1）SuperData Research分析师最近预测，全球手机游戏收益在2014年底将达211亿美元，比2013年的177亿美元增长19%。西方游戏玩家平均投入仍然较高，但日本、中国和韩国市场也表现强劲。

SuperData指出该市场的主要增长动力来自亚洲，该地区在全球移动市场中占比超过一半，预计2014年亚洲手机游戏收益将达113亿美元。SuperData还预测到2016年全球游戏收益将达282亿美元。

在今年7月，美国和英国用户手机游戏平均投入超过25美元，是拉美最大市场巴西用户平均投入的两倍以上。欧亚大陆最大的移动市场俄罗斯的ARPPU（每付费用户平均收益）不足20美元，而该地区第二大市场土耳其在过去一年中的ARPPU则稳定增长。

2）据venturebeat报道，Chair Entertainment最近发布了《无尽之剑III》的大结局内容，该系列至今下载量已超过5000万次。

这款游戏的终结版更新内容面向所有已支付3美元购买游戏的玩家免费开放，其中含有新的敌人、6个新藏宝地图，以及一系列新武器和功能。

初版《无尽之剑》历时5个月开发时间，于2010年12月发布，问世首周就实现了数百万份销量。《无尽之剑II》发布于2011年12月，《无尽之剑III》发布于2013年9月11日。

在发布这一系列游戏的过程中，Chair Entertainment团队结构也发生了许多变化，该公司于2009年发布《Shadow Complex》时仅有9名开者，到2010年底发布《无尽之剑》时有11名员工，现在完成《无尽之剑》系列时的成员为24人。

3）据venturebeat报道，发行商Bethesda Softworks日前确认了旗下ZeniMax Online团队裁员一事，表示公司已经不如此庞大的员工规模来开发《上古卷轴online》，因为该游戏已经发布和运营，并且没有出现太大问题。

该公司表示，这款游戏现在发布已经将近半年，并且拥有一个顺利运行的繁荣社区，所以他们要调整成员数量以满足工作室持续运营的需求。

4）据venturebeat报道，Digi-Capital最近报告显示，目前全球已经有25家身价至少达十亿美元的移动互联网公司，值得注意的是，其中有半数公司来自亚洲。

这25家倡导移动优先原则的公司按其身价排名分别是：

1.Twitter

2.WhatsApp

3.Uber

4.Snapchat

5.Dropbox

6.LINE

7.Gungho

8.Square

9.Pandora

10.Colopl

11.King

12.Spotify

13.Cheetah Mobile

14.Kakao

15.Supercell

16.Cyberagent

17.DeNA

18.GREE

19.IGG

20.Rocket Fuel

21.AirWatch

22.Waze

23.Evernote

24.Instagram

25.FunPlus

5）据venturebeat报道，休闲游戏公司Big Fish Games日前聘请前PopCap Games高管Robert Chamberlain任公司新首席财务官。

Chamberlain此次接替的是David Stephenson的职位，后者于2011年任Big Fish Games首席财务官，之前曾在亚马逊就职11年。

Chamberlain拥有30多年的财务和运营经验，曾在PopCap、F5 Networks和KPMG就职。（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）Analyst: Mobile-gaming revenues will surpass $21B in 2014 with — guess who? — Asia leading the way

Jeffrey Grubb

Asia’s mobile-gaming market is an unstoppable, money-generating monster, and it’s going to push worldwide spending on smartphone apps to new heights over the next few years.

By the end of 2014, mobile gaming will reach revenues of $21.1 billion, according to the analysts at SuperData Research. That represents a 19-percent increase from the $17.7 billion mobile games generated in 2013. Western gamers still tend to spend more money on a per-player basis, but countries like Japan, China, and South Korea are contributing in a big way to the bottom line.

“Much of this growth is due to Asia,” SuperData founder and lead researcher Joost van Dreunen wrote in a report, “which accounts for over half of the worldwide mobile market and its booming smartphone industry as devices become more affordable and ubiquitous in the region.”

Mobile-game revenue in Asia will reach $11.3 billion by the end of 2014, according to SuperData. That number includes in-app purchases as well as money generated by in-game ads. While that is a huge figure, the region still has plenty of room left to grow. China, India, and Russia are all markets that have large portions of their populations still waiting to pick up smartphones. SuperData expects that worldwide gaming revenue will reach $28.2 billion by 2016 as those untapped consumers come online.

In the West, meanwhile, SuperData notes that spending is growing by 16 percent from 2013 to 2014. That is still double-digit growth, but it’s slower than the worldwide average.

“Though revenue growth in the U.S. and Canada is stagnating, it will see an 11 percent bump in 2015 as smartphone penetration hits critical mass and players become comfortable with spending more on mobile games,” said van Dreunen.

And it’s not like Western gamers aren’t already comfortable with spending money on mobile. SuperData’s research reveals that the average paying player in the U.K. and U.S. spends far more than just about anywhere else in the world. The intelligence firm explains this by pointing out that U.S. and U.K. are mature tech markets that have both had a long time to get accustomed to the way mobile games work.

“At more than $25 in July, mobile spending in the U.S. and U.K. is more than double that in Brazil, Latin America’s biggest market,” wrote van Dreunen. “The average revenue per paying user [ARPPU] in Russia, Eurasia’s largest mobile market, is just below $20 while the region’s second largest market, Turkey, shows promise as ARPPU steadily increases over the last 12 months.”

With the market expanding in every region, it’s clear why developers and investors continue to rush into the mobile space. If revenue really does reach nearly $30 billion in just a couple of years, the companies establishing a presence now could end up the big winners.（source：venturebeat）

2）4 years and 50M downloads after its debut, the Infinity Blade mobile game comes to its conclusion

Dean Takahashi

Chair Entertainment is launching its final content update for Infinity Blade III today. The conclusion of the series that has been downloaded more than 50 million times is a milestone in the Infinity Blade trilogy and a landmark in the history of mobile games.

Chair’s Infinity Blade series grew up with Apple’s iPhone and iPad as it was one of the first really high-quality 3D-animated games that showed what the smartphone and tablet platforms were capable of. Now, Chair Entertainment’s creative director Donald Mustard told GamesBeat that the team has decided to bring the story to its end and move on to a new one.

The company, a division of Epic Games, describes the ending as an “epic conclusion” to its series. Dubbed Infinity Blade III: Kingdom Come, the update is a free download for all players who have purchased the $3 Infinity Blade III title. The update has new enemies, six new treasure maps, a bunch of new weapons and features, and a hallmark of the series: infinite play.

Not many developers would have the nerve to walk away from one of the most popular video game trilogies of all time. It has spawned a bestselling book series from award-winning author Brandon Sanderson, along with custom collectible toys.

The closure of the game brings an end to a chapter at Chair, which has become one of the most successful mobile-game studios. Founded in 2005 by Donald Mustard and Geremy Mustard, Chair created games like Undertow and Shadow Complex on Xbox Live Arcade. Epic Games, the maker of the Gears of War console games, acquired Chair in 2008.

After it launched Shadow Complex, Salt Lake City-based Chair started thinking about a sequel. But it abandoned that project after it learned that Apple wanted a demo to show off the 3D graphics capability of its latest iOS devices.

With just a couple of months before the next major press event, Chair rushed to build a sword-fighting game that felt like a realistic sword-fighting simulation. It had to learn how to make a mobile game using Epic’s Unreal game engine. As a studio, it had hardcore gamer employees who were playing a lot of games on mobile devices, said Laura Mustard, the marketing manager at Chair, in an interview.

“We thought that if we could make a gamer’s game for mobile, then gamers out there might be really interested in playing it,” she said.

Donald Mustard said the company decided to make a game that was fun for the team to play on a new platform. But the company had no clue about whether anyone would like it.

“We had to trust our instincts,” he said. “The goal wasn’t to bring the console experience to mobile. It was to answer, ‘What can you do on mobile that you could never do on a console?’ How can we make something that is completely unique to this device that can deliver the rich game experience that I expect when I play?”

The team finished its demo, and Apple showed off “Project Sword” on stage at a big event hosted by Apple founder Steve Jobs on Sept. 1, 2010. Jobs said that if the game was going to be on stage, it also had to be released in the same year. By December 2010, almost five months after the team started working on it, Infinity Blade shipped. It sold a few million copies in its first few weeks.

While that game was a technical achievement in graphics, Donald Mustard acknowledged that it was designed to fit inside the constraints of mobile device. The game had just a couple of scene locations where you could fight other characters in sword duels. Each time when you reached the evil God King, you would fight and lose. Then, 19 years later in the game’s time, your son would appear and refight the God King. You fought over and over this way until you reached the conclusion.

This circular battle made good use of the core assets of the game, and it minimized the amount of memory needed. Since mobile devices didn’t have much memory, the design of the game was a great match, Donald Mustard said.

“We were always looking at how to push the envelope further than people thought was possible, and this was a way to do it. Every device and every game has its constraints,” he said. “And to me, the best games embrace their constraints and find creative solutions to get around them.”

With the second game, Chair Entertainment had much more time to work on the title. It released Infinity Blade II, which had more variety of landscapes and fighting, in December 2011. Staying on a punishing game development schedule, Chair Entertainment released Infinity Blade III on Sept. 11, 2013.

“By that time, it was a little more like Skyrim,” or a game with huge scope, Donald Mustard said. “It had a huge map with 50 locations. It was a huge sprawling game, and we had enough time to build the quality that we wanted.”

Donald Mustard said he thought it was cool that you can now use 3D printing to create toy models of the characters from the game. You can now order those characters from those games via Sandboxr from within the game.

Given the circular design of the Infinity Blade series, the game never really had to end. Donald Mustard said the team decided on its own to conclude the series.

“To me, it’s about creating the game you want to make,” he said. “We want to create unique, exciting new things. It was very exciting for us to create Infinity Blade and turn it into a trilogy. We creating a new subgenre of role-playing game fighting. We had more to explore when we got to the second game. And there was a meta game attached to it. The third game is the fulfillment of the expression of our original vision, with the combat in place, a robust meta structure, and extreme custom crafting. You could play it in multiplayer and co-op, and it truly was an endless game.”

He added, “To me, that was a perfect time to move on to something new. Even though I knew we could make a lot of money, I would rather move on to something new. We want to push a different envelope and go in a different direction.”

Chair Entertainment changed a lot over the course of the series.

In 2009, when the company released Shadow Complex, it had nine people. At the end of 2010, when it released Infinity Blade, it had 11 employees. Now, as it finishes the Infinity Blade series, it has 24 people, including the division’s first real office manager. As for the changing roles over time, Mustard said, “I don’t change the toilet people anymore.”

Donald Mustard said the company will continue to think about what to do with Infinity Blade as a property over time, but the company is done with it for now. It is exploring taking the existing series to new platforms. He said the team is working on something new, but it will be some time before it unveils that work.

“We think it’s going to be pretty amazing,” Mustard said.（source：venturebeat）http://venturebeat.com/2014/09/04/four-years-and-50m-downloads-after-its-debut-the-infinity-blade-mobile-game-comes-to-its-conclusion/

3）The Elder Scrolls Online developer hit with post-launch job cuts

Jeffrey Grubb

Bethesda’s ZeniMax Online Studios launched The Elder Scrolls Online earlier this year. Now, with the game established and much of the production and support work done, the company is cutting jobs.

Publisher Bethesda Softworks confirmed to GamesBeat that it is laying off portions of the ZeniMax Online team. The company pointed out that it no longer needs the huge number of employees it brought on to create the title now that it is out and operating without any major issues.

“As is the norm for games of this type, we had ramped up a large workforce to develop a game of vast scale and ramped up our customer service to handle the expected questions and community needs of The Elder Scrolls Online at launch,” Bethesda vice president of public relations Pete Hines said in a statement provided to GamesBeat. “Now that we are nearly six months post launch, we have a thriving online community in a game that runs smoothly. We have adjusted staffing to meet the ongoing needs of the studio, which continues to operate with a large work force.”（source：venturebeat）

4）There are now at least 25 billion-dollar mobile internet companies

John Koetsier

Some are virtually household names, like Uber and Dropbox, Snapchat and WhatsApp. Others you may never have heard of, like GungHo and Airwatch and RocketFuel.

But all of them have two things in common: a minimum billion-dollar value and unprecedented speed.

“Mobile Internet first mover advantage is more extreme than in any other technology market in history, with a direct relationship between total value created and value created per year,” says Digi-Capital’s Tim Merel. “First movers have delivered unprecedented value at an unheard of rate, so dominating quickly is worth its weight in gold.”

He’s not kidding about the gold. Or the speed.

Facebook famously acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion. That means the instant messaging app accrued value at an average rate of about $4 billion each year of its existence. Snapchat’s latest valuation puts it at the same blistering pace, which means both of these young giants grew shareholder value at almost $110,000 every single day for the first years of their young lives.

Merel details the growth of the mobile Internet in his latest report, a massive 500-page review of mobile Internet investment. The hefty tome also documents his forecast of more than $700 billion in mobile revenue by 2017, plus the $61 billion in mergers, acquisitions, and investments in the mobile Internet in the past 12 months.

As the names of the mobile Internet players mentioned above make clear, not all of that value is in one sector. And interestingly, almost half of them were born in Asia.

“The billion dollar mobile Internet club operates across sectors (games, messaging, transport, productivity, social, music, navigation, mCommerce, utilities) and geographies (12 US, 9 Asia, 3 Europe),” Merel told me via email. “Continuous disruption is creating huge opportunity for growth, as well as significant risk of decline.”

Japanese giants such as LINE, with a $10 billion valuation and GREE, worth about $1.8 billion, lead the Asian charge. Others include Colopl, with an estimated $5.1 billion valuation, and Kakao, the Korean messaging giant.

With the massive and rapid growth of mobile, the more traditional tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are on the lookout for acquisitions — as are second and third tier potential acquirers like Disney, Adobe, Box, Zynga, or Nintendo, says Merel. “The pyramid of consolidators is changing constantly, with today’s growth companies becoming tomorrow’s consolidators and some former giants struggling to adapt.”

First-mover advantage was massive in the first Internet gold rush, which led to the dot-com bubble and subsequent implosion from roughly 1997 to 2000. Apparently it’s even more massive in the mobile revolution that we’re now seeing unfold in front of our eyes.

The question, of course, is whether that’s sustainable — or whether we’ll see some kind of similar bubble bursting.

That’s a macro-level question and difficult to answer, but on the micro level, there’s certainly plenty of churn, according to Merel.

“Entering the billion dollar club is difficult, but staying there is even harder,” he said. “Some pivot beyond their initial success to greater heights, while others struggle to move beyond their legacy of success. There are former billion-dollar companies which have dropped out of the club, and others risk doing so.”

Here is the full list of 25 mobile-first companies that have achieved billion-dollar valuations, in decreasing order by value:

Twitter

WhatsApp

Uber

Snapchat

Dropbox

LINE

Gungho

Square

Pandora

Colopl

King

Spotify

Cheetah Mobile

Kakao

Supercell

Cyberagent

DeNA

GREE

IGG

Rocket Fuel

AirWatch

Waze

Evernote

Instagram

FunPlus

The valuations are a mix of public company market caps, exit values on acquisition, and valuations from funding rounds, Merel says.（source：venturebeat）

5）Big Fish Games hires ex-PopCap finance chief as CFO

Dean Takahashi

Casual gamemaker Big Fish Games has recruited a new chief financial officer, Robert Chamberlain, from publisher Electronic Arts’ PopCap Games division.

That move may raise some eyebrows as companies bring aboard CFOs when they are on the verge of big changes, like selling the company or going public. But Big Fish Games’ boss said that the company was overdue to hire a replacement finance chief.

“There is no immediate interpretation,” said Paul Thelen, the chief executive of Big Fish Games, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We’re doing very well. We announced our results last year. We continue to be profitable and grow.”

Bob Chamberlain of Big Fish Games[/caption]

Chamberlain replaces David Stephenson, who was hired as the Big Fish Games CFO in 2011. Stephenson, who had previously spent 11 years at Amazon, went back to take another position at the company. Thelen took his time about hiring a replacement, but as Big Fish Games grew, it became more urgent to replace Stephenson, he said.

Chamberlain’s tenure at PopCap Games was remarkable in that EA acquired PopCap for up to $1.3 billion (with earnouts) in mid-2011.

Asked if he planned to sell the company to EA for $1.3 billion, Thelen chuckled and said, “No.”

Chamberlain has 30 years of financial and operational experience at PopCap, F5 Networks, and KPMG. In an interview, he said that he wants Big Fish to scale up its accounting and finance department to deal with the company’s size.（source：venturebeat）