A Discussion on Games and Building Global Brands

As GMIC winds down for the year, this afternoon Aiko Tanaka, a co-founder of Infinity Ventures Partners moderated a discussion with some of the biggest names in casual gaming: David Roberts (Senior VP at PopCap/EA), Henri Holm (senior VP at Rovio), Narry Singh (CBO at Outfit7), Phil Larsen (CMO at Halfbrick), and Diana Moldavsky (CRO at Zeptolab).

The discussion began with the panelists reflecting on Disney, which resulted in exactly the sort of self-congratulatory idiocy you might expect at an event like this from a few of the panelists. Roberts and Moldavsky stayed out of the fray, but the other panelists expressed skepticism about Disney that spiraled until we reached the point when Narry Singh actually said this sentence, referring to the makers of casual mobile games: “We’ve destroyed traditional storytelling.” My guess is the purveyors of more traditional kinds of storytelling — for example, the filmmakers behind The Avengers, which made more than $200 million this past weekend — would have some issues with that claim. But let’s move on.

From there, the panelists began talking about brands, and how each company has dealt with its game becoming a brand. Both Roberts and Moldavsky said that building a brand wasn’t really their focus, but that their companies eventually saw from the responses of fans to the game that there was demand for additional products and brand licensed products. Larsen pointed out that most of these companies got their initial boost from a single product — in his case, Fruit Ninja — and that Halfbrick has had success building its brand by expanding that product in a way that’s thoughtful and targeted.

This was also the moment when Mr. Singh came back down to earth, where he remained for the remainder of the panel. “I didn’t realize we were a brand until we got invited on this panel,” he joked, adding: “But are we sustainable brands? Time will tell.”

Merchandising has been a big project for many of these companies over the past year, but none more so than Rovio, which has been pumping out everything from stickers to Angry Birds underwear (which is big in Australia, according to Holm). Holm says it’s all about fan engagement for Rovio, which has now been doing merchandising for nearly two years. Merchandising in China is obviously especially important since it’s much harder to sell games here than in other markets, and Roberts illustrated this by pointing out that PopCap has been merchandising in China for more than a year, but just started merchandising elsewhere around a week ago.

Speaking about piracy in China, Roberts put the blame squarely at his own company’s feet, saying that when gamers pirate a game it means that the company has failed to properly connect its game with the market. That’s one reason PopCap just announced a China-focused Plants vs. Zombies expansion — the initial success of PvZ in China took PopCap by surprise and the game hadn’t been designed or properly introduced to this market.

Tanaka — who was an excellent host — pushed the panelists on China. Are they making much money in the Chinese market? All of them admitted that while they have huge user numbers in China, overall, it doesn’t make up a significant portion of their revenue. But all of them also expressed hope that that would change. The phrase “huge potential” was mentioned more than once.

Roberts closed the panel with some good advice for anyone interested in making globally popular games: “Make the best game you can make, and take as long as you can to make it great.”

This post is a part of our coverage of GMIC 2012.