Public Funding for Mforma Europe Limited

The aim of Indie-Go project is to provide small independent game developers with effective business strategy analytics and marketing. Over 90% of game ‘apps’ have total revenues of less than £5000 (normally less than the cost of development). Advanced analytics for game developers are targeted at large institutions and typically are unavailable or irrelevant to small companies. Also the cost of marketing for a successful launch of a game is beyond the financial capabilities of most independent developers. Indie-Go will enable independent game developers to comprehensively define, plan and deliver the marketing campaigns for their new games. The novelty is based upon the creation and implementation of new big data algorithms: a) To mine games apps to identify the common characteristics of the games using at the very least:- degree of success/failure, time of release and correlation with other regional, national and international events, game type and target market, monetisation models, etc. b) To inform and enable intervention-based marketing i.e. marketing that is responsive to the usage and progress through a game or set of games. These analytics will be used to detect the usage of the current game set and so determine when to, and how to, market new games or try to re-stimulate a player’s enthusiasm. The benefits that will accrue include: a) Game designers will be able to receive validation that their proposed game has market potential and so reduce the likelihood of market failure thereby avoiding a significant waste of money, time and effort; b) Only by acting as part of a larger total of multiple developers would businesses in the gaming sector be able to optimise their business development and marketing activities. This will increase revenue per game and improve cross-game market leverage; c) Allow smaller developers to competitively acquire users in a market place that is now highly driven by incentivised download and installation business models.