Presented by Xsolla TinyBytes co-founder and CEO Andrés Constantinidis believes the mobile games industry has entered a more unforgiving era where shrinking organic discovery, rising user acquisition costs, and increasingly algorithm-driven platform visibility are reshaping how independent studios launch, scale, and survive. The shift is forcing studios like TinyBytes to rethink how they approach growth, particularly as early-stage visibility on mobile platforms becomes increasingly difficult to secure without significant marketing spend. Starting in Santiago, Chile TinyBytes is a mobile games studio with global traction, having surpassed 100 million downloads across its portfolio. Its title Massive Warfare alone has generated more than 70 million downloads and over $60 million in lifetime gross revenue, reflecting the studio’s commercial scale in the mobile market. The company has also previously earned industry recognition, including honorable mentions for innovative game design at the Mobile Games Awards and Gamescom, and has raised seed funding with backing from Start-Up Chile and investors such as Initial Capital and London Venture Partners, both of which have also supported leading mobile game companies like Supercell. At the studio level, TinyBytes faces challenges which mirror broader pressures across the global mobile games industry, where scaling new titles profitably has become increasingly difficult. Organic discovery has declined sharply as platform algorithms and KPI-driven visibility increasingly favors large publishers with significant user acquisition budgets, forcing smaller studios to invest earlier and more heavily in UA before monetization and retention are fully validated. Without the early organic baseline which once helped de-risk launches, independent…
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