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The ministry of hypercasual gaming | Afsar Ahmad @ Gameberry Labs
204 Plays1 year ago
Delve into the fascinating world of mobile gaming with Afsar- he talks about their journey from a bootstrapped Indian startup to becoming a global gaming powerhouse. He shares insights into their unique approach to success, highlighting how they managed to build a massive gaming empire without relying on external capital.
For more such interesting founder journeys, subscribe to our newsletter www.founderthesis.com
Read more about gameberry labs:-
1.Rolling it right: How Gameberry Labs built a profitable international gaming business
2.India’s mobile ludo games find enthusiasts across the world
3.Ludo Star is down and people are feeling 'lifeless' without it
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Transcript
Introduction of Afsar and Gameberry Labs
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everyone, this is Afsar from Gameberry Labs. I'm the co-founder of Gameberry.
00:00:17
Speaker
Are you listening to this podcast while doing your daily commute on a metro or a bus? Look around you for a minute. I'm sure you will find quite a few people playing games on their smartphones. In many ways, you can say that the gaming industry was responsible for many of the tech revolutions we see today.
00:00:35
Speaker
In fact, one of the first jobs held by young Steve Jobs was at Atari, the gaming company. Most people discovered a love for computers through gaming, and it was gaming companies that started the original trend of charging people for software. One of the winners in the mobile casual gaming sector is a company called Gameberry Labs.
00:00:55
Speaker
Gameberry Labs is a bootstrapped startup which has built up an enviable global business from India.
Afsar's Journey into Gaming
00:01:02
Speaker
In this episode of The Founder Thesis Podcast, your host Akshay Dutt talks to Afsar Ahmed about the business of gaming and how they built up a massive gaming company without raising any external capital. To hear more such industry deep dive, subscribe to The Founder Thesis Podcast on any audio streaming app.
00:01:30
Speaker
So what got you interested in gaming? I have played games a lot, especially the TV video games that were there long back, right? I would not consider myself as a gamer gamer because I've seen true gamers before joining college.
00:01:47
Speaker
I had this tendency of going back to building and creating things is what I remember Russian, which was adding just more meaning to life more or less. And I enjoyed that process. And I think pretty much that is the reason why I went into gaming eventually and have a stick to gaming and building games.
Early Entrepreneurial Ventures and Lessons Learned
00:02:06
Speaker
So you are an IIT Kharagpur engineer after which you worked at capillary, all of which is like friendly on the other side, you know, from designing to like that creative designing to like more analytics. I mean, were you feeling that itch to do something more creative and hence you quit capillary to start something or, you know, tell me what happened around that time?
00:02:31
Speaker
One of the characteristics that I have is basically when I look at people who are doing something different and interesting, I start to observe them and try to imitate more or less. That's how I started learning about how to build websites.
00:02:47
Speaker
So I started learning programming, tried building few websites, coming off Facebook pages, some concepts here and there for the last three years of Khadakpur, which helped me get into capillary eventually, because they felt I might add value to capillary and I joined capillary as an SD. By the end of my tenure at capillary, I felt I wanted to do more things, but probably the profile would not allow me to do that.
00:03:17
Speaker
So, me with my friend, Johnny, he's founded local and Govind was back then, who's the current founder, he was back there in college. So, he passed out in 2014. He passed out in 2013. So, we decided to move out, quit our jobs. We were pretty much clueless back then, but we had an idea of creating a social blogging platform.
00:03:40
Speaker
So we got together, we said, okay, let us build something in this. We moved to Hyderabad for, there was an investor who was interested in us. So we moved to Hyderabad for him, but quickly realized that that was not going to work out for us. So we spent some time in Hyderabad.
00:04:02
Speaker
But again, this social blogging platform was pretty much away from what we thought could be a good product market fit. So quickly realized it, but we were out of jobs. Then the idea was, okay, let's move on to something which will get funding.
00:04:19
Speaker
which is ironic because you have never raised funds for a game very hard. Absolutely. Plus, interestingly, if you look at it, it's not the right approach to entrepreneurship altogether as such. So that's what we did. We looked out and thought, what is working in the US? What would be interesting in India? And we stumbled upon Blue Apron.
00:04:41
Speaker
And we were fascinated by the idea that okay, if people would like to cook at home, let's give them exact ingredients in the exact quantity and they would love it. So we started Ask Teaspoon.com in April of 2014. So I ran for three months in Hyderabad, then realized Hyderabad has got the right place for getting funding. So we moved to Bangalore, back to Bangalore, spent again three to four months over here. You're very close to a funding round, but then
00:05:10
Speaker
Luckily they saw what was wrong with us back then and I feel blessed because of that, that thing happened with me and I eventually moved out. We both moved out me, Jani and Govind also. We will not do this, we will go back and re-evaluate what we want to do in life and then probably do something in future. So what was wrong with half tea school?
00:05:33
Speaker
And that idea, I don't think it was ready for the market. First, second thing that I learned was it was operation heavy and operation heavy, on-ground operation heavy. And it was not something which was catering to my appetite of creativity and making things.
00:05:53
Speaker
because you were essentially either building a basic app or a basic website and your real business was on the delivery side and logistic side, right? Yeah, essentially it's a hyper-logistic company. Right, absolutely. But when we all quit half a teaspoon, what happened is I was pretty much on square zero. Okay, what do I do now from here onwards?
The Birth and Growth of Gameberry Labs
00:06:18
Speaker
So then gaming was something that was booming back then, booming as in there were a lot of new games coming out in the App Store, Play Store, and people were getting addicted to it, people were playing it. So social gaming was like really taking off at that time. Right. Absolutely. So that's why again, it got my attention and focus more on product building is what I realized.
00:06:44
Speaker
So I started in 2015, January, I started working on a game called Rocket Romeo.
00:06:50
Speaker
There was a character which was chicken looked like character but the character was having a propeller at the back falling from the sky just to reach the Juliet and there was hurdles in between and you would tap to propel him upwards so that his speed is not so high that you would hit the hurdle. It took me 45 days to finish that game from scratch and it was so much fun.
00:07:16
Speaker
that I just could not think anything else after that. I just thought gaming is something that will truly belong where I truly belong. And that has been my journey towards gaming. Gameberry started after my experience at Moonfrog. So after building Rocket Romeo, Moonfrog got a series of funding back then in 2015.
00:07:38
Speaker
And Pushpesh was my college senior. He was also from IIT Kharagpur. So he reached out to me reading one of my blogs where I wrote about my process of building that game Rocket Romeo. So he liked it a lot. So he said, Kiar, join us and we'll see what we can build together.
00:07:59
Speaker
So I joined them, spent a good amount of time over there, one and a half, two years, really great experience. When I joined them, I really liked that place. So I called Govind as well, okay, why don't you join as well? And we will learn together how to build games and what to do games too.
00:08:16
Speaker
And eventually, at the end of 2016, I started seeing this trend where I realized maybe Ludo is a game which people want to play. It was not such a big market that a big company would start away, jump into it. And it was good enough for us to jump. So we thought, OK, let's move out. Let's start building Ludo. And that's how Gameberry started.
00:08:43
Speaker
So did you distribute rocket from you? I did, I did. I launched it on Play Store and promoted it through blogs, but it was difficult to get. So that was one of the places where I realized that distribution is a problem in gaming for sure. And probably when we started game-bearing, the first thing that we were very clear that we will not spend money on marketing because that's a
00:09:10
Speaker
sync, huge sync, and you will still be in a battle of a PNN. So we would go after games which are organically being demanded. So Ludo was organically being demanded by people. And then when a game which was organic in nature, if you build it really, really well, we were sure that we would have a good product market. How do you know Ludo was demanded? Did you have some data? Like did you look at some Google trends?
00:09:36
Speaker
Google Trends plus similar web was one of the softwares that I was using. Okay. So what were the options for you to distribute? One is of course an Android app, but what about like, I believe Zyngar did a lot of his distribution through Facebook and all those also options in front of you at that time, because I think today nobody talks of Facebook's games. Absolutely. Back then also, I think Facebook gaming was pretty much dead.
00:10:03
Speaker
Most of the developers were focused on mobile in 2017 years. Why did Facebook giving that? I think mobile experience is a lot more than what a web HTML5 game can do. So the engagement, engagement retention and engagement is really really high on mobile. And the experience is a lot more immersive compared to Facebook. Interesting.
00:10:29
Speaker
What did Ludo look like? Absolutely. We were very clear that we have to give a multiplayer experience. We wanted people to connect with other folks. We were the first game to provide chat, in-game chat, very WhatsApp-like chat that you're playing a game and then you are going on a chat window to express yourself, talk to the other person. We had this option where if you get delayed while typing,
00:10:55
Speaker
So, you will not be thrown out of the game. Generally, what games do, they'll give you three turns where you can miss the time, miss the timer, and then they'll throw you out of the game. So, our principle was that when you are playing an online game with somebody, you have all the time in the world. We will create a timer for you, but then we'll create an experience so that you can play with the other, talk to the other person very easily.
00:11:21
Speaker
you can send some fast chats to tease the other question again. And the chatting option was phenomenal and super smooth experience. The third, the one interesting thing that we did was while you were chatting and engaged in your chat, you would miss out on multiple times. So we created this auto mode where the computer takes over if you are busy chatting. So I've seen people
00:11:48
Speaker
keeping the phone aside, doing their daily work, looking at their game, then coming back into the game. And there was no experience like this. In the world, nobody has done this.
00:12:00
Speaker
What was the way to monetize it? Did you have monetization from beginning? Yes, we did. And I think that is one of the key few of the top innovations that we have done. So, ideally, Ludo market, if we look at the current space also.
00:12:18
Speaker
board games monetize 80-20, 80% ads, 20% IAP. IAP is basically your in-app purchases. So user is buying something inside the game for advantage for anything. So we started thinking of how do you monetize people if you're not showing ads and because nobody has done in the board's game market. Then one day while we were developing,
00:12:43
Speaker
We were playing a playing game together. We both me and go in and we were one of us got triple six and it felt like damn if I had an option of rerolling it, then I would just get rid of the six. So we thought why not create it as a feature inside the game where the third six is coming. You have an option of rerolling your dice and that will cost something which is in the game.
00:13:10
Speaker
but will allow the user to re-roll it. So as a player, it is giving me an advantage that I have an extra role while playing the game. But then it was fine. It was very small of a game changer for the whole game. So going came back and say, why only on the third six? Why not every turn? And I said, OK, why not? And then we thought, OK, this sounds good.
00:13:40
Speaker
If people don't like it, we will remove it from the game. Otherwise, we'll just go ahead with it. And we launched it. And people, nobody said anything about it. So that is where our learning was that if a lot of time it is in our head that maybe the user will feel this and that and this and that. But maybe this is what they want at times, because that's what we felt while playing the game.
00:14:04
Speaker
So we gave this option where you can re-roll your dice and it costs you certain gems.
00:14:12
Speaker
And the gems eventually you have to buy, which is driving the 70% of the revenue of the game. And 30% comes from it. 30% is there is a stake which is going on, which is the coins in the game. So when you are playing with me, we also wanted you to be serious about it, not just quit the game at times when you don't like it. So we wanted to introduce some kind of blocker to people. So we both will put 500 coins as a stake, and the winner takes all.
00:14:42
Speaker
And these coins are just virtual currency. You don't get back or get anything. It just keeps on building. So you start with 500, then you move to 2000, you move to 10,000, then you move to 50,000. And then you mentioned 10 million, 20 million, something like that. So it's a feeling that you are gambling, but then you are playing a serious game. That risk and reward is what we wanted to attach to it. But how did that give you monetization? Because you said people can't withdraw it, and it's not real money.
00:15:11
Speaker
How did you make money from that? So, you won't eventually, sometimes users will run out of those coins because you will lose. When you run out of it, you want to play the game because you are liking the rest of the experience of it.
00:15:28
Speaker
And sometimes people even buy 10 million packs because they feel that I don't want to play lower games. Why I don't want to play lower-bed games is because I want to be matched with a top-class player. So that is how it differentiates between the level of players as well. So it makes the whole gaming experience a lot more worthy for you. So it is the experience that you're looking for and what you're paying for.
00:15:56
Speaker
interesting. So everybody would start with like 500 coins and then they would earn and move up and then be able to bet more and the more they are able to bet the better is the quality of opponent that they are meeting because opponent should have already moved up to be able to play like a 10,000 coin game.
00:16:16
Speaker
So it automatically separates them out, makes it interesting for them. Interesting fact, I'll tell you that people, even though sometimes they have more coins, they would like to play at the lower bet.
00:16:30
Speaker
And why do they do it? Because they want to get matched with interesting people, rather than playing a game with an expert. They are looking for a casual Udo game, but they want more variety of players to be matched against. Most users will have 500 coins, so they get a wide spectrum of players in that region. And you can choose to play with your friends, or it is a random matching.
00:16:56
Speaker
Absolutely. I think there are multiple options. You can actually play a two-player game. You can play a four-player game. You can play with your friends. You can play with two friends, three friends, four friends. You can team up. Team up was the first team up built in Ludo.
00:17:12
Speaker
space by us. So you and me will be a team. And once you take your tokens inside, your devices can help me move my tokens inside as well. So that is how a team will perform. And you can strategize with your teammate, talk to the teammate separately and send him a message, things like that. So it becomes very interesting there. I've seen people pairing up
00:17:34
Speaker
Generally, couples play team up because they are very excited about playing with their husband or their friends or their boyfriend. People who are in relationship, they would like to go get on a call.
00:17:48
Speaker
And then start a Ludo game, be talking with each other, but play a Ludo game on the side. So you guys quit your job when you started building Ludo? Yes, yes. And how did it go then? Like, you know, when did you launch? What kind of numbers did you start seeing?
00:18:22
Speaker
In a one and a half months span of time, we released the first version of it, which had just basic two players coming together and getting matched. It took us another two, three months to develop features like private people, the undo mechanics, the team up systems.
00:18:31
Speaker
When did it become enough to reinvest in the business and grow the business?
00:18:42
Speaker
the basic leaderboard. So it took us good amount of time, three to four months to come up with all these features together. But within two months, we were starting to see 500 downloads, 600 downloads every day coming to us, which boosted our confidence heavily because people were organically coming, they were liking the game, we were talking to them, trying to understand what do they want more, things like that. We were not looking at data interestingly back then.
00:19:09
Speaker
And I again feel sometimes it is less in disguise because we were so focused on giving them the right experience that we were just reading what they are saying and just abiding by what people said in reviews.
Expanding Gameberry's Reach and Success
00:19:24
Speaker
Which? Like the app reviews are placed or comments and reviews, huh? OK. Yes. So if they said, this particular experience I did not like, the next release will get that fixed. 100% chance.
00:19:39
Speaker
So, there was huge loyalty from people because they knew that these guys are going to fix it. In April, I think it was 10th April or 12th April, the government was working on some server-side
00:19:53
Speaker
and accidentally he deleted the whole database. And he lost all our users that day, right? And it was, and we had around 10, 12,000 DAU back then. And all of them started complaining that I'm not able to see my account, my coins are gone, my gems are gone, what is happening?
00:20:13
Speaker
And I was looking at the emails and I was thinking, what has happened? So I checked with Govind. And Govind, what has happened? They said, I don't know. So he checked his terminal and he says, OK.
00:20:24
Speaker
I've accidentally deleted the holding dies. But luckily, because the people were so loyal to us, they forgot what had happened to them. They went back to playing their game, locked in again, started doing things again. And within six months, we were viral in Pakistan. Everybody in Pakistan was playing rhodostar.
00:20:48
Speaker
When Pakistan was playing so much, Saudi Arabia, because there's a huge immigrant from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, so shopkeepers, workers in shops, they started playing Dodo Star. The residents of Saudi Arabia, they started seeing what is happening, like everybody's playing this game called Dodo Star. So they started playing Dodo Star.
00:21:12
Speaker
And we were like, that was a peak time that we had in our DAU journey. Revenue wise, we are in our peak right now, but that was a DAU peak that we had back then, because that virality was super high, which went back to a lower numbers back then. In COVID again, it started growing faster, picked up again and then settled to a new baseline.
00:21:38
Speaker
So that was our curve for Ludo. Parthisi again had a very similar journey. Pretty much the same game. What was the peak DAU at that time, where it went viral in Saudi? We had 6 million DAU in Ludo back then. And now we have 1.5 million DAU. So that was too high for us back then.
00:21:57
Speaker
But you had enough money for the server costs. Right. Absolutely. After six months, we realized that this is going, it's getting out of control for a two-person business to be there. That is where we started thinking, okay, how do we bring people? So that was the time when we had peak traffic and then we started hiring, building the team. And then we were not sure how we want to build it. Yeah. Tell me about that. Like, how did you figure out how to build a team?
00:22:24
Speaker
First few people, we were very skeptical because we were not sure how to do that. We did not have investors to advise in certain sense. So it was pretty much network hiring that we brought him to Pradeep. Pradeep is heading marketing right now and data from at Gameberry. We brought him in. He was our roommate, but he was working at Hype Games.
00:22:45
Speaker
So we asked him to join us. And then Banish from IIT Kharagpur again, he joined us as a fourth person. And then we started hiring five, six folks, customer support folks, artists, started building with whatever understanding we had, we started hiring folks to see where this goes. We were very slow. In the first two years, we were very slow with hiring because we are not sure
00:23:13
Speaker
Who do we want? How big do we want to go? What do we want to do from this and things like that? But we were doing pretty well. Why didn't you take the customer support? Because we wanted somebody to take care of the emails that were flooding. There were so many emails coming, so many queries on Facebook. We wanted them to be there. So tell me about Pachisi. When did you start thinking of second game?
00:23:36
Speaker
So interestingly, it started with Ludo itself, because when we were researching on Ludo, we found this game called Parthisi in Spain, one of the companies that built our Spanish company. And we again did not like the game. We thought, this is a crap game that is present.
00:23:57
Speaker
So, because again the same thing like a traditional game which was made digital. Absolutely, exactly the same, exactly the same. And it was pretty much Ludo, but it had two dices and the spots of movement were higher than Ludo. Certain rules were different.
00:24:12
Speaker
And we did not knew how to play Parseesi. So we went online, read public articles where rules of Parseesi were mentioned, things like that. And we understood, OK, what do we want from this game? And we knew that we would build a good, good experience. So we knew we can build a better Parseesi experience as well.
00:24:28
Speaker
But we did not end. The third point was that the market was spin. So we knew that this is a country which will monetize better than Indian and Pakistani diaspora. So then we went back and thought, OK, we'll create an engine kind of a setup where if you want ludo, you can create ludo. If you want parci, you can create parci.
00:24:51
Speaker
And everything else will be same. We'll stick to that basics that everything has to be the same and we'll not pay attention what is to create a difference between both the games. So that is how we minimized our efforts and created both these games. RTC took one year too. So you're saying that.
00:25:08
Speaker
You created Parcheesi within that same app, like a person downloading the app could choose which board he wants to play. No, no, no, no. The person would not know. So as a user, it is Ludo or Parcheesi. But when creating a build or the final upload build, you have that option of choosing
00:25:28
Speaker
Which game build you are creating? Oh, that's very nice. So that way any upgrades to one game are automatically getting upgraded in the other game also whatever monetization engine you want to tweak, whatever you want to tweak is getting tweaked in both games together.
00:25:49
Speaker
And in 2017, I looked at how much downloads Marthisi was getting back then. So the download was not that huge, but it was on top 50 charts of Spain. So that is why it was in our attention that it is doing something and people want it.
00:26:05
Speaker
Interestingly, that category grew pretty big because of us, because the experience was so good. People who were playing RTC offline, they started playing RTC online. They started inviting their friends. If you go to our Instagram page, you'll see 1.3 million subscriber followers over there.
00:26:25
Speaker
They will keep sharing their stories, birthday stories, where they have cake of Parthisi star. You're a big fan of it. And it grew from Spain to Morocco, because Morocco, North Morocco is heavily influenced by Spain. So it started growing in Morocco. People in Brazil started playing Parthisi. People in Panama, Venezuela, dominant Republic, Colombia,
00:26:53
Speaker
Right now, Columbia is the biggest market in terms of DAU for Parchi. And when did you launch Parchi? Parchi was so easy for us that it was just a week's delay between both the releases. So anything that we are building for Ludo, the release will come out for Parchi within a week's time. That was the approach.
00:27:16
Speaker
And then by the end of that year, it started growing very heavily in Spain. So it took longer than Ludo, but even that game has grown. And right now it has like 2.5 million daily activities. Wow. So right now it's bigger than Ludo. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. And did it start monetizing also in the year one, Parchisi?
00:27:36
Speaker
Same, same. It did exactly what we anticipated. And because it was Spain, so the monetization was a lot more better. But interestingly, judo had Saudi Arabia and Mena market. So that was also doing pretty well for us.
00:27:50
Speaker
How much revenue did you do in year one then? It's around 10-11 million is what we did in the first year. Rupees or dollars? Dollars. Wow. Incredible. $10 million in year one is amazing. Okay. There would be a place or cut in it or this is after the place or tax? No, no, this is the total revenue I'm talking about. There will be a good 35% cut that police store will take, things like that.
00:28:16
Speaker
So that we was there. But we were not doing marketing back then, not much employee costs. So it was all profit to us. Oh, amazing. Amazing. Okay. So tell me the journey from this, like you have had a pretty strong year one. What was on your mind then by the time you were entering year two?
Post-Virality Challenges and Strategic Shifts
00:28:32
Speaker
By the time year two, that whole bus had already gone because the virality stays for a certain time and then it decays. But then you would not see that steep curve that was week on week we were seeing back in 2017. So instead of focusing on Ludo and Parcisi more and building team around that,
00:28:51
Speaker
We thought, okay, these games are doing good. Let us build another game. We started building a game called Monopoly, bankrupt. It was Monopoly created into a digital form again. Six, eight months, they were building that game itself. Then Luden Parcisi were doing slight bit of changes, fixing things here and there. We did not know what to do from here onwards.
00:29:17
Speaker
But that whole journey of building bankrupt and looking into data, it unlocked a lot of things for us. It started giving us that product inside, that marketing inside, how to grow things. So we started applying those things in Rodo, looking back at data and making changes to it. And we realized that, okay, now these two games are not just saturating. The de-growth is not in such a way that it will go back to a very bad number.
00:29:42
Speaker
It has saturated to a good number. So that means that people are not going to leave it. In 2018, we were very clear that we want to build a big team for load up RCC. We started hiring first PMs for ad in 2019, January, started looking into data analyst, a lot more artists, UX designers, game designers. So that's where we started our focus and very quickly moved to a size of around 30, 40 people.
00:30:12
Speaker
in 2019. What about Bankrupt? Bankrupt, we closed it because there were retention problems compared to what we were seeing in Budapest. Retention, especially D30 retention. Monopoly was a very long game.
00:30:25
Speaker
So we created a version where you could complete your business game in just 30-40 minutes. So it was a lot more game design inclined towards converging very quickly, which was not a real property trading experience that people get on board games. And it had good D7, D31 retention, but not great D30 retention. D7 is like people who continue to play after seven days. D30 is people who continue to play after 30 days.
00:30:53
Speaker
Right. After installing the app, these are the retention numbers that I look at. So people were trying it for novelty, but they were not sticking around. So we closed that game. Team size went around 35. So we had a great 2019 compared to 2018. 2017 was the best. We had DIP from there onwards, 2018-19. Because users would have problems. Yeah. Yes.
00:31:20
Speaker
So 2019, we were doing better than 2018 because now we know how to move the revenue levers, how to move the engagement levers. We understood how to do that.
00:31:31
Speaker
Can you also help outsiders understand how to improve revenue levers in a game? What are the ways in which you do that? So having the best way to understand or increase your revenue is either you will get new user, new payers in your game, or you will increase the payment that people, payers are doing right now. If you have not unlocked the potential amount of money that a peer can give, that means there's a huge scope of doing it.
00:32:01
Speaker
So it's better to focus on them rather than focusing on converting people to peers. So that very simple two metrics that you have to look at. So you're saying that you were leaving money on the table, the people who were paying people who would have paid more also, but you were not clear on that. And so the analytics. So how did you figure out that they will pay more like by running experiments, by increasing the price for these things or what
00:32:27
Speaker
Very, very small experiments, very simple, simple experiments. So let's say, just looking at the funnel, if let's say a person is moving from a lower bed to a higher bed. Ideally, you would think, okay, so our revenue was coming from gems, because of selling gems, which was the undo mechanics. So ideally, you would think people would do equal amount of undo at equal all the levels.
00:32:53
Speaker
But if you go deeper into it, there is a pattern to it. People will not do so much undo at lower bet, lower stake amounts. They would do more at a higher stake amount. So if you look at just this, and if you, so the first time when we build it, the pricing of these undo was flat across bets.
00:33:15
Speaker
And we thought, okay, why do you think about so many things, right? Keep it simple, same price point everywhere. So we were just taking 20, 30 gems in a game. Now, when we looked into it, we saw that most people are doing undo at a higher value. And if you think from a product angle,
00:33:33
Speaker
you should charge more because a lot more is at stake. Right. And that is why they are doing that. Got it. Okay. So 2019, how much revenue did you end with? Like you did 10 million in 17 then. Right. I actually was checking back the number. 10 million is what we did in 2018. 2017 calendar year I'm talking about, we did around 6.6 million and 2019 we did around 7.5 million. So, so that was not that great, but
00:34:03
Speaker
but it was actually getting better on month-on-month revenue basis. So that is why I remember that 2019 was good for us.
Adapting to Pandemic-Induced Changes
00:34:11
Speaker
2020 was fantastic for us because of COVID. When we entered March, before March, Parcheesi was played around 1.2 million daily active users. End of April, it was played around by 9 to 10 million daily active users.
00:34:25
Speaker
Wow, okay. We have people are isolated and it's a way to connect. Right. Okay. And interestingly, our games were serving that need of connecting with other folks. So it was go-to for people. And because it's so mass game and casual that there are a lot of people in coming to us. So I have seen numbers improving for other games as well, but this was too big of an increase.
00:34:53
Speaker
So both these games, Parchi, Ludo went back to 5 million daily activizers. Parchi went to 10 million daily activizers. Deploying server were a nightmare at that time because every night you would know that you need three, four new servers to be deployed today, too late. So that was exciting times for us. Okay. Okay. So you continued with that team of 30 people by the time you was at Brinkover.
00:35:20
Speaker
Right, right, right. But then when COVID hit, the DAU increased so high, we knew that now we have to unlock it even further because the reach is a lot more, a lot more people playing. And our learning was telling every time when you add more smart folks, you will unlock new things that you have not thought about. So I'm grateful to the smartness of people in Gameberry that they have unlocked a lot more things than what we could have done ourselves.
00:35:48
Speaker
So in 2020, we decided, OK, let's double the size of people, keep building more. We went from 60 to 100 to 155 right now. And most of the people have come in post-COVID.
00:36:05
Speaker
So, how do you find gaming talent? Do you look at hiring from other game companies? I mean, is there any talent or do you need to create talent? Very difficult and we had created talent and we have spent a lot of time with our
00:36:22
Speaker
team members, allowing them to make mistakes. It has taken a lot of time for us to fill this team. And I'm really proud of the team that we have built so far. Very smart folks, people who come back and tell me that I have made mistakes on my design time that I've done with Lodo and Parthi Zee. And they are right about it. They have pointed out such nitty-gritties which I never thought about.
00:36:45
Speaker
And it just fills my day that, okay, this is too much fun that even after six years of building this game, I still don't understand the user so much. So what do you hire for? What do you look at when you're hiring? It's a mix of things, especially if I am looking at product managers. I'm looking at two things. I mean, obviously they should be smart. The other thing that I want to see is that they have certain intent towards building games.
00:37:12
Speaker
which makes it a lot more easier for them to enjoy the whole process of being here. So in your interview, you talk a lot about what kind of games you like to play and like you go deep into.
00:37:24
Speaker
Right. The assignments are also sometimes inclined towards making you play certain games and then checking back. Okay. What do you have learned from that game? Things like that. Interesting. And you hire people who are what like engineer MBA combos or like who have done coding and or like, what is a profile view? Pretty much based on the role, we prefer a little bit of an MBA experience as well, because that helps a lot in understanding it.
00:37:53
Speaker
faster but we have spokes which have not done MB as well and they are doing equally good so no not necessarily true okay okay so you're at 150 now and what revenue are you at now last this particular year 2022 we have done around 39.5 million in total revenue okay amazing you're almost at the 50 million mark and with just these two games Ludo and Parjeezy right
00:38:20
Speaker
These two games have now been split into three pods, one specifically focusing into ludu, one focusing on part cg, one focusing on a new product inside these two games.
00:38:33
Speaker
What is that new product? So what we have seen, people in Ludu and Parchi, they have an affinity towards talking to other folks a lot, because it's a social game. So they're not just looking for a game person, but they want to spend their time talking to someone, and voice chat is the best way for these folks to do that.
00:38:55
Speaker
Now, if you look at certain economies, especially China, voice chat based products have come out over there, which monetizes in itself altogether, really well, where people talk to other folks and gift each other certain things in the game, just to slight bit of shows, make them feel good about it, which monetizes well.
00:39:22
Speaker
So if you look at TikTok also, they have this reward system where you can reward your content creator. So even in these voice channels where 10 people are sitting together, somebody VIP would come in and would like to
00:39:39
Speaker
reward people who are saying something great, something interesting. And reward is basically something like a collection for them. The person who's getting that reward has an appreciation firm where they can look back and see how many gifts they have gotten in the game and what is their reputation. Their club's reputation, things like that.
00:40:00
Speaker
So that is a new product that we're building in these games. And it's very entirely with a very different mindset, where we want to make people to engage with them and each other and talk to each other. So that is why I separated out a bit. So these three bonds now is what Ludo Parthisi is all about. And it's altogether 110 people almost. Okay.
00:40:25
Speaker
not able to relate with paying another player unless I'm dating or I'm looking to date. That's a very interesting point. Ideally, you would think that, but in the geographies that they play, especially if I look at this product is very, very popular.
00:40:42
Speaker
as a mechanism in Saudi Arabia, MENA region especially. Why does that happen is because of the restriction in the culture that is present over there. So they generally want to talk to folks and show off that they are VIPs.
00:40:59
Speaker
So these are two terms which are really important to them. They want that importance when they come in. And as a peer, when you get that gratification, so let's say I give you a gift which is worth $100 and I've seen people gifting the other folks $100 worth gift. This gift would be like the gems or coins. This gift would be just an image or animation playing for that other person for a brief amount of time.
00:41:28
Speaker
So people like to tell everybody that, hey, I am here, and I liked what you said or what you did. And it is not necessarily one-on-one. It is to a group sometimes. I've seen all the 10 folks are saying something very interesting. So the person would give to all the 10 people. And I've seen people doing mimicry, doing singing songs.
00:41:53
Speaker
just to entertain their audience and they spend hours and hours, seven hours, eight hours in a group chat where they are just talking that they are cooking something at home and then they are by the time, so they are cooking and on the side they are chatting or in the club itself you can play voodoo as well.
00:42:15
Speaker
So there's a whole mix of things that is happening for you as an entertainment inside that. And the person who is receiving the gift, can they convert that into cash? No, they can't. But they can convert. They get a portion of that gift in the form of that currency. Let's say I have gifted you a gift called an island. I have gifted you a car, let's say. And the car costs me 500 hearts.
00:42:43
Speaker
So, you will get 100 hearts as a conversion. So, you are getting hearts and how does it help you is because then you can send gifts from your site in future. So, that is how it translates between people. So, you are exchanging currencies in a way. Have you already piloted this voice chat? Yeah, we have done that. So, how much revenue does it make compared to the other methods?
00:43:10
Speaker
Right now, for us, it is doing very miniscule around $1500 a day, something like that. But then we know that this will go bigger from here.
00:43:22
Speaker
You think it will be bigger than the other methods because it's more intimate. It could. It could. Highly. Interesting. I used to think that a game studio is a bit like say a movie studio where you need to constantly create hits.
Exploring New Game Ideas and Markets
00:43:38
Speaker
In your case, you've decided not to focus too much on creating more hits and just milk the existing hits better. So, you know,
00:43:48
Speaker
What is your take on that? Do you think that you will also need to create more heads or help me understand that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I said, Ludo Parcisi team is around 110, then rest of the 40 people are actually on new games.
00:44:03
Speaker
One of the game is called Backgammon. Again, our Turkish Middle Eastern DICE based board game, which we are trying to build. Again, this game is showing really good retention at par with what Yudhan Parchise is showing. Then we have, again, a very special team that we have built. This team has made a game called Traitor Labs.
00:44:26
Speaker
which was built when Among Us was famous. Post that we thought this category is going to open up. So why not create a different kind of experience in the social reduction space? I am not familiar with Among Us. So what is this space? So Among Us was very viral during COVID times. It is if you have played mafia with a group of people. I haven't played that. Okay.
00:44:54
Speaker
So Mafia is a very popular game where there is one killer. There will be a group of people, 10 people playing together. And it's playing physically. You play in parties. It's a party game. So there will be a killer who will silently kill people every night. And the group will go back and do a discussion to figure out who could be a potential killer. And they will eliminate people one by one. And the final winner, if it's a killer, then the killer community wins if it's a citizen.
00:45:23
Speaker
than the citizen wins. What Among Us did was made it, digitalized it really, really well. So you can see that there are, you are moving in a lab or a spaceship.
00:45:36
Speaker
where you are doing certain things and there is an imposter who is killing everybody. And then you are doing a group discussion, who could be that imposter? Because it was so suitable for COVID, it was immensely popular. It had like 100 million downloads in a month time. So when among us got popular, we thought there are a lot of small gaps because you had to get on a call, meet call to do all these things. Okay. The voice chat was not input.
00:46:01
Speaker
Right, right. And we knew how to build voice chat. We were very fast on it. We'll bring voice chat to it.
00:46:06
Speaker
and create a different kind of experience. So we brought in a zombie mode in it, where there was a zombie, he was running around, making you a zombie, so you had to save and complete the task before the zombie hits you. So that was one game that we built, and it was really good in terms of what we have executed, but difficult in terms of growing it. So in one year time, we took with that game. We built that game, closed it in April, 2021.
00:46:35
Speaker
then started a game called merge, quickly realized that that space was very crowded, very expensive to grow. What is that space with merge? So in merge games, you typically have a similar looking objects that you will merge together to create a higher level object. And then there are things that you are doing with those objects.
00:46:58
Speaker
So very simple mechanic, but people like it a lot because you inherently you like to see patterns on a screen. So that game feeds to that, uh, psychology of ads of these type of games. Like you have an army of one color and, uh, if your army is bigger than the other, then they convert to your color. Okay.
00:47:21
Speaker
Right, exactly that. So we built traitor, then merge, then a couple of failures along the way. Why did you shut down merge? Merge was very expensive. The market was, there were a lot of big players coming into the space. Getting an install from tier one countries was very expensive. And it was, we knew that it is not going to grow organically. Then after that, this team, this new game team is working on a game called World League.
00:47:51
Speaker
which is a PVP word game versus one word game in real time. And it is in a good stage right now, but not really. It's a stage where I can say it's a success or a failure. And then there is a game that we have released recently called Match Star 3D. Very simple. You have to pick objects from a bundle of a lot of objects in a specific amount of time. So pretty fun. I mean, if somebody wants to check out, they can check out our Match 3D Star.
00:48:20
Speaker
And this is also a social game or solo? No, no, it's a solo game. So this team is specifically looking at games which...
00:48:27
Speaker
not necessarily his social type that we have at the other space. And these experiments, were they monetizing through in-app purchase or through advertising?
Monetization Strategies in Gaming
00:48:40
Speaker
Primarily, we look after in-app purchases. Still, we have the same philosophy mostly. At first, we will think in-app first. We would like to monetize through in-app purchases.
00:48:52
Speaker
And if there is a scenario where it's not happening and ads could be a solution to it, then we would do that. So it seems like you've changed your approach towards marketing where initially you said you didn't want to spend money, but it seems like you're now okay to spend money also for acquisition. So what drove that change? Frankly, the reality is that now the biggest challenge for the gaming industry is distribution.
00:49:19
Speaker
So you cannot be a studio without a marketing capability and you cannot reach 100, 120 million, 150 million mark if you are not good at marketing. So to scale from here you have to do it and you should understand to do it how to do it better and better than everybody else obviously. So that is why we have moved from a studio which did not believe in marketing to a studio which now
00:49:47
Speaker
spends a lot of money in marketing as well and want to get better at it. What are the ways in which you do marketing? What works? What does it work? What are the kind of return on ad spends that you see? What is your average customer acquisition cost?
00:50:06
Speaker
Right. I will start with probably how you can divide marketing probably. So the biggest piece is performance marketing in gaming. And when you say performance marketing, it means very data-oriented marketing where you know that you are spending a particular amount of time, money, and then that money will eventually get moved over the period of time.
00:50:26
Speaker
So, you have to get very good at measuring that, understanding and predicting what will be the LTV curve of a user. LTV curve is basically the active value of the user. So, if you look at a typical player of Nudwar Parchesi,
00:50:39
Speaker
the player will stay for a really long time. And if you see the purchase pattern of that player, you will see that till 18 months, the pair is actually paying in the game and it keeps growing. After 18 months, there is a decline in interest and that hits a saturation.
00:50:59
Speaker
So, that means if you plan a bit around 12 months window, then you can spend money and recoup it over the period of time and you are pretty much on the positive side of things.
00:51:13
Speaker
with a good margin, of course. And sometimes we include ad revenue in it, sometimes we don't include the ad revenue as well. So that's how we approach it. We look at the LTV curve, we look at what is the amount of ROAS should get met at 30 days, 60 days interval. If they are meeting it, then the campaigns are working well. If they are not meeting it, that should work in the campaign, not earlier.
00:51:37
Speaker
Things like that. All these things come into performance marketing. Then organic marketing is basically your ASO side of things where you are playing around with screenshots. One quick question on performance. So you're looking at the LTV curve. You would also need to see the conversion of gamers into paying gamers, right? Not paying gamers. No, but when we prepare this MTV curve, it is our typical DAU LTV curve.
00:52:05
Speaker
Okay, so it's averaging out that out of 150 are paying, but it's averaging it out. Okay, got it. So and you look at the campaign level. So if 100 people have installed what has happened to those 100 people on an average. So that simplifies the whole equation for us. And what platforms do you use for performance marketing?
00:52:25
Speaker
Google, Unity, Facebook, TikTok, Snap, we try all these platforms to see where we can get better returns, things like that. What is Unity? I have not heard of Unity. Most of the games in the world are actually built on an engine called Unity. Because they have built an engine, they have a very simple integration of ads in them. They are also potentially a good network for gamer games to acquire users because of that.
00:52:55
Speaker
Okay, so Unity is essentially a Google AdWords for advertising with Indians. Right. Got it. So that was the performance marketing piece. Organic site, we divided into ASO, where you want to optimize your pedestrian listing.
00:53:12
Speaker
play around with languages, multiple languages, what do they want to search, and things like that. You will see different logo, different screenshots in different countries. And there are a number of things that you can keep playing around with, and which helps it slowly to get additional 10% traffic. That's your organic side of things. Then you can do more influencer-based marketing, where you are probably reaching out to gamers through gamers.
00:53:40
Speaker
which also pretty much helps a lot of time. Like Twitch is a live streaming platform for gamers or you would have people playing this game like a popular gamer who plays this on a Twitch account is in a way then gonna drive downloads. Exactly. So that's how we bucket it broadly. Is it only on Android that you're focusing or you also have iOS apps and what is the split?
00:54:02
Speaker
We have, actually 50% of the revenue is coming from iOS for us. The paying propensity is higher for Apple users. Okay. Tell me about how gaming monetization happens. Right. So if you look at the whole landscape of gaming, there will be very similar looking tactics or mechanisms that can be grouped into monetization methods.
00:54:29
Speaker
The first one I would say is where you want to speed up the content or get a blog content. So take example of Candy Crush. So you are trying to cross a level. You are almost on the verge of crossing it, but you don't have enough moves.
00:54:45
Speaker
So now this is, you'd want to cross that level. You are trying to speed up that content. So you wouldn't like to get extra moves and you would like to pay for it. And people like that because some levels are very difficult in nature. So sometimes only occasionally you will end up with a level where you are very close to it, coming close to it. So you would like to pay for it because you don't want to replay that level again. Then you will see some games like Clash of Clans or
00:55:09
Speaker
heyday for that matter where you're growing a crop but the crop takes an hour to grow but you can pay for it just to speed it up now why these monetization model work really well and these are the top type of model monetization model because they are not competing against anybody else you are competing against yourself and they sync very fast sync very fast means you
00:55:39
Speaker
For an hour, once you have used it, you are seeing a very huge gratification that my one hour has gotten reduced to a zero second and your currency has just got and gone out in an instant. It's not a slow process.
00:55:53
Speaker
So, this is the first category where you speed up content and get access to more content very fast. Second is a leverage category where you are up with somebody else and you want an advantage over the other player. Very simple example could be Ludo because an extra dice roll is a slight advantage to the other player.
00:56:14
Speaker
And when there is an advantage like this, you are doing this because you want to be the winner. So again, it's a sink, but it's a slow sink in Ludo because it will take 40 minutes to close a game. You will buy certain gems, but it will slowly get decayed from your wallet. So it will not monetize so great.
00:56:32
Speaker
But it's a fair bit of monetization that happens. Then the third is cosmetic, which is skin. You would like to buy avatars. You would like to buy dices in our games for that matter. So we have very interesting concepts of dices. So you would like to buy those skins. In a shooter game, you would like to buy a gun, which is looking
00:56:55
Speaker
very fascinating, and you want to show off to other players who are watching you, things like that. So I think these are the top three monetization models that work, other than that ad monetization is always there. But this is primarily IAP-based monetization that works really well. Okay, so you've not done anything on the speed up side, or this Math3D is using that? Math3D is on the speed up content side.
00:57:22
Speaker
where you will have a lot of levels in it, you will cross those levels, things like that. Yes. So the third type you spoke about of skins of TARS. This is when this whole NFT gaming space is in, like now there are gaming companies which are saying that if you buy a skin, it's an NFT for you, which you can then sell and you can make some trading profit on it and things like that. Exactly. So this is a category you're not exploring so far. Is it on the roadmap to like this?
00:57:50
Speaker
Not right now. I'm pretty much focused towards a lot of the social board game side and trying to figure out new games. I mean, maybe two years down the line, three years down the line, maybe we can explore. Okay. Interesting. And help you understand the gaming industry.
Future Prospects and Industry Insights
00:58:08
Speaker
Like, you know, what are the kinds of players in it?
00:58:11
Speaker
So broadly, if you look at gaming industry, you will see PC console games, which are very, very hardcore shooters and more detail-oriented, more nausically AAA with depth in it and narrative in it. Those are the PC console games. Then comes mobile. Just like Epic Games would be this PC console game-taker with Microsoft is trying to acquire.
00:58:36
Speaker
look at Fortnite, like the depth of immersion is very, very high. So that's the hardcore games. Then comes mobile, which is slightly casual on the sides, where the immersion is not so deep as casual. And in mobile, you can divide it into free to play gaming, and then real money gaming. And a lot of time people especially confuse real money gaming with gaming.
00:58:59
Speaker
But internally, if you ask a free-to-play gaming company, they will say that's not really a gaming company. They are building an ecosystem around games. They are not building games as such.
00:59:13
Speaker
So, free-to-play gaming is what we do. And in India, there are companies like Moonfrog, PlaySimple, GSN games, which have been acquired by Skopli now, Zynga. These are the top players along with us in free-to-play space. Okay. Why is real money gaming getting so much funding? Like, these real money gaming companies are becoming unicorns and so on.
00:59:41
Speaker
In terms of money, there is definitely a lot of opportunity to make revenue from the real money space. If you look at Ludo space also, if it gets legalized in terms of betting, probably it will also have a very good billion dollar market for sure. So, Rami has been a
01:00:03
Speaker
very huge market in real money. And it has proved again and again that it's a very healthy business as such in terms of business metrics. And it's a very predictable business. So if you look at free to play,
01:00:18
Speaker
problem is predictability. It's a creative process. As a VC, you cannot predict that this will be a successful team or not. But in real money, you can still predict, okay, if the team looks smart, the space is visible, you can make a mark over there.
01:00:36
Speaker
Okay. You said that betting is allowed in Ludo also. Is there a regression that betting is not allowed in some games? Betting is only allowed in games which are a game of skill, not a game of chance. And Ludo falls in a grey area where it has skill attached to it as well as chances are.
01:00:53
Speaker
attached to it. So according to Indian law, it is not very clear whether it's a game of skill or complete game of chance. It's somewhere in between and yet that is why even Rami has the same grey area. No, Rami is pretty much defined and proven that it's a game of skill. And I think cricket is the other space which companies are using for real money gaming.
01:01:13
Speaker
Right, right. Yes. Again, that is the fantasy side of things where again the skill side of things has been explored over it. But I guess real money games are not an out-of-the-place store, right? Like you can't list them. Recently, Play Store have started experimenting with real money games as well. If we look at
01:01:34
Speaker
Dream 11 is now on the top three, four downloads, downloaded games in Play Store. So they are doing an experiment. I think either it's an experiment or it is completely out there that I'm not very updated with.
01:01:48
Speaker
What do you see as your future now? I think like movie studios, eventually that consolidation happens. You either acquire or you get acquired. And because there is so much value of finding that hit. And so either you find hits and then someone acquires you because you found a hit or you have money enough to acquire companies which have found a hit and then scale it up. What do you think?
01:02:16
Speaker
So I don't think we are in a stage right now where we can acquire studios. But we are also not looking out for an exit right now. We're pretty happy with what we have built so far. Want to do it more, want to build more games. And there are ways like what we're doing with Backgammon. We feel we can crack certain formulas where we can predict whether a game will be successful or not.
01:02:43
Speaker
And then that is where we are striving as a studio to become, okay, can we create a system and ecosystem understanding which can become an advantage to a studio to jump into a category. The fun is in acquiring studio. And when we will do that, that is the real achievement that we will do. And that is what in the long run is what we aspire to be.
01:03:12
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at adatthepodium.in. That's adatthepodium.in.