How Text-Based Games Win Without Graphics: Live-Action Strategy

0:00This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet, and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70 % less than their U.S. and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. Hey, everybody. Thank you for listening. My name is Andres Figueira, and I'm going to be your host for the day. Today's episode is sponsored by The Global Talent Company, a company that's connecting amazing remote talent from Argentina, South Africa, and anywhere really, leading tech companies worldwide.

0:37So if your team is looking to hire top-notch South American or South African talent, just visit theglobaltalent.co and see how we can help. And today with me here, I have Dennis Coural, Director of Product Marketing at HandyWriter, a mobile game developer and publisher based in Miami, Florida, known for creating the popular text-based life simulator BitLife. So Dennis, how's it going, man? It's a pleasure to have you here. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, man. It's going very well. We're working on a lot of 2-4 related projects right now, a lot of stuff over HandyWriter, and a new pack and a new update to release very soon to the players.

1:14Very excited about that. Wow. Okay, Dennis. And just so that we can get the audience a bit more in context, would you be able to tell us like deeper, a little bit more about your background, where you come from, how you got to be a director of product marketing at CandyWriter? Sure. So I'm Turkish by birth. I grew up and lived in Turkey for roughly 25 years. 30 days of my career, I was in consumer goods. So I started off, you know, my very first job in Coca-Cola. around when the share a coke campaign was happening fantastic time i want to move on to move on to water phone for a while at the time you were doing like prepaid packs for farmers so you know rural areas and these like old school limited internet and phone and sms packages that we used to sell and upselling and all of that it was very interesting but i didn't last there long and then i moved on to my last consumer good which was jurex so i moved to Rekit Benkizar and worked for personal care and healthcare or personal care, basically.

2:17So I was the brand manager for Durex, the condom brand for a year. Along with that, wheat and shawl, it was fantastic. But Turkey has a specific ecosystem. So landing jobs and staying in them for a long time was challenging after college. So due to many like background reasons, I bounced saw some early jobs that afterwards I said that if I don't find a job in a short time, I'm going to go to military service and do my mandatory work. Before I did that, I found a gaming company called Netmarvel. This was around 2015, 16. It was very interesting because, you know, I grew up playing all kinds of games and in college, you know, my pet pee was basically World of Warcraft.

3:00I studied business. Man, and I tell you like, so I was looking like at the job market and what I want to be in 10 years from now. You know, this classic question on the interviews that they always toss towards your way. I thought to myself, like, what do I want to be? So I went to actually Bidessert's website around like 2012 and they had a senior brand manager role. I still remember that. And it required for the marketing manager to have 10 years of FMCG experience. And I was like, I'm going to go there. And in a way I'm going to build that experience. So that's like how I went into the whole conversation.

3:35But eventually, like I found myself in gaming earlier than I suspected. In Turkey, I did that for a while. After roughly two years, I got head-on to it, moved to Germany. In Germany, early days of mobile still, it was around like 2018, 17. Yeah. And worked for two different gaming companies for over four years in total. Afterwards, my wife and I, we were looking to find a permanent spot for ourselves that we moved to Finland. I found a job in Rovio, makers of Angry Birds. Wow. Okay. That was really fun. I worked there for roughly two years, then moved on to Supercell. Yeah. Then took part in launching of Squadbusters, their webshop project, and then moved on to Hay Day, like this iconic farming game.

4:21I was the marketing manager for that for two and a half years. Wow. My little cousins in Venezuela are addicted to Heyday. It's crazy. They just like playing that. Not even like Clash of Clans or Clash of Grounds. It's Heyday. I couldn't even believe it because when I was like, I was older than them. And I was like, what is the appeal of this game? And they were like, it's just relaxing. Just play it and just live the life in the game. And it's like, okay, okay. There's a lot within the portfolio of Superstyle that it feels. But I mean, talking about portfolios, I recently moved to Stillfront Group.

4:53Okay. So Stillfront Group is a Swedish-based company. It's publicly traded. We have a lot of gaming companies under our tent. Candy Rider is one of them. We're based in Miami, and I'm working with the team as their product marketing director now. Okay, that is so cool, Dennis. You really have had like a hell of a journey, and it's been in so many different industries that it's super interesting. Yeah, it's so much cool. and okay dennis what in your opinion or from what you have learned and all the experience you have is what's the biggest difference between marketing a mobile game versus traditional consumer products like the ones you used to work with before oh this is such an interesting thing i mean like i think you know so when you're looking at the marketing's evolution you know there is this father of marketing which is like philip coppler and he talks about like these five different phases of marketing that started and came to where we are right now.

5:48I think I entered marketing scene, especially when we were talking about like late stages of emotional value, then going into like this, you know, social value conversation. So people really wanted to understand like what's in it for me back in the day. So when we were talking about a product, the first focus about the whole communication was about like, what do you get out of it as an emotional service? What do you really feel about it? What do you want to do with that? What kind of experience does it present to you? And, you know, today brands like Red Bull, Coca-Cola, you know, all these like iconic taglines that they grew up over the years.

6:26That's basically a byproduct of that. It's an evolution that drove that. Of course, there's a lot behind the scenes, but I think it's a very good example. When it comes to gaming, practice is very different, but not off from, so to say, you know, today's marketing practices. I think it shaped a lot with what marketing is supposed to evolve into in the way that GoodCopter puts it forward. I mean, the interesting part about mobile and especially entertainment-based marketing is today, the whole conversation is about our life. Like a lot of our investments yield very fast results. I think back in the day, when you're thinking about, you know, a 3 billion, 4 billion today, even more than that Coca-Cola's yearly marketing investment.

7:13Back in the day, 60 % of that used to go to, 70 % of that used to go to the television and traditional advertising. And when you're putting like, you know, buying ad spots, you cannot calculate ROI on that immediately. Like you're, no, there was no conversation about it. The ROI conversation was mostly about sales. And then today this evolved with the digitalization. This is what was predicted. Like 10 years ago today, we talked about hyper customization, but then IDFA came, right? A couple of years ago, digital rights and then consumer rights basically came in and then hyper personalization stopped.

7:49Social media's evolution kind of got staggered at that point because you were not able to serve like these custom experiences anymore. Your personal data is protected, which is fantastic, right? With the GDPR and then systems within IDFA on the mobile devices, you have to opt in for the ads and data collection, and then you're protected as a consumer. This evolution is very human, very interesting. It is not disconnected necessarily from what the traditional marketing does, but when it comes to, you know, mobile market, ROI is a very strong conversation. There's a lot of reasons behind it. I think, you know, user acquisition drives this conversation.

8:28When you're putting$10 in, you can immediately track and analyze how much money you get out of that. And it kind of sets to its own in both good and bad ways. We can really talk about this in a very like deep level, actually. You know, when you're thinking about marketing organizations today, there are like certain structures that you will come across in every early or late stage organizations. User acquisition is must, analytic is must, and then you have community teams. Community team or community manager is a must. These are the three must-haves that every gaming company with a live game out there have.

9:04And the interesting part is product marketing or marketing today as an organization, you know, the brand managers, the strategists, also, I don't know, product marketing manager, if you want to put it as such. These roles are a bit of afterthought because a lot of acquisition and analytics and committee related activities actually go into tactical efforts. Tactical effort are basically efforts that you can see the end of. When you're riding a journey for yourself, you say that I'm going to go from, I don't know, Michigan to Florida. You can literally drive the whole road and figure out how you want to go, how long it's going to take you and what's going to happen.

9:43You can go into bumps, but you're going to know what that journey is. That is more of a tactic. You want to decide, I want to get there. You can get a taxi, you can get your own car, you can fly there. You can make that choice. But when it comes to the rest of the marketing, a lot of that is driven by strategy. And strategy is unpredictable. Strategy is very interesting. Strategy is a vision. It is not as tactical. It's an ideology that you want to bring people together for and then put five steps towards it, right? So a lot of these like strategy related ideas, I think within the mobile gaming scene, there are not many companies out there that celebrates it well.

10:21They're really big ones. that are able to afford to celebrate this. And, you know, the examples of like King or Zynga or Scopely, you know, all these like big names out there with a lot of deep pockets to touch into. They're not really worried about it. They are willing to take those risks and risks equals, again, unpredictability and strategy. Whereas like a lot of the, you know, smaller companies that want to become big, they're really over hyper-focusing into tactics. And this is like the key difference today. I think a lot of the consumer goods focus into still strategy. There's a long-term vision, a five-year vision, 10-year vision about where they want to go and what they want to become.

11:01And the products communication, products evolution, direction, all of that is basically led by that. There's a strategy, there's an involvement of marketing in that leadership conversation. Whereas, you know, on the entertainment industry, I think a lot of the critics, you know, talk very loudly about a great example. is Netflix gaming, right? So they put Netflix games into TV right now, but they're not yielding immediate ROI because there's a vision, there's a strategy, there's like the thing that they're building in the back. They just launched it after billions of dollars of investment and many years of development, literally this one.

11:38So if you think about it, like this is the key difference. The ROI conversation is fantastic. Marketing needs that. Every aspect of marketing needs that. But I think we tend to lose the balance of that conversation, especially at the, you know, midsize level entertainment companies. And this is like the very key difference that you easily observe between the two different industries. Okay. So from my understanding then of what you're explaining to me is that for gaming companies and entertainment companies in general, it's more of they can't be just strategizing and going for longer periods of time without knowing the results they'll get.

12:15They need to be a bit more narrow with their scope and just make sure to use the tactics. I love how you've been doing this nomenclature that you're explaining to me these terms. So that is so cool, man. I hadn't thought about it that way. But now that you paint this picture for me, I totally understand it because I do get that gaming companies don't have those deep pockets that you're referring to as other big companies that can just take those risks and take their time with these strategies. It really is a more, we got to do it now or we might lose the investment or the funding we got, or we just got this game and we need to make money to make more, because if not, it'll just come to a standstill.

12:51And that is something that nobody wants. But okay, I love that. And Dennis, could you tell us a bit more about the games you guys develop and publish at Candy Rider? Because I saw BitLife and I know there's some more, but I would love to give the audience a bit more of an explanation of what those games are. So today we have one big franchise. this is BitLife franchise. Under the franchise, we have CatLife and DogLife. These are in the past years, simulations of your animals and their lives. Just like a life that you play in BitLife, I think it's better if I start explaining what BitLife is. In the way that you're playing it, this game gives you a control unmatched in the industry.

13:33It's ridiculously deep. It's very interesting. It's not predeterministic, so to say. So every single time that you're playing the game, you're going to get very unique and new experiences coming out of it. It allows you to make choices every stage of your life from birth to death. And as you're doing that, basically as a newly growing tree, as a newly sparring life, it kind of evolves like that. You can become nearly anything. You can role play and cosplay anyone. You know, in Big Bang Theory, basically Sheldon Cooper used to say like, you know, this game plays on the world's strongest GPU, my mind kind of a thing.

14:11It's kind of like that. It's very cool. Like, you know, so you can become anyone, you can become anything. And basically you can simulate if you want to become Batman, become Batman. If you want to become, I don't know, Adriana Lima, become Adriana Lima. You can make choices like that. My wife and I, whenever we're flying, for example, she gives me her device and tells me like, build a life for me and I'm going to play through that. So I play like, you know, I built her character for herself. And then she tells me like, I lived up to a hundred years old and all of that. It's really fun. There's a whole journey built into it.

14:43You can make a lot of different choices, a lot of different experiences, very edgy in its nature. A lot to do things that would be frowned upon in a normal life. So a good example is like, if you have a best friend and you're parting with your best friend or if you have a manager and you're parting with your manager and job in the game you can flip them off you can punch them in the face if you want to the game you can drop options and it kind of likes you know scratches those itches off the people that i would have loved to do that once like here it goes you know so you can have those experiences really fun and then this whole idea started seven years ago we just celebrated last month our seventh birthday Wow, congratulations.

15:25Okay. Thank you. And this team has been amazing. So they developed along the way CatLife and DogLife. And the game and the tech that our team has built had a lot of different challenges over the years because this game was hard-coded in English and it's a text-based game. Localization is a nightmare. It's a literal nightmare. So along the way, we partnered up with other Steelfront studios and released BitLife Go catering into other localizations and other languages around the world. It's a similar game developed with another studio within our portfolio. And along the way, there were other variants of the game that were made just to cater other local languages.

16:04And I think what sets BitLife apart from many other games out there is because it's very hyper-focused into English, the culturalization is also very deep. It's ridiculously relevant to, you know, an average internet slash American culture. if you're interested about that. And, you know, the team takes it into the next, next, next level every single time. I love the example. I love it and hate it. I'm so sorry about that. But the way that it's an astronomer example from Coldplay concert, right? So the CEO that was caught red-handed and stuff. Okay. Yeah, so when that happened, what we were able to do is we were able to craft a story inside the game literally a day after.

16:46And when you logged into the game, the game would greet you saying that you were just caught in a Coldplay concert, red-handed. What do you do? And then it gives you options, right? So like this culturalization aspect of it is a very strong suit that really sets apart BitLife from any competitors in the market. And then, you know, it's really fun. When it comes to development, you know, our team is doubling down on making BitLife very special for many years to come to our players. So we're literally working on BitLife only right now. Okay. And really like making sure that, you know, we're taking it to the next level and team is putting their harder effort into it.

17:25I'm fairly new to the team, so it's hard for me to put and call me everything. But I know that, you know, we're doubling down and focusing onto making BitLife very special as a franchise. Wow, that is so cool. That's something that I do admire that you pinpointed it exactly, like perfectly when you were explaining it to me. And it's the fact that those games, like those simulators, they do tap into those intrusive thoughts that we all have. And it happens to me playing video games. Like I am one person in real life. That's totally normal. And we have our things we can do and the things we can't.

18:00But when I'm playing games, I'm like, should I kill this character? Like nothing's going to happen. It won't change anything. And it just plays into that gray moral area that is not frowned upon because it's just a game. But I do like that you're using that to entice people to keep playing, because that really is cool. That really is cool. Who didn't remove the walls and windows and the doors from a Sims character just to see what happens in, like, four walls, you know, and try to see if they survive. And then eventually seeing the tombstone or removing the ladder from the pool and see if they're going to drown.

18:34You know, everyone did that. It used to be our pet peeve, like, what's going to happen? Let's see. Uh-huh, uh-huh. It's just experimenting to what's it called? To play with the boundaries and the limits that the game provides for you. And people always want to test that. So that is super nice. Super nice. And Dennis, how about marketing this type of game that's more built on storytelling than graphics? How do you guys go around just convincing the public and making them want to try it out when it's not something that's like, I don't know, the new Call of Duty that it's so fast stand so quick and so real life looking that it's crazy.

19:11You feel like you're in war actually. So how do you guys market a more, I don't want to say simpler game, but it's just a different type of... Yeah, definitely call it a such. It's by far not a simple game at all. But the interesting part about marketing this thing is, so if you look seven years ago, it was literally shortly before the COVID era start. Okay. Like, it doesn't feel so far back, but, you know, if you think about 2018, 2019 times, that's when the game was released. And this is like when everybody got locked down in their houses. Also, they did live life from within their house. So that was a great start.

19:51And then, you know, one other layer was when influencer marketing, like when you have so much time to spend at home, your TV is occupied by your parents. Where do you watch content? What do you watch on your phone you're busy. Influencer marketing spiked everyone afterwards since they have been trying to become influencers, but influencers at that time became rock stars, like really like big names. And even the outstanding, like very interesting edge of our game, organically back in the day, a lot of influencers wanted to pick up and see what they can do with it. Because again, it has a tone and a taste that other games do not really offer at all.

20:29If you dive into bit life, you're going to immediately realized that. And it's very interesting. So a lot of the influencers jumped in and started making content and see what they can do if they can become a beginner in this life. If I can become undressed in my life and make a choice throughout this journey. If there is a moment like PewDiePie shines, for example, an influencer comes in and says that, I'm going to simulate PewDiePie today. I'm going to do this and that in their name, or I'm going to become Mr. Peace. All of these ideas, all of these conversations were very interesting. So early days, the team started understanding and building it with that vision.

21:06So what they did was, we have this everlasting long-term nothing, which is building on the fantasy of Batman, but the creation of Batman, how Batman in this story as a DC story comes to be. So you're an orphan, you know, you have a billion dollars and then you're growing into and making those choices that makes you that superhero. Now, we don't have those things happening inside the game per se, but we're able to simulate them visually and say that, tell that story. So the storytelling aspect is one of the key ways that we're telling this. Since I have joined the team and we kicked off another aspect of it, because we don't have the graphical storytelling, we cannot really tap into, you know, everyday advertising model.

21:51So what we did was we partnered up with a very talented team within Hollywood. These are stunt doubles and very like professional recording team, production team. Yeah, that's the right word. Production team. So we have worked with them. And what they did was this game is all about making choices after all. So every time you release the new pack or a new moment or a new story to tell back to our players, I think we're about to release our fifth video now. We have been telling this story in a real life scenario, play so you know the game comes in and says that you're in a forest you're going to lift a stone and what's underneath the stone so we're actually seeing a person lifting that stone options come up on the screen and they click to it and then they act on it and then basically so it's a bit of the game with live action recording and the person that in person they press as if you were playing on the phone.

22:49Okay. That's a nice spin. I love that spin on it. We took the live action. Thank you for that. We took the live action angle to it and started telling that story. That has been a lot of fun. We intend to do more of that down the road. The other thing that we have been exploring is, of course, going back to this investment that organically happened in the past with an influencer scene. I think there's a bit of missed opportunity there, but we want to pick that up and really double down on making that very special for our players. We have launched a new program called BitLife Creators Club. Okay.

23:22I've just started inviting creators to this program. It is a revenue share deal. They make some money on the side and the whole basically program has quite a big pool of money if they actually double down on start making content for us. So it is fairly interesting, but the part that we want to continue doing is basically influencer marketing, user acquisition, storytelling, of course, communities and Warner Stone for all of this. I didn't mention this at all, but you know, our team has been actually been the same since day zero. Wow. So the majority of our team have been part of the team and they have been working in growth and this evolution of the game.

24:03So they have seen through and through how the community reacts, what they like, what they want, what they dislike. And they have been catering for that in a very craftful manner for many years. now that you know i'm here i started whispering some you know some notes that we want to improve on and then hopefully in due time we're going to take them into action but the thought that i have and the general idea about marketing for me is consistency i have been looking into you know what i can think about if a philosophy was a word that i wanted to you know highlight here i think consistency in innovation is the interesting thing that I love thinking about.

24:42I mean, if you look at the way that teams and games and products evolve, if you look at majority of the marketing budget right now towards investing into something, it's user acquisition. You will see a lot of the companies invest 90%, nearly 90 % of their yearly marketing budget with an entertainment scene into user acquisition. And what it creates is a repeat effort. I mean, And in that innovation, there's so much investment that even though it is a marketing activity, this is where the growth and consistency usually occurs. If you put that money just for two, three years into community, I tell you, you're going to achieve the same thing.

25:22But the risk-taking attitude, the strategy, the brand building aspect of it, it's really hard to make cases for that from an investor point of view. So what I keep going back to is like consistency and innovation. I'll give you another example. I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately. And this channel that I love to watch, I'm very into making food. And this channel called Bon Appetit, they were covering this New York pizza joint called Ceres. It's apparently one of the hot spots right now. They're like these old Michelin star restaurant workers, two buddies that created this small restaurant.

25:57And Ceres restaurant basically make pizzas on a limited number a day. They don't sell slices or anything, but there's a special episode made by Bon Appetit on the set as pizza, and they interview the makers. And what makes it really interesting in that conversation, if you like listen to it well, they are very consistent in the way that they're making their product. I think we have a lot to learn from that. If like they check the moisture level of their dough and write that in an Excel document so that they can track back if they receive any bad feedback from anyone. They write who produced that pizza on the box of the pizza and when.