Hybrid casual mobile games will get hotter in 2024 says Mintegral
Wednesday, December 20, 2023 by Richard Harris
In the evolving mobile gaming landscape, the hottest trend is hybrid-casual games, where downloads grew by 13% and revenues reached $1.4 billion in 2022.
Hybrid-casual fills a need between hyper-casual games, usually free-to-play games with simple gaming mechanisms, and mid-core games, which customers purchase to play and are rewarded with intricate gameplay and ...
Apple gaming studio predictions for 2022
Monday, December 20, 2021 by Justin Welter
If Apple were a person, it would seem they are (still) living on top of the world. Still flush with cash, flexing those privacy muscles with the final rollout of iOS 14.5 and then benching more with iOS 15, and up 29% year over year. But like a senior year quarterback with three championships already to their name, expectations are high and when they’re not m...
Mobile gaming market turned upside down by Netflix
Tuesday, November 16, 2021 by Mike Gadd
Stranger Things have happened but at the beginning of November, the global streaming giant Netflix announced that it is moving into the mobile gaming market.
Though it's a low-key debut by Netflix standards, with just five mobile games initially available to download through its app on Android smartphones (with two focused on the entertainment juggernaut's 80...
Leveraging connectivity and integration to access new audiences
Tuesday, November 9, 2021 by Daniel Twigg
The need for interconnectivity
Businesses require a wide range of applications across departments to run effectively, and interconnectivity between these applications is becoming more desirable as businesses seek to drive increased efficiencies out of their systems and their staff. Application providers can capitalize on this need for interconnectivity by solving the...
Uptodown: An alternative to Google Play
Wednesday, June 2, 2021 by Richard Harris
The Uptodown app market has more than 130 million active users per month, and more than 450 monthly downloads of their more than 4 million APKs available. The company operates worldwide and it is localized to 15 different languages. The Spanish-based company was born in 2020 in Málaga and founded as a University Project in 2002. Recently we intervi...
Google announced product updates
Tuesday, March 24, 2020 by Brittany Hainzinger
As an avid gamer, every year I look forward to spending time with developers at GDC to celebrate together and learn from their successes. We are all disappointed that this year's conference was postponed, but we applaud the organizers for taking steps to protect our global community.
Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, the Google team is hos...
In game advertising extends beyond casual games
Tuesday, December 31, 2019 by Freeman Lightner
The fifth annual In-Game Advertising Study by deep-data analytics and player management company, deltaDNA, finds that 94% of Free-to-Play (F2P) games now feature some form of in-game advertising (up from 87% in 2018). While the number of developers making between 40-100% of their revenue from ads has increased by 21% year on year.
The study, which is based...
How game developers can drive more revenue
Monday, September 23, 2019 by Offer Yehudai
Game developers tend to follow standard templates for monetizing their apps. Mid-core publishers focus on IAP and time-gated ads to be shown at a later date, usually based on their studios' recommendation. Meanwhile, hyper-casual ones go all-in on advertising, while casual games fall somewhere in between. These default strategies leave money on the table b...
Twitter teams up with MoPub
Thursday, May 30, 2019 by Brittany Hainzinger
Back in March, Twitter shared how MoPub’s impression-level revenue data will enable mobile app publishers to understand true ads lifetime value (LTV) of users, which allows UA teams to better optimize paid user acquisition. Now, we’re extremely excited to announce the offering of this mission-critical solution to our full-platform publishers. Publishers will...
Mobile app profitability and user LTV
Tuesday, May 28, 2019 by Alon Golan
According to a recent survey, mobile advertising and app marketing practitioners believe that more and more advertisers will focus on actual profitability this year and move away from the exhausting what-ever-it-takes growth strategy.
Profitability is a rallying cry I hear almost daily from mobile app publishers, and it begins with user acquisition campaigns. If ther...
Ahead of GDC 2019, Google drops new app advertising solutions
Monday, March 18, 2019 by Richard Harris
Google has announced new mobile app advertising solutions ahead of the Game Developers Conference 2019.
The new tools aim to help developers carve out better revenue and build a better app business, especially those developers making games. There are new tools in most sections of the software lifecycle, including pre-launch, launch, and even post-launch.
...
Hothead games wants to make your mobile game a hit too
Thursday, January 24, 2019 by Richard Harris
Hothead Games announced that it has launched a new publishing division to help third-party game developers turn their mobile games into hits. The company is currently accepting submissions and offering financial assistance for games in various stages of development that will benefit from Hothead’s expertise in analytics, marketing, monetization, and gameplay mecha...
New app marketing tool gets smart about user acquisition
Tuesday, December 18, 2018 by Richard Harris
Mobile monetization and marketing company ironSource has announced the launch of its ROAS (return on their advertising spend), Optimizer tool. The new tool enables user acquisition managers to automatically bid on dynamic CPI (cost-per-install) rates to reach the desired ROAS goal, solving one of the most painful challenges of user acquisition today of efficient and rea...
Unity Ads SDK 3.0 come to game developers
Wednesday, October 24, 2018 by Richard Harris
Unity has just launched the latest version of their Ads SDK, and it’s a doozy. The new Unity Ads SDK 3.0 introduces personalized placements, as well as two new ad formats: Augmented reality and Banner ads.
Personalized placements are particularly noteworthy. Now in open beta, personalized placements tie ads and in-app purchases into the same auction, serving th...
Measuring mobile ad revenue on the user level
Thursday, October 4, 2018 by Austin Harris
ironSource announced the launch of User Ad Revenue (UAR), a unique product giving app developers the ability to accurately measure ad revenue on the user level, and link that data to the marketing channel which brought in that specific user.
By revealing how much in-app advertising revenue each individual user generates across all networks, and attributing that reven...
Facebook announces inapp purchases for Instant Games
Tuesday, May 8, 2018 by Austin Harris
At Facebook's annual developer conference, F8, the company has announced that In-App Purchases (IAP) will be available on the Instant Games platform for developers to implement on Android and Facebook. Enabling IAP has always been on Facebook's roadmap for Instant Games, and it's a key part of helping developers be successful. For purchases made in web versions of Insta...
Are app store subscription models right for your app
Friday, October 6, 2017 by Mark Rosner
While advertising and in-app purchases are the methods of monetization app marketers are probably most familiar with, subscription-based models may be the most overlooked. But subscriptions offer publishers benefits like a predictable, long-term revenue stream, and higher average revenue per user (ARPU) versus ads or IAPs. Subscriptions can also be deeply engaging for u...
Apps with subscriptions should read this report about pricing
Thursday, August 17, 2017 by Richard Harris
Liftoff, a mobile app marketing and retargeting company, has released a report dedicated entirely to trends around subscription apps. The surprising data shows that setting subscription costs too low might actually lose otherwise-loyal app users. Additionally, the report looks into which price group converts users fastest, and highlights untapped potential in the male s...
Mobile rewarded ads help increase IAP spends shows study
Tuesday, August 1, 2017 by Richard Harris
Rewarded videos inside games and apps can be a double edge sword. Give "something" to a user for watching a video is a gamble because it's hard to decipher how users will react. It's an obvious thought to wonder if rewarded ads take revenue away from In-App Purchases (IAPs). But new data out today from Tapjoy shows that rewarded ads actually help increase IAP ...
Your Unite Europe 2017 keynote briefing
Monday, July 3, 2017 by Austin Harris
Unite Europe 2017, taking place in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, has just kicked off! Over the next two days, artists, developers, teachers, filmmakers, researchers, storytellers and anyone using Unity will come together to talk about what they love most - creating with Unity.The opening keynote has just concluded and several big announcements have came down the pipe...
Keeping your free to play games and apps profitable
Friday, April 21, 2017 by Richard Harris
Free-to-Play isn't a new concept, it's still a very popular business model for many software companies, game and enterprise alike. But although a F2P platform looks very attractive to prospective customers, the downside is the wager that is made on whether or not enough customers will make the leap to actually pay for the premium items on your platform. It's this consta...
How to increase app revenue by using analytics
Wednesday, March 1, 2017 by Richard Harris
Editors note: Guest submission by Mark Rosner, CRO of AppLovinYou wouldn’t create a website without at least one line of code for Google Analytics. So why would you create an app without it? Analytics might seem like an obvious element to incorporate into app development, but I’m still shocked that I regularly meet developers who don’t use analytics at all, or bare...
Unity 5.6 is coming, what you need to know
Wednesday, March 1, 2017 by Austin Harris
Unity Technologies has announced at GDC that Unity 5.6 will release on March 31, 2017, marking the final installment of Unity 5. The company also provided an early look at Unity 2017, the next generation of Unity with version 2017.“The Unity 5 cycle culminating in 5.6 represents great progress in our key focus areas: graphics, performance, stability, efficiency and plat...
Being smart about competitor mobile ads could increase your eCPM
Monday, January 9, 2017 by Jan Pollack
You've worked hard to build a cool app with great user engagement, and a market for yourself, but you don't want someone else's poor ad or competitive call to action to mess that up, right? This concern causes some developers to keep advertising blacklist settings on auto-pilot, or avoid ads from competitors altogether, but that's a mistake - the odds a...
Unity and Xiaomi team up
Tuesday, November 29, 2016 by Richard Harris
Unity Technologies and Xiaomi have revealed additional details on the recent partnership agreement as both companies scale to serve consumers and developers worldwide. As one of the top Android device makers in China, Xiaomi boasts one of the world’s most engaged audiences, with the MIUI app store seeing more than 50 billion downloads to date. Unity developers will have...
Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite adds two new key ingredients
Thursday, October 27, 2016 by Richard Harris
Flurry Analytics has announced the availability of two advancements to the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite, Crash Analytics 2.0 and Revenue Analytics.Crash Analytics provides developers information about application crashes, exceptions and errors log, all in real time. This functionality is vital for determining the root cause of any issues quickly, while keeping apps runn...
ironSource Launches Ad Engagement Intelligence to Help Improve Engagement
Friday, September 23, 2016 by Richard Harris
ironSource has released a major feature for its Mediation Platform, adding ‘User-level Analytics’, advanced ‘Frequency Capping,’ and ‘Delivery Pacing’ tools to their Ad Placement Technology. Developers will now have the ability to see in-depth user-level ad engagement, and make optimal placement and pacing customizations to impro...
Google Play, Mobile Ads and AdBlocking: The Macro View
Tuesday, July 19, 2016 by Janis Zech
Google quietly rolled out an update to the Play Store a few months ago, but the change sent ripples through the entire mobile developer community: the company started clearly labeling the apps that include ads. It’s a small change, but one that has greater implications for every participant in the mobile app ecosystem - from developers and end users, to mobile ad platfo...
DeltaDNA's New Service Aims to Help Drive Monetization in Low Player Games
Monday, March 14, 2016 by Richard Harris
deltaDNA just announced the release of SmartAds ‘On Demand’, a dynamic independent ad mediation and management platform developed specifically to drive monetization in games with low player numbers.Smaller games typically struggle from a lack of available performance data, which alongside the major time drain of managing multiple ad networks, makes the effective o...
Windows Dev Center Rolls Out New Age Rating Process and Other Updates
Wednesday, December 2, 2015 by Richard Harris
The Windows Dev Team is rolling out several updates for how developers work within the Windows Dev Center including a new age rating system, new app promotion and monetization opportunities and updates to the Windows developer agreementNew Simplified Age Rating ProcessIn December Microsoft will begin the rollout of a new process to simplify obtaining age ratings for app...
deltaDNA Releases New SmartAds Mobile Game Ad Monetization Platform
Tuesday, July 28, 2015 by Richard Harris
deltaDNA has released the new SmartAds gaming ad management product which combines player targeting with dynamic ad mediation. The new platform combines in-app purchases (IAP), analytics and ad-serving with data derived from player experiences. It provides the ability to customize a player’s monetization experience by segmenting them into either ad responsive or IA...
Amazon Releases New Cross Platform Plugins for Unity, Adobe Air, and More
Wednesday, June 24, 2015 by Richard Harris
Amazon has developed a number of plugins for cross platform tools to allow mobile developers utilizing the Amazon platform to access Amazon Services without the need to write boilerplate code to bridge cross platform code with native language Amazon APIs. Amazon has recently released several new plugins for Apache Cordova, Unity, Adobe Air, and Xamarin to allow dev...
Gondola Launches Liftpass an Open Source Platform to Help Developers Manage Game Monetization
Friday, May 22, 2015 by Richard Harris
Gondola, the creators of the Dynamic Pricing Engine for mobile games, has announced the beta release of Liftpass, an open source platform for game developers to manage and track the prices of virtual goods and in-app purchases (IAPs). The full-stack solution offers SDKs for iOS, Android and Unity, and the tracking of in-game metrics and in-game currencies can be fu...
Windows and Windows Phone Store Trends for First Quarter 2015
Wednesday, April 22, 2015 by Richard Harris
Microsoft has released the latest Windows Store trends across categories, markets, and more for Q1 2015. Microsoft provides the quarterly analysis to help app developers understand general trends can help determine what types of apps to build or where to focus development efforts. Data from the Windows Store is presented alongside Windows Phone Stores.Windows and Window...
Amazon Updates Web App Starter Kit for Fire TV
Wednesday, April 8, 2015 by Richard Harris
Amazon’s Web App Starter Kit for Fire TV is an open source project intended to help developers get up to speed on creating simple media-oriented apps for the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. The Starter Kit provides a basic media app template that is designed for the 10-foot user experience and includes UI controls, support for the Fire TV remote, sample UI compon...
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