Big Point to Prove

Bigpoint's Philip Reisberger on money, tablets and going beyond social networks

Feature by Dan Pearson Contributor

Published on Dec. 8, 2011

GamesIndustry.bizYou mentioned in your presentation about literally bumping into a woman in your car who you ended up talking about games to. She turned out to play a lot of casual games but was still almost horrified when you referred to her as a 'gamer'. You also mentioned the need to turn these casual gamers into quite core players quite stealthily, gently. Do you think that's because there's still a bit of a social stigma attached to being a gamer?

Philip Reisburger

Personally I think that everyone loves games, but the reason for reactions like that is that not understanding what gaming means. Especially in Germany there's a lot of press about youth protection and all of that stuff, gaming always has a bit, or used to always have a bit of a negative perception. So people who are new to this field are a little bit more aware of that than people like us who grew up with it and chose a profession in it because of our passion.

It's just a bit of a different mindset. Give it until 2016, 17, 18, 19, 20, when we're the old ones and there's a generation who've grown up playing on mobile devices and phones, they'll have a totally different view. We've seen it even in the last two or three years.

GamesIndustry.bizThere's a fair amount of business consolidation going on at the moment in social and casual, with mergers and acquisitions. It's what you'd expect from any maturing business, but there have been some casualties too. Are you feeling any of the pinch?

Philip Reisburger

Directly in terms of market developments and things like that, we're definitely on the plus-side, we're continuously growing. We don't see any issues and we've don't have any plans for consolidation or anything like that. We just moved into a new office three months ago which has seven floors - we now have more than 850 people there.

Just last month or the month before we acquired 49Games, who made console games. That was 43 people. So it's continuous growth, we still have around 80 or 100 positions vacant.

Of course it always has to pay, we like positive margins and stuff like that!

"The 200-250 million monthly actives that they have, that's say 30-40 per cent of the active Facebook population. Our quarter of a billion registrations we have do not represent 30-40 percent of the internet's users."

I think the main reason for consolidation at the moment is that new things are emerging, so you get stages of repeated growth and consolidation. The market has just become a lot more professional, more mature.

GamesIndustry.bizAnd you along with it?

Philip Reisburger

We have big SAP systems and stuff like that - if you're a smaller indie developer and want to grow, there are other companies who'd say "a two Euro ARPU is fine, but we can do 12" - I'm just making up numbers here!

Just having the distribution network, that's something that took years to build up, it's one of the benefits of having this big infrastructure.

GamesIndustry.bizOne of the problems we've seen Zynga have, after becoming the de facto spearhead for the market, is that their new games tend to just stir the pot of their existing users rather than attracting new ones. Is that an issue for you in the same way? You have a much broader portfolio of games...

Philip Reisburger

For me it's less the portfolio - I love what Zynga is doing, they really have this iterative innovation. They grow something and then the next thing is a little bit better - they totally understand it - their business sense is quite similar to ours.

They have a different basis, though, because we're outside of Facebook. The 200-250 million monthly actives that they have, that's say 30-40 per cent of the active Facebook population. Our quarter of a billion registrations we have do not represent 30-40 percent of the internet's users. So we're in a bigger market, we're not relying on a new guy registering on Facebook - we have over a thousand media partners who drive traffic, so whenever they venture into new ground, it's beneficial for us.

We are where the internet is.