cool thank you all so much for coming I see so many familiar faces I feel like we've been through this a couple times which is exciting and it's always so energizing from us to hear from you and figure out okay this is you know this is where we need to keep pushing uh for those who don't know me my name is Ken I've been in Epic almost six years now uh working with creators for well over half of that uh and I do product stuff on fortnite on our social systems discover uh and a few other things as well and I work really closely with Joey hello uh I'm Joey um so it's been great to meet a bunch of you I'm a product director on the Discover team specifically um and so I started about a year and a half ago and so have been learning a lot from Kent as we go um but yeah excited to to have this conversation today and I saw that uh Tom Jank tweeted four minutes ago that uh you know it's kicking off so uh you we'll see apparently there's a lot of excitement so we'll see what happens uh cool well let's get into it you know we we've had a couple bites of this and I think this ideally is the most condensed version of trying to crystallize what success in discover is all about and again this is something we're continually iterating on but I hope it's something that uh can be really clarifying as you think about the games you make and how you appro approach updating and and you know continuing to iterate on those games and so today we're going to talk about how discover Works we're going to talk about how new content testing works and then we're going to walk through the Discover Evolution which is a fancy word for a bunch of features we're trying to deliver to improve discover towards the end of this year so first how does discover work uh essentially there are three core types of metrics we really care about when we're looking at your content we're looking at the attraction of your content how well does your Island convert Impressions into sustained engagement note that second half of the sentence sustained engagement um engagement itself meaning if you get a player is this a player that's sticking around are they bringing their friends are they coming back tomorrow and finally and kind of this is kind of the newest uh version or newest term for this but one we're really excited about which is satisfaction how satisfied are players after they have played your Island do they also do they refer it do they recommend it to their friends is it something that they're like basically bringing their friends to so to start with attraction which is uh and for all these slides be the same format left side is like hey this is how we kind of think about it and the right side are best practices and then what I think everyone's excited about which is key new features that will help enable this in the future and so in terms of Attraction this is all about we're giving content Impressions how are you turning that into sustained engagement players that are really you know enjoying your game and are attached to your game we cut this in a bunch of ways and ideally more in the future but right now we care a lot about looking about which games new players people brand new to fortnite are seeking out returning users people took a break from fortnite then came back and retained users are going into so right now in best practices you know this shouldn't be shocking for anyone but the Creator marketing Playbook just came out there's a lot of great stuff in that a lot of great interviews in that in terms of how do we learn from the best practices the community is learning I saw it's Jackie's interview in that this morning it was really cool to see Creator analytics as well are a huge part of this so you can understand the Impressions you're receiving the clicks you're receiving and the types of player you are attracting to your Island but we know there's a lot more features we want to deliver to keep to give you this opportunity and that's where these big things for this year come in and the coming year first personalized discover which is an ongoing process right this is something that each additional week and month we are trying to make those models better to better reflect players and audiences so if I'm a player who loves roleplay and Lego we're actually serving that content to you versus you know here's a another XYZ map favorite a Creator which is coming later this year which is going to really allow you both from web and in game to kind of start developing that relationship with your audience so when you publish a new game you can actually like have a place to show them hey there's this new thing I publish uh a new and returning user interest flow which something we're really excited about essentially we're trying to get this in this year I hope it lands essentially when I arrive in fortnite as someone who's never played fortnite before we actually ask you what are you interested in why why did you come here are you here for Battle Royale you here for Lego are you here for fall guys tmmt are you here for driving role play etc etc Joy's going to talk about this a bit later um and then finally I'll go through these next ones a little quicker we're looking for to make it ever easier for you to directly link to your Islands whether a user on your phone or on the PC or on any type of application in terms of being able to like send people to a particular Island within fornite uh we're trying to perpetually make the fordnite client itself thinner so it's a quicker download it's easier we're downloading what you need when you need it and expect some some big updates on that next year and then finally we're trying to squeeze this in for the start of next year the ability to AB test thumbnails so you can actually understand you know which thumbnails are working best for your audience and which ones are actually allowing you to create this sustained audience with your content the only thing I'll add really quickly um is like this is an ongoing conversation uh we're always listening so like if there's things on here that you're like this is the most important thing you guys are totally missing this like definitely reach out um contact folks from different Creator relations teams um we want to hear from you like this is you know our best stab at what we think that top priority things are um but you guys are really in the weeds and you know it better than we do um and so as much as you can like let's make this a conversation uh and let us know what we're missing if there is something that you think we need to do the good news this is one of three slides so there's two more where there's new features coming which is great there's also a bunch of other stuff that's not on here this was like the ones that really felt you know above the fold so to speak next one which I think most folks should be familiar with is engagement so you got a player to your Island are they sticking around are they coming back to Mar are they bringing their friends and are they social within the island um again this is where we've been trying to push into crater analytics this year I think in particular drop off in terms of like where players leave your game is incredibly powerful here for you to understand you know I play a ton of ufn and there's often a game-breaking bug that could appear in minute nine and giving you a Metro it's like hey something's happening at minute 9 to 10 I think that's the type of uh analytic we want to provide ever more of so you can really understand where are you losing players where are they saying okay I'm not no longer interested in this um as well this is again a big thing we're trying to push on this year it's key to iterate on your content you know most fortnite itself has had I don't know how many updates at this point but once a game comes out ensuring you're taking that audience feedback you're iterating AIT you're looking at your data and you're figuring out okay what are the updates I need to make to this game to make it more compelling for my audience um and when we think about key new features I didn't write the whole list cuz there's so much stuff uh if you consider any feature allows you to make better content something that helps you drive engagement that's actually like basically every feature we're building but in particular favor to Creator we think it's going to be really important for this retention story so you basically your players have a relationship with you when you push a big update to your game you'll be able to broadcast it to your players and then we think TCH chat is just going to really allow games to be more social more engaging and it's going to be a real game changer later this year as well as again all of our tools features which are in this area anything you Dad Joey no I mean we heard SE graph come up a lot so I know a lot of folks are excited for what that's going to unlock um yeah all the tools uh I think go a really long way in just differentiating the types of engaging content you can make so and more than engagement we want players who are satisfied as well where they leave your game and you delivered on the promise this is what the game was about I'm satisfied I enjoyed it I had fun uh and right now we kind of look at satisfaction in two ways and we're looking again for ever more ways uh one is postmatch where random sample surveys that pop up in game asking players if they had fun in your experience whether it was too hard what's the quality of the experience is one thing we pay a lot of attention to here as well as endorsements is this a piece of content I'm adding to my favorites is this a piece of content I'm recommending to my friends and again for us this has been a new one this year but it's one where and we've always had favorites kind of slashing around um but it's one we're really excited about in terms of ensuring that some of our most boundary pushing and successful content that's really swiching in the direction that we're all just so excited for the platform to go uh can be rewarded in terms of like a numerical sense in terms of like we can actually understand how satisfying your island is and again this is where similar to engagement iteration is so key continually pushing updates I saw a Twitter thread this morning from one of you all I forget which where it's like you know the moment you're play testing your game and you're like wait I want to keep play testing like this is really fun like that that might be a sign you're on to something satisfying and again the other one I'm going to flag here because I think it's really important is are you actually delivering on the fantasy of your thumbnail where your thumbnails are promised to your players this is what I'm going to try to deliver and as we know there's been a lot of back and forth of thumbnails there's always a Hot Topic in the community appropriately so but what we see with games that are not delivering on that thumbnail is they often struggle to actually hit the satisfaction score because you're telling players one thing and you're giving them something else and that's not good for anybody um in particular we're super soaked uh that the crater portal team and analytics is going to be able to deliver these metrics later this year so you can understand you know you push a new update how does my satisfaction score change both in terms of like overall satisfaction did you have fun and then as well as the difficulty of your game was it too hard too easy somewhere in between and again much like engagement all the great tool stuff that's coming down the pipe we think is going to allow you to build more Innovative engaging and satisfying content which is why it kind of keeps coming up here the other topic just to kind of touch on um is new content testing you know as the moderation talk and other talks go into we receive an amazing amount of games and that's really exciting in a given week uh we currently and I I actually I need to start stop and start by saying what the heck is a test because that's a madeup word a test as our currently you know uh created system is giving your Islands 50,000 Impressions within a short time window and we don't really care about giving impressions for the sake of giving Impressions we care about getting your game full lobbies and high enough CCU where we can get a good Taste of the data and understand whether this game is like uniquely compelling satisfying attractive whatever it may be um and we've been working as well on some matchmaking improvements in the last kind of couple months and more coming to basically how can we even more efficiently allocate those Impressions and concurrent users into games I don't know if you want to add anything there no I mean I think um yeah I I think like we we say 50,000 I think that that doesn't mean that you only get 50,000 impressions no more um it's more like we aim to try to get as many Maps as we can that like burst of Impressions we try to get you to like a you know a high CCU um so that we can better understand kind of what your game is doing um but definitely like and then and then discover like looks at the results from that and then sort of adjusts and says okay like it's doing well within these metrics here's how it sort of starts to display in the other rows yep and so in a given week we currently test test uh 4,000 new and updated games across all of our rows and we are constantly looking for ways to scale this to keep up with the amazing amount of content coming in the one we are most excited for that is we I was hoping we'd have by this time it's not ready yet and we don't want to rush it is uh personalized testing meaning if I make a tycoon we should test that with players who love tycoons and if I make an awesome Search and Destroy let me show that to some people who look like they like Counter Strike and making sure we're we're actually matching these audience segments so niches of play can truly form which we've seen like you know Green shoots all this year and that we think until we are able to test content particularly with that audience that we we think is going to resonate with it it's going to be uh you know it's not as perfect as we know it can be and so that's our big push here yeah the other thing I'll add um is that you know it we try to test Islands multiple times especially if creators are updating their Islands so it's not like oh I get one try and it didn't work or whatever uh and now I'm you know might as well start over or go to something else like I I really really want to underline that like up your Island and continuing to invest um will give you more tries uh at at getting tested um and that discover tries to sort of have like a a fairly short memory All Things Considered um where you know if a few weeks ago you were tested and for whatever reason you had a bug and your Island engagement doesn't look so great uh and then you come back two weeks later and you fix the bug uh discover doesn't look at your metrics from two weeks ago it really tries to focus on what's happening right now when people engage with this island today where is it like where are they going yeah like kind of short memory and as we spoke about at GDC when we think about prioritizing what islands get testing we are looking at the content within your map the devices within your map the verse code you've written and the game you've created in terms of how how our editor sees it again that's that's an art and not a science and something as well we're trying to get more and more sharp on going to pass it over to Joey now who's going to talk about some of the new features coming cool um so the first one we're going to talk about and one that we've sort of already talked about and some of the pieces have already come out is Creator Pages um so um what goes into Creator Pages um the first thing is that players are going to be able to favor a Creator in client and in web uh we think having it on web is awesome just because it allows you to sort of like Leverage your socials send it to players um and really start building that following building that relationship with your audience uh and then having that reflected back to them in game uh favored creators um the new islands from those creators and updated islands are all going to show up um in the player's Library um and then we're also going to have multiple different rows and discover to surface that same content so as the kind of scrolling through Discover they actually get a little bit of control over oh this is the type of content that I want to see um and so you'll be able to see you know new and updated Islands as well as we were we're working on a version of trying to like an integrate Creator picks um so that you can kind of also build up uh the other creators that you think are doing awesome things within the ecosystem and so we want to be able to have those in in multiple different places have multiple different touch points with players um so they get to like have a little bit more control over their kind of browsing discover experience um so we're trying to launch Creator Pages fully in client uh in 33 so that'll be in the end of the year um and I know that the uh the images during the keynote were a little bit small and so we are trying to basically blow them all up and give everyone a really good look at what the different features are going to be so I think the thing we're really excited about in addition to other stuff here is if you get a user who just loves your content and loves what you're doing you can actually build a real relationship with them where when you're publishing content when you're on your socials Etc as opposed to now where the content is kind of floating in in a thing over here and your creators over here we're really trying to integrate that so when you make consistently great content it really is valuable to like build this following and when you punch a when you publish a new game your fans are able to see it and that's actually part of your testing Loop is that your fans are able to try out your awesome new content yep and just to kind of like walk through the page a little bit we have you know new profile images um bio and description being added into client that's been live on web for a little while same thing we're adding socials so that we can start building that connection and have places for your community to go for discussion uh We've noticed that like the my socials device is great but you don't always want to like Direct people out of the game when they're in the game you kind of want to keep them in there and engaged um and so this is like another place that you know another touch point for those players to say oh I want to go check out this Discord or check out their Twitter um we're going to have featured games um where you'll be able to highlight three or four different games and then you'll have your list of sort of all Islands um that you've published and then Creator picks on the bottom um and so the next screenshot here is just the way that uh this content is going to show up in library um and so we're going to be making a couple of changes to library we've already started some of that uh We've also heard a lot of your feedback um around Library placement we're going to look into that too kind of leaving un real fast um but basically you'll be able to see your favorite creators here um these will actually be ordered by um sort of the recency that you've interacted with this content and so actually like if you have a a player group um that play your games all the time your creator uh page should show up first here um new releases uh these are these will be all the different you know islands that are coming out and and and then underneath that you can kind of see it at the very bottom here uh is like recently updated um and so this is just you know an example screenshot but this is kind of what we're we're thinking and and what we're hoping that players start to really like lean into their Library as this is the place for me this is kind of my um my content that I'm super excited about within the ecosystem I recently played my favorites as well as you'll see collections down there which I know if you want to you talk about later we we'll Tee It Up collections we're going to get to it um so the next screenshot here is just within discover um everyone's pretty familiar with this version of discover but don't worry more more to come on that um new and updated from creators that you you have favored um and then similarly we want to try to find a way to kind of integrate you know different Creator picks or the you know picks from your favorite creators and things like that and that can be a different row and discover as well uh the last place that uh Creator pages are going to show up is within search um and so we want to just carve out uh within the search page so that you can as a player you can search specifically for an island or for a Creator um we don't have any sort of like weird mixing of of intent with when I'm searching for something um and so players will be able to you know toggle between whichever one that they're looking for and we can kind of adjust some of the waiting and we can get a better sense of um you know directing players exactly where they want to go cool I think that is all I have on Creator Pages um and so the next piece is what we're calling discover Evolution um and so we've taken a very like long hard look at Discover um it's been um you know over a year I think since we since we launched sort of like the home bar and some of those big changes kind of last year um and we think that there's still a lot of room for us to improve the Discover user experience and so we've been lucky enough to work with some super super super talented uiux designers um across epic really um and take a big stab at like what we think the best experience for players and for creators is within discover um and so we're super excited to be able to deliver some of this uh for the end of the year um and so we want to go through and sort of share it all here as a preview and then you should see more of this kind of come November um so again this was in the keynote um but I'll kind of Step through it um there's a bunch of different changes here um as Kent has alluded to we're definitely still leaning into personalization uh we want that for you page uh to feel sort of curated to you as a player uh it should feel contextual to the type of content that you're interested in um underneath for you uh we're adding game collections um and I should also call out that all the ordering here is subject to change like discover is still going to do the same old like experimentation we're going to figure out what rows work best for players and move things around as needed um but here's sort of what we're thinking for now so game collections um these will be the place that you can go uh and kind of Click into any of these different um games and then you'll be able to see the sort of full list of content um and I think we're really excited about this because this is actually going to differentiate from like the current browse experience where it's just hey here's a list of 100 Island sorted by CCU uh really what clicking into these does is it's going to open up an entirely new discover surface and that discover surface is going to have its own rows it's going to have its own top rated it's going to have its own new and updated but filtered specifically for the context that you are opting into um and we think this will be great for games we also think that this will be great for genres um and so if I'm a player who's super into roleplay games I should be able to go to the roleplay page and I should be able to see a full sort of discover surface curated to roleplay content um and so there's a ton of work that goes into that um and we're constantly going to be working on improving it as we go but we think that we can get the version of this out uh by the end of the year uh so that players can start really like diving deeper into discover as opposed to having to scroll 40 rows down and hope they stumble upon something that they're excited about I think the thing we're really excited about as well with those category pages and again this is collections there's also categories for different genres within fortnite is it allows us to be a little more efficient with some of our testing impressions right now we're giving you 50,000 basically random accounts to see your stuff if you made a role play you don't actually need 50,000 random accounts you need 10,000 roleplay players and you're going to get even probably higher CCU better metrics better everything if you're actually being tested within these contextual areas where people are actually trying to go deep in your genre which is again something we're we're really stoked for yep and so um here's just an example of like what that role play page might look like um we're adding a new kind of top 10 we're going to mess around this as like a sort of visualization of cont cont that we think that players will be really into um similarly we have like top rated underneath this you can imagine new and updated and then at the bottom we still want to have that like full list of islands um so that like players who really want to go deep uh and see all of the different content that's available within a genre they can still do that um but we're really hopeful that players kind of dive into these Pages um the other thing that we're going to be allowing players to do is actually favorite these Pages um and so then again those same collections can show back up in their Library they'll be able to have more immediate access um ideally we can start sort of sorting the different rows by the things that they favored it and really bringing that to the front uh and giving players a little bit more control over hey I'm here for roleplay games um and I want to make sure that I can get to those roleplay games really quickly and you don't need to show me like 25 rows of various content or various like combat content if I'm here just for this one thing um so the other example here uh would be like Fall Guys right and we can have different branding and images and and stuff kind of associated with these to really like convey that fantasy um but it's going to follow a similar sort of structure um where the different pages um will probably feel similar but like we want to be able to sort of like uh curate as needed and so if we see oh like this specific genre we know we want uh a different type of row we can do that this gives like discover actually a lot more control over um trying to find what rows are working for what different um what different genres and so maybe we want to have a most engaging within roleplay but with Fall Guys we want to have you know most social or like highest party size or whatever and so this just gives us um room for that like experimentation that I think goes a long way I asked if Joey could make it even more blinding version of this slide even brighter but so we're we're stuck with this yeah um and so the last thing that I'll talk about here kind of along with uh favoring these different categories um is something that can't alluded to which is like the new and returning sort of flow um and so one of the challenges that we have on Discover is that kind of as players are coming into the ecosystem um we don't know very much about them we don't know what they're here for we don't know what they're excited about um and so we sort of just serve everyone the same blanket content and so what we're doing is we're adding this sort of interstitial screen uh where players can say hey I'm here for Battle Royale I'm here for com combat I'm here for fall guys or whatever um and then we can very immediately turn that around and reflect it back in their home bar in the tops of their discover um and so it sort of solves it's a cold start problem um but it helps us to kind of get some forward progress on hey this is a platform this is not just BR um and we don't need to show every single player BR as the first thing that they see if they tell us that actually I'm here for something totally different um and so we think this is a really good step forward um and so we're excited to also you know hopefully be able to ship that with kind of the end of the year when we tend to see a lot like new players are showing up and sort of around that holiday period so um I think the other thing that we didn't touch on if you go back to like the main discover page is you know we're trying to hit the player feedback that discover can be a bit overwhelming there's emojis in the titles and there's ratings down there and there's title there's CCU and there's all this stuff and so again we we've been fortunate to work with some really great designers but the big thesis is can we give players all the information they need but not completely overwhelm them while not sacrificing density which we know is really important to our players they don't want to scroll around forever have giant tiles that take over everything and so again like so much of discover as I you've been on this journey with us for a while now it's a really iterative process this is our current step towards responding to feedback responding to creators trying to serve players and I think this is going to be the first of ideally almost infinite steps of trying to make this better and better sweet I think those are basically all the slides that we have um I'll Stand down here and the folks who are line I can finish answering the questions but I think we have to turn over the room so thank you all so thank you everyone for the time