Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 4)

Sramana: What percentage of your titles are your own and what percentage are third-party titles across both your PC and mobile businesses?

Keela Robison: Our own titles are not the core focus for my side of the business. We have a fairly significant effort in terms of what GameHouse does for social casino games. That is an area where we are investing time and effort. In the casual games area, our own titles account for less than 10% of our total sales. Our focus is on providing developer services. While we have a suite of our own games, we really use them so that we can eat our own dog food, try out different technologies on our games, and use them as a base to cross-promote or kick-start third-party games.

Sramana: What I hear is that the bulk of the GameHouse business is publishing third-party games.

Keela Robison: That is correct.

Sramana: Our audience is full of small entrepreneurs, and this will be an interesting discussion for them. What does GameHouse bring to the table as a distribution channel?

Keela Robison: Distributors and game publishers are ideal for smaller companies. There are a lot of disciplines that need to be mastered in order to bring a game to market. More and more developers are realizing that you cannot just make a great game, launch it on an app store, and hope for the best. There are a number of disciplines that [are involved] after launch. There is a need to provide ongoing services and to conduct data analysis of where consumers are engaging the most within the game, where they are getting blocked, where they are likely to make additional purchases, and at what price point they will make those purchases. There are also other nuances to consider. Certain customer segments will never convert and will require advertising to monetize.

We are the consultancy that will do this work for smaller developers on a revenue-sharing basis. Our share of services includes the marketing activities as well as a certain amount of customer service, monitoring the app store, and making sure that any known bugs are found and brought to the developers’ attention. For larger games, we will take them to localization. We open new markets and introduce them to other app stores besides Google Play and iTunes. Games of a certain size do better if you take them directly to carriers or distributors in Asia. We will help our more successful titles get distribution in those other areas.

Sramana: How does your revenue-sharing model work? The app stores are taking 30%, which leaves 70% of revenue to be split.

Keela Robison: It varies on a per-title basis. For free-to-play games, we have to understand how much the developer is doing when it comes to hosting the game and providing maintenance. Our revenue shares are generally around 30% to 50% of the net after the app store fees. In many cases, a developer should expect to spend 30% of net revenue on acquisition, so our fees are in line with expenses that would already be expected. We absorb paid acquisition within our share of the margin. We are more cost effective because we can take advantage of our large network of players, including the mobile and PC audience.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions
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