Has the bubble burst for the world’s most lucrative mobile game? Publisher King announced its latest quarterly financials yesterday, fuelled by Candy Crush Saga. On the surface, the numbers are still startlingly big: the company reported $593.6m of revenues and a net profit of $165.4m for the second quarter of this year, with 485m monthly active users (MAUs) and 138m daily active users (DAUs) of its games across web and mobile. Yet the revenue and DAU figures both fell quarter-on-quarter, as King – which went public earlier this year – warned investors of “lower gross bookings from Candy Crush Saga” during the last quarter, which were “only partially offset” by newer games. Cue a plunge in the company’s share price, amid fears that the puzzle game’s massive audience may be about to lose its sweet tooth en masse. The cautionary tale is another social games firm, Zynga, whose revenues and daily active players have halved since the summer of 2012, at the peak of its ‘Ville’ games’ success.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…