Trends in Mobile Game Publishing and Monetisation - Mihai Gheza @Games Business Aalborg 2015

Editor's Notes

1. My own views and opinions! Mostly empirical :)
2. My indie adventure, pitching, dealing w complexity and failing miserably. Agency representation, launched 30 titles self-publishing, through PR, converted really well, but hard to guess success. While at the agency, met Sylvester and Bodie, later joined them. Recently moved into consultancy with www.adriancrook.com
3. History: Sylvester and Bodie @Viborg – most SYBO artists are Viborg Anim Workshop alumni, excellent school! Award winning short film Funding CAT Science 3 games then Subway Surfers Buyout, independent Scaling Where is it today? Subway Surfers, the World's 2nd most downloaded mobile game in 2014, 2nd to Candy Crush Saga alone (AppAnnie, Feb 2015), with 1 Billion+ lifetime installs (Sep 2015) and more MAUs than League of Legends. How? Proven concept, right team, right timing, a strategy for scaling. Key: +1 strategy simplify and add joyful gameplay (no turning, no tilting, just 3 straight lanes up down) timing, the entire ecosystem was ready for that city updates and good relationship with platform owner * The screenshot is Mike running in Transylvania, get it? Later note to self: perhaps too much cheese :)
4. I got to work on BoB when it went into production, on most things publishing: meta systems, UI/UX, monetization, analytics, ads, while witnessing studio grow from 10 to 50 today. 2nd game, much more hardcore, something the entire studio wanted to manifest (‘cos most of us were core gamers), great reception in West & Asia across midcore audiences. Editor’s Choice in 165 countries top brick. 2k 5* reviews in 1st weekend in US and CN alone. Coming out on Android soon.
5. iPad Pro the new laptop? watches, TV, AR, VR… Mobile players ready for more complex mechanics. 3-500 games launched each day? Big players get big money on proven IP and teams. CPIs go up, a lot of ad spend VC funded.
6. Indies will find a way to make it. Mostly through innovation and smart bets. Publishers seem to come back in style, as CPIs are so high. But relevant audience is key.
7. A note that evolution is Casual -> Midcore, not Hardcore -> Midcore.
8. Works very well w indie. Good PR helps. Featuring makes or breaks.
9. Most popular economy types in Top 400 grossing. Blending between genres. All have to deal with gating content, content delivery systems.
10. Check out Joris Dormans’ fantastic work! Bridging the gap between literature, systems and code.
11. You’re looking at a simplified runner. STOP, live demo time!
12. Play w values real-time and get outcomes. Future vision is to sync it with real time telemetry. Imagine dynamic balancing. Game design + coding + analytics become intertwined in a live system. Considering all the AI advancements and machine learning, it’s not SF to say that in the upcoming years somebody will achieve this, if they haven’t already, offering players a perfectly tuned experience.
13. It’s a business plan for very few ppl who actually have positive ROAS
14. Noticed a lot of studios treat App Stores like publishers, just saying… PR works well for indie sensations and premium I did a lot of SEO back in the days, ASO is not really a thing Vainglory had 1M on Twitch in September, nice! We still need a breakthrough, probably when App Store data meets Facebook data
15. The name of the game will be cutting down margins. But we need to know what other ppl are spending. And now we know, a couple of companies already offer this insight and it’s automated, not on demand expensive reports.
16. The game is kinda rigged. Big players have audiences they know intimately in terms of personas and develop custom tailored games for them. For an outsider it will become increasingly more difficult to penetrate and get the attention. For a successful studio the risk of releasing new IPs, done right, diminishes greatly when combining all the systems we talked about today.
17. For a machine it will be rather easy to understand the human brain. We can be boiled down to psychological mechanics and chemical reactions. Once we will have all the bio-feedback mechanisms on us at all times, they will learn how we think and operate, what works and what doesn’t. When to give you stronger monsters, sell you a new item or tell you to cool down and watch an ad. And do that at a scale and speed unparalleled by any human endeavor. That’s probably somewhere later down the line, not sure how soon though.