Game IQ categorizes mobile games for advertisers.

App Annie: Game IQ is a taxonomy to help publishers understand mobile game categories

Biologists created a taxonomy of animals to help us understand the natural world better. Mobile insights and analytics firm App Annie is doing the same for games with the launch of Game IQ, a new taxonomy service that uses data science to categorize thousands of apps in a way that helps publishers better understand audiences.

From next month, this classification model will become important for publishers, as Apple is going to make it harder for mobile marketers to target ads toward individual users, in the name of preserving privacy. We’ll get back to that point soon, but first let’s look at what Game IQ will do.

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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.