Mark Of Quality

It's interesting. There's always ups and downs, but more ups than downs. It's a very exciting market.

It's mainly about constant service for the main games. InnoGames doesn't release too many games each year; it has four main games and two that have been the main drivers of growth. These require a constant update, a constant service to that community, so it's about investment in a game after its release. That investment in the community is a strong foundation for growth.

In that market it's down to retaining customers and monetising your customers very well. It's a conscious decision that it's not quantity, it's quality of the game service that matters. Which is why InnoGames puts a lot of work not only into games before they are released but more importantly after release. The users will get bored very quickly if you don't come up with new updates and content for them - you have to feed them constantly.

InnoGames is more interested in the revenue than the millions of people inflating my servers but never paying anything

Gerhard Florin, InnoGames

The concept of doing that is very, very old. It's much cheaper to retain a customer than get a new one. That's marketing wisdom from the past 60 years. The old book clubs did the same, and it's the most rewarding thing to do. If you look at the investment budgets it's fairly evenly split between new investments and new undertakings and updates on existing games.

It's always easier to grow in a growing sector than in a shrinking or stagnant sector because you don't necessarily have to increase your market share in order to grow with the market. InnoGames is always trying to outgrow the market.

But this market is highly fragmented. It's not like playing against two or three big companies. Increasing market share is not really seen as taking that share from somebody else like it is in a very mature market. I wouldn't say that these markets are comparative. It's a little bit easier to grow, and in the main so far it's been good commerce to concentrate on domains - strategic, role-playing games and browser based games.

It wasn't necessary to go to mobile - we have some thoughts that might be developed further down the line. We don't have to go deeply into the Facebook arena, we don't have to go after new consumers. There are thoughts of going after the female gaming group, but so far the growth has come from the core gamers.

To a certain extent I would say yes. The main driver for consolidation is the cost it takes to maintain the games, develop the games and service the games. You need deeper pockets because the quality requirements are going up. The customer is expecting more and more depth, better graphical fidelity, the tools for new programming languages being offered in browsers. Eventually we will see 3D coming in browsers as well. All of this will drive up the budgets and as soon as the budget goes up it gets harder for the smaller companies to stay in the market.

There are two investments you make when you start a game. One is the money you pay - if you've paid £50 for a disc game, online or not, there's a certain likelihood you will stay with that game. The other factor is the invested time and knowledge. If you have built an avatar or built a village, invested 100 hours in a game, you are not going to leave it so easily. That's equally a barrier to access.

The only reason you will leave a game is because you get bored by the game. As soon as you stop offering new things for the players they will begin to leave. What we've got are not casual games with five minutes of investment; we have hours of investment. And the consumer is loyal as long as you offer fresh content.

That's one of the most interesting questions. I cannot say yes or no but there's plenty of talk. We can see very clearly that hardcore gamers, like everyone else, do have Facebook accounts. But still the majority of Facebook game players are a completely different target group than the core gamer. And we've asked core gamers why they don't play Facebook games and they say it would tarnish their image. But I think it's not that the core gamer isn't interested in Facebook but that the games it offers aren't right. As soon as a real hardcore game is offered on Facebook then these players will flock to it.

Well we had one offering, West Wars, but it was not really done with full force and full energy. It was more of a test... it's still a discussion that we're clearly having. From my point of view, I think it's a worthwhile platform and we could pioneer it very easily with our strong brands. But you have to use the top brands. The difference is that with InnoGames people play against users they don't know, they only know their avatars. On Facebook you have to play against your social graph if there's enough friends online playing that same type of game.

Latin America monetises okay, but Asia usually monetises very poorly. Going there you not only have tough competition but you have very different cultural experiences, especially in Korea and China. We have two people in Korea scouting for games that we might take to Europe. Asia is not a high priority but it's good for reach. If I want lots of MAUs and DAUs then I go to the Philippines but I'll never make any money there.

InnoGames is more interested in the revenue than the millions of people inflating my servers but never paying anything. The balance needs to be kept and I would say the US is more interesting, and InnoGames has more roots there than Asia. The Philippines and Indonesia are huge Facebook markets, but have extremely small revenue.