AI-driven tools have sharply increased the volume of advertising in mobile gaming, intensifying competition for player attention and raising the cost of standing out, according to a report.
The company’s State of Gaming for Marketers 2026 report, published earlier this year by mobile measurement firm AppsFlyer and which 
analyzes data from 2025, shows that artificial intelligence accelerated the pace and scale of creative production across iOS and Android, even as overall player attention remained relatively flat.
Top gaming advertisers produced between 2,400 and 2,600 creative variations per quarter last year, up 25 to 30 percent year-on-year, AppsFlyer said. That expansion coincided with a surge in paid acquisition activity, pushing paid installs up 10 percent year-on-year across both platforms. Ad impressions rose 20 percent, signalling heavier competition for the same pool of users.
“AI has dramatically increased the speed and volume at which games and marketing assets reach the market,” Adam Smart, director of product for gaming at AppsFlyer, said. “The challenge now is not creativity, but navigating a surplus of it.”
Global user acquisition spending for gaming apps reached $25 billion in 2025, growing 3.8 percent from the previous year, the report said. Nearly half of that spend flowed into the United States, even as budgets in the market declined by 5 percent, suggesting intensifying competition rather than expansion. Growth shifted toward emerging markets, including Turkey, where spending rose 29 percent, and India, up 19 percent.
China-headquartered publishers continued to gain ground overseas, capturing 35 percent of global gaming user acquisition spend outside China. Their share increased 22 percent year-on-year, with the strongest gains on Android and in competitive Western markets such as the United States, Britain, Germany and France.
While AI is now embedded in daily marketing workflows, AppsFlyer said it is still being used primarily to manage scale rather than guide strategy. Nearly half of AI assistant queries tracked by the company focused on reporting and performance analysis, reflecting the growing need to process expanding volumes of fragmented data.
On iOS, advertisers widened their media mix to find incremental growth, increasing the number of media sources used by up to 15 percent year-on-year as reliance on core channels became less effective.
AppsFlyer’s analysis is based on anonymized data from 9.6 thousand gaming apps worldwide, covering 24.8 billion installs during 2025, including 14.1 billion paid installs.
