Week in Mobile Games E63 - The Esports World Cup unpacked and lightning strikes twice for Supercell

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 pocketr.r.biz. With me this week, as usual is our news editor, Aaron Assel, and we are welcoming back events content coordinator Darly Scan. Welcome back on the show. Good to have you here. How you doing? Thanks for thanks for having me back. I'm good. I'm good. Apart from, you know, the the golfing and the general general sort of gaming as well. I was um out in uh Riad a couple weeks ago uh for the esports World Cup uh which I'll talk a little bit more about that in the moment. And then the week uh just gone. So last week I was in Edinburgh for for a couple days uh taking t taking some time to relax and see all the Fringefest activities. So, I think we timed it right because the storm sort of rolled in as we were

leaving. So, I think we uh we timed it perfectly with that.
For anyone that doesn't know, Fringefest, I think, right? It's like a comedy month, right? And so,
yeah, it's like loads of comedy shows going on, whether that's uh standups or um sort of little plays that going on and there's performances on the streets and loads of tours going on and loads of beer and student stuff as well. So there's it's it's a very busy um time of the year in Edinburgh. And I was speaking to someone out there and they said that if you tried to see every single performance for 20 hour of 24 hours a day that you could. So every half hour that you'd be going, you'd still only see not even 1% of everything that's going on at the FringeFest. It's just absolut It's the sheer amount of stuff that's going on there is absolutely crazy.
Aaron, how's your week going?
Yeah. Yeah, good. Thank you. Although it was last week, I thought I should let everyone know cuz they'll have been

waiting to hear since our last podcast. I have actually finished Zenablade Chronicles X finally. It took about 115 hoursish. So, that was doing kind of the postgame story content as well. I think it took I was like 99 and a half hours to finish the main game and then another like 16 for the postgame story. So, I'm kind of in this weird nebulous phase now. It's like when you finish a longunning TV show and it's like, well, what what do I do now?
What does life mean now?
Yeah. Like, I'm free, but also what what's left?
So, as for my as for myself, not too much. Obviously, we missed podcast last week. So, but this week I've been super pumped about Alien Earth. So again, if listeners for a long time might have heard me say how big a fan I am of this franchise, which is kind of funny because for the longest time, there are really only two good films. Aliens one, Alien and Aliens, obviously, although people for some reason say Alien 3 is

really good. Still don't understand to this day. Anyway, Alien Earth looks awesome. It's about five different kind of monsters this time. Set on Earth set two years before the events of Alien. So, I'm quite intrigued how that if they even bother making that come together. It's got it sounds like it's got a really good team behind it. The reviews are actually really good and it comes out on Tuesday at least in the US I believe. So, I can't wait. Everything I've seen and read about it. It looks amazing. Right, we'll start jumping into it. So, as usual, a few shoutouts. Um, we've got the mobile games awards coming up on August 19th and then we have the Pocket Gamer Party on August 20th. So, please uh if you want to join us, please do sign up for that. got PC Helsinki October 7th and 8th, PG Akaba November 8th and 9th and we are in the process of announcing at least two other events.
So we've soft announced PGC Summit Korea which is taking place in just outside of Soul on uh October 1st and then uh we will be announcing another summit taking

place in December. So please do stay tuned for that.
Nice, nice, nice. So we got plenty going on, right? kind of keeping to the topic of events and Charlie, explain to us about your trip to the esports world cup and and what you learned.
Yes. Uh yeah, as I mentioned that I I flew out there um uh on the 21st. I sort of arrived at the esports venue um around like sort of midday. It was very hot. There's one key takeaway. It was very hot in Riyad. Who would have thought, right?
Well, when I went to the UAE, it's like 40° feels hotter.
Yeah. I was there for that week that I was there for it was predominantly more mobile focused. Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile and Mobile Legends Bang Bang was taking place during that week. Um, so that yeah, it was more predominantly mobile focused. Of course, throughout the tournament and throughout the whole of the esports world cup, there were other mobile titles taking place and I think there's still more to play, but that was that week was certainly where more of the mobile was taking place. Chess and Call of Duty of course were um

just starting as well towards the tail end of the week. I was given some stats about the esports scene and um from some of the folks that I met out there and these were taken from Nuzu. So I'm just going to read some of these out uh if in case anyone is unfamiliar about the uh sort of esports landscape. Um 3.4 billion uh people in the world are gamers and 1.5 million are core gamers. These are all taken from the news, so don't shoot me. About um 610 million of those are esports fans. Billion there were $4.3 billion uh revenue growth in 2024 uh with CAGR of 6.6% and it's uh projected to reach market volume of $5.9 billion by 2029. Uh in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia specifically, it's a 1.8 billion video games market in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 23.5 million of the 35 million population in Saudi Arabia are gamers with 67% of that um

are active. It's quite a lot of people. 6.8 billion uh dollars are projected in gaming consumption by uh 2030 and uh esports and gaming's uh contribution to uh the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's GDP is projected to hit uh 13.3 billion by 2030 and generate nearly 39,000 jobs. And then then the wider Mina region has 83.7 uh million gamers by 2028 increasing uh by at 5ear CAGGR of 4.1%. So 72% of gamers in uh MINA uh so in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt engage with esports. So, some of the takeaways that I've sort of ex experienced whilst I was at the esports world cup and some of the things that I was hearing from uh people that I met out there. Of course, it's it's no secret that uh the media region has a very young population. It's full of potential. Um ton of the uh the the

stats I just read out are from folks that are under the age of 30. So, there's so much room to grow when it comes to the games industries and and the esports industry out there. Funnily enough, the people that I spoke to there um all said that out of the um platforms, so PC and console and mobile, they seem to think that mobile had the most potential. They argued that this skill-wise is very similar to PC and console, but the accessibility is much higher. More people tend to have phones in their pockets than they do spend on the high-end gaming PCs and uh consoles. One of the examples was you had more views in Mobile Legends Bang Bang, a peak viewership compared to League of Legends, right? That's pretty crazy. I spoke to Fabian, the chief games officer of the Esports World Cup Foundation. And what their mission is is they want to make esports go to mainstream audiences. So that's putting it in front of non-gaming fans through sports channels like ESPN and taking inspiration from sporting events like Wimbledon, which

you could see when being at the esports world cup. So you didn't only have the arenas where all the games were taking place. You had a massive complex where there was so much going on in terms for consumers and fan meetups and stores. There's so much going on like food food markets and I I took a picture of it actually as well. It looked very futuristic. It it looked like sort of Time Square in a way where it's just so there was just so much going on.
But was there strawberries and cream?
There weren't strawberries and cream. No, there weren't. No, but it's funny.
It's hardly taken inspiration from Wibbleton.
No. No. No. Of course. But but there's other there's other things other than the the esports titles and games taking place. A lot of like the consumer sides of the wider the festival, which is what they were calling it, were was take place at night, of course, when the sun went down and it was less less hot in in the evening, which I can guarantee you it's still very hot around 11:00 p.m.

It's in Riyad, but it was a lot more manageable than it was around like 1:00 p.m. for example. And so yeah, they're trying to they're trying to push the esports world cup to be a sort of wider festival rather than just a specific tournament which some esports uh sort of finals like a League of Legends or M or some those sort of titles being just more concerned about the uh the actual arena and the games. There was a lot going on. So it's like a Gamescom is in the consumer side and all that sort of stuff. Another takeaway that I sort of was hearing from people is that they're they are trying to make esports uh self- sustainable. I think one of the things about the esports industry that people were skeptical of recently was how can it be how can you make money out of it? How can you make it self sustainable? the people that I was speak speaking to in Riads were arguing that the ways that you can make it more self sustainable was through these uh sort of more brand celebrity celebrity partnerships. I was

speaking to this dude who uh is a caster for Honor of Kings and he does a lot of hosting but used to be a professional rugby player for the Philippines but he said that gaming was was part of his life anyway but he was he was arguing that um yeah we need to get more brands and celebrity partnerships involved. We had that in in certain with certain esports organizations um where they would partner with the likes of BMW and other sort of outside of games brands, right? But they were arguing that there needs to be more of that and celebrity partnerships. And Fabian, who as I just mentioned is the chief games officer of the Esports World Cup Foundation, was arguing that to help make it more sustainable, we we need to sort of like leverage government support at a grassroots level. He he called on examples like football governments and uh countries around the world were investing sporting at that grassroots level, right? Although I don't know how much I don't know how much the UK are doing that uh at the grassroots level.

However, he was saying that was one of the ways that um governments can that was one of the ways that esports can be self-sustainable is through making uh through leveraging government support. um which is why which is what he was arguing what Saudi Arabia are trying to do within their own um within their own country. And finally, some of the so I spoke with uh 10 cent while I was out there in Moonton and they were they were arguing that they can't imagine Honor of Kings and Mobile Legends Bang Bang uh being not being esports titles. The way esports has worked for them, especially on on the mobile side of things, is it's allowed a lot more engagement and retention for their gamers uh any other sort of title that they could imagine. It just keeps them interested following teams and following players and following these um following these organizations just allows them to talk much more about sort of the the titles and retain their attention in that. Right. So yeah, those those were sort of

like the main takeaways. Of course, there there's still loads of things that Saudi Arabia are working on. The audience, I would say in Saudi Arabia, it's not quite up to the level as like traditional sort of esports events like like a worlds, for example, in the League of Legends World Championships or M in CSGO. The atmosphere still needs to improve on that, but there are there is progress being made on that. But yeah, it be interesting to see what how the esports World Cup grows over the next few years.
Really interesting. I think the the scale of it is quite uh quite amazing to to see at least the attempts to uh kind of make esports in general like a big thing cuz obviously it's all just like the sum of its parts. I guess
it had Yeah. Like I mean it had a boom in sort of like the mid2010s, right? Everyone was so excited about it thinking it was going to be the next big thing and then I don't know
well like with many like with many

buzzwords and trends metaverse the blockchain
blockchain part of it just yeah it just sort of peted out I I I guess I think one of the things that esports suffered from was growing it grew way too quickly and unsustainably to the point where you just couldn't teams teams were sort of losing money because they grew too quick. I think it's it's a similar thing that I think a lot of games industry face, right? I don't think it's necessarily a specific problem to esports.
Well, I don't agree with that.
I think certain parts I think certain parts there are issues.
All parts of the industry face challenges, but they also face challenges for different reasons.
No. Yeah.
Esports is its own thing of whether it's sustainable or not. And I think that question has been raised a lot longer than the current industry challenges. I guess my my few questions are like it feels like this is what Tencent and Moon were saying. It's like is esports more an engagement tool. Do they really care

if it made that much money or any money really even doing the esports as long as it actually helps keep people engaged with the ecosystem and the game? Yeah, I would say obviously they weren't going to get into how profitable esports was, but they definitely said uh on the
I think that's telling in of itself if it was super profitable.
Yeah, they've been shouting about constantly, right?
They definitely said Yeah, on the engagement and retention perspective, they were seeing numbers that they could only dream of
if it wasn't an esports title, right? like it it's just the it's just such an effective way of retaining and acquiring new users as well because it's not you know esports fans from other titles as well also genuinely look to other other sort of titles as well to see what's going on there right like I imagine me as a League of Legends player for god knows how many years and been a fan of the esports ecosystem there I want to see what sort of similar games are doing

so it was very interesting to see like the honor of kings and the Mobile Legends uh esports tournaments play out and how you know different it is in the gameplay but similar at the same time. I think other esports fans sort of set sort of have that similar mindset where it's like they they like to bounce between different titles as well in terms of viewership. So it's not it's not only great at retaining players actually and engaging with them, but it's acquiring new users as well um through natural word of mouth.
Yeah, that's interesting. The other thing I wanted to say is is uh the other thing I want to say is as uh I guess it's it's good while it lasts. So you used to have like the crypto money that all dried up obviously the crypto crash which has kind of driven the so-called esports winter and then now you've got all this money being pumped in by one from one place effectively which is Saudi Arabia. So once that if and when that dries up, I would argue that it's this setup is possibly not sustainable

unless it's literally going to last for decades. I don't I don't think you can expect that.
From what uh Fabian from the Esports World Cup Foundation was saying, they are in it for the long haul. They are they have forecasted it to go on for quite a while. One of the goals there is encouraging other countries to sort of follow Saudi Arabia's lead there. We shall we'll see.
We shall certainly see whether whether that holds up.
But great uh thanks thanks for uh reporting on your in your findings, Charlie. Do you appreciate it and uh I
actually do have an interview with Fabian as well if anyone wants to check that out on Pocky Gamer Adopt. It's certainly certainly a good read. Fabian was a good good person to speak to.
I'll try and remember to add in a link uh in in the description. Aaron, we'll move on to you. You got some uh you got a story about Clash Royale.
I do. So yeah, we obviously recently spoke about the game that it's been growing monthly since March this year and that it reached a like post pandemic

revenue record uh for the month of June. So now obviously uh we have newer figures and its earnings reached even higher in July. Uh so that was now the game's most lucrative month in almost eight years at 77 million. Uh this is based on atmagic estimates. So that's just Google Play and the App Store. Doesn't account for any of Supercell's own store. So yeah, this was the first time uh in a very long time that the game has surpassed like 70 million in a month. As I say, it made 77 and it was a 50% increase month over month and a 251% increase year-over-year. So seems Clash Royale is having its Brawl Stars moment. Um, yeah, not only has it reached this kind of near decade high, but it out earned all other Supercell games in July and more than doubled the revenue generated by Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars as well. So, Clash Royale's revenue was

actually more than Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars combined, which is quite a feat. I think it's just Yeah, it just seems to be growing and snowballing really. Like the initial growth in March was only 12% month over month. April's was 14%. Suddenly in May that shot up to 66%. So yeah, it's it feels like it's Supercell has potentially managed here to kind of make another comeback with another one of their games. I say kind of a Brawl Stars moment where that game really had a resurgence starting in like late 2023 and then into 2024. In Brawl Stars case, it was a bit slower to get to this kind of momentum of growth, but ultimately it grew month over month for the better part of a year. It was nine consecutive months and ended up hitting a lifetime revenue peak at the end of that at over 100 million in May 2024. So

whether um whether Clash Royale continues growing to its own lifetime record, I guess we'll we'll find out in the months to come, but it's currently at like an 8year high, which is impressive in and of itself.
So lightning does strike twice, I think, is is what we've learned here. It felt like Ilka Parlan, obviously CEO, he he said earlier this year, I think that he'd never seen anything like it in his career, the comeback that Brawl Stars had made. So he must be pretty chired to see it's kind of so far it's happening again. We'll see how far it goes. Whether it peaks already at a very good level and then crashes or what stays at this level. We'll see what happens. But yeah, it must be very chuffed that the thing that you never seen happen again has happened twice at the same company. We had a debate here about Supercell and I feel like I was one around a bit because I was probably being a bit harsh person. This is just my personal view on Supercell, which was they've released

Squadbusters and then they've released Moco and they're both, you know, Squad Busters me 100 mil. People be happy with that, but they've also spent a lot of marketing TV, etc., etc. And and then and the revenue's kind of created. Uh, and they're doing a bit of a comeback. Moco didn't do anything. So, it's like new games wise, the strategy there isn't it appears to be not working at the moment, but then you have this other side where it's kind of easy to forget that last year was Supercell's best year ever. At least according to the I believe they calculated their figures different differently this year, which might be the reason that's the case. But either way, it's still they made a lot a lot of money, did very very well. and turns their live games perhaps they're restructuring and they've got bigger teams now is actually starting to have an effect on on all of their games. So apparently that was one of the reasons it helped with Brawl Stars. They've been experimenting for a long time. They've been experimenting a long time with

Clash Royale and I wonder if there's also proof of concept. So bigger team proof of concept of um having Clash Royale as a platform. They're starting to do that now and yeah very intrigued to see where it goes from here. And actually it does make you think okay if I really step back actually you know supcell is still kind of killing it like it's difficult because Brar's revenues also gone down so well or I don't know swings roundabouts they're still very successful and maybe there it's one of those things you just have to see in the next year or two does any of is any of that success sustain does it all crumble and because they can't release new games it's just not what they once were. It's kind of it's weirdly encouraging and discouraging for the industry more broadly that they're kind of showing you can bring back a previously successful game and turn things around but also yeah if even they can't really release a new hit in this modern landscape then like who can in a way yeah cuz like um Squadbusters this spring I think they um did the big overhaul for like version

2.0 O which was surely quite expensive with the changes they made and yet it's not really done anything at least based on like what we can see from Magic. It's not turned the game around or made much of an impact at all and even like Mo is doing better than Squad Busters at the moment. So yeah, it's good that kind of their older games are fighting to come back. But yeah, it is it's not a very encouraging view for kind of newer companies, I guess, looking to get that initial hit.
Yeah, I mean, but just to be clear, I think over the past couple years, companies have proven that you can actually release a successful title.
I'll go on to in a minute something that agrees a comment that agrees with you. Absolutely. But we have seen like billion dollar games come out from large publishers um that have been super successful like Pokémon Pocket for example, Last Waring Go. So it is possible but it is very challenging. So I guess speaking of that then I I'll go on to uh my story. So the learning

language platform Dualingo has uh acquired the majority of the staff next beat uh to join its team. It's going to form the first kind of official UK office for Dualingo. So that's 23 members and then about seven or eight staff are actually going to remain at Next Beat. So Next Beat still exists. They're going to continue to operate Beast Country still. When I spoke with yesterday with Simon Hay, so we're doing this on a Thursday. I I spoke yesterday with Simon Hayes and Ollie Barnes. They said that they were actually in the middle of doing a fund raise before this. So they had fully intended to be an independent company and raise some money and and go from there focusing on music games. But then they said like when you do that sometimes people kind of come out of the woodwork and opportunities arise and one of those was with Dolingo. They've got to work on the uh um the music course at Dualingo and they're basically going to develop that that side of the app and experience. They've got experience with um getting like music riots and just developing

music games like Be Star. Simon Hay actually called it more like an app really than a game which I thought was an interesting way to put that. some some interesting quotes when I was chatting with him. He said, "To your point, Aaron, about the challenging time in the industry. He said that they'd already run into industry headwinds. Um, and so I asked him to elaborate a bit." And he was just like, "Well, even with the capital that they already had, they were probably going to raise. Uh, and the games in it portfolio was actually still very challenging for them." So, I think maybe that that's kind of part of the reason if they go within within a company like Dualingo. It's kind of easier to kind of make these experiences than it is to have to create something brand new, build up a new audience, and release it and hope it does well and spend lots on user acquisition when there's 47.7 million daily active users in Dualingo already. Apparently, apparently millions have already played the music course in its beta. A couple of interesting quotes. He said Julingo's

charm comes from the fun factor. So that's the character engagement through the character the engagement and the leaderboards. And he said it was almost working on working through that is almost a bit nostalgic. So again it's like making a fun experience in Duolingo sandbox. It's like going back to making games before they had to start worried about freetoplay stuff which includes user acquisition, uptime value, return on investment, you know, all these KPIs that we're always talking about. He said, "What we've been doing over the last 10 years in free-to-play gaming, the bar for complexity of a base product is getting bigger and bigger. And what Duolingo's design team has done really well is really capture the essence of those mechanics and make them very accessible and very simple. So on the Dualingo side, this is kind of the latest expansion of their kind of gamified learning and leaning on game mechanics to expand the platform into already done language into music, maths, potentially more over the past couple of years. If you're in industry circles, you've probably heard Dolingo mentioned quite a lot because they do come actually to the big games conferences

and they try and snap up the talent because that is part of their strategy. One of their board members they appointed late last year is Bonnie Ross who who used to head up the Halo franchise. So that's how serious they are about it. It's not just that they talk about it, they actually do stuff about it. So it's just really interesting. And now obviously they bu they've snapped up a games team effectively. So we'll be hearing a lot more about that and uh our plans for PGC London is to kind of ex delve into that a little bit more with a specialized track so you kind of the games industry can learn a bit more about how other sectors other sectors uh do it.
Yeah, there's a lot there's a lot to be explored in terms of like uh trans media, how other sort of industries interact with games and the gamification of apps.
Uh so Aaron uh what story have you got? Yeah. So, the other piece from me this week is I spoke with Jenny Zoo, who is the founder and CEO of Topofa Games, and we spoke about the studio's second fitness game, Monster W. So, Tofa closed

a 6.3 million seed round last year with investment from Million Base 16Z, Speedrun, and others. Jenny revealed basically this is what allowed them to ideulate and prototype their second game. So their first game was called Run Legends, which was her kind of love letter to fitness. It ended up appealing more to athletes rather than gamers. So they wanted to make their next project more like clearly for gamers. So this one is more like an RPG with walking elements. And she said basically the funding you allowed them to come up with different ideas. So they prototype like five different games and then decided to go ahead with Monster War and yeah through the investment they were able to hire new talent and uh get access to support from a wider network like investors from games, tech and healthcare. So, I um asked her quite a

lot about Monster Walk itself cuz obviously there's already the big kind of monster based walking game out there, which is like Pokémon Go. So, in terms of what this game is kind of doing differently to uh hopefully stand out when it releases, it comes out in the US in September. It's already in early access in a few regions. And um it's one of the core things that's different about this to a lot of the walking games is that it's not location based. So it uses a pedometer system to earn you points that you can then spend to progress in game. So the idea there being it um makes it more accessible whether you're a rural player or like can't really go out. You're not kind of required to go somewhere with landmarks or whatever or to find you. In Pokémon Go, you might see that there's a Pokémon you want if you go to this place. Whereas a monster walk doesn't use like the location services. It's just a

pedometer. So, you might see in the game there's a monster like a thousand steps away. So, once you've done that, you'll caught up to it and be able to try and like get it on your team. And then other things like there might be a boulder in the way that takes 30 steps to get around things like that which I thought that's quite an interesting kind of twist on on the talking genre. Um apparently the monetization for the game you can't like buy steps but you can buy kind of boosters in limited quantities to like double how much how many points your steps are worth effectively. But largely the game is just going to be monetized around like customization options like skins and designing a base. And it's also going to have rewarded ads to give you a limited amount of extra steps. But Jenny did say that she um well they're not they're not going to let people basically buy their way through the game. She said that would defeat the purpose of the game if you didn't actually have to do any walking. and she also talked about it as

something that's apparently appealing to Gen Z primarily. They tested an earlier version of it with 30,000 people and found it mostly resonated with this age group of which Jenny is also part of. Um she said that she thinks that the generation responds well to authenticity and a sense of belonging. And she said she's taken kind of the companionship aspect of fitness apps that she likes and then mixed those with games that she likes. she named like Undertale and Pokémon as big standout examples and to basically make Monster Walk into a cozy RPG as she put it uh with walking elements. I'd recommend looking at the full interview that we went in a bit deeper on kind of how how they're targeting Gen Z in particular and the kind of collaborative nature rather than competitive uh to it as well. That's kind of the gist really. I thought it was a really interesting interview and I remember when you mentioned it I was my first reaction was like who are they? What is this game? Why why is someone doing a location based game because I I

hear it so often that someone's doing it and it'll never do anything. But uh this actually sound really interesting and I downloaded it. I'll give it a go. Some of the things that you mentioned in the interview were were really interesting especially like the they called it monster walk not like the previous game was run and then that was a problem because that that was intimidating to people.
Yeah. Yeah.
At least in that context cuz I guess there was a zombies run that was very successful in a different at a totally different time in the industry but yeah I I do want to give this uh give this a go. All right. Thanks Aaron. So I'm going to close out with the last story. So there's been a lot of financials uh this week uh and we're in the financials season yet again but there was uh some really interesting things I thought from this week and the thing I want to focus on is the unity and apploving financials. So there was a few interesting and kind of insightful statements that they both released. I was looking through a very log document

from Unity and hidden within that uh they they mentioned that like the amount of money it was costing to close their offices. That money the cost of that has obviously gone way down but they're still they're still doing layoffs and they they sort of intimated that they're they're going to close more offices uh in the year ahead. Uh but the main thing I want to focus on is the ad side of things. Unity CEO Matt Romberg he called this quarter an inflection point for the company as his AI ads platform Vector which is basically designed to compete with Apploven's ads business which has basically you know this is an extreme way of putting it but it's basically decimated Unity and kind of Lion Sourc's businesses because it's just so vastly more successful was growing massively and Unity needs it as ad business to basically make the whole thing eventually profitable which is kind concerning I I imagine for a lot of people on the engine side, right? Anyway, so it said uh that vector had grown by 15% revenue-wise from the

previous quarter, but overall it's as revenue is actually down 4% year-over-year. In in an ear call, Matt Robo said he shared optimism about the platform, but he was keen to know it's still very early days. So, I think they don't really expect things to kick off until kind of the 2026 financial year. He said that Unity is had yet to tap to its biggest competitive advantage over its rivals, which is the Unity engine itself and the billions of players that engage with the games uh built on it. The company's previously claimed that 70% of the top 1,000 mobile game studios use its tech. Obviously, over the years, things have changed since the runtime fee. In in essence, a lot of people still use it, don't get me wrong, but people are kind of looking at alternatives as well. Just something to keep in mind. Anyway, his quote, he said, "The increased confidence we have in the future of the business is actually partially derived from the fact that we've not yet tapped into that advantage." And he said, "That is the deep consumer understanding we possess uh by virtue of its position as an operating system for games globally because it builds helps build,

distribute, and run game applications." Uh he said the unique vantage point uh will provide our vector AI engine access to new and highly differentiated behavioral data that will provide a significant potential for enhanced performance growth. And again to see that 26 what does that mean? I guess we don't really know the the funny thing after this is so you know app lover's killing it in terms of revenue worth noting. Yeah it's made a lot of layoffs. It has actually made a lot of layoffs over the years and because it's kind of focusing revenue per employee. Last quarter revenue rose by 77% year-over-year to $1.3 billion. If you want to know how like well it's how fast it's growing. The CEO Adam Fugi he was asked directly about on the earnings call about vector and user potential to use engine related data and I found his remarks kind of amusing. He just basically completely brushes off the challenge. I mean, he's not going to sit there on an early school go, "Yeah, this is really concerning. Our business could

be really hit hard." He's not going to say that, right? He's just like, "We don't we don't know what game engine data even means." But when you're integrated inside an application, both as a publisher and advertiser, you have a lot of data points that you're able to extract that are behavioral points of how the consumer is playing into a game. So, we're obviously very good at that. Our models are cutting edge. It goes up about Axon 2. He actually said, "But our market penetration inside gaming is really large at this point." and that 70% figure kind of comes back. And so he says it's materially higher than 70%. We've got very good visibility into what matters in in the gaming category given how large we've become. So I I find that the competitiveness quite quite amusing. I doubt Apploving is that worried at the moment, but I'm sure it is looking very it is looking at that. But you know, I feel like Apploving could at any point probably just buy UD now. So back to the emerging days and that nearly happened. So part of me does wonder like how serious Vex will ultimately be as a challenger to applovin. It's it's coming in very late. It does feel a bit like

part of it feels a bit like they've kind of just saying it to get invested interest in the company, but I guess they do ultimately have to follow through with it. And I'm curious about how they use the data from this engine and also that means data from other companies and their games, how that'll actually work and what is allowed. It's worth noting. So I was looking around. It's released a data framework in Unity 6.2 which I think is out in beta now as part of plans to overall scale in AI investments across the business. So it's really going heavily on that. But the idea of the data framework is to give developers control over how their data is collected and used across Unity's ecosystem. So it feels like Unity is basically saying we want to use your stuff your data from using our tools to develop our our engine and our new UI platform. So, I'm interested to see exactly what options they give developers to not share their data and then also what ultimately developers just have to share uh and give up to

Unity. Yeah, I found that really fascinating. Right. So, after all that, that brings us to the end of the Pocket Gamer Dog podcast week in Mobile Games. After a week's break, I have remembered the name of the show, which is incredible all by itself. Thank you very much, Charlie, for joining us. Really good to have you back on the show.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks, Aaron, as always.
Yeah, thank you. And thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you again hopefully next week just ahead of Gamescom. And obviously if you want to reach out and meet us at Gamescom, please do uh drop us an email. And have a good weekend. We'll see you soon. Goodbye.