Good ASO is vital in this modern mobile landscape; in increases app visibility, store rankings, it drives organic installs, and best part; it's virtually free. Sadly, it is not as widely used by games companies and apps as it should be. ASO can easily be used by large companies as well as small start-ups and when done right can drive a large number of organic installs, however, when not done right it can negatively impact your games data and other areas of user acquisition. In this session you will learn how to get your app discovered on the IOS and Android stores, the most important areas to focus on, how to test your ideas and the positive and negative impacts this might have on your game, and the external factors that can impact your organic installs. You will also learn about different tools and research methods that can improve your ASO and how your ASO can also impact other areas of your game.

Takeaway:

• Attendees will be aware of important areas to focus on on both platforms when deciding on a new ASO strategy
• They will be informed of various external factors that can impact their ASO efforts, positively and negatively
• They will be shown how ASO can positively and negatively impact other aspects of the game and user acquisition - Research, how to test new ideas, and useful tools that can help

Chat platforms are the biggest thing to hit mobile gaming since the App Store. With the likes of Snap, Facebook and Apple now supporting games in their messaging apps, there are huge opportunities for developers to reach a bigger, broader audience than ever.

Takeaway:

Attendees will learn

• Why chat games are a Big Deal.
• How to approach designing for them, and the importance of going beyond porting existing mobile games.
• Why and how to put the audience and social play at the centre of your game design.
• Insights into the differences between chat and mobile games, and between the different chat platforms, using case studies from iMessage, Instant Games and Snapchat.

I was a hard core console game developer and player and was therefore very cynical initially of both mobile and the free to play business model.  I had to personally change my views and attitudes and so did my team.  It was a difficult adjustment but it's proved to be a very rewarding change to make.  I will tell the story of my personal experience creating CSR Racing, launching it and how it felt to transition from being independent to selling the studio to a publisher as the game transitioned into a successful live service.  This will lead into how I've discovered that market has changed as I now run our new game, LEGO Star Wars Battles through the soft launch process.  On the way I'll talk about user acquisition, development, deciding on what product to make and then guiding it based upon analytics, user testing and the design process with the team.  I'll try to be as honest and open as I can so that people can learn from my experiences and the methods we used at Boss Alien and have evolved to use at TT Odyssey. 

Takeaway:

• Mobile development is competitive and more difficult than ever but it's not impenetrable if you do it right
• Mobile publishing is sophisticated, so know what you're signing up for
• The key product choices you should make in mobile free to play

Black Desert is an award winning, billion-dollar franchise developed and published by Pearl Abyss. The open-world fantasy MMORPG launched in 2014 on PC and has since gone multi-platform launching on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and mobile. At the beginning of 2020, Pearl Abyss revealed the Black Desert franchise had generated more than $1.5 billion in gross sales with over a third of all sales stemming from Black Desert Mobile’s F2P experience on iOS and Android devices. Since its launch in December 2019, Black Desert Mobile now boasts over 20 million downloads across and has become a global success story. Join the CEO of Pearl Abyss America as she looks at how they became one of very few publishers to see success in the East and West, creating a core mobile game that speaks to gamers globally, attracting 20M downloads and retaining those players, and how they brought their vast immersive world to mobile.

Takeaway:

• How Black Desert Mobile became a global hit in the East and West
• How Pearl Abyss onboarded 20M downloads and how they manage to retain a paying audience
• How Pearl Abyss manage and deliver live ops with over 13,000 updates for Black Desert Mobile as part of a dedication to live service
• Black Desert is a F2P game that has generated over a third of the $1.5bn franchise lifetime revenue from in-app purchases

Licensing is a way to gain more attention for your games, and is usually part of a company's marketing strategy. How can you harness the potential behind an IP and apply it to your design pillars in order to find the right fit between the brand and your product? Going over the development of F1® Manager (from the concept stage to live servicing) this talk will look at how to differentiate your game from its competitors, achieve the right balance with features, engage and retain your target audience as well as scale with the brand.

Takeaway:

• Bringing a brand’s core values into life
• Appealing to a target demographic
• Validating early ideas
• Creating a scalable game
• Increasing the longevity of a title
• Overall game development and metrics insight

We all have an idea for a mobile game, but what does it take to make it a commercial reality? Mobile is a highly competitive space to get traction. How do you know your idea is good enough? What is the quickest way to prove your game? Can it survive in the wild? How do you compete with Wordscapes and Word With Friends? In this session, Greg takes us through the real journey from 2019 to the present. Starting from nothing to launching a successful game. In the process, he’ll talk about evaluating ideas, good foundations, picking your battles, flogging dead horses, intuition vs data, team growth challenges, how difficult it is to keep things simple, the sacrifices made, the successes and failures in the development process. The session will be of interest to attendees who want an insight into the growth of a game from first stages of incubation to launch. Team Leads and game teams alike will benefit from the first-hand experience. It will drill down on the key learnings on finding and keeping the initial spark alive and marrying it with the commercial realities for long term growth.

Takeaway:

• Positioning your project for the greatest chance of success from the beginning.
• Knowing your success criteria.
• Marrying player experience with commercial performance.

Industry Legend Charles Cecil discusses the opportunities, as well as the challenges, of reinventing one of the most loved adventures of all time. In designing ‘Beyond a Steel’ Sky’ the team set out to appeal both to the original fans of ‘Beneath a Steel Sky’ as well as a new generation of gamers. Charles will talk about how his team identified the core values of the original, and how they developed gameplay, narrative, and technical elements that respected the original, as well as delivering a cutting-edge modern adventure: the result is a game set in a unique world, populated by wilful characters driven by advanced AI, that responds to – and is subverted by – the player’s actions. In collaboration once again with Dave Gibbons, co-creator and artist behind the comic book ‘Watchmen’, ‘Beyond a Steel Sky’ evolves and redefines the adventure genre for Apple Arcade, PC and console.

Takeaway:

• Reinventing a classic adventure game that delights an existing community whilst appealing to a new, contemporary generation
• Revolution’s take on evolving and redefining the adventure genre
• Bringing a console-quality adventure game to Apple Arcade

In this session, Isabel Davies, associate at law firm Purewal & Partners, takes a look at the legal and regulatory landscape for mobile F2P games, including monetisation, app stores and social functionality, and what best practice currently looks like.

Takeaway:

• Which areas of mobile F2P game design consumer regulators can find problematic.
• How to keep your app store page legally compliant.
• What regulatory issues there are around monetisation and user purchase flows.
• What legal requirements exist around social functionality.

Hyper-casual games are topping the mobile app stores with great regularity, but there remains some uncertainty over what exactly makes a game hyper-casual. In this session, Kwalee’s Head of Publishing Simon Prytherch will first provide some core definitions for those unfamiliar with the term, before going into a deeper exploration of the elements that all the most successful hyper-casual games share. What should a hyper-casual game look like? How can you bake a viral appeal into your game from the very outset? Can innovation still be achieved within these relatively narrow parameters? Attendees will learn all this and more in a talk that touches upon all aspects of hyper-casual game development and aims to equip developers with the best possible chance of hyper-casual success.

Takeaway:

• The definition of hyper-casual, based on Kwalee’s experiences developing and publishing successful titles - as well as analysing dozens of competitors.
• Some concrete “dos and don’ts” for those looking to develop a hyper-casual game.
• Key principles of hyper-casual game design, conveyed via specific firsthand experiences.