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PGC takeaways, the UK's social media ban and Fortnite vs Roblox | Week in Mobile Games podcast
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a complex landscape defined by shifting platform strategies, evolving regulatory pressures, and the pursuit of sustainable growth.
- The UK government is planning to implement a social media ban for under-16s by spring 2027, targeting platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X while excluding messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal.
- Epic Games has paid over $1 billion to creators through the Unreal Editor for Fortnite since 2023, though the platform faces stiff competition from Roblox, which paid out $1.5 billion to creators in 2025 alone.
- The mobile title 'Where Winds Meet' generated $22.1 million in revenue outside of China during its first six months of release.
🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: GTA 6 pre-sale, EU regulations looming, Layoffs and Pokemon Champions launch
The current landscape of the gaming industry is defined by high-profile product launches, significant regulatory challenges, and a pervasive trend of studio restructuring and layoffs.
- Take-Two’s stock valuation has risen in anticipation of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-sale.
- Epic Games has set a 2027 target for Unreal Engine 6, focusing on AI-assisted development and live service interoperability.
- Fortnite’s creator ecosystem has surpassed $1 billion in total payouts since 2023, with community-made content now accounting for nearly 50% of total playtime.
TWIG #388: Xbox's Spinout Plan, Metacore's Mass Layoffs and Netflix's FIFA Flop
The gaming industry is currently navigating a period of intense structural realignment, characterized by aggressive cost-cutting, leadership turnover, and a pivot toward profitability over creative expansion.
- Xbox is pivoting toward a distribution-heavy model focused on daily active users, signaling a potential strategic spin-off from Microsoft following significant studio closures and leadership turnover.
- Mobile gaming studio Metacore has implemented workforce reductions of up to 70% after failing to successfully diversify its portfolio beyond a single declining asset.
- The gaming industry is increasingly prioritizing short-term profitability and cost-cutting over creative expansion, driven by rising customer acquisition costs and the limitations of web shops as revenue stopgaps.
💀 Mo.co DEAD on arrival. Is it time for Supercell to kill Mo.co?
Supercell’s title Mo.co faces a critical existential crisis, as its current design fails to gain traction within the competitive RPG market.
- Supercell’s Mo.co is failing to monetize, generating only $14,000 in daily revenue despite reaching 230,000 daily active users.
- The game suffers from a fundamental design misalignment, prioritizing lightweight accessibility over the depth, build customization, and endgame progression expected by the RPG audience.
- The project is currently considered unsalvageable because the cost to bring it up to industry standards would exceed the development budget of multiple new, more viable projects.
Amateur devs score hits with 38-0, WWDC reactions, May's top games, Orna, jobs, data and more
The mobile gaming industry is currently witnessing a surge in amateur-developed hits, driven by the accessibility of AI-assisted coding tools.
- Amateur developers are achieving viral success with AI-assisted football drafting games like '38-0' and '38-0-0', which secured over 100,000 downloads each in a single weekend with zero marketing spend.
- Honor of Kings dominated May’s top-grossing charts with $161 million in in-app purchase revenue, while 'Last War Survival' saw a significant decline, dropping to 10th place with $82 million.
- Apple’s new developer policy offers free access to its AI foundation models for apps until they reach 2 million first-time downloads, a move aimed at supporting indie developers.
Rewarded UA Handbook: 2026
Rewarded user acquisition (UA) has evolved into a foundational component of the mobile marketing mix, serving as a critical solution to the industry’s ongoing challenges of rising acquisition costs and high user churn.
- Rewarded UA is now a core marketing channel, with 61% of surveyed studios planning to increase their budget in 2026 and 65% of studios allocating between 11% and 50% of their total UA spend to the channel.
- Extending reward structures beyond traditional short-term windows is critical for retention; for example, Candivore increased their Match Masters reward structure from 50 to 90 days, resulting in a 50% increase in D60 retention and a 70% uplift in D90 ROAS.
- Campaigns that layer multiple event types outperform single-event campaigns, with IAP/hybrid games utilizing an average of 3.25 distinct event types per campaign to drive long-term engagement.
S07, E20: Shopify as a marketing operating system (with Venkat Prabhu)
Shopify is fundamentally transforming from a commerce platform into a comprehensive marketing operating system designed to simplify advertising for merchants.
- Shopify is evolving into a comprehensive marketing operating system by launching 'Campaign Autopilot,' a tool that uses data from $1.7 trillion in processed GMV to automate campaign settings and budget recommendations for merchants.
- Shopify is expanding its 'Shop Campaigns' advertising program to new surfaces, including ChatGPT, Pinterest, and the open web via Microsoft Monetize, to help merchants scale beyond their existing channels.
- The platform leverages its position as the transaction layer to solve cross-channel attribution and data blind spots, allowing merchants to manage attribution logic directly within the Shopify admin.
🧠 What You Send Is What You Get: Signal Engineering and the Future of Attribution with Core Plan
Airbridge has introduced Core Plan, a self-serve, pay-as-you-go mobile measurement partner (MMP) solution designed to address the needs of early-stage app founders.
- Airbridge launched Core Plan, a self-serve MMP solution for startups with under $10 million in ARR, offering 15,000 free attributed installs in the first year followed by a pay-as-you-go rate of 5 cents per install.
- The platform utilizes an AI-native onboarding process to reduce typical two-month SDK and taxonomy setup timelines to two or three hours.
- Core Plan provides 65% of enterprise-grade features, including cohort analysis, raw data export, and deep linking, while excluding complex agency management and multi-touch attribution tools.
The Rewarded Ads Strategy: Why Original Games Dedicates 30% of UA Budgets to This Channel
The rewarded advertising landscape in mobile gaming has evolved from a simple tool for driving short-term installs into a sophisticated, data-driven ecosystem essential for user acquisition and game discovery.
- Rewarded ads have evolved from simple install-driven models into a sophisticated, data-led channel that can deliver 4 to 5 times higher ARPDAU compared to traditional UA channels like Apple and Unity.
- Original Games allocates 30% of its monthly user acquisition budget to rewarded ads, leveraging cohort-based modeling to predict long-term player value and profitability.
- The rewarded ecosystem has shifted from a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to a strategy requiring granular user segmentation, balancing 'rewards hunters' who seek quick payouts with 'casual players' who provide long-term retention.
My Wife Uninstalled Roblox. Then I Talked to Their Safety Team.
Roblox is undergoing a significant strategic shift to prioritize user safety through the implementation of age-gated account tiers and advanced verification technologies.
- Roblox is implementing age-gated account tiers, specifically 'Roblox Kids' and 'Roblox Select,' to restrict content and communication features based on verified age brackets.
- The platform supports its safety architecture with facial age estimation technology and a multi-layered moderation system that combines artificial intelligence, human review, and user reporting.
- Roblox currently manages a daily active user base of 150 million, positioning its investments in trust and safety as a core requirement for long-term platform sustainability.
Global Games Revenue Cracked $200 Billion in 2025
The global games market reached a significant milestone in 2025, generating $201.6 billion in revenue and marking a 9.1% year-over-year increase.
- The global games market generated $201.6 billion in revenue in 2025, a 9.1% year-over-year increase, driven by strong PC and mobile monetization.
- Mobile gaming remained the largest segment at $113.3 billion, growing 10.7% despite fewer downloads, indicating increased spending per user.
- PC gaming led growth with a 12% year-over-year increase, reaching $43.6 billion, fueled by diverse premium titles.
Puzzle Monthly #3: the Merge 2 Secret Tell-All Episode
The merge genre has reached a critical inflection point, transitioning from simple board-based mechanics to complex, live-ops-driven ecosystems.
- The merge genre is shifting from simple board mechanics to complex, live-ops-driven ecosystems, with titles like Gossip Harbor successfully challenging legacy giants like Candy Crush.
- Commercial success in the genre is now driven by aggressive, event-based monetization strategies rather than the foundational merge gameplay itself.
- To combat the friction of board clutter and tedious inventory management, developers are increasingly adopting temporary event boards, generator constraints, and multi-board systems.