Mobile gaming startup Scopely has signed on former Zynga general manager Reed Shaffner to lead its product team. Shaffner will oversee games from Scopely’s developer partners as well as its infrastructure. → Read More
Rovio Entertainment, maker of the popular line of “Angry Birds” games, announced today that its expanding its business to include third-party titles, which it will publish, distribute and market to consumers. The new program is being called “Rovio Stars,” and makes available the company’s expertise as well as its marketing teams to other publishers. The first title to… → Read More
Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan.
There are several metrics that game developers keep an eye on when tracking the performance of their games. Notions of creativity, novelty and fun are all confined within the prism of an analytics-centric approach: They have wiggle room as long as… → Read More
Gyft, the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 finalist working to bring the plastic gift card industry to mobile, is today announcing the general availability of its APIs, which allow developers to integrate Gyft into websites, apps, or other services. However, as Gyft co-founder and CEO Vinny Lingham explains, the primary focus is on mobile app developers – a group that’s interested in offering gift… → Read More
Atari — the iconic company and that helped spearhead the videogames industry 40 years ago with titles like Pong, Asteroids and Centipede, as well as consoles to evolve the consumer electronics field — has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to “separate from the structural financial encumbrances” of its French parent, Atari S.A., and to seek “independent capital for future growth” in… → Read More
A new report from mobile ad network Chartboost suggests that while the iPad is the best platform in terms of getting return on advertising spend for mobile game developers, the iPhone is still seen as the marquee iOS platform for mobile games, since it commands an impressive 61 percent of all gaming time spent on iOS devices. So despite lower acquisition costs on iPad, advertisers are still… → Read More
Mobile games dominate the charts when it comes to top grossing apps, but that popularity also breeds a lot of competition. Tylted, the games publisher recently rebranded from Cellufun, wants to tap into that opportunity with GameDrop, a new kind of distribution network that taps into existing ad platforms to provide in-app gaming overlays, with Pandora one of the first app publishers signed on to… → Read More
MakeGamesWithUs is a new iOS game publishing company with a twist: its focus is on helping high school and college students to build games. MakeGamesWithUs us will take the kids’ creations, provide professional graphics and art and publish them in the App Store. The kids will own the code, and the company will own the graphics and take a cut of the sales. The company already has a few games built… → Read More
App store analytics firm App Annie released a report on mobile gaming this week, which focused on the earnings potential of what it defined as “long-term” versus “short-term” games. That is to say, it found that mobile app superstars with media buzz were not necessarily outperforming the slow and steady games that flew under the radar - meaning, those that never cracked the top 25 grossing… → Read More
Facebook is banking a lot on the future of HTML5 and the idea of people going web-first instead of native-apps for their mobile content fixes, and today mobile gaming company Cellufun taking one step in its strategy to position itself as a key player in that space, too: it’s announcing that it is rebranding itself as Tylted.
Tylted — a name chosen from 30,000 entries in a competition run by… → Read More
Rovio has made a killing out of its Angry Birds franchise, and today it announced a deal that points to how the mobile games maker is hard at work developing what could well be the follow up to that: it has bought Futuremark Games Studio, the gaming arm of software developer Futuremark.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The team behind Futuremark Games Studio, based in Finland like… → Read More
Casual and mobile games company Miniclip has teamed up with app monetization platform and ad server MoPub, today releasing a joint study on the behavior of mobile gamers, breaking the group down by age, gender, and content preference. The biggest surprise from the study came in this little nugget of user behavior wisdom: Despite its name and connotation, 44 percent of gamers play “mobile games” on… → Read More
GREE, the $5.9 billion Japanese mobile gaming company making a big push in international markets, debuted its first-ever title designed by U.S. talent for Western audiences today.
Taking the evergreen Zombie theme that has fueled countless mobile gaming hits, GREE’s game “Zombie Jombie” is designed from the perspective of zombies who must battle humans. In the game, players become a “Jombie,”… → Read More
Swedish gaming company King.com just acquired Stockholm-based developer Fabrication Games in a big push to expand onto Android and iOS this year.
With the deal, King.com picks up Fabrication’s talent, games and developer tools. Terms weren’t disclosed, but I would assume the acquisition is priced in the talent-range. Fabrication had titles that cropped up on certain game category rankings like… → Read More
Viximo, originally a virtual goods marketplace until moving into web-based social game distribution a couple of years back, is shifting yet again. This time, Viximo is moving to mobile. Today, the company is introducing a platform for mobile game developers called Social Zone which delivers a modular set of tools that developers can pick and choose from in order to make their games more social… → Read More
OMGPOP, the social game-maker formerly known as iminlikewithyou, says it has another mobile hit — its app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 1 million times in 10 days.
Draw Something is based on OMGPOP’s online game Draw My Thing. Described by CEO Dan Porter as a turn-based version of Pictionary, players are assigned things to draw, which can be simple (like a smile) or complicated… → Read More
Mobile advertising took off in 2011, as tablets went mainstream and it seemed as if half of the world woke out of a daze to find they were holding some sort of Apple device. Meanwhile, advertisers and developers are increasingly relying on mobile and in-app advertising to boost revenues as consumers become more comfortable with being served ads while on the go.
The mobile app community needs… → Read More
Following its November partnership with TinyCo, social games outfit ngmoco (now a DeNA-owned company) is partnering with game publisher Glu Mobile, Inc. The deal will brings Glu’s popular Gun Bros game to ngmoco’s Mobage gaming platform for Android.
No word yet on whether the rest of Glu’s titles – many of which are more well-known than Gun Bros – will port over as well. → Read More
John Carmack, the man behind Doom and Quake, appears to be a bit of a Sony NGP fan. That shouldn’t come as a shock to close followers of id Software, which has very much embraced mobile gaming, particularly of the iPhone variety. Shortly after Sony’s big reveal, he tweeted: “Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs.” Is that… → Read More
Bad news from Japan’s multi-billion dollar social gaming industry earlier this week: Tokyo-based mobile gaming heavyweight DeNA (current market cap: US$4.5 billion) was investigated on Wednesday by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) over antitrust issues.
The allegation: DeNA, which recently paid US$400 million to acquire American smartphone game maker ngmoco, pressured Japanese mobile game… → Read More
Showtime’s Dexter is arguably one of the greatest shows on television as of late and it happens to be one of my favorites, too. So I’m happy to announce, or at the very least, inform you all that Dexter will soon be coming to an iPhone/iPod Touch near you, says Marc Ecko. TV Squad was on hand on at Comic Con for the panel and learned a few more details. It’ll include using SMS… → Read More
Hands-on Mobile has released Iron Man: The C&D. Only instead of Tony Stark you play a slightly overweight lawyer who represents Marvel Comics. You always wanted to write real fiction but your mother told you she wasn’t going to pay for any bum so you went to law school and were hoping for a job in politics when you got the Marvel account and you were OK for a time, kind of rationalizing… → Read More
Straight from Espoo, Finland (loosely translated from Spanish to English as It’s Poo, Finland!) comes “the global launch of the Nokia N-Gage mobile games service with more games, additional compatible devices, and an expanded online offering.” Nokia handset and device owners will be able to browse, demo, and purchase games directly and can whoop it up with other N-Gage users via… → Read More
TOTALLY cooler than a PS3 Nokia is on a mission to create a mobile game that’s cross-platform and doesn’t suck. The first project, which is rumored to run on both PC and mobile phones, is called “Project White Rock”. Judging by the name, I’d say the title will be an MMORPG in which players compete to become addicted to crack-cocaine. Or not. But after the failure… → Read More
NTT DoCoMo is taking a design cue from Nintendo’s oh-so-very-popular Wii for the Japanese wireless giant’s newest phone. The D904i features motion-sensing technology for playing games on the handset. It will be joined by two other handsets in the hopes that people will want to look like a complete douche while on the subway. Other than motion-sensing games another cool new feature, 2in1, will… → Read More
BlackBerry addiction is about to reach another level and I, for one, am not looking forward to it…or am I? It’s bad enough that I play Sudoku on the train and ignore the world, but can you imagine what I’ll be like if I have Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones? I’ll probably miss my stop – repeatedly. Gameloft has announced they will be selling games for BlackBerry smarphones. → Read More
Mobile gaming company Gameloft, developer of Paris Hilton’s Diamond Quest, has recently released Lumines Mobile for all who love puzzle games. Lumines was awarded game of the year for the PSP by many video game websites and magainzes, including Gamespot. Being a gamer, I had to try Lumines Mobile out for myself. The mobile version isn’t too different from the PSP version gameplay wise… → Read More
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