Hot Five

Hot 5: The rise of Roblox, Call of Duty is mobile's fastest ever launch, and you won't like Ilkka when he's angry

The hottest stories

Hot 5: The rise of Roblox, Call of Duty is mobile's fastest ever launch, and you won't like Ilkka when he's angry

To help you keep on top of a busy news cycle and the latest hot topics in mobile gaming, each week we round up the five most-read stories on PocketGamer.biz.

Read on and digest... 

In many ways, Mario Kart Tour has been a success story for Nintendo. It's by far the company's most downloaded mobile game at launch.

And despite the usual complaints from the usual suspects about its monetisation, there's a feeling that things have gone better than for Super Mario Run. 

Yet, our Monetizer Mavens expert group were more than a little surprised about some of the decisions that had been made: notably the requirement to sign in with a Nintendo ID; the game's control; and the lack of finesse when it comes to monetisation. 

 

Given Czech studio Madfinger has done over 250 million downloads of its mobile shooter games, there are plenty of reasons CEO Marek Rabas has confidence in forthcoming release Shadowgun War Games.

Effectively this means a player-versus-player mode inside of previous game Shadowgun Legends.

Rabas says he wants the game to be the best first-person shooter in terms of competitive gameplay, and that despite the recent release of Call of Duty: Mobile. 

That stated, Activision and Tencent's shooter is shaping up to be something rather special. In fact, it's already the most downloaded mobile game ever.

Its total of 100 million in week one beats out the 90 million racked up by Mario Kart Tour two weeks ago.  

Minecraft might be more famous - at least among the parents - but Roblox is now the king of user-generated content games.

The platform has surpassed 100 million monthly active users and the number of hours of engagement has passed 1.2 billion.

More significantly, nine games built within Roblox have more than one billion gameplays, and the company expects to pay out $100 million to its creators in 2019. Indeed, it even hopes to play out $50 million to a single studio working on Roblox by 2022.

Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen is a gentle man but the inefficiencies of the Migri, the Finnish immigration service, have made him angry. 

And you won't like him when he's angry. 

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Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.