Some trends from GDC 2015

hello and welcome to pocket gaming up busy as a weekly news digest this is for the weekend in the sixth of mar 2015 so kind of big things happening this week some in some that's got a physical big things off to GDC the game developers conference in san francisco has been happening I've been Oh many times in the past not been for the last couple years for various reasons but not some pocket gamer activity there we've had our party we've had our awards and we've had our drink up when we've had our big indie pictures Bob and our news editor Alicia's been running around interviewing people and going to sessions and kind of getting a kind of view on what's going on kind of on the ground kind of what people are saying and I kind of think as a guess for a news channel to decree or gave it up is and it's kind of interesting to be able to see both views they certainly when you're at GDC you're running around the entire time you've got meetings every prolly every half an hour you're

dashing from hotel to conference center to wherever you'd probably a bit jet-lagged but we're not eating really well and by the end like you're quite tired and we go home so in some degrees i'm glad i'm not doing that this year i'm sure i will be doing it in the future but um it's interesting too I guess get a more I guess what editors view really am sitting back in the UK and kind of seeing all the press races and kind of doing some some briefings with people via via Skype about what's going on and I guess everyone who goes to the show has it has its kind of different kind of view of what the what the trends are kind of in terms of what they're seeing I don't think in the moment kind of GDC is a show really for mobile but kind of breaks out trends I think it's a continuation of kind of what we've been seeing in the past so and that point of view other thing is anything kind of amazing kind of news that's kind of risen from that but there are kind of I guess some interesting kind of bits and bobs we can kind of put together I guess that's what trends is to the greater and it's one interesting kind of I guess is did you see as it has been in the past was a lot of our own technology a lot about tools companies

certainly when I used to go in the early 2000s it was a lot about engines and engines that really matter so much anymore but obviously people still using engines and they were just oh well recognized part the ecosystem know and I guess it was something for us journalist to kind of a kind of play off in the way we love to do kind of companies battling against each other all wars against vs vs vs all over and they're two things that just to briefly kind of go through this epic announced kind of a change licensing for it's unreal engine so of the Unreal Engine has been going for decades now or at least a over a decade on Unreal Engine 4 and they you know in the days of consoles and PCs over the strongest player but over as a gaming development as kind of fragmented it at particularly mobile platforms you need for it was like epic was never setup but have unreal really working for a mobile or lightweight technologies notice they have to do a lot of work that them off work to kind of get that working guy that's now clearly where the majority of the market is but mark but you know markets is not just about how good your technologies it's also about your

support and about your pricing and about kind of other things I guess you can't like kind of soft features really am an epic two degree surprise people it's been playing around with its pricing for a while and GDC announced it was going to an upfront free fee can you have a free fee I don't know but basically anyone can get Unreal Engine 4 now for free and how they going to monetize it from their point of view is a bit more complicated over every every quarter that you run a live product you'll pay them a five percent royalty and you'll get a certain amount of kind of a kind of money upfront oil certain amount of revenue faith hasn't almost free up front then they take a revenue share but five percent off back of that so in a sense that's kind of early model has been much in the past you have been out doing a royalty model quite difficult to know how you actually police that in terms a lot of these small companies not gonna give you presumably there their access into their apple account but anyway um it's a significant move from an epic just to kind of get market share

back again because a lot of people were just saying too expensive to to just get access technology to see if you want to use it unity immunity is by far away the biggest player in the innocent a laundry markets over a million individuals using it so it hasn't really changed its model that degree it has kind of subtly shifted how it kind of them presents its technology so you t fibers announces you expect got all the usual kind of graphical updates and kind of rendering and textures ring and physics and animation and they're worth my stuff it's got cloud new cloud builds got team tools various kind of things that developers love to say make them more productive and make their games look nicer but what his son is its kind of split out its technology now so there's a free version they've always had a free version and now that's kind of the personal edition so yeah it doesn't have some of the kind of top-end tools that you would need if you were professional developer really and then as the professional edition and that cost 75 dollars per seat per month so anyone who's using unity paisa so much more muchness I mean if you talk to the

the those companies epic and you can see they still kind of argue they're not really in direct competition I mean to degree they probably are but they're still probably the majority of game developers still use their own technology so they still like it gets a big a big market and certainly places like Asia there's other companies so it's like cocos2dx very big in China and in Asia Iran so am I guess a traditional GDC story another interesting story I guess not to do with GDC but announced at GDC was a storm eight so fairly well recognized a social mobile publisher developer really um from the US it announced 1 billion downloads of its game so one being damages is obviously a lot downloads havoc schemes and I guess I was kind of interesting that storm at is it doesn't really have a signature kind of game so we've often gather the companies have done a billion downloads so it's been a billion downloads of angry birds but that was then necessary really knew that was that was rovio that was angry birds you downloading and we still makes the other way around it doesn't have it has games off to being

that downloaded hundreds of millions of times but they're not really stand out in a way that angry buddies and basic the reason that a gig is it always says it's going for a network approach so it's about 45 live games on the App Store which is an awful lot play some of them don't have fit that many users but the whole point of first all mate is it really releases game still talking about kind of a couple every month and it still plans to do that and it wants to just build its network so the network's the most important thing once it's got once it's got a player in the network he can kind of up hoss promotes own games and that's how it's got to a billion downloads which is as we say is it's quite a lot of for downloads um so I'm going to check my cheat notes right okay so to two other things that kind of just kind of caught my eye relentless not really to do with new so much it's just how people are looking at the market so just mentioning rovio so actually not at GDC but there's another conference called mobile world congress which is in Barcelona which is much more about handsets and it kind of them kind of base stations and then kind of the infrastructure of mobile lots not only so much for mobile games although it has attempted in the past foolishly it's a shed route itself with GGC this year which ones they play with anyway Peter

vest Ibaka who's the the angry angry he's the Mighty Eagle from Angry Birds he's their chief marketing officer and he gave a speech and and its innocence it's nothing we've not heard from from Rovio before but he was saying that brand clearly is massively important for rovio rovio's not games company it's then same company yeah we've heard that before but something they kind of I like because I have been banging on about it for a while is he says we don't talk about users so often in the industry we talk about daily active users no one talks about daily active players but if your games company you don't have users you have players and the same thing that the Peter was saying and we don't have users we never use the term users we don't use the term customers we don't have customers we have fans so obviously there's not saying they're saying they not games company so they're not saying they have gamers they're saying their intimate company to have fans and I've let's just come a nice way of kind of looking at things I think it's something you know terminology doesn't necessarily change how successful your games are but I think it's kind of a good process to go through didn't think about how you're communicating what the kind of passions and the vision of your companies and in a similar way we spoke to the CEO of mag

interactive which I mean there are fairly small small Swedish publisher but they famous game is a Russell which is a word game and they were talking about when they first launched that word again they kind of actually went out to find gamers who like we're at games company we're going to find games to play our word again and obviously gamers don't really like word games and they might kitchen play work ends but more like playing strategy games or skewer games and so they kind of worked out I need to kind of their market even if people were playing their games at very high levels of retention they didn't see themselves as gamers this is something a lot of casual companies talk about of course and I guess seen get back in the neighbors of there was a classic one people who have played and I guess King degree as well people who play candy crush it seems as gamers but even though they playing war games and potentially pain and letting a lot of games and so the razzle guys were talking saying we find gamers as a category very fickle you know you can get into download your game but next week they downloaded someone else's game very hard to keep them in your engine your kind of ecosystem in your game whereas non-gamers because in all gamers not looking for other games you get me to your game they have some religious proportion of the people who first downloaded razzle think three years ago

ten percent is still playing the game up for three years and that's because it's a social game you play against your kind of real real life friends again that's just another interesting way of looking at it I think often pulsating the last 18 months had a lot people talking about mid core and medical gaming we'd call mobile gaming no one really seems exactly sure what a mid core game is compared to a casual game or a hardcore game and certainly no one really seems to have found a kind of strong audience or a strong reservoir of this kind of lead core audience who are a bit more hardcore than casual audience and a bit war I'd like to pay but a lot huggle anyway um moving on to the other kind of big thing at least for Pocket Gamer up is this week because we announced our top 50 developers or 2015 so that's something going on for six years it's a bit of a kind of labor of love for us to kind of try and kind of chunk down all the developers in the world box it is kind of a millions of Maori and so we kind of look to see kind of kind of ranking more against each other and in looking at things like financial performance for the compass we can see

that for looking at just just quality the games really minutes what kind of what it boils down to obviously looking at kind of public sources looking at how much the interaction we've had with studios and what we know about them and we're basically bugs down to how good we think their games are and that gives us our kind of basis for how we work out our top 50 developers so I'm sure you've seen that on the site that will be on the side if the whole at the end till we do one next year and I hope to see you next week and put that some more news thank you