Pocket Gamer Connects London 2018
2018-01-22..2018-01-23
London, United Kingdom
[Pocket Gamer Connects London 2015, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2016, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2017, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2017: Show Me The Money, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2018, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2019, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2019: Growth, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2020, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2022, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2023, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2024, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2025, Pocket Gamer Connects London 2026]
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| From missile defense to user acquisition – How advanced AI models predict performance | Roy Leiser | 20m |
Shows three concrete ML builds: a deepfake lip-sync model trained on 14 hours of Obama video that transfers audio to video with no manual editing; a… | ||
| Prototyping and production process – The core of the Gram Games company culture | ERIN O'BRIEN | 22m |
Gram Games treats culture as a product and runs a repeatable prototyping process: weekly DIY Fridays for experimenting, a structured hiring culture call, and a… | ||
| Remember coffee with your squats – Building a company culture | Anette Staloy | 19m |
Company culture is shaped by concrete rituals and measurable outcomes: a student team turns Fun Run into #1 US App Store, scales to 17 people and later hits… | ||
| Culture is hard | Mark Sorrell | 20m |
Announces a new London studio with concrete stats — 300 employees, 150 in development, average age 35, 37 nationalities — and a culture plan: flexible hours… | ||
| Leveraging inclusion to build better teams – and games | Kate Edwards | 22m |
Slides present a 2016 developer satisfaction survey (about 55% North American respondents) showing women make up roughly 15–20% of the industry, a 14–15%… | ||
| Panel: How to get ideas to happen | Martine Spaans | 45m |
Panel discussion spells out concrete processes: No Man's Sky ships on PS4/PC from a 20-person team using heavy procedural generation and then iterates with… | ||
| New start-up? No money? No problem! | Leonard Tatum | 17m |
Tatum Games builds a collaborative collectible card game called Heroes vs. Villains and grows from two founders to a 20-person team while hitting roughly $300k… | ||
| Rapid prototyping for mobile games development | Jack Burfield | 18m |
Creates fully playable single‑mechanic games in five-day prototypes and publishes to one app store to compare performance; uses a base Unity project with a… | ||
| Switching from developer to publisher | Oscar Clark, Paul Kilduff-taylor, Erik Pontiskoski | 21m |
Indie studios describe concrete moves: one studio pivots to publishing in 2016 and releases Tokyo 42 as its first external title, another grows Drive Ahead to… | ||
| Playing with IP over different media | Oscar Clark, ANIL MISTRY, Dhaunae De Vir, CHRIS BURCH, MARCUS PULLEN | 39m |
Panel describes concrete deals and outcomes: mobile teams reuse engines and art to target global reach, fundraising board game campaigns raised £150k to buy… | ||
| Social messaging games in the post-app era | Laurens Rutten | 25m |
CoolGames builds multiplayer mini‑games for Facebook Messenger using Unity and ships soft launches in a few countries to test scale and traffic. Group play… | ||
| Increasing productivity and preventing burnout | Thomas Forss | 24m |
Claim: burnout depends on how work happens not just hours, supported by a personal contrast of burning out on 40 hours/week versus thriving during 5,047 hours… | ||
| The art of failure | Mariusz Szypura | 21m |
Describes moving from ad design to shipping four indie titles and why four released games matters more than mythic success: early experiments with GameSalad… | ||
| The debating game | Oscar Clark, Dean Day, SITARA SHEFTA, KISH HIRANI, TANYA LAIRD, ADAM CAMPBELL, Mike Hines | 46m |
Panelists argue five contested claims with concrete examples and numbers: discoverability is crushed by 100,000 new games a day and rising mobile revenue… | ||
| Succeeding with community investment | Mark Peterson, Romain Schneider | 23m |
Claims a community-funded game raises about £1M from roughly 20 hardcore gamer angels rather than VCs or Kickstarter, using a bespoke investment units vehicle… | ||
| Life as a public indie developer | Jussi Tahtinen | 20m |
Nitro Games is a 10-year studio (about 40 people in two studios) that focuses on real-time multiplayer mobile titles, goes public in Stockholm after six months… | ||
| Selling live games – A new strategic option for studios | Shanti Bergel | 02h 38m |
Defines selling a live game as an asset sale and gives concrete deal examples: Dragon Soul moved to FunPlus, FunPlus sells its casual division to Century for… | ||
| Panel: The investment trends power panel | 35m | |
Panelists trace investment waves: aggressive Chinese and Korean M&A slows after CFIUS stops deals, cross-border purchases get restructured (App11 becomes… | ||
| Bringing esports to mobile | Anatoly Ropotov | 20m |
Game Insight ships a mobile FPS, Guns of Boom, that reaches 30 million downloads and 25 million players by focusing on three concrete things: make matches… | ||
| Summoners War and the recent esports and community events focus | David Mohr | 21m |
Summoners War runs a nine-event global series to showcase its new real-time World Arena, building live qualifiers, local finals and a Paris world qualifier… | ||
| An update on mobile esports progression and opportunities | James Dean | 19m |
ESL frames mobile esports as a full ecosystem: competitive player base, tournament structure, teams, and monetization examples such as in-game purchases… | ||
| The next generation of mobile esports | Kirsty Endfield, Taewon Yun, David Lee | 25m |
Claims that 5G drops latency from 4G’s ~50–80 ms to 10 millisecond latency and lets competitive mobile MOBAs run like PC titles, evidence being a recent World… | ||
| Games in 2020 – The future of entertainment, esports and beyond | Christopher Cataldi | 21m |
Genvid Technologies demonstrates cloud gaming as server-native rather than streamed PC emulation, running a 17× Skyrim map with 16,000 synchronized AI… | ||
| Mobile eports in India | Scott Prather | 20m |
India has 1.3 billion people, 77% with mobile subscriptions and ~300M smartphones growing to ~530M by end of 2018, plus 50 billion app hours and 30‑80% mobile… | ||
| The esports trends power panel | 35m | |
Industry numbers land hard: 2.26 billion gamers and roughly 190–192 million people interested in esports (projected ~286M by 2019/20), yet mobile currently… | ||
| Blockchain 101 | Peter McCormack | 24m |
Explains blockchain as a distributed ledger replacing bank trust, demonstrates sealing a block with a paper live demo and a proof-of-work puzzle that costs… | ||
| The good, the bad and the ugly around launching and running a successful ICO | Tony Pearce | 27m |
Reality Clash runs an ERC‑20 ICO that sells 14 million RCC coins at a 30¢ base price with a pre‑sale 50% bonus, raising development cash to fund a geo‑targeted… | ||
| 5 things we learnt from launching a mobile game on the blockchain | Shaban Shaame | 18m |
Everdreamsoft launches Spells of Genesis with blockchain cards, sells ~20k on-chain cards at ~$20 each, and its token grows from microvalue to about $20M… | ||
| The Future Opportunities for Crypto and Blockchain in Games | Richard Skaife, Jake Scott, Gary Bracey, Peter McCormack | 40m |
Panelists discuss practical ways blockchain and cryptocurrency can be used in games, focusing on technologies like blockchain-based assets and crypto for… | ||
| Panel: Blockchain and gaming – The winning combo? | 33m | |
Panelists argue that blockchain in games only matters when digital items become transferable crypto assets that players can use across titles and trade on a… | ||
| 5 secret hacks to winning on Snapchat! | Timothy Armoo | 20m |
Fanbytes shows three concrete Snapchat tactics and results: build a network of 17–21 year olds to create vertical, playful ads and programmatically place them… | ||
| Panel: Influencer Marketing Uncovered | 37m | |
Agency-run campaigns hit real numbers: Battle Cats videos near 1M and a Weegner Mains spot at 1.2M, a Fastlane stunt embeds 20 creators in-game and earns ~30… | ||
| How to get seven billion views On YouTube | RICH KEITH TURPS | 23m |
Yogscast has seven billion views and uses that history to show what actually scales: starting as Minecraft survival-guides turned narrative series, growing via… | ||
| Show me the public money – Tax breaks and grants | Ella Romanos | 20m |
UK games tax relief returns 20% back (max £1M) of qualifying costs, can be claimed pre-release and via interim certificates; use an accountant experienced with… | ||
| Panel: The influencer’s perspective | Josh Pieters, Jodi Sahlin | 37m |
Panel gives concrete, measurable takeaways: daily posting routines (some do 2 videos/day, one did 14/week), subscriber and view milestones (channels at ~8M… | ||
| M&A in the games sector – 2017 recap and 2018 predictions | Shum Singh | 24m |
2017 sees five mega-deals make up over 70% of announced value and total announced deal value hits $5.6bn, with large acquirers paying about 3x LTM sales and… | ||
| Live ops for indies – The DNA of an effective mobile team | Derk de Geus | 26m |
Stormbound is a collectible card mobile game run with a core live team of about four to eight people using a release train cadence, Periscope dashboards for… | ||
| 25 tips for successful pitching and networking | Walid O. El Cheikh | 18m |
Gives concrete rules: know the ask down to numbers like 1 million euros for 25%, pick one specific audience, and stop polishing — launch a shitty pitch to… | ||
| Mind the gap – The future of mobile games | TOBIAS KNOKE | 16m |
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes”… How did games evolve on PC, console and mobile so far? What insights can we gain from that to predict how mobile… | ||
| The journey of a mobile marketing agency to the Korean gamers | Timur Kulbaev | 18m |
Rebound Mobile launches in 2016 as a six‑person agency and chooses South Korea over China and Japan because Western games perform better there and competition… | ||
| What is the one feature modern F2P games cannot succeed without? | Isaac Roseboom, Aaron Ludlow, MARTIN KWADNIC, NICK HARPER | 41m |
Argues that the single must-have is a game that’s actually fun to play, backed by a live-ops system of weekly events and predictable schedules that sustain… | ||
| The live ops power panel | Mark Val | 44m |
Panelists compare concrete live‑ops practice: long‑running titles (one >20 years, Subway Surfers ~6–7 years) require growing then sometimes shrinking teams… | ||
| How to work with the games media | SUE GREENWOOD, JACKI VAUSSE, HARRY COLE, Craig Chapple, HARRY SLATER | 28m |
Don’t spray the inbox: target three-to-five relevant outlets, send a short email with a link (screens, trailer, or art), and avoid long press dumps. Give early… | ||
| Crafting promotions that work and how I created one that didn’t | Mike Hines, Mario Viviani | 21m |
Developer builds an Alexa political-trivia skill, prints quote t‑shirts and runs a Facebook ad that flops because the art is unreadable and the audience… | ||
| Defence against the dark arts of mobile game hacking | Kristan Rivers | 15m |
About 100 cheating apps exist for Android, roughly 80% originating from China, with top tools like Lucky Patcher and Xposed framework used to modify runtime… | ||
| Facebook Instant Games – The state of play | Joy Marianowicz | 23m |
Platform runs HTML5 games across Messenger and Facebook, reaches more than 1.3 billion Messenger and 2 billion Facebook users with ~70–80 live titles, and… | ||
| The Trailer Park Boys success story | Josh Nilson | 11m |
Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money hits #1 app in Canada at launch, reaches top 10 games in the US and top 100 in 100+ countries with a small launch spend, and… | ||
| 10 million players, weekly updates – A player-centric, fast and agile approach | JANOSCH SADOWSKI | 16m |
Company hits ~50 million downloads, ~9 million monthly active users and about $10M revenue last year while shipping roughly one-week sprints and ~40 live… | ||
| Dive into the Outfit7 game development knowledge pool | Helder Lopes | 13m |
This talk, led by Helder Lopes, VP of Design and Animation at Outfit7, will explain the success story of the company’s latest game, Talking Tom Pool, which… | ||
| A UX toolkit – The player’s perspective | Graham McAllister | 24m |
A practical UX checklist maps every bug to five layers: appeal, learnability, usability, player experience, monetization and prescribes concrete measures… | ||
| Why do you need a production plan for your game? | Filip Cholewczynski | 16m |
Many indie game developers are not considering proper production plans and a need of a producer within their projects. Some of them don’t even see a problem… | ||
| Indie journey – From intensive care to hit game (clear vision) | Dan Olsson | 13m |
Clear Vision starts as a flash game that racks up 100 million plays and becomes a mobile hit with ~35 million installs and 1.6 million App Store reviews… | ||
| How a reborn determinism will disrupt multiplayer games development | Christof Wegmann | 21m |
Reborn determinism claims to replace state sync by sending tiny inputs, using predict-and-rollback to hide latency and then memcopy-rollback when predictions… | ||
| Time to rethink the waterfall mediation model? | Slava Taraskin | 18m |
Since mediation has become the “silver bullet” solution for ads monetisation, many challenges have appeared that are inherent to the model I.e Multiple SDK… | ||
| The rise and rise of the Chinese mobile gaming market | SEAN PARMENTER | 14m |
China’s mobile games market is presented as the fastest-growing region: global games $108.9B, China $27.5B with mobile at $14.6B, 500 million mobile gamers and… | ||
| How to get your app to the top of the App Store | Rory Mudie | 23m |
Claims concrete steps: combine ASO + search ads so metadata and paid bids work together, pick ~29 target keywords and seed them across title, subtitle, promo… | ||
| UA & monetisation trends in 2018 | Johan Lofstrom, Robert Kelly, Igor Lautar, Alexander Ekvall | 41m |
Header bidding claims to lift publisher revenue by about 5–10% while leveling demand and cutting exchange fees; Outfit Seven is actively testing it. Rewarded… | ||
| How to get the most out of your ad strategy | Mark Robinson | 21m |
Three years of survey data with hundreds of responses show ad income shifting rightward, with many games now getting 20–60% of revenue and some clients hitting… | ||
| Hatch and the new opportunity of on-demand gaming | Juhani Tuomas Honkala | 16m |
Hatch claims a working, low‑bandwidth cloud game streaming service that runs full Android/Unity titles with native graphics and low latency; it signs… | ||
| 5 reasons why you need to embrace interactive ads now | Johan Lofstrom | 19m |
Claims that interactive ads out-earn video and boost retention get backed by numbers and a method: HTML5 playables and interactive video units are built… | ||
| Influencer marketing: The tips that your app needs | Dmitry Liapin | 21m |
Agency grows influencer line from one person to a team of eight and builds a database of 3,000 influencers, running over 1,000 ad placements in 14 months… | ||
| Mobile gaming: Been there, done that | CHRISTOPH GODDERIDGE | 20m |
App stores balloon from thousands to millions of apps while revenue grows faster than downloads, and engagement concentrates: top app takes ~50% of time, top 3… | ||
| Through the looking glass – Following the rabbit down the data… Whole | BRETT BAUER | 16m |
Claims that full transparency on an RTB platform + analysis of creatives, bids, apps and events cuts wasted spend and raises quality installs. Workflow moves… | ||
| The unreasonable effectiveness of data for better monetisation | Ted Verani | 23m |
Claims that dynamic, ML driven pricing and reused behavioral data boost revenue with real results: an SDK captures hundreds of pricing triggers, models run in… | ||
| Don't do it like a virgin – Automated revenue management in gaming | Alex Moukas | 25m |
Claims a 50% uplift in IAP revenue by deploying automated revenue management that uses machine learning, predictive analytics and deep data pooling. Describes… | ||
| Space – The final app tier | Kalle Vähä-Jaakkola | 22m |
Space Nation launches a mobile astronaut-training app called Space Nation Navigator in March with NASA trainers and an Axiom Space partnership, funded by about… | ||
| Chaos, control and creativity – Tips for managing and scaling an art team | EYAL CHAMEIDES | 22m |
Company scales from one artist on five games to 30 artists across 4 games and recommends concrete steps: pick one visual direction early because 90% of design… | ||
| Next generation playable ads on mobile | RANDY BARENSCOTT | 16m |
Zplay introduces a new playable ad format that sits between streaming and HTML5, built to serve low-tier ad markets and 3D action titles while using the game’s… | ||
| Round Zero on how to (not) get your mobile game published | Daniel Rantala | 15m |
Round Zero runs a screening pipeline: 6–7 day test campaign using cross‑promotion in Fingersoft titles, measure installs, CTRs and early ARPDAU, then expand… | ||
| Monetisation revealed – stories and data behind ad revenue success | Dan Laughlin, Daniel Stammler, Eren Yanick, Lisa Pak | 22m |
Panel gives concrete playbook: treat opt-out rate as the primary daily health metric, not just eCPM; use mediation/waterfalls with 2–4 networks, then add more… | ||
| Maxing out your Facebook user acquisition for games | Mika Kuusisto, Morgan Monnet, Saikala Sultanova | 38m |
Ubisoft tests South Park in a short soft launch (about four months) then goes global in November, using Facebook/Instagram with Smartly.io, app event… | ||
| Gamified panel: Which ad won? | 32m | |
Liftoff shows real A/B tests and claims interactive, gameplay-mimicking ads beat static video repeatedly, one test delivering a 99% uplift; localized Swedish… | ||
| How we can leverage games to help people learn | Robby Yung | 20m |
Animoca Brands experiments turn specific ideas into working products: an endless runner that replaces IAP with math so students solve problems to keep playing… | ||
| Board games and mobile games – The perfect union | Philippe Dao | 10m |
Asmodee Digital adapts tabletop classics to mobile by preserving rules while adding bespoke UI, solo mode, live competitive features and platform-level social… | ||
| Messaging, Messenger, iMessage & More – Learnings and predictions from EU experts | Josh Burns, Adam Telfer, Matthew Wiggins, Elina Arponen, Bozena Rezab, Tung Nguyen-Khac | 40m |
Panel gives hard numbers and concrete pivots: Facebook Instant Games launches in late 2016 and a web-to-HTML5 port draws 12–40 million users in weeks while… | ||
| The future of Hollywood and games | Matt MacMahon | 12m |
Hollywood faces a shift: mobile is the primary consumption screen and Apple apps > global box office as revenue, so traditional funnel economics (ten scripts… | ||
| How PlayRaven is working with CCP and Improbable to create next-gen MMO experiences in mobile | Lasse Seppanen | 20m |
PlayRaven is building a mobile MMO set in the EVE Online universe with CCP and proves the concept by emailing a pre-alpha to ~1,000 EVE Vegas attendees and… | ||
| Low budget growth tactics that every games developer should know about | Aurora Klaeboe Berg | 21m |
Fun Run hits 100 million downloads after a Twitter hashtag contest that sparks a growth inflection; A/B tests show removing the tutorial increases retention so… | ||
| Global Games Publishing Trends for 2018 | Everett Wallace, Nikhil Birla, Kay Gruenwoldt, Frank Duffer, Nour Khrais | 30m |
Panelists give concrete numbers and tactics: global mobile revenue hits about $55 billion in 2016 and growth concentrates in China, India, Middle East and… | ||
| Candy Crush Saga and longevity and innovation | Todd Green | 18m |
Candy Crush Saga hits a five‑year anniversary and live games, not new launches, drive the charts (eight of ten top titles are older than a year). The company… | ||
| Living games: Jagex, RuneScape and the evolution of live games | Phil Mansell | 18m |
Jagex recounts refocusing RuneScape into two live products (modern RuneScape and Old School) after acquisition in 2016 and claims metrics like millions of… | ||
| CSR Racing GM discusses nurturing a creative company culture | Julian Widdows | 17m |
CSR Racing 2 launches in June 2016 and hits number 1 top‑grossing in 126 countries with over a million five‑star App Store reviews, and the live team ships… | ||
| Monument Valley 2 – How premium games can succeed | Daniel Gray | 19m |
Claims that small teams can profit by making short, intensely polished premium games: Monument Valley is built by ~8 people, delivers roughly 90 minutes of… | ||
| The indies’ path to getting out into Asia | Shintaro Kanaoya | 19m |
Company has published 16 games (15 mobile) and offers indie distribution into Asia with a broad and shallow approach rather than betting a single market… | ||
| The big three – China, Korea, and Japan Markets Uncovered | Paul Barnes, Joyce Xu, Tom Van Dam, Aras Senyuz | 30m |
Four games passed $1B in 2017 and every one originated in China, Korea or Japan; Japan is ~ $12B, China similar but with ~250% growth from 2015–2017 and ~550M… | ||
| The British games industry – The state of play discussion | Jo Twist | 37m |
UK games combine decades of creative heritage with recent free‑to‑play know‑how: examples cited include Golf Clash $1M/day and Grand Theft Auto V hitting a… | ||
| The Subway Surfers story | Mathias Gredal Nørvig | 21m |
The SYBO Games CEO speaking at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2018 on how the endless runner has been such a success for the company. | ||
| A fireside chat with games industry legends | Peter Vesterbacka, David Helgason | 44m |
Historical hits and hard numbers: Unity powers cross‑platform production, Rovio’s Angry Birds tops over a billion downloads, and China already dwarfs other… | ||
| How to use your mobile game for good | Adam Holmes | 13m |
War Child UK describes running a Game On hub since 2017 and raising close to £2.5m from industry partnerships over a decade while reaching about 140,000… | ||
| Creative ways to make money in the mobile games market | Mail.RU Group | 42m |
Panel claims rewarded video is the primary growth driver, with a Q4 eCPM range of $5–6 for brand buys, but warns of revenue cannibalization when videos flood… | ||
| Designing games for optimal IAP | Ted Verani, Jeferson Valadares, Casey Dickinson, Ian Griffiths | 40m |
Panel argues you must design the game first, then price: build a long playable core loop, soft‑launch and A/B test for retention benchmarks, then layer… | ||
| Fireside chat: Brands and indies | Alex Moyet, Nat Griffith | 18m |
Curve Digital and PressSpace argue that a brand is more than a logo and must be built from day one: define core values, treat game studio and creator as… | ||
| Golf Clash – The power of infectious gameplay | Oscar Clark, PAUL GOUGE | 25m |
Claim: a tiny studio builds a short-session mobile golf game that becomes a breakout live-service hit. It ships a real-time 1v1 mechanic, data-driven live ops… | ||
| Finding the right partner in a consolidating market | Louis Rene Auclair, John Peterson | 18m |
Corporate development describes a strategy: raise a strategic partnership with Netmarble, use a tranche of financing to acquire studios (first major buy… | ||
| Tales from the cryptocurrency trenches | Alex Amsel | 25m |
Blockchain tokens represent true digital ownership so a virtual item can be issued, provably scarce and transferable without the platform keeping a ledger… | ||
| Wappier on improving mobile game monetisation by up to 50 per cent | Alex Moukas | 09m |
Wappier claims its cloud ML platform and simple SDK deliver 30–50% revenue lift and 40–50% longer LTV by combining loyalty points, bundling and dynamic… | ||
| nothing matches | ||