Industry Leaders at PGC Nordics Push for Simplicity as Game IPs Take Center Stage in Los Angeles

The games industry has long suffered from an addiction to accumulation. When faced with a drop in user engagement, sliding revenue, or shifting market trends, the instinctual reaction across almost every sector of video game development and publishing is to add rather than subtract. Studios typically respond by rolling out more live-ops events, packing in additional features, expanding across a wider array of marketing channels, and, in recent years, aggressively chasing the latest artificial intelligence tools to ramp up production volume.

However, a strong pushback against this industry-wide reflex emerged at the recent Pocket Gamer Connects (PGC) Nordics conference. Across four distinct talks, industry veterans and experts arrived at a strikingly unified conclusion: the secret to sustainable success in the modern games market is to do less, and to do it significantly better.

Cutting Through the Noise: Four Key Lessons from PGC Nordics

The consensus around minimalism was most vividly illustrated by Outfit7’s Urška Leskovar during a deep-dive session focused on live-operations strategies. Anyone who regularly opens a mature, long-running mobile game will immediately recognize the common phenomenon of feature and event bloat. Players are frequently greeted by a chaotic user interface where five different temporal events are running simultaneously, three distinct premium and free-to-play currencies are competing for attention, and red notification dots clutter every corner of the menu screens.

According to Leskovar, this relentless drive to keep players busy has fundamentally missed the mark. "Players don’t need more to do," she stated, cutting straight to the core of modern live-ops fatigue. "They need a reason to care." Despite how self-evident that philosophy sounds when articulated aloud, the prevailing corporate response to any temporary dip in user retention or monetization metrics continues to be the hasty scheduling of yet another in-game event.

This theme of intentional strategy over knee-jerk expansion carried over into the discussion surrounding direct-to-consumer (D2C) models. Xsolla’s Ola Dokun addressed the gold rush mentality that has gripped the industry following the legal fallout of the Epic Games v. Apple antitrust litigation, which famously opened the door for alternative web-based payment systems and external storefronts in the United States and beyond. In the wake of that ruling, it has felt as though virtually every mobile and cross-platform studio scrambled to launch a proprietary webshop in an effort to bypass hefty platform commission fees.

Dokun cautioned that establishing a webshop is fundamentally distinct from possessing a coherent D2C strategy. Having a basic web-based portal does not automatically guarantee loyal customers or sustainable revenue growth. Instead, Dokun advised studios to design their D2C infrastructures with extreme adaptability in mind. "Build it around the ability to change paths when the economics change," she explained, emphasizing that flexibility and long-term economic resilience must trump hasty execution.

The skepticism toward industry buzzwords extended directly into the realm of generative technology. Luke Dicken, the former head of artificial intelligence at Take-Two Interactive, offered a sobering, highly critical perspective on the pervasive push for AI integration across game development pipelines. While corporate boardrooms across the globe continue to herald artificial intelligence as a magical panacea for spiraling development costs and ballooning timelines, Dicken warned that studios blindly pursuing efficiency gains are chasing a mirage. In his view, "people that are chasing the productivity conversation are just running on a treadmill," continually exhausting resources to keep pace with a shifting technological expectation without necessarily improving the creative output or the core player experience.

Rounding out the core insights from PGC Nordics, Katharina Schmidt delivered practical, grounded advice for studios looking to navigate intellectual property collaborations and cross-media crossovers. Rather than getting lost in grand, sweeping partnership visions, Schmidt stressed that successful collaborations hinge on granular administrative and creative alignment. Studios must pin down the exact duration of the partnership, the geographical territories included in the agreement, and the precise visual and functional manner in which the external IP will manifest within the game environment. "Agree on IP usage rights and approvals early," Schmidt advised. "Clarity is key."

In a market climate characterized by hyper-saturation and an exhausting pressure to continuously pile on new mechanics, features, and technologies, the prevailing sentiment at PGC Nordics offered a refreshing counter-narrative. The industry’s most forward-thinking voices are increasingly recognizing that true value comes from restraint, precision, and a renewed focus on what genuinely matters to the audience.

Game IPs Take the Center Stage in Los Angeles

While European developers were reassessing strategy and scope in the Nordics, the transmedia ecosystem was finding a vibrant physical expression thousands of miles away in Los Angeles. The conversation surrounding transmedia adaptations typically revolves around cinematic and television projects, but the boundaries of interactive entertainment continue to expand into live music and real-world cultural events. This week, multiple major game intellectual properties are celebrating their rich brand identities and memorable soundtracks through live-music experiences across the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

The cultural convergence kicked off on October 17th, when Kuro Games rolled out a dedicated fan celebration centered around its hit action role-playing game, Wuthering Waves. The event offered devoted players a rare opportunity to congregate in a physical space, listen to live orchestral and electronic renditions of the game’s acclaimed score, pose for photographs alongside professional cosplayers, and secure exclusive merchandise and pop-up rewards.

Cygames was scheduled to expand the transmedia footprint even further with its massive multimedia franchise Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which had planned to host two consecutive nights of live musical performances in Los Angeles on October 22nd and 23rd. The ambitious production was designed to bring the game’s virtual idol racing stars directly into the real world. However, Cygames announced a last-minute cancellation for the engagement due to unforeseen United States visa issues, which ultimately prevented the Japanese voice cast from traveling to the country and performing on stage.

Meanwhile, the celebrations continue with one of the most recognizable entertainment franchises on the planet. Pokémon is preparing to host a high-energy night of electronic dance music on October 24th with a headline concert event at the state-of-the-art Intuit Dome. Aptly titled Pokémon Night Out, the event promises live music performances designed to tap directly into contemporary nightlife and club culture. In tandem with the physical concert, players of the location-based mobile phenomenon Pokémon Go can look forward to discovering exclusive Timed Research challenges deployed directly at the venue, offering attendees and local players a chance to capture musically themed creatures such as Toxtricity as part of the cross-promotional experience.