In this interview, we speak with Jochen Gary, vice president of marketing for Stillfront Group. We discuss how we can adapt to changes in the industry and what the future of mobile gaming will look like as new capabilities become available.
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Can you first introduce yourself and briefly explain what your role is within your company?
My name is Jochen Gary and I am Vice President of Marketing responsible for the Stillfront Group Marketing Hub.
Stillfront’s Marketing Hub is an internal marketing feature that provides marketing services to Stillfront’s 23 game studios worldwide. The services vary from full-service marketing and individual services such as ASO to advice on an individual basis.
One of the great advantages of Stillfront Group is that studios retain a lot of independence, but can access very strong support from the group when needed.
What do you think is the biggest change in the industry since you got into it?
Change is a constant in our industry and throughout my career. I started working with web games, then the app ecosystem was formed and now 90% of the traffic is mobile.
Campaigns used to be very specific in targeting and automation took over all major networks. The most recent change in the industry is Apple’s new approach to IDFA and the impact it has had on the app marketing ecosystem.
Did you see the above change coming? If not, how did you adapt to it?
Change is normal in this young ecosystem
Jochen Gary
To a certain extent, yes. We had identified changes to mobile privacy regulations as a major potential change in our industry long before the actual changes were announced by Apple in 2020. Our way of working allows us to bring together experts from different fields quite quickly, be it UA managers, marketing technical or legal.
The changes led to short-term disruptions in the market and specific marketing channel members, but our business model and broad channel reach allowed us to quickly reallocate marketing investments to other channels and cope with the changes.
Since the third quarter of 2021, we have seen continued high marketing investment across the group with returns on ad spend well within our strict payback requirements.
When you think back to the past few years, what’s the biggest hurdle you’ve encountered?
For me personally it was an eye opener a few years ago when I saw what people can achieve if you entrust them with full responsibility and decision-making power. Mistakes will of course be made, but I saw people rock it, make it happen because you made it happen to them. With shared responsibility, the whole team thrives, and in hindsight I wish I had given that trust to people much more and much earlier in my career.
Many app/game developers have moved away from in-app purchases in favor of subscription models. What do you think about the current state of monetization in the industry?
Many developers have added subscriptions to their monetization models as a third pillar alongside IAP and in-game advertising. I think players are starting to understand that in order to continuously add content to games, developers need to continuously generate revenue. Games-as-a-Service is now widely accepted by the ecosystem.
Where do you think the mobile game industry is headed in the coming years?
Mobile in general will continue to grow. New devices and 5G+ connections provide even better graphics and experiences on mobile. Cross-platform will become even more important. Seamless play on mobile, desktop and partial console is becoming the new norm. We’ll likely see Google push in this direction on desktop as well.
With rising UAC and strong competition, smaller developers will look even more for strong publishing partners
Jochen Gary
Consolidation will be an ongoing trend. Current market conditions favor larger groups like Stillfront, which can create economies of scale in marketing, game development and global reach.
I also think environmental awareness will lead to more purposeful games. For example, in our game Big Farm: Mobile Harvest, we regularly organize tree planting charity events to combine fun with helping the environment.
Technologies such as AR and location awareness are becoming more mainstream. Which technology, if any, excites you the most?
While location awareness has compelling use cases, it can be seen in a more critical light as data privacy becomes a bigger discussion. Personally, I’m looking forward to the next big thing in AR. There are great uses like augmented reality home scheduling, but I still haven’t seen any strong apps or people using it widely.
In gaming, web3 is very interesting and fascinates me. The concept of players owning parts of the game and possibly being able to use it in a metaverse somewhere is exciting. But I think there is still a long way to go.
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