Mikael Leinonen is the Co-founder and CEO of MyGamez Ltd. At Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki on September 11-12 he'll be part of panel discussion with the leading Chinese Android game platforms Oppo and Vivo. Click here to get more info on the show, and to buy your tickets.
Mikael has lived and done business in China for nearly 15 years. He has quickly built MyGamez to be one of the leading publishers of foreign casual mobile games in China with over 400 million users in the first 4 years of publishing and proven that China market is a tough nut but can be cracked.
Q: What does your role at the company entail?
A: We have two founders, myself from Finland and my Chinese co-founder Charles Chiang. Naturally Charles is more leaning towards our partnerships and ground operations in China and I’m more facing the world outside. As the CEO I want to make sure that MyGamez is always developing our services with a ‘game dev first’ mentality and that we continuously strive to make China market access as easy as possible for foreign games developers.
Q: What do you think have been the most exciting developments in gaming since the last Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki?
A: It’s been quite ride in the China game market. The government’s decision to halt the new game approvals has caused many Chinese developers to shift their focus more towards the global market and many of them have been very successful in both Japanese and western markets. South East Asia gets lot of attention too. As the organiser of IMGA China we also see clear improvement on the quality of Chinese indie developers’ games. In the China market the OEM platforms have further strengthened their domination of Android game distribution. The Tencent WeChat mini game platform started a huge trend for HTML5 games and all the major distribution platforms are now active on this space.
Q: What are your thoughts on the way the industry has grown in the last 12 months?
A: China is already the biggest market and still growing, but the regulation changes have caused the growth to be slower than what it would probably otherwise be.
Q: What do you think the next 12 months in mobile gaming are going to look like?
A: The China market will continue to grow and evolve at a fast pace and we expect the game approvals to resume, with probably some changes to the approval requirements. The most exciting market developments will be the rise of HTML5 instant game platforms (we might see some new platforms gaining market share here) and the development of ad monetisation and UA services on the China Android market. Casual and mid-core PVP will continue to grow and we might see China leading some trends on the global scale as Chinese developers continue to evolve and innovate and are aggressively going to global markets.
Q: Which part of Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki are you most looking forward to and why?
A: Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki is always great place to meet up with game studios from Finland and abroad and I’m really looking forward to catch up with friends and see some great games that we could take to China.
About Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki
In a few short weeks the whole mobile gaming industry is set to descend on Helsinki for Pocket Gamer Connects. The event, which runs from September 11th to September 12th, is packed full of talks, tracks, networking opportunities, and more. You can read about the full conference schedule here.
There are still tickets available for the show, and if you click this link right here you'll get all the information you need on how to buy them, and what's going to be happening in Helsinki over the two days.
