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 a look at Supercell's company culture and how it designed Hay Day, Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aimé on the company's comeback, the eSports revolution and the process behind coming up with achievement names in games.
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.
Supercell talks unique company culture and winning game design strategies
"While many game designers swear by missions, Timur and his team wanted to give users the freedom to explore the game and establish their own patterns for interacting with it. In fact, behavioral psychology says that doing so increases engagement."
Nintendo of America boss Fils-Aimé on comebacks, the future of the DS and surviving the Wii U
"Where we've shifted is that ten years ago we were focused on growing the gaming universe, expanding the audience. And that's what the Wii and DS did. Over the past five years, with smart device gaming and everything else, everyone's gaming now, in some way, shape or form. And so what we needed to do was we needed to shift our vision to something that we could deliver against, but also to something that was meaningful and differentiated. And that new vision is about leveraging our IP to make people smile."
ESports: the digital revolution has arrived
"[The Guardian] asks why thousands of people have begun to attend eSport events across the globe and looks at how problems such as corruption and cheating may affect sport’s digital counterpart just as much as they do in the real world."
The agony and ecstasy of coming up with achievement names
"It's these little details that bring your product to life, almost in a literal sense, because the 'essence' of what you're inserting into your product is virtually synonymous with what life even is to begin with."
Former MySpace CEO makes a comeback as a mobile gaming hitmaker
""We expect Cookie Jam to be around 50 years from now," says Jam City cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, 51. Such longing for permanence seems jarring in the hyperactive world of smartphone gaming, but it makes perfect sense when one recalls that in a prior life DeWolfe was the CEO and cofounder of MySpace, the pioneering social media company that most definitely did not become Facebook."
Is Design Home's performance enough to rescue Glu Mobile?
"The problem for Glu bulls, however, is that to hit break-even, even on a non-GAAP level, Design Home will have to more than double its previous quarterly bookings total. This isn't likely but neither is it impossible. And over time, Glu will be able to reduce its marketing and still maintain profitable revenue from the game."
"Too often segmentations like this primarily differentiate segments in terms of life stage or gender, which can hide key commonalities and differences across dimensions that really matter. While there are slightly more younger 'connected enthusiasts', or older 'passive players', the dominant age profile for both segments is between 26 and 45 years old."
Will E3 ever be a mobile games show?
"E3 doesn't need to be entirely transformed, but I do think it can make some changes to better reflect the way that most of us game nowadays. To do otherwise would be to accept an increasingly niche role in the wider gaming landscape."
"A person familiar with matter said a turning point for Konami came in 2010, when it released the social gaming title 'Dragon Collection' for smartphones. Developing the title cost only several tens of millions of yen -- a paltry amount for the gaming industry -- but it ended up raking in hundreds of millions of yen a month."
