Marketing

Adsup marketing agency decided to help marketers and application developers. It has published a guide on mobile traffic sources and working with them.

We continue the cycle of publications about games that require investment or a publisher. Next up is material from Herbarium Games studio, which is developing a cooperative online action game BUS: Bro U Survived.

In early April, Yandex released the seventh version of the Mobile Ads SDK. Among other things, the SDK has a new advertising format — the feed.

App2Top brought together representatives of AdQuantum, Appska, Tenjin, AppsFlyer, Adjust and Appier to talk about the current situation in the mobile game advertising market. We discussed AI, the transition to the web, traffic prices and much more.

There is little talk about games in the Telegram messenger. We decided to fix the situation by talking with Daria Novikova, product director at PlayDeck startup. The latter launched a gaming marketplace for Telegram. In a conversation with Daria, we touched on topics such as user engagement, earnings from leading projects, monetization and, of course, PlayDeck itself.

Journalist Stephen Totilo from Game File spoke with Michael Douse, head of the publishing department at Larian Studios, about the current state of the gaming industry. We chose the main thing from the interview.

Michael Douse, director of publishing at Larian Studios, has opened about the current state of the games industry. He touched on topics such as mass layoffs, marketing, Steam vs. consoles, and Early Access.

The document is called the Mobile Ad Creative Index. Its focus is on the average cost of advertising for various types of creatives. One of the verticals considered by the authors of the work is mobile games.

The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled that Electronic Arts (EA), Miniclip and Jagex misled users by not telling their game ads about the presence of loot boxes in those games. Companies have been banned from using this advertisement in the country.

The giant 2024 Unity Gaming Report has been released. It is dedicated to trends in game development. If possible, we will briefly tell you about the main thing from the study.

Adjust, together with Applovin, has released a report on the state of affairs in the mobile market — Mobile app trends: 2024 edition. A separate chapter is devoted to mobile games. Read more about them in our material.

Google is expanding its Google Play Games service by adding several important features. One of them is support for games built specifically for PC.

The Yandex analytical service has received a new tool. It is called "LTV and Outflow Predicates". The service predicts revenue from the existing audience and identifies users who are going to leave the application.

Together with the Game Finder business partner search service, we continue the cycle of publications about games that are looking for investments and publishers. Next up is material about the Russian studio Aeroplan Games, which is preparing to release a game dedicated to the culture of the Altai Republic.

What should be understood by LiveOps, what tasks this discipline solves, why it is important not to confuse it with operating a game — the editors of App2Top talked about this and much more with Vadim Bulatov, author of the course "LiveOps in games".

Games and Names, an industry podcast launched by AppMagic in partnership with WN Media Group, is back. The first episode of 2024 is all about LiveOps and the main challenges that mobile developers may face in this area.

Unity continues to restructure, this time preparing for changes in its leadership. The founders of ironSource, an app monetization platform it acquired in 2022, will soon leave the company.

All six ironSource founders will leave Unity within the next six months. This is reported by the Mobilegamer portal, which has read the letter from Jim Whitehurst, interim CEO of Unity, sent to the company's employees.

Russian MPs want to limit the duration and frequency of advertising in video games. The draft amendments to the federal law "On Advertising" have already been submitted to the State Duma for consideration.

We continue to summarize the results of 2023 with gaming (or related to the gaming sector) teams and organizations. This time we talked with Konstantin Ivanov, brand director of AdQuantum.

This was stated by the former marketing director of Pixel Federation and SuperScale Matej Lancaric. He believes that Scopely spends up to $4.5 million per day on user purchases.

In a world where more than 1,000 games are released every month, even quality titles run the risk of not recouping their development costs. Here are the lessons indie studio Pixelsplit learned from the launch of its theme park sim Indoorlands.

Rockstar has finally unveiled the first teaser trailer for GTA VI. As expected, it quickly turned into the industry’s biggest news, generating dozens of millions of views within hours.

Targeting the right audience for a game is one of the most important tasks for developers. Acclaimed developer and former BioWare producer Mark Darrah has opened up about the decision-making process and who should make the final choice.

Ubisoft started promoting Assassin's Creed Mirage with pop—up ads in another part of the series - Assassin's Creed Odyssey. The network noticed that banners now appear during the game with an offer to buy Assassin's Creed Mirage at a discount in honor of Black Friday.

On October 17, the AppsFlyer MAMA Georgia conference dedicated to mobile analytics and marketing was held in Tbilisi. The other day, the organizers of the event posted recordings of all reports in open access.

On the topic "What are the tasks of advertising?" and "Do games need advertising at all?", the editors of App2Top talked with Kirill Oreshkin, former co—head of the Wargaming advertising agency and author of the course "How to make advertising for games that will work?".

The devtodev analytical platform now belongs to the AppsFlyer marketing company. The amount and terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The new episode of Games and Names, a games industry podcast launched by AppMagic in partnership with WN Media Group, is dedicated to the use of AI tools in game development and what the main limitations that come with it.

The guest of the new episode of the Games and Names podcast was Thomas Kriebernegg, co-founder of the page optimization service in App Radar app stores.

Pete Hines, head of publishing at Bethesda Softworks, has announced his retirement. He has been with the company since 1999, supervising the PR and marketing of games like TES III: Morrowind, Fallout 3, TES V: Skyrim, and Dishonored.

AppLovin could be interested in buying Unity again after the scandal over the Runtime Fee and the departure of Unity CEO John Riccitiello. Citibank analysts think so.

The recent Runtime Fee controversy and CEO John Riccitiello’s departure have sparked speculation among some market experts that Unity could be considered an M&A target. Mobile monetization platform AppLovin, which offered to acquire the engine maker last year, was named as a potential buyer.

A new deal in the mobile services market. The Appodeal marketing platform has announced a collaboration with the Pollen VC Rapid Capital Fund.

There is a new deal on the mobile services market landscape. Marketing growth platform Appodeal has announced a partnership with velocity capital firm Pollen VC.

When testing ads and creatives, a prototype’s marketability is a thing that shouldn’t be underestimated. In a new column for Game World Observer, ByteBrew Chief Strategy Officer Christopher Lefebvre explains what marketability is and what metrics developers should pay attention to.

Mobile marketing and monetization platform AppLovin has launched a new project to help Unity developers switch to other engines like Unreal and Godot. It can already speed up code translation, and tools for asset and plugin migration are also in the works.

Over the past week, there have been many developers who have decided to abandon the Unity engine and switch to other platforms. To help them, AppLovin has released Unifree, a tool that allows you to transfer the code of games written for Unity to the Unreal Engine, Godot and Cocos engines.

It has been a while since Microsoft officially shared the number of Game Pass subscribers. So we can only rely on indirect data to assess whether the service is growing.

Against the background of changes in Unity’s pricing policy, a number of gaming companies have decided to disable the monetization of Unity Ads and ironSource in all their games. They demand to cancel the new installation fee. Among the signatories of the appeal are Azur Games, Voodoo and many others.

The media reported that those gaming companies that will start using the Unity LevelPlay Mediation advertising platform will not have to pay a fee from each download.

Today Yandex has released the Yandex Mobile Ads SDK 6.0. In this version of the SDK, a new advertising format has appeared — advertising when opening an application.

A new course will start on the WN Academy training program marketplace next Tuesday. It is dedicated to the development and launch of advertising campaigns. The author is Kirill Oreshkin, who previously worked at Wargaming and Zorka.Agency.

In mid-October, the capital of Georgia will host MAMA, a conference on mobile analytics and mobile marketing. According to AppsFlyer, the organizer of the event, 350 participants are expected.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has opened up about the use of AI tools in game development. He also threw shade at Steam, saying that the EGS doesn’t ban titles for “using new technologies.”

Erik Peterson, responsible for business development at Valve, has shared some insights into visibility and discovery mechanisms on Steam. Here is how the company helps devs reach players and connect users to games.

Spyro Reignited Trilogy, a remaster bundle for the classic platformer series from Insomniac Games, has hit a major milestone by selling 10 million copies globally. Let’s take a look at how these figures compare to the original titles.

Embracer Group, which was once on an endless shopping spree, is now dumping its first-party studios as part of the ongoing business restructuring. This time, the victim was Red Faction and Saints Row developer Volition, not to mention layoffs at Gearbox Publishing.

Starfield is now available for owners of the Premium edition, already attracting hundreds of thousands of players. Let’s take a look at the game’s early launch numbers and how they compare to other titles from Bethesda.

Discoverability expert Simon Carless has shared some interesting insights into why some games, even quality ones, fail commercially in today’s market. It might be due to the oversaturation of certain genres, but the issue seems to be much more complex.