We are bringing you the news from the second day of the event Casual Connect in Amsterdam. Your Freegame team was present again, so we can convey experiences and impressions directly from the venue. This day conference was marked primarily by the four themes:

- Indie Developers
- M & A, Founding and accelerators
- Games as a service: Engagement and retention
- Social Casino and Real -money gaming

We were most interested in topics related to the independent scene. In this spirit, we conceived the whole visit that day of the conference. Besides, we devoted ourselves to identifying what games are prepared for you, often by completely unknown and new developers.

Part of the event is also a great competition "Indie Prize".This competition involves 103 teams; each has prepared a small presentation at its little table. Developers are often very nice and you can try a game which often comes with a running commentary. Why wouldn´t they be, when during the conference they are fighting for a position in the competition for the best independent game. How does it work? Throughout the year developers signed up to participate and the best were chosen. Each visitor of Casual Connect got the label when entering, of which purpose is clear. To mark the game, which they liked the most and which impressed them the most. Specifically, in our case, after two days of investigating and playing it is still not clear. So many imaginative and beautifully processed games at one place doesn´t make our decision easier. I´m afraid the developers will have to wait for our label until tomorrow. More games have yet our sympathy..

So much for the developers and now to what we learned in lectures. Sebastien Borget from Pixowl company, which we already know well for the amazing game The Sandbox (review by Dominik here on Freegame ) spoke about the strategy before , during and after the game's release. Although in our opinion the size of their company is a little beyond the notion of "india developer " lecture was extremely inspiring and helpful for beginners. Developers often forget what to do when the game supposed to be released, or spend all their time creating games and then they don´t devote themselves to the project anymore. According to Sebastien it is fundamentally wrong and he showed us graphs from which it is clearly seen that the greatest success of The Sandobox came after two years. This is certainly a long time and not every developer is able to trust his or her game for that long. But the truth is that the success is largely influenced by marketing actions after the release. Interestingly Sebastian claims, however, that he was able to take care of his work himself. This gives independent developers hope that it is not unrealistic to achieve such success in the absence of company providing the marketing.

Ten tips to sell your indie game brokered to us Tomas Ahlström in his excellent presentation. Positive charmer fascinated all students by his approach that creating games freelance is definitely worth it, it is often very creative and innovative.

On the other hand, the harsh realities of a highly competitive environment introduced us in their speech fellows Juan Grill of Joju Games and Chris Natsuume of Boomzap . They showed many obstacles in distributing games. The period of brick-and-mortar distributors in the nineties is long gone, but even though it might seem that a lot of web publishers should provide developers with a smooth entry into the market, the opposite is the truth. Strong competition not only among game developers, but also among publishers themselves places the author of the game in a difficult situation where they have to take care of a large number of legal issues in contracts. Another problem is cheating of some bad agencies that promise a large number of application download. However, in fact the programmed robots or other cheaper labour take care of the growth of numbers. Are they the actual users of applications? They are not. Presenting this harsh reality certainly opened the eyes of developers and if they are careful, they can avoid inconveniences. The implication of this lesson is that we have to take care of the game not only during development, but mainly after the release.

Today we have heard many opinions about the development of the games. Our verdict is "Game development is not easy, but if the author knows what to expect and is prudent, it is a creative work that can be paid the same as independent developers ."

Read more: Casual Connect in Amsterdam 2014.