Sega-Rovio news, Tripledot's Supersonic buy, mobile at Take Two, Playtika shenanigans 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. The latest round of Sega financials were a little bit kinder to Roio sales were steady. You may remember back in May, Sega wrote down the value of Roio by around $200 million and said the 775 million acquisition of the Angry Birds Maker had so far failed to create quote economic value. It also confirmed that it was in the process of rebuilding Roio and had moved around 100 staff away from free-to-play projects. That report also noted weak performance of Sonic, Rumble, Party, and Angry Birds 2. But in the last set of financials announced this week, Roio was described as performing in line with expectations,

and Sega's wider free-to-play sales rose up a little bit a year on year. ROIO contributed about $46.9 million to Sega's sales in Q1, and Sega's free-to-play division, of which ROIO is obviously a large part, rose up to $81.8 million earned in the last 3 months. Sega also said it has plans to launch new roio titles, but none are coming this financial year. It also forecasts continued growth in licensing revenue tied to key IPs, anniversaries, and the third Angry Birds movie which is coming out in December in the US TBC on other regions. This has been a popular story. I think we have a lot of readers who work in Finland and at ROIO a less brutal verdict on the ROIO business this time around, which will be a little bit more pleasant to read than last time.

The big story of the last week, if you look at traffic numbers certainly, is Unity selling Supersonic to Triple Dot for $40 million. This came out as part of Unity's financials. The deal closed on August 4th and follows the sun setting of the Iron Source Ads Network and Unity's announcement that it is no longer interested in being a mobile game publisher. So, Supersonic's been up for sale for a little while and it's been snapped up by Triple Dot, second major mobile publishing acquisition in a little over a year following its acquisition of lots of apploving owned studios in 2025. That deal was done for 800 million in half cash, half equity. So, Triple Dot seems to be going around acquiring unwanted studios from large ad tech and engine companies. I saw one person describe this as a fire sale, which is

probably not a nice thing to hear if you work at Supersonic. That label was definitely at its peak during the hyper casual era, has faded a little since then, and then as Unity sort of lost interest in being a mobile game publisher, has waned ever since. But yeah, within that, of course, Unity also confirmed its Q2 financials revenue of $546.5 million for the quarter ended June 30th, up 24% year-on-year. Growth was led, of course, by its advertising business. Unity CEO Bramberg called it arguably the best quarter in Unity's history as a public company and pointed to Vector AI's ongoing success. Profitability as measured by adjusted airbit duh came in at $160 million up from 90 million a year earlier. So that's a big leap too.

The company's gap net loss narrowed to 23 million from 107 million in the same quarter last year. So, it is losing less money, too. Unity says it expects to become GAP profitable by Q3 2026. There's more stats and figures in the full report, which is headlined, Unity has sold Supersonic to Triple Dot for $40 million. Take Two's financials came out late on Friday, so we only got to this on Monday morning, but the headlines are kind of the same as they are every quarter. Mobile is the category that takes the most money at Take 2, despite it being the owner of Rockstar, 2K, etc., etc., 53% of its net bookings in the last quarter were from Zingga and its other mobile game studios. That is down actually 3% from 56% a year earlier.

$739.5 million in bookings from mobile at take 2 in the last quarter. Boss Strauss Zelnick attributed the dip largely to a tough comparison against Color Block Jam's breakout year in the same quarter in 2025. He was asked in the earnings call directly about a mobile slowdown and he said no, it's not really what we're seeing, but did say there is quote a bit of pressure on user acquisition. So, console growth helped account for that dip in mobile's proportion of Take 2's business. NBA 2K and Bordlands games helped there. Tomb Blast Words with Friends grew 8% year-on-year, top 11 up 15%. When asked about mobile direct to consumer, Zelic said it has had a material effect positive on our margins in the mobile business. It reiterated

its outlook for fiscal 2027, anchored by, of course, the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6, a game you may have heard of that is coming November 19th and is likely to absolutely eclipse every other game on the planet at the end of this year. So, something to look forward to. Some intriguing stuff in the Play Tika Financials that came out Thursday. Disney Solitaire big highlight for Playa. Of course, revenue for the game was up 288.6% year-onear. Obviously, that is because it kind of launched a year ago, but its financial success has helped the company swing back to profit after a loss in Q1 2026. But it did say in the earnings call afterwards that it would be slashing marketing spend, aka user acquisition

spend on Disney Solitaire by around 70% in the second half of this year. For those wondering why you would slash user acquisition spend on your most popular and lucrative title, the context here is from the reports a few weeks ago that Player is actually looking to offload Disney Solitaire maker Super Play to Tencent for $1.5 billion. That was the figure in the report from CEK a couple of weeks ago. Uh those reports suggested that Playa was having trouble keeping up with the earnouts. agreed with Super Play based on its performance before the acquisition of the studio went through back in 2024. Uh that was before Disney Solitaire came out and absolutely smashed it. So CFO Tae and Play Tikica boss Robert Antacol talked about this in the earnings call and prepared remarks.

The quote here is from Antico, "We bought our marketing spending down and the game still grew. It only happens when the players you have added continue to stay with you when they keep playing and they keep spending. This is how we ask you to judge this business. Which is an interesting way of putting it. In the prepared remarks, Antico also said, quote, Disney Solitire grew again this quarter even as we reduced our marketing investment and our margins expanded meaningfully. These results reflect the durability of our model and the discipline of our execution. There's some other facts and figures in that report about Bingo Blitz. Revenue is falling on that one. June's journey is broadly steady and some facts and figures about average daily paying users. But yeah, worth reading the full story. The headline here is Disney Solitaire drives Playa earnings, but UA spend will now drop 70%.

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Quick one from Wednesday. Hungry Studios hit puzzler Block Blast is heading to Apple Arcade. Haven't covered Apple Arcade for a little while really because there's not been much notable coming out on that service. As reported before, it seems like they've really dialed back the commissioning of original games and are concentrating on porting over existing popular free-to-play games and removing ads and inapp purchases. Block

Blast, of course, pretty much the top download of the last year and a half at least, if not longer. So, you can assume that Apple are paying quite a few quid to Hungry Studio for this deal. This is effectively the most popular puzzle game on the planet and it is now coming to Apple Arcade on September 3rd without any ads or inapp purchases. More financials fun applo reported its latest set of results for Q2. It missed its guidance despite 53% year-on-year revenue growth in the last quarter. Revenue of $1.92 billion for the last 3 months ended June 30th. It also posted a rise in adjusted EBITDA of 58% yearonear to 1.61 billion.

Despite these pretty extraordinary numbers, Uplavin shares fell sharply in the aftermath, dropping more than 20%. As traders focused on the miss in guidance and margin pressure from higher AI training costs, CEO Adam Farugi explained all this away by saying, quote, "This quarter came down to timing. our pace of meaningful model improvement was lighter than normal during the quarter and the next step up in model performance landed just after quarter end. He said that further improvements could deliver around 30% annual growth over time and they also pointed to continued growth outside of gaming. There's further details on the outlook for apploving and a few more facts and figures in the article headlined apploving misses guidance despite 53% revenue growth in Q2. Quick one about Google Play. Not about regulation this time, but potentially

linked to it. You can now link your Venmo account to your Google Play Store account and pay for things through Venmo. Google announced this in a very brief statement on its website on Monday. It did not confirm how much of a percentage it may or may not be taking from those Venmo payments, but yes, Google Play increasingly offering more and more ways for people to pay for inapp purchases outside of its own ecosystem. And I guess this counts as a further opening up of the store. So yes, you can now pay for stuff on the Google Play Store with your Venmo account. There seems to be a lot going on at MTG. Their latest move is to unveil Playamp, which is their sort of umbrella brand for its Midcore Games studios. That includes Pllearium, Inoame, Snowprint,

Hutch, Ninja Kiwi, and Future Play. They will now operate under this new identity play amp. According to MTG's last financial report, these midcore games, now known as Playamp, generated $953 million in revenue and $240 million in adjusted EIT desk/profitability in the last financial year. Obviously, of those studios, Pllearium is the largest contributor to MTG revenue. So, Rage, Shadow Legends leading the way there, but the group also includes Forge of Empires, Bloons, TD6, Warhammer 40,000, Tacticus, F1 Clash, and Merge Gardens. They're all going to share centralized publishing tools, marketing tools, data tools, AI tools, and so on. And there's going to be a renewed push to direct to consumer revenue within the

newly named Play Amp Group. Quick one on CI play games. Its Israel development hub has cut 20 jobs according to Israeli tech publication Calculist which appears to be pretty well connected. Seems to break a lot of Israeli tech news. That's about 7% of the 300 people working there. That operation produces the game's quick hit slots, 88 fortunes, and Hot Shot Casino. That follows a separate round of layoffs that Scipplay made in June when the company told us that it had eliminated a limited number of roles as part of a strategic review. So yeah, I think social casino is fading a little bit as a category on the app store due to lots of different factors, UA, etc., etc. But yeah, 20 jobs gone at Scame

Israel according to this report. In data digest this week, loads and loads of interesting facts and figures. Most of all, Sensor Tower's US webshop revenue chart. So, Sensor Tower has put out its estimates on how much games are making from web shops and included that in a report on June's top earners. And maybe it's no surprise to learn that Monopoly Go is top of the web store charts in the US. 52 million in revenue through the web shop estimated in June for Scop Please Monster Hit. The other top games earning big money through web shops in the US according to Sensor Tower are Pokémon Go 34.3 million in June, Disney Solitaire 28.7, Rage Shadow Legends 26.4 before and Slaughter Mania slots 18 million.

Loads more interesting numbers on web shop revenue in that report. Another Scopa game, Pokémon Go's 10th anniversary event has driven a big revenue jump. A 230% jump in revenue for July. According to Censor Tower estimates, that is a leap of.7 million month. Uh there's some data in there from Sensor Tower on the leading publishers in the first half of the year as well. There's a bit on Love and Deep Space which has seen its revenue crash after the controversy around a new love interest in that game. There's App Magic's hybrid casual chart for the first half of 2026. Bando Namco financials pretty steady. Scipplay revenue down 9%. Southeast Asia games market stats and India games market stats from Nico Partners. Marmalade, the board game specialist, they have doubled their profits. And Communix has raised 20

million in UA financing from PVX partners, the prolific UA financier. There's also a bit right at the end on Reigns. 4 million lifetime players for that series. This is now 10 years old. More stats and figures to marvel at in the article on the site. In Jobs Digest this week, there are moves and promotions at EA, Nazara, Unity, Epic, Scoply, Kabam, Exola, Tactile Games, and Moon Active. And in the last new game digest, there's a new Cookie Run game. There's a My Hero Academia game. There's Nine Kings. a new verse game which was promoted by Apple on its today tab. There's also an indie game about pigeons, a Wipeout like game and a couple more indie titles coming to mobile or out on mobile right now. And that's it for this week. Thanks for listening. We are out for another sunset

walk in glamorous Norfolk with this very special guest once again. Would you like to say goodbye?
Yep, it's me again. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.