As the global mobile gaming market moves into 2026, growth remains visible but the logic behind user acquisition is shifting. Rising downloads and revenue are now accompanied by denser competition, forcing game publishers to rethink how budgets should be allocated and where efficiency can truly be gained.
Mobile Gaming Growth Continues, but User Attention Has Moved
Entering 2026, global game publishing has continued its growth momentum, while the user acquisition landscape has quietly evolved.
According to the Global Mobile Gaming UA Trends & Strategy Report (Q1–Q3 2025) jointly released by XMP and Insightrackr, global mobile game downloads reached 38.9 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, a 7.4% year-on-year increase. Estimated revenue during the same period totaled USD 82.5 billion, growing 13.2% year on year.
While the market is expanding, it's also more crowded. With new titles and ad creatives surging, scaling through high spend alone is no longer sustainable. UA efficiency has now become the decisive factor for growth.
How Channels, Budgets, and Creatives Are Shaping UA in 2026
Multi-Channel Coverage as a Baseline: Following Fragmented User Attention
From the channel perspective, industry data shows a clear dual-track pattern. According to the 2025 edition of AppsFlyer's Performance Index, walled garden platforms, including Google Ads, Apple Ads, and Meta, continue to serve as foundational pillars for mobile game user acquisition, providing scale and stability.
At the same time, open networks like AppLovin and Mintegral are maintaining rapid growth and gradually narrowing the gap with leading platforms, as advertisers extend reach into additional environments where user attention has shifted. This expansion is not driven by experimentation alone, but by the practical need to maintain coverage across increasingly diverse attention scenarios.
This combination of walled garden platforms and fast-growing open networks is reshaping how UA coverage is built.
Budget Concentration Within Complexity: Head and Mid-Tier Platforms Dominate Spend
Budget data further reinforces this channel structure. AppsFlyer's Performance Index points out that, among the top five global media platforms, 60% recorded year-over-year growth in ad spend. For platforms ranked 6th to 10th, this figure rises to 80%, while only 30% of platforms ranked 11th to 20th achieved growth. These figures indicate that advertisers are increasingly concentrating budgets on head and mid-tier platforms, rather than distributing spend evenly across a long tail of media sources.
This trend aligns with XMP's aggregated observations. Based on USD 10 billion in ad spend managed by XMP, Meta consistently ranks first in advertiser spending, while Mintegral and AppLovin also represent major budget destinations. Together, leading and mid-tier platforms form the core battleground for game UA, where scale and efficiency intersect.
Creative as the Interface: Communicating Gameplay Across Fragmented Attention
From a creative perspective, video ads continue to dominate the UA landscape, accounting for 81% of mobile game creatives. Image ads make up 14%, while playable ads account for 5%, as shown in the Global Mobile Gaming UA Trends & Strategy Report (Q1–Q3 2025).
Beyond formats, creative strategies are undergoing a fundamental shift. The rise of playable ads, narrative-driven storytelling, and AI-integrated production is redefining the mechanics of UA. Industry competition is gradually shifting away from a volume-first approach toward a new phase that emphasizes content quality and gameplay understanding.
As a result, the coordination between high-quality creatives and precise user targeting is becoming increasingly important, setting the foundation for UA performance optimization in 2026.
Key UA Characteristics Emerging in 2026
Looking at 2026, we see two distinct trends emerging in the global gaming UA space, spanning both traffic expansion and creative production.
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User attention is spreading beyond mainstream platforms. Player activity is no longer concentrated solely on major social channels such as Meta, TikTok, and Google. Growing time spent on utilites, AI apps, and short drama is unlocking new pockets of high-value, niche traffic for game advertisers. Platforms like AppLovin and Mintegral are becoming important complements for expanding reach and easing competitive pressure on mainstream channels.
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AI-enabled creatives are raising the bar for conversion efficiency. AI-generated avatar creatives and gameplay-integrated formats are emerging as new creative trends. With advantages in cost efficiency, production speed, and customization, these creatives can adapt more quickly to regional preferences and present gameplay in a more immersive way, helping reduce user decision friction and improve conversion potential.
Translating Trends into Strategy with Data and AI Support
Against this backdrop, publishers seeking to stand out in the next phase of global UA competition need to stay focused on two core objectives: precise targeting and efficient conversion. Building on the characteristics above, effective UA strategies can be structured around two key dimensions.
Precision Channel Allocation: Balancing Core Scale and Segmented Growth
Rather than relying on a single channel type, budget allocation increasingly follows a "core platforms for stability, segmented platforms for incremental growth" approach. While maintaining strong presence on platforms such as Meta, Google, and Apple Ads, advertisers are allocating more testing and expansion budgets to high-potential segmented platforms to diversify traffic sources and manage risk.
However, segmented channels often differ significantly in structure and performance. Identifying the most relevant traffic sources therefore requires systematic analysis rather than manual trial and error.
To support this process, XMP's Traffic Pool feature enables refined optimization across SDK-based ad platforms and open networks such as Mintegral, Unity, and AppLovin. Through cross-channel app-level analysis and sub-channel performance insights, advertisers can clearly assess coverage gaps and identify underutilized opportunities. Combined with indicators such as traffic value, growth potential, competitive intensity, as well as benchmark metrics including CPI, eCPM, and ROAS, teams can more accurately evaluate cost advantages and prioritize scalable, high-value traffic sources.
AI-Driven Creative Systems: Improving Iteration Speed and Market Fit
As competition increasingly shifts toward creative quality, UA teams face mounting pressure to iterate faster while adapting creatives to diverse regional preferences. Managing high volumes of assets across markets, channels, and teams adds further complexity to the optimization process.
To address this, advertisers need to prepare creative assets in advance around core game genres, such as MMORPGs and casual titles, and key target markets, while using AI tools to improve creative production efficiency. At the same time, building a standardized and collaborative creative management system becomes essential. With XMP's Tagging System feature, advertisers can centralize asset management by uploading creatives into a unified library and applying standardized tags based on game genre, target market, creative format, visual style, and AI elements. This enables cross-team and cross-channel sharing while improving operational efficiency.
Tag-based performance report further allows teams to quickly identify high-performing creative elements. In parallel, AI creative generation tools can analyze patterns behind top-performing assets and support faster iteration, reducing trial-and-error cycles. At the same time, creative reuse should keep selective, assets need to be adjusted based on platform characteristics and campaign stages to ensure relevance and effectiveness.
As UA enters a more competitive phase in 2026, growth will depend less on budget size and more on allocation clarity and execution efficiency. Teams that adapt faster across channels, creatives, and workflows will be better positioned to sustain performance.
Ready to turn insight into more efficient UA execution? Contact us to get started with XMP.
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