I have been a bad boy. It has been weeks since my lecture at the Indie Game Summit during GDC and I haven’t put the slides on the blog. Hopefully, anyone interested in them already got a look at them on SlideShare, but I do need to share them here as well, and I need to share more.

First things first, here are my slides from GDC:

I will be talking at 2 events in the near future, in both occasions, it will be about crowd funding and Kickstarter. While this probably comprises less than 2% of my time, I think  it makes feel event organizers that much more comfortable in inviting me talk about the topic.

I am not selling anything to the audience and I have no agenda when I come as a speaker. It makes me scratch the itch, so we are all winning in the end.

So, what’s cooking?

Read the rest of this entry »

Kickstarter launched in the UK a bit more than 2 months ago, I wanted to have a look at the initial set of data. That data sample is quite small still, projects usually run for 30 days, so you only really have 2 months and half (kinda – see below) to look at, but still, it seemed interesting to check the early days.

I also want to point out that the data collected was done differently this time. I have gone away from the manual collection of data and now run a fairly simple script to collect my info. This is still limited to successful projects only, but there is no lower limit on the amount those projects have raised as opposed to the $10 000 I had set before (I still think there is a point in excluding the small projects for my purpose in the analysis I am doing, but here, this is very useful). Read the rest of this entry »

In preparation for this week’s panel at Evolve, I refreshed the data collected on the successful Kickstarter Video Games projects. We decided at the last minute to focus more on projects stories rather than talking about data on the platform, but as the work was done, and it was 3 months since the last time I had a look, now is the perfect opportunity for a blog post on this. Read the rest of this entry »

While it is still relatively fresh in mind, I want to share about our experience from the Gstar 2012 and what we saw and learned there.

First of all, you can find a summary of the event over at Thisisgame: http://www.thisisgame.com/en/2012/11/19/gstar2012-wrap-up

As highlighted in the article, the most impressive change from last year’s event was the very strong switch to mobile that Korea is operating. So, of course, there were still many online games present, but having probably around 50% of the B2C showfloor taken by mobile publishers was very impressive (and think about it, how much space is usually taken by mobile games at other shows?).

And that’s my biggest take away from this year discussions – Korean developers left that online corner they stayed in for so long and a lot of them moved to mobile. Last year, there was an interest in social games, but this is nothing like it.

There are multiple reasons for that strong change in the developing landscape, but the biggest one mentioned is the stellar (recent) success of Kakaotalk in the game space.

Kakaotalk is an online chat app for mobile (with VOIP as well) that has been very widely adopted in the country. It runs on iOS and Android (and Bada and other OSes that don’t matter much) and many operators bundled it and its adoption is crazy.

In July, they launched their first games (on the Appstore for iOS obviously, and Google Play for Android), including Anypang, a match-3 game, heavily using the Kakao contacts as a social graph (leaderboards and gifting). The game has been *very* successful. They report 10m DAU, in a country of 50m inhabitants (I think users outside of Korea are negligible), and significant revenues (that figure varied a lot depending on who you talked to but it averages around $1m per day).

It has created a lot of attention to the mobile space in general and Kakao in particular – with many studios lining up to integrate with them. It also means that money from investments is quickly leaving the MMO space towards the mobile space.

If you are interested in that market, I recommend you to have a look at the Kakaotalk app: http://www.kakao.com/talk/en

And Dragon Flight, the current game doing very well for them (Google Play link):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.NextFloor.DragonFlightKakao&feature=nav_result
Discussing the Kakaotalk success last week, I was asked why I thought it worked so well, compared to Facebook for instance (or Skype). I think a short answer should be: “Check the app!”.

It is very easy to use, very quick to load and does what it does very well. This is a Dropbox case: service existed before, but was overly bloated (see Skype – I won’t launch the app on my phone, it takes ages to launch, ages to load, difficult to navigate). Kakaotalk also works on every device.

It seems that in Japan, The Line, a similar app, might get the proper momentum and build a similar success and start challenging DeNA and Gree presence. And we might have other apps doing the same in different countries. Whatsapp was mentioned (SEA and Spain), as well as Tango (North America)…

Interesting to see how this will develop…

When discussing with local developers and publishers, I collected a few rough estimates on the mobile market make up. Take those with a grain of salt, but it does help in getting an impression:

In the past year, the mobile OS distribution seems to have completely shifted. Where iOS was the main one a year ago, Android has taken over (through Samsung devices mostly but not exclusively). I was told 89% Android, 10% iOS, 1% margin of error for others – it is probably exaggerated but it highlights the current trend.
Another change, the carrier Android app stores have lost lots of market share, with Google Play being currently the main App store (about 50%), followed by Tstore – the android app store of SK Telecom (30%), Apple App Store (10%), and Others completing the count.
That change seems to have happened through users getting educated about the ecosystems (and not liking being tied to their carrier for their apps) as well as Kakaotalk pushing all its android distribution and payments through Google Play.
One last bit of relevant info: I was told that there was close to no piracy on Android in Korea.

Like every year, going to Gstar was a very good experience. We had excellent meetings, we were able to have a peek at trends from a very different territory and we met with local industry people that we don’t have the opportunity to catch up with at other events.

Every year, like clockwork, in the early days of November, we fly to Korea to go to Busan, in order to attend the Gstar.  We will be there on Thursday and Friday, on our very own booth, as usual.

If you find yourself in the neighbourhood, you should definitely give us a shout and come say hi to Diane and myself (Thomas).

See you there!

Unsurprising fact of the week (month? year?): the whole team is headed to Cologne next week for GDC Europe and gamescom. Here’s where we’ll be:

Thomas and Diane arrive on Sunday, and will be at GDC on Mon 13th and Tue 14th. They’ll be taking meetings in our B2B booth, located in Hall 4.1, A012, until Fri 17th.

The PR team will be with clients in the business centre, from Wed 15th to Fri 17th:

Jen will be with Riot Games (Hall 4.1, C051) managing press meetings for League of Legends

Nora will be with Hi-Rez Studios (Hall 4.1, B022) managing Tribes: Ascend demo attendance and SMITE match bookings

Kat will be managing the press schedule for Born Ready Games (co-exhibiting with us in Hall 4.1, A012) supporting Strike Suit Zero

Anne-Julie will be a superhero, flying in to assist where she’s needed.

If you’d like to book a meeting or meet up in the evening, please get in touch. See you on the other side…

It’s been an action packed year for the PR team so far — we’ve got great work coming out of our ears (not literally), and as a happy consequence of this, we’re hiring again!

This time, we’re looking for a native English speaker with equal amounts of writing skill, creative flair and love of online video games. Prior PR/marketing experience is a definite plus, but the role could also suit someone with a different background in online communication, like a community or social media manager. If this sounds like you, and you’re interested in joining a small, fun-loving (but hard-working) team based in Brighton, please send your CV to jobs@icopartners.com and/or ping for more info.

Here’s the job spec:

________

Who we are: ICO Partners Ltd., a small but fast-growing online games services consultancy and PR agency based in Brighton, UK. Find out all about us at http://www.icopartners.com.

Who we need: A flexible, autonomous and motivated communications professional with a passion for online video games

Skills and requirements:

• Native English speaker with very strong spoken and written communication skills

• Minimum 1 year’s experience in a position involving direct contact with the media

• Experience of and enthusiasm for online video games

• Proven organisational and planning skills

• Self-motivated approach to work; ability to work to short deadlines and under pressure

• Sound judgement in dealing with media

• Ability to work with and analyse data

• Skills and experience in online marketing is a strong plus

Responsibilities:

• Managing relationships with journalists across Europe (in English)

• Working closely with clients to create and implement PR plans, schedules and communications

• Drafting press releases and media alerts

• Developing and updating media lists and contact databases

• Participating in daily media relations tasks, including media outreach, collection and analysis of press coverage, reporting, organization of events, interviews and promotions

• Assisting with market research projects

• Participating in product testing as required

Remuneration : To be discussed with the candidate, based on experience

Location:  Brighton, UK

Reports to:  Head of PR

Hours:  Full-time, 37.5 hours per week

Contact:  jobs@icopartners.com

Just a quick post to let everyone know that Thomas and me are attending Nordic Game up North in Malmo this week. Thomas will be speaking on Thursday 24th May at 2pm in a panel  about game financing. Hope to see many of you there!

We all managed to avoid the GDC flu but are still pretty quiet for now, waiting for a time when the workload eases up and we can blog more frequently again. TO hold you over a bit until then, here are the presentations from the lectures Diane and I delivered during the week of the GDC.

In chronological order, here are the slides from my presentation during the Social and Online Game summit of the GDC:

I ran out of time and couldn’t cover the case studies in the end, so even if you attended you should find a few extra details in here.

Diane lectured on Business Models: current trends and perspective for the future. She didn’t run out of time, and some of the slides don’t speak for themselves very well, but you may still find the presentation useful: