News roundup: BlackBerry bought, King preps IPO and EA's Apple payoff?

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.bizizz news run of the week and this is for the weekend in the 27th of September it's been a pretty busy week this week I mean that last week ended with a kind of not necessarily shock news but I guess it was shock in terms of the timing that um Blackberry had uh announced uh that it was going to kind of lose about a billion dollars in its quarterly figures um mainly due to a write down on the Z10 it's kind of phone that he launched um earlier in the spring um and while they uh it was over the weekend so the kind of shares obviously where it was suspended at that point or not um not for sale um so while people were considering that we woke up on Monday morning to the news that um blackberry's largest shareholder which is a Canadian Venture Group which had about 10 of the company put in a bid to basically take the Bible the outstanding shares how much value the company about 4.7

billion dollars um so I mean in a way that's kind of a sensible move um because at least it gets Blackberry off the stock exchange which means it doesn't have to give it out terrible figures every quarter and it just gives it a bit of um I guess a bit of opportunity to kind of rebuild the business without it being in the public eye um of course it doesn't change anything in terms of the business that battery has um I mean Blackberry has said it's going to basically pull out a mid-range phone so it's going to have very low end phones that do very well in Emerging Markets with hard keyboards and it's going to says it's going to focus on early adopter high-end devices which seems pretty unlikely to do any better than what it's been doing um anyway um and obviously Enterprise is the place where Blackberry has always done very well so we would tend to assume um that in the future Blackberry will not be focusing on games very much which are really sad people who did um have battery phones and want to play games and developers who did release games for Blackberry phones and they probably didn't make far sums of money but it's one um

I guess uh Channel That's now no longer exists but talking of companies on the stock exchange there's been a few other kind of uh bubbling understories about companies who have shares because they have to uh tell us about what's going on with their companies because they're publicly end so actually one that we I kind of missed out on actually happened last week um glue mobile which company I kind of uh like following in and out not really secretly but um because they can't do this equally but it put out a um a public um kind of a rights issue so basically it um created a whole bunch more shares um which sold for about it it got in terms of its net revenue you've got about 14 million dollars in cash um that's kind of interesting because the while it's um completely changed around its business it used to be a paid mobile game publisher and it's completely now pretty much 100 free to play game publisher quite different businesses um it's been losing money every quarter pretty much every quarter but about the last four years

um and but it had it's done several rights issues in the past two years ago and he said it raised enough money to take it yourself through profitability which it hoped it would do at the end of 2013. um but it looked like um that it may not have kind of fulfilled that and I kind of wrote an article a while back suggesting that it probably had about six to nine months left of cash before it went past obviously now it's got um another 13 million dollars of cash so probably got another six months um I hope he doesn't go bus but um it's difficult to uh to uh turn around a Ross making company particularly when you haven't made any profits for a long time um but one company not worrying about um losses at all just uh worrying about um how big his profit it'll be now is a king once known as king.com so um as it has has been suspected for a long time it wants to do an IPO select shares on the American NASDAQ market and if you want to do that as a company you have to um a couple of months before you want to put out your kind of intentions so

people can buy shares you have to file legal papers and it's been reported that King has now done that it's also got a new CFO Chief Financial Officer progumably to take it through that process um not really a public information yet about how how what the share price will be or how many shares it will sell but people are Reckoning a valuation of about five billion dollars so um that's all that's bigger than a Blackberry at the moment if you want to put it that way um so I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about about king.com not King not.com anymore just Keen um as they go towards IPO um some other stories um that have been kind of a kind of bubbling under kind of I think we'll have a bit more of them in future weeks but uh Miss speaking it's always difficult for the politicians I mean they're not misquoted they misspoke um but apparently at a internal ea uh kind of conference meeting so with EA staff um one of their senior executives

was talking about uh a game just on out on iOS so Plants and Zombies 2 which is done pretty well for them um and he was uh it's kind of hard to tell because obviously it wasn't filmed or anything um so you may be saying it in a jocular manner but he was saying when someone said why is it not out on Android yet he said Apple paid us a truckload of money that's the quote truckload of money um to keep it on iOS um which is a kind of a room where people have suggested for all years really that Apple um have uh what kind of I mean the question is uh will they persuade people will there be like a contra marketing deal that don't release on Android and we'll give you lots of featured slots um but even if you're joking a truckload of money is not like a truckload of marketing a truckload of money is money isn't it anyway yeah you have um have firmly stamped down on these rumors so there's nothing of this nothing of the case happens and apple have even announced a Curt no this isn't the case but um

the guy in person is very senior EA guy so maybe he was joking it came out wrong but um it's interesting nevertheless um and um but eventually all games do come to Android so we even heard that Clash of Clans obviously the uh one of the few games really that's um just on iOS at the moment and obviously it's making so much money on iOS You could argue they don't really need to go on Android but there's more Android devices so maybe they could get another 50 of Revenue if they went on Android so that's apparently been um in not soft watch releases like being beta tested on Android so we'll expect that to come to Android at some point and then supercell will rule the world and maybe they'll go to IPO and be worth more than five billion dollars in a couple years maybe we'll see um uh but kind of coming back to how all these games make money free to play so obviously games are free and people will spend money in their games so in the UK the office of fair Trading which is a government consumer focused body has been looking at um in-app purchase models specifically for children now this is not not new the US government has looked at this kind of

stuff before the Japanese government has passed new laws uh last year to um limit the amount of money under 16 year olds can spend the oft report was a bit different it was actually looking at existing consumer law so it's not they're not going to change any laws they're just saying this is what the laws are at the moment and our children being pressurized not just mobile games it's online games as well um and it's a pretty interesting report so they're not they're not gonna they've not recommended changing any laws or anything they're just saying they looked at 38 games which they haven't didn't say what games they were but they basically say most of them probably contravene existing consumer law as it applies in the UK to children um and they put out a really interesting excuse me a really interesting report which is what I was looking at so they basically they basically given examples of um a situation where a game would probably contributing the law in a situation where a game probably wouldn't contrain the law so they're not like laying down the law they're kind of saying he's obviously open to interpretation and that's what the courts are there for but the suggestion is if you're in playing in a free play game and it says oh you planted a lovely tree do you want to um to make your tree grow immediately

drop a diamond on it that would be seen as contravening law consumer law as it applies to Children whereas if you say in your game oh you've got a lovely tree um you want to make it grow immediately you can drop a gem on it or you can wait for 10 minutes so as soon as you're giving people the option um of seeing there's a there's a behavior or action that isn't a paid for action and gets the same results then that's fine so it's a lot about transparency I kind of think um globally we'll see a lot more about developers having to be much more careful about just how they're presenting stuff and obviously this is something we look at in our monetizer um feature quite a lot so um this week we've been looking at a few games there so there's um uh Infinity Blade three uh Cave Mania and the uh Farmville game Sorry Castle Bill Legend So check all those out as well um and we'll catch you next week