Weekly News Digest #19

Supercell Completes Full Metacore Acquisition as Studio Restructures

Finland-based mobile games company Supercell, a subsidiary of China-based tech giant Tencent (SEHK: 700), announced its plan to fully acquire Finland-based mobile games developer Metacore and integrate Merge Mansion into its live games portfolio. Supercell was already Metacore’s largest shareholder. Concurrent with the deal, Metacore initiated organizational restructuring that could result in up to 160 job reductions in Finland, with its operations in Germany and Sweden also under review.

Supercell’s path to full ownership of Metacore spans eight years of progressive financing. In 2018, Supercell made an initial equity investment of $5.7m (€5m) in the studio, then operating under the name Everywear Games. In Sep’20, at the time of Metacore’s rebranding and the global launch of Merge Mansion, Supercell provided a further ~$29.6m (€25m) in financing, structured as a $17.8m equity investment and an $11.8m credit line. In May’21, with the game’s daily player base exceeding 800,000 and annualized revenue approaching $50m, Supercell extended a $180m (€150m) credit line to fund the game’s global scaling. Total committed capital across equity and debt exceeded $200m before the full acquisition.

The move to complete ownership reflects Supercell’s broader live-games strategy: the company reported revenue of $3.01B (€2.65B) in 2025, matching its 2024 record, with EBITDA reaching $1.06B (€0.93B), up 12% year-over-year, and its portfolio maintaining ~300 million MAUs globally. Running the farming sim Hay Day, base-building strategy Clash of Clans, card battler Clash Royale, hero shooter Brawl Stars, and base-raid strategy Boom Beach as long-running evergreen titles, Supercell is adding Merge Mansion as a sixth live game to the same operational framework. As Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen said, “With Supercell’s experience turning around and scaling global live games, alongside our capabilities in live operations and user acquisition, we can help it climb back to the top of its category.”

Founded in 2014 as Everywear Games, initially developing games for the Apple Watch, Metacore pivoted to mobile game development in 2018 and rebranded in 2020 alongside the global release of Merge Mansion, the title that established the merge-2 genre. The game has since reached 60 million players worldwide and generated $700m in lifetime revenue. According to AppMagic, both IAP revenue and downloads peaked in 2022–2023 before entering a sustained contraction through 2025, as competition intensified within the category Metacore created. Metacore’s attempts to diversify beyond Merge Mansion failed to yield a second globally distributed title. As CEO Mika Tammenkoski stated, “The competition has become tougher every year since we launched Merge Mansion and created the merge-2 category as a pioneer.”

Metacore’s financial history reflects the arc of a studio built around a single breakout title. Based on the chart below, revenue grew at a ~253% CAGR from 2020 to its 2023 peak, before declining 4% in 2024 as the game’s growth plateaued. Operating losses peaked in 2021, the year Supercell’s $180m credit line was deployed primarily toward marketing and user acquisition, before narrowing steadily over the following two years. The studio reached operating profitability for the first time in 2024, posting $16m in EBIT on ~$168m (€154m) in revenue, the profitability inflection arriving precisely as revenue softened.

The headcount evolution adds another dimension to this picture. Based on the chart below, the number of employees grew steadily from 15 in 2020 to 223 in 2024, while revenue per FTE peaked at $2.1m in 2021 before declining to $0.8m by 2024 as the team continued to expand, even as game revenue plateaued. As Tammenkoski acknowledged, the company “built an organization with growth ambitions that have not materialized as expected,” making the planned reduction of up to 160 roles a structural correction rather than a reactive cut.

The full acquisition formalizes what was already a deep operational relationship, bringing Merge Mansion into a portfolio operating at a scale that sets an exceptionally high internal bar. Supercell’s catalog includes some of the highest-grossing mobile titles ever made, with Clash of Clans alone surpassing $10B in lifetime revenue and three further titles each clearing $2B+, setting a portfolio standard that frames both the ambition and the distance Merge Mansion has to travel. The acquisition raises a genuine strategic question: Merge Mansion, with ~$700m in lifetime revenue and declining metrics over the past two years, is entering Supercell’s live-ops framework at the same time as the merge-2 genre it pioneered has grown sharply more competitive, with both Gossip Harbor (Microfun) and Travel Town (Moon Active) having already displaced it from the category leadership it once held. Supercell has been explicit that this is a turnaround play, intending to apply its live operations and user acquisition capabilities to help Merge Mansion regain category leadership, while using the title to reach a broader casual player audience than Supercell currently serves. Whether those capabilities are the right tool for a genre now dominated by faster-moving rivals is a question the integration will have to answer. We will continue to monitor how the acquisition develops and whether Merge Mansion can find a path back to growth inside one of gaming’s most demanding live-ops portfolios. 

Fenris Creations: Finalizing MBO, Rebranding, and Partnership with Google DeepMind

Iceland-based PC & Console games developer CCP Games has completed its management buyout from South Korea-based games company Pearl Abyss (KOSDAQ: 293490) for $120m ($100m cash plus $20m in token acquisition rights), simultaneously rebranding as Fenris Creations and announcing a minority equity participation by UK-based AI research company Google DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL). The transaction closed on May 6, 2026. Aream & Co. and Arion Bank are acting as financial advisors to Fenris Creations, and LOGOS is providing legal counsel.

We covered the buyout terms and Pearl Abyss’s strategic rationale in our previous digest. The $120m exit represented a substantial markdown on the original investment. At $120m against EVE Online‘s 2025 revenue of $70m+, the transaction implies a ~1.7x LTM revenue multiple, consistent with the low end of pricing for mature, single-IP live-service studios with plateauing but stable monetization.

The structural novelty in this deal is Google DeepMind’s entry as a minority backer. The partnership is framed as a research collaboration: DeepMind will use an offline version of EVE Online on local servers to study long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning in a complex, dynamic environment. EVE Online‘s persistent, player-driven economy and 20-year behavioral dataset make it a credible research substrate for frontier AI models in ways that purpose-built synthetic environments cannot replicate. The rebranded studio enters this next phase from a position of financial strength: EVE Online recorded its second-highest revenue quarter in its 20-year history in Q4’25, growing 19% year-over-year, with Nov’25 as a record month.

This may be the first time a frontier AI research lab has taken an equity stake in a games studio specifically to use a live game as a research environment. We have tracked AI’s growing presence in gaming in our report — $1.8B deployed across 178 startups between 2020 and 2024 — almost entirely directed at in-game content generation and development infrastructure, not arrangements of this kind. The equity structure, rather than a straightforward licensing deal, signals that DeepMind sees long-term access to and influence over the environment as strategically valuable. If the results from the EVE Online environment prove publishable and defensible, it is reasonable to expect other frontier labs to pursue similar arrangements with studios running the right kind of persistent world. We will be watching how the Fenris Creations partnership develops — and whether comparable deals start appearing across the sector.

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MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

India-based advertising technology company InMobi has acquired US-based app analytics and App Store Optimization platform MobileAction for an undisclosed sum. The deal extends InMobi Advertising’s iOS growth capabilities, pairing MobileAction’s specialized Apple Ads and App Store Optimization expertise with InMobi’s existing advertising scale and its consumer commerce platform, Glance. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, MobileAction provides data spanning over 90 million creatives, 6 million keywords, 5 million apps, 100 thousand publishers, and 500 thousand advertisers, and counts Google, Meta, DoorDash, Square, Zalando, Playtika, and Priceline among its customers. Following the close, MobileAction will continue operating as a dedicated platform within InMobi Group, with teams across the US, Europe, and Türkiye joining the company.

Canada-based play-and-earn platform Mistplay has acquired MyChips SRL, a subsidiary of Italy-based rewarded advertising platform MAF, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition adds MyChips’ offerwall supply across hundreds of apps in North America, APAC, and Europe to Mistplay’s LoyaltyPlay partner network, expanding the range of apps through which Mistplay can run rewarded campaigns. MyChips is an iOS offerwall platform focused on playtime-based rewards. Following the close, MyChips’ teams across Europe and APAC joined Mistplay. Mistplay, founded in 2015 and headquartered in Montreal, leverages an AI engine and play-and-earn model to drive mobile user acquisition and engagement for game and app publishers worldwide.

US-based games company Atari (EURONEXT: ALATA) has acquired the complete and exclusive rights to the first five Wizardry titles and their underlying IP for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition covers Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981), Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds (1982), Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983), Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna (1987), and Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom (1988), along with related contract rights and IP spanning characters, spells, locations, and monsters from the original universe. The original Wizardry IP and its NES, SNES, and PC titles have been unavailable to developers for more than 25 years. Atari plans to bring the titles back through expanded digital and physical distribution, remasters, collections, and new releases, complemented by merchandise, card and board games, and TV and film programs. In 2024, Atari’s studio Digital Eclipse released a remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, introducing a new generation of players to the franchise. According to Alinea Analytics, the title has sold over 108,000 copies across PC & Consoles since launch, generating ~$2.6m in combined gross revenue. 

Poland-based digital entertainment marketplace G2A.COM has secured a minority equity investment from Krzysztof Krawczyk, former head of CVC Capital Partners’ Warsaw office, for an undisclosed sum, with Krawczyk appointed Chairman of the company’s Advisory Board. Krawczyk brings nearly 30 years of private equity investment experience in Central and Eastern Europe, including leadership of capital allocation for one of the world’s largest PE funds managing over $180B in assets. G2A, which has grown without external funding, generates nearly $400m in annual GMV, EBITDA exceeding $20m, and serves over 35 million users across 180 countries, surpassing 200 million visits and 150 million total listings sold in 2025. The partnership targets international expansion into Asia and high-growth markets, an M&A program focused on EBITDA-positive businesses valued between $5m and $350m, and the development of an agentic AI ecosystem across the platform. Non-gaming categories, including software, gift cards, subscriptions, and e-learning, already account for nearly half of G2A’s business.

UK-based games developer It’s Happening, the studio behind the game PlateUp!, has acquired a 30% stake in UK-based games publisher Yogscast Games for an undisclosed sum. The deal formalizes founder Alastair Janse van Rensburg‘s consulting role in game selection and development direction at Yogscast. Van Rensburg developed PlateUp!, a restaurant management roguelite published by Yogscast Games in 2022 that generated more than $38m in revenue and sold more than 3.4 million copies across PC & Consoles, according to Alinea Analytics. Van Rensburg has already consulted on two new Yogscast signings: Glory on Pluto, an engine-building roguelite from LittleBigEars Games, and Dupery, a solo deduction roguelike from Gilded Rune Games.

VENTURE FINANCING

US-based AI gaming tech company Astrocade has raised $56m in combined Series A and B funding, with the Series A led by Sea (NYSE: SE) and the Series B led by Sequoia Capital. Additional investors include Google’s AI Futures Fund, NVIDIA, LG Technology Ventures, Dentsu Ventures, Conviction Embed, Chaac Ventures, and Rogue VC. Astrocade is a generative AI platform that enables anyone to create and publish interactive games in minutes, without technical skills or coding. In the eight months since launch, Astrocade has attracted more than 20 million engaged users and over 75,000 creator-built games from 80 countries, with 140 million game plays per month. The funds will support team expansion, generative AI development, and a $10m creator incentive program. The company was co-founded by brothers Ali and Amir Sadeghian, with Ali having conducted AI research at Google.

US-based AI creative studio MOTHER.tech has raised $15m in a Seed funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), with participation from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, BoxGroup, and Shine Capital. Simultaneously, MOTHER.tech launched Degen, a mobile app for AI-generated images, videos, memes, carousels, and text. At the center of Degen is a “gen” format, a modular creative tool built by individual artists and designers, translating their visual style into shareable generators powered by a multi-model AI render pipeline. Creators earn a usage-based revenue stream each time their generator is used. The app is currently available on iOS and Android via invite, with broader access planned. Founded in 2023 and based in Brooklyn, MOTHER.tech was co-founded by Kelsey Falter, Raissa Chagas, and Miles Seiver, who previously worked inside major technology platforms.

UK-based mobile gaming analytics and user acquisition optimization company Kohort has raised $7m in a Series A funding round led by The Raine Group, which also led Kohort’s Seed round in Jun’25. The funds will support the development of Kohort’s UA agent suite, comprising three capabilities: Kohort’s flagship product, Ktrl for campaign optimization and network-specific bidding; Deep Research for on-demand UA trend analysis cross-referenced against a studio’s historical data; and Automated Reporting. All three agents are backed by predictive models trained on $6B of historical UA spend across hundreds of games, delivering daily campaign-specific predictions with 95% accuracy, with client-specific models trained in under 20 minutes. The Raine Group noted the potential for a future product around user acquisition financing.

UK-based content moderation and Trust and Safety platform Checkstep has raised $4m (£3m) in Seed funding led by Alea Capital Partners, with participation from Slow Ventures and LookAI. The funds will accelerate product development and commercial expansion as EU and US regulatory pressure on online platforms intensifies, notably under the EU’s Digital Services Act. Checkstep provides an AI-driven content moderation tool for digital platforms, processing more than 60 million pieces of content monthly and automating over 98% of moderation decisions while maintaining full audit trails. Customers include Trustpilot, JustGiving, Daily Mail, and MoneySavingExpert. CEO Guillaume Bouchard previously co-founded Bloomsbury AI, acquired by Facebook in 2018, and brings Trust and Safety experience from Meta.

Türkiye-based mobile games developer Mindtail has raised $2m in a pre-Seed funding round led by APY Ventures, with participation from Inveo Ventures and Ak Portföy. The funds will support team growth, with the studio targeting a tripling of headcount in the near term, development of AI-native production infrastructure, and initial marketing tests. Founded by R. Tamer Özgen, Umut Yıldız, Sarper Karabağ, and Doğuşcan Öztürk, Mindtail targets the hybrid casual puzzle genre through an AI-driven production model, with the founding team bringing experience from Dream Games, Tactile Games, and Ace Games. The studio’s first game is expected to be announced soon.

US-based skill-gaming platform EasyWin has raised its second Seed funding round at a $20m valuation, backed by an undisclosed EU-based investor. The second round represents a 29% valuation increase from the first seed, closed in Dec’25 at a $15.5m valuation led by Velo Partners through its Angel Fund, with participation from Vladimir Nikolsky, former CEO of MY.GAMES, and private angel investors. Founded by Ivan Leshkevich, a former executive at mobile games publisher and developer Mamboo Entertainment, EasyWin operates a global tournament platform for casual puzzle games with real-money cash prizes. Since launching in 2025, EasyWin has reached 35 thousand daily active users, a 55% D30 payer retention rate, and an annualized GMV run rate of $30m, operating across 12 markets with localized legal opinions and GLI certification confirming compliance with US regulatory requirements for skill-based gaming.

Serbia-based indie games developer Tricoman Studios has secured $450k (€400k) in a pre-Seed funding round, with €100k still left to close at the time of the announcement. The raise was backed by angel investors alongside non-dilutive co-investment from the Katapult Accelerator and the Innovation Fund in Serbia, which match private capital without taking equity. The funds will support vertical slice development of Godforged: Origins of Ozgalor, a single-player action RPG. The studio’s first game is planned for release on Steam. Founded by Borislav Vesnic (CEO), Luka Budimir (CPO), Marko Ristic (CCO), and Luka Filipovic (CTO), Tricoman Studios has grown to a team of more than 10. The studio previously secured $22k (CHF 20k) through the Raising Starts accelerator and $94k (€90k) in angel funding in Jan’25, prior to the current round.

FUNDRAISING

US-based venture capital firm Griffin Gaming Partners has launched the Special Opportunities Fund (SOF), a $100m project financing fund for indie PC games developers through a revenue-share model, taking a flat percentage of a game’s revenue in exchange for capital without an equity stake or full recoupment requirement ahead of developer distributions. Individual investments typically range from a few hundred thousand dollars to around $5m, depending on team size and project scope. The fund is led by Tim Bender, CEO of US-based PC games publisher Hooded Horse and a managing director at Griffin since Oct’23. The SOF has already deployed capital into 15 titles; nine are announced: Menace (Overhype Studios), Begone Beast (Tandemi), Expedition: Into Darkness (Antediluvian Interactive), Vaunted (Lost Lake Games), Gilded Destiny (Aquila Interactive), Darkwood 2 (Ice-Pick Lodge), Kinstrife (Finitude), Highland Keep (HighlandArchitect), and Hellforged (Moonpyre), with six further projects unannounced, spanning both self-published and publisher-backed titles.