Here is Part Two of our retrospective for 2011 and what we have been doing for the past year.

Every year, we take the opportunity during holiday down time to reflect on what we have done in the previous 12 months, and to plan a little bit for the coming year. We’re just about to undertake our formal 2012 planning now, so I thought I’d share some of our findings about 2011.

We do a range of different kinds of work, so it can sometimes be a challenge to explain, but maybe splitting the summary into two parts will help to reduce confusion! In this post, I will talk about the consulting and the market intelligence work we did last year (as they often go hand in hand). In a future post, I will talk about our media relations activity.

So, looking back on what we did for clients under the consulting umbrella, there was a lot of variety:

Consulting missions like these are often accompanied by market intelligence requests which allow us to provide evidence for our recommendations and provide clients with a global perspective. We’re currently trying to make our market intelligence work more accessible — this is an important objective for us for 2012. In the meantime, here’s a taster of  the 2011 reports we delivered to clients:

• State of the browser games market in Europe

• State of the kids and teens online game market in Europe

• State of online FPS games in Europe

• Kids and teens online games publishing best practices

• State of online strategy games in Europe

• State of client-based MMO games in France

And of course, there’s our report on European Office Locations for Online Games Companies. After being repeatedly asked for this kind of information last year, we finally saw the light and bundled it into a commercial report, now for sale on our website.

That’s about all for our consulting in 2011, and we’re excited about this year of interesting research and diverse missions — it’s already well underway! If you would like to know more about how we work, please feel free to get in touch.

2011 was another really good year for us, if a bit of an emotional roller coaster with both Martin and Julien leaving for greener pastures (not sure that Julien is finding Sweden greener than Ireland, but you get the idea!). We’ve also recently welcomed several new members of the PR team that we’ve been remiss in not mentioning before now. This will be fixed Soon™, at which time you’ll learn more about (in order of appearance) Nora, Katja and Gemma. But that’s another post.

We’ve got a lot coming up in 2012. More clients (probably), more market research (definitely), more things to share with all of you. And we hope, more new encounters, more surprising games, and more fun for everyone.

All of this to say that we also wish you all loads of wonderful things for this coming new year!

Visual designed for ICO by Beatoa – as were the previous years’ designs

This morning I gave a lecture entitled “Past, present and future of online games in Europe” and, as usual, I am sharing the slides over here and on slideshare:

If you want to meet in Busan, don’t hesitate to get in touch, we still have a few meeting slots available. Alternatively, you can also drop by our booth in the B2B area, it is at A-07.

And a last thing as I have your attention, we have just opened our official page on Google Plus. Feel free to add us there.

Over the past couple of years, we have worked with many clients on projects to open a local office in Europe. They all had different objectives, budgets and priorities but with time, we were able to discern some patterns. Much of the information we collected for them and, in some cases, the recommendations we made were based on the same basic criteria.

Of course, each company is unique, and what matters the most for one will not be very important for another, ultimately leading to a different decision. But the dataset was almost the same, and we have re-purposed it into a commercial report, available for sale on our website for anyone interested.

The report is about 34 pages long. About a third of it is dedicated to general data on European countries, while the rest of the report is dedicated to detailed descriptions of our most recommended locations across the 6 most popular countries for European offices (France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and the UK), including general appeal of the location, accessibility and cost of living.

This report is pretty important for us, because it is the first in a series of commercial reports we’ll be offering for sale on the website. We have always been about sharing our expertise widely to help companies make the right decisions about starting up in Europe, and while we are happy to share our knowledge openly (at conferences and speaking engagements, for example), we also need to pay our bills. We are very aware that not every company has the budget to cover consulting fees, but we hope that some will be able to buy the report and benefit from it. If it leads to further consulting work for us, that’s great too!

So without further ado, I’m pleased to present ‘European Office Locations‘! Stay tuned for the next in our series, coming soon.

More than a year ago, as ICO Partners expanded its business, I was very happy to get the opportunity to offer Julien a position with us. When he joined, we knew that before the end of 2011 he would have to take personal decisions that might be incompatible with continuing to work with us. Even despite knowing this, when he came to me this summer to tell me that he would be leaving ICO at the end of October (yes, that’s this week), I didn’t want to believe it.

So, we have prepared for it, the team has been growing and new ICOers will be joining soon to complete the team. But I will miss Julien very much. He brought us a lot and improved our work — obviously in the area of PR activities, but in many other ways too. I am very proud of the legacy he is leaving with us. He is incredibly professional and thorough, with the perfect personality to work within a team.

Before this post starts too look too much like a LinkedIn recommendation, I have to add that, more importantly, Julien is a great friend, and while working with friends adds a lot to the boost you get from your job, I take equal comfort in knowing that we had a great time together and that him moving on has nothing to do with ICO’s perspectives and upcoming projects – it’s just the best move to support what should matter more than work: his family.

So please join me in wishing him all the best in his future adventures with Mr Snowy Badger (which I hear is 265% more badass than a honey badger).

This week, for some reason I don’t understand, my brain was fired up at night, I couldn’t sleep and that idea came back to haunt me. So, I spent a couple of hours with LinkedIn and here is the result, a year after Realtime Worlds shut down (maybe that’s my subconscious at work here).

Methodology (sort of)

The method I used is very simple and a bit flawed, but by the time I realized that, I had done most of the data mining and was too lazy to start over. I went in LinkedIn, used the advanced search and looked for anyone who worked at Realtime Worlds in the past. I will obviously miss anyone who hasn’t a linked account, and will include anyone who had left before the studio shut down. The search has to be done per country, and I didn’t search *all* of them but I covered the most important countries in Europe, North America, Canada, South Korea and Japan.

I grouped employees by “job category”: biz/publishing/QA (one of my early mistakes — I should have made QA its own category considering how many people fall under it), producers, game designers, artists (including audio artists), coders. In a few instances, I made calls that are questionable (I put all the IT/admin staff in publishing for instance), but I was consistent doing so and I don’t believe that drastically changes the results.

The results

There are 352 people on LinkedIn who state they used to work for Realtime Worlds. RTW used to have an office in the USA, so it is impossible (without a lot of painful research) to know how many of those currently living there moved from the UK. I will assume that they were all already in the US when working for RTW. The same is true for the employees currently based in South Korea. Everyone else, I think we can assume has relocated to a new country within the year after they left RTW. Here is the repartition per country:

So basically, 90% of RTW employees remained in their own country. Unsurpisingly, the countries that attracted the RTW talent are either very strong in online (Germany, Iceland) or offer very strong tax incentives (Canada). I didn’t have any expectations when starting this research, but this seems like decent retention.

However, despite being based in the UK, I tend to have a more global approach and global concerns, and I am more worried about talent leaving the industry altogether than I am of foreign brain-drain.

Even if it is unfortunate when a country loses talent, at least the industry as a whole is doing OK. With that in mind, I did some segmentation per industry, with the following groups: Games industry, Finance (totally biased choice, I was expecting it to be a strong competitor, especially for coders), Other IT (I included middleware providers in the game industry – so anyone employed by Unity wouldn’t be here for instance), Other industry (none of the above) and ‘status unknown’, which covers basically 2 cases: anyone still working at RTW according to their profile (they could be unemployed or happily working somewhere else, we just don’t know) and anyone who is freelancing. ‘Freelancing’ is really vague – freelancers could be very successfully working in the games industry, or barely making a living, or freelancing in the games industry and the cinema industry or anything else. Because it’s so open-ended, I decided to set freelancers apart. There are also a few cases of people saying they are looking for a job, but it could be that they haven’t updated recently or they are still looking now, so I put them there.

All that said, here is the result worldwide:

So, the game industry has lost 37% of the RTW pool – and that’s a scarier picture to me. Arguably, it is not THAT bad. It could have been a lot worse. Next chart is the same, but only for the UK employees and I added two categories, eeGeo and APB released, to check the number of people who found work through the spin-offs of RTW.

First, the UK numbers are quite similar to the WW numbers – it makes sense as this is the biggest group of the survey. There is a bit less Other IT (RTW US employees were more prone to switch to this segment) and more Unknown status (not a good thing in my book), but the ratio of retention of the game industry is roughly the same.

What is a lot more interesting is to note that the RTW spin-offs only cover 12% against 50% for other game companies. It is by no means a small number. Not having gathered that data, I can’t say which company really helped there, but top of my head, going through the profiles, it is mostly Jagex, CCP and Codemasters. Kudos to them, I am sure they were quite happy to be able to get staff with online experience, a profile hard to get in the very-console oriented UK industry.

The last charts I want to share are the ones highlighting where each job category ended up in in terms of industry.

So, that’s about it. I have put all the data in a google spreadsheet if anyone wants to play with them – as it is imported from Excel, charts won’t look pretty. I should also add the disclaimer that I did this on the spur of the moment for fun, and doing this analysis seriously would require a bit more thinking through beforehand and more rigorous process (for instance, several formulas are likely to break).

GOOGLE SPREADSHEET

Expect a very different topic next time I have insomnia.

27th of September, Frankfurt – Gameplaces

Diane will be speaking there, specifically on games and investments.

10th to 13th of October, Austin – GDC Online

This is an usual rendez-vous for us as we will be meeting with partners as well as sitting in sessions, checking for the trends of the online space.

7th to 9th of November, Daegu – KGC 2011

I (Thomas) will be speaking at KGC 2011, ahead of the Gstar. I present a general overview of the European market for online games. And (hopefully), it should the opportunity for us to update the aging presentations we have on slideshare on that topic.

10th to 13th of November, Busan – Gstar

We will have a booth in the B2B area of the Gstar. More details on this when we are closer to the date, but you can expect that if you want to meet us, it will be easy.

6th to 8th of december, Paris – Game Connection Europe

Another of our regular haunts, we have just confirmed that we will be there again. The event has moved to Paris (an excellent move in my opinion) and now also has a conference component. If you are not familiar with the event format, just think speed dating between publishers, developers and service providers  of the games industry.

Below is the description of the profile we would be looking for, along with the responsibilities this person would handle.

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

Skills and requirements:

●Graduate in public relations, journalism, marketing or related programme

●Native French speaker

●Fluent in English (other European language a plus)

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

●Autonomous, with good organisational and planning skills

●Able to work to short deadlines and under pressure

●Strong communication skills, both spoken and written

●Sound judgement in dealing with media

●Ability to work with and analyse data

●Self-motivation and sense of initiative

●Strong business acumen

●Interest and knowledge of online games

●Skills and experience in online marketing is a strong plus

Responsibilities:

●Managing direct relationships with journalists in several European territories

●Writing and/or translation of Press Releases and Media Alerts

●Developing and updating media lists and contact databases

●Participating in daily media relations tasks, including collection and analysis of press coverage, reporting, organization of events, working with related service providers to support projects, etc.

●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: PR and Marketing Manager

Hours: Full-time, 37.5 hours per week

If you are a motivated person passionate about online games, and the above description did not scare you, please don’t hesitate to send us a CV and cover letter at jobs@icopartners.com

A bientôt!