Evgeniy Kurenkov is the founder and CEO of Magify, an analytics and live-ops platform for game studios.

Take a look at the top ten free-to-play games in any category and you’ll see they’re all built by big, well-established studios. These companies have massive marketing budgets, streamlined user acquisition systems, and deep experience in keeping players engaged.

Do you see any emerging studios on that list? You don’t. And while it’s easy to blame rising user acquisition costs and lack of access to scalable business intelligence (BI) tools, I’d argue that’s not the real reason.

Yes, user acquisition is expensive – that’s just how this market works. Chances are not even, and larger studios keep increasing their user acquisition budgets, while smaller ones struggle to compete. The real issue isn’t access to traffic funding, but the lack of understanding around game economics and forecasting models, which prevents new studios from growing. The real issue is that smaller teams aren’t managing the levers they do control. And there are plenty of those.

Insights above all else

In today’s gaming market, your edge comes from knowing how to extract insights from your data and use them to make decisions. Even seasoned teams often struggle with resource allocation simply because they lack a robust analytics platform – or they’re still using an outdated system that can’t support the increased standards in analytics and live ops. Modern free-to-play game development is based on metrics and maximizing user lifetime. It’s a high-tech industry that runs on numbers.

The mobile gaming economy today is about one thing: the balance between customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV). To strike that balance, we need good data, good analytics, and good live-ops tools. Every new stage of game development needs to be backed by A/B testing and data analysis – without a data-driven approach, a budget is at serious risk of being wasted.

Every decision becomes a guess if you lack data. You might as well be betting on zero at the roulette table. The successful experience of working with in-game audiences has become an unspoken industry standard. In 2025, any casual mobile game developer is expected to build forecasting models a year or more ahead when planning mass user acquisition – and to ensure that players stay in the game and enjoy spending time there.

Without end-to-end tracking, we can’t really know which in-game events and offers are driving retention

A successful studio in 2025 isn’t just a content creator. It’s a systems operator. Success depends on personalisation, hypothesis testing, monetisation strategy, and thoughtful live-ops planning. Games aren’t just entertainment any more – they’re embedded in players’ lives.

Analytics and live ops shouldn’t operate separately. Without end-to-end tracking, we can’t really know which in-game events and offers are driving retention, what’s converting players, or what’s actually moving the revenue needle.

It’s possible to build your own BI system from scratch – although this takes serious expertise and time, which can be in short supply. Plus the emerging trend of automating live ops with machine learning and AI demands an entirely new tech stack – and talent that smaller studios often simply don’t have.

It should also be noted that internal BI rarely contributes to a company’s valuation the way founders expect. In an acquisition, the acquirer will use its own BI system after the purchase, and the valuation of the acquired company’s internal solution, in which the team has invested a significant amount of time and money, will be excluded from the deal.

However, there is now a mature software-as-a-service ecosystem, offering top-tier analytics, attribution, and live-ops tools.

Data driven

The trend is clear: we’re moving towards long-term, data-driven product management. The north star? Return on ad spend (ROAS). Getting cheap traffic is nice, but it’s meaningless without understanding its performance. That’s why data maturity directly impacts margins.

Here’s an example: it’s common to see nearly identical-looking games on the app stores; yet some attract millions of new users each month, while others plateau at less than 100K installs. The key difference often lies in how well studios personalise the gameplay experience, and monetise through segmentation and remote configs.

These are levers that can and should be controlled. They’re what make a game appealing to the broadest possible audience and enable direct engagement with the player.

Successful studios use these tools to their advantage, and others miss the opportunity.