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UA Monthly #2: AppLovin's Social Network, Google Fee Cuts & Unity Vector
Unity is aggressively challenging the current user acquisition landscape by introducing D28 in-app purchase ROAS campaigns powered by its Vector engine.
- Unity is testing D28 in-app purchase ROAS campaigns using its Vector engine, moving beyond the industry-standard seven-day optimization window to better identify high-value players.
- Google has reduced Play Store fees from 30% to 20% for new installs, providing developers with marginal improvements in unit economics and increased bidding power for user acquisition.
- AppLovin is exploring expansion into e-commerce and social networking to secure first-party inventory, though analysts view this as a high-risk departure from its core B2B ad-tech expertise.
MDM Podcast, Season 7, Episode 11: Understanding Unity's Vector (with Felix The)
Unity’s Vector platform represents a strategic evolution in mobile user acquisition by leveraging the company’s dual role as a game engine provider and an advertising network.
- Unity's 'Vector' advertising product leverages engine-level runtime data to improve user acquisition performance by providing high-fidelity, sequential event signals that are superior to traditional, often fragmented, software development kit (SDK) data.
- Unity is shifting from fragmented machine learning approaches to 'massive unified models' that allow for better autocorrelation, covariance, and causal understanding of user behavior across the advertising ecosystem.
- The company is prioritizing generative AI tools that focus on improving Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) rather than just increasing creative volume, ensuring that advertisers do not simply shift costs from production to marketing without performance gains.
How to leverage incentivised rewards for high value UA | Nicholas Bloom from Exmox #PGConnects
The incentivized user acquisition (UA) sector has emerged as a significant force in the mobile gaming industry, currently accounting for approximately 30% of the total UA marketing share.
- Exmox, a rewarded user acquisition platform, facilitates high-LTV traffic by incentivizing users with cash rewards to complete specific in-game events, currently accounting for approximately 30% of the total UA marketing share of voice.
- Exmox plans to triple its UA spend in 2026 to $300 million, following a $100 million spend in 2025 and a doubling of its internal headcount from approximately 60 to 120 employees.
- Rewarded UA platforms require users to opt-in to tracking to function; this acts as a necessary trade-off for users to receive rewards, as the platform must verify in-game event completion via MMPs in real-time to trigger payouts.
Pokemon Go owner: There’s less of a need for new games
Scopely co-CEO Javier Ferreira provides an analytical overview of the current mobile gaming landscape, emphasizing that while the market has reached unprecedented scale, the requirements for success have shifted significantly.
- The mobile gaming market has shifted from rapid user acquisition to a focus on longevity, with 80% of Scopely’s revenue now generated by players who have engaged with their titles for over a year.
- Scopely has reached $15 billion in lifetime revenue and 2 billion downloads, anchored by six distinct billion-dollar franchises including the recent hit Monopoly Go.
- Market maturity has reduced the demand for new, transient game titles, placing a higher premium on the development of exceptional, long-term player experiences.
OpenClaw 101: Automated Content Creation with AI
OpenClaw functions as an advanced agentic AI framework designed to achieve full automation of digital workflows, specifically targeting high-volume content creation for platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
- OpenClaw enables the creation of autonomous AI agents that can perform complex, multi-step workflows like managing end-to-end content pipelines for TikTok and Instagram with minimal human intervention.
- AI agents operate using 'skills'—modular, downloadable sets of instructions that allow the agent to execute specific tasks such as video editing, web searching via MCP (Model Context Protocol), or data analysis.
- Persistent memory allows agents to retain context over time, which users can manually review and edit in local files to correct errors or refine the agent's behavior.
The Future of Consumer Apps: How AI and Game Design Principles Are Reshaping Every Category
The analysis establishes that consumer applications are entering a “Game-Design 2.0” era, driven by AI-native personalization, real-time feedback and progression systems that elevate engagement and monetization across education, fintech, e-commerce, health, social media and emerging verticals.
- Non-gaming mobile app revenue is projected to reach $150 billion by 2030, with spending in this sector already surpassing traditional gaming apps as of 2025.
- AI-driven gamification is the primary catalyst for revenue and engagement, with BITKRAFT forecasting at least five non-gaming consumer companies will exceed $10 billion valuations by 2035.
- High-friction sectors are successfully using game mechanics to drive retention; for example, fintech platforms like StockGro use leaderboards and AI-personalized tutorials to convert financial discipline into instant gratification.
🚀 Last Asylum Review: Is this the next Kingshot moment in 4X gaming?
Last Asylum: Plague represents a strategic evolution in the mobile 4X genre, synthesizing proven engagement mechanics from industry leaders like Whiteout Survival and Kingshot into a highly optimized, accessible experience.
- Last Asylum: Plague generated $4 million in its first month and is projected to reach $5 million in monthly revenue, positioning it as a top-tier competitor in the 4X genre.
- The game maintains a consistent volume of 200,000 daily downloads, with particularly strong performance in high-lifetime-value markets including Japan and South Korea.
- Developers are increasingly utilizing AI for 70% to 80% of creative asset generation, enabling rapid iteration and the deployment of thousands of targeted advertisements.
Google Play's Rate Cuts: Winners, Losers, and Unknowns
The recent settlement between Epic Games and Google has fundamentally altered the mobile gaming landscape by introducing a tiered commission structure that challenges the long-standing 30 percent platform fee.
- The Epic Games and Google settlement introduces a tiered commission structure, allowing developers to reduce platform fees from 30 percent to between 15 and 20 percent through the Level Up program.
- Eligibility for reduced fees requires developers to integrate Google’s AI tools, achievement systems, and cloud infrastructure, leading many major studios to express concerns over potential user experience degradation and loss of proprietary data control.
- The settlement legitimizes direct-to-consumer web shops by explicitly permitting developers to steer users toward off-platform payment options, enabling them to bypass platform fees entirely.
The final word on GDC | Week in Mobile Games podcast
The Game Developers Conference faces a precarious future following a sharp decline in 2024, where attendance plummeted by 33% to 20,000 participants and exhibitor numbers reached their lowest level since 2012.
- Starting June 2026, PEGI will expand its age rating criteria to include in-game monetization and online features, with games containing loot boxes or paid random items likely defaulting to a PEGI 16 rating.
- Epic Games Store GM Steve Allison described the recent Google-Epic settlement, which allows developers to keep more revenue, as a 'meaningful reset' that provides developers with a toolkit to improve margins.
- King’s Farm Heroes Saga has surpassed $2 billion in lifetime revenue, highlighting the continued success of the studio's casual portfolio despite its historical, largely unsuccessful attempts to pivot toward midcore titles.
MDM Podcast, Season 7, Episode 7: MDM Mailbag #7 (with Matej Lancaric)
The mobile gaming industry is undergoing a structural shift toward web-based onboarding and direct-to-consumer payment strategies to mitigate the impact of platform-level tracking restrictions and high app store fees.
- Mobile game developers are increasingly using web-based onboarding and shops to bypass the 30% platform fees charged by Apple and Google, though major companies remain hesitant to fully move their monetization stacks due to security concerns and the difficulty of auditing web-based transactions.
- Artificial intelligence and no-code tools have drastically shortened production cycles for high-quality video and playable ads, allowing developers to deploy new creatives in as little as one day using pre-built templates.
- The effectiveness of mobile measurement partners (MMPs) remains debated, with smaller studios often lacking the internal resources to manage complex data attribution, leading to a reliance on internal dashboards built on top of Firebase and Looker.
TWiG #375: GDC 2026 Post-Mortem, Epic’s Surrender & Google Play’s Legal Rebirth
The global gaming industry is currently navigating a period of significant structural recalibration, marked by declining event attendance and shifting platform economics.
- GDC 2026 attendance has declined by 30% compared to 2011 levels, signaling a structural shift away from mass-market conventions toward exclusive, executive-focused events.
- Google Play’s recent 5% reduction in service fees is considered insufficient to offset the rising costs of user acquisition, despite improvements in user friction through the removal of installation scare screens.
- Epic Games is pivoting away from protracted legal battles toward internal platform growth, focusing on self-publishing and cross-platform social features rather than alternative mobile app stores.
🚨📢 Breaking News: Apple AI money, rewarded roll-up, mobile funding wave
The mobile gaming industry is currently defined by three major trends: the indirect monetization of generative AI, a resurgence in venture capital funding for game studios, and the consolidation of rewarded user acquisition (UA) platforms.
- Major industry players are prioritizing control over distribution infrastructure, evidenced by NCSoft’s $202 million acquisition of a 70% stake in Just Play and Nazara Technologies’ $100 million investment in Blue Tile and Best Play.
- The mobile gaming industry is undergoing a consolidation of rewarded user acquisition firms, allowing companies to build proprietary ecosystems that bypass traditional ad networks.
- Apple is projected to generate nearly $1 billion in annual revenue from third-party generative AI applications by collecting 15% to 30% commission fees on subscriptions through the App Store.