Sandsoft’s David Fernandez Remesal on the Apple antitrust ruling and more mobile game opportunities | The DeanBeat
David Fernandez Remesal took the job of CEO of Sandsoft in 2020 and moved to Saudi Arabia, where his mobile game company is based. He set up a studio in Riyadh and also hired mobile game developers in places like his native Spain, Finland and China. Fernandez Remesal focused on esports at first, but pivoted to mobile games as a more viable business approach.
The summers are a lot hotter for sure, but Fernandez has sweated out the hard work of establishing a new studio in a place where game development skills are only just being fostered now for the new generations of game developers. While Brazil is a bigger and more established market, Fernandez Remesal, who worked on games like Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga before leading Sandsoft.
We talked about mobile game trends at our fireside chat at Gamescom Latam in a talk entitled, “The Mobile Frontier: Big Trends and Smarter Moves for 2025.”
We covered a lot of ground in our fireside chat at Gamescom Latam in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We hit topics like Apple’s move to emphasize user privacy over targeted ads as it deprecated the Identifier for Advertises. We also covered the antitrust ruling that could bust the floodgates open when it comes to developers being able to advertise their own web shopsinside their mobile games on the Apple and Google app stores. We explored the consequences if game developers are also able to use their own payment systems — which take around 3% commissions rather than 30% — in mobile game transactions.
Sandsoft is focused on taking advantage of these trends by focusing on midcore gamers, which is becoming a bigger part of the overall mobile games market. And Sandsoft is also busy working on AI tools that can help developers work more efficiently.
And we looked at other opportunities for mobile to grow as the mobile-first generation grows up and becomes a bigger part of the population of gamers. We also assessed when it’s the right time for local talent to take on local stories and spread them to the global stage with authentic triple-A development.
Here’s an edited transcript of our on-stage interview.
Sandsoft CEO David Fernandez Remesal
GamesBeat: I’m here with David Fernandez Remesal, the CEO of Sandsoft. I’ll have him introduce himself, his career in games, and the origins of Sandsoft.
David Fernandez Remesal: I’m pleased to be in Brazil. It’s my first time. I’d like to thank everyone here. You’re doing an incredible show. I’m kind of what I could call mobile native when it comes to game development. I started my career working on mobile games almost 20 years ago. Those of you that were around, that means before smartphone games. I worked at a company called THQ that you may remember. They were one of the pioneers, as a triple-A games company, in doing mobile games as well. I started my career at THQ Juarez, their mobile game division.
After that I had the privilege of working with two industry titans at a company called Digital Chocolate. That was Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, and Ilkka Paananen, who happens to be the CEO and founder of Supercell as well. I spent part of my career working on an app store with Nokia. I also worked on the N-Gage handheld device. In that particular case I made the wrong choice. I went for the loser in the smartphone era. But eventually I learned quite a bit about how you need merchandise, games, and apps on an e-commerce platform.
After doing something in the mobile advertising space, I also had the honor of joining King, where I worked for almost five years on a couple of franchises. One was Bubble Witch Saga, and then Candy Crush Saga. I was at the King London studio when I left to run Sandsoft five years ago.
GamesBeat: Sandsoft is interesting to this market in part because you’re also in an emerging market, albeit a very different part of the world. The company is headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Can you talk about how that happened to come about?
Fernandez Remesal: We’re slightly earlier in terms of the game industry in Saudi compared to what we see here in Brazil, particularly toward game development capabilities. But we have a nice consumer market. It’s not as big as Brazil. But let me get started with how Sandsoft was created. For those of you who are not familiar with Saudi Arabia, they have a plan called Saudi Vision 2030. The main proposal is to diversify the economy away from oil and gas. As part of that program, they’re trying to build what we call a knowledge economy. Gaming is a pivotal part of that transition.
We’re part of a large Saudi corporation that was founded to support that plan. They decided to diversify their group. Gaming was one of the things they wanted to do. Sandsoft was born in 2019, originally as an esports company. The first thing we did as a company was the PUBG Mobile event in Saudi Arabia. Butrealized esports was not a business. It was maybe more of a show, rather than proper commercial ongoing activities you can run in a sustainable way. They decided to venture into mobile game development and publishing, which is what we do today. We’re developing games in our own studios, and we’re a global games publisher. We’re supporting game development studios in the mobile space to commercialize their games.
Iza’s Supermarket
GamesBeat: What are you working on? What is your focus? How big is the team, and where are they?
Fernandez Remesal: We now have roughly 100 people. We’re split into four different markets. We have people in Saudi Arabia, where we’re headquartered. We also host a game development studio there. We have satellite offices in Spain, where we also have a development studio. Then we have a couple of publishing operations in China and Finland. We also have a small studio in France. That’s where we have our operations.
In terms of focus, as I mentioned to you, we’re focused on mobile platforms. We have a few games with aspirations to become cross-platform, but we’re mobile first.
GamesBeat: You moved to Saudi Arabia. Can you talk about what that was like for you?
Fernandez Remesal: Yes, I did. I’ve been there for four years now. The weather aside – the summer is really hot – it was a big cultural change for a European to come over to a country that was maybe more conservative, that was more closed than other countries I’ve lived in. But I felt that if you are respectful, if you try to understand the things that are changing, and if you adapt to the pace of change, it’s quite livable.
The people are very passionate about games specifically. There’s a young, savvy population. They consider themselves gamers. When you tell them you work in games, they respect you. It’s different from other countries, where people think you play games all day. They don’t realize that this is an art form, that this is something that goes beyond just play.
GamesBeat: A reminder that it’s a global industry. Gaming is not what it used to be. It used to be from Japan, the U.S., and Europe. Now it’s a very different world.
Fernandez Remesal: Correct. It’s becoming very global. Like we see here. It’s not just about all the people attending to play games, but also all the game companies showcasing their games, which is really exciting.
GamesBeat: How far along are your games?
Fernandez Remesal: In terms of our game development studios, we’re just starting our first prototypes. Both studios started in 2023, but it took us some time to get the initial core teams that we could trust to develop their game ideas into commercially viable games. We have been in a kind of boot camp at both the studios for a year. Now they’re starting to prototype what we can see as more commercial games.
As a publisher we have a few games already in the market. Maybe the first we released was in partnership with Jam City, DC Heroes and Villains. We’re also raising a few other games that–mobile free-to-play games, you don’t have a red button where you hit it and the game is live. It’s more about ongoing progress. You’re keeping them in development and improving the games. Then you try to find ways to scale. In this case through user acquisition. In that sense we’ve had games available in the market for more than three years. We have six games in our portfolio. Two of them are more mature. We expect to scale them in the first half of the year.
GamesBeat: Let’s get into some of the trends in the mobile industry. What do you see? What matters to you? What is important to pay attention to in mobile?
Fernandez Remesal: Let me start with something that is in many cases not looked into enough. We’re seeing a change in the audience itself. We need to acknowledge that Generation Z is coming in. They bring a completely new way of consuming content. They’re less attracted to deep, engaging experiences. If I could call them, in a way, the digital generation, they’re focused on short-term or short-form entertainment, where they can get their dopamine and adrenaline and then engage further. They’re a generation that doesn’t pay a lot of attention until they get really hooked on the things they’re doing.
From that perspective, we see a shift in consumer behavior. We see different session lengths, different ways of engaging with games. The industry is growing by double digits in regions like South America and the Middle East and southeast Asia, while the more western markets aren’t growing as much. That’s linked to the average age in these regions. They have much younger populations in these emerging markets, where they consume games as a native entertainment form. There’s a new consumer coming in from Generation Z, bringing new consumption patterns in their session habits and rates of play. At the same time, there’s an opportunity to propose different kinds of content.
Epic Games is still tangling with Google and Apple on antitrust.
GamesBeat: One of the interesting trends that’s emerged in mobile is the importance of the relationship between developers and platforms. We saw Apple’s decision a few years ago to prioritize user privacy over targeted advertising. It made targeted advertising much harder. Game companies lost the ability to very precisely target people who favored certain kinds of games. They had to go back to more of a guessing game around how to zero in on which users they wanted to target.
This had an impact over years. Do you think we’ve learned how to deal with this change in the market and still be able to find the users that you need?
Fernandez Remesal: IDFA is not going to go away. Privacy is going to be with us. It’s going to be something that everyone has to pay attention to. That’s been critical in the mobile space, because of the merchandising problems we see in the app stores. We see a lot of problems in content discoverability. That means most of the growth we’ve seen in these games has been through performance marketing user acquisition.
One thing that we’re seeing more and more is game developers trying to build communities everywhere. Trying to expose their games. Trying to create communities through influencers, through Discord and content creation. But eventually IDFA is here to stay.
GamesBeat: Speaking of the developer-platform relationship, we’ve had an antitrust case going on for a long time, four and a half years now, between Epic Games and Apple. Yesterday we got a ruling from the judge that held Apple in contempt of court. This has a lot of significance for whether or not mobile game companies can go outside of Apple’s store and advertise lower prices on their web shops or other sites. They can sell the same things at lower prices than the app store because Apple takes a 30% cut.
Apple appealed this and had been able to dodge the effects of it, even in Europe, where they had a 27% core technology fee they introduced. Now the judge has said, “No more of that. You can’t evade this ruling anymore. You have to allow game companies to tell their users that there are lower prices elsewhere.” This is a fundamental antitrust protection for consumers. The ruling should affect the whole industry. What’s your view?
Fernandez Remesal: We were talking last week, early this week. Eventually, we’ll see some form of platform disruption, especially when you look at mobile platforms. Mobile has been mostly governed by two platform companies, Google and Apple. There have been other app stores in the Android ecosystem, but in the end there are few opportunities for you to get content, and particularly games, on your mobile device. That’s a situation set for disruption.
Eventually, particularly in countries that are more protective toward consumers–they’re upset about these oligopolies. They’d like to offer consumers more opportunities to discover content and do so in a way that’s fair for both consumers and game developers. The Digital Markets Act, in the United Kingdom, was one of the first changes we saw trying to open the mobile gaming ecosystem a bit more, trying to ensure that developers have some choice and consumers have some choice. But as you mentioned, that was a segue way for Apple to introduce a new tax, a new fee for game developers if they wanted to go that route.
What we saw a few hours ago–it looks really recent. But game developers now have the opportunity to have a direct relationship with consumers. They can build that relationship in a way where they can offer consumers more alternatives and choices. First of all, price points. You can offer different price points compared to what’s available in the app stores. For those of you who are game developers, in the app stores you cannot select any price point you want. They’re fixed. They have ranges you can pick from, but you can’t just select any price point at all.
The second factor, as you mentioned, is discounts. Trying to ensure that if you’re proposing this direct to consumer offering, you can adjust your margins and provide more value to consumers. Eventually that ensures that you as a game developer can get a broader part of the value share you’re creating with the consumer, but at the same time give some back as well to the consumer in a way where they can pay less when they’re using a web shop.
The thing that we’ll hopefully start to see soon is that it’s not just about you informing consumers that they can have other ways to consume your content and buy content outside of your app, going to the web to buy it. Eventually it will open up the actual app to more real payment methods in games, as you see in other apps in the app stores.
GamesBeat: We’re not quite sure what the line will be. Will Apple allow people to use their own payment systems as an alternative to Apple Pay?
Fernandez Remesal: Right. But from that perspective, games have been punished compared to other apps. Why are we not able to build that kind of relationship with consumers? Why can’t we propose a specific payment or subscription mechanic that other entertainment options can do in the app stores?
Sandsoft’s Potions & Spells.
GamesBeat: Assuming that payments are not going to change, the next best thing is web shops. Set up your own store on the web. In the past companies could not advertise that web shop’s existence inside the app, but now they can. They can say that you can get something for cheaper prices elsewhere. Xsolla has been opening a lot of these web shops and operating them for companies. They have more than 500 of them now. But nobody knew about them. They do say that consumers are using them. They’re going back at a 30-40% rate and creating a 10-16% lift in revenues for developers, or in some cases higher. Those sound like fairly promising results relatively early for alternative web shops.
Fernandez Remesal: That’s correct. Particularly, if you’re a consumer that pays in mobile free-to-play games, you’re trying to get the best value for money. Eventually this kind of core, engaged audience that makes up the payers in your game, they already know they can go to the shop to get a better offering. For the greater mass of consumers that don’t pay, they’re not really aware they can go to the web shop to buy content and get better deals than going through the app stores, the in-app shops.
There are two issues here. One is about consumers getting more value for money here. The second is about developers getting more value from the value chain and delivering more of it back to consumers as well.
GamesBeat: The net result is that it’s more money going to the bottom line for developers to reinvest in their business. That’s been sorely needed, especially in the last two and a half years. We’ve seen a real painful downturn in the global game industry. Every penny counts these days.
Fernandez Remesal: It’s a better distribution of value in this case, considering what everyone puts on the table. Maybe in the early days of the app stores there were more merchandising options for developers, ways to get value from the app stores. There was less content. Your content could reach more users. There was value in the promotional activity the app store would run for you. Now that’s heavily driven by UA. In that context, the app stores really just become a payment method. From that perspective, developers capturing more value and giving more value back to consumers is good, because that’s reinvested in the game industry. Game developers capture more value and that helps them create better content and engage better with consumers.
GamesBeat: We’ve talked about some of these trends. How are you most closely aligning your company to some of these trends, to take advantage of them?
Iza’s Supermarket is a game from Sandsoft.
Fernandez Remesal: There are a couple of trends we didn’t discuss much. One is about how mobile games in particular are becoming more complex. Three years ago we were talking about hypercasual games, games mostly monetized through in-game advertising. Because of the challenges around privacy, games are becoming more deep now. They have microtransactions. Even casual games are becoming more complex. They have metagames on top. They have deeper economies. Casual games are becoming more mid-core.
Mid-core games are going this way as well, to more core game mechanics. You see plenty of games with battle passes, with more core engagement loops that you didn’t see before. And then when you go to really core games, they’re becoming more like casual games. They’re trying to simplify at the core, trying to make themselves more accessible. There are some shifts on the way. Game developers are making games that are in a way more complex, but they’re trying to simplify the core game mechanics to be more accessible.
As a company we’re trying to follow these trends. We’re working on a few casual games that we’re releasing with our exterior partners. We’re trying to observe how we can propose these deeper economies in games that feel very accessible, that are easy to play, that are easy to grasp and explain through a simple ad, but that can eventually retain and engage people for a long time.
The second trend we didn’t discuss much was generative AI. That’s transforming not just game development, but many industries. It’s a new tool for everyone to use and leverage. Any game company, or any company at all, in the long term needs to have a proper AI strategy. In our case we’re leveraging AI mostly for content creation, mostly for ads at this moment. We’re enriching our NPCs through AI. But I presume that we’ll be adding efficiencies in most of the things we do, like game programming. We’re doing code reviews with AI now. We’re doing some small level designs with AI. That’s one of the tools that’s going to provide superpowers to game developers.
David Fernandez Remesal moved to Saudi Arabia to run Sandsoft.
Teams that, a few years ago, were considering building an engine of their own, they don’t do that any more. They use Unity or Godot or Unreal. Now there are pipelines for game development that will be transformed by the use of AI. Things that need 10 people to do them nowadays, one developer might be able to do them more efficiently a year from now.
GamesBeat: Would you consider bringing mobile ads into the company because of AI advances? Mobile ad optimization now can be done quite well by AI. Fewer people can get much more work done in terms of creating variations on ads to test them in the market and see which particular ad does well. That optimization process was often handled by outsiders. Could that change?
Fernandez Remesal: On the go-to-market you’re precisely right. For mobile games, what we call creative optimization is part of the way that you can optimize your growth strategy. But it’s broader than that. When you think about how, particularly in this case, artists work, they work on content production. You create some illustrations of characters and environments, and this is transformed by AI. With one artist you can get 100 different concepts with just a couple of prompts. Before, in the manual world, you’d need to spend probably half a day to just create one. This is about being more open for creativity, to get more options for exploring characters, environments, and art styles. It’s not just on the advertising side, too. It’s on game creation, too, to explore new concepts in a broader way.
GamesBeat: In Saudi Arabia you have some parallels to Brazil in some ways, in terms of what you do with the team that you have. The team is relatively new to games. You’re growing a local staff. We saw some very interesting trends in the past year around Black Myth: Wukong. It was a Chinese-made game made for Chinese consumers, the Chinese market. It did spectacularly well on the global stage as well, 25 million copies sold right off the bat. It validated the notion that a country’s local content could be appealing on a global scale. A lot more games are being greenlit in China now with hopes that they’ll reach a global market.
Sandosoft’s PocketNecro
For you, in Saudi Arabia, do you have a choice to make around whether to make local content or global content?
Fernandez Remesal: As a game developer, we’re creating content for global markets. We’re not doing content to be consumed locally. But that doesn’t mean–as in any part of the world, you have local stories, local myths, local themes that you can expose and eventually create connections with consumers and players everywhere in the world.
When I think about our talent pool, I won’t deny that we’re quite an international company. We have 100 people on the team who come from 30 different nationalities. We’re still a nascent state in terms of local Saudi talent. We don’t have enough capability to create these local stories in a way where they feel authentic, where they’re told by the right people. But that will come eventually. I think there’s a good analogy when you think about movies and television. There are plenty of stories from this part of the world that have been told. We talked about Aladdin, about Prince of Egypt. There are plenty of stories that resonate with global audiences. But we need to have the real people, the local talent that can tell these stories in a way that eventually attracts a global audience and can become a mass market opportunity, rather than a niche thing for the local market.
GamesBeat: A lot of this is maybe a stepping-stone process. You have to level up your team. You have to make sure that they can grow to be veterans of the industry. Then at that point the opportunities change. You can use them to be the central creators of the content.
Fernandez Remesal: Correct. When you’re creating games, when you’re creating many kinds of content, it comes from your own passion. There’s some sense of the market involved, understanding whether there’s a commercial opportunity, but it comes from people’s passion. The passion is there, but the skills and capabilities are not there yet to think about a global game opportunity. We’ve seen that in other games. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of that, where they’ve taken worlds and themes that resonate in the region, but not to the extent that it feels like a proper story from that part of the world. But you’re precisely right. We need to wait a few years to have this capability in place so we have a credible story to tell in a commercial way and can meet the quality expectations that global audiences have.
GamesBeat: From what you’ve seen, what is your assessment of where talent is? Whether in your region or other regions of the world as well. Where is the best mobile gaming talent now?
Sandsoft’s Wizario
Fernandez Remesal: The answer for me is quite easy. You just need to look at the games that make the top of the charts. China has definitely become the world leader in game development talent for mobile games. It’s not just about Tencent or Netease or MiHoYo. Plenty of game developers are creating games that are consumed globally. That’s the larger talent pool for mobile games.
It’s true as well that the pool is expanding quite broadly. Creating mobile games is more accessible than going for triple-A console games. There are plenty of pockets of excellence in Europe, in the U.S., in Latin America. I’m really impressed by people here in Brazil, in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Chile. That’s becoming more accessible. Talent is developing in many parts of the world.
In my region, in Saudi Arabia, it’s very new. I think that’s resonating with people here in Brazil. Maybe we’re Brazil five years ago. There were some pockets of talent that were trying to get their first companies into the market. We’re on the route where we’re importing talent to support game development, but also building local talent, so we can develop the whole industry.
Another topic that’s not so much a trend as a reality now, it’s about going cross-platform. There are plenty of mobile first games that are thinking about moving to different platforms. When you think about how you can go to market, how you can prototype, mobile is usually the cheaper platform to do that. We see more and more teams getting their IP into PC and console coming from mobile. We’re observing that more and more.
Another trend we see is transmedia. Maybe that was a buzzword at one point, people thinking about migrating IP from games into other art forms, but we definitely see it quite a bit now, particularly the series we’ve seen from Netflix and Amazon and so forth. Rovio is doing movies. Transmedia is becoming a trend for companies with deep pockets and deep budgets.
GamesBeat: The biggest thing to watch right now, I would agree, is AI and where it’s going to change things. I believe that mobile gaming is one of the areas where it’s going to have the biggest impact. AI can’t create triple-A games yet, but there are a lot of things related to the business of mobile games that can be automated. We’ll see where that takes hold and gets traction.
Fernandez Remesal: Something that we’re seeing quite a bit here in Brazil is the renaissance of web gaming. WebGL has really improved lately. We see amazing experiences on the mobile web. Mobile web will be an opportunity for game developers. It links to what we mentioned before with web shops and how you can monetize.
GamesBeat: We have the Nintendo Switch 2 launching very shortly. The interesting thing about now versus years ago is that Nintendo is no longer the first device that kids get their hands on as a gamer. It’s smartphones and tablets now, mobile games. That’s how they learn to play games, which represents a sea change for companies like Nintendo. They have to follow this trend. The youngest gamers are only going to know the brands that they see on mobile.
Fernandez Remesal: That’s precisely right. Mobile is the first gaming device for many, many people, particularly kids. That’s where they discover content. It’s not just games. It’s how they find all forms of entertainment – streaming media, music, and games as well.
Disclosure: Gamescom Latam paid my way to Brazil.
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#sandsofts #david #fernandez #remesal #appleSandsoft’s David Fernandez Remesal on the Apple antitrust ruling and more mobile game opportunities | The DeanBeat
David Fernandez Remesal took the job of CEO of Sandsoft in 2020 and moved to Saudi Arabia, where his mobile game company is based. He set up a studio in Riyadh and also hired mobile game developers in places like his native Spain, Finland and China. Fernandez Remesal focused on esports at first, but pivoted to mobile games as a more viable business approach.
The summers are a lot hotter for sure, but Fernandez has sweated out the hard work of establishing a new studio in a place where game development skills are only just being fostered now for the new generations of game developers. While Brazil is a bigger and more established market, Fernandez Remesal, who worked on games like Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga before leading Sandsoft.
We talked about mobile game trends at our fireside chat at Gamescom Latam in a talk entitled, “The Mobile Frontier: Big Trends and Smarter Moves for 2025.”
We covered a lot of ground in our fireside chat at Gamescom Latam in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We hit topics like Apple’s move to emphasize user privacy over targeted ads as it deprecated the Identifier for Advertises. We also covered the antitrust ruling that could bust the floodgates open when it comes to developers being able to advertise their own web shopsinside their mobile games on the Apple and Google app stores. We explored the consequences if game developers are also able to use their own payment systems — which take around 3% commissions rather than 30% — in mobile game transactions.
Sandsoft is focused on taking advantage of these trends by focusing on midcore gamers, which is becoming a bigger part of the overall mobile games market. And Sandsoft is also busy working on AI tools that can help developers work more efficiently.
And we looked at other opportunities for mobile to grow as the mobile-first generation grows up and becomes a bigger part of the population of gamers. We also assessed when it’s the right time for local talent to take on local stories and spread them to the global stage with authentic triple-A development.
Here’s an edited transcript of our on-stage interview.
Sandsoft CEO David Fernandez Remesal
GamesBeat: I’m here with David Fernandez Remesal, the CEO of Sandsoft. I’ll have him introduce himself, his career in games, and the origins of Sandsoft.
David Fernandez Remesal: I’m pleased to be in Brazil. It’s my first time. I’d like to thank everyone here. You’re doing an incredible show. I’m kind of what I could call mobile native when it comes to game development. I started my career working on mobile games almost 20 years ago. Those of you that were around, that means before smartphone games. I worked at a company called THQ that you may remember. They were one of the pioneers, as a triple-A games company, in doing mobile games as well. I started my career at THQ Juarez, their mobile game division.
After that I had the privilege of working with two industry titans at a company called Digital Chocolate. That was Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, and Ilkka Paananen, who happens to be the CEO and founder of Supercell as well. I spent part of my career working on an app store with Nokia. I also worked on the N-Gage handheld device. In that particular case I made the wrong choice. I went for the loser in the smartphone era. But eventually I learned quite a bit about how you need merchandise, games, and apps on an e-commerce platform.
After doing something in the mobile advertising space, I also had the honor of joining King, where I worked for almost five years on a couple of franchises. One was Bubble Witch Saga, and then Candy Crush Saga. I was at the King London studio when I left to run Sandsoft five years ago.
GamesBeat: Sandsoft is interesting to this market in part because you’re also in an emerging market, albeit a very different part of the world. The company is headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Can you talk about how that happened to come about?
Fernandez Remesal: We’re slightly earlier in terms of the game industry in Saudi compared to what we see here in Brazil, particularly toward game development capabilities. But we have a nice consumer market. It’s not as big as Brazil. But let me get started with how Sandsoft was created. For those of you who are not familiar with Saudi Arabia, they have a plan called Saudi Vision 2030. The main proposal is to diversify the economy away from oil and gas. As part of that program, they’re trying to build what we call a knowledge economy. Gaming is a pivotal part of that transition.
We’re part of a large Saudi corporation that was founded to support that plan. They decided to diversify their group. Gaming was one of the things they wanted to do. Sandsoft was born in 2019, originally as an esports company. The first thing we did as a company was the PUBG Mobile event in Saudi Arabia. Butrealized esports was not a business. It was maybe more of a show, rather than proper commercial ongoing activities you can run in a sustainable way. They decided to venture into mobile game development and publishing, which is what we do today. We’re developing games in our own studios, and we’re a global games publisher. We’re supporting game development studios in the mobile space to commercialize their games.
Iza’s Supermarket
GamesBeat: What are you working on? What is your focus? How big is the team, and where are they?
Fernandez Remesal: We now have roughly 100 people. We’re split into four different markets. We have people in Saudi Arabia, where we’re headquartered. We also host a game development studio there. We have satellite offices in Spain, where we also have a development studio. Then we have a couple of publishing operations in China and Finland. We also have a small studio in France. That’s where we have our operations.
In terms of focus, as I mentioned to you, we’re focused on mobile platforms. We have a few games with aspirations to become cross-platform, but we’re mobile first.
GamesBeat: You moved to Saudi Arabia. Can you talk about what that was like for you?
Fernandez Remesal: Yes, I did. I’ve been there for four years now. The weather aside – the summer is really hot – it was a big cultural change for a European to come over to a country that was maybe more conservative, that was more closed than other countries I’ve lived in. But I felt that if you are respectful, if you try to understand the things that are changing, and if you adapt to the pace of change, it’s quite livable.
The people are very passionate about games specifically. There’s a young, savvy population. They consider themselves gamers. When you tell them you work in games, they respect you. It’s different from other countries, where people think you play games all day. They don’t realize that this is an art form, that this is something that goes beyond just play.
GamesBeat: A reminder that it’s a global industry. Gaming is not what it used to be. It used to be from Japan, the U.S., and Europe. Now it’s a very different world.
Fernandez Remesal: Correct. It’s becoming very global. Like we see here. It’s not just about all the people attending to play games, but also all the game companies showcasing their games, which is really exciting.
GamesBeat: How far along are your games?
Fernandez Remesal: In terms of our game development studios, we’re just starting our first prototypes. Both studios started in 2023, but it took us some time to get the initial core teams that we could trust to develop their game ideas into commercially viable games. We have been in a kind of boot camp at both the studios for a year. Now they’re starting to prototype what we can see as more commercial games.
As a publisher we have a few games already in the market. Maybe the first we released was in partnership with Jam City, DC Heroes and Villains. We’re also raising a few other games that–mobile free-to-play games, you don’t have a red button where you hit it and the game is live. It’s more about ongoing progress. You’re keeping them in development and improving the games. Then you try to find ways to scale. In this case through user acquisition. In that sense we’ve had games available in the market for more than three years. We have six games in our portfolio. Two of them are more mature. We expect to scale them in the first half of the year.
GamesBeat: Let’s get into some of the trends in the mobile industry. What do you see? What matters to you? What is important to pay attention to in mobile?
Fernandez Remesal: Let me start with something that is in many cases not looked into enough. We’re seeing a change in the audience itself. We need to acknowledge that Generation Z is coming in. They bring a completely new way of consuming content. They’re less attracted to deep, engaging experiences. If I could call them, in a way, the digital generation, they’re focused on short-term or short-form entertainment, where they can get their dopamine and adrenaline and then engage further. They’re a generation that doesn’t pay a lot of attention until they get really hooked on the things they’re doing.
From that perspective, we see a shift in consumer behavior. We see different session lengths, different ways of engaging with games. The industry is growing by double digits in regions like South America and the Middle East and southeast Asia, while the more western markets aren’t growing as much. That’s linked to the average age in these regions. They have much younger populations in these emerging markets, where they consume games as a native entertainment form. There’s a new consumer coming in from Generation Z, bringing new consumption patterns in their session habits and rates of play. At the same time, there’s an opportunity to propose different kinds of content.
Epic Games is still tangling with Google and Apple on antitrust.
GamesBeat: One of the interesting trends that’s emerged in mobile is the importance of the relationship between developers and platforms. We saw Apple’s decision a few years ago to prioritize user privacy over targeted advertising. It made targeted advertising much harder. Game companies lost the ability to very precisely target people who favored certain kinds of games. They had to go back to more of a guessing game around how to zero in on which users they wanted to target.
This had an impact over years. Do you think we’ve learned how to deal with this change in the market and still be able to find the users that you need?
Fernandez Remesal: IDFA is not going to go away. Privacy is going to be with us. It’s going to be something that everyone has to pay attention to. That’s been critical in the mobile space, because of the merchandising problems we see in the app stores. We see a lot of problems in content discoverability. That means most of the growth we’ve seen in these games has been through performance marketing user acquisition.
One thing that we’re seeing more and more is game developers trying to build communities everywhere. Trying to expose their games. Trying to create communities through influencers, through Discord and content creation. But eventually IDFA is here to stay.
GamesBeat: Speaking of the developer-platform relationship, we’ve had an antitrust case going on for a long time, four and a half years now, between Epic Games and Apple. Yesterday we got a ruling from the judge that held Apple in contempt of court. This has a lot of significance for whether or not mobile game companies can go outside of Apple’s store and advertise lower prices on their web shops or other sites. They can sell the same things at lower prices than the app store because Apple takes a 30% cut.
Apple appealed this and had been able to dodge the effects of it, even in Europe, where they had a 27% core technology fee they introduced. Now the judge has said, “No more of that. You can’t evade this ruling anymore. You have to allow game companies to tell their users that there are lower prices elsewhere.” This is a fundamental antitrust protection for consumers. The ruling should affect the whole industry. What’s your view?
Fernandez Remesal: We were talking last week, early this week. Eventually, we’ll see some form of platform disruption, especially when you look at mobile platforms. Mobile has been mostly governed by two platform companies, Google and Apple. There have been other app stores in the Android ecosystem, but in the end there are few opportunities for you to get content, and particularly games, on your mobile device. That’s a situation set for disruption.
Eventually, particularly in countries that are more protective toward consumers–they’re upset about these oligopolies. They’d like to offer consumers more opportunities to discover content and do so in a way that’s fair for both consumers and game developers. The Digital Markets Act, in the United Kingdom, was one of the first changes we saw trying to open the mobile gaming ecosystem a bit more, trying to ensure that developers have some choice and consumers have some choice. But as you mentioned, that was a segue way for Apple to introduce a new tax, a new fee for game developers if they wanted to go that route.
What we saw a few hours ago–it looks really recent. But game developers now have the opportunity to have a direct relationship with consumers. They can build that relationship in a way where they can offer consumers more alternatives and choices. First of all, price points. You can offer different price points compared to what’s available in the app stores. For those of you who are game developers, in the app stores you cannot select any price point you want. They’re fixed. They have ranges you can pick from, but you can’t just select any price point at all.
The second factor, as you mentioned, is discounts. Trying to ensure that if you’re proposing this direct to consumer offering, you can adjust your margins and provide more value to consumers. Eventually that ensures that you as a game developer can get a broader part of the value share you’re creating with the consumer, but at the same time give some back as well to the consumer in a way where they can pay less when they’re using a web shop.
The thing that we’ll hopefully start to see soon is that it’s not just about you informing consumers that they can have other ways to consume your content and buy content outside of your app, going to the web to buy it. Eventually it will open up the actual app to more real payment methods in games, as you see in other apps in the app stores.
GamesBeat: We’re not quite sure what the line will be. Will Apple allow people to use their own payment systems as an alternative to Apple Pay?
Fernandez Remesal: Right. But from that perspective, games have been punished compared to other apps. Why are we not able to build that kind of relationship with consumers? Why can’t we propose a specific payment or subscription mechanic that other entertainment options can do in the app stores?
Sandsoft’s Potions & Spells.
GamesBeat: Assuming that payments are not going to change, the next best thing is web shops. Set up your own store on the web. In the past companies could not advertise that web shop’s existence inside the app, but now they can. They can say that you can get something for cheaper prices elsewhere. Xsolla has been opening a lot of these web shops and operating them for companies. They have more than 500 of them now. But nobody knew about them. They do say that consumers are using them. They’re going back at a 30-40% rate and creating a 10-16% lift in revenues for developers, or in some cases higher. Those sound like fairly promising results relatively early for alternative web shops.
Fernandez Remesal: That’s correct. Particularly, if you’re a consumer that pays in mobile free-to-play games, you’re trying to get the best value for money. Eventually this kind of core, engaged audience that makes up the payers in your game, they already know they can go to the shop to get a better offering. For the greater mass of consumers that don’t pay, they’re not really aware they can go to the web shop to buy content and get better deals than going through the app stores, the in-app shops.
There are two issues here. One is about consumers getting more value for money here. The second is about developers getting more value from the value chain and delivering more of it back to consumers as well.
GamesBeat: The net result is that it’s more money going to the bottom line for developers to reinvest in their business. That’s been sorely needed, especially in the last two and a half years. We’ve seen a real painful downturn in the global game industry. Every penny counts these days.
Fernandez Remesal: It’s a better distribution of value in this case, considering what everyone puts on the table. Maybe in the early days of the app stores there were more merchandising options for developers, ways to get value from the app stores. There was less content. Your content could reach more users. There was value in the promotional activity the app store would run for you. Now that’s heavily driven by UA. In that context, the app stores really just become a payment method. From that perspective, developers capturing more value and giving more value back to consumers is good, because that’s reinvested in the game industry. Game developers capture more value and that helps them create better content and engage better with consumers.
GamesBeat: We’ve talked about some of these trends. How are you most closely aligning your company to some of these trends, to take advantage of them?
Iza’s Supermarket is a game from Sandsoft.
Fernandez Remesal: There are a couple of trends we didn’t discuss much. One is about how mobile games in particular are becoming more complex. Three years ago we were talking about hypercasual games, games mostly monetized through in-game advertising. Because of the challenges around privacy, games are becoming more deep now. They have microtransactions. Even casual games are becoming more complex. They have metagames on top. They have deeper economies. Casual games are becoming more mid-core.
Mid-core games are going this way as well, to more core game mechanics. You see plenty of games with battle passes, with more core engagement loops that you didn’t see before. And then when you go to really core games, they’re becoming more like casual games. They’re trying to simplify at the core, trying to make themselves more accessible. There are some shifts on the way. Game developers are making games that are in a way more complex, but they’re trying to simplify the core game mechanics to be more accessible.
As a company we’re trying to follow these trends. We’re working on a few casual games that we’re releasing with our exterior partners. We’re trying to observe how we can propose these deeper economies in games that feel very accessible, that are easy to play, that are easy to grasp and explain through a simple ad, but that can eventually retain and engage people for a long time.
The second trend we didn’t discuss much was generative AI. That’s transforming not just game development, but many industries. It’s a new tool for everyone to use and leverage. Any game company, or any company at all, in the long term needs to have a proper AI strategy. In our case we’re leveraging AI mostly for content creation, mostly for ads at this moment. We’re enriching our NPCs through AI. But I presume that we’ll be adding efficiencies in most of the things we do, like game programming. We’re doing code reviews with AI now. We’re doing some small level designs with AI. That’s one of the tools that’s going to provide superpowers to game developers.
David Fernandez Remesal moved to Saudi Arabia to run Sandsoft.
Teams that, a few years ago, were considering building an engine of their own, they don’t do that any more. They use Unity or Godot or Unreal. Now there are pipelines for game development that will be transformed by the use of AI. Things that need 10 people to do them nowadays, one developer might be able to do them more efficiently a year from now.
GamesBeat: Would you consider bringing mobile ads into the company because of AI advances? Mobile ad optimization now can be done quite well by AI. Fewer people can get much more work done in terms of creating variations on ads to test them in the market and see which particular ad does well. That optimization process was often handled by outsiders. Could that change?
Fernandez Remesal: On the go-to-market you’re precisely right. For mobile games, what we call creative optimization is part of the way that you can optimize your growth strategy. But it’s broader than that. When you think about how, particularly in this case, artists work, they work on content production. You create some illustrations of characters and environments, and this is transformed by AI. With one artist you can get 100 different concepts with just a couple of prompts. Before, in the manual world, you’d need to spend probably half a day to just create one. This is about being more open for creativity, to get more options for exploring characters, environments, and art styles. It’s not just on the advertising side, too. It’s on game creation, too, to explore new concepts in a broader way.
GamesBeat: In Saudi Arabia you have some parallels to Brazil in some ways, in terms of what you do with the team that you have. The team is relatively new to games. You’re growing a local staff. We saw some very interesting trends in the past year around Black Myth: Wukong. It was a Chinese-made game made for Chinese consumers, the Chinese market. It did spectacularly well on the global stage as well, 25 million copies sold right off the bat. It validated the notion that a country’s local content could be appealing on a global scale. A lot more games are being greenlit in China now with hopes that they’ll reach a global market.
Sandosoft’s PocketNecro
For you, in Saudi Arabia, do you have a choice to make around whether to make local content or global content?
Fernandez Remesal: As a game developer, we’re creating content for global markets. We’re not doing content to be consumed locally. But that doesn’t mean–as in any part of the world, you have local stories, local myths, local themes that you can expose and eventually create connections with consumers and players everywhere in the world.
When I think about our talent pool, I won’t deny that we’re quite an international company. We have 100 people on the team who come from 30 different nationalities. We’re still a nascent state in terms of local Saudi talent. We don’t have enough capability to create these local stories in a way where they feel authentic, where they’re told by the right people. But that will come eventually. I think there’s a good analogy when you think about movies and television. There are plenty of stories from this part of the world that have been told. We talked about Aladdin, about Prince of Egypt. There are plenty of stories that resonate with global audiences. But we need to have the real people, the local talent that can tell these stories in a way that eventually attracts a global audience and can become a mass market opportunity, rather than a niche thing for the local market.
GamesBeat: A lot of this is maybe a stepping-stone process. You have to level up your team. You have to make sure that they can grow to be veterans of the industry. Then at that point the opportunities change. You can use them to be the central creators of the content.
Fernandez Remesal: Correct. When you’re creating games, when you’re creating many kinds of content, it comes from your own passion. There’s some sense of the market involved, understanding whether there’s a commercial opportunity, but it comes from people’s passion. The passion is there, but the skills and capabilities are not there yet to think about a global game opportunity. We’ve seen that in other games. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of that, where they’ve taken worlds and themes that resonate in the region, but not to the extent that it feels like a proper story from that part of the world. But you’re precisely right. We need to wait a few years to have this capability in place so we have a credible story to tell in a commercial way and can meet the quality expectations that global audiences have.
GamesBeat: From what you’ve seen, what is your assessment of where talent is? Whether in your region or other regions of the world as well. Where is the best mobile gaming talent now?
Sandsoft’s Wizario
Fernandez Remesal: The answer for me is quite easy. You just need to look at the games that make the top of the charts. China has definitely become the world leader in game development talent for mobile games. It’s not just about Tencent or Netease or MiHoYo. Plenty of game developers are creating games that are consumed globally. That’s the larger talent pool for mobile games.
It’s true as well that the pool is expanding quite broadly. Creating mobile games is more accessible than going for triple-A console games. There are plenty of pockets of excellence in Europe, in the U.S., in Latin America. I’m really impressed by people here in Brazil, in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Chile. That’s becoming more accessible. Talent is developing in many parts of the world.
In my region, in Saudi Arabia, it’s very new. I think that’s resonating with people here in Brazil. Maybe we’re Brazil five years ago. There were some pockets of talent that were trying to get their first companies into the market. We’re on the route where we’re importing talent to support game development, but also building local talent, so we can develop the whole industry.
Another topic that’s not so much a trend as a reality now, it’s about going cross-platform. There are plenty of mobile first games that are thinking about moving to different platforms. When you think about how you can go to market, how you can prototype, mobile is usually the cheaper platform to do that. We see more and more teams getting their IP into PC and console coming from mobile. We’re observing that more and more.
Another trend we see is transmedia. Maybe that was a buzzword at one point, people thinking about migrating IP from games into other art forms, but we definitely see it quite a bit now, particularly the series we’ve seen from Netflix and Amazon and so forth. Rovio is doing movies. Transmedia is becoming a trend for companies with deep pockets and deep budgets.
GamesBeat: The biggest thing to watch right now, I would agree, is AI and where it’s going to change things. I believe that mobile gaming is one of the areas where it’s going to have the biggest impact. AI can’t create triple-A games yet, but there are a lot of things related to the business of mobile games that can be automated. We’ll see where that takes hold and gets traction.
Fernandez Remesal: Something that we’re seeing quite a bit here in Brazil is the renaissance of web gaming. WebGL has really improved lately. We see amazing experiences on the mobile web. Mobile web will be an opportunity for game developers. It links to what we mentioned before with web shops and how you can monetize.
GamesBeat: We have the Nintendo Switch 2 launching very shortly. The interesting thing about now versus years ago is that Nintendo is no longer the first device that kids get their hands on as a gamer. It’s smartphones and tablets now, mobile games. That’s how they learn to play games, which represents a sea change for companies like Nintendo. They have to follow this trend. The youngest gamers are only going to know the brands that they see on mobile.
Fernandez Remesal: That’s precisely right. Mobile is the first gaming device for many, many people, particularly kids. That’s where they discover content. It’s not just games. It’s how they find all forms of entertainment – streaming media, music, and games as well.
Disclosure: Gamescom Latam paid my way to Brazil.
GB Daily
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