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GAMING
Industry:
Supercell has completed its full acquisition of Merge Mansion maker Metacore. First announced in May, the deal officially closed on October 19, a few weeks later than its end-of-September target. Merge Mansion now joins Supercell's live games portfolio, with the Metacore team continuing to develop the game as part of the Finnish publisher. It's a clear signal of Supercell's ambition to grow beyond its core franchises and further into the casual merge category.
Google launched Playground, a new platform that lets anyone build games with AI prompts. The Google Labs experiment turns natural-language descriptions into playable browser games that run on both mobile and desktop, with no coding required. Alongside it, Google and Unity unveiled Unity Spark, a more advanced AI creation tool with a closed beta planned for later this year. Following similar moves from Meta and Roblox, it's another sign of how quickly AI is lowering the barrier to game creation.
Google Play is rolling out a wave of new discovery and engagement features for games. Highlights include a personalised Game Finder built on players' preferences and behaviour, 48-hour competitive Sprints, shareable Playbacks clips and in-game rewards through Quests. Google also says Play in Gemini has driven over 6m app installs in its first two months. For developers, it signals a bigger push by Google to own more of the discovery journey inside its own ecosystem.
South Korea fined Google and Apple a combined $47.6m over app payment practices. The country's Media and Communications Commission found that both companies restricted external payment options and charged a 26% commission on third-party payments. They have been ordered to allow links to external payment options and revise their app review procedures, while Apple has said it disagrees with the decision. It adds South Korea to the growing list of markets reshaping how app store payments work, with real implications for how mobile games monetise.
Games:
Istanbul-based Flow Games has confirmed $49m in total funding, with Tencent among its backers. The Smash Fest developer named Tencent, Makers Fund, Arcadia Gaming Partners and Ludus Ventures as investors, without disclosing individual amounts or its valuation. The studio plans to grow its team following the game's breakout success. It's another strong signal of international investor appetite for Turkish mobile studios.
ADTECH
AppLovin has taken legal action against Unity over data collected through Unity's Ad Quality SDK. AppLovin alleges the SDK gathered data on ads it won and served, including creatives, revenue and engagement, and that Unity used it to train models that compete with its ad business. Unity disputes the claims and argues that AppLovin's own Ad Review product is far more intrusive. AppLovin's request for a temporary restraining order was denied in early October, with the wider dispute now heading to arbitration. With both companies running major mediation platforms, the case puts data access and transparency in ad auctions firmly in the spotlight.
Miniclip launched AdSurge, a new standalone ad network for game publishers. Three years in the making, the platform from the Tencent-owned publisher covers both user acquisition and ad monetisation, starting with games that earn most of their revenue from in-app ads. Miniclip says it drew on AI expertise from Tencent's advertising ecosystem but built AdSurge's algorithms from scratch around its own traffic, with support for IAP and hybrid-monetised games planned next. As publishers feel the squeeze from platform fees and network margins, it's a notable example of a studio building its own answer to the ad stack.
