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This is the final post of the year. We’ll be back in 2025, but in the meantime we’ll re-posting some of our very best articles on our social channels – follow us on LinkedIn, Bluesky, X, Facebook and Threads for more.
Okay, so I don’t have Spotify-level data on precisely which stories each of you read on mobilegamer.biz this year, but I can give you some interesting numbers:
- Regular readership keeps rising, with over 36,000 visitors and 55,000 views on average per month plus over 9,400 newsletter subscribers
- The site has now attracted over 1m visitors and 1.5m views since launch in March 2022
- I have posted 1,051 stories in that time
- The site gets over 1,800 views daily, on average
- I have posted 393 stories this year, and published over 250k words
This is all organic growth, based purely on running a website that people actually want to read. I started in March 2022 with nothing but a WordPress blog and a very very small social media presence. I have no investors and I don’t do cheap growth-hacky bullshit on my social media channels.
So thanks, in particular, to my sponsors and paid subscribers. You should feel good about supporting independent media in a climate where so many outlets are struggling.
If I may get self-indulgent for a moment: what’s different and what works about mobilegamer.biz is focus. I spent years working in big tech wanting to read a site that only publishes things that are useful or really matter.
Google has effectively incentivised websites to just pump out as much content as humanly possible to get the numbers up and keep them there. That is not, in my opinion, the way to do industry media – people are busy and just want to get the info they need without wading through a load of guff to get there.
That’s the goal here, and it’s going well. Several big sponsors have signed up for the first quarter of 2025 already, and work has begun on the first event, slated for April. Paid subscribers to the newsletter will be the first to be invited.
It’s also been pleasing this year to see several of the original reports i’ve put together reach very large audiences, either organically, through some weird Google quirk, or both.
So here are five of the most popular stories from 2024, and a little inside-baseball bit on each.
Inside Apple Arcade: axed games, declining payouts, disillusioned studios – and an uncertain future
Well, this caused a bit of a stir. It even shook Apple into an attempt at a response in the form of this Guardian piece that came out a little while later, which didn’t really dispute any of it anyway.
I think it effectively confirmed what many folks already knew through whisper networks – that Apple are a nightmare to work with, Arcade is nowhere near as important to the company as Apple TV+ and Apple Music, and that the service has plateaued badly.
The law of diminishing returns meant that the sequel to this story had much less impact, though for my money it had more incendiary stuff in it about Apple’s working practices and the disaster that is Vision Pro support.
Still, all is not lost – Apple’s Arcade team had the good sense to snap up Balatro, still serves that family-friendly audience well, and continues to pay out big bucks to some developers. It just all seems a little directionless.
Lifetime Netflix Games downloads pass 210m, GTA: San Andreas hits 25m, says Appmagic
Not sure what happened in India around this story but it got crazy traction there, as well as in the usual western markets. In the absence of any real numbers from Netflix, this is a decent proxy. And i’m told the numbers are broadly about right.
The success of GTA: San Andreas is perhaps obvious, but it’s worth namechecking Storyteller too, a game that appears to have really worked on Netflix. The likes of Football Manager and Farming Simulator also quietly tick along nicely.
Those Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil and Death Stranding ports have bombed
Again, I think this confirmed what practically everyone in the mobile business already knew – no-one wants to play old triple-A console games on their phones. And they definitely don’t want to pay a premium for what amounts to a glorified tech demo.
A follow-up about Resident Evil 7 also got a large readership, and cemented the idea that these ports are really just there so Apple can talk about the power of its chips in keynotes.
The soft launch games you need to know about
This is a new column that spun out of Friday’s ‘new game digest’ articles, and has become a new regular on the site, alongside jobs, data and the aforementioned new game round-ups.
It turns out lots of people want to know what their competitors are up to, and several folks in the business have told me they find this article really useful. Expect more of this sort of thing next year, then.
Why Supercell greenlights teams, not games – and is now open to external pitches
Interviewing Ilkka Paananen was a bit of a white whale until this March, when I finally hooked him in, so to speak.
I had been chasing it on and off, but it was Supercell who approached me out of the blue to break this story about their shifting work structures and ‘Spark’ initiative. And it proved popular, not least because it opened the door to anyone who thinks they’ve got the juice to work for Supercell to just pitch them on it.
It is a long article – I usually keep things as concise as possible – but I figured it was worth the extra wordcount, and it seems you agreed. It was the most-read interview of 2024.
