Panel: David vs Goliath: How Can Smaller Studios Compete With Big Studios In The UA Space?

So, next up we have a panel which is the last for the morning session and we have a fantastic crew of people. Mr. Kelly, T Kelly coming on up. We've got Bryce from Antihero. We've got Takala from uh uh well a growth marketing consultant. Lean from Tilting Point. Uh Warren from Optic and Seek from Cashkick. So come on up folks and I'll hand over to the very very capable Mr. Kelly.
Hello. Hello. Okay. So um today uh we have a wonderful panel where we're talking about UA opportunities but particularly we're talking about UA when

it applies to smaller and middlesized developers and how they may be able to compete or indeed find awareness or um even opportunity within a market that's actually super crowded by very very large big hitters various names who you know um we have a wonderful panel that we're going to go through and and talk about a variety of these things with. One of them is Warren Woodward. There he is over there. He's the co-founder at Uptake. Warren has over a decade of experience leading user acquisition divisions um previously game publishers including Nexon and Wargaming and he's the founder and chief growth officer at Optic. We have Psychala Sultanova. Hello. Sorry I'm butchering the names. I'm sorry. Um who's a growth marketing consultant and with a over 14 years experience in mobile games and apps driving UA and global launch strategy for studios such as Ubisoft Product Madness and a variety of others. We have Bryce Leavville St. Martin, uh, who's the CEO and co-founder at Anti-hero Studios, who are backed by A16Z Speedrun. Um, Bryce worked at Supercell for more than six years, transitioning from a developer on Clash Royale to helping establish the marketing team at the company's headquarters in Helsinki, and he's now

building anti-hero with a focus on games worth sharing. Uh, we have Leah Nam, who I just met 10 seconds ago. Hi. Who's the general manager at uh, Korea Japan's Tilt the Tilting Point in Korea, Japan, sorry. Um, Leah is a seasoned business development professional with extensive experience in the game industry across the Asia Pacific region, currently serving as general manager. Um, and has previously held senior roles at Facebook and uh, where you were development lead for Apac Gaming. Uh, we have Gveton. Yeah, close enough, right? [laughter] We've been debating how to pronounce each other's names for the last ever. Um, who's an account manager at Cashkick. Um, GVED is an account manager based in Cypress. is partners with mobile game studios to scale rewarded UA campaigns that drive highv value engaged players. All right. Did I get everybody? Yep. All right. So, um hopefully we're uh we have about 35 minutes. We're going to go through as many questions as we can talk about the the ins and outs of uh what it's like for mobile devs um to particularly as I say small and middlesize to try and find opportunity in the UA landscape. One question I did

want to ask everybody um to sort of start with as a kind of a level setting question is what's your sort of take on what the landscape looks like particularly as we're going into 2026 and uh and where you think maybe opportunities may live. So Bryce, I'm going to start with you.
Um I'm quite as a founder, right? As a we are building games, right? We're building content. I'm quite excited about the the the UF financing. I think for for us, you know, like building our game and and and thinking about we know what the next year is is is and the raise the fundraising like UF financing for me it's like some a new financial vehicle that is quite interesting.
Mh. As usual, I'm also quite interested in how our target audience, which are genesis that define themselves as as gamers, which I think I think might be quite different from from many of us

here, you know, how are those consumer trends, you know, them as consumers, how do they discover new products and what are they excited about? I think that's something that I'm I'm I'm thinking quite a bit.
Okay, cool. Warren, what's your take? Yeah, when I think about the current state of user acquisition for games, especially for for small teams, the biggest thing I think about is this is probably the largest gap I've seen between like perception and reality. So, the assumptions I see teams have about what does or doesn't work in UA. Uh, overall, it's a really great time for user acquisition right now. I've been doing this for a long time and there's been a lot of painful periods, but a lot of the I'll just say dumb money. there's been a lot of periods of like unsustainable growth for teams like pursuing M&A opportunities and things like that or just uh blind spending in the early iOS scan days. A lot of that has kind of washed through and it's actually a really I'd say healthy time if you are uh having strong UA fundamentals, competent practitioners, have the right technology in place, if you do the work, you can actually get very strong UA outcomes right now. It's the healthiest I've seen the ecosystem overall in some years. I would say

some years. Okay, Leah, how's it how do you see it? So the first glad to hear that the other UA financing thing is interesting [laughter] for last 15 years. So I think this year is UA is the not just yet game about the scale but is more like the precision and the accuracy. So I think this uh the traffic is always there and then is efficient the growth is harder. So you know this is a large company that can absorb inefficiency with capital but the small teams that cannot. So I think for the small teams that it depends on the other the clear hypothetis on you know the goal and then yeah the facet test and then also you know have to you know uh iterate all these things. So I think that's important thing.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Psycho what's your what's your view?
What's my view? Um, I think 26 is going

to be exciting because right now we have much better tooling and we've been practicing it for like 10 15 years. So we should be smarter, right? But there are lots of new things. I'm going to say the word AI and aentic workflows. Um, so it will be different for smaller companies versus bigger companies. The one thing is always true that um, scalable UA requires funding. So it's good to hear about UA financing and there are many other things. There's factoral and other things as well. But at the same time it would be what smaller companies can do now. They can be much smarter measure [clears throat] things and use automatic tooling and there's a lots of things for experimentation. Whether it's going to be scalable that's a big question and you know that's
right
uh things to see for big organizations. I think there's a lots of maybe inefficiencies that bigger companies would be able to bring internally with

processes with smarter budget allocation, better building creatives, I don't know, measuring and all of these kind of things. So, I think it's going to be pivotal for both.
Right. Interesting. How about you, Gab? A
little bit more focused experience on my end because I've been in the rewarded UA side of things and you know, it's been like the growing thing in the past couple of years. And I think it's a it provides a more focused um environment for the publishers to try out test their app um increase their you know initial UA especially for smaller companies you know it's a little bit more relatively more expensive might be a source
but then it helps you with the kickstart a little bit better um in my experience obviously um and it's to like from my end and I've been doing UA for you six years in different fields. Um, it's been a different experience that I think could be leveraged to a further extent.

Um, and you know, kind of helping with that whole big UA mix significantly.
Yeah. Just going to the I mean, we're going to have to ask the AI question, so let's get it out of the way. Um, the obviously particularly in UA at the moment, there's a big trend toward like mass creative deployment, right? So particularly with the ability to very easily and quickly generate a ton of different creative the uh numbers that I read just yesterday like some studios are now deploying like 2500 creatives every quarter to sort of see what works and stuff like that which is obviously something that is very easy well easier for larger studios to kind of contemplate doing with a lot of spend but for smaller and mid-size studios that's extremely daunting. What's your kind of take on that sort of sloppy strategy if you like and what's your your kind of advice to a smaller developer in in that kind of landscape like how to try and um compete? I'm going to go to psychic because you brought up AI first. [laughter]
Well, 25,000 creatives I think is a lie because more creatives requires more ad

spend. So I think yeah that's questionable. Probably they made that many but not that many went live with the ad spend. Um I think as like to kind of iterate to what I said earlier, there's a lot more possibilities to do experimentations. So the eye tools are not perfect. None of them are. And you would make some part of the creative with one another part of the creative and then you need a human to merge it all together to make sure it's edited right. And then you need to apply a naming convention to put it through the ads and then see what works. and then you need to measure the hook rate and something at the end and like all of these things. So I think for smaller and medium developers the experimentations and measurements are a lot more possible and cheaper here right now and um it just requires time because you need to try so many different AI tools and talk to people and see which ones are actually better or none of them are perfect but which ones are less

worse let's say and um do that but again with more creatives more ad spend which means you need to be kind to have controlled spend. And then also [sighs] one of the things that smaller create smaller developers need to kind of understand that what is the purpose of testing and bringing these new users to your game or app or whatever it may be.
Is it for testing the product? Is it to show potential investors what you can bring with this product? Because none of that is going to be massive scalable anyway. So I think that is very important as Okay, Bryce, as since you're working on the development side more, is that how's your experience? What are you sort of seeing?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's interesting question on, you know, we use AI all over, right? Um, but what we see again for our target audience, we saw Jenz's and what we see is that in term of creatives, the players don't want to see AI. That's not something they they

support. This is not something they they are behind. So even so we've been using it on the art side for example you know in in prototyping we went very fast on that we could do you know like a character in 12 minutes from concept to all of this but then when it comes to actually putting in the game like it's a big no no and we know that that audience is very perceptive even if it's an image on on Instagram or something and that's not something we want we want to do uh we want to use AI in targeting we want to use AI in coding but not in term of creatives and again this is very much for our audience which might be different from from others um this is not something we're going to do
I see okay Leah how's your experience been with it
actually right now I'm not a big get a fan of this AI thing so even at this time and I got the a lot of the meeting request from the company they're saying that they are doing it something at AI

creative thing but actually what I think is that you you know every this developer had expected to lower the production that cost the using AI but actually it's not yeah so you know uh the media like the meta or the Google yeah the old system only keep saying that you should test the more creative so everyone just think that you know the making the massive the creative is it important to optimize but what I've seen the meda is that you know even only one or the creative with the clear message and sometimes is working at. So I think what the developer really need to understand is that they should know their game and then they should know which kind of message they should deliver and then with that you know if they need to use AI for that then it might be helpful but for
okay cool Warren are you seeing something similar? So, I think a couple of the main things I'm thinking about

were already touched on by Sakala and and Bryce. Um, the the blocker, the choke point right now is not amount of ads. You I think that's not something our industry is suffering from or any individ like it just can't get enough ads. It's it's like breadth of quality ideas is the choke point and similar to what you're seeing Bryce like we're finding um in testing you know we'll always be testing AI ads as part of the mix but there's not breakthroughs right now. We are still you know the state of things today will not be the state of things in the future with AI but state of things today we are still in a bit of probably the last phase of the uncanny valley of uh especially for more savvy like younger gaming audience they can smell it they can sense it so where we see breakthroughs is breadth of ideas that is very human feeling content not just UGC but UGC that feels very homemade that should that feels like people that have actually known and used the product mixed with some sort of like clickbait attention getting thing in the first few seconds but definitely we're almost seeing a counternarrative to AI ads as far as what's actually getting breakthrough performance currently.
Right. Okay. Like, do you have a good

example in mind?
Um, a concept that worked recently for us, we had one of our creative team members literally like get in the shower with their cell phone crying for the first few seconds and then talk about the strategy that led them to that moment in the follow-up. So, you know, some clickbait, something weird, and then like, oh, this is the moment in the game that brought me to this point and [laughter] showing some strategy.
Fair enough. Fair enough. Uh, Kevin, how how are you uh with particularly on the UA as regards rewarded side? How do you sort of see this kind of stuff applying
uh the creatives? Yeah. Well, for so we have two parts of we have we work with advertisers that leverage the users from in our platform which is a highly intentional user base and in that case I totally agree with you um no clickbaits um go well and you know especially with a
highly highly intentional user but they know they're already going to play some games. They just want to see what the game looks like. Yeah. and you know having that kind of a v variety of creatives in there clickbait you know um it's it doesn't really work um but advertising our platform cash cake it's

it's a different story and then again I agree the click clickbait well it works a little bit depending on the platform but then again people want to actually see what's going on like what is it and before they start engaging with it. Yeah,
and that's what we've been seeing so far. That's why like yeah, we do leverage AI in different fields as you have mentioned like personalization, targeting, other stuff. Um creative, I don't think we're there yet.
Yeah. Yeah. Do you think though I mean we see a lot with um with UA that it sort of goes through movements of like certain types of creative, certain styles. So for example, last year I remember it used to I used to see a ton of ads that were um like kind of supposed like in-game play kind of segments, many of which were fake or not actually in the game properly or kind of were or that sort of stuff. And that was a sort of a fashion that sort of passed through for a while. And then you would see say for example a lots of like micro micro celebrities or something like that sort of being involved and trying to like help push a game or you'd see a lot of kind of real world sort of I'm in the shower because I'm weeping because my game sort of stuff. Do you sort of think that a lot of the this kind of AI

content that we're currently sort of seeing a surge on similarly will actually expire as a kind of a tactic relatively quickly or do you think that there's a lot more to it um substantially?
Well, yeah. So I think it's a generational thing as as you have mentioned previously and
yeah it's it might go away it might not go away I don't know for sure right now
right
I don't know what the next generation is going to bring either
but I don't feel like it's going to stick around much
having though coming back to it and having the ability to be able to create like 2500,000 you say
2500,000 is much the same though right
I mean [laughter] it it takes a a ton of stress off of Yeah.
operational work and then you can test it and those kind of creatives and I' I've worked with a couple of them myself.
Yeah.
Um
though again as you mentioned it's impossible to test all of them. Um it's going to help us understand what's going to happen next but I feel like it's going to be a trend. Yeah.
If I can just add on this I think yeah

definitely it's generational. You have to imagine depending of generation I would say people are more or less educated about what's marketing and what's clickbait and you know and what's in there for me you know beyond just this white t-shirt you know and so on. Um I I think Jenz's and Gen Alpha you know they have brands out there and other companies like Liquid Death and Gentle Monster all of this you know that propose entertainment that propose something that make them belong you know and and that generation I don't believe you know a clickbait something that you know just try to is not going to is not going to work out that's not what we see at least
totally agreed with you just I don't want to exact say that that's the exact case but it kind of disconnects the personal connection that you might have with the creator or the brand.
Yeah.
If you have like 2500 ads of
right
AI generated stuff.
I I read as a related stat to that that um it's expected now that many creatives have only like a lifespan of like three or four days like or that sort of thing

because there's such a volume that it's like they're not even expecting them to have like say two weeks lifespan or that sort of stuff. So um so that does track. I mean it's got to certainly be just like a wall of kind of crazy after a while, right? or it's it's so impossible even to tell across different creatives what types are working anymore because you just have such a mass of them that it's it's like I don't know that one kind of thing. Yeah,
to me I just want to add again it's to me it's such like imagine we are in gaming right we're in gaming everybody love it my target audience surely loves it you know and I want to propose as a company like I want to propose something more than this clickbait you know I want to propose something like a liquid death I want to you know make them belong to a community I want to show them the game and tell them that this is a great game you know of this and thus what we see converts and brings a lot of very engaged players but also people in the community that brings more players.
It's funny you say that because one of the best performing uh concepts that our team worked with for one of our partners was I think maybe you were speaking more like metaphorically, but it was just literally the the founder of the game on

screen mixed with gameplay footage. Yeah. Just the founder talking about why he designed the game, what he learned from working with the community. And it's again it's just kind of that counter to AI seeing like oh this is a person that designed the game. This is what they cared about. This is what the he learned from his community. I did a I did like some not such like a fun story we call them you know we spend 5k on on that on that post and we brought almost a million players to our website with 5k.
Mhm.
On the stories actually work not only for gaming for others as well.
Yeah that's what I was to say. I I've started seeing that and
very strong.
Yeah. Deeper connections like the founder talking about.
Right. Right. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Do you are you okay? [laughter] Um, speaking of, um, I mean, obviously one of the things that that a lot of this kind of, uh, conversation sort of brings up is that there's a real specialization of expertise that's kind of come in with like learning how to get you good at UA. And one of the issues I don't know about you guys, but I run into as I work with a lot of smaller

teams is they often just don't have like the beginning expertise or the kind of the depth of knowledge that guys like you do, right? What's your kind of recommendation for de developers in terms of like how to scale up on UA efficiently so that they do become able to kind of understand the marketplace? They're able to like learn how to navigate different tools. Say assuming they're they're just started. There are a bunch of coders in the room. They made a great game. They don't really know where to begin. Like what's your what's your kind of thoughts particularly in the modern landscape on on how to um how to sort of get going essentially? Warren, I'm going to throw that at you first.
Yeah, sure. I can start here. I think it it depends on where a team is at. If you are a sole founder or a very small team, do not invest in the resources of building out like a BI team, a UA team, in-house creative team. You can start very basic. Uh I usually advise people start on meta and Tik Tok because the the UIs are the same. I think there is actually high value in learning like fundamental UA even as a founder. Uh you don't want to spend your hours doing it, but you want to understand the part of the ecosystem and be able to communicate

effectively with whatever stakeholders eventually doing that for you. Um so prove it out with you know those two channels initially they're the same you can port learnings from one to the other creatives etc. If a company is either ready to scale or it's an older product that needs like a turnaround that's like one of our partners for last year was Ludia they reacquired their portfolio and had to do like a full UA turnaround kind of starting from zero and rebuilding in that case a partner like uptick can come in do the UA creative across all channels provide all the analytics and insights and in that case working with you know not nec us or resource like that as sort of a proof of concept of can this game scale can this game turn around and then decide from there it doesn't mean you need to work with the agency long term but if having a proven resource to kind of build the proof of concept and then decide cool where do I want to go from here? Do I want to raise around and build out an internal team? Do I want to keep working with partners? Do I want to do a smaller version of this? So that's what I would say just keep it small and simple if you're starting from zero. If you're trying to get to that point of scaling, use an expert resource, but don't build

out fully internally until you know you have something that can sustain profitability and sustain the burn of that larger team.
Sure. build on that actually I had a couple of cases where the smallest startup one was gaming one was non-gaming and um they basically didn't know should we should we hire somebody in house do UA ads and stuff like honestly I don't think it's worth it right now because you don't know how long it's going to last and if anything it's maybe getting for UA operations getting an agency who is already very experienced and who can do stuff but also if you want to have a larger control over content that gets out maybe uh have a freelancer who can help you work fully with how creative should look like. let's say it's a founder story or product story or anything like that and invest more time in that because um that's can actually be quite cost- effective if you do it that way and that way you will see the proof of concept whether or not and then collect the information okay actually

what is a consistent workflow that I need to hire somebody and it would it actually in that case it helped us build out let's say a job description a profile what they're look who are they looking for Um, so definitely would not hire in-house straight away. Although I'm a marketing person, but I would not hire marketing [laughter] straight away. I agree. I would just add be very careful with the vetting of the agency and especially if it's like a a younger product. Like have that conversation like is it someone that can give you bad news or is it someone that's going to tell you to spend and spend and spend regardless of what's happening? So just check references of the agency. make sure it's someone who's philosophically aligned uh and will be willing to tell you if you need to kill the product even even if it's not in their best interest. So
it's an extra step to take.
Sure. Yeah. Leah, what's your do you have a take on that? So whenever this is developer asking me how to start.
Yeah.
And then sometimes I also get got the same question that should we hire somebody or should you use agency but

you know whether you work with your agency or work hire somebody internally what I told them that you know founder or that team you know they should understand what it is so it doesn't need to be complicated. I think what work best is simplicity. So they need to understand that how it works and so I think you know they should do it something on one platform because they don't have massive budget and then they should set the clear the message and then you know they should add a test and then I think the one the more important thing is to get the run or the test is then you know at the to important thing is to get you know uh interpretable data and then you know they have to get you know they said a common understanding ing of this data and then it'll help to be able to act on it fastly.
Right. Right. Okay.
Yeah. So disclaimer, this is not advertising but it has a little bit of a product placement in it. So a little bit

biased here because I have done this previously many times. Um I I have studios that just started advertising with with rewarded networks. First of all it doesn't have to be expensive. We have options that cheaper options. And then what you get out of that is um certain installs that you can that's not fraudulent and a highly intended user base that is going to give you a lot of insights. First of all, if they like your app or not, second of all, what the mechanics are. You can get all of this from every single media. Yeah.
But then you have this highly intentional that wants to go through all of the events real fast. User base. Um and this is a I'm an account manager. Obviously, we don't really, you know, comment on the mechanics of the title that we're advertising, but these deep conversations I have with my couple couple of my advertisers on how to actually improve the progression within their titles and you know, it's not a big big big cohort from reordered

networks um but gives you a lot of accurate insights. So initial processes, initial growth and operational wise, it's not going to be that expensive because you don't need many people to do the campaigns, the creatives and whatnot. Uh it ends up helping you a lot in in many different fields. So although I'm biased um obviously
um that's I mean and I'm not saying like this is the best strategy to good to go with but it's just another alternative strategy that started growing recently um and I've been consulting you know yeah advertisers that just do rewarded or just start with rewarded or if they're like already existing advertiser they'll they'll publish another title from the get-go and they start with because you you get to you get that install amount of of course also on on the store. I'm not saying it's the, you know, the main reason why the conversion is going to happen, but it definitely helps.
Yeah. One thing I've observed a lot with the smaller studios that I work with again with stuff like this is that

because they're maybe trying to run a lot of say smaller micro experiments or like that sort of scale, right? That they are very very prone to like over interpreting the results that they see or they're very prone to maybe being a bit emotional or emotionally guided by what they think their creative is doing or what their UA campaign is doing. How can they guard against that? Because they can't necessarily spend at the level if you like that a larger dev can to get truly statistically representative kind of results. They do have to kind of use their intuition a bit. But how do they avoid biasing themselves essentially?
Uh price
I would love actually if you give me the opportunity to come back to the previous question. Yeah. Um
I would say you know I mean again as a on the perspective of a founder if you're building a game if you're building a company today 2025 2026 I would say From the beginning, you're going to have to be extremely methodical and understand that are you hiring a UA or you not? It's all about phases. And what do you do now when you don't even have a game? What do you do now when you're not

in a place to do you have a game but not in a place to do UA and and it's it's phases, right? Um and something I that we do for sure and that I would suggest you know everybody does it's start to get a community very early you know build a community of couple of thousand people tens of thousand people and see what they talk about you know about your game what resonates start to test you know like theories on them you know either it's on your discord either it's like some small ads you know if you even if you just spend like 500 you know you hear something about you know that resonates in the try to do an ad, see how it performs compared to something else, you know, even looking at what competitors are doing, you know, and and and try does that resonates actually with with your audience or not. Um, it's all about Yeah, it's all about phases, but don't underestimate I think this, right? You're going to build a game. We decide to do actually one game, right? We don't we don't want to do multiple games and,

you know, spread our focus is one game. So if you do one game, you're going to have one or two years, maybe three, um, of just building. It's three years where you can build your brand, build your community, learn before going to those guys and push your ads, right? And it's it's like a gold mine and I I see a lot of uh startups slipping on that opportunity.
Okay, cool. Um, what do you think? I totally agree with you and for whoever has a luxury of time to do that that's great because I think community and word of mouth word of mouth let's say is the strongest type of marketing and people who are engaged and they're going to play they're going to give you feedback um and I agree that it it is phases because at the beginning when let's say you're building community and then at some point you need to start Facebook ads or whatever or Tik Tok you don't need an agency for that you just can do it yourself there's lots of free knowledge online. I mean, if you're short of time, go to GPT and just ask them to give you instructions. Anybody can do it. It's like really easy. Um,

but then going to the marketing mix. Actually, [clears throat] reward play. Uh, marketing mix exists for a reason. I would still start with something based more like SRNs and things like that and uh combination of community because organics are very very important. organics that's what's going to take you to the next level and that's something that you cannot buy with money that's something that needs to be built from scratch but then when selecting networks I would not select reward play networks I'm sorry because looking at the data literally the retention drop off really really high straight after the reward window is finished so therefore I would never recommend to smaller developers to do that because if they're making decisions based on like they're going to change their product they're going raise or not raise investment fund raise or whatever and if that is in the mix that's just going to make it high risk uh give them high risk stats and I don't think that's a good thing they need to

blend organics and something that is a little bit more stable
no I mean yeah I do agree with you and I would say like the community building is super important and that's one of the things that my company does
right
and to to keep that and that retention is not going down that much what we realized with some of the consultants that we have given is because we have the row eyes before and the installs before and and and I understand the retention rates drop after the reward facure but it also helps them to build up some numbers on their end plus improve their product. Of course you can do that with other things. you can do your testing, you can listen to your community, which I'm, you know, by the way, one fan of as well. Um, but we have seen it in my experience at least to help um to a certain level. And I'm not saying that would be the only thing that will carry you to the future, but it's

just um a lever to pull if you're interested in it.
Yeah.
I I think it's it's going back to phases. As you mentioned in earlier phases, you shouldn't do that. But then once you go to like maiden phases because then when you have a mix then you should have a mix of everything and this is where reward play is going to be have like very short payback window very good draws in a short period of time particular types of games it's going to work for but at the very very beginning probably starting with community and building the base first
but I'm more on his side because you know the this community building is not yeah something like the pre-arketing Right. So it doesn't mean then you know don't run at UH and gathering user for free because you know I think uh whether this the community building or add yet I think all this small team or the even at the bigger team should start something

with the users. So it's not about add platform. So I think that even at the bigger team yeah without a massive budget the team yeah cannot clearly explain that you know the who this title is for you know what kind of what kind of the player would care about their game or you know how they can differentiate from their other competitors I think it's just wast money so I think the need to understand your user So I think this community building thing or the hear user feedback is more like that together keep the users in. So I think u can be an amplifier. So but it's not yet magic or they only to get the user. So you know if the product cannot keep user then yeah it's useless.
Okay cool. Warren, do you have a
Yeah, I guess going back to the original question, um, one of the one of the pitfalls we most commonly see uh, as far

as like that emotional attachment to creatives or certain messaging. Uh, in mobile gaming, we tend to be very data driven almost to the point of of a crutch in the sense of the pitfall I see is teams are very quick to be like, all right, we have some data, this works, this doesn't work, do more of this, don't do this. And I see it in both ways being that teams will like do a couple of UGC creatives, it doesn't work, and then I talk to them, they're like, "Oh yeah, we tested UGC. It doesn't work for our game. What did you test these three ads?" Okay. And you wrote off a whole like segment of design based off of those three. Uh, and similarly, there's a temptation to be like, "Okay, this is the overperforming of the first five things we tried, so do more of this or copy our competitors." Normally, the gap and what people are not doing is just a lack of imagination. It's it in most cases the thing that needs to be done is just try something net new increase the breadth of ideas. Um if people usually don't work hard enough to explore breath and find the breakouts and pivot too

quickly to this is our data set, this is what works. Iterate off of that and then that's when you see really fast creative burnout because you're just iterating off of things you've already saturated the market with rather than uh shipping net new ideas.
Right. Okay. So we only have a couple minutes left. Amazingly, this panel has gone super fast and is fantastic. By the way, thank you all so much. With one final question then, um, so obviously the the panel title is David and Goliath and in the story of David and Goliath, David famously fells the giant with a slingshot, right? A little stone. What is your recommendation to smaller developers? Like what is their slingshot? What is the opportunity that they're like maybe not seeing the thing that really could help them to sort of accelerate over and above where they currently are at the moment? even if it's kind of pie in the sky, like what's the thing that you think you should do that more than anything else um to uh to be successful throughout 2026 and beyond? You have that?
Yeah. So, it's going to depend on the type of title. If it's going to be anything more than hyper casual or maybe even casual, then I'll probably go with
community building, which I'm a gamer myself and I think it's very important,

right? Um, then again, I'll go back to if it's something, you know, less than casual, I'll probably go with my suggestion.
Very cool. Uh, Warren, what's your slingshot?
Yeah. Uh, two things really quick. Uh, we work with a mix of like really small teams, individual founders up to like big publicly traded companies. The small teams can always win by just moving faster. They can have an idea for a creative, for a new ad network, a new tactic. They can be testing it tomorrow. For these bigger companies, it can take them months, quarters to push through a new a new uh strate creative strategy to get the paperwork done to work with a new network. So, there's so many ways small teams can move faster. A lot of our biggest wins have been working with these very small teams. And then just a low hanging fruit. Uh our team uptick is doing free uh UA audits or one-hour audits we're doing at this event. There's Ilia on our team and there's uh Xander out there. Just flag one of us down. We can do a one one hour audit with you now. It's not a sales pitch. We'll like open up your data. We'll take a look. We spend about $8 million a month in UA. We're happy to tell you what we're seeing and what you think you

could improve in a short span.
Oh, very cool. Sakala, what's your slingshot?
Use free audits. [laughter] People like free. I like free stuff. So, I take that. Um I think for smaller companies is especially for smaller like uh teams and startups people underutilize quality research speaking to their customers speaking to their competitors customers and understanding what actually what do people want because at the beginning you do need that kind of thing you do need that kind of thing at the when you get midway as well but I think as you said we are so data driven gaming to to the extent that it goes a bit extreme,
we forget to talk to our customers, to our players and see what how do they actually feel about this.
Um, and then use just a playbook online. You don't need to work with anyone. You can start doing your regular Facebook ads and Tik Tok to begin with to experiment. It's

really, really important that founders learn what it is and what it is not. So that then when you're ready to work with the agency, network, build your team, you're a lot more knowledgeable about the basics and pretty much all of it is nitty-gritty to be
price. What's your slingshot?
Yeah. Again, um I want to say just make a great game. Focus. Try to stay focused on freaking making a great game and taking like, you know, you're going to be able to move faster on that. Uh you are a small team. uh of great creative hopefully and look target a specific opportunity and just move as fast as we can towards it. The the big companies you know will take longer is going to be a more messy process for them where you can go straight to it. Um then yeah again you know repeating my my community piece uh I would add to that make sure that it adds to a brand you know the community and everything that you do during the

development adds to a brand where you start to build equity for your studio for your game that resonates with your audience you know I'm I'm a huge believer that there is consumer shifts in in many generation but specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha and we are in the most exciting industry for them in their life. Gaming is the most exciting things surely mod and school and and we have so much that we can propose to them that we are sleeping on.
Okay. And Leah last word what's your slingshot? The one thing that I always empathize is especially under this tough environment on the UA or the other side don't try to become everything for everyone you guys should understand you should be something indispensable for summon you know so I think that's the other most important thing so it's related to make a great game
great okay so we are completely out of

time so thank you very much everybody. Um, that was wonderful. [applause]