Pocket Gamer Connects Barcelona 2026
2026-06-15..2026-06-16
Barcelona, Spain
who it's for
mobile game developers, user acquisition managers, product managers, studio founders, live ops teams, monetization leads, game analytics engineers, creative directors
topics
direct-to-consumer monetization; payment link checkout flows; web game porting via Haxe; browser game discovery and placement; AI game analytics pipelines; generative creative for UA; agentic AI workflow automation; web store growth strategies; music licensing in user acquisition; player experience automation with AI; merchant-of-record and localized payments; WebGPU for browser visuals
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| The Current State Of AI In Games | Rana Rahman, Hege Tokerud, Simonetta Lulli, Enric Cabestany, Ilya Kuznetsov | 41m |
Panel describes concrete wins and limits: AI flags toxic users early — from 30,000 players seven account for 90% of harm — and blocks abuse before it spreads… | ||
| The 2026 D2C Playbook: Unlocking One Of The Biggest Revenue Drivers In Games | Craig Chapple, Gustav Pastucha, Valerie Alfimova, Benjamin Lyon | 39m |
Panel argues D2C can shift 10–50% (sometimes 40%+) of transactions off-app if execution is right, using direct checkout links plus a native web shop community… | ||
| Browser Renaissance: Can Web Games Be The Driver For Growth? | Thomas Huxter, Rafael Morgan, Nino Protic, Marina Espin | 37m |
Browser games are selling points, not promises: InnoGames reports a 20‑year lineage from Tribal Wars to Forge of Empires and documents moving a Flash title to… | ||
| Beyond Play: What Can Games & Apps Learn From Each Other? | Nadir Garouche, Oscar Garcia Pañella, Steve Rock, Talia Shmuel, Solomon Ruiz-Lichter | 43m |
Games bring live ops and teaseable content depth: use time‑boxed progression, battle passes and collections to expose value; apps bring tight lifecycle CRM… | ||
| Direct-To-Consumer In Games: Promise vs. Reality | Craig Chapple, Inês Ramalho, Peter Gerson, Jonas Matins | 37m |
Platforms no longer hand developers a simple 30% saving: bypassing stores still incurs 3–7% payment fees plus taxes, compliance and discovery costs, and… | ||
| Barcelona Rising: Emergence of A Global Hub For The Games Industry | Xavier Carrillo Costa, Yolanda Sanchez, Jordi Martin, Beto Osorio, Alex Corominas | 39m |
Barcelona positions itself as a growing games hub with concrete outcomes: it hosts 260 studios, a third of staff are international, and long-running companies… | ||
| Payment Links vs. Web Stores: What Actually Drives Incremental DTC Revenue? | David Stellzer | 39m |
Claims: direct-to-consumer (DTC) already accounts for about $12 billion of an $81.8B game market (~15%), and payment links act as a high-conversion funnel… | ||
| How to Make a Successful Web Game in 2026: What Actually Works | R. Dincer, R. Morgan | 21m |
Crazy Games reports 2,500 submissions per month, average sessions around ~30 minutes, and a user split of 65–70% desktop users. Fast load and instant play… | ||
| Time To Resolve | Raúl Orrego del Río | 19m |
Claim: games primarily solve lack of agency by exploiting reward prediction error to drive flow and self-determination. Decision quality matters but the… | ||
| Game Data for All: How AI Is Reinventing Game Analytics | Orly Shoavi | 16m |
ClarityQ demonstrates an AI pipeline that builds game-specific context then answers data questions, connecting to BigQuery Snowflake Databricks and BI tools… | ||
| AI Creative Factory: How We Scaled Performance Creative Without Scaling Costs | A. Kempe | 17m |
Company builds an internal "AI Creative Factory" that trains an LLM on brand guidelines, personas, competitor ads and AppTweak/app-store data to auto-generate… | ||
| From Workflows to Agents: The AI Shift Redefining UA Creative Production | I. Kuznetsov | 21m |
Claims a concrete partner test: fully automated AI-generated creative packs deliver 4% lower CPI, 7% higher CTR and 8% higher ROS after one month. Describes a… | ||
| From Reviews to Ratings: Scaling Player Experience with AI Automation | J. Rodríguez | 19m |
AppFollow analyzes ~23,000 games and 52 million reviews in 12 months and finds one third of apps never reply while customers who reply average 50% reply rates… | ||
| Designing For Billions: Crafting A Distinct Visual Identity For A Hit Global Game | H. Shin | 25m |
Project pivots from a failed 2.5 year build into MONOPOLY GO! with a one to two month research sprint, a 13‑artist team, and a single guiding slogan: Scrooge… | ||
| From Transactions to Relationships: How Studios Are Redefining Player Ownership | Ola Dokun, Daniel Madrid, Oren Debi, Rafael Morgan | 41m |
Studios report concrete moves: Crazy Games reaches about 55 million MAU with 3–4k titles and zero-install click‑to‑play, using WebGPU and an internal QA… | ||
| Demystifying China UA: Reverse-Engineering AI Advice (Fact vs. Fiction) | Yolanda Huang | 20m |
AI market research is unreliable: mainstream LLMs return outdated, partial or contradictory China UA advice, so human validation is required. Games do not… | ||
| Hit Music In UA-Unpacking the Impact of Commercial Hit Music In Mobile Games | T. Jenneborg | 19m |
Reactional Music tests commercial hits inside HTML playables, injecting licensed tracks like Return of the Mac (≈650M streams) and targeting songs >250M… | ||
| Beyond Ads: How Publishers Are Rewriting Mobile Gaming Monetization | J. Vause, A. Jones | 21m |
White-label rewarded marketplace (CashKick / Besitos) embeds earning offers into apps and games, claiming white-label rewarded marketplace adoption across six… | ||
| D2C In 2026: Global Growth In Web Stores | Chip Thurston | 22m |
Current D2C reality: steering to web stores in the United States is allowed and fee-free today, but Google now requires enrollment in an external content links… | ||
| Welcome to Pocket Gamer Connects Barcelona 2026 | Chris James | 28m |
Welcome notes list concrete scale and practical signals: 48 nations represented, 20 years running, 75,000 delegates and 170,000 organized meetings claimed, and… | ||
| nothing matches | ||