King's Tommy Palm on the growth of global games

thank you thank you Chris um hi so the topic of my presentation today I guess uh Chris wrote the topic the dawn of the global games publisher but uh I found it to be a very interesting challenge to to fill out the content of this um I went and start from the beginning I always like to do that in two in 1997 I was at a Technical University and one of my best friends showed me his new Nokia 6110 and it was the first phone that had a game on it and not any game of snakes it was a very simple game but it was multiplayer so we played this uh against each other on the breaks and I was blown away I was completely uh I was sure that this was going to be super big instantly I I founded a company uh soon

after to make mobile games this baby also had a stand stand uh my time for 200 hours what happened with that um this is a screenshot from from 2006. at that time I've been struggling for about seven years trying to make great mobile games that would be profitable uh as Chris mentioned earlier was two problems and back in those days it was uh distribution and fragmentation and and one big thing was that the end consumers didn't get good quality games so people would buy new phone typically download one or two games and feel ripped off and nobody would really making money no no developer who was investing in this got their money back so it was really not a working Market until the App Store came along and and changed all this and I think it's worth to note that it was it was really the Simplicity and the innovation in user interface that that changed and laid the

foundation for for the games Market mobile games Market that we have today I met this guy Steve at the barbecue party uh in um in 2000 and a private party in 2008 before the App Store was launched and he showed me a a game Prototype that he was working on and he wanted a lot of advice on how to make mobile games and he later became one of the poster child for uh for apple on on how simple it could be to to you know make your idea come true and and he sold tourism uh hundreds of thousands of copies or or even Millions for for five dollars and they later changed that to three dollars and he was he was really somebody who showed how how simple it could be for anyone to to make money on the App Store same thing in 2010 with Andreas illinger the the German student who made a fantastic game called tiny wings I spent a lot of time playing this

um so what happened in 2013 last year one Trend that I seem to notice is that it was three games that was topping uh the the grossing short all year basically and that was uh Candy Crush Clash of Clans and heyday we launched Candy Crush Saga in November 2012. um and it has been a quite a stable number one on on the grossing chart this is the the US short for iPhone according to to app Annie and Clash of Clans and Hay Day have the symbol similar type of shorts uh we we King just recently went out and said for the anniversary of one year anniversary of the the mobile game that we had half a billion installs which is a so fantastic number that that is uh came to a shock uh to the development

team as well we had an early bet in the beginning on the download numbers and even though I I really guessed on a high number I was 10 times off the first weekend so we saw that it was going to be really big one of the big differences from the early days is the definitely the marketing and this discovery that needs to go into the the concepts really early on and this is also one of the power today SSO games successful game company you you don't only need a great pipeline of making great games you also need to have a fan base that you can continue uh releasing games to and that's really one of the differences be between before when you you didn't have this direct connection to your consumers um this is an example from our app page Candy Crush app page on Facebook that has today almost 60 million uh fans that

we can communicate directly with and they can also um give us input on on what to do that's how the the Candy Crush Candy came out as a product that we were hearing a lot of requests from fans and these are are great uh a great asset for games company when when releasing new games we recently released a farm hero saga which is made from the London Studio which is a new studio for us this is the the first big release and it's on the top short here of of the top grossing Android apps we actually have four titles here on the top 10 list and I'm not only saying this to brag I also want to make the point that having the connection with your fans today is really one of the strengths that you can have as a company especially if you continue targeting the same target audience so let's have a short look on the spread

of Candy Crush this is uh what it looks like on Google Trends in November 2012 when it was launched so not a whole lot of people were searching for for Candy Crush and then as this advances you can see how how it becomes more and more popular in in America and and some part of Europe and also in in a few countries in in Asia and uh it continues until um that what is today and what we feel is quite much a global success even though there is definitely a few countries there that that's not represented um there is something called we are social and report that was released recently that has data from from updated data from January 2014 that's a really great uh report it's a little bit too long for me to go into any details but it's saying that we're now more than seven billion people on Earth and and

2.6 billion is is today connected which is a very interesting comparison to um our um current number of active users or we have uh 282 million monthly unique uh users between our games so a little bit more than it's definitely connected with with the number of people who are connected and also if you go back and look at the shorts here this is typically where the social networks especially uh Facebook is is strong of course because the the Candy Crush the most important channel for Discovery has been word of mouth and people telling their friends about the game um but but the social integration has been extremely important um to to support this of course and uh

I have argued many times before that it's not very complex social integration but it is there so you easily see who are your friends is playing the game and and people like to talk about this outside game that's the really important things so one of our uh clear potential growth areas is Asia of course we have seen that the game has become super popular in some regions of Asia like Hong Kong and Taiwan um where they're using Facebook a lot this is a pictures from from Hong Kong's Times Square that was counting in the New Year in in Candy Crush and candies one of the things that we've done is that we have partnered with cacao talk that is uh the social dominating social network in uh in Korea and has a little bit more than 80 percent of the Korean market and here I am shaking hand with uh with the CEO siegrow Lee and that has been a very well working strategy for our games this is again the

ranking history in South Korea uh since land launch and we're now one of the few uh Western games that's actually on the top list so I wanted to to try to prove a little bit but kind of my gut feeling that we're seeing this trend going from uh you know a lot of you um garage developers to to fewer um large companies so I I used app Annie to search for for the top grossing uh companies during 2011 and up till now and I I concluded this table where I saw that there was 26 companies in 2011 20 in 2012 and just 10 last year so I think that we we see a clear Trend that there's fewer and fewer companies in the in the top five of the App Store

so just to conclude my my 10 minutes here which still has 20 seconds to go yeah uh is that I definitely think that opportunity on on mobile games continues to grow we're seeing a lot of more new players coming in that hasn't discovered games and just now seeing how much fun games can be as an Entertainment form it's going to be more and more social uh components that's going to be important and especially if you can make them in offline mode because the networks are still not as good as they they should be especially here in London by the way uh and and as I said I think that fewer companies are gonna dominate the top Crossing short for 2014. thank you very much right