Mobile games industry news (w/e 19 July 2013)

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.bizizz weekly bite size news Roundup and uh it's for the week ending uh July the 19th um in the UK it's been a rather hot week for us we're not used to this this kind of weather and a bit of humidity I know the rest of you in around the world will be laughing um at that but I'm trying to cool down with some sunglasses at least um but it's been kind of a bit of a summary I guess we're interested in the summer period now it's not getting kind of big breaking news but there's a it's always a lot of Trends to to have a I guess consider and we'll see kind of what they mean um in a couple of weeks time I'm going to stop some numbers I'm a big fan of numbers so um one number another bad one for for Gameloft so um it announced that it's a new free-to-play game Despicable Despicable Me minions rush let's get that right yeah so that's an endless Runner uh obviously playing onto the new Despicable Me 2 film that's done 50 million downloads um which maybe for some companies is not

seen as a vast number but for Gameloft which is kind of been playing around with free to play and often it's still sticking to paid games with in-app purchases in them um so that's but so there's pretty good pretty good numbers for it um and it's actually top kind of heading up the top grossing chart so it's something we'll be looking at in the next uh next week or so um another kind of bigger number is is from Korean publisher and developer a game bill it's announced this week 300 million lifetime downloads on IOS and Android um pretty impressive obviously 300 million that's that's across quite a lot of games it's now quite heavily involved in publishing and third-party games but uh what's interesting in this case is that is the period of time um that it's gone from 100 million to 200 million downloads uh and then 200 million to 300 million downloads is is decreasing so it was about uh I think seven months between um 200 million and 300 million downloads compared to nine and a half for the uh 100 to 200 million so it's kind of speeding up I guess that's going to show you particularly the pace of the Korean market um something else uh in the Korean

market is a cacao so cacao talk is one of the big messaging programs over there of apps over there so it's got 100 million users um spreaded around career and some of the Southeast Asian companies uh countries um and uh but it also has a games platform which is a so it's a bit like it's compared a lot to Facebook it's quite um quite viral uh quite spammy still at the moment but it's been very popular for casual games and uh cacao have announced that their games platform in the first half of 2013 has generated uh over 300 million dollars in Revenue um so 70 of that will go to the to the developers and Publishers um and cacao takes 30 as it's it's margin obviously that means um it's taking Google play or iOS will take the first 30 and then cacao takes 30 of the 70 so it kind of yeah you can work out how that kind of thing happens um okay um some other some other even bigger numbers uh in from that region is uh I guess they're probably the big news of the week really is uh is Badoo which

is a kind of often said to be China's version of Google so it's a big search engine kind of company um it's it's made a 1.9 billion dollar kind of a bid for 91 Wireless 91 Wireless operates a whole bunch of Android app stores in China um generation is being uh if not the biggest one or certainly one of the one of the two leading kind of uh Distributors of Android apps and games um so that's if that goes through um which everyone seems to expect it will that's going to be one of the biggest uh deals of that type for that kind of company in in Chinese history um and then sets up kind of um Badoo which has been struggling a little bit in terms of mobile distribution um it kind of sets that up as a player behind and tencent which has a mobile QQ and WeChat as platforms um and there's also 360. so there's a few kind of get these kind of big beasts now looking um looking to Android um distribution in China which is obviously uh the the big growth Hardware situation um so what other news has been going on

um some other big numbers um kind of a US web and mobile free to play uh publisher Kabam so that did a a private um share of some of its uh shares so it's kind of kind of interesting it was basically to um to to allow some of the Senior Management and staff to kind of vest their um best some of their their shares because obviously they've got obviously Kabam is having a very kind of good time at the moment so he had a revenue of 180 million dollars in 2012 looking to do 300 million dollars um this year um and so while the valuation of the company is increasing it's very hard for people who got in early to actually extract value from their shares unless they're IPOs so this is a kind of way of getting some value out of the shares obviously because they've sold some shares that means there's a new valuation on the entire company which is uh now supposedly valued at 700 million dollars which are obviously a large amount of money um whether it could be more could be less hard to tell I suppose um I guess we had with supercell it did a similar a

similar kind of shared private share kind of placement uh early earlier on um this year and that value did 800 million dollars I mean they're quite different companies and obviously super sales very small effectively 100 people two games only on iOS Kabam is massive 700 people a lot of uh you know dozens of games looking to get heavily into publishing there's a lot of stuff still on on web even though the majority of Revenue knows on mobile um but still uh several million dollars is a nice chunk of cash um now the rumors obviously are uh kibam will at some point IPO maybe towards the end of next year we'll have to kind of see what happens there um and kind of talking about uh kind of a kind of money again I don't know I just talk about numbers of money all the time um there's a kind of an interesting thing happen so uh on the App Store so App Store it was five years old last week um and because of that Apple uh put some games that were paid games put them free for kind of like the celebration and one of those ones was Infinity Blade 2.

um so Infinity has always been a paid game paid game with internet purchases um obviously pretty successful um but not as successful as a free-to-play games but effectively it's gone free to play for that period of the promotion which it allowed um companies like this remote to Who Do market analysis to kind of work out what you know what effect that has so they reckoned so it seems pretty clear that it had about um over 5 million downloads of the free version of Infinity Blade 2 7.5.7 million I think is is the correct figure or estimated correct figure um and obviously that uh would have generated if that happened at the six dollar price a certain chunk of money um but but um but then what's happened is it's looked to see how Infinity blades um taking that money out having videos kind of top grossing kind of revenues happens affecting people getting the game for free and then spending money with the in-app per your in-app purchases and they they think it's uh so 2.4 times more Revenue has been

generated through internet purchases in Infinity Blade 2 then was generated the previous week I guess it kind of goes to show the the power of free to play games um although some people you know there's always things around about so so another big game uh big game release this week uh was breaching clear which is um from a new developer set up from from the Call of Duty um kind of the console developer um and there's been they've been quite um active about discussing how they looked at their Go free to play and didn't work out for the design of their game so they'd gone paid so they're two dollars for the game and has internet purchases in it which seems kind of I always think interesting if they're saying free to play wouldn't work if it was free but we can do it paid really like purchases um I'm not sure quite how they can design it kind of a thing kind of uh kind of rolls out but we'll have to see um certainly we'll be looking to see how how the game uh kind of progresses in terms of its top grossing chart performance and equally in terms of how

well it's reviewing um so it's certainly play to look forward to and just uh just to highlight something we'd like to do on pocket gaming up Biz now it's called monetizer which is basically a um a kind of a section I guess a regular feature of the site now where we're looking at the top five minutes a video in the top five minutes uh first five minutes of free to play games effectively and looking to see how the flow how the flow for users is in terms of how we've been taking the game what's the tutorial like what kind of uh incentives have been given to come back how's the first kind of process of being taken into a store these kind of um kind of aspects and techniques which I think are becoming much more important and much more sophisticated um for developers so uh so check that out monetizer every week on pocket gamer.biz see you next week