12-14 February 2013
Lectures at Casual Connect are programmed to focus on cutting edge topics in the casual games space. On February 12-14 2013, over 1600 industry professionals came to Hamburg for the 8th Casual Connect in Western Europe. If you attended lectures at Casual Connect and want to see your favorite sessions again, or if you could not make it to Hamburg this time and want to see what you have missed, press the 
icon to watch videos and download slides (all content is FREE!).
Conference content was programmed by a set of industry advisors.
If you would like to submit a session proposal for Casual Connect Europe 2014, please submit here.
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Hall F:
Innovative Business Ideas/Browser MarketsEmcees: Jessica Sachs, Big Fish and Jan Wagner, Cliffhanger Productions
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From Keyboards to Fingertips - Rethink Game Design!
Jens BEGEMANN, CEO, Wooga
Jens founded Wooga in 2009. With around 50m active players per month, Wooga is one of the most popular social and mobile games developers in the world. Jens is enthusiastic about people, play and technology. Guiding a team of talented people to develop quality games of a social nature fulfills one of his lifelong ambitions. Before creating Wooga, Jens was Chief Product Officer & Member of the Management Board at Jamba (Jamster), where he aided the company in becoming a world leader in mobile entertainment products.
[Email Jens]
One thing has become clear in the computer industry over the past four decades: UI, not technology, governs large leaps in adoption. In the first age of personal computing, keyboard-centric character-based UI's limited access to only those sufficiently motivated (and antisocial) to suffer such dramatic abstraction of the world we live in. In the 2nd age, GUI's and a "Mouse" opened the usage of personal computers to a much broader audience and enabled a first change in game genres. Today, we are poised on the brink of the 3rd age. With touchscreen devices, the mouse has been replaced by our fingertips and games can be played by everyone, anytime, anywhere. Join Jens Begemann, CEO and Founder of Wooga, as he beholds this new age in game genres and proposes why this new UI standard is a revolutionary, not evolutionary, influence on our industry.
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Best Practices for Creating and Distributing Games Cross Platform
Tommy PALM, Mobile Guru, King.com
With over two decades of experience as a game designer and entrepreneur, Tommy Palm has earned the title “Mobile Guru” at leading casual social games company, King.com. He works in the forefront of the company’s prevalent cross-platform games initiatives taking games from social to mobile. During the more than 10 years developing mobile games at Jadestone, which he founded in 1999, his team has been awarded nine international awards and numerous nominations. In 2009, Jadestone’s mobile department spawned off into Fabrication Games, where Tommy was President. The company went on to be acquired by King.com in early 2012.
[Email Tommy]
Games are going to be accessible on the screen that is most convenient at any given point. The design challenge has gone from porting between different resolutions to creating a unison game experience between completely different devices. Games will increasingly have the ability to be picked up where they were left off in the queue and continued in the comfort of the living room. Learn what King.com did to become the leader in Social Casual Games in less time than it takes to build a console game.
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Power Your Games with Adobe Gaming SDK | 10:00 - 10:50
Tom KRCHA, Gaming Evangelist, Adobe Systems
Tom Krcha works as a Gaming Evangelist in Adobe and speaks regularly at conferences in USA, Europe and Asia. He started with Flash and programming more than 12 years ago and worked for interactive studios, streaming companies, telco providers and recently he is focusing on game development.
[Email Tom]
From Stage3D development on the desktop with Flash Player, to cross-platform mobile development with Adobe AIR, Adobe is shaping Flash to be the console of the web. Learn about the new Adobe Gaming SDK, what it offers for 2D and 3D game developers. See Adobe Scout - the advanced performance profiling tool - in action, check some of the latest Stage3D based GPU accelerated games and find out what's coming in Flash runtimes and Flash Pro.
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Staying Lean and Vibrant: Secrets To Developing A World Class Work Place
Michael KALKOWSKI, Co-founder & Managing Director, GameDuell
Michael Kalkowski is co-founder, Managing and Creative Director of GameDuell and is responsible for the company’s games, websites, and player communities. He has a passion for creating great teams and products that people love. Michael started his ventures as a serial entrepreneur 13 years ago as a founder of dooyoo.com. In his previous life, he worked as an international product and marketing consultant. He holds several business degrees from Germany and an MBA from Eastern Illinois University (USA).
[Email Michael]
Michael Kalkowski will examine best practices of games companies and teams that are known for a great work environment in both Silicon Valley and Europe, as well as companies from outside the games industry. By demonstrating processes that GameDuell follows in order to maintain creativity and drive amongst employees, Michael will show how to survive the impact of corporate fast growth and high speed technology changes on a team's culture.
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Small but Smart! Drive Success with International PR
John TYRRELL, Creative Director, Cosmocover
John’s games industry career began in 1999 with the UK launch of Nintendo’s Pokémon while at London PR agency Cake. After leaving the role of worldwide PR Director at Atari in 2009, he became Creative Director at games PR and marketing agency Cosmocover. On the side, John works for new cross-platform game studio oOki, writes about games and technology for Intel’s Software Adrenaline magazine, and lectures in digital marketing at business schools in Lyon, France.
[Email John]
You have no budget but you need to talk to the European press? How can you connect with the press and what are the mistakes to avoid? Learn how to create your own international PR campaign in 5 steps illustrated with concrete examples of game launch.
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The Cross-platform Experience Challenge
Andres BOU, Co-founder & CEO, Social Point
Horacio MARTOS, Co-founder & CEO, Social Point
[Email Andres]
[Email Horacio]
Playing the same game from different platforms and devices is a great experience, no one can doubt that. Well done, it can drive lots of benefits, higher user engagement and better monetization. At the same time, it can be tricky and challenging for a company. Come and discover the challenges and the benefits from cross-platform experience in social games.
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Snail Bob: Success on Mobile and Flash
Andrey KOVALISHIN, Independent Developer, Hunter Hamster
Andrey Kovalishin is an indie developer from Russia and together with his friend, Andrey founded Hunter Hamster. The studio has released Snail Bob, a popular flash title (Best Indie Game award at Flash GAMM Kyiv 2010) and its successful mobile version.
[Email Andrey]
What does it take to succeed both on Flash and Mobile markets? Andrey Kovalishin, a creator of the successful Snail Bob franchise, knows the answer.
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Virtual Goods, Morning Coffee and Location - How This Mix Can Help You Retain and Monetize
Iryna LIASHCHUK, Head of Marketing, Zigi
Iryna Liashchuk leads business development and marketing at Zigi, a California-based company that has built a tool for game developers to earn revenue and reward their players each time they visit a retail location, and for retailers to drive foot traffic to their stores. Iryna's previous position was Head of Marketing at CloudMade, the creator of a cloud-based location platform currently serving GPS and mobile phone manufactures, the automotive industry and ISVs, and also being leveraged in the Zigi offering. Prior to CloudMade, Iryna's professional duties varied from planning advertising for global consumer brands to business administration and marketing for cutting-edge technology startups - areas that now fully converge in her current role at Zigi.
[Email Iryna]
Ever wondered how to make more players act like "whales" - get deeply engaged with your game, keep coming back to it and bring you a lot of revenue? Some of the most successful developers have already figured out the rules: make it easy to get virtual goods and reconnect with users as they perform their offline routines - get coffee, grab lunch, go to movies, etc. The session will show what effect on monetization and user retention can be achieved by giving a larger number of players access to premium game content through location-based sponsorships that naturally fit into the users' daily activities.
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Single Screen Metrics in a Multi-screen World: Following Consumers in Changing Old Habits
Peter WARMAN, CEO, Newzoo
Peter Warman is Managing Director and Founder of Newzoo, the games market research and consulting firm, servicing clients across all game business models. After being responsible for sales and business development at Europe’s largest interactive agency (LBi), he was responsible for internet development at Reed Business and operated as commercial director for a MMO for kids.
[Email Peter]
As games increasingly become continuous services rather than products, game companies prioritize metrics such as cost of acquisition, conversion, ARPPU, lifetime value etc. This single-screen focus is risky and as cost of acquisition rises, so does confusion among investors who lack a future outlook. Peter Warman’s keynote will place metrics into perspective of the total picture, outlining alternative ways to understand a changing industry that is ultimately controlled by consumer behavior.
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Vlambeer - The Indie Business Model
Rami ISMAIL, Business & Development, Vlambeer
Rami Ismail is the Business & Development Guy at Vlambeer, an award-winning Dutch independent game studio known best for its hit game Super Crate Box, LUFTRAUSERS, Ridiculous Fishing, GUN GODZ, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter & Radical Fishing. Also known for developing presskit(), a popular free marketing tool for indie developers. Rami exclusively drinks cane sugar Coca Cola.
[Email Rami]
Rami Ismail of award-winning Dutch independent studio Vlambeer talks about the hidden influence of indie: while the creative prowess of the scene is widely accepted, the business innovations are less commonly discussed. This talk will identify and discuss the many aspects of business that indie has revolutionized, what influence those changes have had and why you should pay attention.
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Successful Premium Casual Games
Jessica SACHS, Director Developer Relations, Big Fish
A part of Big Fish since 2006, Jessica Sachs is a Director of Developer Relations. Jessica actively seeks out game developers who have the potential to develop successful casual games. Jessica works to establish and foster long-term relationships with these developers. This allows the developers to utilize Big Fish's production and research services to improve the quality of their games.
[Email Jessica]
Come listen as Big Fish walks the audience through how to ensure success in the premium casual space through development of great content that easily translates to other platforms and resonates strongly with the end user. Understand the features that customers love and hate, review case study examples from some of the top studios partnered with Big Fish on their hits, misses, and how they learned to make great games.
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Ecosystems & Platform Patterns
Jan BECKERS, CEO & Founder, HitFox Group
Jan Beckers has co-founded 5 successful companies before starting the HitFox Group. HitFox Group is focused on building and acquiring synergetic businesses in the fields of game distribution and user acquisition. Its portfolio companies include ad2games, AppLift and Game Finder. Previously, Beckers has been Co-Founder and Managing Director of SponsorPay, Madvertise and Absolventa.
[Email Jan]
New platforms always come with new challenges for game publishers and developers. On first sight, those challenges might look novel and unique. But looking beyond the surface, there are surprisingly similar patterns that drive the evolution of different gaming platforms and the surrounding ecosystems. Jan Beckers analyzes patterns in the development of browser- and social-games, drawing conclusions about possible future-trends.
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LUNCH SESSION: Tips for Making a Good Game Great | 12:00 - 12:50
Oleg PRIDIUK, Technical Evangelist, Unity Technologies
Oleg has been breaking mobiles in Unity since Unity iPhone 1.0.1 and grew up to a default goto person for everything mobile. He is using his technical skills along with an irresistible charm and charisma to advocate Eastern Europe of Unity and vice versa.
[Email Oleg]
How much of your game is ready when you're done with the game play? How do you develop, fund, publish your game? Let's see some Unity production examples to answer these questions and see what can be improved.
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LUNCH SESSION: Profitably Partnering with Social Good: Good for the World, Your Brand, and Your Bottom Line | 12:30 - 12:50
Parker CROCKFORD, Commercial Director, Playmob
Parker heads commercial relationships with partners for Playmob. He has 10 years of fundraising, business development and operations experience across many different sectors, and has spent the last 3 years working in London within the digital and tech start-up community.
[Email Parker]
In this session, Parker will illustrate why giving is good for your game, your brand and increasing engagement with your current and new players. He will present data from research and case studies showing that players’ spend increased by 300 percent when running charitable campaigns. Remember Zynga's seed campaign for Haiti when $ 1.5 million was raised in 5 days? 80 percent of those spending on the campaign were non-paying players! Parker will show you how you can do the same for your business.
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LUNCH SESSION: Hype vs Real Deal | 12:00-12:50
Andreas VAN DE CASTEL, Manager Gaming Partnerships Northern EU and CEE, Facebook
Magnus ALM, CEO, Free Lunch Design
Brett SEYLER, Chairman & Founder, Kerosene Games
Jasper SMITH, CEO, PlayJam
Moderator: David NIXON, Founder, Gemini Hive
Andreas van de Castel is Manager of Gaming Partnerships for Northern Europe & CEE at Facebook. In this role he works closely with key game developers across Europe. Prior to that, he was with Facebook's Platform Partnerships and International Growth teams. Before joining Facebook in March 2009, Andreas held several Product Management and Consulting positions in the Internet and ICT sector.
[Email Andreas]
Magnus successfully transformed Free Lunch Design from being an advergame company with clients such as Disney, Marvel and Paramount, to a self funded social games studio reaching millions of users each month. Originally trained as a chef Magnus is as passionate about games as he is about the culinary arts.
[Email Magnus]
Brett was an early employee at industry pioneers GarageGames and Unity Technologies who now spends most of his time working with a handful of companies that he's invested in, primarily in games and related tech. Most recently he created Kerosene, a new game publisher for very high-end mobile games.
[Email Brett]
Jasper Smith is a pioneer in interactive media and currently the CEO of PlayJam. During a career spanning 20 years, Smith has developed a number of successful media and tech businesses. Smith re-acquired PlayJam from Open TV in 2009, believing the shift to Internet connected TVs would allow PlayJam to become the premier destination for games on TV. PlayJam recently launch GameStick, a mini games console, on Kickstarter.
[Email Jasper]
David is Co-Founder and CEO of "Gemini Hive, Inc." - a boutique investment, advisory, and consulting firm focused on helping small social and social mobile game companies get started and find growth.
[Email David]
The future is rushing at us faster than ever. Our panel of experts pull out their crystal balls to predict future trends.
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Our Kickstarter was saved by an image: FORCED Case Study
Steffen Kabbelgaard GRØNNING, CEO, BetaDwarf
Steffen is the CEO of a 2-year-old 12-person company BetaDwarf from Denmark, and is currently working on the FORCED RPG.
[Email Steffen]
A postmortem of a successful Kickstarter campaign for the indie game FORCED. Many different PR approaches were tried during the campaign, from crowd-fan pr and live streaming to social viral efforts. Come and find out which worked and which did not!
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"GreenSight City“ – How to Combine Serious Gaming into A Social Game
Thorsten UNGER, CEO, Zone 2 Connect
Thorsten Unger is an expert for Serious Gaming and CEO of Zone 2 Connect, one of the leading and most awarded serious games companies in Germany.
[Email Thorsten]
The social game GreenSight City was invented by Daimler to communicate urban mobility concepts such as car sharing and e-mobility through a game. Nominated for the Deutsche Entwicklerpreis as “Best Social Game”, the game managed the approach to combine communication and gaming.
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Emerging Strategies to User Acquisition | 1:00-1:50
Jussi LAAKKONEN, CEO, Applifier
Erlend CHRISTOFFERSEN, Director of Customer Acquisition, Supercell
Eric SEUFERT, Head of Marketing & User Acquisition, Grey Area Labs
Billy SHIPP, Vice President of Growth, Iddiction
Stefan BIELAU, Founder & CEO, Stefan Bielau Consulting
Gilad ROTEM, Head of Sales & Product, InGaming
Moderator: Dean TAKAHASHI, Lead Writer, GamesBeat
Jussi Laakkonen is the founder and CEO of Applifier, where he focuses in helping game developers grow their games. As the leader of what the press dubbed "the rebel alliance", Jussi rallied Facebook game developers together with cross-promotion and grew the network of games to reach over 150 million monthly active users. Jussi and Applifier are now focused on building authentic social discovery for mobile games with Everyplay, that lets players share their most memorable game replays with friends and fans, and driving user acquisition and monetization with Impact video ads. Jussi tweets actively at @jussil about games and entrepreneurship.
[Email Jussi]
Erlend joined Supercell Fall 2011, just in time for the launch of their first title. He is now based at their US office in San Francisco. Previously he has worked for FOX Mobile Group (formerly Jamba!) and CityDeal (acquired by Groupon) in Berlin, Germany.
[Email Erlend]
Eric Seufert is a quantitative marketing specialist with a keen interest in applying predictive analytics and statistical methods to user acquisition. He serves as the Head of Marketing and User Acquisition at Grey Area Labs, the makers of Shadow Cities, and held previous roles in strategy and business intelligence at Skype and Digital Chocolate.
[Email Eric]
Billy Shipp is the VP of Growth at Iddiction and is responsible for distribution and monetization. Previously, Billy ran user acquisition for Flixster, driving adoption for the leading movies discovery platform. With over ten years of media experience, Billy has built operating teams for companies including Sharethrough, Current TV and VideoEgg. He lives in Palo Alto, CA with his wife and son.
[Email Billy]
Stefan Bielau has more than 11 years of experience working in the media industry. Currently he helps companies to achieve their goals in terms of mobile revenues, content distribution and digital expansion. His clients include companies like Lookout Inc., HAILO, simyo, ImmobilienScout24 and 90elf. Prior to his consulting assignments, he founded dailyme, the leading application for mobile video and TV in the German-speaking area.
Stefan has been in various executive management positions in Poland and Germany and invests in early-stage startups. He is an avid user of social media tools. Feel free to follow him via www.twitter.com/StefanBielau, connect via www.linkedin.com/in/StefanBielau or read his blog about App Store Optimization www.appstoreoptimization.tumblr.com
[Email Stefan]
Gilad is head of Sales and Product at InGaming, a leading targeted User Acquisition network, sister company to the major online gambling super affiliate, Incomate. Gilad is leading the company’s expansion into the Casual Gaming industry and oversees the company’s client base, strategic partnerships and customer relations management.
[Email Gilad]
Dean Takahashi is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. He previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked.
[Email Dean]
User acquisition tactics and strategies are evolving into a sophisticated and subtle art as fundamental to successful free-to-play games as great game design, fantastic engagement, value-centric monetization and great performance evaluation tools. Join Jussi Laakkonen of Applifier, Erlend Christoffersen of Supercell, Eric Seufert of Grey Area Labs, Billy Shipp of Iddiction, Stefan Bielau of Stefan Bielau Consulting, Gilad Rotem of InGaming as they discuss, debate, and perhaps even synthesize the "state of the art" of cross-platform games user acquisition. Panel led and moderated by Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat.
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The Russian Bay: Succeeding In The Wild
Sergey BRUI, Co-founder & Managing Director, Vizor Interactive
Sergey Brui is co-founder and Managing Director of the Minsk-based social games developer-Vizor Interactive. At the moment, the company's main title, social farming adventure Zombie Farm (Zombie Island on FB), has 30+ mln players worldwide, with average DAU of one million.
[Email Sergey]
Come hear from a leading Eastern European social games developer how to grow a successful company from scratch, what are pros and cons of Eastern European game development, and what do Russian gamers want.
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Online Games: The Past and the Future through the Eyes of Bigpoint
Heiko HUBERTZ, Founder, Bigpoint
Heiko is the founder and managing director of the Hamburg-based Bigpoint GmbH and San Francisco-based Bigpoint Inc. Founded in 2002 in Düsseldorf, Bigpoint has become the world’s largest portal for browser games and ranks among the top three gaming portals worldwide. Hubertz started Bigpoint GmbH by developing the first game, Hockey Manager, himself. Since its founding, Bigpoint has expanded to 700 employees from 35 nations who utilize cutting-edge technology to develop and operate a diverse range of browser-based games that are enjoyed worldwide by well over 300 million registered players and growing.
[Email Heiko]
Three industry leaders from the biggest players in the market offer their unique view on the past and future of the browser games space. Guided by their extensive experience and their companies’ specific approach they will interpret the current market, its roots in the beginning of browser games and its possible way forward with regards to production and development, marketing and user trends. The three-session set will be topped off with a panel discussion with these influential industry leaders.
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Postmortems
Pheus and Mor
Goal Defense
Dream SymphonyAnton VELMOZHNIY, Co-founder/Developer, Pegas Games
Alexandra SIDORINA, Ideologist, Dynamic Pixels
George ZARKUA, Developer
Anton likes to play games, mostly RPGs. He was a student some time ago and then stopped to become a game developer of indie games. After one year, he came to Gameloft, working on iPhone demo versions of Gameloft games. After one year, he created his own company with a Gameloft co-worker.
[Email Anton]
Alexandra joined the Goal Defense development team a year ago. She focused her attention on the improvement of gameplay and in-game business model of monetization and became an expert of low-budget game PR.
[Email Alexandra]
An indie game developer with 4 years of hard knock experience, he is the artist and game designer of Nude Hunter, Ragdoll ball, Dream Symphony, and Spicy Story.
[Email George]
Pheus and Mor: Learn how important storyline is in games and not to use flash effects too much!
Goal Defense: The developers will share the story of how they came across (absolutely accidentally) the idea of a sports tower defense; how much fun they had drawing and animating the main characters; and, finally, how they managed to introduce familiar TD gameplay features into humorous, and absolutely untypical for the genre, setting and atmosphere of sport.
Dream Symphony: Discover the development process behind the launch of the music game and the role of music and sounds in indie games. What should one do to work on the game simultaneously?
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Online Games: The Past and the Future through the Eyes of Aeria Games
Dr. Pascal ZUTA, CEO, Aeria Games & Entertainment
Pascal Zuta is the CEO at Aeria Games Europe GmbH and oversees Aeria Games European business. Aeria Games the fastest growing publisher of free to play client games. Their success is based on their market-leading analytics system processing data from more than 20 client games as well as 15 browser games.
[Email Pascal]
Three industry leaders from the biggest players in the market offer their unique view on the past and future of the browser games space. Guided by their extensive experience and their companies’ specific approach they will interpret the current market, its roots in the beginning of browser games and its possible way forward with regards to production and development, marketing and user trends. The three-session set will be topped off with a panel discussion with these influential industry leaders.
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Gaming Insiders: A Chat with Rob Winkler, CEO of 5th Planet Games | 2:00-2:50
Robert WINKLER, CEO, 5th Planet Games
David KAYE, Founder, Gaming Insiders
Robert Winkler is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of 5th Planet Games, a leading independent game development studio. Robert oversees all game design for the company, including development of such hits as Dawn of the Dragons, Legacy of Heroes, and more. When not spending time with his family, he enjoys playing video games and planning world domination.
[Email Robert]
David has been building games since high school. He started his career as a game designer and co-founder at Iron Realms Entertainment. He has since played founding roles at companies across the online, mobile and social gaming sectors. Today, David runs Gaming Insiders, a private community for the entrepreneurs and executives who are building the new games industry.
[Email David]
Join David Kaye, Founder of Gaming Insiders, as he sits with Rob Winkler to discuss the startup and evolution of one of the hottest new "indie" game developers, 5th Planet Games. Sudden success, particularly in a relatively new market like mid-core free to play games, comes with a host of challenges and more than a few grey hairs. David and Rob will explore Rob's hard-won insights and learnings during the rapid growth of 5th Planet, particularly those around adapting his organization rapidly to changing needs and establishing a lasting identity beyond the first success.
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Postmortems
Wake Up the Box 4
Zombotron 2
Transmorpher
Evgeniy KARATAEV, Flash Developer
Zakhar GADZHIEV, Developer
Alexander KALINOVYCH, Head of Development Team, FlashRush Games
Evgeniy is a 28-year-old indie flash game developer. He is making flash games since 2006. His most popular games are Splitter and Wake Up the Box series.
[Email Evgeniy]
Zakhar Gadzhiev is an authorized delegate of Anton Karlov, working as Flash and iOS developer.
[Email Zakhar]
Alexander Kalinovych leads the FlashRush Games development team from Ukraine. The team was founded 4 years ago and engaged in RIA development. For the past two years they have been developing flash games and have released more than 10 games.
[Email Alexander]
Wake Up the Box 4: This session will cover the development process, mistakes and lessons learned in making Wake Up the Box 4.
Zombotron 2: In this postmortem, Zakhar is going share about tricks and tips of developing, and also talk about the success of the game during the first 3 months.
Transmorpher: Alexander will speak about the Transmorpher flash game: creation process, game release, and statistics.
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Browser Games: The Past and the Future Panel Wrap-up | 2:30-3:20
Heiko HUBERTZ, Founder, Bigpoint
Dr. Pascal ZUTA, CEO, Aeria Games & Entertainment
Hendrik KLINDWORTH, Co-founder & Managing Director, InnoGames Moderator: Jan WAGNER, Managing Director, Cliffhanger Productions
Heiko is the founder and managing director of the Hamburg-based Bigpoint GmbH and San Francisco-based Bigpoint Inc. Founded in 2002 in Düsseldorf, Bigpoint has become the world’s largest portal for browser games and ranks among the top three gaming portals worldwide. Hubertz started Bigpoint GmbH by developing the first game, Hockey Manager, himself. Since its founding, Bigpoint has expanded to 700 employees from 35 nations who utilize cutting-edge technology to develop and operate a diverse range of browser-based games that are enjoyed worldwide by well over 300 million registered players and growing.
[Email Heiko]
Pascal Zuta is the CEO at Aeria Games Europe GmbH and oversees Aeria Games European business. Aeria Games the fastest growing publisher of free to play client games. Their success is based on their market leading analytics system processing data from more than 20 client games as well as 15 browser games.
[Email Pascal]
Hendrik Klindworth (29) is Founder and CEO of InnoGames. He began to program when he was 14 years old and entered the online game sphere in 2003, when he created the browser game Tribal Wars together with his brother Eike Klindworth and his school friend Michael Zillmer. In 2007 they founded InnoGames as a consequence of this huge success.
Today InnoGames is a successful developer and publisher of browser and mobile games with more than 100 million registered players and strong growth.
[Email Hendrik]
Jan Wagner has been involved in the industry for almost 20 years with his experience spanning producing, PR and product management along with QA, localization and game design. He was Head of Product Management at Vivendi Universal Games and worked on over 100 titles during this time including Half Life, Warcraft, Empire Earth and Diablo. Trying to get back to the creative side of the industry, he co-founded a consulting agency whose customers included Blizzard Europe, Vivendi Universal, Massive Development, Tilted Mill and JoWooD and worked on titles like SpellForce, Gothic and Ground Control. He went on to found Cliffhanger Productions, a production studio, with his partner Michael Paeck in 2006 trying to support the creation of more original games. Cliffhanger now focuses on premium browser and trans-platform games like it’s upcoming Jagged Alliance Online and new project Shadowrun Online.
Jan is a co-founder of a local initiative called gamearea frankfurtrheinmain, organizes the German industry event browser games forum, teaches game studies at the University of Darmstadt and is jury member for the German Developer’s Award, the German Games Award and the European Innovative Games Award. He never won one of those though.
[Email Jan]
Three industry leaders from the biggest players in the market offer their unique view on the past and future of the browser games space. Guided by their extensive experience and their companies’ specific approach they will interpret the current market, its roots in the beginning of browser games and its possible way forward with regards to production and development, marketing and user trends. The three-session set will be topped off with a panel discussion with these influential industry leaders.
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Postmortems
Gluey - How Simple Concepts Win
Red Ball 4
Ticklebot’s Super Sub HeroSergey BATISHCHEV, Developer
Eugene FEDOSEEV, Developer
Milica ANDJELKOVIC, Co-Founder & Game Artist, & Stefan NIKOLIC, Game Designer/Programmer, Ticklebot
Sergey Batishchev is an indie game developer. He has been an enterprise Java developer and tech lead for 12 years. Still, games and game development has been his hobby for a long time. Now, after a successful launch of his “Gluey” game series, he is finally a full-time indie! Sergey strives to make simple but polished and fun games that appeal even to the most casual gamers.
[Email Sergey]
Eugene Fedoseev is a 27-year-old independent game developer from Russia. He has been playing games since childhood. His educational background is programming, but he also finds himself to be a game designer. He loves his occupation and hopes to create a lot of cool games in the future.
[Email Eugene]
Milica Andjelkovic is a landscape architecture student, born and living in Pancevo, Serbia. She is a co-founder and a game artist of the game making studio Ticklebot . As a part of the Ticklebot duo, she had worked on several projects, includig their breaking browser game Super Sub Hero, to be published in January of 2013.
[Email Milica]
Stefan Nikolic is a game designer and programmer at the game making studio Ticklebot. He graduated in 2011 at the Faculty of Science in Kragujevac, Serbia. During his senior year, he started working for Studio V5 Play on a casual puzzle adventure game called May's Mysteries: The secret of Dragonville, which was released for Nintendo DS and PC.
[Email Stefan]
Gluey: Want to know how to break things in a sequel that worked just fine in the original game? Want to get better at hindering solid mechanics with cumbersome gameplay? Ever wondered if a complete engine rewrite can help you deliver six months later than originally planned? Come and learn how Gluey's simple mechanics attracted 25+ mln players and paid Sergey’s bills for 2 years, despite all these rigorous efforts!
Red Ball 4: Eugene will report to you how he started the Red Ball game series 3 years ago, about his progress from game to game and a detailed account of Red Ball 4's creation process.
Super Sub Hero: “Swan Lake”, the famous classical ballet piece was the team'sinspiration. They were heading for a humoristic, wintery theme, and ended up with a puzzle game with an heroic story and a mellow atmosphere. Even though the concept changed drastically, the core idea of a not too ambitious, brain training game was kept all the way through. Along with every change that was made, they learned to let go, and to question every decision. Planning ahead would have saved them a lot of time, so that was a lesson learned. -
Funding the Dream with Kickstarter
Jasper SMITH, CEO, PlayJam
Jasper Smith is a pioneer in interactive media and currently the CEO of PlayJam. During a career spanning 20 years, Smith has developed a number of successful media and tech businesses. Smith re-acquired PlayJam from Open TV in 2009, believing the shift to Internet connected TVs would allow PlayJam to become the premier destination for games on TV. PlayJam recently launched GameStick, a mini games console, on Kickstarter.
[Email Jasper]
After working on GameStick for almost 12 months, Jasper chose Kickstarter to get this project into the final stage of production. His project kickstarted in January 2013 and was funded in 30 hours. "Hot off the press," he will explain why he chose Kickstarter, what you should be aware of and what he learned along the way. He will give insight into what to do and what not to do to increase chances of making a Kickstarter project successful.
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Postmortems
Jelly Cannon Reloaded
Critical Missions:SWAT - From a Hobby Project to a Viral Success
Intrusion 2
Alexander SINELNIKOV, Indie Developer
Veli-Pekka PIIRAINEN, CEO and Founder, Critical Force Entertainment
Aleksey ABRAMENKO, Developer
Alexander Sinelnikov graduated in 2004 with a Magister of Computer Sciences from the International Science Technic University. He worked as a Flash cartoon animator of political cartoon shorts for six years. Since 2006, Alexander has worked as a Flash and iOS indie developer.
[Email Alexander]
Veli-Pekka Piirainen is CEO and founder of Critical Force Entertainment Ltd, a Finnish startup game studio established in 2012. He is a former studio manager of Supercell North as well as a lecturer and head of Kajak Game Development Lab. Veli-Pekka is also co-founder of NMP Games Ltd.
[Email Veli-Pekka]
Aleksey is an independent game developer from Russia. In 2012, he launched Intrusion 2 on Steam.
[Email Aleksey]
Jelly Cannon Reloaded: Alexander will discuss the details involved in the development of Jelly Cannon Reloaded, as well as lessons learned through the process.
Critical Missions:SWAT is the first real cross-platform FPS MOG, where players are able to compete against each other using PC-web, iOS and Android platforms. It has gained wide popularity and achieved over 6 million downloads and over 200000 DAU so far. This presentation tells how the game was built, what went well, what went wrong and what the future of the game looks like.
Intrusion 2: A short story about Intrusion 2 development, physics, Flash and Steam. -
Game Development Funding | 3:30-4:20
Honor GUNDAY, CEO, Paymentwall
Eric GOLDBERG, Crossover Technologies
Chris TAYLOR, CEO, Gas Powered Games
Jan WAGNER, Managing Director, Cliffhanger Productions
Moderator: Daniel BERNSTEIN, Founder & CEO, UpTap
Before launching Paymentwall, Honor was the CEO of OutCubator, a virtual incubator where he invested in and co-founded innovative startups in Silicon Valley such as Adperk.com, MiNeeds, Rofo.com as well as Zurna.com. Honor graduated with a B.S in Technology Management from Stanford University.
[Email Honor]
Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies. Eric is a 30-year veteran of the game, mobile, and consumer Internet industries, serving in capacities ranging from game designer to executive.
[Email Eric]
Chris Taylor is a computer game designer and entrepreneur most famous for developing Total Annihilation and the Dungeon Siege series and for founding Gas Powered Games.
[Email Chris]
Jan Wagner has been involved in the industry for almost 20 years with his experience spanning producing, PR and product management along with QA, localization and game design. He was Head of Product Management at Vivendi Universal Games and worked on over 100 titles during this time including Half Life, Warcraft, Empire Earth and Diablo. Trying to get back to the creative side of the industry, he co-founded a consulting agency whose customers included Blizzard Europe, Vivendi Universal, Massive Development, Tilted Mill and JoWooD and worked on titles like SpellForce, Gothic and Ground Control. He went on to found Cliffhanger Productions, a production studio, with his partner Michael Paeck in 2006 trying to support the creation of more original games. Cliffhanger now focuses on premium browser and trans-platform games like it’s upcoming Jagged Alliance Online and new project Shadowrun Online.
Jan is a co-founder of a local initiative called gamearea frankfurtrheinmain, organizes the German industry event browser games forum, teaches game studies at the University of Darmstadt and is jury member for the German Developer’s Award, the German Games Award and the European Innovative Games Award. He never won one of those though.
[Email Jan]
Daniel Bernstein is building his second games company, UpTap, having sold Sandlot Games in 2011 to Digital Chocolate. UpTap leverages shared experience, multiple shots on goal, and clear focus on an emerging market of casual free to play games on tablet computers. UpTap’s development team had previously delivered best-selling titles such as Cake Mania, the top selling casual game of 2006. Daniel holds a BS in Computer Science and an MA in Music Composition from the University of Virginia.
[Email Daniel]
Now there are more than a few options for funding your company or video game project. Whether it’s angel investment, venture funding or project funding through crowd-sourcing, we’ll talk to the experts that have done it in a variety of different and creative ways.
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Game Lynch - Games Panel Discussion | 4:00-4:50
Philipp DOESCHL, Co-Founder, FDG Entertainment
Chris BENJAMINSEN,Co-Founder & CPO, PlayerScale Inc.
Tom KRCHA, Gaming Evangelist, Adobe Systems
Emily GREER, Co-founder & COO, Kongregate
Moderator: Alex NICHIPORCHIK, Brand Director, Spil Games
Philipp has co-founded FDG Entertainment back in 2001 at the age of 19. Having graduated in Sound Engineering and studied Japanese, he can look back onto a video gaming background of more than 25 years, starting playing games at only 4 years old, witnessing the evolution and growth of the video gaming industry from the big crash in 1983 to nowadays first hand.
[Email Philipp]
Chris Benjaminsen a Co-Founder & the CPO of PlayerScale Inc., a fast growing technology company providing platforms such as Player.IO for games developers. Prior to forming PlayerScale Inc, Chris was co-founder of Nonoba.com, a gaming community where Flash developers and casual game players come together on the web to chat, relax and play innovative single and multiplayer games. Chris has also produced more than 20 games including Everybody Edits and Untangle.
[Email Chris]
Tom Krcha works as a Gaming Evangelist in Adobe and speaks regularly at conferences in USA, Europe and Asia. He started with Flash and programming more than 12 years ago and worked for interactive studios, streaming companies, telco providers and recently he is focusing on game development.
[Email Tom]
Emily co-founded Kongregate in 2006 with brother Jim and as COO oversees most day-to-day operations including product development, marketing, community, and monetization. Prior to Kongregate, Emily worked in marketing/e-commerce for various catalogers & retailers building statistical and financial models predicting customer behavior as well as doing product analysis, customer research, strategic planning and website development.
[Email Emily]
As a member of Spil Games team, Alex Nichiporchik promotes gaming portals and manages innovative projects. His marketing and SEO strategy insured the leading position of Spil Games (www.ourgames.ru, www.ggg.ru, www.flashgames.ru) sites on Russian games market. In his free time, Alex takes to hardcore games design.
[Email Alex]
Game-lynch is a special discussion panel where game development experts will speak about highs and lows of the presented games. They will discuss the drawbacks in game design, visuals, usability, etc. Lynched games: Jelly Canon, Zombotron 2, Red ball 4, Gluey 2, Wake Up the Box
(See games...) -
The Top Three: 3 Workshops on Online Payments | 4:00-5:30
Torsten KOERNER, Infernum Productions AG
Victor BACRE, JustAGame GmbH & Paysafecard
Patrick PREISSL, Head of Cooperation Marketing, Paysafecard
Mark GERBAN, Director of Business Development and Payments, gamigo AG
Torsten Koerner is the Lead Payment and Fraud Manager at Infernum Productions AG, a Berlin based international publisher, and operator of online games founded by industry veterans. Prior to Infernum, Torsten worked at Wimdu GmbH and Frogster Online Gaming GmbH, where he developed strong insight in the online payment landscape, along with its associated risks. From 2003 to 2010, Torsten lived in Ireland, where he worked on the payment provider side for PayPal. Due to his high expertise in fraud prevention, Torsten was elected in July 2012 into the European Advisory Board of the Merchant Risk Council (MRC), the global merchant-led trade association focused on e-Commerce payments and fraud.
[Email Torsten]
Victor Bacre is Director of Business Development & Payment at Just A Game GmbH, a Berlin-based subsidiary of the publically listed company, CLIC AG. Previously, Victor worked at ATLAS Interactive GmbH and Webbilling, where he developed a deep insight and understanding of the online payments industry. He also lived in Barcelona, where he worked at Emagister, part of Grupo Intercom, one of the most successful internet companies in Spain.
[Email Victor]
Patrick Preissl has worked at paysafecard group, Europe’s leading provider of prepaid payment solutions, since 2009. As Head of Cooperation Marketing, Patrick is responsible for all kinds of marketing-activities with merchants and media-partners along with the communication to existing and potential paysafecard customers. This includes the development of innovative ways to involve the payment solution paysafecard into effective and successful marketing-activities together with partners. Prior to paysafecard, Patrick has primarily worked at several Austrian media-companies with a strong focus on B2C marketing and cooperation marketing.
[Email Patrick]
Mark Gerban is Director of Business Development & Payment at gamigo AG, an online-games company of Samarion SE. Mark oversees the Account Management, Business Development and Payment Operations at gamigo. Prior to gamigo, Mark worked for BillingPartner GmbH, where he was involved in international sales operations for alternative payment products. Mark is originally from the United States, where he worked for the CIGNA Corporation (NYSE: CI) as a Mid-Market Underwriter, before relocating to Hamburg, Germany at the end of 2005. He has worked as a freelance consultant for various businesses in Germany, and is also a former World-Class athlete.
[Email Mark]
- Fraud Prevention, by Torsten Koerner from Infernum Productions AG
Fraud is a dangerous business, and if you’re not in control, the problem can ruin part of your business! Learn from one of the best in the industry, and find out how you should protect your company with the best practices in fraud prevention.
Please confirm you attendance by sending an email to tkoerner@infernum.com.
- Payment Product Placement and Monetization, by Victor Bacre of JustAGame GmbH & Paysafecard, and Patrick PREISSL of Paysafecard
Learn from a real business case in how product placement played an important role when using paysafecard along with special promotions to encourage user purchases. This is a must if you want to learn about changing user behavior!
Please confirm you attendance by sending an email to victor.bacre@just-a-game.com.
- Lowering Billing Costs & Optimizing Cash Flow, by Mark Gerban of gamigo AG
Are your payment costs too high, and causing an overall strain to your bottom-line margin? It might be the deciding factor to running a profitable business, so find out how to negotiate your payment costs and optimize your cash flow.
Please confirm you attendance by sending an email to mark.gerban@gamigo.com. -
Dual-Track Fundraising/ M&A Process: Optimising Transaction Value & Success
Paul HEYDON, Managing Director, Avista Partners
Paul Heydon covers the digital media sector at Avista Partners. Paul is also a Partner at London Venture Partners which invests in the game sector. Paul has worked on a variety of transactions including cross-border M&A, IPO’s, convertible bonds, private placements and strategic advisory with many digital media companies including: PlayJam, Unity Technologies, Channel Four, Infogrames, Ubisoft, Canon Europe, Criterion Software, Endemol, Teliasonera International Carrier, and Lionhead.
[Email Paul]
Choosing between raising money for a company or a secondary round giving liquidity to founders and investors or selling a company is a hard decision to make. A Dual-Track process of talking to potential investors and acquirors in parallel can optimize a transaction value and probability of success. Many aspects of a fundraising process are similar to those of a sale process: confidential information memorandum, detailed financial model, due-diligence materials and the use of an investment bank (fundraising advisor/ M&A advisor). The possibility of obtaining liquidity in a single transaction at a higher valuation generally makes a dual-track process appealing to shareholders in a company and can increase significantly the likelihood of a sale. Paul’s session will address the key issues using both his insight from over 13 years advising game companies as an investment banker but also as an investor in game companies in the past 3 years.
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Forget 2016…2013 is the Year for Games in Brazil!
Julian MIGURA, Director of Global Business Development, UOL BoaCompra
Julian Migura professionalized his passion for games in 2006, when he served as Project Manager for MMOfacts (Galaxy-News). In 2010, Julian founded consulting agency Jayanda, which later emerged as OnLegends, the first global licensing broker for games. Julian left the operational side of OnLegends to fully engage within Brazil’s UOL group as the Director of Global Business Development and became a partner of the gaming units in early 2012.
[Email Julian]
Brazil is one of the world’s fastest growing markets for PC F2P games. Julian Migura, Director of Global Business Development for UOL, will outline why Brazil is such an important market for casual games, why the arrival of STEAM will accelerate new growth in this field and why everyone in casual games development needs to take this unique market very seriously in 2013.
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What Makes a Mobile Game Successful?
Joel BERGER, Industry Leader Media & Entertainment, Google Deutschland GmbH
Joel Berger is responsible for the development of the media and entertainment markets for Google in Germany. This especially entails the use of Google products like search, Youtube and mobile platforms for clients from this industry.
Previously, Joel Berger was the Managing Director of Fox Interactive Media Germany, and the social networking portal MySpace in Germany and Northern Europe.
[Email Joel]
Thousands of games are being released today. How can you stand out of the mass? Focus on the multiplayer part as this essential drives long-term loyalty of a user. But do not just add some social features to your game - leverage the very own features of the mobile device – you can play anywhere, anytime!
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Console to Online: How To Transition Your Development Studio Successfully
Ian VERCHERE, CCO & Co-founder, Roadhouse Interactive
Ian Verchere has created, directed or produced dozens of games, including SSX Tricky and NBA Street V2. One of the founders of Radical Entertainment, he left Electronic Arts Canada (2006) to move into online/social games. He co-founded Roadhouse Interactive in 2009, and has grown the company to 65 talented developers.
[Email Ian]
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The Sandbox - Story of The Pixel Art God Game Which Became One of iTunes Best Of Apps of 2012!
Sébastien BORGET, Co-Founder & COO, Pixowl
Sébastien manages the operations of Pixowl's 15 people international team. He has supervised the production and marketing of the studio's most popular titles: Doodle Grub and The Sandbox (10+ million players in total). His work was awarded by the nomination in Dec. 2012 of The Sandbox in App Store Best of 2012!
[Email Sébastien]
Sébastien will be sharing Pixowl's experience on how they launched The Sandbox on iOS, a pixel art world creation simulation game, initially targeted at a niche market, which turned into a 2 million downloads success story crowned by a nomination by Apple in its iTunes Best Of Games 2012!
He'll get back on Pixowl's player-centric approach which involved a large scale beta testing period and their efforts on social marketing which helped them achieve this success. -
Bringing Console-Quality Games to Smartphones and Tablets--from Development to Marketing and Beyond!
Michael SCHADE, CEO and Co-Founder, Fishlabs Entertainment
Michael Schade, CEO and Co-Founder of Fishlabs Entertainment, is a well-known evangelist of high-end gaming on mobile devices and seasoned speaker at international gaming events. His company has been spearheading the mobile gaming industry since 2004 and developed award-winning premium titles such as Galaxy on Fire 2 or Snowboard Hero.
[Email Michael]
In less than a decade, the mobile gaming platform has evolved from simple 1-bit retro games to (almost) console quality-style core game experiences with HD graphics and high-quality audio. Michael Schade, CEO & Co-Founder of Hamburg-based mobile specialists Fishlabs, will explain what it takes to bring AAA-quality to mobile devices and generate more than 100 million downloads on the hottest smartphones and tablets on the market.
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Stealing Your Heart, Eating Your Brain
Timo DRIES, Product Manager, Wooga
As a kid, Timo always wanted to work for Disney. At age 10, he discovered the electric guitar and stopped developing his drawing skills. Today he is a Product Manager at Wooga, responsible for the look and feel of a top-secret unreleased game. He is leading a team of six graphic artists and a sound engineer, driving them crazy with his weird stickman mock-ups and home recorded humming choirs.
[Email Timo]
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Ichi - The Killer App
Eric DIEPEVEEN, Co-Founder, Stolen Couch Games
Eric Diepeveen is Stolen Couch Games game designer. Stolen Couch Games is the studio behind Kids vs Goblins, Ichi and the Green Light Bundle. In 2013 they will try to take over the mobile free to play market with Castaway Paradise.
[Email Eric]
Despite having over 400.000 downloads, great reviews, being featured by Apple, Amazon and others, Stolen Couch Games’ Ichi has not brought in enough money to justify its development. In this session, Stolen Couch Games will share which design and business choices they made to make Ichi the hit that failed to monetize.
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Staying Unique at the Age of Clones
Philipp DOESCHL, Co-Founder, FDG Entertainment
Philipp has co-founded FDG Entertainment back in 2001 at the age of 19. Having graduated in Sound Engineering and studied Japanese, he can look back onto a video gaming background of more than 25 years, starting playing games at only 4 years old, witnessing the evolution and growth of the video gaming industry from the big crash in 1983 to nowadays first hand.
[Email Philipp]
Almost every idea has already been there in some way in the past 40 years of video gaming history. How can we still create unique, memorable and enjoyable gaming experiences without copying and cloning each others? How much inspiration from other games is ok? What are gamers expecting and when does cloning actually start? What are the do's and don'ts?
This lecture will give insights in the development and idea finding processes at FDG Entertainment with examples from our projects as well as games of other developers.
Be creative, be successful! -
Who Dares Wins? 5 Steps Towards Incremental Innovation in Social Games
Aki JARVINEN, Executive Producer, Digital Chocolate
Aki Järvinen, Ph.D., is a 10+ year game industry veteran and noted speaker in both industry and academic conferences. As Executive Producer, he is running one of Digital Chocolate's production tracks. His credentials include award-winning titles such as Army Attack, and his latest project Race Track Rivals, an online free-to-play racing game, was released in December 2012.
[Email Aki]
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Momonga Pinball Adventures: A Quest For The Holy Grail
Derk DE GEUS, Co-Founder & CEO, Paladin Studios
Derk is co-founder and CEO of Paladin Studios, an independent game developer based in The Netherlands. They create games to make you smile – be it a sweet twinkle, loud laugh or evil grin.
[Email Derk]
Paladin Studios has traditionally been a work for hire studio. This pays the bills and keeps them sharp, but they have always dreamt of making their own games. After several prototypes and failed attempts, they decided to start working on their debut flagship title. Self-funded and self-published, the game is Paladin from A to Z. This talk is about the processes and principles they used to find their holy grail.
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Mobile Publisher: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Kyu LEE, VP and Head of GAMEVIL USA
Kyu Lee is Vice President of GAMEVIL USA, US office of GAMEVIL Inc. GAMEVIL is well known for revolutionizing the sector with its original and innovative mobile games, backed by unparalleled expertise in advanced mobile and network technology. Kyu, who has been in GAMEVIL since the beginning at 2000, has constantly played a key role in the evolution of Korean mobile gaming and has continuously introduced the innovation to the world.
[Email Kyu]
Developers need partners for various reasons, whether it is for financial, promotional, productional, or regional purposes. In this talk, GAMEVIL will share its various experiences working with more than 40 developers of different sizes with different needs around the world as a publisher.
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Publishing. Publishing! Publishing?
Brett SEYLER, Chairman & Founder, Kerosene Games
Brett was an early employee at industry pioneers GarageGames and Unity Technologies who now spends most of his time working with a handful of companies that he's invested in, primarily in games and related tech. Most recently he created Kerosene, a new game publisher for very high-end mobile games.
[Email Brett]
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LUNCH SESSION: Business at Warp Speed: Insights for Indies | 12:00 - 12:20
Jean MATHEWS, Strategy & Business Development Consultant, iMAGINATE
Jean Mathews specializes in creating franchises or negotiating deals on behalf of studios. She helped indie studio Bolt Creative’s Pocket God grow beyond iPhone into a multi-million dollar brand whose story made the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine (Nov 2012). She does strategy and business development work for a variety of clients from indies to major studios, such as Adult Swim Games (Turner Broadcast), Disney XD’s Slugterra (by NerdCorps), Roadhouse Interactive, and Harmonix. Recently, she forged a deal with powerhouse Sony Pictures and Playfirst to launch a mobile game for hit animation Hotel Transylvania.
[Email Jean]
This session reveals business aspects Indies should consider when looking to grow from a single title on one platform to a global franchise. Attendees should come away with specific tips for negotiating deals by channel to assist their efforts in creating the next Angry Birds.
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LUNCH SESSION: How To Scale Your Mobile Business For Gaming? | 12:00 - 12:20
Darya TRUSHKINA, VP of Business Development, Game Insight
Darya leads the team, which handles international publishing of GI’s games on the world’s largest social networks, mobile platforms and develops business relationship with payment solutions providers.
[Email Darya]
Growing business is tough work with zero guarantee of any success. Growing mobile and social gaming business is even tougher due to the insane speed and increasing competition every day. Scaling requires doing things outside of comfort zone, reinvestment of revenue, attracting and retaining key people as well as a lot of luck. User acquisition, retention, monetization, global markets and understanding of industry trends – are crucial elements of reaching multi-million revenue in 2013 and, as a result, bringing a success to your door.
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LUNCH SESSION: Thriving in the Mobile-First Economy | 12:30 - 12:50
Richard FIRMINGER, General Manager, EMEA, Flurry
As General Manager of EMEA, Richard leads Flurry’s UK office as well as advertiser sales and publisher relationships across the region. Prior to Flurry, Richard led the digital media sales team for Amazon EU. Prior to Amazon, Richard was Commercial Director for Northern Europe for Yahoo!, UK MD for Enpocket, UK Deputy MD & BD Director for AdLink, and the first UK Commercial Director for DoubleClick.
[Email Richard]
Join Richard as he draws on the very latest data and insight to show how consumers are using mobile games, what existing behavioral trends mean for mobile game usage in the future, and how developers and publishers can use analytics to boost the performance of their apps. This session will provide critical insight about how mobile developers can use measurement to create better games, build better audiences and increase revenue.
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LUNCH SESSION: Augmented Reality: How to Use within Games, Games Promotion and Couponing | 12:00-12:20
Thomas BALDUFF, Director of Central Europe, Total Immersion
Thomas Balduff worked a number of years as a professional in the digital entertainment and software industries before working in sales management and marketing positions for US-based IT organizations like Oracle and Cognos. Most recently he worked successfully in the Entertainment business for Macrovision and RealNetworks before he joined Total Immersion.
[Email Thomas]
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Failing Forward
Ola HOLMDAHL, Producer, Tarsier Studios
Ola Holmdahl is a producer at Tarsier Studios. He is the former co-founder and CEO of Junebud. Ola’s previous career includes managing the game design program at the University of Skövde, doing lead game design at DICE and creating concept art for various games. In a previous life, he was a freelance artist and a fledgling sociologist.
[Email Ola]
This session is a postmortem of a Free-2-Play company. Four years as an entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of a gaming startup left Ola with a lot of questions. He took a company from concept and financing, to incorporation, through the release of two games and eventually into bankruptcy. Still, what does it all mean and what lessons can be learned from such a venture?
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Keys for Mobile Game Marketing Success | 1:00-1:50
Sebastian KRIESE, Corporate Development Manager, Wooga
Martin SCHULTZ, Founder, Decane
Brett SEYLER, Founder, Kerosene Games
Moderator: Pepe AGELL, Sr. Director, Publisher Relations, Chartboost
Sebastian Kriese is Corporate Development Manager at Wooga. In this position, he is responsible for building new and managing existing partnerships as well as screening the gaming market for potential acquisitions and investment opportunities. Prior to Wooga, Sebastian was a Business Development Manager at GameDuell and in charge of the Social business (on and off Facebook). He has also worked in a partner management role at Studivz.net.
[Email Sebastian]
Martin owns and runs the 2008 founded app & game development studio Decane, located in the Hamburg area in Germany. With over 50+ published titles, Decane is a strong player on the mobile, web and desktop platforms. One of their latest #1 hit games is RC Mini Racers.
[Email Martin]
Brett was an early employee at industry pioneers GarageGames and Unity Technologies who now spends most of his time working with a handful of companies that he's invested in, primarily in games and related tech. Most recently he created Kerosene, a new game publisher for very high-end mobile games.
[Email Brett]
Pepe Agell leads the International Expansion at Chartboost. In his role, he oversees the global expansion of the company’s publisher base, strategic partnerships, and customer relationship management (CRM) to ensure the highest standard of service and support.
[Email Pepe]
This session will look at how studios of all sizes can succeed in the mobile gaming space from a business perspective. Pepe Agell will moderate a panel of game developers who will share their experiences operating with three different, but effective business tactics.
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Opportunities in Free to Play: How Big Fish is Expanding into Free to Play Gaming on Mobile and PC | 1:00-1:50
Chris WILLIAMS, VP/GM of Free to Play, Big Fish
Chris Williams has spent more than 14 years dedicated to the interactive entertainment industry. Before joining Big Fish games as VP & General Manager of Free-to-Play, he was the VP of Products & Strategy at PlayFirst, where he rapidly grew the iOS business, establishing Dash as one of the most successful gaming franchises in the App Store.
[Email Chris]
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The Pros and Cons of Working With Existing IP as an Indie Developer
Ilja GOOSSENS, Creative Director, Gamundo
Since the late 90’s, Ilja has mainly focused on mobile, online gaming and community building projects. He set up and ran Virtual Fairground; a leading browser based game developer, and the mobile community company yoMedia. Currently he is running the cross-platform game development company Gamundo, their first title will be released Q1 2013.
[Email Ilja]
Very valuable story on being dependent of a franchise as an indie and the risks that can come up by doing that.
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Postmortems
Nihilumbra - Delivering Indie Awesomeness
HUEBRIX
Flooded Village - Create your own FlowKevin CERDA, Game Designer, Beautifun Games
Shailesh PRABHU, Founder, Yellow Monkey
Yoeri STAAL, Founder, StaalMedia
Kevin Cerdà is the game designer and something like a CEO for the indie developing studio BeautiFun Games. He’s a really young developer with a deep interest on narrative, creating new gameplay mechanics and delivering great experiences to the players.
[Email Kevin]
Shailesh Prabhu has been designing games for over 9 years. He has worked as a game designer and producer for various high profile titles such as; HUEBRIX, It's Just a Thought, Finger Footie, Maria Sharapova Tennis, rounders poker and many more. He set-up the independent game development studio Yellow Monkey in 2007. He won the International Young Interactive Entrepreneur 2008 India award for this venture. His game, It's Just a Thought, also won the Best Original Idea award at HoPlay 2011 a games festival in Bilbao, Spain.
[Email Shailesh]
Yoeri Staal founded StaalMedia as a freelance webdeveloper. While finishing his MSc in Computer Science, Yoeri developed the innovative puzzle game Flooded Village in his spare time. New to the game business, Yoeri has an idealist passion to produce original and high quality games.
[Email Yoeri]
Nihilumbra: One year and three months of development condensed in 10 minutes of thrilling postmortem. In this session, Kevin will explain some of the troubles they found in the development of this game, and how they dealt with them. Also, a bit of marketing: An original game needs an original strategy to sell it!
HUEBRIX: A postmortem of an original puzzle game that took 3 people over a year to make. HUEBRIX is a logical, spatial and visual puzzle game that was our effort to create a challenging yet fun game in the puzzle genre. This talk will give you a brief idea of the pitfalls we faced and the successes we enjoyed while designing HUEBRIX and whether it was all worth it.
Flooded Village: channeling water has never been this much fun!
Trees grow and pirates set sail, but don’t drown or freeze those poor villagers!
With a lot of determination and a bit of luck, StaalMedia transformed a hobby project into a high quality game, without any experience or budget. In this postmortem, Yoeri will explain how to use limited resources efficiently and prove that there is always support for original ideas.
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Mathematical Analysis of Game Mechanics
Nick BERRY, Data Scientist, Facebook
Nick has close to twenty years of data-mining and games industry experience. He has recently joined Facebook as Data Scientist. Prior to Facebook, he was President and founder of DataGenetics, a recognized consultancy company. Other past roles include General Manager of Analytics for GameHouse, and 14 years at Microsoft, the last ten of which were on Microsoft's casual games team. Prior to Microsoft, Nick was one of the founders of the AutoMap company which Microsoft acquired in 1994.
[Email Nick]
This presentation will walk through a selection of mathematical techniques that can be used to model games to understand how often players win, and how long average games take to ensure a balanced ecosystem.
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4 Years, 300 Games: What We've Learned About Free-2-Play
Emily GREER, Co-founder & COO, Kongregate
Emily co-founded Kongregate in 2006 with brother Jim and as COO oversees most day-to-day operations including product development, marketing, community, and monetization. Prior to Kongregate, Emily worked in marketing/e-commerce for various catalogers & retailers building statistical and financial models predicting customer behavior as well as doing product analysis, customer research, strategic planning and website development.
[Email Emily]
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Postmortems
Cowbeam Postmortem: Indie & Casual Go Together Like
Aliens & Cows
The Hairy Road to Hairy Tales
Room of Disaster – Maybe Not a Disaster at All!
Roy van DE MORTEL, Co-Owner & Level Designer, & Thijmen BINK, Co-Founder and CEO, Digital Dreams Games
Ricardo MENDEZ, Developer, Arges Games
Oscar Kurniawan MANULE, Co-Founder, Tanoshii Studio
Roy is one of the owners of Digital Dreams and is specialized in level design. He has studied Game Design & Development at the Utrecht School of the Arts and worked on Triumph Studios’ Overlord 2. He applies his creative and practical background with his hands-on approach to create elegant and meaningful game experiences that inspire through originality.
[Email Roy]
Thijmen is one of the founders of Digital Dreams and responsible for the technical aspects of game development as well as day-to-day business. He has studied Game & Media Technology at the Utrecht University and applies this academic background with his creative drive to create elegant and meaningful game experiences that inspire through originality.
[Email Thijmen]
Indie game developer with a background on game AI, Ricardo J. Méndez established Arges Systems in 2008 initially to provide contracting services to companies, and has since started developing the company's own games. He maintains several Unity-related open source projects such as UnitySteer.
[Email Ricardo]
Oscar Kurniawan Manule (Oz), is an IT professional graduated from Faculty of Computer Science Universitas Indonesia majoring Computer Science. He has interest in programming, software engineering, software quality assurance, web technology, technopreneurship, education for children, and especially games development. Born in Depok, October 1, 1988, Oz likes to imagine where happiness is spread around the world by making games. Oz is a co-founder of Tanoshii Studio and winner of Shell Indonesia Business Startup Awards 2012.
[Email Oz]
Cowbeam: What happens when aliens see a planet populated with cash cows? They become interested in what a cow looks like from the inside and might try to make one of their own. But do they copy the cows’ DNA exactly, or do they apply the concept of the cow with their own? With Cowbeam, they used their own DNA, and they will be sharing with you what the impact is of doing so.
Hairy Tales: When the small indie team at Arges Systems decided to fund their own game after a few years of working as contactors on other projects, they were expecting a more straightforward path than the one the process ended up taking. Richard will go over the several twists and turns, and point over some pitfalls of planning too far ahead on a quickly changing market.
Room of Disaster was built in approximately 30 days to enter the contest. But, when they thought it may be a messy experience when creating their first game, it turned out otherwise. They learned about how the power of word of mouth marketing, how to develop the game design idea, and how to span the game life by porting it. All worth of experience to start a new journey creating the next big thing. -
Going Global: How to Localize, Monetize, QA and Grow Your Mobile Game Internationally
David KIM, CEO, Animoca
After several years of pioneering work in Internet and technology in the US and Asia, David Kim now serves as the CEO of Animoca. He previously served as CEO of Lycos after spearheading its acquisition by Daum Corporation, and CEO of mail.com Corporation, a leading personalized email and messenger service.
[Email David]
The beauty of digital distribution is that it allows mobile game developers to find new players throughout the world. And in today’s global economy, the biggest growth opportunities often lie overseas. But with international growth comes international challenges, like translating your apps into native languages, leveraging local payment methods, customizing your artwork for different cultures, testing your apps in different regions, and more. This session will reveal the best practices for attracting, engaging with, and monetizing mobile gamers internationally.
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5 Ways to Fail Freemium
Ben SIPE, Mobile Games Producer, W3i
A seasoned game producer/designer that’s produced hundreds of titles spanning all genres (from mature shooters to kid’s pet titles) on all current platforms; digital and physical except PSP and Vita. Currently working in W3i’s Games Task Force, as a Producer/Monetization Consultant specializing in increasing monetization and retention for free-to-play games.
[Email Ben]
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Postmortems
Icy Tower 2 - Brick by Brick
Wobble Bobble - Gamepad to Finger Swipes: Resetting the Mindset
Do It Yourself Jimmy ӦMAN, Creative Director, & Magnus ALM, CEO, Free Lunch Design
Rajat OJHA, Managing Director, The Awesome Game Studio
Shinji KIM, Creator, ShufflePix
Jimmy works as a Creative Director at Free Lunch Design, a Swedish mobile games developer with the Icy Tower IP as its flagship. With 8 years in the business, his primary focus lies in game design and business development.
[Email Jimmy]
Magnus successfully transformed Free Lunch Design from being an advergame company with clients such as Disney, Marvel and Paramount, to a self funded social games studio reaching millions of users each month. Originally trained as a chef, Magnus is as passionate about games as he is about the culinary arts.
[Email Magnus]
Rajat Ojha (Managing Director) has 18+ years of industry experience, has represented the entire creative industry of India at various forums, is credited for releasing India’s first global PS3 game Smash ‘N’ Survive, and has produced over 15 titles so far.
[Email Rajat]
Shinji Kim is the creator of ShufflePix (http://shufflepix.net), a fun, free iPhone game that turns your pictures into puzzle jumbles. Before ShufflePix, Shinji was a Business Analyst at Deloitte Consulting, focused on operations strategy in financial services, telecommunications, and media industry. Shinji holds a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Waterloo and has also worked with Facebook, Sun Microsystems, and Barclays Capital in the past. Her favorite games are the original StarCraft, Tetris, and Counter-Strike, in that order.
[Email Shinji]
Icy Tower 2: Having appeared as early as 2001, Icy Tower quickly grew and spread like wildfire to become an unstoppable internet phenomenon. With such a success, it took more than 10 years to simply gather the courage to create a sequel. Jimmy and Magnus share the experiences of transforming a hugely popular game from old classic to modern masterpiece.
Wobble Bobble: This postmortem of Wobble Bobble will focus on how The Awesome Game Studio shifted from console development to mobile game development, how they simplified their thought process, how they could reset their thinking to address millions of casual gamers instead of a niche hardcore gamers, how they kept on adding features, the Wobble Bobble contest and what the development of Wobble Bobble taught them.
ShufflePix: You might have thought about it, you might have talked about it, but have you done it yourself? Shinji started ShufflePix from scratch not knowing anything about game design or building an app. And she did it alone. With the increased availability of self-service platforms and tools today, you can build a game yourself, even if you can’t draw or even if you can’t code. She did it. And she’d like to share her experience and tips of being a creator.
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Children's Games and Entertainment on Tablets: The Whole Truth
Barry O'NEILL, President, StoryToys
Barry O'Neill is the CEO of StoryToys, a developer and publisher of award winning mobile games and interactive books for children. Prior to StoryToys, Barry was a “Mobile 1.0” pioneer, having headed up Namco’s European mobile business and co-founded Upstart Games which he sold in 2006.
[Email Barry]
A look at the entertainment and books categories: what is selling that should not be, what is not selling that should be, and a discussion of challenges of marketing free-to-play content to kids under five. The talk will also look at trends in design for children's tablet content, market size and dynamics.
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How to Spot a Midcore Game | 3:00-3:50
Andrew SHEPPARD, President, Kabam Studios
Andrew serves as President of Kabam Game Studios, overseeing 12 development teams in the global production of web and mobile games. He also manages the product marketing, community and player insights functions. Prior to Kabam, Sheppard’s experience in the games industry included positions at hi5, Outspark, Electronic Arts and CBS Interactive.
[Email Andrew]
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Postmortems
Haunt the House: Scaring up Business
Westerado - The Postmortem: Cramming a Lot into a Little
Speedrunner HD: From Flash to XBLIG to SteamTom VIAN, Founder, SFB Games Ltd
Wytze KAMP, Game Designer, & Yhorik AARSEN, Co-Founder, Ostrich Banditos
Casper VAN EST, DoubleDutch Games
Tom Vian has been making Flash games with his younger brother Adam since the age of 16. After a number of years of full-time game development for various employers, alongside evenings of his own projects, he founded SFB Games Ltd with Adam and has now branched out into mobile development.
[Email Tom]
Wytze has an interest in physical and social multiplayer gaming as well as digital games. He's one of the game designers at Ostrich Banditos and manages the fairly rambunctious team, of which he is often the most rambunctious.
[Email Wytze]
Yhorik is one of the founders of Ostrich Banditos having been the lead developer on High Vaultage, and now the Senior Developer on Westerado where he's focused primarily on tool integration. Previously he has worked on Bierbaas, the multiplayer bar arcade.
[Email Yhorik]
DoubleDutch Games is a small Dutch indie game development team, consisting of Casper van Est and Gert-Jan Stolk. Since neither of them has any skills, they often work with other (talented) people to make their games.
[Email Casper]
Haunt the House: Sony's new Playstation Mobile store is still very young, launching on PS Vita and selected Android devices in October of last year. Haunt the House: Terrortown, a sequel to a popular 2010 Flash title, was released this January. Tom will talk about his experiences developing the game, his dealings with Sony, the lessons learned promoting his first commercial release and sales statistics for the game on the new store.
Westerado:In this postmortem, Ostrich Banditos, a starting company, explains how they developed their first Flash game for Adult Swim: Westerado. The talk will mostly focus on the challenges associated with collaborating in a new company and how to efficiently create a content-heavy game with a small team.
Speedrunner HD:A post-mortem on the launch and post-launch adventures of Speedrunner HD, an XBLIG version of a successful free browser game. This postmortem discusses how it got picked up by Steam, and why it still isn't finished. -
Drive Users From Web to Mobile - The Most Important Lessons Learned
Tobias SJOGREN, VP Mobile Games, Stardoll
Tobias Sjögren, VP Mobile Games, runs the new mobile games development and publishing department at Stardoll – the worlds largest online community for teenage girls.
Tobias' games industry track record that reaches back to 1996 includes heading the DICE Stockholm studio during Battlefield 1942 and seven years as an agent supporting game developers around the world.
[Email Tobias]
Stardoll.com is the worlds largest online community for girls with over 210 million registered users supported in 28 languages. When the mobile games publishing business was initiated, the big question was how to drive users from the web to the new phone and tablet games.
In this session, Tobias Sjögren will share the most important learnings from how Stardoll successfully converted web users to dedicated mobile gamers and how to utilize the expertise in an online company doing so. -
Postmortems
Champions of Chaos: How Learning from Previous Experiences Can Lead You to Victory on the Casual MarketHernan LOPEZ, Warchief and Founder, Epic Llama
Hernan Lopez is the Warchief and founder of Epic Llama Games, a game company focused on the casual game market founded back on 2008, He and his company has developed more than 30 titles in the past years and have a lot of experience on the field to share.
[Email Hernan]
Champions of Chaos: Hernan will be sharing his experience on the making of Champions of Chaos after the release of 3 less successful RPGs, and how those previous experiences helped his team to reach the top of the mountain.
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Evolution of Android Discovery
Eyal RABINOVICH, Co-founder, Mominis
An entrepreneur, software engineer and user-experience evangelist, Eyal Rabinovich particularly specializes in developing and delivering products and ideas. He has experience in developing consumer facing products while understanding and adapting to customer needs.
[Email Eyal]
The much talked about and anticipated rise of Android as the most popular platform for smart phone gaming is upon us! But the open-platform approach that has made this OS the winner of the installed-device race, also created a "wild west" of app stores where the strong prey upon on the weak and no IP is sacred. Is there a utopian medium where open-platform distribution meets the ordered enforceability of a "walled garden"? Join Eyal Rabinovich, MoMinis Co-Founder, as he explores the past, present, and future of Android app discovery.
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You and the Industry: Where Do You Stand?
Sebastian SUJKA, Founder & Editor in Chief, Social Games Observer
Sebastian is Editor in Chief of the European B2B blog SocialGamesObserver, which he co-founded in early 2010. Sebastian started his career as an entrepreneur with the founding of Whitewall, a Berlin-based start-up company specialized in developing dietary supplements for athletes and students. In 2009, he joined alternative payment provider Sponsorpay through which he got in contact with the gaming industry.
[Email Sebastian]
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Beyond Top Charts – How To Benefit From The Present And Future Of App Store Search
Matthaus KRZYKOWSKI, CEO, Xyo
Matthaus is a co-founder of mobile app search company Xyo where he manages all growth and sales activities. Translating customer experience into product innovation he drives Xyologic forward. Passionate to help ideas develop into products and companies, he is an investor and advisor to other innovative startups.
[Email Matthaus]
In his presentation Matthaus will share key learnings on:
- What the user’s app search behavior looks like and how to take advantage of it when creating titles and descriptions.
- With Apple’s acquisition of Chomp, what are the 3 key approaches to app search?
- What are the current key gaming trends? -
One Size Never Fits All: How Focus on Players Defines a Winning Game
Aycan DEMIRHAN, Director of Strategy, Peak Games
Aycan is Director of Strategy at Peak Games, 3rd largest social gaming company globally. Before moving to Istanbul, she has worked in technology strategy and finance in London, Sydney and New York. Aycan holds a BA from University of Virginia and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Among her favourite games are Okey Plus, Lost Jewels and NEW Battles.
[Email Aycan]
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Motion Controls and Touch Mechanics in Your Mobile Game
Guy BENDOV, CEO, Side-Kick Games
Guy Bendov is CEO of Side-Kick Games, a game developer covering Xbox360, PC and Mobile platforms. Side-kick is focusing on the mid-core arcade market and developed games for Square Enix, Intel and Microsoft. Starting 2013, Side-Kick is also self publishing its own mobile games.
Prior to Side-kick, Guy founded DoubleFusion (dynamic ingame ads for AAA titles), Cellular Magic (Mobile games) and Click! Multimedia.
[Email Guy]
Controlling games by moving your body, rather than fiddling with a handful of abstract buttons and joysticks, dramatically widened the global games audience over the past few years by making the human-to-game interface more intuitive. Whether with a "wand-like" Wii controller, a faux guitar, a touch + accelerometer-enabled smartphone, or a magical camera that translates your body movements into game inputs - this relatively new human interface framework remains poorly understood by most of the game development industry. Join Guy Bendov, Founder and CEO of Side-Kick Games. As a pioneer and evangelist for "motion controls", Side-Kick is uniquely positioned to expose the potential and pitfalls of motion and touch as primary inputs for future games.
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Finding Velocity and Quality: Customer Acquisition for Social and Mobile Games
Josh SWERDLOW, Director of Business Development, Bidalgo
Josh Swerdlow brings nearly a decade of business development experience to Bidalgo, where he is responsible for the overall growth and positioning of the company. Bidalgo currently works with many of the top social and mobile gaming companies in the world. Originally from the UK, Josh currently resides in Tel Aviv, where he enjoys its unique tech culture and creative Spirit.
[Email Josh]
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5 Payment Managers: 5 Payment Flows | 9:00-9:50
Andreas SCHULZE, Payment Product Director, Gameforge
Moritz KÖNIGSBÜSCHER, Product Manager Payments, SoundCloud LtD
Torsten KOERNER, Infernum Productions AG
Victor BACRE, Director of Business Development and Payments, JustAGame GmbH
Michael SCHADE, CEO and Co-Founder, Fishlabs Entertainment
Moderator: Mark GERBAN, Director of Business Development and Payments, gamigo AG
Andreas Schulze is Payment Product Director at Gameforge Publishing Services since February 2012. In his current role, Andreas is leading the Payment Product department, which is in charge of all Gameforge payment business topics. Andreas has more than 10 years of payment industry experience. He has a strong background primarily in end-2-end product management (7Ps), in business development for B2C, B2B payment services and software as well in managing payment service provider business. In the last 13 years, Andreas has been with various internet, online gaming and mobile communication companies like Gameforge, 1&1, First Data, Qpass, Mobilcom/Debitel and others.
[Email Andreas]
Moritz works as a product manager for payments for SoundCloud, the world´s leading social sound platform. He´s responsible for SoundCloud´s payments infrastructure, fraud management and partner management. He´s been in the payments industry since 2000, working with ClickandBuy, Arvato Financial Services and others. Later on Moritz switched to the merchant side, on which he now combines payments expertise with agile product development skills. Moritz considers himself as a payments hipster, since he was already into payments before it became cool.
[Email Moritz]
Torsten Koerner is the Lead Payment and Fraud Manager at Infernum Productions AG, a Berlin based international publisher, and operator of online games founded by industry veterans. Prior to Infernum, Torsten worked at Wimdu GmbH and Frogster Online Gaming GmbH, where he developed strong insight in the online payment landscape, along with its associated risks. From 2003 to 2010, Torsten lived in Ireland, where he worked on the payment provider side for PayPal. Due to his high expertise in fraud prevention, Torsten was elected in July 2012 into the European Advisory Board of the Merchant Risk Council (MRC), the global merchant-led trade association focused on e-Commerce payments and fraud.
[Email Torsten]
Victor Bacre is Director of Business Development & Payment at Just A Game GmbH, a Berlin-based subsidiary of the publically listed company, CLIC AG. Previously, Victor worked at ATLAS Interactive GmbH and Webbilling, where he developed a deep insight and understanding of the online payments industry. He also lived in Barcelona, where he worked at Emagister, part of Grupo Intercom, one of the most successful internet companies in Spain.
[Email Victor]
Michael Schade, CEO and Co-Founder of Fishlabs Entertainment, is a well-known evangelist of high-end gaming on mobile devices and seasoned speaker at international gaming events. His company has been spearheading the mobile gaming industry since 2004 and developed award-winning premium titles such as Galaxy on Fire 2 or Snowboard Hero.
[Email Michael]
Mark Gerban is Director of Business Development & Payment at gamigo AG, an online-games company of Samarion SE. Mark oversees the Account Management, Business Development and Payment Operations at gamigo. Prior to gamigo, Mark worked for BillingPartner GmbH, where he was involved in international sales operations for alternative payment products. Mark is originally from the United States, where he worked for the CIGNA Corporation (NYSE: CI) as a Mid-Market Underwriter, before relocating to Hamburg, Germany at the end of 2005. He has worked as a freelance consultant for various businesses in Germany, and is also a former World-Class athlete.
[Email Mark]
Five payment managers from top European online game companies will present their perspective of the perfect payment flow, where each manager will give examples of characteristics that contribute best to their conversion rates and monetization strategies. These flows will consider such aspects as user demographics, screen size, currencies, payment methods, languages, number of clicks, and other key factors.
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One Step at a Time: Making Top Eleven’s Tutorial
Aleksandar MARKOVIC, Game Designer, Nordeus
Upon getting a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Belgrade, Aleksandar Markovic joined Nordeus as part of Top Eleven’s developer team, later advancing to the position of Game Designer. He now works on constantly improving the most popular online sports game in the world.
[Email Aleksandar]
Markovic presents insights gained during development of step-by-step tutorials, as a retention effort in Top Eleven. The design team found ways to make sure players skipped as few tutorial steps as possible, achieving an impressive percentage of finished tutorials. Markovic shows some neat techniques to improve your tutorial and identifies potential situations where tutorials aren’t as necessary as you might think.
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Games Solution Centre: Supercharging Game Development in Singapore
Albert LIM, Deputy Director, Nanyang Polytechnic
Albert has been working in the tertiary education sector since 1990. He is currently a member of the senior management team at Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore. In addition, he played a pivotal role in establishing and managing the Games Solution Centre; a National Centre established by the Media Devt Authority of Singapore to facilitate game development in Singapore.
[Email Albert]
This session aims to share some insights into a unique approach to supercharge Singapore’s game industry to stand-out in the highly competitive & ever-changing Global game industry. This unique approach – with the establishment of the Games Solution Centre - involves a crucial strategic partnership between a proactive Government Agency (MDA), an innovative Education Institution (NYP), and an emerging local game industry.
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Casual Connect Brings You the First Ever "Casino Games" Track!
Brock PIERCE, CEO, Playsino
Brock Pierce (31) is an entrepreneur best known for pioneering the market for virtual goods in online games. He has founded eight companies, acquired more than 30 companies, and closed a dozen corporate finance transactions, securing more than $200 million on behalf of his companies. He is currently CEO of Playsino (formerly Titan Gaming), Managing Director of the Clearstone Global Gaming Fund, and he sits on the boards of IMI Exchange, Xfire, EverTune, RevenueAPEX, and Spicy Horse Games.
[Email Brock]
Content advisor Brock Pierce, Founder & CEO of Playsino, and Casual Connect teamed up this year to dedicate an entire conference day to the emerging crossovers between casinos and casual games. Surely gambling represents a great deal of money, and an intuitive link exists between gamers of all sorts, but what are the real opportunities for lucrative services and collaborations? Do land-based and online casinos really have an interest in making great social and mobile game experiences? Can game developers navigate the legal and business complexities of operating in a global real money gambling business? Join Brock for a breakdown of what is really going on, a historical perspective of the factors that led us here, and stick around while he emcees a day-long all-star lineup of leaders from both the "real money" and "social casino" arenas.
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Designing For Discovery
Oscar CLARK, Evangelist, Applifier
Oscar Clark, Evangelist for Applifier, the leading mobile games cross-promotion network, has been involved with putting social and games together since 1998. His career has been at the cutting edge of online, mobile and console social games and includes roles at British Telecom (Wireplay), Hutchinson Whampoa (3UK), PapayaMobile and Sony's PlayStation Home.
[Email Oscar]
Discovery continues to be the hot topic in the industry with too many great games going unnoticed because they don't get the promotion we think they deserved. But the fact is that the most effective distribution still comes from Word of Mouth. If we want our games to be successful we have to move our thinking forward, understand our audience and where we can communicate with them. We need to think about the context and content of our marketing and trigger an action in them to install our games. Join this session for a practical approach to designing your game for word of mouth, empowering your players to do the marketing for you and how to leverage social amplifiers in iOS 6, Facebook and beyond to get the word out about your smartphone or tablet game.
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5 Reasons HTML5 Apps are Easy to Monetize
Alexander KRUG, Founder & CEO, SOFTGAMES GmbH
Alexander Krug is a serial games entrepreneur with more than 10 years experience in making big things happen. Alexander started his career at Yahoo! Germany where he successfully managed the re-launch of Yahoo!’s complete gaming portal. In addition Alex has co-founded several successful gaming start-ups. SOFTGAMES, founded in 2006 is a developer and publisher of Mobile Games & Apps which has worldwide partnerships with carriers, mobile social networks and mobile portals. [Email Alex]
With today’s capabilities of HTML5 and well known challenges of the technology one wonders if HTML5 is here to stay or if it actually does monetize. Alexander Krug will present SOFTGAMES's insights on the launch, promotion and monetization of HTML5 titles on e.g. of “Pet Motel”. Both in-store and off-deck performance will be analyzed. Insights on LTV, ARPU, ARPPU and comparison to existing native titles will round up the discussion.
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What "Social" Means to Big Casinos
Melissa BLAU, Director, iGaming Capital
Melissa Blau has been in the Media, Technology & Finance sectors for 20 years and has been specifically in the online gaming sector for the past eight years as both an operator and advisor. In her current capacity at iGaming Capital, Melissa is an advisor focused on bridging US and European interests. In addition, Melissa is the Finance Editor and regular columnist for iGaming Business Magazine. Prior to the iGaming industry, Melissa was a General Partner and founding member of Constellation Ventures.
[Email Melissa]
Why do big online and land-based casinos care about social games, of all things? Social games seem like "big business" to those of us in the industry, but compared with the global gambling industry, our whole industry barely covers the cost of one new resort. To understand the answer to this question, you must take a step back and look at what social networking generally means to the big casino operators and then put social gaming in this context. Melissa Blau, Principal for iGaming and Finance Editor for iGaming Business Magazine, works closely with many of those big operators and understands why they see social networking as a huge opportunity. Join Melissa as she explains it to the rest of us!
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Casual, Social & Mobile Games and the Audio that Makes Them Successful
Nick THOMAS, Founder, SomaTone Interactive, Inc.
Nick Thomas began his professional music career as an Engineer/Mixer for a long list of platinum artists such as Destiny's Child, Celine Dion, Carlos Santana, and Ricky Martin to name a few. Nick founded SomaTone in 2003 and began producing audio content on a number of feature films, national ad campaigns, and AAA games. Over the last 6 years, SomaTone transitioned exclusively into video game production and is credited on over 1,000 titles to date.
[Email Nick]
Join Nick Thomas, co-founder of SomaTone Interactive Inc., for an in-depth look at the transforming casual games industry, and what make these games sound great. Casual games continue to be the largest growing segment of the gaming industry, with tens of millions of gamers logging on daily to play social, mobile, and downloadable games. Understanding the requirements, limitations, and creative needs of today's casual and social games is paramount to successfully providing Music, SFX, and Voice-Over for these abundant games.
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Monetizing Your App with Mobile Optimized Advertising
Robert SCHNEIDER, Head of European Operations, TrialPay
Robert Schneider is TrialPay’s head of European operations in Berlin, Germany. His mission is to extend TrialPay's industry-leading solutions in transactional advertising to European markets and grow the client base of advertisers and publishers. Robert was previously a senior business development director at zanox, Europe's leading performance advertising network.
[Email Robert]
Today more than ever, social game developers and brand advertisers are hoping to ride the coattails of the mobile wave. Mobile developers face the challenge of creating an engaging app and acquiring users, but they also need an effective monetization strategy. This session will highlight how premier brand advertisers are optimizing for mobile, and how publishers can best take advantage of this by increasing the diversity of quality offers. We'll share best practices, key findings, and trends we've seen first hand in the mobile advertising space.
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State-of-the-Art Slot Machine Design
Al THOMAS, President & Co-founder, Bluhare Studios
Al is the President and Co-founder of Gemini Digital Development, a digital media publishing and management company of wholly-owned subsidiaries including Bluhare Studios and Wildhare Gaming. Prior to founding Gemini, Al was Executive Director of Advanced Game R&D for WMS Gaming. He is an accomplished creative professional with extensive experience in design and innovation with over 30 issued patents and 150 patent applications.
[Email Al]
Slot machine design evolution is in fast-forward! Mega-multi-line "penny" slots are replacing "dollar" slots. High-res, multi-layer video screens create realistic 3D "reels" that aren't. "2nd story" bonus games and multi-screen formats add drops, cut scenes, and brand-licensing opportunities. Al Thomas, President and Founder of Bluehare Studios, shares experiences in the thick of the ongoing radical technical and design innovations around real-world slots.
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Going Above and Beyond the Standards: How to Engage with your Players!
Almog KOREN, CEO/Game Developer, Scoreoid
Almog Koren is an interactive developer and the founder of Scoreoid, a startup creating the ultimate backend as a service for game developers! Specializing in interactive games and mobile devices, Almog is an Adobe Community Professional who contributes to magazines and blogs and is actively involved in the gaming community.
[Email Almog]
As game developers, our most powerful asset is our players. With today’s competitive market, it's important to understand how we can engage with our players and drive retention.
While you have analytics tools, as a game developer you need more then this, but the ability to engage directly with your players to drive retention and your game brand. We will cover a number of options like direct in game notifications, push notifications or messaging, newsletters and even SMS.
In this session, we will cover the importance of game players and how as a developer you can directly engage with them. We will cover the importance of identifying the different types of players. We will cover how to create direct engagement options for better conversions while saving you time.
Whether you’re an indie game developer or big studio, you will have a better understanding of the importance of engaging with your game players. -
Top 10 Tips For Mobile App Optimization Through A/B Testing
Steven COLLINS, CTO, Swrve
Steve Collins is CTO and Co-founder of Swrve, providers of a mobile app optimization platform. Prior to Swrve, he was CTO and co-founder of Kore Virtual Machines, and in 1998 co-founded Havok and worked as CTO leading the technical development and strategy of the company until 2006.
[Email Steven]
Developers are increasingly looking to optimize mobile apps through data analysis and ongoing A/B testing. But how do we identify where the biggest gains can be made with the least effort?
This session will look at the practical ways in which leading developers have used data to inform decisions on what to test, and how they have gone about implementing those tests to make effective changes and improvements to retention, engagement and monetization rates. -
Three Keys to Swimming in the Social Casino & Real-money Game Shark Tank
Eric GOLDBERG, CEO, Crossover Technologies
Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies. Eric is a 30-year veteran of the game, mobile, and consumer Internet industries, serving in capacities ranging from game designer to executive.
[Email Eric]
Eric Goldberg presents a survival guide for professionals and companies coming from all other game sectors. First, local politics matter—and can be show stoppers. The incumbents understand this quite well, and many of them have had decades to get quite good at moving the levers of power. Second, social casino & real-money gaming are different animals—play patterns, and even the relative popularity of classic games, differ in a number of significant respects.
Third, the virtual-world gaming frontier—the rules of the “virtual-world” game are in an earlier stage of evolution and, as many physical-world gambling best practices do not translate well to the virtual world, is an area in which certain traditional game developers have a competitive advantage. -
LUNCH SESSION: BlackBerry 10 Rises | 12:00 - 12:20
Volker HIRSCH, Director, Global Head of Business Development - Games, Research In Motion
Volker is the Global Head of Business Development - Games for Research In Motion (BlackBerry) where he arrived via the acquisition of mobile social gaming platform Scoreloop where he was the Chief Strategy Officer. He is also a co-founder of Blue Beck, a game and app development studio.
Volker has been in the mobile games sector almost from its start with Mforma/Hands-On Mobile and Connect2Media (which he co-founded) where he oversaw licensing and corporate development and worked with Marvel, Hasbro, Activision, LEGO, BMW, Konami, the World Poker Tour, Universal, Viacom, and many developers along the way.
Volker is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an EMEA Board Member of MEF and a Governor of the Fallibroome Academy. He is also a co-organiser of TEDx Youth @ Manchester and a co-founder of Mobile Monday Manchester. He tweets @vhirsch.
[Email Volker]
This session will introduce participants to the new BlackBerry 10 platform, which provides a radically improved opportunity for game developers to deliver great games and monetize them.
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LUNCH SESSION: Monetize those Non-paying Users! Best Practices in Ad Monetization
Damon MARSHALL, VP Business Development, SupersonicAds
Daniel SIEGMUND, Founder & Managing Director, GAN
Oliver CLAMP, Director of Publisher Services, Millennial Media
D. Patrick PETTAY, Director Business Development EMEA, InMobi
Moderator: Gilad ROTEM, Head of Sales, InGaming
Damon heads Business Development in North America for SupersonicAds, a leading full-service monetization platform for mobile and online games. Damon has held a number of roles in the video games industry, including having worked for IGN Entertainment, WeGame and Macrovision over the past eight years.
[Email Damon]
Daniel is Founder and Managing Director of GAN Game Ad Net, an advertising specialist for advertising and media services in games. Furthermore he is Founder of GAN Technologies, a tech company focusing especially on adserving and video technology for online games, and NEODAU, a specialized agency in the field of marketing for games.
[Email Daniel]
[Email Oliver]
Patrick joined InMobi in June of 2012 and runs App Developer business development across EMEA. Prior to InMobi, Patrick spent four years at Fox Digital Media where he was Vice President, business development and operations across a thirty site network which included all of Fox’s online and mobile sites. Prior to this, Patrick was Director of Development, Entertainment, at Fox Interactive Media, where he help develop such sites as Hulu.com.
[Email Patrick]
Gilad is head of Sales and Product at InGaming, a leading targeted User Acquisition network, sister company to the major online gambling super affiliate, Incomate. Gilad is leading the company’s expansion into the Casual Gaming industry and oversees the company’s client base, strategic partnerships and customer relations management.
[Email Gilad]
In-app purchases is a great way of monetizing that tiny percentage of players that is actually willing to open their wallet for your game. Still, over 95 percent of your players will never spend a dime. In this informative and interactive panel, you will gain the tools and know-how to generate revenue from ALL your players. Display ads, interstitials, offer walls, rewards-based videos--understand what would work best for your game. Hear real success stories from industry veterans and learn the dos and don’ts of ad monetization in this money-making panel.
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Rick 'O Shea - Daredevil App
Kjell 't HOEN, Game Developer, Tingly Games
Kjell 't Hoen is a game designer from the Netherlands, specialized in casual games. After creating his own concepts for his 'Ludomo Gamestudio', he is now mainly working as a game developer at Tingly Games. Kjell has a passion for making games and is always looking for new and original gameplay.
[Email Kjell]
This is the story of a daredevil app that made it to the spotlights and back. Look back at the development of the game app Rick 'O Shea. This session will cover choosing the business-model for the game and the design decisions made to tailor the game towards that model, what happened when they published the game and how it was received on the marketplace. Kjell will conclude with a reflection on the chosen business-model and approach.
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The Marketing Playbook for API & SDK Adoption
Kate PIETRELLI, Managing Director, Path Advisors
Kate Pietrelli is Managing Director of Path Advisors, providing marketing, public relations, and general business services to gaming and technology companies. Prior to founding Path Advisors, Kate led marketing initiatives for World Golf Tour, hi5.com, Shockwave.com, and Sapient and TriplePoint clients, including acquisition, retention, product marketing, merchandising and media relations.
[Email Kate]
Beyond a doubt, the marketplace for application distribution is crowded, and fatigue is setting in among developers. How do you rise above the rest, and get developers to prioritize implementing your API or SDK over the competition? What are the best channels to market and what outcomes can you anticipate to achieve? Kate Pietrelli shares tactics and insights regarding API and SDK marketing for developers from traditional lead gen and demand programs to media and events to messaging strategies.
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The Current Legalities of Gambling and Realities of Operating in a Regulated Business
Eva LANGER, Associate, Hogan Lovells International LLP
Eva Langer is an associate within the international law firm of Hogan Lovells International LLP. Eva worked at a movie production studio before deciding to combine her interest in law and her passion for media with pursuing a career in intellectual property law. She earned her PhD in copyright law and specializes now in copyright, trademark and unfair competition law in the field of new media.
[Email Eva]
Join Eva Langer from Hogan Lovells International LLP for a practical presentation of operational differences between operating a business in a relatively unregulated industry, like casual games, compared to operating in a heavily regulated industry like real money gambling or (potentially) social gambling. It promises to be liberally laced with legal specifics and examples from the EU regulatory sphere, Eva's personal area of expertise, but proposes areas of thought and business impact likely to apply worldwide.
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User Experience and Usability in Browser Games
Eike KLINDWORTH, CCO, InnoGames
Eike Klindworth (27) is Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer (CCO) of InnoGames. He focuses on graphics, game design and is responsible for all titles in pre-beta status. Eike studied Computational Visualistics in Magdeburg, Germany. Up to now, he is a passionate player with Age of Empires 2, Civilization V and Heroes of Might and Magic as his favorite games.
[Email Eike]
Eike Klindworth, Chief Creative Officer (CCO) at InnoGames will present valuable insights into “User Experience and Usability in Browser Games”. His presentation will include a summary about the development of UX in the last ten years as well as some concrete proofs of the relevance of this topic. With best and worst practice examples taken from real-life experience, Eike will show that UX is one of the major keys to success in the online gaming area. He will also explain how user tests and their results can be implemented into a smooth and successful developing process.
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Segmenting Players: How You Can Increase Player Retention and Spend
Ian ATKINSON, Head of Biz Dev & Player Relations, Playnomics
Ian Atkinson is Head of Business Development & Player Relation at Playnomics, responsible for new business, developer relations and strategic partnerships. Formerly with THQ, Ian headed corporate development, co-founded the global online games division, and helped build the worldwide online games platform.
[Email Ian]
As players dig into your game, you'll gain insights about how users play, whether they're coming or going, and what they buy and when. Ian Atkinson of Playnomics will share how to leverage player behavior data for targeting special offers, incentives, and messages. By mapping the right offers to players, engagement, retention and spending all increase. Additionally, Ian will share how Playnomics' PlayRM customer retention platform segments and targets players with messaging and offers.
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An Intersection of Industries: Online Gambling and Casual Games
Chris GRIFFIN, CEO, Betable
Christopher Griffin is currently the Founder & CEO of Betable, a revolutionary platform that
gives game developers the ability to legally integrate real-money gambling and betting into their
games. He is responsible for Betable’s vision, management, execution, and product roadmap.
[Email Chris]
Online gambling giants like Bwin and Betfair have made billions with commodity games that are void of modernization. How can they compete with social and mobile game developers who excel at growth and innovation entering the real-money space? Join Christopher Griffin, Founder & CEO of Betable, as he lays out why emerging industry synergies gives huge online gambling companies interests in Casual Games, and how this timely intersection will dramatically impact the trajectory of the Casual Games industry in the coming year.
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Rapid Cross Platform 2D Game Development with Marmalade Quick
Nick SMITH, Senior Engineer and Developer Consultant, Marmalade
Nick Smith is a senior engineer and developer consultant for Marmalade, a UK-based company whose SDK lets developers quickly and easily build and distribute cross-platform, high-performance applications. Nick has a background in C++ and OpenGL programming for games and has worked on mobile platforms from Win CE and Symbian through to iOS, Android and BlackBerry 10. For Marmalade, he has worked on many core SDK internals as an engineer, but is now focussed on developer relations, partner integration and R&D, with a little bit of app programming for fun on the side.
[Email Nick]
Marmalade is a powerful cross platform SDK that lets you build native C++ apps and games using a single standards-based set of source code. Build once and then deploy with a single click to mobile, desktop and TV platforms. Marmalade Quick is a new APi and toolset for rapid 2D game development on top of Marmlade. It aims to be the fastest, most flexible, most open way to create cross-platform 2D games and apps for mobile devices. We'll de demoing the tools live, showing how Quick can build a game from the ground up with powerful features in just a few lines of code.
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The Science of Listening: Analytics Driving Player Relationship Management
Mark ROBINSON, Co-founder & COO, GamesAnalytics
Mark has 15 years’ data-mining experience across retail, FMCG and finance sectors. He co-founded GamesAnalytics in 2010 with games industry veteran Chris Wright. A born statistician, it’s Mark’s personal mission to evangelise how analytics can change the games industry by learning CRM techniques and strategy from other market sectors.
[Email Mark]
Often for developers analyzing data still hasn’t gotten beyond dashboards. Metrics are useful, but only confirm what has happened. So what if your average user session is 1.4?
Understanding player behaviours through player segmentation and analytics provides actionable insights and is the cornerstone to optimizing game design.
PRM is the new doctrine in F2P Games. Listening to your players and building a relationship with them using effective messaging tools and strategy drives in-game monetization by improving player engagement and retention. -
Blue Sky Brainstorming: Real Money Gambling Features Applied to Non-Casino Video Games
Bryan BENNETT, VP of Marketing, RocketPlay
Bryan Bennett is VP of Marketing at RocketPlay, a leading developer of social casino games for Facebook and mobile devices. Prior to RocketPlay, he led Marketing and Publishing for Booyah and served as Studio General Manager for Kabam. Bryan holds an undergraduate degree from The University of Texas and a graduate degree from Texas Christian University.
[Email Bryan]
Let's have some "what if?" fun: What if real money gambling mechanics were legal everywhere and game designers were free to reward players with cash and prizes at will? How might this incentivization tool be integrated seamlessly into non-casino games? What kind of monetization features might capitalize on it them? Bryan Bennett, VP of Marketing at RocketPlay, explores how game designers of the future might leverage real money gambling to make video games more compelling, engaging, and profitable.
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Using the Right Monetization Tool for your Windows Store Game
Kristina ROTHE, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
Kristina Rothe, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Germany, has a distinct background in games, project & team management and IT. Passionate for games, she was able to look at various aspects of the games industry from differing view points: writing for German online games magazine Gameswelt, coordinating projects for Square Enix Ltd., across all platforms, leading browser and mobile development teams and projects for Travian Games GmbH.
[Email Kristina]
Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 offer a variety of monetisation tools.
This session will shed some light on possible uses of:
- one-time payments
- microtransactions
- Ad services
- subscriptions using
- Payment or Ad SDKs provided by Microsoft
- or your existing infrastructure
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Unique Game Design Challenges in Virtual Gambling Games
David JANÉ, Product Marketing Manager, Akamon
David Jané, Bingo Product Manager, is an expert in gaming, where he has worked since 2003. Founder of several companies related to the online and gaming industries, David joined Mundijuegos.com project in 2008. In his role as Bingo Product Manager, he led this game experience to be considered the Best Social Bingo Product at the EGR Operator Awards 2012, and is now leading the new mobile Bingo Product.
[Email David]
Games with a core basis on virtual money gambling economies can be very motivating. However, "traditional" game design experience, while useful in a creative sense, must be adapted to fit the reality of these games: The psychological effect of "winning" at these games dominates the players' behavior within them. "Real Money" gambling game design experience, useful in a mechanical sense, must be adapted to reflect that these games have no "real world" payout - the economic currency has value only inside the game world and the game team has substantial direct influence over that perceived value. These two characteristics create a unique game design decision-making framework quite unlike other types of games. Come hear David Jané, Product Marketing Manager of Akamon as he shares both successful and unsuccessful examples of adapting "traditional" and "real money" game design ideas into "virtual money" gambling games, as well as how sometimes the surprising behavior of "fake" money gamblers required him to approach game design from an entirely new perspective.
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Now It's Time to Go Mobile- Taking a DSiWare Success into iOS
Eva GASPAR, Business Manager, Abylight
Lawyer & Business Consultant, with a Master's Degree in IP&IT by ESADE, Eva started working in the video game industry on '99 at Bit Managers. On 2008, she joined Abylight to reinforce the commercial team and became a fix member of the company on 2010. On 2011, she became Business Manager of Abylight.
[Email Eva]
After the development and digital publishing of AfterZoom for the Nintendo DSi console and its success in the service, Abylight decided it was time to get back into mobile. The reasons behind this decision, the general situation of the game industry and all the challenges faced will be the main focus of this talk.
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Transform Your Games into Profitable Businesses: Tools and Best Practices to Maximize Revenue
Andy YANG, CEO, PlayHaven
With more than a decade of leadership experience building businesses and products, Andy leads PlayHaven in building the industry's leading relationship management and monetization platform for mobile games. Since becoming CEO in April 2011, Andy has grown PlayHaven's network from 400 games to more than 3,000 with MAU exceeding 70MM.
[Email Andy]
Andy Yang, CEO of PlayHaven, the leading relationship management and monetization platform for mobile games, will explore how the industry’s most successful mobile developers leverage PlayHaven’s platform to transform their games into flourishing businesses. Andy will give an overview of PlayHaven’s toolset including groundbreaking new User Segmentation functionality, which allows developers to take action on consumer insights in real-time and target audience groups with unique campaigns. Andy will conclude with valuable insights from mobile developers about how they are customizing marketing campaigns to boost the lifetime value of their games and maximize overall revenue.
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Casual Connect Casino Day Review and Wrap-up | 3:00-3:50
Uri ADMON, VP Platforms, Playtika
Raf KEUSTERMANS, Co-founder & CEO, Plumbee
Yoni GOTTLIEB, Head of Business Development, InGaming
Moderator: Eric GOLDBERG, CEO, Crossover Technologies
Uri is VP of Platforms at Playtika, the world's leader in social gaming, and he is an instructor at Tel Aviv University and Beit Berl College. Uri co-founded the content division at Orange Israel, and co-founded Dyuna, a cloud-based appstore. He also co-founded the games development program at Beit Berl College and is a founding member of game.is, the digital games association in Israel.
[Email Uri]
Raf, a social games veteran with a background in gambling, is co-founder & CEO of Plumbee. He worked most recently as a strategic consultant for social and mobile game studios. Prior to that, Raf served as global marketing director for EA Playfish. Before Playfish, he headed up the European arm of EA’s successful casual games platform Pogo.com. He also worked for advertising agencies like BBDO, Grey and Publicis and was leading the marketing teams for online gambling operator Unibet in Western Europe.
[Email Raf]
CEO of the long-time traffic optimization leader, Infomeda, Yoni heads InGaming’s Business Development. Yoni is a veteran in the online gaming/gambling industry, having previously held a variety of positions at 888Holdings, before co-founding Infomeda Ltd. Yoni also oversees the development of industry-leading online brands such as Winnings.comTM, Casino.mobi and the Incomate affiliate platform.
[Email Yoni]
Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies. Eric is a 30-year veteran of the game, mobile, and consumer Internet industries, serving in capacities ranging from game designer to executive.
[Email Eric]
After six presentation hours on the realities and opportunities of the emerging crossover between Casino and Casual Games, we have undoubtably covered enormous ground. New information is circulating, old questions remain, and new questions have been raised. To wrap up the day, join a panel of experts and entrepreneurs currently operating in these markets to explore inconsistencies, question assumptions, dig into details, criticize positions, and refute statements made during our first ever Casual Connect Casino Games Track!
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Cross-platform 3D to the Max!
Robert BATEMAN, Managing Director, The Away Foundation
Rob Bateman is an internationally renowned web developer and open source advocate with a passion for high-end interactive content and games. His main focus lies in and around the widely established 3D graphics engine Away3D.
In 2012, Rob set up The Away Foundation - a non-profit organisation specializing in the production and maintenance of a variety of open source libraries for use on the web and mobile devices.
[Email Rob]
With so many of today's digital platforms having built in 3D capabilities as standard, there has never been a better time to create 3D games for the casual user. But striking a good balance between performance and quality is something that requires a little more knowledge of the underlying systems to get right. From best practice design to neat coding tricks, this session explores the techniques at our disposal for wringing the best results out of any GPU accelerated system, using the popular open source framework Away3D to provide illustrative examples.
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Using Data-driven App Marketing to Get Your App to Rank #1 and Increase ROI
Florian LUTZ, Co-founder & Director of Sales & Business Development, Trademob
Florian Lutz leads the sales department at Trademob. With more than seven years
experience in the mobile industry he knows the landscape inside and out. His experience covers everything from mobile content marketing, mobile adServing and location based advertising right through to Trademob´s sophisticated 360 degree mobile
advertising platform.
[Email Florian]
Learn how a performance and data-driven approach in your mobile marketing can promote the success of your app and boost user base, engagement and revenue.
- Access to data: Learn which tracking technologies are out there, their differences, drawbacks and benefits.
- Use the data: Understand how to properly analyze big data and how to integrate them into your campaign optimization.
- Drive results: Listen how other gaming advertisers lowered user acquisition costs and increased ROI by up to 70%. -
Using Microsoft's Windows Azure Cloud Backend Successfully for Games | 4:00-4:50
Finn BOYSEN, ISV Lead,
Microsoft Germany
Christof WEGMANN, Founder and CTO, Exit Games
Karsten WYSK, Co-founder and CEO, MobileBits
Moderator: Stephan HARMS, BDM Gaming and Social Media, Microsoft Gemany
Finn Boysen is working for Microsoft since 2002. Since 2010, Finn Boysen is responsible for Microsoft business with ISVs and Cloud vendors in Germany, with the Goal off driving sales, platform adoption and app wins..
[Email Finn]
Christof Wegmann is founder and CTO of Exit Games and develops the realtime, multiplayer, cross-platform product "Photon". Photon is used by more than 20,000 game developers - including companies like Codemasters, Warner Bros., FOX, Glu, KranX, Nival, A.C.R.O.N.Y.M., OpenFeint, Konami or World Golf Tour. The high performance Socket Server "Photon" allows cross-platform gaming between PC, MAC, Browser, iPhone/iPad, Android, Windows Phone und other popular devices.
[Email Christof]
Karsten Wysk is the (co)founder and CEO of MobileBits based in Hamburg, Germany. Besides being a strategy consultant for 2 years, he has over 15 years of experience in the gaming industry with MobileBits (high quality games for the AppStore economy) and exDream (PC & console).
[Email Karsten]
Stephan Harms has been working in the IT business since the age of 18. Before joining Microsoft to become an account manager for classical independent software vendors he directed the distribution of a medium-sized system house. Since mid-2012, he has been working as a business development manager in the field of gaming and social media. At this juncture his target (his passion) is, together with his team, to inspire gaming companies for the Microsoft platforms – from apps for Windows phone and Windows 8 up to the Cloud back end.
[Email Stephan]
Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform offering many advantages for games development. Further, Microsoft dedicates expert resources to helping developers design, deploy and operate their games on Azure with consultation available at every stage of development, especially during the critical architectural design and implementation stages. Join Exitgames and Mobilebits as they share their experience developing for Windows Azure. Learn from them how Azure allowed them to focus more on their products, and less on anxiety over developing scalable infrastructure and IT operations.
