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The games industry moves quickly and while stories may come and go there are some that we just can’t let go of…
So, to give those particularly thorny topics a further going over we’ve created a weekly digest where the members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming in the past week.
Craig Chapple
Head of Content
What is going on at Xbox?
You might have missed it, but last week, Xbox rebranded to XBOX. That came after new CEO Asha Sharma started a poll on X, which had 19,176 responses, with 64.8% voting yes. Or 12,426 users. That means 6,750 didn’t want the change.
For those that care, that brings Xbox back to its old branding. But it also seems to have been done on a whim and left marketing teams scrambling to change branding across all platforms and marketing assets. Thanks to a X poll.
What is the point of this, you might ask? Sharma and Xbox appear to be looking for easy wins to change the narrative at the company – that the console giant is back and it will relive the good times of old. Before the dark times. Before the Xbox One.
But announcements like this just feels like busy work. What’s wrong with a quiet period for the PR machine while Sharma gets to work on exactly where she wants the company to be? Surely it’s better value to work on bigger, tentpole marketing beats that will add value to the company and truly excite players, than drip feeding random announcements like this.
Then we have the new Xbox (sorry, XBOX) Player Voice feedback portal. This is open to the public to suggest ideas of what they want to see from the future of Xbox, and they can upvote other comments they like.
Currently top are ‘exclusives for Xbox’, ‘make online multiplayer free to access’, and ‘backwards compatibility’.
I’m not saying engaging with the community is a bad idea. But this particular approach could have unintentional consequences that leaves Xbox shooting itself in the foot.
For starters – what do we mean by exclusives, exactly? Xbox has had exclusives that have failed – like Halo Infinite. If the company made Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox, how might fans feel? And will that destroy the value of the brand given it will miss a larger market share of players on PlayStation? Can Xbox leadership really justify the business reason for making online multiplayer free to access?
The bigger question for Player Voice, however, is what happens when Xbox doesn’t follow through on the most voted for comments? What happens when it lays off hundreds or thousands of staff, cancels a game or closes a studio? I don’t think Xbox will like the results!
Then there are the hires. This week, it was announced that analyst Matthew Ball, author of those insightful state of the games industry reports, is joining Xbox as chief strategy officer.
I’ve met Matthew Ball – he clearly knows his stuff. But what tangible experience does he have at this level to be one of the leaders shepherding Xbox’s future?
It’s one thing writing deeply insightful reports on the industry, quite another deciding on a new strategy and direction for a major games platform holder and executing it successfully to ensure Xbox doesn’t end up right back where it is now, or worse. I’m curious what his vision will be, how much freedom and influence he’ll get, and how it all shapes up.
The next generation could be make or break for Xbox.
Fortnite returns globally on the App Store, with one exception
This week saw another chapter in the battle between Epic and Apple, with Fortnite now on Apple’s App Store globally, with the exception of Australia.
For Epic, this latest outcome clearly feels like a significant win in a long journey. Fortnite already returned to the US App Store last year after almost 5 years away, and it quickly climbed the download charts, so having its broader global reach restored is a big moment.
But I do also think it’s important to remember that battles like this come with sacrifices too.
Fortnite’s absence from major mobile storefronts for years undoubtedly limited the revenue and reach the mobile version could have achieved during that time. Then there’s the wider costs of long legal battles, which are never cheap, and of course, Epic itself went through major layoffs during this time.
So while Epic may be on the winning side of this particular moment, it hasn’t come without a cost.
At the same time, though, there’s also the bigger picture here outside of just Epic and Fortnite. This whole battle has become part of a wider industry push against closed storefronts and tough platform fees.
With Fortnite now back on both the App Store and Google Play, it feels like this is another moment that will show the wider market that they can push on these boundaries, perhaps not with the might that Epic has been able to, but change is possible and it could have a huge impact over the coming years.
Melon Sandbox: 150m installs and UGC evolution
Melon Sandbox is a game I admittedly haven’t long been familiar with, but I actually think that’s part of what makes it such an interesting case in the mobile scene.
When conversations are so often dominated by the billion-dollar makers or new hits getting players emptying their wallets, it can be easy to overlook the casual titles finding major success without such major player spending.
I think Melon Sandbox is one of those games. It has over 150 million downloads, reached 19m monthly active users this March and has an average session time of 40 minutes. Clearly, it’s a hit with players.
AppMagic estimates suggest the game’s made $16.9m in mobile player spending to date – a good sum, but not unprecedented in the world of mobile games. However, that doesn’t including web shop earnings or ad revenue – and the latter surely makes a significant sum with so many monthly players.
Add to that Melon Sandbox’s UGC element, and suddenly there’s even more data pointing to how players are resonating here. The game has around 90,000 UGC creations so far, made by approximately 35,000 creators, who earned more than $1m through Melon Sandbox last year.
So, I spoke with publisher Playducky’s founder Ivan Fedyanin to find out more about the game, why downloads matter and why they’re being overlooked in favour of revenue milestones.
“For a creator-led product, a large audience is not just a vanity metric. It covers distribution for creators, liquidity for the content marketplace and fuel for organic growth,” he said.
In the full interview, we also discussed the impact increasing regulation is having on game development and marketing – especially when your target audience is younger users.
