Why is Google policing how the world's top mobile games monetise? | Week in Mobile Games podcast E72

[music] Hello and welcome to the pocket gamer.biz podcast week in mobile games where we chat about the week's news and provide some insights. I'm Craig Chapel, head of content at pocket gamer.biz and with me as ever is our news editor, Aaron Asel. Hello Aaron. How's it all going? What you been up to?
Uh yeah. Yeah, good, thank you. Um, I've been busy um looking at the Nintendo store app. That's been the highlight of my um past the whole week. Your highlight is sitting down in a quiet room.
Yeah. And not for any actual shopping reasons. Although cuz the main purpose of the Nintendo store app is obviously to look at, you know, here's all the Switch and Switch 2 games, but kind of hidden away in your um kind of profile section on the app. They've got like really thorough data on like your play time on the Switch,

which is really random to like throw in on this app. Like Nintendo have like five or six apps already. I don't know why why this has been put into the shopping app, but it's it's um it's been a bit of a nostalgia trip really looking through it. So, it shows like every game that I've played on the Switch. You can filter it by like most played or you know date first played or whatever.
Um and when you click on the game, it tells you the date that you started the game, the date you last played it, how many separate days you have played it on.
Oh, that's cool. And even you can scroll through and it shows you every instance where you've played the game and like how long you played for. Like every single date going back to 2017 on the Switch, I can see what exact days I played what games for how long. And it's creepy, but it's interesting.
I didn't know they were tracking it to that level individually for you to see.
It's like Yeah. And suddenly now, you

know, they're happy for you, you see how long you've been playing for. So like I saw that um I think like one of the Zenablade games like the day it came out it's like oh I spent nine hours on that game. That was a healthy day.
Wow. You did a full You did a full day's work. [laughter]
Yeah. And then or or a few where it'll say like I played for like a few minutes and it's like that was probably like midnight like just before the new day ticked over because it'll be like a few minutes and then the next day is like 5 hours. It's like yeah that was probably a late night session. But no, so I've been looking through that a lot. I um pleased to to report that my most played games actually kind of reflect some franchises I talk about a lot on the podcast. Actually, my three most played kind of hourswise games are a Pokémon game, a Fire Emblem game, and a Monster Hunter game.
Makes sense.
I feel like that sort of sums me up. [laughter]
Yeah, very accurate. So, thanks, Aaron.

And then I guess for me, the main thing I've been up to is I've been watching Ted Lassa and I must I don't know why it took me so long. I must say it is a fantastic TV show. It's like people have probably already said over the past few years, like it's just such a lovely kind of feel-good show to watch. Has a right mix of kind of comedic humor, a bit silly to some like serious heartwarming emotional stuff. It it does everything really well. I finished it already. I took me like a couple weeks. I finished all three all three seasons. I highly recommend it.
Right, we'll get on to the the news. As always, some shout outs. So, the main thing that we've got coming up now is PGC London, the big one, January 19th to 20th. As always, I think I'm sure there are some deals going on. So, if you know you're going, just grab grab an early bird offer. They're still going and get some cheaper tickets and then I'll see you there. I'm also, shout out if anyone wants to meet up, I'll be in Helsinki for a few days from November 17th to the

20th. So mainly really I'm basically there evening of 17th and I leave morning on 20th but I'll be at Roio Con. Shout out to that and I'm going to be at slush which I surprisingly have never been to. So I'm very much looking forward to that. Right. We're going to get into the news. Uh Aaron, you've had a really cool story. So kick us off.
Right. Yeah. So um first up from me, we've been looking this week at the kind of new Google Play Store sort of monetization situation. I suppose following all the well the legal battle between Google and Epic. So basically Google Play it's looking like it will be they're going to charge like 9% fees on in-game purchases if they're like cosmetics or things with um like no more than a um the minimus uh like gameplay advantage.
Mhm. and then something that does give you more of an advantage will be charged at 20% fee. So obviously both

improvements from the kind of 30% fee, but um that um the kind of the difference there, the nine and the 20% uh sort of got us looking into how various games do monetize. Um
I I just want to add before you uh you carry on there is is that this is just a proposal, right? So the judge is actually questioning this at the moment. So this is a proposal to an injunction that is already in effect in the US. This would effect be effective globally if the judge approved this. The judge isn't sure about it, but yeah, 9% 20% fee just based on monetization. Sorry.
Yes. Um, so yeah, basically we took a look at the top 50 mobile games on the Play Store from October uh to and then kind of took a bit of a deep dive into all their monetization models to determine like which games would likely, you know, in our opinion based on the information that is

available, which ones would likely kind of be charged 20% and which ones would be 9%. And we ended up finding that all 50 have elements that they would be charged the 20% on again based on our analysis which I think kind of goes to show first of all that like elements that give you an advantage obviously are just what you know that that's what works. That's what games are doing and that people want to buy. I know people do spend on cosmetics and stuff and obviously that's very much like Fortnite's thing which I think we'll come back to in a minute. But overall, you know, I guess generally people if they're going to spend it's because they they do want some benefit from it rather than just like a visual change and therefore all all of these top games have some element that you could argue uh gives an advantage. loot boxes, you know, very often have um characters or weapons or something, which obviously if you end up getting the weapon or whatever, that might be

advantageous. And we found that like 37 of the top 50 games last month had loot boxes. Then there were also 12 of the 50 um had guter elements which are similar. there's some overlap between the those 12 and 37 um got and loot box games, but also then so like 21 of the top games had monetized timers which you could argue is an advantage if you're able to pay to skip a cool down on something. Obviously in puzzle games it's quite common to have boosters like Candy Crush like the lollipop hammer or royal hammers in Royal Match kind of make levels easier to complete. So again that can see that being argued as an advantage. um even a bit more broadly just like consumable items whether that is boosters like this or kind of upgrades to characters or um I guess like premium currency or whatever. So 31 of the top 50 had

consumables and basically overall all of the top 50 had some monetization element that you could say is advantageous to buy. And yeah uh worth noting as well. So that doesn't mean necessarily the entire like game would be charged 20% like on any purchases if I think if the developers able to show kind of you know if you have cosmetics and advantageous items or whatever and you can show that people spent to get the cosmetics then you would get charged the 9% on those purchases which sounds like it's it would be a bit of a nightmare to actually manage like actually you know correctly tracking all of that And I guess sharing that information with Google and them approving it. Particularly like Pokémon Go is an example that comes to mind. I know that the the coins that you can buy in Go like so it's one currency that you buy and then you can use those coins on cosmetics like clothes or you can buy more Poké Balls or like raid tickets to

buy legendary Pokémon. So if the player's purchase is for coins and they can do any of those things with them and you know say you bought 100 coins and you spent 61 on clothes and the remainder on advantageous stuff and I just I say I see it being a bit of a nightmare to actually monitor how how this all gets broken down. Yeah, I think um so thank you to Sensor Tower. We got the data for the loot boxes, the consumables that's based on their own game classification, game taxonomy slash game IQ, whatever they whatever they now call it after the data AI acquisition. But uh and then we we looked at the top 50 ourselves as well. We went into the monetization of that and that's where we decided that we thought all 50 have at least like some purchases that that by our understanding could give you a gameplay advantage. We've asked Google and Epic for what they think and they they they haven't replied to us. I think

it was interesting. I mean I've never played so many social casino games in my life in past couple days. So uh did that and I guess it was interesting like what do you consider gameplay advantage in that situation? So, for example, like and I would consider this a gameplay advantage like you you use coins to gamble to get more coins and you can also then get access to other games areas and then if you run out of coins, you can get some for free by like daily login bonuses and and other maybe other ways. But like generally then you then have to pay to get more and then so the only way you can progress through the game technically then is is just to wait or pay. And generally it's the frustration like the timer is that you pay for to progress, right? So if you buy the coins, you could presume that that would be a gameplay advantage.
But I think it it's just it's so not clearcut and I think a lot of developers will be complaining to Google quite frequently, well why would this be considered that a gameplay advantage? How do you prove this? And like you say,

like I mean really what we now got developers have now kind of got to track individual
Oh, sorry. Yeah, they got to look at like the individual transactions within a game, put a price on that. So, not just like you say, you buy you buy 50 gems. You you spend 30 on something, 10 or so, five something else. And like you then have to put a value on each one of those gems to say, well, this is that that's that. Send that to Google and then what does Google track that? No. Like how does Google track it? I think they it's just like about an API. It's just it sounds like a bit of a nightmare for everybody involved, even Google. Obviously, the notable thing is is that, and I think we probably mentioned this last week, is that the nine is that Fortnite classically monetizes through cosmetics, as you said. So, they'll be the the 9%. So, they're kind of getting what they Epic's kind of getting what it wants along with the alternative store stuff that's also in the in the ruling. But what's interesting is even Fortnite, well, they have to fork out like part of

that 20% fee. And how does that work? because you can buy your V-Bucks and then they've just they're just enabling um in sorry they're enabling in island transactions now. So each creator uh that creates their own island they can charge for their own things within that and maybe they'll have loot boxes. They'll have uh like you I think we mentioned you were telling me about growing by seed packs, right? Maybe there's a version of that in in Fortnite. these things might give you a gameplay advantage or help this grow, help this plant grow quicker. So then Fortnite and Epic are liable for the 20% fee there. And none of this considers the uh there's an So that's the 9% or 20% is now a store fee. So they've create from this amendment, they've created a new fee, which also doesn't really seem in keeping with the original point of the whole lawsuit. And then after that, it's a 5% charge for Google Play billing. So they've actually managed so Google's actually from this

managed to split out what was always for the billing to now the billing is 5% the rest is that
it's 25% cut or and 5% as it as it were is also the same as any direct consumer well it's the same as most direct consumer platforms. What's happened here? It's still good, you know, cut the fee by 5%. But then you've also sort of tried to they've also tried to cut out a bit direct consumer platforms and web ships by like if you link out to a direct consumer platform, I think in the first 24 hours for purchases made, then Google takes a cut,
which wasn't going to be the case in the original injunction. So, I'm very curious to see what the judge does. But yeah, it was all really interesting and just investigating it. you can see just how complex it is.
And again, like at the minute, like what counts as an advantage feels like such a gray area to find? Um because like you're saying with the social casino games, like is it if you reach a point

where you need to spend money to be able to play at all? Is it a gameplay advantage to spend? Then you're just spending to be able to play. You're not at an advantage. But equally, yeah, like there are other kind of games where you would, you know, if you've run out of stamina and you pay to carry on, you know, that
could easily argue that's an advantage. So then with that perspective, it's like, so yeah, obviously the social casino ones are, but then you look at something like DLC where you pay to play that DLC,
I think for DLC,
not really an advantage.
I think actually they they do explain that a bit. So in the let me look. So, the nine So, for the 9% fee, uh, that includes content, levels, events, or cosmetic items. So, I I would read that as if you get DLC, it's a one-off payment, or you access a new level, pay direct for that, then that's 9%.
Yeah. kind of where I was going with that though is that I could see social casino games arguing or like DLC if that's 9% and you pay to just be able to

play the content that's kind of the same with the casino games once you run out of coins you have play you have to pay to be able to play it so I can see you know arguments on both sides but um and I imagine Google will argue they're advantageous
I can see a lot of disputes arising for sure there were some other like little bits that we quoted So in the article we say we say there's currently some confusion around exactly how Google would manage these changes and what constitutes gameplay advantage. I was saying Google Epics proposal give some clarity to titles offering varying types of purchase. So we kind of explained this earlier but just just as the actual quote of this amendment which is for an inapp or linked purchase of virtual currency which can be used to obtain multiple kinds of items whose service fees differ. the higher service fee may apply until and unless a portion of the virtual currency use can be attributed and prorated to items bearing the lower service fee. And then there was another bit. So games offer starter packs and bundles. Epic Google's new proposal

notes that the tech giant may charge the higher service fee for a bundle that includes items subject to two different service fees. So in that case, you can't split it.
No, because it's a bundle, you then have to pay 20% rather than 9%. But ind individual transactions can of currency can be attributed prorated items bearing the last services. It's such a nightmare for everyone involved and it really does change like the way at least like offers are presented I think and the way I again I just go back to what I said last week. I don't know why this case has suddenly come down to the way that games
monetize and why Google and Epic should be able to decide that for the industry.
Yeah.
It doesn't make any sense to me at all. Cuz like the 30% fee that that was never kind of built on an argument of like what type of monation the games have it. That was just like the service fee for being on the Play Store. Basically,
they just added completely new fees and it's bizarre. Right. Good work on that investigation, Aaron. And if you haven't

read it, uh definitely check it out. I'll put a link in the description below. So, we're going to move on to the next uh the next story, which is we released the top 30 Mina game makers for 2025. So this is similar to our top 50 list. The the criteria for the top 30 is based on factors including quality and quantity of new games released. Financial performance over the past 12 months, notable innovation or impact on the industry, culture, importance, future potential, some cases M&A, uh it's basically kind of all the factors that make someone like makes someone makes a company like one of the most notable. And so it probably come as a little surprise who topped the list. At number 10, I won't do number one, but everyone knows what it is. At number 10, we put Rav uper games. They're a Jordanian developer. Made this Hala games. Ad Hook is at number nine. Uh they make uh Highway Drifter, Rooftop Run, etc. Gala Play, they've done games like Space Masters or Tiny Masters Studio, which I think raised some funding recently. They do King of Steer

and Climbing Sanju and Drift X. They've been around for a while. As a ward that's led by a guy called Nor who's a very big figure in Jordan's games industry in the wider Middle East has been doing it for a long time. I think it was is it their first games company maybe in Jordan founded in 2003 still going. So shout out to them. Jawaka was number five. They are owned by Steelfront and another Steelfront owned company in number four is Babel Games. They do need a har and the grand frontier. Got Tamate number three. They're like a kind of a regional publisher and they help kind of local culturalize and localize games. Then we've got Yala Group. So I think if you ever think like well what big games have actually come from the Middle East kind of other than the ones I've said but maybe not heard like Yala Ludo has actually made like hundreds of millions of dollars on the market. Sorry over $500 million on the iOS and Android and that's in Saudi Arabia in Saudi Arabia and the US. It's kind of a bit of a

global success story for the region and Gal Group might even be public. Number one, you could really guess the Savvy Games Group, right? But they made they made a few big acquisitions. They're really investing a lot in in the region. I mean, they also have Steer Studios, the local development team, which has done Grunt Rush, and they're doing Tom and Jerry Blast, which is big get for them. They've obviously acquired Scopely. as a kind of investment group for for Scopley's kind of ambitions. So Scop is apparently like independently run as they see it, but that Savvy is like an investment backer which I guess makes sense. So Scopio acquired itself for $4.9 billion and then Scopi acquired Niantic for $3.5 billion and then we're seeing like this Mai studio from Scopia has opened up now in in Saudi and there'll be others. Yeah, Savvy Games Group is making uh big waves and I think it's that's kind of encouraged investment across the Middle East. Uh I was speaking to Norcra last year maybe

about it all and he was saying yeah like because of this big Saudi investment and and Savvy Games Group that's that's kind of inspired or forced or however you like to to say it but like made other countries be like oh we should invest in in this sector. There's obviously something going on here and we want to kind of get in on that. So yeah, hugely influential. So that's my I guess that's my spiel for the top 30 Mina. I'll put a link in the description as well. Aaron, what else have we got?
Yeah, so my other story this week. So there's been a lot of financials coming out lately and I thought I'd draw attention to one in particular. So Playa uh have released their Q3 financials. Some interesting numbers like there like um direct to consumer revenue has risen 20% apparently. They also generated 4.6 6 million in overall revenue which was up 8% year-over-year and so 31% of that was direct to consumer which obviously you know we've been seeing a big increase in companies kind of opting for

that and yeah clearly clearly they're making that work. Bingo Blitz June's Journey Solitaire Grand Harvest and Super Plays portfolio apparently were all quite big factors in achieving this with the like BTC stuff. Um, and Disney Solitaire Super Play's recent solitaire game was highlighted for having exceptional growth. According to CEO Robert Panto Cole, he noted in Platica's earnings call that Disney Solitaire scaled faster than any other game in Plat's 15-year history. And I was surprised to hear in the earnings call cuz this wasn't mentioned in the the financial report or anything but basically teased that building on the momentum of Disney Solitaire um they are quote expand or they have expanded their collaboration with Disney and Pixar games and they're developing a new title in the Super Play pipeline with more information to to follow. So basically,

yeah, I guess Disney Solitaire has helped them secure another partnership game with Disney, which obviously after how big Disney Solitire has been, exciting to see what that is and how big it ends up being. Apparently, Beta had 354,000 average daily paying users in Q3, um, which was up almost 18% year-over-year. Averaged 8.2 million daily average users, which was up from 7.6 6 um in Q3 24. Yeah, basically a lot of numbers went up. Obviously full full details are in the article. Yeah, I thought they were worth shouting out in particular because of the Yeah, the new Disney collab.
Yeah, I think uh a couple things. It shows that the Super Play acquisition, which is $2 billion, is off to a really good start. It's a lot to pay back obviously. Was it Dreams is already doing very well. I think Domino Dreams was was scaling last looks. Don't know what the latest is to be honest. And then um uh Disney Solitaire has just

knocked it out of the park really. [snorts] So it also sounds like they I guess they've got another development team at work there, right? So they've already got free development. They've already got free teams on three of their games. I guess they got another one. Maybe others. We just don't know about it sounds like they've expanded a bit and which is cool. And on the direct consumer revenue, so it's interesting that like the for the quarter I'm just looking at it now like for Q3 the total revenue as I think it was up 8.7% year-over-year. If it's actually down from Q1 and Q2 appreciate the different quarters doesn't necessarily mean much direct consumer revenue got up 20%. But like that's it's amazing because it was kind of flat the whole year direct consumer revenue and you can really see like the recent changes with app store. Well, I guess it's too early for Google, but the recent changes in direct consumer have had a significant impact. So, that's kind of that's kind of cool as well. So, moving on, a couple we'll try and go through these reasonably quick. There was a we had two really

interesting bits of news. Sorry, we had an interesting bit of news and we had an interesting article. Squad Supercell has released an FAQ, which is fan based fan questions that they've answered about Squadbusters. And we asked them for an interview. They said they did decline. I'll ask again, but maybe I'll maybe post FAQ they're open to it. But uh they just give a bit more color. So obviously Squad Bus is going to shut down next year. It's the first time Supercell shut down a live game. I think it was their sixth global launch. The big decision for them seems to be if you consider that their ambition is to make their self-state ambition, I think, is to make games that you play forever. And then the industry figures sort of billion dollars or bust. Neither of these things. So, they've decided to close. It seems to be the right decision, but obviously a big one cuz they've never done that before. So, they shed some light on it. Uh they they noted that when the team shared a road map and announced new content back in August, there were already conversations going on about the fate of the game. Uh in parallel with development, no final decision have been made to shut it down. So, they've been obviously wasn't just a

snap decision. Oh, we're just going to shut it. They've been talking about it for quite a long time. I'm sure that's very much expected by anyone in the industry, but it was just interesting to see that to see that they wrote that. They said, well, one of the quotes we picked out was it it would have to rework it again. Squad busters 3.0, they already re reworked it once. They said it would have made it almost a completely new game. So, I guess in that sense, there's kind of no no real point. asked what the team would do differently if it could go back in time. Supercell said it would spend more time making sure, this is the quote, making sure the very core gameplay of Squad was truly ready for prime time. And then it said, "We believed it was, but in the end, too few players connected with it deeply enough to find fun and stay for the long term." I think that is kind of a recognition of they just didn't test it enough and they didn't put it in soft launch to really find out these these issues. I know they did a couple I think it was alpha tests. It does seem like had it had it gone through say what we me before say it went through kind of the the gauntlet that RAW stars went through I think these issues would have

come up a lot earlier but they've explained why they've done this before and they wanted to do things differently right question is if they could yeah bring it back to vision version one of the title removing 2.0's changes instead of just ending the game they just said the reality is that 1.0 O, which the original release proved not to be scalable in the long run. And it said it, the Squadbuster team also said it did not want to simply update the game less often because that's not how we build games at Supercell. One fan asked if Supercell would consider releasing the game source code or letting fans continue developing the game. I've also seen some people from the industry on LinkedIn asking, you know, would Supercell why doesn't Supercell like sell this? Why why do you have to shut it down? And I think that's just a I think that was tapping into a wider thing that companies shut down these games, but actually maybe another developer would take it on. I don't know necessarily why in a lot in some cases that would happen, but in this one, Supercell said it's not something it could do as it includes content and characters from all Supercell games, which makes it complex both legally and technically. They said, "We also used

internal tools and systems that can't be shared publicly. As much as we'd love to see Squad live on, it's just not something we can make happen." which makes a lot of sense to me. I think there are cases where sometimes a game gets soft launched from Supercell that's not using his IP, you know, it's classic IP that you're like someone else could do this, but that did happen right with um Everale and that never got anywhere. Metacore bought Everdale and they weren't able to make anything happen with that and I think the rights went back to Super. So, I mean it has Super has done it. It still didn't work because obviously if Super couldn't make it work either. So, that was that was interesting. another update on school buses. And to close us out, I I just wanted to mention this like spate of game announcements that's happened over the past 24 hours really, but also over the past week. So, we've got a Power World Mobile alpha test set for Q4 2025. So, remember Power World, the Pokémon kind of like game that I think is still under a legal dispute that's coming to mobile. So, that's really cool.

Interestingly, Mojang and King soft launch Minecraft Blast. So, it's in a play test in Malaysia at the moment. That kind of came out of nowhere. We'll see how that does. I guess couple interesting things there was that King previously did the Crash Bad game on the run, which I think had a a good start in terms of downloads, but you can kind of manufacture that and then it just never really did anything after that and they closed it. So, they have used Microsoft IP before and they're doing it again now with this and they did test a Blast game last year. We asked them about it, didn't we? And it was like, "Oh, we just I can't remember what the the PR was about it." And they were like, "Oh, you know, we're just experimenting. We're not necessarily closing it." I wonder if that was I wonder if that after that they tested it for the Candy Crush IP. Maybe it didn't work. And they were like, "Let's let's uh just use the Minecraft IP. See what we can do." It's kind of interesting one that's out now. Etsyoft has revealed a new global MMO RPG, Horizon Steel Frontiers. That's for

mobile and PC. I think the PC is through its own platform. But that's interesting. I love the Horizon game. So that's the gorilla game Sony PlayStation IP. And it's really good series. So I'm quite excited to see that. It also explains a bit about why Sony was so angry with Tencent for their uh their game that looks a lot like Horizon. And and then the the background to it, wasn't it? Was it from the court case that uh I think there had been like a brief discussion about uh brief there had been a discussion between Tens and Sony about a partnership on Horizon and Sony I I believe wasn't interested maybe because they're already working with Ez. And then just more coming in we had uh there's the news that there's a Ratchet and Clank Ranger Rumble mobile game that's been announced. Subway Surface Plus for Apple Arcade and Boat Game Supercell, big one, their latest soft launch in a lot of countries. And then Temple Run Free, if anyone remembers that classic IP, like billions of

dollars, I'm sure everyone knows that soft launch from mobile sort of out of the blue as well. So, there's a lot going on and a lot of big IPs from PC console being adapted to mobile all at once, it would seem.
Yeah, lots to play.
Lots to play, lots to ponder. And it was like I was thinking like what are the big games kind of coming out now the rest of the year and just all of this stuff is at least being announced. So always interesting on mobile. Right. So with that that brings us to the end of the week in mobile games. Thanks as always for tuning in and listening. Thanks Aaron for your insights and for your investigation.
Yeah. Thank you. Always a pleasure.
And everyone we'll see you again next week. Have a good one. Goodbye.