King announces it now has more than 70 million daily players across all platforms and three top 10 Facebook games

King, the world’s leading cross-platform, bite-sized games company, today announces that it is releasing its popular, top 10 Facebook game, Pet Rescue Saga, on mobile early this summer. The game, which is the third largest overall game on Facebook with more than 6 million daily players (DAU), will be available on iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) and on Google Play for Android devices. Pet Rescue Saga becomes King’s third Saga game to be released on mobile and will further position the company as a leader in mobile games alongside their hit mobile title, Candy Crush Saga, which is one of the most popular titles across Android and iOS in many major markets seeing over 500 million gameplays a day on mobile alone.

Social Games Observer spoke to King’s US VP of Business Development, Jong Woo, who told us that the company has more than 70 million daily players and 130 million monthly players across all platforms. This surpasses Zynga’s 52 million daily players. The company currently has three top 10 Facebook games with Candy Crush Saga (15.5M DAU), Pet Rescue Saga (6M DAU) and Farm Heroes Saga (4.8M DAU). King’s games have taken the number one application and game slot on Facebook and top grossing app positions on iOS and Android, clocking over 21 billion gameplays per month across mobile, social and online. Of the different platforms, Woo told us that both iOS and Android see similar levels of engagement and retention although with monetization, the iOS seems to monetize better than Android.

“We are completely humbled to have three of our games among the top 10 on Facebook and seeing that our games are attracting over 70 million daily players and 21 billion gameplays a month across all platforms,” said Riccardo Zacconi, CEO and co-founder of King. “Pet Rescue Saga’s fun puzzle challenges have proven to be extremely popular since its release in October. The game quickly became one of the most prevalent games on Facebook and is one we are confident will translate well to mobile.”

Indeed, King’s Candy Crush Saga was a huge hit on both mobile and Facebook. Jong Woo explained that the release of the game on mobile definitely boosted its popularity. Cross platform synchronization means that users can now play anywhere and still have their gameplay updated on each platform. Woo also put the success of Candy Crush Saga down to its playability factor – it is a “bitesized” game, meaning you can pick it up at any time and play for one or two minutes from anywhere you are.

Pet Rescue Saga will launch on mobile with over 72 levels, providing a seamless gameplay experience across mobile and Facebook. Players will be able to play the game anywhere, anytime – ensuring their leaderboards, scores and progress are fully synchronized regardless of device.

As King looks towards its future, Woo told Social Games Observer that they would continue to adopt the strategy of first prototyping the games on King.com before moving the games across to Facebook and then to mobile – the same route taken by Pet Rescue Saga.  The future certainly looks bright for King – having overtaken Zynga with the largest number of daily active users and a robust pipeline of games, King looks set to dominate its stance as the largest game developer and leading mobile gaming company out there.

AbZorba’s latest addition to its Hub of Fun™ live, multiplayer mobile casino joins Live Roulette on Android. Other titles include Poker, Blackjack and Hot2Slot™ on both operating systems, which now complete the line up of eight, entertaining social casino games.

AbZorba Games CEO, Andrew Hughes, said: “This is an explosive time for multilayer mobile casino games so Roulette on iOS is an integral addition to our Hub of Fun. It’s the live element that makes our games so social, fresh and fun each time a gamer joins in.”

The Athens and Delaware based company already offers classic mobile casino games BlackJack, Poker and Slots all on Android and iOS and recently reached the significant milestone of 1 million app installs.

The Hub of Fun is also offered as a managed white label solution for Gaming Operators seeking to rapidly deploy a mobile social casino without the high cost of development and risk. This is a growing market that

Screenshot

AbZorba seeks to leverage its technology and knowledge to extend its reach whilst enabling its partners to extend in to mobile social games. CEO Andrew Hughes comments “No other multiplayer mobile social casino brand with over 1 million app installs and complete casino titles is open to share its considerable social knowledge for white label partnerships”. Hughes added: “This sector is a wide open for casino partners to exploit the social casino marketing and conversion potential with AbZorba’s complete package.”

All AbZorba’s live multiplayer casino games have highly integrated social features with Facebook and Twitter, avatar creators and in game added feature functionality. Players can chat with and buy a cocktail for fellow gamers, invite and compete with their friends or make new ones. Multiplayer is key to extending lifetime value and retention.

“Rovio Entertainment has positioned itself as one of the powerhouses of mobile entertainment, so moving into publishing is a logical step for us at this point”, said Rovio’s EVP of Games Jami Laes. “We want to help our fans find quality entertainment among the more than 100,000 games available in app stores. That’s where Rovio Stars comes in.”

“In the course of our work, we run into so many fantastic upcoming titles — games with memorable characters and entertaining gameplay that are also just really fun to play!” said Kalle Kaivola, Director of Development. “These are the sorts of titles we’re interested in. We want to help the developers to give these games that last coat of polish, publish the games and find their audience. We’re focusing on a small, select number of games, and each Rovio Stars launch will be an event of its own.”

The first game to be published under the Rovio Stars program will be Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage by Nitrome Ltd., followed by Tiny Thief by 5 Ants. Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage follows the adventure of a lone Viking, combining a unique ice slicing mechanic with an offbeat humour. Tiny Thief is a beautiful medieval adventure featuring stealth-based puzzles.

“Being involved with Rovio Stars means that we have one of the best marketing teams behind us, as well as visibility to their vast audience. To a small indie studio like Nitrome this is all the backing we could hope for!” said Mat Annal, Managing Director of Nitrome Ltd.

Name: Geewa

Where founded: Founded in Prague, Czech Republic. Offices also in Berlin, Germany and Brno, Czech Republic

Founded by: Milos Endrle

Founded in: 2005

Funding: Yes, 1.15M € in 07/2007, MCI Investments (Series A)

Pirates Poker Screenshot

Acquisitions: Yes, CUKETA studio (developed Age of Defenders), 09/2012

Number of employees: 60

Number of Games published: 3 main + 20 more minigames at Geewa.com

List of Games published: Main games are:

Pool Live Tour

Pirates Poker

Age of Defenders

Describe what you do in a sentence: We develop and publish casual competitive multiplayer games for online and mobile platforms.

Pool Live Tour Screenshot

Games published on: Online (browser based), mobile (iOS, Android)

Working with publisher: No, self-published

Acting as a Publisher: Yes, for itself and partners at Geewa.com

Publishing games in with languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Italian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish, Czech, Arabic

Game genre/s: Casual competitive and tower defense

User demographics (gender): 75% male

Pool Live Tour Screenshot

User demographics (location): Turkey, Argentina, USA, Indonesia, Egypt

Best-selling virtual item: Special edition cues in Pool Live Tour, which come out regularly in bi-weekly intervals

Most expensive virtual item: Largest coins package in Pool Live Tour for 120 USD

What do you see as currently most exciting trend in the industry: The move to free-to-play model across the board and the need to find new avenues of monetization.

In a brief announcement on Rovio’s site, the company reports that the Accounts feature is first arriving in the new The Croods game worldwide, and in the classic version of Angry Birds on iOS in Finland and Poland. The continued worldwide rollout to other titles and markets will happen “gradually,” explains the post.

Registering for a Rovio Account will be an optional feature, and it will support transferring progress to new devices, such as when you upgrade your phone, or to enable continued gameplay on other devices you may currently own. In addition, the feature will also allow several users to share a device, each with their own saved game.

If you’re already playing multiple games on several devices, upon first sign in on each, you’ll be asked if you want to merge the scores, stars and feathers into your current account. However, power-ups will continue to be stored per device, explains Rovio in their FAQs.

To get started, after registering, you’ll need to verify your email within 48 hours to confirm your account.

Rovio didn’t offer any details as to when it expects the Accounts feature rollout to complete worldwide, but it’s no small undertaking given the size and scope of its current lineup. In the past year, the company launched Amazing Alex, Bad Piggies and Angry Birds Star Wars, which in addition to Angry Birds Classic, Friends, Space, Seasons, Rio, and The Croods, accounts for 263 million active monthly users.

In more recent months, the company has been shifting towards making some games free, such as when it offered the original Angry Birds game for free this March. The new Accounts feature will now help with these efforts to draw in both new lapsed users who have since moved on from the device where they had first installed the paid Rovio titles.

via: TechCrunch

The Hanover, Germany-based Kamicat has scored a hit with its cross-platform Kamicat Football game, which has attracted more than 5 million registered users since its launch last year. This game combines live action soccer with team management elements, and it is available in nine languages.

Traffic Captain, a promotional network for games, is another iVenture Capital portfolio company, will now be the exclusive marketer of that game. The aim is to make Kamicat Football into a bigger worldwide title and to generate more advertising revenue. A mobile version is coming later this year.

“The quality of Kamicat’s top title, ‘Kamicat Football,’ in particular convinced us to move forward with this new investment,” said Michael Reul, the cofounder and chief executive of iVenture Capital in Hamburg, Germany. “In fact, I am an enthusiastic ‘Kamicat Football’ player myself. It will add top-notch value to our portfolio as well as the TrafficCaptain performance network.

Kamicat cofounder Christoph Reisner said in a statement, “Kamicat Football’s staggering growth on Facebook over the past several months is largely due to viral effects. Players spend above-average amounts of time with our game – a combination of football action simulation and management – and recommend it to their friends.”

IVenture Capital, founded in 2011, has also invested in game companies Farbflut Entertainment, Infernum, MobileBits, Pro 3 Games, Games.de, Allvatar.com, Kamcord, and Traffic Captain. It also invested in payment service provider BillingPartner. IVenture typically invests anywhere from 50,000 euros to low-seven-digit euros.

via: VentureBeat

Bingo Rider is a 90-ball multiplayer social bingo game where users share their gameplay experience with the shared-liquidity Akamon community of over 11 million players in real-time, regardless of which platform each player uses, allowing them to play with portal or Facebook users, synchronously.

This new mobile gaming experience offers multiple levels and gifts and includes new social elements with collectible cards and a chat option in the iPad version. David Jané, Head of Bingo at Akamon Entertainment explains: ”We have developed a mobile game that allows users to pair the game with other tasks and have an exceptional gaming experience shared with other users, translating the success of the online game to new interactive screens and emphasizing the social aspects, reproducing the experience of a real, traditional bingo game in the palms of your hand.”

Bingo Rider Screenshot

Bingo Rider is available for free on the AppStore, and users receive 5000 chips and 50 cards with their download, so they can play for free. In addition, following Akamon’s freemium business model, users can purchase virtual chips to improve their playing experience and accelerate the progression of levels.

Vicenç Martí, CEO of Akamon Entertainment, emphasizes “the company’s veritable leap with the new offering of mobile games, particularly in the Latin American markets, with Brazil at the forefront, where already more people use smartphones and tablets than PCs and where more users want to play on their smartphones every day.”

According to Martí, “The launch of Bingo Rider and 5 other mobile games throughout 2013 is the first step to turn Akamon into a mobile-First company, and will allow Akamon to consolidate its position as a main player in social gaming throughout the company’s natural markets -Latin America and Southern Europe- and exponentially grow the number of registered users, projecting a total of 20 million users by the end of the year.”

In its first week available at the Apple’s Appstore, Bingo Rider reached the top position in the categories of board and casino games in all Akamon’s strategic markets -Spain, France, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia standing out-, and keeps on Top 10 of these categories in most Latin American and European markets.

Akamon plans to launch the Android version of Bingo Rider before the end of Q2 2013.

This week we profile Sm4rt Games Studios.  This developer is based in Mexico City and currently has three published games. Check out their recent game Castle Tower on Facebook here.  They are currently working on the development on their fourth game, Castle Heroes – to be released soon!

Developer Name: Sm4rt Games Studios

Where founded and office location: Mexico City, Mexico

Founded by: Gustavo Chapela

Founded in: 2010

Funding: 1 Million USD

Acquisitions: No

Number of employees: 14

Number of games published: 3

List of games published: Broken Reality Online, Botball Adventure, Castle Tower and Castle Heroes (currently in development).

Describe what you do in one sentence: We create original online games that emphasize social interactions (competition and/or cooperation)

Where games are published: Facebook and the Web

Working with publisher: No

Acting as a publisher: No

Publishing games in which languages: English

Game genre/s: Strategy, Sports, RPG

User demographics: Male

Caste Tower Screenshot

User demographics: America, UK, Western Europe and Asia

Best-selling virtual item: $9.99 USD Gem Pack for Castle Tower

Most expensive virtual item: $200 USD Jumbo Gem Pack for Castle Tower

What do you see as the current most exciting trend in the industry: The transition of PC and social games to the mobile space (iOS/Android/Win8).

Five games are ready today for the messaging app’s users in Indonesia and Vietnam: HotDogStudio’sEveryone’s Game for Kakao, Com2uS’s Tiny Pang for Kakao, LIVEZEN’s Astrowings for Kakao, GameZen’sBirdPang for Kakao, and CraveMob’s Hunter Cat for Kakao (pictured).

KakaoTalk has been pushing hard into both those Southeast Asian markets in the past few months, even spending on a big budget TV ad campaign for Indonesians that fused K-pop with one Indo pop star.

Korea-based KakaoTalk has just over 80 million users, and the startup made $7 million in profit last year, despite being up against web giant rivals like NHN (makers of Line), Tencent (WeChat), and Facebook Messenger.

The KakaoTalk Game Platform launched in its home market last August and soon showed its worth by propelling a number of its supported games to the top of Korea’s gaming charts. It then rolled out in February in Japan.

GameSpy services power online features that players now expect from games in a world of ubiquitous connectivity: multiplayer matchmaking, player statistics, individual player profiles, in-game buddy lists, leaderboards, and storage of game media, including screenshots, gameplay videos, and playable content.

Our acquisition of GameSpy brings Glu industry-recognized leadership in online, cross-platform technology infrastructure, said Niccolo de Masi, Chief Executive Officer of Glu. GameSpys battle-tested team will enable Glus product roadmap to include robust and highly scalable multiplayer and social functionality. We expect that the acquisition of GameSpy will be earnings neutral in the near term. However, GameSpy team and technology is expected to help us drive higher monetization and lifetime value in Glus titles from 2013 on.

GameSpy is already integrated in Glus Gun Bros Multiplayer on Android launched in Q1 2012. In this update, players co-operate on missions and also compete in real-time head-to-head combat with their friends and other Gun Bros players. GameSpy functionality will be utilized in a number of Glu titles from 2012 and beyond.

Founded in 1997 and based in San Francisco, CA, GameSpy was acquired by IGN Entertainment in 2004. GameSpys technology has been licensed and integrated into more than 1,000 games. There will be no disruption in service to GameSpys current customers and contracts as a result of this acquisition by Glu.