62 jours pour créer un succès à 125 millions de dollars : Last Day on Earth
Kefir n'a rien d'un zombie quand il s'agit de prendre des décisions judicieuses en matière de conception de jeux et d'acquisition d'utilisateurs.
Kefir : une étude de cas Unity
In 2009, Kefir leapt out of the starting gates in Volgograd with a team of five making games for Russian social networks. Taking advantage of new technologies and markets for mobile apps, the studio has grown to 165 people and is best known for its crazy-successful Last Day on Earth (LDOE), a zombie survival title. So far, LDOE has garnered a whopping 83-million downloads, a million daily active users (DAU), and so far, over $125M in gross revenue. Unity powers all their launched games.
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Le projet
Proposer le genre sur mobile, ajouter une fonctionnalité multijoueur et développer le gameplay
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L'objectif
Booster la production et optimiser les performances
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Équipe de projet
27 artistes et concepteurs et 23 ingénieurs logiciels et QA
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Entreprise
Plus de 165 personnes à Saint-Pétersbourg et Volgograd, Russie
Siège : Volgograd, Russie
Des décisions avisées en matière de conception et d’acquisition d’utilisateurs génèrent 125 millions de dollars pour ce jeu mobile
In a market saturated with survival games, Kefir looked for ways to stand out. They decided to focus on three challenging tasks: bringing the genre to mobile natively, developing multiplayer capability and community, and building a simple UI for relatively complex gameplay.
“We pride ourselves on creating intuitive resources that don’t need to be explained, so we consciously limit the number of buttons, settings and instructions that appear on the screen,” said Petr Kostylev, Kefir’s Art Director. Still, he understands that some players like instructions. “We really hate tutorials,” he joked, but promised that they’ll provide some for those who like them.
So, where does Unity fit in the LDOE world? To start, the studio uses Unity to speed up and optimize their game architecture and coding tasks. Kefir’s artists use it to create and apply humanoid avatars, inverse kinematics, and particle systems. And the business teams use Unity to ensure easier, more effective ways to attract new players and sustain revenue growth through user acquisition (UA) and ad placement strategies. For LDOE, Kefir has embraced a wide range of Unity’s offerings.
The results:
- Soft-launched mega-successful LDOE in just 62 days
- Highly focused teams solved different game mechanics by working on separate Unity modules in parallel
- Enhanced monetization and marketing strategies with Unity Ads, Unity IAP, and Audience Pinpointer
- Achieved smooth gameplay experience across all devices using the Unity Memory Profiler
Concevez avant de compiler
Most game reviewers note LDOE’s smooth-running gameplay. To achieve this, Kefir used a variety of techniques, including combining meshes to optimize the number of draw calls and simplifying the UI with a minimum number of atlases.
According to Technical Lead Roman Romanenko, “The most important thing is to focus on creating project architecture at an early stage of development. For example, our basic design patterns solved the inventory system and building mechanics.”
To save more time, Kefir’s developers used a custom “combined sprite” component to draw multiple sprites at once. They also reused objects from fixed pools when possible, minimizing the number of instantiated objects, and enabled automatic user-graphic settings based on device configuration. The Unity Memory Profiler was an important tool that helped them regularly ensure optimal performance across all Android and iOS devices by measuring the impact of all aspects of the game in the device memory.
Participer à la communauté du jeu
Kefir est remarquablement réputé pour son ouverture d'esprit ; le studio n'a aucun mal à parler des points forts de ses concurrents et à évoquer les tendances du marché du jeu sur ses blogs et lors d'événements. « Être un véritable développeur/concepteur de jeu nécessite de bien comprendre, étudier et jouer aux meilleurs jeux, quel que soit leur créateur », indique Petr Kostylev.
Une attitude qui lui semble cruciale aussi bien pour les start-ups que pour les studios bien établis. « Prêter attention à ses émotions lorsqu'on joue à un jeu créé par quelqu'un d'autre peut largement stimuler la créativité et apporter de nouvelles idées. »
Le directeur artistique tient également à souligner l'importance de ne pas se contenter d'imiter les éléments qui ont bien fonctionné pour d'autres. « Cette démarche est inefficace ; l'important, c'est de se concentrer sur ses propres particularités. Si nous aimons tant Unity, c'est en partie parce que la plateforme nous permet de nous exprimer et de tester facilement des idées inédites. »
Growing their player base and revenue
In addition to game creation, Kefir uses Unity to monetize their game through ads and in-app purchases (IAP), and to grow their game with UA strategies. While Kefir integrates advertisements into LDOE using Unity Ads, they try to minimally impact their game world by fine-tuning the frequency of impressions, and they especially appreciate how Unity Ads minimizes external calls in Android environments. The bulk of LDOE’s revenue, however, comes from IAP. According to Andrey Kulakov, Kefir’s Head of Marketing, “By design, ads only make up perhaps five percent of our game revenue. Our priority is the game and IAP, and Unity IAP makes that very easy for us.”
A small in-house team is dedicated to UA, focusing mainly on performance marketing. “We recently started running Unity Audience Pinpointer campaigns as part of our UA strategy with Unity Ads. This has helped us meet our return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) goals while also letting us scale campaigns and increase volumes. We’re moving a larger portion of our acquisition budget towards it,” said Kulakov.
However, he added, “Our top positions in the charts are the direct result of the work and excitement we put into our games – which we believe is ultimately the best UA strategy possible.”
Last Day on Earth : et après ?
Once LDOE became a beloved game with millions of players battling zombies in a nightmare landscape, another Kefir team took the title into a time machine and emerged with Grim Soul: Survival, a dark Middle Ages fantasy replete with castles, dungeons and plenty of impressive medieval weapons and tools.
So, with these huge successes under their collective belt, what does the future hold for Kefir? On the Unity front, Romanenko mentions that the LDOE team is looking forward to using the Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP) to “have more control over their shader systems. We’ll also start using Cinemachine, the procedural camera system, because I know we’ll get some great effects from that,” Romanenko added. “Unity was key for building and launching Last Day on Earth. And it’s our most successful game to date. As for the future, our new projects will be daring as always!”
« Unity était un élément essentiel de la conception et du lancement de Last Day on Earth, notre jeu qui a obtenu le plus de succès à ce jour. Quant à l'avenir, nos nouveaux projets seront audacieux, comme toujours ! »
“We recently started running Unity Audience Pinpointer campaigns as part of our UA strategy with Unity Ads. This has helped us meet our return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) goals while also letting us scale campaigns and increase volumes. We’re moving a larger portion of our acquisition budget towards it.”
“By design, ads only make up perhaps five percent of our game revenue. Our priority is the game and in-app purchases, and Unity IAP makes that very easy for us.”
Être un véritable développeur/concepteur de jeu nécessite de bien comprendre, étudier et jouer aux meilleurs jeux, quel que soit leur créateur. »
