Supercell, King and Sybo slam EU plan, Atari buys Hipster Whale, Zynga's Mark Pincus, 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 is a fun one. Um Supercell, King, and Sybo bosses Ilkka Paananen and Todd Green and Mathias Gredal Norvig executed a coordinated strike on uh EU regulators this week. They all spoke to the Financial Times to air their concerns about forthcoming proposals from the EU which would act a bit like how cookies act when you're browsing the web in the EU. So, there would be an EU-mandated pop-up every time you spend in-game currency or buy in-app currency, which is obviously a disaster if enacted. Their quotes in the FT piece aren't as dramatic as the ones from October 2025 when Ilkka

said these proposals could kill European game developers, but they still do not reflect well on what the EU is trying to do here. Ilkka takes the lead in this article in terms of quotage. He says basically most free-to-play games would be unplayable in Europe. Mobile games are a real strength for European tech and business, and that would kneecap these companies pretty much overnight. Todd Green for his part is not quoted that much in the FT piece, so I'm guessing his quotes weren't as juicy as Ilkka's, but he basically just says these proposals, if approved, would make playing mobile games like Candy Crush Saga confusing and less attractive in the EU. Mathias of Sybo fame says that these are just confused bits of legislation based on anecdotal evidence where some parents have been taken aback by their children

running up big in-app purchase bills. And he's right, if you are handing your child a phone or an iPad to play games with, you should probably know what they're doing on there, I would say. So, yeah, I think this legislation will probably get shut down based on this level of industry feedback. The EU's proposals will be reviewed this autumn, apparently. So, let's anticipate absolutely nothing happening from this. Although, it will have cost the leadership at Supercell, SciPlay, and King plenty of time and money to do all of this. The EU probably not doing itself many favors here, proposing a load of stuff that would ruin a load of very successful businesses. It's been fun to see some very powerful people speak out, but let's hope that's the end of it. The big and unexpected, I would say, acquisition news of the week is Atari

acquiring Hipster Whale, maker of Crossy Road and other titles, for an initial 29.3 million dollars. The price will go up another 10 million in earn-outs and so on if Hipster Whale hits its targets over the next 3 years. Crossy Road, an absolute smash hit back in, I think, 2014. In the press release for this acquisition, it said that that game has been downloaded 340 million times in its lifetime. Hipster Whale also released Pac-Man 256, Disney Crossy Road, a really good and underrated Peggle-type game called Piffle, and Crossy Road Castle, which was one of the flagship games near the launch of Apple Arcade. Atari expects to complete the acquisition in the next few days and has also been snapping up retro specialists elsewhere

in the industry. So, it bought Digital Eclipse and Nightdive Studios, which are both kind of retro remake type companies. So, yeah, Atari now owns Hipster Whale. It just seems to be quite a sensible pretty well-run company with some good hits under its belt. So, good luck to everyone at Hipster Whale and Atari with whatever they're planning in mobile. It says in the announcement that there are projects a foot with Amazon, Netflix, and Air Console. An unexpected acquisition to start the week. Some fun comments for the game designers among you from Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus. As reported on Tuesday, the headline here is Zynga founder Mark Pincus says, quote, "Only a master craftsman can spot excellence and be comfortable copying

it." There's also a few shots fired in a way at Supercell in this article, which is based on a free sample of Pincus's book, Life at the Speed of Play, which is coming out in June 23rd. If you sign up to Mark's mailing list, you get sent a free chapter of the book, which is all about his proven better new methodology, which he pioneered at Zynga, and you know, the rest is history. Lots of other product manager and game design people, specifically in mobile, do use this as a foundation for how they make new games. He breaks down the proven better new definitions. It's pretty self-explanatory, honestly. But, you can read his specific wording in the article. He also defends

the idea of copying other people's work in quite a forthright way. He reuses Steve Jobs' famous line, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Which he itself is modified and stolen a little bit from Picasso, apparently. The meetiest quotes here are, "We all want to be respected by our peers, so our egos hold us back from copying. In my experience, the more junior the product teams, the more they spend cycles trying hard not to copy or even look as if they were copying. We need to get comfortable copying what already works, {brackets} legally, so we can spend all our time and energy on the novel innovation that actually excites us and our users." He continues, "Only a master craftsman can spot excellence and be comfortable copying it. They recognize when something is already excellent and understand that changing anything will just make it worse. There's also bits on why all new fails,

which became a motto as well within Zynga in the early days. There's an example of this proven better new idea and how it applies to Zynga Poker. And that bit about Supercell and FarmVille, which it probably is a little underappreciated that Hay Day is effectively FarmVille for mobile, and Pincus says as much. Clash of Clans is also pretty much a copy of another early Facebook game as well. Supercell has clearly been making notes on the Zynga approach. For more detail and you see quotes from Pincus in the article. Have a look.
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I've been experimenting a little bit with what we cover on mobilegamer.biz and why. There's a couple of quicker stories on the site this week which reflect that. First of those, Simpsons taking over Monopoly Go. There's a big new season that starts June 3rd, goes until July 29th. And it's a complete Simpsons takeover involving the Simpsons writers, all the characters, and locations you know from Springfield and beyond. And I think this is interesting because it will inevitably come with a big marketing spend as well. They've got Will Ferrell back in as the voice of Mr.

Monopoly, and he's in a sort of tussle storyline with Mr. Burns. So, that's pretty good stuff. Consume Me, the multi-award winning indie game, is now on iOS. That came out June 2nd. It's $9.99. And its developer says, "I genuinely think it this is the best way to play the game, and I had always envisioned Consume Me as a phone game because I'm not really a gamer. I made this game for my younger self who did not really play games on the computer. If you look at Consume Me, the art, the mini games, everything, it is clearly a mobile game, but if this had come out as a iPhone game, it probably wouldn't have won all those credible indie game awards. But anyway, you can check out for yourself. $9.99 on iOS only. No word on an Android release yet. Another quick one. Apple announced the winners of the Apple Design Awards

Tuesday evening. Is this seat taken from Potty Party Studio took the Delight and Fun award. Pine Hearts from Secret Mode got Inclusivity. Ginger's Garden from Sago Mini, the kids specialist, scooped Interaction. And Can See Me, which was nominated as a macOS game, but just came out on iOS, too, got the Social Impact award. Matt Games' Cyberpunk 2077 and Blue Prince got the other awards in visuals and graphics and innovation, respectively. And the final quick product-related announcement on the site this week, Mattel has got its first first-party game out on the stores. It's Masters of the Universe: Skeletor Until Next Time. Very convoluted title, but yeah, it's a tie-in to the film that is coming out next week. And it's a Subway Surfers-style runner, but more broadly, it's notable as

Mattel's first real first-party game launch. It is under the label Mattel Game Studios, which is separate and different thing to Mattel 163, which was co-owned by NetEase. Mattel recently bought the 50% of that business that NetEase owned, you would imagine will unify those games under this new brand. Mattel, by all accounts, really going for it in games, and this is the first of two games coming out through Mattel Game Studio this year according to its last financial report. It also collaborated with Canadian studio Uken to launch 3D match puzzler Mattel Match earlier this year. There was some fun at the end of last week with Block Blast. This is by far the biggest puzzle game on the planet in terms of downloads at least and it disappeared from the Google Play Store

on Thursday evening. I saw a few people posting about this and thought it was probably some sort of glitch or slight oversight and it'll be back to normal in a minute and I asked Google and Hungry Studios what was going on. No reply to me for a couple of hours and the game was still not back online. So, I wrote up to the site and as if by magic, the next morning the game had returned. Hungry Studio got in touch to say the game is back, but it doesn't have an official explanation for its disappearance or anything like that. So, I'm going to assume that maybe it got flagged as a clone or something like that or there was some other administrative error and the two companies clearly worked to rectify it pretty quickly. In data digest this week, King put out this big report about the

power and strength of mobile game development across the EU. Some big numbers in there. King estimates over 1,000 European mobile game studios contributed almost 6 billion euros to the European economy in 2025. EU-based devs also supported more than 63,000 jobs generated 7.5 billion in revenue from global audiences. That revenue is expected to rise to over 8 billion and there's a few mild shots fired in the direction of EU regulators from King President Todd Green in there. The full quotes in the article, have a look. PlayStack, publisher of Balatro or Balatro as it is apparently meant to be said, has been bought by Vantage Co. Vantage Co is a subsidiary of Integrated Media Company, which also owns Fandom and GameSpot, two big consumer games websites. The deal values PlayStack at about 168 million dollars,

125 million pounds. Elsewhere, Makers Fund and Akin Babayigit revealed UA finance firm AMF Capital their first maneuver in the market was to give Bear Hug Entertainment 28 million in UA financing. Mobile games revenue topped 4.5 billion dollars in April according to Sensor Tower figures published by The Game Business. Honor of Kings top grosser there in April. Block Blast top downloads. Detail in the article if you want that. Golf Rival, the Zynga game which is very, very similar looking to Golf Clash, 65 million registered users apparently. NetEase Q1 revenue up 6%. The star performers there on mobile are Fantasy Westwood Journey, a Chinese MMO, and Where Winds Meet, a similar game, I think. China's games approval board

approved 137 mobile games in May. This is up significantly compared to the same period in 2025, says Niko Partners. So, games getting more quickly approved in China. Hoyoverse is going to spend 14.6 billion dollars on AI investment and tools. And didn't see many other websites pick this up, but new game engine Spark, with a Q, has raised $8.5 million. This is a game engine which, according to the founders, sits somewhere between Unreal and Roblox. So, interesting stuff there. Lots more numbers and detail in the article. Have a look. In Monday's jobs digest, there are moves at Miniclip, Supersolid, Scopely, Social Point, Aeries Interactive, Tilting Point, Exola, Embrace, Ace Games, King, and a couple of other companies. Have a look at the story on the site for full details and some

lovely headshots of those involved. New game digest, that new Nintendo game's out, Picto Nico, pretty good fun, but very, very limited free-to-start offering. There's like three mini-games, and then you have to buy the full game for £8 here in the UK. MLB The Show Mobile also came out from PlayStation. Rust Mobile is on its way, there's a new beta for that. And Just Dance Party was announced in a very low-key way at some sort of Tencent showcase last week. Azur Games, which is the studio made up of a load of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes guys, their new game, Ungodly, is in pre-order now, ahead of release on July 30th. There's also Slime Rancher, and a couple of other games in there, too. I also did a bit of listical action at the end of last week. I didn't quite have enough time to

finish off another story I've been working on. And one of my old stories about Hyper Beard popped up when I was searching for something else the other day, and it made me think, actually, there's loads of stories like that which are pretty good, in my humble opinion, but didn't really get much readership in the first couple of years of this site's operation. So, I rounded them all up and put them in an article called the best mobilegamer.biz stories you probably haven't read. It's a collection of stories from the last 4 years of this site that I put a lot of work into and didn't get much readership or maybe didn't blow up in the way I thought. There's the story about Playdeo, which Apple basically acquired its founders and got them to work on what became Vision Pro. There's the rise and fall of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood Story that I did around the closure of that game with loads of fun bits from Niccolo de Masi, the then boss of Glu.

There's the sequel to that story about the other celebrity games of that era, Taylor Swift, Britney Spears and beyond. More from Niccolo in that one. There's the third bite of the cherry at King's layoffs last summer in which a former senior manager at King wrote a blog for us anonymously and gave us some insights of what it's like to work there. There's Ubisoft's weird aborted Far Cry mobile game. There's a bit about Plague Inc. and how it could have changed Boris Johnson's prime ministership if he had played it when COVID hit. There's Devolver's attempt to satirize mobile free-to-play. Bacon, the game's creator, Hyperbeard. There's good stuff in that article, I think. That's it for this week. I'm about to fly out to LA for Summer Game Fest and Play Days and the Game Business Live on the Monday. If you're out there, let me know. It doesn't seem like there's a great

deal of mobile stuff pre-announced. There may be some stuff there on the day, but we shall see. Maybe see you there. If not, thanks for listening. Speak to you next week. Goodbye.