🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: AppLovin Just Cut Off Everyone's Data: The MeowDoku Studio Got Sued & more

The entertainment industry has flipped that. Games now have such big followings that they then warrant [music] to have movies made. So, this is just proof of how crazily big the gaming industry has gone compared to music.
Two and a Half Gamers [music] exclusive.
Breaking news. Literally breaking.
Hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. As you can see, it's Friday. I'm here alone, so it can only mean one thing. It is time to do the news for this week. So, I have three news stories for you that I have personally selected that I will first read. Then I will tell you what I actually think is going on behind the scenes. And then, if we have time, we'll also go do the weather, which is obviously the top charts in Sensor Tower to see what's kind of been performing this week in mobile gaming. So, let's

start with the first news story. So, this is from a blog post which came out last week, but hasn't really been talked about anywhere. And it's from the CEO of AppLovin, and it's Adam Foroughi, of course. So, it's titled "Ad quality tools should catch bad ads, not collect other networks user-level [music] data." So, I read "Publishers rely on ad quality tools to catch bad ads, creatives that redirect, auto-click, crash the app, or serve inappropriate content. AppLovin offers this through AppLovin ad review inside of MAX. Other providers offer similar tools. These tools only work if they can see the ad, and the provider gets that access from the publisher. The access does come with an obligation. The data belongs to the network that served the ad and to the user who saw it. And it should be collected to find and kill bad ads, nothing else. This post covers that standard and how AppLovin ad review meets it. How

AppLovin ad review works. Let me skip ahead a little bit, but basically what AppLovin ad review does, it runs on Max, their mediation platform. And basically, yeah, what the data use it moderates ads and is aggregated for reporting. User level data detail exists today only so a publisher can trace the specific ad bad ad and block it. AppLovin doesn't use this to actually build any device profiles and they don't feed it into their Axon AppLovin model.
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So, why this matters. For users, the ad network serves is the output of the model trained on data that the network collected under its own agreements with users and publishers. When another company captures a network served ads at the user level, it takes a piece of that network's and the user's data outside those agreements. And publishers and users may not even know it's happening. Networks, every network's competitive

advantage is its own served ad history. What it showed to whom and what happened. It sits sit inside every other network's ad stream and you get the entire history's output paired with pricing. Our terms bar transferring data derived from our service to third parties and treat our pricing as confidential for this reason. So, attribution. Think through what network A's real-time model trained on this stream can do. It seems that network B just served a specific advertiser's ad to a specific user at a given price. Networks A's bidder can then buy the next impression for that user, show the same advertiser and then take the click and install that then the install then came from B's network B's spend created. So, what they're actually doing, I'm not to finish reading this, but essentially what they're doing is that they will remove the user-level ad journey to essentially mean that only publishers

see aggregating reported by network ad units and creative instead. So, this aggregated ad review SDK will be available for iOS and Android, and any provider is free to follow this example. So, reading between the lines, this is probably one of the more interesting blogs that Adam has come out with recently, right? So, looking at this, if you have access to what a network is bidding for a user, say if you broke a company's mediation cipher, or if you look at, for example, whatever eCPM is served by Meta on a particular user level, that could be used as training data for a network algorithm. So, AppLovin's advantage in the marketplace is that everyone mediates on AppLovin. That is their biggest advantage, right? But, if people are training their data or networks or any competitors of AppLovin are training their data on

mediated data, that essentially means that they don't have the same competitive advantage. So, this is why they're removing this to essentially make it harder for anyone else to get stuff from their data. Very interesting. Didn't expect to see this, but yeah, I'm sure this is not the last we hear of user-level data from AppLovin. Let's see if basically they start banning more and more, cuz that is a signal that this essentially is a big problem for AppLovin. So, moving on to the next story, and that is that Sega and Netflix announce [music] partnership to develop Crazy Taxi, Sonic, and Stranger Than Heaven adaptations. I read, and this is from Game Industry written by Sophie McEvoy, uh McEvoy. Uh Sega and Netflix have formed a multi-title partnership to adapt Crazy Taxi, Sonic, and Stranger than Heaven. The first project is a Crazy Taxi film adaptation written by Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, known for the Naked Gun reboot. Sonic franchise

producers Neal Moritz, Toby Ascher, and Toru Nakahara will serve as producer. Stranger than Heaven will also be adapted into live-action prime film produced by Nakahara. And the Sonic franchise will launch a new animated series for an upper preschool audience. It will join Netflix existing animated show which premiered in 2022. So, the interesting thing here that I take away from this is just Do you remember when you were growing up, I don't know, in the early like mid-90s? Basically, movies came out, then they were adapted to games. So, for example, a good example of this would be James Bond GoldenEye came out, then N64 game came out. And then also all the other Bond movies they made a Bond game that came with it, right? This thing has now flipped on its head because gaming is so much bigger and generates so much more cultural following that basically the entertainment industry has flipped that

games now have such big followings that they then warrant to have a movies made. So, this is just proof of how crazily big the gaming industry has gotten compared to music, movies, TV, everything put together. Really interesting to see. So, moving on to the third and final story. This is from MobileGamer.biz with Neil Long who reported that Vita My Young, Amazgo, and Meow Duruku maker Oak Ever Games fighting cloning accusations. So, the company behind Vita My Young, Amazgo, and Meow Duruku has already lost one copyright infringement case against Block Blast maker Hungry Studio and is fighting another one brought by Avia Games. Oakever has scored a string of mobile game hits with titles including Paint by Number, Tile Explore, Jigsaw Scapes, Zen Word. The company also trades as Learnings and publishes via Vitamiong under the name Vita Studio. More

recently, Oakever titles like Amaze Go Me Out have been riding high in the top downloads charts. A profile of the company in Chinese press suggested the company was founded by Lexing Shangwen in February 2016 and two co-founders. The co-founders met when they were running AdMob in China. The company now has 200 employees. So, a California judge ruled in favor of RTS Limited, better known as Block Maker Hungry Games, against Oakever Games in a copyright infringement case [music] in April. Courts reports from the beginning of the case that the Hong Kong-based RTS, trading as Hungry Games, accused Oakever of producing a copy of his puzzler Block Blast. The case alleged that Oakever's puzzler Q Block had essentially the same artwork and design interface. The case also accused Oakever of copying some of Block Blast audio artifacts. So, the judge in

this case found in favor of Hungry Studio on April 15th this year, say the further court documents. Q Block has since been rebranded as Wood Block Puzzle Games and looks similar to Triple Dot's Woodoku. So, a second infringement case was filed against Oakever by Avia Games in December 2025. The case is still ongoing, but court reports that initial filings accuse Oakever of copying eight copyrighted ads produced by Avia Games and alleged that Oakever simply pasted his game names and studio logo over the top of the ones in the AVS original ads. So, I'll stop reading right here, but this is super interesting because we had last year a couple of large-scale games that were scaling taken down from the App Stores because of copyright infringement. So, the interesting thing here is we always say that Chinese games, you know, they don't care about copyright because they're based in China. So, everyone is watching this extremely

closely because this is kind of the battleground for big large-scale companies because everyone copies in mobile, right? And there's no repercussions. But it looks like there might be some now, right? So, these decisions that are made in these cases will then be basically used for further cases, which means that legal expenses for games could go up significantly because you always need to find fight off basically copyright infringement trials. Super interesting. It's going to be interesting to see what this house because there is kind of no IP on mobile. Let me quickly now just finish this off and move to Sensor Tower. So, I stopped sharing. Very smooth on me. So, we can see here on the App Store in the US as of yesterday, we have Meow Doku from Okervil Games at top spot, Block out by Grand Games, AnimA, I haven't actually seen that much that one before. Definitely we should cover it on the podcast even more. Call of Duty Flow,

Vita My Young, and Smash Fest. And on Google Play, we have Meow Doku again, Roblox, Royal Smash by Cypher Games, Magic Sword, and Block Blast that are topping the charts. So, that's everything I had for you this week. This has been another terrific news episode by the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. I'm Felix. Thank you for stopping.