Rovio Studio Profile, Resolution Games strike VR gold, how to make success from failure

The top stories of last week

• 5 UPDATE: Machine Zone CEO sues Kabam after party banter turns sour

  

  A wine-soaked spark at a recent Casual Connect conference has combusted into a full-blown lawsuit between Machine Zone and Kabam.

  The developer behind Game of War is taking Kabam to court over “misappropriation of trade secrets.”

  In layman’s terms, Machine Zone believes that details of its plans to raise $500 million in funding through investors had been wrongfully obtained by Kabam.

  The whole fiasco began at a Casual Connect party, when Machine Zone’s CEO Gabe Leydon and Kabam’s director of corporate development Daniel Wiggins were talking together.

  During the conversation, Wiggins claimed to have seen a deck from Morgan Stanley that included figures for Machine Zone’s profit and revenue. These sensitive statistics were only available in a confidential pitch document the developer had circulated to a select few.

  According to a statement submitted to the San Francisco Superior Court, the document also contained details of in-development technology and games, screenshots, artwork, and other confidential financial information.

  Witnesses say that Leydon was infuriated, and immediately threatened legal action - threats that he swiftly followed up on.

  Kabam denies that such a document was ever in its employees hands, and said in a statement that it is "ludicrous" that proceedings ever got this far.

  
  

• 4 Resolution closes largest VR game development Series A funding round at $6 million

  

  The largest VC cash injection for any virtual reality games developer has been pumped into Swedish studio Resolution Games.

  Founded by King’s former games guru, Tommy Palm, Resolution Games has raised $6 million in Series A funding.

  Google Ventures led the round, which marks the firm’s first investment in a Swedish company since it expanded into Europe.

  The money will be used to grow Resolution Games’ development team.

  Building off mobile gaming’s old adage of “innovate fast, fail quickly,” Resolution Games will invest in speedy production that enables the company to quickly gain knowledge, discover successful titles, and experiment with emerging trends within the nascent VR market.

  “As we learned with the mobile games market, perseverance is critical for building a successful company in an emerging market.” said Palm.

  
  

• 3 A history of Finland's mobile games industry: Why N-Gage deserves to have its memory rehabilitated

  

  In the build up to Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2015 - which runs from 7-8 September 2015: get your tickets here - this week, we're looking back over the history of the Finnish mobile games industry.

  In particular, we've been interested in the Nokia N-Gage - 2003's specialist mobile gaming device.

  Released in the autumn of 2003, the device is remembered for being a commercial and practical failure. The familiar criticisms of holding the phone on the side, having to remove the battery to change a game, and having a woefully small portrait screen are used as the starting point of a negative narrative that can stretch from the downfall of the device itself to the slow, terminal decline of Nokia itself

  Yet while the commercial facts about the are irrefutable, the N-Gage's role in mobile game history - indeed in the rise of dedicated mobile gaming, and particularly in terms of kickstarting mobile game developers in Finland - is very different.

  Click the title above to read the story in full.

  
  

• 2 25 developers, 8 newborns, two years, no crunch: How Rovio Stockholm made Angry Birds 2

  

  We went behind the scenes at Rovio Stockholm to find out more about the studio that created Angry Birds 2.

  Tucked inside an old tobacco factory in the center of the city, the studio is all high ceilings and massive windows - with a hearty sprinkling of beanbags and birdy plushies thrown in for good measure.

  It was created back in 2012 as studio head Oskar Burman abandonned making first-person console shooters with EA and turned to mobile.

  “Many of us come from the console/PC space," he told us, "It’s definitely helped us in terms of pushing the production values for our games, with high fidelity art and sound not normally seen in mobile.”

  He then talked us through the creative proces of Angry Birds 2, and the unique work environment of the studio that spawned it. 

  In a team of 25, nearly half left to have children - both men and women. Still, Rovio Stockholm ensured this didn't affect the game's production process and finished Angry Birds 2 with no crunch.

  Click the title above to read the full interview in full.

   

  
  

• 1 How Flaregames found success by learning from its failures

  

  Four years ago Gameforge co-founder and CEO Klaas Kersting decided to plunge into the world of mobile gaming.

  Things were rather different back then, of course.

  For one thing, Kersting's startup - Flaregames - set out to make a location-based casual game.

  "We just couldn't make it fun," Kersting recalls of that failure.

  Not only that, his previous experience making F2P browser games at Gameforge - a studio with 400 staff and annual sales of $150 million - proved to be more of a hindrance than a help when it came to the F2P mobile games market.

  Kersting sat down with PG.biz to chat through some of the challenges Flaregames faced in finding success, detailing where some of the studio's previous games went wrong and how they learned from their mistakes.

  You can read the full interview by clicking the title above.