Gabriel Leydon of MZ / Machine Zone (Game of War, Mobile Strike)

• Very smart guy but it's also kind of depressing how MZ made money. It sounds a lot like the casino games.
• One of the depressing thoughts I had while watching these talks was that because of the competition for advertising space, the companies that will inevitably "win" (be able to afford the advertising) will be those that are able to separate as much money from their users as possible, which may be the companies which are using tactics which hurt the users (casinos) rather than help them (Uber, arguably).

General

• LinkedIn - Gabriel Leydon

Summary of MZ's strategy for success

• Make the game free at first. Minimize the barriers to people getting into the game.
• Try to get people into alliances ASAP.
  • I remember reading an article about how gyms have gone downhill because in the old days you'd join a gym for the community, but nowadays no one talks to each other. So in the old days if you didn't show up you had the other people asking where you were (social pressure), but nowadays there's no social pressure to keep going to the gym.
• After ~100 hours / 2-4 weeks, start to ask for money.

Articles

• 2013.07.25 - PocketGamer.biz - Machine Zone's Gabe Leydon on why he cares about more players' time than their money
• 2013.08 - GDC Europe - One Big World to Rule: Breaking Language Barriers
  • The big idea of this game was to make a real-time mobile game that the entire world could play. The closest game to it is Eve Online.
  • 5:46 - They use Erlang on the backend for the messaging.
  • 6:30 - The translation is handled by Bing and Google translate.
  • 7:46 - Auto-correct really helps the accuracy of translation.
    • This fits my theory that rather than having computers do all of the work for translation, it may be helpful to have the human modify the way they're expressing themselves to make it easier for the computer to translate it. This doesn't just mean spelling correctly: it could also mean not using slang, or using more words than you would normally use.
  • 8:55 - The big problem they ran into was chatspeak: 'brb', 'lol', 'ur', etc.
  • 10:20 - Their solution to the chatspeak problem was to create a dictionary of chatspeak that would convert chatspeak into a translatable form before sending it to Google / Bing.
  • 13:20 - That didn't work well enough, so their final method was to incentivize their users to 
    • They have an automated approval process.
  • There's a three-step process by which a totally-un 
  • 
  • 20:15 - "We can currently translate Twitter better than Twitter can."
• 2013.08.20 - CasualConnect - Do You Want to Rule the World?
  • 22:20 - Q: Would you be willing to license your translation technology?
    • Short answer: "We may in the future."
• 2013.10.25 - VentureBeat - The DeanBeat: Will your mobile game strategy take you more global or more local?
• 2015.10.14 - GamesBeat 2015 - Chat with MachineZone CEO
• 2015.10.16 - VentureBeat - An interview with Gabe Leydon, Machine Zone’s man on the Iron Throne
• 2016.02.24 - Watch Machine Zone’s CEO freak out a room of media people — full interview Code/Media 2016
  
  • Wow, this is an amazing talk.
• 2016.04.09 - VentureBeat - CEO Gabe Leydon on why Machine Zone renamed itself and launched its real-time cloud platform
• 2016.07.20 - MZ boss Gabe Leydon breaks down how bots run New Zealand’s transportation
  
  • 1:04 - Presentation topic: "Our vision for what a 'smart city' is"
  • 1:30 - We've decided to take the technology we developed to run Game of War / Mobile Strike and turn it into a platform: "RTplatform".
  • 3:00 - As a demo of this platform, they decided to network the entire public transportation structure of New Zealand.
  • 7:00 - The real benefit is for the people making decisions (the "command center"). They can see all of the buses that are off-route. They were getting hundreds of emails from passengers who were getting double-charged by off-route buses, and that is now solvable.
  • 9:15 - "I think bots can be running countries. There's a lot we can automate..."
  • 9:43 - Presentation ends, Q&A begins.
  • 15:30 - "To me, the internet's broken..." There are billions of people on the Internet, but when you go to the Internet you don't feel the presence of all of those other people. GoW's goal was to make you feel the totality of the internet.