Impressions from the Social Games Summit 2012

After a very interesting and successful two days at the Social Games Summit and a nice long weekend in Berlin with the Mrs. I found a few minutes to write my impressions from the Social Games Summit.

Two major topics were very prominent during the summit.

1. Cross-platform engagement is this year’s hit. All major social game developers are seeking multiple engagement points with their users on PCs, mobile phones & tablets.  Currently, mobile app developers are still struggling to reach profitability and prolong user engagement with apps. Statistics show that 90% of the players don’t pass the 8-month playing mark.  The cross-platform approach is meant to boost the user’s playing time and to switch the majority of his activity from the Facebook PC platform to dedicated apps (which is better for the bottom-line as well) .  Also, cross-platform players are going to gradually be exposed to more in-app advertising to increase revenue from this source
2. Videos, Videos and more Video. Everyone is looking into more and more video ads. The innovation in this fast growing advertising medium for virtual currency is with in-game video advertising and CPV+CPA models – what we in Matomy call “View & Do”. For example:  A user watches a video and installs a trial, watches a video and fills in a form, watches a video and…the list goes on..

Lastly, it was interesting to see how many companies are popping up that serve targeted geographic regions.  There are numerous reports and forecasts for the Brazilian gaming market and one of the most interesting people I had the opportunity to meet was from http://jampp.com. This company offers a monetization platform especially for the South American and Brazilian markets – keep an eye on these guys, they are going to be big.

Ary Cohen
GM Matomy Money