The acclaimed game developer discusses the opportunities that the Cloud is opening up for game makers.
What are the next steps for publishers and developers to improve player engagement to maximize a games’ reach and profits now, and for the future?
Clash of Clans is currently making about $750,000 a day and it’s making that because it’s refining and adjusting and balancing these experiences around analytics to make sure that people are being monetized as efficiently and effectively as possible. Now, would that be possible without the cloud? Unlikely, because it’s only by looking at people’s behavior patterns and the way that they’re interacting with the experiences that you really get a sense of what numbers you should adjust or prices you should adjust. These are real values that are coming out and this is the tip of the iceberg. I can predict that free-to-play is going to be a model that is going to break through the $1 million, $2 million, $3 million per day for the right experience. There were a billion smartphones out there and a billion people that want to be delighted by experiences, and that love the fact that an app is free. Once they download the app, it’s down to the skill of the analytics and the balance of the game to tempt them into spending money. Some people will spend a couple of dollars. Some people will spend a lot of dollars. A very good example of this is a PC game called World of Tanks, which is dynamically balanced around analytics. I think the average spent on it is a few bucks, but one person has spent over $500,000 on this game. There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on in that world.
How do telecoms fit into the cloud gaming ecosystem and how do you see partnerships unfolding moving forward?
One of the things to bear in mind is that a lot of gaming experiences are using your connection to the cloud. There’s a lot of data now flowing. If you look at most of the big entertainment apps will require you to have some sort of Internet connection. What that means to telecom makers is that it’s a lot of data being used -- all data that’s being used in a knowing way by consumers, even if you don’t know how much an app you’re using at that moment is actually using in bandwidth terms behind your back. Telecoms want consumers to use bandwidth because bandwidth equals money at the end of the day, so a lot of consumers may find that their usage plans that they’ve got at the moment have to be changed because of their app usage on their mobile devices.
What excites you about what the cloud opens up for games moving forward?
We can do some of the heavy weightlifting that your device, whatever it is -- and of course that’s another thing that cloud allows is device agnostic because I don’t need to worry about being a console or being mobile or being a browser -- but we can do some really heavy AI tasks. That particularly excites me because I have some dreams and passions about AI, but they’re impossible to do on smaller devices. We can do those on the cloud and we can send those down to the experience. We can even do some really heavy weightlifting on the graphical fidelity of things. If you’re looking at something, and quite often the device you’re on is not meaty enough to render that level of detail, but a cloud computer can do that. We can do crazy things on cloud compute like voice recognition within games and like learning and understanding on cloud computers. There are lots of exciting avenues there, which for me as a game designer feels like we’re at the golden age of design because a lot of things we had to code around, the cloud takes all of those problems away.
