Could games possibly become even more fun and profitable?

The days when “you could make money just by creating any old game” are long gone.

According to data from the *China Game Industry Report (January–June 2025)*, the number of domestic game users reached 679 million in the first half of 2025, representing a year-over-year growth rate of just 0.72%. As the market’s growth potential continues to narrow, this indicates that the industry has fully entered the deep waters of competition for existing users.

Behind these figures, developers across different sectors are facing equally acute survival challenges: those focused on the mobile gaming sector must not only meet players’ exacting demands for graphics quality and smooth performance—while overcoming technical bottlenecks in performance optimization—but also contend with the dual pressures of soaring user acquisition costs and low user retention rates;Meanwhile, developers in the mini-games sector are constrained by complex development and adaptation requirements, plateauing user growth on individual platforms, intense competition from homogeneous products, and insufficient monetization efficiency, making it difficult for them to capitalize on growth opportunities in this lightweight segment.

These overlapping challenges have created widespread obstacles to the industry’s growth, and finding targeted solutions to overcome them has become a top priority for all industry professionals.

01

The "involution" of mobile games must also keep pace with the times

The ultimate goal of a game is to create an enjoyable experience for players while generating a corresponding return on investment. In the actual process of development and operation, however, achieving this goal still presents numerous challenges.

• Enhanced Experience

Most players have likely encountered issues such as slow loading times and stuttering graphics while playing games. These performance bottlenecks directly undermine the gaming experience, which in turn affects user retention and word-of-mouth. For this reason, developers often devote significant effort to overcoming these limitations in graphics quality and smoothness.

To fundamentally improve the user experience, technological upgrades are undoubtedly the best approach. The native 165fps ultra-high frame rate introduced by OPPO Gaming has garnered widespread attention within the industry—compared to the mainstream 120fps, a 165fps ultra-high frame rate allows for more on-screen details and faster command processing per action, giving players a smoother visual experience and more fluid gameplay.Dong Weixin, Director of Media and Game Development at OPPO, mentioned in his presentation at the OPPO Developer Conference: “165 Ultra High Frame Rate allows players to spot enemies earlier in FPS games, aim and fire faster, make more accurate predictions, and engage in more intense firefights.”

To ensure players can enjoy a stable, native 165fps gaming experience over the long term, OPPO has partnered with upstream suppliers in the chip, display, and thermal management sectors to develop new technologies, thereby establishing the hardware foundation for 165fps gaming. Furthermore, thanks to exclusive chip-level gaming technology and the "Fengchi" gaming kernel—which is pre-programmed into the chip at the factory—native 165fps games run flawlessly on OnePlus’s latest smartphones.

Thanks to its immediate impact on the user experience, this technology quickly attracted adoption by numerous top-tier games, including *Operation Delta*, *Dark Zone Breakthrough*, *Call of Duty: Mobile*, and *League of Legends: Wild Rift*.

It is also worth noting that OPPO’s investments in GPU and graphics technology have led to the development of GPU super-frame rendering technology, which enables games to run at higher graphics quality while consuming less power. Furthermore, following OPPO’s collaboration with Qualcomm to exclusively launch a “standardized, easy-to-integrate, low-maintenance” frame-interpolation and super-resolution integration solution, the barriers to adopting native high-frame-rate technology continue to drop.A unified, standardized integration framework significantly simplifies the adaptation process and reduces the difficulty for developers, allowing more developers and players to enjoy the benefits of these technological advancements.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to OPPO’s technological upgrades: players can use the NFC “Tap to Team Up” feature for social sharing and user growth; they can also use the “Game Camera” to automatically capture memorable moments, customize watermarks, and share them easily, which indirectly drives user growth.

It is clear that these upgrades systematically optimize the entire gaming journey—from launch and gameplay to sharing. Not only do they help developers iterate on their technical capabilities with lower barriers to entry, thereby effectively enhancing their products’ competitiveness in the market, but they also comprehensively improve the game’s smoothness and immersion, delivering a more engaging, high-quality experience for players.

• Operational Efficiency

Players may care only about whether a game is fun, but for developers, while providing a smooth experience for players, they must also figure out how to successfully monetize their products—a challenge that directly impacts the team’s survival and growth. However, in today’s increasingly competitive landscape, making money from games has become increasingly difficult; pain points such as high user acquisition costs, low retention rates, and slow conversion rates are plaguing developers across the board.

So how should developers respond? The operational strategies shared by Team A, whom we happened to meet at the gaming session of the OPPO Developer Conference, may offer some valuable insights.

The company’s representative told Teahouse that mainstream game distribution channels and advertising platforms have already rolled out a wide range of solutions to address the user acquisition challenges that most trouble developers. As long as developers stay informed and make careful choices, they have the opportunity to significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their user acquisition efforts.

For example, during a major update for one of their games, they leveraged OPPO’s intelligent algorithms to precisely target user groups that closely matched the game’s theme and gameplay, significantly improving the accuracy of user acquisition. At the same time, the team actively utilized new promotional channels—such as featured cards in app stores and display slots on the Game Assistant desktop—to effectively boost the efficiency of re-engaging existing users. This series of targeted operational initiatives ultimately led to a significant increase in the overall size and sustained engagement of high-value users.

For large-scale mobile games, lengthy resource package updates are a common occurrence; a routine update often takes several dozen minutes, while major updates can take hours. During this process, a significant number of players give up waiting due to the slow-moving update progress bar.

During a discussion with the head of Team A, Teahouse learned that OPPO has introduced three core capabilities—channel pre-update, background pre-update, and idle-mode update—to improve the efficiency of resource packages, which have proven highly effective in reducing user wait times.

How do these features work? The “Channel Pre-Update” feature allows resources to be downloaded and installed silently through the app store without disrupting normal device operation, making it a popular choice for the launch of new games and major updates to existing titles. Both *Zhu Xian 2* and *Valorant Mobile* utilized this feature during their launch phases, resulting in a resource package distribution rate of 45%–50% among OPPO users who had pre-registered.

The "Background Pre-Update" feature automatically downloads and updates the game in the background when the phone is idle. As a result, the completion rate for active users downloading the new season update of *Honor of Kings* reached 28%, saving each user up to 18 minutes of waiting time. Meanwhile, the "Background Update" feature allows downloads to continue even when players switch the game to the background.

These three resource packages cover virtually the entire game operation lifecycle—from launch to updates and routine maintenance—and provide comprehensive support for seamless updates, thereby reducing user churn caused by waiting times.

In addition to continuously optimizing its resource updates, OPPO Games has also introduced a series of practical features tailored to developers in the areas of user acquisition and operations.

Intelligent algorithms help teams precisely target high-value users during peak promotional periods, effectively reducing customer acquisition costs; meanwhile, ad placements across multiple channels—including app stores, gaming platforms, and browsers—provide more opportunities to re-engage inactive users.

What’s more, OPPO Games enables developers to precisely target users through multi-dimensional tags and custom audience segments, allowing for truly personalized operational strategies and helping games achieve long-term, stable growth.

While OPPO’s online operations focus on “efficiency,” its offline efforts place greater emphasis on “emotional connection.” In recent years, OPPO has used “store partnerships” as a starting point for its offline initiatives, providing developers with operational solutions ranging from “casual check-ins” to “immersive experiences.” This approach has helped games such as *Love in Light and Darkness* achieve success in both user acquisition and word-of-mouth.

In Tea House’s view, OPPO’s dual-pronged development strategy of “technology and operations” precisely addresses the common challenges currently facing the gaming industry: it optimizes the player experience through technological upgrades while enhancing commercial efficiency through operational measures. This helps developers establish a virtuous cycle of “experience and growth” amid fierce market competition, ultimately allowing them to refocus their efforts on refining the game content itself.

02

"Cross-Platform Synergy" Dominates the Mini-Games Market

Beyond the increasingly competitive mobile game market, the rapidly emerging mini-game market is becoming a hot new avenue for game developers seeking to break through. In recent years, the mini-game market has attracted a flood of companies with its astonishing growth rate; even Supercell, whose headquarters are in Finland, made a high-profile announcement this year that it would fully enter the domestic mini-game market.

However, as the market has expanded rapidly, the mini-games sector has gradually begun to face challenges such as plateauing user growth on single platforms, intensifying homogenized competition, and low efficiency in monetizing traffic. Countless practical examples demonstrate that one of the most effective ways to fully realize the potential of mini-game platforms is to promote coordinated operations across both mobile games and mini-games.

"Cross-platform synergy" refers to no longer treating mini-games and mobile games as separate categories, but rather leveraging the unique strengths of both platforms. By sharing capabilities, complementing traffic sources, and facilitating user migration, the two can generate combined growth momentum to maximize operational effectiveness.In fact, the concept of "cross-platform synergy" has long been discussed within the industry and is widely regarded as a key trend. Among the various gaming platforms, OPPO stands out as a pioneer in establishing a new ecosystem paradigm for "mobile games + mini-games" synergy—and this is more than just a slogan.

To accelerate the implementation of the "cross-platform synergy" ecosystem, OPPO has leveraged its platform and technological strengths to introduce a range of new features—including cross-account compatibility and "download-and-play" functionality—that are designed to reduce developers' workload and boost efficiency across the board, from user experience to retention.

With just one OPPO account, players can seamlessly switch between the full-featured mobile game and the mini-game version, with all data and progress synced in real time. Even more convenient is that when downloading the full-featured game, you don’t have to wait for installation to complete—you can jump into the mini-game version right away to experience the core content. Once the full-featured game is installed, simply follow the system prompts to switch to the more powerful client with a single tap and seamlessly continue playing from where you left off.

For developers, the first hurdle in cross-platform operation is undoubtedly platform adaptation.With so many mini-game platforms available today, developers often face significant time and labor costs when adapting their games across platforms. OPPO supports the rapid conversion of WeChat mini-games into OPPO mini-games, allowing developers to reduce the time required for cross-platform adaptation from one month to just a few hours. This truly enables “develop once, deploy across multiple platforms,” significantly lowering the technical barrier for small and medium-sized teams.

With the support of these ecosystem capabilities, developers can easily create a virtuous cycle where mini-games drive traffic and acquire new users, while mobile games provide a deeper gaming experience. This approach not only reduces user conversion loss but also extends user lifetime value.

Currently, many game titles are adopting a "cross-platform synergy" strategy, which has significantly boosted overall user acquisition and monetization. According to data released by OPPO, while users playing *Three Kingdoms: Ice Age* across both platforms account for only 1% of total active users, they contribute 23% of total revenue. Additionally, the mini-game platform has opened up new growth channels for the mobile game beyond app stores and game centers, accounting for 16% of total revenue—a clear demonstration of the commercial value of cross-platform synergy.

From *Three Kingdoms: Ice Age* generating nearly 10 million yuan in monthly revenue through cross-platform synergy, to *Heroes Without Flash* achieving sustained growth in monthly revenue by leveraging new capabilities, a growing number of examples demonstrate that the new mini-game ecosystem model established by OPPO is becoming a key driver for developers to break through the saturation of the existing market and achieve incremental growth.

Conclusion

With competition in the gaming industry becoming increasingly fierce, developers can no longer rely on "luck" to drive growth—every step, from product development to operational execution, requires careful planning. Players’ high expectations for gameplay and the market’s strong demand for efficiency mean that “high-quality gaming experiences” and “efficient operational capabilities” are like the two wheels driving growth, neither of which can be overlooked; meanwhile, rapidly emerging segments like mini-games have become a key opportunity to break through the competitive landscape.

Given the need to refine the user experience, boost efficiency, and drive growth while also capitalizing on opportunities in new markets, the challenges of going it alone are obvious.Against this backdrop, the comprehensive ecosystem value built by OPPO through its “mobile games + mini-games” model has become increasingly evident. By deeply integrating technology and operations, it has built a complementary and symbiotic bridge between traditional mobile games and emerging mini-games, continuously bridging the gaps in user experience and growth. This enables a virtuous cycle where “high-quality experiences attract users, high-value users drive commercial success, and commercial revenue supports R&D upgrades.”

Teahouse believes that this empowerment model, centered on ecological integrity, not only provides developers with the tools to break through current challenges but also points to the direction of future growth: as technology, operations, and cross-platform scenarios converge, OPPO’s gaming ecosystem is emerging as a new engine driving the industry through the current market saturation phase, working alongside developers to carve out a sustainable growth path in this highly competitive market.