Intro: Introduction & Welcome - Chris James, Steel Media.

[Music] okay that is the only Jordanian you're getting I'm afraid so I probably confuse the guys in the box but good morning uh and welcome and a huge warm welcome to our uh honored guests to our International visitors and to the majority of the gaming ecosystem from Jordan it seems um warm welcome to PG connect Jordan 2024 good good energy

that's why I get out of bed in the morning this is our fourth PGC event in Jordan it's our fifth of the year and it's actually our 49th uh overall so my name is uh Chris James in case you've never met me before or don't know me uh I'm the CEO of Steel media in case you don't know what we do just a little bit of that uh we run obviously these events we run other games and events uh like the awards the mobile games Awards the the top 50s we run leading media such as pocketgamer.biz pocket gamer.com PC games in cider blockchain gamer B all that sort of stuff um and we are also these days part of a bigger family we're part of the Enthusiast uh gaming Group which is a bigger Canadian uh and Us Media games media business which does a whole load of different activities in the game Space I'll give you a taste of some of those so um they do the NFL Tuesday night gaming which is a cool initiative which brings NFL pro athletes any NFL fans here

not a lot fine uh more football fans I hope uh they bring together pro athletes with influences uh they've got the impending NHL uh version of that they've got a Luminosity Esports team I know people like Esports here uh they run Icy Veins u g which is a a tool for people that play League of Legends other games The Sims resource it's a huge resource for Sims players um and they even have their own uh sort of games label uh called addicting games and they're just actually launching at the moment we are launching at the moment a small initiative to help Indie developers particularly in publishing and promoting across the internet now essentially everything we do everything enthusiasts do um is about connecting supporting and celebrating the games industry whatever format of game you choose to make whatever genre it's in or wherever you in the world you are and that's precisely what we want to do for the next two days here at PG conect Jordan now we've been doing this for quite a few years as you can tell I'm not not

that young so this is um PG connect has been going for for 10 years now we started in 2014 and over the last decade we've kind of welcomed over 55,000 delegates uh to various conferences 49 conferences 14 cities 11 countries three continents and we've contributed we reckon over a billion dollars I think that's actually quite conservative we've not updated those numbers in a while we we have tried to support the ecosystem wherever we can in the world we've also been uh to Jordan of course quite a fair bit so um I first came to Jordan I was very lucky to be invited and very honored to be invited um back in 2016 uh to the Jordan games Summit as a guest um by no and then over the following years we got more involved we started running the big Indie pitch which some of you may have taken play part in uh and that kind of culminated in us then launching our first PGC Jordan in 2019 a dedicated conference which sort of took over from the Jordan gaming Summit and combined it in which took place in in Aman and then

we moved here to Dead Sea in 2022 which was our biggest uh event uh in Jordan at the time until today it appears is anybody here in Jordan in 2022 hands up were you here in 2022 yeah a few of you God there's a lot of new people as well wow there's a lot of you okay um so we we've had a you know the course of of of recent history has been a little bit challenging for us as everyone else in the in the events industry and and you know other Industries in 2020 and 21 we had to take a break from all Live Events due to the pandemic last year unfortunately we had to take a break for entirely different reasons but much like people of Jordan and game developers to be honest General we are not easily defeated we're not easily deterred and so we are delighted to be back here again um to restart our activities and hopefully build again over the next few years uh so more about that later now a question I do get asked we we run all over the world is is why

why Jordan I've been asked this a number of times over the last eight or n years why holding an event in Jordan the games industry is massive there's hundreds and hundreds of countries we could go to why choose this Market why come here why support it and my answers kind of remain virtually the same one of course it's an incredible place it's an incredible place to visit it's got inspiring history uh you have one of the wonders of the world Petra which I've had the honor to go to about four or five times an amazing Place obviously other amazing spots as well at Wy Ram obviously in the Dead Sea incredible as well the food is incredible I love the food here a little bit too much maybe but I do I do love it um but more important than just it being a lovely place to come it is it's a gateway to the minina market and and it's a brilliant gateway to Min market so the Mina Market is we'll come on to this a bit more is the fastest growing Market in the entire games industry right now uh us be worth about 7.7 billion uh dollars this year uh which is a big growth and and Jordan

represents a great way to kind of enter that market it's it's uh and kind of join uh and take advantage of that from an international uh Visa perspective and obviously of course there's an awesome ecosystem that's you right you're you're an awesome ecosystem aren't you yeah you're awesome of course you are that's good we have I've already sented the enthusiasm one which is great didn't need to coffee that got me up but we have all the native Talent we have an incredible uh amount of of uh of native Talent here we have obviously great academic programs we have incredible initiatives like uh the gaming lab and the app challenge which we'll come on to a little bit um and of course some very established kind of Studios have sprung up and and listed here like the the Babel and Ma award tamen Joo mad hook many many chick Mania uh many others um so we're going to come back we're going to come back to celebrating the awesome people in the ecosystem a little later on we've got no uh announcing uh the winner of the app challenge just after to this uh and then we have tomorrow the

Jordan games award so if you're still around tomorrow at 12:00 in here please come and see as we celebrate uh the best of the industry in Jordan from The Last uh 12 months or so um and there's a lot of talent here there's a lot of young talent and talking a youthful talent I kind of look out here kind of intimidating sea of of young faces uh young eager faces and I'm really excited by the potential by what you guys are going to do I you might not believe this I was youngish once too this was me this was me on my starting my my journey um I didn't have the tech skills that many of you guys do or the art skills I can't make games um but I did study this journalist oh and I did want media okay okay we're being broadcast another room I think that's fine I did uh I did study as a journalist I want to launch B Media company and 20 years later I'm standing here right in front of you today running our okay 49th games conference that was a bit confusing um and my message from

that really is um don't be worried about putting on weight but no my main message is that you can do it it's not going to be easy whatever your chosen mission is there's been a lot of bumps uh and bruises on the way to get here but you can achieve this you can achieve your your your dreams if you stay the course okay which uh brings me on to another question which is which is a question that maybe your your friends and maybe your family are asking and maybe you're asking yourself like why the games industry is this really the very best time to be in the games industry it's no secret that the industry like many others has has had some turbulence over the last few years in in in in the mobile World especially we've had all sorts of disruption we had Apple's RFA totally upsetting the way we Market monetize games and various other legislation coming in and sort of augmenting that we had National governments impacting uh even the downloader games in China particularly China is a big part of the industry and and they just stopped reling in games for a couple years

pretty weird um and obviously we've had a lot of of turbulence in the world as a whole there's been massive inflation people have a little bit less money in their pocket to spend so consumer spending on games like everything else has gone down a little bit and our our Recession Proof industry has looked a little bit less Recession Proof and these are just kind of mobile things but to be honest whatever format you're on it's the same like steam brilliant platform but absolutely packed the gunnels with games right now console we've got ID Xbox here which is great oh they they're supporting this um and there are ways to get in there but it's still competitive to get into there um and investors who we all need money to kind of launch our businesses and Run games investors have been scared off uh by a lot of these things happening and and that they they've kind of kept the money in their pockets for a little while and all these things have consequences right um don't worry it gets better uh all these things have consequences um we know the news fees have been full of of bad news for for games for the last year layoffs closures it's it's been it's been pretty tough

around 30,000 people in the last 18 months have lost roles some companies have closed and some people say it's as bad as 20% of the industry I think that's that's not quite right but there has been a general a general mood of Doom and Gloom which has has suffered around the industry however this is the low Point don't worry it's up now um I'm not really given to that I'm not someone that that's uh that's a doom and glue Monga there's there's a TV show in the UK I don't know if it's popular here I'm assuming not um called Ted lasso which which is about a guy American guy who coaches an English sports team uh and he's just constantly relentlessly positive and constantly sees the opportunity to turn things around and that and and see the upside and so that is why I like to think of myself as a Ted lasso uh of the games industry if you if you know Ted lasso you think that's a great bit of Photoshop but uh but you probably don't but anyway he's a very positive guy so I'm going give you 10 reasons why you should be excited about being in the games industry or getting into the games industry right now now first of all the games industry

is big it is huge this year uh newu who are the one of the main data providers for the industry uh estimate it's going to be $188 billion market and mobile games itself has kind of been flirting with being aund billion doll market for for a while uh I I used to use this little joke to show the1 billion dollar wasn't quite as much as you thought it was but these obviously Zimbabwean dollars this is US Dollars we're talking about here um the industry is huge and and and and that's just newu other other people are more bullish about the market even newu um um there's another uh there's a chal convoy it does estimates they think it's going to be even more 189 billion um there's another um uh research analysts Aldora who say mobile alone will be worth $ 109 billion this year and clearly whatever whichever those numbers is right there's all different metrics we can see that player spend is growing uh certainly in Mobile steadly this is from sensor Tower this

one in the bottom uh left corner that that shows player spend growing uh in Mobile on games and apps and growth is important this is the second key reason to be excited the games industry is a growing industry it had 25 years of growth from 1997 to 2021 yes there was a speed bump in in 2022 as we came out of covid um and it was a down year but 2023 was marginally up and 2024 will be more up and the years forward expected to see a steady growth um curve maybe not as crazy as that that Peak we got a very big peak during covid because people have nothing else to do but but generally this is a growing market and one of the reasons for this is the player base currently the estimate say this year there'll be 3.4 billion people playing video games in on some form or other 3.4 billion and that is up around 4 and a half% year on year the forecasts are to get to 3.8 billion

by 2027 or 3.76 rather uh that's huge that's about 40% of the global population playing games I know what you're thinking there's 60% still to play for which is true we still have the rest of them to convert but but 40% of the population playing games at potential customers that is just so so huge um and and not everybody's paying not everybody plays games pays a lot of them get free uh play games for free but the payers who fund our activities Ely are also increasing uh steadily year on-ear uh in their own uh trench crucially much of this growth is coming from the so-called Emerging Markets uh it's not a term I really like but it's a term that's used a lot and more good news is that you're in one you are the one you are the number one regional growth Market in the entire Global games industry right now the Mina Market as a whole is projected to about 9% as I said uh this year 9% and and up and in players to 559 million that's 8%

player growth as well now fair enough Mina is a broad term and you can you can sort of cut up into a different number of ways includes bits of Africa and lots of different markets but regardless take some Solus from that you are in the hottest spot in the world not just weatherwise but also also for the industry um another thing reason to be cheerful um is the games industry has always always been great about coopting new technology it's always one of the lead uh sort of industries that gets into new technology um and and you can see this is one of my favorite charts I love this this is the history of video games and you can just kind of see how how it started out and video games had a big boost in the arcades and then consoles came and grew and PC came and grew and Handel came and grew and then mobile went whoh and then you got VR on top of that and new things like web 3 coming in and that's the thing there are new tech platforms coming in web 3 neither web 3 nor VR really quite hit the promise early on but both are showing steady growth now so other there's other ways

of of making money out of games other ways of monetizing games and of course you've got ai ai is a huge huge thing it's it's it's it's changing the way we make games it's changing the sort of games we can do it it's potentially leveling up for smaller developers allowing to create even better experiences because they can they can do a lot with a smaller team and that's going to have a huge effect on the way we make games and play games uh in the coming uh years and we've also got new game platforms coming there's a new Switch coming out people love the switch it's coming coming in early 25 um but when we talk about platforms it's not just about consoles that of Hardware it's about distribution channels and and where you can sell your games now there's been a lot of discontent um recently with the wall Gardens of of Google and apple both incredible companies both very important both have driven this business but they are a lot of developers feel they're taking too much for what they're doing now they're putting unnecessary blocks they're changing the rules arbitrarily and the good news is that that is for thing a change like new stores are opening up

epic just opened their their own game store Apptoid already had its own store on Apple um you've got Huawei and Samsung stores offering different routs and and at a certain point these side these other app stores were kind of quite small uh change people weren't that interested but now more and more big companies are taking these very seriously you can see King one of the absolute biggest mobile game developers in the world is engaging fully with these new app stores and these new channels and we'll see more of that we've also got a small company called Microsoft is due to deliver a App Store of its own at some point and it's not just app stores there's this thing called Web stores now it's a new direct consumer model where rather than going through the App Store all the time you get to sell to your players outside the App Store you get to cut out the 30% margin effectively you have to pay still a bit of a margin but and you get to own the customer relationship a bit more um which is huge you know rather than kind of having to be told by by Apple Google how you can touch people what you can

charge how much they'll take for it you can start having that building your own community and a lot of the big developers are the likes of the supercells the scope pleas uh blizzards and and and all these big businesses are doing very well out of this it's getting more and more part of their uh industry there's a lot of big companies a lot of companies available making this super easy for you to do like the likes of aarum aola an apch charge and many more making it really easy for you to have a your own web store um a really crucial part of any industry and certainly games Industries is investment landscape as I said before investors kind of ran scared for a while they stopped investing there was this kind of gush gush G you can see those figures there you see the growth of money coming in one way or another it's the games industry from 33 to 85 to like 127 in 3 years it was insane and it was kind of insustry being invested in one way or another uh whether that's through cash investment whether that's through stock market flotations or Acquisitions it's huge amount of money moving about

obviously 23 there's been there been a drop although there are still a few big deals in this region one of them the bigger deals was Savvy acquiring scopely but as inflation subsides and interest rates drop and money just stuck in a bank is less kind of valuable PE the risk appetite is coming back on um and there are plenty of positive signs about the investment Taps opening once again um this is an interesting figure this is one of the reasons for it as well this it's it's a bit confusing but essentially this is all the major gaming stocks on the stock index obviously some of them are down some of them massively up the the one the big line in the middle uh the blue one is which you can't is supposed to be a bit thicker uh is the Drake stair gaming index which is up 10% it's not up as much as the S&P but the games industry these shares overall are up 10% that's the aggregate of all of them in the the year so far that's good news and together with the improving market conditions that's making investors want to to get more back involved again we've

had continual growth of of of of mergers and Acquisitions uh 2 a half billion was in Q3 alone from 56 deals and and more importantly unless you're selling the company which is important is investment um with have early stage funding into new into games companies was an all-time high in Q2 I think it it was pretty similar in Q3 for from convoys data and in yeah in Q3 alone there's been 169 Investments or 1.1 billion going into the games industry uh according to Drake star now if you are trying to raise money I highly advise you to follow this stuff there's a a free report from Drake star we're not affiliated don't get anything for it but they they put out as a few people put out drstar Convoy a few put out great data and you can see not only where money's going what people are investing in what companies are investing these are some of the most active investors right now both on a large scale and and a seed level people like the games fund and Gem Capital bitc um and of course there are um there are

uh many developers kind of setting up in this space too many investment companies setting up the spoke in this um in this space too uh I think it was uh one of them was I've did there's a few of them here tonight from from various parts of the the region I'm not saying raising money is easy it's not it's never easy even in different times but I think you're going to get listened to now at least if you've got a decent pitch be persistent there is there is going to be money out there and I think that trend is going to increase and as I say we do a little bit to help that as well we we actually cover all investment major Investments on our pgbs Channel and at our events we we have an investment track I think it's tomorrow uh but we also have a a a speed match session where you can connect with some investors or Publishers uh which is happening again I think tomorrow afternoon so we do our bit to help um one small other point I'm not near at 10 just eight um one flip side of people losing their jobs which is never great is there's a lot of talent now for new

Studios and obviously there's a lot of talent coming out of universities and programs as well so I'm expecting I'm seeing a massive wave of startups not all of them are going to succeed but we are going to see this whole exciting Rush of new startup companies uh and that's kind of the flip side of uh uh of the um job losses is there experienced people out there that you can draw to help you in your studio um even at just advisory uh so you should look at that um and the the the the flips the the positive from this all these positive factors I've mentioned sorry the result of these positive factors we're starting to see in in developer surveys this survey is from uh am media count is from sandoff based in in uh Saudi Arabia and they did a survey of uh a couple hundred how many developers a couple hundred developers internationally and and and they got uh a really some positive feedback that 81% of them are working on new games it's been a perod of people just haven't been making new games and that overall the major majority the slim majority maybe

are positive about the fact we've hit the the kind of low point and and we're now back onto growth we're also doing our own big Trend survey uh on our our Channel at the moment it's just about finished that'll be out by the end of the year hopefully early results say we're going to be in line with this uh as well as a a real return to positivity and and rightly so we are the number one media and entertainment category by far is that good are we excited about being the number one meter in C we are games I like that it's good don't worry it's not there not there not ours more the games industry is worth more than film TV and music depending on the metrics you choose it's possibly combined worth more than that it is the biggest the biggest uh industry of no wonder that other media are falling over themselves to get a bit of what we have that you know they've got TV people like shows like the kind of Last of Us you've got obviously Netflix moving in movies a lot of the leading movies uh uh from games um and we've got um sorry here we've got

uh I say TV shows like the last first and Fallout we've got Sports Leakes like NFL and NHL queuing up to have a game component um I said our parent company enthusiasts are working with NFL football leagues like the Premier League and La Liga have games experts trying to trying to work out how they can work together other media Giants are obviously extremely specialist Netflix I mentioned are ramping their own services but it's not just them the New York Times has a game section LinkedIn has games tools everybody is trying to get on games and our our technology is being used elsewhere you can you know we've got this whole uh the Esports and the influencer space is also massive that's kind of sitting alongside that some of that's within games some of that's outside and the film industry as I said before the film industry is using our technology unreal engines been used in many many Productions and and some of unity's tools to uh produce some of the great uh films and TV we see now there are actually in talking of which there are 40 games IPS in two TV or film uh TV

or Film Production right now um each one of them is guaranteed to be a Smash Hit apart from Borderlands which was not very bad I I do apologize if you had to watch that I watched that on the plane it wasn't good full respect to the developers to gearbox but that was not a great film however fortunately that we can there are some many great films The Fallout is incredible series uh obviously last us we talked about we've got Minecraft with Jason Mamoa coming we've got Kian Reeves in the latest Sonic film we've got um uh K Carl Urban in Mortal Kombat and many more to come that is potentially Tom Holland as Link in Zelda which is rumored so final point the future is bright our audience for video games is one of the most engaged the most loyal and the most opinionated of any medor entertainment existence with each successive generation becomes more game native than the last so genzi and Millennials they they do more games than than anything else they find games more

attractive than social media streaming TV push forward a little bit further and the Next Generation generation Alpha are totally engaged they're born with a game control in their hand virtually um all of which kind of leads me to believe and I hope you'll agree with me that 2024 apologize for the drop the font on there 2024 is the best time to be in the games industry and it's the best time to be in the games industry in Jordan are you with me yes come on we may be a little bit leaner a little bit humbler too maybe after a couple of difficult years but we're coming into 25 uh stronger than ever so a lot of people talk you'll probably heard this about about sort of survive till 25 we prefer thrive in 25 that's what we're pushing and over the next few days of talks panels roundtables workshops Fringe events and meetings we're hopefully going to help you uh to do that give you some practical assistance and connections to help you

thrive