Serious loss of Blizzard, addition to Oculus Rift team and new publisher of Boom Beach game - top weekly mobile news

Team Oculus Rift

One day it became known that the senior producer of PopCap (PvZ, PvZ2) Bernard Yee leaves the company for the sensational virtual reality project - Oculus Rift.

Bernard himself states that “he was struck by the level of his emotional reaction to the demo” and “virtual technology allows you to experience the effect of immersion like no game before.” Well, you can only congratulate Oculus Rift on yet another loud addition to an already quite stellar team. Recall that the previous high-profile acquisition for the company was Kenneth Scott, a former art director of the Halo 4 project.

Oculus Rift becomes a kind of mecca where developers from successful and well-known companies come together. One has only to eat up that this faith of “mammoths” of development will come true and we will soon become witnesses of a new chapter in interactive entertainment.

Supercell Decides To Launch Boom Beach In China With Publisher

The publisher will be for most people the unknown Beijing company Kunlun Wanwei. It is worth noting that we are only talking about local Android markets, which are quite numerous in China (there are no Google Play in China).



For some, this decision will be controversial. Especially considering the fact that Boom Beach is doing very well in the list of the most earned games of AppStore China on both the iPhone and iPad (20th and 5th, respectively). Supercell could completely open its own representative office in this country and hire the best people to promote the game. But even if such giants sign their powerlessness, then the rest of the market player can only follow suit.

This is confirmed by the fact that it’s very long, difficult and costly to go out on Android stores themselves. But dozens of Android stores generate about 70% of revenue from the entire mobile games market in China.

Beijing Kunlun Wanwei - satisfied with a large company with more than 30 gaming products. There are not so many mobile games in the AppStore and Android markets. Most of them are client and web games.

Blizardov left the creative director after 17 years of work

Something is happening to the old world. The news that stirred up all the news sites of the game world: Rob Pardo himself, the flesh of the Blizzard flesh, leaves his company, where he was a designer and a leading designer for 17 years. WoW: TBC, W3: RoC and TFT, SC and SCBW, D2, titles that have become classics, games that have had an unconditional impact on the entire gaming industry. According to Time magazine, in 2006 Rob was named one of the 100 most influential people.

Recently, he emphasized the growing importance of mobile games, games on tablets and the opportunities that small teams carry, capable of creating something new and innovative in their work, which is not always possible within the framework of AAA projects. I wonder if this somehow indicates his future work? Well, time will tell.

1 million downloads - a good result or an attempt to reassure investors?

The project of Supernauts, the Finnish company Grand Cru, collected 1 million downloads in a week , got the Editor’s Choice mark in 40 countries and hit the hit parade of the best new products in 155 countries. But here it is worth considering, but are these really outstanding indicators? We worked on the project for 3 years and invested more than $ 16 million in it, and whether these investments will return is still to be seen! Grand Cru themselves called their project "the most ambitious iOS game of all time." Strongly said, but this is really an experiment, as a result of which Minecraft was combined with a farm in the Sci-Fi setting, where the main character becomes a hero and saves the inhabitants of the earth.
But back to the question: yes, 1 million downloads is an impressive result in itself, but nothing outstanding in comparison with other players in the market. Although this is the first project from this company and it is difficult to compare with the "Whales", which demonstrate tens of millions of downloads in the first few weeks of the life of projects in the stores. The game cannot boast of cash results - in the tops the project was noted only in native Finland.

As a result, we get that Supernauts has nothing to brag about yet, and probably this news is more directed to investors in order to somehow please them.