FRVRS - First Time
From Corporate companies to early-stage startups, it's not Guilhermes first time disrupting a sector. In Telecommunications, he helped bring the first triple-play operator to Portugal, managing multiple areas like Customer Service & Retention, Technical Operations and Logistics. In Angola, he was on the team that created one of the biggest satellite providers in Africa, going from 40k Customers to 1M in one year and a half.
FRVRS - First Time
Through a deep understanding of technology, Michael has been working as an opportunity enabler from his first job as a Tech Lead at BankInvest in Denmark through his 20 years as a serial entrepreneur with gaming platform Networkleague and Data Mining at Netminers and Scitylana.
Knowing when to stop or when to explore further, we seek the 20% effort that drives 80% impact. Life is too short and our goals are too big to waste time on being complicated or playing politics. We act on our thoughts and speak with honesty and respect, always from the heart.
Brian Meidell:There's quite a few. We are mostly focused on the worldbeyond the app stores. Most of the game industry currently would be on mobileapp stores, I think. And today people on mobile devices is basically most ofwhat we consider computer users and gamers. But on mobile, the distributionmodel is just fundamentally broken.Generally, people end up playing the game that was advertised the heaviest tothem. That makes it so that the people who make games generally have a real hardtime reaching their audience because they can't compete with a hundred milliondollars marketing budgets. And the people who play games generally get to playthe games that monetize them the most aggressively. And we don't feel likethat's an ideal situation for the players or the developers. We are currentlytrying to solve that.
Chris Benjaminsen:Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Making a good game today isprobably less than 10% of actually being a successful game developer. Of course,you have people who are lucky who stand out. The people you hear about, whereit's a single developer who just happened to make that game that was good enough,I think YouTube picking it up. But that is an unnatural state of affair. Thatis not the story of the average developer.What we're trying to do is we're trying to get the games in the hands of theusers without them necessarily having to go through this inherently abusiveprocess of user acquisition. And what we found by doing so is that the consumersdon't inherently have a preference for technology. As long as they get a goodgame that they can enjoy they don't typically even know or care about how theygot that good game. And that has opened up an opportunity for distributing gamesin different ways.When I was really young, the way we would do it is we would find a user on theInternet through a browser, a better version of the game. And then we wouldup-sell them to playing the mobile app version. But as the market has maturedand as mobile phone has become more powerful, that need to move people into amobile app has gone away because now we can provide sometimes even a betterexperience outside of the app store than inside the app store.And that might sound counterproductive, right? If you look at the averageconsumer today, they have much more than a hundred percent of the time taken upby entertainment. People are playing games while watching shows or whatever.People already have something to do. There's no minute in the day where aconsumer is not entertained, right?
Roland Siebelink:How many games do you have right now? And how's it lookingin terms of the distribution of users? Is there one game really having the bulkof all your traffic or is it more of a distribution that is also maybe shiftingover time?
Brian Meidell:It actually shifts over time. But in general, I think allgame portfolios will always have some sort of power law distribution. There willalways be a few number of titles that have a relatively high percentage of thetraffic. We've seen over time that we've gotten better and better at compressingthat field.It's a little bit special for us because we don't just operate in a singlemarket. We operate in many, many markets on top of each other. We tend to havethese wild growth spikes in one market or another market, which will makewhatever I say now true right now but probably untrue by the end of theconversation. It certainly is getting better and better over time to the pointwhere quite a few titles are seeing some really significant traffic.
Brian Meidell:And we started unpacking the strategy to realize it was amuch larger market opportunity. It was very clear that there was a paradigmshift happening where the 10 years of ironclad rule of the app stores wasstarting to show some cracks. And it's interesting, for all the time that we'veworked together, we've never pivoted or changed the direction of the strategy.But it has become both more focused and execution and way more expansive inambition. It's interesting to see how it's continued. The red thread is veryclear all the way back. But the ambition has just grown insanely since westarted.
Brian Meidell:Yeah. Actually, when we first started walking around atconferences, talking about this stuff to people, it was a pretty fringy lunaticidea that there was something beyond the app store. You'd have people that havegrown up their entire professional careers inside of the reign of the appstores. They consider the market dynamics of the app stores their laws ofphysics. They're immutable. But we're old farts, so we've been around theprevious 17 game distribution paradigms. And we could recognize the winds ofchange when we started seeing them.
Brian Meidell:We ended up finding a methodology that we call the four ates.Which is a smart way of saying - a clever way of saying we usually separatestuff into four stages and they're of wildly different length. But it reallyhelped communicate how we do this stuff.The four ates: validate, replicate, formulate, and automate. And we start byvalidating something as cheaply and simply as possible. And it's great practiceto think of it - it should be absolutely thrown away when you've tested it. Andthen if it works out, then we replicate it. And then we might clean up the worstof it and make it a little bit more prepared for the future. But still very,very cheap and effective ways of testing things out.And once it's been proven that it works multiple times, then we start toformulate it. And this is by far the most difficult step. It's basically goingfrom something that runs on intuition and "maybes" to proving it out with dataand finding out how it works. And then once we get to the point where we havethe recipe, then usually it lends itself to be fully or partially automated.And then we invest in making it. And this is key to how we captured all thatcomplexity was because once we figured out the correct sequence of things to doto launch on the app stores, then it became a single command that fired off 20other commands that did all the right steps in the right order.
Brian Meidell:Well, we have a very strong core of techies. But we likepeople who are strong technically and who have market sensibilities. We've beenhiring pretty aggressively in the engineering department because traditionallywe've had a very tiny engineering department who has managed to do a lot in ashort amount of time. But now we're getting to the point where we want to beable to do many more things in parallel. And we validated the unit economics ofwhat we do and the basic system. Now we're ramping up to be able to capture moreopportunities in parallel.
Today, the way a song can reach listeners around the world is latent and yes, there are many of us who are making music in Spanish. The global trend is favoring us as well as at the time the music in English reached all corners. It becomes a virtuous circle because many of the current composers were very influenced by English music.
On the heels of receiving $76 million in funding, casual games platform FRVR has expanded its games portfolio with the acquisition of F2P first-person shooter game Krunker.io for an undisclosed amount.
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