Clash of Clones: The Importance of Standing Out

hey everyone happy to see so many people how many of you in here are game developers a majority how many are press and others okay cool how many of the game developers are more than twenty people okay cool when I'm not on stage here GDC my everyday job is to lead a company called Paradox Interactive which I've been doing for close to 11 years actually exactly 11 years now August 15 so it's some sort of celebration and today I was going to talk about the impact of cloning of games and how to stand out and the more I dug into this presentation the more I figured out that from a management and conceptual perspective standing out is a very very interesting issue and everyone who knows me everyone who worked with me knows that I'm not a programmer I'm a crappy game designer and I'm an even worse artist so if you take that as a statement because it is a statement it's actually true then you can listen to this from a management perspective I'm specializing business development in contracts and everything that impacts your company in your games except for maybe the game itself I've worked with acquisition of games for seven years I work with contracts and business for 11 years so I see a lot of gaming concepts I think I know what I like I play a lot of games I have over a thousand hours logged into League of Legends so I'm an avid gamer but everything else is business and standing out in the market today if you take 10 years ago everything was very very where there were bottlenecks in the market everywhere so other consoles not even we a paradox could could publish a console game because it was too expensive we're too many greenlight committees and Microsoft and Sony and every thing was just high budget and really high to get into steam used to have their green light up until half a year a year ago or something so when Mobil came and took the market by storm everyone started opening up it started with steam who accepted more and more games and when they let go of green light there were 75 PC games released the same day which must be some sort of new world record the same goes for consoles even Microsoft and Sony are now saying that we will support Indies which essentially means we're going to have more games our platforms which in itself means that competition is going to be even more fierce and I'm going to talk from all these successes and all the failures that we've had a paradox as well so I'm going to share some anecdotal anecdotes and some stories on my 11 years of running this company so like I said about me I'm the CEO and principal owner of paradox I have shipped over 70 games in the last 10 years and five of those franchises eventually became million sellers and my specialization here today is mostly business development so I'm going to talk about this subject in a very conceptual way and you'll have hopefully at least 10 minutes in the end to ask me questions about how I see the market and where we're going I'm Paradox Interactive as a company I'm not sure if everyone is familiar with us but we're a fast-growing hardcore publisher of games we've been growing with 36% a year since 2008 on the PC platform which makes it a bit left less sexy because it focus on the market in the last five six years has been mobile growth where a lot of company has made some really great successes so we took advantage of the steam system of digital download on PC and grew really quickly with our current franchises and build some new franchises on that as well today we're over 150 people across three offices and our headquarter is in Stockholm in Sweden we have for internal studios we working on seven different games at the moment and we have another ten studios that are working for us on contract meaning another 200 people are making games for us on the daily basis these students are based in UK Brazil Finland the United States basically all over the Western world so we're really used to working international if it take cloning of games I mean everyone is borrowing from everyone in this industry we know that we do that at times sometimes we look at things once I was in a meeting with a guy who said um you know what the diplomacy system is this game in this game is taken from a game called Europa Universalis do you know that game so I looked at him and then he looked at me and I looked back and he looked at me and said oh yeah you made that game that's how it goes right so everyone's borrowing from everyone so I looked into the history like for how long have people been stealing games from each other because it's really interesting the first game that was actually accused of stealing was no other than a Taurus game pong many people think of pong with the first game actually in history but it turns out that a console called the Magna ball Magnavox Odyssey released a game called tennis two years before Paul so they threatened to sue Atari and take them to court and Atari settled outside court licensed the game and released pong and the rest is history so it starts in 1972 actually and then it just falls in a line with more or less successful clones of other games if you take games like space invaders there are 20 different clones of that you have asteroids that were early in the market there we talk early arcade days but other games respond respond not only clones but entire John rates our Defense of the Ancients as you know dota which was a Warcraft 3 mod to begin with super mario bros guitar freaks that turn into whole music genre as well with rock band guitar here or what not and of course numerous mobile games as well in mobile you don't only borrow the game concept but you also steal the name there 20 different temple runs temple jump temple hide just to try to fool the iTunes system of searching singles work for a flappy bird which is it not really my type of game but I found my iPad when I learned it to one of my kids I found a game called splash a fish so I thought wow this is really terrible it's like taking terrible to a new level so I actually played some splashy fish as well I've got to level 63 is this then it is necessarily something bad is it bad to borrow other people's ideas being inspired by what other people are doing I would say that no it's not really it's actually helping our business going forward Newton said that when you're standing on the shoulder of giants it's much easier to make new inventions so his idea that other people invented things first and then you refine them throughout history and the same goes actually for games at least if you ask me in brief you can say that if you borrow something it's a shortcut to approved gameplay approved market maybe even a proven business model that you see that works for other people and therefore you you want to emulate it and be inspired by it but there are also different ways of actually going into America if you want to like borrow a concept from someone you can do like the guy who was in a meeting with me and said they took the whole diploma system from Europe a demur solace now that is just taking one of the features if you do a direct copy of the game it's typically to ride on a genre that is very popular at the moment you see the MOBA genre that most of the games look and feel almost the same and they're trying to spin off on the same that people already know the gameplay they already know how to pay for the games they already know how the whole system of eSports work within that genre so it's a smart way to do it but there are also some challenges and some advantages in doing that I'll get back to that later inspired by is a good way to say that you take inspiration from other people it's typically a homage to another title something that plays a bit with the original and in all other aspects it's a game totally on itself and a spiritual successor is actually a good way to go into this market because a spiritual successor typically aims at an abandoned John ray with abandoned games where people are dreaming of the old glory days of gaming and when you bring back a game in that john ray people are going to hail you as a savior is doing something not entirely new but at least something that adds to an underserved audience and underserved niche so if you're going into we're in these situations daily you look at your game concept and say okay so what am I going to do with my game how much can I be inspired by other people how can i how do I need to work to make my game stand out no matter the actual gameplay value and the actual things do you do in the game and that's where I come in typically because we work a lot of paradox with taking the game aside saying how do we make the game stand out communication-wise from a company standpoint and in all other aspects they're not typically gameplay related basically making sure that you communicate the the personality of the game instead of what you're actually doing so if you walk into the pros and cons when you go into this market inspired by market why people do this is that they know what the market size roughly is we're here that candy crush saga has over 100 million daily or monthly users it's very tempting to go into that area it's a known market size the market size for that type of game is at least a hundred million players if you hit the right mark it also has a proven game design which means the people know what they're supposed to do in the game so candy crashes know is in many ways borrowed from many other games like match three is something that I think bejeweled did at least 20 years ago but refining it making it new repackaging it making it a bit more fun for people to play makes it 100 million monthly users get the quality benchmark obviously you can look at what other people has done and say this is the actual quality that they have this is what we're striving for as well and you can also use this to remove things from the game and I'm going to get back to some examples of that later on as well they're also of course back sides when you get inspired by a game when you walk into a new area and you see that you ought take certain gameplay elements from other people what are going to happen first of all journalists and gamers they always say that they want new things they want new concepts they want something that stands out in the gameplay itself well to be honest is this industry is a bit conservative it's to be so young it's very conservative and people will be very entitled about what you guys are doing as soon as you walk into this territory so the first thing that is going to happen if you walk into the territory are borrowing a bed or inspired by is the PR challenge because journalists are going to ask you like so what what game is this compare this to another game because you never get away with saying well this game that is totally unique and stands on its own feet and paradox will always get that question so what other game is this gay there are a few ways to get out of that question and there are a few methods so I'm going to come to the method chapter later on but that's the first question that comes up and that's something you have to be prepared for because the press say they want new things truth is they actually are pretty nostalgic there is a reason because of why there are so many retro-gaming shows and when there were there are so many people talking about like the best games from the 90s and everything like that you can also if you go into this you can inherit a very demanding target audience so people see that you're doing something that they recognize and they want to be a part of that because they say like I play the game that you're basing your game on for ten years I played 2,000 hours so I can probably design this game better than you can so that is also challenge the demanding target audience they're your best friends in some ways and in some ways they're very very challenging time I have one example of that we actually bought an IP it was not even it was not even an inspired by or a clone or something that was actually taken from someone else it wasn't we bought an IP was Majesty the fantasy kingdoms him did anyone play that yeah we made Majesty to they don't wanna play that as well well cool good to hear and the first thing that happened was that we got approached by a lot of ads say what you have to do this you have to do that you have to do this and this is like seven years ago I think and we said you know what we're great game designers we can do whatever we want to do so shut up and stay on the forums and we did not communicate that well with the audience so what happened was that first of all they made up a lot of conspiracy theories about what we were actually going to destroy in this game because our intention obviously wants to destroy the franchise when we bought it right that's why you buy a franchise it's to completely destroy it same thing happened with with Star Wars and Disney actually when they're out like oh now they're going to destroy yeah if you put 7 billion dollars into something your first idea is obviously to flush it down the toilet right the problem with that is that if you don't communicate with people like we did not do about that they're going to be very conformational so they're going to come up with that that you you think it's the JFK murder again so what happened was that we release the game the target audience was really pissed off because I said all the terrible things we just couldn't imagine how terrible they were you actually implemented it but it wasn't actually true because they thought a lot worse than that but even worse was that every time a positive gamer came into our forums and said you know what I really like this game but I got stuck at level 8 he was jumped by this crowd we just tore him apart I said how can you like this game it's you go that's your demanding audience same thing is going to happen if you move into something that is say Dungeon Keeper esque you just inherit the audience right now dungeon keepers a bad example you all know why on the other hand you can get away with clothing as well um because the negative perception is much less in certain areas and we've seen this as well first of all low engagement target audiences we're talking mobile there's a reason why it works to steal other people's names and steal other people's gaming concepts on mobile splasha fish for example it's because people are not that engaged there is no die-hard fan of flappy birds there's going to write like 10 pages on the forum about flappy birds maybe a flappy birds convention though on the other hand you never know but when it comes to for example Minecraft it's a totally different story there's also something called underserved niches is this mic turned off now is cool and these are niches where people still are craving a lot of Compton there are like you can take for example city building is a good example right now because you all know what happened to SimCity 5 if that have been a huge success the market would have been totally taken by yay now the market is totally open and we're getting back to SimCity 5 as well I think another underserved knees are simulators in general I would say that flight simulator is another niche that probably could be filled by this it's a bit of a stretch budget-wise to make a flight simulator but for anyone who could you'll inherit a lot of bonus fans and you'll be alone in the market if you pop my own guess is the space it's a new thing so if you want to release a space game I think you should do it before 2016 because I think the space is what people are doing right now you know black holes and wormholes and space and all that what I was talking about target audience and how to work with the target audience the target audience that you inherit I now assume that you make something that at least can be seen as something that's similar to something else they will have very specific ideas of what you can do with your game we know that a paradox when we started making hearts of iron for a lot of people or if it was hearts violence we I have one of the hearts line for developers here so I'm not sure which game it actually what was in the heart of iron series we presented a new screenshot and first comment was not this is not hard to iron this is not harsh but like make it the real game like mega the game we actually oh so our fans have a very specific feeling that they own our franchises which is a good thing it makes them loyal but it also puts a lot of pressure on us to deliver and to communicate they will have ideas about your game design they will have ideas about how you conduct your business they will have ideas about the price point DLC plan how you patch the game essentially everything so how do you put all of this together get the customers on your side and work in a methodological way to actually stand out in the market given the assumptions that we have here first of all I was not going to touch that much in game design but I'm going to at least mention it because it's an important way I'm going to mention it from a methodological standpoint standing out basically is making people believe that you do things that no one has ever done before and it can be done in a few different ways this is actually how we do things at paradox we try to imagine what people are doing when they're not playing the game just imagining the game so of course in game design you can make your character stand out we try to do that for every game how many in here played Magica Oh quite a few and how many would recognize a magic a wizard if you saw one on the street that's even more people that's a good good job from our marketing the part that kind of proves my point if you see someone cosplaying as your game what do they dress in then my absolute favorite cosplay for me would be a super meat boy I would love that costume before Super Meat Boy goes I'm not going for the t-shirt here because that's beautiful too but the full Super Meat Boy health that is really interesting so the characters in your game how do they stand out and how are they a character in itself so when they walk on the street people are recognizing wow Magica or who that Gears of War very important same goes for art the Sun should almost see on the colors that is your game obviously on the marketing side we released that is also interesting to see that we invent characters not only in our games but also in everything else with you in the communication in the trailers that we do in everything that has to do with the game how many saw the trailer for our game Leviathan worships you know yeah quite a few so that game we invented a character called jazz boatman this all goes back to that we had no really good budget to make a cool trailer because it's a game about boats and explosions so this guy talks in a smooth voice that sounds like Barry White and he goes on for one and a half minutes explaining boats and making boat jokes like just got real so that trailer cost us I think $500 to make and it got close to a million views now on YouTube it's our most viewed trailer up to date still our cheapest trailer as well if it was the ground work that we did like what does the character going to be how is he going to be perceived by the market what is the actual things we want to say only from this character never mind the game this is just the character he wants to describe this game how would he do it from his couch position where he is Jesse boatman playing the game but not being in the game right and these are the things that we look at on the side here play obviously the game in itself when you play the game what do you do read it if your game was a book what would the book be about would it be a funny book would it be sad would it be ironic what would be the actual feeling when you read this book a you're finished with the book what does the reader take with them to the next book to the sequel of this book where it like I was mentioning before if you cosplay your game what are you cost playing the game like I mentioned the magic of wizards which is obviously for Magica historical games it's much harder to say parts of iron is World War two which is more generic but instead in hearts of iron it's a very deep strategy game and so you can't use Churchill and you can't use this big leader so we use Douglas Douglas MacArthur as our main character very characteristic character so if you want to cosplay hearts of iron you'll probably go as Douglas MacArthur watch it same thing if your game was a movie what will the movie be about who would be the lead actors in your movie we think that within the Magica would probably be eddie murphy playing the lead red wizard maybe not let's see we'll see about that a Will Ferrell maybe we don't know that is very interesting to say because when one should sit down and you compare like okay so we're making a magical movie who is making the voices because you can't see the faces of the wizards it's all of the voices who's playing that what personality does that give your game when you talk in between each other so build it how do you include your target audience modding is a big part of our community for example but it can be other things as well if you welcome fan art for example for your project what is that fan art going to be how do you inspire people to make things for your game that people just feel the creativity flows through them and preach it very important how what work does other people say about your game when they talk to their friends I know that we marketed our European Restless series when we release the third one is a second as we say to people like this maybe this game is a little bit too hard for you to be able or like what yeah we said this game might be a bit too her it's very very advanced strategy yeah okay I have to check that out so it was a form of empty marketing so we're not pushing things and people people's faces but we said like when you tell your friends about European or solace it's going to be you know what I'm playing this awesome game but you prep you probably don't understand how to play it because it's very advanced so that's how we spread the word on our strategy games from a communication standpoint when it comes appeared and this one this sounds almost like we're being a sect here which is kind of awesome in itself but live it when this game embraces your entire life and you do nothing else than live within this like gaming community gaming franchise what does your everyday life look like you just try to imagine I have to get back to Super Meat Boy and do all this I feel a-- so this is how we do things our paradox when we try to like think outside the game see like okay we have the game but everything else around that how are we going to make it stand out so that everyone when they see it like god there it is that's the game giving it personality standing out as well is obviously like I said not only the games in itself but also the business that you do how do you update what you're doing what is your DLC policy like what is your patching policy and what is your consumer promise as we call it what do you say to customers how do you say to customers like this is what we're going to deliver this is how we're going to support the game over this period of time so basically this is what you can expect from us when we release this game the most expensive part but the part that people use the most to stand out is technology the problem with using technology explosions lightning effects and all of that is that the big studios will always win that race the bigger the studio the more things they can do to make the game stand out from a Technol logical standpoint and you know the studios has very little to show in terms of standing out when fish a.i is one of the selling points right then you haven't really done your read it where it watch it live it fish a.i people but um see if I took another thing here on the con day I have to take a story here the one part of the consumer promise is support obviously and we are trying to teach our developers to be good at support we're trying to teach each other every day to go to support when I get an angry email when I get an abusive email like I hope you die and I hope your company goes bankrupt these emails coming in every now and then then I write the most abusive reply you can ever think of like this long open in the evening I have a beer and I write an abusive reply and I take a walk in my apartment I walk around a bit and I come back to my computer and I say in your face and then I delete to me but I have to get it out of the system but you can never treat customers like that we had a developer who replied on the forest someone said like this our game does not start with this type of video card and the developer replies it's not a problem because it's only 2% of the computers imagining imagining walking into the doctor's office walk into the doctor's office do you say hey I have cancer doctor says you know what it's not really a problem because only 2 percent of my patients even have cancer that's not the reply you're looking for right because you have a problem and the problem you want someone to sort out free at least if you can't do anything else tell them we're working on it even if you're not working on it right if you can't say anything say that you have nothing to say or say I bleed like we're so sorry we screw this up totally here your money back and I hope that we'll fix it sometime in the future the problem the problem is not normally communicating if you're not in super bad at communicating or super abusive it's the lack of communication if you take again we take SimCity 5 as an example and compare that to when Blizzard released Diablo 3 releases were simply were similar because you can play the game and they were both demanded online play and you couldn't connect EA was silent for two weeks they didn't say a thing and the first thing they released was a sponsored gas station for SimCity 5 well they had hourly updates from Blizzard on the Diablo 3 situation so in the end their Blizzard will never be remembered for that release of the other three maybe a bit though because it was kind of bad but SimCity 5 is still have scars from that release and that's the first thing people mention when there's an article about the game which is sad because in itself the game is not bad it's a fairly good game more methods on making your game stand out I was mentioning how we look at things around the game how we're trying to give the game a personality and how we work without a paradox but you can also look at what your competitors are doing so benchmarking is a very good tool to use you can just have comparison charts say what types of features whatever features does my competitor have because you probably have a competitor in the market and what feature set do I have and then you compare them I say okay can we see what features are actually the most important to keep in the game because a lot of game developers tend to think that a lot of features is better than fewer features but there is an example to that as well to free-to-play games Battlefield Heroes and World of Tanks they're not exactly similar though but they're like shooting games multiplayer games online battlefield heroes was released many years before World of Tanks they had infantry they had tanks they had planes they had everything World of Tanks they only attacks tanks is what they do tanks if you cosplay world of tanks you come as a tank probably or as a turret maybe I don't know that they even have their own personality like one of my kids said like I said I didn't do play World of Tanks and she said what no no I've heard about it in school isn't that the game counter-strike for for retired people and I'm like yeah that's exactly that's a great tagline I'm like wow I would use that if I was Victor kislyi at wargaming I would totally use that counter-strike for retired people I'm one of them because I'm a bit too slow to play country but it's funny because World of Tanks has a very specific personality and that is one of the things that helped the game become great Battlefield Heroes did not at the same they were trying to be everything for everyone but the feature set and the feature list was just too long for anyone to digest when you do that benchmarking you quickly come up with what is your competitive edge as a company like work do you do better than your competitors what can you over deliver on that your competitors can not and how can you how can you implement that satisfactory to the customers you can also do a market analysis like 10 years ago you had to subscribe to NPD to get data for America all the sales data we did that we spent like $40,000 a year and we were we were a small company back then but it was only to get the sales data and retail that you needed just to check that all your reports were correct from your distributor and to check how much did our competitors actually sell is there other genres that are just as interesting as ours but today you can just google it everything is one googling way like iTunes Android everything all these numbers are fairly old but even analytics firms are fairly accurate with their theme numbers I mean we compare some steam numbers to some analytics figures it's in the same ballpark definitely so what you can do easily now is it Google what numbers are you looking for because finding them is super easy another thing here on the benchmarking that I forgot to mention is that you need to find in here some sort of key performance indicators key numbers what you follow up on it's not only regarding the game but also regarding how the customer behaves it could be on the customer size like number of support tickets it could be how quickly quickly respond how many negative reviews you get on Steam if you release the game on a PC or your overall review numbers on mobile for example on anonymously it's also trying to identify how individuals behave within a certain game and something that is very useful there is the use of achievements in a game some people use achievements solely for a marketing purpose but you can also use it to measure exactly what people are doing in the game and trying to give people more of that same experience so if a hundred percent of the people got one achievement maybe that was opening the game so that was too easy but the rest of the achievements that are not super easy or super hard how many of them did people actually fulfill and how do we give them more content there's actually like that not all companies can measure exact customer activity it might be that the Steam interface doesn't let you do that it might be that the mobile interface doesn't let you do that it's only probably the people have direct connection with their customers you can measure it but there are also workaround like how do you measure achievements for example so the more achievements you have you can do that with steam trading cards as well so once you're you're done on the market you need to be brutally honest with yourself so on just as much work needs to be spent internally as you do externally when you develop a game depending on if you're up to five people everyone can communicate with everyone on a daily basis just need to like stretch over and say hey what's going on and then everyone knows what's going on in the entire company but being brutally honest to yourself is very hard it's maybe you should have someone coming in from the outside helping you to be brutally honest in the paradox management team we sit down once a year and we give brutally honest feedback so you have to say two positive things and one negative thing about every member of the team and the negative thing can never be oh sometimes you work too much because that's just a excuse for not being like able to give feedback you have to say like you know what really annoys me is that you don't report properly on your sales stuff for it it's good brings the company forward this builds up - once you're done with that it builds up to your organizational strength when you know what every individual can deliver in a team and when you know what you personally can deliver you have your organizational strengths just lined up for you and if the previous previous slide defined a bit of customer needs you can see here what can our organization actually deliver once we're through with what we can do how we stand out against our competitors strengths weaknesses opportunities threats compared to what we think our competitors can do and how do we bridge the gap in between this and the customer needs that we saw on the previous slide okay this all boils down to the studio USP so the day that you're going to tell everyone how great your studio is these are the things that you're going to use it's going to be the 5 things that you're best at and typically it doesn't do anyone anything anything good to be working and what you're weak just trying to balance up your weak spots is not going to make you a better company focus much more on what you're already good at and be the best in the world at that specific topic on what you're actually doing again tanks if you do tanks really well you can sell a lot of it's one mistake that I see developer - every now and then as well is in this case is not to follow their passion they're trying to fill a gap in the market that they see but they're not really passionate about the game that they're actually making so the questions you're going to be asking both yourselves and your team members is do I think about this game all the time do I bring my like ideas back to home and annoy my spouse will it during dinner conversation do I play this game in alpha in the evenings when I get back from work and if you don't you're working on the wrong game I have to think again and make something that you're actually passionate about because you're definitely do either wrong you see yourself as benchmark as I say it's sue proof underestimated in this industry people are crying you can use all the market analysis in the world you can use a lot of different things that you know about all the numbers and everything but if you think something is really good if you laugh at something if you have fun with something I bet you'll be able to sell that product much better than if you don't even if the game that you're making is technically perfect so getting started on this how much time do I have anyone has the time huh 16 okay I'll speed this up getting started the most important thing that we said I was touching this a bit with a breeded play it watch it where it etc is setting the product vision and why do you set a product vision it's to get all the major influencers in the company looking at the same target goal it's also a good way to communicate externally what you're what you're trying to achieve with the game an example of or there are no examples of games being shipped there are not teamwork in this industry with one example and that's minecraft which is probably one man's work must be a good vision can summarize the feeling when you play the game and make everyone understand what you're trying to achieve a good vision you can look at everyday and say my daily work is being done and I'm following the vision that is our overall goal with this product one such example is actually SimCity which is saying build the city of your dreams that's a really good vision it's really simple to understand good tagline for Europe universalities we've used be a Renaissance Emperor very easy to understand what kind of decisions are you making how do you play the game how do you feel when you play the game Gears of War allegedly I'm not I'm not sure if this is true but if I understand correctly they used an even more down-to-earth vision when they created their game they said Marcus Fenix is a total badass and how is that a vision well everything he does is badass he doesn't open doors right he kicks doors in that's badass don't open though like this you just want BAM so if you're a designer and you see that vision Marcus Fenix is about us how does he behave how does that affect the gameplay how does that affect marketing in the game examples of really bad visions is we're going to make the best strategy game in the world and why is that a bad mission because best is a very subjective matter no one can look at that and say okay so hmm is this real time or turn-based like it doesn't make sense at all so the mission should be simple for everyone in a team to understand I said use yourself as benchmark and the be crazy part I just added because as I say like what you like and you're trying to sell if you twist it around a bit other people are going to like that too because that's how the market works you take the vision you boil it down you sell the idea internally when all the stakeholders are on board with this mission typically you have to sit down in the left room until you come up with your product nation there are many ways to do this I could have won I could have won session only on how to set the product mission because that takes probably a few hours to explain but look people in the room maybe a few beers and then you don't work out until all the major stakeholders or bored on the same page you can then take the vision and say okay you're in charge of programming what do you do to fulfill the vision in your daily work five tasks in your daily work you're the lead artist how do you make sure that this vision is followed on a daily basis this five bullet points are three bullet points you can take back to your team and say this is how we work to fulfill our mission this is the ground mission this is what we do to fulfill our part of this crown which makes it so much easier for people to understand both internally and externally it's super good for communication as well because it sets the whole page for trailers that you're making for communication that you're making magic eyes perfect example of everything everything in Magica every single line that someone says is a reference to popular culture everything in the game that includes all the trailers it includes all the achievements it includes everything I only get about 33% of that but what well I sometimes get it I really find it I will allow I was standing next to this building called Graham's Workshop which looks a bit like Games Workshop in the logo type because it's yellow and red and then guy next to Graham's workshop says when I click a dialogue he closes someone at Graham's workshop told me that in a distant future there is only war I find that kind of scary and I started laughing no one okay we'll take that later write that down and we'll take it later it's also important that you keep the vision true as a team you challenge each other you go up to even if you're not an artist you can go up and say you know what how is this badass how is this art actually got us is this something that we want to stand for and we want to be behind when we released a game with the bishop we already agreed up another thing that I think is underestimated I'm going to hurry up a bit here its naming the game just such a simple thing because naming a game takes forever first of all you have to search all the trademark database and all that and then you have to figure if your name is a funny meaning in a foreign language and yeah there's so many things keep it simple I love the old Adel's way of naming games you are what you play they did hit man championship manager thief super simple only downside is that it's not google-able in the same way that a very strange name like Europa Universalis if you google that you'll only get hit some paradox there are downsides to everything from the vision we boil it down to a consumer promise as well like what is the package that we promised to deliver to a consumer so what we do is ask ourselves through the communication that we've done through all the vision things that we communicate it out to develop to the customers everything communication wise what do we think the people playing the game for the first time will actually experience what will be their first reaction what's the reaction we're after we're trying to envision that okay so this is what they're going to do that's what we call the player fantasy because sometimes people have higher expectations on your game that you can actually deliver and try to match the player fantasy with what your actual reliever or even exceed the player fantasy is a very hard balance as well what is our commitment to deliver them and I was mentioning name and brands were another part of that they can use just us as a toy of like coming up with what is actually unique about this game what makes it stand out are a few things like in sales you'll be use an elevator pitch which means that if you go up from elevator from floor 1 to floor 50 and you have to explain to little big-time CEO your business model how does that sound because you only have 20 seconds same with your game I tried this on my parents my parents they're very hard there hard sell because there's 70 years old and they never play games so I tried to sell Europa Universalis to my mom first and she refused to listen and and then my dad said like oh that sounds interested and he said something really smart back at me he's like oh that takes a lot of research of maps doesn't it I'm like I got it I got him like says I'm just taking him in now but the only game he actually played was a fruit ninja and then some Wii Sports so it's a tough sell for but the hardest ratted you gave everything I was touching actually on key performance indicators and numbers earlier on but it's very important for any organization to find the numbers that your measure using to measure yourself what are not the most common numbers are for example a Metacritic score the Metacritic score doesn't say that much to be honest about the game probably the user score on Metacritic says more about your game that the actual Metacritic score score does but you check out how long are your average player sessions and does that match up with how you thought that people would play the game did you think the people would play the game for one hour at a time and they're only playing twenty minutes well what where is the bridge why are you failing to deliver that one hour an average session to the game and what are you going to do about that we're into again engaging the fans of wooden touching a bit of this on inheriting fans and all that and the most important thing I mentioned that as well with only 2% having the problem that is not really respectful so important is that even if you think that people are wrong just be respectful because Trust is the most valuable asset that you have especially as an independent developer or a developer with limited resources I say like treat all your gamers I say to myself like I treat my mother-in-law because with my mother-in-law I have to live with for the rest of her life or my life depending on who kicks the bucket first but you have to live with your customers for the rest of your life and this threads very quickly spreads very good listening versus hearing on the customer side as well there are many more people than you are the collective knowledge of the people playing your games is bigger than a knowledge that you can have in your company it's true for any company out there even for Apple the thousands of employees the collective knowledge of the people using apple's product and their knowledge is bigger than Apple's own so if you listen to your customers you will do what they tell you to do if you're hearing what they're saying you will hear between the lines what they need to have going forward there's a classic quote here from Henry Ford one of the inventors of the car who said like if I had listened to my customers I would try to breathe faster horses right but what they were actually saying was that I want to get faster from point A to point B not that they actually wanted faster horses yeah I add some examples of that if they say in SimCity 5 we want a bigger map what people are probably saying is that we want to have longer and more advanced gameplay settings or a game play on the universe people say about European solace I probably don't understand this game what they're saying is that I would love to have a really advanced tutorial if someone says this is a true story I'm with you I want the refund for this piece of crap you sold to me after playing 1200 hours which we could see on Steam what he is actually telling us because it's awesome to have a customer playing 1200 hours then sending his email is a bit out of character but what he is telling us is that if you had updated this game I would have been buying every piece of DLC that you've ever released but now it's just sad that we have on the game because we did enforceable bouncing I'm going to touch on the the world champions are treating your customers well or at least making the customers believe they're treated well well well or about they turned team fortress 2 into a totally customer driven economy making it now the third most played game on state every day every month one of the things that we say that the collective knowledge is bigger than the outside knowledge is that when you create your game you're limited crowd of people and then you have it out to huge crowd of people that can look at it not it make changes come with feedback 5 of the 10 most played games on Steam started out as mods I actually checked it just yesterday and it's actually true people do something that they care about where they have their passion and it ends up being this time tastic game we call it the dota factor within every game so Warcraft 3 was incredibly popular the mod dota became even more popular than anyone could ever imagine so I'm actually going to I'm going to jump through this very quickly and have see if I have any question see I'm here ah I'm building the fan base just how you're going to build a fan base step by step here what kind of culture if your game and your company was a country what country would it be and how would it welcome people how would it communicate the people what sort of common language do you share with your customers what do you celebrate in terms of ceremonies what references do you have in common if some would symbolize your game or company what kind of symbol will they use for the company what legends do they tell about you how good are you as a storyteller about your company because the company standing out is just as important as the game standing out in itself because a stand out company can release mediocre games and get away with it because their stand out company I'm not going to take any examples here it's very interesting so how in essence do you create the sense of belonging that you want for your gamers that they belong to what you do so I'm going to if I'm going to summarize what I've said here divided up to product company team we say a paradox that passion makes perfect meaning that passion is more important than strategy passion is more important than everything to do in the game because it means that you're willing to work hard to succeed and to complete what you're doing first of all if I'm just going to make set some advices here is to set your vision and get your team on board with that make sure to communicate what your vision and your consumer promise is to the people are supposed to play your games and be passionate and follow your heart when it comes to everything not only to the game but to the marketing and to the business of the game that's all thank so now I've been talking for an hour any questions yes microphone here you can use the please hello I have a question about your internal methods and being brutally honest to yourselves yeah what do you do if someone on the development team loses his passion during the game they're working on and how do you proceed with this that's a very good question how do we how do we get the passion go when we have introduction days of paradox we have a one full day that's how we start at least we have one full day of presentations I always start in the morning telling paradox history the organization a bloody boring things I always end my presentations with saying you know what when you walk into this office two weeks in a row or so and you don't feel that you're having fun come to me come to me and I'll help you get a better job than the job that you have here in paradox I swear so that's how we start like setting it straight saying like you it's mandatory to have fun at paradox nothing else actually counts but keeping the passion in the team is actually something ongoing that is more like you try to have peer to peer evaluations and all that but it's very hard and very tricky to do so I don't really have a straight answer on that thank you very much thank you the target group of some video game genres especially war games is pretty hardcore and traditional and they like certain aspects of gameplay that are recurring to the series so how do you balance innovations in game and also stay true to your fan base and make the games that they are used to and of how we stand the truth to the brand and at the same time trying to field type try to make new things yes actually I think a lot of the if you take wargames or for example hot iron as an example of that I think we have hidden a lot of what is actually fun in game underneath the surface in the past I think that probably everyone in the world can enjoy a good war game because it's like the basis of what you what you play even even now today we're games are the foundation of a lot of games so in our case I think one of the challenges we have one of the hearts of iron developers here so you can talk to him later on hand up here I think one of the challenges that we have is trying to lift it up to the surface and telling people like this is actually what is fun in this game and this is how you learn it's it it's a lot of interface issues actually so it's very technical what is fun in the game but also on our M to communicate this is what you can do in the game this is the feeling you should have when you're playing the game so it's both a bit like lifting up what's fun and the other one is communicating it's not just a war game it's like you're ruling the world sort of that feeling so a little bit of everything with one more question yeah all right you've been talking about that you do have you need your developers to have passion for the game when they do the game and that they love to play the game you also talking about that you need to listen to your customers and that their customers are satisfied and that they are kept in incorporated into the process in some way do you ever have the situation that you're the developers and your customers were drifting apart in division and how do you handle that I mean if the team has an idea about where they wanna go and it's totally not what the customers want what do you do then well we have that all the time actually and there are several ways to to get people on board get the the customers on board at an early stage what our strategy game teams are doing really well is to release developer Diaries where you explain bits of gameplay like every week to explain new things or the gameplay because that gets more and more people on board they're like oh yeah this sounds really smart and then you're very active in communication and you can also be like you can listen to the fans but you should also be very very clear what they can say about the game saying like you know what we're he what you're saying but this is how it will be so you're not fooling people to believe that they have influence or something that they want and they people can choose either say okay huh not sad but probably I'll play the game again or they'll be a really happy about that so it's typically a dual situation but sometimes in the past at least we did polls on the forums as well so we ask people like do you want paradox to do this next and then we have like yes because I love games or no because I'm a boring person like and then we got like nap 97% yes so it depends on how you ask the question as well it was not that obvious though but it depends a lot like if you want people to like really be on your side it depends a lot on how you ask the questions one is that microphone holding up one last question here hi I'm how important do you think language localization is to engage people I think language localization is quite important especially since they're basically just a few territories where you can release English games its North America its UK Netherlands Nordic territories apart from that if you want to reach the highest numbers I think localization is very important and it's always for us it's always a balancing between localized or not because if you take for example your open or solid it is like 600,000 words or something European or sala sport so it's always a stretch but I think as a concept localization is really important to get into every local market now that you have digital distribution as like a global support on almost all platforms okay thank you thank you

Channel: GDC

Views: 75,803

Rating: 4.7913299 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: vX3kjPgvcFU

Length: 63min 54sec (3834 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2016