Epic-Google shenanigans, EA payouts, Squad Busters, Take-Two, Playtika, Rainbow 6, Horizon, 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 business. Here we go. Let's lead with Google and Epic once more, shall we? After last week's Google/Epic proposal suggesting amendments to the US judges court ruling, it quickly transpired that that is probably not going to happen. Loads of websites picked up the first part, but didn't pick up the part afterwards in which Judge Donato and basically said these changes don't look big enough to justify a change in the original ruling. That proposal laid out by Epic and Google last week is unlikely to happen or get the seal of approval from Judge Donato in this hearing in December or January. um which has left the field wide open to some rampant speculation which is what I'm going to do now. Within that hearing,

the judge made it clear that Epic and Google wanted the terms of their settlement to remain private. That is a direct quote from a journalist who was in the courtroom working for a website called Law 360. Again, this is all speculation, but what actually happened was these court rulings just came out of thin air perhaps because the judge quoted by Law 360 wants all of this to be out in the public and Google and Epic had to quickly react on X. The way this came out, the agreement itself being complex and very clearly geared towards how Epic runs Fortnite does suggest there has been quite a lot of collusion is a sinister word. But these two companies have obviously worked together quite closely to come up with this new solution which happens to suit Epic down to the ground does run counter to what Tim Sweeney has been saying for the last

few years which is that he wants open app stores and payment system liberation for the benefit of all game developers. But this agreement with the discounted cut on cosmetics does seem to suit Epic really nicely. We will see what happens next in this hearing in December or January. Behind the scenes, I've had conversations with people suggesting this is a big Google epic stitch up. unsubstantiated claims of course, but yes, after years of portraying itself as the knight in shining armor for the mobile games business, Epic Games appears to have struck a deal with Google, which may or may not also involved millions of dollars, that favors Epic Games and Fortnite most of all, and leaves everyone else figuring out what on earth's going on by looking at these

court documents which are written in a typically baffling way. This will keep developing, but I think overall the behind the scenes chatter on this one is that Epic's reputation has been damaged as a result of this because it really does seem like they've just given in and taken whatever money Google has offered them to go away and accept some new terms which benefit them and not really anyone else. But that's where it is at the moment. It may well change and there may well be more clarity as this one develops. On Tuesday, I spent slightly too long combing through a 204 page merger document sent out by EA to do with its 55 billion takeover led by the public investment fund. I figured there'd be something newsworthy in there and there was. It actually revealed how much

equity in the company five of its top executives will have at the point the takeover is expected to complete. And it turns out it is a lot. Andrew Wilson has unvested and vested stock in EA estimated to be worth over $15.9 million. Laura meal her stake is worth 44.4 million CFO Stuart Canfield stands to earn 33.4 million and chief people officer Mala Singh and Jacob Shatz EVP of global affairs and chief legal officer each stand to get 24.6 6 million. That is just the equity invested and unvested stock they have in the company which is being paid out at a price of $210 per share at the point the company is no longer on public markets. The document also revealed that EA CEO

Wilson was on an annual retainer of 250K as an adviser with Silver Lake, which is one of the companies in the consortium buying EA. Supercell has put out another blog about Squadbusters closure, and there's more very apologetic stuff in there about the closure, but also some interesting insights. The pertinent one for me is why not just keep it alive and on autopilot with minimal updates. Supercell says that is simply not how it builds games. The quote here is we want every update to push the game forward in a meaningful way and keep it fun for years. When we realized we couldn't keep improving squad to the level we expect and that our players deserve, we decided it was better to stop than to stretch it just to keep it alive. There's also further regret over that short soft launch. Quote, "If we could

go back in time, we'd spend more time making sure the very core gameplay of Squad was truly ready for prime time. We believed it was, but in the end, too few players connected with it deeply enough to find the fun and stay for the long term." There's also nuggets in there about the team. but they've either moved on and are already working on other projects at Supercell or are taking a bit of time out to rest and reflect. There's also further self flagagillation around what happened after the reboot in May which didn't turn around the game enough for it to survive. The quote here is the level of rework needed would have made it almost a completely new game. It felt more honest to stop here rather than rebuild Squad into something unrecognizable. There's also some nuggets in there about why it can't hand the game over to players and have them run it on a private server. There's Supercell IP and

technical restrictions involved there. A slight change to what was announced in that original closure blog. It said the game will be playable until mid 2026. This new blog says it will be playable until middle or end of 2026. Players may well have a bit more time with the game after the final content update in December. You're halfway through the podcast. Here is a quick commercial break. I'll be back after this. Exola connects developers with the resources they need to build, fund, launch, and monetize their mobile games globally with Exola web shop. Sell virtual items, in-game currency, subscriptions, and custom offers directly to players while driving up to five times the revenue growth. With the industry's number one web shop solution, Exola provides the tools for developers to focus on what's most important. Creating great games. Visit exola.com to learn more. That's xsol.com.

Mobile games from Bazinga, Peak, Rolic, and Nordius represented 46% of Take 2's net revenue in the last quarter. Despite the launch of Borderlands 4, NBA 2K, and Mafia, the old country in the 3 months ended September 30, 2025, all those console games combined came to 41% of its net revenue. PC and other pulled in 13% of net revenue. People remain surprised that mobile is the thing that makes the most money at take 2 despite years of evidence. And until people stop being surprised, it's still worth taking this angle on this story because people don't pay attention. People don't remember things. The stars of the show from a mobile point of view at Take 2/Zinger are Tomb Blast, Match Factory, Color Block Jam, Empires and Puzzles, Words with Friends, and Toy Blast. Tomb Blast grew 26% year-over-year, 90% over the

last two years, said CEO Zelnik. Color Block Jam, highest grossing title in Rolex history. A CSR series has passed 1 billion in lifetime player spend. WWE Supercard, now at 38 million lifetime downloads. CSR and Top Goal, two games that have always been hanging around in the soft launch article that I publish every other week. They got a nod, but still no firm release date on those. There was also a little bit of chat about Take 2's direct to consumer business. Zelnik said that it has rolled out its direct to consumer offerings in most of its mobile games and he expects revenue and margins to rise as a result of the various court rulings and shenanigans going on with Apple and Google. But those are perhaps not large enough to affect forecasting referring to the recent liberation of payments on

Android. And yes, they delayed GTA 6. You may have noticed over at Play Ticker, the headline act was the new Disney title that Super Play will be working on after the success of Disney Solitaire. That game is is looking like it will be a $200 million annual title said play ticker revenue was up 8.7 euro overyear 674.6 million directive consumer platform revenue up 20% yearonear they reeled off a couple of other stats play tickers average daily paying users were up 17.6% 6% yearonear 354,000 average daily paying users. Bingo Blitz revenue up 1.7 to 262.6 million. Slot Mania down 46%

that is struggling. June's Journey down 2.7. It seems like the business is very much geared around Bingo Blitz, Disney Solitaire, and whatever this next Disney collaboration may be. CEO Robert Anticole noted that direct to consumer was a rising part of the Disney Solitaire story. Even what you would imagine to be pretty casual consumers of a Disney themed self-tare game are doing direct to consumer. So that's interesting. Yes, it seems that Super Play acquisition for an initial 700 million in September 2024 working out pretty well at Play Ticker with the success of Disney Solitaire and another Disney game in the works. Ubisoft announced that Rainbow 6 Mobile is actually going to launch worldwide.

This game has been in the soft launch update pretty much since it launched. 3 and 1/2 years since I spoke to Ubisoft about this game. In an interview in April 2022, the game had been in development for 3 years already. They also said that a mix of 11 different Ubisoft studios have contributed to the game plus help from Tencent as well. That interview was April 2022. Now we're in November 2025. The grand total of development time on Rainbow 6 mobile is 6 and 1/2 years. That seems like a long time and feels very Ubisoft given its famously long development cycles for some of its other games. They still did not actually give a date, but they said there will be one more update of bug fixing, optimization, etc., and then a launch build will be submitted. And away it goes. Good luck

to Rainbow 6 Mobile. The first big mobile game to launch from Ubisoft worldwide for a very long time. NCoFT announced Horizon Steel Frontiers this morning at the time of recording. It's an MMO and it's coming to mobile. There's a trailer you can take a look at a 10-minute gameplay and developer commentary video, but no release date yet. I would imagine this will go through a couple of rounds of testing before it does launch globally. But yes, PlayStation releasing a mobile game. It has happened finally, but perhaps not in the form you may have been expecting. It's a Horizon MMO. We'll see how that turns out. Regulars this week, data digest full of news nuggets. As ever, Nintendo's mobile apps have now reached 950 million downloads. That includes its music app,

its news app, as well as all the games including Mario Run, Pikmin, Mario Kart, Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing, etc., etc., etc. Apploving's Q3 revenue jumped 68% yearonear to $1.4 billion. Unity 5% revenue increase for Q3. There's a big report from Sensor Tower on ad spend in Q3 2025 and also some data on genre and the split between iOS and Android as it relates to gaming revenue. Quite detailed stuff. probably not easy to digest in audio form, but the highlights here for me are that Dream Games is Royal Kingdom was the biggest ad spender for the first three quarters of 2025. Lots of bar charts and nuggets of info in there. Another big number worth leading on is that total gaming digital ad spend for the first three quarters of

the year was $8.7 billion. a big market, one that I don't cover perhaps enough. Other nuggets in there, there's Craftton's mobile revenue up 15% in Q3 driven by PUBG Mobile. Square Enix sales overall down, but profits are up in mobile/ browser games. Lots of other nuggets in there, particularly worth checking out that Sensor Tower report. That is a meaty document. And elsewhere in soft launch, you've got loads of interesting stuff. Hill Climb Racing 3 from Fingersoft. You've got Ark Knights Endfield. You've got Petty Planet. Hoya versus Next Game. A couple of Angry Birds Soft Launch is in there. Supercell's boat game seems to be approaching soft launch. Super Scent has what looks like its take on White Out Survival and loads of other stuff from Playicks, Zingga, Ubisoft,

and others. And finally, your regular reminder off the record London returns. Next week, Wednesday the 19th of November, we start at 1:30 p.m. It's at Mini Clips office in central London. Come along. It's free to attend. It will be quick snappy panels and presentations, a long afternoon tea break, and then roundts where you can get to know your peers. Thanks to Exola for the support with all of these events. There will be more in 2026 which I can maybe think about in the middle of December once things slow down a little bit. But yeah, it's been quite a year for events. I think this is the sixth or seventh event I've run this year since starting in April. So, thanks for everyone for coming along to those and for everyone who's supported these events in the last year. Thank you. Bye-bye.