Gaming
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South Korea Declares Game-Boosting Services Illegal
If you’re caught offering ‘boosting’ services to video game players in South Korea, you may now face a USD$17,800 (£14,000) fine, or two-years jail time. Boosting sees less-experienced users of a given game grant accomplished players access to their account for that title. The high-level player then ‘boosts’ the accessed account, deploying their skills to rapidly progress a player-character through a game. ‘Levelling up’ the player account typically opens access to higher levels of game competition, increased powers, and new weapons [...]
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Harvesting the Niche: Understanding Farming Simulator 19's Chart Success
Earlier this week, the latest EMEAA game sales charts were released. The relatively new (and long-awaited) GSD charts compile data from across an impressive spread of countries, from Australia and Great Britain, to India and South Africa, via Ukraine and the UAE. This time around, in the wake of Black Friday and as the traditional Christmas game buying spree intensifies, there were plenty of expected entries. In the combined chart, reflecting both physical and digital purchases across all formats, plenty of [...]
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Letting off Steam? Fortnite Dev Lifts Lid on Epic Games Store
Just days after Epic Games’ phenomenally successful Fortnite cleared 200 million registered users, the studio has announced that it is opening an online gaming store. When you you have already acquired an audience the size of Fortnite’s, that is a step with vast potential to disrupt the ecosystems of the global games industry. For over a decade, the Steam store has dominated PC gaming; and had an influence that has shaped the way games are designed, distributed, and marketed. Steam has arguably [...]
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'Tis the Season... to Get Your Game Ready for Christmas 2019
It’s easy to be ambitious when Christmas is a few months away. You tell yourself that you’ll get all the Christmas shopping done by mid-November, and have the decorations up on the first day of Advent. Then suddenly it’s December 24th and you’re scouring an all-night garage for passable gifts, low-quality wrapping paper, and spare bulbs for the fairy lights. TheGamingEconomy can’t help you make your own Christmas a meticulously organised triumph, but we are here to share insights on making a [...]
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Fortnite Hits 200 Million Players
Video game sensation and global cultural phenomenon Fortnite now courts the attention of 200 million players. That’s according to Bloomberg, which points out that the shooter’s user base is now approximately comparable to the populace of sizeable nations like Brazil. Put another way, it’s well over 3x the entire population of the UK. That’s impressive for a handful of reasons. Fortnite is an established success, of course. Even so, the new user numbers mark a 60% increase from the 125 million registered [...]
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Rebellion to Open Doors on £78.4m Film & TV Studio
Long-standing independent UK game developer and publisher Rebellion has purchased a facility to convert into a film studio, estimated to be worth USD$100m (£78.4m). That might not seem the most obvious purchase for a video game company, but Rebellion has always confidently expanded its remit beyond its core business. The move equally reflects an ongoing convergence of the industries of game development, film, and television. That convergence to date has been defined most apparently by crossover in technique, technologies, and creative [...]
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How Pokémon Won Over the United Nations
This week, developer Niantic revealed that it has partnered with the United Nations to create ‘tourism experiences’ delivered as ‘real-world games’. The AR specialist studio will build titles specifically with the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), with a view to work enhancing global tourism. Niantic, of course, created the global phenomenon that is Pokémon GO. In May 2018 alone, almost two years after the AR title’s launch, 147 million people played the game, according to Superdata. The data outfit also reported [...]
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Q&A: Reality Clash & the Arrival of Blockchain-Powered AR
Reality Clash is an in-development mobile AR shooter that integrates blockchain, cryptocurrencies, dynamic in-game advertising, and geo-mapping technology into the gameplay experience it offers. Yes… there are a lot of tech buzzwords in that opening line. We’d only need to throw in AI and VR and it might seem like a parody of contemporary marketing parlance. But in truth, there’s often a meaningful reality hidden somewhere behind the hype of headline-grabbing tech trends. And it just so happens that Reality Clash [...]
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'Non-Intrusive' Programmatic Advertising: The Future of AR & VR Monetisation?
This week UK monetisation outfit Admix revealed that it had secured an impressive USD$2.1m (£1.63m) in funding to further develop its AR and VR advertising platform. As reported by Tech.EU, Admix was only founded in 2017, with a focus on allowing developers to place advertisements programatically that sit contextually inside content. A simple, hypothetical example would a be a VR game set in a sprawling city. Admix’s platform could allow a developer to assure that programmatic ads appeared only as billboards on [...]
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Mobile eSports as a Tool to Aquire & Retain: A Primer
You don’t need to be a devoted games industry observer to have noticed something of the recent rise of eSports. Organised competitive gaming has been around along time, of course. eSports’ nascent form was forged in the earliest arcade gaming tournaments in the 1970s, where players competed to win a patch declaring their prowess; presumably to be sewn onto an oversized distressed denim jacket. By the 1990s the notion of a ‘pro-gamer’ making money from prize winnings was established, but even then [...]
