ICO Partners Part 1

So you have different expectations of business models, service quality, all this stuff. So when you look at it, it looks similar but when you look more closely there's lots of things you can fine tune and improve. That's where we come in.

From Asia, Asian companies come with a very different expectation. Because they come from a fragmented market as well: China is different from Japan which is different from Korea which is different from Vietnam, so they think "we need to do the same thing in Europe that we did in Asia, which is licence to different people in every single country". Actually, if you try to do that you'll lose out, because the critical mass you reach in Korea, because player density is so high, you'll never reach with just one partner in France.

So it's fragmented like in Asia, but not that fragmented. There's still a lot of things that can overlap. So you need to think about the cultural differences, but also the cultural similarities which you should leverage. But the challenge is more in operations.

For instance, it's not as pronounced as it was two years ago, or even last year, but browsers. For Asian companies Internet Explorer is the one true browser. And they come here and say, oh, my website isn't optimised for Firefox. So you're losing 50 per cent of your potential audience.

So you need to educate them on that, you need to make sure they understand it.

They also come with very data heavy stuff because they're used to very good connections, especially in Japan and Korea. They have optic fibre everywhere. Direct fibre optic lines to you building, to your apartment, which are one gigabyte. So for them it's "push the button, have the experience".

They have very "heavy" games, very fast downloads. They don't have the problem of optimisation for the bandwidth.

There's also the history. They don't have the history of browser-based games like we do in Europe. But then you have to also explain the expectations of how a beta is being run, because the notion of a beta being secret, with an NDA, is totally alien to them. They think, "it's online, you should be able to talk about it".

If they go like a bull into a china shop, they try to do things in the way they imagine it should be done in Europe, rather than how it's being done. We tell them best practices, stuff that's obvious for us but not for them. Having worked on so many projects now we've got experience of working with Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese companies. They need this kind of stuff, not because otherwise they'll fail, but because they'll waste money and energy. Maybe so much that they'll lose faith in the market.

My job is to make sure that the European market grows. I want all of my clients to be so successful that the market becomes bigger, until we become comparable to Asia in the online games space. Lot's of things to be done.

But we have two businesses. We have the consultancy, and the PR side, which Julien runs, which is also very specific.

The way we deal with PR is to help with the marketing for the companies we're dealing with, for example League of Legends, and Hi-Res studios with Global Agenda in Europe, that kind of thing. We're not traditional PR people. We've all worked in house at publishers before. A large part of our staff comes from a community management background rather than PR. So we have a different approach. We know all the games very well, we play the games a lot.

We don't take many clients, we have between three and five clients so we can really focus on the quality. We work on a pan-European level. We communicate just as much with journalists in the UK as Poland, Italy, Scandanavia... Depending on the client, we'll receive a message, with an announcement and screenshots or whatever, but we don't just relay it. We try to adapt it to the European audience. Not necessarily for the editors or journalists, because they're used to dealing with international publishers, but rather for the readers so that they really understand.

Especially with American clients, there's a particular American style to the way they do PR, the way they communicate their stuff. That may not be quite so well received in Europe. So we don't change the message ourselves but we advise them on how to communicate.

It's been quite successful for us. Having an in-house point of view, having operated games ourselves, we know the implications of everything.

It was never a strategy to do PR, it just happened. There was a need to do PR differently for one of clients, we looked around for solutions and couldn't find them. After talking with the client they asked "can you do it?" So we said we'd try. I think we've been so successful, so happy with the results, that we've been able to develop it in parallel with the consulting. We also look at it as a long-term thing, rather than a burst of news for the launch. It's an online game, so you have to have a different way to communicate.

For me, the whole business is changing. It's evolving. The way we're doing PR is to try and contribute to that, to make it online friendly.