Pocket Gamer Connects London 2019 will take place on January 21st to 22nd. To give you a taste of what to expect, we'll regularly be publishing interviews with the speakers at the show.

For more details on PGC London and to book a ticket, head to the website here.

In today's Speaker Spotlight we're talking to Round Zero, Fingersoft publishing CEO Daniel Rantala.

Rantala has a significant amount of experience in the fields of overall game publishing, management, business development and analytics.

He knows the pros (considerable success) and cons (revenue decline and downfall) of the games industry first-hand and is eager to share his findings with other games developers.

At Pocket Gamer Connects London he'll be hosting a talk entitled 'Automating Data-Driven Mobile Game Evaluation'.

He'll introduce the KPIs that are used for evaluating and forecasting a mobile game's success factor, and give a sneak peek into Round Zero's self-developed game publishing technology that handles user attribution, game analytics, cross-promotion and business intelligence.

PocketGamer.biz: Could you tell us a bit about the company?

Daniel Rantala: Round Zero, the publishing label of the Finnish mobile racing game success story Fingersoft, evaluates and publishes mobile games that perform in its current user base of 50 million-plus monthly active users.

The company’s data-driven team of professionals offers their expertise to early-stage mobile game developers and helps their game reach its full potential.

In the publishing process of Round Zero, live users are driven into the developers' games from an exclusive player network of 50m-plus monthly active users. Round Zero’s data tool reviews the results, eventually showing whether the game is a good match for its publishing portfolio or not.

We at Round Zero are constantly scouting for promising new mobile games. We’re especially interested in casual mobile games that are developed first and foremost for Android.

We’d like to meet up with mobile game studios, test their games with our audience and if the data looks promising, publish the title. In any case, the developer gets free installs so let’s talk business.

What does your role entail?

Game analytics, management, game producing, business development.

Why did you want to work in the games industry?

Love for games, of course!

What advice would you give to anyone looking to get into it?

Don't ever think you know everything, the industry is constantly shifting. Keep your mind open for new things, and "stay humble".

What are your thoughts on the industry in the last 12 months?

Interesting developments with F2P battle royales and platform changes.

What major trends do you predict in the next 12 months?

China will bloom, cross-platform PvPs will properly find their way into mobile, most likely a new hot genre will appear.

How has the games industry changed since you first started?

Players are a lot harder to reach nowadays and midcore has become a lot more popular. Hyper-casual has also found its place in the market as disposable, short-term engagement games.

Which part of the Connects event are you most looking forward to and why?

Meeting games developers is the best. Connects are always brilliant events for that!

Find out more about Pocket Gamer Connects London 2019 on the website.