King and the Xbox cuts, Meta's 'TikTok for games', alot of Scopely news, game closures, MTG, 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. Obviously, the big news of the week is that huge cut in Xbox staff. 3,200 jobs are going. 1,600 cuts were made on Monday when this was announced. The rest will be made throughout the financial year and so far appear to be mostly in the PC and console side of the Xbox division. Included in all of those cuts is Compulsion Double Find, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs spinning out as independent studios. Arcane Leon is also in consultation. So, may well spin out or close. The big news from the mobile side of things is that Minecraft maker Mojang and Candy Crush Studio King seem to be being

upgraded within the Division. Both of those parts of the Xbox business will now be reporting directly to Asha Sharma, the boss. and she said in the blog outlining these big changes on Monday that quote, "These two studios have increasingly become platforms and are our largest by monthly active players. They bring critical geographic, demographic, and differentiation to Xbox. So confirming pretty much what we knew before and have discussed on this podcast and on the website in general that between Minecraft and Candy Crush, it's actually in the casual market where Xbox is doing the right kind of numbers and given that Sharma has said before the metric is monthly active players,

mobile is really the only place they can hit that many people. We have covered this theme a couple of times before as Xbox has put out its various public statements about where it's going and what it wants to do next. But there are further hints at maybe more of a mobile focus. Elsewhere in this blog, Sharma says the next decade of gaming will be larger, more global, and more creative than anything we've seen before. The target is to entertain more than a billion people each day, which is a very large number and one you cannot achieve without mobile. We will return to growth in 2027, says Sharma. I've also been poking around with a few sources that helped out with the layoffs articles that I ran last summertime when King laid off about 200 people. Two sources said that there's been no communication within

King about layoffs and you would think there would be by now. So, it seems like King has escaped much of this cost cutting and understandably so in terms of the efficiency of the business. There probably will be a few here and there you would imagine because with staff cuts like this a lot of the time everyone has to take a little bit of pain. But yeah, this is really, as many other outlets and observers and analysts have expressed, this is really the failure of the game pass uh initiative, the failure of the console arm, and this is not really on King or, you know, Hearthstone as a mobile game is still extremely successful. You got Diablo Immortal. You got Call of Duty Mobile, Fallout Shelter under the Bethesda umbrella. All these games are, as far as

I'm aware, pretty well-run, profitable, require relatively little staffing and resource because they're live games with a dedicated audience who seem to be happy to pay over the long term. So, yes, grim for anyone working in the platform, PC, console side of the Xbox division, but seems like mobile has got away quite lightly when it comes to these cuts. I'm still digging around for more information using a few of my sources. So, stay tuned for more on this one. And good luck to anyone out there now looking for a job as a result of these cuts. There is another contender in the Tik Tok for games type space and it is Meta. So, they quietly

soft launched a new app called Pocket this week, which appears to be Meta's reworking of a previous app called Gizmo, which it acquired earlier this year. It promises a Tik Tok like feed of experiences using text, photos, touch, and sound. Users can create them using AI prompts and it will all add up to a feed of interactive miniame type experiences. Meta acquired this team in March. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but according to some filings dug up by Business Insider, the New York based startup Gizmo raised about $5.5 million from investors and Meta trying this thing out is notable because they are following on from supercellbacked Hype Hype, US startups

Murk and more recently Minute. All of which have tried to do this Tik Tok for games style app experience. None of them have really taken off as yet. I think Hype Piper has been in the works for years now. Not sure how that's going. Smirk I think closed down. Minute recently raised a couple of million to get that sort of feed of mini games going. So, the idea of a Tik Tok for games is clearly a thing that people are working on, as well as Tik Tok itself. We reported back in 2023 that Tik Tok had set live a load of playable mini games within the main Tik Tok feed. The company since told us that experiment has ended, but yeah, Tik Tok for games. Meta is now trying it with its new app, Pocket. We shall see if it reaches full

launch after this initial soft launch. Nintendo is closing down Mario Kart Tour in September. That game was launched in 2019 and has earned, according to App Magic, around $270 million in that time. It got a little bit of fan backlash at launch for its gata mechanics, but that did fade away and it introduced a gold pass, a sort of battle pass system as well as an in-game shop. That stuff has since closed down. So, this was on the way out. There's not been any new content in the game for months, maybe even years. So, no surprise to find this one finally closing. But it does once again suggest that Nintendo is retreating a little bit from mobile. Even though as we note in the article here, it did release a sort of photobased miniame

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Quick one on these guys. Tribbo. They are a bunch of experienced mobile game makers in Finland who set up their studio a few years back with a little

bit of venture funding from Play Ventures CESU and King co-founder Sebastian Nutson. I think they had about 10 staff and closed this week after having launched Rumble Arcade, which is a kind of NFT powered battler that was designed for mobile, playable on the web, never reached app stores, but was part of that sort of ground swell of NFT web 3 games that arrived a few years ago. The studio has now closed. According to co-founder Mika Custo, the company recently appeared to pivot to become an agentic distribution platform, whatever that may be. It says on their website they were helping studios bring mobile games to the web while using AI agents to handle acquisition, retention, and monetization. So, that doesn't seem to have lasted

very long. Rumble Arcade is now closed. Tribo games is now closed and seems to be another casualty of those web 3 VC years. Quick bit of recruitment news from the end of last week. MTG has tapped up former Supercell marketing person Ibo Zakowski to lead marketing at what MTG is calling Europe's largest collection of midcourse studios. We had a quick chat with Ivo which you can find on the site. He used to run global brand marketing at Burger King. He also held a senior role at Denown before he moved into mobile games with Supercell and he will now be leading up marketing for Rage Shadow Legends, Forge of Empires, Warhammer 40,000, Tacticus and many more. More

details of what his plans are on the site. Have a look. Very quick one on Niantic Games that is now rebranded to become Scopely Explore. This is the group of teams that run Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter. Now, formerly Niantic Games, now Scopely Explore. The rebrand comes just over a year after Scopely bought Niantic's games portfolio for $3.5 billion. And the new branding, quote, reflects a mission that has guided these teams from the very beginning. So yes, Scopley's sort of realworld location type games are now under the umbrella of Scopely Explore. A little bit more Scopely news. Scopely has helped fund the new studio from the mind behind Uma Misumi Pretty Derby, the top grossing horse girl racing game.

This is a Japanese studio called Studio O now. A U K N O W set up by one of the architects of Uma Misumi, a chap called Takuma Akitsu. So, Scopely investing in a new Japanese studio. And as part of the announcement, president of Scopely Japan, Kchi Kawaii, said as translated, Japan is home to many world-class creators with exceptional talent and innovativeness, and we are confident they will continue to play a vital role in the global games industry. This investment demonstrates Scopley's long-term commitment to the Japanese market. So yes, possibly a new um Misumi type game coming out of Scopely Japan, which is interesting. Scopely continues to invest all over the games industry, and Japan is no

exception, it seems. In further game shutdown news, Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis is closing in October, says Square Enix. According to AppMagic's estimates, the game has been downloaded 3.7 million times, which seems quite low, and has generated around 100 million in revenue in a little under three years. Seems like a fairly concentrated group of high-spending players playing that game. The game was out on Steam as well, but clearly not profitable enough for Square Enix to keep going with that one. Japan about a third of all lifetime downloads. Quarter of players in the US. The other markets trailing significantly. So, no more Final Fantasy 7 ever crisis sadly. In data digest this week, we had a little look at the numbers for Pokemon

Go, which turned 10 this week. App Magic estimates suggest Niantic has earned 6.37 billion in inapp purchase revenue since the game's launch 10 years ago. Though, of course, web shop revenue is not accounted for. Neither is you know China Android market and the other usual caveats apply. The numbers suggest 39% of the game's lifetime revenue has come for players in the US 30% from Japan and then the rest much smaller numbers. Germany at 5% UK, Canada, Taiwan, Australia 2 to 3% of lifetime earnings. So mostly Japanese and US players driving the revenue on this one. By downloads, lifetime split is US top 21%, India 9%, Brazil 8, Mexico 7, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan 4 to 5%. [snorts]

More stats in the article if you want more Pokémon Go estimates. June's top grossing games worldwide according to Sensor Tower. Century Games White Out Survival was top. Roblox led the charge by downloads when it comes to revenue growth, which I think is an interesting metric. Unfortunately, Sens doesn't actually offer hard figures in these updates, but White Out Survival was top in terms of growth as well. Net Marble's Soul Enchant, which I assume is some sort of Chinese RPG, was second. And then E Football, Konami's surprisingly powerful football sim that was third in terms of revenue growth in June. World Cup Fever taking over there. Gossip Harbor, Honor of Kings also get a shout out in that one. Google Play's indie games fund launches in Africa with a 1 million grant for indie game

creators. AI native game engine company canrip raised 2.75 million from Arcadia. And Super City, a game I'm not super familiar with, but it's got 40 million in stores and has made over 100 million in revenue since it launched 15 years ago. More detail as ever in the article. Have a look in the latest soft launch update. We have Zinga's dice companions scope please next game WWE generations new strategy game from Mini Clip usual suspects from Player Century Roio Supercell etc etc and in new game digest last week which I forgot to put out on any kind of social media. [laughter] So, unsurprisingly, slightly fewer people saw that one last Friday. We got updates on Monster Hunter, Dave the Diver, a new Cookie Run game, an indie game called Tiny Bookshop, Farlight Next Title, and plenty more.

And that's it for this week. It is so hot here that I am recording these at nighttime now. I usually record these on the way to and from picking up my children from school, but it is too hot for that. Next week, Brighton, I'll be at develop most of next week. Although, if England get through to the semifinals on Wednesday, I will go home and watch it at home with my son. But uh speak to you next week and let's hope England beat Norway.