Come work with us ! ICO is looking for an experienced German native to join its media relations team providing PR services and consulting on some of the best online games in Europe. The position is based in Brighton, UK, and all other information is below. If you’re interested, send your CV to jobs@icopartners.com !

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That’s Farewell in German. Exactly a year ago, Martin joined ICO Partners as the first non-partner employee. It was a big step for us and quite a big risk for him. I remember telling him that there was a chance that the growth we were predicting would not happen and that it wasn’t a “safe” position, especially considering his very secured role at NCsoft at the time. The fact that he actually accepted the offer and made the leap of faith for us meant a lot to me.

We are now a year later, a lifetime at the speed of things these days, and Martin has decided to go back. Back to his first love and vocation, community management. While he had some opportunities to work on that field for some of our clients, that wasn’t the core of his role and it seems the calling is making itself known to him again. But he is also going back to Germany. After 6 years abroad, mostly in England, another calling, possibly cultural, most likely culinary, has made itself heard and won. Read the rest of this entry »

Next week, Julien and I will be attending the Nordic Game conference in Malmö. We will be there from the Tuesday to the Thursday, listening to the lectures, meeting with existing and future partners, but we should still have a fair amount of time if you want to come and have a chat with us.

I will also be sitting in a panel at 3pm on the Investment and Funding Day (an invite only event) on the Tuesday prior to the conference as well as at the Funding Hotspots panel on Wednesday. That’s at 11:30 in the Stockholm room and I am looking forward sharing my views with David Gardner and Ilkka Paananen on the topic under Fred Hasson‘s direction.

Vi ses nästa vecka!

As a follow-up from my previous blog post, intentionally quite theoretical, I thought I would give two very specific examples of what I consider good development to push the service side of a game.

While a lot can be done to improve the quality of the service of a game, I really believe that it is when a company is dedicating its most precious resource (developers) on pushing the level of the service quality that you know it has a genuine will to develop a service strategy. More than, say, opening a dedicated Customer Support department with hundreds of dedicated staff and limit the developers to only build new content and gameplay features.

It may be biased by my own personal experience, but I have seen a bit too often CS departments used as a stop gap for development shortcomings. It is too common to see a bug left unfixed by the development team, that would require a couple of days of an engineer’s time at worst, to have hundreds of hours of CS staff spent hotfixing the issue. But I digress.

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The recently launched RIFT, a big-budget subscription MMO, has been offering a very deep discount for 3- and 6-months subscriptions set up early (the Founder pricing, normally valid for the first 2 weeks after release, which has been extended to the end of March). Discounts for longer subscriptions are the norm in the industry, and such an offer has been proposed before by other games. These limited offer at a very low price are really interesting. Read the rest of this entry »