Back at Mobidictum Conference 2026: What Four Years Changed for Game Studios and App Growth

The last time I was at Mobidictum was in 2022. This week I went back to Istanbul for Mobidictum Conference 2026, held on 7 and 8 October, and the first thing that struck me was how much it has grown. New venue, a much bigger crowd, and a very different conversation on the floor.

This time I was there for Apptrove, our mobile attribution platform, and I had a clear focus: meet game studios and build partnerships. Here’s what I saw and what I brought home.

A different event from the one I remember

The 2026 edition moved into the Lütfi Kırdar International Convention and Exhibition Centre in Şişli, a proper congress venue right in the middle of the city, and it needed the space. This was the fifth Mobidictum Conference, and it brought together around 2,000 people from more than 65 countries, with well over half of them coming from outside Türkiye. The organisers opened up an extra floor this year and broadened the programme beyond mobile games to include the wider app economy and PC gaming.

In 2022 it felt like a strong regional event. In 2026 it felt like one of the places where the global games industry actually does business. Big publishers, ambitious studios from Türkiye and the wider region, investors, ad networks and platform companies were all in the same building, and the meeting areas were full from the first hour.

Why game studios were my focus

Türkiye has become one of the most interesting places in the world for mobile games. The studios coming out of Istanbul and the region are fast, data-driven and very serious about user acquisition, and many of them are scaling globally from day one. That makes them exactly the kind of teams that care about attribution: where their players come from, which campaigns bring paying users, and how to make every UA dollar count.

So most of my two days went into conversations with studio founders and growth teams. A few patterns kept coming up.

Measurement cost matters more than ever. Smaller and mid-sized studios want strong attribution without paying enterprise prices that eat into already thin margins. Many are rethinking the tools they use as they scale.

New traffic sources need to be measurable. Studios are experimenting with more channels than ever, including rewarded and incentivised platforms. Every new channel only works if it can be tracked properly, which means integrations matter as much as features.

Teams want a partner, not just a dashboard. The studios I spoke to don’t just want data. They want someone who will help them understand it and act on it.

Partnerships were the other half of the trip

The other big reason I went was partnerships. An attribution platform is only as useful as the ecosystem around it: ad networks, monetisation platforms, rewarded traffic providers and the agencies that run campaigns. Mobidictum puts a lot of those companies in one place, and some of my most useful conversations were about how we can work together to make life easier for the studios we both serve.

I also spent time with investors and publishers who are backing the next wave of studios in the region. It’s a good reminder that the ecosystem here is maturing quickly, with more capital, more experience and more studios ready to go global.

The evenings

Like every good conference, a lot happened after hours. The week opened with an Executive Mixer the evening before the doors opened, the Main Party followed the first full day, and the Indie Award Show closed the conference on the 8th, celebrating independent developers. Around it, partners hosted their own side events across the week. Some of the best conversations of the trip happened over dinner in Istanbul, which is a very easy city to say yes to one more meeting in.

The organisers also announced their plans for Mobidictum Week, bringing the industry to Istanbul for a full week of events. Based on how this year went, that’s going to be worth blocking out in next year’s calendar.

What I took home

Four years ago, I left Mobidictum thinking the region had potential. This time I left convinced that some of the most important mobile games of the next few years will come from studios I met in Istanbul. They’re ambitious, they move fast, and they want partners who move at the same speed.

Now comes the part that actually matters: the follow-ups. If we met in Istanbul and haven’t heard from me yet, you will soon.

If you run growth or UA at a game studio and want to compare notes on attribution, send me a message on LinkedIn, or see how Apptrove works for game studios.