A look at Angry Birds 2, Niki Minaj and Jason Statham as new stars of Glu, the rise in price of a loyal user - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

Angry birds 2

Since the launch of the first part of Angry Birds, Rovio has released 12 birds and pig games. Among them were races, RPGs, and various versions with the favorite mechanics of destruction. Despite the fact that the first part became a real legend in the mobile gaming industry, all subsequent experiments were not so successful. Almost six years have passed, and now the company is ready to go to the next level and present a completely new product to the players. Two weeks after the release of Angry Birds 2 in the App Store, we are ready to share our feelings about the game.

The first game session allowed me, the orthodox fan of the first series, to breathe a sigh of relief: at the heart of the gameplay lay an old time-tested mechanics of destruction. No too bold experiments - only birds, pigs and flying in all directions, fragments of wood, stone and glass. At first glance, it seemed that they were all the same good old evil birds. However, at the first reading it became clear: something has changed and changed a lot.


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The pace of the game has become much higher. Game progress takes place according to the scheme Candy Crush: one game session - five lives. Not enough birds to deal with all the pigs - you lose a life. Game levels contain from two to five stages, and a fixed number of birds is given to the whole level.



The colorful effects of destruction, the bustling animation, the customized soundtrack - all this underlines the rapid pace of the game. The feathered camp rushing headlong through the game locations, not allowing the player to take a break and break his head a difficult or otherwise level for a week or two. Personally, I almost did not notice how in a week the game was at level 70.



As for the monetization, there was a place for both bold experiments and stormy indignation of users. The free-to-play approach, when you have to pay for the length of a gaming session, is in principle considered quite tough, but here, from my point of view, it is competently moderated by the presence of view-to-play. If you belong to the number of principally non-paying players, then you can almost always fill up your lives by watching the built-in commercial.

Be that as it may, Angry Birds 2 is a landmark product of a large company, the result of delicate and complex work. One could even call it a masterpiece, but, unfortunately, rather a masterpiece of monetization, and not gameplay.

Glu will release games with Niki Minaj and Jason Statham

Now with the taste of “Statham”! Glu announced a couple of games with celebrities, singer Niki Minaj joined the list and - unexpectedly - the face of all men's public in “Vkontakte” - Jason Statham. Details, what kind of game will be with Statham, not yet, I hope it will not be a variation on the theme of Kim Kardashian :)

And now joking aside, Glu resolutely approached the matter and firmly occupied a niche. Even if most games do not show such success as the first game of the genre, it will still pay for itself. I suspect that buying fans is pretty cheap, and they can play not only the game with their idol.

I do not know how anyone, but I'm already waiting for the game with Statham, at least out of curiosity :)

Loyal users are becoming more expensive

According to a study by Fiksu, a loyal user (CPLU) has grown by 30% over the last month and amounted to $ 3.21, and if you look at the whole year, this is an increase of more than 44%!

Against the background of this data, the drop in CPI over the last month by 21% for an iOS user is surprising, which is $ 1.15, and by 9% for Android - $ 2.12. There is an assumption that this drop is related to statistics, which shows the invariance of the average number of applications per user for two years, even though the session duration has increased by 63%. More information about the results of the study can be found at the link .

A little about advertising and publishing

Facebook presented the results for the second quarter - revenues increased by 40% to $ 4.04 billion, but net profit fell by more than 9% compared to the same period last year and amounted to $ 719 million. This is not surprising, given the record number of new employees in the company, but the results are obvious - these efforts did not go in vain, and in the next quarter we will most likely see impressive results in net profit. More than 76% of the company's revenues come from mobile advertising, which is 844 million DAU and 1.31 billion MAU. It is worth noting the weakening of the growth of DAU - 17% in this quarter, although last year for the same period the increase was 19%.

Beeline becomes publisher

The Russian mobile operator VimpelCom tries itself as a publisher. So far, there is no clarity on how the company plans to promote products in the App Store and Google Play, whether they will pre-install games on devices sold in their stores, but three projects have already been launched: Forest Farm, One Touch and 13 ". This is not the first manifestation of interest in mobile games at Beeline - earlier, the Beeline Tab tablet was advertised using Shadow Fight 2, which increased the number of project downloads by 2 times.