Left to right: Kim Bhatha of Zynga, Robert Garfinkle of Big Huge Games, and Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat.

Adjust panel: The state of user acquisition for mobile games

Acquiring users for mobile games isn’t the sexiest part of the game industry. But it’s a critical one. And so I was happy to get caught up on the subject of the highly automated and strategic process of acquiring new users through mobile advertising campaigns.

I moderated a panel on the subject at Adjust’s Mobile Spree event in San Francisco. It got a lot of attention, as mobile gaming is a $70 billion market, and it is the biggest part of gaming. And games account for 10% of time spent on mobile devices, but 74% of revenue in the mobile game industry.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.