GDC is an annual video game conference that focuses on developers, bringing the global community together to exchange ideas, create connections, and learn new skills to advance their craft. The 2021 edition will see the conference go all-digital, allowing the event to be accessible to even more people with online attendance.

Educational sessions to help developers grow and prosper

The two sessions will bring developers through an educational journey on how AppGallery plays a critical role as a key platform to developer’s growth strategy and explore new ways of monetisation strategy for mobile games with Huawei Ads. Alexandre Salem, Global Gaming Business Development Director, commented:

“Gaming is going through several fundamental transitions from the evolving demographics of global game players to a transformation of cross-platform gaming experiences. AppGallery presents unique growth opportunities with its extensive distribution, market reach, and strength in the Chinese market; with Huawei’s combined hardware and software innovation with HarmonyOS and HMS, it delivers an elevated experience that can maximize the value for gaming partners and users.”

In the first session ‘Find your next big win with AppGallery’, Alexandre, as well as Gavin Kinghall Were, Global Head of BD Solutions, Consumer Business Group, Huawei, will be joined by Aurelien Lavaud, Global BD Director, Gameloft, and Maxim Kirilenko, Chief Business Development Officer, Playrix, to discuss their experience incorporating AppGallery as part of their global growth strategy in their game launch and expansion. From launch to marketing support, AppGallery provides valuable resources for developers to help expand their growth opportunities with every new game they release. He also added:

“We are excited to meet global game developers and invite everybody to explore the next growth opportunity with AppGallery. We are also very grateful to have our partners Playrix and Gameloft join us to share their journey with AppGallery, and hope more partners will join us to explore more and expand together with AppGallery,”

In the following session ‘HUAWEI Ads: Drive Growth with a New Ad Platform’, Aoife Brodigan, Marketing Director, Huawei Mobile Services, Europe, and Stephane Fournis, Director of Business Development, HUAWEI Ads, Europe, will be introducing the HUAWEI Ads’ new monetisation opportunities, the platform’s unique value and support, as well strategic tips to drive growth through building new revenue streams.

As part of the GDC 2021 sessions, Huawei will also unveil an in-depth case study ebook of its recently concluded inaugural global Game Fest campaign, which saw doubling its daily download figures to over 1.2 million hits during the height of the campaign. The eBook shares in detail each of the 13 participating developers’ journey and achievements and the support they received to help their games flourish on AppGallery. More details will be made available during the week of GDC 2021.

AppGallery continues to offer invaluable resources for developers’ growth

As a top 3 global app marketplace, AppGallery provides scalability, speed, discoverability and monetisation, as well as an unwavering support to game developers worldwide.

AppGallery offers scalability with its 540 million monthly active users, 730 million device users, and a growing diversified device base. With strong leadership in the Chinese market and other emerging markets, AppGallery has a proven record of supporting game partners to enter and expand their growth in these booming markets. Developers can enjoy a fast and worry-free experience through simple integration processes, easy to use tools and capabilities, and local market knowledge with hands-on local support. Leveraging HUAWEI Ads, Petal Search, and many other services through AppGallery, game developers can explore the best way to reach gamers and expand to regions critical to their user and revenue growth.

Throughout the whole process, from development and publishing to promotion and monetization, game developers can access high-touch and hands-on local support in their desired markets, leveraging AppGallery ’s large global reach, local market knowledge, and many years’ experience working with global leading app developers.

According to Huawei, over 4 million developers have signed on to build on the Harmony platform and that there are already 134,000 apps using HMS Core. HMS Core itself keeps evolving and yesterday’s event saw the launch of version 6.0 with extended support for Huawei’s cloud services.

To increase those numbers the company launched the Huawei HMS Global Application Innovation Competition 2021 that invites developers to create innovative new apps based around HMS Core. Since the name is quite a mouthful, in short, it is known as Apps UP.

Developers from all around the world can participate. The monetary prize pool is $1 million, but Huawei will offer practical awards too, including marketing support, cloud resources, incentives for using HMS Core’s payment system and more.

The tens of thousands of apps are already available and can be enjoyed by over 10 million users – Huawei already claims that HarmonyOS is the third-largest mobile ecosystem in the world. That may or may not be true, depending on how you count mobile ecosystems (e.g. KaiOS was on 100 million devices a couple of years ago).

However, this is only staged one of the HarmonyOS 2.0 rollouts to older models, which will extend into next year. And, of course, there are the devices that come with Harmony out of the box. What is more, the Huawei Watch 3 and 3 Pro are on sale in China as of today, alongside the MatePad Pro 12.6 (2021).