Everyone knows that Turkey is a hot market and Vietnam is the next mobile powerhouse. That popularity makes them crowded and increasingly expensive. With skyrocketing UA costs and tight capital, finding an edge means looking where others aren't. For investors, it’s about backing talent hubs early. For founders, an uncrowded, inexpensive hub stretches the runway. For studios, it means knowing where your next major rival may already be scaling quietly in an overlooked region.
But which up-and-coming mobile development regions are flying under the radar? In this article, we uncover two underrated mobile development regions with entirely different playbooks. One excels at scale, while the other excels at sophistication.
We pulled Sensor Tower data for the top 1,000 mobile games by downloads from 2021 to 2025, grouping them by publishing country. Using downloads CAGR as a primary growth filter — and adjusting with a 2023–2025 window for countries missing 2021 baselines — we identified the top 10 growth regions:
From this list, we stripped out corporate outliers and established powerhouses. Singapore and Hong Kong were culled because their volume is heavily inflated by mainland Chinese studios using them as international publishing shells. Known F2P heavyweights like South Korea and Vietnam were also removed to preserve our focus on truly overlooked markets.
With this filter, we surfaced some countries that are less well known as mobile F2P powerhouses. For example, Latvia and the Netherlands show strong downloads growth and good absolute download numbers (over 100M each). Romania, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan are also interesting, with a 2023-2025 CAGR of 50% and strong download numbers. Finally, the UAE shows a strong five-year CAGR and very strong absolute download numbers (second only to Pakistan), making it worthy of investigating.
To determine if this regional growth points to an expanding local ecosystem or just a single hit-driven studio, we tracked the volume of unique publishers entering the top 1,000 download charts over a five-year period:
Pakistan and the UAE emerge as clear scale outliers. However, the UAE’s apparent boom comes with a major asterisk: asset localization. Granular analysis reveals that the majority of top UAE entities are corporate transplants fleeing geopolitical and tax pressures in Russia and Belarus. For example, Starplay Games — the UAE publisher behind the 2025 download hit Spider Fighter — houses the vast majority of its development staff in Belarus. Stripping away these shell relocations, we remove the UAE to focus on native ecosystem growth.
Now, let’s perform the same exercise, except with revenue, to round out our list of countries to investigate.
To unearth true hidden gems, we filtered out established mobile heavyweights like Turkey, Vietnam, Singapore, Israel, France, and Cyprus. We also discarded an "Unknown" country category from the Sensor Tower data, which manual checks revealed to be a fragmented mix of Chinese and Hong Kong corporate subsidiaries.
For France, a quick check shows that growth is indeed coming from the usual suspects, Voodoo and Homa. According to a Sensor Tower estimate, Homa has grown IAP revenue by +385% from 2024-2025, successfully riding the hypercasual to hybridcasual wave. But since these are known, we’ll also cull them from the list.
Russia has shown quite a respectable five- and three-year growth, but its talent in mobile development is well known, with many of the top mobile publishers like Playrix, Nexters, and Wargaming, all tracing their lineage to Russia. That leaves us with the dark horse, Estonia, which has the greatest revenue growth over the last three years.
A quick look at the number of publishers shows a very small but growing presence, so let’s add it to our shortlist which is composed of the top countries remaining after removing powerhouse markets and those which are more of a “shell” presence. This leaves us with:
- Pakistan
- Latvia
- Estonia
Besides Pakistan, the other two emerging countries are Baltic states. While it has not made our list, the third Baltic state, Lithuania, is also well known as a tech and mobile games hub, with many mobile game companies having a presence there. So it makes sense to look at the Baltic states together to see if there are synergies enabling regional growth.
With our shortlist complete, let’s dig deeper into both Pakistan and the Baltic states and see who the biggest players in each region are.
Pakistan
The top publisher by downloads and revenue in Pakistan, based on 2025 figures, is Game District, with The Fashion Valley a distant second by downloads.
Both studios experienced explosive growth curves in late 2024, with The Fashion Valley increasing its downloads tenfold from October 2024-2025. However, their collective revenue trajectories expose Pakistan's bottleneck: an over-reliance on low-yield, ad-monetized hypercasual games that fail to capture meaningful IAP revenue.
However, there’s a very successful studio not included here due to its publishing relationship with Lion Studios — Mindstorm Studios. Co-founded by an ex-VP Product Strategy of AppLovin, Mindstorm’s games brought in 32M downloads and $28M in revenue in 2025, the bulk of it from hybridcasual hit Hexa Sort.
Mindstorm cut its teeth with Lion Studios from the hypercasual days and has successfully bridged the gap to hybridcasual. Game District has also made moves to level up, acquiring Turkish studio Gleam Games, with its CEO now acting as Game District’s Chief Strategy Officer, resulting in 2025 revenue being up +55% YoY, while still remaining largely bootstrapped.
That’s the path that other studios will need to follow to learn how to make and release hybridcasual and even IAP-based titles without multi-accounting (where they release very similar games on different accounts) or handholding from external publishers. Hopefully, there’ll be an element of trickle-down talent, with developers that cut their teeth in Mindstorm and Game District springing forth to build their own studios.
Will Pakistan be the next mobile growth hub? In a way, it already is, with it contributing more than 1B downloads in 2025. What will make it a real global force is its ability to learn how to convert those downloads into paying customers.
Baltic States
As we covered above, two out of the three countries of interest are Baltic states, so it makes sense to look at these countries as a region of interest. Looking at each country’s top publisher by 2025 revenue also shows an undeniable link between them.
The image below shows Estoty (top publisher in Latvia), Melsoft (originally from Minsk, but now operating mainly in Lithuania), and Plummy Games (top publisher in Estonia, with offices in Moldova).
Lithuania, the most populous of the Baltic states (2.8M habitants), has long been a tech hub. Vilnius, its capital, is a European leader in fintech. It also houses offices of major gaming companies like Wargaming, Belka Games, Unity, Moon Active (through its acquisition of Melsoft), alongside the largest home-grown publisher, Nordcurrent.
It is also the largest mobile publishing country in the Baltics, and in 2025, contributed to $160M in IAP revenue based on Sensor Tower estimates.
Estonia is the smallest of the Baltic states with a population of 1.3M and the country with the largest revenue growth over the last three years. That growth was driven by one publisher, Plummy Games, whose co-founders came from Peak. Estonia is also a major tech and startup hub; it has the highest Unicorn per capita in Europe and has birthed major companies like Wise, Bolt, Skype, and igaming company Playtech, among others.
However, the success of the tech and igaming industry there and the small population may be a detriment to the growth of its games industry. Besides Plummy, there aren’t that many new and successful publishers.
Nevertheless, there are signs of growth. We noticed multiple job ads from Voodoo based in Estonia (and one from Plummy), while Netflix acquired Estonian virtual avatar startup, Ready Player Me, in January of this year.
The final country, Latvia, has a similar population to Lithuania (1.8M). It is the smallest country by publisher revenue but it punches above its weight in terms of downloads, contributing almost 200M in downloads.
The big success story out of Latvia is Estoty. The name may be familiar to those of you who play hypercasual games. For everyone else, Estoty is responsible for some of the genre's biggest hits, including:
- Sand Balls
- Johnny Trigger
- Jelly Shift
- Knife Hit
- Blend It 3D
- My Little Universe
When factoring in titles Estoty shipped through major third-party hypercasual publishers, their additional portfolio represented more than 88M downloads and $4.9M in revenue for 2025 alone (accumulating an incredible 1.6B lifetime downloads and $52M revenue).
Interestingly, one of its largest hits, Sand Balls, was developed in conjunction with another Latvian developer, Hypercell, the second largest Latvian publisher by downloads. This LinkedIn post suggests that the original game came from Hypercell, but they likely collaborated with Estoty.
While Estoty’s self-published games haven’t reached the levels of their previous titles, they are still very successful, with its portfolio bringing in 122.8M downloads and $4.3M in revenue.
Conclusion
The two regions we looked at, Pakistan and the Baltics, are a tale of two “cities.” Pakistani studios are great at creating mass-market, fast-follow hypercasual titles that get billions of downloads but struggle with IAP revenue. The major opportunity here lies in injecting sophisticated product management and IAP design expertise into highly efficient local engineering teams.
The Baltics, however, punch way above their weight, with studios like Melsoft, Nordcurrent, and Estoty showing that the region has the talent to create popular and successful titles. While running at a higher cost-of-living index than Istanbul or Hanoi, the region offers Western-grade tech infrastructure, elite talent density, and an incredibly mature tech ecosystem at a fraction of London or Berlin costs. The next leap here will rely on these anchor studios turning into talent incubators. We need an “Estoty Mafia” to recycle talent and capital back into the ecosystem.
Ultimately, tracking these micro-hubs is how you identify tomorrow’s breakout partners or rivals, before they become mainstream and expensive. In a crowded market, uncovering these hidden talent pools early is the ultimate strategic advantage.
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In Other News
💸 Funding & Acquisitions:
- AppsFlyer secures over $1B investment from Moloco, Google, Meta and Unity.
- San Francisco-based fund Denmu raises $50M fund to fuel visionary game makers.
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- Kotoba Technologies raises $10M for real-time voice AI platform in East Asia.
📊 Business & Products:
- Xsolla data reveals direct-to-consumer PC game transactions surpassed $1B in 2025.
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- Fortnite surpasses 1M daily App Store installs for first time ever after global comeback.
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- The U.S. game industry will hit a cyclical downturn in 2027 despite GTA VI launch.
- Jio files for IPO that could become India’s largest share sale.
- Tencent explores exits from Japanese game studio investments amid portfolio review.
👾 Miscellaneous:
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- Google Play offers expanded billing choices and lower fees for game devs.
- Brawl Stars teams up with Adidas for first apparel collaboration.
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The AppsFlyer Investment and the New Dynamics of Mobile Attribution(with Olivia Kory) (Mobile Dev Memo Podcast): “On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Olivia Kory, the CMO of Haus, to discuss the recent $1B Investment in AppsFlyer by Meta, Google, Unity, and Moloco, and the shifting landscape of mobile measurement it portends. We explore the strategic motivations behind major ad platforms banding together to ensure measurement neutrality and how the industry is moving toward more sophisticated incrementality models.”
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