If you're attending the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, there's a very intriguing talk you'll want to see that's all about the weird underbelly of the mobile app market.
Even if you don't make mobile games or work in the mobile market, this particular session is interesting enough that you might like to keep it on your radar as you get ready for GDC 2019 next month.
As part of the GDC 2019 Business & Marketing track of talks, game makers Alex Schwartz (cofounder of Job Simulator dev Owlchemy Labs) and Ziba Scott will proudly present "1,500 Slot Machines Walk Into A Bar: Adventures in Quantity over Quality."
As they describe it, disheartened by all of the noise in the mobile ecosystem, they set out to determine the lowest bar for success in mobile app stores -- and learned some surprising lessons.
They flooded the market with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games, got 1.6 million installs, made money (!!), received some very strange emails, made it big in Iran, and garnered a stupefying number of good reviews on Google Play. They even enlisted the talents of an honest-to-God MIT statistician.
It's a wild story with some unique lessons, so consider making time in your GDC 2019 schedule to check it out! If nothing else, you can marvel as the speakers share their experience with pushing the limits of automation as well as the rate limits of every public API under the sun.
For more details, check out the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler. There you can begin to lay out your GDC 2019, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco.
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For more details on GDC 2019 visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.