Mobile games industry news (w/e 2 August 2013)

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.biz weekly Roundup of all the news this is the news for the week ending the 2nd of August 2013 as you can see I've moved from a very hot Shanghai to uh to rainy Manchester which is uh which is where we where we're based um uh in terms of the news this week uh I guess the The Big Show has been the Casual connect um show in San Francisco for the first time I wasn't there but there's plenty of Pocket game of people there we had parties and networking and and all that kind of kind of good stuff in terms of big news I guess the biggest news really was um concerning Facebook um OB we all know Facebook is a massive social platform in the west um it's been getting into the distribution business for mobile games and apps um over the last kind of couple of months and uh and actually driving a lot of volumes driving like kind of 25 million million downloads over the last quarter um now it's done it's kind of interesting interesting um uh kind of definition of

what it's trying to do so it's talking about it's going into the publishing business um I've written editorial suggesting it may be going into the distribution business and suggesting there's quite a lot of difference between the two but anyway the um it's basically announced it's going to work um with 10 um Partners to begin with and it's kind of um describe them as uh small and medium companies who don't have the money to be able to kind of take advantage of its big paid for distribution you know marketing Services which sounds great doesn't it like Facebook's helping out these small India developers who can't struggl to kind of find a find a foothold unfortunately three of those companies are listed on the stock exchanges so there's Game Loft who are about a $300 million a year company there's game bille who have just raised $50 million on the Korean Stock Exchange and there's uh we made another Korean company who do a lot of um online pc games and just get into Mobile and have a enormously successful game called windrunner on kakout in in career so 30% of the games of the companies they're launching with are companies who can clearly spend this advertising money so um I've been poking a little bit of fun but amount of seriousness as well I mean

if Facebook I don't really care if Facebook wants to work with gameel that's fine but it can't really pretend it's working with small and medium Indie developers if it's working with those kind of guys I mean some of the people is working with are definitely small Indie developers they kind of startups and haven't got money so that's fine um but I guess we'll see where that one works obviously because Facebook in the west at least is having enormous amount of potential but um as I was kind of talking about last week as in China last week we were looking at some of the channel stuff going on in China um some interesting news coming out about 10cent launching its we WeChat games platform which is WeChat is like a social messaging mobile messaging platform in um mainly China they have some people outside China but it's 400 million people using that platform it'sit you can imagine it's bit like a cross between Twitter and Facebook on on a mobile um they're launching games on that uh well they've got games live on the moment live on it at the moment but there's no monetization there's no billing built into it at the moment they're launching at the end of August with four um games uh interestingly they're all non-chinese games so they're launching with um Fruit Ninja they're launching with uh uh PLS versus Zombies

2 from EA they're launching with uh Temple Run 2 and they're launching with a game from we made called um what's it called it's called Uh wolf wolf Moon so they like games they're launching with and they we have monetization in there and everyone's expecting obviously 300 million people in China I think 330 million people in China use WeChat and expecting like suddenly they're going to switch this on all these people are going to be playing these only four games and there's going to be a massive Drive of Revenue um it seems like within China some of the developers are saying it will have an impact but not an enormous impact and what people are looking at is what happened in Korea which they have a similar thing called kaca um which is again like a a mobile messaging system um and that's been very very successful in driving downloads and activity on certain games but what's happened is over time they as kaca put more and more games through their system they used to like release one or two games a week now they're releasing five or six games a week obviously that's just saturating the market there's only so many games people can play um every week um and so what you're seeing now G launch on kaco

kind of rise up and then kind of fall off as the next ones come in so I think it's kind of interesting in that context how Facebook does need to think a bit more seriously about is it a distribution platform distribution just like releases lots of games doesn't really care who wins it just knows it's going to have volume through distribution and releasing a lot of games or is it doing publishing so publishing is very different publishing is about a small number of Select games and really looking for the hits so for me that's the kind of the the interesting kind of dma the interesting kind of a trend for the week not the only one of course so um lots of other things been announced so um a company we know quite well uh from from uh from Finland uh Grand crew they've just announced their first big funding round they've announced $11 million of their a round they actually raised $2 million on their seed round before so for a developer that's very well funding that's $13 million they've got the game for launch game's coming out it's now in beta in certain territories um super nuts so looking forward to that um another company real networks bought a SL SL Slingo Get It Right Bingo slot Bingo Slingo um they've bought that

company for $15.6 million that's mainly more of a a social kind of web platform game at the moment but they they're going to be pushing that onto mobile um and kiwi Inc um which is a kind of small startup in San Francisco has raised $9 million um from SEO capital and other companies so we're still seeing kind of emergence Acquisitions and and and kind of investment going into into into developers which is kind of a interesting um other other interesting news another kind of game we've been looking at on pocketgamer.biz for a while is the drowning from DNA's Sweden studio um scattering scattered entertainment is the studio name drowning it's a um first person uh kind of kind of shooter um it's been in soft launch for a long time 6 months uh sorry 3 months in certain territories so we're we're kind of talking to the uh the kind of Creator behind that Ben Cousins it's very Innovative it uses a different kind of control method um and he was talking about how they focused on the tutorial retention that's what they looked at as their main metric to see where whe they're having success Gone live now

we'll be looking at that the next couple of weeks to uh to see kind of what uh what impact it has what money it's generating um obviously again we know a lot about Puzzles and Dragons one of the top grossing games in the world they just announced they got a million users um in America now so the majority of their funding of their of their revenue has been coming from um from the Japanese market and they're up to let's have a look they're up to like almost like $5 million a day peak days which is a phenomenal amount of cash but now some of that we know they haven't broken down where the percentage of Revenue but some of that now probably maybe 5 10% um is is coming from from the US audience so that's a that's a pretty pretty interesting stuff um and a few of the kind of features that we we look to do every week now we have our chartic gole where we look at kind of the success or failure of a game this week we looked at um Pet Rescue Saga from king um it's kind of not had the same I think say it's not had the same kind of reaction people seem to love Candy Crush Saga they're really big game but looking at the numbers actually it's doing pretty well um so I guess the

question is never never write never write off king.com um and um I think we we're going to see progressively over time whe whether it actually whether Pet Rescue Saga hits the Candy Crush Saga kind of height it's kind of hard hard to tell but it's certainly doing great business and then we have our monetizer where I look at the first five 10 minutes of of new games coming out um we looked at Despicable Me minions rush in particular um then the game again that's done very well in downloads um and again it's kind of I think you're seeing with a lot of these big companies now they're they're not worried so much about getting into the charts top top gring very quickly they're looking to kind of release stuff and and kind of build it up slowly and they're looking more longterm they're looking over 3 to 6 months to get in these charts they're not looking for I think previously people have been very much about bursting into the charts in the first kind of couple of weeks I think we're kind of seeing a more long longevity kind of approach which is obviously Much More Much More sensible so uh so that's the uh the news um from gaming. be this week uh catch us next week