🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Stillfront's CEO Steps Down + AdColony Sold for Under $5M + Meowdoku Hits 1.7M DAU

And what they have done is they have essentially bought the rights for the brand [music] had colony which was really big back in the day.
[music]
Two and a half gamers exclusive.
Breaking news. [music]
Literally breaking.
Hello there and welcome. This is two and a half gamers. It's Friday which was mean I am alone and I am reading you the news. So this is our new segment when I pick out the top stories from the last week in the news of mobile and basically I read them to you. Then I tell them what I think it's going on. I am Felix and the first new story we have today is that Stillfront CEO Alexis Bonte is stepping down and this is reported by Neil Long. It's actually from MobileGamer.biz. It's been reported by everyone but I just like Neil's writing so this is the one I picked.

Uh so I read "Alexy Bonte stepping down as CEO of Stillfront roll up group. Stillfront owns Goodgame, Supremacy, Joker, BitLife, Albion, Sandbox Interactive and has been undergoing a restructure in the past few months. It has sold off its narrative games portfolio recently. The restructure was completed a few months ago and according to company financials in March Stillfront held an extraordinary general meeting at which the company replaced three members of its board. Bonte will stay on as its CEO until his successor is found. He joined Stillfront in 2017 and was appointed CEO in October 2024 at which point he led the company's strategic review and restructure. So on behalf of the board I would like to thank Alexy for his significant contribution to Stillfront throughout his nearly decade long journey with the company most recently as the CEO said Stillfront and board, [music]

Lars Johan Yarheimer. So, what is going on here? Let's just take a little quick peek inside of the portfolio, what it's looking like inside of Sensor Tower. So, the interesting thing here is that we can see that these is all of Stillfront's downloads by application. And you can see that pretty much since the COVID time has been on a decline. And I guess this is a really big issue for a company if you're a roll-up company because what you do is you essentially use your share price to lever up and basically buy more games and increase your revenue. That does increases the share price and usually what you do is you buy games with the share price. So, you buy it, it goes up, people are happy. And when it starts going down, things go ugly in a hurry as with most things financial engineering. So, here's the revenue.

You can see it's already going down. The Stillfront is not really known for a lot of ad revenue. I hope they basically try cuz they have a big user base and a big potential they can monetize on. But you can see it's also gone down. So, if we look at the share price, you can see that it's not doing too well either. It's pretty much down from [music] its COVID peaks. And I guess this is why you fire three board members and your CEO. So, it's not really a great sign when a company does this. Let's take a look here again. Yeah, financial engineering stuff can get ugly in quite a big hurry. It has not been a good run for Stillfront in last couple of months. And yeah, we're wishing them the best and hope that they can get back. And yeah, increase their share price. Cuz that's exactly what they need to do. All right. So, this is not really a new story, the next one, but it's just interesting to point out. We are halfway

through the football World Cup, and looking in Sensor Tower, here here are the top apps by downloads in the last 30 days. And we can see here that, yeah, it's always topped by Roblox, though. And Garena's always there. But the interesting is how thing that's happening is that Football Mania has grabbed the mobile downloads, yeah, mobile download situation, right? So, you can see here EA Sports downloads have grown 30% month over month. Football League Soccer has grown 50%. That's great for them. And eFootball by Konami has grown by 60%. The biggest surprise for me that I even didn't even put like pick out when we did our uh, Football World Cup episode is that Soccer Superstar is grown by the most, 62% on a download basis. Breaking these games out, you can see here the downloads. Everything is flat as a pancake, and yeah, very jaggedy for

all the mobile games. And then, as soon as the yeah, as soon as the Football World Cup started, you can see here that soccer the Soccer Superstar is basically growing the quickest, which I didn't think happening. But these games right now is pretty much what they're doing is enjoying like COVID-style growth. So, it's very interesting. Uh, let's look here on the revenue as well. Uh, you can see it's a bit different because some of these games are ad monetized. And also, if you look at active user base, it's going to be very different because Konami is obviously and EA is very big. But you see here how Soccer Superstar is pretty much has gone from uh, 4.8 million to nearly 8.3 [music] million. So, yeah, very big growth. So, not really a new story, but yeah, thought it was quite interesting to point out anyway. Then we have the app that I think it's the most hilarious World Cup app at all. It's the FIFA Panini Collection Album, where you, yeah, go every day, you open up cards, a

bit like Pokémon, and you collect them, and then you can re- basically get you get cards from Coca-Cola bottles. You can see here that this has grown like crazy in terms of daily active users. [music] Probably what I'd say here, the biggest screw up for this app is that they don't have any in-game ads, but I guess this is an advertisement to sell sugar water. I guess they don't care about the revenue that much. All right. Now, moving on to an actual story um before we finish up, and that is that and it was reported in PR Newswire, so that's usually paid by companies to actually bring something out, and that is that Indian company Affle announces a strategic acquisition of AdColony technology assets and the trademark from Digital Turbine. Those who don't know, Affle is a Indian company that owns a bunch of large DSPs in the mobile space, both for targeting and user acquisition DSPs. And what they

have done is they have essentially bought the rights for the brand yeah, AdColony, which was really big in the day. So, I'm just going to read a little bit of this because, you know, since it comes from a company, it's yeah, pretty much propaganda, but let's see what they're saying. So, San Francisco and Gurugram, India, June 16. Affle, a global technology company that delivers premium consumer conversions for advertisers with its verticalized AI-powered consumer platform. Remember what I said about the propaganda? Uh announced that Affle has entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Digital Turbine. Formerly Digital Turbine to acquire a select strategic AdColony assets including AdColony SDK for Android and iOS devices. Tech platform existing integration with InMobi publishers and mediation platforms. The brand name, domain, and the goodwill exclusively related to their assets. So,

super interesting here because if we take a look at Affle's share price, you can see they've been doing quite well since they went public in 2021. They're on the Indian stock exchange. I don't know what actually I can't remember what it's called, but yeah, they're bit up over the last couple of weeks. Anyway, so what they're doing is they're buying a digital they're buying the AdColony brand. So, those who don't know, in 2015 to 20 not 2014 to I'd say 2018, AdColony was pretty much the AppLovin of today. So, it was the premium UA channel that where you went to buy ads for your mobile game or mobile application. And they kind of fell on the wayside. It wasn't handled I guess extremely well and then essentially it was sold to Digital Turbine. So, it was an ad network. So, it's still actually what I've heard the gossip on the street is that it's actually plugged into a lot of applications still. Apparently over 80,000 applications still have a

AdColony SDK even though it doesn't really deliver anything. So, it's a very cheap way to actually buy that. Let's see if it actually said what it what they're paying for it. I I the whisper number I heard was sub 5 million. So, it could actually be a quite interesting purchase for Affle. They're a DSP company, so that would mean that they have direct access to inventory. Pretty much doing exactly what Moloco and Liftoff has done as well. So, that's probably the strategy that they're going for with this. Let's take a quick look at Digital Turbine share price before we move on. You can see here that they are down by 82% if we look from the 2022 view, but they are having a bit of a comeback on the on this type of news. So, basically the stock has jumped quite significantly from about $9 up to $13. So, final story that I wanted to record on and which I think is super interesting is that Okay for games has What was it? Okay for

games? Sorry. I'm getting a bit confused at learnings that they renamed from last week is quite interesting. It's a Chinese company, right? So, they have renamed and they have launched a game called Meowdoku. [music] So, this game is pretty much brain puzzle game meets Sudoku. And they have since May 18th grown from 15,000 all the way up to 1.7 million daily active user. This is only an ad monetized product. I'm estimating they're probably earning somewhere between 70 to 120k a day from ads currently. And what's super interesting here is if you look that they are shaking up an extremely kind of genre where it's pretty much dominated by Sudoku. What's interesting here is that yeah, this has pretty much been all Miniclip and Easybrain's stomping ground for so long. [music] And

now Meowdoku has come and pretty much as you can see by downloads is pretty much dominating the downloads charts here. If we look by DAU, you can also see that pretty much they're probably second or third Oh, no, fourth. They slipped down. But essentially what's happening here is that they are combining cats which typically have low CPI. Sudoku and brain learning together to basically get even wider reach for their game. Super interesting. We're probably going to be covering this game very soon on the the but I wanted to showcase it here and highlight it. So, this has been my news from this week on Friday, July 3rd. This is Felix Braberg from Two and a Half Gamers. Have a lovely weekend. Bye-bye.