The UK is the next emerging soft launch market, how to get a job at Madfinger, and King has another midcore game

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• 5 Are you regularly changing your IAP pricing and taking advantages of international price tiers like the best developers?

  

  Since we can't get our hands on the sales data for most games, and most mobile developers are privately-held and choose not to share their financials, it can be hard to get a clear view of what's happening in the mobile market.

  Unless you're Scientific Revenue, that is, which decided to just ask the developers in the first of its planned quarterly surveys about IAPs and mobile monetization.

  The results find that the number of premium games is on the decline, with most developers instead generating revenues from IAPs and advertising.

  But the IAPs aren't very sophisticated - most of the developers in the survey don't alter their prices for different players, for example.

  

• 4 Updated: Is the United Kingdom the next emerging soft launch market?

  

  Historically speaking, soft launching in the United Kingdom would be a terrible idea. High CPIs in a mature market make it hard to get any kind of foothold, so why bother?

  Well, turns out that a handful of developers have thrown caution to the wind, and now there's a growing trend of developers soft-launching in the UK after all.

  The reasons are differing - for Black Anvil Games, developer of Warlords, it was just to get easy access to more English-speaking players.

  Interestingly, however, Bandai Namco told us that "we soft launched in the UK as well to lower the overall cost of acquiring players", implying CPIs might in the region might be dropping.

  
  

• 3 How to join the bickering, passionate, effective family that is Madfinger Games

  

  You may have read our interview with Miguel Caron, the new Studio Head at Madfinger Games, and thought, "gee, I sure would like to work there, but how do I go about that?"

  Well you're in luck, because we also spoke to Recruiter Honza Stafa about what it takes to get a job at Madfinger.

  The base requirement seems to be that you need to be a tiny bit mad yourself. As Stafa says, "we can try to sound all official but really we’re just a bunch of people trying to create amazing games."

  "We want to work with professionals who understand the importance of having fun. If you have fun, you create fun."

  

• 2 How Miniclip doubled CPMs in Agar.io

  

  Agar.io may have been one of the biggest games of 2015, but it wasn't built with monetisation in mind, leaving Miniclip with something of a conundrum on its hands.

  But after working with MoPub to implement playable ads, Miniclip managed to double its CPM from Agari.io alone.

  MoPub admits that playable ads have a lower click-through rate than than static ads, but those that do click-through have better engagement.

  Because of this, advertisers will happily pay more to run playable campaigns in games, to the point where Miniclip managed to generate 41% of its ad revenue from playable ads in March 2016.

   

  
  

• 1 Turn-based strategy Rise of Tyrants is King's other soft-launched midcore title

  

  All eyes may have been on King's midcore title Hero for some time, but it turns out that our attention should probably have been focused elsewhere.

  Because, as it happens, King has another midcore title in soft launch, and it's a turn-based strategy called Rise of Tyrants.

  Luckily, one of the soft launch locations is the United Kingdom, so we can tell you now that it's actually a pretty enjoyable game, with a distinct art style and a solid combat mechanic.

  It's been in soft launch for nearly two years now, which is never usually a good sign, but hopefully it'll come to the rest of the world before too long.