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Free-to-play marketing costs rise and profitability falls at King and Supercell

Supercell has recently reported revenues of €1.55 billion for 2014, from Hay Day, Clash of Clans and Boom Beach. It made profits (EBITDA: Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation)...

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Is Nintendo working on the defining videogame controller of the smart device...

Nintendo’s partnership with DeNA makes no sense. The thing we all know about Nintendo is that it doesn’t follow the herd. It makes surprising announcements that make the industry shake its collective...

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Can you help me get my TED talk to 10,000 views?

In November 2014, I gave a talk at TEDx Brum. It was a fifteen minute condensed version of everything I believe about how the Internet has changed business and art forever. About how the threat is not...

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How Fallout Shelter made me sexist.

I love Fallout Shelter. I don’t think it will be keep me for ever. I’ve got 200 Dwellers, I’ve gone nearly as deep underground as you can, and I’ve almost run out of things to do. It has also made me...

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Why Apple’s ad blocking will be good for games

At this very moment, the top paid app on the US App Store is an ad blocker. Ad blockers threaten the business models of many traditional media businesses as they transition to the web and mobile. The...

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Taking your F2P game and making it paid–the story of Jagged Alliance Online

This is a guest post from Jan Wagner, Managing Director of Cliffhanger Productions. He recently took his F2P game, Jagged Alliance Online, back to being a paid game on Steam and I asked him why. This...

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Why Sony’s technological focus blinded it to a shift in what its customers want.

I’m reading Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers by Niraj Dawar about how competitive advantage is moving from upstream (control of manufacturing, R&D, products) to downstream...

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Mind Candy signals that the kids market for games is too tough, even for them

Mind Candy has just stated that they are pulling out of the kids space, because it’s too tough. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, founder and ex-CEO* Michael Acton Smith said “The competition is immense....

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Is F2P the natural fit for Virtual Reality?

This is a post by GAMESbrief’s Rob Fahey, co-author (with Nicholas Lovell) of The F2P Toolbox and Design Rules For Free-To-Play Games. You can also read more of his work every week on...

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“Advertising is a tax on the poor”

This amazing talk from NYU Stern professor Scott Galloway covers how Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google are dominating the world. It particularly focuses on the consequences for the users, and is full...

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EA is earning $650 million a year from a F2P style add-on to FIFA and other...

Electronic Arts is managing to have its F2P cake and eating it. Its sports franchises such as FIFA, Madden and NFL are some of its most popular and successful titles. But it has successfully added a...

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What I read in May–Nicholas Lovell

These were the articles and books that grabbed my interest over the last month. I would welcome feedback on the list, and how to make it more useful to you.   Internet and business A Pyramid of Pivots,...

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What I read last summer

My reading list has been delayed by a chaotic summer. A lot of holidays, which was good, but also a surge of 18" of sewage that flooded through my kitchen on the morning of Brexit day, leading me to...

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Bigpoint gets bought, but for half a billion dollars less than its most...

In April 2016, lots of sites reported that Germany’s Bigpoint, one of the pioneers of browser and F2P gaming, was bought by Chinese firm Youzu Interactive, for Eur80m ($89.7m). They bought into the PR...

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Valuation multiples for F2P games–the Innogames valuation

It’s not often that you get details about the acquisition of private companies, but the recent acquisition of a stake in Innogames by Sweden’s MTG is a rare counter-example. In an extremely detailed...

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The move East continues–DeNA shuttering ngmoco

It was part of the early wave of iPhone game developers, and one of the first to be snapped up by a Far Eastern partner. But now ngmoco is no more, as parent DeNA shuts its San Francisco office, taking...

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GAMESbrief reading list – October 2016

Games VR: There will be blood:  Rob Fahey’s take on VR. Rob points out that even if VR hardware is a huge hit, there is a lot of money flying around, and it’s hard to see all the investors making their...

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They say no-one ever gets sued for breaching an NDA – $200 million says...

There is an old saying that a non-disclosure agreement is not worth the paper it’s written on: secrets are hard to protect, and despite the best efforts of lawyers to get you to sign away all your...

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Is your problem in marketing, or in design?

I’ve been dealing with a number of clients recently who have challenges scaling their game. The game is good, the clients say, but we just need more scale. That is true, to a point. There is a virtuous...

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My predictions in 2010 turn out to be quite true in 2017

Back in 2010, I wrote a blog post setting out how I expected the industry to develop over the next decade. In the end, the games industry will polarise into these three segments (can you polarise into...

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