Apple's EU App Store changes, Supercell, PUBG, MTG, Poinpy, Gamescom, July's top games, 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. Apple has announced a new set of EU app store terms that include tweaked commission fees on every flavor of payment type. This is apparently to quote resolve Apple's disagreements with the commission over business terms and alternative distribution. End quote. This is a revision of the previous new EU terms and conditions Apple rolled out over a year ago, maybe even two years ago in response to the EU's Digital Markets Act, which categorizes Apple as a platform with slightly too much influence and is now subject to some rules and regulations. Apple as ever did not really play ball with the rules first time around. Caused a big fuss as we note in the story. There was a huge backlash to those original terms and

conditions. One payment provider said that quote, "Apple views developers and as nothing more than thieves." In a response article we ran around that time, I guess the headline number is a whopping 4% drop in inapp purchase commission for developers using Apple's native inapp purchase payment systems. So, it's worth checking the actual documentation in your Apple developer account to see which ones apply. And then games using alternative payment processing must give Apple a 20% cut of inapp purchases. Games that link out of the app to complete purchases get slapped with a 15% commission. Apps and games downloaded through alternative app stores or the web. Apple charges a 5% commission. Smaller developers will get a 10 or 15% commission. Alternative payments will now also be displayed

alongside Apple's native inapp purchase payment options for the first time in the EU. Although this is of course subject to presentation requirements, there's also a new set of hurdles to clear for alternative app stores. Every app to be distributed through these other app stores also need to be notorized by Apple. Apps and games in the kids category or those for under 13s will not be allowed to carry alternative payments or linkouts for safety reasons. Any app or game for under 18s will also now have a parental gating and approval system. This applies to all developers. Before you had to specifically ask to sign up to new terms in order to offer offstore or alternative payments or run an alternative app store. So a lot of changes. Whether it will amount to much in real terms is yet to be seen. I'm going to imagine this will make very little difference. But it apparently

resolves the conflict between what Apple wants to do and what the EU wants. So I guess they are both happy. Apple has not given much away. EU seems to have given in really. And we await of course the catty tweets from Tim Sweeney which have yet to come through at the time of recording. Hey, guess what? Epic Games and Tim Sweeney have had their say on the revised Apple EU App Store terms. The Epic Games Newsroom X account described Apple's App Store Commission as junk fees and claims that the new terms do quote nothing to open up the mobile app ecosystem to competition as required by the Digital Markets Act. It continues, "The law makes it clear that Apple must allow developers to offer linkouts to the web for purchases free of charge and has to allow effective use of competing stores. Apple's terms deliberately

violate the Digital Markets Act if the commission accepts the terms and drops their ongoing enforcement actions. The law will become meaningless and consumers and developers will not experience the benefits it was designed to provide." Tim Sweeney, Epic Games boss, also chimed in, quote, "Apple has launched a new junk fee structure in EU, mirroring the terms in Brazil and Japan. They're still unlawfully charging for linked out transactions, brackets clearly prohibited by DMA, and add prohibitions and friction to herd kids into high junk fee Apple payments." So predictably scathing comments from Apple's Best Chums Epic Games there. And you would imagine that perhaps a lot of people also feel the same way. Apple's concessions to the EU amount to not very much. So this feels more like an Apple victory than a EU Commission victory.

But we shall see how it plays out and how the reaction unfolds in the next few days. and weeks. Bit of Supercell news. After its summer break, it seems the Moco team is back and has updated its players on how it is performing. In short, it is not doing great. Supercell has floated the possibility of killing the monster hunting game. It was recently rebooted, but the results are in and they are not good. but killing the game entirely remains an unlikely scenario. End quote. So, the game was effectively relaunched 3 months ago, but Supercell says Moco is not performing as well as we hoped. There will be further changes to the game now, and the next couple of seasons will likely be affected by that work going on behind the scenes. This really feels like the last roll of the dice for

this game. I have no sources or information on that. But I mean, how many times can you reboot something like this before you call it a day, especially within a company that is actually sort of weirdly fond of killing games, but clearly the development team believe in it. So, it is carrying on. Uh, I pulled some AppMagic numbers on Moco as well here, just for context. It's earned about $6.7 million from 9 million downloads to date. So that's about a year and a half on the market. In terms of revenue is tracking way behind Squadbusters, which was killed a little over a year after being on the market. So yeah, Mo seems to be the cat with nine lives at Supercell. It is continuing and closing it is possible, but unlikely, says Supercell. Exola connects developers with the resources they need to build, fund,

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Tencent and Craftton are bringing out a new edition of PUBG Mobile. It's called PUBG Mobile Light and it is a lower footprint version of the battle royale hit that has been raking in cash for many, many years now. Pre-registration opens August 25th and a full launch is targeted for later this year. It seems like the idea here is to lower the barrier to entry on storage and device requirements presumably for emerging markets and places that Garina's Freef

Fire is perhaps a little bit more popular as a result of being a little bit more friendly for lower-end Android devices. So clearly these emerging markets have become more of a priority for Craftton and Tencent in recent years and that is reflected in this new version of PUBG Mobile. A lot of news coming out of MTG. It's midcore division now rebranded. Play amp is allin on AI across development, art, marketing and more. Play amp CEO Oliver Bulos told us that all of the studios under that umbrella, Pllearium, Innoame Hutch, Snowprint, Ninja Kiwi, and Future Play have all integrated AI tooling into practically all of their processes. The example given here is Inoame. So rather than shutting down the underperforming

Sunrise Village, a two-person team spent two months building a custom AI stage designer. That game is now run by effectively three people where it maybe would have closed down because it needed about 25 people to run it. So that is an interesting and pretty solid example of how AI tooling is helping keep production costs down. Of course, the concern here is that that just gives companies like MTG licensed to sack a load of people. They say that no one was laid off and the staff freed up by those changes were moved from Sunrise Village onto Innoame's newer title, Cozy Coast. There's other examples here about how Pllearium is using various AI tools in its processes and art generation and particularly marketing. It's quite a complex stuff. So you should have a look at the article which is headlined MTG's play app division is all in on AI across development, art, marketing and more.

A lot of people liked reading this one which is unexpected because it's about a Japanese indie developer but good to see. The headline here is indie author Ojiro Famoto on reviving Pompy his Netflix deal and working at Nintendo. Famoto made downwell which was a smash and that seemed to get him a job at Nintendo where he worked a little bit on Ringfit Adventure and Donkey Kong Bonanza but he left. He wants to do his own thing. You don't see too many people come out of Nintendo. So his is an interesting case. Point P was then in development and snapped up by Netflix. The game didn't perform particularly well despite being critically acclaimed and when the Netflix deal expired, Point P disappeared from the app stores. Devolver brought it back last month. He says in short, it was great working with

Netflix. They gave him loads of support and reading between the lines, money. He feels like the game has earned enough money now, which is the reasoning for releasing it entirely free. So, this is not a money-making scheme. It is really for game preservation, he says. And what he learned from Nintendo is essentially to make games more accessible, think about easing players through the experience. So, yeah, point P back on the app stores and a rare Q&A with its creator on the site. Now, Apple and Google up their Gamescom presence as court dramas continue. Traditionally, Apple and Google don't really bother with big trade shows. Google always turns up to GDC, but it's always to promote, you know, Google Cloud in the case of this year or some other service. It's rare that Google Play itself turns up to one of these shows in a big way. Google

Play will be in hall 7. And Google says it is its biggest regional consumer push and first major Gamescom presence in a decade. And even Apple is turning up to Gamescom these days despite being generally quite mysterious and not ever really wanting to join anyone else's events. Apple has three different developer facing talks at Gamescom Dev. So maybe there's hope here in terms of Apple and Google making a little bit more of an effort to please developers. Apple certainly has the worst reputation here because Google does tend to play ball a little bit more, but nice to see both platforms giving a little bit more back than they usually do at Gamescom. July's top downloads, Roblox on top, followed by Freef Fire Max, Arrow Puzzle, Blockbust, Soccer Superstar, and more. The notable thing here is the ins and outs, ups and downs with these

arrows games. Two of them made by Mini Clip, one by Learnings. Learnings Arrows Go and Mini Arrows Puzzle Escape, both dropped pretty significantly month and have been replaced by Mini Clips Arrows Puzzle Tap Puzzle Games. that is in third spot now with 19 million downloads in July. There's also notable influence from the World Cup in this top 10 downloads list according to at Magic Data. Blockb Blast, Ludo King, and Subway Surface are in the top 10, but so are soccer superstar football league 2026 and EA FC mobile for the first time. Downloads for these games rose as the World Cup final approached and then dropped off pretty quickly after that. E Football from Konami also in at number 12 with about 11 million downloads in July. Smashfest is really gathering pace from Flow Games 10 million downloads in effectively its second month on the

market. Level Devil and Gossip Harbor also rose pretty significantly. And SuperSense Pizza Ready has dropped off pretty significantly. That was once in the top 10 most months. is down to 23rd place having dropped 14 spots month on month. More download data and analysis in the whole article. Take a look on the website for that. And in the top grossing charts for July according to ATM magic, Honor of Kings back on top, $158 million in out purchase after a big wobble in June, but also drops in March and April. Big boost for Roblox, over 100 million for the first time since December 2025. Gossip Harbor is the third top grossing game in July according to these numbers. That is the highest ever ranking for Micro Funds Merge Puzzler, but not its

highest ever monthly earnings. It earned more back in March according to this data. PUBG Mobile is on a comeback after dropping down the rankings significantly in June. But maybe the biggest story is Pokémon Go. It was earning 30 millionish a month in inapp purchase for the last few months. But July with a load of 10th anniversary celebrations and live ops and so on, it jumped up to over hund00 million and is also earning a load of money through its web shop. according to last week's data digest. So July 2026, Pokémon Go's best month of inapp purchase revenue since June 2022. Royal match and white out survival fell only a little bit month on month. Monopoly Go and Candy Crush target grew a little bit and Kingshot remained effectively flat. Outside of that, Konami's e Football is doing the best job of monetizing through inapp purchase. July 2026 was its best

month ever. 69 million roughly for the month. That is way ahead of its previous record of about 40 million back in July 2025. It is mostly in Japan, but it is still way out ahead of EAFC Mobile, which is down in 42nd place with 17 million earned in July. We got a source on this last war thing. It was top two, top three practically every month for the last 18 months or so. Now it is down in 12th position with 64 million earned. It was racking up a good 120 million a month before. A source has told us that some players are quitting the game due to lack of new content. And Last War has also removed high cost packages due to a class action lawsuit. So, those are the I should say allegations, suggestions from a source as to what's happened with Last War. The rest of the top 20

interesting that Mihoyo's games all rose pretty significantly. Full analysis and data in the article as ever. Netflix is to close its LA studio night school, Helsinki's Moonloot, and cut internal game teams. So, the excellent Steven Tortillo, founder of Gamefile, got this scoop. Perhaps the more relevant one here for the mobile gamer.biz audience is Helsinki's Moonloot. This never shipped a game as far as I'm aware, but it was, we understand, led by former Digital Chocolate EA and Zinga exec Marco Lastika. Job ads from 2023 suggested it was developing an Animal Crossing like game. There were no details on how many people will be put out of work, but these Netflix cuts were all over LinkedIn. So yeah, studio closures and layoffs at Netflix games perhaps not a

surprise, but still very sad for those affected. In data digest, Pokemon TCG pocket has declined pretty notably. It has meant that Japanese developer Dena's revenue was down 33% year on year in its latest financials. Crazy Labs Sled Surfers has driven mobile game growth at Embracer Group. My Hero Academia United Survival has got a million downloads in a week. that is a popular anime and therefore a popular mobile game. Record Maple Story numbers have driven revenue at Nexon. That idle RPG game they have out seems to be doing the business. Shooters were the midcore category to grow the most in Q2 says an App Magic report also from AppMagic Last Asylum earned 3.8 million in a week recently. That game's

doing pretty well according to these stats. And there's also a little reminder that Liftoff has posted 220 million revenue in its first quarter since its IPO. New Game Digest was popular this week, mainly because of Supercell's update to Project Rise. This is getting a beta. This has been long in gestation, as we say in the article. It's an action RPG spin-off of Clash of Clans. A beta test has opened for the game and runs until September the 2nd. This game was first revealed as Clash Heroes way back in 2021, rebooted and renamed 2024. Couple of small beta tests and alpha tests since then, but this seems to show that there is life in Project Rise. Whether it will actually get to launch after that long in development and in beta, we shall see. There's also Disney Epic Mickey

rebrushed in there. Dave the Diver update, Goat Simulator 3, and as usual, a couple of quirkier indie games in there. New game digest every Friday. And finally on Monday, our regular roundup of soft launch games had another new moon active beta and more from the likes of EA, Zingga, Roio, Playicks, Blizzard, and Scopley. And that's it for this week. We are back to reality, back in glamorous Harford cheer after our summer holidays. And next week is Gamescom, so maybe see you out there. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.