Hot Five: Squad Busters breaks $50 million, EA’s mobile blueprint, and Finland’s "survive to 2025" mantra

• We’ve curated the biggest stories you need to know from the last seven days

Start your week right with our quick take on the stories that are impacting the mobile industry right now.

To help get you primed and ready for another week in mobile gaming, we’ve curated the biggest stories you need to know from the last seven days.

1) The state of Finland’s games market

The mobile games industry in Finland is facing many of the same troubles as those facing the global market, with a challenging economic climate, investment difficulties and more. In fact, many games studios - outside of giants like Supercell - are currently in in ‘survive to 2025’ mode.

PocketGamer.biz visited Helsinki and Turku earlier this year and got the lay of the land; we spoke with Finnish developers and executives about the country’s challenges in the games industry as well as this new survival-based mantra.

2) Squad Busters takings pass $50 million, but how does it compare to Supercell’s greatest hits?

Supercell’s Squad Busters surpassed $50 million in gross revenue in its first two months after global launch, having released worldwide on May 29th, 2024 and crossing the milestone on July 28th.

According to AppMagic data, the US represented Squad Busters’ biggest market during the period and had spent $19.6 million in-game two months in, followed by Germany’s $5 million and France’s $3.2 million.

3) Celebrating seven years of Garena Free Fire's success

Garena Free Fire and Free Fire Max have surpassed a combined $4 billion in lifetime revenue according to AppMagic data. We spoke with Free Fire's global marketing lead Cindy Chen about the battle royale hit, what’s kept it going after seven years, and what players can expect next.

"We continue to look for ways to deepen user engagement further by developing more social elements," Chen said. "We are also exploring ways to use AI to enhance the player experience."

4) Electronic Arts: "FC Mobile is the blueprint for our mobile strategy"

"FC Mobile is the blueprint for our mobile strategy," said Electronic Arts executive VP and CFO Stuart Canfield.

This comment came during EA’s earnings call discussing its Q1 2025 results, which included a 30% year-on-year profits fall and a 13% decline in revenue. Even so, this was deemed an "incredible" quarter by the company as tumbles were less severe than predicted and mobile games such as FC Mobile Madden NFL 24 saw "double digits" growth.

5) dotplay raises $1 million funding to transform mobile game distribution

Game distribution platform dotplay raised $1 million in pre-seed funding through a round led by Transcend Fund. Further contribution came from investors in the ad tech and finance spaces.

Funds will be used to expand dotplay’s platform, bring more game developers aboard and employ more engineers in particular.