GameDev Days 2016: about the main thing from the conference

About why Creative Mobile organizes its own gaming conference, and about the last of them, held last week in Tallinn, – the editorial staff who visited the event tells App2Top.ru .

For the Estonian studio Creative Mobile, which recently announced that it has crossed the threshold of 370 million total downloads, the GamedDev Days conference is a non-profit enterprise.

The company partially covers expenses with tickets, but does not earn money from it. But I could, if, for example, I would not refuse to sell sponsorship packages to marketing companies.

But then why do they spend it?

The organizers set a number of goals for the event.

In his opening report, Creative Mobile CEO Vladimir Funtikov positioned the conference as one of the ways to solve the difficult situation in the gaming market.

“The console and PC games market is expensive in terms of development, the mobile games market is oversaturated, distribution channels are overloaded, and the pace of development itself has slowed down in most regions. What to do? Unite and cooperate with each other. This is also why we are doing the conference,” said Functikov, opening GamedDev Days 2016.

Speech by Vladimir Funtikov
Marianna Kryakvina, Director of Business Development and Coordinator of Creative Mobile events, revealed who exactly the company wants to cooperate with in the near future in a conversation with us.

According to her, one of the objectives of the conference is to attract the attention of the Estonian government to the gaming industry. In order for the government to launch a grant program for gaming projects, it is necessary to show that this industry exists in the country.

And, of course, the conference for Creative Mobile is something that allows you to fairly position yourself not only as the largest developer in Estonia, but also as a successful publisher contributing to the development of the industry in the region. This is a job for both the global and local image.

This year GamedDev Days 2016 was held for the fourth time. And for the fourth year it continues to grow. If a year ago the number of participants numbered about 325 people, this year there were already more than 500 visitors from about 150 companies. Most of them were residents of Estonia, Russia and Finland.

There were also more reports this time – 32. We remember two of them. The first one, read by the co-founder of Fireproof Games Barry Meade, concerned the need to “go your own way”, create original projects that destroy stereotypes.

Barry believes that players don’t need clones or games of the same genres, they don’t need the “number two” on the market. For this reason, the problem with low visibility on the market is far-fetched: a good original game will be found and bought anyway.

Barry Mead
The main marketing and PR tool of a good game is word of mouth.

And if the project is similar to thousands of others, there is nothing to blame on the market. If you want to be a leader, offer something new. Today, according to Barry, 98% of developers follow the ideas that have already been proposed.

Moreover, Barry understands originality much more widely than is customary. He believes that when creating new games, it is not necessary to build on existing genres, it is necessary to work outside of them.

His speech was well complemented by the speech of Eric Sefert, the chief user purchase manager at Rovio. The idea of his report was that independent developers should not think about marketing the same way big companies think about it.

For example, small teams need to forget about LTV.

It makes sense to think about it if the team has time, if it spends huge budgets on advertising and waits for a return (and it generally has time to wait for this return). When it comes to a small team, the main thing is to reach the maximum number of users as quickly as possible.

Eric Sefert
So, from Sefert’s point of view, first of all, it is necessary to think about virality, how to make each download bring two.

But don’t think about virality (k-factor) abstractly. The task before our eyes should be how to make players communicate in the game, share it.

His thought can be logically developed by answering the question, what exactly will make, apart from good gameplay, share the project?

Multiplayer!

So the project is able to get a number of additional ones from one installation.

In this context, it makes no sense to be surprised that the audience paid special attention to multiplayer projects at the conference developers’ exhibition – Game Village. In particular, the unpretentious-looking but addictive Combat Racers of the Finnish The Major Game Company, as well as the third-person action Skara of the Spanish 8-Bit Studio.

But the winners for the title of the best game of the event (they were determined by the guests of the conference, leaving voting cards for them) turned out to be other, non-multiplayer titles. The first place, for example, went to the already released mobile quest Spotlight: Room Escape.

Conference guests watch Skara
Returning to the multiplayer.

One of the topics of the event suddenly became Clash Royale. Despite the absence of Supercell, it was not without her participation. A number of reports mentioned the game, conversations often boiled down to it, even some interviews were taken at the moment when the speaker was checking the chests.

But the main topic of the conference, of course, was not a specific game, but indie. More precisely, how and what they should do in the modern gaming market. Another thing is that there is no clear and precise answer. But, again, there is an excellent recommendation by Vladimir Funtikov, which boils down to the need to cooperate for survival in the market.

Photo: Creative MobileThe conference group is on FB and on Twitter.