‘Casual marketing is flawed in US’

Her main area of advice lies in marketing, in which she believes casual games companies haven’t yet realiased exactly where to find their audience.

“If you don't know how to quickly do things like find out where gamers are going for anime, where teens hang out, how to track down players interested in first person shooters or those who want a shopping game, your cost of acquisition could be prohibitively high,” she told Edge.

“At Outspark we've maximized our marketing dollars to target relevant areas via various channels and community driven approaches, in so doing achieving one of the lowest user acquisition costs in the industry,” she continued.

“We’re flexible enough to reach the most valuable groups of users (due to geographic or other demographic targeting) without incurring significant additional marketing costs.

"This comes from a team with a great deal of both Internet portal marketing experience and game publishing experience that's constantly fine-tuned based on performance. Otherwise, copious marketing dollars would have been wasted—as many international publishers have found.”

She concluded: “While it’s easy to layout what publishers may be missing, there are no blueprints for what makes one game succeed and another one fail.

“A lot of the reasons for success fall on the habits of the audience, and with market size growing it’s more important than ever to find quality and relevant titles to bring to them.  

“Just listening to your audience and giving them the tools to provide you feedback are invaluable, which we at Outspark, and other publishers, have taken seriously. Because in the end no matter the quality of the game without an audience playing it doesn’t matter, now does it?”