This company was as well a Finnish game studio. Their development focus is mainly on mobile gaming. The company also had experiences of utilizing crowdsourcing in their games in the form of crowdsourced, user-generated con-tent creation into their game. The game provides assets, tools, and a built-in level editor for creating new levels to play and share to other players. The representa-tive was a leading figure in the company, focusing mostly on game design and leading the business side of their company.
The representative had overall positive views and thoughts on the utilization of CS in video game development, but saw a large amount of risks and challenges when utilizing CS. The representative also stated that CS requires ad-ditional work. As one of their most prominent game projects includes mostly user-generated content, CS is very necessary for the game to succeed. The repre-sentative stated that in mobile game development, it is vital to know your target market, what is done in the game, and how to execute monetization of the game.
Monetization might be difficult in game projects that heavily utilize CS, espe-cially in games that utilize the free to play -monetization model. This factor was raised as a major challenge of utilizing CS this way in game development. One of the reasons why Finnish game studios do not usually utilize CS more in their game development is because most Finnish games utilize the free-to-play mone-tization model. The challenge is not as drastic in more traditional monemone-tization models, such as in paid games, meaning games that are purchased once.
The representative stated a dilemma about player progression within a game, as it might be very different from player to player, especially when it comes to a game which utilizes user-generated content. The player pro-gression in this case refers to the things different players do: quests, tasks, char-acter development etc. Completing those factors leads to progression in the game, rewarding the players. There are various ways to view and design different pro-gression paths for individuals who simply play and enjoy the game and for indi-viduals who play and create content into the game. The challenge lies in these progression paths: could they be united? Should they be united? Should there be different paths for different kinds of players, such as one progression path for all and another, different one for the content creators as well? How are these players rewarded and how to make them generate revenue for the game studio? These questions, combined regarding the element of monetization and the economy of the game, present a major challenge for this type of game. In their games, the most active members of their “crowd” were the players who designed and cre-ated content into the game. The representative is eagerly looking into the future, waiting for someone to successfully monetize in-game content creation, because it remains a very difficult aspect in game development, and something that hasn’t
been seen often in mobile games. The person stated that their game development processes are almost completely done with in-house resources. They do not cur-rently outsource any parts of their design and development processes. Although, they use third party programs and other tools for attribution and analytics.
The studio’s decision to utilize CS arose from personal passion for games that utilize user-generated content. The phenomenon was interesting to them, and they saw some success stories from the PC and console markets of these kinds of games. They came up with a vision to bring it to the mobile plat-forms and started designing and developing the game with a small team, bring-ing in more people durbring-ing the development of the game. In the early phases of the game studio, their game development processes used to follow a traditional waterfall-type model, but as the team grew and the game was nearing its soft launch, the model was altered to fit the needs of the game studio. The develop-ment also wasn’t as metrics-driven as it is currently. The focus was on the quality of the product. Further on, development became more metrics-driven and faster in terms of development cycles, focusing more on retention, engagement of play-ers and session times, which is very common for game studios focusing on mo-bile platforms. Prototyping, early and consistent testing and minimum viable products play a vital role in their development. The aim is to produce a playable version in short cycles in a short time, do a simple trailer for the game, acquire players and then to follow the data and metrics and make decisions mostly on the gathered data and analytics.
The technical quality assurance and testing is mostly done by desig-nated employees in-house, but the game studio is also running a beta server for their newest game, where people outside of the studio can experiment with new updates and features, test the game and send feedback on the new content before the game’s release. The company also runs thorough analytics on the beta server, as well. Player data and analytics are usually the most trusted source of data and information, but there is a balance between sheer trust in data and analytics, and feedback received from players themselves. The company’s Discord server is es-pecially active and crowded, being utilized heavily by the game studio to gain many types of information from players.
The person stated that it is likely that the game studio will utilize CS in their game development as well in upcoming game projects, at least in some of the various forms of it. Despite this, crowdsourcing will most likely not be a
“spearhead” in the company’s upcoming game projects, meaning that the game will not be made with full focus on crowdsourcing in the form of user-generated content. According to the interviewee, as almost all free-to-play mobile games currently seem to utilize CS in some form, it is very useful to include in many types of games, especially if the game utilizes the free-to-play monetization model. The person referred especially to the communal aspects like player feed-back and testing, data-driven development, and player-generated content.
According to the interviewee, CS can create much value for both the game developers and their crowd. One of the most prolific occurrences of value creation is the longer lifecycle for the game, because the stronger the community
around the game, the more connected people feel towards the game. Lengthen-ing the game’s lifecycle naturally is a great way to deliver more money and other value for the game studio. This phenomenon is important when considering the servitization of video games, which might be useful considering the community around the game and value co-creation between the game studio and their cus-tomers. Often, the success of games is largely dependent on their longevity. If a game becomes a viral phenomenon, it might be very popular for a while, but it also might die out very quickly without an active and connected community. Es-pecially in games that utilize the free-to-play monetization model, commitment of customers is especially important, because paying customers generate much more revenue as they use the game service, whereas in more traditional moneti-zation models, players usually purchase the product once, paying for it, and po-tentially never invest any money towards the game anymore. This behaviour de-scribes the servitization of video games: the customer gains value to oneself when using the product and has the will to keep investing to it, if the game service is deemed worthy of it by the customer. This is another example of value-in-use (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). The customer in this context can be referred to as an ex-isting or a returning customer. When a game studio creates new paid content into the game, there are already plenty of potential, existing customers in the game already, so it is not necessary to invest as much into the marketing of the game in order to find new customers. This can generate great savings regarding time, money and other resources to the game studio and possible related parties, such as the publisher of the game, outsourced subcontractors etc. According to the interviewee, regarding the previous factors and topics, it is understandable, why free-to-play games like Clash of Clans by another Finnish game studio, Supercell, remain in the top 10 of top grossing games in the mobile application markets, despite already being there for multiple years continuously.
“No matter if the game is the same and the features are the same, but one can’t steal away the community of that game.”
The interviewee emphasized the significance of the communities of game studios and their games, especially considering the number of clones and copycats in the mobile application markets. The growth of the community might take a lot of hard work and many years of time, but it is very important for competitive ad-vantage.
The interviewee, when asked about critical key factors of successful crowdsourcing, stated that building an active community is crucial from the very beginning of the game development project. This helps to grow the game in var-ious ways, provides potential virality and “unofficial marketing” for the game, especially if smaller groups consisting of very active individuals, superusers and
“superfans”, arise from the crowd. It is beneficial to engage the “superfans” from the beginning to allow them to affect the game to raise its popularity and com-mon awareness of the game.
Another important factor is the early testing of the game. These ac-tions help determine the popularity and success potential of the game. The
interviewee brought up another Finnish game project, “My Summer Car” as an example of gaining a cult status and reaching a niche but gaining a large fanbase consisting of very active fans around the game. According to the interviewee, “it is not worth forcing it afterwards, when the game is already too finished”, stating that one of the “magical” aspects of creating a crowd around a game is the fact that the crowd has seen various phases of the game being developed, and poten-tially affected the development in various ways. This is why it is not as viable to try to attract a crowd, when the game is already launched, as the crowd might think that the game is made just on behalf of the crowd with little interaction with the crowd.
The person saw that CS is in fact utilized quite often in the Finnish gaming industry, especially in mobile markets and the free-to-play markets, and its popularity is continuously on the rise. A good example of this is soft launching game titles very early, enabling the crowd to participate in the form of testing the games and sending their feedback on them. Other examples include creating so-cial media presences and utilizing communication platforms like Reddit and Dis-cord early in game development. Games that utilize CS in the sense of users being able to generate content into games aren’t made more than currently because of the various challenges these types of games face. Critical challenges of these types of games include the challenges of consistency and marketing. Also, game de-signers and developers usually have a good understanding of game formulas. As the market grows, “guidelines” for creating successful mobile games are becom-ing a reality. The same goes for game genres and game subgenres. There isn’t a straightforward formula to create a game based on user-generated content, as the most prevalent examples of those kinds of games, Minecraft and Roblox, have been “coincidences”.
The person didn’t particularly see the Finnish gaming industry as being very different, compared to other countries. In the person’s view, Finland used to have a major technical advantage when it comes to game development, but currently, the differences are minor, at least in the mobile market. The person also didn’t see Finnish game studios utilizing CS in game development less than in other countries.