15 predictions for the future of mobile games in 2014

[Music] my gut feeling is that we're heading a year where sociability is going to be important again and it's something where we I think we're going to see that that whole process you think look at the share button on the the you know the Xbox and the PS4 look at what we're doing with every play the ability to create magical moments in your game that other players want to show off is incredibly important I think next year it's going to be all about putting the power of gameplay back in the hands of the player and then finding ways to communicate and share that and I think that that's going to be the best way to get discovered and I think that's why you know working at everything has been such a good thing for us is because we've seen that starting to emerge we're absolutely the Forefront of doing that well I think like the uh the Indie time for small developers with low budgets is maybe going over so you have to have a really money to to make it also in the mobile so I think it's like more segment in the big players sadly well I feel like there's going to be a lot of of

midcore to hardcore games in the west part of the world and also the Publishers are going to change a little bit the the way they work they are going to start to to work more on live operations mobile industry is still buoyant and and it's great and I think um um mobile and console now uh are our two markets we're going to Bon I mean in terms of conso the Market's going to be uh obviously largely better in the next two three years and mobile is going to gain momentum again and again especially in the in the many uh many Grand countries like China uh like Brazil so uh it's very interesting to see that um U now those two markets are are are really uh complimentary and uh and and and and and have a very good growth everybody's talking about the micro consoles but I'm yet to be totally sold on that um

I think it'll be more of the same I think though uh the Market's getting harder and harder to break so I think a lot of the smaller companies are going to start folding unfortunately and actually having a publisher is becoming more and more needed because you need a big budget to actually get seen I think you continue to see massive growth in uh gaming companies moving to Mobile and or mobile only games um I think you're going to see uh more sophistication uh by Mobile gaming companies as far as seg segmenting out their users um and I think um they're going continue there's going to be a lot of room for new uh mobile companies I think uh it's not just going to be two or three uh developers dominating anymore that is going to be even more dominated by big companies so it's going to be even more challenging for Indie companies so you have to like I think your colleagues said be really creative in order to punch through the big Mass so again I think that uh uh connecting the players and making players more social is the the next thing that's going to happen um you can see it in the top games and in

the store and the most successful gaming companies today what they do is uh um you know connecting between the players so I think that you have a game and your game uh doesn't let your player to play with another friend so it would never you know there's there's very low chances that he would recommend it to a friend and you would get another download and if your game doesn't get a lot of downloads and you're not getting featured and you're not going to be at the top at the stores and and again the whole thing is just like a cycle so what you should do is make sure that uh your games that has the right social features that fits together with it you know it depends on the game and the style of the game and I think that um we should also make sure that uh you know your players are actually communicating with each other through the game so every player can express himself or herself and kind of find themselves within the game I think that's something that we're going to see later on in next year well I think we're going to see some uh interesting second screen applications so people getting an iPad and a you know an Android tablet connected into a a Xbox One a PS4

uh PCS and I think there has been you know the Wii U has begun putting some games out there but I do not think we've seen the more interesting uses of that and and I think there's a whole wave of games coming which will take advantage of the the number of screens which are in people's homes these days so I think that crossplatform strategies uh will be much more important in 2014 so typically there are a lot of iOS there are a lot of developers that have gone that have taken the iOS first approach and then deal with Android later but now they can't really afford to ignore the Android market anymore and simultaneous launches are even more important so I think this upcoming year developers um large and small will really have to consider what crossplatform strategy they will use um to get on both IOS and Android

from the beginning of development and not have it as an afterthought I mean what I find really interesting right now is that Berlin in Germany is emerging into a new gaming Hub after vuga we established our company there in 2009 being around 280 people we see that a lot of gaming companies are actually coming to Berlin uh Kabam opened up their first office in Berlin now King announced that they want to open up a studio in Berlin so for us it looks like Europe is coming more and more the the the continent of producing Gam and producing the Next Generation games so I think that's pretty exciting and that's something we are looking forward to because it also helps us to establish us as a gaming company and to establish gaming as a new type of entertainment TV so I think second screen games on mobile phones are going to become really important uh because when you've got a TV audience saying yay let's get this app um specifically in a country you'll hit the charts and do really well and um we're starting to see some really interesting conversations here so I think I think having your phone watching

TV doing things together is going to be really important in 2014 I think it's going to be very interesting um because the whole peripheral software uh is is increasing a lot and uh with all the new devices and Frameworks it's just going to be there's more devices to go to it's not over we're still Rison I think next year we're going to see even more mobile games even more startups a lot of a lot of money being poured into into this uh a question of whether it's going to reciprocate in the return uh I don't really know but I think that a lot of money is being poured into Mobile social and whether that pans out for everyone is too soon to tell what I look forward to is we're going to see like this year I believe you could say the puzzle and dragons was this year probably in an individual game made potentially this year about a billion dollars I think we may see a couple of those so to me the expectation is is that we're going to see more and more big games happening on mobile necessarily it's just not going

to be casual kind of a semi casual like pule dragons I'm expecting more kind of m/ core games to really well and kind of I expect we see some kind of breakout like Clash of Clans that's going to go up and really do like redefine how we look at mobile games so I'm really expecting that all this talent coming from the console side the traditional development side into Mobile it's going to create some some really amazing experiences at the same time the experience we build around freeto play will enable those experience to be monetized uh to at the a large scale to the point that we're probably going to see a multiple billion dollar uh games