Why go to the Winter Nights conference?

How to choose which conferences to go to, and why Winter Nights and White Nights should be on your list,” said Yulia Lebedeva, Business Development Director at Nevosoft.

As a business development director, I quite often go to various conferences that gather people from the mobile gaming industry. There are a lot of them now and this, on the one hand, is good, because there is a choice. On the other hand, three business trips in a row is very tiring. Of course, for colleagues who stay in the office, the opportunity to fly to Paris or San Francisco seems to be a great happiness, however, in fact, speaking and communicating non-stop at another professional event is a very intense and tedious job. 

Nevertheless, not going anywhere is a great luxury and a lot of missed opportunities, because it is at conferences that I meet people with whom we then sign contracts, negotiate more favorable terms for us, etc. 

How to choose which conference to go to? 

In my opinion, it all depends on the tasks that you set for yourself. We at Nevosoft make a choice based on who will be at the conference: I definitely need the main mobile platforms (Apple, Google, Microsoft), representatives of alternative stores, social networks (Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki), publishers (we are not looking for them purposefully, but it happens that some can offer unexpectedly good conditions) and various companies that do something new and interesting. I’m not looking for developers right now either, but having a large number of them at the conference is a good indicator, because it’s the developers who will be “hunted” by all those who I need. 

I also make sure to look at the list of speakers – who speaks and what he talks about, even if I don’t go to the reports themselves. Well-known successful companies will not go to a bad event. 

I would like to tell you more about the conference that we are organizing ourselves: Winter Nights (February 9-10, 2015) and White Nights (June 26-27, 2015). At the same time I will answer frequently asked questions. 

Why are you organizing a conference if Nevosoft is a developer?

For us, this is an opportunity to make an event that would solve all our business tasks at once and would be as close to the ideal as possible – from the point of view of a developer of mobile and social games. 

We try (and we manage) to bring potential partners from different countries to White / Winter Nights so that you don’t have to go to the other side of the world to meet them. So we find them, persuade them to come and give everyone else the opportunity to talk to them personally, listen to their performances. 

Why go to you if there are conferences where a lot more people come?

Firstly, our main audience is development teams that already have ready-made (or almost ready-made) products. Not prototypes, but serious sound projects. These are people who are looking for new partners and opportunities for promotion/publication, not those who just want to hang out. By definition, there are fewer such people than students with million-dollar app ideas.

Secondly, it all depends on who exactly you need. Everyone the developers need (that is, those I wrote about at the beginning) will be at Winter Nights.

Thirdly, for an ordinary visitor, a huge conference-exhibition, where several thousand people come, is hell, believe me. It’s quite difficult to “pick out” the useful ones, talk to the really important ones, and sometimes there just isn’t enough time for everyone. 

And fourthly, in my own experience, there are not so many sensible conferences right now that are worth spending your time on.

How many participants will you have, where can I see their list? 

Winter Nights is our 6th conference in a row. Every time the number of participants grows: at the first one we gathered about 300 people, at the last one – 812. The list of all the companies that were there is on the website. 

2-3 weeks before the start, we will update the list: there will be only those who have registered directly for Winter Nights 2015, and there will be an “Make an appointment” button near each company. From experience, we receive about 60% of registrations in the last two weeks, so it doesn’t make sense to open the current list earlier. 

We have a big project close to completion, we don’t have time to go to conferences, we have to work.

Of course, if the choice is made in such a way that “either we make a game or we go to a conference,” my advice will be unequivocal: it’s better to make a game. Because without the product, no one needs you. Publishers are not currently being led to stories about “how cool everything will look in just a year, and we will screw up monetization – wow!”. Everyone wants to see a ready-made or almost ready-made game that you can download and view metrics. Moreover, if the metrics turn out to be bad, no one will invest their efforts in it, much less money.

And here’s an important point: are you sure you know exactly how to make a good game that will also earn money? How thoroughly have you studied the market? How often do you track changes, follow success and failure stories? What do you know about competitors? Who will you show your game to when it’s ready? 

If you can give sane answers to all these questions, then everything is fine – conferences can be postponed for now. However, as my experience shows, without communication with other market players, everything quickly loses its relevance.

At the beginning of October, when I was at DevGAMM in Minsk, I was struck by the fact that the absolute majority of developers I talked to there did not know anything about the VKontakte mobile platform. For Russian-speaking igrodelov, this is an incredible opportunity to get traffic with payment for revenue share and make a cool viralka in the project! The announcement of the platform took place at the end of June just at White Nights and, nevertheless, for many it went unnoticed, some did not even bother to watch the four games that were launched there. For me, this fact has become surprising. Does everyone have suitcases of money in store for the purchase of traffic? But a successful game in Russia (iOS + Android) can safely bring thousands of 5 dollars a day, even without being in the top ten of the cash register!

The market is developing very dynamically, and if you do not track changes every day, do not meet with different companies at least four times a year, you can hopelessly lag behind. 

I will simply copy the following question and answer from Denis Zhuravlev’s article on the Alconost blog, which served as the inspiration for writing my own:

“If I need something, I will calmly ask on the forum or from friends. Why waste money and time and go to confu?

This is, perhaps, an age-old philosophical question not about ISDEF specifically, but about the benefits of attending conferences in principle. I will also answer in a philosophical way.

We don’t always know what we really need. We can endlessly ask questions on forums or acquaintances, the answers to which, we believe, will help us move forward. But are these questions themselves correct and will the answers received help us much? Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place and looking for the wrong thing. Sometimes only someone else’s view from the outside or acquaintance with someone else’s experience helps to see a completely different direction of movement and formulate completely different questions. That’s what the right conferences are for, where there are people with different experiences who are able to take a different look at your situation from the outside, offer a different direction and other ways of moving.”

I agree 100%. Sometimes I returned from business trips not with what I went there for, but what ultimately justified the whole trip. In particular, in the spring of 2014, at the GDC in San Francisco, I met guys from VK, whose office is located in St. Petersburg, 1 km from ours. The result is the successful launch of our game “Planet of Gems” in the Russian App Store and Google Play. And of course, now Misha Boldov and Maxim Babichev are “residents” of the WN Conference. 

There are a lot of advertisers at conferences now – where to get rid of them?

I would say that the most effective way is to take your marketers with you, they will certainly be able to learn a lot of useful things from conversations with representatives of advertising networks. If you do not have specially trained marketers in your company yet, be sure to give your business card and ask them to send their offer: it’s now you think that you will never buy traffic for anything, and in six months the situation may change. And then, instead of conducting extensive market research, you can simply view the letters in your mailbox: you will already have all the information and the necessary contacts there. In addition, many advertising networks are ready to make unique offers – but certainly only to those who already know. 

The main thing to remember is that there are a lot of non-advertisers on Winter Nights. 

What will be new?

As an experiment, we are launching a separate track with lectures for programmers and game designers. It is designed for 200 people, there will be “technical” speakers from companies such as Microsoft, Unity, Google, Facebook, etc. We are still working on the details, but we have already decided that the ticket will cost 2-3 times cheaper than a similar one for the business part. It seems to me that we can’t limit ourselves to business meetings – there are many specialists in the industry who also want to learn new things first-hand.

Let’s say I decided to go – what should I do at the conference to get the most out of it?

Take a few hours to study the program and the list of participants: select those who are at least potentially of interest to you, and send a request for a meeting. 

It’s no secret that they are often ignored – in such cases, I approach the right person immediately after the report, ask my friends if someone can introduce me personally, carefully look at the badges of people passing by – if I see someone I wanted to talk to, I just come up, give a business card and ask them to I need at least 10 minutes at any time convenient for him. It always works. 

If you have a decent game (almost finished, fully finished or launched only in one country), write to us at wnconf@nevosoft.com . Within the framework of the conference, in the business lounge area, together with mentors of the Games Market section on “Zuckerberg will call” we will organize an exhibition of developers (20-25 projects, no more). Write and I will try to find a place for you.

Attention: this is not a fashionable indie showcase nowadays – serious, well-developed, “deep” games will be presented at the exhibition. 

Go to parties, even if you are a supporter of a healthy lifestyle.

We choose the venues and format very carefully: at parties there will be an opportunity to talk without shouting in the ear of a fellow guest; there will be alcohol and food, and most importantly – there will be all the people you need with whom you can communicate in an informal setting.

Winter Nights traditionally hosts two parties: a pre-party on the eve of the first day and a big party at night between the first and second days. Only Premium ticket holders will be able to get to the second one.

Believe me, if you meet even the coolest speaker at a party and can keep up a conversation, and then (what the hell is not joking!) together with him, you will burn on the dance floor, your letters will never get ignored. 

What cool new speakers are coming this time?

Benoit Sokal (creator of the legendary Syberia) and Neil McFarland from Ustwo (developers of the sensational Monument Valley) have already confirmed their participation. Representatives of Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Opera and other well-known companies will also speak. Negotiations are still underway with many, but there will definitely be pleasant surprises, I promise. 

Now tickets for the business part are available at the lowest prices – $200 and $300 – register (http://wnconf.com/#registration ) in advance if you want to save money. 

If you have any more questions, write in the comments – I promise to answer everyone!