What do you think the mobile games business has in store for 2025?
We asked a whole host of regular mobilegamer.biz readers what they think the big trends will be over the next year, and here’s what they said.
You can find parts one, two and three of this series through the links, which include predictions from senior folks at AppLovin, King, My Games, FunPlus, SciPlay and more.
Berkley Egenes, Xsolla chief marketing and growth officer
Mobile game development and revenue generated from online transactions will continue to rise at higher rates in 2025 and beyond. We will see more mobile games with 40-60% of their revenue coming from online webshops.
Karah Sutton, PikPok CPO
Perhaps not mobile specific, but in the face of potential tariffs, I think we’re going to see a lot of countries, including Aotearoa New Zealand, come to fully appreciate the opportunities presented by the video game industry as a weightless export, and see those countries double down on investing in and incentivising game studios. My hope is that this leads to fresh new voices in games, growth in emerging markets, and gamedevs emboldened by funding injections to take creative risks they’ve been afraid to consider in these recent tumultuous years.
Teemu Haila, Metaplay CPO
I predict Destiny: Rising will be a big hit. There’s immense power in putting recognisable gaming IP on mobile with gameplay and monetisation models tailored to the behaviour of mobile players. With regular LiveOps updates, I expect the game to serve well for retention – and the additional world-building (albeit in an alternative universe) may just tempt players from console too. If Destiny: Rising succeeds, I expect to see more gaming IP put into the hands of third-party studios.
Claudia Heiling, Golden Whale cofounder and COO
2025 will be the year when the mobile games industry recognizes that UA and player retention should be looked at holistically rather than in siloed teams and tasks. There’s still strong, untapped potential in supporting the player lifecycle all the way from acquisition to onboarding, enjoying the game, and sustainably extending their customer lifetime through well-designed, data-driven, and (semi-) automated live ops activities.
Kian Hozouri, ByteBrew COO and cofounder
In 2024, we witnessed a successful shift from hypercasual to hybridcasual games. This transformation brought new challenges, particularly around designing content and mechanics to support this hybrid approach effectively. Looking ahead to 2025, I foresee studios prioritizing the search for tools that uncover how users retain and engage to discover innovative methods for keeping players invested and monetizing.
Tom Froud, Ludoforma founder
Stuff I’m interested/expecting to see in 2025:
- Alternative stores – Amazon, Epic, Microsoft and so on – super excited to see how this mixes things up
- 5G + cloud investment could see higher quality games take off – but arguably the mobile market consistently shows us it’s not really that interested in higher quality games
- We’ve been talking about more personalised early game experiences for a few years now, tailored content and mechanics which have a clearer through line between the ad a player sees and the experience they get in game. I’m hopeful that’ll take off – developers will get creative on the UX side and players will appreciate it.
- Honor of Kings: World – can’t ignore it, might even do some damage in the west!
Tom Storr, The Experimentation Group cofounder
Necessity is the mother of invention. The people we speak to are pushing hard to find new angles in product and UA. VC wants to spend. AI is becoming genuinely helpful. These forces will come together in breakthroughs that bring the good times back.
Gabi Weinberg, Hathora head of growth
I hope 2025 is the year we see a true AAA-fidelity game launch on the iPhone. The platform is powerful enough, and with so many people carrying the latest, more capable iPhones in their pockets, it could draw casual players back into gaming.
Kirill Zhukovskiy, Zimad CPO
This year, there has been a lot of talk about Telegram’s game catalog, where mini-games with social elements seem to be quite popular. It is reasonable to believe that in 2025 there will be new very high-profile hits, while the active audience of the platform will continue to grow.
On M&A, there will be fewer buyers of large projects due to market consolidation, but smaller projects and studios will have more opportunities – thanks to flexibility they will be able to change audiences, assets, and portfolios and thus diversify their business.
Ben Cousens, ZBD COO
Rewarded gaming as a category will continue to grow, but the market is starting to get saturated. There are over a hundred rewards apps, with only a few being fully-fledged products from sizable companies. Next year, I expect both consolidation and a number of rewards apps to hit the rocks.
There’s been a lot of investment in D2C stores this year, but expectations at the moment are too large to be met in 2025. They will continue to be a focus for publishers and whale-driven games. D2C drives margin more than revenue, so I do not expect a large return to top line growth. With many of the largest players already serving successful D2C offerings, returns for webshop opportunities could fall short of expectations.
Acquisitions in the mobile gaming space will continue, leading to a more consolidated market. Mobile gaming profits continue to concentrate amongst bigger publishers, which is becoming an increasingly tough nut for smaller players to crack. Companies with healthier profits will have an opportunity to lift up teams that are doing great work and begin to scale.
With ongoing changes in privacy regulations, user targeting could take another hit in 2025, sustaining UA and IAA monetization headwinds. While the entire market would be affected, my eye is on AppLovin, especially with their recent stock surge. My prediction is that AppLovin takes a hit from Apple and Google next year. Even without a massive crackdown or outright ban, tighter privacy controls are still growing and this is who it’s going to hit the most.
