🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Fortnite Returns, AI Wars Begin, Netflix Backs Out

Claw is beating ChatGPT in US downloads. Why this is important is because the US is pretty much the most important market when it comes to AI.
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Two and a Half Gamers exclusive.
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Breaking news. Literally breaking.
Hello everyone and welcome to Two and a Half Gamers. These are the three most important news articles in mobile gaming from the last week. So, we start off with the first news story, first reported by Neil Long in Mobile Gamer Biz, is that Fortnite will return to the Play Store as Google reduces store fees and ends [music] Epic disputes. Epic and Google have resolved their long-running legal disputes over the Play Store. It means that Fortnite will be returning to Google Play soon. And at the Play Store will be reducing

store fees this year by in many markets. Uh the rest of the world will follow by September 30th, 2027. Google said that its native billing system will now be effectively decoupled from the Play Store, [music] meaning developers around the world will be able to choose any payment provider they please for in-app purchases. Google's blog explaining the changes reads, "Mobile developers will have the option to use their own billing system in their app alongside Google Play's billing. Or, they can guide users outside of their app to their own websites for purchases." The tech giant is also reducing its store fees, though a little more complex, Google's flat 30% cut on most IAPs is effectively effectively going down to 20%. [music] Google's cut of IAPs in new install drops to 15% if a developer signs up to Google's

level up program. If a developer uses the native Google Play billing, Google will take another 5% in the EU, UK, and US. A similar rate to most third-party payment providers, Google said. Uh Google said that market-specific rates would apply outside of the US, UK, and EU, but did not confirm those rates. No fees are charged by Google uh for those using alternative payment providers. The new pricing structure is coming to the EU, UK, and US by June 30th, and Australia by September 3rd, Korea, Japan December 30th, and the rest of the world by September 30th, 2027. Google is also rolling out new easier ways for players to sideload alternative app stores through a new registered app store program uh that will begin in international markets first uh before coming to the US. It claims to offer cleaner, more user-friendly install [music] process. Both Epic and Google said that as of

today, legal disputes between the companies are over. Epic also welcomed the changes on its own blog. It confirmed that Fortnite will be coming back to Play Stores worldwide. These changes will evolve Android into a true open platform with competition among stores as we've seen on Windows where Steam, uh the Epic Games Store, Old Good Games, and all other offer consumers and developers real choice and lower prices, the Fortnite maker said. Epic will be investing robustly in serving developers and gamers with the Epic Store uh with the Epic Games Store for Android and will also bring back Fortnite to Google Play Stores worldwide. So, I guess this is very similar to what we talked about our episode we did last week with Fast Spring, how basically everything is crumbling down now when it comes to these ridiculous fees. So, I guess we all have to say in the mobile industry a big fat [music] thank you to Epic and Fortnite for basically starting this conversation, but it looks like finally

some sanity's coming back. This is going to be extremely good for a lot of payment providers in our space, which probably will see their revenue go up quite a lot in the coming weeks. Right, moving on to the second story. So, Chat GPT uninstalls a surge by 295% after DOD deal in the states. So, this was reported by TechCrunch. US app installs of Chat GPT's mobile app jumped by 295% day-over-day on Saturday, February 28th as consumers responded to the news of OpenAI's deal with the Department of Defense, which has been rebranded under the Trump administration as the Department of War. This data comes from market intelligence provider Sensor Tower. Presents a sizeable increase compared to Chat GPT's typical day-over-day uninstall rate of 9% as measured over

the last 30 days. Meanwhile, [music] US downloads for OpenAI competitors and Anthropic's Claude jumped by 37% day-over-day on Friday, February 27th as and 50% as of Saturday, 28th after the company announced that it would not partner with the US Defense Department. Anthropic said that it would not not able to agree on a deal terms over concerns that AI would be used to surveil Americans and be used in fully autonomous weaponry, [music] which AI is not yet ready to do safely. A set of consumers seemingly favored Anthropic's position on [music] the matter as the data suggests. In addition, Chat GPT's download growth was impacted by the news of the the DOD partnership with its US downloads dropping by 13% day-over-day on Saturday shortly after the news went public. Those downloads continued to fall by Sunday when they were down by 5% day-over-day.

These rapid changes were also reflected in Claude's App Store ranking as the app hit number one in the US App Store on Saturday, where it continues to sit as of today. The jump of over 20 ranks compared with roughly a week before. So, you can basically see here that Claude is beating ChatGPT in [music] US downloads. Why this is important is because the US is pretty much the most important market when it comes to AI chatbots. And essentially ChatGPT has been at the top of the download charts for pretty much, I guess, like two or three years now in the US for non-gaming downloads. So, I guess any shifts here is really indicative and probably will hurt the bottom line of ChatGPT, which could quite a lot hurt them right now when they're actually burning through quite a lot of cash and are nowhere near profitability. So, very interesting story here indeed. So, [music] moving on to the third and final story, and that is that Netflix drops the Warner Bros.

re-deal as Paramount wins the bidding war. This was reported by Pocket Gamer Biz by Craig Chapple. So, Netflix has effectively dropped its mega $82 billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery after re-u- refusing to counter Paramount's sky-high superior proposal. The two entertainment giants have been in a bidding war in recent months with Paramount's latest bid bid worth $31 per share in cash. After Warner notified Netflix of the deal and asked [music] for a counter offer, Netflix declined. The streaming firm's co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that the deal was no longer financially attractive and said it would not match Paramount's [music] bid, effectively pulling the company out of the race. It paves way for the acquisition of Warner Bro- Brothers by Paramount subject to regulatory approval and I'm assuming they're going to get these approval [music] because there hasn't really been any noise about anything

about this kind of stuff lately. So, yeah. We believe we could we would have been a strong steward of Warner Brothers iconic brands and that our deal would have strengthened the entertainment industry and preserved and created more production jobs in the US, read a statement from Sarandos and Peters. But, the transaction was always a nice-to-have at the right price, not a must-have at any price. Paramount will pay the 2.8 billion termination fee to end Netflix existing agreements. Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, City, and Apollo will provide [music] a 57 and 1/2 billion-dollar debt commitment where the Ellison trust is providing 45 billion in equity commitment. So, taking this back to the mobile games industry, so the future of Warner Bros. Games. So, Warner Brothers Discovery has a gaming division that includes studios such as Rocksteady, NetherRealm, TT Games, Avalanche, and Warner Brothers Montreal. It also includes famous IPs [music] the Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, and Games of

Thrones and the DC Universe. It's not clear what the fate of these of the company's game division will be post acquisition. Netflix co-president and director Gregory Peters previously said that the streaming firm didn't attribute any value to this division in its 82 billion-dollar bid. They've got great studios and great folks working there, so we think that there's definitely an opportunity here, but just to be clear, we haven't built it into our deal model, he said.
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So, top revenue-generating mobile games from Warner Brothers stable includes titles such as Game of Thrones Conquest, which accumulated about $960 million according to AppMagic. Meanwhile, the partnership with NetEase Harry Potter: Magic Awakened gathered about $460 million across the App Store and Google Play Stores. So, we're going to keep an eye on this and see actually where this family of games ends up. I probably think that we're probably going to see some shake-ups in this division and probably

some more games being launched cuz there's a lot more IP that's actually being accessed. But, that is everything I had for you today on this news overview. We've actually hit our 10-minute mark, so we need to end it here. Thank you so much for tuning in and let us know if you'd like us to cover any specific news in the future. Thank you. Bye-bye.