Matt Warren

Category: Marketing

Brand building, content strategy, growth, and campaigns

  • Building Social Services

    Technology is getting more and more personal. As it does such it becomes easier to make things social in a real way.

    Bringing a social experience to your application is more than just slapping a like button somewhere. Social is about making people aware that when they use your application they are entering a social situation.

    A party is a real social situation. We know it’s a social event before we get to it. The host of a party tries to ensure that people engage in social behaviour such as chatting with each other, singing, dancing, and meeting new people by arranging for food, drinks and games to stir conversation.

    Facebook is social in only a narrow sliver of what it means to be social in meatspace.

    Now is the time to take a leap in what it means to create social software.

    Creating software the provides a sense of presence, promotes social engagement, and enables social discovery and self expression is a real challenge from both a software and design perspective.  There will be new innovation required from both disciplines to get it right.

    We are digging into this by experimenting within the scope of mobile games.  Mobile provides an interesting place because it is much more personal than sitting down at a computer in your office.  It allows us to go deeper than Facebook was able to go with their app when it was developed in 2004.

    There is much work to be done yet in this area.  MMOs provide a glimpse at what should be possible to duplicate in mobile.  World of Warcraft and Second-Lift allowed people to meet and form relationships that became more intimate than would have happened outside of the games.  Technology has the potential to make social much more than it is in a physical setting.

  • Strategy Adjustment

    Despite my amazing singing, Birds can fly had a less than stellar first week in the store. Invader Crush essentially saw no downloads.

    It seems that there are just too many games in the store. It’s nearly impossible to get noticed with simple games (outside of pure luck).  I thought that the laughable graphics and sound in Birds Can Fly would be enough to create some word of mouth buzz (at least with my friends it has).  But for a wider audience I need to step up my game.

    So my next attempts at publishing a game will raise the bar.  The things I put out there will be better than the current competition in at least one of these things:

    • unique (no competitor)
    • better graphics
    • better gameplay
    • better social integration
    • better use of mobile

    So no simple clones, or re-skins.  I’m going to go back and attempt to follow through on some of the bigger plans I had to expand on my previous games.  In particular I have some good ideas to take the slot machine game to the next level with some features not yet seen in other games.

    That said, if anyone want to pay me to finish (and brand?) this game called Fantastic Voyage I’m open to offers.

    iOS Simulator Screen shot Apr 5, 2014, 9.30.54 PM

  • Candy Crush Game Analysis

    Candy Crush Saga from King has been dominating the top grossing charts for a very long time now.  The game mechanic itself is not new or particularly innovative and is of similar type as Bejewelled that was originally released in 2001 – long before the iPhone was invented.  What is it that differentiates CCS from the pack and keeps it at the top of the charts?

    CCS was originally released as a Facebook game, and was later re-written for mobile.  Much of the virility aspects is a result of this heritage.  It is and was a key aspect of the games distribution and marketing.  I’ll come back to the social integration later in this post.

    Art and Design

    The first thing you might notice is that the game has a very unique and recognizable art style. This branding helps it stand out in the clutter of a Facebook news feed.  The game’s UI is consistent, with smooth simple animations.  The theme of the game is attractive to a wide audience of casual players.

    The UX for the menus and dialogs are designed to reduce confusion. In most cases there are very few decisions to be made.  For instance the start view contains 2 obvious buttons: “Play”, and “Connect with Facebook”.  Settings and extras are hidden to reduce clutter and focus the player on the actions King would most like you to take. (The Facebook button disappears once signed in)

    The design of the levels map clearly shows progress in a way that is more difficult to visualize in a flattened list of levels. The integration of Facebook friends into the map is particularly interesting (I’ll discuss this more later).

    For the match 3 game itself there are no obvious issues.  One thing I might change is to encourage the use of power-ups to help players learn to use them.  The colors provide good contrast needed for this type of visual search game. The various goals, power-ups, special blocks, and levels keep the game challenging, and interesting through the 400+ levels.

     

    One nice touch is the consistent use of a squeeze animation on all buttons. This helps keep the UI feeling alive and helps indicate things you can touch. It’s simple, consistent and goes a long way to improve the look and usability of the game.

    Gameplay

    The game has fairly short segmented levels.  Players can play for 5 minutes at a time conveniently.  However, a level on it’s own is not the core game loop…

    The core of the game is based around hearts.  You lose a heart when you fail to pass a level, once you run out of hearts you are presented with with options to get more.  This is one of the places where King has pay walled the game.  You have the choice of waiting for free hearts, collaborating with friends for hearts, or purchasing some.

    I’m sure there are some key metrics that King is collecting to help optimize the levels. For each level they have a couple of levers to pull that can change the difficulty.  After a level has been designed it can get a number of moves and thresholds for points needed to get the stars.  On the backend these numbers can be tweaked to meet certain goals. The vast majority of levels would be tuned to say an average number of attempts before winning. Some levels on the other hand could be tuned to higher difficulty in order to encourage IAPs or to drive online discussions about tips and techniques to win. Still other levels may be artificially easy, for some positive feedback.

    Being able to tune the difficulty easily gives King a way to provide just the right amount of challenge to players, which in turn keeps the game enjoyable.

    With 400+ levels CCS needs a lot of variety to keep players interested. With most game updates they’ve managed to include some new pieces, power-ups, behaviours and goals to keep you learning and challenge you to think of new techniques to deal with the new levels.  Constant investment in the game has helped extend it’s life and keep it popular.

    Monetization

    You don’t get to the top of the top grossing list without nailing the monetization.  One of the things you might have noticed is lack of an in game currency.  Unlike what is popular in many other games on the App Store right now. CCS does not have IAPs for currency with large price points.  Instead they present many opportunities in the game to make smaller $0.99 impulse purchases. This integration is rather ingenious in that there is no “store” in the game you have to go to to make a purchase.  The IAPs are seamlessly integrated into the flow of the game and priced where they can be quick impulse purchases.  On the other hand having a store and currency would add friction to the buying process – go to the store, decide on an amount of currency to buy, then find the place to buy hearts and make another purchase there.

    CCS used to have ads in the game for additional revenue but removed them. This move places more focus on staying in the game (and running out of hearts) rather than getting distracted to go download something else.

    There was also a small “Yeti Store” in the game for a while that sold some high priced non-consumable power-ups.  This seems to have been removed.  It’s likely that these permanent power-ups either made the game too easy or the revenue from these paying players would be higher with just the consumable power-ups being the only option.

    There are many opportunities to buy things in the game. Before starting a level you get a chance to purchase power-ups, if you fail the level you get a chance to buy a few more turns to keep going, if you run out of hearts you get a chance to buy more hearts. When you finish a block of levels there is a paywall to wait or pay to unlock the next block of levels.  All of these purchases are inexpensive impulse buys.  This model of integrating the IAPs at the point where they are needed in the game, and otherwise hiding them is obviously working very well.

    As you can tell King is not afraid of making significant changes to the monetization as they measure and experiment.

    Social Integration

    Being initially a game on the Facebook platform pushed King to deeply integrate the social aspects of the game. They have managed to execute well on both cooperative and competitive levels, as well as providing deep social proof and tools for virility.

    The game changes dramatically once you connect your Facebook account. Suddenly all the friends in your social graph appear on the level map. At a glance you can see how many of your friends have played the game, and how far into the game they’ve gotten. It’s some powerful social proof of just how many other people you know play the game, and implies some competition for you to catch up to your friends.

    For competitive incentive the top scores amongst your friends are presented before playing every level.  The implied competition hopefully gets you play longer to beat their scores (and loose some hearts in the effort). Seeing photos of your friends baked into the game is kind a cool way to personalize the experience.

    They have a system for gifting and requesting hearts. This appeals to the players looking for a more casual, cooperative approach.  It’s also ties into their somewhat subversive way of blasting facebook with messages.  Each message that goes out is yet another opportunity to get players back into the game.

    Marketing

    Most games at the top of the top grossing list have taken to a strategy of fortifying their position through massive and aggressive advertising. With a massively profitable game like Candy Crush they have a huge budget to purchase traffic on ad networks. Persistent ads attract new players and remind existing players that the game is still installed. By spending a significant portion of game revenue on advertising they continue to buy their position at the top of the charts.

    Refinement

    Keeping a game at the top requires constant attention. King has been consistently adding new levels to the game with new power-ups, goals, and obstacles.  They now have over 400 levels.

    The UIs seem to have been getting simpler over time.  Monetization has been simplified to focus solely on IAP consumable items, ads have been removed, non-consumables have been removed. Small consumable IAPs seem to be working extremely well.

    Re-Skinning

    King is not sitting idle on just one game.  They’ve discovered a formula that works and are busy replicating it. Pet Rescue Saga is essentially the same game with different graphics. This is an easy way to re-use the code, attract a different audience of players and build a network of similar games that you can cross promote while keeping things in the family.

    Key Lessons

    If there are key lessons to be learned from an analysis of Candy Crush they are:

    • unique and original gameplay is not required for success
    • very simple UIs help make the game accessible to a wide audience
    • tightly integrated consumable IAPs can generate more revenue than ads or non-consumables
    • continuing iteration on the same game is critical to keeping it relevant
    • making social part of the game add genuine cooperation and competition
    • being able to easily fine tune the difficulty makes easy to get the balance just right

  • App Kontrol

    My next project has got underway and it will be launching as App Kontrol sometime in the next month.  This app will be a business dashboard that can be used to pull together download and advertising revenue numbers from various mobile services into one place.  With this information gathered we can produce metrics to help mobile business owners determine their profitability.
    There are plenty of other services that track app events, such as flurry and mixpanel but they don’t help with the financial side of running a business. App kontrol will help you determine your ROI and therefore allow you to figure out how much you can spend on advertising.
    It will save you time from having to jump from site to site as and compile spreadsheets for your business

  • Announcing AffiliTunes

    I’m happy to say that the first service under the new Halotis.com is open now for it’s first users. Affilitunes is a simple service to geo-target iTunes affiliate links. You provide your affiliate keys for PHG and Trade Doubler and AffiliTunes will redirect clicks to the correct affiliate program depending on where the click came from.

    It does one thing, and is trivial to use.

    The service is 100% free, and I use it myself so you can count on it sticking around for a long time.

    What you might not know is that iTunes Affiliates are currently run through two different affiliate tracking networks that operate in different global regions. Trade Doubler handles the European iTunes stores and PHG handles most of the rest.  To get the most revenue from your iTunes referrals you need to have your clicks tracked by the appropriate company.

    AffiliTunes redirects your links to the appropriate tracking agency so that you can get the most from your referrals.

    Curious? Sign up and try it out.

  • My Personal Brand

    Over the last week several things have popped into my news feed mixed with conversations I’ve had which brought up the idea of honing my personal brand.

    I’m not much of a fan of brand marketing in general but I’ve been doing some more research and reading about the idea.

    Personal branding is about taking the techniques used by big companies to create a persona around a corporation and apply it to you as a person.  That may include creating media assets, publications, books, blogs, videos, podcasts, advertising etc which are used to give people and impression about who you are.

    The goal of creating a personal brand for me would be that if people looked me up or came across me they would be impressed by my accomplishments, see me as a guru in whatever my expertise is, and if they’re looking for help in that area reach out to me for speaking engagements, consulting gigs etc.  Also if it came time for me to look for another job, a solid brand would enable me to demand a higher salary at a top company.

    Over the last few days I’ve started crafting a brand strategy.  Depending on how it goes you may see some big changes to my online presence.  this blog, mattwarren.co and other communication outlets could get a refresh.

  • “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal”

    That quote from Steve Jobs in 1996 holds true for more reasons than are apparent at first thought.

    I’m currently working towards completing my first ‘real’ game on iOS but with a 2 person team it will take an exhaustive amount of work to produce something that fulfils our vision.

    Cutting scope is the easiest thing to do but also shortsighted. Chopping off features limits your ability to compete in this highly competitive market. You need to ship something, but can’t afford to cut vital features.

    Originality is overrated. It is high risk and an uphill battle. People (for the most part) cling to the familiar so producing a game that is utterly unique and original is like trying to replace thanksgiving turkey dinner with tofu and seaweed salad. Thank you for trying but what I really wanted was turkey.

    The better approach is to take what you can from the existing best of the best and find areas you would like to improve upon and then work towards that goal. Having actual physical manifestations of similar products and features vastly reduces the burden of figuring out how to steal them for yourself.

    Starting with the reference for 90% of the work removes the need to communicate how every detail needs to work and so you can get right to implementing it. The few unique parts you bring to the table serve to evolve the platform and make your game even better.

  • Virility

    Having a game that naturally promotes itself is a challenge. The old techniques of tweeting your score or sharing the app on facebook are not enough to make something popular or have it go viral. The mechanic to make something go viral has to be much more deeply integrated.

    The virility of games like Draw Something was astounding, but it was also a natural extension of the type of gameplay. In order to play you needed to get your friends in the game. It’s growth was astounding because of that.

    I started to dissect another popular game recently called Clash Of Clans made by SuperCell which takes things to a new level. The live in game chat and team gameplay create a fascinating dynamic that works extremely well on a mobile device.

    It’s clear that the bar has been raised. Creating a top game now requires a complex server side backend, a massive amount of content, depth of gameplay which can attract new players but keep existing ones playing for a long time and a polished high quality look.

    Thinking now about creating a great game to be released in 6 months is a real challenge. How much more complexity will be expected by then?

    The added complexity of making a game naturally viral rather than tacking on twitter and facebook buttons is hard. It requires thought about how to change the game mechanics to work these things into the core of the game. Making games that are inherently social will be a fun challenge for game designers. A challenge I’m looking forward to.

  • Getting ready for Winter

    Winter seems to have struck early here in Calgary.

    It’s left me with a bit of a conundrum for getting to work.  All of the transit options in this city suck including driving your own car.

    • The buses are never on time, and always delayed or late
    • The C-Train doesn’t get me to the office, and gets hung up a lot in the cold and doesn’t run often enough
    • The roads don’t get cleared or salted, and it gets to -40 degrees so biking is both dangerous and frigid
    • The side walks also are icy, not cleaned so walking is slow, dangerous and cold.
    • Parking is stupid expensive in this city, and traffic sucks
    • Innovative car sharing option car2go trades the parking concern with finding an available car within walking distance

    Luckily I only have to be in the office 2 days a week.

  • ABT: Always Be Testing

    Sales teams often have the letters ABC plastered somewhere next to their weekly leader boards and top salesman photo. It stands for Always Be Closing and it’s a motto that keeps sales people laser focused on their goals. Marketing teams should have a similar motto: ABT – Always be testing.

    Lately I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot more testing on the performance of webpages and apps. One thing always holds true. Nobody knows what’s best – which is why it’s always important to test things.

    This point cannot be more clear. If your head of marketing, lead designer, or CEO could peer into the minds of potential customers and knew the most effective way to sell to them, then they would probably be living on a beach somewhere. The fact that they keep coming into work by car instead of helicopter is enough evidence to show that they don’t have all the answers.

    One of the things that gets under my skin about marketing is the focus on branding and brand related marketing. Reading a book about branding is like taking a walk back in time to the 1980s. It’s difficult to find good recent examples of successful brand marketing because more and more companies are discovering that it’s simply not effective. With more technology to play with it has become easier to track the performance of marketing efforts. TV ads can be tested in different regions. Web banners can be split tested daily to find the most effective ad copy.

    You know what tends to happen when tested and accountable marketing comes into play? The clever catch phrases disappear, gimmicky websites get toned down and focused, and communication becomes more direct.

    I recently heard a pitch from a brand marketing consultant who tried hard to impress upon us the importance of a good tagline as the basis for all marketing. It was not very good advise. One of the examples he used was Avis and their famous “We try harder” tagline. It was claimed to be a tagline that helped grow the business a lot. Question is if taglines are that important why aren’t they presented up front in current marketing.

    “We Try Harder” shows up as a footnote on Avis’ current website – barely noticeable. It’s not important enough or effective enough to use on their adwords copy. If taglines were good marketing they would be more prominent in current advertising.

    I have tested a lot of marketing ideas over the years, and there are constantly surprises and unexpected winners. I would however never claim to know the best approach – The best approach changes year to year. The experience you get from testing gives you a pretty good place to start from for future tests.

    When your business income is at stake Always Be Testing. Never trust the status quo, and don’t trust your copywriter to give you optimal sales copy (why buy one sales page when you can buy two for twice the price). Test every assumption. ABT.