Gaming · AR · VR

Games and immersive worlds
players actually come back to

Nine in ten players quit a new game within thirty days. We design, build and operate hyper-casual games and XR experiences engineered around the one metric that decides who wins — retention.

What we build

Powering the future of gaming & XR

Game Design & Prototyping

Core loops and reward systems built so players feel the value in the first ten minutes — the window where staying or leaving is actually decided.

AR / VR & XR Development

Immersive experiences for headset, mobile and web, tuned for comfort and performance. The hard part is never the demo — it is the second session.

Backend & Live Ops

Real-time multiplayer, matchmaking, leaderboards and live events on infrastructure that holds when a tournament spikes.

3D Assets & Animation

Production-grade modelling, rigging and animation that make worlds and characters worth returning to.

The opportunity

A record market — and a brutal one to win

$201.6BGlobal games revenue in 2025 — the first year past $200B

$49.6BUS consumer spend, the largest single market

£8.76BUK consumer spend, up 7.4% year on year

30%+AR/VR market CAGR forecast through 2030

Sources: Newzoo Global Games Market Report 2025, Ukie UK Consumer Valuation 2025, Mordor Intelligence XR Market 2025.

Current landscape

Why most games and XR products never take off

The challenge

90%

of players are gone within 30 days of installing a game.

<1%

median Day-30 retention across mobile games in 2025.

69%

of VR headset owners use them less than once a month.

0.8%

global app-download growth in 2025 — acquisition alone no longer scales.

Pythrust’s solutions

Engineer first-session activation and progression loops that push Day-1 and Day-30 retention well above genre benchmarks.

Design XR interactions around human comfort and a clear reason to return, so headsets and apps do not gather dust after week one.

Architect multiplayer backends — matchmaking, tournaments, live-ops and analytics — that scale through spikes without re-platforming.

Shift growth from paid acquisition to retention and referral economics, where every five points of retention compounds into profit.

Case Study

2MINWIN

A hyper-casual tournament game we designed, built and shipped — and kept players in.

Built on Unity and Firebase with a real-time tournament backend, 2MINWIN is the retention playbook applied to our own product: fast to launch, engineered to keep players, and architected to scale through live spikes.

14 wksConcept to Play Store

41%Day-1 retention, vs 20–30% hyper-casual benchmark

8%Day-30 retention, vs under 2% benchmark

7.2 minAverage session length

99.6%Crash-free sessions

60%Lower live-ops overhead vs a custom backend