Legendary: Game of Heroes is more than a $100 million revenue business, but it didn’t get there just by releasing on digital storefronts and hoping for the best. The mixture of RPG/Card Game/Match-3 grew so huge because the company behind it, N3twork, knows a lot about user acquisition, having followed the ever-changing trends in mobile gaming for years. Collecting data, and knowing how to best act on the patterns they see within that data, is what has paved the way for mobile success.
Daniel Barnes, COO of N3twork, wants to share the story of how they did it at GameDaily Connect Asia in Shenzen, November 10-12.
Barnes knows a lot about the subject. Having worked in user acquisition (among other things) for Zynga’s NaturalMotion Studio and Machine Zone, the veteran executive has years of experience in figuring out what brings players to games and what keeps them there.
“The game industry is very different from just a few years ago. Today, companies have to focus not only on launching a single game, but also on launching a game that has continuous updates and live operations, such as ongoing tournaments that keep players engaged,” Barnes said in an interview with VentureBeat back in 2016.
The industry in 2019 has become more about games-as-a-service than ever before. It’s not just about launching a great game that people want to play. It’s vital to keep players engaged with that game through updates, events, and other means, the effects of which Barnes has seen in the success of Legendary: Game of Heroes.
“You have to make great products first. It’s possible to break into the top ranks with great games. On top of that, we as an industry haven’t been highly evolved when it comes to monetization. The key learning is that we have to move away from static, one-time shots on goa,” he said. “Live operations are key, with content that lets users interact with content 365 days a year. If you have content with a longer life cycle, then you have to continually feed people into the game.”
“Game companies also have to move away from forcing players to pay and toward making it so that they want to pay. That means getting away from harsh pay walls and pay-to-win schemes,” he emphasized.
Getting your game prepped for these kinds of events and changes, preparing for growth and how to manage it with your ever-growing team, and keeping up with advertising trends as they come have all been vital to N3twork’s successes — so much so, that the company has worked to automate user acquisition processes with Scale Platform.
Scale Platform, designed by N3twork, is “a suite of tools that programmatically builds ad creatives, constructs ad campaigns, automates the optimization of those campaigns, and generates meaningful user segmentation and behavioral insights, for use by 3rd-party app developers.” It’s a vital tool that’s designed to help developers see those ad and player patterns/trends and help them grow their game into a massive business.
Barnes and N3twork have put a great deal of work, data, and advertisement savvy into their systems, hoping to automate the processes of following those trends, capitalizing on them, and creating ad campaigns around them. And they’re looking to share those tools and ideas with developers who want to see their games grow.
Through the story of how Legendary: Game of Heroes grewto its current size, and the triumphs and mistakes they made along the way, Barnes is looking to help developers at GameDaily Connect see the solutions and cutting edge ideas that will help their own user numbers skyrocket.
Interested in attending GameDaily Connect Asia 2019? You can register right here, and don’t wait too long, as discounts on tickets are available only up until October 11.
GameDaily.biz © 2024 | All Rights Reserved.
