GCAP 2017

Free-to-play is a tricky business model, and a lot of things can go wrong. Even when you have a great game loop, unexpected problems can interrupt the playing experience and drive players away. A game might even be an enormous success with millions of downloads, but find that those downloads don't translate into IAPs. This lecture will go into some of the surprising ways in which games can sabotage their own success, and provide advice on how to avoid these pitfalls.

The Free-to-Play market is more competitive than ever and dominated by huge companies with endlessly deep pockets. It can be challenging to know what game to make or how to make meaningful improvements once it’s live. While daunting, this can be advantageous. The Free-to-Play market offers a constant feedback loop; a discerning audience who vote with their time and wallets. The challenge can be knowing what to create, what to measure and how.

Ella will share methodologies for tackling these challenges and the (many, many) lessons learnt developing and supporting Mighty Kingdom’s most recent Free-to-Play game Shopkins: World Vacation. She’ll discuss how the team approached every stage development to allow data, not opinion, to inform almost every decision they made and the ripple effects they saw as a result (inducing a 300% increase in a key metric). Using concrete examples applicable to every genre, she’ll discuss how to develop your own feedback loop and separate the insights from the noise. Lessons include how to decide what game to make in the first place, how to know what to measure, why user cohorts matter and why the first session is the most important one.

CANCELLED


Regardless if Premium or F2P, PC/Console or Mobile, and whatever genre of game, unsuccessful projects have one thing in common: they don’t meet player’s expectations. Using best practices for User Experience and User Interaction to design player experiences, and using business intelligence tools to validate outcomes, makers can understand how and why players use their games to learn what players want and give them more of it. Good UX/UI helps players understand how to play, when to come back, and why to spend, drastically improving retention, engagement, and monetization. In this panel we'll discuss how player personas and mental models inform better design methodologies, establishing how an heuristic approach to UX can improve quantitative research hypotheses, evaluate a data reporting pipeline that can minimize iterative headways for improvement, and design a rationale how the 'soft' and 'hard' components of player validation come together to give players more of what they want.