During her session at Casual Connect Eastern Europe 2014, Martine Spaans shared facts to understanding a female audience. One such fact was “female gamers spend more time and money than males,” she says.
Martine Spaans had been working with FGL Mobile Services from the beginning eight years, then as a client, building a great deal of trust and mutual understanding with them. She was immediately intrigued when they explained their new mobile service model and announced that they were now looking to develop a working relationship with some trusted publishers. Her intrigue and interest was the impetuous that culminated in founding Tamalaki Publishing. She has been working exclusively with FGL ever since.
The division of responsibilities in this relationship has FGL handling QA testing and the integration of their services, while Spaans manages communications with the developers. Together, they analyze how a game can be improved, how the monetization strategy can be optimized, and what theme and model would be most advantageous for future projects. She uses her experience in online and mobile marketing to help optimize the advertising revenue.
Working Together in the Industry
The satisfaction of working in the games industry for Spaans comes through seeing how the fun of their products is reflecting in the people working on them, as well as through working with development teams who are so eager to learn.
Spaans sees everyone in the games industry facing the same challenges: how to get a game discovered, how to break the circle of the self-fulfilling Top Games prophecy, how to compete with big marketing budgets, and how to monetize and retain players. Essentially, the problem lies in the nature of the App Stores and the expectations we have raised within our own audience.
She decided her response to these challenges would be to focus on a niche market. Tamalaki publishes exclusively for the 30+ female demographic, mainly hidden object games, with some match-3 or time management content for variety. They ensure their games will get traction by cross-promoting and building audience loyalty through using all the tools FGL provides.
Vastly Changing Landscape
As Spaans looks toward the future of the games industry, she is keeping her eyes open to be ready to try new ideas. She notes that the industry has become very dependent on the hardware we create for. But in five years, the mobile landscape could well look completely different. Perhaps VR, Smart Glasses, or smart watches will have taken off to become a mainstream gaming medium. She says, “I’d love to imagine someone playing a hidden object game through augmented reality glasses, wherever they are.”
Her own gaming these days is generally done on her iPhone or Nexus 7 tablet since she is so frequently traveling. Her PS3 console is now neglected and gathering dust along with a complete collection of Ubisoft Games. She is a huge fan of Tamalaki’s hidden object games, but currently she is also enjoying Ruzzle Adventure, and occasionally, for a complete change of pace, she plays Critical Strike Portable.
In her free time, Spaans is a car enthusiast who enjoys relaxing in her garage, tinkering away with her cars or motorcycle. Her most prized possession is her 1974 Aston Martin V8.
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