This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Sensor Tower has published its State of Mobile 2026.
Mobile game downloads have fallen for the second year running: -7.2% in 2025, down to 50.41 billion. In Q1 2026 the decline accelerates — -12% year on year, 11.9 billion downloads — the worst first quarter since 2019. Monetisation, on the other hand, is holding up: in-app spending grew 1.3% in 2025, but has been flat for five consecutive quarters, up just 0.5% in Q1 2026 compared to the previous year.
Fewer and fewer people are downloading mobile games, and the ones who stick around aren’t spending more. The industry is squeezing a user base that isn’t growing, wringing a bit more value out of each download.
The disaster didn’t start yesterday
Part of this story is well known. A few years ago Apple killed off IDFA, the identifier that allowed user tracking across apps for advertising purposes. From that point, user acquisition costs exploded, because targeting effectively became much harder. Many mobile studios had built their whole model around that mechanism. When it broke, so did their ability to grow cheaply.
But that only explains half the problem. Acquisition costs explain why it’s become more expensive to find new players. They don’t explain why spending from players already inside a game has been flat for a year and a half. Plenty of people conclude that “players prefer old games, they don’t want anything new.” That explanation has always struck me as a bit of a convenient excuse.
When the brain stops responding
Most of these games are built almost entirely on dopamine. Variable-ratio rewards, progression loops, notifications, artificial urgency, FOMO. It works brilliantly at first. The problem is that the dopaminergic system adapts. You need an ever-larger stimulus to get the same response, and at some point the stimulus just isn’t enough any more.
Ramin Shokrizade puts it well in an article that addresses exactly this point: an arms race built purely on dopamine, in an attention economy that’s already saturated, can only end badly for anyone who’s staked their entire business model on it. His alternative proposal is to design for oxytocin rather than dopamine — social bonds, cooperation, interdependence between players instead of ever-faster solitary rewards. He cites the player-driven economy of early EVE Online as an example (with the caveat that that history has been somewhat mythologised over time), and notes that the wave of “cosy” games in recent years is essentially a cultural response to the same underlying need: people who want to be kind to other people, inside a world that feels like their own. That’s also why 4X games have been performing better than most lately.
I think Sensor Tower’s numbers are partly this: the dopamine bill coming due. It’s not (only) an acquisition problem. It’s an industry that optimised for short-term stimulus rather than long-term attachment, and now the average player is desensitised.
Speed as a symptom, not a feature
There’s another signal, in a different niche but rooted in the same problem. David Brevik, creator of Diablo, spoke recently about how fast modern ARPGs have become. Screens full of enemies dying by the hundred, instant progression, nothing that feels personal or earned. His defence of Diablo 2, the game that helped define the genre: the pace was slow on purpose, and that’s precisely why it held up for twenty years. I still play it today! By compressing that journey and making it feel almost trivial, the whole experience has been cheapened.
Building worlds instead of chasing the spike
If this reading is right, the way out isn’t an even more optimised loop. It’s the opposite: games that bet on a world worth inhabiting, relationships between players, a sense of place that’s worth coming back to again and again even without a new reward every three minutes.
That’s exactly the territory I work on every day at GSC Game World, the studio behind STALKER. On 20 August, the first major DLC drops:
The trailer says it better than I can: not a new reward loop, but another piece of the Zone to move through, with all its silence, its danger, and its deliberate slowness.
It’s no coincidence that a studio doing this for nearly twenty years is still here, while mobile chases a dopamine spike that’s stopped working.