Mobile gaming is big, really big.
But then we all knew that right?
Well, apparently Zynga didn’t, and they are somewhat unsurprisingly going straight down the toilet. To give you an example, two mobile gaming companies Supercell and Gung-Ho have made something in the region of $250 million in revenue over the last year, and Supercell alone took in some $100 million inprofit. Zynga made about $250 million in revenue and made about $4 million in profit. That’s a number most would call unsettlingly low and it appears that Zynga agrees because they’ve now hired Microsoft’s Don Mattrick is taking over as CEO to try to bring the ship back on course and away from disaster.
Which in itself is a bit of an interesting choice as Mattrick’s previous position at Microsoft was heading up the team who managed to quite spectacularly destroy a large portion of the Xbox One’s market through a series of terrible decisions related to features and marketing. The accusations leveled at him and Microsoft were that they were out of touch with the consumer and that they had no idea what the people on the ground wanted from a games console.
So his departure from Microsoft may appear like he’s decided to move to greener pastures, but as to how much of that decision was made for him may never be known.
In other areas of the mobile world, it would appear that Facebook wants to move into becoming a mobile games publisher. For a good while it seemed a little odd that Facebook had acquired Parse (UPDATE 2017: We all know what happened there.), what did a social network want with a Backend as a Service? But now it seems that question may be answered by looking at where the money is at in gaming. It might appear to be the developers who are making a killing, but you just have to compare those amounts with what the average publisher makes and you’ll see who’s really raking it it. As Facebook continues to struggle to monetise itself, setting up what could essentially be a money printer for them is a smart move, and it will engrain them heavily into mobile culture in a way that they’ve not been before.
So it seems that it’s still all systems go for mobile game development, and if you need a Mobile Backend to go with your development project, look no further than Kumulos. We’ve got a Mobile Backend as a Service that can help get your app, whether it’s a game or not, straight through development and launched out into the world faster than you ever thought possible. So why not talk to us today?
