Stop splitting mobile and PC, the split is F2P versus premium

For two days now the timeline has been arguing about what the mobile industry has added to the games industry. Both sides make the same mistake even where they are right, they build the split on the platform. “Mobile is one job, PC is another” is a sentence I hear constantly in this industry, and to me it is wrong. I have been inside both, I shipped successful products end to end and helped plenty of others get shipped, so I think I can talk about this in depth.

Mobile and PC/console are far more similar than you think. Talking through a category called “mobile game” is wrong from the start, because F2P on PC does the same job as it does on mobile. Only the device is different, the goal is the same. The split does not run through the platform, it runs through the business model and the method.

This split applies to decision makers, the business and design side. If you are on the production side your skills already map one to one, so do not fall for the grifters who tell you they do not transfer. What you have to adapt is your mindset, and depending on which way you cross you will get used to thinking either smaller or broader. It looks hard from the outside, but once you are inside the production process you can adapt very fast.

This subject does not fit in one post, and this part alone is already long, so I am splitting it into five posts. This is the first, on the mobile and PC split itself. The remaining four are money, system design, discipline and the creative side. Until the series is finished I will post twice a day instead of once.

In Turkey the argument always runs through match 3, because that is our leading genre, so let’s look there first. To sum up match 3 in its most basic form: there is a lives system, your five lives run out, and to refill them you either wait half an hour or you pay. Levels have a move limit, and the moment you lose, an offer for five more moves drops onto the screen. On top of that sits a booster economy, an events calendar, tournaments, a season pass and a piggy bank. All of that is an F2P economy independent of what the gameplay is. The gameplay of course still has to be engaging.

The ancestor of these games, Candy Crush, came out on Facebook on 12 April 2012, only reached phones seven months later, and King was Facebook’s fourth largest game developer at the time. A model built in the browser was carried over to the phone.

The investment side does not price the platform. Gram Games was sold to Zynga in 2018 for 250M dollars in cash plus an earn-out, Peak went for 1.8 billion dollars in 2020, Dream Games took 255M dollars in 2022 at a 2.75 billion dollar valuation and later climbed to 5 billion, and Loom Games passed to Scopely this year at a valuation above 1 billion dollars, becoming Turkey’s seventh gaming unicorn.

Genre is not the deciding factor either. When Masomo was sold to Miniclip in 2019, what it had was a sports game. What the investor looks at is measurable KPIs and how much lifetime and room for growth is left. Anyone producing the same ratios off the phone finds the same money, and often more. Fortnite took 2 billion dollars in 2022 on a 31.5 billion dollar valuation, and there are many similar examples, but most are not disclosed.

Then there are the gachas, Genshin above all. The same build runs on the phone, on PC and on PlayStation, the same gacha, the same account, with cross-save. It is not a mobile game when you come in from the phone and a PC game when you come in from PC, it is the same game. Wuthering Waves is the same, and both are inside Newzoo’s 2025 PC playtime top 20 list.

The same split exists inside PC itself. In Newzoo’s 2026 PC & Console report the three most played games are Roblox at 9.7%, CS2 at 7.0% and League of Legends at 6.9%, all three F2P. The top 5 has not changed at all since 2023, and on top of that every newly released F2P game put together can take only 2% of the playtime in the long tail. The top is full and there is no room for anyone new.

Below the top 20 the picture flips. There, 73% of playtime is in premium games, and the real growth is there too, rank 21 and below was 48% of PC spending in 2022 and rose to 56% in 2025. Even so, F2P models still cover a large part of PC as well. To see the real split you do not even need to look at mobile, looking inside a single platform is enough.

Take Roblox, where the currency is Robux, revenue is reported as bookings and the company announces DAU every quarter, a plain financial statement. Opening cases in CS2 is a gacha model. League of Legends’ Sanctum system is gacha too, the drop rate is 0.5%, it is guaranteed at 80 pulls, and a single skin comes to around 250 dollars. All three are PC games, but the same machine turns inside all three.

Gachapon is mobile’s most distinctive system strategy anyway, and it is not tied to a single genre, it is everywhere from match 3 to 4X to tower defense. So you do not need to look at a phone to see the system that makes mobile mobile.

On console the situation is not much different. The platform itself is built on premium from end to end and games sell for 70 dollars. But the money in the games at the top, like FIFA and NBA 2K, starts after the box sale. It comes from Ultimate Team packs, and those packs are gacha. So an F2P economy is running on top of a 70 dollar premium game. Rocket League changed the model completely, it came out at 20 dollars in 2015 and went F2P in 2020. Same game, same platform, same studio, the only thing that changed is the model.

Where the whole model lands is very simple, LTV staying above UA cost. If bringing a player in costs 2 dollars and that player leaves 3.5 dollars over their lifetime, the business works. If they do not, it does not. This calculation has nothing to do with the phone, the browser or Steam.

The things you measure are the same everywhere. D1, D7 and D30 retention, ARPDAU, ARPPU, conversion, session length, churn. Put a mobile team’s dashboard next to a PC F2P team’s dashboard and you could not tell which is which.

The mechanics people think came from mobile mostly did not come from mobile. The battle pass was Dota 2’s Compendium in 2013, it cost 10 dollars, and mobile took it years later. Borrowed systems like that are mobile’s building blocks.

Premium has all of these too, but they are not as dominant as in F2P, because there is next to no attribution. That is largely what creates the split. Anywhere you can do attribution, the work turns into a KPI and numbers game like it is in F2P, and where you cannot, that machine never gets built at all. This is why the model is what decides things, which model you work in determines what you can measure.

When there is attribution, you go straight to the individual in the audience and measure conversion. When there is not, you have to converge through the representatives of that audience, finding the right audience and trying to create brand recognition there. That is the best you can do in premium, and the road runs through streamers and credible press.

What does not carry over shows up when you move to premium. In F2P you can buy growth, you buy installs, and as long as that imbalance holds the loop closes inside the app. In premium what you buy is a click going to a store page, the sale happens once, and there is no D30 you can fix, whatever happened in launch week is what you have. Measurement is the same story, on mobile we measured appeal with paid ads, in premium that tool is not in your hands.

There will be an objection to this too, premium games have battle passes and seasons as well. True, but that game is now a live service game taking money at the door. The point is not the mechanic, it is where the money comes from, and if the game keeps producing revenue after it ships then you are running a live service and everything from here on applies to you too. Helldivers 2 is sold as premium, but the work running inside it is the same work.

So what do you do? Drop the question “can you move from mobile to PC”, the question to ask is “can you move from F2P to premium”. If you are going to make F2P on PC, everything in your hands still applies, live-ops, UA and monetization are all the same job. If you are going to make premium, your production side stays where it is, but you will learn production costs and the business side attached to them from scratch, and that is the hard part.

The design side works differently too, and the reason is access. In premium the production process is more closed, and reaching the player takes much longer and costs more. Failing is expensive in both time and money and pivoting is very hard, so you design broader and find the core of the game by elimination.

In F2P you can reach whatever cohort you want in a very short time and solve it with instant A/B testing, and the design is narrower for that reason, so you can control the variables. Once the smallest design that works is found, everything gets built on top of it. If you cannot find it, you accept that it failed fast and go next.

Someone coming from F2P has more in their hands than they think. In F2P you learn what works, in premium you learn what does not. The difference is measurement, one shows you what was tried and caught on, the other shows you what did not catch on after launch. Mobile’s fast processes let you see what the player reacts to, and over time you get much better at judging the game’s short bursts.

On the premium side that same instinct gets built over years, game by game, by widening your horizon, consuming content deliberately and blending it with theory, and exercising your ability to interpret. And there is no shortcut.

So everything you will learn is model driven. The same holds when you hire someone, “I worked in mobile” says nothing on its own, which model and which vertical they worked in does.

The mobile industry is not standing across from PC, the same model is already sitting at the top of PC. The question to ask is not which device you work on, it is whether the money ends at launch. The method comes out of that, because the money model you are aiming at decides for itself which skill gets rewarded.