Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2023
2023-09-12..2023-09-13
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
mobile game developers, studio founders, live ops managers, user acquisition managers, monetization managers, product managers, community managers
topics
text-only premise testing; PlaytestCloud surveys; cross-platform cross-play; player safety policy; carbon accounting for studios; in-play advertising strategies; app store pricing upgrades; offerwall monetization; subscriptions and season passes; porting PC indie to mobile
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction to Pocket Gamer Connects, Helsinki 2023 | Chris James | 23m |
Opening remarks state this is the 44th conference with 37,000 delegates and roughly 100,000 meetings, claiming roughly $1 billion in deals facilitated… | ||
| You Need to Know who is Going to Play Your Game | Teppo Soininen | 22m |
Metacore runs rapid text-only premise testing to predict which fantasies resonate, writing a few short premises per day, pushing them via PlaytestCloud surveys… | ||
| Fireside Chat: Steps Towards Sustainability – Cases Remedy & Rovio | Elina Tyynela, Tommi Lappalainen, Veli-Pekka Puolakanaho | 22m |
Two companies lay out concrete steps: a three pillars sustainability strategy (safe and responsible gaming, people & society, climate) built from a materiality… | ||
| Nitro Games & the Next Wave of Games From Finland | Jussi Tahtinen | 22m |
Nitro Games runs ~80 people with 15+ years in action shooters and claims mobile now accounts for a healthy quarter of shooter revenues. The company pushes… | ||
| Panel: Finnish Gaming 3.0 - The Next Big Thing. | Suvi Latva, Jonne Taivassalo, Jaakko Sarno, Lasse Seppanen, Sonja Angesleva | 33m |
Panelists argue AI is already reshaping every part of development: GitHub Copilot and GPT assist scripting and briefs, visual assets are being prototyped with… | ||
| Building a Game Studio: The Blueprint for Purpose and Balance | Jaakko Kylmaoja | 22m |
A founder explains how a studio that learned from early failures built a care-first company around the Hill Climb Racing franchise, now with 2 billion… | ||
| The Story of Critical Force: Over ten Years of joy & Pain | Veli-Pekka Piirainen | 21m |
Company started 2012 builds mobile multiplayer shooter Critical Ops that reaches 130 million downloads and roughly $40 million revenue after rapid early… | ||
| Game Jam Culture at the Workplace | Teemu Kokkonen | 19m |
Finnish Game Jam argues that workplace jams work when they respect volunteers and don't crunch, use strict timeboxes (weekend 48–72 hour jams or short 30–60… | ||
| Panel: Nordic Gaming - State of Play. | KooPee Hiltunen, Ville Rauma, Antti Paikkala, Ilari Kuittinen, Miikka Lindgren | 37m |
Panel surveys concrete shifts: Nordic games scale from 3,000 to 15,000 employees and revenues from €250M to €7B turnover over two decades, driven by breakout… | ||
| The Awakening of MENA Gaming: Empowering Talent, Harnessing Tech, and Making Markets | Ahmed Sharif | 22m |
MENA mobile gaming revenue jumps from $1.1B in 2017 to nearly $7B within a decade, driven by a population over 60% under 30 and >70% mobile gamers; consumer… | ||
| Exploring APAC: How to Market in a Flourishing Region | Yolanda Huang | 17m |
Case studies for APAC marketing with hard results: an offline influencer push in Japan uses 26 influencers to drive cosplay events and earns 7 million video… | ||
| Africa: The Next Frontier in Mobile Gaming | Mahmoud El-Azzeh | 16m |
Africa has 1.1 billion people under 40 and 300M+ mobile gamers, with installs and revenue projected to grow multiple‑fold (transcript cites ~3.1x installs and… | ||
| Panel: The New Gaming Frontier Navigating Emerging Markets for Global Growth | Chris James, Miikka Lindgren, Jussi Autio, Kadri Harma, Thamer Matar | 42m |
MENA shows fastest growth — roughly $7.2B and ~574M players — driven by competitive shooters, strategy and social tabletop hits (Ludo, backgammon, dominoes)… | ||
| Questions you Should be Asking Your DSP | Ben Jeger | 21m |
Machine learning DSPs treat ad budget as an investment, not spend, optimizing for ROAS and cash‑flow/payback rather than publisher lists; they claim access to… | ||
| Go Direct to Your Consumers & Earn More | Jan Kuhlmann | 19m |
Xsolla pitches a white‑label web shop that plugs into games with 700+ payment methods, claims top customers shift up to 45% of revenue to their shop, sees 60%… | ||
| Top 5 Monetization Events in Casual Games: Maximizing Revenue Pot | Oxana Fomina | 22m |
Analyzes 50+ casual games and isolates five event designs with measured lifts: a 34-day pet with time-limited levels in Dream boosts revenue ~43% and long‑term… | ||
| Special Offers & Personalization Strategies to Grow LTV in Games | Julia Iljuk | 21m |
Balancy presents concrete tactics: special offers drive 20–50% of total revenue and launching packs often causes revenue spikes. Implementation details include… | ||
| Fireside Chat: Learnings & Best Strategies for Unlocking Revenue Potential via In-Play Ads. | Chloe Cave, Otto Simola | 41m |
Racing titles replace fake billboards with real in‑play ads using Adverty/Bidstack SDKs, taking 1–2 days to integrate but weeks of QA and placement tuning for… | ||
| The Hidden Gold Mine How Gaming Communities Can Drive Monetization | Izaac Fouladi | 21m |
Company sells an AI social Community OS that automates gamified posts, replies and DMs, claims to tie game business IDs to social IDs via a one‑way API, and… | ||
| The App Store Evolution Making the Most of Apple’s Pricing Upgrade | Ted Verani | 23m |
Apple expands the App Store to 900 price points (lowest $0.29, scheduling, per‑country control and local‑currency locking), so teams can set per-country… | ||
| 2 Mistakes you are Making With IAP & how to fix Them | Athena Peters | 20m |
Two common failures are concrete: slow iteration — top‑grossing titles push updates weekly or faster so changes are validated quickly — and poor customer… | ||
| Panel: The Gold Pot: The Best Ways to Grow Your Revenue in New Markets. | Kaley Hurst, Alicja Drozdzyk, Oliver Kern | 37m |
Counts show MENA, Saudi, Brazil, Indonesia and parts of Southeast Asia as the biggest near-term opportunities; benchmarks use Sensor Tower/SimilarWeb-style… | ||
| Measurement in a Post Privacy Era | Hadar Telem | 22m |
Incrementality platform claims to report the true lift from spend changes by comparing outcomes to a prediction baseline, no user-level data required and it… | ||
| Bet on Psychology How to Leverage Player Behavior in Ads | Ekaterina Rudnichenko | 21m |
Classifies players as Killers, Achievers, Socializers and Explorers and maps exact creative tactics to each: epic showdowns and domination hooks for Killers… | ||
| Superstar Session: Performance Marketing on PC & Console | Adam Smart | 17m |
AppsFlyer launches AppsFlyer PC & console attribution so ads can be measured on big screens and revenue shows PC+console now nearly equals mobile. Developers… | ||
| Crafting Level Design for Combat | Max Pears | 22m |
Practical guide to making combat feel intentional: explains weapon ranges, cover types and cover buffer spacing, and how room shape (example: figure-eight… | ||
| Animating to the Metaverse | Pablo Jordi | 18m |
An established 2012 animated IP gets rebuilt inside Roblox as a hub street plus a playable Fungi Farm mini-game made with All Huts where players pick good… | ||
| Panel: Esports Evolution: Future Trends in Competitive Games. | Iwan Morris, Mika Kuusisto, Thamer Matar, Chris O’Kelly | 44m |
Panel reports rapid prize growth (DOTA’s ~$50 million and Gamers8 payouts) and rising production value, but also an esports winter where many teams burn cash… | ||
| Digital Fashion in Roblox, Fortnite & Zepeto | Colin Brown | 23m |
Dubit claims digital fashion in Roblox Fortnite and Zepeto already moves comparable sales to big luxury brands and expects Roblox plus Fortnite to outsell… | ||
| TV Gaming: What Does it Mean for the Audience and Types of Game | Juhani Tuomas Honkala | 20m |
Return Entertainment argues TV gaming targets casual living-room players, not console fans, and recommends designing latency-friendly games that tolerate high… | ||
| Panel: The Rise of Real Attribution in PC & Console Gaming. | DAVE BRADLEY, Adam Smart, Anna Salomaa, Gus Viegas | 40m |
Panel argues that PC/console marketers must adopt measurable UA like mobile, using IP/household attribution and aggregated cohorts rather than user-level… | ||
| Democratizing LiveOps: How Leading Studios are Achieving Peak .... | Solomon Lichter | 19m |
Argues that studios cut dev tickets and shave time to value by pushing live ops and player personalization into the hands of product and marketing through a… | ||
| Curated Panel: A Practical Approach to AI Transformation Across Player Support | Saïd Zouaghi, Samantha Pang, Pascal Debroek, Marek Niszkiewicz | 42m |
Company migrates from email to an in‑game Helpshift SDK across 23 live games, exporting and rewriting over 1,500 FAQs to short chat responses, aiming to… | ||
| Stumbling Into a Multiplayer Hit Downloaded 2 Million Times per Day | Christof Wegmann | 20m |
A small team prototypes a mobile Fall Guys clone in six weeks using Photon’s quantum netcode and a custom backend, ships with minimal monetization, hits 55%… | ||
| Subscriptions, Season Passes & Other Goodies From the Monetization Toolbox | Uffe Flarup | 22m |
Explains how subscriptions and season passes actually drive revenue: subscriptions give predictable monthly cash for longer‑retention games and can coexist… | ||
| Curated Panel: The Keys to Monetisation in 2024 | Uffe Flarup, Stan Minasov, Allison Bilas, Nir Regev, Falko Boecker | 46m |
Panelists forecast hybrid casual as the growth path, arguing developers tune gameplay, economy and progression to hit a 50/50 ads/IAP sweet spot and add… | ||
| Viral Loops in Games Marketing | Konstantin Elgazin | 21m |
Stupidella claims 26 mobile games and 200 million installs built around viral loops not paid ads, using Stable Diffusion AI for creative prompts and embedding… | ||
| How to Drive Incremental Revenue Growth With the Offerwall | Eyal Hendelman | 21m |
Unity merges Tapjoy and ironSource offer tech into a single offer wall product and tests a staged roll‑out (start with non‑payers, 50% slow rollout, then open… | ||
| Porting Successful PC Indie Titles to Mobile | Lakhvir Takhar | 19m |
Robot Teddy ported Vampire Survivors to mobile and lands roughly 1 million downloads in the first year, then negotiates Apple Arcade and Google Play deals… | ||
| Curated Panel: Billion Dollar Secrets: Games That Never Die. | Jessica Banunaek, Joel Kulikoff, Luka Rade, Talia Zulty | 39m |
Panelists describe concrete wins and tactics: using causal impact and mixed-media models and incrementality testing to navigate ATT and Android privacy… | ||
| Looking for Alternatives | Duncan Blackett | 20m |
Claims that Apple+Google account for only 49% of all installs and that alternative Android stores saw $36B spent in 2021 drive the argument: direct-to-device… | ||
| Building Growth Teams Around UA Algorithms Success Case From 2023 | Gus Viegas | 21m |
Claims a growth stack that turns algorithmic signals into predictable scale and shows it by hitting 1 million downloads a week after rapid testing. Teams sign… | ||
| Reignite Your Strategy | Brent Blazek | 20m |
Argues that mature live games need a Maslow‑style hierarchy for organizations: fix lowest blockers first (crash rates, billing, reliable delivery and baseline… | ||
| Panel: Beyond Acquisition: Lessons for Better Player Retention. | Craig Chapple, Nick Murray, Stephen Lee, Kim Grewal, Matej Jurcak | 41m |
Concrete retention moves include increasing daily login rewards and clear progression loops so players feel regular wins, plus overlapping long events with… | ||
| nothing matches | ||