The first mobile game that officially overcame the bar of one billion dollars earned was a card butler with elements of Match-3 – Puzzle & Dragons.

The release of the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper caused a wave of criticism. Fans of the original game were not ready for the mobile continuation of the cult series. 

The secret of NaturalMotion’s success and its purchase by Zynga, King’s response to accusations of theft, advice from Facebook and the reaction to them from Pixonic – this and much more in our traditional digest for the past week.

Last week, App Annie summed up the results of last year, telling about the main events of 2013. 

Kingdoms At War by A Thinking Ape ranked 8th in the iPhone box office top in 2010, 13th in 2011. Then the game spent a couple of years in the top 40, and a month ago broke into the top twenty. How does this ancient project still manage to make a profit?

Last week, Flappy Bird took first place among the free apps of the App Store and Google Play. The simplicity of the game’s graphics is compensated by a rather complex gameplay, which probably caused its popularity.

Last December, a record average number of daily downloads for 2013 was recorded in the United States. At the same time, there was a slight drop in the cost of a loyal user. 

Is the situation on the market of mobile and social games as cloudless as the representatives of the platforms claim, Igor Klyukin, the leading analyst of Pixonic, analyzes in his article “The Departing Train”.  

Game Analytics in the material about analytics distinguishes two basic concepts – telemetry and metric. Sometimes they are used as synonyms, but this is not entirely justified.

At a press conference dedicated to the Zynga development strategy for 2014 (about it in a separate article), it became known: Zynga buys the British publisher and developer of mobile games NaturalMotion for $ 527 million.

Game Analytics publishes articles on game analytics issues. The new material deals with the basics of this process and the sources of information.

The British company Revolution has sent the game Broken Sword – the Serpent’s Curse: Episode 1 to Apple for consideration. If everything goes well, then the game will appear in the App Store very soon. Previously, the project has already been released on PC and PS Vita.

The Office for the Organization of Fair Trade in the UK has issued standards for projects with in-game payments. Will free-to-play survive after their introduction? 

From 15 to 20 million mobile games built on the Unity cross-platform engine are installed on iOS devices every day.

China’s application market is characterized not only by extensive, but also by intensive growth. Chukong (formerly CocoaChina) and Wandoujia told about how much games earn in China.

The low visibility of apps on the App Store and Google Play has long been no secret to anyone. What to do when there is no money for traffic, but I want to promote the application? Go to smaller stores – say analysts mobyaffiliates.