u/awogaming_team

The one who goes full offense from minute one and doesn't understand why they're struggling at wave 60. Blames the game. The game is fine.

The one who spends 20 minutes on the upgrade screen before a wave starts. Has a spreadsheet open on a second screen. Is having the time of their life.

The one who reads every single tooltip, understands the system better than anyone, and then picks the weirdest possible build just to see what happens. Usually has the best stories.

The one who loses three times in a row, goes quiet, and comes back two hours later with a build nobody has seen before. Says nothing. Just wins.

Which one are you ?

(And be honest because everyone in your life already knows the answer.)

It's not the pay wall. Not the forced ad. Not even the bad update.

It's the moment you open the game and realize you don't have a decision to make.

You just have a button to press. And you press it. And nothing interesting happens. And you close it. And you never open it again.

You didn't even notice it was the last time.

The games that keep people are the ones that always leave something unresolved. A build you haven't tried. A wave you haven't beaten. A question you're still turning over.

What was the last mobile game that actually kept you coming back and what was the thing it kept leaving unresolved?

Genuine question.

We're getting closer to having something playable and we need real people, not friends or family who will tell us it's great no matter what.

The kind of tester we're looking for is someone who plays idle games or tower defense on mobile, who has actual opinions, and who isn't afraid to say "this part doesn't work for me tbh."

No download link yet. Not ready for that. Just trying to understand if there's interest here before we open anything up.

If that sounds like you, drop a comment !

What kind of mobile games do you play and what usually makes you quit one after a week?

We get asked sometimes why we built four gods instead of one unified power system.

The honest answer is that the tension between them is the point.

War acts before it thinks. Ice thinks before it acts. Time sees things the others don't and rarely shares what it sees. Life exists because everything else risks ending and it doesn't fully belong to the same conversation as the other three.

None of them are wrong. None of them are right. They're all present at the same tower for reasons that aren't entirely aligned, and that disagreement is built directly into how the strategy works.

A pure War build plateaus. Not because War is weak, but because War alone doesn't account for what War doesn't see. The same is true for the others.

The builds that go furthest are the ones that understand what each god is bad at, not just what each god is good at.

More lore coming soon. There's a reason these four ended up at the same place.

Not your favourite right now. The first one that made you understand what the genre was really about.

For a lot of people it's Kingdom Rush. For others it's Bloons, or Plants vs Zombies back in the day, or something more obscure that nobody else mentions.

Asking because we're deep into building Lost Tower and we still think about the games that shaped how we see tower defense. The ones that proved the genre could have real depth instead of just wave after wave of the same thing.

Curious what yours was ?!

The reputation is earned. Most F2P is built around extraction, not experience. But I don't think the model itself is the problem -> I think most studios using it have the wrong priorities.

What would actually make you trust a free game? Not in theory, what has a game actually done that made you think "okay, this one is different"?

(Part of a team building a free to play mobile game right now, so this is something I think about genuinely and not theoretically.)

Genuinely asking because I'm working on one right now and "respect the player's time" is something we keep coming back to internally as a design principle. Easy to say, harder to actually build around tbh.

I'm curious what that looks like from the player side. Not the best game you've ever played... just one that felt like it wasn't trying to manipulate you.

Early in development we had a version with an energy system. Standard mobile stuff; you play, you run out, you wait or you pay.

We cut it. Not because it's morally wrong or whatever, just because it made the game worse. The idle loop we built doesn't work if you're rationing sessions. The whole point is that you come back when you want to, not when a timer tells you to.

The no forced-ads decision came from the same place. We wanted to build something we'd actually want to play ourselves daily. That's a weird constraint to put on a free mobile game but it's the one we kept coming back to.

Whether that's sustainable long term is a real question we don't have a perfect answer to yet. But it felt like the right call for the kind of game Lost Tower is trying to be.

I've been trying to articulate this clearly and I think I finally have it tbh !

The games that feel condescending are the ones where every upgrade is clearly correct. There's a most-efficient path and it's either obvious or available on a wiki in ten minutes. Your choices don't have real consequences because the system is shallow enough that all roads lead to approximately the same outcome.

The games that respect you are the ones where the upgrade decision has a genuine opportunity cost. Choosing X over Y changes your run in ways that are legible in hindsight but genuinely uncertain in the moment.

Most of the games I respect in this genre; Realm Grinder, Antimatter Dimensions, Melvor Idle at its best, have this property. There are real builds, real tradeoffs, real reasons why a Time+Ice combination plays differently from a War+Life combination.

I've been watching a mobile game in development called Lost Tower that's trying to bring this to mobile tower defense with a strong lore and nice game design. Their parchment system (rare upgrades that change ability logic rather than just adding stats) sounds like exactly this design intention. Pre-launch, so unverified.

What games in your experience best exemplify upgrades that actually matter?

One of those questions where the answer is obviously "it depends" but I want the real answer tbh, not the safe answer.

We've been sitting on a build of our mobile game that is playable with very nice game design/lore, has the core loop working, and would generate useful feedback. But the presentation layer isn't finished, some screens are placeholder, and certain mechanics don't have their full visual feedback/review yet.

The instinct is to wait until it looks 100% right. But every week we wait is a week we're not finding out whether the core design actually works.

I keep coming back to the idea that what external testers are evaluating isn't the polish, it's the design. And the design is as ready as it's going to get without external feedback.

We're building the Lost Tower, mobile tower defense, god power system, idle mechanics. Still pre-beta. I think we're at the point where the right answer is to open it up to a small group and accept the discomfort of showing something unfinished.

How did you know when the time was right?

Sensor Tower published their State of Gaming 2026 report last month, covering full-year 2025 data. It's the first year they've aggregated mobile, PC, and console into a single report, which itself tells you something about how the competitive framing of the industry has shifted.

The headline numbers, and why some of them are genuinely surprising:

Mobile game IAP revenue grew a barely-there 1.3% to $81.75 billion in 2025. Sounds okay until you see that non-gaming apps hit $85.6 billion, a 21% increase. For the first time ever, consumers spent more on non-game apps than games on mobile. ChatGPT, CapCut and WeTV each crossed the $1 billion IAP mark in 2025. No new games did.

Downloads kept falling tbh ➟ 50.41 billion in 2025, down 7.2% year-over-year, with the decline actually accelerating versus 2024. App Store down 5.7%. Google Play down 7.3%. This is the second consecutive year of declining downloads.

Meanwhile PC/Console posted a completely different story. Aggregate PC/Console revenue rose 13% in 2025. Steam broke records for game sales, units, and number of titles released. The top-selling game of the year was Battlefield 6, with R.E.P.O. and PEAK, two viral indie co-op titles made by tiny teams; coming in at #2 and #3, comfortably beating most AAA releases.

The top 1% of apps generated 92.2% of all IAP revenue in 2025. The remaining 99% of games split $13 billion between them.

One genuine bright spot in mobile: Strategy was the only genre to post gains across revenue, downloads, and time spent simultaneously. Last War: Survival and Whiteout Survival were the two highest-grossing mobile games of 2025. The CEO of Sensor Tower put it plainly: "mobile has entered a more mature phase. While downloads are harder to scale, opportunity has shifted to favor developers who prioritize retention, monetization, and innovation."

The debate I actually want to have:
Does the mobile trajectory described here, revenue barely growing, downloads accelerating downward, non-gaming apps eating the monetization pie, concentration in the top 1%, represent a structural platform decline or a market correction toward sustainability?

The optimistic read is: this is what maturity looks like, fewer garbage games, more retention-focused design, the strategy genre thriving because it's one of the few that actually delivers depth, even in the small-scale/market stuff, you can see teams building for the post-quantity era ➟ things like Into the Breach, Balatro mobile, Vampire Survivors, or smaller pre-launch projects like Lost Tower that are trying to compete on design depth rather than acquisition volume.

The pessimistic read: the concentration stats are damning. If 1% of games generate 92% of revenue, the "strategy maturity" framing is just narrative cover for an increasingly winner-take-all market, like always. The indie success stories exist, but they're statistical outliers in a market structurally dominated by a handful of publishers with the budget to run live ops at scale.

And then there's the platform comparison that nobody really wants to sit with: R.E.P.O. and PEAK, games made by tiny teams with essentially no marketing budget. Were the second and third best-selling games of 2025 on PC/Console. That story just doesn't exist on mobile in the same way, I feel.

With GTA VI dropping on console later this year (we hope...), and almost certainly dominating the conversation across every platform; this tension between where the money goes and where the culture lives is about to get a lot harder to ignore.

This is a genuine creative challenge I've been thinking about.

There are a few games in pre-launch development that I find genuinely interesting, the design discussions, the dev stories, the lore and storytelling, the building of the community/superfan base. I want to make content about that process. But every time I try to script something, it ends up sounding like a sponsored video even though there's no sponsor.

Part of the problem is that "here's a game that doesn't exist yet" naturally invites speculation and hype language, which is exactly the tone I want to avoid for gaming content creation.

I've been following Lost Tower in particular, mobile tower defense, still in pre-beta -> and the development conversation around it is legitimately interesting. The god power system, the design decisions they almost made and didn't, the challenge of communicating idle game depth to new players. But I have no idea how to cover that authentically in video content without it reading as promotion.

Has anyone cracked this format? "Game that doesn't exist yet" as a content subject without the promotional undertone?

The site is up. Three sections: Game, Studio, and Press.

Game covers everything about Lost Tower mobile game ➟ the four gods, the core loop, what makes the idle and tower defense mechanics actually work together rather than just coexist. If you've been following along here, it's the first time everything is in one place rather than spread across Discord messages and Reddit threads.

Studio is AWO Gaming's page ➟ who we are, where this came from, what we're building toward. Small team. French studio. Been at this for a while. Worth reading if you want the context behind the design decisions we've been talking about publicly.

Press is there for anyone covering indie mobile games ➟ assets, the pitch, contact info. If you know journalists or creators in the mobile or indie gaming space, now there's something proper to send them.

The beta is the next milestone. The Discord is where early access happens when it opens.

https://awogaming.com/