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The uncomfortable tension between brand and performance marketing on mobile

The second mobile cycle instantiated an extraordinary new set of commercial opportunities: apps in entirely new categories and featuring new content interaction models are now generating billions of dollars per year.

The mobile Top Grossing chart has thawed and diversified far beyond gaming, and the games that do reside there have adapted to the new commercial milieu in which they operate as either eSports or with recurring subscription packages. The Top 10 grossing chart is now comprised of apps that support the Three Ss: streaming, subscriptions, and social in-app advertising. The monetization strategies and tactics that support these interaction models are the result of a number of tectonic shifts that have taken place in mobile over the past few years.

This new opportunity space, to many, feels like a beginning: the start of a new commercial era for mobile. A blank playbook can be terrifying, and as the second mobile cycle has attracted marketing talent from outside of mobile, some companies are looking to traditional media strategies for app growth. For many companies, these marketing tactics have taken the form of pure-play brand development as a go-to-market and growth strategy. This is a reversion.

If the first mobile cycle is ignored, and the idiosyncrasies of mobile are ignored, and the nature of freemium is ignored, then it’s natural to look to pre-mobile marketing strategies for guidance on achieving commercial traction. But the growth lessons that were learned during the first mobile cycle are relevant — eminently so, painfully so — in this second mobile cycle. The marketers that are ignoring the lessons of the first mobile cycle are doing nothing but paying tuition with their marketing budgets.

Mobile apps are probably the most measurable, instrument-able, connected consumer products that humans have ever interacted with. This measurability and the immediate feedback cycle between the user and the developer (advertiser) means that direct response advertising is the shortest and most efficient path to the largest number of users.

A simple diagram for thinking about the progression from reach to monetization on mobile is:

This pyramid is perennial and hasn’t changed with the second mobile wave. The bottom of the pyramid here is important: it is growth. And while brand equity plays an important role for some apps in capturing value and even in capturing growth, brand marketing almost certainly isn’t and shouldn’t be the exclusive strategy used for capturing growth. Brand marketing can contribute across the entire value generation spectrum (all three triangles), but it cannot service the foundation — capturing growth — on its own. Direct response performance marketing is fundamental to capturing growth on mobile.

As I have written before, the opposite of performance marketing is not brand marketing: it is non-performance marketing. Brand marketing can be woven into a performance marketing strategy in a way that preserves the measurability and immediacy of mobile: in fact, the best marketing teams use brand building to make their direct response campaigns more efficient. But as uncomfortable as it might be for brand marketers to embrace, direct response advertising is best suited to do the heavy lifting in capturing growth on mobile.

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash

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A/B testing can kill product growth

In hearing from most consumer product growth teams — that is, teams tasked with growing a product’s user base that don’t have a specific remit to run advertising campaigns — it’s fairly common to learn of some considerable number of A/B tests that were undertaken in service to the group’s keystone strategy of mass experimentation. In a conference presentation or post-mortem Medium post, this might take the form of an admission that the team ran 10,000 (or some other suitably large number) of A/B tests until they found the one thing that drove engagement or monetization or social sharing.

A/B testing is a powerful tool, but it’s also a blunt tool that can cause more harm than good to a product when used haphazardly or senselessly, especially on the early funnel portion of a product. Much has been written about A/B testing on this site over the years, and there’s no point in re-treading that particular ground, but it does make sense to consider A/B testing within the context of not just preserving existing users but in reinforcing marketing campaigns.

Many growth teams could just as easily be renamed retention or monetization teams: their primary goal is to retain users that are already in the product and to surface the experiences to those users that are most conducive to generating monetization. That’s a noble goal and it’s a focus that every consumer product company should take very seriously, but it actually has nothing to do with “growth”: it is the conservation of potential user attention, not the growth of it. User base growth can only be achieved by adding new users to the system — as a supporting thought experiment: imagine an app with perfect retention that is removed from the App Store. Existing users can still interact with the app, but new users can’t find it to download it. Is it growing?

This isn’t a semantic quibble — once the growth team has been tasked exclusively with retention, then their canvas becomes the early user funnel and they become inclined to not care about the provenance of users. This means that growth teams tend to functionally be most successful at companies with products that have already become viral cultural phenomena — the Facebooks and Spotifys and Slacks of the world. Huge numbers of users adopt these products every day, and the growth teams at those companies are tasked with ensuring that the maximum proportion of those users remain engaged: the “growth” dynamic leans heavily on organic adoption but also user base accumulation through increased retention.

I have no doubt that the growth teams at companies like the ones mentioned have tremendous and invaluable impact through retentive experimentation. But for products not in that rarefied sect, where actual free, abundant, organic inbound growth can’t be taken for granted, freewheeling and unfettered A/B testing at the funnel stage of the product can be disastrous.

There is a serious, fundamental problem with extensive A/B testing at the earliest stage of the funnel, especially for products where marketing is the function that drives user acquisition, which is that nothing is “known” about the user in their first session. What are their product motivations? What kind of content do they consume, and how do they consume it? For freemium apps: can they pay? What is the purpose of applying broad A/B tests to an entire cohort before that cohort can be segmented and the tests can be dimensionalized beyond just the most superficial features of each user (like geography, type of device, source acquisition channel, etc.).

This is an obvious case of pushing an entire cohort to a local maximum, and it’s the kiss of death for freemium apps, where monetization is generally driven by users at the extreme tail of the LTV distribution (that is: 95% of the revenue comes from 1% of the users). What’s more: if you can’t segment users out into behaviorally-relevant profiles and then optimize within those, which you are not doing if you are bucketing an entire Day 1 cohort into A/B tests, then you can’t send relevant signal back to acquisition channels — you don’t know if Facebook is providing users with a different distribution of engagement than Google is because all users were pushed through an A/B test in the first session that was designed to optimize engagement at the lowest common denominator. Obviously this isn’t a concern when all traffic is organic, but being able to break source channel cohorts apart by engagement and monetization distribution is tremendously important when marketing is driving user growth, and mass early-funnel A/B testing seriously impairs that.

The core concept here is that source channels differ materially in what’s often called “user quality” but what is actually captured in user intent (what was the user trying to do when they installed the app?), user understanding (how much does the user know about the app already?), and user proclivity (what types of apps does the user enjoy?). A user acquired for a mobile game from another, similar mobile game potentially has a different combination of those than a user acquired from some utility app; likewise for a user acquired into a D2C fashion app from Instagram versus a mobile game. Source channels matter, and when products are running marketing, it makes no sense to try to optimize a product through limited A/B testing for the combined, blended mass of users in a cohort that represents a multitude of different acquisition channels.

If the goal of a product is to be personalized, then that won’t be accomplished with p-value, confidence interval A/B testing but rather with an online Bandit mechanism, but even still that will work better with acquisition channel (and even better, behavioral cues) taken into account. Managing the entire user base to small, incremental boosts in early-funnel engagement can hurt product growth as the best marketing channels are diluted away with broad, un-segmented A/B testing.

Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash

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Apple’s $500MM bet on Arcade and the future of mobile gaming

At Apple’s Show time event last month, amongst a slew of new services and product announcements including Apple News+, a credit card, and Apple TV+, Apple introduced a cross-platform games subscription service called Apple Arcade. When it launches later this year, Apple Arcade will offer users unlimited access to a selection of games that are void of advertisements or in-app purchases via a special tab within iTunes.

And this past weekend, some more information around Apple Arcade surfaced: the company has allegedly earmarked somewhere in the ballpark of $500MM to finance the development of exclusive titles for Apple Arcade. Such an investment seems appropriately sized for analyst expectations around the service’s revenue potential: according to the Financial Times (via HSBC), Apple Arcade might eclipse revenue generated by both Apple News+ and TV+ by 2022.

The goal behind the basket of new non-hardware revenue streams announced at the Show Time event is fairly obvious: to offset slowing iPhone sales as smartphone ownership reaches near total penetration. Apple has seen its services revenue increase fairly consistently since Phil Schiller was put in charge of the App Store, and his focus has primarily been applied to subscriptions, App Store editorial curation, and App Store Ads. And under Schiller’s leadership, the Top Grossing charts have thawed and per-user monetization has increased remarkably: from $58 per iPhone in 2017 to $79 in 2018, with $44 of that coming from games revenues in 2018.

But the aforementioned smartphone penetration level only explains slowing hardware sales, and increased per-user yearly monetization hides another phenomenon: app downloads have peaked and actually declined in Q1 2019 (of course, that discovery on mobile is problematic isn’t a new notion, and popular wisdom has maintained that the mobile app economy is winner takes all since at least 2014). An Arcade-type product certainly makes sense within the context of Apple’s push to subscriptions on mobile and when considering that app downloads are slowing: the biggest developers with the most established momentum are the beneficiaries of increased per-user monetization, but that’s not a good thing from Apple’s perspective. It’s not hard to interpret the Apple Arcade as an attempt to re-balance the iOS ecosystem away from free-to-play games.

Why would Apple want to do that? There are a few possible explanations. The most obvious and practical is that, if Apple structures its Arcade content partnerships like its News+ partnerships, it will keep 50% of subscription revenues (versus the 30% and 15% it keeps now, depending on the age of the subscription). A second plausible explanation is that the winner-takes-all nature of the freemium economy on iOS punishes radical gameplay experimentation and drives game concepts, mechanics, and visuals into a narrow band of choices that drive resonance in mobile advertisements (as in the MAYA principal of industrial design: design should be advanced enough to be novel and interesting but not so advanced that users can’t grasp the functionality).

The size of the mobile advertising market for gaming might be as much as $100BN annually: without a second marketplace to sell their wares, smaller game developers have to make conservative, incrementally innovative design choices in order to be able to distribute their games versus deep-pocketed advertisers. Apple Arcade provides a pressure valve on that ultra-competitive marketplace, creating a home for wholly new, experimental game concepts.

That’s where the funding comes in: the small indie developers that Apple announced that it is working with on the Arcade can create titles that wouldn’t otherwise be commercially viable on iOS without risking their own capital on the projects. Apple is purportedly prepared to provide studios with between $1 and $3MM in development funding for titles that will be exclusive to its platform; that’s another win for Apple, giving it exclusive claim on those games and potentially being a magnetic factor for its hardware (although it seems unlikely that the Arcade on its own could catalyze increased hardware sales). Those indie developers, many of which have defected from mobile and have moved to Steam and, more recently, Epic’s new store, might be tempted enough by Apple’s Arcade funding to return.

So what impact will Arcade have on the mobile gaming industry? Realistically, Arcade won’t siphon a meaningful number of users out of the free-to-play ecosystem — analysts expect the Arcade price to come in around $9.99 / month, which doesn’t prohibit playing both Arcade games and some selection of preferred free-to-play games (at the high end of the LTV distribution for most free-to-play games, even the $120 that Arcade users will pay for yearly access is relatively insignificant). But it’s not unthinkable that Arcade introduces some avowed non-gamers, turned off by what they deem to be predatory monetization tactics in free-to-play (deserved or not), into mobile gaming, ultimately leading them to install free-to-play games. That’d be a welcome development for all game developers: a gentle introductory step into mobile gaming with simple, ad- and IAP-free arcade-style games that opens the door to their more complex free-to-play counterparts.

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Reboot Develop Blue 2019: Live Stream on Twitch

Reboot Develop Blue 2019 was sold out this year again, but you can join the Live Stream powered by PlayStation featuring sessions and interviews with developers and creators daily on the official Reboot Develop Twitch channel.

Reboot Develop Blue 2019 takes place from April 11-13, 2019 in the legendary historical seaside city of Dubrovnik, also known as “real world King’s Landing” from HBO TV series Game of Thrones. The conference is held again at the luxurious conference resort Sheraton Dubrovnik Riviera. Watch the live stream on the official Reboot Develop Twitch channel for interesting sessions and interviews with developers and creatives.

2019 marks the sixth edition of the conference which has undergone a total name and logo rebranding (with Blue edition in Dubrovnik, CROATIA during spring while Red will take place in Banff, Canada during fall). The conference is being set to grow and go again level higher than the previous iteration, reconfirming its position as the most unique, premier and high-end games industry and game developers event in Europe and one of the biggest worldwide. It has more than 120+ speakers during 3 days at 8 tracks with the truly big B2B expo and indie expo areas.

Conference passes, even with the way bigger extended limit got sold out a few days before the start of Reboot Develop Blue 2019! Because of this repeating itself more rapidly every year the organizers already launched availability of SUPER EARLY BIRD conference passes for Reboot Develop Blue 2020! The Super Early Bird Standard Ticket, the Super Early Bird Indie Package For Two, and the Super Early Bird VIP Package are available here at a great discount until April 25, 2019.

Save the date: Reboot Develop Blue 2020 will be taking place from April 23-25, 2020 in the city of Dubrovnik at the luxurious conference resort Sheraton Dubrovnik Riviera.

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Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2019: Don’t Miss Tonight’s Live Stream

The German Computer Game Award (Deutscher Computerspielpreis / DCP) is the most important Award for the German games industry and has been awarded since 2009.

With the DCP (Deutscher Computerspielpreis), game – the German Games Industry Association (game – Verband der deutschen Games-Branche) together with the Federal Republic of Germany, represented by the State Minister for Digitalisation and the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI), awards the best computer and video games “made in Germany”. They are supported by the Digital Games Culture Foundation (Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur). High-ranking expert and main juries select the best games in 13 categories according to aspects such as quality, innovative content, gaming fun, cultural, and educational standards. The players already decided on the awarding of the audience prize as the 14th category by online voting. Check out our post about the audience award here.

On Tuesday, April 9, 2019, moderator Ina Müller will welcome around 700 invited guests as well as prominent speakers and show acts to the 11th German Computer Game Award ceremony. In 14 prize categories, the best games of the year will compete for the coveted silver-blue trophies and prize money totaling 590,000 euros. For the first time, the German Computer Game Award will stop at the Admiralspalast in Berlin. The Admiralspalast offers a perfect setting for the award ceremony. The building on Friedrichstraße looks back on more than a hundred years of history and still stands today for culture and entertainment with a unique atmosphere in Berlin. More information can be found at the official webpage https://deutscher-computerspielpreis.de.

Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2019 (April 9, from 7.30 p.m. / 19:30 Berlin Time)

Please use the following link to watch the grand awards ceremony via live stream: https://deutscher-computerspielpreis.de/preisverleihung-2019

  Additional Information: The gamesweekberlin connects a variety of events from April 8–14, 2019, including the games business and development conference QUO VADIS, the independent video games festival A MAZE. / Berlin, the public playing event Gamefest, the action program for more gender diversity in games Womenize! Games and Tech, the VIP Matchmaking Dinner or the professional eSports conference GERMAN ESPORTS SUMMIT. For further details please check out our events section.

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Can Snap make an Audience Network work?

Snap, the company that publishes the Snapchat app, held a partner summit last Thursday at which it unveiled a number of fairly substantial new product and content features. The announcements included a lineup of eight new original content series, a new AR implementation called Landmarkers, an in-app games platform, a tool for bringing Snapchat-style stories to 3rd-party apps called Story Kit, and the Snapchat Audience Network, an ad network that will allow Snap advertisers to reach users in 3rd-party apps. Snap’s stock price surged on news of these initiatives and now trades at nearly two times its price from the end of 2018.

Given its name, it’s impossible to not immediately draw comparisons between Facebook’s Audience Network, which launched in 2014, and the new Snapchat Audience Network. When Facebook’s Audience Network (FAN) launched, I wrote:

But what’s more, in building out an ad network, Facebook can tightly integrate its own social graph into the fundamental mechanics of mobile distribution, strengthening its position against the broad threat of “unbundling” on mobile. Just as Millennial Media acquired Jumptap and Twitter acquired MoPub in land grabs for valuable mobile user profiles and data collection infrastructure, Facebook’s new mobile ad network will benefit immensely from the data its social graph can lend to targeting. And the more developers that integrate Facebook’s API into their apps for advertising, the more data the company will accumulate.

The key here is that in launching the Audience Network, Facebook was allowing advertisers to reach Facebook users — which effectively means every smartphone owner in the developed world at this point — in any app in which they engage and not just in Facebook-owned properties. This is a powerful idea not only because the Facebook news feed was always destined to reach a maximum ad load, but because Facebook inventory is highly prized and competed over, making it expensive. If Facebook could allow an advertiser to target users using its own proprietary profile models and find those users in apps that aren’t competitive in terms of impression costs, then it could allow advertisers to target users cheaply while still remaining dependent on Facebook’s data.

This was a beautiful transposition of the Facebook value proposition, turning a source-level targeting schema (“I advertise on Facebook because the ROI performance of that source is favorable”) into a user-level scheme (“I target certain Facebook users, wherever they are and using Facebook data, because the ROI of those users is favorable”). The Facebook Audience Network effectively extended the advertising surface area of Facebook’s proprietary user data to the entirety of the mobile app economy: by joining its own proprietary profile data to the advertising and device IDs that it sees for its own users, it creates opportunities for advertisers to reach those users in all (or at least, more) of the apps they use. The diagrams below are meant to try to illustrate this dynamic:

Of course, Facebook has more data at its disposal than just advertising IDs to use to join data on: it can use a multitude of data points to identify users, whether they have Facebook accounts or not (some details of these activities were surfaced in Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony last year). But even if Facebook could only identify Facebook users in FAN participant apps, that still represents fairly significant progress towards identifying every person on Earth: Facebook reported 1.52BN daily active users for Q4 2018.

And that fact raises an interesting question over the viability of Snap’s version of the Audience Network: can it work with an order of magnitude less user scale? Snapchat’s latest reported DAU metric was 186MM; can that provide the level of scale needed to grow a meaningful 3rd-party advertising business through the Audience Network?

But beyond that, some other questions call the viability of Snap’s endeavor into question. First, Snap doesn’t have nearly the level of granular detail around interests and behaviors that Facebook does. How valuable is Snap’s data in targeting users, on Snapchat or off? Brand advertisers may be happy to shower Snap with their campaign dollars to reach its young audience, but Snap has struggled to prove to performance advertisers that it can deliver ROI-based efficiency. If Snap can’t deliver that for its first party inventory, can it do so for third-party inventory?

And the second question that remains unanswered is how ad creative will be handled for the Snapchat Audience Network. In the unveiling last Thursday, Snap emphasized the fact that this audience network would bring its signature full-screen video ad format to third parties, but there are some problems with that. First, not all apps — and especially many games, which represent a massive vertical slice of the mobile advertising market — run in a vertical screen orientation. Second, that format may work well within Snapchat, where users have grown accustomed to it, but it may underperform relative to other creative concepts and become a liability out in the wild. With the mobile advertising ecosystem becoming increasingly programmatic, rapid creative experimentation and flexibility is a competitive advantage.

Snap showcased some incredibly interesting product initiatives at its partner summit last week, and it does seem to be making forward progress with innovative new engagement mechanics. But it’s tough to beat Facebook on its own turf in a game that it largely invented: performance mobile advertising. And while many advertisers would love to see new contenders insert themselves into a marketplace that is wholly owned by Google and Facebook, Snap faces some formidable, systemic headwinds in gaining traction with its audience network.

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Making Games Magazine: Issue 05-06/19 Out Now

The latest issue of our Making Games Magazine is out now and features a lot of hot topics like The Making of Tropico 6, FFF: Games Funding in Bavaria, 10 Years Headup or The Sound of Hunt: Showdown.

Below you will find an overview of the most important contents of Making Games Magazine issue 05-06/2019 which is available now. Please scroll down to find out how to order your copy of the Making Games Magazine.

Tropico 6: Winning the Trust of Users Interview with Limbic Entertainment & Kalypso: We sat with Martin Tosta and Bernd Berheide to discuss why postponing is the better option over early release of any games project.

Tropico 6: Communication with your Audiences Delaying a game is one of every developer’s greatest horrors and in order to be successful with a delay, next to fixing the problems is communicating.

The Sound of Hunt: Showdown We spoke to Audio Director Florian Füsslin about his team’s work on Crytek’s visually and acoustically impressive first-person shooter.

10 Years Headup Headup celebrates its tenth anniversary and we took the pleasant opportunity to visit the company to take a closer look at the career of the successful Indie Publisher from NRW.

FFF Bayern celebrates 10 years of games funding in Bavaria In an interview with Michaela Haberlander from FilmFernsehFonds Bayern, we explain the basics you should know if you want to apply for games funding.

Additional tips on games funding Wolfgang Emmer, boss and founder of the development studio Aesir Interactive, has a lot of experience in games funding and in our interview, he gives valuable tips on the subject.

GIST Gaming Istanbul once again cemented its central role as the MENA region’s most important B2B and B2C event. Read all the details in our report!

QUO VADIS New location for Germany’s oldest developer conference: In an interview with Michael Liebe we talk about the future of QUO VADIS and the new venue in the heart of Berlin.

Reboot Develop In our event preview, we take a look at the highlights of the upcoming reboot develop and introduce the most interesting speakers.

Making Euclidean Skies on my own Miro Straka, the creator of Euclidean Skies and Euclidean Lands, talks about developing games on his own and gives tips and tricks on a successful game release for solo developers.

Keep players engaged with SCILL We talked with Phillip Schuster and Marc Berekoven about the development of their next-generation player engagement platform SCILL.

  Subscribe for our printed version of Making Games or get your digital copy now!

Making Games Magazine issue 05-06/19

Making Games Magazine Subscription

  Making Games Issue 05-06/19 printed version (single order of latest issue)

Making Games Issue 05-06/19 digital copy (single order of latest issue)

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GDC 2019: Record-Breaking Number of Attendees

GDC 2019 broke last year’s record attendance with a total of 29,000 industry professionals at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center from March 18-22.

The Game Developers Conference is the world’s largest and longest-running professional game industry event with unparalleled education and networking opportunities. GDC 2019 concluded its 33rd edition on Friday, March 22 after a week of inspiration and celebrates a record-breaking attendance with a total of 29,000 industry professionals at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center from March 18-22.

GDC 2019 hosted a slew of content over the course of the week, including a total of more than 780 lectures, panels, tutorials and roundtable discussions, as well as more than 550 exhibitors on the Expo Floor. This year introduced the GDC Main Stage: The Developer’s Journey, a multipart presentation that featured Siobhan Reddy of Media Molecule, Sean Murray of Hello Games, and Laralyn McWilliams of Microsoft describing the sources of inspiration that drew them to game development and propelled them through the challenges of creating and releasing games out into the world. Check out our latest news about The Developer’s Journey here.

GDC 2019 – Photo by Trish Tunney

A new addition for 2019, the GDC at The Gardens added areas to relax, games to play, and a Pokemon Go Pokestop hosted by Niantic. The GDC Film Festival returned after its 2018 debut to give pass holders access to a slew of feature films and documentaries about games and game production. The indie game scene continues to thrive at GDC, with multiple showcases for cutting-edge titles. The Independent Games Festival Pavilion gathered many of the most acclaimed indie games of the year, allowing pass holders the opportunity to try the games themselves. Likewise, the Indie MEGABOOTH, iam8bit and Double Fine’s “Day of the Devs,” the traveling indie developers at Train Jam, and the super-chillaxed indie lounge called the Mild Rumpus gave talented development teams the opportunity to show off their games.

At the 21st annual IGF Awards ceremony on Wednesday night, Lucas Pope’s narratively-rich murder mystery, Return of the Obra Dinn, won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. The award comes six years after the 2013 Grand Prize win for his previous title, Papers, Please. That same night, Return of the Obra Dinn received the award for Best Narrative. At the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, which immediately followed the IGF Awards, the big winner for the night was Sony Santa Monica’s God of War, which won the prize for Game of the Year. Check out our latest news about the Game Developers Choice Awards here. An archive of the IGF and GDCA ceremonies can be viewed on the official GDC Twitch channel at http://twitch.tv/gdc.

GDC 2019 – Photo by Trish Tunney

The GDC’s Expo Floor, which was open from Wednesday through Friday, was spread across the sprawling and newly-renovated halls of Moscone South and Moscone North. The Expo Floor encompassed more than 550 exhibitors showing off their newest technologies, software and services from games and tech industry leaders like Epic Games, Amazon, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Unity and many others. The playable alt.ctrl.GDC space let attendees try their hands at unconventional controllers and alternative control schemes. The special GDC Play area allowed emerging developers to display their games to key distributors, publishers and investors in attendance. In the Moscone’s West Hall, the Shut Up & Sit Down area allowed attendees to enjoy the best tabletop board games of the year. Check out the highlights from GDC 2019 in pictures here.

“The Game Developers Conference evolves with every year, encompassing new trends, new technologies and bringing up new questions for the whole industry to reckon with. GDC brings people together, and gives developers a space to solve those problems and invent the solutions to help developers make better games that can be enjoyed by more people,” said Katie Stern, general manager of the Game Developers Conference. “From the countless indie showcases in and around GDC, to the amazing new VR hardware and cloud gaming technology from industry stalwarts, the GDC is a conference for developers of all shapes, sizes and backgrounds. This year, we concluded GDC with eyes wide open for the challenges and potential for the future of games. We’re even more in awe of the hard work it takes to create compelling games and appreciative of the connections made here to facilitate better games and better work environments to come.”

GDC will be returning to the Moscone Convention Center Monday, March 16 to Friday, March 20, 2020. The call for submissions for GDC 2020 will open in the summer.

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User acquisition and systematic growth for consumer apps

Last week, I appeared on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast to discuss user acquisition and systematic growth for consumer apps and games. I thought this podcast was worth sharing via the weekly column, even though it was recorded for another outlet, because the conversation broached a wide range of topics in detail and generally covered quite a bit of ground across more than an hour.

The discussion centered on these three MDM articles, so it might be worth reading them before listening to the podcast:

The problem with the 30% platform fee on mobile in three charts;

High growth, low growth, no growth: systematic growth with DAU replacement;

Using machine learning to automate mobile marketing budgets.

Photo by João Silas on Unsplash

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Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2019: Vote for the Audience Award until March 31!

Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2019: The winner of the “Audience Award” will be decided by Germany’s game fans. Take part until March 31, 2019, and vote for your favorite game to win attractive prizes!

On Tuesday, April 9, 2019, moderator Ina Müller will welcome the who-is-who of the German games industry as well as personalities from politics, culture, and society to the Admiralspalast in Berlin for the German Computer Game Award 2019 (Deutscher Computerspielpreis – DCP). The coveted trophies are awarded in 14 categories and are endowed with prize money of 590,000 euros. On stage are prominent speakers and political celebrities such as Dorothee Bär, Minister of State for Digitalisation, and Andreas Scheuer, Federal Minister for Transport and Digital Infrastructure. It will also be top-class musically: Namika brings her hits live to the stage.

The gala will be broadcast on Tuesday, April 9, 2019, from 7.30 p.m. (19:30 Uhr) via live stream: https://deutscher-computerspielpreis.de/preisverleihung-2019

Until March 31, all game fans can take part and vote for their favorite game to determine the “Audience Award”. Visit https://deutscher-computerspielpreis.de/publikumspreis to take part in the voting and, with a little luck, win a great prize. The conditions of participation and information on data protection can be found here.

Voting participants may win the following prizes:

1x NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX™ 2080 TI

3x ERAZER X1000 MR Glasses + Motion Control Units

1x Nintendo Switch + Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Party, Super Mario Brothers U. Deluxe, Mario Tennis Aces, 1-2-Switch, Fitness Boxing

1x Nintendo Labo Robot-Set + 2 Customisation Sets

1x Nintendo Labo Fahrzeug-Set + 2 Customisation Sets

1x Nintendo Labo Multi-Set + 2 Customisation Sets

2x Ace Combat 7: Skies Unkown Collector’s Edition

2x Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition – Premium Edition

1x Dragon Ball Xenoverse XV Trunks’ Travel Edition

1x Soulcalibur VI: Collector’s Edition

1x Fallout Package – Fallout 76 Collector’s Edition, Fallout Kochbuch, Fallout Guide

1x DOOM Package – DOOM Collector’s Edition, DOOM PINKGUY, T-Shirt

1x Elder Scrolls Online Package – TESO: Morrowind Collector’s Edition, Greif-Plüschtier, Artbook

1x Wolfenstein Package – Wolfenstein Collector’s Edition, Longsleeve

4x Ubisoft PC Package – Anno 1800 (as soon as available), The Crew 2, Steep Winter Edition, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

4x Ubisoft PS4 Package – Just Dance 19, Starlink Starterset + Weapon & Pilot Packs

4x Far Cry Fan Package – Far Cry New Dawn Horatio key ring, Far Cry New Dawn T-Shirts

1x Maxnomic Need4Seat gamescom Chair

4x Farming Simulator 19 Fan Package – Landwirtschafts-Simulator 19 – Collector’s Edition (PC), Farming Simulator C64-Edition, Artbook, a Mini-John Deere tractor from Siku, a cloth from License partner Horsch, a wool cap, a baseball cap and a bag – all packed in a nice box

1x Tropico Bundle (Tropico 4 – Gold Edition, Tropico 5, Tropico 6, El Presidente Bobblehead, Tropico-Pin)

1x Kalypso Games Bundle (Dungeons 3, Railway Empire, Tropico 5, Sudden Strike 4, Shadows: Awakening)

More information can be found at https://deutscher-computerspielpreis.de/

The post Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2019: Vote for the Audience Award until March 31! appeared first on Making Games.

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SCILL Play – Beta Started Today

4Players launches SCILL – Unique Real-Time Player Engagement Platform which is dedicated to the empowerment of game developers and publishers. With minimal development effort, SCILL™ can significantly increase entertainment value, social interaction, and long-term motivation in current and future videogames.

4Players GmbH, a subsidiary of Marquard Media Group AG, announced today that SCILL™ Play, a second-screen app developed for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, is now available through a closed beta access. SCILL™ Play empowers players with access to real-time challenges specifically tailored to fit their individual profile and playstyle. 4Players is focused on building unique value through innovative multimedia solutions for mobile, PC, and console games. SCILL’s prediction-based data platform enables developers and publishers to sustainably increase the engagement-level of their titles and access a new dimension of player statistics to power future game development.

‘Free-to-play, competitive gaming, and social media require a new paradigm for game-agnostic player engagement’, says Marc Berekoven, Head of Business Development and Product Manager of the SCILL™ platform. ‘With SCILL™, we offer developers and publishers a highly effective and easy to implement solution to improve re-playability and significantly increase the associated retention time of gamers, put aside a new dimension of monetization models.’

How does SCILL™ Play work? Using the free app, players have access to bespoke challenges that are customized to the game matching individual playstyles. During subsequent game sessions, the service evaluates the online log files of the respective game and uses the data to determine whether the goals set have been successfully achieved. SCILL™ Play will reward success through achievements, rankings and exclusive prizes.

SCILL™ Play launches in Summer 2019. Developers and publishers are invited to participate in the SCILL™ Play Beta as of today. Further information can be found at www.scillgame.com.

About 4Players GmbH

Since 2000, 4Players has been recognized as a leader in multimedia solutions for PC and video gaming, creating sustainable gaming communities and services to enhance the gaming experience. 4Players operates a comprehensive platform that includes (a) the leading video game and eSports portals in German-speaking markets, (b) game server hosting and cloud apps backed by a turnkey infrastructure (comprising payments), (c) an innovative engagement platform that dramatically increases the replay value of games, and (d) content delivery technology that intuitively delivers existing content to mobile devices. https://www.4PlayersHQ.com

The post SCILL Play – Beta Started Today appeared first on Making Games.

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Google’s Stadia could make app stores obsolete

At this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco last week, Google finally pulled the curtain back on one of the worst kept secrets in gaming: Google Stadia, its games streaming service. This article does a capable job of explaining what the Stadia is, but in a nutshell: Stadia is a cloud-based games streaming service that allows players to interact with video games instantly, without downloading anything, on their tablets, laptops, televisions, and mobile phones so long as their internet connection is sufficiently fast. Some specific hardware requirements, such as the fact that Stadia will not work on non-Pixel Android phones at launch, have dampened the lofty aspirations of the service, though.

Stadia isn’t the first ambitious cloud-based games streaming service to come to market: OnLive somewhat infamously was sold for less than $5MM after raising more than $50MM in financing and reaching a peak valuation of nearly $2BN. Gaikai fared better with a $380MM sale to Sony in 2012 and now allegedly powers the “Playstation Now” service, and GameFly acquired Playcast in 2015 to deliver what it called a “Netflix for Games” service.

That term is important, as it has become something of a popular call to arms lately as a number of different companies, from Microsoft to Amazon to Apple to Electronic Arts and a subsidiary of Rovio, have announced products that could be deemed a “Netflix of Gaming”. And in fact, Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, may have tipped his hand for such an endeavor from Netflix itself when he stated that the company “compete(s) with (and lose(s) to) Fortnite more than HBO. When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, (Netflix’s) viewing and signups spiked for that time.”

Almost nothing is known about how Stadia will source content, what it will cost to use, what requirements will be placed on developers in order to have their games appear on the platform, etc. Former Ubisoft executive Jade Raymond recently joined Google to head an internal first-party studio to make games for Stadia, but it’s unknown how large that studio will be or how many games it will publish per year. Google will surely expect to lean heavily on third-party developers for content on the Stadia at launch and for the foreseeable future. As Netflix would certify, being the Netflix of something is expensive: the company is expected to spend $15BN on content in 2019.

And indeed, as this article asserts, the Stadia may be more of a YouTube strategy than a games streaming strategy — or, at least, the Stadia may serve the purpose of further aggrandizing YouTube as games streaming goes mainstream. 50BN hours of gameplay footage were watched on YouTube in 2018, and 200MM people watch gameplay footage each day on YouTube: YouTube is an important part of the gaming ecosystem, and Stadia unifies the viewing experience and the first-hand playing experience in a way that could create a powerful virtuous circle between first-person and third-person gaming engagement. Players will be able to drop pins into gameplay footage on YouTube and then immediately open the game at that moment and start playing. Likewise, players will be able to seamlessly switch between devices, retaining their in situ game state.

It is that last capability that could perhaps be the most monumental promise of Stadia: if every game is playable on a mobile device (all computation is done in the cloud, so end-user hardware profile is irrelevant), then every game is a mobile game. And the Stadia effectively distintermediates the app stores: with Stadia, there is no download requirement in playing a game, and the click-to-stream mechanism effectively extends game discovery to the entire surface area of the web. If game distribution escapes the app stores, then the entire mobile advertising ecosystem could become upended, with a critical pain point — the click-to-install conversion dynamic — being circumvented and otherwise poorly-converting ad inventory like mobile web banners, interstitials, and, conveniently for Google, YouTube inventory becoming suddenly very interesting to mobile advertisers.

This could be a very interesting development. The mobile app ecosystem has been trending toward intermediation as the biggest mobile properties start to look more and more like app stores themselves; Stadia could change that by abstracting away the idea of an app store, at least as games are concerned. Of course, a vast amount of territory exists between now and Stadia being a hugely successful platform that has materially, indelibly changed the landscape of the mobile app ecosystem. Stadia is a complex, ambitious undertaking, so of course it could fall; it’s frankly annoying that so many media commentators elect to vocalize that very obvious fact.

But if the Stadia is successful, it will have a massive impact on the way that smartphone users interact with games. That possibility is intriguing.

Photo by Carl Raw on Unsplash

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Choice Awards: God of War wins Game of the Year at GDC 2019

God of War earned accolades for its mature narrative, dazzling visuals, and refined combat gameplay and was honored with the prize for Game of the Year at the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony during GDC 2019.

The Game Developers Choice Awards honor the very best games of the year and was created for and voted on by developers. Winners are selected by the Game Developers Choice Awards-specific International Choice Awards Network (ICAN), which is an invitation-only organization, comprised of leading game creators from all parts of the industry. An archive of the award ceremony, as well as the full presentation of the Independent Games Festival Awards, can be viewed on the official GDC Twitch channel.

“The Game Developers Choice Awards represent the most refined games of the year, and the sheer variety of games honored tonight showed that games can still represent wholly new and unique creative visions,” said Katie Stern, General Manager of the Game Developers Conference. “A number of independently developed titles like Celeste, Gris and Florence helped prove how internal or deeply personal turmoil can make for massively appealing games for millions of fans. While games like God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 capture our imagination with poignant moments juxtaposed against epic tales of staggering scale and technical prowess. We embrace and accept all these amazingly creative works, and we’re proud to recognize these nominees and winners alike for the imagination and hard work that brought them here.”

This year’s Game Developers Choice Awards winners are:

Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Amy Hennig

Pioneer Award Winner Rieko Kodama

Audience Award Winner ETHEREAL

Game of the Year God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Best Audio Celeste (Matt Makes Games)

Best Debut Mountains (Florence)

Best Design Into the Breach (Subset Games)

Best Mobile Game Florence (Mountains / Annapurna Interactive)

Innovation Award Nintendo Labo (Nintendo EPD / Nintendo)

Best Narrative Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909)

Best Technology Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

Best Visual Art Gris (Nomada Studio / Devolver Digital)

Best VR/AR Game Beat Saber (Beat Games)

For more information about the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, visit the GDCA website!

About GDC

The Game Developers Conference is the world’s largest professional game industry event, with unparalleled education and networking opportunities. Learn about the latest tools to develop games across platforms including consoles, mobile, PCs, virtual reality and more. Gain knowledge of opportunities in digital entertainment and communities that will garner new ventures and shape the future of video games. Hear best practices from studios that have produced games with international and domestic audiences and gain insight to streamline your production process and improve your game’s quality. Check out our latest news about interesting GDC talks like “New Development Methodology for Anthem” or “Controller to Display Latency in Call of Duty“.

The post Choice Awards: God of War wins Game of the Year at GDC 2019 appeared first on Making Games.

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[cellerityweb]

GDC 2019: Opening Day of the Main Conference – Live Stream on Twitch

The inaugural GDC Main Stage presentation, The Developer’s Journey, starts today at 12:30 PM PDT (20:30 Berlin Time) in the Moscone Convention Center’s West Hall.

GDC 2019 has already started on Monday while the opening day of the Main Conference will be today (Wednesday, March 20). Please note that the new GDC Main Stage marquee presentation will be live streamed on the official GDC Twitch channel for everyone to enjoy! Don’t forget to tune in early, because at 12:10 (20:10 Berlin Time) the pre-show starts, and it features a special musical performance generated in Media Molecule’s upcoming creativity-fueled title Dreams.

New to GDC, the GDC Main Stage is a space for larger discussions on the state of game development. This year’s presentation, The Developer’s Journey, is a first-of-its-kind combined talk which consists of three parts:

Part 1: ‘Dreams’: Unlocking Creativity in Everyone (Siobhan Reddy) In her talk, Reddy will discuss the evolution of Dreams from 3D sculpting tool to full-blown game creation engine in the journey to bring the hobby of game creation into the living room for the modern generation.

Part 2: ‘No Man’s Sky’: Grit (Sean Murray) A small and unlikely team was behind one of the most ambitious and anticipated games of 2016. Hello Games’ Sean Murray takes you behind the scenes during the intense and dramatic launch of one the biggest selling new IPs in recent years.

Part 3: I Don’t Want Your Lemons: Optimism Fuel for Weary Devs (Laralyn McWilliams) This inspirational talk provides practical tools and techniques to stay positive and creative in game development despite the bumps (and craters) in the road, drawn from the experiences of fellow developers with 15+ years in the business.

About GDC

The Game Developers Conference is the world’s largest professional game industry event, with unparalleled education and networking opportunities. Learn about the latest tools to develop games across platforms including consoles, mobile, PCs, virtual reality and more. Gain knowledge of opportunities in digital entertainment and communities that will garner new ventures and shape the future of video games. Hear best practices from studios that have produced games with international and domestic audiences and gain insight to streamline your production process and improve your game’s quality.

Check out our latest news about upcoming GDC talks like “New Development Methodology for Anthem” or “Controller to Display Latency in Call of Duty“.

The post GDC 2019: Opening Day of the Main Conference – Live Stream on Twitch appeared first on Making Games.

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[cellerityweb]

Choice Awards: God of War wins Game of the Year at GDC 2019

God of War earned accolades for its mature narrative, dazzling visuals, and refined combat gameplay and was honored with the prize for Game of the Year at the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony during GDC 2019.

The Game Developers Choice Awards honor the very best games of the year and was created for and voted on by developers. Winners are selected by the Game Developers Choice Awards-specific International Choice Awards Network (ICAN), which is an invitation-only organization, comprised of leading game creators from all parts of the industry. An archive of the award ceremony, as well as the full presentation of the Independent Games Festival Awards, can be viewed on the official GDC Twitch channel.

“The Game Developers Choice Awards represent the most refined games of the year, and the sheer variety of games honored tonight showed that games can still represent wholly new and unique creative visions,” said Katie Stern, General Manager of the Game Developers Conference. “A number of independently developed titles like Celeste, Gris and Florence helped prove how internal or deeply personal turmoil can make for massively appealing games for millions of fans. While games like God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 capture our imagination with poignant moments juxtaposed against epic tales of staggering scale and technical prowess. We embrace and accept all these amazingly creative works, and we’re proud to recognize these nominees and winners alike for the imagination and hard work that brought them here.”

This year’s Game Developers Choice Awards winners are:

Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Amy Hennig

Pioneer Award Winner Rieko Kodama

Audience Award Winner ETHEREAL

Game of the Year God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Best Audio Celeste (Matt Makes Games)

Best Debut Mountains (Florence)

Best Design Into the Breach (Subset Games)

Best Mobile Game Florence (Mountains / Annapurna Interactive)

Innovation Award Nintendo Labo (Nintendo EPD / Nintendo)

Best Narrative Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909)

Best Technology Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

Best Visual Art Gris (Nomada Studio / Devolver Digital)

Best VR/AR Game Beat Saber (Beat Games)

For more information about the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, visit the GDCA website!

About GDC

The Game Developers Conference is the world’s largest professional game industry event, with unparalleled education and networking opportunities. Learn about the latest tools to develop games across platforms including consoles, mobile, PCs, virtual reality and more. Gain knowledge of opportunities in digital entertainment and communities that will garner new ventures and shape the future of video games. Hear best practices from studios that have produced games with international and domestic audiences and gain insight to streamline your production process and improve your game’s quality. Check out our latest news about interesting GDC talks like “New Development Methodology for Anthem” or “Controller to Display Latency in Call of Duty“.

The post Choice Awards: God of War wins Game of the Year at GDC 2019 appeared first on Making Games.

Choice Awards: God of War wins Game of the Year at GDC 2019 published first on https://thetruthspypage.tumblr.com/

[cellerityweb]

GDC 2019: Opening Day of the Main Conference – Live Stream on Twitch

The inaugural GDC Main Stage presentation, The Developer’s Journey, starts today at 12:30 PM PDT (20:30 Berlin Time) in the Moscone Convention Center’s West Hall.

GDC 2019 has already started on Monday while the opening day of the Main Conference will be today (Wednesday, March 20). Please note that the new GDC Main Stage marquee presentation will be live streamed on the official GDC Twitch channel for everyone to enjoy! Don’t forget to tune in early, because at 12:10 (20:10 Berlin Time) the pre-show starts, and it features a special musical performance generated in Media Molecule’s upcoming creativity-fueled title Dreams.

New to GDC, the GDC Main Stage is a space for larger discussions on the state of game development. This year’s presentation, The Developer’s Journey, is a first-of-its-kind combined talk which consists of three parts:

Part 1: ‘Dreams’: Unlocking Creativity in Everyone (Siobhan Reddy) In her talk, Reddy will discuss the evolution of Dreams from 3D sculpting tool to full-blown game creation engine in the journey to bring the hobby of game creation into the living room for the modern generation.

Part 2: ‘No Man’s Sky’: Grit (Sean Murray) A small and unlikely team was behind one of the most ambitious and anticipated games of 2016. Hello Games’ Sean Murray takes you behind the scenes during the intense and dramatic launch of one the biggest selling new IPs in recent years.

Part 3: I Don’t Want Your Lemons: Optimism Fuel for Weary Devs (Laralyn McWilliams) This inspirational talk provides practical tools and techniques to stay positive and creative in game development despite the bumps (and craters) in the road, drawn from the experiences of fellow developers with 15+ years in the business.

About GDC

The Game Developers Conference is the world’s largest professional game industry event, with unparalleled education and networking opportunities. Learn about the latest tools to develop games across platforms including consoles, mobile, PCs, virtual reality and more. Gain knowledge of opportunities in digital entertainment and communities that will garner new ventures and shape the future of video games. Hear best practices from studios that have produced games with international and domestic audiences and gain insight to streamline your production process and improve your game’s quality.

Check out our latest news about upcoming GDC talks like “New Development Methodology for Anthem” or “Controller to Display Latency in Call of Duty“.

The post GDC 2019: Opening Day of the Main Conference – Live Stream on Twitch appeared first on Making Games.

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[cellerityweb]

Spotify vs. Apple

Last week, Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, published a blog post in which he revealed that the company has filed an antitrust complaint about Apple with the European Commission. In the blog post, Ek claims that, as an operator of both the distribution platform (the App Store) and a participant in the mobile app ecosystem as a publisher of apps like Apple Music, Apple enjoys an unfair advantage against companies that develop apps similar to those that come pre-installed on Apple hardware. From the post:

Apple operates a platform that, for over a billion people around the world, is the gateway to the internet. Apple is both the owner of the iOS platform and the App Store—and a competitor to services like Spotify. In theory, this is fine. But in Apple’s case, they continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn.

To illustrate what I mean, let me share a few examples. Apple requires that Spotify and other digital services pay a 30% tax on purchases made through Apple’s payment system, including upgrading from our Free to our Premium service. If we pay this tax, it would force us to artificially inflate the price of our Premium membership well above the price of Apple Music. And to keep our price competitive for our customers, that isn’t something we can do.

Ek goes on to state that what Spotify finds problematic about the App Store dynamic isn’t the existence of the 30% platform fee (which is also applied on Google Play), per se, but rather the fact that alternative payment methods are not available on mobile (the App Store prevents developers from notifying users that they can register on the Spotify website) and that Apple’s own music app should also be subject to the payments rules of the App Store.

In all, the argument in the blog post comes off as disjointed and somewhat confused. At one point, Ek states that he doesn’t want or expect special treatment from Apple, only to be treated the same as Uber or Deliveroo, which don’t pay the 30% platform fee on transactions facilitated by their app. But Uber and Deliveroo don’t deliver digital products or services via in-app purchases; these companies fulfill their transactions in the real world. eBay similarly does not pay a 30% platform fee on items purchased in its app; nor does GOAT, the sneaker purchasing app; nor does Poshmark, the used fashion marketplace; nor does Fair, the car leasing app.

The distinction here is clear: Uber and Deliveroo don’t get special treatment on the 30% platform fee relative to Spotfiy because Spotify competes with Apple Music, but rather they are treated differently on a point of policy because they (and many other apps) facilitate the purchase of physical, real-world goods and services, not digital goods and services.

The second reason the blog post feels disoriented is that the issues taken with Apple aren’t harmonized around a single conversational thread. The original complaint is that Apple imposes a 30% platform fee on participants in the App Store but that the fee isn’t imposed on Apple’s own music app, Apple Music. That’s fine, and it is a reasonable grievance, but then the blog post continues to reveal that Spotify doesn’t actually pay the fee itself (it handles payments on its website; users aren’t even given the option of upgrading to premium via the iOS app anymore). So the objection evolves from having to pay the 30% platform fee to not being able to utilize the full range of communications functions for user messaging that a developer might desire because those aren’t permitted when a user isn’t seen as a customer by Apple.

This gripe is less reasonable. If Apple doesn’t facilitate an app payment, it has no idea that a user is a customer; imagine if every app that a user ever downloaded resulted in emails and other out-of-app messaging? My sense is that the emails that Ek is referring to here pertain to special promotions for users that have canceled subscriptions, which, again, makes sense from Apple’s standpoint: Apple should restrict app developers from sending unsolicited promotions to users via email. There is a word for such emails: spam.

The blog post ends with three suggestions for how Apple could change the App Store dynamic to be friendlier to developers and to reduce any anti-competitive advantage:

Apply its App Store rules to its own apps;

Allow developers the ability to offer multiple payment options to users, not just the iTunes payment mechanism;

Remove any controls (which are essentially implemented via Apple’s iTunes Connect Terms & Conditions) over messaging between developers and users.

Points two and three sound like genuinely bad ideas: they are both ripe for abuse and, frankly, would deteriorate the customer experience. The second point creates the opportunity for users to be scammed and exploited, and the third would result in a flurry of communications.

The first point is prima facie reasonable until one considers the wider mobile ecosystem and the sheer amount of choice that Spotify has in distributing its product to customers. Is “Spotify” as a concept an iOS app, or is it a streaming music service that exists on multiple platforms? Spotify operates a desktop website that is functionally identical to its desktop app (which is partly why it can so easily collect payment information from its website), and it also operates a Google Play app. Spotify could almost certainly create an HTML5 web app that matches its iOS functionality and push users into that — it won’t do that because iOS users make that hardware choice in part because of the convenience, distribution benefits, and comfort of the iOS environment.

Apple is coming under increasing pressure over its 30% fee, and it seems likely that some sort of overhaul will be conducted in the medium-term future. But iOS is one ecosystem choice on mobile, and Apple is not a monopoly: the pressure that is being applied to the company comes in the form of a proliferation of optionality for developers on mobile.

Spotify benefits from the App Store — in terms of being able to easily connect with consumers in an environment that they deem safe and trustworthy — and it’s not unreasonable in the least that Apple should implement some conditions on the service it offers to developers. Spotify already isn’t paying Apple, either a share of its subscription revenue or the advertising revenue it generates from the free version of its app; in asking for further consideration, it comes off as slightly overindulgent.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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