Mobile Mavens on the biggest games industry trends of 2024: The cross-platform shift, merge’s rise, and direct-to-consumer strategies

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Once again it’s that time of year where we all start feeling reflective and look back on the year just gone.

So to that end, we thought we’d ask our Mobile Mavens – a collection of games industry experts – a few questions about the year gone by. Here we ask:

What were the biggest games industry trends of 2023?

Discover more about the latest games industry trends at Pocket Gamer Connects London on January 20th to 21st, 2025.

2024 marked the third consecutive year of significant headwinds in gaming — stagnating revenue, intensifying competition, rising costs (particularly for user acquisition), and pressure on profitability.

After years of exceptional growth, the market is maturing and entering a new phase. 
Still, despite these challenges, truly creative and thoughtful games, new (like, Last War, Legend of Mushroom, Match Factory), but also old (Brawl Stars) have the power to thrive and grow.

On the player side, we saw a growing demand for meaningful, community-driven experiences and a notable shift toward cross-platform play.

The market is evolving at a breakneck pace — keeping up is a challenge in itself. I can’t emphasise this enough: the first trend to watch closely is skill-based gaming. While this topic has been discussed for some time now, I firmly believe it has a bright future ahead.

Alongside this, merge mechanics continue to gain traction, captivating new audiences across the globe. Some have compared merge games to match-3, and I’d say that comparison holds water — they’re becoming a phenomenon in their own right.

On the investment side, the landscape is shifting significantly. Young, talented studios now prioritise finding partners with expertise over simply securing funding. The days when chaotic projects could thrive on sheer traffic acquisition are long gone.

Today, the market demands hits, and creating a hit requires a different level of effort — classic marketing strategies, data-driven market analysis, and deep audience research.

Development teams are acutely aware of the risks they face. Every day, they see examples of failed projects and understand how critical it is to work with a partner who can provide not just financial backing, but also strategic guidance and long-term support

This shift marks a new chapter for the industry, one that emphasises collaboration and sustainability over short-term wins.

AI is revolutionising game development by accelerating art creation, streamlining marketing content production, and enabling more efficient workflows. This has empowered studios to focus on creativity and innovation while meeting the increasing demand for high-quality content.  

Live ops yet again proved to be a growth engine for many studios, including Goodville. It has become an essential strategy for sustaining player engagement and driving revenue. Regular content updates, limited-time events, and data-driven optimisations allowed games to stay fresh and relevant, keeping players invested over time.

Another new trend worth mentioning is the rise of hyper-accessible games across many games genres. Creating games that are easy to pick up but hard to master, appealing to a broader and more diverse audience.

Simple mechanics paired with layered depth are resonating across casual and core player segments alike, making accessibility a defining feature of successful games in 2024.

There were several trends, including layoffs, AI, hybridcasual, and web shops. I’ll focus on two. The first is a bigger picture thing. Games are increasingly becoming a huge part of pop culture. 2024 started with the Fallout show and ended with the second season of Arcane and Secret Level. It’s like games are the new Marvel, back when the Avengers were first a thing!

The second is the surge of interest in alternative app stores. Many closely followed the ongoing battle between Epic Games and Apple/Google, which has led to the opening of a brand-new previously inaccessible market.

The EU and Japan have already opened up, and I think the US will do the same next year. The cracks in the 30% revenue share are widening! 

Stabilisation – that’s how I would describe 2024. While iOS installs declined and Android saw slight growth, revenues and CPIs fluctuated across regions and platforms. Yet, overall, things seemed to settle down.

Despite investor sentiment around mobile gaming hitting an all-time low, new studios are emerging, and fresh games are being developed. At AppAgent, we had a strong year with nearly 40% revenue growth and greatly improved dynamic within the team after two challenging years.

2024 saw a major shift in how studios bring their games to players. Alternative app stores, custom webshops, and direct-to-consumer channels moved from niche experiments to mainstream strategies.

Studios are no longer bound to traditional app stores, and many embraced cross-platform publishing as a standard practice. I think this is a trend that will continue to evolve as we go into 2025.

Of course, better tooling was a crucial component of this. We’ve seen a big shift in more developers starting to trust tech they haven’t built themselves.

In fact, a recent survey we just ran suggests that developers are actually starting to prefer external tooling to in-house solutions. That’s given them more time to focus on building which, as we enter a crucial era for game development, is vital.