The Lithuanian mobile scene, power of merchandising, and 5 types of iPad

hello and welcome to pocket gamer.busy's weekly news roundup i'm john jordan and this is the uh excuse me news roundup for the week ending the 17th of october um so this time last week i was actually in a lithuania in the capital of illinois so we were over there um for a conference called live mobile so it's one of the kind of i guess a fairly regional kind of conference looking at mobile games and apps um and it was interesting never been to vilnius before it's kind of interesting to travel around some of these kind of nordic and baltic states and kind of see the the local kind of environment what's going on there um and and there's kind of actually quite a lot going on in vilnius so one of the big developers there is it's called nord current and they've been there for a long time now kind of quite going under the radar but they're like a 60 60 strong team um they used to do console games now pretty heavily into mobile um kind of moving into they were casual

games um 101 games was that with a big hit and now they're moving into more i guess kind of um kind of kind of i guess casual simulation type game so it's interesting to see those guys um well one of the reasons we were there one of the reasons that the conference is there this year is because um game insight who are pretty well known uh pretty massive uh russian publisher well they've actually moved their um kind of hq operations so they moved from moscow um to to the illness um obviously part of that reason is because um lithuania's in the eu so that's probably um slightly more kind of business friendly and actually as we found out kind of at the conference and there were quite a lot of kind of news uh news breaking in the conference about what's happening in lithuania um and we learned that lithuania has the fourth lowest corporation tax in in the eu which is a good place to put your company um and also um i guess another good place to the reason to start a company in in lithuania is it has the third lowest wages in the eu which obviously for lithuanians isn't it's a bad thing but i guess the idea is that for the government um we encourage

companies to set up in lithuania because the wages are much lower than other parts of the eu and over time that will drive wages up um and equally as there's also um part of games industry moving to vilnius that they they've announced with the the mayor of illness and other kind of investment companies and things that they're they're refurbishing a 200 year old hospital and that's going to be kind of refurbished over the next nine months or so and that's going to be a technology hub um partly for games industry to relocate um some of their stuff there and equally for local companies and incubators and all that kind of stuff so that was kind of interesting from us kind of structural point of view to see what's going on going on in lithuania and in terms of the conference there was i guess the usual array of people talking about user acquisition and people like me talking about games journalism things like that but one an interesting thing that kind of did kind of tie into some extra news this week was um someone who used to work at a zepto lab so um obviously well known for cut the rope and they've done uh an awful lot of

merchandise okay i'm gonna say an awful lot of merchandising actually not an awful lot of merchandising they've been kind of quite um they've done merchandising but but in in in quite a um kind of uh a smart way really they they've also got the nom nom character um i should say um who who is very kind of cuddly and plushable so they could have done that but they've not gone too far so i guess the other interesting news a couple of weeks ago was rovio letting go some people and that was partly seen um as rovio's probably the the arch archetype of of over licensing um angry birds which jaguars has gone on on everything from from cola to uh bed spreads to playgrounds to um kids tattoos all manner of crazy things on angry birds but anyway so um so um they were talking about licensing and merchandising and the view was that um you have to be a bit careful with games you know you kind of say hey i've got a hit game and that means i'm good at licensing you have to have characters obviously and something more subtle is you have a hit game do you have a brand so you might have a quite strong game in terms of like kind of uh user numbers

or or monetary revenue but that's not necessarily mean you have a brand and really to do licensing and to sell things that are based on the characters in your game you need something a bit more kind of untangible a tangible thing that came out of it there was um the person from reckoned um you need as a rule of thumb you need a hundred million a hundred minutes right ten million monthly active users or monthly active players as we like to say um that's kind of what she thought was that was the borderline between um having a kind of a big enough audience which is pretty interesting um i guess particularly i think cut the rope has about um 70 million players actively every month and angry birds at one point i think had 163 million active players anyway um kind of the reason that news was interesting because um it transpired this week um the uh supercell so the the the i guess the in in finnish talk the um the current hot company taking over from rovio so the developer of games like uh

or games like or games that are clash of clans heyday and boom beach um they're looking to hire some licensing people specifically for merchandising which is kind of interesting because um while the games are obviously enormously successful and kind of to degree have strong characters those characters are not necessarily um i mean you could even argue that angry birds like a red bird or black bird or you know um they when they started out they were quite generic characters who kind of but they grew into characters i guess the red bird in particular but um so the clash of clans you have you have the barbarian you have the archer and you have these kind of generic strategy characters can they become you know how would how would you license them and brand them um uh i guess that's what the people who who supercell employ will be thinking about this um over over the coming months um so what other news has been going on i guess the kind of i don't know it's the news of the week or the or the damn script of the week or um depends on how you view these things i guess was um apple announcing some more ipads

so you know in in a technological point of view obviously these are incredibly um sophisticated kind of bits of hardware now you know every time now it's they're thinner and they're lighter but they do more than before and you know and and it would be easy to um kind of poo poo the the advances that go into to making these devices particularly if you go back and think about the original ipad which actually i quite liked but you know it was it was a heavy big block of aluminium you know i think i've moved on a lot a lot since then um and i had to laugh really because um because in apple in it and it's kind of like tech marketing kind of a talk called it a magical piece of glass so the um i think it's particularly the ipad air 2 is a magical piece of glass it's so light you can hold it all day hold it up all day long um which made me think it actually if it was a magical piece of glass out of a fairy story obviously just hover but maybe that's one for uh for tim cook to announce in another year the the the hoverable ipad um but i guess i think well while negative would be wrong has been interesting for the for the first time press kind of coverage of the of the apple announcement has kind of

been kind of a low-key you could call it and i think there's been some kind of interesting um kind of commentary that that now with ipad you originally started out with an ipad that was fine it was upgraded ipad 1 2 3 4. ipad mini came out um that was fine absolutely different it was a smaller ipad so you had an ipad and ipad mini but now um we had there's actually five so apple is actually selling actually promoting five different um ipads so you have two standard ipads you have ipad air and ipad air 2. and then you have three ipad mini so you have the ipad mini the ipad mini 2 originally called the ipad mini with retina display thank goodness they've changed that and now the new ipad mini 3. so i guess part of the reason is the original ipad mini still exists it's the only one without retina display that means it can be considerably cheaper so it's actually um they cut the price of of the three existing ipads so the ipad mini is now 249 which fifty dollars cheaper than the than the um ipad mini two which has the retina

display but fifty dollars doesn't seem very much for us in the west but obviously emerging markets that can be quite a big draw i guess the interesting thing is why apple still has the ipad mini 2 at 299 dollars that would kind of be this seemed to be the obvious one to drop in terms of the ipad mini 3. i'm sure that would happen at some point i'm sure a lot of people in apple in marketing have kind of thought about the reasons for doing this but um it has kind of sparked some interesting kind of debate and keith has written a um an opinion piece um kind of looking at how you know in the days of steve's jobs apple was a very different company facing the consumer it was a it was a visionary company and created these kind of products that never been seen before i guess ipad being the particular version we've never seen a tablet computer before quite like that we didn't know we needed one and then we probably 225 million of us do or that's how many they've sold at least um but now i guess with tim cook tim cook he was the operations guy at apple um before he came ceo and apple is much more an operations company now it's not necessarily i mean you could argue with the apple apple watch is is a is an innovation or not i guess we'll don't really know until it comes out but apple

is much more seems to be geared around um operations and even when it comes to iphones now obviously the iphone 6 and the iphone 6 plus and you have the iphone 5s um so you have these kind of i mean fragmentations is probably the wrong word to use compared to android fragmentation which is proper you know fragmentation across many devices and manufacturers but even within apple now you can you kind of seen what used to be a very small number of kind of devices is now spreading to families and things um so that was uh yeah that was kind of the uh some of the interesting news that was happening um this week come back next week and hear some more you