Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2018
2018-09-11..2018-09-12
Helsinki, Finland
[Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2016, Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2017, Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2018, Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2023, Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2024, Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2025]
who it's for
live operations managers, monetization designers, community managers, user acquisition marketers, customer support leads, producers, studio founders
topics
TV and VOD placement; revenue projection modeling; soft launch timing; DAU and ARP per user; community moderation metrics; support specialist interviews; player monetization tactics; operant conditioning rewards; season passes and subscriptions; blockchain for game monetization; representation in character design
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| PGC Helsinki 2018 Pecha Kucha sessions: Ginx's Solenne Lagrange | Solenne Lagrange | 07m |
Argues that traditional media is not dead and still moves users by using TV spots, radio, magazines and VOD catch‑up to rebuild awareness, not just niche… | ||
| PGC Helsinki 2018 Pecha Kucha sessions: ZeptoLab's Dylan Tredrea | Dylan Tredrea | 07m |
Argues that revenue projections are a way to break a game into quantified risks rather than crystal balls, using analogues and blunt assumptions to connect… | ||
| PGC Helsinki 2018 Pecha Kucha sessions: Nitro Games' Ida-Emilia Kaukonen | Ida-Emilia Kaukonen | 07m |
Compares community work to caring for 25 parrots and makes two concrete claims: spotting early warning signals prevents crises, and long silence beats angry… | ||
| PGC Helsinki 2018 Pecha Kucha sessions: BlockchainGamer.biz editor-at-large Jon Jordan | Jon Jordan | 07m |
Career timeline claims: started a niche mag that runs three issues, helped launch Dreamcast-era Chuchu Rocket noted as the first console-enabled online game by… | ||
| PGC Helsinki 2018 Pecha Kucha sessions: IMGA's Maarten Noyons | Maarten Noyons | 07m |
A meditation on legacy lists concrete surprises: an uncle once in Encyclopedia Britannica later erased, a claim that the Dutch Golden Age was financed by drugs… | ||
| PGC Helsinki 2018 Pecha Kucha sessions: Rovio's Måns Wide | Måns Wide | 07m |
Rovio runs a support team that talks to top spenders daily and turns anonymized metrics into stories so designers know names habits and life events rather than… | ||
| PGC Helsinki 2018 Pecha Kucha sessions: Rocket Lolly's Oscar Clark | Oscar Clark | 07m |
A rapid, sarcastic rundown of concrete monetization tricks and their effects: using operant conditioning rewards, interrupting play with purchase gates and… | ||
| PGC Helsinki 2018 Pecha Kucha sessions: King's Sabrina Carmona | Sabrina Carmona | 07m |
Millions of players are diverse and games should reflect that by design choices not stereotypes: prioritize ethnicity, sexuality, disability and age in… | ||
| 5 years and counting - Keeping our pet alive | Rose Thomas | 14m |
A King Malmö level design team keeps Pet Rescue Saga live with a two-week sprint pipeline that ships ~15 levels every cycle and has produced over 2,000 levels… | ||
| How making Subway Surfers changed the company and where they are running to next | Mathias Gredal Nørvig | 23m |
SYBO Games CEO Mathias Gredal Nørvig speaks at Pocket Gamer Connects 2018.
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If you want to hear more world-class speakers… | ||
| Successful business without investment: A team of 50 in three years | Vera Velichko | 18m |
Claims growth to 50 people in three years without outside funding, running an art-and-services studio that concurrently delivers 15 projects at once and keeps… | ||
| How to conduct playtests when you have no budget, time or resources | Vera Rabkina | 21m |
Gismart uses rapid, cheap playtests to validate specific hypotheses across a metronome app turned music games suite (12 apps, 300M downloads, 15M MAU). The… | ||
| Company culture: Growing too fast, (mis)communication and how to fix it | Veli-Pekka Piirainen | 21m |
Company scales from 18 to 78 employees in two years after $4.5M seed and $6.3M follow‑on funding, and miscommunication, noisy partial office renovations, Slack… | ||
| Badland Brawl and Rumble Stars Soccer soft-launches | Teemu Mäki-Patola | 21m |
Frogmind ships two soft-launched realtime PvP games: Badland Brawl (9 months) and Rumble Stars Soccer (4 months), built with server-run battles to stop client… | ||
| Telling your brand's narrative across mediums: A case study on Best Fiends | Reko Ukko | 19m |
Best Fiends is a match‑three puzzler fused with combat built as an owned IP, supporting in‑game lore hooks, randomized bounty events and hidden‑object hunts… | ||
| Sami in play: Building games on indigenous themes | Annakaisa Kultima, Aku Seppälä, Herkko Pirskanen, Outi Laiti, Marjaana Auranen | 41m |
A community runs a Sami game jam that produces six playable prototypes and pushes a year total to about ten small Sami-themed games; projects include a kids’… | ||
| Promoting games the app stores won't | Jeff Tremblay | 39m |
Panel argues discoverability fails on Apple/Google and gives concrete alternatives: Epic fortnite: 15M installs in 21 days as proof self-distribution pays… | ||
| Growing as a developer in Finland | Oscar Clark, Ilkka Immonen, Ville Rauma, ANNE RYNNÄNEN, Luai Mahjneh, SAMI LAHTINEN | 46m |
Panelists describe concrete moves: DoDreams is ten years old and focuses almost entirely on Crime Head (turning three), Fingersoft reports a billion downloads… | ||
| Fantasy game pitching | Martinez bounce | 33m |
Four industry reps from 4EversGames Snowfall Housemarque and Tamalaki take forty messy screenshots and improvise marketable concepts then pit them to audience… | ||
| Round Zero's game evaluation process: A date with real users | John Rantala | 18m |
Round Zero uses Hill Climb Racing’s player base to push 100–1,000 live installs per week and measures day 1 retention and session metrics to decide whether a… | ||
| Adult games as a credible option to developers | Jean-Francois Tremblay | 20m |
Claim: adult-focused games are a viable alternative distribution channel, proven by a niche platform that hosts 170–200 games and reports 115 million visits… | ||
| Looking beyond blindness: The important role of the disabled in product development | Felicia Prehn | 17m |
Advocates embedding accessibility from day one so it’s part of the budget not a costly retrofit, with concrete features: descriptive audio, customizable… | ||
| Prototypes and pitfalls: Lessons from a year of jamming | Adriel Wallick | 21m |
One year of making a new game every week produces 52 prototypes published on a personal website under strict rules: released weekly, never repeat ideas, and… | ||
| How offline advertising can boost your mobile and digital acquisition performance | Matthew Pover | 19m |
Specialist Works shows TV lifts mobile UA beyond the short attribution window: app installs often surge up to 40 minutes after a spot instead of immediately… | ||
| Gold standards for acquisition and retention | Craig Chappell | 26m |
User acquisition costs rise, so teams focus on measurable LTV, 7- and 30-day churn, and creative channels: Chartboost for UA, Megacool for user-to-user… | ||
| The history of ad monetisation and how we got here | Johan Lofstrom | 12m |
Overview of how mobile ad stacks move from fixed waterfall mediation to per-impression auctions with header bidding borrowed from the web, explained with… | ||
| The future of gaming is empathy: The key to retaining players | Joe Schaeppi | 20m |
Argues that retention hinges on empathic design not just metrics: Dungeon Boss hit 8 million organic installs and $2–3M/month early but revenue falls because… | ||
| 7 post-launch CRM strategies you need to know to maximise game revenues | Isaac Roseboom | 21m |
DeltaDNA platform data shows about 70% of daily revenue comes from players who installed over a month ago and 60% from those over three months, while 30% of… | ||
| How AI automation increases games IAP LTV by 25% | Doron Kagan | 17m |
Claim: automated real-time AI boosts IAP LTV by 20–25% IAP uplift by replacing slow analytics cycles with a real-time SDK that sends events to the cloud… | ||
| Going global: Bringing giant games from South Korea to the West | Barış Özistek | 19m |
Netmarble explains how Asian hits are adapted for Western tastes by changing UI, art, tutorials and difficulty rather than only translating. Lineage 2… | ||
| Users acquired - Now what?: Maximising revenue from existing players | Alex Moukas | 20m |
Argues that building a personalization stack using machine learning-driven personalization and dynamic pricing lifts spend from existing players without… | ||
| Facebook marketing 101 - Boost your revenues with high-value users | Alessio Aristide | 17m |
Facebook launches full‑screen playable ads inside News Feed (lead video + short game demo + CTA) now available to all gaming advertisers; beta shows strong… | ||
| What makes a game YouTubable? | Veera Rouvinen | 16m |
Analysis of top lists shows real-time PvP dominates seven of ten most-viewed mobile games and all top YouTube games, while top-grossing charts barely overlap… | ||
| The Holy Grail: How to get the best out of influencers | Heini Vesander, Olesja Marjalaakso, Romain Schneider, Veera Rouvinen | 36m |
Influencer campaigns claim 67% of marketers see better targeting and the market grew from $2B (2017) toward $10B (2020). Examples: a soft launch in Russia uses… | ||
| Influencer marketing: The ultimate management tool | Dmitry Chudovsky | 11m |
Agency program grows from 1 to 16 managers since 2017 and runs campaigns with thousands of influencers for clients like Gameloft and Big Fish, claiming… | ||
| Games industry influencer campaigns: Facts and figures from the trenches | David Kim | 20m |
Agency-run data shows YouTube campaigns average 6.3% engagement and channels convert about 31.7% view-to-subscriber with average watch time ~5m49s (one third… | ||
| 7 myths of influencer marketing and how to overcome them | Andrey Selin | 19m |
Pixonic runs influencer work as performance campaigns, collecting historic data (channel theme, integration length, placement) and optimizing like UA; agencies… | ||
| The cloud gamer – Defining the audience | Vadim Andreev | 13m |
Playkey builds a cloud-streaming service after five years of development to run PC games on any device, citing Far Cry 5 data where ~30% of Steam users cannot… | ||
| Cloud gaming adoption | Joseph Knowles, Juhani Honkala, Vadim Andreev, Teemu Mäki-Patola, Joline Schouten, Martine Spaans | 42m |
Panel reports streaming makes premium PC and console titles playable on low‑end phones and old Macs, and it drastically reduces developer multiplayer… | ||
| The new reality of cloud gaming | Juhani Honkala | 39m |
A mobile-first cloud gaming platform claims to run games 60 FPS on 4G, launches titles like Hitman Go with live leaderboards for any game, and removes… | ||
| Will cloud gaming change our mobile game? | Joline Schouten | 15m |
GameHouse tests cloud streaming via Hatch with two games live on Hatch and sees session length at 82% above average versus other Hatch titles, arguing instant… | ||
| Insights on determinism | Erick Passos | 13m |
Claims that true determinism is practical: a server-coordinated rollback architecture replaces lockstep, uses tick-by-tick input exchange at 60 Hz with simple… | ||
| Leaving the lag behind | Bruce Grove | 21m |
Claims that cloud gaming cost falls from dollars to 3 cents per user per hour by moving rendering to local GPUs while the cloud runs the game engine, using… | ||
| Look mum, no wheels! Riding the marketing long tail in games | Tracey McGarrigan | 26m |
Claim: sustaining post-launch marketing turns a small initial spike into steady revenue, potentially doubling year-one sales by keeping the long tail alive… | ||
| Developing engaging and interactive storytelling in games | Jukka Laakso | 22m |
Rival Games builds a licensed Robert Kirkman game that mixes comic frames with a 3D stealth heist; development starts with 2D lane movement but moves to full… | ||
| Shipyard Games on making location-based mobile games | Teemu Harju | 19m |
Shipyard Games builds a location-based city-builder that uses reverse geocoding to turn GPS into readable addresses, proving that text location cues register… | ||
| The future of XR games | MARCUS PULLEN, Christina Barleben, Kristoffer Benjaminsson, Harri Manninen | 41m |
Argues AR is farther along in adoption because phones let everyone try spatial experiences now, while headsets remain bulky and cause motion sickness until… | ||
| The future of games development - a discussion | Max Sjoblom, MARCUS PULLEN, Jani Kahrama | 47m |
Panel argues that the industry’s immediate problems are concrete: rising user acquisition costs (platform fees and a 30% cut), toxic dependence on proprietary… | ||
| Lessons learnt from converting parts of Apex Construct from PSVR to mobile Gear VR | Kristoffer Benjaminsson, Pablo Fraile | 18m |
Fast Travel Games and ARM port Apex Construct to Gear VR and prove a console-style VR game can run on mobile by combining content reduction and engine tooling… | ||
| Terra Virtua – The consumer VR platform | Keith Ramsdale | 21m |
A consumer VR marketplace that sells access through subscription gates and an ICO-launched token, with claims that the token pays creators and buys premium… | ||
| The business of immersive AR and VR games | Kaveh Vahdat | 19m |
RiseAngle ships three VR titles (Gear VR, Oculus Go, Cardboard) with the IP Word of Mazes and plans Rift and mobile ports plus an upcoming AR game, using an… | ||
| Resolving complex urban challenges with gaming | Bobby Born | 18m |
CIV Lab claims gaming can solve urban problems and reports running workshops where architects play city-builder games and GTA to surface design flaws the city… | ||
| Skabma - The challenges of bringing in Sami mythology into the video game format | Sahin Cengiz, Marjaana Auranen | 19m |
A small Tampere studio is building the first video game addressing Sami mythology, mapping dozens of conflicting folktales into a single playable world while… | ||
| Dead Cells post-mortem | Sébastien Bénard | 17m |
Post-mortem claims that obsessive polish of the basic player actions drives Dead Cells’ success: the team implements coyote time (allowing jumps a few frames… | ||
| What's next in line for PC games? | Milena Koljensic, Sébastien Bénard, David Roulin, Raimo Gratseff, Kimmo Kari, Tracey McGarrigan | 53m |
Discussion predicts cross‑platform is now about design and markets more than engines: teams use Unity and Unreal but still rework controls and UI for mobile… | ||
| Housemarque on battle royale with cheese | Mikael Haveri | 12m |
Housemarque adapts battle royale into a fast, arcade-flavored multiplayer called Stormdivers with a playable prototype: third‑person drop pods, three classes… | ||
| Community-based games development | Kimmo Kari | 20m |
FakeFish Oy showcases two community-driven projects: an SCP-inspired free indie that reaches 10 million downloads and climbed to #22 in PC new releases after… | ||
| The Middle East opportunity for mobile games | Ahmed Alsafar, Nour Khrais | 37m |
Publisher Play 3arabi and Maysalward-style experiences report 3 million MAU across casual titles, monetizing roughly 90% from ads while RPG/strategy players… | ||
| Changing dynamics of digital gaming and influencer marketing in India | Hardika Shah | 15m |
Kuuhubb Oy senior product manager Hardika Shah speaks at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2018.
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If you want to hear more… | ||
| Why Western games struggle in Asia (and vice versa) | Gio Zhang | 27m |
China has ~1.4 billion people and several hundred million mobile players, mobile revenue and users outsize PC, App Store games generate about 75% of App Store… | ||
| International engagement from local level engagement | Fernando Vasconez | 11m |
Samsung claims 700 million Galaxy devices with device-level targeting (push, Bixby Home, Samsung Pay, Dex) and cites a Korea-to-global lift example with Black… | ||
| The Asian games market and G-STAR | Don S. Kim | 20m |
Asia supplies 47% of a $108B global games market, China ~25%, and Korea ranks fourth with ~17–18M mobile players and ARPU ≈ $87. Android/Samsung dominate (~80%… | ||
| How the Chinese Android market works | Mikael Leinonen, MyGamez (moderator), Yin Jie, Oppo, Zhang Cai Yun, Vivo | 49m |
Our panel of experts from MyGamez, Oppo Game Store and Vivo Game Store speak at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2018.
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If you… | ||
| How to promote your games in the ever-changing Chinese market | Summer Huang | 18m |
China shows 788 million mobile users and 554 million mobile gamers (2017–18) with mobile game revenue around 1.16 trillion yuan; iOS users spend more but… | ||
| Being a truly international player in the games industry | SEAN PARMENTER, Ioana Hreninciuc, Jeppe Bisbjerg, Justin Endo | 39m |
China has roughly ~600M mobile gamers and ad eCPMs jump to about $30 in good Chinese traffic, so revenue can rival the US; Android dominates (~85%) while iOS… | ||
| live services game design with SimCity BuildIt | Petri Ikonen | 18m |
SimCity BuildIt spends 18 months in development with repeated pivots and reimplementation, then soft-launches Oct 2014 and goes global Dec 2014; live service… | ||
| What is the 'gold standard' for live ops? | Oliver Kern, Mihai Sfrijan, Sonja Angesleva, Bugrahan Göker | 35m |
Panel from Lockwood Publishing, Amber Studios, Zynga and PlayRaven argues live ops is planned service work not just in‑game events: teams take over live… | ||
| Company culture - Influencing live operations | Petra Icahn | 38m |
Panelists from Lockwood Publishing, EA Tracktwenty, Oktagon Games and Wooga describe live ops as continuous player service that needs fast feedback, tooling… | ||
| lean live ops for mobile games | NICK MANSDORF | 17m |
Describes a live‑ops system that keeps older mobile titles profitable with tiny teams: a content cycle that yields a two‑bot/month cadence early on, an… | ||
| Increasing retention with live game services | Mike Hines | 21m |
Claims that live ops lift retention by making competitive and peak moments measurable and tweakable: Amazon uses GameSparks and GameOn plus AWS to run… | ||
| The Hitman Sniper post-mortem | Jean-Francois Dugas | 19m |
Live ops converts a dying premium tail into steady growth by changing pricing, adding events, and instrumenting the game: Chinese New Year triples downloads in… | ||
| AppAgent meets Small Giant Games: How to create a media plan for a global launch | Peter Fodor, Antti Paikkala | 20m |
Game rebrands visuals after soft launch poor conversion, swapping dark RPG packaging for a lighter, friendlier style that lifts installs; team builds an… | ||
| Agile development application for live ops | Derk de Geus | 20m |
A 50-person studio with four live teams describes an actionable workflow: two-week sprints, biweekly/weekly live updates, and a focus on shipping MVPs fast… | ||
| Game design for incentivising players | Torulf Jernström | 20m |
Tribeflame touts its Benji Bananas success (about a hundred‑something million downloads) and now ships a mid‑core title, Valhalla Wars, entering soft launch in… | ||
| Live operations: Bringing a seven-year-old game back to life | Tim Shepherd | 19m |
A seven-year-old match‑3, Diamond Dash, proves to have 6–10k organic daily users and a core audience that is casual competitive rather than casual puzzle… | ||
| Facebook on Instant Games | Bob Slinn | 21m |
Facebook Instant Games runs across web and mobile with 4,000+ games live and claims reach into Facebook’s 2 billion monthly users and 1.3 billion Messenger… | ||
| The 'Rami Ismail market overview' - Insights on what devs should expect | Rami Ismail | 15m |
Market shifts center on two forces: fragmentation into dozens of niche storefronts and consolidation as platforms fight for dominance. Developers now face… | ||
| Levelling up – How to move from a small indie to an established publisher | Romain Escaich, Hadrien Des Rotours | 31m |
Ogury positions an AI-powered mobile journey marketing stack (220 people, 12 offices) that analyzes smartphone signals to inform marketing; market numbers cite… | ||
| Unreal Engine and the future of mobile games | Sjoerd de Jong, Heikki Repo | 39m |
Unreal Engine runs the exact same game build across PC, consoles and mobile—Fortnite ships on iOS and Android without a separate branch—supporting over 50,000… | ||
| How mobile games went from Snake to a $50bn industry in 20 years | Wilhelm Taht | 19m |
Mobile games grow from Snake in 1997 to a roughly $50bn industry in 20 years by combining touch UI, the App Store distribution model and in‑app purchases; 2.5… | ||
| Unleash the power of operator data to convert 9x more paying users | Guy Singh | 24m |
Bango uses operator payment data to identify high-propensity spenders and runs operator-delivered campaigns via the Bango marketplace connected to 40+… | ||
| Mobile business keynote: Games monetisation beyond ads | Slava Taraskin | 41m |
Unity Ads outlines concrete alternatives to banner/video ads: in-game placements that surface branded items and IP promotions, a real-time-bidding pipeline… | ||
| The real story of mobile game ad monetisation | CHRIS LAM, Sebastien Borget, MARIANNA KRJAKVINA, SARA SALMI, Aaron Ludlow | 36m |
Panelists describe concrete experiments and outcomes: integrating dozens of ad SDKs causes a 23% crash rate; building an in-house ad server takes two years of… | ||
| Driving game growth through balance: A discussion of hybrid monetisation approaches | Thomas Garza | 41m |
Panelists from MoPub, Fluffy Fairy Games, Flaregames and BoomBit report a ~50/50 split between IAP and ad revenue after evolving from ad-only MVPs, using only… | ||
| PlayStack Helsinki - The new publisher and fund in the Nordics, Baltics and Russia | Juha Huhtakallio | 18m |
PlayStack Helsinki opens a local office to sign and fund games across Finland, the Nordics, Baltics and Russia and runs a fund launched in 2017 that aims to… | ||
| Unity Mobile Business: LiveTune - Increase mobile retention and session length | Jocelyn Shieh | 14m |
Unity LiveTune from Unity Ads automatically adjusts asset quality per device using Unity’s dataset across ~3 billion devices to raise retention and LTV… | ||
| Unity Mobile Business: 5 things Pixonic does to retain users in War Robots | Anatoly Shestov | 22m |
Pixonic runs War Robots at ~100M installs with ~1.5M DAU and ~250k MAU and credits five concrete retention moves: daily replenished ad watches that let players… | ||
| How Nvizzio increased day 30 retention by 50% with Unity's LiveTune | Sylvain Constantin | 21m |
Claimed D30 retention on Android rises from 4% to 6% (a 50% jump) after switching from slow build-time tuning to Unity LiveTune remote configs that adjust… | ||
| nothing matches | ||