1）Epic Games近日宣布《无尽之剑》系列目前收益超过3000万美元，其中《无尽之剑2》所创收益为500万美元（该公司在三个月前宣布原版《无尽之剑》收益达2000万美元）。

Infinity Blade 2(from themacfeed.com)

据该公司所称，原版《无尽之剑》发布三个月实现500万美元收益，而继集游戏《无尽之剑2》发布不久就实现了这一目标。原版游戏目前收益超过2300万美元，还推出了街机版产品《无尽之剑FX》，以及数字中篇小说《无尽之剑：觉醒》。

2）Rovio最近通过公司博客宣布，他们在芬兰第三大城市坦佩雷成立了一家新工作室。

angry-bird-adult-costume(from kaboodle.com)

坦佩雷以优良的游戏开发传统而得名，当地高校及Manse Games孵化计划皆享有游戏声誉，并拥有20多家游戏初创企业。前THQ Wireless内部工作室Universomo（已在2010年关闭）联合创始人Atte Kotiranta将任这家新工作室总经理。

3）据gigaom报道，美国移动广告平台Millennial Media最近也申请进行融资达7500万美元的IPO。

millennial_media_logo(from allthingsd)

该平台每月广告印象为400亿次，其广告网络通过2.8万款应用程序触及全球2亿用户，IDC上月报告曾指出，Millennial Media在美国所占市场份额达16.7%，仅次于谷歌并超过了苹果。

Millennial在过去9个月中收益为6910万美元，高于2010年同期的2910万美元，但来自海外市场的收益仅占10%。

4）NPD最新报告指出，2011年平板电脑出货量达7270万部，移动便携电脑的出货量为2.854亿部，这两者比例为1：4。

ipad-zaggmate(from zagg.com)

由于2011年第四季度涌现许多新设备，iPad需求量以及额外发售渠道增加，2011年平板电脑出货量增幅达256%。不过移动便携电脑仍有市场发展空间，预计到2017年，笔记本电脑出货量将达4.32亿部，平板电脑将达3.833亿部。

5）Zynga近日向iPhone、iPod Touch平台发布《Scramble With Friends》这款社交文字谜题游戏。

scramble-with-friends(from webpronews.com)

该游戏项目由旧金山的With Friends手机游戏工作室与Newtoy工作室联合开发，总经理为Ya-Bing Chu，With Friends系列游戏还包括在2008年发布的《Chess With Friends》、2009年7月出品的《Words With Friends》、2011年6月推出的《Hanging With Friends》。

6）据信息分享应用Bump最新数据显示，目前多数苹果用户已升级到iOS 5，截止2011年12月30日，已有54.4%的bump用户升级至iOS 5.0.1版本，还有4.74%使用5.0.0，但也有21.2%用户仍在使用iOS 4.3版本。

ios_5(from bbiphones.com)

移动分析公司Localytics的数据也反映了类似的趋势，其监测的结果如下：

5.0.1: 60.41%

5.0: 5.74%

4.3.x: 19.92%

4.2.x : 9.48%

4.1.x : 2.02%

4.0.x : 0.68%

3.x: 1.72%

从中可以看出，66%以上的用户已升级至5.0.0以上版本，但也有30%的用户仍停留于iOS 4.3版本，这一比例与仍在使用问世一年有余的Android 2.2版本Frozen Yogurt的用户相当。（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）Infinity Blade’s franchise earnings top $30 million in first year

by Keith Andrew

Three months after Epic announced Infinity Blade had generated $20 million worth of business, the publisher has revealed the launch of its successor has pushed franchise wide gross earnings past the $30 million mark.

In Epic’s own words, the milestone cements Chair’s series as “one of the most popular gaming franchises to be launched on the App Store”, with Infinity Blade II accounting for $5 million of revenue in its own right.

A cut above

“The success of the Infinity Blade franchise is testament to our talented team who is devoted to making games we want to play, all while using Unreal Engine technology to redefine what is expected from games on iOS devices,” said Epic Games president Dr. Michael Capps.

“We have so much more in store for players, and will continue to make great content for Apple’s evolving platforms.”

Further milestones look set to follow, with Epic claiming the original Infinity Blade took three months to top $5 million in revenue – a feat its successor has achieved in little over one.

Earnings from the original game now sit at more than $23 million, with arcade release Infinity Blade FX, sales of the game’s original soundtrack and Brandon Sanderson’s digital novella Infinity Blade: Awakening making up the rest.（source:pocketgamer）

2）Rovio setting up new development studio in Tampere

by Jon Jordan

What does Rovio have cooking for 2012?

There are plenty of rumours, but the news that the Helsinki-based developer is opening up another Finnish development location suggests its ambition stretches beyond merchandising deals and movies.

As announced on the company’s blog, the new studio is being set up in Tampere, which is the third largest city in Finland and 150 km north of the capital.

The place to be

It has a good reputation for game development, thanks to its universities and its Manse Games incubator program, which contains over 20 start ups.

It was also the location of THQ Wireless’ internal studio Universomo, which was closed down in 2010. Yet it seems some of the old guard remain in the area as Rovio’s local GM will be Atte Kotiranta, who was a Universomo co-founder.

No doubt, he will be tapping up ex-colleagues, while anyone else interested can check out the available positions – ranging from artists, programmers, game designers and level designers – via its jobs website.（source:pocketgamer）

3）Mobile ad network Millennial Media files for IPO

By Ryan Kim

Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile ad network in the U.S., has filed to go public to raise a maximum of $75 million. The company is looking to capitalize on the big shift in advertising toward mobile devices, a market that is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years as smartphones and tablets proliferate.

Millennial’s platform serves up 40 billion ad impressions per month and reaches 200 million people worldwide through more than 28,000 apps that use Millennial’s network. IDC said last month that it has 16.7 percent market share in the U.S. behind only Google and ahead of Apple.

The company in the last nine months of 2011 generated $69.1 million in revenue, up from $29.1 million for the same period in 2010. It narrowed its net loss from $5.4 million to $417,000 over the same period while adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization improved from a loss of $4.9 million to earnings of $650,000.

Millennial is poised to become a major player in mobile advertising, which is expected to grow to $20.6 billion in 2015 worldwide, according to Gartner. The company has a bigger opportunity as it expands internationally. Only 10 percent of its revenue comes from overseas markets.（source:gigaom）

4）One tablet sold for every four laptops

by Tim Green

The astonishing rise of a form factor that’s basically less than two years old.

The latest NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report says there were 72.7 tablets shipped in 2011, against 285.4m units for mobile PCs.

This represents a shipment growth rate for tablets in 2011 of 256 per cent thanks to significantly competitive new devices in Q4’11, strong demand for iPads, and additional distribution channels.

Yet there was still growth in the mobile PC space too – just not as fast. Notebooks were expected to reach 187.5 million units, up 12 per cent year on year, while mini-note PC shipments were pegged at 25.2 million units.

But the gap is closing.

By 2017, notebooks are forecast to reach 432 million units, and tablet shipments are projected to reach 383.3 million units. Ultrabooks, the very slim laptops evangelised by Intel, could be the form factor to watch.（source:mobile-ent）

5）Zynga launches Scramble With Friends for iPhone

Dean Takahashi

Some of the most popular mobile games are simple ones. With that in mind, Zynga is launching Scramble With Friends on the iPhone and iPod Touch today.

The game is part of Zynga’s strategic expansion into mobile games, a market where its social chops can be an advantage. But Zynga faces stiff competition in the mobile market and has far less market share in that segment than it does as a dominant player on Facebook. Zynga launched seven mobile games last quarter.

The game is a fast and fun social word puzzle game that is the latest installment in Zynga’s “With Friends” mobile social apps. In the game, you look at a four by four grid of letters and use your finger to unscramble as many words as you can see in the grid. The fun part of the game is challenging a friend to a match and taking turns to find as many words as you can within 2 minutes. The challenges last for three rounds and the one with the most points wins. You can take your turn at your own leisure, as the play is asynchronous, where one player moves at a time.

Previous games in the series include Chess With Friends, launched in 2008, Words With Friends from July 2009, and Hanging With Friends from June 2011. Zynga picked up the series with its $53 million acquisition of Newtoy in McKinney, Texas in December 2010. Newtoy was valuable because its biggest hit, Words With Friends, had been downloaded millions of times.

But this game was made by the San Francisco With Friends mobile game studio, in consultation with the team at the Newtoy studio. The game was based on an earlier Zynga title called Scramble, which had a kind of cult following. One fan, Manoj Saranathan, drafted a petition beseeching Zynga and Facebook to keep it going. But Zynga zapped the game on Sept. 30 on Facebook and now it’s available on mobile.

The Scramble With Friends game will be out on Android and the iPad later. Overall, Zynga is on an accelerated pace for introducing new games not only on mobile devices but also on Facebook. It introduced Hidden Chronicles on Facebook this week.（source:venturebeat）

6）More than 66% of Users Have Upgraded to iOS 5

By Dan Rowinski

This post is part of our ReadWriteMobile channel, which is dedicated to helping its community understand the strategic business and technical implications of developing mobile applications. This channel is sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent. As you’re exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: Cultivating a Developer Ecosystem: Understanding Their Needs

A lot is made of Android platform device updates. Is your phone going to be getting Ice Cream Sandwich? According to the latest numbers, Gingerbread is the dominant version of Android in the wild, with version 2.2 Frozen Yogurt still on more than 30% of all devices. What about Apple? iOS 5 has been available for about three months. How many users have upgraded their phones to the newest platform?

Apple does not publish platform numbers the way that Google does for Android. To determine how many people are using different versions of the operating system we went to app developers and analytics companies to get a clear picture of what version of iOS people are using.

According to Bump, an information sharing app for the iPhone, most users are now on iOS 5. Of users that used the bump app in a period leading up to Dec. 30, 2011, 54.42% were on iOS 5.0.1 and additional 4.74% were on 5.0.0. There was a significant amount of Bump users that had not upgraded, with about 21.2% using various versions of iOS 4.3.x.

While Bump’s data shows a good cross-section of what its users are connecting to the service, it is best not to trust one app of with a comparatively small user base. So, we asked mobile analytics server Localytics about data from its network of app publishers. The numbers, while similar, are probably much more accurate because of a much larger sample size.

5.0.1: 60.41%

5.0: 5.74%

4.3.x: 19.92%

4.2.x : 9.48%

4.1.x : 2.02%

4.0.x : 0.68%

3.x: 1.72%

More than 66% of iOS users have upgraded to version 5.0.0 or above. This cuts across all iOS devices which Localytics tracks. The company has the ability to track to what device a user is accessing apps from, such as an iPad, iPhone 4, iPad 2 etc. We will report on that data next week.

Apple has a distinct advantage in upgrading users to the newest version of the operating system. The source code is pushed from one place and run through iTunes via a wire or (now with iOS 5) a wireless connection. At the same time, it is telling that near 20% of iOS users have not made it past iOS 4.3.x. These users either never open iTunes and sync their devices or are using older devices. Nearly 30% (29.4%) of all iOS users are still on 4.2.x or 4.3.x. That is a number very similar to those still using Android version 2.2 Frozen Yogurt that has been out since for more than a year. （source：readwriteweb）