James Gwertzman examined how in-game events can help boost monetization and retention in free-to-play games to a Casual Connect Asia audience. “Events are ways to keep your game fresh and interesting and exciting to encourage your players to come back and spend more time in the game,” he says. For tips on setting up in-game events and details on how they can help, see the video below.
Last year, Playlab grew from 20 people to 100, and CEO Jakob Lykkegaard detailed what the company is doing to make sure success doesn’t crush out creativity in his Casual Connect Asia 2015 lecture. “One of the reasons for that [growth] is that last year, we at Casual Connect also met Niel [Dagondon] from Anino Games, and we acquired that studio in Manila a month after Casual Connect or so,” Jakob says.
Ubisoft Head of Player Intelligence Benjamin Pommeraud reported on the company’s efforts to make the games players are looking for during his speech at Casual Connect Asia 2015 “Every year we collect data — we collect billions of data points to understand how our customers behave inside our games,” he says. For his advice on how more developers can use player feedback and internal expertise, watch his speech below.
At Casual Connect Asia 2015, Jesse Davis shared knowledge he harvested from his time reskinning apps. “When you’ve produced hundreds of games, you go through a cycle that most indie developers don’t get to go through, right? Because you’re releasing constantly.” His company, Hydraulic Games, is transitioning into developing larger Unity games now, you can see his insights on accelerated game development in the video below.
Layton Hawkes explained to his Casual Connect Asia 2015 audience how a new development approach helped Halfbrick double Bears vs. Art’s day seven metrics after a problematic start. “We developed a really core focus on retention,” he says. “And we learned a new approach that eventually led us to global launch.”
At Casual Connect Asia, Immersion Corporation’s Bob Heubel shared his expertise on haptics in mobile games. Immersion’s work is “in over 2 billion devices worldwide,” he says. “We don’t make the devices. We just give the recipe on how to create the devices.” Watch the video below to see how lessons learned from rumble feedback in console games can transfer to mobile haptics.
At Casual Connect Asia 2015, Sonal Patel presented ways game developers can use MoPub to add real-time communication to monetize their games and even add new users. “Publishers usually ask me — ‘The biggest challenge I have is understanding how to show my ads. When to show my ads. What type of ads to show,'” Sonal says. “That, we can help you with.”
At the recent CasualConnect Asia, Aun Taraseina unpacked how Kiragames has kept their game Unblock Me going strong through half a decade of changing hardware and audience tastes to reach 100 million downloads. “Kiragames, with our only game so far, which is Unblock Me, is in the top four of [Southeast Asian] publishers by download,” he says.
At Casual Connect Asia, Justin Ng compared the development of Lurking, an award-winning game he helped develop at Digipen Singapore, and Stifled, his indie studio’s own spiritual successor to Lurking. “I think the biggest difference between a student project and a commercial title is really the business and legal side of things,” Justin says. Watch the video to find out what issues the Gattai Games team encountered as they rewrote the game as a new IP.
At the recent event in Singapore, Casual Connect Asia 2015, Yiwei P’ng reflected on the whirlwind of events that led to how Tiny Guardians came to be. There were things that went right and some things that went wrong. “It’s actually quite scary when you prototype something to be fun, and it turns out not to be fun.”
