Beyond games: what 2,695 players across 7 countries revealed about mobile gaming, monetisation and Google's next billion users
Mantaray led cross-cultural user research across Southeast Asia, South Asia and Latin America for Google's Android Growth team. The findings challenged long-held product assumptions and made one thing clear: the next billion users aren't waiting to be discovered, they are already playing.
Why do they play, what keeps them playing, and where is the monetisation opportunity?
Mobile gaming in emerging markets is growing fast. Most people in the industry already know that much. What's harder to find is a clear-eyed understanding of why people play, what keeps them coming back and what would actually persuade them to spend money doing it.
That's precisely what Google's Android Growth Team needed. The brief wasn't about tracking downloads or benchmarking retention rates. It was about something more grounded: building a genuine, evidence-based understanding of the people behind the numbers across seven of Android's most strategically important growth markets.
The core problem was straightforward to state, if harder to solve. Despite Android's dominance across Southeast Asia, South Asia and Latin America, Google's gaming ecosystem had largely been shaped by assumptions built elsewhere, for audiences that look nothing like the players in Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai, Ho Chi Minh City, São Paulo, Mexico City or Bogotá. The product experience, the monetisation mechanics, and the way games are discovered and recommended; all of it had been built upstream of the billion-plus players it was supposed to serve.
Mantaray was brought in to close that gap. The research needed to cover the full gaming spectrum; from hypercasual and casual to midcore titles, and map behaviour across four distinct player profiles. Without that depth and specificity, any product strategy would remain a poorly targeted approach for an audience that deserves much better.
The research at a glance
7
Markets
Across Southeast Asia, South Asia and Latin America
98
In-depth interviews
14 per country, one-to-one sessions
2,695
Survey responses
385 per country, statistically validated
4
Player profiles
From enthusiasts to dabblers
How we approached it
We designed a mixed-methodology research approach that could hold scale and cultural nuance at the same time. We ran a two-phase, mixed-methods study across all seven countries simultaneously, with locally recruited participants and moderators and market-specific interpretation at every stage of analysis.
In-depth interviews – 14 per country (98 total)
One-to-one sessions exploring gaming motivations, daily habits, emotional relationships with play, barriers to deeper engagement, and honest reactions to the existing Google Play and Android experience. We recruited across all four player profiles.
Quantitative surveys – 385 per country (2,695 total)
Structured surveys built to validate and scale the patterns that surfaced in qualitative sessions, giving statistical weight to what was heard in conversation and enabling confident cross-market comparison.
Markets covered
Indonesia
Philippines
India
Vietnam
Brazil
Mexico
Colombia
These markets were selected for specific reasons. Each represents a distinct relationship with Android, mobile infrastructure, digital payments and gaming culture. What they share: high Android penetration, growing middle classes, and young, mobile-first populations. What they don't share: culture, social context or the lived experience of being a gamer within them.
Philippines
Gaming is often communal, woven into family routines and social rituals.
Vietnam
Conversations about personal spending require a different kind of sensitivity than they do in Brazil.
India
The diversity within a single country rivals the diversity across all seven markets combined.
Brazil
A distinct digital payments culture and a rapidly growing mobile-first gaming population.
The four player profiles
Understanding who plays, and how, was central to the research design. Four distinct profiles emerged across all seven markets, each with different motivations, habits, and commercial potential.
The enthusiast
Highly engaged and emotionally invested. Gaming is identity, not just a pastime. Most likely to spend.
The busy hobbyist
Genuinely enjoys gaming but time-constrained. Short, habitual sessions. Values speed and convenience above everything.
The persistent puzzler
Loyal and deeply habitual. Returns to a small set of titles repeatedly. Low variety, very high retention.
The dabbler
Low intent, plays incidentally. Significant untapped conversion potential if the right friction is removed.
What the research revealed
The formal findings will shape Google's product direction in ways that aren't ours to detail here. What Mantaray can share are the UX insights that emerged from spending real time with real people across seven markets. These are the findings that only surface when you set aside assumptions and actually listen.
The personal device assumption is a design flaw
Across multiple markets, smartphones are shared household objects. A product built around individual profiles and private payment histories is, for a significant proportion of these users, a product that was never really built for them.
Monetisation barriers are structural, not motivational
Across all 7 markets, participants regularly expressed genuine willingness to support games they loved. The blockers were almost never "I don't want to spend." But rather, "I don't trust this payment system. I can't access the right payment method. I'm afraid of being charged without warning." These are infrastructure and trust problems.
Casual doesn't mean low-value
The persistent puzzler and busy hobbyist profiles represent some of the most commercially significant opportunities in these markets.
The Android ecosystem is its own invisible barrier
Most participants were deeply reliant on Android, yet the majority had no idea how much of Google's gaming infrastructure was available to them. Discovery is broken. The foundation for a genuinely unified gaming experience exists yet not utilised.
Localisation signals respect, and its absence signals the opposite
Players across all seven markets were acutely aware of when a game was built for them and when it was adapted as an afterthought. Currency, cultural references, and in-game event timing relative to local festivals are not just cosmetic details. They determine whether a product feels like it belongs in someone's life or merely functions within it.
Gaming is social infrastructure
In the Philippines, Colombia and Indonesia especially, mobile gaming is a primary way people maintain social bonds across geographically dispersed families and communities. Features built around individual play modes miss the social architecture that provides gaming its meaning. The next billion users don't play by themselves.
A final thought
What this research reinforced, more than any single data point, is that great UX work starts with refusing to let prior assumptions do the heavy lifting. Every market the team entered, they entered with hypotheses. Every market pushed back on at least one of them. That's not a failure of the research. That's the research doing exactly what it should.
The people who gave their time across seven countries weren't data sources. They were experts in their own experience, and the generosity with which they shared it is what makes work like this possible. The least any product team can do is make sure those insights lead somewhere real.
Google has the scale, the platform and now the evidence to build a gaming ecosystem that genuinely reflects the diversity of its users. That's a rare combination, and it's an exciting one.
Join the conversation
Are you working on a product or growth strategy that needs to hold up across cultures and markets? Mantaray Africa would love to hear what you're navigating. Share your experience or get in touch directly. These are conversations worth having.

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