INTERVIEW: SPIL Games (Part Three)

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 final part of this three-part interview, Mock talks about how the cooperation shown by the big players in the casual games sector represent a maturing of the wider games industry.

CasualGaming.biz: What reaction have you had to your announcement that you’re the biggest portal? Have people questioned it?

Sidney Mock: We’ve had an increasing number of discussions with our partners in the last year which show that we’ve become an even more interesting party to talk with. Our biggest asset is our users. Everybody who is developing or publishing games wants them to be played, and what we can offer is a massive audience.

This has made it easier for us to get around the table. If you’re a small Dutch website from the Netherlands the big portals are likely to say “sorry, who are you again”, but now it’s different – it’s easier to do business. We get a lot of compliments, particularly from those who have been around a long time. They look at their growth and then look at ours and see that we’re doing something special here.

CG: So you’re comfortable staking your claim to glory, and with your relationships with your piers? You seem relaxed about it.

SM: Yes. It’s remarkable that we’ve come this far, but it’s nothing more than evidence that what we’re doing is correct. The whole industry is working very closely together. That’s something I particularly like about my new role. Of course, in some parts of the business we have to act like competitors, but the majority of our dealings with others is to do with teaming up to make the whole sector bigger. The relationships we have with King and Oberon and Real – in one way we compete but in another way we work together. The maturity of the industry is very good.

CG: That’s an interesting thing to hear. In my years in the games industry I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve been accused of lacking maturity.

SM: It’s a young industry, but I’ve seen that all the players want to work together to elevate the entire industry. It’s useless to compete within a single piece of the pie when you could instead be working together to make that piece the whole pie. I’m not saying the industry as a whole is mature, but we’re in a good phase.

CG: One of the defining characteristics of the early console days was the lack of that. Look at the relationship of companies such as Nintendo and Sega in the early ‘90s, and even Sony and Microsoft now – those guys weren’t and aren’t working together. Far from it. Some of it was plain nasty. Maybe the industry has matured a bit. You’d hope so.

SM: When I worked for Google I saw that the black and white of competition is fading. For instance, look at Google and eBay. eBay is advertising on Google, but the two are competing over VOIP and Skype. They were both competitors and partners. Can I ask – how do you see the industry?

CG: Well, I’ve been involved in CasualGaming.biz for less than a year, so like you, I’m a relative newcomer to the sector. The main difference I’ve seen between casual and core gaming is the idea that it’s finding its feet. Core gaming is rooted in a model – perhaps too much so. The walls, as you say, are up.

There’s rivalry. But in casual, the sector is so new and boom so quick that there are a lot of companies rattling around trying to find the magic formula. There’s a feeling, I think, that one day the ideal recipe will be found and everyone else will be like “oh, so that’s how we should be doing it!”.

SM: If you look at a lot of companies you will hear that many are surprised by the size of the casual audience. comScore says that casual gaming reaches 40 per cent of all internet users. 40 per cent of all those online play a casual game at least once a month. The total audience is something like 500m globally, which is massive. The industry needs to get comfortable with these kinds of numbers.

Casual gaming is a sector that can touch all platforms and audiences, and we need to work together to break down the barriers between platforms. You should be able to play game X wherever you are and on whatever platform you have access to at the time. I think for the next one or two years the audience will keep growing, and that will provide us funds to carry on experimenting on new routes to our audience and find the answers.

Part One of this interview can be seen here.
Part Two of this interview can be seen here.