GDC Recap: Fireside chats with iDreamsky and Social Point

It was "game on" for Chartboost during GDC 2018

We can't believe that GDC was two weeks ago. Time surely flies by! It was such a busy week for us throwing a huge party, opening our office to developers, and hosting several talks but most of all we appreciated seeing all our customers and meeting new game developers. We can't wait to do it all over again next year!In the meantime, we'd love to share some of the GDC Dev House talks with you that we recorded in the Chartboost office. We hope you will enjoy them as much as we did.

SocialPoint - Lessons from building a game start-up and being acquired

Barcelona-based game studio Social Point first started on Facebook, but founders Horacio Martos and Adres Bou soon realized that transitioning to mobile and tapping into the app store was the only way to make their brand thrive. After their hit game Dragon City opened the floodgates of success, Social Point blossomed into a 360-person company. Recently, the company was acquired by Take-Two Interactive, which has inspired them to achieve even greater heights within the Take-Two family.Watch Andres Bou and Horacio Martos join Chartboost?s VP of Corporate Strategy Pepe Agell for a casual and frank conversation about Social Point?s journey from startup to acquired company, the challenges of structuring a company as it grows, how to successfully assign teams of game developers and engineers to multiple games simultaneously, and which KPIs matter most. They also discussed how to avoid team siloing with effective communication and coordination, as well as how to use RPG game mechanics to transcend traditional gamer demographics.

iDreamsky - How to be successful in the Chinese market

Once a humble outsourced developer, iDreamSky has transformed into the largest mobile games publisher in China, famous for distributing Western titles such as Fruit Ninja and Angry Birds. Now, iDreamSky is viewed as the premium partner for cracking the Chinese mobile games market.President and Co-founder Jeff Lyndon Ko joined Chartboost?s Fionna Ferrier, VP of Business for the Americas and Asia, for a chat on how to successfully launch your game in China. Ko outlined the fundamental differences between Western and Asian publishers, the importance of finding a partner that can penetrate multiple platforms, the unique regulatory challenges that developers face when launching in China, and which indie trends iDreamSky is tracking. He and Ferrier also discussed China?s data transparency policies and how they shape the IAP process. Bonus: Ko shares the unlikely origin of the iDreamSky name.