Week that was

Learning from Taylor Swift, Alibaba to spend big, and Nokia and Jolla both announce Android tablets

The past 7 days in bite-sized portions

Learning from Taylor Swift, Alibaba to spend big, and Nokia and Jolla both announce Android tablets

As anyone who's been working in gaming for longer than a week knows all too well, our industry can't go more than seven days without cooking up another controversy. 

This week it was developer ustwo, and its beautiful Escher-inspired puzzler Monument Valley, at the eye of the storm. 

After the studio chose to charge for an update (or DLC depending on your point of view) containing eight new levels, a small band of consumers made it their mission to bring down the game's App Store review score. That move sparked a debate as to whether or not ustwo had done the right thing.

In a bid to get to the heart of the problem, we asked our group of mobile mavens - which includes ustwo's Dan Gray - whether it was okay for ustwo to charge for Monument Valley: Forgotten Shores?

Moving away from the doom and gloom, we spoke to New York studio Dots to find out how it learned to thrive on mobile, while we also handed out prizes to Critical Force and Fluff Stuff Studios: the winners of our Big Indie Pitches at Slush and Apps World 2014.

As always, there's more where that came from, so hold on to your hats because its time for another Week That Was. 

Industry voices

 User acquisition, retention, and discovery

 Tools & Platforms

 Monetisation

 Funding, acquisitions, personnel and shuttering


What do you call someone who has an unhealthy obsession with video games and Sean Bean? That'd be a 'Chris Kerr'. Chris is one of those deluded souls who actually believes that one day Sean Bean will survive a movie. Poor guy.