As happens four times a year, this week has been dominated by numbers, financial numbers.
It's been a particularly important time in this respect as in many cases, the quarter companies are reporting is their Q4, so hence they are reporting their entire 2014 financials.
For many - such as Korean companies Gamevil and Com2uS - those numbers have been good, very good.
For others - such as Zynga - they have been the opposite, while for the likes of King, the headline figures are good, although looking behind those numbers demonstrates some significant trends in terms of how the business is changing.
Industry voices
- We kicked off the week with our Mobile Mavens answering the question - What advice would you give a F2P developer without $500,000 for UA?
- Meanwhile our VR Mavens discussed if Microsoft HoloLens had helped augmented reality overtake virtual reality?
- Marketeer Eric Seufert highlighted 3 UA megatrends small developers should ride to outperform the big boys in 2015.
- Editor-at-large Jon Jordan argued that all data on the size of the Chinese mobile game market is wrong.
- Jake Birkett from Grey Alien talked about the challenge of marketing a casual solitaire game.
- Stateside columns Carter Dotson laid out the reasons he thinks all games should play well with disabilities.
Financials
Plenty of companies were announcing their 2014 financials, including...
- Com2uS, which saw 2014 sales up 188% to $216 million thanks to southeast Asian growth.
- Gamevil's saw 2014 sales up 79% to $131 million, and it predicts 2015's sales will rise another 120%.
- Despite going majority mobile for the first time, Zynga saw 2014 revenue down 21% to $690 million.
- Spouting a fountain of cash, King saw 2014 sales up 20% to $2.4 billion.
- Of course, there are lots of companies that have already announced their quarterly and annual figures, and more are to announce them so we've set up these snapshot articles where you can easy see all the key metrics.
- They're split along regional lines: a snapshot of western mobile game company financials; a snapshot of Korean mobile game company financials: and a snapshot of Japanese mobile game company financials.
Discovery, user acquisition, retention, and monetisation
- Monetisation expert Ethan Levy pointed out 5 monetization missteps in Midnight Star's UI.
- Glenn Kiladis from Fiksu argued that developers should be retargeting their way to success in 2015.
- Ariel Rosenstein from analytics outfit SimilarWeb showed how you can use its services to to analyze the performance of top trivia games on Google Play.
- The scale of InMobi's mobile advertising network is now over one billion unique devices.
- Glispa reported 90% growth in BRIC regions.
- And, finally, it seems that Apple is banning App Store screens with characters holding guns, but not melee weapons.
Funding, acquisitions, personnel and shuttering
- Supercell surprised gamers by pulling the plug on fourth game Spooky Pop.
- Looking to expand from casual into midcore games, King bought Z2Live in a deal that could be worth up to $150 million.
- Tencent lead the investment in US midcore developer's Hammer & Chisel's Series B round.
- Japanese outfit Metaps raised $36 million to research smarter AI for better UA.
- French company Appsfire was acquired by Mobile Network Group for a rumoured $30 million.