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) Nitro Games receives further €3.5 million to continue Warframe mobile development
Finnish developer Nitro Games has received a further €3.5 million towards its ongoing development of Warframe for mobile. Having signed an expanded agreement for additional funding from the IP’s creator Digital Extremes, the total order value is now approximately €12.5 million.
Nitro Games expects the mobile adaptation of Warframe to be completed sometime this year and has received the funding top-up shortly after cross-platform saves were introduced to the currently available versions.
2) Apple has acquired more AI companies than any of its competitors
Apple is believed to be securing a bunch of early-stage startups to develop new AI technology within the iOS ecosystem. In total, 32 companies are believed to have been bought in 2023 alone - from an emotion-analysing AI creator to a self-driving car company - with the assumption now being that their skills will see some repurposing towards Apple devices.
It's therefore increasingly likely that the latest iOS (coming up at their Worldwide Developer Conference most likely to take place in June) and September's new iPhone 16 announcement will both feature a major AI focus.
3) ByteDance CEO warns employees against mediocrity amid AI disruption
ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo is concerned that the company is being complacent during a time of increasingly prevalent AI solutions, having warned workers that the company’s risk of sliding into mediocrity is a real one - particularly with enthusiastic emerging startups for competition leveraging the tech in interesting ways at an affordable price.
Notably, Liang commented on ByteDance’s ignorance to AI technology: "Our company is not sensitive enough (to new technologies). For example, discussions about GPT did not appear in our half-year tech review until 2023, although GPT-1 was already released in 2018."
4) Match Factory! surpasses $20M… With 99% coming from iOS
The popular new 3D puzzler Match Factory! has seen a strong debut with this Peak Games title becoming the second-biggest trending game by revenue less than six months on from launch.
Match Factory! has earned approximately $22.5 million in gross revenue so far since its August 2023 launch and showed 350% month-on-month growth in November and December, all pointing towards a successful future with marked staying power for Peak’s latest game.
5) Roblox introduces AI powered chat translator supporting 16 languages
Once again, all eyes are on Roblox and its latest use of AI, and this time they’re tackling the language barrier. Roblox launched its new live-chat AI translator last week, designed to connect players around the world.
Built upon Roblox’s "proprietary artificial intelligence technology", the latest AI addition translates players’ messages live between 16 supported languages, only further bolstering the potential connections users can make beyond the current 70 million daily average.
