Gaming
How Adtech Platform AudioMob Is Changing The Mobile Game Monetization Through Amazon Web Services
AudioMob was founded after we spotted a tremendous monetization opportunity for game developers.
Rewarded video ads in mobile games have made developers and publishers money, but always at the expense of interrupting games. Yet these interruptions don’t just irritate players, they can even push them away from a game entirely, thereby damaging retention. This can be incredibly frustrating for game developers, who have put time and craft into building games that they want to have thrive, both creatively and commercially.
In considering the solution to this challenge, the core AudioMob concept was born. We let advertisers reach their consumers and game developers monetize their games without interrupting gameplay by using audio ads. ‘In-game audio ads’ are what we do, and we’ve seen developers implement them in truly interesting ways.
Larger tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, already offer ad platforms. This begs the question – why create a new platform?
The answer is straightforward. Existing Demand Side Platforms (or DSPs) cannot deliver audio ads in-game. Our Ad Platform enables advertisers to serve In-game audio ads with banners while users play their game. Therefore, players are given something to click on to head to a landing page or another app, should they feel engaged by the ad.
That potential is most powerfully demonstrated through an active example of AudioMob. Grammy award winning artist Nas and his label Mass Appeal created the following audio ad in order to promote his new album, King’s Disease II. They were confident that mobile games would expose them to wider audiences. This also presents an example of how personal and direct audio ads can feel.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite has proved to be a powerful tool in helping us achieve our vision for in-game audio ads as an option that is better for players, advertisers, and game developers.
Why Amazon Web Services?
What we’re doing is unique, so we needed to build a unique stack, and AWS matched our vision and ambition. Be it hosting everything from our user interface to providing a Content Delivery Network (CDN), AWS lets AudioMob serve audio content worldwide in milliseconds.
Meeting AudioMob Privacy Requirements with AWS
On the subject of digital advertising, undoubtedly you will notice the privacy conversation occurring around the world. We believe audio advertising makes it possible to respect the privacy of our users while ensuring the games and apps we love remain free to play.
We’ve deliberately built privacy-first adtech that places contextuality at its core. This approach allows for the ‘best of both worlds,’ letting ads find relevant audiences without utilizing personal data.
However, ad campaigns inevitably generate large amounts of data. This includes the data about a campaign’s success as well as aggregated contextual data held for 90 days and more. And that means we have data to keep safe beyond the data that is processed and stored so that it can be analyzed for insight.
AWS infrastructure aligns with our privacy stance and has achieved numerous internationally-recognized certifications and accreditations. It has demonstrated compliance with rigorous international standards, such as ISO 27017 for cloud security, ISO 27701 for privacy information management, and ISO 27018 for cloud privacy.
Meeting Advertiser Demand with EC2
Choosing the AWS product line started with building our own DSP. A DSP ultimately lets advertisers buy ad space within websites and apps. Ours is known as the AudioMob Ad Platform, and it lets advertisers create, manage, and set the targeting criteria of their advertising campaigns, thereby delivering the right ads to the right people, optimizing, analyzing success, and much more.
When artists or brands want to start a campaign through the AudioMob Ad Platform, they upload an mp3 file and a banner image that is instantly compressed through our internal code hosted on AWS. Compressing those larger file assets to a global average of 35KB, AudioMob can later distribute those ads without latency concerns and into countries with slower mobile data connection speeds. Rendering and content load issues become non-existent.
AWS Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) provides instant access to server space, computing power, and various databases. Purpose-built to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers like us, EC2’s accessibility in 25 regions and 81 availability zones globally allows for an efficiency never seen before.
As a leader within the adtech industry, we couldn’t build our own equivalents to what AWS offers. We’re motivated to deliver player-centric ads that impact equally well for advertisers and game developers. To do that well, we have employed the AWS stack knack for scalability and elasticity, global reach, and intelligent data storage options.
Delivering Ads with CloudFront
Over 2.8 billion mobile gamers spend an average of 26 minutes per day on gaming apps. This provides AudioMob the unique opportunity to quickly serve audio ads to around 40,000 games. Based on the last three months of internal data, this allows an average impression rate of 372,908 per day, leading to a 1,000% increase in click-through-rate as compared to traditional banner ads.
We let advertisers reach users based on age, gender, location, language, mobile device, and mobile carrier through our Ad Platform. The process works as follows: ad slots open in games and are filled in a fraction of a second, as multiple advertisers make a bid for the opportunity to connect with a player. This makes a Content Delivery Network essential, as our audio content must reach the end user in any location defined by our advertisers without delay.
Wherever we deliver an ad in a game, AWS’ Cloudfront’s vast geographic spread puts us anywhere globally, thereby ensuring that AudioMob fills the available advertising space extremely fast, and with minimal latency. Furthermore, this ensures that we fill ads in a timely manner, and can continue to deliver the non-interrupting audio ads into mobile games anywhere that advertisers have specified.
Before these developments, we handled many of these processes in-house, which was pretty costly to our bottom line. AWS’s Cloudfront integration allows data serving capabilities without transfer fees for origin fetches, and it offers custom Transport Layer Security (TLS) certification at no charge. Most importantly, the highly secure Content Delivery Network provides both the network and application comforting levels of security.
Meeting Reporting Requirements with S3, RedShift, and Glacier
Measuring creative engagement and providing campaign reporting is critical in advertising. We have built volume detection with selected partners, so that brands can be sure that players hear ads rather than mute them or set the volume extremely low. Furthermore, we can track whether users mute, close, or click on an ad. However, all of this requires data processing, storage, and reporting.
At AudioMob, we utilize Amazon S3 to store our campaign serving logs and RedShift for analysis. That lets us keep our data secure, while giving advertisers the power to optimise their audio ad campaigns based on the insights we provide using RedShift.
RedShift is a column-oriented DBMS database management system (DBMS) that stores data tables by column rather than by row and utilizes parallel processing to enable fast execution. This makes querying large amounts of data extremely fast and lets our advertisers query campaign data within milliseconds (0.7 seconds).
In addition, we utilize the AWS cold storage solution S3 Glacier. For data inquiries older than five years, this yields slower but reasonable query times (around 100x our RedShift query times). This is achieved by using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, which lets us query data from older campaigns directly from our log files stored on Amazon S3.
AWS facilitates the potential of audio
Ultimately, AWS has provided AudioMob with backend tools and services that greatly aid the performance of the ad format we’ve created. It’s been a perfect accompaniment to our rapid growth, helped us stay elastic and scalable, let us meet the needs of real-time international bidding, and support our data values and strategy. As well, of course, it lets our tech empower advertisers to reach wider audiences.
“The team here at AudioMob are extremely proud of everything we built ourselves, from the in-game audio ad concept to executing and expanding our company. We did those things ourselves – but AWS has facilitated our progress in myriad ways, and ultimately been a tremendous help in letting us deliver on our vision of in-game audio ads as a more user friendly and seamless advertising experience.” – Wilfrid Obeng, Co-Founder & CTO, AudioMob
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Gaming
The German Games Industry Association congratulates all winners of the German Computer Game Awards 2024
• “EVERSPACE 2” by ROCKFISH Games is ‘Best German Game’ 2024
• Pixel Maniacs from Nuremberg wins in the ‘Studio of the Year’ category
• ‘Best International Game’ is Baldur’s Gate 3
• ‘Player of the Year’ is Maurice Weber
High-quality games, great entertainment and many well-known personalities from the games industry and the cultural, societal and political spheres – the German Computer Game Awards 2024 (DCP), presented this evening in Munich, featured all that and more. Numerous guests celebrated the best games from Germany and the creative minds behind them in person at Eisbach Studios in Munich. The award show, which was hosted by Katrin Bauerfeind and Uke Bosse, was additionally followed by hundreds of thousands of viewers via live stream. A total of 800,000 euros was awarded in cash prizes. “EVERSPACE 2” by ROCKFISH Games was chosen ‘Best German Game’. The ‘Studio of the Year’ award went to Pixel Maniacs from Nuremberg, which has made a name for itself with successful games like the party racing game “Can’t Drive This”, its multifaceted involvement in the game industry and its promotion of young talent, as well as with its innovations in the area of marketing. The ‘Special Jury Prize’ was awarded to the project “Gaming ohne Grenzen” (Gaming without Borders), an initiative that enables young people with disabilities to participate actively in game culture – for example, by assessing in inclusive game testing groups the accessibility of various games as well as the ability of certain technologies to help overcome barriers in video games. In voting by the community and the jury, Maurice Weber was selected ‘Player of the Year’. The games editor and Twitch streamer regularly analyses current developments in the games industry and takes a critical look at them, while at the same time formulating a clear stance for more diversity and against extremism in games and society.
The German Computer Game Awards, which honour the year’s best German-produced games, are hosted by the German Federal Government, represented by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, and game – The German Games Industry Association.
‘Congratulations to all winners of the German Computer Game Awards 2024!’ says Felix Falk, Managing Director of game. ‘Even in these very challenging times for many German firms in the industry, German games companies have created high-quality and successful games that have deservedly been honoured on the big stage of the DCP. Around half of these outstanding games were developed with the support of federal game funding. This once again demonstrates the potential that we can leverage when the underlying policy framework for game development in Germany provides for truly predictable and internationally competitive conditions – conditions that allow games from Germany to shine even more brightly all over the world and achieve even greater success on the national as well as international stage. We must make this our goal!’
Overview of all winners:
Best International Game (not endowed)
Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios)
Best German Game (endowed with 100,000 euros)
EVERSPACE 2 (ROCKFISH Games)
The other nominees will each receive 30,000:
Atlas Fallen (Deck 13 Interactive/Focus Entertainment)
Fall of Porcupine (Critical Rabbit/Assemble Entertainment)
Best Family Game (endowed with 40,000 euros)
Spells & Secrets (Alchemist Interactive/rokaplay)
Newcomer Award – Best Debut (endowed with 60,000 euros)
Ad Infinitum (Hekate/NACON)
The other nominees will receive 25,000 euros each:
Fall of Porcupine (Critical Rabbit/Assemble Entertainment)
Lose CTRL (Play From Your Heart)
Newcomer Award – Best Prototype (endowed with 50,000 euros)
Misgiven (Symmetry Break Studio)
The other nominees will receive 25,000 euros each:
Bloodletter (Katharina “Mikey” Müller, David Cafisso, Marvin Braun, Alica Schneider/Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin)
EcoGnomix (Lars Hinnerk Grevsmühl, Lars Eble, Bahy Nguyen, Marcel Zurawka, Alec Shae)
Footgun: Underground (Eduard Dobermann, Theo Lohmüller, Georg Nimke, Robert Pistea, Lukas Salewsky)
REPLICORE (Sarah Inés Roeder, Rody Nawezi, Leonhard Gläser, Maximilian Götz/ HAW Hamburg)
Best Innovation and Technology (endowed with 40,000 euros)
Marble Maze (Fox-Assembly)
Best Serious Game (endowed with 40,000 euros)
Friedrich Ebert – Der Weg zur Demokratie (Playing History/Stiftung Reichspräsident-Friedrich-Ebert-Gedenkstätte)
Best Audio Design (endowed with 40,000 euros)
Ad Infinitum (Hekate/NACON)
Best Game Design (endowed with 40,000 euros)
Lose CTRL (Play From Your Heart)
Best Graphic Design (endowed with 40,000 euros)
The Bear – A Story from the World of Gra (Mucks! Games)
Best Mobile Game (endowed with 40,000 euros)
Cat Rescue Story (Tivola Games)
Best Story (endowed with 40,000 euros)
Ad Infinitum (Hekate/NACON)
Studio of the Year (endowed with 50,000 euros)
Pixel Maniacs
Player of the Year (not endowed)
Maurice Weber
Special Jury Award (endowed with 10,000 euros)
Gaming ohne Grenzen
The post The German Games Industry Association congratulates all winners of the German Computer Game Awards 2024 appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.
Flexion, the games marketing company, and Kabam, one of the world’s leading game developers, announced a new partnership to bring Marvel Contest of Champions to alternative app stores. Flexion will distribute the game on the Amazon Appstore, Aptoide, ONE store, Samsung Galaxy Store, and Digital Turbine Hubs in 2024.
“We are excited to partner with Flexion to bring Marvel Contest of Champions to even more players. Flexion’s expertise, experience and technology make them the ideal partner for us. This collaboration will help us reach new audiences by making Marvel Contest of Champions available on even more app stores. This is especially exciting ahead of the game’s upcoming 10-year anniversary,” SeungWon Lee, CEO of Kabam, said.
“We are delighted to partner with Kabam, one of the world’s leading game developers, to bring their hit game to more players around the globe. This partnership is a win for Kabam and the app stores, which we will connect to drive audience engagement,” Jens Lauritzson, CEO of Flexion, said.
Marvel Contest of Champions is an epic fighting RPG with over 260 iconic Marvel Super Heroes and Super Villains in the ultimate cosmic showdown. Players can collect and build a competitive team of Champions, compete against the world’s top Summoners, battle through an epic and deep Marvel story, and team up with powerful Summoners in alliances to become the Ultimate Marvel Champion.
“We’re delighted to add such a well-known and successful game like Marvel Contest of Champions to our portfolio. I am very positive about the growth potential of these alternative stores in 2024. There is no better time to expand to more audiences,” Jens added.
Marvel Contest of Champions will be available on the Amazon Appstore, Samsung Galaxy Store, Aptoide, and ONEstore Korea starting on April 29, 2024, with Samsung Gaming Hub, OneStore Global, and DT Games Hub following in the near future.
The post Flexion and Kabam Team Up to Bring Marvel Contest of Champions to the Alternative App Stores appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.
Gaming
World’s Best Teams to Compete in UK’s First Professional Women’s VALORANT Tournament in 2024, Red Bull Instalock
The UK’s first professional women’s esports tournament of 2024, Red Bull Instalock, is set to take over the Bull Gaming Sphere in Shoreditch, London for two days of thrilling VALORANT action from April 20 to 21. Red Bull Instalock will invite four of the world’s best women’s VALORANT teams to battle it out to become inaugural champions.
Promising a thrilling experience for viewers worldwide, the invited teams list includes G2 Gozen, GIANTX, Karmine Corp and Shopify Rebellion. Boasting four of the best women’s VALORANT teams globally, Red Bull Instalock will be a must-watch for VALORANT fans.
The LAN tournament will be broadcast from London’s premier gaming and esports venue, the Red Bull Gaming Sphere in Shoreditch, which will be transformed to replicate the in-game atmosphere of the legendary VALORANT map “Icebox”.
A unique format will be deployed to shake up traditional team compositions. Each team will be required to use three duelists, the game’s dedicated offensive class, which will encourage aggressive plays while rewarding tactical expertise and clutch skills to promise viewers worldwide an exhilarating viewing experience.
The Semi-Finals on Saturday 20th will set the stage for a pulse-racing Final day on Sunday 21st. Red Bull Instalock will also host a one-of-a-kind exhibition match, featuring a star-studded cast of fan-favourite VALORANT creators.
Renowned British esports host, Yinsu Collins, will be headlining the broadcast, with commentary provided by Kieran “Kairo” Tulloch, Billie “BillieIDK” Purdie, Matt “Twiggy” Twigg, and Harry “Hazza” Chapman. British FNATIC content creator and partnered streamer Megan ‘Megsoundslikeegg’ Garner will host the creator showmatch on Sunday 21st.
Looking ahead to the tournament, Red Bull Player and member of G2 Gozen Michaela “mimi” Lintrup said: “It’s fantastic to see another event for women’s VALORANT come into play and Red Bull Instalock is another amazing step into making a really lively competitive scene. It’s also going to be great for fans, with the format twist bringing a really exciting and new edge to every matchup.”
Red Bull Instalock will be broadcast live on Red Bull’s Twitch and YouTube channels, featuring top talent from the UK and around the world.
AGON by AOC, a global leader in gaming monitors, returns to join the Red Bull Gaming universe once again as the official Monitor Partner for Red Bull Instalock. Bringing the event to life and providing cutting-edge hardware for the esports tournament, AGON by AOC is equipping the event with the AGON PRO AG254FG monitors, featuring a 360 Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time for the best in-game experience.
The post World’s Best Teams to Compete in UK’s First Professional Women’s VALORANT Tournament in 2024, Red Bull Instalock appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.
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