GameDaily Connect 2019 Highlights: Familiar Challenges Persist, But Fresh Ideas Abound

This year's GameDaily Connect (formerly Casual Connect) is in the books, and Sensor Tower was in attendance to share industry insights with a mix of mobile gaming's heavyweights and up-and-coming developers alike. Here's some of what we took away from the event, which drew attendees from around the globe to Anaheim, California last week.

The New Games Industry Still Has Old Challenges

During his presentation on navigating the new games industry, FunPlus EVP Shanti Bergel highlighted how mobile development and publishing has changed over the years, including the shift away from premium titles to free-to-play monetization. Sensor Tower data provided a glimpse into how such titles dominate today's revenue rankings.

While mobile games continue to evolve their monetization strategies to include ever-popular elements such as rewarded video—which are no longer just for casual and hyper-casual titles, according to Facebook's Nate Morgan—developers still face familiar issues such as rising acquisition costs and development crunch, along with emerging challenges including diversity and representation.

Hollywood & Games Are (Closer to) Reading From the Same Script

Another long-running challenge of game development is working with licensed properties, which served as the focus of a panel including representatives from FoxNext, Amazon, Skydance, and Seriously (which had just been acquired by social casino giant Playtika).

While the panel acknowledged that there are still a number of ways to improve alignment between Hollywood and game developers, it's clear that progress has been made—and there is the promise of closer relationships on the horizon. Part of this is due to studios becoming more amiable towards the idea of cross-media appearances of IP originating from games, such as Marvel characters created for FoxNext's Marvel Strike Force potentially coming to comics, TV, and movies.

Experimentation Isn't Dead

A major highlight of the summit was a fireside chat with game designer Jenova Chen of thatgamecompany. Chen's studio recently released its inaugural mobile-first game, Sky: Children of the Light, which arrived in July and surpassed one million installs in less than a week.

Chen took a decidedly different approach to the design and even monetization of Sky, which, while adopting a free-to-play model, eschewed many now-standard mechanisms in order to focus on a new type of social experience that plays heavily to the always-on, interconnected nature of mobile devices. Players have clearly been taken with the title, which has been downloaded more than two million times as of this writing and grossed more than $1 million.

This Is an Industry, But It's Also a Community

The second day of GameDaily Connect was capped off by a gathering sponsored by Sensor Tower and our friends AppsFlyer and AppLovin at Tortilla Jo's in Downtown Disney. (Thanks to our partners and everyone who attended!)

After two days of nonstop networking and sessions, it provided a welcome retreat from the show floor—and also a reminder that this is an industry driven by shared passion for entertainment. If you'd like to meet with Sensor Tower at upcoming industry events such as GameDaily Connect, you can reach our team at meetus@sensortower.com.