season 3, episode 4 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest chris benjaminsen, frvr games, galaxy store chris benjaminsen, founder of frvr, the super successful game publisher with over 70 titles on samsung services not only do we chat about monetization and game revenue strategies, but how the frvr platform has allowed them to scale their global reach all music from today's show is from frvr games, composed by rasmus hartvig listen download this episode topics covered frvr publishing on galaxy store marketing discoverability monetization generating revenue in-app purchase iap in-app advertising iaa interstitial ads galaxy badge best of galaxy store awards acquiring games/studios diversity and inclusion helpful links frvr - frvr com frvr careers - careers frvr com frvr linkedin - linkedin com/company/frvr frvr youtube - youtube com/c/frvrgames galaxy store gold digger frvr - galaxy store/digger1 gold train frvr - goldtrain frvr com chris benjaminsen linkedin - linkedin com/in/chrisbenjaminsen/ chris benjaminsen twitter - twitter com/benjaminsen galaxy badges - developer samsung com/galaxy-store/gsb-promotion samsung iap - developer samsung com/iap samsung developer program homepage - developer samsung com samsung developer program newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developer program news - developer samsung com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode four on today's show, i'm joined by chris benjaminsen, founder of frvr, the super successful game publisher with over 70 titles on samsung services not only do we chat about monetization and game revenue strategies, but how the frvr platform has allowed them to scale their global reach and the music from today's show is from frvr games, all composed by rasmus hartvig, enjoy hey, chris, welcome to the podcast chris benjaminsen 00 50 hey, tony thanks for having me yeah, so tony morelan 00 52 so i'm excited to chat with you because, you know, we've had game developers on the podcast, but never a game publisher let me first ask you though, who is chris benjaminsen? chris benjaminsen 01 02 like? that's a good question like, if i were to define myself, i think there's like two defining characteristics, like one is i must make things and the second one is, i detest repetition so if you come to my place, it's not unlikely i will cook but it's very unlikely i'm cooking something i made before so you know, it might be good might not be good, right? but you know, that, that drives and making things like it, it can be origami, it can be computer games that can be like, doesn't really matter, as long as i'm sort of producing something, and then i really don't like doing things twice right you know, like, anything that's routine is just boring tony morelan 01 41 so you're an explorer, then? chris benjaminsen 01 43 i guess so i guess so yeah tony morelan 01 47 so you're with frvr? what exactly is your role? and what is frvr? chris benjaminsen 01 53 like, like, i'm the i'm the original founder, the company, right? you know, and my role today is mostly around working together with massive companies such as samsung, i lead a team at frvr that does that and if you're, if you were to describe frvr, as a company, we're a platform and a publisher okay, so we have a platform that allows game developers to make fantastic games and with all the services that they need to do to do so basically, anything in between a, a game developer and a consumer, and then we also the publisher, we actually make sure that the games get in front of the right user, and they have an opportunity to play those games tony morelan 02 29 okay, what does frvr stand for? it's an acronym, does it have a deep meaning? chris benjaminsen 02 35 no, it's not like, like, a lot of people are sort of asking us if we have french vr company, which we're not yeah, but, but like, like, if rbis is technically forever, without the vowels okay, you can trademark frvr you can trademark forever, at least, not unless you have apple liberal money, right? so so if we say if i'm yeah, because if you could locally use you sort of the full pronunciation you can actually use the trademark so there's a bunch of stupid rules there tony morelan 03 07 interesting interesting so before we dive into frvr, tell me about your journey what led you into the mobile gaming area, and then specifically into creating frvr, chris benjaminsen 03 17 i've been in the, in the games industry for like, more than 20 years, my first job, sort of professional job ever was to make a real time multiplayer games in javascript and if i'd be honest, my seventh startup in total and my second year, and my third platform company over also have like a long history of sort of building companies in this space and i've been very fortunate i never managed to go bankrupt but one of these companies so far, right, you know, so little bit proud about that tony morelan 03 48 oh, that's great it definitely plays into you know, when you first started, you had said that, you know, you're not going to repeat much so you said seven companies that you've started, chris benjaminsen 03 58 you had all very different companies, and some of them were like, like, like, very small and, and never got successful, anything like that right? it's just like the companies apparently gets bigger and bigger every time i try yeah, there might be there might be new startups in the future as well but for now, if rbis is a very exciting company to work at, and definitely want to want to spend my time tony morelan 04 20 so i know one of those companies you had started you actually, it was a pretty successful company that you ended up selling but you came away with that from with a lot of lessons learned, i would say is that correct? chris benjaminsen 04 33 yeah so like, like, in a previous life, build a platform company that did infrastructure for cash or mobile, social and in that company, there was a lot of people building games on top of our infrastructure and 1000s of developers right and, and there was there's a few significant learnings from that so one was that building a company that just charges other people for services is not a particularly good business, a lot of money was made by the developers on top of our platform where we are not making quite a lot of money so you know, make sure that that you actually participate where, where the value is if you want to be a publisher and then the second learning was that the successful developers were not the ones who had the best at making games, right? so there's, there's not a strong connection between sort of making games that are fun to play and the economic success that those developers were able to see so if you want to be successful in the game space, and this is particularly true in the in the mobile game space, you need to be good at a lot of other things that has nothing to do with game development, such as a user acquisition, and revenue optimization, and data and all these things and that, you know, i don't think there's anything wrong with that but if you are somebody who really loves making kickass games, you're missing the 90% if you also want to be successful at that tony morelan 05 57 it's interesting you say that, you know, i had on the podcast a few weeks ago, peter and tobias from biodome games, they have their game gold digger, frvr yeah and it was peter, who had a great quote, saying that he was chatting with one of his partners, who had said, you know, for once, can you stop trying to be so artistic in your games and just build a game that can be successful? and, you know, we all had a good laugh at that chris benjaminsen 06 23 yeah and, you know, i think all industries are like that, right you know, you probably have to be good at a multitude of different disciplines to be successful but, but the games industry, being one of the most valuable entertainment industry, two worlds is, of course, also one of the most competitive and that competitive landscape it's a very, it's a very hard place for, for most people to compete and, and the market sentiment is sort of dominated by survival bias yeah right you know, like, like, the people who won the lottery yeah you know, like, like an among us are like flappy birds so like these, these small teams that had an outsized hit, right, but that's like winning the lottery good luck with that yeah and tony morelan 07 04 i think a great example of that right now is wordle, in the phenomenon behind that chris benjaminsen 07 08 absolutely fantastic game, right you know, and i like these small puzzle games once in a while to come along i was like, 2048, as well, which was also originally made, i think, by an italian game developer, you know, just as a small example, fantastic, fantastic game as well yeah, tony morelan 07 25 definitely, in kind of going back to, you know, what i mentioned, peter, and tobias, they said that for them, you know, the key to their success was partnering with someone like frvr, so that they could just focus on creating the game and let everybody on your team handle everything that when it comes to publishing and marketing, so i think there's a huge value with where you guys are in this space chris benjaminsen 07 47 i hope so like, that's what we're trying to do we're trying to allow developers focusing on making fantastic games and then we took care of all the nitty gritty details of making those games available and i think we published the 39 platforms and then while also helping those developers make sure that the right users come into the games yeah, yeah because it's not it's not only just about the volume of people who play a game, it's more important to make sure that the right user plays the game sure, to get the kind of games that i like, it's not necessarily the kind of games that you like, right, for tony morelan 08 17 sure so let's talk a bit about the history how long has frvr been in existence? chris benjaminsen 08 22 so i think i think technically, they were written, sort of in the integration of the company was founded in must be 2016 okay and their written version of frb apps was decided to be the biggest, baddest lifestyle company you have ever heard of, and sort of sort of allowed me to go and travel the world without having to worry about expenses and it did that it did that very well like, very successfully however, like i'd had a corporate job in corporate america, i had moved to san francisco at this point in my life after having sold a previous company and i sort of managed to convince myself that everything that was wrong with my life was working it turned out everything that was wrong with my life was working for corporate america and it took me it took me like three weeks and a whole bunch of success to realize that and decide, oh, wow, there's a big opportunity here in what inevitably came if ivr that exists today yeah, i teamed up with a guy called brian meidell they joining co-founder came in and we started sort of getting serious about the company a few years after the original founding tony morelan 09 28 and it was brian actually, who had told peter, hey, for once, put artistic stuff aside and let's focus on you know, how to be successful here chris benjaminsen 09 36 yeah and like he's a fantastic executor right, you know, and that's, like, due to building big teams and sort of running productions a lot of repetition stuff i don't like right, yes really good at that tony morelan 09 48 that's great so how many employees are at frvr? chris benjaminsen 09 52 yeah, so i think we are 130 now so as of today, but yeah, like we find ourselves in a situation right now, where we are onboarding around 11 new people a month, so you're growing? yeah, every time you ask that question, the number would have changed? tony morelan 10 08 no, are these people are you focused in one headquarters? are you guys you know, all around the globe? chris benjaminsen 10 13 we have most of our people in in lisbon in portugal and that's predominantly where we are focusing on hiring okay, you know, post covid, the world has changed and, you know, we absolutely accept that some people want to be wherever it is they want to be so we also we also have offices in denmark, we have offices in united kingdom and we have a small office in malta as well, and a small office in spain so we have we have sort of different opportunities for people who wants to work in an office got it and then the majority of people are now in in disband portugal and that's also where we are mostly doing a tony morelan 10 50 hiring you yourself, though you are in the uk is that correct? yeah, i'm chris benjaminsen 10 53 in london, right? you know, i get to i get to be a special snowflake and decide where i want to live so i live in tony morelan 11 01 wonderful now under the frvr brand how many game studios do you guys have that you're working with? chris benjaminsen 11 07 we are publisher right? you know, so? we i think presently we work with around 20 okay, yeah other studios, right? so it's a non-insignificant amount but we have high aspirations, we want to get to a place where we can work with hundreds, if not 1000s of developers sure to do fantastic things tony morelan 11 28 so how many monthly players? do you get playing frvr games on all channels? chris benjaminsen 11 34 i get to it various, right like, like a lot of our success comes from viral traffic right okay so active users can range from i got a really bad month, 50 million to get month where we were we peek into, like, like 100 plus million mark wow, tony morelan 11 50 monthly active users that's crazy yeah, it's chris benjaminsen 11 53 a lot of people so far, i think like, like it's a number we track we think we've had around 1 6 billion absolute unique for the lifetime of the company tony morelan 12 03 wow and that is just in you know, you said the 2016 was the start of frvr chris benjaminsen 12 09 have you? i failed to remember it might have been 15 right but yeah, like plus minus a year sure tony morelan 12 16 so now let's talk about samsung and galaxy store with frvr, what are some of the popular titles that you guys offer on galaxy store? chris benjaminsen 12 24 so particularly on the galaxy store, like we have, i think we have like 12 games live, their most notice would be it's called tigger, frvr which, which is built by peter and team and then we have sort of our higher end games like a basketball and a hex and however, we do work with samsung in other ways, as well, they have this instance type product as well, where we are also present and we have i don't know; i think we've done like seven or eight different integration with samsung along the year so we are sort of everywhere on a samsung phone, including the galaxy appstore tony morelan 12 57 okay, so not just the galaxy app store but there's other different platforms that samsung offers frvr is involved in chris benjaminsen 13 04 yeah, so we work with, we work with samsung about building an experience in our first integration with what's in the product called bixby minus one home screen so when you swipe left on your on your phone, like we will be wearing, we had a cart where there was sort of quick links to our games, okay, we build an instant games type product together with samsung, we work quite a lot of that together and we have our games live there we also have integrations with the with the browser and like we exploring, basically, a big part of what frvr is, rather than trying to drag the user to where we want them to be, say, a mobile app store, we try to take the model and turn it inside out and bring people great games wherever they have already decided to want to be because it's very costly to drag a user somewhere else, right tony morelan 13 50 i see so if they're already there, you want to make your game available to them chris benjaminsen 13 54 yeah, yeah it's like, you know, if you're, if you're starbucks, right, people won't care if you can only get it in the airport, you actually have to be on a street corner close to where people sort of walk around, otherwise nobody is ever going to drink their coffee tony morelan 14 05 yeah, that's true that's true so how did this relationship with samsung for start? chris benjaminsen 14 10 we met samsung at a at a conference and they were like, can you give us games in like, four months? i think was the was the original question and we got the games to them in two days so wow so the answer was yes yeah tony morelan 14 24 that's a great way to start the relationship oh, yeah so why would you say it's important to offer your game on galaxy store? chris benjaminsen 14 31 like, again, you know, that those users there who love the galaxy store, and we want to have our games available to those users in that space and galaxy store is actually well performing? right you know, it's a samsung product and samsung phones are very high-end devices generally it's very, not only is it it's great to meet a consumer where they are they are also very high value users when people are playing from the front of samsung galaxy app store tony morelan 14 54 yeah, in what ways would you say galaxy store has helped you promote frvr games chris benjaminsen 14 59 for is the organic installs a fairly competent product? and it has all the features you would expect as a game developer, right? you know, so, so great access to in app purchases, great access to notifications, great access to distribution, right but we've also, we also really enjoyed working together with the samsung galaxy team and we have, like, among other things, we have an frvr category in the galaxy store that sort of exclusive to us it's only our games oh, no, no and we work together on seasonal featuring and to give feedbacks to us, you know, saying, hey, we think it would be fantastic if we could do some something around easter, for instance and then we go and work on that together and sort of find a, a process that works well together for both of us tony morelan 15 42 that's great and i'm sure that banner promotions are part of that is that chris benjaminsen 15 45 yeah, banner promotion, and i can promotions and like there's a lot of tools that samsung has in the toolbox to help out right? yeah and then we also push on the galaxy team to do more like we, we've sent a lot of feedback on the on the back-end tools and things like that and fantastically, it has impact, like we get better product right so for us, that's a fantastic partnership tony morelan 16 09 yeah and that's one of the things that actually pulled me into working for samsung was how open they were to feedback in wanting to improve their platform fantastic you know, you'd mentioned gold digger, frvr those are the guys they won our 2021 best of galaxy store award for best instant play game awesome game awesome guys, we were so happy to give that award tell me what it did mean for frvr to have one of your games win a best of galaxy store award? chris benjaminsen 16 37 it's a privilege, right? you know, and the credit goes to the game developer, they made that game? yeah right you know, we supported them along the way and, and of course, came with a lot of feedback and help them with technical issues and things like that but at the end of the day, you know, we have to be honest about the fact that the great games are made by the great developers, right, and also, as a platform publisher, provide the tools to make that a possibility but games are fundamentally a creative endeavor and you need massively traded people to make to make those games sure i'm, i'm a game developer myself as well, right you know, and i'm almost more proud of some of the games i've built and, you know, the very successful company that and if rbis, right, you know, because, you know, so it's sort of like an expression of something where you sat down and said, here's the thing i want to create, and now i've gotten it out right and i think to be as impede completely deserves getting that, that recognition from galaxy tony morelan 17 35 yeah success for a game definitely revolves around revenue tell me as far as frvr, what has been your strategy for generating revenue? chris benjaminsen 17 46 like so so from a, from a technical side, right, you know, we try to we try to make all avenues of generating revenue available in our platform, right so that means interstitial-based advertisement, it means reward the best advertisement? it means in app purchases, it means subscriptions it actually does not mean, banner advertisement, we don't do that because i don't like it no, really but you know, yeah, other than that, like, like, we sort of have all the technical capabilities, and then what we find and what we try to optimize for, it's not revenue, we try to optimize for engagement okay and there's a multitude of reasons for that, like so so like, one is the fact that i can't remember the specific number, but it's more than 90% of all value that is captured in the game is made by people who play the game more than once yeah, right you really want to have these long engagements with people, right and another fairly simple reason is it's a lot easier to take a game that has huge engagement, and turn it into a good business than it is to take a game with a with a strong monetization model and turn it into a great game right? so fundamentally, everything we focus on all our kpis, all our visions, and missions are around building experiences that people want to engage with for a long time and then revenue is something that happens as a result, they're off, rather than being sort of a driving factor and because we are good at distribution it because we, we are not sort of participating in the race to the bottom that is cost positive user acquisition on app stores, we can take the privilege that it is to be less aggressively monetizing than some of our competitors tony morelan 19 22 yeah, yeah so let's talk about some of the specifics here, when it comes to, you know, different ways to generate revenue you know, there's developers out there that may just be getting started in this space and so i want to help explain what some of those are so ip is in app purchase, kind of explain, like what is in app purchase chris benjaminsen 19 39 so new in app purchases, if you can somehow convince a user to pay for something in the game, right, you know, and, and how they pay it's actually quite different across the world so northern europe or usa, right? america has a distributor for a credit card, okay but if you're talking about a consumer in india, it's typically through a gift card or something like that why? they've gone into install and sort of funded a wallet, right but the fact of the matter is, what essentially ends up happening is you have you have an experience in your game that the user feels is worth the value of paying for and again, you know, like, like, like talking about engagement in games, right? why would a user be willing to, to sort of exchange money for something in a game? and that's typically related to the user's expectation of also playing this game two weeks from now? right? yes, they're investing yeah, you're investing in your future experience in this game? right? you know, so so it's another place where this this long-term engagement becomes very important, right? but a lot of times what people are buying are like, simple things, like more lives, or an item, or whatever it is that sort of, and in some of our games that are multiplayer, we even have people playing for things that are purely sort of cosmetic, buying a different hat, because then other people can see the hat that hat, but the hat, the hat has no function, right? sure tony morelan 20 57 so it's just being able to create their own identity, you know, within that game, chris benjaminsen 21 02 it's no different than people buying clothes in the real world, you know? tony morelan 21 05 sure, sure so how do you look at your player demographics for getting the best returns on iap? chris benjaminsen 21 10 i? well, first of all, that's a per game thing right? you know, we have, we have games that appeal to 50 plus women and we have games that appeal to like, like, a young male audience right so that's, that's very individualized per game fundamentally, though, there are some there are some core mechanics that always worked really well, if you can proposition a user to, to exchange money for time yeah so something where they can progress faster if they if they put money in is typically a very strong mechanic, regardless of who the consumer is and then, like we do the thing that successful game developers, do, we spend a lot of time looking at data and looking at, you know, what are the flows that leads to a conversion? so somebody's actually putting money into the system? how do we how do we balance those metrics such that we sort of get the most statistical value of, and we use, we use tools such as ad split testing, okay, where you run, run two versions of the game at the same time, and then you measure which one performs better? and then you make that diversion that everybody plays? tony morelan 22 16 yeah, yeah, no, that's great i've heard that that is a pretty important aspect, not just in the gaming industry, but just with, you know, ads and marketing to do a b testing chris benjaminsen 22 26 yeah, we even do something it's called multi variant testing, right and we should not go into the details, but it becomes very complex very quickly tony morelan 22 33 sure, sure so what other mobile game monetization models do you consider like, you know, premium paid apps or paid user acquisitions, you had mentioned that chris benjaminsen 22 43 we did experiment a little bit with premium paid apps, but it's a very, it's a very tough market and, and it's not, it's not something where we found a lot of a lot of success, like we generally see more successful, and we can just sort of allow anyone to play the games, and not without having that limitation, right and we do both interstitial based advertisement, which is unprompted and then rewarded video type advertisement, where the user gets a reward for watching an advertisement but when a user sort of opts to watch an ad, right, you know, so you could imagine that, so this tony morelan 23 14 is during gameplay, there would be a moment where then a video would play, and they would watch that chris benjaminsen 23 18 yeah so a simple example could be you know, that you have just died yeah and you can revive by watching an advertisement and not paying a coin okay right so giving the user the choice between, say, watching an advertisement and spending a bit of time versus spending a bit of their money, right, you know, so and it's a very high value format because the user has elected to watch an advertisement so you know, the users there, yes, you know, they're engaged and they're just sitting there waiting, right? so advertisements are typically willing to pay a high price for that type of advertising tony morelan 23 54 and you'd mentioned interstitial ads so explain what that is for someone who's new to game development? chris benjaminsen 24 00 yeah so it's a bit like to have to get on television so something is happening on your screen, and then suddenly does an advertisement and something else is happening, right? you know, so it's an ad that is that is shown to the user, like interstitial technically means an advertisement that runs before something starts, right but it's used interchangeably in the games industry to mean like an ad before something starts on ad in the middle of something on that after something happened okay, we try to be cautious of using those type of advertisements sort of out of order like we don't want to interrupt a user while they're playing yeah so we will typically only put those in so like, for whatever reason, your game session has ended, and you have just elected to press play again and that's where we would put in those type of advertisements you do have games out there, which are you can imagine you're playing a solitaire game and then put an ad pops up in the middle of it right and you have to sit down wait till you can continue your game and we try to stay away from that tony morelan 24 55 i see i see what about subscriptions have you guys read any subscription models on your games? so, yeah, we've chris benjaminsen 25 00 run a, we run a few experiments here and it's a relatively new area of monetization for us but we have run experiments where our games have been sort of presented as a games club so rather than having advertisement or having, you know, purchases in the game, you can just play them completely for free if you had a subscription through a third party, right and some of our debug games to the kind of stuff we're building now definitely lends itself well towards being able to support subscriptions subscriptions to free to play games these days, mostly expresses themselves as season passes so you like buy a season pass subscription, and then you get like, extra rewards while you play for a period of time and then that time period is up and then you know, you can buy the next season pass as well, or continue your subscription or whatever it is, right you know, that's, that's the model of like, a, like a fortnight or those type of games tony morelan 25 52 got it so we've talked about in app purchase, aap, you know, there's another category to monetization called ia, which is in app advertising and i think, under that falls, the, you know, the rewarded videos, these interstitial ads have also heard of something called offer walls can you explain what is an offer wall? chris benjaminsen 26 11 yeah, we actually don't think we have any games library or footballs anywhere but it's, it's basically, you know, you can get a reward in your game for doing another action right? so again, it's user opt in the use of one something and find alpha wallets typically, like extra coins, or whatever in the game and to get a get sort of a list of different options for things they could be doing right now to have some level of value and that can go all the way from, you know, signing up to a website, all the way up to you know, committing yourself to four years of sirius xm radio in the us, oh, really, you know, or whatever right? you know, and as there's different types of reward levels of that, right so but they can be significant, right so like that it's, it's sort of a way for other companies to interact with that consumer and get them to do something that has value to them and date and pay you for that service so it's a bit sort of a direct affiliate program or something like okay, okay yeah okay tony morelan 27 11 interesting so, you know, a lot of what we talked about now have been in game, you know, advertising for monetization so what about paid user acquisition? so actually going out there and advertising for your game? so you guys are active in that area? chris benjaminsen 27 23 not particularly, it's something we are exploring, and it is something that i believe it's going to be very important for the future of frp yeah but historically, it's not something that we done to a huge extent however, it is an area where we actually partner with the samsung galaxy appstore team, where we were looking at what is the best path for somebody who is publishing on the samsung galaxy app store to find sort of pockets of uses that can be that can be purchased right? tony morelan 27 51 okay okay so of all these different ways that we've talked about when it comes to monetization, what would you say is the most effective way in why? chris benjaminsen 28 00 and so there's many answers to that what has been the most successful for frvr suffice advertisement, that has mostly down to the kind of games that we have been building historically and the kind of games we've been building historically has mostly been the result of the capabilities for the platforms, our games has been available on, which, by and large, have not supported in app purchases however, if you were to look at where is the most potential value, it's most definitely in the in-app purchase space, right? like the potential value that you can derive from a single user is larger in app purchases than any other way you can monetize that user, even with subscriptions, right? make some simple math, you know, rewarded video is considered valuable, right but if you have a player, sort of watching 1000 ads a month, that might sort of in the united states be worth $20, or thereabouts, where $20 is not an uncommon average transactions for a central user to spending in app purchases, right and people typically buy more than once sort of the opportunity to create a great business around in app purchases is much higher, and opportunity to create a great business purely from advertisement tony morelan 29 08 got it? what would you say would be some advice that you can give for a developer looking to integrate iap? chris benjaminsen 29 15 like, like, it goes back to what we talked about earlier right? you know, build deep experiences, right? sure for like engagements, yeah, long engagements, and then then allow people to buy something that they, you know, feel like they're going to get value from a long period of time right and i think an important thing there is you must be trustworthy as a developer yeah right you know, like, like, like, the player must trust you to not to screw them over so if you have all kinds of other stuff into games, where they feel cheated, they're not going to give you their money or if you cheat them, they're only going to do it once right? yeah you know, so you actually have to provide something that brings real value to the user otherwise, they're, they're not going to engage with that thing right like they're not, they're not stupid they are very clever tony morelan 29 57 yeah so let's talk about a how you guys go about acquiring games for frvr? what do you look for? chris benjaminsen 30 03 like we look for, for great teams and i think it's important here that we are publisher, right? so we work with developers who take a fair amount of that total risk of building a game sometimes you find the games, right but predominantly, we work with great teams that is passionate about the game that they're working on and that's, that's mostly what we look for okay and then we help though, those developers to go and, and build fantastic games, right but due to the nature of our platform, at least how its structured right? now, you must basically build the game from scratch on top of stuff so so we're not a publisher that can sort of accept a game that somebody's already built, and say, yeah, we'll publish that it's more sort of a cool collaborative co development process, where we work together with developers to create fantastic things that work on top of our platform tony morelan 30 51 you know, i heard somewhere that between 50 to 1000 games are added to the app store's every day so i know it's a huge competition when it comes to games what's your strategy for discoverability? chris benjaminsen 31 03 i like as we talked about, go to the user where they are, rather than trying to drag them to the app store where it's very competitive, right and, like we use, we use all the tricks including branding, like we now have significant volume of people just searching for our games every day, both in app stores and on google, right and i truly did that basic strategy of saying let's bring our games to where the users are, has been very, very successful for us, and allowed us to sort of get in front of all of these consumers without diving deep into cost positive user acquisition and things like that and dental labs though, say they're hyper competitive, it gets very, very hard to get your game there, right and people talk about all of these things like influencer, marketing, and whatever and they don't call it user acquisition, but that's just what it is right? you know, it's just a different way of doing it right you know, it's all of these hacks to try to get in front of the user tony morelan 31 54 so are you using tools like creating promotional trailer videos and posting them on youtube? chris benjaminsen 32 00 we do we do that for some of our debug games, like a game like wells frvr yeah there's like there's a content team that creates content for social media that being you know; youtube and facebook and i think we even have posts on tik tok okay, tony morelan 32 14 so you guys have a ton of experience now, when it when it comes to publishing games? i'm sure you faced a few challenges can you share some stories and how you overcame those challenges? chris benjaminsen 32 24 a lot of our challenges is around scale right? you know, so we have 70 games on 39 platforms right wow and that didn't that in itself is a big number, right? to sort of, sort of manage this, like, that's more than 2000 combinations, almost 3000 combinations, right? we also have all of those games in 20 languages so when you when you sort of factor in those combinations, that's 50,000 combinations, right? and if you want localize screenshots, yeah, that's no way you could do that with humans, right and a lot of ways we try to solve with technology, right? that's what the what the frvr platform does, okay, encapsulate just the complexity of trying to do all of these things into sort of a unified platform and that goes for what is a good experience on the samsung galaxy appstore, like the samsung galaxy appstore has specific capabilities and specific api's and specific sort of things that work particularly well on a platform and if every developer had to consider that for all the platforms we were on, they would be spending none of their time making great games so we encapsulate that complexity into our platform and that's sort of the recipe that makes frvr work that's sort of removing humans from the equation, basically, tony morelan 33 42 that's interesting i mean, i can totally see how you guys are able to scale your reach with having so many games, but you've got quite a team behind so it's not all automated, you still do need to have those employees to support that chris benjaminsen 33 56 yeah, but like, 95% of those people work on the platform, right? to build the to build the infrastructure, right and frvr is also a company that's been growing quite a lot, i think, okay, two years ago, we were we were fewer than 20 people right? so a lot of the people who actually worked at frvr now people who joined us in the last year tony morelan 34 15 so what are some of the trends that you've seen in the in the gaming industry chris benjaminsen 34 19 or hotels that there's a lot of them right you know, there's a like i think the status trend i see is when you have say and among us or a fall guys or a flappy birds come out and be successful, like, like older people who try to get success by just following that recipe right? not realizing that the reasons those game were successful originally were sort of a bit of luck and timing and typically some external factors, like among us grew with discord and discord grew it among us yeah, right and that was sort of sort of the game to play on that platform, right and all the other games in that in that category by and large failed because it was just like it and not again but that right and, and a thing i think a lot of people have forgotten is that the game industry is cyclical, right? so you get a new channel it comes out it's very cheap and easy to get users on it initially and then that's the value of that platform goes up, it just becomes more and more expensive, right and people have sort of forgotten that's how the games industry used to work because mobile came along yeah and stuck around for a very long time to do to sort of these stores that were tied to specific devices right which, which is something you didn't really have on a on a pc, where there was more open competition on who could sort of have an app store tony morelan 35 40 yeah, yeah, for sure so tell me what is in the future for frvr chris benjaminsen 35 45 a lot more high-quality games? like that's basically our focus right now we are very fortunate, we just closed out a round funding wonderful yeah, thank you and like, the entire theme of that funding is we need, we need games of a completely different quality, right? so we are we are looking for fantastic studios who can come in and build games with sort of that depth that can support in app purchases that's the thing that we really want to focus on we want to want to have games that can have people play for years, not just once, right? tony morelan 36 18 yeah so as far vr is seeing this growth, what are you guys doing related to diversity and inclusion? chris benjaminsen 36 26 and we do a lot of things, right, like diversity and inclusion is something that we try to sort of have both across our games and across our company culture, right? so it can be everything from i personally created the hex frvr game so yeah, i got a nice email from somebody said, i love this game, but it can they call us i can see the different things, right so making sure that you're aware of the different kinds of colorblind people can be sure, sure and it also it also means a lot for hiring, like, like, what's the best candidate for the job is not necessarily the person that fits the checklist, the best that you see that you put on your yeah, other requirements yeah, in like diverse teams perform better so diversity is a is a virtue in the hiring process and it can be advantageous to hire the more diverse candidate if you have an opportunity to hire too, and like, but it means a lot like you have to be mindful of it everywhere those like natural biases, right now, a simple example of that is that the more bullet points you put on a on a job post about specific requirements, the less likely it is that females would, will apply for a job interesting, like a male candidate would sort of look at a long bullet point and see two things that good and go, yeah, i could totally do this, right? where if fema will see a long list and sort of say, i can only do two of these things i shouldn't apply for this right so you have to be mindful of those things all the way tony morelan 37 52 interesting yeah, i think giving someone the opportunity to really talk about their personality, and their value is probably the best way to go about finding that that good candidate chris benjaminsen 38 02 yeah and it's a big part of our it's a big part of our sort of, sort of, sort of hiring flow is the values right? you know, we also a, a company in portugal, that doesn't behave like a portuguese company, this particular company, company structure in particular is very hierarchical, right you know, some people might call it a bit old fashioned that's not the company we are, that's not the company we want to be so we want people that resonates with sort of a more flat structure, modern ways of working tony morelan 38 34 wonderful so if someone is interested, either in working for frvr, or their a game studio that want to bring their games to you, what's the best way for them to reach out to frvr? chris benjaminsen 38 45 like, like, send me an email first, right? you know, and, you know, i'll redirect you to the right person, my email is chris@frvr com so it's fairly straightforward, right? like, always happy to chat with people who do fantastic things tony morelan 38 57 yeah, that's great and we'll include links in the show notes too much about what we talked about today and into frvr websites so chris, i got to say, it was great to have you on the podcast i love learning all about frvr and what you guys are doing but let me ask when you're not working for frp or what is it that you'd like to do for fun? chris benjaminsen 39 15 i find most of my spare time is taken up by you know, walking the dog, or, you know, cooking food if it's some like i'm probably not good at cooking food in the winter but you know, like i like to grill outdoors and whatever right you know, and i actually try to keep a fairly strict work life balance wonderful so you know i am one of the people who like go into the office but mostly yes a way to not work while i'm at home tony morelan 39 40 that's great well hey, we're just about to hit the springtime of the year and soon will come summer so i'm sure you're going to enjoy lots of outdoor grilling when the when the season comes chris benjaminsen 39 49 hopefully, you never know where they're somewhere in london right? you know, that might be like two days where it's impossible that's tony morelan 39 56 awesome hey, chris, really appreciate you coming on the podcast today chris benjaminsen 39 59 no, thank do so much for having me closing 40 01 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding it all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 40 17 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu
