Have you ever wondered how some games manage to hook us in and keep us coming back while others struggle to maintain our interest? While it’s partly due to our own personal interests and the well-deserved dopamine fix they give us for the day, there’s something more calculated happening behind the scenes.
Reward systems, no matter how explicit or implicit, tap into our psychology and encourage us to play day after day. The best mobile games go beyond entertainment and create an ecosystem of incentives that involve daily achievements, login bonuses accumulating over time, random items to claim, or a combination of these. Yet they also strike the perfect balance, avoiding overwhelming the players and driving them away.
Each genre boasts a unique reward system style that aligns with the gameplay mechanics. Puzzle games might come with streak-based bonuses; strategy games reward tactical skill, and endless runners will provide unlockable skins and gear.
Let’s go over several mobile games in various categories that have mastered player retention using clever reward design.
Coin Master
Coin Master is considered a game on the cusp of the social casino genre. Seeing as it incorporates features from slot machines and other gambling mechanics, the developers seem to know exactly what they’re doing. The purpose of the game is to win coins to upgrade building items for improving villages.
Users can earn these coins by spinning the slot machine or raiding and attacking other players’ villages. When five items are upgraded in each village in the level, they progress to the next. With 570 levels, players have plenty of reason to continue playing and trying to reach the next milestone. It’s essentially built for players interested in games that reward you right from the get-go, like the ones on this curated list with 120 spins.
And the reward loop doesn’t stop there. Social sharing to earn coins, seasonal rewards, card collecting, raising pets to collect more coins, and gifted Spins all add to the player experience.
Pokémon TCG Pocket
Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) Pocket hasn’t been around long, having been released in October 2024. In just a month and a half, however, it already had over 60 million downloads. As one of the world’s most famous and highest-grossing media franchises of all time, the Pokémon fanbase was ready to strike the minute the app was announced.
What TCG Pocket does exceptionally well is capitalize on the nostalgia of the physical card game and use mobile mechanics. With 50 levels to progress through, daily packs to open, daily missions that award you hourglasses to help you open more packs faster, rare cards to scout out, ranked battles, and daily Wonder Picks (a random card), there are countless rewards to take advantage of just about every time you log in. The developers have created a fully incentivized system that has kept the app alive.
Genshin Impact
Although Genshin Impact is a complete open-world action RPG, the game is known for combining an intricate, vast environment with an equally elaborate reward system. The fact that the app offers cross-play with consoles and PC has given it massive reach, with the mobile version alone accounting for over 202 million lifetime downloads.
Given that Genshin is an RPG game, it naturally focuses on exploration. There are all the typical hallmarks of the genre, like quests, new regions to discover, NPCs to talk to, and resources to collect, which fuels players’ desire for progression. Its biggest incentive of all, however, is its gacha mechanics. Players collect weapons and characters through the Wish system and have the chance to earn a rare item. There are also daily rewards, timed events, seasonal updates, and more that continue to make players curious about what’s next.
Candy Crush Saga
Candy Crush Saga is so iconic it might be considered a pioneer or even the epitome of the mobile game. The minute it was released to the public, it managed to draw in a broad audience across all age groups and walks of life because of its easy-to-learn mechanics, rainbow colors, and instant gratification. While the match-3 concept has been around since the mid-1980s, it’s the constant stream of rewards that makes Candy Crush so successful.
The game was a trailblazer in classic mobile game rewards mechanisms, such as boosters, power-ups, daily log-in bonuses, limited-time challenges, and a spin-based reward system. But what Candy Crush does is time these rewards extremely well. It’s almost like it feeds the players little forkfuls of cake without giving you the entire slice all at once.
Clash Royale
Clash Royale is one of those games that you’ll see everywhere—in ads while playing another mobile game, recommended by your favorite YouTuber, and front and center on the app store. The game’s premise is to destroy more towers than your competitors in three-minute matches. Players can level up their towers by earning experience points through cards.
Yet it’s not a new game by any definition. Released in 2016, it’s fully maintained its longevity by capitalizing on trends with the times. It features short matches to align with increasingly shorter attention spans, new emotes and cosmetics, and the Pass Royale, a battle pass with many tiers and exclusive rewards. While the gameplay is engaging and tactical, it’s the rewards that keep players on their toes and keep them progressing toward the next objective or surprise—regardless of whether they win or lose.
