Wooga's Games For Everyone

Mobile is different. I mean one thing that has changed in mobile is now the most successful games on the iPhone are free games where you pay for virtual goods. So there mobile has become more similar to what Facebook games already are. The thing that is really different on mobile is everything around social. So how do access your friends, how do you access the social world, how do you get viral distribution, which communication channels do you use? All of that is very different because the App Store is the default way that people discover our app, not through their friends, so we know we have a lot of experimentation ahead of us. And we're working hard on making a great game there, but it will take time.

For us it's very very important to integrate these people well into the organisation and we use to grow at one person a week, but as the company gets bigger, as we're getting better at integrating people into the organisation we're now able to grow at two people per week and still make everybody part of Wooga.

And I think a big key to that is that we've got these independent game teams which operate almost like a start up inside all of Wooga, and therefore it's much easier to integrate people if you have a ten or 15 person team, than if you are a big organisation.

Obviously we remain committed to grow social games on Facebook and also of course on Google+ but the big thing for us really is mobile. So we have done nothing with mobile, we're launching two games now, one native version - Diamond Dash for the iPhone - and just announced today that Magic Land will get a special version based on HTML5. That's a new field for us and we know that we have little experience in that field and we will have to learn a lot.

Nobody knows for certain what will be there in five years, and we try to build Wooga in such a way that we can really move fast and move quickly, and we've got a six month plan. Beyond that it's really open for speculation. But broadly speaking I think gaming and playing games and playing social games will be something very normal, that almost everybody does. It will integrated into our lives, people will play these five or ten minute gaming sessions on the phone and on the PC.

In my presentation I focused a lot on that woman because this is audience here, at the Games Developers Conference, it's a lot of men and they don't think that this woman, that I used as a role model in my presentation, would be a customer. So for us it's 70 per cent women, but it's also 30 per cent men right? We don't just do female games, we do games for everybody. And I think the reason why it's so many women is that that audience was completely under served.

Over the last few decades the whole games industry, we've all created games for young men who want to shoot aliens. And that's fine, but we under served a very very big part of the population and that why I think that there's nothing female about our games, it's just that this audience has been under served so far.