Why discovery and monetisation will converge across mobile games in 2026

The useful part

Prefer PocketGamer.biz on Google Live-streaming viewership reached 17.5 billion hours in Q2 2026, with TikTok Live accounting for 50.9% of the total. More mobile publishers are expected to treat TikTok as a core distribution and community channel. Once a player has made three web store purchases, their repeat rate passes 84%.

How it works

• For fifteen years, the app store answered two questions for every mobile publisher: how a player finds you, and how a player pays you.
• The prediction for the second half of 2026 is that publishers stop running them as separate programmes.
• In Q2 2026, live-streaming viewership reached 17.5 billion hours watched, and TikTok Live alone accounted for 8.9 billion of those hours, or 50.9% of the total, making it bigger than every other platform...
• It is about where audiences choose to spend their time afterwards." Eduard Montserrat For mobile publishers, that changes how TikTok should be thought about.
• We predict that by the close of 2026, the publishers pulling ahead will not be the ones with the best creator campaign or the best web store.

What to take from it

Stay Informed Get Industry News In Your Inbox… Sign Up Today Eduard Montserrat is Founder and CEO at Stream Hatchet and David Stelzer is CSO at Appcharge. They look like different trends because different teams own them, but they are the same shift. Stream Hatchet "Discovery is no longer just about where someone first hears about a game.

Example or evidence

• It is increasingly becoming a platform where games can build sustained audiences and communities over time.
• Both answers have changed inside about eighteen months, and the industry has been reporting them as two separate stories.
• The app store bundled discovery and payment into a single product, and the games industry has now unbundled both halves of it.
• The businesses that pull ahead will treat discovery and payment as one loop: a player found through a creator, converted on a surface the publisher owns, and brought back without the platform sitting in the...

Details worth keeping

Discovery moved first, to live video, creators, and communities. Payment followed, to web stores and payment links. This is the first Gamescom where discovery and monetisation are two parts of the same conversation.

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