Top 10 Gaming Predictions for 2025: What to Expect by John Wright

Number three, direct-to-consumer and web stores. So, look, if you haven't seen at least a dozen articles talking about D2C and web stores by, I don't know, five to ten different companies, then, you know, I don't know where you've been.
You've been under a rock. Even companies like App Charge recently just raised, I think it was 23 million off the back of this whole thing.
stash has been all over the press

you know, with Justin being the ex-founder of Twitch. This is a no bullshit gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail, powered by our ad monetization, game design, and user acquisition triple threat expertise.
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Hello everyone, this is Two and a Half Gamers and I am your host Matej Lantricic. No, not really.
don't ask me why, but the wonderful team of Matej, Jakob and Felix have asked me to do a one-off monologue of my, who I am, John Wright. I'm VP of Mobile Games at Quali.
So my predictions for 2025.

So let's see if I'm trustworthy or not. Let's see if I know what I'm talking about.
It's a real privilege for the team to allow me my opportunity today to talk over this stuff and I'm really thankful for everyone who tunes in. And again, this is Two and a Half Gamers with your your host today John Wright.
So let's kick off and I'm going to explain very briefly what I'm going to be talking about today. So it's officially the Christmas season, December is here and that means that equally is the time of the year when people start putting out their predictions for next year.

Obviously, our industry is one that is ever-changing, ever-growing.

There is new things coming up every day, and that's one of the things that I think I like

and everyone else likes about the space we work in.

But today, I'm going to pick out my top 10 sort of predictions and upcoming trends for 2025. So starting off at number 10.
So number 10 for me is anime games. So anime games are not something that's new.
You know, we've been having anime games in gaming for, God knows last 20 years um naruto dragon ball z dressing dragon ball z which i'm obviously a huge fan i've also had console games coming out from the anime for for a very long time however what i'm seeing in particular in mobile is there is a cultural shift, which anime has been a huge thing for the last, again, 30 years, 40 years in Asia. I think in the West, in France and the UK, maybe for the last 20, 30 years, it also had a niche following, which I'm definitely part of one of those people, the early adopters.
But we are seeing now the West, including the US, really, really start gravitating towards anime. We've seen that with the adoption of Netflix, with series like One Piece doing extremely well on both the animation and the live person version.
and equally Disney plus picking up things like bleached thousand year blood war um but so there is there is definitely a cultural shift and people it's becoming more cool and trendy to like anime play anime games and watch and read manga um so what we've seen this year is we saw the launch of games like Solo Leveling Rise, which Jakob, Matei and I did a podcast earlier in the year about. We've also seen other games coming through like Dungeon and Fighter Mobile reportedly made 800 million in its first month alone.
and I think that anime is going to be one of the quickest growing

year over year growing areas for mobile um a few things i like are really is that the production quality is very very high these games cost tens of millions if not more to build and normally they're cross-platform which gives an ability to go play with your mobile as well as playing on PC for a much better experience,

which a lot of mobile games still haven't cracked that cross-platform play yet. Prediction number 10, anime games are going to grow by double digits this year.
so moving on to my next point so prediction number nine is big publishers will dominate and small studios will pivot to steam so I was recently at Mobadictum I also was at Nordic Games Festival and equally even at PGC at the start of year, we have seen traditionally conferences that were very dominant for mobile start to show a lot more PC and console. And what I believe very simply is that mobile is becoming ever more a sort of a red ocean.
And a lot of small developers are trying to self-publish but because of the current challenges in the market post-ATT and everything else it it's just meant that it's really hard for small studios to to self-publish and succeed on their own so what happens is the big publishers who have these huge you know growth teams and technology and resources and tools and money, all of these guys essentially partner with all the smaller studios and kind of gobble them up. And the ones who are not willing to allow that work in a developer publisher format, these are the ones that I'm seeing start shifting to PCC and predominantly Steam and like I said I you know I've seen it as a trend across this year at different events where where people are doing this and I think there's an attractive option in the fact that there's been a couple of solo devs this year that produced games on Steam,

which made millions of dollars.

And I think that is a very attractive potential for small developers.

However, my personal opinion is that Steam is even harder to crack than mobile.

So if you're thinking about it, I would say do not think that it's a complete blue ocean more games get launched on steam than mobile per day and yeah it's it's a much more complex um production cycle to to produce a you know a game that's good enough for console pcc in my opinion versus mobile So yeah, one to watch out for, but think about it before you, what are you going to do? Going into number eight. So hybrid casual evolves into casual.
So this is a controversial one, but one that I stand behind. So if you remember at Pocket Gamer in January this year we did a live two and a half gamers episode where Matei, Felix, Jakob and I were recording below a venue where we were having a PGC after party and you know we were having a good time having a few drinks you know letting

loose and we spoke about what exactly is hybrid right so this is nearly 12 months ago and and hybrid still does not have a very distinct or depending on who you ask you know it's not very distinct uh definition it really is dependent on who who you ask and and what they think of it but you know, hybrid itself, in terms of the way I look at it, has always been to do with the hybrid monetisation model. So it's, you know, 30 to 50% IAP and, you know, 50 to 70% ads.
And it's a hybrid monetisation model. That's the way I've always looked at it.
But what I've seen personally from my experiences at Quali and what I'm seeing in the rest of the market is hybrid originally people expected it to be say 50% between or halfway between hyper and casual so dead in the middle what what I think i've seen and what people have realized is that hybrid is not halfway between hyper and casual it's 90 towards casual and if anything i would say it's more like casual light there's a few sort of features or maybe like p versus p or you know some sort of advanced sort of clan based systems or something like that which detracts it really from being a full casual game in this in this current state and i think all of the hybrid or the big hybrid casual games that are doing well are focusing on them becoming more more casual in nature ensuring things like like players can stay around for a year plus.

Whereas I think originally hybrid was like, oh, OK, if we keep them for a month, then we can make loads of money. And then if they churn, great.
But I think that that mindset has shifted and changed. and yeah I think look if you look at the the actual TAMs of the total addressable market of

hybrid as it is per sort of any of the big reports it's saying it's about one to two billion um which is actually not a huge you know a huge amount of money to go after um especially for the amount of developers trying to crack hybrid so if we compare that to casual which sits at about 40 billion or even more sometimes some people are saying it's more like 50 billion there's you know there is a lot more to play for in the casual space if you can crack it correctly so yeah i i think you know hybrid was a stepping stone people have realized the extra complexity which comes with it and realizing it's very close to casual.

And developers over the last 12 to 18 months have really done well learning how to succeed in, you know, building economies, understanding iApps, you know, ensuring that they have a much more casual

framework for their production um you know the level of polish required the amount of meta and essentially just you know having a lot more stuff in there rather than just focusing on the core loop so yeah my my Next year, hybrid just becomes casual. But maybe in a slightly casual light frame.
Cool. Moving on.
So number seven. Transmedia and IP.
So this was also something that I spoke about in my 2024 predictions. It's something i still very much believe in and i think there is been a number of notable examples over the last 12 months where ip has been successful um you know talking about another podcast that that two and a half games and i did recently which was the pokemon company's uh pokemon tcgp so trading card game pocket launch that has generated about 140 million in the first month um pokemon is by far the number one ip in the world um and you know to to utilize that ip which is based on a you know an animation and a movie series, but one that has been interlinked and very successful with games in the past, but still nonetheless, still based off of an animation.
This launch, purely off the back of its IP and relatively low user acquisition, has done nine figures in the opening month

and has been only 10% below what Pokemon Go was,

which we all know is one of the best successes of recent year.

So we've also seen a huge rise in integration.

So integration is very simply is when we take an IP that's not associated with our game and integrate it into our game as a limited time experience. So we've seen Supercell do this a lot recently.
You know, they did. Godzilla was integrated there.
Also, Harland was integrated as a playable character. and a lot of the time what happens is these developers are working with these big IP companies

or the owners like Hasbro, like Mattel. They're paying either a fixed sum of money or giving a large percentage of a unique in-app purchase that's associated to getting that special character.
So another good example I saw recently was Teenage Mutant Hero Tur hero turtles and you could you know effectively buy and use leonardo as the as your sort of protagonist character in the game so yeah there's been lots of lots of and equally voodoo just did this for the first time in hybrid with transformers which also was a big up big success and what we see is these you know spikes of interest and downloads because people who like the brand want to play the game with the brand in it right so transformers in voodoo created a spark um off the back of brand brand recognition and increased installs off the back of that also that brand recognition piece is also important because of marketing so what we notice is cpis normally drop when you have an ip or you're advertising marketing something that has something that's um recognizable so yeah if you're using something that is cultural, pop culture sort of trend, or something that is easily recognisable, like Optimus Prime, then of course people are going to be more inclined to click on it and then download the game off the back of that. So yeah, the IP definitely allows increased marketing by lower CPIs.
It also brings organics because of the brand recognition and loyalty built by its audience it also allows um or transmedia in general allows cross promotion between the different mediums so you know once someone's hooked on the show you can push them the game or vice versa and overall if you look at that as a transmedia LTV, then obviously the value of your user goes up dramatically

if they're playing on more than one medium

or engaging in more than one medium,

i.e. paying for Netflix, watching the show,

going to the cinema, watching the movie,

and then downloading the game and spending money.

If you look at that user in all those different points,

it's obviously very, very valuable to whoever it is, the developer, the IP holder, whoever. So yeah, transmedia and IP continuing to succeed in 2025.
Number six, AI. So definitely the buzzword of the moment.
We're seeing this literally everywhere. If you look at the bulk of gaming VCs in Europe, especially right now, and also the US, you'll see that most of the money raised lately has been either AI-centric companies, tech that uses AI, or even developers using AI in game production.
So there is we know there is a huge trend when it comes down to AI and its adoption. You know, I use ChatGPT every day and I have done for a very long time.
I know a lot of other people in our industry also do the same. But up to yet, the real traction that AI has had within gaming has been around marketing creative and asset production if you read Matei's blog you'll see he did a really really good article recently about how very quickly a layman like him or me could actually use a bunch of different ai tools and create a a really successful very quickly to produce asset that you could run on tiktok and it was you know using a halloween vibe theme and it had like grim reaper long form content which is trending very well well on TikTok.
And he did all of this himself without the need of artists, of designers, of motion designers, of whoever. He did this himself using AI.
And that ad went on to be fairly successful. So, you know, we've seen marketing have high adoption, even UGC actors, which has become a right you uh a an ai to to pretend to be a certain type of user who looks like a in a certain way that talks to your audience um about something like this is this without having to pay like a real person the amount of money we normally do so that's obviously a cost saving aspect but all in all that is is gone very well we've also seen the adoption of ai in mimicking user behavior for qa so qa engineers are now building ai sort of plugins you know to the game or you know in the level design to really kind of focus on mimicking user behavior so that an actual QA person doesn't need to go through and play the game or play the level to do that the AI can mimic the behavior and then it can report back all of that information and then you know the developers can then fix or change whatever based on the churn analysis that would they would see from that level so that's where we've seen the two big adoptions but my prediction for 2025 is that we'll see the first successful game where over 50% of its foundation you know such as the core loop or the base code for the game mechanic or the initial documentation like GDD, all of that will be generated by AI.
So what that means is someone will train a model to create a market leading game. And again, this could be purely creating different core loops in a prototype format.
So training an a you know a large amount of prototypes um i think that that is completely possible and then what i expect to happen is for that prototype once it's successful and we've tested it and you know markability is good and you know day day one retention etc or time is is session length is uh is good then i expect um the developer to then throw real people at it so use ai to help with the initial conception and the foundation and then when you want to make a really well polished game with lots of content and throwing again things like meta into it that's

when you get your team of developers to work on it and execute on the best game possible

so that's that's my prediction AI will help create core loops and initial prototypes and then

strong teams will help finish them

number five walled gardens continue to win so again something that's been well documented Thank you. will help finish them.
Number five,

walled gardens continue to win.

So again,

something that's been well documented.

Eric Suford has been speaking about this for a very long time.

And I think essentially

he's been knocking on the right door.

I think there's another way

to approach this.

There's the aspect of Apple and Google losing with the DMA. So in Europe, the DMA has destabled the monopoly or duopoly that these two platforms have within gaming.
So we're starting to see the rise of that. direct-to-consumer stores, etc.

We'll talk about later in one of our other trends.

But equally, we've seen another big example of this, which is the recent example of AppLovin versus Unity. And AppLovin, as of the last time I checked, was about $412 per share, which compared to a couple of months ago where it was about $150, $180, has grown dramatically and is now, I think, 12, 13 times bigger than Unity.
And there was a point where Unity was bigger than AppLovin in the not-so-distant future, not-so-distant past. So, you know, the fact that these big um you know successful companies with large large large data pools um have been able to corner off and create these wall gardens of their users um and they've been able to do that very successfully and i think once you create these wall gardens once you've cornered off those users you'll be be able to keep that user within your ecosystem.
And look, if we look at AppLovin, they did the Mopub acquisition. They did the Adjust acquisition.
They did a number of studio acquisitions. They have the Max acquisition, because Max obviously wasn't originally a product they developed.
They acquired it and then built that in. so they've been great at buying different companies that have lots of different data points and stitching all those users together and building you know an incredible sort of environment that's that's you know that has become the most successful tech company of the year by establishing those sort of walled gardens and I think once users are now in that environment, it's very hard for them to get out.
And I think, yeah, other tech companies like Unity are going to struggle to compete against Apploving until some form of innovation comes along and can hopefully re-stabilise or give a bit of fair competition. Number four, privacy will worsen before it gets better.
So one of my 2024 predictions was that Google Sandbox slash privacy would start to really affect user acquisition on Android the same way that IDFA deprecation and ATT did for iOS a couple of years ago. That doesn't seem to have happened.
However, depending on who you speak to at Google, you know, it's already underway or it's not really, really fully there yet or it hasn't started. It really is hard to kind of get a clear answer.
But I think, you know's going to happen it's going to happen in 2025 so i do think that privacy will become again google will start moving towards more this direction um and with you know idfa deprecation we saw a lot of industry average of around 30 drop in in ios acquisition through, you know, CPIs becoming more expensive and quality of targeting. So CPM is going down.
So what we were hit with a double negative, right? We saw higher CAC and lower LTV, which made things worse. And ultimately why launching games has never been more difficult on iOS.
I do think that there's going to be a similar trend in Android. However, I don't think it will be as much because Apple are a privacy first business.
It's part of their marketing strategy. Google are an ads first business and that's where they get the bulk of their revenue.
So I don't think they would be as aggressive. So I do think there'll'll be some downturn but i don't think you'll be as much as what ios was i think probably somewhere in like range of 15 20 rather than 30 so let's see but good news companies like apps flyer and geek lab are developing technology now to better help you target users which will hopefully try and again rebalance that sort of hard times of the last few years so definitely check out what those two are doing right now um right going into the top three and hopefully the three that i think are going to be the most impactful and the ones that ideally you've already heard about but maybe you haven't gone into too much detail yet so number three direct to consumer and web stores so look if you haven't seen at least a dozen articles talking about d2c and web stores by i know five to ten different companies then I don't know don't know where you've been you've been under a rock um even companies like app charge recently just raised i think it was 23 million off the back of this whole thing stash has been all over the press with you know with with justin being the ex-founder of twitch um and you know a number of other you know big companies He's big companies really trying to hammer this home.
But obviously, it all comes off the back of the DMA and the success of the DMA and Apple being sued for X number of billion. And look, what's hard to understand if by integrating a direct consumer store off the app allows you to reduce the amount of fees you pay for iaps especially if you're an iap centric game and as we were talking about earlier with hybrids evolution into casual if we're going to start start seeing 50-50s, even hybrid developers will start to look to implement, you know, these type of stores, because, look, 50% of revenue, and where you can save maybe 10%, you know, 20%, that starts equating to millions of dollars of profit, and, you know, studios right now need to need to focus on a beta.

It's about, you know, becoming profitable. It's about being self-sustained.
And and yeah, it's just really important that people start to to focus on this. And I think, again, even hybrid developers in the next 12 months will start to have this strategy.
we've already seen mid-core and traditional puzzle games companies

start actually generating more revenue

and profit from these tiny stores

versus actually through Apple or Google.

So we are seeing those early adopters

in mid-core and strategy have real success.

And I think the rest of the industry

will start following. It's definitely one of the big ones to watch number two alternative stores so this is this is another one which is kind of coming off the back of the dma so alternative stores you know historically and again if we look at things like the Epic Games win against Apple,

we're seeing the grip loosen across that duopoly of Apple and Google.

We are starting to see other stores scale up and find success.

And look, a great one, an observation that I saw recently was Amazon Amazon's LTV or the user LTV for games in general is anywhere between 20 and 40 percent higher iOS and Google um it's not hard to to work out why because you know with Amazon you need to have you know Amazon amazon prime account and you know if you're going to spend 100 pounds a year on you know something like a free delivery service like amazon prime is and then obviously like a tv and the music and all that stuff but you have to have disposal cash right you you have to have more you know have money to be able to do that to warrant that so you know the fact is

you're going to get higher LTV users because the user's been somewhat validated by their purchase behavior and being able to afford a you know a nicety like Prime so that makes sense but equally it's a really good thing to do a good good thing to observe and good thing to test out um equally there's been a huge sort of uh expansion by people like samsung people like halway one store um and there's even technology out there in the market like like kiln that actually aggregates all of this for you and allows you to basically push out your games onto multiple stores and look if you look at the android ecosystem in china there's i think around 300 alternative stores um so you know being able to tap into all of this it gives you incremental users it gives you incremental revenues it gives you you know a real ability to start making more money and normally these stores take a smaller percentage so if you say apple and google take 30 i think the alternative stores normally take anywhere between 12 and 20 so in some areas you might be halving that cost component from from paying Apple and Google so it's a real good thing

to do and look I want to give a special shout out to Epic Games and Sarah who's their director of BizDev she's doing some fantastic work on getting you know developers onboarded and ready to launch and look Epic are doing some great stuff on PCC have done for a long time and I think there's a real chance that epic could come to mobile and do something really well and then finally my number one trend for next year is html5 games so again something that is not new this is something that's over a decade old but i think people have started to leverage it as a strategy um to help with the fact that we have seen this decline in apple and google uh this you know increased costs from from everything that we're paying for iApps and look you know if you're able to port um a webgl version of the game it and then convert it to html5 from unity which is not the most difficult thing to do you know and there's plenty of porting companies out there who can do this for x number of thousand dollars if you're able to then have something that is compatible in this format you can then take it to platforms like wechat like telegram um which are growing massively and again if you look at some of the two and a half gamers website um episodes which focus on telegram and sorry wechat in particular you know wechat games are generating millions a day um so there's a massive massive opportunity and you know in the ecosystem there that's kind of been untapped by the western world which you know the asian developers are really you know finding success on and i would definitely suggest looking at those two in particular because because they've already got very large, engaged audiences, right?

These are messaging services.

People use them on a day-to-day basis.

They're living in that environment.

If they then get to see a game, then they're going to play it,

and then they're going to stay there.

It just makes a lot of sense.

Equally, we just saw MetaInstagrams on iOS allow integrations for iApps for the first time which is new and we've also seen double digit growth by companies like Pokey and Crazy Games which again are doing great work they're establishing ecosystems it reminds me very much like what miniclip.com was

for me when i was growing up and it allows developers again other places to target users

to get ad revenue to get i-app revenue which without paying you know the same amount of money

to to apple and google and i just think it's it's low penetration because you've already got the

games and you can just port them to WebGL and then HTML5. There's already a

Thank you. to Apple and Google.
And I just think it's low penetration because you've already got the games and you can just port them to WebGL and then HTML5. There's already established platforms so you can push it out to large audiences.
So you're not having a scaling issue. The scale is already there.
You're paying less overall because again, the cost component and what they charge is much less than the traditional providers and Apple and Google. And overall, it's an area where you can really just start generating more money and finding success.
And that is ultimately why I think it's my number one prediction for this year is more and more studios will start adopting H5. More and more studios will start seeing bigger percentages of their revenue breakdown from H5.
And I think it's going to continue. So, yeah, I am bullish on that.
And these were my 10 predictions and trends for 2025. So I just want to thank everyone who sat here for the entirety of this hearing me talk hopefully you found it interesting and i was able to say some stuff that you know rings home

and rings true to to the audience and yeah look i'd really like to thank you know matey jacob and

felix for allowing me the opportunity to do this so thank you for listening

and have a good day

bye Thank you.