2015
Company
Documents about 2015
Huge Demand for UK Games Fund
The UK Games Fund experienced immediate and significant market validation during its launch phase in late 2015, highlighting a substantial appetite for financial support within the domestic interactive entertainment sector.
- The UK Games Fund received over 100 applications during its launch round, indicating significant demand from the domestic games development sector.
- CEO Paul Durrant noted that the volume of applications exceeded initial expectations, confirming high levels of creative activity across the UK.
- Successful applicants for the launch round were scheduled to be notified during the week of December 21, 2015.
Facts and Figures about the Games Industry in Poland
Poland has emerged as a significant hub for game development within Eastern Europe, characterized by a rapidly maturing industry and a strong domestic player base.
- Poland's games industry generated €262.66 million in revenue in 2014, more than double that of its closest Eastern European competitor, Romania, which recorded €114.89 million.
- The Polish games industry is ranked as the 23rd largest in the world according to market tracker Newzoo.
- 60% of Polish internet users play games, with 35% playing on PC, 28% on smartphones or tablets, and 10% on consoles.
iOS Gaming Leaders: October 2015
This analysis provides a performance overview of the iOS gaming market for October 2015, utilizing data from the Store Intelligence platform to track downloads, revenue, and growth trends across the United States and international markets.
- Game of War overtook Clash of Clans as the top-grossing iOS game worldwide in October 2015, driven by an 8% month-over-month revenue increase while Clash of Clans saw a 1% decline.
- Smashy Road: Wanted became the most downloaded iOS game in the U.S. for October 2015, gaining nearly four million downloads over the previous month.
- Electronic Arts' Need for Speed outperformed Smashy Road: Wanted internationally by approximately 1.5 million downloads, despite losing the top spot in the U.S. market.
Unpacking the $5.9BN King Acquisition Price
The $5.9 billion acquisition of King Digital by Activision Blizzard, announced in November 2015, represents a strategic move to diversify revenue streams and capture a significant mobile gaming audience.
- Activision Blizzard acquired King Digital for $5.9 billion, representing a 20% premium on King's enterprise value and 8x its projected 2016 EBITDA.
- Activision Blizzard funded $3.6 billion of the purchase price using offshore cash, allowing the company to avoid US repatriation taxes on the transaction.
- The acquisition provides Activision Blizzard with access to King’s 330 million monthly unique users, 60% of whom are female, offering a strategic demographic expansion.
Creative Industries Including Games Add $3.848b to NZ Economy
A 2015 report commissioned by the industry alliance WeCreate and prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) quantifies the economic impact of New Zealand’s creative industries.
- New Zealand’s creative industries (games, music, books, and film/television) contributed $3.848 billion to the national GDP in 2014.
- The creative sector supports approximately 42,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs when accounting for both direct and wider industry employment.
- Film and television is the largest contributor to the sector, accounting for 74% of the total GDP impact and 31,416 total FTE jobs.
Whale Spending and Retention in Freemium Apps
The prevailing industry assumption that freemium success relies primarily on aggressive, short-term monetization of high-spending users, or whales, is challenged by an analysis of the United States iPhone Top Grossing chart as of September 2015.
- Retention is the primary driver of long-term monetization, as evidenced by the fact that none of the top 10 grossing apps are currently in the top 10 downloaded list.
- Successful freemium apps prioritize long-term user engagement over short-term purchasing bursts, with over 50% of the top 10 grossing apps having been released prior to 2014.
- The dominance of established apps in the top grossing charts suggests that the inability to retain users over long periods, rather than poor app store discovery, is the primary barrier for new entrants.
Psicologia del Videogioco: Come i Mondi Virtuali Influenzano Mente e Comportamento
The document is a critical book review, published in 2015, of "Psicologia del videogioco: Come i mondi virtuali influenzano mente e comportamento" by Luca Argenton and Stefano Triberti, two psychology PhD researchers from Milan, published by Apogeo.
- The book "Psicologia del videogioco" (Apogeo, 2015) by Milan psychology PhD researchers Luca Argenton and Stefano Triberti offers a balanced synthesis of the scientific literature on games, neither condemning nor uncritically praising them, and avoids the sensationalist, moralizing tone common in earlier texts.
- The authors write as gamers themselves, which the reviewer credits with helping them move beyond common clichés about the medium.
- The book is organized around four themes: identity, immersion, emotion and cognition, and psychopathology.
Re-framing Video Games in the Light of Cinema
This editorial introduction to the fourth issue of the peer-reviewed journal G|A|M|E, published in 2015, examines the complex relationship between video games and cinema.
- The editorial argues that video games and cinema are linked through shared aesthetics and iconography, but also through production models, professional roles, consumption habits, and theory, making film theory a useful lens for game studies.
- The cinematic character of games extends beyond narrative and genre to interface design, framing, editing, and spectatorial practices such as YouTube walkthroughs and live streams.
- Game studies historically fought to establish independence from film-based frameworks, while film scholars were slow to engage with interactive media.
Play the Game in the Opening Scene: A Multidisciplinary Lens for Understanding (Video)Ludic Movies, Including Super Mario Bros., Resident Evil and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
This study by Enrico Gandolfi and Roberto Semprebene, published in Game Journal in 2015, proposes a multidisciplinary framework for analyzing video game-to-film adaptations, often called "videoludic" movies.
- The authors propose a multidisciplinary framework for analyzing video game-to-film adaptations ("videoludic" movies), assessing each across four dimensions (production, agential, representational, economic/cultural impact) and four analytic bridges (narrative, aesthetic, encyclopaedic, dynamic) along continuums of coherence and dependency relative to the source game.
- The central argument is that a game adaptation's success hinges on balancing fidelity to the game's identity against accessibility for viewers who have never played it.
- Super Mario Bros. (1993) received the lowest coherence rating (C-) because its major departures from the source, including a cyberpunk New York setting and altered characters and goals, alienated general audiences despite the game's large player base.
Towards a Typology of Video Game Trailers: Between the Ludic and the Cinematic
Jan Švelch's paper, published in Issue 04 of Critical Notes in 2015, proposes a new typology of video game trailers grounded in their relationship to the ludic (rule-based, interactive) and cinematic (narrative, fictional) dimensions of games.
- Jan Švelch's 2015 paper in Critical Notes (Issue 04) argues that existing trailer classifications based on formal criteria are descriptive and inconsistently applied, and calls for a theory-driven typology that explains how a linear trailer represents a nonlinear game.
- The paper's proposed typology has three categories: performance trailers (staging player interaction to show possible gameplay in linear form), transmedia trailers (expanding a game's fictional world through cinematic footage as a tool of transmedia storytelling), and interface trailers (mimicking a game's interface to convey interactivity and creating two layers of paratextuality).
- Current publisher and press discourse classifies trailers by four overlapping criteria: content (gameplay footage, CGI, live action), date (teaser, reveal, announcement, launch), venue (e.g., E3, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show), and focus (story, combat, multiplayer).
De-framing Video Games from the Light of Cinema
Perron and Arsenault's 2015 essay, "De-framing Video Games from the Light of Cinema," argues that video game scholarship has been shaped too heavily by a cinema-centric framing that treats film as the default lens for understanding games.
- The essay argues that video game scholarship has been overly shaped by a cinema-centric framing that treats film as the default lens, and that this alignment is a cultural and historical construction rather than a natural fit.
- Its central thesis is methodological: games should be analyzed through their own traditions, including real-time animation, parallel projection, cartography, and text-based interactive fiction, along with ludic and computational dimensions that cinema-focused analysis underweights.
- Drawing on Gaudreault and Marion's theory, the authors call on scholars to use film theory with awareness of its limits rather than importing film assumptions wholesale.
'Tell No One': Cinema Auditorium as Game-Space: Audience Participation, Performance and Play
Kennedy and Atkinson's 2015 study examines Secret Cinema's immersive staging of Back to the Future as a hybrid form that combines film, game, and theatre.
- The study frames Secret Cinema's immersive staging of Back to the Future as a hybrid of film, game, and theatre in which audiences actively perform within the film rather than simply watch it.
- Based on participant observation and pre- and post-event questionnaires with 70 participants, the authors find the experience is shaped as much by play as by viewing.
- Pre-event in-fiction websites, assigned identities, and costume instructions, combined with on-site navigation of a recreated Hill Valley, encouraged roleplay and cosplay-like behaviour, with participants describing the experience as "live" and "in character."