The State of Playables

Count games, then count dollars

Playables look niche, the money says otherwise.

If you count by games, playables look like an afterthought. Just one in five of the games we analyzed runs even a single playable ad. If you count by dollars, playables are the standard: four of every five UA dollars flow through a game that runs playables.

20%

of the games we analyzed run a playable

81%

of UA spend flows through games that do

Of $6.28B in quarterly UA spend, $5.10B sits with games that run playables. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

The case against playables

On the surface, playables look optional

The games we analyzed run 2.24M video creatives and 550K playables. Four videos for every playable. If you only counted creatives, you'd call playables a nice-to-have.

That read is real, but you've seen the map: most of the 16,296 run minimal UA. These are titles from the world's most meaningful studios, so they point directionally at where the market sits. To sharpen it, we narrowed the analysis to the games buying users at scale.

9,847 games with minimal UA spend. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

The answer, step by step

The more a game spends,
the more likely it runs playables

Look at the market by how much each game spends on UA. Playable adoption rises with every step up. For the top spenders, playables are a given.

Where does your studio sit?

Pick your spend level to see where your studio stands.

Games grouped by quarterly UA spend · top level: 77 games. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

The next question: how many playables

Even the studios that run them can't make enough

Adopting playables is step one, feeding them is the real work. The studios that run playables run them at volume, and they still run three times as much video.

Some of the gap is inventory, as video serves in more places. The rest is a ceiling on what a creative team can build by hand.

Playables Videos

Only 130 of the 16,296 games hold a thousand or more playables each. The biggest library holds 8,682. The typical game running playables holds just 32. That spread is a manufacturing problem: what's missing is capacity.

Average libraries by studio tier; market-wide median 32, 130 games at 1,000+, max 8,682. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

The trend, not the totals

The playable is breaking out

Forget totals for a second and watch the share. Through 2025 the share wandered between roughly 11% and 18% with no clear direction. Then 2026 broke the pattern. Playable share of new ad creatives climbed from 23% in the first quarter to 32% in the second, and month to month it ran from 17% in January to 34% by May.

Playable share of new ad creatives

By quarter · share of all new creatives tracked that quarter

Share self-corrects for tracking coverage. 26 Q2 shown muted: June was still filling in at the July data pull. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

The growth runs deep. The games already making playables are making far more of them, from roughly 17 new playables per game each month at the start of 2026 to 71 by May. Same studios, four times the output.

Playables per producing game per month: ~17 (Jan) to ~71 (May) 2026. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

Genre by genre

Who actually ships all this?

Very few. In Puzzle alone, 286 games shipped 32,759 new playables in May. Same trend in every genre: pick yours and poke around.

New playables per month

Jun 2025 – May 2026 · playable creatives first recorded that month

Playables shipped per game in May

Averages and medians use May 2026, the last complete month. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

Every trend has one

Where playables are under-used

RPG. The one genre where playables are still under-used. Most genres only look playable-shy because they're full of games spending nothing on UA. Compare the games spending real money, $1M+ a quarter, and the gaps vanish: Casino jumps from 21% to 87%, Simulation from 24% to 84%. RPG doesn't move: 57% of 125 big-spending RPGs, while every other big genre runs 76 to 95.

For scale: the RPG games we tracked spend $472M on UA every quarter, nearly half a billion dollars in the one big genre playables haven't cracked. Maybe you can't demo a story or a gacha pull in a 30-second ad. Maybe RPG is the most under-served pocket in mobile gaming. The data poses the question, it doesn't answer it.

Genre	Games (spending $1M+/qtr)	Run a playable

Adoption among games spending $1M+ a quarter. Only genres with 50 or more such games shown; smaller genres are too thin to read. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

Check for yourself

See where your genre stands

The report tells the market's story. Your genre's page tells yours: adoption, production pace, the benchmarks to beat, and the summer's trending playables. One page, straight to your inbox.

Enough with the charts, let's have fun

Play the real thing

For each genre, these are examples of trending playables from the summer: created since June 1, already serving at scale, ranked by impressions, running live from their original ad hosting.

Tap one and play the ad the same way a user meets it: mid-scroll, on a phone, with seconds to earn the install.

Puzzle

Top 5 new since Jun 1 · by impressions

Every playable is verified as a real interactive game and spot-played by hand; end cards are excluded. Creatives belong to their studios and serve from their original ad-network hosting. Source: Sett market data, Jul 2026.

9:41

Full size ↗

Tap a game to start. Sound may play.

While you were reading

0

new playables shipped to the market

At the current pace the market ships a new playable roughly every 35 seconds. The only thing standing between a studio and the volume this market now demands is an efficient machine to deliver the next hundred playables: fast, cost-effective, high quality, and full of new concepts.

Sett's view

That intelligent machine is the whole game, not the cost alone. You can't predict which creative wins. You can explore much more of them, way faster, and let the market find the winner. That is what Sett builds: playables and video at the volume this market now runs on.

New playable every 35 seconds.
How many of them are yours?

Scale your playables with SettGet AI playables

Method and honesty

How this was counted

Every figure comes from market data collected and analyzed at Sett, pulled July 2026. The universe is the 16,296 mobile games we analyzed: only games with meaningful downloads and revenue make the map. "Runs a playable" means at least one playable creative on record. UA spend is trailing-three-month ("quarterly" throughout), in USD.

The 20% figure is share of all games we analyzed. It is always paired with spend, because most non-adopters run no paid UA at all. Counting only games that buy users, adoption climbs from 16% to 84% as budgets rise.
The trend uses playable share of new creatives, which self-corrects for changes in tracking coverage. June 2026 was still filling in at the July pull, so it is shown muted.
Library sizes follow a power law. The typical game running playables holds 32; the average is 168, pulled up by a long tail. We report both.
The production line counts a playable in the month it first appears in tracking; "games shipping playables" means at least one new playable that month. Averages and medians use May 2026, the last complete month.
The arcade shows examples of each genre's trending new playables, one per game: created on or after 1 June 2026, ranked by impressions to date. Each pick is verified as a real interactive game (live engine and canvas checks, then spot-played by hand); end cards are excluded. Creatives are embedded unmodified from their original ad-network hosting, in a sandbox that cannot open new tabs. The ads belong to their studios.
Static creatives are excluded (not reliably counted). Percentages are share of games unless stated as share of spend. Genre tables show only genres with 50 or more qualifying games.

Sett market data, analyzed alongside AppMagic data · pulled July 2026.

The Stateof Playables