Android Fee Cuts 📱, NeRD Robots 🤖, Godot 4.6 🎮
Market & Monetization 📈
Mobile Discovery Is Local: APAC Browses Stores, West Clicks Social
Mistplay’s 2025 report shows mobile discovery is hyper-local: Japan/Korea find games via app store browsing, while US/UK lean on Facebook and Instagram. Japan leads global spending, with a third regularly spending $10+ per IAP, and DTC web shops rising in Korea and Japan. Retention strategies diverge—bonuses and rewards drive the West, while story content and limited-time events win in APAC.
Google Proposes Global Fee Cuts and Alternative Billing on Android
Epic and Google have proposed a settlement that could globally open Android to rival stores and third‑party billing until June 2032. Google would cut Play service fees to 20% or 9% based on gameplay advantage, with a separate 5% fee only if Play Billing is used. Payment choices could appear side by side, and developers could set their own prices. A 24-hour attribution window may still apply to web purchases after an app click-out.
Pixel Washer Signs with Acclaim: Why I Chose a Publisher
Acclaim is publishing Pixel Washer, and there’s a new one-take video breaking down the collaboration. The dev shares four practical reasons to work with a publisher—actionable insight for indie teams and solo creators. Quick PSA: newsletter delivery changed with new hosting, so check spam and whitelist. More resources are coming soon, including a cheat sheet and a “No Longer Solo” discussion.
Engines & Performance ⚙️
Godot 4.6 Snapshot Adds Modern Theme and Faster Reflections
Godot 4.6’s third dev snapshot drops with 239 fixes from 101 contributors and a striking editor refresh. The community-favorite Minimal Theme becomes the new default “Modern Theme,” while a cleaner array inspector now applies across all editor themes. Rendering also levels up with an overhauled screen space reflection system for better performance and quality. Check the interactive changelog and share accessibility feedback before final release.
Turbo Animator for Unity: 40x Faster Crowd Animations
Turbo Animator promises up to 40x faster performance than Unity’s default Animator by baking humanoid animations into lightweight data. Its Spread Value system spreads CPU work across frames, keeping FPS steady even with thousands of characters. Built for efficiency, scalability, and cross-platform support, it’s ideal for crowd-heavy or mobile projects. Bonus: related combat animation packs can help you prototype fast.
Creative Tools & Frontier R&D 🎥🤖
Blender Camera Controller: Realistic Phone-Driven Shots, Free Demo
Wanderson M. Pimenta’s Camera Controller turns your Android phone into a handheld camera rig for Blender, generating natural shakes in real time—no tracking needed. It records and bakes motion as keyframes, with dual joysticks for translation/height and phone-driven orientation. You can also keyframe specific moments or capture rotation-only. A free demo is available, plus a companion add-on to move objects with your phone.
NeRD: A Neural Engine Replacing Physics Solvers for Articulated Robots
NeRD introduces a learnable dynamics engine that replaces traditional rigid-body and contact solvers with neural models. Using a robot-centric, spatially-invariant state, it stays stable and accurate over 1,000+ steps and generalizes across tasks and environments. Plugged in as a backend to an existing simulator, NeRD supports policy learning entirely in a neural engine and fine-tunes on real data to bridge sim-to-real—hinting at data-driven physics for complex game characters.