🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: PIF running out of cash? Applovin surge, Kingshot explosive growth

Since launch, Law Kingshot has quickly become one of the biggest mobile releases of 2025. Monthly revenue has grown 1500% from March to November, with no signs of slowing.

Its best day so far was October 5th, when players spent $4.1 million in the title.

Two and a half gamers exclusive.

Breaking news.

Literally breaking.

Our signature new swivel chair move can only mean one thing. It's time to do the news.
Saudi Arabia's investment fund is reported to be limiting new investment as cash runs low.

Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, PIF, is reportedly short on cash for new investments after spending heavily for the last few years, including in games and esports.

According to the New York Times, several major projects the fund backed are now in financial distress, which limits how much new capital PIF can actually deploy.

One of the biggest issues is Neom, a futuristic city planned for the Tabuk region, which has faced major construction problems blamed on unrealistic planning.

Other struggling investments include a coffee company, a cruise ship line, and an electric car startup. None of the troubled assets are in gaming, where the PIF has invested heavily in recent years.

PIF values its portfolio at almost $1 trillion, but many holdings are difficult to sell due to a lack of clear market valuations. As a result, PIF

representatives have told international investors that it cannot commit much new capital in the near term.

However, a fund spokesperson says PIF still has around 60 billion in cash for similar liquid assets.

Recently, PIF joined Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in a $55 billion deal to acquire Electronic Arts. The deal is not yet closed.

However, EA CEO Andrew Wilson expected to complete in the fiscal quarter uh the first fiscal quarter of the year 2027 piff's influence in gaming is already large it owns savvy games group the parent company of scopely and niantic and it also holds stakes in capcom nexon embracer nintendo take two and along with several other large-scale esport investments so why did i choose to read this news story i think it's quite important for one thing and one thing alone.

Piff has been kind of the investor of last resorts for the last couple of years where large-scale gaming companies could actually get exits inside of mobile and instead of gaming overall.

If they're actually slowing down on their purchasing, that essentially means that the MA climate in games could slow down considerably. And what does that actually mean?

So what usually happens when games get bought out is that a large portion of the former employees make quite a lot of money, which usually means that they go on to fund more gaming companies.

So the sign here that I take away from reading this story that if PIF is actually slowing down investments in gaming, that could also lead to a more chilled M ⁇ A climate moving forward in the next couple of years.

So one to watch next. I want to talk about Kingshot because Kingshot has generated more than $500 million in IAPs in just nine months.

The game launched on February 24th and crossed the milestone of $500 million on November 18th.

Century Game Strategy Tattle has posted nine straight months of revenue growth after earning a record 95.7 million in October.

It beat that again in November with 96.7 million dollars according to Censor Tower. And as of December 1st, total player spending on the Play and App Store has reached $542 million.

Since launch, Lock Kingshot has quickly become one of the biggest mobile releases of 2025. Monthly revenue has grown 1500% from March to November with no signs of slowing.

Its best day so far was October 5th when players spent $4.1 million in the title, which is almost 70% of the entire game's March revenue when it was still scaling up on.

Kingshot has now become a consistent top 10 earner and has helped Century Games take the number one spot in the top 50 mobile games makers list of 2025.

The game's success has boosted the entire 4X strategy category. Kingshot mixes casual mechanics with mid-core gameplay and frequently runs events tied to real-world holidays.
Kind of standard, right?

Most spending has come from the US, which accounts for 42% of lifetime revenue. Korea is next at 9% and Japan follows with 7%.

So why did I want to talk about this? Because it's quite interesting. Kind of we touched on upon quite a lot of trends that we've been talking about the podcast here.

So Century Games is a Chinese developer and they have been competing primarily in the 4X genre by essentially tying on idle games or different type of games as an onboarding funnel.

So essentially, Forex category monetizes extremely well. However, CPIs in this genre tend to be extremely large.

So the big insight that Century Games has had is that if you tie in an onboarding funnel, which looks like an idle game or which looks like a casual game, that you can essentially decrease the CPIs that you get for your Forex game, because the Forex game is only rolled out after about 20 minutes worth of gameplay.

So the big Forex battle in the last year has kind of been between River Game and Century Games, whereas Century Games had one large title in the Forex genre and White House Survival, and River Game had about, I think, six of the top performing Forex games in the genre.

So Century Games coming out with Kingshot essentially means that they have two of the largest titles, which means they can kind of start fighting River Game for dominance in this genre.

So this is one of the games we're also watching very closely, but essentially I wanted to talk about this because it's quite interesting to see how well this works.

And we're also seeing this type of onboarding funnel behavior also expand to social casino.

So, if you have a game and that you want to scale in this type of genre, it's very good to look at these type of games because they tend to kind of rule a lot of these trends that we see.

Moving on to the next story.

According, okay, so the AppSflyer Performance Index of 2025 is out, and it reveals that Apple and Google still lead mobile game advertising, but App Loven is gaining ground in several genres.

According to the AppSflyer Performance Index 2025, both platforms face stronger competition this year as the mobile marketing landscape matures.

On iOS, Apple Ads stayed number one across every game genre except hypercasual and tabletop, where AppLoven performed better. Apple's lead over Appleven has shrunk, dropping from a 43% gap to 28% gap.

Apple Ads remained the strongest in Japan, Greater China, Korea, and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, whereas AppLoven moved ahead in Europe and North America.

Google Ads dominated Android once again, especially in casino, tabletop, puzzle, racing, and action games.

AppLoven ranked second on Android and even beat Google for match games in Eastern Europe, and Mintigrill took third place, pushing Unity Ads to fourth, while Meta Ads placed fifth.

AppSlier described 2025 as the year of sharper competition with tighter efficiency across both platforms.

More advertisers spend their their budgets across a wider set of media sources, increasing pressure on the leaders.

It has also been a standout year for App Loven after selling its game division to focus entirely on advertisements. Its business has surged with revenue up 68% in Q3 2025.

The report notes that App Loven video creatives performed best overall, winning top scores for pure gameplay videos and for ads mixing animation with live action.

The report also revealed that remarketing has also

expanded considerably with conversions up 20% year over year and more apps running remarketing and more apps are running remarketing campaigns than ever before.

All right, lots to unpack from this article, but I think we should just start at the most interesting thing here, right? So let's start out talking about Apple ads, right?

So they've been losing ground against AppLovin. And that's essentially one of the biggest takeaways from when a couple of years ago, when Apple removed the IDFA and introduced privacy, right?

That essentially meant that Meta got kicked off of iOS and opened a door wide open for AppLovin, Loven, right? And what they've been doing is gradually become the largest network on iOS.

And kind of the issue here that Apple's faced with is that they have Apple search ads, right? But the main issue with Apple search ads is that they only have, I think, about six placements.

So scaling on Apple search ads is always hard to do, right?

And also means that Apple ad Apple search ads, they kind of have this inherent flaw that you need to search for something to actually stay relevant. So yeah, you need to bid on these keywords.

So, well, AppLoven

shows their ads inside inside of other games or applications, right? So that means it's kind of only a question of time before App Love in becomes larger than Apple Ads on iOS, right?

So looking for the next thing here, what I think is quite interesting is that Google Ads is also dominating on Android. I don't think that's much of a news.

I think they'll stay dominant there because it's kind of their platform. One of the interesting things here that I'll have to say though is that remarketing has also expanded, right? So up 20%.

So the interesting thing here is that's also kind of one of the trends that we see quite a lot, right? Because CPIs have been increasing. So essentially UA and getting new users is more expensive.

So what you can also do is actually target users that's currently in your game or that have churned from your game to actually get them back.

And you're usually able to do this at a lower cost than a new user because essentially those users are actually used to playing your game. So that's enough for the news, these three news stories.

Now what I want to do is move on to what I call the weather section.

So we just finished one, our equivalent of a weather second we just finished off uh a month so i just wanted to look at the last month worth of earnings in sensor tower so you can see that the game that earned the most revenue uh was last warm at 145 million dollars right and after that we have century games whiteout survival at 117 million dollars and then followed up by monopoly go at 115 million Then fourth place, we have

Royal Match by Dream Games at 110 million, and then followed by Candy Crush at 93 million and Coinmaster at 80 million.

Then we have new heavyweight Kingshot on the seventh placement at 78 million, followed by Honor of Kings, 77 million, and then we have Gossip Harbor by Microfund at $75 million in November.

Looking at this ranking, we can also move and just quickly look at the top apps in November month by active user base. And here it looks a bit different, right?

So this is usually a sign of ad revenue as opposed opposed to IEP revenue, right? So, we had the largest active user base on mobile was actually Roblox with 154 million, no ads there, obviously.

Then, we have Garena Free Fire with 70 million daily active users, followed by Clash Royale with 66.

And Mobile Ledges by Moontown, 50 million daily active users, followed by Block Blast at 46 million daily active users.

And then at seventh place, Brawl Stars by Supercell with 33 million daily active users. So that brings us to an end to this new segment.

If you have any feedback, because this is a very new segment that we're doing, how we can improve on this segment, yeah, please let us know. Have a great day.
Bye.