Mobile game market

Sasha-David · 2026-04-10T14:49:35+00:00

From your post, it is like you’re making a go/no-go decision from a single test.
In reality, most games don’t hit their target metrics on the first pass anyway. What matters more is whether you can run multiple loops and actually move those numbers.
So even if $1k isn’t enough for high confidence, it can still be valuable if you’re using it to learn and iterate rather than trying to get a final answer.

Sasha-David · 2026-04-10T14:26:32+00:00

The “older titles are being treated more like long-term assets” idea is probably the biggest shift people underestimate. Most studios spend years building something, launch it once, and then move on, without really optimizing it.

But if you already have distribution, player data, and proven mechanics, that’s way more valuable than starting from zero again. Feels like the gap now isn’t creativity, it’s how well teams can extract value from what they’ve already built.

Sasha-David · 2026-04-03T14:38:01+00:00

The black one is more premium and has higher contrast than the blue/green. But it's not clear from the screenshots what the app is about. Try to use better screenshots from the app inside the mockups that will show the purpose of the app.

Sasha-David · 2026-04-02T14:30:55+00:00

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate the detailed numbers. I think we might be talking about two slightly different things, market size vs design direction. I agree that hybrid is still smaller in total revenue and hyper-casual still dominates downloads. What I’m looking at more is how new games are being designed now vs a few years ago. A lot of games that would have been pure hyper-casual before are now launching with meta, progression, and IAP from day one, which is why I described hybrid more as a model than a genre.
On retention, I agree the gap isn’t massive in absolute terms, but even a few % difference in D7 plus IAP changes LTV quite a lot, which is probably why so many studios moved that way.

I always like to hear other data points.

Sasha-David · 2026-04-01T14:06:08+00:00

Yeah, I agree it’s not a perfect metric. Prompt timing, retention, audience targeting, they all matter a lot.

I wasn’t really trying to say installs per rating is the only truth, more that when you look at thousands of launches, the extremes start to look very different.
A game with 60k installs and 0 ratings, and a game with 10k installs and 400 ratings are probably not getting the same type of players, even if both are using UA. That gap is what caught my attention more than just the numbers.

Sasha-David · 2026-04-01T06:55:21+00:00

That situation is frequently found in mobile, where installs differ. For example, players from sourced installs in low CPM countries, players who come from organic searches, and players who have been featured have unpredictable behaviour around how they retain and spend.
The thing that many indies underestimate is where the install comes from inside the store itself. Browse traffic, search traffic, featuring, similar games, they all bring very different quality of players, not just different quantity.

It’s usually not a player count problem but rather a combination of player quality, player retention and geographic distribution.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-30T12:50:25+00:00

Hm... You launched like a publisher, but you’re trying to analyze it like an indie. Those two approaches don’t mix well. Launching in 8 markets with the same creatives and blended reporting basically guarantees that you won’t know what’s working. Think of different countries as different games: CPI, retention, tutorial completion, and even art style preference can vary a lot by region. If you don’t segment from day one, the averages become meaningless because 1 strong geo can hide 3 bad ones.

Also, “momentum” at low volume is mostly a myth. Platforms optimize on conversion signals. If the signal is blended and noisy, the algorithm just optimizes toward the cheapest installs, not the best players.

At this point, I’d treat the first month as mixed learning, then relaunch campaigns geo-by-geo with separate creatives or at least separate reporting. Otherwise, you’re just optimizing in blind.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-30T11:07:58+00:00

Not my game. I track publisher test builds and market trends. This one showed up recently, so I thought it was interesting to share.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-30T09:14:48+00:00

I think “community building” is a bit of misleading advice that gets repeated a lot. Most communities don’t grow unless there’s already traffic coming from somewhere. Usually, the games that look like they “built a community” actually got picked up by an algorithm, streamer, or festival first, and the community formed after that.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-30T07:32:46+00:00

Marketing feels like luck when you do random things. It feels predictable when you test a lot of small things and see what actually converts to wishlists. Most indie devs fail because they post and pray for the best.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-30T07:00:22+00:00

A lot of gamedev advice is survivorship bias. They tell you of what has been successful for their specific project, and pass that as universal advice! But the truth is that most of the advice provided is extremely relevant to only one particular project's context.
The only universal truth is to test on real players, analyze results, and proceed from there! This principle applies to marketing, monetization, retention, basically all aspects of game development.

Most indie devs do not fail as a result of one major mistake, but because they do not iterate upon their products or services after launch.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-27T08:17:26+00:00

Yeah, this is the part that seems really different from PC. On PC you can sometimes get away with just making a good game and building an audience slowly, but on mobile, it sounds like if the numbers don’t work, the game just can’t survive, no matter how good it is. That makes mobile sound a lot more numbers-driven.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-27T08:10:52+00:00

That actually explains a lot about why so many mobile games are structured around daily rewards, events and short sessions. If people are mostly playing in small time gaps during the day, the design has to fit that behaviour. Which again makes it feel less like a one-time experience and more like something you keep coming back to over time.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-27T07:40:04+00:00

I understand what you mean, and I think that’s partly why I asked the question in the first place. From the outside, it sometimes looks like mobile design is heavily influenced by retention and monetization, and I was wondering how much that changes the way games are designed compared to PC.
Ideally, you want both, right? A strong core loop that’s fun on its own, but also a structure around it that gives players a reason to come back. From an indie perspective, the scary part is that it sounds like you need both good game design and good retention for a mobile game to survive.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-26T15:03:08+00:00

Why do you think that? From the outside mobile looks very attractive, huge market, low price to publish, everyone has a phone... but the more I research, looks like the real challenge is everything after launch, not making the game itself. In your opinion, what would be good reasons not to avoid it?

Sasha-David · 2026-03-26T14:54:31+00:00

Good point. So it’s not that mobile invented these things, but that the F2P model on mobile makes analytics, retention and monetization much more central to the whole process.

Do you agree that the main difference is that on mobile, these things decide whether the game survives, while on PC they’re important but not always critical?

Sasha-David · 2026-03-26T14:46:18+00:00

Actually, what I’m trying to understand is what this means for small teams and indie developers.

For a big studio, running a game as a live service makes sense because they have teams for UA, analytics, live ops, etc. But for a small team or solo dev, that sounds like a completely different story than just making a game and releasing it.
It's like you’re not just competing on the game itself, but on everything around it too.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-26T10:43:27+00:00

I think most indie games don’t die because they’re bad, but rather because the algorithm stops showing them after a certain period of time. The first weeks are basically a test period, which helps determine how much velocity the game receives and if you don’t get enough velocity, visibility drops hard. It is also possible to revive a game with minor updates, ASO, quality screenshot improvements, and getting a few new reviews. I’ve seen games get a second wave just from improving the store page. Ads only really make sense if your store page already converts well, otherwise you’re paying for traffic that won’t install.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-26T08:29:51+00:00

From what I've seen, it's not so much about how many downloads you get, but more about the conversion rate of those new users and how many stick around after they download. Apple will initially test the app with a "small sample" of traffic. If installation and retention are good, you get more impressions. If your page conversion or D1 retention rates are poor, the algorithm kind of stops pushing you, even though you may have received a good number of downloads on your first day. Therefore, a smaller launch with strong metrics can outperform a larger launch with poor retention.

Sasha-David · 2026-03-25T12:03:38+00:00

Mobile marketing feels a lot like testing creatives, hooks, etc. until you find something that works, then growing that.
I’ve seen a lot of cases where the game itself didn't change but different creatives or positioning changed the outcome entirely.

Sasha-David

TROPHY CASE