GDC09 lecture teaser

GDC is now only a few weeks away, and we are busy planning meetings and giving some final touches to the lecture.

As a reminder, we will be speaking at GDC, during the Worlds in Motion Summit. The session is on the 23rd of March, at 4.15pm, in the North Hall (room 132).

We actually wanted to share here a teaser of the many topics that the session is going delve into. A lot of the focus is on explaining Europe and the market of online games in Europe and how it is different from the North American market.

There is obvious, to start with, with the fact that everybody doesn’t speak English in Europe, as the many languages is the most obvious challenge coming to mind. Here is a map representing the level of English across Europe, with, for each country, the percentage of people who said yes to the question “Is your English good enough to have a conversation?”:

And we would argue as well that if you can have a conversation in English, it doesn’t mean you want to or have a knowledge good enough to actually be comfortable doing it. But those differences go beyond different languages being spoken. Cultures are different. Player behaviours and expectation are different.

Here is an example that illustrates this, the World of Warcraft servers per type in Europe and in the US:

There is more demand for PvP in Europe it appears, even if only by 10%.  The fact alone that a difference exists is actually quite key as far as the European market is concerned. It means you cannot translate 100% of what is being done in the US for instance to the European audience. This doesn’t even show the differences inside Europe itself, which we’ll be developing during the talk. There might some topics that will work in a similar way, but there will probably as many that won’t.  Catering for Europe properly is a good strategy as you will improve your long term user retention and lower the acquisition barrier.

If this glimpse hasn’t sparked any interest, know that we will also talk about much more: payment systems, Latin as an official language, game ratings, the many definitions of Europe even Europeans don’t understand, the subtle differences between American English and British English, the main local operators, the main local developers, why Germans don’t get French humour, why the French despise German humour, the local Free 2 play market, the relative political correctness of beheading characters, French keyboards and Superman (and perhaps more importantly, Green Lantern). If none of those topics is sexy enough to convince you to attend, the presentation has a slide talking about booth babes. German booth babes.

If you will miss the session, feel free to use the form and contact us so we can meet later that week.

Tags: Conference, ICO Partners, Latin, Map, Superman, WOW

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