Mobile Mavens’ highlights and lowlights of 2024 part two: “The competitive UA landscape has been particularly intense”

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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, and what lies ahead in 2025. Here we asked:

What were the highlights and lowlights for you and your business in 2024?

You can read part one of this article here.

For me, 2024 was all about Utmost Games — a year of dedicated effort in building the company and investing in talented studios and teams.

One standout success has been Top App Games and their hit Ludus, which achieved remarkable results (over $2 million in monthly revenue and three million downloads) and became a source of genuine pride.

I’d like to highlight another one of my investments: Digital Vortex Entertainment, a publisher focused on PC and console games. I strive to take a comprehensive view of the industry, and for me, this area is just as important as mobile gaming. Both sectors have immense potential, and I’m committed to supporting innovation and growth across the entire gaming landscape.

Before diving into this new chapter, I took some time to rest and recalibrate. In 2023, I stepped down from my role as CEO of My.Games and focused on my family for a while. Now, my energy is fully directed toward growing Utmost Games and supporting studios and publishers worldwide.

This support goes beyond mere investments. It’s about sharing expertise and offering tailored guidance. Different teams have different needs — whether it’s strategic advice, operational insights, or creative direction — and I’m always eager to help them thrive.

The highlights are too many to count! We hit every company KPI by mid-November: from revenue, to DAU and ARPDAU. So a phenomenal year from a business standpoint.

We also entered a new vertical: shopping rewards. US-based ZBD app users can now earn rewards by shopping online and in-person at hundreds of stores. 

Recently, we also became the first company to get approved for an EU MiCAR license! That means we’re licensed to perform a range of crypto services, including exchange, across the EU.

No real lowlights, except for some long work weeks, but that’s par for the course in a startup.

2024 has been a very transformative year for Metaplay. We launched the first public version of our SDK at PGC London in January and have been busy growing all aspect of our business.

We have onboarded more game studios to use Metaplay than all previous years combined and kept up shipping large feature updates that directly address the biggest challenges our customers face in developing their projects.

Specifically, I’m seeing us take on a more active role and stronger opinions on how our customers should operate their live games.

For example, we are now hosting scalable production environments in addition to offering a path to self-hosting and have openly published our ever-growing LiveOps Dashboard design system that makes it easier to build internal tools on top of Metaplay’s existing dashboards.

Our latest release 31 (from earlier this week as I’m writing this) even introduced the very first sneak peeks of built-in business KPIs and a visual timeline view of LiveOps events that will grow next year to be a completely new, no-code way for large teams to manage their game server content.

The important nuance in all of the above is that while it was all previously possible and large studios have built their custom tooling on top of Metaplay, we are now increasingly confident in declaring certain workflows as industry best practices and making them permanent additions to our product.

My lowlight for the year is just the ever-continuing stream of layoffs and studio closures. The supply shock is still ongoing and project (or “content”) funding is still few and far between for all that talent to start new things. Happily, the trend seems to be slowly rebounding on the positive towards 2025.

2024 marked a pivotal year for Goodville. Among the highlights: we became profitable, had 80% revenue growth and significant user growth. We also successfully relaunched our mental wellness campaign in collaboration with WHO and introduced Sarah, a smart AI resource assistant for mental health and wellbeing.

Additionally, the introduction of new live ops features garnered excellent feedback, strengthening our players’ engagement. 

On the downside, the surging costs of user acquisition in an increasingly competitive mobile market, and particularly farm adventure games, posed challenges, prompting us to innovate with creative strategies and partnerships to sustain our growth.

The year 2024 was incredibly dynamic for both me and my company. On a personal level, I celebrated the birth of my son and took on a new role as the CEO of Top App Games — both of which were undoubtedly the most significant milestones of the year for me.

For Top App Games, it was a year of transformation. What started as a small startup has grown into a thriving international company with an office in Cyprus and monthly revenue nearing $3 million.

And yet, I believe this is only the beginning — our ambitions reach far beyond. We are attracting new teams and developing multiple projects across genres, with one upcoming title offering a twist on genre fusion that we’re eager to unveil as soon as it’s ready.

On the downside, the competitive landscape in traffic acquisition has been particularly intense. Our user acquisition team has had to explore innovative approaches to product promotion. For instance, we’ve started experimenting with broader media traffic channels in addition to performance marketing.

Highlight: More game studios realising the potential of rewarded UA and reaching out to us in order to scale their UA. Also increasing the ad budgets from our long-standing customers, by increasing quality step-by-step with data-driven product and campaign improvements.

Lowlight: Tough restrictions by the App Store and Google Play, no differentiation between high and low quality UA apps. So Freecash is still being generalised and perceived as dubious by Apple and Google, despite thousands of positive reviews by gamers and users.

This year, Candy Crush Saga’s Music Season was a standout highlight for both players and the team.

There’s something about the combination of candy and music that just works, and this season captured that perfectly. From the catchy songs to the creative candified music videos, the experience was well balanced for our players.

One of my personal favourite touches was the metallic look of the Candies, it was an unexpected and playful twist that added to the excitement of the season.

Each of the 100 developer-driven product updates and launches we released this year marked standout moments for our team; giving us the opportunity to support and empower our incredible games community.

With our community-focus development, ByteBrew has emerged as one of the largest product footprints on the app stores for games in 2024. What we’ve achieved over the last year is a testament to our passionate and innovative team. 

However, as an industry, 2024 brought significant challenges for studios who had to adapt to shifting market conditions and tighter margins. As the industry shifts around them, studios can rely on ByteBrew to provide the solutions teams need to navigate and thrive.