GameAnalytics Benchmarks Hub

D1 is the first honest read on whether a game has a hook. The median established game brings back 20.8% of its installs the next day, so even among games this size four in five are gone within 24 hours. The spread runs from 12.4% at the bottom quartile to 40.6% at the top, a little over three times. Onboarding and the first session do most of that work.

Seven days after install, the median game is holding 3.8% of the players it acquired, down from 20.8% on day one. The week costs more than the first day did. The gap between tiers widens with it, from roughly three times at D1 to nearly eight here. This is where the core loop either proves itself or quietly fails to.

A month in, the median game keeps 0.8% of its installs, roughly one player in 120. The top 5% keep 6.9%, around eighteen times more, and that ratio has climbed at every stage: three times at D1, eight at D7, eighteen here. Retention gaps compound, and it is live content rather than onboarding that separates the top.

What is retention in mobile games?
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Retention is one of the most critical metrics for understanding the health and success of a mobile game. It measures the percentage of players who return to your game after their initial play session, typically tracked on key milestones like Day 1 (D1), Day 7 (D7), and Day 30 (D30). It’s widely regarded as the most critical metric in mobile gaming as it directly impacts every aspect of a game’s lifecycle: notably, user acquisition, monetization, and player engagement.

Retention is the foundation of a sustainable and prosperous game, as it measures how well your game resonates with players over time. A game with poor retention won’t survive long, regardless of how many users are acquired. Conversely, strong retention indicates players are finding value, enjoyment, or a reason to return.

Monthly players are not daily players. In the median game, 5.9% of monthly actives open it on any given day, fewer than two days a month each, while the top 5% reach 20.6%, closer to six days. February reads high at every tier, but that is a 28-day month shrinking the denominator rather than players genuinely returning more often.

Sessions per DAU, also called session count, measures how often a player opens the game on a day they play at all. Rarely just once: the median active user starts 4.5 sessions a day, and even the bottom quartile manages three. At roughly three and a half times from P25 to P95, this is the narrowest spread on the page, which suggests frequency owes more to genre than to anything a team can tune.

Sessions are short, and in the middle of the market they are slowly getting longer. The median now runs 3.1 minutes, up from 2.97 in March, while the top 5% have drifted down from 10.76 in April to 10.19. It is the only sustained directional movement on this page, and it is narrowing the gap between typical and strong.

Playtime combines frequency and length, and separates games further than either on its own: 13 minutes a day at the median against 59.6 at the top, almost eight times. Resist multiplying the percentiles to get here. The game ranked highest for session count is not the one ranked highest for session length.

Most games earn almost nothing per player per day. The median makes about one cent per daily active user and the bottom quartile barely registers, which is what the near-flat green line shows. This is the most skewed metric on the page because it divides revenue by every user, including the large majority who never pay. The 95th percentile sits at $0.69, roughly 65 times the median.

Once a player pays, the figures change completely. The median paying user is worth $10.93 a month, the bottom quartile $4.73 and the top quartile $25.43, a far tighter band than ARPDAU. The 95th percentile is the outlier at $212.94, around twenty times the median, and it swung between $152 and $272 across the year.

Ad revenue is the one line on this page that is clearly rising. Median ad revenue per daily active user has gone from $0.029 to $0.032 over the year, and the 75th percentile from $0.089 to $0.111. The 95th percentile has climbed the most, from $0.208 to $0.321, a 54% increase. This is a real trend rather than month-to-month noise.

The median payer buys exactly twice, and that has barely moved all year. The bottom quartile sits at 1.27, meaning most payers in most games buy once and stop. The 95th percentile, not shown, reaches 17.5 purchases, which is where subscription-like and consumable-driven economies appear. Repeat buying, not the first purchase, is what separates them.

Day one on PC looks nothing like mobile. The median desktop game brings back 6.5% of its installs the next day, against 20.8% on mobile, and that is a difference in how the games are played rather than in quality. A PC player who buys deliberately and sits down for an hour is not checking in the next morning. The spread runs from 4.2% to 32.4%.

By day seven the median desktop game holds 1.4% of its installs, down from 6.5% on day one. The proportional fall is steeper than mobile's, but it means something different: a PC player can go a week without playing and still not have churned. Read this as whether the content pulled them back at all, not as a measure of weekly habit.

A month out, the median desktop game holds 0.19% of its installs while the top 5% hold 3.85%, around twenty times more. The bottom quarter sits at zero in October, meaning at least a quarter of PC games keep essentially nobody thirty days on. For PC this is the clearest read on lifecycle design: the games still holding players are generally the ones shipping updates, seasons or multiplayer content.

Why is PC game retention different from mobile game retention?

Retention in PC games reflects a different engagement model than on mobile. While mobile retention often measures how successfully a game becomes a daily habit, PC retention is more closely tied to content consumption, progression depth, and lifecycle design. Many PC games are designed for long, immersive sessions spread across fewer days, making lowerday-based retention a natural outcome rather than a sign of underperformance.

In this context, retention should be interpreted as the time players continue to engage with a game after their first experience, not how frequently they return each day. It provides insight into whether players find enough value to progress through content, return for updates, or re-engage after major milestones such as expansions, seasonal updates, or multiplayer events.

PC players return on fewer days than mobile players. In the median desktop game, 4.3% of monthly actives appear on any given day, around 1.3 days a month each, against 5.9% on mobile. The top 5% reach 14.9%, closer to four and a half days. February reads high at every tier here too, the same 28-day denominator effect seen in the mobile section.

Sessions per DAU, also called session count, is the tightest metric in the PC set. The median desktop player opens the game 1.7 times on a day they play, against 4.5 on mobile, and even the top 5% only reach 3.7. PC is close to one sitting per day. Where mobile engagement is assembled from many short visits, PC is built from a single long one.

This is where PC separates from mobile completely. The median desktop session runs 20.8 minutes against 3.1 on mobile, nearly seven times longer, and the top 5% reach 71.8 minutes. One PC session outlasts an entire day of mobile play in most games, which is the strongest evidence for reading PC retention as content consumption rather than daily habit.

Daily playtime on PC comes from long sessions rather than frequent ones. The median desktop player spends 37.7 minutes a day, close to three times mobile's 13, assembled from 1.7 sessions instead of 4.5. The top 5% reach 159 minutes. Resist multiplying the percentiles: the game ranked highest for session count is not the one ranked highest for length.

New users is the only metric here counted in absolute numbers rather than rates, so it tracks marketing spend and store placement more than design. The median desktop game added 10,657 players in October, the bottom quartile 4,556 and the top quartile 34,780. This chart stops at the 75th percentile: the top 5% added 256,572, which would flatten every other band.