The opportunity ahead in the mobile game market is huge, according to Neil Young, CEO and co-founder of N3TWORK — we will see a mobile game generating $10 billion a year in revenue in five years’ time, according to him. But exactly how do we get to that point from where we are now What sort of games do we need to create, and perhaps even more importantly, what sort of company can create those games

Neil Young spoke with [a]listdaily on these questions and what sort of company N3TWORK is aiming to be in order to seize these massive opportunities that lie ahead.

So instead of trying to craft a game that appeals deeply to a few whales, we should be trying to craft games that appeal to a very broad audience, even if the appeal isn’t that deep?

You definitely want to create games for a broad audience of people that generate lots of money, for sure. But I think the counterpoint to that is we are all a deep fan of something. There is something in our lives we have all spent a lot of money and a lot of time on. We’re all whales, to some degree, in something. The trick, for people running a portfolio of products, is to try and figure out what those are.

Now, every single one of those games that you build, you should be trying to make it reach the broadest audience that it can reach. But everybody is not your customer — I think Seth Godin said that. You have a specific segment. Is my wife my customer? Probably not. Is my 13-year old son my customer? Maybe, but he won’t be monetizing highly. You start with the intention of building something that resonates with humans, but very quickly you get to the place where there’s an audience, and you have to fess up to that, and own up to it, and lean into it.

Then you look for ways to take what you’ve built to see if you can strongly appeal to another audience without building a new game from scratch?

Or change the way that the player sees the fantasy that they’re buying into. I think Game of War did this brilliantly with a game that’s exceptionally hard-core, and really dated structurally and graphically. The marketing campaign uses Kate Upton to basically say “It’s like Game of Thrones but with Kate Upton and there are these huge battles.” There are huge battles, but they happen in your head, they don’t happen on the screen. What that did is cast the widest net possible for people who like that kind of fantasy, and this is the opportunity for them to fulfill their fantasy. The entry point for a lot of games is “I have a fantasy I want to fulfill.” Mobile games very quickly become an activity instead of escapism. The best ones you enter because you love this universe or this thing, and then it’s an activity you’re constantly playing.

It seems like the best games need to get you quickly hooked in with some simple game loop, and then eventually see how you can play the game better by doing some other activity.

Help them build equity in the game. Help them feel like they have an ownership stake in the journey they’re going on, or the characters they’re investing in, or the team they’re building, or the space they’re investing in. The games that are most successful are the ones that help you build the most equity.

With N3TWORK, are you building a team to create your own games to do the things you’ve talked about, or are you planning to bring in other people’s games and publish them?

The answer is C, all of the above. We’re building a new type of developer/publisher/operator/marketer of these mobile games, and that means we’re going to have games built by our first-party teams, we’re going to have games that we create in partnership with third parties, and then we’ll have partners where we have no part in creating the game but we can bring something to help them succeed — either technology, or expertise, or capital.

We think of our company as two big pieces to its puzzle. It sits on a platform that is a business and technology platform that allows these products to be published and operated very effectively. Then there are the products that we are creating that sit on top of that platform. Ultimately we hope that platform can be shared with other people, but initially our focus is on our own stuff.

I think the next great publishing company is more a platform than it is a traditional kind of publisher. So if you aspire to do that, you need to eat your own dog food along the way. We sometimes enjoy it and sometimes don’t — and if we can’t enjoy it, we know no one else is going to enjoy it.

With all of the challenges of today’s market, and all of the challenges in creating what you’ve described, you still feel the opportunity is big, don’t you?

The key is you have to be building high-LTV games. If you are not building high-LTV games, the only way you’re going to create a hit is because you got lucky. And by lucky I mean you created a great game that lots of other people liked. You’re probably leaving lots of money on the table if you’re not thinking about high LTV even in that case, too. My sense is high LTV solves a problem for the industry, which is that of discovery.