>> Everyone, hi. I'm Bernardo Zamora.
I work in the Microsoft Store.
I work in the Dev Centre Team which is
the team that helps get your games into the Store.
So we'll talk a little bit more about what
this Microsoft Store that our friends from Astron,
Brendan, talked about before.
We will talk about some of
the capabilities that the Store
has to enable your games
to make money and reach more customers.
And finally, we will talk about some of
the self publishing capabilities
that we have in the Store.
So just a start, when we're
talking about the Microsoft Store,
it's the place where your games can be
submitted and target Windows 10 PCs,
Xbox One devices and Mixed Reality devices.
I was in one of
the business reviews we have
every quarter a few months ago,
and I was hearing some quotes from some of
the top game publishers in the world in the Store.
They were saying, for example,
in console, we had the best quota ever.
On PC, surprisingly for most of us,
they're seeing a lot of
resurgence and growth again on PC.
So you see that getting your games in
this single place allows you to do both.
But not only that, we're able to get a lot
of opportunity in the Mixed Reality area.
And just to get a sense a little bit about
what the capability and the reach for the Store is,
here some just sample numbers.
More than 600 million people are
using device that have
Windows 10 where your game can run.
Xbox One out-sold PS4 this last December.
And if you produce a game for a console,
700 million hours played.
So gamers out there spend a lot of time playing
your games and other games of course.
Just since the launch of Xbox One X,
there's been more than 220 exclusive games
and more than 1300 titles
also launched for that platform.
You probably realized a few months ago,
PUBG launched in December PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
In the last couple of months only,
there have been more than 5 million players.
So if you produce a good game,
you will get players for that one.
And another example is Minecraft.
There's been more than 144 million copies
sold of Minecraft up until January of this year.
So if you build a good game, there is an audience there.
And examples of games that have launched so
far you see Gears of War,
Forza Horizon, Halo Wars, Zoo Tycoon,
ReCore, and many many many others in this for example,
that have made the console and PC
the platform for launch.
So we've seen many of these games being very successful.
And we're also seeing a new trend now.
The new trend is Mixed Reality.
There's a whole section in the Store
that has Mixed Reality apps and games.
And something I found out
last week from our marketing friends,
we started with 30 apps or
games when Mixed Reality launched.
There are now more than 130.
And currently, three out of
the top 25 apps or
games in the Store today are Mixes Reality ones.
So again, meaning to
one single place, you can target Xbox,
you can target a PC and you can start
exploring this Mixed Reality opportunity.
And let me play a video, minute and half,
just tells you some examples of what some of
the new games coming with Mixed Reality concepts.
So that's Mixed Reality.
That's the Mixed Reality opportunity.
And as you think about bringing
your games to the console,
to the PC or Mixed Reality or all three,
think about what the Store provides
you to be able to
monetize your games to promote your games.
So as I mentioned, you can
build once, target different platforms.
So it reduces the cost and
complexity to get your game to market.
The Store supports pre-beta, pre-order,
full release, it supports
all the different combinations to get your game from
idea into full release.
It supports both physical and digital.
Most of the games are now digital but we have
still several games maintain the disc
and sending disc especially
in countries for example
where the bandwidth is not as high,
this are still a premium way
of getting your game out there.
Also for digital, and Brendan from Astron,
he mentioned in the previous session, we have IARC.
We have an agreement with IARC to be able to
certify your games with
different age ratings for all the world.
So it not only saves you weeks and
weeks of work but it also saves you a lot of money.
It's all integrated into the Store.
You can release a game or you can add add-ons,
you can have bundles,
you can have consumables,
you can have subscriptions,
pretty much every one of
the monetization options out
there it's supported in the Store.
You have digital downloads. We have map facts.
You can have all of those already supported.
You can have the games but you also
have Mixed Reality apps also.
All of them support it. You can have full GA
for every single user across
the platform or you can support flights,
where you target different binaries
to different users and
also get analytics for
these different segments every time you do a release.
You can figure out what works and what
doesn't work in real time.
Because also the Store supports real-time analytics.
As Brendan mentioned before, we support crashes,
we support analytics but in
the last few months we've added real-time.
So minutes after you start launching a new version,
you get data about acquisitions,
data about crashes which also is one of
the major features that
developers are using to be able to release more rapidly.
And another example of the multiple things
you can do is you can respond to reviews.
In Xbox, that's very new.
In PC we've had it for a while.
Somebody posts a review
saying something works or something doesn't work,
you can respond immediately and you can
start the dialogue with that user either
to debug something or to explain how
to solve some problems that the user has.
So all of those are capabilities
that the Store has today.
And what do you need to do to be able to get
your game to start using all of these capabilities?
You need to get an account in Dev Center.
Dev Center is the portal where you
do all of these configurations,
do all the analytics.
Then create your submission.
You put your binary,
age rating, pricing, market,
you define if it's a beta,
if it's going to be a release,
you configure all of those properties.
You configure the descriptions,
you target which devices.
You might want to start with Xbox,
you can go PC later and then
Mixed Reality later, then you release it.
You submit it, and it goes through certification.
It validates that everything works.
So last minute surprises don't catch you.
So, oh I didn't know, this set of hardware didn't work.
We try to catch that as much as possible for you.
You can actually do pre-releases,
you can distribute tokens for reviewers, for example.
You can do pre-orders and then you release it.
And then once it's out there,
we have the tools to help you optimize it.
Not only can you do analytics real-time,
you can do health, crashes,
reviews but also you can do so maybe testing of
the content inside the game.
You can see by country health, crashes by devices.
If some devices are having
more problems than others, for example.
And then you can continue expanding the game.
Astron here as we heard,
it has been live for many months and they keep
on adding DLCs and content packs and new features.
So the Store allows you to do that.
Again, you can use flighting to do
it and catch issues before you
distribute to all the community or you
can go wide to 100 percent of your users from day one.
And then you can do sales.
The Store does a lot of good promotion for your sales.
Then you can add trailers,
you can add 4K assets.
You can continue to grow the game and evolve it because
once the game catches a good community,
you want to keep on building in that community.
And how does this portal look like?
This portal what we call
Dev Center is completely self-service.
You go in and this is exactly how it looks.
You choose your game and then you go into
the different screens and you
configure anything in the game,
from pricing, to descriptions,
to age ratings to the sales,
all of that is still very online.
You do your own submissions, they go live.
And this year, what we're trying to
do is make this process more agile and faster.
So if you've worked with Dev Center before,
you'll see faster time to turn around,
faster certification, faster time to go live.
That's some of the high level capabilities
that you can do in Dev Center today.
So, as you're thinking of
expanding your reach to your game,
think about the Microsoft Store,
a place where you can target console,
Windows 10 PCs and Mixed Reality.
More than 600 million users are
accessible to you for both apps and games.
And we have a very advanced
self-services publishing system.
So you can use it from the simplest game
to one of the most complex games
that you saw there like Kayla War,
Gears of War or the one
that was released yesterday, Sea of Thieves.
So all of those are using the system that
we've seen today to target all these platforms.
So, at a high level what the Store can do
for you and I'm open for any questions you might have.
>> Yes.
>> The question is what is my favorite game?
It keeps evolving. Because I
knew I was going compresend with Astroneer,
I've been playing Astroneer the last two weeks.
So it just keeps
changing after I finish it move to the next.
Cuphead was one of the best ones.
I tried it until it get very frustrated.
And it just gets super complicated
a few levels so it just keeps on evolving.
I was a fan for Gears of War
for about six months, it just kept changing.
And I actually just bought
Pac Man an Xbox for my daughter.
So I keep on playing games,
probably I'm ready to start playing Sea of Thieves now.
I just downloaded it but I'm a GDC
I cannot play that one.
Thank you very much. But now someone to
ask me any questions after this session.