The year is winding down, so we’re handing out some festive awards.
See also: our games of the year, Balatro and Minute Cryptic, and yesterday’s entry on 2024’s no-shows, biggest hardware flop and worst AI use.
2024’s best squabble: Tim Sweeney versus Phil Schiller
Apple superfan and Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney has had quite a year, having overseen a landmark Disney deal, myriad advancements with Fortnite and Unreal Engine plus the launch of the Epic Games Store on mobile.
The path to getting Epic’s storefront on more platforms has been famously public and, we assume, incredibly expensive. It has also been fantastically entertaining.
The fun reached its peak in March, when Epic and Sweeney released emails exchanged between them and longtime Apple exec, App Store boss and overall charming fellow Phil Schiller.
(Schiller, we’re told, is “one of those guys that would love to throw insults at people” and would even “insult your children” in meetings. Nice.)
Just as Epic was planning to launch its Games Store on iOS on the EU, Apple terminated its developer account, on the grounds that it was an untrustworthy partner, but also, let’s be honest, because it doesn’t want other people running stores on its devices. Schiller’s emails also referenced the very public criticism Sweeney has aimed at Apple over the years.
Sweeney reacted in a typically calm, considered manner, of course. “Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again,” said Epic in a fiery blog that revealed the emails, and also included copies of lawyers’ letters between the companies. Yikes.
The bust-up also caused Sweeney to call in the EU, which was just about to start enforcing the Digital Markets Act. Under increasing pressure, Apple backtracked and reinstated Epic’s account.
The flare-up appears to have been a squabble over nothing, though. While the Epic Games Store is indeed now live on iOS in the EU, it has not made a great deal of impact.
And more generally, efforts to open up the mobile ecosystem appear to have run out of steam, and the industry is instead adopting other direct-to-consumer and webshop options to dodge that 30%. After all the bluster around getting its mobile Games Store out in the wild, Epic now needs to make sure people actually use it.
2024’s cheekiest switcheroo: Last War: Survival
Whatever your feelings are on Last War: Survival’s famous lane-runner UA ads, you can’t deny that they genuinely work. So marketers will keep on doing them, and infinite variations thereof.
Last War’s constant presence in the top grossing charts also suggests that – whether you like it or not – developer Funfly has very nearly perfected the practice of hooking players in with one gameplay style and then leading them gently into another. This is switcheroo marketing at its most effective.
And it took a further twist with the addition of The Boys’ Homelander actor Antony Starr into the creatives over the summer – a switcheroo on a switcheroo, if you will.
Mobile game ads have a bad reputation for good reason, in parts – some of them are horrible, sexist slop – but these are different, and actually quite funny; I can’t help but admire the chutzpah on display here. So well done.
2024’s most elusive studio: Dream Games
Dream Games must surely be the most successful game-maker operating today that has done the least press.
After the typical start-up and funding announcements in Dream’s earlier days, more recently this hugely important and wildly successful developer has been completely silent.
From memory, there’s been one story on VentureBeat about its newly-opened London office in March 2023, and a year ago there was this FT piece which gave very little away, beyond Royal Match’s ousting of Candy Crush Saga as mobile’s top puzzler.
And that strange media blackout continued even for the launch of Royal Kingdom in November. Two trailers, one to tease the launch and another to confirm the date, was about all we got.
Now, if Dream wants to keep its secret sauce under wraps and put all of its efforts into making and marketing its games straight to consumers, that’s fine by me. But I – and presumably most mobilegamer.biz readers – would love a bit more colour on what makes this company tick, and where it might be going next.
I’ve managed to interview most of the major players in the mobile games business at some point, but Dream Games remains a white whale. I’ll try again in 2025.
