Technology
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Adobe acquires Facebook's Medium; Epic Game Store enables third-party in-game purchasing
TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: Adobe acquires Facebook’s VR sculpting tool Medium; Epic Game Store enables third-parties to offer in-game purchases; Bethesda puts The Elder Scrolls Legends development on hold. Adobe acquires Facebook’s VR sculpting tool Medium Creative software provider Adobe has acquired the VR sculpting tool Medium from Facebook for an undisclosed sum. Launched by the social media giant in December 2016, the art tool previously let users of VR systems paint, sculpt [...]
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Qualcomm and Niantic Collaborating on New AR Glasses; Wildlife Studios Raises USD$60m (£45.7m)
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 [...]
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Building a UA Strategy Around 'Affinity'
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 [...]
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The secret ingredient in AI-powered community moderation? Humans.
Tackling toxicity in online communities is a demanding, nuanced and sometimes thankless task. As communities around single games grow into tens of millions – or hundreds of millions in some cases – a tiny minority of problematic users can still present a sizeable group, and cause real harm to significantly large audiences. The challenge in meeting, managing and countering toxicity is two-fold. Firstly, as a human craft game moderation can be remarkably demanding on community management staff. The thing is, there remains [...]
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Interview: AppLovin's Carl Livie on Making In-App Bidding Mainstream
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 [...]
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Hands-on With Google Stadia: The Future of Gaming?
Late last week TheGamingEconomy headed to the upper floors of Google’s central-London offices so as to spend a little time hands on with Stadia. Even in the few days since that preview opportunity, updated news about the platform’s arrival has continued to land. Many were disappointed that the console would launch with 12 games – only one being a platform exclusive. Now there is some surprise that with little time until launch, that list has leapt to 22 titles. As other players [...]
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Streaming and the Cloud: What We Learned from Microsoft's XO19 Event
Last night was a big night for Xbox. Microsoft hosted its X019 event in London, which was plump with announcements. If one theme dominated, though, it was the delivery of games as a service. Both Game Pass and Project xCloud enjoyed plenty of focus. The former is a subscription service for the Xbox One that adopts the ‘Netflix of Games’ model, giving users access to a library of titles for a regular fee. xCloud, meanwhile, is the coming Xbox cloud gaming streaming [...]
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10 Billion Mixed Reality App Installs Predicted by 2024; MR Ad Spend to Hit USD$11bn (£8.54bn)
‘Mixed reality’ content will see 10 billion app installs by 2024, up from 3 billion in 2019, says a new report. The prediction comes from research and analytics outfit Juniper Research, which has published the results of a new study titled ‘Consumer Mixed Reality: Emerging Opportunities, Vendor Strategies & Market Forecasts 2019-2024’. ‘Mixed reality’ – or ‘MR’- is a term defined slightly different in different places; particularly since it’s deployment as marketing jargon when hype around virtual reality spiked in the wake [...]
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Google Open-Sources Cardboard VR Software
Google has made the software for its Cardborad VR system open-source, with a view to letting third-party developers continue to support the platform and existing apps. The announcement came via a Google blog post, and is as much and end-point as it is an attempt to breath some more life into the tech giant’s VR ecosystem. Google had already dropped it’s Daydream VR mobile virtual reality system, and is no longer actively working on the VR SDK development toolset that powers [...]
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Apple and Valve Rumoured to be Partnering on AR Headset
Apple is rumoured to be working with game outfit Valve on an augmented reality headset that may be due for release next year. Citing industry sources, DigiTimes points to late 2020 as the earliest reasonable debut for unnamed headset, and identifies Taiwan’s original design manufacturing specialists Quanta Computer and Pegatron as handling the manufacturing. While the news firmly falls under ‘rumour’, there are a number of reasons the suggestion is both compelling and fascinating. Valve is the respected and often beloved video game [...]