Are we in an M&A bubble, iOS 8 rates plateau and World of Tanks Blitz

hello this is john jordan from pocket gamer doctors and this is our weekly news roundup for the week ending the 10th of october 2014. so um one of the things this week we've been uh kind of i guess we always look at kind of uh what i call m a activity mergers and acquisitions um and uh it's been an interesting kind of survey kind of like a roundup of what's happening what's been happening during the q3 period so that that's um between july and september 2014 um from digi capital it's kind of interesting they do this every quarter so um even if there's something interesting happening in the quarter the interesting thing is often the comparisons with other quarters so they've been looking um across the whole games industry but specifically they've been looking breaking down into into what's happening in mobile games and um what they've kind of uh been looking at is they've um it's a record uh quarter in terms of m a activity uh during q3 now that's kind of

not to be um you know no one should be really surprised about that because we've seen some really massive deals um but if you strip out those deals actually the level is running it pretty much the same as previous years which kind of makes you kind of wonder you know are we are we seeing something different or you know is it right to strip out these five big deals so if you look at the big deals it means no surprise here this kind of stuff we've seen so microsoft buying minecraft for 2.5 billion and we've had amazon buying twitch for almost a billion dollars um we've had some kind of a chinese stuff going on in china so a chinese company are giant interactive they were on the stock exchange and they took themselves private and that was like a 1.6 billion deal um and uh let's have a quick look down um and obviously yeah obviously that's lip checking facebook and oculus early earlier in the in the quarter so these five kind of big deals and the interesting thing that i guess now is for for kind of journalists like me who who like to use the term bubble well i guess we'll generously use the term bubble when it comes to financials but um you know often we're using it in the in the proper manner and analysts like digicapital kind of frown upon um people

like me using the term bubble all the time but um when we when you kind of have the these uh these massive deals happening and um i guess the interesting thing in all those cases is those deals have kind of been questioned in terms of their long-term uh kind of value for the buying company so will microsoft you know generate 2.5 billion or more of profit off of the minecraft deal um that's the kind of long-term question and and the microsoft deal you could argue the minecraft deal is one of the better deals that's happened there you know will amazon ever generate a billion dollars in profit off twitch which at the moment is not generating any profit at all so um yeah so that's kind of stuff that's been kind of interesting interesting me um in terms of our kind of general pocket gamer uh kind of new kind of more kind of i guess hard news activity stuff that's actually happening um there has been another kind of interesting deal it's a company that probably you guys won't have heard very much of partly because they've just changed their name but there's company called sponsorpay who were very big in the pc uh user acquisition um uh kind of scene a couple years ago the german companies lots of these companies tend to be because obviously

the pc web browser game business very big in in germany um and then they moved over to mobile and recently um obviously because they knew this big deal was coming they changed their name from sponsored to fiber um and uh they just announced that they've been bought by um kind of an interesting korean korean stroke german company called rnts media not particularly well known they are floated in on the luxembourg stock exchange but um it's kind of weird kind of a weird announcement it was announced that the deal was happening but sometimes happens that the price was not disclosed um if you had a look around on the rnts website you could see that they just they'd raised about 50 million dollars um in in shares and through new um through raising cash and and putting out new shares um which is obviously to to buy uh a sponsor pay now called fiber um but after that was kind of kind of came out then they kind of put out a further statement actually disclosing that there

was 190 million dollars so again this is a kind of companies people have never really heard of who have been doing sterling kind of effort helping people kind of buy users um and now have been bought for 190 million so in a sense you know when we're looking at these big kind of emergent acquisitions and amazon spending almost a billion dollars buying buying twitch you know we could say oh that is that he's out he's at a bubble deal but perhaps these kind of smaller deals in terms of kind of monetary value obviously 190 million dollars being smaller than a 970 billion a million dollars um but that's actually where the bubbles happening so i guess this is kind of one thing we have to look to see the end of the year when people like digi capital kind of do their 2014 comparison 2013 that'll be where we'll really see kind of kind of what kind of what's happening um in terms of kind of more general pocket gamer kind of coverage our charticle was kind of interesting this week we're looking at world of tanks blitz so obviously world of tanks massively successful could be argued one of the the most successful um pc franchises over over the last five years finally come to mobile um it's kind of even in its blitz form which is a cut down not cut down version but they kind

of streamline should we say version four for mobile devices it's kind of done okay actually surprisingly um not surprisingly has a very highly tuned monetization um kind of uh kind of flow which is a bit different to other games so you kind of have xp and you can um there's this kind of different ways of using xp and different types of xp and you can kind of buy different kind of time subscription levels to get those different um kind of level levels of xp which help you either generally level up or level up faster through the tech tree to open up various tanks obviously called world of tanks all about tanks but the interesting thing i guess um certainly from a personal point of view is the download for the game is actually 1.4 gigabytes so that's quite large and for most people you know for this for the smallest ipad uh like the one i have that's basically ten percent of your of your of your available storage is in that one game so it was quite interesting to see that it has done pretty well has um hasn't been in the top 100 top grossing probably hasn't got that many downloads in comparison to its top grossing which kind of said which is

kind of due to how good the monetization is um going back to something that we have i've kind of banged on about a bit in previous weeks but it is kind of related so we've still been looking um at the the the uh adoption rate for ios eight which is the new operating system um from apple which has obviously come about to agree with with the new iphone sixes um now that was a good this is kind of something that i've banged on about and i've kind of i kind of given up banging on about it because i kind of thought it was a bit of a dead subject really but now it's transpired that um apple were quite keen um on three days after launch just to suggest that according to their estimates which have taken off people using the app store that are quite a high percentage of people were had updated which we hadn't really seen from third party data tracking services like fiscal who were who were so apple was suggesting kind of in the 40 was it was had updated very quickly whereas fiscal was saying it was kind of in the 20s to 30s but now um several weeks after three weeks after the the ios 8 has been

unfortunately for available that they have updated their figures but they they from the previous number they've moved from 46 to 47 percent of people on the app store had been using the apps updated to ios 8 which clearly suggests that basically nothing's changed um that's kind of what we've seen in fiscal as well from there from their data that the the the kind of adoption rate has kind of slowed almost plateaued so now with ios 8 we're kind of seeing it so the same adoption rate from launch as ios 5 and much much less than ios and six and seven which is not necessarily a bad thing obviously it's a big download it's um about it so about six gigabytes of available space you need to download it if you're doing it over the air which is i guess what a certain proportion of people are doing but it's interesting i guess for um kind of ios developers who have never really had to deal with that with os fragments and fragmentation level before obviously on on on android is systemic kind of in terms of hardware and software you just have to deal with it but on ios people have generally gone for ios because there's been very clean hardware and basically everyone at least the

majority of people have been on the most up-to-date ios mark um so that hasn't happened yet it'll be interesting to see kind of when the majority of people will be using ios 8 it will make things a bit easier for developers now let's have a quick uh well what else do we have have going on this week so yes the other thing are mavens group there are a group of experts who like to debate things they were looking at windows 10 so that was announced last week um obviously it's not out to 2015 but not really a lot of takers people seem to think that that microsoft is is not going to gain much traction um on on the phone space so um we've done a lot of kind of high level stuff this week but um come back next week and see what the news is then thank you