John Getze has 15 years experience building brands and marketing consumer products and is part of the founding team at KIXEYE where he currently serves as CMO. KIXEYE creates accessible, high-fidelity strategy games from their studios in San Francisco, Portland, Australia, Canada, and Vietnam. He knows the Konami Code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A) by heart and his all-time favorite movie is Big Trouble in Little China.

We caught up with him about his role, upcoming session at Gamesforum and we ask about the big changes and challenges facing the games market and Kixeye!

Gamesforum: Hi John, thanks for sitting down with us today, can you tell us about your background and day to day role at Kixeye?

John: Sure. I started my career in e-commerce and consumer internet marketing. I’m part of the founding team at KIXEYE and have been primarily focused on User Acquisition, Product Marketing, and Analytics for the last 8 years.

Right now I spend a lot of time working on optimizing our ML-powered offer system and improving our overall player experience in our games.

Gamesforum: What’s been the most satisfying moment in your time at Kixeye?

John: Tough to choose just one but shipping a new game and watching players react to it is always a lot of fun. I’ve also formed some incredible friendships with co-workers along the way.

Gamesforum: In your talk at Gamesforum you’ll be taking a look at “the top 5 reasons no-one is playing your game,” in your opinion what’s the most common mistake game marketers make?

John: People are largely either intuitive or data driven in their decision making. In my experience, the most common mistake is to not make sure you’re leveraging both approaches at all times. I’ve seen incredibly smart people paralyzed by a lack of data, just as much as I’ve seen people make snap judgements without checking the data. Either approach is fundamentally flawed. They key is to leverage empathy and then triple check the numbers on all of your campaigns.

Gamesforum: What do you see as the biggest change coming to games marketing in 2019?

John: Including KIXEYE, most mobile marketers run a yield-based, arbitrage model that is laser-focused on ROI.  So far this year, I'm seeing a lot more direct response marketing from large brands and agencies. The larger the portion on those massive budgets that gets dedicated to DR, the more costs will rise. I see a significant portion of future advertising spend be allocated to influencer programs as those channels mature and improve their ROI tracking as well.

Gamesforum: What’s the biggest challenge you see affecting your role in 2019?

John: The biggest challenge is always delivering a compelling product or service to consumers. Second to that is telling a compelling story about that product to promote it.

Gamesforum: And we’ve got to ask… what game are you playing at the moment?

John: I'm a lifelong Command & Conquer fan, so I spend most of my time playing our game War Commander: Rogue Assault. It's loads of fun.

Gamesforum: Thanks very much for your time John.

If you want to hear more from John, don’t miss his presentation, “The Top 5 Reasons No One Is Playing Your Game” at Gamesforum Seattle on the 23^rd/24^th October.

Purchase your passes for the event here.