Similar to the to the mobile game industry itself, Newzoo has been growing at a incredible rate. Over the past few weeks, the market data and analysis company announced partnerships with deltaDNA and Priori Data. It also announced a strategic minority stake investment from TalkingData, China’s largest mobile internet big data technology company, this morning — another important step in further becoming a new global leader in mobile data and intelligence.
[a]listdaily talks to Peter Warman, Co-Founder and CEO of Newzoo, about the kind of deeper insights these partnerships might uncover and what the company might have in store.
In what ways will the combined data from Newzoo, deltaDNA, TalkingData and Priori Data provide a more complete picture of the mobile gaming market?
With most of our clients, we have a relationship that goes back years. As the cooperation deepens, more client-specific challenges are put on our plate, including ones that used to be outside the scope of our products and services.
Particularly on mobile, it requires various angles and data sources to come to truly unique and client-specific insights backing up smart strategic, tactical and operational decisions. These formal strategic partnerships allow us to mix up data on a continuous basis and develop new joint products and services. This new mobile intelligence consortium offers everything from consumer insights, granular revenue projections for every country in the world, app store data, device usage, ad intelligence to monetization metrics, on a global and local scale.
We have an ambitious product roadmap in place that will ensure our solutions are accessible and affordable for companies of any size in any market. Our clients highly value our custom analysis support that comes with all of our subscriptions. We want to make sure future users of any of the mobile intelligence products coming from us, and from our partners, experience the same.
Equally important to the complimentary market intelligence of these partners is our common and intrinsic desire to innovate. This includes innovation in technology, data visualization, making data actionable and staying ahead of the curve when it comes to market trends.
Has collaborating in the past yielded any surprising discoveries?
It certainly has. We do a lot of analysis on Asia to help our clients develop a realistic and smart roll-out plan for that region. In one instance, we looked at KPIs per country on all levels such as revenue projections, big spender profiles, app store data and in-game metrics and combined this with our predictive analytics approach. From this, we were able to size and profile the current as well as the future opportunity for a specific game title. This resulted in an alternative roll-out strategy for one of our clients, particularly for greater Southeast Asia, that we did not consider at the start of the analysis.
How will the investment from TalkingData further strengthen Newzoo’s data services?
The year 2015 was Newzoo’s biggest year to date, doubling our headcount and turnover. We did not need an investment. Still, the money involved in cementing our relationship with TalkingData comes at a perfect time when our growth strategy has never been clearer.
The investment allows us to accelerate this plan and dedicate more time to new product development, an even higher standard of client service and global presence in terms of staff. Even though approximately 75 percent of our business comes from the US, we are only now seriously building our San Francisco office within the tech-hub RocketSpace. Key staff will move from HQ to the US and we have already have filled two of our five job openings in the US. TalkingData not only gives us real-time data on close to a billion connected devices in China, it also gives us an extensive business network within China. Its corporate event late last year, at which we both announced our partnership, was attended by 2,000 professionals from the biggest and most innovative firms in China.
As video games continue to grow and evolve, particularly with eSports models and the emerging VR platforms, what will be some of the key trends to keep an eye on?
Driven by the convergence of games and video, games have evolved towards cross-screen transmedia franchises. ESports is only the very visible part of a large scale change in the market that only occurs when various consumer, technology and business trends come together. It is the biggest thing to hit the games market since the launch of the iPhone in 2007. Though not as tangible, it is equally as disruptive.
Everyone agrees that over time, VR and AR will change the way we interact with people, our environment and content. Mass adoption of these technologies into our daily lives will take a generation or two. Until that time, VR provides the ultimate form of entertainment and will slowly move from niche to mainstream. I expect good hardware sales but less of an impact on game software revenues. As it stands, VR is not creating new time spent on entertainment such as the mobile screens did. The game software revenues it will generate will cannibalize spending on other “screens”, especially console gaming in the Western world. We take VR game revenues into account as part of our Entertainment Screen.
A business trend related to the convergence of games and video is the increased focus on communities. Communities of gamers and communities of viewers. Following the Asian model of owning a larger chunk of the value chain around the development of entertainment content, there will be an increased effort by game publishers to grow, maintain and monetize communities.
Given the data you have right now with these partnerships, how would you describe the average mobile games user?
I think everyone agrees that there is no average mobile gamer. There are Big Spenders, there are Free Marketers (people playing a couple hours a day but never spend) and an endless number of segments that can be relevant to a specific company. Another example where using averages is useless, is with in-game metrics. Average metrics are simply not good enough to be successful. This is one of the reasons why we work with metrics from deltaDNA and make sure our clients use metrics in their business plan that truly make sense.
