Every Wednesday, we break down the latest data, research and financial results into digestible chunks.
Read on for the numbers you need to know about without the fluff.
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Papaya ordered to pay Skillz $719m in damages
A US court has ordered Papaya Gaming to pay Skillz $719m in damages.
Competitive gaming outfit Skillz, a subsidiary of Firy, won its false advertising case against Papaya Gaming yesterday and will receive $719m in damages, a figure significantly higher than the $420m payout initially proposed back in April.
The court found that roughly $4.7bn of the payouts advertised by Papaya between 2021-24 were paid out to the firm’s own bots, and not to players. “Papaya could not beat us fairly, so it used bots to fake the competition we invented,” said Firy CEO and founder Andrew Paradise. “This judgment sets the record straight.”
Match 3 dominates casual category in H1 2026, taking 22% of revenue
Five of the top 10 grossing casual games worldwide in H1 2026 were match 3 titles, according to AppMagic estimates, accounting for 22% of total casual revenue.
Royal Match led with $619m (-18% YoY). Dream Games’ Royal Kingdom grew 188% to $227m, and has now outpaced Royal Match’s own post-launch trajectory, while Candy Crush Saga held steady at $536m (-5%), although it dropped one position to Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story, which is up 157% to $566m, surpassing $100m in monthly revenue for the first time.
Playrix held two spots with Gardenscapes, which is flat at $222m, and Homescapes, which is up 8% to $160m.
Declines for Monopoly Go ($546m, -20%) and Coin Master ($333m, -12%) meant that the coin looter category saw a 11% genre-wide decline, though AppMagic notes combined IAP and D2C revenue is far steadier for both.
Capcom’s mobile net sales up 20% to $3.7m in Q1
Mobile is a small fraction of its wider Digital Contents segment, though, which brought in $337m (¥54.6bn) in the same period.
Candy Crush gets World Cup final boost
The boost was sharpest in Argentina, it said, where levels played rose 28.2% overall and peaked at 66.7% above normal for a five-minute stretch as the team trailed Spain.
Ludus: Merge Arena passes $50m in net revenue
Palo Alto snaps up Embrace
Palo Alto Networks is acquiring real user monitoring platform Embrace. No acquisition fee was disclosed, but the deal is expected to close in Palo Alto Networks’ first fiscal quarter of 2027. It follows Palo Alto’s acquisition of Chronosphere in January.
US video game spending fell 21% to $4.5bn in June as mobile’s top 10 held steady
Zoom out to the half-year picture, though, and things look pretty stable: mobile game spending’s down just 1% at $27.5bn compared to this time last year. Circana also highlighted the launch of Warner Bros’ Game of Thrones: Dragon Fire in June, which broke into the top five strategy games in the US by downloads.
Neon raises $13m
Direct to consumer firm Neon has closed a $13m Series A funding round. PUBG publisher Krafton was a strategic investor.
Neon claimed that publishers using its D2C tools generate “up to 70% of monthly revenue through their direct channels,” capturing 50% of DTC “within the first three months.” This increases to 52% after a player’s first transaction, and 90% by their eighth, the firm said.
Neon also said that its customer base has increased sixfold since 2024. The firm has raised a total of $27m since it launched in 2022.
