Unity copies the AppLovin playbook with Vector | Week in Mobile Games podcast

[music] Hello, welcome to the pocket gamer.biz podcast week in mobile games where we chat about the week's news and provide some insights. I'm Craig Chapel, head of content at pocketgamer.biz. With me this week is our news editor, Aaron Assel. I know Paige this week. She is on holiday. It's the Easter holidays now as I'm sure many of you are aware. So, a couple days off for everyone. But Aaron, how's things going?
Yeah, very well, thank you. As we said last week, it it's h been my birthday. We recorded the day before my birthday last week. So, the the eagleeyed viewers may have already spotted I've put a new Pokémon figure in the back. Yeah, we got like a little tur twig, which was my first ever Pokémon from Diamond and Pearl. Um, and then like the player character. And I'm also wearing some new Bluetooth headphones which have a very nifty light up Pikachu on each each ear

which hopefully you can kind of see that in the
Yes. Yeah. For video viewers. Yeah. There's like it's almost like a neon Pikachu.
Yeah. I'll stay side on for a sec. But yeah, obviously I'm the only one who doesn't get to benefit from them. You know, I can't see them when I'm wearing them. So, um I'll just have to listen to them while looking into the mirror. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Yeah, I think really I got bought them just as a little like joke present, but I've never actually had Bluetooth headphones before. So, you know, I'm actually trying to make use of them now. I have some,
you know, seeing the turt reminded me that so bul. They look exactly the same, but they don't. But they look astonishingly similar.
Yeah, they're both four-legged grass starters. If you
Tig's got the leaf on his head instead of on his back.
If you put Bulbasaur on a diet plan and replace the bulb with some leaves, you got yourself a turtle twig.
Pretty much. I mean, I like Bulbasaur as well, but yeah, there's a similar kind

of profile going on.
Give him a shell.
Um, and yeah, as for I guess outside of just showing off my presents, um, so I spent my birthday, so I went out for dinner like with family on my birthday. went out with some friends the the night after we went out in Oxford and we did another escape room. So I did my first one last year for my birthday and that was like pirate themed and we we smashed it last year. So we had an hour and we did it in like 31 minutes. Um which you know for my first one I thought that was pretty good going and we all had a great time. typical thing of, yeah, we should do these more often. And so now, a whole year later, we finally got around to doing another one. And yeah, this one we struggled a lot more. So, it's sort of multiple rooms you had to try and get through. Like, you'd unlock doors to progress to new rooms basically. So, it was still an hour. We were still in the first room after half an hour, which I said basically how long it took us to clear the whole one last time. And then

we sort of in the second room when they sort of spoke in and said, "Look, you got 10 minutes left." We eventually finished that and then got into a final room knowing we had less than 10 minutes left. Then we had the you've got 1 minute left. And so we were all just frantically pressing stuff and doing whatever to try and see if anything could be done. Um and somehow we did manage it and um apparently our clear time was 59 minutes and 59 seconds. This is right before they end it.
Yeah. So, we really got our money's worth on this one. Made good use full use of the time. But yes, that was good fun. Yeah, it was a nice weekend. And then obviously this weekend we got a long one coming up. So, it's sort of been well timed really.
Yeah, that that sounds like an awesome way to celebrate your birthday. And then, like you say, now you get an extra extra long weekend.
Yeah.
Perfect. All right. Thank Thanks for that, Aaron. As for myself, I appear to just be on this streak of watching films

at the moment and the games that I mainly play are Starcraft still. I I watched Mission Impossible Final Reckoning and it's just so ridiculous. It's such a dumb movie. I really like the Mission Impossible series generally actually and the previous one, Dead Reckoning, I thought was fantastic. The stunts were good. It was a fun film. Final Reckoning, oh my god, it's not even really a spy thriller. It's just like this hero movie where everybody seems to know who Ethan Hunt is. He's not like this sort of secret international spy working for a secret agency. It's just like he is the hero. He's the president. What the what is happening? And I need to find a video or something like the amount of times they say the words the entity. So, in the film, in the films, the entity, spoilers, AI, the entity is like the villain, which I think is a really terrible villain, even in the first one. Although, there's this man that's a fantastic villain, but like it doesn't really work when a robot's a villain because you can't really relate to it

in any way. Well, I think all the best villains are always something that have like a good motive, you know, that you could kind of think like, oh, I kind of get where they're coming from, even though they're awful person or whatever. Yeah. Every scene they say the entity and I don't know if anyone saw I didn't caught a glimpse of this, but I think Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were talking about how Netflix movies and some streaming movies are designed to be written in a way that is for people that don't pay attention. So, you think you're repeating the plot points?
Oh my god. Is Mr. Impossible Final Reckoning the exact is the epitome of what they're saying so many times. And I know that I believe that they write some of these movies or all of them like kind of on the fly like it's written and then they don't always have a finished script. So, famously, I'm going back into the Diaz now. Famously in Ghost Protocol, there's a scene in the start where they're in a van and they're discussing like, well, I don't know what's happening. I think it's Ghost

Protocol. It's the fourth one. And because in the script they didn't know what was happening either. So they were like why don't we just lean into that and the characters don't [clears throat] and this film is just I don't know if it was that or what but they tell feels like the same characters sit around about three or four times throughout the film and just reexlain the plot to you and why they're doing things where they're going. Like I was I was literally like please shut up and get on with it. You could have shaved it's like a three-hour film. You could have shaved off like a half hour without these needless things. Uh so yeah, there's some still some cool stuff. Yeah, apparently it's probably not even the final one. There'll be another one even though that's how it's marketed. Whatever. See it or don't see it. I don't think you're missing them. Cool. Wait. I always have a bones. Um we we'll get into the news. As always, a few shoutouts for our events. We have Pocket Gamer Connect Summit Malmo coming up May 27th and 28th. 27th is just for networking. 28th. We've got a little summit going on. Barcelona on June 15th

to 16th. That's going to be a pretty big show by the look of it. And we got Shanghai July 29th. Helsinki October 20th to 21st. Bangkok October 27th. And we'll be heading to the Canary Islands in December hopefully. And of course, Pocket Games Awards is coming in August alongside Games. So hopefully we'll see you there. Right. A few news bits this week. the first bit how last week we said oh we recorded on a Wednesday we'll probably miss something that happens in the in the subsequent day so something obviously didn't then happen which was Unity is to shut down the Iron Source ad ads network and is exploring a sale of supersonic its games publishing business so Unity said that the Iron Source ad network will be shut down effective April 30th 2026 so Really the idea is to focus on the unity vector business which is like their AIdriven copy of app

loving business that they're doing. Apparently the platform is expected to increase 15% sequentially in the first quarter and it was contributing to stronger than anticipated results across the business. One of the interesting things it got me thinking about was how much they are copying apploving and a bit of the history of app loving and iron source and then unity. So when apploing stepped into the publishing space it was really controversial. I remember speaking with some marketers from some major publishers at the time who were very unhappy that their data could potentially be used against them by what they now saw as a competitor. I think this was in 2019 uh 2018. So uh one marketer said they were going to stop working with Atloven. Another said that they felt they had no choice but to continue using Atloven services. It was kind of like the devil you know kind of situation. So in 2018 a few months after Lion Studios which is at loven that was the start of their publishing business officially the official announcement of

it. Obviously later they had other studios. There's so much more you could go into there but I won't. A few months after Alliance Studios was officially launched, I headed to Iron Sourc's Gamefest event in also in 2018, which brought together UA experts from around the world that was in Israel. Uh speaking with a member of the Iron Source leadership team at the time, I remember one executive telling me that they wouldn't be stepping into games publishing like Applovin had. They clearly saw an opportunity to to differentiate themselves from apploving and perhaps take some of that business from angry customers. Some companies were pretty angry with apploving at the time. And I think over time as applo scaled that part of the business I believe it was to basically get data on users and then they went into midcore with machine got more data and that helped kind of start growing Applover's business as we know it today. But by 2020 I source opened supersonic. So they copied it. who they decided, oh actually

doing something different from apploving isn't working. We're going to do the same. So flash forward a few years post the hyper casual boom, the unity apploving iron source acquisition saga and the rise of apploven's AI powers ad business now unity are doing the same thing. They are leaving those publishing operations behind. One thing that's worth mentioning is as much as Apploving has left it behind, I think they still own 20% of Triple Dot which bought it all of its game studios. So Unity wants to focus on the vector growth story and peel away parts of the business that aren't part of that narrative. It's copying that above playbook, but it has for people worried about the engine. It has previously hinted that the engine division or the create division as it were could be its killer USP for the AS business taking some data from the games there. I don't know how that would work if that can work. Well, now the question is, can Unity actually become a like a worthy competitor to Apploving or at least grow Vector enough that it's a really profitable business? I thought that was interesting. A bit of history there. It makes sense that Unity doesn't

own Supersonic. I hope the team there finds a home and does well. Maybe maybe Triple Dot would also come in [laughter] in for that. It depends if Unity is going to look at a fire cell. Yeah, that's cool. Uh Aaron, we'll move on to the next story. What else have you got? First up from me is some Sonic Rumble news. So the the game has rebranded to Sonic Rumble Party following various overhauls in the version 1.5 update. So this this went live on March 16th. So we're kind of two weeks on from it now, but I thought it was worth sort of taking a look through some of the the changes that they've made and also whether this has had much impact so far revenue-wise based on estimates. Um, so Sega had previously said that Sonic Rumble had fallen short of expectations, I think, across like every KPI they said. Um, and obviously it had a, you know, a long kind of soft launch time and it got delayed multiple times. So

then when it finally did go global, you know, it's not had the impact they were they were hoping for. So it's quite clear this latest update has been quite a big effort to, I guess, try and add some wind to the game sales. And among the changes, so there's like the party rumble mode, which I presume is why it's now the game is now Sonic Rumble party. Um, so yeah, this mode offers a variety of like one round games. There's a high-speed skateboard race. There's like a competition to collect the most cow. Uh, there's jump rope jam, lots of like short challenges, I guess. Um, and these modes have been explicitly designed for quick and casual play. Some existing stages have also had difficulty adjustments. Uh, three new ones have been added. Uh, while some of these changes have been made and new things have been added, they've also removed certain things. Special rumbles research and Dr. Eggman's challenges are gone.

And notably, so is Quick Rumble, which when we interviewed uh Roio, who have kind of been partners more on like the communicationsy side for this, we interviewed them last year about something Rumble after it was delayed. Um, and Quick Rumble came up as one of the features they were working on kind of that they wanted to implement based on player feedback. So, it's I think quite noteworthy that one of the things they delayed it to create is no longer in the game. Anyway, as for the numbers and I guess whether this is paying off so far, so according to AppMagic estimates across its lifetime, Sonic Rumble party has made 1.6 million between Google Play and the App Store. So, obviously in the the context of the broader mobile games industry, 1.6 6 million isn't, you know, huge amounts of money, especially an IP like Sonic. It doesn't really look like revenue's picked up since they've done this update so far. In fact, it's um declined. So,

in the the two weeks since the update, um the game has picked up about 53,000 in player spending, whereas it made 65,000 the two weeks leading up to the update. So, yeah, there's a decline there. And over March as a whole, um, their spending was down about 13 1.5% from February. So it dropped from 148,000 to 128,000 over the course of a month, which also means the kind of consecutive monthly decline continues. Um, I think every month since the game came out in November, like that was the peak and then it's declined every month since then so far. So again, it's clear to see why they they've done this rebrand and trying to implement new things, but at least in these initial weeks, it hasn't really had an impact. They're also doing crossovers um at the minute. There was a Smurfs crossover

and Care Bears, as I seem to have made much impact on spending or anything since since this update. I was quite surprised. It seems a bit of a tonal shift cuz their their previous big like crossover was with Godzilla in December. Um, which I mean I guess you know they're experimenting you can say but like I don't know you know I I can see Sonic players being into Godzilla more than like Care Bears personally but obviously I have not done any market research on that. But yeah, it it's it's a thing that's happening. You're right though that in in essence though, you don't have to do the market research surely to know that there's no crossover between Car Bears and Godzilla and the Smurfs. I'll tell you all three of those are very different, very different audiences. I guess market research would help back up that claim, but it feels pretty obvious on the face of it. At least it's a shame what's happening with Sonic Rumble. I hope that

Roio doesn't get the blame for Sonic Rumble's faults because it was developed by a Sega team. Roio's role is in publishing and through its um Beacon platform I think which was called out by Sega as as overvaluing the business which I thought was interesting. That again strikes me as a lack of due diligence by Sega at the time. Maybe if we look back the deal was a bit rushed, but anyway, back to the Rumble. Uh yeah, I guess we'll see how it goes. Chasing the name, a rebrand. You can rebrand it, but if you're still not focused on what you're going to do with these partnerships with really the game itself, it seems like they're kind of clutching a straw. So, I hope they figure it out and I hope they find the success for the team. But at the moment, it does seem all a bit mixed. We'll move on to the next story, which should be a fairly quick one. Uh the ninth circuit court has denied Apple's reharing request uh in the Epic

Games App Store dispute. So as you may remember the app store was cracked open by a furious judge who was not very happy with Apple. I think someone was even referred to for criminal proceedings for lying to the court. Apple had argued that the expanded scope of the ultimate ruling created uncertainty around what fees it could charge for transactions completed outside of his ecosystem, which is kind of funny to me that they really really want to charge for transactions that do not take place on their platform.
Um, but that here has been denied. I believe that Apple can still file an appeal to that as well. I guess we're going to see what happens with that. I know that I think one of their appeals was already successful in that they can charge at the moment. I think they just technically don't have to receive anything, but I think it was last year there was a decision that okay, Apple can actually get some money from their app store, which is fair to get something. I was thinking that a lot hinges on what the judge in the Google

Epic case does and I know they're different and the results are come about for different things. So obviously recently Google and Epic made a deal that we discuss we've discussed at length uh reduces the creates a platform fee really of 20% and then Google can take an extra 5% if you use Google pay. So effectively cuts fees by about 5%. for developers in a lot of places around the world including Europe, the US not so much at the moment because we're waiting on basically the US judge to say that that deal is okay or not and that the judge in the Google case expressed a lot of skepticism that you know these enemy mortal enemies have now become friends and as we discussed last week it does feel like that whole this whole settlement has really come about because Epic they made a thousand layoffs Now, as we know, and it feels like it's come

about because Epic's like, "Okay, well, we need to end this now. We can't do this forever. We need to take the benefits now, not in a few years if we can claw back even more of a percentage." So, what is the judge going to think of that? That I believe I believe the hearing is scheduled for April 9th. I think if the judge was to say, "Okay, like your your settlement is fine." I wonder if that affects the Apple case because surely Apple could then say can we not just charge this like it's fair there's now precedent but I don't know how that would work I'm not as I say I'm not a lawyer but I feel like one can affect the other here so something to watch out for what else have you got
right uh yeah my my other story this week is about Fire Emblem Shadows which is Nintendo's you know hot new mobile game that they released 6 months ago so yeah I I basically took a look into how the game's been doing. We we've talked about it before on the podcast that it, you know, it hasn't really done particularly well, especially compared to like Fire Emblem Heroes, which is Nintendo's biggest mobile game. So,

yeah, like looking at App Magic figures, Fire Emblem Shadows made just 578,000 in its first 6 months. So, it was Shadow Dropped last September and yeah, marked Nintendo's first new mobile game in six years because we we'd sort of long doubted their claims that they were still interested in making mobile games and then they released one, but it's yeah, not really hit the mark like some of the others, particularly Heroes. Um, so yeah, as I say, just over half a million in 6 months. Um that's less than 1% of what Heroes made in its first six months. Um Heroes made 150 million. So yeah, half a million. It's no comparison really. So I um kind of took a look into um you know some of the the differences. I'm a big Fire Emblem fan anyway, so I

sort of they were immediately apparent when the game came out that you know why heroes worked better. I think Heroes is basically the Fire Emblem formula where we were saying about like the Sonic kind of market research. I guess like Heroes is like Fire Emblem but in mobile form with a gacha to get old characters whereas Shadows is a totally different genre of game. like it's realtime combat whereas the main series is turnbased and it's like a social deduction game which I don't know if there was any evidence to suggest Fire Emblem fans would like that particularly you know it's like a a bit among us
right but Among Us did well so
yeah yeah but it's also down to the monetization model I think as to our shadows hasn't done so well because there's basically a monthly season pass where you can get on like legacy character generally if you buy the season pass. So then you go through the kind of reward tiers and end up

unlocking this new character from the main series. But if you don't buy the season pass, you can unlock them like a couple of months later for free anyway. And if you do buy the season pass, well that that's kind of all there is to buy. So you've done your like one purchase for the month which obviously some games run on a subscription model but it's just yeah I think compared to a gacha where like heroes adds roughly like four characters of Fortnite and then you get like a big banner at the end of every month with usually one like character that's especially good in the kind of competitive like arena scene. So there's just way more characters to summon for and it's a gotcha. So, you know, people spend money to try and get the character rather than just buy a season pass and then get the character. So, just fundamentally like in basically every way they're doing the opposite thing these two games. So, yeah, I guess we'll see how long the game lasts. I said before and kind of surprised that they released it. I mean, like we won't

really talk about the game's quality, but just like like you well there just how it monetizes. It's it's not a mobile game really. So, I'm kind of surprised. I mean, maybe they did try this or maybe they just it's their own IP. They didn't want to do this, but it seems like it's kind of perfect for a Netflix deal or an Apple Arcade sort of thing because it doesn't really monetize like a mobile game, right? It just it's just such an odd game to have released. All right. Uh, thanks for that, Aaron. The very last thing I wanted to do, which I'll do fairly quick because it's astonishingly late, so apologies. All right, I finally did the February mobile game charts like just in time to do the March mobile game charts at this point. But there was a few interesting takeaways that I thought I want to mention and that I wanted to mention. So with the top grossing games, I thought it was just interesting that in recent months we had these fast growing g we had these games growing like your white out survival, your monopoly go recently like Kingshot,

we've got gossip harbor, Last Sea survival and what's really and those have become like sort of the new top grossing games. The long running joke is that those charts never change. They kind of have over a period of years and now this is the new the new lot that will probably take a couple more years to get a few more years to get replaced as well. They've basically peaked or started to decline. I just thought that was interesting. Everyone's going on about how China's dominating that. And don't get me wrong, they are. These projects definitely are. Doesn't matter if they're not growing. They're still at the top. Insane amounts of money. Like the Forex and M genres, they've grown to like new height. Scaled them to new heights. especially like surprisingly forex because you thought that was already a very lucrative genre that peaked. The only one that's really growing is micro funds gossip harbor which in February actually declined but that's you know seasonal I'm sure in March those figures are back on the rise. Um it's just interesting even other fast rises and there could be various reasons for this but royal kingdoms kind of peaked. Pixel Flow from

Loom Games is kind of stabilized and peaked at a very like a very lucrative level. We don't have to grow forever. I'm just saying. But then that could be Scope Cle might be preparing a big user acquisition campaign post acquisition. So, you know, maybe that's going to scale up dramatically in the not so distant future. I thought that was just an interesting thing to that that I found. Some other quick things from top grossers that I thought were interesting is Monopoly Go revenue according to AppMagic estimates tanked in February uh to to a measly $111 million gross gross revenue error. It's pretty pathetic really if you think about
Yeah. Not worth it at that point.
Yeah. What's the point? Uh no, obviously still amazingly good but it's just how much it's And that was a fall of 39.5%. uh from January. So that was a very big decline. Looks like it's slightly that decline has kind of reversed a bit in

March. You did a big interview about their pet season which actually kind of covers some of this period. So I'm just curious if that how how that update connected with fans or didn't sounds like it did but don't know. I guess the key thing to kind of keep in mind with this with any market intelligence platform it is just player spending on apps on Google Play outside of China at the moment. Set Tower is looking at doing direct to consumer estimates, but for this purposes, we don't see that. So, it's curious how much Scope Fleet has managed to put on their direct to consumer platform now and if that makes up for at least some of that decline. And it would be worrying if market intelligence isn't even directional at this point. Um, which which is possible. Anyway, I digress. So, that was really interesting. And then a couple quick ones. Brawl Stars, is it back on the rise again? Is this another game this year from Supercell that goes back up in Live Ops? It's seen a revenue rise since November 2025 and it hit 33 million in February. That was up 9.2% of the month.

That's gross revenue. Um that growth has continued in March. So that looks like it could be back on the up. We'll see how sustainable that is in the long term. Wthering Waves had its best month since June 2024 made up $50 million. Uh, Hottopia is looking pretty good. It hit $28.7 million last month. That's from XD Network. So, multiplayer lives. Play Tikica's Disney Solitaire started scaling again in February as revenue hit 26.5 million. Uh, that followed a rise in downloads as well from 1.5 million in December to 5.5 million in January, 5.6 in February. And one game to keep an eye on and this will be the last one I do. Century Games Tasty Travels which could be the next big hit in the nurse category. So a player spending rise slightly to $24.4 million in February and it's on the rise again in March. So that is Chinese publishers really moving in heavily like like microphone on the

casual space and match free when you ask people it feels like the last bastion for uh publishers. It's like the gap in the market that China hasn't yet cracked
unless you create something new like a loom games. So, we'll see what happens this year with with match three. But yeah, they're definitely cracking merge or the cracked merge. We'll see what happens. Interesting. Hopefully next week I'll be able to talk about the March and we'll see how some of those games that I mentioned have done. Right. So anyway, that brings us to the end of the Pocket Gamer podcast week in mobile games. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you, Aaron, for all your insights tonight.
Yeah, thank you. That's been a good one. Good topic.
And we hope you all have a great Easter weekend. Enjoy the holidays and we'll see you again for next week's show. Have a good one. Okay, bye.