“Game-powered machine learning” could make searching for music online easier. When it comes to online music, we really are spoilt for choice. So spoilt it can make uncovering new music to match our tastes or finding a track when we don’t know the artist or song title, a hit and miss affair. Engineers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have developed a new approach called “game-powered machine learning” that they claim is just as accurate as other methods, but is cheaper and has the potential to let users search every song on the web using a text search.
We all know how difficult it can be using a text term to search for multimedia content online. Many Internet radio sites, such as Pandora, pay experts in music theory to categorize songs and make catalogs easier to search, but this is time consuming and expensive. Another method, often employed by online music stores, involves basing recommendations on the purchases of others with similar tastes in music. Source: UCSD. Rovio makes a Mighty Eagle's $68 million in profit in financial squawk. Rovio Entertainment reports 2011 financial results Solid performance across all business areas Helsinki, Finland – Rovio Entertainment Ltd, the world's leading provider of mobile entertainment and creator of the Angry Birds franchise, today had the pleasure of announcing the financial results for the full calendar year of 2011. Total revenue amounted to €75.4 million ($106,3 million) driven by strong growth in game download activity and consumer product sales.
Earnings before tax were €48,0 million ($67.6 million) or 64% of total revenue in 2011. "The strong growth in revenue clearly demonstrates the popularity of the Angry Birds brand. " The Angry Birds franchise fuels Rovio's performance The financial outcome of 2011 is very positive for Rovio. The Consumer Products business area, which includes both Merchandising and Licensing income, generated revenues that represent a about 30% of total revenue in 2011. The number of employees grew from 28 to 224 during the year 2011. Angry Birds merchandising, licensing made up 30% of Rovio's 2011 revenue. Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment says it is "very optimistic" about its financial outlook for 2012, having today reported strong revenue and profits for the 2011 fiscal year.
Mikael Hed, Rovio CEO, put the notable results down to the popularity of the Angry Birds brand, although he noted that the company needs to "stay focused on entertaining our millions of fans by continuously developing new and innovative products and services" if it wishes to continue this success. Hed commented that by the end of the last fiscal year, the Angry Birds franchise had seen over 648 million downloads across all versions and platforms, and more than 200 million active monthly users. During the 2011 fiscal year, Rovio recorded total revenues of 75.4 million euros ($106.3 million) and earnings before tax of 48.0 million euros ($67.6 million). The company's employee count grew from 28 to 224 staffers. "The heavy investments made in 2011 to all business areas will be seen in future products," said Hed. Indie studio Tiger Style breaks down key trends in its iOS sales data.
[In this article originally published on Tiger Style's official website, studio co-founder and indie developer Dave Kalina breaks down the sales numbers for his team's iOS titles, noting some important sales patterns that emerge after a game's launch.] Waking Mars has been on sale for two months, and we just released a big update, so it seems like a great opportunity to reflect on its progress in the App Store.
While we're at it, we'll also show you the sales numbers for Spider and Spider HD -- something we've wanted to do for a while now. I hope you find it interesting! Why Share Numbers? We believe strongly in the spirit and value of sharing information. When we were starting Tiger Style, there were many 'gold rush' style news articles and blog posts highlighting small garage developers making significant money in the App Store. By giving back, perhaps we can serve as a data point that other developers can use to make informed decisions in their own business. Encouraging Risk-Taking.
After Another Big Loss, Nintendo Holds Its Breath For The New Wii. Mobile games taking big bites out of Nintendo, Sony's handheld biz. Richard Firminger, managing director of EMEA territories at metrics firm Flurry Analytics, told a GDC Europe audience today that revenue that is coming from the iOS and Android is killing off the handheld video game market, where dedicated portable game systems like Nintendo's 3DS and Sony's PlayStation Vita currently compete. Firminger said that the share of revenue for iOS and Android games in the overall U.S. handheld and mobile game market has grown from 19 percent of a $2.7 billion market in 2009 to 58 percent of a $3.3 billion market in 2011.
"It's really sort the biggest content revolution that we've ever seen. It's exciting and it shows that indies can kill a very, very established market. " However, Firminger warned that, in order to tap into its incredible potential, developers had to "stop building the future of their businesses on hunches, or who speaks loudest around the table when you're discussing the next big project. " "The retention rate is really depressing. " Nintendo Q1 results: Wii sales cut in half since 2011, but 3DS sales more than double. U.S. retail game sales suffer continuing decline in March. U.S. retail game sales suffer continuing decline in March Video game software revenues at retailers in the U.S. dropped 26 percent to $585.1 million in March, which falls in line with analystexpectations, but continues the industry's consistent declines over the past severalmonths.
Hardware proved to be the biggest detrimental factor in an overall $1.1 billion industry-wide decline, with $323.5 million in hardware revenue representing a 35 percent decline from March 2011, according to data from the NPD Group. "Hardware really slowed down this month and all systems saw a unit sales decline versus last March, and on an average sales per week basis, versus February 2012," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier. "That said, the high definition console systems fared better than many other hardware platforms. " The top selling console for the month was Microsoft's Xbox 360, which Microsoft says sold 371,000 units. The top ten best-selling games at retail for the month were as follows: 1. Defender's Quest: By the Numbers. Let's start with sales numbers. We went on sale January 19th. As of this writing, we've been on sale for about two and a half months. All dollar values are in USD. *This does NOT represent a profit of 46.7K.
Altogether, we put in several thousand hours of labor that still needs compensating. We sold the game on www.defendersquest.com by partnering with FastSpring, a popular online payment provider, which takes 8 percent of our gross revenues. On February 7th, we started letting players on the portal Kongregate buy the full game with "kreds," the site's virtual currency. We started with the special introductory price of $6.99 on our site, and 50 "kreds" (about $5) on Kongregate. Why two different prices? 1. 2. 50 kreds is a better impulse purchase price than 70, since the smallest amount of kreds players can buy is 50. Though the game is a complete, finished experience, we plan to add more content later in an upcoming Gold edition release. Next, let's look at a chart of our sales over time: Triple Town fortunes. The past month must have been frenetic for developer Spry Fox, especially regarding its hit puzzle game, Triple Town.
From partnering with Playdom on Facebook to initiating legal proceedings against 6waves Lolapps for cloning it, and also releasing smartphone versions, this tiny indie studio has repeatedly been making big waves. In the middle of it all, before heading to the lawyers but after launching on mobile, we spoke with CEO David Edery about his studio's fortunes. Today we present the first part of our discussion, about the pernicious effects of cloning on indie creativity and the development of Triple Town's Android and iOS versions. Read the second part here, covering Spry Fox's Playdom deal, why indies are crucial to gaming on social networks, and why Spry Fox won't be developing for consoles any time soon. How did you develop the mobile versions?
How have you fitted the mobile versions into continued development of the web versions? Why not connect them? Another App Store Millionaire: 'Doodle Jump' Close To 2 Million Downloads, Over $1 Million In Sales. In-depth: Xbox Live Arcade sales analysis, March 2012. [Gamasutra contributor Ryan Langley examines March 2012's Xbox Live Arcade debuts and continuing successes, with charts and Leaderboard data showing the performances of titles like I Am Alive, Sine Mora and Wrecked.] For March this year we close another Xbox Live House Party promotion -- I Am Alive and Nexiuz being at the front of the pack for a chance of big sales.
The question is, did they succeed? Alongside that we've got games like Shoot Many Robots, South Park: Tenorman's Revenge and Sine Mora -- can these games also live alongside those that get the extra marketing push? We've pieced together Leaderboard statistics and Metacritic ratings from all new titles in March, allowing us to determine what went right or wrong for the newest games, older titles, and downloadable content. Next With Nexuiz After a huge response from other shooters like Gotham City Imposters, it's interesting to watch this game fall so hard, especially with the push of a promotion. Certainly Alive Defenders of Robots. Has video game retail become an entirely 'hits driven' industry? Is the video game industry, in particular the brick-and-mortar side of the business, becoming more "hit-driven"? That's the claim that Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter made in his most recent note on March's retail sales.
It's a temptingly straightforward thesis, but one that probably deserves some scrutiny. To explain a bit more about Pachter's thesis, he explains the hit-driven business as one in which "gamers [are] willing to pass on an abundance of catalog titles in anticipation of the industry's premier franchises. " That is, while some middle-tier games languish on shelves, gamers are content to play the games they own until a truly big game comes along. I think there is another aspect to this phenomenon: the increasing concentration of sales of these popular games immediately after launch. Activision Blizzard, in particular, can be seen doing this with the last few years of Call of Duty releases. So, are sales becoming concentrated among the top-selling games? Amazon Appstore’s Revenue Per User Beats Out iOS, Google Play, Says Game Developer TinyCo.
TinyCo, a mobile gaming startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, is yet another major game developer that has come forward to show that revenue per user on Amazon’s appstore is tracking much higher than it is on Google Play. The company, which has top #25 grossing games on both iOS and Android, looked at its title Tiny Village, a prehistoric-themed simulation game that’s available on all three stores from Google, Apple and Amazon, and found that when you break it out by platform, Amazon’s store monetizes 80 percent better per user than iTunes. If you break out the tablet market, Amazon Kindles monetize 43 percent better per user than iPads do. So Amazon is doing even better than Apple is, according to their numbers.
This is not to rag on Google Play though. TinyCo’s numbers are actually not that bad when looking at Google’s store. Update: Some readers are complaining that I am pointing to an isolated case of a single developer, which of course isn’t representative of an entire market. NPD: 40% of freemium players pay for in-game upgrades. The latest report from the NPD Group has found that 40 percent of people who have played an upgradable freemium game have made an in-game payment to extend or enhance the experience. The Insights into the Freemium Games Market report, which surveyed over 6,000 individuals including both children and adults, notes that women and girls are "significantly more likely" to play freemium games than men, yet are less likely than men to pay. The NPD Group says that around 38 percent of the U.S. population currently plays some form of freemium gaming, with the majority of those players who opt to pay doing so within the first month of playing a particular game.
Therefore, says the NPD's Anite Frazier, it is important for developers to consider features that drive quick conversion to pay for players. However, while females are more likely to continue playing a freemium game after the initial try, males aged 13 to 34 are most likely to abandon freemium gaming entirely after trying it. TinyCo: Amazon App Store is a "gold mine" Mobile developer TinyCo believes that Amazon is a potential "gold mine" for developers seeking to improve monetisation rates for Android products. The company's last game, Tiny Village, was released on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon, with the latter proving the most lucrative app store by far. Taking the game's iTunes ARPU across all devices as 100 per cent, TinyCo found that its ARPU on Amazon was around 80 per cent higher. Narrowing the field to just tablets did nothing to buck the trend, with the Kindle returning ARPU around 43 per cent higher than iTunes.
And with Amazon's recent introduction of one-click in-app purchasing TinyCo expects its app store to become more and more lucrative for developers. This contradicts data released by Flurry at the start of the month. However, Tiny Village's Google Play smartphone revenue was only 18 per cent behind iTunes, and only 35 per cent behind across all devices. ComScore: Games Media UK Results, Q1 2012. ComScore has released traffic data for calendar Q1 2012 (January - March) and GamesIndustry International has compiled a list of the top 20 gaming media websites as defined by UK traffic numbers. The list below is ordered by Total Unique Visitors, and features specialist sites that primarily offer videogames editorial such as news, reviews or other features. This table does not indicate absolute rank, but is a comparative list of specific games media outlets.
Sites excluded from this listing include content aggregation websites, advertising networks, digital distribution websites, file download sites, official publisher websites, free games sites and cheats sites. A full games site ranking, which would also include all of the above along with videogame editorial sites, is available to purchase from comScore. Please note that comScore has two methods of measuring traffic to websites. The following table is a list of consumer gaming sites for the period January-March 2012: Nintendo posts first annual loss of $460 million, predicts turnaround next year. Report – UK and US mobile gaming market now 125 million strong.
A mobile gaming survey commissioned by PopCap has found a growing pool of consumers hungry for mobile gaming. PopCap’s survey, the third of its kind, found a market of more than 125 million people playing mobile games in the UK and US. Over 44% of all respondants had played games in the last month, up 29% from 2010. More new gamers are joinging the fold, too, as 40% of these self-confessed gamers had only recently picked up the hobby, a serious jump on the 22% in 2009.
Of these new players, 9% got on board after buying a tablet, which is estimated to have brought about 11 million mobile users to gaming in the last year. The study claims 36% of mobile gamers now own a tablet as well. 12% of all mobile gamers play only on a tablet and people who play on both devices spend more game time on a tablet than a phone.
Those who responded to the survey said they spent about 46% of all gaming time on mobiles. PopCap has released the full results, downloadable as a PDF file here. Timber! iOS and Android take 60 percent cut of mobile gaming dollars. Xbox Live Arcade sales analysis, May 2012. Tencent accounted for a third of all Chinese online games revenue last quarter - report. Digital vs. Retail: Five big publishers. Diablo III becomes fastest-selling PC game ever, deluge of broken PC mice likely to follow.