The world leader in the mobile gaming market told about development plans in Russia

Source: playground.ru



The world leader in the mobile gaming market is Gameloft .



The company was founded in 1999 by the Guillemo brothers, the founders and owners of one of the world's largest video game publishers Ubisoft. Gameloft releases Ubisoft mobile gaming franchises (Prince of Persia, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Driver), and also develops its gaming brands (Asphalt, Modern Combat). In the company's gaming portfolio more than 500 projects, last year the number of downloads of games exceeded 700 million.

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However, games for mobile platforms are not only one of the most popular types of entertainment in the modern world, but also a brand and consumer communication tool.



Polina Nefidova, managing director of Gameloft in Russia and the CIS, told Sostav.ru about the Gameloft work in the advertising business, about the company's development plans in the world and in Russia.



"Megamind" leads the most interesting statements from the interview .

Briefly about the history of Gameloft

Gameloft's idea is to make games available to as many people as possible. Michel Guillaume, CEO of the company, 15 years ago saw the future behind mobile phones, made a bet on them and did not lose. We tried ourselves on the field of portable consoles and publishing games on social networks, but in the end we decided to focus on smartphones in order to reach as large an audience as possible. Almost everyone has smartphones, which means that we are also nearby.



In Moscow, we opened an office in early 2014. The Russian market is important for us, so you need to be “physically” here, but we do not develop games in Moscow - here we have advertising and marketing departments. It's nice that we grow! Started with three employees, and now eight. And we continue to look for new team members!

About Gameloft Audience

The number of our active users per month in the world fluctuates at the level of 170 million, per day - about 19-20 million. In Russia, our games launch more than 7 million unique players per month and more than 900 thousand per day. We think this is a great result. According to the number of game downloads for 2014, according to App Annie, we firmly occupy the first place both in the world as a whole and in Russia in particular. We have a large audience and this is what we are proud of.

About advertising business

Today, the field of mobile advertising is full of prospects. This direction is growing now and will show even greater growth in the future, so we immediately decided to take a prominent place here. We have a huge audience, powerful advertising equipment and our own internal advertising agencies - we entered the market as fully equipped and prepared as possible.



It so happened that we refused to cooperate with advertising networks right away - unreliably, and therefore one of our main goals was complete control over the campaigns being conducted. There were already precedents, when “juicy” banners appeared in children's applications of other developers, for us this is unacceptable. We are responsible for the quality of the head, provide statistics and do not mind the integration of third-party metrics.

About ways to attract customers

The formats of advertising are different: classic banners, there are full-screen banners, video, regular and motivated, built-in branded lead collection forms, mini-sites and even mini-games!



As for the audience, this is our trump card. The library of games in which advertisements are available are impressive in size - there are 30 games of different genres in it! We have races for car brands, shooters for advertising action films, and games for children’s products. Therefore, it turns out that we show advertising to the most relevant audience and receive a positive response from it.

About cases for Russian advertisers

We recently completed the integration of the Beeline brand into the Asphalt 8 racing arcade. The goal is to promote the idea of ​​Streetgaming, and the format is an in-game online racing tournament that showed excellent results. All players received prizes in the tournament regardless of the occupied place and were very pleased.



With Central Partnership we made a whole rich-media game for the film Carrier: Legacy. Players like this format: it is unusual and for interspersing with advertising, in-game currency is guaranteed. So, in the form of a game, we talk about the product, and the player has a positive attitude towards it. After all, he received bonuses in an unusual mini-game! Now the campaign is over, and players are already asking for it to be returned.



The client was also pleased with this placement. Here are some interesting statistics on this case: 9% of users started the game (clicked on "play" on the fullscreen banner); 83% of those who started the game, passed it to the end; 14% clicked "play again"; CTR on the banner at the end of the game - 1.8% of the total number of hits.

On stereotypes and prospects of advertising business in Russia and abroad

Overseas, in Europe or the United States, mobile advertising is already working and does not surprise anyone. We are still looking at this area with some distrust. As for mobile advertising in general, if we talk about advertising in mobile games, then very often we hear that only children play games, and the adult consumer is not interested. In reality, this is not at all the case - the majority of our players are well over 20, and these are completely solvent people!



Definitely exactly this area will grow. In Russia, mobile is still perceived mainly as a performance instrument, but in the Western world it has long been looked at much more widely, realizing that this source of advertising can also be used as a flexible media tool. We, in turn, are doing our best and, by our own example, we show the advantages that advancement on mobile channels can bring. Here is the most active audience - young people prefer the Internet and mobile, rather than TV and newspapers.

About the phenomenon of mobile games

The phenomenon of mobile games is that they are installed on almost every smartphone: someone plays from time to time, someone constantly, but one way or another, gamers are the vast majority of mobile gadget owners. According to Flurry, in 2015, games accounted for 15% of the total use of the smartphone, and this is an impressive figure - more than just Facebook and entertainment apps.



Moreover, when a person plays, he is focused on the process and closely follows what is happening on the screen. If you offer advertising in a timely and organic way (for example, it can be a branded tournament or rich media game), you can achieve excellent results: a properly designed advertisement will not only not cause rejection, but also leave a positive impression - the player not only looked at the advertisement, but also Got in-game currency. The future is a cool interactive format, interesting and effective!

On the purpose of working in the advertising market in Russia

Our goal in the advertising market to reach a level of income comparable in volume from in-game purchases. Already, some countries in Gameloft have achieved the task, in Russia this is only to be done, but we are on the right track.