Robert Antokol: Mobile gaming sees more changes in 6 months than other industries see in years

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Every few months, I’ve stayed in touch with Robert Antokol, CEO of Playtika, a mobile game firm with projects like Slotomania and a $7.3 billion valuation. And I’ve had to ask him what he thinks about the state of the gaming industry. We’ve had this conversation because so much as changed.

“It’s a very big question because a lot of things have happened in our very big industry,” Antokol said. “Every six months in our time is like four or five years in other industries. We are in really different times. But I can tell you that in this new time there are a lot of new opportunities coming.”

I noted that we see a lot more uncertainty in the market now. Geopolitics have reared some ugliness with the war in Ukraine, venture capital investments have slowed as the public markets get choppy, and tech startups are seeing valuations starting to drop. I wondered if that will spill into the game industry and make acquisitions happen again.

“This is the main topic right now in our industry. As you said, two years ago, in the pandemic, everyone thought it’s going to be a big huge happy party,” he said. “In the last year and a half, I never saw my career of 25 years so many new startups, so many new companies. And the valuation becomes higher. In the last few years, it was really a challenge to look at a new company because the valuations became crazy.”

Then, in the last three months, everything came to a stop, he said. Mobile game companies saw that it wasn’t easy to grow revenue per user anymore, as it was at the beginning of the pandemic. The cost per install, or the advertising cost to gain a new user, has doubled in the