This year we continued to break countless exclusives and set the mobile games industry news agenda.
And so this loose run-down of the most popular stories of the year is, pleasingly, mostly original work that takes time, experience and deep industry connections to produce.
Mostly this site relies on a growing group of regular readers and people sharing our work on social media. But no serious website can discount Google’s influence; sometimes, it semi-randomly decides to push our stories in front of a lot of eyeballs, and that’s what happened with our reports on Resident Evil 2 bombing on iOS and King soft-launching Minecraft Blast.
Another quirk of how the internet works: in March, we revealed that Miniclip had acquired Lessmore, maker of Eatventure and We Are Warriors. That one performed well too, but it also made its way onto Miniclip’s homepage, where it has racked up beefy daily clickthroughs ever since.
While of course we’re happy with these stories, and that Google and Miniclip are sending readers our way, let’s get to the spicier stuff. Three original stories about those King layoffs this summer were perhaps more representative of what we do here.
Firstly, our piece on how laid off King staff were effectively being replaced by the AI tools they helped build was a neat fit for the wider AI narrative running across games and tech this year. And it was spread organically by social media – and by other outlets picking it up – rather than by Google, though it played its part.
Our follow-up report from inside King, which depicted layoff lawsuits, toxic leaders, toothless ethics teams, low morale and mandatory AI use was also very widely-read. It got fewer eyeballs than that AI story, though, despite arguably being a juicier piece.
(A third article penned by an anonymous King staffer as part of our secret developer series didn’t get as much traction as those other two – diminishing returns and all that. I was still pretty pleased with it, though.)
In the spring, just as that star-studded Royal Kingdom ad campaign hit, we also tried to answer the question how much are celebrities getting paid for mobile game ads? It’s a lot, it turns out. LeBron could have got up to $4m for an afternoon’s work, we were told.
AppLovin also got a lot of attention this year, and not just because it was accused of some pretty wild stuff by some short-sellers. We were the first to report on AppLovin selling off its game studios for $900m to an unnamed buyer, and we later speculated on who it might be. But we never guessed that it would turn out to be Tripledot.
There are plenty of other stories that made a big impact – we also exclusively revealed the first details of the Space Ape-Supercell transition, and two Unity stories about Vector and a new fee for Enterprise customers have been very popular too.
Less scoopy but no less important were several evergreen-type stories, like our regularly-updated soft launch games you need to know about round-up. Our top grossing games of 2024 analysis and our breakdown of 2025’s top grossing mobile games (so far) played a similar role in terms of answering search queries. Frankly, though, SEO shenanigans is just not what we do here, and we plan to keep it that way.
We’ll keep pushing to do bigger, better, more impactful stories over the high volume, low value stuff you see elsewhere. There are already plenty of sites cranking out a load of rewritten press releases every day – there’s no value in us doing the same.
This less-is-more approach means we are reliant on people sharing our stories in Slack, on social media and in work email chains. So please, keep doing that.
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Thank you for reading all the way to the end. You’re one of the good ones.
