Pocket Gamer Connects London 2019
2019-01-21..2019-01-22
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]
who it's for
mobile game developers, indie studio founders, game designers, narrative designers, user researchers, product managers, marketing managers
topics
hyper-casual one-minute sessions; AR drum spatial placement; concept art-driven storytelling; audio as UI; environmental storytelling techniques; weekly prototype playtests; designing for kids micro-cohorts; influencer-driven soft launches; Firebase quota scaling; branded games approval workflows; timer mechanics as narrative; blockchain game integration
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Future of casual music game publishing – Trends, struggles and hacks | Vera Rabkina | 19m |
Gismart reports ~20 titles with 350 million downloads and ~17 million MAU and argues music games scale by being simpler, social and educational: move to… | ||
| The vitality of visual storytelling in games | Natasha Trygg | 23m |
Argues that visual storytelling moves design decisions and saves money by using concept art is cheap to lock composition, color and usability before… | ||
| How to lay the foundations for compelling storytelling in games | Martin Korda | 21m |
Get a writer at concept stage and plan design and story side by side so mechanics inform narrative and narrative informs mechanics; expect ripple effects when… | ||
| From Reigns to Game of Thrones | Francois Alliot | 20m |
Nerial builds the Reigns series — minimalist swipe-based decision games — then scales the brand with a licensed Reigns: Game of Thrones that connects back to… | ||
| 3 things that games developers need to know to safeguard their games | Beata Sobkow | 20m |
Three concrete risks and fixes: copyright protects expression not ideas so courts bar clones only when substantial expressive elements match (Tetris, Pac‑Man… | ||
| User Research in the Prototyping Phase | Sophie Vo | 21m |
Rovio’s indie session describes concrete user research during prototyping for casual mobile/puzzle games: run weekly mock-ups and quick lab sessions with video… | ||
| Designing for kids | Ram Kanda | 18m |
Design advice centers on specific age-driven rules: treat kids as two-year micro-cohorts and push interfaces to the edge of ability. Pre-readers (2–4) need… | ||
| betting the studio future on one influencer | Olesja Marjalaakso | 18m |
An indie studio builds Trendy Stylist, a dress-up mobile game tied to real fashion and Instagram-style social loops, and soft-launches in Russia around one… | ||
| adult games as a credible alternative for developers | Jean-Francois Tremblay | 22m |
Nutaku positions adult games as a discoverability-first alternative to crowded stores by building a dedicated platform and Android app, growing from 1M to 20M… | ||
| Mobile indie is dead – Long live mobile indie! | Herdjie Zhou | 14m |
Studio launches Namcat and a followup Beach Street using celebrity internet-cat IP and pixel art revenue-share deals to secure 2 million downloads in two weeks… | ||
| Building branded games without getting burnt | Emil Kjaer | 17m |
Studio has built branded games for about six years and ships titles like Lego Star Wars Microfighters as ad-driven product integrations; branded launches lower… | ||
| Exploiting timer mechanics as a narrative tool | Greg Buchanan | 18m |
Breaks timer mechanics into concrete patterns and outcomes and argues time can be a narrative resource rather than just a monetisation grind. Shows four… | ||
| How blockchain tech can usher in the next era of gaming for developers and players | Sebastien Borget | 21m |
MagnaChain positions itself as a gaming-first blockchain, claims a live mainnet and offers SDKs for Unity and Unreal plus onboarding to let developers mint… | ||
| Growing pains – Moving from a handful of entrepreneurs to a company | Ville Rauma | 44m |
A clear playbook emerges: measure the real levers (DAU = new users × retention), track 100,000 new users every day as a success signal, and watch churn kill… | ||
| Fantasy games pitching | Katleen Evers, Sabrina Carmona, Martine Spaans, Natasha Trygg, Oscar Clark | 38m |
Panelists improvise game ideas from screenshot prompts, delivering two-minute pitches against a countdown and deciding winners by audience voting. Many… | ||
| Transhaping – Kickstarting with meaning | Ryan Nisbet, Dylan Hetherington | 17m |
Small student studio builds a short side-scrolling platformer that literalises transition as a character-changing progression and aims to educate while… | ||
| Better together – How to build a mobile game with help from your community | Sam Barton | 23m |
A pre‑alpha of EVE: War of Ascension goes live at EVE: Vegas for a planned three‑day playtest and keeps running for nine months, exposing engine edge cases… | ||
| Which simple tips deliver the biggest value to developers | Marek Rabas, David Mohr, Jeremy Glazman, Martin Jurasek | 36m |
Says don’t build your own engine: pick Unity or whatever fits the team, plus Photoshop/Adobe XD for art and mockups. Set up source control and CI (Jenkins or… | ||
| Redefining play – Blurring the lines between app and game | Mark Van Ryswyk | 19m |
Design Home launched November 2016 and claims 1 million daily active users creating over 2 million rooms per day; it reaches ~60 million downloads and reports… | ||
| Meet your new and improved teammate! Human-directed AI agents and gaming | John O’Malia | 21m |
Claim: language and voice let players coach AI teammates to improve outcomes. Uses reinforcement learning agents (built on the SC2LE hack-and-slash maze), adds… | ||
| Mobile game production and advanced device research | Guy Ulmer | 14m |
Plarium’s developer toolkit lays out concrete heuristics: Android lists ~15,000 SKUs so targeting by SoC/GPU family is far more practical than per-phone… | ||
| Top 5 mistakes designing free-to-play collectibles | Elad Drory | 22m |
Free-to-play collectible systems fail when one item dominates or duplicates become dead weight; fix by forcing collection diversity with color dungeons or… | ||
| Creating games on Roblox – A fireside chat with Roblox developer Joshua Martheze | Joshua Martheze | 22m |
Platform claims $500M mobile revenue (Oct 2018), ~17M monthly users and a $150M funding round; creators use Roblox Studio and Lua, publish free games, monetize… | ||
| The pain and pleasure of free-to-play game UI design | Lissa Capeleto | 19m |
UI design for live free-to-play games focuses on measurable outcomes: avoid dark patterns that boost clicks but harm retention, and expect constant iteration… | ||
| Optimising your mobile game using scriptable render pipelines | Yilmaz Kiymaz | 21m |
Shows how to convert a custom vertex‑color shader from Unity’s built‑in pipeline to the Lightweight Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP), replacing CG with HLSL… | ||
| Gram Games on iterating your development pipeline as you grow | Engin Erenturk | 18m |
Gram Games scales from ~15 to ~90 people across Istanbul and London while keeping iteration fast: teams produce one-week playable prototypes, run ~200… | ||
| Lessons from Fusebox's Love Island: The Game | Ed Sibley | 17m |
Postmortem of Love Island The Game explains concrete outcomes: a licensed mobile visual-novel built with ITV Studios that hit top grossing charts for several… | ||
| How to make great games without crunch / mental health problems in the games industry | Kate Edwards, Derk de Geus, Josh Nilson, Kevin Agwaze, James Nicholls | 40m |
Panelists give concrete fixes: embed QA into teams instead of isolating them, run paid mid-day workouts and clear no-email time to decompress, buy third-party… | ||
| Gaming for good – Why games companies are collaborating with charities | Harriet Hughes, Lisa Pak, John-Paul Burke, Amparo Garcia | 27m |
War Child reports $3M raised through an annual Armistice campaign that asks games to sell themed items and run events; publishers describe tactics… | ||
| Company culture at NaturalMotion | Jeff Hickman | 20m |
NaturalMotion runs a deliberate cultural overhaul: one-on-one interviews and surveys produce an eight-sentence vision, 250 sticky-note obstacles get grouped… | ||
| Ditch toxic systems so we can finally love video game romance | Elie Abraham | 22m |
Argues that common systems teach toxic romance by design, naming the kindness tokens model and showing how games make sex-as-reward: Mass Effect’s Jack stops… | ||
| Running a games business without killing yourself | Chris Kempt | 19m |
Built and released five games on £200k over 18 months, achieving top-ten hits and a title that reached #1 in 32 countries, but cashflow ran out and leadership… | ||
| Can a game be therapy for emotional health? Can it change a teen's life? | Rosemary Lokhorst | 20m |
Resonance House builds Shadow's Edge as a free nonprofit mobile digital therapeutic that uses journaling, creative rebuild mechanics and therapist-written… | ||
| How InnoGames Became Warlords After Getting Warlords – Learnings from Taking Over an External Game | Philip Bang | 15m |
Innogames' team took over the mobile strategy game Warlords of Aternum from Wooga, performed massive content updates, ported parts of the game to a new engine… | ||
| Culture driving productivity | Sabrina Carmona | 20m |
Experience across six countries and three languages informs a pragmatic recipe: use measurable evidence (Deloitte finds 84% of employees value distinct culture… | ||
| Exploring cross-platform play between virtual reality and mobile | Lari Unkari, Antti Sartanen, Kim Haataja | 18m |
A team from Hipfire Games shows a working prototype: a ship-based space game where the VR user performs tactile, hands-on tasks and mobile users act as droids… | ||
| 101 concepts for games innovation | Mihai Pohontu | 15m |
A rapid inventory of concrete ideas: brain-controlled VR with electrodes is demonstrated in a clinical demo called Awakening that reads neural activity in real… | ||
| Future games platforms – Exploiting the possibilities | MARCUS PULLEN, Nancy Basi, Jon Hibbins, Christina Barleben, Harri Manninen, Simon Barratt | 49m |
Panel discussion lays out concrete bets and numbers: PlayStation VR at ~5 million headsets, Play Ventures running a $30M seed fund, and a Nordic location-based… | ||
| From mobile to consoles and back to mobile | Sako Salovaara | 14m |
Small indie studio moves from mobile to consoles, ships a 2016 top‑down shooter on Xbox One/PC, then ports a drunken brawler that previously hit 600,000… | ||
| Skybound Games: From comics to games… and a wheel of awesome! | Mark Stanger | 29m |
Skybound positions creators at the center of a multi‑platform publishing engine: a 100‑person LA hub, 40 monthly comic titles, 50 license partners, a Simon &… | ||
| The business of immersive (AR/VR) games | Kaveh Vahdat | 17m |
Company RiseAngle ships four games: one mobile AR title and three low‑end VR releases, plus a larger episodic IP that moves between VR and non‑VR. Market view… | ||
| Voice games – An overview of an up-and-coming category | Jeferson Valadares | 20m |
Claims voice will replace typing within 5–10 years and points to platform growth — Google Actions hitting 1 billion+ enabled devices and smart speakers… | ||
| Raw Fury: Cross-platform publishing – Why and how | Andreea Chifu | 18m |
Publisher Raw Fury releases a 2D Metroidvania to six platforms (PC, Steam/other stores, iOS, Android, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox) at the same $2.99 price and… | ||
| The ethical hacker’s guide to winning with Gen Z | Timothy Armoo | 17m |
Fanbytes describes a repeatable "ethical-hacker" triangle: hacking culture, choose emotion over gameplay, memeing it up. Case specifics: DI.fm drops a Bob's… | ||
| How developers can bring augmented reality games to the masses in 2019 | Tommy Palm | 22m |
Resolution Games recounts concrete wins and hard limits: five prior VR titles, a VR fishing game with 2.5 million downloads becomes Bait: Under the Surface… | ||
| Porting to console – Why alternative platforms options matter | Shintaro Kanaoya | 16m |
Console ports cost surprisingly little and can pay off: a Unity point‑and‑click had £5.5k port cost, required one engineer for one month, dev kit/SDK access… | ||
| The emerging markets power panel | SIMAY DINC, Nour Khrais, Gaurav Agarwal, Amit Khanduja | 23m |
Mobile games in India and MENA show concrete signals: India is the fastest‑growing smartphone and data market with half a billion devices expected by next year… | ||
| Publishing in Asian markets – The ‘how to’ discussion | Langer Lee, Anderson King, Dmitry Chudovsky, Harry Holmwood, Shintaro Kanaoya, Allison Bilas | 37m |
Asian markets are different countries not one market: China, Japan and Korea demand different monetization and genre fits, and localization plus a strong local… | ||
| A Westerner's guide to the Japanese games market | Molly Heady-Carroll | 14m |
Arcane Circus is a two-person studio building Kaijack: Card Attack, a kaiju-themed doodle card game targeting iOS, Android and Switch with release planned next… | ||
| User analysis for premium games in China | Miley Chen | 24m |
Survey-backed snapshot of China’s premium-PC market: 40M registered Steam users (real ~23M), average Chinese Steam user owns ~11.5 games vs ~43 in the US, and… | ||
| The games industry scenario in China – And the value a local publisher can provide | Ken Li | 25m |
China generates roughly $37B mobile game revenue with about 600 million paying users and sees massive churn — 9000 new games in 2017 versus Steam’s ~7000 — so… | ||
| The Latin American games market overview 2019 | Juan Pison | 21m |
Latin America has two-thirds internet reach and slightly more than half of those users play games, with Brazil then Mexico and Argentina dominating installs… | ||
| Oriental versus occidental monetisation | Jorge Castaño | 19m |
Compares concrete monetisation differences: Japanese players deliver $134 ARPU and a highly loyal base (cited 173 million players), so studios build huge… | ||
| The future of the Chinese mobile games industry | Jeff Lyndon | 21m |
China now counts 600 million users and treats mobile gaming as everyday life, with offline eSports bars, paid coaches and social venues driving growth and a… | ||
| Meet the Dragon's neighbours – South Korea and Japan | Heita Miyoshi | 18m |
Korea favors fast turnover: games need frequent updates, attract players with heavy new content and short life cycles, while Japan keeps players for months or… | ||
| A new opportunity for casual game success in the West and China | Heaven Wu | 14m |
China’s casual opportunity centers on WeChat Mini Games as an alternative distribution and monetisation route because China’s Android market is decentralised… | ||
| Data-driven UI/UX for the MENA region | Hanin Suradi | 15m |
Tamatem’s card game VIP Minutes reaches over 1 million MAU after a data-led redesign: a beta shows ~65% initial approval, home-page restructuring lifts day‑1… | ||
| The year of hyper-casual in China | Jeppe Bisbjerg | 27m |
China accounts for nearly 50% of global iOS+Android downloads in 2018 and the market is shifting toward hyper‑casual because advertising and UA mature… | ||
| What do movie directors, motorcyclists and historians know about making games? | Todd Green | 19m |
Argues that games gain concrete design moves by borrowing from other arts: King applies standard UX win screens in Farm Heroes but can swap to a Rio Carnival… | ||
| 5 lessons from making London the games capital of the world | Michael French | 13m |
Games London runs the London Games Festival and year‑round programs and since 2016 works with about 160 companies, matches around 100 with investors, and… | ||
| Paving the way for player-owned game economies | John Linden | 18m |
Mythical Games CEO John Linden delivers a Trade Trends session at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2019 on January 21st to 22nd.
2019 will mark a new horizon of… | ||
| What happens to the UK games industry after Brexit? | Jas Purewal, Joe Brammer, Craig Fletcher, Chris James | 22m |
Panel lays out concrete impacts and contingency steps: several studios opened a Munich studio or are relocating staff after hires collapsed, IPOs stall and… | ||
| The history of the UK’s mobile games industry | George Osborn, Nicoll Hunt, Adrienne Law | 30m |
Chronicles how UK mobile gaming shifts from J2ME and Snake to App Store-era hits like Monument Valley and swipe-first games such as Paper Toss, credits ngmoco… | ||
| London Venture Partners on venture capital in games – What, when, why, how | Jon Bellamy | 17m |
London Venture Partners is a seed-stage games fund that writes checks up to roughly $2.5m and claims about $14.3bn shareholder value from past exits. Data… | ||
| Global trends – Insights from 3 billion mobile gamers | Ioana Hreninciuc | 22m |
GameAnalytics presents a global benchmark of 60,000 games and 3 billion devices showing concrete numbers: median day‑1 retention ~25% while top performers hit… | ||
| How to bag an IP like Rick and Morty and deliver a killer game | David Burpitt | 19m |
Big Pixel wins Rick and Morty rights, builds Rick and Morty: Pocket Mortys (2016) and keeps it live with weekly content updates and monthly events, proving… | ||
| Third-party publishing – Why and how | Anderson King | 26m |
Huawei reports 200 million devices shipped in 2018 and about 68 million users outside China, pushing AppGallery to claim roughly 200 billion cumulative… | ||
| Lifetime value forecast – How to predict your game's revenue | Vera Karpova | 18m |
Explains concrete LTV recipes and pitfalls: compute true LTV only by waiting until a cohort dies or use practical forecasts like daily ARPU × estimated… | ||
| App search marketing – How to conquer this new frontier | Rory Mudie | 19m |
Agency plus SaaS platform runs ASO and paid search together, claiming 65% of downloads come from app-store search and that Apple Search Ads convert at 50% on… | ||
| Hypercasual monetisation versus long-term retention monetisation | Guy Singh, Ian Verchere, Kim Bolsoni, Christopher Kassulke, Jules Minvielle | 37m |
Panelists compare concrete outcomes: moving a premium mobile title to Switch by removing loot boxes and shipping full features wins 8 million downloads and… | ||
| SpeedPanel: Ad monetisation takes over the world | Akin Babayigit, Anette Staloy, Elizaveta Kostyukhina, Enric Pedró | 20m |
Panel claims ad monetisation now funds scalable user acquisition, crediting rewarded video for big eCPM gains and the rise of bid-based mediation. Studios… | ||
| Understand the complete mobile user journey – Attract brands in your games, drive revenue | Jules Minvielle | 21m |
Ogury presents concrete claims and tools: a consented data platform integrated into ~10,000 apps with access to ~400 million profiles and reported 100 million… | ||
| Understanding game genre for smarter monetisation | Fatma Burcu Ozcengiz | 12m |
Unity recommends tailoring monetisation by genre: hyper‑casual needs very short sessions and many ad impressions to cover acquisition, midcore accepts higher… | ||
| Debunking header bidding in mobile apps | Anel Ćeman, Dilpesh Parmar | 21m |
Claims that header bidding drives 20–30% yield uplift for some publishers, that rewarded video shows the biggest gains, and that SDK footprint shrinks when… | ||
| How to acquire two-times more paying users by partnering with mobile operators | Guy Singh | 20m |
Bango connects apps to 40+ mobile operators and leverages operator payment data to target top spenders who lack credit cards (5 billion mobile subscribers vs 2… | ||
| Voodoo and MoPub deconstruct the hyper-casual phenomenon | Vincent Pagnard-Jourdan, Céline Droit | 19m |
Voodoo runs an ad‑first playbook: banner, full‑screen and rewarded ads across games, uses Tenjin to tie ad revenue to install sources, and merges UA and… | ||
| How to monetise with Facebook Audience Network | Alessio Aristide Di Salvo, Ben Atherton | 18m |
Facebook Audience Network claims publisher payouts of $3.2B in 2017 and says rewarded video CPMs often rise +20–80% versus other networks. A Berlin case… | ||
| UNO! Playing your cards right in global casual games | Tom Van Dam | 19m |
Mattel163 partners with Nettie's to turn UNO into a global free to play product that already reaches 15 million unique players before global launch and… | ||
| Keys for success in hypercasual and Messenger games | Simon Spaull, Alexander Krug, Christian Calderon, Mark Ettle, Gaurav Agarwal | 42m |
Panelists report concrete metrics and tactics: Softgames claims 100 million Messenger plays and about 500 HTML5 games built, Gamezop distributes ~250 titles… | ||
| What Gamee learned about hyper-casual games from 3 billion gameplays across 70 games | Bozena Rezab | 15m |
Gamee reports 3 billion gameplays across 70 games and a shift to a progressive web app after iOS removal, yielding over 25 minutes per user per day. Increasing… | ||
| Growth on Messenger – What Moonfrog Labs learnt from the success of Ludo Club | Vasavadatta Trivikrama | 16m |
Moonfrog Labs’ Ludo Club achieves 10 million MAU and Top 3 status on Facebook Messenger by prioritizing concrete fixes: it scales from 64k to ~2.8M DAU early… | ||
| Facebook Instant Games - What's next? | Joy Marianowicz | 21m |
Update on Facebook Instant Games' roadmap with numbers and features: platform grows from ~100–200 to over 6,000 live games, day‑1 retention moves well past the… | ||
| Fireside Chat: Creating enticing sports games with short and fast play time | Jon Middleton | 21m |
Company raises $3 million seed to build mobile-first sports games focused on 3–5 minute head-to-head sessions that prioritize competition, social leagues and… | ||
| Why go hypercasual? | Alon Paster | 20m |
TabTale outlines why hypercasual wins by numbers and process not buzzwords: short production cycles under three months, hit examples like Helix Jump hitting… | ||
| nothing matches | ||