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ENCORE - Navigating the Game Launch Journey: Insights from Ivan Zaguirre
42 Plays9 months ago
In this episode of the Player Engage podcast, host Greg Posner interviews Ivan Zaguirre from SocialPoint. Ivan shares his nine-year journey at SocialPoint, discussing his various roles and the recent release of their new game, Top Troops. Ivan emphasizes the importance of understanding the gaming audience and tailoring the product to their tastes and preferences. He also highlights the significance of metrics in measuring success and making data-driven decisions. Ivan touches on the challenges of product management in the gaming industry and the need for effective communication and alignment within teams. He concludes by encouraging aspiring product managers to embrace the role and prioritize early product-market fit and audience feedback.
Overall, this episode provides valuable insights into the product management process in the gaming industry, highlighting the importance of metrics, audience understanding, and effective communication. Listeners gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and strategies involved in creating successful player experiences.
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Transcript
Podcast Break Announcement
00:00:07
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Greg here. Before we start today's podcast, I actually want to take a few minutes to thank all of you for listening to me and our amazing guests we've had in the Player Engage podcast. To give you a heads up, we're going to take a two-week break here to catch up on new content and to recharge for a bit. It's been about 52 weeks since we've started, and I've only missed one week so far. So I feel like that's been a great first year. And I want to take a couple of breaks to make sure we can regroup and talk about what we've heard from you. And the journey itself has been incredible.
00:00:34
Speaker
So first of all, I want to thank you, the listener, for actually taking your time and listening to me. Your feedback and responses have been fantastic. I love being able to see them and read them and respond to you when you send them in. So keep sending in that love and I will send all my love back as best I can.
Follow Player Engage Online
00:00:49
Speaker
A few things I gotta do on this checklist here I have here. So first off, if you haven't checked this out on social media, we're building that up. You can find us on Play or Engage on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. We're putting all different clips and stuff out there, and we would love to hear from you if you have any feedback on that as well.
00:01:05
Speaker
If you can't find it, it's all available at playerengage.com. We're also on TikTok while that's still around for as long as we can. And if you're really feeling adventurous, share it with a friend who might find some value in it. We would really appreciate that. To answer some random questions that we have gotten through the time is the first is, are you actually from New Jersey? And yes, I am actually from New Jersey and may be weird, I guess, but we
00:01:27
Speaker
moved away for a little bit to Georgia and have come back to New Jersey. The other biggest question that I've gotten so far is what game am I playing? Well, I am now playing Ex Defiant, which I am not good at, but I still get invited back to play, so I play, but mostly Bellatro, which I still get joked about because they haven't tried it, but Bellatro is amazing.
Acknowledgments to Supporters
00:01:46
Speaker
I also want to do a big shout out and thank you to both Helpshift and Keywords for helping us build out the podcast and the brand. Their support, their teams that they've provided to me have given us so much help from people like Alicia and Brandon from the Helpshift side. They helped me with the website and content. Anya and Rebecca, who helped me with social media and graphics from Keywords. Thank you so much.
00:02:10
Speaker
and all different teams that have been providing tons of support. Thank you so much for all that you've done and provided that support.
Listener Requests and Future Content
00:02:18
Speaker
We've also received requests for specific types of content, and I love that because I love building out content that does resonate with you.
00:02:25
Speaker
We've heard things like the recent one we did with Christine marketing the industry spotlight series We're gonna build that out with different roles as well, right? Understanding things like arts and sound right when you think about art and it's 2d art and 3d art and environmental artists What do you need to do? What are those things those skills that you need to tap on? We're gonna dig more into the business side of things like we did with Pasquale We're gonna look at the roles of a COO CMO CEO we're gonna discuss
00:02:52
Speaker
things like video game magic, like we've talked about with Jamie Smith. And we're going to build out more content like that to get an understanding of how things are built in the background and things like when we met with Dan McCready, he was teaching us how accessibility works with not just people who are need accessible options, but for kids and being able to pick up and learn with just their visual cues. Our goal is to bring value and curiosity to your day. So those that have reached out, we want to build that content that resonates to you. So
00:03:21
Speaker
First off, we will provide that content and thank you for that feedback today. We're gonna listen to Ivan Zaguaro from social point This was such a cool podcast for me I got to hear about the the launch the pre-launch launch and the post launch of a game that I play top troops I'd love to be able to hear the KPIs and the insights that you learn from from that position as a director So I'm excited to hear this and sharing with you and I'm excited to share more content with you soon So thank you for all the love that you shared and keep on sending it and enjoy it
Introducing Ivan Zagara
00:03:51
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Player Engaged Podcast. Greg here. Today, we're joined by Ivan Zagara from Social Point. He's had a lot of roles at Social Point. I'm excited to learn about it and learn about all the different roles that he's been in. And they recently released a new game, Top Troops, which I'm a player of and I'm excited to talk about. Before we dig into things, Ivan, first off, thank you for joining me. You care to say a few things about yourself and your background?
00:04:13
Speaker
Well, first, thanks, Rick, for inviting me. I'm very excited to have time to introduce myself to you today and also speak about the game that I've been developing the last couple of years. So I joined Social Point nine years and a half ago. So it's been a long journey all the way in doing product. And when I joined the company, we were just launching Monster Legends, our second franchise that is still alive and contributing to the P&L of the studio. Right. So that was already nine years ago.
00:04:41
Speaker
And since then, I basically had four main stages here. The first year I was helping the team to scale Monster Legends. Then I used these learnings to go a couple of years to new games to try to release something I failed, first time that I failed on new games. Then I went back to live games to use everything that I learned on new games and applied back to live games.
00:05:06
Speaker
Um, that was between 2017 to 2019.
Ivan's Game Development Journey
00:05:10
Speaker
It was very interesting because I was, I was actually leading Monster Legends for a couple of years. And that was a very, very interesting moment. I mean, the game was doing well in good shape. Uh, we had some that I think success and growth. And then right before, uh, Kobe changed our lives for, uh, at least for a year. Um, I got a call from the founders of the company.
00:05:31
Speaker
that exclaiming that there was an opportunity on new games. And I decided to join new games early on 2020. And this is what I've been doing the last three years. And for the first year, I did a small strategy revamp for the studio. And then for the next two years, I focused on the game that we will talk right now. So that's all about me, my nine years at Social Point. Prior to this, I was 10 years doing product management for startups in Barcelona, because product management is something that I really like to do.
00:06:00
Speaker
And my background is on computer science. So I mean, technology is also something that I really enjoy, talking to tech folks and understanding and building bridges between technology and business, right? That's why I found a home in product management. That's all about me. That's awesome. And there's a ton there to unpack it. And things that we're not going to get to on this podcast, but things that are just kind of strikes to me. First of all, being almost at a company for 10 years, I feel like is unheard of these days. And that's amazing.
00:06:27
Speaker
I'm just looking at the different titles that you had. And that's probably part of the reason why you're still there. You're getting to expand your background. You're also there for the acquisition by Take-Two, which is an interesting one because a lot of these AAA publishers ended up purchasing a lot of mobile companies because they had trouble with mobile, particularly on their own. And there was a lot of mobile companies out there, the social point.
00:06:48
Speaker
And that's fascinating to me and to your point, right? You had you had Monster Legends when you started, you had Dragon City before you got there. So there's a few nice IPs under your belt and now with top troops, hopefully that's going to be a third one that we can add to that bucket.
Product Management vs. Gaming Background
00:07:01
Speaker
The first thing I want to go to is what you just said, though, which is kind of not about this is about your background and product management. Do you think your background and product manage? Well, this is kind of a two point question. Did this did that help you get to where you are today? And do you think you need that video game?
00:07:16
Speaker
background in order to get started if you have product management skills? That's a very good question. Prior to joining Social Point, I never thought about myself or joining the video game industry. I was a gamer, but a lightweight gamer, but I was a hardcore PM guy. Then Social Point was growing very fast in Barcelona. Actually, I would say it was the first
00:07:42
Speaker
pure mobile free-to-play studio that heavily invested in Barcelona. And one of the main ecosystem or many of the drivers of the current ecosystem and Barcelona scene that we have right now that it's quite big with other large studios. And I joined very early. And I thought, hey, I'm coming from other startups. I have a large playbook of PM skillset. I'm Hargrove product management.
00:08:09
Speaker
this gaming thing won't be that complex, right? I was immensely wrong because gaming is such a different beast compared to other industries that even though some of the, let's say, foundations are similar when it comes to management, there are things that are inherently very, very different. Even
00:08:28
Speaker
Even if you think about games, I mean, verticals or audiences are radically different. I mean, it's not the same type of PM that you do, you know, if you build a casual game, that if you build a mid-core game, that if you build a shooter, that if you build a MOBA. So there's all these nuances in terms of audiences, tasters, systems, I mean, make your PM work.
00:08:50
Speaker
I mean, there's a part of it, horizontal, and it can be applied, but there's many different that you need to learn, and you can only do it by working on these categories, right? Also, life cycle is very, I mean, the different life cycles of the product, which is basically build, grow, and mature, it also push you to construct or develop a different skill set.
00:09:16
Speaker
So all this is very exciting. And actually, you know, as you said before, that's one of the reasons why I've been nine years and I see myself working at least for, you know, a few years at social point because every year the work changes for many reasons. You work on different challenges, audiences, the industry change and also push you, you know, to get up to speed.
Unique Aspects of Game Product Management
00:09:38
Speaker
So even though, you know, a lot of things I could pour it from my previous work,
00:09:45
Speaker
I need to learn a ton of stuff that was very specific to the industry. Yeah, I feel like that's almost what happens after you graduate college. If you go to college for accounting, you learn accounting by the books, and then you go to your first accounting firm and they teach you, this is how we do accounting. And it's maybe not what you learned before. So you got the product management skill set, but then you went into a new vertical that was completely different and did things differently, but you still knew your basics and you can go from there. Gaming, though, it's even more specific.
00:10:15
Speaker
Because the major difference in PM for gaming is that on other, I mean, it's entertainment. And on entertainment, you are not solving an actual problem. I mean, you are enabling others to invest spare time, essentially, right? So you need to set a product that first the light players get hooked them, right? Create artificial needs because they don't exist, right? You are not solving an actual problem and then solve those needs, right? So it's actually.
00:10:42
Speaker
It has this emotional component. Then in other industries, you don't have it. That is very unique, right? Because again, I mean, in traditional industries or verticals, PM, you can sit down in front of a customer and tell them, hey, what's your problem? What's your pain point? Can you tell me? And he's going to be able to pretty much help you understand and frame the problem and the type of value that you can provide for him. But in gaming, that's actually way more challenging. That's one of the main differences.
00:11:09
Speaker
It's interesting you say that and it makes a lot of sense. It's funny, though, the types of games players play end up being almost what they basically do for work anyway, just in a game setting, whether it be a simulator where you're simming, hey, I'm going to go through the life of a sim and build a house and work and do all this stuff like
00:11:25
Speaker
A lot of people's escapes from their real life is basically living their real life in a video game or that type of game. And I think it's kind of funny and it is an escape. I love that kind of challenge that you can kind of go into that and think about, hey, how do we get people and draw people to keep coming back here and keep doing this stuff? Yeah, that's clearly one of the challenges. I mean, actually, gaming is interesting because the competitors, it's not only gaming, but it's also Netflix. Yeah. It's also books.
00:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, competing for players spare time, you know what I mean? So you need to delight them and enjoy them, which is very interesting.
00:11:58
Speaker
And it's interesting, I mean, we can go on and on
Expanding Gaming Audience
00:12:00
Speaker
about this, right? It's also interesting that you see some of the games that are created now, especially by companies like Zynga, right, are appeal to millennials and boomers, right? Like the older crowds that would typically have their eyeballs on TV or film, right? They're starting to draw more people to gaming because gaming is starting to embrace crowds no matter what age, no matter what gender, no matter what you do, like people want to just play games.
00:12:22
Speaker
Understanding your audience, an audience is a company, a composition of essentially two things, demographics, uh, age and male, female distribution, but also tasteless. Understanding this, it's crucial to set up your creative vision for success. You need to really understand the type of product that you are doing. And people, sometimes also people, I think that tends to overthink this, right? When they, when they say, yes, you need to understand your other, they think about big, large service.
00:12:52
Speaker
but sometimes things are way easier. You know what I mean? Really identify what's your audience, what are their taste, motivations, and your game needs to fulfill those. And it's very different. I mean, if you are making a game for female plus 45, it's very different the type of creative direction, UI, UX, monetization schemes that you need to use versus if you are doing a game for millennials or essentially
00:13:21
Speaker
uh, kids, right? So you need to have these into account in your creative direction because otherwise you're set, you're, you're, you're set up for failure. So I'm just taking a note here because I want to ask you a question and relate this to top troops, right? But before I do, I want to tell you, we can later down the road, we can, or later during the podcast, I can explain to you about how has this influenced, you know, some of the mistakes that we have done in the
Skills for Leading a Game Studio
00:13:47
Speaker
past.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's fantastic. I think mistakes are the most important part of all this, right? Because you learn and you pick yourself up. But one of the reasons I'm most excited to talk to you is that I think a dream of mine, and maybe it's not, but is to one day lead a studio and be a studio and then get to create games.
00:14:05
Speaker
One of my always worries is that I can't code, and I speak to a lot of studio heads that are developers and engineers, and they're hands down in the game. And I'm going to make an assumption about you, and you can yell at me afterwards. But looking at your background, and let's just go through the titles that you had at social point. You had Product Lead, Director of Product, VP of Product, Head of Studio. What is your coding skill level, and is that necessary to become a Head of Studio? It comes down to what is the day-to-day of a Head of Studio, and what are those backgrounds that you need?
00:14:33
Speaker
So the bottom line here is that you don't need coding skills to be successful in the product vertical at all. Actually, at social point, we have PMs coming from very different backgrounds. And I would say that most of them are not coming from tech background. It can help that you have deep tech knowledge in some areas, but it's not a decision or a critical factor. There are other things that are way more important.
00:14:58
Speaker
I mean, execution, very important skill. Business understanding, very important skill. Analytical mindset, creative problem solving, just not the same of being innovative. Okay. That's a certain thing. Creative problem solving. Those are skills that are way more relevant than you understanding how the tech stack is built on. For these, it's always better that you partner with a great technical director or a developer lead or whoever title you want to say.
00:15:27
Speaker
and rely all the tech stack and all the tech positions on this person and you focus on other things. So it's not gonna be an issue if you don't have developer skills to become PM. Neither I would say here at Social Point nor any other, let's say companies out there. Another thing is that if you are technical product manager, okay, but that's the first story.
00:15:51
Speaker
So no, okay, good to know. So it's really about the, I don't want to call them soft skills, right? But all those other things like can you follow through, you keep up, all those skills kind of lead up to where you can be and how you can make it in the industry, for lack of other words, unless you want to be an engineer in the development, then you probably need to code.
The Idea Behind Top Troops
00:16:10
Speaker
So let's go back to kind of what we were just talking about. Let's talk about the demographics and can you talk about, I guess, how long ago did the idea for top troops come up?
00:16:21
Speaker
So Top Troops idea came during late 2020, and it actually came as a result of a prototype that we're internally building and testing in the market that didn't work. So there was a couple of important factors here that explain how did we start with Top Troops. First, in 2020, we were reviewing our e-game strategy, and I was part of this decision
00:16:51
Speaker
And we take several decisions. First, we align the whole company and do an ambition. OK, what type of ambition do we have for new games? By ambition, I mean, hey, we are building games here. We are building, here, games that we want $1 billion in revenue lifetime, $100 million or $50 million, right? So aligning everyone on ambition, that it must be realistic with your capabilities, with your people, with everyone. This led ourselves to what type of KPIs we want to achieve. And that was one part of the story.
00:17:19
Speaker
The second part of the story is, OK, what type of development process do I want to follow? What type of stages we want to follow? And for us, it was very clear that what we wanted to do is ship as fast as possible things out there to start testing, because we're not doing IP-based games. And therefore, we have this flexibility. And for us, it was very important to test initially three concepts, three things. Early marketability, how marketable
00:17:49
Speaker
the idea was, so kind of what's the ECPI, how more or less what's going to be the ECPI that we're going to have with this concept. The second one is product market fit, early product market fit, how our early stickiness look like. I'm saying about day zero, day one, day two, day three retention. So how good, you know, it's clicking the code phase, the good action phase, you know, into our audience and the third one is purchase intent. That was, it was very clear for us that even though
00:18:19
Speaker
We know that a game success explains because you have day 30 plus good metrics. It was very important that we started by something really solid from the get-go. And that's why from the process point of view, what we always said is it was rich market as fast as possible. Okay. That was the mantra. And the third, it was portfolio strategy. And here, what we tried to do, it was, okay, let's build games that we have
00:18:49
Speaker
Capabilities in the studio that are relatively familiar to and also that we can reuse the staff. And when I say staff, I mean knowledge, but also tech right and other things so we can reach the market faster. Right. That was important. And then that was the first thing. The second thing that we did.
00:19:08
Speaker
I was in charge, you know, in this overall strategy, I was in charge of the mid-core space. And this is when two things happened. First, we tested this concept top troops before, you know, the way that we see right now. And we saw early metrics, but lack of purchasing 10 and also no good day seven plus metrics.
00:19:30
Speaker
Right. And the team also was very strong. So I chat with the initial team and they were very strong and they had a clear idea on how to not pivot the concept, but expanded which parts did they think from the original prototype that were working and what others, you know, need to fix it. And we started working on this. And around seven months later, we were able to release our first prototype into market to again, test early marketability.
Refining Top Troops
00:19:55
Speaker
early retention up to day three, when I say early retention and purchase of intent and build from there. And it was very interesting. I mean, we combine a team that it was very senior, very small, that in seven, eight months taking, starting from a prototype that it was already, uh, uh, working, uh, evolve it into, uh, what we know right now that it's a top troops. So that's when all started. And the idea we started squeezing about the idea, it was on.
00:20:25
Speaker
late 2020. We set up the team on first quarter of 2021. And the first version that we released with the current top troops format that you see right now in the game that it's merged building battle, character evolution and city building, we launched it in during July, August, 2021. So that was a journey.
00:20:50
Speaker
Sorry, I'm here. I'm taking a bunch of notes here because I find a lot of the stuff fascinating here. So first question I have on that is, in late 2020, the idea came up. Is that like, I'm just picturing this in my head. Is it in a conference room? You guys are all just sitting around kind of talking about what are you creating? Is it around a lunch table where you guys are just spitballing ideas? Obviously, you looked at kind of the assets that you have, I assume, in past value. It was a combination of three things. First, again, we started from a prototype.
00:21:18
Speaker
that we were testing already live. And from the prototype, we said, OK, what is working from this one? Because we have some good metrics on this prototype, right? And we thought that the code action phase, these massive battles were good. Also, the theme and the IP that we picked was also good, because we wanted something accessible for the players out there. We always had in mind that we want an accessible experience, and it was a combination of essentially the following things, theme,
00:21:45
Speaker
UI, UX, and system design. OK, we always have those three in mind. So we had clear the ingredients that we thought from the first try at work. We look at the market, and also it was important for us to build a product that it was marketable from many angles. And we have many ways to market the product, because even in 2021, you could already ambition, or 2020 you could already ambition that
00:22:12
Speaker
uh, the marketing landscape was going to be really hard and you need not only deep pockets, but also, you know, other tools to break through. And also we look at the, uh, uh, on our capabilities, internal ones and the three use combining the three of them. We had this idea on a let's use.
00:22:30
Speaker
these action phase and build these other pillars around with this team, address for these audience using these technologies. And let's try to release as fast as possible and see how the audience react and build from there. So that was the process. So from there, it came in beautiful. The idea came up, now we're going to ship as fast as possible. In late 2021, you launched V1, let's call it a top troops, where you start testing out these marketability.
00:22:56
Speaker
You saw that? It was on August. On August, we hit the market on August, very first version that we shipped out there. Now, when you say hit the market, right? Is that anyone in the world can download it? What type of testing is happening? We selected a few countries and we put a version out there and we started doing some UA, very low-scale UA, to understand how the metrics and the users were reacting to the product.
00:23:22
Speaker
So from there, I know a lot of the Southeast Asian countries or a lot of game testing goes on there. We skip, back in the days, maybe right now it would be something different, but back in the days we skip all sort of tier three countries and some sort of technical stages because we learned in the past that
00:23:42
Speaker
And I mean, usually the products right now that we can launch from the get go are relatively stable from the technical point of view. I mean, we have never killed a game because of tech issues. I mean, all the games that we've killed happen because the metrics are wrong, right? So we wanted to get metrics as fast as possible. And we wanted to get metrics from
00:24:02
Speaker
markets as close as possible to what we consider that we're going to be our markets, especially on marketability, because it's not the same, you know, doing, trying to understand your ECPIs right on Philippines than doing it already on Canada, Australia, UK, you know, and other TDA countries, right? So we went to the GEOs as soon as possible to understand or to at least
00:24:26
Speaker
let's say, exclude the market setup from the results that we were seeing. That was the mindset back in the days. Again, we could do it also because we're not doing an IP. So it was clear for us that we were going to be under a very long self-launch, and we were comfortable about that. But this is very different. There are other companies that work very different, and then they put themselves a max of six months of self-launch. But that was not our case. Our case, it was more, OK,
00:24:54
Speaker
that's the risk things one by one, reaching market as fast as possible. Because our previous experiences is that the risking certain things internally, you can have a lot of false positives. Yeah. I love the fact that, I mean,
00:25:12
Speaker
You're collecting these metrics and these metrics are important. And I think most companies probably realize that, but I don't know if A, they even know how to collect the metrics all the time. But monitoring these metrics during your soft launch is important, but are you also listening to customer feedback? Are you doing any sort of player surveys or is it all just, can you tell this from the data as it speak to you? The most important thing, it's always metrics, always metrics, but metrics alone does not explain the full picture.
00:25:39
Speaker
Usually data will tell you the what, but not the why. For the why, you need to go to bladers. What happened with top tropes, it was we were creating a game.
00:25:49
Speaker
And the audience was inside of the building. So social pointers were some of the most engaged players at the beginning, as some of those were providing us the best feedback out of the game, right? We were lucky because, again, our demographics into Studio were quite close to the product that we're building, and that helped us a lot. On top of that,
00:26:13
Speaker
We were adding also feedback from players that were directly reaching because it was important. But metrics, it's the single truth for any project. Quality will help, but metrics, it was our Northern Star always, right? The thing is that to build, to select KPIs to work, build challenge, and North Star metrics, we use intensively this qualitative feedback.
00:26:42
Speaker
right, to get the whole loop. But again, for us, metrics, it was the king. And in feedback, it was the queen. Do you compare these metrics to things like Dragon City or Monster Legends, or because there might be different types of games, is that not really fair? How did we select metrics, right? So that's a good question. So we did it with two main, we used two main levers here. One was
00:27:09
Speaker
Remember that I told you before that first thing that we did is aligning on ambition. Hey, what do we want for this game? You want to create a game that makes 50 million and it's a bit profitable on your one, you want 100 million, we want a 1 billion game, right? So these will lead to certain metrics, right? So the second thing that we did when we had these metrics, and this is a numerical exercise, right? We benchmarked those versus internal benchmarks
00:27:40
Speaker
Dragon CD Monster Legends, right? But also external benchmarks. And at the beginning, we also had, again, our ambition and our KPIs to our reality. I mean, if it's a social point in the past, we had not capabilities to, let's say, release a game that it was making 300 million on a yearly basis. Right now it's different, but if in the past, you know, we didn't have it, that was not an ambition that we put for ourselves from the get-go.
00:28:08
Speaker
So that's the way that we selected metrics. One, ambition, we're driving the metrics. And second one, when we have this set of metrics defined, which essentially it was basically ECPI, estimated ECPIs, retention, LDB. Those are the three metrics, the only three that we curve. And we have those, and we kind of envision a certain UA budget to generate the business side.
00:28:34
Speaker
We check all these with internal and external benchmarks. And when all this made sense, and that was not a very complex exercise, so it was something that it was relatively fast to do, we had the goal set up and all the demos working for this.
00:28:49
Speaker
Very cool. I can imagine this being very exciting, just seeing this whole thing, all the pieces of the puzzle coming together. I mean, it sounds like a kind of a dream come true and just being able to see your vision being built. And you mentioned internal benchmarks and external benchmarks. When you're part of a company like Take Two, are metrics shared between studios, right? You got Zynga, you got Nordian. So when you look externally, you can have access to three types of metrics.
00:29:17
Speaker
So one, it's obviously being part of a large family, like Take Two and Jing. And you have a large portfolio of games that you can quickly check your metrics. That's one. Second, partners, platforms can also provide you anonymized benchmarks, which are quite useful to find gaps and help you understand how others are performing. And the third one is sometimes, I mean, some metrics for some categories are shared publicly out there.
00:29:47
Speaker
it's always the same. Again, you need to check and compare how does this fit into your ambition. Because the KPIs are radically different if you are trying to build a game that it generates, 400 million on a yearly basis or 50 million on a yearly basis. The set of KPIs, I mean, the KPIs will be the same, but the scale of those KPIs will be radically different. Right. It's not fair to compare you to GTA or anything like that because it's completely different monster, different beast.
00:30:12
Speaker
Even when you do it externally, you need to also understand the type of benchmark that you are using. It's very important to understand how the benchmark is configured if you are comparing yourself to external games.
Top Troops Global Launch
00:30:27
Speaker
You're building this game, you're launching it in soft launch, you're getting feedback, you're watching your metrics, then on October 3rd,
00:30:34
Speaker
2023, top troops, launches. And I imagine that's an exciting day for everyone there, but it's also a busy day, right? It's time to start collecting real life metrics, not real life, but much greater scale metrics and start hearing from your players. So take me through kind of, if you can, that 30, 60, 90 days, right? What's priority one in those days? What's priority two? How do you proceed? You mean when we were launched, right? Yeah.
00:31:03
Speaker
So the good thing is that the team was already set up for world launch many months before. So some of the team is essentially structured with bots.
00:31:14
Speaker
Right? And each pod has a specific function mission. Its components complete. They have KPIs, roll map, et cetera, et cetera. But on top of these, we make sure that some pods were already working in, what we say, live game dynamics, right? Rather than new game dynamics. So for some pods, it was literally not disruptive at all. It was just okay. Right now, instead of doing UA only on three, four countries, we are doing UA worldwide, right?
00:31:43
Speaker
So it was relatively smooth, but the thing that we focus the most on the first 30 days, it was essentially smooth operations that everything was stable, that it was scaling properly, that customers were being, were well-served that are supporting also functions, you know, were really plugged into ad scale, you know, into the product, et cetera, et cetera. Then on day 60 and 90,
00:32:10
Speaker
when we ensure that, which is right now what we are doing, when we ensure that operations are already working and the tech is stable, right? And all supporting functions are plugged and already performing at the level that we feel confident.
00:32:23
Speaker
It's all about two things right now, product strategy. So how can we keep improving the KPIs? And secondly, it's growth. How can we invest more marketing profitable into the game to make it bigger? It's all about these two right now. And the priority is always at least
00:32:46
Speaker
The game, it's not fully finalized and we have a wide array of things prepared on the next 12 months. So for us, the main focus right now, it's product strategy. What do we do? How can we accelerate? What's the best thing composition to do it? Which features are we going to pre-arise? Do we need to revisit the challenges that are fueling our hypotheses, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a lot about this.
00:33:12
Speaker
Have you had any major revelations in these first couple of months about the type of game that is things that you may want to... Have you had... Not really. The big revelation that we had over the last two years when we were in soft launch was that at the beginning, so the game, it has this merge component in. If you play the game, you are going to see that it has this merge component. And the merge component, usually it's associated with a bit more of a casual audience. At the same time, it has also
00:33:43
Speaker
Some massive battles over the game has also massive battles and a CCRPG component. So back in the days, there was a lot of creative tension internally into the team and externally on what type of their final direction should we prioritize, whether making a game that it was a bit more casual and merge.
00:34:06
Speaker
even though we always thought about a mid-core audience, right? But try to, from the mid-core, you know, let's say, oscillate a bit towards as open as possible, make the game as open as possible, you know, and lean more on merge mechanics, or just use merge as an onboarding system, but transition into a more CCRPG game, more focused on more traditional mid-core, let's say, motivation. And at the beginning, there was some tension
00:34:36
Speaker
But more or less a year ago, we gained consciousness, basically talking also about a lot of players. I mean, there was a couple of things that make us finally pivot towards, no, no, our roadmap and our features need to essentially serve CCRPG players. And there was two fundamental things that fueled these. One was that every time that we were releasing features addressed for these audience,
00:35:00
Speaker
the whole KPI set was improving. And the second one is that every time that we're talking to players through structured tests, longitudinal tests to capture their feedback or through chats, it was clear for us that even though we designed that experience trying to be as broad and open as possible in the top of the funnel, the players that were more engaged with the product, it was traditional CCRPG players. So that was a important changing moment around 12 months ago
00:35:29
Speaker
when we realized, A, that's what we need to do. We need to place our CCRPG audience, and we are going to heavily invest on that. And since then, our roadmap has been, let's say, discussing a lot about, A, what can we do better for this type of audience? We know that the game is great, and we build it these ways to attract a lot of players from the theme, from some mechanics, and from some system design, and UAWX, but down the road,
00:35:56
Speaker
The players that engage the most, it's easy RPG. So how can we do better, you know, for them? You know what I mean? This has been always the moment, but on the last, and these, we detected 12 months ago and the challenges on the metrics. We also detected six months ago. And since then it has been always building on top over and over and over. But the last two months, there has not been really something new. You know what I mean? The things that are working in the game.
00:36:22
Speaker
We knew it. And the challenges, we also knew it. And those are the ones that we are trying to address moving forward. It's interesting because I feel like if I would have taken a gamble on the guests in the beginning, I would have imagined more people from the casual side would probably be more engaged based on kind of gameplay habits. But it's interesting here that people who are doing the kind of the CCRPG stuff are the ones that are more in there and more
00:36:41
Speaker
more active. And something we do often at Helpshift is talk about segmentation, understanding who are your VIPs, who are this. Do you segment your players? Can you tell what type of player they are based on their habits and kind of not label them, but categorize them under specific buckets? With segment layers based on several dimensions, one of these, I mean, some of the dimensions based on in-game metrics,
00:37:09
Speaker
behavioral metrics and some others based on a peer average, right? But we don't put them levels. You know what I mean? It's people that it's more engaged with battle and this type of things and others that are less engaged, things like that, then obviously type of peers. But we don't have that much segments to be honest with you. We always talk about three, four segments much. That's as much as we do.
00:37:33
Speaker
So that's pretty much it. Having said that, though, we never saw ourselves as a, let's say, hardcore CCRPG game. We never created top troops to compete with best-in-class turn-based RPG games with hardcore R setups and very deep system designs. That was not how we were going to position the top troops. The way that we want to position the top troops was more
00:38:03
Speaker
mid-core to casual space into the male mid-core traditional audience. But again, at the beginning, it was this creative tension between how much of casual or mid-core do we need to be. And right now, it's clear that the type of features that we need to build are more traditional CCRPG systems to serve this audience.
00:38:22
Speaker
So taking a step away from kind of the conversation around top troops and more from your perspective as kind of game studio director is with the emergence of new AI technologies and just technologies in the marketplace,
AI in Game Development
00:38:35
Speaker
right? Are anything interesting to you and you digging more into that when you're thinking of your next game or the next update for top troops that you might want to incorporate new things or new objects into using the latest technology? And maybe this is too vast of a question, right? Because it could go all over the place, but are the things that
00:38:50
Speaker
Are there things that excite you about what's coming out in the marketplace? Well, AI, so far we have not found a way to apply direct value on AI on, let's say, feature creation or anticipation on risks. We are thinking as a studio to use AI on other areas where eventually we can get some gains. Creatives, it's an area where we can get some gains. We are looking into other areas.
00:39:21
Speaker
But we haven't found a use case into product management where it really has represented a radical step up. I mean, aside of the, let's say productivity improvements that we are already, you know, using AI for, you know what I mean? Aside of those ones, we haven't found something yet.
00:39:39
Speaker
groundbreaking when it comes to A. We are going to stop doing what we are doing and start doing it this way through AI because that's the way that we are doing. But in efficiency and creation, especially on certain areas, we are exploring already in the studio to use AI as a new tool to boost productivity.
00:39:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's what we've been hearing a lot, right? We don't want AI to replace anything, but to make things more efficient, make things more effective. Correct. You can use that in the background to help simplify processes. Creatives. Creatives is an area where you can experiment. I mean, we haven't been doing yet a lot in the studio, but I know other studios that are starting to experiment a lot with AI and creatives.
00:40:21
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of people don't want to talk about creatives and AI, but the truth is once the technology is out there, someone's going to start utilizing it. So how do we make sure we use it for our advantage to make sure that we enable? Yeah, I mean, as you said, if the technology is older.
00:40:36
Speaker
It's all there for everyone, so. So with the different roles that you had, I mean, most of them are around the product side of things, right? Is there something that you loved the most about what you did? That might just be, again, too vague of a question here, but are there kind of these moments? I remember waking up when I was in customer support, like I loved being able to see the number of counts of tickets that I close, right?
00:40:59
Speaker
I don't even know the right proper question to ask you, so maybe we just don't do this, but is there something that stands out for you in your career and the kind of different things that you've done? There's some things that push me to wake me up in the morning. One is see the impact on metrics of the things that you do. And that overall in product management, it's quite interesting, but on gaming, it's just insane. I mean, you released something yesterday and tomorrow, you know what I mean? You already have data that is telling you
00:41:28
Speaker
how everything is looking. And when you really impact the metrics, it's great. And that's one of the things that I like the most. You know what I mean? This sense of instant impact through your work that you have. And the ability that gaming gives you, it's just insane. So that's one thing. The second thing, it's really working with teams, putting goals on them, setting
00:41:56
Speaker
top-down strategy, but enabling bottom-up contribution, initiative, discussion, et cetera, et cetera. That's also another thing that I like the most. And actually combining both, everything that is key for
00:42:13
Speaker
uh, manager into product management space to, uh, to succeed. So those are the things that I like the most, uh, impacting KPIs and second, you know, working with the teams to set goals, but enabling them bottom up to contribute to the overall strategy and empowering the teams to experiment, try and improve the metric, you know, through releasing stuff.
00:42:34
Speaker
When you're working with a large team like that, organization, communication, something typically people say is one of the hardest
Effective Team Communication
00:42:41
Speaker
things to do. So how do you keep those teams organized? Is it a JIRA? Is it a different tool that you guys are working through?
00:42:46
Speaker
The toolset is extremely simple. I would say that we do most of the things only using two tools. I would say three, which is Slack. We use the Slack Zoom suite. It's nowadays almost, well, basically for us, it's mandatory. So a lot of communication and you need to do it through these.
00:43:07
Speaker
Second, it's the Drive Suite, Google Drive Suite. We use it a lot, a lot for everything. And the third thing in Jira. And we use it at different scales, because obviously, we have what we call high-definition or low-definition files, usually for a certain type of stakeholders or descriptions, then meet a low definition, right? So we are just also the
00:43:33
Speaker
Not only the visibility of the information that we are doing, but also a tool that we are using because it's not the same. Managing day-to-day operations into a team, that talking to a, let's say, portfolio-wide stakeholder and explaining, you know, what's the roadmap. So those are the three that tools that we use the most, but tools are only enablers. For us, what's critical, it's several things. First, over-communicate.
00:43:59
Speaker
especially because alignment complexity grows exponentially with team size. And the only way to compete this or fight this is communication, communication, and communication. That's the only way. So make it as simple as possible, as straight as possible. And again, complexity of alignment will scale with your team size. It's not linear. It's exponential. It's exponential. So that's one. Second, simple organizational design.
00:44:27
Speaker
Okay. So create reporting lines and structures that simplify decision making and accelerate these as much as possible and avoid conflicting agendas as much as possible. Okay. Then the third, it's even though you communicate and you have a good organizational set up, create regular forums to make sure that everyone is in sync on the most important topics. So we have these forums at the level. We have constant game leadership scenes. We have pod scenes.
00:44:57
Speaker
We have the barman things, no. We have organizational things at two or three layers that are mandatory, and then we also have management things. Very, very important. I was hoping your third point would be over communicate again, just to kind of nail that hammer in, but I love it. A lot of times I know people say, hey, why do they keep telling us this? Why do they keep telling us this? And it's something I'm bad at, and it's just good to know. It's like over communicate. People might get annoyed at you, but then if they get annoyed at you, at least they heard what you're saying.
00:45:26
Speaker
Especially on highly remote, I mean, we have transitions since COVID, hopefully, you know, into the model that is presenting new challenges. I mean, right now, most of the time we were remote versus in the office, which is fine, right? So in this scenario, you need to communicate even more than before. The thing again is that alignment and visibility complexity will exponentially scale with your team size. And the only way to fight this is communication over and over and over through regular channels.
00:45:54
Speaker
all sorts of channels, all types of communication, so do it a lot of times.
00:45:59
Speaker
annoy everyone, just make sure you're heard. I think that's fair. I think remote work has this feeling that people aren't working their hardest, which I could disagree with, but it comes down to the person that you're dealing with and the type of employee that you have, but over-communicate, right? That's what you got to do as a manager. That's what you got to do as a boss. Make sure people hear you. Before we go on, I'm pretty much asked most of my questions. I'm happy to keep a conversation going. Is there anything specific you want to talk about?
00:46:25
Speaker
I think that we cover most of the topics and I've been enjoying so far this question. Cool. So Ivan, I think that's all I had for each other. I was really excited and this lived up to my hype. I got to hear about a game that I play constantly, about the pre-launch, the launch, what's happening.
00:46:40
Speaker
kind of what you're looking at now. I think it's a really exciting thing and I think you're in an awesome position. As a numbers person, I'm jealous to get to look at all these statistics and analytics. I'm sure it's really cool being able to watch this stuff on a daily basis. Maybe it makes you go crazy, but before I let you go, is there anything else you want to just share with our listeners? No. I'm good at everyone that wants to try
00:47:05
Speaker
in the PM space to do it, no matter the type of skill set that they have, because you'll see that you find yourself at home in the product management vertical if you like business and technology, because it's a great break in between. Think about your audience a lot. My advice for games that are no IPs, try to raise product market fit as fast as possible and understand from your audience as fast as possible.
00:47:34
Speaker
and only complexify your production pipelines when some early risks are already out of the table. That could be my recommendations.
00:47:45
Speaker
Awesome. Thank you, Ivan, for joining us today. This was insightful. We have a lot of cool nuggets that come from this, so I'm excited to share them and we'll make sure to have all of Top Troops as well as social points information on our Player Engage website as well as some other content and marketing material. Ivan, thank you so much again for joining us. I hope you have a great rest of the day and best of luck with everything with Top Troops. I will continue to play and I hope other people do too. Thank you, Greg, for reminding me to do a podcast.
00:48:15
Speaker
Sure thing.