Chinese Gaming Publisher Yodo1 Raises $5M In Round Led By Singapore's SingTel Innov8
Yodo1, a Beijing-based company that works intensively with Western game developers to bring their titles to the Chinese market, raised $5 million from SingTel Innov8, the corporate venture arm of a mobile carrier. An earlier investor, Chinese online game maker Chang You, also participated in the round. Yodo1 has a co-production model where they actually get access to the code base of a Western developers’ game. They modify the graphics, virtual goods and music for local Chinese tastes. An example CEO Henry Fong points to is Ski Safari, a game from Brisbane, Australia’s Defiant Development. In the platformer title, a character races up and down ski slopes (kind of like last year’s indie hit Tiny Wings out of Germany). For the Chinese version, they made the architecture of the houses in the background more Chinese, added a zither to the music and put in terra cotta warrior outfits. “We’re a full blown co-production team,” Fong said in an interview a few weeks ago at San Francisco’s ...
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Android Picks Up The Pace In Smartphone Sales Over iOS Globally, While Windows Phone Continues With Modest Gains, Says Kantar
Google's mobile OS Android continues to power ahead as the world's most popular smartphone platform, according to figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, the WPP-owned market research company that tracks sales of handsets across key markets on a 12-week rolling cycle. In the nine markets surveyed by Kantar -- Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, UK and the U.S., all detailed in the table below -- the only one where Android did not dominate was Japan, where Apple's iOS just about eked out a lead against it (49.2% versus 45.8% of sales) for the three months ending March 31. Elsewhere, the figures indicate that regardless of whether the market is developed (U.S., UK, Germany) or emerging (China) or struggling financially (Spain), collectively, Android handset makers are winning them all, with sales figures for the platform reaching their high point in Spain, at 93.5% of all smartphone sales.
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Apple And Google's App Stores Now Neck And Neck – Except On The Metric That Matters Most To Developers: Revenue
On nearly all fronts, Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android marketplace, Google Play, are essentially tied. Apple offers some 800,000+ apps, Google claims 700,000 officially, but third-party reports peg it much higher. Google Play is also now growing at a faster rate than iOS’s App Store, in both downloads and revenues. And Google Play reached close to 90 percent of the iOS App Store downloads in Q1 2013. But there’s one area where Google isn’t winning yet: revenue. According to a new report from app analytics firm App Annie, the iOS App Store has maintained its lead in terms of monetization, earning around 2.6 times more revenue in the last quarter. During the holiday season – when users are receiving, activating and then filling new smartphones and tablets with apps – that lead was even higher, with iOS generating roughly four times more revenue. The U.S. and Japan are leading the revenue drive in Apple’s App Store, though that could change in the near-term. Last year, ...
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In-App Purchase Revenue Hits Record High: Accounts For 76% Of U.S. iPhone App Revenue, 90% In Asian Markets
Though it’s well-known that many of today’s mobile applications generate revenue through in-app purchases, a new report released today shows how powerful this money-making mechanism has become. Last January, just over half (53 percent) of iPhone App Store revenue in the U.S. was attributed to in-app purchases, but as of last month, that number has climbed to a record 76 percent. The figure varies by region, however. In Germany, for example, it’s lower – only 61 percent of revenue in February came from these in-app sales. Meanwhile, in Asian markets the number soars. In Hong Kong, Japan, China and South Korea, at least 90 percent of all revenue comes from in-app purchases. These findings are revealed in the latest report from app store analytics firm Distimo, which took a deep dive into the data in this month’s report. In particular, the report examines trends here in the U.S., looking at the business models chosen by app publishers who are using in-app purchases in their mobile ...
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Multiplayer Mobile Gaming Network Nextpeer Adds 100K Users A Day As A Ninja Bike Race Takes Off
It can be a tough life out there for mobile-social gaming platforms. With Apple’s Game Center covering the bare basics and GREE’s recent shutdown of OpenFeint, it’s arguable that there isn’t that much room for another mobile gaming platform. Yet there are a few startups that are trying to do it by offering something differentiated. Nextpeer launched about a year and half ago as a way for independent game developers to add multi-player mode to mobile apps. While building these gaming platforms can be slow-going at first, a breakout game called A Bike Race of Ninja Temple is helping to add about 100,000 users per day to the Israeli startup’s network. Muoyo Okome, a Microsoft business manager who moonlights as an indie game developer, used some open source code for games that resemble last year’s hit Tiny Wings. Tiny Wings is an indie hit out of Northern Germany and a physics game that has you press the screen to roll a bird off different hills. He then re-skinned it with a ninja-bike ...
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