{"id":4042,"date":"2012-07-09T15:50:07","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T13:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/?p=4042"},"modified":"2019-05-03T15:57:47","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T13:57:47","slug":"european-games-group-partnering-to-enable-successful-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2012\/07\/european-games-group-partnering-to-enable-successful-games\/","title":{"rendered":"European Games Group: Partnering with Developers to Create Successful Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"EuropeanSecuring investment and achieving successful commercialisation are two of the major challenges that are often hotly debated in the games sector.\u00a0 Although securing funding is always a challenge for any entrepreneur, the problem is particularly acute in games where the \u00a0development process can often be long and costly, causing traditional tech investors (ie VCs) to prioritise investments in tech sectors they perceive to be ‘lower risk’. \u00a0If the game developer does manage to develop a solid, releasable version of his or her game, they are, of course, immediately confronted with the formidable tasks of effectively promoting and monetising their game(s) in an increasingly crowded space.
\n\"\"
\nEuropean Games Group<\/a>, a Munich based start-up founded in 2010 by games industry veterans Johannes Sevket G\u00f6zalan and Justin Stolzenberg,\u00a0is looking to partner with game developers to address some of these challenges through providing funding and business support (ie monetisation, mechanics, marketing, and international expansion support). Their vision is to become \u201cEurope\u2018s leading enabler & partner for independently published Free2Play online games.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0Although their investments have focused on the German market thus far, they\u2019ve recently successfully launched of one of their hit games Hero Zero here in France (and Poland) and are now actively looking to partner with French game developers.\u00a0 I recently caught up with Justin to discuss how things are evolving thus far and their plans for the future.
\nWhat is European Games Group’s focus?<\/strong>
\nWhat we really are about is empowering the developers by entering into an equal partnerhship with them. When selecting partners, we strive to work with those that have a similar work ethic (to ours), which focuses on fast decision making, transparency and fairness,and enough ‘technical muscle’ and know-how to develop and launch a successful game. \u00a0We believe that ensuring that developers keep full control over all product related issues is of utmost importance in creating a long-term successful game with an active community,\u00a0and that these teams and games deserve a focused commercial partner who has similar \u2018muscle\u2019 in global scaling.
\nWhat types of game developers are you looking to partner with?<\/strong>
\nThe game developers we’re looking to partner with should, firstly, have some kind of previous experience in the industry. \u00a0So, they should have worked in a online and\/or mobile games company, worked as a freelance developer, and\/or already launched a project. \u00a0This game industry experience and technical know-how is particularly important in terms of scaling up after launch. \u00a0Typically, what we want to achieve within 12 months after launch is to have expanded into 10-12 markets. \u00a0In order to achieve this we need to make sure developers have the necessary technical experience to achieve this. \u00a0We also, prefer, but don’t necessarily require, that teams that are founder led\/owned because we believe that founders\/owners on the development side behave differently than pure managers. \u00a0Our way of working tends to work best with this type of structure. \u00a0Of course, having a great team, with a strong, innovative vision is also imperative.
\nWhat do you offer game developers.<\/strong>
\nFor the game developer, it should feel like a joint-venture where you outsource all commercial matters for the game, but you maintain 100% of \u00a0the IP, the graphical and technical assets, and control of the features of the game. The commercial aspects we handle include securing payment providers (in the different markets in which the game is launched), administration tasks to launch quickly in new markets, ad sales if the game is fit for ads, and all marketing aspects, including creating banners and the pre-financing of external marketing in both the pre-marketing phase and the scale-up phase. \u00a0We pre-finance these services, which in a browser or mobile game amounts to approximately 300-500\u20ack in the first 6 months. \u00a0As it’s important to be in an equal relationship with game developers, we enter into a 50\/50 revenue share relationship for the specific game, so we don\u2019t take equity of the developer\u2019s company, and there is no way we could ever earn more than the developer.
\nHow do you find new partner developers, especially in new markets?<\/strong>
\nAt this point we’re establishing developer relationships in new markets mainly through word of mouth and cold-calling. \u00a0As we’re becoming more known as we’re operating successful titles in more markets, we’re starting to have more developers contact us now. \u00a0We’re operating a few games now and our first group of developers are starting to pitch new games (which we may fund). \u00a0However, we want to continue to look for innovative new developers to work with, so are looking for new partners with quality ideas and teams. \u00a0We still expect though to maintain our target of supporting about 3-4 games a year.
\nHow are the games you support distributed?<\/strong>
\nWe decided to not launch our own game distribution platform because we need to be open to market and distribute each game in the the best way for each individual title. \u00a0For us, the game should come first and be distributed through all means that are healthy…so, the game needs to fit the platform and not the other way around. \u00a0Our main focus is the standalone version of the games and distribution through a great variety of performance ad networks, media portal partnerships as well as portal integrations, including but not limited to Facebook \u2013 a proper Open Graph integration is great to drive viral traffic, but there\u2019s no need to actually run in the FB canvas. \u00a0 We view all these means of distribution as all complimentary to our stand-alone, destination sites.
\nHow do you support expansion to new markets and negotiation with service providers at the local level?<\/strong>
\nWe employ experts in local markets that can assist with identifying suppliers and building relationships locally. \u00a0What we look to do, which we have done in France and Poland, is launch a game in a new market with a few local or global service partners and once the game proves itself in that market, we then look to identify other local partners to work with. \u00a0 So, we have been quite successful this far with doing initial launches without being present in-country. \u00a0For example, in France we had 120k players in the first 4 weeks and healthy 4-digit daily revenues\u00a0without having a physical presence there. The hardest things we deal with when launching in a new market are actually being aware of cultural differences (and how they impact how things operate in country), understanding tax and administration differences, managing money streams which can be very difficult in certain markets, and optimising after launching. \u00a0As mentioned, working local experts is an important part of addressing these challenges.
\nWhat are your long-term objectives?<\/strong>
\nWe don’t want to grow to a point were we have an extremely large number of products as we feel this would be detrimental to the games. \u00a0So we want to avoid a situation like you have in the music industry, where you have so many releases that you don’t ‘feel’ the product any more. \u00a0We prefer, instead, to scale-up each game to its maximum potential. \u00a0Our goal is to have a smaller, high quality number of games and developers which allows our team to stay small, agile and fast in terms of marketing execution. \u00a0Our strategy to grow is mostly through duplicating the organisation we have currently in new markets. \u00a0These local structures will work with local developers and operate in a similar way to how we do currently. \u00a0We’re actually preparing to establish our presence in Latin America. \u00a0The Middle East is also a really interesting market for us in terms of expansion on the developer side.
\nWhat are your thoughts about opportunities in the games sector?\u00a0<\/strong>
\nIt’s a very interesting and constantly disrupting sector. \u00a0There are so many things that companies can do better to make room for themselves in this crowded market. \u00a0\u00a0Cross-platform approaches to browser \/ mobile look promising, and there\u2019s an increasing growth in acceptance for the free2play business model, which in turn supports more service oriented operations than under the retail or pay per download business models.\u00a0We feel there are a lot of things that can still be done in the games sector. \u00a0We’ve managed to do well thus far (in a very crowded space). \u00a0But this success isn’t because of luck. \u00a0It really starts with the developer having a great, innovative vision and team.
\nAs mentioned earlier, European Games Group are actively looking for game entrepreneurs to partner with.\u00a0 So if what they do might be of interest, feel free to get in touch with Justin and Johannes here.<\/a>
\nThis article has been modified after its original publishing to include facts omitted initially.<\/em>
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Securing investment and achieving successful commercialisation are two of the major challenges that are often hotly debated in the games sector.\u00a0 Although securing funding is always a challenge for any entrepreneur, the problem is particularly acute in games where the \u00a0development process can often be long and costly, causing traditional tech investors (ie VCs) to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":64789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10564],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tech-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}