For the second year in a row, Pocket Gamer Connects is visiting the ever-dynamic game development city of Helsinki, Finland.

Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2015 is happening on 7-8 September at Wanha Satama exhibition centre.

And tickets are still available.

So to give you a hint at what you can expect, we're shining the spotlight onto our speakers to provide a deeper look at the personalities who will be taking the stage.

Allison Bilas is the VP of Product at Danish outfit GameAnalytics, which provides a free analytics platform that helps developers understand their players' behaviour.

At #PGCHelsinki, Bilas is talking in the Bonus Level track, which runs from 10am to 1pm on 7 September about GameAnalytics' analysis of what makes successful F2P games successful and how Crossy Road found a different path to success.

PocketGamer.biz: At the conference, you're talking about what makes a game successful, so without giving away your entire talk, what areas will you be focusing on?

Allison Bilas: We examined the post-launch performance of over 400 games that launched in 2014 to see what set the most successful games apart from the rest.

As we all know, there are some games that see many times the success in terms of revenue as other games... and we wanted to know, apart from being featured or having big budgets for marketing campaigns to get DAU, what was the secret sauce.

In my talk I'll be showing that these top games do have very clear reasons for their success, which show up in their monetization, retention and engagement metrics.

There's a twist though... after showing how most top games come to their success, I'm going to talk about the success of Crossy Road. Crossy Road actually had quite a different way of becoming so successful, and I highlight exactly how they did it in my talk.

It all goes to show that there are many roads to success, and speaks to the need of having a specific strategy when launching games.

What do you think is the biggest challenge in this area that developers have to overcome?

Outside of discovery, which is very difficult and can require some big marketing budgets to get recognized in the app stores...

I think it's hard to pin down exactly how a game is going to make money before it is launched, and I think it's important for game developers to start being very specific about this in their game design.

How do companies like GameAnalytics help developers find success?

GameAnalytics is a free tool that is made by and for game developers. We do the heavy lifting to provide game developers with the data they need for actionable, insightful analysis of their players and monetizers.

We look at analytics in a very holistic and game-specific way, which helps developers get straight to the important information they need without having to fiddle with their instrumentation or setting up a custom solution.

And, aside from your talk, what else are you looking forward to at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki?

I love the Nordic gaming scene because it's really driving creativity in the industry right now.

At PG Connects Helsinki I'm excited to hear what people are working on and what's coming out next from this region. Helsinki is also gorgeous this time of year, so I'm really looking forward that as well!