Each weekend we’ll be rounding up a selection of the most interesting articles related to mobile and the games industry at large.
This week includes an analysis of why App Store games gross better than their Google Play counterparts, an interview with Unity CEO John Riccitiello on why it raised $400 million when it didn't particularly need to, and a discussion over Transformers: Forged to Fight's early struggles in contrast to the Contest of Champions success.
See an article you think we should share? Email PocketGamer.biz Craig Chapple at craig.chapple@steelmedia.co.uk to add it to our weekly round-up.
Why Apple iTunes App Store has double the sales of Google Play store
"Apple’s walled-garden or strict restrictions on the iOS app store is why tampered or jailbroken iPhones and iPads cannot access the official iTunes store. On the contrary, Android developers had to endure Google’s lenient policy on tampered Android devices."
How Unity convinced investors it’s worth $2.6 billion
"Part of it was getting secondary so my employees can live their lives. And then the second thing is, I’m a believer in the principle that you raise money when you can, not when you need to. Our business is doing exceptionally well, so we chose to raise capital. There wasn’t a particular need."
Podcast: Why Transformers: Forged To Fight flopped?
"In February 2017, Korean publisher Netmarble made a significant acquisition, purchasing Kabam’s Vancouver studio and some other minor assets for a cool $750M. After all, this studio had created Marvel: Contest of Champions, one of the biggest games in the history. Yet despite riding one one of the biggest IPs in the entertainment industry, Forged to Fight has mustered only a fraction of the success that Contest of Champions had."
How Google’s latest VR moves are a major blow to Oculus’ mobile strategy
"For consumers (in the near-term) that’s a good thing. It means that whether a game is on Daydream or on Gear VR, consumers will be able to play it (whereas other phones can only do one or the other). For Oculus however, this is the beginning of an awkward Google-Samsung-Oculus love triangle and a major new threat for Oculus’ mobile VR platform on Gear VR."
Truly intelligent enemies could change the face of gaming
"There's an obvious question here: Why make enemies more complex if you're just going to shoot them? Players have been dispatching foes since video games moved past Pong 45 years ago. They are obstacles. But big-budget studios are spending lots of money making them look like really pretty obstacles to shoot at. A time might come where the disparity between human-looking-but-robotic-acting enemies becomes too jarring."
"Apple could become the dominant and most profitable hardware enabled mobile AR player, scaling from zero to hundreds of millions of iPhone AR users by 2021. This could become the innovation for which Tim Cook is remembered, and potentially lead towards Apple’s long term smartglasses dominance going into the next decade (assuming smartglasses solve their 5 big challenges). Apple has been looking for a catalyst to take it beyond Steve Jobs’ legacy, and this could give it a real chance of becoming a 100 year company."
Why do devs love Slack, and how do they get the most out of it?
“What Slack has allowed is building a tight team in a way that in the past would have required an office and everyone to be local,” [Ron] Gilbert says. “Slack is more about building your team’s community than just communications. I can now go out and hire the best person and not have to worry about them being in Seattle, or moving them here.”
How PixelJunk Eden is going to get even more surreal on mobile
"I want to make Eden Obscura all in real time and make the player think that their phone is no longer a phone, but a device, a weird device that you can peer into. There are some levels that are going to use the cameras in some particularly interesting ways, and if we just used the camera as is, I don't think people would be too happy with it.
