Top News

#1:  Zynga Acquires App Store Optimization Platform Storemaven

Zynga has acquired mobile growth and app store optimization platform Storemaven for an undisclosed sum, making it Zynga’s first acquisition under Take-Two’s banner. For context, Storemaven is one of the pioneers in app store optimization (ASO), launching one of the earliest app store creative A/B testing capabilities in 2015 (around the same time as competitor Splitmetrics) and boasts an impressive client list, with King, Zynga, EA, Facebook, TikTok, Tinder, Uber, and Warner Brothers all having used its services. While there’s not much publicly available information on how well the business is going (the company was bootstrapped by its founders and remained in private hands until now), they are a well-respected company and frequently cited by industry peers. On paper, this acquisition and the acquisition of Chartboost last year spreads Zynga’s technology and expertise over the entire marketing funnel.

As our resident UA expert Matej Lancaric has written, ASO must be an important part of any UA campaign. You may have the best creatives in the world that attract a lot of clicks, but if those clicks don’t convert into downloads and installs, then you’ve just wasted your money. In fact, according to marketing platform AppTweak, though the average conversion rate for the iOS app store is 31%, the majority of game genres fell well below that.

It’s the same story on Google’s Play Store — the average conversion rate is 32.7% while most games fell slightly under that, though they had much higher conversion than on the app store.

The discrepancy of the conversion rates between the stores could be a combination of the Play Store having better native ASO tools and users behaving differently in the stores. This blog post by Storemaven shows that users on the Play Store are 40% more decisive, meaning that they either install or leave the app page in a few seconds as opposed to lingering and reviewing the page before taking action.

With Storemaven’s expertise and tech, this acquisition should help Zynga optimize its UA funnel and increase its ROAS in a tough post-IDFA world.

That’s all well and good, but what about the other parts of the funnel which were supposed to leverage Chartboost? When the deal to acquire Chartboost was announced, Zynga’s Chief Product Officer, Scott Koenigsberg, said, “I think one of the things that drove us to do this acquisition was we were looking for ways to take more control over our ability to monetize players and our ability to acquire players. We’re looking for opportunities to vertically integrate to get these efficiencies to create a better market for ourselves in both the user acquisition and ad monetization side.”

It’s pretty clear that what Zynga wants is essentially a content fortress, a term coined by marketing and media strategist Eric Seufert. A content fortress is a company that owns content and ad tech infrastructure that allows it to be less reliant on external means to acquire users and data, think AppLovin when it bought Machine Zone and opened Lion Studios.

A content fortress requires three elements: the right portfolio of content, an ad network, and an organizational structure that allows the integration of the tech across the entire portfolio. Zynga has been steadily working on the content portfolio over the past few years through acquisitions of studios like Rollic, StarLark, Peak Games, and Small Giant Games. With Zynga now being under Take-Two, it has also gained access to games from studios like Social Point, Playdots, and Nordeus.

The acquisition of Chartboost and now Storemaven means that Zynga has also ticked off the second requirement for constructing a content fortress. It then begs the question, what is Zynga’s progress towards its dream of vertical integration, and can it successfully wrangle all of these independently run studios to follow the vision? It does appear that Take-Two is fully onboard, as seen in its investor presentation, so this should help grease the wheels.

It won’t be easy though, and a sampling of games from various subsidiaries in Take-Two’s portfolio shows that many of them haven’t implemented Chartboost’s SDK.

Studios under Take-Two’s wing prior to acquiring Zynga, like Social Point and Nordeus, have an excuse as it has likely been too soon since the combination to integrate the SDK, but it’s strange that studios under Zynga, like Natural Motion, OMGPop (Draw Something Classic), and Small Giant Games (Empire & Puzzles), have yet to integrate it. Perhaps Zynga’s strategy (according to a statement from CEO Frank Gibeau’s Q4 2020 earnings call) of acquiring “companies that have compatible cultures that are looking for autonomy, that are interested in independence“ could be hindering this company-wide initiative.

Zynga (and Take-Two) has got all the ingredients it needs to create a considerable content fortress, and the only thing left is to execute its vision. As we’ve seen, it’s not going to happen overnight. There’ll be inter-studio politics to maneuver, and it’ll need a strong hand to ensure all these independently run studios toe the company line. We’ll be keeping tabs on the company to see how it all goes.

#2:  Ubisoft to Put More Focus on Mobile Moving Forward

While speaking to media ahead of Ubisoft’s annual Ubisoft Forward event, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated that the company will put more focus on mobile as part of its future strategy. There certainly were a number of mobile games spotlighted during the event:

• Assassin’s Creed Codename Jade was announced. It’s a “classic” Assassin’s Creed open world game set in China, and according to Daniel Ahmad, a senior analyst at Niko Partners, it’s a partnership between Tencent and Ubisoft.
• A gameplay trailer of Rainbow Six Mobile was shown. Tencent is also reportedly helping out with this mobile adaptation.
• The Division Resurgence is undergoing closed beta testing for its extraction mode, Dark Zone.
• Netflix and Ubisoft partner up. Netflix will create a live-action Assassin’s Creed adaptation, and Ubisoft will make three Netflix-exclusive games based on Assassin’s Creed, Valiant Hearts, and The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot.

Mobile has not been a happy hunting ground for Ubisoft, and it has struggled to find a hit game. The company’s mobile revenue trends don’t look very pretty either.

A recent example being the quiet launch of Wild Arena Survivors, which according to MobileGamer.biz was a failed Far Cry game that got rebranded. It has also made bad bets on some of its acquisitions, such as Ketchapp which went from being the number one Hypercasual publisher in 2016, when it was acquired, to being driven out of the top 10 publisher rankings by 2021.

The good news is that it has found a reliable partner in Tencent, which has studios like Timi (Call of Duty Mobile) and Lightspeed (PUBG Mobile) with expertise in taking western AAA IP and creating a successful mobile game. If I were a betting man (and I’m not), I believe Rainbow Six Mobile may have the best chance out of the lot to be Ubisoft’s first hit game. It’s essentially Rainbow Six Siege in mobile form, and the attacker vs defender gameplay combined with the unique operators and cool gadgets makes it stand out from the other games in the genre.

Game Launch Radar

#1: Merge Stories

• Publisher: Playtika
• State: Hard Launch
• Territories: Global
• Classification: Casual – Puzzle – Merge/Build & Battle

• Quick thoughts:

  • A mash-up of the merge and build & battle genres, Merge Stories’ gameplay is about merging items to build up your island. Where it adds a twist is that you can combine items with peasants to build units which you’ll use to raid other islands to get more resources to merge with. These units can also be merged to create more powerful versions, though this is capped to level 4. The loop of merge→build→raid is pretty fun and makes it stand out amongst the other games in the genre.
  • My greatest criticism of Merge Stories is its weak UI/UX, in particular the “tap and drag” interactions. Tapping and dragging is used for moving both the camera and the items to merge, and I’ve found that I often moved the camera when I meant to move an item and vice versa. This makes THE most important action in the game frustrating and diminishes all the fun out of the game. The other infuriating UI/UX snafu is that the game often blocks input without any indication that it is doing so; for example, in the post-raid sequence, when loading pop-ups for store deals, and in a complete no-no, for several seconds after game launch.
  • Merge Stories has a fun core game that is hindered by its, frankly speaking, terrible user experience. Developer Jelly Button needs to fix this ASAP as it holds back a promising game.

#2: Family Scapes

• Publisher: Playrix
• State: Soft Launch
• Territories: India
• Classification: Casual – Puzzle – Puzzle & Decorate

• Quick thoughts:

  • The newest puzzle & decorate game from industry leader Playrix will be familiar to players of its previous games, Gardenscapes and Homescapes. With Familyscapes, though, Playrix leans harder into the narrative aspects and allows some light narrative choice. The story follows a couple, Tim and Emma, who move into a new apartment only to find out that Tim’s parents have also moved in next door. An example of the narrative choices are selecting Tim’s response to Emma’s outfit change or a choice of beverage to buy for your housewarming. While the choices don’t really have much consequence to what happens in the story, a fun addition is that the results of your choice show the percentage of players who answered the same way (this also appears in another Playrix game in soft launch, Family Hero).
  • It’s interesting to see that while other games, like Royal Match and Zen Match, are finding success with casting off narrative in the puzzle & decorate genre, Playrix is going the opposite direction and doubling down on story. And why not when the formula has worked so well for them? While games like Homescapes and Gardenscapes have been seeing reduced downloads and DAU since the peak of the pandemic, RPD and ARPDAU is actually increasing, showing that the players that remain invested in the game are more than happy to spend.
  • One way Playrix is innovating is in the story content which, according to its app page, features “an edgy, relatable storyline.” This article from GameRefinery concludes that most game narratives in mobile fall in the cheery camp and there may be an opportunity to stand out with edgier fare. This trend for more mature storytelling is becoming more prevalent; for example, the main character in Trailmix’s maiden game, Love & Pies, is a single mother.

Other Game Announcements

• Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile is coming in 2023, with pre-registrations now open on Android. Link
• Diablo Immortal tops the global revenue charts in August. Link
• Call of Duty Mobile tops $1 billion in lifetime revenue and has been downloaded over 300 million times. Link
• The Division Resurgence enters pre-registration ahead of a closed beta of its Dark Zone mode which is essentially an extraction mode. Link
• PUBG Mobile’s newest update includes a new map, Nusa, and a new game mode, Gear Front. Link
• Adopt Me!, the biggest game on Roblox’s platform, is disabled in Belgium and the Netherlands to comply with their loot box policies. Link
• Kuro Game, the developer behind Punishing Gray Raven, reveals a new gameplay trailer for its next game, Wuthering Waves, at TGS 2022. Link
• NetEase and Shueisha Games announce a tactical hero-summoning RPG, unVEIL the World, that features characters by famed The Promised Neverland illustrator, Posuka Demizu. Link

Company Announcements

• Unity shareholders will vote on the ironSource merger on October 7th. Link
• AppLovin officially withdraws Unity merge offer. Link
• Flick Games, the developer behind Flick Solitaire, has raised over $1 million in funding. Link
• Metaverse platform Yahaha announces a partnership with 3D asset marketplace CGTrader. Link
• Gamelancer, a gaming content creator across multiple channels, announces a partnership with TikTok to distribute HTML5-based games on the platform.
• Tencent takes a minority stake in Triternion, developer of the medieval combat game Mordhau. Link

Ecosystem Announcements

• Mobile games market declines in the first half of 2022, according to Sensor Tower’s Mobile Gaming Outlook 2022 report. Link
• Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard will undergo extensive investigation in the UK and Europe. Link
• Google implements a 24-hour delay to reviews to combat review bombing. Link
• UA marketers are shifting advertising budgets to Apple Search Ads, according to a survey by Digital Turbine. Link
• Hardcore gaming on mobile has increased 27% YoY in Western Europe, according to a study by Cybermedia India. Link
• Ubisoft will put a heavier emphasis on mobile moving forward. Link

• Unity’s Pro and Enterprise plans are increasing in price. Link

• Google axes half of its projects in its internal R&D center, Area 120, which has been responsible for projects such as GameSnacks. Link
• Sensor Tower reveals that 1% of publishers are responsible for 91% of revenue on the app market. Link

Content Worth Consuming

• data.ai x GameMakers: Learning from Apex Legends’ Rapid Growth in Japan (data.ai): “Japan’s gaming market might be huge, but it is also quite insular – with a chart that is full of homegrown titles. This can make it hard for overseas-developed titles to make an impact. Apex Legends has proved an outstanding exception. Shortly after launch, the game hit #1 for 12 days in Japan’s Top 10 Games by Downloads chart (iOS & Google Play). It stayed in the top 10 for 54 days.” Link

• The video hack gaming brands are using to build player loyalty (PocketGamer.biz): “In the gaming industry, engagement is king. Lapsed players, though, pose a constant threat, especially as pandemic-related restrictions ease up. In 2021 alone, brands saw a three-point decline in gamers. To make matters worse, the cost of player acquisition is on the rise, making retention that much more essential. So how can brands win back players? By reminding them of their love for the game. The challenge is that the approach needs to be scalable and exciting, just as immersive and visual as the games people play.” Link
• Gamescom 2022: New challengers to the fore as traditional players scale back (Game Developer): “Omdia analysts discuss key trends at Gamescom 2022, including the reduced presence of key console players, accelerating interest in the role that advertising is poised to play in the games industry, and ByteDance’s rise to prominence in gaming and VR.” Link
• Interview: Abigail Rindo, Narrative Design Director at King, discusses crafting a compelling narrative in Candy Crush Saga (PocketGamer.biz): “This year alone we’ve had ice-cream-themed sporting competitions, an outdoor music festival, and a masked ball where an epic heist was staged. By connecting the gameplay of matching Candies with these kinds of events, we’re creating a narrative context that is fun and memorable for our players. We’ve also cut the character cast down and revised it from over 100 to less than 15. With a smaller, more memorable cast, we’ve found that our players are connecting more deeply to the world of the Candy Kingdom.” Link
• Automate User Acquisition with AI (Pollen VC): “This is a very good problem for machine learning AI because user acquisition managers need to manage lots of different campaigns on different channels, different geographies, different source apps. It has been proven that if you do it data-driven, then you get better results. Your campaigns are more optimal, and you get more users, more profitable users. So we saw that this is challenging. This is challenging because good UA managers are not that many. I think the number of UA managers is less than the number of gaming companies in the world, probably. And the second is to do it consistently without getting tired. It’s a perfect job for AI.” Link