As mobile gaming shifts from user growth to competition for existing players, marketing in 2025 has become more complex and cost-driven. Rising acquisition costs, faster creative fatigue, and fragmented channels are reshaping how marketers drive growth.
We have prepared a short summary of the report:
1) The market got bigger — and more crowded
- 84K+ active mobile game advertisers per month in 2025 (+21.9% YoY), peaking at 90K+ in June; the report says 400K+ advertisers were active across the year.
- About 7.9K new advertisers joined per month on average (roughly 9.4% of monthly advertisers), and new advertisers were 23.4% of all advertisers—similar to last year.
What it means: UA isn’t just “expensive”, it’s busier. The baseline level of competitive pressure keeps rising.
2) Creative velocity became table stakes
- In 2025, 82.5% of monthly advertisers launched new creatives on average (up 14.6% YoY), and new creatives represented 58.1% of monthly creatives on average (up 5.9% YoY).
- The report positions creative as the most controllable lever: faster refresh cycles held performance longer, especially in peak periods.
3) Video won the format war
- Video creatives reached 74.1% of creatives in 2025 (+14.2% YoY). Images fell to 24.7% (-11.6% YoY).
- Most video was short: ≤15s (12.8%), 16–30s (45.2%), 31–59s (35.1%), ≥60s (6.9%).
- For image creatives, square dominated at 67.2%.
4) Genre marketing mix: casino surged; RPG/strategy stayed “creative heavy”
- By advertiser share, casino jumped to 47.0% (YoY change +22.7%), while casual was 19.9% (YoY -5.9%).
- By creative share, casual still led at 23.9%, but casino rose to 22.3% (YoY +13.9%).
- The report highlights RPG as the top spender by “creatives per title” (over 800 annually), with strategy close behind (728).
5) Regional competition: Europe led volume; Hong Kong/Macao/Taiwan led intensity
- Europe recorded 46K+ monthly advertisers in 2025, leading all regions.
- Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan had the highest competitive intensity with 122 monthly creatives per advertiser, followed by North America (119); Oceania and Japan & South Korea were also above 110.
6) UA in 2025: “discipline” replaced volatility
Singular’s section describes 2025 as modest growth in spend paired with more careful scaling:
- Install volumes started cautious, strengthened through the year, and Q4 scaling didn’t automatically crush ROAS for advertisers with mature creative and measurement pipelines.
- A key theme is diversification as risk management: paid social remained dominant, but concentration risk increased, and advertisers diversifying channels often saw better marginal returns.
- Measurement maturity (multi-touch attribution, modeled conversions, blended metrics) is framed as a competitive advantage when signal loss persists.
7) 2026 takeaway: retention-led, full-funnel systems
Aarki’s framework shows performance-first marketing hits limits when churn is extreme:
- Citing Business of Apps, the report states 95%+ of installers churn within 30 days across iOS and Google Play, pushing marketers toward retention-led orchestration.
- Aarki proposes an “Infinity Loop” that connects UA + retargeting + lifecycle marketing so learnings from retention feed back into acquisition, and vice versa.
- It also emphasizes operational practices: pacing spend based on retention/creative signals, and treating reactivation as ongoing experimentation that can inform UA.
Practical implications for studios
- Plan for constant creative refresh (the market is already doing it at scale).
- Bias toward short-form video as default, with square images still relevant for specific placements.
- Expect genre-dependent competition: casino is aggressively expanding, while RPG/strategy remain high-output categories.
- Regional strategy matters: Europe brings advertiser volume, but some regions show much higher creative intensity per advertiser.
- Treat measurement as product infrastructure, not a reporting layer—modeled and multi-touch approaches are positioned as necessary to scale confidently.
You can access the full report here.
