Supercell buys Metacore amid brutal layoffs, Second Dinner cuts, inside Scopely x Niantic, 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. This week recorded in part on location in MadiRaa. Here we go. The big news from Tuesday. Supercell is to fully acquire merge mansion maker Methacor, which is restructuring with 160 jobs at risk. Those jobs are all at Finland, according to a blog from the company, which also said that it has been trying to launch a follow-up to the very successful Mer 2 game, Merge Mansion, for a couple of years. regular listeners and readers of the website will know that I've been tracking those soft launches for some time. They've had at least a dozen games in soft launch. Most of them merge games with variations on the theme, but also there was Grandma's

Solitaire Secrets in Soft Launch for a little while there. But yeah, clearly none of those games resonated. And if Metacor's restructuring plans go ahead as planned, Metacor will cut 160 jobs in Finland. Rolls that Sweden and Germany studios are also at risk. A quick look at the medical website tells us that it has over 280 staff. So 160 jobs gone is over half the company which is a lot of people and obviously very sad. Those that are staying will focus on Merge Mansion and Supercell much like they did with Space Ape actually will absorb that team. Merge Mansion will run as a Supercell game once the process of restructuring and acquisition has gone through. Supercell has invested 180 million euros in Metacor. At least Metacor actually

acquired Supercell's soft launch game Everdale which was once cancelled and then resurrected at Metacor but Metacor couldn't figure out a way of bringing it to market and making it sustainable. So they cancelled their work on Everdale about 18 months later. So yeah, I mean Merge Mansion, as it says in the blog, really pioneered Merge 2, it has since been overtaken somewhat by the likes of Gossip Harbor from Micro Fund, but maybe it will have a new lease of life within Supercell and all the resources and knowhow that company obviously has. So yes, more layoff news. Unfortunately, particularly in Finland, that is a lot of people looking for work in Helsinki. Quick one from Tuesday morning. I noticed that a few people on LinkedIn

were saying they've been laid off from second dinner. I followed up and the spokesperson told me that there was a quote relatively small number of staff leaving and the cuts do not affect the as yet unannounced second game from Second Dinner which has been in the works as I note in the article since back in 2023. And shortly after I posted that story, Second Dinner got in touch to say 16 staff to be precise were laid off. And the company has had a bit of an eventful time uh in the last few years. It raised 100 million from Griffin Gaming Partners in January 2024. Then it was caught up in the US Tik Tok ban in January 2025 because its publisher New was owned by Bite Dance, a maker of Tik Tok. Marvel Snap actually dropped off the store and then came back uh as a self-published game. Benro, the boss of Second Dinner, posted on the game's Discord and was very transparent about

these cuts. He said, "These decisions were painful to make and say nothing about the quality of the people leaving." He later moved to ease any concerns the player community had by saying, "For those of you concerned about Snap, we're still here, still building, still committed to this game and to you. The road map we shared in March remains the same. This is us making hard decisions to make sure we can keep going. Not a sign that we're winding down. Ben Bro did one of the best GDC talks I've ever seen back when the game was fresh on the market. That's on the site somewhere if you want to dig that out. But yeah, hope all is well at Second Dinner and stay tuned for perhaps some news on that second game soon. Talk about Scopley and Niantic. This came in after last week's podcast was published, so we can talk about it here. Big assist on this one from my friend John Hicks, who runs gamesindustry.biz. He was on

the ground in Vegas last week at the Icon Two Eyes event, which is the ESA, the people who used to run E3. It's their attempt at bringing back some sort of big industry event, although they are keen to have everyone call it the Davos of games. Quite glitzy, quite glamorous. Apparently, John sat in on the Scopely and Niantic session in which they talked through the runup, execution of, and aftermath of that 3.5 billion mega deal, I've called it in the headline. They chronicled, as I say in the article, the late nights and naughty technical problems the two companies overcame as they joined forces. But the chat was between Scopely Chief Revenue Officer Tim O'Brien and Niantic President Ed Woo. There's a little bit of cander which you don't often get at these kind of glitzy

slick events. O'Brien did say there are times when deals don't go well, but the Niantic one has gone exceptionally well. Niantic's portfolio double digit year-over-year growth. He also noted a little bit of trepidation among the partners. Previously, Niantic obviously worked quite closely with the Pokémon Company, Nintendo, and Capcom for those games. Although, of course, Scopi works with lots of partners, too. There's some natural trepidation in the meeting of those two sets of stakeholders, I guess you would say. Brian did reference some getting to know you time. He says the partnership with the IP partners couldn't be stronger now, but but also noted there was some concern as we came in. You have to be careful, particularly with Pokémon Go, big passionate fan base. You got to be very very careful about keeping that fan base happy because as in a lot of online community culture, the tide can turn on you quite

quickly. So yeah, good that O'Brien noted that. There's also talk about the immense amounts of time the two executive suites spent together, Niantic and Scopely, even during the LA wildfires of January 2025. Woo also says I think Scopi is probably well known in the industry for the headline amounts that they can spend on acquisitions or user acquisition. The implication being that you know maybe Scopi is seen as a group of wealthy financiers more than game makers and creatives and I guess to some extent that is true. They are well known for being dealmakers. Woo was keen to stress that Scopely was focused on quote investing whatever is necessary to make an opportunity succeed. The example given later on in the article is Pikmin Bloom which Woo

noted in his various meetings with the Scopely hierarchy that it was a really really strong game in terms of retention but wasn't really delivering in terms of revenue and since being under Scopley's management that game has performed much better. The middle chunk of the article is where O'Brien talks about the complex technology involved in running these games that Niantic obviously pioneered. Talking about tons of middle of the night phone calls, people sitting in offices trying to understand how this technology works, a strain on marriages. But obviously it helped that Nantic could be a quote self- sustaining independently run business by itself. I can paraphrase O'Brien where he says a lot of companies they acquire or work with need a lot of help from Scoply, but Niantic had already been running these games very successfully by itself. And then O'Brien was very complimentary about the transition teams and prep work

that goes into a big move like this. And the the final flourish, I think, was where O'Brien says, quote, "We're not a publicly traded company. We don't have the type of quarterly pressures that other gaming businesses are under and we have a very long-term horizon view. So yes, the message here is Scopely is very much in it for the long term. It has a lot of money to invest in things it thinks can grow. A lot more detail and nuance in the article of course which is on the site. The headline is Scopely and Niantic on getting that seismic $3.5 billion mega deal over the line. Have a look. Tell me what you think.
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It's the start of the month, so it is time for your regular monthly dose of app magic estimates. For the previous month, April's top mobile game downloads included Minecraft. Interestingly enough, at 25.5 million installs for Minecraft in the month of April, according to AppMagic. Digging into those estimates a little further, it seems that there was some sort of free trial on Google Play in April, which led to that huge spike. Obviously, Minecraft is typically a premium game, which pulls in about 4 to 6 million downloads per month, leapt up to 25.5 million in April. I've asked Microsoft what the deal is with that free trial, but don't hold your breath for a response. All

that bumps the typical chart topper, Block Blast down into second, Freef Fire into third. The other big story in the top 10 in terms of downloads, Arrows and Arrows Go from Mini Clip and Learnings respectively. Both of these sort of hyper casual looking puzzle type titles. Big surge in downloads in April for both games. Arrows rose up the charts 46 places. Arrows go from learnings up 336 places which I think just means that it had only just launched in March and April was its first full month on the market. India biggest market by far for both those games. About quarter of the downloads in April for both those games were from players in India. Another notable one, Royal Kingdom. Sudden surge into the top 10, up 20 spots month on month. 12.1 million downloads is his

best month of downloads yet. Plenty more data and observations in the analysis on the site. And in the top grossing charts, a fairly static top 10. Four games earning over 100 million. Honor of Kings, Last World Survival, White Out Survival, and Royal Match. PUBG Mobile took a little bit of a dive down three spots under 100 million for that game for the first time in a couple of months. Outside of the top 10 is where the action is, though. Delta Force doing really well. Another quitely lucrative month. Up four places and back over 50 million in earnings per month from inapp purchases. Hongkey Star Rail, very spiky game, has seen a slightly more steady increase in revenue in the last few months. It earned just $6 million in January, but it has basically grown

every month since then and is now up to 37 millionish dollars for April. Konami's e Football, another lowkey success. Its earnings has been growing pretty steadily since 2022 with some peaks and troughs, but 36 million earned in April, close to its biggest ever month, which was 40 million back in July 2025. Tomb Blast, another one that's doing really well. Big growth spurt for that game in late 2023. It's back earning about 30 million a month. Pokémon Go dropped out the top 20 once again under 30 million for that one, down nine places month. And players in Japan are spending big money on Monster Strike, a top grossing chart veteran. And a newer game, Bandai Namco's BD Gundam Generation Eternal,

which as well as having a clunky name, has a really appalling app icon. get the full story as ever on the site in the article in this week's data digest. EA mobile revenue down 5% yearonear. This is probably one of the last times EA is going to report its financial results and it does split out its earnings between console PC and mobile. So I found this interesting. Earnings from mobile were down yearon-year by 5%, dropping from $287 million a year ago to $272 million for the three months ended March 31st. Roblox shares were down 18% after it cut its bookings forecast. These were down to news child safety features which may well negatively

impact growth. Steelfront's Q1 revenue was down 13.6% 6% 144 million earned in Q1 for Steelfront Studios that includes franchises including the big series Empire Supremacy Albian there's also BitLife Jawaka in there as well MTG owner of lots of studios including Pllearium Hutch and others also reported their Q1 64 million in Eba profits it's also continuing to push through an IPO for its place simple division in India. Craftton's quarterly sales were $931 million. Mobile accounting for over half of the South Korean publishers revenue in Q1. Most of that is PUBG and PUBG India. Mintel Games 2 million in preede funding. Another Istanbul based studio

getting some funding. Misplay has acquired fellow rewarded advertising platform My Chips, which is owned by MAF. The adtech industry continues to reveal companies I have never heard of and yet appear to be quite big and important. Then there's figures from Sensor Tower on mobile game revenue in March. Sensit data was published by the games business. March's revenue for the mobile category up 2% on February's total down 1% year on year. So basically flat. Last war survival topped the monthly revenue chart again $128.3 million in March. Honor of Kings $116.3 million in March. So quite a big difference between the sensor tower numbers and the magic numbers. more granular data in the article on the site. Have a look.

There's a bank holiday in the UK this week. So, only one story posted on Monday. That was the jobs digest. A busy one. Um, very much led by Jam City and Josh Iguadu. Not sure how you say that. Um, his departure from the company he founded. He's being replaced by Chilman Sim as CEO. Sim is also CEO of Kabam. So he he's now going to be CEO of both. There's also moves in there at Scopely, Niantic, Activision, Netflix, Supercell, Social Point, Moon Active, Crazy Labs, Loom Games, and more. The thing I called out on LinkedIn that seemed to get a bit of traction is Netflix hiring Christopher Pope, who is Fortnite's ex director of design. clearly a big name in the business. He also spent 15 years at Ubisoft and just goes to show that Netflix, although things have quietened down a little bit in terms of them

hiring lots and lots of top talent, they are still in the market for the right people, particularly uh if they're Expic. Um, obviously Alan Tascan is of that stock too, so there's some good connective tissue there. more moves and promotions in that article on the site. Have a look. And finally, worth mentioning, I think, a few things from last week's New Game Digest. Fortnite and Rocket League have come out in Japan via the Epic Game Store on iOS. And of course, Epic took a swipe at Apple's policies as part of that announcement. Aries Interactive announced its Walking Dead Aftermath game that is coming out this summer. Guild Wars Reforged is coming out from NCoFT/Arenet. Monster Hunter Outlanders is edging closer to release. There's a second beta test going on for that one. Couple of

other titles in there, including a new Netflix party game and a big new update for Genchin Impact. And that's it for this week. recorded on the coast of MadiRaa, Portugal, alongside a very, very large cruise ship, which might be making a horrible noise. We'll find out in the edit. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.