KEY TALKING POINTS

1. The next milestone for game consumption2. Games as complex media products – what makes them successful?3. Working for Disney Interactive Studios4. How to get as much as you can from your team5. Business view vs. quality bechmarks – what is the strategic

perspective? 6. Advice for gaming startups 7. Making though decisions

IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCESThe next milestone for game consumption will be building increasingly immersive experiences will attract the most (loyal) users.

• Content is king in the gaming development world. • New devices and platforms have instilled a sense of constant change and a need to constantly adapt to hardware and software developments. • Gaming is being acquired as a habit since childhood for the new generations, and a company must be able to deliver a longer lasting gaming experience.

QUALITY IS PARAMOUNT2 factors determine a games’s success: making quality content for all ages and getting the product as widely distributed as possible.

• Don’t take the same experience and deploy it across all platforms – find the unique experience that works on each platform. • Convergence – thinking strategically and effectively to cover all products and platforms. Convergence also helps with minimizing the work. • Stay engaged as much as possible with the customers to get their feedback and adding additional content, functionality, etc.

A GENERATIONAL COMPANY Building games in a generational company makes you look at things from a different perspective and consider the long term impact of your work.

• Brand owners meticulously take care of the brands and maintain a certain level of quality – this adds a bit of pressure.• Logistically, working for a company as big as this adds more overhead to the production side. You don’t always have full control. • The biggest responsibility is to the fans.• There is a much shorter production cycle (6 months).• The key is to be constantly engaged with the teams working on the product.

SETTING EXPECTATIONSAs a producer, you have to make sure that things go as smoothly as possible. Get involved in all the aspects and don’t work on something too long. Iterate quickly.

• Don’t fool yourself into believing you have more time than you actually do. • Making tough calls – it’s your job. You also have to be a good communicator, motivator, negotiator, community management. • You have to intimately know a project so as to be able to solve the problems and make your deadlines.• Set realistic expectations and be honest about your progress• Let everyone weigh in and keep all the stakeholders in the loop.

PASSION vs. REVENUETight deadlines means you might have to do some quality cut backs – it’s a very fine negotiation.

• Ratings are important and they’re more important than deadline – make sure you make the right cuts. •Digital distribution – it allows you to enhance the game’s lifecycle even thought you didn’t ship it from the beginning.• You’ll learn a lot from the entire creative and executive process, every single time. You get better as you learn. • Having feedback from other people can help you get a clearer perspective. • Rely on analytics – the more info, the better. • Tweaking can derail your timing. • Do as much beta testing as you can.

EXPECT TO FAILIf you can’t market yourself, you can’t reach your users.

• Make sure that the people who are providing the funding understand the game space. • Set the right expectations with investors.• Don’t expect everything to be a hit right away. Expect to fail and make it a learning experience.• Having the cool technology is not enough. Having big brands as clients is not enough. • Users want new content every week or every day.• Expectations from consumers are much higher now – more quality and depth of game for free and not wanting to pay anything to continue with the experience• There is no formula for success.

DON’T DELAY DEPLOYMENTWork quickly and get your app out there. Users today accept the idea that the product can evolve over time. It’s okay to get your core experience out there and then tweak it.

• The longer you go without shipping a product, the longer you don’t get paid. • Feature cutting is okay, as long as the user can’t tell you cut it (nonessential features) – if you go into the game play, then you may be touching dangerous areas. • Add severity and reproduction rate to your QA process and realize that you’ll never be able to address every bug.• Leverage what you have (technical skills, marketing knowledge, sales acumen, etc.).• When a huge trend is going into a direction (ex: freemium), figure out what other opportunities are there for you.

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