1）休闲游戏公司PlayFirst高管Chris Wiliams在最近的GDC智能手机及平板电脑峰会上发言表示，发布于2009年3月的《美女餐厅》iOS版本营收高峰是2012年1月份（游戏邦注：该游戏在各个平台下载量已超过6亿次）。

该游戏刚发布时有50个关卡，PlayFirst后来持续更新内容，将其关卡增加至150个，有82%的收益来自IAP功能。

PlayFirst在iOS平台拥有600多万MAU，该公司重视迭代开发过程，经常对新手教程等关键元素进行10到15次的迭代开发，《美女餐厅》iOS版本的用户留存率达72%。

2）StatCounter最新报告显示，尽管浏览器产商Opera宣称Opera Mini是“世界上最受欢迎的手机浏览器”，但Android设备预装浏览器才是目前最热门的手机浏览器。

调查发现，Android浏览器在2012年2月份首次超越Opera，从2011年同期的第4名攀升至首位。目前Opera位居第二，iPhone和诺基亚手机浏览器则分居第三和第四，黑莓排名第五。

3）广告公司Chitika最新数据表明，在2月份最后一周中，移动数据流量在Chitika所有网络流量中占比超过十分之一，比2011年7月份增长34.4%。

在2月17日，报告发现Windows网页浏览器市场份额在Chitika平台所占比例下滑10%，原因是现在许多用户更愿意通过手机或平板电脑使用浏览器。

报告还指出，PC和手机网页使用率在一天当中的高峰期并不相同。美国移动网络流量在上午8点至晚上10点左右达到高峰，在这一时段所有网络流量中占比18.3%；而PC网络流量在上午时间达到高峰，并占据这一时段近95%的网络流量。

4）据gamasutra报道，EA最新智能手机及平板电脑游戏《The Simpsons:Tapped Out》最近由于网络连接问题而暂时撤下苹果App Store。

该游戏发布于本月初，最迅速跻身iPad游戏榜单之首，但由于该游戏人气高涨，EA不得不暂时移除游戏，以免更多新玩家涌入并拖垮服务器，该公司将解决这一问题后再重新发布游戏。

5）前苹果游戏设计师Graeme Devine出席近日的GDC 2012大会时发言表示，他发现视频聊天功能在iOS游戏中行不通，因此放弃了这种设置。

他以自己于2011年发布的《Full Deck Word Games》和《Full Deck Poker Hold ‘Em》这两款游戏为例，指出这两者都植入了iOS视频聊天功能FaceTime，但都没能获得成功。

他17岁的女儿Roque Devine也是游戏的联合开发者，据她所称，“视频聊天功能是一个很棒的概念，但在实际操作中并不可行”，她本人更情愿与好友体验《Words with Friends》的异步玩法，而不是体验多人在线模式。

Devine指出，手机平台上的实时在线游戏并非青少年用户欢迎的设计，并称他通过《Full Deck Poker Hold ‘Em》发现，人们并不喜欢和好友玩扑克游戏，而是喜欢与擅长打牌的人玩扑克游戏。

6）云游戏平台spaceport.io报告显示，iOS设备是目前最理想的HTML5游戏及应用运行的移动设备。

通过使用不同动画技术的一系列测试，Spaceport发现iPhone 4S和iPad 2在HTML5图像渲染方法表现最为出众，可一次性在屏幕上显示200-300个移动对象；而在此方面表现最杰出的Android设备则是三星Nexus，它也是唯一能一次性在屏幕上显示一个以上移动对象的Android设备，而其他Android手机“甚至无法以每秒30帧的速度处理一个图像”。

不过css3dbackground和css2dimg等特定动画技术在三星Galaxy Tab和华硕Eee Pad Transformer平板电脑上运行良好。Spaceport最早测试的设备是iPhone 3GS，它能以每秒30帧的速度显示53个移动对象。

7）pocketgamer针对苹果App Store突破250亿次下载量的情况，发布一份信息图表，盘点该应用商店实现历次标志性下载量的时间及相关游戏。

App Store在2008年7月正式上线，2009年4月突破10亿次下载量，当时的代表性游戏包括《超级猴子球》（发布于2008年8月27日，售价6.99英磅）、《航空指挥官》（发布于2009年3月5日，售价69便士）；2011年1月实现100亿次下载量，当时代表性游戏是《无尽之剑》（发布于2010年12月8日，含IAP功能的付费版游戏），2012年3月实现250亿次下载量，代表性游戏是迪士尼推出的《Where’s My Water？》（售价99美分）。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）GDC 2012: How PlayFirst built up Diner Dash to be an iOS hit with 72% retention through 30 updates

by Jon Jordan

The App Store is often seen as something of a fire-and-forget, or hit-or-miss process.

That’s completely wrong according to Chris Williams from casual publisher PlayFirst.

He gave a talk at that Smartphone and Tablet Gaming Summit at GDC 2012 entitled ‘My games a hit… What do I do now?’

“When you have a hit game, say 100,000 daily active users, you don’t have a lot of time,” he argued.

“You have a couple of weeks before you’ll be replaced, so you have to act fast.”

Taking the example of its key Diner Dash brand (downloaded over 600 million across all platforms), Williams said, “We’ve never stopped working on Diner Dash on iOS. Our peak revenue to-date was January 2012.”

It was released in March 2009.

Quality first

One part of this is what Williams described as ‘commitment to native quality’.

“When someone starts your game on mobile, it should feel like it was built for that device, even it if wasn’t the original platform,” he said.

This includes supporting all new features as they become available.

“As soon as IAP was available on iOS, we took advantage of it. It’s the same with Game Center, the ability to have a universal app, and now we also have a free-to-play version.

“If you don’t quickly take advantage of new features, someone else will and your game will be replaced. We’ve updated Diner Dash 30 times.”

For example, the game launched with 50 levels, but now there’s 150 levels, while 80 percent of game revenue comes from IAPs.

“You should have your first update ready to submit when the game goes live,” Williams advised.

Players are your gold dust

Williams said the most important part of this was to nurture your community at all times.

“You have to make your commitment to your users obvious. We’re very focused on this,” he stated.

“We have over 6 million monthly active users on iOS. We obsess over that number. Those users are incredible valuable,” he said.

The result is that the company is very data-driven, especially in terms of key elements such as the tutorial.

“We’ve iterated over things such as tutorials 10 to 15 times,” Williams explained.

And it’s this attention to detail that sees the retention rate on Diner Dash iOS at 72 percent.

The company also updates the content of the game in terms of art assets or tuning gameplay on a daily basis.

“You can’t be beholden to the three week App Store update process. It’s too slow,” Williams said.（source:pocketgamer）

2）Android’s pre-loaded browser is the world’s most popular

by Zen Terrelonge

Opera may have to rethink its tagline.

Browser firm Opera is always eager to plug its Opera Mini as ‘the world’s most popular mobile browser’ with every one of its press releases, however, Android’s embedded browser has now taken the coveted crown from the Norwegian firm, according to StatCounter.

The research showed that Android’s ‘robot’ browser passed use of Opera’s mobile browser for the first time ever in February 2012, out of a 12-month period.

This means that Android has climbed from fourth place in February 2011 when it was behind iPhone and Nokia.

While Opera now sits at second place, iPhone and Nokia sit at third and fourth respectively, as BlackBerry rounds off the top five.

Opera has continued to push its mobile offerings over the past few months and will surely be looking to wrestle the number one spot back, though with Android the most dominant mobile OS on the market, it may have a hard task on its hands.（source:mobile-ent）

3）Mobile web traffic up by over one-third in under a year

by Zen Terrelonge

Accounts for 10.5 per cent of all web traffic at end of February 2012.

Research from ad firm Chitika shows mobile data traffic accounted for over a tenth of all web traffic in the last week of February, which is up 34.4 per cent from July 2011.

Chitika blogged: “On February 17th, Chitika Insights reported a ten per cent decline in Windows web browser market share as seen on our network, which we believe could be related to the trend of consumers who prefer to do more of their browsing from a mobile or tablet device.”

Additionally, the results show that web usage peaks at different times in the day for PC and mobile platforms.

Mobile web traffic dips significantly overnight, rising in the US during the morning hours and spiking at between 8-10pm with highs of 18.3 per cent. Meanwhile, PC web usage peaks in the early hours of the morning with highs of nearly 95 per cent of all web traffic.

The firm continued, saying: “For publishers and advertisers, this data can be extremely valuable in fine tuning advertising strategies to match traffic composition and the time of day in order to optimise their revenues.”（source:mobile-ent）

4）EA’s Simpsons freemium game removed from App Store following ‘connection issues’

by Mike Rose

Newsbrief: EA’s latest freemium smartphone and tablet release, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, has been temporariliy removed from Apple’s App Store due to connectivity issues.

The game was released earlier this month, and immediately jumped to the top of the free iPad games charts. EA told Gamasutra last month that it hopes filling a freemium game with characters that users care about will lead to success.

However, the game proved a little too popular, and the company has been forced to remove it from the store to stop new players overwhelming the servers. On the game’s official Facebook page, the company noted that once a solution has been found, the game will return to the store. （source:gamasutra）

5）GDC 2012: Graeme Devine – ‘No more video chat games’ on iOS

by Christian Nutt

Graeme Devine, the lead writer on Ensemble Studios’ Halo Wars, who is now focused on mobile titles, has sworn off video chat features after implementing them in two games and finding out they just don’t work for his audience.

At GDC 2012 on Monday, he explained how two of his games released in 2011, Word Chat — later renamed Full Deck Word Games — and Full Deck Poker Hold ‘Em both integrated FaceTime video chat features on iOS, and neither was successful, for different reasons.

For the presentation “Designing a game your teenage daughter will actually play,” Devine co-presented with his 17 year old daughter, Roque Devine.

She explained why the FaceTime chat features of Full Deck Word Games don’t work for her:

“The chat feature is a cool concept, but it’s awkward,” she says. “When I’m playing a game I’m not going to hold my device right in front of my face.”

She also prefers the asynchronous play of titles such as Words with Friends, rather than playing a live multiplayer match. “It’s on my own schedule,” she says.

“On mobile, playing peer-to-peer in real time is not something that teenagers, especially, want to do,” says Devine.

He also pointed out major flaws in the idea of a Texas Hold ‘Em game that has video chat.

For Full Deck Poker Hold ‘Em, it was a misunderstanding of the poker audience’s preferences — which are quite different from his daughter’s, but just as important.

Though he envisioned the game as a title people would play together with people they know and chat together, “It really turns out that nobody likes to play poker with their friends; they like to play poker with other people who are good at playing poker,” he says.

And those players “don’t like playing on video, because it gives away their competitive advantage,” says Graeme Devine.

He put a lot of effort into implementing these features for both games, he reveals, but neither of them helped sales. In fact, his original description for Word Chat mostly upsold its FaceTime support, but de-emphasizing the term “chat” for the word game and re-branding it with his Full Deck name helped it become more successful.

“No more video chat games,” he says, is his new rule moving forward. （source:gamasutra）

6）Spaceport says HTML5 performs better on iOS than Android

AJ Glasser

Cloud-based games platform Spaceport released a report today rating HTML5‘s performance on different mobile devices like iPad and Kindle Fire. Unsurprisingly, HTML5 images rendered better on iOS than Android.

The study created benchmarks for HTML5 performance using advances from the HTML5 Consortium’s RingMarks test suite, announced last week at Mobile World Congress. Through a series of tests using different animation techniques, Spaceport found that the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 scored the highest in HTML5 image rendering, supporting more than 200 and 300 moving objects, respectively. The Galaxy Nexus was the highest-scoring Android device, but it was the only one in the family that could maintain more than one moving object on screen at a time.  Android phones besides the Galaxy Nexus could “barely handle a single image” at 30 frames per second. Specific animation techniques, like css3dbackground and css2dimg, performed fairly well on the Galaxy Tab and Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet.

For the sake of comparison, Spaceport throws in the little gem pictured above (click to see the rest of the infographic). The oldest device tested, the iPhone 3GS, clocked in at 53 moving objects at 30 frames per second.

Though most mobile and social game developers prefer creative native apps for each platform, many are still hoping HTML5 will grow into cross-platform shortcut it promises to be. Right now, the technology is limited in several ways — like low frame rates and a lack of tools — that discourage most developers from investing resources in it. Even early adopters like wooga, which built Magic Land as a launch title for Facebook’s HTML5-based mobile platform, have backed off on it somewhat. CEO Jens Begemann telling us at Inside Social Apps last month that HTML is still a good three years off from being a viable platform on which to release a game across Facebook and mobile.

“HTML5 is getting faster over time, as seen in the latest OS updates across Android and iOS,” Spaceport founder Ben Savage said in a press release. “There is still a long way to go.”（source:insidemobileapps）

7）Infographic: 10 key games that helped Apple to 25 billion downloads

by Owain Bennallack

On Saturday 5 March 2012, Apple revealed that the iOS App Store had delivered 25 billion apps. And few PocketGamer.biz readers will be surprised to learn that a game, Disney’s Where’s My Water?, nabbed the milestone download honours.

Games are such a feature of smartphone life nowadays, it’s easy to forget that when Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone in January 2008, the App Store was nowhere in sight. Jobs himself described “making calls” as the iPhones ‘killer app’.

Even when the iOS App Store officially opened for business in July 2008, games were hardly front and centre – except perhaps in the minds of traditional games publishers, who saw a sort of mini-PSP where they might demand £10 or more for a title, compared to the loose change they’d typically seen Java games go for.

Era of the app

How times change. The past four years and 25 billion downloads have seen prices crash even as revenues have soared, as specialist mobile game publishers have thrived by pioneering new kinds of business models…

Here’s PocketGamer.biz’s take on the App Store’s first three years, and the landmark figures Apple’s market-leading marketplace has passed in the process:（source:pocketgamer）