Mobile games industry news (w/e 30 August 2013)

[Music] hi and welcome to pocket gamer. fizz's weekly news round up this is for the week ending the 30th of August 2013 um so I guess the big news of the week is uh Nintendo springing a uh a surprise on everyone with its 2DS as obviously uh Nintendo seem seems to do this quite a lot come up with consoles with slightly weird names that uh cause lots of debate if we remember the um 2DS is actually potentially even more interesting really cuz it's not just it's not just the name although there's obviously plenty of confusion now having the the DS the 3DS and now the 2DS um obviously behind the scenes there's uh kind of they're thinking quite hard about how they're going to kind of deal with the handheld Market obviously something we've been talking about um for years really um but certainly over the last year uh kind of more regularly with Nintendo saying it will never make

games for mobile phones and we assume Nintendo will never make a mobile device itself so um so um so I wrote a piece about the 2DS this week um kind of trying to kind of place it in context of what of Nintendo not making mobile games and what that means for it obviously it means there are hundreds of millions of devices that can't now access um the 3DS hasn't been failer it's sold kind of 32 million units so far pretty good um but doesn't they don't have a good uh digital strategy and obviously price is potentially still an issue so um in the long term where they're $140 2DS which let's face it and we've been quite rude about it doesn't look good I mean doesn't have a hinge which is a big thing for the for the has been for the DS range so far that's a cost cutting measure so it's one big screen which kind of kind of like broken into two with the casing um it just looks ugly it's just why would you for $40 why

would you buy that one as opposed to the normal one I think it's interesting that in Japan they're not releasing the 2D s so that's clearly the Japanese care much more about Aesthetics than they think the American Market does which cares about price um we'll see how it goes I mean I my my view is the hardware doesn't matter anymore per se across anything consoles or or mobile or anything so whether 2DS is there or not doesn't really matter um it's the software that matters the problem Nintendo has at the moment is the people making good games for Nintendo Hardware is Nintendo um and that's pretty hard in the scheme of things when there's over however many a million developers in the world it is if you you're the only one making games for one platform it's a hard ask for you to better going to fulfill every need um but that wasn't the only news of the week um I guess the the big kind of industry conference was the unity conference um unite and that's it in just finishing off in Vancouver in Canada so our editor Keith has been out there

kind of like snuffling around like a good news hound and kind of finding out what's going on the big news there was obviously Unity is well known for its tools um and it's kind of had a kind of a publishing you call it kind of Quasi publishing or this kind of like distribution type thing they've had for a couple years um and now they've kind of decided kind of Whole Hog they're going into into publishing so um I think quite a lot more to come from from Unity on that they they've announced kind of one game but it's not particularly kind of a big branded game but they're going into publishing in a big way and obviously with most mobile developers or a large proportion of mobile developers using Unity um and obviously IND developers and crossplatform developers kind of um Unity has has will have a a good kind of pick of of of kind of projects going forward so it be interesting to see how how they kind of manage to combine a publishing approach with a with a kind of technological kind of tools approach quite different kind of businesses um so what else has been going on um a few kind of interesting kind of

like kind of bubbling under new stories which maybe kind of show some Trends so so King has has sued six waves um over some IP that it said it's they copied um I mean this is like an ongoing thing a bit with six waves which kind of ended up having a big kind of uh Fandango with um over over Triple Town um and you know lawsuits are lawsuits we won't kind of talk about that we'll leave that to the voyers but I think it's more interesting is maybe it's King doing that because it's everyone assumes King's IPO or attempt to IPO at some point float itself on the stock exchange um you would kind if you going to do that you would kind of maybe um kind of start to tie up some kind of legal loose ends in the Preamble to that cuz who's going to buy shares in a company where they they could be kind of suing people um so we'll see I mean that's a bit of a speculative thing on my on my behalf um so uh a few other things with from Unity so so Unity have announced like a a 2d tool set they've also announced kind of

a a kind of hook up with Facebook so so now Facebook are moving quite heavily they obviously they've announced their own publishing in the in the past couple of months and Facebook is really big now in mobile app uh distribution and advertising so that's kind of a unity in Facebook getting together two two quite powerful kind of companies coming together in in the mobile space um uh bit more on the TOs on the tours news not 2D at all so Autodesk well known proly 3ds map mayor has um announced a super cut down mayor version for Indie developers and mobile developers um it's called mayor LT and it's a you can you can buy a license for $800 In Perpetual or you can rent it from I mean kind depends exactly what what um kind of how you want to kind of pay and what at what level but it's about kind of $35 to $50 a month which is enormous reduction on what otherwise would have been a $35,000 C if you want the full version of Mayor obviously this mayor LT is cut

down doesn't have the renderer doesn't have scripting doesn't have plugins um not not to make you kind of buy the expensive one but because most mobile developers would use them anyway so it's a that's kind of an interesting move I guess we're kind of seeing um kind of the highend stuff coming down to Mobile in all forms in games in tools and everything so that's a a good one um uh what else have we been we been seeing um so in terms of kind of the the the ongoing Pocket game are kind of like a our kind of regular column so we looked at Plants versus Zombies 2 which obviously been kind of EA's big game um and we looked at that in our charal article this week so look to see it's done lots of downloads has it been successful still a bit early to say so it's you know kind of a month a month off the release so it's it's doing okay we wait to see um whether the massive downloads are actually being monetized in a in a a way as efficient as other games maybe that's the polite way of putting it um and in our monetizer article this week um slightly

different to normal I looked at uh asphal 8 which is a game loss new racing game slightly different because it's not a free-to-play game so it's 99 cents to buy um on IOS and Android so that kind of puts a bar so obviously you're kind of limiting your audience um initially um obviously as the whole kind of range of inet purchases I kind of found it didn't monetize as heavily as other racing games CSR Racing um and uh fast and furious six have probably um kind of showed kind of uh some some more sophisticated bation that than ashel 8 does at the moment um and uh just just today we had a really uh it's always good to kid developers kind of giving you kind of a kind of a watsal view on on what's going on in their business and uh and Rubicon uh development a UK studio um just kind of published a great postmortem on its game get this right uh it is the great big war war game so it first game was

the great little war game sequel was was the great big war game and is's a very prolonged uh postmortem about what went right what went wrong where they see the industry going where wasth checking out um and before I forget um obviously pocket gameer we're known for do lots of events lots of parties networking um so I should be telling you about these things I guess so we've just announced a new one so in uh in Talon in Estonia we we have a a one of our mobile mixler events and that is on the 19th of September t in beautiful city in in the Baltic region so um if you're around that in talin or near Talon or you want to go talian for the first time you need an excuse Pocket Gamer mixer um we we're happy to see you there so that's all the news this week um so I won't see you next week cuz I'm I'm going to have my own little uh kind of sareet into into the Nordic regions I'm going to be on holiday so uh cheers to you all so you want to get back

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