Background
Following a successful and varied career, learning my trade as a digital specialist, I moved into a business where I could focus on my passion for games and help build a successful business in this space. I wanted to flex the digital, ecommerce and technical communications skills I learnt in building performance marketing, brand, and digital transformation programs during the first phase of my career.
Throughout my digital career, I had one eye on Game, the retailer and ecommerce store. Working on the agency side, I won and lost a pitch or two, and they had just acquired Multiplay for their events business and community. Multiplay hired me to lead marketing and ecommerce and to take over P&L for the Community Game Server business, Clanforge. This role was a great introduction to the games industry, community-based business and cloud technology because we supported over 20,000 multiplayer communities worldwide with complex server technology. My customers were passionate gamers, creators, community leaders by night, and PHD level computer science professionals by day. Rust, Ark Survival Evolved, Battlefield, Minecraft and Farming Simulator were just some of the top communities we supported back then.
In addition to the community business, which delivered a modest seven-figure revenue, I supported our pivot to selling bare-metal server hardware and hybrid-cloud orchestration technology to game studios and publishers for their official server infrastructure. Early on, most game publishers had to solve the problem of scaling game server infrastructure via community servers, paid for by players or with in-house networks. Industry leaders such as Riot and Blizzard had to build vast private networks of data centres worldwide. This cost was a significant investment, a barrier to entry for many new developers and a vital problem we wanted to solve!
Public Clouds such as AWS and GCP had made grounds in the market, but this path was costly and, despite their promise, failed to scale to meet demand from tens of thousands to millions of concurrent players. The team at Multiplay had seen the trend for Hybrid Cloud solutions outside of games, so they decided to build on this concept to support multiplayer entrepreneurs and communities with more cost-effective, resilient and scalable infrastructure.
Challenge
From a positioning perspective, we were new to the market. Our target audience and Do-It-Yourself engineers were also the most significant competitors. By default, developers built in-house teams and solutions rather than buying or partnering with third parties; therefore, DIY was the norm. Outsourcing this critical part of the back end, which can significantly impact a game’s enjoyment and retention, was often perceived as too risky.
Through our sales and marketing, we had to demonstrate that despite its complexity, our solution was far less risky and costly than DIY or going all in with Public Cloud. Furthermore, AWS has invested significantly in taking market share in games and is the default computing provider for services such as analytics and player data storage.
To win in this space, it was clear that we had to find a way to highlight our credibility as trusted specialists in our field.
Hypothesis
Multiplay’s sales team, which had recently moved from the hosting industry to focus on multiplayer games, had a significant advantage over its competitors. The team knew how to sell and hit the ground running to build our pipeline. We had already built some decent credibility and service infrastructure by managing the official servers for popular games like Rust and DayZ for some time, and we used this to our advantage. A significant early AAA / Enterprise win was our new customer Respawn, who hired Multiplay to support Titanfall 2 with our Hybrid Cloud solution.
We had many hosting experts in our business and a reasonably optimised approach to selling. We also had good relationships with industry leaders and engineers who were happy to help us and advise on the best value propositions to surface in a complex and competitive space.
Solution
As a digital strategist working on complex strategic platforms and technical propositions, I advise clients to invest in a solid round of research to determine the correct path. Although the time and investment required often impacted the time it took to deliver a project, 100% of the time, the output is 100% worth it. When we complete a solid round of research and understand the customer, their problems, the business and the culture, our strategy and tactical approach always become very clear.
The approach was similar at Multiplay. I learnt a huge amount from our sales team, which had been selling cloud compute for some time. I also spoke with many of our customers, who were happy to help and describe their process when planning and launching a game.
With this insight, we prioritised a complete rebrand and implementation of a fresh digital presence and content strategy that highlighted the appropriate value propositions for the market:
Cost – We highlighted the total cost of ownership of DIY & Public Cloud vs our Hybrid Cloud solution
Scale & Resilience – We showed evidence of how scalable and resilient our solution was through tests and launch stories.
Credibility – We used advocacy and let our customers tell the story of their success by partnering with our technology and team.
Human Support – We highlighted the incredible team we had to support the industry through written content, speaking engagements and webinars. Our customers wanted our tech, but most of all, our expertise.
Human support was a critical pillar of our value proposition
Results
- A clear and differentiated product positioning framework that supported Multiplay’s acquisition by Unity Technologies and created a credible following amongst the multiplayer development tribe.
- A digital content strategy that promoted the success of Multiplay’s long-term advocates, such as the brilliant teams at Respawn Entertainment and Bohemia Interactive, positively influenced more than 30% of the sales pipeline.
- A clear presentation of Multiplay’s value proposition benefiting our sales-led growth from $300k ARR to over $10m and onto $100m+ with the successful launch of hits such as Apex Legends and integration into Unity’s ecosystem and Product-Led framework.
Need support?
Have you recently founded a business? Are you planning to launch a new product, or are you considering a pivot and need help with your positioning and go-to-market strategy? If so, contact me today to discuss your plans.