Mobile gaming CPI is the least useful average in performance marketing. A casual puzzle install on Android in Brazil and a casino install on iOS in the United States sit roughly a hundred times apart, and no blended figure that contains both of them will tell you anything about whether your campaign is working.
The direction of travel is at least clear. Gaming install costs rose around 30% year on year into 2026, according to Adjust's Gaming App Insights, so whatever you budgeted last year is now optimistic. The useful question is not what the average is. It is where your genre and your geography sit inside a spread this wide, and what that should change about the creative you put in front of people.
This is what mobile gaming CPI actually looks like in 2026, broken down by genre and by region, including an honest note about where the public data stops and everyone starts guessing.
Key takeaways
- Casual games run about $1.41 on iOS against $0.14 on Android, the widest platform gap of any category, while midcore averages roughly $2 and splits $3.65 iOS to $0.73 Android.
- Casino is the most expensive published category at $21.03 on iOS, and that price is a statement about lifetime value rather than a sign of a broken auction.
- Geography moves midcore CPI about twenty times, from $0.27 in LATAM to $5.45 in North America, and monetisation moves along roughly the same axis.
- Nobody publishes a defensible hardcore benchmark. Public genre data stops at casual, midcore and casino, so a two decimal hardcore number has almost certainly been derived rather than measured.
- Gaming creative fatigues in one to two weeks at scale in our experience, the fastest cycle of any vertical we run, so your real CPI over a quarter is set by your refresh rate.
Where mobile gaming CPI sits in 2026
For orientation, the cross category average across all mobile apps in 2026 runs at $2.24 on iOS and $1.12 on Android, per Searchlab citing Adjust and AppsFlyer data. Gaming straddles that line in both directions: a large part of the category buys installs far below the all apps average, and a small part of it buys installs at ten times the average without blinking.
Ad format is the other lever people forget sits inside the number. Liftoff's creative data puts native at $1.80, banner at $2.14, playable at $2.38, interstitial at $2.66 and video at $2.68. That ordering is worth reading carefully, because the cheapest format on a CPI basis is not automatically the one you want. A playable costs more per install and, for top game advertisers, converts eight times better than a non playable unit, rising to sixteen times for everyone else. Optimising the input metric in isolation is how people talk themselves into worse economics.
We covered the cross vertical picture in our mobile app CPI benchmarks for 2026. This post is the gaming specific view of the same data.
Mobile gaming CPI by genre
Casual: $1.41 iOS, $0.14 Android
Those figures come from Liftoff's 2025 Casual Gaming Report, built on 1.4 trillion impressions, and the platform gap is the story. Ten times is not a rounding difference, it is a different business model. Casual games monetise mostly through advertising, so the unit they need is reach rather than spending power, and Android supplies enormous cheap inventory in markets where an individual player is worth very little but the aggregate is worth plenty.
The matching return figure keeps you honest: casual Day 7 return on ad spend averages 7.6 to 7.8%. That is not a failing number, it is what a long payback advertising model looks like on day seven, and it is the reason casual teams live or die on volume and cost discipline rather than on any single winning campaign.
Midcore: around $2 blended, $3.65 iOS, $0.73 Android
Midcore averages roughly $2, splitting $3.65 on iOS and $0.73 on Android, with global Day 7 return on ad spend around 4.3%. A lower day seven figure against a higher install cost sounds like the worse business until you remember that midcore monetises through in app purchase over months rather than through impressions over days. The payback curve is longer and steeper, which is exactly why midcore teams need cohorted reporting and casual teams can get away with less.
Casino: $21.03 on iOS
Casino carries the highest published CPI of any single category at $21.03 on iOS, per Liftoff. Nothing about that number is broken. When a converting player is worth hundreds of dollars in lifetime value, a twenty dollar install is a comfortable trade, and the advertisers in that auction know it. Two other forces push it up further: inventory is restricted by platform policy and by regulation, and the compliance burden narrows what the creative is allowed to say, which concentrates a lot of bidders onto a small amount of eligible attention.
Hardcore: the number nobody can actually give you
Here is where we stop quoting. Public genre data reliably covers casual, midcore and casino. It does not cover hardcore, 4X, strategy or mid to late stage RPG as separate, measured categories, and the specific hardcore CPIs that circulate in blog posts do not trace back to a published dataset when you follow them. One analyst put the problem well: when you see a genre specific number carried to two decimal places, it was almost certainly derived rather than measured.
The practical answer for hardcore is to treat the top of the midcore band as your floor and to build your own benchmark from your own cohorts, because that is the only hardcore data that exists. If you are buying a small number of high value players, an external average was never going to be the input you needed anyway.
Geography moves the number more than genre does
The single widest spread in the gaming data is not between genres, it is inside one. Midcore CPI runs about $0.27 in LATAM against $5.45 in North America, a factor of roughly twenty for the same genre and often the same game. Western Europe sits between the two at $3.40 on iOS and $1.85 on Android, and UK install costs typically run 20 to 40% below equivalent US costs across most genres.
Which produces the most common self inflicted wound in gaming user acquisition: a team under pressure on CPI shifts budget towards cheap geographies, watches the headline number fall, and reports it as a win. The install price fell because the players are worth less. Revenue per user is spread along broadly the same axis as cost, so you have not improved the economics, you have relabelled them.
The discipline is to judge on the ratio rather than the price. Lifetime value to CPI of at least 1.5x is the widely cited minimum viable threshold, and a $0.27 install that returns $0.20 is a worse purchase than a $5.45 install that returns $12. This is the same argument we make about platform choice in iOS versus Android CPI, and it fails in the same way for the same reason: the cheaper install is only cheaper on the side of the equation you happened to measure.
Gaming fatigues faster than anything else we run
Every benchmark in this post is a snapshot, and gaming holds a snapshot for less time than any other vertical. In our experience gaming creative fatigues in one to two weeks at scale, against three to four weeks for health and fitness and five to eight weeks for finance and software. The audience overlap is enormous, the same mechanics get advertised by everybody, and the pace of iteration in the category means players have usually seen your idea before you launched it.
So the CPI you achieve at launch is not the CPI you hold. Watch frequency on your top spending ads rather than the account average, since past 3.0 in a seven day window on cold audiences is the standard point at which cost starts climbing, and understand that your effective quarterly CPI is mostly a function of how fast you replace concepts. The mechanics of that decay, and the difference between refreshing an idea and replacing it, are in our guide to Meta ads creative fatigue for mobile apps.
What the spread means for creative
Genre does not just set your CPI, it sets what creative work is available to you.
- Casual. Volume and iteration speed win, and the playable is the format with the strongest conversion evidence behind it despite costing more per install. Build for the first two seconds, because at a $0.14 install you have no budget for anyone who scrolls.
- Midcore. You are selling progression, mastery and identity rather than a moment of distraction, which supports longer formats and a slower hook. Introducing user generated content lifts impression to install by an average of 152% across Liftoff's index, and midcore is the genre where creator credibility does the most work.
- Casino. Compliance removes most of the claims you would normally lean on, so the only variable you have left is psychological position. That is a harder brief and a more interesting one, since almost nobody in the category is competing there.
- Hardcore. You are buying a small number of valuable players, so precision beats reach. Creative that self selects, by being explicit about complexity and commitment rather than hiding them, costs more per install and usually earns it back.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good CPI for a mobile game in 2026?
There is no single good number, because the genre and the country you are buying in move it by more than an order of magnitude. Casual sits around $1.41 on iOS and $0.14 on Android, midcore averages roughly $2 with a $3.65 iOS and $0.73 Android split, and casino runs to $21.03 on iOS. The only benchmark that means anything for your game is your own lifetime value against your own install cost, and a ratio below 1.5x is a problem regardless of how cheap the installs look.
Why is casual game CPI so much lower on Android than iOS?
Casual games have the widest platform gap of any category, at roughly ten times, because they monetise through advertising and therefore chase reach rather than spending power. Android delivers enormous cheap inventory in markets where a casual player is worth very little individually but is worth plenty in aggregate. The iOS number is higher partly because the audience is more valuable and partly because measurement is harder there, so the platform has less signal to work with.
Which mobile game genre has the highest CPI?
Casino carries the highest published CPI of any single category at $21.03 on iOS, according to Liftoff. That price reflects the lifetime value of a converting player rather than a market failure, since a small number of high value users can justify an install cost that would be absurd in casual. Restricted ad inventory and heavier compliance requirements also shrink the pool of places those ads can run, which pushes the auction price up further.
Should I move budget to cheaper countries to lower my gaming CPI?
Only if the monetisation follows, and usually it does not. Midcore CPI runs about $0.27 in LATAM against $5.45 in North America, a spread of roughly twenty times, but revenue per user is spread along broadly the same axis. Shifting spend to a cheap geography reliably lowers your reported CPI and frequently lowers your return on ad spend at the same time, which is why the ratio matters and the raw install price does not.
How often does mobile game creative need refreshing?
In our experience gaming creative fatigues in one to two weeks at scale, which is the fastest cycle of any vertical we run, against three to four weeks for health and fitness and five to eight for finance and software. That means the CPI you hit in week one is not the CPI you hold in week four unless something new is already in market. Your effective quarterly CPI is mostly a function of your refresh rate rather than your launch number.
Benchmarking your own account instead
Benchmarks are useful for one thing: telling you whether the number you are looking at is roughly normal for your genre and your markets. They cannot tell you why yours is drifting, and in gaming the answer is usually that the account is covering three or four psychological positions and refreshing assets inside them rather than opening new ones.
We are a performance creative agency for mobile apps. The work is mapping the positions an account is not covering, then producing against the gaps at a pace the category demands. If you want that mapped for your game, apply to work with us. We take a small number of mobile app clients per quarter.