State of Gaming 2026: What’s Really Winning Now

Sam Awney, a welcome back to the podcast. Hello, great to be here, Misha.
So, you're in the middle of a move, so I caught you in the in the right time to talk about State of Gaming 2026. Yeah, if somebody's looking at your background, you are moving at the moment. Apologize deeply. Yeah. And you are lead gaming insights analyst at Sensor Tower. And State of Gaming report that just launched that has How many pages does it have? Oh, no, I want to say 69 70 pages. Over 100 is our State of Mobile report. We don't quote quite that. Well, I wouldn't say deep. We don't The mobile market is massive, so it's just so many things to cover. Gaming we do go deep, but yeah, not quite as deep.
Yeah, so I'm really really deep and insightful report that covers not only mobile, but also PC and console. So, this is your report, right? It is. Yeah, this is the thing that I do every year. And last year it was State of Mobile Gaming, and now for the first time that's State of Gaming. So, very excited

to start covering the PC console space, especially someone who's just been, you know, a lifelong gamer and getting to talk about the things that that I play a lot more when I'm with my friends is is pretty exciting. Attention app and game developers. Are you ready to unlock the secrets behind the world's top-performing apps and games? With Sensor Tower, you get the ultimate competitive edge, whether it's breaking into new markets, fine-tuning your UA strategies, or boosting monetization. Dive into data like never before. Track global trends across app stores. Analyze market-leading in-app purchase and in-app ad strategies. And benchmark your performance with real-time insight. The best part, Sensor Tower doesn't just deliver data. It helps you turn it into action. With intuitive tools and expert analysis, it's everything you need to make smarter, faster decisions. Thousands of app and game studios, from

indie creators to global giants, trust Sensor Tower to help them win. So, why not you? Start your free trial today at sensortower.com. That is sensortower.com. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know this is Web Store Rumspringa. 70% of top apps are using Web Store, and the best ones, they're doing it with AppCharge. Do you want a $20,000 in-app purchase? Yeah, AppCharge does that. How about using web-based Apple Pay checkout? Yeah, AppCharge does that. Do you want to pretend that subscriptions are still a viable monetization strategy for games? Yeah, AppCharge even lets you do that. Look, these guys are backed by Supercell, Moon Active, and Playtika. They get what high average revenue per paying customer means. And they're already doing over half a billion dollars in transactions a year. So, are you going to be the first to do a $20,000 IAP? Don't accept microtransactions, embrace

macrotransactions. Learn more at appcharge.com. This time around we're going to cover eight trends, and I picked the trends that are less typical than what we covered in the State of Mobile. So, we're not going to talk about apps and store accesses and and so forth. We're going to talk about something equally important, but very very gaming. And the first trend that I want to cover is, of course, the Battlefield. Battlefield is the best-selling game of the year, and it wasn't even close. And in this graph, the Y axis is free to play, and the X axis is money, I assume. Yeah, it's price on the X axis, so, you know, zero is free to play. And on the left side we have the units sold, downloads, whatever you want to call them in in millions. So, the top right is going to be all the AAA games, best-selling in other words, Battlefield 6. On the left side you're going to see the free-to-play games on on the actual Y axis itself, cuz zero dollars is free to
graph, I'll be honest. Like, even though I don't understand the beginning like

correctly,
[laughter]
but I love this graph because it doesn't talk about like what is the best game per somebody's opinion, or what was the best game of the year because it was launched this year. This has all the games. It has like Grand Theft Auto V here still, probably the online version. It has the EA Sports, it has the Monster Hunter World, the Call of Duty, it has Marvel Rivals, Skate, all of that on the same graph. And we can see from this one how well Battlefield 6 has fared. And the main question here is the bubble chart is the most striking visual really in the whole report in my opinion. And Battlefield 6 sits at, according to this one, about 20 million downloads, and that is 20 million downloads at $70 price point. So, it is well ahead of every other premium game out there, EA Sports FC included, both versions. Yet, when I'm looking at this graph, I saw on pretty much the same level, there's Skate.

And there's Marvel Rivals. I was actually really surprised how how well Skate has done. And then so, the question here is like, what does it tell us about the state of premium market that the best-selling game of the year, the 70 bucks AAA title in the world where free-to-play is supposedly won? So, I think it tells us that the market isn't as simple as free-to-play winning, premium dying. Free-to-play is huge. It's here to stay. It's no longer the cool new kid on the block. We have entrenched incumbents who are devouring the mass majority of free-to-play time. And taking players who've invested time getting good at the game, paying into it, have friends who they habitually play with. It's harder to break out in free-to-play compared to premium, it seems like. You can see this in this chart. There's there's four breakout free-to-play games in 2025 with more than 10 million downloads. There's nine premium games with more than 10 million downloads this year. And it's pretty wide variety. There's, you know, EA Sports FC 25 and 26, of course, Battlefield 6. There's also indie games, Repo and Peak. There's double-A games in Split Fiction, Arc Raiders, and Claire Obscure. Demands for remakes, remasters, Grand Theft Auto

V enhanced, which almost sold as much units as EA Sports FC 26 in 2025. There's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remaster as well as an example of that. Basically, premium seeing huge demand and wide diversity in demand as well. When you look at free-to-play, the story is a little bit different. The top downloaded free-to-play games of the year are Skate, Marvel Rivals, Delta Force: Deadlock. And there's a pattern here. It's some of the biggest publishers in the world, and NetEase with the Marvel IP, Tencent reviving the old Delta Force IP, Valve, who has huge credibility in the hardcore gaming community. They're all moving into the shooter space. And it seems that it's only giant publishers and only shooters seeing free-to-play launch attention, with nothing else really except Skate really breaking out in a big way. And even these games, they they tend to have huge spikes around launch, then MAU kind of decreases over time until a steady state is found. And these steady states aren't really that close to what the incumbents like Fortnite, PUBG, and and Call of Duty are pulling. So, so maybe free-to-play incumbents have {quote} {unquote} won in terms of winning players and time, but it really feels like this space, free-to-play PC

console, is getting kind of saturated. And and players aren't just playing their free-to-play competitive of choice, they're also playing social experiences and single-player games. So, if you want to break out, it seems like premium is is kind of the safer road to It also seems that there's these hybrid games being launched where the company launches a game and it's like, it's not free, it's going to be 30 bucks, 35. It puts it like in the middle, like Arc Raiders, for example. And yet it has the components of free-to-play. So, they're kind of trying to get both of best worlds, and it's understandable because sometimes what happens is like you come up with a free-to-play game and it has no audience, and suddenly you lost all your money. And so, these companies are thinking like, well, let's say they get the other 10 million installs, 5 million installs, at least we'll get a payback of the game, and then we can continue the momentum with the free-to-play element. Like, are you seeing this trend becoming more prevalent, these sort of a hybrid versions? I took a look at the top In the past 30 days, what are the the top games by MAU that that came out in 2025?

So, we we can talk about Battlefield 6. It's comparable to like NBA 2K26. Battlefield 6 MAU is more like 6.8 million is what we estimated at. Marvel Rivals is about 8.1 million in MAU. Number 12 game by MAU in the past 30 days. But Arc Raiders is at number 11 with 8.8 million. So, it really seems like, you know, you don't need to have a AAA price, you don't need to be free-to-play to get these long tails of of live ops. You can you can have this middle price point and kind of hedge your bets a little bit in terms of making sure that you get some payback around launch, which seeing how a lot of these games fare after launch and having that huge spike at launch and then kind of trailing off a bit afterwards, it seems like kind of a smart play. I I I would go for that, I'll be honest. But it really depends on the type of organization you have. If you have the organization to actually do free-to-play cadence, then then sure. If you don't, then go with one-off. And if you kind of don't know if you should invest more into the studio size and that content funnel, go in the middle. That seems to be the way. Yeah, that

makes a lot of sense to me. I wanted to just touch upon the success of Battlefield 6 and the counterintuitive finding in the report because EA deliberately avoided the known channels. There's no YouTube, the TikTok, the Instagram in terms of the pre-launch window. And instead they defaulted into Facebook, Reddit, linear TV, you know, just basic billboard advertising. For a AAA game in 2025, that needs really that viral reach. That seems to be almost like a malpractice of marketing. Can you walk us through what the data actually shows about why this type of a again, weird marketing strategy, similar that they did with Apex. It was against all the rule books. Like, why did it work again for EA when they do everything {quote} {unquote} wrong? Yeah, this is something that honestly surprised me, too. But yeah, kind of brought back memories of of Apex and the kind of creator focused launches there. So, I pulled some quick stats to kind of

dive into this a little bit further focusing on the US in Q4 2025. How we arrive at ad spend at Sensor Tower and Pathmatics is a bit convoluted, so I wanted to focus on ad impressions just based on our panel. Looking at raw impressions, Sensor Tower Pathmatics estimates the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 drove around three times more impressions on Instagram than it did TikTok. Around eight times more impressions on YouTube than Battlefield 6. We're looking at the share in terms of strategies, how much of their impressions went to these different channels. The Black Ops 7's impressions that went to TikTok, that share was around 1.7 times higher than Battlefield 6. Instagram it's about 1.9 times higher. YouTube it's about 4.4 times higher. So, I I feel pretty confident in saying that in comparison to Black Ops 6 and other PC console launches, Battlefield 6 did lean less into these channels and more into others. But as for why the shift immediately contribute to success, that's the best I can do in terms of really feeling definitive is is say that the channel strategy of the best-selling game of the year looked really different than some other PC console games. I think it's fair to say that Battlefield 6 was quite viral around launch even

without paying into some of these viral channels during the beta test as well. Tons of creators are streaming, tons of people watched. Uh by the way, if EA does pay a creator, that doesn't show up in these ad mix estimates. And the channels that Battlefield 6 did lean into that we saw in terms of ad impression share like Facebook, desktop video, Reddit. These all have kind of these older male audiences with disposable income, which makes sense for Battlefield 6 to target. So, whether that's marketing malpractice in Battlefield 6 could have been even more successful if it had allocated more budget to YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok isn't really something I can disprove or prove. I'm just saying yeah, they they looks like they did something different and yeah, 20 million units sold is is a pretty good benchmark to clear. 100% and then I'm sure somebody will try to do it again and and fail miserably by doing the wrong things which EA succeeded by doing the wrong thing. So, It's not there. It's not there. But EA. So, I want to talk about some of these indie games. You kind of you kind of mentioned them a little bit. You talked about Repo or r e p o. You talked about

Peak a little bit. They are the second and third largest or best-selling PC console games of 2025. And so, the question there is not only how incredible this is for these clearly indie games to beat Monster Hunter World, Hogwarts Legacy, Red Dead Redemption 2, and so forth. But what is it about these sort of a content creator and friend group experiences that resonates so strongly with players today? Yeah, I I would say that these games understand that probably the core PC console gamer experience in 2026 is social with friends. Repo and Peak, these are designed to be played with a small group of friends getting on Discord regularly specifically to play with each other. And this is just how so many people in Gen Alpha and Gen Z to Millennials play today. Uh these games create moments where everyone is laughing and yelling at each other that kind of define the ultimate gaming night that everyone wants to have. Competition obviously huge motivator for a lot of people driving motivation behind a lot of very

successful games, but there are so many competitive experiences out there already. It feels like the market might be saturated there and not everyone wants a competitive experience all the time. So, playing on a team with friends in in contrast, I feel like it's something almost every social gamer enjoys. These games tap into that. As it happens, all of these attributes also make these games attractive to streamers and influencers who give these indie games the reach that they need to cut through the noise and go viral. When you're laughing and yelling at other streamers you're collabing with, there's humor in these games, horror, high-stakes moments like falling off the side of the mountain. These all give creators something to react to, generate the clips they need to attract new viewers to their channels. And when these new viewers and established audiences see the game and say, "Hey, that looks fun. I want to play." they go back and sell it to their friends. Another viral moment, it costs $10 or less, which actually might play better with some audiences than free-to-play making the process pretty frictionless and increasing the virality factor. I'll also mention that graphics aren't as important as they might have been in the past. The younger generations are playing Roblox, which isn't exactly photorealistic. They prize the social experience of the game above the graphics level at least

for this type of gaming. And that's not to say there isn't a market for high definition AAA games. Obviously, there is, but when the visual change compared to games from 10 years ago is not that big, it's hard to make graphics a selling point. It's just not possible to blow everyone's minds, you know, like Final Fantasy 10 cutscenes when that came out. The get the gap is just not that big.
Yeah. I I'll say that it wasn't just these two. These they're probably the best examples, but it wasn't just indie games that capitalized on this friend group content creator wave. Our creators, I would say, is part of this wave as well. Very playable solo, but great co-op with friends experience as well. Uh I would also say anecdotally for me, Claire Obscur Expedition 33 despite being a single-player RPG game was also a friend experience for me because my friends and I we recommended this game to everyone else. We recommended to each other. We streamed it to each other in Discord. We talked about the story, listened to the soundtrack, cosplayed the characters even. Uh so, I feel like the era of social media virality means there's there's so much noise, but there's also a lot of potential for someone and something genuinely moves a lot of people deeply and inspires them to share and speak out.
And apart from this sort of a word of mouth that you describing, have you seen

more professional streaming, sharing, maybe even ads? Like I don't know if you use TikTok, but have you seen a lot of this content, this sort of indie content on TikTok? Uh I Sadly, I don't use TikTok. Maybe I should start. To be honest, one of the the main spaces that I do happen to follow is the Japanese streaming space. One really interesting thing that they do there is they have these big collab events where they'll get on a Minecraft server or a GTA server or something and all play with each other. So, I feel like these experiences, social experiences are also seeing huge adoption in among streaming circles, but also it's it spreads in, you know, GTA 5 is still one of the biggest games in the world by by MAU. Yeah. No, it's I'm I'm just asking because if something is organically shareable, then that usually means that the networks or the platforms, however you want to call it, the overlords, you can call them. But but these platforms see that they're being shared and so, they jump on it and create products around it to make the sharing monetizable.

[laughter]
I see. Yeah. And and uh if the content is shareable, then then I'm sure there there's going to be different type of tools to to make it easier. So, you must be playing in an in a social uh just saying that you're a true fan. And in addition to playing these indie games, Expedition 33, and so forth, you've probably been playing also the AAA games, the ones from the big publishers. How are they viewing, in your opinion, these smaller highly social experiences? Do you think that they're taking a page out of their viral playbook or are they still kind of going for those blockbuster moments? I think that they're still definitely down on these massive blockbusters. These are the the moments that really make them work, I think, as as a business model. Peak is probably the biggest success of the social archetype of the year, but at $8 per unit, it's only like 60 million post-steam cut. So, they would need like a bunch of those to really make a huge impact. They're still definitely doing

these AAA games. That said, the the ROI of a game like Peak really attractive, obviously. So, I think we are seeing some experimentation with smaller social formats. Obviously, there's things like Hazelight EA, the It Takes Two split fiction, great successes. They have the whole whole friend pass as well, which which I think was was a great idea. So, they're great successes, not enough to single-handedly warp revenue like like Battlefield 6 might. But lastly, I would say that AAA blockbusters and games riding the social trend don't necessarily need to be separate things. Just because social experiences don't need amazing graphics doesn't mean players will reject a game for having them. I I appreciate the fifth largest game by average 2025 MAU and still one of the most streamed games in the world as I mentioned before is Grand Theft Auto 5 Legacy, deeply social experience. And I fully expect Grand Theft Auto 6 to be almost the culmination of this trend despite the assumed AAA price with the existing GTA audience adopting the game, so many new people coming in, streamers adopting it, friend groups playing it, and just creating a huge gravitational pull. And with GTA 6 coming in and probably having that that online capability from the get-go

at least pretty quickly after the launch, that's going to be huge time sink with with everybody owning the other main game as well. We haven't talked about mobile, so let's talk about mobile now. So, here I have a bunch of graphs and this is showing basically the trends that most of the listeners know. It talks about mobile gaming revenue rising only by 1% despite the downloads essentially falling. And here we can see the in-app purchase revenue over the levels of 2022. I don't know if they're about at the levels 2021, which seem to be at sort of a peak levels. Yes, we can inflation adjust and it probably will be significantly lower, etc., etc. But the story is that the market is not growing in terms of in-app purchases. Of course, we don't know the effect of web shops at least yet. I'm sure Sensor Tower is working on that. We don't know the size of in-app ad market really and the effect of that. But what we can see is is sort of extreme maturity and with downloads declining

and total hours spent kind of plateauing as well, it's unlikely that we are going to see growth anytime soon, right? That's fair to say. That's definitely the pattern we're seeing. But your question earlier, Sensor Tower is devoted to measuring the digital economy and we are going to try to be covering the entire gaming space. So, I'm really excited to see what I can show you guys next year in the state of gaming, honestly. But yeah, it's definitely mature and when I delve a little bit deeper into it, looks like this is consolidation of growth. So, the share of revenue for the top 25, the top 50, and the top 10 or top 100 didn't really change drastically year over year. Top 25 and top 50 actually ticked down a little bit in revenue share of the whole market, but growth is concentrated in the top 50 for sure. So, the top 50 accounted for 180% of that 1% revenue growth in 2025. That means that the rest of the market as a whole it's kind of a more nuanced story that I don't want to get into too much detail, but another stat that I thought was interesting, 24% of 2025's top 50 were not in the top 50 in 2024. So, it's not like that it's all

the same games, there's some movement in there, as well as the, you know, the last war survival and whiteout taking the number one and number two spots. They were in the top 10, I believe, in 2024, as well, but that's still quite a jump up into number one and number two. On top of that, number of games clearing revenue thresholds is shrinking. So, for example, the number of games with revenue above 100 million per year in 2025, that dropped 4%. So, yes, top level trend kind of just boring 1% growth, but the growth was concentrated into these top 50 games. In the middle, it feels like this thinning. It does definitely feels like it's it's harder to scale in 2025 than 2024. Do you have a hypothesis what the reason is for the market maturity? Is it the IDFA? Is it that we are just not growing because everybody has already the latest device and we've downloaded the games and we keep playing? Is it as Supercell CEO famously had in his blog post of the West is just not innovating? Like, what is it? I would say, honestly, like a lot of the things that you say sound pretty

possible. Like, market saturation, everyone has a smartphone. IDFA is certainly a thing where it's harder to to target and and get those high-value players in your game and it's requiring different strategies to really succeed and scale compared to previous times when before IDFA. One thing that that stayed in my mind is you said that really all the growth of the market and overall the revenue is going more and more towards that top 50 publishers, right? The 1% growth, it's not a lot of growth. Most of that growth did go into these these top 50. But the revenue share of this top 50 is actually about the same year-over-year, interesting.
Got it. How much is the revenue share of the total market? It's like 76, maybe? I remember it's a lot, but it's not as much as on PC. So, PC is even more concentrated, which is funny because oftentimes you would hear that mobile developers, because it's so difficult on mobile, it's so difficult to scale, it's so difficult to find your niche, these publishers are looking at PC as a

growth channel because they are looking at the peaks and and the other indie titles doing so well and they're thinking that, "Hey, we can come in with all our knowledge." But PC is even more concentrated than mobile. And even harder to advertise than on mobile, despite the IDFA. Yeah, I believe that, for sure. Another thing about the graphs that you have here is when you look at the time spent alongside the revenue, do you have a hypothesis of the story here? Because on the time spent, total hours spent is relatively stable now for the couple of years. The in-app purchase revenue is slightly growing. Downloads are going down. It almost, I would say, that players are spending more time in existing games and those existing games are monetizing better. Yeah, that makes sense to me, especially whenever the a lot of the growth is getting concentrated in these top 50 games. It also sort of depends on which genre and in region you're looking at, too. Strategy was actually the only genre to grow downloads year-over-year, I believe, especially across major regions, North America, Asia, and

Europe. So, some other genres, shooters, look, maybe squeeze shapes revenue up, time is flat or down in most most regions, so that's kind of higher revenue per download. Maybe that's just higher efficiency. There's a lot of new launches like like Delta Force on the market, especially in China. So, yeah, different markets telling some some different stories, adding up to like 1.3% increase in revenue, 0.9% increase in time spent. Yeah, I'm looking at the other graphs, so this is on page 31. They have I should [clears throat] have probably said the other pages for for folks watching this, but this will be on Deconstructor of Fun with all these images, so you can also grab it there with the links to the full report. But again, so this is on page 31, which just says strategy one in 2025 and then there's the whole matrix chart that shows different genres and different regions, how well they've succeeded in those. And of course, you can see here the strategy is doing mighty well in Asia, North America, Europe, so basically everywhere seeing the growth. And it's interesting because all the strategy games are made in China.

[laughter]
And and then there used to be at least one from Scopely, the Star Trek Fleet Command, it was somewhere in the top 10, then it kind of slipped to top 20, now even that one is kind of not there. What is it about strategy now that keeps producing these massive global revenue machines while other genres, especially when I'm looking at this, action, RPG, simulation are really suffering at the same time? It's a bunch of things, I think, compounding on each other. They have these really interesting in-live ops and game events, the alliances, the the competitive events, these really create durable engagement and retention. Monetization tightly coupled to to time and social competition. You really want to be able to to pay to win your wars, to not let your alliance down. That produces some pretty high LTV, which lets them fund really aggressive acquisition, makes the winners global, where they're able to go to all sorts of different markets. And these these aren't things that we see in other genres a lot of the time. I guess the closest cousin that that comes to mind are some of the Chinese MMOs like Perfect World, where

guilds kind of mirror alliance obligation, there's cross-server PvP and some other scheduled conflicts that create these spending moments and relative power between players is an important motivation as well in in this genre, as well. Of course, mobile MMOs never really jumped to the West. Mobile players here really prefer, you know, PC console games like WoW and and Final Fantasy, it seems like. But I would I would say the lesson here is that what makes these 4X games work is not necessarily a 4X only special, that these lessons of reusable economic and social systems based on real player motivations are I think they're working here in strategy first, but I think they're also applicable beyond strategy, for sure. I actually had a webinar today with AppsFlyer and we're talking about this. One of the panelists was suggesting that we kind of have this loop because the amount of money put in into advertising in North America creates this loop where the in-app ad revenue also increases in North America. And so, by feeding this loop, we're essentially feeding the machine that is

self-fulfilling and thus there would be opportunities if you look outside the key North American market for growth and and so forth. But like one North American market is is first of all, that tier one West market is very familiar for most of the game developers, it's culturally it's kind of hard to make a game for a specific audience that is more of a niche. Like, if you're making a game for Middle East, you better be from Middle East to make a game for Middle East.
[laughter]
So, like it's a and and the same thing goes for for key Asian markets, same goes for the European less because European and and and US audience has pretty much the same taste, but, you know, Oceania isn't and so forth. So, what I'm kind of like leading towards is, when you made this this graph, are you seeing that there are certain types of opportunities in certain regions where certain types of genres are doing particularly well and that could be interesting for a Western developer or publisher? Yeah, I So, I looked into

this a little bit a little bit more. And honestly, at the high level, it's really just strategy, puzzle, and shooter that I'm seeing. Going into some a little bit deeper, there there's some interesting stories. So, one is an interactive story, actually, in the US, which is Love and Deep Space. Made in China.
Uh that that's come out. Another amazing China game, for sure. It's really interesting. It's the number one interactive story game by a mile, like 19X more revenue than the number two interactive story game worldwide, but that's not just worldwide. And if you look at the US only, it drove five times more revenue than the number two interactive story game. And it's typical like Asian high production value 3D anime art style, but it's still, you know, hitting and and landing in in America, for sure. But the the really interesting about this game is the way it monetizes. It has these handsome anime men with whom the player develops relationships through cinematic story chapters. It has other gameplay like real-time combat missions, but the story content, often in the form of basically dates, are attached to powerful items that are locked behind gacha events. So, that's kind of how how this this game is is working and I find it really really interesting to follow since its release.

Other stories, battle royale in the US, basically Free Fire has been doing really well here. Interestingly, it had some huge growth in the US over 2025. It's now the number one mobile shooter in the US in revenue. They had a lot of major spikes alongside collabs. The the collab with Naruto is a really big one. And they had a release of a really rare cosmetic that did really well in terms of driving spikes, but the overall revenue trend throughout the year was positive, despite declining downloads and active users. So, it's not something I haven't looked into a ton, but it it does seem like a really interesting story. One more thing, I guess. Survival in China, there's there's this game called Tomb Busters. It looks like Repo on mobile to a degree. It's a kind of a com- order comedy co-op extraction game, one to four players. A lot of the same social factors it feels like is Repo driving its success. So, yeah, maybe maybe we'll see some of these social experiences jumping to mobile in the next year. With There are some other, you know, social games, of course, in in the West that are working, like Roblox chief among them. I mean, you mentioned it, so now I want to talk about China. So, actually uh I covered this in in some charts in my previous presentation. I actually pulled

it here. Look at this. Look at this slide. Look
[laughter]
Oh, no. So, yeah, my my presentations are fun. But basically, what I'm when I was looking at it and and just really going through like the top 20 publishers, there's already what, 11 or no, there's eight of them are coming in from China. And what's really interesting is that that there doesn't seem to be any stop for this. And I used an example of Merge 2 where the Finnish company Metacore with their Merge Mansion, they had the end mystery puzzle game, and then came the Israeli Travel Town and kind of beat them and grew the market by by basically twice. And then the Chinese started coming in, Gossip Harbor, that just beat Candy Crush. Insane growth to already. And then they released another game that was already doing better than than previous number one. And now even century games, which is, you know, behind the King Shot and White Out Survival, they are also doing tremendously well in casual games. So, where I have a kind of tried to look at

the the entire publishing and I work for one, by the way, they are the best company I work for. But anyway, this is great workplaces. But when when you think about why they're so good, they have these big team size, like really really big team size. They have the 996 culture of extreme like they're skillful at hard work, which is you're not born with it, you just have to learn how to how to work hard. They're pragmatic in terms of how they develop, so there's not that sort of a oh, we didn't invent it here and thus we can't use this mechanic. It's like no, this mechanic work, this works, this style works, we're just going to use it. Monetization, as you mentioned multiple time, it's at the core of the development and they don't have this sort of a almost like a stigma with monetization. We can't do this, we we can only do cosmetics, we can't do this Like no, you can do anything because monetization is is the lifeblood of your game. This allows you to acquire users and stay on top. And then the approach of development factories where when they like a certain genre, they would just go with five teams against it and help, you

know, not help, but basically put in the bats and the shots on goal making sure that one of them lands, maybe even two, like we're seeing with century games. And and final one is the structural advantage that they have. They do have a bigger target market. Like when you account for China, that's 700 players. I mean, they do play around with how they calculate their population, but
[laughter]
but assuming assuming the calculations are somewhat correct, that's 700 million players that we can't access to. So, I'm kind of going through these these elements, what does your data show and tell about how these Chinese publishers cracked the western market so efficiently? Because it's not only about, you know, having more people.
[laughter]
Yeah, of course. Thank you for this breakdown. This is actually really interesting for me to see. Working at at Sensor Tower, I get a lot of access to the data and so we know a lot of the what, but the why and the how is something that we we don't get a lot of visibility into. But yeah, looking at what's making Century Games so successful. By the way, if we're

looking at more recent data like January, February, I think they're now our number two mobile publisher globally.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh they're moving up, which is which is pretty pretty insane. Cuz number one's Tencent, no one's ever beat Well, you know, yeah, Tencent's going to acquire them. But remember when I was doing my presentation, that was last November, yes, they were already twice the size of Supercell and Supercell's Clash Royale hadn't even, you know, started declining rapidly at that point. Yeah, I mean Supercell's also Yeah, exactly. Who are we kidding? Chinese company.
[laughter]
One other uh I guess element that I that I that I didn't see in the immediately in the the the six bullets that you called out there uh is just the UA strategy, I guess. So, looking at their downloads for for White Out Survival, Sensor Tower estimates 68% of their US downloads come from paid display, 15% come from paid search. So, they're absolutely scaling through UA. They have this whole strategy their ASO as well, which we might just talk about later. But it's definitely scaling through UA and going through all these different creatives and having these huge like creative

factories and finding these concepts that maybe western companies are a little bit shy of. Yes. They're willing to lean into that, for sure. Pragmatic. Yes. Also, just talking about the monetization, yeah. I think I mentioned this a bit before, but players really motivated to monetize with alliance pressure peaking with these huge monthly inter-server PvP events creating huge LTV. It's it's a flywheel, you know, they they have this huge deep LTV that they're getting with their live ops. Really executing on the UA side as well. Art style obviously universally readable and appealing, kind of reminiscent of Supercell in some ways. And yeah, like you said, they didn't just double down on White Out Survival. I think FunPlus Last War Survival, they they're kind of really all in on on Last War, but Century Games they launched King Shot, which is the top game by 2025 revenue growth. Expanded into casual with Match Merge 2 Tasty Travels. And yeah, now they're now they're number two overall. So, he really really interesting story to watch with with Century Games for the past couple of year. And there's a lot of competition between these Chinese public let's just

just take strategy as an example. Like you can see even the competition now we talk about Century Games. What three years ago we would be talking about was it Rise of Civilizations? What was that? Lilith, right? Rise of Kingdoms? Rise of Kingdoms. Like new comes in, the previous goes down. It's it's really really interesting. Yeah. I I don't know. Like how do you succeed against these companies? Cuz like yes, they they are really great at strategy, but now they are crushing casual with merge two games. When are they going to be owning match three? Like what? By summer? We'll we'll see. I don't know. That's a that's a pretty high mountain to climb. It's a tough question. I I feel like a lot of things you brought up in in in your slide are kind of tough to match from a western perspective because it's a lot of this is is on the the execution side. You know, creative iteration volume, live ops cadence. These publishers are really good at finding concepts that convert, whether

it's in in strategy or or in match and scaling them across different markets. All these games are not just big in Asia, they're able to penetrate America and Europe and they beat these tier one western markets. They're able to keep pressure on long enough to compound. They're able to use a lot of these UA and a lot of these tactics, you know, the 996 and so forth that maybe western publishers aren't or can't do. Beating them, it's it's it's a tough question cuz you can't really do a lot of the same things that they're doing. Why? I mean, when you when you break it down like yes, they they yeah, they will beat you on cost of talent. So, that allows them probably to scale bigger, but at the same time like European talent is not that expensive and Chinese talent is actually not that cheap. So, you probably can find a happy medium where you can scale. They will beat you on content volume just because of the amount of work they can do. And the team size. They will beat you on iteration speed. Like we see them they they don't they don't do these

like, you know, let's let's ship an update, take a break, think about what it comes next. It's like no, even even when when I remember like working at FunPlus and working on strategy games, the way the teams were structured was very different than I had used to. So, it wasn't like one game team. Really? It was multiple games, but then live ops and marketing was its own team. So, they would do live ops because the engines are same, so they would do live ops across the portfolio from from that central team. I believe Machine Zone adopted that type of a tactic cuz they were really looking at the the way the Chinese are working. So, it wasn't even that like you have the creative lead and they do the things inside the game and they're kind of siloed and they're supported by marketing. It's like no, there's the publishing team and they are running these things across portfolio and and that allowed the learnings to go really fast and also moving the events from from one to another and trying at a bigger audience because you have multiple different games that are essentially same products. And and

again, like there's yeah, and the final part is like technological advantage. I know everybody keeps talking about AI, how it's giving this, how it's giving that. Chinese are using AI a lot and then they have proprietary models inside these companies. Like whatever you're thinking, they are already doing it and they're doing it cheaper. So, how do you compete against that? What's coming to mind I guess is like the latest big really western hit was like Monopoly Go, which brought this coin leader thing to the market, had a bunch of different new things attached to it using the the IP and finding a loop that really allowed them to to monetize really well in in in the coin leader genre. I think you mentioned two things. I'm going to ex- extrapolate from that. You said global cultural IP that resonates with wide audiences. That'll be Monopoly IP. You really talked about gameplay, right? So, if you find that scope really replayable gameplay that you can do over and over and over again, western developers are actually really good at the core gameplay. But if you look at the other indie

successes, like what do you think makes them successful in this market? There's so many cool games that come out on indie and don't make it.
[laughter]
But it's just such a huge experimental passion sector where everyone is making games just because they love games and they want to make something new and interesting. So, maybe a return to that sort of culture is where we can outcompete Chinese, you know, the match merge two, they didn't invent that. Forex strategy wasn't something that Chinese publishers invented as far as I know. So, yeah, maybe just keeping the new core gameplay move that takes over the world is where we need to pivot to. I got to that because regarding to what we're discussing, you mentioned like we talked a lot about shareable elements that you share from those games. And that kind of leads to what has been used to grow the games like Discord communities. I think that's inherently very western way to distribute games is the word of mouth and then of course Reddit or Discord used being used as a platform to do that on a scale as well as the influencers. And then the other

part with these indie games is, you know, who makes indie games? Well, it's really really compact, usually very very senior teams that are very very focused on one thing. They don't go to conferences, they don't do BD, they don't do anything. Like they're very focused on making the most perfect game in a very very small team. You can't be more focused. You can't be more compact. You can't be, you know, more community distributed. So, it kind of like it feels like those are the ways for the western publishers to still find the success if if we kind of get back to um more compact, more senior, more fo- more focused team, more more distributed through communities, using global cultural IPs and very very focused on the core gameplay. Cuz I feel like that's still something that the Chinese developers aren't automatically doing better. Yeah, I would agree with that for sure. I wonder how much we can extrapolate from Steam indie games to to mobile though. Is that Is that a comparison that we can

easily make? I think when we're talking about efficiency. And when we're talking about like how can a smaller team compete against bigger teams? Like, well, they have to be more efficient. How they can be more efficient? And everybody says, well, they just need to do cloud code. It's like, no, there are there are other ways. I mean, sure. Yes, [laughter] use the other appropriate tools, but there's also the other way. Don't do all the meetings in the world. Don't go to all the events in the world. Focus. Just, you know, close the door and focus on what you're doing and it will be probably better. I [clears throat] think that increases efficiency. It's just just focus. Yeah. And and that's what what they need to do. Like, they they are not big companies. So, there's not going to be a manager meeting and a call there and a call there and somebody's going to do this and then you have to go to this. Like, yeah, you're just you're just hammering it in. Just in the zone all day. Yeah, just making the game. Imagine that. Like, how efficient you are if you don't even have an email address.
[laughter]

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and are a key partner in their success. AppsFlyer, where your app's potential meets performance. I wanted to jump in on the trend six. Yeah. Yeah, you work at a big company. You know how it is with all the meetings. That that definitely eats up the uh the time and the focus. Yeah, you can debate whether we're big or not, but we do have meetings. That's true. Yeah. There were there was a web store trend. So, web store promotion trended in 2025. And this is the uh the trend how to bypass app store fees. And and particularly probably started in casino games and they're being definitely ahead of the curve, followed closely by the RPGs and the strategy games. So, the question on this, like looking at page 10, the web from store promotion heavily trended in 2025. I mean, we work with with App charts, so we're we're familiar with that. And since players have to sacrifice their convenience to buy off platform, how much extra value does a publisher typically need to offer to

successfully convert players and and encourage them actually to move from this safe haven of Apple and Google onto a different side and give their you know, credit card information. Yeah, yeah. So, we see a couple different tiers when we see these these web store promotions on on mobile games. Sort of the standard baseline that is kind of always available on these web offers is usually around 10 to 20%. Usually delivered extra currency for the same price as the App Store. A lot of times you'll see kind of first-time hook offers to get people to try it for the first time, maybe in bonuses around like 35 to 100% to break the initial entry barrier. Some publishers use discount coupons like 15% maybe around for or promo codes instead of adding extra items. And others, a lot of times value can spike during special events up to around 90% or scale based on a player's loyalty tier, which can go up to around like 30%. So, yeah, those are some of the the different tiers for the bonuses you can get from using a web store that we're seeing in the market at the moment. Mhm. And when looking at different genres, I

know that this is coming to Sensor Tower. The way I've traditionally seen is that they work, and well, as this report says, in casinos and more of mid-core games. And that they don't really work in casual games like match threes or match twos or merges or or other type of things. Is that just my feeling or is it something that you're seeing in data? No, I I think that's that's lines up with what I'm seeing on our Playliner live ops data is a lot of times these web stores, like you said, a lot of them are in casino. We do see a decent amount on mid-core. Whiteout Survival has these frost stars that they they sell on their web store. War Robots, Marvel Strike Force. But yeah, it's it is a bit rarer to see them in in the casual space. It feels like casino players definitely want as much of the currency as they can get a lot of the time, especially the whales, so they're willing to go off the platform and and do that. And the kind of the similar story with mid-core where they're maybe a bit more strategic in thinking about the game and not just

passing the time. So, it's like convenience is less of a factor. How widely are you seeing web stores being in the market? Like, are we reaching the sort of a saturation level where most of the publishers have web stores already enabled or is there a way to go? Uh I don't have any specific data, but my my feeling is that it's not reached saturation yet. I think it's still a lot of the time still like the the the top games that are that are having this the web store option for for players. That's just my feeling though. I need to actually go in and and make sure that that's still correct at some point, so maybe I'll get back to you on that one.
Okay. Jump in into app store ranking is the hidden battlefield. You can see that Apple search ads is is the cross-category battleground. Something that you mentioned, how well these Chinese strategy games have been surfaced in search ads. So, looking at this, like Roblox has really branded the search traffic score with 9.1, comparable to Google and TikTok at this

point as a as a search term. And this is an extraordinary level of brand gravity. Meanwhile, your data shows that Fortnite is actively bidding on competitor keywords like Roblox. Interesting, they do have the brain rot game. And winning share of voice. Oh, yeah. So, the question here is like, how much of top game success in 2025 is actually being fought and won inside the app store search result, invisible to most developers. Yeah, I'd say it's it's not insignificant. It's not the entire, you know, actual success is a million different factors of the how good the game is and monetization and execution, of course. But this is the battle that maybe a lot of people aren't as familiar with. So, yeah, Roblox branded traffic score, that's just extraordinary external demand creation. They've built up this brand over years. Uh actually not inside the App Store, but through, you know, ecosystem effects, creator networks, social platforms, cultural elements, all these things.

But however, once that demand exists at the App Store search results, that that definitely becomes a high-intent battleground. So, branded queries like Roblox, these are some of the strongest intent keywords in the funnel and it's it's not surprise surprising to see competitors like Fortnite strategically bidding and in winning share of voice, it looks like, to capture some incremental share of voice. So, yeah, a meaningful portion of marginal growth definitely being optimized and defended within the App Store search, particularly around these these branded competitor and and genre-defining terms. And that that layer of competition is often invisible to developers, but it plays a material role in monetizing existing demand efficiently. So, it's mostly existing demand that they're going after here when it's it's the brand these branded keywords. That said, yeah, search typically amplifies brand momentum rather than creates it. And the biggest games win first by building gravity outside the store and then by capturing and defending it effectively inside the search results. Sensor Tower estimates that 88% of Roblox's 322 million downloads in 2025 were organic. 74% of Candy Crush Saga's 2025 downloads were organic is what

we're estimating. So, for games with established brands, defending that demand with brand defense campaigns seems to be pretty important.
Yeah. And what's really interesting is Block Blast being number two. Like, clear number two. That game is doing phenomenally well. It's insane. It's part of me wants to believe that Block Blast is generic enough to be a generic term, but my other part of me is like, no, people are searching for Block Blast.
game being played most in in airplanes, like by far. Yeah, it used to be like you would see Candy Crush for a while, then it was definitely I and I still see Royal Match, but the most what you're seeing is block blast. You know, but yeah, block blast, I don't know, it's just everyone's downloading it somehow. How how typical do you see that companies engineer their names? By companies or publishers, I'm really thinking about Chinese publishers. Because I know you know, we're most of my career in Western publishers, we always take the meaning super seriously.

Like we're making you know, legacy of ourselves, but but when I look at the other names for Chinese title, like coming out of China, they are you know, they they sound sound almost awkward and you're like, "Wow, that's a search engine optimization name." Yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely something we see a lot. Yeah, it's very common, I think.
Last war survival.
[laughter]
Yeah, war, survival, these are some of the highest intent Top battle. They just put it into the name and that's how it it it contributes, you know, to a to a ranking higher and getting those label organic downloads. So, yeah, this is definitely it's a meta metadata strategy to improve organic visibility on these high intent category terms. Yeah, our data consistently shows that titles containing these strong genre defining keywords significantly more likely to have to rank for competitive generic queries, particularly when supported by paid acquisition and strong conversion signals. In other words, paid UA may drive initial velocity, but

metadata engineering really helps convert that momentum into durable organic presence. So, name alone obviously doesn't guarantee success. Ranking sustainability on generic terms still depends heavily on engagement, download velocity, et cetera. The title creates eligibility and performance that determines durability. So, long story short, yeah, it's an integral part of the growth marketing strategy.
Yeah, everything affects a little bit. There's no one kingmaker. It's the puzzle of them and that is why this report is 96 pages long. 97 if we count the last one if we count the first page. So, nearly 100 pages.
that's 40 minutes of my It's interactive. It's really good and I very much suggest that everybody downloads it because we covered only seven trends inside of an hour. I would say it's a little bit more than scratching the surface, but we took a bite of the other report. But there's so much more to see.
Yeah, there's so many things. Exactly. So, Sam, I think you guys are doing phenomenal job and I'm not saying

because Sensor Tower is a long time partner. I'm saying this because you honestly are doing phenomenal job with these reports and they're always always a pleasure to dive in because you're telling things and showing things that that are new, that you didn't get before. Like even, you know, even these naming conventions. Smaller things, but they're definitely something that you can learn from and adopt for your business. So, um huge thanks for coming on and Yeah, my pleasure. showing the light in the industry and talking Chinese developers with me. Of course, yeah. So, everybody, thank you for listening. There's link in the description for the report. If you haven't gotten it yet, go and get it. It's free. It's interactive. And there's going to be a blog post about this, so you can actually see the graphs that we went through and follow Sensor Tower because they have the best reports in the game. That's right. Yeah, follow us.
[laughter]
Sam, best of luck moving to Hawaii. Thank you so much to everybody. Bye. You did it. You made it [music] to the end

of the episode. As a fan of the show, it would help us out if you'd subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice. [music] Those stars and likes, while a small action on your part, mean a lot to us and help to grow the show. More importantly, [music] are you a member of the Deconstructor of Fun Slack group? If you have 5 years or more of games industry experience, go [music] to deconstructoroffun.com/slack and apply to join. Join the games industry's best professional community filled with peers [music] always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all the latest insights [music] from the Deconstructor of Fun content creators. Thanks for listening.