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🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Royal Kingdom Adds Ads, Playtika Exits Social Casino, Mistplay Buys Mychips
The mobile gaming industry is currently undergoing a significant shift in monetization and user acquisition strategies, characterized by a move toward casual gaming, the consolidation of rewarded ad platforms, and the abandonment of "no-ads" policies by major studios.
- Dream Games has abandoned its 'no-ads' policy for Royal Kingdom, integrating interstitial and rewarded ads as of February 2026 to drive daily downloads from 100,000–300,000 up to 600,000.
- The addition of ads to Royal Kingdom generates an estimated $170,000–$190,000 in daily revenue without cannibalizing in-app purchases, with markets like Brazil showing simultaneous growth in both revenue streams.
- Playtika has pivoted away from social casino games, which are now in managed decline, to focus on casual titles that currently represent 76% of its business.
Long development cycles are putting off video game investors
The video game industry is currently undergoing a painful financial correction following a period of post-pandemic over-investment that fostered unsustainable budgets and unrealistic growth expectations.
- The gaming industry is facing a financial correction due to a misalignment between traditional venture capital models and long, multi-year production cycles that lack early-stage performance indicators.
- Investors are increasingly deterred by the industry's reliance on legacy titles, as 92 percent of current sector revenue is generated by games older than six years.
- To mitigate high-risk, massive-budget development, major publishers are adopting agile strategies and leveraging artificial intelligence to optimize workflows and reduce prototyping costs.
The New Era of Social Gaming
The gaming industry in 2025 is defined by a significant shift toward social, co-op-focused experiences that prioritize player interaction over high-fidelity graphics.
- The gaming industry is shifting toward social, co-op-focused experiences that prioritize player interaction over high-fidelity graphics, as evidenced by the success of indie titles like Peak and Repo.
- Mobile gaming has reached extreme maturity, with revenue growth stagnating at approximately 1% and the number of games generating over $100 million annually declining by 4%.
- Market consolidation is intensifying, with growth heavily concentrated among the top 50 publishers and new title scaling hindered by market saturation and IDFA-related user acquisition challenges.
🧠 MVP UA template AXON: How to set up your Applovin for Success by Matej Lancaric
AppLovin’s Axon platform functions as a high-performance, automated user acquisition engine that requires a distinct strategic approach compared to Facebook or Google.
- Creative assets are the primary performance driver on AppLovin, with playables accounting for 80% to 90% of total ad spend.
- Top-performing games maintain high creative velocity by producing and shipping over 60 new playable assets per month.
- Abandon traditional geo-bucket campaign structures in favor of a worldwide approach, using geo-level ROAS targets instead of geo-level budgets to manage traffic.
S07, E16: AI and video games (with Julian Togelius)
Video games function as critical model organisms for artificial intelligence research, serving as sophisticated pedagogical environments that force agents to learn, adapt, and navigate complex, non-stationary action spaces.
- Generative AI tools will fundamentally shift game development by enabling shorter production cycles and lower costs, potentially making billion-dollar projects like GTA 6 the last of the pre-AI era.
- Video games serve as essential sandboxes for AI research because they provide structured environments for testing reinforcement learning and algorithmic theories, moving beyond simple win-loss mechanics to understanding player style and content generation.
- Consumer backlash against AI-generated assets, such as the reaction to placeholder textures in Crimson Desert, is often a proxy for broader societal anxiety regarding AI's impact on creative professions rather than a critique of the technical utility of the assets.
PlayStation: “We have a responsibility to the whole industry”
PlayStation operates a comprehensive ecosystem designed to support nearly 10,000 third-party partners, functioning as a primary engine for global industry growth.
- PlayStation supports an ecosystem of nearly 10,000 third-party partners, positioning itself as a primary driver for global industry growth through resource, marketing, and funding support.
- The company is actively expanding its geographic footprint by investing in emerging development hubs, specifically targeting China, India, and the Middle East to cultivate international talent.
- The 'China Hero Project' is utilized as a primary model for regional development, successfully accelerating the creation of unique content within the Chinese market.
Nintendo’s “New” Star Fox, $80 GTA6 says BoA & Mixtape is a Masterpiece | Games For Breakfast
The gaming industry is currently navigating a period of significant structural and economic transition, characterized by shifting pricing models and evolving development strategies.
- Grand Theft Auto VI is expected to spearhead a shift toward an $80 price point for AAA software, potentially establishing a new industry-wide standard.
- Sony reported a $766 million impairment loss related to Bungie, signaling a strategic pivot away from high-risk extraction shooters toward focused, single-player experiences.
- Nintendo is planning a $50 price increase for the upcoming Switch 2 hardware to offset rising manufacturing costs and maintain profitability.
The Myth of Global Games, National Games, and the Folkloresque: Reflections from Brazil
This paper challenges the "global games" myth by arguing that national and regional cultures continue to shape how games are made, marketed, and read.
- The 'global games' myth is challenged: national and regional cultures continue to shape how games are made, marketed, and interpreted, with Brazilian indie titles as the case study.
- The author introduces the 'folkloresque,' a term for commercial appropriation of folklore that retains a sense of authenticity, as a lens for analysing these dynamics.
- Brazilian games fall into a typology: some (Vengeful Guardian, Horizon Chase, Mullet Madjack) obscure their Brazilian roots through fictional worlds or genre conventions, while others (171, Árida, Gaúcho and the Grasslands) make Brazilian culture explicit, sometimes relying on stereotype or assuming insider knowledge.
Ritual Elements in Souls Games: Liminality and Communitas in Elden Ring
Elden Ring and the broader Souls series are examined here as hybrid spaces that combine the transformative qualities of ritual with the structures of commercial play.
- The report frames Elden Ring and the Souls series as a "ritual machine" that produces rite-like transformation within a commercial entertainment product, drawing on van Gennep and Turner's theories of liminality.
- Boss arenas are analysed as liminal thresholds where players are temporarily severed from ordinary progression and exposed to risk, while the wider play session is described as a voluntary, market-based liminoid experience.
- Repeated combat cycles, flow states, gestures, and the ghostly presence of other players (understood via Schechner's restored behavior) generate a recurring sense of shared ordeal.
Exon: Delusion of Equilibrium
The document presents a Research-through-Design case study of EXON – Delusion of Equilibrium, a cult-themed game built on the Roblox platform and designed to examine the formation of hybrid online-offline communities.
- EXON – Delusion of Equilibrium is a cult-themed Roblox game used as a Research-through-Design instrument to study the formation of hybrid online-offline communities, with themes of communitas, belonging, ritual, and control.
- The empirical core is a single event, Milano Digital Week 2025, where 103 participants played over three hours, with children making up 48% of participants and being the most engaged group.
- Only 37% of sessions reached completion, mainly due to multiplayer constraints and waiting times.
From Mobile Games to Apps: Inside Play Ventures' $500M Fund
Play Ventures has evolved its investment strategy from a mobile gaming focus to a broader mandate encompassing consumer applications.
- Play Ventures has expanded its $500M fund mandate from a mobile gaming-only focus to include broader consumer applications, leveraging shared expertise in user acquisition and subscription monetization.
- The firm mandates two-year vesting cliffs and utilizes behavioral assessments during due diligence to mitigate the risk of co-founder conflict, which they identify as a primary determinant of early-stage failure.
- Investment decisions are made through a non-hierarchical structure where any team member can challenge a deal and only a minority of partnership votes are required to proceed.
🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Applovin Record Revenue, More Layoffs, EvE online sold back
The gaming industry is currently experiencing a period of significant corporate restructuring, marked by record financial performances for some entities and aggressive downsizing for others.
- AppLovin reported record Q1 revenue of $1.84 billion, a 25% year-over-year increase, while Unity posted a $347 million loss despite a 17% revenue increase to $508 million.
- CCP Games is being sold back to its CEO by Pearl Abyss for $120 million, a significant drop from its $425 million valuation in 2018.
- Supercell acquired Metacore, resulting in a 30% workforce reduction at the studio as part of a strategic shift in the merge-game genre.