Tis the Season: Holiday Live-Ops in 2026

Fundamental design pillars of in-game events include novel content, exclusive rewards, and a time limit. A national holiday supplies all three wrapped in real-world festivities, which is why seasonal content such as Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day became the backbone of OG live-ops long before events ran constantly. As we head into the annual run of big events, we wanted to take a look at how seasonal live-ops perform in 2026.

Live-ops doesn’t take days off anymore. Most top mobile games now run major seasonal events as one entry in a constant stream of quests, tournaments, and sales, not as the rare interruption it used to be. Over 90% of the top 100 grossing U.S. iOS games run seasonal events, and the number of live-ops events per game climbed from 73 to 89 per month over the course of 2025 alone. If every week already has an event, what does dressing one of them up for Christmas add? We pulled a decade of Sensor Tower revenue and download data across 14 top mobile titles, plus console and Roblox data, to find out.

Mobile games analyzed: Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, Coin Master, Monster Strike, Pokémon GO, Monopoly GO, Royal Match, Brawl Stars, Whiteout Survival, Last War, Honor of Kings (Global/China), PUBG (Global/China), Genshin Impact, eFootball

All Trick, No Treat?

Across our mobile cohort, median revenue during Halloween week runs from 0.97x to just 1.05x that of a normal week in every market we checked, from the U.S. to Korea, and has since 2016. Battle Royale is an outlier: PUBG Mobile Global’s Halloween week has run a median 1.22x to 1.38x since 2022 (as high as 1.90x in 2024), and the lift has held every year since 2018. Gruesome time-limited skins and unique zombie modes are on brand for both the game and the holiday.

Console shows a similar pattern. Call of Duty's annual Halloween event, The Haunting, has run since 2020, and Fortnitemares has run every year since 2018. When a game leans thematically or mechanically into Halloween territory, the uptick seems more substantial.

Of course, most games run some form of Halloween events and promotions. Teams keep running them because players expect them, and that expectation is worth meeting even when revenue doesn’t move much. Meta’s own developer guidance is blunt about this: players “have learned to anticipate that major changes will align with holidays,” and a game that skips the moment risks losing them to one that doesn’t. The anticipation shows up in player sentiment regardless of what the revenue data says: outlets from YouTube to Vice cover Fortnitemares leaks every year.

Black Friday Isn't About the Game

Black Friday works differently from Halloween because it doesn’t ask players to “feel” festive about the game. Instead, it imports a discount habit players already have from shopping everywhere else at that time. Our mobile cohort’s median lift has held at around 1.19x for ten straight years. And it travels: the same lift shows up in Japan (1.50x), Germany (1.27x), and Korea (1.12x), markets where Halloween barely registers.

Arguably, Black Friday is very much a U.S. tradition, but a good deal is rarely questioned! About 30% of casual mobile titles now offer Black Friday sales globally. For example, Coin Master runs Black Friday harder than most, driving close to 1.9x normal weekly revenue two years running.

All I Want for Christmas Is Robux

Christmas revenue lift used to be much more significant to our cohort than it is now. Five of our sample titles have run a Christmas event every year for a decade: Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, Coin Master, Monster Strike, and Pokémon GO. Their combined median Christmas-week revenue lift fell from 1.88x that of a normal week in 2017 to 1.01x in 2025.

Clash of Clans shows it most clearly: from 2.6x normal weekly revenue in 2017 down to 0.85x in 2025 (though this followed a particularly strong November for Clash of Clans, alongside an overall increase in live-ops activity across titles in recent years).

Christmas largely delivers new players, not just more spending from existing ones. Cohort downloads jump 1.41x in Christmas week while revenue sits at 1.05x, matching Sensor Tower’s long-standing attribution of December’s revenue lift to new devices, first-time users, and gift-card credit rather than any in-game event. People naturally have more time to play and check out more games.

When it comes to younger audiences, nearly half of U.S. kids surveyed this year said in-game currency — specifically V-Bucks and Robux — was what they wanted for Christmas. In other words, they want gift cards, not to spend time responding to mobile in-game banners.

Converting seasonal traffic into revenue depends on providing compelling purchasing opportunities when players arrive and introducing impactful progression gates shortly after download. Last War and Whiteout Survival also generate 1.3x to 1.5x baseline revenue through Christmas week because their genre is more suited to aggressive monetization and hard progression gates. Those arrive within the first few days of install, so a December cohort converts while the holiday is still running. Candy Crush Saga — with softer monetization depth — takes the cohort’s biggest download lift, 1.55x, and converts it to 1.06x revenue, because a new player there is weeks away from a hard paid gate.

Similarly, on console, Take-Two credited GTA Online’s December content update as “one of the best-performing updates in its history” for subscription growth; generous holiday offers and time-limited exclusive content (staples of successful live-ops) likely contribute to the peaks in conversion.

Where Holidays Still Print Money

Declining tentpole holiday sales in the West aren’t a problem that travels to the East. Honor of Kings’ Chinese New Year window has delivered 1.2x to 1.7x normal weekly revenue every year since 2018, and Tencent’s earnings calls still single out Spring Festival as a driver of results: Honor of Kings and Peacekeeper Elite both hit record quarterly revenue in Q1 2026, the quarter containing this year’s Chinese New Year. Japan’s New Year is sharper still. Monster Strike’s January 1–3 window runs 3x to nearly 8x a normal week, the largest holiday effect anywhere in our data, and 2025 was its best year on record.

Both holidays work because — like Black Friday — they’re tied to a real spending tradition, not just a theme. Japanese department stores sell fukubukuro, sealed “lucky bags” of discounted goods, every New Year. Mobile games run the gacha version — a limited banner with better-than-usual odds at a top-tier character.

Which holiday pays depends on which one players actually acknowledge, and a storefront’s country only roughly predicts which holiday will matter. Christmas is worth 1.12x in the U.S. and 0.99x in Korea; Chinese New Year reverses it: 1.03x in Germany versus 1.18x in Korea, and 1.44x on China’s App Store. Lunar New Year content shipped by Western games like Call of Duty Mobile and Brawl Stars produces no measurable lift in Western markets, and Valve dropped its own Lunar New Year sale from Steam for scheduling reasons rather than performance. If most of a game’s paying players are Chinese or East Asian, Chinese New Year is worth building the year’s biggest content drop around, wherever those players happen to live.

It’s My Party

Outside China, the biggest single days in our data don’t belong to any calendar holiday. They belong to dates the games invented themselves.

Every Fortnite player count record belongs to season launches or one-time events, never to Fortnitemares or Winterfest, and the pattern now runs three years straight. 44.7M players logged in on a single day during the “OG” nostalgia season in November 2023. 14.3M were playing at once for the Remix Finale concert in November 2024, still the all-time record on Fortnite’s own live tracker. In November 2025, the Chapter 7 launch event, Zero Hour, pulled a monthly peak of 9.7M players, up almost 300% from the month before. Each time, Winterfest ran the following month and came nowhere close: December 2025’s peak was 2.7M, down 72% from November.

Related, EA opened an earnings release by crediting FIFA Ultimate Team’s January event, Team of the Year, with record success and reactivating over 2M lapsed players in a month — no real-world holiday required.

Pokémon GO's best week, GO Fest 2025, ran 6.7x a normal week, six times the lift generated by its best calendar holiday (Black Friday, 1.1x). Monopoly GO's best week, built around a major content drop rather than any date on the calendar, ran 2.6x, still well clear of its best holiday performance (Black Friday, 1.9x). Even Brawl Stars, where the gap is narrowest, favors the manufactured week: 1.7x for a major April 2024 update against 1.5x for its best Christmas. A game's own calendar beats the common one on every title we checked, including ones that also do well on Black Friday or Christmas.

China’s own “manufactured holidays” perform just as strongly as its official ones. Genshin Impact creates an event about each major content update release, roughly every six weeks. The median revenue lift across those releases is 2.4x, bigger than the Western games’ Christmas lifts we measured. Honor of Kings went further and built its own holiday from scratch: the May 5th High 5 Festival, an internal promotion that now runs worldwide every year.

Genshin Impact’s first anniversary in 2021 was so light on rewards that players review-bombed the game down to a 2.0 rating within days. Every anniversary since has been more generous than the last: free characters, escalating currency, and permanent systems. An owned date only outperforms a shared one when a team spends the production budget that owning the date is supposed to free up.

Something for Everyone

Roblox’s own event calendar, including The Hunt, The Haunt, and Winter Spotlight, is entirely Western-focused, while Asia-Pacific is now its largest and fastest-growing region by daily active users. Roblox hasn’t built Lunar New Year or Ramadan events of its own, but individual creators have filled the gap: BedWars and Jujutsu Infinite both ran their own Lunar New Year content in early 2025 without platform support, the same way individual Fortnite creators use Epic’s UEFN toolset to build seasonal islands independent of what Epic programs centrally. If seasonal events are table stakes everywhere else, UGC is the main segment still waiting for the platform layer to catch up to what creators are already building.

The Seasonal Playbook

A well-structured seasonal calendar provides a reliable framework for engaging players. Since festive updates often build on content already in production, creating memorable, festive moments is well worth the effort — even when immediate revenue gains are modest.

To maximize impact, it’s important to allocate significant production resources toward key dates driven by external spending behavior. For example:

• Black Friday for discount-driven purchasing
• Christmas to capture the influx of new device activations
• Chinese New Year for regions with strong cultural gifting and spending traditions

Beyond the big holidays, the same rule applies: the date itself matters less than whether players have a reason to care. Pokémon GO, Monopoly GO, and Brawl Stars have all found ways to make their own event calendars more valuable than most traditional holidays, while Genshin Impact has turned anniversaries and major updates into recurring tentpoles. The takeaway isn’t that games need more events. It’s that the event needs to give players a reason to show up — whether that’s a cultural moment, a big content drop, or simply a date the game has made its own.

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In Other News

Funding and M&A:

• Chinese game developer Kingnet Network has revealed plans to invest $298M in a consortium set to become Wemade’s largest shareholder
• Nex raises over $150M to take Nex Playground global
• Istanbul-based mobile game studio Circle Games raises $25M in Series A led by Tencent
• Japan-based reward-marketing platform operator Skyfall has listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market, raising $21.7M
• Israel-based database company Keewano has raised $12M
• Trophy Games acquires Airport Simulator: First Class developer Playrion from Paradox Interactive

Business & Product:

• AppLovin grows 60% Y/Y rounding to $20B in annual platform ad spend
• Japan generates $10B in mobile game revenue despite declining downloads
• TinyBuild revenue rises 18% to $20M during H1 2026, with 85% coming from first and second-party owned IP
• Zynga Ads+ brings 100 mobile games to advertising offering
• No “single model” for growth, says Newzoo

Miscellaneous:

• The EU KIDS Act: What game developers need to know
• Northern Forge Studios and Runaway Play lead Green Games Jam Awards 2026
• Sanrio to launch first Sanrio Games mobile title in January 2027
• Discord re-launches age verification following backlash over privacy concerns
• MBRIF and Dubai Future District Fund partner to expand UAE startup opportunities

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