GAME ON
B U S I N E S S I N T E RV I E W
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THE INNOVATION GAME Mickael Bougis, Vice President Marketing at mobile games publisher, Flaregames, shares an insight into the importance of the studio/publisher relationship, as well as the impact of an unexpected, new audience of gamers.
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FLAREGAMES IS AN AWARD-W SPECIALISING IN FUN, HIGH-Q MOBILE GAMES FOR ANDROID Mickael BOUGIS Vice President Marketing
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WINNING GAMES PUBLISHER QUALITY, FREE-TO-PLAY D OR IPHONE. est known for publishing Zombie Gunship Survival, Nonstop Chuck Norris, Nonstop Knight and Royal Revolt 2, the company works with worldclass developers to bring their titles to market. Mickael Bougis, Vice President Marketing at Flaregames, explained, “The biggest difference between us and other companies is that they have internal developers developing their games. We generally don’t do that. We only work with external studios – so companies of around five to 35 people – who develop their own games. We partner with them to release their games, providing
funding, marketing expertise, as well as technical expertise.” The creation of a game is not as straightforward as you might think. Around 90 per cent of all ideas are generated by the studios, but how does an initial concept come to fruition? Mickael said, “We have business developers who attend all the main gaming conferences in the world. They will see projects at
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“BEING BASED IN EUROPE, WE KN BUTIT’S MUCH MORE DIFFICULTTO WELL WHERE WE ARE NOTPRESEN 6
NOW WHAT’S RELEVANTHERE, TO KNOW WHATIS PERFORMING Mickael NT” BOUGIS 7
various different stages. Often, they are nowhere near finished, but sometimes, they are really advanced and you can play the game for a few hours. The developers select about five or six games they have seen, and present them in a meeting after the event. If we decide to go forward with them, we will plan a ‘green light’ meeting, where we will really start to make the investment.” The gaming industry has evolved considerably in recent years, and as a result, it has faced numerous challenges. Mickael explained, “The biggest change we have seen
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in the market is bigger studios buying up smaller studios, so those companies are no longer independent, and the number of companies we can work with is shrinking every year. In 2014 and 2015, it was really easy to make copycats, and we had a huge lack of innovation in the market. "The market at the time was also much more fragmented between Europe, Asia and the US. If you saw something working well in the US, you could replicate it in Europe, and nobody would really notice. You can’t do that anymore, so there is a real drive today for
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innovation. The games that enter the top thousand are those with different gameplay, different style, different everything. Of course, making those games is harder and much more costly because you take more risks and you’re making more mistakes. After an acquisition, you don’t usually take as much risk because the company usually asks the studio to do exactly what they were doing before, so the concentration of the market partially explains this lack of innovation.” With the popularity of Candy Crush and Pokémon GO in recent years, the industry has 9
experienced a new audience of ‘gamers’, namely middleaged women who have started playing games on their mobile phones for the first time. So, how have games developers responded to this boom in mobile gaming? Mickael said, “If you want to be successful, you have to be really innovative to capture people’s attention. "Pokémon GO marked a change two or three years ago at a time when everyone in the industry was talking about AR and VR. People said they wanted to go there, but it was very complicated. The way that Pokémon did this was to make it really easy for anyone, including my mum, to
play. Usually, the beauty is in simplicity.” The first wave of this new type of gamer coincided with the launch of Candy Crush in 2012. There are three billion mobile phone users worldwide, and 800 million play Candy Crush, which is more than 10 per cent of the global population! Mickael added, “When you define a gamer, you usually think about sessions per day and how they are playing. "Some of these people are playing longer than teenagers! The industry has a real problem in recognising this new audience of middle-aged women who have more time
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“IF YOU WANT TO BE SUCCESSFUL,YOU HAVE TO BE REALLY INNOVATIVE TO CAPTURE PEOPLE’S ATTENTION” Mickael BOUGIS
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and more disposable income. It’s not an audience that most games developers understand.” It is not just external funding that Flaregames provides the studios – the relationship is very much dependent on each individual studio’s strengths and weaknesses. Mickael said, “We might be working with a larger studio which has the funding but doesn’t necessarily have the skillset. Most of the time, they lack the marketing skills and only want to concentrate on making the game. We have
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some studios that are fascinated about marketing, while others want us to do 100 per cent of it. There is not one single recipe for success.� Flaregames partners with App Annie for its market data and cutting-edge insights, which Mickael believes have been crucial for understanding how the company is placed in the market. He said, “App Annie provides real-time data to all the mobile phone companies in the world. We can access this data and the revenues of all our competitors worldwide, allowing us to detect any trends in the market. It would be really difficult to do our job without it. It is also global, which is very important. Being based in Europe, we know what’s relevant
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Todd ENGLISH Flaregames CEO here, but it’s much more difficult to know what is performing well where we are not present.” Having launched Nonstop Knight 2 in the last few weeks (Flaregames’ biggest franchise to date), the company is now turning its hand to creating games for the Warhammer brand. Mickael added, “Working with such an iconic franchise in the gaming industry is really big news for us.” We look forward to seeing the result! For further information on Flaregames, visit www.flaregames.com 15
flaregames.com Flaregames GmbH KaiserstraĂ&#x;e 146-148 76133 Karlsruhe Germany