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Duxter + Playfab 12/19

Published on Nov 20, 2015

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Duxter + Playfab

Thoughts & discussion points from Dec 19/2014
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High level points

  • Organization
  • Brand
  • Product
  • Market
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Organization Qs

  • Do we fully integrate the teams or leave them silo'd?
  • Who do we retain? Replace? Upgrade
  • What does org chart look like next month? Next year?
  • What are key management rolls? Key structures?
  • Major weaknesses? Where do we still need to hire?
Fully integrate the teams (not on day one, but have a short term plan)

Need deeper individual discussions/interviews possibly with each team member to make this determination. Also dependent on org chart.

Could probably come up with both of these pretty quickly. Important to have both.

See later slides

Need head of sales. CTO? Customer success?
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Adam (CMO) responsibilities

  • Company marketing
  • Game dev marketing
  • Own marketing & consumer facing product KPIs
  • Game dev community
Company marketing - Brand/messaging, website/materials/anything outward facing.

Game dev marketing
-Tools game devs use to market their game including: Community, in-game communication, player manager tool, anything that ends up being gamer-facing, Duxter.com (or whatever our network is called)
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My part of the org chart

  • Run marketing team
  • Product team creating marketing tools
Marketing team creates company brand, marketing materials, instruments and is responsible for marketing KPIs across entire org. Works closely with sales team (probably does some sales early on) to create materials, absorb customer feedback and tune the message. Works closely with product teams to properly message the product to the market as well as provide feedback to product teams on customer needs. Customer success team possibly starts here.

Product team to create - community tools, in-game marketing tools, anything game devs use that is gamer facing.
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Org chart

  • Marketing team
  • Customer success
  • Product team
Marketing team, content marketer, data analyst (MBA intern maybe?)

Customer success: Probably 1 person, jr/sr depends on timing/scale

Product team: 1-2 backend devs, 1-2 front end devs, designer, PM, devops (shared), qa (shared)
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Brand

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Brand Qs

  • What are we? Tools/services? SaaS/Consumer?
  • What are the key things we have that nobody else does?
  • Where do we generate the most value?
  • What should gamers think of when they see our brand?
  • What should game devs think of when they see our brand?
SaaS is the business, consumer is just a way to create value.

1. We have end-to-end solution for running your game
2. BIC tools for various things
3. Long term connected network of gamers, data, targeting, globalization

Value today comes in BIC tools (which ones I think needs research) / acumen

Services/consulting etc... all just ways to bring people onto the platform which is where we sell software

Gamers need to think they get additional value: Shared friends list, leaderboards, gameplay history, achievements, SSO, community activity/reputation.

Game devs should think "powerful tools to run my game" : Devs shouldn't think we have a disparate set of solutions, they should think it is one cohesive platform that allows for "toggling" of various features. More unity/Salesforce less Atlassian
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Consumer brand

  • Gamers need to love us
  • Leverage tech we are building to build consumer destination
Like opentable. One thing we've learned is that we can attract gamers to games we don't work with. Creating massive value for our customers.

If we do this well we have a very defensible business that has tons of extendability.

Per Mitch, this needs to be decided early on, otherwise you make bad decisions. Might require us to turn customers down early on, but better in the long term. Important things like data ownership matters. Always the key tension of "who owns the gamer."

Product

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Product Qs

  • Do we/when do we merge products/services?
  • What is consumer facing?
  • How do we make money? What is free/paid?
Merge products once we have brand figured out. I'd relaunch the "new brand" with integrated tools/tech and the new vision of the company. This could take months to do. In the meantime I'd probably expect everything to run as is.

Next project Duxter/product team does must be PlayFab backend

Consumer facing network (duxter.com) & some in-game branding. Not sure if it is the 1. "unity logo" popping up as the game loads 2. In game UI (openfeint) 3. Done on login screen only

Not sure what is free/paid but needs deep research into exactly where our value is, what might be a good hook etc.. Should analytics package be free? Google analytics for games? In order to use it must use our backend (not free). Not sure, but important to understand product offering, value, and pricing.
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Everything you need to run your game

  • Game manager (liveops)
  • Player Manager (CRM)
  • Backend (servers/deployment)
Thinking about these three distinct tools through the eyes of the user. Each tool has its own set of user archtypes who would use it.

They should all be linked together through some sort of "game switcher."

These three could form the basis of the brand. "Playfab+Duxter = everything you need to run your game (Liveops+CRM+backend).

What else is there?

Unity + us + your creativity = game?


Game manager = analytics/optimizations/in game tweaks. Tons of "consulting" level stuff with Chris/team.

Player manager (community, in game communication, social media tools)

Backend (spin up servers, devops, loadbalance, scale, many of the core things Playfab does today)
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Duxter CaaS product

  • Becomes "toggle on" feature on PF
  • Continue to develop CRM tools
  • Heavier focus on in-game
  • Social?
Give devs ability to "turn on" community with the flick of a switch. Still offer customization (maybe required).

Additional CRM tools including mail, push notifications, surveys, vip programs, marketing sites.

In-game tools for both marketing: community web view) + events + campaigns (synced)

See a real opportunity for us to sync up a bunch of social media (FB/Twit mostly) with everything else we do. Ability to run campaigns across game/community/social I FEEL like is tremendously valuable.

Market

Market Qs

  • What is our TAM/SAM?
  • How do we "move up" to bigger fish?
  • How do we explain this to current/pipeline customers?
  • Non gaming applications? 
  • Where do we focus now?
Combined vs separate? Are we gaining new markets that were otherwise closed to us individually? I don't really know the answer here. Definitely don't know the math but we should figure it out. My intuition is a big yes but probably worth articulating, even if its just abstract.


Combined offering maybe more attractive. Certainly being venture backed helps. Being venture backed by Mitch really helps. Removes some of those startup partner risks. Joint relationships joint sales. Sales task forces sound great.

Maybe there isn't a one size fits all answer. I think there are additional services we can offer "immediately." I am going to have some competition concerns with Trendy, but ultimately solvable.

Chris seems to think there is a great opportunity now for this. I question whether this is a long term strategy that we don't embrace until after we've conquered gaming.

Mobile/social/pc/console? Does it matter? F2P only? I've found traction with a certain archtype, and have plans to expand to another archtype. Do we need to reconsider this philosophy with an expanded offering. With new company/$ I think we have the opportunity to be laser focused on one type of customer and really nail it. Then expand to different segments. I'm not sure that "we are everything to everyone" is something we can execute on, at least not for some time.
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Next steps

  • Joint vision make sense?
  • Does 1+1=3?
  • Does organization make sense?
  • Do economics make sense?
  • Timing?
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