Google Play store fees, Kingshot's World Cup ads, AppsFlyer gets $1bn, Kabam layoffs, 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. Here we go. The big one this week, certainly in terms of readership, was Google Play opens up billing options and lowers store fees from June 30th. This is a blog out of Google Play from engineering VP Paul Feng and it mostly reiterates the announcements that were made back in March when Google and Epic settled their ongoing legal disagreements and suddenly Google also lowered its fees and introduced a few different tiers and schemes through which developers can reduce their store fees a little bit further. Essentially, in real terms, everyone's getting a store fee cut. For developers in the US, EU, and UK

from June 30th onwards, store fees are going down to a minimum of 10% for smaller devs not making more than a million up to 25% for in-app purchases in existing installs. Essentially, if you do nothing and you are using Google Play billing, your store fee goes down from 30% to 25%. If you're using alternative billing, web shops, etc., your fee goes down to 20% but then of course you are paying usually 5% ish to the web shop or other payment provider. So, roughly, it'll work out at 25%. It is 20% on new installs and then again, if you're using a billing an alternative billing provider, you can add their fee on top so it'll it'll net out about 25% again. Subscriptions is different, 10%

plus billing fee if applicable. And then you've got the extra wrinkle of this level up program which I've tried to summarize in a clear and concise way, but it is quite complicated. Essentially, to qualify for this level up program, you need to implement Google's Play Games Services V2 SDK, Google's AI-powered sidekick functionality, its reward system, achievements, cloud save services, and it appears you need to also sign up to Google Play Games on PC to make your game playable on big screens as well as aligning with various stability, performance, and graphics standards as set by Google. This level up program, to add further complication, is rolling out in the in Australia, EU, UK, and US in September 30th, so after

the new fees come out, and then from December in Japan and Korea, rest of the world September next year. There's also a glimpse in that story at the payment user flow as well, which I have not seen before, so I included that in the story, too. So, yeah, those Google Play Store fees will be lowering from June 30th in the major Western markets, other markets in the next few months. So, it's happening, but in real terms, it'll probably work out as a 5% cut for most people with caveats. I had good fun putting together this King Shot story, which ran on Tuesday, right in time for the incredibly boring England game against Ghana, which ended nil-nil. But some England players have been on TikTok and other social platforms advertising Century Games is King Shot. Those footballers include Harry Maguire,

Michael Owen, John Terry, and then for whatever reason I was also getting served Brazilian footballers as well. Gabriel Jesus, Jorginho, Marquinhos, Thiago Silva. These are guys who have played for Chelsea, Arsenal, PSG, and it seems Century Games is leaning on World Cup fever to push King Shot to my demographic, which is mid-40s dads. So, yeah, you got me. I think these are quite funny. The delivery from the English lads does leave a little bit to be desired, but the Brazilian footballers bring the right amount of flair to the delivery of the script. Century hits on the usual bullet points strategy, no ads, that kind of stuff in the adverts, but more to come on these because they're quite fun to put together and

people like reading them. Keep an eye on the site for more. This AppsFlyer news is interesting, isn't it? I will admit the marketing side of the mobile business is not an area of deep expertise for me, but let's try and explain it anyway. Google, Unity, Meta, and Moloco have partnered up to invest in AppsFlyer. The actual figure invested was not revealed by AppsFlyer itself. Instead, that story seems to have been given to Axios, who estimate that it's a $1 billion investment. The theme in the press release seems to be that AppsFlyer will remain neutral and independent in order to maintain the integrity of its data and its services to marketing types across the mobile games industry. The fact that Google, Meta, Unity, and Moloco have ganged up across the divide to invest in AppsFlyer

suggests that as online commentators like Eric Seufert have stated on their blogs, AppsFlyer is a really foundational part of the marketing side of mobile and this may well be a play on the part of those tech giants and ad giants to keep AppsFlyer independent and maybe beef it up a little bit in the face of the overwhelming dominance of AppLovin. But we'll see. Like I say, I'm not a super deep expert on the ins and outs of mobile game marketing because it's complex world. But yeah, AppsFlyer very successful business already. An extra billion dollars is going to help it accelerate innovation in AI-powered ad measurement, advanced cross-platform attribution, and continue building a measurement foundation which supports autonomous marketing and agentic workflows. So yeah, 1 billion for AppsFlyer. Nice work if you can get it.

One that I published on Monday but broke through gamedeveloper.com on Friday is Kabam's LA office being consolidated. Kabam have been in touch to say the LA office has not been closed but did not confirm the number of layoffs being made there. As I've said on this podcast many times, you just need to be clear and remorseful if you are making layoffs. Say how many people are affected and in what parts of the business and why. Say sorry, wish them all the best, and that story is done. People will move on. But the more studios try to obfuscate these job cuts, the more confusion it causes and frankly, the worse you look. If you are trying to stop this information getting out there and refusing to confirm the number of layoffs or what exactly has happened, then it is no surprise that this causes

further confusion.
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This story about Queen Digital Entertainment was very popular at the end of last week. For those not aware, and you'd be forgiven for that because the studio has been very much in stealth for the last couple of years. This is the studio from former King execs Sebastian Nutzen and Stefan Kurgan. They left King to set up Queen in 2022, according to my research, and then

reports from 2024 and 2025 suggested that combined Queen Digital Entertainment had raised as much as 50 million in VC funding. It had offices in Ireland and Sweden and was making King style puzzle games for mobile. Reports on Business Post in Ireland and Forbes combined suggested that at the point it was founded, they hired about 10 staff, mostly from their former workplace, King. One of the posts by a person laid off said that the company had expanded to about 25 people and a quick check of LinkedIn profiles connected to Queen Digital Entertainment said around 25 to 30 people work there. So, that sounds about right. Of course, I asked Knutson and Kergan for a comment, but they have not replied.

If you look at the studio's output on AppMagic, there was four titles that were either in soft launch or ready to go into soft launch: Pet Panic, Tail Team, Block Hero, and Wild Joker Poker. That last one was released May, last month. So, they were clearly working on these games right up until this past week when the studio was closed. Tail Team and Pet Panic were the only ones to register a decent number of downloads, 60k for Tail Team, Pet Panic 130,000 installs. So, quite a lot for a soft launch game. But yeah, unfortunately, the studio does appear to have closed. Like I say, there's no official confirmation on that, but it seems that more and more founders just don't want to confirm or deny anything in these situations, which is a little disappointing, but here we are. Queen Digital Entertainment

appears to have closed. So, yet more people looking for work. Hayio versus next game is Honkai Nexus Anima, which very much appears to be their take on Pokémon. It is a creature collecting adventure in which players roam around with sidekick characters who have evolutions and do battle, which obviously all sounds quite familiar. If anyone's going to crack this Pokémon style adventure on mobile, it's probably going to be Hoyoverse. And the reason I ran this story is because the company is interesting. It seems to have mastered the Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero open-world adventure, and it is now pushing into variations on that theme with this Pokémon game and Petite Planet, the Animal Crossing type game that it's working on. And within this story, there's extra

context around how, as I've reported before, Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero, and Genshin Impact all seem to be eating into each other's revenue. So, yes, it seems it's about time Hoyoverse tried something slightly different within the large-scale adventure template that it has really mastered. There's a beta coming for this next month, July, for iOS, Android, and PC players. No confirmed release date yet, but yeah, I would anticipate that Honkai Nexus Anima will be a pretty big hit when it arrives at some point. It's in beta next month, so may well arrive by the end of the year, maybe early next year, who knows. I did a fun story about this game, number 10, a full confidence on some

Monday, just at the point Keir Starmer quit as Prime Minister. This is a Prime Minister simulator, essentially, that's been on iOS for a little while, made by one guy in about 6 months. To continue this theme of solo developers making chart hits, it's a paid game, so the numbers will be relatively low compared to what you get in the free games chart, but I thought it was a fun thing to write about and also the kind of thing that only really happens in mobile where you can have a fun idea, turn it around pretty quick and score a chart hit. So, that game at the time of writing on Monday when Starmer resigned, that was in the top 10 paid charts in the UK App Store. I'm sure it would have got even more downloads as the day went on. We're getting used to Prime Ministers resigning here in the UK, so

this doesn't feel like the momentous occasion that it once was. But, yeah, congrats to Ben Burris who runs an indie app developer. Have a look at number 10 full confidence uh if you want a bit more political intrigue and maybe avoid it if you're sick of it all like I am. Quick one from Wednesday morning. I was scanning the latest MAG Interactive financial results cuz I'm a fun guy, and one quote from CEO Daniel Hasselberg jumped out at me. He said, "The speed at which we can prototype, iterate, and evaluate new ideas continues to improve rapidly thanks to AI." He continues, "Historically testing five to six game concepts per year would have represented a high pace for a company of our size. Today, we see a realistic path toward testing a similar number of concepts every quarter."

Within these financials, the company made about 6.75 million in the last quarter. About $1.4 million of that was profit or adjusted EBITDA. And they make really solid casual, puzzle, trivia, and word games. They've also been around for quite a long time. Koi's Jewel and Word Ze are the two biggest revenue drivers. Its latest launch, Crozzle, is doing okay. It returned to growth in Q3. So, I think there was maybe a post-launch lull for that one, but yeah, interesting that smaller or mid-sized companies like MAG are seeing results from these AI tools coming online helping to fuel that narrative that hopefully games will be faster and easier to make in the future as a result of this tech, but that obviously comes with the caveat

that this was within some financial results and may have been aimed at investors just to tick that box off, but interesting comments nonetheless, I thought. In Data Digest this week, we've got some World Cup numbers from App Magic showing uh relevant sports games could see a 71% uptick in downloads and a 24% boost in revenue as the tournament unfolds. That is all based on what happened last time for the 2022 World Cup, but yeah, EA Sports FC Mobile mostly benefiting from that one, although it seems the game Soccer Superstar also scooped up a fair bit of interest. For the last World Cup, there's also a note on Gossip Harbor, Royal Match, and Coin Master who are really juicing the football-related live ops at the moment. A new [snorts] report from GDC and App Charge states that the direct-to-consumer market is worth $17 billion.

More stats and figures and thoughts and feelings on people using direct-to-consumer in the story. Epic has paid out over a billion to UEFN creators since the platform launched in March 2023. There's Maze, Ad Charts, Viker Mahjong, and Zen Word leading those. Rush Royale hit 500 million in lifetime revenue. Kinoa, a data and monetization platform, raised 10 million. There's a report on Google and Apple's removal of 2.2 million apps for security reasons last year. Desert DIY, 150 million lifetime downloads for that one, and Nexon is investing 163 million dollars into new studios in Korea. Full details in the article. Data digest every Wednesday. In soft launch, Zynga is testing a dice-rolling board game, which looks a lot like Dice Dreams, Monopoly Go,

and so on. Sega has reworked Sonic Blitz into more of a character- collecting RPG battler type thing. Before it was more like a card- collecting game. There's another roulette game in there that's worth looking at, too, as well as the usual suspects from EA, Playrix, Century, Miniclip, and many others. And then in new games last Friday, you got Pokémon Champions, a new Kingdom Rush game, a new Barbie game, new soft launches from Century Games and Miniclip. The closure of blockchain game Pudgy Party, which was once the big hope for those blockchain NFT games. And plenty more, couple of indie games in there as well. Have a look at the site for more details on that. New game digest every Friday. Soft launch update every other Monday. This week's jobs digest, very busy.

Moves at LEGO, Supercell, AppTweak, Tilting Point, SuperEvilMegacorp, Scopely, Rovio, Zynga, Play Ventures, Fortis Games, Wooga, Tactile Dream, Crazy Labs, Nautius, King, Tryolabs, Zebedee, Papaya, Pick Pok, and SciPlay. I'm not going to run through all of them here. You'll have to check out the article. It's called Jobs Digest. It runs every other Monday. And that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. It's very hot here. Goodbye.