Bigpoint's Heiko Hubertz

I agree, loyalty is not very high because there are so many casual games. But there is still a lot of money in this market. Farmarama cost us to develop around 50,000 euros and it's generated this year two-digit million in revenues. So why not go after this space if it's so profitable? It's profitable so we don't want to rely on one game genre.

One of the reasons why we changed the business model for DevLounge was that we saw many people were interested, but the idea of only getting the minority of the revenue share, it's not worth it for them. Since the change we've launched 30 games, so ten games per month, and that's really interesting. It's not the biggest revenue driver for us but it's important for our users that we have all the content on the website, so they know if they go to Bigpoint.com they can find a game they like. The developers get 70 per cent and we only take 30 per cent, so the developers have huge user numbers that they can get through our media partners, and we have more users, so everybody's happy.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of browser-based games and many of them, to be honest, are crap. We don't want them. So from that point of view, yes there's enough content. But from a technical point of view we could continue to release that amount of games, it's just an API. But from a user point of view it doesn't make sense to have a catalogue of thousands of games if the player can't find the right games for them. So the next step for that is to look more at the quality of content, to get different genres, to be more picky in the future over these games.

Yes, especially with the third-party IP. The big Hollywood licenses help us introduce the micro-transaction business model to users. At the moment it's easy for a user to make a registration for free but if they don't like what they see they will stop playing. With IP the user already knows the story to some extent, the basic goals of the game and they trust certain products, so they take more time to play the game, play it for longer and hopefully pay more. That's the reason why we think it's so important to use third-party IPs combined with high-quality games, because in the future the user will decide by the quality of the game if he pays or not. It's no longer a case of going into a store, buying a boxed product, playing it at home and if you don't want to buy it, well shit, you've already paid for it. With our games its free at the beginning and the user decides if he pays or not. Quality is the key from a monetisation stand point.