Pocket Gamer Connects London 2026
2026-01-19..2026-01-20
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 growth marketers, user acquisition managers, monetization leads, live-ops managers, indie studio founders, web and HTML5 publishers, product analytics teams
topics
direct-to-consumer webshops and DTC revenue; rewarded user acquisition networks; cross-platform publishing and portals; HTML5 in-app purchases and web monetization; AI-driven game analytics and growth copilots; automated player retention and re-engagement; loot box regulation and virtual economy compliance; CTV advertising for games; Meta ads post-ATT measurement fixes; onchain football management games; privacy-first monetization strategies; game security and scaled social media attacks
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Panel: What Do The Google Updates Mean For You? | Sam Gaglani, Tayber Voyer, Bob Slinn, Marina Espin | 39m |
Two legal dates matter: January 21st (possible Apple v Epic reconsideration) and January 28th (Google enrollment that may require an API and introduce… | ||
| Panel: Beyond Downloads: The New Rules Of Games Marketing | Stephen Hey, Julia Gorbunova, Daniel Helmhold, Mike Gallagher, Markus Wilding, Sashank Venkatraman | 29m |
Put marketing before code: define target personas, run a SWOT and comp analysis, and pre-produce post-launch content so launch momentum doesn’t die. Treat UA… | ||
| Session: PR Is Your New Power-Up: Ranking In A World Run By AI | Kalie Moore | 19m |
Claims that PR directly shapes LLM recommendations with measurable results: using PRcoverage.ai, ARFS and Profound plus queries in ChatGPT/Gemini/Grock, a… | ||
| Session: The Power Of Rewarded: Building Meaningful Connections Between Players & Games. | Nicholas Bloom | 18m |
A rewarded user acquisition network that runs on iOS and Android and builds customized reward funnels using MMP event splits and cohort data to optimize… | ||
| Speed Panel: New Revenue Pipeline: How To Effectively Monetise HTML5 Games. | Chris Kempt, Rafael Morgan, Gustav Pastucha, Alex Tarrand, Elina Arponen | 19m |
HTML5 publishing now supports real in‑app purchases and web shops (Xsolla/AppCharge style), with traditional banners, interstitials and rewarded video still… | ||
| Session: How Cross-Platform Publishing Is The Next Frontier For Game Growth. | Rabia Dincer, Rafael Morgan | 20m |
Crazy Games claims 50 million monthly active users and says submissions have grown three times year‑on‑year, releasing about 900 games last year. The platform… | ||
| Session: Reddit Has Games: Build, Distribute, And Monetize On A Global Platform | Edgar Neto | 19m |
Reddit launches a new HTML5 publishing platform called Devit that hosts games on the home feed, a dedicated games feed and a community games drawer, serving… | ||
| Curated Panel: When is a Game a Gamble? Loot boxes, Virtual Economics and Regulatory Creep. | Nick Allan, Donna Del-Greco, Tom Nutt, Rohan Paramesh, Ronit Bernstein | 41m |
Panel argues regulators treat a game as gambling only if there is a stake, chance and a prize convertible to real world value; Belgium and the Netherlands… | ||
| Session: Finding Signal In The Noise: What 2025 Gaming Trends Reveal About Measurement | C. Agaoglu | 20m |
Measurement becomes multi-layered with privacy‑centric, device and modeled data, installs rise 4% but sessions fall, and median ad partners per app climb 5.7… | ||
| Panel/Workshop: Workshopping A Web Shop With Xsolla, A Thinking Ape & Lab Cave. | Ilayda Bayari, Jane Startseva, Tayber Voyer, Jami Wardman | 38m |
Panelists from Xsolla, A Thinking Ape and LabCave show how webshops run on Xsolla go live faster because they need no app store approval, support dozens of… | ||
| Session: Meta Ads: The Next Chapter | Volkan Satirtav | 22m |
Team moves to London to speed product rollout and Meta describes concrete post-ATT fixes: AEM support for MMPs and view‑through/engage view attribution that… | ||
| Session: AI vs. Your Game: The New Era Of Social Media Attacks | Naveh Ben Dror | 20m |
Claim: one out of five studios will be hacked as AI enables scaled social attacks. Adversaries spin up fake websites, phishing ads and cloned games from one… | ||
| Session: Quit Your Job… Then Join Duolingo? The Unexpected Journey Of An Indie Icon | Nicoll Hunt | 22m |
Leaves indie studio life to join midsize Space Ape (~110 people), helps grow a match‑3 + car restoration team to ~80, launches Crown Valley Customs (good… | ||
| Speed Panel: Next-Gen Game Security: How To Protect Your Players In Games. | Brian Chadwick, Richard Smith, Hege Tokerud, Nick Tannahill | 31m |
Panelists argue concrete moves: deploy client‑side fraud detection used in fintech to spot nonhuman behavior, block copies not installed from app stores, and… | ||
| Session: Scale Your App! Applifter's OS Turns Insights Into Installs | Goncalo Martins | 16m |
Applifters claims a single platform that replaces spreadsheets and middlemen by combining a BI bidding engine with predictive LTV to day 180, a playable editor… | ||
| Session:Using High-Quality Cinematics To Nail Your Pitch Without Breaking The Bank | Robert Craig | 19m |
Claims that Unreal Engine 5 closes the quality gap and makes high-end cinematics affordable, demonstrated by a low-budget proof-of-concept built around… | ||
| Session: A New Era Of CTV For Gaming | Avi Das, Ed Wale | 26m |
Claims a first-of-its-kind deterministic CTV-to-mobile loop that pairs LG first‑party viewing data and home‑screen inventory with Aarki’s mobile DSP and Encore… | ||
| Curated Panel: Giving New Life To Established Games - Live Service Strategies To Boost Retention & . | Thomas Huxter, Teemu Haila, Felicity Gracie-Herst, John Wright, Maya Hofree, Zorbey Cantürk | 42m |
Long-running games break plateaus by changing concrete levers: an economy rebalance +50% LTV after months of AB testing, adding mini‑games = double‑digit… | ||
| Panel: Full-Funnel Growth for Mobile Apps: From Install to Lifetime Value. | Peggy Anne Salz, Felix Braberg, Hannah Parvaz, Itai Cohen, Suma Amreiz | 29m |
Panel argues that ad signals become actionable product signals: use eCPM segmentation (bucket users by bid — e.g. $80–$100 groups convert after ~80 hours… | ||
| Panel: From App To Super App: Expanding Mobile Apps Beyond A Single Experience. | Hannah Parvaz, Osman Mansur, Sebastian Totté, Piyush Mishra, Simon Hade | 32m |
Duolingo consolidates new subjects (math, music, chess) into one app after abandoning separate standalone apps to capture cross-course engagement and simplify… | ||
| Session: How Does Duolingo Drive Growth At Scale Without Losing Speed Or Quality? | Osman Mansur | 23m |
Duolingo reports 50+ million daily active users and over 10 million learners with a 365+ day streak, and attributes growth to thousands of AB tests driven by… | ||
| Session: Leveling Up Loyalty: Essential Lessons From Rewarded Gaming For Loyalty Leaders. | Marc Bearman | 18m |
Misplay positions rewarded gaming as a retention channel: Loyalty Play launched April last year and the market shows 2.4 billion gamers and $125B revenue in… | ||
| Session: Real Players, Real Value: Building Onchain Football Management Game Soccerverse. | Jon Jordan | 22m |
Persistent multiplayer football management runs on Polygon with 5,350 clubs and 171,386 licensed players (FIFPro), seasons of six months with two matches a… | ||
| Panel: All In Or Incremental? What's The Best Way To Integrate AI In Your Production? | Charlotte Cook, Volkan Gurel, Japhet Asher, James Wu, David Jimenez, Hege Tokerud | 35m |
Panel gives concrete tradeoffs and actionable steps: bots empirically boost retention up to 6% and increase monthly active users by 15%, moderation systems… | ||
| Session: Player Value At Scale: Automating Replies That Actually Help | Jonny Hair, William Smith | 18m |
Large-scale review automation uses AppFollow for semantic tagging, experiment-based rollout, per-automation monitoring and approve-mode checks to avoid harming… | ||
| Session: Game Data For All: How AI Is Democratizing Game Analytics | Orly Shoavi | 19m |
ClarityQ builds an automated context builder agent that ingests warehouses, BI tools, docs and SQL history to create a semantic catalog of events, tables and… | ||
| Panel: The State Of AI: Sustainable Or A Bubble Waiting To Burst? | Rana Rahman, Oriane Piedevache, Charlotte Cook, Oz Silahtar, Pal Chohan | 32m |
Panel argues AI is real but pragmatic: VCs now demand traction not prototypes, raising is harder and many startups will fold; costs of GPU/RAM and inference… | ||
| Session: Beat The Uninstall Button: How AI-Native Engagement Rewrites The Player Retention Playbook. | Rakesh Mistry | 17m |
A gaming-focused engagement platform uses an in‑game SDK, telemetry and backend hooks to power purpose-built AI agents — Care AI, Engage AI, Community AI and… | ||
| Session: 2026: The Year UA Could Become Good, Fast, & Cheap? | Alex Engel | 21m |
Layer AI says user acquisition creative now hits the iron triangle: quality, speed, and cost. Custom LoRA training yields style-consistent assets from 91-image… | ||
| Curated Panel: How Brands & Publishers Are Navigating The New Gaming Media Landscape In 2026. | Slava Taraskin, Vincent Fevrier, Tina Riznar, James Lodge | 39m |
Publishers report selling rewarded video with engaging end cards, in‑game billboards and full game integrations to brands like McDonald’s and L’Oréal, aiming… | ||
| Panel: The Future Of Monetisation: Is Now The Time To Take Advantage Of Direct-To-Consumer? | Conor McLaughlin, Liam Wiltshire, Chloe Cave, Matt Tubergen, Archie Stonehill | 41m |
Panel discussion gives concrete takeaways: Android is actively changing rules with an external content links Jan 28 filing and a court hearing on Jan 22, so… | ||
| Fireside Chat: How Yodo1 Grew Transformers: Earth Wars Webshop Revenue Share 2.2× In Under A Year. | Liu Xu, Ioannis Leftkaditis | 21m |
Transforms webshop revenue grows 2.2× in under a year by moving spend off stores and capturing margin, reaching about 45% of sales via the web store. Key… | ||
| Session: The End of Global DTC: How Regulation Is Forcing Regional Player Flows | Archie Stonehill | 22m |
May 2025 court wins remove anti‑steering and trigger explosive DTOC growth with many games doing north of 50% of US volume via open steering linkouts to… | ||
| Session: D2C Monetisation: A Cost-Saving Shift Or Something More? | Liam Wiltshire | 18m |
Tebex argues D2C is more than fee savings: it requires building orchestration for payments, routing optimization across card, wallet and local providers, and… | ||
| Panel: David vs Goliath: How Can Smaller Studios Compete With Big Studios In The UA Space? | Tadhg Kelly, Brice Laville Saint-Martin, Saikala Sultanova, Lea Nam, Warren Woodward, Cevdet Ustun | 41m |
Panelists argue smaller studios win by being surgical: pursue UA financing rather than blind spend, start UA on Meta/TikTok, and use free one‑hour audits… | ||
| Session: Re-Engagement In 2026: How To Design & Scale Winning Retargeting Campaigns | Joseph Iris | 19m |
Retargeting now commands about 30% of UA spend and probabilistic iOS retargeting has scaled ~600% by matching IPs; DSPs run ~4 million auctions per second… | ||
| Fireside Chat: Money Talks - Listening To Buyer Signals | Adam Smart, Edik Mitelman | 19m |
SignalHub lets studios buy audiences built from real card spending via partners like Mastercard Factures and Equifax meanwhile running inside a privacy‑first… | ||
| Session: Bringing Your Mobile Title To The Epic Games Store | Walter Somol | 19m |
Epic Games Store now supports PC, Mac, Android globally and iOS in the EU with expansion planned to Brazil, Japan and the UK, reaches over 70 million monthly… | ||
| Session: You Grew D2c In 2025. Now What? How To Level Up D2c In 2026 | Chip Thurston | 19m |
2025 opens a no-fee window: Epic v Apple (iOS US) and Epic v Google (Android US) allow steering players to web stores without platform commissions, and a… | ||
| Session: How To Get To 30% DTC Revenue Share | Omer Torok-Arlosoroff | 21m |
Claims reaching 30% DTC revenue share by following concrete steps backed by more than $700 million in 2025 transactions: use payment links as a first-touch to… | ||
| Session: Rewarded UA In 2026: The Growth Playbook | Jan Sommerfeld | 21m |
Prediction: rewarded UA narrows the gap with DSPs on access and allocation by 2026 while staying unique on post-install engagement. Platforms like Aarki Media… | ||
| Session: Future of UA: Creatives, Predictions & Funding | Halil Ibrahim Özdemir | 11m |
Leus Capital shows a toolset that finds "heat" ads by image search and cross-network analysis, a visual creative search that identifies hooks, VO and UGC… | ||
| Session: From Installs To Lifetime Value How Snapchat Powers Gaming Growth | Sara Antonelli | 26m |
Snap reports concrete lifts: the App Power Pack drives a 25% increase in installs and an 18% uplift in unique converters. Performance tools include target cost… | ||
| Session: What’s Really Limiting Publisher Monetisation Today | Olga Zharuk | 09m |
Claim: growing ad stacks and vendor-controlled auctions strip publishers of control, causing unexplained revenue swings and player harm. Evidence: SDKs… | ||
| Fireside Chat: The State of DTC In Mobile Games | Maor Sason, Harri Manninen | 20m |
Company claims it has processed $700M processed in DTC transactions and shows publishers reaching ~30–40% revenue from DTC in social casino examples. Platform… | ||
| Panel: Running DTC at Scale - Lessons From Mobile Game Leaders. | Shuli Finley, Dafna Ben Onn, Julia Palatovska, Ashley Paulus | 21m |
Webshop DTC revenue jumps from about 10% to 40% in months after shifting off-app and lowering fees, driven by creator-led promotion, in-app direct inbox… | ||
| Session: Unlocking MENA Gaming Growth Through Local Payment Methods | Faisal Al Bitar | 17m |
MENA totals ~500 million people, 67% under 35, mobile-first with pockets of >100% smartphone penetration and a $7B games market; local barriers leave 67%… | ||
| Curated Panel: The Privacy-First Advantage: Smarter Data, Smarter Monetization In 2026. | Jacki Vause, Kristan Rivers, Bozo Jankovic, Oleksandr Kyselov, Sofia Gilyazova | 42m |
Publishers report concrete wins and costs: Google adoption data shows 60% games use Google CMP while only 2% use vendor CMP, and popups without a reject button… | ||
| Session: From Steps to Spending: A New Motivation Loop That Turns Player Movement Into Engagement... | Luke Michas | 19m |
Goplay converts phone and wearable step counts into reward points called go bits that can be exchanged or part-pay for in‑game currency and claims this… | ||
| Panel: Getting Real Success, Keeping Afloat & Comebacks. | Rhoda Campbell, Wolfgang Hamann, Tayber Voyer, Solon Bucholtz, Emma Bullen, Carina Kom | 36m |
Panelists describe concrete choices that kept studios alive: a 21-year studio that got a demo running from a brew emulator to handsets and won a first contract… | ||
| Session: Bring Your Games To China—Unity China Publish Service | Wang Wei | 14m |
China mobile downloads fall ~20% and revenue ~5% while mini games grow from $5bn (2024) toward $10bn, so Unity China Publish Service claims to have published… | ||
| Fireside Chat: A Life in Mobile: From Games to Music to Apps – 15 Years of Wins, Losses and Learns. | Chris James, Simon Hade | 25m |
Built a hit music game Beat Star that sold into Next Beat then into Duolingo, spent a year securing music licensing and a publisher, and prototypes in Unity to… | ||
| Session: State of the Gaming Industry | Chirag Ambwani | 24m |
2025 posts a record 52 billion downloads across Apple Google Steam Xbox and PlayStation and mobile app stores generate about $82 billion while Steam tops $12… | ||
| Welcome to | Chris James | 21m |
Pocket Gamer Connects London marks 20 years of PocketGamer with over 300 speakers, about 1,500 companies and roughly 11,000 meetings confirmed (5,000 pending)… | ||
| nothing matches | ||