A look at Angry Birds 2, Nicki Minaj and Jason Statham as new Glu stars, a loyal user price hike - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

Angry birds 2

Since the launch of the first installment of Angry Birds, Rovio has released 12 games about birds and pigs. Among them there were races, and RPGs, and various versions with the destruction mechanics that the players liked. Despite the fact that the first part became a true legend in the mobile gaming industry, all subsequent experiments were not so successful. Almost six years have passed, and now the company is ready to move to the next level and present to the players a completely new product. Two weeks after the release of Angry Birds 2 on the App Store, we are ready to share our feelings about the game.

The first game session allowed me, an orthodox fan of the first series, to breathe a sigh of relief: the gameplay was based on an old, time-tested destruction mechanics. No too bold experiments - only birds, pigs and fragments of wood, stone and glass flying in all directions. At first glance it seemed that they were all the same good old evil birds. However, already at the first reading it became clear: something has changed and changed a lot.



The pace of the game has become much higher. Game progress takes place according to the Candy Crush scheme: one game session - five lives. There weren’t enough birds to deal with all the pigs - you lose your life. Game levels contain from two to five stages, and a fixed number of birds are given for the entire level.



Colorful effects of destruction, fussy animation, customizing the soundtrack - all this emphasizes the rapid pace of the game. The feathered camp rushes headlong through the game locations, preventing the player from taking a break and breaking his head over a difficult non-trivial level for a week or two. Personally, I almost did not notice how in a week of the game I was at level 70.



As for monetization, here there was a place for bold experiments, and for violent indignation of users. The free-to-play approach, when you have to pay for the length of the game session, is considered quite tough in principle, but here, from my point of view, it is competently mitigated by the presence of view-to-play. If you are one of the fundamentally non-paying players, you can almost always replenish your life by watching the built-in commercial.

Be that as it may, Angry Birds 2 is an iconic product of a large company, the result of delicate and complex work. You could even call it a masterpiece, but, unfortunately, rather a masterpiece of monetization, rather than gameplay.

Glu will release games with Nicki Minaj and Jason Statham

Now with the taste of “Statham”! Glu announced a couple more games with celebrities, the list was supplemented by singer Nicki Minaj and - unexpectedly - the face of all male publics on Vkontakte - Jason Statham. There is no details what kind of game will be with Statham yet, I hope this will not be a variation on the topic of Kim Kardashian :)

And now, joking aside, Glu resolutely approached the matter and tightly occupied a niche. Even if most of the games do not show such successes as the first game of the genre, all the same, the costs will pay for themselves. I suspect buying fans is pretty cheap, and they can play not only a game with their idol.

I don’t know how, but I’m already waiting for the game with Statham, at least out of curiosity :)

Loyal users are getting more expensive

According to the Fiksu study , the cost of a loyal user (CPLU) has grown over the past month by 30% and amounted to $ 3.21, and if you look at the whole year, this is an increase of more than 44%!

Amid this data, the CPI drop over the past month by 21% for the iOS user, which is $ 1.15, and by 9% percent for Android, is $ 2.12. There is an assumption that this drop is due to statistics that show the invariability of the average number of applications per user for two years, even though the duration of the session increased by 63%. You can find more detailed results of the study here .

A bit about advertising and publishing

Facebook presented the results for the second quarter - revenues grew by 40% and amounted to $ 4.04 billion, but net profit decreased by more than 9% compared to the same period last year and amounted to $ 719 million. This is not surprising, given the record number of new employees in the company, but the results are obvious - these efforts did not go in vain, and in the next quarter we are likely to see impressive results in net profit. More than 76% of the company's revenue comes from mobile advertising, which is 844 million DAU and 1.31 billion MAU. It is worth noting the weakening of DAU growth - 17% this quarter, although last year the growth was 19% over the same period.

Beeline became a publisher

The Russian mobile operator VimpelCom is trying itself as a publisher. While there is no clarity about how the company plans to promote products on the App Store and Google Play, whether they will preinstall games on devices sold in the network of their stores, but three projects have already been launched: Forest Farm, One Touch and 13 ". This is not the first manifestation of interest in Beeline mobile games - earlier the Beeline Tab tablet was advertised using the Shadow Fight 2 game, which increased the number of project downloads by 2 times.