Why acquisitions fail, Netflix Games’ investment plans, and the big H1 2025 genre analysis | Week in Views

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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.

Can India’s Nazara really crack $10 billion?

I had a great chat with Nazara CEO and joint MD Nitish Mittersain about the company’s M&A spree. One quote that stood out was:

“I’ve always had a belief that one of the biggest failures in M&A is caused by overestimating synergies at the time of acquisition, overpaying for the synergies, which may never materialise.

“And also, because you’ve kind of visualised so many synergies, right from day one of the acquisition you start pushing the management of the acquired company just to focus on synergies and deliver on them, which kind of defocuses them from the core business in itself.”

We’ve seen it countless times when it comes to mobile. Big publishers getting in on mobile late and paying over the price, while also not really being all in on the platform.

Then sometimes you get spurious claims of how IPs could be adapted to mobile without any real consideration of the actual teams and expertise they are buying.

King runs one of the most lucrative game franchises on the planet – but it will never successfully adapt Microsoft and Activision’s core IPs, at least based on history. EA’s purchase of Glu, well, what happened? Far from being the foundation of a strategic expansion of the publisher’s mobile operations, Glu’s entire business seemed to fade away within months.

As we’ve seen over the past few years with mass layoffs, and really over decades of M&A, a surprising lack of understanding over what’s actually being acquired can lead to terrible outcomes.

Netflix plans to ramp up gaming investment

We know that in the grand scheme of things, Netflix’s investments in its games division is only a small fraction compared to the firm’s efforts elsewhere, but the company is saying it’s ready to ramp that up. 

Over the past year or so, Netflix Games has seen changes to its strategy and shifts in leadership. Despite offering games for a few years now, it still feels like Netflix Games is very much so in the early stages of finding exactly where it fits and what it wants to achieve. 

That’s not as much of a negative as it sounds, these things take time, years even and I think this was always going to be the case when Netflix started offering games considering that’s not what the platform was originally made for. Just because you’re a giant at streaming shows and movies it doesn’t mean your users magically want to use that same platform for games.

However, at the same time I do understand the thought process behind the world’s largest streaming service wanting to offer games. It’s a massive market, and for interested users, it does add additional value to their subscription. But is that really enough? For now, maybe it is. But I’m intrigued to see what this additional investment in its games division ends up looking like.

H1 2025 genre analysis: Mobile strategy games surge to $10.6bn as RPG revenue tumbles

I was about due for another data dive, and this time around my search had me analysing each and every genre on mobile.

My findings? Well, according to AppMagic estimates, the strategy genre snatched gold from RPGs with $10.6 billion in gross player spending during H1 2025. This made strategy not only the biggest genre globally, but also the third fastest-growing, up 26% year-over-year.

RPGs, meanwhile, fell by around 11% to $9.3bn.

Rounding out the top three was the puzzle genre, which surpassed casino this time around. The genre’s top three games alone comprised 30% of all puzzle player spending during H1 2025.

Among other insights, game collections saw the largest rise globally at a 138% increase Y/Y, despite remaining the smallest genre. Although, in the US, the genre saw a much smaller increase – with arcade instead taking the crown for greatest spending surge.

As the genres shift, new stars rise, and others fall, it’ll be interesting to watch how other players take their own spin on strategy, just as RPG mechanics have become commonplace industry-wide.