How to Win as a Mobile Game Entrepreneur, With Joakim Achrén

Jordan: 00:00

Welcome to Playmakers, the game industry podcast, whether you work at a studio, publisher, service provider, or startup, this is the podcast that will give you all the information and entertainment you need to succeed in the game industry. Who am I? Just your friendly neighborhood veteran designer and producer, Jordan Blackman.

00:21

In each episode of Playmakers, I go to work uncovering insights, tactics, and know how from a wide range of game industry luminaries. My goal? To help you win the game of making games. Are you ready? Then let's begin. Do I have an interview for you this week with the fantastic Joakim Achren, who you may know from Elite Game Developers, the podcast and blog. He has amazing content there. I've really enjoyed his interviews. Well, this is me interviewing him and he's just an incredible guy. I mean, he worked at Supercell. You may have heard of it. He worked at Supercell and then he started Next Games. And now he is an angel investor and also runs the podcast, the blog, et cetera.

01:10

So for me, this was just a really fun interview. Joakim threw some questions back at me where he asked what I thought. And so I just got really engaged at a great time asking him things that are just on my mind that I kind of think about, and it was just really fun to kick back and forth with him on some of this stuff. So we talked about the early validation phase of mobile games. What comes next and what the process is like after that, we talked about how free to play gaming is impacting PC and console and things like game pass and how those things are coming together.

We talked about some of the most common traps and errors that mobile game entrepreneurs are making. We talked about how to really find the source of a failure. So you're not just moving on to your next project, but you're really understanding what went wrong. So that you can do it better the next time. We talked about how to make games that make people want to come back. What are some of those key elements? We talked about how to balance innovation and what, I think he called stealing like an artist, which was a really interesting conversation. How do you balance that, What's the 80, 20. And we talked about some of the ways that people get that wrong. And we also talked about what the game industry can learn from Pixar's creative process, the brain trust process. So just a lot of really good stuff. I think I mentioned this, I think you could tell from this interview just how much I respect Joakim and how much I was getting out of the interview. I really enjoyed this one. I know you will too.

02:32

If you are in mobile games, if you realize that mobile games are going to be having a bigger and bigger impact on PC consoles, then this is a must listen interview. I truly believe that. And if you know someone who is in the mobile gaming space, especially if they're an entrepreneur, working in a studio or, you know, and again, if they're interested in the kind of the ways that mobile gaming might be affecting other parts of the game industry. This is really a must share episode with those people that is going to help them for sure. It's good for the show, for us here at Playmakers, and it's also going to make you look pretty cool, which is a nice thing too. So, please share this with anyone who you think would get something out of it. You will find in the show notes information on where you can check out Joakim's podcast, Elite Game Developers. It is really a great podcast. it is worth your time. Please check it out. You can also find in the show notes, how to connect with him on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and all that sort of stuff. So what can I say? We've got a great interview. Joakim, let's do this.

03:31

Joakim, welcome to Playmakers. I'm really excited to have you on the show. I've listened to your podcast. I've read some of your blog articles and I'm really excited to get to talk to you and learn from you.

Joakim: 03:41

Thanks Jordan. This is really fun to explore your podcast a bit as a guest.

Jordan: 03:46

Right. Cause you're used to being the interviewer, huh?

Joakim: 03:48

Yeah. Mostly 99% of the time.

Jordan: 03:51

We will make sure to get a link to your show in our show notes and into your blog as well. Now you started, correct me if I'm wrong, did you start as an analyst? And kind of go through the whole thing from that to running your own studio to now advising and investing in studios?

Joakim: 04:06

Actually, I got my first break in gaming 20 years ago when I started as a programmer in a Finnish gaming startup, which was doing like Nokia, like black and white phone games for WAP protocol. That was like 0.4 frames per second. It took so long to load a frame on that phone. That was the early days of Finland sort of like that mobile gaming boom. There was a lot of text message games making money back then. You would have a service like a TV show and they would send, "Hey, send us A, B, C, or D to this number" and you're making a choice in a game and then you get back another message where the story sort of plays out and you get to reply again.

04:55

aduated from school, That was: 2005

05:37

ercell was starting, this was: 2011

06:14

So it was an amazing experience. But then that feeling when clash of clans sort of started going more and more revenues every day. And the growth was just like, you never saw anything like those numbers. I was thinking I need to do another startup. And that's when I left.

06:31

sted until sort of like maybe: 2016

06:52

ith four other co-founders in: 2013

Jordan: 07:53

That's Henric, right?

Joakim: 07:54

Yeah. Henric and Harri.

Jordan: 07:55

How do you pronounce Henric's last name?

Joakim: 07:58

Suuronen.

Jordan: 07:59

Okay, thanks. Yeah. I've been following him for a while because he has been putting out content for a really long time. you and I actually, it's funny. we were both, cause I was consulting with AMC in that period where that was being made. I worked with Mark Hagan.

Joakim: 08:15

Yeah, he's great.

Jordan: 08:17

That's also where I really got to know Dave Rohrl, who's been on the podcast. So that's funny. We were working at the same time with AMC, but kind of ships in the night there. So when you say you're doing content for founders, can you tell me more about that?

Joakim: 08:28

Sure. I got sort of like this bug from helping founders when I was leaving supercell and starting Next Games. I was doing a lot of lectures and coaching around Finland, and I met a lot of young entrepreneurs who were just starting their first studio. And that was amazing to sit with them, talk about their issues and give my feedback.

08:49

Seeing how responsive they were to that feedback. And now that I left Next Games, it was going back to kind of those memories that this was actually a lot of fun to help out founders. So that's how it ended up, and why sort of like content and online content. I believe it's the best way to help sort of like thousands of founders versus just helping out a few people who I meet, who I physically get to meet, because that online content sort of reaches anybody who just wants to pick it up and listen to what I have to say.

Jordan: 09:22

Got it. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly been enjoyable for me to have the opportunity to read some of that stuff. And I'm sure, for a lot of people, I want to talk to you about something.

09:30

this is a bit out of left field, but you know, I've been looking at Game Pass and starting to see it as a little bit of a sneaky way to do free to play because a lot of the games that end up there that are really big premium games have some sort of free to play style component. Like FIFA ultimate team kind of thing where you have a whole aspect of a game that essentially works like a free to play game. And then Game Pass ends up being kind of like a top of the funnel strategy to get a lot of new users into that part of the game. Do you know what I'm saying? Do you think this is like a trend that is going to grow so far? It's really only massive games that as far as I can tell are doing this strategy. I'm curious about your thoughts about this.

Joakim: 10:12

I think that it's great that they're exploring these options. I think it's not the end of their exploration of what works. I feel that we often look at services out there from bigger companies like Microsoft, Sony putting things out, but they're experimenting, they're testing the waters with these services and might go away soon. And it's no big deal for them because that's how I think they're treating these things. How do they deliver value in a way that's sort of like stellar and captures what the gamers are looking for.

10:50

Think about the whole future there. Like, we could go into talking about streaming. I'm not a big believer that streaming is something that will fix a lot of things. And you sort of like, have the whole PC console freemium and free to play is really tricky in the West still. So I think one of the areas that I've been interested in the past few years, if you go and talk about this kind of experimentation for PC and console, is how do you start thinking about validation for being an indie developer and validating cost effectively or games? Cause that's what mobile devs are doing.

11:25

Like a few years ago, I was talking to the Finnish people who are doing Steam games and how they validate. And it was still like a very iffy, this kind of soft launch, because in mobile, it's so clear cut that you want to get those numbers early on as possible to make sure that it's worth continuing. But like, I don't understand why it's so hard to go into that realm for the developers in PC and console. I think the bigger players must have those figured out, but I think they're still also doing a lot of just user testing, focus groups for validation. What do you think is taking so long for them to figure out like their own minimum viable products off-launch retention number based analysis? What do you think?

Jordan: 12:11

Well, I think for the bigger companies, they deal with a lot of risks where they're thinking about things like protecting the brand is more important than getting validation. So they have to figure out ways to do it where they're not going to upset the community. They're not going to upset their players. They're not going to harness the brand in any way. And so they have this whole set of considerations that a lot of mobile devs don't think about because of the scale of their enterprise and the nature of the community. And then I think small studios don't necessarily have the know-how or the wherewithal or maybe even the budget, cause a lot of sort of smaller games are really small. It does seem like there ought to be this middle size group that would be able to focus on this. Yeah. I really wonder what those challenges are. I mean, it'd be great to have someone who does Steam publishing primarily or PC publishing primarily and kind of dig into that.

Joakim: 13:06

Yeah. I've been thinking about this for so long and it's still not figured out. And like, why do we have this in mobile? So clearly we have big IPs in mobile as well, and they're not that afraid about soft launching, like what Supercell does, for instance, with their IPs. And they're pretty upfront that this might be killed eventually. And often they do kill those games, even though they look great and they play great, but numbers are just working.

Jordan: 13:36

Maybe we would get more new ideas out of console games and these big brands, if they were able to do that, because it's amazing how few new game IPs are launched these days on console or at least over the last 10 years. So do you foresee, I mean, obviously we've had Genshin Impact and we have, I think through Game Pass, this kind of stealth way that these companies are, to your point, able to explore free to play and kind of add free to play to their games and still sell them at a premium price, but then later on, put them on Game Pass. Do you think this is the future for more and more of big budget titles. I mean, assuming the business is there, I assume people will figure out how to do the validation, what kind of numbers to be looking for early on. Maybe we'll see console providers allow more kind of soft launch or geo specific tools. I'm trying to evaluate the size of that opportunity.

Joakim: 14:31

Yeah, man. I think if Google went into big on, like they would Become a dominant player in gaming for other than just mobile and Google play, I think they would roll out all the lessons they've learned at Google play regarding because they have amazing tools for what they have regarding like how you can grant early access to mobile games, all sorts of AB testing on the store pages. So if they'd go outside of mobile, like, Stadia, if that would start working, I think that would sort of like gradually expand the sort of, like, this is what the developers are expecting. So it could gradually grow that way. So I think it's not Sony who's gonna be figuring out how to build better soft launch tools or Microsoft either. Nintendo is probably going to be the last, but I think all the discussions that I always have with Google play is that they're pretty great with the developers, as sort of like, they do not restrict the player as much or the developer, as much as Apple. So I think that direction, if that continues, it's going to be really strong for game developers on all platforms.

Jordan: 15:48

Interesting. All right, let's take it back to mobile where, this is a lot easier and well understood, but still not always easy to do, assuming that you are in agreement that yes, you can do some UA testing upfront to kind of make sure that. you've got a concept that people want and you've validated that and maybe you've gone some iterations on that. Assuming that that step is done. I'm really interested in what you see as some of the next steps in the path, because there's this sort of purgatory between, early validation of the concept, whatever you want to call it, your prototype, your first playable, what you're putting out there to start to get real data on user behavior in the product. And I'm interested in ways to navigate that path, that period.

Joakim: 16:33

I think there's a lot of purgatory along the way. So there's the first thing is like picking up a concept, like how do you pick a concept that makes sense? Like a lot of teams are sort of like blind to not really caring too much about the market but rather having a belief that now that Archero became a big mobile hit in two years ago, that that sort of opened up the floodgates to do more games that are sort of arcadey and that that's a really good business model.

17:07

I've seen a lot of teams struggle to get out of that sort of mode, "Hey, We have knowledge of our arcade games. So just, let's just build concepts for the prototype. Let's do quick soft launching." And they're like going back into like, "Hey, this doesn't work. Why? Well, it just wasn't fun enough." "Okay. Let's start another game." You got that moment where you're doing concepting and you're coming back to concepting and you're not doing all the necessarily learnings. one of the big learnings there that I've seen with these arcade mobile game developers is that they pick examples from other platforms and they treat it as like this is proven, like, "let's do the 80/20 and now let's add our own thing into something that's proven," but it's not proven at all on mobile. So it's sort of like they throw out the real definition of the 80/20 of proven innovation sort of ratio because they're bringing it from outside of mobile. I think that's what I've seen a lot. It's like concepting you take on unnecessary innovation and unproven things. And you don't really like steal an artist in a sense. You try to figure out something from scratch and that's often very, you got a lot of questions when the numbers don't come through because you don't really know what's not working.

18:30

And if you're playing it by the rules, let's say you're doing a match three game or a merge game for mobile, and you know that you're picking up all the right things and you're innovating there, and then you end up in a situation where you might have retention numbers that look good first, but then the rest of the metrics aren't sort of good, and you start iterating and trying to understand what that means to do next and then you're in, you're stuck again when you don't know what to do, what's wrong. And what you end up doing is like, "okay, we don't really know what's wrong." And I think that's one of the worst things that mobile developers who are rapidly developing, measuring quickly. Is that if they move on without understanding why it didn't work like really understanding, I think that's sort of like it's a bigger waste and the failure is moment where you could learn is sort of wasted. I think that's where the purgatory really happens.

Jordan: 19:32

Interesting. Okay, so I would love to dig in on that. So how would you describe that learning loop? When can that developer say, "yes, now we really understand,why" because I see your point that you can explain things on a very vague level. Like, Oh, it just wasn't, it wasn't that fun for someone in their first week. So our day seven was low and, you know, we added something and it made it more enjoyable for them. That's like a very bad explanation on a very, very high level metric. You're not deep enough to really be saying much. How do you look at that? And what is deep enough to really know?

Joakim: 20:05

When I play mobile games, I'm sort of like viewing it through this kind of user experience layer of games. Is it convenient? Because mobile usually requires a lot of convenience so that you can drop in and out really quickly and frequently during the day. That's a bit like a winning formula for those games. So if that's not fluent, and your first session didn't really work out, let you experience the game in a way that you want to come back later. Cause I think you can achieve that same feeling, but then what happens is actually the game doesn't give you a sense of progression regarding that you're learning and picking up skills in the game to actually use when you come back, sort of like "it's fun, but I don't get it." Like, that's what I see a lot in games, that you get it, but it's not like in a way, like I don't get it that I would want to come back. And I think that that sort of learning journey for the players is something that I always try to talk to the developers about.

21:07

What are they learning in the first session? What are they looking forward to learning later on? Kind of like segments of learning, because that's where the fun comes from. the motivation to actually come back.

Jordan: 21:18

You know, one of the most enjoyable parts of learning is like an insight, right? Or like an aha moment like, "Oh, I get this," delivering those sorts of moments.

Joakim: 21:26

Yeah. And I don't think you need more than one or two of those or three, to get people to want to come back on day one, and day three, and so forth. You then gradually start layering more things there that are also interesting for the player. like, I think it's interesting is the right term sort of like description of the experience, like if it's just, shits and giggles kind of like thing going on. I think it drops the opportunity for the player to say, "this is something that felt really good and felt fun. And I'm going to try it again. I'm going to try to master the game somehow."

Jordan: 22:06

I want to take one step back from here because you mentioned kind of feeling like an artist and looking at what's working and also you talk about innovation. And I'm making sure you've applied that innovation. I'm curious for you how you think about that balance so that you're not, I mean, one thing that I've seen a lot of teams trying that will not work is like, "Oh, we're going to make it like this other really successful game, but we have this extra feature we want to add. And we only need 10% of the audience to have a successful product," right? So you're getting into like this crazy red ocean versus doing something that's totally unproven. So, how do you think about that balance or advise people who are working on something to kind of think about that?

Joakim: 22:45

Yeah, it's a good question. I think proven, make sure that you're actually picking something that is proven. When we were doing a location based game on the Walking Dead IP, we were looking at what was going on in the market and Pokemon Go was sort of huge and there were some other games like Jurassic World was also being built as a location based game and they came out. So there was a hype in 2017 about these location based games, but I think the whole market sort of missed out on what was sort of proven with Pokemon Go was that Pokemon is actually a really great mechanic in itself. There's like RPG baked into that IP. The sort of like the twist was the location based gameplay, the 20. That doesn't mean that the 20 sort of like becomes a proven thing all of a sudden.

Jordan: 23:38

Or the base on which you can make a new totally different 80-ish.

Joakim: 23:42

I think that's why Niantic failed with the Harry Potter game as well, because they were also doubling down on the 20% that was in Pokemon Go, the location based AR gameplay, which wasn't the 80 to begin with.

Jordan: 23:58

So, and then on Walking Dead, did that mean you guys thought about it like, "okay, it's a role playing game, that's really what we're doing, and then we're adding this geo-aware element."

Joakim: 24:05

I think we ended up in a place where we were creating a game without the 80/20. That's what so many developers actually end up doing is they build games where there's a lot of innovation going on. So we were building a zombie apocalypse game in location based like you're playing on the map and that was what we were doing. We weren't sort of betting on anything proven. At the end of the day, it became a lot harder to sort of like, know how to build that game, how to launch the game and everything. But like, I think that's very common in game development, that you're thinking that you're picking up something that's proven in the market, and it actually, you're picking the wrong proven.

Jordan: 24:49

Right. What you think it proved is not necessarily what it really proved, or at least it's worth questioning that.

Joakim: 24:56

Yeah. I think questioning, being paranoid about these things is going to reward you well when thinking about concepts and especially building these big projects where you're going to be investing millions. Later, as you progress with the project.

Jordan: 25:11

How do you think about like, there's all these strategies to help improve the chances of an individual product. I'm curious how you think about a company, the overall product strategy, having been working my entire career in games, we tend to take a very product to product approach or an IP based approach. And a lot of direct to consumer businesses are audience first businesses, right? Like you build an audience and then you market and design for the audience that you have. And when I think about game studios, that seems a lot rarer. I mean, maybe that's what Blizzard does, maybe that's what Supercell even does. But most studios certainly don't think that way.

25:50

Like, do you think that's an appropriate approach? Like a sort of audience first design based on who's already your market, but not necessarily a, "Oh, and so therefore it's the kind of game we're good at making, but it's the kind of audience we're good at making a product for." Do you see what I'm saying?

Joakim: 26:04

Yeah, I do. I'm a big fan of having an audience in mind. It goes back into thinking like, what is your purpose? As a game developer, why does your company need to exist? Why do the gamers need your company in the first place? I started making games because I loved games and I had an idea, let's make this game. And that's probably 90% of how people start game studios, is that they love games and they have an idea and they just start building it. Like, let's build. And okay, now we have the measuring tools, let's measure, get the numbers in, "ah, the numbers are great. I don't understand why they're not great. Why aren't people coming in? Why aren't they staying?" So that all goes back to, I think, the audience and also what's going on in the market. Like who is also attracting or trying to attract these audiences towards the products that they're building. So all of that knowledge, I think, I love the idea of figuring out your audience and creating a player persona that you're going to be attacking but you want to also know what's already being delivered to these people. So I think that's where the combination of understanding the player, but also the dynamics on the market and seeing where the market is going. it's the right way to approach that thing.

Jordan: 27:29

So, for an individual product, understanding your player well. If you were in charge of a studio that had already succeeded at that, you've got your first successful product, and you're thinking about what to do next, where would you want to start that process from? Would you want to start that from, "we're a team that's really good at X, Y, and Z kind of game, or, this is where we see the market opportunity, or this is who we're already good at making games for." Like, how would you want to proceed for, let's say game number two?

Joakim: 27:57

Yeah, that's a really good point. I think I'm off the camp nowadays that I really hate when you sort of like box game developers into like, "Hey, this is like the territory you need to be operating in because this studio built the game for this audience now you need to continue developing stuff because we already know so much about them and things like that." There are certain things there that make sense, but I think more freedom and it's kind of like ownership and empowerment for developers is really necessary so that it becomes a project that there's somebody who wants to own the project and see it through and really like it do hard decisions and figure out the right decision, the data for that decision.

28:47

I've seen it happen a lot where It isn't that way and it's always a struggle. So I think you get to solve so many issues if you trust the teams to make the right choices. even if you have a big IP, let's say now after the first game, which is doing really well and you want to double down on that, you want to trust in the team to actually come back to you and ask for the IP for their concept if they find something that works, making games is so much like this, making magic sort of, it's so magical. So you want to facilitate the right conditions to make that magic happen.

Jordan: 29:27

If the developers aren't in love with what they're doing, it's harder to get that magic to come out. And therefore you're saying it's extremely important to make sure that you are giving the developers the freedom that will allow them to feel that connection to their product.

Joakim: 29:41

I remember like these stories from big studios where KPIs were being thrown around that "All right, we're going to kill all the projects that aren't getting similar KPIs to Clash of Clans or something like that," like that's fairly like strict, like, okay, it's great to have sort of like a mentality of how do we actually kill games and like discussing those. I think peer to peer accountability also helps a lot that you create a culture where that is like the norm that you're sort of accountable and come through with what you're doing. Like if you're spending three years on a game project, because the company doesn't have their freedom and we don't kill games unless the team kills it. I think that then you have a problem on the accountability side. But creating a great layer of trust is key here for all studios.

Jordan: 30:37

How do you do that?

Joakim: 30:38

Talking about the ways that you want to structure things. Keeping people hungry and curious and knowledgeable, motivated. I think all of those play back as long as you sort of like give people the freedom to work on the games on the ones that they believe in. And you're giving guidance, facilitating, not something coming very much like top down. I don't think that works.

Jordan: 31:02

Are you kind of suggesting like a stage gate process where in between the gates, the team has essentially unlimited freedom, and they're getting advice, but there are these hard gates where there are certain judgments or KPIs that are looked at by management that are kind of these hurdles that the team needs to get over. So it's a way of providing this very hard work, set of goals along the way, but then the team has the freedom to achieve those goals in whatever way they determine.

Joakim: 31:31

Like, you know, Pixar's brain trust, So the way that they have these meetings with the directors and they review like the story, what's going on with the movie, they see early version of the movie, and then they give feedback to the director of that movie, which is like very candid, but the whole idea is that the director doesn't need to react to that feedback, they need to take it, but they can use it however they want. But they need to come back later on, like, "Hey, this is what we're going to be doing. And this is the plan," and the plan doesn't need to change at all, but they know that they're going to be facing the same sort of peer meeting the brain trust in a month or so.

32:14

So I think that that model should work for gaming as well where you don't have strict gates, you don't have KPI gates but rather get the peers in from other teams to give feedback. The peers could even say that "hey, I would kill this game" or Be very direct and then the game lead of that game could come back later on to say like, "Hey, we're going to continue because this and that, or we're going to kill the game because this and that." So I think that's how you could create trust of having that kind of system where there is no management interference at all, but it's rather like the peers are doing the reviewing and giving feedback.

Jordan: 32:53

Yeah, that's very interesting. So you basically let the team cancel their own products or not through this process of ongoing review from management. That is like a feedback mechanism, but not a management mechanism.

Joakim: 33:06

Yeah. And I've been reading Catmull's Creativity Inc like several times because there's so much there that's applicable for games. Like when Pixar was acquired by Disney, it was sort of the other way around. So Disney Animation Studio joined Pixar. Lasseter and Catmull didn't go to the first storyboard meetings because they didn't want to show that sort of like the management is in the room. They were actually asking only that the other directors join.

33:35

So I think that would be the optimal way of doing this in gaming as well, that you don't actually have any management C level people attending these reviews. So it's only peers and it's not even a review, it's more about like, "Hey, this is a brain trust. Like we're curious about what's going on here and we want to be giving feedback." I think it's more like a feedback session and not a review session at all.

Jordan: 34:01

This has me thinking about something that's tangential, but I think very relevant, which is teams that are maybe looking to hire a studio to build something for them. And kind of the viability of that in general in mobile, the difficulty of like, "we're going to have a third party who's going to develop this game, that's going to be a free to play game." And the difficulties of that. One, because of exactly This sort of ownership is really hard to offer to a third party studio. And then financially, you have similar challenges where, building a direct to consumer business where you're not really part of that business, you're sort of just a work for hire, it's very hard to get the outcome that you want. What is your take on the viability of that sort of business model?

Joakim: 34:39

I've seen it work. And I think where it does work is specifically on very light mobile projects, let's say like hyper casual or hybrid casual, where, the development, it's short, we're talking like weeks to a few months to get soft launch. The company who is purchasing this service from this other company needs to be very clear that it's super hard to actually give that ownership feeling to a work for hire team.

You need to have a PM, a product manager who is at the company who is purchasing this project from the work for hire studio. The PM needs to be on top of all of these things, not only just the game design, not only like, "Hey, how do we go from a soft launch to actually proving the early retention to actually long term retention? How does this outsourcing or work for hire studio start building that out?" Because the PM has to do a lot of heavy lifting. I've seen it work when the PM is really good, but it's tough. It is tough.

Jordan: 35:42

Kind of reversing that the other way for studios that are building these games. Like how do you advise people to look at self publishing versus trying to hire some sort of UA partner or some sort of a la carte publishing deal.

Joakim: 35:56

In mobile it's actually, with the invent of the whole hyper casual genre, it's really good for bootstrapping because all of these indie mobile developers have a way now to actually have this publisher relationship where they're being paid.

36:12

I've seen like, you know, 50K a month comes to their bank account and it's a team of like three full time people, maybe a few part time. And it's very sustainable for them, even for the long run, because there's a lot of publishers who need hyper casual games if the team is really good. So I think where you go from there, is thinking about, "what do you need to be doing? What do you need to be developing in your studio to sort of like get out of that and start growing?" Cause if you're happy doing that 50K a month, it might be fine. But if you have more ambitions, I think then you want to go into things like figuring out what you need to learn about, the data side, the user acquisition side, so that you can escape the publisher developer relationship. I think it's a really good situation nowadays on mobile because of this whole hyper casual.

Jordan: 37:03

So for like a bootstrap company, maybe you do hyper casual with the publisher, if the deal works for everyone. But if you were like a venture backed studio trying to do something bigger, there's probably no place for a publisher, I'm trying to suggest what I'm hearing you imply, but I'm checking to make sure.

Joakim: 37:20

There are cases where a venture backed studio working with a publisher makes a lot of sense. there's Tilting Point, which is a pretty big mobile publisher. They're sort of like a more like an a la carte, like you got a deeper metagame, whatnot in your mobile game. So you want to talk to Tilting Point if you're looking for a publisher and Boom Bit is another one.

37:43

There's a lot of those folks who aren't sort of hyper casual, but are more deeper. So I think that's where you could go, but as a VC backed company, I think the VCs would want you to sort of graduate to becoming your own publisher in some time frame. I don't see it as a problem, but I see it as more like a, "hey, this is a stepping stone that we're going to the next one soon, you can do the publishing deals. Let's start planning together how the future will look like so that your company can grow and things can sort of go on this growing track."

Jordan: 38:19

So it's, similar to that hyper casual studio in that, there's a situation you use to get started, which you might have someone to help you with UA and scaling and maybe some other elements of your publishing arm. But then as you are succeeding in that, you want to, like you said, kind of get your freedom, more freedom, financial or creative freedom, depending on the situation, by ultimately taking those things back under the company.

38:43

Okay. I wanted to kind of round up the interview by talking a little bit about how you see things changing, particularly over the last year. We've had coronavirus, I've heard it is called the great accelerator and that trends that we're taking, 10 years are now, going to be brought down to happen in three, four, five. Curious what you're seeing happening in the industry and what you think the effect has been of what we've all just been through.

Joakim: 39:09

Yeah. I don't know if this was happening to all the mobile developers. The big spending is going to be going down a bit more sort of like people who have very big spending in mobile games will divert some of that spending into other things, leisure activities. Travel is coming back, you got restaurants, movie theaters, whatnot, which are the money sinks of the 2022s. And so it's not going to be as big for gaming. User numbers are here to stay. So the thing nowadays with games is that they're so social, like as activities, the best features in any kind of games that retain for a long period of time, the best features are always about the social activities.

39:55

So people will stick around a lot in games just because you played some games during lockdown and you made friends there. you might've spent time with your existing friends there. That habit will stay those social structures in those games will pull you back, but I think like all in all, there's going to be a small decline, but it could be that the decline is so slight now that this summer we're going to see everything going back and it's summer is always more quiet in gaming. So I guess next fall, we're going to be feeling like how it comes back, but I think it's going to come back really well.

Jordan: 40:36

So you see a slight unwinding maybe for some of the biggest spenders, but generally new people come into gaming, they're going to stick around one way or another. And I'm also hearing that social play was even more important probably during the pandemic. And that trend will also be something that kind of, I mean, it's always been a trend, but it just remains even stronger.

Joakim: 40:55

Yeah. And I think about what's happened in funding all over the globe in the last two years, like a lot of IPOs, a lot of companies, listed. I think that's part of the acceleration. So those companies do have revenues so they're not like in a bubble. That there would be some fake stuff going on. So I think those companies will also do fairly well, even though there could be a decline. I do believe on the acceleration part a lot.

Jordan: 41:24

Great. Well, Joakim, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was super fun. And I definitely could go another hour. I mean, we got about halfway through what I had prepared, but I think it was great. We dove into some areas that we hadn't planned on that I think were really valuable.

Joakim: 41:38

Sure. This was a lot of fun. There's so many more topics that we could cover, for next time, maybe.

Jordan: 41:44

Sounds good.

41:49

Another episode of Playmakers Podcast is in the bag. And if you want the show notes with all the links wrapped up with a bow for you, you can find all that at playmakerspodcast.com. If you're interested in giving some feedback on what you'd like to see on future episodes, you can also reach out to me there. And in the meantime, if you want to support what we do, the way to do that is to write us a review and subscribe. I will see you on the next episode. We have some great stuff coming your way. So I will catch you then on Playmakers.