2015
Company
Documents about 2015
"A Pure Meritocracy Blind to Identity": Exploring the Online Responses to All-Female Teams in Reddit
Esports audiences' attitudes toward women are examined through 952 Reddit comments, 910 from r/leagueoflegends and 42 from r/GlobalOffensive, responding to Team YP's 2015-2016 announcements of sponsored all-female Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends teams.
- Commenters on r/leagueoflegends and r/GlobalOffensive (952 Reddit comments analysed by Siutila and Havaste) overwhelmingly described esports as a meritocracy "blind to identity" while viewing all-female teams with suspicion.
- The dominant community view was that a sponsorship by a pornography company was a publicity stunt that damaged perceptions of women players, and that all-female teams' low rankings and rule-based exclusion from top competitions made them ineligible for higher-tier play.
- Many commenters asserted women showed less skill, though some cited Ratan et al. (2015), which found men and women acquire League of Legends skill at equal rates when time played is controlled.
Fragmentation: Between Expansion Packs and Episodic Video Games
Online distribution platforms such as Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Steam moved the games industry from selling products to providing services, and that shift made downloadable content a central means of extending a game's life.
- The report argues that the shift to downloadable content and digital storefronts (Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam) has turned the games industry from a product-based model into a service-based one.
- Its central thesis is that expansion packs and episodic releases share a common serial logic: both fragment a game's experience over time, delay gratification, and extend a title's lifespan like serialized media.
- The author distinguishes extensive DLC, which expands the original narrative (e.g., BioShock Infinite's Burial at Sea), from supplementary DLC, which adds gameplay without extending the story, but treats both as forms of the same fragmented structure.
The Games Monitor 2018
The Games Monitor 2018, the third edition after 2012 and 2015, maps the Dutch games industry and concludes that it is accelerating.
- The Dutch games industry saw a net job growth of over 60% concentrated in Utrecht, Eindhoven, and Amsterdam between 2015 and 2018.
- The total number of entertainment game companies increased by over 50 since 2015, continuing a previous trend, while the number of applied game developers stabilized at 114 companies.
- Applied games have a strong foothold in the Dutch industry, with healthcare and education remaining the largest market segments for applied game companies, and 62% of studios working on five or more projects in 2018.
Games Monitor: The Netherlands 2018
The Games Monitor 2018 is the third edition of a factsheet tracking the Dutch video games industry from 2015 to 2018, with comparisons to the 2012 and 2015 editions.
- The Dutch games industry reached 575 companies and 3,850 jobs by the end of 2018, generating an estimated annual turnover of €225–300 million.
- The sector experienced accelerated growth between 2015 and 2018, maintaining an average annual job increase of 10 percent.
- Entertainment game development expanded by 33 percent, while the applied games sector, serving healthcare, education, and government, stabilized.
The Data Behind 10 Years of the iOS App Store – 2018
From July 2010 through December 2017, the iOS App Store recorded more than 170 billion downloads and over $130 billion in consumer spend, with nearly 10,000 apps each generating more than $1 million.
- The gaming sector is the primary economic driver of the iOS App Store, accounting for 75% of total consumer spend despite representing only 31% of total downloads.
- Between 2010 and 2018, the platform generated $130 billion in consumer spend, with revenue growing at a 52% compound annual growth rate compared to a 15% growth rate for downloads.
- The Asia-Pacific region now accounts for nearly 60% of global iOS revenue, with China overtaking the United States in 2016 to become the largest market for both downloads and spending.
The Data Behind 10 Years of Google Play (2018)
Google Play's first decade of data, covering January 2012 through August 2018, shows a platform that reached nearly 330 billion cumulative downloads and over $85 billion in consumer spend.
- Between 2012 and 2018, the Google Play Store generated over $85 billion in consumer spend across 330 billion total downloads, with more than 5,000 apps surpassing the $1 million revenue milestone.
- Annual consumer spend on Google Play is projected to reach $42 billion by 2022, representing a 90% increase from 2017 levels.
- While India leads in total download volume with 36.9 billion, Japan is the most lucrative market, contributing $25.1 billion in total consumer spend.
The Ludomusicology Research Group: Interview
The Ludomusicology Research Group was founded in August 2011 by three early-career academics, Mark Sweeney, Tim Summers, and Michiel Kamp, as a way to discover who else was researching video game music and to create a hub for connecting them.
- The Ludomusicology Research Group was founded in August 2011 by Mark Sweeney, Tim Summers, and Michiel Kamp, initially to identify other researchers of video game music and build a connecting hub, with its inaugural conference held as a Royal Musical Association study day at St Catherine's College, Oxford, featuring keynotes from Anahid Kassabian and Isabella van Elferen.
- In December 2016 the group joined the North American Conference on Video Game Music (est. 2014) and Audio Mostly (begun 2006) to launch the Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games, which plans a peer-reviewed Journal of Sound and Music in Games.
- The group's conference broadened from musicology to include ethnomusicology, computer science, psychology, and theatre studies, with sustained participation from industry composers, and its venues have rotated through Oxford, Liverpool, Chichester, Utrecht (its first overseas event in 2015), and Southampton.
Desert Island Diskettes: A Journey through Video Game Sound History
Karen Collins's "Desert Island Diskettes: A Journey through Video Game Sound History" is a personal, curated retrospective of video game audio, published in Issue 06 of Critical Notes in 2017.
- Karen Collins's essay in Critical Notes Issue 06 (2017) rejects a canonical 'best of' ranking, instead choosing fifteen games for their personal resonance with the author, modeled on the BBC's 'Desert Island Discs'.
- The fifteen profiled games span roughly 1972 to 2014, from Pong-era and PC beeper sounds through the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, NES, Sega Genesis, and PlayStation to modern titles like BioShock and Peggle 2.
- Each entry ties the music to hardware constraints, such as the Atari TIA's atonal tuning, the C64's module-based composition, and the Genesis's shift from FM synthesis to digital audio.
The Last Jedi Premiere More Than Doubled Star Wars Mobile Game Downloads
Star Wars mobile games saw a sharp surge in new-player acquisition during the opening weekend of The Last Jedi in December 2017.
- The opening weekend of 'The Last Jedi' drove a 153% increase in new Star Wars mobile game installs, resulting in over one million new downloads compared to approximately 413,000 the previous weekend.
- Top-performing titles significantly outperformed the franchise average: Netmarble's 'Star Wars: Force Arena' grew by 260%, EA's 'Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes' by 216%, and Disney's 'Star Wars: Commander' by 201%.
- While the 2015 release of 'The Force Awakens' generated a higher total volume of 2.17 million downloads, 'The Last Jedi' achieved a stronger relative growth rate of 2.5x week-over-week compared to the 1.8x growth seen in 2015.
Interview with Joonas Laakso, Executive Producer at Next Games Oy, Finland
Joonas Laakso, Executive Producer at Helsinki-based Next Games Oy, discusses how the studio builds mobile games from major entertainment properties and how regional culture shapes global mobile gaming.
- Next Games Oy is a Helsinki-based mobile game studio of roughly 120 people, founded in 2013, that builds games on established entertainment IP and aims to be the preferred partner for bringing major entertainment brands into mobile gaming.
- Its flagship title, The Walking Dead: No Man's Land (2015), is followed by the upcoming augmented reality project The Walking Dead: Our World and a Blade Runner mobile game in development.
- Acceptable content varies sharply by region: blood, dead bodies, and religious symbols require careful handling, and South Korea imposes a strict age-rating barrier.
Video Game Development in Asia: A Research Project on Cultural Heritage and National Identity
This report summarizes a 2017 collaborative research project investigating the implementation of cultural heritage and national identity in video game development across four Asian nations: India, Japan, Nepal, and the Philippines.
- The study addresses a research gap: while media-and-national-identity scholarship has focused on social media, radio, TV, and print, video games, a pervasive medium especially among younger audiences, have been largely overlooked.
- The authors frame games as "secondary worlds" in which national identities are imagined, histories reconstructed, and traditions reinvented.
- The Nepal case contrasts AAA title Far Cry 4 (2014), which presents Nepal as a romantic, timeless "Shangri-La," with the Nepali mobile game polyTricks (2016), which emphasizes natural beauty, economic development, and eco-political critique.
There is money to be made from attending conferences
The primary purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate the tangible financial and professional benefits for game developers who actively participate in industry conferences.
- Strategic attendance at industry conferences like Pocket Gamer Connects directly correlates with significant revenue, with one regional cluster generating over 1 million euros in combined investment and contract revenue between 2015 and 2017.
- Conference participation acts as a critical pipeline for growth, where initial networking often leads to subcontracting work that builds the operational credibility necessary to secure later seed funding or publishing deals.
- International hubs such as London and Helsinki provide essential access to global capital markets, including investors from China, South Korea, and various European nations, which compensates for limited local investment options.