User Acquisition reports and market data
Documents
The Essential UA Financing Guide: 2026
The guide outlines a non-dilutive financing model designed to fund mobile studios’ user acquisition (UA) campaigns by leveraging cohort performance data.
- Global mobile user acquisition (UA) spend reached $78 billion in 2025, representing a 13% year-on-year increase.
- Studios can access non-dilutive financing to cover up to 80% of monthly UA spend per cohort, avoiding equity dilution while scaling growth.
- Repayment is tied directly to cohort performance, with the schedule beginning only once the return on ad spend (ROAS) reaches the 100% breakeven point.
🎲Dicero: Habby’s biggest bet (And biggest risk?)
Habby is undergoing a fundamental strategic transition, moving away from the hypercasual-adjacent success of titles like Survivor.io toward a more complex, midcore model exemplified by its latest release, Dicero.
- Habby is pivoting from hypercasual-adjacent titles like Survivor.io to a midcore model with Dicero, characterized by complex gacha mechanics, tiered evolution, and a slower-paced merging economy.
- The studio has abandoned rewarded advertisements in favor of a direct-to-consumer web store and high-intent monetization, marking a fundamental shift in its revenue strategy.
- Habby is currently facing its lowest revenue and download figures in recent history, casting doubt on whether its new, more complex gameplay can achieve the same market penetration as previous hits.
UA Monthly #3: Freecash Ban, Unity Kills ironSource & Vector’s Rise
The recent deplatforming of the rewarded ad network Freecash underscores a critical shift in the mobile user acquisition landscape, signaling that app stores are increasingly intolerant of aggressive, non-native incentive models.
- The deplatforming of Freecash signals that app stores are increasingly penalizing aggressive, non-native incentive models and deceptive affiliate marketing practices.
- Advertisers should treat rewarded traffic as a transient resource and diversify spending away from high-risk, single-network dependencies to mitigate performance decay.
- Unity is pivoting its advertising strategy toward the Vector AI solution following the integration of ironSource, though current performance metrics remain inconsistent.
🕹️ Playable ads are the most underused growth lever right now
Playable ads represent a critical, underutilized growth lever within the mobile gaming and application sectors, serving as a primary driver for high-quality user acquisition.
- Playable ads are currently the most effective, underutilized growth lever for mobile user acquisition, moving beyond gaming into non-gaming app onboarding.
- Success in playable advertising is driven by high-volume creative iteration rather than the pursuit of individual asset perfection.
- Developers are increasingly adopting a 'plus one' strategy, borrowing and iterating on proven mechanics from successful titles like Township and Pizza Ready to lower customer acquisition costs.
Mobile App Trends: LATAM
The Latin American mobile app market is experiencing robust growth, driven by a highly mobile-first population and rapid economic digitalization.
- The Latin American mobile app market is projected to reach a valuation of $56.1 billion by 2034, supported by a smartphone penetration rate expected to hit 93% by 2030.
- User privacy opt-in rates in the region reached 49% in Q1 2026, significantly outperforming the 38% global average, with Brazil leading at 54%.
- Finance apps experienced a 34% year-over-year increase in session activity during Q1 2026, driven by the adoption of super apps and real-time payment systems like Brazil’s Pix.
Beyond Almedia’s Freecash Ban: What’s up, REWARDED UA?
The rewarded user acquisition sector is currently navigating a critical period of transition following the removal of major platforms like Freecash from the Apple and Google app stores.
- Apple and Google removed the rewarded UA platform Freecash from their app stores due to concerns over misleading advertising practices and sensitive data handling.
- The rewarded UA model is shifting from simple 'install and delete' mechanics to a focus on long-term engagement, play, and monetization.
- Advertisers in the rewarded space often face challenges with profitability, as some top-tier games like Monopoly Go may pay $15–$25 per user, making it difficult to recoup costs within a one-year window.
How's it going, Outfit7? Learnings from 2025 to New Projects in 2026
Outfit7, the developer behind the Talking Tom franchise, navigated a challenging 2025 by shifting from a KPI-driven, siloed organizational structure back to its core creative roots.
- Outfit7’s Talking Tom IP remains the global leader in mobile game downloads, surpassing 27 billion lifetime downloads as of 2025.
- To combat declining organic reach and rising user acquisition costs, Outfit7 shifted its strategy back to its core roots by focusing on clear project goals, remastering original titles, and expanding into the kids' segment with new products like Talking Tom and Friends World.
- The company successfully launched the survival roguelike game 'Vampirio' by empowering a small, autonomous team with full trust and resources, demonstrating that focused, silo-free teams outperform larger, distracted groups.
🤖 AI creatives are evolving faster than anyone expected (March 2026 trends)
The integration of artificial intelligence into game development pipelines has fundamentally transformed creative production, enabling studios to scale output to unprecedented levels.
- AI-assisted production pipelines now allow studios to generate over 10,000 asset variations per month, with automation handling up to 70% of creative output.
- The primary strategic challenge in 2026 is balancing high-volume AI asset production with core game mechanics to combat stagnant user acquisition and declining download numbers.
- Studios are shifting away from low-quality content toward high-production-value storytelling, utilizing AI to maintain character consistency and narrative depth across massive creative libraries.
🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Chinese domination, M&A boom, Freecash controversy
The mobile gaming industry is currently undergoing significant structural shifts characterized by the dominance of Chinese developers, a resurgence in merger and acquisition activity, and regulatory scrutiny of rewarded user acquisition platforms.
- M&A activity in the mobile gaming sector reached $7.7 billion in Q1 2026, representing a threefold increase compared to the same period in 2025.
- Chinese-developed titles such as Last War, Honor of Kings, Whiteout Survival, and Gossip Harbor are increasingly displacing long-standing market leaders like Candy Crush on global top-grossing charts.
- The removal of the rewarded user acquisition platform Freecash from major app stores has triggered industry-wide scrutiny regarding the future viability of rewarded advertising models.
👾 Creative Trends March 2026: AI hooks, fake ads, and the infinite iteration machine
Mobile game marketing in early 2026 is defined by a strategy of infinite iteration, where developers prioritize the rapid, continuous remixing of proven creative concepts over original gameplay representation.
- Mobile game marketing in early 2026 is dominated by 'infinite iteration,' a strategy that prioritizes the rapid remixing of high-performing creative hooks over accurate gameplay representation.
- Top-grossing titles are increasingly utilizing stylized or misleading advertisements that bear little to no resemblance to the actual game experience to drive initial user engagement.
- The industry relies on a cycle of recycling proven tropes, such as wood-chopping mechanics, surreal animations, and failure-based puzzle loops, to maintain ad performance in a saturated market.
MDM Podcast, S07, E13: Google navigates the AI advertising era (with Dan Taylor)
The advertising landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift into an AI-driven epoch, characterized by the transition from manual, keyword-based search to conversational, intent-oriented interactions.
- Google is shifting from keyword-based search to conversational intent, using Gemini to better understand complex, multi-turn queries and improve ad ranking efficiency.
- AI Overviews and AI Mode are currently monetizing at parity with traditional search, serving as new engines for brand discovery by matching ads to the context of AI-generated answers rather than just search terms.
- Google is transitioning away from manual keyword management toward automated, AI-driven campaign systems like Performance Max, which leverage machine learning to optimize performance beyond what manual control can achieve.
🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Unity kills ironSource, Meta lawsuits, AppLovin moves
The mobile gaming and ad tech sectors are currently undergoing a significant transition characterized by market stabilization, consolidation, and a shift toward operational efficiency.
- The mobile gaming market is stagnating, with in-app purchase revenues plateauing at $20 billion for three consecutive quarters and download volumes hitting multi-year lows as of Q1 2026.
- Unity is restructuring its ad business by sunsetting the ironSource network and divesting its Supersonic publishing arm to prioritize its Unity Vector ad stack, which has achieved 15% sequential growth.
- Meta is moving toward a fully autonomous AI-driven advertising model by 2026 via its Advantage Plus and Andromeda systems, shifting the focus from manual campaign management to creative diversity and first-party data.