Soft launch market selection: beyond Canada and Australia in 2026

For most of mobile gaming's modern era, soft launching meant Canada or Australia. The logic was straightforward: English-speaking, Tier 1-adjacent player behavior, much lower CPI than the US, store mechanics close enough to the US that the soft launch data would transfer. The two markets became the default first stop for any title preparing for global release.

That default is increasingly the wrong call. Industry reporting in 2026 documents a clear shift in soft launch strategy: "Forget Canada and Australia. Match your game's core monetisation to a region's user behaviour." The Philippines has become the third most popular soft launch territory at 44 percent adoption rate. The recommendation that's spreading across publishers is to pick the soft launch market based on what the game actually needs to learn, not on tradition.

For executive teams planning global launches, this isn't just a procurement question. The wrong soft launch market produces data the team thinks they can use and can't. The right soft launch market produces lessons that survive the global release. The difference between the two often determines whether a soft launch was worth the cycle it consumed.

Why Canada and Australia became defaults

The case for Canada and Australia was real for a long time. Both markets had specific properties that made them useful as soft launch destinations.

Both were Tier 1-adjacent, meaning player behavior wasn't dramatically different from the high-revenue markets the global launch would target. A game that converted reasonably in Canada had a reasonable expectation of converting in the US. The retention curves were comparable. The session patterns were similar.

Both had lower CPI than the launch markets, so the soft launch could test at a fraction of the cost. Mistakes were cheaper to make in Canada than in the US.

Both were English-speaking, so localization wasn't a confound. The game could ship in its primary language and the data would reflect player response to the actual product rather than translation quality.

The store mechanics were similar enough to the US that the App Store and Play Store behavior in the soft launch was representative of what the global launch would see. Featuring patterns, organic discovery, and search ranking all worked in ways the team could project from.

These properties haven't gone away. What's changed is that they've become less unique, and the cost of relying on them has gone up.

What's changed

Multiple structural shifts have eroded the case for Canada/Australia as the default soft launch.

Both markets are now extensively used by competitors as their own soft launch territories. A game soft launching in Canada is competing for store attention against many other games doing the same thing. The competitive dynamics of the soft launch don't reflect the competitive dynamics of the global launch — the Canada soft launch has more soft-launched competitors per active player than the global launch will have.

The CPI advantage has compressed. Both Canada and Australia have seen CPI climb sharply as the markets become more competitive. The "cheap soft launch" framing assumed Canadian installs at a fraction of US cost; the gap has narrowed enough that the savings are smaller than they were three years ago.

The "Tier 1-adjacent player behavior" assumption was always weaker than it looked, and the gap is becoming more visible. Canadian players spend less on average than US players. Australian players have different genre preferences. The behavior isn't identical to the target launch market; the projections from soft launch to launch have always been noisy, and the noise is increasingly hard to ignore when the soft launch isn't producing useful signal.

The data privacy environment has shifted both markets in different directions than the global launch markets. SKAdNetwork 5.0 and Privacy Sandbox affect attribution in Canada and Australia the same as everywhere else, but the relative cost-vs-signal tradeoff has changed. Cheaper installs don't help much when the attribution noise makes the signal hard to read regardless of where the test runs.

What soft launching actually tests

The right way to pick a soft launch market is to start from what specifically the soft launch needs to test, and reason backward to the market that can answer that question.

If the game is testing core gameplay loop comprehension — does the player understand the mechanic, does the tutorial work, do the first sessions feel right — almost any English-speaking market with comparable phones works. Canada and Australia still fit here, but so do the UK, Ireland, Singapore, or the Philippines.

If the game is testing IAP monetization specifically — bundle structure, pricing, conversion to first purchase — the soft launch market needs to have IAP spending behavior similar to the global launch market. Canada and Australia approximate the US poorly on absolute spend levels; testing in the UK or in some Western European markets gives a closer read.

If the game is testing ad monetization — eCPM, ad placement tolerance, hyper-casual loop friction — the relevant markets are those with high ad inventory absorption and tolerant player behavior. The Philippines and Indonesia perform well here. They're cheap in CPI, they have engaged player bases willing to absorb ad volume, and their behavior signals translate reasonably to other ad-monetized markets globally.

If the game is testing a particular genre's reception with an underserved audience, the soft launch should run where that audience exists. A Match-3 with a unique theme might soft launch in markets where similar themes have done well historically. A strategy game targeting Korean-style audiences might soft launch in Taiwan before Korea.

The choice depends on what you're trying to learn. The default-Canada answer produces data on Canadian players that may or may not be relevant to whatever the specific question is.

Why the Philippines is having a moment

Industry data shows the Philippines at 44 percent soft launch territory adoption — meaningful share, and growing. The reasons it works:

The market is part of the fast-growing Southeast Asian region but has strong English language penetration thanks to its long historical association with the US. This gives it what industry analysis calls the "ultimate bridge" property: testing in the Philippines reaches a market that responds to English-language content while previewing behavior in a SEA region that's increasingly important for global launches.

CPI in the Philippines is materially lower than in Canada or Australia, often by multiples. The same soft launch budget produces several times more installs, which in turn produces more statistical confidence in whatever metrics the team is watching.

Player engagement is high. The average Filipino mobile gamer spends significantly more time per session than the average North American gamer, which means a soft launch in the Philippines produces deeper data in the same calendar window than a soft launch elsewhere.

The infrastructure for soft launching is mature. Major publishers — Supercent, Rovio, Playrix, Zynga — are routinely soft launching in the Philippines. The market knows how to receive a soft launch; the local user acquisition channels have mature targeting; the data infrastructure for measuring soft launch performance is in place.

The trade-off is that Philippines spend levels are not US spend levels. IAP soft launches that try to read absolute ARPU numbers from the Philippines will overestimate cost (CPI looks cheap) and underestimate revenue (Philippines spend doesn't project to US). Reading the soft launch in the Philippines requires translating between markets — which is fine, but the translation has to be explicit.

What's still the right answer in some cases

Canada and Australia haven't become wrong. They've become one option among several.

A game whose primary launch market is the US, whose monetization is IAP-heavy, and whose key question is "will the IAP catalog convert" — that game might still soft launch in Canada. The behavioral similarity is close enough that the data carries.

A game targeting the Australian market specifically. Soft launching there produces direct, untranslated data on the target audience.

The pattern that doesn't work is using Canada/Australia by default for every soft launch regardless of what the game needs to learn. The 2026 framing of "match the market to the question" produces better outcomes than "soft launch in Canada because everyone does."

See how we approach measurement across markets →

The soft launch is a question-answering tool. The right market is the one that answers the specific question this specific game needs answered before going global. Studios picking soft launch markets based on the question rather than the tradition produce launches that actually capitalize on what the soft launch surfaced.

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