Viber game platform, Candy Crush on Windows Phone, Google and Faceebook game of the year - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

Viber messenger launched its gaming platform on iOS and Android

Today Viber Games is available in Belarus, Ukraine, Israel, Singapore and Malaysia, and in Russia the service will be launched on December 20. In other countries, it should appear in early 2015.

The first games at Viber Games were Viber Candy Mania and Viber Pop from Storm8 Studios and Wild Luck Casino from Playtika. The main characters in them are recognizable characters from the Viber Sticker Market. In games, there is a rather active social component: competitions with friends, high score tables, the ability to send virtual gifts, and much more.

The company has not yet named the studios that will work with it, but with such an incredible DAU, like Viber, the projects are doomed to success.

Kabam leaves the browser market

Kabam began to appear quite often in our news bulletin. This time the news is rather mixed. Kabam sells most of its browser projects, including those that support mobile versions of games, for example, Kingdoms of Camelot. Only games developed by third-party studios and posted on the site remain.

The buyer was RockYou, a developer and publisher of social games.
According to Kent Wakeford, Kabam COO, the company intends to focus on mobile games and at the same time provide support for players of browser projects.

If all is true, then this is rather good news. Companies focus on what they do best, and this should improve the quality of the games themselves, and, just as importantly, the level of support in the games.

Windows Phone Saga

Not so long ago, King officially announced that it is stopping the porting of its games to Windows Phone. The statement caused a mixed reaction from the developers - is development at all worth the time and money from the giant? But soon the discussion came to naught. And - like this! - unexpected news: Candy Crush game has been released for devices from Microsoft!

No messages, no information, why the plans changed - just a fait accompli. The mystery behind seven seals. Was it more rational for King to finish what was already partially done, or did the management consider it unreasonable to miss another market? Or, perhaps, a large corporation was very convincing in its arguments?

By the way, this is not the only hit that came to Windown Phone in a week: a day earlier (December 10) Minecraft was launched.

Monkop alternative to TestFlight and Hockeyapp for Android

The Monkop service will help developers test their applications on a variety of Android devices. To do this, you need to upload the apk file to the site, and after a while you will receive detailed statistics on compatibility, security and user experience on your inbox.

According to the project description on the company's website, Monkop employees work in a laboratory where they have access to smartphones and tablets on Android with almost all versions of the operating system, various screen sizes and performance.

The system not only deals with detecting errors or deficiencies of the application, but also offers developers various ways to solve them. While the project is in beta testing, and in December, the service can be used for free.

But imagine that all kinds of applications and games with various functions and interfaces will be sent for testing. In fact, their testing is fundamentally different. In this case, it is expected that Monkop will only be able to automatically verify that all possible screens are supported and the application is installed on each device, but no more. It will be difficult to verify the quality of the test or to check whether the work is really done on all of these devices. And surely the company will not be responsible for its tests.

Facebook and Google named the best game of the year. Each his own

According to Daniel Morris, the key parameters for evaluating the game of the year for Facebook are player ratings and the depth of integration with the social network. Thus, the game of the year was Cookie Jam, and the top five new games were Bubble Witch 2 Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga, Hero Defense, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, Klondike.

The best mobile games of the season of 2014 according to Facebook were Boom Beach, Crazy Taxi: City Rush, Disco Bees, Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, Star Wars: Commander.

Google decided to draw up its rating, based primarily on the number of downloads. The most popular in the past year were Candy Crush Saga, Don't Tap The White Tile, Farm Heroes Saga, Subway Surfers and Clash of Clans.

Judging by the tops of the ratings, 2014 in the application market will be remembered by the popularity of clones, strategy games, and candy-food match3.