“I think some of us will visualize the penalties of failure while others will visualize the rewards of having changed to mobile adequately,” says Vicenc Marti about social casino companies during Casual Connect Europe.
Vicenc Marti is Co-Founder and CEO of Akamon Entertainment. As CEO, Marti’s work is 20 percent strategy and 80 percent people management, and often describes himself as “Chief Cheerleader”. When he’s not working on one of those two core tasks, he concentrates on learning from others, including competitors, and bringing that knowledge back to his work. Marti feels that active learning and sharing of new knowledge makes himself and those around him more capable as individuals, teams, and organizations.
Putting Community First
Marti has developed the conviction that only with happy employees can you compete in the knowledge economy. Holding to this value led to the proudest moment of his career: when the Akamon employees voted it the “Best Place to Work” in Spain. Marti also believes that his company’s number one responsibility is protecting the community of Akamon users. He hasn’t always felt this way, but when the Akamon player community went on strike over a disagreement over a policy change, that belief solidified very quickly. Since then, Akamon pays careful attention to user feedback and incorporates players into the game creation process, with excellent results so far.
Away from work, Marti enjoys traveling with his family, discovering new restaurants around the world, reading, watching movies, sports such as tennis, skiing, and scuba diving, and, of course, playing games. He particularly enjoys playing on Xbox One, saying, “it has become what the vision was, a true entertainment center for the family.” He also owns a PS4, in order to “stay up on the latest trends”, but of course, it’s fun too.
Game Development Democracy
He appreciates free-to-play because it has added democracy to the game development industry. As a result, everyone can tap into the multi-billion dollar European market. The downside of free-to-play is that it has become so widely dominated by Facebook, Apple and Google. Marti believes that over the next few years in the games industry everything will be mobile. He expects desktop to be used only for professional applications. He sees this trend happening much faster than most people expect. His mission is to make sure Akamon is ahead of the curve, or, at the least, keeping up with it.
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