Lisa Marino on RockYou’s Publishing Partners, Ad Platform Growth in Gourmet Ranch And Zoo World July 20th, 2011 №2
Marino: [Yes.] Loot Drop’s game is in the process of being brought in-house. We’re not acquiring them, but once the game is done, we’re going to run the live environment. The game is getting close enough that some functions are beginning to come over. As part of the things that we can take care of early on are the message center, integration to the analytics, working through the ad platform and what types of integrations we want to do — so that work’s all being done right now while those guys are finishing up the game.
Going forward, we’re probably going to work with them on a lot of design and feature elements for the first several months after launch, and a lot of the tuning. But we will definitely be the ones largely responsible for the game and it’ll finally shift.
ISG: Do you plan to model the publishing partners program after your interactions with Loot Drop? Will all developers eventually have to shift their games over to RockYou’s care?
Marino: Absolutely not. We’ve got a couple different levels of opportunity. Something like a Cloudforest is an extreme version of publishing for us. There’s a lot of other games that are already complete, or getting close to completion and the developer wants to leverage RockYou’s distribution capabilities and still wants to run the game themselves. Other developers say “Hey, I just want to build games, I want to leverage not just your distribution, but your analytics platform, your Q&A, your community support.” All the infrastructure that we have for games. So it really depends on the partner that we’re talking to and what makes sense from a deal perspective for both of us.
ISG: The publishing model is definitely picking up speed in 2011. Why do you think more developers are seeking out partners now than they were a year or so ago?
Marino: Distribution is incredibly difficult and expensive. We’re going through four game launches in four months and fortunately we had a war chest in the bank. Had we not had that and a strong infrastructure around analytics, and the ad network, which provides additional distribution for us, we’d be in a similar position to a lot of developers. That’s been a really core area of focus for us in the last 90 days now that we’ve got some games coming out.
A big focus for us is acquiring users that we don’t have to pay for. If you read the Zynga S-1 they were really clear that the majority of their users, they don’t pay for. That said, they’ve got a very large marketing budget as well.
So [publishing] is definitely more of an art than a science in terms of how we can creatively go after users — not necessarily in the viral capacity but in the organic capacity. Part of it’s how you optimize Facebook channels. Part of it is things that we can do as RockYou on our own ad network — we still serve almost 300 million impressions a day. Some of it is that we still have reach apps [to bring new players into the network]. At the end of the day, in the Rock You network, the games are incredibly important. The quality of them needs to be extremely high and competitive.
ISG: Are there any concerns from potential developer partners that RockYou might steal ideas for its own in-house game development?
Marino: Our philosophy on publishing is, we want to bring what we know how to do well to the publishers. We’re pretty open and transparent. We also look at these deals, we want to treat them like our own owned & operated. It wouldn’t make sense for us to sign a publishing deal that we don’t want to actively promote from an ad spend perspective. I don’t see us publishing 20 games a year, I see us publishing four to eight. And the four to eight for me means that we’re actually going to be spending money on those and supporting them just like we would an owned & operated game.
For me, it’s a much more compelling model not just for us but for the developer as well. And there’s just as much secret sharing from RockYou to the dev as there is the other way around. Every one of our publishing partners is getting a product manager. We’re going to teach them what works in message center, we’re going to teach them how to optimize virals. We’re going to teach them, potentially, game mechanics. We’re going to give them access to our analytics so they can see “Hey, users are falling off at level 4, how do we punch through that?”
