F2P's soul, Glu's financials, and the even hotter Helsinki scene

hello and welcome to a special halloween version of pocket game without business weekly news roundup i'm john jordan and i normally wear this kind of stuff because that's kind of personal no uh so this is for the news for the week ending 31st of october 2014 that being halloween so we're kind of entering the uh the financial kind of quarter period reporting period which um it's kind of really interesting just every every kind of a three month week we get a kind of snapshot of where all the uh publicly uh kind of owned companies on various stock exchanges around the world uh kind of how they've been doing over the past three months um it's kind of interesting that depending on where you are they all report at different times um so but we kind of started it this week has been like the start of the kind of i guess we call them the big guns um and it's kind of a lot of work now because there's a there's probably about 30 maybe 30 or so companies maybe a bit more probably 30 40 companies that we look at

the financials of they're not all heavily into mobile um so as an example um people like to kind of uh take to announce their financials um doesn't really affect mobile two percent of the revenue comes from mobile's pretty small um uh but it's presumably uh growing um it's kind of interesting for the first time we've been looking at a ubisoft obviously a massive console company third biggest games company really in the west um it doesn't kind of break out mobile specifically but it did actually point out um that for the first uh six months of its quarter um sales are up uh 45 compared to the entirety of last year for mobile games um so i mean obviously that's from a very low base but still kind of impressive um let's kind of see that from ubisoft and hopefully in future they'll actually break out their um their mobile game sales as a segment so we can kind of see what's going on there but i guess the um the kind of highlights of the news of the kind of financial use so far for mobile games companies were ea which does break out ea mobile's contribution although not profit that to ea mobile but yeah kind of pretty good 123 million dollars

of of revenue from from ea mobile um and that's up 64 year-on-year so kind of pretty impressive from from me obviously been pretty kind of a pretty heavy acquiring stuff over the years so it's kind of um kind of been growing that market kind of organically and and through acquisition but uh um it particularly pointed to its sports brand so i guess it's kind of interesting that we looked to mobile was or we did look to mobile maybe a couple years ago a year ago as there's a kind of a a new playing field for a new kind of entrance to kind of find new opportunities and stuff but for me are you kind of looking it seems like a lot of it's revenue now it's coming from from the maddens and the fifa's and how they just kind of bringing those to mobile i guess a kind of more interesting bellwether kind of stuck as i was looking at is glue mobile so glute mobile is it's a pure play mobile uh company just as mobile games just as free to play games at the moment um and it's been on the nasdaq for um you know a long time like i'm getting over almost 10 years now and it's been very interesting to look at how glue mobile has been delivering or not delivering financial performance because it um

originally it was a kind of a java based company and then it's moved into free to play now it's wholly free to play um and and because that's a big transition it's hard to deal with it's been lost making from for many um quarters pretty much all its quarters um and it's had to do rights issues basically go to shareholders and raise money um a couple of times over the last year and basically to keep keep it going but the big the big change has happened for glue and i think they're maybe they're as amazing as amazed as anyone else is a kim kardashian hollywood so glue has built his reputation making kind of quite high-end 3d action games for blokes effectively boys or you know lads or i don't know what a young man i suppose is the appropriate um genre but it has had one company um that has been making casual games they had a series called stardom which is a bit of casual um you're a kind of a in you in hollywood trying to make your way um and they did okay those games but they've met they've taken that game play they did a couple of games made um using that um and they slapped the king not actually wrong they didn't slap the kim kardashian lego brand on it they got kim

kardashian um as a brand and they actually integrated kim kardashian as a person very well into that into that game and king kardashian hollywood um it's the first it's the first quarter of revenue we've seen where it's been a full quarter of revenue from that game and perhaps not surprisingly because everyone knows it's done very well particularly north america kim kardashian hollywood actually accounted for 52 of glue's entire revenue during that quarter there's different ways of looking at it so um there's gap and non-gap which you'll really won't go into but it's different accounting methods effectively so um but uh kim kardashian hollywood accounted for effectively for a 43 million dollars of non-gaap revenue during the quarter which is you know pretty pretty impressive and actually made for the um gloom you know pretty profitable i think 10 million dollars a profit so um pretty good and it's a very good game um so it's king kardashian's birthday um last week and there was a birthday party in the game and during it and that's halloween there's a kim kardashian throws a halloween party and you can buy kind of halloween kind of costumes and stuff in there they're pretty well integrated um a very nice game um

interestingly though um so blues had this massive success what happened to its share price it dropped 20 in a single day and concluding what's happened there is investors have kind of actually assumed that the game was going to do more revenue um than actually it did which is seems ridiculous considering it's done 42 million um and that kind of shows a little bit of how kind of how kind of market sentiment works so effectively glue share prices back down to before they released kim kardashian which seems crazy because now it's a profitable company um previously it wasn't um i mean the the share price did it has gone up seven percent the day after it dropped 20 percent so effectively it's down 10 anyway um so that's the share price stuff um what else has been going on this week so we kind of it's interesting on biz um uh we kind of like to have come some debates and we have these different mavens groups we have um so we have uh this week we actually run three maven scripts this week our normal mobile mavens um we've had our on our indie mavens as well um and the one i run is the monetizer maven so they're basically experts in free to play games and it's kind of interesting that um at

gdc next which is a conference next week um someone who's working free to play games for for a long time five five six years has been giving a talk saying how she's given up free to play games to regain her reclaim her soul so she's now working with telltale games who make paid mobile games and console games um so that was kind of i thought quite provocative um so we kind of had a debate on that and it's kind of interesting actually how kind of um how kind of anti that sentiment maybe not surprising that these free to play guys are but a lot of them have made kind of big box games they've worked on console games and they really do see free to play games as as being the far superior type of game and obviously there's a business model involved and how that integrates into gameplay is two separate things so i think there's an understanding that some people um integrate that in a more maybe manipulative manner than others but generally people suggest if someone's spending 20 or 50 dollars in a free-to-play game they're not doing that often in one go they're doing that in multiple um kind of transactions of ten dollars or twenty dollars so they're doing that because they spent some money they got a good reaction they enjoyed the what they got from that from that money spent and they're going onto it again and again so that was kind of interesting um

and uh what other other news was there so we the kind of final bit of news i thought was interesting the the helsinki game scene you kind of think it can't get any any hotter it is the hottest game scene in the world um but um what happened is probably companies you've never really heard of but next games who were set up from some guys from um mainly rovio but other other companies as well so they're actually making a walking uh the walking dead game that's what they're working on at the moment they've raised six million dollars in in inequity actually a bit more than that um uh and they seem to be doing quite well and they've actually bought a company a new company called helsinki gameworks so only they've just come out of rovio as well they've only really been going a couple of months it's only been it's only been two months since they announced they were actually formally a company and within those two months they've gone from a startup to an acquisition target so they've been bought uh undisclosed fee uh by net by next uh games so again that kind of just shows the i think the the dynamism that's happening in the in the helsinki development scene as that's news this week uh next week i'll see if i want to kind of keep my costumes going well you know you can comment on that of course it'd be nice to know if you want me to

keep my hat at least um but let's see you next week bye you