Zynga returns, new hit Flappy Bird, Boom Beach scores last week

Deal of the year. Is Zynga back in the game ?!

Last week, Zynga bought the CSR developer and Clumsy Ninja and decided to dismiss about 15% of their staff.




As a result, all the participants of the deal won out.
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Tops Natural Motion made cash out in the amount of almost 500 million in cash (this, of course, fantastic). Employees of the company, who will continue to do what they like, received Zynga shares worth $ 40 million. It is possible that in the near future, these shares will rise in price.

Zynga also got what she lacked so much lately. And a series of successful original games, for which you can run all your channels to attract users. And a team that has repeatedly proved that it knows and knows how to make superhits. Natural Motion is one of those companies that every time achieves success with a new game (My Horse, CSR, CSR Classic, Clumsy Ninja)!

Benchmark Foundation, an investor in Natural Motion, made another exit from the gaming company after Riot Games (which was bought by Chinese Tencent) and Gaikai (Sony). As a result, the fund, having invested in these companies in the early stages, earned as much as 2 billion at the exits! dollars.

The CEO of Zynga Clive Downie told about the purchase and the company's future plans.

Choosing a country for Soft Launch: My.com conquers the CIS ?!

Soft Launch is becoming increasingly popular with mobile game developers. Gaming companies choose the country where they launch the game to check its performance and finish the project to the “desired” state. As a rule, the launch is not announced. The country is selected according to the following criteria: 1) a small market volume 2) the character of the audience of the test market corresponds to the character of the audience of the main market that the game is aimed at. This refers to the behavior of users, and their standard of living, and many other factors.

Soft Launch is an effective way to test games with relatively low marketing costs.

Kabam chooses Canada for this. Supercell for its Boom Beach, too, stopped at Canada, then - and in Australia. Rovio for Angry Birds Go chose New Zealand.

As far as we know, the company My.com (Brand of our Mail.ru) is aimed at the American market. At least they said exactly that. Therefore, the choice of such countries as Kazakhstan, Estonia, Lithuania and Lithuania, for the Soft Launch of their new game Evolution: Battle for Utopia looks, to put it mildly, strange :-). What made them take such a decision? Maybe there are some other good reasons? Or just in these countries there is cheap traffic? Or only in these countries there is traffic? :-)

Boom Beach conquered Canada!

Already mentioned today, Supercell's Boom Beach has conquered Canada. Today (February 4, 2014), the game takes 4th place in Top Grossing in Canada on the iPhone and 7th place on the iPad. According to Distimo, playing together earns more games like Pet Rescue Saga, Marvel War of Heroes and Modern War. I wonder when the game will be available for the whole world. Is this enough for Supercell or will they continue to work on the project, further increasing the performance of the game? In the end, there is something to improve.

Opera Mobile Store - is there any point?

Opera reported that the Opera Mobile Store already has 200,000 applications and 105 million MAUs. I would like to ask the developers of mobile applications, do they seriously consider Opera as a source of income? Did anyone have experience in this business? Our opinion - Opera Store takes a small percentage in the market. This applies to both revenue and users. Promotional channels are incomprehensible and opaque. It’s not worth spending time creating a separate game version and trying to attract users. But perhaps there are successful cases, we just do not know about them.

Identified the most popular push notifications

In 2014, for mobile game developers, the most important task will be to keep the user in the game. To keep the user there are a large number of tools and a mechanic, which together can give a good result. One of these tools is push notifications. Many believe that they work. Others say they have no effect. We believe that notifications are a useful thing. The question is how to implement them so that they do not annoy the players and are really effective. Perhaps someday we will share the rules by which we make our own push notifications.

In the meantime, we offer a look at the chart of the most popular notifications for smartphone users in the United States.

4 years in Top Grossing! How to achieve this?

An interesting article about how to hold out ( venturebeat.com/2014/01/31/4-year-old-top-grossing-game-how-kingdoms-at-war-is-still-making-money-years-after- launch ) in the top grossing for 4 years on the example of Kingdoms at War. The game still brings about $ 15,000 per day only on iOS.

I want to say that we also know how to achieve this :). For the past 3.5 years, Texas Poker, created by us, has not left the Top 100 Grossing Overall in the USA.

Flappy Bird - a new puzzle in the AppStore

Many of you have noticed that already two weeks in the first place of the American (and not only) Top Free hangs the game Flappy Bird. According to rumors, every day it is downloaded more than 3 million times. In many ways, the ad campaign of this obscenely simple game is a fake .

But you try to play it yourself. When, after several hours of play, your record will be 10 points, you will be ready to break your phone against the wall, write a good review (there are already several hundred thousand) and tell all your friends about the application, you will understand - this is not far from dishonest installations!