Mario Kart Tour, Minecraft Blast, Zynga + Supercell deal blocked, games on Instagram(...?), 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 business. Here we go. Nintendo has closed Mario Kart Tour after 7 years on the app stores. According to AppMagic estimates, Nintendo earned about $270 million in in that time from around 276 million downloads. So, across 7 years, that's not a bad performance. As we know in the article, Nintendo did not maintain the early momentum the game had. In-app purchase revenue peaked a month after launch, $22 million in October 2019, and then pretty much declined steadily until it hit a plateau about 5 to 6 million for most of 2020 and 2021. Further decline 2021-2022

saw the game rake in about 3 million per month. And then there was another drop when Nintendo removed the gacha mechanics in late 2022. Since then, it's been pulling in roughly 650,000 a month according to AppMagic numbers. Most of the game's revenue, 39%, came from players in the US, 26% from Japan. Other markets are way down in the single figures. The game is currently in maintenance as I record this, but has effectively been closed. So, yes, Mario Kart Tour gone, but not forgotten after 7 years and 270 million-ish in revenue. King and Mojang have brought Minecraft Blast back into soft launch. I spotted this via AppMagic and Google Play. So, at the time of writing on the 30th of September, Minecraft Blast was

downloadable in Malaysia on Google Play only. It was previously available in Malaysia and Canada on iOS in November 2025, but then King and Mojang pulled it the next month. There's a new trailer, there's new assets. It looks like it's had a visual overhaul. The trailer suggests there's a sort of Candy Crush style saga map and a building-based meta game in keeping with Minecraft, of course. No official remarks or comments from Mojang or King on this one. Looks like the game has been spruced up pretty significantly, so it suggests this is considered a goer internally at King. And we'll see if it makes it to launch. King has not launched a game since Candy Crush solitaire over a year and a half ago. So, given the interest in Minecraft as a brand, and of course King's mastery of mobile

puzzle games, this should be a winner, but we shall see. King's Minecraft Blast back in soft launch. This is a fun alternate reality story. On the Deconstructor Fun podcast, Zynga founder Mark Pincus claimed that Zynga came close to acquiring Supercell for $400 million in 2012, but the Zynga board blocked that acquisition. Pincus said he had a handshake agreement with Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen to buy the company, but Zynga's board refused after Zynga's acquisition of OMG Pop and Draw Something had failed to pay off. "I had the chance to buy the winning hand," said Pincus. Uh And said Supercell's Hay Day was outperforming Zynga's own games, eating their lunch. Clash of Clans had just launched, already climbing the charts. Pincus said Zynga's lawyer told

him that exercising his voting control to force the deal through would mean firing the entire board and replacing it with its own appointees, risking a personal lawsuit. And he goes on to say that if he had bigger balls like Elon Musk, for example, he would have fired the whole board, acquired Supercell, and then created what would have been an absolute monster of a company. I wish I had more confidence as a founder and CEO to go against the grain and fire my board for being idiots. And I didn't want to fight them or Wall Street, and I went along with it to the detriment of everybody, he says. He also goes on to show a little bit of regret at what he calls playing defense. He missed out on quite a few other good investments at the time. And he says Zynga hiring Frank Gibeau was a good move, and he went on to build the Zynga of today, which got acquired for 12 billion dollars by Take-Two a few

years back. He also has a go at the lack of ambition in some game companies. Right at the end here, he says, "We had the chance to build the biggest game company in the world. There's no game companies with any vision today. There wasn't then. Tencent, the only big game company, there is still not a single Western world game company with a market cap over 100 billion. And I thought by now there'd be five or six. There's just no vision in the industry. There's no innovation. They're all just playing defense." So, yes, you can get the full screed on the site and also on the Deconstructor Fun podcast. Have a listen. Have a read. Tell me what you think. Supercell is returning its monster hunting game Moco into beta. The company confirmed to us that the game will not be being removed from any app stores worldwide. So, nothing fundamentally

changes in terms of its release profile, so to speak, but the company did admit that yes, the game is still underperforming and it will now run, quote, on low maintenance mode while the team figures out what to do with it next. No further weapons or premium tracks will be released and merchant content will be recycled from previous seasons. No date planned for the next update, either. There will be one before the end of the year. It will need big changes to achieve mass appeal, said Supercell on the blog announcing this move. The best way to keep iterating and testing out new features is to take a step back and return to a beta development stage. As I've said on this podcast before, this is the game with nine lives and one that clearly Supercell believes in and doesn't want to cancel. I think lots of other games

that have performed much better than this have been canceled. So, that is interesting in itself. But, yeah, I think I I may have said with the last reboot that it was the last roll of the dice for this game, but this is another roll of the dice after the previous last roll of the dice by the looks of it. We pulled some figures on the game as well in the article. Since it launched in March 2025, it's earned 7 million in in-app purchase revenue, 9.2 million downloads to date. So, not great, particularly for a Supercell game. But, yeah, Moco continues on, although it will technically be in beta. King averted those strikes that were set to take place at its Stockholm and Malmö offices right at the last minute. So, this came through Thursday evening. The two unions that had organized

the strikes both emailed me to say that the Candy Crush maker, King, has signed a collective bargaining agreement and the strikes are off. They were set to take place starting 5:00 a.m. on 25th of September. The deal was signed the evening of the 24th of September. So, Unionen and the Engineers of Sweden agreed after over a year of negotiations between themselves and King on a new set of terms. The Engineers of Sweden represents about 100 of the 500-ish staff across King's Stockholm and Malmö offices. Unionen did not provide a figure of how many staff it represents, but it did say the company has taken an important step towards creating secure and predictable long-term conditions for its employees, whilst also contributing to a more sustainable games industry.

And of course, that came 2 days after all of those Xbox cuts that dominated the headlines last week. So, good news for King staff in Sweden. No strikes and by the sounds of it, better working conditions and terms for the staff working in Stockholm and Malmö.
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Meta, aka Facebook, announced a load of stuff at its Meta Connect event last week, but most notable for

mobile gamer.biz readers is this Horizon Create app. In it, users can make games with a prompt and publish on Instagram and Facebook, which suggests games are coming to Instagram and Facebook. I wrote about this a little bit in the newsletter. I think Instagram is a really interesting potential new platform for games. This Horizon Create app is obviously aimed at consumers for now, but you can see a world in which a lot of game developers start to get in on this and make their own games playable in Instagram and Facebook. Horizon Create users will also be able to try out and remix other players' creations while they wait for Meta's Horizon engine to build the game from their prompts. No firm date on this one yet, but the app is apparently in testing right now, so someone somewhere is playing around with it. There's also a companion Horizon Studio tool set, which

is clearly for slightly more complex, slightly more involved game development type interactions. The interesting quote here, if Meta delivers this, is someone's scrolling through Instagram can tap a clip of your game and be in a multiplayer session within seconds without needing to download an app or being redirected. Meta said, "Your game lives natively in the feeds where people already discover content and connect with friends." So, more details coming on this one. Like I say, no date yet, and in-game monetization details are coming soon as well. But yeah, an interesting move from a tech giant involving games and another new platform to maybe play around with for those of you interested in trying this stuff out. More details on the site. The headline is Horizon Create users can make games with a prompt and publish on Instagram and Facebook, says Meta.

YouTube has quietly rolled out playables to over 50 markets. This is a slightly odd one in that there's no official confirmation on this. I've just been seeing playables in my YouTube app for a long time. And YouTube Gaming Partnerships Manager Joel Jantzen said on LinkedIn last week that playables have now been rolled out to many more markets, including the Nordics and EU. That brings the total to over 50. These games are getting played by a lot of people. At the time of writing this story, we had games like Build a Queen, Snake Clash, and Stealth Master getting played over 90 million times. Supersonic's Tall Man Run, 106 million plays. The mobile game makers that have playables live in the YouTube app include SayGames, Super Sen, Supersonic, Voodoo, Play Gamma, TapNation, and Crazy

Labs. These YouTube playables were announced back in 2024 and rolled out in just seven markets. And also, there was a little nugget in the comments below Jantzen's LinkedIn post. Google is also aiming to test in-app purchase solutions during 2027. So, this could be a pretty massive new platform for makers of quick web game type games. I of course asked Google to comment and confirm some of these details, but as ever they did not respond. Within app purchases coming as well. Could be an interesting new way to get your games out there if Google does make an effort with this stuff. The fact that there's been no official confirmation or announcement suggests that these playables are being tested for

now, but yeah, interesting stuff and another tech giant doing stuff in games, which is always interesting. Gameloft is closing Minion Rush. This game has been out on the app stores for 13 years. The game is being withdrawn from the app stores and in app purchases disabled on October 30th. Servers will be shut down on January 29th, 2027. We pulled some quick numbers on it and AppMagic estimates suggest
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it didn't quite make a huge amount of in app purchase revenue. 46 million over that 13 year period from nearly 500 million downloads. You would imagine there's some ad revenue in there as well. But yeah, Gameloft says, "Unfortunately, our run is indeed coming to an end. As the mobile gaming landscape continues to

evolve, we have made the difficult decision to wind down our services on January 29th, 2027." So yes, Minion Rush no longer playable by the end of this month. Service to close in January. Tencent and Capcom have dated their Monster Hunter Outlanders game. That game is coming October 29th. Pre-registration is currently live. This is made by Timi, the Shenzhen, China-based developer behind monster top-grossing hit Honor of Kings. It also works with Activision to make Call of Duty Mobile. It makes another shooter called Delta Force, which is right up there in the top-grossing charts, and work with Microsoft to develop Age of Empires Mobile. It's working with Capcom on this mobile version of Monster Hunter, and I think this could well be a pretty big hit. We will see on October 29th when it goes live

worldwide. Two companies you may not have heard of before, but this is an interesting deal nonetheless. Trophy Games has acquired Airlines manager maker Playrion from Paradox for 2.6 million. So, this is the Paris studio that makes Airlines manager and Airport Simulator First Class. It was owned by Paradox Interactive, the Sim specialist maker of City Skylines, and some others. Copenhagen-based Trophy Games have swooped in to snap up the 30-odd employees at Playrion. And it said in the announcement that they that it generates annual revenue of 4.6 million dollars. So, 2.6 million as an acquisition seems like a pretty good deal. That is upfront cash consideration, and then Paradox is also entitled to an earnout worth 9% of net revenue from Playrion's

games over the following 3 years. So, yes, Trophy Games acquiring Airlines manager maker Playrion, 2.6 million. This AI company, General Intuition, seems to be doing well with investors. It's raised another 220 million and totaling up all the previous rounds of funding means the company is valued at $6.2 billion. This thing was announced as a world model game engine type company. I seem to have recall, but the announcement this week seemed to be more focused on autonomous cars and robotics. So, there may have been a subtle pivot between funding rounds. General intuition trains its AI models on gameplay footage from Medal. This is a game clip capture platform with more than 17 million monthly active players, says General intuition. These companies operate under one

umbrella company, but yes, well done to them. $220 million in its latest funding round. In data digest this week, we've got Tencent leading Circle Games $25 million Series A fundraising. Gossip Harbor and Roblox leading Social Pet's August top grossing charts. Japan mobile game stats, including some top grossing charts. eFootball top earner in Japan. Netmarble and Google have a new report on web games out. Duolingo's Brawl Stars crossover saw a nice install bump for both of those apps. There's also stats on Colony Flow. This trending ASMR game Mystery Dumpling, Hunting Rivals, Bleach Mirrors High and a bit of fundraising news from this real money gaming firm Top Dog. They've raised $2.5 million. A new text powered alt store, Jest,

is apparently on course to earn a million dollars since it turned on in-app purchases. All the stats and figures and graphs you need every Wednesday in data digest. In our usual smorgasbord of new games and soft launch news, there's a bit on Moco, which has gone back into soft launch technically. There's also a new Moon active soft launch in that list. In new game digest, EA FC Mobile has gone live with its big new season update. There's an Nemo, which is out now. There's new Bloons and Kingdom Rush games. Epic Mickey is now playable on your phone. And there's a few more bits and bobs in there from Popcore, Sanrio, the owner of the Hello Kitty property. Their first mobile game is in that article, too. New game digest every Friday. And that's it for this

week. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.