What Games Need to Succeed in UA

What games need to succeed in UA in 2025

The App Stores are littered with the shadows of games that tried to launch with a bang but quickly failed to gain meaningful traction and were sunset.

It seems that many of the top-grossing chart-leading titles have something in common that allows them to massively win against the millions of other titles and become global hits.

The ammunition for success

One of the clearest trends is that in the lack of hyper-personalized, user-level targeting that used to govern the user acquisition space a few years ago, creatives are now king.

Leaving the fluffy clichés for people who love fluffy things, or clichés, or both, it basically means that creative strategy married with product strategy governs a lot of what makes games successful in UA these days.

The "entry point" model for game UA

It's not uncommon to see these days that some of the most successful games in the stores are full-blown 4X games that acquire users in a much simpler way.

In a nutshell, these games find easy "entry-points" for their games and build a funnel in which they are able to acquire users for a significantly lower cost than expected for a 4X or any other midcore or hardcore game.

They do this by creating scaffolding in their games that allows for well-executed FTUE (first time user experience) and slowly pulling in their audience into the depth of the game.

So in games like Kingshot, Whiteout Survival and others, these games find easier entry points for their games that allow players to have fun long before they put in the time and effort needed to really become invested in the mechanics and narrative of the game.

These often appear in the form of mini games or mechanics layered on top of the heavier game mechanics, and then used for user acquisition.

Providing the right ammunition for ad networks

As creatives are one of the last variables that UA teams have control over, by supplying different types of creatives they are able to direct the ad networks to find them different audiences than their core one.

Instead of marketing the game as a full-blown 4X game that requires quite the time and effort to get into, they market it almost as a casual or sometimes even hyper-casual experience that resonates with a much wider audience.

This means in practice that they can put out playable ads that show an idle tower defense mechanic instead of a complex narrative-rich base building and resource management playable. Or an endless runner hyper-casual mechanic with simple math problems. But the effect is similar.

It allows these games to acquire users for a lower cost, while making the ad networks serve their ads to a much wider audience.

Another interesting thought to take home, or to the office with you, is around adjacent audiences. If ad networks excel at finding audiences that would respond to different creative concepts, it opens up the avenue to explore adjacent audiences that would also enjoy the game if they had a chance to play it.

A merge, farm-themed game might be enjoyed by bubble-shooter players, or farming simulator players, or match-3 players as well.

By having these different entry points, you get the chance to acquire new pockets of valuable audiences and onboard them from one adjacent genre to another one they would love, play, and become high LTV users.

Their success is not just UA

Of course, acquiring users based on misleading creatives won't do much if players abandon and uninstall the game after a few minutes.

This success originates from a holistic approach that combines product and UA. It's not two teams working in relative silos.

These games simply push the responsibility of "converting" a player to a high LTV one lower down the funnel into the game itself, and because they created the right scaffolding with these simpler game experiences within the actual game, it seems to be working very well.

This results in the massive success we see with today's top grossing games.

It's not enough to create fun these days. It's creating fun in a way that would work with how modern user acquisition works.

What to do about it?

When developing new games, thinking about UA from the get-go, as well as the high-level creative strategy that would allow massive exploration of different concepts - while supported by the right FTUEs, mini games, levels, and onboarding.

Doing that will allow for maximizing massive exploration of new creative concepts, the kind that's now feasible through Sett's agentic AI platform.