Mobile reports and market data
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🎯 Creative trends don’t DIE. They cycle! Quiet influence of Kingshot (January 2026)
Mobile gaming is currently defined by a rapid, cyclical approach to creative strategy, where proven concepts are continuously recycled and adapted across diverse genres.
- Mobile gaming is currently defined by a cyclical strategy where developers prioritize recycling evergreen mechanics—such as 'Noob vs. Pro' narratives and puzzle-based hooks—rather than pursuing entirely new trends.
- The 'Kingshot' mechanic exemplifies the industry trend of cross-pollinating successful, singular interactions across diverse genres to maintain user engagement.
- While revenue remains stable, the industry is experiencing a contraction in total download volumes, suggesting that the reliance on recycled creative assets is hitting a point of diminishing returns.
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.
Ares' gameplan, Honkai: Star Rail drama, Moonton's Savvy sale, Rovio's write-down, DICE awards, more
The mobile games industry is currently navigating significant shifts in investment, corporate restructuring, and geopolitical influence.
- Savvy is in negotiations to acquire Moonton, the developer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, for approximately $7 billion, signaling a potential exit from mobile gaming for ByteDance.
- Sega recorded a $200 million write-down for Rovio, citing intense market competition and a lack of recent successful titles.
- Financial performance across the sector is polarized: AppLovin reported a 70% revenue increase to $5.48 billion and Krafton reached $1.2 billion in mobile revenue, while Embracer Group saw mobile game sales decline by 66%.
🎙️ Mobile Ad Monetization basics: What every studio gets wrong by Felix Braberg
Mobile ad monetization requires a shift in focus from vanity metrics like eCPM to a holistic understanding of revenue generation.
- Prioritize Ad ARPDAU (Ad Revenue Per Daily Active User) as the primary performance metric, as focusing solely on eCPM is misleading because high rates can be offset by low fill rates.
- Implement a mediation platform to create a competitive marketplace, which can effectively double revenue compared to relying on a single ad network.
- Limit ad frequency to five to seven views per user, as the value of impressions diminishes significantly beyond this point and excessive ads damage long-term retention.
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.
Türkiye Game Market Report 2025
The Türkiye Game Market Report 2025 provides a comprehensive analysis of a maturing gaming ecosystem that is transitioning from rapid, volume-based mobile expansion to a more sustainable, multi-platform, and quality-focused model.
- The Turkish gaming market reached $1.01 billion in revenue in 2025, supported by a player base of 50 million gamers.
- The industry experienced a 24.69% increase in total market size and a significant 133% surge in PC and console game production.
- Investment activity totaled $177 million across 30 deals, with capital increasingly concentrated on studios demonstrating proven scalability.
Rewarded marketplaces and how surprise equals engagement | Lisanne Vera from Kashkick #PGConnects
Rewarded marketplaces function as a specialized user acquisition channel for mobile gaming, bridging the gap between casual play and financial incentives.
- Rewarded marketplaces like Kashkick generate higher-intent users by nurturing them through a funnel that educates players on specific game objectives and reward requirements before they reach the App Store.
- User acquisition for rewarded platforms relies on 'surprising' the audience with unique content to overcome ad fatigue, as generic ads are frequently ignored by users accustomed to scrolling past promotional material.
- Personalized, UGC-style (User Generated Content) advertising is more effective than standard display ads because it frames the rewarded gaming experience as a relatable, authentic opportunity rather than a traditional advertisement.
Supercell faces Clash Royale controversy and banks on innovation | Week in Mobile Games podcast
The global mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a period of significant structural transition, characterized by a shift away from incremental optimization toward radical innovation.
- Supercell reported a 4% year-over-year revenue decline to €2.65 billion in 2025, though EBITDA rose 6% to €932 million.
- Clash Royale experienced a significant revenue surge in 2025, but a controversy emerged after CEO Ilkka Paananen failed to credit content creators for the game's growth in his annual innovation blog post.
- Square Enix's digital entertainment segment, which includes mobile and PC browser games, saw a 24% year-over-year decline in sales over the first nine months of the fiscal year.
Angry Birds RUSH: Rovio's next $1BILLION mobile game!
Angry Birds RUSH represents a strategic effort to capture the billion-dollar mobile gaming market by synthesizing the established Angry Birds intellectual property with the high-engagement mechanics of the luck-battle genre.
- Rovio is developing Angry Birds RUSH as a third-generation social-meta game, aiming for a $1 billion market valuation by evolving beyond the casino-style mechanics popularized by Monopoly GO!.
- The core gameplay loop utilizes physics-based runner mechanics inspired by Burrito Bison to differentiate the title from existing market leaders while leveraging the Angry Birds intellectual property.
- Development follows a lean startup methodology, using bi-weekly prototyping and non-IP assets to validate core mechanics through actual install reads and retry rates before applying the brand.
Panel: What Do The Google Updates Mean For You?
The mobile gaming industry is currently undergoing a strategic pivot as developers respond to the tightening regulatory environment and restrictive payment policies enforced by major app store operators.
- Mobile game developers are shifting toward direct-to-consumer web shops and cross-platform ecosystems to bypass the restrictive payment policies and high fees imposed by Apple and Google.
- The adoption of proprietary web portals is becoming a standard industry strategy to reclaim control over player relationships and diversify revenue streams beyond mobile-only marketplaces.
- While large studios are building internal payment stacks, smaller developers are leveraging third-party tools to minimize the technical overhead required to launch web-based storefronts.
Panel: Beyond Downloads: The New Rules Of Games Marketing
The panel discussion, titled "Beyond Downloads: The New Rules of Games Marketing," explores the evolution of marketing strategies in the gaming industry, emphasizing a shift from simple user acquisition to long-term engagement and product integration.
- Prioritize long-term ROAS and retention by focusing on rewarded engagement, which can yield results two to three times higher than non-rewarded engagement.
- Shift marketing focus from simple demographic targeting to creating specific user personas to better align creative assets with the intended audience.
- Treat CPI as an input metric rather than a primary goal, prioritizing the quality of users and their long-term value to the game's ecosystem.
Session: The Power Of Rewarded: Building Meaningful Connections Between Players & Games.
The primary objective of rewarded user acquisition is to foster meaningful, long-term connections between players and games by integrating incentive structures directly into the core gameplay loop.
- Optimized rewarded user acquisition flows can increase conversion rates by 20% to 30% while significantly improving day-one and day-30 retention and ARPPU.
- Collaborative, iterative reward strategies have enabled hybrid-casual advertisers to scale ad spend by nearly 400% while simultaneously increasing total user volume and revenue.
- Top-performing hybrid-casual titles utilizing these reward models are achieving day-one retention rates exceeding 70% and day-30 retention rates near 20%.