David Y.

DeamPlus Games Earned $12M+ IAP Revenue Amids “Hoa Hoa Hoa” Season 🍂 Game of Vampires: Twilight Sun, an empire-building RPG, is the ultimate vampire fantasy brought to life. 🌘 Gothic castles, luxurious dark interiors, a spooky atmosphere — and a ton of pop-culture references! From Twilight and The Vampire Diaries to Blade and The Addams Family — this game is packed with nostalgic nods that resonate with players through its ASO, ad creatives, and character design. 🧛‍♂️🏰 The right timing and a touch of luck drive this success even further: with the game’s global launch, the unexpected revival of the Twilight franchise came into play! Millennials are fueling it with nostalgia, while Gen Z is having fun with those cringy moments the old movies have. ✨🧛‍♀️ For a deep dive into this phenomenon and the insights game developers can draw from it, check out Diana Levintova's fantastic article for AppMagic. Halloween couldn’t be a better time to dive into the industry insights, spooky vibes, and, of course, “hoa hoa hoa” 🎃👻 Link in the comments! 👇

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Navigating the complexities of porting to Apple Vision Pro? Unity's guide offers 6 essential tips to streamline the process, from leveraging Unity's AR Foundation to optimizing your app's performance on Vision Pro. Check out the full guide for expert insights and practical advice to ensure your app shines on Apple's latest platform - https://lnkd.in/dCcxYKem. #AR #VR #AppleVisionPro #Unity #realtime3D

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Dave the Diver is getting a Godzilla DLC, and it is free!! This new DLC will see Dave come face-to-face with the might Godzilla himself, though in keeping with the true spirit of Godzilla you won’t be fighting the big lizard so much as helping it overcome one of its adversaries, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, from the 1966 live-action movie of the same name. Players will need to pilot the G-Force submarine to take Ebirah on, and work alongside Godzilla to protect the planet from the mighty crustacean’s threat. You can claim this DLC right now from the below digital console and PC storefronts, and you’ll need to do so before November 23rd, 2024, because it’s only available until then. After that point it will seemingly either become a paid DLC or completely unavailable, so make sure you scoop it up: 💾 PlayStation Store: https://lnkd.in/eHPjPi4C 💾 Steam: https://lnkd.in/eFGy6_Y5 💾 Nintendo Switch eShop: https://lnkd.in/ehr7r3zH

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Come learn about Xsolla's strategies to improve your mobile games revenue.

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Creating games is very difficult. And building games is challenging. The process of build requires to compile the code and all the data required in the game in a specific sequence involving many dependencies. As such monitoring the outcome is essential, but not sufficent. What if we were able to predict the outcome of a build ? What if we were able to decrease the required computing resources while increasing our iteration capability ? #Ubisoft #Ubisoftlaforge #innovation

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Hello friends. Last month, I was looking for more work and finally secured some on Reddit from a guy who needed help with preproduction on his Tabletop RPG / Card Battler. After a meeting with him, he showed me what he had and it was quite impressive. He had a prototype of a card-battler using a tabletop RPG battle system, but he had little to no documentation or planning—he's been chiseling away at his game for a few months in his spare time after work. I suggested that before I dive into art, we flesh out the game design and the rest of the game up to around an 80% mark and let the last 20% be changes, additions, and that sort. As your game evolves, it'll come into it's own and you'll find things that need changed or added, this accounts for that. He agreed and I asked if I could work on all this since I did that with my game Alligori and lead the team from start to finish with our vertical slice, and I know tabletop RPGs very well. He agreed and we did the whole song and dance with paperwork, and he sent over a retainer and I began work the following Monday. Three weeks go by and we're working great together. I'm fleshing out his game, adding some meat to the backbone of his prototype with classes, abilities, etc. My goal was to write out as much as possible and then trim content to fit it into a 1-year development cycle. So I flesh a bulk of his game out, and then categorize it more into a game design document that clearly conveys concepts, ideas, and mechanics. Catching up, last week was the final week of my first month and payment was due. He just up and disappears like a fart in the wind, I have no idea if he's alive, incarcerated, on vacation, or what. He didn't remove me on Discord, so I don't entirely suspect malicious intent, but he gave no notice. That's the risk you run with working 1-on-1 with a client remotely, one day they can just up and disappear. I do have paperwork, so I may pursue legal action. If he doesn't log on by Friday, I'm going to publicly release all my documentation and the GDD I wrote on here.

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UMG's Partnership with SoundLabs Brings Advanced AI Technology to Music Production Universal Music Group (UMG) has announced a collaboration with SoundLabs, a music technology company known for its AI tools designed for music creators. This partnership will allow UMG's artists and producers to use SoundLabs' MicDrop plugin, an AI-powered tool compatible with all major digital audio workstations. The plugin can be trained on an artist's voice, enabling the creation of custom vocal models for studio use. UMG, which works with prominent artists like Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Adele, and Kendrick Lamar, highlights that this tool provides artists with full creative control and approval over the generated content. The MicDrop plugin offers several innovative features, including the ability to modify vocal timbres, transform speech into singing, and change the language of a vocal recording. This technology allows artists to release foreign-language versions of their songs without recording new vocals. Additionally, it enables them to perform duets with their younger selves by utilizing archival recordings. UMG emphasizes that these vocal models will be exclusively available for the artists' personal use and not for public access, ensuring ethical application and full control by the creators. This development follows UMG's recent partnership with Roland, where they introduced seven ethical principles for AI in music creation. These guidelines aim to ensure that artificial intelligence enhances, rather than replaces, human creativity. Previously, UMG also explored licensing artists' voices for AI-generated songs in collaboration with Google, demonstrating their commitment to integrating AI ethically in the music industry. SoundLabs, led by Grammy-nominated producer and software developer BT, is at the forefront of AI music technology. BT has a history of working on innovative audio plugins like iZotope's Stutter Edit and BreakTweaker. He expressed enthusiasm about the partnership, emphasizing the potential of AI to democratize creativity and reduce barriers in the creative process. UMG's Chris Horton reiterated the company's focus on keeping artists central to their AI strategy, ensuring that technology serves artistic expression. The MicDrop plugin is set for release later this summer, marking a significant step in the evolution of music production. #MusicInnovation #AIMusic #CreativeTech #FutureOfMusic

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TOP NEW CREATIVE “STAR WARS: HUNTERS” BY ZYNGA The competition for IPs remains fierce in the mobile games market. The latest initiative comes from Zynga, with the Star Wars franchise. 🌌🎖️ The game is a hero shooter focusing on player versus player (PvP) combat, featuring 3D stylized art and a core gaming experience. ⚔️ The game includes various Star Wars characters, allowing players to engage in strategic team-based multiplayer battles. It features multiple game modes and leverages the Star Wars license to create an immersive environment that appeals to fans of the movies and the shooter genre. 🤩 Two weeks ago the game began its growth stage and has reached 2.5MM downloads and US$740k in IAP revenue so far. 📈 It's no surprise that to achieve this result, the Star Wars IP is central to the UA strategy. 🎯 Drawing on a stylized cartoon, the flagship creative video does not make direct reference to the gameplay. So much so that one wonders: is this an ad for a game or a movie? 🤔 Created on June 6, the creative video has achieved over 6.7MM impressions to date. Of these 48% are in 🇨🇦 and 40% in the 🇺🇸 . The source of the impressions is 100% Mintegral. The apps with this creative are "Paper .io 2" by Voodoo (15%) and "Piano Tiles 2" by Kooapps (9%). 👇 Take a look below and I'll show you the creative video and some information about it. 👇 For this research, we have used the following AppMagic tools: Top Soft Launches, Ad Intelligence, and AI Magic Helper. - X - This research was supported by Cost Center. Cost Center is a tech company that offers a powerful suite of tools for Mobile Publishers to optimize UA campaigns. 💪 Its portfolio includes amazing clients such as Amanotes and Lihuhu. 🏆 Do you like it? 🤩 Call my friend Yi Ting Ho. She'll show you a demo. 😉 #marketing #gaming #gamedevelopment #HypercasualByCarlosPereira

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Have you seen the multi-team staffing diagram where the timing between projects is lined up just right? It is the one where teams ramp up and down between pre-production, production and post-production to keep everyone assigned. When I ran my own studio, I planned out scenarios just like this. In thirty years, I’m uncertain whether I’ve ever seen one play out that way. A project often takes 3+ months longer to sign than your worst case – if it gets signed at all. Even with an internal dev team, management may change strategy or be unable to initiate a project for a myriad of reasons. Then there is the drumbeat of project cancellations that rumbles just below the surface of our industry… there are a thousand reasons a game might not reach release. For those games that make it to launch, it is unlikely the gold date resembles what was written on the whiteboard in the original greenlight meeting. And if you cannot properly predict when a game starts, ramps or ships, then this efficient team diagram is only a goal… not a plan. And so, we can continue to handle team staffing as has been commonly done for decades and see the cycle of ramp ups, layoffs, closures, restarts, rehires, strategy changes, more layoffs and closures endlessly repeat. When a full team is carried, the difference between the staffing goal on the diagram and the executed reality is paid in forced decisions of taking any work possible and an elevated risk of losing it all.  No one knows the count of digital tombstones in the video game studio graveyard. The human damage is massive and the turmoil chases talent out of our industry. Changing jobs, moving, losing healthcare in the US… the impact is severe. An alternative is to hire only the core team and become experts at bringing professional consultants and co-dev partners in and out as needed. Sometimes they cost more than equivalent employees in the same territory, but you will not be responsible for their burn when they are not on the project. Thanks to the pandemic we now have the tools, tech, knowledge and industry expertise to properly manage remote team members. Who is core? Only you can answer that. Employ those who together can create magic, who have the skills and disciplines that make you stand out, and who are central to maintaining learnings from project to project. Contract everyone else. I realize there are exceptions, but often, hiring only a core team provides you with a better culture, a nimbler footing and an extended runway to handle what this crazy industry is going to throw at you next. Plans will go awry one day and the key to better options is to have the time to maneuver. Without a wider embrace of the core team concept, the industry devastation we witness around us right now, which is in no way new, will repeat for the next thirty years.

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Check out my latest video showing how to use COPA Gaming’s Quest System Starter Pack!

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Your Voice Production Pipeline is Too Smooth – And That’s the Problem. If your voice production process feels effortless, you might be doing it wrong. Wait, what? Isn’t a smooth pipeline the goal? Not if “smooth” means you're missing opportunities to improve. When voice production feels seamless, it’s often because: - You’re sticking to the same talent pool, limiting creativity. - You’ve stopped pushing for nuanced performances because "good enough" works. - You’re avoiding challenging projects to keep things predictable. The best games and animation voice performances don’t come from perfect, cookie-cutter pipelines. They come from teams who thrive in the chaos. That’s why working with a small, independent studio can make all the difference. We don’t get bogged down by rigid processes or endless layers of approval. Instead: 1. We adapt faster because we’re closer to the work. 2. Communication flows directly, not through a chain of middle managers. 3. We’re free to experiment without fighting against red tape. At Bigmouth Audio, we embrace the messiness of creative production to deliver performances that stand out. When the stakes are high and timelines are tight, we don’t just manage chaos—we make it our advantage. Think your next project could use a flexible, fearless partner? Let’s talk. #VoiceProduction #GameDev #Animation #IndieStudio

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It's Monday Microcast time! - Does Sony need new IP? - How well is Star Wars Outlaws performing? - Should PlayStation give up on live service after Concord? - Do I get the intro right? All these questions and more are answered right here:

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I think one of the things that's so frustrating about Xbox's recent studio closures is that it is stark contrast to the things they *say*. They say they want original, interesting games, but then they shutter Tango. They say they want to take big swings at live service stuff, but then release Redfall in a disastrous state and don't have the bottle to fix it before shuttering the studio. They say they want interesting, original content, but then close studios working on original content to bolster Call of Duty. Xbox needs platform-defining exclusives. But they've also shown they don't have the understanding to ship stuff that can legitimately compete with what Sony's doing with Playstation's first parties. What happened to Starfield? Redfall flopped. Halo Infinite's SP "infiniteness" faceplanted. Halo Infinite's multiplayer took years to sort out a fatally awful progression system, and it still mostly sucks, but who cares because no one's playing it. Forza Motorsport bombed. Where is Gears? Where is the next thing from id? From MachineGames? When it's one studio flailing around, maybe it's the studio. When it's ***everything*** under the Xbox Game Studios banner, it's a different situation entirely. What the hell are they doing over there? But the point is, when you see closures of studios when the platform is totally failing to deliver anything of meaningful, differentiating value to players... it's time to call it. Phil Spencer's driven the Xbox into irrelevance. How you could spend hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve *so little* is genuinely shocking to me.

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Before The Last of Us, Uncharted 4, The Order and Days Gone. Socom 4 was the first game that leveraged the knowledge of the 5 years of Imageworks Digital Double work. I wanted videogames to benefit from a technology that was not appreciated at the time by movie audiences. It was hard working with all your friends and passionate leaders who really wanted to pioneer a space we truly believed in. Audiences just didn’t agree with the work we were doing. The box office dictates what you can and can’t experiment on. We were either too early or just in the wrong entertainment segment. Digital Doubles weren’t needed in film in 2004 but they were needed in videogames. Gamers craved more realistic experiences but they were beholden to the limitations of the hardware unless it was live-action video cinematics. It was an uphill battle to get game developers to accept that this would work. What was once a niche is now a requirement in games. Can you imagine games without scanning and motion capture today? We don’t talk about it but 15 years ago. This was not what developers wanted. They hated it. It replaced them. Was too lofty of a goal and the tooling sucked. Sound familiar? The AI tools for film are now exactly where we were in games 15 years ago. Not only is it not going away but it will become a critical part of making new films, shows, TikToks. AI on it’s own is not going to revolutionize anything. It’s just going to be a new tool that helps revolutionize many things. The time it takes to get into a production worthy state will be much less. You don’t have to love it but isn’t going away. And videogame pipelines are now going to infiltrate linear ones. It’s the circle of synthetic life.

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My heart tonight goes out to the Archiact team, shut down after over a decade, and the 5 folks affected at Payload Studios. Both instances were reported by the companies themselves. There is not an official estimate for cuts at Archiact but a trusted industry source, Obsidian Game Industry Layoffs, suggested this number might be around 35. --- FOR THOSE AFFECTED - WELCOME TO AMIR SATVAT'S GAMES COMMUNITY We will not rest until every gamer is employed. OUR TOOLS WORK - We reach over 400,000 unique viewers monthly and nearly 4,000,000 unique viewers annually across all platforms. - Our games community has facilitated over 2,400 jobs and 45,000 coaching conversations, the largest impact of any games individual or community in the universe. - Our data shows that we can double your job-seeking success from 6% to 12% on average for those who engage with all our tools over a multi-month period. - Over 20% of all trackable games jobs found touch some part of our community. - Always free (nothing wrong with those who charge; just our choice), always with love, and always without ulterior motives. AMIRSATVAT.COM - Our main hub offers 18 resources for games employment assistance with an uplifting, easy-to-use design. - Use our template for Games Org Support Posts (Category 4, Resource 10) to maximize the visibility of those affected at your games company. We have completed 105 posts highlighting over 2,500 candidates. Discord - Join us at discord.gg/amirsatvat, a complementary, live, games career support community with over 5,000 members. Currently open to new members. LinkedIn - Follow me and join the discussion here on LinkedIn, with over 94,000 members and 1-3 daily posts providing support and career assistance in the games industry, the largest Top Voice games community on the platform. How the Games Community Can Help - Spread the Word: Reshares and comments increase resource visibility. - Join Our Movement: Choose one or several of the 16 ways to help gamers on AMIRSATVAT.COM under "How You Can Help," or provide advice on Discord.

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Another stack of resources and layoff support compiled by the incredible Mayank Grover! If you need support or have some to offer, connect and boost that vis so every ship can benefit from the tide. 🙌🌊🙌 #gamedev #games #layoff #support #job #resources #mentors

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How we solve problems for clients as a voice production company. Game devs don't come to us because they need voices for their game. They come to us seeking solutions to problems. Usually problems they have faced on previous projects with other audio / voice production suppliers. 1. Lack of resources in house - The most common pain point we help solve for our clients is their lack of internal resources and time. They want to protect their team's focus and time so that they can work on the most meaningful and important tasks to them. — 2. Communication - Another common issue we hear from clients & prospects is that when they have worked with bigger agencies / studios / suppliers - it can often result in communication frustrations. It's not quick and easy for them to get a hold of the specific people they need. Often having to go through a few levels of Production Managers to get assets or answers. — 3. Diversity in talent casting - "We're hearing the same voices in a lot of games" "We want to make sure we're being more diverse with our casting this time" Two things I hear all the time from prospective clients. The problem: the traditional way of voice producing a game was to hire a studio in London or perhaps L.A and have that studio cast and record the actors. Trouble is - the studio is relaying on booking out that studio time to increase revenues which means they can only work with actors local to them. The solution: Focus on going to where the actors are. Multi Location Voice Production. — 4. Getting the best people - A real frustration for our prospects when working with bigger vendors / suppliers is the people they get assigned to their project. Our clients and prospects always want the A team. The vendor's best people. However, they often get the junior or temp Producer looking after them with the big suppliers. They want the best team with a personal touch. Alright that’s it. Hope it was useful :) #GameDialogue #VoiceCasting #VoiceProduction

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