Yalla’s Middle East magic, Pokémon perfection and lights out at Lightneer… | Week in Views

• 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

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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.

“Our focus is undoubtedly on the Middle East market where we have unique advantages”

I’ve been speaking a lot about the games industry in the MENA region recently. I mentioned the influence of Eastern games companies in last week’s newsletter all about Gamescom, and this week I analysed how Savvy’s investments and new partnerships are helping create thousands of new jobs in the region.

For the Week in Views, I wanted to focus on an interview by our MENA reporter Isa with Yalla Group president Saifi Ismail.

The main reason I want to highlight it is, often when asked about what successful games have come from a developer based in the Middle East, the answer isn’t always immediate. There’s lots of development and publishing talent in the region, but identifying a global hit isn’t quite so easy.

Yalla Group, headquartered in Dubai, flies under the radar globally. It is an online social networking and games company that has a voice chat platform called Yalla, and it employs around 800 people.

Its flagship game, Yalla Ludo, has generated $425 million in gross revenue from the App Store and Google Play worldwide, according to AppMagic data. Saudi Arabia is the No. 1 country, while the US ranks No. 2 with $119m. It’s followed by the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and the UK. Yalla Ludo is a certified global success story.

“Yalla Ludo’s success is due to our deep understanding of the local market and our ability to create a product that resonates with users,” said Ismail. “We focused on delivering a user-friendly, culturally relevant game that also incorporated social elements, which are highly valued in the MENA region.

“For example, Yalla Ludo was the first Ludo application that added in-game voice-chatting and chatroom functionalities in the industry, which enabled us to establish a highly engaged online user community. 

“Scaling it for global audiences involved localising the game for different markets, adapting the gameplay to suit various cultural preferences, and engaging in targeted marketing campaigns. For instance, we explored outside of MENA with Yalla Parchis, a Ludo game designed for the South American markets.”

Moving forward, the company plans to develop mid-core titles, and has three self-developed games in the pipeline for release in 2025. 

It’s a great example of the exciting momentum coming from the Middle East’s games industry. Over the next few years, we may hear yet more similar stories.

It’s lights out at Lightneer as the studio officially announces closure

A studio closure is always sad news but behind every sad story it seems there’s intrigue, hubris and more than a few lessons to be learnt.

This week’s read-it-and-weep riches-to-rags story was the closure of Finnish studio Lightneer which, despite the advisory backing of Rovio’s ‘Mighty Eagle’ Peter Vesterbacka, former Mattel and Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske and Games Workshop legend Ian Livingstone, managed to amount to naught late last week.

And if you roll up your sleeves on this one you’ll find the canning of a years-in-progress launch game, a CEO quitting because they – in their own words – were “never driven enough by things like business growth or KPIs” and the small matter of burning through $7.8 million. 

But it’s perhaps company chairman and CEO Henri Lindman’s eventual sign off on LinkedIn that underscores this strange (but all too common) tale the best. Writing as if the company had in fact achieved greatness (and thanking the many who had ploughed money and time into the failed venture) he shared his “gratitude for everyone who was part of this amazing journey.”

“In Finnish an “entrepreneur” is literally called “the one who tries”. So… Let’s try again.” he wrote, as if threatening to do it all again, before signing off with – despite all that time, talent and money – a card that looked he’d knocked it up in 20 seconds in Microsoft Paint.

One day I’ll learn to recognise true greatness. Until then…

Pokémon Masters EX turns five: Lessons from an IP and monetisation masterpiece

It’s been half a decade since The Pokémon Company’s second-biggest mobile game Pokémon Masters first released, and much has changed since 2019.

The games industry’s changed, the world has changed, and the Pokémon IP just keeps getting bigger. In Masters’ case, developer DeNA has created a long-running spinoff featuring more than 200 characters from the Game Boy classics to Switch newcomers, spawning so many scenarios between fan favourites who would otherwise never have met.

That’s Pokémon Masters’ strong point: its characters. Whether that’s bringing closure to loose threads from the main series or creating an entire arc around what villains get up to after the hero saves the day, the lore here is in no short supply.

Those characters also form the basis of Masters’ monetisation model, releasing new Sync Pairs in a gacha with varying odds. The fifth anniversary banners actually have the worst rates yet, requiring more premium currency to reach the guaranteed spark – not the most favourable way to celebrate – but with some of the series’ most popular characters up for grabs, players are spending bucketloads anyway.

In fact, Masters just had its most lucrative day of 2024…