We continue to wrap up the year 2025 with teams within or linked to the gaming industry. Next up is an interview with Daniil Vostorgov, Product Owner at AppMetrica.
What kind of year was 2025 for your service? What was the main outcome or achievement?
Daniil Vostorgov, head of AppMetrica: The main outcome of 2025 for us was the significant growth of our service's audience. During this time, the number of applications connected to the platform increased by 20% to 72,000. The share of large international projects grew particularly noticeable, increasing by 27%. We maintained positive dynamics even in Russia, despite already having substantial market coverage. Thus, we focused on making our service more functional and user-friendly for new users.
This year, we carried out a large-scale interface update. We added comprehensive search and completely overhauled navigation based on roles—marketers, products, monetization managers, and developers now have quick access to reports and data relevant to their tasks. We also launched new report types and a widget and multi-widget constructor. Their setup has become flexible and personalized—users can group any metrics, change widget positions, types, and visualizations.
Another crucial step was the launch of an AI assistant. It helps new users quickly master the capabilities and functionality of AppMetrica. It explains how to work with metrics, answers questions, searches for necessary data upon request, and selects relevant report settings. Additionally, the assistant speeds up standard operations, tests, and generates ideas based on analytics. Most importantly, it switches to a thinking mode to participate in discussing product hypotheses and suggests tools and approaches for solving specific tasks, like boosting ROI.
How did the mobile gaming market change over the year?
Daniil: The market is actively reconsidering approaches to monetization. The focus is increasingly shifting towards the advertising model and its combination with other revenue sources. According to AppMetrica research, in 2025, over a third of monetized mobile games in Russia generated revenue from advertising. This is 16 percentage points more than in 2024, and 28 percentage points more than in 2023. One in five apps earned solely from ads. An equal amount combined ads with IAP or IAP and subscriptions—in such cases, advertising contributed 54% and 18% of the total income, respectively.
We see that developers continue to test different ad display scenarios for different audience segments, just as they did last year. Only in 2025, the number of apps analyzing ad revenue in AppMetrica doubled.
There is also a noticeable demand for tighter integration of analytics, monetization, and user acquisition tools. This is especially true in global market promotion. In response, in 2025, we introduced Yandex Ads Boost, a platform for app development that combines monetization and analytics features based on AppMetrica and YAN. It provides publishers with access to 600,000 advertisers, 60 global DSPs, a unified SDK, all popular ad formats, and analysis of all key product and revenue growth metrics. Currently, the platform is available to publishers in China, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, and Georgia. We plan to continue its development and expand its geographical reach in the future.
How have gaming companies' requests for analytics changed? In which directions did demand grow the most?
Daniil: We see a growing interest in in-depth analytics of mobile applications from our users. To continue developing products and retaining audiences, teams are customizing metrics specific to them, building complex funnels, and analyzing behavior at the level of individual game mechanics. This year, the share of large projects analyzing monetization and user paths through AppMetrica increased from 84% to 93%.
At the same time, there is a growing demand for analytical tools that not only display statistics but also help in making business decisions—tools that independently identify significant changes in product metrics and highlight what to focus on. In addition to launching the AI assistant, in 2025, we expanded the functionality of Insights—automatic notifications about significant changes in app operations. First, the system now tracks a broader range of scenarios, allowing teams to regularly receive tips on key metric dynamics, reducing the workload for analysis and finding new hypotheses and growth points. Second, we added new simple and clear signals, such as an increase in crashes or changes in revenue across specific channels.
What new trends do you expect in gaming analytics, data, and tools next year?
Daniil: Next year, tools that allow the automation of not just individual actions, but entire chains of data operations will actively evolve. This involves scenarios where the system itself sequentially performs multiple steps—from gathering necessary cuts and metrics to preparing conclusions or recommendations. This is often referred to as an "agent" approach in the market.
In gaming application analytics, this will be particularly relevant. Games are regularly updated with new mechanics, events, and changes in balance and economy. The value of these tools lies in quickly assessing the impact of specific changes—how they affect retention, player progress, engagement, and revenue across different segments.
What conclusions from 2025 might be beneficial for studios planning to grow and scale in 2026?
Daniil: The use of AI tools is no longer experimental but a reality and everyday practice. However, not all of these tools live up to high expectations, especially regarding complex product and creative tasks.
For businesses, this means the necessity of consciously integrating technologies into their development strategy and operational business processes, understanding where they genuinely have an impact, and where human roles remain key. In practice, more effective teams combine specialist expertise with the capabilities of artificial intelligence in a hybrid approach.
What service improvement do you plan to implement in 2026?
Daniil: In 2026, we plan to focus on further developing the Insights and AI capabilities of AppMetrica. We aim to launch more personalized and applied recommendations for our users. These hints will consider product specifics, industry, and audience behavior, helping to identify which actions might yield the greatest effect in a given situation, such as recommendations on monetization formats used in comparable projects that could be relevant for a specific app.