Eva Vonau is currently an intellectual property (IP) lawyer at Hogan Lovells and will be opening her own law firm, Slopek Vonau PartG mbB this September. Before pursuing a career in law, Eva worked at one of the biggest TV production studios in Germany as a technician, something that serves her well to this day. At Casual Connect Europe 2017, Eva laid out a roadmap for navigating the differences in IP law between countries.
Ad fraud costs the industry an estimated $8.2 billion per year. As a medium that sees some of the highest amount of time spent on mobile, games are one of the biggest targets for fraudsters.
Does paid marketing make sense in scaling your game? In a talk at Casual Connect Asia, Martin Macmillan (CEO of Pollen Velocity Capital) called How to Scale Your Game: Understanding the Metrics and How to Act on Them, Martin explained exactly that. He advised, “Here is a bit of marketing 101: unless you have figured out a way to spend profitably, you shouldn’t spend at all because mathematically you’re setting out to lose money.” First and foremost, possessing a good understanding of LTV is a must. Then you need to understand if the unit economics work in order to use paid UA as a viable marketing channel. To learn more about what your game’s metrics can tell you and how to finance growth, tune in to Martin’s full session below.
2017 is the year cloud gaming arrived for mobile! Now it’s possible to stream and play mobile games directly over the cloud. What will this mean for your business? Vesa Jutila, Co-Founder and Vice President of Content and Commercial Partnerships at Hatch Entertainment can help you answer that question.
Hatch Entertainment is a new social gaming service and is set to change the way we play games. Vesa and the team have built an inspiring, high-quality game collection for Hatch. Previously Vesa held a variety of executive positions at Rovio.
At Casual Connect Asia, Vesa explored the opportunities coming through cloud gaming for developers of full-featured premium games with no in-app purchases. He described, “We made it very simple and easy for ordinary people to try out new games, have fun with great games and really share this fun with their friends.” With cloud gaming we may soon be seeing mass market penetration for premium mobile games. PC and console-first developers could have a new way to reach the massive mobile game audience. Watch this video of Vesa’s session at Casual Connect and learn what you need to know to be ready for cloud gaming on mobile.
DOWNLOAD SLIDES
To read more about Vesa Jutila including a lecture from Casual Connect Europe 2017, see this exclusive article.
The time for Asian-Pacific mobile app publishers to switch to programmatic methods for monetizing. As the Head of APAC Platform Sales for MoPub, Simon Toh spoke about the need for developers to take advantage of mobile programmatic to monetize risk so that they don’t miss out on differentiated demand, revenue and control user experience. Simon stated, “To grow your top line, it is important for you to find new ways to monetize more of your users preferably all of them and not be overly dependent on in-app purchases.” During his talk at Casual Connect Asia, Simon also delved into what the beneits for publishers which included a glimpse into innovative ad formats and spend trends in the APAC market. To learn more, tune in to the video below of his full session.
It can be really tough to break into the Asian market, maybe even mysterious. Although there is a large difference in user behavior between Western and Asian players, Youzu Interactive has been very successful in localizing games. They have even been able to make it into the Top 10 in more than 60 countries overseas. In a lecture at Casual Connect Europe entitled Going Global – Local Operation Experience for Over 100 Countries, Yuli Zhao focused on what developers should do rather than what they shouldn’t do. Here is a key finding that Yuli described: “Because there are a small group of deep pocket players, whale players, in Asian games, when we bring the game to Western markets we don’t want to make the non-paying users feel bad about it so there are some items which is to price extremely high in our previous version in Asian market. Actually, we divided these items into smaller packages so that when the players pay for the virtual items, they will view the pricing as not that high but in reality, they need to buy the whole group of virtual items to get the final ones.”
Three of the top world markets comes from Asia are China, North America and Japan. Here are three findings which Yuli highlighted:
For more useful tips on how to break through the cross-cultural barrier, see the full lecture below.
Just what is the relationship between games and life? Do games reflect real life or are our lives becoming more and more influenced by games? These are the questions Baris Ozistek considered in his session at Casual Connect Europe.
Baris is CEO of Netmarble EMEA as well as board member of StatersHub, the largest acceleration program supporting startups in this region. Baris has also been President of Turkish Digital Games Federation and a board member of Turkish Information Technologies Foundation.
In this session, Baris used several of Netmarble’s successful mobile RPG titles to illustrate how gamification is becoming more and more intertwined in our lives. As he pointed out during his session, games are no longer just entertainment and are certainly not simply for children. Games have now expanded to include such things as the Nike app for running which not only tracks your progress, but also allows you to compete with others. Baris emphasizes that, just as we have short and long term goals in life, games do the same, and offer rewards that depend on the efforts we make.
To learn more about the similarities between games and real life, watch the video of this session below.
DOWNLOAD SLIDES
For more insights from Baris, see this article from Casual Connect Tel Aviv 2016.
Casual Games Association (CGA) has had a busy month. Their Indie Prize scholarship program received 470 game submissions before its deadline on December 5, 2016, and they recently released their online schedule for their upcoming Casual Connect Europe conference this February in Berlin, Germany.
All companies have to start out somewhere, and whether you’re a new start-up or an established developer looking to expand, you can benefit from the Growth Track at Casual Connect Tel Aviv. Find out more about ways to get funding and distribution across Growth’s various sessions, starting with Stanislav Sychenkov, Head of Publisher Relations at Mail.RU Group in the morning and Michal Skurnik, Game Designer at Mohican Lab in the afternoon.
There are certain customers, sometimes called whales, that generate a majority of the revenue for apps. Mike Hines, Developer Evangelist at Amazon, will share the company’s insights into who these “power users” are and how you can they be cultivated and engaged in the proper ways in the session ‘Understanding Your Power Users and Fostering More’.
In order to get the most out of advertising revenue, it’s important to understand the analytics that are at the core. Charles Manning, Founder and CEO of Kochava, will look at the ways to improve ROI in digital marketing in the session, The Hidden Truth Inside Your Data: Leveraging Dynamic Campaign Management to Expose Fraud, Strong Influencers and Maximum ROAS.
Also touching on the theme of ads is the panel focusing on the trends of large public companies like Zynga and Glu, who have more than a quarter of their revenue from ads. The panel with Yaniv Nizan, CEO and Co-founder of SOOMLA, Guy Tomer, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer for TabTale, Niko Vuori, Co-founder and COO of Rocket Games, Fernando Pernica, Senior Manager of Monetization and Publisher Growth at AdColony, Efrat Levitzky Krakover, VP Media at Matomy Media Group led by moderator Lior Shiff, founder of Games Growth Partners, will talk about the multitude of different things being tracked in What’s Inside the Advertising Black Box? Tips from Data Driven Publishers Who Monetize with Ads.
The other panel in the growth track will tackle the tricky subject of Intellectual Property and mobile/social games. Appearing at the panel will be Devin Radford, VP of Mobile at Fox Digital Entertainment, Caglar Eger, Expert of Business Development at Goodgame Studio and Sam Glassenberg, CEO of Playtech Casual Games. Henry Lowenfels, Vice President of Business Development at Scopely will moderate the panel.
One of the biggest areas to seek growth is in China, but it’s a challenging market to try and penetrate. Shlomo Freund, founder of AppInChina.co, will talk about the current state of the market and how to approach it in the session Conquering the Chinese App Market – Challenges and Solutions.
It’s important to realize, whether entering a new market or a new social media platform, thinking outside the box is a huge component to success. Shay Gabay, Business Development Manager at Bidalgo will talk about how to engage Instagram users in the session When Creativity Meets Technology – How to Unleash UA Potential on Instagram.
Those who can’t wait to grow their business should attend Casual Connect Tel Aviv on November 1-3. A range of social and mobile gaming sessions will be offered over several tracks in addition to the Growth Track with organized networking opportunities for those interested. More information about Growth and the other tracks is available at TelAviv.CasualConnect.org.
They installed your app…now what? At Casual Connect Asia Ian Atkinson from AdColony explained what! “70% of players like rewarded ads, so it’s leaving money on the table to not do it!”, Ian pointed out during this solo session, explaining how the top mobile app publishers are engaging and retaining users longer while maximizing monetization and minimizing SDK bloat.
