Apple's undercooked games efforts, Google's big AI claims, Ilkka's BAFTA speech, data, jobs, more

Hello and welcome to the mobilegamer.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. This time, back home, walking the mean streets of St. Albans in Hertfordshire. Here we go. Let's start with Tim Cook. You may have heard the CEO of Apple is stepping aside in September. And of course, I took the opportunity to write about my specialist subject Apple's involvement or you know, non-involvement in the video game industry from which it has earned billions and billions of dollars over the course of Tim Cook's 15-year tenure as CEO of Apple. If you don't know already, I worked there as an App Store editor for 7 years in the London office, so not really

close to the heartbeat of the operation in Cupertino, but I saw a thing or two. So yeah, the headline for this piece is Tim Cook oversaw one of gaming's biggest platforms for 15 years but didn't seem to notice. It's a little bit cheeky, I guess, but it does, I think sum up his apparent sort of disdain or just disinterest in the games business and this part of the services division that earns Apple billions and billions. His interactions with the games business have been pretty limited. There's a snippet from a 2017 visit to Us Two Games in London which I remember well. It was like a royal visit. The extent to which things were planned and coordinated and worried about before his arrival in London. He actually met Theresa May, the then Prime Minister. This snippet here

I thought it was funny. I don't know if it's mean or Mr. Cook was jet-lagged or whatever, but he did interview with the Independent about what he's doing in the UK and they really grilled him with tough questioning like, "Are you a fan of us two and Monument Valley?" To which he replied, "Most games are shoot them up or that kind of stuff. This one feels like there's more of a core purpose kind of game." I mean, it's barely even a response. And also suggests that he considers most games to be purposeless and like shoot them up sort of things and you know, look, just say, "Yes, you like the game. Yes, I've played it. It's fantastic and that's why I'm here in London to celebrate the great creativity that London and the UK has to offer." You know, something like that. But, he didn't. And the fact that he didn't, I don't know. Apple does pride itself on attention to detail and all of this

stuff, but if you read that interview, he's just I don't know if he's like severely jet-lagged, but it's not Pulitzer Prize-winning stuff. Elsewhere in that article, I run through what I consider to be the big three gaming moments within Cook's tenure. First with Apple Arcade, I think the bit worth pulling out of this the section on where it sits in the sort of hierarchy of Apple services. Arcade arrived just before the launch of the Apple One subscription service, which is basically subscribe to all the Apple stuff for a big discount. And my theory here is, I don't know this. It's just a speculation, a theory that Apple Arcade's existence is really down to needing some sort of games offering within that big services bundle.

Without Apple One, I'm not sure Apple Arcade would really exist. I don't know that for sure, but one can speculate. You know, Apple's DNA is in music, and it has spent a huge amount of money on that TV service. Arcade, on the other hand, very much at the bottom of that pecking order. Although the news and fitness services, I don't think are particularly strong, either, but yeah, I don't know if Arcade would exist without the need to sell a big services bundle. It's still a very good service. It's just maybe not the thing to save gaming on Apple devices. As I say in the piece, then you got IDFA and ATT, which I think Apple knew very clearly would cause huge problems for user acquisition and mobile game marketing, but it did it anyway in pursuit of its commitment to privacy

and so on. It's a classic in the genre of Apple policy decisions that damage everyone else's business and benefit Apple's. Then you've got the Epic trial in which Cook, having never really referenced games in any of the earnings calls in which services revenue was the star performer, he says he is, quote, "not a gamer," which is fine, obviously. You don't need to have put 100 hours into Demon's Souls or whatever to oversee a very large games business. But the really baffling part is where he pretends, under oath, that he doesn't know whether the App Store is profitable or not. He does say he has a feeling it is. Which of course would be a pretty strong feeling as I noted in the article about 2 weeks before he was testifying

in court Apple reported all-time record services revenue. Most of that revenue would have come from games on the App Store back then in 2021. And then of course later as the repercussions of that Epic trial unfolded, you've got the EU DMA stuff. Of course Apple was very stubborn and contemptuous when responding to that producing a lot of mad new rules that no one really signed up to. So mission accomplished there. And then there's shenanigans in the US when faced with charges of being a monopoly frustrated the judge so much that she just removed all Apple mandated payment restrictions from the US App Store. We round it out with a quick look at John Ternus as a executive. He is a hardware guy. Tim Cook was an operations guy. The simple narrative here is that Cook turned Apple into a money-making machine

and Ternus may well turn out to be a sort of swing of the pendulum back to product. He oversees a lot of the hardware Apple makes and a lot of that hardware is showcased in Apple's keynotes through games. So he may well be more inclined to pay a bit more attention to the games world and maybe reinvest some of the billions Apple has made into keeping developers a little happier and providing better App Store services and tools to help people make more money through its services. It's also worth noting as I do in the piece that Phil Schiller, the very uncompromising App Store lead, has effectively retired Matt Fischer, the guy who took over from him as App Store boss. He left the company in maybe

last year or the year before. And there's new blood running the store now. So, Carson Oliver and Anne Thai, they used to be App Store business managers who were sort of boots on the ground, developer contacts, basically. So, those guys will be maybe more understanding of developers' needs on the App Store. So, as well as Turnus being in charge from September, those guys being in charge of the App Store, calls for optimism, I think. But, the punchline to this article brings in the already forgotten Apple Games app, which was launched in September. And if you are an iPhone user, it's probably sitting on your device right now. You may not have even noticed it's there. The way I tie it up at the end is that the Apple Games app, much like Tim Cook's tenure, was to games pretty perfunctory and soon to be forgotten. Xsolla connects developers with the

resources they need to build, fund, launch, and monetize their mobile games globally. With Xsolla Web Shop, sell virtual items, in-game currency, subscriptions, and custom offers directly to players while driving up to five times the revenue growth. With the industry's number one web shop solution, Xsolla provides the tools for developers to focus on what's most important, creating great games. Visit xsolla.com to learn more. That's xsolla.com. Also this week, I got around to publishing a chat with Google Cloud's Games boss, Jack Buser. I spoke to him at GDC about AI and it's uptake within game studios and of course specifically mobile game studios. I think it's worth pulling out a couple of the more potentially spicy things he said. Obviously, he works for Google and is

very much pushing that technology. And a couple of the claims in this article may well anger the anti-AI brigade online. Who do seem to jump on these things. I think one of the claims is in the headline of the piece. What players don't realize is that their favorite games right now were already built with AI. Which is a nod to practically every game studio's use of Google Cloud's AI services, be it Gemini, be it Nano Banana, be it, you know, Google Sheets. I don't know. He goes into some detail about Capcom, you know, they're putting in some prompts and having it spit out different pebbles and environmental things that go into these large game worlds that Capcom makes. So that its team members can concentrate

on more important things. And that seems fairly sensible. And then the bit that that caused me to stop and think while he was talking was where he said that their surveys suggest that nine out of 10 studios are using AI tools as a matter of course in their daily work. But then other surveys suggest that it's 40 to 50% and that shortfall is essentially game studios not wanting to admit publicly that they are using either Google's AI tools or other AI tools. And I thought that was an interesting one because it does sort of ring true, I think. If you offer a studio a way to make game production quicker and easier and cheaper, more often than not, I would think, they would take it. A lot of studios are using this stuff and not really telling people about it

because you get a backlash like I think Larian had a this crazy backlash online where in an interview or on social media, one of the studio leads said, "Yeah, of course we're using AI in game development." But people misconstrued that as generative AI art assets or replacing game writers or replacing other human tasks. But they had to backtrack and apologize and make it clear that they will never use any AI in game development ever, which I don't know, seems like an overreaction. I think the reality is, as always, sort of quite boring and sensible. Of course, where useful and efficient, some bits of software will be added to the game production process and will help speed things up and make things cheaper.

But there are a large number of people out there who absolutely despise everything to do with AI. I think there's a really fascinating tension between the practicalities of game development and how hard it is, the ever-increasing costs of game development and particularly mobile game marketing. And then you've got all these new tools coming online that may well help with all of that. But then you've also got this moral quandary around the use of it and whether it's replacing people's jobs and the environmental impact of it and the security concerns and so on and so on. So yeah, it's a fascinating topic, I think, and it's not going to go away anytime soon. But yeah, clearly Google is all in on this stuff and I thought Jack was a really

good and enthusiastic interviewee. We crammed a lot in. There's a load of stuff I had to cut out. Have a read, decide for yourself. The quick write-up I did of Supercell boss Ilkka Paananen's BAFTA Fellowship speech got quite a few readers on Monday. If you're not aware, but the BAFTA Games Awards took place last Friday. And Ilkka picked up the Fellowship, which is the highest honor BAFTA can award to people in the games industry. Miyamoto, Kojima, etc. have got it before, and this year it was mobile's turn, which may or may not have something to do with Google Play's sponsorship of the event this year. I don't know. Purely speculation. But yeah, Ilkka's speech, if you are a follower of the mobile games industry, you will have heard some of this stuff before,

particularly the stuff about Ilkka being the least powerful person at Supercell and so on. He obviously thanked all the games teams and the game community and Supercell's creator community for the success of these games, and also said that he didn't come up with any of these game ideas. So, the award is really for Supercell and the wider mobile games industry, which is a a nice thing to offer out. He was also introduced by David Gardner. I think he's was an early investor in Supercell and is also quite involved in BAFTA Games as well, so you can join some dots there. And in a video package before the speech, there was the likes of Shuhei Yoshida, EA founder Trip Hawkins, Trailmix founder Caroline Chrisman, and Ustwo Games boss Maria Sayans, who all paid tribute to Ilkka. The Yoshida part of the video package is legit, I think. I once sat next to him

at Develop in Brighton. And he was just playing Clash of Clans. So, he is a genuine fan. But yeah, you can read the whole speech and some detail on who introduced him and who said what on the website. Have a look. Couple from the end of last week that I think it'd be good to mention here. The maker of Bacon the Game, Philipp Stollenmayer, has a new game out. I think this guy is really interesting. He makes games entirely by himself. They always have a a weird arty twist. And this time it's a slice of bacon traveling through the human body. I asked him some questions about what it's like as a solo indie game developer on mobile and how you survive and he has some really interesting and fun ideas about viral marketing and and how his games are received on social media. So, I think that is really worth a read. Again, later on Thursday, James Acaster, he does the incredibly

popular Off Menu podcast. He's a brilliant comedian. He is the narrator of a new Apple Arcade game called Pachang World. And I put this out just because I think it's fun and a small UK indie getting a big name like that is is worth celebrating. Have a look at the trailer. I think it's good fun. Your regular dose of data has a load of funding news. First Point reveals a 50 million euro fund also Reforged Studios who bought the Bridge Constructor guys head up not long ago. They got 30 million dollars in investment. AI marketing platform AppLovin or Uplinq, don't know how you say that. They got 4.5 million seed round. An animal soup sweeper maker, Smash Games got 2 million in UA funding from PVX Capital.

You've also got Aldoor Joost van Dreunen's data company. They put out this quite interesting top grossing media franchises list every month. There's also revenue and download milestones for Tasty Travels, Century Games Merge Game, Tiles Survive, which is Fun Plus's puzzler, and War Robots from My Games. There's also data on the UK games market and some lovely graphs about outsourcing. Have a look. On Monday in the jobs digest we got news of moves at Scopely, Rovio, Social Point, Star Stable, Google, Stillfront, and more. There's also what appears to be Duolingo's latest acquire, the guys at Wild Camp Games, and also Side Quest Games, a new Barcelona-based studio.

Details on the people involved in that. And finally, last Friday in the new game digest Racing Master, Codemasters' popular racing game big in China, Published by NetEase, that's coming to the West. There's another Dragon Quest game. And I think maybe of most interest, um though the game's name is really generic, Puzzle Panic from Limit Break. Limit Break is the new company from the founder of Machine Zone, Gabe Leydon. It appears to be a match-three with a kind of anime girl meta. There's also the closure of Disney Heroes Battle Mode and Pocket Mortys in that article. And that's it. Thank you for listening all the way through. Goodbye.