Kabam invested $ 120 million, Tango focuses on games and a new mobile hit from the Japanese - the main mobile news of the week

Alibaba invested 120 million in Kabam

Alibaba, a Chinese company, has invested $ 120 million in Kabam, and under the terms of the agreement, the two companies begin a partnership under which Kabam will distribute its mobile games in China through the Alibaba Group applications. Thus, Kabam gets access to a new market with a huge audience in China. Other details of the transaction have not yet been disclosed, but it is known that at the moment, Kabam's assets are valued at $ 1 billion.

Kabam CEO Kent Wakeford expects the company to increase revenue for the year to $ 550 million. Note that in 2013, the company's revenue was 360 million dollars. The forecast is quite real, because the Asian market accounts for 50% of the gaming space, which is a strategic priority for the company.

The deal also means that Alibaba intends to maximize the base before the initial public offering of its shares. Alibaba plans to conduct an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “BABA”. Experts believe that the IPO will allow the Chinese holding to raise about $ 20 billion, with a company valuation of $ 150-168 billion.

New "Godzilla" of Japanese grossing - Monster Strike

The Japanese top is one of the most interesting due to its dynamics and non-standard projects. Puzzle & Dragons still hold first place, but competitors are on the alert. Mixi recently announced that their flagship project, Monster Strike, has scored 10 million installations in Japan and Taiwan. They are also close to concluding a deal with Tencent to distribute the game in China. The game took second place in Japan's grossing and is desperately fighting the leader, occasionally circumventing it both in the App Store and on Google Play. The game helped the company reach a new level, raising its value to 4 billion dollars. More details about the success of Monsters and Mixi are here .

Tango: “Need more games!”

A messenger network with 200kk users - Tango - indicated that you shouldn’t joke with games. They recently received $ 280kk from Alibaba (a Chinese giant, not a trickster from a fairy tale), after which they hired Jim Ying as vice president of game publishing, and also allocated $ 25k to invest in game developers around the world. It’s clear that the investment is prepared only for those who are ready to make or place their games under Tango.

Who is mister Jim Ying? He moved to a new job from GREE, where he would be vice president of publishing and partnerships. Prior to etgo, Senior Vice President of Publishing at 6waves. In short, a man savvy in the vice presidencygame publishing. With such a serious backlog, Tango is going to develop its gaming direction, plus it will create an internal game development team.

A large number of users have received messaging networks and are trying to make the most of this advantage. However, when placing a game on such a network, the developer gives from 20 to 30 percent of the network’s profit, plus an additional 30 percent of the platform on which the grid works - Apple or Google. In such circumstances, attracting developers becomes a serious challenge. According to Tango, 70% of grid users play games, plus, in games, Tango users have two or even three times LTV (lifetime value) compared to non-network users. Mr. Ying also said that Tango has developed an “attractive proposal” for profit sharing for game developers, and the final interest will depend on how well the game performed before. And for games with excellent performance, additional marketing channels outside the grid will be used. Direct investment and team buying are also considered. More games, more features!

Research on the optimal length of the application name (Many numbers and graphs)

Sturat Hall has prepared entertaining data on the names used in the App Store applications, as no one knows how the delivery mechanism works, the author analyzed the top 200 applications in each category, so the data is quite representative. The author tried to find the dependence of the position in the rating on the length of the name and got the following picture:


The distribution is fairly uniform, the only rule that follows from this graph is that most use combinations of 1-7 words. In addition, the author recalls that the maximum name length on the App Store is 255 characters, although the same search on the iphone can normally display only 30 characters, Google play is similar, so most developers try to stay within this limit by banal change in the number of words in the name it is unlikely that anything will be achieved.
After analysis, the author himself offers the following set of rules when choosing a name:

• Try to look authoritative (no one takes seriously applications with 255-character names)
• Try to stay 2-7 words long in the title
• Try to convey as much as possible the meaning of the application in the name
• Try to make a name that attracts attention without icons and screenshots.

In addition to the designated graph, the author gives a lot of different interesting statistics, so I advise you to look at the author’s blog .