Publisher power panel: What games publishers offer in 2016

[Music] we're now into the final final part for lunch which is we've called the it's the publisher power power we've got a good mix of people here from from publishers external publishers and also some big names in the industry so what I'm gonna do initially is just quickly allow people to and also a new guest so who's just just added so yes there we go young a young man so don't be too too harshly me doesn't like lot of questions but just let you quickly introduce yourself and just say what you're working on that moment FG mica hello I meet Claudia I work out flare games as a developer relations manager and i'm currently looking after sourcing new games basic from all kinds of developers and just to initiate the publishing and initiate actual code development of games at

their games and i'm actually based in germany from finland actually hence the name he's got his good night hi I'm Matt I work for EA in Chillingo i'm in charge of third-party development for mobile i'm half of EA under the chillingo brand so here looking for new games and looking forward to judging in the very big indie pitch cool hi I'm Sabrina I work a king the only female in this panel so very proud ah yeah I I have a publishing background I worked at a square enix as a publisher producer over there and I'm working at a publisher a king and new ip's and stuff but we hear talk about market trends so I'm very happy to join okay hey my name is yossi amanha I was just hijacked for this panel like five minutes ago but I'm heading row your stars which is our studio in rovio working exclusively

now with external partners we started at rovio stars as a third-party publishing initiative but then as the market has developed we have more and more focused on not callable raisin and called development project over the pure third-party publishing so cool all right sorry celina stop serpent River war though help yourself to water obviously so we're going to skip around a little bit here it's it's you know bit fast bit loose I won't talk a little bit about the kind of role the publisher but also talk a bit about some amazing interesting trends we've been talking about today so I'll kick off with it that kind of a pretty standard question really and I've been the game since she quite a long time I know I don't look old enough to been in it that long but I have been here quite while I've seen work to the PC side and console and mobile I think across that time of all the publishers changed a lot and certainly within mobile when we started it was all the operators it was all publishers and then the App Store came and it was all people doing in sales and now it feels to me that we're kind of back again leading that the publisher is

neither was always needed back in a very central role so you know how did you see the publishers role in the in the mobile ecosystem the moment is it is about you a is about marketing what is it what would you do well I think more and more kind of go development approach makes more and more sense these days instead of throwing money in a general direction with user acquisition marketing I think what's that makes sense in tomorrow market right now is actually caring about what you do in terms of co-development so you actually want to make a good game you want to facilitate Sox's facilitate awesomeness by simply actually caring and nurturing the game through its soft launch up until hard launch and i think that's that's really important because the market is getting more and more saturated more and more competitive so it makes way more sense to really invest time and money in terms of actually developing the game to its full potential okay yeah and I think

that we've lived through this for a long time now we've seen the market changed and you're right it's come full circle and the role of a publisher is really too it's always been to allow the developer to make a great game and we handle everything else and I think in today's market with being over saturated marketing becoming incredibly expensive it's not just about you a and advertising in other game there's all the clever or the marketing you can do which is where a publisher certainly pick up the mantle there it's as you've mentioned co-development we used to be in a volume-based business but now we're moving more and more into two co-development with developers and really helping you learn about these new worlds you'll hear lots of things today about eSports where do you fit in that world where can we help you in your second game of your third game so it's about long-term cooperation as well there okay Sabrina you can / I know you're not obviously from a king perspective up well you're not publicly yeah pull some of the games yet yeah um can't talk much about King for two reasons 1i joined four months ago

and two because I work in an IP development but I can talk about um past experiences I've been the publisher and I've been the one trying desperately to sell my soul to a publisher yeah I come from Brazil so there it's a complete different scenario for us over there if you want to reach a global market you have no chance because you have no money because you have no knowledge because pretty much the industry developed itself based on advergames so it's great to see the trend and and co-development being in higher place right now because when I was doing it back in 2012 in 2013 it was pretty much whatever the publisher said we would do it and we will still have to compete with the other companies to get it published and then on the publisher side at square enix for instance we had a pool of like 13 15 projects and we would

publish one yeah so it's a I think it's a very different perspective and it changes on the location i think that this panel being on this track makes a lot of sense because I see now that i'm working in europe and and it's completely different and the experiences people have back in other markets like latin america okay cool are you'll be talking about line America later on so yeah all right you say I mean from a I mean rovio stars are over a third party publishing a bullet you know how how yeah what's how does that has that work well how do you see rovio's role in that so as I said earlier we have seen the market kind of a build-up from the scratch as a free-to-play market and then kind of a maturing more to watch the service model business and and that's where we kind of a saw that we started our external partnership development by pretty much running two tracks one was from your stars third-party publishing and then we had more like where for

higher type of a development to the external partners and then when free-to-play evolved more into the service business we can't even saw that all the interesting business models and working Vince business models where somehow going in between these two models so neither one of these extremes is is fully serving the kind of LTVs greater than CPI thinking where the traditional publisher model is the one where publisher is responsible for all the activities and the whole funnel until day 0 and then developers responsible for for kind of making the game to monetize those players who download the game but that's not anymore the key how the game works nowadays so it's kind of a the roles are overlapping and and in order to optimize your funnel for the day 0 you

need a lot of collaboration rounds of efforts also from the game team somehow how the whole experience is and then the publisher is not no longer just responsible for delivering numbers of users into the game but also making sure that the users are right quality and and and they stay along in the game and and they we optimize the traffic as well as the game to towards the target user yeah okay it's a lot lean look there's a lot more full of to do no I think I think we've based established its involved i think i'm gonna skip on some more transit second but just to kind of close out on Naxos one of the things we wanted to talk about was as publishers one way or another currently or previously what what is it you're looking for for developer at this event we're gonna have like the sort of indie pitch and the speed match and a lot of kind of guys with great ideas who need support what you know if I'm a developer why is it you're really looking for is it is it more about the team is about the great

game mechanic that just kind of grabs you is it you know is it something else what is it that you you guys looking for mean you've obviously signed some pretty successful games recent it's done quite well yeah I think the main thing that you want from a developer is that you want to see focus on on an area of type of games that they want to do if a developer's all over the place and they're they're looking to make games for left to right for me that's usually just a sign that they're just trying a shotgun approach but if you have a developer that's really aiming for a specific type of an age of games in terms of ok let's do you know I'd alert RPGs and let's like like go down on a genre and actually really kind of go deep on it instead of really going in a shotgun approach and I think that preciseness is something that I'm looking for and that focus is important yeah ok and not use the same sort of thing or um look the first thing that we

look for and win a great positions publishers that we get to play games all day and we see so many and that first thing is something that makes us smile and that's fun yeah and that it's different because in today's market there's no room for a copycat game especially from a publisher because their expectations that come to my house so it's fun it's innovation then it's about the partnership with the developer where is where's our value as a publisher if we don't have a value than that partnership won't work yeah so it's about saying expectations you're right total focus if we've got developers that were making this game and then I'm making another game in my spare time that's not going to be for us because this is a full-time job and we it's never been the case in the hundreds of games that we've signed that we've been a line from day one on the release date for that game yeah they tend to take years in development with us before we're ready so a developer has to be in it for that long run yeah in that journey that this game is gonna become a hobby for someone's player and that is really critical for us turkey have that alignment cool do you see we having to

add to that no I think I think your point is really valid it's about resilience and I think another thing that it's important is that if a small studio or a small company goes all-in in that deal it's a very high risk as well because it's a long relationship you know the relationships right it goes up and down any sort so it's a high risk and going all in it needs to be clear for both sides what does that mean yeah we are also pretty much on the same line with Mika that focus is the key and teams need to take those small incremental steps i'm not very much interested in somebody making the first game on the Chandra which is completely new kind of a lot of information in evasive but also loads of risk and lessons to learn so I'm more nowadays

looking teams which are more the kind of a third round of the evolution on a certain genre kind of the took already all the lessons and team which hopefully pop five years [Music] development experience together and knowing how how that the invest operates that's the optimal partner at the moment and nowadays you get to see more and more of these around as the industry matures yeah so you're looking for focus its good strong team and someone was in if the long run doesn't think we get my development check and then I'm going to be off in six months ok I'm going to kind of screen in ad sweet we had a lot of interesting talks proceeding to this about different parts of the market i was kinda get some perspective on it um one thing like newsy was always good for data always good for big numbers i like to use these big numbers there was very good so they from i recall what I broke down at least um though predicting a mobile games market 52 billion i think it's why i wrote down I hope that among that by by 2019 whether that was think I

was right now because they scoot on but that's quite a big growth from where we're at now and you'd be hearing everywhere all the mobile games markets kind of topped out and now it's kind of slowing down all this it is you know do you find that that that numbers kind of credible do you find that there is that still a very very big upside because that's kind of I think we're at 27 billion on something now or 130 I think it's almost got doubling it so three years you think that's credible I I think it's only credible by just looking at getting like on average ten pitches a week right now and i look at the market and i look at how many game pitches are coming in I can totally see that in this space you know there's more and more room for players in terms of publishing and development which means that it's it's a great place to be because you know you can't do it all you have to collaborate with publishers published have to collaborate with each other as well because there's so many games that

can be published and there's so many titles so much development happening that I can totally see that number be incredible ok you know and it's good i like it don't get me wrong i've gotten kind of vested in this market I'm hoping it continues to grow numbers are great aren't they but let's just look at players on the street playing games and it's increasing every day you know pokemon go with launches and it gets kids and adults and everyone out on the street and it hasn't cannibalized the market so supercells might not necessary to promote without fact but yeah we've got areas like latin america booming everyone's trying to figure out some other asian asian areas as well so yeah the markets booming people want to play games developers are getting much more clever about how they monetize games and giving people really valuable things by in game so whether we hit that number up it's good no it's good so just skipping on from from that movie Sabrina like you were saying about yet it's different markets and I'm notably in Newsies they are they also pimple in its asia-pacific

as being you know the lion's share of that kind of growth it's that's that was the big that's worth more now than the mobile whole milk is in now so you know dude you know is is that where the opportunity is going to be is it is it is it Southeast Asia India is it Latin America me what interminable about its later but like is it still is the West still gonna go out there right all you can have to look beyond that for growth I think speaking for from a Latin American perspective it's growing enormously I'm going to share some numbers and turn not only in terms of people because that's the deal right there's a lot of people there were not Asia but there's a lot of people there if you put Mexico Brazil together and I lived and worked in both countries and the difference is that it takes a little longer for technology to get there so everything that it's been educated before like we were talking about yeah if somebody said all events have been going in Asia 2013 people ready know so they're getting there now so of course it's a little bit later yeah but it's

happening and I mean they play the same games most of the time like my father is almost 60 clash of clans addicted every day he's over there my mom candy crush addicted so it happens and it's coming and I think the other point is that the gamer is no longer the mail the sits in the basement and he's like what 20-something 17 no that's not that's not it anymore so the the age and Jenna gender gap opened now you have a much broader market okay and the age as well they start playing how old are they when they start playing right now that wasn't true like what five years ago so the market is huge and yes I firmly believe it's gonna happen i hope so and you see i mean obviously you know angry birds especially but is is a is an international success i'm over the first i went to to china like there was more angry birds stuff not that's funny well

official maybe then there was like you know Disney stuff so like are you seeing without giving away kind of trade secrets but are you seeing that Asia's a significant part of the growth going forward or was it more the film industry now that when your focus that I don't know I think it's definitely more and more interesting part of the business we are still kind of a struggling finding our our way to really go back in in terms of game prevent revenues on those markets they are very another competitive event yeah not very easy to go in for Western companies but I think from the kind of Abdul I believe in those numbers yes definitely but it's not all just Morris more I'm thinking that the whole kind of core of the crowd is coming from the fact that there will be more games making more money but it still kind of a fairly top-heavy so yeah top top hundred game on top 500 game kind of in three

years time we'll make much much more but we don't necessarily kind of fuel that crowd with just pure number of new titles flowing in the market that's that's kind of something you said just there and something that you said makers I just want freezing so kind of question always talked about a little bit so you talked about there being opportunities for fur for smaller or medium-sized kind of publishers kind of coming in there you know obviously we've got here king of very much one of the the top tier have been EA of seal so sighs were businesses and roby to it it is that that's still the case thinks that's kind of one of the the Challenger thing for industry without wishing to do king out of any revenue or supercell but it is that it is very top-heavy business and and a small group of companies have absorbed a lot of that kind of growth um but you know your seems to be quite bullish obvious you guys are doing well that there is still plenty of room for like middle the middle class you like of the yeah yeah I think a flare game so I think this is just in general I think there's an opportunity where if you take

mobile game publishing and you target a specific set of games that you do so for example our games we target strategy RPG action games only and if we would just say like let's do everything you know we would be losing our focus so being able to be part of that like very saturated market and having a lot of games i think focus is very important in publishing as well so that you pick your battles really well so did you stick with the games that you know and the game genres that you really know and you published before and that kind of builds on the experience that you can actually offer something you can offer expertise in specific genres and that's actually value that you can bring to the development as well so you're kind of your approach is focus go back to say but kind of being that it's more of a niche market now these you go its focus on your niche and don't do that don't just try and make casual game one week and huncle game and do everything just really go we're going to be the RPG we can be the strategy guys yeah and you would you which matt or I mean would you

echo that or you guys neways obviously a bigger bigger beast so yeah I mean let's remove the big games that do sit the top of the charts and they always will and I think you'll see more the more IP comes to mobile gaming because IP owners are waking up to mobile now you start to see more come in I think there's one thing that we can't forget and you have to treat making games as a business as well so we all sit here and we talk about King and EA and rovio and supercell ok let's not let's dream but let's be realistic as well so where do we want to sit in the charts as a studio and I run my studio as a business how much revenue do I need to keep my people in a job so is it a thousand dollars a day is it a hundred dollars a day is a hundred thousand dollars a day and I think we need to be building games that fit into those those buckets where's our publisher wants a set expectations from the very start with a developer your arm it'sit's dreaming for the top you know 100 charts but look it might be expectations that we don't fit into their because it is a very niche game yeah but we can delight gamers and that's the main thing pleasing people

around the world with it get like a an audience and then build on that audience it doesn't necessarily need to be absolutely you don't beat Sousou settings be king you don't need to be the co top of the chocolate business data and if we as a publisher can help a developer become successful and we've done it many times now that's brilliant for us and hopefully they'll come back and work with us again but maybe they become so big but they they do Benedict it open with your budget Rose I love I go um I'll skip on tonight's Christian got a few to get through so so you're talking about Yale sort of little sore it's all about your IP and you're talking about kind of little niches obviously had that small you know Japanese card collecting game did quite well recently the old pokemon and so so that you know pokémon go is every division talking about it's obviously an incredible amount of money being generated in a very short space time you know is this a it's just a great thing for the industry is just a sign of a lot of trends to come or was it like a one-off thing that's there's not you know that's just going to burn out and not happen to you how do you feel about Pokemon go on I can start

yeah first when it came out it felt easily that this is kind of a something that works only because of the pokemon brandon and and massively suitable IP but then now over the last month's I have more thought about it and I think it's it's basically opening endless opportunities how do you actually utilize the whole location thing because you can start thinking it much more broadly like okay this might be a leaderboard competition or collaboration take it to the next level or it can be something that triggers your live events or all things like that so it it's not just what pokemon dust and you pick up the points of interest around you but it's just the whole technology that is now there and and people are actually enabling device is to utilize it but it offers so much more even so across the

board with the new kind of behavioral I think basically I think it's opened developers eyes to look at the opportunity much more broadly now yeah okay I think it also opened a user education because now like you said everybody not everybody but a lot of people is that anybody here to never played pokemon go can you raise your hand okay cheers wrong with you what are you doing with your life where's it all gone wrong but all the rest has at least touched base with the technology and at least enable their phone so in a perspective yes it consumes a lot of battery consumes a lot of data so that only they open sighs not only for developers but maybe okay how do battery manufacturers here how do they actually she's right so I think it opens a little sort of Education in this type of game and like I said new markets and different types of players collect your competitor they're all there right

yeah um will we see another location based game being successful on the market yes but no not time soon i don't think what it's done for the market is it's driven traffic back to mobile we were seeing a little bit of saturation i think with mobile games and boom we just seen something flat iron you finger i was talking to someone in the industry who and who knew about the installs of pokemon go and how many they were getting and it was just insane I come from a company where we get great installs but this was on another level yeah so it proves that there is there is movement there to get more traffic to the app stores to download the games we go if you get it right you've got some intimate idea the right brand you can just go here are a sweet proves that they're still there still movement that there's still room for growth for your games um I think that it just proves give something to players that they want to earn and collect and play with and they'll do anything for it and that's just proven getting people out on the street and playing in parks and walking

hundreds of kilometres and things like that it's just I think it's waking people's waking people up on how gameplay can change now okay you can wait in right just quickly quickly because I've just noticed also that since pokemon gold there's a lot of a lot of excitement from licensors as well we're really excited about doing AR and location games using brands bigger brands so that's interesting because it's kind of waking up also licensors who necessary haven't done a lot of mobile games and they see that as I kind of like it just gets somehow it kind of passes in a tipping point in a way for a lot of licenses in a bigger brands as well so that's that's exciting I think ok I've got a couple more questions but we've got three or four minutes left so I thought I'd open it up of anybody here I know it's just before lunch I know you're all playing pokemon goa falling asleep but is anybody hit got a question of this awesome panel of publishers maybe a developer wants to know the business cards me other no other finland

and so um the last question then we go back three minutes i'll i'll give you a chance looking at the trends ahead so we've got location basis one thing there's obviously be RNA are at something weird covering more we got whole tracting that's one that there's there's eSports which is you know a big thing which we can talk again this afternoon like finish eSports company just announced a raised formerly in things cook for 34 million euros congratulations to them so uh what is the what is of which which kind of opportunity is most exciting to you and kind of why of these things got VR location-based eSports I think esports is really interesting mainly because nobody has really really cracked it out and I think in particular like to watch ability is something that I haven't seen a lot of mobile games where that kind of target that type of that type of a gameplay that could be sports compatible I haven't seen a lot

of those games that really are watchable like that you can actually enjoy watching well while watching others play there's a few out there but I think there's a lot of opportunity still in terms of finding new gameplay ways that actually make it very interesting for people to watch actually watch other people play on mobile and I think there's an opportunity there that's definitely a big copper to see if you go in eSports what you think Matt oh I can face the mail soon yeah I don't like to call it eSports but I'm meaningful social I think fun way and that's a nice that sounds really wonky turbo we made that one up and it's it's how people are playing together in games and I think we've seen it evolve over mobile with the starting of facebook you know i can send my friend get a life and candy crush or something yeah and now eSports is coming in where you can watch people play against each other on mobile I'm real to in real life streaming and thing I think that's getting really exciting because it it does bring communities together yeah so we don't we kind of

excited but see how that will evolve over time meaningful social social were you gonna go I was gonna say exactly the same so lucky you got the microphone like blizzard being you're being able to stream via Facebook live kudos or to a blizzard yay but it's it it's really interesting any shows that now you can actually watch people playing on your facebook feed or on your social media twitch and everything so on and I think it opens up a lot of other possibilities and as well as things like the I message for example you're gonna be able to play inside anything's like that and no Apple bringing that that up I think it's something very interesting as well okay last but not least you got the difficult choice you're gonna you're gonna go out when they are do you see who he sports no I I said it so many times I need to go to eSports but I eSports this very core gamer they're still at the moment so I'm

looking somebody to crack what is gonna be then casual version of the eSports and how that shapes the market so it's not it's not classifiable to catch these were very predatorial experience the whole game okay wow that's fantastic fair enough okay well we are it is now lunchtime so come up with an applause for my awesome panel thank you very much fuel [Applause] [Music] you