News roundup: Opinions on GTA V and the rise of iOS 7

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.biz video news Roundup of the week and it's the week ending the 20th of September 2013 um so the big news this week well the big news this week wasn't really mobile was it um the big news this week was the release of uh GTA 5 for consoles consoles do we cover them kind of um so despite the fact probably most of our journalists were pretending to work and actually playing GTA 5 I know Keith was um we've been kind of considering how how how was a mobile s do we cover the GTA 5 and obviously uh we have different opinions on these things most of them pretty strong opinions um so uh one of our us writers Carter who um Works FKS on 148 apps he took a what we could maybe can call a consiliary type approach um and said if all these people are desperate to queue up uh and buy Spen 60 bucks

buying um a console game maybe mobile developers should could think more about uh paid games so obviously we're in a free-to-play kind of explosion at the moment where you get games for free and then pay money once you're in them um and uh I think kind of Carter's view uh is that mobile developers shouldn't ignore the fact if they can spend the money up front I guess to uh to to create very high quality content then then perhaps there is an audience or has never been a bigger audience on on mobile particularly stuff like iPads and other tablets uh to actually spend I don't think I think 60 bucks will be pushing a little bit but let's say5 to $10 buying a game um and as if by Magic uh timing wise of course this week on mobile has seen the release of Infinity Blade 3 so uh that um obviously comes from ep one of Epic Studios chair entertainment and is a paid game $7 um has been um pretty successful this week um has inact purchases so I guess in the

long term we'll see uh whether people who have spent $7 have prepared to spend uh more money on top of that to to buy kind of items and things in the game we'll have to see um but I think it's it's kind of and it's kind of something people have been saying that the freet to-play model at the moment it's gone it's gone very kind of down one angle of it which is um give stuff away for free and then really try and force people to who who are remotely interested in playing to to pay money and I'm sure um as as time goes on game makers will find more sophisticated ways of layering these things together and actually he's kind of you know monetizer next week actually so check that out um I've been playing Infinity Play 3 and looking at its uh economic system and it's while I'm quite kind of holistic in the way it's integrated into the game it is it is a fairly highly monetized game in the sense that of how it asks you to buy weapons how it asks you to level up weapons how it asks you to buy ingredients to make potions to spend money to speed up the cook of the

potions it even has um kind of like a randomized kind of a slot roll so you can get random items that you can buy um and it has two hard currencies which is um is is starting to be kind of uh a more popular choice so it used to be you'd have a soft currency and a hard currency the hard one being the one you spend money on now you will have often some games will have two hard currencies uh that used in different ways but that's on for next week um so and actually I I had a view going back to GTA five my view was uh the the coverage that the game has got has has is like the uh the last twitching of a corpse so um obviously GTA 5 is a massively successful franchise and has been over the last 10 years and it's this release has coincided with the end the very end of the of the current console um era where it has the largest install based for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 so the fact that it's that billion dollars of

ret or GTA 5 has has taken a billion dollars of retail in uh 3 days is not really to be surprised about um people been waiting for the game for 5 years obviously 50 around 50% of that of that Revenue will be taken by the stores so I'm good for Walmart and Game Spot and companies like that um but actually in the long term you much want to be sitting in the in the shoes of gungho entertainment gungho online or a supercell who are making two to3 million do a day um getting 70% of that money as as their own net um with with free-to-play games that are on on mobile I mean I I think I wouldn't be doing this job if I didn't think mobile was was going to be the future and it's the future can the future be now I don't know anyway um and and talking of these kind of monetization things there was a conference in New York um New York conference monetization conference um and uh everyone's favorite analyst the one they love to hate or they hate to love I don't know Michael pcho was talking about can Saga which is a game

we well know it's the now I think actually last month it ranked the second top grossing game on on iOS globally um and he's in his calculations he reckons that the average um Revenue per paying user so not per user but per paying us is $40 so that's a year so on that level we're kind of seeing that's not this similar from from someone going and buying GTA 5 so I think I guess the our conclusions from that little Escapade is that people are prepared to money on games that's not a very amazing conclusion is that we've been seeing that for the last 30 years um I guess the question is exactly how you extract that money from them and at what kind of level in the game and what um kind of a pleasure uh the people have spending that money that wasn't the only thing um talking of money on Pocket game Dr beers there's always lots of kind of money and funding that kind of thing and the big funding round this week went to app an the app analysis uh kind of a markeet intelligence company um and they've raised $15 million in their C round so

that's the third round of funding they've done um and uh as as I guess people tend to do in this situation they claim they could have raised more but didn't need to raise more money so they only rais $5 million of course whenever you raise money it's nice to have money in the bank but you're obviously selling um a larger proportion of your uh kind of future earnings when someone buys you um because no one gives you money for free so anyway we like using appani uh on on pocket game. we use it a lot for graph and stuff so so good on them raising lots of money so what else have we been doing this week um obviously I've been writing my monetizer column so been quite busy this week we had a look at kabam's uh game puzzle Trooper um which is a kind of a kind of match three type I guess been saying it's it's a it's a puzzle versus Puzzle and Dragons kind of clone clone's a dangerous word isn't it but inspired by Puzzle and Dragons having a look at that nice game came out from code Masters last week called boom tanks uh again

that's not a clone or inspired by but U using tanks but very much using the monetization methods of games like CSR Racing and fast and furious six um but with tanks so you're leveling them up by new tanks leveling up bits of the tank um and quite nice little very simple kind of rhyth matching gameplay in there as well so we had a look at that and we had look at freak Tower as well which is the latest game from gungho entertainment keep saying that gangho online sorry who obviously are be making tons of money from puzzle from drag get it right from puzzles Puzzle and Dragons It's very complicated selection of words in that one an interestingly when we when we ran our monetizer kind of slide roll over these games we found that um freak Tower is was has scored the lowest so it's the the least monetized game we' we've ever played um hilariously when you loaded up it kind of warns you that this game has inact purchases and even when you go to buy in that purchase it warns you three more times that you're going to spend some money um so uh that's they obviously making their money

in in other ways Puzzle and Dragons um and cod Masters boom tank uh boom TX came out at a monetized ranking of 395 which is pretty much the the highest ranking we've seen not quite but um it's definitely up there so we'll be looking to see if they just announced it's had a million downloads so we'll be looking to see um how that ranks um in terms of chart position um because obviously you can have games are highly monetized but if they don't have an audience who are spending money um that doesn't mean anything the big scheme of things um uh what else have we been doing um I guess the other kind of thing it's not really news the news was last week but um that Apple announced all its hardware and iOS 7 stuff but iOS 7 is is out now has been out and it's been kind of interesting some of the analytics companies have been uh frantically looking to see how quickly the uh the operating system has been um being kind of adopted um and so we had this uh Keith wrote quite nice news story today which took the data from from three different companies so

there was fisu um Tapjoy and um who are they on um goodness me Let Let me let me find the story uh um they're going to kill me aren't they who's the other lot bisu tap Joy come on chart boost sorry chart boost but anyway they' they've all been looking um how quickly people been um upgrading their phones and they found it's the by the update for iOS 7 has been twice as fast as the update rate for iOS 6 um but interestingly for people who haven't updated I haven't updated yet actually oh because a lot of apps have been updated for iOS 7 so when you go to download the update if you're still on iOS 6 Apple tells you you can't upload it um but if there is a a newer version that's um compatible with the operating system you're on it kind of let you download that so it's actually we is kind of weird cuz you kind of think you

would encourage Apple would encourage people to to to take the new system but I guess as the amount of Apple Hardware out there uh increases then um some people what reason don't want to upload or they they want the most updated version of that app that they can possibly get so that was the news that was this week we'll see you all next week goodbye but