Kliuless? Gaming Industry Insights #51
Hi, my name is Kenny Liu, and each week I compile a gaming industry insights newsletter that I publish broadly. Opinions are mine.
See more or subscribe at: https://tinyletter.com/kliuless
Business Development
- LVP raises $80m in seed funding for video game startups
- Manticore Games raises $30 million to enable a new generation of game creators
- Improbable acquires The Multiplayer Guys
- Unity acquires game marketing and analytics specialist deltaDNA
- App Annie acquires mobile analytics firm Libring alongside rebrand
- Epic paid 505 Games parent over $10m for Control PC exclusivity
- Nintendo experiments with subscription through Mario Kart Tour's Gold Pass
Art / Design
- The Animation of Hollow Knight
- Podcast: Teamfight Tactics with Greg Borenstein
- Related: Teamfight Tactics hits 33mm monthly players
- Survival mastery will build “a lingua franca” in the PUBG community
- The Small But Important Change 'Celeste' Made to Its Celebrated Assist Mode
Mobile
- All 71 launch games for Apple Arcade
- Google Play Pass offers 350+ Android apps and games for $5/month
- Related: Devs that sign on to Play Pass are paid by the time players spend in their games
- Report: Facebook News Feed getting 60% of total ad spend across Facebook, Instagram
- Report: The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2019
XR: AR / MR / VR
- Facebook announces Horizon, a VR massive-multiplayer world
- Apple seeks patent on retinal hologram projectors for AR glasses
- Oculus Quest will get hand-tracking, Oculus Link to play Rift PC games
- Ex-Owlchemy devs land $4.4 million for new XR studio absurd:joy
- Respawn's first VR game is Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond
- Intel True View is a cool technology for immersive sports viewing
- Bloomberg: Virtual Reality Is the Latest Dinner Party Trick
Esports
- Enthusiast Gaming completes complex merger with Luminosity
- Louis Vuitton partners with Riot Games on League of Legends World Championship
Tech / Entertainment
- The Complete Beginner’s Guide to TikTok
- NYT: The Slow-Burning Success of Disney’s Bob Iger
- Related: Bob Iger Remembers Steve Jobs
- Bloomberg: Facebook to Buy Startup for Controlling Computers With Your Mind
- Hollywood & games 4.0 — How the love-hate relationship has evolved over time
- The Reimagining of Imagine Entertainment: Ron Howard & Brian Grazer Entering Streaming Video Wars
Overtime
- The 50 best video games of the 21st century
- Project xCloud game-streaming test goes public in October
- Dead Cells' creators are handing off development to new studio
- Ubisoft put an official video game design course inside a video game
- PlayStation cuts out the middleman, starts selling its own consoles and more online
- The Secret to Success of Supergiant Games: No Forced Crunch, Yes Forced Vacations
- ‘Close Friends’ on Instagram, for a Monthly Fee
- For Gen Z, it’s all about just hanging out on FaceTime
- The making of Devotion, China's least favourite horror game
- Niko Partners: Asia cloud gaming to reach $3 billion and 60 million gamers by 2023
- Chinese influencer simultaneously live-streaming on 40 accounts
See more or subscribe at: https://tinyletter.com/kliuless
LinkedIn: @kliuless