EA sells to Saudi, GTA games on mobile, plus Palworld Online, Roblox, Apple, Claude, data and more

Hello, and welcome to the mobilegamer.biz digest. I'm Neil Long, and every week I go for a walk and tell you what's happening in the mobile games industry. This week, recorded from a beach in Norfolk. Here we go. The big news of the week is EA's $5.5 billion sale to a Saudi-led consortium. We've known this is coming for a long while. Obviously, it closed officially on August 4th. The buying group consists of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, the investment firm run by President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. PIF holds the vast majority of the company now, 93.4%. So, it's effectively owned by PIF. And [snorts] there was some hippy waffle from CEO Andrew Wilson. Quote, "We're entering this next chapter from a position of strength with partners who share our vision and ambition."

As [snorts] I reported back in November 2025, CEO Andrew Wilson stands to receive an estimated $105 million from the transaction. Laura Miele will get around 44.4 million. CFO Stuart Canfield will get 33.4 million. And Chief People Officer Mala Singh and Chief Legal Officer Jacob Schatz will get about 25 million each. All other EA shareholders will get a nice little windfall from this transaction, too. But, of course, there is a little bit of pushback online. As the transaction was announced, we reported on lots of people saying it would be a total disaster with EA potentially taking on a ton of debt and potentially slashing its workforce to reduce its costs. In the US, more than 40 House Democrats also wrote to the FTC warning that the debt EA is taking on could push EA

towards massive layoffs and cost-cutting. But, the sources I spoke to not long after the transaction was announced said that specifically for mobile this could be good news. EA has been working to the quarterly SEC clock for years and years and mobile requires big investment over the long term. So, it could be a good thing for its mobile division where it has perhaps not fulfilled its potential. And of course, it is now a stablemate of Scopely, which is owned by Savvy Games Group which is in turn owned by the Saudi government and Savvy has been giving Scopely plenty of cash up front to spend on user acquisition for Monopoly Go and its other games helping it to buy Niantic's portfolio of titles including Pokémon Go, of course. So, hard to predict what's going to happen to EA now. It could be that it receives a ton of extra investment and it fulfills its potential

in mobile. But, as Bloomberg's Jason Schreier and others have pointed out, the company is now saddled with billions in debt and may well slash costs and therefore its workforce to meet the payments of that debt. So, a big landmark moment for the games business. EA now owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. This is a popular one. GTA has made over $100 million on mobile and now Tencent, Garena, and more are moving onto Rockstar's turf. So, I asked news editor Vicki Blake to look into some numbers on where Rockstar is at in terms of earnings on mobile and also because these have been popping into the soft launch lists more and more in recent months and years. Look at the GTA-likes on mobile. And there's a pretty comprehensive report with lots and lots

of interesting data from App Magic, but the headline figure $109.9 million on iOS on iOS and Android for all the various GTA games combined. That includes, of course, the PlayStation 2 trilogy, the definitive editions, Liberty City Stories, and Chinatown Wars, which were initially PSP and DS games. And then we run through the other contenders. We feature Never N S 2 Ever N S, which has made $38.9 million since its launch in April. Pretty good start for that one. I guess the surprise for this is One State RP Roleplay Online from a developer called Chillbase. That game has made over $75 million since since it launched in April 2022. Not a developer I'm familiar with, but they've bought all the search ads on the App Store, and it's the first game that comes up when you search GTA. And as well as that, they seem to be

spending some money on user acquisition. It's popped up in my TikTok feed more than once. There's also Gangstar Vegas from Gameloft. That game has seen better days. It's rumbling along getting about 50 grand a month now, but it is essentially Gameloft's version of Vice City on mobile. And then you got the soft launch games. The Tencent one, Gangstar Mirage City, which looks like a a mix of GTA and Cyberpunk. Garena Free City, an open-world crime game from the makers of Free Fire. And Pure Crime Gangster Shooting from Miniclip. This is a game made by Miniclip's Derby studio. That has also been in soft launch for a long while. More data and facts and figures on all these GTA-like games in the article. Really worth a read. Take a look. This Palworld online game was announced quite a while ago now, I seem to remember, in quite a low-key way, but it

has now been fully confirmed. It's made by Garena, the makers of Free Fire. And it's a mobile MMO based on, of course, Palworld, the smash hit Pokémon with guns game made by Japanese studio Pocket Pair. So, this game is launching later this year on iOS and Android. Further details are to come. There's no official trailer or anything like that. There's one piece of artwork so far.
[snorts]
So, not much to go on here, but this has been a very popular story, and of course, Palworld being on mobile is going to be a big deal when it does happen later this year.
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The Roblox financials came out at the end of last week. And within some middling Q2 financial results, there were some mobile-specific nuggets to pick out on this one. It has revealed a new avatar compositing technology called Slim, which is designed to let more complex avatars run at high performance on low-end Android devices. CEO David Baszucki also hyped up its incoming AI-powered creation tool build and said, quote, "Everything from 2D puzzle games to complex 3D multiplayer games are going to be created on mobile, enhanced in Roblox Studio." Build is already live in New Zealand.

And Baszuki said "More users are creating Roblox experiences through build on a daily basis than through the traditional Roblox Studio." So, it's a generative AI tool that helps you effectively create new Roblox experiences. The comments came as Roblox reported Q2 revenue, which was up 36% year-on-year to $1.5 billion. Bookings Bookings growth slowed to 8% landing at the low end of guidance. Net losses narrowed to 185 million from 280 a year previous. Adjusted EBITDA, aka profitability, rose to 152 million from just 18 million in Q2 2025. So, middling results. And that was reflected in the reaction of the markets. They did not like this at all. Shares fell about 27-30% the day after the report. One of the stock's worst single-day drops on record. And

most of this was down to the age verification and shift in monetization strategy that Roblox has been going through. It is increasingly pointing players at games that retain over the longer term rather than these quick sort of pop and drop Roblox experiences. More numbers, facts, and figures in the article well worth reading. This week's regulation news involves Apple. It has objected to proposed UK rules that would allow developers to direct users to payment options outside the App Store. Perhaps no surprise, but Reuters picked up on this end of last week. The megacorp, as we say in this story, has told the UK's Competition and Markets Authority that the plan to regulate how it runs its stores amounts to price regulation and would be highly intrusive.

So, the background on this, as I'm sure you know, is that currently courts in the US, Europe, and elsewhere around the world have forced Apple into opening up its App Stores and allowing people to direct players out to web shops with less friction. That does not apply in the UK cuz we are no longer part of Europe, another Brexit dividend. But, the CMA, the UK markets regulator, does want Apple to open up and offer the same things that effectively it has been made to do in the EU and US and Korea and elsewhere. Japan, too. Um so, Apple is fighting this one all the way. As we note in the article, the quote from the iPhone maker says that if the proposals go ahead, quote, "The CMA would not only regulate Apple's prices, but also restrict the

products and services for which Apple can charge a commission." So, Apple is fighting this regulation, unsurprisingly. We'll see if the UK regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, has any teeth on this one. You may remember the EU has hit Google and Apple with massive fines for not doing what they're told. So, we shall see if the UK is able to do the same. I've been meaning to publish this one for a while. This is another one from Vicky, a retired tennis pro built and launched Tennis Tycoon entirely with Claude code. This is the story of Ian Atkinson, who is the latest sort of amateur coder to use Claude code to conceive, build, and launch a game on the App Store all by himself. He's a retired tennis pro and felt like there was a gap in the market for this game, Tennis Tycoon. So, he built it with Claude, released it. It's a premium game.

Maybe he should have gone free with a paywall, but this is an increasing trend. It follows on from the 38-2-0 games that we reported on a little while ago. Danny Sancha and Josh Pavey each used Claude to make these football drafting games, which ended up being quite big hits on the UK App Store, at least. Atkinson said, which I think is probably a familiar story to many, the difference between knocking up a proof of concept and making a launch-ready game is quite vast. He also said that the game would not exist without Claude. Hiring developer was out of the question cuz this is a sort of hobbyist project first and foremost. But [snorts] yeah, more detail on Tennis Tycoon in the article. I think that there's going to be more and more of these Claude games on the store over the next few months and years.

In data digest this week, there is a quick summary of Sensor Tower's analysis of the first half of 2026, in which global in-app purchase revenue hit 40 billion. That's down 2% year-on-year. Downloads continued to fall in the games business. Lots more data points in the article. Hay Day, the 13-year-old Supercell game, has just hit its largest revenue total in a single day in its lifetime. These are numbers from AppMagic. It hit a million dollars in-app purchase revenue on May the 1st, driven by a dense single-day live ops push combining two collection events, task rewards, a linked exchange shop, and more than six special offers. There's further data from Sensor Tower on July's rankings. Pokémon GO revenue surged

last month. It is top of the revenue growth rankings and second only to Honor of Kings. There was a lot of 10th anniversary live ops and real-life events in that game last month. Krafton's mobile revenue is up 20% to 810 million for the first half of 2026. PUBG franchise pushing those numbers up. And China's NPPA has approved nearly 200 new games for release in July. Lots of them were mobile games. Notable approvals include a new fantasy Westwood Journey game from NetEase and Ion Classic from Shenkuu and NCSoft. More data and facts and figures and graphs, as ever, in the article. Have a look. A quick look at the new games and soft launch updates from Friday and Monday just gone. Lots going on in New Game Digest. There's a new Lumines game on mobile.

Fortnite has been launched in Brazil alongside the Epic Games Store. There's an update on Rust mobile. There's a new Honor of Kings card battler. There's a new Transformers game. There's Plants vs. Zombies 3, which is edging closer to launch. And a new Moon Active soft launch. And talking of the launch, there's that Moon active game. There's also new beta tests from Level Infinite, Take-Two, Supercell, and all your regular soft launch games from PlayStation, Supercell, Playrix, Miniclip, and many, many more. Those articles are one of the staples of the site, new game digest every Friday, soft launch update every other Monday. And that's it for this week. Thanks for listening. This week is recorded on a beach in Norfolk as we went for a sunset walk, and we have a special guest here. Do you want to say goodbye?
Yes. Bye-bye, guys.

Bye-bye, guys.