This week’s blog section has tips on the Saudi Arabian market, free-to-play games and facing failure after success.
Read on to find out about advertising on Instagram, LTV models and dealing with piracy. You can’t miss it!
Activision acquiring King, a potential Android-Chrome OS merger and the current success of iOS 9 dominate this week’s news section!
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Blogs
Why Saudi Arabia’s dolphins and whales matter to the gaming industry
This piece from Venturebeat.com gives a great breakdown of the mobile game market in Saudi Arabia. If you want to target a market full of big spenders, it’s hard to look past this guide. Get details on who plays, what they play and what influences them to choose a new game.
Three Biggest Ways to Fail Players in Free-to-Play Games
If you’re developing a Free-to-Play game, make sure you avoid these mistakes. Joshua Dallman tells you the three things to avoid and why. His main point is to invest time in quality assurance and have a customer service plan in place to deal with any issues that arise.
How these Mobile Devs Faced Failure After a 4M Download Hit
Three years ago, Alexey Zerkin and Teemu Korhonen left Nokia to delve into mobile game development. After some great initial success with Hockey MVP, they failed to replicate results with their next games. Find out how the survived and what they’re focusing on now.
At 27% market share, game developers are already the #1 advertisers on Instagram
After strong initial metrics suggested Instagram would be an advertising hit, the platform has been strongly embraced by game developers. Only time will tell if it will continue to be successful and there are some initial teething problems but it looks like the early adopters have benefited so far.
Back-testing LTV models
Gaining lifetime users is hugely beneficial to mobile developers but in order to achieve this, we need to calculate the lifetime value of our users. With an array of models for calculating LTV, check out this back-testing guide to find the method right for you.
Piracy is a big problem for premium iPhone and iPad games — much more than you realize
In this report, William Volk has uncovered that 8 of the top 10 iOS games are available free of charge due to piracy. One contributing factor is the fact that users no longer need to jailbreak a game to download pirated games. In Volk’s opinion, premium games are no longer a viable option because of this widespread piracy.
News
Activision Blizzard to buy King for $5.9 billion
In what will be one of the biggest news stories of the year for the mobile game industry, King Digital Entertainment has been purchased by Activision Blizzard. The Candy Crush creatores will be bought out for $5.9 billion after a unanimous decision by the Activision Blizzard board. The deal is subject to approval from King shareholders and the Irish High Court.
Imagining what Google’s hybrid Android-plus-Chrome OS might look like
According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Chrome OS and Android may soon be merged, with an official release happening in 2017. The focus of this combination is to expand the Andoird OS to laptops. An early version of this new OS is scheduled for preview sometime next year.
iOS 9 is now on 66% of Apple’s mobile devices
Apple announced this week that iOS 9 has now been adopted by the majority of Apple’s mobile devices. The new OS can now be found on two out of three Apple devices only two months after its initial launch. This is a huge improvement on the adoption of iOS 8 which only reached 52% of devices at the same stage of its release.
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