Launching a new mobile title has never been harder. But for studios who get it right, it’s never been more rewarding.

190,000 new games were released in 2025, but only 2,500 had more than 500k downloads in their first year.1 Organic growth has become increasingly difficult, and for the first time paid media is driving the majority of installs for the typical new launch.2 On paper, that's a tough market. But even as fewer titles break through today compared to a few years ago, new launches' overall share of gaming In-App Purchase (IAP) revenue has held steady.3

That's because the new titles that do break through are winning bigger:

• New releases are making money faster:
The average time it took to reach $20M in IAP and subscription revenue decreased 21% from 2022 to 2025.4
• New releases are monetizing every user better:
IAP revenue per install increased 126% from 2021 to 2025 for U.S. users. And 58% of new IAP launches now layer in in-app ads to monetize players who never make a purchase.5

The launch market itself has changed shape — from which publishers are breaking through to how they’re doing it.

Many publishers treat a new launch as a concentrated sprint where the outcome gets decided in the first few months. New analysis from Moloco shows why the publishers who break through treat launches as a year-long operation – testing, learning, and fine-tuning all along the way. The insights show that long-view matters more than publishers may expect: Per-payer value more than doubles over the first year. Whale dominance doesn't peak until month eight. And more than a third of a title's top spenders haven't even arrived by month six.

What separates the launches that break through from the ones that stall? We analyzed 55 new mobile game launches through their entire first year. These launches represent more than $1.5 billion in IAP revenue across 20 million+ payers.

Here's how the first year plays out across monetization, acquisition, and creative.

The first thing we looked at was monetization, which is often the make-or-break factor for a new launch. Instead of looking at the data by genre, we grouped the titles by how they make money:

• Whale-Driven: revenue primarily comes from a small group of high spenders. These titles sit above 70% whale concentration, with ARPPU typically above $100.
• Volume-Driven: revenue primarily comes from many payers purchasing repeatedly. Whale concentration is in the 40% to 65% range, with ARPPU between $35 and $165.
• Ad-Driven: revenue primarily comes from advertising, with lower IAP frequency and size. ARPPU is under $20.

Our monetization deep dive focuses on IAP revenue for Volume-Driven and Whale-Driven titles. What we found is that the first month reveals surprisingly little about where a title ends up.

When we look at IAP titles, per-payer value isn’t static at launch. For Whale-Driven titles, ARPPU is 250% higher at the end of the first year than it is in the first month. And ARPPU for Volume-Driven titles ends the year up 25%.

Most of that value growth comes from purchase frequency, as payers continue to engage with the game all year. Whale-Driven payers also increase their transaction amounts as the year goes on.

The Implication ✦ What monetization looks like at month one is not a reliable signal for a title's long-term revenue potential. Players who will drive the most value are still building their habits, and publishers have a long runway to shift their monetization strategies.

At launch, a title's revenue is fairly broadly distributed. Plenty of players make a purchase, and the eventual top spenders are just one contributor among many. Some payers buy once, or only within a single month, and then stop, while others keep purchasing all year. As the year goes on, the whales make up a greater share of overall revenue. For Whale-Driven titles, whales account for the overwhelming majority of monthly revenue by the second half of the launch year.

Volume-Driven titles follow a flatter version of the same arc. These titles’ revenue rests on a wide middle range of players who return to purchase across several months, so the whales never dominate to the same degree.

The Implication ✦ Early spend will look more distributed than where it ends up. Whales take time to reveal themselves, and the titles that let this audience develop are the ones that come out ahead. The payers who lapse along the way aren't lost, either. They've shown purchase intent and what kind of offer moves them, which makes them a natural re-engagement audience later in the launch year.

Whales don't cluster at launch, or at any other particular point of the launch year. Across both monetization models, a title's eventual top spenders make their first purchase in a steady stream across the entire launch year. Case in point: only 15% of Whale-driven titles' eventual top spenders appear in the first month. The whales who will carry a title's revenue are still installing, and spending, in month three, month six, month ten.

The Implication ✦ If most of a title's whales arrive after the launch month, a UA program that front-loads spend and tapers off isn’t aligned with how the player base actually develops. Sustained, year-long acquisition is what gives a title the chance to catch high-value users over time.

As we’ve seen, whales arrive throughout the launch year and take months to dominate revenue. That raises an obvious question: how do you evaluate acquisition spend when the payoff is this delayed? The data shows that a player's early purchasing behavior reveals them quickly. Most eventual whales are already among a title's top spenders within a month of their first purchase, even though the large majority of their value is still to come.

The Implication ✦ For UA, this means the evaluation window shouldn't start at install. It’s about spotting high-value players early from their purchase behavior, and bidding to what they will be worth, not what they’ve spent so far. That is how the strongest launches acquire key users, which is where we turn next.

The monetization findings raise the stakes for UA: the players who matter most arrive all year and take months to show their value. The launches built around that reality are the cohort's clear winners. We call these seven titles breakouts, each among the top-grossing Moloco-supported new launches of its release year, and their acquisition differs from the rest in two ways.

First, they arrive at launch ready to bid for value. Breakout titles use soft launch to establish retention benchmarks and realistic ROAS targets, so that by general release their campaigns are optimized to predicted revenue. In launch month, 94% of breakout titles' UA spend runs on ROAS objectives (vs. CPI/CPA), compared to 65% for the rest of the cohort. The rest do get there eventually, but they spend their opening months of general release learning what the breakout titles learned during the soft launch.

Second, they don't let up. Breakout titles hold their spend through months 6 to 12, the stretch when the rest of the cohort pulls back and, as the monetization data shows, when a third of a title's eventual whales have yet to make their first purchase. Breakout titles accept softer D7 and D30 ROAS as they scale because they’re measuring success on predicted lifetime value rather than early payback.

The Implication ✦ Bid to predicted value from day one of general release, and keep spending while the signals hold. Some titles won't earn that sustained investment, and cutting losses is the right decision. Just make the call on the right evidence: Early revenue often lags behind the payers who will drive it, so D7 payback alone can hinder titles that were working. UA programs that taper spend too early may miss the high-value users who are still arriving.

Creative strategy is one of the clearest dividing lines between breakout titles and the rest. As AI-powered advertising systems get more efficient at testing a wide range of creatives, and generative AI lowers production costs, publishers can experiment more than they used to. And breakout titles do: They experiment with more creatives, keep producing through the year, and continuously diversify their format mix. The longer the launch runs, the more time the AI system has to learn, and the wider the gap between breakout titles and the rest grows.

Breakout titles on average used 93 distinct creatives, compared to 37 for the rest. Moloco's AI system then identified the best-performing creatives and automatically shifted budget toward them. For breakout titles, this larger creative base spread the budget more evenly: the top spending creative accounted for just 15% of total spend, versus 31% for other titles.

The Implication ✦ Every campaign has to make sense of a nearly unlimited number of combinations: different users, seen in different moments, across different apps. Breakout titles focus on creating a range of creative assets to allow Moloco’s AI to match the right asset to the right moment.

Vietnam-based publisher Bravestars puts this into practice, running a wide range of creatives across banner, video, and playable formats. Playables proved especially effective, driving 13.4x higher install volume and 27% higher D7 ROAS than static images.

For most titles, creative production peaks at launch and tapers off, yet launch-day assets still draw meaningful spend in the back half of the year. Breakout titles, on the other hand, accelerate their production as the year goes on. Only about a tenth of their creatives ship in the opening weeks of the launch.

The Implication ✦ Treat launch creative as a starting point for gathering signal and performance data, and budget for creative refreshes throughout the year. Seasonal- and event-based moments can be particularly strong occasions for creative refreshes.

For most titles, creative production peaks at launch and tapers off, yet launch-day assets still draw meaningful spend in the back half of the year. Breakout titles, on the other hand, accelerate their production as the year goes on. Only about a tenth of their creatives ship in the opening weeks of the launch.

The Implication ✦ Playables and a wider range of video lengths reach placements and engage players that a narrower creative set can't. Titles that hold the same format mix all year limit both the inventory they can bid on and the signal that helps AI find the right players for every ad.