Audience
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PepsiCo Planned Space-Based Orbiting Billboard for Gaming Ad Campaign
U.S. soft drinks giant PepsiCo was, until recently, planning to launch a gaming-focused advertising campaign hosted on billboards suspended in space. If you’re not familiar with ‘stratosphere advertisements’ – also known as ‘orbital display ads’ – brace yourself. Russian tech outfit StartRocket plans to releases networks of tiny ‘cubesat’ satellites into space, which can be arranged into formations that project light back to Earth; perhaps assuming the form of a company logo or slogan. As such, the satellite arrays essentially offer orbiting [...]
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Disruptor Beam Lifts Lid on Mobile Live-Ops & Game Dev Platform
The Boston-based development studio Disruptor Beam has made a move into game tech, revealing that it is releasing a new platform for mobile game development and live ops. Known for its work on Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and in particular Star Trek mobile games, Disruptor Beam is now making its Disruptor Engine available to third parties. The new platform is essentially a commercialised version of its internal game technology, which has been used to build and maintain titles like [...]
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Epic Removes Problematic Player-Created Content from Fortnite
Gaming giant Epic has removed a player-created scene from the Fortnite gameplay map after the game’s fans reported that it depicted seriously problematic content. TheGamingEconomy will offer a brief warning here; this article will necessarily make very occasional and passing references to suicide. Back in 2018, Epic revealed that an area of the Fortnite map would be given over to a region called The Block. The idea is that Epic uses The Block to showcase some of the best player-made Fortnite environments, rotating [...]
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UK Games Market Grows 10% Through 2018, Hitting £5.7bn Value
The United Kingdom’s games sector appears to be in rude health. As part of this week’s ongoing London Games Festival, it was revealed that the UK games market enjoyed 10% year-on-year growth through 2018. UK games industry trade body Ukie also revealed that the growth saw the UK consumer games market reach a record £5.7bn value in 2018. Ukie’s figures also show that game software revenues in the UK cleared £4bn for the first time in 2018, climbing 10.3% year-on-year to £4.01bn. [...]
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Rovio Puts £2.3m into Play Ventures Investment Fund
Angry Birds outfit Rovio has announced that it has placed USD$3m (£2.3m) into the new Play Ventures fund, which hopes to initially invest in 20-25 video game companies. Play Ventures was founded last year by video game entrepreneurs Harri Manninen and Henric Suuronen, and plans to grow to offer a USD$30m (£23m) total funding pot. Play Ventures is focused on making early-stage investment in video game companies based across the world. “Our investment in Play Ventures is according to our M&A and [...]
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GDC Day Four Roundup: Microsoft's Stadia Response, Steam Store Redesign & Overwatch's Well-Behaved Players
As the Game Developers Conference 2019 nears its end, the news continues to flow. The most interesting story related to the show in this roundup doesn’t come from the GDC floor itself, though. Instead, it’s from within a reported internal Microsoft email. Specifically, in an email handed to tech site Thurrott (thanks GamesIndustry.biz), Microsoft’s head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, apparently contacted colleagues to assure them that the reveal of Google’s game-streaming platform Stadia validated Microsoft’s efforts in the same space. The Google [...]
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GDC Day Two Roundup: Google Enters Gaming Market with Stadia
Google has made its move on gaming with the announcement of streaming platform Stadia. The news came on the second day of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco; and it surely stands as one of the most significant gaming reveals in the industry’s history. Such a major player moving in with such an ambitious platform could radically impact the broad ecosystem of the industry, the makeup of audiences playing games, and the way the medium is consumed and designed. However, Stadia’s [...]
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What Does House of Lords Proposed 'Digital Authority' Mean for Games?
A new report from the House of Lords has proposed the formation of a new ‘Digital Authority’ to monitor and even regulate technology companies, and make sure that UK law evolves in tandem with technology. As reported by the BBC, the document looks at tech firms’ management of data and privacy breaches, and their handling of problematic social behaviour over online platforms. The reports’ authors have branded responses to such issues as ‘inadequate’, and stress a belief that self-regulation on some [...]
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Intel & Tencent Partner for New Game Streaming Service
Computing hardware specialist Intel and Chinese tech giant Tencent are expected to announce a co-developed game streaming service at this month’s Game Developers Conference. The likely announcement emerged after a series of tweets from Daniel Ahmad of market research and consulting business Niko Partners. Convincing images shared by Ahmad appear to show a service capable of streaming 1080p games at 60FPS with a delay of <40ms. If gaming display and streaming specifications aren’t your thing, you can be assured they promise a [...]
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Chinese Gaming Giants’ Overseas Revenues Skyrocket, Chinese Government Reinstates Game Approvals Freeze
Two current game business stories together highlight the stark dichotomy at the heart of China’s games market. As revealed in a new report from business insight specialist IHS Markit, Chinese tech giants Tencent and NetEase saw extraordinary profit growth for their international mobile game releases through 2018. Simply put, combined mobile game net revenue gained in territories outside of China by Tencent and NetEase increased 500% in 2018 to USD$472m (£360m). Again, that figure relates to sales of games outside Tencent and [...]
Latest posts
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USD$1bn Pledged to Kickstarter Game Projects -
PepsiCo Planned Space-Based Orbiting Billboard for Gaming Ad Campaign -
Disruptor Beam Lifts Lid on Mobile Live-Ops & Game Dev Platform -
Epic Removes Problematic Player-Created Content from Fortnite -
UK Games Market Grows 10% Through 2018, Hitting £5.7bn Value