‘FIFA 14’ Mobile Scores Big

Electronic Arts is rather pleased with the success of its latest FIFA soccer game for iOS and Android, FIFA 14. BY any comparison, it’s garnered more than enough downloads to consider it a phenomenon.

According to the publisher, the game has been downloaded over 26 million times worldwide, which is nearly double how many downloads FIFA 13 got the year before at 14.5 million. Considering last year’s game wasn’t free, however, this year’s edition may not produce the same revenue. Then again, expanding the user base leads to the opportunity to monetize a much larger audience, and so far the game is scoring well on the Top Grossing charts.

Regardless, FIFA 14‘s success speaks volumes, as it managed to top the free iOS charts across 148 countries, and land in the Top Ten Grossing charts for 155 countries. That’s a goal clearly any soccer team can be proud of.

Source: MCV UK

Prefundia Helps Kickstarters

Kickstarter has been immensely popular, but the success of any given Kickstarter project isn’t a sure thing. The new site Prefundia site, recently launched out of beta, provides a new platform for would-be Kickstarters to test their campaigns. In effect, Prefundia is an on-ramp for Kickstarter where ideas can be tested in front of a crowd and build momentum in advance of the actual Kickstarter campaign.

Launching through Boomstartup over the summer, the site had been operating in beta over the last three months, with 195 projects put through the service since June. Out of those, 71 percent have met with success on a subsequent Kickstarter campaign, which is a substantial improvement over the average success rate of 44 percent for crowdfunding campaigns.

The site is very user-friendly, offering hosting space for photos, videos and texts, and easy sign-up for would-be donors to take part.

“People certainly do use the platform to test viability of projects,” says Prefundia co-founder Daniel Falabella. “Here’s one we know is using it for that purpose. In fact, we’re developing a component for the creator dashboard which will compare a project’s stats to all others on Prefundia in order to benchmark and give a clearer indication of demand.”

Anyone looking to launch a Kickstarter may want to look at Prefundia as way to boost the success rate, or find out early on if the Kickstarter idea just isn’t a popular one. The Zip Tie pictured is one of the Prefundia campaigns looking to see if enough people will find it attractive. What do you think

Source: TechCrunch

Graphic Designers Strike Back

A graphic designer’s life often requires listening to some amazingly dumb criticisms, comments and requests, and yet maintaining a professional decorum. Fed up, Irish graphic designers Paddy Treacy and Mark Shanley turned some of the critiques into posters. These were displayed at a gallery and prints were sold, netting thousands of euros for charity.

Think about these before you comment on a graphic design the next time — you could be immortalized in a fashion not to your liking.

Ultimately, though, all of those critiques had a positive outcome. Enjoy some of the posters below, and check out the rest of them at sharpsuits.net.

 

The Uneven Mobile Games Boom

Is the fast-growing mobile game industry getting closed out to smaller developers Is it even a good market for larger developers, with so many games clogging to App Store and Google Play Could there be another game industry meltdown in the offing, similar to the 1983 videogame crash Is it the best of times, or about to be the worst of times Some observers have started asking these questions, but a review of the evidence says this is not happening. Just the opposite seems to be occurring, although it’s certainly getting harder to be successful — and size or past history is no guarantee of success in the future.

Game designer Tadhg Kelly points out that while there may be a crunch in mobile game development as far as investment goes, there is still plenty of demand. “The customers are still there, in droves,” Kelly points out, “but to inspire them to play your game needs a much smarter attitude than before. It is no longer smart to make some conservative games and blast them all around ad networks in the hopes of striking it big.” He calls it “squeaky bum time” where it seems to be getting more dangerous even while opportunity is increasing.

Certainly the basic news about mobile devices is positive. Overall growth of mobile devices continues unabated, with more than one billion mobile devices shipping annually. We’re now at 1.2 billion devices in people’s hands worldwide, and shortly that will be over 2 billion. Yes, we’ll reach a limit pretty soon, but even that limit is a lot bigger than where we are at. Of course, there are problems in trying to reach a global audience, with languages and cultures a distinct barrier to taking a game and making it universally adopted.

Mobile game publisher Machine Zone provides an example of how to get around such barriers with its latest game, Game of War: Fire Age. This real-time strategy game for iOS launched this summer and debuted in the top-grossing app charts at at #14 shortly thereafter as players worldwide jumped in. CEO and co-founder Gabe Leydon spoke at GamesBeat about how the company did this with some innovative design and a lot of hard work. Machine Age built real-time translation capability into the game, and that’s enabled players to work together across the world. “We just going the opposite of the way people say mobile is — shorter sessions, snackable game play,” said Leydon. “I think all of that’s wrong.” His game has people playing in two hour sessions, and it’s monetizing very well indeed. Yet this is happening with a game design well outside of the usual mobile game approach.

Another example of how mobile games are growing rapidly, and in a different direction, is provided by Japanese messaging app Line. The app is now raking in $100 million a quarter with games making up 60 percent of the revenue. This has disrupted the mobile game market in Japan, with former leaders DeNA (shares down 32.5 percent) and GREE (shares down 41.5 percent) having a rougher time. Both DeNA and GREE built their game empires on feature phones and are transitioning to smartphones, but the immediacy of Line messaging has clearly grabbed the attention of the Japanese market. It’s become a compelling to acquire and engage game players, who use messaging on a daily basis.

Messaging apps are rapidly becoming a powerful gaming platform, even though they take an additional 20 percent cut on top of the usual 30 percent going to Apple or Google. Tencent’s WeChat has over 250 million users in China and beyond, Korea’s KakaoTalk has over 100 million users and grabbed all ten of the Top Ten grossing titles in Korea’s Google Play store. Messaging apps may well make similar inroads in the West, as WhatsApp hits 350 million users gaming via messaging will become more prevalent.

While opportunity may be expanding, there’s trouble brewing in development according to some. Kristian Segerstrale, formerly of Playfish and EA Mobile, noted recently that he feels $1 million has become the minimum budget for mobile games. “Few mobile / tablet games will be made with combined production and marketing budgets below $1M in the future,” said Segerstrale. That occasioned some discussion among industry leaders with many agreeing but noting there’s still opportunity for smaller developers and budgets to succeed.

Analytics firm Flurry notes that the situation is looking like there will be a content explosion in the future, not an implosion. “Looking at application starts on the Flurry network since January 2012, we see an increase in the quarterly growth rate,” said Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf on the company’s blog. “This is in stark contrast to theories that the app ecosystem is congested. In fact, in just over 18 months, the rate of which new apps are being started on the Flurry network has nearly doubled.”

Sure, but while there may be more games coming out, do new developers still have a chance to be successful Khalaf says yes. “Just on the Flurry platform the number of independently owned app developers that have a worldwide audience of over 20 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) has jumped from 7 in Q1 2012 to 32 in Q3 2013. That is whopping 357 percent growth in 18 months,” said Khalaf. “In the same period, the number of app developers with an audience over one million MAU has risen from just under 400 to 875, a whopping 121 percent growth.”

There seems to be more opportunity than ever ahead in mobile games, even though discoverability, monetization, development costs and globalization all remain difficult. It seems clear that it’s no longer sufficient to be creative in your game design — you have to be creative in your business model and how you build an audience, too. There’s no simple way to be successful, and throwing lots of money and game installs isn’t going to be the magic bullet to get a game to profitability. Developers and publishers will need to put more thought into all aspects of the business in order to be successful, but the potential rewards will be greater than ever going forward.

The basic fact is there will be billions of smart mobile devices being used on a daily basis worldwide, and games are already one of the leading categories of apps for these devices. Games have become much more socially acceptable, as well as much more accessible. You can find gamers everywhere, and they are ready and willing to play. Developers just have to create something people will find compelling and different enough to get them to stick around long enough to make it pay off. The ways to do that will continue to evolve — which is what makes this such an exciting, and terrifying, time in the game industry.

(Infographic courtesy of Super Monitoring.)

 

The ‘Ryse’ Of Damocles

This second episode in The Fall series based on Ryse: Son of Rome has Marius telling a centurion about the legend of the Roman general Damocles. Just about the only thing that this legend and the real world Greek one of Damocles have in common is the mention of a sword.

‘ZombiU’ Movie Has Brainsss

Ron Dee need a basic human necessity (toilet paper) and needs to go to the convenience store; sadly, the zombie apocalypse has happened and really complicated that simple task. Check out the fan film of his journey — nicely put together for something that only cost a few hundred dollars to produce.

Who’s Stalking Who?

Facebook seems to function these days as the hub of our familial, friendly and informal relationships these days so it should come as no surprise that Facebook knows who is most important in your life. They are also ranking your relationships and, er, who you stalk with their algorithm. Arjun Sreedharan has devised a script that will enable you to see your friend’s ranking score and who is checking on your profile often. While the numbers bear no meaning to us, when we compare these numbers with other friends, the ranking process begins to make sense. The lower the number, the more crucial the connection.

You can figure out what Facebook thinks of your friendships, too. Here’s what you do:

– Drag this link into your browser bookmark bar.

– Log in through Facebook and click on that bookmark.

– A list of rank scores that appear similar to the image above will show you how Facebook has measured your relationships with those individuals.

This information affects the order of results you get when you try to search for someone, the content you get in your news feed and, interestingly enough, who appears in that friends section when they’ve visited your profile. Getting a furtive look at your frenemy’s profile may not be as secretive as you think.

Source: The Next Web

 

Xbox One Video Tour

With the system due to hit shelves in less than two weeks, excitement is at a fever pitch for the Xbox One. To help get users acquainted with the new hardware, Microsoft has released a new video detailing its interface, with a full 12-minute walkthrough.

Hosted by Microsoft’s Marc Whitten and Yusuf Mehdi, the duo walk through a number of menus within the interface, and also provide tips on customization and personalization, so that the system can accommodate a user’s specific tastes.

A number of apps are also featured in the menu, including familiar favorites like Netflix and Skype. The Xbox One arrives in stores on November 22.

Source: The Next Web