Explosive gaming growth in Asia and emerging markets are forcing game developers to revisit global go-to-market strategies. Adding new distribution and monetization channels in high growth regions is critical to ensuring a game’s success going forward. Playphone’s Chief Product Manager, Baskar Roy, gave the attendees at Casual Connect USA a glimpse into the challenges and opportunities for launching mobile games in emerging markets and how game developers can maximize their game’s discovery, engagement, and revenue. During his lecture, he pointed out, “Indian users will sacrifice good graphics for the application size, but that is going to change. People will to start to care.” For more market insights, tune into Baskar’s presentation below.
Bhaskar Roy is the Chief Product Manager at Playphone where he manages their product design, development and engineering teams. Prior to joining Playphone he was the co-founder and product head at Qik, a mobile video and live streaming and messaging app. This was an exciting time for him; in fact it brought him the accomplishment he is most proud of in his career: founding a successful mobile entertainment company and seeing what he built used and loved by over 100 million people globally. Qik was later acquired by Skype and then Microsoft.
Delivering Fantastic Mobile Experiences
Bhaskar is passionate about delivering fantastic mobile experiences that are intuitive and innovative, so his position at Playphone was a natural fit. Here he has opportunities to push the envelope to create new social gaming experiences for users, an aspect of his work that he greatly enjoys. His favorite thing about his job is working with passionate, talented people ready to change the world.
Bhaskar has always been fascinated with computers, technology, entrepreneurship and innovation leaders. His passion for creating amazing mobile entertainment experiences has been the driving force behind his career. However, despite his deep roots in the mobile entertainment space, Playphone is his first opportunity to combine his enthusiasm for gaming with his mobile entertainment know-how.
As a pioneer in bringing new mobile entertainment experiences to market, Bhaskar has developed a good sense of what works in the mobile entertainment space and what doesn’t. As a result, he is able to guide his teams toward opportunity and to push the social gaming experience to the next level.
Challenging the Status Quo
But he points out that whenever you try something new and challenge the status quo, you inevitably run into rough spots. Playphone’s vision is to deliver a leading edge social gaming experience worldwide. As they launched their game stores around the world, they discovered an opening in emerging markets for a new type of game store that would cater to the needs of local players – one that targets who they are and their culture. These same regions are seeing huge growth in smartphones and data consumption, often as their first access to the internet. The result is a huge segment of Android gamers who are underserved by generic solutions. This is the challenge Playphone faces; they believe they can fill this need by delivering a more personalized and localized mobile social game store and gaming experience, something that is not currently available to these users.
This challenge is closely aligned with the trends Playphone sees coming to the games industry in the next several years. They expect to see explosive growth in emerging markets for smartphones, devices and data growth. Billions of users will be exposed to the internet for the first time, making room for the next innovation in those markets. They also expect to see virtual reality becoming mainstream within five years. Both these trends will significantly impact the entertainment and games industries. Playphone is actively working to understand what this will mean in terms of mobile games and how they can meet the needs of gamers in this market.
Distribution and Localization
Playphone’s distribution projects reflect their expertise and the possibilities they are seeing in this market. Prior to their acquisition by Gungho they provided white label and some Playphone-branded game stores for wireless operators worldwide including Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, SingTel, Telkomsel, Vivo, Claro and T-Mobile UK, operating 18 games stores live in North America, South America, UK, Asia and the Middle East. After acquisition, these companies continued to be partners but Playphone took over operation of the stores, rebranding them as Playphone. The company is rapidly expanding into emerging markets and is currently opening stores in Taiwan and India. Playphone has localized their stores to each market using localized payment methods and integrating unique social features into the entire gaming experience, from game discovery and download to inviting friends to play and share gaming experiences.
As Bhaskar explains, one of the key changes in the games ecosystem during the past five to ten years has been the growth of the app stores and social networks. This has democratized the ability for app developers to build great apps and distribute them organically to end users. Opportunities are now open to all developers, leading to huge growth in apps. But the enormous number of apps now coming to the stores has resulted in a discoverability issue that creates significantly increased acquisition costs.
To meet the challenges of distribution specific to each region, Bhaskar employs several key channels. These include working closely with local carriers and OEMs – marketing with or through them as well as tying in with large publishers in order to localize and market the content to meet the needs of local users. They also consider using the social media and other organic channels in that country and they search for niche local distribution channels specific to the country, leveraging these to maximize distribution.
Bhaskar emphasizes, “Understanding cultural nuances is important to building successful game franchises.” Although AAA games are popular worldwide, preferences for other genres vary by locality: RPG and action games in Asia, casino games in the US and sports games in Latin America. But whatever the genre, when considering a game he looks for one that is fun and engaging with a great monetization loop.
Monetization: The Game Essential
When games are not great at engaging and monetizing, Playphone works with developers to make improvements in these areas. They make recommendations to developers about ways they can improve the UX flow in their games and balance monetization by placing purchase offers at the right time. They also look at the monetization models prevalent in the region and help developers take advantage of them. Bhaskar emphasizes that to work through monetization issues, it is essential to “integrate deeply with prevalent local payment methods to provide a seamless experience, improve flow to increase engagement, and seek out monetization at the right moments, with the right balance.”
He expects monetization using the free-to-play business model to continue expanding and he anticipates tremendous growth in subscription services targeting gamers with similar preferences. In emerging markets where users are price sensitive, creative ads now being shown, for example, with ads becoming more like interactive mini-games.
Getting players to keep playing rather than becoming annoyed and quitting the game is a question of balance. “The key thing is to keep the eye on sustained monetization rather than one big pop,” Bhaskar says. “This goes back to figuring out the monetization loop and making this an integral part of the gameplay.”
For smaller studios with monetization issues he recommends: “Don’t focus initially on monetization. Initially focus on building a great game. Once you have that, then figure out how to best introduce the monetization loop till you get a strong conversion. A strong, well-designed monetization loop can have a significant impact on monetization. Once you have the monetization loop working, figure out how to create regular events in the game that can boost monetization further.” He also advises to test, test, test.
Comments
