Kicking off the Monetise, Retain, Acquire track at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2016 was Jami Laes, CEO of Futureplay,

Laes started by saying that "we only see what has changed" after the event, which started a thought process that led to looking into how monetisation in mobile gaming had changed and finding that the global mobile ad revenue was growing faster than IAP spends.

He pointed to the oft-quoted stat that only around 3% of players actually make payments in free-to-play games, saying that you need to monetise the other 97% through advertising.

He says that the best way to make the ads work is to build the game around the model, instead of adding it on after finishing a game.

However, "most ads in the past few years have been through negative reinforcement", which, while helpful at first, makes players feel worse over time.

To that end, Laes instead focused on positive reinforcement, and offering ads as a way to benefit the player and help them out, rather than offer a lifeline after failure.

This led to the creation of Farm Away!, which peaked at an ARPDAU over $0.09, and currently sits at around $0.06, with an average DAU of around 50,000 users, almost entirely through ads.

"I'm not saying view-to-play will come and steal free-to-play's lunch", noted Laes, but instead that the models will evolve, with new things springing up over the coming years.