TheGamingEconomy’s Daily Digest brings you the prevalent business stories in gaming. In today’s news: Apple terminating Arcade games for retention; PlayBrain raises USD$6m (£5m); and Mountaintop Studios formed. Apple terminating Arcade games for retention Apple Inc. is reportedly cancelling development contracts with partners for its Apple Arcade service as it seeks to improve customer retention on the fledgling platform. According to anonymous sources speaking to Bloomberg, Apple has been informing developers of certain in-production titles that their new titles lacked sufficient engagement, [...]

Fortnite outfit Epic Games has launched a new multi-platform publishing initiative that promises to be ‘developer-first’ in its make-up and delivery. A number of high-profile game studios are already on board with the Epic Games Publishing effort, with Playdead, Remedy Entertainment and gen DESIGN announced as early partners. “We’re building the publishing model we always wanted for ourselves when we worked with publishers,” said Tim Sweeney, Epic Games founder and CEO. “gen DESIGN, Remedy, and Playdead are among the most innovative and talented [...]

Audio-first and audio-only games have to-date offered a fascinating micro niche within the gaming medium. In the late 1990s the visionary musician and game designer Kenji Eno released a game with very few visuals at all for the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast called Real Sound: Kaze no Regret. The idea was that blind and sighted players could enjoy the same experience. A few years later Nintendo debuted SoundVoyager for the GameBoy Advance, which challenged you not to look at the screen [...]

TheGamingEconomy’s Daily Digest brings you the prevalent business stories in gaming. In today’s news: Digital drives 68.7% of EA’s Q3 net revenue; Zuckerberg still committed to AR and VR as ‘the holy grail of social experiences’; and Global Game Jam 2020 begins. Digital drives 68.7% of EA’s Q3 net revenue EA’s digital net revenue totalled USD$1.12bn (£854.7m) in the last full financial quarter, demonstrating the significance of the company’s considerable portfolio of live games to its commercial health. That figure accounts for 68.7% [...]

In recent years Amazon has continued to expand its Game Tech offering, providing numerous tools and services from within the cloud, covering back-end services, analytics, monetisation and game development itself. And according to Eric Morales, Games Industry Segment Leader, EMEA for Game Tech, which sits within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) division, it’s part of a movement that could change the way people make games, letting them swap process for creativity. As such TheGamingEconomy caught up with Morales to get a sense [...]

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 [...]

TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Netflix hesitant to enter gaming; Epic acquires Quixel; and Hitmarker raises £200,000. Netflix hesitant to enter gaming Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has reiterated that the video streaming giant is not contemplating a move into the gaming industry in the near future. Speaking at the New York Times Dealbook conference, Hastings referred to the line in the letter to shareholder’s following the firm’s Q4 2018 results: “We compete with [...]

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 [...]

TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Sumo Group Welcomes New Chairman, Posts Half-Year Profits; Sony Selling Hardware and Games Direct to Consumer; Improbable Acquires The Multiplayer Guys.   Sumo Group Welcomes New Chairman, Posts Half-Year Profits The Sumo Group has named game industry veteran Ian Livingstone as its new chairman, while reporting healthy pre-tax profits in its its H1 2019 financials. Headquartered in Sheffield, the Sumo Group has studios under its Sumo Digital banner located across [...]