SUCCEEDING IN MOBILE GAMES
By Dmitrii Byshonkov, CBDO at
MY.GAMES A
sk most live-game teams what’s on their mind, and you’ll hear the same things: the live-ops calendar
feels repetitive, UA costs keep climbing, and players who’ve seen every event format start to drift. IP collaborations are one of the industry’s favourite answers. I like them too, but I don’t buy the idea that they’re mandatory or a guaranteed win. They’re not a silver bullet. They’re a very good tool, and in the right hands, they deliver. A collaboration pulls three levers:
engagement, monetization, and acquisition. All three matter. Engagement is usually the way in. Above all, a good crossover is a reason to reopen the app, but monetization counts just as much. A collab that performs commercially earns the budget, the internal buy-in, and the partner’s trust to do the next one. That’s what makes good collaborations repeatable. Acquisition rounds it out: fresh reach into a fanbase that might never have installed otherwise. How you approach it depends on how
your game makes money. If you monetize on cosmetics and identity, IP skins can be an engine on their own. If you monetize on progression, skins alone tend to underperform. You have to sell power and progression. The best collabs don’t just add new modes; they’re new modes and new ways to play tied to the IP. That combination usually works. And whatever the model, don’t forget what we actually do: entertainment. People show up to have fun. The failures I’ve seen are almost always a famous license dropped in with no thought about fit, where recognizable is mistaken for relevant. Our recent work leans into “give people a new way to play.” In
March
MY.GAMES ran Rush Royale × PAC-MAN™ with Bandai Namco to celebrate Rush Royale’s fifth anniversary and PAC- MAN’s 45th. Not a reskin, but a new Endless Co-Op mode: one
player is PAC-MAN, the other is Duck, our mascot, surviving waves of original Ghosts. Tacticool × PAYDAY followed the same logic by going beyond a few masks. We rebuilt Bank Robbery into a full heist takeover with a new Operator and a mask system where your pick grants real gameplay perks. The collaboration resulted in a 4x increase in total organic visibility and a 2x increase in organic installs. War Robots shows how different “fit”
can look. For our 11th anniversary, we worked with Kunio Okawara, the legendary designer behind Gundam, who built an original in-game robot, the SWORD Unit 190, with its own weapons and playstyle. That fit was about craft. Our Sabaton crossover was the opposite: player surveys told us the community loves metal and rated Sabaton number one, so their new track anchored a Fire Storm event with a themed hangar. One partner picked for craft, one for data. Both grounded in something real. Some studios turn this into a permanent
engine rather than one-off stunts. Scopely’s Stumble Guys does it, as do Japanese live-service giants like mixi’s Monster
Strike, which runs near-constant collaborations, alongside GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons. And when Subway Surfers and Brawl Stars ran a real dual-game crossover, each got a brand-new mode, and each borrowed the other’s audience for a month – something a straight licence can’t do. So no, I wouldn’t tell anyone they have to do IP collaborations.
Plenty of games do fine without them, and a bad one costs you money and goodwill. But choose fit over fame, build it into your core loop instead of beside it, keep it fun, and get all three levers working together. Do that, and it’s one of the most reliable ways to bring players back and keep them.
September/October 2026 MCV/DEVELOP | 41
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