Liftoff's Mobile Game CPI Benchmarks 2025, Read Correctly

Liftoff's annual Mobile Gaming Apps Report lands this month, as it usually does alongside AppsFlyer's own January benchmark release, and the two together give a UA team the closest thing the market has to a consensus read on where CPI and CPA sat across 2024. Liftoff puts particular weight on the casual-versus-hybrid-casual cost split. That split is the part of the mobile game CPI benchmarks 2025 report worth reading closely, because it describes a genre boundary that keeps losing its usefulness as a planning category even while vendors keep reporting against it.

Two mobile game CPI benchmarks 2025 reports, different lenses

AppsFlyer's report, which UA Ledger covered in "How to Read AppsFlyer's Annual Gaming Benchmarks Report," comes out of attribution data and leans toward retention and fraud alongside cost. Liftoff builds its report from its own demand-side platform data instead, and leans harder on cost, breaking CPI and CPA benchmarks into more granular genre bands, then cutting those further by platform and by region. Neither is more correct than the other. They sample different parts of the same buying ecosystem, and Liftoff's numbers skew toward advertisers running programmatic demand through its platform specifically.

Having both in the same fortnight is useful for one reason: triangulation. Where AppsFlyer and Liftoff agree on direction, a genre-level CPI trend rising or falling, that agreement carries more weight than either report alone, since the trend then shows up across two data sources with two different sampling biases. Where they disagree, the disagreement itself tells you how narrow or broad a trend actually is across the buying ecosystem.

The casual-versus-hybrid-casual split is getting harder to read

Liftoff separates casual and hybrid-casual cost benchmarks, a distinction that made clean sense back when hybrid-casual meant hyper-casual mechanics bolted onto a metagame with a monetisation layer borrowed from mid-core design. Reported hybrid-casual CPI has, for two years running now, moved further away from casual CPI and closer to strategy and puzzle CPI, which reflects the format's shift toward retention-driven monetisation rather than the volume-driven, low-CPI economics that originally defined the category.

That drift creates a trap. A studio benchmarking a hybrid-casual title against the category average can anchor on the wrong reference point if its own title's monetisation model has moved further toward retention-driven design than the reported average reflects.

The category label does less descriptive work than it used to, so a UA team gets more out of comparing against titles with a similar monetisation model, whatever genre bucket a vendor's report happens to file them under, than against the labelled category average.

A worked comparison, hypothetically

Take a hypothetical hybrid-casual title whose monetisation runs mainly on a metagame with moderate ad frequency, closer in structure to a light strategy title than to a hyper-casual arcade game. Suppose Liftoff's reported hybrid-casual CPI benchmark for its region sits 30% below the strategy category's benchmark, while the title's actual retention and monetisation profile behaves more like strategy. A team measuring its own CPI against the hybrid-casual benchmark would call that underperformance, when the title may simply be paying a strategy-adjacent price for a strategy-adjacent audience, and the more honest comparison sits with the higher category.

Check the category label against a title's actual monetisation mechanics before picking a benchmark, and an accurate but mislabelled comparison stops producing the wrong conclusion.

CPA benchmarks carry their own distortion

Liftoff's CPA figures deserve a separate note. Cost per action benchmarks react far more than CPI benchmarks do to how a studio defines its target event, and a benchmark labelled against a generic "level complete" event reads very differently depending on whether that event sits two minutes or twenty minutes into onboarding. Liftoff's report, like most vendor benchmarks, cannot fully normalise for that variation across the advertisers feeding its dataset.

Before comparing a title's own CPA against the reported benchmark, confirm that the event definition behind the reported figure genuinely matches the team's own target event rather than merely sharing its name.

Hybrid-casual feels this hardest, since the category's shift toward retention-driven monetisation has also stretched the typical funnel between install and a meaningful monetisation event, which pushes CPA benchmarks higher for reasons that have nothing to do with buying efficiency. A studio watching its own CPA benchmark climb year on year should check whether the funnel itself lengthened as part of the same product evolution before blaming acquisition costs.

Platform and region cuts worth a second look

Pull Liftoff's regional breakdowns separately from the genre cuts, because the two interact more than a single blended genre figure suggests. A hybrid-casual title buying primarily in North America and Western Europe sits against a very different cost baseline than the same title buying into Southeast Asia or Latin America, so a studio entering a new region for the first time should treat the region-specific benchmark as the more relevant comparison point rather than the genre's global average. Platform splits matter the same way: iOS and Android CPI benchmarks have diverged further since ATT, and a studio judging platform-level buying efficiency against one blended figure can mask a real problem on one platform behind acceptable performance on the other.

The report's format-level detail, where it breaks out creative cost by format rather than lumping video in with playable and static, is easy to skip past in favour of the topline genre number. It is often the more actionable cut for a creative team rather than a media buying team, since it shows which format the wider market finds cost-efficient for a given genre this quarter, which is a useful cross-check against a studio's own format mix before assuming an internal shift toward more playable inventory is the right call for the category it competes in.

What to do with two reports in hand

Pull the genre and region cuts from both reports that most closely match a title's actual monetisation model rather than its marketing category label, then note where AppsFlyer and Liftoff agree versus diverge on direction for that segment. Agreement across both sources on a rising or falling CPI trend is worth acting on with more confidence than either source's absolute figure.

Divergence is worth investigating rather than averaging away, since it usually means the two platforms' advertiser mixes are seeing genuinely different buying conditions inside the same nominal category.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• How to Read AppsFlyer's Annual Gaming Benchmarks Report
• Playables nearly doubled their share of creative. Sensor Tower's State of Mobile, read from the brief