Xbox reshuffle analysis, what’s next for King, Overwatch Rush, data, jobs, more

This is the mobile gamer.biz digest. I'm Neil Long and every week I go for a walk and tell you what's happening in the mobile games business. Here we go. Let's start with the goings on at Xbox. Phil Spencer has retired. The air apparent Sarah Bond formerly president and COO. She has left the company. Some reports out there saying she quit. And the new CEO of Microsoft gaming is Asha Sharma who is a former Meta Instacart and most recently of course Microsoft Exec. She was previously in charge of the core AI product, various apps, agents, developer tools, and she is moving over to lead the absolutely colossal Microsoft gaming unit, which of course includes Xbox console business, Microsoft First

Party Publishing, Minecraft, Activision, Blizzard, King, Bethesda, etc., etc. Clearly Sharma has no gaming background whatsoever, which is interesting. The AI background, even though she was in that position for a little over 18 months to 2 yearsish according to her LinkedIn profile, but an AI person in charge of this colossal gaming division seems like a very Microsoft move, doesn't it? If Microsoft is all in on AI, why not put an AI exec in charge of your gaming division? Matt Booty, who has been around Xbox for a long time, he's been promoted to chief creative officer. So, it seems like he's going to be the guy to front up the creative side of things, the content side of things perhaps, and then Asha Sharma will be

the business brains behind the whole thing. Obviously, there have been lots of tributes to Phil Spencer's run at Microsoft. It said that Phil Spencer was at Microsoft for 38 years, which is pretty extraordinary. I personally would go fully insane if I was at the same company for 38 years, but obviously everyone's different. There will obviously be a shakeup and the language towards the end of this blog on the future of play does imply this. It will require us to relentlessly question everything, revisit processes, protect what works, and be brave enough to change what does not. I think it's fair to say there are a lot of things not working within Xbox/Microsoft Gaming right now. The gamers have reacted to this in a sensible and mature fashion. No, of course they haven't. They've gone

completely insane. But ignore them. This is a business decision. Maybe Microsoft's slightly troubled gaming division does need a new perspective at the top. I don't think Satya Nadella cares. one job about what people are saying on Reddit or in the comments on IGN. Maybe Sharma with some fresh eyes will realize that where Xbox is going with games past with the everything's an Xbox idea. Maybe she will have a different view on that and this will be the turnaround. The negative interpretation is of course that she will wield the axe and shut down a load of studios that aren't performing commercially. I actually think having a sort of general tech management background and mobile being quite a numbers driven

more science driven business than craftdriven business. I think maybe this will be good for mobile under Microsoft gaming because Sharma will look at the numbers and see that King is making massive profits and maybe there will be more investment. As a complement to the big moves at Microsoft gaming, I also pulled some data out of AppMagic and had a look at the current lay of the land in terms of Microsoft owned mobile games. Lots of numbers in the article which is called Microsoft's 1.7 billion mobile game empire. What works, what doesn't, and what's next. According to App Magic, Microsoft's combined mobile games earned 1.7 billion dollars in 2025. That of course does not include Apple

and Google's 30% web shop revenue and ad revenue and comes with the usual caveats that these are third party estimates. But I've been told over the years that AppMagic is broadly accurate. And even if you don't fully believe the numbers, you can still get a flavor of the size and shape of Microsoft's mobile gaming business. Obviously, most of that is King earnings. King's Games earned 1.3 billion of the 1.7 billion total in 2025. Obviously, Candy Crush Saga, one billion, top of that leaderboard, but there's a load of King Games earning several million dollars a year that no one ever thinks about or writes about, it seems, inside the top five, which is Candy, Soda Saga, Farm Hero Saga, Pet Rescue, Candy Crush, Solitaire,

12.6 million so far. Not bad. You got games like Bubble Witch 3 Saga 9.4 million in inapp purchases last year. So as ever I think it is underestimated just how valuable and profitable King is as a business. But where it fits into Microsoft gaming is a bit of a puzzle as we will go on to later. Let's run through a couple more stats. Call of Duty Mobile 250 millionish earned in 2025. Obviously, some of that money will be split with 10-centent, which effectively runs the game. Diablo Immortal 58.9. Diablo Immortal China 8.3 million. That feels a little low. I don't know if the tracking is quite right there for the Chinese version of the game, but I thought it was interesting that Hearthstone, which I considered a bit of a legacy game,

$59.6 million earned in 2025 through mobile. That is actually ahead of the Western version of Diablo Immortal with all of its free-to-play bells and whistles. So, Hearthstone, still a massive deal. And then you've got Warcraft Rumble, 4.4 million for a game being wound down effectively. That's not bad either. Age of Empires Mobile, 56.4 million. Again, another 10-centent game. So, likely that Microsoft is not receiving all that much money from that game. And then Bethesda is the weak link here. I would say Fallout Shelter 6.3 million earned in 2025. That makes it lower than Candy Crush Friends Saga ahead of Pyramid Solitaire Saga. So that game is not fulfilling its potential, I would say, given the scale of the

Fallout IP and it's had a very successful TV show this year. Similarly, The Elder Scrolls can't get it right on mobile. Castles half a million. Elder Scrolls Blades around 350K in 2025. Not great for either of those. Castles is a Fallout Shelter like game. Blades, I'm not sure. I think it might be some sort of strategy game. I don't know. And then you got Doom, Doom 2, Elder Scrolls Legends, but those are surrounding areas really in the grand scheme of things. And then Microsoft actually has four casual card/word games led by Microsoft Solitaire collection. $1.2 million in 2025 which is decent for something that looks on the outside to be fairly straightforward solitaire game. Wordament mahjong and sudoku I can see those getting the chop. The question is where do they draw the line on what is

working and what does not. You are at the halfway mark of the podcast. Here is a commercial break. I'll be back after this. Exola connects developers with the resources they need to build, fund, launch, and monetize their mobile games globally with Exola web shop. Sell virtual items, in-game currency, subscriptions, and custom offers directly to players while driving up to five times the revenue growth. With the industry's number one web shop solution, Exola provides the tools for developers to focus on what's most important, creating great games. Visit exola.com to learn more. That's xsol.com. The second helping of Xbox analysis this week came about as I was writing the by the numbers article on Monday. Looking at the portfolio, looking at how clean the split is between casual puzzle on

mobile, hardcore on mobile, and the console and PC business that Xbox runs. So, I jotted down some further thoughts on the whole idea of Xbox being this catchall gaming brand when actually anyone who's worked in mobile in particular will appreciate that a lot of the gamers really really dislike mobile and casual games in general. I'm talking about the very vocal Reddit minority of gamers, but these guys do often shape the discourse, unfortunately. So, anything that Xbox does that has a whiff of casual about it is probably not going to be received well. And actually, you've already got a massive casual mobile first consumer brand ready and waiting there in the form of King makers

of Candy Crush. If you had to ask someone on the street who makes mobile games, they probably would say King and maybe very few others. So, it has a level of brand recognition. And when I think back to what Xbox has been trying to do in the last few years with Game Pass, with its play anywhere ethos, the fundamental flaw, that is the headline in the piece, Xbox's play anywhere pitch has a fundamental flaw and always will. The fundamental flaw I see in that is no one wants to play console or PC like games on a phone. Let them play console and PC games on consoles and PC. It will never really work on mobile. You've got to get your streaming setup going. You probably need a Bluetooth controller if you're going to play

anything that's even remotely complex. The whole setup is awkward. And then the evolution of that play anywhere idea was this is an Xbox. You can play Xbox games on any device. But as I say in the article, even if all Xbox games do become seamlessly playable anywhere on every device, do people actually want that? I think the answer is no. And as has been proven over the last nearly 20 years of mobile gaming is that people want different things from a mobile game. Suddenly making like Gears of War, Halo, Fable, Forza available on phones through streaming or tablets through streaming or any other device through streaming doesn't automatically open those games up to broader audiences. It just means that those games are now sort of awkwardly playable on other devices and those

games have just not been designed to be played that way. So, I think it's a real non-starter. As we've reported many, many times before, practically all of those AAA games that have moved over to mobile have flopped or barely made their money back. These are not experiences people want on mobile. So my solution to that as proposed in the article, just keep Xbox for Xbox gamers, keep Xbox for console and PC. the dedicated gamer who will subscribe to Game Pass, will buy Games Day One, will buy Gears of War, Halo, Forza, Fable, and have King be the casual brand, the mobile brand, because it already is. It's kind of impossible to have a catch all gaming brand. I don't think you're ever going to reconcile those two ends of the gaming spectrum. So why not just

split it into maybe also buy that next playground device which is effectively a cheap connect for kids and families which is great and briefly apparently outsold the Xbox at the end of 2025. Make King the big new casual gaming brand. And then as a little joke at the end, I said that actually if Sharma is there just to euthanize Xbox, she can just sell bits of it off to the Saudis. So maybe that'll happen, too. A very quick one from Tuesday. Blizzard announced Overwatch Rush, which is a top-own made for mobile hero shooter that's still in early development, but there's a YouTube video on the site if you want to have a look at some gameplay. It is set in the Overwatch universe and

is being developed by a dedicated mobile team within Blizzard, all of whom have deep mobile experience, says the blog announcing the game. There will be limited region-based testing coming soon, which you can find out about on the game's official Discord. Blizzard says, "While there remains a lot of work to do, we're eager to see how players enjoy what we've built so far and to hear from them on what we should focus on in the coming phases of development." So, Blizzard trying again with a mobile spin-off of one of its big brands as noted on Monday. In fact, Warcraft Rumble is being wound down at the moment. And that game was a kind of spin on Clash Royale maybe arrived four or five years too late. You could maybe argue the same for this one. I

don't know. It is tough to launch new games for anyone, but the Overwatch brand is still pretty strong and Blizzard know what they're doing. Certainly in terms of making games, perhaps not in terms of monetizing mobile games, but we shall see more details on this one to come. In data digest this week, loads of big numbers. I led on Kingshot outpacing White Out Survival because I feel like this is significant. White Out Survival obviously a top five earning game for the last at least year, year and a half, maybe even two years. It's creator, Century Games, has a new hit, Kingshot, which has been working its way up the top grossing charts as well. According to app figures data, it has now hit $500 million in net revenue after fees in its

first 11 months, which is faster than white out survival did. Female players are still being overlooked even on mobile, says Ampair Analysis. A nice graph based on female player sentiment. App Magic's casual games report says inapp purchase revenue is basically flat. Loads of graphs and data points there. App figures again with its January rankings. Monopoly Go top in terms of combined iOS and Android top grossing games. Last War second, Honor of Kings third on downloads. Blockb Blast, Roblox, and Subway Surfers lead the combined iOS and Google Play charts. And there's the highlights in Sensor Tower's latest quarterly report as well. Plenty to chew on there.

And in the jobs article from Monday, you have, of course, the reshuffle at Xbox and the Unity maneuverings, which we covered last week, but you've also got big moves at Roio, Hoyverse, Google, Steel, France, Supercell, Nexon, Trailix, King, Wuga, Fun Plus, and more. Have a look at the article for more details. Probably someone you know in there. And that's it for this week. We're back home. Not in Vegas or the Cotsw. Next week, London for a Yuki conference. And then the week after that is San Francisco for GDC. Perhaps I will see you there. Thank you. Bye-bye.