Google's Project Genie, Take-Two, Stillfront, Ares, January's top 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. Here we go. Let's talk about Google Genie and gaming stocks on the slide. So Google has been working on lots of different AI products obviously and its latest is project Genie. A video of this thing came out on Thursday night, Friday morning, UK time at least, and it shows off Google's generative world model tech. So, you can put in a prompt and have it generate a 60-second interactive world type experience. The most relevant gaming use for all of this was done by The Verge. They jumped straight on it and put in a load of game related prompts and Project Genie pumped out some very convincing looking replicas of Mario 64, Breath of the

Wild, Metroid Prime, that sort of thing. They know what they're doing over at the Verge. That's immediately what other people will do with this world model as well. And obviously Nintendo being famously quite ligious company, I think they will probably have some thoughts on the ease at which people can just conjure their copyrighted material out of thin air. It's all quite impressive. Obviously, interactivity is limited. The demos are only 60 seconds long, but that did not stop many traders selling off their gaming stocks. Stock intake two and Roblox dropped 10 and 12%. Yen [snorts] Unity saw the biggest decline, 20% in a single day. Matthew Bramberg, CEO of Unity and Tim Sweeney, you may have heard of him, Epic Games Boss, they were both moved to comment on

Project Genie. So, I led on their comments because the traders selling off those stocks appeared to think that Project Genie will undermine the entire game engine and game creation business overnight, which is obviously not true. Nonetheless, Bramberg responded and made it clear that Project Genie's outputs were unsuit quote unsuitable on their own for games that require consistent repeatable player experiences. And he actually hinted at a future in which these AI generated world models can be kind of sucked into Unity and made into a proper game. Bramberg said, "Unity's role is to operationalize these advances. Outputs from world models are ingested into Unity's real-time engine where they are converted into structured, deterministic, and fully controllable simulations." Tim Sweeney

of Epic Games fame also had something to say, similar thing to what Brberg talked about. quote, "The ideal evolutionary path sees emerging of world models and engines, the AI side providing vast amounts of loosely organized audiovisisual and textual knowledge and the engine providing consistent reproducible data representation and simulation. So in short, you can bang out a project genie world model, suck it into Unity or Unreal Engine and continue making your game from there. I mean, that may be a possible future ahead of us, but perhaps doesn't warrant the 10, 12, 20% share price drops that we saw in the markets late last week. And there's a couple more quotes here in the article from A16Z partner Jonathan Lie, who says, "Most investors misunderstand the Google Genie launch. World models

won't build traditional AAA video games anytime soon. Games today are fundamentally deterministic. World models like Genie are different. So yeah, I think people who work in games understand this is not going to change anything overnight. And as others have noted, Google's track record in games in general isn't particularly great either. Their attempts to crack games with Stadia did not go well. And I think there's still that misunderstanding out there among the general tech trading community. If you're smart and you have enough money, go and snap up some of those cheap gaming stocks right now, particularly Take Two, ahead of the launch of GTA 6. Late Tuesday night, UK time, Take Two reported its financial results for the quarter ended December 31st, 2025.

Mobile is up 19% yearon year, and 49% of the company's net bookings. CEO Strauss Zelnik was bullish as ever. He talked through Take 2's direct to consumer business. Strongest quarter ever there. Tomb Blast up 43% year-onear now surpassed $3 billion in lifetime net bookings. Matt's Factory up 17%. Empires and Puzzles up 11. Words with friends up 6%. Color block Jam huge hit according to Zelic. Advertising revenues grew 10% over last year driven by higher art. 2K's mobile games were mentioned as well. WWE Supercard, 38 million lifetime downloads there. NBA 2K26 is a top five game on Apple Arcade. And in China, NBA 2K Allstar grew to 9 million registered

users. The new CSR and Top Goal, the new Nordius game, are still undated and have been for, I think, years now. mobile net bookings $860.9 million up from $79.5 million the year prior. So chunky growth in the earnings call afterwards. Zelnik, I don't know if he's taking a swipe at other game companies here, but I thought it was fun that he said, quote, "We are actually making hits." And that is still pretty unusual in the mobile business. And later he says there aren't very many companies that are doing that and I believe we're the only company that's doing it over and over again. [snorts] I think there's lots coming out of China, Turkey, Korea, Japan, but yeah, to be fair, there aren't a huge number of major western mobile game companies pumping out the hits right

now. He also talks about the much more favorable regulatory environment for direct to consumer programs and also responded to the Google Genie related stock slides that we've been seeing. He says Genie is not a game engine. There are limitations and Google has said as much. So to compare the technologies, I think there's really no way to do that because they're so far apart. So yeah, bullish stuff from Mr. Zelnik and no surprise really. The company's doing great. You're now halfway through the podcast. Time for a commercial break. I'll be back after this. Exola connects developers with the resources [music] they need to build, fund, launch, and monetize their mobile games globally. With Exola Web Shop, sell virtual items, in-game currency, [music] subscriptions, and custom offers directly to players while driving up to five times the revenue growth. With the

industry's number one [music] 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 [music] xsol.com. Still was also in the mix reporting its financials. revenue is down again. It's sold off its narrative games for $4 million and it is restructuring. There's also further game closures as part of that restructuring and strategic review which was announced in the middle of last year. [snorts] Still owns Good Game Supremacy, Jawaka, Sandbox Interactive, and a couple of other studios.
[snorts]
It's a rollup group a little like MTG and Embracer I guess but perhaps more successful. It also mentioned the launch of good games Big Farm Homestead encouraging early metrics on that one. Supremacy

Warhammer 40k. That game was meant to launch Q4 2025 but it's been pushed back. Still among [snorts] those declining revenue figures was keen to point out that profitability as measured by EBITDAC was up a little bit 25% a year ago to 27% Q425. So that's about $41 million profitability for the last quarter. And the margin improvement was down to cost savings, disciplined UA and growth in direct to consumer bookings. DTC revenue 45% of Steelfront's bookings now pretty beefy up from 34% the year prior. UA spend with 26% of revenue in the quarter down from 30% in Q424. [snorts] UA spend as a proportion of revenue would be an interesting number to know for lots of companies out there. So interesting that Stillfront is public about that. It also took a pretty

big impairment effectively a downgrading of the value of its assets by about 251 million and the restructure means that it was formerly in three groups North America, Europe and Mena and Asia pack now it's getting consolidated into one and this is in order to focus on key franchises supremacy big empire Albian Bard Jawaka and BitLife. This will be effective from the next quarter. [snorts] And yeah, Stillfront said, "We will continue to assess the performance of our games portfolio and we'll undertake measures including sunsetting games where necessary." So cost cutting continues at Stillfront and it has also seen a few executive ins and outs. More detail in the report on the site. Aries Interactive 70 million series A funding that has been led by General Catalyst with

participation from founder and executive chairman Nicolo Deamassie. I actually reported on Aries Interactive snapping up a load of Exclude staff in May 2025 when it was still technically in stealth mode. The company did not wish to comment at that point, but back then it was clear Nicolo Damasi and Mike Dilat, two well-known figures in mobile, were hiring a load of fellow Exglue staff, ex Kabam staff, ex Scoply staff, and Glue 2.0 was the way I angled it. And I've seen a few other people describe Aries Interactive that way. And alongside this investment, some big names on this advisory board. They've got former app store boss Matt Fischer, Excabam COO Kent Wakeford, former Glue CRO Chris Akavan, and X Seriously CEO Andrew Stalbo. Aries is already operating Swift Games

title Heroes versus Hordes. 30 million installs for that one. And coming up is Baseball Hits 26, which sounds like a glue game, doesn't it? That is coming later this year, uh, built by San Francisco based studio, 7th Inning. So, yes, interesting stuff. 70 million, a big figure for a mobile game or cross-platform free-to-play game publisher, and I wish them all the best with it. It's also the start of the month, so I pulled the top downloads and top grossing charts from App Magic. Block Blast still on top dropped by about 10 million installs month on month, but still on top with 28 million downloads, free 5 second, 25.8. Roblox down for January as you would expect with millions of kids going back to school. Pizza ready, Subway Surf is pretty steady. Beta mahjong

rising as ever solitire associations journey a fresh contender third month running for downloads in the low teens for that one paper.io IO2's comeback continues with another 10 million downloads last month. Ludo King also back after a little bit of a wobble. That was once a top five, top 10 regular. In the top grossing charts, Honor of Kings makes a pretty remarkable leap up from $79 million in December to $172 million in January. There's [snorts] always a big January spike. for this game and lots of other Chinese games. So yeah, just when you think it might be going away, it is not. It's back on top. Scope Please Monopoly Go back up in the 120 million plus bracket after a few months of hovering around 100 million.

Last Wars revenue very up and down. January's estimated 120 million was a down month compared to December's beefy 139 million. Royal Match up again month on month cleared 100 million for the first time since October. Roblox dropped. PUBG Mobile practically doubled its inapp purchase revenue month on month. Again, big China spend there [snorts] up from 53 million in December to 103 million last month. White Out Survival, Candy Crush, both pretty steady. Gossip Harbor and Kingshot are the growing new contenders. Both of them posted record revenues in the month of January according to AppMagic. Loads more detail in those articles. I enjoy doing these. They don't actually get that many readers, but I enjoy doing them because you get a real grasp of the market. So, please do have a read and

tell me what you think. Should I keep doing them? I'm not sure. In your regular data and soft launch articles, you've got EA mobile revenue declining as that Saudi sale looms. Less noise around EA financials because they don't have to offer that much detail anymore. They are about to get bought for $55 billion. [snorts] Net bookings for the quarter ended December 31st, 2025 was basically $3 billion, up 38% year-over-year, mostly due to Battlefield 6, but also EA Sports FC, FC Mobile, and Apex Legends. The [snorts] breakout of mobile by platform showed year-on-year revenue decline in mobile from 276 million in Q325 to 254 million in Q326. [snorts] Also in data this week, Liftoff

Mobile is reportedly aiming for a 5.2 billion valuation when it IPOs and Pocket Gamer.Biz Biz uh has the scoop on Aristocrat sale of Big Fish. A new company called BFG Entertainment has scooped up bigfish games.com as well as a number of its PC, Mac and mobile games. 30 employees [snorts] moved over as part of that deal. Evermer is now run by Indian digital entertainment and tech company Jet Synthesis and Seven Hit Games is now listed as the publisher of match three titled Gummy Drop. This obviously follows on from Aristocrat's sale of Raid Shadow Legends Maker Plarium to MTG for $620 million. And last February, I reported that Bigfish had effectively stopped new game development and restructured around Evergreen titles in advance of that

sale. So that all seems to have gone through. There's also stats on Hero Wars Alliance, Fun Games, Mamboo Entertainment, some nuggets from the GDC survey, and the M7 World Championship, which has broken the mobile esports viewership record. In the soft launch update, there's new games from Moonton, Super Gaming, and Triple Dot in amongst the regular caster beaters from the likes of Mini Clip, Supercell, and Zingga. Take a look at that useful tracker of who's got what in soft launch. And I promised last week to cover off the new games digests, even though they're a little bit old, but hey ho. The Reigns games are back with a new title themed around The Witcher. Warframe is coming to Android on February 18th. King launched Candy Crush Crushable, a daily puzzle game for

browsers. There's a game called Bobium Brawlers from Studio Athletico, which is apparently an AI first game studio founded by industry veterans from Uber, Meta, Sega, and Creative Assembly. And there's a couple of other indie games in there, too. That's it for the podcast this week. A busy week with financial reports of plenty, as well as some fun stock market action. Next week, I'm going to Las Vegas for the first time to experience the delights of DICE. I'll be there reporting on mobile and wider games industry business. So, if you're going, let me know. Should be fun. See you out there, perhaps. Bye-bye.