How to make it big in the MENA mobile games market

so thanks for coming um first things first let me tell you a little bit about me I think it's good to give people a bit of a perspective on who its actually delivering a speech so I've worked about 10 years in the games industry not the traditional PC hardcore console industry but more with a focus on social and mobile games and my company called free lunch design started out doing facebook games quite early so we went on the the social games bandwagon and we were quite successful with that and as many other developers we kind of pivoted over to mobile s Facebook where was running out of steam if you will and we grew from

just about 34 people up to 15 people and then we were acquired by palringo the company I work for now in 2014 and yeah as a side note I i really love fishing so that's me with a 25 kilos halibut or a 50 pounds halibut about just outside the coast of Norway but enough about me just give you a little bit background on on palringo and why I'm able to be up here and talk a bit about the manor region palringo has focused a lot on its core businesses messaging messaging between gamers chat and communication but we like to call ourselves a chat and play company so we are at the convergence between we're chatting and gaming and happens really so palringo

started out as a kind of bridging application between different types of messengers and chat applications but it became apparent quite a few years ago that in order to succeed the business had to focus on its own core set of users so with that said that the board and the CEO took a deliberate decision to really focus in on the manor region and it has been working out very well for us with a lot of growth both in terms of users and in revenue and we have local teams working down there in different countries or different Arabic countries we also have an arabic-speaking support team and what's also very important we have very good corporations and partnerships with local payment providers which is especially important on the Android side of things and of course we have a very good dialogue with the curators of content in the local app stores so menna

is typically the country is highlighted in red when you refer to the Middle East and North Africa countries some people also considered Turkey to be a part of it and that's not the definition I go I'd use but some people do but I guess what's more interesting is what the opportunity is at hand if you want to get a big of the of the pie it's actually quite substantial it's nothing like the United States which is really easy to enter into the sense that it's one language one region easy to grasp but what we see even though we'd spread out through quite a few countries there's huge potential there rabuck is the fourth-largest the language online but if you look into the app stores only around one percent of the app so actually and games are localized into Arabic so the the revenue is about not a

third but perhaps the fourth of the of the US market meaning that there's still a sizable chunk of revenue and it's about half the size in terms of smartphone usage if you compared to the United States so there is certainly an opportunity to people who would kind of air to go there and if you do and decide to try your wings in the region these are the five learning so that takeaways that we have learned over the year at palringo and keeping in mind that this 15 to 20-minute speech there are several more things we could talk about and if you are interested in getting even more information feel free to email me or come up to talk to me and after the talk but these are the kind of key takeaways and anonymity is something that might be

considered quite a have a negative tone to it but not for the users we are working with it would rather be the opposite that it's quite positive to be able to create an online persona and an alias in which you engage with other gamers other players inside the community so for instance a lot of mobile developers have seen a lot of success in Western countries in utilizing Facebook Connect we've tried both Facebook Connect we also use our own system palringo connect and we actually see that a lot of uses don't really tend to want to use something like Facebook Connect simply because they might not want to talk to people they know about them playing games and also we see that a lot of we have

spanish that really spend a lot on in-game items but they do they don't want to flaunt it they don't want to brag about being themselves spending this much on it virtual item necessarily they rather say this is my handle or my persona online and that's the one who gets the fame not myself the person behind it so we see it as very important to guarantee the users and on anonymity so if you want to build something with community in the region it's really important to let people interact in in a way that's keeping them in the closet or in the you know to not have to kind of out themselves also and this kind of goes hand in hand or ties into it the

sense of exclusivity and when you do pinpoint and localize these or locate these really high valuable users or the loyal users we see that a way to get them more engaged more loyal is to kind of give them access to sneak peeks new releases new games ask them for their recommendations we don't necessarily always act on what they recommend us but we see that specifically in the manor region there seemed to be a huge favor towards stuff that's shiny blingy and makes them seem you know a bit kind of a bit bolsters or you know so what we have in palringo as an example we have this meta game which is really like you level up your online character in an MMO with level we have something called reputation it's called rep for short and

basically whatever we slap reputation on the user's go nuts for it because they really want to level up in a meta game so giving the or uses the power to kind of level up or be feel like they are part of something or a core part of the community as perhaps a bit more important than than the rest of your users that's a good way to keep your loyal users coming back for more yeah if you do a game as a service these days and if you're targeting the United States as markets you couldn't really do it without thinking of having a Christmas special Thanksgiving Easter Halloween etc it's of course equally important in the manor region but I'm first and foremost thinking about Muslim or stomach religious holidays we are the

two biggest one being a doll fitter and eight other I'm sorry if someone is offended by my pronunciation it's not good but what's interesting is you need to look at this learn what they mean and see how you can kind of work with them to your advantage for instance Ramadan is really interesting because you will see a usage drop off if you're running a game but typically you will see you used to start coming back over the month time that is ramadan because you know by the end they start going back into old habits but really that's across all you know network usage internet usage and app usage in the manor region as simply because people take a break from their screens and with a company such as pairing go with big in the tech scene and we need to make sure that our revenues are kept up on a month-by-month basis it's an opportunity to do some

good because there's a strong affinity for giving during ramadan to charity so what we have done is we've promoted different games with different type of features that when they buy something or give money it's donated directly to good causes so for us it's been a way to show that we can keep up our revenues during really slow during it what's otherwise a really slow month but also I guess it's kind of a good thing from our PR perspective besides it's obviously the nice thing to be able to share well with less fortunate people and culture respect well I guess this goes for whatever region you're working in but you need to acknowledge the fact that there is a bit you know a different type of you know different situations or features that might be culturally

accepted or not and for us we see three ones that are kind of you have to tread a bit carefully around this sexuality and how you portray nudity in the game also real money gambling which is a big no-no then again social gambling might not be and of course drug and alcohol reference inside the game there are more stuff to it than this and more points that we could discuss but these are the three most obvious ones that we see we need to tone down our work around if we work with external partners if you look at this image right here to the left you have the first version of a character for a mob style game which we're developing with an external partner and as you can see it shows a bit of cleavage and we actually sense that it's not gonna play well within the region

and we work with a local team based in Jordan we sit down with them and kind of review stuff when we need and say well actually we just have to redraw this image so this one I mean it's quite obvious I guess but if you look at this one it's also a boss from the same mobile game to the left we have a character who is a male guy that's wearing gold and to certain people in this region male people wearing gold is not really something you would would be socially acceptable so it had to be redrawn into silver but this is just references to the subtle nuances and that's to us perhaps a bit you know you need to know what you're doing really that's basically the message of course localization really big thing

does anyone know exactly what it says that word says by the way in here no says play I ask my colleague is like yeah I want this old fashioned phones than an old fashioned do something ironic needs to look at rabuck sec okay you get this one and then we had this big discussion about what actually looks like a rabbit it turns out me as a Western person Western person thought this looked very much Arabic and I thought it's not really it's not really look like a relic to me but it's it's a rabbit but it's you know so the thing is Arabic is very very kind of big word for or small world for a lot of different dialects and even if you cover all of the aspects of different dialects you need to make sure that you translate your gameforgamerz don't just necessarily find a translating translation agency and assume that they

would get it right the first time and that's something we work with a lot to make sure that it actually makes sense for a gamer and of course when you localize your text right to left the more you make it feel native to an arabic-speaking person the better so if you can swap your UI elements to they also are right to left and the loading bars etc it makes a lot of sense for an arabic-speaking person and of course there are big regional variances as compared to potentially in the u.s. so if you can app store or a bit test in the app store that's really good and really helpful for you because in Google Play you can localize into Arabic it's not possible for the iOS store right now but I been talking to some of the Apple guys working in the mana regen and they say that's something that's on their wish list and it's on our wish list as well

so if you look at this is one of our match three titles to the left hand side you have the English version and on the right hand side you have the translated version and I guess it's not a super big difference but you can actually see that the menu elements and the UI elements are mirrored so you close down the the screen or the window with the top left corner instead of the top right corner and yeah there's also reason why we have centered all the buttons inside of the different windows simply because if we put into right we put them to left and you know so if you can send your things on the screen and in the menu it will make life a little bit easier for you like put text on top of an information instead of to the left or something so to summarize it and you need to kind of

approach the users in a regional relevant and culturally respectful way and of course you need to allow players to interact with each other in an anonymous way if they want to so you don't consider the users who have connected to let's say Facebook Connect more valuable because they're kind of giving you your the true name and photo in anything but rather make sure that everyone can interact with each other on unreasonable similar grounds and of course rewarding those loyal users with sense of exclusivity whether it be access to new features or certain programs certain discounts and actually there's one more thing that I might mention that's working very well for us in terms of driving app economy and game economy it's it's gifting we see that a lot that people will really want to give to other users and do not limit the

options you have in terms of gifting so make sure that it's always possible for users to send content to others and by an Antarian gift and with that said actually that's the end of the presentation and if you want to get in touch that's why you may also have two colleagues with me here to raise your hands Jonas and rest so should you want to discuss anything that has to do with men are and publishing gamester we're open to discuss and we are happy to you know sharing is caring so we're really open to to discuss thank you very much Thanks does anybody have one one question it's Magnus oh shiz ask your question so we're actually uh asked questions bit of a business question you can all join in tonight's a meeting so we were looking we've been invited to come out and do something in the MENA

market like is there for people looking to go out there apart from working you guys there any interesting kind of shows or events or things that are happening already and that's why I'm interested oh yeah there is actually stuff happening in in Dubai there's been a show I can't recall and top my head what it's called but and if someone is interested feel free to like just follow up on him in III give in there is yeah there isn't jordan as well and i was just talking to the guys that the IMG a the you know the jordan ooh yeah yeah so there and i think actually there is one in in Lebanon as well so there's quite a few things happening but we haven't really seen these big game studios with breakaway hits yet so I think they're going to build that to that momentum okay and like facilitating incubators and startup entirety okay cool thank you very much Magnus thanks a lot ok

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