Welcome to PocketGamer.biz's weekly rundown of the stories clocking up the hits, picking up the click-throughs and generally keeping the advertisers happy by serving up page views.
Or, if you'd prefer, the top five stories currently dominating our readers' attention.
Given that anyone who is anyone was in San Francisco for the glorious circus that is the Game Developers Conference, it was unsurprising but appropriate that the majority of our most read stories came from our men on the spot - Keith Andrew and Matthew Diener...
The one non-GDC 2014 story in this week's chart is our annual rundown of the top mobile game developers in the world - something we catchily call the PocketGamer.biz Top 50 Developers list.
Now into its fifth year, we started GDC 2014 with a VIP dinner, revealing ten top developers daily with the toppest developers - numbers 10 to 1 - crowning the week.
You can read about them here, or check out the full list then check out the companies in more detail here.
Also, for a bonus, there are some graphs and discussion of the companies that have featured for five (and four) consecutive years. Oh, and did you miss our rundown of the Top 30 Chinese mobile game developers?
Kabam is one of the fast-rising F2P publishers so everyone's interested in its secret sauce. At GDC 2014, Kabam Vancouver's Steven Martin spoke on the challenges of making successful midcore games.
"If you look at midcore games, the top three or so titles are the big hits – and disproportionately the big hits," he revealed.
To capture that market, Martin said games needed "three stools"; accessibility, user-directed goals and a strong 'late game', using the example of Kabam's Fast & Furious 6: The Game to illustrate his points.
How skewed are F2P revenues? According to Scott Rigby of Immersyve, very skewed.
His point is that in this era of games-as-a-service, the vast majority of successful games are 'old' releases; "96% of iOS revenue is from 6 month old top earners" was his headline.
In order to release a game that has such longevity, Rigby said developers had to think carefully about what mobile did best, not trying to ape console gaming.
"What mobile allows for is creating more satisfaction density across the day, but games have to have certain values to fit in with this", he said.
On Tuesday morning, while brains were still working, there was a panel talk from four key industry CEOs: App Annie's Bertrand Schmitt, Chartboost's Maria Alegre, Unity's David Helgason, and Ben Liu from Pocket Gems.
Liu cautioned that "Mobile gaming as we know it is going to be dead in a couple of years": his point being that change is happening fast.
"There are many types of games that haven't been invented or created yet," he added.
As for Unity CEO David Helgason, he was keen to highlight those creative juices saying, that given enough time and energy, he didn't see why we wouldn't see games the quality of BioShock being made by "three guys in a garage".
You shouldn't ignore the power of frustration in game design. That was the takeway from Florian Steinhoff talk about design's Wooga's hit Jelly Splash - our most read story of the week.
"Players need to lose, and lose early on - otherwise they'll think it's a game for kids and will put it down and never play again," he said.
This is something you can measure with the FUUU factor.
# of tries until won / # of times you almost won a level.
The more frustratingly close calls, the lower the FUUU factor - and a lower FUUU factor leads to a more motivated, enraged, and engaged player - apparently.
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
