Retention reports and market data
Documents
Retention Is the New Acquisition – Retention Best Practices From the World’s Biggest Mobile Games
The mobile gaming industry faces a significant challenge regarding player retention, as approximately 90% of acquired players churn within 30 days.
- The mobile gaming industry loses approximately 90% of acquired players within the first 30 days, resulting in billions of dollars of wasted acquisition spend annually.
- Games24x7 achieved a 50% increase in player lifetime value (LTV) by implementing an automated, data-centric retention framework.
- Transitioning from manual, engineering-dependent campaign management to low-code, drag-and-drop platforms allows marketing teams to scale from dozens to thousands of concurrent player interventions.
Keynote: Next Best Action: Best Practices for a Winning Portfolio Strategy
The mobile gaming industry faces significant challenges in player acquisition due to the deprecation of the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) and evolving data privacy regulations.
- Due to the deprecation of Apple's IDFA and rising acquisition costs, mobile game studios must shift focus from external user acquisition to maximizing player retention and lifetime value (LTV) within their existing game portfolios.
- Studios can implement 'feeder app' strategies by using low-monetization, high-organic-install games (such as hyper-casual titles) to funnel players into higher-LTV, IAP-oriented games within the same portfolio.
- Promotional pricing should be based on behavioral signals—such as device information, geolocation, and engagement metrics—rather than dynamic surge pricing, to offer the right price at the right time to specific player segments.
Fireside Chat: The Future of Multiplayer
Success in the modern gaming industry is increasingly defined by rapid execution and iterative development rather than rigid, long-term planning.
- Modern multiplayer success relies on rapid, iterative development and continuous updates rather than rigid, long-term planning or monolithic release structures.
- Studios should prioritize maintaining a playable build throughout the production cycle to mitigate the risks associated with the technical complexities of scaling multiplayer games.
- Multiplayer titles are evolving into persistent social networks, necessitating a shift in development strategy toward live-service models.
Keynote: Competition Boost Retention
Competition serves as a fundamental driver of player retention and community engagement in modern multiplayer gaming.
- Integrating short-form, in-game tournaments significantly boosts daily retention rates by leveraging players' psychological desire for status and achievement.
- In Stumble Guys, a title with 90 million monthly active users, tournament participants demonstrate substantially higher retention rates, with the most engaged players reaching up to 90% retention.
- Tournament systems function as effective economic sinks by requiring in-game currency for entry, allowing developers to retain a portion of fees while distributing the remainder to winners.
Matchmaking Retention Through Emotional Variability - The Metacast by Naavik
The modern gaming industry is currently defined by a dual focus on aggressive intellectual property expansion and systemic consolidation.
- Competitive matchmaking is shifting from strict skill-based systems toward emotional variability models designed to optimize player retention by managing win-loss ratios.
- Major publishers are aggressively expanding flagship gaming intellectual properties, such as God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn, into film and television to leverage global brand reach.
- Industry consolidation is being driven by tech conglomerates acquiring studios to secure content pipelines for subscription services, raising concerns about potential creative stagnation.
Increase Engagement, Stickiness & Revenue Opportunities with Real-Time Voice & Video
The integration of real-time voice and video into 3D gaming environments serves as a primary driver for increased user engagement, platform stickiness, and revenue growth.
- Integrating real-time voice and video into 3D environments increases user engagement and platform stickiness by enabling features like spatial audio and photorealistic human video streaming.
- The infrastructure supports over one million concurrent users per session and currently handles 50 billion minutes of traffic per month across hundreds of mobile applications.
- Latency and packet loss are minimized by using AI-driven routing through a global network of selective forwarding unit routers, bypassing the inefficiencies of public internet paths.
Using Lean Analytics to Make Better Games
Adopting a lean analytics framework allows game studios to manage high-volume development pipelines by prioritizing rapid iteration and the minimization of failure costs.
- Transition from dedicated per-game analysts to a centralized, agile consulting model to allow for rapid resource reallocation away from underperforming titles.
- Prioritize a select group of 'super KPIs'—specifically retention, conversion, and lifetime value—to avoid the operational inefficiency of data saturation.
- Utilize Bayesian statistical methods to achieve faster testing results with smaller sample sizes, increasing development velocity.
Engaging Bots for Multiplayer Games
The integration of artificial intelligence bots into multiplayer games serves as a critical strategy for maintaining player engagement, ensuring consistent matchmaking, and improving first-time user experience (FTUE).
- Integrating machine learning-driven bots into the game 'Forge and Fight!' resulted in a 50% increase in day-one player retention.
- A hybrid AI architecture—combining finite state machines for strategy and imitation learning for combat—achieves sophisticated bot behavior without the high computational costs of deep reinforcement learning.
- Training effective imitation learning models requires relatively small datasets, often involving less than ten hours of gameplay.
Research Methods to Improve Live Game Retention, D1 to D100
Games user experience research serves as a critical bridge between raw telemetry data and actionable design improvements, specifically targeting the enhancement of player retention from the first day through the hundredth.
- Improving player retention from D1 to D100 requires a mixed-methodology approach that combines quantitative A/B testing with qualitative insights to identify the 'why' behind churn.
- Mobile titles like Design Home and Cooking Dash successfully improved retention by using granular funnel tracking to pinpoint specific usability hurdles.
- Longitudinal research tools, such as ten-day diary studies, are essential for observing player behavior over time and refining complex late-game systems.
Mobile App Trends 2022
The mobile app industry experienced a period of robust expansion throughout 2021, characterized by $170 billion in consumer spending and $288 billion in advertising expenditures.
- The mobile industry generated $170 billion in consumer spending and $288 billion in advertising expenditures during 2021.
- Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework saw a 25% global opt-in rate, exceeding initial industry expectations for resilience.
- Fintech and gaming led installation growth at 35% and 32% respectively, while e-commerce downloads increased by 12%.
Panel: What Techniques Can we Apply from Hypercasual Games & Bring into Living Games?
The gaming industry is currently witnessing a strategic convergence between hypercasual titles and live service models, driven by a mutual desire to optimize player retention and monetization.
- The mobile gaming industry is converging toward a hybrid model that merges the frictionless, low-barrier entry of hypercasual design with the long-term retention and monetization structures of live service ecosystems.
- Hypercasual developers are increasingly integrating live-ops and in-app purchase (IAP) frameworks to extend the traditionally short lifespans of their titles.
- Live service developers are adopting hypercasual design principles to simplify complex social and gameplay systems, making them more intuitive for broader mobile audiences.
Tentpole Game Design: How to Make a Competitive Multiplayer Experience that Drives Deep Engagement
Creating a successful tentpole competitive multiplayer game requires a strategic alignment between internal team culture and the psychological needs of the player base.
- Sustained player engagement requires a high-contrast design that balances immediate, dopamine-driven action with serotonin-boosting progression and community systems.
- Developers should avoid burnout by implementing matchmaking variety that rotates players between high-performing, average, and supportive roles.
- Teams should prioritize a cyclical engagement model that encourages seasonal breaks rather than relying on purely addictive, high-intensity feedback loops.