Epic Games Store, Love and Deepspace, Fortnite, Google Play, data nuggets, new games and more

Hello and welcome to the mobile gamer.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 time from back home in glorious Harfordshire, UK. Here we go. The big interview of the week was published on Monday and it was with Steve Allison who's in charge of the Epic Games Store. Quite a few interesting nuggets in there. But I think the headline, as headlines are meant to do, summarizes the overall feeling in that Epic is having a tougher time than expected, breaking Apple and Google's store duopoly. I started by asking him for some numbers. Epic put out this year and review infographic every year, January, February time, and they never really mentioned mobile. So I asked him to clarify the numbers on mobile. He said the Epic Game Store on mobile

has close to 30 million installs overall, which is some way off the initial target of 100 million by the end of 2024. I mean, we're in 2026 now. That tells you the scale of the challenge Epic faces getting people to download a new store with, you know, not many games in it. 60 games on iOS, close to 200 on Android. Self-publishing is coming to Epic Games Store in August. So, the numbers will rise. And as legislation kicks in and the ramifications of the Google settlement start to become clear, Epic is hopeful that these numbers will improve and people will increasingly switch over to Epic Game Store. But yeah, it's pretty tough going if you've got practically the biggest game in the world, Fortnite in your armory. And even then, it's proving to be difficult. So,

you know, you've got your legislation problems. It's available on Android worldwide right now and iOS in the EU only, which is not ideal. I think he even says EU on iOS is 8% of the market. So I mean a long way to go there. I think the mood overall appears to be you know they are plugging away. They are going to keep going and I think their mission is a noble one. But yeah it's a grind isn't it? As the interview happened I had just come out of an interview with another notable mobile company that is owned or part owned by 10 cent. If all of the 10-centent related companies put their games on this store, wouldn't that make a huge difference? You got Supercell, Mini Clip, Riot, many, many more. And if the business thinks of this as effectively the 10-centent store, maybe that would help. And Allison basically

said, "Yes, Tencent philosophically is on board, but nobody wants to be the first one to move is effectively the feeling. Everyone's still scared of Apple and Google and is not super clear on the benefits of putting in the work to put their game on a unproven store or an upand cominging store you might say. Uh Mihoyo is on board. Sounds like Genchin Impact and Hongkey Star Rail coming soon. Honor of Kings is already on there on Android as I ask in the article. iOS is really the golden goose here. That is the key market. That is where all the big spenders are. That is where all the powerful devices are. And the kind of games Epic makes with Unreal Engine are on the higher end of the spectrum. So yeah, Allison knows that that needs to happen and it's super

complicated for sure. He says different fee structures, different policies around the world are causing conststonation. Developer conststonation seem to be a theme throughout the chat. The message at the end is an interesting one. It's going to be a challenge for a while. He says the breakthrough that we need is not there yet. If Tim Sweeney were here, he'll probably say we're going to keep plugging away. Every domino that we can knock down, we're going to knock down at some point. Momentum will take care of itself. Maybe we get there, he says at the end. So, long road ahead for Epic and I hope they do it. I hope they get a firm footing in mobile because the market needs competition. The market needs choice. A variety of ecosystems developers can choose from. But it's going to be a long hard slog for these guys and uh I don't envy them given the

comp complexities of the market. A story I published on Tuesday which I had a great time putting together but as of now not many people have read which is annoying is about love and deep space. For those not familiar this is a hit autom game. Atom being the kind of games where you have effectively a digital boyfriend and this is based on a talk on the Thursday of GDC last week. It was great. The atmosphere in the talk was fantastic. Lizzy Chang who is doing the talk. She's the game director at Infold Games. She had a crowd of what appeared to be adoring fans in the front row whooping and cheering throughout. It was great. And obviously Love and Deep Space in itself is is a fun one to talk about. A digital boyfriend's game with incredibly

high production values. And that was kind of the point of the talk when Infold Games did some player research in 2020, pretty early on in development. The feedback was that the game is cringe and the boyfriends of the game were not hot enough. So the team really went for it in terms of production values to get that emotional connection and it seemed to work. Love these places a hit. Chang said two years after launch the game has over 80 million players. It's made many hundreds of millions of dollars in inapp purchases as well. Of course, the game was developed over 6 years. Loads of great little nuggets of info about the creation of the game. In the article, just to emphasize the point that um making games is hard, she said, "Just a year before launch, when our company members were sharing our wishes for the

new year, the Love and Deep Space team's wish was simply that everyone makes it through alive." So, that got a good chuckle from the crowd. And then she backed up, gave us some context about the market around Atomic Games. So Infold had a bit of a hit with Mr. Love Queen's Choice in 2017. And this spurred the team on to make another one with even more ambitious production values and more video gamey mechanics in order to attract a wider range of players. So one of the fun parts of it was how they see everything through the lens of romance. So combat is romance. Everyday life is romance. And these digital boyfriends are there to keep you company throughout the day. And also there are game mechanics in there. Combat starts off a little bit simplistic and formal. And then as your relationship grows with your new digital

boyfriend, the combat becomes more fluid and dynamic and intimate, said Chiang. But yeah, after they got this player research back, they made the digital boyfriends even hotter. And there's a couple of other interesting tidbits in there about how you can tell if someone's playing love and deep space because they keep switching between portrait and landscape because portrait is story mode and landscape is combat. And they've also added sort of lifestyle app type functionality into it as well. Journaling, diary, even period tracking is in there. And this all helps love and deep space to become sort of daily companion for its players. Slightly bleak that lots of women but also men are seeking out digital companions like this. But let's ignore that. But it it is nonetheless a business opportunity should you wish to

pursue that. And uh in fold and love and deep space has done a great job pursuing that. The funny vital flourish in the talk was that the whole project and the whole infog games team is guided by one principle in the words of Chang. We want our love interests to do everything a real life boyfriend can't do and more. We want them to be better, to be hotter, to be there for you. And for those things a real boyfriend struggles with, he will try to do better. So yeah, they're they're coming for us. Um, read the article for more. I think it's a fun one.
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On Tuesday, Epic Games announced that Fortnite is coming back to Google Play Worldwide. Thursday, March 19th is when it returns to Google's Play Store. This is a significant moment obviously in the kissing and making up that Epic and Google are doing after that agreement two weeks ago. Fortnite has not been available to download through Google Play for nearly six years, which represents a lot of lost revenue for Epic and Google. it will be returning and Epic will be processing all of its own payments. So, Google will still take 20% of inapp purchase revenue, which is still a

pretty decent chunk. And in the story I wrote up for the site, there's a very, very abridged history of this game's fortunes. Obviously, in 2020, Epic infamously switched on its own payment services, deliberately got kicked off both Apple and Google's app stores, and many years of litigation followed. But yeah, this is another step in the comeback story of Fortnite on mobile. And yes, within that article, there are links back to my opinion piece on why the Epic and Google agreement is not the comprehensive victory they are pitching it as. And also links back to the interview with Steve Allison in which he talks about the difficulties of launching an app store in amongst the dominance of Apple and Google. Just after I put out last week's

podcast, Google announced the fine detail of its level up program which was announced as part of that epic agreement. And the long and short of it is, as the headline says, devs must add Google's AI achievements and cloud tech to get lower fees. So joining the level up program as a game developer means that Google's cut of inapp purchases goes down to 15%. But this is for new installs only and the program is being rolled out gradually across markets from this summer onwards. So as ever few caveats there. developers will have to integrate its AI powered play games sidekick into their games to qualify for the program as well as implement Google's achievement systems. And then in November, developers will also need to

use Google's cloud save system which syncs progress across devices and so on. There are also various technical and form factor requirements, including game compatibility for big screen TVs and PC, which is part of Google's wider push to get more Android games on PC. Couple of other announcements from Google. It's Gemini powered Sidekick Tech is live in 90 games. There's a new PC tab in the Google Play Store featuring games playable across mobile and PC. There's also a new game trial wishlist discount functionality and a few more quite cool looking indie games added to Google's Apple Arcade like Play Pass subscription service. So yeah, this was on the site Thursday

last week, but thought it was worth mentioning because Google is actually doing quite a lot of stuff to its store. Meanwhile, over on iOS, practically nothing is happening. This week's Data Digest has a very, very beefy analysis of Adjust's new gaming insights report. loads of detail for marketers about install rates, CPM, IPM, CPC, CPIs, all the acronyms. So, that's in there for marketers listening. Elsewhere in Data Digest, App Store Commission is now down to 25% in China. Another measly 5% drop from a tech giant. So thanks very much Apple for that one. Two marketing firms are combining. Smartly is acquiring incremental. So Smartly is a datadriven ad and asset

creation company. Incremental is a measurement company. They're combining forces. Subway Surface City has got off to a decent start. says app figures 5 million in stores, half a million revenue in 10 days for that one. It is famously quite hard to monetize a runner. So half a million sounds bad for a midcore game, I think, but not bad for a runner. Say games has hit 8 billion lifetime downloads across his portfolio. If you want to read some blogs, very obviously written by AI, you can click through and find that on the SE games website. Vita Marjong leads February ads charts according to social peta is the most heavily advertised game and has been for eight consecutive months

according to Tom who writes these articles. And yeah, loads of graphs from adjust for marketers, a beefy edition of data digest this week. And finally, I just wanted to cover the new games digest from last week. Interesting stuff in there. So, Daiso is Hab's new soft launch. Sony has licensed Ratchet and Clank to OBB, French Game Studio. There's an Overcooked game coming to mobile. The Tomb Raider remasters are also live now on mobile. Roio has retoled Angry Birds Friends to be a web game. There's another mini clip puzzle soft launch in there as well. And in soft launch this week, Sonic Blitz has been removed. Moon Active seems to have launched Coin Master Board Adventure Worldwide after a little while in soft launch. Overwatch Rush is now live and playable on iOS in the

Philippines. Also, a mini clip game in soft launch, which was called Paint Brawl, has now been reskinned as a subway surface game. So, it's now called Subway Surfers Colon Paintball Brawl and all the Subway Surfers gang are in it. So that must have done well enough in soft launch for Mini Clip to reskin it with probably the biggest brand it owns, Subway Surfers. So that is interesting. That's it for this week. The sun's out. The birds are tweeting. Nice to be back home. Thank you. Goodbye.