Delivered at Casual Connect Europe in Amsterdam, February 2015.
Our industry is at a crossroads. Within a few years, the business models that kickstarted the casual games market have widely collapsed. Currently, those of us who are financially successful usually wear ties, have gambling industry backgrounds, and mostly think about maximizing revenue, while chasing whales through optimal A/B testing. We don’t create games to please human beings anymore – we try to rip them off as smoothly as possible. We have become evil.
Are we forever doomed to make our living by milking a fraction of our audience into exorbitant amounts of IAPs with perfected manipulation while we penetrate the rest with heaps of ad banners and interstitials, or is there light at the end of the tunnel? Thorsten will give his best shot at predicting our future, make reference to what happened in other industries in similar situations, and share his opinion on how we might get the good karma back into the job we love. He will also share some ideas on how we can bring quality and diversity back to an audience that continues to happily pay for premium content on their Kindles or on Netflix.
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