Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 7)

Sramana: Where do you see the industry going, and what trends are you seeing? How do you position GameHouse to address those trends?

Keela Robison: Overall the market has definitely moved toward mobile. Facebook is no longer the primary development platform. Facebook is still big, and there are great reasons to work with them because they are a fantastic acquisition channel for mobile. By and large, most studios are putting the efforts into mobile focusing on true free-to-play games and games as a service.

Those are areas that we are shift to with our players and with our studio partners. We have to help our partners be prepared to seize these new opportunities. It takes a lot of effort to offer a game as a service. It takes effort from both a development and a technology perspective as well as from a marketing, business analytics and engagement perspective. It is no longer a business where you build a great game and leave it on its own while it becomes successful. The biggest trend is thinking of games as a service as opposed to software.

Sramana: The SaaS business model is driving the gaming industry as well.

Keela Robison: Absolutely. There is still an interesting struggle going on between customer experience and the ability to monetize. The old way of monetization was very clear. You wanted your customers to be so incredibly happy that they would just buy the game. Now that the free-to-play model is emerging, the industry has to find a way to engage the customers without nagging them, and that is a delicate balance. It is crucial to develop a very entertaining game, and at the same time you need enough friction points that consumers are interested in paying to get past those points. Some games do that very well, and other games are still struggling to balance the business realities with customer satisfaction.

Sramana: It has to be a tricky thing to design something where consumables will be purchased. There has to be a compelling reason. It’s about psychology, not just story line.

Keela Robison: It is certainly not game over by the time you launch. Even if you have a game that does not monetize well from day one, it is common for games do double or triple their monetization through tuning over the course of a few months. The ongoing cost of operating free-to-play games means it is important to have milestones to understand when a game is not going to work. You have to know what you have done your testing and you know when to shut down a game. That is hard.

Sramana: That is emotionally difficult for developers. If a small studio sees its games fail, then it becomes financially difficult as well.

Keela Robison: It applies to successful developers as well. It is more and more like entertainment. The smart entertainers are taking those crazy income periods and using them as an opportunity to save for harder days.

Sramana: Thank you for your time and insights. I wish you the best of luck as you navigate this industry.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions
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