Week that was

PG.biz week that was: UDID confusion, 360m downloads not enough for Nabergoj, and RIM's walking a razor's edge

The past 7 days' news compressed bite-sized

PG.biz week that was: UDID confusion, 360m downloads not enough for Nabergoj, and RIM's walking a razor's edge
Our week started in the snowy embrace of Tampere, Finland, pausing only for some intense networking - and biscuit eating - at the first Free2Play Summit in London.

But that's just how we roll at PG.biz, the home of news and views on the business of app stores, smartphone platforms, developments in mobile game making and assorted technology.

The 'Manchester of the North' was the location for the third ever Pocket Gamer Mobile Mixer, which saw the likes of Rovio, Flurry, Papaya and Symbio talking about their business.

We also had another legendary boxing panel debate on the subject of Core vs Casual.

Oscar Clark really got into the spirit of the occasion.

Things were less combative at the F2P Summit, which was kicked off by ngmoco's Ben Cousins. Other speakers included GREE's Kyoko Matsushita, NaturalMotion's Struan Robertson, InnoGames' Volker Dressel and Zynga's Matthew Wiggins.

All of them were keen to big up the opportunities available when you give away your games for free, albeit each viewing the world through their particular platform, genre or technology focus.

Who I am?

The other big news of the week concerned the world of mobile advertising.

Demonstrating its underlying buoyancy, Millennial Media floated on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE:MM) on Thursday. It launched at $13 a share, ending the week at $23.50, which gives it a market cap of $1.8 billion.

However, in the short term, the industry has a problem.

The week started with news that Apple's long awaited deprecation of UDIDs - a unique device ID - used to track users in terms of advertising and app installation, had started.

Even now, however, there's a certain amount of confusion about whether it has. Obviously Apple hasn't publicly said anything on the matter.

Yet some developers complain their updates have been rejected because they use UDIDs, while other insiders claim Apple isn't rejecting apps for using UDIDs, only because they don't overtly ask users whether they can use UDIDs.

Another way to track?

No matter, the rumours were enough for the entire mobile advertising, monetisation and analytics industries to gear up their various Plan Bs.

The most popular short term solution is to use MAC addresses, but as inneractive's Itay Gadot points out, this approach is likely be banned too, so other options are required.

Indeed, Appsfire's Ouriel Ohayon thinks using MAC address will cause more problems than it solves. He's offering OpenUDID, which is being used by MoPub amongst others. Meanwhile, InMobi is 'primarily' using the cross platform ODIN1 standard.

All together

One thing that everyone can agree on, though, is the need for a new industry standard.

Some hope Apple will provide this; certainly MoPub's Jim Payne reckons there is too much revenue at stake for Apple not to address the UDID gap.

AdColony's Will Kassoy and Applifier's Jussi Laakkonen think that competition and co-operation from the large ad networks will eventually see the evolution of the best solution. But not everyone is so sanguine.

There's going to be constant tug-o-war over between Apple and the industry over UDID replacement, says Kiip's Eamonn Carey.

Opening up another front in the battle (although not directly related) is the emergence of the Mobile Acquisition Transparency Alliance.

Set up by analytics company Kontagent, and supported by Chartboost, Playhaven and MdotM, amongst others, it's a move to provide an open API for analytics that will solve the issue of fragmented monetisation metrics.

Obviously, the more companies that get involved, the more power MATA will have in terms of adopting an UDID replacement, although Kontagent is keen to point out that the Open API approach is ID agnostic.

Black days

Back to reality. It was a bad week from RIM, with the Canadian outfit posting FY12 figures that were down compared to FY11.

This was particularly the case in terms of profitability, with the company making a Q4 loss of $125 million, and suggesting hard times ahead. Indeed, new CEO Thorsten Heins got rid of RIM's CTO, COO and kicked previous co-CEO and founder Jim Balsillie off the board.

He told analysts the company would focus on its enterprise strengths, while considering how to maximise value for shareholders and staff, including looking at partnerships or even selling out.

The company was then quick to point out, however, this didn't mean RIM was pulling out of the consumer market, as some commentators had suggested.

"We're fully committed to the consumer market," it stated.

Size of a cow

For some reason, this week saw a lot of research companies putting out figures - not that they all matched.

A GIC report for UK trade association TIGA put the global mobile games market at $7.9 billion in 2011, rising to $12 billion in 2013. Meanwhile a SuperData report for the Casual Games Association reckoned it would be worth $7.5 billion in 2015.

Go figure, indeed.

More numbers: the US has 100 million mobile gamers compared to 70 million in Europe, said Newzoo, while Distimo claimed China is now the largest market for free apps on iPad.

Significantly, it seems Apple has also been focused on the Chinese App Store, which what's thought to have been a ranking algorithm tweak causing major changes in apps' chart positions.

I'm on fire

Flurry has a great reputation for numbers, given its app analytics background.

Its latest research compared the official Google Play marketplace to Amazon's US-only Appstore for Android, claiming the latter is almost four times more effective at generating revenue, and only marginally behind Apple's App Store. At least, when comparing a basket of comparable apps over a 45 day period.

It's something Amazon is looking to build on, with at least two new Kindle tablets expected in 2012.

Another company looking to the hardware future is Foxconn parent Hon Hai. It's invested $1.8 billion into Sharp, seemingly in the hope it will get manufacturing work for the anticipated Apple TV.

Firm foundations

Onto platforms. DeNA continued to generate press releases.

It's signed a co-development and distibution deal with Disney Japan, that will be see three branded games - two Disney, one Marvel - released first on Mobage Japan, and then on its three global branches - China, US/Europe and Korea.

DeNA also signed a deal with the three largest Chinese carriers - China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom - to further promote Mobage.

But there was less good news from US subsidiary ngmoco, which has seen the departure of publishing head Simon Jeffery.

Other platform companies in the news this week include Adobe, which revealed a 9 percent revenue share for web developers using the high end features of its Flash Player 11, while GREE launched Alien Family, its second US-developed game.

Chinese outfit The9 uses GREE's OpenFeint technology for its Game Zone platform and VP Chris Shen said it expects to be hosting over 1,000 games by the end of 2012.

Facebook/mobile outfit 6waves is looking for scale as well. It announced multi-game publishing deals with 32 developers. It seems to have completely shutdown its Lolapps division, though; quietly killing off its new 6L name and reverting to its original moniker. Lolapps' CTO Brian Rue and CPO Arjun Sethi formally announced their departures.

Also renaming itself - this time for more positive reasons - was mobile publisher Addmired, or Machine Zone as it's now known.

It secured $8 million in Series B funding from Menlo Ventures, gaining SGN's founder Shervin Pishevar as a board member as part of the deal.

We also spoke to the self-styled King of Mobile - Tommy Palm. He's just sold his company Fabrication Games to King.com; a combination of talents he's sure will see strong mobile success.

Big boys beano

But let's end the week talking about numbers, again.

Rovio's never shy shouting about its success. But as soon as it had announced Angry Birds Space has hit 10 million sales, it was time to announce it had now hit 20 million sales. The respective time periods were three days and a week after launch.

It's busy in other areas too, buying Finnish outfit Futuremark Games Studio and revealing its plans for a new Stockholm office.

Another massive success story has been Outfit7's Talking Animals franchise. This week it revealed a total of 360 million downloads and 100 million MAUs.

That wasn't enough for founder Andrej Nabergoj, however. He told us why he left Talking Tom Cat behind to create the next great app distribution channel - Iddiction.

"We're currently scraping the surface. I think this business has much more potential than Outfit7," he explained.

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.