It's day two of the World Cup, and the biggest download winner isn't any of the football games anyone predicted โ it's a Coca-Cola-sponsored sticker-album app. That's just one of three stories this week that matter for mobile.
Felix Braberg flies solo for the Friday news segment. The FIFA Panini Collection is pulling roughly half a million downloads a day across Brazil, Mexico, and the US โ 12.2 million downloads in 30 days and ~$1.5M revenue โ built around Panini's physical collectible-card heritage and Coca-Cola bottle QR codes. Felix also crunched the numbers on Block Blast's 24-hour Google Play takedown (rumored IP infringement) and found it cost the game roughly $120K/day in lost ad revenue, with a 17% daily-active-user drop and a 14-month download low. And Supercell's US game development is winding down โ one project killed, another in limbo after staff departures โ feeding the bigger question of when (or whether) Supercell lands its next hit.
Three stories, one theme: distribution is fragile, and even the biggest names are exposed.
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โฑ๏ธ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Cold open โ Block Blast's lost daily active users
00:40 FIFA Panini wins the World Cup download race
03:00 The Coca-Cola + Panini sticker-album playbook
04:30 Block Blast's 24-hour outage โ the real cost
06:30 The $120K/day loss and the Turkey/Indonesia drop
08:00 Supercell kills a US game, another in limbo
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๐ KEY TAKEAWAYS
โ The surprise winner of the World Cup download race is the FIFA Panini Collection โ a Coca-Cola-sponsored, Panini-built digital sticker-album game. It's pulling roughly 500K downloads a day (12.2M in 30 days, up 6.6M), ~$1.5M revenue (up over $1M), and close to 1.7M daily active users, concentrated in Brazil, Mexico, and the US. None of the football games people predicted are winning โ this is.
โ The FIFA Panini model is a convergence of trends the podcast has tracked: digital sticker-album collecting (increasingly common in casual games), trading mechanics, and a physical-to-digital bridge via Coca-Cola bottle QR codes. It's effectively a marketing front to sell more Coke, and a fascinating hybrid worth a dedicated episode.
โ Block Blast's 24-hour Google Play takedown (rumored IP infringement) was far more costly than the short outage suggests. Downloads dropped to a near 14-month low, and the game lost about 17% of its Android daily active users โ roughly 6.3M users, from 37.8M down to 31.5M between late May and June 8.
โ The damage compounds because Block Blast relies on an organic download engine to supplement paid marketing. When you're taken down, the store algorithms penalize you and rankings get worse โ so the hit outlasts the outage itself. The biggest geo drops were Turkey (down ~41%, from 4.3M to 2.5M) and Indonesia (down 23%, from 5.87M to 4.54M).
โ Since Block Blast is ad-revenue driven, that DAU loss translates to roughly $120K/day in lost advertising revenue for Hungry Studios โ a steep, ongoing price for a single day of downtime.
โ Supercell's US game development is winding down. One project (in development ~3.5 years by ex-Riot staff) was killed and the team disbanded; another is in limbo after most staff departed in late 2025 / early 2026. It feeds the recurring question of when Supercell lands its next hit, given a string of titles launched via questionable, soft-launch-skipping methods that haven't panned out.
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๐๏ธ HOST
Felix Braberg โ Ad Monetization consultant
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#mobilegaming #useracquisition #blockblast #supercell #worldcup #admonetization #f2p
