In 2025, it’s very difficult not to see gambling advertised everywhere. It’s on billboards and sports broadcasts. It’s on podcasts and printed on the turnbuckle of AEW’s pay-per-view shows. And it’s on app stores, where you can find the FanDuel and DraftKings sportsbooks, alongside glitzy digital slot machines. These apps all have the highest age ratings possible on Apple’s App Store and Google Play. But earlier this year, a different kind of app nearly disappeared from the Play Store entirely.Luck Be A Landlord is a roguelite deckbuilder from solo developer Dan DiIorio. DiIorio got word from Google in January 2025 that Luck Be A Landlord was about to be pulled, globally, because DiIorio had not disclosed the game’s “gambling themes” in its rating.In Luck Be a Landlord, the player takes spins on a pixel art slot machine to earn coins to pay their ever-increasing rent — a nightmare gamification of our day-to-day grind to remain housed. On app stores, it’s a one-time purchase of $4.99, and it’s $9.99 on Steam. On the Play Store page, developer Dan DiIorio notes, “This game does not contain any real-world currency gambling or microtransactions.”And it doesn’t. But for Google, that didn’t matter. First, the game was removed from the storefront in a slew of countries that have strict gambling laws. Then, at the beginning of 2025, Google told Dilorio that Luck Be A Landlord would be pulled globally because of its rating discrepancy, as it “does not take into account references to gambling (including real or simulated gambling)”.DiIorio had gone through this song and dance before — previously, when the game was blocked, he would send back a message saying “hey, the game doesn’t have gambling,” and then Google would send back a screenshot of the game and assert that, in fact, it had.DiIorio didn’t agree, but this time they decided that the risk of Landlord getting taken down permanently was too great. They’re a solo developer, and Luck Be a Landlord had just had its highest 30-day revenue since release. So, they filled out the form confirming that Luck Be A Landlord has “gambling themes,” and are currently hoping that this will be the end of it.This is a situation that sucks for an indie dev to be in, and over email DiIorio told Polygon it was “very frustrating.”“I think it can negatively affect indie developers if they fall outside the norm, which indies often do,” they wrote. “It also makes me afraid to explore mechanics like this further. It stifles creativity, and that’s really upsetting.”In late 2024, the hit game Balatro was in a similar position. It had won numerous awards, and made $1,000,000 in its first week on mobile platforms. And then overnight, the PEGI ratings board declared that the game deserved an adult rating.The ESRB had already rated it E10+ in the US, noting it has gambling themes. And the game was already out in Europe, making its overnight ratings change a surprise. Publisher PlayStack said the rating was given because Balatro has “prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling.”Balatro is basically Luck Be A Landlord’s little cousin. Developer LocalThunk was inspired by watching streams of Luck Be A Landlord, and seeing the way DiIorio had implemented deck-building into his slot machine. And like Luck Be A Landlord, Balatro is a one-time purchase, with no microtransactions.But the PEGI board noted that because the game uses poker hands, the skills the player learns in Balatro could translate to real-world poker.In its write-up, GameSpot noted that the same thing happened to a game called Sunshine Shuffle. It was temporarily banned from the Nintendo eShop, and also from the entire country of South Korea. Unlike Balatro, Sunshine Shuffle actually is a poker game, except you’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em — again for no real money — with cute animals (who are bank robbers).It’s common sense that children shouldn’t be able to access apps that allow them to gamble. But none of these games contain actual gambling — or do they?Where do we draw the line? Is it gambling to play any game that is also played in casinos, like poker or blackjack? Is it gambling to play a game that evokes the aesthetics of a casino, like cards, chips, dice, or slot machines? Is it gambling to wager or earn fictional money?Gaming has always been a lightning rod for controversy. Sex, violence, misogyny, addiction — you name it, video games have been accused of perpetrating or encouraging it. But gambling is gaming’s original sin. And it’s the one we still can’t get a grip on.The original link between gambling and gamingGetty ImagesThe association between video games and gambling all goes back to pinball. Back in the ’30s and ’40s, politicians targeted pinball machines for promoting gambling. Early pinball machines were less skill-based (they didn’t have flippers), and some gave cash payouts, so the comparison wasn’t unfair. Famously, mob-hating New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia banned pinball in the city, and appeared in a newsreel dumping pinball and slot machines into the Long Island Sound. Pinball machines spent some time relegated to the back rooms of sex shops and dive bars. But after some lobbying, the laws relaxed.By the 1970s, pinball manufacturers were also making video games, and the machines were side-by-side in arcades. Arcade machines, like pinball, took small coin payments, repeatedly, for short rounds of play. The disreputable funk of pinball basically rubbed off onto video games.Ever since video games rocked onto the scene, concerned and sometimes uneducated parties have been asking if they’re dangerous. And in general, studies have shown that they’re not. The same can’t be said about gambling — the practice of putting real money down to bet on an outcome.It’s a golden age for gambling2025 in the USA is a great time for gambling, which has been really profitable for gambling companies — to the tune of $66.5 billion dollars of revenue in 2023.To put this number in perspective, the American Gaming Association, which is the casino industry’s trade group and has nothing to do with video games, reports that 2022’s gambling revenue was $60.5 billion. It went up $6 billion in a year.And this increase isn’t just because of sportsbooks, although sports betting is a huge part of it. Online casinos and brick-and-mortar casinos are both earning more, and as a lot of people have pointed out, gambling is being normalized to a pretty disturbing degree.Much like with alcohol, for a small percentage of people, gambling can tip from occasional leisure activity into addiction. The people who are most at risk are, by and large, already vulnerable: researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found that 96% of problem gamblers are also wrestling with other disorders, such as “substance use, impulse-control disorders, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders.”Even if you’re not in that group, there are still good reasons to be wary of gambling. People tend to underestimate their own vulnerability to things they know are dangerous for others. Someone else might bet beyond their means. But I would simply know when to stop.Maybe you do! But being blithely confident about it can make it hard to notice if you do develop a problem. Or if you already have one.Addiction changes the way your brain works. When you’re addicted to something, your participation in it becomes compulsive, at the expense of other interests and responsibilities. Someone might turn to their addiction to self-soothe when depressed or anxious. And speaking of those feelings, people who are depressed and anxious are already more vulnerable to addiction. Given the entire state of the world right now, this predisposition shines an ugly light on the numbers touted by the AGA. Is it good that the industry is reporting $6 billion in additional earnings, when the economy feels so frail, when the stock market is ping ponging through highs and lows daily, when daily expenses are rising? It doesn’t feel good. In 2024, the YouTuber Drew Gooden turned his critical eye to online gambling. One of the main points he makes in his excellent video is that gambling is more accessible than ever. It’s on all our phones, and betting companies are using decades of well-honed app design and behavioral studies to manipulate users to spend and spend.Meanwhile, advertising on podcasts, billboards, TV, radio, and websites – it’s literally everywhere — tells you that this is fun, and you don’t even need to know what you’re doing, and you’re probably one bet away from winning back those losses.Where does Luck Be a Landlord come into this?So, are there gambling themes in Luck Be A Landlord? The game’s slot machine is represented in simple pixel art. You pay one coin to use it, and among the more traditional slot machine symbols are silly ones like a snail that only pays out after 4 spins.When I started playing it, my primary emotion wasn’t necessarily elation at winning coins — it was stress and disbelief when, in the third round of the game, the landlord increased my rent by 100%. What the hell.I don’t doubt that getting better at it would produce dopamine thrills akin to gambling — or playing any video game. But it’s supposed to be difficult, because that’s the joke. If you beat the game you unlock more difficulty modes where, as you keep paying rent, your landlord gets furious, and starts throwing made-up rules at you: previously rare symbols will give you less of a payout, and the very mechanics of the slot machine change.It’s a manifestation of the golden rule of casinos, and all of capitalism writ large: the odds are stacked against you. The house always wins. There is luck involved, to be sure, but because Luck Be A Landlord is a deck-builder, knowing the different ways you can design your slot machine to maximize payouts is a skill! You have some influence over it, unlike a real slot machine. The synergies that I’ve seen high-level players create are completely nuts, and obviously based on a deep understanding of the strategies the game allows.IMAGE: TrampolineTales via PolygonBalatro and Luck Be a Landlord both distance themselves from casino gambling again in the way they treat money. In Landlord, the money you earn is gold coins, not any currency we recognize. And the payouts aren’t actually that big. By the end of the core game, the rent money you’re struggling and scraping to earn… is 777 coins. In the post-game endless mode, payouts can get massive. But the thing is, to get this far, you can’t rely on chance. You have to be very good at Luck Be a Landlord.And in Balatro, the numbers that get big are your points. The actual dollar payments in a round of Balatro are small. These aren’t games about earning wads and wads of cash. So, do these count as “gambling themes”?We’ll come back to that question later. First, I want to talk about a closer analog to what we colloquially consider gambling: loot boxes and gacha games.Random rewards: from Overwatch to the rise of gachaRecently, I did something that I haven’t done in a really long time: I thought about Overwatch. I used to play Overwatch with my friends, and I absolutely made a habit of dropping 20 bucks here or there for a bunch of seasonal loot boxes. This was never a problem behavior for me, but in hindsight, it does sting that over a couple of years, I dropped maybe $150 on cosmetics for a game that now I primarily associate with squandered potential.Loot boxes grew out of free-to-play mobile games, where they’re the primary method of monetization. In something like Overwatch, they functioned as a way to earn additional revenue in an ongoing game, once the player had already dropped 40 bucks to buy it.More often than not, loot boxes are a random selection of skins and other cosmetics, but games like Star Wars: Battlefront 2 were famously criticized for launching with loot crates that essentially made it pay-to-win – if you bought enough of them and got lucky.It’s not unprecedented to associate loot boxes with gambling. A 2021 study published in Addictive Behaviors showed that players who self-reported as problem gamblers also tended to spend more on loot boxes, and another study done in the UK found a similar correlation with young adults.While Overwatch certainly wasn’t the first game to feature cosmetic loot boxes or microtransactions, it’s a reference point for me, and it also got attention worldwide. In 2018, Overwatch was investigated by the Belgian Gaming Commission, which found it “in violation of gambling legislation” alongside FIFA 18 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Belgium’s response was to ban the sale of loot boxes without a gambling license. Having a paid random rewards mechanic in a game is a criminal offense there. But not really. A 2023 study showed that 82% of iPhone games sold on the App Store in Belgium still use random paid monetization, as do around 80% of games that are rated 12+. The ban wasn’t effectively enforced, if at all, and the study recommends that a blanket ban wouldn’t actually be a practical solution anyway.Overwatch was rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and 12 by PEGI. When it first came out, its loot boxes were divisive. Since the mechanic came from F2P mobile games, which are often seen as predatory, people balked at seeing it in a big action game from a multi-million dollar publisher.At the time, the rebuttal was, “Well, at least it’s just cosmetics.” Nobody needs to buy loot boxes to be good at Overwatch.A lot has changed since 2016. Now we have a deeper understanding of how these mechanics are designed to manipulate players, even if they don’t affect gameplay. But also, they’ve been normalized. While there will always be people expressing disappointment when a AAA game has a paid random loot mechanic, it is no longer shocking.And if anything, these mechanics have only become more prevalent, thanks to the growth of gacha games. Gacha is short for “gachapon,” the Japanese capsule machines where you pay to receive one of a selection of random toys. Getty ImagesIn gacha games, players pay — not necessarily real money, but we’ll get to that — for a chance to get something. Maybe it’s a character, or a special weapon, or some gear — it depends on the game. Whatever it is, within that context, it’s desirable — and unlike the cosmetics of Overwatch, gacha pulls often do impact the gameplay.For example, in Infinity Nikki, you can pull for clothing items in these limited-time events. You have a chance to get pieces of a five-star outfit. But you also might pull one of a set of four-star items, or a permanent three-star piece. Of course, if you want all ten pieces of the five-star outfit, you have to do multiple pulls, each costing a handful of limited resources that you can earn in-game or purchase with money.Gacha was a fixture of mobile gaming for a long time, but in recent years, we’ve seen it go AAA, and global. MiHoYo’s Genshin Impact did a lot of that work when it came out worldwide on consoles and PC alongside its mobile release. Genshin and its successors are massive AAA games of a scale that, for your Nintendos and Ubisofts, would necessitate selling a bajillion copies to be a success. And they’re free.Genshin is an action game, whose playstyle changes depending on what character you’re playing — characters you get from gacha pulls, of course. In Zenless Zone Zero, the characters you can pull have different combo patterns, do different kinds of damage, and just feel different to play. And whereas in an early mobile gacha game like Love Nikki Dress UP! Queen the world was rudimentary, its modern descendant Infinity Nikki is, like Genshin, Breath of the Wild-esque. It is a massive open world, with collectibles and physics puzzles, platforming challenges, and a surprisingly involved storyline. Genshin Impact was the subject of an interesting study where researchers asked young adults in Hong Kong to self-report on their gacha spending habits. They found that, like with gambling, players who are not feeling good tend to spend more. “Young adult gacha gamers experiencing greater stress and anxiety tend to spend more on gacha purchases, have more motives for gacha purchases, and participate in more gambling activities,” they wrote. “This group is at a particularly higher risk of becoming problem gamblers.”One thing that is important to note is that Genshin Impact came out in 2020. The study was self-reported, and it was done during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time when people were experiencing a lot of stress, and also fewer options to relieve that stress. We were all stuck inside gaming.But the fact that stress can make people more likely to spend money on gacha shows that while the gacha model isn’t necessarily harmful to everyone, it is exploitative to everyone. Since I started writing this story, another self-reported study came out in Japan, where 18.8% of people in their 20s say they’ve spent money on gacha rather than on things like food or rent.Following Genshin Impact’s release, MiHoYo put out Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero. All are shiny, big-budget games that are free to play, but dangle the lure of making just one purchase in front of the player. Maybe you could drop five bucks on a handful of in-game currency to get one more pull. Or maybe just this month you’ll get the second tier of rewards on the game’s equivalent of a Battle Pass. The game is free, after all — but haven’t you enjoyed at least ten dollars’ worth of gameplay? Image: HoyoverseI spent most of my December throwing myself into Infinity Nikki. I had been so stressed, and the game was so soothing. I logged in daily to fulfill my daily wishes and earn my XP, diamonds, Threads of Purity, and bling. I accumulated massive amounts of resources. I haven’t spent money on the game. I’m trying not to, and so far, it’s been pretty easy. I’ve been super happy with how much stuff I can get for free, and how much I can do! I actually feel really good about that — which is what I said to my boyfriend, and he replied, “Yeah, that’s the point. That’s how they get you.”And he’s right. Currently, Infinity Nikki players are embroiled in a war with developer Infold, after Infold introduced yet another currency type with deep ties to Nikki’s gacha system. Every one of these gacha games has its own tangled system of overlapping currencies. Some can only be used on gacha pulls. Some can only be used to upgrade items. Many of them can be purchased with human money.Image: InFold Games/Papergames via PolygonAll of this adds up. According to Sensor Towers’ data, Genshin Impact earned over 36 million dollars on mobile alone in a single month of 2024. I don’t know what Dan DiIorio’s peak monthly revenue for Luck Be A Landlord was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that.A lot of the spending guardrails we see in games like these are actually the result of regulations in other territories, especially China, where gacha has been a big deal for a lot longer. For example, gacha games have a daily limit on loot boxes, with the number clearly displayed, and a system collectively called “pity,” where getting the banner item is guaranteed after a certain number of pulls. Lastly, developers have to be clear about what the odds are. When I log in to spend the Revelation Crystals I’ve spent weeks hoarding in my F2P Infinity Nikki experience, I know that I have a 1.5% chance of pulling a 5-star piece, and that the odds can go up to 6.06%, and that I am guaranteed to get one within 20 pulls, because of the pity system.So, these odds are awful. But it is not as merciless as sitting down at a Vegas slot machine, an experience best described as “oh… that’s it?”There’s not a huge philosophical difference between buying a pack of loot boxes in Overwatch, a pull in Genshin Impact, or even a booster of Pokémon cards. You put in money, you get back randomized stuff that may or may not be what you want. In the dictionary definition, it’s a gamble. But unlike the slot machine, it’s not like you’re trying to win money by doing it, unless you’re selling those Pokémon cards, which is a topic for another time.But since even a game where you don’t get anything, like Balatro or Luck Be A Landlord, can come under fire for promoting gambling to kids, it would seem appropriate for app stores and ratings boards to take a similarly hardline stance with gacha.Instead, all these games are rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and PEGI 12 in the EU.The ESRB ratings for these games note that they contain in-game purchases, including random items. Honkai: Star Rail’s rating specifically calls out a slot machine mechanic, where players spend tokens to win a prize. But other than calling out Honkai’s slot machine, app stores are not slapping Genshin or Nikki with an 18+ rating. Meanwhile, Balatro had a PEGI rating of 18 until a successful appeal in February 2025, and Luck Be a Landlord is still 17+ on Apple’s App Store.Nobody knows what they’re doingWhen I started researching this piece, I felt very strongly that it was absurd that Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro had age ratings this high.I still believe that the way both devs have been treated by ratings boards is bad. Threatening an indie dev with a significant loss of income by pulling their game is bad, not giving them a way to defend themself or help them understand why it’s happening is even worse. It’s an extension of the general way that too-big-to-fail companies like Google treat all their customers.DiIorio told me that while it felt like a human being had at least looked at Luck Be A Landlord to make the determination that it contained gambling themes, the emails he was getting were automatic, and he doesn’t have a contact at Google to ask why this happened or how he can avoid it in the future — an experience that will be familiar to anyone who has ever needed Google support. But what’s changed for me is that I’m not actually sure anymore that games that don’t have gambling should be completely let off the hook for evoking gambling.Exposing teens to simulated gambling without financial stakes could spark an interest in the real thing later on, according to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It’s the same reason you can’t mosey down to the drug store to buy candy cigarettes. Multiple studies were done that showed kids who ate candy cigarettes were more likely to take up smoking (of course, the candy is still available — just without the “cigarette” branding.)So while I still think rating something like Balatro 18+ is nuts, I also think that describing it appropriately might be reasonable. As a game, it’s completely divorced from literally any kind of play you would find in a casino — but I can see the concern that the thrill of flashy numbers and the shiny cards might encourage young players to try their hand at poker in a real casino, where a real house can take their money.Maybe what’s more important than doling out high age ratings is helping people think about how media can affect us. In the same way that, when I was 12 and obsessed with The Matrix, my parents gently made sure that I knew that none of the violence was real and you can’t actually cartwheel through a hail of bullets in real life. Thanks, mom and dad!But that’s an answer that’s a lot more abstract and difficult to implement than a big red 18+ banner. When it comes to gacha, I think we’re even less equipped to talk about these game mechanics, and I’m certain they’re not being age-rated appropriately. On the one hand, like I said earlier, gacha exploits the player’s desire for stuff that they are heavily manipulated to buy with real money. On the other hand, I think it’s worth acknowledging that there is a difference between gacha and casino gambling.Problem gamblers aren’t satisfied by winning — the thing they’re addicted to is playing, and the risk that comes with it. In gacha games, players do report satisfaction when they achieve the prize they set out to get. And yes, in the game’s next season, the developer will be dangling a shiny new prize in front of them with the goal of starting the cycle over. But I think it’s fair to make the distinction, while still being highly critical of the model.And right now, there is close to no incentive for app stores to crack down on gacha in any way. They get a cut of in-app purchases. Back in 2023, miHoYo tried a couple of times to set up payment systems that circumvented Apple’s 30% cut of in-app spending. Both times, it was thwarted by Apple, whose App Store generated $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022.According to Apple itself, 90% of that money did not include any commission to Apple. Fortunately for Apple, ten percent of a trillion dollars is still one hundred billion dollars, which I would also like to have in my bank account. Apple has zero reason to curb spending on games that have been earning millions of dollars every month for years.And despite the popularity of Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro’s massive App Store success, these games will never be as lucrative. They’re one-time purchases, and they don’t have microtransactions. To add insult to injury, like most popular games, Luck Be A Landlord has a lot of clones. And from what I can tell, it doesn’t look like any of them have been made to indicate that their games contain the dreaded “gambling themes” that Google was so worried about in Landlord.In particular, a game called SpinCraft: Roguelike from Sneaky Panda Games raised $6 million in seed funding for “inventing the Luck-Puzzler genre,” which it introduced in 2022, while Luck Be A Landlord went into early access in 2021.It’s free-to-play, has ads and in-app purchases, looks like Fisher Price made a slot machine, and it’s rated E for everyone, with no mention of gambling imagery in its rating. I reached out to the developers to ask if they had also been contacted by the Play Store to disclose that their game has gambling themes, but I haven’t heard back.Borrowing mechanics in games is as old as time, and it’s something I in no way want to imply shouldn’t happen because copyright is the killer of invention — but I think we can all agree that the system is broken.There is no consistency in how games with random chance are treated. We still do not know how to talk about gambling, or gambling themes, and at the end of the day, the results of this are the same: the house always wins.See More:

James Miho, 2004 AIGA Medalist, brought global perspective + Pop art flair to design legends like the “Great Ideas of Western Man” campaign and Champion Papers. ✍️Know a design changemaker? Nominate them for the #AIGAAwards by June 15: https://aigadsgn.org/4ltsgZF

Genshin Impact’s overwhelming presence in the gacha space has been nearly uncontested for five years now, occupying an enviable position as one of the most popular gacha games of all time. Many games, referred to as Genshin clones, have tried and failed to recreate miHoYo’s success, but none have come as close as Wuthering Waves, an open-world action RPG that isn’t content to simply copy Genshin’s formula, but rather takes it further. With Wuthering Waves’ success, developers would be wise to take notes and understand what made this Genshin Impact clone different from all the rest. Wuthering Waves has proven that Genshin’s position isn’t unassailable, and there is room for more games like it in the industry.

David Fernandez Remesal took the job of CEO of Sandsoft in 2020 and moved to Saudi Arabia, where his mobile game company is based. He set up a studio in Riyadh and also hired mobile game developers in places like his native Spain, Finland and China. Fernandez Remesal focused on esports at first, but pivoted to mobile games as a more viable business approach. The summers are a lot hotter for sure, but Fernandez has sweated out the hard work of establishing a new studio in a place where game development skills are only just being fostered now for the new generations of game developers. While Brazil is a bigger and more established market, Fernandez Remesal, who worked on games like Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga before leading Sandsoft. We talked about mobile game trends at our fireside chat at Gamescom Latam in a talk entitled, “The Mobile Frontier: Big Trends and Smarter Moves for 2025.” We covered a lot of ground in our fireside chat at Gamescom Latam in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We hit topics like Apple’s move to emphasize user privacy over targeted ads as it deprecated the Identifier for Advertises (IDFA). We also covered the antitrust ruling that could bust the floodgates open when it comes to developers being able to advertise their own web shops (where they can charge lower prices and don’t have to pay a 30% commission to Apple and Google) inside their mobile games on the Apple and Google app stores. We explored the consequences if game developers are also able to use their own payment systems — which take around 3% commissions rather than 30% — in mobile game transactions. Sandsoft is focused on taking advantage of these trends by focusing on midcore gamers, which is becoming a bigger part of the overall mobile games market. And Sandsoft is also busy working on AI tools that can help developers work more efficiently. And we looked at other opportunities for mobile to grow as the mobile-first generation grows up and becomes a bigger part of the population of gamers. We also assessed when it’s the right time for local talent to take on local stories and spread them to the global stage with authentic triple-A development. Here’s an edited transcript of our on-stage interview. Sandsoft CEO David Fernandez Remesal GamesBeat: I’m here with David Fernandez Remesal, the CEO of Sandsoft. I’ll have him introduce himself, his career in games, and the origins of Sandsoft. David Fernandez Remesal: I’m pleased to be in Brazil. It’s my first time. I’d like to thank everyone here. You’re doing an incredible show. I’m kind of what I could call mobile native when it comes to game development. I started my career working on mobile games almost 20 years ago. Those of you that were around, that means before smartphone games. I worked at a company called THQ that you may remember. They were one of the pioneers, as a triple-A games company, in doing mobile games as well. I started my career at THQ Juarez, their mobile game division. After that I had the privilege of working with two industry titans at a company called Digital Chocolate. That was Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, and Ilkka Paananen, who happens to be the CEO and founder of Supercell as well. I spent part of my career working on an app store with Nokia. I also worked on the N-Gage handheld device. In that particular case I made the wrong choice. I went for the loser in the smartphone era. But eventually I learned quite a bit about how you need merchandise, games, and apps on an e-commerce platform. After doing something in the mobile advertising space, I also had the honor of joining King, where I worked for almost five years on a couple of franchises. One was Bubble Witch Saga, and then Candy Crush Saga. I was at the King London studio when I left to run Sandsoft five years ago. GamesBeat: Sandsoft is interesting to this market in part because you’re also in an emerging market, albeit a very different part of the world. The company is headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Can you talk about how that happened to come about? Fernandez Remesal: We’re slightly earlier in terms of the game industry in Saudi compared to what we see here in Brazil, particularly toward game development capabilities. But we have a nice consumer market. It’s not as big as Brazil. But let me get started with how Sandsoft was created. For those of you who are not familiar with Saudi Arabia, they have a plan called Saudi Vision 2030. The main proposal is to diversify the economy away from oil and gas. As part of that program, they’re trying to build what we call a knowledge economy. Gaming is a pivotal part of that transition. We’re part of a large Saudi corporation that was founded to support that plan. They decided to diversify their group. Gaming was one of the things they wanted to do. Sandsoft was born in 2019, originally as an esports company. The first thing we did as a company was the PUBG Mobile event in Saudi Arabia. But [we] realized esports was not a business. It was maybe more of a show, rather than proper commercial ongoing activities you can run in a sustainable way. They decided to venture into mobile game development and publishing, which is what we do today. We’re developing games in our own studios, and we’re a global games publisher. We’re supporting game development studios in the mobile space to commercialize their games. Iza’s Supermarket GamesBeat: What are you working on? What is your focus? How big is the team, and where are they? Fernandez Remesal: We now have roughly 100 people. We’re split into four different markets. We have people in Saudi Arabia, where we’re headquartered. We also host a game development studio there. We have satellite offices in Spain, where we also have a development studio. Then we have a couple of publishing operations in China and Finland. We also have a small studio in France. That’s where we have our operations. In terms of focus, as I mentioned to you, we’re focused on mobile platforms. We have a few games with aspirations to become cross-platform, but we’re mobile first. GamesBeat: You moved to Saudi Arabia. Can you talk about what that was like for you? Fernandez Remesal: Yes, I did. I’ve been there for four years now. The weather aside – the summer is really hot – it was a big cultural change for a European to come over to a country that was maybe more conservative, that was more closed than other countries I’ve lived in. But I felt that if you are respectful, if you try to understand the things that are changing, and if you adapt to the pace of change, it’s quite livable. The people are very passionate about games specifically. There’s a young, savvy population. They consider themselves gamers. When you tell them you work in games, they respect you. It’s different from other countries, where people think you play games all day. They don’t realize that this is an art form, that this is something that goes beyond just play. GamesBeat: A reminder that it’s a global industry. Gaming is not what it used to be. It used to be from Japan, the U.S., and Europe. Now it’s a very different world. Fernandez Remesal: Correct. It’s becoming very global. Like we see here. It’s not just about all the people attending to play games, but also all the game companies showcasing their games, which is really exciting. GamesBeat: How far along are your games? Fernandez Remesal: In terms of our game development studios, we’re just starting our first prototypes. Both studios started in 2023, but it took us some time to get the initial core teams that we could trust to develop their game ideas into commercially viable games. We have been in a kind of boot camp at both the studios for a year. Now they’re starting to prototype what we can see as more commercial games. As a publisher we have a few games already in the market. Maybe the first we released was in partnership with Jam City, DC Heroes and Villains. We’re also raising a few other games that–mobile free-to-play games, you don’t have a red button where you hit it and the game is live. It’s more about ongoing progress. You’re keeping them in development and improving the games. Then you try to find ways to scale. In this case through user acquisition. In that sense we’ve had games available in the market for more than three years. We have six games in our portfolio. Two of them are more mature. We expect to scale them in the first half of the year. GamesBeat: Let’s get into some of the trends in the mobile industry. What do you see? What matters to you? What is important to pay attention to in mobile? Fernandez Remesal: Let me start with something that is in many cases not looked into enough. We’re seeing a change in the audience itself. We need to acknowledge that Generation Z is coming in. They bring a completely new way of consuming content. They’re less attracted to deep, engaging experiences. If I could call them, in a way, the digital generation, they’re focused on short-term or short-form entertainment, where they can get their dopamine and adrenaline and then engage further. They’re a generation that doesn’t pay a lot of attention until they get really hooked on the things they’re doing. From that perspective, we see a shift in consumer behavior. We see different session lengths, different ways of engaging with games. The industry is growing by double digits in regions like South America and the Middle East and southeast Asia, while the more western markets aren’t growing as much. That’s linked to the average age in these regions. They have much younger populations in these emerging markets, where they consume games as a native entertainment form. There’s a new consumer coming in from Generation Z, bringing new consumption patterns in their session habits and rates of play. At the same time, there’s an opportunity to propose different kinds of content. Epic Games is still tangling with Google and Apple on antitrust. GamesBeat: One of the interesting trends that’s emerged in mobile is the importance of the relationship between developers and platforms. We saw Apple’s decision a few years ago to prioritize user privacy over targeted advertising. It made targeted advertising much harder. Game companies lost the ability to very precisely target people who favored certain kinds of games. They had to go back to more of a guessing game around how to zero in on which users they wanted to target. This had an impact over years. Do you think we’ve learned how to deal with this change in the market and still be able to find the users that you need? Fernandez Remesal: IDFA is not going to go away. Privacy is going to be with us. It’s going to be something that everyone has to pay attention to. That’s been critical in the mobile space, because of the merchandising problems we see in the app stores. We see a lot of problems in content discoverability. That means most of the growth we’ve seen in these games has been through performance marketing user acquisition. One thing that we’re seeing more and more is game developers trying to build communities everywhere. Trying to expose their games. Trying to create communities through influencers, through Discord and content creation. But eventually IDFA is here to stay. GamesBeat: Speaking of the developer-platform relationship, we’ve had an antitrust case going on for a long time, four and a half years now, between Epic Games and Apple. Yesterday we got a ruling from the judge that held Apple in contempt of court. This has a lot of significance for whether or not mobile game companies can go outside of Apple’s store and advertise lower prices on their web shops or other sites. They can sell the same things at lower prices than the app store because Apple takes a 30% cut. Apple appealed this and had been able to dodge the effects of it, even in Europe, where they had a 27% core technology fee they introduced. Now the judge has said, “No more of that. You can’t evade this ruling anymore. You have to allow game companies to tell their users that there are lower prices elsewhere.” This is a fundamental antitrust protection for consumers. The ruling should affect the whole industry. What’s your view? Fernandez Remesal: We were talking last week, early this week. Eventually, we’ll see some form of platform disruption, especially when you look at mobile platforms. Mobile has been mostly governed by two platform companies, Google and Apple. There have been other app stores in the Android ecosystem, but in the end there are few opportunities for you to get content, and particularly games, on your mobile device. That’s a situation set for disruption. Eventually, particularly in countries that are more protective toward consumers–they’re upset about these oligopolies. They’d like to offer consumers more opportunities to discover content and do so in a way that’s fair for both consumers and game developers. The Digital Markets Act, in the United Kingdom, was one of the first changes we saw trying to open the mobile gaming ecosystem a bit more, trying to ensure that developers have some choice and consumers have some choice. But as you mentioned, that was a segue way for Apple to introduce a new tax, a new fee for game developers if they wanted to go that route. What we saw a few hours ago–it looks really recent. But game developers now have the opportunity to have a direct relationship with consumers. They can build that relationship in a way where they can offer consumers more alternatives and choices. First of all, price points. You can offer different price points compared to what’s available in the app stores. For those of you who are game developers, in the app stores you cannot select any price point you want. They’re fixed. They have ranges you can pick from, but you can’t just select any price point at all. The second factor, as you mentioned, is discounts. Trying to ensure that if you’re proposing this direct to consumer offering, you can adjust your margins and provide more value to consumers. Eventually that ensures that you as a game developer can get a broader part of the value share you’re creating with the consumer, but at the same time give some back as well to the consumer in a way where they can pay less when they’re using a web shop. The thing that we’ll hopefully start to see soon is that it’s not just about you informing consumers that they can have other ways to consume your content and buy content outside of your app, going to the web to buy it. Eventually it will open up the actual app to more real payment methods in games, as you see in other apps in the app stores. GamesBeat: We’re not quite sure what the line will be. Will Apple allow people to use their own payment systems as an alternative to Apple Pay? Fernandez Remesal: Right. But from that perspective, games have been punished compared to other apps. Why are we not able to build that kind of relationship with consumers? Why can’t we propose a specific payment or subscription mechanic that other entertainment options can do in the app stores? Sandsoft’s Potions & Spells. GamesBeat: Assuming that payments are not going to change, the next best thing is web shops. Set up your own store on the web. In the past companies could not advertise that web shop’s existence inside the app, but now they can. They can say that you can get something for cheaper prices elsewhere. Xsolla has been opening a lot of these web shops and operating them for companies. They have more than 500 of them now. But nobody knew about them. They do say that consumers are using them. They’re going back at a 30-40% rate and creating a 10-16% lift in revenues for developers, or in some cases higher. Those sound like fairly promising results relatively early for alternative web shops. Fernandez Remesal: That’s correct. Particularly, if you’re a consumer that pays in mobile free-to-play games, you’re trying to get the best value for money. Eventually this kind of core, engaged audience that makes up the payers in your game, they already know they can go to the shop to get a better offering. For the greater mass of consumers that don’t pay, they’re not really aware they can go to the web shop to buy content and get better deals than going through the app stores, the in-app shops. There are two issues here. One is about consumers getting more value for money here. The second is about developers getting more value from the value chain and delivering more of it back to consumers as well. GamesBeat: The net result is that it’s more money going to the bottom line for developers to reinvest in their business. That’s been sorely needed, especially in the last two and a half years. We’ve seen a real painful downturn in the global game industry. Every penny counts these days. Fernandez Remesal: It’s a better distribution of value in this case, considering what everyone puts on the table. Maybe in the early days of the app stores there were more merchandising options for developers, ways to get value from the app stores. There was less content. Your content could reach more users. There was value in the promotional activity the app store would run for you. Now that’s heavily driven by UA. In that context, the app stores really just become a payment method. From that perspective, developers capturing more value and giving more value back to consumers is good, because that’s reinvested in the game industry. Game developers capture more value and that helps them create better content and engage better with consumers. GamesBeat: We’ve talked about some of these trends. How are you most closely aligning your company to some of these trends, to take advantage of them? Iza’s Supermarket is a game from Sandsoft. Fernandez Remesal: There are a couple of trends we didn’t discuss much. One is about how mobile games in particular are becoming more complex. Three years ago we were talking about hypercasual games, games mostly monetized through in-game advertising. Because of the challenges around privacy, games are becoming more deep now. They have microtransactions. Even casual games are becoming more complex. They have metagames on top. They have deeper economies. Casual games are becoming more mid-core. Mid-core games are going this way as well, to more core game mechanics. You see plenty of games with battle passes, with more core engagement loops that you didn’t see before. And then when you go to really core games, they’re becoming more like casual games. They’re trying to simplify at the core, trying to make themselves more accessible. There are some shifts on the way. Game developers are making games that are in a way more complex, but they’re trying to simplify the core game mechanics to be more accessible. As a company we’re trying to follow these trends. We’re working on a few casual games that we’re releasing with our exterior partners. We’re trying to observe how we can propose these deeper economies in games that feel very accessible, that are easy to play, that are easy to grasp and explain through a simple ad, but that can eventually retain and engage people for a long time. The second trend we didn’t discuss much was generative AI. That’s transforming not just game development, but many industries. It’s a new tool for everyone to use and leverage. Any game company, or any company at all, in the long term needs to have a proper AI strategy. In our case we’re leveraging AI mostly for content creation, mostly for ads at this moment. We’re enriching our NPCs through AI. But I presume that we’ll be adding efficiencies in most of the things we do, like game programming. We’re doing code reviews with AI now. We’re doing some small level designs with AI. That’s one of the tools that’s going to provide superpowers to game developers. David Fernandez Remesal moved to Saudi Arabia to run Sandsoft. Teams that, a few years ago, were considering building an engine of their own, they don’t do that any more. They use Unity or Godot or Unreal. Now there are pipelines for game development that will be transformed by the use of AI. Things that need 10 people to do them nowadays, one developer might be able to do them more efficiently a year from now. GamesBeat: Would you consider bringing mobile ads into the company because of AI advances? Mobile ad optimization now can be done quite well by AI. Fewer people can get much more work done in terms of creating variations on ads to test them in the market and see which particular ad does well. That optimization process was often handled by outsiders. Could that change? Fernandez Remesal: On the go-to-market you’re precisely right. For mobile games, what we call creative optimization is part of the way that you can optimize your growth strategy. But it’s broader than that. When you think about how, particularly in this case, artists work, they work on content production. You create some illustrations of characters and environments, and this is transformed by AI. With one artist you can get 100 different concepts with just a couple of prompts. Before, in the manual world, you’d need to spend probably half a day to just create one. This is about being more open for creativity, to get more options for exploring characters, environments, and art styles. It’s not just on the advertising side, too. It’s on game creation, too, to explore new concepts in a broader way. GamesBeat: In Saudi Arabia you have some parallels to Brazil in some ways, in terms of what you do with the team that you have. The team is relatively new to games. You’re growing a local staff. We saw some very interesting trends in the past year around Black Myth: Wukong. It was a Chinese-made game made for Chinese consumers, the Chinese market. It did spectacularly well on the global stage as well, 25 million copies sold right off the bat. It validated the notion that a country’s local content could be appealing on a global scale. A lot more games are being greenlit in China now with hopes that they’ll reach a global market. Sandosoft’s PocketNecro For you, in Saudi Arabia, do you have a choice to make around whether to make local content or global content? Fernandez Remesal: As a game developer, we’re creating content for global markets. We’re not doing content to be consumed locally. But that doesn’t mean–as in any part of the world, you have local stories, local myths, local themes that you can expose and eventually create connections with consumers and players everywhere in the world. When I think about our talent pool, I won’t deny that we’re quite an international company. We have 100 people on the team who come from 30 different nationalities. We’re still a nascent state in terms of local Saudi talent. We don’t have enough capability to create these local stories in a way where they feel authentic, where they’re told by the right people. But that will come eventually. I think there’s a good analogy when you think about movies and television. There are plenty of stories from this part of the world that have been told. We talked about Aladdin, about Prince of Egypt. There are plenty of stories that resonate with global audiences. But we need to have the real people, the local talent that can tell these stories in a way that eventually attracts a global audience and can become a mass market opportunity, rather than a niche thing for the local market. GamesBeat: A lot of this is maybe a stepping-stone process. You have to level up your team. You have to make sure that they can grow to be veterans of the industry. Then at that point the opportunities change. You can use them to be the central creators of the content. Fernandez Remesal: Correct. When you’re creating games, when you’re creating many kinds of content, it comes from your own passion. There’s some sense of the market involved, understanding whether there’s a commercial opportunity, but it comes from people’s passion. The passion is there, but the skills and capabilities are not there yet to think about a global game opportunity. We’ve seen that in other games. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of that, where they’ve taken worlds and themes that resonate in the region, but not to the extent that it feels like a proper story from that part of the world. But you’re precisely right. We need to wait a few years to have this capability in place so we have a credible story to tell in a commercial way and can meet the quality expectations that global audiences have. GamesBeat: From what you’ve seen, what is your assessment of where talent is? Whether in your region or other regions of the world as well. Where is the best mobile gaming talent now? Sandsoft’s Wizario Fernandez Remesal: The answer for me is quite easy. You just need to look at the games that make the top of the charts. China has definitely become the world leader in game development talent for mobile games. It’s not just about Tencent or Netease or MiHoYo. Plenty of game developers are creating games that are consumed globally. That’s the larger talent pool for mobile games. It’s true as well that the pool is expanding quite broadly. Creating mobile games is more accessible than going for triple-A console games. There are plenty of pockets of excellence in Europe, in the U.S., in Latin America. I’m really impressed by people here in Brazil, in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Chile. That’s becoming more accessible. Talent is developing in many parts of the world. In my region, in Saudi Arabia, it’s very new. I think that’s resonating with people here in Brazil. Maybe we’re Brazil five years ago. There were some pockets of talent that were trying to get their first companies into the market. We’re on the route where we’re importing talent to support game development, but also building local talent, so we can develop the whole industry. Another topic that’s not so much a trend as a reality now, it’s about going cross-platform. There are plenty of mobile first games that are thinking about moving to different platforms. When you think about how you can go to market, how you can prototype, mobile is usually the cheaper platform to do that. We see more and more teams getting their IP into PC and console coming from mobile. We’re observing that more and more. Another trend we see is transmedia. Maybe that was a buzzword at one point, people thinking about migrating IP from games into other art forms, but we definitely see it quite a bit now, particularly the series we’ve seen from Netflix and Amazon and so forth. Rovio is doing movies. Transmedia is becoming a trend for companies with deep pockets and deep budgets. GamesBeat: The biggest thing to watch right now, I would agree, is AI and where it’s going to change things. I believe that mobile gaming is one of the areas where it’s going to have the biggest impact. AI can’t create triple-A games yet, but there are a lot of things related to the business of mobile games that can be automated. We’ll see where that takes hold and gets traction. Fernandez Remesal: Something that we’re seeing quite a bit here in Brazil is the renaissance of web gaming. WebGL has really improved lately. We see amazing experiences on the mobile web. Mobile web will be an opportunity for game developers. It links to what we mentioned before with web shops and how you can monetize. GamesBeat: We have the Nintendo Switch 2 launching very shortly. The interesting thing about now versus years ago is that Nintendo is no longer the first device that kids get their hands on as a gamer. It’s smartphones and tablets now, mobile games. That’s how they learn to play games, which represents a sea change for companies like Nintendo. They have to follow this trend. The youngest gamers are only going to know the brands that they see on mobile. Fernandez Remesal: That’s precisely right. Mobile is the first gaming device for many, many people, particularly kids. That’s where they discover content. It’s not just games. It’s how they find all forms of entertainment – streaming media, music, and games as well. Disclosure: Gamescom Latam paid my way to Brazil. GB Daily Stay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox daily Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured.