🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: GTA 6 Pre-Orders Hit $260M + Tencent & Superplay for $1.5B + PubMatic-Zynga Deal

Disney Solitaire's generating nearly $5 million a week currently and Dice Dreams is generating over about 2 and 1/2 million. So, yeah, that's you know, nearly 7 or 8 million a week that Playtika would be moving off their balance sheet.
Two and a Half Gamers exclusive. [music]
Breaking news.
Literally [music] breaking.
Hello everyone and welcome to another fantastic episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. Again, it is me and I am doing the news today. I have three news stories that I think are the most interesting from the past week from the world of mobile gaming. Then read them. I'll then basically give you my take on what I actually think is happening behind these news stories and then we will move on to basically get a quick look at the top charts. All right, let's get to it. So, the first story, which is

a very interesting story, which was reported by Newzoo, is that GTA 6 pre-orders generated an estimated $206 million globally during the first week of a campaign. So, I read directly from the article by Sophie McEvoy. Grand Theft Auto 6 generated roughly $260 million in digital pre-orders during last week of June. Newzoo's data indicating that $180 million was brought in across the US and five European markets. More specifically, the UK, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy. Pre-orders for GTA 6 began on the 24th of June with the game set to launch at $79.99 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S as a digital-only release. Newzoo forecast that sales of Rockstar's

highly anticipated title could reach 3.3 to 5.2 billion by the end of its launch week in November. That's a hell of a spread. And the data firm suggests GTA 6 will follow a typical sequel pre-order curve with pre-orders representing 5.8% of cumulative total sales. Newzoo predicts GTA 6 is on track to reach 4.5 billion dollars in sales by launch week, selling approximately 51 million units at its average price. I quote, "Contrary to social media reports, GTA 6 has not done a billion dollars in pre-orders at 21 weeks out," said Newzoo management consultant Ronan Patrick. "This is absurd given how pre-order curve curves look. Nothing ever has or nothing ever will in the near future." What the data actually shows is that 180 million in digital pre-order spend

across the US and the five largest European markets in the final week of June, translating to a global opening week of roughly 260 million dollars. "Most of the ramp still ahead," Patrick concluded. "Even the most conservative reading, namely that GTA 6 front-loads harder than any other major title in our data set, it lands a tremendous number by any historical standard. So, why am I reading about this? This story is, I argue, is probably one of the most interesting and we've talked about this on the podcast before because the GTA 6 launch is becoming more like a proxy for all gaming company valuations in the whole industry. If GTA doesn't open and doesn't open well, which it looks like it will. Essentially, the bottom is going to fall out of a lot of the valuations that we see in our industry, and that will take down mobile with it for sure [music] as

well. So, really interesting to watch. I think this is going to be a blowout sale. I'm already trying to take time off so I can play the game when it comes out. Anyway, we're going to be watching this closely. So, the second story, which is a bit more closer to a mobile on the mobile word world we're in or I'm in, is that Tencent is rumored to be in talks to acquire Playtika's Superplay in a deal worth up to 1. This is reported by an Israeli outlet called Calcalistech. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but anyway, I read uh from the article, "3 months after announcing that it was exploring strategic alternatives for its business, Playtika is in talks to sell its most valuable assets." That is true. We're going to pull up the Sensor Tower afterwards to check how much value like how much of a value it is to Playtika.

Calcalist has learned that the mobile gaming company is negotiating the sale of Israeli game developer Superplay to Chinese tech giant Tencent in a deal valuing the company between 1 to 1.5 billion. Potential transactions reflect a unusual paradox. Superplay's rapid success has become a financial burden for its parent company. This is interesting, right? Playtika acquired Superplay in November 2024 for $690 million in cash uh from founders Eyal and Gilad, uh both among former Playtika executives. The deal also included an earnout worth up to 1.2 billion dollars tied to Superplay's financial performance between 2025 and 2027. Under the agreement, Playtika reassesses the company's performance, primarily revenue growth, at the end of

each year and adjusts the additional payments owed to the founders accordingly. As Superplay continues to outperform expectations, Playtika's financial obligations continues to grow. Super interesting. Growth has significantly exceeded the assumptions underlying the original acquisition. Superplay generated 573 million in revenue in 2025, roughly 67% above the baseline target used to calculate the earnout. As a result, Playtika increased its estimate for future contingent payments to the founders to 734 million [music] in 2025's annual report. In its first quarter 2026 results, that estimate was raised again to 829 million. Industry sources believe that the liability could continue to increase if Superplay maintains its current growth

trajectory. One of the company's biggest growth drivers has been a Disney-branded solitaire game, which industry estimates says is generating annual revenue of about 300 million. According to industry estimates, 10% proposed a purchase price would not include a the future earnout obligations. Instead, the Chinese company would assume responsibility for those payments, relieving Playtika of a liability that could ultimately reach hundreds of millions of dollars while significantly strengthening it its balance sheets. Super interesting here, right? Uh The proposed The prospective sale would represent a dynamic reversal of strategy. Super say Superplay's acquisition marked Playtika's attempt to diversify beyond its traditional social casino core business and expand into faster growing casual gaming market, which offers a broader customer base and stronger long-term growth products prospects. Less than two years later,

the company could be preparing to part of what has become a centerpiece of its strategy. So, I'll finish off here cuz the article's quite long, but basically, this move is primarily driven by Playtika's balance sheet. The company faces approximately $2.3 billion in debt maturities in 2028 and 2029. Much of that debt was raised during the era of near zero interest rates, and refinancing it is expected to come at a substantially higher borrowing cost, potentially increasing financial expenses by tens of millions of dollars by each quarter. Lot to unpack here. Let's start by looking inside of Sensor Tower. So, this is Playtika's earnings by week looking back 90 days. So, you can see here that Disney Solitaire and Dice Dreams, which is the top two games according to

Sensor Tower, Disney Solitaire is regenerating nearly $5 million a week currently, and Dice Dreams is generating above 2 and 1/2 million. So, yeah, that's, you know, nearly 7 or 8 million a week that Playtika would be moving off their balance sheet. So, let's break it down what's actually happening here, right? So, they bought Superplay. They used debt to finance it, and they gave the founders a hell of an earnout, which they didn't expect that they would hit, which they are currently smashing. So, this is essentially really poor M&A strategy by Playtika's account, right? You don't ever want to put yourself in a situation where you have to sell a prized asset because you didn't plan ahead accordingly, right? So, I guess this is down to the people behind the M&A deal, why they would want to do this, but luckily, bad boy Tencent is here to bail Playtika out of this mistake. So, super interesting,

Superplay founders are absolutely crushing it. So, let's see where they end up. I'm wondering if they actually have a preference to remain with Playtika or Tencent. I don't know. As long as they get their earn-outs, I'm sure they will be more than happy because this will continue to grow even more. Moving on to the final story, which I thought was a bit of a weird one. I just wanted to explore it, and that is that PubMatic and Zynga unlock premium mobile gaming inventory for buyers. So, basically, PubMatic and Zynga has gone into some kind of partnership for more efficient media access, and I thought this was quite interesting when I read it. So, let me just read the first part and I'll explain kind of what's going on. By PubMatic, uh the partnership provides a diversified demand, immersive e-commerce, creative, and efficient media access across the Zynga portfolio and mobile titles in more North America. They talk about how mobile gaming has become hard, and how gaming apps

represent a lot of the media buying, so you have to cut through all of that to actually understand what's going on. As the industry matures and supply chains evolve, buyers are demanding more transparent, efficient paths to inventory that drive measurable results. Historically, this has been notoriously difficult for mobile apps integrating with ad tech, which is why an SDK like PubMatic's OpenWrap brings such value to Zynga's tech stack. All right, now we know what's going on here. So, basically, PubMatic has signed a OpenWrap agreement with Zynga. What is open wrap? Open wrap is essentially a transparent way of buying or selling ad impressions where essentially PubMatic signs a fixed IO deal with Zynga or Zynga signs a fixed IO deal with certain DSPs. PubMatic acts as the facilitator to basically bring the impressions to Zynga, but they fix their margin in a transparent way directly with the DSPs. So, basically they can see what their

margin is, which is a really big issue in mobile ad monetization that you don't know what it is. And that means it's exactly what Amazon TAM does and essentially what BidMachine is also doing right now with their premium buying placements or standard placements. So, I guess this is them announcing that they made a big partnership with Zynga using open wrap. Quite interesting to see how this evolves. Last time I checked out open wrap, there weren't any bidders inside of open wrap. So, you actually have to put in placements, which means that if Zynga is on MAX, which they are, they will see considerable amount of latency when they plug this in because you need unique number of placements for each demand partner you're bringing in and you need at least a couple, which adds latency to the bid stack. So, let's see how this actually performs. So, moving on to finally, just a quick look on the top charts from yesterday in the US on games. We see the most interesting

part is free downloads. Blockout by Grand Games is basically dominating the free downloads category. And followed by Meow Doku, which we've covered here on the podcast. Check it out. We've covered up Blockout as well. And then a new one, Smash Fest, also looks like they're from Turkey, followed by Magic Sword already from Turkey, and Vita Young, which is from China. So, I guess this battle right now is between of top domination of download chart is between China and Turkey. May their battle be super epic. So, I have gone on for much longer than I usually do. That's 13 minutes. Please tune in next week for another news update. I am Felix Broberg. This is Two and a Half Gamers. Thank you for listening to our news brief. Bye-bye.