A serious loss of Blizzard, adding to the team Oculus Rift and the new publisher of the game Boom Beach - the main mobile news of the week

Addition to the Oculus Rift team

On the day it became known that the senior producer of PopCap (PvZ, PvZ2) Bernard Yee leaves the company, for the acclaimed virtual reality project - Oculus Rift.

Bernard himself declares that “he was amazed at the level of his emotional reaction to the demo” and “virtual technologies allow you to feel the effect of immersion, like no game before.” Well, one can only congratulate Oculus Rift with another loud addition to the already quite star team. Recall that the previous loud acquisition for the company was Kenneth Scott, the former art director of the project Halo 4.
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Oculus Rift becomes a certain Mecca where developers from successful and well-known companies run. One has only to fill oneself with the fact that this faith of the “mammoths” of development will come true and we will soon witness a new chapter in interactive entertainment.

Supercell decided to launch Boom Beach in China with the help of a publisher

The publisher will speak for most people unknown Beijing company Kunlun Wanwei. It is worth noting that we are only talking about local Android markets, which are quite numerous in China (there is no Google Play in China).



For some, this decision will be controversial. Especially considering the fact that Boom Beach feels very good in the list of the most earned games of AppStore China on both the iPhone and iPad (20th and 5th place, respectively). Supercell could open its own representative office in this country and hire the best people to promote the game. But even if such giants sign in their impotence, the rest of the market player can only follow the example.

This confirms the fact that it is very long, difficult and expensive to go on Android sites. But dozens of Android Stores generate about 70% of the revenue from the entire mobile gaming market in China.

Beijing Kunlun Wanwei is a big company with more than 30 gaming products. There are not so many mobile games in the AppStore and Android markets. Most of the client and web games.

Blizzard after 17 years of work left the creative director

Something is happening with the old world. The news that has stirred up all the news sites of the game world: Rob Pardo himself, Blizzard's flesh and flesh, has left his company, where he was a designer and lead designer for 17 years. WoW: TBC, W3: RoC and TFT, SC and SCBW, D2, titles that have become classics, games that have had an absolute impact on the entire gaming industry. According to Time magazine in 2006, Rob was named one of the 100 most influential people.

Recently, he stressed the growing importance of mobile games, games on tablets and the possibilities that small teams have that are able to create something new and innovative in their work that is not always possible in AAA projects. I wonder if this indicates somehow his future work? Well, time will tell.

1 million downloads - a good result or an attempt to reassure investors?

The Supernauts project, the Finnish company Grand Cru, has collected 1 million downloads in a week, received the “Editor's Choice” mark in 40 countries and hit the best-of-the-art charts in 155 countries. But here it is worth thinking, is it really outstanding performance? We worked on the project for 3 years and invested more than $ 16 million in it, but whether these investments will return is yet to be seen! Grand Cru themselves called their project "the most ambitious iOS game of all time." Strongly said, but this is really an experiment, as a result of which Minecraft was combined with a farm in a Sci-Fi setting, where the main character becomes a hero and saves the inhabitants of the earth.
But back to the question: yes, 1 million downloads are in itself an impressive result, but compared to other players in the market, nothing outstanding. Although this is the first project from this company, it is difficult to compare with “Whales”, which demonstrate tens of millions of downloads in the first few weeks of projects in the stores. The game cannot boast of cash results - in the tops, the project was noted only in its native Finland.

As a result, Supernauts has so far nothing to brag about, and probably this news is more directed to investors in order to somehow please them.