Mobile Gaming Today: Jun’2
Hei Fam! 🕺🏻
The weather here? PERFECTION. ☀
Will moderate a panel on June 3 at 12:20, ‘The Evolution of UA’.
Cya over there! 🍻
🦄 Game of the Week: Match Villains by Good Job Games
⚡️ Match Villains: A Dracula-Led Heist Into the Most Brutal Market in Mobile
The absolute worst moment to launch a new Match-3 game.
UA costs are sky-high, payback takes forever, and players expect console-level polish. That’s why Match Villains from Good Job Games turns heads—not because it’s a breakout yet, but because it might be.
Match Villains isn’t a hit yet. But it’s the one to watch.
👌🏻 Top Gaming Update: Hybridcasual Time
🦄 The Rise of Hybridcasual: Supersonic’s Vision for the NEXT
Just sat down with Igor Bereslavski, GM at Supersonic, to unpack the studio’s bold leap from hyper-casual dominance to hybrid-casual innovation.
🤟🏻 Industry Highlights
🦄 Turborilla Names Names John Wright as CEO
Gaming Studio Behind Mad Skills Franchise, 200M+ Downloads Drives Toward Future
⚡️ The Definitive Mobile Game Tech Market Map
This comprehensive overview highlights the key infrastructure and service providers that empower Mobile Game Dev, Operations & Growth.
🎸 Game Deconstruction: Magic Sort by Grand Games
I recently discovered Magic Sort, and on the first day, I completed 60 levels. I was in flow — fully immersed, effortlessly progressing.
But over time, I started to observe when and why that flow started to break.
What engaged me? What pulled me out? And what was missing?
⭐️ Arcade Genres Success Tier-list
Based on the analysis of 1,000+ arcade games over the past year that reached at least 1M+ downloads. Here’s the 2025 success rate tier list.
😶🌫️ Apple acquires its first-ever gaming studio!?
And it’s not a super studio.
It’s a 2 person indie studio called RAC7. I wonder what the motivations for this are.
📲 Apple launches a dedicated Games App
Dedicated Games app across iPhone, iPad, Mac & Apple TV. It will replace Game Center and will centralize game launch, achievements, and Arcade.
🧩 Difference between deterministic and random level-based puzzlers?
We see more and more successful puzzle games following a completely different level design paradigm than your usual Candy Crush or Royal Match.
💰 Embracer’s Mobile Revenue drops 31% after selling Easybrain
UA costs rose to $60m, accounting for 61% of net sales.
📲 Apple Blocks $9 billion in App Store Fraud Over Five Years
In 2024, Apple stopped over $2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions.
👑 Dream Games knows how to keep players engaged
These events are built to serve short, mid, and long-term player motivations.
🔥 Burny Games: Integrating AI Agents into Mobile Game Dev
Let’s see how they’re integrating AI Agents into their flow.
» Supersonic’s SuperPitch: 8 Studio Speed-Date?
They’re opening the door to just 8 studios, a live pitch session where selected teams will present their games and get real-time expert feedback.
🚀 84% of New Playable Ad Impressions Came from AppLovin!
AI Agents to improve creative ROAS, and they used their AI Creative Agent to tag and analyze top-performing playables.
💵 Game Investments
⚡️ Scopely Completes the Acquisition of Niantic’s Game Business
Scopely has officially completed its acquisition of Niantic’s gaming division as of May 29, 2025. Many more details that you should know out there.
😻 RevenueCat raises $50M: Monetizing Mobile Amid AI Boom
RevenueCat, now the backbone of over 70,000 subscription-based mobile apps, just announced a $50M Series C to level up its mission: helping developers make more money, faster.
💰 Take-Two Announces Proposed Public Offering of Common Stock
Take-Two (NASDAQ: TTWO) today announced a proposed underwritten public offering of $1 billion of shares of its common stock.
👉🏻 Safety and Fairness in Gaming: PlaySafe ID Secures €1M
PlaySafe ID, a platform designed to safeguard gaming communities by blocking cheaters, bots, and predators, has raised €1 million in pre-seed funding.
🇹🇷 Casual Mobile Games: TaleMonster Games secures $7M
TaleMonster Games, an Istanbul studio founded by Peak Games veterans on a mission to bring depth and creativity back to casual puzzle games, raised $7M in funding.
⭐️ Mobile Game Marketing
🧩 The Monetization Engine Behind Magic Sort’s Rise
Over the last 30 days, the top 10 sorting games collectively garnered 29 million downloads and 15 million daily active users (DAU).
These games generated a total of $7.7 million in in-app purchases (IAPs). Magic Sort, by Grand Games, pulled in $3.3 million in IAPs or 43% of the top 10’s total IAP revenue, from just 478k DAU (only 3.4% of the top 10’s total DAU).
♨ Ad Creatives is a veeery hot topic now.
💰 Data out of 1.1M creatives, $2.4B in ad spend.
👉🏻 Introducing the Playable Testing Flow
A tiered, data-driven system actually to scale what performs.
No more guesswork. No more budget-burn.
Start with a proven winner – use your best-performing video as the baseline.
⭐️ TikTok changed the iOS campaign setup
A new option when creating an iOS campaign on TikTok: you can now enable or disable SKAN attribution.
🔥 Consolidated view of the current UA pain points
Current pain points here, and more importantly, what you can do about them.
⚡️ Rollic’s Color Block Jam scaled past $500K in IAP
What new features did they add to continue this monster growth?
💰 Lands of Jail passed $250K a day, after 2 months from launch.
What’s this prison-themed game about?
😶🌫️ Are aggressive ad campaigns killing the value of rewarded ads?
“Can players get tired of rewarded ads? Aren’t they opt-in by design?”
In theory, yes. In practice? There’s a problem no one likes to talk about.
🇨🇳 Chinese-built 4X survival-sim: Lands of Jail making 250K a day!
Chinese-built 4X survival-sim mashup that combines Frozen City onboarding, Whiteout Survival progression, and King Shot-style map layering.
🦄 11 Tips for Killer UA Ops – Q2 2025
UA killer tips segment out here.
🚀 Podcast of the Week: Paul Bowen on GOAT
🌿 Game JOBS: Juneish
Jobs of the Week – Hope for the industry.
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Cya next week!
