Unravelling the corporate web of games companies, Xbox's $500m Netflix offer and Yalla's Western ambitions | 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.
Craig Chapple
The intricate corporate web of the world’s top game makers
This year we’ve put together a host of regional Top 30 and Top 50 lists, and just last week we published our global Top 50 Game Makers 2026, too.
One of the things that has often come up during research is how some companies obfuscate where their true operations lie and various different names in sometimes confusing corporate webs.
Years ago I remember Deconstructor of Fun’s investigation into where Matchington Mansion developer Firecraft Studios was based. According to the studio’s LinkedIn, a company address led to a coffee shop in San Mateo, while a LTD company was set up in the Cayman Islands.
It was amusing seeing a few US studios apparently based on the side of a road in Delaware when researching the Top 30 US Game Makers list. Incorporating in the state is common practice for US businesses.
Meanwhile, researching the Top 30 China Game Makers and the upcoming Top 30 Southeast Asia Game Makers lists turned up some interesting findings. There are a number of Chinese companies headquartered out of Singapore - some taking interesting lengths to seemingly obfuscate their China operations.
Meanwhile, some companies operate under various guises. RiverGame, for example, appears to have various names. There is RiverGame, of course, Omnilojo (formerly Florere) and, so we’ve been told by a couple sources, First Fun. Two and a Half Gamers’ Jakub Remiar has talked about this on their podcast and at the recent Mobidictum conference, too.
Whatever business and legal reasons, companies can make it surprisingly difficult to find where some of the world’s top games are actually made, and by whom.
Paige Cook
Report: Netflix fails with $500m offer to adapt Xbox gaming IP to film and TV
Xbox reportedly turned down a massive $500 million deal with Netflix to bring its game IPs to film and television after asking for another $300 million.
That’s a lot of money to turn down, but it seems Xbox clearly believes its franchises are worth more. Now you could argue that some of its biggest IPs haven’t been used to their full potential for quite a few years, but we are seeing momentum now with the likes of Gears of War: E-Day, a new Halo game and others, such as Fable, making a comeback.
We’ve already seen some Xbox titles make the transmedia leap, there was a Halo series on Paramount, it got cancelled after two seasons and had a very mixed reaction from fans. Others, like the Minecraft Movie, went the opposite way and achieved massive success, making nearly $1 billion.
However, I would assume Minecraft can’t be part of any proposed deal because those rights are still under agreement with Warner Bros.
As for the Netflix deal, I wonder if that would have been the way to go anyway. That’s a lot of control to give over to one platform. There are pros and cons, I suppose. One big deal could simplify things, and Netflix has done some great adaptations, like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. However, it also risks greenlighting projects for the sake of it, only to have Netflix cancel them a year later.
This way, there's more chance of finding the right individual fit for each project. Perhaps working with different partners will give Xbox more freedom, Netflix could still be involved in some projects, just not all. Either way, it looks like we’ll see more Xbox adaptations in the future.
Mariam Ahmad
Yalla Group's Saifi Ismail: "We're not exporting a MENA formula"
Yalla Ludo made Yalla Group one of MENA’s biggest game companies by going all in on local players. Now its first self-developed match-three title, Turbo Match, is aimed squarely at the US and Europe.
I caught up with Ismail and in his view, this does not mean the company has to start over. For Ismail, success means you hang on to the core principles of what made your game a hit in the first place, but rethink the tactics. Games should be built “around what players genuinely enjoy, rather than what developers assume they want,” he told us.
By mid-2026, Turbo Match was gaining players in the US and Europe as well as MENA and Yalla says it plans to speed up its Western expansion in the second half of the year.
Keeping that momentum against match-three’s biggest names is the company’s next challenge and Ismail will share more about how Yalla is growing at PGC Jordan during his talk ‘From Local Insight to Lasting Growth: Building Successful Gaming Businesses in MENA’. Tickets are available here.
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