The situation

A veteran-led mobile studio — elite talent, big ambition — runs a top-grossing Merge-2 title as a live-service growth business. The game was already a top-grosser; the team wanted to push it further.

Category CPI was rising, so they needed an LTV lift to keep user acquisition profitable. They wanted experienced, fresh eyes to find and prioritize the highest-value opportunities, and to (potentially) upgrade their A/B-testing methodology.

The problem

This was a high-performing, top-grossing title on a live growth service — the hardest place to find incremental upside, because the obvious wins are (mostly) already captured.

The real challenge was finding untapped terrain on a product that was already very polished and fully featured.

Meanwhile, rising category CPI meant the game needed more lifetime value just to keep buying users profitably, and the team wanted a sharper, more rigorous experimentation process to keep compounding gains.

What we did

We opened with our typical deep teardown — product, data, UA, ad monetization, and the competitive set.

As always, we cross-referenced against our vault of 900+ past experiments for perspective on which types of interventions were most likely to pay off.

From there, we designed 13 high-ROI product-side initiatives (plus 3 ASO experiments), prioritized by estimated lift per unit of effort, and embedded with the team to product-manage development and split-testing.

We also flagged ANRs and got them pushed below the store's penalty threshold, and co-designed a specific economy-correcting feature.

The result

Blended ARPDAU rose 24% over the engagement (baseline month vs. final month).

Winning experiments included:

Observed lift, 2-sided p.

And we co-drove the #1-performing permanent feature in the game since launch.

Testimonial

"Working with Matt and the Turbine team has been beneficial in unlocking fresh growth opportunities for our game. They've provided great value on A/B testing, live-ops structure, and — most importantly — new opportunities for tangible retention and monetization improvements. We wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone looking to grow their games!"

— Executive Game Lead, anonymized merge-game studio

Matt's take

"We LOVE deploying our playbook on top-grossing titles. Three reasons. One, the teams are always top-notch. Two, 20% lifts to ARPDAU immediately generate $MM outcomes. Three, it's humbling to see how even the best teams and products can still become snowblind in specific areas, leaving unexploited terrain."