Clones, sequels and original IP, subsidising wearables, and will mobile games always rise?

hello and welcome to pocketgame.busy's weekly news roundup this is for the week ending the 5th of december 2014. um so we're coming to the end of the year so um i guess kind of big news stories you kind of think we'll be tailing away um when we get to the stage now we're kind of looking back at the year in review which is certainly something we'll be doing over the next couple of weeks but there was there was still some news kind of bubbling around kind of this week so a few kind of interesting things companies getting funding still so there's a company called space ape um who i guess are not particularly that one and they're a london-based uh developer a lot of them came out of ea's playfish studios um when that kind of got scaled down so they're guys who've known free to play games uh pretty well um playfish being famous for it's facebook games um and what they've done is kind of um it's kind of interesting so they have a game called uh um samurai

siege and it could be it's kind of one of those games that could be put in that kind of tub named kind of clash of clans clone so whatever you want to call those which is not to kind of be rude about it particularly i mean it clearly is a it's a strategy game that's been based on the success of clash of clans um and to a degree you can look at it and go well it's like fashion plans but we samurais and you build your bases and you build armies of samurais and you go and destroy other people's bases um but the interesting thing is so one thing one advantage that these guys got they built a pretty nice game looks good they were onto android very quickly in on android pretty much before um before clash of clans was obviously yet superstar were quite late to android um the other thing that they when talking to them about that game is they were much kind of uh kind of re try to rethink how how um how alliances work so they kind of like almost like not quite force you but pretty much force you in into lights very quickly into that game because they obviously realize that getting people into alliances is is a big knock-on effect for engagement and retention and monetization all those all those kind of things so that game's been pretty successful

obviously not clash of clans type successful there's not doing a billion dollars a year but they're saying they've done 200 million at 220 million dollars in a year which is not bad for a startup um and they just raised another seven million dollars um they have a second game coming out called uh rival kingdoms again kind of in the strategy uh kind of genre looks a bit more fantasy um but again um alliances or kind of how kind of groups of players playing together is a key aspect of that that'll be out next year so it'd be interesting to see kind of where they go with that and they're with their seven million pounds they're going to be dollars they're going to be kind of user acquisition and hiring and kind of building up that studio into it into a bigger studio so it's kind of a i guess a success story for london the uk we haven't seen too many uh companies really other than the natural motion who've made a successful free-to-play game so it's kind of good to see at least um so looking at kind of uh other other things going on um one thing that we looked at in our charticle this week so we've had some some big games launching i guess um the most successful big game to launch the last couple weeks is candy crush saga her candy crush soda saga sure i should

say that's my uh my freudian slip was suggesting that actually that game is obviously a um something that uh people who played candy crush are being kind of pointed towards and that's actually going to be massively successful so if you look pretty much in all the major markets it's gone out and it's gone top five top grossing um which is obviously massively successful partly because king has stacked load of money for user acquisition partly because everyone knows candy crush um so it's kind of like a kind of a double whammy um that's clearly a a franchise that's massive billion dollar franchise you know not a franchise one of the things i guess we look back for in 2014 in review a lot of people are talking about you know it's clearly been a year where the top grossing charts have been pretty static not much has kind of entered into those charts you can argument the only game really to make an impact is uh is kim kardashian hollywood from gloom clearly that's a branded game um and the kind of scenes you know there's a good argument going around now is is original content you know can that break through now just because it costs so much to launch at position y and use recognition wise and it could

just kind of hard to break into a market that's quite mature um so we were looking at this game a game had come out it's been massively pushed by apple which is kind of interesting so it's called uh vainglory so it's one it's a moba we've kind of seen over the over the last year lots of kind of mobas being attempted on mobile nothing's really stuck um this is the kind of um you know a studio super evil mega core good name for studios they're kind of like a start-up from san francisco very well-funded actually funded with uh some of the some of the people who were involved with uh playfish that's kind of square in the circle there um and they've made a really nice game it's a moba so it's appealing to a certain group of kind of players so they're trying to take some of the kind of that pc market that kind of league of legends market it's designed from the ground up they say for touchscreen i mean everyone kind of says that um they're equally designed for kind of lan land style place obviously not on lan you're on white you're wireless but it's designed so people can who are playing the game can play kind of together in a room so you kind of have your kind of three by three kind of match going on there um um but

the interesting thing there is even they've not really spent a lot of money on youtube yet to be fair to them but they've had massive push by apple they've been in lots of adverts they've been on the keynote for apple they've been pushed as a kind of high-end tablet game because it looks so good um and really download-wise they've done okay but top-grossing this is hard to say they've only been going for it they've only been out for a month not even that but they haven't really made an impact not even not even top 200 yet so i think that'll be kind of something we'll keep looking back on you know can companies who have are being pushed by apple who do have a lot of money if you use application okay you could argue that mobas are a niche kind of audience there's a certain type of guy's going to play a moba not the kind of person who's going to play candy crush soccer necessarily but that's kind of the tension that i think is going on in the mobile world at the moment yeah a few other things to talk about and actually a good a good kind of follow-on to that is our stateside columnist carter dotson always interesting to read he has a kind of different take on what's going on and i guess everyone at the moment is still kind of mobile's growing and mobile is growing so that's fine you know whatever we are how many um is it 30 trillion 30 trillion 30 billion dollar industry or something i don't know um certainly

the predictions are it will be that way by kind of 20 20. um but carter has kind of taken a contrarian view which i quite like contrarian views or it's kind of good to get thinking the other way around and he's saying in his latest column you know we'll mobile just rise and rise so obviously mobile games have kind of exploded a bit out of nowhere obviously there was mobile gaming to degree before smartphones came in before particularly kind of um iphone and ipod came in but um the kind of mobile games have have exploded kind of partly as a byproduct so people always had phones and now they headphones that could do other computing type things on them and play games in a much more natural way than you had when you had java phones so kind of gaming was a kind of a byproduct of a technological change that happened generally it wasn't something you know certainly steve jobs didn't think i'm gonna make an iphone everyone play games on it i mean up to the whole thing of apple have been kind of pretty anti-games they're in their entire lifestyle certainly steve jobs was pretty anti-games um so kind of carter was kind of saying well you know could stuff happen um to phones that make them that make them kind of less liable for people to play games on them you know if potentially if smart if

phones go to smart watches how would that change the way people play games would it monetize less equally there's an argument that kind of we've had these big brands we've had candy crush we've had clash of clans we've had um puzzle and dragons in in in japan and these have been massive billion dollar kind of franchises but um what we've kind of seen as we've discussed before is we've just had lots of clones around so match free everything almost runs through actually type game everyone's doing like a strategy type game so we're kind of seeing not a lot of originality originality isn't being supported in the charts um and it's not being supported by audience spend so potentially we have this situation where the clones are cloned to clone the cloned and the audience just goes well i've played this kind of game before i'm not so interested so your spending could go down um or you could have technological change so um obviously we don't know what's gonna happen yet but it's kind of an interesting kind of uh kind of contrarian view to the fact that mobile games will continue to rise forever and ever um and i guess something i'm particularly interested in and something that our another of our columnist spencer uh spanish spencer was talking about this week was looking at wearables so i'm quite keen on wearables clearly they have a big kind of fitness health kind of aspect that will probably

be their kid application uh gaming will be a byproduct of that so maybe um maybe we we kind of have a uh have a hope that wearables will be big because there will be some interesting kind of game products that will come off that and that will be a new market for us but the big issue for wearables really is they're going to cost let's say the apple apple watch is going to be you know more than probably 250 up plus dollars um most of the wearables now are about 250 that kind of price range for something kind of half decent um and clearly people aren't going to buy that um you know the geeks will you know um early adopters will buy that but clearly the mass market isn't going to buy a wearable probably not going to drop kind of 200 pounds 250 and 300 on that kind of thing um just for the sake of it so spanner was looking at what business mechanisms could there be that could kind of drive take up of wearables and one of the things he was looking at is something i kind of kind of um have kind of talked about before as well is kind of convenient will the insurance industry will that they somehow subsidize them

will it be that kind of um picking the state where obviously healthcare is is is kind of funded by health insurance so could your health insurance company either say get a wearable and we'll knock off money from from from how much you pay us or could actually they just basically go anywhere you know we'll give you or give your smart a smart watch use it we can track your track your kind of movements we can see kind of at the degree how healthy you are and that will have a knock-on effect and potentially i mean you know who knows um but potentially that that could kind of really drive wearable usage which i think um probably is something i know everyone wants to see but it's kind of like that that's one for next year i guess um wearables wearables and more mobile games continue to explode um and if you want to find out that kind of stuff obviously pocket gamer connects london which is our next conference which is the 13th and 14th of january in london it's kind of stuff we're covering so uh so come along hope to see you there you