Introduction

Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This podcast is all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan, although in this special episode, my hosting duties are somewhat truncated.

In the host seat, asking the hard questions, we have Brendan Fraher, General Manager at Liftoff Intelligence. He will be talking to former Rovio Insights lead, Carlos Salvado. They’ll be discussing the indispensable role of player motivation and market intelligence in making a successful mobile game. Okay, Brendan, take it over.

Brendan Fraher: Hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I’m Brendan, General Manager here at GameRefinery, and today we’re diving into some of the biggest topics shaping the mobile gaming world in 2025 and beyond.

I have a very special guest with me today: Carlos Salvado. We’ve known each other for many, many years. I know you have unique skills and experience from many different areas and teams, but can you first introduce yourself to the audience so they can understand a little bit more about you?

Meet Carlos Salvado: Insights from 15 years in gaming

Carlos Salvado: Absolutely. My name is Carlos Salvado. I’ve been a professional in gaming for the last 15 years, across mobile, PC, and console. I’ve worked in several crafts such as advertising, product management, game design, and economy design, so I know my way around games inside and out.

Basically, I’m here to tell you that with all the experience I’ve accumulated, the mobile game ecosystem is evolving constantly. You always need to relearn everything you knew in the past. New business models, new tech, new AI integrations, and new opportunities that can actually drive revenue for most companies are not only focused on the products themselves but on the whole ecosystem that the games provide—IP licensing, et cetera.

Hopefully, I can share a little bit of that information with you today, and let’s see how it goes.

Why do all games look the same? Hybridization explained

Brendan Fraher: Wonderful. As always, every time it’s a great conversation with you, Carlos. I know we’ve got a great agenda today, touching on many of the main challenges top of mind for developers; web stores, live events, and so on. But one thing we were speaking about off-camera was game hybridization. You had a very interesting phrase, which many audiences ask, ‘why do all games look the same?’

Carlos Salvado: I think the mobile games industry recently is going through a creative bankruptcy to some extent. We’ve foregone trying to be unique to trying to make things work dynamically similar across several different games, sometimes even across genres.

This is not just on mobile; you can see this across the board. There’s a lot of talk of Company X copied from Company Y, et cetera, but we need to be upfront and understand that imitation is a way forward, a way for developers to learn how to create better products for their own audiences. What keeps them around? What keeps them engaged? How can you make known and unknown audiences actually opt into those products and continue to play across the board?

This doesn’t mean you’ll be fixated only on one particular game. It can be your available portfolio, it can be cross-platform, it can be digital content. At the end of the day, we’re making products for new clients and old fans—people that don’t know the brand, people that want to tap into the brand, people that just want a different experience.

Carlos Salvado: So, I like to give an example of hybridization just to clarify exactly what I mean. I like to use the match-three souls-like type of game. That’s two genres that usually do not mix.

Brendan Fraher: Not the first thing that usually comes to mind, right?

Carlos Salvado: But it raises the question of casual audiences versus core gamers. Would it be possible to create that game if you design it consciously? You can find that sweet spot where two worlds meet, and you have an awesome product that you can provide, with a lot of creative space for people to tap in and experience something new.

That is what I defend, at least: the creative process around the imitation itself.

Brendan Fraher: I agree… even surprise breakout hits like Vampire Survivors show how unexpected combinations can resonate. Luck plays a role, but so does identifying a niche and timing.

Audience understanding and market timing

Carlos Salvado: I can even add onto what you were saying, Brendan, with one example. Recently there’s been a big boom with the remaster of Oblivion from Bethesda Softworks. A lot of younger gamers saw the game for the first time through the remake and are now on board with new experiences.

So once you have a concept or an app, you just need to cater that same product toward the audiences you want to reach.

Oblivion engages older fans who loved the original and younger players discovering it for the first time. You can actually be creative even with an old product—you just need to add the features those audiences are looking for.

Basically, context matters. Adapt to it, and you will see a big impact on whatever IP you have.

Brendan Fraher: Absolutely—but “just understand your audience” is easier said than done. Where should people start?

Direct-to-Consumer, web stores, and the future of monetization

Carlos Salvado: Let’s segue into an example. On mobile right now there’s a big topic of direct-to-consumer. Studios want solutions that help provide cheaper experiences to players by offering platforms where they can buy at a large discount.

This can be good or bad. On the good side, a web store lets a publisher control what they put in front of players—products, bundles, portfolio titles, even merchandise. You also get direct communication with your audience instead of relying on a third party.

Most companies nowadays are offering steep discounts on every purchase through these platforms. That’s the good part.

But then there’s the murky part:

How will platform holders react?

How will payment processors handle refunds?

What about compliance?

It’s complex, especially at scale across a portfolio.

Brendan Fraher: And yes, for listeners, we’re talking about web stores here. And you’re right—the evolution is happening fast. Companies are experimenting, and nobody has fully cracked the payment experience yet. But it’s definitely not going away.

Carlos Salvado: Absolutely. And regional cases like what’s happening in Japan with anime and manga payment processors is a preview of how these tensions may play out globally.

But again: know your audience. Tailor your offering. Use the data.

Knowing your players: motivation, CRM, and evolving audiences

Brendan Fraher: Right—and that’s why we built audience insights tools. Motivators help guide UA and creatives. But audiences evolve constantly, and trends shift. That’s hard for developers to keep up with.

Carlos Salvado: It is. And only now is the mobile industry catching up to other industries in how they engage with customers.

CRM isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s central intelligence.

It helps you talk to players, understand what resonates, and build trust—inviting them into early access, asking for feedback, and turning them into long-term fans.

This emotional connection is the foundation of personalised service.

Brendan Fraher: And it’s fascinating that definitions like “gamer” have changed so much. The biggest audience in gaming is casual mobile players—female, 35+.

Meanwhile, core genres skew male, 25–45.

User bases are diverse and growing.

Carlos Salvado: Exactly. And launching a game is not the end—it’s when the real work begins. Studios must constantly engage, iterate, and understand what motivates their audience.

AI’s expanding role in creatives, UA, and LiveOps

Brendan Fraher: And that gets us into UA and creatives. We now have AI-generated creatives… and AI-assisted UA. How do you view this shift?

Carlos Salvado: AI helps with faster iterations. More creatives. Faster testing.

But how it impacts UA costs is still unclear.

In LiveOps, AI can support content generation, but humans must still review everything to ensure quality and fit. Today, the most impactful work is still human creativity—AI just removes grunt work.

Brendan Fraher: Exactly. Especially for cross-platform HD games where assets are expensive. AI could be a massive force multiplier. Iteration speed matters.

Carlos Salvado: Yes. Faster iteration leads to better launches and more effective improvements. But again, you must understand your audience to know what to aim for.

Social currency, sharing, and cross-platform player behavior

Brendan Fraher: And then there’s another angle—player expression and social currency.

We’ve seen huge customization demand in mid-core and competitive games.

And casual genres have unexpected competitive behaviours too.

Carlos Salvado: It’s human nature. People want to show their achievements.

Steam profiles, screenshots, hours played—this is the new social currency.

Players want cross-platform visibility, ways to show off characters, mods, or moments in-game.

Hardware makers literally added “Share” buttons to controllers because this matters.

Brendan Fraher: Absolutely. And in an AI-driven world, authentic experiences—moments worth sharing—matter even more.

LiveOps, regulation, and the complexity of modern game development

Carlos Salvado: Almost every aspect of game development is now being regulated:

Digital fairness acts, monetization transparency, influencer marketing, and more.

Companies can’t just throw money at problems. They need to understand how platforms intersect—business, UA, product, LiveOps.

Influencer marketing is powerful, but attribution is weak. We still can’t fully track the user journey from influencer content to installs. This gap exists across gaming, movies, retail—every digital industry.

Brendan Fraher: Yes—and many companies try to “shout louder” instead of listening more. Surveys alone aren’t enough. Real audience understanding requires behavioural data, motivators, and analysis.

The power of audience insights, regional nuance, and IP activation

Carlos Salvado: Start with demographics and regions. Culture can kill a business if you ignore it.

Then layer on behaviours:

Are they collectors? Competitors? Completionists? Decorators?

Shape your LiveOps, economy, and features around that.

Studios must also recognize limits—audiences can only be convinced so many times. So LiveOps teams need constant feedback loops. Talk to your best players. Watch social media.

GameRefinery is an excellent starting point, but always verify insights across your own data and channels.

Brendan Fraher: And we can’t forget IPs and regional resonance.

Carlos Salvado: Absolutely. Price localization matters.

Cross-media activation—TV series, films—can skyrocket interest.

Fallout, Cyberpunk, Arcane—perfect examples.

Hybridization isn’t just mixing genres; it’s blending pop culture with game design.

When you combine audience understanding with the right cultural trigger, the results can be explosive.

Brendan Fraher: And that’s exactly why motivators and audience insights matter so much. Best-of-breed features work across genres if you understand why.

Closing thoughts and where to learn more

Brendan Fraher: I know we’re running out of time. There are always more questions than answers. Carlos, where can people reach you?

Carlos Salvado: LinkedIn is the best place. If you have challenges in market insights, advertising, product management—anything you want to brainstorm—feel free to reach out.

Brendan Fraher: Fantastic. You’ve worked across so many teams and disciplines, tying everything together—the ultimate cat herder.

And I love your advice: Shout less, listen more.

Carlos Salvado: Thank you for the invite. Always happy to help.

Brendan Fraher: Awesome. Thank you so much. Bye, folks.

Jon Jordan: Great work. Thanks to Brendan and Carlos for their insight. Don’t forget, every episode we are talking to the people who are taking the mobile games industry forward to new and exciting places. So, don’t miss out. Do subscribe, and we’ll see you next time.

Introduction

Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook! Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is the podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers and mobile game marketers, as we’ll be talking about today, and all the latest trends.

I’m your host Jon Jordan and joining me today to talk about mobile growth marketing and other things we have Saikala Sultanova. How’s it going?

Saikala Sultanova: Yeah, it’s going well. Thanks for having me!

Jon Jordan: We’ve talked a lot about UA, but it’s interesting in the discussion around growth marketing, which you think is a slightly different thing than UA. We’re going to get into that a little bit. We’ll also talk about the difference between game marketing and non-game marketing.

But to set the scene, I think it would be good to hear about your quite interesting career because it sets up what we’ll be talking about in this podcast. Would you mind spending some time just telling us what you’ve been up to in your career recently?

Saikala Sultanova: Yes, so what I’ve been up to over maybe 14 years or so is helping mobile games and apps grow at places like Huuuge Games, Product Madness, Ace Games, and some early-stage startups as well. I’ve learned how to bring teams together and solve real-world growth challenges.

With every product that goes live, so much preparation needs to be done, whether it’s launching a major IP, building data infrastructure with data teams, or figuring out fresh ways to tackle new markets. This includes new problems that might come up with measurement, creative production, or anything like that.

Saikala’s career journey in games and apps

Jon Jordan: You also have a video series which is related to that. Tell us a little bit about that.

Saikala Sultanova: I watch so many videos and podcasts out there, and I was curious how people actually do it. So I wanted to experiment myself: interviewing interesting people that I meet. Sometimes they’re not very easy to find time with, but they have interesting stories, inspiring stories; they’ve had challenges and failures. They have a journey in their life, both personal and business.

The idea was to connect with those people, give them a platform where they can share their story, and at the end of each episode, I ask them to give their two cents of advice to whoever’s listening. You hear their stories, wins, failures, and lessons learned, and what they could do better next time. Anyway, that’s me pretty much experimenting. I don’t know how to do podcasts.

Jon Jordan: Join the club! Exactly. We just have a good conversation. So, thanks for that introduction. We’ll pull out some of your expertise hopefully over the next 30 minutes or so.

Pilot testing in UA: Where to begin

Jon Jordan: We’re going to start off with something quite specific. We’ve spoken in the podcast about UA a lot in various contexts, but I don’t think we’ve ever spoken about how you do pilot testing and testing in user acquisition.

This is the first time you’re introducing a product and trying to find an audience, and that really sets the scene. When I think about user acquisition, I think about these big campaigns and the more established stuff, but setting the parameters for how you’re going to find an audience for your product is actually one of the important things. If you head up in the wrong direction, you’re going to find it difficult to fulfil your goal.

So when you’re working with teams, when you’re thinking about starting UA campaigns, where do you start? What have you found works best?

Saikala Sultanova: Everyone starts testing, and everyone goes with data first because in performance marketing, which is my strongest background, we believe that data tells you the truth. That’s true, but only partially. Because lots of gaming and app companies launch a product and ask, “Who is going to like my product?”

Some companies start with a hypothesis and do qualitative testing first, maybe interviews or surveys, trying to understand where the product-market fit is, or if their product hypothesis is a good fit for the market and can become a business.

Once that’s done, I always like to start with a clear hypothesis: What am I actually trying to prove or learn? In pilot testing, which is a bit earlier than the rollout testing, we work closely with teams to set up initial campaigns with controlled budgets, focusing on well-defined segments, whether it’s creative variations or different art concepts.

To me, the key milestones are, number one, getting clean data early so that you can see if it’s showing you some indication. Number two is hitting statistical significance, because you might see great results, but if it’s just five conversions, that doesn’t make sense. You need something that’s going to scale as a business.

And then finally, number three is understanding user behaviour, not just from the surface-level metrics, but how it goes a little bit further and how it’s going to help you make decisions.

You’re going to have multiple follow-up questions with the wider team, and it’s important to make sure there’s enough data to ensure you have only one hypothesis or you are answering one question. Once you have the results, share them with the wider team in the company; marketing, product, it doesn’t matter. Everyone should understand and learn, because that way you get everyone on board and can make a joint decision on the next step.

The role of qualitative insight in a data-driven world

Jon Jordan: It’s interesting you mentioned things like user interviews. Obviously, that doesn’t really scale, so do you still think that’s something people should be doing for every product, just to get some anecdotal ideas?

You say the big data is where a lot of the focus is, so maybe people think these days that sort of qualitative talking to potential users doesn’t really stack up in the same way; maybe it’s not so actionable. But do you think it still has a value in getting an idea of how you’re going to be doing marketing?

Saikala Sultanova: The application is twofold. One, in the earlier stages, it’s about product-market fit, and it’s predominantly on the product side to figure out whether their idea could have legs to walk on and become a business.

That’s one. But when it comes to marketing, people often jump straight into getting enough data and the statistical significance that I mentioned earlier. That is the correct way of doing it because it’s something measurable, something you can rely on, and something that you can make conclusions from.

However, one of the things that I’ve learned, and I’ve always been a quant person, is that once you run all the quantitative tests, it gives you an answer: this works, this doesn’t work, yes, no. It never tells you why.

So the qualitative part gives you the answer or can give you an indication of why.

I’ll give you one example. When I was at a previous company, we were preparing to run a TV campaign and to go big on a big screen in the US, for example, you need to do lots of preparation and testing, and it’s very expensive. So, the stakes and expectations from a business perspective are high.

How can you make sure that everything is as optimal as it can be, not just with the channel mix, placements, day parting, or the length of the creative, but how can you make sure that actually people in the US, your target audience, are going to engage with it?

Are they going to hear the voiceover, enjoy your creative, and actually follow up with their response or search by themselves to go in and download your product and play the game?

We did all the testing, we prepared everything. Everything was done. And then there was this gut feeling. Something in our creative just needed another reassurance. We’d done the quant testing like three times, and everything checked out apart from that gut feeling.

The advice was to go and ask people what they really think. And it was eye-opening. Literally, we were asking people who play competitors’ games, our games, and similar things, to watch the video trailer and tell us how they feel, what they think, and what they understand. Is it clear?

And the comments we got were:
“That voiceover was annoying.”
“Yeah, that’s great.”
“Here could be better, here could be better.”

But the voiceover was annoying. And this is something I couldn’t understand straight away because I’m not American, I don’t live there. So, for me, it just sounded good.

Then we realized a couple of other bits after listening to people’s qualitative feedback. The sample size was less than 10 people. And then it was like, “Okay, bingo, now it makes sense.”

So, we went back to the drawing board, adjusted the creative, made it better, tested again, and only then went live.

Crafting effective test plans and avoiding common pitfalls

Jon Jordan: It’s amazing that you don’t have to talk to 200 people. That would be quite a big effort. If you’re saying just start with a few people, maybe not for every product, you might get that feedback quite quickly that everyone’s saying the same thing.

Saikala Sultanova: Yeah, but you see it’s a different application. For a product, you need a bit earlier interviewing, a smaller sample size, and getting that quality information.

But for marketing, it’s about the application scalability. When it’s something like a big TV, or big screen, the stakes are high, and you have to do every kind of testing to make sure that the money you spend is going to be worth it.

Jon Jordan: There is still a place for those sorts of issues, but obviously the main thing is getting the data, getting the quantitative stuff. So when you’re looking at a test plan, what’s a good test plan? What sort of things are you looking for?

Obviously, there are tons of different KPIs that you could be using. What’s the sort of stuff that you think is best practice?

Saikala Sultanova: Well, a typical solid test plan is mostly about clarity. You want to have your test objectives, audience segmentations, creative variance, channel mix, timing, you name it. It’s all the same thing. It’s not rocket science, and we’ve known about it for more than a decade.

Defining metrics is pretty much similar across the board in gaming: CPI, retention (Day 1, 3, 7), ROAS, LTV, PLTV as well.

From my recent experience working with non-gaming companies, they don’t call it CPI; for them, it’s CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) because it’s not just an Apple launch. It’s a little bit more registration and maybe someone onboarding with payments and things like that.

The most important thing is defining the goal that you’re aiming to work towards, and then applying all of that.

Also, make it a bit of a habit and go through due diligence. If there are data gaps, attribution logic issues, or anything to do with goals or projections that you received from the product, based on whatever information they found online, or sometimes the information is outdated, it’s important to run a sanity check and flag these things.

Everyone is an expert in their field, and growth marketing’s responsibility is to make sure that the latest and most accurate information available is communicated to the whole wider team.

Jon Jordan: It’s interesting that a couple of times already you’ve sort of come back to there’s what the growth marketing team are doing or the UA team—they’re getting all this data—but in and of itself, that’s not useful unless it’s feeding back into the wider organisation.

Things have to be joined up. You can’t just have a great UA team who’s doing all the work and coming up with these numbers if they’re not getting support or if they can’t talk to the rest of the product team. Then I guess it’s a bit useless.

Saikala Sultanova: It is useless, but it also makes it much harder for both teams. Hypothetically, the product team thinks the growth team does black magic or whatever with algorithms and bidding, which isn’t true, because there is no black magic.

And then the marketing team doesn’t speak enough to product and engage on expectations, or give enough information on what reality is. This is when misalignment happens.

What I’ve learned from past experience, good or bad, is that it’s really important just to have another conversation and align on expectations, and clearly, explicitly explain what expectations from both sides are, and then align.

Because most of the time they’re not aligned; both teams think different things, and then the data team thinks something else. It’s really important to come to a middle ground because nobody can have their cake and eat it.

It’s going to be a compromise on every single part to come to a joint agreement so that you can shake hands and go live.

Jon Jordan: So clearly another part of doing this is A/B testing, or the more complicated multivariate testing as well. What are your views on that? I guess A/B testing is something everyone has a good idea of.

Is that a bit outdated now, or are these new, more complex ways of testing taking over?

Saikala Sultanova: In growth marketing on advertising, UA, whatever you call it, I’m a fan of simple A/B testing. It gives an answer quick enough, and it’s a yes or no, basically.

It’s also a bit more cost-effective, and then you can move on, because time is the most important currency you have. Especially if you are an early-stage startup, you have your run rate, and time is the most expensive thing you have.

Of course, multivariable testing is possible, and it’s more complex and sophisticated and looks cool, whatever. But you only do that when you have a lot more money to spend on advertising or marketing testing in general, because multivariable testing is more complex, and it just takes a lot more money.

Jon Jordan: In this early phase, have one question that goes back to having it simple.

It’s very easy to get overwhelmed with all this data that’s coming in, and a lot of it is that you can change one variable and then that moves the other variable the wrong way, and then you find yourself in a bit of a pickle.

Saikala Sultanova: You know what the classic thing is that happens all the time? I’ve seen that in gaming all the time, and I didn’t know that other industries do the same, and now I’ve learned that they do.

Greediness. “Oh, we’re going to run this test, and we’re going to bring these 20,000 users, and we are going to analyse, and with these 20,000 users, we are going to answer questions A, B, C.”

It’s not going to give you the same sample size. And probably for testing something like this, you need a different mix of network, sample size, and maybe a different country, platform, and all of these kinds of things.

And then people go, “But why can’t we just do that? Because other companies do it.”

It’s like, “Okay, the other company is not doing it the right way.”

Because if you want to have a clear, conclusive answer—does it work? does it not work? and maybe why sometimes if you do a bit more research—then you need to have just one thing.

And it’s really hard to stick to it, because then marketing and product teams will start multiplying questions and costs of finding answers to those.

It becomes a lot, but this is when everyone needs to prioritise which questions are the most important and the most impactful on your product launch or making it a business, because some questions are just not that useful.

Jon Jordan: Coming to the end of starting off this marketing pilot testing of UA, what are the key learnings you think people should be aware of, and the mistakes that you’re seeing the most that people naturally fall into if they’re not thinking ahead?

Saikala Sultanova: One of the most common mistakes is testing too many variables at once. As I just said, this muddles their results, and you may end up with no conclusive answer, then you’ve lost time and have to do it again.

Other mistakes are attribution gaps, skipping pre-launch tech checklists, and launching without QA-ing your advertising flow. Having the product ready and having your campaigns ready doesn’t really mean that one of the campaigns isn’t going to fail because something has happened with configs.

And it’s very, very common. Or sometimes people forget to put the payment method into their ad account, or whatever.

So, you need to make sure all these small checks are done and that you communicate results and caveats clearly to the wider team so that nobody in other teams thinks it’s black magic, because it’s not.

It’s just very tedious, repetitive work.

I mean, thanks to it being 2025, there’s a lot of machine learning, lots of automation, and I’m going to say the AI word as well, which is a bit helpful for some of the mundane work. But still, there are lots of things we have to do ourselves, and doing the last tiny, annoying, small, mundane checks is always helpful.

Growth marketing across gaming vs. non-gaming apps

Jon Jordan: That’s sort of the first bit of the podcast today, looking at that. And now we’re going to sort of move on.

Again, something you mentioned: you’ve spent a lot of time in games, but also advising non-gaming apps, and you’ve worked on non-game apps as well.

Obviously, we generally talk about games in the podcast, but it’s interesting to see how the other side lives and maybe learn a bit from that as well.

So, I guess the core skills that you’ve been working on in the last 14 years are broadly the same in non-gaming apps. I guess the apps themselves obviously have a slightly different use case depending on what the app is.

They can have very different applications, from banking to social apps to travel, whatever.

What can you tell us about that difference?

Saikala Sultanova: I thought there would be a lot of differences, and when I’ve worked with some of the projects, one of them was mental health, and another one was a FinTech here in the UK, I found out the foundation of operational growth marketing—data-driven decision-making, creative production, ad tech integration, reporting, and budget management—translates directly.

The marketing mix with ad networks is pretty much copy-paste.

There are some differences because non-gaming is a lot more advanced with CRM and web-to-app marketing, and web in general. They are a lot more advanced, but everything mobile is pretty much copy-paste.

And I don’t think there is a big difference, no matter the industry. Probably e-commerce would be a lot more different; I haven’t worked with e-commerce yet.

But yeah, gaming pushes you to test fast and learn quickly from results, and deal with campaigns with agility. The difference with those non-gaming apps is that it takes a little bit longer.

You need to look at the conversion ratio, conversion windows that are a little bit longer, whether it’s FinTech, lifestyle, or health. And this is something that is different.

Other than that, pretty much everything is recyclable.

Jon Jordan: And I guess to some degree, over the last 10 years, we’ve had this idea of gamification.

So even health, and particularly health, but even sort of FinTech apps, have been influenced by game-type features, which probably also plays a little bit into the marketing so that they’ve converged in some aspects.

Saikala Sultanova: In the last couple of years, it became almost like a trend with subscription apps to gamify the experience because that brings engagement.

If it is a subscription app, you pay your monthly subscription or whatever it may be.

The conversion to your net purchase isn’t necessary for you because you don’t sell single packages all the time.

Therefore, one of the most important measurements for you would be engagement: How often is your app used by your customers? Is it helpful? Is it engaging? Do they feel valued as a customer?

Transferable skills and advice for marketers exploring new verticals

Jon Jordan: When you’ve worked on non-gaming apps compared to gaming apps, what have you thought are the opportunities that people with experience in gaming can bring to a new role if they’re trying to do this growth marketing on non-gaming apps?

What really shines?

Saikala Sultanova: You mean what really shines from non-gaming, or…?

Jon Jordan: Yeah. Well, if people have been working in gaming and are trying to say, “I’ve got these transferable skills that I’ve learned in gaming over the last few years, and I can help you with your non-gaming apps,” what things do you think they can really leverage?

Saikala Sultanova: Quite a lot, actually. I was pleasantly surprised when I tried for the first time.

It is quite a lot, especially on user acquisition. Go-to-market plan is very similar; I would say 70% is the same, and 30% is something that is outside of gaming.

When it comes to creative production, it’s exactly the same—creative production, testing, and improving iterations and all of that. So it’s exactly the same.

Channels are exactly the same, maybe for non-gaming it’s a little bit wider than for gaming, which is great.

The only difference in creative production and testing is—well, testing is the same, actually—but in creative production for non-gaming, static creatives are important.

It could be as important as 40 to 50% of the total ad spend, and they convert.

That’s pretty good because the way the product is perceived is different, and the level of trust or level of information, level of accuracy, is a lot more important.

What else?

Ad tech, attribution, measurement, anything to do with creative labelling, AI tools—pretty much all of that is transferable 100%.

Non-gaming apps like to have fancy tools as well, so anything to improve their work life and make it more efficient, of course they will utilise that.

Reporting is exactly the same.

The only thing with non-gaming is that they go further down the funnel because CRM is part of the marketing team, and then there is additional product marketing, web-to-app search, and SEO is important.

So that becomes a much wider scope and, therefore, a much longer time and funnel where you need to report for a long period of time, and not just regular ROAS or whatever it may be.

It’s more than that.

But apart from that, I would say probably 70 to 75% of what we learn and do every day in gaming is pretty much transferable.

Jon Jordan: I guess for games, as you say, you have your D1, D7, maybe D30, but games are often disposable in a way that non-gaming apps are not.

They just don’t have that same relationship. A bank, hopefully, has a different, long-term relationship with its users than maybe a game, where people are just cycling through games all the time.

Saikala Sultanova: Right. It depends what kind of game. If it is hyper-casual, the one that has a return on investment target of 30 days, 60 maximum, and retention is terrible after that, then of course, those are throwaway games, and they are lots of fun.

But then there are some games that people play for years and years, and those are the games that may not have advertising in them.

If you’ve already spent a thousand bucks in that game, buying in-app purchase packages and progressing in your level, you want to stick to it.

You might be there for a year or two until something better comes along.

Jon Jordan: What sort of advice would you give to people who are marketing professionals, UA professionals, and have experience in the games industry?

How have you found it working with those two different things?

I mean, I guess everyone always thinks games are the really fun part of the industry, and obviously, to some degree, I agree with that being a gaming podcast.

But most of the world is not gaming, and I’m sure there are lots of fun companies doing non-gaming apps.

So what advice would you give people about that?

Saikala Sultanova: I’d say keep an open mind and lean into what makes each vertical unique, respecting the pace of learning.

Don’t just assume what worked for games will transfer as is. It wouldn’t be 100%, but lots of those skills are transferable, especially if you’re curious.

It’s important to find mentors in the industry on both sides, in gaming and non-gaming, and experiment a lot.

Make friends with your analytics and product teams, making sure that you’re really into something that matters.

Celebrating wins is important, even if it’s a small win. With every test, you learn something. It’s really important.

And don’t be afraid to challenge the playbook because playbooks get written all the time, and they also get outdated all the time.

Therefore, refreshing your knowledge is really, really important.

To your comment, actually, that gaming is more fun. Gaming is more fun! I can say that now.

There are fewer limitations, less boundaries, and you can be a bit edgy and you can do stuff according to brand guidelines, or if there are no brand guidelines, even better.

With FinTech, you can’t, because you’re a regulated business. With some of the health apps, you can’t as well; it’s regulated because you need to make sure the advice or whatever the product is communicating to the user that is to do with your health is careful.

So gaming is more fun.

You know what else is more fun right now and trending among subscription apps?
The AI apps, AI face apps, and lots of other things like even podcast-making apps.

Those, I think, are on the rise already, and I’ll be looking forward to learning from them because I think very quickly they’re going to be much better than gaming.

Jon Jordan: You got it. But it is like you say, no matter how much experience you have in this, there’s always new stuff coming up.

We always have to be learning.

Obviously, the more experience you have, the better foundation you have, and maybe you can understand what the important or new things are, but it’s never a case of just sitting back and going, “Well, I’ve done this for 10 years, so I’ll just keep doing the same old thing.”

Saikala Sultanova: It’s okay for some, and it’s okay too because we need those kinds of people also.

You can’t just have a hundred percent of your team or a hundred percent of your company always wanting to run wild.

You need to have a diversity of different thoughts and people and culture, and it’s important to have a bit of everyone.

Somebody needs to do the mundane thing every day, and you need those people; somebody’s comfortable with that, and somebody’s not.

I think the most important thing is to stay curious and keep learning.

Closing

Jon Jordan: Good advice. Well, thank you so much for your time. That’s really fascinating. We covered a lot of different stuff there. I think there were some good headline things: make sure you’re not just a team on your own; you have to talk to your entire team, not just the UA team; keep things simple, certainly in the early stages; and keep learning, keep curious.

So thank you so much for your time.

Saikala Sultanova: Thank you for having me.

Jon Jordan: No, it’s been a pleasure, and thanks to you for watching, listening, however you are consuming the podcast. Remember, every episode we are delving into what’s going on with mobile games, which is increasingly expansive in the topics that we cover, and having to be curious about it because it’s all changing all the time. So don’t miss out. Do subscribe, and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.

Introduction

Jon Jordan: Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers and all of the latest trends.

I’m your host Jon Jordan, and I’m very pleased to have joining me today—in fact, joining me and coming back for the second time on the show—we have Kentaro Sugiura, who is the lead User Acquisition (UA) Manager at Rovio. How’s it going?

Kentaro Sugiura: It’s good to be back here, and I’m ready and happy to discuss mobile games again.

Jon Jordan: Good. Yes. Raring to go. So, last time, obviously, you were talking about your main job in marketing and user acquisition, and today it’s indirectly linked, talking about Intellectual Property (IP). So, obviously, that’s a key part of a product in mobile games and has a very strong link through into user acquisition. So, you’re sort of using your foundational knowledge there and going to talk about how IP works.

The rise of IP in mobile games

Jon Jordan: So, why have we seen an acceleration in mobile games using IP, typically external IP? Why are we seeing this massive trend? What’s it doing to the mobile games business? How’s that helping you in terms of user acquisition?

Kentaro Sugiura: I think there are two scenarios when it comes to mobile games using external or existing IP. The first scenario is the game with IP. The biggest benefit of licensing the IP is lowering marketing cost. Now, this happens through stronger UA metrics such as a higher Click-Through Rate (CTR) or conversion rate, which is nicely reducing the Cost Per Install (CPI), as well as higher traffic driven by brand recognition. That is the first scenario.

And the second scenario, which we see more often nowadays, is a LiveOps or game event with IP. So, when you develop or license an IP for a limited period, the main benefit is boosting revenue through LiveOps. This means a limited-time event with IP. Typically, the IP content is only available for a very limited time or a set duration, which uplifts game revenue. We often see additional organic installs or returning user uplift happening because of the LiveOps event with IP.

UA vs. LiveOps: Two approaches to IP

Jon Jordan: Broadly, in my head, those two become the UA part that, I guess, is targeting new players. And then the second part, which is more the LiveOps events, is more to do with the existing player base. Would that broadly be the case? Or, I mean, how much crossover between those two audiences can you get with using IP?

Kentaro Sugiura: Yeah, I think the first case is more new-user-oriented or more of a revenue prospect through user acquisition. And the second is a kind of mix. Sometimes you unlock your untapped audience by having LiveOps or game events with IP, but also you expect a lot of returning users because you do something new, something special.

That’s one of the benefits of having IP in your game for a limited length of time.

Jon Jordan: I guess there is a bit of a crossover in the sense that you could have a live event, and then you can obviously use the IP you’re licensing for that event. You can also put that into your main UA marketing funnel for at least the period of time in which that’s happening. So, there is some synergy between the two, even if broadly they are seen as being different.

Kentaro Sugiura: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Jordan: I guess the other main thing, if you’re thinking about these two different use cases, is that the UA thing would be more about a longer-term marketing effort. So, you might be doing a game and using other IP in that game, whereas the live event stuff tends to be like a faster turnover where you’re having live events every month or something. So, I guess that’s the difference in terms of the broader new users and the existing users, which relates to retention and monetization.

Kentaro Sugiura: Yep.

Evaluating and selecting the right IP

Jon Jordan: So, when it comes to IP, it is kind of funny. I was thinking that probably when games started out, even some successful games weren’t really seen as IP, and now everything is IP. So, it’s interesting how media works these days, and there are so many different channels to put IP in that everything just becomes IP.

So, the question is not really, is there good IP and bad IP? I guess the question we are thinking about if we have a product is, how can we get the most return on investment on that? How is that IP best suited to our audience?

So, how do you think game developers or people running mobile games should be thinking about finding good IP that works for their product and their audience? What’s the sort of process you go through? Do you go through looking at demographics? Is it just obvious that if you’re doing this sort of game, this sort of IP is going to work? What sort of process would you go through for that?

Kentaro Sugiura: So, from my experience and my observation, I see two key directions when evaluating potential IPs for mobile games and collaborations. The first direction is affinity. This means collaborating with a brand that already shares strong similarities with your existing audience. And this strengthens engagement and monetization with your core audience base. That’s the first direction.

And the second direction is expansion. This means you do a partnership with a brand that allows you to reach a new or untapped audience. That will broaden your market and help acquire new users beyond your current demographic.

Balancing affinity and expansion

Jon Jordan: Where do those two sit in your previous example where you’re doing one more focused towards new users? You said there’s the affinity, sort of reinforcing what you’ve got, and then expansion. Do they fit easily into those buckets?

Kentaro Sugiura: Yeah, I think it’s really case-by-case, IP by IP, and game genre by genre. Maybe if your game audience is, let’s say, female, 45 plus, the affinity you may find is some brands or IPs which are appealing to that core audience. That’s one example.

When it comes to expansion, it means if you do the partnership with an IP which is appealing to a different demographic. That’s a separate direction. And sometimes it can be a mix of these two directions. Sometimes affinity with a little bit of expansion. So it really depends on the IP and your core audience.

Jon Jordan: I’m imagining the expansion part is the harder one to do because the affinity one is, everyone knows the people who like this are going to like that. I mean, I’m sure there are some edge cases there, but basically, it seems like people can work that out.

Whereas the expansion, because it’s just a wider opportunity—how do you… because you want it to be expansive. You want an expansive IP collaboration. You don’t want an IP that sort of appeals to your existing community; you do want to reach out. But obviously, you don’t want to go massively reaching out to something that’s too far and has no affinity at all. So you still need some affinity.

What’s the process you work through on that? Because it seems that could really be where you optimize things by finding an IP that really expands your audience that maybe other people haven’t used if they’re in that same game genre. Is there anything you can sort of explain about that process?

Kentaro Sugiura: Yeah, so I think affinity often happens with entertainment content such as movies, anime, or comics, while expansion—yeah, it can happen within entertainment content—but it also can be happening with existing famous movie stars or football players. You know, it’s a little bit outside of entertainment content. So, it can also be some event, an offline event, or some organization.

The expanding IP landscape

Jon Jordan: We haven’t really talked about IP broadly, but now the range of IP is so enormous. Like you’ve been saying, individuals like sports stars are now at the same level as film stars, and there are loads more film stars and TV stars because there are loads more different channels. So you have all these different celebrities now who are just sort of famous for being famous, and that’s before you move through the movie IP, all the anime stuff. Obviously, enormous numbers there, being used more all the time.

How, as someone who’s sort of looking at what IP to license, do you just not get overwhelmed by just the massive range of what’s out there? Because it’s not just, you know, it used to be, ‘A movie’s coming out, so we’ll get the license for that movie and we’ll work on that content for the next six months, and when the movie comes out, our game will come out.’ People still do that, but I imagine most of the licensing that’s happening is not around big blockbuster movies anymore.

Kentaro Sugiura: Of course. Like, you know, if you can align a key beat with IP and, you know, you can capture the momentum, that is the best option. However, usually it’s a little bit challenging to do that because usually the negotiation of partnerships with existing IP can take so long that you might miss the momentum. Of course, that’s the optimal scenario, that you can align a key beat with the IP.

Negotiating and timing IP collaborations

Jon Jordan: All these things are sort of how long’s a piece of string, but the sort of level you’re working at, how long do those negotiations take? You imagine things have sped up a lot just because of the way intellectual property systems work now. But in terms of thinking about something and then getting something agreed and getting it into a game, is that still a process of months rather than weeks?

Kentaro Sugiura: Yeah, I think they’re months. So, I can share more of my experience from the UA side, because we need to prepare creative with IP and we need to get approval from the IP holder. So we usually spend three to six months in advance preparing the campaign from the UA side.

Maintaining player excitement

Jon Jordan: What do you think about this idea of how much new stuff can you get into your mobile game in a year? At what point does it just, you know, something at the start becomes exciting, there’s this new event coming or new characters or, or whatever IP your licensing comes into the game, and at what point does it sort of become, “oh, another one?”

Kentaro Sugiura: Yeah. It’s like you don’t feel something is special, is that what you mean? I think it depends on, you know, how you implement IP in a game and also how you structure the event with IPs. So it really depends on that.

From my observation, I see, for like, you know, one or two Japanese game developers, they’re constantly doing IP collaboration, like a LiveOps event. And, I see each time they announce the IP collaboration event, there’s some spike in terms of install uplift and revenue uplift.

Jon Jordan: I guess it depends a little bit on the genre ’cause there’s some genres who rely on having real world brands constantly in their game. So, you know, in a sense they are games that are fundamentally built on always having IP in their games. But there’s other games maybe, on the RPG side where it’s harder to get real world brands in there.

So there’s a different cadence that depends on what type of game you’re doing anyway.

Kentaro Sugiura: I think it also depends on how you collaborate with IP, is it just characters or do you prepare some special live event or stage, where people feel like “oh, this is the IP theme event.”

So this really depends on how you structure the event with IP.

Competition and reusing IP

Jon Jordan: What’s your view on games having IP that other games have used? Is there a point at which external IP has been used so much in so many games that you feel like, “Well, they’ve done it.”

You’re looking at what your competitors are doing all the time. They’ve used that IP, so now we can’t use it. Or, if you see a competitor has done a really good IP integration and had a massive spike, do you go, “Oh, maybe we should be looking at that”? I mean, how much of this is driven by competitive trends in the industry, where people are looking at what everyone else is doing, versus how much is it just that you’re focused on your product?

Kentaro Sugiura: Sometimes, for example, the IP holder will reject your offer because they already have a partnership with your competitors. So, this is something that we cannot control ourselves. It also depends on the IP holder. Some of them can say it’s okay to have similar partnerships or collaborations with similar products or a similar agenda. Some of them want to be limited in that sense, so it really depends on the brand.

But yeah, I think in general, you’d like to avoid a brand that already had a collaboration or partnership similar to your product because you might not see the result you are expecting.

Jon Jordan: And so, in contrast to that, if you have a really good collaboration with a brand, the point becomes, “Well, we should be doing this again,” because our audience really liked that; it really worked for us. So, I imagine to some degree you’re cycling through these collaborations—we think about this more on the live ops side. You’re cycling through these different collaborations, and some of them work better than others. If you find something that works, do you then think, “Right, we can do that again?” Or, do you think these are more sort of one-shot type things, where you’re going to create audience fatigue if you’re repeating the same tie-ins?

Kentaro Sugiura: I think it really depends on the contract you have with the IP, is it something you can do one more time, or do you need a new contract with them? And yeah, I also see it’s kind of a throwback event in some mobile games. So, it definitely can be an effective way to uplift revenue by doing that.

I also recognise that in some cases, they do different LiveOps events with the same IP, but with a different event structure, based on the learnings from the previous event.

The business impact of IP

Jon Jordan: And how closely do you focus on the financials of the overall thing? Because I guess that’s… I mean, mobile games are fun for people to play, but obviously, behind the scenes, there’s a massive business.

So, as you stated at the beginning, the point of using IP is in some ways increasing the efficiency of your business, either by reducing your marketing costs on a per-download or install level, or it’s increasing the revenue you’re generating. While these things are fun and exciting for the players, and maybe even the dev team, the economics of it is what’s running that. So, how does that sort of play into the way you think about using IP?

Kentaro Sugiura: I’m echoing what I just said. So, IP has two benefits, the first is lowering the marketing cost. That can happen by uplifting funnels such as CTR (Click-Through Rate) and conversion rate, which leads to reducing CPI (Cost Per Install). It’s also because, when you have an IP, you get better organic installs. That’s one part of the business impact.

Another part is uplifting revenue. This is generally a practice that happens during limited-lifetime events, like in-game events. So, I think it really depends on what you want and also your game’s genre. For some genres, they have less of a problem with generating revenue, and it’s less dependent on LiveOps. Then maybe it’s better to focus on the marketing cost side. Other games are okay with the marketing cost and CPI, so they focus more on the revenue play from LiveOps.

Future trends and the Asian influence

Jon Jordan: What do you think are the trends that are happening over the next five years? Do we just see more and more collaborations because IP has become more fragmented, and so there’s more opportunity? Or are we starting to get to the stage where there is a bit of general fatigue around these mashups, not just in games, but in all of culture? What’s your view on how that trend is going to develop over the next five years?

Kentaro Sugiura: I have no idea, but I’m just saying this based on my observation. IP collaboration is a very popular LiveOps strategy among Asian game developers. I see many Japanese mobile game companies have regular, frequent LiveOps events with anime or manga IPs.

It is very popular in Japan, and IP-based games are really popular there. Now, I see more and more Western mobile games having LiveOps events with IPs. We do see a lot of this with Brawl Stars or Monopoly Go. So, that’s my observation, and based on this, I expect that this will be happening more often.

Jon Jordan: I think that’s a good point because even in my limited experience, we have really seen over the last few years a sort of global expansion of what was at one point quite niche. Japanese manga and anime characters have progressively become much more widely viewed across the West, through services like Crunchyroll and all that sort of stuff.

And because that genre of media is really all about collaboration. The history of anime and manga is all about coming up with new things and cross-pollinating them. So, if you are in that genre, like you say, the JRPGs, it’s almost like it’s expected that you have this very fast pacing of collaborative IP because that’s what the underlying medium is all about. So, it is interesting. For some genres, I think, they will probably, as you say, just keep accelerating, but maybe not for all other genres.

There was one other thing I was going to say, particularly around meme culture, which is obviously a similar thing to Japanese anime, where it just explodes so fast. And we’re seeing this in things like Roblox now. I wonder if those IPs just get so popular and then the next thing comes along. Can those IPs be used by more traditional mobile games? They burn so fast, and it’s hard to judge how long they’re going to last. So, you have that issue.

Kentaro Sugiura: I think you’re having a really good point. I think from the Japanese anime and manga perspective, collaborating with different IP and other entertainment can reach an untapped audience, especially in our Western market. This is because Japanese anime or manga have really limited distribution channels.

One example: in Japan, if you turn on the TV, you can see anime all the time. While in Western markets, you probably need to go to a special channel or pay for cable TV, or maybe you need to subscribe to one of the streaming sites. So, the distribution of Japanese anime content is very limited in the Western market. And we are collaborating with different games. It can be a good distribution channel to reach their potential audience.

Jon Jordan: The history of gaming has shown that the trends that happen in the Japanese market tend to be the ones that flow globally. So, I guess from that point of view, we would think that the trends are going to end up more like the Japanese market than less like the Japanese market, because that’s just historically how the games market has developed over time.

Kentaro Sugiura: It might be, but still, it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen in the future. But yeah, so far, we kind of see this trend is mostly moving from the Asia market to the Western market.

The case for building your own IP

Jon Jordan: To sort of flip it the other way: Do you think there is any space for people to still run successful mobile games where they are trying to almost keep a purity of their vision and not want any external IP? Can that work from a user acquisition point of view where you just decide, “My IP is what I want to focus on. I don’t want to dilute that with anything else. I really want to build my IP, at least in the early stages”? So, you sort of go the exact opposite of maybe what the trend is and just go, “My game is my IP, and that’s what I want to focus on.” Does that make any sense at all?

Kentaro Sugiura: I think so, yeah, because some of the genres don’t require external IP, or maybe the effect of such IP is very minimal. Some of the genres are more about your experience in the game; they are not about the IP. You can say that classic, evergreen games like Sudoku don’t really collaborate with IP—the effect is quite minimal compared to other casual titles, like Match-3 or other casual genres.

AI and the future of original IP

Jon Jordan: And I guess, because we can’t have any podcasts going out without mentioning AI, the interesting thing if we are thinking about building your own IP from the ground up is something like Gen AI and user-generated content. That, in some ways, is allowing your community to create their own IP from the IP that you are creating.

So, in a sense, maybe the converse trend to more IP licensing and media going everywhere is some people creating their own striking brand and then allowing their community to expand upon that in a way that they couldn’t have done previously, because most of them wouldn’t have had the art or production skills to do that. So, you do have this sort of flowering of IP, even if it’s a mashup of external IP or people really expanding their own universe of IP. So, in a sense, everything becomes a Marvel universe, which is the end result. We get IP everywhere. So, maybe that’s the counter-argument.

Kentaro Sugiura: Maybe next time, you know, in one or two years, we can talk about how we have a completely different opinion on IP!

Wrapping up and key takeaways

Jon Jordan: Okay, well, I know we’ve painted some broad strokes across what’s going on in the use of IP. I guess as with every tool in the business toolbox, people should definitely be thinking about it if you’re doing mobile games, even if you’re not going to use it.

I suppose that would be the conclusion of this, that there are lots of big brands, and there are lots of little brands. Maybe some companies are not big enough to interact with the bigger brands, but you should be thinking about at least how this could interact with your audience. Because it’s clear that for companies like Roblox and for pretty much every mobile games company, you are using IP to improve your business and make your players happier. So, everyone should be thinking about it. I guess it’s just the question of exactly how you want to deploy it. Would you agree?

Kentaro Sugiura: Yeah, I agree.

Jon Jordan: Any sort of final advice for people who are thinking about IP? What are the things that have resonated with you that are the best working practices?

Kentaro Sugiura: It’s always good to have a high affinity with IP. If you’re looking for more affinity-type IP, then do some user research and try to understand which brands are the most familiar to your core audiences. And maybe, for expansion, what is the audience you’d like to bring in? And yeah, that’s the most important thing: You have a hypothesis, and you make a business case based on that, so you have a clear business goal.

Jon Jordan: Good. Good. Well, thank you very much, Kentaro, for your advice and your expertise.

Kentaro Sugiura: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I hope this helps to understand IP and mobile games!

Jon Jordan: And thanks to you for watching, listening, however you are consuming the podcast. Never forget to subscribe so you don’t miss any episodes. Come back next time to see what we are talking about in the world of mobile games. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Introduction

Intro: Welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook in association with Liftoff. Join us as we uncover the latest trends in user acquisition, monetization, and mobile game design.

Jon Jordan: Welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends. I’m your host, Jon Jordan. Generally, we are talking all about mobile games, GameRefinery, and the great tools that it provides for analyzing what’s going on in the mobile game space…

But in today’s episode, there’s a brand-new platform in town, AppRefinery. So what do you think we’re going to talk about today? Thankfully, we have two experts who will tell us what is going on. One needs no introduction: Kalle Heikkinen, Senior Chief Market Analyst at Liftoff. How’s it going?

Kalle Heikkinen: I’m ok. How about you, Jon?

Jon Jordan: Yeah. Not bad. And, first time on. So, very pleased to have Brendan Fraher, the General Manager at Liftoff Intelligence. How’s it going, Brendan?

Brendan Fraher: Great to be here, Jon.

Vision behind AppRefinery

Jon Jordan: Okay, so we’re gonna start with Brendan. So what’s the vision for AppRefinery?

Brendan Fraher: It’s no secret that the app space is evolving quickly, right?

Because the mobile audience is more sophisticated and some could say trained to expect more, and even if you look at gaming where it was three to four years ago, if you look at a Match 3 games, then to one now, this is where apps are headed. But of course, the timeline is different because games have already evolved.

The audiences are the same, right? You can’t just say there’s a gaming or app audience. It’s just people who use their phones. Like you just spend your time doing different things. And of course, that’s the battlefield, right? The engagement battlefield.

You know, am I spending 10 minutes on Candy Crush, or am I like on Tinder, or am I on let’s say DoorDash or am I on this or on that? As you can imagine, it’s not like you know, you’re just picking something up to use. Well, there are 10 Tinders or 20 booking dot coms and stuff like that, right?

So, with that, the competition is very, very tough. Innovation, as always, is expensive. Developers want to give the market what it wants at this point in time. Which we know, let’s say, is very much a moving target. Fashion moves very, very, very, very quickly.

As leaders in the gaming space for many years, we’ve seen those growth stages, right? It’s easy for us to bring that value to developers, as they say. We know the space. It’s been natural to bring our expertise and our insights to the consumer app space because that’s where the need is now.

Apps vs. Games: Overlapping behaviours

Jon Jordan: No, it’s an interesting, off-the-menu sort of thing. So an opportunity or tech opportunity comes along. Games are always one of the first things that quite quickly got into monetization, but maybe they’re not so bothered about monetization as some other apps.

But it obviously, as you say, makes sense. So games rush ahead, and then apps, you know, learn something from it, and maybe they learn from some of the mistakes that games have made. And, as you say, there’s a similarity in terms of usage, but using a banking app is quite different from a game.

Ok, Kalle, you’re currently straddling both of these fields. So as an overview, what sort of things are you seeing here, what insightful things are you seeing that are similar to games or, on consumer apps? What’s different?

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, definitely. I would echo what Brendan said about games doing these things for a longer time. And this is now the time for apps, too. One thing that we are seeing is the emergence of social features in the app space.

It’s not only social media apps that want to engage users with social features; we are seeing social getting all over different app verticals. And just to give one interesting example that can obviously be found on the Refinery platform, the number one iGaming Platform is DraftKings.

They do very interesting things when it comes to social media, and they’re really unique as well in that regard. For example, they have this social feed feature called Bet Feed, where users can see what other users are betting on. This definitely adds that visibility and social proof to betting.

Then, they also have betting groups. Users can join, create, and share their bigs in these betting groups, which really creates a community within the app.

The pools feature is all about these kinds of prediction pools, where users can join different types of contests and compete with friends or the broader community.

Because in the end, if you think about betting, it is like a solo experience by default. So you are, well, you can say that you’re competing against yourself, but still, it’s something you do often on your own.

Adding these different social layers just makes engaging with an iGaming platform that much more interesting.

Social features in non-gaming apps

Jon Jordan: And in terms of using apps, it’s a very broad term. I mean, obviously, I guess there’s this thing where you need them to be a tight enough category that it makes sense to analyze them as a category.

But you may want it wide enough as well, so you can have enough analysis. So, in a very broad sense, how many categories do you have? How do you look at the app space? Obviously, there are a lot of different sub-genres in the game space, and often, in the podcast, we get very locked down into different types of RPGs or something.

So even within games as a single category, there’s loads of differentiations. How do you handle that from the app point of view?

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, that’s a very good question. The app space has different kinds of genres or verticals; you have the finance apps, productivity apps, fitness apps, and so forth. But, in the app space, it’s not that rigid sense of what kind of features or experience you can expect in an app.
Generally speaking, the potential audience you can serve with apps in general is much broader than when it comes to game genres. If you think about certain core or midcore game genres, they’re definitely trying to, or most likely are, resonating with very specific player audiences. So it’s the app genres and verticals that we’re dealing with in the app space.

Jon Jordan: And I guess another way of looking at the whole app category here is not necessarily looking at the app, but looking at the motivation of how people use apps and the behavior of users in the app rather than what the app actually does.
Because that is another way of looking at these situations, is that a helpful way of looking at apps, or am I just coming up with something clever that is actually not very clever?

Kalle Heikkinen: Definitely, and that’s why we have developed our own motivations model for the non-gaming app space. Longtime GameRefinery fans remember that we do have motivational data for GameRefinery, so we wanted to bring that to AppRefinery as well. The goal is to help developers and marketers understand the why behind user behavior.

We break it down to several key motivations. I’m not gonna list all of them here, but they include things like achievement and sense of achievement, entertainment, social validation, and convenience.

With that, our clients, no matter if you are product-focused or marketing-focused, get to know what really motivates users. So, if you are on the product side of things, you get to build features that meet those specific needs.

If you’re doing a fitness app, it might be that our motivation data says that focusing on achievement and self-improvement can be something that could potentially work out for you.

It helps you create better features that are more aligned with your audience. On the marketing and UA side, you get to target the right users, which is, of course, very important. Understanding what motivations your ideal users are driven by is also very important.

We can help with that. So you get to target them with ads that speak to their needs. Let’s say again, like I mentioned, the fitness app might be that achievement showing content related to achievement could work, for example, or if you have a crypto app, it might be that competitive features could be something that could really resonate with your user base.

Brendan Fraher: And what’s really interesting about this is that all of these trends change. For example, as Kalle said, you’ve got the achievements, in fitness, because of course, you have those goals and stuff like that.

But then, if you marry it with a social system, you can’t just say social system. It has to be, well, how does it work? How do you interface? How are you doing? How are your tasks communicated? And stuff like that.

That can also provide a secondary or third motivator. We’ve heard it from some of the developers who say that one of our competitors has the same app, but the reviews weren’t strong. Why is it so good now?

Right. And they don’t understand. It’s because how they’re interfacing with that main motivator is what’s mainly interesting for the audience at this particular time. As we know, 12 months ago could have been different. 12 months in the future can be, and it’s definitely going to be different.

Jon Jordan: It’s interesting. You mentioned the social aspects a few times already, and it doesn’t work for every app, but, you know, actual searchability is more interesting than it seems to be. Coming from all sorts of fitness apps, it makes sense, and Strava, that sort of thing. And you say sort of gambling stuff, but also in banking now, where people are sending money and splitting bills.

That may not have predominantly come from gaming, but gaming has certainly shown a lot about it. I guess gaming had to go through a bit of its own phase of everything being a single-player game, and then realise that suddenly, your retention suddenly gets really good when it’s engaged and social.

And then, you know, when you’re doing that in a banking app, that’s even more powerful because you are not just moving points around; you’re doing real-world money things. So I guess those sorts of insights are also something that you’re looking to bring to the surface for people.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. In the non-gaming app space, I would add that this applies to many other feature categories, but also to social, in that it can be something surprisingly small that can be the first step. Take, for example, Airbnb. I don’t know if you’ve checked out the app recently, but nowadays, they have collaborative planning tools for your trips, which you can use to share the trip with your family members or friends and then make notes. You can like each other’s picks for the location to go to and stuff like that.

Jon Jordan: And maybe I’m going too far. I generally do, but you can see some aspects of lots of things not becoming everything apps, but there’s a sort of, I think we’re at the stage now, but lots of apps sort of wanna try more things.

As you say, like Airbnb sort of makes total sense for some of those aspects. You can sort of see how there’s, you know, there is interesting hooks for all these different apps and obviously not use all of them, but there is a sort of a movement to sort of have as much activity and as much sort of social aspects in your app as as possible.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. And it’s like you can nowadays find engagement features and even very game-like features in very surprising places. So if you think about the AliExpress app?

They have like complete mini game ecosystems built into the app so that people have just that much more things to interact with and engage with, in the app, in order to make that even more relevant for the users of the app. So yeah, certain apps are definitely expanding their kind of, engagement scope.

Gamification, engagement, and retention systems

Jon Jordan: I mean, obviously a key engagement thing we talk about is stuff like daily rewards and logins and streaks—that has some use, too. Although you probably don’t necessarily want streaks in a banking app. That doesn’t really make sense…

Kalle Heikkinen: I’m actually gonna disagree with that.

If we think about the very traditional banking apps that are very much utility-based, that you just use to pay your bills and stuff like that—you can make that argument that people just want to pay the bills there.

But, especially when it comes to this more like FinTech side and crypto apps, we see a lot of interesting engagement layers being put into place.

So just to throw in one example, Crypto.com, which is obviously one of the leading exchanges and platforms in this space. They have very elaborate engagement systems in place, including different kinds of task systems for daily tasks, for feature exploration, for onboarding.

The goal is to get people to log in daily to the crypto app, because many users are not going to make transactions every day.

So you have that another layer to incentivize you to come in and you have badges and achievements and yes, those streak systems that you mentioned as well actually nowadays.

So every day you log in, you get this in-game currency, diamonds, and then there is a specific store where you can use that currency to exchange it for various in-app rewards.

Brendan Fraher: But we have seen there are good ways and there are bad ways of doing it, right? I mean, it’s very easy to over-egg.

So I would say, Jon, you’re maybe showing your age now with the daily login bonus.

Like, maybe that’s like—we’re even thinking that’s maybe like a little bit in the past, right? Now there’s eight different engagement systems, right?

But there’s also, is there too much? And again, this is the reason, if we go back to AppRefinery, this is what good looks like, right?

And when we say, if there are top-performing apps, or if they’re coming up, the question is, why are they doing it right? Like, why are they engaging more? Are they—you know, it is like retention. And it’s like, what are they doing? So you can see what does good look like, which I think is the important thing here.

So I would say most people—the question is like, after “should we do it,” then it’s “how should we do it?” And then kind of understanding, because I know that Kalle and his team, when they’ve been analyzing things, they’ve seen some pretty bad ways of doing it, but then maybe other ways, which kind of like—you lose kind of the core, like in the soup and stuff.

Jon Jordan: So I guess you’re looking at your competitors and seeing what they’re doing or why is this app suddenly doing really well, and AppRefinery gives you those tools to see what’s going on—some of the features that an app may have added recently—and then it’s a case of drilling down and seeing why is it working?

Brendan Fraher: And then another way of looking at it, and this is what we would always advise people, is that just don’t look in, let’s say, that lane—just don’t look in, let’s say, that category and so on.

Going to, let’s say what Kalle was saying earlier about the motivational drivers, right? If other categories share those similar ones, well what are they doing?

So even if we go back to gaming, it’s like even a couple of years ago, right, where you had Match 3 and then you had slot games, right?

But it’s the same audience, you know, it was like—what was it—35 and over women was the majority.

And then in Match 3, they love collections, right? Well, six months later, all of the main slot games had them because that’s what their audience wanted.

Two completely different, let’s say, gaming experiences, shared audience, and of course the ones that were giving the market what it is that they want.

And again, I would say when people say, “yeah, but that’s gaming,” it’s like, no—that’s giving the audience what it wants. Understand who the audience are first.

Kalle Heikkinen: Just to double down on that—we have, for example, one client, and we asked them that, okay, which competitor apps are you interested in us analyzing?

And none of the apps that they listed that they were interested in were in the vertical or the genre that they operated in. So they were very much interested in exploring ideas from other genres.

So I think that is a very anecdotal example of that.

Brendan Fraher: But it’s definitely some advice for, let’s say, for developers—especially in the consumer app space.

Don’t just look to your closest competitors. It’s like, best of breed is always best of breed.

AppRefinery for UA & targeting

Jon Jordan: I guess that’s sort of talking a little bit about the sort of product side and maybe adding features or maybe taking features out.

You sort of mentioned it a little bit in passing that, you know, another key reason why you might use this is user acquisition and stuff like that.

So, can you talk a little bit about how you think AppRefinery’s gonna help people deal with that key element of getting users?

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, I think the major component is motivations data and how you can leverage that to find the right kind of users by exploring what kind of app elements you could use in your ad creatives in order to resonate with the audience that you are targeting.

So the motivations data is very helpful in that regard. So that’s definitely the key aspect. And then that’s of course related to the product side as well.

So if you are noticing that your audience is motivated by certain aspects, then of course it begs the question of should we build more on the product side also, to answer this kind of demand for, let’s say that it’s social motivations. Should we have more social features or social content in our app for our users?

Brendan Fraher: And on the UA side—’cause of course, as you know, Liftoff Intelligence is part of Liftoff where we’ve got a pretty heavy user acquisition core.

And then I’m sure everyone’s heard the joke—you know, we waste 50% of our marketing budget, but we don’t know what 50%, right?

‘Cause we know it’s a lot of it. Like, if we just put money in, we get users. But if we have directionality on what motivates them, it’s not that we would say it, it’s like—just as Kalle was saying—we have motivational drivers based on what the features have, on the actual apps, and if this is what the audience says that they like, and then you build creatives that are informed by those major motivators already, you’re really narrowing it down to sort of less of the shotgun approach.

Jon Jordan: We’ve had a lot in games where people invented ads that would be nothing to do with the games, and then people liked that gameplay so much they ended up adding those mini games into their games and their games ended up becoming what the ads were in the first place.

You probably won’t deal with that in your banking app, but it’s sort of interesting, isn’t it? It goes back to what you’ve been saying about—there’s things like ads and features that maybe competitors are using, but that’s sort of giving you some behavioral guidance in what consumers want that maybe you didn’t think they wanted or maybe you didn’t wanna give it to them for some reason.

Brendan Fraher: Or that you didn’t realize that they were already exposed to this for many years. Or that, as Kalle was speaking about on crypto, they’ve already had this sort of interaction with it. It’s like, yeah, I know what it is to buy a currency pass.

I know what it is to do and so on, right? So you’re not inventing anything new because they’re already exposed to it.

Jon Jordan: That goes back to what you’re saying about looking wider than just your own single category. ‘Cause there may be some big, enormous sort of features dropped into a category that seems nothing at all to do with what you are up to, but that’s what everyone’s doing now.

And if you don’t have some awareness of what’s going on in the wider app space, then you are flying blind in terms of your own development.

Brendan Fraher: Yeah. And it goes back to, as I said, my first point, which is: innovation is expensive.

So, why not look to what the market says that they like? That doesn’t mean you need to copy or anything like that, but you can—it’s okay to be heavily influenced and sort of say, okay, this is the foundation, this is what they want, and then this part, we’re going to innovate and be like, you know, what our main, let’s say, USP is.

Roadmap, AI, and future insights

Jon Jordan: I dunno if there’s any sort of anecdotal feedback you got when people started using AppRefinery. Is there anything obvious that a lot of people have been saying about what it gives them?

Brendan Fraher: Yeah, so I guess we go back to the same point, which was understanding what the wider space is actually doing.

Understanding that, yes, gamification—I know everyone was rolling their eyes—no, it’s not a game and stuff like that, right?

But I guess the other word would be, it’s like, you know, better user engagement. Right?

And understanding that actual fact that, you know, we have, let’s say like a fitness app. You know, we’ve got lots of 20 to 30 males on it. It’s like, well, when they’re on their phones, this is what they enjoy doing.

We like being part of a guild. And we like to be in battle with this guild, right? But in fact, it’s just online.

People are using their sports app, and this is what we’re doing and stuff. But all of those different systems—they’ve already been worked on by these billion-dollar companies.

They’ve really finessed them and so on, and then you can literally just take that.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. And we’re really in a unique position in the sense that we have the GameRefinery platform and we have all the data and the content that we’ve been putting there for the last 10 years.

So there’s a lot of inspiration that can be drawn from the other platforms and vice versa, as well.

So we’ve already had cases where our gaming clients have been very interested in knowing more about the non-gaming app space as well.

Brendan Fraher: Yeah. And for good reason, because that’s their audience’s time.

So, for example, it’s like just you were saying Jon, it’s like, you know, I’m using my banking app, I just go there, right? Yeah.

But now maybe, okay, I’m gonna buy, I’m gonna, you know, like, you know, do some crypto or whatever. But as Kalle said, yeah, I’m now spending 25 minutes, let’s say, on my train journey, ’cause it’s so engaging.

You know, that can be revenue loss and time loss for those games.

Jon Jordan: It’s funny where you say gamification, which is a term that sort of everyone always apologizes for using or sort of grimaces when they say, but I guess sort of what you’re saying here is it’s not even worth using that term.

‘Cause everything has been gamified—you know, games are now so wide that it’s sort of like, it’s like everything’s been unified.

It’s just that’s how you interact with mobile apps. The fact it’s sort of come from games is somewhat irrelevant, I suppose.

Okay, so that all sounds good. Obviously the final question is always when you’ve explained something that’s new and fantastic and everyone should look at and then the question’s always: so, what else are you doing?

So I dunno if that’s a very sort of impolite question, having you explain what all these new tools are. But have you got anything you can talk about sort of the roadmap for AppRefinery going forward and things you have planned?

Brendan Fraher: Yeah. Well, there’s definitely one thing, and I guess it kind of joins everything that we’ve been talking about earlier, right?

Which is gonna be the mobile audience web. So yes, we have the gaming motivators, we have the consumer app motivators—you know, there’s the apps, there’s the features and so on, right?

But maybe towards the end of this year, start of next year, it’s like, well, what could that mobile user be? Doesn’t mean gaming, doesn’t mean apps, because of course, as we’re saying, that’s the competition.

It’s the competition for the audience’s time. So that’s something which insights we will have in the future.

And of course, surfacing insights easier. Right? You know, it’s like, I always find it amusing that the number one interface that people like now is a GPT-style text box, right? That’s what people want at the moment.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, if Jon, you would’ve asked us what are the current non-gaming app trends, I think different kinds of AI-related features would’ve been quite on top of my list.

But yeah, to Brendan, I would only add one thing, which is that a lot of folks are very interested in getting retention analysis

So like analysis on the notification side and email—retention emails, re-engagement email side.

So we’re definitely looking into having something on that on the platform as well.

Jon Jordan: Good. Everyone should go and check out AppRefinery and add it to your GameRefinery skills and put the two together and see what cool stuff you come up with. Thanks very much to Kalle, and thanks so much to Brendan for their expertise. Thank you.

And thanks to you for watching, listening, however you are consuming the podcast. Remember every episode we are talking about what’s going on in the world of mobile gaming and maybe, in future episodes, what’s going on in the world of mobile apps as well.

So we’re covering everything. Don’t miss out. Do subscribe, and we will see you next time!

Introduction & Listener Survey

Jon Jordan: Welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook in association with Liftoff. Join us as we uncover the latest trends in user acquisition, monetization, and mobile game design.

We’ve just launched a brand new listener survey, and your feedback will be invaluable in helping us improve the Mobile Games Playbook.

We want to know what you enjoy, what you’d like to hear more of, and how we can continue to bring you the most insightful content. Either click on the link in the podcast description or head over to the Liftoff website, click on resources, then head to podcast, and you’ll find a link to the listener survey on that page.

And as a thank you for sharing your thoughts, everyone who completes the survey will be entered into a draw to win an Amazon voucher of $150/£100/€130. So don’t miss out. Your opinions do matter. Please fill out the listener survey today. We really appreciate your input!

Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all the latest trends. I’m your host, John Jordan, and joining me today are two familiar faces from the podcast. We have Kalle Heikkinen and Wilhelm Voutilainen, both Chief Game Analysts at Liftoff. How’s it going, guys?

Kalle Heikkinen: Very good. If I go first, I’m super excited to be on the pod!

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, doing super, super well as well and really interesting to go through the award winners.

Introducing the 2025 Mobile App Dev Awards

Jon Jordan: Yeah. For this episode, we are really working you quite hard. There’s quite a lot of stuff to cover ’cause we are looking at the 2025 Mobile App Dev Awards from Liftoff. Everyone loves an award ceremony, and obviously, we wanna know the winners so we’re gonna go through not everything, ’cause I think you have a whole bunch of categories.

Is it nine categories now? But we’re gonna go through some of those and for each category there is a winner in the mid core and a winner in the casual section. So that’s interesting because some strategies work for one of those categories and something very different works for the other.

So hopefully for each sort of category, we’ll get a good sort of spectrum of what’s going on. And, I think the other thing you’re doing. I don’t think we’ve ever done this on the podcast, however many episodes we’ve done. We’ve never really talked about non-gaming apps. So, this is the first year you have some, non-gaming app categories.

We will also spend some time looking at that because there’s some interesting stuff going on there that may be useful for people even in the game space.

Best Collaboration Event

Jon Jordan: Okay, so the first category we’re going to look at, Wilhelm, I think you’re going to lead us on this, is the best collaboration events. Over the years, we’ve spoken a lot, probably more than anything else, about collaboration events.

This is the best collaboration event. For the mid-core, we have Diablo Immortal vs. World of Warcraft. What made that one stand out?

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, so Diablo and Warcraft, of course, big IPs, they have been collaborating throughout the years, like multiple times, ’cause you know, there’s an excellent IP and player demographic hit.

And of course, both are Activision-Blizzard IPs. So, there’s, of course, cross-play, with players playing both games. So this, they’re a good fit for that. And, in terms of like Diablo Immortal, this is the Eternal War event, which we are talking about; this is actually Diablo Immortal’s first large collaboration event.

Of course, if you compare Diablo Immortal to Diablo on PC, Immortal has a much more active and robust approach to LiveOps. Also, naturally, this event took this kind of Diablo and World of Warcraft collaboration to a whole new level.

The event had super high production values. It was not just about purchasing these bundles, you know, a simple task event, but a gameplay first event. In short, the event had you collecting these frozen moon points, which would unlock this milestone in this kind of overarching menu, and you would then get these, which are two or three limited-time modes.

First of all, these were super well implemented, true to the work of the IP. One of them was this kind of recreation of this base in the battleground familiar from World of Warcraft. And another was this kind of recreation of the, you know, the battle, the legendary battle against the Lich King.

These were both super cleverly made in that they didn’t necessarily mechanically bring anything new to the game. They used their familiar limited-time mode as a base for those new additions.

They used Diablo Immortal’s existing limited-time game mode, which made this feel completely new and did not risk having this world of work elements and mechanics. Yeah, they felt true to the IP, experiences, and performance. Regarding performance, it was clear that the event was made for more engagement and to celebrate the 20th anniversary.

Most of these are really exclusive, cooler rewards, which, this time, are completely earnable for free. And if, let’s say, they could have done it the other way around, these weapon cosmetics would be monetized in the upper fashion through bundles and gachas and so on. But these are clearly chosen, like this more player-friendly approach. The player sentiment was like really positive for this event as well.

Kalle Heikkinen: What I find very interesting about this approach is that, usually, when we talk about IP collaboration events, you have the game, and then you have something entirely different in that game.

The IPs often don’t have that many similarities. Of course, sometimes they do, but in this case, it’s the same. Both IPs come from the developer of this base game, so I find that a unique approach to an IP collaboration event. I guess the lesson that we can all learn from this is that if you have a strong IP portfolio, it can also be very interesting to have different IPS from the portfolio visit these different games that you have.

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, that’s definitely a really good approach in that. And of course, like looking at the Diablo Immortal collaborations, they’re actually now running the second collaboration in the game ever.

Jon Jordan: And, looking at the, on the more casual side, we’ve got Stumble Guys and My Hero Academia. So, obviously a very different sort of collaboration, sort of there, but, talk us through that.

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, yeah. Stumble Guys, of course, has a different approach to the model. So they are more about like having lots of high cadence of constant collaborations. It’s like moving the game to being kind of like this metaverse, which they call Stumble Wars, that they wanna go towards, similar to the Fortnite and Roblox approach in that sense.

Sometimes it’s hard to choose which of these Stumble Guys collaborations was the best. But My Hero Academia here was the year’s standout collaboration because it integrated these core mechanics of the anime.

So they had this ability, called Geeks, Greeks, or something like that. So they actually integrated those into Stumble Guys, and again, like, really clever, simple implementations of theirs. Often, they run this kind of thing like an incredible collaboration team. Limited time most, but now they brought this to kind of the next level and like more, having a bit more engaging and bringing new twists by having this, My Hero Academia abilities in the game.

Jon Jordan: And I guess it sort of shows as well as you say that on the midcore you have, you know, some very prized IP.

So you’ve, I mean, obviously the blizzard thing is specifically on its own sort of pedestal. but you’re sort of being a bit more careful there maybe in terms of how people wanna play and how they sort of, what you’re using their collaboration for.

Whereas obviously on these, maybe on these more casual ones, at that point people are not so bothered maybe in the actual collaboration, but just there’s something new coming and that’s what keeps people in there. So it’s different models.

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah. It also, of course, depends on the game for what kind of approach is better. Diablo Immortal has a very distinct, darker theme. On the other hand, the Stumble Guys theme is closer to the Fortnite model, with not really one single theme. In Stumble Guys, having multiple themes is actually beneficial.

So, the best approach truly depends on the specific game being developed.

Best Social Event

Jon Jordan: Okay. So from the best collaboration event, we’re gonna move to Best Social Event. And for the Midcore one, we’re looking at League of Legends: Wild Rift – Arcane: Battle of Twin Cities.

Wilhelm Voutilainen: So here, of course, the focus was to find, okay, how these social layers were uniquely or successfully implemented into these events. So Wild Rift – Arcane: Battle of Twin Cities was the winner here, and it was basically part of this overarching collaboration with season two of Arcane on Netflix.

This “Battle City” event, however, was a different kind of social addition to Wild Rift. Mid-core and competitive games are inherently social, but this event managed to bring a totally new social dynamic. Players aligned themselves with either Zone or Piltover, the two factions from Arcane.

And then they would cooperate, complete tasks for example, answer Arcane themed quizzes in the game and so on, and then they would have this visualized map in the game, and then they will capture these territories and which of these player factions will capture more territories, will then win the match.

So, having this new collaborative communal social layer on top of the existing super social games is actually really interesting. Of course, again, having this combination of seamless IP integration and this fresh social layer is also interesting.

Jon Jordan: Good. And then on the casual side, we’ve got Monopoly Go and Tycoon Racers.

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah. So, of course, again, like Monopoly Go, we talk about social events, one of the year’s clear winners. They started the partner event trend, which has now appeared in most of the new highest-grossing casual games and is becoming one of the key event archetypes.

They evolved the partner event further, through this KU Racers event, which we can call the partner race event format. In partner events, you collaborate with one or multiple players to complete these tasks.

But then they thought, okay, okay, how do we make this even more social? Okay, we add a competitive aspect. So now you’re collaborating with three other players. So there are four teams of four players, and then you’re competing against other teams. So, adding this kind of new social layer, we have been seeing other games implement a similar event in their games.

Kalle Heikkinen: I actually see this as a very clever way to cater to different kinds of player motivation. So they started with the co-op-focused, partner event and then expanded on that with this one with a more competitive side. And that’s a smart way to address different audiences with different motivations.

This partner mechanic is liked, especially on the casual side. But if we go back to Wild Rift, it can be seen as a partner event itself as well because there are two factions, which are commonly partners. What truly distinguishes this event from previous incidents is its singular nature.

It’s not tied to guild membership, making it accessible to the entire player community. This offers a much broader appeal to players.

Jon Jordan: You often, as you say, joining a guild can be quite an undertaking. You’re presented with a long list, and knowing where to start is hard. You might join one only to have it disband, leaving you feeling lost. It’s a significant commitment for players.

Other activities, however, are far more casual and offer immediate rewards, which is a valid point.

Best Minigame

Jon Jordan: Okay. So, Kalle, next up is the best minigame. So that’s a mini game within, within the game. We’ve spoken about that a few times as well. Merge Mansion is our casual title winner here.

Kalle Heikkinen: That is, correct. So, Merge Mansion had a really good year in 2024, especially the latter part.

They were very active in experimenting with different event types, adding new events to their event portfolio. That has continued into 2025 as well. In 2024, they added their first-ever mini game event, a mix of casino-style gameplay with merge gameplay.

Kind of a combination of those two things. I will not go into the weeds of explaining how the event works, but in essence, it’s about players pulling this kind of slot machine lever, a randomized mechanic, and you pull it, and then different merge items come out of the machine.

You then try to find these combinations to combine them, and you, as a player, have limited energy to engage with this machine. There is also this overheating mechanic if you use it too much, and that is monetized, and so forth.

It stood out that a fresh gameplay event was added because it’s completely different from the default merge gameplay. You have mentioned that it can be very slow paced, but in this one, you are really like hitting the kind of slot machine in a very quick pace.

Things happen fast, and as I said, it has this kind of casino feeling. When you succeed, it’s also very visually pleasing, experience-wise, and performance-wise. For example, when you look at the revenue numbers for Merge Mansion, you can see that they often overlap whenever this event is active, with revenue spikes.

You can definitely make the argument that you can link these two together, usually in the Merge two space. We have noticed that the other top merge games, Seaside Escape and Gossip Harbor, do something innovative first, and then other games copy them.

But then, this one was Merge Mansion’s innovation, and we have seen that; the point is that it went the other way, in this case.

Jon Jordan: Mm-hmm. No, it’s good. You say the difference in pace there. I guess we’ve spoken a lot in the past about people having games and then shoving a load of different games in there, and sometimes that can dilute the overall reason people are playing these games.

But you can, you know, obviously there’s been so much around this casino style. Obviously, casinos are massive on their own, and clearly that’s the mechanic that people like, and you can see having emerged, and that coming in, how often are they running those events?

Kalle Heikkinen: I wanna say it’s several times a month.

Jon Jordan: Okay.

Kalle Heikkinen: So biweekly.

Jon Jordan: So fairly regular.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. So, I want to maybe just add that it is very aggressively monetized. You use premium currency a lot for this event.

There are natural drains to your premium currency stash. Obviously, there are loads of offers available to hint players that they might need some more gems to engage with this event more.

Jon Jordan: Okay. And then on the midcore side, we’ve got Goddess of Victory: Nikke X Dave the Diver.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. So, Dave the diver, a big PC/console indie hit, I think it even won the Best Indie Game award in the Game Awards in 2023,

They had that game experience, which, as we all know, is a third-person shooter game from Asia, still doing relatively well in the US. So they had that, and it was really interesting and definitely something that we’ve never seen before.

You have this premium indie prestige game, which is kind of featured in a free-to-play mobile game. We wanted to nominate it also for its sheer uniqueness.

Jon Jordan: So there wasn’t really an attempt to, unlike Merge Mansion, there wasn’t sort of an attempt to combine the gameplay?

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah. I think that the goal probably was to expose the players to this game experience and then, create sales for the Dave the Diver game through that.

Jon Jordan: I think it makes sense, from your context, that it was a massive indie hit that came out of nowhere and probably is one of those games that people have heard about, if you’re a gamer, you probably may have come across videos on it or you know, you just hear that it won those awards.

But people may be, you know, not taking that step to actually go and sort of check it out. And obviously over the years, the price has gone down, so that makes it sort of perfect sort of crossover in terms of, that would be an audience who would go for that indie hit maybe

Kalle Heikkinen: No, that’s, that’s correct.

And maybe they will also try to see that Dave the Diver is not on mobile, so maybe this is kind of testing the waters: Would an experience like this interest the mobile market?

Best Newcomer

Jon Jordan: Okay. Quite a big category next, and that is best newcomer, Wilhelm?

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yes. So for the mid-core side, we have Pokémon TCG Pocket, which was, I would say, quite a clear winner there. If we look at the performance, you know, it’s performed extremely well, especially in Japan and doing fine in the U.S., too.

An average sustained gross rank of seven in the U.S. and two in Japan currently. I would say one of the reasons behind the success is, of course, the IP. It’s really the perfect IP for this kind of game. Kind of similar to Pokémon Go. And it was interesting that they did not try to create anything completely new, but the approach was kind of new on mobile, so they really focused on the cards, and not so much about the TCG combat.

The focus is on opening packs, collecting gift cards, it’s kind of like a mix of casual and mid-core game in that sense. For many of these players, it’s more of this kind of casual app. Instead of a game where you open the gacha pack, you collect cards and so on, you have like a few quick sessions per day, but that’s it.

That keeps the retention, and keeps you coming every day because it’s so well implemented. And of course, you know, it taps into the nostalgia because everybody pretty much knows what Pokémon cards are, but now it’s, you know, you can actually open cards for free and get that kind of experience.

But for the more mid-level players, the gameplay, playing with the cards, and so on are still possible. Again, it’s made to be much more approachable because it’s a simplified version of the original Pokémon TCG game, which can be pretty hard to get into, especially in physical form.

For me, especially, it was the first time I got to play with the cards, and it’s a clever approach. Of course, if we look at the monetization, then again, we can focus on the subscription plan first.

You can then purchase premium currency to open more packs. But the subscription plan is a really big part of it, kind of like what you have in non-gaming apps as well.

Jon Jordan: Definitely. I saw lots of people saying exactly what you were saying, lots of nostalgia for their youth, and just opening packs and not playing the game at all.

You’re saying just sort of reliving that sort of experience of, oh, I’ve got this one, blah, blah. So yeah, I think it’s done over a billion dollars now, isn’t it? So I’m thinking clearly, smashed it out of the park, as they say.

Kalle Heikkinen: They have created a very powerful, kind of daily login habit for people to open the app and get the daily packs, rewards, whatever. And then yeah, I can imagine that there are tons of players who don’t engage with the game beyond that. They just log in.

Jon Jordan: On the casual side, what was the best newcomer?

Wilhelm Voutilainen: So Domino Dreams, from Super Play. Of course, it was a remarkable year for the company.

They scaled both Dice Dreams to sustaining a top 30 grossing position, so that was the casual casino game. But then as well, their newest game, Domino Dreams, scaled up and broke into the top 50 grossing, which is, you know, a common performance trend for successful casual games.

That being, optimizing the game and then scaling with downloads and revenues closely following. Right now, Domino Dreams is the highest-grossing game, but the gameplay itself is close to what you have in Solitaire titles, which is again one of the really trending genres with the Disney cylinder and so on.

Biggest Evolver

Jon Jordan: The final games category we’re looking at is the biggest evolver. We used to call that most improved, but it’s better to be an evolver than an improver.

Okay. On the mid-core side, Brawl Stars was a pretty obvious choice.

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Absolutely. They turned the boat around after the high decline of 2022 and 2023. It managed to ensure some of the daily revenues of the launch levels and also keep those launch revenue levels for around six months, which is an incredible feat.

And of course, this was like, we could talk about this for five hours, what kind of things they did. But they added to this whole bold, new direction of content. So, a combination of feature changes, events, and collaboration events.

Supercell hasn’t collaborated much in the past. Now, they really embrace collaborations and have brought these new game modes. Of course, this is the main part of that. But if we look at the performance spikes themselves and when the performance was highest, that was mostly due to the kind of events.

So they had these overarching seasons, of course, overarching events, and it’s trending and works in mid-core games. They had great collaboration events. For example, the SpongeBob event was a great success. They were not just reskins but actually brought actual gameplay to the game as well.

So again, bringing more engagement, making the event feel more special, and so on. And just, you know, with this, all these different kinds of modes kept the gameplay fresh.

Jon Jordan: As you say, they substantially changed almost everything in the game. I mean, not quite the basic gameplay, but they reworked that game. And it shows that games don’t necessarily need to be in terminal decline, clearly ’cause it successfully rebooted itself.

But when you have a game that’s in decline, and that game was in decline for getting on for a year. Over six months, they would try many things, but it wasn’t working at all.

But they still kept going. If you want to change the trajectory of the game, you really get to grips with it and part of that is finding out what the audience wants and doesn’t want, not just doing what you, the game developer, think is gonna work.

You really have to sort of obviously look at what the audience is playing. So yeah, it is quite amazing how, even at that very high level, how successful it was and then how low it went, and how I think the most successful they’ve ever been, now, on with their sort of reboot. So they’ve really taken it back up there.

Jon Jordan: And then what do we have on the casual side? Seaside Escape.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yes. So, a casual merge two title. And this is a LiveOps story. When you look at the game product side, what they did in 2024, they were following the latest event trends, from these digging events, as we call it, to social win streak challenges, and just very good at rolling out fresh content constantly.

If the Brawl Stars story is a kind of radical pivot story, then I think Seaside Escape is more about consistency, timing, and looking at market trends and reading them correctly. Then, refining the game experience based on that. And the result has been quite remarkable.

So steady revenue climbs have pushed the game to, at least the top 40 grossing or even higher. So, that just proves that I like this, kind of a quiet evolver can also go very big. So, an excellent example of scaling up in this very competitive genre nowadays by having a stellar event portfolio and evolving that event portfolio.

So, a really good job. Micro Fun, as we already mentioned, has other hit merge two games, namely Gossip Harbor, which had a very good year in 2024. I would say that behind that game’s success has been the really solid job on the live ops front.

Jon Jordan: The thing about live ops is that marginal improvements can really add up over time. You get this compounding when you’re improving your retention and monetization, and over time, that means you spend more on advertising, and suddenly, it really builds up.

Best Feature Innovation (Non-Gaming)

Jon Jordan: For the non-gaming apps, this is the first time you’ve been looking at these in terms of the awards, and we have best feature innovation, which went to DraftKings. Do you want to tell us a bit about what DraftKings has been doing?

Kalle Heikkinen: Yes, for sure. For those who don’t know, DraftKings is one of the biggest iGaming platforms out there, operating in the U.S. It’s mainly a sports betting app, but it has a casino component and a Daily Fantasy League. They’ve added a stats hub feature, which is kind of a directive to users who want to know about the data and statistics when they’re making betting predictions.

So if you want things like, consistency sheets on line moves and stuff like that, this is the kind of feature that gives tons of data to users when they’re pondering on what kind of bets to do. This stood out because looking at some of the top iGaming apps, this is not a staple feature.

Even the top apps don’t have these dedicated spaces where you can look at the different sports and markets, and statistics. And even if they do, they tend to be more underwhelming than what DraftKings has done with the stats.

So, very good job in making the, one of the best, statistics features that we’ve seen.

Jon Jordan: I guess that’s a lot about differentiating compared to competing apps. ‘Cause not being an expert in that field at all. But I imagine in terms of the actual odds, you get broadly the same across every app you use ’cause they’re all checking each other.

So it’s, you know, you sort of don’t get any edge from that point of view. But in terms of feeling like, oh, this is the more serious app or this, you know, that data, maybe if you’re not even using it, but it just feels like, oh, this is sort of the place to go.

Why, you know, why go anywhere else?

Best Use of Engagement Features (Non-Gaming)

Jon Jordan: Okay. Best use of engagement features and the winner was Trip.com?

Kalle Heikkinen: Yes. Trip.com’s Trip Genie AI assistant was the winner here. So this is an AI-powered travel assistant. Oh yeah. Trip.com, if the name does not reveal what kind of app we’re talking about, it’s a travel/booking app.

So if you’re going for a trip, then you have obviously several options like booking.com, hotels.com. But then there is also Trip.com. But yeah, they have added this AI-powered travel assistant feature that basically made the trip planning phase into a more personalized and interactive experience.

So if you think about AI chat bots and stuff like that, then this is what we’re talking about, so it’s able to give users travel recommendations. So if you give it some prompts, like, yeah, I’m going to Italy, you know, give me, kind of like a seven day itinerary and like what kind of places I would need to visit or, and where should I stay?

And then of course you can think that, okay, well, can’t ChatGPT do the same thing? And yes, the answer, I mean, the answer is yes, but the thing is that because it’s in the Trip.com app, you have a seamless integration into booking those hotels.

You just click have, you know, one tab and you have booked the hotel that it’s suggesting for you. So kind of a very frictionless and convenient way for users to make the bookings.

Jon Jordan: Would you say we’re going to see, obviously, pretty much every app will have all these sorts of things, and every AI agent will be able to do these sorts of operations?

But I guess it makes sense to do it in the app, give them a sense of one, you say the user experience is probably smoother and better integrated and it feels like they’re a little bit more in control because that nervousness that if you just tell the GPT to go and do something and you are not fully aware, it’s booked you, I don’t know, Manchester in America rather than Manchester in the UK or something.

You know, imagine these hallucinations being pretty scary for travel.

Kalle Heikkinen: That’s true. And like you said, I’m sure many of Trip.com’s competitors will have this feature in the future, and some might already have it. But currently, that’s not the story. So, if you go to booking.com and some other platforms, they don’t have a similar option.

Excellence in Social Features (Non-Gaming)

Jon Jordan: Okay. Next, we have excellence in social features, which was probably quite competitive. And you’ve given it to Snapchat.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yes. We give it to Snapchat’s personalized Snap Map, homes. So, Snapchat added this social feature where users can design their own virtual homes on the Snap Map.

So, for people who have not used Snapchat, it’s not only about messaging with other people. You also have this map feature that you can use. And on that map, you can now design your own mini home that represents you.

So it’s very customizable. You can show off your personality with the homes, and it really adds a fresh layer of self-expression to the app experience. Of course, this is not the first time that Snapchat has added something related to cosmetics and stuff like that.

They have a lot going on with the avatar personalization and customization, but this is kind of an additional way to make the map feature more engaging. So now the map, which previously maybe could be seen more as a utility tool, is more of a social feature. I find that very interesting and makes using the snap feature just that much more compelling.

Excellence in AI-Powered Features (Non-Gaming)

Jon Jordan: And then our final award is, we’ve mentioned it already, in passing, about excellence in AI-powered features. I guess Pinterest did a really good job, and they have won the actual AI-powered feature award.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yes, that is true. We have picked Pinterest as a winner here. One of the most interesting things was that Pinterest AI users can now generate custom backgrounds for their product images.

This means that if you have a plain photo of a chair or something that you are trying to sell, then the AI can place it in a beautifully decorated room scene for you.

They also added very, very personalized content recommendations. So, it learns your taste on Pinterest and can tailor the home feed and create it for you in a compelling way.

And maybe the most visible thing related to this has been that Pinterest has introduced creative tools like an AI-assisted collage generator that helps the users mash up these different pins.

So if you use Pinterest, and you like something, you always pin it. With this AI collage feature, you can then easily mash them up into these kinds of very stylish vision boards.

Some reports by Pinterest have shown that these AI-generated collages have tripled user engagement. This suggests that users love playing around with this new feature.

Closing Remarks

Jon Jordan: Cool. I guess that will be pretty competitive over the coming years, as you look at every app that is introducing AI for this year.

We will say, thank you very much, to Wilhelm and Kalle for their expertise and for running us through the winners of the 2025 AppDev awards.

Thanks for your time, guys, and thanks to you for listening, however you are consuming the podcast.

Remember, every episode, we’re delving into what’s going on in the world of mobile games, and now, we’re taking a detour to the world of mobile apps. Maybe there will be more of that in the future. So thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time!

Introduction

Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast about making a great mobile game business, and that’s one of the things we’re going to be looking at in today’s episode: monetization!

I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and I have two experts in the subject who are going to be helping us sort of drill down into what’s been going on and the trends in monetization.

First up, we have Andrew Seow, who is the Director of Monetization at Triple Dot Studios. How’s it going, Andrew?

Andrew Seow: It’s going great. Thank you for having me.

Jon Jordan: I’m glad you could come along and share your expertise. Ravid Sela, the Ad Monetization Lead at Play Studios, also joins us.

So much to cover when we come to the subject of monetization in mobile games, which is the heart and soul of mobile games. I think we’re going to drill down into some particular areas, but to kick us off, Andrew, can you take us through some of the headline trends that you’ve been seeing in the sector over the past 6 to 12 months?

Key monetization trends in 2024

Andrew Seow: In mobile gaming, and particularly in ads monetization, which is Triple Dot’s bread and butter, the standout monetization trend for 2024 has been this move to header bidding. In 2024, that’s been headlined by Google Ads making that transition.

We’ve seen a lot of other networks making that transition as well. The corollary is that you’re seeing more partners starting to develop their own products. Beloco is an example where they are starting to come out as an SDK, rather than buy through exchanges, because that is perhaps more efficient, that gives them more control, that gives them more exposure to the inventory.

So header bidding has really been, at least in the ads world, the standout trend. On a longer time frame, when IDFA deprecation happened about three years ago, and a lot of mobile inventory shifted towards Android, we’re starting to see a shift back towards iOS. Some of that has to do with the header bidding model, but it’s also the fact that more advertisers are starting to get to grips with how to work within the parameters of IDFA and targeting inventory on that basis.

And so what would be interesting, I guess, moving forward from that is whether that balance continues to exist, whether it shifts more in favour of iOS as all of the partners move to header bidding, guided by the likes of AppLovin and Unity as the main mediation players.

Understanding header bidding vs. waterfall model

Jon Jordan: I’m sure all our listeners know what header bidding is, and it’s just me who doesn’t, but for the uninitiated in ad monetization, can you give us an idea of what it is?

Andrew Seow: I’m happy to do that, and then Ravid should also give her view on this. The way I think about it is very much like an auction house but almost like a single-slot auction, so you don’t get to bid on top of each other.

Each partner that participates in this auction receives the same bundle of information or set of signals about that particular ad or that particular opportunity to show an ad to a user.

This is in contrast to what in the ads monetization world we would call a waterfall, a collection of prices set by us, the publishers, to tell the partners what prices we would like them to bid at.

So header bidding has really elucidated a shift in that kind of pricing dynamic from publisher-led to partner/network-led because now the algorithms and the way that prices are being determined are changing.

Pros and cons of header bidding

Jon Jordan: That was a good explanation. Ravid, what’s your view on this?

Ravid Sela: To be honest, when I’m looking at this year’s trends, I completely agree with Andrew about the shift to header bidding or more structured auctions.

While we see it as a beneficial transition for publishers and networks since it cuts out a lot of work, and optimization is necessary, we see the disadvantage as giving the entirety of the power to the mediator.

When we look at the whole auction process, it’s based on a very concealed algorithm that only has very general guidelines or explanations for the method itself.

So we’re basically focusing on bidders only, and the publisher loses a lot of the intelligence they would once get from seeing which rates are winning and which are not.

More specifically, seeing which rates are losing—as a publisher, we can only see the winning impression rates. We don’t have that power anymore. That leads to better workflow daily, but we are losing a lot of information in the process.

Another prominent aspect of the mediation is that we’re not able to see the eCPMs of the losing bids as well as the winning impressions throughout a user’s journey or lifetime.

So we only see averages. The publisher is losing their intelligence on what’s going on in that process. The mediation is getting back all the power. As a publisher, that’s a disadvantage. I would like to get a better view of the auction processes.

Industry-wide adoption and its implications

Jon Jordan: It seems like some changes in the industry happen because they’re more efficient. There is an efficiency factor here, but also some downsides.

Has this change happened because, generally, everyone agrees this is a more efficient way to do it?

Or do mediators have the ability to do this? So they’re using that power to introduce a new system that will improve their business efficiency.

Is that the right way of looking at it? What triggered this change? If it’s more efficient, you must be happy with the change on a top-line basis. Otherwise, presumably, you wouldn’t be adopting it.

Ravid Sela: The first ones that deprecated their manual CPM lines were Meta, as far as I know, and it was all part of natural progression. Tech-wise, now things have become more towards bidding as a very efficient method of working, both sides have seen the advantages of it, but not all sides figured the disadvantages of it.

So now, as far as I’m concerned, there’s a little imbalance, but it will eventually be balanced again. Andrew, what do you think?

Andrew Seow: I think, Jon, when you were saying, does everyone agree?

I think the question is, who is everyone?

What we need to remember is that on the other side of the chain are individual advertisers who want to buy inventory on our apps, i.e., the opportunity to show their adverts to our users and players.

They can only do that if they have the technical ability to read the signals they are sending, interpret them, and price them.

The bidding change has streamlined a lot of the infrastructure, but it does not necessarily make it accessible to all advertisers.

Some agencies, for example, work with bespoke brand clients, and the campaigns that they run are very custom and very tailored, but that might not benefit from an incredibly streamlined large-scale system.

And I guess that’s the kind of general claim against most technological progress.

But I suppose in the specific case of thinking about monetization trends and how it affects our revenue performance, it does affect the competitiveness of that auction.

Revenue trends and challenges in 2024

Jon Jordan: I guess you’re coming back to the top line for your business. You may have opinions on how the system’s changing, but if your revenue’s going up for your ads, that’s fine. You become a bit more unsure if you go, “Well, not quite sure if our revenue may not be going up,” then you feel like you don’t like the process and really don’t like the outcome. So that’s the balance.

Andrew Seow: I think we would all accept across the monetization industry that this year perhaps has not been as great as past years. The lack of control is perhaps the most obvious thing because it lets us determine what prices—given the internal information we have about our users—we think those users are valued.

Now that, as Ravid was saying, is taken away from us because it has all moved to the networks or to the mediation ecosystems.

So, I would make the general claim that it hasn’t been as strong across the industry for revenues. Coupled with that, I also think we’re talking about monetization, but user acquisition is the other side of the same coin for us.

And I think we’re generally also seeing a trend where the cost of acquiring users is going up, which generally does not make for a healthy model—of increasing costs and stale or not-increasing-as-quickly monetization and revenue growth.

So, there is a bit of transition friction that I think the industry is going through right now. And I think that’s the context in which we are looking at many of these trends, even looking forward to next year.

What does that determine about our strategy? Do we change anything, or do we try to work within the parameters of the system that is now designed in many ways for us?

The rise of hybrid monetization models

Jon Jordan: Yeah, it’s always funny on the mobile ad side. Lots of companies use ads to drive revenue, but every mobile game publisher is using ads to attract users.

Some have it more than others in terms of how they run ad revenue, but you’re all using it to attract users as well.

So there’s this interesting double situation.

You seem to suggest that these mediation layers are gaining more information, and the revenue model you’re suggesting seems to be making more money as well.

Maybe this is why AppLovin is doing so well. It’s been a really good business model for them.

I guess we need a bit of shaking out over time from this new business model for you guys to work out some analytics to better price what you’re selling.

You don’t want the trend to continue any further.

You both focused on the ad side of monetization, but with these sorts of changes, do you feel that means the sort of more direct monetization of users—does that come more to the fore?

Does that mean that, because ads are sort of in flux at the moment, companies start to think, “Can we increase our in-app purchases?”

Would that be a strategic change or maybe a more tactical change that you could make? Or does it not really mean that?

You can’t just swap those things in and out.

Ravid Sela: Hybrid monetization has just really taken off and become very popular this year.

Users who can’t afford to pay or won’t take that leap are more prone to looking for rewarded videos. In return, users can retain and play, and publishers get a broader audience.

Another interesting point is that if we look at it from a user acquisition point of view, user acquisition methods hint that those ads would pay more for paying users.

They would bid higher to attract those users to their apps.

In that sense, having paying users within your app will draw higher eCPMs and higher revenues from ads. The hybrid model feeds off itself and contributes to the higher eCPMs of the DAU.

The relationship between ads and in-app purchases

Andrew Seow: I would only add one, maybe two things. The first is that the type of game or play mode that supports or encourages in-app purchases—the action of people opening their wallets—is quite different from one that is supported primarily by ads.

When you think about ads, you think about how to make them as seamless within the user experience as possible so that people will never like ads, but they might be more tolerant of ads appearing.

When it comes to in-app purchases, I think you are trying to encourage them to see the incentive and see the upside in buying whatever it is that you are purchasing.

So, you know, to Ravid’s point, I think there is the sense that we’re trying to make it more important, but there are certain underlying fundamentals that need to change.

You need to have an economy that offers power-ups and other forms of rewards to try to justify people subscribing or making a purchase.

And I think that’s the hardest part of a transition.

One thing you might do as a game studio is you might say, “Maybe we need to do an acquisition, maybe we need to produce new games that are starting out from being in-app purchases.”

But that is also a different skill set.

So I think the transition—a lot of studios are considering it or trying to do it—but there is a lot of friction in there that goes beneath the conceptual thing of, “Yes, we want to make that transition to an IAP or hybrid model.”

On the ad side, we are seeing some emerging formats that might encourage people to open their wallets or at least be comfortable with the concept of opening their wallets.

So, if you think about what Amazon is investing in, it is shoppable ads or trying to make that transition to the shop as seamless as possible.

Trying to encourage the habit of getting people to spend in the context of a mobile app is emerging as a format and could change the way players behave when using their devices.

But purely on the IAP and hybrid side, there is perhaps a slower take-up or a more frictionful transition to that hybrid model.

User spending habits in mobile games

Jon Jordan: It’s a good point. The sort of concept someone like me—who doesn’t make games—might have is, “Oh, you’ve got a game that has ads in it, just stick a couple of in-app purchases in there, and hey, you’re making loads of money.”

You probably could have done that 10 years ago. The mobile space is now so specialized in the types of experiences and users that you build your business around.

It’s a very engaged and thoughtful process of how you expand that.

As you say, sometimes the easiest thing is to do M&A and bring in other people who have that expertise rather than spend years trying to build it yourself.

I do wonder—and I guess over time people have got more comfortable with in-app purchases in games or apps or buying things on mobile—the mobile games industry is improving its ability to monetize its players.

Some games are incredibly good, and some genres, such as 4X and RPGs, can be very good at monetizing their audience.

But I don’t get the impression there’s a rising tide making it easier for people to spend money.

It still seems to be a very small percentage of the audience.

I can’t remember the data, but tens of thousands of people are generating almost billions of dollars of revenue.

I don’t get the impression that’s changing quickly.

Do you think people are getting more open to the general concept of spending a dollar on a game or having a credit card attached to Google Pay or Apple Pay?

Ravid Sela: From my experience, games that tend to be more hybrid-build do not rely on friction to get users to pay but on higher value for users.

So seasonal passes, for instance, are a very trendy item right now, and they vary in price.

I feel like this is something that will help convert a user into a paying user, and in return, the user will get more value.

The user will get better enjoyment from the game, and this does not rely on friction. The frustration is almost not there.

It is helping users in their progression within the game in a sense that is not exactly a pay-to-win format, but it is enhancing the fun.

So, I think that both sides are more prone to using that method as a converting method.

We can see that across many games. It’s very popular right now—having seasonal passes that go from weekly to biweekly or monthly.

If we are looking at ways to monetize users and convert them, the industry is trying to tackle it by going with enhancement rather than friction.

Andrew Seow: I think the reality is always going to be that it will remain an absolute minority or even an absolute super minority that is making in-app purchases.

Maybe with the exception of games like Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail, where there is an entire meta built around the in-app purchase and the value of the in-app purchase.

When it comes to in-app purchases, we must ask what exactly we are buying from or selling to the user.

As Ravid said, it’s not so much the fact that you might not get friction—except maybe if you don’t have to see ads because that’s part of the package.

It’s really about how that ties into the enjoyment of the game.

For a lot of people, their relationship with mobile games in the COVID era was to relieve boredom and to be entertaining.

It’s a very casual relationship in a lot of ways, which means that you’re not inclined to spend this money at the margins versus buying a hot dog, right?

So, if you want to increase conversions, you have to ask yourself if there are more micro ways of selling bundles or packages to try and make them more enticing.

But I do think that many publishers who focus on IAP or for whom IAP is the main revenue model accept that it will be a super minority that is making most of the money.

They are trying to increase the amount of money they get from that super minority and then, at the margins, try to convert the payers.

But I wouldn’t think that it is trying to increase the user base from one or two percent to hitting 40% of payers.

I don’t know if that’s reasonable, but intuitively, it doesn’t really seem reasonable to me as opposed to trying to keep your most engaged players and your highest-paying users.

The future of direct-to-consumer monetization

Jon Jordan: In the long term, it’d be interesting to see super games like Fortnite and Roblox as a platform for spending money.

My kids are keen to spend money there, but thankfully don’t have debit cards.

As that generation grows up, you might see it go from one or two percent to three or four percent because digital goods are something they’ve grown up with.

But I think you’re right. At the moment, it makes more sense to focus on the people you know are spending.

Can you get the person who spends $100 to spend $150?

That makes much more sense than getting someone who’s never bought anything to spend $50.

We’re sort of coming to the end, but there are a few other things.

I don’t know if you guys have any comments on this, but clearly, one of the interesting things we’ve seen in the last couple of years is direct-to-consumer stores.

These stores sell in-app purchases to consumers outside of the app.

We’ve seen big players doing it, and I think that’s becoming more relevant because you can give a much better deal to people who are spending.

So it’s not necessarily interesting to get your views on whether that can increase.

Do you think that’s going to be a more impactful way of directly getting money from people?

Andrew Seow: It is definitely emerging and pretty nascent.

Perhaps in some parts of the world—Asia springs to mind—it might be a bit more established in non-gaming verticals.

It could be more established than gaming, but we are seeing it being adopted by some of the larger gaming publishers.

So, what I would say about the direct-to-consumer kind of avenue is two things.

One is that there is always this issue of payments, right?

Anything that is going to be around how you get the payments, if there are commissions, and so on.

And that, I think, maybe it’s not a monetization trend as much as it is just the biggest drama of 2024—fights over payments and stores and commission fees and that sort of thing.

If you’re trying to take it outside of the system, there is that infrastructural question.

The rest of it is very similar to the way you would do economy optimization or in-app purchase optimization, which means you have all this flexibility.

Maybe you can offer even better deals because of the lower commission fees.

Then the question becomes, how are you choosing to segment your players?

Do you segment them any differently than you would if you had the commission fees to take into account or less flexibility because you’re operating within the system of Apple or Google?

You try to push the user to open their wallets.

Some of the more creative startups that we see out there are also trying to push content.

So you’re really building a kind of community, and I know that many publishers are thinking about community as a concept.

But I don’t really know what direct-to-consumer shop-driven communities would look like or how that would be radically different.

I think that’s what we would have to wait and see, but it would be interesting to see if that changes anything about the dynamics of getting people to pay, getting people to pay more, or getting people to generally be more engaged.

Looking ahead: Innovation in monetization

Ravid Sela: To be honest, conducting the auctions using bidding really frees up a lot of time for the ad monetization teams.

So, in that sense, there is so much more time for creativity and seeing where that can take us.

This is what I’m expecting from 2025—it’s going to be a lot of innovation, a lot of new concepts, a lot of trial and error.

This will allow us as teams to dig deeper and maybe be more product-oriented or tech-oriented.

Only time will tell, but just because we have so much more time on our hands for innovation, I am curious to see what we’re going to produce.

The role of AI in monetization strategies

Jon Jordan: And final question, how do you think the impact of generative AI is—Is that going to be significant in terms of your workflow? Or is that still kind of hard to tell?

Ravid Sela: It’s not a podcast if we don’t mention AI, right?

Jon Jordan: Exactly.

Ravid Sela: For me, it still needs to be proven that we can rely on it.

Right now, we’re using it more for ideation and all of those areas of creativity rather than leaning on it technically or analytically.

That’s it for me in that sense.

Andrew Seow: Not much to add in terms of generative AI, and I think it definitely affects more of user acquisition in terms of, you know, creatives and trying to test out new ideas.

But, like Ravid was saying, whether we use it for data science or analytical work—I don’t know if we want to share our data.

Most publishers don’t want to do that.

So until there is a safer way—by which I mean a kind of data-safe, privacy-safe, and confidentiality-safe way—for us to do that, I don’t see it affecting many of the operations we run daily.

Closing thoughts and takeaways

Jon Jordan: Lovely! Well, we covered an awful lot of ground there, so thank you so much for your expertise and for explaining probably very basic concepts for you guys, but maybe for some of the audience.

Thank you very much to Andrew and Ravid for their conversation.

Andrew Seow: Thank you.

Ravid Sela: Thank you for having me.

Jon Jordan: Thanks for watching or listening to the podcast—however you are consuming it.

Remember, in every episode, we dive into what’s going on in mobile games, which continues to be as dynamic as any creative business can be.

There are lots of technical changes happening all the time in how people pay for and play these games.

I hope you are subscribed. Don’t miss out on the episodes, and we will see you next time.

Bye!

Introduction

Jon Jordan: Welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook, in association with Liftoff. Join us as we uncover the latest trends in user acquisition, monetization, and mobile game design. Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook! Thanks for tuning in for another episode. In fact, thanks for tuning in for the first episode of 2025.

In this podcast, we are going to look into our crystal balls and make some predictions about what’s going to happen. Obviously, that means, to some degree, we’re looking at what happened in the trends of 2024 and how they move over, we think, to 2025, but also a few other things as well that we will be looking at. I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and I’m joined today by experts who are going to make their predictions.

So we have Kalle Heikkinen, Senior Chief Market Analyst, and Wilhelm Voutilainen, Chief Game Analyst, both from Liftoff. How’s it going, Wilhelm?

Wilhelm Voutilainen: I’m doing excellent. It’s really great to be here.

Jon Jordan: I always think the end of the year/the start of year podcast is the most fun ’cause there’s so much to say, and it’s a really open discussion. We can go where we’re gonna go, but we’re gonna start off with something I guess that we talk about all the time. ‘Cause it is the fundamental bit of the mobile games industry or any games industry, and that’s monetization.

Key monetization trends

Jon Jordan: Kalle, please kick us off by sharing what you think will happen regarding those monetization trends.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yes. So, just to set the scene, let’s discuss the big trends in monetization in 2024 and before that. Of course, the industry has been discussing direct-to-consumer approaches to web store subscription plans and how to monetize those; that has been a big topic, and then hybrid monetization.

And if we think about why these have been hot topics for some time already, game developers are always trying to find ways to diversify their revenue sources and, in particular, to find ways to monetize the non-paying users. Of course, we’re always trying to revise genre by genre, but to make a generalization, that’s the case.

That’s one reason so many new hybrid casual games are entering the market, especially in 2024. The other thing that I would like to highlight is the regulatory pressure on some of the existing monetization methods. I’m looking at gacha or Loot Box monetization in particular.

So I think it was two or three days ago or so that the BBC actually published this piece about developers not disclosing in their game ads that their games contain loot boxes, even though they should. So let’s see what the outcome will be. But this is just another example of some scrutiny when it comes to these specific monetization mechanics, and there might be some negative outcomes to developers if they’re not following the rules set in specific geographical regions.

And then the third thing I would say that technological advancements, so it’s nowadays just even more possible to have, for example, even more personalized, let’s say IAP offers, or if we think about the web stores, they can be, they’re evolving all the time. They’re becoming more integrated, and the user experience is also improving constantly.

Regarding direct-to-consumer, which is obviously a hot topic, we see developers adding different kinds of engagement mechanics to the web store. So we’re talking about, for example, VIP memberships. They might be targeted to only the most high-paying superfan users and other kinds of loyalty plans to provide more value to those players who engage with the web stores, but obviously, the challenge still remains that there’s quite a lot of friction to drive the first-time conversion to a web store.

Jon Jordan: Interesting. Wilhelm, I know that you have done some research on some specific monetization offer types, for example. Do you have some insights for us?

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah. So we have been following, for example, on the casual side, these different, on the live ops in general, we have been following this super closely for the past like three years or so.

If we look at what the top casual games are doing in the standard offers, it’s basically this kind of chain and progressive offer. So, basically, the first offer you get is free, and then the next one requires a premium price. Then, you get the new one for free, and then you pay for the progression element there. That’s becoming the industry standard now.

But recently, we have seen even further innovation in those mechanics. For example, Coin Master has its progression offers, but on top of that, it has a bonus progression milestone track. So based on how many offers you have claimed, purchased or claimed for free, then you can even get a bonus reward.

One other type, actually super interesting, that has come more from this mid-core, but now appearing in casual as well, are these engagement offers, which basically fuse the gameplay with direct monetization together.

For example, Dice Dreams is one of the trending, absolutely super-performing casual casino games in 2024. They have been running this deep dive journey event, for example, where you collect these event currencies and then have this offer where you use the event currencies. But again, it has this progression element. You purely need to play the game, but to get the maximum rewards, you also need to pay directly.

So there are really unique types of offers there. Some other really trending ones have been, as Kalle mentioned, games coming up with different kinds of monetization methods.

We might see some gacha regulation, so games have been bringing, like not just having those gachas in the mid core, let’s say, but also, on top of that, you have multiple different kinds of subscription plans.

Another really trending one has been mini-battle passes; of course, battle passes are one of the core mechanics in most mobile games nowadays. But on top of that, the games that run these battle pass seasons.

LiveOps and the evolution of event frameworks

Jon Jordan: So monetization, good. And you mentioned it a little bit, Wilhelm already, that plays into LiveOps, but, in terms of LiveOps as its own sort of subject, what do you think is going to be happening there?

Wilhelm Voutilainen: Yeah, so of course, LiveOps has been, and still is, I would say, one of the key aspects of having a successful free-to-play title. But now, I would say the trend, especially in 2025, will be as now, especially in these top games, the LiveOps frameworks and cadences are more established.

You really have this fluid event calendar with lots of different events running simultaneously. Something we’ve seen lately, especially, is these kinds of overarching and interconnecting events, and this has been happening both in the mid-core and casual sectors.

For example, on the mid-core side, we’ve been seeing overarching seasonal events. These are large-scale, multi-month events that tie together different gameplay modes. A great example is EA FC and Wild Rift. Wild Rift’s “Rift Adventures” event connected all events into one system, giving players a unified progression.

On the casual side, games like Lily’s Garden have been pushing interconnecting event systems even further. They now run multiple simultaneous events that require participation in all parts of the game. These trends are going to define LiveOps in 2025.

Kalle Heikkinen: To add to what Wilhelm said, one trend that continues is IP collaboration events. We saw some major revenue spikes in 2024 tied to big IP events. For example, Brawl Stars’ SpongeBob event correlated with one of its largest revenue surges. We expect to see even more games leaning on recognizable IPs in 2025.

The role of AI in LiveOps and game personalization

Jon Jordan: And of course, we can’t talk about 2025 without mentioning AI. How do you see AI shaping LiveOps next year?

Kalle Heikkinen: AI could enable highly personalized live events. For example, a game could launch specific events or rewards aimed at re-engaging a player who is about to churn. It’s already happening to some extent, but we’ll likely see broader adoption as AI tools improve.

Wilhelm Voutilainen: AI is also being used to accelerate content creation for LiveOps. From cosmetic items to event UIs, AI tools are speeding up the production process. However, there’s still a lot of secrecy around how developers are using AI, possibly to avoid community backlash or to keep competitive strategies under wraps.

Jon Jordan: It’s fascinating how the industry is cautious about disclosing AI use. Perhaps we’ll see platforms requiring games to tag themselves as AI-enhanced, similar to what’s happening with crypto or blockchain.

Genre mashups and new titles for 2025

Jon Jordan: What about new game trends for 2025? Are there any standout predictions?

Wilhelm Voutilainen: We’re going to see more genre mashups, especially combined with IPs. Recent examples like Pokémon TCG and Capybara Go highlight the success of blending genres in creative ways. In addition, titles like Destiny Rising and Rainbow Six Mobile are set to bring innovation to the shooter genre.

Kalle Heikkinen: The influence of Chinese developers is also growing. Many of the most anticipated titles, like Delta Force and Project Mugen, are either developed or co-developed by Chinese studios. They’re setting a new bar for production quality and innovation.

Gamification beyond gaming

Jon Jordan: Let’s shift gears to non-gaming apps. Are there any trends there we should look out for?

Kalle Heikkinen: Gamification is a major trend across app categories. Apps like Strava use leaderboards to drive engagement, while platforms like LinkedIn are experimenting with gamified features. Even productivity tools and search engines like Bing are adding gamification elements like streak systems and reward-based tasks.

This is all about retaining users. Just as in gaming, it’s cheaper to keep an existing user than acquire a new one, so we’ll see more apps embracing these features in 2025.

The competitive landscape and closing thoughts

Jon Jordan: It’s clear that 2025 will be a year of evolution, from LiveOps frameworks to AI-enhanced personalization and gamification across industries. What’s your takeaway for the year ahead?

Wilhelm Voutilainen: I think we covered the main trends well. It’s going to be an exciting year, with innovation in monetization, game design, and player engagement.

Jon Jordan: Thank you, Wilhelm and Kalle, for your insights. And thanks to our listeners for joining us. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss any episodes. See you next time!

Introduction

Jon Jordan: Hello, and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what it takes to make a great mobile game, what is and isn’t working for mobile game designers, and all of the latest trends.

I’m Jon Jordan, and today is definitely all about the latest trends. The end-of-year roundup podcast is always the host’s favorite one, and that’s what we’re doing today. So we’re really gonna delve across the past 12 months with our two experts; I’m glad to welcome them back. Familiar faces to us, familiar voices as well. So we have Erno Kiiski, Chief Game Analyst at Liftoff. How’s it going, Erno?

Erno Kiiski: It’s going great.

Jon Jordan: Yeah, good. And, Teemu Palomäki, Chief Game Analyst at Liftoff. How’s it going, Teemu?

Teemu Palomäki: Going great.

Jon Jordan: Good, good. So, you have really done your homework today, and you are going to really take us through all the action that’s been happening. You’re going to be talking about some big releases, and then you’re going to be talking a bit about some features as well.

Big releases of the year

Jon Jordan: So we’re going to kick off with the big releases of the year, and within that, you have encapsulated a very cool trend. So, Erno, you’re going to take us away.

Erno Kiiski: Yeah, sure. Of course, there are a lot of releases, you know, that we could spend hours and hours discussing here, but we tried to narrow it down to more specifics and more of a general idea of what makes these games interesting in terms of the grand scheme of things, what is happening in the market.

I think one, probably with the most releases and most action happening last year, was the 4X genre and the 4X strategy genre. That genre has definitely been evolving, but I think this year was the one when we saw a surprisingly big amount of games scaling to the top of that subgenre. And also, the interesting notion here is that pretty much everybody who went and was able to scale them used the same kind of tactics. So what is the tactic?

Of course, as we know, the current market situation and what it’s been for years and so on, and the difficulty of scaling UA for the whales and finding your whales for your 4X strategy games, which is, of course, a very different market.

So, the trend is to make the 4X strategy out of that niche, trying to casualize it, trying to find a wider audience. This year, we definitely saw multiple very successful examples of that. And especially if you go even deeper, like how these games have been casualizing the experience, it’s been through these mini-game layers; it’s not a new thing itself.

If we think about the 4X strategy and games like Evony, which is like an age-old game, and they did it already like years ago, did the whole like pull the pin ads and then adding it on to the first-time user experience and the early player funnel. But then it’s basically forgotten about, but what is new about this new generation of these casualized 4X strategy games, it’s that actually, these casual hooks and the gameplay are much more part of the whole experience, and it’s much more intertwined into the whole experience. Of course, the emphasis is still that, okay, you know, that’s what they push to, you know, with their UA, with their creatives. And definitely it has a bigger emphasis on the early player experience.

And then gradually, there are more, kind of deeper 4X mechanics and gameplay, but still, those are not just mini-games that you play separately and then kind of forget about, but they are actually intertwined into the whole gameplay loop, and they’re part of the gameplay loop for a longer period of time than just the beginning.

So some games to highlight from this year, of course, like Whiteout Survival. That was the big game last year. That game last year scaled to the very top and is still at the very top. What they did, was, of course, they had the survival element in the gameplay. This kind of like, you have your base, and you need to, you know, make sure that people survive and all that stuff.

I’m sure many of these games that came this year saw the success of Whiteout Survival. And especially in terms of the names, because, for example, the two names that come to my mind, and if we look at the top charts and with games that scaled the most, first of all, definitely Last War Survival, very similar name, survival in the name.

But to be honest, if we think about the gameplay hook and the creatives, what they did, it was quite a different angle than what Whiteout Survival did. So Last War Survival uses this hyper-casual gate mini-game that we have seen; anybody who has used any apps probably has seen these ads. So you have these gates, and then there’s like multipliers, and you need to move the character and go to the right gate.

So hyper casuals have been using it for a long, long period of time, but Last War Survival, actually, yes, they have this very shallow minigame in there as well, but it’s also part of the game as one of their key PvP modes and arena modes that actually you are, you know, moving the character, you have this kind of like a similar gate element into the gameplay. And then, you know, the further you go into the game, the more 4X elements are introduced. It has a casual, very casual theme, very cartoonish theme, and that game pretty much it launched right at the start of the year; I think it was like last days of December or something like that.

Right at the end of last year, but it has been scaling pretty much throughout the year. And it’s now, especially in the U.S., the top 4X game out there. It’s like the top-grossing game, hovering around there in the whole market. So, insane scaling, an insane success story in terms of this casualization of a 4X strategy game.

And to continue from there, there’s a game called Dark War Survival, again, a survival game. This is actually a game from the same company as Last War [Survival]. And, this game just launched in September, so it’s relatively new. But it’s been scaling ever since. And again, same strategy, same game plan that, okay, we have a 4X strategy game.

Okay. How can we make it more approachable? What kind of gameplay layer can we add to it? This time, it’s actually much closer to what Whiteout Survival did back in the day, but now the setting is more like a zombie apocalypse or this type of apocalypse survival aspect. And that game, again, has been scaling like crazy. So that company at least have found immense success with this strategy, and then the third one that I want to highlight on this same strategy pattern; all of these are from Chinese companies, but the third one is different from Last War and Dark War, so it’s game called Top Heroes.

And to me, it’s the most interesting and most differentiating from all of these, because actually this game, what is the casual layer on this game? It’s actually almost like an idle arcade that you have seen in the hybrid casual type of games where you, you know, move characters.

It’s a very, very light-action RPG, a hybrid casual game like Dreamdale from Saygames. It’s a bit similar to what Top Heroes has. And that’s one of the core layers of the game. It starts with that layer. Yes, 4X comes to start in the play later on, but then that gameplay hook and gameplay part of the gameplay loop doesn’t go away at any point.

Yes, their emphasis changes. Maybe 4X becomes a much bigger part of it towards the end game. But it’s not anymore that, okay, we just make a mini game, slap it on top. And then, you know, you play 10 levels, and then you forget about it. And then you get stuck with the actual 4X, and then people churn because it’s not the game that they thought, but it’s actually a much more sophisticated approach and much more part of the initial design process.

This has been the way that the 4X have found a totally new dawn, so to speak, with many new games scaling and finding success with this kind of approach.

Casualization in 4X games

Jon Jordan: What you’re saying makes sense: The 4X people are building their UA funnel from the ads into the game, and that’s going sort of deeper into the game. Obviously, at some point, you need to get those people to be in the 4X thing, which is the really deep, monetized aspect of it.

Erno Kiiski: Definitely. And exactly that, like these mini-games of this type, we have seen it in 4X for a long period of time, but now the past two years, it’s been much more sophisticated. And it is also a part of the retention and engagement for the games because I don’t see, like Evony back in the day, the pull-the-pin style; it’s not the one that keeps building up retention in that game. It’s just a hook to get the player in.

And then, if you’re lucky, some of them stick, and then, you know, the much lower CPIs that they get from there, back in the day, it was enough to get like, the equation was positive. But now, with this one, it’s a much bigger part of the game, which is an interesting shift that I also see in this kind of mini-game/casual gameplay layer that is an element in this genre.

So, the trend is to make the 4X strategy out of that niche, trying to casualize it, trying to find a wider audience. This year, we definitely saw multiple very successful examples of that. And especially if you go even deeper, like how these games have been casualizing the experience, it’s been through these mini-game layers; it’s not a new thing itself.

If we think about the 4X strategy and games like Evony, which is like an age-old game, and they did it already like years ago, did the whole like pull-the-pin ads and then added it on to the first-time user experience and the early player funnel. But then it was basically forgotten about. But what is new about this new generation of these casualized 4X strategy games is that actually, these casual hooks and the gameplay are much more part of the whole experience, and it’s much more intertwined into the whole experience.

Of course, the emphasis is still that, okay, you know, that’s what they push to, you know, with their UA, with their creatives. And definitely it has a bigger emphasis on the early player experience. And then gradually, there are more, kind of deeper 4X mechanics and gameplay, but still, those are not just mini-games that you play separately and then kind of forget about, but they are actually intertwined into the whole gameplay loop, and they’re part of the gameplay loop for a longer period of time than just the beginning.

Jon Jordan: So it’s not just about being a temporary feature but fully integrated into the game’s lifecycle?

Erno Kiiski: Exactly. It’s about ensuring that the casualization draws in the players early while still leading them into the 4X mechanics over time. It creates a smoother transition and a better retention flow.

Pokemon’s mobile success story

Jon Jordan: So let’s talk about something that’s been on everyone’s mind: Pokemon. It’s a brand that continues to innovate, even after decades. Teemu, what stood out to you about Pokemon’s mobile success this year?

Teemu Palomäki: I’d say Pokemon is one that comes to mind. I think everyone has heard of Pokemon TCG Pocket right now. It’s doing quite well. I look a lot at the Japanese market, and it’s spectacular. It’s flat-lining that top spot; last month, there were only like three dips to second place in either downloads or grossing.

So it’s really dominating there. And it’s interesting how it’s a card battler, sure, but more than that, it’s kind of a card collector. Did you play a lot of Pokemon card games with your friends when you were younger?

Erno Kiiski: No, to be honest, that’s actually the thing that I feel they cleverly tap into. Back in the day, we collected the cards, but we never even played with them. It was all about the collection. So they’re definitely going for that angle, and they’ve been very successful, at least in the first few months.

Teemu Palomäki: My younger brother and I played the cards, but for a lot of people, it was just about collecting. That’s what Pokemon TCG Pocket excels in. It takes the “gotta catch them all” mantra and focuses on collecting rather than battling. If you think about Pokemon Go, it’s all about collecting. Sure, there are battles, but they aren’t the primary driver of engagement. The collecting is what you do most of the time.

Here in Pokemon TCG Pocket, you’re opening the packs. You come daily to open the packs, and it feels really good to collect the cards. That’s where the emphasis is. Sure, you can play with them in simplified matches—they’re casualized—but the focus is on collecting.

Erno Kiiski: And it’s interesting that even in Japan, Pokemon Sleep is doing well. There’s not much you do except sleep, but you collect Pokemon in the process. It’s very similar in its appeal.

Teemu Palomäki: Right. If we think about the battling Pokemon games, there’s Pokemon Unite, Pokemon Masters X, and maybe Pokemon Quest. And earlier, there was Pokemon TCG Live, which was more focused on the battling aspect with standard 60-card decks. Compare that to Pokemon TCG Pocket, which has 20-card decks, making it much more simplified and easier to access.

The battling titles haven’t been as successful. I think the focus on collecting offers more longevity. Collecting doesn’t really get old; it might even become more engaging over time as you approach completion. On the other hand, battling can become repetitive or tedious as the challenge increases.

Jon Jordan: That’s a great point. And maybe it also ties into the nostalgia factor. People who grew up with Pokemon are now older, busier, and don’t have the time or energy for complex battling games. But collecting cards digitally feels like a fun nod to childhood without the heavy time commitment.

Erno Kiiski: Absolutely. There are also similarities with Marvel Snap in how they made card collection and casual gameplay more approachable. The biggest question for Pokemon TCG Pocket is long-term sustainability. They’ll need new content to keep players engaged. The launch is strong, but how they maintain momentum is still an open question.

Jon Jordan: That’s a fair concern. But so far, it sounds like they’ve nailed the initial appeal. Let’s see how it evolves.

Trends in hybrid casual games

Jon Jordan: Hybrid casual games have been a buzzword this year. Erno, what are we seeing in this space?

Erno Kiiski: Hybrid casual—it’s a term that’s been talked about so much in the industry lately. It’s a fascinating evolution. We’re essentially seeing a shift from hyper-casual games, which are primarily ad-monetized, to games with a bit more depth, long-term engagement, and in-app purchase (IAP) monetization.

Traditionally, these hybrid casual games were built on genres that could integrate power progression mechanics. Take Archero, for example—one of the original hybrid casual successes. It used simple mechanics layered with progression systems to extend engagement and introduce monetization opportunities.

This year, however, we’ve seen a move into more unexpected spaces, particularly hybrid casual puzzle games. Three games, in particular, stand out: Hexa Sort, Screw Jam, and Twisted Tangle. These titles have been scaling significantly in the Western markets, finding their way into the top 100 grossing apps.

Jon Jordan: What sets these games apart from traditional puzzle games?

Erno Kiiski: The key difference lies in their core gameplay and monetization strategies. These games borrow best practices from top-performing match-three titles, integrating live events, IAP systems, and progression loops. But they don’t stop there—they innovate in the core gameplay itself.

For example, Hexa Sort introduces a unique mechanic where players organize and sort piles, creating a distinct puzzle experience. Screw Jam involves removing screws in a strategic order, while Twisted Tangle is all about untangling ropes. These mechanics are fresh, but they’re underpinned by proven monetization methods like extra moves, boosters, and live events.

Jon Jordan: So they’re essentially blending the old with the new?

Erno Kiiski: Exactly. Companies like Rollic Games, which is part of Zynga and Take-Two, have been leading this charge. They’ve scaled multiple hybrid casual puzzle games this year. What’s interesting is that they seem to use a template for production—testing new core gameplay ideas, finding what works in terms of marketing and engagement, and then scaling those games with a consistent live event and monetization framework.

Jon Jordan: It sounds like a well-oiled machine. Do you see this trend continuing?

Erno Kiiski: Absolutely. The hybrid casual puzzle space is just getting started. The combination of unique gameplay with well-established monetization practices is proving to be a winning formula. It’s a smart way to breathe new life into the casual games market while extending player engagement and revenue opportunities.

Jon Jordan: Thanks, Erno. That’s a really interesting take on where hybrid casual is heading. Let’s move on to another trend—expanding genre demographics. Teemu, what’s happening there?

Expanding genre demographics

Jon Jordan: Expanding demographics is always a hot topic. Teemu, how are developers breaking traditional audience boundaries?

Teemu Palomäki: This year, we’ve seen a lot of movement toward targeting new demographics in genres that historically catered to specific audiences. Two standout examples are Love in Deepspace and Truck Star. These games have been pushing the envelope by crossing traditional gender boundaries.

Love in Deepspace, for instance, combines interactive storytelling—a genre usually aimed at women—with RPG mechanics, which are typically associated with male audiences. The result is a game that appeals to both demographics. It’s doing exceptionally well and has managed to attract a broader audience than you’d expect for an interactive story.

Jon Jordan: That’s an interesting blend. And what about Truck Star?

Teemu Palomäki: Truck Star is another great example. It’s essentially a match-three game but with a theme and mechanics that target male players. Historically, match-three games have been more popular with female audiences, but Truck Star is flipping that script. It’s been performing incredibly well this year and shows that there’s a market for match-three games with a more male-oriented design.

Erno Kiiski: And it’s not just about the theme. Truck Star is from the same company that developed Whiteout Survival, so you can see the level of resources and live ops expertise they’ve applied here. Compared to something like Chrome Valley Customs, which also targets men in the match-three space, Truck Star has a much more robust live event framework. That’s been a key factor in its success.

Teemu Palomäki: Exactly. The live event capabilities of Truck Star really stand out. In genres where live ops are becoming the norm, having a solid framework can make or break a game.

Jon Jordan: So it’s about both broadening the appeal and strengthening the experience?

Teemu Palomäki: Right. It’s not just about reaching a new audience but also delivering the depth and engagement they expect. It’s exciting to see how developers are using these strategies to expand genre boundaries.

Jon Jordan: This is fascinating. It seems like more games are willing to take risks to appeal to new audiences. Let’s move on to our next topic—reviving older games. Erno, over to you.

Reviving older games

Jon Jordan: Let’s talk about reviving older games. Erno, what’s been happening in this area?

Erno Kiiski: One of the most impressive stories this year has been Brawl Stars. It’s a great example of how a game that’s been around for a while can reinvent itself and climb back to the top. At the start of the year, it was already gaining momentum thanks to the return of random elements in star drops and the introduction of hypercharge mechanics—basically endgame skills for characters. They also reworked their Battle Pass system, which set the stage for a strong year.

Jon Jordan: And how did they keep that momentum going?

Erno Kiiski: They embraced collaboration events in a big way. Some of the standout events this year included SpongeBob and Godzilla. These collaborations brought fresh, themed content to the game, and players responded very positively. They also added event-only boosts and skills for characters, which gave players even more reasons to engage with the events.

One of their most recent events, the Angels and Demons event, introduced limited-time boosts that added a layer of progression during the event. This is part of a broader trend we’re seeing where games use overarching event systems to drive engagement and retention.

Jon Jordan: So these events have had a big impact on the game’s performance?

Erno Kiiski: Absolutely. The Angels and Demons event actually drove Brawl Stars to its all-time high for single-day revenue, which is remarkable for a game of its age. It’s rare to see such a significant turnaround in a game that’s been on a decline, but Brawl Stars has managed to do it.

Jon Jordan: That’s incredible. What do you think makes this kind of turnaround possible?

Erno Kiiski: It’s all about understanding your player base and innovating in ways that align with their interests. Brawl Stars didn’t just rely on nostalgia or minor updates; they introduced meaningful new content and mechanics that kept the game fresh. The combination of smart live ops, exciting collaborations, and well-designed events has been key.

Jon Jordan: That’s a great example of how older games can stay relevant. Thanks, Erno. Now, let’s dive into some of the bigger feature trends we’ve seen this year.

Feature trends in 2024

Jon Jordan: Erno, you’ve mentioned feature trends a couple of times. Let’s talk about what’s really stood out in 2024.

Erno Kiiski: Absolutely. One of the clearest trends we’ve observed this year is the evolution of event frameworks, particularly the concept of overarching progression systems. It’s a shift we’ve seen in both casual and mid-core games, and it’s fundamentally changing how events are structured and how players engage with them.

Jon Jordan: Can you explain what you mean by overarching progression systems?

Erno Kiiski: Sure. Historically, most mobile games had standalone events. You’d complete a three-day or week-long event, earn some rewards, and move on to the next one. There wasn’t much connection between events or a larger narrative tying them together. What’s happening now is that games are introducing event systems where multiple smaller events feed into a larger, overarching progression system.

For example, casual games like Monopoly Go have made this concept really popular. They use collectible albums, where players earn stickers or cards by participating in various events. Completing the album gives players additional rewards, and the albums reset every season. It’s a simple but effective way to create continuity and give players more incentive to participate in all the events.

Jon Jordan: That’s a great example. How has this trend evolved in mid-core games?

Erno Kiiski: Mid-core games are taking a slightly different approach. Instead of collectible albums, they often use overarching event currencies or seasonal shops. For example, Clash Royale revamped their event format to introduce a season-based progression system. Players earn event currency through various activities and can spend it in a seasonal shop. This ties all the events together and provides a clear, unified progression path.

Another great example is League of Legends: Wild Rift. They had a massive event tied to the Arcane series, with multiple phases and activities. The entire event was connected by a single currency, which players could earn and use across all the phases. It created a sense of continuity and gave players more reasons to stay engaged over a longer period.

Jon Jordan: Are there any specific games in the casual space that have adopted this trend?

Erno Kiiski: Definitely. Royal Match is one of the leaders in this space. They used to have a permanent progression system for their collectible albums, but they switched to a seasonal model. Now, players have a limited time to complete each album, which creates a sense of urgency and drives engagement.

Another interesting example is Gossip Harbor, a merge-two game that’s been scaling rapidly. They’ve integrated collectible albums and social elements, like the ability to trade cards with other players. It’s a smart way to foster community engagement while driving participation in events.

Jon Jordan: This sounds like a trend that’s here to stay.

Erno Kiiski: Absolutely. These overarching event systems not only improve engagement but also enhance monetization. They give players multiple layers of progression and incentives to keep coming back. It’s a win-win for developers and players.

Jon Jordan: Great insights, Erno. Let’s move on to another fascinating topic—loss aversion mechanics in puzzle games.

Loss aversion mechanics in puzzle games

Jon Jordan: Loss aversion is such a powerful psychological principle. How have puzzle games been using it this year?

Erno Kiiski: Loss aversion mechanics have exploded in puzzle games this year, and one standout feature driving this trend is what we call the Super Light Ball. It was first introduced by Royal Match late last year and has since been adopted by over 50% of the top puzzle games in the market. That’s a massive adoption rate for a single feature.

Jon Jordan: What exactly is the Super Light Ball?

Erno Kiiski: The Super Light Ball is essentially a boosted version of the light ball power-up, which destroys all pieces of a specific color on the board. To unlock the Super Light Ball, players must complete a streak of 10 levels. If they lose even one level during the streak, they lose progress toward unlocking the Super Light Ball and must start over.

The key here is the combination of an incredibly strong reward and the risk of losing it. The boost you get from the Super Light Ball makes levels significantly easier, so players are highly motivated to maintain their streak. But the fear of losing progress creates a strong psychological drive to keep playing—and in some cases, to spend money to avoid failure.

Jon Jordan: That’s a clever use of loss aversion. Has this feature had a noticeable impact on monetization?

Erno Kiiski: Absolutely. The impact has been substantial. For example, when Royal Match implemented the Super Light Ball, we saw a clear spike in both engagement and revenue. Players are more likely to spend on extra moves or boosters to maintain their streaks and unlock the reward. Other games like Toon Blast and Toy Blast quickly adopted the feature, and it’s been a game-changer for the entire puzzle genre.

Jon Jordan: Have developers made any tweaks to this feature?

Erno Kiiski: Yes, there have been variations. For instance, Toy Blast initially implemented the Super Light Ball in the same way as Royal Match, but they later adjusted it to offer a different power-up, like a bomb. This was likely due to balancing issues—they might have found the original reward too powerful for their player base or game design.

Jon Jordan: Are there other examples of loss aversion mechanics gaining traction?

Erno Kiiski: Another great example is win-streak multipliers in competitive events. These were first introduced by Toon Blast and have since been adopted by nearly half of the top puzzle games. In these systems, players earn bonus points for maintaining a win streak, which helps them climb leaderboards or earn event rewards faster. If they lose a level, they lose their streak and the associated bonuses.

This ties into loss aversion beautifully. Players want to avoid losing their streaks, so they’re more likely to spend on boosters or extra moves to ensure they keep winning.

Jon Jordan: It’s fascinating how such a simple principle can drive so much engagement and revenue. Are there any risks to implementing these mechanics?

Erno Kiiski: There’s definitely a balance to strike. If the penalties for losing are too harsh, it can lead to frustration and churn, especially among more casual players. Developers need to carefully calibrate the rewards and penalties to ensure they’re motivating players without alienating them.

Jon Jordan: That’s a great point. It sounds like loss aversion will continue to be a key focus for puzzle games. Thanks for breaking that down, Erno. Let’s move on to discuss the broader sophistication of mobile games.

The sophistication of mobile games

Jon Jordan: Mobile games have come such a long way in terms of sophistication. Erno, can you elaborate on what’s driving this evolution?

Erno Kiiski: Absolutely. Mobile games today are far more complex than they were even a few years ago. The sophistication we’re seeing comes down to a combination of advancements in game design, marketing strategies, and the ability to leverage player data in real time.

Take something as seemingly simple as hyper-casual games. On the surface, they look basic, but behind the scenes, there’s an immense amount of sophistication in how they’re developed and marketed. Every level is meticulously tested for retention, and monetization is optimized through ad placement and IAP integration. Developers use data-driven approaches to fine-tune everything, from difficulty curves to creative ad formats.

Jon Jordan: So it’s not just about the games themselves but how they connect with players?

Erno Kiiski: Exactly. A big part of this sophistication is the seamless integration of marketing and game design. Developers are now creating games where the player journey starts before they even download the app. For example, ad creatives often mirror in-game mechanics, so players know exactly what to expect. This alignment not only boosts installs but also reduces early churn.

Jon Jordan: And what about more traditional genres? How are they evolving?

Erno Kiiski: In more established genres like mid-core or RPGs, we’re seeing a shift toward hybridization and deeper monetization layers. Features like battle passes, overarching event systems, and loss aversion mechanics are all designed to keep players engaged over the long term. At the same time, these games are experimenting with casualization to appeal to broader audiences.

Even casual genres like match-three are incorporating elements like RPG progression, live ops, and social features. The line between genres is blurring, and developers are finding creative ways to cater to different player motivations within the same game.

Jon Jordan: It sounds like data plays a huge role in this sophistication. How are developers using it?

Erno Kiiski: Data is the backbone of modern mobile gaming. Developers analyze everything—player retention, spending patterns, level completion rates, you name it. This data allows them to make informed decisions about game balancing, new feature rollouts, and even marketing campaigns.

For example, if a certain level has a high drop-off rate, developers can tweak it to make it more engaging. If a new feature isn’t driving the expected revenue, they can pivot quickly. It’s a continuous cycle of iteration and improvement, all guided by player behavior.

Jon Jordan: It’s impressive how dynamic the industry has become. Any final thoughts on this trend?

Erno Kiiski: The sophistication of mobile games isn’t just about creating better experiences—it’s about staying competitive in a crowded market. Players expect high-quality content and seamless engagement, and developers are rising to the challenge. It’s an exciting time for the industry, and I think we’ll continue to see even more innovation in the years to come.

Jon Jordan: That’s a great note to end on. Thank you, Erno, and thank you, Teemu, for sharing such valuable insights. Let’s wrap things up with some closing remarks.

Jon Jordan: That was a really brilliant roundup of everything we’ve seen in 2024. Erno, Teemu, thank you both for sharing your insights. It’s clear that the mobile games industry is not only growing but also evolving in fascinating ways. From casualization and hybridization to overarching progression systems and loss aversion mechanics, there’s so much happening right now.

And, of course, for those listening, if you haven’t already, make sure to check out Love in Deepspace. That’s your homework for this episode. It’s a great example of the trends we’ve been discussing and worth exploring.

Before we go, I just want to remind everyone to subscribe to the Mobile Games Playbook. We’ve got more great episodes coming up, and we’ll continue to dive deep into how this industry is changing. Thank you again to Erno and Teemu, and thank you to everyone listening.

We’ll see you next time—in 2025!

Introduction

Jon Jordan: Hello and welcome to the Mobile Games Playbook. Thanks for tuning in for another episode. This is a podcast all about what makes a great mobile game and what works and doesn’t for mobile game designers.

I’m your host, Jon Jordan, and I’m very pleased I have two experts joining me again today. They’ve been on the podcast many times before, so it’s good to have them back. We have Kalle Heikkinen, the Chief Game Analyst at Liftoff. How’s it going, Kalle?

Kalle Heikinnen: Excellent. How about you, Jon?

Jon Jordan: Not bad, yes. We also have Inka Reinola, who is a game analyst at Liftoff. How’s it going, Inka?

Inka Reinola: Great.

Jon Jordan: Good. You’re showing off your microphone there, making me jealous, very impressive. Good. Of course, we’re not talking about microphones today.

Overview of the Chinese games market

Jon Jordan: If you’ve listened to the podcast before, you will know that Kalle and Inka are Chinese game experts. We have done an episode before on the Chinese market. This time, we’re going a bit more international. In this episode, we’re looking at the games being developed by Chinese developers and how they are taking those global.

One of the big trends we’ve seen is that the Chinese games market has probably been the biggest for a decade now. But what we’ve seen, more recently, is very high-quality games coming out of Chinese game developers on mobile and other platforms and then really being successful in global markets.

Previously, they may have been limited more to China and Southeast Asia. So that’s what we’re focusing on today. And Inka, you’re going to kick us off. So, what are the key trends that you’re seeing as someone who looks at this market very closely?

Inka Reinola: Yeah, first of all, China takes 31 per cent of the worldwide mobile game market. So it’s quite massive, but there’s still room to grow. Anyway, it has been successful in global markets. And I think there are a lot of different kinds of these bigger factors that, from the China side, affect this. Like first of all, there’s like a big talent pool of Chinese people nowadays because they are technologically advanced as a country, and it’s also very like the state organized this kind of technological development too, and it affects mobile companies.

Global expansion of Chinese mobile games

Inka Reinola: They also have this global strategy going on from the state level. So it’s very much focused that way. And there’s also, I can see that Chinese games have some characteristics that Western games don’t really have that have affected this success, too.

First of all, I think one thing is the monetization. They’re a bit different. They do gachas very well. They do events and live ops really well. And they also have a lot of content. They have massive teams and, like I said, a really great talent pool of people and a lot of people working on those. So they can make these kinds of massive games that are much bigger compared to Western markets, I would say.

Jon Jordan: It definitely seems to be the case that China would still be seen as a relatively low-cost place to make games. Obviously, these things are all relative. There are obviously cheaper places now, but compared to maybe, the West Coast (of the USA) is still quite cheap, which means they can have bigger teams.

And I guess what the interesting trend is, is that they’ve always made really good games that have appealed to the Chinese market, but gradually over time, the quality has risen a lot. I think, obviously, on the mobile side, we’ve had the Call of Duty-type games that were developed in China and published by Activision.

Key success factors: talent, monetization, and LiveOps

Jon Jordan: It’s interesting that you said that at a state level, the global market is now seen as something they, the Chinese developers, are encouraged to enter. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Inka Reinola: At least in China, the States usually have a lot of these kinds of plans, like on a state level that we will do this in five years or something. They have put a lot of effort into technology, such as developing 5G technology, which affects mobile gaming because of the more stable and better internet connection. But maybe Kalle can add something to this if you have it in mind.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, just on the go global initiative that you already mentioned, just to elaborate on that a little bit further. So this includes all kinds of like financial incentives and tax breaks and whatnot to encourage Chinese companies and not only gaming companies, by the way, but this applies to many other industries as well, but that includes gaming too, so to encourage them to go overseas, expand their businesses.

And in gaming, what we see this translate into is, for example, these big investment deals with Western companies. So we’ve seen Tencent acquiring pieces of different kinds of gaming companies, for example, from Remedy and stuff like that.

The role of state support in Chinese game development

Kalle Heikkinen: So that’s definitely one thing, but then what I would also add is that it’s like an encouragement for Chinese companies to go overseas, but there’s also kind of a need to push elements to it as well. So they, the domestic market in China, as many of you probably have heard, is extremely competitive and launching a new game there has been very difficult. It has been difficult for Western companies as well as local Chinese companies.

So, in many ways, you could argue that Western markets are easier, and the competition in many of the genres—especially in mobile games—is a bit softer than it is in China. That’s why we see a lot of Chinese games finding success, especially in 4X strategy, for example, and in many subgenres in the RPG genre, for example.

Jon Jordan: Is that sort of playing into what Inka was saying about having a large team based on LiveOps? We probably mention LiveOps every time in the podcast. And it’s not, I guess it’s not that, Western developers are not good at LiveOps. When you have LiveOps teams that are, sometimes LiveOps teams are like hundreds of people, which are bigger than the dev teams or the complete teams for Western developers.

LiveOps at scale: A competitive edge

Jon Jordan: It just seems to be a different scale when it comes to LiveOps. And I guess when you’re talking stuff like 4X, those games are very driven by LiveOps and events and monetization, aren’t they? So I guess that certain genres that play well with LiveOps are particularly going to be relevant for Chinese developers to push globally.

Kalle Heikkinen: That’s very much true. So we, like everyone, talk about Genshin Impact, which has a huge dev team to support the enormous LiveOps machine that it operates. But we see this also in genres that might be a little bit surprising. We always talk about Chinese mid-core games being very big domestically and overseas. Something that we are seeing right now, which is very interesting, is their expansion into many casual genres.

So there are examples like in the Merge2 space is actually a very good example. Merge Mansion was the king of the hill for a long time, but nowadays, if you look at the markets, Travel Town and then Gossip Harbor from China have actually overtaken Merge Mansion and I would argue that one reason behind that is the masterful execution of LiveOps when it comes to, for example, Gossip Harbor.

Chinese developers entering casual game genres

Kalle Heikkinen: Seaside Escape is another Chinese Merge2 game from the same publisher as Gossip Harbor. But Inka, I know you’re the expert on Gossip Harbor. Do you have anything to add?

Inka Reinola: Yeah, I just wanted to add that as some background; Gossip Harbor copied the idea from another merge game called Love and Pies. So the kind of art style and the story and everything is the same, but what they did differently is that they added a ton of different LiveOps things and more monetization in the game, and they started doing this at the beginning a bit more gradually, and they still like frequently add still new kinds of events, and they are like looking at the market all the time like what’s new and what’s fresh, and they are adding that in there and then Gossip Harbor has been really successful and a lot more successful than Love and Pies, which was the original game, so they really know how to monetize and how to engage the players.

Cultural influences and global appeal of Chinese games

Jon Jordan: Do you think Western audiences are now more open to Chinese cultural elements? Games like Black Myth: Wukong, for example, are still focused on what we might call Chinese IPs. There’s certain genres that are very popular in China, and the games we’re seeing being popular globally. Is it partly that Western audiences are now more open to that sort of culture? Or are we seeing it more to do with Chinese developers finding their own IP?

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, we actually discussed this with Inka before the podcast recording. It’s a very interesting topic because it feels like, at least for a long time, that Chinese developers have thought that utilizing Chinese cultural elements or Chinese cultural heritage is maybe not something that they want to bet on when expanding to overseas markets.

But then again, as you said with the Black Myth: Wukong, which definitely takes advantage of these Chinese characteristics. I think part of that reason is that they really wanted to do that for that game to be a hit in the Chinese market as well. So obviously catering, if you want to credit that audience, then using the Chinese cultural elements makes a lot of sense, but as we have seen, this game has been a massive hit also in the Western market.

You could then make the argument that utilizing those assets can actually be super interesting for the Western audience as well. So it’s going to be very interesting to see now, looking at the future, whether we are going to see more games that take advantage of or explore these Chinese cultural elements.

Inka Reinola: Yeah, I wanted to add that I feel like overall, people are maybe a bit more open to having different kinds of cultural products than just like US culture-based products in mainstream things too…

Monetization strategies and player experience

Kalle Heikkinen: …And also, it’s good to remember that overseas markets do not equal Western markets. So markets like Korea and Japan are hugely important for Chinese developers. They’re big markets. So also, if we think about anime art style and stuff like that, it is something that we all know resonates very well in Japan. So there are reasons to explore that kind of art style also, even if you’re not interested in the Western markets at all.

Jon Jordan: I guess a game like Gossip Harbor, you wouldn’t know unless you looked at it, that it was a Chinese game. It’s just a typical casual game.

Kalle Heikkinen: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

Recommendations and final thoughts

Jon Jordan: As we’re coming to an end, it’s always good to give people some homework. What games should they be downloading to get a feel for what we’ve discussed?

Inka Reinola: Gossip Harbor is a really good example, and it’s very successful and one of the top games in the merge genre, so that one definitely. And then I would say the Chapters games are also very interesting. It’s very different from many other games in the market, so worth checking out.

Jon Jordan: Maybe you could download Gossip Harbor and Love and Pies and then do a comparison between the two. That would be for advanced-level homework.

Kalle Heikkinen: Let’s go with those that Inka mentioned. Yeah, I think those are good. Good.

Jon Jordan: Thank you very much to our experts for their conversation today.

Thank you, Inka. And thank you, Kalle. And thank you for watching and listening to the podcast. However, you consume it every episode. We are talking about what’s going on in the mobile game industry, the biggest part of the games industry globally! There is so much going on all the time. Please subscribe. Don’t miss out. And we will see you next time.

Bye-bye.