Gamescom reaction, Clash Royale drama, Rovio's studio closure, Google's AI hypeman and more

Hello and welcome to the mobile gamer.biz digest. I'm Neil Long and every week I go for a walk and tell you what's happening in the mobile games industry. This week recorded on the walk home from Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. Here we go. A lot of different flavors of Gamescom article on the site this week. So, let's try and smush them all together and cover it all off here in one go. On Monday, I walked around the Gamescom dev area,
which is open to industry folks on Monday and Tuesday before the Gamescom show starts proper on Wednesday, and took a look at which companies are investing in this event and which companies have made their presence felt on the show floor such as it is. For those not familiar, it's really the Gamescom version of GDC. Lots of talks and presentations and roundts and things like that. They are tucked away at the

back of the Confex part of the huge Cologne conference center and some of these talks are a little bit tricky to find. Some of them sparsely attended, some of them overwhelmingly popular. So, a bit of a mixed bag, but I guess main thing for mobile gamer.biz listeners is Supercell's presence here. They had sponsored the lounge as you go in on the left there and they had a quite a fruitful talk about Clash Royale and the lessons learned there in terms of managing its community. More on that later. But yeah, I would say Gamescom Dev still a very significant show compared to, for example, the events that I've been doing in the last year or so, but still a pretty small part of Gamescom and maybe needs a little tighter curation in terms

of the talks. I would say a little bit hit and miss. I got a couple of decent stories out of them, but nothing on the level of what you'd get at GDC. The show itself, as ever, I walked around Wednesday morning and did some quite bad photography of the various booths and publisher showcases on the show floor for consumers. You know, a regular who spent the most money on their Gamescom stand story. 10-centent likely spent the most given it had a couple of different stands in the consumer portion of the show as well as presumably helping to pay for the giant Ubisoft stand as well as funding maybe a few other projects here and there but still notable that Hoyoverse big presence Griffin the maker of Ark Knights Endfield huge stand for them infold love

and Deep Space and Infinity Nikki Maker. Huge stand for them. Netis, big presence. Animo, the game from the studio backed by Fun Plus, maker of State of Survival. Big big stand for that game. That was also part of the opening night live stream as were several 10-centent and Hoyverse and Netis games. Chinese-made adventure I'd not come across before. Silver Palace. Huge elaborate stand for that one. And a big presence in the opening night live stream as well. I assume these are bought as a package in terms of getting a showing in this live stream as well as a big showcase on the show floor. Google Play before Gamescom said it would have its biggest regional consumer push and first major Gamescom presence in a decade at

this year's show. And it did indeed in hall 7 as you enter. It was a little bit muted there when I walked past. It wasn't quite open yet, but there's about a million staff on that stand. Griefed on what to say and do. Huawei had a big presence for its app gallery, mobile store and game center tech. Epic Games, big Fortnite stand there. Samsung pretty large stand for them as well. So you may be noticing a running theme here. Increasingly, Western companies are really getting drowned out by games from China, Korea, Japan, and really the only major Western presences here on the show floor at least are Xbox, which has a big space at the end of Hall 7, but that's mostly console stuff, and Ubisoft, which is, you know, backed by 10 cent. There's obviously CD Project. They had a stand and a spin-off

studio and a couple of other European and American studios and peripheral companies and tools companies. But Gamescom really does feel like a show for large scale freetoplay cross-platform games, not just mobile games. And it seems a little bit strange that games coming out of China in particular seem to be launching on console, PC, and mobile all at the same time. Whereas Western studios and publishers seem to have not figured out that having mobile there alongside PC and console on day one is definitely a good thing in terms of mind share. And maybe there are tech barriers here. Maybe there's still a little bit of ignorance or caution or even snobbishness when it comes to

bringing your game out on mobile. But yeah, every year the western companies here are getting drowned out more and more by the likes of Ho Universe, Netis, Tencent, Infold, and so on. So yeah, by next year it may well just be Xbox left, but we shall see. Biggest story of the week by far is this story about Clash Royale, which came out of a Supercell session at Gamescom dev. The headline here is quote, "How did we misjudge this so badly? What Supercell learned from upsetting Clash Royale players." Now, after I hit publish on that, I reread that headline a couple of times, and it actually reads a little bit like Supercell deliberately upset Clash Royale players. It's not the case, of course, but within the talk, I think there's some really revealing and interesting insights into the difference between having an idea for a game

update, pushing out that game update with the best possible intentions, and then having the community kind of throw it back in your face. This was a talk from Clash Royale game design lead James Bach and community manager Amelia Russell and there's quite a lot in there so you should read the article but in short they ran through three major updates from the last year which had very different results in terms of community feedback. First one, they effectively took out something called the season shop in Clash Royale, and that upset some of the most vocal and committed Clash Royale players. The update effectively did its job in terms of taking those items that were in that season shop and spreading them out more consistently among the player base. But the very very vocal, hardcore did not like it. So the conclusion from that part of it was that they had not prepped the community well enough, not communicated the change and

why it was happening well enough. And then that backlash continued with the next update as well. The moral of the story here being that it doesn't take long for you to break the players trust and it takes a long time for you to rebuild that trust. Again, with the next update, the good intentions were there. They were finding that people were churning out once they hit level 15. So, they were going to add level 16, and play tests were really positive for this new hero system that they were introducing at the same time. But, it was too much too soon, especially after the last update had soured some of the relationship between Supercell and the players. So the backlash seemed to get worse and that resulted in a big blow up among the streamer community which you may remember from the end of last year. This led to them scrapping the next few updates and putting the team on basically fixing what had gone wrong in

the last 6 months or so. They also promised the player community that there would be no more new cards and no new higher levels. and it promised to be a lot more open and transparent with its community and flag these major changes a little bit sooner and more prominently. And then completing the learning arc of this story with the third moment in the last year of Clash Royale, they found that the chaos mode they added was incredibly popular. Players kept asking for it to come back. So, they rearranged their road map a little bit, worked on it some more, and bought the chaos mode back as soon as they could in response to that fan feedback, and that went down really, really well. I get the sense they're still trying to rebuild a little bit of trust with the player community in Clash Royale and they have learned some tough lessons in the last year. But as ever, very honest and open musings and thoughts from

Supercell on their experiences running Clash Rale over the last year. Please do read the article if you haven't already. Lots of people have and for good reason. I think it's good stuff worth a read. Exola connects developers with the resources they need to build, fund, launch, and monetize their mobile games globally with Exola Web Shop. [music] Sell virtual items, in-game currency, subscriptions, and custom offers directly to players while driving up to five times the [music] revenue growth. With the industry's number one web shop solution, Exola provides the tools for developers to focus on what's [music] most important, creating great games. Visit exola.com to learn more. That's xsol.com.
This was a little bit of a surprise. Roio Copenhagen is to close after Sonic Blitz cancellation. So, just to give you a little bit of behind the scenes on this one. I noticed a few social media

posts about Sonic Blitz closing, which is a sort of hybrid card game and Sonic action game that's been in soft launch made by Roio, published by Sega. That was Monday night. Coincidentally, I happened to be interviewing Alex, the CEO of Roio on Tuesday morning. So, I asked him about it and it turns out that yes, Sonic Blitz not only has been closed, but Roio Copenhagen, the studio behind it, is also being shut down. The official statement from ROIO goes, "Following a redundancy process, ROIO will discontinue all its operations in Denmark. Because the process has not yet concluded, we are not able to confirm an exact number of redundancies at the moment. Altogether, around 20 employees have worked on the now cancelled Sonic Blitz project." Alex goes on to talk about Blitz as an idea and goes into the sort of big difference between a great idea on paper

and once it is out there in the hands of players. He said, quote, "We need to concentrate our bets both in terms of the games that we're making and where we're making them." Referring to the closure of Roio Copenhagen and the cancellation of Sonic Blitz. He also talks about retention not being as good as it anticipated on that game. It's a a kind of a runner racer type game with a card collecting matter, which does sound like a good idea in principle, but I think the key quote here is at the end. He says, quote, I still am convinced that there is a way to reach more players on mobile with Sonic. It turns out that it's much more complicated than I think both Sega and ROI thought. We're still very proud of the game, very proud of what the team achieved, but it didn't work. So around 20 people potentially losing their jobs at Roio Copenhagen. That process is still ongoing. So the number is not final. But yeah, Roio

pulling out of Denmark and its Copenhagen studio is closing. The other one to come out of a Gamescom dev talk was this one from Google's Jack Bucer. You may remember I spoke to him at GDC earlier this year. He is the games boss at Google Cloud which is out there selling a lot of AI tools and systems to game developers. Jack is a very enthusiastic speaker about the future of AI in games. And I thought Google putting its weight behind a studio I'd not heard of before as one to watch in terms of AI native game studios was worth writing about. So the headline here is Google says Survival Sim Colony from blockchain studio Parallel is the AI game to watch. did a little bit of googling around this game and this studio parallel raised quite a bit of cash in the blockchain era but has since pivoted to AI. Make of

that what you will but its game Colony seems to be a survival sim and has adopted some interesting AI tech. He describes how players can effectively make their own cosmetics and apply them to their character within seconds using AI tools that are in the game. And a lot of the rest of it seems to be based on some pretty flashy AI technology, dynamic storytelling, lots of other jazzy graphical effects and things like that. So yeah, according to Google, this parallel studio is one to watch with the caveat that it was maybe one to watch in the blockchain world a little while ago. So make of that what you will. But further into the talk, he also countered some of the accusations that AI is out there stealing people's jobs and provided some interesting case

studies into how Capcom, Pllearium, Nexon, and Square Enix are using AI in their game production processes. Have a read of the article for more details. But yeah, another interesting and bold set of claims from this Google exec. Very quick one from the back end of last week. A quick chat with one of the co-founders of Gem Capital who says that after investing in at Magic and then selling it onto Sensor Tower, the company is now looking for founders with a strong track record. Those looking for a first mover advantage in the field they are in and high potential indies for its next investment. They have a few quid. So [snorts] take a look at that article on the site. The headline is after that sensor tower at magic deal VC firm Gem seeks veteran founders first movers and indies.

And in your regular data, jobs and new games, news in data, we have sensor towers ad revenue charts for the US in July, mini clip, learnings, and triple dot. Top of the charts. There we have some numbers and analysis of Smashfest, the hit game that has spawned apparently 70 odd copycats. There's fundraising news from Makers Fund, Surge Games, and Entity Plus 10 Square Games's financials. In Jobs Digest, there are moves and promotions at Supercell, Scoply, EA, Mattel, Triple, Zingga, Tencent, Playamp, Moon Active, Boombit, Loom, and Testronic. There's also fair bit of new game news from last week, even before Gamescom. uh Gangstar Mirage City, the game that I've been tracking because it looks a lot like 10 cents attempt to do GTA on mobile that has started rolling out in

most regions outside the US and Europe last week. And on top of that, Meta's new sort of UGC AI games app Pocket has been sneakily launched in the US. There's a new soft launch from Century, an update on PUBG, Tomb Raider, The Traitors WhatsApp game, Apttoids App Store on Google Play, and also new titles from Popcore, Gung-Ho Level Five, and Rogue Snail in last week's New Game Digest. And that's it for this week. A very busy one. I tried to keep these under 20 minutes. We will find out in the edit whether I'd succeeded or not. But yes, signing off from Cologne, Germany. Thanks for listening.