KABAM!
So my mind was filled with wonder when gamesindustry.biz announced that "Kabam loses worldwide studios boss to Gree" By Matthew Handrahan
Update: Andrew Sheppard will take the role of COO at Gree International, the Japanese mobile company's San Francisco-based operation.
“Over the past few years, Gree's San Francisco and Vancouver teams have been steadily growing and our games and portfolio have seen tremendous success," said Naoki Aoyagi, CEO of Gree International, in a statement. "We are now focused on the next step and are confident that Andrew's expertise will help take us to that next level.
Great article and very politely doesn't give any facts for his departure but one can only guess that Gree is psyched to have the master of the F2P market on the team. Rather than speculate on why he left I think it would be cool to see why Gree romanced away Kabam's guru!
Here's a string of direct quotations that illustrate some great strategies Andrew Sheppard thought about and used to make his companies so successful!
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By Aaron Lee
Now, why is free-to-play happening and why is mobile happening? Free-to-play is happening because increasingly consumers are demanding choice. And they are getting content upfront for free. So what happened with music, and later movies and television, is happening with games. People want choice, and they only want to play things that they love and they’re only going to pay for things that they love. The entire free-to-play business model is about that. It’s being willing to give your [products] away, because you believe – and in our case, we believe this very strongly – you can deliver a gameplay experience and service that compels people to pay. That people feel is rewarding enough that they will pay for.
What you’re seeing is a fundamental shift in the way people want to interact with content and browse the web. Gaming is the most popular use case on mobile devices. Mobile devices are inherently portable. And increasingly mobile devices are competitive with console from a hardware standpoint.
What we see in the data is that consumers are not having any resistance adopting free-to-play games. And, in fact, consumers are increasingly choosing free-to-play games because they offer accessibility and choice to a degree that paid applications in games do not.
Facebook is still a super huge partner for us, and our games continue to do well and hold steady, if not grow. That’s very unusual. Most other [free-to-play] companies have not been able to deliver that success.
Ways that that manifest is that people form friendships in our games by way of these social functions. It’s those friendships that persist. You know, all the MMORPG companies have talked about how people are getting married [because of] their games to a degree that is sounds cliché. But it is a powerful, powerful concept. This notion of returning to a game that you love, to hang out with the people that you enjoy hanging out with; it’s basically like a virtual living room.
Also, Facebook is very important to us from a mobile perspective. They are really hitting their stride in the mobile space. But, again, a large majority of our business is now mobile and tablet, and increasingly a large percentage of our business is non-English speaking.------------------------------------------------------------------
Our broader goal is ultimately to have as local a presence in every market as possible. I’d say aspirationally the goal would be to have, you know, a British customer, a German customer or a French customer jump into our games and feel like they were developed by a developer from their country.
"We don't view Supercell. GungHo or King as competitors. We're not jealous of them. This is not a zero-sum game."
"30 percent of our revenue remains from web and Facebook and we have 100 people working on those games, but our considerable focus is now mobile."
"Everyone has a superpower and in the case of Kabam's CEO Kevin Chou, it's recognising trends," he explains of the decision to go mobile.
"Whether we're publishing or developing, we're looking for games that can be hits on a global scale," Sheppard says. "Otherwise it's an opportunity cost."
"We pride ourselves on our service approach,"
"We're not yet at the stage we would like to be at, but we've come a long way in four years."
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GamesBeat GUEST POST
Stop congratulating yourselves over E3 — console makers and publishers are massively missing out on mobile
The market has moved — and will continue to move — toward free-to-play mobile gaming.
I predict this year’s E3 will be the last time we see record attendance at the conference and that over the next five years, E3 will struggle to stay relevant in an increasingly global mobile/tablet gaming world. Just as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reduced from two gatherings annually to one and Qualcomm has replaced Microsoft as the keynote, so, too, will E3 decline and hopefully evolve. Why? Free-to-play (F2P) mobile games are eating into the market for console games, and mobile game developers simply don’t require city-sized shows to influence the market or reach consumers.
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