“There should be a strong mix in the navigation through the game so players can quickly find the game that they like, that meets their play style,” Monty Kerr advised during a panel on designing slots for social casinos.
Monty Kerr, Co-Founder and Principal Product Owner, PLAYSTUDIOS
Monty Kerr is the co-founder and the principal product owner at PLAYSTUDIOS. As Chief Product Officer, he sets the strategic path for the company, and he has the ultimate responsibility for every product they create. He considers himself a serial entrepreneur, experience which has taught him how to stay at the helm through rough weather and how to celebrate success. He says, “Those lessons have served me well as we’ve grown PLAYSTUDIOS.”
Kerr describes himself as ‘immersed’, and he certainly can claim to be immersed in gaming. In his free time, he plays games, and when not playing, he is inventing new games. His wife calls their home, “The house that play built.”
Love For Handheld Devices
He loves handheld consoles and mobile devices, spending a lot of time on the Playstation Vita and Nintendo 3DS, or one of the many mobile devices he carries. Currently, he is playing turn-based tactical RPGs: Gladius on PS2, Valkyria Chronicles on PS3, as well as Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together on PSP. According to Steam, he has played FTL: Faster than Light most recently and Skyrim the most, 1041 hours.
If any console has sold more than one million units, Kerr probably has it. He says, “The key to being a good game designer is being able to study an iconic game or a particularly well-done mechanic.” He believes relying on a memory of a great game experience is risky, so he always re-plays relevant games and re-examines key mechanics.
Managing Change
Kerr has strong opinions about gaming business models. With a nod to Charles Darwin, he says, “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent business model that will survive, but the one that can best manage change.” And that is free-to-play. “I love free to play,” he asserts, “I see it as the most substantial evolutionary step in the business of game development since the golden age of arcade video games.
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent business model that will survive, but the one that can best manage change.”
Seeing Hearthstone blast to the top of the iOS Top Grossing Charts was particularly exciting for him, since it was a game that captivated audiences, yet had no in-game merchandising. He feels Hearthstone on iPad definitely validated his “If you build it, they will come” sentiment. He took this opportunity to emphasize to his team (yet again) the importance of building features that lead to customer delight. He does admit, “I do this so frequently there is a soapbox with my name painted on it.”
Team Pride
The things that give Kerr the greatest feelings of pride are centered on his team and his family. He feels tremendous pride when the team pitches ideas they are excited about. And he has his 12-year-old son’s first game design framed above his desk.
He feels tremendous pride when the team pitches ideas they are excited about.
Kerr believes the next few years in the games industry will bring powerful, high-resolution mobile devices with highly available internet conductivity, resulting in AAA game experiences becoming available to players of all ages. But it will be important to make those experiences accessible and the perceived time investment low. He claims, “If you can master a great gameplay while minimizing the time investment friction, you will have a great opportunity in the near future.”
Anders Evju’s colleague, John Golden, Playphone evangelist, spoke about paying attention to all markets on behalf of Evju during Casual Connect USA 2014. “Carriers can deliver a better mobile gaming experience,” he said.
Anders Evju, chief marketing officer for PlayPhone, has been involved with mobile entertainment services since its inception in the mid-90s, so he has seen it evolve over the years. He first became involved in the games industry in 2000 while co-founding and working for I-Play as their SVP and general manager and recognized early that the mobile industry was poised for massive growth. He believed that it was the future of communications and quickly discovered that it would be a major platform moving forward.
A Mobile Background
As chief marketing officer, Evju leads all business development and mobile social gaming partnership initiatives for PlayPhone. Prior to his work with PlayPhone and I-Play, he spent a number of years with MobileSpring and gained experience with US wireless carrier background with Omnipoint Communications. He also gained European telecom experience while working in Norway at NetCom BSN, where he was responsible for several major launches including Mother, one of the world’s first mobile portals.
Launching The Store
The most fulfilling time in Evju’s career so far came with the launch of PlayPhone’s social game store on Verizon. PlayPhone has been a leader in mobile gaming and mobile content distribution for the past 10 years. During the feature phone era, they powered mobile entertainment portals for major brands like Disney, Sega, Walmart, and Best Buy, distributing games and content to almost 2 billion users and forming deep relationships with all leading carriers worldwide. The evolution from feature phone gaming to smartphone gaming was the natural next step; they love mobile gaming and wanted to create the next generation mobile gaming experience.
The most fulfilling time in Evju’s career so far came with the launch of PlayPhone’s social game store on Verizon.
Evju says it has been exciting to see the evolution of mobile from flip phones to smartphones. He feels the best thing about his job is being a part of such an exciting industry, and a nice perk is that it involves playing all the new games that come onto PlayPhone’s mobile gaming network.
Mobile is naturally his favorite platform to play on. He plays everywhere, even while sailing in the Caribbean. He does not own any console, especially since he travels and likes to take his gaming with him, but he does reveal that his son got a PS4 for Christmas. Right now, along with everyone else, he is really enjoying Castle Clash. He owns an iPhone, but he doesn’t have a preference between iOS and Android. Both platforms have advantages in his opinion, but the main goal at PlayPhone is to connect gamers from both iOS and Android and let them play games with their friends regardless of the platform.
More Mobile Expansion Ahead
“Mobile gaming is on a steep incline, and we’ll continue to see aggressive global expansion of games, increased penetration and usage, faster phones and tablets, and better graphics in games that will entice even PC and console gamers.”
Evju insists, “Mobile gaming is on a steep incline, and we’ll continue to see aggressive global expansion of games, increased penetration and usage, faster phones and tablets, and better graphics in games that will entice even PC and console gamers.” He points out that we have already seen mobile gaming exploding globally, and it will continue to do so in regions like China, India and Indonesia. PlayPhone is hard at work to be sure their platform takes advantage of these trends, especially in a way that helps localize features so gamers have the most personalized, local gaming experience possible wherever they are in the world.
Besides being an avid gamer, Evju is a father of three children, so he spends a lot of free time with his family. He is also a swimmer and runner who has recently competed his first half-marathon.
Critical Force Entertainment Ltd is a new game development studio founded in Kajaani, Finland. The studio created Critical Missions: SWAT, a first-person shooter available for iOS, Andriod (released under Studio OnMars) and playable on Kongregate. The company focuses on developing premium and free-to-play crossplatform games with a special focus on the Asian market. So far, the company is self-funded, but investors are welcome.
Veli-Pekka Piirainen is CEO and founder of Critical Force Entertainment Ltd. He is a former studio manager of Supercell North as well as a lecturer and head of Kajak Game Development Lab. Piirainen is also co-founder of NMP Games Ltd.
A student’s hobby project
Veli-Pekka Piirainen
In December 2011, I hired Igor Levochkin – one of the students at a school I taught at – as a programmer in my new startup company after following his work for the past two years. Igor and I would make games for the Apple AppStore, and we started making a prototype of a game called BomberBall. At the same time, Igor put his hobby game project in Kongregate. Early January 2012, Igor showed me that there were hundreds of players playing his hobby project game, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I just thought it could be a good marketing channel for our iOS game.
However, at the end of January 2012, there were a couple of thousand players playing it and I started to get more interested in it. I gave Igor a Sony Xperia Play phone and told him to port the game to that device. Igor managed to have it up and running in a matter of days. Next, I told Igor to port the game to iOS; this was bit more difficult since he was not familiar with Mac and Xcode. After a week, the game was also running on iOS. Now I really started to see some potential in the game. Despite all this work on Igor’s project, we also continued to develop BomberBall because I wanted to have a good prototype for the GDC in San Francisco. I demonstrated both prototypes at the GDC and Igor’s project, Critical Strike Portable, gained more interest from the public. After that trip, we decided to concentrate fully on Critical Strike Portable.
Keeping up with high popularity
Igor started fulltime development on Critical Strike Portable by adding new weapons and features. I still worked part time at the university and couldn’t fully concentrate on the game development. I trusted Igor and also a team of Russian volunteers, who supported us in the growth of the user community as well as map creation. Another important task was to make a proper and more user friendly User Interface (UI) for the game. Unfortunately, Unity 3D’s tools for this job were pretty limited and we didn’t have any artist or UI specialist in our team to design a nice, good-looking and functional UI. So Igor made a “coder-style” UI with many different settings and options inspired by Counter Strike style menus. That UI was easy to use with a mouse, but for mobile phones with touch screens, we needed a different kind of UI.
The user interface of the mobile version.
Because I was inexperienced in game marketing, I hired Teemu Riikonen in April 2012 to lead the studio as well as take care of publishing and marketing of the game. Our next employee was Thanabodi Thongchat, a 2D artist from Thailand. She started designing backgrounds and UI graphics for the game in June 2012. Igor implemented more and more features to the game like new game modes, zombies, graphical effects, as well as fixing bugs. We released new versions on Kongregate weekly and got feedback from players on how to improve the game. At the end of June 2012, we had nearly 30,000 daily average users playing the web version of our game, but we were still growing.
We got over 1 million downloads in one month.
On June 26th, we released a free Android version of our game with exactly the same UI and almost the same features as the web version. Even though it was not so easy to use and the menu elements were pretty small on a phone screen, its popularity surprised us. We got over 1 million downloads in one month.
But the problem was that many players didn’t continue the game after their first try. Only hardcore players did so. We decided to create a totally different and simpler UI for mobile devices, because the current quality was not good enough for Apple’s AppStore to sell it as a premium game.
At the end of August 2012, two game development students, Olli Lahtinen and Aapo Lehikoinen, started their internship in my company. They started to build a totally new UI, added new controls for the iOS version of the game with a new NGUI toolkit we bought from the Unity Asset Store and started to design new maps for the game with Hammer editor. We also needed new character models, guns and animations for the iOS version. Modeling and animations were outsourced to freelancers in Thailand and our Thai artist was leading that work. Unfortunately, the quality was poor and delivery was very late. After that, all animations were outsourced to two Finnish startup game studios and for the modeling of guns, I hired another student.
A screenshot of the zombiemode in Critical Missions: SWAT.
Unfortunately, we had to remake all maps done with the Hammer editor (16 total), because our lawyer said we probably weren’t allowed to use that tool, since it’s licensing agreement is not clear enough. Our lawyer also recommended us to change the name of the game from Critical Strike Portable to something else, because that name reminds too much of Valve’s Counter Strike (Critical Missions: SWAT was born then). Our original plan was to release the iOS version in the end of September, but it was released in the end of November due to these difficulties. A new Android version was released just before Christmas, a Lite version in the beginning of January 2013 and the Mac version is in the review process as of this writing.
The iOS market is very competitive
At the end of the year, the amount of our players had increased dramatically. We had almost 200,000 daily players on the web and over 100,000 daily players on mobile devices, but all were playing our free versions. Monetizing with premium version seemed to be much more difficult than we thought it would be. The iOS market is very competitive and full of games, so getting visibility is very hard. We also had bad luck with a very important review, because the reviewer didn’t like our controls at all (many other not so significant reviewers did like them, however). Because of this, we didn’t start to get income fast but our server costs rose dramatically due to the massive amount of users. We also had some trouble with one specific server provider, who just calmly cut off the lines to our map server without any warning due to dramatically risen network traffic.
Looking back
Our biggest mistake was to save money in wrong places and get low quality from our international freelancers. We trusted our own artist’s capabilities to handle leading of the outsourcing, but she was too inexperienced for that. Of course, rates a quarter of the price compared to local studios were very attractive, but then the harsh reality revealed we had to do everything over again after that miserable trial period. It would have been wiser to use more professional outsourcing studios in the very beginning.
Our second mistake was not to solely focus on Critical Strike in the very beginning, but to also make the BomberBall prototype. Something else I would change was not to have a tighter management; everything went forward more or less without proper planning and scheduling. A fourth mistake was not to take a professional publisher to publish the premium iOS version. We thought it would be easy to self publish, because we had such great success with the free Android version, but we were wrong. A last mistake was not to pay enough attention to the server capacity, but that was more or less because of our inexperience with servers and also our idea to save money.
The team is currently working on a new game, called Critical Missions: Space. It has the same nostalgic fast paced FPS gaming experience as Critical Missions: SWAT, with the addition of space rangers, space pirates, laser guns, aliens, space themed maps and more.
Next to that, they keep adding more to Critical Missions: SWAT. They’ve scheduled new guns, characters and maps as well as unlockable content for the next update of their very popular shooter.
