Grateful to Devin Becker and Naavik team for having me on the podcast.
If you work in mobile gaming, you already know this:
Acquiring a new player has never been more expensive.
UA costs are rising. Competition for attention is brutal. The algorithm keeps changing. And every new install costs more than the last one.
Which means every player you lose hurts more than it used to.
Churn was always a problem. In 2026 it’s a crisis.
When I sit with gaming studios and look at their data, the pattern is almost always the same: teams are obsessing over acquisition while retention quietly bleeds them out. They’re pouring money into the top of the funnel while the bottom leaks.
Fix retention first. Then scale acquisition.
In this episode with Devin we dig into how churn actually works — how to define it properly, the behavioral signals that tell you a player is drifting toward the exit before they actually leave, and what interventions actually move the needle.
Including the dumbest reason players quit — which is more common than you’d think.