Mobile Game Market Research: What Everyone Gets Wrong

Most studios say they’ve “done market research” before greenlighting a new game. But more often than not, what they actually did was check the top charts, scroll through a few competitors, and call it a day.

The result? Missed opportunities, misaligned concepts, and wasted dev time.

If you’re serious about building a successful mobile game—especially in the free-to-play space—you need to go deeper. Here’s what most teams get wrong about market research, and how to fix it.

Start With Reality, Not Charts

Before looking outward, start inward:

• What is your company’s vision?
• What are your team’s actual strengths? (Genre mastery matters.)
• What is your timeline and resource allocation?

This context is essential. There’s no point identifying a billion-dollar opportunity in hardcore strategy if your team excels in casual puzzle and has 9 months of runway.

Market research should align with what you can actually execute, not just what the market says is hot.

Why Focusing on Revenue or Downloads Isn’t Enough?

Many studios today use tools like AppMagic to analyze game categories (or tags) by revenue and downloads. They track trends and growth patterns—for example, noticing that Hybridcasual Puzzle games have seen rising revenue over the last couple of years.

That kind of directional insight is useful, but it’s not enough.

Making development decisions solely based on category trends is risky. For example, Merge games may look highly attractive if you only look at revenue trends.

But when you examine success rates in the same category, the picture changes.

Some titles dominate because they are utilizing strong IPs, massive UA budgets, or marketability baked directly into the core game loop, with alignment from ad creatives to app store pages and into the FTUE (source). Others may benefit from live ops maturity or app store visibility that newer entries won’t have.

Without digging into these deeper layers, you risk building something that looks like a hit on paper, but flops on launch.

Real Market Research Looks Like This

A proper market research process for mobile games should include:

Competitive Landscape

Use tools like AppMagic, Sensor Tower, or GameRefinery to go beyond surface-level insights. Look at:

• Success rates of different categories (e.g., what % of launched games in a certain period of time actually perform well)
• Include only GEOs where you want to compete and win
• Market share of top games in the category
• Release dates of leading games in the category

Then dig into the why:

• What makes the current category leaders successful?
• Are they winning due to IPs, strong FTUEs, Marketability, positioning, UA excellence, or something else?
• What are the most common USPs (unique selling points) in the genre today?

This helps you avoid building another clone. Instead, you can position your game to deliver what the audience wants, while standing apart from what already exists.

Audience Understanding

Don’t just look at who plays a genre—ask why they play. Use audience intelligence tools to deeply understand the players and to segment them to groups that share similar characteristics.

Your goal is to understand:

• What do these players value?
• If they have their favorite game, why do they go back to it?
• What are the culture-derived behaviours and personal values?
• On which other activities do they like to spend their time?
• What is the most efficient style and tone of communication for them?
• What would make them switch their favorite game to something else?

If you don’t have enough capital to buy these tools (they are expensive), gather your own data with zero or low-cost tools such as Google Forms, Geeklab, and Meta UA campaigns. Note, however, that how you conduct the research and formulate the questions is crucial for getting accurate, non-biased data.

Positioning & Synthesis

Take all the insights and ask: Where is the opportunity?

• Are there underserved audiences / categories?
• Is there an angle others missed (theme, feature, monetization)?
• Can you position your game differently even in a crowded genre?

This is where concept validation and positioning come together.

Use Tools Like AppMagic the Right Way

AppMagic is a market intelligence platform I often recommend. One of its standout tools, the Success Meter, lets you define your own custom success criteria (e.g. $100k+ net IAP in the last month) and quickly identify which game categories have the highest and lower success rates.

But as a reminder; don’t stop at the winners. Ask: Why are they succeeding?

• Was it the IP?
• Was marketability baked into the concept?
• Are they backed by massive UA spend?
• Do they exploit a specific feature or trend?
• How big is the time? How long they have been in liveops with a possibility to build tools, processes and loyal fanbase to the product?

Reverse-engineering these elements gives you a much better shot at positioning your own concept for success.

Final Thought: Research Without Context Is Just Noise

While this article focuses on market research and positioning, it’s important to remember that validating your concept’s marketability is the next critical step—something I’ll explore in depth separately.

Data is everywhere. Tools are better than ever. But unless you start with your own strategic constraints—and go beyond surface-level patterns—you’ll just end up building faster in the wrong direction.

Good market research isn’t about finding what’s trending. It’s about validating what’s right for you.

And if you’re trying to do that: Here to help.