Long before the smartphone or the internet, humans made, watched, played, belonged, bought and created. These behaviours have held constant throughout history; only the form factor has changed. Today those persistent layers dictate how consumers meet the world: make, watch, play, belong, buy and create.

Historically, the venture ecosystem drew rigid boxes around distinct consumer verticals: games were entertainment, social networks were connection, utility apps were productivity. Those distinctions are no longer rooted in operating reality. A new category has emerged across all six layers, defined by a single shared property: the products are never finished, they are operated daily. We call it Persistent Play.

Recognising Persistent Play lets us treat digital products for what they have become: living, breathing economies, built and sustained rather than shipped.

Global market evidence

In 2025 a historic inversion occurred. For the first time in app-store tracking history, consumers spent more money through in-app purchases in non-gaming apps than in games. Non-gaming in-app revenue rose 21% to roughly $85 billion, while gaming in-app revenue effectively flatlined at $81.75 billion, up 1.3%.

The same pattern shows up in how growth is financed. The performance-marketing and predictive lifetime-value playbooks built for games now drive global non-gaming user-acquisition spend to $53 billion, more than double the $25 billion spent on gaming. Whether a product is built for social connection, serialised media or utility, retention, virtual economies and live operations are now the permanent, universal standard for building consumer platforms.

TikTok engineered a live gifting economy on top of a social feed, converting Coins to Diamonds through five-minute battles, and became the first app to cross $6 billion in annual in-app purchases. Roblox, fundamentally a social and UGC platform, operates entirely like a live-service game: $1.7 billion in quarterly bookings and 132 million daily active users in a persistent world. Duolingo passed $1 billion in bookings by running its edtech platform on gamified streaks and leagues, and acquired a gaming-studio team in 2025 to embed live mechanics deeper into its daily loops.

The India macro case

If the global market proves the crossover, India is where Persistent Play scales with the highest velocity. It has the raw material of a continuous economy: an unmatched volume of attention paired with a sovereign micro-payment rail that removes the friction from virtual economies.

In 2025 Indian consumers spent 1.23 trillion hours on mobile apps, growing 9% year over year, more than double the global rate, at 5.8 hours of daily screen time. India is the world's largest download market at 25.5 billion downloads in a year, and digital media has crossed one trillion rupees to become the largest segment of its Media and Entertainment sector, fuelled by a 60% surge in digital subscriptions.

Attention without frictionless payment is just a server cost, and that bottleneck is solved here. UPI processed 241.6 billion transactions in FY25-26, about 85% of domestic digital payments and roughly 49% of the world's real-time payment volume, over some of the world's cheapest data at about 7.51 rupees per GB. Serialised micro-drama apps, running entirely on free-to-play coin wallets, scaled to $300 million in revenue in their first year in India.

Chimera's right to win

The defining edge in underwriting Persistent Play is not predicting content trends. It is knowing how to design currency sinks, read cohort retention curves, tune live-ops calendars and optimise paid-acquisition payback windows. Chimera learned these mechanics inside gaming, the hardest and most metrics-literate version of this category to build in. That expertise transfers directly to social, micro-content and habit formation.

Products no longer ship. They run.