Transcript: How Games Make Money — and What Every PM Can Steal From Game Psychology | Ron Finkelstein, PLAYSTUDIOS

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi, this is Eyal. Welcome to Product Builder, the place for the most interesting product conversations. I'm the owner of Userflows, and among other things the host of this podcast, and my goal here is for us to improve our product skills together. If this is your first time here, I hope you enjoy it. And if you've already been here and got value from it, I'd really love it if you'd share the podcast with a friend. So come on, let's get started!

Ron Finkelstein: [00:28] Hey Ron, what's up? Good. Did you come by bus? I came by bus. Where are you coming from? I'm coming from the old Barbie area, the Bloomfield area, the PLAYSTUDIOS offices.

Eyal David: [00:39] Very far, but an isolated island in south Tel Aviv. Depends where from. So tell us a bit, actually, tell us a bit about the career that brought you to PLAYSTUDIOS.

Ron Finkelstein: [00:50] Cool, so I'll take us ten years back, 2014, I started my career in gaming, as a product manager at Playtika, after three years as a copywriter, I was more on the advertising side, I went to Playtika, I tried to get accepted at Playtika twice, I didn't succeed, for various reasons, of course lack of experience, and I went to study user experience design, at the time there was a school called Netcraft, Netcraft Academy, somewhere in Ramat Gan, I studied it, I finished the course and got accepted. Really, you found a job afterward? Yes. As what? As a product manager? Yes. Amazing. On a game called Slotomania, for those who don't know it, well, they don't know it, but those who do, in gaming, it's still considered one of the biggest social casino games in the world, and I was there at Playtika for almost nine years, across a variety of games, and from there I moved to the more casual worlds, I moved to a Brazilian company, which is tropical and exotic, but they had a branch here in Tel Aviv, I managed the product on... a game called Zooba, which is like Brawl Stars, with cute animals, and today I've found myself once again in the casino industry, at a company called PLAYSTUDIOS. All these last ten years I was in the same position, meaning in product, I rolled from PM, to team lead, to director, but it's the same thing, like, and I really love it, and I live it from morning till night, highly recommend it to anyone who wants it. Amazing, so you threw out a lot of terms here,

Eyal David: [02:28] so tell us about the different types of games, you said for example social casino, what are the differences? So at Playtika I was on Slotomania, which is a social casino game,

Ron Finkelstein: [02:39] it means that a person, a user, enters the game, for free, spins the slots, the slot machines, on their coins, on their gold coins, and that's it, they win, they win, they're happy, they don't win, they don't win, nothing happened, if they want to wait a few more hours to get free ones, they wait, they take, today or tomorrow they'll get free ones too, and if they want to participate in features, then they enjoy the content I created for them, and that's what we did in the product department. So that's what they pay for, actually, for more features, for...

Eyal David: [03:11] they can pay, that's what they roll the coins on. But that's the model. Okay, so about the model, if they have no patience, and they want it now, now, now,

Ron Finkelstein: [03:20] to enjoy a slightly more premium experience, a bit more extreme, then yes they pay, every payment is a micropayment of a dollar, up to 100 dollars, to get tons of coins at once. They also get chip packs, and all sorts of little sub-coins, where each little coin gives them participation in a different feature, so they have an experience. Play, play, other games. Totally. Great. What other types of games are there? So I also worked on a poker game, of the WSOP brand, I also worked at Playtika as a team lead, then I moved to casual games, I moved to a division of Playtika called Jelly, Jelly Button, that's the startup Playtika bought, actually Jelly was like an incubator for producing new games, at the time Playtika had a strategy of both developing existing games, and also creating new ones, so at Jelly we created a game called Merge Stories, a super cool game, complex, you fight, you assemble, you assemble characters, you fight against bosses, something really cool, it came out at the end of '23,

Eyal David: [04:28] but unfortunately it closed, very quickly, it was too expensive. Can you expand on that a bit, on the economics of a game?

Ron Finkelstein: [04:35] Wow, yeah, sure, that's a topic in itself, but basically, a game is worthwhile, if you know how to bring the players back. Marketing costs a lot of money, development costs a lot of money, design, people, talent, even the computer we have here also costs a lot of money, and you need to know how to recoup it. The return on a game, you can examine it in the first months it's live. First of all, how many players come back? They come back day one, day seven, half a month, a month, a year, and then to see, economically, financially who pays, the first payment, the second payment, what they even pay for; the difference between casino and casual is the amount of content. In casual the content runs out, the world ends, that's it, there's nothing more to do. No more bad guys to kill. In casino you can spin endlessly. So when you build a game, and design the game design in a casual game, you have to think, okay, I have thirty days of content, so if I let a person buy on the second day, say, for 50 dollars, that's it. They finished the game. No, that's it, it's over. They have no reason to buy anymore. So it's a worthwhile-ness with a very complex model.

Eyal David: [05:47] So go on, are there more types of games you worked on? So I worked in a genre called battle royale,

Ron Finkelstein: [05:54] I'm sure some of you know Brawl Stars, where you basically enter an arena with so-and-so-many other players, and you fight each other, so I played, I mean I worked, I managed the game design and the product of Zooba, which is a cute game, with cute animals, that fight each other, and they have swords, and spears, and shields, and power-ups, and all sorts of those, and it was really fun. What did you learn about the Brazilian market? So the market, actually, the company was Brazilian, but the market wasn't Brazilian. There were players from Brazil, but mainly Americans and Europeans, and mainly young. The target audience of this casual game was really young, I had to speak to them in their language, also the community, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Twitch, suddenly you speak to them in a much younger language, than like messages for adults, you know what I mean? And it was a bit strange to get into that head, suddenly, but say I'd run a design contest for them, you adults, it's not interesting, but you young people, suddenly you make dolls. We made dolls. What ages are we talking about? 18 to 30.

Eyal David: [07:02] They already have a credit card. That wasn't the problem. So can you tell us a bit, actually, what products you work on today? So today I,

Ron Finkelstein: [07:10] for a year and a few months, on a game that, you can tell, I went back to the worlds of social casino. It's a game that was established somewhere in 2013, 2014, by that same PLAYSTUDIOS, but in America. It went through many iterations, many people worked on it, and we set up a team of Israelis,

Eyal David: [07:31] here in Tel Aviv, who manage the game, already for a year and a half. Great, so tell us something, what is this team, actually?

Ron Finkelstein: [07:38] What does it consist of? What does a game's team look like? Okay, so from a really high-level view, obviously every game has its own structure, but basically, in Israel, games are managed such that there's like a GM, which is like a small CEO, could also be a big CEO, because actually Slotomania is a huge company, so the GM is basically a manager of very large revenue, but anyway, there's a GM, and below them there are leads, usually divided, the classic is product, R&D, art, economy, analytics, monetization, which we'll talk about soon, and HR. I almost didn't forget anyone, sometimes there's also production, sometimes there's also game design, but sometimes it's combined too. And with us it's like that too.

Eyal David: [08:26] So go on, tell us a bit about economy, monetization, you mentioned them. Yeah, so economy, so when I say economy to people

Ron Finkelstein: [08:33] who don't come from the games market, it sounds like, what, is he an accountant? What, does he do the financial balance sheet every month? So no, he's not an accountant, and he doesn't work in finance, he produces the experience of the effort and rewards of the game. For example, if you've ever played, obviously, most of us have played Match 3 games, whether it's Candy Crush, or whether it's Royal Match, whatever, sometimes it was hard for us, and sometimes it was easy, and sometimes we got amazing rewards that made us come back, and sometimes we got peanuts. That's economy. The economy produces the... it needs to look at the broad picture of the player's whole progression in the game, to see what they get, how fast they progress, how much... when they need to buy, when they're actually put

Eyal David: [09:17] into a decision junction to keep playing, or to stop for a moment, that's economy. How does it work? Is there a template you work by and adapt per game, do you build it on the fly

Ron Finkelstein: [09:25] during runtime, is it dynamic, what does it look like? So it's very hard to put everything in a template. I think economy people are people who are both creative, and analytical, and also understand games. I, my role, part of the design I produce is to give the economist the desired experience. For example, I want it to be easy at the start, then medium, then automatic, then hard, like a roller coaster. And they, from the profession, need to understand this brief and create from it the right values. And there are models that passed down from father to son from the big companies, like say, there's a feature called album, talk about it, so the album experience is one most of us know, meaning, most of us in the industry. And there are things clear on how to do it. But the bits and bytes, that's art. It's really their... okay, a bit like product management. And then, actually, monetization? Okay. So it's also a role very unique to the gaming market, surely those who listen, you know it, monetization. When you arrive at a game, there are daily activities there, there are people managing a calendar, where every day something happens, every weekend something happens, every holiday something happens. Whether it's a sale, or a promotion, or an event, or even a reskin of a feature, that comes from monetization. They're basically the product side, but facing the customers, facing the users. Producing a party for them every day. Kind of, actually, if I think

Eyal David: [10:59] about it, monetization is basically responsible for being products that lead to... products that basically lead to purchases, at the end of the day, easy. And basically the economists, they're responsible for the logic that also keeps you, that also produces interest, also engagement, which is the same thing basically, and keeps me hooked inside the game. There's also a marketing leg, you mentioned it?

Ron Finkelstein: [11:21] So marketing is a bit external to the game. In most games, it's an external department that provides services to several games. The marketing department, say, at PLAYSTUDIOS provides service to all of PLAYSTUDIOS's games. There's a representative who sits with us, but actually they're not subordinate structurally to us, but yes, they too are the outgoing side. We

Eyal David: [11:42] bring in and they're the outgoing side. It's funny, because such products are such a creative thing, but there's actually a layer of what's called the funnel, very clear, where you need to create clear events, everything is actually engineered at the end of the day with a lot of the game's creativity. First of all, it's all

Ron Finkelstein: [11:56] planned. Meaning that a veteran game like ours, with a company that needs to know, there are clear targets at the start of the year, we need to plan the year like this, okay, there's flexibility and there are needs, but basically we need to show both growth and meeting targets, and also, you know, month to month we know by how much we'll rise, or forecast a drop if there's no big feature, and so on.

Eyal David: [12:19] So things are already clearer as time goes on. Tell me, you as a product manager basically serve all these parties, so first, I'm curious how you prioritize things, whether it's a dollar sign or something else, you mentioned in economy too, it's not necessarily a dollar sign,

Ron Finkelstein: [12:35] and what does your day-to-day even look like? So let's start with how you do prioritization. I get requirements from all the departments, whether it's management, management wants something, we sit down, ask why, understand the KPIs, understand if it even holds up, if it even makes sense, and produce a kind of feature and sell it to my internal management, to the leads who sit next to me, and they agree whether it's cool or not cool, and then I basically also get requirements from monetization, from economy, from marketing, and so on. Based on what do I prioritize? So first of all by cost, how much does it cost? If it's two days of work, I'm just making it up, if it's two days of work, come on, let's do it, like a no-brainer, but if it's a complex event, you need to understand, like, what's the business value, what do they get from it? By the way, it's not a dollar, business value, in games it can also be retention, meaning, how much a player comes back day after day, or it can also be transparency of information, what does that mean, transparency of information? Data, the data isn't logged properly, and now we're improving it, very important, because later it's required to fix and improve, not everything translates to money. You're talking about tracking, actually. Tracking. Okay, tracking is still measured by the dollar that I can recoup with it, but fair enough. Cool. And there are things that are, for example, I want to raise, in games, just, an example soon, in a live game, you want some thing called K-factor to be high. Meaning that you have more organic than non-organic. You bring in tons of players, but most, or at least a significant part of them, are organic and you didn't pay for them. So how do you do that? Through motivations to invite friends, motivations to post it on social networks, motivations to play against others, tournament, leaderboard, cooperation and such. So it's also... how is it today? Is there still something to invent in these areas, or is it already... what? What is invention? I think the vast majority of games there are today in the App Store are reruns of what you know, but the execution is different. And I'll show you how it's different. Even, you know, Monopoly Go, an amazing game, makes tons of money, everyone's happy, players love it, everything's positive, really, a perfect game. It didn't reinvent the wheel. But Monopoly is an amazing IP, on a mechanic that was made somewhere, I hope they won't be angry that I say this, but somewhere at Jelly Button, at Board Kings, that's a game where there too you rolled the dice, advanced on a board.

Eyal David: [15:04] They simply did it, perfectly. Okay, so we talked about different KPIs, we talked about all sorts of types of business models, basically all the members at the party. You also wanted to mention the VIP club. Yes, so, okay.

Ron Finkelstein: [15:17] There are many games that have loyalty. Meaning that you have tiers. It's basically based on your purchase habits. Playtika too has a VIP club, one to seven, and basically it's based on purchases. The more you buy, the more benefits you get. Say, right now I'm dealing with a challenge that's not only the VIP tier, but also a kind of, they call it Play Awards. It's like real prizes inside a digital game. Like a VIP program where you can kind of buy with reward points in the real world. It's like punch cards, actually. No, no. When you play on your iPhone or Android, and based on play time, you get points. And with these points you go. You say, I want breakfast. I want a flight. I want, of course the price is different, but I want a cruise. So it's basically a challenge I hadn't dealt with until today. Like the motivation for a digital purchase is very different from the motivation to go out on a trip now with the whole family and go to just some resort that I bought today in order to test it out. A helicopter flight. So you need to sell them that somehow and make it accessible in a product way so that the players understand it's worthwhile for them. And when you look for a minute

Eyal David: [16:40] at the different layers of users in the app, you started to touch on this, actually. There's a layer like that that you nurture more, that's basically the heart

Ron Finkelstein: [16:47] of the business, right? What does it look like? So veteran games are based mainly, or you know, we'd be happy if not, but that's the situation. Because the market is very big and players kind of move to tons of games, so your loyal audience, that's usually your VIP audience. So high tiers who also play a lot, they spin a lot and deposit, so they have customer service reps who take care of them, and talk to them, and they sit in Vegas at our company,

Eyal David: [17:20] and give them different treatment. No kid gloves, I assume, but more than that, you also change features for them? You treat them in the business plan, in your P&L, more, like differently from the others? What does it look like? It's interesting, there's a chance

Ron Finkelstein: [17:33] you talked to my boss, because we discussed exactly this today in the morning, that you basically need to take every feature we do, and think how to make it accessible differently to the VIP players, so they'll feel more exclusive. Whether it's just visibility, cool, you know, again that same kitschy VIP art, but it can also be expressed in access to a feature. It can be expressed in a different economy, it can be expressed in prizes, it can be expressed in boosters. So the product needs to think about this, and when we spec a feature, we already

Eyal David: [18:03] take into account how to treat it differently. There's really a preference for them, interesting. Yes. For this group. You touched on this kind of in passing, tell me what's the difference, actually, between a new game and an existing game? How easy is it, how hard is it? Okay,

Ron Finkelstein: [18:19] I don't know which of your listeners are parents, but a baby is really hard. Really, really hard, and a big kid is also hard, but manageable. I have, by the way, two daughters, one is nine, and one is five, it was really hard, now it's just hard. So a live game, it exists, there's a user base, there's a community, there are features, there's a core mechanic, and you take care of it. Not that it's easy, they go to other games, you need to keep them, you need to bring in more new players, you need to think creatively, okay? There are tons and tons and tons of talented people here in Israel in the industry, who took veteran games, and grew them significantly, not only in the top line, but also in the bottom, in the profit. Why? Because they streamlined the processes, did things better, but still it's the same core mechanic. A game in setup, that's very, that's different. You need, first of all you need to see the market, what's good today, what's not good today, what's trendy, what's not trendy, there are all sorts of trends. Whether you even have money to pay salaries, whether you have money for offices, whether you have money for marketing. Say PLAYSTUDIOS, PLAYSTUDIOS is currently investing in a game, PLAYSTUDIOS bought the license for mobile Tetris. Remember it from when we were little? By the way. So this Tetris IP was bought by PLAYSTUDIOS a few years ago, and now, and there was a game, and still, and there's a team that takes care of it, and runs with it, and it exists, great, great game. And now, together with a startup company, that they bought, which sits here in Tel Aviv, they're producing a new game, and it'll come out sometime this year, and it's already in a soft launch, which is a few countries, to test the marketing, to test the retention, hard. Which is another situation where my SEO in the store is so good, that probably lots of organics, you mentioned it earlier,

Eyal David: [20:26] you still say it'll be hard, even though there too the economy is kind of pretty clear, right? They're basically getting something, no, you at the company are basically getting something existing and needing to optimize it, like it's also not a game we're building from scratch, which is much more complicated. Right.

Ron Finkelstein: [20:41] It's based on an existing game, that said, as you say, the store, the app store today is like a huge, packed mall. Full of games, full of apps, full of imitations, full of imitations, do you know how many Chinese imitations there are for every game, it's not normal. Who enforces this? Does the store enforce it? Like Apple and that? First of all, Apple enforces a lot, Google kind of lets everything flow freely, except things that touch on privacy, and then it's kind of forbidden. Again, why wouldn't you allow it? If it generates revenue, then why not? But it's hard. Not all users are looking for Tetris, the audience doesn't really know it, you know, you need to be very meticulous with search words, with how the store page looks,

Eyal David: [21:27] and how much marketing you put on it. It's really like starting a new business, you say. It's really finding the audience, and profitable too. Tell me, and you mentioned Apple, so it's interesting, they take the cut of 30%? How does that enter the P&L? First of all, 30%. Both Google and Apple

Ron Finkelstein: [21:44] take, as you said, that same 30%. Back in the day, games that sat inside Facebook, they too took 30%, but they went a bit outside. Hard. Because I was thinking specifically about what

Eyal David: [21:59] you mentioned with the prop, physical prizes, I want to dig into it, let's go over it, actually, no? But still every dollar that goes out, meaning, that you received, you still need to pay 30% on it. What you gave afterward, what you gave is your problem. Because I, as a user, am still buying something digital, actually, it's still the digital. Okay, so you also talked here about trends, you skimmed over it, tell us, so what are the trends right now in the industry? Wow, a lot.

Ron Finkelstein: [22:28] Very, very, very diverse depending on... there's social casino that continues and tries to fight for its life, there are casual games, regular casual, without money, without anything, you just come and play for fun, like obviously those who want to pay, but you don't have to pay, there are games, there's actually something really interesting in the last two years, that there was an evolution, there was an evolution for casual games, that turned from free-to-play, free-to-play, meaning the model of you come, play, and if you want to buy, cool, and if not, then not, to a model called skills, skill, these aren't games of chance, and there's a matter of skill, what does that mean? It means there are companies that allow you as a player to participate in a competition, a tournament let's call it, say bingo, and several players participate together in the same room, and there are the same numbers at the same time, and the first one who does the thing, the marking on the number, is the one who wins, and what do they win? Back in money, the buy-in they make, they can redeem it back to real money in their bank, meaning that an evolution occurred from regular casual games, to games where you can earn money, same thing in casino, in casino too a kind of evolution occurred, it started in America in 46 or 47 states, it's not legal in all of them, that basically a user can play casino games, not in the app stores, that's not allowed, only in the browser, on the phone or on the computer, and basically to choose, either they play on a gold coin, which is regular, like we play at our place, or they play on a coin called sweep coins, and then they can basically redeem the profit, their winnings, back to money.

Eyal David: [24:22] Wow, crazy, and tell me, other things that are happening, what does the economic situation in the world actually look like, how does it affect things, and what does it actually look like, that there's no longer a pandemic, so people are less on their phones, or are you competing with, I don't know, other apps that basically captured the user's attention, what does it look like? So you mentioned corona, it's hard to ignore the two crazy years,

Ron Finkelstein: [24:44] that created a frenzy here in the industry, everyone sat at home, played with friends, their valuations exploded, then got ruined, you know, it was a bit of a golden age, and... afterward a kind of return to routine was created, return to normality, and I think the industry feels it in terms of jobs, and the attitude toward employees, I didn't mean the attitude toward employees in terms of who's not good, but I mean how many they hire, and how many they fire, and how many open positions there are and so on, and I think the players hold the money tight in their pocket, not spending the money all the time like before, I think I sound a bit like big economists, but, I think we're competing with other content services, listen, they have, I don't know, 50 dollars to spend a month, so they're already spending it on Disney Plus and on Netflix, and they have a few more games to pay for, so I hope they'll spend it on me, it's the dollar too, but it's probably also the time, it's maybe the attention that would be more accurate? I think they have the time, they just want to put it on something else, I don't think like okay, the pandemic is over, we want to go out to be together, but still, like the distances between houses in America are enormous, and it's still boring, and you still want the meetups, but I'm competing with the other media. For the attention? Yes.

Eyal David: [26:08] Okay, tell me, what about technology? Are there technological trends emerging? Yes, I think that...

Ron Finkelstein: [26:15] I think it's basic to be on Unity, basic, like if you're not on Unity, then it'll be very hard for you, I think there's no exact compatibility between games today, meaning not everyone develops in the same language, so it's also hard, say you have all sorts of services you want to integrate into yours, so it works better, say all sorts of marketing services, so it takes adaptation time. Okay, so what's your view, actually?

Eyal David: [26:40] What are the most important product skills in a product person? Okay, wow, I think when a product person arrives,

Ron Finkelstein: [26:48] a product manager, at a gaming company, first of all, they should have the affinity for games, they play, they have a console at home, they have games on their phone, sometimes I ask candidates to tell me which game they most love to play on their phone. What answers do you hear? Oh, I haven't played in a few years, remind me what there used to be, because there's no time. So already you know that, like, it could be a very talented person, but they just won't understand the players' motivation, and someone else who says they're, you know, top ten in some famous game. So there are tons of answers of all kinds, of all kinds, and also since you asked about the skill, so I think being a product person, you can learn everything. What you can't learn is, like, how you approach things, the instinct, your charisma, your ability to rally people, to sweep them along, now it's not about a business bloodbath, but it is about it, and to bring the people, to abandon what they're doing now, and move with you to the next feature, because it's important. So that's one of the things I examine, when I interview, and I also try to instill in the people who work next to me,

Eyal David: [28:01] because it's really important. Okay, so do you have some question, that you kind of ask in an interview, and we can kind of hear?

Ron Finkelstein: [28:08] So yes, so first of all, in job interviews, which I also got to do tons of times at Playtika, whether it's in the academy, for product, or in all the games, or here at PLAYSTUDIOS, first of all, why gaming? What does it for you in gaming? What does it for you in gaming? And to hear about a project, interesting, something they did, that they initiated, that they pushed, not that they were part of it, something tangible, that was under their responsibility, because bottom line a product person in games, is really a central axis, they're like a coordinator on a basketball team, they don't have to know all the details, okay, they have to connect all the dots, so if in an interview, you ask such a question, say what project was there one you initiated and did, and you sense that, like, you know, the central point was him or her, then you understand there's something here, you can take it, and they can rally the people, and take them, and run a cool feature, of course with guidance and support, but there's something to work with.

Eyal David: [29:10] What do you expect to hear there, beyond the rallying part, and the ownership and running forward?

Ron Finkelstein: [29:17] So first of all the understanding of what succeeded, what didn't succeed, where you failed as a project manager, or as another central body in the project, and how you learned from it? You also look for there to be no ego. Wow, ego is very, very, very hard. I really, one of the things I can say about myself, I have no ego. Like I'm happy to receive appreciation, and I'm happy to receive recognition, but if, you need, if my manager tells me A, and I say B, and we leave the meeting, and decide he's right, then come on, we go in that direction, and that's it, like, you know, sometimes you do need to fall in line,

Eyal David: [29:54] but ego just gets in the way. Totally, and then you basically let them tell the story,

Ron Finkelstein: [30:01] so you look for them as APIs, that they made themselves, actually? I look mainly for the value, for the value, like, how they did it, okay? I'm less interested in the result, because it's not necessarily an unambiguous doing. Obviously if I take now a product manager, from a company, I already know the project, I know if it worked, okay? Like, let them tell me what the processes were, what the challenges were, where they ran into annoying people, or where they gave breaks to someone else,

Eyal David: [30:28] that's what interests me. Nice. Okay, I'm switching records for a second, because we got a few questions, and I want to hear what you think about them. They asked, actually, in the community, what can product managers at B2C or B2B companies learn from gaming? To improve the experience, to improve the bottom line,

Ron Finkelstein: [30:48] retention, of course, to bring in this mechanism that keeps the players again on the same day, or coming the next day, continuing the process, and you can also, actually, what we produce, it's love of the experience. You can call it habit creation, you can call it retention, you can call it creating positive emotion in me, both on the visual level, and on the level of, like, I enjoy this thing and I want more. Just, say, you need to manage, if you know that meditation app. Okay, Headspace, right. Headspace, right. Basically its goal is to calm you, right? And to put you into a kind of model of, you do meditation every day, and it created in you, really, a habit. It's a game. The fact that it produces in you, meditation, it's a game, you get points. So also on the visual level it's good, also on the sound level, and also on the UX level, where the buttons are, and what they do, and how many times you need to press it, and basically it's an experience without clicks, scroll scroll on its own. So this whole experience produces a habit where you'll come back to it the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and again, and again, and again. There's a mechanism in gaming called a streak, okay? Or consecutive days, it basically means day after day after day, Duolingo gives you a score for it, there are many companies that give you a score for it, so it's another mechanism of creating a return to the app. You know what else they do? First of all they put the metric right in your face, so it makes you aware that they're watching, right? So maybe that's also a thing you can do,

Eyal David: [32:16] and beyond that, I think, again, those small victories, right? That's what both apps you did, something really amazing, I don't know, it's in Headspace, it's also from the thing that a few minutes, wow, and after I did it,

Ron Finkelstein: [32:30] yay, and I finished, and boom. Yes, so that sense of victory, it really comes from the gaming worlds, whether it's a complex game, where you beat a big boss after a few tries, or it's a simple game, like dice or something, it's fun, it produces dopamine in you, and it produces in you a fun experience, that you want to come back to, like chocolate, or like good music, and also in the other apps, that a gaming engine creates for you the state of, yay, you succeeded, you, try the next stage, they give you challenges, but notice, that slowly, slowly, the challenge becomes harder. Yes, so maybe really also, as you say, to start easy, and slowly increase, economy? Economy, right, it's not complex, because it has different goals, you understand? Like, in Headspace, it's just relax. Don't earn money, you understand? We need an economist,

Eyal David: [33:19] in short. Yes. Many companies work on a trial model, right, we have an interest that the user comes back. How can we, with the help of game psychology,

Ron Finkelstein: [33:27] make this happen? Okay, so there's a freemium model. For example, actually, it, bottom line, the games took it from other places, but it works strongly, the games with battle passes, and such, where you can play regular, but if you pay, you get more prizes, or the other experiences. It's the same thing in, you know, also in Duolingo, you can play, you can play their games, and learn the languages, but either you watch ads, okay, or you buy, and everything will be a clean experience,

Eyal David: [33:55] a pleasant experience, and you'll know the language faster. Maybe there's also the aspect of the economy, that someone sits and monitors all the time, basically what's the right logic, that converts the most players, and again, makes them create a habit, right? In regular product companies, the product manager does this, there's no external person who does this. Can you tell us a bit about this methodology,

Ron Finkelstein: [34:17] from your point of view? So with us we work with analysts, the economy gives the game experience, before the product goes live, and when it goes live, then analysts enter the picture, and monitor the feature, or the mini-game, when it's live, and whether it's in an A/B test, or whether it's in the regular run, and afterward they give it polish. And then you understand... and then it's basically optimized, it has, but what's maybe important to say, is that it already has these configurations ready, if it wants to move, right? So usually, whoever moves configurations, and changes the pricing, that's economy, and they monitor the feature on the fly. Really, sometimes they do it during the run on the fly, because it can confuse the players a bit, but usually they change, do optimization,

Eyal David: [35:01] from run to run. No, and that's a good point, I'm saying, like, when you plan the game, or the product, if we project it to B2C or B2B, if you can, of course you need to have a very organized dashboard, so you understand where people drop off, and what's here and what's there, but you also need to have configuration, because when you do it fast, you can test it fast. Okay, I'll ask more questions. What gives the edge in job interviews at a gaming company,

Ron Finkelstein: [35:23] for a product manager who doesn't come from the industry? Play the game. No, like, not metaphorically. Play the game, bottom line. There were people who came to me for an interview, and didn't understand what we were talking about. If you want to get accepted at a games company, play the company's games.

Eyal David: [35:39] It's basic. Okay, so tell me, challenges, do you have any? Or, if not challenges,

Ron Finkelstein: [35:45] then give me two prominent ones. Challenges, first of all, the ability to do product in gaming, you need to know how to handle tons and tons and tons of balls. What does that mean? Requirements from everyone, complaints, feedback, there's always one feature, or two, or five, live, that you need to monitor, and watch, and make sure everyone's on it. Like ten features in the making, and fifteen features post-launch, that require you to have analysis ready, and to prepare for next year, and to do the annual capability, wow. And management, and people, and being nice, and walking the corridors, you know, with your head held high, tons of challenges. So it's multitasking, you say,

Eyal David: [36:30] and timing, and understanding what's important and what's not. So it also brings me back to the question I asked earlier, what I ask in interviews, and I ask if you're organized, or if you work in a way that arranges the tasks, or if someone needs to arrange the tasks for you and such, it's important, it's important to be organized, it's important to work with software, and not with sticky notes. All the things, whether it's long term, or the things that need to be done tomorrow, super important. So you look for very organized people, who'll be tidy. Very, very. Surprising that this is in the gaming world, I wouldn't have guessed. I'm kidding. Okay, so we, I think it was a very successful episode, I'll edit it for a second, and tell me, what do you wish for yourself in ten years?

Ron Finkelstein: [37:13] Ugh, okay. Wow, a really hard question. First of all, on the personal level, to keep being energetic as I am, with my family, and in positive wellbeing, and I think on the career level, I think I want to work on more, different types of gaming, not only casino, maybe to return to casual, to do things that are more, fun, for a different audience, even maybe, to be the owner of some cute and small startup, that makes a cool game that people love, and big,

Eyal David: [37:51] that's it. Amazing, first of all good luck, and tell me, in your opinion in ten years, how will this industry look?

Ron Finkelstein: [37:59] The industry, I think it'll be made up of two, three big players, and all the rest, the rest behind, as is already happening, I think, that whoever invents the next thing is the one who'll manage to sweep along the big ones, and they'll buy them, and then it'll continue to be a de facto monopoly. And how do you recommend entering the field? So there are a few ways to enter being product. Okay? A, in gaming. Either you come as product from somewhere else, and then you come with an affinity for games, or you come with an entry-level role, say there are all sorts of companies that offer an academy, Moon Active's academy, Playtika's academy, that's already a great place. How does it work? You enter as a junior and... great thing. Great model. If of course there are positions, and it's good, you enter into three to four weeks of internships and courses, and disperse to games, and it's amazing. I ran an academy, I had employees who came from the academy, really amazing. It's worthwhile to study it, because in the big courses there are teachers who can connect and make an introduction. There's nothing better in Israel than connections, to know people, to talk to them on LinkedIn, yes. Come on, let's enter the industry, in short. Yes, of course.

Eyal David: [39:16] They need the talent. Great, Ron, it was wonderful, and we'll invite you again, thank you very much. Fun. Bye bye. Hey friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe, follow us, of course for more episodes, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other app, of course if you didn't find us on some app, I'd be happy for you to write to us. We'd be very happy for five stars, on any platform, and for you to follow us, so that more listeners can be exposed to us, and find the podcast. You can also find the previous episodes, on any app, or on the YouTube channel, we have links in the description. Until next time, come on, be efficient, and bye bye.