Writing on F2P games performance
A decade of hard-won lessons on monetization, retention, user acquisition, and the design decisions that actually move the numbers.
Case Studies
Case Study: PVP Casual Card Game — 6.4× Revenue Run Rate
How a hit physical card game became a real F2P publisher: 6.4× revenue run rate, +80% IAP ARPDAU, and +162% ad ARPDAU over a two-year engagement.
Case Study: Classic Solitaire Game — +60% D14 ARPU
Fixing broken ROAS measurement and running 15 high-ROI experiments lifted D14 ARPU 60% blended (+67% incent, +52% non-incent) for a classic solitaire title.
Case Study: Wordscapes — +38% IAP ARPDAU
How the #1-grossing mobile word game of all time lifted blended IAP ARPDAU 38% over a 10-month engagement — embedded PM and disciplined experimentation with PeopleFun.
Case Study: Top-Grossing Merge-2 Game — +24% ARPDAU
A +24% blended ARPDAU lift on a top-grossing Merge-2 title — 13 high-ROI product initiatives, a sharper A/B-testing methodology, and a co-designed economy fix.
Case Study: Wordgrams — 2.0× ARPDAU
How Funcraft's word puzzle doubled blended ARPDAU (2.0×) in its launch window — a rapid split-testing playbook, 29 product initiatives, and a lasting experimentation culture.
Featured Posts
How to Fail, Part 1: Start Without a Business Case
As we know, 95% of mobile F2P games are unprofitable. After working on 80+ mobile projects with 30+ game teams, I’ve seen these odds play out first-hand. It’s quite…
How to Fail in F2P Mobile Games, Part II: Undisciplined Innovation
The F2P Designer’s Dilemma Like many mobile game PMs and designers, I cut my teeth in premium console game production. Down in the trenches, creative…
How to Fail in F2P Mobile Games, Part III: Vague Product Goals
Previously, in “How to Fail in F2P Mobile Games…” In Part II of “How to Fail in F2P Mobile Games” we touched on three distinct approaches to product and feature…
All Posts
What's the Retention Benchmark for a Casual Game in 2026?
Install-weighted D1/D7/D30 for casual genres (US/iOS). A top-grossing match-3 now competes against 47/24/13 — and why some genres survive on 5–8% D30.
What Separates Steam Indie Winners From Losers
A 1,712-game dataset ranks four launch-controllable factors by predictive strength, with explicit correlation-vs-causation and survivorship caveats.
Why China Dominates Merge-2
Merge-2 is one of the few casual categories still minting new hits. China takes ~2x the West's shots on goal and repeats hits at 17% vs 4%. The structural why.
The Pixel Flow Clones, Ranked
Fewer fast-follows than feared. The five best Pixel Flow derivatives so far, scored on forecast, UA differentiation, and retention.
Hybrid Puzzle, Ranked: The 13 Sort Subgenres
13 hybrid-puzzle types ranked by revenue. The top five are all Sort variants — and Sort/Screw alone is a $72M subcategory.
Who's Winning in Hybrid Casual Puzzle?
The top 7 puzzle publishers have each shipped hundreds of games — ABI over a thousand. To compete, plan on 200 prototypes first.
How SORT Took Over Hybrid-Casual
A five-year mechanic-evolution teardown: the UA-readability, procedural cost, and loss-aversion advantages that drove sort puzzle to dominance.
Soft Launch Radar — March 2026
Four soft launches worth watching: 37Games' plague-doctor 4X, 1SOFT's Brick Factory, and Moon Active's Jelly Busters and Reality Bay. Who goes the distance?
Will Hotpot Flow Be the Next $10M Sort Game?
iKame's cozy conveyor-sort hit broke $40k/day within weeks. A teardown of the model, the monetization, and iKame's 40-games-a-year volume machine.
The Greenlight Math Behind Kaiju No. 8
A numbers-first case study on an organic-first AAA-IP launch: dev-cost recoup, UA economics, and IP timing — why even a #2 launch barely pencils out.
The Underpowered Retention Test Mistake
Buy 500 installs for a D1 test and you're working with an 8–9% margin of error — enough to flip a build's verdict. How to power tests right.
Are There Only Two Viable Genres Left?
Of 22 successful Q3 2025 launches, nearly all were XXL RPGs or hybrid-casual puzzlers. The two-strategy recipe — IP-organic vs product-auction-fit — and how to export it.
Where Are Mobile Publishers Winning?
In Q3 2025 just six countries produced nearly every successful launch. The 1.5% success rate, and the two paths that survive it.
How Teams Fail at Retention Testing (Without Realizing It)
A 35% D1 read off 140 installs could really be 28%–42%. Most teams test to a budget, not to the math. How to do it right.
What Features Have the Greatest Impact on Revenue?
Turbine correlated feature launches with ARPDAU across casual games. Loss-aversion mechanics win; some ubiquitous features underdeliver.
Recent Posts on Clash Royale's Comeback Are Wrong
The product-driven turnaround narrative is seductive — and probably wrong. The real story is distribution: one streamer, 85% organic downloads.
Is Free-to-Play Dead on Steam?
Ten years of Steam data: F2P is ~9% of launches but ~30% of revenue, flat for a decade, and dominated by AA/AAA core PvP titles. Why indies wisely avoid it.
What Features Actually Increase Playtime?
Race events, dense daily tasks, and same-day sessioning move playtime. Battle passes and guilds mostly don't — why behavior resists change.
Where Are Mobile Publishers Succeeding? (Hint: Not the US)
Nearly all of Q2 2025's successful launches came from the East. The US had zero. The five geos that are actually winning.
Where Should You Test Retention?
The Philippines is the default low-CPI retention proxy — here's why it works, when it doesn't, and when to anchor it against a US test.
Who Will Be the Next Vietnam?
Low costs and hustle aren't enough. Vietnam's rise took a talent incubator, a startup diaspora, and big tax incentives — a repeatable recipe.
What Types of Games Are Succeeding on Steam in 2025?
Of 1,445 Q2 Steam launches, only 3.4% hit $500k net/mo — eerily close to mobile. Which genres, themes, and tags broke through.
Do Supercell Games Succeed Because of — or In Spite of — Light-Touch Monetization?
Brawl Stars values a maxed hero at ~$200 vs. $2,000–4,000 in core RPGs. Is shallow spend depth the price of a 3:1 organic install ratio?
This One Country Published More Games in Q2 Than Anyone on Earth
Vietnam launched 311 games in Q2 and drove 17% of first-week revenue from new titles — second only to China.
Why Galaxy Defense Wins (Tower Defense)
455 Tower Defense games launched in 2025; one crosses $10M. What Galaxy Defense does differently — roguelike D1R, second-screen idle, deep spend-depth geometry, LiveOps.
Mobile Game Publishing Is (Still) Broken
Only ~1.4% of Apple/Google releases reach $10M IAP within a year. Where else can a new game earn real money in 2025?
Are Mobile Action Games Headed for Extinction?
A client's 'perfect' RTS retention-tested terribly. What a decade of data reveals about the second-screen shift, and what survives it.
How Many Installs Do You Need to Measure Retention?
A lookup-table cheat sheet that answers the question we get ~1,000 times a year — good enough in 90% of cases, no LLM required.
Who Really Drove Hybrid-Casual?
Three French publishers plus Rollic account for ~69% of hybrid-casual revenue since 2022. The RPD milestones that traced the genre's climb from hyper-casual to $4 RPDs.
How to Get Spend Depth Above $100k (Wittle Defender)
Habby's Wittle Defender turns gacha duplicate-fusion into ~$170k of spend depth from a handful of heroes. A teardown of idle-RPG economy design for hybrid-casual.
Can Hyper-Casual Still Work? The Block Blast Playbook
Block Blast scaled to 42M monthly downloads on a D60 of 28% — built from 3,000 A/B tests and 10,000 ad creatives. What it actually takes now.
Mobile vs. Steam: Which Had the Higher Success Rate?
Everyone pivoted to Steam in 2023–24. We analyzed ~8,000 launches: mobile releases were 39% more likely to clear $1M net in 2024.
Why Hybrid-Casual Puzzle Games Fail Without Streak Systems
From direct client work: streaks are a core economy feature, not a LiveOps add-on. The streak-system mistake most hypercasual studios make.
The Turbine Playbook for Hybrid-Casual (10 Steps)
Turbine's step-by-step methodology: the CPI gate before monetization, retention thresholds, ROI-first feature order, and expecting to fail 3-5 times.
How Turkey Became a Mobile Games Powerhouse (2020–2025)
Peak's landmark acquisition seeded 80+ startups and a knowledge-transfer wave — here's how it built Turkey's casual-games dominance.
Why Royal Kingdom Isn't Paying Off (Yet)
Dream Games' second title leans on a differentiator the market isn't rewarding. Five reasons Royal Kingdom trails Royal Match — and whether it still makes sense.
Monetization Is Easy — Retention and CPI Are Where Games Die
The contrarian case: you don't launch, you test. Why retention and CPI (product-market fit), not monetization, decide whether a game lives.
The .100 Batting Average: Test Before You Build
Post-IDFA, the best publishers hit ~10%; everyone else is below 1%. Why you must CPI-test many ideas before committing to build one.
Why Every App Is Suddenly Called '…Games'
Players search 'puzzle games' 1.5-2x more than 'puzzle game,' and the stores reward literal matches. A quick case study in keyword-ranking mechanics.
Why Your Winning A/B Test Won't Reproduce
Bootstrapping, p-values, and false-positive rates: the statistics behind why split-test wins vanish on rollout, and why before/after testing fails at small scale.
The A/B Testing Playbook For Mobile Games, Part 2: Statistical Significance Testing
In the first article in this series: The A/B Testing Playbook for Mobile Games, Part 1: Structuring the Experiment, we discussed the different types of A/B testing…
Why Sci-Fi Is So Hard on Mobile (Warhammer 40K: Warpforge)
Only 8 non-Star-Wars/Trek sci-fi mobile games have ever passed $50M. A look at Warpforge's odds, and why CCGs cap out around $5-10 RPD.
Warcraft Rumble: A Great Game in Search of a Market
A soft-launch teardown: Blizzard built a polished game, but is there a market for it? Polish vs. the brutal reality of mobile in 2023.
The A/B Testing Playbook For Mobile Game Growth, Part 1: Structuring the Experiment
About our articles and guides In our work on 100+ games with 80+ game teams, there are some challenges that we encounter again and again. Over time, our…
The Career Advice I Wish I'd Gotten at 18
'Follow your passion' is directionally right but incomplete. A five-step framework for cultivating passion as a competitive advantage.
The Most Common Ad-Monetization Mistake
Choosing $0 revenue from 95% of your users isn't a strategy. The devil's-advocate case for testing interstitials and rewarded video, with segmentation.
Only 0.29% of Mobile Games Make $1M a Year
Of ~1.01M mobile games, only ~2,900 clear $1M/yr in IAP. The odds say plan for both IAP and ads, and prove top-1% KPIs early.
How to Meaningfully Improve D7 Retention
A five-step client playbook for moving D7 — qualified users, radical FTUE and difficulty changes — ending at the product-market-fit gate.
The IAP Merchandising Playbook, Part 3: MVP Store Design (V2.0)
February 2022 NOTE: This article and wireframes were updated to V2.0. Included: Refinements born of split-test data / ongoing iterationAdded Landscape…
The IAP Merchandising Playbook, Part 2: Visual Hierarchy
In the first article in this series: The IAP Merchandising Playbook, Part 1 we provided a simple checklist for ‘Captivating’ Special Offer Merchandising: In…
The IAP Merchandising Playbook, Part 1: Special Offers that Sizzle
About our articles and guides In our work on 80+ games with 35+ game teams, there are some challenges that we encounter again and again. Over time, our…
What is ‘IAP Merchandising?’
In my work with 35+ clients, ‘IAP Merchandising’ is a topic that I raise frequently, in service of improving IAP monetization. But, I’ve found this term to be…
Getting more with less: 6 high-yield design patterns for F2P games
“We have tons of ideas, but what should we do first?” Having worked with over 30 game teams as a product consultant, I’ve been surprised by how often developers…
Why Raid: Shadow Legends will surpass $250m
Introduction If you played any mobile games during the months of March or April 2019, you likely saw an ad (or twenty) for a game called Raid: Shadow Legends…
Do you know your game’s spend depth?
The topic of Spend Depth comes up often with my free-to-play, mobile game clients, so I thought I’d share some high-level thoughts on the topic. To start, spend…
Game Analytics I: DON’T Measure Everything
It’s no secret that turning a profit in F2P mobile games isn’t easy these days, and not only due to fierce competition. The modern mobile game service is an…
Game Analytics II: Just Track These 6 Behaviors
This is the second part in a multi-part series discussing best-practices in product management and analytics for mobile games. In the previous post, DON’T Measure…
Game Analytics III: What you need to know about your users
This is the third part in a multi-part series discussing best-practices in product management and analytics for mobile games. Game Analytics Part I: DON’T Measure…