🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: BioWare Shutdown 😱, PEGI 16 rating on lootboxes, Griffin Gaming film studio

Two and a half gamers exclusive. [music]
Breaking news.
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Literally breaking.
Hello, hello. This is two and a half gamers breaking news and today it will be literally breaking because there's lots of significant stuff happening. So, yeah, welcome to the usual Friday news [music] recap. Let's get right to it. So, the big news of this week is that there are some cuts in EA, which means uh big Bloomberg article about EA cutting 400 jobs and BioWare shutting down to cut costs. For those who don't know, BioWare being the OG RPG uh makers with games such as Dragon Age or Mass Effect or many many other beloved franchises.

So, this is a big big loss for the industry, uh definitely. Um yeah, so I don't know how big the team is there because I think there were some layoffs before. Uh but yeah, this is goes all the way like BioWare was founded in 1995, acquired by EA in 2007, and of course you know that this year or last year was the Saudi acquisition of EA finished. So, I guess it's part of because of that. But yeah, these are the guys that did the whole Dragon [music] Age Mass Effect stuff and their latest game was Dragon Age Veilguard, which of course missed its sales expectations and I didn't even play that. I played the last Dragon Age The previous Dragon Age game I played, but yeah, that's it. Um also EA said that it's canceling the planned uh Sims franchise and they're re- like repurposing repurposing resources on on some other Sims project so on so

on. So yeah, uh let's see how this goes because uh those games are literally legends. Moving on. Apple App Store chief explains its push for premium games. Uh really? So, um Carl Carson Oliver uh told Polygon uh that more and more premium games including franchises coming from PC and console will be seen on the [music] App Store. And they see incredible growth. Oh, really? Maybe he should look at how big the incredible growth is of Gossip Harbor or King Shot. But yeah, he inside stuff such as like Balatro, Star Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire, Vampire Crawlers, now the new Vampire Survivors card spin-off, and so on so forth, of course, on Apple Arcade and stuff like Apple love this thing because it's nice and handy and it's not their you know, bread and butter fair gets,

which means like 90% revenue they get from games on the store, but okay, but but sure. Let's have this nice PR initiative, but that's that's basically it. But again, we have the Steam scanner, so if you want to see games are being literally ripped off from Steam by the developers of mobile games to kind of being repurposed and staying mind to go on to mobile. So, that that's what's happening. Like that's the actual dynamic here. Um moving on. Clash of Creators went over 50 million. For those who don't know, this game is the new leader in Lilith's portfolio. Not a 4X game, is a social casino RPG as we say because it has this pachinko core. Then you have some monster tower defense auto play gameplay. We have the full review on the channel if you want to see, but yeah, this game's definitely one to look for cuz it could be start of a new category or sub genre, but let's see. It's very successful and hands down to Lilith for going this bold in their innovation. And yeah, they kind of

exiting Forex or I'd say not really that big any
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anymore. Uh, Supercell completes full acquisition of Metacore. Uh, these are the guys behind Merge Mansion. Again, if you don't know, there were some levels before, now it's 100% Supercell. And yeah, Merge Mansion is doing, I guess, pretty okayish, something like 9 10 mil a month. Nothing compared to Gossip Harbor, which is doing 10 times more. And there's, of course, Century Games and other micro-funds games, which kind of stomped over it, even though this game was one of the OG merge games. So, it's there. Staying with Supercell, Supercell was also hit by cyber attack, uh, 21st of October. But since there are no player data was affected, and there were some details of, uh, some, I guess, do do do do Yeah, some data was stolen, but this again is not player data and some seems very minor, so won't even go into

details. Um, okay, real talk before we start. This episode is brought to you by Potensic. And if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, uh, listen up. Potensic is a premium ad network built by people who have actually been on both sides of this industry. Game publishers, agencies, successful exits. So, they get it. Here's the thing. Potensic has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. It's not programmatic. It's direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax. And they handle everything with their in-house team in terms of the creatives. Plus, they've partnered with Playable Maker, Vungle. So, they will take brands' YouTube videos or static images and actually turn them into playable ads or rewarded video, proper interactive format built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming native creative, publishers are getting higher CPIs. Everyone wins. Head

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Monopoly Go earned Hasbro $41 million in Q3. Again, Hasbro being the licensor of the Monopoly IP for Scopely's big Monopoly Go game. This is quite consistent with the previous years where again, for the first 9 months, it's $127 million. Which against last year was $126. So just, you know, you can see how consistent Monopoly Go pretty much is and that it really matters that their web shop is working and even though we see declining current sales at our side, I'm guessing it's very, very good still. Um yeah, some more stuff from Hasbro. They are just, again, kind of killing it. Magic the Gathering passed $600 million in quarterly revenue for the first time, reaching $616.

A big 30% [music] increase. So yeah, card game, the OG card game, Magic the Gathering, is still going strong. Uma Musume canceled its LA concert over visa issues. Yeah, this is one from my favorite game. Which seems is doing concert tour because if you know, like these girls don't really run on a horse track, they didn't sing a concert. And the concerts on October 22nd, 23rd were canceled in LA. But fret not, they will still continue their planned tour in London, Seoul, Yokohama with some dates to be announced. So good luck there. Hopefully, you can see the voice actors sing somewhere else. Next, MY.GAMES raises $10 million to fund mobile game studios. The funding will support game development pay user acquisition campaigns. Uh again, this is uh the Cyprus-based uh investment company sending regards to Anton. Uh guys are quite solid. I work with them from time

to time. They have uh games such as Legend Dale Punk O'War Guard, Merge Tale and Sea Bloom, and so on so forth. Yeah. So, some good news on the investment side. Can't wait [music] for new will be added into the portfolio. Continuing on, Fortnite returns to App Store in Australia today, which means October 22nd. And uh if you remember, it wasn't really just recent when Fortnite got back on the iOS, and this was actually excluded. So, again, some court case stuff, and it seems they're back where they should be. Norway social media ban to target the Roblox, Snapchat, and TikTok. Again, this is the dynamic we've been talking in the news for quite some time, and it's actually happening, which means European countries are slowly one by one trying to enforce this social media ban for children under 16, and they're

adding Roblox into it, which is the main news here. So, let's see how this goes because that's It's going to be quite interesting I think if it really hits like I think it will. And it seems Roblox is going to be in one big uh truckload of heat. Um games with loot boxes receive update that PEGI 16 rating for paid random items. So, basically, PEGI being the Pan European Game Information Agency, the games rating authority, is updating existing mobile games with new age ratings. Titles with loot boxes are receiving PEGI 16, which means yes, if it has loot boxes, it's 16 plus. That's I guess the thing, which means even Pokémon TCG Pocket now comes into this category. So, yeah, let's see how this goes. I don't still think that like revenue will be lost here because again

most of the people with money are adult anyway, but let's see how this goes. Of course, it's much more important to kind of keep keep the kids out of it. Um Griffin Gaming Partners and Entertainment 360 launch game adaptation venture Hit Point Entertainment. So, yeah, you heard that right. They are creating a studio that will create uh that will pursue both major franchises and independent games. Uh and they again you heard that the right. They're they're focus on bringing video game characters, worlds, and stories to film and television. So, this is not a gaming studio. This is actually like a film studio just for game-related movies, which usually like one out of 10 works great and everything else is just horrible. So, let's see if they break the curse because I would really like to see some good good movies like some of the games have incredible [music] story lines, but it's always

kind of fails uh in Hollywood. So, let's see if experts will actually do it. Last thing, uh this is some investigation journal investigative journalism by Mobile Gamer Base. App Store review times are being dragged down by flood of AI-made apps and games. Who would have thought? Yes, because it's usually something like 24 48 hours and it's coming up currently to several weeks in some cases. And the parts saying that it's quite okay with Google, but still not quite okay with Apple as it seems. And yeah, there's some astounding numbers here which is something like App Review Team process an average of 300,000 378,000 app submissions per week, which means like 50k apps, more than 50k apps per day, which is horrible. So, yeah, let's see how this goes because I guess this problem will just get worse and worse and worse as we go because web coding stuff will be just

easier and easier. Let's see. Uh that's it for week. Hope you enjoyed the news.
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Uh rest in peace to BioWare. Uh yeah, it was like very, very important studio. Really hands down and hats off to these guys. And uh yeah, let's see what next week brings up. Any comments or join the Slack channel. See you next time. Ciao.