Mixi retreats, Z2's future looks uncertain, Shilpa Shetty goes for games, and finding the fun in Candy Crush

Hot topics in the world of mobile games

• 5 Mixi suspends Monster Strike's US marketing; pivots to focus on China

  

  Like DeNA and GREE before it, top Japanese developer Mixi is rethinking its global expansion plans for top grossing game Monster Strike.

  The start of 2016 saw the company working closely with Facebook to run a big UA campaign for the game. There were several high profile TV ads running too.

  But six months on, Mixi has crunched the numbers and decided that North America is just too competitive a market for a game that's been #1 in Japan for a year.

  

  Instead, it's turning its attention closer to home to build on the game's already strong audience in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

  And, from that beachhead, it's preparing to re-engage with China, where the game was originally launched back in late 2014 with Tencent.

• 4 Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty sets up new Indian game developer Viaan Studios

  

  There's always plenty going on in the Indian games sector, as our Indian Mavens frequently discuss.

  And now there's a high profile and well funded startup looking to make a splash on the scene.

  Established by husband-and-wife team, Raj Kundra and Bollywood film star Shilpa Shetty Kundra, Viaan Studios is based in Mumbai and already has five games in development.

  

  The first two will be mobile zombie strategy game Survival Block and A Shot of Fame, which appears to be a Glu-esque celebrity experience leveraging the Shilpa Shetty licence.

  More ambitious are the two console/PC games.

• 3 How King uses magic and data to find the fun in Candy Crush

  

  It's been the week of GDC Europe and Gamescom, which has seen Matt and Craig sunning themselves in a sweaty Cologne.

  One nugget of information recovered was a talk from King Berlin's principal game designer Jeremy Kang, who discussed level design philosophies.

  Key to this was the use of four concepts:

  • Difficulty,
  • Rhythm,
  • Flow, and
  • Hooks.

  But more than this, Kang explained that level designers need to "have the magical gut of a magician" to know what makes something fun, and also be able to analyse data from players and testers like a mathematician.

  
  

• 2 Rovio soft-launches yet another Angry Birds title, Angry Birds Blast

  

  Another week, another Angry Birds game goes into soft launch.

  With the arrival of balloon-popper Angry Birds Blast Rovio now has at least five games in testing in various markets.

  We tried to make sense of its strategy in our recent : Trends in the soft launch strategy of F2P mobile games article: Rovio's approach.

  

  As for Angry Birds Blast, it has players popping balloons containing the titular Angry Birds and linking together long chains of the balloons to trigger high scores.

  And it's available in the UK: another soft launch trend we recently investigated.

• 1 Z2's future looks uncertain as forthcoming midcore title Rise of Tyrants is canned

  

  Over at Activision Blizzard-owned King-owned developer Z2, the picture is unclear.

  What we do know is that the Seattle-based studio has announced it's sunsetting all its legacy games, and that list now includes the still-in-soft-launch (and much anticipated by some: i.e. me) Rise of Tyrants.

  It's still available on various country App Stores (including the UK), but you now can't buy any IAPs.

  But why would you?

  The developer has effectively made everything in the game free by gifting players 10 million nanocite (the in-game hard currency). The servers will be switched off mid-October.

  Quite where that leaves the developer's employees is uncertain, given that the only Z2 game that will continue live post-October appears to be casual-focused Paradise Bay.