Start your week right, with our quick take on the stories that are impacting the mobile industry right now.
To help get you primed and ready for another week in mobile gaming, we’ve curated the biggest stories you need to know from the last seven days.
1) Everything you ever wanted to know about Noice: Is this the future of livestreaming?
New streaming platform Noice was fully unveiled last week with the launch of its closed beta, built with streamers, viewers and developers in mind. It’s the latest project from Jussi Laakkonen, the former executive vice president at Unity.
Noice is all about gamifying livestreaming and is currently geared towards battle royales. Notably, it won’t be paying streamers to use Noice exclusively: "Platforms should win by the merit of what they do for creators and players, not by the size of their chequebooks," said Laakkonen.
In part of its ongoing expansion, Helsinki-based mobile gaming giant Supercell is looking to make three more key hires in lead producers for specific games - namely Clash Royale, Brawl Stars and mo.co.
Brawl Stars’ future producer will actually be the game’s first one ever, so quite how the game was produced without a lead producer in the first place must be another part of that Supercell magic...
3) Layer AI seed round raises $1.8M to bolster generative game art production
AI-powered productivity tool Layer AI has raised $1.8 million in a seed funding round towards enhancing its 2D generation for mobile games, with contributions from The Games Fund, GFR Fund, The Games Syndicate, Laton Ventures, Devoted Studios and others.
Following the seed round, Layer AI is looking to hire a founding frontend engineer and a founding full stack engineer, and eventually plans to expand into 3D.
4) Almost half of all mobile games are axed in development and 83% don’t last three years
The results of interviews with 500 game developers in the UK and US show that 43% of mobile games get the axe while still in development, and a huge 83% of those that make it to release proceed to end of services within three years.
SuperScale has found that 32% of developers, meanwhile, have laid off employees this year and 40% have had to outsource development tasks, showing just what impact a skills shortage is having during a time of economic insecurity.
5) OpenAI's chaos is over: Sam Altman is back on the throne. So what just happened and what's next?
Sam Altman will be returning as CEO of OpenAI - the company behind the ChatGPT - after a very brief hiatus following being removed from his post just 11 days ago. In the interim, Altman first hinted he may return to OpenAI but then accepted a job at Microsoft, announced by chairman and CEO Satya Nadella himself and triggering a share price boom at Microsoft.
Then, Altman announced his return to OpenAI where the rest of the board has been sacked instead. Last week was quite a week…
