Red Dead Redemption, Moon Active, Playtika, Liftoff, 2025's top games, data, jobs 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. I thought it would be interesting to look at how Red Dead Redemption is performing on mobile. It is available on Netflix and also as a premium game. It was released on December the 2nd. It's been out for just over a month and the free Netflix version has around 3.3 million installs to date. The Netflix edition was announced as part of Netflix's big games reboot that happened in November. These numbers are decent. Red Dead Redemption has performed below how GTA San Andreas did when that was released in December 2023. You would imagine most people are connecting a Bluetooth controller and playing that way. But on a little screen like that, I don't know if that's how Rockstar want its games to be played. But as with

those GTA games, Netflix has paid them a decent wedge of money to get that game on Netflix. For how long, we don't know. Those GTA games are no longer on the service. So like other Netflix movies and TV shows, they're only on the service for a limited period. But on the premium side, I think it's fascinating that console game makers keep trying to port their games over to mobile and ask console style prices. App magic estimates suggest Rockstar has earned about $430,000 from the game divided by $40. That's about 10,750 downloads. Although Red Dead Redemption has been more successful than various other console game ports, a Rockstar game coming to mobile still doesn't add up to a particularly successful launch. Quick one on Moon Active. I did a report

last summer on three new soft launch games that arrived in limited markets from Moon Active, the maker of Coin Master. This company has not released too many new games in the last few years besides acquiring games like Travel Town and Zen Match. Last summer it soft launched Whole Stars, its take on hold.io and Coin Master Board Adventure, which is its take on Monopoly Go. Monopoly Go itself is a take on Coin Master, so it's all kind of eating itself. And they also put a tile puzzler Match Dreams into Soft Launch that doesn't seem to have made it. But now there are two more. Family Bay appears to be a follow-up to Family Island, the popular farming building game run by Melsoft, which is owned by Moon Active. And then Jelly Busters is an odd one.

It's an action puzzler with pixel art and skateboarding elements. And the little cubes are jelly guys. So jelly skateboarding and pixel art combined. Both currently Android only. No downloads being registered. So they're not officially in soft launch yet. But it looks like they are set up to arrive soon. And this is interesting because Moon Active has been pretty quiet. Coin Master is steadily declining. But clearly Moon Active is a company that knows how to monetize players. But it seems to be taking a very careful and considered approach to launching new games. Very few live games out there considering the company's been around for 10 15 years. So we shall see how these games go. And if you are interested in soft launch games, there is an ongoing list on the site. We update that every other Monday.

Play taker is to cut about 500 possibly more staff. This surfaced on CEK the Israeli tech publication. They seem to have some good sources there. They also obtained the letter sent to staff by Player boss Robert Antacle which outlined the cuts. Play Taker employs about 3,500 people in total. About a thousand of those are in Israel. It wasn't clear from the reports where the cuts would fall. But what was in those reports were some statements from Antacol about the strategy at Play Tika and that the quote broad growth mindset is no longer sustainable. End quote. The company's changing course. It needs fewer layers, smaller teams, sharper focus, which is very much the language of a layoff's letter. The part that will

possibly get most attention is where he says the company must leverage AI and automation to do more with less. So, while these are not layoffs entirely driven by AI, the mention of AI within the layoff explanation does suggest they're a factor, and that's very much in keeping with what we're seeing across tech and games. Using AI in the layoff letter may well trigger a bit of a reaction from a lot of people losing their jobs, as it did with the King story I wrote last summer, which was a little bit more explicit in that King was laying people off and pretty much directly replacing them with the tools that those staff helped build and play ticker just keeps making layoffs. Um, at the bottom of these types of stories, you put in extra context to help people get a grasp of these things. And there must be six, seven different

Playoff stories in the mobile gamer.biz biz archives. The most recent ones were 50 staff laid off at Wuga in May 2025. A month later, 160 staff laid off across Best Fiends and Redecor. The company continues to acquire companies. It bought Superplay for an initial $700 million in 2024, maker of Dice Dreams and now Disney Solitaire. It also bought governor of poker developer UDA games for up to 165 million and animals and coins maker inplay labs for an initial 80 million. Both those deals were 2023 to return to that letter. The broad growth mindset is no longer sustainable. So 500 staff going. Good luck to everyone affected by these layoffs.

Liftoff. The mobile ad specialist has filed for an IPO. I did not realize this company was that big, but clearly it is. In the related SEC filing, Liftoff describes itself as a performance, marketing, monetization, and creative solutions specialist that is mostly powered by AI tool Cortex. It plays in a similar arena to apply also rumored to be IPOing and Apploving which has famously seen pretty incredible revenue growth in the last year. Bloomberg notes that Blackstone acquired the majority stake in Liftoff in 2021. Liftoff later sold a minority stake in a General Atlantic, another giant investment firm, in a deal which valued Liftoff at 4.3 billion. So liftoff could IPO soon? It's not guaranteed, but with Blackstone's

backing, you would imagine this will go through and maybe they will get onto the public markets before Apps Flyier does. You are halfway through the podcast. Here is a 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. As I walk past a particularly noisy bird, let's do the top grossing mobile games of 2025. It is still incredible to me that Honor of Kings can earn an estimated $1.68

billion in China alone. an extraordinary thing that maybe doesn't get covered or talked about enough, but there it is at the top of the top grossing charts once more for Western listeners, which is all of you. The Last War thing is most interesting. Last War is up from posting 1.1 billion in 2024 to 1.57 billion in 2025. It's not even out in China, even though the developer is Chinese. And the US was the biggest spending market for top war in 2025. $672 million spent followed by Japan 294, South Korea 153 million, Germany 58, Taiwan 40 million. And as I note in the article, a China launch, if successful, would make this game easily the top grossing game on the planet. Another game big in the US, Roblox. third in the top grossing charts

on mobile. Obviously, it's making a huge amount of money on PC and console as well. But on mobile, it was nearly 1.5 billion in 2025. That's up from 1.1 billion in 2024 and up again from 900 million in 2023. Obviously, grow a garden, steal a brain rot helped rake in some of that cash, but as I note in the article, which you should read, it took me ages. It's a very western Englishspeaking phenomenon. Apart from South Korea, top five markets, US 723 million of that 1.5 billion. Second market, South Korea, 70 million. Then you got UK 66 million. Canada 45 million, Australia 44 million. White Out Survival. It is up from generating $936 million in 2024 to 1.4 billion in 2025. Big in China in the US

30 377 million from China, 325 million from US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan complete the top markets. Royal match momentum has slowed on this. You could see that in the monthly updates and in this article. It's actually down year on year. 1.37 in 2025, down from 1.39 in 2024. And that might be down to Dream realizing maybe this game is plateauing a little bit and all the UA investment is going into Royal Kingdom. As I note in the story, Royal Kingdom earned about 246 million. It was the 35th top grossing game in 2025. Another decliner, Scopley's Monopoly Go has ever I caveat anything to do with Scopely with the fact they earn a lot of money through web shops. But in terms of

inapp purchase revenue, 1.36 billion in 2025, that is down from 1.43 billion in 2024. And it's very US focused. 1.1 billion of the total came from the US. Second market is the UK, 48 million, France 46, Canada 35, Germany 31. PUBG Mobile does okay in the US, but again, massive in China. Candy Crush pretty steady. Pokémon TCG Pocket seems to have rode out some of its launch momentum. It launched in November 2024, did great for the first few months of 2025 and then dropped off. It was earning 90 millionish per month for the start of 2025, but by the end of the year, it declined to about 40 million every month. And most of its revenues are coming from Japan

and the US. Other markets are pretty much nowhere. And then Coin Master dropped to around 650 million in 2025. This one has been steadily declining for years outside the top 10 in the 11 to 20 bracket. Loads of games that have rocketed up the charts in the last year. Gossip Harbor, Clash Royale, Kingshot, Hongai Star Rail had an odd year, very up and down, but it's down generally. Genchin Impact also down. So, the Moyo phenomenon is fading a little bit. Pokemon Go down for the fourth straight year, but again, some of that may be being siphoned off into web shops. And then you got Love and Deep Space, Delta Force, Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans, Royal Kingdom. Some stats on those games as well at the

back end of that article. Please do read that. It took ages. and actually really enjoy doing them because it really gives you a sense of what's going up and what's going down. Really interesting stuff. So yeah, give it a read. In downloads, Block Blast was of course top 368 million downloads in 2025 according to Magic Freefire. Roblox the nearest contenders, but really not that close. Roblox 295 million downloads. Freefire 287. So, Block Blast a good 70 million ahead of Roblox, its nearest contender. This game is an absolute monster. As Hungry Studio told me this time last year, it is obsessed with AB testing. As I noted in the article, a game with this size of an audience, it would be very tempting to put some inapp purchases in there, wouldn't it? You

would imagine they are probably AB testing that right now. In fact, if you look at the market split, top markets are actually Indonesia by a long way actually. 73 million downloads in 2025 there. US is second, 36 million, Vietnam 24, Brazil 21, India 20. This game is a phenomenon and never gets written about of course. Second, lots more gets written about Roblox. There's more to write about here. Stealer, brain rock, grow a garden, all of that. I thought Roblox was very western in its profile, but the download split tells a different story. 61 million in stores in Indonesia, Brazil, USA, India, and Mexico, the other top markets. Obviously, different story, the top grossing charts, but yeah, Roblox second. And it's up again for the third, fourth, fifth year running. It's a juggernaut that will not stop. The giants in the market are just getting bigger and bigger and everyone else is scrambling around to survive. Free Fire,

another game that's been around for a long time, is actually declined a little bit from 294 million downloads 2024 to 287 2025. Not a huge difference, but still third top download showing that yes, people do still want Battle Royale on mobile. Subway Surfers, Pizza Ready, Ludo King, three very steady performers. Regular listeners and readers will know that these games don't really see any spikes or dips. They're just very consistent. Vimar Jong perhaps if you've been following closely not a surprise to see this in the top 10 but yearon year is actually up 123 places and has done really well also surprisingly not particularly reliant on players in the east top three markets are US Brazil and India so an interesting spread of territories Vita Studio based in

Singapore been spending a lot of money on UA is regularly top of the ads charts that we run. So perhaps no surprise to see that moving into the top 10 of 2025. And the rest of the top 10, My Talking Tom 2, Hold.io, PUBG Mobile, each racking up over 100 million downloads in 2025 according to App Magic. There's more detailed and nuanced analysis in the full article and it took me ages, so please read it. In the regulars, the jobs digest on Monday was packed with people moving here and there. There are big moves at anti-hero Supercell 55 West Ventures, which is the new advisory and investment firm from former app store boss Matt Fischer. There's a new boss at Niantic, now owned by Scopely. Ness's boss retired. Big moves at Roio, Roblox,

Triple Dot, Trail Mix, Appch charge, Hasbro, Stash, King, Lego, and many, many more. January, busy time for jobs, and I'm sure it will be just as busy in two weeks time when the next jobs digest drops in data digest this week. According to that magic data, strategy was the top earning genre in mobile. The genre earned 13 billion in 2025. Apps Flyier is reportedly nearing a $2 billion sale to couple of private equity firms. Block Blast 70 million daily active users for that one according to Hungary Studio. Mobile gaming inapp purchase spend totaled 20.7 billion in Q4 2025 according to Aim. Puzzle and Dragons 16 million North American downloads. quite a small number, but notable that Gung-Ho is

pushing Puzzle and Dragons in the West. And Apple says App Store devs have banked over $550 billion since the App Store launched in 2008. A very large and potentially meaningless number, but it looks good in press releases. And that's it for this week's Mobile. Biz Digest. Thank you for listening.