Mobile Mavens on the biggest games industry trends of 2025 and 2026 predictions: AI maturation, UA disruption, and the shift beyond gaming
- “AI fatigue is real. Social feeds are overloaded with synthetic visuals and people can already smell machine-generated content.” - Peter Fodor
- “Pocket Gamer is riding the wave of my 2026 prediction: Capital shifting from games to apps.” - Evelin Herrera
- “Marketing, especially user acquisition, will still reign supreme in 2026.” - Jakub Remiar
- “Less panic, smarter mechanics is what I'd predict for 2026.” - Kelly Vero
The past year has brought with it plenty of disruption and opportunity to the games industry, with China's expanding global dominance, the continued direct-to-consumer shift and increasing emergence of AI tech in development some of the key trends defining 2025.
To highlight the developments that defined much of the year and those likely to shape 2026, we asked industry leaders to share their perspectives on 2025 and predictions for the year ahead.
Find part one of the Mobile Mavens 2025/2026 trends and predictions here.
Peter Fodor
Three trends defined this year and will hit full force in 2026.
AI adoption hits the inflection point: Big companies finally moved from passive observers tied by legal paranoia to active AI experimentation.
Tools are now simple enough that anyone can build end-to-end workflows and automate work that used to require whole teams. Agencies and studios, including ours, are building custom internal tools because generic LLMs are not enough.
The real 2026 unlock will be proprietary data fed into AI to produce better and privacy-safe outputs.
On the flip side, AI fatigue is real. Social feeds are overloaded with synthetic visuals and people can already smell machine-generated content. Performance is mixed because most teams skip the basics: strong idea, narrative logic, art direction.
Acquiring new players becomes a pain: Western markets are flat and emerging ones do not compensate. Studios must grow up and take brand-building seriously. We see clear demand for creating distinct game brands.
“IP collaborations exploded in 2025, and the number of soft-launch games with partnerships signals that this trend will accelerate.”Peter Fodor
IP collaborations exploded in 2025, and the number of soft-launch games with partnerships signals that this trend will accelerate.
And yes, teams are pushed to look beyond the usual suspects and explore channels like web-to-app funnels.
Meta’s Andromeda kills the “throw spaghetti at the wall” tactic: Meta wants advertisers to finally act like advertisers and produce distinctive creatives that actually speak to real audience segments. Producing dozens of similar ads that differ very little is dead.
Winners will combine big, bold creative swings with disciplined experimentation: If you do not understand your audience deeply enough to predict reactions and tap into their frustrations, hopes and motivations, you will not produce the creative diversity Meta now rewards and your UA will suck.
Evelin Herrera
Well, let’s start with the fact that Pocket Gamer is hosting its first non-gaming conference, App Business Summit, after 10 years. Pocket Gamer is riding the wave of my 2026 prediction: Capital shifting from games to apps.
Let’s look at major events in the app ecosystem: Voodoo’s BeReal acquisition was the eye-opener for many gaming studios and entrepreneurs to start looking into apps, too. Game studio founders and alumni launched a series of app acquisition and publishing companies: Quiet, Rocapine, Kovalee, Luni, among others.
Bitkraft, the long-time gaming VC, launched a UA funding solution that will be deployed for non-gaming too. In my own M&A firm, the interest in acquiring non-gaming apps is 3x that of just games. And there’s more!
We were all surprised by EA's $55B acquisition…Yes, amazing.
But guess what? Only a few months later, an app-based company, Netflix, acquired a 100-year-old company, Warner Bros., for $82B.
To understand this prediction, one must first understand the role that gaming vs non-gaming play in the world. Gaming is entertainment and a passion for big IPs. Apps are utility, social, and of course, a channel to sell more. Picture it this way:
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Games = direct entertainment monetisation
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Apps = utility + distribution + data
It will be hard for individual non-gaming apps to match individual games’ earnings. But non-gaming apps, in most cases, are meant as an ecosystem: a retail company can own an app not as a revenue generator, but as a brand recognition and top-of-the-funnel tool.
A health company can own health & fitness apps to better understand their users and therefore develop better solutions and cross-promote existing ones; and like this, thousands of real-life use cases.
There is also the go-to-market, growth, and maintenance being more favorable for non-gaming. As Rovio’s Luis de la Camara put it perfectly:
“The issue is in mobile gaming we have to continuously acquire new users, while if you have a solid subscription service (which most top grossing apps have) your revenue retention is much longer. So the unit economics can be "healthier" as you stack subscribing cohorts.”
Apps are capital efficiency.
Apps solve and will solve real problems.
Apps are moving at the same pace as current consumers expect.
I’m excited to see which new companies come to non-gaming!
Kirill Zhukovskiy
Top three key results of 2025.
Genre expertise has become the most important success factor:
This past year showed that expertise within a genre is now crucial. The most successful apps in the puzzle, word, and board game categories were released by studios that had already been working within specific genres and subgenres.
Simply copying a trending mechanic or slightly changing the setting is no longer enough - you need to understand audience segments and build funnels for each of them, taking into account the specifics of acquisition, retention, and monetisation.
“New trends are usually born within small teams, simply because there are many more of them and they experiment boldly with mechanics.”Kirill Zhukovskiy
The AI revolution in creatives: The autumn updates of AI tools now let studios create Hollywood-quality ad videos with actors and characters and even HTML5 playables (mini-games). Previously, producing a character-driven 3D animated video took months and cost about $5–10K, but now you can achieve that result in a day and almost for free.
“Trend is your friend.”: It’s clear that top publishers and mobile game developers still actively use trends as a way to increase their success rate. At the same time, new trends are usually born within small teams, simply because there are many more of them and they experiment boldly with mechanics.
Top three main trends for 2026.
Everything said about 2025 will remain relevant next year as well.
App spam - a threat to the stores: AI will learn to create clones of existing apps even faster, with modified visuals that make them appear different. Some opportunists will put cloning on an assembly line, uploading dozens of apps per day to a single account, hoping to get free installs from the store. This will pose a threat to smaller teams due to increasing competition for traffic.
In mature genres, large publishers with larger budgets will compete aggressively: But the winners won’t be the ones with the most money. Success will depend on those whose forecasts perform better. The quality of tools such as MMP, PLTV, and smart segmentation will predetermine the fate of certain companies.
Personalisation of everything: In stores - personalised app listings and in apps - personalised FTUE, monetisation settings, and offers. For two different users, the same game will look and feel completely different. And major differences will begin long before installation - thanks to systems of customised landing pages.
Kelly Vero
Biggest games industry trends of 2025? Easy: studio closures and debt acquisition are the new battle pass. Everyone’s buying liabilities like they’re Pokémon cards, and somehow calling it strategy. Secondary monetisation is quietly becoming the real business model, while Rockstar keeps shifting the GTA release window just to watch the rest of the industry break out in hives.
And 2026? Expect Rockstar to continue playing god with everyone’s blood pressure, but the real shift will be in joined-up monetisation. Reach matters; utility matters more. If I buy an item in one payment system, why can’t I use it anywhere that system exists? The value is in the asset, not the paywall. Consumers aren’t here to bankroll tech-bro yacht habits anymore.
The industry needs to get wise, or get left behind and that's a terrible slogan. Let's try again: Less panic, smarter mechanics is what I'd predict for 2026.
Jakub Remiar
Marketing, especially user acquisition, will still reign supreme in 2026, being more important than the product itself in the mobile game industry, as getting volume of users requires either an enormously strong IP or the UA product funnel of Fake ads and Fake onboarding, which is driven mainly by the Chinese mobile juggernauts, slowly but steadily conquering the market.
AI is one of the key drivers of this, as the current biggest impact of AI on mobile is on ad creatives. The ratio of AI and non-AI creatives in company portfolios is constantly growing in favour of AI, and we predict that by the end of 2026, more than 50% of creatives will either start with an AI hook or be completely generated by AI.
The other giant growth vector, again amplifying the key position of UA, will be AI playables, or more precisely, the acceleration of their creation, which again we already see happening in China.
It is getting more and more obvious which studios are successfully adapting to these trends, but in 2026, this could turn into an existential matter of survival. Make sure you are on the winning side, or you may end up with no users, as they will all be sold out by this UA strategy.
Matt Tubergen
For the first time, non-gaming verticals, from ecommerce to finance to lifestyle, are taking meaningful share from gaming. What gaming built, others are now scaling. Global mobile UA ad spend (excluding China) reached about $65 billion in 2024, up roughly 5% year over year.
Non-gaming apps grew around 8%, while gaming UA spend declined 7%, with casual titles holding steady and mid-core and casino categories going down. The rails of performance marketing remain the same, but the passengers have changed - and that shift is redefining how advertisers think about growth, efficiency, and creative strategy across mobile.
Countries like Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and India recorded dramatic revenue growth, turning from “growth regions” into stable, high-value ecosystems. Developers in these markets are no longer just participating in the global app economy - they are helping define it.
“For the first time, we will see AI not as a trend but as a foundational layer in both game development and marketing.”Matt Tubergen
AI-assisted development will allow studios to build and test faster than ever. Localisation, asset creation, and creative optimisation will be transformed. For the first time, we will see AI not as a trend but as a foundational layer in both game development and marketing.
In 2026, AI will stop being a buzzword and become foundational. From game development to user acquisition to localisation, we will see entire workflows rebuilt around AI, leading to faster production, smarter targeting, and deeper personalisation.
Stuart De Ville
2025 felt like the year the industry stopped pretending everything was fine and finally started telling the truth. Studios downsizing, platforms shifting, funding tightening, and players demanding more transparency. It wasn’t chaos for chaos’ sake. It was the industry correcting itself after years of bloating and speculation.
One of the biggest trends was the rise of smaller, tighter teams reclaiming creative autonomy. The bloated mega-projects are wobbling, and the studios that thrived this year were the ones willing to be lean, disciplined, and brutally honest about scope. We saw a lot of rediscovery of mid-budget and double-A sensibilities, and I expect that to keep growing as indies fill the cultural gaps the big players keep missing.
“Developers who invested in their audience early, transparently, and consistently came out stronger.”Stuart De Ville
Another trend that defined 2025 was community as currency. Developers who invested in their audience early, transparently, and consistently came out stronger. With store algorithms shifting and paid marketing becoming a money pit, genuine communities have become the most valuable asset a studio can build. This won’t slow down. If anything, 2026 will reward studios who treat community building as part of development, not an afterthought.
For next year, I see three big movements forming:
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Smarter, smaller games. Teams embracing constraints as superpowers. Less “live service forever” and more “tight, elegant experiences with identity".
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Hybrid business models. More studios will blend contract work, early prototypes, vertical slices, and smaller releases so they can survive long enough to make the game they actually want to make.
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A return to weirdness. After years of risk-avoidance, the appetite for distinctive, culturally specific, and creatively bold projects is rising. Players are hungry for personality again.
Overall prediction? 2026 will be tough, but clarifying. The studios that make it through won’t be the luckiest. They’ll be the ones who understand two simple truths: you can’t outspend uncertainty, and the players will always reward studios who know who they are.
People