On the podcast: Supercell buys Metacore amid brutal layoffs, Second Dinner cuts, inside Scopely x Niantic, April’s top games, data, jobs, more
This week’s inside view of the mobile game business.
April’s top grossing mobile games: Honor of Kings, LastWar, Whiteout Survival, Royal Match, more
Appmagic's estimates show a steady month for the established giants, but plenty of movement for titles like Delta Force, Honkai: Star Rail and eFootball.
April’s top mobile game downloads: Minecraft, Block Blast, Free Fire, Arrows and more
Hang on, what's Minecraft doing at the top of the charts...?
Data digest: EA, Roblox, Stillfront, MTG and Krafton numbers, funding news, March market stats, more
We've also got Mistplay's latest acquisition in this week's round-up.
Supercell to fully acquire Merge Mansion maker Metacore amid restructure, with 160 jobs at risk
Merge Mansion will be brought into Supercell’s live portfolio as part of the changes, after Metacore failed to launch new, sustainable games.
Layoffs at Marvel Snap maker Second Dinner, but work on new game continues
Edit: We're told 16 staff are affected, and work continues on its second game, we’re told. “This is us making hard decisions to make sure we can keep going, not a sign that we're winding down,” added boss Ben Brode.
New game digest: Fortnite, Rocket League, Walking Dead, Guild Wars, Monster Hunter, more
There's also a game about cats and soup, The Division's PC launch, a new Netflix party game, indie releases and more in this week's round-up.
Scopely and Niantic on getting that seismic $3.5bn megadeal over the line
Scopely chief revenue officer Tim O’Brien and Niantic president Ed Wu chronicle the late nights and knotty technical problems they encountered on the road to that blockbuster $3.5bn acquisition.
Emulation arrived on the App Store two years ago – 60m downloads later, what’s changed?
The developer behind new emulator Provenance is managing to cover his costs with IAPs through the App Store – but, like many others, they would love to see Apple offer more help to the developer community.
That rumoured Subway Surfers movie is still in the pipeline, sort of – and so are more spin-off games
CEO Mathias Gredal Nørvig says Sybo is still trying to find the right format for a big screen adaptation of ‘the most downloaded game of all time’, Subway Surfers. In the meantime, Subway Surfers City is off to a solid start and there’s another spin-off that’s quietly entered soft launch.
Xbox wants to ‘restore the core’ and grow daily active players – so is mobile part of the plan or not?
If Xbox’s new ‘North Star’ is daily active players, mobile must surely be central to what’s next. So why is it barely mentioned in new boss Asha Sharma’s manifesto?
The soft launch games you need to know about
Take a peek at the games in testing from Supercell, Playrix, Rovio, Miniclip, Moon Active, Zynga and more.
Niantic Spatial is closing its virtual pet game Peridot
Three years after launch, the ‘spatial tech’ firm is shutting down one of the mobile games left behind when Scopely bought Niantic’s bigger titles.
The Xbox mobile store isn’t dead yet
“Mobile competition still matters and we believe the future of play should be more open,” says new Microsoft Gaming boss Asha Sharma.
“What players don’t realise is that their favourite games right now were already built with AI”
Google Cloud’s games boss Jack Buser says practically every top studio is using AI to develop games more quickly, and for less. But there’s still a lot of concern around telling players about it.
