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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🎲The most important element of running a classic game.

💯Classic games have very strong long term retention.

🗣How Kentaro found development resources to build his first game. What his communication with his developers was like.

🤔Should you build a game from scratch or buy source code online to customize it?

💪🏽How Kentaro maximizes organics for his apps.

🎨How Kentaro thinks about creatives for his marketing.

📲Finding opportunity by keeping marketing strategy simple and effective 

📈Does long term LTV matter for optimizing a classic game?

⚙️What sort of analytics is best for a small game studio.

👯‍Does this same approach work for a hyper casual game?

⚖️What sort of scale Kentaro is at with revenue and spend.

🤷🏽‍♂️Why more people don’t start their own game studios.

KEY QUOTES

How to compete for a classic game

As I said, the classic game doesn’t have any differences between an indie developer and a big developer because the game is too simple. Just imagine Solitaire on Windows 95 and Solitaire on the latest Windows, there’s not much difference in terms of gameplay. So, this is good for me because I don’t have as much resources, and I’m not funded as well. 

Hiring developers for a classic game

For the typical Sudoku project, I was looking for my developer on freelancer.com. Basically, you can post a project, and some people post some offers for you. I post a description of what kind of game I want to make. For me that is Sudoku, so I don’t need to explain it so much. And I also put some of the references, so I asked the developer to play these games, and tell me that it is possible to do that or some of the functions, they cannot do that with the budget.

Building from scratch isn’t the only option

If you want to make classic games, I think that it doesn’t matter whether you make the app from scratch or you buy the app from sellmyapp.com because the game is very simple to make. 

Simple yet effective strategies

I’m defining some geos, which have a reasonable CPI and also easy to climb up at the top 1 to 3 and download the ranking in the puzzle category. So, that’s my idea that I try to maximize the number of organic traffic and decrease the eCPI in the sub selected geo.

How to prioritize metrics

I’m not optimizing the campaign towards the CPI because CPI, if we ran an incentivized campaign, we can go really lower. I’m optimizing actually cost per day 7 users. For me, the most valuable user is people who stay in my game on day 7. Based on internal game metrics, if people stay to day seven, it’s going to be profitable.

Testing changes with game genre

With hyper casual, you have to try 10, 20, 30 concepts that you go to the next level to production. I think it’s a little bit difficult to do it by yourself. You should have some team to do that. 

Making the leap from marketing to development successfully

I think a lot of people are saying that having a game or game studio is difficult maybe because there’s no skill or they don’t know how to make it. I know a lot of developers working on a game, but I have never seen a marketer working on their own game. As I described before, it’s not difficult. Just go freelancer.com, post it, and we just did the very minimum initial investment, which is very affordable. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I’m excited to welcome Kentaro Sugiura to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Kentaro, welcome to the show.

Kentaro: Shamanth, thank you for having me, and I’m very happy to talk about my project and share my experience.

Shamanth: I’m especially excited to have you, Kentaro, because I think when we first connected about the podcast we were like, “Oh, Kentaro, maybe you can talk about Google UAC or APAC and stuff.” Then I realized you’ve done something that not many people have done, which is that you’ve transitioned from being a game marketer to a game developer. Very quickly, I realized you have a lot of very interesting perspectives and experiences to share about your transition, your project, and all the progress you have made — excited to dive into all of that. To set the lay of the land, can you tell us what you do now?

Kentaro: I’m working for a game publisher, which is mainly focusing on console games, but I also have my own mobile game studio, which focuses on classic games such as Sudoku, Solitaire, Checkers, and Dominoes. And I previously worked for social casino developer Huuuge Games, as a Senior Media Buyer. Then I used to work for another Polish developer called BoomBit as a head of marketing APAC. 

So as Shamanth mentioned, I have a 100% marketing background, but I decided to start my own game studio. I have some hypotheses that with classic games such as Sudoku, Solitaire, and Checkers there’s not much difference between my game and the same game from a big developer in terms of gameplay. So my hypothesis for this kind of classic game is the most important thing is how to run the marketing.

Shamanth: For most people who think about starting their own game development studio, they probably think – and I include myself in this category – “Oh, we need to have 200 levels in this game, and we need to have a big team of game designers, artists and PMs.” Obviously, the games you have built are not as complex as that. So how do you think about the competitiveness of your games versus other game studios, which are much better funded, but also have more depth and complexity?

Kentaro: Yeah. As I said,

The classic game doesn’t have any difference between an indie developer and a big developer because the game is too simple. Just imagine Solitaire on Windows 95 and Solitaire on the latest Windows, there’s not much difference in terms of gameplay. So, this is good for me because I don’t have as much resources, and I’m not funded as well.

I have to find a niche where I don’t have a disadvantage, but I can best utilize my skills.

 Another thing is that usually these classic games have very good retention in the longer period. I know from my previous experiments that Sudoku can have a lifetime of one or two years. Some Solitaire games have over three years. So this gives me availability to optimize the new game product and also the marketing side as well. I can give an example, so my first Sudoku product, I spent 500 bucks, and I tested it out just with the Google UAC install volume campaign — no optimization, just install volume. I’ve already got day one retention of 25%, and if we take a benchmark from the Liftoff reports, the puzzle category median daily retention was 29%. I don’t know how much they spend for the production, but it gives enough reason to continue the project because I see the potential here.

Shamanth: So you were like, let’s put a game out there and see what comes back. And you see that these are very strong metrics even with a simple classic game, so let’s continue to pursue it. For building your first Sudoku game and afterward, what sort of technology resourcing did you need? What sort of teams did you have to build? How did you hire these developers? What was that process like?

Kentaro: Yeah. So

For the typical Sudoku project, I was looking for my developer on freelancer.com. Basically, you can post a project, and some people post some offers for you. I post a description of what kind of game I want to make. For me that is Sudoku, so I don’t need to explain it so much. And I also put some of the references, so I asked the developer to play these games, and tell me that it is possible to do that or some of the functions, they cannot do that with the budget.

Also, I put some sentences about the SDKs because I would like to put the Firebase, AdMob as an ad mediation, and Facebook Audience Network that work for the ad mediation. So I prefer to work with someone who has experience with implementing these SDKs.

Shamanth: As you said, you have been a marketer, and you do not have a technical background. What was the process of making the specs for what the developer needed to execute on a day to day, week to week timeframe.What was that communication like?

Kentaro: So I don’t have any technological background. I don’t know how to code. I don’t know how to make an application or game for mobile. In terms of Sudoku, let’s say I want to implement the leaderboard. I will ask the developer, “Is it possible to do that?” He will tell me what kind of difficulty we could see and what kind of problems we could have. Then I break it down, “So if we have this kind of problem, how about this way?” Can we try to make some points that we are happy with that we can do within a budget, so this is a good game production. 

When it comes to the SDK implementation and integration, we are not the first person to implement and integrate some of the SDK to Sudoku. So we have access to some game communities. I’m located in Poland, and we have a big game community, and I asked some people how to do that. This experienced programmer worked as a mentor for us and does some technical stuff to make sure that everything’s okay — this is how I work with developers.

Shamanth: Speaking of working with developers and accessing technical know-how there are websites like sellmyapp.com, which offer source codes to games, and they can be customised. Would you recommend using sites like that or building from scratch? Why?

Kentaro:

If you want to make classic games, I think that it doesn’t matter whether you make the app from scratch or you buy the app from sellmyapp.com because the game is very simple to make.

You can buy community assets for 50 bucks. If you know how to do the code, you can probably make some prototype in one or two hours, but when it comes to the design, you have to think. So, I don’t think that if you buy some game on sellmyapp.com and just publish it, you can get enough attention from the user because of the design, so you need to customize the design. If you customize the design, you  probably pay more. I think that it is much faster and cheaper to make it from scratch.

Shamanth: So, you’re saying that the UI, the UX just need to look nicer. It does need to look better, and it’s a lot of work if you buy something.

Kentaro: When it comes to classic games, there’s no difference in the gameplay. This is what we  have to think more such as the UI and how people can play these classic games very well without stress such as the numbers are big enough to see — very small details. So, you have to think about this kind of stuff.

Shamanth: How do you think about your monetization? I know you’ve expressed that you have SDKs in. Can you tell me more about what the broad monetization strategy is?

Kentaro: Yeah, so the game monetizing by ads as a usual classic game. So you can check it on the internet. Usually these classic games earn revenue say 80% or 90% from ads another 10% or 20% from the IAP. I don’t do IAP at this moment because I like to focus more on the game itself, I want to develop the game. This is how it looks. I’m using the AdMob mediation and integrated with the Facebook audience network. So this is a very minimal setting, but I know I got enough data to optimize the game and also ad automatization. I’m not focusing on this at this moment because I’d like to go to a very minimum setting. I don’t want to invest in extra cash at this moment.

Shamanth: That makes sense. What I also like about your approach is you’re keeping things extremely simple, and you’re keeping things very effective. You’re not doing anything crazy or super complicated in getting your game studio off the ground. And you said you really got into this as a marketer. So what does your marketing strategy look like at this point?

Kentaro: At this moment, I’m running only worldwide campaign with a very cheap CPI. I need some traffic to test out some game functions. My Sudoku has a leaderboard, but if there’s not enough people, we don’t know if the leaderboard works properly or not. Despite that, I’m getting some traffic. Also, I’m constantly doing some design A/B tests and also doing some app store optimization as well, so I need to be getting certain traffic every day. Also,

I’m defining some geos, which have a reasonable CPI and also easy to climb up at the top 1 to 3 and download the ranking in the puzzle category. So, that’s my idea that I try to maximize the number of organic traffic and decrease the eCPI in the sub selected geo.

This is where I’m doing some kind of test. I was looking for where I have the opportunity.

Shamanth: So how do you think about creatives for your marketing? You’re running these campaigns at a small scale. How do you make these changes? How do you think about other plans for these?

Kentaro: Yeah, so I have my own designer, I found in some Facebook group. So in Poland, we have Game Dev Polski meaning that it’s a game developer in Poland, so I follow him in the Facebook group. I checked his portfolio, and it suits my needs. I just go to the Facebook ads library and check my competitors’ ads to see what kind of ads they’re using and just a copy and paste. My idea is that if it’s the same gameplay game experiments and the same kind of ads, the matter is how to optimize your marketing campaign.

Shamanth: That’s why you have that advantage because you are a marketer, and you have experience on executing campaigns. What I also like is that you’re also keeping your marketing processes fairly simple and straightforward. Again, out of curiosity, you did say you’re optimising for CPI. So are you thinking about or considering the LTV in any manner?

Kentaro: Actually,

I’m not optimizing the campaign towards the CPI because CPI, if we ran an incentivized campaign, we can go really lower. I’m optimizing actually cost per day 7 users. For me, the most valuable user is people who stay in my game on day 7. Based on internal game metrics, if people stay to day seven, it’s going to be profitable.

Shamanth: That makes sense. Do you have any analytics system in the game itself to track the day to day progress? 

Kentaro: Yeah, I’m using the Firebase, which is free. The only thing with Firebase is that we cannot break down is retention by country from the dashboard. So you have to use a BigQuery. You can use let’s say Appsflyer or Tenjin – whatever you prefer. 

Shamanth: Now that you have the game running, you’re monetizing, you’re marketing the game. What’s next for you? How do you think about working on a new game versus improving your current game via adding the leaderboard or adding new features? How do you prioritize what’s next for you?

Kentaro: Now I’m focusing on this Sudoku product because in terms of the in-game KPIs, it’s not a big difference between the big publishers. I’m also working on a Solitaire, but Solitaire is a little bit more complex because there’s a few ways to play Solitaire. This is a reason that I’m constantly testing what is the best way to utilize my skills. 

How can I duplicate that Sudoku strategy to the Solitaire. Besides a classic game, I have two games in the pipeline. One is kind of a shooting game, a little bit like a hyper casual. Another one, is more of a visual novel game, so this is  more like APAC. You know, I’m from Japan, so I know what kind of games Japanese people like. 

Shamanth: Yeah, and the approach you described of taking a very simple game putting in very simple classic games putting in fairly simple marketing and monetization. Do you think that approach could work with a hyper casual game as well? Why or why not?

Kentaro: Maybe not exactly the same approach towards hyper casual because hyper casual games usually have much shorter product lifetime. This is why the production time should be shorter because you have to constantly make new hyper casual games. My approach is based on the fact that classic games are easy to develop and that classic games have very good retention in the long term. If you want to develop hyper casual games you have to modify or adapt the strategy towards the hyper casual games.

Shamanth: Also, I would say that because you’re working on classic games, you don’t have to prove the game mechanic because the game mechanic has been proved for hundreds of years. You don’t have to change anything. With hyper casual, I think the game mechanic is still a question mark. It can work but maybe not.

Kentaro: Exactly, you have to do a lot of tests. Meaning that

you have to try 10, 20, 30 concepts that you go to the next level to production. I think it’s a little bit difficult to do it by yourself. You should have some team to do that. 

Shamanth: Yeah, and what sort of scale are you at with your games in terms of revenue and UA spent?

Kentaro: So at this moment, my main focus is developing the game, which people can play for a long time. So just say, just mentioned before that I’m running only the worldwide campaign with very cheap CPI testing. But, I would expect 2000, 3000 for us to spend in the coming months because based on current KPI everything looks okay. We know the schedule reads a bit small. If everything’s okay with my cash flow then probably scale up and speed up the business. 

Shamanth: More power to you for doing everything you’re doing because this is definitely exciting. A lot of marketers think about what it’s like to be a developer, but I don’t think anybody I know has made the leap and very few people I imagine have. So why do you think more people don’t do what you’ve done in transitioning from marketing to game development?

Kentaro:

I think a lot of people are saying that having a game or game studio is difficult maybe because there’s no skill or they don’t know how to make it. I know a lot of developers working on a game, but I have never seen a marketer working on their own game. As I described before, it’s not difficult. Just go freelancer.com, post it, and we just did the very minimum initial investment, which is very affordable.

You don’t need to do anything – the developer will do everything. And for marketers, it’s kind of a playground. You can do it or you can run some magical campaign for the experiment. So I think that it’s good to know the entire mobile game ecosystem. It helps the marketer’s career because you know everything.

Shamanth: I would also think that for a lot of marketers, much like myself, we work with large sums of money. Oftentimes, we work with hundreds of thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes it’s helpful to get a different perspective. If you’re marketing your own game and you’re like, “Oh, my God, this is what it’s like to get your first 10, 50 hundred installs.” It’s a very different perspective. And as you said, you get to understand the mobile gaming ecosystem from a different category altogether. 

Kentaro: I would recommend everyone to at least try because this really is super fun. I’m not doing it for money or something, it’s just like my hobby.

Shamanth: Yeah, indeed Kentaro this is very instructive, and I definitely have taken a lot of notes. This has been great, and I can’t wait to put this out into the world. As we wrap up, can you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you and your work?

Kentaro: Yeah, if you have any questions or you know, some feedback just enter my name on LinkedIn, and we can have some discussion.

Shamanth: Excellent. We will link to your LinkedIn on the transcript and the show notes, and I’m excited to release this into the world very soon.

Kentaro: Thank you very much

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!