How We Help To Get You On The Top 100 Leaderboard

The average age of the top-grossing mobile games in the market is over 8 years old, with ~60% of these games launched when the iPhone still had a single-digit version number (it’s wild to think about the technology that these games were built on). Only 15% of the top 100 games were launched within the last 12 months. Zero games in the top 50 charts were launched in the last year. Plan A intentionally built a fund structure, a team and tools to help talented operators with great games climb the leaderboard and hit the Top 100.

Why aren’t new games breaking through?

To be fair, the top-revenue-generating games in the market are great products, built on years of live ops content. But I’ve seen product managers decipher the early experience of top games screen by screen. Level tuning and game balance are hardly a secret; most popular products have a very active Reddit community where players document every detail of tuning and balancing; even a slight change deployed through an A/B test gets discussed and debated.

Is it a lack of volume of great products in the marketplace? We’ve seen twice the volume of new products launched in 2025 vs. 2024. There are clearly new, innovative products from talented studios with the potential to become the next top 100 games.

It’s not talent. It’s capital.

Plan A Games was built on the hypothesis that it was the lack of flexible capital, not a lack of talent or game-making know-how, that prevented new games from climbing into the top 100 grossing leaderboard.

Starting in 2020, there was a boom in VC investment into mobile games because of the significant increase in engagement and monetization of gaming during that period. The return-to-office shift and market reopening then triggered a capital drought in 2022 and 2023, leaving talented game developers who had recently been funded by venture money without the capital they needed to grow their businesses and products.

Cohort lending helps with user acquisition, but it’s a less efficient way to solve the studio’s broader growth problem. The acquisition costs of the cohort have to be paid back in the form of the revenue share monthly. The studio has to wait until the cohort is completely paid back in order to get the incremental capital to operationally grow. Plan A Games’ structure is built to solve the cash crunch more quickly when studios need to grow the game and the organization at the same time. We fund 100% of all UA spend instead of only a percentage, and we don’t require the outstanding balance to be repaid until the end of the funding term. The structure and service that we provide are designed to support studios with ambition to break into the top 100 grossing charts.

How Plan A Games works

While Plan A Games only funds user acquisition of a single product, the studio can leverage the cash provided to grow the studio operations. Plan A Games funds the high cost of UA through the facility, and the developer partner can use the cash returned from the game’s revenue to reinvest into the studio operations for growth.

”We fund 100% of all UA spend instead of only a percentage, and we don’t require the outstanding balance to be repaid until the end of the funding term.”

During the term, the funds can be drawn, paid back, and redrawn. The developer is only responsible for paying back a low monthly charge on the outstanding balance. A significant amount of cash can be freed up in a very short amount of time through this structure. We have simple calculators that show this in action - happy to walk anyone through it.

What we ask in return

The Plan A funding structure provides significant access to flexible capital that can be used to scale both the products and the studio operations. The success fee only triggers when the game achieves significant growth. There are two components:

• The target: calculated based on the developer’s planned user acquisition spending. We’re comfortable with developers telling us they have ambitions to grow the game into the top 100 charts. That’s exactly what the structure is designed for.
• The fee: a share of the partner’s cash flow only if the target is reached. This is small when compared to the total enterprise value of the company in the success scenario or the cost of capital of other structures with similar flexibility.

Great games don’t fail on talent. They fail on capital runway to scale. Plan A Games was built to fix that. Please chat with us — we want to support your ambition for growth.

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