Xbox's weird 'North Star', Sybo and Subway Surfers, App Store emulators, Peridot's death, more

Hello and welcome to 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 industry. Here we go. Okay, let's talk about Xbox. So, the news that new boss Asha Sharma may well be bringing back the mobile app store came out after last week's podcast. So, we can discuss that here too. as well as the opinion piece I ran on Monday, which is an overview of the noises coming out of Xbox in the last week and what it all means for mobile. So, they're talking to the press. They're putting out manifestos. Ashes Sharma is is tweeting or posting on X, I guess you should now say, about lots of different things. Very few of those things actually happen to be mobile, which is a a huge division of what was Microsoft gaming, now Xbox. [snorts] So, I don't know how long it was officially Microsoft gaming, but not

long by the sounds of it. So, I summed up all of this. What really stuck out was this new metric, a new north star. I don't know when northstar came into the tech giant vocabulary, but I've heard people at Apple say it as well. land. It just means, you know, central focal point. I guess Xbox's new northstar is daily active players. So, not DAU, daily active players. And this is hard to calculate, but you would imagine given the sheer number of King players out there, the people in China playing COD Mobile, Diablo Immortal, etc. that mobile is actually the majority of the daily active players at Xbox right now. So you would think given this new metric, given this new north star, the mobile would be a really central piece

of the puzzle here as Sharma gets on with turning this troubled Xbox ship around. But actually is not mobile is mentioned twice in the we are Xbox blog. There is talk of playing Xbox games on any device anywhere, bringing your profile with you, etc., etc. Regular listeners and readers will know that we have covered this before. The play anywhere idea. I would say it's a non-starter. As I said in this week's article, console game players do not want to play those games on their phones. And the opposite is true. putting games built and intended for hardcore console and PC players on phones and iPads and any other device does not automatically mean that those games become appealing to the average player. The players buying the likes of Fable,

Forsa Horizon, Elder Scrolls, even they are really quite a small portion of the games playing public. The majority are playing on mobile. They may not show up in [snorts] terms of revenue because they are fundamentally less valuable players per in dollar terms. But if we're measuring daily active players, that number is going to be majority mobile. So, it's a it's a slightly muddled way of seeing your player base. And also, I mean, I didn't have space or time to really put this in the article as a metric that does not take into account where they are active and if they're actually giving you any money. So, is this daily active players a game pass metric? Does it include mobile? Judging by the mentions of mobile in

this we are Xbox blog and the fact that he's not mentioned at all in the Steven Tatillo game file interview, maybe they're not talking about mobile at all. In which case, that seems to be quite a big problem. If you want to expand your player base, but you are not talking about mobile, then what are you doing? You're doubling down on the core and as Ashes Ash Sharma says in that Tatillo interview, you want to restore the core, but the but the core hate mobile games. So you can go around and around and around with this and I come to the conclusion as I have that actually this this stuff is pretty much hot air. It's a few quick easy wins. You can change the logo. You can change it back to Xbox and it makes it look like you've done something when actually you haven't. You can cut the price of Game Pass and remove Call of Duty from it,

which is clearly what should have happened. Call of Duty did not add enough subscribers to Game Pass to justify its inclusion anyway. So pulling it out and cutting the price is quite an obvious step that maybe Phil Spencer should have done, but it helps Sharma that she's doing it in her first weeks and months as Xbox boss. So yeah, Xbox is just really messy and all of the torque coming out of it does not clarify where it is going or what it intends to do. Once you start picking it all apart, it just seems more confused and muddled than ever. So yeah, these thoughts put in a slightly more careful and considered way are written down in the article headlined Xbox wants to restore the court and grow daily active players. So

is mobile part of the plan or not? [snorts] Have a read of that on the site. Tell me what you think. 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, [music] subscriptions, and custom offers directly to players while driving up to five times the revenue growth. With the industry's number one [music] 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 [music] xsol.com.
I spoke to Matias, CEO of Cybo at GDC, so this article has taken a little while to come to the top of my backlog, but I think it's worth reading. I lead on the fate of the subway surfers movie. Now, this has been rumored, but never fully confirmed for many years. I think

there's an animated series on YouTube that has tens of millions of views. And you know, you would think following the wild success of Mario, Sonic, Minecraft movies, all familyfriendly cartoony type game universes, you would think the most downloaded game of all time, as Cyber like to call Subway Surfers. You would think that game would be ripe for a movie adaptation. As I note in the article, Matias when asked about the movie did pull a sort of slightly strained smile which [snorts] suggested to me this movie thing has been rumbling on for a while. I've actually asked him about it last summer as well and he said much the same. But I thought it was worth asking again given the crazy success of that Mario Galaxy movie even though it is by all accounts

an absolute stinker. The exact quote is, I think the official answer is that we still have so much love for the IP and we really want to find the right format to bring it to the big screen, but until it feels exactly right, we keep dreaming and we keep chasing. But once we pass that little wrinkle, normal service resumes in this article. We get back to more familiar ground mobile games. There's talk of Subway Surface City, which he says has had a really solid start. He says the game is more sort of complex and more difficult and more advanced in terms of progression systems and so on. He also expects inapp purchase to play a larger role in the revenue split of that game. He says Subway Surfers is 80 to 85% ad revenue. So Subway Surfers City will have a higher ratio of inapp purchases as a

result of that slightly more hardcore [snorts] approach. He also suggests, maybe I've been a bit cheeky here, but he also suggests that Apple made them a very generous offer in terms of putting Subway Surfers Plus on Apple Arcade. He says there, "We are very happy with the deal we got. It's definitely a plus for us." And yeah, I guess it should be noted he's had a very relaxed and happy demeanor as he answered that particular question. The arcade version and the new spin-off have not dented Subway Surfers Downloads at all. So those two games have been additive to the overall income at Cybo. Later I asked about the integration process with Mini Clip [snorts] and what it's like being part of the wider Tensent family to which he said that they have learned a lot from Mini Clip and they actually have eightball

pools former product director running Cybo now as studio director. His name is Raphael Rodriguez and he has been in charge there since spring of 2025. Matias says his team have learned a lot from him, but it also works the other way. Mini Clip has apparently learned a lot about marketing from Cybo and virality engines. And then there's a bit on being part of Tencent, which I think is interesting. They held a a family summit at GDC. this year, just like every year, where apparently Tim Sweeney did a keynote. And he says that, you know, despite being part of a group that also includes Epic Games, Riot, Supercell, and now, of course, Ubisoft, there's no pressure on any of these companies to collaborate and swap notes. And he even sort of drops a

zinger in the direction of an unnamed other company where he says, "What I love about the Tencent model is that they allow each of the studios to be highly independent. In the traditional model, without mentioning any names, you would see a very large headquarters putting a lot of resources into making sure that studios were aligned. Tencent is leaning back. I don't know if that's a a dig at Microsoft. I don't know. I can't think of any other big conglomerates out there that sort of force its stablemates into close contact, but yes, I think it's a really interesting chat. So, have a look at that interview on the site. Let's talk about emulation on the app store. This is an article put together by Daryl, a new freelancer. He has worked for many different tech and games websites and he has some good contacts into the emulation scene. So I asked him to take a look at this scene and get a

handle on what's happening in it. And effectively, as you maybe could imagine, Apple since allowing emulators on the App Store two years ago, has been pretty handsoff with this category, as it has with really all game and app developers. Daryl spoke to one of these guys, Joe Matiello, who is behind the emulator Provenence. He released his emulator on the App Store in 2024. And it's a good story because it was a hobbyist side project, but the inapp purchase from that app has allowed Joe to cover some of his costs and turn it into not quite a business, but at least a sustainable thing. [snorts] But he does have some reservations when it comes to Apple's back end, its developer tools, and so

on. and he makes reference to the caution developers must tread with with emulators. So there are certain outlawed things you can't do in this space. And apparently you can't emulate Apple hardware on other Apple hardware. So no Apple 2 games or classic Mac games on Provenence or on any other App Store emulators. But he says he's been very careful to play within those guidelines and hasn't had too much push back specifically on emulation, but has had to deal with all of the things that most game developers have to deal with. And looking forward with John Turnis coming into the role of CEO of Apple, I doubt Turnis will be too involved in the back end of App Store Connect or whatever it's called. But Metiello says that maybe with Tim Cook so focused on the end user and services

and the things that the general public see, maybe John Turner will have a different view and improve some of the developer facing tools and portals that developers have to use when getting games and apps on the app store. I think the key quote which will probably chime with a lot of people is the developer portal in general feels dated next to what modern dev tooling looks like elsewhere. For the cut Apple takes, the platform underdelivers on developer experience, performance tooling, and the basics. So yeah, he says he'd like to see Apple rethink its relationship with developers under Turnis' leadership. And yes, with him taking over in September, we'll see if that happens or not. Late last week, Niantic Spatial closed. Virtual pet game Paradot. For those following this, probably not a

surprise. Even at launch, it seemed like it was not picking up a huge amount of players and was really more of a tech demo for Niantic and its eventual destiny as a spatial technology company. This was launched when Niantic was Niantic and not Niantic Spatial. So, important to note the distinction there. Paradot was left behind when Scopely bought Niantic's game catalog and therefore Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter Now, etc. So, the only games left at Niantic Spatial, is now Ingress, the original location-based game that Niantic launched way back when in the early 2010s, I think. But yeah, Paradot did not survive Niantic Spatials breakaway from Niantic,

but there were further spin-offs of the game through Snapchat and MetaQuest, but yeah, Niantic Spatial, very much now an AR company. Not 100% sure how they make money, but it's not going to be through Paradot anymore. Couple of interesting additions to the soft launch article this week. Alongside your regular Zinga Playrex, Supercell Mini Clip titles, there's a new soft launch from Moon Active called Yarn It, which appears to be a pixel flow fast follow or clone depending on how you look at these things. There's also Seaside Secrets from Supercent, which having really cracked hybrid casual with its various idol management games, Pizza Ready, etc., has a couple of more midcore looking games in that list. Seaside Secrets looks like

a merge plus story type game. Rolex Sort Factory is back. That looks like a follow-up to Match Factory. And again, similar to Pixel Flow in how it looks, I'm only really including the more midcore casual type games in this list because it would be impossible to keep a tracker of the more hyper casual leaning ones. So, have a scan through that article that goes out every other Monday. It is called the soft launch games you need to know about. In this week's data digest, we've got skills with a zed getting $420 million and maybe a bit more further down the road from Papaya Gaming, which was found guilty of false advertising and using bots and predetermined outcomes at scale to essentially falsify

results on these platforms. skills may also receive at least $652 million in [snorts] the profits Papaya made from this activity. So that's fun. MTG's Indian subsidiary, Play Simple Games, is getting ready for an IPO, which will be worth about $355 million if you translate from rupees to US dollars. There's [snorts] also March's top grossing games in the US. Some data from India in Q1 from Sensor Tower. Delta Force is doing really well. Recently earned a new peak of $7 million in one day according to App Magic. Tile Explorer and Vita Mahong are still on top of the ad charts that we run regularly courtesy of Social Peta. Stillront's portfolio reached 38 million MAU in 2025 according to its annual

report. Couple more stats and figures on Stillfront in there. PVX Partners 10 million in series A funding and Spill Games 3.1 million in seed funding for that new operation. Plenty more detail in the article. Have a look. In last week's New Game Digest, there's Monopoly match, a slightly ropey looking match three using the Monopoly IP from an Australian developer, Dicero. Haby's new game has gone global remedy has ported its multi-awwardwinning game Control to iOS. Honor of King's World seems to have launched in China, and there's a couple more indie games in there, too. And that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.