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State of the Industry Report: 2025
The blockchain gaming industry is undergoing a fundamental transition from speculative, token-driven models toward a disciplined, product-led future.
- Blockchain gaming funding has contracted significantly, falling from over $10 billion in 2022 to approximately $293 million in 2025.
- The industry is shifting from speculative, token-driven models toward a product-led approach that prioritizes high-quality gameplay and invisible blockchain infrastructure.
- Stablecoins have become a critical settlement layer, reducing transaction friction and volatility to improve player adoption.
Surviving "extinction events" in the games industry with Tyranno Studios' Michael Rubinelli
The games industry is defined by recurring extinction events, such as the transitions from 2D to 3D, console to online multiplayer, and premium to free-to-play models.
- The mobile games market is dominated by long-standing titles, with top-performing strategy games like Clash of Clans maintaining market leadership 13 years after their initial launch.
- Transitioning to new business models like free-to-play requires a shift from relying on personal creative intuition to a data-driven mindset where product decisions are validated by user behavior, churn rates, and testing.
- AI should be utilized to compress production schedules and accelerate the testing of ideas rather than as a replacement for human oversight; it makes good ideas testable faster but cannot turn bad ideas into good ones.
Inside General Intuition’s Push to Build Embodied AI Agents
General Intuition is advancing the development of embodied AI agents by utilizing billions of gameplay clips from the Metal platform to construct sophisticated world models.
- General Intuition is developing world models that simulate environments by predicting future frames based on user actions, allowing for interactive, embodied AI agents rather than just passive video generation.
- The company is leveraging a proprietary dataset from Medal, a platform for recording and sharing gameplay clips, to train agents on human behavior across diverse, consistent first-person perspectives.
- General Intuition aims to provide game developers with tunable AI bots that allow for skill-level adjustments (on a scale of 0 to 100) and steerable text-based prompts to control agent behavior.
How mobile devs use AI and Pikmin Bloom blossoms | Week in Mobile Games podcast E75
The mobile gaming industry is currently defined by a shift toward massive marketing expenditures, with budgets frequently surpassing $50 million to secure user acquisition.
- Pikmin Bloom has reached $100 million in lifetime revenue, with 2025 marking its most successful year to date at $34.8 million in revenue despite only having one month remaining in the year.
- Pikmin Bloom's monthly installs have approximately doubled between 2022 and 2025, while its revenue has more than quadrupled in the same period, indicating improved monetization efficiency.
- Industry experts at the Wiggin Games Summit suggest that the term 'casual' is increasingly inaccurate for mobile games like Royal Match or Candy Crush, as their player bases often exhibit high-engagement, 'hardcore' behavioral patterns.
Insights on AI, China and EU regulation from RovioCon and Slush 2025 | Week in Mobile Games podcast
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a period of intense structural transition, characterized by a contraction in venture capital interest and mounting regulatory headwinds.
- Chinese mobile game developers are increasingly dominating global market categories like 4X strategy and shooters, utilizing massive marketing teams—sometimes exceeding 200 people per game—to outcompete Western studios.
- Epic Games and Unity have formed a strategic partnership allowing developers to use Unity's in-app purchase SDK within Unreal Engine and publish Unity-built games directly into the Fortnite ecosystem to access its 500 million registered accounts.
- Investors are increasingly favoring non-gaming apps over game studios due to higher valuation multiples, with some AI platforms like Lovable reaching $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
The ultimate AI creative breakdown: Why Western studios are late & who dominates the meta?
Artificial intelligence has evolved from an experimental novelty into a foundational pillar of game production, fundamentally altering how studios approach user acquisition and creative development.
- By 2026, an estimated 50% of all game advertisements will be AI-driven as studios shift toward automated workflows like LoRAs, inpainting, and upscaling.
- Eastern developers currently dominate the market by aggressively utilizing AI to produce complex, schedule-based ad sequences that optimize conversion rates.
- Western studios are currently lagging in AI adoption, creating a production gap that threatens their ability to compete with top-performing mobile titles like Idle Lumber and Golden Goblins.
Max Barer talks on UA Creatives Optimization & Automation over AppsFlyer Fall Release.
Creative performance currently serves as the primary driver of success in mobile user acquisition, as advertisers must effectively navigate and outperform the algorithms utilized by various ad networks.
- Creative assets are the primary driver of UA performance, as success depends on beating network algorithms through rapid testing and iteration.
- Approximately 80% of advertisers currently manage creative optimization manually, leading to fragmented data and delayed decision-making.
- Effective creative strategy requires a centralized 'single source of truth' that integrates MMP data with down-funnel metrics like cohort retention to identify winning assets.
How to Build an AI-First Culture with 1,300 People. Real Story.
AppsFlyer is undergoing a fundamental organizational and strategic transformation to transition from a measurement-focused platform into an intelligence-driven marketing cloud.
- AppsFlyer is transitioning from a measurement-focused platform to an intelligence-driven marketing cloud by unifying fragmented data across mobile, web, connected TV, console, and retail media.
- To drive an AI-first culture among its 1,300 employees, the company paused standard business operations for one month to mandate comprehensive AI training for the entire workforce.
- The company is deploying autonomous AI agents to handle technical tasks like creative optimization and audience building, aiming to shift human roles toward high-level strategy and creativity.
Pushing Frontier Tech in Gaming
The gaming industry is currently undergoing a strategic transition from speculative, hype-driven development toward a focus on sustainable, utility-based infrastructure.
- The gaming industry is shifting from speculative web3 models toward sustainable, utility-based infrastructure that prioritizes long-term player engagement over short-term financial gain.
- Blockchain technology is being deployed as a foundational layer for player-driven economies, utilizing stablecoins and time-gated loot systems to ensure digital stability and equity.
- Artificial intelligence is actively shortening development cycles while enabling the creation of agentic, dynamic non-player characters that adapt to individual player behavior.
Consoles Get Steamed, Black Ops AI Refunds, and Krafton's Voluntary Layoffs | Games For Breakfast
Valve is positioning itself to disrupt the traditional console market by launching three new hardware devices in 2026, including a modular living room PC, a specialized controller, and a wireless VR headset known as the Steam Frame.
- Valve has announced plans to release three new pieces of hardware in 2026, signaling a major expansion of their Steam-branded ecosystem.
- Activision's 'Black Ops 7' is facing significant consumer backlash due to mandatory online connectivity for its single-player campaign, leading to widespread refund requests.
- Krafton has initiated a shift toward voluntary layoffs as part of a broader corporate restructuring that emphasizes an 'AI-first' strategy for productivity and growth.
Game Analytics 01 - Building
The modern game industry requires a sophisticated approach to data that balances infrastructure maturity with proactive decision-making.
- Successful studios must transition from generalist data tracking to specialized roles, utilizing data analysts for team-specific decisions and data scientists for predictive modeling and automation.
- Data strategy should evolve from basic AB testing to complex player segmentation and, eventually, AI-driven automated personalization to optimize experiences for diverse player bases.
- Studios should prioritize third-party analytics services over proprietary infrastructure to maintain focus on core product development and achieve better cost-efficiency and scalability.
TWIG #357 Royal Match $200M Splurge, Arc Raiders AI Controversy and AI Duolingo's Broken Streak,
The current landscape of the interactive entertainment industry is defined by intense scrutiny over monetization strategies, corporate restructuring, and the integration of emerging technologies.
- The mobile puzzle market is facing diminishing returns, as evidenced by Dream Games' Royal Kingdom failing to see proportional growth despite massive user acquisition spending.
- The court rejected the Epic Games and Google settlement, signaling continued legal scrutiny over app store fee structures and concerns that such agreements stifle independent competition.
- Square Enix is centralizing operations through significant layoffs in its Western divisions, a move that risks weakening the cultural expertise required for effective product localization.