Hot Five

Hot 5: Halfbrick returns, a new mobile gaming taxonomy, and 6 years of Marvel Puzzle Quest

The hottest stories

Hot 5: Halfbrick returns, a new mobile gaming taxonomy, and 6 years of Marvel Puzzle Quest

To help you keep on top of a busy news cycle and the latest hot topics in mobile gaming, each week we round up the five most-read stories on PocketGamer.biz.

Read on and digest... 

5. Jetpack Joyride studio Halfbrick returns with fast-paced PVP Magic Brick Wars

Three years since its previous game, Australian studio Halfbrick has announced Magic Bricks Wars. 

It's a fast-paced PVP game, forcing players to balance attack and defence, all set within the Raskulls universal Halfbrick is well known for. 

The game is due out on 15 November 

 

4. Why mobile games need a new taxonomy

According to mobile game market data provider GameRefinery, the reason your games might not be performing as you expect or want is that you haven't accurately defined them.

This is particularly important in terms of doing competitive analysis. 

 

3. Deca Games plays F2P’s long tail, buying 4 one-time hits from GREE

Live Ops specialist Deca Games has boosted its portfolio with the acquisition of four games from Japanese publisher GREE.

Released in 2011 and 2012, these games - Knights and Dragons, Crime City, Modern War, and Kingdom Age - were once top grossers.

They've long since fallen away from that level of performance, but Berlin-based Deca thinks it can ride the long tail and make them more profitable than they currently are. 

 

2. Roblox’s masterplan to enable young game devs to make $50 million a year on its platform

Minecraft might be more famous - at least among the parents - but Roblox is now the king of user-generated content games.

The platform has surpassed 100 million monthly active users and the number of hours of engagement has passed 1.2 billion.

More significantly, nine games built within Roblox have more than one billion gameplays, and the company expects to pay out $100 million to its creators in 2019. Indeed, it even hopes to play out $50 million to a single studio working on Roblox by 2022.

 

1. How players pushed Marvel Puzzle Quest beyond midcore to embrace competitive gameplay

Keeping mobile games operating successfully over years is a relatively new skill for the industry but it's one developers are quickly getting to grips with. 

The latest interview in our ongoing Live and Kicking series is with D3 Go! VP of Publishing Brian Etheridge about what the company has learned from the six years it's spent running Marvel Puzzle Quest.

Tags:
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.