Imagine spending two years developing a mobile game. You've come up with an interesting mechanic, tested dozens of different versions, and finally reached the point where everything seems to work. The gameplay is enjoyable, the visuals look good, and the people who had the opportunity to test it seem genuinely interested in playing more. After months of work, the game finally lands on the App Store and Google Play, ready to be discovered by millions of potential players.
The problem?
Well… almost nobody knows it exists.
This is one of the more frustrating realities of modern mobile gaming, especially for independent developers who may have spent most of their time and resources simply getting their game ready for release. Making something worth playing is difficult enough, but finding people willing to give it a chance can turn out to be an entirely different challenge. There are thousands of other games competing for the same audience, many of which have already spent years building their communities and giving players reasons to return for one more playthrough.
In our previous series, we explored how independent creators can come up with unique ideas and use modern development tools to turn said ideas into playable games. However, making game development more accessible also means that more people can release their creations, some of which are lacking the overall quality, which brings us to an interesting question.
If almost anyone can make and publish a game, how are players supposed to discover the ones worth playing?
Spoiled With Choice
Mobile gaming has a rather unusual advantage over other forms of entertainment. Most people already own a device capable of running thousands of different games, and trying something new is only a few taps away. There is no need to purchase an expensive console, more affordable but still expensive handheld, or build a gaming PC. In theory, this makes mobile gaming an excellent environment for independent developers, especially those who want to experiment with relatively simple ideas.
The problem is that the same accessibility applies to everyone else. Modern engines, asset libraries, and all the development tools we discussed in the previous article have made it easier to create playable projects, but they have also led to an environment where countless games compete for the attention of the same players. Sure, not every release is particularly interesting or polished, but even a mediocre game extends the list of available games.
Now, think about how most people actually use their phones. Someone might already have a few games, perhaps one played during the commute, another during break at school or work, and a more competitive one to play with friends. There is nothing particularly unusual about this situation, but it creates a problem for developers trying to enter the market.
Why would that person download another game?
The answer may seem obvious at first. Perhaps the new game has better mechanics, more interesting visuals, or an original concept that hasn't been explored before. However, none of these advantages matters much if the player never discovers the game in the first place. Even when they do come across it, they still have to decide whether trying something unfamiliar is worth their time, and they make split second decisions about whether they will download the game or not.
We also have to bear in mind that many mobile games have spent years building systems designed to keep their audiences interested. Titles such as Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, and Pokémon GO regularly introduce events, updates, and new challenges, giving existing players reasons to continue investing their time. Someone who has already spent hundreds of hours progressing through a game may not be particularly eager to start again elsewhere, especially if their friends are still playing the same title.
This doesn't mean new developers have no chance of competing with established games, of course. Players still look for novelty, and we've seen plenty of smaller titles attract enormous audiences by offering something unexpected. However, the situation becomes much more complicated once we realize developers are competing against habits, communities, and the limited amount of time people have at their hands.
The Price of Being Noticed
One of the most obvious ways to make players notice a game is advertising. Pay to be discovered sounds easy, right? Well, the problem starts when we consider how many developers are trying to do exactly the same thing, often with marketing budgets that would be more than enough to finance the entire development of a small indie game.
This is where user acquisition becomes a much more complicated business than simply paying for a few advertisements and waiting for downloads to come in.
The general idea is fairly straightforward. Developers spend money to reach potential players, some of those people install the game, and hopefully enough of them continue playing to justify the original investment. The difficult part is assessing how much it costs to attract each player and whether the game can earn enough money over time to make the entire process sustainable.
Imagine an independent developer who has just finished working on a game for the past eighteen months. Most of the available money has already been spent on development, perhaps with a little left for promotional materials and a modest advertising campaign. Competing with companies that can spend enormous amounts of money on marketing is hardly an encouraging prospect, especially when there is no guarantee that paid advertisements will bring players who genuinely enjoy the game or any players whatsoever.
The situation becomes even more daunting when we look at how advertisements work. Developers may spend years refining an unusual mechanic, but the first contact a potential player has with their creation could be a fifteen-second video sitting between two social media posts. This is definitely not enough time to explain what makes the game interesting, especially if the answer lies in mastering the mechanics rather than doing something visually spectacular.
Finding the right balance is far from easy. Developers need to make their game look interesting enough to encourage someone to try it, but they also need to attract people who will enjoy what the game actually offers. Otherwise, the entire advertising campaign may bring impressive download numbers, but fail to build the playerbase.
Competitive Markets
Taking a look at recent industry data helps explain why this problem has become so important. According to Sensor Tower's State of Gaming 2026 report, mobile games generated approximately $82 billion in in-app purchase revenue during 2025, even as download growth continued to slow. The company also estimated that players downloaded around 95,000 mobile games every minute throughout the year.
Those are enormous numbers, but they don't necessarily mean that every developer is benefiting from the size of the market. In fact, looking at the same market from a slightly different perspective shows something rather interesting.
During the first half of 2026, mobile game downloads declined by approximately 12% compared with the same period in 2025, according to Sensor Tower data summarized by GameDev Reports. Revenue from in-app purchases also declined by around 2%, while the total amount of time people spent playing remained relatively stable.
What does that tell us?
Well, players haven't suddenly stopped enjoying mobile games. They are still spending enormous amounts of time playing, but they aren't necessarily downloading new titles at the same rate as before.
This changes the situation quite dramatically. Reaching an audience now becomes less about introducing people to mobile gaming in general and more about convincing existing players that a new experience deserves some of their attention. That's a considerably more difficult task when those players already have access to games they enjoy.
The advertising market seems to align with this growing competition. AppsFlyer's State of Gaming for Marketers 2026 report estimated that gaming companies spent approximately $25 billion globally on user acquisition in 2025. The report also indicated that advertising impressions increased by 20% year over year, while the number of installs linked to paid campaigns rose by 10%.
What's particularly interesting is the scale of advertising among the largest companies. AppsFlyer reported that leading gaming advertisers were creating between 2,400 and 2,600 variations of advertising materials per quarter, partly thanks to AI-assisted tools.
Try to imagine a solo developer competing with that.
Of course, producing thousands of advertisements doesn't automatically make a game successful, and smaller creators don't necessarily need to approach marketing in the same way. Still, the figures show how much effort major publishers are willing to invest in getting people to notice their products.
Now, releasing a game and hoping that enough people will eventually discover it is becoming an increasingly risky strategy. Some creators will still achieve success through unexpected recommendations or viral moments, but relying entirely on luck is hardly a sustainable approach.
When Players Become the Marketing
Think about the last time you discovered a game that genuinely caught your attention. Perhaps you saw an advertisement, got it recommended, or maybe you have seen it on a stream or social media.
This is where the nature of the gameplay itself can become the key part of being discovered.
Balatro is a particularly interesting example. Developed by solo creator LocalThunk and published by Playstack, the game became one of the most recognizable independent releases of 2024, eventually selling more than five million copies across platforms by January 2025. We've already discussed Balatro in our previous series, but its success offers something worth taking a closer look at from the perspective of game discovery.
The game’s key idea is relatively easy to explain. Players build poker hands and combine them with special cards that change the scoring rules, sometimes producing completely ridiculous results. However, understanding exactly how all those combinations work takes considerably more time, which gives players plenty of opportunities to experiment and discover something unexpected.
Now imagine watching someone play Balatro for the first time. You might not understand every Joker or scoring modifier, but seeing an apparently ordinary poker hand suddenly produce an enormous score is enough to make you wonder what on earth just happened. The game creates situations that are interesting to watch, and those situations can encourage people to share their in-game experiences with others.
Of course, Balatro also benefited from professional publishing support, so it would be misleading to present its success as purely organic. Still, its gameplay shows how a distinctive mechanic can make a game easier to discuss, demonstrate, and recommend.
We see something similar in the history of Among Us. The game originally launched in 2018, but it wasn't until 2020 that it became a global phenomenon, largely thanks to streamers and online communities introducing it to much larger audiences. The gameplay itself hadn't suddenly transformed into something completely different. What changed was how many people were watching others play and discovering how entertaining the social interactions of Among Us could be.
The important part here is that both games offer experiences that people naturally want to talk about. In Balatro, it might be an unusual combination of cards. In Among Us, it could be an argument between friends after a particularly convincing accusation. These moments become little stories that players can share, without needing to explain every detail of the game.
This doesn't mean developers should start designing every mechanic with TikTok or YouTube in mind, though. Doing so could easily lead to games that look entertaining for fifteen seconds but become boring after a few minutes. There is a difference between creating something that naturally produces interesting moments and building an entire experience around the hope that someone will share a video of it.
What matters is understanding why people might want to show a game to someone else. Sometimes it will be the competitive element, sometimes an unusual mechanic, and sometimes simply the opportunity to experience something funny with friends.
Finding the Right Players
There is yet another aspect that deserves attention, and it has less to do with reaching numbers than with understanding who might actually enjoy the game.
Let's say someone develops a competitive puzzle game built around short matches and quick decision-making. The developer could try advertising it to everyone who has ever shown an interest in mobile gaming, but that would probably include plenty of people who prefer relaxing experiences and have little interest in competing against others.
Now imagine that the same developer focuses on communities interested in competitive puzzles, strategy games, or speedrunning. The potential audience may be much smaller, but the people within it are also more likely to appreciate the mechanics the game has to offer.
Understanding the target audience can also help creators make better decisions during development. If the game is designed around competition, it may make sense to find out whether players enjoy the challenge, how they respond to losing, and whether they want to improve their performance over time.
This is one of the reasons why building a community before release can be so valuable. Developers can share early versions of their games, invite players to test different mechanics, and gather feedback before committing to decisions that may be difficult to change later. Even a small group of interested players can provide insights that would otherwise be left unknown until the game reaches a much larger audience.
There is one practical problem, however. Someone working alone already has plenty of responsibilities, and spending hours preparing promotional materials, answering questions, or organizing playtests means having less time for the actual development. For creators who would rather spend their evenings improving gameplay than managing social media accounts, community-building can feel like yet another task on their to-do list.
Discovery Is Only the Beginning
So far, we've focused on the challenges developers face when trying to get their games noticed. Advertising, social media, content creators, community-building, and all the other ways of reaching potential players can help a title find an audience, but there is one important detail we haven't discussed in much depth yet.
What happens after someone downloads the game?
Let's return to our hypothetical competitive puzzle game. Imagine that the developer has managed to attract several thousand players. The launch looks promising, people are installing the game, and the download numbers are increasing every day.
Everything seems to be going according to plan, except that most of those players stop opening the game after their first few sessions.
This is where one learns attracting attention and keeping it are two different things. The developer may have successfully convinced people to try something new, but the gameplay hasn't given them enough reasons to continue. Perhaps the mechanics become repetitive too quickly, the first matches are too frustrating, or the progression system doesn't provide anything interesting to work toward.
Competitive games involve even more challenges because the experience depends not only on the player, but on others as well. Someone might enjoy the central mechanic but struggle with unfair matchmaking or simply become frustrated when technical problems affect the outcome. Even when the gameplay is interesting, these issues can make returning to the game very unlikely.
This is where reliable multiplayer infrastructure can make a real difference. Elympics, for example, provides an infrastructure layer for competitive games, including a Unity SDK, matchmaking, game-server hosting, and server-authoritative gameplay. These systems help developers address some of the technical challenges involved in creating competitive experiences, allowing them to spend more time refining the mechanics that make their games enjoyable.
Of course, infrastructure alone cannot make an uninteresting game entertaining, nor can it create an active community out of thin air. Developers still need to understand what players enjoy, how competition affects their experience, and whether the game offers enough variety to remain interesting after dozens of matches.
The technical foundations do matter, however, especially when players expect competitive results to be fair and consistent. Losing because an opponent made a better decision can encourage someone to try again, but losing because the game failed to register an action correctly encourages slightly different emotions.
The Real Competition for Attention
The tools available today have made it possible for small teams and individual creators to build experiences that would once have required much greater resources. Today, we can experiment with mechanics, test ideas relatively quickly, and publish games to an audience of millions without needing a traditional publisher to handle every stage of the process.
However, all that accessibility comes with a rather inconvenient consequence. When more people can create games, more games compete for the same limited attention.
The mobile market is still enormous, and players continue to spend more time enjoying their favorite titles. What has changed is how difficult it can be to convince those players to try something new, particularly when established games already sit comfortably in their daily routines.
Thinking about discovery can no longer be left until the few final weeks before release. Building an understanding of who might enjoy the game, where those people can be reached, and what makes the experience worth recommending can be just as important as deciding which mechanics to include.
There is no single solution that works for every project, of course. Some games will benefit from content creators, others may reach success through communities, and some will require paid advertising.
The important part is recognizing that even a genuinely enjoyable game may struggle if nobody knows it exists and that attracting players is only half the challenge.
After all, convincing someone to try a game once is one thing. Convincing them to come back tomorrow, next week, and perhaps even several months later is an entirely different story.
And that is exactly what we'll explore in the second article of this series.
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