Amazon may be joining Microsoft and Google in the race to establish a leading game streaming service. According to two insiders who spoke to The Information (as highlighted by GamesIndustry.biz), Amazon hopes to launch the unconfirmed service in 2020. Streaming games allows consumers to ditch expensive gaming hardware, discs, and even the downloading of content. That’s because the approach typically streams titles directly from the cloud, in much the same way that TV and film streaming platforms like Netflix function. Amazon, of course, [...]

More games are to be released in China. Under normal circumstances, that statement would be far from newsworthy. But for nine months in 2018, the world’s largest games market had been significantly stifled by new Government regulation. In March last year, following a restructuring of the state institutions, China’s Government declined to approve a single new video game for release. Many titles were simply stopped in their tracks, while numerous others hand their monetisation potential stifled. Updates and new content, after [...]

Facebook’s advertising methodology is under the game industry spotlight again, after the social networking giant deemed the trailer for a celebrated indie title too ‘sexually suggestive’ for distribution. In a tweet, Devolver Digital, the publisher of GRIS, claimed that Nomada Studio’s game had its game trailer rejected by Facebook for including an animated scene where a towering sculpture crumbles as birds pass in front of a looming moon. The news left many games industry observers scratching their heads. Kotaku, which spoke with [...]

Apple customers across the world collectively spent USD$1.22bn (£1.7bn) in the week that ran from Christmas Day 2018 to New Years Day 2019: the company’s user spending record for the period. The festive week is famously a time for peaks in app spending; and clearly 2018/19 has been no different. On New Years Day alone, App Store users spent USD$322m (£254m), marking a new all-time single-day spending record for Apple’s customers. “The App Store had a record-breaking holiday week and New Year’s [...]

China may be the world’s biggest game market, with regard to user numbers and revenues, but for many months the nation’s Government had declined to approve a single new game. That all changed in recent days. As reported by the South China Morning Post, a new body, the State Administration of Radio and Television (SART), was formed in March 2018, with a view to monitoring media content intended for public consumption. From 28 March 2018, no new game titles were approved [...]

The gaming-centric voice chat platform Discord has raised USD$150m (£118m) in a round of funding that may position it to rival Valve and Epic’s efforts to dominate video game distribution platforms. The new round of funding, led by investment group Greenoaks Capital, also includes contributions from Firstmark, Index Ventures, IVP, Technology Opportunity Partners, and Tencent. Discord now courts an impressive USD$2.05bn (£1.6bn) valuation. It has been widely reported that Discord will use much of the money to bolster its restructured curated online [...]

Here at TheGamingEconomy, we’re not usually inclined to cover the latest developments in choreography, and muse over the thorny issue of ownership of dance moves. But then with Fortnite’s eccentric game universe continuing to dominate popular culture, anything is possible. And today being the day of the most Christmas parties all year, there’s a slim chance the games industry will be a little more uninhibited when it comes to dance right now. Over the past fortnight – no pun intended – a number [...]

Interactive mobile ads specialist CrossInstall has secured a deal with Google that will see its Instant Playables platform offer game demos within the Google Play store. Instant Playables lets developers offer interactive demos of their games without the end-user needing to download a game, accessible via a ‘Try Now’ button on app store product pages. The approach has already proven popular with games makers and distributors on platforms including Facebook, Google UAC, and Snap. ‘Lite’ versions of games have long been popular [...]

Mobile monetisation and marketing outfit ironSource has unveiled its new ROAS Optimizer platform, which offers users a means to monitor the return on advertising spend (ROAS). Only last week, we saw how advertising is increasingly valuable to casual mobile game revenues. But as the in-game and app-based advertising model continues to find a more established footing, its ecosystem is at the same time evolving into a rather complex beast. ROAS Optimizer hopes to address that complexity, while simultaneously automating bid optimisation with a [...]

A new report from mobile attribution and marketing analytics specialist AppsFlyer highlights the fact that, throughout 2018, in-app advertising (IAA) has gradually replaced in-app purchasing (IAP) as the key revenue driver for casual mobile games. Historically, IAP has powered the soaring profits enjoyed by many mobile games. While premium pricing initially dominated monetisation models, as smartphone gaming sped out the gates with the launch of the iPhone back in 2008, IAP soon became the norm. Millions of players eagerly making modest purchases [...]