As you know, Slush has long been one of the shortest distances between technology and startups. Organized for the first time in 2008, Slush hosted 5000 startup founders, 3000 investors, and many industry professionals this year.
As the event progressed, one of the most awaited talks of the last day was the panel where the legendary Riccardo Zacconi, who was King‘s co-founder and continued his duty at King as CEO until 2020, will address the attendees together with Index Ventures partner Sofia Dolfe.
We attended the panel as a media partner, and Riccardo Zacconi gave great anecdotes throughout the talk, from the importance of the product to stories from his long career. He also praised Dream Games’ successes in his speech.
Dream Games’s Royal Match was one of the highest-grossing mobile games in the world and ranked among the top 10 mobile games in the US, UK, and other key markets.
“We were talking about diversification, and when we worked together with Activision, they were talking about diversification. So, in the sense that when you have a game that does well, what’s proven also is that you have longevity in the games. So you don’t always have to come up with the next game. Suppose a game is really strong, and a strong brand has a strong user base. In that case, if you focus on execution, making the game better, surprising customers, and keeping them entertained, you can keep them for a very long time, and the game is still in the top charts. And I think Dream Games is another example of that.”
Sofia Dolfe also made some remarks on the subject.
“Dream Games, of course another company that we’ve been fortunate to partner with. Actually, one thing that I’ve learned from both Soner Aydemir, CEO of Dream Games, and from some of the conversations that you and I have been having, is that product is at the core, and it all starts with a product, and that you don’t need to innovate across every area of the product. But you need to have that culture of excellence, and every decision has to be well balanced and really well thought through.”
During the lengthy conversation, Riccardo Zacconi’s remarks on innovation were also remarkable. Zacconi stated that it is impossible to come across a product like Minecraft every day. Still, if you can internalize the elements that make the product whole and simplify it in a way that is easier for the user to understand, you have a good chance. The figures he gave about Candy Crush were also remarkable.
“If you take elements easier for the user to understand and get into, and then you innovate around it so that the user prefers your game versus others and wants to recommend it. That’s when suddenly you have something that has high retention. And when you have high retention, that’s the base for everything. From there, you can do marketing and scale the company. And so, how do you know when you have a winner? Well, our key metric was retention, and his retention also. So, anything over 40% on day one is a good game. To put it in perspective, Candy Crush, when we launched, was 65% day-one retention. And once you have, and that was the start, and when you have that, then you can optimize and make it better. From there, you can increase and optimize the day two, day seven, and day 30 retention and make sure that the users physically stay, and then you can also apply the monetization. And then innovate and monetize. We also innovated on that side. But the retention is the number one. If the retention is not good, then you lose the customers, and there is no way that you can optimize. Any optimization after that is hard work.”
Candy Crush, created by King, is considered one of the living legends of the mobile gaming world, and Riccardo Zacconi has a well-deserved prestige as one of the pillars of this story.
