2014 in Review: The top 10 most read stories on PocketGamer.biz

This year's top 10 stories

• 10 The 24 countries where Windows Phone is outselling iOS

  

  As many suggested, 2014 was the year where Windows Phone solidified its third place in the mobile OS market.

  Yet, with BlackBerry all but out of the consumer market and iOS and Android battling it out for the #1 spot when it comes to significance, the third position that has been gained by Windows Phone is a strange place.

  The Lumia range of hardware designed by Nokia is beautiful; and in many western markets is arguably held back by the quirks of the operating system it must use thanks to Microsoft's acquisition.

  But there are countries - for whatever reason; historic or pricing - in which Windows Phone devices (by which we mean Lumia devices) outsell iPhones.

  
  

• 9 8 pieces of advice advertising genius David Ogilvy would give F2P marketeers

  

  We started this article with the advice, if you haven't read David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, stop reading right now and order a copy.

  This still holds true, but, more generally, given the importance of advertising in the mobile games industry - which is currently concentrated on User Acquisition (UA) for free-to-play games - we also wondered what advice the "Father of Advertising" (aka the original Mad Man) - would give to those marketeers currently selling F2P games.

  
  

• 8 Apple surprises developers with iOS 8's Metal graphics API and Swift programming language

  

  In its WWDC 2014 keynote, Apple announced two subtle but significant shifts in development environment.

  Swift is a programming language that co-exists with but is expected to be the longterm replacement for Objective-C.

  Whereas Metal is a graphics API which directly replaces the industry standard OpenGL and is locked to Apple hardware using the A7 chip or better.

  Clearly, Metal is the more disruptive of the two technologies, with Apple hoping its promised performance increase will persuade game developers to adopt iOS as their primary platform, thus increasing Apple hardware's competitive advantage over Android devices, even those with equivalent processing power.

  
  

• 7 Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen talks cloning, lawsuits and his next "big game"

  

  Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen provided plenty of headlines during 2014, and his first appearance of our top 10 list for 2014 followed his talk at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona.

  He opened his talk discussing the inspiration for his game, which although technically released in 2013, found global success in 2014.

  “The inspiration behind Flappy Bird was bouncing a ping pong ball on one hand, which is something I do,” he commented.

  Yet when it came to the game’s success, he seemed as mystified as the rest of us.

  
  

• 6 Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff... and fighting the desire to spend $430

  

  Squaring the circle of spending real money to gain temporary virtual goodness is something that underpins the vast majority of the mobile games business.

  It was with this in mind that PocketGamer.biz launched its IAP Inspector - a series of column looking at the sort of items you could buy in various F2P games and considering what their value might be.

  TinyCo and Fox's Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff has proved to be a successful F2P game, with the TV show's humour underpinning a solid IAP economy system; something supported by a regular update policy that's conceptually ranged as narrowly and as widely as an American Dad tie-in, Halloween and Christmas themes, and an alien Egyptian invasion.

  Still, the $430 Stewie Dictator Statue does provide a strong headline moment...

  
  

• 5 10 trends shaping the global mobile games industry

  

  Written for the Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2014 conference, this roundup of market trends covered everything from changing in publishing to the return of paid games, musings on the future of UA, the rise of PC gaming for indies, the end of crowdfunding and thoughts about the importance of geographic regions from Brazil to APAC.

  Or you can watch the PG Connects Helsinki Presentation below. 

  
  

• 4 Killing your darlings: Post-mortem of a cancelled game

  

  Making a game is easy and finishing one is hard, noted Two Tails' David Mitchell in one of the regular Full Indie UK columns published on PocketGamer.biz during 2014.

  But, as he argued in a column about the game Leaf Rider, what is harder than finishing a game is making the decision to cancel a project.

  "We spent three years working on and off on Leaf Rider, but in January this year we finally decided to kill it," Mitchell wrote.

  "We spent too long building tools, editors and levels rather than focusing on the absolute core mechanics first. We didn't fail fast enough."

  
  

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

  

  Trashing the mechanics of a top grossing game is a guaranteed way to generate interest, and that’s exactly what Vili Lehdonvirta of the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, did at the F2P Summit in his talk about the importance of player-to-player economies.

  Taking Supercell’s Hay Day (a game reckoned to be generated $250,000 a day) has his key example, Lehdonvirta pointed out that players were manipulated the game’s system to get the flexibility of player-to-player trading that they want.

  "People know they are trading with real people, and will do all kinds of tricks to make it more alluring. It's just a better experience than what you get with an NPC,” he added.

  
  

• 2 9 growth hacking tips to boost your mobile game's success

  

  Given the expense and relative lack of effectiveness per dollar spent of standard user acquisition tools, it’s was little surprise that a guerilla How To manual by Pascal Clarysse - now with Flaregames - about finding growth for your game was going to prove popular.

  In terms of the tips he covers, they range from known knowns such as YouTube and mobile messaging apps to known unknows (at least for western developers) such as social networks like Russia’s VK.

  Particularly interesting was Clarysse’s championing of loyal reward platfoms (Kiip, Beintoo), playable ads (Voxel, mNectar), and Android wrapper technologies (Flexion).

  
  

• 1 Why the success of Flappy Bird has the whole industry in a flap

  

  As soon as Flappy Bird found global success there were myriad people with myriad reasons why the free, one-handed, extremely difficult, high score game had made such an impact.

  The fact that its creator Nguyen Dong proved to be a mercurial character, eventually removing the game from the App Store, only added mystery to the situation.

  Was the original App Store chart position really down to bot farms?

  Or as Keith Andrew (top score 7) put it: “The fact Flappy Bird has thrown almost everything I thought I knew about mobile up into the air is what's really frustrating”.