We asked industry experts to share their insights and predictions for the coming year, uncovering the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
Starting with Mobidictum founder Batuhan Avucan, then moving in alphabetical order, here are the industry’s predictions for 2026.
Mobidictum Founder Batuhan Avucan
All the major buzz in the games industry is shifting toward Eastern markets. Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia, are investing heavily in gaming as part of their long-term digital and cultural strategies.
China continues to produce hit titles, while Vietnam is rapidly challenging global mobile markets with the aggressive rise of its studios. Türkiye remains strong with its recent Series A investments, but now faces direct competition from Vietnam and similar fast-moving ecosystems. In 2026, we will see even more global hit games coming from these regions.
Emerging markets, historically not associated with gaming, are now taking the industry seriously. Governments are beginning to invest, support studios, and build their local ecosystems. This is a positive sign for regional growth, and in the coming years, we will see new talent rising from locations that previously had no gaming footprint. This shift may help balance global talent distribution and reduce cost pressure across major hubs.
With game engines and AI tools becoming more accessible, small indie teams will continue to thrive. However, these teams must learn more about the business side of gaming marketing, user acquisition, and publishing alternatives, so they aren’t fully dependent on publishers to survive.
As more mobile studios move toward PC and cross-platform development, this mindset and skillset will also spread across the market.
Adjust CEO Andrey Kazakov
Adjust CEO Andrey Kazakov shared two critical trends that consumer-focused businesses and marketing teams will prioritize in 2026: multi-platform journey analytics and data insights ready for decision-making.
The Mobile First Era Gives Way to a Multi Platform Strategy
In 2026, and already starting today, the most successful consumer-focused businesses will no longer offer products designed as mobile-first, but products conceived from the outset with a multi-platform mindset.
This means experiences that can be discovered and used seamlessly across desktop web, mobile web, and applications. The user journey, from first touch to onboarding, feature discovery, and core usage, will be organized as a single continuous experience regardless of device or platform.
This shift creates both a major opportunity and a necessity for advanced analytics and measurement tools that can truly follow users across devices and platforms. For this reason, marketers need tools that can consolidate all user acquisition efforts into a single, clear performance view.
Monetization processes will span app stores, web stores, and hybrid payment flows, and businesses will be able to track and optimize transactions at every touchpoint. Teams and tools that unify app and web data into a holistic customer view will replace approaches built on fragmented data silos.
In short, mobile analytics will evolve into multi-platform journey analytics that unify users’ discovery, engagement, and revenue journeys across every platform.
From Dashboards to Decision-Driven Insights
By 2026, the priority for marketing teams will be to truly empower analysts not with more dashboards, but with insights that are ready to drive decisions. Today, many growth decisions are still based on intuition and gut feeling, even though measurement systems can clearly show how users move through conversion funnels, how new releases impact performance, and how channels truly compare.
The real breakthrough will come from solving the context problem by defining what matters across the journey: audience quality, value signals and behavioral patterns that predict long term impact. This requires building a comprehensive taxonomy and incorporating data from different systems. Once context is structured and tied to users and events, far more decisions can be automated, and the barriers to data-driven decision-making will be removed.
Moreover, thanks to this rich and well-defined data layer, large language models will become genuinely powerful for marketing. Instead of reasoning over raw clicks and installs, they will be able to operate on a complete and meaningful picture.
People began talking to data in 2025. In 2026, that interaction will become far more meaningful and decisively focused on action.
ByteBrew COO and Co-Founder Kian Hozouri
2025 brought a surge of studios taking control of purchase revenue via D2C storefronts. In 2026, that same drive will expand to the ad stack, making growth tools that unlock control for publishers at the center of acquisition strategies in the new year.
Midjiwan CEO Christian Lövstedt
There has been so much investment across EMEA and especially in the Middle East. I predict those regions will continue their rise. The end of 2026 may be too soon for them to become dominant, but those areas will become major influencing forces across every part of mobile games, from services and outsourcing to development and publishing.
Pragma Founder and CEO Eden Chen
Discord will continue to become a more critical part of the games ecosystem with its wide player reach and the need for studios to access distribution. They will also move further down the developer stack, working closer with game devs.
Poki Business Development Manager Romy Halfweeg
In web gaming this year, we’ve noticed a continued accelerated shift toward cross-platform play. We saw strong growth in mobile players and in people who switch between desktop and mobile when playing on Poki.
So we hope to see more games next year that have been made with this in mind. Developers need to make sure their game feels great in landscape with keyboard and mouse, but also in portrait with intuitive touch controls whenever possible.
While AI will continue to speed up the web gaming prototyping cycle, developers who have the real advantage in 2026 will be those who can use AI in combination with strong technical expertise and creativity.
RaptorPR Director Thomas Huxter
D2C and rewarded gameplay become the norm, not emerging trends. Subsequently, a need for innovation in payouts tech as well as pay ins. Creators and UGC rise in importance for UA, although overall there will be a greater focus on retention and retargeting over constant acquire ‘n’ churn.
This will be supported by AI-powered LiveOps and genuine personalisation to individuals rather than just cohorts. Finally, the potential emergence of mobile-first social gaming platforms e.g. Bitmagic, Nexus Station and Overdare.
Rokky CEO and Co-Founder Vadim Andreev
The e-store ecosystem will continue to grow, offering more alternatives to Steam, thanks to increasing regulation, stricter requirements for key sourcing, and growing consumer trust.
At the same time, direct-to-consumer (D2C) models such as publisher-owned stores, subscription ecosystems, and proprietary launchers will strengthen their position. For most publishers, the standard stack will see them focus on Steam, e-stores, and direct-to-consumer.
Stash CPO Spencer Tucker and CGO Archie Stonehill
“In 2026, we’ll see D2C shift from side experiment to core infrastructure. The playbook is emerging: design it into onboarding from day one, model conversion rates into your UA strategy the same way you track retention gates, and segment your approach.
Studios executing on this are recapturing significant revenue per paying player and feeding it directly into LTV, which unlocks more aggressive UA. By the end of 2026, that structural advantage will separate the winners from everyone else.”
Spencer Tucker, Chief Product Officer at Stash
“In 2026, alternative distribution stops being a side experiment. As regulation accelerates in markets like Korea, Japan, and the EU, studios will finally be able to build real off-store audience funnels. Sideloading, launchers, and owned distribution won’t replace the app stores overnight, but they will become powerful channels that smart teams treat as core to their business, not optional add-ons.”
Archie Stonehill, Chief Growth Officer at Stash
Tuned Global Managing Director Con Raso
Gaming Will Adopt Real-Time Music Adaptation
When it comes to integrating music in gaming, we will see it move beyond sync licensing to dynamic, gameplay-responsive soundtracks.
That could be as simple as an AI bot looking at the people that are in the gameplay and adapting the music style and the music itself to actually align with the gameplay itself.
That’s much more instant and transient than being programmed at the time the game is created. Those opportunities exist because technology is allowing us to actually do these things in real time at the moment, whereas 12 months ago, it wasn’t possible.”
We also expect more ‘super bundling’, where music sits alongside video, gaming, cloud storage, and other subscriptions in a single managed offer.
ZBD CSO Ben Cousens
With Apple and Google, we’re in the mobile equivalent of the Microsoft/Internet Explorer antitrust era. Apple and Google will be fighting regulatory battles for years, and that creates space for new players in payments and distribution.
The momentum behind alternative rails like Lightning and stablecoins is only growing, and every lawsuit or regulatory challenge weakens the grip of the duopoly. It won’t be a sudden collapse. It’ll be a long, grinding shift where developers steadily gain more freedom and consumers finally see real competition in how they pay and play.
