When we introduced last year's annual list of the best games in this space, we focused on how COVID delays led to a 2023 packed with excellent big-name blockbusters and intriguing indies that seemed to come out of nowhere. The resulting flood of great titles made it difficult to winnow the year's best down to our traditional list of 20 titles.
In 2024 we had something close to the opposite problem. While there were definitely a few standout titles that were easy to include on this year's list (Balatro, UFO 50, and Astro Bot likely chief among them), rounding out the list to a full 20 proved more challenging than it has in perhaps any other year during my tenure at Ars Technica (way back in 2012!). The games that ended up on this year's list are all strong recommendations, for sure. But many of them might have had more trouble making a Top 20 list in a packed year like 2023.
We'll have to wait to see if the release calendar seesaws back to a quality-packed one in 2025, but the forecast for big games like Civilization 7, Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, Grand Theft Auto 6, and many, many more has us thinking that it might. In the meantime, here are our picks for the 20 best games that came out in 2024, in alphabetical order.
A software update was supposed to free up the PS Portal from its reliance on the PS5 and add a world of streamable games to its appeal. In practice, it does nothing of the sort.
At their best, "remastered" video games keep terrific older titles viable on new generations of hardware and for new generations of fans. At their worst, they can feel like a cash-in.
So it was with some trepidation that I recently fired up the "remastered" Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game which won me over years ago with its PS4 version due to the simple fact that it was ONE OF THE BEST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME and featured ONE OF THE BEST PROTAGONISTS OF ALL TIME in one of the BEST STORIES OF ALL TIME. (Yes, I like superlatives, which are some of the BEST WORDS OF ALL TIME. But the game world really was terrific.) Even my kids were won over, playing through the game and its sequel multiple times.
The game tells the story of a future Earth long after catastrophe—in the form of an autonomous robotic swarm—has ruined the planet. But it's not mere dystopia, though one does come across many wrecked and overgrown spaces from that earlier age. Horizon instead focuses on how humans, having lost most of their past knowledge, rebuilt a world in tribal fashion, a world populated by animal-inspired machines. The game's story operates ambitiously in two timelines and features massive killer robots, cults, and mad Sun Kings, all set against the gorgeous background of the American West.
While there remain regular laptops and gaming laptops, the line that separates them has nearly disappeared. Today, if you have a fast CPU and graphics card, along with perks like a big screen and a good cooling system, you can play a decent number of games on your laptop. Besides, not everyone wants a big, garish gaming rig, nor does everyone want to spend the money required to get one of those. If you’re considering a new laptop for school, there are more options now than ever before that can both get you through your most challenging studies and keep up with your next AAA play through. These are our top picks for the best laptops for gaming and schoolwork — but if you’re looking for a dedicated gaming laptop rather than an all-in-one machine, check out our best gaming laptops list for our recommendations.
Best laptops for gaming and school in 2025
Are gaming laptops good for school?
As we’ve mentioned, gaming laptops are especially helpful if you're doing any demanding work. Their big promise is powerful graphics performance, which isn't just limited to PC gaming. Video editing and 3D rendering programs can also tap into their GPUs to handle laborious tasks. While you can find decent GPUs on some productivity machines, like Dell's XPS 15, you can sometimes find better deals on gaming laptops. My general advice for any new workhorse: Pay attention to the specs; get at least 16GB of RAM and the largest solid state drive you can find (ideally 1TB or more). Those components are both typically hard to upgrade down the line, so it’s worth investing what you can up front to get the most out of your PC gaming experience long term. Also, don’t forget the basics like a webcam, which will likely be necessary for the schoolwork portion of your activities.
The one big downside to choosing a gaming notebook is portability. For the most part, we'd recommend 15-inch models to get the best balance of size and price. Those typically weigh in around 4.5 pounds, which is significantly more than a three-pound ultraportable. Today's gaming notebooks are still far lighter than older models, though, so at least you won't be lugging around a 10-pound brick. If you’re looking for something lighter, there are plenty of 14-inch options these days. And if you're not into LED lights and other gamer-centric bling, keep an eye out for more understated models that still feature essentials like a webcam (or make sure you know how to turn those lights off).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/best-laptops-for-gaming-and-school-132207352.html?src=rss
TuSimple has completed its pivot away from autonomous trucking to AI animation and gaming with a rebrand. The company shall henceforth be known as CreateAI. The rebrand comes as TuSimple is embroiled in controversy over the company’s plans to move its remaining U.S. assets to China to fund the new business, which it initially announced […]
Stalker 2 had big performance issues and game-breaking bugs, along with balance and difficulty spike issues. Some things that seem "wrong" in the game are just going to stay that way. The first-person survival/shooter series has always had a certain wobbly, wild feel to it. This expresses itself in both the game world, where a major villain can off themselves by walking through a window, and in the tech stack, where broken save games, DIY optimization, and other unmet needs have created thriving mod scenes.
Developer GSC Game World has been steadfastly patching the game since its release, and the latest one should nudge the needle a bit from "busted" to "charmingly wonky." Amid the "Over 1,800 fixes and adjustments" in Patch 1.1, the big changes are to "A-Life." In porting Stalker 2 to Unreal Engine 5, the developer faced a challenge in getting this global AI management system working, but it's showing its weird self again.
A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions is returning to the spotlight. Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf (pictured above, right) describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer products based on the lab’s work. […]
If it feels like everybody's betting nowadays, it's because a whole lot of people are. 2024 was the year companies from sportsbooks to prediction markets to trading apps asked, "Wanna bet?" And Americans responded with a resounding yes.
The ground has shifted on gambling in the US in recent years as it's become easier than ever to try your luck at, well, a lot of things. In a survey conducted in July and August for the American Gaming Association, 55% of surveyed adults said they had participated in some sort of gambling over the past year, up from 49% in 2023. Americans are expected to wager some $150 billion on sports this year, up from about $120 billion in 2023. People bet tens of millions of dollars on the 2024 election, with companies such as Polymarket and Kalshi raking in big bucks. The trading platform Robinhood got into presidential-election betting, and it says it's looking into sports gambling now, too.
It's not just explicit betting, either. A lot of "investing" looks very much like gambling nowadays. There's an increasing acknowledgment that the point of bitcoin is really "number go up" (and down), that it's a speculative investment without much of a use case. Small-time investors doing options trading on platforms such as Robinhood aren't banking on a stock's underlying value; they're just guessing at where it's headed over the next little while. And the meme coins are just complete casinolike chaos, full of pump and dumps and rug pulls and meteoric rises and falls.
Even if you're not putting money on the line, it's almost impossible to escape the proliferation of gambling. There are unceasing commercials during sports games and a deluge of ads on our phones. Culturally, the broader acceptance of gambling is on the upswing — betting's positioned as cool and exciting and fun. There's not so much focus on the downsides yet. Betting is in its Marlboro Man era, and a lot of people are dealt in.
"There's definitely a younger cohort that is trying to — I don't want to say get rich fast, but they're looking for ways to get around the system," Chad Beynon, an equity analyst at Macquarie, said.
That can take a lot of formats — betting on a football game or piling into a meme coin because some guy on X said it was the next big thing. It sounds more appealing, though not more realistic, than a traditional 9-to-5 job. That's especially pertinent in an economy where people don't feel particularly optimistic about their prospects. Instead of a "vibecession," maybe what's happening is a "vibe-screw-it."
The most novel — and notable — gambling story in the US remains the explosion of sports betting. Since the Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal law prohibiting it, 38 states plus Washington, DC, have legalized wagering on games. The past few years have been a land grab of sorts, with companies such as DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars, MGM, and even Disney (via ESPN) trying to get a piece of what they hope will be a very lucrative pie.
"That's the one that opened the floodgates in terms of creating a large addressable market and throwing a spotlight on the scale of the US online-gambling opportunity," Chris Grove, a sports-gambling-industry investor at Acies Investments, said.
The top two operators — DraftKings and FanDuel — have managed to amass a lot of market share and start to venture into other arenas, such as lotteries and iGaming, the industry term for online blackjack, roulette, and slot machines, which is thus far legal in only a handful of states. Adjacent products around daily fantasy sports, such as PrizePicks, have taken hold as well. It "just shows that consumers are clamoring for something," Grove said.
The takeoff of sports gambling has many businesses looking around and wondering just what else people are willing to bet on.
There's still room for growth in sports betting, though it's increasingly limited. There are some big holdout markets, such as Texas and California, and only about one-fifth of the population has bet on a sport in the past year, according to the AGA. But the holdout states are holding out for a reason, and at least some aren't likely to change course. Companies sort of have to look elsewhere to get people to open their wallets.
"For the business model to work, you probably need to cross-sell to other areas," Beynon said.
The takeoff of sports gambling has many businesses looking around and wondering just what else people are willing to bet on — and, in many cases, guessing correctly that the list of possibilities is long. Maybe sports betting isn't for you. That's fine, but what about an online lottery? Or sweepstakes casinos? Or a slot machine on your phone? Or the next Treasury secretary of the United States?
"The minute that you got widespread regulated online gambling in the US, it was inevitable that nontraditional stakeholders were going to look at getting in on the action," Grove said. "Robinhood is one example of that, and prediction markets are one of the most likely vectors for that expansion, but they're far from the only brand or the only vector that we're going to see explore online gambling in years ahead."
Beyond sports betting, 2024 was a monumental year for prediction markets and crypto. People spent millions of dollars betting on the election, despite the legal gray area around political gambling. On Polymarket, players — though not Americans — can bet whether the US will confirm aliens exist or if Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO, will plead guilty. In Cryptoland, bitcoin surpassed the $100,000 mark, and despite constant scams, the meme-coin market is as alive as ever. These are not legitimate investments; they're bets people are making that they can get out before everyone else. (Sometimes, in the pump and dump, you think you're the dumper when you're really the dumpee.) Given Donald Trump's election, it doesn't look like tough regulation is coming for the crypto space anytime soon, so hold on to your hats.
Broadly, gambling has been normalized across American culture. Sports leagues used to be anxious about sports betting and worry it would turn off fans. Now they've seen the dollar signs and embraced it. The vibe around elections betting is that it's kind of cool and smart, a wisdom-of-the-crowds way to prove your political chops. With crypto, the hope is everybody's going to get their bag sooner or later, or if not, at least they think they're in on the joke.
"Every consumer has different motivations for why they're doing it," said Steve Ruddock, a gambling-industry analyst and consultant and the author of Straight to the Point, a newsletter about gambling. "Some are doing it purely for entertainment. Some are doing it as a time sink. Some small percentage are doing it because they're addicted."
It's easy — and responsible — to worry about the harms of gambling culture. There's evidence to suggest sports betting in the US is getting people into trouble with debt collectors, leading to missed car payments, and may even cause a spike in bankruptcies. When people are betting on a baseball game, they're not putting money into long-term investments, and households that are already under financial strain are harder hit. And whatever negative impacts occur aren't limited to gamblers themselves.
"The harms radiate out into families, into the economy, into many sectors of social and cultural life," said Rachel Volberg, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who researches gambling. Most research suggests about 1% of adults develop a gambling disorder. But just because you don't meet the clinical criteria for a disorder doesn't mean all is fine and dandy, Volberg said. "To only talk about the tip of the iceberg means you miss 90% of the impacts," she told me.
Gambling companies have mechanisms in place to ensure responsible gambling. (Not to mention that some companies offering crypto and high-flying stock trading say this is not gambling at all.) Reasonable minds can question how effective those are. In the US, there's a lot of impetus placed on individual gamblers to police themselves and set their own limits, and even if you do reach your limit, you can move on to another app.
The harms radiate out into families, into the economy, into many sectors of social and cultural life.
The sudden boom has pushed public health experts in the US and worldwide to sound the alarm on gambling. A recent report from The Lancet Public Health commission on gambling found that nearly 450 million people around the globe have experienced at least one behavioral symptom or negative consequence from gambling.
"The answer, globally, that the commission puts forth is, 'Come on, guys, wake up,'" said Malcolm Sparrow, a professor of the practice of public management at Harvard and one of the members of the commission. "We are in a very rapid growth period. The assumption is that legalization, which is already running a pace, is going to just continue until it's ubiquitous. And we are not paying enough attention to gambling-related harms."
Here is the thing, though: Gambling is fun. Generally, people do have a right to use their money how they please, and most can gamble responsibly. Exactly how to regulate and where to draw lines is complicated, whether you're talking about an in-game bet or an obscure penny stock or a meme coin that makes zero sense. But public health experts say it's important to figure out where to draw it.
"On many other public health issues, we are, to a degree, paternalistic," Sparrow said. "You must wear a seatbelt. We don't sell alcohol to kids."
Perhaps the weird thing about the current moment is once you start to notice the prevalence of gambling in a few places, you start to see it everywhere — I see it in my own life. I was at a New York Rangers game the other weekend, and not one but two betting apps were advertising on the ice. On a recent trip to New Jersey, I took advantage of an online casino, which is legal in the state. I lost $10 on blackjack in a matter of minutes. Beyond sports, many of my friends and family are at least dabbling in crypto and have taken note of prediction markets. One group I know is talking about organizing a party-bus trip to Atlantic City, New Jersey, just because.
It's hard not to wonder what's going on in culture now that gambling has gone from a no-no to out in the open and even hip. What's getting its claws in us, and why is it working right now in particular?
Natasha Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and the author of "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas," told me she'd identified four shared criteria of products that hook and hold us, from betting apps to dating apps, which are a little bit like gambling. They're antisocial and solitary, so you can get lost in your own flow. They offer continuous, fast feedback, which serves as reinforcement. They're unpredictable, so you can't be exactly sure when a reward will come. And they never come to a close or resolve — you just keep going. The result is that people get pulled into what she describes as a gambling "machine zone," where the world sort of falls away, and people fall into a rhythm of go, then again, then again.
"There certainly is a cultural story to tell here too, where we're living in a context of uncertainty in the world, whether politically or environmental or economic uncertainty," Schüll said. When you gamble, you're diving into uncertainty and chance, but also in an ordered, calm, digital environment that's cordoned off from the outside world. "It might start being about thrill and suspense and imagining a big win or imagining that you're having an encounter with chance," she said. "But once you put yourself in the seat, so to speak, and start having the interaction, the formatting of it and the flow of it gives you this other thing. It gives you this way to modulate your affect and go into a zone that allows you to avoid life."
It could be the case that in 10 years, we'll look back at the current moment and realize this was all fine — it was OK that people were gambling a bunch, that even major athletes were getting caught up in it. Hey, maybe even the meme-coin stuff will work out. The likelier scenario is that we wonder what we were even doing. Or we realize we probably should've done things a little differently.
Volberg, from UMass Amherst, has been studying gambling for 40 years and has seen this story play out before in other countries. Some form of gambling gets the go-ahead, it takes off, and there's a lag in realizing the consequences and getting guardrails in place appropriately.
"It's a pattern I've seen over and over again where it's after the fact," she said. "And if you don't start monitoring impacts before the actual new form of gambling is being used, you really have no idea what the baseline looked like."
The argument many companies will make is that people will gamble anyway — on sports, on elections, on whatever — and that making it legal brings that activity into the light, gets it some oversight, and generates tax revenue for the states. That's true, but also, once the government greenlights it, people who otherwise wouldn't gamble start. It's impossible to argue everyone on FanDuel right now was betting on sports on some offshore account 10 years ago. If it were that easy, sportsbooks wouldn't be investing so much in advertising to draw people in. On the meme coins, I mean, if you got bamboozled by the "Hawk Tuah" girl's crypto shenanigans, that's at least a little bit on you. But also, you probably deserve some protection next time. (But seriously, next time, maybe think that one over a bit more.)
In the meantime, may the odds be ever in your favor, because we're not getting out of gambling-palooza anytime soon.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
In theory, it ought to be as good a time as ever to be a gamer on the iPhone.
Classic console emulators have rolled out to the platform for the first time, and they work great. There are strong libraries of non-skeezy mobile games on Apple Arcade and Netflix Games, streaming via Xbox and PlayStation services is continuing apace, and there are even a few AAA console games now running natively on the platform, like Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil titles.
Some of those games need a traditional, dual-stick game controller to work well, though, and Apple bafflingly offers no first-party solution for this.
When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro a few months ago, some wondered just how many people would be willing to spend $700 for a marginal upgrade to the already quite powerful graphical performance of the PS5. Now, initial sales reports suggest there's still a substantial portion of the console market that's willing to shell out serious money for top-of-the-line console graphics.
Circana analyst Matt Piscatella shared on Bluesky this morning that the PS5 Pro accounted for a full 19 percent of US PS5 sales in its launch month of November. That sales ratio puts initial upgrade interest in the PS5 Pro roughly in line with lifetime interest in the PS4 Pro, which recent reports suggest was responsible for about 20 percent of all PS4 sales following its launch in 2016.
That US sales ratio also lines up with international sales reports for the PS5 Pro launch. In the UK, GfK ChartTrack reports that the PS5 Pro was responsible for 26 percent of all console sales for November. And in Japan, Famitsu sales data suggests the PS5 Pro was responsible for a full 63 percent of the PS5's November sales after selling an impressive 78,000 units in its launch week alone.
In the first week or so of the drive, nearly 180 readers have contributed almost $16,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of the charity drive (Child's Play is barely hanging on to a small donation lead at the moment). That's a long way off from 2020's record haul of over $58,000, but there's still plenty of time until the Charity Drive wraps up on Thursday, January 2, 2025.
That doesn't mean you should put your donation off, though. Do yourself and the charities involved a favor and give now while you're thinking about it.
When Nvidia replaced the longstanding GeForce Experience App with a new, unified Nvidia App last month, most GPU owners probably noted the refresh and rebranding with nothing more than bemusement (though the new lack of an account login requirement was a nice improvement). Now, testing shows that running the new app with default settings can lead to some significant frame rate dips on many high-end games, even when the app's advanced AI features aren't being actively used.
Tom's Hardware noted the performance dip after reading reports of related problems around the web. The site's testing with and without the Nvidia App installed confirms that, across five games running on an RTX 4060, the app reduced average frame rates by around 3 to 6 percent, depending on the resolution and graphical quality level.
The site's measured frame rate drop peaked at 12 percent for Assassin's Creed Mirage running at 1080p Ultra settings; other tested games (including Baldur's Gate 3, Black Myth: Wukong, Flight Simulator 2024, and Stalker 2) showed a smaller drop at most settings.
Rumors have suggested that Nvidia will be taking the wraps off of some next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES in January. And as we get closer to that date, Nvidia's partners and some of the PC makers have begun to inadvertently leak details of the cards.
According to recent leaks from both Zotac and Acer, it looks like Nvidia is planning to announce four new GPUs next month, all at the high end of its lineup: The RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 were all briefly listed on Zotac's website, as spotted by VideoCardz. There's also an RTX 5090D variant for the Chinese market, which will presumably have its specs tweaked to conform with current US export restrictions on high-performance GPUs.
Though the website leak didn't confirm many specs, it did list the RTX 5090 as including 32GB of GDDR7, an upgrade from the 4090's 24GB of GDDR6X. An Acer spec sheet for new Predator Orion desktops also lists 32GB of GDDR7 for the 4090, as well as 16GB of GDDR7 for the RTX 5080. This is the same amount of RAM included with the RTX 4080 and 4080 Super.
AppLovin, led by CEO Adam Foroughi, has rocketed to an over-$100-billion valuation, fueled by a recent push into e-commerce ads.
Adam Foroughi/Applovin, Tyler Le/BI
Wall Street has fallen in love with the mobile adtech and gaming company AppLovin.
AppLovin's recent push into e-commerce sent its market valuation over the $100 billion milestone.
Some ad industry insiders question the sustainability of its run, however.
Shares in the mobile ads and gaming company AppLovin have been running wild — and advertising industry insiders have a lot of questions.
AppLovin entered the Nasdaq 100 in November, with its market value surpassing the $100 billion milestone and shares up more than 780% so far this year. It's a remarkable ascent for any company, but especially for one that had flown fairly under the radar until recently, even within the ad industry itself.
At its current valuation, AppLovin dwarfs even The Trade Desk, long considered adtech's star performer, which has a market capitalization of around $65 billion.
AppLovin — which helps app developers make money through advertising and find new users through ads — has grown its share to 42% of the mobile gaming market, per analysts at Piper Sandler.
But there's one key new development that's driving its stunning stock run: e-commerce.
Bullish analysts say AppLovin has room to grow further and do for e-commerce marketers what it has for gaming companies, taking on Meta in the process.
"In all my years, it's the best product I've ever seen released by us, fastest growing, but it's still in pilot," AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi said of the company's new e-commerce product on an earnings call last month.
With its stock riding high, some industry insiders also think AppLovin could make a transformative acquisition that would make it a household name.
Still, others in the ad industry say AppLovin's business model deserves some skepticism amid its meteoric rise.
22V Research analyst John Roque wrote in a recent note that AppLovin was the most overbought stock in the Russell 3000.
AppLovin declined to comment on a list of detailed questions about its business.
Investor enthusiasm goes stratospheric
Wall Street's interest in AppLovin soared this year as the company unveiled a plan to go after a new target customer outside the mobile gaming community: e-commerce advertisers.
The move opened up a total addressable ad revenue opportunity of around $120 billion, two to three times the size of the $40 to $50 billion mobile games user acquisition market, according to Macquarie Equity senior analyst Tim Nollen.
Nollen recently raised the firm's target share price for AppLovin to $450 from $270, citing its e-commerce push.
Jones Road Beauty has been an early tester of AppLovin's e-commerce advertising offering.
Jones Road
Cody Pfloker, chief marketing and revenue officer for Jones Road Beauty, which is testing AppLovin, said direct-to-consumer advertisers are excited by the prospect of a new player in the market.
"Meta has been the dominant customer acquisition channel for brands and while other platforms have come up like TikTok a few years ago, none are either as efficient or scalable," Pfloker said. "Nothing has been able to dethrone Meta."
AppLovin says it can reach a potential audience of 1.4 billion daily active users across mobile apps and connected-TV devices — an audience comparable to Meta or Google's apps.
Pfloker said part of the appeal is that e-commerce advertisers can easily repurpose their Meta ads into ads for AppLovin's mobile games and other apps.
AppLovin is only inviting e-commerce advertisers that spend upward of $20,000 a day on Meta ads to try its product, and it's incentivizing some of those buyers with $10,000 ad credits, multiple industry insiders told BI. They, like some others in this story, requested anonymity to preserve business relationships; their identities are known to BI.
Prescient AI, a marketing measurement company, ran an analysis in October that found AppLovin delivered a 1.5 times higher return on ad spend for its customers than Meta and Google Adwords, on average.
"A pretty startling thing is happening," said Will Holtz, VP of strategy and operations at Prescient AI. The top spenders are spending 25% to 30% of their budgets on AppLovin, he said, something Prescient hasn't seen before on a new channel, except for something like TV where people bulk up spending over the holidays.
What's more, Holtz added: "They're spending incremental dollars; they're not just shifting budget away from channels like Meta."
It's worth noting that the ads are full-screen and can't be skipped, which also likely boosts some performance metrics compared to other platforms. The results are also early and could fluctuate as more advertisers come on board.
Out-Googling Google
Despite the enthusiasm from some customers, others in the digital ad community have raised concerns about AppLovin.
Some industry insiders attribute AppLovin's performance to its cornering of every part of the mobile app ad transaction.
AppLovin operates AppDiscovery, the technology that advertisers use to buy the ads; the MAX mediation technology developers use to sell their ads; and the ALX exchange that connects the two. It also has Adjust, its ad measurement platform, and AXON, an AI engine designed to improve the performance of its ads.
AppLovin, whose Palo Alto HQ is pictured here, grew annual revenue by 17% to $3.3 billion last year.
AppLovin
This could give AppLovin a unique view of the market and allow it to see what different advertisers and buying platforms are bidding. Theoretically, AppLovin could use this intelligence to refine its own ad bidding strategies.
"It's one company for monetizing your app, growing your userbase, and then grading its own homework," a mobile ad veteran told BI. "They say there's a firewall and 'we don't talk,' but it's hard to prove otherwise."
If that sounds familiar, it's because it's similar to how people often describe the approach that helped Google dominate advertising on the web. A judge in Google's adtech antitrust trial is currently weighing whether that strategy, as well as its use of other auction tactics, amounted to Google operating an illegal monopoly. Google denies this and has said the adtech market is fiercely competitive and that its innovations have brought benefits to consumers, publishers, and advertisers.
Jeromy Sonne, the founder of marketing AI technology company Simbiant, has been monitoring the early AppLovin e-commerce results.
He said he'd seen an "extremely high correlation" between when AppLovin sees a spike in conversions and when Meta sees an increase in ad spend. He said he hadn't seen a similar trend when comparing Meta and Google or AppLovin and Google.
He said that made him wonder if AppLovin was driving real incremental value or whether its campaigns were just reaching the exact same audience as Meta in some way.
He said he'd also seen a "concerning overlap" where Shopify sales purportedly driven by AppLovin have a very high geographic overlap with where Meta ad website traffic was coming from.
Separately, Prescient AI's analysis found that brands spending between 25% to 30% of their digital ad budgets on AppLovin acquired fewer incremental new customers than brands in the 5% to 10% range. While reacquiring some old customers isn't necessarily a bad thing, the finding raises questions about the appropriate level of spending advertisers should devote to AppLovin, Prescient AI's Holtz said.
Other advertisers have questioned why AppLovin doesn't share granular data about exactly where their ads ran.
"It's a little bit of a black box — we have no idea where our ads are appearing," Pfloker said of AppLovin. "There's a lot to be excited about, but there's a lot to be skeptical about."
Could AppLovin become SnapLovin?
AppLovin recently paid more than $150 million to add developer Zynga's portfolio of games to its MAX ad exchange as part of Zynga's divestment of its adtech platform Chartboost, three people familiar with the matter told BI. This boosted AppLovin's already huge audience of gamers.
A spokesperson for Zynga owner Take-Two declined to comment.
AppLovin recently signed Zynga's portfolio of games, such as Farmville 2, onto its MAX ad exchange.
Thomson Reuters
Some in the industry think AppLovin could make an even bigger move. The company recently sold $3.5 billion in bonds, which Bloomberg reported were to pay down debt "and for general corporate purposes."
Could that include an acquisition?
Alex Merutka, an early AppLovin employee who now runs his own digital marketing company, Craftsman+, thinks AppLovin should make a bid for a social network — a particularly valuable sector of apps because users tend to be logged in, visit often, and share useful data.
People who use mobile games don't usually hand over data like phone numbers or email addresses, vital pieces of information for marketers to help connect their ads to outcomes, and to retarget users with ads.
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi is currently positioned at No. 216 on the Bloomberg Billionaires list.
AppLovin
AppLovin is already trading at a larger market capitalization than Snap, Pinterest, and Reddit combined.
Years ago, Snap held informal, early-stage talks about potentially acquiring AppLovin, a person familiar with the matter told BI.
Perhaps the roles could be reversed this time around. While Snap posted a revenue growth bounceback in its latest quarter, it's struggled to keep momentum amid fierce competition from the likes of TikTok. AppLovin could theoretically help optimize Snap's ad platform for performance advertisers to better compete with Google and Meta.
"If Adam was in control, Snap could be a $100 billion business — a $200 billion, $300 billion company — and AppLovin would be stronger too," Merutka said, referring to AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi. "There's a lot of opportunity there."
However, AppLovin execs said onstage at the Nasdaq Investor Conference earlier this month that M&A wasn't a near-term priority and that the company was keeping a close eye on its head count and margins.
"It's much harder than people realize, and it's exceptionally hard for a company that's structured like us," Foroughi said of M&A and the difficulty of absorbing different company cultures, according to a transcript provided by the market intelligence platform AlphaSense.
