🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Tripledot Buys Supersonic for $40M + EA is Private for $55B + Netflix drama

AI. Please, if anyone can share your case studies with Vector, [music] I would be glad to see because yet I have not been able to see any type of great numbers [music] on Unity. But the CEO Matt Bromberg called it, quote, arguably the best quarter in Unity's history as a public company.
Two and a Half [music] Gamers exclusive.
Breaking news.
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Literally breaking.
What's up, everyone? Welcome back to Two and a Half Gamers. My name is Matej Lancaric and this is your weekly news episode. Oof, this week is basically one giant lesson in consolidation. Everybody's buying [music] everybody. Tripledot just bought Supersonic from Unity, which finally [music] mercifully closed the ironSource chapter for good. Saudi Arabia closed the biggest leverage buyout in history to

take EA [music] private. Netflix got to the studio eight weeks after praising its game on an earnings call. And Apple having posted explosive growth that somehow still counted as a miss. The money's concentrating, the ownership is concentrating, and the people are line item getting cut. Let me get into it. So, welcome again. Let's start with the one that matters the most for our world. We heard this news, but I wanted to keep it for the recording for the news for this week, and everybody else already posted about it [music] on LinkedIn. Anyway, Tripledot has acquired Supersonic from Unity, 40 million dollars cash. And it's an interesting number because if we go and look at Sensor Tower, thank you, guys, for the data. If we go to the last 12 months revenue, it's 25 million with 400 million

downloads. And whole Hit 3D becoming the top game in the last, let's say, 6 months. If we count ad revenue on top of this 25 million dollars, I think we are more more likely looking at 40 45 million revenue in the last 12 months. So, getting a studio with this type of revenue for 40 million in cash is interesting bargain. Well, Unity got Supersonic as the part as part of 4.4 billion dollar uh IronSource merger back in 2022. 4 years later, only 40 million. So, here's the kicker. Supersonic was itself bought by IronSource 11 years ago for 150 million dollars. So, it's just sold for less than a third of what IronSource paid for it over a decade ago. Well, as I said,

you have the numbers here. Doesn't make any sense. Or, well, it was a fire sale. That's it. So, that was the last piece of IronSource leaving the building. Ad works is dead. The publishing arm is solved. Game over. So, but why is there just a funny footnote? It's Tripledot's whole strategy coming together [music] because it's the second time they've done this. Just over a year ago, Tripledot bought AppLovin's entire games business for 800 million. So, I'm think I'm thinking about the pattern here. Well, both AppLovin and Unity have now completely exited game publishing. So, both of them sold their studios to Tripledot. Both of them are becoming pure ad tech companies. The ad networks make ads now. The publishers make games, finally. That's the winning part. Anyway, segment or news [music] number two, Unity's best quarter ever. And the Supersonic sale didn't happen in vacuum, obviously. It dropped alongside

the Unity's Q2 earnings, and the numbers explain why they had the confidence to keep cleaning the house. So, revenue 546 million, up 24% year-over-year, led by mobile advertising. The growth segment, which includes the Unity's ad network, well, this was up 35% to 389 million, all driven by Vector AI. Please, if anyone can share your case studies with Vector, I will be glad [music] to see because yet I have not been able to see any type of great numbers [music] on Unity. But, the CEO, Matt Bromberg, called it, quote, "arguably the best quarter in Unity's history as a public company." And the profitability turn is real. Adjusted EBITDA hit 160 million, up from 90 million a year ago. The net loss narrowed dramatically, so not bad. They expect to actually be GAAP profitable by

Q3. Guidance is grow revenue jump jumping 68 to 70% next quarter. The whole thesis, Kill Iron Source, sell Supersonic, ride Vector, it looks like it's working. This time last year, Unity was a
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punchline. Right now, it's one of the better turnaround stories in the space. Credit where it's due. Saudi Arabia [music] buys EA. Well, okay, the biggest deal of the week, and honestly, well, one of the biggest in the history [music] of the industry. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund closed off its $55 billion buyout of EA on August 4th. EA is now private. Delisted from Nasdaq, shareholders got $210 shares in cash. PIF owns over 93% with Silver Lake and this real Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners rounding the consortium. It's the largest leverage buyout in history. Bigger than TXU deal from

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2007, second only to Microsoft Activision among gaming acquisition ever. Now, this isn't a mobile pure story, but stick with me because there's there are two things here that absolutely matter for our world. Number one, the debt. Roughly 20 billion of the 55 billion was borrowed from JP Morgan to secure against EA itself. Analysts are already flagging that the debt burden is going to shape EA's direction significant.
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And I want you to think about that what it means in practice. When you load 20 billion in debt into a company, you need cash flow to service [music] it. And where does reliable recurring cash flow come from in gaming? Live service monetization and mobile. A PIF owned heavily leveraged EA is going to squeeze every recurring revenue lever that it has and a lot of those levers are on mobile and in Ultimate Team. Number two, the soft power. EA Sports

[music] FC alone gives Saudi Arabia a relationship with something like 20,000 players and hundreds of clubs worldwide. This was described by analysts as not purely economic. This is Vision 2030. This is sport washing strategy and this is the golf building an entertainment empire. And now they own one of the crown jewels. Whatever you think about it, ownership of this industry is concentrating in a way we haven't seen before. Keep watching this one. Ooh, the Netflix FIFA disaster. This is the controversy of the week. Well, this one made me genuinely not angry, but I don't know what to think about this because honestly, you build a game for FIFA World Cup for Netflix. World Cup is over. Well, surprise, surprise. Your company is over as well. Nobody cares. Well, but it's a sad story. Refactor Games laid off 80 people, 85% of the entire studio 7 weeks after they shipped

FIFA World Cup launch edition for Netflix. So, here's the sequence. Because the sequence is what's damning. So, the game launched exclusively on Netflix games in June times to the World Cup. Reviews panned it. The controls, the [music] visuals, the player AI, all of it got hammered. But, it still pulled 1.5 million players in its first week. And on Netflix July earnings call, executives stood up and named FIFA World Cup one of their two most successful cloud game debuts to date. Pulled the funding with no warnings. And now, well, most of the team that built the game was gone. So, let me get this straight. The CEO publicly praised the game. Netflix brags about it on their earnings call. [music] And then, they killed the studio that made it. Makes all the sense, right? Well, here's the part that should make everyone nervous. This is a Netflix pattern. So, they did exactly the same thing before.

They closed the Squid Game Unleashed studio, Boss Fight, days after hyping the game on an October 2025 earnings call. Praise it, then kill it. Well, now, in in all fairness, the reporting suggested Netflix didn't directly order the Refactor's shutdown. That was Tilting Point pulling the funding. So, whether the FIFA World Cup was actually any good is beside the point. The point is the two different companies publicly said it was a success, and then the developers got laid off anyway. That's the whole story. And then we have AppLovin Q2 a missed that it isn't a miss. Well, AppLovin reported Q2 after the bell on August 5th and the headline is explosive growth that still counted as a miss. Well, revenue was up 53% year-over-year to 1.9 to 1.92 billion. That's enormous.

And it missed the consensus the consensus wanted 1.94 but the EPS came in at 3.76 against an expectation of 4.21. So, top line miss and the bottom line miss technically. But the context matters here. The stock was already down about 37% year-to-date coming into this. Well, in a mid so, a miss on paper but business is still growing 53% 84% margin is not a business in trouble. It's a business that got too expensive and it's now normalizing. [music] Well, I guess it's different problem. So, I I think we can we can end it with with a very impressive news. Our friend Raymond staffer from Blue Tile now was appointed CEO of Nazara Technologies Limited which is publicly listed gaming company in India. So, they acquired Blue Tile and now Raymond is the CEO. So, congratulations

to our friend and with that in mind thank you very much for for listening. This was an episode about news in the last 7 days. See you next time. Cheers. Bye-bye.