Events and training programs are a main component in many IoT developer programs. But just how effective are they?
This infographic sheds some light into the effectiveness of training and events. Insights are based on our Best Practices for IoT Developer Programs report.
At VisionMobile, we believe in the people behind the numbers. While it’s important to understand numbers, trends and segments, it’s equally important to understand the people we’re trying to reach with our research. This developer profile is one in a series designed to help us get to know some of the people behind the statistics.
Developer Profile:
Levent Gurses
Company, job title and duties:
Movel: CEO, developer entrepreneur. Movel is an enterprise development company, and Levent says, “I code on a daily basis because other people are doing the less interesting stuff.”
Country/Area:
Virginia, US
Development Focus:
Movel focuses on mobile, but that’s too easy of an answer. They work on both native and cross-platform apps (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Phonegap, and more.) Levent emphasizes that mobile development doesn’t mean just the front-end app. The back end, he points out, is the biggest part of a mobile project, particularly one with multiple front ends. The back end includes key capabilities such as RESTful, secure APIs and identity and transaction management.
Levent explains that when building enterprise apps, most of a mobile app’s back end applies to a Web app/client’s back end as well. As he builds enterprise solutions, he’s able to build a “21st century back end.” Everything that applies to a mobile app backend applies to a Web app as well, bringing Web apps up to speed for 2016.
Languages used:
While some developers have a specific language they prefer, Levent and Movel use a mix of languages and clients. AngularJS, however, is a favorite. He’s also fond of Google’s Polymer framework and feels it’ll be a standard in 6-12 months … if Google doesn’t shut it down.
While there’s something to be said for using established frameworks and languages, when a new, promising technology comes along, he takes a pragmatic approach. If a new technology provides sufficient promise, he discusses the potential risks and rewards with the client, along with the backup plan. If the client agrees, they’ll try those less established technologies on a new product.
Favorite devices:
As with some people, Levent is frustrated with the Apple ecosystem, and frustrated by Apple. And like many of us, he says, “I can’t live without my IPhone 6 Plus.” But he uses a variety of devices for testing and exploring. He contrasts iOS devices to Android devices like this: “If I want to use a small computer, I’ll use Android. If I want to use a phone, I’ll use my iPhone.”
He also has an Internet of Things (IoT) shop with about 20 Raspberry PIs running office projects like presentations, dashboards, and temperature sensors. The Raspberry PI is his favorite of this genre for “general, light computing power.” In fact, he says, these eliminate the need for desktops in many applications with the open source Raspbian OS. Arduinos, by comparison, are more limited, but useful for training.
They don’t need any Windows computers, he says, since their MacBooks and Macs run Parallels.
Favorite project built recently:
His favorite recent project stands out to him not because of the technology used but because of the solution. Built for an educational nonprofit, the solution streamlines the application process for college. US high school students use the app to more easily apply to multiple colleges.
Favorite tools:
“Nothing can touch the power of the Chrome developer tools,” even simulating slow connections, network traffic and simulated security issues.
But Movel doesn’t lock its developers into a particular toolset. “That’s what’s beautiful about development nowadays … it’s all open unless it’s Adobe (PDF).” Some prefer no IDE at all, others love heavier IDEs. “Use whatever makes you more efficient.”
They do, however, enforce backend standards like Ansible and Docker.
Best developer-related advice ever heard
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil,” commonly attributed to Donald Knuth. He explains, we need to understand the art of creating the minimum viable product that addresses the business problem.
Best developer-related advice ever given
“Get involved in local meetups and hackathons.” He continues, “Here’s what happened to a lot of developers with the Internet. Everything became impersonal, even resumes. But it takes away the joy. Get out to talk with like-minded people to discuss tools and techniques. You’ll learn stuff you wouldn’t come across in your usual stream, be that Twitter, GitHub or other social media. Everyone you follow is likely like-minded. This takes away the coincidences – local encounters, conferences, meetups, hackathons – all give you a chance to get out of your comfort zone.”
This advice applies to not just new but to experienced developers. He counsels to not get too comfortable: instead, build a trusted network of real people you meet and spend time with. “We grow based on our environment and who we know. When we increase the caliber of people we know then we can grow in leaps and bounds.”
E-commerce as we know it is about to be fundamentally reshaped, as every connected object in the future becomes a potential commerce channel.
Internet of Things – from smart home devices to connected cars – will transform e-commerce and allow it to stretch across the breadth of the customer journey – from awareness, to intent, to purchase. Billions of “things” will double as e-commerce points of sale (PoS), unbundling and extending PoS for e-commerce outside the web, app and product silos controlled by e-commerce players. But how will we get there?
E-commerce is forecast to continue to grow fast, and m-commerce twice as fast for that matter, the latter poised to reach a value of $600 billion by 2018. The Internet of Things (IoT) is at last leaving the hype phase and is becoming a revenue-creating reality. By 2020, there could be as many as five connected objects per every smartphone user. And by then, the IoT market is set to reach a value of $1.7 trillion.
IoT and e-commerce have until now evolved in parallel. They are now embarking on a common journey where every connected object becomes a potential e-commerce real estate. With IoT, washing machines can now not just deliver detergent just in time by knowing when your supplies run out, they can also recommend the right detergent, based on your usage or type of clothes, on demand. Car makers can recommend where you buy your gas, by understanding your drive journey, availability of gas stations, pricing on-demand discounts, and gas station commission – in fact Google’s Waze does this already. Watchmakers can command a commission from health insurers, as they can monitor your heart rate, temperature, fitness habits and determine what risk zone you are in. Moreover, makers of connected devices can now afford a negative BOM (bill of materials) “à la Dell”, by subsidizing the cost of hardware with the revenues from bundled e-commerce services.
E-commerce is already the biggest revenue generator among mobile developers, yet only a small minority have acknowledged it and few have seized it with both hands. Mobile developers using e-commerce (for physical or digital goods) have median monthly revenues of $1,000-$2,000 compared to a measly $200-$350 median monthly revenue for mobile developers across all revenue models.
Yet, only a small share of mobile developers, 9%, have chosen to work with e-commerce, based on our 9th Developer Economics survey wave of May 2015, of more than 13,000 software developers globally.
We expect however that this number will grow as off-the-shelf fulfilment and payment platforms ease the pain of managing inventory, customers and transactions. Scaling up will become easier and therefore e-commerce a less daunting and more appealing option for an increasing number of developers.
Services such as Dash Replenishment Service (DRS) and Pinterest’s buyable buttons are all early, and telling, examples of the commerce things to come. They show how e-commerce is evolving towards letting customers make purchasing choices based on impulse and context instead of having to browse and select among a myriad of items. They also show how a purchasing decision is vastly simplified when discovery and payment friction has been removed.
The e-commerce of things journey has only started but it will have far-reaching consequences for e-commerce, IoT, and overall how goods and services are consumed in the future. For an in-depth analysis of how developers and IoT are shaping e-commerce, download the free VisionMobile report on the Commerce of Things.
The question in question is the question of questions
This week we launched our tenth biannual developer survey – asking thousands of developers around the world what they’re working on and how they’re doing it. If you’re involved in software development, in any way, then go and fill it out – it will only take you fifteen minutes and I’ll wait here while you do.
Answers are easy. It’s asking the right questions which is hard.
Doctor Who – the fourth one
At VisionMobile we spend a lot of time composing questions, especially when we’re compiling a survey like this one. The process sounds easy enough – phrasing 30 questions we’d like answered to provide insight into the developer ecosystem, but it turns out to be a surprising challenge.
For a start we have to create a lot more than 30 questions: the survey tailors itself to ask each person about the industry in which they work, based in the first round of questions. The survey can thus be designed to last around fifteen minutes, but the whole industry can be covered.
Some questions we repeat every six months, choice of language, mobile platforms, and so forth, so we can spot developing trends, but sometimes an old question will need new options as the industry changes. A year ago we added Swift to our language list, and were surprised to see how quickly it had gained popularity, now we’ll be waiting to see if that growth has been sustained and at what cost.
Other questions are created from scratch: the technology behind the Internet of Things might not be entirely new, but the developer interest is. For the first time we’re asking about Open Source in IoT, drilling down to see how this new industry is evolving.
After the questions are written the task is far from over, for once the words are down then the “discussions” can begin. How many options should be listed? Which toolkits are worthy of mention? Whose products should be used as examples? How many IDEs can one developer realistically use? VisionMobile employs experts in many fields; with practical experience developing software and an intimate knowledge of the challenges involved, but like most developers these people are driven by a passion for their subject, and have strong opinions on the tools and techniques they consider important. The survey has to be impartial so we try to ensure that all the experts are equally unhappy, for balance.
Software development is a global industry these days, so the survey has to reach a global audience. Once the questions have been written, discussed, dismantled, and rebuilt to a mutually-acceptable level of dissatisfaction, then they have to be translated into almost a dozen languages, always ensuring that the clarity of the original remains intact.
And then it is done. Perhaps not quite a joy forever, as Keats would have it, but certainly a thing of utility. Questions laid out, check boxes ready to be checked, radio buttons ready to be… radioed(?). Everything waiting for the thousands of developers such as you (what do you mean you haven’t done it yet? Get over there now, this minute). They are drawn by the desire to contribute to the project, or get access to some of the results, or win a prize in the draw, or just know that their opinion matters to the companies and organisations which will be referring to the data over the next six months before the whole process kicks off again.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet asserted that “To be, or not to be” was “the question”, but in these days of Continuous Delivery the questions will never end, and we have turn to a pair of Hamlet’s school friends (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with the help of Tom Stoppard) to see where that might lead us:
We spend a lot of time on our mobile phones (that’s no surprise). But, what’s changing yearly about the way we use these devices? Simon Khalaf, Flurry’s CEO, wrote an interesting post that breaks down the above question and much more:
Last year, on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the mobile revolution, Flurry issued our annual report on the mobile industry. In that report, we analyzed time spent on a mobile device by the average American consumer. We ran the same analysis in Q2 of this year and found interesting trends we are sharing in this report.
After putting the desktop web in the rear view mirror in Q2 2011, and eclipsing television in Q4 2014, mobile and its apps have cemented their position as the top media channel and grabbed more time spent from the average American consumer. In Q2 of 2015, American consumers spent, on average, 3 hrs and 40 minutes per day on their mobile devices. That is a 35% increase in time spent from one year ago and a 24% increase from Q4 2014. In just six short months, the average time American consumers spend on their phones each day increased by 43 minutes.
To put things in perspective, there are 175 million Americans with at least one mobile device. This means that, in aggregate, since November 2014, the US connected population is spending an extra 125 million hours per day on mobile devices. This growth rate is especially astonishing after seven consecutive growth years.
Looking at the chart above, today only 10% of the time spent on mobile is spent in the browser, down from 14% a year ago. The rest of the time, 90%, is spent in apps. Effectively, the browser has been sidelined on mobile. This has major implications on the digital industry in general and the content and media industry in particular. Historically, the media industry has relied almost entirely on search for user and traffic acquisition, building entire teams around SEO and SEM on the desktop web. But search engines are predominantly accessed from a browser. If mobile users aren’t using browsers, the media industry will have to look for new approaches to content discovery and traffic acquisition.
The chart below takes a closer look at app categories. Social, Messaging and Entertainment apps (including YouTube), account for 51% of time spent on mobile.
Entertainment (including YouTube) grew from 8% of time spent last year, or 13 minutes per day, to 20% of time spent, or 44 minutes per day this year. This is 240% growth year-over-year, or an extra 31 minutes. That is more than the time it would take to watch an additional TV sitcom for every US consumer, every day!
Messaging and Social apps grew from 28% of time spent last year or 45 minutes per day to 31% of time spent or slightly more than 68 minutes per day this year. This is a 50% year-over-year increase. However, the majority of time spent inside messaging and social apps is actually spent consuming media, such as videos on Tumblr and Facebook or stories on Snapchat. A study by Millward Brown Digital showed that 70% of social app users are actually consuming media. While we can’t correlate the 70% directly to time spent, we firmly believe that media consumption, either articles read in the web view in app, or video consumed in the feeds, constitute the majority of time spent in social apps. This is a big trend and one that will be watched very carefully by traditional media companies. These companies have to adjust to a new world where consumers act as individual distribution channels. The growth in entertainment on mobile proves once again that content is in fact king and is beating the gaming industry in its own game.
The completely unexpected result of our analysis this year is the dramatic decline in time spent for mobile gaming. Gaming saw its share decline from 32% last year (52 minutes per day) to 15% of time spent (33 minutes per day) this year. This is a 37% decline year-over-year. We believe there are three factors contributing to the decline.
What the mobile industry in general and the app industry in particular have achieved in the past seven years is amazing. Flurry now measures more than two billion devices each month and sees more than 10 billion sessions per day. That is 1.42 sessions for every human being on this planet, every day. And that is just Flurry! If there is anything to say about the mobile and app industry it is this: Mobile is on fire and it is showing no signs of stopping.
Every six months we ask developers around the world those four questions, to see how the industry is evolving. Now in its 9th edition the VisionMobile Developer Economics survey reached out to 13,000 developers, from 149 different countries, and the results are available in our biannual report: State of The Developer Nation Q3 2015.
94% of our 13,000 developers are male, showing a gender imbalance which needs to be addressed if the industry is going to reflect society as a whole. North America is making some progress here, but even in the land of opportunity only a tenth of developers identify themselves as female, and the figures of the rest of the world are much worse.
It’s perhaps surprising that Africa is next best in terms of equality, while Europe is positively embarrassing with only 4% of developers ticking the box for the minority sex. South America offers the greatest imbalance, but nowhere do developers reflect the proportion of women in the general workforce.
Cloud is increasingly important for developers, and cloud developers the most likely to be generating revenue (67% of them are bringing in more than $500 a month). But there’s no rush to the public offerings such as AWS or the Google App Engine, despite all the media attention: 44% of cloud developers are creating apps in private, for use on private clouds.
44% of cloud developers are creating apps in private, for use on private clouds
— Developer Nation Global Community (@devnationworld) July 30, 2015
The Internet of Things is also getting a lot of developer attention, though more a quarter of IoT developers (26%) don’t know who their eventual customer will be. Half of those developers are making applications, rather than hardware or firmware, reflecting the evolution of the IoT industry.
When it comes to mobile the two dominant players (Android and iOS) are squeezing out the competition and 37% of mobile developers are targeting both the leading platforms. Interest in creating apps for Windows Phone has dropped slightly since we last asked, from 30% to 27%, but developers are understandably nervous of Windows 10 and the uncertainty over Microsoft’s commitment to mobile.
Across the developer community the most-popular development language is now a combination of JavaScript and HTML5. The evolution of web languages has imbued them with functionality, while cross-compilers and packaging tools can make them indistinguishable from native applications. That’s been enough to attract 71% of developers in North America, though only 58% in Asia where old-school languages such as Java and C retain their presence.
27% of devs using Swift consider themselves self-taught
— Developer Nation Global Community (@devnationworld) July 30, 2015
Learning a new language is always a challenge, though the growth in Apple’s Swift shows that developers are willing to invest in their education. Swift is, perhaps unsurprisingly, attracting a good proportion of self-taught developers (27% of those primarily using Swift consider themselves self-taught), while Java, C#, and Objective C, all appeal to degree holders (around 60% have degrees) who prefer a more-formal learning environment (around 17% are self-taught).
Not all developers are motivated by money, in fact many professional developers are hobbyists or amateurs in another field. More than half of our mobile developers, for example, are also mucking around with IoT – some professionally, but mostly just to see what it can do, and what they can do with it. Developers are predominantly young, with an average age of around 30, and have both the time and the motivation to explore new areas. Many are involved in open-source projects: 11% tell us that Linux is their primary desktop target platform, despite the fact that the open-source OS accounts for less than 2% of desktop installations.
In mobile the path to revenue, if not riches, is clearly selling products and services, in the manner of Uber or Just Eat, rather than downloads and booster packs, in the manner of Candy Crush and Minecraft. Only 10% of mobile developers are chasing e-commerce revenue, but almost a fifth (19%) are taking more than $100,000 a month – a figure that only 6% of those reliant on advertising can match.
Only 10% of mobile developers are chasing e-commerce revenue, but 1/5th of them are earning more than $100K a month
— Developer Nation Global Community (@devnationworld) July 30, 2015
The whole report, complete with graphics and figures, is a free download, and packed with more insight and analysis from Vision Mobile.
Two years ago, I stepped into the mobile games market when I joined Planeto in Malmö, Sweden. With more than 5 million downloads, Planeto is a leader in knowledge-based mobile gaming. The experience at Planeto has changed me as a product creator and marketer.
Like many of my Scandinavian tech colleagues, I come from the planet where they build mobile phones. One step up the software stack to apps did not seem like a huge leap, especially as Planeto develops games for smartphones. As it turns out, one of the most talented game designers in Southern Scandinavia took me to a planet that was significantly different.
This is the third and final blog of a three part series on battle insights by a mobile game CEO.
[tweetable]Even today, game designers prefer the traditional model of being paid up-front for games[/tweetable]. This business model allows them to devote most time on what is important to them, namely the game and it’s magical game play loop. Our world of algorithms has, however, made Free-to-Play (F2P) the dominant business model for successful games. Free is very powerful as a digital marketing tool for skillful individuals who are able to combine great gameplay with algorithm-winning distribution and marketing.
Ad revenue and In-App Purchases (IAPs) are the two traditional revenue sources in F2P games. Developers mix the two in different quantities depending on the game genre and design. Let’s explore one by one, before we look at the next possible frontiers in the mobile games business.
In our first game, we had one item for sale, namely a premium upgrade. This is not a good business model when your game has strong retention. We still have customers today who played our games nearly three years ago… incredible! These users love our games and, in our original game, their maximum spend was $2.99. That was it for three years of entertainment. 🙂
By implementing lifelines, offering new question packs, and decoupling game boards from the premium upgrade, we have in subsequent games removed the limit on how much money you can spend. Our best customers now spend more and in return we offer more features and content. A much better relationship than the original fire and forget model.
Because of this ongoing relationship, we also have become much more generous. We provide the users with some in-game currency for free, so they can try the different lifelines and game boards. That drives up our conversion, as the users get familiar with our in-game currency early on. Contact to support also triggers free stuff!
Third, we actively work with conversion of users through campaigns where we make seasonable items available either free or at heavily discounted rates. We have had great success with our X-mas tree game board. 🙂
Finally, our lifelines are micro purchases offered at a time where the user is most willing to spend – very similar to the extra turns in Candy Crush Saga.
Good IAP design is hard, and it needs to be closely integrated with the core game play loop.
As mentioned in “The Science of Mobile Game Marketing“, F2P games need an ad mediation layer to be successful in the advertising space.
First, you need a mix of different types of ads from incentivized video, over normal video, to static interstitials, and banner ads. The mix allows you to adjust the ad types over the lifecycle of the user. Advertising is not something users love, so you want to avoid intrusive ad formats, like forced video ads, early in the lifecycle of a user. Later they might make sense depending on your game.
It is also important to ensure you drive up your fill rate. You will not have sufficient video ad inventory from one network available at all times, and hence you should backfill with interstitials from other networks.
Finally, you need to be able to play the different ad networks against each other to ensure the best possible CPM. The ad intermediation layer allows the developer to switch between many different ad networks and adjust advertising volume by network. On top of the automated CPM-based adjustments made by the mediation layer, we adjust our volume by network each week to make sure we get the best CPM per country.
Each advertising network has its own logic when it comes to buying advertising space in games, but generally speaking we’ve also seen that ad networks take advantage of developers who are stale, i.e. developers who do not tweak the number of impressions per ad network. So if you leave your ad network distribution untouched for more than two weeks, expect your revenue to start declining.
Tweak and learn!
Game developers often use other brands for marketing. Whether it is Kim Kardashian, CR7, or FIFA, it is obvious that real world brands sell games. Integrating the real world into games does not necessarily need to be a royalty expense. In fact, this can be a great opportunity for business model innovation in the mobile games market.
Brands, people, and organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to engage with their stakeholders in a positive, meaningful way. Designed correctly, games can be one such path.
At Planeto, we have worked with brands to create question packs about a specific topic for TV stations. One TV station worked with us on a question pack on the Premier League – they wanted to engage their viewers on knowledge about the Premier League. Another TV station wanted 250 questions on fashion for the Copenhagen Fashion Week. Great fun for our users and excellent exposure for the brands.
Think about your game – how can the real world increase your revenue or extend the lifecycle of your game by bringing in brands, information, or other stuff that your users care about? Be creative – people care about more than just celebrities and TV shows – what about the city you live in? Nature? Politics?
As we live in a world of algorithms, game developers have more information about their users and their users’ behavior than any other industry out there. Where traditional industries are looking to build up data about their customers, it often feels like we have excessive amounts of data in the mobile games industry.
Taking advantage of user data requires a thorough understanding of privacy – both from a legal perspective, but also from a product perspective, i.e. what value do you bring to your users and when you decide to generate revenue from data? Privacy must have priority over any revenue considerations. There are, however, cases where the two can go hand in hand.
In the past, we have successfully offered our users a free upgrade in return of receiving an offer for a popular science magazine subscription. This is a reasonable trade-off for the user. They know an upgrade costs $2.99. They know they will be offered a magazine that aligns nicely with knowledge-oriented games that they are playing. For that, they are willing to provide an email or a phone number.
Aggregated knowledge about the users might also be valuable. If you have personal statistics, high score lists, or achievements, could other stakeholders get any value from them, if they were presented in a slightly different way?
I would love to throw a game designer and a big data entrepreneur in a room for a few days to build a truly innovative game where data is the core monetization source.
These are only two examples of frontier-type business models. There are many more.
Education: I am not a big fan of the 1st generation of brain training apps. They are generally not fun to use and need such a huge commitment that they are unlikely to have any effect for 99% of their users. In the end, I do believe we will become better at using games for education. We are just not there yet.
Media: The traditional media industry is going through a tough spell at the moment. Great games where entertainment is integrated at the core of the game could be the future for some magazines, newspapers, and TV stations. SMS voting is one step in the right direction, but there must be more revolutionary designs waiting to be discovered.
Social: Games are good at bringing people together around a common interest. “Play first, date later!” could be an interesting business proposition to pursue.
I believe the next generation of big mobile game innovators will find business models that integrated a magical gameplay loop in weird and wonderful ways with the world of algorithms. What other innovative gaming business models have you seen or would you love to see?
Two years ago, I stepped into the mobile games market when I joined Planeto in Malmö, Sweden. With more than 5 million downloads, Planeto is a leader in knowledge-based mobile gaming. The experience at Planeto has changed me as a product creator and marketer.
Like many of my Scandinavian tech colleagues, I come from the planet where they build mobile phones. One step up the software stack to apps did not seem like a huge leap, especially as Planeto develops games for smartphones. As it turns out, one of the most talented game designers in Southern Scandinavia took me to a planet that was significantly different.
This is part two of a three part series on battle insights by a mobile game CEO.
In my first blog post, I addressed the development of the magical gameplay loop, a process that involves human beings at a very fundamental level working with basic needs like happiness, competition, and the urge to progress. In stark contrast, [tweetable]the marketing of mobile games hardly involves any human beings at all[/tweetable].
The mobile gaming market is at the extreme end of the digital revolution. In other industries, there is an existing physical distribution and marketing channel that gently slows down the product life cycle. There are fashion shows ever so often. There are retailers, who stock up on new items once in a while. In mobile game distribution and marketing, there are no physical inventories. There are just algorithms and a furious pace.
In a world of appfication, anyone involved in product creation and marketing needs to understand the basics of algorithm-driven marketing. That is where we are heading.
Most people find apps by browsing the App Store or Google Play. A close second is recommendations from friends and family. People across the globe discover games in those two ways. It is as simple as that.
Apple and Google have not disclosed how their search algorithms work, but app marketers suggest the following parameters have an impact:
Title and keyword optimization is a topic on its own. Let us instead explore how rating and downloads can be improved.
If you have read my first post about the magical gameplay loop, then you already know that perfecting the gameplay loop is crucial to creating a good game. In most cases, a good game does not automatically guarantee a good review. Customers will give you a one star rating for many different reasons: connection errors, strange chat messages from other players, tiny features that they do not like, etc. Often bad reviews do not contain any text – just a single star, a negative impact on your ranking, and a customer that rapidly moves on to the next app.
To avoid the info-less one star review, you need to take the pace out of the rating algorithm by implementing a funnel system that leads customers to the right place. The objective is to get only happy customers, who are willing to spend time on your app, to leave reviews. Unhappy customers, who are also willing to spend time on your app, send you an email with their issues instead. Quite a simple change that actually provides much more valuable info – you may find the details here.
Boom… first small victory against the algorithms. 🙂
Once you have your ratings sorted out, the next step is to drive downloads. By far [tweetable]the easiest and cheapest way to drive downloads is to cross-promote in your existing games[/tweetable]. This is of course not an option for first-time developers, who instead should be thinking of including mechanisms to cross-promote the next game. Never think of your business as a one game business. We have successfully used Appboy in all our products, and it works wonders for us. Chartboost is another option.
Create your own friendly faces!
If you do not have a successful app already, then you need to follow the painful path of acquiring new users. No friendly faces here. It all comes down to math. The basic equation you need to be aware of is this:
Average Cost Per Install (CPI) < Average Life-Time-Value (LTV) * k-factor
LTV can be calculated in many different ways, but in simple terms, it can be thought of as Average Revenue Per Daily Active User (ARPDAU) * Average retention in days. K-factor is the number of users invited by each new player. If your CPI is $2, your LTV is $1, and each player invites another player (k-factor = 2), then you are break-even.
As such, the concept is simple, but it explodes rapidly. There are hundreds of different advertising channels to use and hence CPI never stands still. ARPDAU is easy to calculate on a given day for all your users, but as soon as you break it down into segments/cohorts (time, advertising channel, segments, geo, etc.) it becomes very complex fast.
Very few developers win in their fight with the UA algorithms. This is truly a scary beast. Experiment with UA, but do not get carried away, until you have a winning formula. In general, nothing is 100% guaranteed. The formula might work for one geographical area and might be totally inoperative for another.
Over the last couple of years, the big game developers and publishers have gotten bigger and customers struggle to find new games – however good they are. Apple has been trying to curb the negative side effects of the App Store algorithms by including more editorial content. The aim is to promote quality games by letting human beings select the games that gets most visibility in the App Store. That has sparked an entirely new set of recommendations on how to get featured by Apple. Google stays true to its roots and is still working to solve the quality versus quantity issue with algorithms.
In a market where there are only two relevant stores, I am not sure I feel completely at ease with the thought that the storeowners decide what goes on the shelves. It drives up the bargaining power of those storeowners to new heights.
Getting plenty of downloads is only one-half of a successful game. The other half is revenue. Most first-time F2P (Free to Play) game developers make the mistake of implementing their own advertising solution with one or two advertising networks. This does not work and it will hurt you badly, if your game makes it through the noise and becomes successful.
You need an ad mediation layer from the get-go – an algorithm that allows you to fight all the other ad algorithms for you. More about revenue options in the third and final blog post of the series.
I have not touched on keyword optimization, user engagement campaigns (i.e. how do you convert users from free to paying users), user acquisition tracking, k-factor optimization (i.e. how do you get users to invite other users), and retention funnels. For each of these areas, there are plenty of algorithms to learn and speak.
To make your apps successful you need to take on the algorithms that govern the marketing and distribution of games. As a rule of thumb (and to set your developers’ expectations right), it is reasonable to budget with 50% of a quality free-2-play game development project being on components (in-house or 3rd party) that does not relate to the actual gameplay loop.
We all love to work on the magical gameplay loop – it is truly rewarding – but the right infrastructure components allows you to take advantage of the algorithms. Do not underestimate the power of the algorithms.
Interested in part three of the series on mobile gaming? Read about Business Models here
Two years ago, I stepped into the mobile games market when I joined Planeto in Malmö, Sweden. With more than 5 million downloads, Planeto is a leader in knowledge-based mobile gaming. The experience at Planeto has changed me as a product creator and marketer.
Like many of my Scandinavian tech colleagues, I come from the planet where they build mobile phones. One step up the software stack to apps did not seem like a huge leap, especially as Planeto develops knowledge-oriented games for smartphones. As it turns out, one of the most talented game designers in Southern Scandinavia took me to a planet that was significantly different.
This part one of a three part series on battle insights by a mobile game CEO.
Having built products with some of the best people in their field, I claim to have a good understanding of how to approach a new product idea. In simple terms, the process involves a deep dive into the needs of the particular user, understanding what technical approach might deliver a product that caters to those needs, creating a first version (1.0), shipping it to the users, learning from the users, and then building an even better version 2.0. Each step has a number of tools you can use to deliver as much “bang for the bucks” as possible. You aim to capture as many facts as possible to keep learning and testing assumptions. Although user experience design and prototyping can make up significant parts, the overall creation process resembles a deductive science project where uncovering the truth is the overarching aim.
The magical gameplay loop makes mobile game creation a very different process. The magical gameplay loop builds on the fundamental premise that delivering entertainment is hard, but when you get there, it is obvious that you have arrived. You will see it in the smile, in the clenched fist raised in the air, or a loud “damn it!” – quite magical, when it happens. 🙂
[tweetable]The gameplay loop is what the player does over and over again[/tweetable]. In a First Person Shooter (FPS) game, the gameplay loop goes like this:
You will do this over and over again, so this loop has to work to perfection – because if not, the player will immediately notice a glitch in one of the steps. Sounds easy, but as soon as you start adding depth to the gameplay, you start challenging the loop: different targets (speed, size, life, etc.), different weapons (power, range, accuracy, etc.), different environments (complexity, dynamics, etc.), and so on.
[tweetable]The process of developing a mobile game starts with the gameplay loop[/tweetable]. You iterate the gameplay loop many times. Planeto is on more than 20 iterations of the next game. Forget about graphics. Forget about login. Forget about high score. It is all about getting the gameplay loop nailed down, testing it with real people, and observing whether you get a fist in the air or the “one more time!” that you are looking for.
It is an inductive process, in which you start with the gut feel and experience of the game designer, observe the reaction from the players, and then iterate until you get to something that is highly entertaining. Although you can access courses and tools, like “F2P Toolbox” creating great gameplay requires experience and a lot of patience. The development of the gameplay loop deals with human beings at a very fundamental level of basic needs, like happiness, competition, and the urge to progress.
Only when the gameplay loop is truly magical do you begin the “normal” development process.
Once you realize the significance of the gameplay loop, you start playing games in a completely new way. You appreciate the beauty of the loop in good games and you become much better at looking beyond beautiful graphics and distilling the essence of a game. You also start benchmarking games against each other on a detailed level.
This brings out a number of interesting perspectives. First, can you find a gameplay loop in other types of products than games? Is there something that the user does repeatedly and therefore needs special attention and many development iterations? I have looked back at products that I have been involved in and I can point to the core loop in most of them. Some of the core loops were brilliant, but some of them were average to poor, as the features and general infrastructure detracted from the essence of what the product was supposed to deliver. My first take-away: look for the loop and make it perfect!
My second take-away is about the inherent contradiction in the popular notion “gamification.” If the essence of a game is the gameplay loop, then you cannot gamify something that has an entirely different user experience loop and purpose.
Let’s take CRM as an example. The purpose of a CRM system is to improve the relationship with the customer. In other words, a CRM system offers a set of mechanisms that remind/drive the sales person to interact with the customer. A gamification project might introduce badges for different activities, high score lists for the best performing sales people, or other elements you might find in a game. Gamification does not, however, change the core user experience loop in a CRM system, which is: 1) enter data to qualify the relationship with the customer, 2) create a profile of the relationship with the customer, and 3) get notified about needs for actions/next steps, which in turn creates qualification data. This set of user actions is not a game. You might get a fist in the air when a deal is won, but sales people will still hate updating the account in the CRM system – even, if they get a nice “Sales Person of the Month” badge 🙂
This does not mean a game cannot deliver more than just fun. As I will explore in my upcoming blog post “Mobile Gaming as a Business,” I am a firm believer that business model innovation is one of the biggest opportunities in the mobile games industry. At Planeto, games are used for lead generation. Games can also tell stories or educate. It is, however, essential that the starting point is the magical gameplay loop. If you do not get that right, then you cannot deliver on anything else.
Interested in how to combine Magic and Algorithms to create a successful Business Model? Read part three of this Blog series here.
Microsoft was slow to react to the step change in user experience provided by iOS and Android versus the first generation smartphone platforms. Windows Phone was then late to market and has finished a distant third in the smartphone platform wars. Smartphone adoption was consumer led and in the race to catch up Windows Phone skipped some enterprise friendly features. This has left it out of the running for business adoption too. In tablets, Windows RT was largely rejected by the market and Intel processor based devices running Windows 8 have only managed a weak third place in the market so far. In terms of their share of the mobile OS market, Microsoft is a long way behind Apple and Google. However, as enterprises are increasingly making big investments in mobile, Microsoft’s mobile opportunity is still not lost.
Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, has made it clear. The company’s focus is now mobile-first and cloud-first. This includes aggressively rolling out their services across iOS and Android.
In fact they already have more than 100 apps across the two platforms and that number is growing fast. Nadella has not been hesitant to acquire technology where previous strategy has left gaps. The new Outlook apps for iOS and Android is based on the Acompli apps that Microsoft acquired late last year. It will likely be enhanced in the near future with the technology from recently acquired calendar app Sunrise.
In addition to filling out their offering and buying in talent for their competitors platforms, they have also moved to protect their dominance in productivity software. Microsoft Office is free for consumers on mobile platforms. To sweeten the deal for those who pay they’ve added unlimited storage via OneDrive. They then removed reasons to switch by opening up to competing storage solutions such as Dropbox and Box.
Following the old adage that the best form of defense is a good offense, these moves help keep Microsoft’s central position in the daily life of business users whilst starving startups hoping to topple them of revenue. No-one without Microsoft’s scale can compete directly on price whilst offering similar value.
The other key to protecting Microsoft’s core enterprise revenues is keeping their technology stack at the heart of enterprise app development. For this to happen, third party enterprise app developers need to stick with .NET and related tools to build apps for iOS and Android. Developer loyalty is where Microsoft has been very strong.
Slashdata’s Developer Economics surveys repeatedly show Windows Phone with massively higher developer mindshare than the installed base of devices merits. That mindshare also continues to grow despite ongoing lack of traction with device sales.
One of the reasons for this developer loyalty is that Microsoft makes top class developer tools. They’ve invested heavily in this area for a very long time. Most developers don’t want to downgrade their tools and productivity in order to target another platform.
While Microsoft didn’t do the groundwork necessary to let developers target iOS and Android with their tools, Xamarin did. Microsoft and Xamarin have a global partnership to enable C# developers (and to some extent Visual Basic developers) to target iOS and Android via Visual Studio. Microsoft open sourced their state-of-the-art Roslyn compiler technology for .NET, presumably mainly so that Xamarin could integrate it. It seems likely that the partnership between the two companies will deepen at some point, probably through investment or acquisition. In any case, it seems to be working.
In the Q1 2015 Developer Economics survey, Xamarin was the second most popular cross-platform tool, behind only PhoneGap/Cordova.
The survey data also shows that C# is clearly on the rise as a language for mobile development.
If you can’t own the OS and platform APIs then the next best thing is to own the developer tooling and thus the key relationship with developers. If you want to introduce or drive new features or standards (that don’t require new hardware or OS level support) then it’s the developer relationship you need to own rather than the platform itself.
Arguably a lot of innovation in mobile going forward will be achieved through cloud services. Microsoft would love to own those APIs. This only goes so far in the consumer space. Apple and Google can veto Microsoft’s moves at the public app store interface. However, in the enterprise, where most apps are not distributed via the public app stores, anything goes. This is where Microsoft’s biggest mobile opportunity lies. It’s also where the bulk of the revenue in app development will end up.
If Microsoft can keep a huge pool of developers fed and happy on mobile then they’ll be in a much better position for whatever comes next in computing.