CEO of Aeria Games Europe Pascal Zuta explains why mobile is important

okay so here we are in berlin we're visiting some of the some of the cool happening companies in the berlin gaming space so do you want to introduce yourself and uh tell us a little bit about what you do and the company okay i'm pascal zuter i'm the ceo of area games europe i built uh the european office of area games more or less from scratch before that i was working in san francisco where i've met the founders of of area games we're we used to and we started as a client download games company we went internationally very quickly starting from the us opening an office here in berlin then opening another office in latin america and sao paulo entering new platforms browser in 2010 and lately in 2012 we did a very heavy push in mobile which was fortunately very successful so far and we merged with another company called gamepot in japan so overall we're now a company of over 600 people and five offices

now that we added the sole office and the tokyo office it's a pretty sizable operation as you say mobile's your kind of one of the big focuses for you now with the japanese application you've got you've got to move from what was a kind of a pc operations kind of team and localizations into now mobile you've got internal development and you're looking to push into that so yes having been pretty successful in the pc space why is mobile kind of was an important thing for you guys to move into it's an important thing if you want to grow your company right when we started in 2006 2007 we saw that um everything was it was pretty easy you could bring a game to the market really yes it was easy you had a free-to-play game and you said hey it's free to play and it's german it's localized and everybody was like wow that's amazing i want to play it and then you you know it was at that time there weren't many people for a huge demand right now the competition goes up it gets harder to grow and we actually see that most of our competitors have declined in revenue over the last year we have not we've been able and unfortunately been able to

be stable and on top of that we had the means to invest into our mobile business where right now we see that if you have good games it's not easy but you have you can grow your business very very quickly and you guys are taking kind of the experience you've had from pc on the monetization and the kind of operation side to your mobiles yeah you have a slightly different approach to maybe some of the other mobile companies who look to do one game put it out globally you're a bit more kind of focused on things yeah what we always did was we source games in asia we build strong relationships with asian developers and in the case of mobile we focus so far a lot on japan we're taking our games from there and we're localizing them not only the language but also artworks or probably events or items we're catering them to our markets that was has always been our approach and in the pc world we did exactly the

same and in the pc world we were successful because we were able to monetize stronger than any of our competitors we were able to make more revenue with a single player than everybody else and that's why we were able to spend more marketing than everybody else and that's why we grew faster than everybody else so in the mobile spaces when you're a fairly large company but there's a lot there's reason dnas and the zingers and lots of people kind of offer the same kind of audience after the same goal how are you going to kind of grow that kind of initial success you've had yeah i think the the um it's very easy at the moment in mobile to lose money okay right if you want to lose money do it in mobile it's going to be very fast you can spend it very quickly and most like or most probably you will not make any money back unless you watch your metrics very closely and that's kind of the dna of area games so far we've always been a metric driven very analytical company far before the

zingers of this world started to to to walk around telling everybody that this is important right in 2008 uh 2009 we started to build out our sales data mart that's what we call it which has all the data not only on sales by the way but also on on get in-game behavior on uh we have ratios that measure fun and engage engagement we just had a presentation from your in-house economist basically exactly we have a team that is taking care of our economies making sure that we that we balance well between making money and having fun they are also balancing for other stuff that comes up like fraud or just to understand our territories more in detail because these territories do have influences from from weather uh to a cultural phenomenon like ramadan which has which drives a lot of players to us because people stay at home and you know can't go to work so we see all these things if we look at metrics across different territories and across different games and this is what was

different this is what was different for area games compared to most of our competitors from the beginning on we had a very thorough focus on analytics and metrics and this is kind of this is a platform that has helped us not only in client games but also in browser and it's the same thing for mobile right now so for us we're more or less agnostic of the platform that we're working on actually we're going in and we say hey we have some infrastructure and we're for us we do have some benchmarks we look at a game we say okay this is going to be successful this is not going to be successful because we have launched 25 client games 40 browser games and now five mobile games we can compare that's probably a good difference between us and most of the other companies in the markets great thank you let's go okay thanks