Apple’s ATT privacy policies finally face the music, and Pokémon GO’s stellar Unova event | 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.
[staff id=”100175″ name=”Craig Chapple”]
France readies Apple ATT antitrust fine and ban
Apple pulled the rug on the entire mobile games industry when it imposed its app tracking transparency (ATT) policy.
You can look at the data and real world events and conclude the mobile market’s decline was due to a post-pandemic lockdown drop, inflation and a general industry and wider economic recession. But one of mobile gaming’s key challenges was Apple’s new rules over IDFA opt-in.
You could argue that the introduction of ATT (App Tracking Transparency) was a win for privacy advocates. It’s perhaps just a coincidence, then, that Apple’s burgeoning ads business was able to grow as rival ad networks, at least initially, suffered.
As Aaron noted in his recent article:
“Putting numbers to the impacts felt by developers, analytics platform Singular found that fewer than 19% of mobile games received ATT consent in Q2 2024 where permission was requested immediately upon download.
“Meanwhile, Robert H Smith School of Business associate professor of marketing Daniel McCarthy co-authored a paper on the impacts of ATT in 2024, finding that conversion-optimised Meta advertisements had seen a 37% reduction in click-through rates.”
It looks like Apple is now facing the music, with France putting its ATT policy to the test. Reuters reports that the country’s antitrust regulator is ready to deal out a fine this month and order it to halt the practice.
The industry has done its best to adapt, but if Apple is forced to reverse its changes – and it complies – this will be a seismic shift for the mobile market.
Meanwhile, Germany is also putting ATT under scrutiny. Mobile Dev Memo’s Eric Seufert believes that a full rollback in France or Germany could mean it would “only be a matter of time” until a reversal of ATT is applied across the European Union.
If history is anything to go by, Apple won’t go down quietly, however. It may even try to change the rules in confusing ways that attempt to maintain the status quo, like its ever-evolving App Store rules in the EU to combat the Digital Markets Act. (A fine for that is also reported to be incoming).
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[staff id=”100270″ name=”Aaron Astle”]
Pokémon Go Tour: Unova – Global weekend made $19.8m in two days
Almost immediately after Pokémon Day 2025, the franchise’s biggest mobile game had its most lucrative weekend of the year so far with Pokémon Go Tour: Unova – Global.
Now firmly established as an annual event, the Tour series is slowly working through each generation of Pokémon and this time highlighted Gen 5, focusing on the Unova region and Pokémon introduced in DS games Black and White.
Tour: Unova began with paid real-world events in Taiwan and the US before expanding into Unova – Global for two days on March 1st and 2nd, then available to all players for free but with extra benefits to those still willing to pay.
With rare Mythical Pokémon up for grabs and one of the most elusive shiny Pokémon out there in Meloetta – hard to come by even in the main series – that paid side to Unova – Global appears to have proven lucrative, with the game making $19.8 million last weekend alone.
According to AppMagic estimates – which don’t include any extra earnings from Go’s web shop – March 1st was the game’s most successful day since July 2024 when anniversary celebrations were in full swing, going to show how a focus on one generation at a time can really pay off.
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