Pure quantity is not what subscribers are looking for, but neither is a handful of hits floating in filler. What retains people is the experience: content that feeds their natural curiosity and rewards them, again and again, with something new and fun to discover, says Robert Schmiedl from TuuT s.r.o
There is a comfortable assumption behind most content deals: more is better. The bigger library, the bigger reason to subscribe. But look at how people actually use these services and you’ll soon find out that catalogue size is one of the least important things they’re buying.
The fix obviously isn’t a smaller library. It’s making every title in it count.
Most of the catalogue never gets used
For a VAS subscription, the catalogue is the pitch: bundle more content, give people more reasons to pay. In reality, subscribers very often play the first game and never come back again.
The content-subscription world proves it. In streaming, just 5.7% of titles drew 75% of all viewing – 95% of the library pulled almost nothing, according to data from an April 2025 study by Nielsen, reported here. Game bundles are worse: Xbox players open about 5.7 games a month out of 500-plus, barely 1% of the catalogue. And fewer than 1% of Netflix’s subscribers played its games on a given day.
The lesson is clear: volume is not value. A big catalogue nobody touches isn’t a richer service, it’s cost. Pure quantity is not what people pay for.
Just a few hits isn‘t the answer either
So, load up on a couple of blockbusters instead? That’s the other trap. A US peer-reviewed 2025 study by Anthony Palomba, from the Darden School of Business University of Virginia and Nicole Fleskes, from Department of Economics, Rice University, found subscribers reward “a catalogue filled with reliably popular content” over “a few hits surrounded by mediocre filler” – marquee titles did little for retention once the buzz faded.
Meanwhile, Parks Associates found nearly one in four subscribers cancel the moment they finish the one show they came for. A hit opens the door; it doesn’t keep anyone inside – as I discussed here in more detail.
It is neither pure volume nor a handful of heroes. It is a catalogue where every title earns its place. You don’t need 2,000 games, a hundred will do, as long as each one is genuinely fun and worth the subscriber’s time.
Retention is won in the first minutes and in the habit
What does “earning its place” actually mean? Two things: a game must hook fast, then build a habit.
The hook is unforgiving. Studies of free-to-play mobile games confirm most players who leave, leave on day one. The first session is where the relationship is decided, if a title can’t win its first few minutes, it isn’t adding value, it’s adding weight.
The habit is what makes that first session last. Duolingo’s own data show it plainly: leaderboards raised engagement time 17% and tripled its most-active users; streaks lifted seven-day-streak users from around 17% to over half, and improving retention this way had five times the impact of any other lever. Same content, wrapped in an experience built to pull people back tomorrow.
That is the real product: not a shelf to browse. It’s a loop – a fast hook, then a reason to return.
The bottom line
The pattern is the same everywhere people pay for content: neither raw volume nor a couple of headline hits keeps them. What actually keeps them is a catalogue with content which hooks fast, rewards the habit of coming back, and adds up, with the platform, to one experience.
So, the question for operators isn’t “how many titles can we list, or which brand is on the catalogue”. It’s “does every title matter, and does the experience bring people back?”. What we need for the next generation of gaming VAS services are titles capable of creating the hook and platforms which make all games feel like one connected product worth re-visiting again.
How TuuTap is built for exactly this
This is the principle TuuTap – a new generation gaming platform – is built around; a curated catalogue where every game earns its place, not a dumping ground measured by title count.
- Every game is built to hook fast. TuuTap’s design standard is a game that lands its first session inside roughly three minutes, and does so broadly, capturing at least a 20% initial hook on a broad general audience. This is the day-one problem answered by design: no title is carried as dead weight; each one has to win its first few minutes.
- Premium content carries the long game. Titles with deeper gameplay, collectibles, and layered reward systems give players a reason to keep going well past the first session – the long-term-play half of “value” that a quick hook alone cannot sustain.
- Gamification builds the daily habit. TuuTap adds the habit layer the research keeps pointing to – daily rewards, visible progress mechanics, and competition, the same family of levers that reshaped retention within services like Duolingo, applied across the whole catalogue rather than one title at a time.
- The platform multiplies the effect. On top of each game’s own loop, TuuTap layers platform-level achievements and rewards that span the catalogue, keeping players curious and giving them a reason to return.
The result is a service where the value isn’t the number of games on the shelf, it is that every game on the shelf is worth opening, and the platform ties them into one experience. One frictionless, carrier-billed subscription, a curated catalogue engineered to be opened again tomorrow.
Robert Schmiedl will be speaking about this and more at World Telemedia Marbella on 4-6 October book your place here
