Angry Birds 2 breaks records, Game of War uncovered, and video ad insights

The top stories of the last week in detail

• 5 How to get a job at Helsinki mobile games indie Two Men and a Dog

  

  The next studio in our "How To Get a Job" series is mobile games Indie Two Men And A Dog.

  Following the news that Two Men and a Dog is currently recruiting a game programmer for its Helsinki office, we got in touch with GM Ville Heijari to get the lowdown on exactly what sort of candidate he's looking for.

  Surprisingly, you don't have to be a man, or own a dog to get the job.

  "Right now we're looking for game programmers, and are looking to open up a game artist position in the near future," Heijari told us.

  We're also working with a number of tech partners in Helsinki, and always looking for great freelance specialists in different areas of development."

  
  

• 4 Angry Birds 2 scores 10 million downloads in 4 days

  

  Following our report that Angry Birds 2 barrelled through 1 million downloads in 12 hours, the F2P remake has sailed past the 10 million mark.

  The official Twitter page for Rovio’s newest smash hit announced the news with a picture of its newest character Silver.

  Nearly half of those downloads were racked up on the first day of launch.

  By Friday afternoon Angry Birds 2 had netted 4.4 million installs, though the figures do not yet take into account interest from China.

  Now though, Angry Birds 2 has surpassed even this milestone. The game currently sits on over 20 million downloads, and you can read the full story here. 

  
  

• 3 Seven tips for a successful mobile burst campaign that you can't afford to ignore

  

  Stanislava Todorova is associate director at glispa's gBoost mobile marketing service, and last week she ran us through in a guest post how to run a successful mobile burst campaign.

  "Burst campaigns are a key mobile advertising tool. They help drive app discovery by catapulting apps into the top charts, and this momentum can spark a surge in organic growth that’s more valuable than a campaign executed over a longer period of time.

  With over 3 million apps in mobile app stores, getting your app noticed is a huge challenge. Recent studies show that over 65% of users discover new apps by browsing the app stores.

  A high-ranking app will be discovered much more easily - and burst campaigns are carefully designed marketing ad spend plans tailor made for this purpose.

  f executed successfully, such campaigns lead to exponential userbase growth and a cost-reducing, organic uplift.

  They can spur the growth of a new app or rejuvenate the user base of an existing one to prolong its life cycle.

  Is a burst marketing a solution that can be successful for every app?’

  The truth is that there is no one-size-fits-all advertising strategy. That said, following these seven rules can help make your burst campaign successful."

  
  

• 2 How Compass Point West generates $0.06 a day per player from incent video ads

  

  Thanks to games like Crossy Road, incentivised video ads have become a talking point for all developers of F2P mobile games.

  And Mitchell Smallman from Helsinki studio Next Games was certainly happy to give out some specific numbers in his GDC Europe 2015 talk Rewarded Video Ads in Midcore Mobile: Blazing Trails Where We Were Told Not To Tread.

  Kicking off he stated that "75% of our players [of Compass Point West] watch an ad daily" with the company generating $0.06 per player daily in terms of ad revenue".

  In order to hit these figures, Next Games took a positive decision to deeply integrate ads within its core loop and to take the lucrative UA adverts from potentially competitive strategy games.

  
  

• 1 Deconstructing the $120,000 IAP economy of Game of War

  

  Game of War is the first western-developed F2P game to hit Asian levels of per player monetisation.

  According to Dimitar Draganov, Monetization Manager at German Flaregames - as revealed in his GDC Europe 2015 talk - Mid-Core Monetization on Mobile: Deconstructing Game of War - its estimated average revenue per paying user is over $350.

  There are many interlinked reasons for this situation; a flow that Draganov broke down into Hook, Habit and Hobby phases.

  "The Hook phase [or day 1] is polished to perfection," he said, explaining that during this phase players are gifted status and resources to make them feel very powerful in terms of how they interact with the game.

  For example, you're gifted VIP 2 status for a day, which speeds up all construction, among other advantages.

  You can read the other two by reading the article.