Mobile reports and market data
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Mobile Games Annual Investment Report: June 2024
The "Mobile Games Annual Investment Report: June 2024" analyzes investment and M&A activity within the mobile games segment, covering a global scope with a particular focus on North America, Europe, and Asia.
- Mobile gaming investment and M&A activity hit a four-year low in 2023, totaling $7.8 billion across 211 transactions, a 63% decline in value and 33% decrease in volume from 2022.
- M&A activity dominated the market with $6.7 billion across 32 deals, heavily bolstered by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia’s $4.9 billion acquisition of Scopely.
- Private investment in mobile gaming totaled $1.1 billion across 179 deals in 2023, reflecting a cooling market compared to the 2021 peak.
TWiG 288: Fortnite in Trouble, Anime Girl Horse Racing Game, and Switch’s New Life
The global gaming industry is currently navigating a period of significant regulatory pressure and shifting market dynamics.
- Apple faces potential fines of up to 10% of its global revenue following formal European Commission charges regarding Digital Markets Act violations related to restrictive app store practices.
- Fortnite is recording its lowest player counts since late 2023, prompting Epic Games to pivot toward a 2025 re-entry into the Japanese mobile market.
- Netflix has invested $3 billion into its gaming division, yet the initiative continues to struggle with demonstrating a clear return on investment.
Top Creatives & Advertisers with Game Review Radar!
The mobile gaming landscape is currently defined by a shift toward aggressive creative advertising and the rapid iteration of proven mechanics.
- Microfun's merge game portfolio, including Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape, is showing strong growth with daily revenues reaching approximately 12.5 million and 9.5 million respectively over the last 30 days.
- Legend of Mushrooms continues to perform strongly with daily revenue around 450k to 500k, driven primarily by the Chinese market which accounts for 80% of its revenue.
- Screw Jam, a physics-based puzzle game, is maintaining high performance with daily revenue of 140k and consistent downloads of 20k per day.
Metaplay’s Teemu Haila On Scaling And Saving Smaller Studios $1 Million/Year With One SDK
Smaller game studios face significant operational hurdles when transitioning to live-service models, often struggling to balance rapid player growth with the technical demands of backend infrastructure.
- Developing a custom backend for a mobile game typically requires three years and an investment of approximately $21 million.
- Metaplay’s SDK aims to reduce the time-to-scale for live-service Unity C# games from years to two weeks, potentially saving studios $1 million annually.
- To prevent cheating and bot activity, developers should move the game logic to a server-side architecture, ensuring the server runs a full copy of the game rather than trusting data from the player's device.
Are games markets bouncing back? | Karl Knights from data.ai
The mobile gaming industry is showing signs of a recovery following a period of stagnation, with data indicating a shift toward renewed growth for 2024.
- Global mobile in-app spending is projected to increase by $4 to $5 billion in 2024, signaling a recovery from the stagnation of 2023.
- Mobile advertising is a primary growth engine for the industry, with a 16.2% compound annual growth rate and projected annual spend exceeding $400 billion.
- Excluding the Chinese market, which saw an 11% decline due to regulatory restrictions, global in-app spending grew by 4% in 2023.
Google Ads Best Practices for Mobile Apps with a Limited Budget
Google Ads offers significant opportunities for small businesses and independent mobile app developers to drive user acquisition, provided they adopt a structured, data-driven approach to campaign management.
- Implement rigorous campaign naming conventions including app name, target event, country, and operating system to bypass obscured default reporting and enable granular performance analysis.
- Manually enable 'engaged view' settings to access non-skippable six-second bumper ads, a high-performing format that is hidden by default in Google Ads.
- Prioritize authentic, low-cost user-generated content (UGC) over polished professional assets, as evidence shows UGC frequently achieves superior performance.
Toys x Games (with Spin Master)
Spin Master maintains a diversified business model centered on the cross-pollination of intellectual property across toys, entertainment, and digital games.
- Spin Master aims to derive 20 percent of its total revenue from digital gaming by integrating its toy, entertainment, and digital businesses into a cohesive ecosystem.
- The company utilizes a bifurcated digital strategy where mobile platforms focus on monetization, while Roblox serves as a high-engagement marketing engine to build brand awareness for new properties like Unicorn Academy.
- Toca Boca World functions as a core growth anchor, maintaining status as a top-20 global mobile title through a games-as-a-service model and rapid content iteration.
Time to rely on self-funding? | Paolo Trezentos from Aptoide
The mobile application distribution landscape is undergoing a significant shift toward decentralization, driven by evolving global regulations such as the European Union’s Digital Markets Act and various court rulings in the United States and Japan.
- Regulatory shifts like the EU’s Digital Markets Act and recent court rulings in the US and Japan are breaking the dominance of major app stores by enabling direct-to-consumer distribution.
- Developers can reduce platform commission fees from the standard 25% to as low as 10%–15% by managing their own user acquisition through alternative distribution channels.
- Due to a contraction in venture capital, developers are shifting toward self-funding models by prioritizing revenue optimization from existing titles and direct distribution.
Data: exploration vs exploitation | Joseph Iris from Persona.ly
The current landscape of mobile game user acquisition is defined by a strategic tension between exploration—testing new creative variations—and exploitation, which involves optimizing known high-performing assets.
- Mobile game user acquisition is shifting from broad acquisition toward retargeting, driven by a decline in venture capital and fewer new game launches.
- Developers are increasingly using incrementality measurement to ensure retargeting spend re-engages lapsed players rather than subsidizing organic traffic.
- Contextual targeting, powered by natural language processing to create vector representations of app store descriptions, has emerged as the primary alternative to traditional user-level tracking.
The State of Gaming 2024: Trends in Marketing, Gaming, and Apps with Sensor Tower's Lexi Sydow
The global mobile gaming market is currently undergoing a period of stabilization as it moves past the anomalous growth spikes triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- By 2030, non-gaming apps and mobile games are projected to reach revenue parity at approximately $145 billion each, as non-gaming apps increasingly adopt gaming-style monetization tactics like tipping and uncapped spending.
- YouTube remains the dominant social advertising channel for the gaming industry, capturing 50% of total ad spend, while TikTok has emerged as the primary engine for viral discovery.
- While RPG and strategy games maintain dominance in the APAC region, casual titles such as Monopoly GO! and Royal Match have become the primary growth drivers in Western markets.
How has attribution changed since ATT Privacy? | Adam Smart from AppsFlyer
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a period of significant structural adjustment, characterized by a cooling of post-pandemic growth and a tightening of privacy-focused data regulations.
- The current mobile gaming industry downturn is a structural correction following pandemic-era overexpansion rather than a systemic collapse.
- Probabilistic modeling remains a viable and effective attribution method for measuring campaign performance despite Apple’s privacy-focused data restrictions.
- Companies are successfully maintaining user engagement by shifting toward transparent, secure data methodologies rather than relying on obsolete tracking practices.
Solo Leveling: Arise - Depth of Content & Progression Layers Exploring the Predatory Monetization
Solo Leveling: Arise represents a strategic expansion of Korean-developed RPGs into the Western market, capitalizing on the global surge in anime popularity.
- Solo Leveling: Arise targets a competitive segment of 25 to 35 million active players by leveraging high-fidelity, IP-driven content to bridge mobile and PC gaming markets.
- The gacha system utilizes a low 0.6% base pull rate, which is balanced by pity timers, wish-list mechanics, and a 'Special Summon' feature that lets players preview results before spending.
- Progression is intentionally gated through energy systems, daily limits, and a dual-requirement structure that mandates investment in both the main protagonist and a secondary roster of support hunters.
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