How a Unity Mobile Game Cut Memory Use 35% and Eliminated GC Spikes at Scale

A production mobile game serving over 300,000 players faced serious performance issues caused by Unity's non-compacting garbage collector and unmanaged asset references, leading to frame drops and out-of-memory crashes. The development team overhauled their architecture by replacing direct inspector asset references and Resources.Load calls with Unity Addressables, enabling on-demand asynchronous asset loading and explicit memory unloading. They also eliminated singleton-based manager dependencies in favor of ScriptableObject event channels to prevent hidden memory retention that blocked garbage collection. Additional measures included zero-allocation object pooling and ASTC texture pipelines to further reduce runtime memory pressure. The combined changes resulted in a 35% reduction in memory footprint, elimination of GC-related frame hitches, and a stable 60 FPS across heterogeneous Android and iOS devices.