🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: EA merging with Savvy? Chinese market hits $50bn, Pokemon GO record spend week

Two and a half gamers exclusive.
Breaking news.
Literally breaking.
Hello. Hello. This is again two and a half gamers breaking news segment for the week of September 7th. Let's [music] get into the news. China games market surpasses 50 billion for the first time as player base is forecast to hit 769 million by Niko partners. Uh until 2030 the market is projected to reach 60 billion. Uh this is again the usual giant growth in China. One of the few growth factors in the gaming industry and your player RPU exceeds $70 last year. And uh as expected, the short video apps are now the leading game discovery channel in China, which again as we were in China, we heard a lot

about micro drama and all its Chinese wa spend and its impact on the sector. Uh which mini games uh or mini games in general account for nearly 20% or mobile game revenue spending. Yeah, China is growing as it's their no tomorrow as especially compared to everyone else. It's not that big of a growth, but it's still quite significant. So, we'll see what happens. Last metric is that in sport esports engagement has increased to 51% of Chinese players, which is quite big. Yep. Um quite a hard market to get into, let me just say that. Uh continuing then, we have Star Stable Entertainment uh layoffs. Uh 20% of staff. Uh this is the studio behind the signature horse riding game uh for girls mainly if you know. Uh yeah recently uh uh celebrated its 15 years anniversary so they're still standing and again the CEO said

the cats are necessary to continue the company. Then we have Unity launches official cloud code plugin with 29 built-in engine skills. Um this is an interesting integration. I guess everything is moving towards AI. Uh features include Unity CLI integration, live editor control through Unity's NCP server. Unity says the plug-in will reduce errors and improves AI assisted workflows. Yeah, it's quite expected. I guess cloth being the main leading engine for coding being put into Unity, I guess it was a matter of time. Uh let's see how it will actually helps. [gasps] Then we have this kind of a let's say bombshell uh Reuters report this week where uh it is expected that the Saudi Piff public investment fund is considering the merger of EA and Savvy Group according to Bloomberg. Um, yeah, this is quite big because this

would mean that [music] basically EA and Savvy Games Group, which basically means Copley would merge into one giant entity, including stuff like EA, Sports FC, Battlefield, Sims, Monopoly, Go, Pokémon Go now, and all these other things, which would create like a giant behemoth. Uh, and uh, again, regulatory scrutiny would probably bite back. Uh it's still not the final decision and we're still also waiting until Savvy completes their 6 billion acquisition of Moon. If you remember Mobile Legends Bank for 6 billion that they uh acquired [gasps] before. Um yeah, that's it. Uh last tidbit. Uh Sevy CEO Brian Ward, the CEO of Savvy Games crew has stepped down last week. So this is maybe also telling or completely independent. I don't know. Let's move on. Then we have uh this is quite news. New app store boss Eddie Q

wants to squeeze additional revenue from developers. like we didn't squeeze enough because uh as you know team cook Apple CEO is stepping down and there's a new Apple CEO called John Turners and of of course with him comes a new team which one of those will be EddieQ which is the boss of app store and he wants to raise margin and squeeze more revenue out of the app store according to Bloomberg report again um yeah so that's what's happening because obviously we haven't squeezed enough for this. Uh I don't even want to continue. Let's see how that goes. Especially in the current web store D2C environment. Then we move on to uh off-road games being snapped by Lego Digital uh which is the [music] spin-off startup uh out of Chrome Valley Customs uh Space Ape Games. Uh so if you remember Supercell

um had the studio that was doing next beat uh which also span out of beatar um so that was acquired later by dual lingo and now space ape co-founder John is also an adviser Lego digital play so this is pretty much supercell getting uh space ape [music] out of it space a doing off-road games and uh beat star going with next beat again being acquired by doing. So, let's see how this goes. Um, Lego is literally at the top of the uh kids toy market toy market currently. So, let's see if they can pull out something digital, but usually their games aren't really there for money. It's a bread bag for them. So, most probably they will just use this like it is. Okay, real talk before we start. This episode is brought to you by Potencus. And if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, listen up. Potencus 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. Potencus 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 critics. Plus, they've partnered with playable maker ving. So, they will take brands YouTube videos or static images and actually turned into playable ad or revert video proper interactive format built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming native creative publishers are getting a higher CPS. Everyone wins. Head to potensus.com to get started or check their creative portfolio in the link in the show notes. Thank you very much Potencus for sponsoring this episode. Then we have GTA 6 uh on Netflix preview

drawing more than 100k signups during its 6-hour exclusivity window. So that's signups for Netflix, not GTA. Uh making it the platform's third largest subscriber spike in 2026 according to Amper Analyzis. Uh yeah, Preview fell behind the final installment of Stranger Things. Uh, so it wasn't the most watched thing, but still 5% of viewers who had not used Netflix in 30 days returned to watch the preview. Uh, it reached 31.1 million views on Netflix within 4 days. Da da da da da. Yeah, let's see. Uh, I guess it is especially overshadowed the leaks now that we see the game much more closer. But again, everybody's looking to the November release, November 19 release date and how this whole thing [music] will come down. Then we have some latest uh revenue spike news with Delta Force doing 10 million in daily player spending for the first time. This a tactical shooter uh

that hit this record September 5th. Uh and [gasps] again this is one of those again very [music] very good live event stuff of course. Uh so we see Chinese developers pretty much being able to drive these [music] big spikes as as it is as players in China accounted for more than 99% of that spending peak because yeah that that's how it works as we read that the Chinese market is going up. Uh and then we have the other one spending peak which is that Pokémon Go is the world's top grossing mobile game in the first week of September mainly because of its uh Go Fest celebrations. Uh and again it's a resurgence because of this Go Fest that they saw in July. Uh and again keep in mind that it's 10year anniversary for Pokémon Go which again this is like big spike on top of the 30 year anniversary of Pokémon itself. So all the anniversaries basically create giant

spending. Who would have thought uh how big? Uh if I look into our usual sensitiv data, it's something like July was 110 million if you look at it. And now uh the game hit something like 31 million during the last week of August, I guess. So again it's spending probably even higher this kind of giant during the like the golf start doing during July again like 53 million week uh which is pretty much the highest since launch. Uh as for the week itself as for the month itself the 110 million revenue in July is the highest since Corona which was like 100 or even higher sorry even higher than in during its height in August. So let's see how this goes. Uh, Pokémon Go is now in hands of Scopi and again Scopi is not uh, you know, sitting this one out. They will

try to optimize and squeeze as much as possible out of it because they're very good at optimization. So, yep. Uh, seems Rosy liveops road map in before Pokémon Go. That was it. Uh, thank you for listening. See you around. Subscribe to the channel or subscribe to the YouTube channel or join our Slack as usual. You can uh comment under the video if you have anything else that we missed or want to cover, want something for us to cover. See you next time. Ciao.