Gameloft's Gangstar series has been dormant on mobile for years. On August 20 it comes back as something quite different from the single-player crime sandboxes it was known for: Gangstar Mirage City is a persistent online open world, developed by Gameloft and published by Tencent's Level Infinite, and it soft-launches on iOS and Android in five regions before any wider rollout.
Those regions are Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. If you are in North America, Western Europe or Japan, August 20 is not your launch date - Level Infinite has said a global release follows, but has not attached a window to it. Pre-registration is open worldwide on Google Play, with iOS registration running through the game's own site.
What actually changed about Gangstar
The last time this series had a mainline entry - Gangstar New Orleans, back in 2017 - it was an open-world crime game you played alone. Mirage City is built the other way around. The city of Rooklyn is shared, and the loop is co-op heists, contested territory and PvP rather than a story campaign with optional side activities. You pick a faction, run jobs, take streets off rivals, and push your standing up a ladder that other players are climbing at the same time.
The supporting systems are familiar territory for anyone who has played a GTA Online-shaped game: deep vehicle customisation, weapon modifications, safehouses and garages that double as status displays, and street racing sitting alongside the shooting. What sets the pitch apart is that it is all running on a phone, with a control scheme built for touch rather than ported onto it.
6.6 million people have already signed up
Pre-registrations passed 6.6 million ahead of the soft launch, which is a serious number for a title that is not even attempting a global day-one release. A milestone campaign running through August 18 hands out Diamonds, vehicle upgrade vouchers and car skins as those thresholds are crossed, with additional bonuses for recruiting other players into your crew.
The franchise pedigree is doing some of that work. Gameloft has been shipping Gangstar games for over twenty years, and the series counts more than 340 million registered players across its entries. Mirage City was originally revealed in October 2024 under the placeholder name Codename: Crime-Vice Open World before Level Infinite came aboard as publisher and the Gangstar branding was applied.
The thing to watch
Level Infinite has not detailed monetisation, which is the single most important unknown here. A free-to-play online crime world with vehicle progression and territory control has an obvious set of levers to pull, and how hard Tencent and Gameloft pull them will decide whether Mirage City reads as a genuine mobile open world or as a storefront with driving attached.
The five-region soft launch is the tell. It gives the team live data on server load, matchmaking and spend behaviour before the game reaches the markets with the highest average revenue per user - which is standard practice, but also means anything you read about the game's economy in the first few weeks may not describe the version the rest of the world eventually gets.
