Scopely, Niantic and the Saudi project

Read on for all of this week's stories in one place. Paid subscribers get an analysis of Scopely's reported swoop for Niantic's games, and what that says about Saudi Arabia's big gaming project.

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This week’s stories:

New game digest: Epic adds 15 new titles, DC: Dark Legion, Garena and Wildlife betas, Gundam, more

There's also Grand Mountain Adventure 2, I Am Your Beast, a retro arcade game collection and more in this week's round-up.

Hasbro makes about $10m a month from Monopoly Go

Monopoly licence holder Hasbro said it earned $112m from Scopely’s hit game in FY24, with $38m in Q4 alone.

Amazon is closing its Android app store

The tech giant is shuttering its storefront on August 20, and discontinuing its Amazon Coins scheme too.

Unity to introduce new AI ad platform Vector to keep pace with AppLovin

The rebuild continues at Unity as Q4 and full-year losses fall, but so do year-over-year revenue and EBITDA.

Jam City poised to sell off Ludia

The maker of Jurassic World: Alive, Lovelink and more is reportedly being offloaded to an unnamed Canadian investment group.

Data digest: January’s top earners, Pokémon TCG Pocket spikes, Nexon, Nitro, Ubisoft and Papergames numbers, more

There's also stats on China's successful mobile game export business in this week's need-to-know numbers round-up.

Scopely set to buy Pokémon Go for $3.5bn, says Bloomberg

The Savvy Games Group-owned outfit had been teasing a ‘megadeal’ for a huge franchise, and this could be it. The potential sale would also include Niantic's other games, too.

Big Fish stops new game development, restructures around evergreen titles

The maker of Gummy Drop, EverMerge and Cooking Craze will be run with “significantly reduced investment” as it is absorbed by fellow Aristocrat-owned outfit Product Madness.

Candy Crush Solitaire vs Solitaire Grand Harvest: can King take Playtika’s crown?

Our product experts say King has the spending power to storm in and own the solitaire space, but Candy Crush Solitaire will have to build out a much bigger suite of live ops to monetise harder.

AppLovin’s studio sale: who’s buying?

Let’s run through the likely options, including Scopely/Savvy, Take-Two, Playtika and a couple of wildcards.

Decoding Supercell’s annual blog

We read between the lines of Supercell's annual blog and work out where it's going next.

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Scopely, Niantic and the Saudi project

Read on, paid subscribers, for an analysis of Scopely's reported swoop for Niantic's games, and what that says about Saudi Arabia's big gaming project.

There’s only one name on everyone’s lips this week: Scopely.

It was already considered by many to be the most likely buyer of AppLovin’s games division. Then, on Wednesday, a Bloomberg report suggested it’ll soon be buying up Niantic’s game portfolio for $3.5bn.

So are about to see the rise of a new Saudi-funded super-publisher? And what does that mean for the rest of us?