Week in Mobile Games podcast E60 - Investment tips, Clash Royale's evolution, and China's rise

[Music] Hello and welcome to the pocket gamer.biz podcast week in mobile games where we discuss the week's news and hopefully provide some insights of Craig Chapel, head of content at pocket gamer.biz. With me as always, Aaron Asel, our news editor. How you doing? How's the week been? You've been manning the site.
Hello. Yes. Um this is sort of our first time actually speaking like vocally couple of days.
Um so yeah. Yeah, I'm doing all right. Thank you. It's been a hectic um days without you around. Yeah, manning things. Um trying to keep on top of all the news with Issa, our men reporter. So yeah, I feel very very much plugged into like all of the news that's been happening this week. I've seen all of it. There's been no escaping it. But um no, it's been all right. It's been a the week's flown by because of it. Constantly been juggling between

different tasks. But yeah, obviously I'm sure you've got a lot to to say about your week.
So this week I've been at Develop Brighton, which is a a UK conference that's been running for for many years and it's kind of really a lot of it. They do sessions obviously over three days and cover various things, development, business. they they have an audio track on the final day and then I guess thousands of people kind of come down to it. But to me it's always like it's just a really great opportunity to kind of catch up with a lot of people in the UK games industry. I had a I had a really good time and it's one of my favorite shows to go to each year and it's quite easy to get to. I say that getting back from there was an absolute pain because London transport does not work. at a meeting at 10:00 in London and then I planned to get there like half hour early just in case and then sure enough I still wasn't actually at my stop like by 10 so I just had to be like I'm not make I can't make it it's

slightly sunny out and the UK UK's transport system has collapsed. Uh but like I said, I was gonna show I guess um if I quickly like some the main takeaway I guess for me was that you know always you kind of take the temperature. How do people feel about the industry? We obviously last year had the survive to 25 and then this year it's well I think everyone's just kind of unfortunately just kind of used to how things are. I'm not saying that. I was going to say I'm not saying that layoffs aren't down, but then obviously Microsoft have just had a massive massive cut in their workforce and which we talked about extensively last week. I won't go into that again for 20 minutes. So things were actually kind of I think people kind of doubt about the industry really. Uh overall obviously people were still hard at work making making their games trying to make it work trying to find an investment etc. you know people aren't stopping but when you generally chat to people there's few there's a few positives like if you looked at the overall macro level

I guess to talk about other than obviously the recent UK games industry stuff there was news this week as well about that which is like extra investment in the industry from the government and new kind of groups forming to help support the industry connect it with decision makers which is which is amazing news so there was I guess there was a positive but yeah a bit saw a lot of negativity going around and I Hopefully, probably been saying this for a couple years, but hopefully like next year, uh, it it will feel a lot better. Um, yeah. So, that I guess that has been my week. I No time to play Starcraft this week, so I'll have to play a bit more this weekend. Right, that's enough of that. So, as always, a few shoutouts before we get into some of the news we're going to cover. We've got our own events coming up. We got Pocket Gamer Connects Summit Shanghai on July 30th, PGC Helsinkiki on October 7th to 8th, PGC Akaba, which in Jordan November 8th and 9th, and we put out the finalists for the mo the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards. So, please do check that out on the site. I'll I'll attempt

to remember to add a link uh in the description. And uh that will take place in August at Gamescom in Cologne. It's on the Tuesday night on August 19th. So, um yeah, we got plenty plenty of stuff coming up. We have a few more things in the works as well that we'll announce in due course. And actually thinking about it, we got we'll have top 50 coming up as well in a few months. So, we'll be starting that process soon as well. So, I guess to kick things off, I guess I won't go too long. So, at Develop Brighton, I did a talk with Aionic co-founder and chief product officer Oliver Hines. And so, Aionic, if you don't know who they are, they're a Swedish games group formed just in 2021. It's not that long ago, but they already own a whole bunch of kind of small to midsize studios and they have service companies and uh publishing operations as well. The companies that it owns include like Endreams, Red Games Co., throughout Tunes, Other Side Entertainment, which I think is War

Respect Studio, Xbox, which is I think it's ads, rewarded ads, and then they own quite a bunch more. They've been pretty busy. In December, they raised $152 million, which is about $160 million. All that was for mergers and acquisitions, and to support its own studios. Hines himself, his experience includes kind of her MTG, GSN, Playerium, Natural Motion, Good Game Studios, Bigpoint. So, he's been in the sector for kind of many years at quite a lot of big companies. and we spoke on stage about kind of how to raise investment in 2025 which after I was kind of talking about the negativity and obviously during the last few years investment has been pretty it's pretty low but this year more of an anecdote I guess but from a news perspective recently it felt like there's been a lot of investment coming back in just because we're reporting a lot of stories I already mentioned just before the podcast obviously Fred studio million

victories just raised at least $40 million. So, congrats to them. And there's been a bunch of others this week I need to catch up on and and last few months. But I guess it depends on who you are to be like how you feel about kind of the uh investment. So anyway, we had like a few tips and his thoughts on the state of investment and then he has an issue point of view because I guess he's raised money and he's also deploying capital as well. So some of the things you talked about when they decided to get kind of their extra round of funding I think it was about he said about 50 million so this is 150 million there is 50 million came from existing investors 100 million came from new uh kind of investors they thought that process so for people that would like to know how long does this kind of stuff take this is obviously a very very big investment round right so I'm sure mileage varies but he said they day four the process would take about 3 to four months months. It took a year. So they began in January last year and it finished in December. Uh so 12 months to

apparently it took about 150 meetings. That's not including meetings internally. So so one of the things that he said kind of asking about the overall state of investment and is it coming back. I'm not saying any of this is new but it's interesting. So he said that investors are now much more focused on doing kind of the right due diligence. So we all know probably about it's not about super growth anymore. was about profitability, right? He said years ago, you could go to an investor and say, "Hey, I used to work for Blizzard 20 years ago." And then the investor would be like, "Oh, here's your check." Exaggeration, but we have seen a lot of those kind of stories, right? X- Riot Games person raises X amount of money. And he said the games industry in particular was really hype during COVID, so it was very easy to get big investments. He said now you can still do that, but investors kind of learned they need to be even more knowledgeable about the industry. So now when you talk to investor he said they they really know kind of well according to him a bit more of a deep knowledge about the industry. He also said you kind of have

to sometimes educate investors that aren't used to games but he said I guess the games related ones they know about kind of failures. They know about success. They ask us more questions about the market and they want to know what your go-to market plan is. He said the biggest difference from years ago is that ideally companies seeking investment they need now something to show that is tangible like a playable or and not just a pitch deck. So he said you you need to have a prototype demo or at least a video. You can still raise it money without without it especially if you have the right CV and the right network. If you want to raise money and you haven't been the CEO of another game studio, you haven't got one or two top hits on your CV or in your portfolio, then you need to just simply come with a far more advanced pitch. And he said they get around well he gets around 200 to 300 pitch decks per month and those are the ones that are just forwarded to him by the team. So it's quite it's quite a lot and it's just a real quick investment advice. So he said to some

red like a red flag. He said the most common mistake in pitches is the lack of research and understanding of the market particularly when it comes to how competitive the space is or kind of reaching out. So practical advice. So if you're uh reaching out to an investor or a publisher and you want funding or someone to kind of help you release your game, publishers usually have forms on their website. You can submit the games. He said LinkedIn is a good source potentially if you want to find someone and he's proof of that. He's had a couple that have reached out on LinkedIn and then they've kind of gone on to progress into talks. I'm not saying do this for everyone but these are just sort of general advice things you could do. Lists are available obviously online but one of them is the financial list which is from fundamentally games. They have a big list that you could get in touch with. So conferences are good for networking but it's not actually easy to find the right people. I mean obviously sometimes like Arave events right we try and set it up so it's like an investor connect so we can actually find the right people but yeah to his point I guess you can't just spot someone out of

the crowd uh but obviously you can use like meet smash things this is right some of that is raw basics still he said finding investors can take a lot of initial outreach so he said when he raised money for his first company he contacted 700 different investors for free so it's quite a lot of work on presentation decks it was just like he I kind of asked you need to tailor it would you could you just have a generic one if you're doing such what broad outreach? He advised for him to he said create some different pitch decks that are more tailored to certain investors. He said he thinks they did about at least 30 to 40 different versions on initial outreach. You could do a teaser deck. So say who you are, what you want to do, why you want to do it, and why your product and company is good. No more than 10 pages for that. you could attach like if that's your initial outreach you can attach like a longer deck at the end obviously if investor wants to know more you you can discuss it with them and his quote was you know I don't have unlimited time and it helps if it's small and compact um and then some real quick general tips you know

your pitch needs to stand out obviously you need to have a product which grabs the audience and his point was just like you know ste there's so many games coming out steam every day on mobile of course is really busy loads and loads of games constantly out In terms of like who you could approach if you want to build games, have your own company and you don't have a mindset really to sell. You shouldn't talk to VCs. There'll be a need to sell at some point. You could talk to strategic investors. Imagine like Mini Click, Jagex or private investments. If founders want to sell but don't want the pressure of VC, so private equity is getting more into games, but they're more focused on big checks. And his last tip that I've got written here, uh, said come with a reasonable budget. So, if you if you come and ask for $50 million, it's probably not realistic at the moment. Uh, so be reasonable with your ask. Uh, be prepared with what you want to do, not just have a great idea. You need to know what's the competition, what's the saturation of the genre, who else is out there, how easy is that to get into, and kind of how competitive is that? So, it

was a really interesting talk. Some interesting tips. So, I'll try and get the video uh for us to publish, but I'll put a link into my roundup of that talk. It was very interesting. So, thanks to all of them and thanks to everyone that attended the the chat. I found it useful for Arab. We'll get on to the news of the week cuz I I've just been out of this all week. You've got a few things, but uh Clash Royale was pretty interesting. Yes. So last week um Clash Royale introduced a new like turnbased mode called merge tactics where players basically initially will buy sell and merge your troops and then you kind of send them into battle where they fight automatically against other players and um you kind of continue to build them up in a bit more of a limited way. One of the unique features of it is that players basically there's a pool of troops. So if you choose some then other players can't. So it's kind of a give and take there of you're trying to build

up a certain type that you've chosen and then other people can't build them up. And it also has kind of a pre-established pool of characters. So it doesn't depend so much on who you've got in other game modes. It's very much like its own thing as we've kind of seen uh Clash Royale become something of a kind of hub for the Supercell projects. But yeah, interestingly, the mode's very quickly been followed up uh with a spending surge based on App Magic estimates. So, the game made $3.8 8 million on the 8th of July um which the estimates say was its highest level of gross daily spending um seen since December 20th 2021. So obviously during the pandemic and this is just Google Play and App Store revenue. But yeah, effectively this mode has now hit like a nearly fouryear high for like daily player spending which could go in. It's

not on um kind of Brawl Stars levels of sudden surge, but it's pretty pretty good going. So, I' I'd actually been working a bit on like a dive into Ash Royale's um kind of comeback because we've kind of been seeing it over a few months recently. This new mode seems to have really spiked things quite dramatically, but the rise was already kind of bubbling away. So, June was already the game's biggest month for revenue since 2021. um was before this new mode rolled out. So yeah, I wanted to take a bit of a look back at um what the Clash Royale team's kind of been doing over recent months. It kind of looks now in retrospect like they were they've made some changes to like design philosophy that have helped the game improve. And then, you know, as that uh snowballed a bit, they've now brought out this new mode that's kind of excelled things even further. In May, um

the earnings up 67% month over month to 40 million. Um and then in June, they went up to 51.4 million. Year over year, June was up 127%. Um and I said that's its best month the game's had since 2021. So, I um I was looking through like Supercell's updates to the game over recent months. They tend to do like one big update a month, it seems. And the April 7th update saw some quite big changes, like they overhauled Clash Royale's battle pass. So, they increased it from 60 tiers to 90 and changed the rewards available in the free pass and the diamond pass. um which I would say points to them trying to get people spending longer playing the game to get more of these rewards during a passes active period. Um and further to this, they also removed chest cues, timers, and keys on

April 7th. So like rewards that you would be able to claim in game, but then you have to wait for them to unlock or use these resources. that's all kind of been reworked and rebalanced so that you play the game and you get the rewards. The Clash Royale team said at the time that the goal was to eliminate every barrier that stopped you collecting rewards at your own pace. And at the same time, they also simplified battle rewards and combined them with daily win rewards. So basically, as you do battles each day, you can get extra crowns for your first so many battles and more for your so many wins. And I think like the first 10 wins a day come with various rewards. So it's all very much pointing to they're trying to get people playing more every day, which I think has ultimately played a role in why we've seen this rise over the past few months. They've also like each update will bring like new evolutions and some bring a new character to the game, which I'm sure

helps, but that's not anything that new. It doesn't explain why previous months weren't so strong. So, I do think that kind of change in philosophy has has affected things. They also streamlined the game in April. They removed the banner box, banner tokens, and season tokens and closed the current version of the season shop, which might all sound like bad stuff to be getting rid of things, but um it's not the first time we've seen Supercell like um removing unsuccessful areas of game. Like the Squadbusters, the big overhaul for version 2.0 post saw them remove multiple modes like double gangers and double tr double trouble which they think is going to be in the best interest of the game. So I think obviously famously changed things up and they famously got rid of loot boxes and they made they tried to make a big fanfare of it but it didn't help the game at all and then eventually they made obviously they made a number of changes but it's I always forget the name of it starry road or star drops can't remember which then helped kind of

the game kind of blow up mega mega success. Yeah. So, the Clash Royale team said with this these removals that um despite offering many great rewards, the season shop wasn't very popular. Um so, yeah, I guess they just decided to to get rid of it. They said that they want to make best rewards accessible to all players and give people the freedom to enjoy the modes that they like without being forced to like participate in seasonal events to get rewards, which I thought was quite an interesting thing to say. Obviously, seasonal seasonal events are a very kind of common thing in mobile games. So, yeah, quite noteworthy. They're going a different direction there. Players were also given like gold in exchange for things that were removed, I guess, so that they weren't too upset at Supercell for just removing things. And they tied it in with an update that introduced a new character called Boss Bandit. So, people didn't just log in on the 7th of April and find there's less to do all of a

sudden. really since then. I say that the um game's been picking up steam month over month. June saw the it's the best full month. You know, July might beat it now, but currently June's the best full month since 2021. So, it'll be interesting to see whether that sustains and whether we just keep seeing monthly growth or whether whether it's kind of peaked now and going to level back out. I guess we'll see as the month goes on.
I I think it's to go back to kind of the kind of the new game play that they're putting in. I think it's really cool to treat Clash Royale as a platform.
I think it's a really good experiment cuz I I always wonder when you have these hit games and any platform really that they build up these massive audiences, many millions of players, and then they're always focused on that singular core experience. There are very good reasons for that. There's obviously Sorry, my cat's here, by the way.
I didn't introduce him earlier. He's been missing me for a couple days, so he's joining the podcast. Um, I don't think he has anything to say. No, just get coffee. Yeah. So, yeah, I think it's

really interesting that um yeah, you get all these games, they get millions of players, and there's obviously very good reasons why they keep that core experience because that's why people are there. And then if you start adding more modes in theory, you can dilute it, right? But I still think it's actually a really cool idea to at least try. And then obviously you have the bigger games. It's a bit diff kind of different. You have like a Fortnite trying to expand into other games. So, I think it's a good idea. And then obviously they were going to put in um they previously announced about kind of Clash Mini being part of Clash Royale, right? And integrated that. I I think this is well worth keeping an eye on. I mean, we don't know if it's going to be a big success. It's had a good start, I guess, along with other changes that they have made. I guess it's risky, but I'm quite excited to see what they do. The other thing I wanted to say is kind of about the revenue going up that it revenue started going up at about mid 2023. there's been like a long decline and it's probably one of the well it is

one of the kind of most successful uh mobile games ever right and I think there's some people out there that say uh it's probably like probably the best mobile game that they've played like the original core experience and then it's just been on the decline for many years obviously went up during the pandemic but 2023 is when things started to rise and I think that and these changes recently are perhaps indicative of I mean one obviously trying to turn around the game but two, they've been expanding their teams, right? Which is apparently what helped with Brawl Stars thought that maybe Brawl Stars the changes kind of came later, but they're saying that the team size helped them make take more risks and so I wonder if now you're starting to see this this new strategy finally they've had an update that maybe has actually worked for now
and the bigger teams just all started to actually have an impact and that these things take time. So, I think it's really cool and excited to see what they do. So, uh the other thing that I that I wanted to talk about, so I've just

written a China Games report. So, I guess I kind of wanted to go through a few kind of stats and takeaways. What's going on there? So, obviously we're doing Pocket Gamer Connect Summit Shanghai on July 30th. So, a couple stats for you. Obviously, it's probably one of the world's kind of most lucrative markets, but also the toughest to break into. So uh according to the China Audio Visual and Digital Publishing Association's annual report uh the country generated about the country's games industry generated about $44.8 billion in 2024 which is a rise of about 7.5%. Niko Partners meanwhile puts it at 48.7 billion and I think that is where Nu puts it around. Then uh so Appmagic I looked on their their China app store only revenue uh they said it generated about 15.6 billion gross revenue last year that's just from player spending which was actually a small decline 1% year-over-year in the

first 6 months of 2025 accumulated already about 8 billion so that's actually a small rise just less than 1% year-over-year if you want to compare that. So the US app store made $8.4 billion uh in H1 2025. Bear in mind that so in China Google Play is not available whereas it is in the US. Google Play generates generally less revenue and in China it's actually the Android stores that kind of make ridiculous sums of money. So they'll make more than the app store. And then you've obviously got WeChat mini games that's been growing for a long time and 500 million monthly active users. So that's that's pretty good I guess I would say. I guess what what's changed in in China's games industry, right? So we already know that 10 cent is highly influential invested loads of money and Honor of Kings at home enormous. Probably the biggest mobile game on the planet biggest game on the planet. PUBG

Mobile has been international success and so we all know they're influential. Netis, it's kind of a weird one in that they're obly very successful. I believe they're still the second biggest publisher unless so one of the trends is that China's kind of proven itself now not just in mobile and not just at home as a country that has studios that create massive massive global hits and now are kind of across platforms. So we've seen the big one was Blackmith Wukon from Game Science. That was kind of the proof of AAA from China having a kind of global reach and that they can have like kind of the same quality levels. You can argue all that if you want, but the general feeling is that that is how it's kind of gone. That's direction of travel. And then Netis has had Marvel Rivals had Delta Force. Mother rivals been successful, but it's kind of come at a weird time of like so they've kind of proven, oh, we can be really global use global success at the same time as Netis is scaling back its international operations. They laid off the US team

for Marvel Rifles or at least most of it. So, yeah, it's really interesting dichotomy. I I've chatted before with uh kind of an executive that used to be a Chinese company and and I believe he's now an investor last year and they were like I they don't see how companies outside of China will actually compete with that scale because obviously Mihoyo get impact massive massive gains that rumored to be $100 million to make $200 million a year to run and so can Western companies compete with that in China they've got more stuff apparently is cheaper uh currently uh to make games there. But then they've got such a big market that's kind of somewhat closed off to international companies can get that that they can use that as a base as well to build on internationally. China's got a lot going for it and I think we'll only see that influence increase over the years. on mobile of course Micro Fun with Merge Games probably I think they're like the biggest merge game developer out there

now ahead of Meta Core and then obviously Fans emerged as another leader in kind of forex strategy space with Last Warry games from China with Wild Survival another 4X strategy game so yeah it's looking very good I spoke with uh a couple people uh from the industry so I spoke with Tom Vanam at Joy Maker and I spoke with Mikall Linan from my games the CEO about the industry. He said that so Mikall said that when we started my games over a decade ago in development in China still lagged behind what he'd seen in the west. Fast forward to today and many of the world's most impressive developers are based in China says believe you're already seeing the tip of the iceberg. Tom Vadam he kind of put he said that China's market is not just different but it has its own trajectory. He said while western market is largely built around console char built from the ground up most of smartphone uh obviously led to different consumer

behavior. You've got WeChat chat is massive there. So he said it's brought gaming to a massive audience that might not otherwise engage with traditional platforms. Anyway like uh the report will be out soon. I'll put the article up on the site very soon. There's a lot of interesting insights, but it it's just that China is one to watch. And if you're an international company, it's it's been tough, right? Licensing freezes, changes. It's quite difficult to get your game out there. My game said a talk at PC Barcelona that that time has shrunk. So, I think it could have taken even like a couple years to get your game to launch there. Now, it's like merely like a year or less, less than a year, which is a very long time. But you don't have that problem with like other markets, right? But they announced there was an announcement this week I think uh for foreign funded games as they put it in Shanghai. There's a new thing to help make it even easier to launch. So currently it looks like there's a bit of an easing. There's an opening up. We'll see if that maintains. We'll see if more licenses keep getting approved. You

know, it is very difficult. But yeah, China is like an old story almost in how influential it is, but it's also a current a new story of just how big it could be on the international stage. So Aaron, you got to round us out. And there's been a lot of anniversaries this week.
Yes, there have. So I thought I'd start with Pokémon Go, which just celebrated its 9th anniversary, which makes me feel incredibly old. Released back in 2016, obviously, um the 6th of July. um took the world by storm. You know, anyone that um listens to our podcast regularly, you know, Pokémon Go comes up quite a lot. So, as of the latest anniversary, App Magic estimates put it at about 8.8 billion in like lifetime revenue. So, player spending from Google Play and the App Store. Um, obviously they make additional revenue from the web shop, but uh just looking at the kind of major store revenue, the spending was actually up like 1% this

past year. So, you know, that's better than down 1%. It's not done anything crazy, at least based on these estimates, compared to like it peaked during the pandemic, ironically, when people couldn't go outside. So for year 9, it's estimated to be about 830 million almost, which still very good money. Swiftly um moving on from Pokémon Go, we also had Zenless Zone Zero's first anniversary, which obviously we were talking about a minute ago,
another big China, another massive China developer now.
Yeah. So, and that that's kind of flown by that it's been a year already since their latest game came out. So it was the 4th of July last year and in its first year endstone Zero's made 442 million on mobile um again from the two big stores according to atmagic which you know not not a bad sum by any means compared to Hoy versus kind of recent standards it's sort of nowhere near as

good like it made just 23% of the mobile earnings that Genchin Impact achieved in its first year on mobile Genshin came closer to two billion in its first year. So obviously 442 million doesn't look so much in comparison. Owner's biggest month was its launch month of July last year. It made almost 100 million or like nearly a third of its whole year's earnings just in its debut month. Um so obviously it's declined since then, but it's not just been like a downward slope the whole way through. June this year was actually its third best month. I think that tied into the um like version 2.0 update which um also triggered the game's biggest spending spike yet on a daily basis. So it was up 740% on the day that version 2 went live and then player spending remained above the pre-update level for 10 consecutive days. Uh which as I say helped helped

make June really a good month for the game. Right, I guess that brings us to the end of the pocket game podcast week in mobile games. Thanks as always, Aaron, for being on the podcast and for basically manning the website this week, so yeah, great job. And uh thank you everyone for listening. Goodbye for me and goodbye for Gizmo. I just woke him up, so I was going to say he's asleep. He'll be very happy about that. Anyway, everyone, have a great weekend. We'll see you on the next show. Thanks very much. Goodbye.