June BlueCloud 2

Question #6: How and where do I start? What if I only have a laptop? Can I get app games to work on Facebook as well as on SmartPhones? [:9]

Answer #6:

·       Okay so this is someone who is just ready to get going and actually a lot of people have been asking me about these kinds of questions, putting games on Facebook, how to cross promote our platforms and things like that. I'm just going to do a quick run down for you.

·       Blue Cloud Select is a great place to start. I think you should definitely go through all the existing videos. We've got how ever many hours of video at this point and all the free resources we're going to be rolling out.

·       What is your business end goal? What are you trying to do because that's going to dictate what kind of business you want to build?

·       You want to start with a template, whether it be one of my source codes or somebody else's. You definitely want to start with a template just so you can go through the whole process and you can understand what this is all about.

·       If you just have a laptop right now, what I would definitely recommend is buying a really inexpensive source code and buying a course based on what you want to be focused on. If you want to learn how to code, you should buy one of the coding courses we have on our site about either Android or IOS written by two awesome Blue Cloud guys who have had huge success with coding. If you want to focus on the marketing, buy ASO and the reskin courses and things like that. Just slowly start to build your education and have a template so you can have something to work on.

·       We have the free books and courses and everything else.

·       In terms of Facebook, if you want to put your app on Facebook, Facebook has I think the Canvas, which deals mostly with [unclear 1:38] and Facebook is SDK and all that. So when you build your app, you can't necessarily import it completely, easily from IOS or Android, but what you can do is modify it and create a version of it that will then get put into the Canvas.

·       Facebook Canvas is always evolving. It depends on the different codes that you put on there. [unclear 2:05] is typically the easiest one to do. It's a little complicated, but if that's what you want to do. I'm not going to get into it completely right now because not everyone here is all about Facebook SDKs and stuff, but that's what it's all about.

·       What I would recommend to you is definitely just get started with all the free eBooks. Take a course on whatever it is you're interested in. Buy a cheap source code and get rid of the rock.

Question #7: I'd appreciate some feedback on my game plan over the next few months. As many people know, Clash of Clans and its various clones out there make a lot of money for the bigger companies that produce them and pour money into their marketing efforts. It's not trivial to create a real time strategy game for mobile or any platform for that matter. As such, this puts game development in this genre out of reach for many indie developers trying to make a living. However, as a Unity developer, I have purchased this asset a few weeks ago and have come up with a development plan that would take roughly two months to implement. My question is this: for me, I run quite lean and two months is a lot of time to invest into a project. Is it worth taking a punt? People I have spoken to so far have two schools of thought: 1) There is so much competition in this genre that any attempt to compete with the bigger companies is futile and upon releasing your Clash of Clans clone to the app store, it will instantly go to the bottom of the heap you will get minimal downloads and no ROI, that's horribly depressing by the way, 2) Competition is tough in this category, but the market isn't flooded. It takes time and effort to make a good real time strategy game and as such, there is still market space for people who come up with a good clone with a new and exciting theme. You may not get rich quick, but if you put a good quality real time strategy game into Google Play, you could potentially do much better than say yet another Candy Crush clone and may attract users looking for an alternative to Clash of Clans. Thoughts? As I said, I'd really appreciate any feedback you have to offer. Is it a good idea? Do you think it will instantly fail? [4:11]

Answer #7:

·       Okay so if I understand this correctly, you're a Unity developer, you've got two months of time and you, I can't tell if you have a source code or a template or you purchased a real time strategy something to get going. I'm assuming you did based on the way you framed it, but I'm not entirely sure. So we're going to talk through a few different things.

·       First and foremost, you're not going to compete with Clash of Clans. I mean, they're not your competition and so you have to have a liked out template to compete with them and even if you do, just I wouldn't even think about that as your competition. That's like saying I should be competing with a company making $3 billion a year. Even if we're in the same business, it doesn't, it's not who you should be competing with. What you should be competing with is like the lifetime value game if that make sense. So you should be thinking about 'how do I use this to create a lifetime value that is ROI positive'. Who gives a shit about Clash of Clans or whatever the other people out there, there is an infinite amount of traffic that you can go get once you have a high enough lifetime value. So don't even think about competing with them. The only way you would is if you have an unbelievable template, a huge team and a massive budget. Just get out of the idea of competition with them.

·       Like I said, number 1 is completely ridiculous. Competitors can come and go and you know. The idea that you shouldn't walk into a market because there's so much competition just means that you are not ready to put in the effort and the time and the money to be the best and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean there's a lot of markets I wouldn't walk into, like the insurance market. I'm not going to start selling insurance, but in this business like there are not too many competitors in a real time strategy game. There might be a lot of competitors at the top grossing level, but I have a feeling if you're running a lean start up, you don't need a lot of money. You probably need to make what? Five grand a month, ten grand a month to feel really good about life and that is very different than making $35 million a month, which is what those guys are making. So there is no competition. You're only competing with people at your level. Always remember that.

·       Number 2 is definitely where you want to go. You've got to find your niche, you've got to find a way to do this and you've got to get really, really dialed in on your focus and on the users themselves, not on the marketplace. It always comes down to the users.

·       I have a lot of experience with these real time strategy builder games and I did a great interview with JP who ran all the data and acquisition for a bunch of these games and there's a couple of games, if you want to go download them. One is Behind Enemy Lines, I think it's called. There's one called Shipwrecked. There's one called Bright Wood Adventures, maybe. If you look up [unclear 7:23] I don't know, but you'll see it. I have intimate knowledge about all three of these builder real time strategy games and it is so 1 million percent analytics. There is nothing else that even comes close to important for these games. Like this is all these guys care about day in, day out is the analytics and every decision, every development, every design, everything is done from analytics. So it doesn't matter what the theme is. It doesn't matter like your marketing strategy. Yeah, it might come into play eventually, but all that matters is the analytics in these games so you might have the template and you might have the theme. As a developer you need to realize that your entire strategy has to be built on the data because that's how these games do compete. So if you want to get like make your game better and better, realize that you are just buying an analytics platform that happens to have a game on top of it. That's all that matters and how well you can build an analytics platform will determine how well you can beat everyone else.

·       Once you get that analytics platform built out, which can be as simple as Google Analytics if you want. If its definitely gotten to the point where it's good enough to use, then it's all about user acquisition. So you're going to build this real time strategy game, like Clash of Clans. What's going to happen is you are going to find what path people take to monetize the best. So what's going to happen is you're going to say they install the game, they complete the first whatever task. They build a barrack or house or whatever it may be and then they purchase it. There's going to be a very clear behavior that leads to action and it might be that they reach level five and people who reach level five have a 600% more chance of spending money, but whatever it might be. That's what the analytics tell you. Then you're going to go out to ad networks and you're going to go buy all the traffic that matches those people and be like "we're going to target 15-35 year old males in Korea who also have these apps installed on their phone and that's who we're going to buy against and those people are worth $1.28 to us. So we're going to spend $1.50 because we can take a loss. We just need to get more people in here". That is how the entire thing works. They don't care about Clash of Clans. They don't care about Game of War. Those games are just, they're competing with themselves to get the data better so they can go buy more traffic. It doesn't matter about the other apps in the store because when you get into these games, ASO doesn't make a difference. It doesn't matter. Your organic traffic is not going to, it's going to become a very small part of your overall traffic strategy once you get the analytics dialed. You have analytics of people that you know you monetize the best. You can just go out and buy a million downloads as opposed to waiting for 50 to come in off your key words. Start thinking about that too. That is what it's all about.

·       Competition is never a discussion for winning products so when you have a product and you are sitting on it and it's got an LTD of $2.50 you're not going to be sitting around going "look at all the other competition. How can I ever beat them? I only have a lifetime value of $2.50". No, you start [unclear 11:01]. What ad networks can I go buy traffic on for $2.49 all day? That's the shift that you're going to see. That paradyne where it's no longer about the competition. All it is is about how can I tweak this internal game and make this better? How can I improve the metrics? How can I get more notifications? How can I get more point sales? How can I get people to buy more in the app? Then how could I go buy more users to push in there? It has nothing to do with your key words or your ASO or your theme or anything like that. It all has to do with that formula.

·       So I just want to drive that home because when you're looking to build an app like this, which is going to be a big app, it's going to be complicated, but it's also going to be very lucrative if you dial it in. What I will tell you is that you need to stop thinking about competition and you need to start thinking about analytics and the internal ecosystem. That is all that matters to you because eventually with apps like this ASO goes away. I mean I think I've told this story before. With Bright Wood Adventures, we launched it on IOS and I opened up iTunes Connect and there's one key word in it. They only put one key word in the launch and the reason was that they looked at me and they go "why the hell would we ever care about key words? How much organic traffic could we really get? We're going out here buying $25,000 worth of people a day? What is ASO going to do for us?" and eventually they add some key words, but this is how they come in. They go "we just need more traffic because we have a winning product. We don't need this stuff. We don't care about this theme. It's just for brand".

·       I hope that helps. I hope that makes sense and I really wish you the best of luck. Definitely keep me in the loop on how that unfolds and that would be really cool to see that all play out.