🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Chinese domination, M&A boom, Freecash controversy

So there's a lot of investors, a lot of people in the industry, UA managers watching this story very closely. And we will, too, to basically stay on top of what is actually happening in our industry. But this is a very important story that we'll keep following up on. (upbeat music) - Two and a half gamers exclusive. - Breaking news. - Literally breaking. - Hello everyone, and welcome to another fantastic episode to the Two and a half gamers podcast. It is Friday today, and of course, that must mean that we need to do the news. It's been quite spectacular news week this week. So today I have three stories for you. We're gonna go through them. I'm gonna add a bit of color on top of them. But first things first, let's take a look at sensor tower, great sponsor of ours, but basically what's actually going on in the top charts. So if we start by looking at the US charts on IAP apps in the last 30 days, you can see that monopoly go is safely on top with $66 million in IAP revenue on Android and iOS. Then you have Forex Giant Last War, which is on 54 million. Then you have Royal Match on 50 million and Classic Candy Crush on 42. The reason I'm actually reading this out is because I want to get to the fifth largest one, which is Gossip Harbor. And as you can see, Gossip Harbor in the US has climbed and it's now the fifth highest earning mobile application on the IAP side in the States at $32 million in the last 30 days. So what's really impressive here is just how much Gossip Harbor has actually grown. And I think I need to change to this page to actually show you what's going on here. So here's the same global listing and global ranking on all the top ads that apps on IAP earnings in the last 30 days. So at the top we have Last War Forex, $140 million in IAP revenue across the globe. Then you have Honor of Kings. It's been here for a lifetime, it's not going anywhere. It's one of these Chinese games that just never gonna go away from this top list. And you have Y-Dat Survival Forex game which is Chinese as well. Then you have Turkish, a developer, Royal match with from Dream games, which has earned $100 million in IAPs. And then you look at here the fifth largest IAP game right now is Gossip Harbor by Microphone. And you can see how it's pretty much demolished Candy Crush which used to hold this role for quite a long time. And also Monopoly Go. So what's interesting thing here is to note that China is absolutely starting to dominate the top IAP category, right? So you have Last War, you have Honor of Kings, what at Survival and Gossip Harbor. These are all Chinese games and so is King Shots, right? Really impressive to see their growth. And then if you also look here on the top by games by Active User Base, you can see a Timinar trend, right? You see Gerina, Brawl Stars, but then also Block Blast which is growing quite a lot. So interesting to see the Chinese takeover. Let's move on to our first actual story. And that is the game industry is starting to heat up. So basically, games industry hits 7.7 billion in Q1, 2026 led by Savvy Games Group. So this is a story from PocketGamer, which is basically saying that M&A inside of the mobile application space is starting to heat up again for games. So in Q1 of this year, M&A's transactions were 7.7 billion. Large portion of that is for the acquisition of volume games by Scopley, but it's basically a remnace reporting on this. And there's a deal value is actually triple compared to what we saw in Q1, 2025. So actually the game's industry is heating up quite a lot. Also, there's a little bit of sign of consolidation going on in the rewarded app space, which we talked about on the last news episode that I did. But it's very exciting to see because you can also usually see when there is an increase in the amount of M&A transactions happening in an industry. You also see that fizzling out into more games and more studios being funded. And I've actually seen quite a lot of news about a lot of studios being funded, which is always on the back of these mega acquisition. So game industry is starting to heat up, and there's leading to more acquisitions. So that takes us to the third and final story of this week, which is from TechCrunch and it's about free cash. So if you don't know if you've been living under a rock free cash, is the largest rewarded app in the rewarded app, user acquisition space. And TechCrunch came up with a story on Tuesday, which basically said that, I don't know if you've actually read it, but there's a lot of things here that they're throwing around that necessarily I don't agree with because I've been working a lot in this industry. For example, one part of the story is that a malware bytes report notes that free cash the app may collect information about user race, religion, sex, life, sexual orientation, health, and other biometrics. And it's also allocating that it's used aggressive marketing, and that's the reason why it's actually been taken off the app stores. But here's the thing. Every single application on mobile usually takes as much data as a cat. And actually the biggest or the worst application in this space that actually takes the most is actually TikTok, right? And they have a way of gobbling up all the data that they can. And usually this kind of becomes a, if you work in the industry, this kind of is a big bad nothing burger. I think the issue here is around advertising, which has been done quite aggressively. And actually free cash has been taken down on both iOS and Android. And I guess this is becoming probably one of the main stories here because the UA share wallet that's basically going from rewarded apps in the last couple of years instead of traditional UA networks or DSPs has started to increase quite a lot, right? So it's actually taking a big chunk of UA budgets these days. So every one in the industry is kind of watching the story develop really closely because it's becoming pretty much a litmus test on how this industry can actually flourish inside of the iOS and Google Play stores, right? So a lot of players here that are growing really fast. And essentially we need to know because Google and Apple don't really say a lot about this industry. So we just need to know if this is actually going to be allowed or not or if it's actually going to be craft down on. So that was the news for this week. If you have any questions or if you want us to cover any important topics, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you so much and have a good day. Bye-bye.