Epic and Google drop settlement and Pokémon Go revenue skyrockets | Week in Mobile Games podcast

[music] Hello and welcome to the pocket gamer.biz podcast week in mobile games where we chat about the week's news and provide some insights. Craig Chapel, head of content at pocketamer.biz. With me as ever is our deputy editor, Paige Cook and our data and feature editor Aaron Assel. How you both doing Paige? What you been up to?
Kind of a quiet week for me, but um I am going to the cinema this week. I'm going to go and see the Odyssey. I've somehow convinced my partner to go watch it with me. It is not the kind of film she would usually be into, but I was like feel like I have to see it in cinema cuz it's such a grand scale. So I was like please come with me.
It looks great. Are you seeing it in IMAX?
Yeah.
Yeah. Is it only in IMAX even? I don't even It was shot in IMAX.
Yeah, I think it was shot in IMAX. I think people were saying like there's only 40 or something cinemas in the UK that will be able to or like in general that will be able to watch it the way it's supposed to be seen. So it's like kind of what's the point? brings psych for my ears cuz I the music in uh in Chrisola's films is so loud or just the

sounds after 10 I vow never to do that again
but yeah I'm excited to see it I hope it's good and I hope my partner is pleasantly surprised otherwise it's going to be a long 3 hours
it looks awesome though I I've had the reviews seem very it seems like critics loved it
yeah I've heard good things so I'll update you all next week
with your big review the segment of the podcast
all Uh, thanks page. Aaron, what you been up to?
Not as much as last week. I think on last week's podcast I'd just been to two gigs, so nothing quite that exciting. I've just got a new figure which is in the background. Briefly bring it forward, which I've been quite excited to get cuz I sort of got this is a Fire Emblem character. Any kind of audio listeners will just have to imagine. But I got this on like pre-order a long time ago and it sort of finally came out in Japan last month. So then because I had to like get it through a like proxy kind of delivery service.
Mhm.

So I've [clears throat] been waiting ages for it to like properly come out and then yeah I had to get it shipped over through customs and stuff and finally it arrived yesterday. Uh so I was very excited to unbox that. So, I need to find a permanent home for it, but I thought for this week's podcast it could uh go in the background on my shell.
Perfect. That's awesome. All right. Thanks, Aaron. As for myself, I have been down to the Develop Brighton conference this week, which is always great. It's basically an excuse for people in the UK games industry to head down to the beach and just catch up is the main really thing. And then obviously there's still some networking going on and some meetings, but really it's just a big get together I think these days. There was a couple interesting talks from us two there. The CEO Maria Science had plenty to say about uh platform holders not earning their 30% that discoverability is such a huge problem and they don't do anything

to earn their 30% on that side of things which I thought was really interesting. She went into why they've moved to from mobile to now PC first and like kind of opened up a little bit on those Netflix and Apple deals for subscription services and why they perhaps should have moved away from those sooner rather than trying to chase that money and then the money eventually went away, especially with like Netflix changing it strategy. So, there's a lot of interesting stuff. Oscar Clark and a few other people did a really interesting talk about mobile and and innovation. I'm working an article around that. So that was that was pretty cool. I guess spoiler, there's like yeah, there is some innovation, but a lot of it is probably it's like smaller within genres as I'm sure everyone listening to this knows. But yeah, it was it was good fun. Unfortunately, we did watch the England game at the summer party there. And after 85 minutes of thinking, oh, this could actually happen. It all it all falls apart within about 10 minutes. So yeah, the the the life of an England fan, it's not pretty. Right, we'll move

on. Uh, thanks for that both. So, before we get to the news of we always do our quick shoutouts. We have the Pocket Gamer Connect Summit Shanghai coming up July 29th. Pocket Gamer Connect Nordics in Helsinkiki October 20th to 21st. We have other events in Bangkok, Jordan, Grand Canary later this year. We got the mobile games awards coming up during Gamescoms on the Tuesday night. Voting is still underway, but it does end on Monday, July 20th. So, not long left. If you want to vote for who you think should win in each category, there's a lot of categories for games like game of the year obviously, best live ops, the use of IP, etc. And then there's best developer, publisher, and then for kind of data services and tools companies. Please get voting and hopefully we'll see you there on the night at the mobile games. Right, so on to the news, the more important part. So there is big news that is currently happening and there may be more to come after this podcast. I may decide to insert a segment at the end of what I'm saying if

there is an update. But the current big news is, but it is big in general. It should be big news. Google and Epic have withdrawn their attempt to settle their lawsuit in the US and change the out to change the outcome of a US court ruling that said Google had an legal monopoly over Android apps. So you remember this was quite a while back now and it came from Epic's really really long yearsl long kick battle with the app store and Google play but this specific one with Google it changed a few things and then since then a case that you think was kind of defined done finished and the appeals kind of didn't really work out in the end for Google Epic and Google then came up with a settlement and they've come up with basically a couple of ideas of what this might look like and it is now rolled rolling out globally what they've settled on. So initially and we reported at the time Aaron needed a big investigation really into how the

impact of their initial proposal which was basically to put the tier the revenue share tier I guess based on monetization and how how a game monetizes which was really not part of the court case at any point and they just sort of made it up and it was one that ultimately would mostly have benefited Epic the way Fortnite advertises through cosmetics and that is not how any other game monetizes. So now they've settled on something else which was the like the 20% platform fee, the 5% fee for the Play Store and then there's other tiers. If you use Google Play services you get 15% subscriptions 10% etc etc. Anyway, this week this is all kind of getting sorted in theory in the case. So, one of the outcomes is that users will be able to download alternative stores directly through Google Play as of July 22nd. The proposed change before and I think is still applicable globally had suggested

a registered app stores program that requires marketplaces effectively to still be sideloaded. So there now seems to be a system that's separate for the US in which Google must allow third party source through Google Play rather than through the registered app stores program again worldwide. We don't know currently what's going on with the revenue share and linkout fees how that'll shake out in the US specifically for Google Play. So when they withdrew their settlement, this is part of the settlement that they've withdrawn in the US and now I guess it's kind of going to be up to the judge to decide what's going on. We might hear more about that today. Um I don't know if it all gets solved today. I think these were hearings basically for the judge to say what is this settlement all about and now it's been withdrawn. So but we might get an indication of where they might go, where they might settle. Maybe the I have no idea. So, I'm just saying random stuff now, but maybe the judge will kind

of be like, why should there be a fee at all? Or why or I don't think there should be a significant fee for these linkouts. It needs to be tied to your costs, which I which I'll get into in a sec. So, one thing that's worth noting is that the US settlement comes again after the judge previously expressed skepticism. And as Archie Stonehill at stash, who follows these these things closely and and is I think at the court to listen to to this case, he's been saying that the court's independent economist, Professor Nancy Rose, filed her review of the settlement, which was said to be not kind. Her job was to her job was to tell Judge Dato whether the deal served the public interest, not just epic Google. and her answer was that three of its key changes in quotes remain intention the purpose of the remedy and again in quotes do not appear to be supported by evidence the court requested. So I mean there's a lap in the air but hopefully we'll know more. Feels like it never ends cuz it never

does. We're getting there. That's that's the current update. It's still pretty seismic rate that stores actually users can actually download them from where they go. So, I've said before about I don't think there's much of a market for alternative stores at significant scale cuz one, it's never worked anyway when you've had massive companies Huawei, Samsung, Amazon, etc. Yeah, they have their audiences, but they don't compete on the level of an app store, Google Play. But maybe if you can download it within the actual Google Play, there's you lose that friction and you keep the habit of people going to Google Play, right, to search for things. So maybe that is a way you can break that habit because you can download it from Google Play and then you you might just start using this app store because the app stores are pretty broken, right? That's my thoughts on that page. Aaron, you've probably been a bit close to this story. Do you any thoughts? Anything you've heard?
I think you kind of covered all the major points. As you say, it's it seems

like a pretty big deal that you'll be able to like download other alternative like app stores through Google Play and stuff like it will be really interesting to see how much that changes things like whether we do see a big shift because of it.
Yeah. Again, all these as with all these things, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. Actually, the thing I wanted to say is I'm actually curious again. There's been this settlement with Epic and Google uh globally, which they've been talking about now publicly. So, they intend to stick with that despite what's going on in the US, which will have its own separate thing, I guess, which kind of confuses. But I think whatever actually happens in the US case, I I think could still then kind of uh alert regulators in the rest of the world to be like, well, hang on a minute then. Maybe this should maybe this is actually what things should look like. So, who knows? Things could start all up again um around the world. We'll see. Right. More on that soon. So, Paige, what have you got?

So, first up from me, I've got like an update on a story that I feel like it's gone a little bit quiet. So, the proposed 110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount has uh another hiccup. So this week, a coalition of 12 US attorneys filed a lawsuit to essentially try and block the deal. They're arguing that it would create too much of a a media giant that just has too much power over that part of the market. Um their concern is essentially that Paramount and Warner Bros. separately are already two of sort of like the biggest in that space that currently compete with each other. So, you know, they compete for like, you know, things when it comes to like theatrical releases, you know, cinema screens, distribution deals, all that, all that kind of stuff. They sort of argue that if they were to then merge, it could lead to higher prices for other people, maybe even fewer films being made, which results in less choice for audiences. They did say that. So, the

combined company would reportedly control 27% of US theatrical film distribution, 30% of blockbuster releases, and 27% of basic cable market. Of course, Paramount disagrees with this. They say that the lawsuit misrepresents uh like competition in today's entertainment industry. I'm not really sure specifically what they mean by that, just that maybe there there are enough companies out there that it would still be competitive. you know, maybe that just the entertainment industry is quite different now, especially with the likes of, you know, a lot of people just watch things on streaming services and things like that. It's interesting because the deal had already kind of been cleared from what I know, like the US, the Department of Justice, like they recently had cleared it. So, it just shows how these things can just get so messy and new things always seem to rear their head. But one thing I always think when this anything to do with this story does come up is there's always a distinct lack of discussion about obviously games and I think we've

discussed it on the podcast before that obviously you know Warner Bros. games like there are some there are some big names under that banner like that there are quite a few there so I understand that maybe they don't feel like the games part of it is the issue in terms of you know like the competitiveness but I do still wonder that if or when this goes through you know whoever buys them if it turns out how it's you know intended to with Paramount taking them what I'm still just confused what happens with their games because there's just yeah never really much of a mention of it like did they just cease to exist or do they continue on. But yeah, we'll see if we'll see if this sticks or if they push forward. But yeah, um I still just have like a massive question mark over the whole games part of it.
I um I was just trying to look up what's the threshold for a monopoly and apparently in the UK it's 25% apparently
and I don't know what it is in the US. I'm seeing anything from 40% 50%.
I didn't know that.
So I guess a combined 30% is quite big but I don't know does that does that

meet the threshold? I guess if people are taking it to court it that they are concerned about it that that's I thought that was interesting. I'm also curious. I mean, they obviously do compete with Netflix and streaming though, right? So, I guess through one channel, again, I know nothing really about how how Field works, so I making this up, but I guess through one channel distribution potentially monopoly there, but then in the actual overall space, is it a monopoly? It's very big company obviously, but curious if it is. I I think I remember reading part of the case was also kind of around whether uh so there was competition concerns with the Netflix deal but that with this deal basically the Ellison's have already had have an agreement this is allegedly with President Donald Trump to basically say don't worry this deal will go through uh any sort of uh competition concerns will be wait I think that is part of

that basically the the plan to try and block this is those allegations don't know if those are true that that is also another I guess part of this that's going on uh possibly a bit power struggle there but as you said coming back to games I I kind of feel a bit sorry for the teams at W games in the midst of all of this because that part of the company is not even relevant really to these deals and so I wonder how if if at all we impact perhaps even the investment into those studios as time goes on and particularly after the deal actually completes what will happen to the studios as well. So it must be a very uncertain time for the Thanks for that page. Aaron, what have you got?
Pokémon Go has just had one of its most lucrative days in history. So on the 11th of July, um it actually might have been its best day ever, which I'll kind of get to in a second. But basically, we discussed I think last week about the anniversary like Pokémon Go's just

turned 10 on the 6th of July. And so on that day, player spending was 129% over the day prior. And there was a kind of 5-day Road of Legends event that clearly seems to have enticed players to spend. There were quite a lot of legendary raids over those 5 days, bringing back a lot of basically like rare Pokémon that you could buy raid tickets to battle. So that seems to have helped revenue kind of from the anniversary forward. And by comparison, a few days before the anniversary, like at the start of the month, the player spending was about 1.2 million according to AppMagic estimates. And then by the 10th, so the end of the Road of Legends 5day thing, the spending was over 10 million per day. And then at the end of that after kind of building momentum for almost a week you had Go Fest 2026 Global which commenced on the spending surged by another 50% resulting in 15.1 million in spending between

Google Play and the App Store. So between those stores this was Go's second most lucrative day ever by AppMagic estimates just 15% shy of its record 17.4 4 million which was achieved in July 2021. So um at the very minimum this is go's second best day ever and its best day in half a decade. Um but it's also worth noting that that 2021 number was achieved 2 years before Go la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la launched its web shop. Um, so to me at least it doesn't seem unreasonable to speculate that the difference may be compensated for by players who have since migrated to the direct to consumer model. And my kind of little bit of maybe evidence to back this up is that AppMagic estimates say that Go made just under 750 million last year on Google Play and the App Store and Scopely just confirmed that it made over 1 billion overall last year. Um, as I say, it's

entirely possible that enough people have kind of moved to direct consumer or are on other app stores or whatever that this could have been GO's best day ever, which is quite extraordinary like 10 years in. As for what's caused this kind of potential new record. So, um, yeah, the 11th marked the first free iteration of a Go Fest, which they do annually. And yeah, kind of ironically, it seems like by making it free, they've actually made a load of money cuz since no one had to pay up front for tickets, everyone in the world had the chance to participate and then kind of feel the pull to spend on extra things, you know, while the event was going on. So, it was across the 11th and 12th. So, like you could get nine free raid tickets a day to like celebrate the event. But there were 60 legendary Pokémon available and you'd need a, you know, raid ticket per battle. So, for someone that wanted all of them, that wouldn't even cover a third of the legendaries. And there were kind of limited time bundles available.

People probably spent on Pokeballs because the event also had the most diverse variety of Pokémon species ever observed in the wild in Pokémon Go. So, there would have been a lot that people hadn't caught before, including some that are usually set to certain countries because there are certain Pokemon that only release in certain places. Like, I believe there's one that's exclusive to the UK, which is based on Stonehenge. Like, Pokémon is like a little Stonehenge creature. So, you can only get that in the UK. Um, like there's a bison creature that I think you can only get in America and stuff like that. But, they kind of broadened some of these out a bit more for the event. So again, you you know, you might have had people spending more on Pokeballs. There were shiny Pokemon at boosted odds. So again, there's kind of more to catch as I personally suspect a lot of player spending went on raid tickets because of all the legendaries and kind of returning Pokémon meta picks. and they just introduced mega Mewtwo X and Y for Go Fest, which obviously Mewtwo is popular and powerful

and kind of ticks all the boxes to get people spending money to try and get a good Mewtwo. Yeah, overall it kind of makes sense why the event did so well, but I'm still kind of impressed at just how how well it's done. And I guess finally for some kind of broader content, this surge in revenue has also helped boost Pokémon Go up 17 positions in the monthly kind of revenue chart. So it's reached second place among the top grossing mobile games this July as it's made close to 100 million already between the two major stores two weeks into the month. And yeah, currently second only to 10 cents Honor of Kings in the overall revenue rankings for July. Whereas, I say like last month it was in like 19th place. This anniversary is really doing some good things for the game.
I'm shocked to see that it was second. That's that's incredible.
Yeah,
still a lot of people very engaged in the game. Is there actually Sorry if I

missed this just now, but are they actually going to continue anything postevent like kind of for the coming weeks or is the event over and there's nothing continuous on that? I just wonder if there's like I don't know. Yeah. So,
yeah. I mean, they always have like
Yeah, they always have like seasonal stuff going on, but I do think Go Fest wrapped up on the 12th. So, that was kind of the big thing that this has been building to. So, I suspect it will drop off now. But, I'm wondering after how big this has been for them, whether cuz the they made this Go Fest free to celebrate the 10th anniversary cuz they've always been paid events before and they do very well, but not this well. So I am curious now whether they'll look at it and decide whether the ticket sales are more beneficial overall or whether they continue to make them free or whether yeah whether it's just a one time thing.
Interesting. So uh I I felt like the DTOC thing kind of tracks. So so they're saying a billion and the estimates which can be inaccurate rate or even wildly

inaccurate but they uh we say about 700 at Magic says about 750 million.
Yeah. It tracks with when we look at direct consumer revenue from some of the top publishers in the world that reveal it and then they're saying 30 40%
of sales
kind of portfoliow wide get some games can make a lot more some make less. Some companies make more some less. Uh but that would kind of track right. Chris Heavily showed some sensitile data which I can't remember the guy's name. It was in his game dev reports newsletter. the guys called Dmitri, they were showing that in the last quarter revenue had gone way down in the mobile games industry. But like I think that combined with what you just said about Pokémon Go and consumer, it does show that we kind of have very little idea even directionally at the moment, public estimates of where if something's come successful or is on a decline. I think

you can only really tell for like maybe a new game like oh it's quite a strong launch. Maybe some of that [clears throat] is already off store. But for a game that has been out for 10 years, you might see revenue just going down, but for all we know, it's it's going up. And same with the global market, I mean, obviously it is very challenging. So revenue might be down anyway, but we just don't know.
It reminds me as well when um Scopely acquired Pokémon Go, like Niantic had put out a number. I think they'd said it that Go had like three years of consecutive growth at that point. But yeah, when we looked at like AppMagic data of each year, it had, you know, from what we could see from the major stores, it was going down. Obviously, we didn't get to see the official numbers for how much it was going up, but yeah, we're kind of it's harder to get the full picture with the the web shops these days,
which is a which is a real shame. I I news numbers apparently their their revenue has D2C attached and they actually raise their their valuation quite significantly and their valuation

of the mobile market is very different from senses to it also includes China Android as well but they don't go into like at least publicly again specifics so we don't know what percent of that is DTC at the moment China etc anyway really interesting thanks to Aaron so for me I just wanted to go through very quickly one we've just released our big China report in association with Exola and it looks into kind of the state of play in China. We've got some commentary from some industry leaders. For anyone that reads, you might notice that someone is also anonymous, but that is actually very common. When we reach out to in China or people in China or in Asia, they don't always or maybe quite often don't like to have themselves on the record. We've had it when you've done some interviews as well. It is just how it is. I I'll be honest, I used to get very annoyed with this. I once did an interview with Ted said. Uh this is I don't know how long ago. This was eight years ago or something stupid. And then after I did it, they were like, "Oh, by the way, can you just credit to a tens spoke person?" I was like, "Absolutely

not." And I never ran the interview, but it is what it is. So, but thank you to to them also for their commentary. We've got a bunch of data in the report. We have a couple interviews in there. We have we interviewed Moonton and we have our interview cur games that Aaron did as well. Lots lots to chew on. Exola has an article in there all about kind of emerging markets. And we also have our top 30 China game makers which is crossplatforms. And I'll quickly go through like the top 10 and then some things I I think I kind of learned just through kind of researching it. So top 10 10 hybrid casual specialist. Uh nine hungry studio. Oh, by the way, some of these technically are not all sometimes technically they're not based in China kind of in some cases we know they are and or they have like significant development operations there but the HQ might be also in case people are like why are they in so number nine home studio block blast everybody's playing it game science number eight black Kong infold games also known as paper games I

love deep space number six verse G impact number five NI games very well established a party but fancy westward journeys I still their flagship time. First fun, which is last war, henc kings, as we mentioned, is still a number one game. Micro fun basically, Gossip Harbor, the leading merge game developer out there at the moment. They're number one, and they were also number one of our top 50 game makers worldwide. Century Games, fantastic studio. They really really dominating the Forex strategy space. And they're also doing well now in puzzle and and I think it's merge. They've got a white out survival, Kingshot. Both fantastic games. King Shot is doing really well still. That was one of their more recent games. And like I say, Tasty Travels and Truckstar. So, they're really getting into space. A couple things that I I wanted to quickly note is one, this list really gives you an idea of how global Chinese games companies are. I think you might if you don't recognize the names of the companies you will recognize the

names of the games completely global like Kuru games with Wthering Waves local game Griffin with Knights Moonto Mobile Legends a global game if historically with its AFK arena AFK journey kingdoms global thumb plus HQ in Switzerland but they have develop operations in China again very much global company and etc etc basically another interesting thing is that my goodness is actually sometimes really difficult to understand and I might not we might not have done it perfectly for this list is there's like a there's like a corporate web of of company names that it's not always clear one where a company is based and two a company might just have multiple names for each game and and it's not obvious. So, for example, and hopefully I don't get corrected on this, River Game, big studio does Top War, and they also have uh it was there's another company called Flow Rare, which I think has now been renamed to Omni Lojo, and I believe I

was told and reliably informed that that is with a game and they also have really successful stuff like last sea survival and dark war survival. Hopefully, I correct. if not that uh it'll be the top 31 China mobile game makers. Uh but yeah, really really really interesting list. And I encourage everyone to read the report if you want to learn more about China and why it's dominating the the global market and particularly upcoming sorry the last thing was a couple studios did quite make it but as you see from here with century really getting into the puzzle space hard especially merge there's a couple other studios it was happy bits and I say vertex games do like really emerging players in the merge space and as people kind of speculating it won't be very long until these publishers start really getting into the match free space which will be a big problem for Western studios and also that is what Turkeykey's games hub is excelling in we'll see if that provides competition there or you know these are very strong

companies in Turkey maybe they can kind of withstand that so yeah check it out right is there so Paige what else have you got
yeah so last one from me so we had a report this week that came in through Yuki so it was a survey it surve uh 1,600 people working across the UK games industry. And one statistic that really stood out to me was that 81% of respondents said that they're proud to work in the games industry. 70% of them said they would recommend their own employer, but then only 38% of them said they would recommend the games industry itself is a great place to work. So my initial instinct on that is that's quite disheartening, you know, and I I guess it paints like quite a broad picture of how people feel about the games industry. There's so much passion for it and love for it. Hence why so many of them are like, "Yeah, you know, I'm proud to say that I I work in the games industry, but at the same time, you know, and I'm sure there's other there's

plenty of factors that go into why maybe some people wouldn't recommend it, but it's hard not to think that the go-to reason is, you know, years of layoffs, studio closures, you know, that that has to take a toll. You know, obviously like we cover a lot of those stories on the podcast when there's layoffs and things. And just coming like straight to the top of my mind, I don't know how many times on this podcast we have spoken about layoffs are, you know, Ubisoft Ubisoft layoffs, you know. So if you're someone that works there, yes, you might be really proud to work there and you yourself might enjoy it, but would you recommend it? Maybe you feel some, you know, instability in your job and in your industry. Maybe not. So I I I do get it and it it's just such a yeah just two sides of it, you know, kind of loving the industry you work in, not feeling like it's in a place that you could recommend it. There were some other points too. It's not all negative. There were sort of things mentioned about how remote work and hybrid work remain more common over the UK workforce. So as opposed to like other

jobs where a lot of them have gone back to sort of like you know in office the games industry has remained quite you know remote or hybrid which obviously opens up you know potential for more people to be able to get into the industry. There was also more across the UK. Obviously a lot of games jobs were centered around London. That's not quite as much the case. Obviously there's still a lot in London but there there is more sort of across the rest of the country. Obviously, the remote and hybrid thing also plays into that since, you know, you wouldn't necessarily have to relocate to get a job. But yeah, Yuki did comment and say that they're putting together some sort of action plan to address the issues that are highlighted in the report. No sort of details as to like fully what that will be yet. And like I said, there's only a story from this week, so we'll we'll see what comes of that and what that action plan will be. I guess it's a big part of it is, you know, trying to support people better in the jobs that they're in. But yeah, like like I said, overall it just sort of for me highlights that there's there's so much love for this industry, but at the same time there's a there's a

lot of confidence that needs to be regained in it maybe.
Thanks, Aaron. What what have you got?
Yeah. So, last up from me is um I've been quite hard at work this week on a H1 2020 analysis which went live just before we started recording this. Um so, please everyone check it out. But to sort of give a few highlights from it. So overall, mobile games generated um a collective 40 billion in gross player spending during the first 6 months of this year. That's between Google Play and App Store. And these are AppMagic estimates. And kind of tying in with what we were talking about earlier with like the web shop stuff like technically this is down like 1%. But we don't obviously know ultimately whether that's a concern or not. um 1% decline because you know it could be people moving to direct to consumer purchases. Um but looking at the genres themselves, so strategy stayed on top as the most lucrative genre of the period after dethroning RPGs last year.

So strategy as a genre made over 9.1 billion in grace player spending between the two stores. Um, and so that represented about 23% of all player spending on mobile this past half year. However, this also came despite the falling revenue. Strategy was down 4% year-over-year from 9.5 billion in H125. Um, and at the time the genre was recording the third highest growth rate of any genre on the platform. uh whereas in H126 the um year-over-year change I say is down like 4%. So it's sort of lost that momentum that it had. And so I kind of looked you know there's there's a load of graphs that are quite interesting and then I looked sort of in detail at some of the bigger genres and like some of the big games within them. So like staying with strategy for a minute. This was led first and foremost by Honor of

Kings which maintained its position as the highest grossing game in the genre and it was actually the top grossing game on mobile every month in H1 like overall. So it's generated almost 1.3 billion during the 6 months and accounted for 14% of all strategy mobile revenue. Uh followed by Century Games White out survival. Uh so that generated just under 950 million and overtook so last year it came third in H1 and now it's second. It's overtaken first funds last war survival which also made over 900 million. So I found it quite interesting. It's like all three of these games have slightly declined in revenue compared to H125. Uh but even so between the three of them they generated over 4.5 billion of the genre's total 9.1 billion. So they're really responsible for you know effectively half of all revenue in the strategy genre. So then yeah I think

that's quite interesting when you compare it to like so I looked at RPGs as well in quite a bit of detail. Last H1's leader was Hongkey Star Rail but that took about a 35% hit. So that's gone down from just over 300 million to under 200 million. So it's dropped from first to fourth place this H1 and that's allowed last year's second place Genchin Impact to move up to the top. So that's number one at the minute. H Universe is still at the top of RPGs. Then after that you've got like Nexon's Maple Story idol RPG which was really close to Genchin Impact only about one and a half million behind and then Mixie's Monster Strike ranked third. So yeah, between these three games, they equate to just over 10% of RPGs revenue as a genre. So they made just over 700 million out of 7 billion, which kind of sounds healthier in a way than the um I say the strategy split where you've got

three games accounting for 50%. Even if there's kind of a bigger, so to speak, the other games are getting a much smaller piece of it compared to in RPGs where seems like a bit of a like healthier split. Um, and also the top RPG, Genchin Impact, made just 20% of what the strategy leader, Honor of Kings, made over H1. Um, and then kind of the final genre that I'll focus on here was the puzzle genre, which I think came out as the real winner of the first half of this year. So yeah, while kind of more broadly the mobile games industry shrank slightly, puzzle games grew by 20% year-over-year to 7.6 billion. So puzzles bigger than RPGs now. And um the rate of growth was second only to party games. But yeah, puzzle overall like it already moved up into third last year and now it's moved up into second this H1. And that's being led by Dream Games

Royal Match, uh, which generated a 12% share of the whole genre's spending. Griffund's Gossip Harbor is in second. That's overtaken Candy Crush Saga, which is now in third. And between those three, they account for about 32% of the genre's earnings. So, you know, substantially more than like RPGs top three, but still, you know, not a whole half of the market for that genre, like with strategy. Um, I also thought it was quite interesting like Player X's Gardenes fell into fifth and Royal Kingdom, which is obviously still a relatively new game, has overtaken it into fourth. So, Dreams Game, Dream Games have two titles in the top five. And, uh, recently I did a Royal Kingdom story. um where it's sort of 3/4 of the way to a billion now and 42% of its lifetime player spending um was generated in this first half of the

year. So it launched globally in 2024 but yeah it's made nearly half of all its earnings over the past like 6 months. it's really accelerated very quickly. And yeah, in kind of the full analysis, I also looked at kind of how revenue kind of varies between the global stage and in the US specifically and kind of which genres the US most accounts for. So like it I thought it was quite interesting that like puzzle, casino, kids and tabletop games, the US contributes more than 40% of global spending on those categories. But then party games, RPGs, and shooters, it's like less than 15%. So yeah, quite a massive difference in kind of how much US players are spending on those games. I say it's quite a a thorough piece, so I won't waffle on for any longer, but yeah, please do check it out if any of that sounds interesting.
That's a really interesting piece. Thanks. Thanks for that, G. I a couple

things I thought that I was thinking about is I wonder if part of the decline for RPG is there's I guess there's a few things going on but is a decline through the apps from Google Play of Japanese games market revenue which I guess is the biggest games of yesterday year I guess I don't actually know how some of these tagged monster strike Puzzle Dragons which Puzzle Dragons is a puzzle game but it has RPG elements not sure that's tagged and then fake grand order I presume is tagged as as an RPG. If that market's declined, maybe that kind of brings things down for a puzzle at least to overtake it, which I'm quite surprised at, but also not surprised at the same time, I guess. And there's also a more recent decline of the last couple years of Mihoyo's games, again, at least through revenue generated directly through apps on Google Play. But that is the data we're using here. Um, it could also be some

side to do with DTOC, but then I would have kind of expected strategy to show that as well, but maybe there's just revenue going off platform in these games cuz I presume they then also have bigger communities with RPGs and maybe easier to direct them to your web store is what I would have thought. And the other side of that uh sorry the other thing I thought was interesting is clearly uh puzzle and RPG have been adapted into other genres right so uh strategy has become even bigger for a number of reasons through Chinese companies investing a lot in them very successfully and investing a lot in UA to generate a lot of revenue but they with those strategy games now they put in the the puzzle or hyper casual stock at the But maybe that's that's probably help that that or I guess that is the reason sorry that strategy has become so big like worldwide even though it's

always been quite big and strategy and puzzle in particular what are the two hottest markets that people talk about right now China and Turkey what do they what what are the things that they do China it's I guess they do RPG but it's strategy and puzzle specifically merge and in Turkey it's puzzle casual kind of specifically at the moment match and maybe sort puzzle etc. So yeah anyway I don't know what that means around a bit but I think that's one of the reasons why like those have kind of increased and maybe why some of the others have declined. We'll end the podcast there. So uh thank you very much Paige and been on the podcast as always. We appreciate all your insights. Thank you very much and thank you everybody for tuning in and listening to the latest episode. We hope you enjoyed it. will be back again and that'll be just before I head off to China for Pocket Game Shanghai Summit on July 29th and then to China join. Yeah, I've never been to Shanghai. Very much look forward to it. So, should be exciting. Catch you on the next one. Goodbye.