HeyHuman was at Casual Connect London 2019. Read on to find out our top three marketing minded take outs from the conference.

The pleasures and pitfalls of developing games for children

It’s an exciting time to be making games for kids.

It’s also an intimidating one.

Children represent a fourth of the gaming industry’s revenue and it is the fastest growing segment, according to Jesse Divnich, Vice President of Research & Strategy at Interpret. Meanwhile, children who grew up with games are now parents, interested in buying games they can play with their children, as a family.

But in an increasingly connected world, it’s harder than ever to keep kids safe online. Laura Higgins, (Director of Community Safety & Digital Civility at Roblox) and Vernon Jones (Head of Safety, at MovieStarPlanet) outlined three tactics for preventing grooming: filters, fully trained human moderators and working with other organisations, including law enforcement and online chat platforms.

The next step for diversity

Game developers are, in the vast majority, young, white, heterosexual, cis men.  However, the conversation at Casual Connect this year showed that this too has started to change, and there’s massive appetite within the industry to push beyond diversity and start working on inclusion.

Liz Prince, who runs the recruitment agency, Amiqus put it best when she said:

Diversity is being asked to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance, and belonging is dancing like no one is watching,” she said. “And that really helps to think about the journey. In terms of what we’re aiming for… I hate the idea of looking at only numbers but having 50/50 [representation] in the games industry would be so amazing.”

There’s also increasing industry recognition that gaming audiences span all ages, races and genders. That’s something we at HeyHuman had first-hand experience with when we performed audience research for Wooga’s game Pearl’s Peril and used our audience segmentation to frame a classic hidden object game as a lifestyle game for busy, adult women. 

The Number One Mistake To Avoid When Expanding Into Asia

$35 billion – that’s how much the Chinese and South East Asian game markets are worth, according to Daniel Ahmad, Senior Analyst at Niko. It’s no wonder then that Western game publishers are looking to expand into Asia.

However, as Boomzap’s Christopher Natsuume pointed out, publishers have been guilty of approaching Asia as one, homogenised landscape. But every country in Asia has its own distinct gaming and spending cultures. Marketing has to take into account these differences. For example, Japan has a very different relationship to time and disposable income than the rest of Asia, so time saving microtransactions may well work better there than in say, China.