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Welcome to This Week in Games, by Deconstructor of Fun's Editor, Aylin.

Think of it as your Friday kahve with the sharpest gaming minds in the room.
Ground in Athens, brewed in Istanbul, and enjoyed around the world - without sugar.

What Pixel Flow's $1 Billion Acquisition Has Done to the Psychology of Turkish Founders.

Cypher Games' Royal Smash is the latest Turkish startup to pivot from Match to Hybridcasual. It's gunning for the Pixel Flow loot. Just like the rest of Turkiye. The question is whether that loot is even there...

​Cypher Games is a Turkish studio founded by Anil Simsek, one of the sharpest founders in Istanbul right now, backed by some of the most sought-after investors, Play Ventures and The Raine Group, in the game. They raised $30 million in Series A funding last year and have been building Match Squad, a game around match core and coin looter meta.

Yet their new game, Royal Smash, is a physics-based casual title that layers ad monetization early and builds IAP progression on top of it. Why such a pivot? Well, it's part of the bigger story this week: what Pixel Flow's $1 billion acquisition has done to the psychology of Turkish mobile founders.

Seed round turned into an acquisition just four months post-launch of the company. Generational wealth seemingly overnight. Pixel Flow turned Istanbul's gaming ecosystem from red hot to something closer to a gold rush. Every founder in the city is now running the numbers on how fast they could replicate it.

Here's the new Istanbul playbook: Ship fast, get magical KPIs, call the VC investors (A or B), who will call the banker, who will call the buyers.

Here's the catch: Pixel Flow's success is, by all accounts, never to be repeated. The game is in sustained decline just months after the acquisition. The book is not fully closed on Loom Games. Scopely is known to turn games around. But if this trend continues, it will go down as one of the most hastiest acquisition in the history of our industry. Time will tell, and we surely root for Loom, Scopely, and the Istanbul gold rush.

>>> FULL deconstruction of Pixel Flow on Deconstructor of Fun <<<

Unity Sold Supersonic for $40 Million. That number is Bad for the Industry.

Tripledot now owns both Lion Studios and Supersonic. And one buyer keeps getting remarkable deals.

​Unity sold its mobile publishing arm Supersonic to Tripledot Studios for $40 million, with the deal closing on August 4th. Supersonic, which originated from Unity's $4.4 billion merger with ironSource in 2022, will continue operating as a standalone brand in Tel Aviv under its existing management team. For Unity, this closes the book on the ironSource chapter and lets the company focus entirely on its Vector AI advertising platform.

For Tripledot, this is its second major publishing acquisition, following its purchase of AppLovin's ten game studios last year. It now controls both Lion Studios and Supersonic, meaning any developer pitching a publisher is likely pitching the same company twice without knowing it. That changes the leverage dynamic for every studio looking for a publishing deal, and it's the part of this acquisition nobody is really talking about.

Yet it's the $40 million price tag for a publisher generating $150M that stops you cold. This is an asinine sale price for the industry. Low multiples are what spooked investors away. That's when they dropped to the x2-3 range. The multiple on this deal is 0.25.

You might argue that Supersonic was unprofitable. We don't know. But if a gaming business under a conservative tech platform generates 150M at break-even or even a small loss, then it likely will generate profit under a more aggressive owner who pushes for IRR vs payback. Or an owner who can cut costs by, for example, reducing overhead.

​Lior Shiff, Tripledots' co-founder and CEO, has now done this twice. He bought AppLovin's game portfolio for $800 million in a deal structure heavily favouring the buyer. He just did it again with Supersonic. If you ever find yourself negotiating with him, just accept that you'll be paying the bill and setting a new floor for asset prices in the gaming industry. Net-net: win for buyers, major loss for sellers and investors.

​The full conversation on what Tripledot is building and what it means for independent publishers ​

AppLovin Had a Great Quarter. So, Why Did the Stock Drop 29%?

Revenue up 53%. SEC investigation closed with no action. And yet $27 billion in market cap evaporated overnight. Here is what actually happened and, most importantly, why.

​AppLovin posted Q2 revenue of $1.924 billion, up 53% year-on-year, with net income of $1.27 billion and adjusted EBITDA margins holding at 84%. Oh, and the SEC closed its year-long inquiry into the company's data collection practices with no action taken. On paper, a strong quarter by almost any measure.

Then the stock fell 29% after hours, wiping out roughly $27 billion in market value in a single session. The reason is simpler than it looks. AppLovin missed its own guidance for the first time in years, and the Q3 outlook landed below what Wall Street was pricing in.

Founder and CEO Adam Foroughi blamed timing: the company's AI model improved less than usual, and the next meaningful upgrade shipped just after the quarter closed. If the fix is already in, he argued, Q3 should rebound. The guidance tells a slightly different story, though. Q3 is guiding to 8% sequential growth, below the 12% AppLovin delivered in Q3 last year. That is not a rebound. That is deceleration continuing.

The part that actually matters for publishers is what Josh Chandley flagged in the episode. AppLovin's publisher-facing MAX network saw earnings grow double digits quarter-on-quarter, even while the headline stock story was negative. Ad revenue is up over 10% in a single quarter, while IAP is falling. Make sure your game is set up to capture the piece of the market that is actually expanding.

The other dynamic worth understanding is that AppLovin has become what Mishka calls a "hedge fund hotel." A large number of hedge funds piled into the stock at the same time, riding the same thesis. When the momentum turns even slightly, everyone rushes for the same exit at once, and the stock moves more violently than the fundamentals justify. The business is still your most important in-app advertising network, and it's not close. The stock drama is a separate story.

​The full breakdown of what AppLovin's quarter means for publishers and UA teams ​

A Spider-Man Movie Just Sold 316,000 Copies of a Three-Year-Old Game.

$11 million in two weeks. Daily active users are 2.6 times higher than before the film. The transmedia halo effect has never been measured this clearly.

​Spider-Man: Brand New Day cleared $1.6 billion at the box office, and then something interesting happened. Marvel's Spider-Man 2, an Insomniac game that launched nearly three years ago, sold another 316,000 copies in the two weeks after the film hit theaters on July 30th, generating over $11 million across PS5 and Steam. Another 274,000 players jumped in for the first time through PlayStation Plus. Over the following weekend, the game hit one million daily active users for the first time since launch week, which is about 2.6 times its pre-film engagement.

Analyst Rhys Elliott at Alinea Analytics called it "one of the clearest transmedia halo effects we've ever measured." Spider-Man 2 now sits at 18.2 million lifetime copies sold and over $1.2 billion in total revenue, and it got there partly because a movie came out almost three years after launch.

The thing that makes this interesting beyond the numbers is that it happened completely by accident.

Brand New Day was not coordinated to land near a game release. There is no GTA tie-in campaign running alongside GTA 6. The alignment just happened. Imagine what the lift would look like if a publisher could actually plan for it: a game releasing the same week as a film in the same IP, both pointing at each other, both sharing marketing spend. Nobody has pulled that off cleanly yet. The studios that own both games and IP rights in the same franchise have a real untapped opportunity sitting right in front of them.

​The full conversation on transmedia strategy and what Spider-Man's numbers actually mean ​

​And that's a wrap! Plenty more was discussed on this week's TWIG episode, including things that didn't make this list, so if you want the full picture, ​go give it a watch. ☕️

See you next Friday!

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Watch the full This Week in Games episode where Jen Donahoe, Phillip Black and Mishka Katkoff and Josh Chandley break down:

• AppLovin's Q2 earnings and stock drop despite growth
• Unity's Vector model closing the gap with AppLovin
• Unity selling Supersonic to Tripledot for $40M
• Take-Two's Q2 earnings, Zynga portfolio trends and GTA VI presales
• GTA VI's Netflix trailer exclusive
• Blizzard's leaked internal email and its quiet turnaround
• Ubisoft Barcelona's layoffs and the birth of Puzzle Mage
• Royal Smash and the rise of cannon physics puzzles
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🎙️ More From the Podcasts:

Why the Best Founders Are Neither American nor European

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 APPLE / 🎧 SPOTIFY / ▶️ YOUTUBE​​

​Emmanuel De Maistre didn’t build Scenario by choosing between Silicon Valley ambition and European pragmatism. He learned to use both.

In this conversation, the Scenario founder joins Mishka Katkoff and breaks down what years of building in the US taught him about ambition, failure, and venture-scale thinking, and why European founders often bring the grounding that Silicon Valley lacks. We also get into what AI adoption actually looks like inside top game studios, why buying tools rarely translates into real usage, what happens to creative teams when AI enters production, and why today’s AI economics may be hiding problems that surface when cheap tokens disappear.