1）据gamasutra报道，King日前公布财报显示，2015年第一季度（载止3月31日）公司收益为5.698亿美元（去年同期为6.076亿美元，但仍超过分析师所预测的5.63亿美元），利润为1.967亿美元（比去年同期多1000万美元左右）。

King还指出《Candy Crush Saga》已经不再占据大部分收益（游戏邦注：去年该公司上市时这款游戏占其总收益的78%），本季度这款游戏所占收益比例仅为38%。

candy-crush-soda-saga(from venturebeat)

该公司月独立用户也从去年同期的4.81亿增长至5.5亿，目前平均每付费用户每月收益超过5美元，但其月独立付费用户则同比去年下降将近30%。

除此之外，该公司还宣布同微软合作，将包括《Candy Crush Saga》在内的数款游戏预装到Windows 10平台。

2）据gamasutra报道，去年9月于香港成立的游戏公司Directive Games（其成员包括前CCP、Square Enix和腾讯等公司的AAA游戏开发者）最近融资350万美元，立志进军手机游戏市场。

该公司目前有14名成员，旗下有两个分别位于冰岛雷克雅维克和中国上海的工作室，计划在今年推出其首款手机游戏。

3）据venturebeat报道，King首席执行官Riccardo Zacconi日前表示公司正在开发多款游戏，以增加在休闲游戏市场的影响力，同时进军中核游戏市场，扩大King游戏的市场范围。

他称公司在2015下半年会推出新作，其中之一来自今年初收购的Z2Live团队（已经软发布《Paradise Bay》）。

King在过去连续5个季度中都有3款游戏跻身畅销榜前十名。

4）据venturebeat报道，伦敦工作室Space Ape日前宣布旗下游戏《Rival Kingdoms: Age of Ruin》发布不足一足已实现100多万次下载量。这款即时战略游戏在应用商店收获了2000多条用户评价以及4.6颗星的评分。

rival-kingdoms(from venturebeat)

该公司之前推出的游戏《Samurai Siege》一年下载量超过1000万次，收益达2000万美元。

Space Ape Games拥有90名成员，约有15人仍在维护开发《Samurai Siege》，约20人开发《Rival Kingdoms: Age of Ruin》，其余成员则负责其他新游戏项目。

5）据gamasutra报道，法国发行商育碧日前表示公司正在试水虚拟现实技术，并且将把旗下大制作品牌引进这一领域，但暂未确定具体日期。

该公司首席执行官Yves Guillemot称他们很看好虚拟现实技术的潜力，并正开发将利用这一技术的游戏，他们相信这一技术能够令育碧电子游戏吸引更多玩家。（本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao）

1）$200M in profits for Candy Crush maker, in a single quarter

By Alex Wawro

Social game company King continues to reap big profits in the face of flagging revenues and an expanding game catalog that still revolves around its flagship title: Candy Crush Saga.

The first quarter of King’s 2015 fiscal year [PDF] closed on March 31st, and saw the company reporting a quarterly profit of $196.7 million on revenue of $569.8 million. That’s almost $10 million more take-home profit than it saw in the same period last year, even as revenue has declined year-over-year.

That $569.8 million figure is a bit better than the $563 million some market analysts had predicted, but still a 6 percent drop in revenue from the $607.6 million King saw in the same period last year. King’s gross bookings (total in-game sales) also slipped roughly 5 percent year-over-year, down to $604.5 million.

The company is also proudly touting the fact that Candy Crush Saga no longer accounts for the vast majority of its bookings. When King went public early last year the game made up 78 percent of its total bookings, and this quarter Candy Crush Saga accounts for roughly 38 percent.

However, that could change soon as the company confirmed a partnership with Microsoft today to bring its games to Windows 10, starting with pre-installed copies of Candy Crush Saga.

The company is also reporting a rise in monthly unique users across all its games and says its now earning over $5 more a month on average from every paying user, even as its number of monthly unique payers has dipped by almost 30 percent year-over-year. （source：gamasutra）

2）Former AAA devs raise $3.5M for a new mobile game studio in China

By Alex Wawro

Newsbrief: Directive Games, a mobile game studio founded in Hong Kong last September by ex-AAA devs from companies like CCP, Square Enix and Tencent, has raised $3.5 million from a mix of investment firms and angel investors to continue developing its inaugural title.

“We believe mobile has huge potential, not only in terms of numbers but also in the quality of games,” studio CEO and former Dust 514 creative director Atli Mar Sviensson told VentureBeat. “We don’t think mobile has been tapped properly.”

Directive currently has 14 people working across its two offices in Reykjavik, Iceland and Shanghai, China, with plans to debut its first mobile game later this year.（source：gamasutra）

3）King is launching new games and expanding to new territories this year

Dean Takahashi

King chief executive Riccardo Zacconi said the company has more games in development than ever before as it tries to come up with hits to match the success of its flagship mobile monster Candy Crush Saga — and taking the opposite tack as other competitors like Kabam scale down their focuses to their biggest games.

King Digital Entertainment announced earnings today that exceeded Street’s expectations, with adjusted revenue of $569 million and earnings per share of 61 cents. Analysts expected adjusted revenue of $563 million and earnings per share of 53 cents.

Zacconi said the company’s goals for the year include increasing its leadership in casual games, expand into midcore games (or hardcore games that can be play in short amounts of time), enhance its marketing, and expand its reach to new geographies.

Zacconi said in his remarks to analysts that King has new titles coming in the second half of the year. One of them is coming from Z2Live, which King acquired earlier this year. Z2Live is in the midst of a soft launch for Paradise Bay, a resource-management game with a strong narrative, Zacconi said. Players create a tropical island in the game.

For the fifth quarter in a row, King had three games on the top-ten grossing games list.（source：venturebeat）

4）Space Ape’s Rival Kingdoms hits 1M mobile downloads in less than a week

Dean Takahashi

Space Ape said today that its Rival Kingdoms: Age of Ruin has been downloaded more than a million times in less than a week. The mobile real-time strategy game is the latest test for hardcore gaming on smartphones and tablets, and it represents the studio’s attempt to knock Clash of Clans out of the No. 1 spot on the top-grossing games list.

The game from the London-based developer saw more than 750,000 downloads in its debut weekend alone. YouTubers posting “lets plays” videos have gotten as many 120,000 views over the past few days and generated thousands of tweets.

Space Ape’s previous game, Samurai Siege, saw more than 10 million downloads in a year, and it generated $20 million in revenue. Its new game is a fantasy world with real-time strategy combat and base-building. The studio created Rival Kingdoms with the help of award-winning games writer Rhianna Pratchett (her credits include Mirror’s Edge and BioShock Infinite).

“We’re thrilled at the overwhelming response we’ve had to the release of Rival Kingdoms,” CEO John Earner said in a statement. “We’ve spent a lot of time exploring why players love the strategy genre so much, and we’ve seen fantastic reviews come in, with the game achieving over 2,000 reviews clocking in at 4.6 stars.”

Earner said in an earlier interview with GamesBeat that the competition includes Clash of Clans, but it is also competing with newer games like Brian Reynolds’ DomiNations and Zynga’s just-released Empires & Allies. It also competes many other games for the time of players.

Space Ape Games has 90 people. About 15 still work on maintaining Samurai Siege. About 20 worked on Rival Kingdoms. Others are working on a couple of other upcoming releases.

Earner said matches take about 10 minutes to play. The company hopes to differentiate itself on its sophisticated alliance system. The result is that some people during testing played on the weekends for hours at a time.

As for marketing, Earner said the company is targeting communities of hardcore gamers, such as those on certain YouTube or Twitch channels. The company is focusing on word-of-mouth marketing.（source：venturebeat）

5）Ubisoft is working to bring its big brands into virtual reality

By Kris Graft

In its quarterly earnings call today (see the results), French publisher Ubisoft said it is not only experimenting with virtual reality, but is working on bringing its big-budget brands to VR, perhaps sooner than you think.

“First, we believe a lot in virtual reality, because we see it’s really giving a chance for gamers to be immersed in worlds,” said Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. “We are developing a certain number of games that are going to take advantage of these new possibilities.”

He added, “What we are doing is working on the different brands we have to see how we can take advantage of these new possibilities, while making sure we also don’t suffer from what comes with it, which is the difficulty to play a long time with those sorts of games.”

Ubisoft clearly sees potential in combining its expertise in creating sprawling virtual worlds (like those seen in Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, and Watch Dogs) with advanced VR devices such as the Oculus Rift and SteamVR-based HTC Vive (pictured).

The Vive is due for launch this holiday, while the Oculus Rift is slated for a commercial release early next year.

“We are very bullish about the potential [of VR],” said Guillemot. “We think it’s going to bring more players into the universe of Ubisoft video games, and we are going to come with our brands.”

The CEO didn’t put a definitive date on when we’ll see Ubisoft VR games, but said, without clarifying, “We’ll have a few titles coming in the first year, and we’ll have regular games coming following that.”（source:gamasutra）