Big numbers from Monument Valley, Crossy Road and Minecraft

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.busy's weekly news roundup as is for the week ending the 16th of january 2015 happy new year i'm john jordan so it's been a pretty big week for uh pocketgamer so um we kicked off the week with our pocket gamer connects london conference that was on the 13th and 14th of january so lots of preparation for that congratulations to everyone who's involved in that which was not really me but um i did some panel talks and stuff but uh we had a really good time at about over 1100 people turning up to london we had something ridiculous like 160 speakers 85 85 talks panel talks and speaker talks and we had a big very big indie pitch i think 17 indie developers came up on pitch we had investors looking at some finnish developers we had some education talks we had the big indie survival panel was that was a very good um wheats east meets west panel

um which uh looks like some of the biggest publishers in the world so people like chinese develop publish a perfect world from caban from the us king games we all know them um kind of giving giving very quick kind of 15 minute presentations uh we call it kind of all the juice and none of the uh none of the filler um so lots of kind of interesting things coming from that we'll do our kind of roundup of news from from the conference um but uh amazingly news continued elsewhere in the world as well so it's kind of been a start of the year so kind of maybe a bit quieter than usual but um i guess uh kind of we can put together kind of three three games that announce them uh monetization figures or some kind of uh some milestones really first one is uh is minecraft so everyone knows minecraft everyone has microsoft spent 2.5 billion dollars on on mo yang to buy them um but they uh they announced this week as everyone seems to do on twitter that the uh the mobile version of minecraft has now sold

30 million uh unit or 30 million downloads i guess um it's kind of difficult with minecraft minecraft is it is the paid game that keeps on giving it's um just this kind of kind of crazy phenomenon and it's it's i guess uh as we'll talk later on in the video it's sometimes when you're looking at paid games it's kind of best to go the paid games market minus minecraft because minecraft is just its own thing you can't very hard to draw any um conclusions about how you doing a paid game in that market how that would operate by using minecraft as an exact as an example um because it just is its own thing it's still very impressive um to have 30 million downloads of a gaming i'm going to say how many pirated versions there are obviously it's hard to pirate because you have to connect to a server but um i guess congratulations to those guys taking a pc game and i think it's now pretty much sold more on mobile than um kind of a pc another platform which i guess goes to show that mobile is is is a very strong platform for paid games when there is a way of

stopping piracy and i'll get some kind of drawing comparisons from minecraft which i just said shouldn't do anyway so moving on um going to free to play so um a game that kind of came out in december 2014 uh kind of um i guess gained a lot of attention for it for its art style crosley road which is a an endless version of frogger so i guess maybe not everyone has played frogger but for one of the oldest um video games out there and not particularly kind of i guess from the early days of the arcade games those games are not particularly focused on gameplay they were very um you're going to lose put some more money into the arcade machine but frogger has kind of been remade in this kind of wonderful kind of um kind of pixel art style by the australian developer hipster whale and i think it's one of these games it was a bit of a kind of a flappy bird it kind of came out just on ios just come out on google uh play now but it kind of just people liked it people kind of understood the idea frogger some quite nice artwork and some quite kind of interesting how it's um how it's kind of how the angle of which

you kind of play slightly different and and just with a lot of those endless games once they kind of gain a kind of um an audience and everyone's kind of looking for that new high score and there's a slight bragging rights thing um and this is fairly hard it's not quite as hard as flappy bird and we know it gives us a happy bird i guess but um and just a game that i did well and didn't really in terms of in-app purchases didn't really has in-app purchases but not really in a heavy-duty managed more kind of i guess in a you could say in a moba type way you're kind of unlocking new characters so more um a kind of a stylistic type thing but they announced um or or maybe unity ads announced for them that they integrated unity video ads and they uh generated one million dollars um just from integrating video ads um and actually at the conference we one of the one of the tracks that i was involved with was um had quite a coup quite a lot of involvement from video ad company so there's fungal is one and play connolly is another one and

there's various kind of companies where video advertising in general mobile kind of mobile advertising has i think always had a kind of very bad rap partly because banners were so awful um so you interact balance into your game people didn't like them because they click on them by mistake the whole fat finger syndrome they just weren't very good advertising um as an advertising kind of a model it's a format not very good so a lot of people move away from banners even though banners just by kind of uh kind of um just the amount of inventory with banners it's still still more than anything else but a lot of the key um kind of advertising networks have moved away from banners and gone to this kind of idea of native ads or interstitial ads where you're kind of popping up over a full screen or or having a much more kind of um kind of smooth process but video ads is basically the thing that came in 2014 and basically kind of just wiped the floor obviously video ads the video so you there are some bandwidth requirements but the what you can charge um what kind of advertisers will will pay for a video adam mock obviously developers and then networks can kind of gain from that is much more lucrative um

and when they particularly when they've uh added to kind of what we call incentivized um ads so basically you kind of win some in-game currency or you've just your games come to an end and say yeah let's run and you say you want to continue watch this video ad and then you can continue your high score um there's that kind of works in a kind of a kind of seamless psychological matter with the player so generally advertising has often been kind of right in your face and you didn't really want it but you didn't want to pay for it to go away so that model didn't work but well integrated video advertising just seems to be kind of click the buttons it's kind of the whole sweet spot win-win kind of thing going on there and actually one of the talks was actually looking at games that actually do integrate video advertising very well and rovio is an example they kind of seen doing that very well but across the road is hit a sweet spot as well say they use unity ads so unity was obviously keen to say that um games that weren't necessarily heavily monetized in terms of in-app purchases could generate you know large sums of money a million dollars in anyone's book is

fairly good and when you're a two-man indie team you're kind of happy with that um and that kind of brings us on to the the kind of final kind of game that was throwing out figures and it was our our friends over us too the london developer um of uh monument valley modern valley has kind of been a um it's kind of singular um success for paid games it's beautifully uh developed um and then it kind of had this kind of a controversy around its in-app purchase which is basically it's like a downloadable content the the forgotten shaw's kind of pack that gave you a whole bunch more levels that some people didn't feel they should be paying for but anyway um so us two um kind of i mean fairly unprecedented really in terms of the information they gave out so they they announced um some some pretty hard hard figures so let me uh let me just check that i know what these hard figures are um because it'd be embarrassing to get the hard figures wrong so there's been 2.4 million sales of the game which um in terms of obviously

download free to play games is not very much at all in terms of sales you know that's not bad so 1.7 million of those have been on ios again that's no big surprise it came out first on ios um and ios has kind of been its lead platform all the time and we all know that kind of ios has has um an audience that will pay more and audiences that will be um kind of economically um kind of stronger than than than other platforms in most territories um and that's uh yeah so the dow says uh 80 or 82 um of all the sales have come from ios and then interestingly they did also break out amazon so they did the deal with amazon uh where amazon gave away almost kind of half a million four hundred thousand copies uh as part of kind of amazon promoting its kind of um kind of christmas uh promotion so in terms of the uh forgotten shaw's um download pack um a third of ios users went on to buy that but what was kind of interesting was the they kind of broke out some figures kind of hard to tell how

accurate these are but they broke out some production cost figures so um let me find this one so the um monument valley itself the main game there's an eight-man team roughly took them 55 55 weeks to make so over that's an enormous amount of time really for a mobile game over a year to make um so they're kind of uh accounting for that at 850 000. um well the for forgotten shows took a further 29 weeks to make um and that's a cost of 549 a thousand dollars so total development costs were 1.4 million so um in terms of the the money that was actually um the net money that came to us too was uh let me find that one it was uh 5.8 million dollars so if you do all the maths you end up with a profit of 4.5 million dollars so in some ways this is i think this kind of cuts across it's kind of like a real glass half full half empty kind of question for the industry so in some ways these people made a game it was one of apple's games of the year it was many many commentators games of the year

i think everyone who pays the four dollars for it and plays it you know you don't really have any complaints it's a beautifully kind of a created um kind of art kind of uh game um some of the style weren't going to be attracted to certain types of audience but anyway so you have a a game that uh the company has made 4.5 million dollars on so is that a lot of money well clearly most people as i say uh when you when financial kind of figures start getting into the millions even with an eight-man team that that kind of works out fairly well um but what would be interesting is given the level of publicity given the the kind of pushes had from companies like apple and amazon you know would you have expected modern valley to have done much more than that clearly in the free play world the games that are doing very successfully there that are top grossing are making uh potentially half a million dollars a day or some of them are clearly making more than a million dollars a day so that's the upper level and obviously the people who kind of don't like paid games don't like the paid game model or says it's not a very useful model say that the problem with something like monument

valley is you pay the four dollars to buy the game you pay then pay the additional two dollars to buy the in-app purchase so that and that is the most you can you can pay you if you're a massive fan of the game you can complete it and then you're stuck whereas in a free to play game obviously you can pay as much as you like obviously very different styles of gameplay there is no correct answer there is a glass half full half empty so so either in some ways modern value is a massive success it shows how paid games can survive and particularly i guess it's got a lot of love from apple apple he's pushing the paid game um kind of model um harder than the free to play one but for the free play game guys the monarch valley is an example of how massive success is capped in the paid market because you just can't extract those for those guys who want to pay old girls who want to pay hundreds and thousands of dollars to get further on in that game this does not you know that game this game does not provide that in terms of the financial model or in terms of the gameplay model so so there you have we started we start the year with a with a quandary is moon valley a massive success or an example of the paid cap that you have on games where

you can't have lots of in-app purchases there we go maybe something to be answered later on in the year