Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank has received permission from its board of directors to acquire a controlling stake in GungHo Entertainment, which literally blew up the cash tops of mobile app stores with the Puzzle & Dragons game.

Mikhail Ryazanov, Head of the mobile direction Mail.Ru Group, at the Winter Nights: Mobile Games Conference, answered several questions to our editorial staff.

The Australian studio Halfbrick, which created Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, will soon release its new creation – Fish Out of Water.

At the round table “Free-to-Play Game Design: a review for the year” at GDC 2013, the speakers analyzed the latest trends in “free” games using the example of the King – Candy Crush Saga project.

As part of the GDC 2013 conference, Havok, a company specializing in middleware development, announced the Project Anarchy toolkit designed to create three-dimensional mobile games. 

The EA-owned PopCap studio announced two games being developed within its walls under the Plants vs. Zombies brand.

Charles Yim, executive director of PlayHaven, spoke at the Winter Nights conference about how to learn to understand players, and also gave examples of optimizing marketing campaigns in order to extend the life cycle of the game and achieve maximum earnings.

Company King.com celebrating its 10th anniversary, it announced a rebranding. Now it will be called simply King. The MAU of the company’s mobile products has grown to 49 million. 

The founder of Kabam at GDC 2013 told how the company ported the box office hit Kingdoms of Camelot from PC to mobile platforms.  

Yesterday, at the GDC 2013 conference, the company Wargaming.net announced a new project – mobile MMO World of Tanks Blitz for smartphones and tablets running iOS and Android.

Marianna Polyakova, Director of Product Management, told about how PlayFirst uses metrics obtained from hit games to continuously improve them using concrete examples at the Winter Nights conference.

The console sells games, even if this console is built on Android and costs $99. Apparently, the developers of Ouya understand this perfectly well: the other day it became known that it will be possible to play games with NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 on their console.  

Apple has added warnings about the presence of IAP in the description of applications on the App Store. But will this help parents avoid “unexpected” embezzlement in the future?  

Ludei has announced that its HTML5 platform of the same name now supports 3D. 

A series of high-profile announcements continues. This time the Wizard of the Coast company was pleased. At the Boston PAX East 2013, she announced the transfer of Dungeons & Dragons board games to iOS. 

The marketing company Trademob decided to find out which platform is better for promoting applications: the one from Apple, or the one from Google?

Akin Babayigit, Strategic Partnership Manager at Facebook, at the Winter Nights: Mobile Games Conference, spoke about the strength of the platform, its significance for developers and focused on its capabilities for mobile games.

The Japanese card hit recently turned one year old. Despite his young age, he managed, in fact, to reshape the global mobile games market, remaining a mystery game for most.