Mobile publishing is changing fast.

That was the first topic of conversation at Mobile Gaming USA West 2013 in San Francisco.

One of the big companies to experience and succeed in this transition is Korean developer and publisher Gamevil.

"Early on, the role of the publisher was leveraging its user base to cross-promote new games," said Kyu Lee, president of Gamevil USA.

"But as live services have been become more important, the operations part is the new value that publishers are providing to developers.

"It's not about squeezing the margins anymore. There are games making millions of dollars per year, but you need offices or partners around the world to successfully run these games globally."

Less is more

This change has filtered through to the way publishers source their games

"We used to look for small indies with great games, but now we're looking for companies who can support their games for one or two years," Lee said.

"The real game starts when the game is launched."

This has combined with an industry-wide move for less but higher quality releases.

Gamevil used to release around 40-50 games a year, with project manager handling multiple games. Now it's streamlining with one project manager on one game.

Indeed, the 230-strong company has 150 staff dedicated to running its thirdparty developers and their games.

Cash up

In turn, this means that the success metric for a game has increased.

"It used to be that if a game hit $200,000 in sales, we thought that was ok," Lee explained.

In 2012, however, Gamevil's average revenue was around $800,000 per game, and now if a game doesn't hit $1 million, it's seen a failure.

"I want to see our best games doing $10 million per year," Lee said. Indeed, the company's best performing game is doing $50,000 per day.