Retrospective: ICO’s consulting in 2011

6027218091_f974cbb05dEvery year, we take the opportunity during holiday down time to reflect on what we have done in the previous 12 months, and to plan a little bit for the coming year. We’re just about to undertake our formal 2012 planning now, so I thought I’d share some of our findings about 2011.

We do a range of different kinds of work, so it can sometimes be a challenge to explain, but maybe splitting the summary into two parts will help to reduce confusion! In this post, I will talk about the consulting and the market intelligence work we did last year (as they often go hand in hand). In a future post, I will talk about our media relations activity.

So, looking back on what we did for clients under the consulting umbrella, there was a lot of variety:

• Project management. Diane managed data analysis and focus group projects for 2 game studios over a period of about 9 months.
• Project evaluation. I worked with a client’s internal team to understand the objectives of their online game service, discussed different paths to achieve them and provided guidelines to approach a key partner for negotiations. This project was specifically aimed at reviewing and adjusting their PnL.
• Coaching on Free-to-Play as a business model. This was ongoing for me throughout the year. I coached executives (and their staff) to help them understand the potential opportunities for their company and the consequences F2P would bring to their day-to-day tasks, and addressed their related concerns.
• Consulting on business models. A wider mission, this was related to developing opportunities for independent game studios. We worked with indie clients to review the opportunities they had with their existing models (mostly pay-to-play), and helped them to explore the possibilities of new models. We made recommendations and conducted some risk assessment.
• Consulting on operations for an online game. This was a popular request in 2011 as more and more local developers delved into online game development. We worked with several clients on this to fine tune their plans, identify gaps and assess their strategies in light of industry best practices. While we worked a lot with companies new to online games, we also provided advice to established actors in the market, particularly with regard to best practice.
• Game evaluation and competitive analysis. This kind of work is part consulting and part market intelligence. Last year, we reviewed games for several clients and provided feedback on their potential in the European market based on the inherent qualities of each game as well as the current competitive landscape for each, by genre and type.
• Masterclasses. We work with the videogame MBA of the International Institute of Management (IIM) in Paris, and presented one-day masterclasses with them in the areas of Marketing, Monetization and Community Management.
• PR and Marketing Audit. A client came to us with an executed PR and marketing campaign that had produced disappointing results. We took a look at it, identified some weak spots and likely errors, and suggested changes to help them improve results in future campaigns.
• Social game analysis. We were asked to review a social game that a client felt was not reaching its full potential. We analyzed the game and its KPI, and delivered a report outlining the priority improvements they could make to increase the game’s success.
• Coaching on international business development. A self-publishing studio enlisted us to help work out its international business development strategy. I helped them to prioritise their efforts and identify their key targets, and provided advice on how they might approach specific partners.
• PnL coaching session & review. Diane helped a client  to review their current budget, and coached them on how best to approach their online game project PnL. This is typical of our approach to consulting: we offer clients fishing lessons as well as providing tasty fish!

Consulting missions like these are often accompanied by market intelligence requests which allow us to provide evidence for our recommendations and provide clients with a global perspective. We’re currently trying to make our market intelligence work more accessible — this is an important objective for us for 2012. In the meantime, here’s a taster of  the 2011 reports we delivered to clients:

• State of the browser games market in Europe

• State of the kids and teens online game market in Europe

• State of online FPS games in Europe

• Kids and teens online games publishing best practices

• State of online strategy games in Europe

• State of client-based MMO games in France

And of course, there’s our report on European Office Locations for Online Games Companies. After being repeatedly asked for this kind of information last year, we finally saw the light and bundled it into a commercial report, now for sale on our website.

That’s about all for our consulting in 2011, and we’re excited about this year of interesting research and diverse missions — it’s already well underway! If you would like to know more about how we work, please feel free to get in touch.

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Slides from Browser Games Forum 2011 in Frankfurt – European Browser games market

Here are the slides from my presentation today at Browser Games Forum:

BGF European market

BGF European market

View more presentations from ICO Partners
View more presentations from ICO Partners
Also, don’t miss the awesome presentation by Jussi Lakkonen on predictions for the future of social games :
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KGC 2011 – The European market: past, present and future

Diane and I are in Korea this week, attending the KGC 2011 in Daegu at the moment and in Busan for the Gstar from Thursday.

This morning I gave a lecture entitled “Past, present and future of online games in Europe” and, as usual, I am sharing the slides over here and on slideshare:

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Looking to open an office in Europe?

 

eu_office

Over the past couple of years, we have worked with many clients on projects to open a local office in Europe. They all had different objectives, budgets and priorities but with time, we were able to discern some patterns. Much of the information we collected for them and, in some cases, the recommendations we made were based on the same basic criteria.

 

Of course, each company is unique, and what matters the most for one will not be very important for another, ultimately leading to a different decision. But the dataset was almost the same, and we have re-purposed it into a commercial report, available for sale on our website for anyone interested.

 

The report is about 34 pages long. About a third of it is dedicated to general data on European countries, while the rest of the report is dedicated to detailed descriptions of our most recommended locations across the 6 most popular countries for European offices (France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and the UK), including general appeal of the location, accessibility and cost of living.

 

This report is pretty important for us, because it is the first in a series of commercial reports we’ll be offering for sale on the website. We have always been about sharing our expertise widely to help companies make the right decisions about starting up in Europe, and while we are happy to share our knowledge openly (at conferences and speaking engagements, for example), we also need to pay our bills. We are very aware that not every company has the budget to cover consulting fees, but we hope that some will be able to buy the report and benefit from it. If it leads to further consulting work for us, that’s great too!

 

So without further ado, I’m pleased to present ‘European Office Locations‘! Stay tuned for the next in our series, coming soon.

 

 

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Julien’s leaving us, and we’re sad.

P1030480I really don’t want to write this post, because putting it down in writing will make it true, and I would very much like it not to be. We can’t avoid it any longer though, so here goes.

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Realtime Worlds employees – where are they now?

realtime-logo-300x107Back in June, during the Gamesindustry.biz Brighton meet up, we discussed studio closures, what they meant to the industry in general and the UK industry specifically. I mentioned that it could actually be pretty easy to do a check of former employees’ profiles on LinkedIn to see what happened to them: how many left the games industry, how many left the UK to find a job, that sort of thing.

 

This week, for some reason I don’t understand, my brain was fired up at night, I couldn’t sleep and that idea came back to haunt me. So, I spent a couple of hours with LinkedIn and here is the result, a year after Realtime Worlds shut down (maybe that’s my subconscious at work here). Read more

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