Christopher H. & Robin S.: Next Generation of Interactive Streaming | Games Now! Lecture Series
okay welcome back to games now lecture series i'm annakaisa kultima and this is straight from aalto university not during the coffee time though in the sense of a physical location but still it's out of university lecture series about game development about trends in the industry about emerging and dominant things that happens right now as the games now title gives you the queue together with solip uh park we are here to host you an amazing one more lecture for the spring solip how are you today all right yeah yeah that's good good how are you i'm great the weather is perfect in helsinki and during the weekend there has been almost like a summer time feel walking down the city so that's absolutely amazing and it gives you a lot of energy i guess but we are happy streaming too well you can't see the weather in this blue screen but so yeah yeah i'm going to assure you that the weather is amazing here in finland we could lie here but anyway so it's it's a perfect day uh also perfect day for streaming uh and perfect day of talking about streaming so there is a new kind of uh trend the way which is like is it dominant or is it emergent i'm not sure it's pretty dominant in certain ways but also a trend that not too many uh game developers always follow so this is a great opportunity for us to discuss a bit more how then the future of streaming and kind of uh viewing games and and uh being passive or active player and how all all sorts of all these things happen in the future i guess um so today we have two nice speakers chris and robin talking about their experiences with this trend uh so yeah let's introduce our speakers i guess okay so just like anna kaiser said we have two speakers and as you can see in the banner up there one we have christopher hamilton the director of developer relations at genvid technologies chris is being an expert in game production localization business development and partner relations and he has been working in the video game industry for more than 14 years and our second speaker also up in the banner is robin squire who is a co-founder of blackblock and has been working there as ceo since 2018 is a marketing expert actually and a strategist and a lifelong mmo player who is now aiming to bring large-scale connected open worlds to mobile so we have amazing speakers very interesting topic to discuss pretty impressive and like the regular way of the lecture we have the presentations and then we also have the questions and answer at the end and today i have a we have a special treat also an after party at our discord channel a bit more of that later on the lecture but let's say hello to our speakers hi chris and robin hello hello hey how you doing do we have you guys on the screen i guess we have you guys on screen um yeah so how are you doing how is the day for you yeah heartbreak focused on giving this presentation when the weather is nice here but it's still nice that the weather is finally that the sun has finally come out and the weather is finally nice we hope it lasts yeah it will last it will last so yeah are you excited to share your insights to the topics definitely very good so let's get into the business and let's give the stage to chris uh you're ready i guess to show your presentation and will be silent unless there's something to ask and people you can chat about your questions on the chat box yep go ahead chris okay is the the screen's all there almost set great hi everybody welcome to this presentation on the next generation of interactive streaming um i'll just cover a little bit about myself and judgment technologies i will talk about massive interactive live events for miles um i'll talk about spectator-centric design and three levels of interactivity and then i'll jump into rival geek a multi-million dollar collaboration that we had with facebook and do a postmortem on that project and i guess then i'll hand it over to robin and we'll take questions after his presentation before i get started i do want to talk about what genvit is not because there do seem to be some misconceptions regarding what we do so i'll say that genvid is not a streamer tool we are not cloud computing we're native cloud streaming and the difference is that we scale more cheaply than multiplayer servers and then we are not a platform we are not competing with twitch rather we're a preferred twitch partner um but we're platform agnostic we have games on twitch youtube facebook all of these platforms have different audiences and we feel it's important for developers to choose the platform that best fits their game um so my name is christopher hamilton and i'm the director of developer relations in europe for gender technologies um i've been in the industry since 2007 and here are some of the better known companies that i've worked for on the left um i'm an american i used to live in saint petersburg russia uh i speak russian uh and i have been based in helsinki since 2014 and i'm still working on my finish uh it's quite a ways to go um i've been mainly in production and partner relation roles with a lot of liveops experience of rovio i also feel very strongly about giving back to the community by working with various organizations which you can see on the right i'm on the boards of the igda and the finnish game jam i'm still very involved in igda finland my undergraduate degree was on the environment and media and raising awareness through science reporting and i'm looking at games as a more modern media for this and i've been working with a number of companies and initiatives like playing for the planet with unep um and just initiatives work with charities to raise awareness i'm an advisor for four good games which is a small company here in helsinki and i have been slowly building a special interest group for this under the igd umbrella so if anybody's interested in any of this um do feel free to reach out to me after the talk um genvid technologies was founded in 2016 by some square enix veterans it is a u.s headquartered startup with offices in new york la montreal tokyo and berlin i'm in helsinki technically i'm out of the berlin office the company is backed by some leading uh games pcs like galaxy interactive and maker's fund and we have people from both of those funds in our board and to my delight we have amazing advisors like x square enix ceo uchiwada digital media executive matt ball anna suite who is instrumental in building valve and steam into what they are today and jt gleason uh who was at twitch for more than eight years and key roles in leading both partner and developer relations have a stalwart team of highly talented folks that are a lot of fun to work with many have worked at blizzard riot square enix ubisoft and wargaming and have rich experience in game development esports and live ops and you can see the variety in terms of ethnicity and gender there's also diversity and background experience and age we feel it's very important to have a diverse team help us tackle a lot of these streaming experiences that we're helping companies to create our mission is to power the future of interactive media we believe that people love shared experiences um more so when their participation matters be it gaming sports reality tv these are the events that become water cooler moments in the office or these days perhaps just what people are chatting about the random channel on slack um and we are already working with top tier platforms leagues and events to create those experiences games and traditional media are at a point of convergence uh perhaps an ongoing evolution of convergence is media is trying to become more engaging like games are and some games are addressing louder a larger audience of spectators by creating non-gaming experiences and interactions for them so when talking about interactive streaming it could be something like the netflix choose your own adventure style vandersnatch um it could be the zoom revolution that we're in now with people talking to one another and asking questions but long story short both sides are trying to become more interactive and increase their mass market appeal this is happening now and game developers should be thinking about this ongoing shift in paradigm and the new forms of gameplay that players and viewers can have together and i'll touch on that a bit later um interactivity is the future of mass uh media content and massive interactive live events what we call miles are the next step in this evolution turning passive viewers into active participants we seek to disrupt the traditional broadcast experience by offering increased interactivity and a better viewing experience for the widest possible audience so miles are cloud-powered highly engaging and interactive live broadcast events that allow anyone to be part of a large audience while directly participating in a meaningful way miles combine the best of lean forward gaming lean back tv and the thrill of live entertainment here the audience will matter and the individuals inside can decide their own level of involvement or influence miles can be designed in a number of different formats or combine multiple styles that best fit these specific events and so now i'm going to apologize to people who aren't interested in sports but i find that this is a good analogy to explain what we're talking about because sports are games with rules and objectives and while miles are not exclusive to sports again concert events reality tv make great events that bring people together but the examples in sports are just simply closer to gaming and in order for games to be disruptive in the space we need to think about some of the success that we've seen in traditional media and traditional media has a service design that games really don't have and that is a focus that is beyond just the player we have a larger view of what it is to be a sports fan and that's because there's an entire service design around that there are people that are playing in a physical stadium somewhere in the world and then there are people that pay to go to the stadium and watch and these people are paying the highest per capita and then there's the largest demographic and that is the people watching at home on tv but there is a service design behind this that goes from player to participant in the stadium to viewer at home where the player is just a concentrator for the funnel and so if we juxtapose this to the digital world games in this case you have people that are playing um the participant doesn't really exist and then we jump to viewers and that participant experience ends up being the core of what the viewer experience is built upon so if you are at the stadium and you have you have the people that are closest to the field they have the best access to the live players and the people at home are watching facsimiles of this participant experience you have different camera angles you are zooming in on different players to see different plays um you have scoreboards that let you know how much time is left on the clock or what the score is but there is a service design around this that allows the viewer to enjoy that participant experience and for the most part in the digital world we have jumped from the player experience to the viewer experience and we're just watching the player view for everything and that is not really the best way to build experiences for viewers so right now we have a growing underserved market which is the viewer historically game developers have been great at creating great gaming experiences focused on the players they know how to monetize them developers are just starting to get comfortable with thinking of viewers as part of the ecosystem which is why it's kind of exciting to be in this space and be talking about it now twitch continues to post record quarters both with regards to hours watched and viewer counts on the platform um there's a bit of seasonality in the statistics and clearly the ongoing global pandemic caused a spike in viewership but there was significant growth before covet 19 and it seems coveted simply accelerated these trends now again apologies to the people in the audience who don't know anything about baseball but in many ways this highlights my point of why viewers are underserved um because most streaming experiences look something like this um so streamers can only broadcast from the player's perspective and in this particular slide i can't tell maybe who the player is um if this is an important moment in the game if there is anybody on base what the score is what the tactics or strategy are um so it's really difficult to follow what's happening in this game um and strategy tactics and team coordination are all lost without giving an audience that understanding of the bigger picture and so i as a viewer when i'm watching a game on twitch if i don't play that game i usually have no idea what's going on and therefore it's not engaging for me um and so it's important to note that game developers and not streamers but game developers are in the best position to address viewership of their games game developers have the ability to put in new camera angles they can create interactive experiences that address viewers they can provide data that help explain what is going on in the game um and it's important to note the professional sports are spectator driven businesses so game developers are only now starting to build spectator-centric value into their games and tap into this audience um so we at genvette are focused on that participant experience we feel by creating a value-driven participant experience that has multiple layers of engagement where viewers can affect what they are watching we can create a really cool funnel that benefits everyone in the ecosystem players participants and viewers alike um so again think of the physical world players aren't paying for the most part uh they are being paid um participants are in the stadium are paying the most but they're there at the stadium and likely having the most fun and it's because of that participant experience that they are able to create that viewer experience and drive the most revenue through broadcast rights so players of the core demographic that developers are thinking about today they are basically uh they're the only monetized segment today um interactive viewers again another way of saying participants are an opportunity um game developers make interactive experiences geared towards players um but there is an opportunity in making interactive experiences for viewers and spectators benefit from an enhanced more enjoyable and more importantly more understandable experience that will help drive fandom and value so what does this mean um people go to stadiums to enjoy that rich experience they they get that through understanding the game or the music if it's a concert uh and they want to go to an event knowing that they are competent about what they are watching um so here are ways that we can add value um and create enjoyment competency in fandom so here on the left um are some some uh slot we have a slot of uh bird's eye view camera angles and maps that can be toggled off that can provide users with again that that big picture that was sort of missing in that baseball slide um i can select a new camera angle i can pull up live stats that help me follow my favorite player i can compare my favorite player against other players or other fan favorites i can see tactics as they come around on the map and this just helps create a competent audience that understands what's going on in the game and understanding um increases engagement uh jumping to the middle unlike sports video games are constantly evolving we live in a world of live ops and the rules and the gameplay change over time um so it's important to tell viewers what's going on so they can understand what they are watching this is super important to help novices get into the experience and in fact most people that are watching streamers today they are watching to sort of learn tips and tricks from players that are really good at the game and that is sort of an on-boarding process um and this is also a way of re-engaging potential players that you may have lost so let's say that there's an rpg event that's happening um i have a an ogre that was powerful from before there's a weekend event ogres have a two times buff for the weekend maybe i i see this by going to um the interactive live stream on twitch and i go oh hey i have that powerful olga from before let's dust him off and see what he can do um and then jumping to the last slide um you have viewer interactions where the viewer can reach out and touch the game and actually impact and affect what is happening by perhaps providing the player with a lifeline by sending some extra health or or trolling them by by setting some traps so when thinking about the different types of interactivity we like to structure our thinking a little bit so uh we tend to break this down into three different tiers the first of which is informational and again this is just giving viewers information and the goal here is to have a confident viewer um so like being able to adjust the volume on a traditional broadcast you should be able to adjust things like stats or data or and being able to toggle things off like what's in a player's inventory maps and where they are on those maps and this is just data that is sent along with a stream of audio and video so it's just a sort of a html5 uh web overlay on top of video the next tier is customizable and this is the idea that you have different demographics and different interest groups that are watching your game and giving them each a native experience so this could be a localized version in their own language uh or it could be allowing them to cater information to a specific team or a specific player that an audience is following um it could be something like giving um different cameras or different language options um in esports we're already beginning to see um segmentation between say an english or korean specific channels uh and this helps create that sort of home in a way feeling and shoutcasters talking about specific teams so the easiest way to think about this is is customized cameras and customized data feeds with separate chat or cheering functions and again this is just web overlay on top of video so it's really not hard to do um and then last and this is where game developers usually jump to first and that is the influential tier and this is where viewers can can reach out and touch the game and have that effect on the player experience um be it something like cheering um or i just you know tap on a icon on the overlay and i can cheer for specific players uh and that might have a visual representation or it might have an audio representation where the the players can actually hear cheering noises in their headsets um or it could be something more impactful so it could be something very nuanced uh like i can cheer and the cheering might buff an npc or a boss character and it might make those those enemies more powerful and the viewers enjoy that because it gives something more challenging to the players and then maybe the players get much better drops as a result of these puffed characters or it could be something more impactful like buying a grenade uh throwing it into the middle of a match and just seeing what it does um or sending in supply drops and then watching all the players race after the goods we start with the informational tiers just because it's the easiest to implement it's just exposing data and putting it in a web overlay um customizable tends to take more time to figure out what optimal camera angles the developers may want to put in um and this is can this can be really tricky actually i was working with a a team that was working on a racing game and we wanted to have different kind of overhead sky cameras in but they hadn't actually drawn that part of the world and so we had to choose cameras that didn't expose unmade parts of the game which made choosing some of the camera angles more challenging and we ended up having more more follow uh cams that would follow some of the the racers instead um and then obviously um influential is the hardest it takes a lot of time to figure out uh player balance and enabling viewer inputs that are fun for both the viewers and the players in a way that it doesn't completely destroy the player experience so why would you want to do this um basically because if you build an audience um and fandom you can monetize it um maybe it's a way to attract more players um both informational and customizable tiers can be put behind a paywall or paid for through a sponsorship or monetize through ads while the influential tier opens up the possibility of micro transactions where viewers can be buying consumables or cosmetics that impact their experience as well as everyone around them um and it's it's interesting to note that as of february uh last year um 590 million bits had been cheered on twitch i was looking for some more updated uh information on that but couldn't find any um this morning so so this empowers viewers to become more active participants in the ecosystem and it helps drive these massive interactive live events that i was talking about earlier and so now i'll move on to rival peak um rival peak for anybody who didn't uh hear about it um was basically a new um unique interactive reality show that facebook debuted on december 2nd it got a lot of attention from both industry insiders and the general media and so i'll start this off with just a very quick overview of some of the statistics and then i'll explain some of the elements more in detail the project originally ran from december 2nd to march 3rd with more than 100 million minutes being viewed it's currently running in a rerun mode now that i'll actually demonstrate a little bit later um there were 55 times the amount of minutes watched um difference between week one and week 13. and perhaps this is the best indicator since facebook didn't start marketing the game until week three um but we were kind of there testing for stability and bugs and issues like this um there were a number of sort of core interactions that the audience could engage with and most of them were engaged with the storyline by reading the dialogues and then there were other sort of voting and choices and mini games like match threes and memory games that other audience participation events and ways that viewers could participate um as development went along we we added things to help gamify the ins experience and to make things more understandable to the viewers um and in terms of basic demographics the top five countries were the united states mexico brazil india and the philippines um i was very surprised i have an extensive experience in making casual games which is really more geared towards women and this experience to me felt more like a very casual sort of fishbowl type experience where all you could do is is tapping so i was very surprised that men had actually edged out women in terms of the audience um and i was honestly quite surprised that so few people engage on facebook on pc these days but i guess that's more telling of my age um than anything else um and now i'll explain a little bit more about uh rival peak itself um rival peak was powered by genvin technologies with design and creative by pipework studios and dj2 entertainment and while rival peak looks like a game it is a culmination of a decade's worth of effort to create the world's first native cloud streaming experience so we can say that rival peak isn't a game rather it is a a mile a massive interactive live event um it is built on the idea that interactive stories should not be based or the interactive story should be based around an entire audience not just a single viewer um that your decision should have consequences to you and everybody else that is involved in the experience um and that there are no do-overs there's no pausing there's no way to know who's gonna win um during the 12-week run the world of rival peak didn't stop um its characters were constantly in motion and the story unfolded as the audience participated and played along um so while facebook lacks an extension program like twitch it does have the world's leading html5 platform so we worked with facebook gaming to use an html5 video player to put the live streams from our tech into 13 different facebook instant games and then link them all together to reach facebook's two billion users around the world instantly nothing to download install um it works on low-end android devices that are a pain for developers to support that is highly accessible and is really that the fact that it works so well on low end android devices as to why we perform so well in markets like brazil mexico india and the philippines um and so i find that quite interesting um as a mile rival peak is made up of three components um there is the facebook instant game which as i mentioned was actually 13 instant games all linked together and that's one for each um artificial intelligent character stream uh and then one for the main home stream it's a persistent world and this part is similar to the reality show big brother uh where there's an audience uh the audience can follow them 24 7 and kind of know what the contestants are doing um the contestants are all driven by a very sophisticated ai that was developed by pipework studios and all the voting takes place through audience participation events or aapes or apes as we call them which are various user interactions that i'll touch upon later in the demo um but the contestant with the lowest score at the end of each week is eliminated and the audience votes by engaging with them through the simulation um the second part of the mile is is a companion show called rival speak it was a facebook watch original show that was hosted by will wheaton um and it was more than just a companion show he guides the audience deeper into the world its secrets and its characters and this part of the show was actually more like lost with a very complex storyline filled with conspiracy theories and total craziness dreamed up by the team at dj to um and the narrative here serves as sort of the experiences metagame sort of saying um it was really more than a wrap-up show it was it was you know it went through what happened but will interviewed the contestants he provided more information of their background and set the story up for the following week um and it was a bit challenging because will and the producers did not know who was getting eliminated week on week um so it was truly a crazy production schedule that i'll also touch on later and then there's actually the social platform itself um with the rival peak page on facebook there were several fan pages that provided additional information and ways for the audience to follow what was happening get caught up in the story line find out more information about the contestants and it's interesting that people would uh before watch something like game of thrones and sort of live tweet their reactions to what was happening and this was happening all right on facebook's platform so um before i want to jump into the demo i want to get you caught up to speed with what's happening in the sim which is a little challenging because it's a little bit like summarizing the whole i don't know how many seasons of lost in just a few minutes um so when rival peak began way back in december it really looked like a digitally animated tv reality show there were 12 ai contestants each with different backgrounds sort of struggling to survive in the pacific northwest and then the story storyline got a little weird jeb saw a haunted floating acts in the camp antonio started having strange dreams then maybe all the contestants were having the stream same strange dreams the audience through their participation helped the contestants traverse the map only to have the group split by a landslide they ran through haunted woods discovered a secret bunker only to be forced into some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland by a mudslide so fans sort of quickly pieced together that there was too much coordination and that maybe the mysterious tangram labs the so-called sponsors behind the reality uh show competition may have some more sinister uh motives here um so in the re-run of everything we are sort of slightly past the midpoints which originally was somewhere late january i want to say um all the characters that have been eliminated in the game have returned to the game um in this bunker uh that you can see here which is they are sort of on a side quest of sorts helping the audience sort of figure out what's going on and unravel the mystery um behind the game behind the narrative behind rival peak and tangram labs um and while they're eliminated and can't win they're still back uh and with that i will actually jump into the game and so uh it will load right now into facebook and so this is basically the landing page this is a stream that will cycle through all the different characters and the ai um driven people just some basic elements some information as to what's going on in the game there's sort of a facebook login multiplier here on the left um this tells me sort of what day that we're in uh this will refresh the screen this is sort of me as you can see my wonderful little face here um and this just tells me kind of which characters i've been following the most who's been getting most of my votes um achievements and leaderboards that we've put in to make uh really gamify the experience a little bit more um it's available in efig's basic tutorial that we can run through um i have the sound effects off simply because all of these different characters have different music um and i quite like the electronic music of winter and so i just usually have her going on in the background and um it's sort of fun background music we added uh just a quick link to watch all of the sort of cut scenes that happen um sort of throughout the various stages of the game uh and then uh linked directly to all the the issues of uh rival speak um which they get truly insane by the end um then you can see winter here is kind of doing jumping jacks um we'll jump to winter screen by just tapping our icon down here below again this is videos what you see that's not loaded in the video these are all sort of ui elements everything else is part of a live stream that's streaming sort of right out of the clouds um into facebook um and so we can see that she has this activity she's getting exercise i can tap here and help speed up her getting exercise so this is what i was talking about before one of these audience participation uh events um and again this is really what facebook wanted they wanted something that was sort of a very light touch casual fishbowl what i like to call an ant farm type experience um that again you can lean back and just kind of take it all in or you can kind of jump in and and get more involved um there's also sort of a daily vote um where we can give the contestants a clue or if by disguised as a clue i'll be kind and just say let's just give them a clue submit that so that's the daily votes um there's um also this uh map that kind of shows where all the characters are and you can see we've got six characters in the underground subway system in the bunker and then six that are in this research area and then let's see what judd's doing jump to jet stream he might have something going on um he is i guess he's getting warm by the fire we'll see if i can find somebody that's got uh a more interesting task that we can do um okay so here um sabun is um figuring out what he should do next in this case um look around get warm or socialize he's been fairly social eats i think he needs to get warm so we'll say get warm vote and play um and then here i just get thrown into sort of a match three minigame type thing to get involved with um i'm not going to really bother with this but eventually this will count down if i made the same vote as a number of other people have made then i'll get some bonus points for this and someone will get some bonus points for my sort of involvement um with him but that's that is basically the crux of of rival peak we can come back to this uh later uh if we want um put this back into full screen mode right um so in terms of the narrative um steven fugaj who's the creative director of dj2 entertainment who's known for his narrative work on um several telltale games such as the tales of the borderlands um walking dead season two the wolf of mungus he said that what we're doing in rival peak represents an evolution in terms of narrative creation this goes way beyond selecting um dialogue trees um where players vote on different dialogue choices here players are interacting with the more physical evolution of what these characters are doing and in turn that influences the dialogue so you're not voting directly on who's going to say what you're sort of influencing the characters that they as they pass through this world and that ultimately influences the story and so it was an interesting challenge making the video on demand show because the deadlines were tight and it was complex and they didn't know who was getting eliminated so they had to come up with a very creative framework to um take into account how characters would be eliminated and how that was kind of out of their hands and so they came up with some clever tricks in order to preserve um dialogues that were written and that's sort of why we have a bunch of these characters appearing in the bunker at the midway point because that way they could re use a bunch of dialogues between any two characters that were in the bunker or adapt them to fit the current storyline and then uh imagine sort of watching a sporting event and yelling at a team or a player and actually having that having an effect on the game and and here both collectively and individually the audience members are influencing a number of aspects in rival peak in in big ways and small from affecting the weather um to accelerating tasks choosing goals um viewers are driving the plot in the subplot in real time as they are experiencing the show um and these instances of audience influence influence are called apes and there are project apes that are really involved with removing environmental hazards or puzzles or obstacles typically it advances the storyline once per day and can arrange from something like cleaning debris or setting up tents or more advanced things like building a bonfire or making a bridge um but again viewers help push that along and uh decide kind of the direction of where things evolve by how they engage with characters um action apes are similar to project apes but on a smaller more personalized scale um and they just these are the things that i was tapping on they're just the quick tap mini game and um again they're they're specific to a specific character because not everybody is watching all these 13 street uh streams um or all these characters usually you may only have a number of people watching each one um and then uh goal apes are uh ones where um you select uh what a particular ai character will do next um and each of the 12 characters in rival peak have their their own live stream channel so the audience members can follow them and jump from one to another every so often a character will just sort of stand still and sort of assume this this thoughtful pose um and that's when this widget will come up and uh you can follow them and kind of tell them what they're gonna do next and usually something like hydrate get warm nourishment and then usually something additional some sort of random goal and then viewers can select one of those and play a mini game and sort of push the thing forward so um with rival speak we knew um some of the segments in advance but we didn't know who was going to get eliminated each week um so as a result um we had to rapidly change dialogue scenes and animations to release the the rival speak episode each week a typical week had a lot of changes based on those interactions and user scores were counted from saturday to friday with the cutoff being friday evenings that gave us the weekend to sort of readjust everything and the story line um will was shot on monday production and editing took place on tuesdays and then on wednesdays the instant game would go down um we would upload the next week's worth of contents and then an episode of rival speak would air 6 pm pacific time with new streams coming back up at 6 30 pacific time we had qa teams and marketing teams working 24 7 to respond to each user's issues post new content on the character pages and other facebook pages and just ensure that that streams were up and running and running normally the live operation team was every so often having to push new code or reset things we um had one um player stream for whatever reason the ai in the game got stuck on a wolf and was running around following this wolf for 20 minutes and so it took some time to reset that um in terms of uh rival peak itself miles are new um the tech stack is unique and it was a bit of a challenge doing all of this amidst the global pandemic um and kind of amazing that we did the whole thing in roughly seven months um and so since we were very unsure how this was gonna work out we held off on on marketing for the first couple weeks just so that we could do bug testing learn uh adjust get feedback from players and we we realized that we needed to more clearly explain what new users um should do um the original landing page was meant to be something that was clean with no ui and a lot of this was just really confusing for a lot of people so we added this little tiny description on the left um and we thought this little description would kind of do it and explain kind of to the viewers what to do but but clearly it didn't so a couple weeks later um we created um the version on the right that has this sort of cnbc like banner with an explanation explanation of how to get to the video the instant game um and updates on the week's events and and more um we also thought that there was enough interactivity uh for the audience and for for most of the fans it really was but um a lot of people still wanted to interact with people um and so we started experimenting with co-streamers that would actually guide the audience through the the latest updates and read and perform some of those character dialogues um and make their own impact on the game if you will and we don't think of them as streamers because they're not actively playing the game we think of them as influencers because they're they're coming into the game they are bringing their audiences in they are sort of guiding them as to maybe who their favorite players are and getting those masses of players in involved in in helping uh the storyline sort of unfold um and this ended up being sort of a big success um for the project because it just brought lots of people into the game and and even though they were rotating in and out lots of people were staying in the experience in general um so quickly we had sort of an audience co-streamer and ai characters all collaborating in real time in this shared simulation deciding the fate of what was happening in this this game that became a nightly thing at least for audiences in the western hemisphere i missed all this being in europe and just not the right time zone um and then like all good developers we listened to our users um we had such a flood of requests for iphone or ios support that that facebook finally decided to put the resources behind it and make it happen um so power to the people um and then there were other tweaks like we added the map um and uh just to kind of show where contestants were um integrating links uh really adding various types of mini games uh and other elements just to make it feel more more gamified really um but you know we like to say keep the feedback coming because your participation matters and that's that's what's important really um the key takeaways um audiences watching live streams uh it's growing faster than the games markets um rival peak had a potential audience of of two billion users um native cloud streaming reduces friction there's absolutely nothing for the user to download or install just jump right into the game and because it's highly accessible because everything is getting rendered in the cloud it works very well on low-end devices that are otherwise difficult to support um and with that i'll say thank you i guess i will prepare to pass it over to robin um there is a link here um that i think solo or or maybe i will post in in discord later um so robin's about to talk about retreat uh we're gonna do some play testing on the latest version of retracts uh hopefully the first week in may and we're also working working on on a pilot uh game jam event so if you're interested in in participating in either of those two events please use the link let us know what you're interested in doing give us your email address and and we'll get back to you and thanks thank you robin go for it i'm handing the baton i guess we can go directly to robin we we um we could also chat a bit in the in the between but we can go directly if you think that that's the seamless the best way to do but that's absolutely amazing and interesting uh talk and i'm just excited to have all the questions flowing later in the session so do you have anything to remind at this point or should we just move on well so chris just mentioned the link for the survey so that link is currently on discord and if needed we will also try to share that on our youtube video in case some of the people are joining us later not just on this live twitch but on youtube okay great finally chris uh disabled his screen sharing so our twitch technician was a bit confused in between those okay so when robin is ready i think we can start following yeah i'm gonna say just in between that i'm mind blown and i'm just really excited to ask more questions but robin there you go here we go hey everyone hope you can hear me well um hope you can see my screen okay great presentation chris mine's a little bit shorter so hopefully we'll have some good time for discussion after after i've gone through my slides as well so um my name is robin squire a little bit about me i'm a big mmo fan actually i've been playing everquest was sort of the first mmo game that really kind of ignited something within me and i was playing that around the age of 14 with a bunch of adults that didn't know they're playing with a 14 year old and that was really sort of where you know i'd always loved games as a kid but that's where kind of my passion for games really kind of unlocked seeing these sort of online worlds that are always changing when you're asleep and that are filled with people and things happening and adventure and all of that stuff that it sort of changed my way of looking at games ever since playing that um sort of fast forwarding a bit i went and started a business management with marketing degree so i graduated from that that was at brighton university and i mainly chose to study this because i didn't know what else to do i had no idea what i wanted to do as part of a career i kind of thought it would be nice to work in games but i don't know how i'll get there so i picked the most generic um thing to study and thought well we'll figure that out down the line so i went and did that but during my time studying uh this degree i actually started to apply some of the knowledge i was i was learning on business management and marketing to the games industry i'd always been following the industry as a consumer but for the first time i was actually looking at it critically and analytically thinking about sort of the industry and the companies within it and their business decisions and um and so on and that really made me kind of really really want to work in games so i started then pivoting my dissertation or thesis um into games industry cases and things like that and i came out of university and was like i'm going to work in games i'm going to either work in games pr or i'm going to work in journalism because those are kind of aligned with what i what i already had studied and kind of what i already knew knew how to do so i went and handed my cv out to many companies some of them unfortunately didn't let me through the door but you know i don't hold it against them i worked a bunch of freelance jobs where i wasn't getting paid any money so definitely put the free and freelance writing reviews and stuff like that i interned for companies working on blogs of games companies eventually i just gave up i was like this isn't going anywhere i'm still you know still don't have a career i need to go and take a job so i ended up going into the pr marketing field working at an agency marketing agency in soho london and while i was working there i don't know how it happened but i ended up meeting the right people working on the right projects and landed a job working with ravio in finland so i moved here and i was working as community manager ahead of the community management team at ravio and then that later progressed into the consumer engagement director role and then the marketing director role and then i've been 10 years working in games and living in finland ever since and i since ravio i gone over to work at a company called play raven where i was director of marketing business development they were later acquired by rovio and had some pretty interesting projects and i met some like-minded individuals and co-founded blackblock and was ceo of that company so ultimately i tried to find a career in games but games found me i think that's also a running theme as well for a lot of games industry professionals actually they kind of it doesn't work out and in the end they just somehow through chants land in games and and make it work so you have to be able to embrace the uh the unknown and the disappointment early on um but what we're trying to do here at black block is we're trying to work on mobile first connected open world so what we mean by that is basically mmo games done for mobile done mobile first um and we're working on a title called retroit so retro is all about living in the city it's a massive open world it's set in always online sandbox city and every vehicle in the world is driven by a real player it's a very very lofty ambition with this but we're building it mobile first so we're focusing on making it simple and accessible and something that can be played in short bursts and events driven we recognize that mmos traditionally have a very very steep learning curve they require a lot of time spent playing them they're very demanding you have to be online with your friends in the right place at the right time we want to completely lower the barrier and do away with that and we want to we want to basically take it to mobile make it super accessible but still keep that ambition of creating a huge open world that's persistent and that can support thousands of players in the same space it's a free-to-play game so of course the business model is very important to us we need to make something that is commercially viable first and foremost in order to basically be able to support our creative endeavors and do these crazy things so players will be unlocking new vehicles they'll be participating in a dynamic job economy that'll be rising and fluctuating based on the actions within the game and they'll be participating as part of a community and then with that there's sort of a deep social media game on the back of that to keep people engaged and playing for for not just days or weeks or months but hopefully years so you know they'll be living in the actual city they'll be living in a community with their friends engaging in political systems and so on and then this is where where we get into the stuff we're doing with genvid so we are mobile first but we're also cross-platform later or cross-platform second right so we are and one of the things we're doing in that space is looking at this interactive live streaming functionality it's very important for us to to make sure that we're not just focused on mobile we're actually riding the wave and sort of heading in the direction the industry is heading which is a direction of platforms not really mattering the walled garden is coming down essentially but we want to still do it from a mobile first perspective in order to get that super mass entry point ultimately though we just want to make something that's as relatable and aspirational as it can be and allow people to create the society they had in real life because that is really the magic of mmos is getting all of these people together in a shared space seeing what happens so now i just go into a few pillars just basically a few few kind of pillars of how we see the industry and sort of what guide our thinking our vision so the first pillar is the future is connected quite a cheesy generic statement but what we mean by this is mmos as we know them today just the tip of the iceberg rapid developments in networking technology cloud gaming platforms computation they're now kind of ushering in this new wave of developers that are really focused on making these new kind of cross-platform multiplayer experiences or social worlds or you know online virtual worlds and they're pushing that into the mainstream and they're also taking bold steps into creating this sort of high-level concept that we like to throw around called the metaverse you know this sort of double life that people can live online and as chris said earlier uh the the pandemic and then sort of the lockdown restrictions have really kind of accelerated that you know they haven't i don't think they've actually changed anything for good but they've definitely led to an acceleration of what's already been uh happening and it's kind of the perfect storm right now so you've got these cloud gaming platforms the investments into those and also the networking technology and you've got the um all the next gen online games that have been worked on the high profile ones like eve and amazon's new world but also the the kind of lower profile ones that are being worked on now by indies or vc back startups or other companies so it's kind of like this perfect sort of stars aligning kind of ecosystem that's happened through all these sort of uh developments happening in the industry and we've done our own tests in this area already so we've done and this is a running theme as well we try and test as much as we can early on so our test here is that we've been testing high ccu in the same mobile environment so we have a mobile game we have this virtual world that we've built we built it super early and as soon as we built the virtual world we started funneling uh either users or people or bots that simulate connected users into the save environment so we've you know tested it with hundreds or even a thousand users in the same environment or entities and just really ramped it up to make sure that we actually have robust enough tech in place to start doing these these things and then the second pillar is that we want to make games that are as relatable as the world that we live in or the real world so you know if we're trying to make a if we're trying to push mmos or virtual worlds into a mass market audience then we need to lower the barrier and to make sure the experience is as relatable as possible so that they can enjoy it so we're less focused on doing things with sort of dungeons and dragons or sci-fi and spaceships and all those gaming tropes that are actually quite niche and we're more focused on sort of big concepts that everyone can relate to such as sort of living your best life which we hear so often today in 2021 so we're loving the life sin basically as a genre so you know there are other games out there that are hugely successful that have touched on this before this grand theft auto or grand theft auto online or even the grand theft auto role play servers that are currently sort of generating a lot of um viewers on twitch there's animal crossing which was kind of the game of the pandemic as as sort of dark as it is to say which uh you know was a massive hit for nintendo i think it increased their their operating profits by over 400 percent in the first quarter um and then there's you know games like sim city uh there's a sim city building game that's here out of helsinki there's bitlife which is a personal favorite of mine so this idea of being able to sort of tailor your life i feel is an ex especially compelling fantasy now in 2021 than it ever has been before again we've tested some of this so we've taken to our facebook and we've taken to advertising platforms like that and we've actually pushed our ads as early as possible for the sort of experience that we have so we've advertised different things you can do in our city such as joining the police or working as a fire engine or repairing the city all these kind of concepts that we we think people might relate to and we've just collected as much information on who who these resonate with and how they perform and actually we're very very happy with how we've been able to validate this so far we found out that a lot extremely large amount of both clicks to the store page and installs and just generally a large volume of players were coming through based on these ads which is great great validation for us you know i think the thesis is that they've been seeing something that is very different to what's already out there and they've been responding to that um pretty well and then the finally is we're committed to mobile first so you know more than half of the world's population of mobile internet users it's kind of like what chris said earlier with with uh all of the the rival peaks players being on android right it's where everyone's at so if we're going to build an online world then we have to start start by creating something for them and take it from there you know we don't want to create a pc game and just chuck it on mobile that's not the opportunity so we love mobile mobile's mobile freedom play revenue in particular is just continuing to increase increase it's going to strengthen strength and we've been testing um some of our mobile ux and design already as early as possible and we've been able to refine that early on and actually going back to uh the tests we did on facebook here that you know being able to get so many users into the game by running tests with these kinds of ads has allowed us to refine the game a lot more rapidly than we otherwise might have been able to at a much lower cost as well so now i'm getting into cross-platform which is a little bit more uh what we're talking about in today's kind of uh presentation so our approach to cross-platform is basically a platform native one so what we want to do is have multiple entry points into the same shared world so we have this world the world of retreat that lives on servers and basically each device is a unique entry point into that same shared environment and we recognize that basically people have different plate habits across different devices so people typically play a lot more frequently on their mobile device throughout the day but a lot shorter sessions and people on pc they might just do one session but it'll be a much longer one same with console so we're trying to tailor the ux and the entry point into to to basically meet the uh play habits of the people on these that use these platforms and of how people typically engage with them so basically the client is just a window into the world it's just like a customized portal into the world that has ux that is tailored to to that audience and then on browser here this is where we're starting to to get into what we're doing with genvids so we're exposing some of the world data and actually allowing viewers to interact back with that server basically turning viewers into players so with genvid we've been able to build an interactive live streaming entry point into the world of retro so we have the retro live news channel and it's basically a completely new perspective on the city that is uh native to how people interact on those streaming platforms and the live stream itself is 24 7 because the world is always online and players can have access to multiple different type cameras and viewpoints and they can earn currency and they can interact with the world in a very small and lightweight way we've actually been through a couple of iterations on this already together with gemvid so i mean for example the first iteration we had was very much just uh suited for one single viewer to interact with we had one camera stream we had one stream and multiple cameras within that one single stream which meant that if two people three people four people were using it they were constantly switching around the camera for each other it wasn't a great user experience so our second iteration was actually working with a unadvertised um feature called command center and this enables us to have multiple streams uh much like the rival what rival peaks has there and actually allow users to switch between these different camera camera viewpoints each being its own separate stream so just to sort of dig into what we're doing a little bit more specifically so the first thing you can do is uh watch players so the game's always online it's the exact same world but it's from a different perspective so you're able to access it from a bird's eye view sort of like the ant farm perspective which you cannot see you cannot access it from from the mobile client or the pc client um you're able to watch live players playing from mobile and other devices in real time uh side note is we currently do a lot of testing with ai at the moment but that's just a logistical thing so you can watch the live players playing for mobile and other devices in real time so you can see them going about their business in the world engaging in conflict with each other working together so on and the world is of course dynamic the world that we're building so you can watch the world change as players fix it or as they put out fires or as they do jobs or engage in car chases you can just see all of the emergence happening over time these are all real players and then you can spectate and switch cameras from you from angles uh unique to the viewer experience so i can go from this helicopter cam straight to a over-the-shoulder cam following a vehicle straight to a cctv cam so now the second thing you can do is you can earn cash so basically this is retro sending data to the streaming overlay and in this case the overlay on twitch so what it's doing is it's sending data on car crashes and cars bumping into each other in the world over the switch overlay and populating this this map here with these little blips and if the user if the viewer is clicking on these blips they can earn cash and this is obviously a very very small lightweight thing but it's basically just um taking this idea of data being sent from retroit to the overlay and building something very very small around it that we can then start to iterate on once we get data so at the moment we're optimizing for information we want to do the smallest implementation of a concept and understand how people use it and build from there and then finally this is kind of like the reverse to the to the earning currency one you can drop items in the world so the viewer is actually sending commands back to the game world and interacting directly with the city so they're actually using that currency they've earned to unlock different items to drop in the world and again this is basically trying to test an idea it's trying to test the idea of is this engaging
2021-04-21 22:26
