Marketing

Marvel Rivals, an upcoming PvP hero shooter from NetEase, is showing great numbers at the start of its closed beta. The game has already attracted tens of thousands of concurrent users on Steam alone.

The Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation has prepared a draft law listing measures to support the Russian gaming industry, reports the agency "Interfax," which reviewed the document

Approximately one-third of the workforce at video game marketing firm Project N has been dismissed as part of a service consolidation effort. News of the layoffs surfaced when editorial team members, deputy editor Jack Ridsdale and senior staff writer Miri Teixeira, announced on social media that they were affected. GamesIndustry.biz later verified the additional layoffs after contacting Project N's parent company, Network N, which also manages media platforms like PCGamesN, Pocket Tactics, and The Digital Fix

The Northern Ireland Assembly All Party Group on Reducing Harm Related to Gambling has advocated for tighter regulations on loot boxes within the region. Although they have not suggested an outright ban, they recommend that gambling within video games be restricted as much as possible during the second phase of gambling legislation in Northern Ireland. This recommendation is part of a report generated after an inquiry conducted from December 2022 to January 2024, which examined the public health implications of gambling. The APG asserts that Northern Ireland is well-placed to set a precedent in the regulation of loot boxes

Another top executive at Unity has decided to leave the company. This time it's the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Carol Carpenter (Carol Carpenter)

June 30 will be the last working day at Microsoft for Xbox's Chief Marketing Officer Jerret West. He has decided to move to Roblox. After his departure, the company will make changes to the structure of the marketing department.

Dark and Darker is back on Steam after more than a year away due to a legal battle with publisher Nexon. Despite decent player interest, the game received mixed reviews from users due to its new monetization model.

Another analytical report has been released by the data attribution service Tenjin. It detailed the situation in the mobile game advertising market for January-March 2024.

The marketing company AppsFlyer is preparing to go public, according to Bloomberg sources. They report that AppsFlyer aims to raise approximately $300 million during its initial public offering.

The Japanese government has made modifications to its Cool Japan strategy, which aims to spread Japanese culture globally and strengthen Japan's connections with other countries. Specifically, it has highlighted the content industry (including video games, anime, manga, etc.) as one of the key elements of the strategy.

According to the results of 2023, only one hyper-casual newcomer made it into the top 50 most downloaded mobile games, reports the analytics service AppMagic. This game is Burger Please! published by the South Korean company Supercent. Representatives from Supercent shared with AppMagic what they are doing to promote the game.

Blizzard Entertainment co-founder and former chief design officer Allen Adham has opened up about the studio’s early days, also sharing his design principles and how to scale game development teams.

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.

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".

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.

Ubisoft began 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 to the public.

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 is now owned by the AppsFlyer marketing company. The amount and terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

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

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.

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.

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.

Yandex continues to develop the AppMetrica service. It has added tools for conducting A/B testing, as well as for making changes to the application without releasing its new version.

The Government of the Russian Federation should prepare proposals to promote the games developed in Russia and the domestic software used in them in the BRICS countries and other foreign markets. This instruction was given by Russian President Vladimir Putin following a visit to the exhibition “Development of the Creative Economy in Russia”.

Analytical platform data.ai analyzed the impact of two viral advertising campaigns, which were filmed with the participation of live actors, on the performance of the game Merge Mansion from the Finnish Metacore.