Despite being trashed talked by Big Fish CEO Paul Thelen in his keynote, the afternoon was time for G5 Entertainment CEO Vlad Suglobov to get his revenge.
"We've had 60 million downloads, 20 million on Android. That's more than Big Fish," he said.
There's a spat between the casual publishers with Big Fish highlighting its performance on iPad, while G5 is currently focused on Android.
The crux of the public argument seems to be that both companies compete to source content from the same pool of developers.
"90 percent of our revenue is from mobile and tablets. We're looking forward to a world of 10 billion connected devices," Suglobov said.
Making the switch
Talking about the development of the game Virtual City Playground - originally a paid PC download game - Suglobov highlighted the differences when taking a paid casual game and making it free-to-play on Android and iOS.
The developer slowed down construction and resource production cycles, and increased the in-game price dramatically.
"10 hours to build a house is more realistic than 10 seconds," he said.
In this way, the original 3 hours of casual gameplay was extended into a month-long experience, played across short sessions.
You need to provide the opportunity for people who don't want to spend time working out how your gameplay works to spend money to make progress, Suglobov pointed out, refering to people who spend cash on buying soft currency.
Of course, other additions were high level customisation buildings that people who want that kudos have to spend real money on.
His conclusion: "You can take a relatively unknown PC portal casual game and if you convert it well to mobile and free-to-play, you can do very well from it".
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Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
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