From Tetris to Wordle; the secrets of casual gaming

Marietta:
Welcome to Velti’s webinar and this time I am not in the Netherlands, but in Greece together with my colleagues. So we are here with our 9^th webinar and I am glad you’re all watching. Today we will be talking about casual gaming what it is and why it is changing the status quo of the 200-billion-dollar gaming markets.We will explore the shift from traditional gaming devices, such as consoles and pcs to mobile phones. How this affects revenues and how casual gaming has recommended or reopened huge segments of the market that were not contributing revenues in the gaming markets. Are you ready?  

We have divided the webinar into four levels. First i will tell you a bit more about Velti who we are and what we do, then i will introduce you to my colleague Alex Pefanis, Vp of gaming and revenue generation, who will explain the principles that made casual gaming a dominant force in the gaming landscape. After Alex, Ava Frey our product manager will explain how Velti is applying all the necessary principles to ensure the games designed in-house will be a big success both in player participation, but also in revenue generation. Last but not least, we have a very exciting interview with David Fernandez Remesal CEO investor and former head of candy crush friend’s saga sharing some valuable insights about the gaming markets past, present and future. I can’t wait to hear more about that.

So if you have any questions please do not hesitate to type them down below and we will come back to it during the webinar and otherwise after the webinar in writing. My name is Marietta Robbe Groscamp business development director Europe and let’s get started.

Now let me first start with a brief overview of our company. Velti was founded in the year 2000 and has more than 22 years of experience in the mobile marketing era. The main solutions that we offer can be classified into customer value management, marketing automation, gamification, loyalty, permission marketing and web apps. Today we are going to talk about casual gaming and how it’s reshaping the gaming landscape. How did mobile and casual gaming become the dominant force in gaming revenues? Why simplicity matters and where is the gaming market going? Now the Velti family is ever growing and currently has 140 employees, 50% of which are software engineers ensuring that we are using the latest trends and technologies. Now the main offices of Velti are in Athens, where you will also find the headquarters and the development center, Dusseldorf and Dubai and we also have five additional sales offices in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Now in the next slide you will see an overview of Velti’s footprint which is something we are extremely proud of. Here is an overview of the main client we are working with more than 300 clients representing 70 countries from Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Clients such as deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Etisalat to PepsiCo and many more. If you would like to know more about a specific case study, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Before we will talk to my colleague Alex from the Velti Athens Office let me share some more insights about gaming. So let’s dive in. Well according to one pretty accurate definition a casual game is a video game target at mass audiences and they can be of any genre from sports to puzzles or even action but their main differentiator are the simpler rules, shorter sessions and easier gameplay. We might think of casual gaming as a modern trend after the dominance of smartphones but in reality the app stores resurrected casual gaming and offered it to a much broader audience than ever before. As you can see, casual gaming was equal to gaming in the early days of the video games you would just go to arcade and play for as much time as you wanted and all games were accessible and easy to understand. No safe games, no level ups, no strategy guides and quests. Now with the popularity of home consoles and personal computing more advanced capabilities were made gaming more elaborate and complicated during the 90s. However, there are two important milestones that need to be highlighted. One Nokia snake, the first mobile phone game that got everyone hooked even me and also Wii sports a console game that helped introducing gaming to our non-traditional populations because of the easy and intuitive motion controllers. Now all of these games paved the way for a disruptive new technology that was to change everything and dominate the gaming landscape. Now with the advent of high-powered smartphones and app stores a revolution was taking place. Now literally everyone has a gaming device in their hands along with 3d and freemium games smartphones took gaming away from teenager’s bedrooms and placed it into everyone’s pockets. Radically enlarging and completely democratizing the gaming audience by inviting traditional demographics that stayed away from gaming such as women Gen Xer’s and even baby boomers. While not all mobile games are casual games, casual and high per casual games are the ones that spare-headed the exponential growth of the market to the current leverage. As you can see in the powerful graph mobile gaming didn’t really affect any gaming segment and managed to double the entire market in a little over decades, while other hardcore gaming platforms like consoles and pcs struggled to retain market shares. In a bit more detail regarding the current state of the gaming market, smartphone gaming keeps increasing its market share and just recently passed the 50 % milestone of all gaming revenues beating both pc and console gaming combined. Let that sink in. Now it’s also forecasted that the mobile share will keep increasing as more and more hardcore game studios like Activision Blizzard and EA will enter the markets. Now with around 5 billion smartphones in the world it sounds like a good idea.

So now that we have covered the basics and momentum of this mobile casual gaming revolution. I am very excited to introduce the second level of the webinar, which my dear colleague Alex VP of gaming and revenue generation will present to you. 

Hi Alex good to see you again and great having you here today.

Alex:
Hello Marietta, it’s great being here.

Marietta:
Now thanks Alex, so today you will introduce us to the secrets of casual gaming and how it managed to become the dominant force in the gaming landscape. I am sure all our audience is just as excited to hear more about it as i am.
The floor is all yours.

Alex:
Thanks for the introduction Marietta, let’s jump right into it.

Hello everyone, I hope you’re finding the webinar interesting so far. In this level we will go into more detail and try to understand how the growth that Marietta just described was inevitable and tried to shed some light on what makes casual games tick. How did casual gaming manage to transform a mature market and how did it become one of the dominant forces in gaming revenues?

We will cover the five critical principles that define casual games one by one and showcase how casual gaming opened up an entirely new market forever changing the gaming landscape but also our definitions on who is a gamer. So let’s start with the most important principle, which is simple game mechanics. These come in direct contrast with hardcore games that were constantly increasing complexity since the 90s. When evolving games meant to add more features more choices and complicated storylines. Let me show you an example. This is a game screen of one of the most profitable games ever, world of Warcraft that has generated around 15 billion dollars in the past 20 years. It has inventories, spells, skills items, equipment quests, side quests, Experian points, ability trees and so much more. It’s great fun, if you have countless hours to invest learning it. And on the opposite side of the spectrum we have fruit ninja where you have to slice fruits, flappy bird where you have to avoid crashing on the tubes and of course world which is essentially hangman. It is obvious that between world of Warcraft and these examples, only one type of game is designed to cater for the widest possible audience. Casual games try to be as simple as possible, so the game mechanics must be clear in less than one minute with easy objectives and clear ways of achieving them. These simple mechanics are the driving force behind the growth of the market which attracts non-traditional gamers. An excellent example of this is candy crush, that has generated more than eight billion dollars in revenues in the past decade having women as 70 of its player base a population segment generally not targeted by traditional video game studios.

Now let’s go to the second principle that goes hand in hand with the simple mechanics. This principle was also instrumental in making gaming accessible to everyone. We’re talking about intuitive and simple controls like the game mechanics let me show you an example of how radical simplicity is by comparing to what was considered typical game controls before smartphones dominated the gaming landscape. This is an Xbox controller map for an extremely popular game assassin’s creed. As you can see there are 16 buttons that execute more than 30 different commands. The majority of console and pc games have such elaborate controls to ensure the complex mechanics we just talked about can be used by the players. And these are the controls for fruit ninja, candy crush, angry birds and thousands more casual games. Games downloaded billions of times each. Tap the element you want to take some action, swipe your finger to show direction, pinch to zoom. That’s it, simple, easy, intuitive. It’s no wonder casual gaming reintroduced gaming to a whole new audience that traditional pc and console gaming tried so hard to alienate by adding more and more complexity. Even gaming giant Nintendo has introduced Super Mario run a game that automates almost everything besides one action. Tap to jump

Another important principle of casual gaming, is the time requirement. Casual games are easy to pick up and start having fun within a matter of seconds. They don’t have long intros or complex story lines and get straight to the action. It is very important that the games can adapt to the player’s lifestyle for example someone can play for five minutes at the bus stop or you can try to beat your insomnia for hours going through multiple levels. For this to be possible, the maximum game session needs to be short as each level should not take more than 5 minutes. This will allow players to get immersed into the action for hours but also get a quick hit without being forced to play for long periods of time to complete a quest or find the save point.

Another secret of casual games, is that they’re usually endless. For example, candy crush saga has more than 10 000 levels, Subway surfers is an endless runner game and world has enough words for the next 20 years this guarantees spending users have a lot of opportunities to spend money and cannot complete the game in the typical 30 to 40 hours most games require. A lot of art articles have been published about the current online lifestyle in its addictive nature. Like Instagram and Facebook that generate a quick but short-lived dopamine hit, casual games also heavily rely on the brain’s reward system. The rewards come easy and they come often and they leave the player wanting more. Angry birds have its exploding enemies, Tetris blows up rows with increasing intensity and worldly rewards you with the desirable green letters.

All of the casual games use graphics, sound and even vibration to convey that you did something correct triggering a quick dopamine reward leaving you wanting more. There are even medical research publications measuring the effect of casual games on mood and stress levels. The last principle of casual games is the quick turnover and flexibility to produce the games. Most big titles have multiple variants in sequels while retaining the same core mechanics. King games has developed around six candy crush variants and Rovio has eight angry bird spin-offs. This is again directly opposite from hardcore games that take years to develop and cannot be localized or adapted quickly. And have very high production costs. These high overheads can break smaller game studios if they don’t get it right the first time but casual games have smaller and agile development cycles that help them focus on ideas and concepts and allows them to make errors and try again. Quick to market means quick to localize, release sequels and incremental improvements until a game becomes a hit. Re-skinning games can also allow the same mechanism to be targeted to multiple demographics by utilizing a different design language like cute and fluffy versus space and technology, medieval, sports or even branded titles. This concludes our detailed look on the five principles and i hope this level helps you understand the importance and inevitable success of casual gaming.
Back to you Marietta.

Marietta:
This concludes our second level of the webinar and I hope you learned something you didn’t know. For level 3, I’m happy to introduce my colleague and Velti’s product Manager Eva Frey. Eva was instrumental in designing and producing Velti’s gaming library and will explain to us how the gaming principles we just discussed have found their way into every game Velti has published.

Hi Eva, I’m happy to see you here today!

Eva:
Hi Marietta, it’s so nice to have you here. How was your trip?

Marietta:
Besides the long waiting queues at Amsterdam triple airport, everything went really super smoothly.

Eva:
Yes, it’s not easy to travel these days. Thank you very much for the introduction!

So let’s check out how velti employs the principles of casual gaming in its products. Velti was actually the first mobile marketing company to adjust their products to the trend of casual gaming. In 2015 we actually realized that SMS game became sort of obsolete giving the rise of smartphones. We then analyze the market to understand what is the next big thing. We clearly saw the trend for casual games and decided to develop a portfolio of Web-App Games based casual game solutions. Since then, we have developed eight different web apps that all abide to the principles of casual gaming. This resulted in more than 50 successfully launched projects in more than 20 countries and millions of active players. Let me show you a few examples of how Velti applies the principles of casual gaming, in its products making them stand out from competition and attracting millions of gamers. Casual gamers.

So the first principle as explained by my colleague Alex is simplicity. Yes, our solutions are simple, they often resemble games that people know since childhood such as trivia or memory games. No tutorial is needed and players can start right away. Take for instance a look at dual our very first web up game and the most successful one so far. Duel is a simple trivia game. It features different theme categories that everyone is familiar with. For example, music, sports, movies, geography, history or math. Users can initiate a game at any time and they will be matched with another online player. There is absolutely zero waiting time. A game is then played in three round. Each round features four trivia questions with four answer options each. The user has two jokers available to help him or her solve more difficult questions. The player who answers more questions correctly wins. It is indicated after each question if the given answer was correct or wrong. Thus as you see it’s a very straightforward mechanism that gives the user instant feedback and gratification. One in four important finding that we actually had with dual and that further emphasizes how important it is to keep game simple and short is the following.

At first we designed duel to feature five rounds. We then analyzed the player’s behavior and understood that quite a few of them abandoned the game midway. It appeared that the game was probably too long. We then ran a couple of tests and shortened the game to three rounds and as expected playability increased. We took this finding of course as a learning and applied it to all our future games which are even more simple and shorter.

As we have learned the second principle of casual gaming is intuitive control. The best example of how Velti this implies principle is in our score product. Score is our latest product that will be launched this year in parallel to the FIFA World Cup tournament. It is a simple football themed service that features a mix of easy mini games such as trivia questions and word salads. In addition, we added a complete new mechanism in form of a quick penalty shoot. Users are actually challenged to risk the points they earned in the game and double them if they manage to score the penalty shot or lose them if they don’t. The penalty shot is a very simple mechanism in which the user swipes across the screen with his finger, to define the direction of the shot. As you see this is sort of the definition of the game that is intuitively controlled and we expect users to love it.

Let’s examine the application of the third principle of casual gaming, which is bite-sized games. As i have mentioned before our own analysis of duel has shown that short games perform best. Having this in mind we designed Brainiac. Brainiac is a fun new brain game that is designed to improve cognitive capabilities, sharpen intellects and reward users. Each Brainiac game only lasts one minute. Within this minute the user needs to solve as many challenges as possible. There are three common challenge categories math, logic and memory. Challenges then consist of a collection of little mini games such as questions riddles and puzzles. Brainiac literally features hundreds of different little mini games in each challenge categories. Thus players can go on for a felt eternity if they wish so. If they give a wrong answer to one of the mini-games, they simply jump to the next one. Thus players are not getting tired or bored trying to solve something very complex. Here you may see a few of the mini-games that the user needs to solve in Brainiac.
The first one is a simple math quiz. Most probably you have seen similar games around right users need to do simple combinations to get the result. The quiz can be extremely easy as you see in this example or more complex once you advance in the game.
The second game comes from the challenge category memory, as such it is of course a fun little memory game. In this category we try to feature real life problems, that everyone can identify with. The player might be presented a grocery list like the one here in this example. He is shown this list for a few seconds and thereafter ask a related question.

The last game example you see here is from the third challenge category attention the game speaks for itself i guess i do not really need to explain it further because most of you will have seen similar games around. However, this is exactly one of the success factors for this little mini game users are familiar with it and can play it without any further explanation. So to wrap up the success story of Brainiac is probably its unique concept. As you have seen it perfectly ticks every principle of casual games. At the same time though it also offers real world value to its players because those simple games are proven to improve someone’s cognitive skills.
We employ a number of sophisticated algorithms that analyze the performance of a user in each skill set. Based on this analysis we then give constructive feedback to the user and point out his weaknesses or strength. So we are ready for the fourth principle. The one that is probably the easiest to understand for everyone.
I mean, we all like instant and quick rewards right?
We all thrive in one way or the other for instant dopamine hits. Thus a game that can write this gratification is almost a guaranteed success. Let’s have a look at how we employ this principle. Well, all our products always award users with great real world prizes. This is one of Velti secrets to success since its very first game. However, over the years we have sort of perfect ionized our reward mechanism one of the game that games that clearly focuses on instant rewards is our treasure island.
I mean the name already speaks for itself right? So how does a user unlock the treasure?
Users can choose among three different games. Memory wizard, odd object and spot the difference. Each of these games has a prize pool with real world prices attached to it. If the user solves the game correctly, he instantly leads to a reward mechanism page in which he or she unlocks a price. Probabilities to win in these games are really high and a lot of prices are employed in each project. So here you see the games.

The first one is called memory wizard and it’s the most classic memory game that everyone knows. You try to memorize the pairs, they will be turned around and you try to find them again. The second game is called odd object, in this game four object objects are presented to a user and he needs to identify the one that does not fit to the rest. This game requires the user to make a quick logical connection. Something that almost everyone enjoys, right? And the last game is a game in which a user needs to identify small differences in between almost identical pictures. Again a game that you most probably know and that you never get tired of.

Let’s go to the last principle of casual gaming, do you remember what it was? Well, it was a quick to market strategy. Velti has one big advantage on this one. All our Web App games are built in-house, so they can easily be localized and modified. Like this we are incredibly fast in launching a new project. It usually takes less than six weeks after we receive the get go from the client. Developing the games ourselves also gives us the flexibility too. One quickly create spin-off versions of our games.
In fact, we have created multiple different spin-offs of our duel product. Simple adaptations made a new product appear as something completely new to the end user while the backend mechanism remained the same on our site allowing us to launch a new product within a couple of months. Take a look for instance at hidden image and football pro here.

Developing the games ourselves also gives us the flexibility to localize our games in terms of language, content and look and feel. You may see here different versions of our duel product. It is the same product with the localized look and feel in different countries and it looks completely different as you see.

And lastly developing our games in-house gives us the ability to adapt our games to seasonal events. In this way we keep relevance high. Here a few examples of how we adopted duel to several in several countries to Ramadan, new year’s eve or Christmas.

So i hope you got a good overview of how casual gaming is employed at Velti, with this back to you Marietta.

Mariëtta:

For the next level let’s welcome David Fernandez Remesal. David is a gaming industry expert with more than 15 years working across THQ, Nokia, king and Sandsoft Games. Before joining Sandsoft Games, he led the last two game releases at king, candy cross friend’s saga and bubble witch tree saga. Expanding both candy cross and bubble witch multi-billion-dollar game franchise for Αctivision Βlizzard.
We met earlier this week, so let’s watch a short clip from my interesting discussion with him.

Welcome David, lovely to have you here today!

David:
Yeah it’s my pleasure to be here today with you guys, Julia! I’m glad to have a conversation with you about casual games.

Mariëtta:
It’s a great honor for us to be able to ask questions regarding casual gaming as we kick off our new season on webinars. I know our audience wants to hear more from you.

So let’s get started. What do you think is the number one thing that people look for in casual game?

David:
Well i presume we need to understand phrasing of the audience and considering that casual games are mostly female driven. So 60 % of the actual players are female as well considering the age range they should be slightly older than traditional gamers, so most of them are over 40 years old and usually games that are mostly played in western markets. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have other kind of audiences, which is kind of broad game gender but in fact you know the core audience would potentially be you know women play in a western market originally about 40 years old.
So considering that the typical player motivations thinking on interesting motivations are for this kind of games achieving. Meaning that through the game you can get something as an achievement, reasoning which basically means that you are actually thinking about how your strategic thoughts can be reflected in the skills that you have in the game and definitely relaxation where you can actually wind up and have some free time from your routine and disconnect from that one. That’ll be the main three you know motivations that people have to play casual games generally speaking.

Marietta:
Interesting woman, so do you believe casual and high percussion games have separated the app stores or you expect the growth to continue?

David:
Presuming it’s a hard question to answer per cent but having you know like looking into some data from data AI. So looking into how the worldwide market was evolving in the last six months for both iOS and Android and you know there is a growth opportunity in both genders in per casual and casual.

So per casual downloads you know view 2 % from to 8.7 billion in this first half of the year. Also from casual games if you consider the millions of genders that are puzzle and match games, they also agree to 1.5 billion downloads in the case of you know puzzle games increasing 12 % and also if you think about much games, the total amount of downloads was 1.5 billion which made an increase of 8 % over the last six months. You think about revenue as well, there is maybe a difference here so puzzle and match games that can represent most of the casual game market grew and they grew slightly 5 % to almost 3.5 billion in total from in-app purchases perspective. However, per casual slightly decreased from inappropriate revenue that was 18 million for the first six months of the year, mean 2 % decrease. It’s worthy to note that per casual games are mostly monetized through in-game advertiser in game advertising. So in app purchases may not reflect the actual performance of that one. However, if you look into some of the more popular games in both spaces and maybe for even casual we consider game like bridge race buying supersonic and this game actually decrease the number of downloads on the first six months of the year so totalizing around 78 million that means 30 % decreasing download. So if we think about how we can compare that to how the whole per casual market is evolving you can see that there are two main factors that can potentially help in driving the growth, one is that games are getting more complex. 

Ι think that some of these even casual games from call mechanics stay exactly simple. Ι know kind of one thumb you know gameplay but they start to produce some meta games around those that are more complex and these games are getting more traction. Presume the want from revenue perspective all things changing in privacy policy. Particularly on apple ecosystem it’s maybe decreasing the potential of modern monetary opportunities three per casual games and that’s why i see as well some of the games moving into more in app which is more monetization. Coming back to casual games per cent and maybe thinking one of the games I am more familiar with which is candy crush from king.

So this game in the first six months of the year drove roughly 100 million downloads that meant 11 % increase. If you also look into the revenue from data i perspective the game was above, you know 50 sold 568 million that meant as well eight percent increase from you know last six months of 2021. So here i think there is some more challenges for new entrants to come in the growth is mostly given by existing hips and then the opportunity here will be more about making sure that these existing hits can engage whether the audiences, but unfortunately for in a new entrance might be harder to penetrate this casual market.

Marietta:
Yeah but some nicer results. So do you believe big studios like Activision Blizzards and EA entering the mobile landscape, will benefit the end consumer our limiter originality and creativity and focus only on the revenue bottom line?

David:
It is worthy to note that somehow both electronic cars Activision and some other let’s say traditional console pc game developers have been in the mobile space for a while. So electronic cars have been 3a mobile a franchise like you know scenes or you know FIFA on mobile since a while person similarly you know you think about acquisition blizzard that happens to be king owner as well. I have some properties like hearthstone from blizzard or call of duty from Activision mobile already but maybe thinking about the wider ecosystem and some of these traditional IPO franchises from console pc coming into a mobile.
I think it’s really important to grow the market and definitely you know there is always a space for creativity and most of the successful games are based on creativity and innovation. Being these you know all games or new games. So i personally know gamers and players are the money more and as such you know part of this innovation is not coming just from recognized IP but also how the game experience looks like.

Marietta:
Interesting, so subscription monetization is all around us from Netflix to LinkedIn and music streaming and fitness apps.However mobile games are still monetizing mostly on in-app purchases and in app ads.
So do you believe we are on the cusp of a monetization revolution in mobile games?

David:
Well that’s a great question and i presume that game developers as in the particular industry, they are trying to realize the opportunity with the most popular existing mode and as such free-to-play has been the ruling business world particularly on mobile and as such most gaming developers have created games that they are designed based on free-to-play principles. It doesn’t mean that there are not game subscription services that are becoming more popular and specifically on mobile you have a better arcade.
Also on console pc you have Microsoft game pass but as well if you think about specific game subscriptions not you know service games you had one of them maybe long lasting franchises in this case from blizzard. Called world of Warcraft that has been in a subscription game since its inception. Also if you look into other games that can be moved or even cross platform you don’t see subscription but you see things like season pass or battle pass things that actually are creating this habit of money payment to the games and maybe a good example here could be Fortnite.
So as such i think that the subscription business mode is supposedly going to grow. I presume that i thinking of mostly game design most of the games that you see in the mobile free to play space are not designed for subscription model and more redesigned you know to engage players and monetize them through you know in it purchases or in game advertising and definitely you know there is a growth opportunity for game developers designing games for that subscription mode.

Marietta:
So Velti is a pioneer in non-casino casual games that offer tangible and monetary prices to players.
Do you believe price awarding apps offer a unique value proposition to players and will increase in popularity?

David:
Maybe thinking on player motivations, but from other perspectives rather than looking into intrinsic motivations that’s actually tackling extrinsic motivations from players and price and rewards do always have an impact in the games. So i presume that most of the games you may see in the market being this on mobile pc they offer some kind of virtual rewards and prices they propose in-game currency, in game items that people can win based on competitions or based on their progress.
So as such i think that proposing prices that we have good it’s always a good way to engage with players and particularly to propose proposed competitions. If i think about actually monetary prices this is really interesting and unique and i think this is you know appealing to certain kind of players that are potentially looking more value for money and actually there is a good opportunity to engage with them in competitions where you know the actual activity from these kind of players could be you know by far you know more interesting than through existing, you know virtual rewards. I think that you may have maybe looked into the market but in India i think that there is some you know population that is very eager to compete you know for in this case monetary rewards and therefore there is an increase opportunity in other markets to consider how they can tap these potential audiences that are really interested in value for more than mentioned before.

Marietta:
And as Alex explained to us casual games and smartphones.
The democratizing gaming, do you believe this effect will spill over to pc and console games in the near future?

David:
Yeah that’s great and i think one of the kind of jokes i tend to play with students when you know, they were coming to visit us when i was working at king, we’re trying to you know provide them lectures and you know make them understand how the mobile games was working. I told them that i was particularly proud because king managed you know to convert their moms to gamers and that was maybe something that they have not thought about so here maybe considering the actual question.

Casual games actually started on easy i think that most of the successful social games that you see in the castle space now started actually in Facebook. However, i mean they actually exploded from a while and as Alex mentioned before, there are a few reasons for that explosion considering the things happening in the space as he shared before. Thinking on how we can actually bring this casual audience to these platforms is maybe the main trigger here.
As you may realize most of the people playing console on pc are different than mobile graphics than the ones that i mentioned to you before regarding casual players or casual gamers but it’s nothing possible. I think if you think back and you think particularly Nintendo, i think they did a great work with the Wii to manage to bring this population to actually play you know on console so potentially this could be an opportunity but that would mean that we will have that audience you know in these platforms, if not casual games may not explode as they did in the smartphones through other platforms.

Marietta:
Yeah thanks for that David so before i will close the interview.
Would you like to offer a prediction about mobile gaming in the next years?

David:
Well that’s really hard to make and I am not having my crystal ball with me today but what i can share is a few thoughts about some of the potential disruptions that can happen and definitely you know which of these things will materialize and that can actually represent that business opportunity. I don’t know, we just you know touch a bit on business models and i think as i mentioned to you before free to play is the main visual now particularly for mobile games.
Also we discuss a little bit about subscription but there is a kind of new business model that is coming in which is play an earn which is something that may potentially kind of change the way that you know players are engaging with the games. We also touch this a little bit as well which is about the players and how you know the players are evolving and this is particularly important for casual players. Take into account that some of these players you know that have started to play computer games are starting to play those through casual games.

However, you know we see that the players evolving they have the money for more they are you know they want to get i would say more complex experiences and you will see things like you know. The casual games moving more too casual as i mentioned before. Actually moving to mid core, mid card moving to core and then maybe having a more complex structure where you know games are more glory and you cannot actually differentiate games per gender and all of them will have more complex meta games even though the actual you know working loop is simple. Maybe thinking on distribution as well as you know most of the games are distributed through close ecosystems particularly mobile. So you have you know apple app store google play and other potential platforms from you know OEMS and i feel there is an opportunity to disrupt on the distribution here and motion through the web. So how mobile web and web can you know manage to provide a different distribution channel really something that we can potentially observe and i present the last this point or the last thought is about technologies and definitely there are things that are kind of happening in the technology space that can impact games and i’m not thinking here about you know processing power from you know new devices that can actually do or more you know resolution from graphics you know in the games. I was thinking mostly on two main changes that are happening one is cloud gaming and what extent cloud technologies can provide different gaming experiences where actually the device that you use is done it’s basically a representation or a display for you to actually play the game on a control, remote control but for the full intelligent seller and this stream through the cloud services.

The other one is the block chain i presume that you have been you know aware about some of the changes in in the space here and there’s a full opportunity to develop you know games in web3 and if we connect that to something we mentioned before around how you can disrupt the distribution models there’s maybe an opportunity here as well to think about that one. And all in all there is a kind of a fuzzy and a password for the Metaverse right.
For the Metaverse is because it might not be one, might be multiple of them that can be connected that would basically mean that games may potentially transform. How people interact and how social networking is down and particularly. How you actually present yourself in the social context to have your platform that can potentially provide us with opportunities for entertainment.

Marietta:
That are some interesting predictions. Thank you David it was really very insightful!
So thank you for sharing your gaming expertise with us.

David:
My pleasure, it’s been great to connect with you today and hopefully you have a more webinars that we can participate on.

Marietta:

Yeah, definitely.

I hope you enjoyed learning about the mobile gaming landscape and Velti’s casual gaming solutions. As well as our interview with a true industry expert.

And with this our webinar already comes to an end. As you can see casual gaming is here to stay and Velti solutions stick all the boxes of what a game has to have in order to be fun, engaging and profitable. Our expertise and experience in combination with our data-driven approach, make our solutions stand out from the competition.Velti casual games are easy to participate, can be customized quickly ensuring the happy players and good revenue generation.

If there are any questions or you would like to talk about any business opportunities regarding gaming solutions, please don’t hesitate to drop us an email at demo felty.com. Where we also like to offer you a free one-on-one consultation with the Velti experts, just drop us an email at demo velti.com and we are more than happy to help you to grow your business in value and loyalty. For the latest news, more interesting webinars and blog posts please subscribe to our LinkedIn channel, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or visit our website at Velti.com.

See you on our next webinar!

For now, have a great day and game over.