On January 27, AppsFlyer, the Modern Marketing Cloud platform, officially announced the State of Gaming for Marketers 2026 report, which in-depth analyzes how artificial intelligence (AI), the expansion of creative content production and increased advertising spending pressure have reshaped mobile game marketing activities in 2025.
Based on AppsFlyer's global data, the report shows that studios and publishers are forced to adapt as marketing activities grow faster than the ability to attract and maintain player attention.
According to the report, Vietnam continues to maintain its position as one of the leading important mobile game markets in the Asia-Pacific region, especially in the mid-range (Midcore) segment. However, domestic publishers are also facing increasing competitive pressure, along with clear changes in the monetization model and increasing requirements for investment efficiency.
AppsFlyer's research shows that, along with Japan and Korea, Vietnam contributes about 40% of the total In-App Purchase (IAP) revenue of the Midcore segment in 15 markets analyzed.
The advertising-based monetization model of Hyper Casual games (mobile games with simple gameplay) continues to weaken. In Vietnam, Hyper Casual's advertising revenue decreased sharply, with a decrease of 23% on Android operating systems and 37% on iOS compared to the same period last year, reflecting the saturation of creativity and the decline in profits of the model relying heavily on advertising.
Casual and Midcore games in Vietnam have higher natural settings than many Western markets, showing the increasingly important role of natural growth in the context of escalating advertising costs.
According to AppsFlyer, the total budget for user attraction (UA) activities of global game applications reached 25 billion USD in 2025, an increase of 3.8% compared to the previous year.
Nearly half of the budget is still concentrated in the US market, although spending here decreased by 5%, while growth mainly comes from emerging markets such as Turkey (up 29%) and India (up 19%).
AI is still mainly used to manage marketing scale, rather than playing a strategic role. 46% of AI assistant queries focus on performance reporting and analysis, reflecting the increasingly large data volume processing and tracking needs, while only some game genres are starting to exploit AI for more complex tasks.
iOS advertisers continue to expand the list of media channels to seek new scale. The number of media sources used increased by 15% compared to the previous year, showing an increasingly clear trend of fragmentation and the need to diversify beyond core advertising channels.
