Week in Mobile Games E52: Tim Sweeney's epic App Store win & Tripledot's $800m AppLovin deal

[Music] Hello and welcome to the pocket gamer.biz podcast week in mobile games where we discuss the week's news and provide some insights. I'm Craig Chapel, head of content at pocketamer.biz and with me as usual is our news editor Aaron Ashel. Welcome back Aaron. We've missed another week. Yeah. Um we're slipping. We're slipping. Yeah. Not not as bad as January, but No. No. Well, thankfully I haven't been ill thankfully for for about a month. We missed last week's show. I I've just been traveling and didn't get a chance to set it set this up. So, we'll go into it. I've been to Gamescom in Brazil, uh, which was great fun. And then straight away, I went home for one evening. The next day, flew out to Dubai for Dubai Game Expo Summit powered by Pocket Gamer Connects, which has also been great. And that's where I am now. I'm still in Dubai.

Hopefully this records. We'll find out. If you're listening to this, it means it worked. Yeah, it's very hot here. That's that's my one of my main takeaways. It's like 40°. Someone was telling me it's not even that hot at the moment. It's like, come on, man. Come on. You can't be serious. I'm not my pasty skin. But yeah, I've had a nice world tour. I'm a bit I think I'm tired, but I don't really realize how tired I am. So So if I if I sound like I'm speaking more nonsense than usual, that is hopefully why. But no, it's been good. How how's everything been for you? Yeah, good. Thank you. Um, it's been a it's been very busy while you've been away. I guess before we jump into all the newsy stuff, my recent highlight was probably I went to see Star Wars Episode 3 at the cinema because it's back in for like the 20th anniversary. You've seen it before, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, it it made me feel old because I saw the I saw it originally as a a very young child. Only half understood what was going on. And so to be old enough to remember seeing

the original and then back for the 20th anniversary. Did it ruin your childhood? Actually, it was all right. I think it holds up. I think that's that's supposed to be the better one or the best one. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I I would argue it's the best of Star Wars films. Oh, that that that that's that's my Gen Z controversial take. It's better than the originals. No, you mean you mean of the prequels, episode three of Star Wars media. See, it's it's better than like four, five, six, I think. This is outrageous. I could now do the whole podcast just on why you're wrong objectively. How could you how how how could you say that? A New Hope is like that's what they based the new Top Gun on, right? It's it's like a classic. Empire Strikes Back. Absolute classic. Return of the Jedi was good. I really loved of the new ones. I mean, Force Awakens at the time was was just a nice return after the terrible prequels,

Aaron. And then and then The Last Jedi controversial, but I I actually thought that was fantastic. And then and then uh what was he what was in the Rise of Skywalker was was possibly the worst one which says a lot because if you rewatch Attack of the Clones, I enjoyed it as a kid. I was like, why does everyone hate this film? I rewatched it again as an adult. I was like, I see this is this is awful. No, I won't defend um episode one or two, but I think Brie is Bree's up there. You're not It's not just defending Bree, is it? Is is you're saying it's the best? I can't I can't take it. I can't take We're We allow We allow all opinions on this show except for that. Feel free to email your complaints. We need to do a poll after this, right? Viewers like, "Do you agree with Aaron?" Yes or no. That's all I want to know. All right. All right. We're tight for time on this episode, which is funny because I'll probably talk for ages as usual. I'll do the usual shout out. So, we've just done

the Dubai Game Expo Summit. So, that's finished. You can't come to that anymore. It was a very good episode. It was a very good uh show. Next up, we've got PGC Barcelona on June 3rd to 4th. The PGC Summit in J in Shanghai on July 30th, the PGC Helsinki on October 7th and 8th. We'll be doing PGC Jordan later this year. And we'll be doing some other events and of course the Mobile Games Awards during Gamescom. So, yeah, plenty going on for us. So, more traveling. So, uh, since we missed last week's show, I think the big story that we really want to cover is obviously one of the the biggest pieces of news in the mobile games industry maybe ever, is it's just an incredible story. So, Apple in the US on the app store must now allow developers to link out directly to their payment systems, to their web shops, effective immediately. a US judge said and that's part of the Apple v Epic case and I'll

give you the actual uh so effective immediately Apple cannot impose a commission on any fee on purchases consumers make outside of an app nor audit or track such transactions restrict developers' style language formatting quantity follow or placement of links for purchases outside of an app nor can it prohibit or limit the use of such calls to action. It can't exclude certain categories of apps and developers from obtaining link access. Can't interfere with consumers' choice to proceed in or out of an app with scarecreens. So, it must now use neutral messaging to inform users they will be using a third party site. So, basically just saying you're about to use another website. That's about it. That's all they can do. Whereas before myriad of scarecreens and they can't restrict a developer use of dynamic links. So, yeah. So this is kind of at the moment the culmination of the Epic v. Apple case which was I think it was filed in

20 I think it was 2021 it was actually filed and it's just taken this long to get to this point and the judge was just scathing in their assessment of Apple's conduct. So this actually this ruling wasn't actually expected I don't think at this time and and and basically the judge in the case said this is a willful violation by Apple of an injunction issued in the case. So it had it had previously found that Apple's 30% commission was not tied to the value of its IP and was anti-competitive and it also prohibited Apple from denying developers the ability to communicate with or direct consumers to purchases outside of the store. So, I think that ruling was a bit more vague on purpose, a bit more lenient in some ways because then you see, okay, what what is Apple's reaction? And I'm remembering some of the uh well, the response to the injunction, strange credul, and that despite knowing its obligations, thwarted the injunction's

goals and continued its anti-competitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. And I think later the judge says use basically at every moment use the anti-competitive option. And it gets it just gets absolutely mad as the judge called out Apple's attempts to evade the ruling with a 20% 27% commission on off app purchases where it had previously charged nothing. Yeah, I had a go at New Barriers and and uh the judge also accused Apple VP FI of finance Alex Roman of lying under oath citing internal communications at at the company. So during this part of the case, the judge requested, I believe, contemporaneous documents because I think the judge figured something's up here. Something something's not right. And then um apparently Apple fellow Philip Schiller had advocated Apple to comply with the injunction. I read through a lot of the document. I don't know if it said explicitly like oh we

should just uh let people link out freely. I I don't know if that was the case. Then but that the CEO Tim Cook ignored him. And then to quote Tim Cook chose poorly. Unbelievable. There's there's more. Just very very incidiary quotes. I'm just I'm just uh yeah, that thought the court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation as always. The cover up made it worse for this court. There is no second bite at the apple. So obviously had to use a pun at the end there. And I think Apple is appealing, but it's not really clear. We we're speaking to the lawyers at the moment to get their opinion. We'll get that up on the site, but it's not really clear where Apple can really how much maneuverability it has from here. If you remember, the Supreme Court already rejected to hear this case. But now, I guess it's going to bounce in between courts again. I guess we'll see where this goes. But cuz Apple's already found in contempt and there's going to be

criminal proceedings, it doesn't, as I always say, I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't put Apple in a good position, right? And I guess to finish with some of this, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, you know, he won right against all odds. And we spoke to him earlier this year and he said like, "Do you regret doing this?" Because at the time it kind of felt like a almost a losing battle. He said, "No, don't regret it. Going to keep going." And did did we write a story this week, Aaron? 100 million. Yeah, I was just going to mention that the legal fees are over 100 million apparently. That's crazy. And obviously they can be more. I I don't know if in this kind of case, but if you lose sometimes you you then you then have to pay also the other side's legal fees. So it can get extremely uh expensive. He called he said it was game over for the Apple tax. Fortnite is coming back. Obviously he said again Apple's 15 to 30% junk fees are now just dead here in the US as they are in Europe. I don't

think it's quite as bad for Apple in Europe, but it's kind of getting there. We obviously had the ruling they breaching the digital markets act and there's another investigation happening into the core technology fee. So a lot of things are happening in some key markets for Apple. There was one more thing that I wanted to say about what it means. We'll be writing an article going a lot more in depth. Some experts talking about what it means for the user acquisition space. I guess is there more money now to spend on user acquisition? Does it change the kind of genres that you can uh and business models that you can actually use on mobile? If you think that profitability is actually quite tight with the 30% fee, maybe 10% taxes, user acquisition costs, and just general development cost of running a company. But by the time you get to the money you actually make from these games, it it's a low percentage. Again, obviously can be very lucrative companies, but this kind of changes things quite considerably. I I guess it doesn't grow

the market overall, but it makes in theory these publishers a lot more profitable. Uh it's too much to talk about. I spoke with Exola today and they actually again I'll we'll put an article on the site. It was David Steltzer and he said it doesn't actually necessarily mean that now 100% of revenue will be made off store. He was thinking in the near future at least be more like 50%. But bear in mind before that they were looking at 25 to 30%. So again big big change. And then now it's the last thing probably that I'll say on this matter. But one of the questions I had was does this how does this affect market intelligence? I've raised this before. I reached out to sensit. But one of the ways market intelligence companies generates estimates and they have different algorithms different ways of doing it. But one is they look at the rankings in each country across the globe for top

grossing uh top downloads and from that and and other things that they do they can generate estimates and then that's so you know top one well it's actually really difficult to get an estimate for the top number one grossing or number one downloaded but you know after that they can start calculating okay we think this has got that so that's got more this has got less by country etc. So that's how these platforms kind of live. And you could see that I want to say I'm not sure when it was 3, four, 5 years ago, Google Play actually shut off, I think it was Google Play, they actually shut off part of that to part of those rankings to to companies to see. So I think it used to be you could see I don't know the top thousand or the top 500 and then they shut that off so you could only see I believe this is my memory serving so apologies if I'm incorrect. The general story is true. Facts. So that's what we like with journalists. Um it was the like you could only see like say the top 200 which actually greatly affects how much you can well how accurate your estimates

can be for the entire market right so that was a big problem. So now you can see a world where if a lot of payments go 50% of payments go off store where it's not being tracked that really greatly affects estimates and also for the bigger publishers who will presumably be taking more advantage of this it might look like their revenue is going down but that's actually not the case. So directionally potentially it's not even true what's happening. So I think it's a big issue for them. I'm sure they're working on it. They've got ways of of getting around it. Again, there are other ways that they generate estimates, but this is this is one of um so maybe we'll start seeing partnerships with webshock companies and more partnerships with publishers to get access to that data or to get access well that I could I could go on forever. You can't you and then if you get access to actual data that's that's potentially a problem because you're not allowed no one's allowed to see that because of laws data AI got in trouble for a

different kind on that kind of subject that's why they got a fine $10 million a few years back but yeah that's one of the examples of of a wider impact it's not just developers can make more money it has an effect on the entire ecosystem so I've spoke for a while there sorry as always but Aaron uh what do you think of the big news yeah So yeah, on that note that reminded me we talked a while ago about um like Pokémon Go has officially increased its revenue like yearon year, but based on the uh kind of estimates from how it's performed on stores, it's been going down. So, we kind of presume that must be because people are moving to like the web shop, but yeah, that's kind of a a real example we've already seen that as you say is probably going to only scale up as more people find it easier to move their players to the web shop. Yeah. And you know, that's absolutely correct, right? Because for a few years, you're looking at it like it's going down. I mean, we're taking their word for it, by

the way. Yeah. It could be like it made $1 more or something. We're taking their word for it though, which is a dangerous game. They said in that email they past was it past three years? You say it been growing. I think so. Revenue had actually grown again. I guess there could be spantics like you say could be $1 extra a year. So inflation didn't really go anywhere. And maybe maybe they start including some revenue outside of actually not just inapp purchases but from physical events. I don't know how much money they make. Sponsorships etc. So, you know, maybe the IIP revenue trend was down, but that's not how they put it. Um, so yeah, just uh incredible news. We've had commentary from the DTC companies. They're obviously extremely happy. Exeler app charts. They're already making kind of money hand over fist really. But now it's just finally, we joked last time, they popped the champagne on a previous decision and within hours Apple was like, "No, no, no, don't worry about it. 27% fee." So, kind of like what is Apple gonna do? You

don't know. But it's it's different this time. It's very different this time. I spoke with Exor earlier and yeah, they said obviously like the phone's off the hook basically with people getting in touch now. So, just a game changer and we spoke with mobile mavens. We got a couple articles of industry opinion. So, please check those out. Right. I'm going to do a lot more talking in this episode. Sorry everybody. We're back to normal next week. But uh the other another big story I wanted to talk about was um just a huge stories keep breaking while I'm away. It's outrageous. UK developer/publishing Triple Dot has acquired Apploven's games business. Now we already kind of knew that as reported we were kind of on to the story before but we got beaten by uh was it businessider I believe if I recall and now it's kind of officially confirmed that Triple Dot is the buyer. So, some key points. So, the deal will see Triple

Dot pay $400 million in cash. That is $150 million to be paid at the close of the transactions, which is expected in summer 2025. It was It was a bit confusing because I'm pretty sure in the financials it said Q2 and now it's saying summer. I was a bit I didn't understand. Maybe it's a different Q2. remembering wrong, but yeah, 150 million at the close of transactions and a $250 million secured promisary note to be issued by Eaton Games. Theor did actually go into a lot more detail. Uh so I spoke with uh the CEO today. There'll be an article on that. It should be out on Friday. Uh so probably before this podcast goes out. Uh please check that out. He goes into quite a bit of detail about actually how that all breaks down according to him. Uh so there's that 400 million. The the total deal is worth 800. Um and Applovin is picking up a 20% stake in the common equity of of Triple

Dot. This is kind of interesting to me because it's like oh Apple uh App Apple do is selling it gays business to get rid of it and taking a 20% stake in a new company. But there's reason there's there's good reasons for that which we'll go into. So now what falls under Triple Dot's umbrella is Lion Studios, Bela Games, Machine Zone, Clipwire Games, Magic Tavern, People Fun, Ley, Athena Studios, Z Life, and Zuru Gravity. Triple Dot will now house 12 studios under its belt. So it's added it's just added 10 if you want to see how transformational this was. And and Leo said himself it was yeah, a transformational deal. The company will now span across 23 cities with more than 2,500 employees. It will serve 25 million daily active users. Before this deal, I believe it was 12 million daily active users. So, it's quite sizable. But again, this is more than double. And it it has anticipated to bring in annual gross revenue of nearly $2 billion. It said I asked Leor about this as well,

what were you earning before this? He says they were profitable since their first year of business, but he wouldn't uh he said as a private company basically. Basically, he he didn't have to say how much they were making before this deal. But, you know, they were ads focused business before, apparently profitable every year since their first year of business. Now, it's kind of a 50/50% split between inapp purchases and ads. So, again, it's just really really significant deal for this company. really just changes who they are effectively. So, a couple points from that and from from the interview I had. So, I asked obviously the obvious question then when you when you do this kind of deal um will you do an IPO? Is that the exit strategy or just the next step? And he said it's basically like they may do one and this and he said this does set them up more than they were before for that because they weren't really a place to do that before. It's not the immediate plan. I did ask if this deal could

represent an existential threat to the company's future. Um because it's a lot of it's a lot of money and before the reporting we reported from AppLoving's really own financials is a lot of it could be in loans. Um well that's what it sounded like and even Apploving could put forward the money be paid back to to so Triple Dot could afford this this deal. And bear in mind their last valuation I think was 1.6 6 billion. So they're spending $800 million which is half their worth. A few years later it's a bit different. And this deal now values uh triple at $2 billion. So again very very substantial for them to be doing. But he he said he was adamant it does not it's not an existential threat. And claims they don't have that much debt from the deal but he didn't say how much. So apparently it's not that highly leveraged for this deal. And he said, so you got the 150 million effectively cash

up front. And he said they previously raised over $250 million for M&A. So maybe some of that is still left for this. Um, and again, they've been profitable since their first year. And really the remember the owners, the co-founders are three of them in the UK games rich list in the top 2025. They were all in it. All the triple dot founders were in it. So they they're not short of money. Aken the president uh was it Bloomberg who called him the mobile gaming Kimpin they're not short of money or experience again I'll have more in-depth analysis uh in in the interview Leo said there's no plans to close any of the studios it picked up or to do layoffs currently they're also looking at new games which which was kind of important to him as well as obviously the existing games that will keep bringing that $2 billion in revenue I asked about the specifically about the status of machine zone because I it kind of sounded Thank you. It had closed before which we reported on and even one of the former staff members said it had effectively closed. He said there is a

very small team left which basically operates game of war and mobile strike and they won't be doing anything new for the foreseeable future because they don't have the team in place to work on new projects. So and worth remembering Triple Dot is historically a casual based company as I said and adsbased. Leo kind of suggested that the history of MZ and Machine Zone was a reason that they don't want to close it because it's like important to the industry, but if you look at it, it's really just a husk of what it used to be. And whenever you think of it games and its impact, you know, which a lot of them were for forex strategy reskins, but its impact on the UA landscape has been really meaningful for the entire industry. And it did try other projects like Reign of Vampires, I think it was called, but that was cancelled last year, I believe. And yeah, they just it was in soft launch and they they just don't have anything else. I would actually be genuinely surprised if they just keep this operation going in like a year's time.

But we we'll see. But he said there's going to be no closures. They don't anticipate layoffs. That's not what they want to do. I guess you would say that before the layoffs potentially that happen. It depends, right? And then lastly, actually points already made, but yeah, 50/50 revenue split between IPs and ads. So again, changes a lot apparently. I think it was again this will be in the article in much better detail. I I do apologize. I think he said no game could be no studio. I think he said no game represents more than 10% of revenue because I asked if you know what if there's one or two failures from these studios with the entire company kind of collapse and he and he disagreed with that it's not going to be like I guess the examples according to him that we've seen with Embracer. He didn't call that Embracer but that was kind of the example I was kind of alluding to. Uh sorry actual last thing. The other thing I said was uh do they have the capability to actually operate this massive business and he said well he said yes obviously there's some shifting

that they have to do at the kind of the leadership level to adapt to this but that along with the 10 studios there is a kind of can't come like a publishing or managing operation for all of those studios from applovin so they actually get some of that I guess you can call it infrastructure the team that was managing the whole thing. But it does sound like, you know, Applo didn't really care about it in the end. So, it's probably as a guess probably be out of staff, right? So, I think there's some work there for them to do by the sound of it from the interview, but they're pretty confident going forward. So, really interesting to see. Good for the UK games industry and they've suddenly become a major European games company. They're already pretty big under the radar. Now, they're out there for everyone to see and yeah, we'll see how it goes. Uh, sorry Aaron. I keep throwing stuff at you. I've been I've been desperate to talk about these these stories. I was tucked up I was about I tucked up in bed last night. Turn the lights off. Saw the story and I was like I better write this. I don't

know. So yeah, lights on. But uh yeah, what do what do you think of the the news? Yeah, I mean, yeah, obviously, as you say, it's a huge deal that's um it's really skyrocketed um Triple Dot's portfolio and yeah, just the number of studios. It would be nice to know the the specifics on what their profits and stuff were like before versus the the new projections. But, um tried the only thing they say which they said publicly already was was the the two billion revenue gross. Um although he said close to didn't say two billion exactly, right? But yeah, obviously it just seems we've got this like constant uh wave of massive deals going on of late. Yeah, I think you've covered most of the points to be honest. But sorry Aaron, I've just I could tell how excited you were to um to get it all out. I know. I know. Um we'll go through the final bits. I'll do some very quick summary. We got a hard we got a hard finish today. But I

do. So I've obviously as I said earlier, I've been to Gamescom Latam, seen the emerging kind of market there. I've been there when it was big festival many years ago and the Dubai Game Expo summit powered by PGC. I've been there for a few days which is really interesting. I think if I had just one takeaway from from from being here in both places is just like coming from the UK games industry and that's not to say the UK games industry doesn't have massive issues massive challenges and struggles it does to do with like talent the education of talent that's already at studios is is a problem you know uh people trying to get sorry juniors trying to get jobs these are all challenges years ago uh over a decade ago there was there was a big thing about tax breaks trying to get those in. Get people's support for that. Managed to get it in the ends, but not after and loads of people left Canada. Sore subject for a lot of people in UK games industry. But despite all that actually you kind of take I at least personally

kind of take things kind of for granted now in the UK. I think in some aspect that it's just there and that I think companies can be founded. There is some support for them. I know it's a bit difficult lately with general investment but there is support there. there's a big community here. There's obviously a lot of talent and so there's a lot of infrastructure already in place that you can be successful and actually when you see in Brazil and now what they're trying to do in Dubai and in general in the Middle East and in the United Arab Emirates they obviously have a lot of money but it's just the amount you have to do and it will take so it takes such a long time to build build the community of developers build a culture. So in Finland they built a culture of sharing. You kind of potentially you've got to build that. You've got to build the support structures. You got to attract investment. You know Gamescom Latab they're paying for publishers and I think investors as well to to come over to see their games because one of those deals might make all of that all that budget worthwhile. But they have to do

that to get people to actually see their games. You can't just do it like online. really a lot of effort goes into and when you're in the UK and you have already established big events right obviously pocket gamer connects London and then uh in in the US you have established events like GDC where people come together locally and you're just known as a bigger scene maybe perception is you're a bit safer you might come from well-known company that experience it's just so incredibly difficult to build these industries and just get government support in the first place like Brazil has uh I think had a lot challenges getting that there's a new government in place now. They've got a new legal framework for games which which basically will open up support for the industry and yeah the the exciting stuff that they're doing they're doing here but you know it's it's going to take such a long time in the end it might not really come to fruition especially if if your government might decide oh actually AI is what we want now it's very difficult and one of one of my other takeaways from Brazil was

that I think there's increasing support for entrepreneurs by the sound of it for entrepreneurs there they tripled the number of studios that they have from 400 something to over a thousand by the last date they're going to release fresh data this year when I was speaking to people if you're just a worker there for some people it was like well I wanted a guy was working for bank wanted to work in games he worked for an international company that set up an operation there paying nothing like well below even possibly what his rent could be and it was just like well he just needed to get his foot in the door and his longerterm ambition was to leave the country so you've got to compete with these established games hub abroad hubs abroad. So that's the other challenge. So yeah, it's just incredibly difficult and uh just the sheer willpower of especially a few people that really want to push their industries forward. It's it's quite commendable when people are that passionate, but ultimately how successful they're going to be. We'll see. Brazil's been trying to do it for a long time and it has built up an industry, but it's still got to push

hard all the time to kind of I guess whatever is going to be defined as and and the yeah become like a key hub in the global industry. So that was that was what I wanted to say on that. The reasons that I've been away. Aaron, I'm going to give you the microphone. You've got a few minutes. I've talked too much. I'm so sorry. But yeah, you you had an interesting story about the the golden week. Yeah. Um, so I've just put a um big kind of data dive on the site today as of recording. So be sure to check it out everyone. But um, so I've went through a load of ATM magic data to put together a bit of a um, analysis on Golden Week in Japan, which is an annual holiday, just for anyone who's um, not aware. So it's April 20th to May 5th every year. Uh basically they have like four public holidays over the course of the week. So it's they just make it like golden week and it's a big thing for many industries and mobile

games kind of get in on it as well. And particularly you like the Japanese developed mobile games will often do events or special bundles or sales or you know something to I guess try and capture their Japanese player base you know while while people are off work. And so I thought it was quite interesting to look at some of the top performing games over that period. According to Atmagic, Pokémon TCG Pocket was the top earning mobile game in Japan over the course of that week. So it made um over $18 million gross. I'm not sure whether um it was when we missed the podcast last week, but it's pocket overall is on its way to a billion now. Um, again, check check that article out if you're unaware that it's um moving even faster than Pokémon Go did back in the day. And like out in the real world, you know, you've not noticed it as the same kind of phenomenon that Go was. I guess that's down to the the genre really. But yeah, so I guess with that

context, it's a little surprised that it was the biggest game in Japan over the over the week. Dynamo's SD Gundam Generation Eternal uh was the second highest earning game in Japan over Golden Week. The second longest name as well actually. Yeah. Yes. Good point. So that made about 15 million. It's worth noting. I think it came out on April 16th, so obviously only just before Golden Week, so it's probably kind of had a a bit of both impacting it there. But really interestingly, Onos Corporation's The Battle Cats, which is a 2012 tower defense game, has basically been slightly skyrocketing in revenue since like late 2024. And so that ended up being the third highest grossing game in Japan, even though it's like a 13y old game. I played that for the first time like a week ago. Somehow somehow for the first time, it's been out for ages. This is quite fun. Yeah. Yeah. I've never tried it myself. It's

ridiculous the different kind of cats and animals on it. It's very quirky. Also, but yes, that beat. So, Monster Strike came fourth. Konami's Professional Baseball Spirits A came fifth. So, um all the top five um were developed by Japanese companies. Um in the out of the top 10, I think seven of them were developed in Japan. The exceptions were Weathering Waves, Conquer Star Rail, and Last War Survival. Overall, across the top 10 um games in Japan, they generated 81 million over Golden Week, which is quite a big increase. So, last year, the top 10 games made about 45 million. So, yeah, that's like up about 80% from from last year's Golden Week. And there are also more in the top 10 this year that were developed in Japan compared to last year which I thought was quite interesting. So there I've done quite a thorough piece on it. So I' um please

read it. We'll put a link in the comments. Really interesting just how these seasonal events can big events could be very lucrative if done right. Really interesting that it's almost kind of doubled last year cuz we meant to do an article. We'll do an article but like Japan's kind of games mobile games market was flagging right. I think we might have touched upon it a bit last year in one of in one of your articles, but yeah, it was actually been on the decline for a while. So maybe is this a signal that's on the app or they just had a good week? We'll we'll we'll look into that for sure. Oh, another just quick point to note as well. So the last two years, Fake Grand Order was the top grossing game in Japan during Golden Week. So it it fell to eighth place this year. and Pokémon Pocket obviously winning so to speak this year made about 50% more than Fate Grand Order made last year when it the top spot. That's quite interesting that it's fallen so far. Yeah. Yeah. And as I say, it held first place for two years. So, it's it's

surprising it's fallen that much. It's been out for a very long time. Another one another one for us to uh delve into. Love all the status stuff. Right, that brings us to the end of of the week in mobile games. Apologies for everyone that I was talking mostly on this episode. I really wanted to get out those those couple big stories that had a lot to say. I apologize. I know. I know. A white man with opinions. It's it's crazy, but uh thank you. You're cultured. You know, you're well traveled. Well traveled. Yes. But thank you everyone for tuning in. Thank you Aaron for putting up with me and for your great insights. Appreciate it. Thank you. It's um I felt like a listener this week. I'm so sorry. No, that's I'm joking. The Golden Week stuff is really interesting. And we didn't even touch upon Scopely are making $5 billion by the way. I guess that's that's always news, isn't it? Oh, made six million. Six billion now. Great. Once again, thank you everyone for tuning in. I'll be back home hopefully next week. We'll have a more normal podcast. I'll actually make a point of

just not really speaking. Maybe next week. At least not introducing stories. We'll see how that actually works. Thanks again.