They were exciting thing about the games is it transforms
itself
Almost a daily basis the technology advances the experience and opportunities and also creates problems like no other entertainment industry
But the starting point has to be a great game you haven't got a great game. Don't even bother
The controllers of consoles games are quite intimidating got 15 button, so it requires a certain amount of knowledge
So well as a large nice audience playing
Console games it was never really mass-Market entertainment
I mean apple really nailed the user interface with Swipe technology
Suddenly enabling people who had never thought about playing games to be able to play games games like Angry Birds and wares with
Friends and fruit ninja and Temple run and clash of clans these are very engaging games and more recently
Candy crush Saga just millions upon Millions more people are playing games and suddenly realising these aren't so bad after all
this is not such a
Dark are after all it's actually quite good fun and engaging and when the social aspects of it
Whether it's online versus with friends you know or people who don't even know to have some chat and community
I think is a wonderful thing and so the whole games world is being
Demystified as more and more people are playing on smartphones and tablets the games industry has moved from a premium
Pricing point to a freemium pricing points he used to be physical goods celled at retail for a fixed price
40 50 pounds or the dollar Euro Equivalent and
That was inflexible, but today
Online and more recently on tablet
they've moved from a subscription-based model to a freemium model whereby it's free at the point of delivery and
During the game you were given opportunities to be up sold through microtransactions contents a game has to be
Amazing if it's free because no one's gonna spend any money inside their game unless they're having a great time
If you give them a good rubbish game, and it's free. They're not gonna buy anything
so if you're having a good time
You're more likely spend money now of all the millions of people playing only between 1 & 5 percent of people actually spend money inside
These games, but the numbers so big that the revenues from that small percentage of people
generates huge amounts of revenue for the successful titles
Because let's not forget for every angry bird. There's probably 20,000 dead birds out there on the uP still
Physical ballgames which you see around you here I?
Still play but clearly a lot of those games of being Ported onto digital devices
Plus purely digital games are being created
By the hundreds of thousands these days and just the way we are in the world, but there's ebooks
music physical components are
disappearing and that in a way is a wonderful opportunity cuz
content creators
No matter where in the world can reach global audiences very high-speed broadband the traditional gatekeepers?
are no longer blocking the way and you're not having to put loads of money upfront to
create
products in the old world you have to for games for example you to
Spend an awful lot of money on development, and then you have to make a physical media put them on trucks put them in shops
And get returns build inventory. This is quite a
Laborious and very costly process and some of the people have stood in their way
Have you reaching your audience?
Often didn't know what the hell they were talking about
but now you can reach global audiences directly and with the democratization of
raising funding through Kickstarter
open other crowdfunding ranges you can find out whether or not your idea is viable before you've had to start the project and
You can find it your own audience, so this is Brilliant
it's allowing new ways of creativity to reach an audience new ways of playing and
And guess people who are often not wanted out of the way. It's almost like the second Golden age of games is happening
It's small teams
bootstrapping sometimes working at home
Doing it for nothing with friends are able to get content up there and they learn through that
It's getting what they say getting water through the pipes to learn the business
and
When they've had a few apps out there, and it might not have monetize much
but they've learned a lot especially about the backend and about virality and
and
And discovery that's the big challenge. How am I gonna get my game known about?
Often comes back to old-fashioned marketing buying installs and leveraging the paid for in stores with free installs once you get your chart position
But it's it's learning that the whole thing and the whole Pr
Social Media
reviewers back the old world of getting your product known it's funny with games industry because
Like in any industry you have to be
Know what you good at and know what you're bad at now a lot of creative people to start off games companies
Yeah, brilliant at making games, but they're not often brilliant at making
running companies
So to build real value in a company you have to create your intellectual property
Try and retain ownership of it and scale your business
now
It reaches a point when you realize that you can't do everything so you need to partner with a business person
Which often happens and
Sometimes successfully sometimes not the reason why it doesn't happen is that suddenly the business people you employ?
suddenly big think big they know a lot about games and
They start making decisions and they tend to want to make games from yes dear ron tomorrow
So the crisis and the business should absolutely work in
Tandem Together both know in their own areas neither of them taking control
Because you know the business people certainly have an opinion about games as a creative people. They don't something have an opinion about
what's you know spreadsheets that they're Gonna use or
What accounting packages are going to use but everyone seems have an opinion on products, and that's often where it goes wrong
It's not just the pricing points moving from a premium to premium
pricing points games are moving from a box product to a digital service and
at that point now a game is forever in Beta and through analytics a
Metrics you find out what bits of a game?
Consumers like and what abyss the game they don't like so of course because it is a service
You're gonna give more what they like unless of what they don't like and during that course buy forever improving your game
It gives you more opportunities of course to monetize your consumers