Sybo CEO Mathias Gredal Nørvig breaks into a slightly weary smile when we ask him about a potential Subway Surfers movie.
“I think the official answer is that we still have so much love for the IP and we really want to find the right format to bring it to the big screen,” he tells us. “But until it feels exactly right, we keep dreaming and we keep chasing.”
Getting that long-rumoured Subway Surfers movie off the ground sounds like it has been tough, then. And so as work continues on all that behind the scenes, Sybo has the small matter of a sequel to what it claims is the most downloaded game of all time.
Subway Surfers City launched worldwide on February 26, and Sybo has also quietly reskinned Splatoon-like soft launch game Paint Brawl to include Subway Surfers characters. On Paint Brawl, all Gredal Nørvig can say is that yes, Sybo is always “exploring where the IP fits” – so while that goes through a low-key soft launch in the UK and Philippines, Gredal Nørvig says “the early signs are strong” for the Subway Surfers City launch.
Sybo has been working on a new mainline Subway Surfers game in different forms since 2013, Gredal Nørvig tells us. What eventually became Subway Surfers City has been in development for four or five years, he says, and it is what one might consider Sybo’s ‘difficult second album’.
But the success of the first title has given the studio enough time and space to get it right, and also allowed for plenty of consultation with Apple and Google, who advised the studio to avoid calling it Subway Surfers 2 – because once you do that, “players expect number one to no longer be supported,” he says. “We are perhaps the only mobile evergreen so there is no reason to cannibalise or jeopardise that.”
And so far it hasn’t dented the original at all, he says. Where Subway Surfers City differs is in its greater complexity, difficulty and in its progression paths, characters and game world, which is more like a saga map. There are also many more skill-based challenges and shorter runs for hardcore players. Gredal Nørvig estimates that City will have a higher proportion of IAP revenue than the original, whose income is “maybe 80-85% ads”.
Similarly, the addition of Subway Surfers+ on Apple Arcade in December 2025 has not changed the original game’s monthly install rate. “Quite quickly, we could see from the data [Apple] shared that cannibalisation is not really a big issue,” he says. “Because out of all the devices in the world, with all respect to Apple Arcade, it’s not eating away the free to play market.”
And it seems Apple made a generous offer to get it on Arcade, too: “We are very happy with the deal we got, it’s definitely a plus for us,” says Gredal Nørvig.
As we’ve chronicled before, that landmark deal with Miniclip in 2022 saw Sybo become part of the Tencent network of companies and studios after fielding takeover bids practically every week for ten years. In the end, Miniclip won out after Sybo fielded 23 buyer presentations and 10 formal acquisition bids in late 2021.
Gredal Nørvig says that since then, Sybo has learned plenty from Miniclip about publishing and product management, especially since former 8 Ball Pool director Rafael Rodrigues moved over to become Sybo studio director in the spring of 2025.
But it has worked the other way too, he says. Miniclip has taken on knowledge from Sybo’s marketing and “some of our virality engines”, says Gredal Nørvig.
With Sybo now part of a larger Tencent-backed family that also included Epic Games, Riot, Supercell and, more recently, Ubisoft, it is now part of things like the annual Tencent ‘family summit’ at GDC every year.
“What I love about the Tencent model is that they allow each of the studios to be highly independent,” says Gredal Nørvig. “The way I describe it to people is it’s more of an octopus with an efficient brain, but the arms operate independently.”
And so, for example, 2025’s Subway Surfers crossover in Brawl Stars was not the result of Tencent HQ forcing two of its portfolio companies to get along. It happened organically, adds Gredal Nørvig:
“That was us talking to Supercell,” he says. “In the traditional model, without mentioning any names, you would see a very large headquarters putting a lot of resources into making sure that both studios were aligned…Tencent is leaning back.”
