Since joining the company in 2012, Erik Goossens has been busy steering Spil Games around an ever-changing marketplace and identifying strategic opportunities.
Erik is highly skilled in asking questions, making decisions, and getting things done, all of which he does on a daily basis.
Eriks experience in the online gaming industry goes back over a decade. He is the co-founder of well-known brands Zylom and Gynzy.
We are now living in a world that we class as 'Post-Zynga' - a world where the needle for casual gaming has moved.
It is an exciting time but it is also a time when making hard cash from your free-to-play games is becoming pretty damn tough.
The marketplace for mobile games is dominated by three major players; King, Supercell/GungHo Online and Kabam, all of whom are producing fantastic and revenue-generating games. But beyond these, indie game developers are fighting over the scraps of potential revenue that is left.
In the last twelve months there has been a tsunami of games. In fact I heard that last December we hit the 1 million apps mark; 18 percent of which are games.
I mean, wow, 180,000 games; that is a lot of competition. This is reflected in the economics - user acquisition costs have gone up 288 percent in just 12 months to roughly $4 and the average revenue only going up by 38 percent.
Now I am no Einstein, but I can see that is a huge hole.
Much too much
This all means that the development and monetisation of casual, free-to-play games has now become a complex and really quite scary world with so many decisions to be made.
You have to ask; "How do I access the global audiences without paying through the nose?" and "What monetisation model do I pick, and will anyone actually pay me any money?"
These things rattling around in your brain, on top of finding the time and capital to make an amazing game, makes the job of a developer a crazy place to be.
The pitfalls of monetisation models come in many guises. However the main issue is finding a solution that suits all parties: developers, publishers and the gamers.
As we have often seen pay-walls, in-app purchases and premium content don't work for a lot of developers and users; largely because gamers have to make an active choice to spend their money on the spot and with such a vast array of genuinely free content there is often little incentive to do so.
Developers and publishers are, in turn, struggling to make the genuinely good, new and quality content they want to as production values increase and revenues decrease.
Sticky eyeballs
But, I want to be careful not to paint too negative a picture. Despite what I'm writing about here there is one very important piece of excellent news: There are 1.2 billion people playing games around the globe! This is a huge opportunity. And, it begs the question...
Where can the revenue come from? The answer is: In-game advertising.
We know a few key facts. First; traditionally, TV has been the main entertainment content that brands have used to capture the mass market. It had a captive, targeted and accepting audience, however increasingly advertisers are starting to realise the power of online advertising.
Second; the 30-second video ad is the content brands are choosing for marketing their products, and that these ads need long form content to be attached to.
Looking at the State of Online Gaming Report, Spil Games released in 2013, we know that 44 percent of the global population online play games. That figure is staggering and really puts into perspective where the mass audiences, that advertisers are looking to engage with, are. More importantly we found 83 percent of gamers are open to advertising within free content.
So the simple truth is online games are the perfect vehicle to receive the funds from brands for their 30-second video ads. They are available in large quantities on a global scale and provide long form content advertisers require - with average play sessions of 40 minutes; versus 15 minutes for YouTube or 5 minutes for news sites.
Spil Games Platform - making real money. Really!
The Spil Games Platform, which has just launched, is a simple revenue sharing model. Developers generate additional revenue based on that which is made from 30-second video ads placements within the game.
An important consideration is to ensure the level of acceptance of ads is right for the player.
We know when a natural break in a game comes along; between levels for example, gamers are generally in a positive mood, engaged and receptive to advertising. We call these "cliff-hanger moments". When ads appear at these "cliff-hanger moments" inside of games, players are more respondent to the ads and more willing to engage with them.
And all of this is not just conjecture, we have tested our new platform, on a fairly big scale and it works.
Really 'bleeping' well! We ran the trial with some of our trusted developers including: Hunter Hamster Studio, and Absolute Hero Games, and we and they have seen some amazing results.
They showed us that the players didn't mind being served the ads; the time spent and return rate were stable and advertisers were clearly happy with the results given the CPM they are willing to pay.
But the most important factor here is that we have seen some amazing results for our developers; including one that has received revenue from these ad placements alone that will boost their annual income by a six figure sum!
I think you can imagine they are pretty damn happy with that.
It would be great to hear your thoughts on concept of revenue generation through our in-game-advertising platform so please feel free to tweet me @therealgoos or drop a comment below.
