Serge Versille
Cloning or crying wolf? CSI Hidden Crimes VS Criminal Case
French gaming industry behemoth Ubisoft has just published CSI: Hidden Crimes on iOS and Android. Controversy is never far in the gaming industry, as games very often draw inspiration from their illustrious not-so-distant predecessors, and outright cloning is an ever-present worry (ask the Vlambeer guys). In this case, CSI Hidden Crimes uses mechanics that are […]
Servers crash, some parisians won’t get to vote in 2014
People living in Paris had up until the 31st of December to register on the electoral list in their respective administrative districts. Failing that, they would be unable to vote in the upcoming 2014 municipal elections. I won’t get into the absurdity of closing electoral lists months before the actual elections are held, when abstention […]
DragonBox continues its mathematics learning revolution with Dragonbox 12+
The education revolution is gaining momentum online, with MOOCs and startups like Coursera getting more and more people and universities to join in. Breakthroughs on earlier education are however still very few. French-Norwegian startup We Want To Know is focused on K-12 education, and is revolutionizing the way mathematics can be learned – though once […]
3 French games studios in trouble – are Social & Mobile still keys to success for games studios?
Two social gaming studios publicly announced they were closing these past few weeks in France, Mandala and Qozmo. We often hear from companies having a hard time that the Facebook market has been becoming tougher in recent years, and if several companies in the same space fail in a short time, this can turn into […]
JCDecaux bringing real Open Data for Paris bike riders
Paris, like many other French cities, has a network of bicycle stations called Velib, where people with (very cheap) subscriptions can take a bike for free for as long as a half-hour. However, up until now, the data of what stations are full of available bikes, and which have space to put one back, was […]
Social games start-up Pretty Simple Games hits gold
Back just over a month ago, Criminal Case was off to an impressive start, with nearly 100k DAUs. Fast forward, and this hit by Pretty Simple Games sees 1.5M daily players. The kicker(s)? Still almost no ads, organic growth being a staggering 97% of their total growth, and projected revenues for the game in 2013 […]
Twitter silent in the face of French Government’s demand for censorship. Good or Bad?
Politicians and civil society have much less of a free speech culture in France than what exists in the US. Recently, there has been a bunch of offensive trending hashtags in France that have been quite widely publicized. France has reacted officially by whining, through the voices of its press secretary first, and now through […]
eReputation and my shitty experience with RueDuCommerce
It’s that time of year again, where gifts are exchanged between people who love one another, or pretend to with varying degrees of acting talent. It’s also the time of year where customer services of big retailers are stretched (much) thinner than their desire to provide said service. Everyone’s experienced the long queues, hotlines asking […]
Why Facebook game Criminal Case is seeing explosive organic growth
Pretty Simple Games is a 40 persons social games company here in Paris, who’s just published Criminal Case, a hidden object game on Facebook. Another one, right? So why should you care? Here’s exhibit A : This is a hockey stick kind of growth – basically the dream of any company launching a scalable web […]
Mandala Games adds real-money mobile gambling through Betable
The two biggest challenges for any web app are user acquisition and user monetization. The game industry is no exception, and with the rise of freemium models, user acquisition is more competitive than ever, and monetization needs a bit more thinking than the traditional retail model. French studio Mandala Games, based in Nantes, has partenered […]