Supercell veterans test Field Day in mobile early access rollout

Bit Odd’s Field Day is one of the clearest reads on where mobile publishers think the next hit might hide: a free-to-play, four-minute PvPvE game from former Supercell developers Lasse Louhento and Jani Lintunen, already in early access in Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The studio, founded in 2019, has moved quickly from a $5.8 million raise in 2022 to an $18 million round in 2024, with Index Ventures backing the company as it pushes its debut game into live markets.

Century Games is making a different but equally telling bet. Just Desserts: Merge & Story has soft-launched in Australia, Canada, the Philippines and the UK, and the Google Play listing already shows 10,000+ downloads, a 4.8-star rating and 233 reviews. Set in Frostvale, the game centers on pastry chef Ella and a mystery around a fire, blending merge mechanics with a story wrapper that looks built to keep players coming back between short sessions and longer narrative beats.

Legacy franchises are being handled just as carefully. Electronic Arts and PopCap Games officially launched the latest early-access rollout of Plants vs. Zombies 3: Evolved on April 8, 2026, after a development cycle that has stretched back to around 2016. By April, the game was already in Ireland and the Philippines, with the UK and Singapore slated to follow, a phased approach that makes the rollout feel more like a live test of audience appetite than a simple release.

Fingersoft offered the cleanest franchise pivot in the group. Hill Climb Racing 3’s Open Beta rolled out in Finland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the UK, the Google Play listing passed 100,000+ downloads, and live multiplayer PvP racing became a first for the series. Blizzard’s Overwatch Rush was also showing surprising traction, with more than 10,000 iOS downloads in the Philippines despite still being in early development. Garena’s Free City followed a similar pattern, moving from an Argentina soft launch into markets including the Philippines, Algeria and Egypt.

That is the bigger story behind these early-access runs. The biggest publishers are not just tossing prototypes into the store; they are staging narrow regional tests around hybrid genres, familiar IP and first-time multiplayer hooks, then watching which combinations can survive outside the comfort of a single launch market. Field Day fits that playbook neatly, and the rest of the slate shows how crowded the race to the next mobile breakout has become.