There were no mobile games at Summer Game Fest, and for good reason

We’re used to playing ‘spot the mobile game’ at big industry events, but at Summer Game Fest this year it was harder than ever.

There were precisely zero mobile-exclusive games present in Friday’s big showcase, and it was the same at this weekend’s Play Days gathering, a bespoke event for press and influencers.

Multiformat games Wuthering Waves and Fortnite were the only games featured in Friday’s showcase that were even playable on mobile. And we counted four or five mobile ports among the hundreds featured in the other streaming showcases that took place.

In fact, the only encounters I’ve had with mobile games here were strolling past a Love and Deepspace mural in downtown LA and spotting a Monopoly Go TV ad from across a Mexican restaurant. (El Cholo, in case you’re wondering).

Last year, Niantic had a presence at Play Days and we spoke to the minds behind Pokémon Go. In 2024, Netflix had a beefy presence. In 2026, though, there was practically nothing. And yes, let’s take into account that there’s a decent chance Geoff Keighley and his SGF team just don’t want mobile games here.

Indeed, we learned back in 2024 that Supercell practically had to beg to get Squad Busters into the show – as well as paying for the privilege, of course.

In some senses, it’s a real shame that mobile games are so anonymous at events like these. Our half of the games business reaches a much more diverse and mainstream set of players all over the world, and that’s a great story to tell, especially given how many of the trailers played out this past week were so gory and grim.

So should the mobile game business be pushing and promoting itself harder at big, glitzy events like this? Probably not, actually.

Mobile has always been a data-driven business, and the value of turning up in force to an event like Summer Game Fest is not clear at all. Its predecessor E3 also suffered – and eventually died – from being very expensive and offering very little measurable ROI.

As everyone reading this knows, a thing you can measure pretty well is UA. And I would guess that 99% of mobile games companies would rather spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on that than on placing a trailer in a summer showcase that is for the wrong audience, and will likely get lost in the noise anyway.

SGF might look bright and breezy, but the audience for this stuff is hardcore players – the kind that regard most mobile games with suspicion, if not outright contempt. We’ve already explained plenty about why consumer game websites never write about mobile games, and indeed why mobile games never win at award shows.

The same principles apply here, I think. Take as an example Monopoly Go. It is one of the biggest games on the planet and its moneybags creator Scopely is headquartered down the road in Culver City. It also has a massive Simpsons crossover event to promote right now. And still Scopely is sitting this one out.

In fact, to look at it the opposite way, maybe it’s the PC and console business that needs to sit down and think a little harder about how effective its marketing spend is.

This week I have heard about lavish parties thrown by IO and Xbox that from the outside just seem to be an extraordinary waste of money – at a time when there’s much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the state of discoverability and profitability in the PC and console space.

Of course, part of me would love to see mobile represented better at events like Summer Game Fest. It is certainly odd that such a giant, vibrant and important chunk of the games business is effectively invisible here.

But the mobile business is nothing if not pragmatic: your marketing dollars are likely better spent elsewhere at any or all of GDC, MAU, Gamescom, TGS, G-Star, ChinaJoy and beyond. SGF will be just fine without us, I think.