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 […]
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 […]