2025, year of the Ming vase strategy

Read on for all of this week's stories in one place. Paid subscribers get exclusive commentary on the week's biggest news.

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Hello, I’m Neil, I run mobilegamer.biz. Thanks for subscribing to this newsletter.

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This week’s stories:

New game digest: Candy Crush Solitaire, Dark and Darker, Rainbow Six, fresh Apple Arcade launches and more

There's also a new Dragon Quest, a couple of new soft launches from FunPlus and Miniclip, new indie games and another Com2us RPG in this week's round up.

Huuuge cuts 122 staff, halts new game development

The staff cuts amount to a 29% reduction in its workforce, and mostly affect employees in Poland. Offices in the Netherlands and Finland will also close.

After $1.6bn earned from 730m downloads, is Nintendo giving up on mobile? (Yes, it is)

With Switch 2 on the horizon and Nintendo in better shape than ever, the Japanese giant’s foray into mobile seems to be coming to an end.

Palmon: Survival is Lilith’s take on Palworld (which is Pocketpair’s take on Pokémon)

And the Rise of Kingdoms and AFK Journey maker is using some creative ways to advertise it.

Data digest: State of Gaming ’25 data, Apple’s $1.8bn suit, Aonic invests $10m, Grand gets $30m, more

We also break down the highlights from AppsFlyer's latest report as MAG offloads its Primetime app and Zenless Zone Zero hits $250m.

Block Blast maker Hungry Studio A/B tested its way to the top of the charts

Block Blast was second only to Roblox in 2024's download charts. It got there through an “obsession” with A/B testing, says Hungry Studio VP Jason Wang.

NextBeat wants to make the new Guitar Hero

Cofounders Olly Barnes and Simon Hade want to launch a Guitar Hero-like edition of Beatstar (Rockstar…?) this year, and have several other projects cooking already.

Jobs digest: moves at Super Evil Megacorp, NextBeat, Stillfront, Exient, Netflix, Trailmix, Epic, Com2us, EA and more

Our bumper jobs run-down also has ins and outs at AppLovin, FunPlus, Tactile, Deca, Miniclip and lots more.

Former Space Ape exec Hade spins out new firm NextBeat

Hade is taking hit music games BeatStar and Country Star with him to set up the new outfit.

King to launch Candy Crush Solitaire on February 6

It's dropping globally on both iOS and Android next month after several years in soft launch.

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2025, year of the Ming vase strategy

Read on, paid subscribers, for thoughts on why this year most games businesses are playing it safe – even Nintendo.