As the global mobile gaming market shifts from rapid expansion driven by new user acquisition to an increasingly competitive battle for existing users, 2025 marks a decisive turning point for marketers worldwide.
Against this backdrop, SocialPeta, in collaboration with Singular and Aarki, officially releases the Mobile gaming marketing trends whitepaper 2026. The report is powered by core data support from Funtap Games and enriched with exclusive insights from industry leaders, including Rzain Consulting, Two & Half Gamers, Gamigion, Playable Factory, AdQuantum, Mobidictum, asomehdi.com, Yodo1, Gamelight, Reforged Labs, and Jampp.
The white paper offers an in-depth view of the latest global mobile game marketing trends, uncovering several critical shifts:
- The market continues to grow steadily, but unevenly, with advertiser scale and creative iteration rates increasing year over year. Casino titles are surging, while short-form video creatives have become the dominant format.
- Top-performing titles are consolidating their positions, even as new breakout hits emerge. Kingshot, a casual SLG title, became a standout phenomenon, while the hybrid game category continues to heat up.
- Singular insights reveal that user acquisition is moving toward greater discipline and standardization, with creative velocity and measurement sophistication becoming the core competitive levers. Channel diversification is increasingly essential for risk mitigation.
- Aarki insights highlight a shift toward retention-led growth, where full-funnel orchestration between UA and retargeting can increase user lifetime value by up to 20%.
- Looking ahead to 2026, success will be driven by deeper gameplay hybridization, AI-powered creative efficiency, and localized operations focused on maximizing existing user value.
To further enrich the report’s strategic depth, Funtap Games, a leading Southeast Asian publisher, contributed exclusive first-party data on strategy game publishing, offering rare visibility into one of the most competitive genres in the global market.
From traffic competition to refined operations
In 2025, the global mobile gaming market underwent clear structural shifts. Market data shows that the average monthly number of mobile game advertisers exceeded 84,000, representing a 21.9% year-over-year increase, with a peak of more than 90,000 advertisers in June. New advertisers accounted for 23.4% of the total throughout the year, signaling sustained market vitality.
Advertising trends in global mobile games, 2025
Source: SocialPeta
Creative iteration has become the core battlefield. On average, 82.5% of advertisers launched new creatives each month, up 14.6% year over year. The proportion of newly released creatives peaked at 63.2% in December. Video creatives dominated the landscape at 74.1%, with short-form videos under 30 seconds accounting for 58%, reinforcing the trend toward lighter, faster content consumption.
Category dynamics continue to evolve. The RPG category maintained the highest investment intensity, averaging more than 800 creatives annually. Meanwhile, Casino games emerged as a breakout category, with advertisers accounting for 47% of the segment (up 22.7% year over year) and creatives representing 22.3% (up 13.9% year over year), making it the fastest-growing vertical.
Advertising analysis of global mobile games by genre, 2025
Source: SocialPeta
Regionally, Europe remained the most active market, with an average of 46,000 advertisers per month, while Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan recorded the highest creative intensity at 122 creatives per advertiser per month, followed by North America and Oceania. From a platform perspective, Android advertisers accounted for nearly 80% overall; yet for mid- to hard-core titles, more than 32% of creatives ran on iOS, reflecting the platform’s concentration of high-value users.
Marketing analysis of mobile games in top regions, 2025
Source: SocialPeta
Mobile game UA shifts from “volatility” to disciplined growth
In 2025, mobile game user acquisition moved beyond prolonged volatility and entered a phase defined by discipline and rational scaling. According to Singular data, global gaming ad spend grew at a low single-digit rate year over year, signaling renewed confidence without excess returns.
Gaming user acquisition in 2025
Source: Singular
Quarterly performance patterns became increasingly predictable. Q1 began cautiously, with modest quarter-over-quarter install declines as teams prioritized efficiency and learning. Q2 saw budgets gradually loosen as performance stabilized. Q3 delivered a meaningful rebound, fueled by creative optimization and live operations. By Q4, despite intensified holiday competition, increased budgets did not erode returns; many advertisers maintained stable ROI, breaking the historical pattern of peak-season performance decay.
Platform strategies continued to diverge. Android dominated install volume due to scale and CPIs typically 40–60% lower than iOS, while iOS remained the primary driver of monetization efficiency. Leading advertisers treated the platforms as fundamentally different ecosystems, scaling on Android while optimizing for value on iOS.
Measurement maturity emerged as a defining advantage. Advertisers adopting multi-touch attribution and modeled conversions gained clearer cross-channel visibility and offset signal loss on iOS, enabling faster, more confident decision-making. Singular emphasizes that competition in 2026 will center on transforming fragmented data into closed-loop decision systems that support sustainable growth.
What 2025 taught gaming marketers heading int0 2026
Source: Singular
A full-fnnel growth framework redefining the future of mobile gaming
As acquisition costs rose 12% year over year while user growth expanded by just 2%, Aarki introduced a Full-Funnel Growth Framework that unifies user acquisition, retargeting, and lifecycle marketing into a continuous learning system: the Aarki Infinity Loop.
The Aarki playbook
Source: Aarki
Retention has become the new core performance metric. Aarki data shows that more than 95% of mobile game users churn within 30 days. The solution lies in shifting from performance-first marketing to retention-led orchestration, where UA and RT operate as one system, delivering up to 20% higher LTV. Creative intelligence analysis further indicates that structured creative refresh cycles improve performance stability by 30%, making creative velocity a controllable lever for growth.
The fantastic five
Source: Aarki
The new rules of retention:
- Retention starts on Day 0: Build engagement directly into onboarding to demonstrate value before the first purchase
- Measure relationship depth, not just reach: Focus on engagement frequency, session depth, and reactivation cost to assess true user value
- Refresh before fatigue sets in: CTR can drop by up to 45% after four exposures without a refresh, making proactive iteration essential
- Reactivation is R&D: Winning RT insights should continuously feed back into UA optimization
- Scale what works, pause what plateaus: Stable reactivation budgets lead to smoother ROI curves and lower volatility
Aarki emphasizes that future competitive advantage lies in building ecosystems of user nurturing rather than traffic consumption, enabled by unified data, creative intelligence, and disciplined pacing.
Competitive dynamics and creative trends in 4X games
In 2025, strategy games continued to anchor the global mobile market, driven by high user value and long lifecycles. Among them, 4X strategy games demonstrated exceptional resilience through gameplay hybridization and refined live operations.
Drawing on its global publishing experience, Funtap Games outlines the early indicators required for global scalability. To remain competitive, D1 retention must reach 30–35% (35–40% on iOS), while D7 retention should exceed 15–18%. Titles with D1 below 25% face structural disadvantages in paid UA auctions.
Social integration proved decisive. More than 60% of players must join an Alliance before Day 3 to sustain healthy D7 retention. Alliance participants generate 3–4 times higher playtime than solo players, reinforcing the central role of social mechanics.
The competitive scorecard
Source: Funtap Games
First-week behavior analysis shows average daily playtime of 40–60 minutes, with core payers reaching 1.5–3 hours. 4X games rely on high-frequency, variable-length sessions, typically 8–12 per day, split between short check-ins and deeper engagement. By Day 7, playtime diverges sharply: Alliance players maintain more than 45 minutes, while solo players drop below 20 minutes. Players accumulating 600 minutes (10 hours) in the first week are five times more likely to convert.
Playtime behavior analysis for the first week
Source: Funtap Games
Creative trends continue to evolve, with AI-generated content emerging as a major efficiency lever. Top creatives typically follow a structure of AI character hook → gameplay showcase → emotional resonance, often incorporating light horror or family-conflict narratives. Future growth will be driven by deeper hybridization, such as SLG titles integrating casual mini-games, and culturally adapted themes such as wuxia.
Analysis of popular ad creatives for SLGs
Source: SocialPeta
Funtap Games recommends strengthening launch readiness through hybrid onboarding, mandatory social systems, and early-stage time compression, while validating scalability through paid UA before a global rollout.
Case studies and market coverage
The report also analyzes the full-year marketing cycles of four highly representative titles:
- MapleStory: Idle RPG (classic IP idle RPG)
- New Mahjong Wonders™
- Gossip Harbor, a top-performing merge title
- Kingshot, a breakout casual SLG hit throughout 2025
Spanning nearly 100 pages, this white paper delivers comprehensive data and forward-looking insights to support your global expansion strategy.
Download your copy today and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive mobile gaming market.
