Supercell buys Metacore amid layoffs, adds Merge Mansion to portfolio

Supercell’s move to buy the rest of Metacore puts Merge Mansion back inside the company that helped shape its early history, and it lands at a brutal moment for mobile gaming. Metacore said it was restructuring around Merge Mansion, efficiency, and a more competitive market, while also cutting up to 160 jobs in Finland and reviewing operations in Germany and Sweden.

For Merge Mansion players, the headline is not the ownership swap itself. It is what usually follows when a major live-service game gets folded into a bigger publisher’s portfolio: tighter scheduling, more pressure to keep the monetization machine humming, and a stronger focus on the one title already proving it can pay. Merge Mansion launched in 2020, now has more than 60 million players worldwide, and Metacore says it has generated $700 million in lifetime revenue. The studio also said it made EUR 154 million in revenue in 2024 and was profitable, which makes the game look less like a rescue project than a proven asset Supercell wants under one roof.

The deal also closes a strange loop between the two companies. Supercell had been Metacore’s largest shareholder since 2020, and Metacore bought Everdale from Supercell in early 2023 before discontinuing it in September 2024. Now the direction has reversed again, with Supercell planning to bring Merge Mansion into its live games portfolio and acquire the rest of Metacore. For Supercell, that means leaning harder into a hit it did not build from scratch, rather than chasing another risky launch in a market where launches keep failing.

That caution matters because Supercell has been unusually blunt about the state of mobile. In February 2026, it said launching new hit games remained very hard across the industry, and its 2025 review said the same thing. The company backed up that view by shutting down Squad Busters after it reached 75 million downloads and more than $100 million in spending. In other words, even a game that found scale was not safe if it did not look durable enough.

The broader market is sending the same signal. Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 report says non-game apps passed games in mobile consumer revenue in 2025, which helps explain why publishers are doubling down on proven live services instead of funding more moonshots. That is the real story behind this Supercell deal: not just consolidation for its own sake, but a sharper bet on the few mobile games that can still carry a business through a layoffs-heavy year, even as Second Dinner cut staff in late April after raising $100 million in January 2024 to grow Marvel Snap and build new titles.