A lot of App Store news, NC’s $300m mobile push, Overwatch, Metacore, Yahoo Games and more

Hello, and welcome to the mobile gamer.biz digest. I'm Neil Long, and every week I go for a walk and tell you what's happening in the mobile games business. Here we go. An unusually large amount of Apple news over the last week, so let's start at App Store featuring, shall we? I ran this story just after the last pod. And it is taken from a rare public-facing Apple talk, which took place at Gamescom Dev. It featured an App Store business manager and editor explaining a few of the ins and outs of how to get featured, how they like to position premium games, particularly when it comes to try before you buy. And I thought this was worth covering because you know, some personal history here. I was an App Store editor for many years, and during my tenure there, it was all very secretive.

And back then considered a lot more impactful. Today in 2026, App Store featuring much, much less powerful if you're a large company. Still good if you're an indie game developer, and this is where this talk was pitched, really. It's more for premium game makers, maybe bringing their PC or console game to mobile. So, there was a lot of talk of try before you buy, which is basically you know, release your game as a free game, put a paywall in it to unlock the full game, and the example here was Funday Games Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, which had a paywall conversion rate of 13%, which is obviously pretty healthy for a 12.99 game. Obviously, this example has been cherry-picked to be favorable to that business model. But, worthwhile, I think, reeling off

some of these stats. The App Store gets 150 million weekly visitors, said Apple. Present on 2.5 billion devices, 175 storefronts, 50 languages. They pushed some of the universal purchase stuff that you can do with Apple. TestFlight, of course, on Game Center. They did particularly pick out that they do feature games that have Game Center integrated right there on the games tab. So, that will get you a little bit more featuring, by the looks of it. There's a few other AB testing and pre-order functionality bits and bobs that they ran through. But, I think the thing that was previously not top secret, but for those in the know, was the editorial bit, where they took through how to submit a featuring request through the Apple developer portal, how to pitch a story for the today tab,

particularly around cultural moments like International Women's Day, Earth Day, Pride, local moments, where for example, in the UK, they always do something quite big around London Games Festival. Those features should be pitched at least 10 weeks in advance. For featuring on the games tab, you should submit a request at least 3 weeks before your game's launch or your update goes live. And then, it went on into some other bits of context around the kind of games that the Apple editors like. They're all quite indie type games. Gumbananza, Drive Rally, Mind Cop, Sisyphus, Afterplace. These are all games that the editor, Sergey, picked out as the editorial team particularly liking. So, nothing really free-to-play or even particularly successful when it comes to the top grossing charts. And there was

other ways of getting featured, too. There was a a little bit on how Dead Cells' very well-thought-through fully customizable on-screen virtual controls were executed, and that has helped that game get a bit more visibility. So, yeah, uh quite a lot of detail in this one. I would recommend you read the article for the full deal. The headline here is Apple's App Store team revealed their tips and tricks for getting featured. The very next day, we had a report from the FT using Sensor Tower data suggesting that Apple actually saw a drop in revenues it receives from the App Store for the first time in a decade. And of course, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney had a few thoughts on all that. This was a report in the Financial Times where Sensor Tower estimates that US consumer spending through the App Store fell 6% in the second quarter

compared to 9% growth a year earlier. This was, according to Sensor Tower, down to Apple's ongoing legal fight with Epic Games, which forced the tech giant to allow developers to direct players to external payments without taking its usual 30% commission. The App Store had been, quote, "significantly impacted by the ruling." said Sensor Tower. There's also a stat in here from App Figures suggesting that Apple's US commission revenue has contracted 18% this year as a result of those rulings. Apple [snorts] is seeing less cash in its coffers through Brazil and Japan, as well, after being forced to open up in those markets. Epic boss Tim Sweeney, of course, had a very sensible and measured response to this report. He claimed Apple broke mobile gaming with its 30% junk fees, and then went on to say, "Apple has extracted the far majority of

profit from games on the App Store and is depriving developers of the ability to reinvest." He also dragged Roblox into the rant, saying, "Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft heavily promote the best games and sales are merit-based. Apple shows a hatred for developers striving for a free market and fair competition." Adding, "When we challenge their monopoly openly, they blocked Fortnite for a billion users, but they look the other way on Roblox's quiet violation of Apple policy because Roblox stays silent." You can read the full rant in that story from our friend Tim. The headline on this piece is Apple reportedly saw US App Store spending fall for the first time in a decade, and Tim Sweeney has thoughts. Another bit of Apple news for this week, Eddy Cue is taking over the App Store. Phil Schiller is stepping away from it. Schiller has been very senior at Apple

since the Steve Jobs days and helped set up the App Store, relinquished control of it to Eddy Cue for a little bit, and then it went back under his purview in 2015. He's now stepping away, and Eddy Cue takes over again. Eddy Cue is the services boss at Apple, so he runs music, TV, that sort of stuff, and now apps and games. It also means that Carson Oliver, the long-time App Store business manager, leader, he now reports to Eddy Cue, and Thai, who was co-running the App Store, now reports into Carson Oliver, as does Alex Rothman, who has been leading Apple Arcade for a long time. So, slight rejig of the reporting structure there. We shall see if this rejig has any real effect, but yeah, a change of leadership on the App Store, and maybe some changes

coming to the actual App Store product itself. We shall see.
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This was an interesting one, I think, from Gamescom. I spoke to the head of mobile at NC, formerly NCSOFT, the Korean company that's probably best known for Guild Wars and Aion, some other MMOs to come out of Korea. So, Anel Suman is a former Outfit7, Wildlife, and triple.exe, and

he is in charge of mobile at NC these days. The company has actually bought four studios for a total outlay of around 300 million-ish in the last year to 18 months. Those studios are Vietnam's Le HuHu, Korea-based Spring Comes, Moving Eye in Slovenia, and Germany's Just Play. So, we covered the Just Play acquisition a few months back. This is a rewarded gaming platform that also runs a few games, founded by several former AppLovin execs. That was about 200 million, that deal. So, across the four studios, NC now runs around 200 live mobile games in total. Most of those are casual, hyper-casual type games, as you can probably guess from the sheer volume of them. But, NC is now building an internal tool set that can semi-automate

creative production, live ops, AB testing, prediction models, and so on across that portfolio. And Soman says, quote, "We will keep buying actively." The company has Europe, Korea, and Vietnam covered in terms of mobile game development hotspots, but has yet to make a move in places like Japan, China, India, and Turkey. So, a studio from one of those markets might be next on the shopping list for NC. The profile of studios is interesting, too. They want mobile studios with success full live titles out in the market that are pulling in 50 to 100 million a year. So, that's not a huge field of studios, but essentially they want to take on and then supercharge these existing titles that maybe could do with a helping hand in terms of UA, monetization, that sort of thing. So, they are not taking punts on

new studios, they're not seed investors, they want games that are out there in the market right now. So, they may well be swooping for some more familiar names in the next few months. And they're also not fussy when it comes to business model. While currently its portfolio is casual, hybrid-casual, they also are interested in buying up studios who run more mid-core in-app purchase type games. They essentially want to hoover up all the games and the data that they can in order to improve the internal tools they're building and it's quite ambitious stuff. NC has said publicly that it intends to build its mobile casual division into a $5 billion business by 2030 representing about a third of its total revenue and it's already at 22%. So
[snorts]
yeah, really interesting stuff from a company that you're probably familiar with but maybe you didn't realize was

that significant in mobile but more to come from NC. Quick one from Wednesday, Blizzard's Overwatch Rush has entered soft launch in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. It went live in those markets on August 31st and the game's arrival was heralded on LinkedIn by lots of people who seem to be working on the game. This game was announced back in February for those not familiar. It's certainly Overwatch universe, it's a top-down made for mobile shooter developed by a dedicated mobile team within Blizzard. There's a bit of gameplay footage in that story if you're interested. There's also a little bit of context on Blizzard's other mobile games which are quietly really quite successful. Hearthstone still makes 3 to 5 million a month on mobile according to AppMagic estimates. Diablo Immortal made in collaboration with NetEase of course also pretty successful.

3 to 4 million per month for that one. 420 million over its lifetime so far according to AppMagic again. Warcraft Rumble the least successful of Blizzard's mobile projects is still live in the app stores but it's effectively on autopilot after Blizzard cut a reported 100 staff on the project and confirmed it would not be adding any more new content to the title back in July 2025. But yeah, Overwatch Rush, we shall see how that does if and when it gets to full global launch at some point. Quick update on this Supercell Metacore acquisition. The two companies confirmed this week that the agreement is signed. Metacore will become part of Supercell by the end of this month. So, Merge Mansion will be officially a Supercell game by the end of September. This obviously follows news of the

acquisition earlier this year when Metacore also closed its offices in Germany and Sweden and cut 159 staff at Helsinki HQ.
[snorts]
So, Metacore soon to be part of Supercell and on steadier ground from this month onwards. On Monday, we published this Q&A with Andrew Pedersen, Yahoo's head of games and a former mobile VP at EA. He is at Yahoo quietly building out a web games portal. So, Yahoo still gets a ton of traffic, and they relaunched their web games portal in January, which has resulted in 60% growth in active users. That may well have been from a small user base, but Yahoo's games are up nearly 25% since the start of the year in terms of gameplay clicks, he says. This also follows their partnership with King

for a game called Candy Crushable, which is almost like a a daily play version of Candy Crush. And Yahoo, now having released its own web games, spins on solitaire, crosswords, that kind of thing. They're now looking for other partners to work with to build out that portfolio as well as building their own games in house. I thought this was interesting because they are following that kind of NYT LinkedIn playbook. Trying to become part of a very casual kind of game players daily routine. And it seems to be working so far. The headline on this one, if you want to read more, goes Yahoo is quietly building a games business and it's starting with daily web games. Quick one from Monday. We had a quick chat with a former Treyarch level designer, Brian Douglas. After working on Call of Duty Black Ops 1 and 2, he left Treyarch, moved to Free Range

Games, then was laid off. And the story here is after pitching around a new PC console project and failing to find funding, he built an extraction shooter called Rift Raider Extraction in 7 weeks and has shipped it to Google Play. This is not an AI-assisted story. He says in the piece that he used Unreal blueprints, Photoshop, and a few visual assets from the Unreal Fab Store as needed and then modified those for his own purposes. It's not a huge game, but an interesting case study in how quick an experienced game developer can whip something up and get it on the app stores. There's an iOS build coming soon as well. Headline, if you are interested in this one, is Call of Duty Black Ops designer turns to mobile after months of funding rejections. In data digest this week, Cookie Run: Kingdom has passed 14 million in revenue

in its first 4 weeks, says developer Devsisters. Papaya seems to be struggling to pay the $730 settlement it owes Skillz. The NYT Games app, which my family has just got back into and made $7 million in August for the first time. Best ever month for that game. Lifetime earnings for that app are about $190 million. 85% of that cash came from the US. There's some stats about the China market from Niko Partners. 51.8 billion the games market is worth there in 2025 according to those stats. The China-only Valorant mobile has made $300 million in its first year in China alone. It would be crazy if they didn't bring that out internationally. Konami's eFootball was the top-grossing mobile game in all of Japan for the first half of 2026 according to some new

Sensor Tower figures. The other top earners Monster Strike, Last War, Whiteout Survival, and Uma Musume. 26% of Jurassic World: The Game's revenue comes from direct-to-consumer channels. That is a case study from Ludia published by AppMagic and Mihoyo is dominating Chinese live stream charts. Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero are three of the top five most live streamed games in China according to more data from Niko Partners. Lots more graphs and stats and figures in that article. Data digest every Wednesday. In new games news, we've got new footage of the incoming GTA likes from Miniclip and Garena in the soft launch update from Monday. There's also a bit on Meta's stealth games app Pocket and the usual suspects from Playrix, EA, Supercell,

PlayStation, Blizzard, Zynga, and more. And in the latest new games digest, we have rounded up all of the game announcements from Gamescom. That includes pre-orders opening on PUBG Mobile Lite, Anima, the Pokémon {slash} Animal Crossing like game from FunPlus backed Poor Print Pet Planet from Hoyoverse, Wobbly Life from Rubber Band Games, which is very much in the vein of Human Fall Flat, Monster Hunter Outlanders from Timi and Capcom, Sea of Remnants from NetEase, and Nanta from NetEase, both big ambitious open world games. Another Tencent game which is a bit sort of Pokemony, Rocco Kingdom. A closed beta for that is coming across all formats in October, and quite a few more games to keep an eye on in that article. And that's it for this week. Thanks for listening.

Bye-bye.