Reaching Color Zen - GDC Mobile Games Summit 2014
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Slides from my 2014 Mobile Games Summit talk at the Game Developers Conference "Reaching Color Zen"
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Reaching Color Zen - GDC Mobile Games Summit 2014
- 1. Reaching Color Zen From Prototype to Chart Topper in Three Weeks Robert Meyer Game Designer @RobMeyer7
- 2. Who am I?
- 6. Takeaways marked by a blue font that Doctors don’t want you to see.
- 8. Tight, unmovable deadlines can help small teams create cool things at a low cost.
- 11. “There are no timers in Color Zen. You aren't being scored. It's a game where you're meant to take your time. Slip on some headphones and just lose yourself in the color and shapes” - Kotaku
- 13. Settle on a unique design aesthetic for your game and stay true to it for every feature.
- 14. Initial Launch Lessons ● Focusing on 2 week release means unrefined monetization ● Paid to free is hard. ● Lack of stat tracking early hurts forever.
- 15. What does being “featured” on the App Store as a $0.99 game really mean?
- 16. Peaked at #6 Paid Downloads on iPad, #20 on iPhone
- 17. Peaked at #168 on iPad, #249 on iPhone
- 18. For our $0.99 game: #6 on the Download charts = #168 on Grossing charts
- 19. For our $0.99 game: 41,500 Downloads = $30,500.00
- 20. Vs.
- 21. After 2 Weeks of Being Featured
- 22. After 2 Weeks of Being Featured
- 23. After 2 Weeks of Being Featured
- 24. 7 people working on it for about 9 weeks at this point
- 25. The Self-Teaching Game vs. The Crutch of Text
- 29. Level Packs
- 30. Level Packs
- 31. Level Packs Total Gross Revenue From Serenity Pack as of 3+ months after release: $7,085.69 Total cost estimate: ~$10,000
- 32. Bundling Packs
- 35. Micro-talk time
- 36. Reaching Ad Zen (or “RAZ”) How we put Ads in our game without hating ourselves or disrespecting our players and still made some money. Robert Meyer Game Designer @RobMeyer7
- 37. Who am I?
- 38. Ads
- 41. Ad Revenue Averaged 4.4¢ per DAU Our limit was ad inventory, not user interest
- 42. 98.4% of Opt-ins came when player was presented with “Out Of Levels” dialog.
- 43. 98.4% of Ads ~1% of Ads
- 44. Ad Revenue Averaged 35.4% of Total Revenue
- 45. 35.7% of the time players opted to watch another ad right after finishing their previous one.
- 47. Well, we might as well go free on iOS.
- 51. A Quick Note on Paid User Acquisition (AQN on PUA) Free Best CPI: $0.48 Paid Best CPI: $2.70
- 55. In Conclusion
- 56. Lastly, let’s not forget about the most important takeaway of all:
- 57. Just try making players smile. Thanks
- 58. Reaching Rob Zen How to reach the creator of the acclaimed GDC talk “Reaching Color Zen: From Prototype to Chart Topper in 3 Weeks” E-mail: RobMeyerGames@gmail.com Twitter: @robmeyer7 Tumblr: robmeyer.tumblr.com
Notes de l'éditeur
- Hey, everyone. My name is Robert Meyer and I’m going to talk about the game Color Zen I released last year.
- I’m a game designer, currently working at Avalanche Studios in NY. Before that though, for two years I was working as a lead game designer on a small team at Large Animal Games that focused on web and mobile development. At Large Animal I was the lead designer on Color Zen, a puzzle game we brought from conception to release in 3 weeks, and that went on to get featured by both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
- I am going to talk about both the key design and process decisions we made and also discuss some of the live services and various changes we made post-release and how those fared for us. For those of you who don’t know the game, there is a gameplay trailer looping on screen. Basically players move shapes of matching colors together to fill the background. They use matching and various other mechanics to clear the screen and leave it filled with the border color to complete the level. As you can see the game has an abstract, flat graphical style and that the content is level pack based.
- Before we dig into the details I want to give a high overview of the timeline of the game’s development. From prototype to submission to the app store we only spent 3 weeks on the game. It launched in June as a 99 cent paid app on iOS and free on Android, it was featured immediately on iOS and soon after on Android.
- After that we tried a bunch of small things in live services, but some of the bigger ones included ad integration, making the game free on iOS, and offering sponsored content. Ultimately it was only after all of this that the game became profitable for the first time. Of course many people assumed that the featuring alone made the game a financial success, and I’m going to dig into the details a bit later of why that wasn’t the case.
- So now I’m going to talk through our journey through this development and release and punctuate it along the way with 12.5 takeaways marked by a blue font that doctors don’t want you to see.
- A small group conceived of the game during a 24-hour game jam day at our office. It was mostly inspired by a visual concept. While there was no clear design direction or mechanics, having the playable visual toy helped us interact with the idea and discover the fun. This reinforced a valuable lesson about not putting an over-emphasis on defining mechanics or a business model first when developing prototypes. It’s often better just to build something based off of a tiny shred of an idea, even if not fleshed out, and by playing with that thing and going through the process of building it, you’ll often discover something neat, like we did.As opposed to dedicating an entire team right away to the prototype, which still had no real game loop, we decided one programmer and one level designer would work on it for a week, with feedback and testing ideas from me and another game designer on occasion.
- This sort of low-pressure low-cost plan was really useful for being able to quickly iterate on a bunch of ideas without a lot of stress and is highly recommended for initial exploration. Once we had the mechanics nailed down we decided on a firm 2 more weeks until submission. We kind of picked a deadline that seemed insane but refused to move it so the team really had fun pulling together in order to hit it.Besides process, let’s talk about some design things we did right early on:
- Players consistently noted they loved the tone and that it was “relaxing,”The minimalist and zen design aesthetic was settled on along with the title very early. I believe the title proved to be key in communicating and selling that aesthetic, along with the simple, elegant graphics.
- Being specific and unique with your aesthetic like this can also get you featured in special categorical round-ups on App Stores such as the “New Year, New You: Relaxing Games” featuring we got in January.
- Note when I talk about Zen and Relaxing as “aesthetics” here I don’t just mean graphics, but the underlying principles of the game. Color Zen is not minimal and relaxing because of its graphics alone, but rather the very intentional lack of things like achievements, scores, timers, star-ratings and the never-ending feature list people who should know a lot about mobile games kept pushing us to add. Not putting any of those things in is one of my personal favorite accomplishments with Color Zen and I think players appreciated it. Players and journalists also apparently like sharing and showing off things they find “classy” “beautiful” and “elegant,” terms we constantly saw come up in reviews.
- However, we still had the challenge of being a level-based puzzle game, which structurally is often hard to work into the flow and zen play style we were also trying to emphasize. It has become essential and common knowledge now that it must be quick and seamless to retry a level when failing in a level-based puzzle game like this, but I find the transition of completing one level and going into the next is often unnecessarily clunky and over celebrated in many mobile games. Our CEO Wade suggested this brilliant visual transition that really makes the levels feel much less contrived, and much more part of one cohesive play experience and world. Best of all, it’s quick to get into the next level, but still satisfying and stays true to our aesthetic.
- So, boom. Takeaway 2: Settle on a unique design aesthetic for your game, stay true to it for every feature.
- Of note – there was almost no talk of monetization early on. With the focus (read: tunnel vision) on a 2 week release we knew we didn’t have time to implement a solid IAP model so we decided to just make it $0.99 on iOS and free on Android and see what happened. I think this was essential for us getting a quality gameplay experience launched early, but risky since featuring happens at launch as well. More on that later. For launch we only put in one in-app purchase, which was to “Remove All Level Locks” which let the players pay a dollar to be able to skip any level or play the levels in any order. It wasn’t very successful as you’ll see. One other mistake we made with the launch was assuming it’d be easy to launch an iOS game at $0.99, then move it over to a free game with IAPs for level content later. This actually got extremely hairy and we had to do a bunch of server work to maintain ownership of levels for players with the initial version when we switched to free. It costs us weeks of programmer time to resolve and is not a transition to be taken lightly. So takeaway 3 is “It's not trivial to go from paid to free with a content based game” Lastly, we also lacked sufficient stat and metric tracking from the start. While we added a bunch later, it was always hard to track LTV because of a lack of metrics at launch. This made it hairier to try to acquire users later, since we weren’t sure what to compare our CPI against as segmenting of our user base was forever a headache. Takeaway 4: Lack of stat tracking at launch can hurt forever.
- So when we released on iOS we were immediately featured for one week in New and Noteworthy, and then another in What’s Hot. Around this time people started congratulating me on the massive hit Large Animal surely had on our hands. Furthermore, on iPad we were almost instantly in the top 10 charts. This all seemed like fantastic news, but in reality being featured didn’t even really return our investment. As a $0.99 game, let’s look at some of the numbers we saw to try and contextualize for all of you what it can mean to be featured these days.
- First, let’s look at how exactly we rose in the charts solely as a result of the featuring. Note that we did no advertising or user-acquisition during this time. On iPad we were in the top 10 on downloads for much of the first week, peaking at #6. On iPhone, we hovered between #50 and #20 for downloads. Ultimately it seemed it took less downloads to rise higher on the iPad charts than iPhone.
- In terms of the Grossing rankings, though, it was a very different seeming story. On iPad we only peaked at #168, and iPhone was even lower.
- I think it’s worth emphasizing that we were the #6 game in downloads on iPad at the exact same moment we were the #168 game in top grossing on iPad. The takeaway here is just realizing how much revenue many games make outside of their download revenue, and how that will affect your game on the top grossing charts if you rely mostly on download revenue as we did on the initial launch. I’m sure that in many cases, paid games have made much more money than Color Zen during their featuring, but I can only speak for the experience of this game and try to provide these numbers as a useful data point to you all.
- At the conclusion of our 2-week featured period on iOS we only had made about $35,000 on the platform and as a company were in a financial loss on the product. At this point the company had put in an estimated $60,000 towards developing the game. Should we have started free on iOS? One thing I’m confident of is that if we were free, the featuring would’ve gotten us a lot more users. However, our IAPs were really bad at the start, so would more free users for iOS have been better than getting the guaranteed 70 cents for the few users that downloaded the paid version? It’s hard to say.
- While not byany means a true AB Test, we can compare the data from the iOS featuring of our paid app to our subsequent featuring on the Google Play store as a free app.
- So like I said, we launched identical versions of the game on both markets, but just to see what would happen we launched it fore free on Android.Over 2 Weeks on iOS we got 41.5k downloads for the paid app and the free Android App we got over 10 times that in the same time period.
- Again though, this was the free version with pretty much no effective monetization in it, so the revenue breakdown looks like this for total revenue.
- And like this for Revenue per Download. Later on in the game’s life, we got the free version ARPU up to over 10 cents, and I’ll touch on that a bit later on, but still you can see where this left us after the featuring.
- Which was even more in the hole as our development and team size costs had not reduced and several more weeks had passed. This gives us TAKEAWAY 5: Just getting featured might not return your investment.And TAKEAWAY 6: Being free when you're featured will probably get you at least 10x more downloads. At this point the company was basically faced with a decision, cut the team and hope that over time the game would slowly break even, or keep the team on and try a bunch of stuff to improve the game and hopefully raise the numbers. For a variety of reasons we chose the latter, which is good for you all, because now I can touch on some of the changes we made and how they affected things. Now we did a ton of stuff to the game, but for the sake of time of course I’m going to try to highlight either the most impactful or the most universal types of things we tried to hopefully provide as much useful info to you all.
- One thing we changed early, which I was very reluctant to, was adding in more text to the levels to try to teach the rules and interactions of the game more clearly. We had worked very hard to design the levels in such a way that they would teach the rules themselves, but we were not seeing the numbers we wanted in terms of percentage of players completing the first 10 or so levels.
- Here’s what they looked like with the text we added. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t feel as elegant nor does it feel as minimalist or zen as the design was intended to be. Still, it yielded some interesting results.
- Simply adding in this text increased the amount of users finishing the first 10 levels by a full 10% so we decided it was certainly worth keeping. Bam, TAKEAWAY 7: It's worth being extra sure players get through the start of your game.
- Color Zen is essentially a puzzle game with levels, this means that the content is consumed and not very replayable. Of course we worked hard to create additional level packs for the players. Each pack had ~100 levels in it and cost players $0.99.
- In general a level pack would cost us between 10 and 15k to make and release., but it probably got down to about $10,000 afterward as we got more efficient at creating them. Their immediate in-app-purchase return is simple to measure, though they also have positive effects on retention and ad watching, which is a bit more ambiguous.
- Overall level packs would often come in at close to the $10,000 mark over long periods of time.
- Jumping forwards in time a bit, one of the most successful live service updates we made to the game in terms of positive effect on ARPU for in-app purchases was creating a level pack bundle. Once we had 4 packs, usually a dollar each, we provided an opportunity to sell all 4 to the player for a discounted 3 dollars, and we only offered this once a player had already indicated interest in purchasing a single pack.
- You can see it more than made up for the little bits of revenue it cannibalized from the other pack sales and overall had a positive impact on revenue from level packs.
- This change alone marked a clear growth point in our ARPDAU especially among new users, because they’d see the bundle when going to make their first purchase.So TAKEAWAY 8: Bundle your content into discount sales.
- Micro-Talk Time
- Talk-ception!
- Just kidding
- So of course earlier I said it was important for me as a designer to always fight for maintaining the zen aesthetic and that classy, flow gameplay style. On the surface this may be hard to reconcile with ad integration, but we found a way that did pretty well and it basically came down to two hard rules:1.) No banner ads on top of content (we thought it would cheapen our feel too much and they weren’t as valuable of ads anyways) and 2.) Never show the player a video ad unless they explicitly ask to see it.
- Well, of course then we had to reward the player for them watching an ad. Again, the only meaningful resource to our players was content, specifically levels and level packs. We were charging 99 cents for a ~100 level pack, so we though it’d be fair to let a player watch a video ad in return for receiving 5 free level unlocks.
- Essentially we were getting around 7 cents per watch from our best ad provider, so ultimately if players decided to get all their content through watching ads, it’d be free for them and we’d actually make more money. It was mutually beneficial. Alternatively, if they detest ads in games they never have to see one, simply purchase the level pack and we’d be content with our 1$.
- Here are some of the numbers we saw on a per DAU basis from these ads: 4.4 cents per DAU on average in Ad revenue on both platforms.At times with good inventory it could reach almost 10 cents per DAU though.
- Also we saw very conclusive numbers from where players decided to start watching ads. Players tended to watch it when they were out of levels and we gave them an explicit opportunity to decide to start watching or to pay more…
- Players could also go to the in-game store on their own to watch an ad, but this made up only 1% of total ad watches. The lesson: while we didn’t show them ads without asking, it did pay big for us to politely include the offer to watch an ad for content whenever they hit a content wall.
- It made up 35.4% of our total app revenue on average in the fall. So Takeaway #9: Make your ad integration mutually beneficial for you and your players.
- Players even tended to watch multiple ads in a row. Surprisingly over a third of ad opt-ins came when we asked nicely if players wanted to watch ANOTHER ad for more levels. So 10. Don't be afraid to ask if users want to watch an ad to support you. Even right after they just watched an ad. As long as you’re asking, and being nice, it’s cool. This is actually the game changer. Innovate.
- Micro-Talk concluded
- Talk about transition to free motivations:-Android version was getting lots of downloads being free still, we were up to 1 million total.-We didn’t think the app on its own would be profitable with the full team the way we were going, so we wanted to try something new.-We wanted to get as many players as possible for this game and future games, even if it meant slightly less revenue per player now-Our ad integration and monetization was best with new players, so we thought if we could just get a whole bunch of new players in our average numbers might go up. -We were hopeful it could open up other promo opportunities if we were free and had a bunch more users.
- Some charts on going Free in the big picture…
- Now with downloads.
- That spike was our AASAP.So yeah, going free didn’t result in an influx of revenue from the in-app purchases, but we did get a few more downloads and were also able to try some new things, such as…
- (pretty self explanatory) – Being free also let us take a crack at Paid User Acquisition, which we had established early with the paid version was out of reach expensive.Lack of solid LTV stats and player segmentation made it hard for us to judge if 48 cents on free was worth it for us, but it was possible that it was.
- It did open up other partnership opportunities for us as going free on Android at the start, and then later on iOS got us into the millions of downloads. Here was one pack we gave away for free thanks to a partnership with Samsung.Again we tried to be respectful to players with this – providing a free level pack to players was palatable to them and so they didn’t mind the limited branding appearances made by Samsung stuff for the most part.
- Partnerships like this made a *huge* difference in the revenue.
- And after this point the team started to scale down and the profit slowly grew. So Takeaway 11:Going free to get more users can be profitable even with minimal in-app purchases.And Takeaway 11.5: Make your sponsored partnerships mutually beneficial for you and your players. Which only counts as half because it’s more like a 9b. I didn’t feel this deserved a full takeaway.
- We made an elegant game quickly and cheaply in about 3 weeks at a dev cost of around 50k$. It got featured in the iOSAppstore and Google Play store, but even so, the game wasn't profitable, and as the team continued to do live services for the game, the sunk cost continued to grow. We tried a variety of thingsand watched the effect on revenue. No one feature increased the revenue that much, though some had more impact than others. However, all along we were still getting love from the app stores, festivals, and journalists and were growing our player base in the game. We were also always staying true to our design aesthetic and keeping player’s interests in mind with every feature. The large player base we acquired over time and by going free made our in-app ads successful and also attracted other companies that paid us to create branded level packs for them and ultimately this all made the game profitable.
- Note on slide 2
- Note on slide 2