🚨📢 Breaking News: Apple AI money, rewarded roll-up, mobile funding wave

Just Play was founded in 2020 by former AppLovin executives and operates over 40 mobile casual titles. 70% of its revenue comes from North America. Just Play is demonstrating exceptional growth and strong potential with revenue projected to increase 88% year-over-year in
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Two and a Half Gamers exclusive. [music] Breaking news.
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Literally breaking. Hello everyone and welcome to the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. It's absolutely Friday. So, we must do the news. So, I have a couple of news stories. I'm going to talk a little bit about it and then you will be fully caught up on all these weeks' stories. So, we're starting with one of my favorite ones, which actually I thought was one of the funniest. So, this is actually from Wall Street Journal and it's about how Apple is far behind in AI

but still making a fortune from it. So, Apple is on pace to surpass $1 [music] billion in artificial intelligence revenue this year. A tidy sum that demonstrates that the company's AI advantage even as it struggles to deliver a AI strategy of its own. Its Siri chatbot is still weak by modern AI standard. What Apple does have that other AI players don't is a dominant position in making devices. However fancy OpenAI OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or xAI make their chatbots chatbots, iPhones are still the primary primary way to deliver them to consumers. That means that they typically pay the Apple Store tax, roughly 30% of subscription fees in the first year and 15% thereafter. Though the rates vary by country, generative AI apps paid Apple nearly $900

in App Store fees in 2025, according to [music] AppMagic. 3/4 of this revenue Apple rakes in from GenAI apps in the App Store comes from ChatGPT, according to AppMagic. Next, about 5% is xAI Grok and Apple's revenue from GenAI apps rose from about 35 million in January 2025 to a high of 101 million in August. So, I find this absolutely hilarious because Apple doesn't really have an AI strategy and they're lacking so far behind on capital expenditure compared to the other companies, but they're still raking in the profits from all of it, right? So, what do we take away from this? I guess that AI companies have noticed this and I guess this is why Jony Ive has joined ChatGPT to basically build the next AI phone. So, I guess they're very well aware of this and kind of kind of want to dethrone Apple's grip that they have because it's ridiculous that they're earning nearly billion a

year from these companies. Anyway, moving on. So, here we have three stories that I think is kind of related. So, I'm just going to read them out quickly and then basically you decide what you think the red thread is between these three stories. So, the first one is Istanbul-based Vento Games secures $4 million to scale family-friendly mobile puzzle portfolio. Then the next story is that Antihero Studios raises $4.5 million in a seed funding deal ahead of an open alpha. Then we have another news story that reads Cheer Games raises $4.5 million in pre-seed round led by Makers Fund with participation from Play Ventures setting a new standard for mobile game franchises. So, here we have three stories and I think this is really interesting and I think this is all news right on the back of the sale of Loom Games, the billion-dollar valuation and the $200 million cash up-front deal is breathing life again into certain parts of the

gaming market and most of this is Istanbul-based, right? So, what the big takeaway from all this I would say is that absolutely mobile gaming is back and we're going to see a lot of new interesting [music] things coming in from these studios. So then we have another two stories to come on the back of this, right? And I think these stories I'll read them out and there's another red thread that goes here. NCSoft acquires 70% stake [music] in mobile developer Just Play. $202 million expected to close at the end of April 2026 as Korean games giant continues expansion into casual into the casual games markets. NCSoft is set to acquire 70% stake in Berlin-based mobile game developer Just Play for $202 million. The deal is expected to close end of April. Just Play was founded in 2020 by

former AppLovin executives and operates over 40 mobile casual titles. 70% of its revenue comes from North America. Just Play is demonstrating exceptional growth and strong potential with revenue projected to increase 88% year-over-year in 2026, NCSoft CEO Bum-ho Park said. Though this is an acquisition, we will secure the core a core platform for our global mobile casual businesses and focus on building an ecosystem that maximizes synergy both in Korea and internationally. So, great story about a South Korean giant buying a Berlin-based startup, right? So, here comes the next story. So, this is reported by Neil Long in MobileGamer.biz, which is that Nazara is buying controlling stake in casual game studio Blue Tile and rewarded play firm Best Play for $100 million. So, Indian tech giant Nazara

Technologies has spent a combined $100 million to buy controlling stakes in casual game studio Blue Tile and rewarded play firm Best Play. So, regulatory filings suggest that Nazara paid 88.4 million dollars for 50% in Blue Tile and 11.9 million for half of Best Play Systems, both which are based in Barcelona. And the filings also suggest that Blue Tile has 17 live games with 375 million downloads and roughly 22 million active users. Best Play meanwhile, it's a rewarded play company that offers players vouchers and other incentives for playing mobile games. Its apps rack up to 1.2 million downloads per month and has 2.2 million monthly active [music] users. Then the CEO says something here about how happy he is with the acquisition and how everything was done from the UK. So, these two

stories I think are very much related. So, Blue Tile if you don't know, that's formerly PlayValve. But actually what's happening here? So, if we start with the NCSoft story here, how they bought Just Play. So, Just Play is a rewarded apps company. So, think adjoe and all these type of companies, but what they do is they send all the users to their own owned apps. So, it would be like for example, yeah, you own a bunch of gaming apps and then you only send your yeah, your offer wall clients to these applications. And now they have been bought by by NCSoft, right? And then you have this Indian company that buys controlling stake in Best Play and Blue Tile, pretty much is the same thing. So, this is I guess what we've been talking about on a couple of podcasts ago that this is the start of the roll-up of the rewarded ads space. So, we have this whole industry, so with UA where it's

essentially AppLovin and Google where you pay and do UA, but what a big part of UA that's actually happening now is actually now through done through rewarded channels. So, where you pay users to complete tasks such as playing a game to a certain level or reaching or reaching a certain play time to actually get your reward.
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So, this is the first we're seeing of a lot of these companies that is basically starting the roll-up. So, right now there's probably about 15 to 20 players that all earn a lot of ad revenue or a lot of revenue, but now what we're already seeing is probably they're going to be more consolidated. So, this is exactly what happened in the ad network space 3 4 years ago. So, now we're going to start seeing the roll-up and this was the starting gun. Funny story about Apple, good to see more investments after the Loom Games investments and now we're also seeing the start of the rewarded ads space roll-up. So, those were the three kind of overarching themes from this week. That's everything I had for you today. Enjoy enjoy your fantastic weekend ahead and this was the

Two and a Half Gamers podcast where you can stay two and a half steps ahead of the mobile gaming industry. Thank you very much for listening.