Apple's social network, new title from Rovio, success secrets from the creators of Vainglory - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

Apple is working on its social network

The company from Cupertino received a patent for the creation of its social network. Its audience will be users of devices from Apple, and this iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and others.

The social network will aggregate the data sets received from your devices in order to find people with a lifestyle similar to yours. For example, using geolocation data, we can assume which institutions are most often visited by users, and on the basis of this, collect an interest group from them.
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You can make friends online, exchange short messages, create meetings and share data.

The question arises: how well geolocation data and other information available to electronic devices, reflect the lifestyle and interests of users? And in general, how much will you be interested in a person with a similar lifestyle? After all, similar does not mean suitable.

Asia Mobile Market Research

In 2018, the mobile gaming industry will earn $ 45 billion. And the share of Asia will be more than 50%. Such forecasts are published by the Digi-Capital campaign in their research .

The market volume in 2015 will be $ 29 billion. And every year its revenues will grow by 15%.

As for Asia, it has been ahead of North America and Europe since 2013 in terms of revenues from mobile games. Given the current trends, 50% of the entire market is a very real figure.

The report also says that the most profitable games will only increase their superiority.

Nibblers, evolve!

Rovio quietly released a new match-3 in a soft lunch in the Canadian app store. Good, bright animations, comics in the screensaver - all in the classics, only one distinguishes this game from the others on the Rovio account - there are no birds in it! That is, maybe, through some number of levels, birds will appear, but the protagonists are not known to anybody’s critics. No, not those cosmic monsters, but cute nibblers who have just stepped out of the sea onto the land in order to conquer it.

Very nice and colorful game, built around funny mechanics of battles with mobs and bosses, what else can I say ... seemingly very high-quality time-killer, almost ready, if the company does not decide to refactor to make a couple of corrections. We are waiting for the global launch, lizard - panic, nibbler - attack!

Five farewell from the creators of Vainglory

Kristian Segerstrale from Super Evil Megacorp, the creator of the popular mobile MOBA project Vainglory, shared the secrets of the success of his game with the online edition of Venturebeat.

It all starts with the engine . The development of the engine from the creators of the game took more than two years. Using such a powerful foundation, artists and animators could not limit their imagination to technical capabilities.

Take into account the interests of gamers . Vanglory has become popular with hardcore players, being something average between hardcore and softcore games. The length of one match is approximately 20 minutes - a bit too much for a mobile application, but not so much for a MOBA game.

Work with the community . The creators of the game claim that they did not spend a cent on the purchase of players and relied on the viral effect. At launch, the game was introduced to eSports fans, fans of the MOBA genre.

Evaluate the result . In addition to standard metrics, Vainglory developers propose to pay attention to the unusual indicators of popularity. In their project, this indicator was the number of views of game broadcasts on Twitch. From February to the present, the number of views has increased from 500 thousand to 1.1 million.

Have patience . Creating a community around the game can not happen instantly. According to the creators, the time when a quick start was an integral part of a successful project is gone. Successful games are slow.

From myself, we add that the approaches listed above look logical, but are more suitable for a complex hardcore project. In the dynamic mobile gaming market, developers increasingly prefer to take on something faster, simpler and more casual.

EA Mobile bets on branded games

Immediately after the financial report for 2015, EA Mobile shared their predictions on which games they pin their hopes on. All the projects mentioned were from existing and well-known brands. This is a rather logical decision, the mobile market has already been formed and an independent “takeoff” on it is almost impossible, we need strong marketing support. This is where a strong brand helps, it significantly reduces promotion costs and forms a loyal attitude to the game in advance. The main thing is not to deceive the expectations of the players, as it happened with the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper.

However, the mentioned EA games are not threatened, it is difficult to deceive expectations from them. The main aspirations are assigned to the UFC (made on tracing paper with FIFA), Minions Paradise (“Despicable Me”), it is planned to expand work with the Star Wars universe and further develop its IP Need for Speed.

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