Chinese Mobile Gaming Sees Big Boost

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When it comes to mobile gaming, China audience is growing fast, but the revenue from mobile gaming is growing even faster.

While some games still don’t make too much in terms of profit, the general market saw a huge increase in revenue over the past year, according to the chart below. TechInAsia reports that even though the general audience of gamers remained the same, the games have managed to make more money. Mobile gamers rounded out to nearly 360 million, while the revenue has seen a significant jump, up from just over $100 million in 2013 to nearly $300 million this past year.

Most of this revenue is coming from popular intellectual property, games that have worldwide appeal. And this would indicate that more Western developers are entering the Chinese game market, even if that means making a few changes to their products along the way.

The Verge has a huge article on this, explaining how a game such as Clash of Clans generated over 200,000 in its first month on the Chinese market, despite the fact that it didn’t generate too much revenue due to the fact that it utilized a Google payment service for in-game items, which most Chinese gamers couldn’t use at the time.

According to Henry Fong, CEO of publisher Yodo1, “the market has evolved to become very, very crowded and competitive.” The games are easy to adapt to the Chinese market, even if some certain changes have to be made, such as art or characters that adapt more to general Chinese culture.

Finding the right partner can play a huge part as well. For the Android launch of Monument Valley, developer Ustwo had to seek out the right partner for the game’s distribution, unlike what it did when it released the game on the iOS front. “We really wanted to partner up with someone who understood the market and the players within it,” said the company’s executive producer, Dan Gray. So, it partnered with iDreamsky, which previously produced Temple Run and Fruit Ninja for the market.

Needless to say, the results paid off. “Downloads and purchases surged following the launch of the game’s first expansion pack in November 2014,” said iDreamsky CEO Michael Chen, “demonstrating the enormous appeal this game has to a very broad demographic which we are confident we can replicate in China.”

Rob Segal, co-founder of Get Set Games, explained that the process of moving into a new market can be a little easier with the right partner in tow. “We had games there before we had a partner,” he explained, “and I don’t think you have any chance of success without working with a partner.”

Still, Gray believes there’s potential to reach a bigger audience by going overseas with a familiar product. “Knowing there’s over a billion people who’ve never heard of Monument Valley is a great reason to want to release over there,” he explained.

Here’s to more U.S. companies making a reach for a bigger market — and succeeding as a result.

Awesome Games Done Quick Raises Big Awareness

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Gamers taking part in charitable foundations is nothing new, as many participate in the yearly Extra Life event, raising millions of dollars to help sick kids at children’s hospitals nationwide. However, the team over at Awesome Games Done Quick have done some impressive work themselves, managing to get millions of views — and dollars — out of “speed running” through their favorite games.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “speed running” of games means blasting through them as quickly as possible, and can range from 8-bit classics like Mega Man and Super Mario Bros. to more modern titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. With this year’s broadcast, the Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ for short) team ran through 160 hours of live streaming this past January, in the hopes of raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Needless to say, it was quite successful.

Twitch.tv recently put together a chart showing just how successful AGDQ was with its broadcast, which drew in 9.4 million viewers and raised $1.58 million dollars for the Foundation. In addition, the chart also shows that the AGDQ channel has grown impressively over the last couple of years. In 2012, it had 1.15 million viewers. This year, it rose up to 29.2 million — and should be even larger next year.

As you can see by the chart, many other statistics were also revealed for individual viewers. The average unique viewer tuned in for an estimated 98 minutes, while the maximum concurrent viewers reached 170,000 in the channel at one point — pretty impressive for a Twitch broadcast that didn’t revolve around a tournament.

The social front was also huge within the channel, with a total of over 3.3 million chat messages, across over 300,000 unique chatters. Many of them also used “emotes,” or images to express certain things happening in the game, such as a puppy dog face.

It just goes to show that gamers definitely care about raising money for a good cause — all while having a good time as they “speed run” through Super Metroid.

Making Songs Out Of Selfies

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Who would’ve thought that a car company would make “selfie” photos into something more innovative

The Lincoln Motor Company has created a website where users can upload their best “selfie” photos (or worst, if they prefer) to put together a custom song on the fly.

Here’s how it works. The song is put together using certain elements from each photo, with each instrument representing certain parts of the body. Here’s the breakdown:

-The arrangement of eyes puts together the keyboard harmony

-The person’s jawline helps create the bassline

-The formation of lips helps put together the tonality of the guitar

-The rhythmic percussion is formed around the shape of the person’s nose

-The eyebrows help set the ambient tone for the song

The goal of the site is to “celebrate your individuality by turning your selfie into sound, as personal and unique as your own thumbprint,” according to the description on the website.

Lincoln Motor Company has already put together an impressive gallery, showcasing all the different music styles that incorporate with the “selfies” of many users. However, that shouldn’t stop visitors from putting in their own and seeing what kind of creation their photo comes up with.

It’s a unique approach for would-be consumers, as it allows them to integrate with a tool that isn’t usually associated with automobile sellers, providing a distinctive touch that still ties in with Lincoln’s main website.

This isn’t Lincoln’s first attempt at tying in its brand with music genius. A couple of years ago, it hosted an event {link no longer active} where Emmy-winning recording artist Beck performed a cover of David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” using a 157-piece orchestra, with artists from around the world. The video’s outreach did good business for the company, while at the same time providing Beck more room to stretch his musical creativity.

Indeed, Lincoln is on a roll every time it connects with music. Don’t be surprised if it launches future campaigns that keep things in tune.

Now Hiring This Week: Feb 11

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[a]listdaily is your source for the hottest job openings for senior management and marketing in games, entertainment and social media. Check here every Wednesday for the latest openings.

$11,607. That’s how much 47 percent of workers are losing every year in earnings due to the gender pay gap. Here’s how to vanquish it.

For last week’s [a]list jobs postings, click here. Have a position you’d like to place with us Email us at pr@ayzenberg.com.

Hammer & Chisel: Forging Hardcore Gaming For 1 Billion Players

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The mobile game industry is moving out of its toddler years and into childhood, relatively speaking, and with that growth mobile games are getting more than just casual. A number of startups are betting their investor’s money on the belief that as the mobile game business grows and matures, more players will desire gameplay that’s richer, deeper, and more engaging. One of the startups dedicated to that proposition is Hammer & Chisel, the company started by OpenFeint founder Jason Citron, which today announced it has closed its Series B funding round from investors Tencent, Benchmark Capital and YouWeb’s 9Plus. Hammer & Chisel aims to be the first core gaming company to reach one billion players, with the fast-growing market of mobile devices reaching over 2 billion people soon.

Hammer & Chisel was founded in 2012 by Jason Citron, whose previous company OpenFeint was acquired by GREE for $104 million in 2011. With this latest round of investment, Hammer & Chisel has raised more than $8.2 million from top tier Silicon Valley VCs and investors like Tencent, Benchmark, YouWeb’s 9Plus, Accel, TWI, and IDG. Hammer & Chisel’s first title, the iPad only Fates Forever, was released last year, reimagining the MOBA genre on touch devices. Fates Forever has received awards such as “Apple’s Editor Choice” and “Best of iPad 2014.”

Jason Citron

“There are an estimated 100 million to 200 million core gamers right now – growing at a rapid pace. We think there’s tremendous opportunity to craft high end, respectful experiences tailored to the mobile play patterns of core gamers,” said Citron. “This investment paves the way for us to bring high end mobile games to emerging markets all around the world, which constitutes a substantial percentage of the future core gaming population.”

The [a]listdialy spoke with Citron about the investment, Fates Forever, and where mobile games and Hammer & Chisel are headed in the future.

How has the Fates Forever performed for you since its release? Has it met your expectations?

We launched Fates Forever last summer, over the July 4th weekend, and Apple gave us their Editor’s Choice award and we were featured on the front page. The project overall has really been an experiment for us. We’re a new company trying to bring a new type of hardcore gaming to mobile devices. The game has done well, but it hasn’t been a grand slam. On our journey of building an important gaming company, we started with something we thought would push the envelope a bit and we’d learn a lot from. If you look at other gaming companies that have been around longer and are very successful, the journey that all these companies take is they start by making games that are experiments to learn and grow on their way to building a massive success.

What size is your new round of funding, and what will it enable you to do?

The round of funding was led by Tencent. We met them a while ago, when we were doing the beta testing of Fates Forever. They are very interested in the MOBA space, and they are a huge distributor in China. They were interested in investing in us and building a relationship for high-end games on mobile devices. We’re not disclosing the size of the round, but it’s a multi-million dollar round that Tencent led.

The way that we look at the world is that mobile devices are just at the beginning of a multi-decade run. Who knows what will happen after that, but it seems conceivable in ten to twenty years every human being on the planet who’s not in poverty will own a smartphone. So we think there’s a tremendous opportunity to bring high end gaming to not only the current smartphone market,long term over the next twenty years. The money we’ve taken in this round will help us in our journey to bringing core games to a wider audience than we did with Fates Forever.

With tablet growth slowing, does this change your perceptions about the market opportunity or your strategy?

Sure it does. Fates Forever is tablet only right now, and when we started building the game a few years ago it looked like tablets were going to be the “next big thing.” That really hasn’t shaken out. We’re thinking of our next step more broadly in terms of mobile devices. The market conditions have definitely affected what we do going forward.

What lessons have you learned about multiplayer gaming on tablets?

The summary version of what we’ve learned is that the tablet gaming market how really high-end multiplayer games is still pretty early. The level of adoption and awareness of that type of content is very different than what it is on the PC. The PC people are used to sitting down and playing a game for hours, a really deep and immersive experience, and people don’t expect that of a tablet right now. Wone of the things we’ve found ourselves having to do is try and educate them people that they can get those kind of really deep experiences on tablets. The type of gamers that really enjoy high-end multiplayer games, it’s a different audience, and spreading that message is a big part of what we’ve learned we have to do.

What I really want to do with Hammer & Chisel is bring the kind of games that have had meaningful, deep impacts on us in our lives to the next billion gamers. Both you and I have spent the majority of our lives completely submerged in gaming culture, but the people who have smartphones and will be getting them in the next five to twenty years will have not experienced that. There’s an opportunity to bring the really meaningful, shared experiences we’ve had to them, and to make a first impression. Smartphone growth in the developed world has slowed, but in emerging countries it’s still 30 percent to 40 percent year over year growth. These are people to whom it’s their first computer, and this will be the first time they’ve experienced a videogame. That’s such a remarkable thing — it has an impact, and it’s great to be a part of that.

Where do you see mobile gaming, and especially tablet gaming, going from here? What is the biggest opportunity ahead, and what’s the biggest challenge?

The fundamental challenge over the next year is content diversity. As a player if you go to the App Store there is a ton of stuff. Apple and Google, every week, do a good job of promoting the new stuff for the week, but what usually happens is those games tend to not stick. On the top free and paid charts, for the last year and change, the top ten games have been relatively static. They don’t change. The ability for developers to get their content seen and played is so hard, it’s now going to affect the quality and the diversity of content. If you look at consoles and console gaming, and you map the trajectory over the last thirty years, the amount of diversity and experimentation in content from big-budget studios any more is nonexistent because it costs so much money to make something that stands out.

On the low end on console and PC you have the indie game phenomenon happening. None of those studios are successful in any measure similar compared to the ones at the top. Some of those indie studios have good lives, but if you look at the amount of money Call of Duty brings in compared to a hit game like Braid, there’s no comparison.

The bright light here is that because Apple and Google go out of their way every week to feature new content, that content does get pickup, and you will see games that come out of nowhere and do well. The trick is making a game that, from that pop, can sustain itself.

These Are The Digital Trends Poised To Take Off

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Sometimes a digital trend can be hard to predict. Hot one minute, and then completely cold the next, a trend is only as good as the buzz that’s behind it — and even then, it can be hard to predict.

Adweek recently posted an infographic, located below, that discusses the various digital trends that have gained some big buzz — mainly across social media. The infographic, compiled by Bell Pottinger Digital, was put together using its online listening tool, the Crimson Hexagon, to find all publicly available data from the Internet around certain topics, which are identified as digital trends. They’re ranked below in the infographic.

“While technology will be one of the biggest drivers of marketing change in the new year, the key focus for brands will be on delivering truly integrated strategies, said James Thomlinson, partner and managing director of Bell Pottinger Digital. “Every year new hardware and software appears, but the most successful brands in 2015 will be those that harness new technology to deliver a single experience to consumers wherever they are in their journey.”

The infographic covers 15 topics in all, including the following: Near-Field Communication, The Internet of Things, Wearable Tech, Internal Communications, Storytelling, Branded Content, Beacons, Personalization, Big Data, Content Marketing, Augmented Reality, 3D Printing, Real-Time Marketing, Mobile and Gamification. Each one is broken down with certain stats and numbers, such as mobile’s outreach with over 1.4 million mentions, and gamifications’s projected market of $2.8 billion by 2016 — a huge rise from the $242 million reported back in 2012.

Out of all of these, near-field communication takes the top spot, with a 358 percent increase in conversation, thanks to 42,530 mentions throughout 2014 in news articles. By 2017, the article indicates, half of today’s smartphone users will use mobile wallets as a preferred payment method, compared to credit cards or cash.

Check out the details below, and take note. These could be the next big trends we’re looking at.

 

 

Why ‘Evolve’s’ Four-vs.-One Multiplayer Will Work

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For the past few months, 2K Games has been heavily hyping its latest multiplayer release, Evolve, which is in stores this week. The game takes a novel approach to the usual multiplayer experience, where four hunters chase after a large monster, who can strike back and eventually “evolve” into something unstoppable. The catch is, players can control all these characters and compete against one another.

It’s a big difference from the usual multiplayer experience that players have come to expect, especially those that have become accustomed to the likes of Call of Duty and Halo. However, it’s an experience that should work for 2K in the long run.

Here are several reasons to consider:

The Hunters Aren’t “Weaklings”, and Are Unique
Some might think that the player controlling the monster in Evolve has the advantage, and, in a way, it is kind of a guilty pleasure. However, that’s not to say the Hunters involved in the game don’t have their role to play. Each one has a specific duty, whether it’s playing as a medic who keeps the other players healthy while unloading gunfire, or a trapper that puts up a temporary electric fence to keep the monster from escaping.

Learning – and mastering – each of these skills provides an overwhelming replay value to the game, and may find players getting accustomed to certain roles with each new match they enter. Considering the generic roles they usually file in other multiplayer experiences (where they just play “soldier” or “grunt”), this is a huge difference.

Playing As the Monster Is a Blast
Okay, so if you get to play as the monster (be it a Goliath, Wraith or Behemoth), you’re going to have a good time. That’s because each monster has a number of capabilities that can easily crush Hunters flat if they’re landed the right way, from throwing rocks to performing a crushing smash into the ground to firing electrical bolts that can hit at a satisfying distance.

Each monster has something unique to provide, and players who finally get a turn with them certainly won’t be disappointed.

 

The Game Industry Opens Up To Women

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It’s sad but true – some guys believe that video games are clearly their dominion, and that there’s no place for girls in said dominion. But the truth is, there is a place for them – and they’re surely finding their spot within it.

Over the past few years, there’s been an upswing in more women getting involved in the video game community, not only as players, but also as developers and executives who have some say within the industry. It shows balance within said industry, as women clearly have as many good ideas and skills as men – and in some cases, even more.

A report from The Guardian indicates that 52 percent of overall gamers are women – more than half of the industry out there. Granted, a big chunk of them come from the mobile market, where games like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Soda Saga are just as easily accepted by females as they are males. Still, it’s a staggering sign that females do make a difference in the industry as far as playing is concerned.

That’s not all. More professional players are entering the scene, and even though some male gamers still aren’t quite accepting of them as equals, that isn’t stopping companies from opening the doors to them. But there are still limitations, like with certain tournaments holding special events for both males and female without intersecting them, as explained by PC Gamer.

And, of course, some women have prominent roles as developers within the community. Jade Raymond worked as a producer on Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series for years, helping the series prosper before eventually departing the company last year to strike out on her own. And creative director Amy Hennig made a name for herself working on Sony’s Uncharted series, before eventually moving on over to Visceral Games, where she’s hard at work on a top-secret Star Wars game project.

What we’re seeing here is a shift, one that provides a welcome mat to females within the video game industry instead of the usual scornful eye. That’s not to say that everyone is willing to accept them – there are still those skeptics out there – but it seems the industry is becoming more integrated as they find their place within it. And it’s a welcome sight, as many of them provide the kind of ideas and skills that can help the industry move forward.

It’s still an ongoing fight, as some tournaments still refuse to let females compete with males, but slowly but surely, women are finding their place with games. So make room for a player two, guys. They’re here to stay.

Say Hello To Facebook’s New Ad Format

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Facebook is always looking for new ways to catch its social base’s attention with new advertising, and it may have just struck gold with a new format it intends to introduce in spades – the cinemagraph.

Adweek is reporting that Facebook, through both its own site and its wholly-owned Instagram page, will encourage brands to try out the new format, which works like an eye-catching advertisement that stands out from the usual norm, utilizing a half-video, half-photograph style.

“You’re going to start seeing a ton of these on Facebook,” said an advertising executive who has seen Facebook’s guide on the new format, which has been named Hacking Facebook Autoplay.

This isn’t the first time that cinemagraphs have been seen, as they’ve been made famous for the past few years by a pair of artists, Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, who have spent a good amount of time in the advertising world. It utilizes a similar format to a GIF, but meant to run in an ad format, instead of as a separate video set-up.

Burg and Beck have already perfected using this format on other sites (like Tumblr), and now it appears Facebook wants to give it a try to see how effective it is for both users and advertisers.

“Because of autoplay, brands need to be doing more with this stuff,” said the ad exec. “This is something that plays out with motion in the feed that’s cool.”

Stouffer’s and Coca-Cola have already signed on to give the program a try, with their own advertisements put into play. The video ads would play in motion on a user’s feed without having to click a button. “Advertisers buy it just like video,” said the ad exec.

The ads would run on repeat, and in a non-obtrusive fashion, so it may catch users’ eyes while they scroll down their page.

When it comes to the idea of the cinemagraph, Burg explained that he and Beck were just playing around with “isolated motion” when they came up with the format. They believe it’s ideal when it comes to advertising. “People can’t stop staring at them,” he explained. “Isn’t that what advertisers want ”

And it’s a format that’s beginning to pick up in popularity. “We’ve had all kinds of new inquiries (from brands),” he explained. “They don’t want video that’s so noisy; they want a cinemagraph because it has more elegance.”

No word yet on when Facebook will introduce the program on a wide scale, but it shouldn’t be too long.

You can check out examples of cinemagraphs in action here.

CREATIVE: Don’t Mess With Marriott’s ‘Two Bellmen’

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Marriott’s Content Studio is off to a rollicking start. Now we finally get to see the trailer for the film that Marriott’s content division has been working on which is set at the JW Marriott LA Live hotel.

The film is called Two Bellmen, and from the looks of the trailer, is fairly action-packed.