The State of Mobile Game and App Markets: H1 2022

The mobile app and gaming landscape underwent a significant strategic pivot during the first half of 2022, characterized by a transition from high-volume advertising to a quality-focused, data-driven methodology. Faced with rising user acquisition costs and the restrictive post-ATT environment, marketers reduced the total volume of mobile game creatives by nearly 30% year-over-year. This contraction reflects a broader industry shift toward precise traffic optimization, where performance metrics like Cost Per Purchase and In-App Purchase Return on Ad Spend have superseded raw install volume as the primary indicators of success.

Geographically, the United States remains the dominant market, commanding the highest share of traffic and the most expensive advertising costs. CPMs surged significantly during this period, rising 18% for mobile games and 64% for non-gaming applications. In response to these economic headwinds and privacy-related tracking limitations, advertisers have increasingly pivoted toward the Android ecosystem, which now hosts approximately 70% of mobile game creatives. Simultaneously, growth is being sought in emerging Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets to offset the saturation and high costs found in traditional Western strongholds.

To maintain performance, publishers are diversifying their acquisition channels, moving beyond traditional social media giants to include incentive-based traffic sources and search-driven discovery. App Store Optimization and Apple Search Ads have become critical components of visibility strategies, while the adoption of predictive analytics and first-party data collection allows developers to navigate the loss of IDFA-based targeting. By prioritizing user-generated content styles and optimizing opt-in prompts, which have reached success rates as high as 51% in certain hyper-casual segments, the industry is successfully recalibrating its approach to sustain long-term growth despite a challenging macroeconomic climate.