With so many games being released, getting your titles noticed by consumers can be a daunting prospect.

This is where analytics and marketing experts such as iQU come to the fore.

Based out of offices in Holland and the US, iQU has been hard at work collating gamer data within its marketing mothership in order to help raise your game's visibility.

We wanted to know more, so we got in touch with company CEO and founder Reinout te Brake.

PocketGamer.biz: What is iQU and what problems are you trying to solve?

Reinout te Brake: iQU is a marketing technology platform that forms perfect connections between gamers, publishers and advertisers to create a more robust marketplace for online games. Using its sophisticated GameriQU intelligence platform, iQU maps gamer behaviour across the internet, social media and mobile devices.

Increasingly, game developers are having a more difficult time marketing their games due to the competitive and oversaturated market. It is not only about a single registration any longer.

You have to think in terms of profiles and cross-promote your users over your entire portfolio. A game needs to not only be good, but it must be accessible on wireless devices and have social elements, such as gamer authority, referral and socialising with friends.

What were the reasons behind your rebranding from MMO Traffic?

In order to meet the demands of the evolving multiplayer online gaming market and to reflect the company's expansion across gaming platforms and genres, MMO Traffic and its parent, MMO Life Group rebranded as iQU.

We are offering a wider variety of games and are focusing more on rich data and profiles of the gamer. Our technology and engagement with the gamer allows us to grow with the user and be able to predict gamer behaviour per country, vertical, age, etc.

The difference between MMO Traffic and iQU is that iQU offers a complete portfolio of services to publishers, advertisers and gamers.

Using the GameriQU data intelligence as its core, iQU expands far beyond the reach of MMO Traffic to social and mobile games, and eventually other connected devices, such as IPTV and consoles.

How does your experience as gamers help you?

When you are passionate about games, you play, test, and check out new and old games constantly. Good games deserve a stage, no matter what kind of budget the publisher has, and that is something iQU offers.

It is about relevancy based on your behaviour not just about who is paying the most.

It's trite to say that the mobile industry moves quickly, but it does. If you look at the number of games launched in a month on mobile, in comparison to the number launched in the same time frame on console, one month in mobile is equal to about six or more elsewhere in the industry.

For that reason it's important for us to get a broad view of what is out there and the only way to do that is by testing and playing as many titles as possible. Also, you need to understand and learn every day from the current generation of gamers.

They talk to us with their behaviour and choices they make. That data is not only important for targeting but also for us to share with developers to improve game quality, features, localisation, etc.

What does GameriQU provide that other services can't?

iQU's platform uses cutting-edge tracking and tracing technology which gives its services a high level of reliability and accuracy.

Using multi-channel, and multi-device logic and transaction logarithms, the platform delivers advanced targeting and profiling options to help game developers better find, attract and retain their most valuable gamers.

Using the data and intelligence for addressable advertising campaigns or integrated with the game engine itself, our services process and optimise gamer data around the clock with more than 100 million gamer profiles.

Can you tell us a little about Gamer Society and how/does it link into GameriQU?

GameriQU is a sophisticated platform that maps gamer behaviour across platforms.

As the web's most comprehensive database of online gamer profiles, iQU uses this intelligence to help advertisers target gamers in all territories and regions across the globe, as well as by specific profile preferences, such as game genre, game activity or payment history.

This system of profile matching allows iQU to provide its clients with the most accurate assessment of target profiles and their value. iQU's Gamer Society is a network of game websites, gaming fanatics and gamer communities localised across 12 countries within Europe and the United States.

By connecting and building a relationship with the gamer, we are able to bring them the games they are most likely to enjoy and play. The two feed each other.

The ability to track and target gamers is massively important, so how do you go about doing this?

If you have the data of hundreds of millions of players, you can not only target, but you can become predictive, giving you the right information to be able to choose the right games to (co)publish.

What's your approach for mobile games?

Mobage (DeNA/ngmoco), GREE and Papaya Game Hub social mobile game platforms have gained tremendous grounds by offering discovery and social mechanism as part of their proprietary mobile platforms.

The current trend by these companies is to aggregate successful game content into their hubs and publish the games for the relevant markets, but this disruptive approach creates confusion for the developers and gamers.

iQU's approach is to provide a unique social mobile game platform where everything is centralised.

At the same time, iQU will be delivering a platform to allow game developers to offer more dynamic contents throughout different OS and device platforms. We understand that gamers demand more and iQU will be setting the global standards to make this a possibility.

What sort of billing solutions do you hook into?

The most obvious and successful billing solution to-date is direct consumer to content provider mechanism.

For example, provisioning personal credit cards and gift cards for iOS and direct carrier billing integration to either proprietary market channels or third party markets for Android.

With the increased popularity of third party market channels, payment gateway vendors are gaining ground in the mobile space. Because the target audience for mobile games is dynamic we cannot rule out the prepaid game cards that are becoming available in most retail channels.

iQU's call to action will be to leverage and hook into the IAP API and carrier direct billing in major markets for iOS and Android respectively.

We will also strategically adapt prepaid game cards as well as partner with payment gateway vendors to offer our gamers with a choice of payment methods based on consumer culture by region.

How much work do you do in terms of app installation advertising?

We don't have to advertise, it goes through our network of publishers.

What do you think you can particularly offer mobile developers?

We offer developers visibility, targeted users, localisation and more importantly the capability to take their scores, gameplay and friends to the TV/computers.

Mobile is not a vertical. Mobile social games are games you can play anywhere at anytime on any device with your friends so you can socialise, compete, challenge and share your game experiences and results.

Some of the best minds in this industry have come to iQU to work on our mobile objectives. That means that we can be sure that we always have someone who can answer a client's question, whether it concerns commercial, technical or product issues.

That's something to be proud of. We have some very interesting announcements in the New Year that will specifically leverage the talent that's been brought into the fold, so stay tuned!
Thanks to Reinout for his time.

You can check out what iQU gets up to via its website.