Over 1,000 games industry professionals are expected to turn out for Casual Connect Kyiv on October 24-26. During the conference’s Market Navigation track, they can expect to receive actionable insights from experts that will help them navigate the sometimes choppy waters in the gaming industry’s current and emerging markets.
“The casino industry doesn’t have the depth of knowledge on who their future consumer is.” Those were the words spoken by Rahul Sood of Unikrn during GiGse 2017 in San Diego last month. Indeed, a major focus of the three-day casino gaming industry event surrounded video gamers instead of traditional slots and table-game players – showing that the door is open to a new and lucrative market for non-casino game developers.
In one panel, experts from UNLV’s Center for Gaming Innovation, GameCo, Rover Strategic Advisors, Zeal Networks, and Guru Games, barely touched on traditional casino fare and focused entirely on how to merge skill-based games with gambling.
GameCo’s Blaine Graboyes noted that the average gamer is 35 years old and is looking for VIP experiences that the casino industry is adept at – but with a video gaming slant. “I’ve been producing games for over 20 years and there’s just a level of interactivity and engagement that isn’t available in slot games.”
While GiGse touched on virtual reality’s place in the casino industry last year, this year it was a major focus. In its Day 2 opening lecture, KWP Limited Director Kevin Williams dove into VR gaming and what it could mean for the casino industry.
Kevin comes from the digital out-of-home entertainment (DOE) industry which, historically, has not overlapped much with the casino industry – although the two industries have sometimes competed for customers. However, with consumer trends toward entertainment shifting, the two industries have recently started working together. Kevin noted, for instance, that people are beginning to see casinos as experience destinations instead of gaming centers.
Kevin brought his experiences with VR from the DOE industry to share with those at GiGse who might be mulling VR setups in their casinos – listing various ways VR is already being used. He noted that many places are looking to VR to supplement their current entertainment options or provide something new for guests.
This is part of a series on the convergence of video games and the casino industry and opportunities for non-casino game developers. This article focuses on skill-based games. Part 1 focuses on mobile games. Part 3 focuses on spectator events such as esports and virtual reality.
At the recent Global Gaming Expo (G2E) in Las Vegas, panels and attractions with companies such as Caesars, IGT, Gamblit Gaming, GameCo and Competition Interactive made one thing abundantly clear: The video game and casino industries are converging. This promises not only new sources of revenue for casinos, but new opportunities for game developers outside the casino industry as well.
During his session about maximizing revenue at Casual Connect Eastern Europe 2014, Andrei Dementjev also provided a bit of advice to those listening: “Stop ignoring 50 percent of your audience.”
Andrei Dementjev works within the mobile operator relations department as the vice president of operations at Fortumo. When Dementjev first started at Fortumo, the company was just getting started and the team was relatively small. The business idea was much more local and targeted at very specific markets. Even though the company and its goals were small, it was still a challenging opportunity for Dementjev. Now, he has been the leading Fortumo payment coverage expansion strategy for the last five years. When asked what he does at Fortumo, Dementjev says, “operations is all about stress, incident management and expansions. [There is] unbelievable multitasking and project priorities changing every day.” Some of these changes which Fortumo has faced over time were when they shifted from desktop to mobile and then from dumb phones to smart devices. Both of these changes presented completely different challenges in payment flow, UI, and use cases.
Fortumo currently covers a network of 300 operators in 81 countries from Albania to Vietnam. Fortumo is unique as it focuses on emerging markets in Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa. It is in these areas that mobile payments can make a tremendous difference. According to Fortumo’s website, “Fortumo is now enabling developers to effectively make money from more countries . . . than any other mobile payment provider”. A large part of this success is that Fortumo was the first to fill the niche in emerging markets, and it offers instant activation and self-service setup.
With millions of new smartphone users in existence (and prior to released games), Dementjev strongly believes that emerging markets are coming on strong in the gaming industry. As the use of smartphones spreads, game developers are faced with all sorts of new challenges. These challenges are occurring because the product is new to the audience. The “normal” or expected behavior of people whom are introduced to these products for the first time is different than the challenges the gaming industry has tackled before.
Dementjev stays positive because it keeps him motivated and able to conquer the challenges he faces. In his free time, he enjoys cycling and photography. His favorite subjects to photograph include big city nightlife and beautiful Estonian nature. He also likes all varieties of active team sports. When asked about F2P games, Dementjev said that he has both a love and hate relationship with them. He loves them because they bring “great games to the masses.” His hate of F2P games springs from the fact that “it kills smaller games, genres, and niches.” Andrei’s favorite gaming platform to play on is Xbox Kinect because it is fun and it is a great way to play with friends. In fact, the only console that Dementjev owns is Xbox 360 because of the Kinect.
The single event which changed how Dementjev viewed Fortumo was the first popularity boost of Android devices. The Android devices had a “very quick market share rise and ecosystem development”. Fortumo embraced this and was the first company that released a mobile payment product on Android. The proudest moment in Dementjev’s carrier was when Fortumo launched payments coverage in 80th market, saying “every new expansion is unique and unforgettable, with it’s own problems and solutions”. In Dementjev’s opinion, in the next three to five years, the many variations of smart devices such as phones, fridges, wearables, tablets, glasses, and cars will keep growing. These new devices will interact and communicate with each other in innumerable ways. Fortumo’s role in this will be to ensure proper content and game monetization in emerging markets around the world.
“Android, at this point, is over 53 percent of all global device shipments this year,” Omar Siddiqui informed his audience during his session at Casual Connect USA 2014. “1.3 billion devices to be shipped this year. As you are developing your games, if you want to reach that mass audience, you obviously have to be thinking about both iOS and Android.”
DOWNLOAD SLIDES
Omar Siddiqui is the co-founder and CEO at Kiwi, a cross-platform game developer that has produced top games on Android and more recently on iOS. He and his co-founder Shvet Jain started the company in 2011 after building free-to-play games for almost a decade at Trippert Labs, Playdom, and Disney.
In Kiwi, Siddiqui has found an opportunity to tie together all his experiences, especially those gained from building top social games, such as Gardens of Time for Disney Playdom. They innovated on design and also achieved commercial success. He says, “That balanced approach continues to be our template for the types of products we want to continue to build going forward.”
Siddiqui gains the greatest satisfaction in his career through achieving goals as a team. These moments are his opportunity to take stock and appreciate what they have been able to do together, especially since it takes a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and luck to make a game tangible, starting with nothing but an idea.
For him, these meaningful moments range from successful products, such as Gardens of Time for Playdom or Shipwrecked and Westbound for Kiwi, to products that didn’t succeed commercially, but they were still proud to have pulled off as a team.
Siddiqui emphasizes the advantages that he personally finds with the mobile gaming platform, particularly the accessibility and availability that make it convenient as his life has become busier. He has also noticed that he is increasingly using tablet gaming as a multi-tasking activity; this correlates with the data Kiwi is starting to see about how people are gaming.
These days, he plays Hearthstone quite actively. Although he is a casual player, he still enjoys competitive play. He particularly enjoys a quick, player-to-player experience with permutations and nuances he can figure out at his own pace.
Typically, he does not become involved in paying for F2P, preferring to grind his way through. But he did break down and pay for construction acceleration in Clash of Clans, and considers that to be quite a testimonial for the game.
His console gaming is considerably more limited than what he does on mobile; he is still running an old Xbox 360 and says he is definitely due for an upgrade.
Siddiqui emphasizes, “As a company, we are ensuring that we build great linked player experiences across iOS and Android devices, whether phones or tablets. Providing excellent cross-platform social gameplay and community building remains an area where we feel we can excel on in the coming years, as smart mobile devices are truly ubiquitous.”
They are following the extension of smart operating systems from mobile devices to televisions with interest. With their titles built on Android and iOS, as smart televisions and smart top-set boxes become common, new markets open up for them. Siddiqui also believes, “With the same casualization of gaming that becomes increasingly possible as households play familiar mobile casual games on their televisions, new forms of approachable gaming will emerge that could be very exciting.” Kiwi is planning for this future through experimenting with their existing games to these new platforms, as well as prototyping new games that are relevant for smart television play.
Siddiqui believes the emergence of international markets will make a tremendous impact on the entire game industry. He points out that these markets are both huge and unique. For example, new mobile gamers in China have very different preferences toward in-app purchases and game genres than players in other markets around the globe. He insists, “To capture these enormous opportunities, developers everywhere will have to rethink how they build and distribute games to better appeal to a global audience.”
Robert Grossberg, Co-founder and CEO at TreSensa, describes the proudest moment of his career as “when I said to myself, ‘Why not me?’ and took the leap to start TreSensa.” He emphasizes that starting your own business requires that leap of faith, believing that your vision can be translated into a viable enterprise. It is also a scary thing to do, especially if you have a family to support. But Grossberg did have the advantage of years of experience as an operator at several startups, where he was able to see firsthand what it takes to succeed as a CEO.
HTML5 Drives the Mobile Web
In 2011, Grossberg, with Vincent Obermeier and Rakesh Raju, founded TreSensa. They saw game studios struggling to build successful mobile gaming businesses in the existing app store economy, and they believed the mobile web and HTML5 could be the solution to many of the issues involved. Grossberg and Obermeier brought experience in digital marketing and monetization to the venture; only Raju had prior gaming experience. They were able to approach the challenges of mobile gaming with no preconceived ideas or prejudices; a situation which Grossberg believes has helped to drive their innovation.
A CEO’s Life
At the beginning, Grossberg was closely involved with the day-to-day execution in the business, but as the company has grown, his activities have shifted. He is now responsible for fund raising, PR, and recruiting senior talent to the team. He is also involved with setting the strategic direction of the company and leading certain business development efforts. But most important, he claims, “I try to stay out of the way of the other people on the team and block for them when necessary so they can be as effective as possible.”
A Sucker for Simple Fun
When away from work, Grossberg is mainly involved in family activities, such as coaching his son’s lacrosse team or TV show binges with his wife. He also enjoys running and playing ice hockey. Because of TreSensa’s focus on mobile gaming, he has spent much of the past two years playing mobile games. He says, “I am a sucker for the basic, but addicting, games like SuperHexagon, BikeRacePro, and Paper Toss.
Emerging Markets Multiply Mobile Growth
The spread of smart phones and tablets, especially in emerging markets, is the most important development Grossberg is currently observing. He says, “The hardware, software, and wireless infrastructure are getting stronger and stronger, opening up mobile gaming to billions and billions of new gamers. We are talking about the largest addressable market in the history of the world.” He foresees a huge impact on the gaming industry through the growth of mobile gaming in international markets such as India, Africa, the Middle East and Brazil.
Grossberg points out that every smart phone or tablet contains a browser. TreSensa’s technology enables mobile browser-supported game play across the widest set of devices and operating systems. As a result, they are in a position to help studios distribute their games through multiple channels to reach this massive audience. He encourages developers to check them out at www.tresensa.com.
