Fireside Chat: Post-Pandemic Gaming Market Analysis

first up we have a fireside chat um a post pandemic gaming market analysis and joining us for that we have govindrag from app ceiling and he'll be joined by our newly appointed features editor at pgbiz matthew ford so they should be joining right now hello there is matthew hey bad how are you yeah not too bad cheers of course uh we should have gone to drag as well coming in now hi matthew hi daniely hi how are you doing

[Music] thank you for having me here no worries great to have you um if you guys are ready to go i will uh meet and let you guys crack on with the fireside chat absolutely perfect thank you cheers [Music] how's it going girlfriend josh good good very good how are you doing yeah not too bad thank you yeah looking forward to this so yes uh welcome everyone uh the first uh talk we're doing today is uh as daniel mentioned a five-sided chat on post-pandemic gaming market analysts uh this is how the pandemic has impacted the gaming market in terms of downloads and revenue and how hackers have evolved to carry out attacks on gaming apps so uh to start off uh well first of all i'll just give you a quick brief background on myself as daniel mentioned i'm the features editor at pocketgamerbiz um i'll also appear on the podcast now and then and you know general feature stuff as you imagine uh so garvin dash do you want to give a

quick brief background on yourself yeah uh so my name is uh i take cares of selling uh overall business and sales and uh the revenue management of absaline and abseiling is uh the gaming application protection solution uh we have uh offices in uh us uh india and south korea so that is a short introduction about me and my company yeah good stuff okay uh we'll get right into it then um so the first question i think is what do you think have been the biggest challenges for the gaming industry in 2020 and uh how long do you think we will see these repercussions last uh well uh the gaming industry uh there are i would see lots of challenges in the gaming industry

uh just not a one i would say the the gaming market uh when the gaming studios are or any gaming uh companies uh the challenges are they are what they are facing is they are not able to target the right audience uh it's not easy to find out the right audience because uh it's not even though easy of fragmented of os there are lots of os and platforms are there uh technology wise it's the limitations to take care all the platform and all the os then there are uh issues like how to you know get notice your game there are thousands and thousands games are available in the market visibility of course is always a big issue correct how do you get noticed about that that are the challenges uh but in terms of the biggest challenge i would see the farming of the monetization model

when you can prepare the game itself but how do you monetize that that's a major issue i would uh say like bi model in-app purchase how do you create in a purchase model itself uh it is stage wise or are you doing anything related to selling in-app uh stuff or a paid subscription or how do you monetize the ads in the gaming uh sometimes most of the games app does not require uh you know in-app purchase they they are not able to generate the revenue from in-app purchases but majorly revenue generated from ads so how do you manage that ads and then the major upcoming trends are coming in game personalization uh so uh i will talk about a little bit on game personalization uh so these days the gaming personalization is the vast and uh

the the upcoming trend i would say because uh when you start off understanding the mindset of the user how he wanted to play and similar game i can able to show off on the same screen and i can take him to the up the next level so if i can create a personalization on each stages and each a title so that will make me that user will stick to me for the longer time period and my game studio are creating new games so i can sell the same the different game titles to the same user so that means i can get more user and those will loyal customers i would say and i will stick to that royal customer so tailoring the experience to each player goes a long way he's like so exactly yeah it's all about it will talk about the experience and

the level of intimacy with the user uh and the second major i would see the securing the mobile games or gaming and protect your revenue so if you see uh in the market uh so it's is uh when we talk about year 2020 there are lots of challenges and opportunities uh so for everyone 2020 is uh will burst i would say yeah but for the entertainment market and gaming market it's a boom because most of the people sitting at home and they are investing their time on their mobile phone watching movies or playing games which means the gaming revenue gaming user the increasing rapidly

so as per the data the mobile uh measurement firm adjust found the mobile game develop the downloads has been increased by 75 sorry uh in quarter one uh because this is all due to the kovid 19 issue because most of the people are sitting at home and they are consuming uh the gaming or the content movie content online makes sense yeah yeah it's also interesting because um i think it was a talk yesterday funnily enough that was uh talk about south korea and they've seen a massive influx as well i think it was 600 percent um of since covered started and so whenever that was you know february january that's all the time earlier this year you know they're still seeing that increase going even though like they're potentially coming out of it in many ways correct correct uh yeah uh so south korea market is a little bit different the gaming market is uh that

it has been increased a lot and similarly uh the india market is also uh grown up very fast for the gaming because huge population yeah cost and of course china is there uh for the gaming uh so this numbers are growing the mau's are growing the stickness of the users are growing downloads are growing but simultaneously vulnerabilities also get exposed so mcafee reports understand that [Music] the gaming threats are increased more than 43 percent and uh the security challenges are pretty high in the market and developers has facing lots of issues with going into the market because there are certain limitations uh with uh developers also because game

developer uh they can pretty much interested on the gaming engine and their feature set but the the wrapper of solution or security or platforms it's a different world all together uh so this is i think in 2020 uh for gaming and entertainment market is always up so i do i would say for uh gaming and uh entertainment it's a good uh year for uh 2020. good time for gaming about time for the rest of the world um so specifically what sort of genres would you say benefited most during the pandemic uh so in in genres it's depend uh to country to country i would say uh so uh in overall in terms of the global outlook i would say rpg has

the benefited genre and in southeast asia rmg it's a real money gaming i'm not sure uh if you guys are aware of rmg real money gaming yeah we i think you want to give a brief overview of people yeah uh so the real money gaming is started uh uh on a on a basis of skilled gaming so uh it's not like uh a casinos but it's required a skill so if you have a skill you can earn the money on a real cash so that is not real cash but you can uh it's a digital cash i would say you will get the money on a wallet and you can spend it so this is uh rmg has started legitimate business uh in india on terms of skilled gaming under the skilled skilled gaming so in india indonesia china and

southeast asian countries i would understand the rmg gaming is most benefited uh because of people are uh playing the rmg gaming and also they are playing uh the cricket or karam sort of games on rmg so in southeast asia i i understand most of the people are playing uh caroms and the cricket matches uh rmg games and what they are doing it most of the companies are made of super apps in the same app you can able to get 10 15 applications games so user are keep switching the games within the same app that means they are just creating super app and in that super app you can play as much as 25

games uh so user is not going back to some other application and he is not able he is not downloading the application in the same platform he is getting all the application uh and what they are using it they are using personalization if you liked the sport sort of uh genre they will start showing you the sports one like chess carom uh indoor activities or crickets baseball that sort of game uh titles they will show up so again it's coming back to that tailored experience yes experience great you're right okay um so over the last two years uh and more recently i've seen lockdown there's been a rise in attacks on gaming apps and be that attempts to access someone's personal details or way to exploit data uh tell us how and why this has grown more and more well uh so you know uh

in the probability of mobile games or the pc games it has been uh you know they have been multiple reason to attack popular games app for example the hackers the hacking allow gamers to access premium feature of game without being there and they need they need not to pay the money it's like a in-app purchase hack it will affect you the the revenue directly and what other people are doing it like most of the gamers who scores from forum to forum uh look for the hack that could give them advantage over the other players uh such gamer chasing personal glory end up installing hacks at uh and compromised uh then there are hackers who are looking into personal

information of user to be sold on a dark web whatever the hacker's reason to be since security is not a prime concern of app developer or game studio the mobile gaming industry is sitting duck for running miscellaneous code uh and uh that uh hacker who has provided that miscellaneous code he can get access that sort of data anytime anywhere and he can harm the overall uh your business and the data of using the sensitive information i would say and you there are other things are also available like uh you know the jailbreaking or routing detections people are trying to get into the the code of uh the games ipf rods and the gamers also

offering uh you know uh it's our opening most of the what are the gamers are using observation not the encryption level uh techniques so for those that are maybe not aware what what would you say why does mobile game security matter especially you know more than ever [Music] yeah okay so overall if you think of uh you wanted to protect the revenue you wanted to protect your brand if you wanted to protect your identity uh so you know if you search on a google you will able to understand there are many hacking tools are available in the market and if you have a good brand and people are start searching about your brand and they can also able to search how to hack this game this is pretty harmful for the gamers the gaming companies studios or publishers uh if people most of the people have

started surfing on internet and if they are able to understand and they they can able to access that a hacked file or the hacked apk then it's a loss for brand and revenue both what would you say are the latest security trends that are affecting the gaming industry wow so there are i think uh uh there are lots of security trends are in the industry uh i would uh maybe i can uh throw some data on uh akamai akamai is i think world's largest cdn provider uh what they have studied for the gaming industry between july 2018 and june 2020 uh they have concluded that under uh seven stand of hackers it detect almost 10 million uh credential stuffing attack in this

period uh and uh which has facilitated by login credentials purchased on a dark web means we are most of the data as sold on a dark flare uh another uh trend compromising of device and account security uh through the phishing attack and the common uh attack attempt is uh the sql injection and local file inclusion methods and normal you know on the normal game sites has been attacked under attack on ddos attack so these are the challenges already there and technology should be evolved i guess to handle this sort of situations yeah well that brings me nicely on to my next question with you know how has technology evolved over the last 12 months which is you know contributed to this increased amount of attacks

you know day by day uh if your games or uh the titles are getting popular you will find out most of the cheating tool or most of the reversing engineering packets are available in the market so that means people are the hackers are trying they're they're getting smarter day by day and uh they are doing lots of automated ways like a speed hacks data scanning uh stat manipulation in-app purchase simulation ad removal level of implication uh maybe i can share you some of uh one of the pain points of the gaming uh so as i shared most of the revenues coming from ad and uh what hackers are doing uh

they are removing the ad engine from the game and they are putting their ad engine which means the game developer or game publisher losing the revenue from ads and they have created the game but they are not getting the ads uh revenue but someone else who has made the switching and add engine removal and putting their adren uh engine so they are getting the revenue so that that's happening in the real world and there are many cheating tools are available like x mod lucky patcher cheat engine freedom apk game guardian game guarding is i think the major cheat tools available in the market uh sb game hacker game killer with these two the user can inject code to manipulate values of game apps without even how to

hack app operate means you the normal hackers the normal user can also use the cheating tool because most of the things are getting automated okay i'm going to skip ahead just a little bit and just because time's obviously running along and so what is the mobile game black ecosystem and how does it affect developers publishers and consumers sorry what is the mobile game black ecosystem oh okay uh so i think uh the mobile game uh ecosystem uh is depend how the the the user you know uh the game app the providers use utilizing the whole ecosystem uh most of the uh you know

in we are a game application security uh what we have studied in the hacking scenario in the game mobile called the black ecosystem witnessed what based on the uh problem of the hackers can navigate to the dark web and that analysis shows that more of more than 100 cheating apps are available in the market and majorly threats are coming from the china and uh in gaming app there is two worlds i would say one is china world and rest world so there are many uh things are available if you have launched in somewhere in europe the same game are available in the chinese app store there is major there are i think uh i would uh

share one of the major case study done uh by one of the game publisher uh their game has been published that was pretty hit in in u.s and europe side i love coffee and the same game has been published in a chinese market just removing uh the adding engine and in-app purchases and just a little bit code modification so that is actually pretty uh exposed uh and pretty dangerous for the game developers to do that okay um so a big issue is obviously hackers and cheat hackers and cheaters affecting competitive multiplayer games and that's obviously a growing issue and especially early on in a game's life cycle uh how much resource should be put back should be put in by the developer or

publisher to make sure this doesn't happen uh i think uh multiplayer games are the prime target for the hackers because the popularity issue the popularity and uh the rp is pretty good people love multiplayer games uh the aim of hackers are give unfair advantage to the user using cheating tool using the tools and processes like inbox uh and trigger bot so in a tigger bot if you preset the value and uh in that case you don't have to play it it will pre uh trigger and it will automatically play back uh so the cheater fire using this this for bots and uh when the the opponent appear lag switch which manipulates the data stream to the uh real user which means most of the

game the the game publisher or game studios they are uh allowing the hackers to play automated play at the the games and the genuine players will be lagged off and they will uh switch from that game into different gaming because there is no this is this is unfair gaming i would say so this is pretty uh bad for the reputation and uh uh this is pretty bad to uh for for the game studio to get access uh without playing the game and just win over uh with the bots so what can developers do to stop their games from being hacked uh so this is pretty good question uh i think uh the developers should be uh more searching on the internet and they should get knowledge of how to

protect the game apps uh to being reverse engineered or how to protect the anti-tamper entity compiling or if if the hackers are trying to get into the memory access area how to prevent that so if uh the studios are looking at this sort of the feature set uh i think the feature set should be preventing if they use encryption level technologies and multi-wrapped solution then i guess it is pretty easy to tackle these sort of issues okay um do you think the next generation gaming acts with more gaming apps will be more equipped for dealing with hackers cheaters and so on uh i would say yes i'm no because uh a few gaming companies are

pretty advanced and still there are lots of game companies are not that much advanced to adopt new technologies in security or any uh upcoming trends so in terms of security there are many uh companies they are still using the older methods of securing the gaming app like sdk or apis which is a quite traditional ways uh in term this is actually uh i would say issue because gaming the games are update very often the releases are pretty often like two or three days uh they are keep upgrading the the gaming's engines or the game updates are coming in so which means you have to integrate again the sdks or apis which will take time to the market it is not easy so what you need what the game developers or studios

requires the wrapping solution quick quick to the market uh they should not be investing time to integration or uh apis or sdks it should be quick and uh the studios should get all intel what is happening with their application um we've got a couple questions in and from audience members so and we'll hopefully try and answer these before we run out of time so first one uh indie developers due to reduced capacity might not have in-app protection as their main concern why would you advise indie developers to start on security from the start okay uh good questions uh you know why they think uh they would not require the security one reason is a price okay most of the indie developers they think that uh the security cost super high and they cannot afford it

yes that is why they are not looking uh or they are not working out uh the security but if they get pretty affordable the the pricing model they will go it because we have worked uh many indie developers in the past and we understand the pain points because the game they are not sure how much revenue they will get it from the game that's the issue that that's one issue and uh if they are pretty sure that their game can hit in the market and they can generate revenue they can invest on security but uh if the security company started using sas based model if they are not charging a front no setup cost no setup uh the amc no technical support cost so if they uh the security companies is offering psego model that will pretty much sure for indie developers to use the security solutions okay great

yeah obviously these anything those flexible sort of models go a long way especially in these more economic hard times we're living through so uh another one we've got is how is app ceiling dealing with the fact that data protection rules vary a lot from country to country and uh do developers need to worry about this or does app ceiling take care of everything uh yeah so uh abseiling takes everything all the worries the game developers did not worry of uh security uh and abseiling protect its offer 360 degree security which means the you don't have to hire the security person also the normal developer can just seal the apk and he can download the so uh this is absolutely the wrapper solution so it's create a multi-layered technologies on the apk file

it off and in just 10 minutes you can download that wrapped file and you can publish on a play store or ios store when hackers trying to get into your application it will protect it's a based on rasp runtime self-application protection rasp is new trend of the security uh area uh it will give you intel how what is happening with your application it is sitting top of your application and it's protecting all sort of uh hacking cheat tools reverse engineering apk mods uh in-app purchase hacks uh network packet sniffing and spoofing memory access areas there are so many things absolutely absolutely takes care absolutely indie developers game studios any uh gaming application does not require to handle

the security matters if they apply the app ceiling security okay uh just to finish this off then um did you want to explain a bit more about app ceiling you know what services you offer okay uh so abseiling uh started uh in south korea uh with the help of lots of studios there are lots of studios uh in south korea and uh we keep meeting with them and those our customers understand the pain points to the quick time to the market second uh they wanted to have a sas based model because uh no one knows the what is the life cycle of the game no one can predict the life cycle of game and how much it will hit yeah so a front paying the security is always an issue and uh so we understand lots of pain points of the gaming industry so abseiling started for the uh limitedly for gaming market but later on

we have probably we have opened up for the other market uh but we pretty much understand the gaming market because in south korea south korea is one of the largest game market in the world and there are lots of pain points in terms of cheat tool in terms of uh apk mods in terms of uh rooting detections or a jailbroken so there are lots of pain points and there are uh applied security solution also get bypassed and what is happening no one is providing the dashboard you cannot able to see the real-time hacking detection analysis anywhere in the world but in the app ceiling you can able to see the real-time analysis what is happening if you have you have playing some of the game and you have open up some emulators

so app ceiling will understand it's a norm it's not a usual uh user if this is unusual behavior so abseiling works on a behavior based and it will show a dialog box that you are currently using the emulators please stop the emulator to if you wanted to play back you if you wanted to keep continuing uh playing the game so app ceiling will understand the normal user and hackers and it will give you the real-time analysis dashboard the all intel uh the android ids uh it will app ceiling does not collect any user information it just collect the android id and it will give you the uh country location uh what sort of uh cheat the the hacking attempts are happening how many times all the vectors and uh all sort of

new cheating tools available in the market it will show up and it will uh protect so it's a dick uh the protect detect and respond all three system has been taken care by epsilon okay and we've got a couple of extra questions see if we can sneak in just for the end and does that ceiling provide the same level of security like proguard on google on the google play store okay uh it's not uh the pro card is uh you know pretty uh i would say not mature uh it's not matching the the gaming market uh scenario because uh proguard does not protect the cheating tool or reverse engineering it's just observation but in terms of abseiling its multi-layered technologies

and it's a fully compliant with gaming apps okay um how would you so one more and how is app ceiling different from sdk based app security uh so uh sdk based security is you need to invest the time for sdk integration but in app ceiling in just 10 minutes you can seal the application which means you can wrap the apk file in just 10 minutes and you can just test it and release on the marketplace okay um just one more question i want to ask before we wrap up because i think this is important obviously indie studios and we've had a few questions about that as well um would you say overall it is affordable for small studios yeah so uh it's pretty affordable for the small studios because

uh we start with 129 there is no setup cost no amc no technical support cost uh it's a real psego model uh where in 129 dollar you will get fifteen thousand meds made these monthly active devices uh we just count uh the the active devices only uh who has used the uh your game in a month not the download or installs sorry okay uh yeah i think that'll do is then i think we're running out of time about anyone but um yeah i won't say thank you very much uh for taking time out and sharing uh very interesting information and what's the best place for people to find you um have you got an email you can share or possibly yeah social media yeah so i think uh they can uh contact me by govindraj drake inca dot co dot kr or they can just shoot a mail on appsealing.com we have uh contact us forms on our

website www.appsealing.com great stuff and yes uh you can find me so matthew ford on uh pockygamer.biz you can drop me a message of anything at matthew.4 steelmedianetwork.com and i'm on the twitters at 40 999 hi daniel great hello brilliant talk guys thank you so much for taking the time out to come and speak to us today come in josh uh and i hope you enjoyed the rest of the conference great thank you daniele and thank you pgc and the steel media thank you guys thank you cheers [Music] you