“It’s true that the market is dominated by a few players, but still, if you look at the number of the 100 grossing apps right now on the IOS, it is doing about 30K a day,” says Giordano Contestabile during Casual Connect USA. “If you can keep it going for one year, that means a 10 million dollar round rate.”
Giordano Contestabile is the vice president of product management at Tilting Point Media, a company that focuses on partnering with elite independent game developers, helping them to succeed in the market with funding, product feedback, and marketing services. Contestabile’s team handles product management, UX/UI, analytics and user acquisition, working with developers from the very early stage of the development process to post-launch operations.
Recognized Efforts
When Leo’s Fortune, developed by their partner 1337/Senri, won an Apple Design Award, they were extremely proud of this achievement that was the result of two years of work. The team’s focus on making the highest quality experience led to this recognition and support from Apple.
Leo’s Fortune was launched as a premium game on iOS at a time when everyone told them the market for premium games was dead. But the game was received extremely well, was a financial success and was Editor’s Choice in 135 countries, as well as receiving the Apple award. From this experience, Contestabile learned that even though F2P is the overwhelming majority of the market, there is still space for extremely high-quality, original premium experiences.
Building The Business
Now Tilting Point Media is looking to develop as broad and diversified a portfolio as possible in terms of genre, theme, and business model. The overarching intention is for all their games to be extremely high quality and original; the market is so competitive that only great products will be able to rise above the rest.
Prior to coming to Tilting Point Media, Contestabile was the executive producer of the Bejeweled franchise for EA; handling a massively popular live game, such as Bejeweled Blitz, taught him a great deal about how much complexity is involved in developing and operating free-to-play games. He loves the opportunity F2P offers to make games available to a large audience, with games now reaching hundreds of millions of people who weren’t playing them before. Unfortunately, the past few years have seen low-quality clones and uninspired games flood the market. However, the market has evolved, and low-quality games are finding it harder and harder to succeed. He calls this a great development.
Contestabile is a long-time PC gamer, but his current favorite platform is his iPad, not only for reasons of available time and portability, but because recently a large number of very high-quality games have been released. His game preferences include Threes, Leo’s Fortune, Twodots, Toy Rush and Trials Frontier. He also owns a PS4 and an Xbox One, using them mainly for sports games and to watch movies and videos.
When he is not involved in gaming, he loves art, design, fashion, food, and wine. Fortunately, these are found in abundance where he lives in New York City.
Believing In Mobile
Contestabile sees huge potential coming in cross-platform, and he believes mobile and tablet will be central to it. So Tilting Point Media is making sure all their games will be ready for a future in which a player will play on mobile, tablet, and big screen devices. Players will expect the best user experience on all of these. He believes in the future there will be a strong trend toward experiences that are differentiated on each device, but are interconnected.
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