The future of F2P mobile gaming with Kabam's Andrew Sheppard

okay so it's pocket gamer and we're down in london checking out the new games from kabam and we're here with uh andrew from cabanas we want to introduce yourself absolutely thank you very much for the opportunity uh my name is andrew sharper and i'm president of studios at kabam at kabam we have two business units we have a publishing team and an internal development team both actually distribute their own games uh but the studio side represents about 550 people within kabam and our heritage is very much about strategy games that's what we're best known for but over the last uh three to six months we've really been expanding our genre focus so it started with fast and furious six one of the top downloaded games in 2013 33 million installs live to date and uh our first fourier into dragstrip racing games and continues with heroes of camelot which is a battle card game that we're really excited about and this coming year you're going to see a lot of much more innovative titles come from kabam you'll see us push into tower defense games but this time with a unique twist in dark district which

comes out december 12th we're looking at a game that is a 3d tower defense game with direct control of units and in q1 a game called blast zone which is a fully interactive action game uh multiplayer synchronous when when possible uh that is really resonating well with uh our focus groups you say you guys been really well known for your strategy game so yeah kings of camelot and dragons of atlantis so so obviously that's kind of something you've nailed down so why not just make another one of those why are you kind of experimenting that's a great question uh one of the things that's core to the history of kabam and to our belief as a company is that you always have to adapt you also have to change you have to adapt and tune yourself to where the market's going and what's for sure happening right now is that game developers and more importantly consumers are moving to higher fidelity gameplay experiences they want 3d they want aaa quality they want more immersive and interactive gameplay experiences so although we have games that are phenomenal for 2012 convince

camelot was the top grossing app in the ios app store in 2012 that game would not be successful in 2015 wouldn't be successful in 2014 to the extent it is so that means our strategy is twofold one we're going to upgrade kingdoms to camelot to make it next gen and some of those updates have flown into the most recent release we've improved the quality for high-res devices and we'll continue to push that game to new levels new levels of innovation without changing what works and then in the future you'll see us push into games that are much more interactive well beyond the comfort zone of what we're doing today it's another thing you you kind of been surprisingly good at everyone allowed to say that is kind of having you know movie licenses were normally like a curse and you've managed with the hobbit and fast and furious to pull off two very successful movie glasses games i mean is that just kind of like how are you guys kind of making those things work super nice of you to say uh you know we've been very fortunate as a company uh we've made a couple of great decisions over our lifespan which feels longer than it was but you know four

years passed as fast in this space and the opportunity to work on the hobbit with warner brothers and the opportunity to work with nbc universal on fast six and to be able to deliver uh early wins that gave them the trust and confidence for us to to basically drive a lot of the creative execution a lot of the gameplay innovation uh was critical to making those games work and what i love about both those partners and in fact all of our partners on the hollywood side is that they understand that this is a service based model they understand that we need to constantly be making changes and updates and improvements to the game and they're supportive of that from the get-go and i think just by virtue of us being communicative of those goals those objectives those requirements we've been able to deliver the success that they were looking for from a business standpoint so yeah we've done something that no other game companies would have done before which is make licenses work so the games you've been looking at you kind of mentioned them most of those uh internally developed games you have a really strong internal studio um and beijing but you've also you mentioned publishing

before and it's kind of something you've been building up in 2013 so you're doing war tunes so can you talk a bit about kind of um why that was a game you wanted to publish so uh amit ronald is the president for our publishing business and that business has only been around a year but the heritage of the business is really important for people to to know amit came from the studio side and ran our distribution team and it was the distribution team that powered a lot of the success that the first party business had in 2013 and in 2012 with mobile and what we realized as we're kind of looking at the operating qualities of the business is that that distribution muscle can go a long way to help our first party business but it can also help third-party companies and so the company we're working with on wartoon and i don't want to take too much of that thunder worked with us on a non-exclusive basis on the web distribution side and they were so impressed by our distribution team's ability to deliver results that they signed up to do an exclusive distribution deal on the mobile platform ios and android so uh that team

is phenomenal uh they are what's really nice about the way kabam operates in general is both business units operate in parallel and there's a great deal of support for both and so uh although i'm jealous of how great wartune looks i i think it's going to be a real smash and and i'm excited to see them bring it to the market it's always good yeah we're coming to the end of the year so last question do you have any kind of predictions for the next year anything which kind of trend do you think you're looking for i would the trend that i'm most curious to watch and i'm not sure how it'll play out yet is how much tablet uh sell through and adoption will impact console gameplay and so i think pretty much everyone in the world understands and realizes that the tablet is more of a home entertainment experience you can do it in front of the tv you can do it in the bed and the sessions are longer you know mobile is 15 anywhere between 30 to 45 minutes for a tablet and so by virtue of the fact that it's co-located at home

that it's longer session and it's increasingly high fidelity how much will it eat into the next generation console sales i think it's up to the market to determine but it could be it could be messy i think yeah this year with the new consoles thank you very much i appreciate it you