From top downloads to breakout rev makers, a snapshot of Jul26 WW global chart:

Top Grossing Titles:
Honor of Kings back at 1 with $157.6M (up 42% from $110.6M in June)
followed by Roblox with $101.6M, followed by Pokémon GO at 3 with $101.1M

Top Downloads:
Roblox at 1 with 22.9M+
followed by Free Fire MAX at 2 with 22.8M+
Arrow Puzzle: Tap Puzzle Games at 3 with 19.3M+ downloads

Games to Track in August:

1. Pokémon GO, at 3 with rev at $101.1M, its best month since July 2021. The 10th anniversary, and its first under Scopely, has worked in their favor. Need to watch whether the bump holds post-anniversary event.

2. eFootball, all-time rev record at $69.9M (11), 4th straight month it has climbed on WC momentum. The clearest case of a studio converting a real-world event into durable IAP.

3. The arrow-game reshuffle,

   1. Arrow Puzzle: Tap Puzzle Games climbs to 3 downloads (19.3M)

   2. Arrows: Puzzle Escape 1 to 11 (25.3M to 11.4M)

   3. Amaze GO! 2 to 9 (23.2M to 11.9M)

vs June, What Shifted:

1. Honor of Kings roars back. $157.6M is a 42% jump and its best month since January ($172.4M).

   1. Summer school holidays in China plus the team’s habit of saving big events for July-August is the likely driver.

2. Roblox does the double. 1# downloads (22.9M) and 2# rev ($101.6M) in the same month. Got it with its young audience and summer break.

3. PUBGM back in the top 5 at $99M

4. Last War: Survival declines a 4th straight month, $64.5M (down from $71.4M), and drops to 12#.

5. Isn’t Football a category now. 4 titles in the top15 downloads: Soccer Superstar (5#), Football League 2026 (8#), EA SPORTS FC Mobile 26 (10#), eFootball (12#).

Charts are curated monthly at iCartic.com
tCARe, Cartic P

FUNDING & M&A

1. $55B → EA’s take-private closes on or about August 4 (tomo). Some insights via FAQ with answers

   1. Does a $55B deal mean money is coming into games? No. Roughly $20B of the $55B is JPMorgan debt, about $18B drawn at close, and it lands on EA’s balance sheet. Shareholders get cashed out at $210 a share. The operating business gets leverage, not capital.

   2. Who actually bought EA? PIF at 93.4%. Silver Lake at 5.5%. Affinity Partners at 1.1%. A sovereign wealth fund, a private equity firm, and Jared Kushner’s investment vehicle.

2. $3.2M → ForgeGUI, AI asset generation for Roblox and UEFN, at a $40M valuation. Verdict Capital led. Founder Giulio Greco turned 18 in late June, so his parents signed the docs. Two people. 300K users. Launched in March.

3. Undisclosed → Razer acquires StreamElements assets from Live Momentum. Part of the consideration is earmarked to clear payments the platform already owed creators.

4. Undisclosed → Nordic Partners Gaming (Malta) takes AM Gaming’s CS2 roster, ranked 79th. NPG’s parent is an iGaming affiliate network.

5. Undisclosed → Hypercent (South Korea, PC and console) closes a Seed round.

FUND LAUNCH

6. $30M → Drilo Ventures, backing Turkish-founded mobile studios wherever they sit. $500K to $1.5M cheques. First close in October.

7. Undisclosed → UzCA Game Fund, Uzbekistan’s first. $1K to $2K for concepts, $5K to $20K in development, $50K to $100K+ on proven revenue.

STUDIOS & ECOSYSTEM

8. up to £100K each → UK Games Fund backs 29 studios.

9. $1,000 each → Türkiye’s NextGen high school incubator. Six teams, equity-free. $10K to the Demo Day winner.

ADJACENT CAPITAL

10. $30M → Ex-Anduril founders raise for a synthetic battlefield for defence AI. Defence, gaming adjacent.

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

PS last week's post on AI Tech Art opening from EA

1. The legacy stack is still there: Blender, Unreal, After Effects, Nuke.

2. The AI stack sits in the same list: ComfyUI, LoRA, ControlNet, Veo, Nano Banana.

3. Governance is written into the role: IP usage, Approvals, Disclosures, Policy compliance, Incident handling. A tech art JD carrying compliance weight.

4. FYI. This one is brand and campaign content for XO AI Labs, not game production

The merge people keep predicting is not coming. It is in a live JD at a major publisher.

If you are figuring out what to learn next, read this JD as a map.
Link in the first comment.

PS: AI tools or governance, which one surprised you more?
tCARe, CARtic P
/ iCartic.com

1. Meshy raised ~$400M at a $1.5B valuation. AI 3D generation.

2. Neon Commerce raised $13M. a16z and Renegade co-led, Krafton came in as strategic. D2C storefronts for publishers.

3. Pure raised $8M. Compliance and payments rails for real-money peer-to-peer games.

4. Ash Games Studio raised $1.5M. Merak Capital and Impact46. Saudi action-adventure for PC and console. The only money on this list that went into making a game.

5. Tencent is in talks for SuperPlay at $1B to $1.5B. Talks.

6. Uzbekistan launched its first fund for game studios. Cheques run $1,000 to $100,000.

7. Alpha Dog Games founders bought the studio back from Microsoft. The deal actually closed in May 2025. Nobody noticed for 14 months, until a LinkedIn profile edit gave it away.

8. When Tides Turn launched in the UK. Same Wreckreation team, now self-publishing the sequel on a UK grant.

Deal/NoDeal: Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery hit a restraining order. Extended Thursday. No close before Aug 18.

Clone wars: Funfinity sued ABI Global over Colony Flow. The clone outranked the original in downloads despite launching a month later.

TL;DR:

1. $422M disclosed. 95% of it went to one AI 3D company. 0.35% went to a studio building a game.

2. The two studio comebacks were buyouts, not raises.

3. The biggest number on the page is not signed yet.

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

PS. Other posts from last week: 1. SRMIST Keynote Session, 2. Did India have paying players, or do we pay the players? RMG side effect

Indie Game Development In India Lessons & Postmortems

3.15MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Full session reel (YT Stream link):

If you’re into IG carousel, here's a link to the IG post from the Geekroom SRMIST Instagram post

tCARe, CARtic P
/iCartic.com

We used to have players who landed from performance ads. Tried the game. Tried their luck. Grabbed early giveaways. Timed the encashment turnaround.

If everything checked out, they stayed.
And we called that retention.

Regulation switched off the payback loop, and the entire behaviour and persona disappeared with it.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: they were never playing your game.
They were playing your payout system.

One of the best things that happened with RMG games is that players got to know how to make in-app purchases.

So the design brief for you to figure out is what loop replaces payback? What’s the motivation to introduce when you can’t pay them to play?

tCARe, Cartic P
/ iCartic.com

$593M out (stake sale), $1M in (as raise). That was the week.

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P


PS. Other posts from last week: Indie devs under $1M, are you tipping Apple extra 15%?

Manual enrollment only. It never happens by default. Who qualifies:

1. Under $1M USD in proceeds last cal year

2. New developers, from day one

3. Proceeds means net of Apple’s cut, so ~$1.3M gross can still qualify

Reduced rate only kicks in 15 days after the fiscal month your enrollment is approved. Every month you wait is margin handed back to Cupertino.

PS. EU alternative terms devs get a further cut to 10%

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

1. Kaon AI raised $60M for AI story worlds (FlowGPT, Emochi), gaming-adjacent. Emochi claims 2M daily users at 150 mins a day. Session time most games would kill for.

2. Bold Games raised $6M, Istanbul-based studio.

3. Kantrip raised $2.75M, UK-based AI game engine developer.

4. Slitherine acquires Blood Bowl license and publishing rights from Nacon, undisclosed.

5. Scopely invests in Studio AuKnow, the ex-Umamusume Pretty Derby director’s new studio, undisclosed.

6. Google opened a $1M Indie Games Fund for African developers.

7. Innovate UK opened a £10M (~$12.7M) Createch funding call for game developers.

Capital chases engagement, not categories.

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

PS. Other posts from last week: June chart, micro dramas stats

From top downloads to breakout revenue earners, a snapshot of Jun26 WW global chart:

Top Grossing Titles: Honor of Kings holds #1 with $110.6M (down 29% from $155.9M in May), followed by Whiteout Survival with $109.1M, followed by Royal Match at #3 with $102.7M.

Top Downloads: Arrows: Puzzle Escape at no.1 with 25.3M+, followed by Amaze GO! at #2 with 23.2M+ (listed as Arrows GO! in May, same publisher, same rank), Free Fire MAX at #3 with 22.7M+ downloads

Games to track in July

1. World-cup season: eFootball, KONAMI climbs 6 spots to #12 revenue ($43M), its best month ever. World Cup attention is lifting the whole football category in downloads,

   1. Soccer Superstar (+20 spots)

   2. Football League 2026 (+21)

   3. EA SPORTS FC Mobile 26 (+9). eFootball is the only one converting that attention into IAP at scale. July tells us who retains.

2. Arrow Puzzle: Tap Puzzle Games, climbs from #10 to #5 (16.4M installs).

   1. Three titles with the same mechanic now sit in the top 5 downloads. Two of them share a publisher :?

3. Tasty Travels: Merge Game, the playtime leader at 117.2 mins per user, earning $24.7M.

   1. Royal Match does $102.5M on 90.1 mins.

   2. Candy Crush does its number on the lowest playtime on the board, 63.2 mins.

vs May, What Shifted:

1. Honor of Kings sheds $45M and still wins. A 29% IAP drop would end most games’ reign. Tencent’s MOBA is prone to big swings, and $110.6M is still well above its Nov-Dec 2025 dip below $90M.

2. Whiteout Survival has posted roughly $110M for four straight months.

3. Royal Match, roughly $100M for three.

4. Last War: Survival declines for a third month, $71.4M (down from $80.7M). Downloads are at their lowest since November 2023, when the project began scaling. The earlier D2C hypothesis still holds, but the UA pullback looks like the bigger driver.

5. Candy Crush Saga drops to just over $77M, its weakest month since April 2022. On AppMagic’s May chart it sat at $90.4M.

6. PUBG Mobile falls to just over $62M. It was $118.2M in February.

7. Brawl Stars exits the top 20 at under $27M, after three months in the $34-38M range.

Charts are curated monthly at iCartic.com
tCARe, Cartic P

Micro-drama has D1 retention 27%. D30 ~2%. D90 ~1%.

US ARPDAU from $2.50+ down to under $0.50.
US and Japan downloads plateaued, so UA shifted to India, Indonesia, Brazil.

The Indian download spike is an act to please investors, rather than focus on India as a market; India is more of a metric to them than a market. (That’s another story to brainstorm).

Isn’t it the same biz metric as hyper-casual games: LTV, stickiness, session length, retention

Hotstar’s tadka and Amazon MX Player’s fatafat are jumping in. Classic laggard move: rent a new audience to stretch your late-maturity stage.

When you say Micro-drama absorbs hypercasual gamers’ attention I agree, But You cannot fill a games-sized revenue hole with 1% D90 retention.
tCARe, Cartic P
/ iCartic.com

1. Funding and M&A: $3.1M → Spill Games raises seed round to scale mobile games portfolio

2. Griffin Gaming Partners acquires strategic stake in tinyBuild (undisclosed, AIM-listed)

3. Kepler Interactive acquires minority stake in Oro Interactive (undisclosed)

4. CVC Capital Partners invests in Chess(dot)com (undisclosed)

5. Fund Launch: $50M → Denmu launches fund dedicated to visionary game makers

6. Adjacent Capital: $320M → General Intuition Series A at $2.3B post-money, AI-for-gaming infra, adjacent

7. $150M → Tripo AI raises for GenAI 3D tooling, gaming adjacent

8. New Studio Launch: Atmospheric, new studio from nDreams founder, original IP across games and music

9. Studios & ecosystem: Savvy Games Group partners with Genvid and Massive Studios to expand AI access for Saudi developers

Pure gaming raised $3M last week. AI-for-gaming raised $470M.
The money isn’t going into games, it’s going into what powers them.

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

Wanted to introduce a new Job Board meant exclusively for Tech Artists. Currently, it has 129+ open roles, updated weekly (refreshed 2-3 times per week).

One click. No signup wall. No recruiter spam. Free to browse. Covering:

• Environment, Character, VFX

• Houdini, Shaders, Pipeline, Tools

Share it with anyone who might find it helpful! 🧡
tCARe, CARtic P

1. Funding & M&A: $10M → Playtika veterans secure funding for AI-powered mobile app operations platform

» Fund Launch:
2. $163M → Nexon Korea launches fund for early-stage game developers (5-year commitment)
3. $50M → Denmu raises fund to fuel game makers
4. $10M → VGames launches new Indie Fund

5. Adjacent Capital: $1B → AppsFlyer raises from Moloco, Google, Meta and Unity — ad measurement infra

» New Studio Launches & Spinouts:
6. TRAILMARK Games launches
7. Orixa Games launches
8. 34BigThings spins out from Embracer Group

The money is moving up the stack: Less into individual studios, more into funds, infra, and platforms.

Where do you think gaming capital flows next?

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

YouTube Playables, a platform with 2B MAUs, Unity, Godot, Cocos, PlayCanvas has SDK support.

2 formats, 2 platforms. Which port would you ship first?
tCARe, Cartic P

/ iCartic.com

1. UAE: under-15 ban, 12months clock started on June 18th. Behavioural ads to minors prohibited.

2. UK: under-16 ban, Spring 2027 deadline. Livestreaming and stranger-contact restrictions

Regulators stopped tightening social media. They’re tightening games now.

If your DAU under 16 sits in voice chat, party systems, UGC creation, or co-op-with-strangers loops, your product just got a deadline.
Not your legal team. Your product.

Planning to reprioritize your tickets in JIRA? Or are you still betting the legal definition holds?

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

Funding & M&A:

1. $2.4M → AutoVRse (VR simulation) raises from Singularity AMC and Lumikai

2. $1.34M → Breaking Change closes funding, UK games dev software

3. Spektra Games receives investment from APY Ventures (Türkiye) → undisclosed

4. Voltage acquires OperaHouse anime studio → undisclosed

5. PULLUP Entertainment divests Douze Dixièmes to founding partners → undisclosed

6. UA Financing: $14M → Luni secures financing from PvX Partners
7. Adjacent Capital: Affle acquires AdColony assets from Digital Turbine - ad tech, gaming adjacent

Another week, another PvX UA financing round. Luni’s $14M proves this is now a permanent funding pillar. Not a trend.

What’s your read on UA financing going mainstream?

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

• Grossing rank: 1,519 on launch day, up to 129 by May 30

• Download rank: top 6 on May 27, down to ~217 today

• Daily IAP: flat under $10K in soft launch, then a 20x spike to a $222K peak, now holding at $200K

Most gamedevs chase the download line, here they found the spenders and retained them while the tourists churned.

Design 101 says avoid genre mash-ups, too many mechanics. Clash of Critters is the counterexample, has 4 genres under one hood:

• Grid lane defense: session depth

• Pinball progression: pacing (just like Monopoly Go!)

• Tatari collection: gacha

• Cozy base building: personalization

tCARe, CARtic P
/ iCartic.com

Funding & M&A:
1. ~$29M → Anima Kitchent closes late-stage round (Spain, animation studio)
2. $20M → Board raises Series A, physical-digital gaming device
3. €3.5M → CardNexus closes seed led by Piton Capital
4. Roblox acquires Morpheus AI, undisclosed
5. Secret Mode acquires Chained Together from Anegar Games, undisclosed

6. Debt Financing: $57M → Nazara Technologies raises debt
7. UA Financing: $20M → Two Desperados secures UA financing from PvX Partners
8. Adjacent Capital: $7M → Sony Innovation Fund leads WeRize pre-Series C, fintech, gaming adjacent
9. Studios & Ecosystem: Jin Universe Studios launches with backing to fund debut title Aether Dawn

Roblox buying an AI company! They are focusing on building tools that makes experience. The platform isn't just hosting games anymore. What's your read on Roblox acquiring Morpheus AI?

Stay ahead. Curated weekly at iCartic.com
tCARe, CARtic P

Indian studios with experience in RMG, ludo/board, and fantasy do not mint hybridcasual founders. What other genres are we shining now?

What would it take to build the Indian Peak Games/puzzle games?
tCARe, Cartic P

/ iCartic.com