The mobile gaming industry pulled off a quiet inversion last year. Downloads dropped 7% in 2024, falling to roughly 49 billion installs worldwide. By any traditional measure, that looks like a market in decline. But time spent in mobile games surged 8% year over year, and gaming sessions jumped 12%. Players are downloading fewer games but spending far more time, and money, inside the ones they keep.
The industry’s center of gravity has moved from acquisition to retention, from the install to the session. LiveOps is the engine behind that shift.
With mobile gaming revenue projected to hit $103 billion in 2025 (roughly 55% of the entire global gaming market), games that run LiveOps generate 30x more revenue on average than those that do not. Every single title in the top 10 by revenue runs a LiveOps program. The question for studios is no longer whether to invest in LiveOps, but how to execute it well enough to survive.
This report examines where mobile game LiveOps stands today: what strategies are working, what operational problems studios face, and which emerging technologies will reshape the discipline over the next several years.
The Economics of LiveOps
Revenue Concentration
The revenue picture in mobile gaming has become starkly binary. Games running live operations models captured 84% of all in-app purchase revenue in 2024. Among the highest-grossing RPGs, 90% feature active LiveOps programs. Only 34% of action games on mobile use LiveOps, yet those titles capture the vast majority of the segment’s revenue.
In-app purchases remain the dominant monetization model, accounting for 77% of mobile game revenue. Global IAP spending reached $81.7 billion in 2024, up roughly 4% from the prior year, with the average transaction value at $7.62, highest in the strategy and RPG categories where LiveOps is most common.
But the revenue story goes beyond IAPs. Battle passes now appear in nearly 60% of top-grossing titles and account for 22% of total IAP revenue. Subscription-based monetization grew 13% year over year, reaching $4.2 billion globally. The most successful games in 2025 run hybrid models combining ads, IAPs, battle passes, and subscriptions. Genshin Impact and Fortnite are the standard-bearers, blending cosmetics, battle passes, and brand collaborations into a revenue model that would have been unrecognizable a decade ago.
| Revenue Stream | Share / Volume | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| In-App Purchases | $81.7B (77% of revenue) | +4% YoY |
| Battle Passes | 22% of IAP revenue | 60% of top titles |
| Subscriptions | $4.2B globally | +13% YoY |
| Hybrid Models | Ads + IAP + Pass + Sub | Industry standard |
The DTC Revolution
The most consequential business development of 2025 is the mainstreaming of direct-to-consumer web shops. Following landmark rulings in Epic v. Apple (April 2025) and Epic v. Google (October 2025), studios can now legally link to external web stores from within their apps in the US.
Web shop providers charge roughly 5% of revenue, compared to the 30% platform fee levied by Apple and Google. According to industry estimates, the top 200 mobile publishers collectively lose approximately $41 million per day by routing spend through app store billing instead of DTC channels. Annual DTC transaction volume exceeded $700 million in 2025, and 56% of players using payment links are entirely new to direct purchasing.
DTC has become a core revenue channel. For LiveOps teams, it opens a new execution surface: the ability to run exclusive offers, loyalty rewards, and event-tied promotions through a channel that returns dramatically more margin per dollar spent.
The Retention Crisis
The Numbers
Even as engagement metrics improve, the retention picture remains sobering. The industry benchmark for Day 1 retention sits at approximately 24%, with casual games retaining about 20% and top titles reaching 28%. By Day 7, retention drops to somewhere between 9% and 20% depending on genre and quality. By Day 30, approximately 98% of players have churned from a typical mobile game.
With user acquisition costs climbing to $4.83 per install on iOS and $2.17 on Android, and the gaming industry spending $25 billion on UA in 2025, losing 98% of acquired players within a month represents an enormous destruction of marketing spend. Keeping existing players engaged is far cheaper than replacing them.
Why Early Engagement Matters
Churn is heaviest in the first week. Roughly 80% of users leave after the first day alone, making the first few sessions the most important window for LiveOps intervention. The studios that perform best in retention have shifted their thinking from “onboarding flow” to “first-week LiveOps strategy,” treating the initial player experience as an engagement sequence designed to build habit loops and emotional investment before the natural drop-off window.
How Top Studios Run LiveOps in 2025
The Event Cadence Revolution
The most visible operational change in 2025 is the sheer volume of LiveOps events. Quarterly tentpole events separated by quiet periods are a thing of the past. Top games now run nearly 100 monthly events. Gossip Harbor, for example, increased its event volume from roughly 20 per month to nearly 100, reflecting an industry-wide acceleration.
Effective programs operate on two complementary layers. Short-loop events (daily challenges, flash sales, limited-time modes) drive immediate engagement and give players a reason to open the app. Long-horizon systems (battle passes, album collections, loyalty programs) provide persistent structure that absorbs rewards from short-loop events and gives players a sense of progress over weeks and months. The interplay between these two layers creates a rhythm that keeps players engaged across multiple time horizons.
Personalization as a Design Discipline
Segmentation has evolved well beyond grouping players by country or spend tier. Leading studios in 2025 use AI-powered systems to optimize the player experience at the individual level. AI tunes the difficulty of LiveOps challenges per player, maintaining what designers call the “flow state,” the zone where challenges feel neither trivially easy nor frustratingly hard. AI-driven systems swap out rewards based on a player’s historical inventory and playstyle, ensuring that offers feel relevant rather than generic.
Merge Mansion demonstrated this approach with its Holiday Mystery pass, delivering tailored rewards and cosmetics that drove sustained spending. A one-size-fits-all event will always underperform a targeted one.
The industry is also treating personalization with guardrails, not as a blanket optimization lever. The goal is to deliver experiences that feel genuinely better for the player, which also performs better commercially.
Cadence, Segmentation, Experimentation
The third element alongside event cadence and personalization is structured experimentation. A/B testing has become standard practice, with modern tech stacks enabling multiple simultaneous tests on different player cohorts without requiring app store submissions. Metacore has demonstrated outsized gains from disciplined, controlled experimentation with documented hypotheses and statistically significant results.
Organizational Design Matters
As event cadence increases, organizational design becomes as important as feature design. The industry is moving toward small, autonomous LiveOps teams with clear ownership and minimal cross-team dependencies. Scopely, for instance, maintains five or more dedicated LiveOps managers for Stumble Guys alone. Reducing coordination overhead improves delivery stability and allows teams to iterate faster, a real advantage when you are shipping content on a near-daily basis.
The Operational Challenges
Tool Fragmentation
Most studios run LiveOps through a collection of disconnected tools. An analytics platform here, a CRM tool there, a separate A/B testing service, remote config, push notifications, an in-game economy manager, and an event scheduler. Popular platforms like PlayFab, Unity Gaming Services, Leanplum, GameSparks, Metaplay, and others each cover a portion of the stack, but no single platform covers the full LiveOps workflow end-to-end.
This fragmentation has a real cost. Integration overhead, data inconsistencies between tools, and the constant maintenance burden of keeping multiple vendor integrations working together consume engineering time that could be spent on the game itself. Average budgets now allocate $22 million toward third-party live-operations infrastructure per major title, with LiveOps dashboards, event triggers, analytics, segmentation, and matchmaking consuming 20-30% of total build cost.
The Data-to-Action Gap
The most stubborn challenge is the silo between data analysts who identify problems and LiveOps managers who fix them. Marketing operates with one set of metrics, development with another, support with a third. Most analytics tools silo data into dashboards accessible only to analysts, forcing other teams to wait on reports or make decisions based on intuition rather than real-time data.
Studios have more data than ever. The problem is turning insight into action quickly across every department. When an analyst spots a retention drop in a specific player segment, how fast can the LiveOps team deploy a targeted intervention? In many studios, the answer is still days or weeks, not hours.
The Production Burden
Running nearly 100 events per month requires content. A lot of it. A full LiveOps operation demands what amounts to a continuous development team with ongoing traffic acquisition. Many studios face a direct tradeoff between event frequency and event quality. Resource limitations force difficult choices, particularly for indie and mid-size studios that lack the headcount of a Scopely or a miHoYo.
This production burden is a strong argument for AI-assisted LiveOps tooling. When the bottleneck is the volume of content, configuration, and testing required to sustain a modern event cadence, automating repetitive operational tasks can expand what a small team can deliver.
AI in LiveOps: What Works Today
Measurable Impact
AI adoption in LiveOps is producing real results. Unity’s 2025 industry survey found a 40% reduction in live-ops production time after AI adoption, along with an 8-12 percentage point lift in 30-day retention. Early data from multiple studios suggests AI-driven LiveOps can boost retention and session time by as much as 40% in some cases.
The practical value of AI in 2025 has landed in specific, narrow areas rather than as a broad transformation. Studios seeing the best results are those applying AI to well-defined operational problems rather than hoping for a general-purpose revolution.
Where AI Delivers Value
- Automated event scheduling — AI agents manage battle pass cadence, event timing, and content delivery based on player engagement patterns.
- Real-time player segmentation — behavioral analysis creates dynamic cohorts that update as players' behaviors change.
- Personalized offers and rewards — contextually relevant content swapped in based on individual player histories.
- Difficulty tuning — challenge parameters adjusted per player to maintain engagement.
- Churn prediction — models identify at-risk players for proactive re-engagement before they leave.
What Remains Human-Led
Strategic and economic decisions remain in human hands. Creative direction, narrative design, and major game balance decisions require human judgment that AI cannot replicate. The industry consensus heading into 2026 is one of refinement and optimization rather than disruption; AI deepening its role in asset and workflow acceleration while humans retain strategic control.
“AI in gaming becomes infrastructure; you won’t brag about using it, you’ll just use it the way you use Excel.”
AI-powered LiveOps will not be a competitive differentiator for long. It will be table stakes.
What Comes Next
The Near-Term Horizon
Several trends are converging as we look toward 2026 and beyond.
The Bigger Shifts
On a longer horizon, the industry is moving toward AI-native LiveOps platforms that unify analytics and in-game action, where identifying a problem and deploying a solution happen within the same workflow rather than across disconnected tools. Predictive models will shift from reactive churn prevention to proactive engagement design, anticipating what players need before they disengage. Cross-platform LiveOps spanning mobile, PC, console, and web will become table stakes as more games launch simultaneously across platforms.
The line between user acquisition and LiveOps will also blur. Retention-as-acquisition, through viral mechanics, referral loops, and community-driven growth, represents a potential shift where keeping players engaged becomes the primary growth engine, not paid installs.
- LLM-powered player insights — non-technical team members query player data in natural language.
- Reinforcement learning for offer optimization — learns optimal pricing and timing per player.
- Agentic AI workflows — detect issues, diagnose root causes, propose fixes, and execute them with human approval, collapsing days into minutes.
Where This Leaves Studios
The state of mobile game LiveOps in 2025 comes down to a tension: the operational demands have never been higher, but the tools and techniques available to meet them are evolving fast. Studios are expected to run near-continuous event cadences, personalize experiences at the individual level, experiment rigorously, and manage all of it while costs rise and toolchains remain fragmented.
The studios that thrive will recognize LiveOps as a core game design principle that deserves the same investment in tooling, talent, and technology as the game itself. The $103 billion mobile market is not growing because more people are downloading games. It is growing because the games that invest in keeping their players are capturing an outsized share of attention and spending.
The shift from manual, intuition-driven operations to data-informed, AI-assisted LiveOps is already underway. The question for every studio is whether they are building the operational infrastructure to compete, or still running their live game from a spreadsheet.