Mobile Gaming Brief

🔥Playtika: From $13bn to $1bn. What went wrong (and what it means for mobile)
On April 6th, Playtika hired Morgan Stanley to find it a buyer.
 • Wayne Bickerton
🔥 Scopely just said something the industry isn't ready to hear
"There's less of a need for new games."
 • Wayne Bickerton
🔥 Free-to-play games was supposed to have won...right?
In 2025, nine premium games cleared 10 million downloads.
 • Wayne Bickerton
🚨 AppLovin just opened its platform to ecommerce brands. Buying the same in-app gaming inventory your UA team depends on
Self-serve launches H1 2026.
 • Wayne Bickerton
🚨The Trump administration is debating forcing Tencent to sell Riot Games, Supercell, and its Epic Games stake
Most coverage is treating this as a US-China tech story.
 • Wayne Bickerton
🔥 Mobile gaming UA creative is a $25 billion bottleneck. Sett just raised $30M to remove it
The round closed this week.
 • Wayne Bickerton
🚨 Africa's gaming market just hit $2.3 billion. 87% of it is mobile
*high skew towards iGaming/gambling
 • Wayne Bickerton
🚨 Meta and Epic add 1,700 gaming job cuts in one week
Epic Games let go of 1,000 people.
 • Wayne Bickerton
🔥 ByteDance just sold Mobile Legends: Bang Bang for $6 billion
Not because they needed the money.
 • Wayne Bickerton
🔥 Roblox just told creators that every brand deal you make inside our walls, we take a cut.
May 4th is when mandatory registration and labelling of brand integrations begins. The revenue share doesn't kick in until January 2027
 • Wayne Bickerton
🍄 Mobile gaming now converts better than social media.
Kantar and AppLovin just published the numbers to prove it
 • Wayne Bickerton
🔥 "They just weren't hot enough."
The player research note that helped Love and Deepspace reach 80 million players.
 • Wayne Bickerton
© 2026 Wayne Bickerton · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture