In this special contributed feature by Wilhelm Voutilainen, senior game analyst at GameRefinery looks at what we can learn about mobile gaming by looking back to the previous year, pulling insights from the company’s considerable pool of data. — So here we are in 2020 – not just a new year, but the start of a whole new decade. We’ve returned to our desks full of heady optimism, and focused on the future. Looking back at the past year can often be [...]

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 [...]

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, considers the need for the programmatic sector to make the case for its responsibility, or risk imprecise regulation becoming the dominant governing force.   From time to time, I hear about a revolution in the online advertising business. Occasionally, I’ll listen in to conversations talking about how programmatic is up-ending the industry – changing ad buying habits, how consumers interact with adverts and transforming the industry with it. I do, [...]

Mobile app advertising, monetisation and mediation outfit ironSource recently expanded its platform to offer a cross-platform mobile cross promotion solution. The distinct tech promises to offer a previously unseen approach not yet offered to mobile app developers and publishers by existing solutions. But just what does the new platform provide that is quite so different? And why has cross promotion historically been a tricky entity to perfect? We caught up with ironSource’s VP of product developer solutions, Nimrod Zuta, to find [...]

Mobile monetisation and marketing outfit ironSource has launched a new cross-platform solution that enables mobile developers to manage cross promotion campaigns while utilising a suite of ad network capabilities. Available to those that use the ironSource mediation platform – which TheGamingEconomy has previously covered – the new solution promises to maximise the value of all existing users by driving the adoption of games from across a given developer’s catalogue of titles. According to a statement to the press, the new ironSource technology [...]

2K’s long-standing and wildly popular basketball game NBA 2K19 has in recent days been the subject of a flood of frustration from players unhappy with the premium title’s apparent ramping up of ‘unskippable’ ads. It appears some of that frustration may be partially unfounded; the ads may not be unskippable, and they have always been part of the game. But the momentum that has built in recent days has seen a lashing out against 2K’s use of ads – and that [...]