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Daily Crunch: Apple removes Fortnite from the App Store

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Epic Games takes on Apple, Instagram fixes a security issue and Impossible Foods raises $200 million. This is your Daily Crunch for August 13, 2020.
The big story: Apple removes Fortnite from the App Store
The controversy over Apple’s App Store policies has expanded to include Epic Games and its hit title Fortnite. The company introduced a direct payment option for its in-game currency on mobile, leading Apple to remove the app for violating App Store rules.
“Epic enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple, and they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines regarding in-app payments that apply to every developer who sells digital goods or services,” Apple said.
Epic, meanwhile, said it’s taking legal action against Apple, and that the game’s removal is “yet another example of Apple flexing its enormous power in order to impose unreasonable restraints and unlawfully maintain its 100% monopoly over the iOS In-App Payment Processing Market.”
The tech giants
Bracing for election day, Facebook rolls out voting resources to US users — The hub will centralize election resources for U.S. users and ideally inoculate at least some of them against the platform’s ongoing misinformation epidemic.
Instagram wasn’t removing photos and direct messages from its servers — A security researcher was awarded a $6,000 bug bounty payout after he found Instagram retained photos and private direct messages on its servers long after he deleted them.
Slack and Atlassian strengthen their partnership with deeper integrations — At the core of these integrations is the ability to get rich unfurls of deep links to Atlassian products in Slack.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Impossible Foods gobbles up another $200 million — Since its launch the plant-based meat company has raised $1.5 billion from investors.
Omaze raises $30 million after expanding beyond celebrity campaigns — The Omaze model has shifted away from celebrity-centric campaigns to include fundraisers offering prizes like an Airstream Caravel or a trip to the Four Seasons resort in Bora Bora.
We’re exploring the future of SaaS at Disrupt this year — We’re bringing Canaan Partners’ Maha Ibrahim, Andreessen Horowitz’s David Ulevitch and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Mary D’Onofrio together to help explain how the landscape has changed.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
How to get what you want in a term sheet — Lior Zorea discusses the reality of term sheets.
Five success factors for behavioral health startups — Courtney Chow and Justin Da Rosa of Battery Ventures argue that behavioral health is particularly suited to benefit from the digitization trends COVID-19 has accelerated.
Minted.com CEO Mariam Naficy shares ‘the biggest surprise about entrepreneurship’ — Naficy got into the weeds with us on topics that founders don’t often discuss.
Everything else
Digital imaging pioneer Russell Kirsch dies at 91 — It’s hard to overstate the impact of his work, which led to the first digitally scanned photo and the creation of what we now think of as pixels.
AMC will offer 15-cent tickets when it reopens 100+ US theaters on August 20 — The theater juggernaut announced plans to reopen more than 100 theaters in the U.S. on August 20.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Daily Crunch: Apple removes Fortnite from the App Store

Lenovo brings some unique features to its new gaming phone

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Gaming phones are a weird one. They make sense on paper to some degree. As we well know, everyone’s a gamer these days, and much or most of that gaming happens on mobile devices. So why aren’t devoted gaming phones a more popular phenomenon? It’s not for lack of trying.
Lenovo is the latest company to toss its hat in that highly specific ring. That’s the sort of thing you can do when you’re the size of Lenovo and can experiment with such things. Gaming phones are a kind of go big or go home proposition, and the company’s doing mostly the former with the Legion Phone Duel, a mobile addition to the company’s Legion line of gaming PCs.
Image Credits: Lenovo class=»piano-inline-promo»>
For starters, the handset was briefly alluded to in Qualcomm’s recent Snapdragon 865 Plus announcement — and is now one of a very small club of phones sporting the chip. From where I sit, however, the most interesting thing about the category is the way it affords manufacturers an opportunity to experiment with ideas in a way that you don’t often see on flagships. And, indeed, there’s definitely some interesting stuff happening here.
For one thing, it has two batteries — something you don’t really see outside of foldables. Of course, those sport them for the very pragmatic reason that phone batteries don’t fold. Here, however, the batteries are separated to prevent overheating, leading the company the split the extremely healthy 5,000mAh capacity in two. You’re going to need that sort of battery for a gaming-centric 5G handset.

Asus and Lenovo among the first to launch Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus devices

Also worth pointing out is the horizontal pop-up selfie camera — the most notable feature from early leaks. The idea here, of course, is that serious mobile gaming happens in the landscape configuration. As such, the design makes sense for video capture to stream to services like Twitch and YouTube. It’s a highly specific use case, of course, but this is a highly specific phone. And, of course, your results of taking selfie video on the mobile device you’re using to game may vary.
Image Credits: Lenovo
Speaking of unique feature positions, there are also two separate USB-C charging ports — one in standard position on the bottom, and the other on the side. Again, the idea here is to make it as easy as possible to remain in landscape mode. If you’ve ever attempted to charge your phone and play a game at the same time, you know how much of a pain that can be.
Along with the aforementioned Snapdragon chip, you’ll also find up to 16GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage. The display is 6.65 inches at 2340×1080, with a 144Hz refresh rate. The phone does not appear to be coming to the U.S. for now, but will be available this month in China (where it will be called the Legion Phone Pro), followed by the Asia Pacific region, Europe/Middle East/Africa and Latin America.
Pricing is TBD.

Lenovo brings some unique features to its new gaming phone

Tilting Point acquires FTX Games and Plamee Studios’ assets

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Game publisher Tilting Point announced today that it has made its third acquisition in eight months, buying games, key employees and “most of the assets” from FTX Games and Plamee Studios — both previously owned by Playtech, which will be focusing on its gaming and sports betting software moving forward.
Plamee previously developed Narcos: Cartel Wars, which has supposedly made $60 million in revenue since launch. FTX published Cartel Wars, as well as The Walking Dead: Free Casino Slots and Criminal Minds: The Mobile Game. Tilting Point has taken over operations for all three FTX titles, as well as a fourth that’s currently in development.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Last fall, Tilting Point acquired Gondola, a startup that optimizes in-game offers and ads. Then it purchased the mobile game Star Trek Timelines earlier this year, hiring the development team to form a new gaming studio called Wicked Realm Games in the process.
CEO Kevin Segalla said he’s always seen acquisitions as a big part of the company’s “progressive publishing” model, in which the company is first hired to help developers with user acquisition and then develops a deeper business relationship over time.
“We were built to ultimately be in a position where we could acquire some of the studios that we’re working with,” Segalla said.
He added that he expects “more acquisitions down the pike for sure,” with Tilting Point particularly interested in acquiring games that have previously been “constrained in marketing spend” and “clearly are going to have longer legs.”
It sounds like studios acquired by Tilting Point continue to operate with a degree of independence while drawing on the larger company’s resources to grow and monetize their games.
“We truly value the developers’ independence,” Segalla said. “We specifically want to work to continue operating their business and help them accelerate their growth. A lot of development studios are recognizing that scale is becoming more and more important.”

Tilting Point acquires mobile game Star Trek Timelines

Tilting Point acquires FTX Games and Plamee Studios’ assets

DoubleDown is going public: Why isn’t its IPO worth more?

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Agora isn’t the only company headquartered outside the United States aiming to go public domestically this quarter. After catching up on Agora’s F-1 filing, the China-and-U.S.-based, API-powered tech company that went public last week, today we’re parsing DoubleDown Interactive’s IPO document.
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The mobile gaming company is targeting the NASDAQ and wants to trade under the ticker symbol “DDI.”
As with Agora, DoubleDown filed an F-1, instead of an S-1. That’s because it’s based in South Korea, but it’s slightly more complicated than that. DoubleDown was founded in Seattle, according to Crunchbase, before selling itself to DoubleU Games, which is based in South Korea. So, yes, the company is filing an F-1 and will remain majority-held by its South Korean parent company post-IPO, but this offering is more a local affair than it might at first seem.
Even more, with a $17 to $19 per-share IPO price range, the company could be worth up to nearly $1 billion when it debuts. Does that pricing make sense? We want to find out.
So let’s quickly explore the company this morning. We’ll see what this mobile, social gaming company looks like under the hood in an effort to understand why it is being sent to the public markets right now. Let’s go!
Fundamentals
Any gaming company has to have its fun-damentals in place so that it can have solid financial results, right? Right?
Anyway, DoubleDown is a nicely profitable company. In 2019 its revenue only grew a hair to $273.6 million from $266.9 million the year before (a mere 2.5% gain), but the company’s net income rose from $25.1 million to $36.3 million, and its adjusted EBITDA rose from $85.1 million to $101.7 million over the same period.

DoubleDown is going public: Why isn’t its IPO worth more?

Newzoo forecasts 2020 global games industry will reach $159 billion

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Games and esports analytics firm Newzoo released its highly cited annual report on the size and state of the video gaming industry yesterday. The firm is predicting 2020 global game industry revenue from consumers of $159.3 billion, a 9.3% increase year-over-year. Newzoo predicts the market will surpass $200 billion by the end of 2023.
Importantly, the data excludes in-game advertising revenue (which surged +59% during COVID-19 lockdowns, according to Unity) and the market of gaming digital assets traded between consumers. Advertising within games is a meaningful source of revenue for many mobile gaming companies. In-game ads in just the U.S. drove roughly $3 billion in industry revenue last year, according to eMarketer.
To compare with gaming, the global markets for other media and entertainment formats are:
Pay TV: $226 billion in 2019 (excludes streaming services)
Publishing: $261 billion in 2017, of which books accounted for $121 billion
Film: $101 billion in 2019 ($42.5 billion from box office)
Music: $62 billion in 2017 ($30 billion recorded music, $6 billion music publishing, $26 billion live music)
Board games and playing cards: $12 billion in 2018
Podcasting: $863 million 2020 advertising revenue (there is no good data on subscription and live events revenue in podcasting, but it is fair to estimate it at a fraction of the total ad revenue figure)
Counting gamers
Of 7.8 billion people on the planet, 4.2 billion (53.6%) of whom have internet connectivity, 2.69 billion will play video games this year, and Newzoo predicts that number to reach three billion in 2023. It broke down the current geographic distribution of gamers as:
1,447 million (54%) in Asia-Pacific
386 million (14%) in Europe
377 million (14%) in Middle East & Africa
266 million (10%) in Latin America
210 million (8%) in North America

Newzoo forecasts 2020 global games industry will reach $159 billion