Continuing Consolidation In The Gaming Industry; Video Game Sales In June Down 10% And More…

Glue Mobile Has Acquired Two Game Development Companies
Mobile game developer Glu Mobile has acquired two game development companies to increase its game development capacity. Over the past year Glu Mobile has been active with developing free-to-play social games for iPhone and iPad and recently also Android-powered phones.

Griptonite Games, one of the acquired companies, employs about 200 people and is known for its console game and Nintendo DS development, but will now focus primarily on social games for mobile devices. Blammo Games, has already partnered with Glu in the past on social game development projects.

Both of the acquisitions where paid for in stock.

Free-To-Play Smartphone Games Are Outselling Packaged Software Games
Sales of traditional, packaged software games are getting killed by the play-for-free mobile game offerings. As a result video games revenues dropped by 10% in June of this year, according to market research firm NPD Group. One of the reasons for the decline is the hefty average $40 price traditional game publishers and developers are charging gamers for packaged software games. But the biggest impact is caused by gamers shifting from handheld devices, such as the Nintendo DS and 3DS, to iPhone, iPad and Android mobile devices.

Facebook Is Enhancing User Discovery Of Social Games
Facebook is planning on updating the algorithms that drive the discovery methods it is using to filter game stories so that they are shown only to users that actually are actually playing social games.

Beyond 2011 the product road map calls for the engineering team to look at new game platform features that may work for Facebook, like voice chat and text chat.