Sega-Rovio woes, Playtika goes casual, Unity's turnaround, pitching investors, data nuggets, 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. This Sega and Roio story was by far the biggest story of the week and was later updated. So the original the headline on the site is actually ROIO set for a restructure after Sega acquisition disappoints which was based on an investor presentation that Sega put out some very harsh words in that presentation and also reference to a restructure at Roio after the article had done the rounds all day Tuesday. Uh, I was made aware that actually there was a translation error at Sega and Roio in translating it from Japanese to English and actually the word they

meant to use was rebuilding rather than restructure. So I have updated the article on the site to reflect that. So, the restructure has already taken place and I already reported on that back in October 2025 when 3540 staff were made redundant. It's probably worth mentioning I double checked with them rather than them contacting me to offer a clarification. Nonetheless, that does not change the fact that Sega said the ROIO deal has failed to create quote economic value. Sega is also lowering the priority of free-to-play games going forward. Sega doesn't actually operate too many free-to-play games anyway. So that is largely aimed at Roio. It seems 100 staff have been moved over from free-to-play into what Sega calls full game development, which is PC, console, premium games. Sega's financials also

state that Sonic Rumble Party's performance has been quote weak and that declining Angry Birds 2 revenue has quote bottomed out. The company is however optimistic on its Angry Birds IP and licensing going forwards. There's a release of Angry Birds 2 in mainland China coming up. A new game in the Angry Birds series coming later this year. and also high hopes for the third Angry Birds movie which is coming out in December this year. But there's a chart in there which shows Romeo sales declining every year since the acquisition went through in 2023 down from €275 million to€181 million euros in the financial year just gone. and they actually predict that will go lower to 158 million euros in the next financial year. So not a positive outlook for Roio

unfortunately. Uh and Roio's problems dragged down earnings and profitability at Sega overall as well as problems with Sega's acquisition of a gambling or i gaming company stake logic. Roio's value was written down by $200 million in Sega's previous set of financial results as well. So yeah, um Roio may not be restructuring, but the outlook is not good. Um and I mean Sonic Rumble Party's performance being weak, uh it doesn't really tell the whole story there. According to App Magic numbers, it earned like $100,000 last monthish. Really poor. Um, so I can't imagine that will last too much longer. So yes, there may not be job cuts directly imminent at

ROIO, but given the language and projections for that bit of Sega in this financial report, it doesn't look good. Sega is also suspending large-scale M&A activities for the time being after those um deals for Roio and Stake Logic didn't work out too well. So yeah, like lots of other companies, it seems Sega treading more carefully in the market right now, not taking too many more risks with acquisitions or new game launches and backing off freeto play a little bit, which is understandable given what's happened with that Roio deal. On Monday, I caught up with the Play Ticker financial results cuz I'm a fun guy. These actually came out Thursday last week, but I was otherwise engaged. The story coming out of those financials is

really that Play Ticker now sees itself as a casual game maker. A 76% of the company's business is now from casual games and having built its business on social casino titles like Slaughter Mania, Bingo Blitz, World Series of Poker, etc. CEO Robert Antacol now sees the company as casual games first and was pretty clear that its social casino portfolio is pretty much a legacy asset. The quote on its social casino portfolio is quote we are not making a forward promise of continued growth from here. Flattening the decline and showing early stability is an important milestone and it matters for the overall durability of the portfolio. So they are not expecting growth in social casino from this point onwards and they are portraying Superplay and

Disney solitire as the star performers in that group. The other financial highlights overall total revenue was 744.7 million US up 9.7% sequentially and 5.5% year-over-year. Profits were 125.2 million margin of 16.8%. Bingo Blitz down, Disney Solitaire up 72.1%. Obviously, that game is newer on the market, so that needs to be taken into account. June's Journey up 10.4% yearonear. And average daily paying users down a little bit. Average daily active users down 4.4% up Dow up 8% yearonear. They actually raised their revenue and profitability outlooks for the year as part of that overall

pretty bullish earnings report and also talked about direct to consumer as a big growth driver. You may remember last quarter Play ticker said it had passed a billion per year in direct to consumer revenue. So that category paying off nicely for Playa. Um, there have been layoffs at Playa owned Wuga in the last week. I'm still trying to get details on exactly how many and what happened there. Um, Wuga, as it has done so before, is refusing to confirm the number of layoffs that have happened, but I am continuing to pursue that one and we'll see what happens. But yeah, Play Tikka overall pretty happy with that Super Play acquisition. Without that Super Play, without Disney Solitaire, Dice Dreams, Domino Dreams, I

think Playa would be in quite a bit of trouble. Um, but uh, as it is, pretty bullish outlook from Playa and it should now be considered a casual game maker. So, there you go. 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.
It is financial season, so let's do Unity as well. Supersonic has not been sold off just yet. Unity boss Matt Bramberg said that process is still ongoing. Iron Source is closing. Uh I

think it closed at the end of April. While that supersonic divevestature is ongoing, it posted a 17% year-on-year revenue rise. mostly thanks to Vector, it's AI powered adtech product. The company said that revenue from Vector is up 80% yearonear, which is maybe not a surprise. It's quite a new product, so it probably wasn't raking that much money in last year. It has also just launched Unity AI into beta, an AI prompt powered version of Unity that the company is clearly putting a lot of stock in. This obviously follows the launch of Google Genie and that whole slightly silly episode where a load of gaming stocks plunged in value because traders seem to think this would crush game creation and game makers overnight. Obviously, that's not true, but Bronberg

did address that in the earnings call. He said that actually Unity AI is designed to suck in world models like the ones that Google Genie can create and then game makers can tweak them from there. He's framing this as Unity being part of this new wave of AI tools rather than being a competitor. So yeah, total revenue for Q1 2026 58 million overall up 17% yearonear which is pretty good. Strategic grow which is adtech revenue 279 million up 49% yearonear big growth there thanks to vector strategic create which is engine revenue 154 million up 15%. So the price rises and other tweaks it has made to its engine business have resulted in some big gains. Their non-strategic revenue which is basically iron source

and supersonic was 76 million down 34% yearonear probably as you would expect given they have given up on those bits of the business adjusted a bit 138 million margin of 27%. They'd made a big net loss of 347 million, but they did promise to be profitable by the end of this financial year. So, the turnaround story is ongoing at Unity, certainly helped by Vector and potentially also helped by Unity AI. I would guess that Unity is out there telling the market that Unity AI might well be a subscription product for consumers as well as people in the industry. So that might excite investors too, but it is still making a loss. Bramberg and the new executive team do seem to be turning this one around given the depths of

despair it was in a couple of years ago after all that runtime fee stuff. So yeah, the turnaround is on at Unity. As regular listeners will know, last week I was in Madiraa for the games summit run by Dev Gam. This is an events company that runs conferences in Eastern Europe and Portugal and other places, Middle East as well. They invited me out there to listen in on the discussions last week. Very nice hotels, very nice place. But if we get down to business, I think the most notable thing here was the discussions around what on earth to do next. uh as the games industry changes all around us as I noted in the article which is called investors and publishers want pragmatism flexibility and games that AI can't copy which you can read on the site now it was interesting to note the number of

consultants work for higher outsourcing companies in the room at this event and more generally it feels like those companies are getting more and more work as the center of game development fragments a little bit and layoffs happen and people spin out and set up their own shorter term contracting businesses and consulting businesses. One conversation that I've had a couple of times now was how games is increasingly moving towards this sort of Hollywood style model of roaming groups of work for hire companies who come into a project, get it built and finished and then move on to another or just running live ops on existing titles. I think most notably for mobile gamer.biz Biz readers was the panel on

investment where starting point game CEO Jeff Hilbert Agura's Lily Zang Oak Fins Willie Kellich and craft and investments Victor Lee discussed what they are looking for in investable studios and game projects. If you're out there pitching, you've probably heard a lot of advice before. But the new part for me was making a game the AI can't copy, which is a new problem studios will have to face. Imbuing your game with enough of a human touch to make it not only hard to copy from a technology point of view, but also from a sort of human point of view, an emotional point of view. I mean, that goes right back to just making a good game, I guess. But it was an interesting point. I'd not heard before. And also, as I say in the article, maybe mobile players don't really care that much about AI generated

clones because, you know, the market has told us time and time again that actually mobile players don't really care and they'll download a copy of a copy if they happen to come across it. There was a fun bit where they only seem to be half joking where Hilbert and Lee suggested you can vibe code a PUBG or Fortnite type game in a couple of weeks and discoverability is going to be a really big problem after that. Um I mean discoverability is a big problem and will get worse. So they're right there. I'm not sure about the vibe coding part. Nonetheless, in pitches, they are looking for studios to at least be trying to solve the problem of discoverability by building communities around a targeted player base. So, knowing the player you are trying to get in front of and having a plan to build a community around those players is a big

part of what should be in your investor pitch. And then later there was a lively chat as I'd say in the article between Agusto Suminetta, Enrique Olaf and Ramy Ishmael. All industry veterans of different shapes and sizes. They were pretty damning on the the dumb money that flooded into the industry in the early 2020s postco. Um, Ishmael in particular advised attendees to build development teams in South America, India, Indonesia to keep costs down and keep the kind of central creative work in Europe and America. And as ever, the new opportunities that arise in the next few years will be grasped best by small, nimble, flexible teams, uh, without legacy baggage, things that slow game

development down. Uh, the final line in this is stay small, nimble, and pragmatic, they suggested, and it'll all be okay, maybe. But yeah, a good event, interesting chat from investors and publishers there. Read the article for more detail and nuance. A sudden flurry of M&A action in this week's data digest. Hottest off the press is Sensor Tower's acquisition of AppMagic. He obviously follows Sensor Tower's acquisition of data.ai about two years ago. and obviously also means it is once again one of the only data providers in town. The consolidation of those two things will obviously mean that sensor towers and app magagic's data will improve, but also means there's even less competition out there in this market. I don't know if that's a good thing overall, but well

done to AppMagic. It's only been around a couple of years, so good for them. Grand Games raised $70 million. Uh this is the hybrid casual studio behind Magic Sort and Block Out. Yet another big investment going into Istanbul. In Moby has acquired Mobile Action for an undisclosed sum. Those two companies are analytics, advertising, adtech type companies. Mobile Action specializes in Apple ads and app store optimization. cohort seems to have pivoted a little bit into UA agents and has raised $7 million from the Rain Group, another marketing ad tech type company, Smartly, has acquired incremental. No financial terms disclosed for that one either. There's also summary of Apploven's latest financials which are

as ever spectacular. revenue of 1.84 billion in the last quarter alone, up 59% year-onear. Net income even bigger gains there up 109% from 576 million in March 2025 to 1.2 billion this year. There's also a quick breakdown of a sensor tower report on action and strategy games across mobile but also steam where as you perhaps might expect the growth is all on Steam but the monetization is all happening in mobile. Lots more detail and a bit more on play tickers financials in data digest this week written by Vicky Blake, a prolific games industry writer and freelancer who you will be seeing on the site a little bit more. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.