"When someone stops playing a game, they should not lose everything they invested in it"

Pocket Gamer Connects, the leading international conference series for the global games industry, returns to London on January 19th to 20th, 2026. 

The must-attend conference will bring together 3,000 delegates from 70+ countries, including decision makers from key international games hubs across the globe. Companies set to join the show include Supercell, Epic Games, Duolingo, CD Projekt Red, Tencent, PlayStation, EA, AppLovin, TikTok and many more.

PGC London will host 32 tracks across two days, including at the Apps Business Summit (January 19th) and the Beyond Games: Transmedia Summit (January 20th).

One of the speakers set to join the conference is Gameplay Galaxy CEO and founder Doron Kagan.

Kagan has been in the mobile space for the past two decades, founding companies including Telcogames ME, Rayfusion ME, Game of Whales and Deemedya. He's also held roles at Google as a launchpad accelerator mentory and the Forbes Business Council as a thought leader.

At Gameplay Galaxy, Kagan aims to build the first decentralised web3 competitive games ecosystem.

At PGC London, Kagan will be hosting a session entitled 'From Optimisation To Reinvention: Reclaiming The Right To Win' on the Show Me The Money track.

We caught up with Kagan ahead of the show to discuss the present and future of web3 games and why the real opportunity is about ownership, not earning as a motivation to play.

PocketGamer.biz: Where are the next big opportunities in the mobile games market?

Doron Kagan: The biggest opportunity is not a new genre or a new platform, but a fundamental shift in how players experience and participate in games. Mobile free-to play has effectively plateaued over the last few years.

The market is large and stable, growth in retention, monetisation, and lifetime value has become increasingly incremental. Players are spending more time in games, yet their role is still limited to consumption rather than participation.

The next wave of growth comes from turning players into stakeholders. We plan to enable this by introducing real ownership, open economies, and meaningful participation inside games.

When players can own in-game assets, influence the game economy, and leave with value, playing becomes both entertainment and a source of value.

This is especially powerful for established F2P games that already have strong gameplay and healthy economies. By layering these additional functionalities on top of proven titles, studios can unlock higher engagement, community bonds, and longer lifecycles and increase all relevant KPIs. Ownership, composability, and player-driven economies create a depth that traditional F2P systems have struggled to achieve.

The next big opportunity is using web3 not to replace F2P, but to evolve it. By giving players a real stake in games they love, mobile gaming can reignite growth in a market that is clearly hungry for meaningful innovation.

What do you think the next big disruptor in mobile games will be?

The next major disruptor will be the shift from closed, developer-owned game economies to shared economies where players have real ownership and influence.

For years, innovation in mobile has focused on UA efficiency, monetisation mechanics, and content velocity. Those levers are now largely optimised, which is why disruption will come from changing the structure of games rather than tweaking their mechanics.

Web3 introduces a new operating model for mobile games. Assets can exist beyond a single session or even a single publisher account. Players can participate in economies instead of being fully controlled by them. Most importantly, players can convert long-term engagement into something tangible, and can exit a game without losing everything they invested in it.

The real disruption comes from alignment. When the players, the developers, and publishers benefit from the same growth loops, engagement becomes deeper and more durable.

Communities become contributors rather than just audiences, and games evolve alongside their players instead of being dictated purely by live ops schedules.

What makes this especially disruptive is that it does not require building new games from scratch. Existing successful F2P titles can adopt these systems incrementally.

We are already seeing that when ownership and community participation are added on top of proven gameplay, retention, LTV, and social dynamics improve in ways that traditional systems struggle to replicate.

The real disruption isn’t web3 as a buzzword, it’s changing who games are built for and shifting value from only studios to players and creators.

What game do you think offers something new and exciting that hasn’t yet hit the mainstream?

One example is the game “Duels”, which we are publishing as a F2P game with optional web3 functionality. What makes it interesting is not the genre or the gameplay itself.

The core game is already proven, with a large existing player base and recognition from the App Store in the form of featuring the game and choosing it as the ‘App of the Day’.

The innovation comes from how the game is published and how players will participate in it. We take an existing, healthy F2P game and layer an optional functionality on top through our infrastructure, including wallet abstraction, asset ownership, and open APIs. This allows players to own meaningful in-game assets, participate more directly in the game’s ecosystem, and retain value even when they stop playing.

From a player perspective, it feels like a deeper and more respectful version. Progress and time invested actually last. From a developer and publisher perspective, it becomes a live case study in how ownership can positively impact retention, monetisation, engagement, and community involvement without disrupting gameplay.

What excites me most is how scalable this approach is. It shows that many successful mobile games can evolve into something more durable and community-driven, without having to start from zero, it has real potential to extend how long games live and how deeply players connect to them.

What are your thoughts on play-to-earn games in general?

The original play-to-earn narrative promised a lot but delivered very uneven results. Most early implementations focused too heavily on short-term financial incentives and token speculation, rather than on building great games. As a result, many of those ecosystems were fragile and unsustainable once incentives declined.

That doesn’t mean the core idea was wrong, it was simply ahead of its time and poorly aligned. The real opportunity isn’t “earning” as the main motivation, but ownership as a natural layer within games. When players own assets, progression, or participation rights, value is created as a result of engagement, not the reason to play.

A more sustainable model allows players to convert time and skill into value, without forcing every action to be financially optimised. Importantly, it also allows players to exit gracefully if they like or continue endlessly. When someone stops playing a game, they should not lose everything they invested in it. It complements traditional F2P rather than trying to replace it.

When done correctly, this model strengthens retention, community involvement, and trust creating healthier game economies that can last for years instead of cycles.

The future won’t be defined by how much players can earn, but by how fairly value is shared between players, developers and publishers.

Can people get in touch with you at the event? What sort of people would you like to connect with?

100%. I’m easy to find at the event. We want to talk to studios that already run profitable mobile games and understand that squeezing more out of the same levers is no longer enough. Teams that know their game works, but also know it has hit some sort of a ceiling and needs a change to scale further. 

Studios get upfront capital and long-term revenue whilee take on the complexity, including infrastructure, legal, compliance, and operations, so studios can stay focused on building great games.