EGD News #74 — Soft launching an IP based game
I recently watched a presentation where Corentin Delprat from Hutch talks about developing and launching their F1 manager mobile game. The presentation revealed lots of insights from working with an IP like F1 and how that can work when dealing with a big audience like F1 fans, how you manage expectations, and how you take full advantage of an IP like that.
You land the license for F1. What do you do?
Corentin talks about how they decided to tackle the F1 manager for mobile. The metagame was adopted from Clash Royale, as it had been successfully transitioned to other sports games like Golf Clash and Tennis Clash.
From my experience, the “Clash” meta can be a copy and paste thing, as long as there are meaningful long-term goals on the horizon.
Corentin explained that they wanted to tailor a mobile F1 experience. They went for an F1 manager type of game, instead of a driving game, because Hutch has the experience as a racing studio, doing car games for mobile. They must have known that driving games don’t retain players well.
Mismatch with the audience?
The big question for Hutch was if F1 would be too niche, and could it be profitable? The fact was that F1 games hadn’t seen success on mobile. But still, F1 has a massive fan base. According to the Formula One organization, “The audience figures for 2020 show the strength and resilience of our sport, with average audience figures in 2020 at 87.4m and a total season cumulative audience of 1.5bn.”
Then you start breaking that down into players who play mobile games, and out of those, who want to play a Formula One game on the phones, versus playing Candy Crush or Clash of Clans, the portion dwindles down.
Speculation number one: F1 fans who’d like to play driving games on the phone? 0.01% of the potential audience.
Speculation number two: F1 fans who’d like to play an F1 manager on the phone? It has to be higher than 0.01% of the potential audience.
But it’s still a significant opportunity. Working with an IP has many benefits. As Corentin mentions, fans are familiar with the setting. When they see something in the game, they know what it is. They know that you need to change tires during a race and that an extra pitstop will cost valuable time and lost positions on the track.
CPI can be lowered because of a known IP, and the organic installs can be higher proportionately to what a non-IP racing manager would have.
Retention for an IP based game
When you have a mass influx of people coming to your game, there are mixed expectations. They might be expecting an F1 experience to be a game where you drive a Formula One car on your phone. You will churn players who are not happy when they instead have to play a manager of an F1 team.
This expectations mismatch hurts your Day-1 to Day-7 retention, but not so much after Day-30 since you’re keeping those players if you’re providing them meaningful long-term goals.
These long-term goals are: Get stronger, to beat harder content. And the harder content gives better rewards, and social recognition.
Once you reach a goal, the game offers another goal for you to beat. And you end up retaining your players.
🎙 Innovation in Mobile Game Ads
I recently hosted a webinar with Erik Bryant from Opera Event and Steven Chard from Luna Labs. Both companies are at the forefront of innovative mobile game ads, and I wanted to explore several topics on how game developers can utilize game creatives to win players over.
Listen to our discussion by going here.
📃 Articles worth reading
+ Roblox – an in-depth analysis — “Almost half a million users pay money into roblox every day. That is an astounding number, as typically most F2P games that have any spenders at all are in the single digit percent. Roblox cite this as the key reason that revenue has increased, and this shot up from 184,000 in 2019 almost tripling (2.7x). Again, this is driven by lockdown measures and I do not expect this to sustain going forward as we come out of it. For comparison, 1.04% of DAU were daily payers in 2018 and 2019, this grew to c. 1.5% of DAUs in 2020.”
+ Angel Investing: What Experienced Investors Wish They Knew When They Started — “Many experienced angels admit that they should have placed an even greater emphasis on the quality of the team and on the ways in which one could probe that early on.”
+ What Books are Highlighted the Most Densely? — “Of course, not all ebooks are worth highlighting the same. You’ll only highlight something if it’s so interesting or so well-written that you want to see it again. This suggests that the more a book is highlighted, the more interesting or well-written it probably is.”
+ Investing: The Greatest Show On Earth — “Let me share two quick stories that have nothing to do with investing. I want to convince you of something important and overlooked: Investing is a broader field than it looks, and there is so much to learn about it outside of the narrow lens of finance.”
💬 Quote that I’m thinking about
“One of the biggest things that holds us back in life is we’re unwilling to look like an idiot in the short term, to be successful in the long term” — Shane Parrish
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Sponsored by Opera Event
Looking for some great new authentic video creative? Try something totally new with Influencer Generated Content (IGC) by Opera Event. Influencers or actors will make specific creative content for your games and Opera Event will deliver you high-quality video ads that highlight the best parts of your game.
Note! You get a free video with the purchase of 4 or more videos. Remember to say that Elite Game Developers sent you!
Go to www.getigc.com to see some examples and get more information.
That’s all for this week! I hope you have a relaxing weekend and I’ll see you next week!
Cheers,
Joakim
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