In this LevelUp episode, Melissa Zeloof sits down with John Wright, CEO at Turborilla and ex-VP of Mobile Games at Kwalee, to discuss his vision for the mobile gaming market. They explore the biggest trends impacting the industry, the role of AI in development, funding strategies, the evolution of hybrid games, and the potential of alternative app stores.
Tune in or keep reading for some of the highlights.
What are the biggest things that you think are going to be impacting mobile gaming this year?
A lot of it is around investment, right? So what we've seen very recently is like the most recent convoy report came out and basically highlighted the fact that Q1 25 it started to show a resurgence in deal flow.
So obviously deals of all different sizes and different gravitas are very good for gaming. What we want in the industry is investment, right? Investment allows us to grow games. New studios get the resources that they're able to do to do that.
But equally on the other side we've seen other, other more recent reports saying that 62% of game revenue today is coming from games over five years old, which I think is a huge, a huge eye opener for what a lot of teams should be investing in. And I think over the last year or so we saw a lot of big companies say that they weren't going to invest in new games.
And what that sort of says to me, is that LiveOps and sustaining games is really kind of the future. And what we've seen, and there's been a lot of phrases thrown around in the industry lately which is that retention is the new UA, right? It's about how do you retain your users for longer and how do you make your LTVs of those users increase.
How do you think AI is going to impact new game development? Are you an optimist or a skeptic?
So firstly, the reason why it's never been harder to launch new games is that the unit economics of games is currently not working the way it did previously. And as you see, ATT was a massive driver of this, right? Not only did it increase CPIs and CAC, but it also brought down eCPMs and affected LTV.
So you know, ultimately that has put a bit of a spanner in the works of how we come to market with new games. However, there are still new games coming out and there are successful new games.
For me, AI is an amazing lever, right? It's an amazing tool. Like if you ask me categorically now, do I think that in the next, let's say three or four years, AI will develop a game that will launch and become a unicorn? My answer to you is no.
Because I think there's too much complexity, with balancing economies, LiveOps, etc. Games are so complicated. There's so many moving parts. What we do is build these substantial technology or technology small businesses, which is what your apps and games are.
But, to answer your question, we've already seen dramatic implications of AI in marketing, right? Like market production has never been better and easier. But the marketing stuff's been done for the last couple of years.
What I see in the next 12 months, and I'm starting to see now is more around the prototyping and the validation side. The idea is that creative people, people like you. I'm not creative, I'm a numbers guy. People like you would like using, you know, an AI and a prompt system, to build a game, right?
And validating concepts very quickly is going to be highly important. Because the problem with today, is like during the hyper-casual phase, it would take us two weeks to a prototype and then two weeks out of date and test. Now, like, you know, before I left Kwalee, we increased our prototyping time from two weeks to three months, right?
And this is the evolution of the complexities of games. When you have to add in things like meta progression and stuff like that rather than just a core loop, this stuff takes additional time. So I think AI is going to be transformative in the early stage and the ideation stage and also reduce your say, need for the engineering support so your engineers and developers can basically continue to work on your back catalog and your successful games doing all of the updates they need to prolong the revenue coming in.
What advice would you have for developers who are looking to get funding for their new game?
Yeah, look, it's a really complex sort of time. I think there's, there's a lot of deal flow either on the big acquisitions. Obviously we saw Tripledot acquired the Applovin back catalog officially. So we've seen these big, huge consolidation places which is part of their M&A strategies to build out those big sort of juggernauts. And we've seen investment in the very early stage. But predominantly for teams with heritage.
It has never been harder to raise money as a new company, as a new studio, especially if you don't have that heritage piece. What I'm advising a lot of people to do now, is to explore other options.
There is an abundance of angel syndicates in the gaming industry. There's a lot of government schemes like one of the companies where I'm an investor. We just raised, you know, half a million dollars through a research grant in Norway. And the UK has just put a bunch of schemes in at the moment where you can raise 150, 200k to build out an R&D project. We know that in Turkey they give huge tax deductions. So there is an abundance of government schemes and tax schemes globally that you have to research in your local region.
What do you think we're going to see next with hybrid games?
My opinion very simply is that hybrid, and I've said this for a while, but hybrid is kind of a stepping stone to casual. If we're talking about this on a line, you know, originally it was like hybrid will be here and like actually hybrid's going to be there, and really what everyone wants, is the same thing. They want to try and find a 50/50 breakdown on monetization.
You know, we'll talk a little bit about the rise of D2C right. But hybrid games, we had this ideology of quality which was it would take us, you know, four weeks to do a prototype and then three months to launch a game. And then what we found is the prototype alone was taking three, four months. Then it was taking three to six months to balance and polish. Because as soon as you try and focus on IAP, the balancing of the economy and the games become complex.
With alternative stores and D2C options growing, how do you think that's going to impact the mobile gaming landscape?
In terms of the alternative store space, probably the biggest one that you're going to read or hear about the most is the Epic mobile game store, right? So, Epic have for a long time had a competitor to Steam, which was, you know, their Epic store on the PC front. And, you know, at the end of last year, they launched the mobile store as well.
So they are trying to get as many people to put their apps on the Epic Store as possible. And the idea very simply is you download an app on your phone, which is the Epic Store, and you go in there and you know you can download games.
Epic does really good things, like they do monthly incentives and campaigns, you know you as a player can go in and get something for free. You could get a unique purchase which gives you a limited edition item or additional currency. And like they're incentivizing users to go through the Store. As a developer, they charge under half of what Apple charges for IAP. So the developer wins, the user wins. The issue very simply is how many people are going to go against their better nature.
