The 'Rami Ismail market overview' - Insights on what devs should expect

[Music] hi good morning yeah you good thank you thank you for thank you for the one person who we didn't applaud wow this is very very this is good for my first talk ever it was great so I am obviously did not name this talk the Romney market I don't really name things after myself but normally what I do is I kind of come up with talks as I am at events and kind of figure out what they are about which is bad for printing them in programs but I thought hey this is a fun challenge let's get a sort of high-level overview of the games industry talk to people in all parts of the games industry and figure out what the topics are that they keep coming back to and honestly there was mostly just one topic and to talk about that a little bit I actually heard it mentioned in a previous top real quick as well we have to go talk about

steam and I understand that steam is not necessarily a mobile platform but it is kind of an important platform because it is huge and sort of seen is like the de-facto games market and it's been these weird rumblings about steam losing steam about blood in the water about new stores coming up and even though this is primarily a PC issue it obviously kind of affects the games industry as a whole because there are fewer fewer games that are platform centric even though there are absolutely mobile games and PC games in the current day and age mobile phones have gotten so powerful that these marks have started to overlap in ways that we did not have before and it's making people not just a little nervous but they also checked for opportunities that might exist there so as an independent developer a lot of people say in the game started with steam in the later iOS and then nowadays people would say that

well this is where you sell your game she seldom on steam and they import them to mobile the important to console then you release on all of them because that minimizes your risks and that's fair but then if you look at where people are actually selling their game kind of selling them on these places which includes like funding platforms like Kickstarter and fig but also nowadays content providers have started to sell game so I twitch and this court yes we're absolutely still selling on Apple and Xbox and stores like a Chia and Origen and there's now block stained blockchain stores like robot cash just humble store which evolved from the Humble Bundle there's Green Man gaming there's places where you can buy and resell games there's a lot of places yeah that is just looking at our little part of the market because if you look a bit further you look a bit more broad there's a lot more stores that have a lot more things that you can buy there's things that are globalization it means that we can publish in a lot more places and even though we have all these stores these are not the stores that have changed

what the industry is gonna look like as much as one very simple thing which is for tonight the thing that is about to change the games industry is that Linley everybody can open a store and anybody who can fool the traffic in will because it makes no sense not to if you make a game that has any numbers at all you make it a store and this is how things are going to be this how things are going to stay for a while and honestly the way fortnight's started this I'm not a huge fan of apik decided to pull the game off of the Google Play Store so they can keep their 30% and just publish it themselves I didn't like that the thing I didn't like about it is that it kind of gives Apple with free 30% just for being a closed ecosystem and I'm not a I don't like that implication sure I think the idea behind it is fine be your own store that's cool that'll be good for

everybody I don't like that that had to happen this way but that's a different story I don't really want to talk about the thing I want to talk about is what is happening right now and these are the two words that no matter where in the industry I talk to people they keep coming back up it's fragmentation and consolidation these are the two topics that as far as I can tell everybody's talking about and this is not new to the mobile space the mobile space has fragmented into what seven eight different markets in the past years whether it's premium hardcore games or some free to play or freeware games that are like experimental or games that build or walk into an ecosystem subscription games all of these games are all mobile but the industry as a whole has fragmented in ways we haven't seen before it has become many tiny industries that don't even want to pretend they're the same industry anymore and in that regard it's kind of weird that we still have games industry events and it's kind of cool that we have more focused events like Pocket

Gamer where we get to talk about specific issues because mobile games are not PC games are not console games yes they have some stuff in common now with the fragmentation comes a certain level of refocus and the refocus that we are going through is that the focus has gone from platforms to content and that might sound a little silly because platforms are about content but the focus has always been the platform focus has always been well this game on that platform nowadays it's just this game and the platform does no longer matter because it can be on any platform and it will be sold by the people who make the thing so as being a stores being demócrata is being democratized than anything you own will be a store your smart assistant is a store your TV is a story publishers our store games are a store middleware as a store streaming platform service or at this point pressed is a store IGN owns Humble Bundle their store everybody is a story

everybody owns a store everybody has some way to sell because that is the way you get free money now that creates some new opportunities that create some interesting challenges as well and I think this is some of the stuff where will see the most shift in the next few years as an opportunity a lot of developers will have increased ability to target certain niches if you want to do something experimental weird and for each i/o if you want to make a game you want to play with the business model of resale then you go for robot cash if you want to release a game and try for the big money on PC you go for Steam if you want to create something that fits the Apple ecosystem then you release it on Apple and maybe you release it on Android or maybe you don't you can kind of pick what audience fits where there's a challenge unless you're your own unless you're your own publisher that means as an independent creator you're gonna get a much harder time doing that without a publisher so we're about to run into this lovely new golden age of indie publisher and some of those any publishers will grow to be the big

publishers of the of the future but as an independent developer I don't think we stand much of a chance because submitting your game to what four platforms is a lot of work submitting your game - what was it 47 on that slide that's gonna be a lot harder because all of them will have their own rules they will have their own requirements they will have their own API so they will have their own implementation standards and the only way to really compete in the industry at that point will be to be on all of those because every other game will be now obviously as an opportunity it creates new competition which we saw when epic announced that on their store they prefer 12% over 30% as a revenue cut and that's cool hopefully that means that other platforms will do the same of course if those platforms are tied to a piece of hardware like the App Store they probably won't because they don't really have to that is again why didn't like the fortnight thing because Apple just said well you pay 30% so they paid 30% there's two possible outcomes of

that story either everybody will compete at the 12% or everybody will make their ecosystem tight - something that you can't go around I don't know which one it's gonna be but either way it's reality we're gonna have to deal with now obviously there are some incredible opportunities here there's incredible opportunity for middleware if you can be the person that makes all of this easy go do that because you're gonna be needed there's gonna be used options in publishing because the amount of publishers we have right now can barely deal with the amount of indie games that is coming out right now let alone this weird double a standard that is starting to start right now and it'll be a huge opportunity for an agent like model somebody who is sort of a freelance agent that helps people connect with platforms introduces them to platforms but doesn't do the full gamut of being a publisher people will want to do their own marketing people will want to do their own funding but they still don't want to do with the Oh deal with the overhead of having to put your game on 50 plus stores and the other thing that I keep having to keep hearing is this one whether the Netflix of game is happening it's not happening it's just not it's way too

late for that the Netflix of games would have been a really good idea like 10 ish years ago but instead Netflix started as the Netflix for movies and that was that because Netflix exists in movies it will never exist in games because everybody wants to be the Netflix of games and everybody can be the Netflix of games steam is doing their own streaming PlayStation is doing their own streaming game Xbox is doing their own streaming everybody's doing their own streaming Xbox is not gonna go like well you know what will stream your thing that's not it's the market it's a store they're not gonna give up an opportunity to be a store streaming is being implemented way too evenly across different platforms for it to be its own independent thing this is not gonna be a service people are gonna pay for because it's already in their hardware now this cycle will continue this is not the end of this story it's not like this fragmentation and consolidation is going to just be the status quo of the industry forever what is going to happen is all of these platforms are gonna

fight it's like a battle royale of platforms 100 are gonna come in and eventually one will be the winner now who that winner is or why they will be the winner is a big question will it be some sort of middleware that makes all of this publishing easy and then they just decide to pull it all towards themselves will it be related to new global markets emerging markets markets that weren't easy to reach for certain markets before will it be something from from Asia will it be something from the Western world will it be something from somewhere we haven't even looked at for that kind of thing we don't know the only thing is that this is part of a cycle and we are now at a very interesting part of that cycle I think the previous talk kind of mentioned similarly that we are in an up and down of how this fragmentation goes but eventually one of these stores will come out on top that doesn't matter too much now what matters now is there is an incredible wealth of opportunity in this fragmentation it is something that a lot

of people talk about would worry but the more I think about it the more I think that this is something that we should welcome look at the opportunities of and then work with that nothing that was that thanks so much I was too busy tweeting you and sharing your wisdom to have any questions for Rami I'm sure we must have come on every guy's question of that can we get a mic this junk this young man all this lady coming she's sprinting towards you she's coming in now yeah I will regarding the fragran of fragmentation of the markets ah isn't there like as a natural backlash of that you mentioned that publishing and multiple platforms will become more and more complicated for developers isn't that also going to actually result in a decrease in exports exposure because people would obviously have a you know they'll have a preferred store prefer market and who end up in a field of not

console exclusivity but platform exclusivity in many cases yeah the platform exclusivity will be an interesting thing because the the main thing that's gonna happen is people are gonna expect their games to be everywhere so exclusivity is going to be more and more valuable which is a positive for developers I think it that way we'll see some interesting new forms of competition between these different platforms ultimately though I think that it won't limit developers access to markets or any of that because these these audiences are not mutually exclusive I think a lot of people will have multiple stores because stores will be built into their favorite software so it's not like what we do now where you have steam and that is the one app that you put on your phone or you have the App Store or a Play Store it'll be a lot more like how it is in other place in the world where people have 20 different 20 30 different apps for accessing their favorites excuse me can I just make a small clarification I was not referring for the complications for developers yet

actually from the front end from the user perspective I mean I can talk subjectively that for example it's already quite frustrating to have something like steam and origin and you play and one of the advantages of steam was exactly providing you with the consolidated place and as a developer I actually worried that users are the ones who are gonna McBeal the easiest way to see whether that's through is whether people are downloading for tonight if something has users people will go for it if that needs a separate launcher they will get that launcher I thought the same way I thought no way people are gonna download seven different apps but people have battlenet on their PC for Diablo and destiny they have a fortnight launch or epic store on their PC for fortnight and then they just put their other stuff in steam steam is turned for like your games library - where you play the other games that's kind of a big shift you got any more questions for follow I do I do expect that to continue on mobile as well like Play Store or eventually even the App Store might just turn into

things where you put your other stuff I don't know how fast that will go on Apple because it's Hardware tied but unless your store is Hardware tight I'd just I don't see how you could prevent that because this is clearly healthy for our understanding the market now is I want to play my favorite game oh hey look they did click a launcher then go from there okay cool all right can we have a round of applause please for again for the round in his face [Applause] [Music] you