Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #2
2020-06-08..2020-06-12
-- online --
who it's for
mobile game developers, monetization and product managers, live ops managers, user acquisition managers, game publishers, community managers, esports organisers, indie developers
topics
rewarded video optimization; hybrid monetization strategies; app event optimization; live ops tooling and cadence; mobile esports tournament platforms; virtual economy and black markets; Unity ML-Agents in games; culturalisation for global reach; influencer-driven user acquisition; team recruitment and wellbeing
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Bold Predictions for H2 2020 | Slava Taraskin | 26m |
Device usage jumps 10–70% in March and weekly game downloads hit 1.2 billion weekly downloads, VR headset availability roughly doubles, and hardcore up 30–40%… | ||
| Hybrid Monetisation Deserves a Hybrid Investment Strategy / Supercharge Your Instant Games | Olha Muzychenko, Sneha Vaidyanathan | 31m |
Argues that hybrid monetization needs a matching UA mix: combine mobile app installs, app event optimization and value optimization rather than chasing ROAS… | ||
| How Can Monetisation Make Your Game More Fun? | Cyril Cael | 47m |
Panel argues that properly placed monetisation improves fun by shaping pacing and progression: rewarded video as breather after intense waves (Archero… | ||
| What Do You Do in the Inevitable Decline of Ad Revenue? | Ric Cowley, Ilya Kuznetsov, Michelle Brandstetter, Martine Spaans | 48m |
Ad revenue spikes during COVID prove temporary but not doomed: rewarded video sometimes reaches $40 eCPM on rewarded video while interstitials still hit about… | ||
| Machine Takeover - Improving Your Game With Machine Learning & AI | Matthew Forde, Tommy Thompson, Jeff Shih, Kelly Vero | 48m |
Forza’s Driveatar uses Bayesian learning plus a neural network to mimic human racers and ships in-game without breaking player expectations, Ubisoft prototypes… | ||
| The Live Ops Readiness Checklist | Crystin Cox | 32m |
Microsoft Game Stack session lays out a pragmatic 10‑point Live Ops readiness checklist: retention strategy (what actually keeps players long‑term)… | ||
| When is the Right Time to Start Thinking, Testing & Delivering Live Ops? | Stephen Lee, Nick Murray, Mark Robinson, Patrick McGrath, Saumya Iyer, James Gwertzman | 49m |
Starts testing live ops in soft launch with hypothesis-driven A/B experiments on day‑1/day‑7 retention, progression and ad strategy, and ships tooling for CRM… | ||
| Live Ops is not a Sprint! - How do You Plan a Recurring Series of Activities Indefinitely? | Oscar Clark, Crystin Cox, Wouter Schrijvershof, Xavier Carrillo Costa, Antanina Livingston | 49m |
LiveOps is a marathon: teams build server-configured content so events run without app updates, supporting a daily/weekly/monthly cadence and seasonal 1–2… | ||
| How Grassroots Organisers are Fueling Mobile Esports | Alwin Wong | 25m |
Bash is a mobile-only tournament platform that lets organizers create and publish events from a phone, claiming 60% faster publishing than competitors. Soft… | ||
| Levelling the Playing Field: Mobile Esports Driving Diversity | James Yang | 32m |
PUBG Mobile reports 1.7 million qualifiers across 169 countries in 2019, 56 million viewers and roughly tenfold growth since 2018, expands its competitive… | ||
| T1000’s, Trex’s & Eyebrow Mites | Steve Williams | 28m |
Claims that a fully digital T‑rex is feasible and production‑ready, built in off‑hours with an archaic modelling system (Alias 2.4.1) and a four‑word kinematic… | ||
| Designing Engaging VR & AR Games | Tadhg Kelly | 42m |
Spatial computing design focuses on concrete fixes: use device limits (Quest, Hololens, Magic Leap, Valve Index) to reduce meshing cost by anchor an origin… | ||
| Emergent Behaviour, Informal Currencies & Black Markets-How Trade Adds Value to Your Virtual Economy | Tayber Voyer | 30m |
Built a chat-only barter system that forces friending, logs consent and resets offers when changed, which cuts scams and preserves social trade value. Uses a… | ||
| Fueling Growth Through User-centric UA Creative Design | Kieran O'leary | 32m |
Rovio describes a growth process that shifts from blind A/B volume to hypothesis-driven creative testing, running thousands of creatives and reporting a marked… | ||
| Ten ways that No More Robots Makes its Games Sell (that You're Probably not Doing) | Mike Rose | 30m |
A PC/console publisher that uses hard numbers and the Steam backend plus Google Analytics to pick projects, prioritizes a single memorable hook over genre… | ||
| How to "Break-in" to the Games Industry: Why it’s Both Hard to Hire & get Hired | Brian Murphy | 34m |
Hiring favors internal and active candidates: outside hires cost more and take longer to perform, with outside hires needing about three years to match… | ||
| Gameloft: 20 Years of Mobile Gaming | Alexandre de Rochefort | 32m |
Company launches in 2000, wins viability when Java phones in 2003 let downloadable action games replace browser toys, scaling from ~100 staff to ~4,000 and… | ||
| From Live Ops to LIVE OPS | Zoe Williams | 34m |
King moves Farm Heroes Saga from weekly, cosmetic “lowercase” live ops toward event-driven uppercase live ops by adding a dedicated events track, a dev pod and… | ||
| Demystifying Live Operations | Daniel McLaren, Oscar Clark | 28m |
Live ops means running the game as an ongoing service: prioritize retention not short-term ARPBU, build a data pipeline that answers "what is retention over… | ||
| Are You SEGA’s Next Big Hit? | Bobby Wertheim | 29m |
SEGA Searchlight is an incubation program that provides full funding while letting studios retain IP and creative control, incubating projects through preprod… | ||
| Maximizing Your Game's Reach - A Quick Primer on Culturalisation | Kate Edwards | 28m |
Argues that small, early design tweaks unlock big new markets and avoids late-stage scrambles: cites double-digit growth in Nigeria Kenya India Vietnam… | ||
| Your Virtual Game Arts Studio | Nick Gibbons | 16m |
A new product called Credits Game Art connects vetted game-studio talent across US, UK, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines to deliver concept art, 3D models… | ||
| Influencers as Part of Your Video Creative Mix | Erik Bryant | 32m |
Introduces an Influencer Generated Content (IGC) workflow where influencers act as paid actors who record gameplay off-platform and deliver short ads that run… | ||
| Mixing it up - Latest Techniques for Innovating in User Acquisition & Retention | Craig Chapple, Clara Copeland, Erik Bryant, Sid Sharma, Rockford Yapp | 48m |
Budget shifts from Facebook/Google toward TikTok, Snapchat and Apple Search Ads while creative optimization and influencer-produced ads are used as reusable… | ||
| The Explosion of Adult Gaming | Jorge Rosales | 28m |
Nutaku is a dedicated adult-games distributor and publisher claiming 450+ games and 50 million players, focused on free-to-play mobile and PC/browser titles… | ||
| What Does Success Look Like in UA? | Kayleigh Partleton, Brian Murphy, Yiannis Alexopoulos, Gus Viegas, Arjuna "AJ" Sath, Alex Kruglov | 46m |
Panel lays out concrete UA moves: split budget into a small pure experimentation bucket and a performance bucket, run control groups to measure incrementality… | ||
| History of Mobile Gaming Quiz | Seun Balogun | 22m |
A ten-question live quiz runs over video with fastest-finger-first answers held in chat, scoring by a colleague and prizes including an iPhone 11 prize for… | ||
| Bidstack: A New Era of Advertising for Your Game | Charlotte Cook | 39m |
Bidstack builds a lightweight SDK that dynamically swaps non-clickable, native ads onto any 3D texture in PC/console and mobile games and connects those… | ||
| The Benefits of Using a Publisher Rather than Going it Alone | Sophia Aubrey Drake, Simon Prytherch, Hugo Furneaux | 35m |
Small indie studio of three publishes Clean Up 3D with a partner that runs 30+ ad networks, owns live‑ops servers and runs continuous A/B tests that sometimes… | ||
| How Lockdown has Unlocked the Games Industry | Stu Dinsey, Branko Milutinović, Kim Soares, Charlotte Cook, Petri Hyokyranta, Sean Lim | 46m |
Global downloads and engagement jump (roughly 23% year‑over‑year in some markets) while advertisers pivot into native in‑game ads, publishers run public health… | ||
| 2020 so far - How the Mobile Gaming Industry is Changing | Ioana Hreninciuc | 31m |
GameAnalytics uses fresh benchmarks (data through last week, partners include Adjust) covering 2 billion monthly players, 22 billion sessions, 100k games… | ||
| What will Inspire the Next Big Thing in Games? | Zsuzsa James, Dieter Schoeller, Joanna Haslam, Jeferson Valadares, Charlotte Cook | 41m |
Panelists argue for practical shifts: selling native ads on 3D textures inside game assets and using per-region targeting, reporting successful early… | ||
| Alternative Billing Solutions and how to Monetise SMS Traffic | Daniela Ganick | 25m |
Mediatel offers phone-based monetisation that converts users who lack cards by using premium SMS, carrier billing and international SMS plus… | ||
| Subscriptions, IAP & Ads - The Trinity of Hybrid F2P Monetisation | Teis Anker Mikkelsen | 35m |
Argues mobile monetisation becomes a three‑pillar system of ads, IAP and subscriptions and shows a working product: the Unleashed SDK integrates into Unity… | ||
| Using Virtual Shops to Increase Real-life Sales During Social Distancing & Unrest | Tracy Hutson | 21m |
Company claims a virtual-shop platform that maps brand 3D models into purchasable rooms using game engines, shipping a verseware stereoscopic 3D pipeline and… | ||
| Building Your Product Strategy Based on Market Research | Max Samorukov | 26m |
Recommends choosing genres where the team has proven expertise or hiring it, or else starting with short, cheap projects to learn fast; shows $12M/month tower… | ||
| How is Esports Filling the Gap of the Olympics? | Danielle Partis, Emmanuel Oyelakin, Brandon Byrne, Malte Barth | 54m |
Esports shifts real-world cancellations into online competitions using simulators, streamed leagues and rapid celebrity matches that were turned around in nine… | ||
| Navigating the Current Esports Environment | Eric Bernofsky | 34m |
Esports market sits near 1.6 billion estimate but Goldman Sachs projects it can double in two years; Enthusiast Gaming operates about 100 sites, 50… | ||
| Driving One Million Installs with TikTok Influencers | Jide Maduako | 38m |
Yoke Network runs a 2,000 influencers roster with a 600M+ total reach and sells performance on a CPI-based influencer network that scales UA and drives organic… | ||
| A Virtual Fireside Chat with Agora & MPL | Ranganath Jagannath, Sai Srinivas | 33m |
Platform started in 2018 as a mobile competitive esports app and now hosts 60+ games, adds creator features and live streaming, and integrates third-party tech… | ||
| Keep on Slicing - A Publishing Case Study | Rotem Eldor | 37m |
Game launches from pitch to second iteration and ARPU test in three weeks, hits 42 million downloads in under two months, and validates UA with a soft‑launch… | ||
| Finding Hypercasual Publishing Success: Lessons from Rocket Sky! & OverTake | Simon Prytherch | 28m |
A publisher turns two prototypes into global hits by combining fast creative ad testing, server-side settings, A/B experiments, an in-house analytics platform… | ||
| The Pokerface Explosion – The App that Changed Poker | Mike Lopez, Or Ben Shimon | 25m |
A social poker app embeds Agora.io real‑time video to replace static avatars, shipping an MVP quickly by plugging Agora’s SDK into Comunix’s game. Live video… | ||
| Making Your Craft a Science - How to Replicate the Success | Will Freeman, Joel Thomas, Chris Kempt, Markus Vahtola | 53m |
Presents concrete methods for repeating hits like using a success triangle of minimum goal goal and blue sky to avoid scope creep and keep priorities clear and… | ||
| Best Practices for Keeping Your PC Game Relevant | Jacki Vause, Phillippe Erwin, Chris Hewish, William Farrell | 54m |
Advice focuses on concrete moves: switch monetization when paid sales fall (for example flip paid to free-to-play or add tiered $2–5 subscriptions for younger… | ||
| How Company-wide Creativity Made us a Success | Simon Platt | 30m |
Kwalee rebuilds product process so everyone pitches weekly through Creative Wednesdays, yielding over 200 pitches in year one and turning the best into… | ||
| Monetisation & Skills as Motivation | Diego Ricchiuti | 43m |
Claims that combining intrinsic hooks with ad rewards outperforms simple rewarded ads: a charity-linked runner (Donai) adds a double-your-coins at start option… | ||
| Sports for the Win! Why Licensed Sports Games are Positioned to Win Big in Mobile | Jon Middleton, Alex Verrey | 30m |
Company raises $15 million and secures league and player-body partnerships including the NFLPA investor, then builds a data-driven, live-ops studio focused on… | ||
| Promoting Growth Even During Lockdown | Ricardo Flores | 32m |
A concise, practical template for fundraising: a 10-slide pitch deck that specifies cover, founders, team composition, prior titles, game design (core mechanic… | ||
| How LBC Studios Used Social Media & Innovative Marketing Strategies to Grow Their Hempire | Solon Bucholtz | 28m |
Studio builds a cannabis-themed live game launched April 20, 2017 and grows it to 12 million installs with $30M gross revenue by leaning on in‑house LiveOps… | ||
| From Head Ball 1 to Head Ball 2: How it Became a Multi-million Dollar Game | Sertac Picakci | 31m |
Head Ball 1 reaches 40 million lifetime installs with ~1M DAU and ~70% organic but suffers very low LTV; Head Ball 2 swaps direct purchase for gacha card packs… | ||
| Opportunities in Games as Marketing Channels | Dayan Paul | 26m |
Argues that brands can buy attention inside games using existing ad network SDKs and niche tools like the Bidstack SDK, plus survey SDKs and rewarded video… | ||
| A Tale of the $6bn Neglected MENA Gaming Market | Mo Fadl | 32m |
Argues that MENA is no longer “emerging” but a fast‑growing, high‑spend market: Tencent forecasts 6.1 billion gaming revenue for 2021, GCC app revenues jump to… | ||
| Lessons we Learned as a Publisher | Ric Cowley, Kyu Lee | 31m |
Publisher role shifts from product drops to long live services, with minimum project sizes rising from sub-$1M to minimum project size $2M and a checklist… | ||
| Eastern Games in the West. Reasons why Eastern Games Succeed in Europe & USA | Aras Senyuz | 29m |
Mobile now generates about 45% of global games revenue and Asia-Pacific accounts for roughly 50%, driven by China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan; examples cited… | ||
| The Games Business During and After the COVID-19 Crisis | Louise Shorthouse | 29m |
Mobile games show resilience: Omdia projects 2–3% extra annual mobile revenue from COVID, but much of the user surge is non-spending. Advertising already… | ||
| Hypercasual 2.0 | Baris Ozistek | 30m |
Netmarble proposes Hypercasual 2.0: keep the easy core and low CPI of hypercasual but add selective RPG features, ranking and live social tools to raise… | ||
| At the Intersection of Anime, Manga & Games | Terry Li, Siobhan Sullivan | 31m |
Crunchyroll launches a games arm called Cultural Games, publishing several mobile titles and reaching 6 million monthly users across 200 countries. Focus is… | ||
| Stillfront Group- Growing from $20 Million to $2 Billion Market Capitalisation | Shum Singh, Alexis Bonte | 29m |
Stillfront grows from $20M to $2B in five years mainly by buying profitable, founder-led studios, keeping each studio autonomous and avoiding forced tech… | ||
| Building & Running Game Economies | Nick Murray | 33m |
Recommends at least soft and hard currency with distinct roles, converting every currency to real money to price items (example chest: 750 normal, 350… | ||
| Panel: 2020 M&A and Investment Overview, Expectations & Consequences | Ella Romanos, Shanti Bergel, Jason della Rocca, Jim Ying, Michael Chang, David Bluhm | 52m |
Deals keep closing despite COVID with acquirers shifting strategy: Zynga buys Peak and public Stillfront pays about $190M for BitLife, a largely organic… | ||
| Working Smart - Machine Learning in Art Asset Creation for the Games Industry | Kelly Vero | 27m |
Claims a production pipeline that turns real objects into game-ready assets using CT-based digital twins (not photogrammetry), with trainable segmentation… | ||
| Panel: What are the Best Ways to use Tools to Bring Data into Design? | Oscar Clark, Emil Kjaehr, Jasmin Dahncke, Max Pears, Miloš Endrle | 44m |
Practical tactics and tradeoffs: use heat maps and session video to reveal level problems, run cohort analysis and cluster analysis to separate… | ||
| When Gameplay met Narrative - A Love Story on a Budget | Anna Jenelius | 31m |
Two-person studio builds Pendulum Swing, a dialogue-heavy, non-combat RPG about prejudice and empathy, shipping three episodes during a 2.5+ year development… | ||
| Panel: Workflow Tricks for Growing Teams:Working with Freelancers & Outsource Development Agencies | Oscar Clark, David Fox, Christopher Natsuume, Zaair Hussain | 51m |
Virtual studios scale by nailing three concrete habits: force concise documentation (design docs stay ~25 slides or one-pager per feature), run a daily build… | ||
| Multiplayer - Demystifying the Development of Games we Play Together | Arran Topalian | 30m |
Multiplayer design focuses on concrete choices: Mediatonic builds a Family Feast feature for Yahtzee with Buddies that uses ingredient-collecting recipes… | ||
| Building Your Game's UX Strategy Using a Scientific Approach | Celia Hodent | 33m |
Argues for a hypothesis-driven UX strategy: align on the exact experience and target players, then use playtest lab at Epic style usability tests, scripted… | ||
| Panel: What Influences the Influencers? | Danielle Partis, Jodi Sahlin, Patrick 'Chief Pat' Carney, Timothy (Ash) Evans, Richard Little | 37m |
Discussion lays out concrete influencer tactics for mobile esports: long-term deals beat one-offs, creative freedom outperforms rigid scripts, and tie‑ins can… | ||
| Mobile Gaming: Conquering the Esports Market | Matt Rutledge | 29m |
Mobile esports is framed as a sleeping giant with concrete wins: PUBG Mobile reaches 50 million daily active users, Call of Duty Mobile hits 100 million… | ||
| Esports & Entertainment. A Success Story for Brands | Piotr Bombol | 33m |
Esports reaches about 500 million monthly viewers while gaming is a ~$150B market and esports revenues sit just under $1B, with Twitch up ~100% year‑on‑year… | ||
| Esports, Influencers and New Media Changing the World | Mo Fadl | 28m |
Claim: influencer-driven content diversity predicts future viewership growth — platforms show spikes (example: Twitch growth to ~1.4M concurrent viewers) and a… | ||
| The Next Wave of Esports Investments: Mobile Esports Investment Trends to Watch for in 2020 & Beyond | Malte Barth | 31m |
Claims that mobile esports is moving mainstream with concrete scale: Free Fire in Indonesia runs professional teams and national events, China shows roughly… | ||
| Critical Force & Mobile Esports: Now & Next | Veli-Pekka Piirainen | 20m |
Critical Ops is a competitive mobile FPS with 80M downloads and roughly 500k daily / 5M monthly active users. Esports begins in 2016 with a 3v3 cup that gets… | ||
| Professional Standards- Getting the Best out of Your Influencer Relationships | Max Sjoblom | 32m |
Overview of concrete takeaways: a 350-streamer survey finds intrinsic motivations (enjoyment, social interaction, skill growth) predict creators’ long-term… | ||
| The Impact of Having Esports Events Without an Audience | James Dean | 31m |
Empty-arena events lose ticket, on-site merchandise and F&B revenue and kill local B2B networking, yet viewership spikes — Twitch hits 1.7M concurrent, overall… | ||
| The Evolution of Dynasty Games | Matthias Wuensche | 30m |
Toplitz evolves one core simulation into four distinct products: Farmers Dynasty adds social mechanics and social points that can be exchanged for cheaper… | ||
| Knowing Ze Dschermans | Tom Putzki | 28m |
Germany ranks as a top-five games market at about 6 billion dollars a year with roughly 34 million players, average age ~37 and ~48% female, but distinctive… | ||
| Unseen: How Non-gamer Input can Change & Improve Art & Storytelling in Games | Angel Luis Sucasas Fernandez | 28m |
Non-gamer testers react strongly: photoreal graphics often read as “toys” and amplify the uncanny valley, while non-photorealistic art lowers that barrier and… | ||
| Got Games on Your Apple Watch? | Orchidee Stachelig | 28m |
Abylight Studios builds Minekeeper: The Lurking Fear, a native 3D Apple Watch game released with the watch App Store on 19 Sept 2019 and featured on the… | ||
| Using Accuracy & Realism to Attract New Gaming Audiences | Alexander Winn | 31m |
Terragenesis launches in 2016 as a solo-made Mars terraforming sim and grows into Edgeworks Entertainment, signing a publisher, hiring staff, and reaching 17… | ||
| Panel: The Return of Interactive Fiction | Kate Edwards, Guy Gadney, Karoliina Korppo, Shib Hussain, Geoff van den Ouden | 44m |
Panel argues interactive fiction resurges through concrete techniques: using natural language input and voice as the primary interface, training actor voices… | ||
| What does Live Ops mean Anyway? | Oscar Clark | 30m |
Live ops means driving retention by getting more players doing more things more often for longer, measured by analytics and run from a back-end pipeline that… | ||
| Live Ops in Small Teams | Diego Diaz Perez | 29m |
Small Seville studio runs Live Ops on a four‑person team supporting three live products, using soft launch data, three to four core KPIs and iterative design… | ||
| Let’s Work Together! How to Improve Your Game With Your Players. Cooking Diary Case Study. | Diana Korkina | 30m |
Cooking Diary uses analytics, external playtests before soft launch, in-game and social surveys, and machine-learned review tagging to find specific problems… | ||
| Bringing Live Events to Games | Oliver Kern | 32m |
Lockwood Publishing runs Avakin Life, a 3D social world with ~1.4M daily players and an 80% NPS, and produces live music events that hit 1.7M visits, 9-minute… | ||
| Live Ops Production for Mobile Games | Tayber Voyer | 32m |
A Thinking Ape’s Live Ops process centers on building psychological safety so teams can move fast without fear: engineers and designers deploy via Git so… | ||
| The Secrets of Community Management & Customer Service | Emilia Machuca | 32m |
Advocates community work from day one, claiming social features measurably boost retention and act as free marketing; recommends don't reveal dates to avoid… | ||
| How Film, Games & Social Media are Merging Using AR | Raffael Dickreuter | 28m |
Claims that film, games and social media are converging around AR with concrete tech: high-res digital twin scans (CT-grade topology) used directly in games… | ||
| Superstar Session: MicroProse Then & Now | JW 'Bill' Stealy, Sergio Costa | 39m |
MicroProse relaunches with four concrete products: a Cold War naval combat sim featuring 50 ships, 30 aircraft and a dynamic campaign and post-battle replay; a… | ||
| Launching Spaceteam VR | Simon Baratt | 30m |
Launch of Space Team VR goes live May 21 2020 with an Oculus Quest build approved and cross‑play with a mobile web app so VR players can play with phones; the… | ||
| Licencing & Business Development at Paradox | Dhaunae De Vir | 30m |
Paradox explains that licensing is a separate team expanding brands like world of darkness, cities skylines, stellaris and europa universalis into board games… | ||
| Working with Independent Developers: Lessons Learned Over the Years | Anton Ravin | 30m |
Covers lessons from 2005 onward and cites titles like Stalker, Metro and Kingdom Come; key claims: small teams can match large studios commercially, yet 1% of… | ||
| Artists...go into the Light!: Fundamentals of Lighting in Videogames | Daniel Candil | 44m |
Summary of concrete takeaways: lighting design relies on three real contributors—directional skylight bounced light—and four engine primitives: point spot rect… | ||
| Unscheduled Chat | Chris James, Daniele Partis | 14m |
Casual unscheduled chat explains how the digital conference is run: a distributed editorial team uses Skype, Trello and a pre-check workflow to stage live… | ||
| Superstar Session: Lessons Learned When Including Third Party Content in Your Videogame | Kathy Carpenter | 29m |
Clears IP for games since 2000, recounts practical rules: copyright typically attaches on fixation and lasts life plus 70 years in many territories; register… | ||
| Panel: Reasons to Push the Limits - How can we Take Advantage of Next Gen Capabilities? | Kay Gruenwoldt, Ricardo Rego, Christopher Kassulke, Mark Aldrup | 49m |
Panelists lay out concrete tradeoffs: Unity and Unreal arrive with early-engine bugs so expect porting headaches, publishers often provide in-house porting and… | ||
| Putting the Developer First: From Veterans to Indie Publisher | Bill Wang | 23m |
Skystone Games positions itself as a multi‑platform, developer‑first publisher that invests in people and moves fast: a $1M early investment mentioned leads to… | ||
| Keynote: Building the Right Team | Eamonn Vann Harris | 30m |
Starts a recruitment agency on £800 start and grows it into an 11–12 year business where a junior hire becomes director and holds more shares than the founder… | ||
| Getting the Best Out of Your Team Without Burning Them Out | Satu Ahlman | 30m |
Presents a systems method that ties genetics, environment and behavior to performance and uses wearable data to spot stress before it becomes burnout: deploys… | ||
| Design Within Constraints | Tara Mustapha | 31m |
Designers perform better when tight boundaries replace unlimited freedom, so establish an X-statement and build 4–5 personas up front; use two-week sprints to… | ||
| How can Gaming Help in Times of COVID-19? | Rosemary Lokhorst | 33m |
Shadows Edge adapts an emotional-resilience mobile game into a COVID response by adding targeted missions, art-sharing and in-game billboards, clinical… | ||
| Gamification and how Games are Occupying the World! | Sham Al Bdour, Jana Al Bdour | 26m |
A practical tour of gamification claims concrete tools and results: four motivators are status, access, power, tangible rewards; design leans on… | ||
| Keynote: Turning Games Green: How the Industry is Signing up to Play for the Planet | Sam Barratt, Deborah Mensah-Bonsu | 52m |
UN-backed Playing for the Planet Alliance gathers 24 companies, ~1 billion monthly players to push measurable change: Sony-funded research shows streaming is… | ||
| Doing Good is Hard! - The Challenges of Making Games 4 Good | Ilmari Hakkola | 28m |
A studio builds a physics-based casual called Planet Patrol aimed at 30–35+ puzzle players and promises 50% of profits to charity, arguing that mission-driven… | ||
| Panel: Inspiring the Next Generation of Talents | DAVE BRADLEY, Melissa Phillips, Leanne Peppiatt, Sandro Manfredini, Des Gayle | 55m |
Conference panel notes show the industry at roughly $150 billion, attendees from about 67 countries, and studios ranging from ~87 to ~300 people, stressing… | ||
| The Sky Roller Story: How we Created More Value by not Looking for Top Ranking Charts | Olivier Le Bas | 34m |
Homa Games turns a one-week prototype built in Unity into Sky Roller, a swipe-left/right runner with short segmented levels, lots of skins and a shop, iterates… | ||
| Best Practices for World-class Recruitment | Alexei Ryan | 58m |
Panel argues hiring starts internal: companies look internally first before headhunting, with only around 20–28% of recruiters prioritizing internal candidates… | ||
| The Perfect Funding Pitch Deck | Ilya Eremeev | 33m |
A 10-slide template lays out a concrete pitch: 10-slide template with a founders slide first, team and burn details next, game concept, competitor matrix… | ||
| Superstar Session: A Look into the Impact of COVID-19 | Emory Irpan | 25m |
Unity's analysis shows specific behavior changes during COVID‑19: overall mobile usage spikes with many one‑game players adding titles, mid/hardcore +35% DAU… | ||
| Panel: Maintaining Your Culture While Working Remotely | Oscar Clark, Nikolina Zidar, Georgina Felce, Todd Zeile, Simon Iwaniszak | 51m |
Panelists compare concrete practices and results: studios send chairs and cables to homes, use Slack and Discord working rooms plus Notion and Miro for shared… | ||
| Maximizing Your Game's Reach - A Quick Primer on Culturalisation | Kate Edwards | 28m |
Argues that small, early design tweaks unlock huge new audiences by matching game worlds to local values, laws and distribution realities; recommends doing… | ||
| Superstar Session: The State of Mobile Gaming 2020 | Alexander Grach | 34m |
AppsFlyer analyzes ~5B organic and ~3B non-organic installs, 1.4T sessions and nearly 1T events/day to show two lockdown phases: an initial end‑Feb–early‑Apr… | ||
| nothing matches | ||