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Tenjin platform director Matthaus Krzykowski on the big changes to come to the industry in 2021

"I don’t see a bigger trend than changes because of iOS 14"

Tenjin platform director Matthaus Krzykowski on the big changes to come to the industry in 2021

Matthaus Krzykowski is a platform director at Tenjin. He says that he failed in selling African art, then got into startups, founding two and loves helping creative people succeed.

Krzykowski will be giving a talk entitled "Understand how Tenjin are preparing their customers for the iOS 14 attribution switch", complete with a demo of how a hyper-casual game developer could think about ConversionValues (a completely new iOS 14 invention) and how the data could flow into a dashboard.

Ahead of his talk, we spoke to Krzykowski to find out more about his role at Tenjin and why he chose to get into the industry.

PocketGamer.biz: Tell us a bit about Tenjin.

Matthaus Krzykowski: Tenjin provides Tools and Training for mobile developers who wants to scale their games. We are especially known to be good with hyper-casuals and Indies.

What does your role entail?

Platform is about how our clients interact with us; it is a product role. Hence my job is fourfold: 1) understand our clients well, what they do with data, and what makes them successful. 2) think about our tools, how our clients can leverage them,. 3 ) contribute to the type of training their marketing managers, data scientists, and data engineers should get. 4) influence our product roadmap and what we are building!

Why did you want to work in the games industry?

I got into the games industry by accident. Before, I was a founder at Xyo, an app search engine, and Priori Data, an analytics company. I love building for game developers. Game developers are playful, usually anti-authoritarian, and run with what is new and what works. This makes them 2/3 years ahead in most trends that shape our society. Building for game developers is exceptionally meritocratic - if they like it, then they will come. I was attracted to this type of person and found them in the games industry.

What advice would you give to anyone looking to get into it?

Share your passion. If you love a particular game or a job, then shoot an email to the company’s founders with a write-up about what you like about it and what you would improve if you had the chance. You just may get it!

What are your thoughts on the industry in the last 12 months?

I think more things happened in the last three months than during the previous three years—the iOS 14 announcement. Epic is fighting Apple. Before that, there were all of the COVID-19 changes. Crazy year.

What major trends do you predict in the next 12 months?

We are entering into a completely new era in 2021. I don’t see a bigger trend than changes because of iOS 14. I see early indications that it will put many games and app types out of business. Facebook’s micro-targeting is changing as we speak; this is affecting everyone’s workflows. I am excited, though, for the opportunities these changes will bring as well!

How has the games industry changed since you first started?

Lol, I still remember WAP games on mobile! IMO, we have seen five waves of mobile gaming since. For me, the last wave was about app stores reaching billions of users, hyper-casual games, Facebook’s micro-targeting, and game devs trying to benefit from data warehousing.

Which part of the Connects event are you most looking forward to and why?

Any talks that show real-life examples or demos around iOS 14. Networking with smart nerds.