For years, the terms “mobile” and “casual” have been closely intertwined, but Playtika’s Alex Galasso argues that you can no longer assume that all mobile gamers are casual. Player skill levels, logged hours and community involvement are all more consistent with definitions of the hardcore category than casual, he explained in a Casual Connect Tel Aviv lecture. “By not looking at your players as hardcore, you miss marketing opportunities,” Alex said. For more, see Alex’s full lecture below.
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Alex Galasso, User Retention Director at Playtika, has a wealth of knowledge about social casino gaming and the games industry as a whole. Recently he described his experiences in the industry and shared his insights with Gamesauce.
Gamesauce: Tell us about the work you do at Playtika. How did you come to work there?
Alex Galasso: I’m the User Retention Director at Playtika Canada. My talented team and I manage all the live resources, including promotions, sales and events for the World Series of Poker game, along with all customer and community support.
I started working at Playtika after the Electronic Arts Mobile studio in Montreal closed. Offers were immediately extended from Playtika to the entire WSOP team, which was being licensed to Playtika at the time. Two years later, being laid off from EA was the best thing for me professionally!
GS: How have your past career experiences been helpful to you in your current position?
Alex: I always wanted to work in the games industry, but unfortunately, non-technical roles are hard to come by and very competitive, especially in Montreal. I didn’t know it at the time, but my first two jobs, as an Internet Marketing Specialist and a Social Media Manager, helped build a variety of skills that got me my first job in gaming.
GS: What do you do in your free time? What are your hobbies?
Alex: Definitely cliché, but I play more video games. It’s a must, working in the industry. Aside from that, I play a lot of sports, which is a great hobby to break up the 10 to 12 hours I spend looking at a screen every day. Occasionally, I’ll collapse on the couch with my wife and cockapoo and binge watch a television show.
GS: What is your favorite thing about your job?
Alex: I love that I have a nice mix of hands-on and strategic work. Some days, I’ll be deep in the numbers trying to solve a problem or drive growth, while other days I’ll be in planning mode, delegating tasks to my team, building a schedule for the upcoming quarter and meeting with various team members to brainstorm ideas.
GS: What inspired you to pursue this career?
Alex: I grew up playing strategy games like Warcraft 2, Starcraft and Civilization, so I wanted to work for a big AAA studio. However, since it was so difficult for me to break into the industry, I took the first job I could get, which was at EA Mobile. Although the scale of games was smaller, I started to appreciate the business challenges and “service” elements that were inherent in the free-to-play mobile/social games. I’m happy to say that today I wouldn’t dream of working for a premium, AAA studio.
GS: Do you have any advice for someone interested in pursuing the same career?
Alex: Typically, I tell people to take advice with a grain of salt, because what works for one person does not necessarily work for another. So I’ll share the path I took.
First thing, I played a lot of games and formed my own opinion on why certain ones were working and others were not. Although this seems simple, the number of people I interview who have never even played our games is shocking! This also allowed me to document trends that were happening in the industry and apply them to the games I was working on. You’ll notice that certain features that work well will find their way in other top-grossing games.
Since I wasn’t able to find a job in gaming right away, I decided to take a tech-related job in another industry. This allowed me to build a skillset that was easily transferable to games. What’s tricky about this is communicating to the person interviewing you how your unique experience can help their games succeed. They aren’t looking at what you’ve done in the past, they are looking for what you can do in the future.
Finally, find the time to work on a side project. I decided to launch a blog, alexdelasso.com, to talk about gaming and startups even before I was working in those industries. However, if you can swing it, download GameMaker and launch a quick and dirty game on the app store. This will be the best experience you can get. Learning by doing. On top of that, potential employers will see that you’re clearly passionate about game development and that you’re capable of seeing things through.
GS: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in your current position? How have you overcome these challenges?
Alex: The biggest challenge I face on a daily basis is Growth Management. A large part of my job is ensuring revenue targets are met on a monthly and quarterly basis. Although we’ve been great at growing and maintaining Playtika’s market share dominance, we don’t take it for granted. Every day we wake up to a million apps fighting for revenue and user attention. To further this point, we consider ourselves part of the larger entertainment industry, so we’re contending with movie releases, sporting events and console game launches, which take attention and time away from our game. You never know what might come next, so we’ll never take growth for granted, even when we’re on top.
Back in the day, WSOP had very little live content. We’d have a sale and a new table once a month, and that was it. Today, with improved communication in the team, every time a user comes into the game, they see something fresh and unique. We’ve invested in the time to build tools for our team to deliver pretty much anything we want almost instantly.
GS: If you were not in this industry, what would you be doing?
Alex: If I wasn’t working in mobile games, I wouldn’t stray too far away, as I would probably be working for a tech startup. Montreal has a really interesting scene that’s starting to be recognized internationally.
GS: What was your dream job as a child?
Alex: Pretty boring, but my dream job was to work in games, and I’m doing it! You were probably looking for a firefighter turned game developer, but that’s not the case.
GS: What has been your proudest moment during your career so far? What led to this moment happening?
Alex: When I joined Playtika, I told my boss that I was here for the purpose of dethroning Zynga Poker from the top grossing charts. My proudest moment was when we beat ZP for the first time in the US app store earlier this year. Today we’re constantly ahead of them in the US and in multiple countries on both iOS and Android.
GS: How did you become involved in the games industry? How did you make your start? What do you find to be the most fun part?
A
lex: Like I mentioned, I became involved in the games industry from a young age by playing everything I could get my hands on. Later on, during university, I started to work on a small indie project that eventually shipped on Steam. I was in charge of marketing and every day was a grind. Grassroots marketing is tough, and even tougher when you’re trying to get people excited about a game shipping in two years. Nevertheless, I got my feet wet and loved every minute of it. We also paid our way to GDC one year, which was a complete blast. However, the most fun is definitely the fact that I am working on a game that I have fun playing. I get to help build the poker game I want, which makes going to work every morning easy.
GS: What do you think will be the next big trend in the industry in the next three to five years? How are you incorporating this trend into your future plans?
Alex: From an overall gaming standpoint, I think within the next five years premium games on PC/console will be close to extinction. Games like FIFA, Destiny, Civilization, etc. will have to move towards a freemium model in the same way Team Fortress and Dota 2 have done. The new consoles can already support downloadable games with micro-transactions, so it’s really up to the developers to adapt.
From a mobile gaming standpoint, the next few years will become harder than ever to breach the top 100 grossing games. About 30 to 40 of the top grossing games were there 12 months ago. In the next three years, with improved monetization, even more aggressive ad spending and intelligent cross promotion, it will be possible to see the same 100 games rule the top grossing charts month in and month out.
To further my first point, I’d expect to see games like Clash of Clans, Game of War and Candy Crush end up on the Xbox One and PS4. They will have the freemium expertise to make the game work on these platforms and may even be able to offer platform specific features. Playtika has always done a great job treating games as a service and being adaptive to market trends. We’ve been great at pushing the monetization envelope and retaining users long term. I’m very confident our top five games will still be there in next five years.
GS: Do you foresee the Apple Watch and Oculus Rift as future platforms for social casino?
Alex: Love this question! I strongly believe the Apple Watch will be a platform worth pursuing in the social casino space. I think it offers a great second screen experience for mobile gamers. As for Oculus and other virtual reality platforms, I wouldn’t touch it for social casino. As for the wider gaming market, I think it’ll peak at a niche offering. Right now the VR experience is primarily available for the console and PC markets, which are tiny in comparison to the mobile/tablet markets. I also don’t expect VR to penetrate every console player’s home either, which leaves them a small piece of a small piece. Things may change, but this is my outlook for the next two to three years.
GS: A lot of attention is being paid to skill-based casino gaming. Do you see opportunities there?
Alex: Yes, I definitely do, but primarily from a social gaming standpoint. For example, take a slots game, add a multiplayer component and power ups, and all of a sudden you add a layer of strategy and skill when it comes to speed of spinning, power-up timing and countdown management. The core mechanic will always be one of chance; it’s the only way to manage payouts and sinks, but a layer of skill could definitely be added.
GS: For social casino, is there still such a thing as an emerging market?
Alex: Yes, for companies like Playtika, who have dominated Western markets, our emerging market is Asia. Poker, slots and bingo work well for North America and Europe but may not necessarily work in their vanilla forms in China, Japan and Asia. However, for companies that are dominating Asia, their emerging market would be the West. We’ve seen games like Puzzle and Dragons and Brave Frontier break into the top-grossing charts in Canada. Revenue-wise, North America is still growing at a tremendous rate.
GS: Other than your own, what is your favorite social casino app?
Alex: Staying within the Playtika family, I’d have to say I’m a big Bingo Blitz fan. Very easy to get hooked to the quickness of gameplay and the city-based progression.
GS: Are there any social casino blogs/Podcasts worth following?
Alex: To be honest, there isn’t much out there, partly because the industry moves so quickly, partly because social casino is taboo among game developers and partly because no one really wants to share their successful strategies with the world. All of which is understandable. All this being said, we have great internal competitive intelligence and business development teams that send weekly and monthly recaps of industry news and highlights. Externally, I follow Lloyd Melnick’s blog; he often writes about user behavior, business intelligence and user acquisition and is a great resource.
GS: What have been some of the most effective tools for mobile marketing at your company?
Alex: Since being with Playtika, we’ve investigated a bunch of marketing tools that offered very interesting and innovative solutions. However, after evaluating our long-term goals and vision, it didn’t make sense to partner with anyone. We decided to build everything internally so our tools would match exactly the needs we had. To start with this is tricky, but in the long term it’s always better. It was definitely a shock for me at the beginning. I always thought these over-the-counter tools were good enough, but after you factor in cost and their inevitable compromises, custom is more often the way to go.
GS: How have you handled constantly changing technology? How have you been able to incorporate it into your business?
Alex: This is the beauty of going with custom tools; we’re the masters of our own destiny. When Facebook decided to disconnect HasOffers, a lot of devs were left out to dry and had to scramble. With our in-app marketing, this can never happen because we’re the masters of all the technology we use for retention. Push Notes, promotions, events; it’s all managed internally. If I have a problem I can talk to the engineer who’s maintaining the feature. If there’s a feature missing I can talk to another dev and get it in the next sprint or release. I like to think Playtika can change faster than technology, and this is one way we do it.
GS: What challenges did you have setting up your tools? How did you handle these challenges?
Alex: Continuing on the point of custom internal tools, we had a few challenges. First was focus. We’re in the business of making games, not tools. This meant we didn’t have the expertise or knowledge to make these tools. Although this was true at the beginning, as the game grew we hired this talent and nurtured it internally. Now I prefer to look at this as the following: We’re in the business of making games, so no one is more qualified to build the tools we need for our games than us.
Time is also a big challenge. Would we invest the time in a new game feature that would allow us to make immediate revenue, or would we spend the time building a tool with no immediate impact? Like I mentioned before, the short-term loss was worth the long-term benefit, as developers could build things faster and retention folks could push more content, faster and more efficiently.
GS: What other kinds of tools would you fear most as competitors?
Alex: This is the thing. Our internal tools have no competitors. If we see a third party developing something useful, I’ll document it, send it over to a developer, and they will scope it out. If it’s truly worth it, we’ll add it to our tool. At the beginning, this felt daunting from our side. We figured a team of dedicated third party engineers would be faster at building features than we would. However, they were always being pulled in a bunch of different ways by all their clients’ feedback, which would all be different and hard to prioritize. Internally, I’m the client for our development. They build a tool for me and that’s it. This makes the development more focused and in some cases, faster.
GS: What has been the most interesting feature the audience shows recently in terms of marketing for casino games?
Alex: It’s hard to pinpoint one specific feature. I think the most impressive thing I’ve seen are new games that can grow really quickly. I’m thinking of our latest release, Vegas Downtown Slots, which is a throwback to the old school slot machines of the Vegas glory days. The art is amazing, as well as the machines and mini games. Can’t wait to see where this goes!
Check out Alex’s blog: alexgalasso.com, which talks about gaming and startups even before Alex was working in those industries.
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