Events (Issue #3)

Last week was full of surprises. Although she personally tired us with the abundance of financial news from the East. Recall that a number of Japanese and Korean companies almost simultaneously submitted their reports for the second calendar quarter of this year. If you missed them, feel free to click here. And now to the main events of the mobile games market last week. 

Game Insight has a new CEO

The story is very unexpected. The first information about the new CEO of the company appeared on Monday. But since she appeared in Secret, no one took her seriously. Well, you never know what they write there. Although, on the other hand, it was the users of this service who first learned about the deal between Yahoo and Flurry. 

Anyway, in the second half of Thursday, an official press release from Game Insight appeared, according to which Anatoly Ropotov, who previously headed one of the company's central partners, the Latvian studio innoWate, became the new CEO of the company.

To a clarifying question App2Top.ru about the fate of the founder of the company, the press service of the now Lithuanian company replied as follows: “for personal reasons, Alisa Chumachenko decided to leave the position of CEO, the board of directors accepted her resignation.” 

There is no information about her plans yet. The source of speculation and various guesses, apart from gossip in Secret, is now the new avatar of Chumachenko herself, published just on August 7, the day of the official announcement of the new CEO.

As for the future of Game Insight, under Ropotov's leadership, she will focus on developing three-dimensional games on Unity (Kanobu has also been labeled “hardcore").

By the way, in the direction of 3D, judging by the releases, GI has been purposefully going on for at least a year. Not so long ago, she released games such as Tank Domination and Running Shadow, and very soon X-Mercs will appear on virtual storefronts. 

The head of Kabam games has left for GREE

The transition of Andrew Sheppard from the post of president of Kabam Studios to the Japanese office of GREE is at least comparable in scale to the departure of Chumachenko, a personnel “reshuffle” in the gaming industry. 

The fact is that it was Sheppard who built the company's game development. Kabam was very successful before his arrival, but was mainly engaged in the development of social services for sports fans, not fantasy games, for which he was hired in 2009 to create a studio, at that time numbering only 25 people. 

It is clear that nothing is likely to happen to Kabam, which has just received $100 million from Alibaba, but how the new high-ranking employee will affect GREE's policy is very curious.

Recall that GREE, like DeNA, is not in the best position right now. Their main market — games for feature phones — is rapidly falling, and they have not yet managed to gain a foothold in the market of games for smartphones and tablets. GREE's problems are evidenced at least by the fact that at the end of last year it laid off 11% of its staff and closed the development of 27 games.

Will Andrew be able to become a lifesaver?

The novelty for 3DS will appear on iOS

The release of Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies on iOS less than a year after its release on the Nintendo 3DS is a landmark event. I'll try to explain why. 

Nintendo DS, as a competitive platform for anything, has long been a thing of the past, leaving, however, a great legacy, in fact, lying dead weight. Therefore, it is not surprising that over the past two or three years we have regularly received ports of classic products from lines like Final Fantasy on iOS and Android. 

3DS is a completely different matter. For Japanese Nintendo, the portable console and game sales for it are one of the main sources of falling revenue today. Sharing relevant products selling the console with the mobile market is not in its interests. Actually, it is not divided, it does not port internal projects to external ecosystems. 

It's a completely different matter for third-party companies making games for the console. But they had previously been in no hurry to port their 3DS blockbusters to “mobile rails”. Capcom, in my memory, will be the first. 

This is an important “call” for Nintendo, which indicates that at least one third-party team developing games for 3DS considers a possible strategy for bringing games of the current generation of portable consoles to the mobile market. 

Are we waiting for Fire Emblem IV on iOS?

A couple of lines

Well, a couple of very small news, not directly related to the mobile games market. 

Firstly, the Windows Phone Store now has 300 thousand applications (compared to more than one million in the App Store and Google Play, as well as 240 thousand in the Amazon Appstore). This is 100 thousand more than in December last year. Despite the fact that we do not really believe in the future of this platform (we have been told about its imminent takeoff since 2011, but it still does not take off), new data indicate that its ecosystem continues to grow. 

Secondly, several major Western sources said at once that the presentation of two new smartphones from Apple will take place very soon - on September 9th. They say that one will have a 4.7-inch screen, and the other will have a 5.5-inch screen. If that's the case, we'll all need to turn over the minimum UI in our games soon.

We will end on this optimistic note. Have a good working week!

Photo: VIKTOR HANACEK