Gamescom in review, Supercell's AI lab and news nuggets from our data, soft launch and new game digests

#10, 21/08/25: This week's audio tour of mobilegamer.biz includes thoughts on Gamescom's mobile presence and a growing sense of optimism overall, a look at what Supercell is up to with its AI lab and plenty of fascinating news nuggets in our regular data, soft launch and new game digests.

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Hang on, what is going on here, exactly? Every week mobilegamer.biz founder and editor Neil Long goes on a walk and explains what is happening in the mobile game business. That's it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the mobilegamer.biz podcast. Every week I go for a walk and tell you what's happening in the mobile games business. Except this week I'm at Gamescom going for a walk telling you what's happening in the mobile games business. So here we go. Let's start with Gamescom, shall we? I did a tour of the consumer part of the show as well as the business area on Wednesday before it really got going. Just to get a sense of... really who's spending the most money on stands because i think that is an interesting thing in itself and points to who's got marketing budget to spare and who is doing well there's a few observations in the article on the site which is called who's got the biggest booth at gamescom but hall by hall you can go through and see that hoyoverse infold level infinite facepunch They're the big mobile game operators in Hall 6. Facebook makes Rust Mobile, which is yet to be released. They're actually a UK studio, which it turns out is actually owned by Tencent, so they can be folded in with the Tencent spend here. But yeah, HoyoVerse, huge stand, Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Star Rail, Genshin Impact was also huge on the Samsung stand as well. Enfold, a newer presence at Gamescom. They have Love and Deep Space, which is really climbing up the top grossing charts. And Infinity Nikki, which I don't think is earning quite as much. That is across PC and console as well. I think it's doing better there. But yeah, another Chinese company making a big splash here. Tencent Stand, you might think that Tencent's sort of level infinite brand is more mobile focused. But here at Gamescom, There's more console PC stuff. Exoborn, Dune Awakening, Dying Light and Path of Exile are the big presences on the Tencent stand. PUBG Mobile gets a sliver on the side there, but nothing too major. Roblox has a decent but not massive presence here, given the scale of that game. Maybe it's not so big in Germany. Randomly, there's a... Paramount Plus stand here with Scopely's Star Trek Fleet Command on it. The Xbox stand, Xbox obviously owns King and lots of mobile titles as well, but nothing really mobile here to speak of from Xbox. Although they did invite me to their booth on the Wednesday morning to look at the handheld, the ROG Ally handheld that they have, which I think they consider to be mobile, but I don't. It's not really mobile, is it? It's a big, chunky handheld. But yeah, Arknights Enfield is one that took me by surprise a little bit. I'm not super familiar with Arknights as a thing. I assume it's popular in Asian markets, but the developer Griffline, seems to be pushing it pretty hard here. It's got a huge stand, some sort of working robot factory attached to it, enormous screens, and it's in the same area as the World of Warcraft stand, the Lego stand, the Netflix stand even. Pokemon, Pokemon Trading Card Pocket gets a bit of airtime on the Pokemon stand. Samsung's stand is enormous. It's got Genshin Impact on it and a load of Samsung phones showing their gaming hub, which is their app store, I assume. I'm not a Samsung owner, but... I assume that's what that is and then you've got Honor of Kings World as well from Timmy also obviously owned by Tencent but that is a pretty big stand in the same space nearby you've got Huawei as well with their app gallery booth so a booth about an app store they've got stuff like Candy Crush and Monopoly go on there but also these hardcore anime style RPGs that obviously do well in China and Japan and Korea so They are certainly a presence. There's also Hero Games Duet Night Abyss, which has a pretty meaty stand in the consumer area as well as the business area. And in the business area, you've got Quali. Quali have taken quite a big chunk of the UK stand. Big yellow branding is difficult to miss as you walk around that one. Reddit has sponsored the stand. bit that was taken up by TikTok last time the sort of business lounge cafe area TikTok as I mentioned in the article was a very big presence at this show but also shows like EGX in London and elsewhere seems to have just disappeared in terms of spending on games events in the last few months but yeah also in the business area some needlessly elaborate booths quite fun to mention Overwolf which has a modding platform, I think, has a kind of medieval castle-type booth. IO Interactive, the Hitman makers, have an Aston Martin out the front of where people are going to see the new James Bond game. And then, of course, you've got your big webshop rivalry. AppCharge and Exola stands right next to each other. And also, amusingly, AppCharge is giving out branded AppCharge lanyards. to replace the Exola branded ones that everyone gets as they arrive at the show. Pretty funny bit of rivalry there. They're also giving out these recycled iPhones with 30% chunks taken out of them, which is a fun publicity stunt. Talking to people around the show, talking to investors, publishers, developers, it feels like the comeback or let's say the worst of it is over in terms of the market downturn. I think when games industry commentators and analysts talk about the games business, they're really talking about the PC and console business, which is genuinely hurting quite badly, but mobile hasn't escaped the sort of market downturn, but it has experienced it's purged a little earlier, I think. So everyone who wanted to make layoffs has made those layoffs. And now actually from talking to various people out and about, it seems like companies that do work for hire, companies that can be hired on a sort of project by project basis, it's those companies that are doing really well that can hop into a live game and run their live ops for a bit. or can develop something and pass it over to a LiveOps team, both sides of it, really. Those are the companies that seem to be getting the work that was previously done by these big internal teams. So that is an interesting trend. Also, from the investor point of view, talking to a few investors, I wouldn't be the first person to say that the days of the mega check and the mega investment into a game developer are not over, but certainly have been dialed back. And now the investments are in more projects, but smaller projects, more sort of spread betting going on in the investor community, it seems. And then, of course, you've got the webshop rivalries that I mentioned earlier. You've got Exala, you've got AppCharge, you've got Stash doing coffees outside one of the conference halls. You've got a couple of these other guys. I think some of these guys need better names, honestly, because they don't have very catchy names. But there are some other payment providers here looking to get in on the loosening of the App Store rules. And that is certainly a trend that will continue until, of course, as lots of people I spoke to this week seem to believe, that Apple and Google at some point may just decide enough's enough and reduce their rates to 20%. And then... These workshop guys might have more of a challenge justifying their pitch to game publishers and developers. But we'll see what happens there. Personally, I can't see that happening because these platforms have been fighting against this for so long. To give in at this point would feel like a big defeat. I'm not saying all of these decisions are made by men with big egos, but senior... people at these big tech companies would rather cost their companies millions in legal fees than be seen to be backing down, I think. It's probably a bit early to say the good times are back, but of the companies I've been speaking to at least, there's quite a lot of optimism out there actually about mobile and where we are. The walled gardens are crumbling. People have more payment options. People are talking about this stuff more publicly. You've had Zynga twice in the last month questioning the value of those App Store fees. So things are opening up and it's not all doom and gloom as it is, as it seems to be in PC and console, which I don't know, if you walk around here and you watch the opening night live Jeff Keighley show, there's just a lot of very, very similar looking games all trying to appeal to what is ultimately quite a small number of gamers. That's not to say every mobile game out there is highly original and innovative. In fact, there's loads of Genshin Impact-like games out there, but the market can accommodate that. You know, it's a global market. Everyone has a mobile phone. The market is just bigger and can accommodate that many competitors. Whereas PC and console... It's very tribal and there's actually a relatively small number of people who buy multiple games a year. And the length of the production timelines on PC and console mean that these games are still getting made and still coming out, even though there may well be next to no market for them. So, yeah, interesting contrast between PC and console and mobile. And I think mobile is in a pretty good spot, actually, in general. And mobile is faster to move and faster to feel pain, but also faster to reap rewards when there is an upturn of the people I spoke to. Pretty positive feeling overall and reasons to be cheerful. You are halfway through the podcast. Well done for getting this far. Here is a commercial break. I'll be back after this.

SPEAKER_01: 11:03

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SPEAKER_00: 11:33

Elsewhere on the site this week, not related to Gamescom, what's going on inside Supercell's AI lab? So I picked up a few sort of tweets and a few posts on Supercell's AI Innovation Lab website and turned that into a story because I thought it was interesting that Supercell, as ever, is actually being quite public about what it's doing in AI and gaming and it hadn't been brought to many people's attention before. because following things on social media is hard. So I pulled a story together about what Jessica Jung has been saying on social media. She is the boss of Supercell's AI Innovation Lab, former Niantic product manager. So she said that Supercell is currently working on game projects, including a thing where AI companions live in Discord and play Minecraft with you, an Animal Crossing-like game with AI NPCs, and a game in which character classes and weapons are generated during play using AI. Elsewhere on the AI Innovation Lab webpage, it's not clear on whether Supercell is working on these or would like to work on these, but there is reference to a dating sim with AI-powered companions, an RPG with an AI-powered vast open world, and a new social media platform for So, as I mentioned before on this podcast, Supercell is very public about its push into AI where other game companies are a little bit more conservative, maybe more nervous about being seen as embracing lots of pieces of technology that may well put people out of a job. But Jung said on X that Supercell is hunting for, quote, Startups working in AI and games to come build the next$1 billion plus gaming product. Supercell will also cover all expenses, housing, meals, compute, for those in the program. So, yeah. Also, other Supercell news, they hired Drusilla Hollander as the company's first head of new games. She was previously a game lead on Hay Day, founded a studio called Papakuya, and also worked at Supercell. Hive, A Coding School, Digital Chocolate, Rovio and Wooga. So Supercell always out there in public talking about what it's up to. This week is no exception. I haven't seen a Supercell booth here at Gamescom, but I may well run into it at some point. With Data Digest, a very busy week for this roundup of interesting numbers, stats, and financial reports. Most interesting, perhaps, AppsFlyer in talks to be acquired for around$4 billion, says a report from Israeli tech news outfit Alibaba. Ctech. They've been sort of bang on the money with a couple of other Israeli tech or ad tech stories in the past. So sources suggest Goldman Sachs is engaged in the sale. A private equity firm is in advanced negotiations to buy AppsFlyer and the likely price is$3.5 to$4.5 billion. It's some Extra context is that Bloomberg in June 2024 said AppsFlyer was going for an IPO, looking at raising$300 million. But now it looks like it might be a sale to private equity. Either way, big, big deal for AppsFlyer. Lands of Jail was the most advertised iOS title in the first half of 2025. That is E-World's prison management simulation game, according to a new chart from Socialpeta, a marketing firm. Top on Android was Vita Mahjong. I'm certainly getting TikTok ads for Vita Mahjong, so I must be hitting that demographic. Other most advertised titles were Mafia City, Draconia Saga Global, Matchingham Games Braindom, and Zen Color, the tile matcher. On Android, the top contenders were three titles from Chinese developer Learnings, Jigsawscapes, Paint by Numbers, Coloring Game, and again, Zen Color. Lands of Jail was also in the top five on Android. A new Sensor Tower report says mobile game in-app purchase revenue hit 19.8 billion in Q2 2025. That is up 0.7% year-on-year. So... flat, essentially. But at least it's not down. There's some other fun facts and figures in that breakdown. Strategy was the top genre in terms of in-app purchase revenue, obviously led by games like Whiteout Survival and Last War. On-download simulation games led the way. And in terms of Q2 revenue, Last War Survival was top ahead of Royal Match, Whiteout Survival, Monopoly Go, and Honor of Kings. Downloads in Q2 led by Block Blast, Garena Free Fire, Roblox, Subway Surfers and Ludo King, according to Sensor Tower. Bain, the consulting firm, said 44% of top-grossing games have direct-to-consumer stores. Some interesting bar charts in there. There's also financials from Square Enix, Nexon, Embracer and Eastside Games, as well as News of app charges raising of$58 million. And some more stats from Newzoo about mobile game players. 2.9 billion globally, says Newzoo. The other regulars this week, Monday, was Soft Launch, so there's news of Valorant Mobile, EA's various EAFC Soft Launches, the three new games discussed previously from Moon Active that are in Soft Launch, as well as a couple of other bits and bobs from Metacore, which is constantly putting games in and out of Soft Launch, and the usual contenders from Playrix, from Ubisoft. from zynga from miniclip and others in the new games digest this week even more metacore soft launches a new renovation game from say games some more chinese rpgs so a happy gilmore game from netflix jam city has opened disney magic match 3d for pre-reg, so that's coming soon. Level Infinite is handling the release of Rust Mobile. Its first closed beta is happening in early November, so that means that's coming soon. And there's also bits and bobs from Rusty Lake, indie puzzle game maker. They have a game called Servant of the Lake. And there'll be a couple more interesting games in that article by the time I have looked at it and got it ready for publication. It's going live tomorrow as we record this. So yes, that was Gamescom 2025. A fantastic off-the-record event. Lots of meetings, informal chats, things like that. An overall sense that maybe the comeback isn't quite happening yet, but it's on its way. Thanks very much. Speak to you next week. Goodbye.