PocketGamer.biz review of 2008: June
PocketGamer.biz only launched in June this year, which is why we're kicking off our 2008 review in that month. Don't worry, there was some news in the first half of the year - we just weren't around to cover it.
With that in mind, here's ten of the biggest mobile games industry stories from June, starting with Apple's announcement of its App Store for iPhone and iPod touch at the WWDC show, complete with demos of Super Monkey Ball, Enigmo, Cro-Mag Rally and Kroll on the gaming side of things.
Meanwhile, Fishlabs announced plans to release ad-funded versions of its games, via a deal with Greystripe - the latest publisher to sign up with the company.
It was around now that things started to look a bit less rosy for Glu Mobile, with speculation that its Speed Racer game hadn't sold as well as expected, mainly due to the movie it was based on being a flop.
In-Fusio, formerly one of the big guns in the mobile games industry, came back from the dead in June, too, securing a new round of financing to ramp up its global expansion plans (again).
Capcom revealed that it had sold three million mobile games in its Who Wants to Be a Millionaire franchise - all the more impressive because it only had the licence in North America.
Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson was also coughing up some stats - in this case the fact that 80 per cent of people who buy its handsets play a preloaded game at least once. Preloaded games were already being talked up as one of the best mobile game discovery mechanisms.
More rumours surrounded Disney's plans to launch a mobile game spin-off from a virtual world - one of the first examples of this kind of cross-platform synergy (or something).
Talking of cross-platform plans, EA Mobile let slip some of its strategy in a job posting, looking for a senior engineer who'd "work with PC and console teams to deliver cross-platform networked game services".
June saw the latest bullish prediction from analyst firm Gartner, which forecast $4.5 billion of mobile games revenues in 2008, rising to $6.3 billion by 2011. We were sceptical, mind.
Finally, UK developer TAG Games found an innovative approach to securing work-for-hire projects - it promised publishers and brandowners their money back if it didn't deliver, based on "an objective scoring system based on pre-defined delivery objectives as well as external game analysis".