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Actionable Insights from Data and Monetization with Mark Val
230 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, we dive into the transformative power of data analysis and monetization strategies in the world of gaming and digital platforms. We'll explore how a deep understanding of your players and users can be a game-changer for your business.
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Transcript
Introduction to Player Engage Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engage podcast, where we dive into the biggest challenges, technologies, trends, and best practices for creating unforgettable player experiences. Player Engage is brought to you as a collaboration between Keyword Studios and HelpShift. Here is your host, Greg Posner.
Meet Mark Val: Multiplayer Gaming Expert
00:00:16
Speaker
Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to our padcast. Today we have with us Mark Val, the head of growth at Photon Engine. In the dynamic world of multiplayer gaming, Mark has carved a niche for himself. He currently steers the growth engine at Photon, reaching over 1.4 billion players monthly with their leading services. Before diving into the vibrant gaming universe at Photon, Mark had lent his expertise to PlayFab, as well as a mentor at Startup Boot Camp.
00:00:42
Speaker
He has an impressive track record of setting up successful teams, creating infrastructure, and raising public awareness in new terrains. Mark, I'm excited about our conversation today and be able to talk about all the analytics, but is there anything I missed about your intro that you want to share or talk more to? It's all good, Craig. I mean, obviously, we have long decades of experience left and right, but that sums it up for the last five years, let's say.
Key Analytics for Gaming Success
00:01:07
Speaker
Cool, yeah. And I want to dive into this, because ever since I started understanding the behind the scenes world of gaming, PlayFab keeps popping up. And I even tried to create my own game using my own Unity engine that I was using. And it just boggled my mind on how you actually connect multiplayer services. And now you've kind of dabbled with both of those. So starting off with kind of that hard hitting question is,
00:01:29
Speaker
What to you, if you were starting a company, are the most important analytics that you want to be measuring about an audience to help set yourself up for success? Sure. I mean, there's the obvious retention, conversion, and K factor. So I call it the home run. So let's say the first thing you want to do is have good retention, obviously. But the second thing you want to do after that is improve your conversion rate to payer if you have a free-to-play game.
00:01:58
Speaker
or ads based game. And after that is to improve the amount you will generate from each of the players. And then the fourth one would be to actually grow that game. So to make sure that you have as many eyeballs as possible, then you know your overall funnel regarding acquisition to how much you can have on little TV and then start to have something. But yeah, but otherwise like, you know, another thing in general, it can go,
00:02:26
Speaker
all the way to the rabbit hole of understanding the behaviors of your users and end up with 56 different high O of behavior pattern that will monetize in different ways.
The Role of Execution in Game Launches
00:02:42
Speaker
Yeah, so those are some to look at. Obviously, if you're going premium, well, you have to do a very good soft launch. Hopefully, you will have to test your things very well.
00:02:54
Speaker
and create the bugs and make sure that you are up to the standard of the current industry. But as we have seen just a few days ago, you can have it, you know, with Battlebit, you can have a game that doesn't have true polygraphic and all these things, but the fun is there. You can still be a small team of four and be the number one
00:03:18
Speaker
selling game on Steam on Steam today. So I'll say that it's really about execution before anything. I mean, like another thing is one thing, but in the end it's if you want to make good decision, it's your guts to start with. And then after that is how your support is talking to you regarding like, does the game fail? Is there a QA to do?
00:03:46
Speaker
Do the community enjoy what's going on right now in the game?
Photon Engine: Services and Focus
00:03:50
Speaker
Did they progress well? And then essentially it's the sum of the three that will give you the right decision, bound led with data and analytic. So I wouldn't say like, um, like another thing or one KPI is the answer. It's really what you do with it. Yeah. So you bring up user attention. We talk about that a lot and just taking a step backwards, right?
00:04:11
Speaker
You've had a lot of experience with player information player data player who they are We talk a lot about building communities on this podcast Right and the importance of it and a lot of times people talk about discord and they talk about your network and your reddit But you guys are helping connect multiplayer
00:04:27
Speaker
Players playing together and in that there's a whole nother logic that has to make sense right because yes you have a community But you need to you need to match like players right if I'm playing Call of Duty and I just pick up the controller for the first time on I'm playing an expert I'm immediately gonna leave So I feel like you guys are taking a look at community from a different side of it to make sure that you can match up against like players But even before diving into that you mind giving maybe an elevator pitch to people that are listening to the podcast What exactly is photon engine doing sure so um?
00:04:56
Speaker
Photon is the number one service provider of multiplayer service worldwide. We're mainly focused on Unity, so we provide all the topologies and the engine types that you can dream of regarding how to build a multiplayer game today. It's free to use, so anyone can go and register and try out your services. And then we have thousands of live games worldwide. We cover
00:05:22
Speaker
everything all the way to China. And then we continue to innovate. So our goal is to always have like the latest tools regarding multiplayer. So now we've launched not too long ago, Fusion, which is a new product that supports easily up to 200 players, but you can go way higher than that if you want to, in a full first-person shooter sister it's game.
00:05:40
Speaker
And then we have Quantum, which is a deterministic platform, which use a different way to do net code. And it's very easy to actually build something with that. And now it's free for everyone to use. So yeah, so that's how we operate. But what you were referring to earlier is matchmaking.
Complexities of Matchmaking in Gaming
00:06:02
Speaker
So matchmaking can be
00:06:04
Speaker
You know, seeing that multiple level. First thing you want is to, when you launch your game, is to make the people play. And usually when you have a multiplayer game, you don't have enough players to create meaningful match. Even if you have a four versus four, right? So don't even think about it, 16 versus 16.
00:06:23
Speaker
Android player map or something like that because you can have problems to get those users without spending money. So one thing to be done at the start is to integrate bots. Obviously, those bots will go away with time, but bots will make it possible for your players to try out the game on the first play rather than wait for players to come.
00:06:43
Speaker
And once you have enough players, then the bots just goes away with time. And you can use the same bots in the future if a player leaves and don't come back or there's a disconnect, you're replacing with a bot, which always great so that there's an even match, right? Even if it's AI. Regarding matchmaking, there's multiple aspect to it. It's a very deep subject. But if we go just, you know, scrap the surface,
00:07:07
Speaker
you can have helo scoring or you have different type of belt curves. So a belt curve has, let's say you have zero and then you have like 50 and then you have a hundred, right? And let's think you have like 3000 levels. So you will be matchmaking with someone that is somewhere in that belt curve. And obviously the one that are closer to you
00:07:27
Speaker
have a bigger risk to be matchmaking with you. And then if you don't find enough, then you have expansion. So we have expansion of that bell curve to find more players. And that's purely based on scoring or rating. If you want to do it properly, you have to also integrate behaviors, which I've talked a bit about earlier. So that could be
00:07:49
Speaker
Well, that's his 10 game today, or that's his first one. He is part of a clan. He's always participating. He's someone who will always give stuff to his colleagues. So those behaviors are all different, which will create a different type of gameplay. Some players just like to kill everyone on a map. Some people just like to finish the map. So those behaviors are important to take in place, and that will create a better match in the end. You have to also calculate how many times did you lose.
00:08:19
Speaker
How many times did he wins in the last 10 or 20 games? Someone who will always win is as boring as someone will always lose. So you have to make sure to give him a challenge to that group or that person. And when I say group is when you are matchmaking, like you are four or eight or 16 players in a group and you want to be matchmaking with others, then obviously that belt curve gets a little bit crazy. So there's more into that obviously, but, um, you know, scratching the surface there.
00:08:47
Speaker
It's kind of a fascinating topic because I have found myself over time getting bored with certain games because as I get older, I'm actually playing games on easier because I'm more interested and invested in the story. But then the game gets boring pretty quick because it's too simple. These rules that you talk about, right? And I'm going to call them rules and it's probably not the right term for it.
00:09:06
Speaker
Are those pre-built into the tool? Is that stuff you have best practices upon? I just remember myself the last few times I played Siege, my own teammate would kill me. It's just like, all right, this is a frustrating experience. Why is this happening over and over again? Well, obviously, you can have static segment regarding of play or other things like that. But in the end, you will have threshold R dynamic, which is that data sets gets updated.
00:09:34
Speaker
and based on those data sets, then it will change. Obviously you can, you have elements that you can not very much change, which is like you are here physically on the world. This is your region, right? So, but essentially like, it goes very much into like details of play, which is like, you can, you know, as the same as you can do an estimated value of moderation of how a player will spend money in a game, you can do the same of how much gonna have fun in it.
00:10:05
Speaker
So you can risk sometimes as part of your algorithm to propose two match that are too hard right now for this player. But based on cycle traits or other behaviors, it might be exactly what he is looking for right now, a challenge. So actually like knowing perfectly a community requires
00:10:32
Speaker
you know, some a lot of work to analyze the psycho traits, and to have the players fill out forms that you understand more about their habits and what they do. But ultimately, like, you know, at the base is still the same, which is
00:10:52
Speaker
either elo's core rating or similar there's true match there's smart match you can look at xbox there's a bunch of white papers about that as well but the behaviors themselves are really depending on your game i mean like if you're making like a cooperative terrain game where you have to conquer a map versus a first person shooter
00:11:09
Speaker
Don't get me wrong, but there's other things to target between the two, something with the RTS and the click per seconds and other things like that. So I would say that every game style and gameplay will have its own unique set of elements to track. But those are core to the gameplay.
00:11:27
Speaker
and the community. And obviously, there's no gameplay or community that are the same. So there you go. These behaviors are interesting to me. And I'd like to take a second to kind of understand it, right? Because at Helptrist, we talk about that quite a bit as well. But the behaviors usually get passed to us from our
00:11:43
Speaker
from our customers, right? They already have that information saved somewhere.
Analyzing Player Behavior: Challenges and Tools
00:11:46
Speaker
Where do customers capture this data? Is it a PlayFab? Are they doing it directly on Photon? Are there other tools that you know of? Like this is complicated stuff, or maybe it's not as complicated as I'm making it, but where are companies capturing this type of data typically? Sure. So usually it starts with the basic stuff, which is like event-driven data based on to either progressions or
00:12:10
Speaker
other elements, very few are making chords. Okay. So meaning that a one week virus, one week to another, or maybe of course that lasts two months or 28 days, depending on your target profile regarding like the tools themselves. I don't think yet there's the,
00:12:28
Speaker
the ultimate tool. For example, in PlayFab, there's a lot that you will get for tracking your events and data. There's not that much to... Well, you have the tools to consume and interpret that data, but you don't have the wires in between, which is like, here's what you have to track or and whatnot. Obviously, there's templates and other elements, but as I said multiple times, games are so different from one to another.
00:12:52
Speaker
I think that if you look at the open source services, like game and anything and others, like it's getting more and more in that direction, where they will offer you elements to track that, you know, track a large part of it easily. But you will, well, first, before you go all the way down to the, you know, to the funnel of tracking, let's call it like that. You have to make sure you have a successful game, right? And that you are making money. So if you're making money, you're going to hire a proper data scientist who will have
00:13:21
Speaker
his own set of tools and graph. Maybe he's going to use Looker from Google. Maybe he's preferred to use some Synapse and Data Lake from Azure. I don't know. And then use some Power BI after that to share the dashboard and other things. I think right now there's no one tool fits all. Interesting. I kind of noticed that gap a while ago and I thought someone would solve it.
00:13:49
Speaker
Well, it's been 20 years before working on that. I mean, I think where it gets very hard is the GUI, like how do you present that data sets and how will you do that typing an event and keeping the story and all that. And that if you mess up or have data that you want to remove from the equation for whatever reason, that it's easy to clean and revert and other things like that, then
00:14:17
Speaker
you know, the size of those data sets, which has, you know, billions of tracks every day, depending on the size of the game. Yeah, it's not easy. Now, but it's cool data, right? If I'm wondering if like, as you're talking around thinking can generate of AI start to look at some of these common themes and try and make connections between them that or make at least suggestions, right? It's again, taking a look at a big data set and trying to find insights in it, which I think is one of the hardest things to do. And anything you can do to help enable it shows you positive
00:14:47
Speaker
stuff?
Generative AI in Gaming: Potential and Limits
00:14:48
Speaker
Uh, yeah. I mean, like, um, well generative AI, I would, is really not ready to have the full end to end. Meaning like, um, you let AI ingest and interpret the data, create some creative or change some element of the game and then update the whole thing. No, um, it's not there yet.
00:15:11
Speaker
Um, regarding like AI that, that tries to create a report for you automatically. Well, yeah, it's there. I mean, like, um, here's the thing is that if you look at chat GPT or most of the creation tools or what is offered in another thick and they have some sort of AI or co-pilot or something, the result is very convincing, right? Meaning that, uh, uh, it's very good, but it doesn't mean it's true.
00:15:40
Speaker
that this is the thing that you have to do or release. And I think that's where it stops, which is that you as an individual should be able to assess, interpret, and have a result by yourself. And the AI is more like a good colleague that you can learn from
00:16:11
Speaker
but doesn't have the definitive answer. We might have it sometimes, right? No, get me wrong. And you will learn from the AI as well, definitely. But it's not there yet. It's just simple ideas. Maybe sooner or later, but the current approach, which is like the sum of all conversation and whatnot, doesn't let creativity
00:16:38
Speaker
run into new things very much, right? It's always something that worked before. Do you guys find yourself dealing with a lot of your customers or their customers on Discord?
Community Engagement via Discord
00:16:48
Speaker
Is that a big channel for you guys? Yeah, so we use Discord extensively, actually. So what we did, we actually closed our web forum in favor of Discord simply to have more of a form of a community, and that is real time.
00:17:07
Speaker
And so we have a public discord that anyone can join. Anyone that has a Photon Engine account can go there, mingle with the community. And then we have a private discord as well, which we call the Photon Circle. And those are customers that we select and are part of that. But now it's actually open to everyone now as well.
00:17:31
Speaker
And then Gaming Circle members will have access to our tech team. So our engineers are on Discord as well answering questions right away. And then what we did on top of that is add the Stack Overflow of those questions asked and have the answers directly there and then have the content of the Stack Overflow shared to other people. Yeah, you know, like, but Discord is really much about
00:18:01
Speaker
being in charge of your community. If I go back 10 years ago, you still had multiple games launching with just a website, and that's it. So then what was happening, you had all those third party community that were being built up. So then you lose the conversation. It's not yours anymore. So it's very important to keep your community very close to you, both in SAS service and gaming
00:18:31
Speaker
simply because that's where you're going to have all of your intake of what is good, what is wrong.
00:18:37
Speaker
you know, have some genuine ideas about what to do next as well. Do you find that your users are providing best practice to one another in the public facing discord? Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, it's always those, you know, we talk about behavior and cycle traits earlier. And one of them is some individuals really like to help others, like for them, it's rewarding and it's resourcing.
00:19:03
Speaker
the bigger your community, the more you can have of those. If you go back into the forum days or, you know, MRC or other type of communities, then you will end up to have moderators that moderate the content just for free, just because they want to be part of the community and mingle more. So on that end, yeah, people do help each other. I mean, like,
00:19:31
Speaker
I think every human should help each other. If you see someone who has a question and you have the answer, it'd be great that you take just a minute to answer back.
00:19:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's why I think it's the community has to grow by helping one another. And we see that a lot in our we have slack channels that are public facing as well, where companies always want to disclose what company they're working for. But they're more than happy. I mean, they're all customer experience or customer service people at the end of the day. So everyone wants to be able to help their customers, right. And
00:20:07
Speaker
We see a lot of knowledge sharing. I mean, when we look at our roadmap, our roadmap is reset. But when we see specific types of feedback or people coming to us with specific type of questions, we take that seriously and talk about how we implement that because we think we know everything. But until you start talking, I mean, this is the role of a product manager, right? Do user stories, interview your customers, get an understanding of what they want and need. And it's fun to just be able to sit back and watch two customers solve a problem together, something I wasn't even thinking about before.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. And I would say like, what you just said now is more important than knowing what your number one KPI is to actually have the soft skills to be able to engage with your community and not be afraid that that says something is on fire somewhere. Maybe it could be your servers or
00:20:58
Speaker
something else, then you are genuine enough to go straight to your community and say, hey, sorry, we know that this is happening. We're going to take care of it. Usually the fire will go down slowly, just because you said that. It's not fixed yet, but you're talking to them. And that's retention, really sticking care of your people.
00:21:19
Speaker
wherever you go, if people are taking care of their customers, they're going to come back. Yeah. And that's not just companies, right? Brand advocates. And that's what you're talking to build up those brand advocates to help build your communities. They'll make everyone strong. And it's this ongoing cycle of just keeping your customers happy. And that leads to user retention. Yeah, it's empowering your users. It's UGC. It's all of that.
00:21:41
Speaker
So a little bit about
Mark Val's Journey in Gaming Technology
00:21:42
Speaker
you, Mark, right? You have this awesome background. You've worked with some fun companies. You've learned about players in the background, but how do you, how do you get there? Do you, you go into school thinking, I want to learn about players in the game or how did you get to where you are? Well, um, well, for me, it's, um, uh, I'm very passionate about multiple things, right? So, um, I'm an engineer myself, so I can build pretty much anything I want.
00:22:07
Speaker
And I'm a creative person as well. So I like to explore new things. And third is that I love science in general. So then I touch a lot of physics. I touch a lot of human behaviors through psychology. I love progress and other elements. So obviously anything that will make the brand I'm working for
00:22:29
Speaker
or people I know, or my colleagues better, I will try to talk to them about that. So, um, um, and then I think per se is, is very much, especially in gaming and free to play, you know, we have so many different vertical, right? So you should talk to the user acquisition guys, or you should talk to people working game lane, or, uh, she talked to, you know, folks who work only in Asia versus here in the West.
00:22:58
Speaker
Um, you will have so different discussion, right? So, um, to me is the sum of it, like is the sum of all of that. Um, but it's just, you know, I think what is very important is to know where to give effort to it. What, why do I say that is simply because like, um, obviously there's those that release something with no tracking at all. And they just hope that, uh,
00:23:21
Speaker
things would go okay. Then you have the opposite, which is people that spends a lot of time on an analytic framework and then they are stuck in creating the content. So I think it's the right balance. So all the basics regarding like how many you had, how many people came back, how time spent,
00:23:42
Speaker
um, the, um, your retention or your K factor. So slash virality, all of those are important. Like, um, but when it, but when you go down to knowing the 56 behaviors or so I was talking about earlier, this is when you have a successful game, right? So, um, but to start to, to, to get going, I would say is to, um, look, just have how hats works, right? So, um, ads in general works with attribution. So.
00:24:11
Speaker
You attribute the eyeballs to the creative, to the publisher, and then the money flows from one hand to another. Just knowing that this is like the basic loop of tracking very much gives a lighthouse to your meaning regarding what you're going to provide to your customers. So yeah, so it's both technical and soft skills and
00:24:41
Speaker
understanding of behaviors that we're on a finite planet now that the internet has been flat for more than 20 years, right?
AI and Internet Evolution
00:24:51
Speaker
So what I mean by that is that everyone can access your content, maybe not from China, but they find ways. And from day one, you should aim for going global. So it means culturalization, globalization,
00:25:10
Speaker
you know, we have to know the major holidays worldwide, right? So there's a lot of things to know regarding like, how will you take data in general and put it to your advantage?
00:25:26
Speaker
I love that, right? You said your background is science and engineering and I took note of that, right? And at first I was like, it's so weird that you're kind of a public facing figure here with an engineering background and a science background. I typically think that's behind the scenes and then I start thinking about it and you're monitoring these user flows, these user tendencies. And as an engineer, when you're building a product and you have to start
00:25:50
Speaker
understanding where are people clicking what are people doing how are they reacting to this stuff it gives you kind of this edge to know alright well i can just fix this at myself or i can move this button or i can do this and and i can really make that perfect experience so it seems weird at first to me on how those connect but it does make a lot of sense it maybe the the outgoing personality side is still kind of a strange one to me because
00:26:13
Speaker
Most engineers I've met before are more quiet and reserved. There's all kinds of people. Well, the big difference with me is that, so my first company was the end of the 90s. And so I was making websites and whatnot. And an interactive experience, which we used to call multimedia. And I very much like to do those. And I very much didn't want to work for someone else. So
00:26:43
Speaker
So I had to become a public facing person and to engage with customers and create a brand and sell it to be able to do what I like. So yeah. I remember those days of Dreamweaver in front page in school and trying to learn how to build a web page for people. Yeah. That's a great skill to have back then. And Dreamweaver is still there today. I mean, it's a very old tool. Sometimes I miss those days because it was
00:27:11
Speaker
Like it was really down to the core of programming rather than now there's like frameworks and all these things everywhere and people talk about frameworks instead of programming language and I'm like this is just so weird anyway.
00:27:28
Speaker
I'm eating, I'm buying the hype very big. I truly think that generative AI is the next big leap in technology, similar to how the 90s was for the internet and people who were, I'm just gonna say younger at that time and learn to go and run with the technology made the most of it. And I see people who are willing to give
00:27:45
Speaker
the different tools doesn't just have to be chat GPT, but like all these other AI tools for images, for sounds, for like, I think this is going to be the next big step. And what are people going to do with it? I'm not sure. I know there's a lot of products coming out and a lot of them are not fantastic. It's first movers advantage. But I see this as being a big step similar to how that was in the 90s for you. Yeah. I mean, like for those who understand all of the verticals, like these tools are like magic.
Generative AI in Creative Industries
00:28:12
Speaker
When I see this is that I have understanding of design, have understanding of flow, and then to be able to composite everything together in a meaningful format. If it generates code, to be able to parse and arrange and debug and iterate on that generated code. So
00:28:35
Speaker
By any means, just to come back to what I was saying earlier, yes, it's true. It's like both for creating 3D models or animation or sound, take an image and have a 3D character being generated out of it. It's extremely impressive, but still you have to understand what is the result. You have to understand what you have. Obviously, if it's an image, fine, you have 2D picture. You have a WAV file or MP3, whatever you find, you have a file. But if you have something that is dynamic,
00:29:04
Speaker
You have to understand how things are connected together. So you still have to do the learnings about what they are and how to use them. Otherwise, it's just information that is spit out. But it's a nice way to learn, I guess, right? But I would say that
00:29:24
Speaker
for anyone today, it's still very important to understand what is a buffer and how to use it. So yeah, it's funny, this kind of this kind of ties into the second point you made earlier that wrote down the internet being flat, you know, back to the days of the 90s, when you were learning to use or you were building websites, right, coming across that knowledge on how to do that, and how to build this stuff,
00:29:45
Speaker
wasn't as easy as going to Google and say, how do I build a website in Dreamweaver and then watching a YouTube video? Now we all have access to the same videos, the same content online. And I'm not going to say it's going to be a race for who's the most talented or not. But this concept of the internet is flat plays perfectly into this because it's a fair it's a fair game for everyone here.
Tech Advancements and Cultural Impact
00:30:08
Speaker
I mean, that's right. It's an interesting place to be in. Well, I have this
00:30:13
Speaker
You know, like a week ago, there's this guy from Germany who published a video, I think it was on Twitter, and then went on TikTok, YouTube everywhere. And he's just holding a camera, walking in this flat, and then he just changed the world he's in that every five to 10 seconds. Here's the thing is that the edge of creation just got pushed like further away. So this summer, 2023, we're gonna see new content
00:30:41
Speaker
that we didn't thought was possible to be created by one or two individuals with AAA quality and all these things. And everyone's going to be stunned about it. Like, wow, this is great. And with everything, at one point, there's going to be a lot of them. There's going to be 30 of those a day. And then you're going to be like, oh my god, OK. So this cycle has been happening ever since music tapes.
00:31:11
Speaker
So, which is like now it's all about, you know, rock music and then after that it's all about metal and then after that it's all about hip-hop, you know. So, in the end it's not necessarily, at first it's very impressive, but at one point it's assembling and then it becomes more like a culture or a movement that goes in a certain direction.
00:31:36
Speaker
Um, I mean, and as we go with technology, you know, like just to go back a little bit. Okay. So when I say the world is flat and you say anyone has the same chance to learn and execute very much reflect what century we're in right now, which is the century of self, right? It's like me, myself, and I.
00:31:57
Speaker
Look at me, look at what I can create. I'm a good person. The material individual, right? And both into like, who do you project as an individual, as part of communities? So where I want to go with this is that I'm as the same as I was saying with moment in time in the past that really define cultures and generation. Technologies are a big accelerator of those, right?
00:32:30
Speaker
Creativity is the part that makes people dream, right? And a bore to some ideologies, right? And as I was going to before, I said, let me go back a little bit. With the technology that is up and coming now, it makes that reality.
The Future of VR and New Mediums
00:32:45
Speaker
Well, we've seen the real refers to them multiple times, right? But what I mean is that the first time that you're going to have a mass market product, which is going to be the Questry,
00:32:55
Speaker
Um, with full pass through and in colors, uh, similar to what we saw with Apple vision. Um, then you're going to, then you have a whole other medium, right? So, um, um, that medium that re interprets what is your surrounding and making it yours in the sensory of self. Wow. Like soon enough, like people are going to create a whole world, like really crazy.
00:33:20
Speaker
So, um, and be inside of it. But that still means that you have to stay to the edge of technology and be the latest one to do it. Because as soon as this second wave, which is like the first wave is going to be a bit, whatever second wave is going to be more about personalization of that content. Fine. And then.
00:33:40
Speaker
We have those new mediums that are coming. If you put everything together, you still have to offer something that is genuine and original. So by any means, if you want to win, you always have to create something new. It's interesting. A few things you said there make a lot of sense, and the last one resonates real quick, kind of being unique for lack of better words. You have to create something new.
00:34:03
Speaker
I have a five-year-old, and I get bored of telling him stories. So every once in a while, I'll go to chat GBT and say, write a story about Iron Man and Spider-Man. And after a while, you see the stories are exactly the same. They replace a couple of words here with a couple of words there. And it's kind of like that honeymoon period about, oh, this is awesome. Then it's like, OK, this is the same thing over and over again. It's a great first step for technology, right? And you're talking about the kind of stages of technology, right, with the Quest 3 coming out with full 3D pass through.
00:34:31
Speaker
I'm not necessarily sold on the VR hype. I like where it's going. I keep telling people I truly believe that if it was going to blow up, it would have done it during COVID when we were all locked down anyway. The price point was there, but I would love for it to work. We used to call it, or I guess Gartner has something called the hype cycle. And I think that's kind of where you were starting with this generator of AI is like,
00:34:53
Speaker
The hype cycle, we're at the top right now. Everyone's hyped up and they're all creating stuff that probably may not last for long, but something will come of it. The question is, what is it going to be? And we've seen this for web two. We've seen this for the web to begin with, right? Like people dream of what's going to come. And I think we need to get through these first few, this first period of time and see what comes of it. And that's where we are jumping back in the quest, right? Quest one was for enthusiasts. Quest two opened it up to the public. Quest three will hopefully be more
00:35:21
Speaker
more public facing it and about the. Yeah. Also the device changed a lot. Right. I mean, like, uh, you know, like, um, to me, I'm, I'm, I'm bullish on, um, when the, when the glasses are like that big, right? So that's the obvious. So, um, you know, like, um, sunglasses are 50 gram on your nose, right? Like regular glasses, like the one I've just showed you is like 30 gram or something. Right.
00:35:48
Speaker
And then you look at the Apple Vision and then, okay, you have like alpha kilo on your head. It's like, okay, well, and you know, like for myself, I've built a startup using HoloLens 2016.
00:36:00
Speaker
And after a year of having the HoloLens on my nose, I was like, I have to sell the startup. Like really, like I just could not bear any more of having that thing on me. I just wanted to throw it on the wall. So a lot of it has to do with quality of life. And then the other one is quality of service, which is if it breaks, where do you go to repair it? So you want something that is cheap so that when it breaks, it doesn't matter. You can buy a new one. So there's a lot of product fits to get there.
00:36:29
Speaker
But for anyone who has two VR in their house with kids, there's a very high chance the two VR is going to get used every single day. So because there's just so much content, you know, going from rec room to gorilla tags. And then if you go to older, then you have those popular VR game, you have fishing games, you have shooters, and you have all those resident evil that's going to make you cry.
00:36:53
Speaker
So I mean like the immersion is really hard to beat. And if you go back again, like 10 years ago, you look at VR headset, you had a launch back in your face, right? You had a full thing of what is gigantic. And now with Equestria, it's getting very thin. And I mean, it's the same as with, you know, the first cassette players, you had this huge thing with double D batteries. And after
00:37:14
Speaker
You know, a few while you have like those CD players that has two batteries that can last for a whole week, right? So yeah. You have me thinking back. I don't know if you had the virtual boy. Yeah. Remember the red one. Yeah. Right. It was just mind boggling. And it was just a bunch of pixel art or like 3d lines that just kind of played tennis. So it was a cool experience. I always wanted to buy it. And then every time I was trying it, I was like, yeah.
00:37:42
Speaker
Not worth it, but cool experience nonetheless. I mean, we've been talking about technology and we're talking about that.
Variety in Gaming Experiences and Business Models
00:37:48
Speaker
One question I always ask and I haven't asked yet is, what games are you playing now if you do play any games? Oh, yeah, sure. So I'm a big gamer. So I've lost another art core character at W4. So that will have been playing art core since art core exists. I don't play any other mode.
00:38:04
Speaker
Because I love the trail the same why I very much like battle royal game that I like war zone and Tarkov and other Extraction type of games where you can lose all your loot, but you can always you know Save it if you do well on mobile I play just too many games because of our customers. So I play pretty much everything that comes to me and
00:38:28
Speaker
But otherwise, recently I've, which one did I just install like a week ago just for fun? It's a rush arena, which is funny because now, you know, like if you go back to like 2016, you know, you had a match tree game, you had a mystery game, you had, you know, all of the genre were pretty much
00:38:55
Speaker
what it is and then 2017-18 and you start to have like cross, which is like garden scape. So you have to do match tree, you have to do quest, you have to do cleaning, you have to do a bit of farm bill left and right, you know, so this mix of
00:39:13
Speaker
Casual job being mixed up and nowadays is taking those mechanics and just like putting bear to the minimum in term of mechanics, but trying to put a Lord on top of it. So that's a longer story.
00:39:26
Speaker
And there's arcs and other elements, and then the seasons and the community that goes to it. And I find it super fascinating that gameplays are extremely simple, can have such depth. Anyway, so if you compare this game I just talked about, which is what's the game again? Rush Arena versus Diablo 4. The amount of time to execute these two are so different. Really, the amount of combat in Diablo 4 is crazy.
00:39:57
Speaker
Um, but that's what you get for a premium game. Um, and then when you pay for, when you pay nothing for free, that's what you get. So, so, uh, yeah, so it's, so I think it's very important to see both. Um, but at the same time, like now we have like, uh, the finals, uh, that's going to get released on steam. There's some prep for you and those are free to play. So, um, I think it's free to play. So. So it's interesting to always see those mechanics, like take league of legends, for example.
00:40:26
Speaker
So you have 40 million people playing every day. I think it's still the case. I'm not sure. But then you have a very small amount of the players that converge to pair, just 10 margin. But that's because they have such a large crowd. And they make a ton of money with that, even if they have a small conversion rate. So when you have a premium title with Blizzard, they know they're going to sell a million copies. And they're going to put it at launch.
00:40:52
Speaker
at 80 bucks and then 129 bucks for like ultimate package or something and they sell all of it and they make all their money in you know the first 48 hours and of course gonna make way more money with all of the merch and other things on the side. So where I want to go with this is that the business of gaming is like super wide. Very few talk about that and the business of gaming is actually not talked about very much so
00:41:22
Speaker
and how to leverage a brand through across media and how you leverage your merch. I saw games that saw that sold like 100,000 copies of a game. Yeah, not good. But their merch, they sold like a gazillion amount, right? And they made way more money with merch. Some people with way more money than ads with ads than if it was premium. And that's the thing, right?
00:41:51
Speaker
all goes around. But for me, I like to play things I haven't seen. Yeah, that's what it is. You mentioned two games popped in my head as you were talking there on two different
Community Engagement: Lessons from Among Us
00:42:02
Speaker
topics. One was Among Us because that game came from a studio that had very few developers, no one heard about it.
00:42:10
Speaker
and the game just blew up. I think it was a little before COVID. I don't know, right? But everyone played that game. And I don't think it scaled as well. It's five years ago now. Five years ago. A little before. But this is to your point where it was a non-AAA studio. They threw together this game. They probably made more money in selling their little space guys than the actual game itself. And now it's
00:42:36
Speaker
It's cool to see what they did with the VR. I didn't try the VR one, but it looked really cool. It was a fun experience. I feel like it was a little late to the game, but it was a cool experience. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's hard to do proper VR as well. So Shell Games took the Among Us VR project and did it very well. So I'm happy they made it happen. Regarding
00:43:04
Speaker
You know, what happened with Among Us, if you are able to empower a community to invite others to create fun and they have fun, there's a hundred percent chance that you're going to invite more people.
00:43:20
Speaker
It was one of the few games that got that so right. Like we would literally have people over and there'd be eight of us sitting in a room and we'd all have our phones out. The only other game we've ever really done that with was like the Jackbox games because we're all in the person together. But like among us had such an amazing formula to just suck people in. Yeah, that's right. And it's using some behaviors of humans.
00:43:42
Speaker
which is trust, right? And do I trust you? I don't, you know? And then you have the soft skills approach to it, which is like, huh, no, it's not me, right? And which is, you know, are you sus, right? I mean, like, now in every
00:44:02
Speaker
schoolyard, they say, oh, you're sus. I mean, everyone knows exactly what it means, where it's from, and what is the mindset behind it. And that is because of a game. So being able to pull those barriers to cycle traits that is across a large portion of the population triggers those moments where you're like, oh my God, right?
00:44:28
Speaker
So, um, you know, the high effect is for everyone. You know, it's the same like us, we're assessed service, we provide multiplayer service. Well, for us, the ha ha moment is when, you know, like a developer registers, uh, download one of our samples and go in unity, compile it. And then he has character moving on the screen and like, okay, cool. And then double click again on the build. And then he has two windows and then he's moving here. It moves there.
00:44:57
Speaker
And he's like, Oh my God, let me try with my phone. And then he moves on his phone. It moves on his screen. He's like, aha. Okay. Now I can do it too. Right. So, um, that's the thing is that when you are able to bring people to a point where they feel very, a lot of satisfaction is a hundred percent chance that your retention goes very high.
Photon Engine's Service Philosophy
00:45:17
Speaker
So these aha moments are interesting. Right. And they make a ton of sense from,
00:45:23
Speaker
Photon, the type of content you have the ability to monitor, are you able to help provoke or help expose some of these aha moments based on just the data that you're able to see? Not at all. So when we make aha on our side is when there's a hockey stick, when there's a game.
00:45:41
Speaker
But it was like in the Amazon, and then it reached the moon. So why? It's because we are not tracking anything about the players. It makes it very hard to make a ha-ha moment. But when it comes to my desk and I play the game, I do have a ha-ha moment and tell them. But what I mean by this is that we don't have any tooling to do that. And it is precisely why Photon is good, actually. Let me explain why. To be able to activate
00:46:11
Speaker
data understanding, like I could do it at PlayFab, like I could do that PlayFab. You need cloud safe, right? You need the full progression and history of a player. We don't have anything about that in Photon because we have 100% focus in delivering the best product for multiplayer. And that side of things, we do provide a matchmaker, right? But we will not provide all the stack of
00:46:42
Speaker
a cloud-safe solution that needs to run in real time. Because, you know, I know it. It's freaking hard to build and to do it right. And if we will do that at Photon, we will have to spin another company, right? And make them independent of us. And then they could
00:47:01
Speaker
And then we'll have a really beautiful dashboard. I mean, it will make our product better because in the end, when you sell hammers and screwdrivers and saw, that's what we sell pretty much. You can only assess the quality of the work.
00:47:21
Speaker
once the house is built, right? So, meaning that it's very hard to, I can give you videos on how to hammer properly, right? There's no problem. But what will you hammer? I don't know, right? So, and that's the thing. It's the- Yeah, I get it, right? There's a saying and I forgot what it is. Like you can't see the full picture until the full picture is actually complete. So you're just providing tools to help create this picture and then you gotta see how everything's actually
00:47:51
Speaker
operating together as a whole. So we do give best practice regarding what or how to implement some game mechanics. But the total execution will be up to that person on the other side of the screen. And that can only be tracked in game tracking. Cool. I think that's all I have for you today, Mark. Is there anything that you think we want to discuss that we haven't yet? Is there anything you want to just plug?
00:48:23
Speaker
Do I have anything to plug? Well, yeah, sure. So if you go back like five years ago, so that's 2018.
The Growth of Multiplayer Gaming
00:48:33
Speaker
And you look at the top 100 games on mobile that were multiplayer, yet I think like 10 of them or something. And now it's like over 70%. So why are they up there?
00:48:52
Speaker
He has a touch with every single thing we've talked about before. The intrinsic value of multiplayer is that it creates a community right away. It means that if you have a global chat, or if you have a local chat, or if you have clans, or if you even better have a tool for people to create content in your game, that could be their own emblem.
00:49:17
Speaker
a landing page or an area for the clan where people can visit afterwards. There is a 100% chance, again, that your players will come back to see what happened in there, simply because it's the IKEA effect, which is that if you spend time in building something, it raises in value. So the value you bring to a multiplayer game as individual in a game that you like,
00:49:45
Speaker
Uh, it makes it that there's a very high chance that you're going to find people that have similar mindset than you, that you are going to enjoy talking with them and bonding happens. Um, and then the brand takes over after that. Right. So, um, and then obviously like with time or industry found out that PDP monetize more than just, you know, cooperative game or single player game because
00:50:12
Speaker
of all the cycle traits that falls into that. So by any means, I would say you have to think very much about implementing some sort of elements that brings players together. And the real-time aspect of it is where pretty much everything is heading now. And it's also much cheaper than before to run these things.
00:50:41
Speaker
So we used to say it's hard, it's expensive. Like those two are not true anymore. It's easier than before. It's as cheap as running PlayFab, for example, or cheaper even. So if there's one thing to add is that it has to be something to consider. And as for us, like one of our,
00:51:09
Speaker
What has been growing the most is not gaming, actually. It's B2B. So we're talking about Daimler or NASA or other huge international companies, doctors, surgeons that are using multiplayer in real time for education or for doing real groundwork
00:51:40
Speaker
And the fact that you can be multiple eyes and ears and brain on a problem at the same time makes it solve faster. That's the, you know, the same as a processor, you stack them, you're just faster. So, so I'm pretty sure that in 10 years from now, like real time will just become boring because it's everywhere. So a bit like,
00:52:09
Speaker
You know, if you compare back in the days, HTTP to billboard, right? HTTP was like, Oh, a new thing. It's super complicated. There's, there's all these languages, the JavaScript, what's that? Right. And then now it's omnipresent that people don't even think about it. And, um, well, it's the same for real time, uh, and multiplayer in general. So yeah, so you have to accept it and do it.
00:52:35
Speaker
The two things I really like there are again, the same thing we hear time and time again is build your community, build your community,
Building Communities for Game Success
00:52:41
Speaker
build your community. If you build a good community, they will build your game basically, or the people playing your game. The second thing I know you mentioned a few times was psycho traits. And it's just fun to think about, you know, someone that's playing home scapes, it's not the same as playing Call of Duty. It's not the same as playing Pokemon Go yet. There's an urge in each one of those players to go purchase, right? And one of them is, I'm going to go purchase and then I'm going to go
00:53:03
Speaker
play Call of Duty and shoot people, I was gonna go catch Pokemon. So like, there's overlapping traits here. And once you start analyzing your audience, which you probably won't wait till you have a decent enough sized audience, you can really start to get a better understanding of what are those little things that make them make them do what they're doing. And it's an interesting thing to be able to watch and learn. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, if you take games like GardenScape, who has like, you know, 10,000 levels and whatnot, your level
00:53:32
Speaker
1000s, I pick a random one and my level 1000 will be different. And that's the beauty of it is that the customization in those types of games can be very much individualized.
00:53:48
Speaker
Uh, but when you have like big war faction, let's say you have like a conquer type of game where you have a map and there's like seven factions that are battling for castles. And, um, and then it's real time. You can be attacked at any time.
00:54:04
Speaker
and you hear that someone from the other client or someone in your team had a super useful item for half the price all of a sudden, just like that, and you don't. You're like, whoa, okay, that's weird. So you have to be careful on how to use certain tricks as well regarding like, and how to leverage your community in certain ways.
00:54:29
Speaker
There's things you can do with a small community that you cannot do with a global one. You can certainly not do with fanatics. You have to be careful with communities as well. It's a beautiful domain, isn't it? It is, and I love being here. Mark, it was great having you on our show today. I really appreciate this conversation, everything from player analytics, about Photon Engine, about PlayFab, about
00:54:55
Speaker
old-school gaming, which I'm a big fan of.
Closing Remarks and Upcoming Events
00:54:57
Speaker
So I really appreciate it. Everything about Mark will be on our website. You can learn more. Mark, again, anything else? I'll be at Gamescom this summer in Cologne. Then I'll be at Hugh Knight in Amsterdam. I'll be also at Unreal Fest in New Orleans. And at Megs in Montreal. So if you want to meet me in person, those are the plays I'm guaranteed to be in. Otherwise, you might see myself somewhere else. And thank you for listening.
00:55:25
Speaker
Yeah, thanks. And I'll leave it marked with saying you can be unreal fest that unreal tournament was the first best online game. That's what got me going. And I hope you have a good time there. And thanks again for jumping on today. It was a pleasure, Craig.