“Mobile has become too expensive for the old playbook”: The Mobile Mavens on rising barriers to entry

• “Adapt or die – the games market is changing every 180 days. Get used to it or leave.” - Christopher Kassulke.
• “PC is not necessarily easier, but mobile is certainly not the default starting point it once was.” - Joanne Lacey.
• “The biggest challenge isn’t just production cost, it’s visibility.” - Stuart De Ville.

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The mobile games market remains the largest sector in games by revenue. However, breaking into the mobile space has become increasingly difficult for new studios. 

Rising costs, platform fees, live ops expectations and general higher production costs have all contributed to an already competitive landscape.

We asked our Mobile Mavens whether mobile has become too expensive or difficult for new studios and if we are seeing developers shift toward other platforms as a result. 

Here's what they had to say.

Christopher Kassulke

CEO at HandyGames

The entry barrier to the technical side of gaming has never been so low. Everyone can develop and upload a game or an app nowadays – that’s why you see so many clones within days after a one-hit wonder or a hit. Thanks to AI tools, Godot, Unity, and open stores, everyone can start something. 

Discovery is and always will be the biggest issue, or as most call it, the UA deathtrap, is hitting hard. A real mobile game press is not existing, influencers or content creators for mobile are not really available or reliable. CPI of $5-10 for a F2P title is not rare! Live ops and multiplayer/server costs are growing extremely as well, so we see a higher cost for updates and all the required fresh content.

We still see very nice profitable niches in the $90bn+ mobile games market! You just have to find yours! You can fight with all the others in the hypercasual, F2P, and UA-dominated market, of course! Good luck, it's a red ocean! 

The evergreens will also dominate the charts in the coming years and we will see further spending and M&A in that field. Very similar to Metacore/Supercell who can do live ops more efficiently in the future and milk the existing portfolio. Who owns the best first-party data and cross-promotion networks, it's not only about the IP of the game!

HandyGames moved away from that madness and provides premium AAA mobile games and I can tell you it is a nice little niche.

Adapt or die – the games market is changing every 180 days. Get used to it or leave. That’s why so many investors left the market.

If anyone thinks PC Games are different or even consoles – think twice. The grass is not greener somewhere else! The PC and console market is older than the mobile market, and they also provide tons of challenges.

We are providing games on every platform and it’s work – hard work.

The gold digger times are over – the gold rush is gone! The smart or the big players are taking over. If you believe you are smart or you have real deep pockets you can try your luck in the games market! We are in the “industrialised gaming era”, I would say.  It is a tough challenge for newcomers to correct, but when we started, there was no $90bn+ market! So do not cry – be smart!

Joanne Lacey

Advisor at Mode 7 Collective

PC is not necessarily easier, but mobile is certainly not the default starting point it once was.

In the last 20+ years, mobile games development has gone through (at least) three commercial eras.

The early years. Hundreds of devices, screen sizes and multiple OSs created technical complexity, but also plenty of opportunity. Studios offered aggregation, porting and work-for-hire services in a nascent fragmented ecosystem, as many major publishers simply outsourced mobile development.

2008. Of course, the iPhone and App Store changed everything. One dominant device, frictionless distribution and D2C billing dramatically lowered barriers to entry. Small teams suddenly had (potential) global reach overnight, creating a generation of independent mobile studios.

Post-pandemic. Today, the market entry challenge is almost the inverse.

Technically, development is far easier, but commercially, the free-to-play market has become much more sophisticated (expensive). The barriers to entry are now user economics, data infrastructure and content creation.

So a positive shift could be towards leaner studios focused on creativity and community; where IP and audience remain in-house, but expertise such as UA or live ops can be outsourced, and AI tools reduce the risk and operational burden of running games.

It’s essential the industry continues broadening commercial education. Too many talented teams reach launch without a clear understanding of how customer acquisition, retention and monetisation fit together commercially.

Another way to make the market more accessible for new entrants is to de-risk experimentation. Platforms such as gameloom.ai aim to test game concepts, economies, monetisation loops and market fit before full development even begins. The goal is not to replace creativity, but to help teams avoid expensive mistakes earlier in the process.

However, if mobile’s fourth commercial phase becomes heavily commoditised through LLM-assisted development, there’s a risk the economics simply shift rather than improve, with power remaining concentrated among a small number of platforms. “Use up all your credits and give us a cut” is unlikely to be the foundation of a healthier mobile games ecosystem.

Nilay Patel

Head of Product at Kohort

In many ways, mobile still has the lowest barriers to entry when it comes to development.

For example, Steam takes 30% of all revenue from your first dollar earned. iOS and Android both drop rates to 15%. So I don’t think that tells the whole story.

However, PC and console benefit from community-driven development, which essentially turns into organics at launch. The majority of mobile games need to rely on ads for the majority of their users. Ads have, of course, increased in price (higher CPIs) due to bid competition as well as IDFA changes, making 50% of the market (iOS) less measurable.

Finally, the current leaders in mobile are fierce competition - they’ve already run hundreds to thousands of AB tests to optimise their games and have deep tech stacks that allow them to optimise, predict and manage users at scale. So it’s a steep and expensive learning curve to make a breakout success.

Simply put, this seems unlikely for F2P casual mobile developers. The majority of the users for these types of games have a mobile in their pocket for every waking hour of the day. That's a very different audience to building games for those who have a console or PC. 

“AAA” mobile games like Genshin Impact, Neverness to Everness, and Arknight: Enfield tend to release on mobile and PC near the same time. For these types of games, a move to being PC-first is definitely possible but it seems they continue to be mobile-first because of the unparalleled volume of distribution possible with the app stores. 

The current leaders have access to tools that give them an edge in everything they do - creative production, AB testing, live ops, UA predictions. Often these are internally built over a number of years and by thousands of dev-hours.

Democratising access to these kinds of tools, and making sure each studio doesn't need to build from scratch, is key to giving new studios a leg up. For example, Heroic for backend services and Xsolla for payments are two great examples of shortcuts for new studios to get on par with the leaders. 

Tanja Loktionova

Founder at Values Value

Let's imagine a new team that wants to build a successful casual or hybridcasual mobile games studio in 2026. From scratch. They can succeed either by having a name or a promising prototype, or both.

Path one: raising capital.

VC and private financing demand a self-publishing strategy. In 2020, seed and sometimes even Series A PnLs in mobile were about building the product. The main metric was retention. In 2026, it is ROAS and the D1–D3–D7–D30 LTV coefficients. Early concepts were tested with the market. Expensive A/B tests on the earliest stages.

In 2020, hiring a CMO was something you planned for the global launch. In 2026, CMOs become co-founders, and sometimes CEOs. Bekir Batuhan Çelebi went from Marketing Director at Good Job Games to CEO of Grand Games. The studio closed Turkey's largest-ever Series A in nine months. At Cheer Games, a CMO is listed as a co-founder before a single title ships.

You also need a sophisticated BI, preferably built in-house. So add an analyst and a data engineer. You need ad monetisation expertise early. Consulting or in-house. You need to think about talent density to stay productive and investable, and AI tools to move fast.

A good project is not enough. You need enough money to reach traction that makes your UA cohorts investable. That takes six more months on top of everything else, plus the scaling costs.

Path two: signing with a publisher.

You are not a Turkish team, so not everyone wants to invest in you, and you choose the publishing path. Do they want to finance your development? Yes, if you have a name. Or if you have a project ready for ROAS D3 tests. No guarantee your game will not be tested with the same playable for three months in a row. No financing guaranteed until you prove that both the project and the team are worth covering your salaries. The winners, however, get access to the ecosystem and insights that a newly founded self-publishment studio cannot reach in years.

Imagine you are building a hybrid-casual puzzle. Your first dividends arrive in one to one-and-a-half years at the earliest, even with a hit.

Whichever path you take, you are in an overheated market. Your rivals have credit lines and dedicated managers from ad networks. Trained BI. Prediction models running. Big teams. They produce ten thousand creatives monthly. They improve the dynamic level complexity of their systems, now AI-powered. They have built pipelines that ship playables in two days to feed the algorithms.

Mobile has become too expensive for the old playbook.

Vietnamese teams prove this. They entered the market with speed, iteration, and cost efficiency built into their operating model from day one. They did not try to ship the 2020 way at 2026 prices.

The option may not be to enter mobile at all. PC indie. Roblox. Each one lets a small team build, ship, and find an audience without the UA race.

Igor Melniks

SVP Business Development at ZBD

The mobile games market is still a massive opportunity for developers, but it has matured into a far more demanding environment than it was 5-10 years ago. In 2025, new game launches generated only around 7% of total mobile gaming revenue, with 63% going to games that are more than three years old. 

Competition for player attention and long-term engagement is intense, and much of mobile gaming today is dominated by titles that have spent years refining progression loops, monetisation, and retention strategies.

At the same time, adNetwork consolidation has concentrated much of the ecosystem around a small number of dominant platforms, while privacy changes have made user targeting and paid UA much less effective (and monetisation less profitable) than they once were, making the mobile market harder for newcomers to meaningfully enter.

However, this does not mean developers are abandoning mobile for PC or console. Mobile still remains the largest segment in gaming revenue globally, generating around $~103B in 2025 compared to $39.9B for PC and $45.9B for console, according to Newzoo.

It does, however, mean that many studios are becoming more selective about how they approach growth. The days of relying primarily on launch momentum, store featuring, and paid acquisition are fading. Mobile success depends more and more on what happens after the install.

Part of making mobile more accessible again will likely come from giving studios better ways to build sustainable player relationships without requiring massive acquisition budgets. For example, implementing engagement systems that create a stronger sense of value exchange between users and games over the long term. 

Claire Rozain

Founder SisterSoundFR & CEO at RZAIN consulting

Newcomers with ethics are doing the most interesting work in mobile right now, and they are not facing the gates the industry keeps describing. Those gates are real for incumbents defending market share. They do not apply the same way to people who never agreed to play that game. 

Bootstrapped developers working locally, for causes, for minorities, for audiences the dataset forgot, are still shipping and still finding their players. They are not waiting for the gate to open. They are walking around it.

The gates were built for a particular kind of game: high-spend, high-LTV, optimised inside a narrow set of genres. If you are not playing that game, the gate does not apply to you. You do not need a six-figure soft launch to reach a community you already know. You do not need to win UA auctions against incumbents if your audience finds you through word of mouth and organic discovery. Ethics, specificity, and local rootedness are not handicaps. They are the strategy.

What is structurally true is that mobile has spent the last decade generalising itself. Match-3, hypercasual, idle, gacha-RPG, the same five hooks rotated forever. Players are addressed as a statistical average instead of specific people in specific cultures. This is a monoculture, optimised for yield and structurally fragile, which is partly why CPIs keep rising. 

We have standardised the player to produce a "universal" that is, in fact, one perspective dressed as everyone's. Mobile did exactly that to the player. There is no universal player. The market was just designed for one and told everyone else they were wasting their time.

That is the gap ethical newcomers walk into. They do not compete on the templates, they build outside them, on community, long-tail discovery, and the parts of the ecosystem incumbents stopped paying attention to. Some are on PC and itch.io because those spaces still reward specificity. Plenty are quietly on mobile, doing real work, just not in the rankings the trade press tracks.

What would help them go further: real movement on platform fees (the DMA is a start, only a start), publisher models that share risk again instead of laundering it onto the developer, better non-paid discovery, and public or grant funding. It already exists for cinema, music, and literature. Mobile is the last creative industry pretending it does not need it.

And the part the industry usually skips. The accessibility question is a diversity question, and it is an ecological one. The teams called "marginal" are disproportionately women-led, queer, non-Western, non-VC-backed, and they are the ones bringing ethics and situated knowledge into the work. They are not edge cases. They are the future of the form, if it has one.

Oscar Clark

Director at Arcanix

Playing the current mobile game is arguably out of the question for most teams now.

But there is an inherent dilemma at the heart of the mobile game market. The more a team spends on UA to gain more market shares, the more expensive it becomes. You basically end up competing with your own ads!

However, I suspect a lot of potential players on mobile have been left dissatisfied with overly-demanding business models.

The first question for me is how to find the joy of the handheld experience, the fit to the stackable playfulness and still find value that those players actually love.

Then such games need new ways to be discovered. Not saying paid UA has no place if used smartly, but we have to find alternative channels which are less overloaded to complement ads. 

I suspect social/streaming channels can help, but the games need to feel native to those experiences to resonate. 

Heck, I don't know the answer, but finding lower-cost, more creative channels with games that tap into where the audience is already will be key to smaller teams breaking the next generation of mobile games.

Stuart De Ville

Director at Fribbly Games

I do think mobile has become significantly harder to break into for new developers, but I’m not convinced that means the opportunity has disappeared. What’s changed is the shape of the opportunity. Ten years ago, a small team could launch something relatively simple, get featured, and build momentum organically. Today, the market is far more mature, far more competitive, and in many ways far more industrialised.

The biggest challenge isn’t just production cost, it’s visibility. You can make a genuinely good mobile game and still struggle to find an audience because user acquisition costs are so aggressive and discoverability is incredibly limited. Add live ops expectations, retention pressure, platform fees, and increasing player expectations around polish, and suddenly, small teams are competing in an environment that often resembles large-scale service operation more than traditional game development.

That’s naturally pushed a lot of indies toward PC, partly because platforms like Steam still allow room for slower audience-building and community-driven discovery. PC players also tend to be more accepting of experimentation, rough edges, and niche ideas. On mobile, the expectation is often immediate clarity and long-term engagement from day one, which is a huge ask for a small studio.

That said, I think indies sometimes make the mistake of viewing mobile purely through the lens of the largest success stories. The reality is there are still opportunities, particularly for teams that understand a specific audience, community, or underserved niche. Mobile remains one of the largest and most accessible gaming platforms in the world from a player perspective. The challenge is less ‘can you launch?’ and more ‘can you sustainably reach and retain people without burning your studio out?

I’d personally love to see more support around discoverability and sustainability rather than just monetisation. Better featuring opportunities for smaller teams, more transparent platform support, funding initiatives tied to innovation, and healthier approaches to UA could all make a difference. Right now, too much of the ecosystem feels optimised for scale rather than creativity, and that’s where indies tend to struggle most.

Ultimately, I don’t think mobile is closed to new developers, but I do think it increasingly rewards studios that approach it strategically rather than romantically. The teams that succeed now are often the ones that understand community, positioning, and sustainability just as deeply as they understand game design.