Kent Wakeford still believes in the mobile gaming market because of the huge reach of the smartphone.
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Kabam’s Kent Wakeford on why mobile gaming is so complicated

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 9 min

Kent Wakeford, the chief operating officer of Kabam, returned to the stage at our GamesBeat 2016 event to talk about how tough the mobile game business — a $36 billion worldwide industry — has become. And doing business in China is even more difficult.

San Francisco-based Kabam is a big player in mobile games, with 700 employees. And it makes more than $25 million a month from its free-to-play mobile game Marvel Contest of Champions. Wakeford thinks Kabam’s focus on “regular” players, who keep on coming back every day, is why that game has succeeded. It is the highest-grossing Marvel game of all time.

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Written by

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.