Amateur devs score hits with 38-0, WWDC reactions, May's top games, Orna, jobs, data 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 industry. Here we go. Let's start with these football drafting games. So, two stories in the last week about these. There's one called 3800, and there's one called 380. I guess in American sports parlance, you would say 38 and 0. So, these two games have been knocking around the top end of the UK App Store games charts, and with the World Cup kicking off, there's a lot of interest in all things football. So, I had a look at both of these games and noticed that the developer names are just some guys' names. So, I looked a little bit further, emailed them, asked them a few questions, and a couple of stories came out of it, which have been extremely popular. I don't know if Google just suddenly decided to really like these, or whatever, but

these games really popular. I think a lot of people are searching for 38-0, and getting either my story or these guys' websites. So, what happens in these games is this is a sort of football spin on a basketball drafting game called 82 and 0, I think. So, you hit spin, and you get a team with player ratings from a certain year of the Premier League or a World Cup, or what have you. And then you pick your player from there to fill a team, and then the game works out where you would finish in the league, or if you win the World Cup, what have you. So, 3800, 380 and 0, that game was made apparently overnight using cloud code by its creator, Dennis Sansha. So, he's an entrepreneur who runs a marketing firm, verelo.ai. Got the idea from 82-0, the basketball version. Built the website

in Claude code overnight, he says. And then he used Claude code again to build out the app. So, this is very much a win for the vibe coding scene, even though I really do not like the term vibe coding. But, that seems to be what people are calling it. So, he released this game. It took 4 days to get approved by Apple, which is four times longer than it took to actually make the app. And that chimes with reports elsewhere in the last few months that app review is struggling badly with the volume of AI-coded apps that are being submitted for release now. And at the point I did the story on it last Thursday, it was number one in the games chart, ahead of Fortnite. It had 100,000 downloads. UK top market, followed by the USA, Ireland, and European countries. It was awaiting release on Google Play as well.

And then, I guess the reason this one in particular has taken off is that Deniz runs a marketing firm, and used some of the tools that he uses for his day job to promote his app. And also, I think a neat function of it is that you can share your team with a tap of a button. It exports a PNG with your team on it, and you can put that on social media. That is quite a nice easy way for people to share their results. Yeah, he says he got 30,000 users overnight. And then, 100,000 pretty much within a day or two. So, great result for him. And then there's Josh Paivy, a similar kind of amateur coder. He has a little bit more experience when it comes to actual coding, but at the time of writing on Tuesday, it was hovering around the top 30 in and around games like Pixel Flow, Royal Kingdom, chess.com, Subway

Surfers, Township. He also got about 100,000 downloads since that game launched on Thursday, so over a weekend essentially. It was top 10 in the UK, led the simulation genre chart for a day or two in the UK. Top markets, UK, Ireland, EU, US, Australia, New Zealand. Android version incoming as well. No marketing spend or PR or data crunching with this one. He just launched it having seen his friends play similar types of games in group chats and so on. He's using a mixture of Opus, Gemini, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Open Code. Cloudflare Workers was used for the multiplayer component, which is something the other 38 and 0 game doesn't have. On monetization, both these games are sort of lightly monetized. 38 0 and 0 has a remove ads option for like £6, so

assume 6 7 $8. And 38 and 0 has recently added a pro mode as well as an in-app purchase. The first game, 38 0 and 0, also has a reroll rewarded ads option, too. So, breakout success for amateur coders, two in the last week. I think as both of them say in the articles, if you have an idea and you don't mind dabbling in a bit of cloud code, you can actually get that idea out there pretty quick. And with viral things like this drafting stuff, if you're first to it, you can make an impact. 100,000 downloads over a weekend is not bad given that there's no UA spend at play here. There's no PR, there's no marketing. It's one guy.

So, really interesting stuff. You can imagine that more of this kind of thing will happen with the charts going forwards as more people dabble with cloud code and other game making AI software. But, yeah, fascinating trend. Something that it can only really happen in mobile, too. So, more of this sort of thing to come, I think.
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Last week was WWDC '26, and we had

freelance reporter Darryl Baxter on the ground in Cupertino to report back. He wasn't invited to the main event, but he did go to a sort of community Apple coders event called Community Kit down the road from Apple Park. And he spoke to a couple of people about the overall Apple development scene and their feelings around broken promises, liquid glass, Siri AI, and so on. Lots of quite technical detail in the article, but for the casual observer, I think the takeaway from this article is that Apple developers are keen on this idea that you can use Apple's AI foundation models for free until your app gets 2 million first-time downloads. So, again, a lot of amateur coders will probably be quite pleased with these announcements. Practically nothing for game developers

here beyond, I assume, some deep technical talks at some point about game engines and occlusion and shaders and so on. I don't know. I'm not a game developer. But, the overall vibe seemed to be Apple has listened to feedback. The AI story is still a little bit scattershot, says one person in this article. There's also a bit of frustration from those who redesigned their apps around liquid glass. And then, it seems Apple have a road back a little bit on that whole thing because, you know, it looks horrible. Siri AI described as genuinely a huge leap forward in personal assistant technology. Private cloud compute terms extremely generous for developers, so that's good. The indie app makers in this article all planning to use some of these AI tools that Apple

announced. But, there are still questions to be answered about what happens once you use up your 2 million installs allocation. Do you have to pay? What happens? I don't think that was explained very well. And as ever, I guess, these new features are a mixed blessing because yes, there are new interesting features to adopt, but it also means a lot of dev work. So, a mixed response from WWDC 26, but at least it wasn't the disaster of previous years. Although, yeah, practically nothing games focused, nothing on the App Store. A few things for advertisers to get their heads around, but as ever, it's quite deep technical stuff and you probably need to read through all the Apple literature around this stuff to fully understand it anyway. So, yeah. Too much to explain in one concise

article, but have a read of the article on the site from Darrell. It's called what Apple developers really thought of WWDC 2026. I meant to publish these last week, but I didn't get around to it. So, here they are this week. It's May's top grossing and top downloads charts according to App Magic. Top grossing, you got Honor of Kings top, of course, absolutely miles ahead of its closest contender, Whiteout Survival. 161 million dollars in in-app purchases from May according to App Magic numbers. Second place, 109 million. So, yeah, huge win for Honor of Kings as per usual. I guess the most notable thing about the top 10 here is the big drop for Last War Survival. That is down to 10th place, 82 million earned in May from in-app purchases. Usually that is second or third.

Whiteout Survival and Last War tend to just swap places every month. Not entirely sure why that's happened. If you know, let me know, but yeah, pretty typical month for Whiteout Survival, Royal Match Gossip Harbor, Candy Crush back to normal after a blip in February. Roblox and PUBG Mobile, pretty typical. Century Games King Shot continues to grow, though. 91 million for May, best ever performance, consistently steady growth since its sudden rise into the top tier of earners back in August 2025. Monopoly Go's big drop in in-app purchase revenue since January is presumably down to some web shop stuff going on at Scopely that was usually pulling in 110, 120 million. That is now pulling in about 80 million every month. But, we'll see. Maybe The Simpsons crossover will push up the in-app purchase revenue from more casual

consumers coming in this month. Outside the top 10 is arguably more interesting. Brawl Stars up three places, Free Fire Max up four spots. Love and Deep Space continues to grow up 13 places, 28.5 million earned in May. Goddess of Victory: Nikke saw similar growth up 12 places, 27 million earned in May, 24th spot for that one. Honkai: Star Rail down again, very spiky up and down game that is. Valorant Mobile a China-only game, 26.5 million just from China in May. And then Wuthering Waves really growing quickly month on month. That is before the Cyberpunk crossover went live on June 8th. Up 51 places month on month. 23 million earned in May. In top downloads, May was the month of these arrows games.

So, Miniclip {slash} Less More's Arrows Puzzle Escape top of the charts, 29.1 million downloads in May. Arrows Go {slash} Amaze Go from Learnings {slash} OK Viper Games. That game has changed its name in the last couple of weeks. More to come on that one. But, yeah, those two games top one and two in the downloads charts. Most downloads from India, of course. Block Blast, unusual to see that down in fourth, even below Free Fire, 18.8 million from Block Blast. Its removal from the Google Play Store briefly last month will not have helped its download numbers, of course. Pretty typical month for some of the regulars in this top 10. Vita Mahjong seems to be tailing off a little bit, fourth straight month decline for that one, 14.6 million installs in January 2026. Now that is down to 11.7 million, so steady decline

for that one. In 11th, Fortnite was very close to breaking into the top 10, up 18 spots month on month after its return to iOS worldwide, apart from Australia. So that may well keep growing now that that is essentially back on all platforms and all stores. Royal Kingdom dropped out of the top 10 for May, down quite a few spots month on month. EA FC started rising through the downloads charts, I would imagine as World Cup fever takes hold, that will be up, maybe even in the top 10 for June. And then the shock return of Game District's My Supermarket Simulator 3D. That was once riding high in the charts at the end of 2024, it's suddenly returned to the upper end of the rankings in May, 23rd place, million downloads for May. So return to form for that one. Quick one on this game, Oona.

I thought this was interesting and continues the theme of small indie games breaking out this week. This is a actually an 8-year-old game, came out in the years after Pokémon Go, and it's sort of Pokémon Go meets fantasy RPG. It was initially made by one guy, the development team is now nine people. And they sent us some interesting remarks about how they managed to survive for eight years and actually out survive a lot of the other bigger budget location games that arrived in the wake of Pokémon Go. I think it's a nice little Indie success story that I wrote up just for fun. I think the message with that one is keep your teams lean, listen to community. And they talk about how all the content in the game is paid for, there's no gotcha, there's no paywalls, nothing like that. They also hired quite a few people from

their community as well. So, that is an interesting quirk of that story, but yeah, check out the story on the site about Orna. I haven't published it at the time of recording, but the headline at the moment is Indie Pokémon Go-like RPG Orna has defied trends and turbulence for eight years. So, yeah, an interesting survival story for a what appears to be a very sensibly run Indie game studio. In data digest this week, PixelFlow 100 million in-in-app purchase revenue according to AppMagic, there's some graphs about hybrid casual puzzle in the article this week. Sensor Tower's May rankings suggest mobile game spending rose to $6.6 billion in May. Honor of Kings top of the revenue rankings, of course. Wuthering Waves is the fastest growing game month-on-month for May. In the downloads charts, you've got Arrows, of course.

And Arrows is top of the growth charts in downloads as well. Few more stats and interesting figures in the article for that one. Never Nester, Ever Nester, I keep tracking this game cuz I think anime GTA is a good pitch that no one seems to have done before. 28 million in its first 7 weeks on the App Stores. Pretty decent from 9.3 million downloads. This is from AppMagic, of course. Biggest spending markets are Japan and China with 43 and 28% of the respective spend. South Korea and US 11 and 10% of the spend. Download is China is ahead. 28% of the total. Then the US, Japan, Indonesia 12, 10, and 4%. Pokémon Go, again, these numbers are big. Pokémon Go Fest in Copenhagen 613,000 unique active Pokémon Go players across the Danish capital during its Pokémon Go Fest. That is

similar numbers to the event in Boston. So, huge real-world presence for that game. Looney which is a sort of short drama app that's got 14 million in UA funding from PVX partners. Another announcement for them. And then there's a Zebedee survey about loyalty and rewarded gaming to round off that one. This week's jobs digest very, very busy. Moves at LEGO, Supercell, AppLovin, Tilting Point, Super Evil Megacorp, Scopely, Rovio, Zynga, Play Ventures, Fortis Games, Wooga, Tactile Dream, Crazy Labs, Nordeus, King, Trailmix, Zebedee, Papaya Pick Poc, and SciPlay. I'm not going to run through all of them here. You'll have to check out the article. It's called jobs digest. It runs every other Monday. Thought it's worth mentioning a few notable games in new game digest from

last Friday. Dave the Diver is coming to mobile in August. One Piece Grand Gourmet also coming in October. That FIFA World Cup game is live on Netflix. Soccer Clash is the new game from Wildlife. Then you got Don't Starve Together, Hoverboard Party, which appears to be another Subway Surfers spin-off party game. And then you got some more new games from Rollic, Popcore, some new Apple Arcade games, and plenty more bits and bobs in that article. Have a look. New Game Digest every Friday on the site. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.