Gameloft's 360 on in-game ads, Super Bowl UA success considered, and Katy Perry boosts Glu
The past 7 days in bite-sized chunks
With the Super Bowl XLIX having now been and gone, we can see now that the Katy Perry-fronted halftime show held far more significance to the world of mobile gaming than we realised at the time.
Post-show Glu Mobile announced big plans Perry as the face of its new celebrity game.
This has gone down well with investors, with Glu Mobile stock rising in value accordingly.
And continuing with the Super Bowl theme, we looked at how the big-money adverts taken out by mobile game developers have impact app store stats - TV ads, now more than ever, continue to be of increasing interest for the industry.
Industry voices- UK trade association TIGA laid out its manifesto for empowering the homegrown games industry.
- Jesper Krogh Kristiansen, Editor-in-Chief of Nordic Game Bits, contributed the first in a series of regular guest columns on Nordic mobile game development, this time on the growing presence of Norway.
- Ahead of Pocket Gamer Connects in Bangalore, we spoke to Shailesh Prabhu of Yellow Monkey Studios about the potential of the region.
- We caught up with the CEO of Chinese publisher Perfect World, Robert Xiao, to discuss what makes a global free-to-play success.
- Steel Media (that's us!) has unveiled the first key speakers due to appear at April's Pocket Gamer Connects Bangalore. They include experts from Rovio, Xiaomi, Unity, and Roadhouse Interactive.
- Over 1,000 entrants to the 2015 International Mobile Gaming Awards have been whittled down to 93 finalists.
- The AppSpy Twitch channel, run by our sister sites AppSpy and Pocket Gamer, has hit 3 million views.
- Finalists announced for the SXSW 2015 Gaming Awards, including Monument Valley, Hearthstone, and Threes.
- The upcoming Develop conference in Brighton is now open to speaker applications.
- We put together a snapshot of current quarter mobile game company financials, so you can check out how the likes of King, EA Mobile, and Gameloft are ticking over.
- Following the presence of mobile games in incredibly expensive Superbowl advert slots, we spoke to Josh Rinsky of Quaid Media to question is TV advertising just for the big guys?
- Supercell splashed the cash with a $9 million ad for Clash of Clans during the Superbowl, staring Liam Neeson.
- At the Taipei Games Show, it was predicted that the Taiwanese mobile game sector could hit $474 million in 2015.
- Gameloft, after having previously turned its back on in-game advertising, is preparing for an about-turn in the face of its disappointing 2014 financials.
- Lower development costs, and the success of Tsum Tsum in Japan, led to Q1 profits for Disney Interactive, despite a dip in sales.
- After Kim Kardashian, Glu Mobile revealed that its next stab at celebrity-fuelled F2P success will be a Katy Perry game.
- In a novel move, Porsche has revealed its new Cayman GT4 model via an update in EA's Real Racing 3.
- As Japanese mobile publisher DeNA continues its restructuring process, the firm's revenues for FY14 Q3 were down 4 percent.
- Following the extreme UA of advertising at the Superbowl, we investigated whether these big-money ads translated to App Store popularity.
- Japanese mobile game developer, publisher, and platform company GREE wrote off $75 million from its OpenFeint acquisition.
- Our go-to VR expert Spanner Spencer spoke to Imangi Studios about creating a virtual reality Temple Run on Samsung Gear VR.
- We covered the news that World of Tanks developer Wargaming.net has signed a sponsorship deal with Vevo to specifically target rock and metal music fans.
- It was revealed that iDreamSky have acquired exclusive rights to publish ustwo's Monument Valley on Android in China.
- LINE, the successful mobile messaging service and social network, is looking to partner with mobile game devs in Taiwan and Thailand.
- Dan Scheidegger, former head of game design at Storm8, has joined Scopely as general manager of casual games.
- A strong performance in 2014, coupled with the promise of Katy Perry, led to Glu's market cap rising to $150 million.
Matt Suckley
Achingly contrarian. Proud owner of an N-Gage and a PSP Go. Matt spends most of his time writing about indie games of which you've never heard. Like that one, yes. Matt is an English student, and largely terrible at games. Go figure.