Seven Things the 2025 State of Gaming Report Actually Tells Us
Sensor Tower dropped its State of Gaming report, and the industry did what it always does: selectively quoted the parts that confirmed whatever they already believed. I sat down with Sensor Tower’s lead gaming insights analyst, Sam Aune, to go deeper. We covered seven trends from the report. Some of the data is encouraging. Most of it should make you uncomfortable. All of it is worth understanding.
TREND 1
The $70 Game Won 2025 and GaaS Can to Blame But Itself
The most striking visual in Sensor Tower’s report is a bubble chart plotting every major game of 2025 by price versus downloads. Battlefield 6 sits at approximately 20 million units sold at $70, miles ahead of every other premium title. EA Sports FC, Monster Hunter Wilds, Call of Duty, all clustered well below. Games-as-a-Service (GaaS) was supposed to have won. The chart doesn’t agree. Don’t get it wrong, Marvel Rivals and Skate did phenomanally well but failed at converting the launch event into a durable live service (read: CCUs collapsed).
What makes this remarkable is the premium market context. According to Sam, nine premium games cleared 10 million downloads in 2025, versus only four free-to-play breakouts.
The variety on the premium side is genuinely striking: indie titles like R.E.P.O. and PEAK, AA games like Arc Raiders and Split Fiction, remasters like Elder Scrolls IV, and full AAA in Battlefield 6 itself. But the more uncomfortable structural truth is this: free-to-play incumbents have entrenched player bases, built-in social graphs, and years of investment. Breaking in against them is only getting harder. Premium, paradoxically, may now be the less saturated path to player attention.
One more thing. EA’s channel strategy for Battlefield 6 adds another counterintuitive layer. They deliberately leaned away from YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram pre-launch, and into Facebook, Reddit, and linear TV channels with older male audiences with disposable income. Sam’s data shows Call of Duty Black Ops 7 drove roughly three times more impressions on Instagram and TikTok, and eight times more on YouTube. Yet Battlefield sold more.
TREND 2
(How) Indie Friend-Group Games Beat AAA
R.E.P.O. and PEAK were the second and third-best-selling PC/console games of 2025. They cost less than $10. They were made by tiny teams. And they went viral because groups of friends couldn’t stop playing them together.
Sam’s read on why these games work is specific:
"These games understand that the core PC console gamer experience in 2025 is social with friends. R.E.P.O. and PEAK are designed to be played with a small group getting on Discord regularly, specifically to play with each other. These games create moments where everyone is laughing and yelling — that kind of gaming night that everyone wants to have."
The virality loop is self-reinforcing: laughing, horror, high-stakes moments like falling off a mountain. Streamers have something to react to. Their audiences see it, buy it, and recruit their friends. At $8-10 per copy, friction is near zero. Sam also noted that graphics don’t matter for this category the way they used to. The younger players prize the social experience over visual fidelity, and the gap between today’s best-looking games and games from ten years ago simply isn’t wide enough to wow anyone.
TREND 3
Mobile Revenue Is “Up” 1%
The headline number is mobile game IAP revenue up 1% in 2025, downloads down. That sounds like stabilization, yet the underlying data tells a different story.
The growth is almost entirely captured by the top 50 games. Sam’s number: the top 50 accounted for 80% of the market’s 1% revenue growth, meaning the rest of the market, taken together, actually declined. The number of games clearing $100M in annual revenue dropped year-over-year.
"It feels like the market is thinning. It definitely feels like it was harder to scale in 2025 than 2024."
The time-spent data adds another layer. Total hours spent is relatively flat, while revenue is slightly up and downloads are falling. That pattern means players are spending more time in fewer games, and those games are monetizing more efficiently. Market is not adding new engaged players. The game is focused on optimization and extraction, not growth.
One piece of nuance worth noting: 24% of 2025’s top 50 mobile games were not in the top 50 in 2024. The market is concentrated but not fully frozen. Last War: Survival and Whiteout Survival jumped from the broader top 10 to the number one and two spots. Movement is possible. It just requires playing at a level that most studios can’t sustain, let alone achieve.
TREND 4
Strategy Won Every Region at the Same Time
Last War: Survival and Whiteout Survival finished 2025 as the top two grossing mobile games globally. Both are strategy titles. Both are made in China. Strategy was the only genre to grow downloads year-over-year across North America, Asia, and Europe simultaneously. That kind of universal cross-regional traction is rare in a market that otherwise fragments badly by geography.
Sam’s explanation for why the 4X strategy keeps producing these machines comes down to interlocking systems:
"They have really interesting live ops and game events. The alliances, the competitive events. These create durable engagement and retention. Monetization is tightly coupled to time and social competition. You really want to pay to win your wars, to not let your alliance down. That produces some pretty high LTV, which lets them fund really aggressive acquisition, which makes the winners global."
The closest structural cousin Sam identified is the Chinese MMOs, games like Perfect World, where guild obligations and cross-server PVP create scheduled spending moments. Western MMO players chose PC/console for that experience. What 4X figured out is how to bring that psychology to mobile, without the hardware barrier.
TREND 5
Century Games Is Now #2 Globally
By January-February 2026, Century Games had moved to the number two mobile publisher globally by revenue, behind only Tencent. Two years ago, nobody in the West was seriously talking about them. Now they have Whiteout Survival, Last War: Survival, King Shot, and have expanded into casual with match-merge titles.
The UA data is clarifying. Sam’s Sensor Tower estimates: 68% of Whiteout Survival’s US downloads come from paid display, 15% from paid search. They are scaling through raw UA volume and creative firepower at a pace most Western publishers won’t or can’t match. The monetization flywheel makes it sustainable:
The harder question is what Western publishers can actually do about it. Chinese publishers have structural advantages that are genuinely hard to replicate. Such as direct access to the Chinese audience, which brings another 30% of revenue to the numbers you’re seeing on Sensor Tower.
On top of that, Chinese publishers regularly beat their Western rivals on execution, creative volume, live ops cadence, iteration speed. Centralized live ops teams runnin across entire portfolios, AI-powered creatives are published at scale, crativity is handled by a development factory models that puts five internal teams against a single genre. These aren’t things Western studios can easily copy, nor should they necessarily try.
The answer to the Chinese dominance Sam and I landed on is about different leverage:
Core gameplay innovation is still largely a Western strength.
Western studios are also better at coming up with a Global IP that resonates across cultures without requiring deep localization.
Western publishers can distribute with creators and communities better than the Chinese.
And we can achieve velocity throuhg radical focus: small, senior teams that don’t go to conferences, don’t do BD, and just build.
The studios competing on those terms are finding the gaps that Chinese publishers aren’t occupying. Match three is still holding. For now.
TREND 6
Web Stores Are a Standard, Not a Tactic
Bypassing the app store is now a standard publisher strategy, not a fringe experiment. Web store promotions surged in 2025, led by casino and followed closely by RPG and strategy titles. The mechanic is simple: offer players more currency for the same price they’d pay on the app store, routing the margin difference back to the publisher rather than Apple or Google.
Sam laid out the incentive tiers: baseline web store offers typically give 10-20% extra currency; first-time conversion offers can hit 35-100% bonus to break initial friction; event-driven spikes can reach 90% bonus; loyalty-tier offers can add around 30%. The math on why high-spending players convert is obvious.
Web stores work well for casino, strategy, and RPG audiences. They do not work for casual genres like match-three, where players are passing time, and the friction of leaving the platform outweighs any currency bonus. The casual audience isn’t optimizing. They just want to play.
On saturation: Sam’s read is that we haven’t reached it yet. Web stores are still primarily a top-games feature. The competitive pressure for mid-tier publishers to adopt them will only increase as the margin math becomes impossible to ignore.
TREND 7
Search Bar Is a Battlefield, Metadata is The Weapon
Roblox has a branded search traffic score of 9.1, comparable to Google and TikTok as a search term. That’s an extraordinary level of brand gravity for a game. And Fortnite is actively bidding on competitor keywords like “roblox,” winning share of voice. App store search is a live competitive battlefield where meaningful player acquisition is being won and lost daily, largely invisible to most developers.
Sam’s framing on how it works is worth internalizing:
"Sensor Tower estimates that 88% of Roblox’s 320 million downloads in 2025 were organic, and 74% of Candy Crush Saga’s downloads were organic. Search typically amplifies brand momentum rather than creates it. The biggest games win first by building gravity outside the store, then by capturing and defending it effectively inside search results."
For games without Roblox’s brand mass, there’s a different game being played: metadata engineering. Last War: Survival and Whiteout Survival rank on generic keywords like “strategy games” and “survival games”. Sam confirmed this is common and deliberate among Chinese publishers: include the highest-volume generic category terms directly in the game title. The name creates organic eligibility; paid UA provides the initial velocity that makes it stick.
"Paid UA may drive initial velocity, but metadata engineering really helps convert that momentum into durable organic presence. The title creates eligibility — performance determines durability."
Western publishers have traditionally treated game naming as a branding exercise: building legacy, expressing creative identity. Chinese publishers treat it as an SEO exercise. Neither approach is inherently wrong. But studios competing against games named for their highest-volume search queries, while naming their own games for their creative vision, are playing a harder acquisition game than they need to.
Philosophical Musing: The Pattern Underneath All of It
Seven trends that look separate are actually one trend viewed from different angles: the mobile gaming market is mature, concentrated, and increasingly dominated by publishers that out-execute on systems rather than out-create on ideas. The premium PC/console space is counter-intuitively more open — more diverse demand, less entrenched incumbency across many genres, and an audience that will still pay $70 for the right product.
The studios that navigate the next three years well will be the ones that pick their lane honestly. If you’re competing with Century Games on their terms in strategy or match-merge, you’re in an attrition war, and you will probably lose. If you’re making a genuinely novel social co-op experience with a small, focused team and strong community distribution, you might be the next PEAK. The report is 97 pages. The actual insight is simpler: know which game you’re playing.
The full Sensor Tower State of Gaming report is free to download
