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Zynga acquires Echtra, maker of Torchlight 3, to double down on RPG games
Games company Zynga has been on an acquisition tear the last several years to beef up its activity, in particular in mobile and casual-puzzle games, spending over $3 billion to pick up a range of startups across Europe (specifically Turkey and Finland) in the process. Today, however, it’s taking a turn toward more immersive, highly graphic cross-platform experiences. The company has announced that it is acquiring San Francisco’s Echtra Games, the role-playing game publisher behind Torchlight III, which is available on Steam, XBox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch.
The team will be working on releasing a new title in partnership with Zynga’s NaturalMotion studio, the company said. No other details on that were released for now.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. It’s also not clear who backed Echtra, if anyone.
But Echtra is in some ways a classic example of a gaming startup built out of a burning idea, rather than cold, calculated moneymaking — perhaps the best kind of company you can have.
Max Schaefer, the co-founder and CEO, had previously been at Runic Games, the developer of the original Torchlight series, as well as Diablo and others. Runic was shuttered by its owner, Perfect World, and so in 2016, Schaefer went on to form a new company, Echtra, with some of his Runic colleagues and others in the industry because he saw more life left in the franchise.
That perhaps didn’t play out as well as Echtra had hoped, though. After the game exited early access into general availability, it received mixed reviews, some of the criticism leveled at how the game was built, and some because of bugs.
The plan will be to bring on Echtra’s team and expertise, potentially to continue building the franchise, but more generally to help Zynga build out more of a footprint in cross-platform games, and also gaming technology, in particular around tools built on Unreal Engine, the platform of choice at the moment for RPG and other immersive applications.
“Max and his team at Echtra Games are responsible for some of the most legendary game properties ever created, and they are experts in the action RPG genre and cross-platform development. I’m excited to welcome the Echtra Games team into the Zynga family,” said Frank Gibeau, chief executive officer of Zynga, in a statement. “This acquisition will be instrumental in growing our iconic licenses and brands from mobile to PCs and consoles, while helping to further expand Zynga’s total addressable market.”
“Echtra Games is delighted to be joining the Zynga family,” added Max Schaefer. “We share Zynga’s vision that cross-platform play is an essential part of the future of RPGs and interactive entertainment and are eager to apply our vast experience and talents to this effort.”
Gaming has been one of the bright spots in the last year — no surprise, since people are spending so much more time indoors and at home because of the pandemic. Zynga, as a consequence of that, has also been on a roll in recent times, with its fourth-quarter earnings, released last month, beating analyst expectations. Its revenues of $616 million are the highest-ever quarterly bookings posted by the company. Acquisitions are a major part of its strategy these days, the company said at the time.
Going for more immersive RPG titles outside of mobile is an ambitious and potentially more expensive undertaking and is a very notable swerve away from the company’s acquisitions in recent years, which have included a majority stake in Turkey’s Rollic for $228 million, Peak for $2.1 billion, 80% of Small Giant Games for $718 million; and Gram Games for $299 million.
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Chinese mobile games are gaining ground in the US
Over the past year, the coronavirus crisis has spurred app usage in the United States as people stay indoors to limit contact with others. Mobile games particularly have enjoyed a boom, and among them, games from Chinese studios are gaining popularity.
Games released on the U.S. App Store and Google Play Store raked in a total of $5.8 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, jumping 34.3% from a year before and accounting for over a quarter of the world’s mobile gaming revenues, according to a new report from market research firm Sensor Tower.
In the quarter, Chinese titles contributed as much as 20% of the mobile gaming revenues in the U.S. That effectively made China the largest importer of mobile games in the U.S., thanks to a few blockbuster titles. Chinese publishers claimed 21 spots among the 100 top-grossing games in the period and collectively generated $780 million in revenues in the U.S., the world’s largest mobile gaming market, more than triple the amount from two years before.
Occupying the top rank are familiar Chinese titles such as the first-person shooter game Call of Duty, a collaboration between Tencent and Activision, as well as Tencent’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. But smaller Chinese studios are also quickly infiltrating the U.S. market.
Mihoyo, a little-known studio outside China, has been turning heads in the domestic gaming industry with its hit game Genshin Impact, a role-playing action game featuring anime-style characters. It was the sixth-most highest-grossing mobile game in the U.S. during Q4, racking up over $100 million in revenues in the period.
Most notable is that Mihoyo has been an independent studio since its inception in 2011. Unlike many gaming startups that covet fundings from industry titans like Tencent, Mihoyo has so far raised only a modest amount from its early days. It also stirred up controversy for skipping major distributors like Tencent and phone vendors Huawei and Xiaomi, releasing Genshin Impact on Bilibili, a popular video site amongst Chinese youngsters, and games downloading platform Taptap.
Magic Tavern, the developer behind the puzzle game Project Makeover, one of the most installed mobile games in the U.S. since late last year, is another lesser-known studio. Founded by a team of Tsinghua graduates with offices around the world, Magic Tavern is celebrated as one of the first studios with roots in China to have gained ground in the American casual gaming market. KKR-backed gaming company AppLovin is a strategic investor in Magic Tavern.
Other popular games in the U.S. also have links to China, if not directly owned by a Chinese company. Shortcut Run and Roof Nails are works from the French casual game maker Voodoo, which received a minority investment from Tencent last year. Tencent is also a strategic investor in Roblox, the gaming platform oriented to young gamers and slated for an IPO in the coming weeks.
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Area 120 is beginning to use Google’s massive reach to scale HTML5 GameSnacks platform
Hundreds of millions of users, especially in developing markets, don’t own high-end smartphones and can’t afford fast data plans to enjoy much of anything on the web.
Google has been exploring multiple ways to better serve this segment of the user base. It has tried partnerships to make the internet more affordable to tens of millions of users. It has worked with smartphone makers to bring reliable Android experience to cheap smartphones. In fact, it’s currently working on a project with telecom operator Jio Platforms in India to further lower the price point for decent Android experience.
For mobile games, however, Google has a slightly different idea to reach users. Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator for experimental projects, last year launched GameSnacks. It’s an HTML5 gaming platform, where titles are bite-sized and they load much faster and consume far less resources because of the way they have been designed.
And that idea appears to be working.
Google said on Tuesday that over the past year it has made inroads with GameSnacks, and is now ready to scale the platform and test monetization models to make it worthwhile for game developers.
In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Ani Mohan, general manager of GameSnacks, said the platform has amassed over 100 titles and millions of users.
“HTML5 gaming has been growing, especially outside of the United States. HTML5 is a great way to get games to users who have just come online and probably haven’t played games online before. These games are cross-device, work on low-bandwidth connection, and are instantly playable as they don’t require users to install any files,” he said.
These single-player games, that work on any device with as low RAM as 1GB and 2G to 3G data connection, are available to users through the GameSnacks website. They can be played on desktop as well as Chrome on an iPhone or iPad (if you wanted to give it a whirl).
Now the company is using its scale to expand the reach and discoverability of GameSnacks. Mohan said in recent weeks GameSnacks games have been made available from the New Tab page in Chrome for users in India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Kenya.
In India, Google’s biggest market by users, GameSnacks games are also arriving to Google Pay. The company is also experimenting with bringing GameSnacks games to Discover feed.
Mohan said the company is starting these integrations is select countries because that’s where many users face the challenges the platform is trying to address. “We view this as an early stage of experimentation. If it goes well, we will love to expand it,” he said.
Additionally, Mohan said the company is experimenting with bringing GameSnacks games to the Google Assistant.
“Now that few of these integrations are live, one of things we are hoping to do is talk to developers, and tell them that there is an easy way to get on Google,” he said.
Developers on GameSnacks currently monetize their games via a non-exclusive licensing model. Mohan said the team, which comprises six people (though more people from Google contribute to it), is working on helping these developers monetize their games using next-generation AdSense for Games ad formats.
“We want to help them build viable businesses over time so we’re going to start experimenting with advertising on the platform,” he said. However, this will be for a select number of GameSnacks games for now.
Emerging markets such as Africa and Asia are not new to the world of HTML games. In India, for instance, a gaming platform called Gamezop raised $4.2 million last year to expand its HTML5 games to reach more developers and embed them into over 1,000 apps.
In 2018, South African telco MTN Group launched the Bonus Bucks HTML5 game portal for its subscribers in the Southern African country. Facebook operated HTML5 Instant Games on Messenger for years until taking it off the messaging service. A quick search on our own archive returns scores of firms that work on HTML5 games in the past, though we have seen fewer examples in recent years.
Mohan remains bullish that there is a big opportunity for HTML games and this extends beyond Africa and Asia. “We don’t see these markets as our only option. These are just the markets we’re starting with because the need for HTML5 games… is especially compelling. We think the market size for this is much broader because HTML has users all around the world,” he said.
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Plex launches a subscription-based retro game streaming service, ‘Plex Arcade’
Plex, the media software maker that’s expanded into streaming in recent years, is adding to its service once again with today’s launch of game streaming. Unlike other game streaming efforts from companies like Microsoft or Google, the new “Plex Arcade” isn’t focused on top gaming titles and new releases, but rather on retro games. At launch, the service is offering around 30 games, including titles like Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Adventure and Ninja Golf.
The game streaming service was spun out of Plex’s in-house incubator, Plex Labs, and represents more of a passion project for the company, rather than some larger shift in direction, we’re told. The technology to make it available was already 95% built, so the team decided to put together the game streaming service as a surprise for users, as well as a way to expand Plex’s core mission of becoming a broader entertainment platform.
The company says it actually kicked around the idea of adding games to Plex for years, but over the course of 2020 in particular, the team was drawn to the idea even more out of personal interest and a need for a distraction.
Image Credits: Plex
The game service was built with the help of new partner Parsec and its underlying, low-latency streaming technology, Plex says. This made it possible to bring fully playable game libraries to Plex.
To build the game library, Plex partnered with Atari to license a catalog of classic titles.
At launch, the full list of games include: 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Adventure, Alien Brigade, Aquaventure, Asteroids, Avalanche, Basketbrawl, Centipede, Combat, Dark Chambers, Desert Falcon, Fatal Run, Food Fight (Charley Chuck’s), Gravitar, Haunted House, Human Cannonball, Lunar Battle, Lunar Lander, Major Havoc, Millipede, Missile Command, Motor Psycho, Ninja Golf, Outlaw, Planet Smashers, Radar Lock, Sky Diver, Sky Raider, Solaris and Super Breakout.
Due to the partnership and licensing fees involved with the project, Plex Arcade will not be a free addition.
Instead, it will be offered as a separate subscription for $2.99 per month for existing Plex Pass subscribers (Plex’s existing $4.99/mo plan). For nonsubscribers, Plex Arcade is $4.99 per month. A free, 7-day trial is also available.
Plex Arcade’s server will require either a Windows or Mac to run (due to Parsec’s limitations), which means it won’t work on Linux, NAS devices or NVIDIA Shield. Gameplay, meanwhile, is restricted to iOS, Android (mobile or TV), tvOS and the Chrome web browser.
It will also support Bluetooth and USB game controllers that are compatible with your device, or you can use a keyboard for Chrome-based gaming. Plex recommends the Sony DualShock 4 or Xbox One controller for the best results.
Image Credits: Plex
The company is taking a wait-and-see approach to expanding the service over time. If it demonstrates interest and traction in the form of subscriptions, Plex may consider growing it further.
Plex Arcade is the latest addition to what’s now a growing lineup of entertainment options for Plex users.
Over the past several years, the media software company has moved beyond being a tool to organize home media collections to also allow users to do things like stream live TV from an antenna or via the web, listen to music and podcasts, watch ad-supported movies and TV, watch the news and more.
These efforts are slowly paying off in terms of user growth. In 2017, Plex had 10 million registered users. A couple of years later, it had 15 million. Today, Plex says it has 25 million users.
Plex Arcade is available as of today.
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Google Play’s Best of 2020 Awards highlight the stressful year it’s been
Continuing its annual tradition, Google today announced its Best of 2020 awards — the company’s list of the best apps, games, movies and books for the year. Not surprisingly, the top apps picked by both Google Play users and editors reflect the stressful year that 2020 has been, with a top sleep app, Loóna, winning the title of “Best App” of 2020 in the U.S. Meanwhile, Google Play users picked streaming service Disney+ as their choice in the market.
Loóna is a fitting app to win the award this year. The sleep aid promises a mood-altering experience that helps its users deal with the negative emotions that accumulate during the day and are then processed during sleep. As anxiety and stress grow, people’s sleep patterns and REM sleep can be disrupted, Loóna explains. To combat this, its app offers nightly “sleepscapes” that combine activity-based relaxation, storytelling and sounds to help people shut out their stress and thus relax.
Unlike other sleep or meditation apps where users close their eyes and drift off, Loóna is intended to help people wind down while still on their phones. Users tap to color images while the sleep story plays. The company also this year introduced music playlists, called soundscapes.
Image Credits: Loóna
In October, the company reported its app — which is also available on iOS — was seeing daily average time spent of 34 minutes from its subscribers. And its average conversion rate from trial to paid subscriber was 52.5%. Today, Loóna says it has reached 500,000 users and people have spent more than 35 million total mindful minutes with its product to date. With version 2.0, Loóna plans to reposition its app from being solely focused on bedtime relaxation to become a broader mood management app that also covers the sleep to wake up cycle, among other things. It also plans to add personalized content recommendations.
In addition to Loóna, Google Play editors selected the free-to-play action role-playing game Genshin Impact as the year’s best game for giving players a “wondrous world to explore” while unraveling mysteries. The game, miHoYo’s first-ever open-world game, features battles with elemental magic, character switching and gacha game monetization for obtaining new characters, weapons and other additions.
Google Play users, however, selected SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off as the year’s best game.
Another app that benefitted from coronavirus lockdowns was Disney+, which won this year’s User’s Choice award for Best App. The streaming service helped families stuck at home to keep their kids entertained. Plus, with new shows like the “The Mandalorian,” the service has been a hit for adults in the family, too.
In addition to the top winners, Google gave a shout-out to a few other notable titles, including Chris Hemsworth’s training app Centr, behavioral modification app Intellect, as well as games like The Gardens Between, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells and Sky: Children of the Light.
The Play Store also awarded various gaming subgenres with awards of their own, like best competitive games, best indies, best pick up and play and best game changers. These winners include Brawlhalla, Bullet Echo, GWENT: The Witcher Card Game, Legends of Runeterra, The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross, Cookies Must Die, GRIS, inbento, Maze Machina, Sky: Children of Light, Disney Frozen Adventures, DreamWorks Trolls Pop, EverMerge, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells, SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, Fancade, Genshin Impact, Minimal Dungeon RPG, Ord., and The Gardens Between.
Other top apps won awards in categories like best everyday essentials, best for personal growth, best hidden gems, best for fun and best apps for good. These app winners include Calmaria, Grid Diary, The Pattern, Whisk, Zoom, Centr, Intellect, Jumprope: How-to Videos, Paired: Couples App, Speekoo, Cappuccino, Explorest, Loóna, Paperless Post, Tayasui Sketches, Bazaart, Disney+, Dolby On, Reface, Vita, GreenChoice, Medito and ShareTheMeal.
Movies that won “Best of” for 2020 included “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” “Just Mercy,” “Miss Juneteenth,” “Onward” and “Parasite”; while book winners included “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama, “The City We Became” by N.K. Jesmin, “Riot Baby” by Tochi Onyebuchi, “Solutions and Other Problems” by Allie Brosh and “You Had Me at Hola” by Alexis Daria.
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PUBG Mobile to terminate access for users in India on October 30 following ban order
PUBG Mobile, the sleeper hit mobile game, will terminate all service and access for users in India on October 30, two months after New Delhi banned the game in the world’s second largest internet market over cybersecurity concerns.
India on September 2 banned PUBG Mobile Nordic Map: Livik and PUBG Mobile Lite, along with more than 100 apps with links to China. The ban came after India banned TikTok and dozens of other popular Chinese apps in late June.
These apps were “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order,” the country’s IT Ministry said on both the instances.
But unlike other affected apps that became unavailable within days — if not hours — PUBG Mobile apps remained accessible in the country for users who already had them installed on their phones, tablets and PCs. In fact, according to one popular mobile insight firm, PUBG Mobile had retained more than 90% of its monthly active users in the country, a mobile-first market where 99% of smartphones run Android, in the weeks following New Delhi’s order.
(Following the ban, Google and Apple pulled PUBG Mobile apps from their app stores in India. But soon enough, guides on how to work around the ban and obtain and install the apps became popular on several forums.)
PUBG Mobile had about 50 million monthly active users in India, tens of millions of users ahead of Call of Duty: Mobile and Fortnite and any other mobile game in the country.
“PUBG Mobile kickstarted an entire ecosystem — from esports organisations to teams and even a cottage industry of streamers that made the most of its spectator sport-friendly gameplay,” said Rishi Alwani, a long-time analyst of Indian gaming market and publisher of news outlet The Mako Reactor.
“Granted Tencent did a lot of the heavy lifting in building it out, but the game’s quality itself was heads and shoulders above what most Indians were used to on smartphones. And that’s a reason many kept coming back, some eventually monetising as well,” he added.
South Korea-headquartered PUBG Mobile attempted to assuage New Delhi’s concern by cutting ties with Tencent, the game’s publishing and distribution partner in India.
On Thursday, PUBG Mobile said, “protecting user data has always been a top priority and we have always complied with applicable data protection laws and regulations in India. All users’ gameplay information is processed in a transparent manner as disclosed in our privacy policy.”
“We deeply regret this outcome, and sincerely thank you for your support and love for PUBG Mobile in India,” it added.
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Former Apple engineer and autocorrect creator builds his first app, a word game called Up Spell
Former Apple software engineer and designer Ken Kocienda, whose work included the original iPhone and the development of touchscreen autocorrect, has created his first iOS app, Up Spell. The fast-paced, fun word game challenges users to spell all the words you can in two minutes and uses a lexicon of words Kocienda built to allow for the inclusion of proper names. A portion of app revenues are also being donated to a local food bank, so you can help give back while relieving stress through gaming.
Kocienda says he had never before made a standalone iOS app.
When he worked at Apple, all the code he wrote was integrated into a bigger iOS release. So when Kocienda got the idea to develop a game, he looked to obvious sources of inspiration: his past experiences with typing, keyboards and autocorrect.
The game’s lexicon was built first with the New General Service List to serve as its foundation. This was followed by weeks of writing small programs to generate lists of candidate words — like, by adding an “S” to existing words to pluralize them, for example. And hours more were spent scanning lists to choose the words to include.
Kocienda says he also wanted the game to be fun, and personally found it frustrating that other word games wouldn’t allow proper names.
“Many games accept words like PHARAOH and PYRAMID, but not NILE or EGYPT. This doesn’t make sense to me. These are all words!,” he says.
So he built his own list that includes thousands of proper names, then added to it more slang and contractions to expand it even further. That means you can spell a word like S’MORES, which involves an apostrophe, for example.
Image Credits: Up Spell
While support for a variety of words, including proper names, is the key way the gameplay differentiates from rivals, the app’s business model is also one that’s becoming less common these days: it’s a one-time paid download.
The app is a $1.99 download that lets you pay once to play forever. Today, many games in this same space use a freemium model where the app download itself is free, but you’re then nagged with in-app hooks to buy coins or tokens to advance gameplay or unlock certain features.
Kocienda’s decision to forgo this model was intentional, he explains.
“I made Up Spell a two-minute game without much in the way of gameplay gimmicks,” says Kocienda. “You just spell words. 2020 has been a rough year for everyone, and sometimes taking out two minutes to think about nothing but spelling a few words is just the kind of right kind of stress reliever,” he adds. “I hope Up Spell brings people a little unexpected happiness to their 2020.”
Also of note, 25 cents per download is being donated to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, which works to get food to vulnerable people in Kocienda’s area.
If all goes well, Up Spell may be followed by other games with a similar model, like a sounds or color-matching games, for instance.
The new game is a one-time paid download on the App Store.
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Tencent wants to merge China’s esports archrivals Douyu and Huya
The war between two of China’s largest esports companies may soon come to a truce at the will of their investor, Tencent.
Tencent, the world’s biggest games publisher, announced late Monday a proposal to consolidate Douyu and Huya, the competing live-streaming sites focused on video games. Rather than paying in cash, the deal will see the pair enter a stock-for-stock merger.
The proposal is non-binding, but Tencent has paved the way for it to go through. In a separate deal, the entertainment giant agreed to pay Joyy, part-owner of Huya and the company behind TikTok’s serious rival Likee, $810 million in exchange for 30 million shares. Tencent will also buy 1 million shares from Huya CEO Dong Rongjie. Upon the transaction, Tencent will hold 51% of Huya’s shares and 70.4% of its voting rights.
Tencent is also the largest shareholder of Douyu, with a 38% stake and voting power.
What this means is the esports platforms that have long fought neck and neck for audiences and live-streaming hosts may soon need to work together. That’s good news for investors who have been hemorrhaging cash.
NYSE-listed Huya has a current market cap of $5.27 billion and Nasdaq-traded Douyu is worth $4.44 billion, giving the duo a combined value of around $10 billion. The pair will together control more than 300 million monthly esports users. By March, Douyu had 158 monthly active users and Huya claimed 151.3 MAUs, though there can be overlaps.
The question is who will be in charge of the consolidated behemoth. Could Mr. Dong be relinquishing control of Huya as he gives up a considerable amount of shares? Joyy already signaled its retreat in the first quarter when it stopped folding Huya’s operating results into its own report.
Ammo for Tencent
Industry observers believe the merger can significantly expand Tencent’s reach in the gaming supply chain. The company is the publisher behind blockbusters like the mobile versions of PUBG and Call of Duty, and the addition of a live-streaming empire will allow it to capture not just gamers but also the wider esports spectatorship.
It’s worth noting that Tencent has its own in-house Penguin Esports that’s a counterpart to Douyu and Huya. It’s not hard to imagine the three players integrating resources and generating synergies under Tencent’s oversight.
New challengers have sprung up in the field. While Douyu and Huya focused on esports from the outset, more general-purpose video services like Bilibili and Kuaishou have been luring legions of esports users in recent years. But lo and behold, Tencent is also an investor in Bilibili and Kuaishou.
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Roblox jumps to over 150M monthly users, will pay out $250M to developers in 2020
Gaming platform Roblox, which has seen a surge of use due to the coronavirus pandemic, now has over 150 million monthly active users, up from the 115 million it announced in February before the U.S.’s shelter-in-place orders went into effect. The company also said its developer community is on pace to earn over $250 million in 2020, up from the $110 million they earned last year.
These metrics and other company news were announced over the weekend at RDC, Roblox’s annual developer conference that was held virtually for the first time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Roblox, to be clear, doesn’t build the games that run on its platform. Instead, offers the platform for developers to build upon, similar to the App Store. Many of its most popular games are free, monetizing as players spend on in-game items using virtual cash called Robux. Some of the company’s larger individual games, before the pandemic, would average over 10 million monthly users. And over 10 games as of February claimed more than 1 billion total visits.
Image Credits: Roblox
Thanks to the pandemic, however, these gaming milestones have significantly increased in size.
During the first part of the year, the Roblox game Adopt Me! reached 1.615 million concurrent users and over 10 billion visits. A new game called Piggy, launched in January 2020, now has over 5 billion plays. Jailbreak surpassed 500,000 concurrent users during a live event held in April 2020.
In total, there are now 345,000 developers on the Roblox platform who are monetizing their games, and over half of Robux being spent in catalog is now being spent on user-generated content (UGC) items, in less than 12 months after the UGC catalog program began.
The more than doubling of Roblox developers’ earnings year-over-year is related to a combination of factors, including the platform’s growing game catalog, new development tools, international expansions, and of course, a pandemic that has locked kids indoors away from their friends, forcing them to go online to connect.
On notable factor driving the increased developer earnings, however, was Roblox’s recent introduction of Premium Payouts, which pays developers based on the engagement time of Premium subscribers in their game. Through this system, launched earlier this spring, developers earned $2 million in June 2020 as part of this program alone.
Image Credits: Roblox
During the RDC event, Roblox also detailed its plans for expanded developer tools and platform updates. This includes new collaboration tools for larger development teams, which will allow developers to grant permissions to team members and contractors to work only on a certain part of their game. It will also launch a talent marketplace by the end of the year to help developers find people and resources to help with game development.
Roblox also said it will begin rolling out automatic machine translation for all supported languages, languages including Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Spanish. This feature will help developers more easily reach international users with localized versions of their games.
Later this summer, Roblox said it will launch “Developer Events,” a new service that will help developers find one another in their local communities. Initially, these events will be held virtually, but will transition to in-person events when it’s safe to do so.
The company also signed its first music label partnership with Monstercat, an indie electronic music label known for its collaborations with gaming titles and artists, including Marshmello and Vicetone. The partnership has initially yielded 51 tracks for developers to use, free of charge, in their games. These include songs from a variety of EDM genres, such as Drum & Bass, Synthwave, Electro, Chillout, Electronic, Breaks, Future Bass, and more. More tracks will be added over time, Roblox says.
“The accomplishments of our developer community have eclipsed even our loftiest expectations; I am incredibly impressed by the unique and creative experiences being introduced on the Roblox platform,” said David Baszucki, founder and CEO, Roblox. “Our focus is to give developers the tools and resources they need to pursue their vision and create larger, more complex, more realistic experiences and collectively build the Metaverse.”
Roblox raised an additional $150 million in Series G funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s late-stage venture fund, just before the COVID-19 health crisis hit the U.S., valuing the business at $4 billion. Ahead of this, Roblox had been working to take its platform further outside the U.S. and into China, through a strategic partnership with Tencent focused on bringing its coding curriculum to the region and through added support for Chinese languages, among other things. Also with the additional funding, Roblox said it planned to help further its expansion effects, and build out more tools and its developer ecosystem.
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Over 2,500 games removed from Apple’s China App Store in early July, as crackdown begins
More than 2,500 mobile games have been removed from China’s App Store during the first week of July, according to a new report from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The removals were expected due to a planned crackdown on unlicensed games, but this data is the first to demonstrate the impact on the app economy.
For comparison, the July figure is four times the number of games that were delisted during the first week of April, five times higher than the first week of May and more than four times higher than the first week of June.
The removals have to do with Apple’s new compliance with Chinese gaming regulations.
Apple earlier this year set a deadline of June 30 for app developers to comply with a Chinese law for mobile games, first introduced in 2016. The law requires game developers offering paid downloads or in-app purchases to get a license from one of the country’s censorship bodies, the General Administration of Press and Publication of China.
For years, iPhone game developers had skirted the law by publishing their games, then waiting for their license approval. This can be a long and tedious process that could take many months, or longer if there’s a freeze underway — as in 2018. Then, the gaming industry saw a nine-month halt on the issuing of licenses as Chinese regulators reshuffled their duties to clamp down further on games containing pornography, gambling, violence and any other content deemed inappropriate by Beijing.
Major Android app stores had already enforced the 2016 rule, but Apple’s loophole allowed a mobile gaming industry to thrive on the iPhone platform in China for years.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
Apple’s decision was expected to see the removal of thousands of games from the App Store, starting in July. Sensor Tower data indicates that came to pass.
However, its data is only able to capture those games that saw enough downloads to rank in the App Store’s charts, including the game subcategory charts.
Out of the 2,500+ games that were pulled, nearly 2,000 (80%) had less than 10,000 downloads since the start of 2012, the firm estimates. Together, the titles had seen a total of 133.4 million lifetime downloads.
Combined, the removed games generated $34.7 million in lifetime gross revenue, with one game accounting for more than $10 million and six that earned over $1 million.
Notable removals included Contract Killer Zombies 2 from Glu, Solitaire from Zynga, ASMR Slicing from Crazy Labs and Nonstop Chuck Norris from Flaregames. More recently, Hay Day from Supercell was also taken down.
The changes to the gaming market as well as the coronavirus impact on the app economy have already allowed the U.S. to reclaim the top spot in terms of iOS consumer spend in Q2. According to App Annie, the U.S. saw 30% quarter-over-quarter growth in iOS consumer spend in Q2, besting China.
The longer-term fallout from the removals may show up in Apple’s bottom line, as China has been the most lucrative mobile games market in the world, noted Sensor Tower, including on iOS. In 2019, games on China’s App Store generated an estimated $12.6 billion, or 33.2% of all global games spending on Apple’s marketplace last year, the firm said.
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