Events (Issue #2)
Last week personally seemed very eventful to us, but looking back, trying to isolate the main thing, it turned out that there were very few resonant news. About them — just below.
One of the central themes turned out to be the announcement of the imminent closure of Ultima Forever, a large-scale mobile MMO that EA launched last June. For 13 months, the game has not been able to get into any of the box office Top 100 leading markets. The main achievement of the game is getting to 11th place in the Estonian box office chart at the beginning of November last year. On August 29, it is officially “turned off".
It is difficult to say what is the reason for such low performance of the game, the authorship of which is responsible for the now closed Mythic Entertainment, famous for the computer Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Perhaps, after the game “did not fire”, it was decided to focus all efforts on Dungeon Keeper, the hype around which led to the closure of the studio (by the way, the mobile “Keeper of the Underworld”, despite aggressive criticism, showed very good box office performance). After the dissolution of Mythic, there was no one to finish spinning Ultima Forever. EA could consider it an unwise decision to pull an expensive but unsuccessful project within another studio.
Facebook is planting Messenger
This news could have passed by many, although very soon all users of the mobile version of Facebook will feel it “in their own skin”. So, in a nutshell, it will be impossible to send a message through the Facebook mobile app very soon. There is now a separate Messenger application for this.
This is not the most obvious step, which we tend to explain by Zuckerberg's attempt to prevent the expansion of Asian “chats" into the Western market.
Why is this expansion possible?
Today, social networks are already media platforms. The chat inside them is only one of the functions. When you launch Facebook, you see a news feed, photos, but not a list of contacts. As we have already written, content prevails here, not private communication. At the same time, there are no such heavy “add-ons” in Line or KakaoTalk, they are easy to use directly for communication. You can also use Messenger now.
Kabam was given $120 million for pocket expenses
There were no high-profile purchases last week, but Alibaba distinguished itself. The Chinese company, which earned $170 billion (!) in 2012 from online advertising, cloud services, online sales of goods and much more, is now looking very closely at the gaming market.
The $120 million investment, for which the Chinese company receives a seat on the board of directors of Kabam and the right to publish its games in China, perfectly fits into the framework of a relatively unhurried movement towards creating a gaming business that, in the future, will be able to compete with the power of Tencent.
So it turns out that the main thing in the event is not that Kabam's market valuation reached $1 billion after the investment, but that in the next year, at most, a new giant will appear on the mobile games market, which is now just preparing to jump.
Photo: Viktor Hanáček
