Rumble Arcade maker Tribo Games is closing

Tribo Games is closing down after four years, its CEO and cofounder has confirmed.

Mika Kuusisto announced the news on LinkedIn, thanking the company’s co-founders and co-workers, as well as Tribo’s investors, which include Play Ventures, SISU and King co-founder Sebastian Knutsson.

According to Tribo’s LinkedIn page, the firm employed between two and 10 people on a remote-first basis across Europe, primarily in Finland and Spain. Collectively, Tribo says its staff have shipped more than 50 games from their time working at King, Rovio, PopCap, Wooga and more.

The studio has been running pay-to-earn, NFT-based battler Rumble Arcade as a browser-based game for several years, but never officially released the made-for-mobile game through the app stores. A post on X says the game’s servers are being closed down by the end of July, and Tribo is entering insolvency, meaning any further player payouts will be ‘limited’.

More recently, Tribo appears to have pivoted into becoming an ‘agentic distribution platform’, helping studios bring mobile games to the web while using AI agents to handle acquisition, retention and monetisation.

“We did some truly innovative things with AI agents, live ops and web distribution,” Kuusisto said. “Rumble Arcade, our PvP strategy game, is something we can be proud of.”

The X post from the Rumble Arcade account explained more: “There was a growing disconnect between the traditional and Web3 gaming audience Rumble Arcade needed, and the audience we were able to reach through organic traffic. As a result, some of the game’s fundamental features never reached the level of engagement they needed to perform…building and running Rumble Arcade cost many times more than the game brought in.”

It continued: “That was only sustainable while there was funding to cover the gap, and we invested heavily in the belief that we could close it. The numbers did not put us on a trajectory that justified continuing to invest more resources, and alternative options were not realistic or added even more complications.”