🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Rotate Labs Raise + Rival App Store Returns + Gaming Revenue Drops 4.5%?!

Investment amount was not disclosed. That usually means it's quite big. And just 4 months after launch, Cubelands, uh Rotalab's flagship title, has surpassed 2 million downloads and broken into the top 50 of the US App Store's top free [music] games and charts.
Two and [music] a half gamers exclusive. Breaking news. Literally breaking. [music]
Hello and welcome to another fantastic episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast.
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It's Friday. That must mean that we must do the news. Uh what has been the best news stories from this last week? And here to tell you exactly the answer to that question is me, Felix. And without further ado, let me share with you the three news stories I think that actually mattered the most this week in terms of mobile [music] news. Let's start with some news from the mobidictum.com website. Fresh off the presses today,

August 13th, is that Rotalab raises seed round co-led by Leighton Ventures and Arcadia Gaming Partners. Rotalab, the mobile gaming studio behind Cubelands, which side note, we covered on the podcast. Friends of the pod, very very strong team, and very very very persistent team uh in Turkey. Um yeah, you should check out the episode. It's absolutely fantastic. But basically, they raised a seed round. The funding round was co-led by Leighton Ventures and Arcadia Gaming Partners with participation [music] from an angel investor called Mert Gür. The investment amount was not disclosed. That usually means it's quite big. And just 4 months after launch, Cubelands, uh Rotalab's flagship title, has surpassed 2 million downloads and broken into the top 50 of the US App Store's top free games charts and top 80 of the US App Store top grossing charts, underscoring the game's strong traction.
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Behind Cubelands' rapid rise, there are years of resilience, perseverance, and

relentless execution. Founded by Arda Koshak and Selin Koshak, along with angel investor co-founder Yunus Bastit, [music] the founding team has built games today since 2016. So, I'm just going to end there. So, the only actual interesting part that's kind of still West-adjacent for gaming is Turkey. And I guess this round basically raises or yeah, showcases this even further. I don't think there's many gaming teams other than in Turkey and Vietnam that are getting funding right now. And even I know a lot of venture uh VCs that are actually opening offices in Turkey because this is where all the talent
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is right now. But, these guys are friends of the pods. Uh if you haven't seen the Cubelands episode, it's absolutely amazing what they've actually come up here. It's a very, very clever iteration of the game. And we're wishing them all the success possible. So, great news story and fantastic, but

let's move on to the second news story. And this is from TechCrunch. And that is that Aptoide uh Aptoide uh becomes the first rival app store to return to Google Play in the US. Competing [music] Android app stores are now back in Google Play in the US. And Aptoide is the first to take advantage of this new option. On Monday, the Portugal-based app distributor brought its game stores [music] back to Google Play after more than a decade, crediting the loosening of restrictions that had been criticized as anti-competitive. Uh for the first time in many years, Huawei users will be able to install a competitor to Google's Android app store directly uh from Google Play itself. A milestone milestone in terms of opening the app market for more competition. Aptoide's independent app stores one of the larger apps Android app marketplaces outside of Google Play offering more than 40,000 Android application [music]

uh Android applications to roughly 25 million active users. The US has been up to this largest market to date, but until now the store had been the store had to be side loaded on Android devices limiting its reach. Just going to end right there. This is quite big news. I mean 40,000 apps on an app store is not that much. This is to compare against 2 and 1/2 million apps on the Google Play Store, but the big thing here is that no one really outside of really avid Android users would actually side load apps, right? So this is actually a real big feather in the cap for yeah, competition and it's kind of just a big litmus test for just how quickly the app stores are actually opening up. What is the advantages to using another app store? Is essentially you can get around the 30% Google [music] fees, right? Which otherwise you have to pay for IAPs. So what you usually find is with these app stores is that

yeah, your games are lured here because or convinced to go there not because they're rich, but because the money saved, right? So I guess this is going to be the starting gun to a lot more app stores. The interesting thing is to see how they will actually get a lot of downloads. I know they're trying to get unique type of games that actually become popular so you actually have to download the app store to get the game and then you're kind of keeping using the app [music] store, but super interesting to find this and we're going to see actually what the impact is going to be on the Google Play Store revenues in the coming days and [music] coming months and coming years. So super interesting. It's a great time to basically be an app developer again and I guess this new story kind of dovetails with the third new story I want to talk about today and that is from 9to5Mac, and the report is basically that non-gaming apps drove mobile spending growth in Q2 as games fell 4.5%. I read, a new report from Sensor Tower shows that non-gaming apps continue to

drive global mobile spending growth in Q2 2026 across iOS and Android, while gaming revenue declined 4.5 year-over-year. Here are the details. AI apps led non-gaming growth as mobile gaming spending declined. Last month, during Apple's fiscal Q3 2026 [music] earning calls, the company attributed part of its services revenue slowdown to weaker mobile gaming performance [music] and regulatory changes affecting the App Store business model. This is basically them saying the payment side, right? So, today Sensor Tower published a Q2 2026 [music] digital market index report offering a closer look at how mobile app spending and downloads changed during the quarter. According to the report, non-gaming revenue rose 14.6% year-over-year in Q2 2026, while gaming revenue declined 4.5% over the same [music] period. In absolute terms, non-gaming apps generated 24.4 billion

in revenue
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and 25.5 billion downloads compared with 90.2 billion in revenue and 11.3 billion downloads for games. And if you're actually watching me right now, you can actually see this beautiful graph take place. I probably was going to read this last paragraph and then I'll stop and give you my two cents on what's actually going on here. So, the report also noted that US IP revenue declined 3% year-over-year, but the country still led the world spending at 14.8 billion.
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China came in at the distant second at 5.98 billion despite despite seeing revenue growth of 10% over the same period. So, lots to unpack here, right? But, the most important thing is to remember here, right? These numbers might look like some things are actually slowing down, and you can see here that basically overall the spending might be slowing down. It's very stable, but we actually had a uh yeah, we had an

episode that we recorded just this week with Chip from FastSpring,
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where we were essentially talking about what's actually going on here. And I asked him a point-blank question during that talk that's going to go live at some point next week. Essentially, if you had to estimate right now, so last year was 52 billion, right? By gaming on iOS alone. And I asked Chip to estimate how much of on top of that was earned via uh direct-to-consumer direct-to-consumer payment providers. And he came in with an estimate somewhere between 9 to 12 billion dollars on top of that 52 billion. So, plus a 15 to 20% of that revenue is actually now being done outside of the App Stores, the iOS and uh Play Stores, right? So, what you're seeing here is half of the truth because basically Sensor Tower doesn't get to have access to all of the web store data, which they will at some point, I'm sure, but quite interesting story, but I don't think it's 100% the truth. [music]

So, before I let you all go, what I want to do is to show you the top [music] charts and how it's looking across the App Store uh in the US games category.
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You can see on free downloads, it's basically block out by brand games. That's leading, followed by Smash Fest, Meow Dokku, and Bus Traffic Fever, and Magic Swords. All are games we have covered on this podcast, and they are absolutely killing it. It's the first time I've actually seen the majority of Turkish games being uh on the leaderboard on the app side uh on the Google I on the iOS side. On the Google Play side, Roblox is always number one, but we here we have Meow Doku, Vita the Young, Block Blast, and Block Craft 3D by Wildlife Studios leading the chart as of yesterday. So, that's everything I have for you today. That's 10 minutes of what I think was the most important news stories from the mobile gaming industry in the last week.

This has been 2 and 1/2 Gamers. I am Felix, and thanks for stopping by. Have a good week. Bye-bye.