1）据Techcrunch报道，英国游戏公司King（原名为King.com）旗下有一款游戏最近在美国iOS游戏营收榜单登顶，并宣布公司目前已有5000万日活跃用户（Zynga上个季度日活跃用户为5400万），其手机和平板电脑月活跃用户为4900万。

该公司创始人Riccardo Zacconi（在10年创立公司，曾经差一点出售这家以街机游戏起步的公司）最近表示，公司手机游戏目前每天用户超过2400万，《Candy Crush Saga》在香港用户达130万（将近香港总人口的20%）。

king-Papa Pear Saga(from mashable.com)

King现在已向Facebook推出7款游戏，仅向移动平台发布两款游戏，即向将Facebook和iOS推出两款新游戏《Papa Pear Saga》和《Farm Heroes Saga》。

2）eMarketer最近报告预测，2013年Twitter收益将达5.28亿美元，2014年则是9.5亿，其中有53%来自移动广告。

twitter_mobile ads(from blog.shift.com)

Twitter多数广告收益来源仍然是美国市场，2012年美国市场广告收益占比90%，预计2013年这一比例为83%。

3）ABI Research最近数据预测，2013年基于NFC的设备安装量将达2.85亿台，2014年这一数据将超过5亿台，这一情况要归功于设备制造商对无触点解决方案的支持力度。

4）据gamasutra报道，Capy工作室（游戏邦注：代表作包括《Critter Crunch》和《Sword & Sworcery》）联合创始人及总裁Nathan Vella在最近的GDC大会上指出，虽然2013年App Store有66%收益来自免费增值游戏，但付费游戏收益仍将达到20亿美元左右。

Sword & Sworcery EP(from steampowered.com)

他认为“付费应用已灭亡”的论调并不可信，付费游戏仍然存在许多发展机遇，关键在于开发者能否推出适合这种商业模式的游戏。

在他看来，目前仍有许多小众题材的游戏拥有愿意预先付费的粉丝（例如体育类游戏玩家），而《死亡空间》和《行尸走肉》等手机游戏的成功也足以证明，付费应用仍然大有市场。

5）据venturebeat报道，休闲游戏开发商Big Fish Games日前宣布公司在2012年收益超过2.2亿美元，下载量达20亿次。

Big_Fish_Games(from analytics.theiegroup)

移动业务目前在公司收益中已占比30%，该公司已推出3000多款游戏，并同全球140家开发商结成独家合作伙伴关系。

6）IDC最新报告指出，2012年平板电脑出货量超过1.28亿台，预计将在2013年超过台式电脑，并在2014年超过便携式电脑。

总体来看，2012年全球智能手连网设备出货量同比去年增长29.1%，整个市场出货量超过10亿台，市场规模达5769亿美元。

Tablets(from pcadvisor)

IDC称2012年平板电脑在总体智能设备市场份额为10.7%，预计到2017年将达16%。在此期间，台式电脑增幅将下降5%，在2012市场份额为12.4%，并在2017年降至6%。

预计2017年全球智能连网设备出货量将超过22亿台，市场规模达8143亿美元。到2017年，智能手机和平板电脑在这个市场中所占份额将达83%，超过2012年时所占的70.8%。（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）Surprise: Europe’s King Now Has Nearly As Many Daily Users As Zynga

Kim-Mai Cutler

Around four years ago, Riccardo Zacconi said he was close to selling King, the arcade gaming company that he had co-founded and bootstrapped six years earlier.

The company, which has a destination site at King.com, had lost about 45 percent of its traffic as one of its biggest partners Yahoo! Games cut back. Facebook, the next big platform King was eyeing, had started to curb the cheap virality that fueled the rise of Zynga.

But after two big pivots onto the Facebook platform and then iOS, King has staged a revival. Today, the company has the #1 grossing game in the U.S. on iOS, and possibly in the world.

The company said this week that it has 50 million daily active players, which is just shy of the 54 million daily actives Zynga reported last quarter. About 49 million of their monthly actives are playing King games on mobile phones and tablets.

“Zynga’s competitive advantage in the past was the size of their network and I think we’ve closed the gap,” Zacconi said.

Because of that big shift, they’re dropping the “.com” from their company’s name. So it’s King, not King.com.

Unlike many competitors that jump on new platforms right away, King has been cautious. The company only started launching mobile titles last fall with Bubble Witch Saga and Candy Crush
Saga. They only came to Facebook in early 2011 — when many other companies started putting the platform on the backburner.

Zacconi said that the success of their hit mobile game Candy Crush Saga took him by surprise.

“You read the stats in reports from companies like IDC. But when you experience it, it’s mind-blowing,” he said.

A little more than 24 million people play the company’s mobile games every day. He says that Candy Crush is played by 1.3 million people a day in Hong Kong. That’s almost 20 percent of
the city’s entire population.

The reason the King has been able to be late to market and still do well has to do with the building blocks it has laid out over the last 10 years. King has a portfolio of about 150 games on its destination site, which operates like a lab for titles it can later bring to Facebook and mobile phones.

They test out titles with their “hardcore casual” group of gamers on King.com, who play about five to six hours a day. The games that do well get brought over to other platforms. To date,

King has brought seven titles to Facebook and two to mobile. It’s how they help hit-proof their business in a hits-driven industry.

“If some games fail, we needed them to learn and understand what works. It’s really about probability,” he said.

They’re bringing over two more games to Facebook and/or iOS soon: one is called Papa Pear Saga, which is a Pachinko-style game, and another called Farm Heroes Saga that’s a classic Match-3 style game.

King was rumored to be exploring an IPO back in 2011. But the performance of big consumer IPOs like Zynga have made growth-stage gaming companies more reluctant to test the public markets.

“There’s a bright future for us. We’re not planning to be acquired. I don’t know whether we will do an IPO or not,” he said. King raised $45 million back in 2005 from Apax Partners and

Index Ventures. Zacconi acknowledge it was largely a secondary round, which he believes was ultimately good for the longer-term health of the company.

“We don’t need to sell, and we can build for the long-term,” he said. He added that he didn’t think that Zynga’s post-IPO performance should have too much a shadow over the industry.

“Savvy investors understand the difference,” he said. “A company is not a sector. Mobile content this year should be a $12 billion market and games is the #1 category by reach and time spent. We are at the heart of this huge tectonic shift.”（source：techcrunch）

2）Report: Twitter ad revenues higher than expected on strong mobile numbers

By Jeff John Roberts

A research firm predicts that Twitter will earn nearly $1 billion in advertising revenue in 2014, largely on the strength of mobile ad sales. The figure exceeds the firm’s earlier predictions and reflects Twitter’s ongoing emergence as a force in mobile marketing.

According to eMarketer, Twitter will pull in $528 million this year and $950 million in 2014 with 53 percent of that money coming from mobile ads. The firm had earlier pegged the 2014 number at $800 million.

There are two takeaways from these figures. One is the obvious observation that Twitter is killing it, and fulfilling predictions that it will become a media and advertising behemoth. The
other is that Twitter is one of the only companies to crack the mobile morass — the problem, faced by many websites, in which users are moving to mobile devices but ad dollars are not.

Twitter is sitting pretty here because its mobile experience is highly conducive to so-called “native ad units” (sponsored or promoted tweets) that drop easily into its regular story flow. Twitter’s surging mobile numbers could also bode well for Facebook which is ramping up its own advertising efforts, and will likely expand options for marketers to drop “sponsored stories” (another type of native ad unit) into its mobile News Feed.

The other figure that jumps out from the eMarketer report is how much of Twitter’s ad money still comes from the U.S. The firm says that the figure was 90% in 2012 and predicts it will be
83% in 2013.

Twitter continues to hire high profile figures to drive advertising ambitions; in February, it announced the hiring of Jeffrey Graham, a Googler and former New York Times executive.（source：gigaom）

3）NFC-enabled devices to pass half a billion in 2014

by Zen Terrelonge

Contactless technology is now ‘at the point of no return’.

ABI Research reckons the installed base of NFC-enabled devices will pass 500 million in 2014, rising on the 285m mobile and consumer electronics gadgets to ship this year.

The rise is attributed to OEMs continuing to implement the contactless solution into their new handsets, while operators are said to be dragging their heels and slowing down the process with a lack of support.

John Devlin, practice director, ABI, said: “NFC has reached the point of no return. It all hinged on handsets; and next year we will see half-a-billion devices in the hands of consumers as it becomes more widely integrated.

“Up until this point banks and other service partners were holding back from committing to MNOs and it has always surprised me that they did not drive this forward themselves and invest to
take charge of this market’s potential.

“Put simply the OEMs have innovated and made use of the simple abilities that NFC offers to increase interaction of people, devices, and their immediate environment. This is not just in mobile; tablets, PCs and peripherals, speaker docks, televisions, cameras, gaming and domestic appliances are all increasingly incorporating NFC.”（source：mobile-ent）

4）The relevancy of premium games in a F2P-dominated economy

By Simon Parkin

There remain compelling opportunities for ‘paid for’ games in the mobile space despite the continued rise of F2P games, according to Nathan Vella Co-Founder & President of Capy, the creator of premium games like Critter Crunch and Sword & Sworcery.

Speaking at GDC 2013, Vella argued that, while an estimated 66% of revenue generated in the App Store in 2013 was from free-to-play games, around $2 billion came from paid games.

The argument that “paid apps are dead” is disingenuous, Vella said. “There is still a huge amount of opportunity in paid games – so long as you find the right game for the business model.”

Vella argued that there are lots of niche genres with fans who are willing to pay for games up front when they appear. “Many players don’t even know they want a game in a particular niche till one arrives,” he said citing iOS titles The Room and Year Walk as games that have found vast success over the past few months despite being idiosyncratic titles that don’t easily fit within an established genre.

“F2P has very specific genre effectiveness,” he said. “I think in general the titles that don’t go that well as F2P titles can sell well in the paid space. For example, players of sports games expect to pay money up front for their game.” Vella also pointed to console to mobile titles such as Dead Space and The Walking Dead as titles that work particularly well as premium apps. “Creators of these titles should understand and embrace the fact that their fans won’t be OK with a F2P approach.”

Vella encouraged would-be premium game developers to split their promotion down the middle between speaking to players and speaking to Apple and Google as the platform holders who might potentially feature the game. “A significant part of this is understanding when you’re creating trailers and press you are specking directly to Apple and Google,” he said. “Both companies have ear to the ground editorial teams so they will notice.”

The producer had the following warning for studios considering switching to F2P from a premium business model: “Unless you have tons of experience and a really powerful backer who knows how to turn the most amount users into money, it’s an extremely risky place to play right now.”

“The top 25 games in the F2P space are generating more than 50% of the revenue, immediately halving your market.”（source：gamasutra）

5）Casual-game developer Big Fish celebrates 10 years and 2 billion downloads

Jeffrey Grubb

It’s hard to last a decade as a game developer. It’s even harder to find continued growth in the competitive field.

Casual-game developer Big Fish recorded its most successful year on record in 2012. The company generated over $220 million in revenue for the year and reached two billion total game downloads since it started in 2002.

“Last year was a successful [transition] for Big Fish,” chief executive officer Paul Thelen said in a statement. “We achieved nearly 20 percent top-line-bookings growth last year and

anticipate our growth rate to accelerate throughout 2013 and 2014, largely due to our new lines of business that are now at a meaningful scale.”

Big Fish started early last decade primarily as a casual developer of PC and web games. In the last few years, the developer expanded into mobile and free-to-play.

“Mobile is our fastest growing platform and now accounts for 30 percent of total company bookings,” said Thelen. “A year ago we transitioned from a premium ‘games you own’ business model to providing more choices to our customers on how and where they want to play.  More than half of our mobile bookings now come from a free-to-play business model.”

Big Fish develops its own games internally, but it also has exclusive partnerships with 140 developers around the world. The company has a huge stable of over 3,000 games, and it plans to
continue pumping out new releases at a rapid pace.

“Customers continue to respond to our ever growing catalog of high-quality games and platform flexibility,” Big Fish chief financial officer Dave Stephenson said. “Virtually every one of our 3,000-plus PC and Mac games made money in 2012, and our consumer base continues to expand as they increasingly turn to us for great games to play on their iPhones, iPads, Kindles and Android tablets and phones.”（source：venturebeat）

6）IDC: Tablet Sales Grew 78.4% YoY In 2012 — Expected To Pass Desktop Sales In 2013, Portable PCs In 2014

Natasha Lomas

Strong growth in tablet sales is helping to drive overall growth in the global smart connected device market, according to analyst IDC, as the market reshapes itself with mobility at its core. Posting a new report for full year 2012 and projections through to 2017, the analyst notes that market expansion last year was “largely driven” by 78.4% year-over-year growth in tablet shipments — which exceeded 128 million units. But this is just the beginning for tablets: IDC expects tablet shipments to surpass desktop PCs in 2013, and portable PCs in 2014.

Overall, worldwide shipments of smart connected devices grew 29.1% year over year in 2012, and the entire market pushed past one billion units shipped, with a total market value of $576.9 billion.

IDC said it expects tablets to grow their share of the overall smart devices market from 10.7% in 2012, to an estimated 16% by 2017 — with a projected growth rate of 174.5% between 2012 and 2017. Over the same period, the desktop PC category will have negative growth of -5%, and will slide from 12.4% share in 2012 to 6% share in 2017.

Portable PCs are also project to take a declining share of the market, dropping from a 16.8% share in 2012 down to 11% estimated for 2017. The category will still see some growth, according to IDC, which is projecting 19.3% growth for portables over 2012 to 2017. But the powerhouse growth is in the tablets and smartphone categories — the latter projected to also grow by triple-digits (109.9%).

This year IDC said it expects the tablet market to reach “a new high” of 190 million shipment units, with year-on-year growth of 48.7%. While the smartphone market is expected to grow 27.2% to 918.5 million units.

“Consumers and business buyers are now starting to see smartphones, tablets, and PCs as a single continuum of connected devices separated primarily by screen size,” said Bob O’Donnell, IDC Program Vice President for Clients and Displays, in a statement. “Each of these devices is primarily used for data applications and different individuals choose different sets of screen sizes in order to fit their unique needs. These kinds of developments are creating exciting new opportunities that will continue to drive the smart connected devices market forward in a positive way.”

Powered by growth in the tablet and smartphone categories, IDC predicts the worldwide smart connected device market will continue to “surge” — with shipments forecast to surpass 2.2 billion units and revenues reaching $814.3 billion in 2017. By 2017, 83% of the market is projected to be composed of smartphones and tablets, up from 70.8% in 2012.

Returning to 2012, IDC noted that in Q4 of the year Apple significantly closed the gap with market leader Samsung in the quarter, thanks to the combination of its refreshed smartphone (iPhone 5) and new smaller tablet (iPad Mini). Apple took 20.3% unit shipment share in the quarter versus 21.2% for Samsung, according to IDC. On a revenue basis, Apple continued to dominate with 30.7% share versus 20.4% share for Samsung.（source：techcrunch）