It’s easy to feel instinctively optimistic about in-game advertising. In recent years there’s been a powerful sense that in-game ads aren’t simply an increasingly valuable means of income for developers and publishers; perhaps they’re now understood and embraced by more consumers and industry figures than ever before. Furthermore, there is an ever more diverse spread of games, markets and consumers where ads are fitting. And now it feels like there are a greater number of platforms, approaches and tools through which [...]

TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Facebook acquires cloud gaming outfit PlayGiga; Bidstack secures £10m Agency Trade Deal; and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare clears USD$1bn (£776.4m) in sales Facebook acquires cloud gaming outfit PlayGiga Social networking giant Facebook has acquired Madrid-based cloud gaming company PlayGiga. As reported by CNBC, the move furthers Facebook’s increasing presence in the gaming space, following the news that it picked up VR studio Beat Games last month. Equally, with [...]

In our latest guest post Vanessa Goff-Yu, marketing director at in-game advertising platform Bidstack, takes an optimistic look at the sizeable female gamer demographics, the rise of the strong female game character, and the role brands can play in aiding female representation across games. The news that Natalie Portman will take on the lead role in the fourth Thor film in 2021 wasn’t just the start of Marvel’s next phase; it was part of a wider radical shift in female representation [...]

TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Qualcomm and Niantic collaborating on new AR glasses; Wildlife Studios raises USD$60m (£45.7m) for mobile portfolio; Gameloft closes UK studio. Qualcomm and Niantic collaborating on new AR glasses The studio behind the phenomenally popular augmented reality mobile game Pokémon GO is working with semiconductor and telecommunications equipment giant Qualcomm to develop a new AR headset. While Pokémon GO was pivotal in introducing mobile to the masses, as highlighted by [...]

In this guest post by the CEO of the mobile game insights and market data specialist GameRefinery, Markus Ramark considers a new way to build your targeting, and looks at why understanding player ‘affinity’ with given games might unlock new levels of success.   At its heart, the mobile games industry is a multi-billion dollar battle to find the highest spending, frequently playing, most loyal new players. Top-performing games are supported with marketing spend in the tens of millions, and app stores [...]

Late last year mobile marketing platform AppLovin acquired in-app bidding start-up MAX. The AppLovin team has since built out the MAX platform, and integrated the real-time mobile header bidding solution into its wider ecosystem. Now MAX has had a little time out in the wild in the hands of mobile developer and publisher customers, we caught up with Carl Livie, MD EMEA of AppLovin, to talk in-app bidding. Could it be that the long-promised in-app bidding revolution is finally underway? And [...]

Twitter isn’t a gaming platform. The social network may have seen a major uptake in gaming engagement in recent months, but while the likes of Facebook, WeChat and Kakao Talk have become homes for hyper casual, the micro-blogging platform has not. Still, there are lessons to be learned for game ad-tech providers – as well as game makers and publishers of ad-monetised games – after Twitter had a somewhat bad week. As reported by the BBC, on Thursday shares in Twitter fell by [...]

Earlier this year mobile monetisation platform outfit Fyber launched a significantly reworked version of its Fyber FairBid technology, having celebrated 10 years in business in the previous months. But what have the team learned about the changing in-game advertising landscape over that decade? And what does it mean that Fyber FairBid offers a unified auction technology for app bidding ‘built from the ground up for the in-app programmatic era’? TheGamingEconomy caught up with Fyber president Offer Yehudai to learn more about the [...]

In this special contributed piece Erick Fang, CEO of AI-driven ad platform Mintegral, explores the opportunity and challenges around cloud gaming. And as the release of Google Stadia nears, he considers how the roll-out of 5G will found any potential… March’s GDC presentation of Google Stadia was a real game-changer. Stadia and services like it could disrupt the gaming industry, just as Uber did with taxis, Netflix with TV and Amazon with shopping. Google, Microsoft and others vision a future without consoles [...]

TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Bidstack launches in the US; EA data breach affects 1600 Fifa 20 Global Series competitors; and Reality Gaming Group to raise £1.5m. Bidstack launches in the US Bidstack Group PLC, an ad tech company which enables brands to purchase native in-game inventory programmatically, has launched in the US. The firm’s efforts across the Atlantic, which have been on the cards since August this year, will be led by [...]