Each weekend we’ll be rounding up a selection of the most interesting articles related to mobile and the games industry at large.
This week includes a talk revealing how Supercell balances Clash Royale's gameplay, the legal barriers holding back eSports in Japan, a list of XR studios that have made more than $1 million, and Michael Abrash on the future of human interaction.
See an article you think we should share? Email PocketGamer.biz Craig Chapple at craig.chapple@steelmedia.co.uk to add it to our weekly round-up.
Quest for the healthy metagame: Balancing cards in Clash Royale
"I really think that if you have monetisation as a goal for balancing, I think that’s really hurtful for the gameplay, both in the short, and especially in the long run. Obviously there are places where we think about monetisation, but balancing is absolutely not one of those places."
Legal barrier hobbles esports in game-crazy Japan
"The prize money in Japan is pocket change by comparison. That is because of the act against unjustifiable premiums and misleading representations, which puts a 100,000 yen ($895) cap on cash prizes for events deemed to be aimed at selling a specific product."
Million dollar babies: The XR studios that are smashing it!
“We thought it was time to recognise the progress made by the VR industry in its infancy and put together a list of the VR, AR and MR developers and publishers that have broken the million-dollar barrier.”
Unite Europe 2017 - How Futureplay's F2P mobile games soared
"In this fireside chat with Futureplay (FarmAway!, BuildAway!), hear what the founding game industry vets did right and how they did it. Learn how Unity Ads, IAP, and Analytics help fuel their revenue strategy; how they, in a very short period of time, have accumulated more than two million monthly active users, with over 320 million ads served; and, since last Unite Europe, received their first funding round."
VR's grand challenge: Michael Abrash on the future of human interaction
"The reality we experience is whatever our minds infer it to be based on perceptual inputs, regardless of the source. So if VR can provide the right perceptual inputs, we can have whatever experiences we want, and those experiences will feel real—they’ll be genuine experiences."
"In terms of reception, we were really hoping that we released the app at the right time, considering how Dragon Ball Super was coming along and the hype generated around an official Dragon Ball Z smartphone app. We were sort of worried about whether it would spread out because the genre is an entirely new one to the series, because you immediately think of an action-oriented game, or a fighting game. We were really trying to bring a game that nobody has ever tried before."
Breath of the Wild and telling stories through archaeology
"The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild offers a masterclass in storytelling through environment. The story of Hyrule's history is written into its landscape, there for anyone to read and reconstruct if they want. The mechanic of finding Link's missing memories prods players in this direction, but delve deeper and you'll find there's so much more to it."
The sacrifice Gigantic’s team made to save it from development hell
"Even though we were all laid off and we were out of money, no one was willing to accept that this would be the fate of the game," McBee says. "We all believed so much in the game, we just thought, there's no way that it's going to end like this. That's what drove us to come back, because we believed we'd been working on something special."
