INTERVIEW: SPIL Games (Part One)

CG.biz was lucky enough to sit down with new chief commercial officer Sidney Mock to talk about how his firm got there, and where it hopes to go next.

In the first part of this three part interview, Mock discusses the importance of branding, localisation and monetisation.

CasualGaming.biz: The name SPIL isn’t as established as something like, say, PopCap, mainly as you guys do your business through targeted portals. How important is it to you guys that SPIL as a brand is recognised, and is increasing that recognition the next step in your evolution?

Sidney Mock: We had a re-branding last year. We were previously called SPIL Group. Our founders started with a whole range of activities in 2001. They had affiliate marketing programmes, skill gaming and more. Over the years it has evolved into what it is now. In 2004 it introduced its first portals in the Netherlands, and over the years it came bigger and bigger on the games front, and eventually sold its other interests to focus on games.

So the name change from SPIL Group allowed us to explain that our focus was now on games. We have different target audiences, and whilst the name SPIL Games is important to the industry and to developers, to our users it isn’t important at all. Our portals are tightly targeted, and the essence of the portal is far more important than the SPIL Games name.

What we’re doing right now, and a strategy we’ll be rolling out in the coming years, is using the SPIL name as a quality label. We want users to see that if a portal is backed by SPIL it will mean that it’s of a good quality. We’re more interested in building the brands of our portals and making the most of our localised domain names.

CG: So localisation forms a very important part of your business?

SM: It was one of the cornerstones of our success – a local domain name with local content and a localised website. I strongly believe the next step is building a brand for those portals.

CG: One of the big topics that keeps cropping up is that of monetisiation. There’s so much casual content out there and so much of it is free, if you look at your user base and the revenues you’re generating do you think the two correspond correctly or is there potential to monetise better?

SM: Yes, there’s big potential. We focus on the content and the audience, and have over 4,000 games in our portfolio. We’re very happy that our revenue grew faster than our traffic last year, which I think says a lot. We hope to see that trend continue this year as well. In the end that is important and is what keeps our company stable. There is a lot of potential to make money in other ways.

Right now we focus on two things – advertising and partner revenues. There’ still scope to increase advertising. Take interactive banner ads, for instance – they’re big in the UK but in places like Germany they’re less common, so there’s room for growth there. Secondly, we work a lot with external syndication partners such as RealGames, Oberon and King, and also with independent developers. If these partners have a specific revenue model for their end user then we’ll get a share of that, too.

However, we’re always looking for a third and fourth revenue line, and that will always be something where we’re willing to experiment. The maths are very simple – you have 100m users and they can all be tapped in to.

CG: Are there new monitisation models out there that have not yet been stumbled upon?

SM: Yeah, definitely. It could be that maybe the ones we have right now on the internet are the ones which work, but maybe on the mobile platform there’s a whole new source of revenues, especially for casual games, that haven’t yet been found. But that’s what makes this industry very interesting. Not everything is known.

CG: Some people say that there’s too much in the way of free content and that people have become so accustomed to sitting down at the PC and playing something for free that when they come across a barrier that requires payment they just think “nah, I’m not having that” and click onto another site. Does this concern you?

SM: No. The most important thing is that you have to make it very clear to the user that they get added value if they pay. I’m not sure what the situation is in the UK but in the Netherlands when ISPs started they offered free internet. It was all free.

CG: We don’t get much for free in the UK…

SM: Right, yeah! Well, it was free in the Netherlands. Everyone was thinking there must be a catch or a trick. I mean, if you give it away fro free how will these companies ever make their money and how will people ever be convinced to pay? But now Dutch people pay for internet access. DSL and high-speed appeared and people understand that if they want better internet access they have to pay. The change happened in just a couple of years. I don’t think there are any free ISPs anymore.

A big thing in the success of casual gaming is that the entry barrier is low, is free, is easy to play and is of relative high quality. You can then move consumers to pay or partly pay for services as long as the added value is clear. You see it a bit in the differentiation between the free-to-play and the download games. If you pay for a game sometimes it’s full screen, or advertising free, has more levels or you can save your high score – stuff like that. People understand that if you pay a bit you get more.