Pixowl is one of the mobile game business’ quiet successes that shows that indies have a big space in the world of mobile apps. The company had a hit in June 2011 with Doodle Grub, a cartoon-style game based on a cute character. Now Pixowl is following up with the launch of Greedy Grub, another game based on the cute, little, orange grub.

Players downloaded Doodle Grub more than 8 million times across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8, and BlackBerry. Only a handful of people made that free-to-play game, but Greedy Grub is the work of a studio with 15 employees in San Francisco, Paris, and Buenos Aires. Three French founders — Adrien Duermael, his wife and comic artist Laurel Duermael, and Sebastian Borget — started the project in April 2011. Arthur Madrid serves as chief executive.

“We’re very focused on character-based games that combine comic art and gameplay,” said Borget, chief operating officer, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We think of it as a rare simulation that is character centric. You directly control the grub with your finger. We want you to feel like you are inside the cartoon.”

Doodle Grub was such a big success that the company managed to raise $1.2 million in funding in September. That amount suggests what a lot of developers have learned over time: Making simple games is very complex and sometimes expensive.

Greedy Grub launched last week in Canada and France and will debut in the U.S. soon. The title is a simulation game. It has short cut scenes, telling the story of how fate separates the little grub from his family when he falls from a tree. He meets an owl who adopts him. The owl, Mayor Apollo, teaches him to be a mayor’s assistant. The player’s job is to help replant a forest after a terrible winter. You have to eat fruits, water trees, and interact with other characters. Pixowl plans to create a total of eight episodes for Greedy Grub.

The company has worked on the title for about a year, and it expects to issue new episodes every two or three months, changing the game based on user feedback.

Last May, Pixowl also launched The Sandbox, a building game that resembles Minecraft. In that 2D game, you create physical elements like water, stone,  soil, mud, sand, electricity, metal, lava, and other things. Then you put them together, and they all interact.

Borget (pictured left) gave a post-mortem talk on The Sandbox at the recent Casual Connect Europe event in Hamburg. The game started with one programmer with a project in Argentina who had built a physics simulator for a title published on Kongregate. Pixowl approached him and asked him to create a casual world simulator for mobile phones and tablets. He agreed, and the company assembled a team around him. Together, they built the game and showed it to Apple. Representatives of the company said that The Sandbox would likely fail because the graphics were so crude.

The team’s morale plummeted after that, but they worked on the weaknesses and trusted their initial instincts. Pixowl added more people to the project, and the larger team made the graphics better. The creative process required constant prototyping and iterating on the design, which the team produced relatively late in the development cycle along with the virtual economy. The team included a lot of software development kits for analytics and advertising, and that was a “pain in the ass,” Borget said. Using Testflight, the team tested the game for more than two months with users. When the developers were satisfied, they launched The Sandbox in May 2012.

The game won critical accolades, and players downloaded it more than 2.1 million times. Apple nominated The Sandbox as one of the best iOS games of 2012. Players could share their creations and rate those works of art. Players have shared more than 160,000 universes over the course of nine months. Eight updates tripled the amount of content after launch. The community is bustling, with more than 100,000 daily active users.

“It paid off for us not to give up,” Borget said. “The lesson is you should not give up and always try to make the best-quality app.”

Pixowl relied upon cross-promotion deals with other developers. It used Chartboost to arrange those, which are a lot less expensive than advertising an app. Borget said the company also used AppFigures, AppAnnie, Flurry, ApSalar, and HasOffers to monitor everything it needed to manage after the launch. Borget said that it made sense to target marketing only in countries where enough users existed to make a profit. Denmark, for instance, paid off a lot more than Spain for The Sandbox. All of the post-launch activity made a difference, and the game was successful enough for Pixowl to release it on Android.

Borget said that making games as an indie studio is important.

“The first time we showed the game, people said it didn’t make sense,” he said. “But we believed we could take it straight to the audience and find out.”

Full disclosure: Casual Connect Europe’s organizers paid my way to Hamburg, where I moderated a panel.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For part one of the discussion, click here.

Game designers may not care about it, but acquiring users is still one of the most difficult tasks in launching a free-to-play mobile game. The problem is that a new game will compete with 132,000 other active titles on Apple’s iTunes App Store. Advertising can help it stand out, but as ad costs rise, the risks are very real that a company may pay more to get new users than it can generate a return on.

If a company pays $3 each to get 100 users, it would be outstanding if 10 percent of them convert into paying players. To get a return on the advertising outlay, those players have to generate $30 over the lifetime of the game (a stat known as lifetime value). It can’t take forever to get those users, either.

In the real world, the problem is that some companies are paying $8 to acquire a user. And mobile marketing firm Fiksu says that the cost of user acquisition rose 21 percent from November to December. At the Casual Connect Europe event, I moderated a session about the tips and tricks of user acquisition.

It’s no wonder that some companies are searching for alternatives to getting their games discovered. Some of those alternatives are shifty. Tapjoy found that out when Apple cracked down on its incentivized installs in 2011, and many turned to Android as a result. Last year, as Gree entered the U.S. market and bid up the cost of user acquisition dramatically, developers longed to be featured. Gree was accustomed to paying much more — $15 a user and advertising on TV — to get lucrative Japanese players. But in the rest of the world, consumers aren’t yet as crazy about paying for games. Alternatives have to be found, even for the likes of Gree. But the pressure on costs is rising as more brands move into the market without worrying about user acquisition costs.

Our panelists included Jussi Laakkonen (pictured far right), the chief executive of cross-promotion firm Applifier; Stefan Bielau (second from right), a freelance mobile consultant; Erlend Christoffersen (third from right), the head of user acquisition at mobile gamemaker Supercell; Eric Seufert (pictured third from left), who’s in charge of marketing and user acquisition at Helsinki’s Grey Area Labs, the publisher of Shadow Cities; Gilad Rotem (pictured second from left), the head of sales and product for InGaming; and Billy Shipp (pictured far left), the vice president of growth at Iddiction, the creator of the App-o-Day promotion platform.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. They brought home the point that everyone should think about solving the tough problem of user acquisition.

Takahashi: Is there something you want to see the platform owners do to help with discovery? And what are they going to actually fail to do that you’ll have to undertake yourselves in some way?

Laakkonen: Apple and Google have to do social better. People I like, people who know me — why can’t I see recommendations from these people? The App Store already knows all this information. They don’t even need the voice channel. They already know my information. I was so excited when Facebook and Apple became buddies. I thought I’d be able to actually see what my friends were playing. Is there a way for me to say, “Show me what someone’s playing?” No.

Seufert: Just give me an application where, if I touch down in Hamburg or Mexico City, I get some stuff to do here. Based on the location, it could be something like contact data or the relation to my friends.

Schipp: I think it’s not anything the platform operators are going to fail to do. You have to realize that app store search is broken by design. Because the app store’s discovery is broken, because it’s very hard to find apps, these platform operators control the means of disseminating apps. Everyone hopes to get featured by Apple or Google, right? That’s the holy grail. That solves all your user acquisition problems. So how do you get featured by Apple or Google? Well, you visit Apple or Google, and they tell you what direction to take your app in. They want to curate the app stores so they can set the tone of the app store, what kind of apps are being sold. If you’re trying to go against that force, you’re not going to see any return. Maybe if you were to go around it, using services like Jussi’s or other innovative ways of sourcing users. But if you try to go head to head with the dynamics of the app stores, you’re not going to do anything but waste money.

Rotem: I would like to see pay-per-click on the app stores. I don’t know why it hasn’t happened yet. Facebook has recently launched sponsored search.

Takahashi: Can you explain what pay-per-click is?

Rotem: You all know how the ad words work on Google. You search for something, and then you see an ad related to what you searched. It’s not available yet in Google Play or in the App Store, but I’m sure we’ll see it very soon. At least I hope so.

Takahashi: What predictions do you have about user acquisition going forward?

Laakkonen: I’m going to reiterate what I said a few times. I think that there remains a gap with mobile and social. We won’t succeed by stuffing the Facebook news feed with every second story being a sponsored app. We won’t succeed with a pop-up five minutes into a game. We won’t succeed with spam in your gameplay. Authentic, social word-of-mouth referral is the one way that we have. We have a brand, and we will find a way. That will happen. Afterwards, third parties … who knows?

Christofferson: I have a prediction, which is that I hope we’ll see the same kind of established practices in the mobile space that we see in the dev space, when it comes to tracking and transparency and standardization. I’d love to see more standardization, letting us share the work of our user acquisition team, focusing on acquiring the most daily users and figuring out a way to track people, whether it’s user IDs or MAC addresses.

Seufert: I think Jussi’s totally right. The good news is, Supercell already set a precedent. They did that with asynchronous multiplayer. In Clash of Clans, I can join a multiplayer game with my real-life friends. That’s an element of game design that’s not the kind of strategy you can tack on to any game’s development. You have to design a game around that. I think synchronous multiplayer will be the next big thing that iterates on what we consider user acquisition. When you have this compulsion to play with your real-life friends in real time, and it’s free, the reality is that you could bring in 10, 12, 15 users per user acquired. That reduces the cost of the effective CPIs to the point where I can acquire a user for $10 dollars because I know he’ll bring 10 friends in.

Rotem: Obviously, I see a shift in the user acquisition base. It isn’t about CPIs. You hardly see it in other industries or other forms of marketing. We come from online gambling. No one there will pay you to just bring in a person to play the game. They will pay you if that person’s spent money or a certain amount of money. They’ll pay a revenue share. If there’s a risk, it’s completely on the developer side. Somewhere in the middle is forming a partnership between the marketer and the developer.

Schipp: I agree with Eric. It starts with a great product — great product design — to lower your effective cost of install. Some of the things we know about the future marketplace is that there are going to be more devices and there are going to be more users. That’s going to create new fragments in the market as different providers crop up and they each grab a different piece of that market. The ability to then sort through all that data and find the right partners, the ones that actually work and deliver results, is going to become more and more important and more and more challenging. Tools that help people do that are going to be the valuable ones in the future.

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Switching careers and making games isn’t easy. But Shinji Kim pulled it off in nine months.

The 26-year-old New Yorker quit her job as a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting and decided to make a game. In nine months, she created social puzzle game Shufflepix and launched it on the iOS app store. She demonstrated it at the Casual Connect Europe indie showcase in Hamburg, Germany, last week and gave a talk about do-it-yourself development.

Kim, a graduate of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, was a fan of jigsaw puzzles growing up. After she quit her job, she contemplated making her own.

“I felt it would be cool to build a puzzle game that is personal to you,” she said.

It took about six months to create Shufflepix and a few more to polish it and figure out how to launch it. Kim said she went through hundreds of iterations on the design and user interface. The game is free to download.

Shufflepix takes pictures from your Facebook profile and turns them into scrambled images. You swap the tiles around to put the image back together. When the border on the image disappears, then the piece is in the right spot. It’s a simple game, but it isn’t easy to master, particularly as a clock ticks away while you play.

You can share your puzzles with friends and see who can solve them the quickest. The game pulls you back by giving you three new picture-puzzles to solve each day. Kim, who worked as an international growth intern at Facebook, hopes that the social nature of Shufflepix will help it spread. The game is built on HTML5, the new lingua franca of the web.

A variety of puzzle games are already in the market. Amy Jo Kim, a seasoned designer, created one called Shufflebrain on Facebook, where a user sees an image and then has to try to figure out where small snippets of that image fit while a clock runs down. But that title didn’t get traction. Shinji Kim (no relation) hopes that Shufflepix, which is very different, will get a big audience.

“I haven’t seen other puzzle games that take your pictures and make puzzles out of them on mobile,” Shinji Kim said.

The free-to-play game will have in-app purchases in the future, and Kim is thinking about publishing it on Android.

Full disclosure: The Casual Connect Europe organizers paid my way to Hamburg, where I moderated a panel. Our coverage remains objective.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Game designers may not care about it, but acquiring users is still one of the most difficult tasks in launching a free-to-play mobile game. The problem is that a new game will compete with 132,000 other active titles on Apple’s iTunes App Store. Advertising can help it stand out, but as ad costs rise, the risks are very real that a company may pay more to get new users than it can generate a return on.

If a company pays $3 each to get 100 users, it would be outstanding if 10 percent of them convert into paying players. To get a return on the advertising outlay, those players have to generate $30 over the lifetime of the game (a stat known as lifetime value). It can’t take forever to get those users, either.

In the real world, the problem is that some companies are paying $8 to acquire a user. And mobile marketing firm Fiksu says that the cost of user acquisition rose 21 percent from November to December. At the Casual Connect Europe event, I moderated a session about the tips and tricks of user acquisition.

It’s no wonder that some companies are searching for alternatives to getting their games discovered. Some of those alternatives are shifty. Tapjoy found that out when Apple cracked down on its incentivized installs in 2011, and many turned to Android as a result. Last year, as Gree entered the U.S. market and bid up the cost of user acquisition dramatically, developers longed to be featured. Gree was accustomed to paying much more — $15 a user and advertising on TV — to get lucrative Japanese players. But in the rest of the world, consumers aren’t yet as crazy about paying for games. Alternatives have to be found, even for the likes of Gree. But the pressure on costs is rising as more brands move into the market without worrying about user acquisition costs.

Our panelists included Jussi Laakkonen (pictured far right), the chief executive of cross-promotion firm Applifier; Stefan Bielau (second from right), a freelance mobile consultant; Erlend Christoffersen (third from right), the head of user acquisition at mobile gamemaker Supercell; Eric Seufert (pictured third from left), who’s in charge of marketing and user acquisition at Helsinki’s Grey Area Labs, the publisher of Shadow Cities; Gilad Rotem (pictured second from left), the head of sales and product for InGaming; and Billy Shipp (pictured far left), the vice president of growth at Iddiction, the creator of the App-o-Day promotion platform.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. They brought home the point that everyone should think about solving the tough problem of user acquisition.

Takahashi: Stefan, can you talk a bit more about some of the history here in user acquisition? What has worked in the past, and what is working now?

Bielau: The old craze was around incentivized installs — pay-per-click spends on mobile advertisement. Nowadays, the market has opened up a few more opportunities. Facebook came around with the App Center. You find a lot more performance-based models, breaking down your acquisition target to a cost per install, or deeper, to cost per acquisition. Those possibilities weren’t available two years ago. A lot has happened to open up the field for user acquisition. Stuff like mobile search engine optimization becomes more and more important due to the fact that the App Store is so crowded. That can still be triggered by some outside factors to improve your ranking position. I would say localization plays more and more into the marketing part. Before you saw games localization just amounting to translation work. Nowadays — you just gave the example of Japan — it’s important to know the local market when it comes to mobile app marketing.

Takahashi: Erlend, you’re fairly new here in user acquisition, with Supercell coming up with a big hit game, Clash of Clans. It almost seems like you guys wouldn’t need to spend money on user acquisition at all.

Christofferson: For Supercell, it’s all about the problem of building a great game. Only when you see that from your retention and engagement metrics that you’ve got in there — that’s when you can start thinking about marketing. We focus on creating engaged users. We believe an engaged user is more likely to tell his friends about our games, and more likely to monetize.

Takahashi: How do you go about choosing things like an ad network?

Christofferson: What’s important for us in choosing a network to work with is user experience and transparency and tracking. User experience and transparency go hand in hand. It’s important for us to know exactly where our games are promoted and how to share that through the user experience. Tracking is important: making sure that we have all the data we need and that it’s reliable. Preferably, we can see it broken down so we can then optimize a formula to find those most highly engaged users.

Takahashi: Jussi, why don’t you talk about paid versus non-paid user acquisition?

Laakkonen: The new way for games coverage, like everyone says, is a friend showing another friend a game. “Hey, you have to play this.” That’s the best way for a consumer to find a game. You want to have that happen, but you need to delve into paid acquisition, which is very different in the social and mobile markets.

The social market on Facebook exploded, all on the back of viral acquisition. Seeing what your friends play, whether it’s spam or whether it’s authentic. Facebook shut down spammy ways for acquiring users. Whereas [with] mobile, you started by taking out your phone and showing your friend.

I think mobile is actually relatively sophisticated nowadays in paid acquisition. There are people who can help you arrange your campaigns. There are supply-side platforms that help mediate those campaigns. The one thing we have not cracked yet in mobile is the social angle. Not the Facebook-style spam that we all hate, and we’re still kind of afraid of. Every time we add an app on Facebook, we’re like, “Will this game spam me?” It’s always a question. But that’s something that still remains to be cracked. Is there a way where I don’t need to pull out my phone, but I’m somehow able to share and compete with my friends? We’re working to revolutionize the way people do that.

Takahashi: Can you talk about Everyplay for us?

Laakkonen: We do videos of game replays that people can share with friends. Seeing the game, actually seeing what the game is, it inspires some emotion. “Hey, I’m having a great time with this. It’s a fantastic game.” What we’re trying to do with Everyplay is to replicate that moment. We record the gameplay as it happens into a video container. You don’t have to think about it. It just happens. Then they can share it. Like if they had a great fight in Clash of Clans or a great race in a racing game, they can share that in their networks. We see that when a share happens on Facebook, 12 percent of the people who see that replay, on average, immediately go and download the game. Twelve percent is a really good when you think about conversion rate.

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The statistics around mobile gaming are becoming staggering. At the Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg, Germany, the move toward mobile games was evident among the 1,600 attendees. The numbers suggest that a sweeping shift is happening in the industry.

Of the 7.1 billion people on the planet, about 4.3 billion have mobile phones, according to the TomiAhonen Almanac 2013. About 1.3 billion of those are using smartphones. There are an estimated 1.2 billion mobile gamers, or 18 percent of total mobile subscribers. By comparison, there are about 1.2 billion computer users in the world.

Much of the excitement is, of course, focused on the growth of iPhones and iPads and their Android counterparts. The app economy is creating jobs for small studio developers at a time when the big console game companies are hurting. On the iOS iTunes app store, there are 792,398 active apps, including 132,963 active games, according to 148apps.biz.

In 2012, revenue earned from apps will approach $10 billion, with games taking over 80 percent of the pie, Flurry reported.  The free-to-play business model (aka freemium), where consumers download and play the “core loop” of a game for free but then pay for virtual goods and currency through microtransactions, is the the best business model in the era of digital distribution. When it comes to app consumption on iOS and Android smart devices, consumers spend over 40 percent of all their time using games.

And their favorite business model is free-to-play. Of the top free-to-play games, about 47 percent have average revenue per daily active user at more than 25 cents. The average cost per install is $4. And while Android has lots of users, iOS generates 3.5 times more revenue.

On the charts, the No. 10 top-grossing game makes about 10 times the revenue of the No. 100 game, said Chris Williams, a vice president at Big Fish Games.

Forrester Research found that 46 percent of mobile users use games on a daily basis, and most users prefer apps that include ads instead of paying a purchase fee.

Magid Associates found in a survey for Tapjoy that four out of five smartphone users and nine out of ten tablet users have played a mobile game. Kids ages four to 14 play mobile games more regularly on handheld game devices than on tablets, but the gap is closing.

Smartphone gaming is no longer just a U.S. business. Mobile chat networks have soared in Asia, with Tencent’s We Chat reaching 300 million users, Japan’s Line getting 100 million, and Korea’s Kakao Talk hitting 70 million. On Kakao, the viral spread of a game can boost it into the top 10 lists on Google Play on a worldwide basis — sometimes generating $1 million a day, according to market researcher App Annie and industry sources.

Thanks to Kakao, the Google Play app store in Korea generates 95 percent of its revenue from games, compared to 76 percent in the U.S. In the worldwide Google Play app store, several Kakao-based games are on the top 10 grossing list at any given time. Apple generates more game revenue than Google Play in the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Canada, German, France, Russia, and Italy. Still, Google Play earns a higher percentage of its revenue from games compared to the Apple iOS app store.

When looking for apps, consumers do about 80 percent of their searches by interest, such as golf or racing games. About 10 percent of the searches are by inspiration, 5 percent function, and 5 percent brands, according to consumer app search engine Xyologic.

For games, the top three countries generating revenue in the Google Play store are Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. In data from the month of December, South Korea’s Google Play app revenues are 95 percent based on games. Japan’s Google Play app revenues are about 88 percent based on games, and the figure for the U.S. is 76 percent, App Annie said.

On the worldwide market, the success of the Asian chat platforms has remade the top rankings of the most popular developers. For games, the top revenue generators on Google Play in December were GungHo Online’s Puzzle & Dragons, DragonFlight for Kakao by NextFloor, NHN’s Line Pope, Anipang for Kakao by Sundaytoz, and a casual title from Patistudio. Of these top five, all were from Japan and South Korea.

App Annie found that the U.S. and Japan contributed over half of the total revenue for the iOS app store in December. Asian countries lead the way in percent of revenue coming from games on the iOS app store. China has more than 80 percent of its iOS app store revenue coming from games. It is followed by Japan, Macau, Singapore, and Canada.

Japan has the highest games revenue-to-download ratio on the iOS app store, followed by Switzerland, Australia, and Singapore. It’s no surprise then that Japan’s Gree and DeNA, two multibillion-dollar makers of rival mobile gaming social network companies.

And in the U.S., the top revenue generators among games in the iOS app store were Supercell’s Clash of Clans, Electronic Art’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Supercell’s Hay Day, Backflip Studios’ DragonVale, and Kabam’s Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North.

The arrival of social features is remaking the ranks of which games are popular. In Big Fish Games’ Casino app, more than 100,000 players have more than 10 friends. One popular player has 13,000 friends, Williams said.

“Five to 10 percent of your users will be responsible for 50 percent of your revenue,” Williams said. “Some players in the free-to-play casino game are spending more than $5,000 a month.”

Peter Warman, an analyst at Newzoo, said that 33 percent more people in America are spending more on mobile games than a year ago. Sixty-nine percent are spending more time. And Anil Dharni, an executive at Gree, said that revenues from mobile games are four times bigger than they were just a year ago.

Zynga has more than 50 percent of its developers working on mobile games as of the start of the year, according to our interview with David Ko, the company’s chief operations officer. That’s impressive, considering that Zynga has more than 3,000 employees. Wooga, with just 280 employees, hit the same milestone in June 2012.

Disclosure: The organizers of Casual Connect paid for my trip to Hamburg, where I moderated a panel. Our coverage of the event remains objective.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Betable, which enables companies to convert their casino games into mobile-online gambling titles, says that the results it is getting from its first customers in the United Kingdom are well beyond expectations.

Real-money gambling promises to revolutionize social games as the barriers between gambling and social casino games collapse. Betable’s aim is to disrupt traditional land-based casinos and online gambling by making it extremely easy for companies to convert their non-real-money gambling games into gambling titles.

“The opportunity for disruption is enormous, with social casino games taking money from the core incumbents,” said Chris Griffin, the chief executive of San Francisco-based Betable, speaking at the Casual Connect Europe event in Hamburg. “Across the board, we are seeing incredible performance.”

The best news is that 80 percent of the players have never spent money in the social casino games before.

“It’s complementary,” Griffin said. “That’s what we’re excited about.”

Betable provides the back-end processing to enable a person to bet real money in what would otherwise be a non-real-money casino game. It detects where the player is and then checks to see if that person can legally gamble where they are. If the player can, it asks if the player wants to play for real money. Then the game executes the random gambling round and pays out coins that can be converted into real money. Betable makes the process seamless so the social casino gamemaker can convert a title to real-money gambling in 48 hours, said Griffin.

The walls between real-money gambling and social casino games (where you play for fun and can’t cash out) is collapsing as regulatory barriers fall and countries around the world eye the possible windfall in tax revenues. In the U.S., the Justice Department ruled in 2011 that online gambling is permissible so long as states pass laws to allow it. Nevada and Delaware have passed such laws, and more are on the way.

If the walls come down, then both sides could benefit. Real-money gambling companies could find new recruits among the larger audience for the social casino games, and social casino game companies could enjoy much higher average revenues per paying player associated with real-money online gambling metrics. Griffin says the lifetime value of a user in social casino games may be $2, but the lifetime value of a gambler could be $1,800.

Betable’s customers in the United Kingdom include Big Fish Games, which has launched a popular casino game suite on mobile using the Betable technology.

“We are seeing 10 times engagement,” Griffin said. On top of that, about 2 percent of the social casino game players are converting to real-money gambling. The daily average revenue per paying player is 10 times higher with real-money gambling compared to the same games without real-money gambling.

Griffin said the company is in the process of getting licenses to operate in other territories where online gambling is legal.

Disclosure: The event organizers paid my way to Hamburg, where I moderated a panel. Our coverage remains objective.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Applifier’s Everyplay lets you record your game sessions so you can share the replays with your friends. And now it is adding a FaceCam feature that lets you capture a video of yourself in a window of the replay, where you can brag about your exploits.

Everyplay and the new FaceCam feature are aimed at improving mobile-game discovery, a huge problem because it’s so easy for games to get lost among a sea of titles on the app stores. Instead of paying to acquire users via advertising, developers can use Applifier as an alternative that doesn’t cost them up-front money.

Jussi Laakkonen, the chief executive of Applifier, told GamesBeat at the Casual Connect Europe conference that Everyplay is aimed at enabling developers to get viral word-of-mouth marketing through players who share their game sessions with friends.

With FaceCam and Everyplay, players can share video of their games and audio that provides a post-game play-by-play commentary. Helsinki-based Applifier is launching a private beta test of FaceCam today. The feature will be available publicly in March.

Everyplay launched its replay videos in December. In the hit mobile game Stair Dismount, players recorded and shared over 10,000 video replays in 30 days. The most popular sharing destination was Facebook, where an average of 15 friends watched each replay, and 12 percent clicked to download the featured game from the App Store, Laakkonen said.

“This is a staggering click-through rate,” Laakkonen said. “It combines a social proof, showing what a game is about and what you really did in it. This was our thesis with Everyplay. The best way to get noticed is through sharing with friends.”

Some of the videos were funny, where players shared a session of a bug where they scored lots of points. Players can add greetings, taunts, or challenges for friends.

About 2 percent of users share videos via Everyplay. That’s consistent with the usual rates for user-generation content.

“The ability to share replays was the biggest feature missing from our game Stair Dismount,” said Jani Kahrama, the CEO of developer Secret Exit. “Everyplay lets our players share the comedy of the game with their friends and game fans.”

Laakkonen said that players have been yearning for more meaningful ways to share their experiences with friends. Everyplay is available for all iOS devices. Everyplay is a way for Applifier to branch out from its roots. In 2011, Applifier got its start by offering smaller game developers a way to reach more users through a large banner ad for cross-promotion of Facebook games. It reaches more than 150 million monthly active users, but Everyplay represents the company’s chance to expand into mobile.

Applifier is backed by Lifeline Ventures, MHS Capital, PROfounders Capital, Tekes, Webb Investment Network, and angel investors. It has 25 employees. Over time, Laakkonen believes he can monetize Everyplay via advertising.

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