EWC Paris success, GTA 6’s big reveal and evolving live ops | Week in Views
The games industry moves quickly and while stories may come and go there are some that we just can't let go of…
So, to give those particularly thorny topics a further going over we've created a weekly digest where the members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming in the past week.
Paige Cook
EWC Paris 2026 draws 2m visits as AG.AL claims Club Championship
Earlier this year, I spoke about the Esports World Cup and how much I hoped the event would be a success. It has been a huge moment for esports and the tournament has now come to an end. Judging by the numbers, it seems to have been a hit.
The tournament sold 175,000 tickets for its competitive matches, it also set new records for attendance, viewership and engagement. AG.AL were crowned club champions, taking home a $7 million prize.
The Esports World Cup will now return to Riyadh in 2027. I still really like the idea of the event becoming a travelling tournament, with different countries getting the chance to host it, so I hope we see that format return in the future.
Overall, it seems like the Paris event was a success, let's hope they can build on it.
Outside of mobile
While this isn't a mobile topic, it is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in games right now so I wanted to touch on it.
Of course it's GTA 6!
The game has been absolutely everywhere for the past week and with the extended look last night, it feels like a huge moment in games history.
The leaks over the past week have caused controversy, some feel frustration at Rockstar’s business practices - digital codes in physical boxes for example - and it seemed like some people felt the leaks were a form of pushback. I personally don't agree with that and leaks are never the way to get a point across.
Now that we’ve actually officially seen GTA 6 as Rockstar intended, just wow. The game really does look incredible.
Something that really stuck with me was going online after the extended look and seeing developers who worked on the game share their reactions. You could really see how much this project means to the people who made it, one developer said they’ve spent a quarter of their life working on it.
I don’t expect the leaks to have any meaningful impact on GTA 6 or Rockstar, but I do feel for the people who made the game and I’m happy that last night could feel like a true win for them to finally showcase their hard work in the way it was intended to be seen.
Mariam Ahmad
InnoGames' Zoran Gjorgiev on rebuilding Heroes of History's live ops one layer at a time
This week, I got a look under the hood of live ops at InnoGames’ popular game, Heroes of History.
Zoran Gjorgiev, product manager, came to live ops the hard way. He joined Forge of Empires late in its life, when the calendar was already crowded and players had firm ideas about what they were owed. Then he moved to Heroes of History, where there was no calendar at all so he had the freedom to curate his own vision.
Two years on, he has revised a couple of his long-held convictions. He used to believe a game needed an event every day but he now clusters events into short bursts and leaves the gaps alone. He also assumed the gameplay was what made an event land. He’s since shifted his view to think that it's the reward - and if the reward is good enough, everything else is just a detail.
The best part of our conversation was his diagnosis of why winning formulas stop working for teams - players either learn to beat them or just stop caring. His fix is to keep iterating, changing one layer at a time so each version teaches you something, whether that's the reward, the structure, the runtime or the theme.
Gjorgiev tells me what's next for Heroes of History, and it is something he calls ‘Big Beats’ - four-to-eight-week themed arcs that trade standalone events for something closer to a series with seasons. Gjorgiev is speaking on live ops at PGC Nordics in October, so there will be more where this came from.
Companies
