Live Ops reports and market data
455 documents·27 writers·596 charts and tables
Documents
PocketGamer.biz40 min
Backend Infrastructure Now Decides Mobile Game Winners
The competitive landscape of mobile gaming has shifted, with long-term commercial success now dictated more by backend infrastructure and LiveOps capabilities than by traditional feature roadmaps.
- Infrastructure is a strategic lever rather than a technical burden, as studios that build their own backend technology often waste up to 20% of their total R&D budget on operational debt that does not differentiate their game.
- Growth in the modern mobile market is driven by deep player engagement and lifetime value rather than user acquisition volume, making robust LiveOps infrastructure essential for long-term business viability.
- Studios should prioritize high-velocity content updates and social mechanics—such as leaderboards, cooperative events, and asynchronous competition—to drive re-engagement and monetization without needing to build massive, complex MMO architectures.
PocketGamer.bizMar 2026
Deconstructor of Fun80 min
TWiG #372: Death at an Xbox Funeral & Balling Out Ball’s State of Gaming
Microsoft is undergoing a fundamental strategic pivot within its gaming division, marked by the replacement of long-time leadership with Asha Sharma, an executive from the company’s AI division.
- Microsoft is pivoting its gaming division toward AI integration and platform monetization under new leadership from its AI department, signaling a potential long-term move away from the traditional console-centric business model.
- The gaming industry has experienced a steady decline in profitability since 2019, despite overall revenue remaining at historic highs.
- Traditional Western publishers are struggling to compete for user attention against non-gaming sectors like short-form video, gambling, and social-first platforms like Roblox.
Deconstructor of FunFeb 2026
PocketGamer.biz33 min
Scopely's $1bn Loom Games deal and Matthew Ball's big industry report | Week in Mobile Games podcast
The mobile gaming landscape is currently defined by a widening divide between established franchises and new market entrants.
- Scopely has secured a significant investment in the hybrid-casual game Pixel Flow, which has achieved daily seven-figure revenue since its October launch and is one of the few games in the last year to break into the top 20 grossing rankings.
- Activision will shut down Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile on April 17, 2026, citing a failure to meet performance expectations and the strategic difficulty of competing with other successful shooters.
- Unity shares have declined by 91% since November 2021, a trend attributed to the lingering negative impact of the runtime fee controversy, restructuring challenges, and market pressures from AI-driven competition.
PocketGamer.bizFeb 2026
Report32 pages
Casual Games Report 2025: Finding Growth in a Flat Market
The 2025 casual games market is defined by a paradox of rising engagement and stagnant financial performance.
- The casual games market faced stagnant IAP revenue at $21B in 2025 despite an 8% increase in downloads, highlighting a growing challenge in monetizing players at scale.
- The Puzzle genre was the only top-grossing category to grow, with revenue reaching $8.2B (+7.6% YoY) and downloads increasing by 9.9%.
- Merge games emerged as the fastest-growing puzzle subgenre, with revenue jumping 80% YoY and its share of the total puzzle market rising from 14% in 2024 to 20% in 2025.
AppMagicFeb 2026
PocketGamer.biz16 min
From Extracting Resources To Building Games | Inside Look
The mobile gaming industry requires a disciplined, analytical approach to growth that mirrors the resource extraction strategies of heavy industry.
- Offroad Games manages studio runway and financial health by maintaining radical transparency with the team regarding KPIs and company goals to build trust and alignment.
- The studio treats player acquisition and retention similarly to mining operations, focusing on identifying high-value 'ore bodies' (player cohorts) and maximizing their lifetime return through consistent LiveOps.
- Offroad Games prioritizes sustainable, responsible growth by maintaining a lean team structure and utilizing contractors rather than aggressive hiring, ensuring the studio can protect its runway.
PocketGamer.bizFeb 2026
Two & a Half Gamers11 min
🚨📢BREAKING NEWS: Clash Royale Drama, Layoffs, Applovin Q4, Unity Reshuffle 🤯
The current state of the gaming industry is defined by a sharp divergence between companies undergoing painful structural restructuring and those achieving significant growth through product-market clarity.
- AppLovin reported a 70% year-over-year revenue increase to approximately $5.5 billion, highlighting a stark contrast to the 30% stock decline and leadership reshuffle currently impacting Unity.
- Nexon achieved a 6.5% revenue increase to $3.1 billion, driven by the strong performance of titles like ARK Raiders.
- Supercell’s recent Clash Royale revenue spike was temporary, with data indicating that performance has already regressed to previous baselines despite influencer-led marketing efforts.
Two & a Half GamersFeb 2026
The Game Business26 min
Interview: How the Fallout TV show transformed Fallout 76
The Fallout television series has served as a significant catalyst for the growth of the online RPG Fallout 76, driving over one million new players to the game in a single month following the show's debut.
- The Fallout television series drove over one million new players to Fallout 76 within a single month of the show's debut.
- Development strategy focused on thematic alignment by integrating show-inspired gear and tonally consistent expansions like Burning Springs to capitalize on the influx of interest.
- The development team manages player onboarding by leveraging the existing veteran community to assist newcomers, maintaining a collaborative environment rather than relying on intrusive messaging.
The Game BusinessFeb 2026
PocketGamer.biz42 min
Curated Panel: Giving New Life To Established Games - Live Service Strategies To Boost Retention & .
Established games frequently encounter growth plateaus that necessitate a shift from passive maintenance to active, strategic recalibration.
- Rebalancing a game economy can drive significant growth even in mature titles; one panelist reported a 50% increase in LTV for a four-year-old game through systematic rebalancing.
- Live service teams should shift their mindset from constant content production to problem-solving, as some developers have successfully broken growth ceilings by pausing roadmap production for months to focus on better decision-making.
- Player trust is a form of capital that must be managed by communicating expectations clearly; using 'beta' tags or direct community feedback via Discord allows studios to iterate on features without alienating the existing player base.
PocketGamer.bizFeb 2026
PocketGamer.biz18 min
Session: Player Value At Scale: Automating Replies That Actually Help - Jonny Hair & William Smith.
Toca Boca, a Stockholm-based mobile gaming studio, implemented a data-driven strategy to scale its customer support operations for Toca Boca World, which serves up to 60 million monthly active users.
- Toca Boca managed high-volume feedback for Toca Boca World, which reaches 60 million monthly active users and generated 75,000 reviews between 2022 and 2024, by shifting from manual replies to an experiment-based automation strategy.
- The team achieved a 20% increase in reply effectiveness by using AppFollow’s machine learning-based semantic tagging to identify and address player issues more accurately than traditional keyword-based systems.
- To maintain brand voice while scaling, the team used human-authored response templates combined with AI-driven rephrasing and translation, ensuring high-quality, localized communication without repetitive copy.
PocketGamer.bizFeb 2026
Two & a Half Gamers18 min
The soft launch checklist everybody needs to follow by Matej Lancaric
A successful soft launch in the mobile gaming industry requires a rigorous technical and operational foundation to ensure that subsequent data analysis—such as CPI, retention, and ROAS—is accurate and actionable.
- Prioritize a dedicated 'technical stage' during soft launch to verify that tracking, attribution, and monetization infrastructure are accurate before scaling, as flawed data leads to unreliable performance metrics.
- Implement a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) and Firebase to track core events, including installs, sessions, purchases, and ad impressions, while ensuring revenue deduplication across SDKs to prevent double-counting.
- Maintain app stability by keeping crash and 'App Not Responding' (ANR) rates below established thresholds to avoid platform penalties and ensure a reliable user experience.
Two & a Half GamersFeb 2026
Deconstructor of Fun11 min
PUBG Never Died. Krafton Just Forgot Why It Worked
Krafton faces a strategic crossroads common to companies defined by a single massive success.
- PUBG remains a massive commercial anchor for Krafton, maintaining approximately 40 million daily active users across its global platforms.
- Krafton is shifting its strategy from speculative, disparate acquisitions toward a disciplined focus on expanding the PUBG ecosystem through new titles like the 5v5 shooter Blindspot and the extraction-based Black Budget.
- The company is adopting a platform-based model for PUBG that incorporates user-generated content to drive long-term engagement, similar to the strategies used by competitors like Fortnite and Roblox.
Deconstructor of FunJan 2026
Deconstructor of Fun71 min
Building Games That Don't Die: The Zynga Model
Forever franchises represent the cornerstone of sustainable success in the mobile gaming industry, defined as titles engineered to endure for at least five years while generating annual revenues exceeding $100 million.
- A 'forever franchise' is defined as a mobile game engineered to last at least five years while generating over $100 million in annual revenue.
- Long-term viability is validated during soft launch by monitoring retention curves through day 60, allowing developers to mitigate financial risk before global scaling.
- Core gameplay must possess inherent engagement before meta-layers are added, prioritizing structural integrity over superficial feature iteration.
Deconstructor of FunJan 2026