🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: The Surprise World Cup Winner, Block Blast's $120K/Day Bleed, Supercell's US news

As Blockbuster's only driven by ad revenue, you can see here by the active user base, they actually lost about 17% [music] of their daily active user base. And this is essentially because if you're relying on organic download [music] engine to supplement your paid marketing, what also happens if you're taken down is that the algos get worse [music] and you don't get as good rankings, right? And that's
[music]
Two and a Half Gamers exclusive.
Breaking news.
Literally [music] breaking.
Hello everyone and welcome to another special episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast. What makes this episode so special? Because it's Friday, obviously, and we are going to do the news. So today, I have three stories from the world of mobile games and essentially what we think has been important in this last week. So, starting off with our first story. And

that is that it's the second day of the World Cup right now. And there's already been an emergence of one particular app or kind of slash game that seems to be the winner of the mobile World Cup football download race. And it wasn't any game that I actually expected. I wrote a blog post recently about the football games that I thought would actually be making the most money from [music] this. But I was completely blindsided by this because if we look here in the growth by downloads in the last 30 days charts on Sensor Tower, we see here that the second most downloaded app by growth in the last 30 days compared to the 30 days before is something called the FIFA Panini collection, which has 12.2 million downloads in the last 30 days. It's grown by 6.6 million downloads and it has a revenue of nearly 1.5 million up by over a million from the

same time before. [music] So, what the hell is this app or game or whatever it is that's actually getting about half a million downloads a day in countries all across the world? If you apply the country filter here, we can see that it's Brazil, Mexico, US. So, it's a big big difference and if we look also at the active user base, we can see here that on the unified apps, it's close to 1.7 million daily active [music] users. So, I've actually looked at this and what it is, it's a Coca-Cola sponsored application with an Italian company called Panini which does football collecting cards. So, what they're actually doing is kind of a photo album style game which we're actually seeing a lot in casual games where you can collect sticker albums and basically trade them with others. And this right now is making 1.4 million and it's a big front for I guess Coca-Cola selling more

of its bottles because Coca-Cola bottles actually contain QR codes where you can scan it. So, very interesting winner. It's going to be interesting to see how this app does throughout the FIFA World Cup. We're going to keep an eye on it and I think we're probably going to cover this game on a very special episode cuz there's a lot of interesting things inside of this app that basically is a convergence of a lot of things that we talked about on the podcast before. So, the next thing I basically also did some number crunching this week. So, if you remember a couple weeks ago, we reported that Block Blast was taken off the Google Play Store for whatever reason that we don't know about, right? It was essentially taken down for I guess IP infringement is the rumor I'm hearing
[music]
across town. But, actually what happened was that when it taken down, I could show you here. When it was taken down, it was actually down for about 24 hours,

which doesn't sound like it's too bad, right? But, if we look at this chart, we can see how much downloads have decreased since after the snafu. It was actually at a nearly 14-month low if you look at it. And as Block Blast is only driven by ad revenue, you can see here by the active user base actually lost about 17% of their daily active user base. And this is essentially because if you're relying on organic download engine to supplement your paid marketing, what also happens if you're taken down is that the algos get worse and you don't get as good rankings, right? And that's what's happened here, right? So, how much money has Block Blast lost because of this 24-hour outage on the Google Play platform? So, I crunched the numbers. So, it looks like before 27th of May on Android, they had about 37.8 million daily active users.

On June 8th, uh which is a couple of days ago, it was 31.5. So, it's 6.3 million users or about 17% of the existing Android users. The biggest drop came from Turkey, which was down by nearly 41% from 4.3 million to 2.5 million. And the second biggest one was Indonesia. It was dropped from 5.87 to 5 4.54, which is down 23. So, all in all, this equates to about $120,000 per day in lost advertising for Block Blast and Hungry Studios, which [music] is quite a lot of money. So, on to our third and final story, and this was reported by Neil Long from Pocket Gamer Biz. Great insights from his newsletter and the website. And that is that Supercell has killed one of its US game projects and the other [music] one is MIA. So, I'll just read a little

short from here. Supercell's US game development operations appears to be winding down. One of the games has been killed and the other appears to be in the balance after most of its staff departed late last year. In early 2026, Supercell US product founder Steve De Staeles announced on LinkedIn that the game he has been working on for three and a half years with Matt Maraska has been killed and his team [music] has been disbanded. So, they were from ex-Riot. So, why is this kind of news? This is kind of news and what we're talking about is because it looks a lot like Supercell has kind of lost its funk, so to speak, because they have launched a lot of games that haven't really panned out [music] and they've launched games in very questionable methods that seem to do away with normal best practices for how to launch a mobile game in this day and age, not [music] using a soft launch, and basically doing some odd decisions, right? So, the the big question that everyone's been asking about themselves is kind of when will Supercell have their next hit game? So, this is why it plays into this because looks like the

US studio hasn't either produced a hit game for Supercell. So, we're watching this and we're updating this. We've actually have a podcast coming out on one of Supercell's games that they actually have right now called Moco. That's going to be out soon, so you can check that out for great analysis later on. So, that's it for our three news stories this [music] week. If you have any questions or if you'd like us to cover anything else in terms of the news, please reach out to us or yeah, leave us a comment. We do read our comments, even the nasty ones. So, yeah. Have a great week and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Bye-bye.