Acquisition Costs Have Risen, but Loyalty Has Not
The global iGaming market continues to grow. According to estimates, from $103 billion in 2025 to a projected $169 billion in 2030. But it is precisely the market's growth that creates the problem: competition for each new player is intensifying faster than the market itself is growing. In some EU markets, the cost per acquisition (CPA) has risen by almost 30% year over year.
At the same time, retention remains the industry's weak spot. According to research data, the average player retention rate in iGaming stays at around 37 to 40%, while in traditional media this figure reaches 84%. Mykhailo Zborovskyi draws attention precisely to this difference: today a player can choose from several licensed operators at once, and the threshold for switching to a competitor is low.
Why One Percent of Retention Matters More Than It Seems
In my opinion, the most important insight of recent years is this: not all players affect the business equally. In a typical iGaming product, a small share of players, often less than 5%, generates the bulk of the platform's revenue.
This means that a 1% drop in retention among casual players and the same drop among the top segment are two events with completely different consequences. The second can knock the financial foundation of the entire marketing budget out from under the business.
As of 2026, the best operators achieve a Day-30 retention rate of 30 to 40%, which is roughly twice the industry average of 15 to 25%. According to Zborovskyi, the gap between the average market player and the leader is not cosmetic but structural.
What Actually Affects Retention, and What Only Looks Effective
If you strip away the marketing rhetoric, Mykhailo Zborovskyi identifies a set of factors that really affect retention:
- Speed of response in the moment. A player decides whether to continue or not during an active session, not a few days after it. Retention mechanics with a delayed response (for example, next-day mailings) lose part of their effect precisely because of this delay;
- Personalization based on real behavior. Not generic bonuses for everyone, but offers that match the actual activity of a specific player;
- Stability of the technical infrastructure. The best retention strategies will not work if the core product – loading speed, withdrawals, support – remains unstable;
- Compliance with responsible gambling regulatory requirements. There is an important nuance here. Retention mechanics in iGaming operate within the requirements of responsible gambling, and this is a fundamental difference from ordinary gamified products, where there are no such restrictions.
Why Aggressive Bonuses Lose to a Personalized Experience
According to observations by the aggregator Infingame, operators that rely mainly on static bonus campaigns and expanding their game library show lower acquisition efficiency compared to platforms that have bet on convenient UX, localization and real-time personalization of promo offers.
This is consistent with what Mykhailo Zborovskyi sees in practice. Players are becoming less and less tolerant of friction in the experience and more and more demanding about how well a product understands them specifically, rather than offering the same deal to everyone at once.
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The figures in our materials are taken from open industry research and public reports. Before publication, we compare several sources and indicate where a figure is a forecast and where it is a fact. For the methodological foundations of risk management, we rely on the recommendations of NIST and ENISA.
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