On Friday, May 17, a few days ahead of the announced deadline, the acceptance of pre-orders for the NVIDIA Shield portable Android console began.

All our reports from Flashgamm Moscow 2013 and KRI 2013, as well as a detailed review of the gaming market for March from App Annie, details about Google I/O from San Francisco and the most important news from last week, read our digest for last week.

Two days later, ticket prices for White Nights: Mobile Games Conference, Europe’s largest conference on the development and promotion of mobile games, will increase. On June 27-28, 2013, Rovio, Supercell, Chillingo, Facebook, Wooga, Big Fish, FishLabs and G5 have already noted in their calendar of events. Have time to register before May 22.

Speaking at the Google I/O 2013 conference, Google Play product manager Ibrahim Elbuchikhi gave a lot of interesting figures and facts regarding the monetization of mobile applications in the official Android store.

App Annie and IDC claim that mobile games have overtaken portable console games in terms of user spending in the first quarter. It also turned out that there are 1.1 billion smartphone users and 160 million tablet users in the world.

The company of one game is a statement of a clearly negative nature. So they scold those studios that have been living on earnings from a single title for many years now. But is it really that bad (to live thanks to the brand)?

The British casual monster King announced that in early summer a mobile version of Pet Rescue Saga, the third part of the “royal saga”, will appear on iOS and Android. 

Paying players in the US spend more every month on mobile games than ever before in history, reports PocketGamer.biz with a link to SuperData.

Expert project Hi-Tech.Mail.Ru and IDC conducted a study of the Russian smartphone market in the first quarter of 2013.  According to its results, the share of Android-based devices in shipments for the year increased from 39.7% to 70.9%.

The second day of KRI was held under the banner of Game Insight. As part of the game developers conference, the authors of “Natives” and “Dragons of Eternity” held their own mini-event – a four-hour seminar “Mobilization”.

Google has published in the official developer blog some details about the Google Play Game Services service, and also talked about the launch line of games. 

Ubisoft, at a conference of game developers taking place in Moscow, told by its own example exactly how to recruit game designers.

Korean developer of free-to-play games Nexon has published a financial report. Compared to last year, the company’s revenue grew by 46% and reached $ 437 million, and net profit for the first quarter of 2013 amounted to $ 129 million. 

Yesterday, May 15, the Google I/O 2013 conference opened in San Francisco. Naturally, there were figures indicating the continued growth of the Android platform, and loud announcements. But let’s talk about everything in order. 

On the first day of KRI 2013, a round table “The present and future of mobile games” was held, which was attended by representatives of App Annie, Flurry, Game Insight and Zeptolab.

According to analysts from Gartner, global sales of smartphones to end users in the first quarter of 2013 reached 210 million units, which is 34.8% higher than in the same period last year (147 million) and 44% higher than in the fourth quarter of 2012.

 

May 15, Cosmos Hotel, the first day of the Eleventh Game Developers Conference, or, in short, KRI and our first impressions of it.

Rovio Entertainment yesterday announced the opening of a new division of Rovio Stars, which will be engaged in publishing third-party mobile projects.