Discussing the future of how game studios can build creatives

Last Monday, we gained another great addition to our fast-growing commercial team in London. Joining as Vice President, Operations, John Wright (formerly at Coda, ironSource, Green Man Gaming) will be leading and scaling our business operations.

For those who haven’t met John yet, he has been in the gaming industry for over six years. Throughout his career, he has spearheaded commercial growth, and nurtured close partnerships with a portfolio of household names, such as Zynga, Rovio, Ubisoft, Ketchapp, Kwalee, Rollic, and Outfit 7.

To properly welcome John on his first day, we decided to pick his brain about how he sees the production of creatives is evolving for game studios.

Welcome, John! So, tell us — how did you hear about Luna Labs?

I first learned about Luna Labs from a friend in the industry — he was the Chief Design Officer for a huge tech and gaming company. Given the rise of playables between late 2018 and early 2019, he, along with the majority of the industry, wanted to know which company was best for playable production.

As someone who was working with big names like Kwalee and Outfit 7 at the time, I was also super interested in finding out. So, after many tests and conversations with different companies, it then became apparent to me that Luna Labs was that company.

Shortly after, I met with Steve (our CEO) and Adam (CPO). I then quickly became a regular advocate.

What most excited you about Luna that led you to join the team?

Honestly, it was a combination of the technology and great people. I learned very quickly what the company’s mindset was the moment I spoke to Steve and Adam. We want to build products that solve the pain points game studios have around creatives.

Given the current climate, creatives are probably the most important aspect of marketing within the mobile gaming ecosystem. And… on a personal note, who doesn’t like to be a part of a company full of forward-thinking and fun individuals?

Based on your past experience, how do you think Luna is helping to innovate the way game studios produce creatives?

Up to this stage, there had been a lot of companies profiting from building playables. Although we also started in this area, I learned that we quickly went beyond and built something so much more.

Now, we’re offering a suite of products that enable game studios to produce incredible quality marketing creatives whilst significantly improving team efficiency.

It’s really a two-pronged attack. Firstly, our technology improves the quality of the studios’ ads. And, at the same time, it saves them a countless number of hours, by freeing up their teams’ time to focus more on strategic decisions, test more ad concepts and game prototypes than ever before.

You’ve worked closely with many game studios both large and small, and have seen both sides of the fence so to speak. What do you see as the most common challenge they are facing right now when it comes to creatives? How is Luna Labs able to solve this?

Everything we do at Luna Labs is aimed at improving the way game studios work with creatives. Aside from building games, producing creatives is single-handedly the most time consuming and important aspect of a studio’s day.

We’ve seen IPM (installs per 1000 impressions) become the key optimisation metric for almost every studio out there. With our technology, it’ll no doubt help in a multitude of areas. I mean take a look at our product suite!

Using the game code itself, Luna Playable enables studios to produce the most accurate playables on the market with their existing Unity build.

Our platform, Luna Playground, is where they create multi-variant tests to find the best combinations of the in-game elements (characters, CTA, colours, languages, etc.) they’ve previously selected.

To simplify the process of creative testing, we have Dynamic Playables. This feature dynamically optimises the content of the ad to find the experiences that drive the highest performance.

Then, there is Luna Replay (currently in beta-testing), which I believe could really revolutionise the way that gaming companies work with videos. Using the new Replay Unity plugin, users can tag a multitude of in-game elements, click a few buttons, then produce dozens of gameplay video variations to test.

It’s not uncommon that studios spend a majority of their time re-recording these gameplay videos and making small changes to them to optimize IPM.

Well, Replay removes that laborious task completely, enabling UA managers to bring down install costs in return (the higher the IPM, the lower the CPI can be — all while maximizing the eCPM).

Before we let you get on with your day, do you have any predictions you can share about creatives in gaming for this year and beyond?

#1. More automation, bringing studios together as a result.

Teams will be integrating more automation into their structures, resulting in the user acquisition and design teams working more closely and strategically together than ever before.

#2. The rise of higher quality ad creatives, resulting in better quality users acquired.

The quality and integrity of ads will go in a more positive direction as Apple, Facebook, and Google will help reduce the aggressive firing click to the store model that rose in popularity over the past 12 months. Although this may lead to an overall drop in IPM, I would expect the quality of users acquired (from a retention and ARPU perspective) to improve.

I can also foresee this resulting in the demise of the super-popular GIF end card that many hyper-casual developers have strongly adopted.

Great chat! Thanks again for your time, John. We’re very happy to have you on board.

If you would like to catch up with John, please send him an e-mail at john@lunalabs.uk.

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