We continue our 2025 wrap-up together with top managers and experts from the games industry (and related fields). Up next is an interview with Nikita Kharlamov and Diana Korkina, top managers at Top App Games.
What kind of year was 2025 for your team? What did you manage to accomplish, what are you proud of, and what, on the contrary, did you not have time for?
Nikita Kharlamov: 2025 was an exciting and intense year for our team. On one hand, we had massive potential with our project, Ludus – dozens of growth points, hundreds of hypotheses, and thousands of ideas in both marketing and product, with the most interesting ones right at their intersection.
On the other hand, the market got more expensive. Creative competition in our genre, the never-ending hyper-casual wave, the rise of iGaming and Betting, plus unexpected “black swans” – those were the main challenges this year.
It felt like a rollercoaster full of twists and turns. Some people might get thrown off by that, but it just fires us up, motivates us, and gives us more energy. Thanks to our team always staying on top of things and evolving our marketing, we managed to grow a lot this year and set the bar even higher for 2026. A significant contribution to this result was made by the strategic decisions of CEO Vladimir Markov and investor Vladimir Nikolsky, whose ideas helped us act confidently in the specified conditions.
We are very proud of our talented team that created Ludus, which keeps growing in a stagnating (or even declining) mobile games market. Even though we’re a young studio, we implemented marketing best practices right from the start and built solid internal and external processes. As a result, we have time to think through new strategies, ideas, and innovation in general. Some marketing directions we’re especially proud of are:
- The successful launch of the rewarded direction (which now takes up a quarter of our UA budgets).
- A diverse creative strategy that includes different cluster approaches in video ads, playables, and Custom Product Pages.
- A highly ROAS-oriented UA strategy: we didn’t waste too much money on sketchy channels that “might work, need to test.” As we all know, “a penny saved is a penny earned.”
Starting this year, our project is no longer limited to the App Store and Google Play; we have launched on Aptoide and other alternative stores – there is even a web version of the game. We fell just a little short on time to secure our gaming license in Vietnam, but we expect to receive it in early 2026.
Diana Korkina: 2025 has been a really strong year for us. Our game Ludus keeps growing and evolving at a great pace. Just this year, we rolled out four truly game-changing features: clan competitions, clan wars, spells, and the solo event Atlantida. We’ve now passed 8 million downloads, which feels fantastic for a title that only went global a year and a half ago.
We also kicked off development on several new projects and already tested a couple of prototypes. One of them is looking very promising from the early tests, though it’s still too soon to talk about scaling it up. The big, exciting challenge ahead is ramping up content creation.
Our little startup nearly doubled in size, and there’s still so much ahead in 2026. Growing the team always brings big shifts in how we work, and we’re right in the middle of that transition from a small startup to a proper full-scale studio.
From my CBDO perspective, scaling Ludus globally through partnerships has been one of the biggest focuses this year. Ludus is performing especially well in Asia. Korea and Japan are climbing into the top-grossing ranks. We see huge potential in Vietnam, even though the publishing regulations there got stricter this year. My main goal is to make sure Ludus is available and actively growing everywhere. 2025 was a serious challenge in that direction, and 2026 will be no easier, but that’s exactly what makes it exciting. The project needs to be present in every possible market, and honestly, we’re only just getting started.
What conclusions did you draw as a development studio by the end of 2025?
Nikita Kharlamov: 2025 showed us that even in a tough, stagnating market, a consistent focus on quality, smart processes, and quick adaptation pays off. We proved that a small but hungry team can compete with big players by mixing a strong product with innovative marketing. Challenges like rising ad costs and heavy competition don’t stop growth if you stay agile, test a ton of ideas, and keep the team motivated through the ups and downs.
Diana Korkina: This year hammered home just how crucial marketing is in mobile gaming. Take Kingshot, one of the biggest success stories of 2025: it launched globally early in the year and is already pulling in over $3 million a day. They cast the widest possible net upfront, then gently guide players into a deep 4X strategy with outstanding monetization. Or look at Township, a game that’s been around for about 10 years yet grew roughly 30% in the last year alone, largely thanks to fresh marketing creatives.
If retention used to be the king metric, this year CPI moved right up alongside it for us. You have to figure out early whether a project is ready to scale and whether the market actually wants it. We often pour tons of energy into new features, content, and art, pushing marketing to “when the game is finally ready.” The lesson is don’t wait, test market receptiveness as early as possible, alongside that first player session.
What kind of year was it for the niche/genre you work in?
Nikita Kharlamov: It was a “Fast Fashion” year for the genre. Just as fast fashion retailers take high-end designs, mass-produce them with cheaper materials, and sell them in high volume to a broad audience, strategy games took hardcore mechanics, wrapped them in mass-appeal casual “skins” (minigames), and relentlessly copied whatever visual trends were selling next door – creative fatigue was solved by industrialized theft.
Diana Korkina: Competition got a lot tougher: several big-name titles launched in 2025 and instantly raised the bar across the board.
Players became pickier about monetization. Anything that feels pay-to-win or overly aggressive gets hit hard with bad reviews or simply ignored. The most successful games keep leaning heavily into cosmetics that don’t touch gameplay balance.
What trends in your niche/genre do you expect to strengthen or emerge in 2026?
Nikita Kharlamov: In 2026, I expect the evolution of “onboarding gameplay” in our genre. Hyper-casual mechanics will completely conquer creatives in pursuit of lower CPIs, and mid-core and hard-core projects will have to adapt the first stages of actual gameplay to maintain retention rates. Fake creative – Fake onboarding – actual gameplay. You already know some pioneers of this approach.
CPMs are expected to go even higher in the upcoming year. Following the significant increase in 2025, demand is still high, so there is room for margins to be cut even further. Some projects will have to adapt their in-game economies to maintain their market share.
I anticipate a continued ‘migration’ of IAP payments toward web shops as developers look for optimization of store commissions. This, in turn, will allow lower UA KPIs, resulting in larger marketing budgets, increased competition, and ultimately, a further rise in traffic costs.
AI integration will hit the roof, accelerating creative production and localization. The art and graphics of the average game will definitely become better and more eye-appealing. However, I believe that top-tier projects will refrain from showing raw AI content to users, which does not preclude the use of AI in internal processes.
Finally, I hope that 2026 will mark the end of iOS transparency issues. Many ad networks have already implemented probabilistic attribution, and we are eagerly waiting for Google’s ICM / ODM to become fully operational.
Diana Korkina: More studios are turning to AI for user acquisition, not just optimizing campaigns, but also fine-tuning creatives for better performance.
We’re excited about deeper personalization powered by AI: think real-time personalized quests and story branches that adapt to each player’s unique style, rather than just generic AI-generated content.
AI is a powerful tool, not a replacement. It’s already invaluable for routine tasks like textures or dialogue drafts, but it still needs careful human editing and quality checks. Sometimes it even takes longer than doing it manually.
What are the team’s plans for the next year?
Nikita Kharlamov: We see 2026 being an even more ambitious year for us. We also have several new titles in development and aim to become a multi-hit studio. Every member of the team knows the goals, how to reach them, and what role they play in achieving them. Personally, I prefer to impress with actual results rather than big announcements or promises. So, happy holidays to everyone, and I’m heading back to work. Ciao!
Diana Korkina: Launching new games is our biggest focus. We’re actively preparing several joint releases, including in the hyper-casual space, which our management views as a very promising direction. Continuing to scale Ludus globally remains my top priority: expanding into more markets, forging deeper partnerships, and establishing a stronger presence everywhere.