Devs on the brink of murder, the truth behind loading times, and the sexual dilemma facing Candy Crush players

Last week's top five stories

• 5 Opinion: Why your game needs to load within 30 seconds

  

  PocketGamer.biz editor at large, Jon Jordan, believes there's a correlation between player retention and loading times.

  So, in last week's Monetizer he attempted to explain the method behind his madness and see if his trusty numbers would prove his theory.

  "Being a numbers-sort-of-guy, I decided to stick some numbers into a spreadsheet," explained Jordan.

  "The first thing I noticed was that many games take a cunning approach to loading. They will load what looks like the game screen, but actually the game isn't yet playable.

  "This made my process more complex as I was looking to measure the time it took from hitting the icon to the game actually being playable."

  
  

• 4 "We were about to murder each other": How Real Cricket 14's devs went from despair to 1 million downloads

  

  From development hell to developer heaven: that's the only way to describe the journey indie duo Nicolas Beuvin and Anuj Mankar embarked upon as they chased the impossible dream.

  The pair finally realised that dream when their latest game, Real Cricket 14, closed in on 1 million downloads. However, Beuvin also recognised that victories rarely come without defeats.

  "We topped the Blackberry Appworld for 3 months, we were above Angry Birds, above Batman," recalled Beuvin.

  "[Of course] topping a market with no customer will not help you to pay the bills, and by mid-December we were left with no money, no staff, angry investors, and two damned trophies on our TT table.

  "I thought that was it, not only we were about to close the studio, tell the investors we lost their money, but Anuj and I were also about to murder each other."

  
  

• 3 Player to player economies: Why mobile needs to do it, and how Hay Day did it badly

  

  When Vili Lehdonvirta of the University of Oxford suggested that mobile extraordinaire Supercell had made a mistake within one of its games, it, understandably, caused quite a stir.

  During his talk at the F2P Summit in London, Lehdonvirta explained that developers should be looking to include a player to player economy in their games, before pointing to Supercell's Hay Day as an example of how not to implement the system.

  "In Hay Day, you have a road side shop where you can sell your produce to other players," said Lehdonvirta.

  "But what's happened is, because the UI doesn't facilitate exchanging goods for goods directly, unofficial trading forums have sprung up where people request goods, friend each other, and then use a strange signalling system.

  "This is how not to do it."

  
  

• 2 PG Connects Speaker Spotlight: Ben Cousins

  

  In order to prepare you for Pocket Gamer Connects' grand return in Helsinki, we've been shining the spotlight onto our speaker selection to give a deeper look at the men and women who'll be stealing the show.

  In the limelight recently was industry veteran Ben Cousins, a man who's amassed 15 years worth of experience working as a senior executive, studio head, project lead, creative director and game designer at firms such as DeNA, EA, Sony and Lionhead.

  "It's been clear for several years now that mobile gaming is rapidly evolving into a later stage where the major players take most of the revenue through highly polished products supported by large marketing investments," detailed Cousins.

  "I think the mobile game industry as a whole will have a great year in 2014 - I'm sure its best ever - we'll probably have a few more games hit the billion-dollar lifetime revenue number and I'm sure we'll see some new hits emerge."

  
  

• 1 20 percent of mobile gamers would skip sex for Candy Crush

  

  Sex or Candy Crush? We've all been there.

  Okay, maybe not all of us, but according to a recent survey conduced by PlayPhone, almost a quarter of Americans would rather give up sex then mobile games.

  The survey also revealed that an alarming amount of Americans play mobile games while behind the wheel.

  "Just as we seek to reveal emerging trends in mobile gaming monetization, we feel it's essential to investigate behaviors that define heavy spenders," said Anders Evju, CMO of PlayPhone, when explaining why the survey was carried out.

  "It furthers our goals of maximizing value for our game developer and operator partners and enables us to continue to deliver an optimal social gaming experience."