ZeptoLab: the main channel for attracting new players is virality and our other games

Recently, the Russian company ZeptoLab released a big update to the King of Thieves game, in which players got the opportunity to fight guilds. We asked the company’s CEO Mikhail Lyalin about the update, and at the same time asked him to comment on his recent performance at the GamesBeat Summit.

Hi! Firstly, I want to congratulate you on overcoming the threshold of 10 million downloads and at the same time ask if you considered how many of them came from the feature, how many from the cross-promotion and how many were obtained by buying advertising?

Mikhail LyalinHello.

Thanks.

Until now, we have spent almost no money on traffic, all advertising activities are still of a test nature, so almost all the people who installed the game came to us through word of mouth, cross-promo in our other games or found the game through app stores (tops, features).

I have now calculated, based on the number of downloads and the number of weeks since the release (that is, starting in February and ending in early May, when the figure of 10 million was published), it turns out that, on average, the game received 1.2 million per week. It is clear that there were more at the start, but how many downloads does the game generate per week now?

A little more than seven weeks have passed since the global release. Now the flow of installations is at the level of several hundred thousand installations per week. The main channel for attracting new players is virality and our other games. Players like KoT, they willingly tell about it and show it to friends, plus, because of the system of returning stones, players are interested in maximizing the involvement of friends in the game. It works very well.

As part of your speech at the GamesBeat Summit, you also said that the project’s MAU is 6 million. Is this, as I understand it, the actual figure for April? Where is the game most popular?

Yes, this figure is relevant at the moment. The main players we have now are representatives of the English-speaking world, and the game is also very popular in Latin America, China and Russia.

Before moving on to the questions about the update, I can’t ask the main question – about money. The slide from your presentation that has been posted on the Internet shows that the LTV of the project has grown 26 times since the first soft launch, in this regard, the question is whether the project has paid off by now?

Yes, over the past three months since the release, the project has already paid off several times.

Did I understand correctly, looking at the slide about the soft launchie, that the differences between the version of the game at the stage of the fourth soft launchie from the version that went for gold is that the second one was translated into several languages and got rid of bugs?

Yes, the main focus was on bringing the game to a release state. There was a lot of work to fix bugs, bring graphics up to our quality standards and localization of the product.

Then it turns out that literally these two moments strongly influenced the LTV and the retention of the seventh day? Or were there, in your opinion, any other factors?

Not really, several things played here at once: firstly, the project reached a mass audience, and secondly, we were polishing the energy system (lock picks) and monetization, not only at the time of release, but also in the first patch. And, of course, it was also important to bring the game to a normal state in terms of localization, graphics and the absence of bugs also affected the final result.

By the way, what was the difference between the versions of soft launch 3 and soft launch 4?

There were a lot of innovations – it was in the fourth iteration that the costume crafting system, guilds and the stone return system appeared. And these are only the biggest innovations in mechanics.

The stages of launching King of Thieves – from the first “soft launch” to the global release

A large-scale update was recently released. Was it tested in the same way as the product was tested before launching?

Yes, we actively tested the update internally and on a small sample of loyal players.

How did the update show itself? It is clear that it gave a surge in downloads, but if we talk about other business metrics, what did it help to achieve, what grew, what fell?

The update proved to be excellent. First of all, the involvement of players has increased. Naturally, the average income per user has also grown.

In general, when you were just about to start developing an update, what goals were set for the team?

The main objective of the update was to increase the involvement of players by strengthening the social part of the game. That is why we were focused on the functionality of guilds, the possibility for guild members to return stones to each other and the confrontation between guilds.

And the last question. You are currently cooperating very successfully with Yodo1. Please tell me what the Chinese company demanded to change (or what it changed) when preparing the game for release in China?

In the Chinese version, the economy and monetization system were noticeably redesigned, the graphic style of the game was slightly tweaked, and the integration of the game with local social applications was also implemented.

Thanks for the interview!

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