Pocket Gamer Connects London 2022
2022-02-14..2022-02-15
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, user acquisition managers, monetisation managers, live ops engineers, game studio founders, product managers, game publishers
topics
user acquisition strategy; header bidding mediation; rewarded video monetisation; audio ad integration; live ops disaster recovery; cloud game infrastructure; multiplayer tech stack; blockchain and NFTs; app store optimisation; creative ad testing; in-game programmatic advertising; studio valuation and M&A
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| What Tools Should Game Developers Have at Hand at all Times? | Khai Trung Le, Valerii, Minenko, Gordon Midwwod, Mathieu Duperré, Chris Kempt, Ben Weekes | 40m |
Panel argues for concrete, cross-platform tools: network debugging with Wireshark, low-latency comms via Agora Spatial Audio, and content pipelines built on… | ||
| What is the Future of Mobile Advertising? | Kay Gruenwoldt | 47m |
Panelists argue the next 12 months focus on plumbing and math not hype: mediation consolidation (MAX, ironSource, Fyber) and a move from waterfalls to header… | ||
| Reimagining Games Advertising | Cheryl Savage | 24m |
Industry faces less third‑party data and rising costs while a near‑3 billion player base and 1 million Facebook gaming groups demand new approaches. Meta is… | ||
| Why are Audio Ads Here to Stay? | Wilfrid Obeng | 17m |
Claims that audio ads can monetize without hurting retention, demonstrated by an AudioMob Unity plugin integrated into titles like Big Brother that shows no… | ||
| How Can We Create Authentic & Engaging Ads? | David White | 39m |
Panel argues that deceptive creatives drive clicks but tank retention and LTV, citing a rewarded slot that served a static image and triggered bug reports… | ||
| Bidstack x MadSkills Motocross 3: Tech Drives Effective In-game Advertising | Bryan Stealey | 22m |
Bidstack provides a lightweight SDK plus a CMS that injects trackside banners, billboards, new in-menu units and rewarded videos; integrations run with one… | ||
| Scale for Success: A Developer's Guide on UA Strategy & DSP Partnerships | William Melzer | 19m |
Moloco is a performance DSP that uses machine learning to target the 63% of impressions outside Google/Facebook and claims it can scale clients up to a quarter… | ||
| How to Break Through the Noise: Reasons You Really Need to Start Automating Today! | Jonathan Mamou | 14m |
Adjust aggregates marketing data across 2,000+ partners and 60,000+ apps and claims automation reduces the 80% time spent on manual data work by automating… | ||
| Giving Your Game the Best Chance of Success in the Cloud | Tristan Greaves | 22m |
Claims that 90% of the largest public game companies run on AWS, so plan for sudden success and design for millions of concurrent players rather than vertical… | ||
| What are the Challenges of Running Live Ops Across Different Game Genres? | Aaron Orr, Mitchell Smallman, Mario Rizzo, Tristan Greaves, Jay Shin | 47m |
FPS and real‑time multiplayer demand the heaviest Live Ops: latency and CPU‑bound engines force large cloud spends and global low‑latency infra, while MMOs… | ||
| Live Ops Disaster Stories: What We Learnt | Ella Romanos, Sarah Tilley, Mario Rizzo, Arjun Ratra, Philippe Erwin | 38m |
Multiple Live Ops failures get pinned to concrete causes and fixes: a stress-tested launch lets only 10% of queued players through because connections and… | ||
| Navigating M&A During a Global Crisis | Shum Singh, Ken Go, John Peterson, Ronen Gross | 43m |
Panelists compare concrete pandemic-era deals and tactics: one closes a studio sale at Embracer in August 2020, another moves to buy Ludia and a Montreal… | ||
| Scaling Without Fundraising | Hugo Trojani | 20m |
Explains why debt financing can let a game studio scale without giving up ownership and when it actually saves money: retain control, because lenders demand… | ||
| Why Angel Investing Matters | Joakim Achren, Cassia Curran, Nick Button-Brown, Jon Hook, Lawrence Gilioli | 39m |
Panel argues angel rounds are the pragmatic step before VC: smaller checks (multiple panelists cite doing dozens of angel deals, one mentions 14 last year)… | ||
| How Much are You Worth: How to Accurately Value Your Studio & Game | Simon Prytherch, JOHAN EILE, Shum Singh, Barak David, Kim Nordstrom, Marina Andersson | 40m |
Panelists give concrete valuation guidance: public comps typically trade around 2–4x sales and EBITDA 8–25x, private deals often carry size discounts, and… | ||
| Make the On-chain Kingdoms Last: Welcome to 2001 | Alex Moukas | 21m |
Argues that sustainable on-chain games require operations tech not token hype: concrete tooling includes auto asset import from Unity/Unreal, catalog and SKU… | ||
| What Does the Future Hold for Blockchain Gaming | Brian Baglow, Markus Lipp, Alex Moukas, Bozena Rezab | 49m |
Panelists describe concrete outcomes: a casual studio with 40 million registered players launches one of the biggest mobile dApps on Polygon, Kongregate… | ||
| Maximising IAP Revenue Through Localised Pricing & Promotions | Ted Verani | 22m |
Claim: adjusting IAP prices by country and running targeted promotions lifts revenue quickly — typical gains of 20–40% incremental revenue and extreme case… | ||
| Growth Hacking 2022 | Adam Smart, Piyush Mishra, Saikala Sultanova | 21m |
SKAdNetwork creates ambiguous install metrics so UA teams shift to cost per player and segment signals into low / medium / high privacy risk to decide what to… | ||
| Publishing, Partnership & Problems | Victoria Beliaeva | 25m |
Claim: early small UA tests are often misleading — one prototype showed great KPIs then collapsed at scale, another tested well until a slower, cautious… | ||
| Seizing the Trends in Asia: Three Top Trends Game Publishers Should Prepare for in 2022 | Alvaro Gil Abad | 12m |
Pangle positions itself as TikTok for Business’s exclusive app network with 600M DAU and over 50k apps integrated, arguing Asia holds 50% of the global gaming… | ||
| Engaging Bots for Multiplayer Games | Christoffer Holmgård | 20m |
Modl.ai maps real player replays from Forge and Fight! into an AI engine that trains bots to craft player-like weapons and fight with human timing. The game… | ||
| State of Multiplayer Games & Current Trends | Mark Val | 28m |
Photon reports about 2,500 live games and an average of 2.3 million CCU, servicing roughly 850 million multi-active users worldwide. Real-time multiplayer… | ||
| Living Assets: Evolutive NFTs for Playing Fair in the Metaverse | Alun Evans | 18m |
Claims that NFTs can evolve with use: $21bn sales in 2021, and a Korean study estimating ~20% of game economies sit in a gray market. Concrete tech: metadata… | ||
| State of Mobile Gaming 2022 | Karl Knights | 19m |
App Annie data shows 2021 hitting 230 billion downloads and $170B in consumer spend, with mobile ad spend approaching $300B (up 23% year‑over‑year) and users… | ||
| Turn up the Volume: Let Your Users PlayOn With In-game Audio Ads | Amit Monheit | 13m |
A company sells an Odeeo SDK that detects device volume, mute state, in-game music and background apps to run short audio ads that let players continue… | ||
| What to Expect in ASO in 2022 | Simon Thillay | 20m |
App Store now exposes three concrete iOS 15 levers: in‑app events, custom product pages and product page optimization; product pages can be A/B‑tested but… | ||
| Independent vs Traditional Publishing on App Stores: What Can we Learn from Each Other? | Riley Andersen, Anette Staloy, Claire Rozain, Simon Thillay | 41m |
One panelist reports a game series reaching ~140 million downloads with ~95% organic installs from word‑of‑mouth; another scaled a hyper‑casual runner to 11M… | ||
| Building a Scale-up Financial Model | Martin Macmillan | 19m |
Shows how to model UA as an investment: use MMP cohort data and country-level ROAS and LTV modelling, factor ad network payment terms up to 90 days, and layer… | ||
| CFO Confidential: Best Practice Tips & Tricks | Matt Pearce, Henri Holm, Martin Macmillan | 41m |
Advises when to hire: bring a finance-shaped person early and hire a full-time CFO by Series A when games, IP and cap table require stewardship; teams under 20… | ||
| A Hot Nordic? How they Succeed & What’s to Come | Anton Albiin | 19m |
Sweden and Finland combine about 15 million people and games revenue rises from €130 million to €3.3 billion in a decade, now outsizing iron‑ore and truck… | ||
| MILEs as a Bridge to the Metaverse | Chris Hamilton | 21m |
Genvid presents MILEs (Massive Interactive Live Events) as cloud-powered, cross-platform live streams with an SDK that turns viewers into actors. Case study… | ||
| Scaling Blockchain Games: The Fundamentals | ivan transic | 19m |
Argues blockchain games already show scale: 1.4 million active wallets and 100x growth year‑over‑year, with roughly half of on‑chain transactions tied to… | ||
| Thriving in the App-ocalypse | Brett Orl | 19m |
Privacy changes push idfa opt-ins to about 20%, so teams shift spend to Android, probabilistic SKAdNetwork modeling and server-side signals, plus SDKs… | ||
| When the Shit Hits the (RGB) Fan: What Can Go Wrong When Making Multiplayer Games | Mathieu Duperré | 21m |
Lists the concrete failures to avoid: slow CI/CD and nightly builds with fortnightly QE, reinventing netcode instead of using vendors like net tension… | ||
| Game Production in the Cloud | Andy Payne | 25m |
Migrating studio pipelines into an AWS Virtual Private Cloud moves content creation, version control, build farms and testing into scalable services: virtual… | ||
| API Security & Performance for Gaming | Daniele Molteni | 21m |
Cloudflare reports it proxies about 20 percent of proxied internet traffic and sees APIs as 54 percent of requests with ~20 percent growth over 10 months, so… | ||
| Internationalisation, Content, & Diversity: Reaching New Markets Through Technology | Kayla Madsen | 21m |
Localization must be planned early: treat it as product design, not an afterthought, because a typical translator handles ~2,000 words/day and linguistic… | ||
| Building a Winning Creative Strategy for Games in 2022 | Yusuf Barutcu | 17m |
MobileAction presents an ad intelligence workflow: a dashboard that tracks 44 million creatives (adding ~2 million monthly), shows which ad networks receive… | ||
| How to Monetise Mobile Games Beyond the App Stores | Miika Luotio, Robin Squire | 21m |
Claim: 260 million paying players remain unreachable via app stores. Xsolla reports $1.5B+ GMV, 700 payment methods and regional gains like +1M US, +3M Europe… | ||
| The Art of Making Data Driven Creative Decisions in Gaming | Callum Carmichael, Elise Zareie, Lamia Shreim | 38m |
Discussion argues creative becomes the control lever after ATT, replacing cohort targeting with a disciplined testing pipeline: two new concepts and three… | ||
| 2021 was the Year of the NFT: So What Now? | Robby Yung | 20m |
Argues that 2021 crowned NFTs and now the focus is on building interoperable ecosystems, not walled gardens, with a strategy of shared network effects and wide… | ||
| Living the Dream: How will the Metaverse Look in ten Years Time? | Laura Taranto, Aleksey Savchenko, Neil McPhillips, Winston King, Marie Franville, Marta Waydel | 39m |
Panel predicts many parallel metaverses rather than one unified world, with real examples like a virtual wedding in Decentraland and games such as Phantom… | ||
| Building Blockchain Games & NFT Businesses for the Masses, Not the Crypto-natives | Yan Ketelers | 19m |
Venly positions itself as a bridge between blockchains and mainstream games, claiming Venly wallet onboarding with one‑click Google signup, in‑wallet Polygon… | ||
| Powering Real Economies: How Programmable Money Unlocks Monetisation & Activity in Games | Ben Cousens | 22m |
ZEBEDEE shows a working payments stack that embeds Bitcoin via Lightning into games through an open REST API and a gaming wallet (browser extension… | ||
| Why NFTs are the Foundation of the Open Metaverse | Yat Siu | 27m |
Claim: NFTs on public blockchains create real property rights over NFTs that enable permissionless businesses, finance and composability. Evidence: Animoca… | ||
| Multiplayer 101: Your Ideal Tech Stack | Larry Rye | 20m |
Mobile multiplayer demand spikes during the pandemic and Unity responds with a concrete stack: Unity Game Services offering lobby codes, matchmaking, relay… | ||
| Unity Mediation: Monetisation That Grows With You | Andrew Brock | 19m |
Unity Mediation positions itself as a built-in mediation layer that helps games scale monetisation across changing privacy rules and consolidating partners… | ||
| Bringing Your Favourite Brands as an NFT into Your Game or Metaverse | Owen Ma | 19m |
Claims that NFTs are a new digital-merchandise category and that smart contracts reduce licensing friction get concrete support: a B2B NFT platform that… | ||
| Voodoo's Secret to Reaching Repeat Hits: A Unique Game Ideation Process | Alexander Shea | 21m |
Claims that Voodoo’s edge is a repeatable ideation process backed by hands‑on publishing managers, analytics and genre playbooks, not magic. Company hits… | ||
| Still Flying High: Sunset Games 101 | Jake Parker | 12m |
Defines a “sunset” hypercasual as a runner-like core loop with persistent, meaningful upgrades that extend runs into a single explorable world; claims no… | ||
| Tired of the Hypercasual Publishing Model? Then Become Your Own Publisher! | Hugo Furneaux | 18m |
Studio shifts from publisher deals to full self-publishing after nine months of running PlayEmber, keeping 70 million downloads history with ADC Games while… | ||
| Hypercasual & Casual Success Factors | Thomas Coulon | 18m |
Hypercasual growth hits ~60% year‑on‑year installs while players spend about $1.7B per week in H1 2021 and the market forecasts nearly $200B for 2023, so… | ||
| Why Influencer Marketing is a Bad Idea as a User Acquisition Channel | Jiri Kupiainen | 22m |
Argues that celebrity influencers are not a repeatable UA strategy and that scale comes from automating outreach to many smaller creators: Matchmade tracks ~10… | ||
| In-play Ad Monetisation - Past, Present & Future | Thorbjörn Warin | 39m |
Claims that in-play ads are ready to scale in 2022, with SDKs live for 2–3+ years, three patents in viewability to measure whether billboard-style placements… | ||
| In-play Ads: Tips & tricks for Creating a Seamless Experience | Thorbjörn Warin, Vincent Fevrier, Marawan Hassan, Maxence Laurencin, Thomas Jonasson | 43m |
Panel shows actual integrations: Unity-based games place dynamic billboards, garage and roadside slots filled via Adverty, with A/B tests over 2–4 weeks… | ||
| Monetisation Strategies Beyond the Appstores for 2022 | Miikka Luotio, Robin Squire | 29m |
35 US states challenge Apple while regulators in the Netherlands (€5M fine), Korea and Russia push for open payments, and Xsolla offers a merchant‑of‑record… | ||
| Overcoming Negative Hype: How do we Make NFTs Commonplace to Ordinary Gamers? | Sean Kauppinen, Nick Sadler, Kim Soares, Tsahi Liberman, Bozena Rezab | 46m |
Panelists describe live experiments: a mobile platform with half a million monthly users already linking game tokens and selective NFTs; a film crowdfund that… | ||
| Exploring the Metaverse, NFTs & Blockchain | Gary Bracey | 23m |
Company builds a platform and marketplace called Terra Virtua marketplace and sells usable game assets — pre-release stylized cars for a racing partner — as… | ||
| The End of Downloads: Will Cloud Gaming Conquer the World? | Marion Finnigan, Joanna Haslam, Paul Farley, Derk de Geus, Simon Meek, James Dobrowski | 42m |
Panelists argue cloud gaming is not hype but a gradual shift: streaming removes downloads, subscriptions change revenue, and cloud back ends enable scalable… | ||
| Panel: What is Giving Hypercasual its Longevity? The Recipe for a Successful Game | Craig Chapple, Tamara Feiman, Victor Vielliard, Alexander Krug, Ryan Davies | 44m |
Global hypercasual downloads rise from 7.5B (2019) to 11.9B (2020) and 13.7B (2021), with ad and player-spend revenue climbing (ad-related revenue near $231M… | ||
| Panel: Snap Games, HTML5 & a New Generation of Hypersocial Games | Gracia Pozo, Maja From Andersen, Ioana Cazacu, Laurens Rutten | 41m |
Snap Games runs HTML5 titles inside Snapchat with no install, leverages bitmoji 3D avatars, and prioritizes real‑time plus asynchronous multiplayer; players… | ||
| Increase Engagement, Stickiness & Revenue Opportunities with Real-Time Voice & Video | Ben Weekes | 17m |
Agora claims a global low‑latency voice/video backbone that handles 50 billion minutes per month, powers 244 Android apps, 269 iOS games, and routes media… | ||
| Panel: The Evolution of Game Economies: What is the Next Stage in the Progression? | Susan Cummings, Jari Pauna, Anton Backman, Ben Cousens, Tony Pearce, Caglar Eger | 41m |
Panel argues play-to-earn is real but messy: Axie economics force players to buy three Axies (~£200 each so ~£600 entry) and a rental market emerges, gas fees… | ||
| nothing matches | ||