Back in 2023 I noticed something around Christmas time for big branded celebrity mobile game ads. I remember there being a few of them and was so curious why Christmas time for these big ad campaigns?

Then the next year that helped make it all make sense - an article came out in 2024 from Naavik’s article on Q5.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, Q5 is the unofficial period between Boxing Day and the end of January. It is normally a great time to acquire mobile players. Christmas puts new phones and tablets into people’s hands, everyone has more time to play, and advertisers start switching off their big festive campaigns.

That combination can make media noticeably cheaper. The Naavik article points to CPMs falling by roughly 10% to 40% on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok compared with late November. Players are still around, but much of the competition has gone home.

It sounds perfect. So when I first wondered whether GTA VI could upset Q5, my instinct was probably not. GTA is a console game and Q5 is a mobile UA opportunity. They are different markets.

Then I realised I was looking at the wrong part of the problem.

GTA VI is due to launch on 19 November 2026, just over a month before Q5 begins. Although it is only coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S at launch, its effect will reach much further than the console market.

The obvious concern is attention. A huge number of players will still be exploring Vice City over Christmas and well into January. Gaming creators, press coverage and social feeds will be full of it. Any other game launching around the same time will have to fight incredibly hard to get noticed.

More importantly, there is the question of what every other publisher does to avoid GTA VI.

Everyone has to go somewhere

Not every publisher will delay a game because of GTA. Development timelines are messy, financial years matter and release dates cannot always be moved at will. But if a publisher has the option, launching immediately before or after one of the biggest entertainment releases ever is hardly appealing.

We have already seen how much influence GTA VI has over the wider calendar. When its previous launch window changed, Reuters reported that rival publishers moved quickly to fill the space it left behind. Former Rockstar technical director Obbe Vermeij also said that releasing just before or after GTA VI could hurt another game’s sales.

The important thing for marketers is that a delayed launch budget does not disappear. It follows the game.

If enough publishers move away from November and December, many of them will end up in January, February or March. Suddenly, the supposedly quiet period is full of games launching at the same time, all needing reach, installs, wishlists and sales.

January also brings fresh annual budgets for plenty of companies. Instead of Q5 being the moment when everyone has run out of money, we could see delayed launches meeting newly approved budgets and aggressive growth targets for the year ahead.

This is where mobile gets dragged into it.

GTA VI doesn’t need to be on mobile

Console, PC and mobile games increasingly buy attention in the same places. They use TikTok, YouTube, Meta, Reddit, creators and programmatic media to reach overlapping groups of players.

A console publisher does not need to run an app-install campaign to make it more expensive for a mobile game to reach gamers on TikTok. It just needs to enter the same auction with a large launch budget.

Mobile publishers could therefore get squeezed from both sides. There may be more gaming advertisers bidding for their audiences, while those audiences are simultaneously harder to pull away from GTA VI.

The competition will not stop with paid media either. Creators can only cover so many games. Press outlets have limited space. Players have limited time and money. Even a mobile game with no obvious connection to GTA is still launching into the same wider attention economy.

Of course, the impact will not be equal for everyone.

Core games, shooters, action titles and games aimed at younger adult console players are likely to feel it most. They have the greatest audience overlap with GTA VI and are more likely to compete directly with the publishers moving their launches.

Casual, puzzle and lifestyle games should be better protected. They appeal to different motivations and often reach audiences outside the centre of the GTA conversation. Mobile-first networks such as AppLovin and Unity may also behave differently from social platforms where console, PC and mobile advertisers are all competing side by side.

That is why I do not think GTA VI will completely kill the Q5 opportunity. The usual reasons for cheaper media will still exist. Retail campaigns will wind down, new devices will be activated and people will have more time to play.

I just would not assume that gaming advertisers will see the same Q5 discount they have seen in previous years.

Cheaper media doesn’t always mean better performance

There is another trap here. CPMs could fall after Black Friday and still leave mobile publishers with disappointing results.

If impressions become cheaper but players are distracted, CPI may not improve by the same amount. If those new players retain or spend less, ROAS could actually get worse. A cheap impression is only useful if it eventually turns into a valuable player.

So if I were putting together a Q5 media plan for a mobile game now, I would treat lower CPMs as a possible upside rather than the foundation of the strategy.

I would test early, keep part of the budget flexible and avoid committing everything to January before seeing how the auctions actually behave. I would also leave room to move spend into February or March if the delayed release calendar makes Q5 more crowded than expected.

Creative will matter too. There is little point trying to compete with GTA VI on scale or spectacle. Mobile games should focus on what makes them different: they are immediate, accessible and can fit into the moments when someone is away from their console. For some games, positioning themselves as a break from a huge open-world experience may work better than trying to shout over it.

Q5 is not disappearing. There will still be good opportunities, and some genres and channels may perform brilliantly.

But ‘January media is cheap’ is not enough of a strategy this time. GTA VI will reshape the release calendar, and all the games trying to stay out of its way may end up competing with each other instead.

The hidden quarter will still be there. The problem is that everyone hiding from GTA VI might find each other in January.

When I joined Space Ape Games in 2015, I started where a lot of people in games quietly start: support tickets. It was the fastest way to understand the game, the players, and all the strange little problems that never show up in a product roadmap.

Pretty quickly, though, I found myself helping with something else. It didn’t really have a proper title. It sat somewhere between community management, sales, marketing, live ops, and growth.

At the time, we called it community hacking.

The concept was straightforward. Go into competing games. Find the top 100 or so alliances. Identify the decision makers - the guild leaders, the big spenders, the people other players listened to. Then pitch them. Hear their gripes about the game they are currently in. Tell them you can give them a better service in your game, have access to a VIP manager, accelerate their progress with promo codes, and help find them a kingdom suited to their style of play. Get them in. Those promo code redemptions let us attribute installs and spend directly to the effort.

For Rival Kingdoms, I can remember pulling the lifetime spend reports on the players we’d brought in this way. The number was around $500k and this was maybe a year after the efforts which only lasted a month or two. So given the game was sunset on August 24th, 2024 it’s safe to say that number crept much higher over the years as a lot of those players were there till sunset. And the cost to acquire them? Time from salaried employees. Definitely a largely profitable endeavour.

Most UA today works in the opposite direction. You cast the widest possible net across Meta, Google, Applovin, Unity, Ironsource, and whatever else is hot that quarter. You’re hoping the right person sees the right ad at the right moment. Some of them convert. Most of them don’t. And whales - the players who will spend thousands over their lifetime - get treated the same as everyone else in that funnel, because there’s no way to filter them out before they install.

Community hacking skips all of that. You’re not hoping a whale sees your ad. You’re going to where the whales already live and talking to them directly.

The targeting is better than anything an ad platform can offer, because you can see exactly how someone behaves in a game before you approach them. Alliance rank. Activity level. Garrison power. Whatever the metrics are for the title you’re fishing in. You’re approaching someone with proof that they’re the kind of player you want.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I’m watching a new version of it play out, and it’s impressive in its own way.

The game is Infinity Kingdom, published by Yoozoo. And the method is Discord.

For context: On iOS it sits at #160 in Strategy for Downloads, pulling around 30k installs and $1M in revenue last month. On Google Play it ranks higher - #88 in Strategy - with 50k downloads and another $1M in revenue.

Over the past few months, I’ve been joining more Discord servers tied to mobile games - occupational habit. And I started getting random friend requests. At first I ignored them. Then I got curious.

The first message was from someone called Yolanda. Profile picture of an anime woman, casual opener, nothing that screamed anything in particular. I didn’t respond.

Then Harper, 26, from Toronto. She opened with “How did you get so high in IK?” I didn’t know what IK was, and I hadn’t responded, so she followed up with: “im sorry, my bad. I thought you were my teammates.” Then: “Oops. I’m so embarrassed. If you don’t mind, can I invite you to play IK with me? I need teammates.”

I asked what IK was. I got a screenshot of a phone with Infinity Kingdom circled.

A few weeks later, Judy. “yo u still on ik? look familiar.” I played along and said “It’s me, Bryan, from elementary school.” She didn’t miss a beat. Carried on. Told me she was 26 from Canada - same age and location as Harper, worth noting - and said she was heading to a new IK server and wanted to know if I’d join.

I stopped responding. She followed up. “yo, did you catch my last msg or did discord eat it? lol”

I caved, asked which server, and got funnelled into Infinity Kingdom. Once I said I’d signed up, Judy rang me on Discord audio. I didn’t answer. She asked for my username. Once she had it she told me to join her alliance and start working through the tutorial to level 5.

I stopped the conversation after that as I knew where this was going. First get to level 5, then eventually make a purchase etc. etc….

This is not a scam. It’s a well-built affiliate operation.

The people running these conversations are likely working on CPA, using in-game screenshots and usernames as proof of conversion before getting paid out. The playbook is deliberate: attractive female profile picture, casual opener, manufactured coincidence (”I thought you were my teammate”), same age and location across accounts to build a consistent persona, and escalating urgency once you show interest.

The targeting is not random either. One Reddit thread I found had people noting they’d received these messages while in Monopoly Go servers, DC Dark Legion servers, Avatar Realms Collide servers, cozy game servers. The people running this are looking for mutual servers with their targets before reaching out. They’re fishing in known waters.

And by the numbers on YouTube, where a video documenting this has around 41,000 views, the volume of people hitting this funnel is significant.

There’s a cost to doing it this way though. A quick look at Infinity Kingdom’s store reviews and its Steam page shows a pattern of players calling out the fake Discord accounts, warning others it’s a scam, and leaving one-star reviews as a result. The operation is generating noise in exactly the places a new player would look before installing. Yoozoo probably don’t care - the affiliate program is clearly converting enough to justify the blowback, and strategy whales aren’t typically browsing App Store reviews before they spend. But it’s worth knowing the trade-off if you’re thinking about running something similar.

The version that actually works, and the one we ran at Space Ape, doesn’t need a fake persona. If you want to community hack properly, either invest time building a legitimate high-level account in the game you’re targeting, so you have credibility when you approach top alliance players, or find someone already playing your game at a high level and bring them in as a scout. A real player in a real alliance, making a genuine pitch to someone they’ve actually played alongside, will convert better and leave zero negative reviews behind.

The whales are out there. You just have to earn the right to talk to them.

As always, if you've seen versions of community hacking in the wild - or ran a program like this yourself - I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Historically, mobile success was based on product-market fit. Does the game retain? Do people understand the core loop? Is it possible to buy players, onboard them, and scale spending without burning money? This is all still true. A game without retention remains a leaky bucket. However, product-market fit is not the whole story anymore.

The next tier in the stack of mobile games is meme-market fit. Does your game create clips worth sharing, commenting on, remixing, arguing, and creating memes around? Is the game mechanic replicable as content? Not as an advertisement that pretends to be a part of the actual gameplay. It should work as standalone content that people might actually want to consume as part of their newsfeed.

TikTok has redefined marketability. Today, the mechanic can be an ad in its own right. Merging. Clawing. Stacking. Failing. Upgrading. Combining. Transforming. The mechanics themselves become the main hook. The need for a Hollywood-quality commercial or some kind of fake-choice add or massive budget on UA is no longer necessary. Sometimes, the best creative comes from the mechanics, which could be chaotic, funny, aesthetically pleasing or understandable within just three seconds.

VTheDev-style thinking

VTheDev is a good example of meme-market fit in action. The interesting bit is not just that he makes TikToks about games, but that he appears to build around what TikTok already wants to watch: claw machines, chaotic combinations, brainrot characters, capybaras, satisfying upgrades, and simple mechanics that make sense instantly. His Tiktok bio frames him simply as someone ‘making mobile games,’ while games like Brainrot Catcher show the wider trend clearly: take a familiar mechanic like a claw machine, wrap it in whatever internet culture is peaking that week, and suddenly the game itself becomes content.

Capybaras have been mega-viral on Tiktok for awhile now thanks to the 2020 song OK I pull up / After Party Don Toliver meme (capybara riding in a car). That was then followed by “Chill Animal” Vibes in 2022 when it became a format not just an animal. Then the Capybara song dropped and cemented the Capybara in legendary Meme status.

The game is relatively simple… Capybara Rush is an endless runner where you play as a viral capybara, pulling up and sprinting through colorful levels. You dash, dodge, and collect treats while unlocking secret prizes along the way. It’s fast, light, and built around the chaotic, meme-driven energy that made capybaras blow up online.

Merge Fellas follows the same playbook, just with a different mechanic at the core.

The game is relatively simple… Merge Fellas is a combination game where you drop and merge characters to evolve them into bigger, weirder versions. Each merge escalates the chaos—what starts as something familiar quickly turns into absurd, meme-like creations. The loop is easy to understand instantly: combine, upgrade, repeat.

What makes it interesting is how closely it mirrors what already works on TikTok. The act of merging is inherently satisfying to watch - clean upgrades, unexpected outcomes, and a constant sense of “what does this turn into next?” It’s the same kind of visual payoff you get from stacking, claw machines, or idle upgrades. The mechanic is the content.

Instead of building a game and then figuring out how to advertise it, Merge Fellas feels like it starts from the opposite direction. Take a format people already enjoy watching-simple merges, escalating absurdity, quick dopamine hits-and wrap it in meme culture. The result is a game that doesn’t just play well, it clips well and can go viral on Tiktok creating you a free organic growth engine.

There are rules for meme-market fit.

There are rules for meme-market fit. This isn't a coincidence. It's not just luck that makes some games break through; they follow a pattern.

When a game has meme-market fit,

• You can understand the main action in less than two seconds.

• The result makes people feel funny, cursed, satisfied, chaotic, or surprised.

• The mechanic can wear clothes from different cultures.
  People who watch right away think, ‘I want to try that.’

• The content looks like it belongs on TikTok, not like an ad that pretends to be TikTok.

If you look at Merge Fellas, Capybara Rush, or anything else VTheDev makes, they all hit these.

The mechanic is easy. The reward comes right away. The wrapper is always changing.

The last part is the real key.

The mistake most studios make

The majority of game studios make a common mistake by seeing memes purely as a marketing layer. Most studio production cycles have the following flow: Games get built, the roadmap solidified, the creative team gets handed a bunch of assets, and then someone eventually asks, “Can we make this work on TikTok?” All of these things occur in reverse order. Therefore, in order to achieve meme-market fit, games should be designed with ‘shareable surfaces’ from inception rather than forced into meme work, randomly dancing mascots, or trend-jacking for the sake of it. These shareable surfaces can include game-play mechanics that have no barriers to clipping, reactable game-play moments, characters can become memes/jokes, or systems that can mold into any trend that the internet is currently obsessed with. Therefore, the holy grail is having user created content that doesn’t feel like it was just piggybacking onto the original game, but rather that it was an organically occurring part of that game and wasn’t a separate phenomenon being appended onto it.

The takeaway

Meme-market fit is not about chasing every trend or slapping a viral character onto your game at the last minute.

It is about building games with mechanics that people immediately understand, want to watch, and feel tempted to share. The best examples do not need to explain themselves. You see the claw drop, the merge happen, the capybara run, or the weird character evolve, and your brain gets it instantly.

That is the real shift. In 2026, your game does not just need to retain players. It needs to create moments that travel without you paying for every impression.

Product-market fit keeps people in the game.

Meme-market fit gets them there in the first place.

My bet for one of the next great gaming businesses is not another AI-native studio, a Web3 comeback story, or a new shooter from a team of ex-Riot people.

It is LEGO Digital Play.

Not because LEGO suddenly needs games to become relevant. LEGO is already one of the strongest entertainment companies in the world. In 2025, the LEGO Group reported revenue of DKK 83.5 billion ($12.9B), operating profit of DKK 22 billion ($3.4B), and consumer sales growth of 16%, while growing more than twice as fast as the wider toy market. This is not a brand fighting for cultural permission. It already has it.

What makes LEGO Digital Play interesting is much bigger than ‘LEGO should make more games.’ LEGO may be one of the few companies on earth with the trust, creative DNA, IP relationships, family appeal, adult nostalgia and financial strength to build a truly massive digital play business.

The brick will always be physical. But the next big LEGO company might be digital.

LEGO’s real advantage is permission

Most child-facing gaming platforms have to earn trust from parents. LEGO starts with it.

In 2026, LEGO was named the most reputable company in the world in the Global RepTrak 100 for the fourth year running. That kind of reputation matters in games because children’s digital entertainment runs through a different emotional filter than most other media categories.

Parents buying a game for their child are not weighing up whether it looks fun. They are weighing up whether strangers can contact their child, whether the monetisation is fair, whether the content is appropriate, and whether the platform itself deserves access to their family’s time. For most gaming companies, those questions create friction. LEGO already has answers to most of them before the conversation starts.

Decades of goodwill have coded LEGO in parents’ minds as constructive, safe, and worth their trust. That gives LEGO a rare opening to build a digital play ecosystem that families approach without suspicion.

The same reputation is also the liability. Roblox’s problem is that children love it while many parents remain wary. LEGO’s problem runs the other way. Parents already trust the brand. If a LEGO-branded digital world gets safety wrong, it registers as a betrayal rather than a product failure. The floor is lower, and the drop is further.

LEGO is not just a children’s brand anymore

LEGO’s cross-generational reach is the advantage that tends to get underestimated.

The brand is not selling to children. It is selling to children, parents, adult collectors, Star Wars obsessives, Formula 1 fans, and millennials who grew up with LEGO and now have the income to spend on it. That spread matters enormously for digital play.

The recent LEGO Pokémon collaboration makes the point clearly. The Venusaur, Charizard and Blastoise set runs to 6,838 pieces, priced at £579.99 in the UK and $649.99 in the US. It sold out on presale in both markets, with resale listings appearing at markups shortly after. This is not a pocket-money toy pitched at children. It is a premium nostalgia product for adults who grew up with both franchises and now have the money to buy them together. LEGO can convert childhood nostalgia into premium adult demand at scale, and the Pokémon set shows exactly how that mechanism works.

The same logic applies to digital. A LEGO digital platform does not need to be built around young children, and the biggest opportunity probably lies elsewhere: family and cross-generational play, where kids build worlds, parents join them, adult fans create more advanced builds, collectors buy digital-physical bundles, and IP communities arrive through franchises they already care about.

Roblox has enormous youth scale. Minecraft has generational depth. Fortnite has expanded into a broader entertainment platform. None of them, though, can credibly hold a seven-year-old, a teenager, a parent and a thirty-five-year-old collector in the same space without it feeling like an accident. LEGO is one of the few brands where all four can show up and immediately understand why they belong there.

This is not a side quest

In 2025, LEGO Holding created LEGO Digital Play as a standalone entity focused on new digital play experiences beyond LEGO’s existing partnerships and titles, while the LEGO Group continues supporting live projects like LEGO Fortnite. The structural separation matters. This is company-building, not a licensing arrangement.

The Aaron Loeb hire reinforces that reading. Loeb was appointed President of LEGO Digital Play, reporting to Niels B. Christiansen as CEO of LEGO Holding. He brings over 30 years of games industry experience across IP-led gaming and studio leadership, and served as Chief Business Officer at Scopely, where he oversaw the product pipeline including MONOPOLY GO!. Operators with that background get hired to build IP pipelines, run live operations, manage monetisation at scale, and grow durable game businesses. That is the brief.

The Scopely reference is worth dwelling on. MONOPOLY GO! demonstrated that mainstream, broadly familiar IP can still become a category-defining mobile hit when paired with serious free-to-play execution. Scopely’s edge was not the IP itself but the operational discipline behind it: retention systems, live events, monetisation design. Loeb oversaw that pipeline. LEGO’s challenge is identical in structure. The brand awareness is already there. Translating it into a digital product that holds players without cheapening what makes LEGO worth trusting in the first place requires exactly that kind of operator.

The team tells you what LEGO is trying to build

Aaron Loeb is the obvious headline hire, but the team assembling around him tells its own story.

Kitty Schemmer, previously Vice President of Operations at Scopely from 2022 to 2026, brings the operational backbone you need if the ambition runs beyond a single title. Scopely’s reputation was built on execution: live operations, cross-functional discipline, and the ability to turn mainstream IP into long-term game businesses.

John Earner joins as an advisor. As founder of Space Ape Games, which he led from 2012 to 2025, he carries the kind of hard-won knowledge that comes from building teams from scratch, scaling products through competitive markets, and learning what actually breaks before it does.

Beth Goss joins as Head of Consumer Experience. Her background spans CMO of Space Ape Games and CEO of Outright Games, combining games marketing with children’s entertainment at a depth most games businesses never need. LEGO Digital Play does. Selling digital experiences to families means understanding parents, not just players, and Goss has operated at that intersection for years.

Holly N., Director of Corporate Strategy, comes from Head of Product Transformation and Strategy at the BBC and Principal Product Manager at Walt Disney. Both organisations sit at the crossroads of media, children’s content, family trust, and large-scale consumer brands. That background maps directly onto what LEGO Digital Play is trying to navigate.

The Epic Games thread running through the team is worth noting. Aaron Sternberg, working on external partnerships, focused on Unreal Engine partnerships at Epic. Raffaele F., Director of Digital Art and Avatar, spent several years at Epic between 2021 and 2025. Given LEGO’s existing relationship with Epic through LEGO Fortnite, both hires signal serious thinking around digital worlds, avatar systems, creator tools, and platform partnerships rather than surface-level brand integration.

David Aspden as Chief of Staff anchors the team internally. His background in strategic projects and business development at LEGO Group means someone in the room understands how the parent organisation moves, what it will and will not sanction, and where the institutional pressure points sit.

Taken together, this is a team built around mobile operations, kids’ entertainment, digital strategy, avatar infrastructure, external partnerships, and platform-scale thinking. It is not a toy company hiring a few games people, nor a games studio borrowing a famous brand. It sits in its own category: a digital play company grounded in LEGO’s trust, staffed by operators who have built and scaled the kinds of products LEGO is now reaching for. The company is still hiring at lead level across multiple functions, which suggests the build is nowhere near complete.

LEGO already has proof of digital demand

The clearest recent proof point is LEGO Fortnite.

LEGO reported that LEGO Fortnite Odyssey reached over one billion player hours since launch. For a brand whose digital track record has been patchy, that number confirms two things: LEGO can hold attention in modern gaming environments, and the core idea still translates outside the physical box.

The translation makes sense when you look at what LEGO has always been. Build something. Tear it apart. Build something different. Show it to someone. Start over. That loop predates the term UGC by decades. Every child with a box of bricks was already a creator. LEGO’s entire product philosophy was a sandbox before sandboxes had a genre name.

Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite Creative have each built enormous platforms around that same instinct: give players tools, let them make things, watch them share those things with other players. LEGO’s philosophy sits closer to that model than most gaming companies could credibly claim. The gap has never been conceptual. It has been technical and organisational, building the digital systems to support that philosophy at scale, with the live operations, creator tools, and platform infrastructure that a real UGC ecosystem requires.

That is the gap LEGO Digital Play exists to close.Roblox is the prize and the warning

Roblox shows how big this opportunity can become.

As of Q3 2025, Roblox reported 151.5 million daily active users, 39.6 billion hours engaged, 3.5 million developers, 7 million daily active experiences, and $427.9 million in developer exchange distributions in the quarter. That is a social layer, a creator economy, a discovery engine, a youth culture platform, and a monetisation machine built on top of a single product. LEGO has every reason to want a serious role in whatever comes next.

Roblox also shows the exposure that comes with that territory.

Child safety scrutiny around online gaming platforms has intensified sharply. In April 2026, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner issued legally enforceable transparency notices to Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Steam, asking each to detail how they protect children from grooming, exploitation, and radicalisation. Reuters reported that the regulator raised concerns about gaming services becoming first points of contact before harmful interactions shift into private messaging channels. In the US, Reuters reported that Roblox agreed to pay more than $23 million to settle child safety investigations by Alabama and West Virginia, with settlements requiring changes to age verification, chat restrictions, and parental controls. Roblox has denied wrongdoing in related cases.

The pattern matters regardless of the individual outcomes. Child safety has moved from a moderation question to a board-level, regulatory, legal, and brand question. Platforms are now expected to demonstrate their safety architecture, not just describe it.

For most gaming companies, getting this wrong is a reputational problem. For LEGO, it would be something more serious. The brand’s value rests almost entirely on the trust parents extend to it. A safety failure in a LEGO-branded digital world would not register as a product stumble. It would read as a fundamental breach of what the brand has always promised.

Safety cannot be a settings menu

If LEGO Digital Play moves toward developer tools, UGC, multiplayer worlds, or creator-led experiences, safety has to be built into the architecture from the start.

The alternative has a well-documented pattern. A platform grows fast. Chat gets added. Creation tools open up. Engagement mechanics get tuned for retention. The safety team spends the next several years trying to retrofit trust into a system designed around growth metrics. That is how Roblox ended up facing regulatory action in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.

LEGO’s brand sets a higher bar, which means the consequences of that pattern would land harder. A safety failure on an unfamiliar gaming platform is a platform problem. A safety failure inside a LEGO-branded digital world is a broken promise. Parents would not separate the product from the brand.

The structural implications are specific. Developer access needs to be earned rather than open by default. Publishing should sit behind a meaningfully different threshold than building. Social features should be designed around children’s wellbeing rather than session length. Parental controls need to be simple enough for ordinary parents to set up without reading documentation. Moderation capacity needs to be in place before monetisation scales, not after.

The deeper opportunity is that LEGO could make safety a competitive position rather than a compliance cost. Roblox has scale. Fortnite has infrastructure. Minecraft has the sandbox. Trust, as a designed product property rather than an inherited brand assumption, is still genuinely available. LEGO is better placed than anyone to claim it, but only if the product earns it rather than assumes it.

LEGO is already saying the right things

To be fair, LEGO does seem aware of the responsibility.

Its long-term partnership with Epic Games was explicitly framed around building digital experiences that are safe and fun for children and families. LEGO and Epic said their principles included prioritising children’s safety and wellbeing, safeguarding children’s privacy and giving children and adults tools to control their digital experience.

LEGO also says its digital play experiences are designed to be safe-by-design and use a responsible gaming framework to deliver accessible, socially responsible and inclusive products.

The company is also involved in the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children initiative. In March 2026, LEGO said the LEGO Foundation was committing $4.9 million to a new three-year phase focused on making children’s wellbeing central to digital game design.

That is encouraging. But the hard part is not writing the values down. The hard part is keeping those values intact when growth starts working.

When creators want fewer restrictions, when older audiences want more freedom, when product teams want more social loops, when monetisation wants more urgency and when performance metrics start rewarding more time spent, LEGO will have to decide what kind of digital company it wants to be.

That is where the brand will be tested.

The billion-dollar opportunity

The case for LEGO Digital Play comes down to this: it does not need to win gaming on gaming’s existing terms.

Building the next Call of Duty is not the goal. Neither is replicating Roblox or chasing whatever platform trend emerges next year. The goal is building the best digital version of what LEGO has always been: creative play, safe social connection, digital-physical loops, adult nostalgia, premium IP partnerships, and a creator ecosystem with real boundaries. A platform where play feels expansive rather than extractive.

The starting position is genuinely unusual. LEGO enters this with a globally loved brand, strong financial performance, proven demand for digital experiences, deep IP relationships, adult collector appeal, a dedicated new entity, and senior operators who have built platform-scale games businesses before. Most gaming companies spend years trying to acquire one or two of those assets. LEGO already has all of them.

The question is not whether LEGO can make a successful game. It probably can. The question is whether LEGO Digital Play becomes a durable, billion-dollar gaming business built inside one of the most trusted companies on earth. The ingredients are there. What happens next depends on whether the product lives up to the brand rather than coasting on it.

The brick is the moat

LEGO’s power has never been the plastic brick alone. It is the permission that comes with it. Parents trust the brand. Children understand it intuitively. Adults carry genuine nostalgia for it. Collectors spend serious money on it. IP partners want to sit inside it. And the behaviour at the centre of everything LEGO makes, building your own world from available pieces, maps onto where gaming has been heading for the better part of a decade.

That is the foundation LEGO Digital Play is building on. It is not the loudest new entrant in games. It is one of the most structurally advantaged, sitting on a combination of brand trust, cross-generational appeal, IP relationships, and senior operational talent that most gaming companies cannot assemble even with time and money.

The risk is real and proportionate to the opportunity. A LEGO-branded digital world that gets safety wrong, or that trades family trust for engagement metrics, does not just underperform. It damages the asset that makes the whole enterprise worth attempting. The brand is both the advantage and the liability.

Get it right, and LEGO Digital Play builds something the market genuinely lacks: a creative, trusted, family-oriented alternative to the open-ended children’s platforms that dominate today. Get it wrong, and LEGO spends years rebuilding trust it took decades to earn.

It might be built one brick at a time.

EA’s Sims Marketplace: A Real Monetisation Path

On March 17th, The Sims 4 launches its ‘Marketplace’ - a built-in marketplace where custom content creators (now officially called “Makers”) can sell their work directly inside the game.

You own your work, you set your prices, and EA covers publishing costs - platform fees, taxes, server costs, even translations into 18 languages. Content gets packaged as “Maker Packs” (3–30 items each) for Create-A-Sim or Build/Buy mode.

Creators earn through a virtual currency called Moola at a 30% revenue share - $0.30 for every 100 Moola spent. EA says the remainder gets reinvested back into the program: better tools, quality checks, and translations.

Your free mods elsewhere? Still allowed. You just can’t also sell them on the marketplace.

The announcement hasn’t landed quietly though. The Sims has a long and loyal OG fanbase, and they’ve watched the game steadily pile on microtransactions over the years. For them, this feels like another step in the wrong direction - and Twitter made that pretty clear. There’s a genuine allergic reaction from that crowd.

What’s interesting is the contrast. On Roblox, this kind of monetization is just the norm. That audience grew up with it, it’s baked into how they experience games. The Sims audience is older, came up in a different era, and has a very different relationship with what a game should cost. It’s also worth noting that Roblox has a progressive earnings system that let’s some creators earn up to 70% of UGC creation purchases, although most creators are still on a 30% share. This has been another point of contention on the Sims marketplace announcement.

It’ll be worth watching how this actually plays out. Do the veteran fans push back hard enough to make noise? Or do creators embrace the new revenue stream and bring their audiences along with them? Creator enthusiasm can shift a lot - but so can a fanbase that’s already been stretched thin on trust.

Supercell Creators: Actually Solving a Real Problem

Every creator program runs into the same wall eventually - creators start strong, then go quiet. Life happens, motivation dips, the content slows down. For gaming companies, that inconsistency is a real headache. An active creator community drives players back into the game. When creators go cold, that pipeline dries up.

Supercell’s answer is borrowing straight from mobile games playbook: treat it like a Live Ops event. Creators 2.0 introduces monthly Seasons - resetting every first Monday of the month - where creators work through personalised quests built around their channel’s size and growth stage. There are two types: Season Quests focused on long-term habits like watch time, upload consistency, and audience growth, and Featured Quests tied to major game updates that reward creators for jumping on key moments with higher XP payouts.

It’s the same mechanic that keeps players logging back into Clash of Clans or Brawl Stars every week - and it’s a genuinely smart move to apply it here. Instead of hoping creators stay motivated on their own, you build a rhythm into the program itself.

The tier system got an overhaul too. The new progression path - Creator, Verified Creator, Trusted Creator, Super Creator - is designed to feel transparent and achievable, rewarding consistency over pure audience size. Smaller creators who show up and do the work can actually climb.

Then there’s the LootBuddy. Complete quests, earn XP, level up, unlock Loot Keys with in-game rewards to share with your audience. Keys come in Common, Rare, and Epic rarities depending on your tier, and can even be upgraded for better drops. Hit 10 quests completed and you unlock a free Season Pass for your game of choice. It turns the creator program into something that genuinely feels worth showing up to every day.

Keeping creator momentum is one of the hardest problems in this space. Supercell might have found a clever way around it.

Bravo to Supercell’s Rick Crane and their partners North Kingdom for delivering this update. Let’s see how it lands with creators.

The 70-Million-View Ghost

On November 4th, 2012, I posted my first video about Clash of Clans. I was part of the original cohort - the pioneers alongside Chief Pat and Godson. Over three years, I poured my life into that game: 400+ videos and 70 million views.

Not once was I ever acknowledged by a community manager. I wasn’t looking for just a paycheck, I was looking for a signal that the effort was appreciated by the developers. While others were eventually flown to Helsinki and given the insider keys to the kingdom, I remained in the dark. It became impossible to compete with creators who had update footage prepared weeks in advance. Eventually, like many others, I moved on.

Acknowledgement isn’t just about ego - when a developer ignores the long-tail creators who built their foundation they can risk losing their biggest advocates.

The Power of “The Room”: From Molt to Jynxzi

Contrast my experience with someone like Molt. He speaks fondly of the 2016 Clash Royale era because he was in the room. He felt invested as he had say from the ground up, he came up with the Miner card and the Draft League concept that ended up in the game. That sense of input creates a ‘forever’ creator. He also talks about the first time he went to Helsinki and Ilrskka took the time come ask him how he was doing and spoke to him directly and how he felt valued. Listen to this from Molt himself on feeling valued.

But Supercell is currently facing a scaling crisis. It’s easy to listen to five guys in a room, it’s nearly impossible to listen to the 100,000+ creators Supercell has now. Even with a tiered creator system in place they are still inviting hundreds of creators for their events in Helsinki. The community team has built a solid foundation with the Supercell Creators program, and while the upcoming move to Creators 2.0 promises a new era of support, the current scaling challenges are becoming harder to ignore.

We saw this play out with Jynxzi. His impact was a black swan event - growth on a scale we haven’t seen since Trymacs took over the German market for Clash Royale. But growth is a double-edged sword. If you don’t have the connective-tissue to consult with these creators, they become the loudest voices in the riot.

The Evolution of Friction

Acknowledgement is the first pillar, but the second is intent. In Clash Royale, we’ve seen a shift from a game that felt like modern chess to one that often feels like a race against a moving goalpost.

We are seeing a series of sentiment shocks that make it impossible for creators to maintain a positive narrative. Take Level 16, for example. To the developers it’s a natural progression of the economy, but to the community, it’s a transparent way to force veteran players back into a spending cycle they thought they had finished.

Then there are Heroes. While they added a new layer of strategy, they fundamentally shifted the game’s balance and raised the pay-to-win floor. When you combine this with the power creep of Card Evolutions and the sudden introduction of Elite Wild Cards, you create a environment where the goalpost is sprinting away.

When you’re a creator it’s hard to get behind these things when they come out as you have to tell your audience that the deck they spent six months (and potentially hundreds of dollars) maxing is now obsolete because of a new paid mechanic. Obviously as a creator you rush to get it to create content, but the frustration in the audience grows as it becomes more unobtainable and creators can feel that in their communities.

Inside the “War Room”: Bridging the F2P Gap

I have the unique privilege as moving from the creator side to the development side while still maintaining a voice of the player stance. During my time as a Community and VIP Manager for Rival Kingdoms, I lived this exact F2P Dilemma from within the studio walls.

As a mobile game ages, the player base naturally thins, but revenue targets stay aggressive. This is where the danger lies. You end up squeezing a smaller orange for more juice, creating two distinct, warring tribes:

1. The Whales: High-spending VIPs who expect dominance and immediate value for their investment.

2. The F2P Holdouts: Disgruntled players who feel like “fodder” for the spenders and see every new level cap as a middle finger.

I’ve sat in rooms with Live Ops managers, acting as the voice of the player while the monetization dials were being turned. I’ve been the one brainstorming ways to get ahead of the complaints before they turned into full-blown boycotts.

“If we’re going to push these monetization goals, we have to give the community a win elsewhere. We need to reward playtime, not just the credit card, or we’ll lose the CCU that makes the game feel alive.”

We tried ‘Kingdom Gifting Bundles’ allowing big spenders to buy a pack that provided rewards to their entire guild. It was a way to let the whales ‘prop up’ the F2P players, turning a potential point of resentment into a moment of community benefit. And a ton of other non-monetised ways to prop up non-spenders.

A Community Manager’s primary job isn’t just posting on Twitter and Discord, it’s being the internal friction during update discussions. If you don’t have someone in the room saying, “Level 16 is going to trigger a riot or longterms frustrations” you are walking blindly into the territory we are seeing today.

A History of High-Stakes Friction

When a developer ignores concerns of the community, things can spiral, we’ve seen it time and again:

• Genshin Impact (2021): The ‘Anniversary Uprising.’ After stingy rewards, fans review-bombed everything from the game itself to Google Classroom. HoYoverse eventually folded, giving away paid bundles for free to stop the bleeding.

• Fate/Grand Order: The ‘Second Class Citizen’ revolt. Global players felt ignored compared to the Japanese base. A ‘no-spend’ boycott eventually forced the devs to implement a “pity” system.

• Pokémon GO (2023): The Remote Raid Strike. Niantic doubled prices and ignored the ‘Hear Us Niantic’ movement. Unlike the others, Niantic took a hardline stance. The result? A permanently fractured relationship.

The “Jagex” Blueprint for Forever Games

If Ilkka Paananen wants Supercell to be remembered ‘forever,’ he needs to look at Jagex.

After the disastrous “Evolution of Combat” in 2012, Jagex did something radical. They brought back Old School Runescape and gave the players the Veto. No major update enters the game unless 70% of the community votes “Yes.”

It shifted the power dynamic from Dictatorship to Democracy. And the game is more alive then ever and growing. (Read my full take on this below) It would be hard to say if this model that Jagex took on would work in F2P mobile gaming, but if there is any company that cares enough about their community and creators enough to do it, it’s Supercell.

The 100,000-Creator Challenge: Scaling Humanity in a Global Ecosystem

Supercell is clearly cognisant of these tensions. Their recent job posting for a Head of Creator & Influencer Partnerships is a strategic move to address exactly this. They know they can’t just build a game and hope the creators follow; they need to turn their 100k+ influencers into a growth engine while simultaneously protecting them from the monetisation squeeze. By hiring a leader to represent creators internally, they are acknowledging that the small team era needs to evolve into something more robust.

The challenge now is scaling that acknowledgement. Supercell is locked in the classic F2P struggle, but they have the resources and the awareness to lead the way out. To do so, they will need to continue innovating - not just with their updates, but with how they communicate and collaborate with the players and creators who keep their worlds alive.

Beyond the Riot: Rebuilding the Developer-Creator Covenant

To avoid the cycle of sentiment shocks and creator burnout, studios moving into the next era of mobile gaming should focus on these three strategic shifts:

• Move Beyond ‘Reach’ to ‘Reciprocity’: In a world of 100,000+ creators, you cannot fly everyone to Helsinki. However, you can scale acknowledgement through agency. Like the Old School RuneScape model, the goal should be to turn creators from distributors into stakeholders who have a measurable say in the game’s evolution.

• CMs as Internal Friction: The most valuable Community Manager is not the one who manages the riot, but the one who prevents it. Studios must empower their CMs to act as internal lobbyists in Live Ops meetings - having the authority to veto a monetisation dial if it threatens the game’s long-term sentiment health.

• Decide Your Identity: Studios must look at the industry’s precedents and decide their future. You can take the Hardline Path (Niantic), prioritizing a rigid vision at the cost of community trust; the Reactive Path (Genshin), fixing problems only once the review-bombing starts; or the Democratic Path (Jagex), where the social contract is baked into the code.

But this year’s blog post, “The Best Games Haven’t Been Made Yet,” hit a sour note that is currently reverberating across Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit.

In the post, Paananen celebrated a “historic” year for Clash Royale, describing a nearly decade-old game “exploding with growth.” He attributed this success to the team’s “relentless focus on the player experience” and “optimizing what already exists.”

The problem? He forgot to mention the 6-foot-4 elephant in the room: Jynxzi.

The “Jynxzi Effect” vs. The Corporate Narrative

To the community, the reason for Clash Royale’s 2025 resurgence wasn’t a “simplified progression system” or “A/B testing.” It was Nicholas “Jynxzi” Stewart.

When the world’s biggest Twitch streamer started grinding Clash Royale, he didn’t just bring his audience; he created a cultural slipstream. Suddenly, Clash Royale was “cool” again. Even MrBeast publicly commented that he redownloaded the game specifically because of Jynxzi’s content. Along with other major Clash Royale players coming to pledge support.

Yet, in the official Supercell recap, this massive organic marketing miracle was reduced to a footnote about “finding new ways to delight players.”

Jynxzi’s response on stream was characteristically blunt:

“The team that murdered the game?! Are you f**king stupid?!... I think it’s going to be your worst year ever! Unless you literally fire everyone.”

The Double-Edged Sword of the Creator Program

Supercell has arguably the most robust influencer program in gaming. They have spent years building a creator system that rewards loyalty. But as the user feedback suggests, this relationship is now being tested by what many see as a money grab phase of development.

While Ilkka’s post talks about delighting players, the community points to:

• Level 16: A controversial addition that many see as a transparent way to force veteran players back into the spending cycle.

• Heroes: A mechanic that shifted the game’s balance and increased the pay-to-win floor.

• Monetization Curves: A feeling that the legendary ‘Supercell Magic’ is being replaced by ‘Finance Department Math’ to fund new projects that haven’t yet found Clash-sized success.

Why This Matters: The PR ‘Wildfire’

When a company as successful as Supercell stops acknowledging the community’s role in their success, they risk turning their greatest advocates into their fiercest critics.

The data doesn’t lie: while Supercell credits internal changes, revenue and player spikes align perfectly with the ‘Jynxzi Era.’ By ignoring the creator’s impact, Supercell has accidentally signaled that they value their ‘optimized formulas’ more than the people who actually make the game a phenomenon.

The Verdict: A Crisis of Consultation

Supercell is at a crossroads. They are blessed with a community that cares enough to be angry, but that anger is reaching a boiling point.

If they want to avoid a mass exodus of creators to a competitor game, the path forward is clear:

1. Acknowledge the Mistake: A public statement crediting the community and creators for the growth.

2. Community Consultation: Moving beyond A/B testing and actually listening to the veteran players who feel the game is being squeezed for funding.

3. Refocus on Delight: Proving that updates aren’t just about moving the goalposts (Level 16), but about genuine gameplay innovation.

The least powerful CEO needs to exercise some power here-specifically, the power to admit that the Supercell Magic isn’t just found in the offices. It’s found in the millions of screens controlled by the creators they’ve spent a decade courting.

If they don’t, that double-edged sword is going to cut very deep.

That logic still makes sense. But I was only half right.

Where I was correct is this: Duolingo can only move as fast as its internal teams. That has always been the bottleneck.

But where I was wrong, is in assuming UGC was the obvious solution. Duolingo is pursuing a different strategy, and the way they got there mirrors a powerful lesson from the company’s CEO.

A Timely Lesson From Duolingo’s CEO

Two weeks ago, Duolingo’s CEO shared a personal moment of being wrong - a moment that reshaped the company’s direction.

When his team first proposed adding chess to Duolingo, he rejected it.
The logic seemed airtight: Duolingo is an education company, not a gaming app. Chess felt like a diversion from the mission.

Then he had a conversation with Guatemala’s Minister of Education, Anabella Giracca. She told him:

“The system is so broken I’m ready to send every student a chessboard. At least they’ll learn logic.”

That line reframed chess not as a game, but as a tool for teaching logic, pattern recognition, and strategy - foundational skills for STEM learning.

He reversed his position. A two-person team built the first prototype. A year later, chess became one of Duolingo’s fastest-growing courses ever, now with a 20-person team and millions of learners.

His takeaway: great leaders admit when they’re wrong - because that’s how innovation happens.

And that mindset is exactly what we’re seeing again in Duolingo’s next phase.

Simon Hade, now leading the new subjects pillar, said his team was brought in to make Duolingo’s music experience “even more delightful and game-like.”

He also hinted at what’s coming next: They’re now exploring gameplay-driven learning formats like Duolingo Adventures, an RPG-style lesson mode.

Duolingo’s London office is now home to around 30 people focused on music, marketing, and game-inspired learning projects.

This is not UGC - it’s something more intentional.

A structured expansion into subjects where game design + learning science can unlock entirely new behaviours.

From Simon Hade:

”We’re interested in meeting with small teams who might be OPEN TO ACQUI-HIRE conversations—especially those with experience building delightful, moment-to-moment gameplay on mobile. There are several upcoming projects at Duolingo where strong game sensibilities would make a direct impact on helping people learn.”

And interestingly, this tracks with my own experience with what i’ve seen at Space Ape, we used external teams to build a major feature in Chrome Valley Customs. It removed bottlenecks and let us go faster - as long as the core creative and quality bar stayed internal. It’s the same principle Duolingo is applying.

So where does this leave the future?

Now when I look at chess in Duolingo, which I’m quite enjoying, I don’t see a side quest.

I see a blueprint:

• Bringing in game talent.

• Owning the learning science.

• Using external teams tactically to eliminate bottlenecks.

• And building a platform that reaches way beyond languages.

So beyond Music, Chess, and the hinted Duolingo Adventures (RPG-style learning), there are several genres that fit naturally into Duolingo’s model:

• Puzzle & Logic Games - teaching reasoning and pattern recognition.

• Coding Fundamentals – interactive logic chains, debugging micro-puzzles, pseudo-code challenges.

• Rhythm & Timing Games – expanding musical learning (Already working on)

• Narrative & Story Games – comprehension, history, civics, and immersive language practice.

• Deduction & Mystery Games – inference, reading logic, data literacy, decision-making.

• Strategy & Tactics – planning, probability, resource logic (the natural extension of chess).

• Light Simulation / Systems Games – economics, ecosystems, cause-and-effect thinking.

• Micro-games (WarioWare-style) – fast vocabulary, math, or logic drills that fit Duolingo’s session length.

The possibilities are endless…..

Just look at this LinkedIn post talking about how Clash Royale teaches principles of finance and investing

”While it’s a real time strategy game, the underlying mechanics are surprisingly relevant to portfolio management and financial decision making:
• Capital Allocation: Every card played represents a resource decision. Deploying at the right time, with the right combination, determines your return, just like managing a portfolio.
• Risk Management: Overcommitting on offense or neglecting defense often leads to losses, a clear reminder of balancing risk and reward.
• Diversification: A well balanced deck performs better than relying on a single “strong” card, much like diversification reduces volatility in investing.
• Compounding and Patience: Progress is incremental. Success comes from consistency, small wins, and learning from setbacks; the same principles that drive long term financial growth.”

Alas, I was wrong - and I’m glad I was. I thought Duolingo’s next frontier was UGC, but the company is aiming higher: small, game-savvy teams building learning experiences that scale new subjects without sacrificing quality. Chess, music, RPG adventures - it’s all part of a blueprint that uses game design as a core engine for mastery. UGC would have added content, but this will expand the canvas. Duolingo isn’t becoming a game company; it’s transforming into an education company that finally utilises the best lessons from games and shares them with millions of people - and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

We talk a lot about retention, content cadence, and monetisation models in games, but the thing that holds all of that together is often invisible: trust.

Trust determines whether players return, invest their time and money, and become advocates for your game.

But here’s the thing, trust isn’t just one thing. In games, it lives on three different levels:

1. Brand trust: how players see your studio as a whole.

2. Community trust: how connected players feel to the people behind the game and other players.

3. Player trust: how fair and transparent the game itself feels.

Each one affects the others, and when one breaks, trust as a whole starts to break down.

Brand Trust

Brand trust is the foundation. It’s what makes players believe your studio will deliver on what it promises - fun, fair, and finished.

Think of Supercell. Whether it’s Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, or any of their other titles, their players know what to expect: polish, balance, and quality. That reputation gives new titles instant credibility before a single ad runs. Players will flock to a new alpha announcement or join Discord without a second thought.

Contrast that with studios that overpromise in trailers or drop half-finished games - the kind that leave players saying, “I’ll wait for reviews next time.” Once that expectation is set, you’re no longer competing on gameplay; you’re competing to win back trust. (Looking at you Halo)

Supercell has a very high bar in all games endeavours it undergoes and holds that same standard to the talent it hires.

The recent closure of Squad Busters marked one of the first noticeable dents in Supercell’s otherwise spotless record of brand trust. But on the flip side, it also revealed a side of Supercell that’s far more common across the rest of the games industry. It exposed the inherent uncertainty that comes with game development: even big, trusted studios sometimes have to make tough calls to sunset titles that aren’t meeting expectations. For most developers, this is standard practice - shutting down underperforming games, pivoting strategies, or reallocating resources, but for Supercell, known for consistency and polish, it was a jolt. It reminded players that behind even the most beloved brands, business realities and hard decisions still govern the lifecycle of a game.

The closure of Squad Busters didn’t just affect its own community - it shook players’ expectations around Supercell’s entire portfolio. Gamers have long assumed that a Supercell launch comes with a long-term commitment, but this move now raises questions: if one title can be sunset so suddenly, what does that mean for other games and future releases? Even Mo.co’s community manager had to address the potential of that game being killed. For the first time, even the most loyal fans are forced to consider that no Supercell game is truly untouchable once launched.

Shutting down a game for Supercell is nothing new, they’ve killed a ton of games with 30+ games in it’s graveyard. What made Squad Busters different is that it made it to global launch past their famously strict quality filter - the very thing that built much of their brand trust in the first place.

Supercell will be fine when it comes to brand trust, as they’ve accumulated a lot of it over the past 15 years. It’s what they learn from this and take forward that will determine future of their brand trust.

Tip: Take bold risks, but not at the cost of consistency. Players remember when a studio stays true to its standards - that’s what builds lasting trust.

Community Trust

If brand trust is built through marketing, community trust is built through conversation.

It’s the emotional connection between your devs and your players - the feeling that the people making the game actually listen.

When Genshin Impact’s anniversary rewards caused backlash, miHoYo’s slow communication made things worse. Later, their transparent dev letters and roadmap posts helped repair the relationship.

In my experience, I’ve seen developers assume that if they just ignore an issue, it’ll eventually go away, but that strategy never works. It often leads to review bombing, where your app gets flooded with negative feedback that deters new players, sparks in-game spending boycotts, and creates bad PR. All of these can have a real, measurable impact on your game’s commercial performance.

There are ton of way to stay on top of this and gather feedback rather quickly with great community listening tools like:

• Appfollow: Let’s you spot user feedback through reviews and even makes suggestions based on competitors.

• PlayerXP: Allows you to monitor sentiment in pretty much real time. Have a baseline community health score and immediately spot any trends in both positive and negative directions.

While these tools are great for identifying trends after an update or announcement, your game team should also take time beforehand to reflect on the updates they’re planning. Ask yourselves: How will our players react to this? A bit of proactive empathy can prevent a lot of damage control later.

Tip: Silence kills trust faster than bad news. Communicate early, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Player Trust

Player trust lives inside the product - in how fair your systems feel and how safe and reliable the community is. Players may love your world, but they’ll only stay if they trust both the rules of the game and the environment in which they’re playing.

Marvel Snap demonstrated this early on. Players felt they could win through strategy, not spending. When later monetisation changes tipped the balance, trust eroded - and suddenly, every update was questioned. Once players stop believing the game is fair, they will stop caring, stop spending, and eventually leave.

RuneScape 3 provides a clear example of trust eroded through monetisation. Over the years, microtransactions gradually replaced the grind, allowing players to bypass long-term progression. Even when Jagex put the idea of removing microtransactions to a player vote, the damage was largely done. Player trust in RuneScape 3 is essentially gone. The monetisation has been part of the game for so long that the only realistic way to restore integrity might be to “restart” entirely - similar to how Old School RuneScape recaptured its sense of authenticity.

Old School RuneScape, by contrast, enjoys remarkably high player trust. Its monetisation model is transparent, balanced, and player-driven. The game prioritises fair progression over microtransactions, and major decisions are guided by player voting and community input. Players trust that the system is designed to reward effort and skill rather than spending, which has helped the game maintain loyalty over more than a decade. Check out my article, “Why Old School RuneScape Is Still Growing After 12 Years of Relaunch”, for a deeper look at how that model continues to work.

In live-service competitive games like PUBG Mobile, trust also hinges on community integrity. Cheaters, bots, and exploiters can quickly destroy confidence in the game, but PUBG has fought back aggressively. By implementing advanced anti-cheat systems, proactive moderation, and transparent enforcement, they’ve made huge strides in regaining player trust. This shows that actively maintaining a safe and fair environment is just as important as game mechanics or monetisation.

Player trust is therefore holistic: it’s about systems that reward skill and effort, fair monetisation, and a community where players feel safe and respected. When all these factors are in place, players stay longer, invest more, and advocate for the game.

Tip: Build systems that reward time and skill, maintain transparency in monetisation, and actively protect the community. Player trust grows when fairness, integrity, and safety are aligned - and that trust becomes the foundation of long-term engagement.

Trust Is the Foundation

Retention, content cadence, and monetisation models are important, but none of it works without trust. Brand trust gives your studio credibility before a player even opens the game. Community trust ensures players feel heard and valued. Player trust makes the experience feel fair, rewarding, and safe.

These three forms of trust are interconnected. When one falters, it can ripple across the others, affecting engagement, retention, and even revenue. But when all three are aligned, players don’t just stay - they become advocates, ambassadors, and loyal fans.

The lessons are clear from the examples we’ve explored: Supercell’s long-term brand trust, Genshin Impact’s community communication, RuneScape 3 versus Old School RuneScape’s monetisation models, and PUBG Mobile’s battle against cheaters. Trust isn’t static - it must be earned, maintained, and protected at every level of your game.

The takeaway: Everything in a game - retention, monetisation, growth - relies on trust. Get that right, and players won’t just play your game; they’ll stand behind it.

It’s a familiar story…

A new title launches. It has a solid marketing plan, the budget is spent, and it sees that first exciting spike of new users. And then... a plateau. The excitement fades, the numbers flatten, and the realisation sets in. It feels like growth has stalled, and the team can’t figure out how to restart it.

I’m going to be a giant nerd for a second and tell you that the answer is hidden in one of my favourite movies, the 2003 sci-fi disaster movie, The Core.

In this movie a ‘ship’ that drills to the center of the Earth. Stick with me, because it’s the perfect metaphor for a games marketing growth engine.

The Dead Engine: Our Game’s Core Has Stopped

Quick plot refresh: in The Core, the Earth’s molten core stops spinning. This is... bad. The planet’s magnetic field collapses, and everything starts to go haywire.

This is exactly what it feels like when your game’s growth stalls. Your “magnetic field” is gone - you’re not attracting new players, and you’re not retaining the ones you have. CPIs have gone up and early retention numbers are down. You’ve burned through your golden cohort and are now looking to find more.

So what do we do? We do what the scientists in the movie did: we plan a “Big Bomb.”

We gather our teams and plan a big, expensive UA campaign, a big brand play, influencer push, or IP collaboration. We’re going to force this engine to restart. We’re going to drill down, detonate our “nuke” of a marketing budget, and get that core spinning again.

But this is where we hit the first, and most critical, snag.

The “Less Dense” Core: When the Marketing Energy Dissipates

Here’s where the metaphor gets really good.

The crew in the movie makes it to the center of the Earth, and they’re about to set off the bomb, when they make a horrifying discovery - their calculations are all wrong. The core is way less dense than they originally thought.

This means their “Big Bomb” plan won’t work. The explosion, as powerful as it is, will just dissipate. It won’t have enough dense material to “catch” and transfer its energy. The mission is a failure.

And that, right there, is the ‘Aha!’ moment for your game.

That ‘less dense core’ is any critical weakness in your game’s flywheel that lets the energy dissipate. It’s not just one single problem; it’s all the “low-density pockets” you have in your product and marketing loop.

It’s things like:

• A clunky onboarding experience: Your marketing “bomb” works, players arrive... and are met with a weak FTUE or their expectations don’t match what they’ve seen in the ads.

• Missing core features: Players who come in have played this genre before and expect certain features, but instead see ‘Coming Soon’ or just cannot find what they expect.

• Weak or No Live Ops: You get a huge spike of users, but there’s nothing new to do. They get bored and leave after a week.

• No community hub: Players get excited play for a little bit, but there’s no official Discord, subreddit, or in-game guild system to “catch” that excitement and let it build.

You can have the biggest, baddest marketing bomb in the world, but if your game’s “core” is full of these holes, the shockwave just vanishes. The energy doesn’t transfer, and the flywheel - self-sustaining growth engine - never even starts to turn.

The Flywheel & The “Wave Interference” of Growth

A single, underpowered bomb won’t cut it. The movie crew figures this out fast. A single blast in a low-density core just won’t work. They need a compounding force. They need to work with Wave Interference to have success.

This is the difference between a marketing funnel and a flywheel.

A funnel is a single, “fire-and-forget” explosion. You spend money at the top, and hope some customers fall out the bottom.

A flywheel is a Wave Interference engine. It needs to “catch,” and each push needs to make the next push easier, building momentum over time. If your first marketing “bomb” (Acquisition) goes off but isn’t powerful enough - or dense enough - to connect to the next stage (Engagement), the energy is lost. It never carries through.

This is precisely where the flywheel model, as shown in the image, becomes our operations manual.

Think of each stage of that flywheel - Attract, Engage, and Delight - as one of the individual “bombs” the crew needs to detonate in sequence to create their compounding “wave interference.”

The ‘Attract’ Bomb: This is your first explosion. It’s your UA, your marketing, your creative, and your influencer partnerships. Its job is to get that first powerful shockwave moving.

The ‘Engage’ Bomb: This is your core loop, your lifecycle management, and your monetization systems. This bomb must be timed to “catch” the energy from ‘Attract,’ holding the player’s attention and amplifying the momentum.

The ‘Delight’ Bomb: This is your product, your community, and your support. This is the final, crucial blast that not only solidifies the spin but sends a “reverse” shockwave back to the surface, fueling the ‘Attract’ phase with organic word-of-mouth and turning players into advocates.

A failure in any one of these “bombs” breaks the chain. The energy fizzles out.

The Three Variables That Restart the Core

This is where the movie gives us the final, critical piece of the puzzle. The crew figures out that to successfully restart the core, their success hinges on three variables.

For us, they are:

1. The Size of the Bombs (The Effectiveness of Each Stage)

2. The Density of the Core (The Alignment of Your Teams)

3. The Detonation Sequence (The Timing and Handoffs)

First, you have the size of the bombs. This is the raw effectiveness of each department. You can’t have a weak “bomb” in the chain. You can have the best UA campaign in the world, but if your core loop is boring, or your game is buggy, the sequence fails. You have to optimise each stage independently to maximise its potential power.

But, and this is a key insight, having powerful bombs isn’t enough. This is what the movie’s crew discovered. If the medium they are in isn’t right, the power doesn’t matter.

That’s the second variable: the density of the core. This is your team’s shared vision and alignment.

This is the true meaning of the “less dense core” metaphor. The “low-density pockets” are the gaps between your teams.

• It’s when your UA team runs ads for a specific “dragon riding” feature.

• But your Product team is focused on a new guild system and the dragon controls are clunky.

• And your Community team is getting hammered with feedback about the dragons, but that feedback isn’t making it back to Product.

Poof. You’ve created three low-density pockets. The energy from the “Attract” bomb hits the “Engage” stage and dissipates. The feedback from “Delight” never makes it back to “Attract” to improve the ads. You can have the biggest bombs in the world, but if your core is ‘less dense’, if your teams are siloed and misaligned, the shockwaves will never connect.

But even that isn’t the final piece. The third, critical variable is the detonation sequence. The crew couldn’t just set all the bombs off at once; they had to explode in a precise, compounding order. The shockwave from the first bomb had to build momentum and be perfectly amplified by the second.

This is the timing of your flywheel. It’s ensuring the “Attract” phase doesn’t just acquire a user but primes them perfectly for the “Engage” loop they are about to experience. It’s making sure the “Delight” feedback doesn’t just sit in a report but is fed back to “Attract” while it’s still relevant, allowing the team to adapt. If the timing is off - if the player’s first experience doesn’t immediately match the ad’s promise - the sequence fails. The flywheel will never spin.

The Core is Spinning: Success

In The Core, the crew finally succeeds. They re-calculate, align their plan, and detonate the bombs in perfect, compounding sequence. The waves build on each other, the core restarts, the magnetic field is restored, and the world is saved.

This is what happens when your flywheel starts to turn.

Your ‘Attract’ phase doesn’t just lead to an install spike; it delivers the right players who are primed for your specific game. They are caught by a compelling ‘Engage’ loop that matches their expectations. They are so impressed that they are ‘Delighted’, and they rush to your Discord or subreddit to talk about it.

And here’s the magic - that ‘Delight’ feeds back into ‘Attract’.

Your delighted players become your evangelists. They create content, they stream, they tell their friends. Your word-of-mouth and organic installs go up. This is the “wave interference” in action. The ‘Delight’ bomb is now setting off the ‘Attract’ bomb, making it more powerful and efficient.

Your CPIs stabilize because your organic traffic is rising and halo effect has taken effect. Your LTV goes up because the ‘Engage’ and ‘Delight’ phases are retaining players longer. This increased LTV gives your ‘Attract’ team more budget to acquire even more high-quality users.

The engine is on. The growth is no longer a series of expensive, exhausting pushes. It’s a self-sustaining, compounding force.

Don’t be the team that builds the biggest bomb in the world only to watch its energy vanish into a “less dense core.” That feeling of a stalled plateau is the feeling of misalignment.

Before you plan your next “Big Bomb” marketing push, look inward. Get your teams aligned. Build your dense core.

Do that, and your next big push won’t just be another spike. It will be the first powerful turn of an engine that never stops spinning.

As a preface: there’s no magic, one-size-fits-all for a User Acquisition creative engine. Every studio’s reality is different, shaped by team size, budget, and the game itself. This is based off what i’ve seen working on teams i’ve worked on.

So think of this as a flexible framework.

Before we start, some things to point out.

• It’s designed for teams without a dedicated Marketing Analyst. In this structure, the UA Manager takes on analysing and sharing performance data with the rest of the team.

• For smaller operations, outsourcing is a valid option. If you’re a lean team, one person might be doing the job of three people shown here. To avoid burnout and leverage expertise, it can be more effective to hire UA consultants or a specialized agency to manage this entire engine for you as they usually have these established systems in place.

Section 1: The Strategic Foundation

Before you can even think about making an ad, you need a clear direction. A great UA engine doesn’t run on random ideas; it runs on a solid strategy and a clear roadmap. These are the essential inputs that give your creative process purpose.

The “Why”: Marketing Strategy

This is the high-level game plan, typically set by the Marketing Lead. It answers the big questions that guide every decision downstream:

• How much can we spend?

• Who are we talking to?

• What’s our overall plan for launch or a major push?

Without this guidance, your team is flying blind. This strategy is the north star for the entire operation.

The “What”: The Marketing Roadmap

Strategy sets the main goal, and the roadmap breaks it down into a plan. The fuel for this roadmap comes from three key sources:

• The Product Team: They provide the “news” you can market - upcoming feature updates, big beats, and seasonal events. This is the fresh content that keeps your messaging relevant.

• The Marketing Manager: They take the product news and combine it with audience insights, competitor research, and new creative hypotheses to build a concrete schedule of campaigns.

• The UA Manager: They provide the data-driven reality check. Armed with performance data from live campaigns, they answer the most important question: “What’s actually working?” and what to do more of.

Section 2: The Engine Room - From Idea to Asset

With a clear strategy and roadmap, it’s time to start making things. You can use these four steps that takes a concept from a creative inbox to a final asset.

Step 1: The Brainstorm

This is where the creative process officially kicks off. A good brainstorm is a focused session fueled by two things: the Marketing Roadmap (what we need to make) and, most importantly, learnings from past campaigns (what has and hasn’t worked). The goal is to come up with ideas that are not only creative but also have a real shot at performing well. I like the 70/20/10 concept here as you should look to what’s working for you or competitors 70% of the time. Get on SensorTower or AppMagic to research and Don’t be afraid to copy competitors 1:1 in your own style of course! 20% of concepts should have a moderate risk, think of these like the Cameo assets I talk about in another article. And 10% should be wild ideas that haven’t been tried before by you or competitors. More effort, but can yield more reward.

Step 2: The Filter

Every brainstorm should produce a broad range of good and bad ideas (hopefully more good!). It’s the filter that is a crucial reality check. Here, the UA Manager and Creative Producer step in to vet the concepts. They ask the practical questions:

• “Can we actually make this with the time and resources we have?”

• “What’s most likely to work?”

• “Is this aligned with our budget and strategic goals?”

This step isn’t about killing creativity. It’s about focusing it on ideas that can actually be produced and have the best chance of succeeding.

Step 3: Asset Production

Once an idea gets the go ahead, it moves into production. The Creative Producer acts as the project manager, distributing work, and make sure assets are delivered on time and according to the ticket specs. Once tickets are made it’s over to the artists - 3D Artists, 2D Artists, Motion Graphics Designers, and Animators - execute the vision and build the final asset. Put a name against tickets for who should is the hypothesis owner or the POC for sign-off on the asset.

Step 4: Delivery

The final step is simple but essential. The finished ads are properly named, organized, and delivered to the UA Manager. Right, you have your new creatives. Time to get testing!

Section 3: Closing the Loop

Okay, the ads are made. Now you need to find out if they actually work. This next part is the most important: testing your new creative, seeing what won and what lost, and feeding that information back to the team.

The Launch: BAU vs. Test Groups

Once the UA Manager has the new assets, they don’t just throw them into the wild. They set up structured tests.

• BAU (Business As Usual) Group: This campaign is your control group. It’s filled with your proven, top-performing ads-the “winners” that are reliably bringing in users at your target metrics. We used CPI (Cost Per Install) + D7 ROAS (Day 7 Return On Ad Spend).

• Test Groups: This is where the new ads are placed. They run with a small, controlled budget against your BAU ads. The goal is simple: find the winners to earn their way into the BAU campaign. We used Facebook PH as our test channel as they act as a good proxy for US market with a lot lower costs.

The Verdict: Analyzing the Results

After a week, the data comes in, and the UA Manager has to make a call. It’s a straightforward “Yes” or “No” decision for each new ad.

• “Yes” (We have a winner!): The new ad is performing well - maybe it has a lower CPI or a higher ROAS than your BAU ads. It gets promoted into the main BAU campaign to be scaled up.

• “No” (Loser): The ad underperforms and gets paused. But this is not a waste. Take those learnings and learn from them!

The Feedback Loop

This is the most important step in the entire diagram. The results - both good and bad - are immediately shared with the creative and marketing teams to close the loop.

• Sharing Learnings from Winners: When a creative wins, the UA Manager explains why it won. Was it the Hook? The CTA (call-to-action)? A specific character shown? These insights tell the creative team what to do more of.

• Learning from Failures: Why did a creative fail? Was the message confusing? Did the visuals not resonate? Very important to document these as they prevent you from making the same mistakes over and over again.

You learn from every creative you launch. Both wins and failures improve your next campaign.

Section 4: Making It Happen: A Rhythm That Actually Works

What matters is the real-world schedule you follow week to week. A common trap is to jam the data review and the creative brainstorm into the same meeting. This rarely works well.

Here’s a better approach using a bi-weekly ‘sprint’ that gives your team time to digest learnings and come up with ideas.

Step 1: The Data Drop

Instead of a big reveal in a meeting, the process starts asynchronously.

On Monday, the UA Manager sends out a concise report or a Miro board with the results from the last round of tests. It’s a summary of the key winners, losers, and perhaps some theories about why they behaved the way they did. Also good to discuss these things in the creative sync.

This gives the entire team a full day to actually think about the results and brainstorm before hopping into a meeting together.

Step 2: The Creative Sync

Here’s what to cover on your Tuesday meeting.

1. Q&A and Discussion (15-20 mins): Talk about the performance data. “Did anything surprise you?” “Why do we think the hook on Ad B failed so badly?” This ensures everyone is aligned and understands the data.

2. The Brainstorm (30-40 mins): With a full day to process the information, the team can now have a high-quality brainstorm or share hypothesis and ideas on the back of what has worked or hasn’t. Competitor research also makes it way into these. Also, good to have a shared inbox for creative ideas that your team populates before the meeting to discuss.

The Two-Week Cycle in Action

This simple change makes the whole two-week cycle flow much better:

• Week 1 is for brainstorming and building. After the Tuesday meeting, the creative team has clear direction and spends the week producing the new assets.

• Week 2 is for testing and analysis. The new ads go live and run for a full week. As the week ends, the UA Manager analyzes the data to prepare for the next Monday Data Drop, and the entire cycle starts over.

Suggestion: Keep things fresh with larger quarterly creative reviews/workshops to rejuvenate ideas and the team.

Closing Thoughts

Use this framework as a starting point. No teams are the same and everyone has different setups.

Have you’ve seen better frameworks or have suggestions to improve this one? If so, feel free to share and suggest what works for you.

We’ve been downloading apps for years. But the next frontier is living experiences. Guided fitness routines, creative workflows, learning sessions - all overlaid directly on reality. Think of it as the App Store… but for your life.

The problem? The hardware isn’t ready. AR glasses are still clunky, expensive, and awkward to wear. Most people won’t adopt something that requires effort without immediate value.

The promise is clear, though. Military tech like Anduril’s EagleEye already shows what’s possible when AI and sensors layer intelligence onto the real world. Soldiers operate with a fully interactive interface - a taste of the experiences AR could one day deliver to consumers.

Watch Anduril’s new EagleEye footage and it looks like a live-action Call of Duty -drones, sensors, and AI all feeding into a perfectly synchronised tactical overlay. Soldiers see in layers: heat maps, target trajectories, environmental data. Reality itself has a user interface.

Now shift to the consumer world. Meta’s new Ray-Ban 2 glasses might seem almost trivial in comparison - snapping photos, taking voice notes, live translations, and streaming to Instagram. But that’s exactly how the iPhone started: limited features, infinite potential. The iPhone was revolutionary, but the App Store unlocked its real power - turning a great device into a platform for entirely new behaviours.

We’re approaching that same inflection point for AR.

The killer use case for AR glasses won’t be ads floating in front of your eyes - it’ll be experience packs: immersive, guided modes that shape how you live and learn. Imagine subscribing to a Fitness Coach Pack that overlays your next set or run route, a Creator Pack that helps you capture ideas and publish in real time, or a Cooking Pack which guides you through recipes in real time.

Or maybe it’s an Artist Pack that guides your creative process step by step, showing composition tips or lighting suggestions as you paint or shoot. A Tutor Pack could bring real-time explanations into your study sessions, visualising complex concepts in 3D. Even a Focus Pack could structure your day into deep work blocks, using micro-feedback from your environment to keep you on track.

We’re not seeing true “experience packs” yet, but some fitness apps hint at what’s coming. Apps like WalkScape turn walking into an RPG with characters and skill trees. Zombies, Run! transforms jogging into an interactive mission. Platforms like Strava and Nike Run Club have already gamified consistency and social competition.

These are the behavioural blueprints for what AR will eventually make seamless - imagine those same systems, but living in your field of view, responding to your pace, posture, or environment in real time. Fitness is the testbed where these new interfaces will first prove their worth. Instead of scrolling through how others live, you’ll live through experiences designed by others - following their routines, practices, and mindsets in real time. Social media made us watch other people’s lives; AR will let us step inside them.

As people burn out on social media’s passive dopamine loop, they’ll crave something different: tools that make them feel in control, engaged, and improving. Experience packs will offer that - a UI for becoming who you want to be.

The only barrier? Adoption. The tech is still clunky, expensive, and too visible.

Smartphones are essentially everywhere now: by 2025, there are about 4.69 billion people owning smartphones globally, up from ~4.25 billion in 2024. That’s more than half the global population.

AR glasses, by contrast, are still niche. In 2024, AR head-worn device unit sales were only around 1.49 million, with an installed base of ~2.22 million units. Forecasts suggest growth, but even by 2028 annual sales will barely exceed 2 million, with a total installed base of ~5.8 million.

What could accelerate this? A few things.

First, seamless design, the moment AR glasses look and feel like regular eyewear, adoption will spike. No one wants to feel like they’re wearing a gadget. Second, social utility, when these devices make you tangibly better at something people care about (fitness, creativity, productivity), the value becomes obvious. Third, creator ecosystems - just as the App Store made the iPhone indispensable, an open marketplace for “experience packs” will give AR purpose beyond novelty. And finally, cultural pull - a moment where AR becomes a lifestyle flex, not a tech experiment.

Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 shows that AR hardware is finally catching up to the vision. The experiences are ready, but for AR to become the next app store and give us Live-to-Play experiences, adoption will take time, and creators will need hardware that’s powerful, comfortable, and ubiquitous enough to build on. The world it unlocks is coming - but getting there will be a gradual, hardware-driven journey.

Most people use Cameo to get a celebrity shoutout. We used it to acquire players.

After spending over $200K on ~50 Cameo videos for UA, we found that it can be a surprisingly cost-effective, and creative, addition to your marketing mix. Here’s what we learned and how to make it work for you.

What Even Is Cameo — and Why It Belongs in UA

Cameo started as a feel-good platform where fans could pay celebrities to record short, personalised videos - birthday wishes, roasts, pep talks, you name it. During the pandemic, it exploded. Stuck at home, people found joy in having a semi-famous person say their name.

At its peak, Cameo had over 400 employees and a full-on cultural moment. But as the world reopened, demand cooled. The company downsized to just 33 employees - and for a while, even our account manager vanished.

That’s when we started using it — not for birthdays, but for ads.

The timing was interesting: Cameo was quietly evolving from a novelty app into a creator-driven platform. You could now filter talent by category, response time, or location. Prices ranged from $10 shoutouts to $10K+ videos, spanning sports stars, TV personalities, musicians, and niche internet icons.

Today, Cameo is finding its second wind. The team’s rebuilding, account support is back, and they’re repositioning Cameo as more than a consumer toy — as a tool for brands and marketers. (Their recent AI-driven Peppa Pig activation says it all.)

That shift matters because it opens a new creative channel for UA teams:

✅ Low-friction video production with real personalities

⚡ Quick turnaround - sometimes same-day, usually under a week

💡 Built-in audience familiarity that cuts through ad fatigue

Cameo isn’t here to replace your production pipeline or influencer strategy - it’s a complement. Think of it as a fast, flexible way to test ideas that lean on personality, nostalgia, or cultural cues before you commit to a bigger spend.

Interestingly, despite this potential, Cameo isn’t actively marketing itself to game developers. Most gaming teams aren’t aware of how this platform can unlock fast, culturally relevant, and highly shareable creative. That’s part of why we saw such an opportunity to experiment with UA campaigns here.

The Spark: Royal Match and the Power of Familiar Faces

Our first spark came from watching what Royal Match was doing. Dream Games had built one of the most polished UA machines in mobile, but what really stood out wasn’t their polish - it was their personality.

They started running ads with Rick Hoffman from Suits, Akon, Frankie Muniz, James Murray, Joe Gatto, Lamar Odom, and a rotating cast of recognisable faces from TV, music, and pop culture.

At first, the idea seemed almost random - why mix celebrities from such different worlds? But it worked. You’d scroll past a dozen polished ads, then suddenly see Louis Litt shouting about a match-3 puzzle. It broke the pattern instantly.

What Dream Games understood is that people stop for people. A familiar face can stop the scroll and in UA, that’s half the battle.

(With Royal Kingdom, they’ve taken this Cameo approach a step further by producing high production, high quality ads with A-List celebrities. (Deconstructor of Fun wrote a great piece on this here if you want to dive deeper)

With that said, that was the nudge we needed. If it worked for the leading match-3 game, could it work for Chrome Valley Customs?

We were in the middle of trying to scale spend on Chrome Valley Customs and feeling the creative ceiling closing in. Performance was solid, but growth demanded new angles to unlock different audiences - something disruptive enough to stand out in crowded feeds, yet efficient enough to produce at scale.

That’s when we turned to Cameo.

Start with Data, Not Guesswork

If you’re going to use Cameo for UA, don’t start by browsing random celebrities. Start with data.

Before spending a penny, run in-game or community surveys to understand what your players actually care about - hobbies, sports, shows, creators, memes, anything. Those insights will guide who you pick on Cameo and how you brief them.

When we did this, we found that a big segment of our audience was into motorsports - not just cars, but specific series and personalities. That gave us a direction: target creators in that space, and write scripts that play into those shared interests.

Cameo even helps on this front. Their newer dashboard includes audience insights for many creators, showing follower demographics, engagement stats, and niche relevance. Combined with your own player data, it’s a goldmine for narrowing down who to test first.

The key is to treat Cameo like any other UA channel - data in, creative out. Don’t guess. Let your player base point you toward the right voices, humour, and cultural hooks to explore.

That said, Cameo’s talent pool won’t always align perfectly with your data - but stay close to the theme and test broadly. Some of our best-performing videos came from creators we never would’ve predicted.

The Practicalities of Running Cameo for UA

Okay, so you’ve found your themes - your players love Pimp My Ride, Top Gear, or BBQ Pit masters - and you’re ready to test Cameo.

Let’s talk about the part nobody covers: costs, timelines, and sanity.

💸 Costs & Licensing

In total, we produced around 50 Cameo-based creatives, spending roughly $200,000. That doesn’t mean each video cost $4K - not even close.

Here’s how it really breaks down:

Cameo charges per creator, and pricing can vary wildly - from tens of dollars to tens of thousands, depending on name recognition.

Each booking includes a 15-day commercial license (which lets you use and edit the footage freely - e.g., adding subtitles, gameplay, or other UA elements).

If a creative performs, you can extend the license. We often pushed successful ones to 30 days or more, but only a handful ever made it past that mark profitably.

On average, without counting extensions, each creative landed around $2,000 all-in - including the Cameo cost and internal production time.

Performance-wise, we found Cameo creatives spend well for about a week before fatigue sets in. A few exceptions go the distance, but most follow that “one-week spike” pattern.

📋 Briefing Talent: What Works

Cameo has improved massively on this front. Their booking flow now prompts creators with:

• “What’s the goal of this video?”

• “Tone and style”

• “Filming requirements”

• “Things to avoid”

You can also choose between ‘Talking Points’ and ‘Exact Script’, and the character limit has been lifted from 500 to 1500 — a lifesaver for context.

A few tips from experience:

• Keep videos under 60 seconds and vertical (Meta still performs best for these).

• Be crystal clear with your talking points - don’t assume talent knows gaming lingo or UA context.

• Always hit key value props: Free to download, play offline, no ads. These lines consistently improved performance.

• If your game has clear visual cues (e.g., Chrome Valley Customs’ garages, tools, or cars), ask talent to include them in the frame. That visual connection to gameplay matters more than you think.

⏱️ Timelines

Here’s the reality of production speed:

• Cameo delivery: Allow up to 7 days for talent to deliver the video (though most arrive within 2–3 days).

• Post-production: Add another 7 days for your internal team to edit — trimming, subtitling, and cutting in gameplay.
  So, you’re looking at roughly a two-week turnaround from booking to live creative. Pretty efficient compared to a custom shoot.

📱Channel Selection

For us, Meta was the clear home for Cameo creatives. Vertical, short-form, personality-driven videos perform best in feeds where people scroll fast — and Meta’s platform gives you both reach and engagement. While other channels are possible, we found that Meta consistently delivered the strongest results for this type of content.

🌏 Regional Plays

Another advantage we discovered is the ability to produce content for multiple regions. Cameo has a wide pool of talent across languages and geographies, which makes it easy to localize videos for different markets without the usual production headaches. This adds another layer of efficiency and reach to your campaigns. You do have to have the resources to check the content itself in said language so it’s something to think about.

🚧 Going Off-Platform (and Why We Stopped)

A few creators might suggest going off-platform to avoid Cameo’s 25% booking fee. It sounds appealing, but there’s a hidden tax: time.

When you go direct, you’re suddenly managing:

• Contracts

• Licensing periods

• Payment tracking

We tried it - and honestly, the marginal savings (maybe 15–20%) didn’t justify the added complexity. Cameo’s platform fee buys you structure, safety, and a paper trail. That’s worth it when you’re juggling dozens of videos and licenses.

That said, there is a flip side. Some of the off-platform creators delivered work at a noticeably higher production quality. A few had their own mini film crews or editors, and the difference showed. So while it’s more hassle, if you’re targeting a specific talent and quality bar, it can be worth exploring selectively. (Example from Steve Darnell below)

Familiarity Breeds Opportunity

When you collaborate with creators on Cameo, you’re not just buying one video - you’re building a relationship. If a creator’s first video performs well, that’s your signal to double down. They’re now genuinely excited about your game, more likely to go above and beyond, and already familiar with your brand. That familiarity pays off later - if the partnership works, it becomes much easier to scale up to something bigger or more integrated down the line.

Our first video with Xzibit was a huge success - and it wasn’t a surprise. He ranked high in our survey data, and Pimp My Ride scored strongly too. The nostalgia of seeing Xzibit back, restoring cars, instantly clicked with our audience.

What made it even better was how much he loved the project himself. Xzibit wasn’t just showing up to read a script - he was genuinely hyped about the game and ended up becoming a deeply involved player. His creative went on to become one of the few evergreen pieces made from Cameo, and his enthusiasm helped spark a full 360° marketing campaign.

All told, around 45 different creatives came out of that partnership - all from a single Cameo video. That’s the hidden benefit: when the fit is right, it can grow into something far bigger than you planned.

Closing Thoughts

Most people see Cameo as a novelty - a place for birthday shoutouts or fan videos. We found it’s actually a fast, flexible way to feed real, personality-driven content into UA production.

Over 50 videos and $200K later, it’s clear it can be both cost-effective and strategically valuable. You get authentic delivery, cultural relevance, and recognisable faces - all content that slots straight into your ad creatives without the overhead of traditional shoots.

The bigger upside is what comes after the first video. When you approach it with data, clear creative intent, and structure, Cameo can turn into genuine creator partnerships - the kind that evolve into long-term campaigns and even full 360° initiatives.

Cameo isn’t just a platform for shoutouts. Used the right way, it’s a way to inject fresh, proven content into your UA pipeline - boosting performance, saving time, and unlocking creative ideas you might never have tried otherwise.

Duolingo has changed how millions of people learn languages. Its bite-sized lessons and gamified streaks are already a proven formula - but the platform can only move as fast as its internal teams. Meanwhile, learners crave more: niche dialects, cultural modules, local idioms, or supplemental practice packs that the company can’t realistically build at scale.

The solution? User-generated content (UGC).

What UGC Can Unlock

In the gaming world, UGC is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a proven growth strategy. A new UGC Impact Study (2025) by mod.io and GameDiscoverCo analyzed hundreds of games and found that those supporting UGC significantly outperformed their peers. After one year, UGC-friendly games earned an 8% revenue lift, growing to 31% over five years. They also enjoyed better retention and stronger community loyalty.

The logic is simple: when players can create, share, and personalize content, the game stays fresh. And what’s true for games is just as true for education apps.

The Next Frontier for Duolingo

Right now, Duolingo’s course library is broad but finite. Want to learn a local dialect? Specialised business vocabulary? Cultural idioms? You may not find it. By opening the door to community-built courses, Duolingo could:

• Expand coverage into hundreds of niche languages and specializations at zero marginal cost.

• Boost retention, since new content would continually refresh the platform.

• Foster community ownership, turning learners into contributors and advocates.

• Unlock monetisation opportunities through premium community packs, certifications, or creator revenue-sharing.

Beyond Languages: Duolingo’s Bigger Play

Duolingo is already signalling bigger ambitions. The recent acquisition of Nextbeat, a music-gaming company, alongside moves into chess, shows the company doesn’t want to stop at languages. It’s a great strategy, but it comes with a bottleneck: progress is limited to how fast internal teams can design new courses.

Opening the door to community-built content would remove that ceiling. Just as UGC keeps games alive with endless mods and expansions, it could let Duolingo learners create not just niche language packs but music drills, chess puzzles, and beyond. The platform could become more than a classroom - it could become a creative ecosystem.

Making It Work

Quality and brand trust are critical, which is why Duolingo might hesitate to open course creation to the community. The concern is real: giving up control risks inconsistent lessons, errors, or off-brand content. But there’s a middle ground. With structured creator tools, clear guidelines, and moderation pipelines, the community could replicate - or even improve on - official content without sacrificing quality.

Gaming provides a clear example. In Halo Infinite, developers keep official content separate from the community tab, but highlight the best community creations in official matchmaking - and give credit to the creators. Duolingo could adopt a similar approach:

• Keep official courses distinct so learners know what’s “official.”

• Showcase standout community content with badges, features, or revenue-sharing.

• Use peer ratings and reviews to surface the best contributions.

• Start small with elective modules - vocab packs, cultural notes - before expanding to full courses.

Opening up UGC does come with challenges - quality control, moderation, brand consistency - but if any education platform is positioned to manage these at scale, it’s Duolingo. The company already balances global reach with playful rigour, and gaming shows how to blend official and community content successfully.

Why Now?

Duolingo has always thrived because of its passionate community of learners. Giving that community the tools to create wouldn’t just add more courses - it would turn Duolingo into a place where learners actually build content themselves. In gaming, we’ve seen this model work: UGC drives engagement, keeps things fresh, and even creates new revenue opportunities.

Duolingo is already exploring music and chess, but progress depends on how fast internal teams can ship. UGC could speed things up, letting learners contribute drills, puzzles, and lessons that go way beyond what the company could create on its own.

What do you think - could UGC be the next frontier for Duolingo?

Every so often, a game emerges that doesn’t just entertain - it elevates. Beatstar and its sister title Country Star were exactly that for mobile music games. They didn’t feel like disposable rhythm apps with knock-off tracks and clunky interfaces. They felt premium. With sleek UI/UX, real licensed music from major artists, and exclusive song drops, these games sat at the intersection of streaming and gaming - polished, relevant, and culturally connected.

That’s why their closure on October 31, 2025 stings. Losing them isn’t just about two games going offline. It’s a setback for the entire rhythm gaming genre, which had finally been pushed forward in a meaningful way.

Why They’re Shutting Down

The reason traces back to the acquisition of NextBeat - the studio behind the games - by Duolingo. Duolingo hired much of the NextBeat team to focus on music education within its learning platform, but it did not acquire the Beatstar or Country Star IP. Without the resources to maintain the games, NextBeat made the difficult decision to sunset them.

The Business Challenge Behind Music Games

Even before the acquisition, the business model was notoriously tough:

1. Constant Demand for Fresh Music
   Players consume new tracks rapidly. To keep engagement high, developers need a steady pipeline of music - but every song requires costly licensing.

2. Upfront + Ongoing Costs
   Deals often involve an upfront fee plus royalties or revenue splits. That means a song often needs to be replayed a certain amount of times to recoup initial upfront fees.

3. Replayability is Hard to Engineer
   Making songs replayable requires thoughtful systems - progression, live ops, leaderboards, and community play - but the economics are unforgiving. Licensing deals often combine fixed and variable costs, so the model only works if players return to tracks frequently enough. On one hand, replayability comes naturally at first: players will loop songs to improve their score, climb leaderboards, or chase perfection. But as skill levels rise and mastery comes quicker, that organic replay tapers off - making it harder to sustain engagement at the level needed to balance licensing costs.

That’s why Beatstar was so special. Simon Hade, Jessica Ashton, and Olly Barnes managed to build a sustainable licensing pipeline - something most developers would never even attempt. Recreating that moat is daunting, and even if someone does, they’ll still face the same structural hurdles around replay and deal economics.

Country Star: A SKU Test Into Genres

Country Star was a bold attempt to test whether the Beatstar model could be expanded into genre-specific SKUs. It didn’t disprove the SKU concept, but it also didn’t provide a clear green light that this direction could be sustainable under the current industry structure. Licensing costs, fragmented rights, and player appetite all made it difficult to scale genre-based spin-offs as standalone businesses.

The takeaway isn’t that SKU models are dead, but that the economics need to change before they become viable. The structure of deals, replayability mechanics, and the overall licensing framework all have to evolve for a genre-specific app strategy to work long-term.

The Marketing Challenge

Music games like Beatstar and Country Star face steep obstacles in user acquisition. Mobile marketing in this genre is a high-stakes environment where creative constraints make it tough to stand out. If a song resonates in an ad, it can drive installs, but if it doesn’t, iterating on the campaign is challenging, often forcing developers to move to the next track.

Players also expect seamless experiences, such as quickly accessing songs featured in ads. When games gate these songs behind progression, it can lead to frustration and churn. This tension between acquisition and retention is a common challenge in the genre, yet Beatstar became one of the most downloaded rhythm games on mobile, showcasing its ability to navigate these headwinds.

The Industry’s Fragmentation Problem

Another layer of difficulty is the music industry itself. Licensing isn’t just expensive - it’s messy. Rights are split between publishers, labels, and artists, with little alignment between them. Even artists themselves are frustrated by the disjointed system. Rapper Tinie Tempah, when asked about gaps in the music market, described it as “fragmented and disjointed, with publishing and records not really talking to each other.”

The positive spin: awareness of this problem is growing. The more the inefficiencies are acknowledged, the more likely it is that labels, publishers, and tech partners will experiment with new ways of working together. Whoever cracks this coordination issue - bringing rights and revenue streams into a more coherent structure - will be well-positioned to thrive in games and beyond.

The Good News Moving Forward

It’s not all doom and gloom. Two shifts in the industry could open the door for the next great music game.

1. Labels Are Hungry for Sync Revenue

Music publishers and labels are increasingly leaning into synchronization (sync) licensing as a way to diversify revenue. Sync income now represents a meaningful share of publishing revenue - well into the double digits - and has been growing rapidly year over year, driven by demand from TV, streaming, gaming, and social media. Investors are even securitising music royalties - including sync income - into multi-billion-dollar asset classes.

This is good news for developers. If music games can be pitched as regular sync channels, labels may be more willing to structure flexible deals that work for both sides. The appetite is there.

2. Lower Platform Cuts Are Emerging

Historically, on top of paying labels and publishers, music games lost another 30% of gross revenue to Apple and Google’s app stores. That tax made the already thin margins even tighter.

But the walls are starting to crack. With the rise of webshops and regulatory pressure forcing platform holders to loosen their grip, developers now have alternatives - lower-cut third-party services or even in-house direct payment systems. This means more revenue can flow back into licensing and design, making the economics of music gaming more attractive than they’ve ever been.

Silver Lining: The Talent Isn’t Gone — It’s at Duolingo

Perhaps the most overlooked silver lining is that the people who made Beatstar and Country Star great aren’t disappearing. The core NextBeat team has joined Duolingo, a company already renowned for making learning engaging, playful, and sticky. With that DNA, it’s almost certain they’ll continue to build innovative, beautifully designed products - only now at the intersection of music and education.

That’s not the same as another Beatstar, but it does mean their expertise in music rights, UI/UX, and gamified design will continue shaping interactive music experiences in new, exciting contexts.

Another Avenue: Artist-Exclusive Apps

If genre SKUs face structural hurdles, another promising route could be artist-exclusive apps. Instead of trying to serve entire genres under one umbrella, developers could collaborate with individual artists or groups to build interactive apps around their catalogs.

This approach narrows the licensing scope, making deals easier to negotiate, and taps into one of music’s most powerful forces: superfans. In today’s industry, superfans generate a disproportionate share of revenue - streaming spins, merch sales, concert tickets. An interactive app that gamifies their favorite artist’s music could become both a marketing tool and a monetization channel.

We’ve already seen hints of this potential:

• Travis Scott’s Fortnite Concert (2020) drew over 12 million concurrent players, proving how music + interactivity can generate cultural moments and huge engagement.

• BTS and K-pop fandom apps like SuperStar BTS and Weverse have shown that fans are eager to engage with rhythm mechanics, collectible systems, and exclusive drops when tied directly to their favorite artist.

• Lil Nas X’s Roblox Concert and Ariana Grande’s Fortnite Rift Tour reinforced that fans will flock to experiences where music and gaming collide in exclusive, artist-led ways.

An artist-exclusive rhythm app could build on this momentum - offering fans exclusive access to songs, behind-the-scenes content, or even early releases in a playable format. With sync revenues becoming a bigger priority for labels, and direct-to-consumer tech breaking down distribution walls, this could become a viable path forward.

Closing Thoughts

Beatstar and Country Star proved that mobile rhythm games could be premium, cultural, and sustainable - if only briefly. Their loss is a setback, but not the end. The demand for interactive music experiences is only growing, and the industry conditions around licensing and platform revenue are shifting in ways that may finally favour developers.

The challenge now isn’t whether another Beatstar will come - it’s whether the next studio can blend music licensing, replayability, and monetization into something sustainable. If they can - and if fragmentation is addressed, or if artist-exclusive apps become viable - the genre still has a future worth tapping (Ba-dum-tss! 🥁) into.

RIP Beatstar/Country Star - you will be missed!

So i’m trying something new here - calling it Fresh Cuts. Basically, whenever i see an ad that makes me go “oh damn that’s clever” or “lol wtf was that,” i’ll throw it up here and we’ll pick it apart.

Don’t expect some textbook ad analysis. it’s more like: here’s the ad, here’s what i noticed, here’s why it slapped (or flopped). big campaigns, tiny one-offs, whatever. if it’s interesting, it’s in.

So yeah…. welcome to fresh cuts. Let’s dig into some ads and see what’s good.

What if you could get all the engagement of a playable ad - without actually building one? Just a clever use of the way people naturally swipe, tap, or wave in front of their phones.

The Playable That Isn’t a Playable
Usually, a “playable” usually means an HTML mini-game. Tap to match tiles, swipe to cut ropes, drag to race cars. They’re effective because they make you do something, not just watch. While working on Chrome Valley Customs the team constantly had them in the pipeline as they were just so effective.

Lately, i’ve noticed a new trend on social media and some light integration of interactions into ads that could be a fresh area to explore. Let’s dive in.

Neo exhibition tokyo node 2025 creative interactive video

I first stumbled across this trend watching a video from a Tokyo exhibition. the screen would throw up little prompts like chop it, pull it, flick it, point it - and then a video would play right after, making it feel like your move actually caused the reaction.

basically it’s running on the same logic as quick-time events in games - you see the cue, you do the action, and your brain connects it to the outcome. it’s not really interactive, but it feels interactive, which is the clever part.

Now lets look at some examples of how social media adopted this.

Example #1 - Telus Tennis

This one blew my mind - a post where the comment bar basically turns into a tennis racket. like, you’re not actually playing, but it tricks your brain into feeling like you are.

it’s such a smart use of the platform’s own features - no extra coding, no fancy playable, just leaning on what’s already there. and the kicker? by making you open the comment section to “play,” it signals to the algorithm that people are engaging with the post. more interaction = longer watch times = better performance.

Example #2 - Jetpack Joyride

Next up - jetpack joyride (doesn’t look official though). I saw a video where they used instagram’s sliding bar as the controller. You drag it left and right to dodge zappers and scoop up coins.

now here’s the funny part: there’s no real punishment. If you hit a zapper, nothing happens - the slider doesn’t actually have physics tied to the game. but your brain doesn’t care. you still feel like you have to dodge them, and you keep sliding along anyway.

it’s such a neat hack - tapping into that same compulsion loop games use, but without actually needing full gameplay behind it.

Example #3 - Subway Surfers

Next up - subway surfers. they posted a clip where a dot moves up the y-axis and across the x-axis, and then the in-game character does the same moves right after.

It’s basically a visual mapping of input to action. Your brain sees the cue, sees the result, and instantly makes the connection - just like in a game, even though you’re not actually controlling anything. It’s clever because it makes the viewer feel like they’re part of the mechanics without needing a playable.

Example #5 - Pudgy Party

This is the first ad I saw implementing a prompt to the user, they cleverly asked the viewer to wait before pausing increasing viewing time and then promptly showing the CTA. (I got the dragon costume)


Takeaways

A lot of brands are already playing with this in social posts - little taps, slides, or comments that feel game-y.

but there’s room to take it further with native ads. same tricks, bigger impact: cues, micro-interactions, cause → effect, all baked into the ad itself.

Here some tips you can try if you want to make your ads feel like a playable without being a playable.

Make it feel interactive: Even if users aren’t really in control, give cues that make them feel like they are.

• Use what’s already there: Platform features (comment bars, sliders) can double as game mechanics.

• Show cause → effect: Map actions to outcomes visually to grab attention.

• Small gamey moments stick: Micro-interactions boost engagement without needing a full playable.

If anyone out there has tested these types of ads before or will do so off the back of this post - please feel free to share how they went for you! Good luck, and see you on the next Fresh Cuts.

I’m going to love writing this one. I’ve been playing RuneScape since I was 11 years old. I remember being on our family computer downstairs back in 2004 at 2 a.m. when I was supposed to be asleep way before that. I would hear my dad wake up upstairs and walk to the bathroom. That was my cue to haul ass back upstairs, slip into my room, and pretend to be asleep as he inevitably came to check on me. Most of the time I got away with it and could go back to fishing lobsters or chopping a few more trees for a Woodcutting level.

Fast forward to today and the game is still not only alive, but continually smashing player records with the most recent run up being extra wild with ~250,000 concurrent players being recorded. Not bad for a 12 year old game (in it’s current form) more on that soon.

How? Has this game in it’s current form continued to grow in the 12 years it’s been out? Let’s delve into some history of the game and see what takeaways can come from it

If you’re not familiar with the history of Runescape, I will try to keep it brief. It all began with Andrew Gower's text-based DeviousMUD in the late '90s, which led to the browser game we know as RuneScape Classic in 2001. After that, Jagex completely rebuilt the game in 2004, creating RuneScape 2 with a fully 3D world, which became the version most of us played for years. Then came the big split. In 2012, they released the Evolution of Combat (EOC) update, which changed the game's combat system completely and alienated a ton of the old players. In a brilliant move, Jagex listened and brought back an old 2007 version of the game, launching it as a separate client called Old School RuneScape (OSRS) in 2013. Now, you have two distinct games: the modern RuneScape 3 (RS3) with its new combat and graphics, and the community-driven OSRS, which holds onto that classic, nostalgic feel. Worth noting that Old School RuneScape (OSRS) was officially launched on mobile devices for both Android and iOS on October 30, 2018.

In 2012, RuneScape released the Evolution of Combat (EOC) update - a massive overhaul that changed the game’s combat system entirely. The old appeal of RuneScape had been its simplicity combined with surprising depth, but EOC introduced MMO-style mechanics that felt overly complicated to many long-time players. While some embraced it, backlash was intense, with in-game riots and forums flooded with complaints. World 66 Falador was full of players expressing their feelings.

Recognising the demand for the old style, Jagex actually found a backup of the old game from 2007 and in 2013 launched Old School RuneScape (OSRS) alongside the updated RuneScape (EOC). This decision not only salvaged trust but created two distinct paths: OSRS, driven by nostalgia and community, and RS3, the modernized version with enhanced graphics.

Now that we have a little background on the history of the game. Let’s talk about what the game is and what it offers players. RuneScape is a fantasy MMORPG set in the world of Gielinor. What makes it unique is that it's a "sandbox" game with no set path. Instead of choosing a class, you train over two dozen different skills - like combat, fishing, mining, and woodcutting - to create your own adventure. You can follow quests with deep stories, fight powerful bosses, earn a fortune by trading, or simply relax and train your skills. It offers an incredible amount of player freedom, letting you set your own goals and play exactly how you want. The game has an endless amount of content to explore and while it can be considered grindy in some aspects with the average account taking 3000-5000 hours to max all of the games skill and to completely finish the game will take you much longer than that.

When we look at the graph for this game we can see that overtime it had a bit of a lull period after launch up until 2015, this was due in part to the trust not being there from the community given the major backlash they had caused with the EOC update. Along with releasing the game with very few updates. Things started to pickup in late 2014 and the reason why ended up being a critical reason as to why I think the game has continued to grow throughout these years. Jagex introduced the Polling Booth and said to the players, this is your game now. We’ll propose updates and you the player get to decide what content makes it into the game. Not many players paid attention to this at the time, but as the game got a bit more serious about content updates and major expansions the idea started to pickup steam.

Community-Driven Development: Why It Works in OSRS

The polling system in Old School RuneScape (OSRS) is simple: if a proposed change gets more than 75% “Yes” votes, it makes it into the game. If not, it gets dropped. While there have been exceptions - for example, content sitting just under the threshold (74.9%) that was later repolled and passed - the rule is consistent. This mechanic has created a unique sense of ownership among players because they know their votes directly shape the game. That sense of agency is one of the major reasons OSRS continues to grow.

Would this system work in mobile?
Hard to say. OSRS runs on a subscription-based model with membership bonds that can be bought and traded, whereas most mobile games rely heavily on microtransactions. A community-driven voting system would be difficult in free-to-play mobile unless the game is already financially sustainable. On top of that, I can’t imagine many mobile devs handing that much control to players, even with the safeguard of devs guiding the vision and explaining rationale behind updates.

What other factors help the game continue to grow?

Another factor driving OSRS’s growth is the sheer volume and consistency of updates. Major expansions, quality-of-life changes, and content reworks are constantly rolled out - and all of it goes through polling. If you look at update calendars from 2013–2021, (don’t have further, but you get the idea) it’s staggering how much has been delivered by the team and continues to be to this day along with very clearly communicated roadmaps.

MMORPG players expect ongoing content, but what makes OSRS special is how often they get it right. Sure, Jagex has had failures (EOC being the big one), but they’ve learned from mistakes and are now highly receptive to community feedback. Updates are framed as logical “next steps” in the game’s evolution, expanding maps and storylines in ways that feel faithful to RuneScape’s 2007 roots. What’s more impressive is how they balance updates to appeal to both new players and hardcore veterans.

Developers Who Play Their Own Game
One of Jagex’s biggest strengths is that their devs play OSRS. Designers, QA analysts, and even higher-level staff are actively involved in the game. This creates a feedback loop where updates aren’t just abstract design choices - they’re informed by real player experiences.

For example, one QA analyst has even achieved “completion” status at the Grandmaster level, which requires finishing some of the game’s most brutal challenges - tasks that take months for many players, if they’re ever completed at all. That level of personal investment shows up in how well updates resonate with the community.

Jagex has also hired from the player base itself. Chris Archie - who once ran a popular community montage channel - joined the OSRS team and provided valuable insight into what players really wanted.

Experimentation Through Temporary Game Modes
One of the more underrated reasons OSRS has stayed fresh is Jagex’s willingness to experiment with temporary game modes. These aren’t permanent additions, but rather short-term experiments that test new ideas and give players alternative ways to experience the game. The beauty of this approach is that Jagex opens up temporary servers that have no effect on the main game.

The two major ones for Jagex have been Deadman mode (which appeals to PVP players) Leagues (which caters to completionists) and seasonal updates (for all players)

Deadman Mode
Originally launched as a high-risk PvP seasonal mode, it stripped away the safety of the main game and encouraged brutal competition with heavy rewards. While not every iteration was perfectly balanced (Watch this video for lols), Jagex continually reworked DMM based on player feedback. The seasonal resets kept it exciting, and over time it evolved into competitive tournaments with real-world prize pools. DMM proved that OSRS players were eager for hardcore, experimental content that sat alongside - but didn’t disrupt - the core game.

Leagues
Another major success story is Leagues. These are time-limited events where players start fresh accounts under unique rulesets, like accelerated XP rates, locked regions, or powerful relics that reshape gameplay. Leagues give players a sense of progression and discovery all over again, but in a condensed and novel format. They’ve become one of the most beloved experimental modes in OSRS, largely because Jagex listens after each League and tweaks the next one based on what players enjoyed (or didn’t). For example, the first League was more about raw novelty, but by the second and third, Jagex refined progression systems, relic power balance, and reward structures to make them more compelling.

While temporary live-ops modes are common in mobile games, they’re usually stand-alone events and rarely change the core gameplay the way Jagex’s experiments do. Imagine starting fresh in a separate Clash of Clans server for a limited time, with wild battle modifiers that don’t exist in the main game and 20x the loot per raid with challenges to complete and event unique rewards at the end of the time period - that’s the kind of twist Jagex brings to OSRS.

I understand why, though. It’s tough for dev teams to commit to something so major that may or may not succeed when they could instead be working on five smaller features and A/B testing them before scaling up. Still, there’s something about these big swings Jagex takes - and then refining them with community feedback - that I believe has played a big role in the game’s continued growth.

Old School Runescape Community

Another reason why OSRS has continued to thrive is the community itself. This game isn’t just about skilling, questing, or chasing the next boss drop - it’s about the people you do it with. RuneScape has always had this weird magic of turning random online encounters into long-term friendships. Whether it’s joining a clan, grinding for a raid together, or just hanging out in a bank skilling and chatting, the social side of OSRS is as much a part of the experience as the gameplay itself.

The clan system, group content like Raids, and even older activities like Clan Wars or Castle Wars all encourage players to stick around because they’ve got a team depending on them. On top of that, the Grand Exchange economy has its own layer of social gameplay. Flipping items, merching, or even just calling out trades in chat gives the game this “living marketplace” feel that makes it feel alive in a way few MMOs pull off anymore.

And then there’s nostalgia. A huge part of OSRS’s player base is made up of people who played back in the early 2000s like myself and came back when Old School relaunched. That shared history gives the community this sense of “we were all there” - whether it’s laughing about noob mistakes at Lumbridge cows or remembering the first time you died in the Wilderness getting lured for your first full rune set. It’s not just about the game itself, it’s about growing up with it and now sharing that with new players or even their own kids now.

This kind of community stickiness is something most mobile games struggle with. A lot of mobile communities are based on temporary clans or matchmaking systems that disappear when the game dies down. In contrast, OSRS has real staying power because of these social bonds. When your friends are still playing, you keep logging in. That’s not something you can fake with push notifications or daily login rewards - it’s built by giving players the tools and freedom to create those connections naturally.

Adding to the momentum of record high player counts is the fact that a ton of World of Warcraft streamers have recently switched to Old School Runescape finding that WoW classic had run out of content. The Old School Runescape community loved watching these seasoned MMORPG players discover the game and triggered a ton of nostalgic moments and brought in a ton of newer players. Take this clip below from Sodapoppin where he dies in a most classic fashion running past the dark wizards south of Varrock. This, to everyone who has played OSRS before, is almost a rite of passage, but in the moment you feel flabbergasted when it happens to you.

Monetization & Trust

Another big reason OSRS works is how simple and fair the monetization is. You pay for membership, and that’s basically it. If you don’t want to spend real money, you can even buy membership with Bonds using in-game gold. That setup alone earns a ton of goodwill because it respects both types of players - the ones with more time than money and the ones with more money than time.

Compare that to RS3, which went all-in on microtransactions with Treasure Hunter and cosmetics. A lot of players felt exploited, and it damaged trust. OSRS has stayed away from that model, and the community hasn’t forgotten it. People are more willing to grind thousands of hours here because they know the devs aren’t trying to squeeze them every step of the way. RS3 has even started to experiment with removing MTX which in and of itself will be interesting to see the impacts off. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the impacts of this following their live tests.

Looking Ahead - What Mobile Devs Should Take From This

So why is Old School RuneScape still breaking records 12 years after its relaunch, while most online games are lucky to survive a few? It comes down to a mix of trust, consistency, and giving players real ownership in the game. Polls make players feel heard. Regular updates keep the world alive. Temporary modes keep things fresh. Devs actually play their own game. And the monetization is fair enough that people stick around for the long haul.

That’s a recipe a lot of mobile devs could learn from. Too many mobile games treat their players like short-term wallets instead of long-term communities. OSRS proves that if you build trust, listen to feedback, and deliver meaningful updates, people will not only play your game - they’ll live in it.

I’m not saying every mobile game can copy-paste the OSRS model. But the core lessons are the same: give players a voice, respect their time and money, and make a game so fun your own dev team can’t stop playing it. Do that, and maybe your game won’t just survive in the crowded mobile market - it might still be thriving a decade later.

Seriously…. if you haven’t tried Old School RuneScape yet, I’d highly recommend giving it a few hours when you can. The game is more active and vibrant now than it’s ever been.

If you have the time (3 1/2 hours) this 4 year old breakdown as to why Runescape is awesome is worth the watch.

Destiny: Rising by NetEase Games is set to globally launch on mobile on August 28th, giving Bungie a fresh opportunity to reignite interest in the franchise. While Destiny and Destiny 2 have been hugely popular, daily active users have started to decline. Bungie’s live service model - constantly rolling out new seasons and content - has kept players engaged, but since Season 25, activity has cooled, making a mobile launch perfectly timed.

Looking at the Steam charts, Bungie’s live service model has kept players engaged with regular content updates, generating noticeable peaks in activity. However, baseline concurrent players have gradually declined, and engagement appears to be cooling off since Season 25, making the timing for a mobile launch well-suited to reinvigorate the franchise.

Why NetEase?

Partnering with NetEase makes strategic sense. In 2018, NetEase invested over $100 million in Bungie, securing a minority stake and a board seat. The partnership opened a pathway into the Chinese market while giving NetEase access to a top-tier IP. Even after Sony acquired Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion, Bungie retained full autonomy, allowing the collaboration to continue. With a proven track record in FPS shooters like Knives Out, Lost Light, and Blood Strike, as well as major IPs like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, NetEase is well-positioned to bring Destiny to mobile audiences.

Why take it to Mobile?
There are several strong reasons to bring Destiny to mobile:

• Expand Player Base – Reach players without consoles/PCs.

• Boost Visibility – Keeps Destiny relevant between expansions.

• Test Mechanics – Mobile progression and monetization experiments. We see this happening with Wild Rift being a testing ground for League of Legends on other platforms.

• Drive Cross-Platform Play – Mobile players may try console/PC versions.

• Global Reach – Access to large mobile markets, especially in Asia.

Besides those main points, the core Destiny games demand significant time investments, with sprawling campaigns, complex progression systems, and endgame activities like raids that require hours of coordination. This intensity has led to player fatigue, particularly as Destiny 2’s live service model has struggled to maintain baseline engagement since Season 25. Destiny: Rising addresses this by offering a condensed, mobile-friendly format tailored for shorter play sessions. Drawing from Wild Rift’s approach to League of Legends, which simplified mechanics and reduced match times to 15-20 minutes, Destiny: Rising is expected to streamline missions and activities to fit 5-15 minute bursts, ideal for mobile gamers. Expect campaign missions to be bite-sized, with quick objectives and instant rewards, and co-op modes like six-player Gauntlet Ops to feature matchmaking that minimizes setup time, unlike the console versions’ raid coordination demands.

This snackable design will likely appeal to burned-out Destiny players who found the grind overwhelming. For example, Call of Duty: Mobile successfully distilled its console counterpart into fast-paced matches with simplified progression, retaining core gunplay while reducing commitment. Similarly, Destiny: Rising’s first- and third-person shooting, combined with touch or controller support, will preserve the franchise’s iconic gunplay while making it accessible for quick sessions on commutes or breaks. The introduction of pre-set hero characters like Ikora Rey and customizable protagonists like “Wolf” with unique Relic abilities further reduces complexity, allowing players to jump in without navigating Destiny 2’s intricate class systems.

Monetization and Gacha Concerns

As a F2P title, Destiny: Rising will most likely adopt a monetization model similar to NetEase’s Diablo Immortal, featuring microtransactions for cosmetics, battle passes, and potentially gacha-style mechanics for weapons or characters. Posts on Reddit express skepticism about NetEase’s business practices, with fears of pay-to-win elements alienating fans. However, NetEase’s experience with titles like Naraka: Bladepoint suggests they can balance monetization to keep free-to-play players engaged. Expect a generous free track in the battle pass and earnable rewards to mitigate backlash, though premium “Mythic” gear or crossbows may tempt spending. This approach could mirror Wild Rift, where monetization focuses on skins but doesn’t lock core gameplay behind paywalls, ensuring accessibility for casual players.
Challenges and Risks

Risks
Destiny: Rising faces risks from limited Bungie involvement, which may lead to non-canonical storytelling that feels inauthentic to fans, as seen in X posts questioning NetEase’s creative control. Mobile hardware limitations could hinder delivering Destiny’s signature visuals and fluid gunplay, disappointing players expecting a AAA experience. Additionally, aggressive monetization, like pay-to-win gacha systems, risks alienating the core Destiny community, similar to Diablo Immortal’s early backlash.

I’d imagine NetEase would have learned from Diablo Immortal’s backlash and make adjustments, but regardless will still face some wrath of people experiencing the non-spender vs spender experience.

Besides those concerns, I believe the overall net will be positive for the Destiny franchise as they access new players and breathe new life into the communities. And while other major FPS titles have come and gone like Battlefield Mobile and Apex Legends Mobile - I think that NetEase is better positioned then they were to keep the 10 million pre-registered players and new installs that will come during launch happy with regular content updates and live ops events.

We will keep our eyes on Destiny: Rising launching globally August 28th…..

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Why I’m Starting This

I spend a lot of time playing mobile games. Not only playing them (okay, fine, guilty), but also the creative aspect: how they're made, how ads attempt to get us to convert, and why certain games click immediately and others fail.

I needed somewhere to write about those thoughts. The funny (and sometimes strange) creative trends, and the games worth your attention. When I was still working at Space Ape Games, I was always trying to stay up to date on what occurred in the world of mobile games and sharing it with the rest of the team. I truly miss doing this a great deal, and this is my way of bringing it back. I'm calling it Creative Cuts because that's what this is: short, engaging "cuts" of creativity from the mobile game world - either an ad that blows me away or a game that surprises me with originality. Imagine idea snapshots that I'd love to share with interested players, developers, and everyone who enjoys playing mobile games.

What You'll Find Here

Expect things like:

• Breakdowns of creative ads: which ones are genius, which ones flop, and why.

• Spotlights on games that surprise me.

• Ideas and trends I’m seeing in the mobile space.

• Occasional rabbit holes into interesting design quirks

• Hopefully at some point some guest articles/spots

What’s Next

I’ll be posting regularly (aiming for once a week to start). Some posts will be quick, casual write-ups, others might be deeper dives. I’m new to this blogging thing, so expect a little experimentation along the way.

And Finally…

This is meant to be fun. Games are supposed to be fun. I’ll probably switch things up, try new ideas, and share whatever grabs my interest in the moment. Hopefully, it’ll spark your interest too.