Promoting games the app stores won't

[Music] welcome everyone to our a little panel about app store basically you know promoting the games and discovering the games the way basically the App Store won't put a much much focus on let's start with maybe let everyone introduce themselves right Jeff maybe you can start on your site do you have a microphone 22 oh hi my name is Jeff Tremblay I am business development manager for new taku I am as masala anta from caviar publishing and my job is to help basically all the game companies in northern Finland in a fund a funding and publishing games and marketing and I'm Anderson King and I'm from hawawa mobile services team based here in Helsinki and we're helping indie developers and large developers promote their games in an alternative app store all right

and my name is Martina and I'm a mobile game publisher and we specialize in hidden object games time management's match three games the company's name is tama lucky all right so we have a very nice diverse panel here of no appstores publishers and apparently be lovely according to Oskar that to race I mean we got that one we got that going for us the idea behind this panel was you know the app stores and Google Play Store mainly they've they've already been difficult to basically get discovered on from the start and it's only getting more and more tough and like in the last couple of years so it's it's basically about discovering and what weather their options mobile game developers have so kind of always it was fun getting you also on the panel I understand cuz I also want to tap a little bit into China cuz just how vastly different the app store space looks their language just like close to them no Google doors right

it's I mean it's it's basically a maze trying to navigate through and you know in Southeast Asia and Latin America you also see that mobile operators for example have their own store do you think that like could the future of a fragmented app store like that also be a reality in the West yes definitely I think it's it's happening right now there's many different options for developers to distribute their content obviously the the big players still dominate and will continue to dominate but maybe we'll see a change in business models moving forward potentially like the other main content industry music and TV and movies you could see potentially people paying for exclusivity for for content as well so it is in China I think I don't know I can see a future where various verticals I mean right now the main stores are generalists they host everything and anything or

they refuse everything and anything no pun intended but I think there's gonna be a time when fragmentation will come through verticals various game categories so basically the user the player will be will have the option of going to yes a general store but also to very specialized store that calls upon his interests within the type of games yarns and game categories that he plays and I think that's that's one angle that the space should look into maybe the UI ways of this world who knows okay well a comedy comment specifically on that but we certainly are providing an alternative option to Google I mean we distribute we have our own SDK to integrate as well you know it's a way for developers to access our hawawa audience and being a Chinese manufacturer we have an app store in China surprise surprise one of the 100 or many more than there are a hundred in in China and you know we can help

Western developers into the Chinese market we can't publish you there you're probably aware of the in the China is a very strict market when it comes to things like corruption so from the very highest levels in the Chinese government there down on you know corrupt activities and people literally get sent to jail for doing corrupt things so we can't be a publisher in China because obviously if we publish content and put it on our store and promoted it then that's obviously a way to make more money for ourselves so that's why we have partners to help with things like that but I think in the West though still for the for the time being it's so expensive to to set up a store and you know do all the necessary things around managing and operations of a store and hosting content and distributing it that it'll be a while until you get a very big competitor to the the main ones I think of gap is the gap is just insurmountable yeah but then that's why you know sitting in Europe it's actually quite

encouraging because you may have heard of all the fines I think I took a note here this year July four point three two billion euros fine to Google from the EU June 2017 two point four two billion fine and this is against antitrust practices for the operating system essentially search and what's the one browser sorry so the only thing that's not covered in that the latest fine is the App Store the Google Play Store so that's kind of in there targets as far as we can see so they could well be a point where the EU makes it such that Android licensees who take the operating system can fork from Android and have their own App Store without having Google Play on the device so I think that's a real reality that's coming up and it probably the next 12-24 months will have a bit more clarity on that this do you think manufacturer as well

manufacturers will will create this new google start so we'll have a store per manufacturer likely that's a little scary for developers I mean you guys are gonna have to talk to every single manufacturer out there and work double time to get feature to get listed so so what happens in China Jeff is you engage with a company that generally gives you an SDK and that SDK makes you able to address multiple stores that does remind me a little bit of like the old flash days it's basically where I started my career right where it was like thousands of websites just all had their own little portfolio of flash games and one would be focused on dress-up games the other owned car games and then there's kind of things and yeah I mean if you wanted to basically hit every available channel you had a lot of work to do but back then also distribution was pretty easy you just gave them your flash file and that was it right and he didn't need to implement basically a different API for every store so that that's gonna make it

much more much more difficult on the mobile side of things but you know like that's mostly also kind of fun to step on the store perspective but also want to talk a little bit about like how publishers catch sort of a niche in the audience and give it some ohmic grab a microphone right I mean also equates with what you guys work as you know publishing games how do you see that of course it's like impossible to if many you publish that your game is like in Google Play and and it's in a pilot with the other 800,000 same genre games it's like impossible to to find there if you don't just put it lots of money in you you you a and it's impossible so but if in China otherwise there is a different kind of storage that people who wants to play that kind of games they have that store installed in their phone so that

that might almost solve couple problems for developers as far as we're concerned we kind of circumvented that we created our own destination platform so I mean it's our our position in the market is we're in adult gaming platform so you know to publish and operate a platform and do you already have your own App Store it's coming it's coming on Android it won't be on Apple it will be on Android our client will be there will facilitate a player install is 57% of our current traffic is from mobile so we're definitely keen on that we're we're anxiously waiting for the release of that new Taku store if we want to call it that way but it'll stay within the ecosystem of new Taku so we won't be open to external developers unless you're actually distributed on the platform or have a publishing relationship with us okay yeah because it's so hard to install your games when

I made the research about the adult adult games we're working on making it a lot simpler for the users there's a few hoops to jump you know does have that interesting angle or you guys do actually have experience that like setting up your own your own app store that you know basically in four or four to Android markets so I mean was that like I said of like a massive thing or you know was it just a few months of work what did the company basically need to spend it's not just a few months of work there's a lot of work involved it's but we've been talking about it and and and looking into it for months and months and months before we actually got into development we're in the final stages of development were really excited about launching it this fall but then again it's it's it's not it's just not simple it's not simple we you know we started by putting together the web

destination with most of them browser games initially within three and a half years that we've been there the world has changed we we integrated downloadable games we've integrated mobile games we had to go through hoops of the installs where we were the adult content obviously is definitely blocked from the App Store and still Google has a little you know twists and turns let's put it this way so we had to find a solution to facilitate access to content and you know when I was talking earlier about this vertical slice this this this very nice vertical were totally into it and we're we're addressing it left right and center just an additional comment you talk about you know years of development for your store in China for the hawawa up gallery it's a team of 400 people that did handle that product in China so that's the operation it's the development of the of the actual store itself its partner management for you know developer relationships all that kind of stuff so it's 400 400 people Wow

well hey new Taku thumbs up if everyone's looking for a big project to take on set up an app store apparently yeah and so you know news also that you know last month of course epic bringing a fortnight's outside of the App Store what'd you guys take on that maybe the publisher it just agreed it just wanted more money but there was take over the trust issues into their own store right I think it was mainly the 30% thing because of that they made their own app store but I have to say that when you when I installed your your games or your App Store and my firt mitigate in front of everyone really appreciate that when my phone asks that hey no Tiger wants to access in your Facebook and in your data

and in your photos and camera and everything so I twice first I put in no cancel and they know I have to do this and all of my data at that we know you know that yeah but that that's a little bit scared of course that okay I'm okay giving all my information that is cuddly and you know what thanks for pointing it out will definitely make a point to bring it back to the engineering team I mean there there are some level of access permissions that we don't necessarily need so thanks for pointing that out a little definitely they couldn't take a note I think fortnight's a very special case there's not many other pieces of content today that could have done what they did with the the releasing outside of the Android Google Play Store but still I mean I think I read something last week

15 million installs in 21 days or so it's creates crazy yeah I mean if you did you expect anything less I mean look at the poll this is having I mean it's things like the most views on YouTube it's just a phenomenon right now absolutely but but yeah you do the math that they've saved 30% of every in-game purchase so it was worth a fair bit of money to epic to do that as long as it doesn't take 400 people to do it but what you see the interesting thing though is the the the interesting thing though is that it took a lot of effort from epic you know a few it did try and install fortnight on an Android device there was a long list of what was whitelisted and because of the fragmentation of Android it's you know been a quite a lot of a lot of effort but they made enough money to justify that yeah it's it's it's basically a numbers game right they know that they

had the audience and they could definitely at that point it's not even a money this is only like it just makes sense but then maybe it makes relative Rhodes is still here maybe she has a comment on King's business practices but maybe it makes sense for somebody like King to to set up their own store you know like they have done a look put a lot of traffic through Google Play obviously and back to our earlier point are we now going to see and a store / publisher or / large developer the supercells of this world and so on that's another conundrum earlier today there was also a whole track about cloud gaming and how do we think that's gonna like influence the distribution of apps who knows if such inspiring ads I'm using hatch it works fine and I like to use that but I think it will be even more successful in the future when the old 5g and 60 networks are working and everything

can be in the in the cloud you don't need your own like phone power I was gonna say basically the the the cloud computing power combined with no more latency or super high-speed wireless connectivity will actually enable developers to work in a different way and and and not rely on the devices computing power but be able to feed directly into the phone make it a different experience I think as well that perhaps the devices will become more graphically powerful because that's what you want to render like on right in the front of your face where the s7 was the first one with its own dedicated GPU yeah so of a trend obviously so yeah and as you can see there's a lot more handheld gaming devices Nintendo's had a huge boost with the switch and yeah so that's just down to the the chipsets

becoming much more powerful look in the last three years these phones are now becoming game consoles they have more power I have more power on this phone than we have on PS PS B and Vita in the days yeah we're entering the points where actually PvP for mobile phone to pcs there yes it works yeah and that's also we're in another angle where we're cloud computing is is coming in and as a support that mean it's huge for that absolutely I mean AWS is doing so much business I mean they're building data centers for AWS faster than Amazon can build ed quarters which is quite fast oh and there they actually now have games park and game lifts and they have dedicated services destined at developers and facilitating the cloud the usage of the cloud infrastructure that they offer you know there's also kind of you know when you think of companies setting up app stores of course first you think of like mobile operators and such but nowadays we also see for example this Court's offering

games and you know companies like wheat chats or Facebook through messenger or something they're offering html5 games so throw all these various various channels where do you guys expect to see most growth and success that's a really good question yeah I mean I think that twitch and that's it's great for discovery like the biggest problem we have with the stores today is they're so overcrowded and it's so hard to I mean they're really just there for search yeah especially the Google Play Store so if you don't know what you're gonna search for then how do you discover something that you might launch you it might like so yes sir so consequently this is why I believe that twitch and and other computers version the dis chords are used as marketing channels at this point correct and also kind of teaching channels as well I know my 11 year old son likes to watch twitch to learn how to do things in in games yeah well I think that it's gonna serve a purpose for that but you know it switches owned

by Amazon there's clearly a hose on has an app store there's clearly integrations in the in the roadmap for the future so you know it's gonna be a variable the ease of user experience the ease of people being able to consume content to install games is what it's going to come down to so if you can make that journey for a user from having an idea of let's have a bit of a fun and a bit of a casual game session from watching a video of a cool new game to actually installing it and being playing and monetizing in their future then I think that's probably what we'll see more of I think manufacturers are in a great position to take ownership I mean you're the first point of contact I mean that there's no friction between you and the Qi way or that's well that's why it's alright whenever I made partners you know developer partners they always want to find out about pre-installation because that's you know it's on the software on the device out of the box there it is ready doing some company's business models around it for 10 12 maybe while

tangent while tangent in Seattle has been doing this on PC this is especially but for over 13 years and the the big mover in Mobile was iron sauce they they kind of took that pre-installation model and put it on its head and have done great business since then and they're in a lot of different sure is out of box experience you know the onboarding flow so I think you'll see more competitors in that space to a small when you are working on like a new game projects do you also kind of take that take the distribution in consideration like you know besides the usual suspects like Apple and Google they also already plan ahead for a certain game to go on other platforms it's like always like first Apple in Google and then you figure out that is it game successful enough to put your effort and money to spread it in other other platforms so it just have to say

Apple and Google are so big them if they're unavoidable but every developer out there thinking of getting a game distributed needs to look at alternative distribution channels because they're just not going to make it on those two overcrowded saturated undiscoverable game stores period yeah that's my point yeah there's money in all day all the stores so don't let them money stay there I have a very similar approach with better hidden object games yeah I mean we you know for a long time we saw that Apple and Google were like okay you know we're running with that first two years and you know it's it is it is becoming harder and definitely more distribution and therefore different territories different different stores and try to get from more of the mix try to get featured yeah as an indie developer try to get featured you're one in a billion literally one in a billion chances of

getting featured out there not on huawei all right I also do want to open the floor a little bit went to questions from the audience not sure if this raise your hand let's say are you want to talk about html5 like I've been waiting for that question all right all right yeah that's that's true I did also you know well let's first take take a blatz question cuz he's got his hand up Thanks this is kind of an expert expertise question based on what what you guys think might be happening so a little bit of crystal ball asking there but most recently we've seen a lot of developers explore the Nintendo switch so when you released before I would say September last year you were one of the first 100 games in December it was first a 500 right now we're think I think we're

passing like the 2000 mark of games on switch so I know that new taku has 170 games at the moment because well I work for you guys but it's it's going to be an interesting development I think for hallway as well now that you're you know out here showing what what what's happening what are your predictions and feel free to pick it up whoever wants to from the panel but what are your predictions how developers need to adjust once they tap into the opportunity of a new market or new app store and how do we then adjust as developers to that Marsh you know that app store going from you know a hundred to two thousand to five thousand to ten thousand to the billions that Jeff also mentioned what kind of mentality should developers have is the mentality shift need to have it at the developer side developers need to focus on one thing is make the best game they can right I think that responsibility of curating or organizing content relies on the store

operator not the developer the developer is is challenged enough with what is out there if you start changing the rules and putting the burden on developers I mean you guys you guys are just gonna die it's a simple that so that responsibility I think lies with the stores we've seen evolution in the Google Play or Apple throughout the years those rules have changed and I think any store that will open will have a set of three the the what do they call it the three pillars the three pillars and then the rule sets will evolve but I remember the day that I discovered a few years ago now that editors choice in Google Play was an algorithm and I was like oh I thought it would be a real person there's no editor so I understand what you're saying and that's kind of like how do we not foot turn into Google Play

and not be discoverable again I echo Jeff's comments that you know it's about the developers making the best games it's also about having relationships with the stores as well it can be very difficult but getting early is a good tip while the stores are still growing and you know develop a business relationship with those stores and and make sure that you know you're responsive to their requests obviously everybody has different requirements to address a store but you know we try and make those things as easy as possible and make those the the support function I think is another key factor too so we're one of the big moves for Hawara this year is to really develop our developer support or the technical information that's available on the web sites things like that needs to be really top-notch to to help developers and give them the opportunity to monetize on our different stores as easy as possible yeah it is a good point because I was thinking this

conference we always like broadcast a message it's like no you should put your games on every platform like well what if every developer does that then obviously copying to froth flow right right you know it's yeah I guess like we said before for develop for like the Mo's development teams it's it's pretty much impossible to try to literally get on every sort anyway because it's just too much work yeah and then if you want to do an update and you have it on you know ten different SKUs with different SDKs and that kind of stuff then happy hell it's a date nightmare a nightmare yeah like nobody wants me there it's where the cloud can help to probably client versus if the stores allow it well you did have a very good point that I skip the question about html5 so circle back to that so because I promised I've you know ten years ago I was at a company where back then they were already saying that html5 is the absolute future let's fully black move our content strategy there and well that didn't move and and

I you know like literally now today ten years later I still don't really have the feeling that we're there even though for messenger platforms it's now like taking off and there's some companies who have html5 content it's like they were doing really well but do we think that at html5 realities is really gonna happen from my perspective I don't know when you say companies doing really well in html5 I think they're surviving I think that they especially when it comes to Facebook messenger gaming they were promised a lot and didn't quite deliver as as they had hoped I think people that got onto that platform the ones that are making money on that or actually the early adopters and yeah and and if you relate to that platform which kind of sucks because it hasn't been around that long so how do you be late so it's it kind of penalizes them a little bit because they don't have the the user base and therefore the algorithm doesn't surface it to other people to discover the content where I do think html5 has

got a big future though is in the other screens so not your personal highly powered you know expensive device in your pocket or in your hand or in front of your face most of the time it's in things like cereal packets that are gonna have you know flexible screens that are powered by cellulose batteries and things like that so there'll be use cases for very light games that don't need to be installed that can be accessed the you know across the board in in many different formats many different places could be a bus stop could be in a in a bathroom honor you know above a urine or something like that you'll find that there will be a lot so that's probably a bad example sorry at least you've had lunch but you'll finally be lots of new spaces where screens exist that people will be able to consume content on and I think that that's where html5 is gonna really start to sing we're exploiting html5 to actually be able to have people play our games on iOS devices but which I do you

wrap it up like a like it's an app no it's a web browser the browser browser game yeah yeah that way I guess you don't get circumvented circumvent the censorship yeah excessive webpage what do you think of html5 festival I just miss flash games it is but when was the last time you played it's the ml of five game I mean it might have been when did html5 launched it's pretty much bad thanks for your question yeah it's true I mean we might to be honest we might be playing html5 games but not know it right because they do get any other questions from the audience also I mean we have we're good on time so if anyone

chipping in otherwise it'd be happily continuing here it's all fine we're not wait I lost it you have the empty paper in front of so when we look at like sort of more like the specialized stores right what is so do we think well I mean Jeff for you this answer is gonna be pretty clear but besides sort of an adult store what other sort of niches do we really think are can can take off I'd really like to have a like each store you have the adult store I want I have two and four year old old girls and they both have their phones and tablets and they both have the Google Play so all the devices are for of so I don't even it mean that

there are full of games that I don't like but they are just full of games that just just are like a pop up at all that time they are the only purpose is to just show the show the ads to the kids or trying to get the kids to find my credit card and put money it's a totally crap there's no like any gatekeeper in there it's about kids stores like kiddos or something use that I have tried trying to find out like that website which has which are like showing all day all day like good games but same problem in every every store on page he goes they just want to make money they don't want to have a good game for the kids brand companies look at what Disney is doing right now it withdrawn all its content from Netflix and is launching its own Netflix it also has a truckload of interactive

entertainment available out there so I think those are the first suspects that would I capitalized on the power of the brand to say ok you want you want to watch digitally download Disney and whatever it is and you want to play our games download our Disney Play Store and Warner Brothers can do the same and there's a bunch of other ones that can do the same a lot of game companies can actually think about do that doing that too yeah right a handful at this point but still up what about eSports I think that would be a great you know specialized category for is it all true true and it's and it's pulling like crazy like crazy we got a few business models here for those who are listening ok exactly just keep keeping pumping out that's why we all right there's there's another question I see what they're up

need to wait let me you can just shout it out blood sorry on the topic of niche audiences I feel like there's there's definitely something I you know left there to discuss with with this awesome panel huawei of course I mean I'm not sure if you guys are focusing specifically on like like certain niches in terms of neuron now Nadia it's not right now we're just requiring as much as we can into this yeah exactly just like wrapping those tentacles around the globe this Oscar Ani launched in Europe in June and it's basically you know filled of Chinese developers content that's localized for Western audiences so there's not a lot of recognisable stuff in there so it's our mission purely to to bring in Western developers into our environment so that's a question I had for for the rest of the panelists as well it's like how what what advice do you guys have for the developers next to me and behind me in

terms of dealing with with niche audiences because even like you know the conversation me and Jeff have a lot with developers right now is the fact that there is a huge opportunity for more female friendly titles under taku gay friendly titles LGBTQ friendly titles but what are your personal opinions on how developers can best leverage niches inside of these kind of new apps to know your audience I mean you would expect if you're making a game for a particular audience you maybe have a passion in that field or experience at least so know your audience well and know what triggers you to get them worked up for wanna not to use the natok who example but it's simplistic but it's it's true I mean II understand how the players interact with your games and know what kind of things that they're attract them to to the game so and use that in your marketing material I mean you talk about discoverability everything looks the same or if you look on the Google Play Store most of the app icons are scary so

is yeah yeah look at the top ten gold store titles there they're all matched threes how do you circumvent that you get a great idea to come up with the next generation of match 3 game where the top positions are already overcrowded and given the editors now an algorithm excuse me but you're well I have to say for nice audience there's also often niche publishers so for example and you know like my own company where we really specialize in hidden-object titles I mean I often get developers of hidden optic title it's already released but they can't get an audience and it turned to me like well we need help on that and you know with basically running Tamala key for more than 5 years we kind of built up that audience and that reputation and all that you know could have easier to find and just like one developer out there with with their title so I guess yeah when you just look at the existing stores and all that just like maybe in the help of a niche

publisher and sort of bundle your strengths basically all right oh I think we are getting close to time Oscar do you have a question yeah I was just wondering one other reason why I haven't done a lot of offs off App Store you know different App Store and releases it's because of the focus I've often had with rewarded video kind of style monetization because I integrate that so deeply into a lot of the designs that I work on but that means that when I put them on if I wanted to put them on to other stores those ads redirect you to main stores you circumvent that how do you deal with that can you deal with that well in our case we have a ad network whitelist so we would if you for example we're gonna publish on our store then we would work out if your ad network is gonna work or not but but do

you have systems in place on vast or the do do reward video for example yes okay because there historically the main players haven't and they haven't done it and the ones that have done similar things haven't been able to do it as scale and I imagine that Sonique it's a big issue for a lot of people an interesting anecdote about that I just heard from another developer that the update on his game on iOS was rejected because his ad network was accidentally showing in ads that had both the Google Play and App Store download buttons so it wasn't even the game wasn't even rejected because of his own content but because of a mistake in the ad network so I guess yeah that is a kind of a really interesting interesting thing for for new app stores right how to how to handle that so the you know you said you said that you work with basically a whitelist is that as

far as you know sort of the usual thing how other app stores handle it as well I have a new idea about this I believe so I haven't worked for Apple or Google so I can't really comment on their behalf but I would imagine it's um you know there's systems in place that makes sure like you said it was an automated thing for your friend with the Apple Store they've got blocks oh yeah those systems are in place and you know you need to be very careful that you don't end up losing out because of some mistake that your third-party ad network has done yeah I guess at the end of the day it just comes down to taking a lot of care over your product make sure you've got good product teams and good product managers that on top of all this stuff because there's lots of you know traps I guess you could say that you could fall into that can mean that you're you're really great monetizing game is suddenly no longer available to people to to install so yeah it's very important and I think I mean if you can have a relationship with the the stores do it you know try

and find the I mean the people from the Google Play Store and from iOS App Store they do attend conferences they're hard to get there your hands on them that's for sure but you know try your best often they're speaking you know if you've seen them speaking in an event might take a note of what they look like try and find them in the corridor and you know have a word to them it's you know simple simple things of just a face-to-face relationship to make a big difference you know so I would encourage you all to do that and you know have that pride in your products as well stamp believe in them stand behind them and you know cook present present them confidently unlike myself alright about time to wrap it up you guys have any closing remarks yeah just call a publisher and you as a developer you can concentrate on making the great games and publisher makes all the other stuff that is actually a very good tip second that and I do believe

that that that should be the fundamental role of the publisher so yeah all right lovely well thank you so much guys for these valuable insights thanks so much thank you [Applause] [Music]