News roundup: Gamevil buying Com2us, Kabam and GREE reorg and Kixeye's mobile entry

hello and welcome to pocket gamer doctors news roundup of the week this is for the week ending the 4th of october 2013. it's been a week of um kind of ups and downs really for the industry um i guess sometimes we get kind of caught into some uh kind of predictable kind of uh comment that everything's booming and everything's kind of going well and and in general i guess for most companies is still seeing quite quite strong growth but um within those kind of constraints there's still kind of things happening so um i guess we'll start off with some with i guess some bad news at least bad news for the people who've been sacked um so two very big companies in the free to play mobile space uh kabam and gree but both i guess they would call it kind of internal reorganization so um kabam has actually shut down its um one of its teams or its studio actually in austin texas we shut down a game kind of um sacked 23 people um but the broader context for that is is booming in terms of sales particularly on um on mobile and it's kind of started off as a web free to

play company and as kind of over the last two years exploded in terms of its mobile um side so i guess that's a reorganization depending on where you happen to live in america and where kabam kind of has its offices um and kind of i guess a similar thing slightly more concerning maybe agree which is one of the big um japanese companies it's been um kind of having a difficult year really um and the news is coming out it's shut down one studio and it's offered voluntary redundancy to 200 staff so that's a fairly large percentage of its workforce um and it's kind of what we seem to be seeing in the japanese market is is slightly later than the rest of the developed world at least it's going through a transit transition from feature phone games often japanese feature phones are a bit more advanced than the feature fans we had in the west but now it's heavily going to to um smartphones um ios and android and that's kind of shaking things up where previously dna and gree have kind of sat there in the in the in the future in the feature phone market they were

the two platforms you played games on if you wanted to play games in japan on mobile you had to basically go through one of those platforms cool shaking up a bit now but i'm still free is a massive company with revenue in the billions of dollars so we're sure that's um it will refocus itself in the future and so while some kind of big companies are kind of call it kind of internally reorganizing there's still kind of more companies still entering the uh the mobile space so it's a few this week that we that we spoke to and so i spoke to the um guys over at kicks eye who are well known for their facebook games and of um fair to say we've been waiting for a while to get their first mobile game we think it's coming pretty soon so it's a backyard monsters unleashed which is a mobile version completely kind of standalone version of one of their popular facebook games and it's the first of um i think they've got kind of four or five mobile games um in production so we're just gonna wait into waiting to see if they can have the same impact of course the big question from me to them was um are you worried that the market's kind of taken off without you and clash of clans is which is kind of clearly inspired by backyard monsters is coming come into made all this money but they

uh i guess as you'd expect them to say perhaps they say no we're not worried about it at all it's all about quality and we're looking for a core gamer and we think the core gaming market on mobile is underserved we'll see that game should be out in the next month or so other companies are also coming to market uh us companies again kind of hardcore strategy company um stardock so we're looking their first game came out this week and in the uk kind of a similar web web company web browser company jagex is it's released a few mobile games before but now it's getting a bit more serious so so um despite the mobile market being what we consider now increasingly mature there's still these kind of new entries and not these aren't startups these are these are big kind of companies coming in so um so kind of interesting time from that point of view um there's been a bit uh on the i guess what we call it m a mergers and acquisitions so um the small news this week on that front was a french publisher ubisoft um obviously well known for its console side moving heavily into mobile has been for last year or so it bought uh future games of london which is a i guess an indie kind

of not really startup they've been around for a couple of years now um terms weren't uh disclosed but um they're a fairly small studio but had pretty good success with their with their shark games um so that's a hopefully we assume a good deal for both parties concerned um and the big news of the week which for some reason i don't know why they announced it just about two hours ago just as everyone's shutting down it's the the two big korean companies so gainesville and come to us are now coming to be called one company so gameville has bought come to us so they're both publicly owned companies so their shares are available on the stock exchange in korea and that has has meant that uh gameville has put in a bid to buy it will come to our share so it's a pretty interesting deal there they're both um broadly similarly similar size companies in terms of their market capitalization um over the last before before smartphone kind of happened uh come to us was the bigger of the two and game

bill kind of proved um i guess kind of like start up spirit and kind of uh even though it's a smaller company by head count and still is um it grew revenue much faster and then about a year ago kind of come to us got a second wind and they were both kind of running neck and neck to be the the biggest company in uh in korea in terms of mobile games um the last kind of 2013 we've seen gameville kind of like push ahead the korean market has been kind of uh disrupted by by cacao talk which is uh one of the big social um mobile messaging systems and that's affected both companies really um but uh i guess when you get to a certain size and and and gameville has been quite bullish in the sense that it was raising um had quite a lot of cash anyway and was raising more money on the stock exchange uh and it said it was that's for international expansion and it was quite um clear it was going to be buying companies what we kind of assumed was it would be buying say developers in the us or china rather than buying its largest um kind

of competitor in the in the korean market now with all these kind of uh m a moves it's kind of always it's always exciting news when company buys another company that always gets a high juices flowing but in the long term it's statistically been proven by other companies is often not a good use of the money um and i think in this case it'll be interesting to see that the uh culture i from my viewpoint is kind of quite different between the two companies um so be interesting to see if kind of gameville let's come to us run um kind of as a separate company or does it try and take it over and does it does it kind of uh clear out some head count does it kind of shut down some of its games so that's um tony something that we will be looking at over the next six months um and that's the news for this week and i'll catch you next week