Data digest: Pokémon Champions, the top US earners, funding news, Sensor Tower’s big ad report, more

Every Wednesday we break down the latest data, research and financial results into digestible chunks.

Read on for the numbers you need to know about without the fluff.

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Pokémon Champions has surpassed 10m downloads, according to The Pokémon Company. The free-to-start, battle-focused game, which first launched for Switch consoles on April 8, reached the download milestone about a week after its mobile release on June 17. To celebrate, players who log in will receive 100 Fast Coupons, in-game items which reduce the waiting time required to recruit new Pokémon.

Based on Sensor Tower data published by research firm Circana, the top 10 mobile games by US consumer spend in May (and the change in ranking compared to April) were:

1. Monopoly Go (-)
2. Royal Match (-)
3. Candy Crush Saga (+1)
4. Gossip Harbor (+1)
5. Kingshot (+1)
|6. Last War: Survival (-3)
7. Whiteout Survival (-)
8. Township (-)
9. Royal Kingdom (-)
10. Garena Free Fire (-)

“The top charts saw a major shakeup this month as Last War: Survival dropped three spots to #6, driven by a 30% month-over-month revenue drop,” said Sensor Tower insights analyst Bryan Isagholian. “This steep decline comes right after the publisher paused US ad spend in mid-April.”

“Farlight Games’ newly debuted Clash of Critters proved to be a breakout newcomer, combining tower defence with cosy pet collection to secure a brief spot in the top 10 free casual games during its global launch in May,” he added.

US consumer spending on video game content across all platforms in May was up 1% YoY to $3.77bn. Year to date spending on content is up 3% YoY to $20.43bn.

AI research lab General Intuition has raised $320m in Series A funding at a $2.3bn valuation. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Hillspire, Bezos Expeditions, Nico Rosberg, and researchers.

The New York-based company intends to use the financing to build AI models trained on billions of gameplay clips uploaded to Medal, a platform which lets users capture, edit and share gaming moments.

“We believe the best path to physical interaction with AI is mapping the controls humans already know: game controllers,” said Pim de Witte, co-founder and CEO of both General Intuition and Medal.

“We use these precise actions to build foundation models that can perceive environments, predict what happens next, and generate the right action in real time, across many embodiments, virtual or physical.”

General Intuition previously raised $134m last October, according to The Robot Report. “General Catalyst led the round, which also included participation from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has made a $5m equity investment in UA finance firm PvX Partners.

Singapore-based PvX said the investment shows “growing institutional recognition” for the UA finance category and the cash will help the company to support the continued expansion of its cohort financing platform.

FunPlus has announced that its strategy game Tiles Survive has passed 30m lifetime downloads. The game soft launched in August 2024 but started scaling in June 2025. Appmagic estimates suggest the game has earned FunPlus around $70m to date.

Sensor Tower has published a new report diving into mobile gaming ad monetisation. The research firm estimates that mobile gaming ad monetisation topped $12bn in revenue across 19 countries in 2025, with 2.4tn ad impressions served.

Across these markets in May 2026, ad-supported titles accounted for 84.1% of all mobile game downloads. While the figure is down from  88.5% in July 2021, ad monetised games continue to dominate downloads. Last year, they generated 24.6bn downloads.

As IAP growth has stagnated, the share of games with ad monetisation has increased from 45.1% in July 2021 to 55.6% in May 2026. In-app advertising is the dominant revenue driver in developing markets, while IAP purchases drive the majority of revenue in more mature markets.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, in-app advertising accounted for 70.4% of total earnings in India, 55.8% of revenue in Indonesia, and 54.7% in Brazil. Conversely, IAP revenue made up 90% of total earnings in both Japan and South Korea, 81.9% in Canada, and 77.9% in the US.

Between February and April 2026, hypercasual and casual games each accounted for approximately 40% of mobile gaming ad revenue, while hybridcasual commanded 16% of the total.

In terms of genres, puzzle dominated with a 53% share of the market, which was almost four times as much as its closest competitor, arcade, which had a 13% share. When it comes to sub-genres, block games led with 10%, ahead of match pair, sort, and match swap titles, each with about 7%.

AppLovin and AdMob now account for two-thirds of global gaming ad revenue, capturing a 65% share between January 2025 and May 2026. The former is the overall network leader with a 36% share, including 41% of total hypercasual ad revenue and 31% of casual ad revenue.

AdMob has a 29% overall share of the market, including 33% of casual ad revenue. The third largest ad network by ad revenue market share is Meta Audience Network, followed by Unity Ads, InMobi, Mintegral, Supersonic and Digital Turbine.

Block Blast was the top-grossing game by ad revenue between January and May 2026, bringing in $127m. Vita Mahjong more than doubled its ad revenue year-over-year to take second place with $89.8m, ahead of Candy Crush Saga with $81.1m.

The leading publishers by ad revenue during the same period were Hungry Studio ($131.2m), Easybrain ($117.3m), Onesoft ($113.5m), King ($106.2m) and Voodoo ($95.1m).

A significant number of mobile developers plan to port their games to browsers, according to a survey conducted by Atomik Research, which was commissioned by web-based game platform Poki.

In May, it surveyed 400 game developers in the US and UK, 70% of which develop primarily for mobile platforms. 53% of respondents said they plan to distribute a game on the web that has been ported from mobile in the next 12 months.

The survey was conducted as part of Atomik’s research for the newly published 2026 State Of Web Gaming Report. For its fieldwork, the research firm also surveyed 2,000 ‘web gamers’ in the US and UK.

46% of the web gamers who participated said they had stopped playing a mobile game because it took too long to open or load, while 28% said they had stopped playing a mobile gaming app because the download size was too large.