Tag: mobile games

Baidu aims to take advantage of foreign talent in order to excel in the mobile gaming market

Mobile gaming is becoming more popular in China and companies that have helped the growth of these games, such as Baidu, are beginning to seek expansion beyond the country’s borders. Baidu is China’s largest search engine company and has played a pivotal role in the expansion of the mobile games sector. The company operates a mobile gaming platform that accounts for some 100 million application downloads each day. Baidu recently visited Canada in order to spark relationships with talented game developers.

Company meets with developers from Vancouver and Toronto

Representatives of Baidu Mobile Games met with more than 20 game developers in Vancouver and developers from Toronto. Both Vancouver and Toronto are considered “hot spots” when it comes to animation talent and mobile game development and, as such, Baidu has been making an effort to connect with this talent in the hopes of making new mobile games more available in China. Competition in China’s mobile gaming space is beginning to grow at a rapid pace and more companies are looking for foreign talent to give them the edge in the booming market.

China is an attractive market for ambitious game developers

China is a very attractive market for the game industry as a whole. An estimated 300 million people play mobile games every day. These people are willing to pay for the games they play, if these games are able to hold their attention and are not too big in terms of data. Many foreign development studios have been trying to break into the Chinese market, but doing so has been quite difficult. Having the backing of a company like Baidu can make this process much simpler and give developers access to a huge demographic that is hungry for mobile gaming.

Baidu has yet to announce partnerships with Canadian developers

Things move quite quickly in the mobile gaming world, so the developers that Baidu has met with may already be creating games for the Chinese company. These games may be released in a matter of months, but Baidu has not yet made any official announcement concerning any partnership it has made with Canadian game developers.

New mobile ad platform raises $7 million in funding.

mNectar, an app promotion startup, has created a new mobile advertising platform called Playable, which allows gamers to demo a game on their mobile device before they choose to download or purchase it, and the company has raised $7 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associate (NEA).

The new groundbreaking mobile ad platform provides consumers with a better shopping experience.

In an interview with GamesBeat, CEO and founder of mNectar, Wally Nguyen, said “We created this company to solve the problems of mobile advertising.” He added that “Our ads give you a chance to instantly sample games and apps. We can connect people with the right apps.”

According to Nguyen, their “playable ads” improve the shopping experience of potential mobile game buyers as they browse through new game options. “Today, everything else doesn’t tell you what you are getting,” Nguyen commented. It is the hope of mNectar to solve the app discovery problem that so many mobile app developers have due to the huge amount of mobile game competition that exists within app stores, which makes the chance of being discovered quite difficult.

The CEO of mNectar said that the firm is equipping mobile ads with cloud delivery and mobile app virtualization. This enables consumers to try out a playable demo of an app or a game prior to downloading it. This results in higher advertising revenue for application developers and produces an experience that is more enjoyable for mobile users.

The interactive ads are many times more effective than other mobile advertising.

Presently, the majority of mobile users depend on friend recommendations, app ranking lists and app reviews in order to determine which game to play. Standard ads, such as pop-ups, banners and videos, do not give the consumer any real indication of what the actual gameplay would be like.

The user retention rates of interactive advertisements are four times more effective compared to other types of ads like interstitials and they are two times better than mobile video ads. According to Nguyen, these results have received verification by independent ad measurement firms.

Playable gives users the chance to experience the real product for a brief time. This helps them to instantly decide whether or not the game or app is worth downloading or buying. The CEO explained that the unique mobile advertising platform leads to fewer retention issues because users know precisely what they will be getting when they download the app.