Category: Technology News

Activision Blizzard acquires King Digital

Activision Blizzard, a leading publisher of games and parent company of both Blizzard and Activision, has successfully purchased King Digital, makers of the massively popular Candy Crush franchise of mobile games. The company purchased King Digital for $5.9 billion, which is more than Disney paid for the rights to the famed Star Wars franchise. Mobile games are becoming a prominent focus for many companies involved in the game industry, as these particular games have proven to be quite lucrative.

Mobile games market expected to reach $55 billion by 2019

According to Activision Blizzard, the mobile gaming space is expected to reach $36 billion this year, growing to $55 billion by 2019. This explosive growth is creating a great deal of interest among investors, as mobile games could represent a major return on investment in a relatively short amount of time. Investors have been pressuring Activision Blizzard to enter into the mobile games market for several years, but the company has only done so in a limited capacity, focusing its efforts on its more popular franchises for consoles and PC.

Mobile games are very simplistic and do not appeal to the core audience of Activision Blizzard

One of the reasons that Activision Blizzard has been slow to enter into the mobile games space is because its most popular games are not suited for mobile devices. The attraction of these games are their graphics, immersive experiences, and interactive multiplayer options. Mobile devices have very limited capabilities when it comes to providing an expansive and immersive experiences, but they excel at offering consumers access to easy-to-play and simplistic games, in both style and mechanics. Moreover, Activision Blizzard’s core audience is not incredibly involved in mobile games, as they prefer to play their games on consoles and computers.

King Digital could help Activision Blizzard break into the mobile gaming space

The purchase of King Digital may allow Activision Blizzard to begin establishing a strong presence in the mobile gaming space. In the past, King Digital saw major success with its mobile games, but has struggled to replicate this success after 2014. The company has developed some 200 mobile games, but only its Candy Crush franchise has done well, both financially and in terms of player adoption.

Several departments have been upgrading their systems so that e-citations can be issued for traffic violations.

Issuing the traditional type of traffic ticket can take a tremendous amount of time, but with the use of mobile technology, several police departments have been making it possible to speed up the process by quite a bit.

The idea will help to save time for the officers and will make the process at least a sliver less painful for drivers.

According to the clerk of the Circuit Court for DuPage County in Illinois, Chris Kachiroubas, the average amount of time that is required for a police officer to pull over an offender, speak to him or her at the side of the road and then return to the cruiser in order to write the ticket is eighteen minutes. After that, the officer is required to send the ticket to the office of the clerk, where other employees must enter it into the system. A court date must be issued and a notice must be mailed to the offender. It takes a full 10 days before the offender will even learn what his or her court date will be. By that point, the date could be within two weeks. To speed up the process, many departments have looked to mobile technology.

Using mobile technology has made it possible to skip many of the manual processes involved in issuing tickets.

By using mobile devices as a part of the traffic enforcement process, it becomes possible to issue e-citations. That has reduced the average amount of time required to create the ticket from having been 18 minutes to a much smaller 6 minutes, said Kachiroubas.

The new system allows a police officer to use a handheld mobile device or laptop in order to scan the driver’s license of the person who has been pulled over. The information on the license automatically populates the digital ticket so that it does not need to be entered manually. The officer can then select the offence(s) and that information is automatically entered into the system of the police department and the country. A court date is automatically generated.

The mobile technology device of the police officer is connected to a special printer located within the cruiser so that the ticket can be printed out, including the court date for the offender.