Most mobile-game success stories are told backwards. Once the charts, revenue milestones and celebrity campaigns arrive, every decision looks inevitable. The mechanic was obvious. The intellectual property was perfect. The studio simply executed. MONOPOLY GO! is useful because its real history is much less comfortable. Scopely began working on the game around 2016, discarded several […]
Does AI AdOps Replace AdMob, AppLovin MAX or Unity LevelPlay?
No. AdMob, AppLovin MAX and Unity LevelPlay decide which eligible demand source gets an opportunity to serve an ad. AI AdOps manages the operating decisions around that system: floors, hybrid waterfall order, anomaly response, timeouts, testing and escalation. One runs the auction. The other keeps the commercial setup responsive as traffic and demand change. Confusing […]
What is Predictive Ad Optimization?
Every ad ops team already optimizes. They check dashboards, spot a drop, switch a tag, adjust a floor. Predictive ad optimization is not a new version of that work. It is a different relationship to time. Instead of acting after a metric moves, the system acts on a forecast of where that metric is headed, […]
Why Rovio Deleted Its Own Best-Selling Angry Birds Game
In February 2023, Rovio Classics: Angry Birds was the second best-selling paid app in the entire US App Store. Rovio killed it. The Android listing came down on 23 February. The iOS version stayed up under a new name, Red’s First Flight, scrubbed of the words that would let anyone searching for Angry Birds actually […]
Ten Dollars, Once: How Nintendo Got 816 Million Installs and Monetized Almost None of Them
On September 30, 2026, Mario Kart Tour stops working. Nintendo announced the shutdown on July 8, stopped selling Rubies, and switched off Gold Pass renewals. There is no offline version and no refunds. Seven years, 290.7 million downloads, $365.6 million in player spending, and then nothing. Two years earlier, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp died the […]
Game of War (by Machine Zone) Made $69M in a Month. Now It Makes $400K
In January 2016, Machine Zone was priced at a $5 billion valuation. It had raised close to $600 million. Its flagship game was doing more revenue per player than almost anything on mobile. Four years later, AppLovin bought the entire company. The SEC filing puts the price at $328.6 million, of which $287.1 million was […]
The Games Were Never the Point: How AppLovin Turned Ten Studios Into Training Data
At Gamescom in 2023, AppLovin was quietly shopping its game studios. According to mobilegamer.biz reporting on the eventual sale, the asking price at the time was around $2.4 billion. Two years later, all ten studios went to Tripledot Studios for $800 million total: $400 million in cash plus a 20% stake in the buyer. A […]
Being Liked is a Business Strategy: Maryna Bondarenko on BD, Regions and Women in Games
Maryna Bondarenko is Director of Business Development at Fortis Games, working on casual games and publishing out of London. She has been in games business development since 2019, with four years at Miniclip before her current role, and has been a Women in Games ambassador since 2022. We asked her about two things: who gets […]
What Happens to Your Ad Revenue at 3 AM
A casual mobile game does not sleep. Its ad ops team does. That mismatch is structural, not a staffing failure. Most studios build one product for a global audience and hire one ad ops team in one time zone to run it. The game collects downloads everywhere. The team that watches the waterfall clocks out […]
Netflix in the Gaming Business: Has It Helped the Main Business, or Is It Still an Expensive Experiment?
Netflix launched games inside its app in November 2021 with a handful of mobile titles and a simple thesis: subscribers who play stay longer. Five years and roughly $2 billion later, the company has closed or sold off nearly every studio it built the effort on, pulled games from its catalog, changed leadership twice, and […]