🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: New Hoyoverse game, D2C stuff, layoffs and a WhatsApp game

Firms on their neutrality and independence as major tech and ad firms become backers. No [ __ ] It's going to be really neutral if you are being backed by Google, Meta, and Unity and Moloco.
Two and a Half Gamers exclusive.
[music]
Breaking news.
Literally breaking. [music]
Hello, hello. This is again Two and a Half Gamers breaking news segment. So, let's get into the news for this week. Google Play opens up billing options and lower store fees from June 30th. [music] You may have already heard this because we did the podcast with Chip from FastSpring on this. What's the latest on the D2C state and how web stores are pretty much being affected by all these lawsuits and deadlines. So, let's see if this actually happens because this is still part of that settlement that Google did with Epic

that is not still like completely finished. Again, if you want to really, really detailed rundown, go watch the video that we published on our channel last week, if I remember correctly. Sorry, 10 days ago. So, you can find there. It all boils down to the to the thing that Google cut the fee to 25%
[clears throat]
and then you can go even further another 5% enroll into this level up program which you can we talk about this there a lot and it's again one of the big news here, but [music] again, it's not yet finished because we'll see how the trial kind of continues. So, sorry. Let's see. Layoff section as usual. Marvel Contest of Champions maker Kabam cuts jobs and downsizes LA office. There's an undisclosed number of uh employees getting uh laid off

unfortunately. Da da da da da. Yeah, as if you don't know what Kabam is, is a subsidiary owned by Netmarble, one of the giant uh developer giant publisher developer houses in Korea, the three big and Nexon and NCsoft and Netmarble. And uh yeah, this is the studio responsible for Marvel: Contest of Champions. But it didn't really follow up with another game to its success. Then we continue with EA also uh hitting further layoffs across its support and operation teams. Again, total number of those impacted has not been disclosed. Uh the cuts follows the recent layoffs within EA Battlefield and development [music] teams. EA Battlefield development teams. Uh for those again who are Sorry. Looking at this, uh EA continues through this giant transaction of being acquired by $55 billion through an investor group

through an investor group that includes Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund and Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. So, I guess it's just part of this kind of restructuring during this process. This is not really kind of game or external factor related.
[snorts]
Then we continue with this trend that we talked about last week, which is the UAE bans children under 15 from social media accounts. Even with parental consent, they cannot access this. So, this is again wider dy- dynamic that we see here again coming from Australia and it seems countries are slowly adopting it and I'm guessing by the end of the year, we'll have multiple Western countries pretty much adopting the same setup where it's either 15 or 16 or pretty much somewhere there around like right below 18 where social [clears throat] media will unfortunately unfortunately fortunately I would say get banned from minors and hopefully

get stuff better and hopefully games don't get into crossfire because to be honest stuff like Roblox is basically social media for kids but let's see how it goes. Okay, another one. Hoyoverse new game Honkai Nexus anime gets closed beta testing to July. You can go and register right now until July 3rd and what's happening here is that the guys are using again their Hoyoverse sorry their Honkai IP. They already had the Honkai original games Honkai Star Rail one of the biggest games after Genshin and now this game called Honkai Nexus anime. It seems it's going to be some kind of a pet brawler or like a Pokemon game. Let's see like the trailer there's always like a anime waifu or husband with a creature fighting each other so I'm going to looking forward to it

because it seems it's going to be one [music] of those big games the aesthetic literally is like five base GTA like again I don't know why why we keep seeing this. It's going to be by the way very interesting how this is going to compete against the new FunPlus game because there's also kind of creature themed collector creature themed game so let's see. Then we have some raises the veteran veterans from Playtika secure 10 million for the AI powered mobile app operations platform called Kinoa. The funding will support the development of new predictive models and AI driven automation tools. Kinoa aims to automate live ops retention and monetization using AI agents. So this is going to be interesting you're going to hear from these guys on our channel soon So, just wait up to it. Then we have some more reports. Mobile game D2C revenues are projected to reach 17 billion this year. Pretty big number.

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AppsFlyer secures over $1 billion investment from Moloco, Google, Meta, and Unity. Uh firm stresses neutrality and independence as major tech and ad firms become backers. No [ __ ] It's going to be really neutral if you are being backed by Google, Meta, and Unity, and Moloco. Uh AppsFlyer aims to develop its AI-powered ad measurement and cross-platform attribution services. Company stresses its commitment to measurement remaining [music] independent and neutral. Sure. Uh the financing round values the company at $2.7 billion. So, after they couldn't get sold themselves, now they raised. So, yep. It seems they're going to entrench as the de facto MMP industry now, but let's see how it goes. City Days and All Three Media team up to launch the Traitors game on WhatsApp. So, yeah, there's this TV show or something, I guess. I'm guessing it's the usual kind of who's the killer

setup. And the guys are launching this in WhatsApp. I guess I'm going to look it up because seems quite interesting. Uh it should support up to 30 players with large groups being able to split into parallel games. Participant must be again age 16 or Yeah, um it's going to be quite interesting. Hill Climb Racing 3 expands soft launch to Germany. Uh again, sending regards to Fingersoft guys. Fingers crossed for their third iteration of the legendary Hill Climb Racing game. Uh game focuses on real-time multiplayer racing with player interactions during races. Yep, again, standard setup. Uh let's see how this goes. Third time's the charm. Neverness to Everness uh goes over 50 million in 2 months on mobile. This is the gotcha RPG released on April 23rd. Um let's see how it goes further. The problem is that biggest market is of

course Japan. Uh so, with these games [music] they can usually go like a big shark fin. So, let's see if they can go against that. Then we have a report another report that's saying that 53% of mobile game publishers plan to port mobile games to browser in next 12 months. That's a pretty, let's say, bold number, but uh nevertheless, browser is getting more and more important these days, especially with all this D2C web stores movement. So, I wouldn't be surprised that this number could be actually quite accurate. Let's see. And then we have the last let's say watch of the news, which is Pokémon Champions, which we talked about last time. We couldn't get the data. Now we have the data. So it seems that during its launch it went all the way to something like 400k a day. And now it's kind of cruising

around 230 to 250k a day, still getting very very strong traction of like 400k installs a day. And if you look from the usual perspective, of course this is being led by Japan. Japan is like nearly 50% of the revenue. US right behind with 18% and South Korea 10%. We're definitely going to review this game on the podcast, so no worries. We'll get you up to speed [music] with the latest on this. That was the new segment. Hope you enjoyed. Subscribe. Send us comments such as new games or join the Slack channel and have a nice weekend. See you.