Ironsource Gamefest 2019 | Day in the Life at a Games Conference

[Music] [Music] All right, it's Sunday, 6:30 p.m. Going to head out to Iron Sourc's Gamefest Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. Heading out the door right now. Stuff. Yo, cat, get off my stuff. Hey, get off my stuff. I got to go. Hey, I got to go. Hey, I got to go. [Music]

[Music] What's up, dude? [Music] All right, just landed in Tel Aviv. Definitely excited to be here at the Iron Source Conference GameFest. Going to start kicking it off. [Music] just had dinner. It's like past midnight. First day of Gamefest. Damon, just landed. What What is Gamefest? GameFest is a an

annual event that Iron Source puts on where we bring all of our clients from across the globe uh to Tel Aviv for a few days of discussion about the industry, what's going on, trends, and then we also like to have a lot of fun as well. So, we are going to um a hotel called Ray Sheet on Wednesday, which apparently I've never been there either. overlooks a crater um in the desert. So, I'm looking forward to that. But, as I'm talking to my friend Jaro here, we're talking about uh the trends or what happened in the last year and what's what are people talking about because I think we're just getting over the hyper casual movement and we're starting to figure out what's next, what models are working. So, uh, I'm really excited to talk to all of the, uh, the developers and publishers that have come from around the world to figure out what's next. All right, great. And, Yarko, so you

came to Gamefest last year and you're coming again. What what why did you come to this conference? What's uh, what's valuable for you at Gamef Fest? Well, I think it's always always very useful to come come together with peers and colleagues from other other companies and put our small minds together together and and try to figure out ways how we could all spare head the industry to the completely different level all all together and and exchange ideas, compare notes and also put more more pressure to all of our partners as well that how could also they do better than than than ever before. Right. And then how was the uh the hummus and falafel here? Pretty much best ever. So we're uh we're at a place called Hakos, which is uh in my opinion the best falafel you can get in. Awesome. Really good stuff. Thanks guys. Thank you everybody. Good morning from Tel Aviv. It's day one of Gamefest and definitely excited for an exciting week

coming up. first time for me in Israel and uh really really excited about all the events and new people I'm going to meet this week. I'm going to be leading some workshops and giving a talk and that's also going to be pretty cool as well. So, let's get this week going. How's it going? Good. Hey, good breakfast. Can can you tell me quickly who you are, what you do, and what are you looking forward to at Gamefest? My name is Treyos. I work at uh Green Panda Games. We're based out of Paris and we make hyper casual idol games. Right. Um, GameFest just gathered 120 of the top uh, people in the gaming industry across the world. So, we're just excited to network and learn about what Arnour is bringing up. Okay. And how has it been since uh, since the 70% acquisition by Ubisoft? Ah, well, no, nothing's really changed. I mean, we're very excited to go forward with Ubisoft. This sounds like a press release at this point, but no, it's uh, it's been great and they've been very uh, good with us. So, Okay, cool. Brian, how's it going?

Good. Yep. I'm Brian Sap. I oversee UA and ads at Jam City, uh, based out of Los Angeles, and it's my second time at Gamefest. For me, honestly, it's just meeting with all of my counterparts at the European companies cuz they all fly in. And, uh, you know, a lot of the biggest puzzle gaming companies are based out of Europe. So, I really like catching up with, uh, folks who sit in similar positions as I do. And I got to thank you, Ryan. you were like the very first day I started my YouTube channel. You agreed to do a video with with me. So, I definitely have to thank you for that. That was a lot of fun. Anytime. And Andrew, what's up, man? From Alabama, for sure. So, my name is Andrew Stone. I'm with I'm a co-founder of Random Logic Games. Um, this is my second GameFest as well. And, uh, I'm just looking forward to meeting all of my colleagues in the industry and also enjoying Tel Aviv, which is just a wonderful, wonderful place. Right. And you guys work on word games, right? We do. So, we have some a number of popular word games. Uh, Infinite Word Search is probably our most popular

game. Um, crossword quiz. Guess the emoji. We've got quite a large portfolio that's done quite well. Okay. Great. Thanks a lot, Andrew. Good. Thanks, man. I'm here with the famous Mishka Kakoff. What's up, Mishka? All good. All good. What are you looking forward to? Am I the famous? I don't want to be the famous. You are. You are the famous, Mishka, but um, what are you looking forward to most at Gamef Fest? Can I be honest? Yeah, son. Second one is you. It was great to to finally see you. Yeah, hanging out. We haven't hung out in a long time. And um third one is ATVs. ATVs are going to be awesome. And then definitely the presentations. They're going to be fun. There's going to be uh some interesting stuff. Uh but yeah, I like coming in here, especially when it's November in Finland. We get to come here. It's like sun. I'm constantly here on the balcony of this amazing skyscraper in Israel. Look up. Oh jeez. Yeah. Wow.

Swanky. So yeah. All right. I for me it was a short trip. Actually a long one for the month with all the traffic. Guys, thank you all for coming. [Music] Good again. [Music] [Music] [Music] I'm a UA campaign manager and best part of Gamefest so far has been the food.

Food. Absolutely. And what do you think of Angry Birds 2 the movie? Everyone should go see it. Definitely. Absolutely. All right. All right. Great. My name is Oshin. I work at Cybo Games. Uh I'm the UA and AdMan lead. Um based out of Copenhagen, Denmark. Uh we're a developer of Subway Surfers. If anyone knows that game. Yeah. Um I think key takeaway from uh from the conference was definitely first of all to experience Tel Aviv. amazing city. Yeah. And um really here to learn, you know, the newest trends on on app monetization uh and to connect with all the the awesome people like like you guys to get get to pick the brains of some very intelligent people. Great. And then there's big changes coming to Subway Surfers next year, right? Yeah. I mean, um

[Music] yeah, there's going to be some some big changes, you know. I don't want to I I I can't really announce anything yet, but Okay. But yeah, there's we have a lot of stuff brewing at at Cyber. We're obviously exploring the the IP of of um of Subway, right? Um developed a mini game for Snapchat, which is in soft launch now. Yeah. We're also developing um an AR graffiti app. Yeah. Um, and then some big changes in in Subway as well, but um, we're going to share more more about that in the start of of next year. Awesome. All right. Thank you very much. Cool. [Music]

The presentation I'm going to give today is really about new game development and the argument I'm going to make is that new game development unlike scaling or optimizing or live ops actually are two fundamentally different disciplines and actually require different skills fundamentally different skills. If we were to think about this concept in terms of technology, 0ero to one is about creating something new, a new technology and one to end is about scaling that technology, optimizing it, taking it from geography to geography, globalization. And so the argument that I want to make with you today is that this concept of 0ero to one and one to n we can also apply to game development. And so when

we think about from a game development perspective, new game development is about finding a a new global maxima, right? Finding like a big new opportunity. Whereas the other discipline in terms of uh scaling, reskinning, optimization is more about incremental maximization. And so the focus of the present presentation today is really going to be about this part, the new game development. And so I'm going to make an argument that these two disciplines are separate. And then I'm also going to talk about some of my own personal theories in terms of how you can maximize a potentially successful outcome when you're working on new game development. Hi, I'm Anel. I work at uh Wildlife. So, I'm the VP of ad monetization. Okay. Uh what I like the most is just like a group of old friends getting all together and just hanging out and share the the like just hanging with like-minded people and sharing their ideas.

Right. And what's next for you? Like what are you working on specifically at Wildife? Um we're working a couple of new titles, but we just launched a tennis game which is doing really well. Check it out. It's called Tennis Flash. All right. Tennis Clash. All right. Okay. My name is Mario Wins. I'm the CEO of Pikpock, a publisher based in New Zealand. Um, it's my first Game Fest, my first time to Israel, my first time to the Middle East. So, uh, a lot of it's a blur, but, uh, loving the, uh, transparency we're getting with, uh, Iron Source, uh, the information, the road map. It's, uh, it's great to connect with everybody. We normally only connect with uh, over email or or the phone, right? And there have been a lot of thick great pickpock games over the years. What's your favorite pickpot game? Uh, I think I I like our Into the Dead franchise. I mean, that's uh it's something I I helped idiate and uh it's been our most successful franchise. So nice.

Um, you know, we're we've been building it out and uh I'm really excited to see where that can go over the next few years. All right, let me get a shot of your pick t-shirt there. There we go. All right, Gary. Yeah, I'm Gary from Dual Cat. I'm the founder of a company that we started one year ago based in France doing hyper casual. Uh what I most about uh game paste is networking obviously and trying to get the secret of competitors. That's the main thing. Yeah. And then why are there so many hyper casual companies in Paris? Um I think maybe for three reasons. The first one is the the culture in France about ging with Ubisoft Gam and might many like huge studios. Uh the second one might be uh Voodoo and Ketchup like leading us. Yep. And the third one is uh like more like than France is European like business. So also I have a lot of

European publishers. So that there's good reason. Great. Thank you. [Music] [Music] Yeah. Heat.

[Music] I'm Aaron Chan. I'm senior manager of user acquisition and admonition at Warner Brothers Games. It's my first year at Gamef Fest. I'm having a blast meeting a lot of great people in the industry. Uh having a great time with our partners and yeah, I look forward to coming again next year. Cheers. Cheers. Hey guys, good morning. It's day three here at Gamefest. uh and all the activities and talks have ended yesterday. So I gave my talk yesterday and uh had a really good time meeting a lot of folks and hearing their experiences. It's been really really

great here. Uh today it's it's all about fun. We're going to go out on ATVs today uh and then have a big closing party. So should be should pretty good times. Hey guys, I'm Or Shahar. I'm from Iron Source from San Francisco. Um, and I uh run the team there. I am I had a really good time so far with the in-game fest. And my favorite moment was for sure dancing with the guys on the All right. And then we got Scott. Hi, it's Scott Koixburg. Uh, speak product at Zingga. Um, I'd say by far my favorite moment so far at Gamef Fest was hanging out with everyone and seeing the passion everyone has for gaming and getting to know everyone and the the sense the real sense of community at this event. It's it's pretty awesome. That's right. Cool. Thank you. I'm Bruno. I'm C and founder of Mith Media. We have two apps publishing two apps. One is called Wishbone. The other one is called Yarn. All content driven apps monetized through ad subscription

and IP. Uh, mostly focused on Gen Z's so younger audience. Uh and my best time here is actually I had two meeting people a lot of really smart people learning a lot from them and I think the uh the other one was uh really all the talk around hyper casual and is hyper casual the ne is that going to the bubble burst or is just the beginning of a very big next gaming like I don't know how to call it like this next gaming thing right but uh so it's been a lot of good talks around that that topic right and you've had a pretty interesting entrepreneurial career starting a bunch of different companies. What would you say is the most important characteristic to be successful at entrepreneurship? Uh I would say never give up. Okay. I think that's one of the big thing. It's too easy to give up when you hit the wall. And usually when you hit the wall, this is when you really can learn and make

decisions that may make you even bigger. Got it? So never give up. and and embrace embrace the challenge. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. No problem. Thank you. I'm a bit mango CEO. Yeah. Bit mango is uh the focus on the puzzle game, right? Yeah. Our slogan is we make puzzles. Right. And what are some of your uh top games? Top game is world cookie. Word cookie. Right. Yeah. And roll the ball. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. So uh we are very early stage development studio and publishing department service. Yeah. So I want to uh learn more about this industry. Right. And then we had a talk last night where you talked about your role as CEO of Bit Mango. Could you say just a little bit about your your role as CEO? Yeah. My role is CEO. Yeah. I think CEO is the chief education officer,

right? So, uh I'm good at the playing puzzle game and or even though it's a mobile game, I'm not good at the developing mobile game, but uh I'm enjoying the at the running my business because I think it's running the business is kinds of playing role playing game. Right. Right. So my role is uh the making at the the self learning environment in terms of machine learning is the reinforcement uh learning environment. Right? So uh now is uh the my main focus is that develop the system level design of role playing game. Right. So uh I I need uh yeah to learn more what 10 years to be aa development studio. Right. So yeah I have a lot of things to do. Right. So you're basically saying you're treating your company like a role

playing game and you're creating the systems to achieve that goal of becoming a tripa. Right. Right. Right. Thank you very much. Yeah. Bye-bye. Desert desert hotel. What's up, dude? Hello. Maybe not. Uh my name's Ollie Christie and I'm founder and chief exec of Neon Play. And uh what kind of games do you guys make? We make hyperculture games. We've been going since 2010. Our first game is Flick Football and recently we've had

hits like Roller Splat, Soccer Kick, Bua, Cannon Man, Idol Tap, Strongman. And what has been your favorite part of Gamefest? Oh man, it's everything's been awesome. I think Source has been phenomenal host. They put on a great show for us. Some brilliant talks, very insightful, really made you think, which I think a good conference does. And then phenomenal networking with, you know, genuinely the top selected studios in the world at very senior level. Um, and a lot of partying as well. All right. Thanks a lot, Ollie. At a winery here with a bunch of ATVs. All right. Getting ready to go on our ATVs. So, hello. Good morning. My name is Danielle. Welcome to our recovery is a All right, guys. Are we uh are we ready to roll here? Yarko, you going to drive as fast as possible. Metal to the metal. Born ready. Yeah, exactly. Born ready. That's it. Yeah. All right, we're about ready to go.

Yako, you ready? Let's do this. All right. [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] I'm the CMO of Cody Games. Uh we develop uh Idol Games. What's What are the most uh popular games that you guys have out? Uh so we released a few months ago Idol theme park uh and also Idol Supermarket Tycoon. Oh, you guys are the Idol theme park guys. Okay, great. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I like that game. Um, and what was your favorite part of Gamef Fest?

I think that the best thing is that, you know, to meet a lot of new people that also work on the mobile game uh and share knowledge and and you know, insights about the industry. That that's amazing. And what do you think of the ATV ride so far? I think it's great. I mean, it's an amazing experience. All right, cool. Thank you. Thank you. [Music] Enjoy. [Music] [Music] Cheers. Hi, I'm Chenille from Hotrick Studios. I'm the CEO. Okay. And uh what's uh I mean it's been a it's been you know kind a few years since um we've heard a lot about Halfbreak. What's what's like the most recent news in terms of what you guys

are doing and um what's happening at Halfbreak. Uh well we just announced that we're releasing a new game uh this month. Uh it's called Magic Brick Wars. So look out for it later this month and we've just been busy working on new games. So the next six months are going to be pretty busy for us with new releases. Awesome. And what did you like most about GameFest? uh just meeting so many smart talented uh developers and learning from them. So that's that's the best thing. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. [Music] Hey Christian, what's up? Hey, how's it going? My name is Christian Calderon, CEO of Game Jam.

And uh what was your favorite part about uh Gamefest? I really loved the the ATV rides. Those were awesome. Uh, but I think my favorite part was definitely the presentations. Uh, definitely learned a lot one-on- ones with a lot of the uh, individuals here. Great contributors and very, very smart people here at GameFest. Uh, incredible show and uh, really look forward to seeing GameFax next year in 2020. All right, awesome. Thanks, guys. Yeah, thank you. Good morning everybody. It's day four. Yesterday was the last day of Gamef Fest, which is pretty awesome. I still have a couple days left here in Tel Aviv, but um yeah, going to going to meet Mishka for for breakfast and uh kind of uh recount GameFest. All right, so that's a wrap for Gamefest 2019. Mishka, what are your top few takeaways or thoughts about the conference? Well, I'll go with the uh three three one. So, um, naturally, I would say the

overall how this is arranged, where it's arranged, the type of, uh, facilities where we're at is, uh, five star. I'll give it five star. Uh, overall and like everything from the buses to the to the location where we're at, just fantastic. The food and and walnuts. Okay, so that's one. Of course, not the most important, but but very much appreciated. Uh, the second is definitely the quality of attendees. So, There's not a lot of people. I think like 125 or so. But the quality of of of uh the selection they did. So conversations keep very interesting. The insights are real. There's not, you know, there's no vendors in the sense is the only one. So there's everybody from different studios around the world and and you can have just amazing insightful conversations especially after a couple of drinks. uh they become very interesting. And finally, I would

say we had two full days of talks. Yeah, a lot of learnings. And if I would have to pick one that was uh for me personally about everything else, not dismissing your presentation anyway, but I would say it was uh Scotty Kes. Uh Scott is um Scott Kingsburg is the Zinga CPO. Yep. And he he walked through Zinga's M&A approach, right? uh how they screen for for studios not in the sense of numbers but the culture approach they the kind of like soft element and how they how they employ that soft element in M&A and how important that soft element is right was super insightful took a lot of notes uh really appreciate his talk uh and um yeah that was that was like the best out of all the great talks so um what was your tough yeah so for me so I agree with you the the quality of the attendees was really high but I think not only that I think it's the the quality of the relationships, right? If you think about life, life is about relationships and it's not like you have an opportunity to like be

forced into like a a week with different people, right? Like the type of discussions, the type of relationship you can build with someone you're forced to be together with for a week is different from seeing someone in an office context or over lunch or over coffee. It's it's very different, right? And so so the quality relationships and the type of discussions we had were really different. In terms of talks, I thought Dan Greenberg's talk in terms of creatives from Iron Source was excellent. He did a great job. Um, you know, Orin also had a really good talk. But, um, yeah, and I I think finally it's just hearing the different stories like you meet different kinds of companies and all of them are finding different ways of being successful in the market, right? So, like the different strategies, how they're being their business, how they're operating their teams all have different, you know, approaches, nuances, flavors. And so hearing about all of that in this kind of relaxed casual environment that you normally can't get elsewhere was really really cool. So if you would have to rate this

podcast Oh yeah. I mean it's four stars. Yeah. Four. Four out of five. Four out of four stars. Oh, four out of four stars. What is a four star rating? But yeah, it's good. It's good. Yeah, I would do the same. This is um this is perhaps the best conference I've been at. I would say so. Just like the the overall package. Um interesting to see what they come up with next year because I was here last year and I thought it was fantastic and this year it was like above all expectations. So now the expectations are like even higher for 2020. Yeah. Cuz now it's like insane, right? Uh but you know, you don't overall like even if it's something like this or even if it's something like last year, it's still four out of four or five out of five in my book. So you know, Iron Source keep it going. Truly enjoyed it. um big fans of of Gamef Fest and um yeah, we're just happy to be here. All right, so from Tel Aviv wrapping up Gamefest 2019. So some rap.

Uh so my name is Maya. I'm a game director at Jelly Button Games. I've been there for the past seven years. Love games, love the industry. And hey, I'm Barack Sheriff. Um lead game designer at Jerry Batton Games. been there for like five years now, right? That's it. Love games, hardcore gamer. Right. And can you tell me about uh the games you guys are working on now? Like maybe So there's there's Pirate King which I'm sure everybody We have Pirate King, we have Board King, we have a few new things that we're working on. Actually, Barack has a game. Yeah, it's called Merge Stories which is on soft launch on Google only. No, I guess story. How's it looking so far? Yeah, it's looking good. It's looking good for a soft launch. Uh we have some major features want to put inside. So in a couple of months we'll be ready for a full release. Great. And then Maya, what did you like most about GameFest?

I love meeting new people, especially other product and game lovers from around the world, talking to them, talking games. Like it's amazing. It doesn't happen uh as much as as we'd like it to. Okay. All right. Great. Thanks, guys. Thanks. All right, guys. That's it. Heading to the uh well, I'm at the airport now and uh finally heading home. [Music] back in San Francisco. [Music]

[Applause] [Music] You're going to [Music] dance.