Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #4
2020-11-09..2020-11-13
-- online --
who it's for
mobile game publishers, hypercasual developers, user acquisition managers, monetisation leads, live ops managers, studio founders and CEOs, publishing managers
topics
automated app ads; preload playable ads; hypercasual rapid prototyping; hybrid monetisation strategies; SKAdNetwork and IDFA migration; rewarded video and offer walls; Azure PlayFab tooling; regional localisation for MENA; South Korea market entry; creative A/B and store optimisation
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Top Lessons to Learn from Monitoring Your Mobile Competitors | Simon Thillay | 30m |
AppTweak's market intelligence workflow tracks category rank, download estimates, reviews, search volume and creatives; one client gets daily reports… | ||
| How Automated App Ads can Help You Achieve More for Less | Finbarr O’Mahony | 30m |
Facebook launches Automated App Ads to run app install campaigns with simplified inputs (fewer than 15 versus ~40), a one campaign one ad set one ad structure… | ||
| Fireside Chat: You Need to be in South Korea! Everything You Need to Know About G-STAR (and Beyond) | DAVE BRADLEY, Don Kim | 30m |
South Korea is the fourth-largest games market with huge mobile strength (legacy MMOs moving to mobile) and roughly a mid-teens share of global revenue; expect… | ||
| Speed Panel: Using Preloads as the Ultimate Playable Ad | Duncan Blackett, Claire Rozain, Anushka Mukherjee | 31m |
Panel argues preloads cut both physical friction (clicks, redirects) and mental friction (ad intent mismatch) and outperform limited playables by delivering a… | ||
| Superstar Session: Sustainable Social Growth on Instant Games | Olha Muzychenko | 16m |
Instant Games growth hinges on concrete levers: implement leaderboards/tournaments that drive seven‑day, time‑sensitive competition to boost retention; test a… | ||
| Fireside Chat: The State of Play in the MENA Market | Chris James, Amjad Alloush | 29m |
Jordan Gaming Lab dates to 2011 and now runs seven branches plus a mobile lab van for remote training; the App Challenge goes virtual and already crowns… | ||
| Superstar Session: Making Your Game MENA Ready | Joseph Shomali | 42m |
Focuses on the Arabic-speaking MENA market: 18 countries, ~400 million people and a severe content gap with under 1% of online content in Arabic. Reports high… | ||
| Superstar Session: Don't Go Indie, Go Hyper! | Gabriel Tanasic | 27m |
Argues that hypercasual development delivers faster iterations, lower costs and clearer revenue: Kwalee-style teams hit core prototype in <1 day, publish via… | ||
| Speed Panel: The Death of IDFA & Cookies - Your Monetisation is at Risk | Jonathon Troughton, Tony Colafrancesco, Clayton McLaughlin | 31m |
Apple's IDFA and cookie changes create a real revenue risk — Facebook warns iOS14 could cut 50% network revenue, and agencies say programmatic RTB has zero… | ||
| Panel: Have we Reached the End of Innovation with Hybrid Monetisation? | Oscar Clark, Tony Deane, Thomas Bidaux, Martine Spaans, Nick Murray, Liz Waldeck-Pinckert | 51m |
Panel argues hybrid monetisation still moves forward with concrete fixes: in-app bidding and tighter placement analytics raise yield per impression; rewarded… | ||
| Panel: Alternative ways to Monetise Your Games | Kayleigh Partleton, Robert Garfinkle, Vedran Rutnik, Minwoo Lee, James Hughes, Robert May | 46m |
Panel reports that rewarded video remains the top revenue driver, audio ads can run while gameplay continues if they are opt‑in and rewarded, and offer walls… | ||
| Superstar Session: Uncover Opportunities & Expand Your Portfolio by Understanding Gamer Preferences | Junde Yu, Lexi Sydow | 28m |
App Annie launches Game IQ (Sept) — a taxonomy-plus-tag system that labels apps by granular subgenres and in‑game features and powers publisher, country and… | ||
| Fireside Chat: How we Transitioned from Successful Casual Games Developer to Hypercasual | Sophia Aubrey Drake, Jake Parker, Mark Fludder | 32m |
Studio reports ~80 million downloads across seven self‑published titles and a mid‑2018 pivot to user‑acquisition led, hypercasual work, with three hypercasual… | ||
| Fireside Chat: Post-Pandemic Gaming Market Analysis | Matthew Forde, Govindraj Basatwar | 38m |
Claims that mobile game downloads jump ~75% in Q1 and McAfee finds gaming threats up ~43% sit alongside Akamai's report of ~10 million credential‑stuffing… | ||
| Superstar Session: Azure PlayFab Party Showcase | Caroline Cai | 19m |
Azure PlayFab Party is a relayed, low-latency networking and chat layer backed by Azure that uses DTLS 1.2 and Xbox Live voice tech to transport game state… | ||
| Superstar Session: Do not Resuscitate - Why Publishing Managers are Life-guards, not Undertakers | Rotem Eldor | 32m |
Publishing managers act as lifeguards: they measure real metrics, iterate fast, and kill games that fail tests. They prototype videos in Unity or After… | ||
| Superstar Session: Hypercasual Live Ops- Building a Data-driven Growth Machine | Michal Issachary | 30m |
Defines live ops as post-scale (about one month after scaling) and describes a data-first pipeline that runs hundreds of parallel tests across stores… | ||
| Panel: How do we Prepare for the End of IDFA? | Joseph Kim, Filippo de Rose, Andre Cohen, Alon Golan, Paul Bowen | 51m |
Panel predicts publishers must implement SKAdNetwork now; expect ad revenue and eCPMs to fall widely — estimates range from 20% to 80% eCPM drop — and… | ||
| Curated Panel: Funding, Scaling & Selling Your Hypercasual Studio in 2020 | Martin Macmillan, Alisher Yakubov, Jon Hook, Naum Mihajlovski | 50m |
Hypercasual studios get practical routes: start with a publisher to learn UA, creatives and monetization, then self-publish once a hit proves the process… | ||
| Panel: Working with Publishers from Different Cultures | DAVE BRADLEY, Justin Keeling, Guillaume Jamet, Douglas Ogeto, Rotem Eldor, Joseph Shomali, Ioana Hreninciuc | 51m |
Panels states markets differ sharply: 370 million gamers in India with six billion downloads this year and massive growth in social multiplayer; MENA estimates… | ||
| Panel: How to Spot a Bad Publishing Deal? | Liam O'Neill, Bobby Wertheim, Francis Ingrand, Jon Hook, Jari Pauna, Nour Khrais | 43m |
Publishing is a partnership, not a supplier deal: expect contracts that lock you in for years (often around five), spell out KPIs, payment timing, cancellation… | ||
| IDFA:How the Right Publisher can Help Choose Tools, Partners & Prepare Data to Avoid the Apocalypse. | Andre Cohen | 45m |
Predicts roughly 80% data loss on iOS when IDFA goes opt‑in, with opt‑in rates observed in tests around single‑digit to low‑teens percentages, and shows… | ||
| Superstar Session: Wordscapes: How the World’s Most Popular Word Game Boosted LTV by 40% | Carol Miu | 31m |
Wordscapes drives a 40% LTV lift by adding weekend tournaments and weekday sticker events, tested via DeltaDNA. Tournaments run in 13‑week seasonal crown… | ||
| Panel: Building the Perfect Team | Ana Toledo, Renee Gittins, Minna Eloranta, Melissa Phillips, Abdellah Alaoui Mdarhri, Leyla Johnson, Sophie Vo | 47m |
Panelists define a “perfect team” with specific practices not buzzwords: trust and shared why at the foundation, an enforced code of conduct, and hiring that… | ||
| Superstar Session: Game Development 101 Opening Ceremony | Nour Khrais | 11m |
Opening ceremony describes a decade-old gaming summit backed by the King Abdullah II Fund and a gaming lab that aims to bridge MENA studios and publishers… | ||
| Superstar Session: The App Challenge Ceremony | Nour Khrais | 35m |
App Challenge announces three winners after about 300 students attend an orientation, 82 teams apply and 23 teams complete five days of cloud-based training… | ||
| Superstar Session: Hypercasual Games Under the Microscope: What Happened in 2020? | Ioana Hreninciuc | 29m |
GameAnalytics uses its benchmarks.plus dataset (about 2 billion monthly players and 100,000 tracked games) to compare platforms: iOS D7 retention ~25% vs… | ||
| nothing matches | ||