Here's a summary of the key points from the 144-page research document on mobile marketing trends in 2024 by SocialPeta

?? The cost of user acquisition is increasing, making the combination of creative-funnel-onboarding-monetization even more important.

In my opinion, the level of complexity and cost will continue to rise. The path from attracting attention to payment should be super smooth. The winner will be the one who can do it well. Research for marketing and product playtests are now essential.

?? Player motivations are primary. It's important to align creative processes, development, and purchasing with this.

Player psychotypes and the connection between the game and life are what we usually research for marketing. Wargaming became a pioneer in this for us. I feel that psycho-research will soon become an industry standard.

?? The authors recommend taking inspiration from monetization tools from non-games. For example, subscriptions. Top companies are already trying this.

This is interesting. A game is essentially a service for "killing time" plus satisfying certain motivations. I saw a player in Homescapes with a level around 4000. Would she buy a subscription? I think so.

?? The advent of 5G will change mobile games. Not revolutionarily, but download speed will have less impact on the gaming experience.

?? We are expecting the arrival of AI human-catchers that will throw personalized hooks throughout the funnel. I heard about personalized offers and content (and we did it at Wargaming) back in 2016. The revolution hasn't happened yet. We'll see.

?? The Play2Earn model for a healthy person (without NFT) is gaining hype. Rewarded Playtime with real-world rewards is interesting to almost a quarter of players.

As the gaming industry develops as a whole, the question of meaningfulness will arise. It's not for nothing that idleness is considered a sin, and what is a game? A celebration. To reduce the feeling of meaninglessness, this shift towards flirting with "meaning" will occur. And we are only seeing the beginning of this process.

That's why I'm making an eco-hamster game. You play, tap, compete, and the planet benefits.

?? A whole cohort of "prize hunters" is emerging who explore games with Rewarded Playtime. If they like the game and the prizes, they go to others.

I feel that the industry will divide more clearly and there will be a distribution between hardcore gamers and hypercasual, where the game is not even considered a worthwhile activity.

?? With increasing competition, App Store Optimization and the appearance of your "product" card are becoming more important. Also relevant for Steam. How to make a top page in the store? With the help of our psycho-research. :)

?? Hypercasual is falling, casual games are plateauing and require large investments in quality and depth. Developers and publishers are looking for new hybrid casual models.

This is actually interesting. The audience is massively becoming discerning. And with rising costs, we are seeing a trend of transition from mobile to PC/Steam. Cool.

?? The rise of mini-apps is happening globally, but not everywhere yet. The hamster game shot up in Telegram. The same thing is happening on WeChat and Douyin in China. The mini-game app audience has reached 650 million players and continues to grow.

?? The top strategy for buying traffic is deep research, bold creatives, and iterative testing. That's the opinion of Senni Nurmi from Geeklab. I fully agree, which is why we do research.

?? UGC-style creatives are coming to ad networks where they haven't been before - Unity, AdMob, Mintegral. And no wonder. Because they work. Only emotion can make you do something. No emotion - no memory, no action. So far, people are best at evoking emotions. But maybe soon AI will hack us.

?? AI will change the gaming industry. This has already happened in 18+ games on Steam for sure, content production has become 30 orders of magnitude faster, although not without specifics. Just as copywriting jobs have disappeared, there will be a shift here too. Some part of production will definitely go faster.

But in other places, such as marketing, competition will increase manifold because there will be even more games and studios. It's important to ask yourself now. Are we doing research? How is our creative process built? How do we test the product? What marketing channels do we use? How do we generate hypotheses?