The situation

A small consumer-products company had something rare: a hit physical card game with a loyal following, and a digital version that already retained players and pulled organic installs on its own, via a reasonable physical-to-digital download pathway.

Our client was monetizing this high-retention gameplay with interstitial ads and subscription ad-removal — in other words, a hyper-casual economy.

Paid UA was nascent: a few experiments here and there, but no real volume.

The problem

Strong core gameplay and retention, but a weak IAP economy — and therefore weak LTV — which made any paid-UA scaling difficult.

The team was also new to mobile UA, and ran on a brittle codebase with a small India-based dev team. Development speed was encumbered, so it took about two years to get through our initiatives.

What we did

We opened with our typical deep teardown — product, data, UA, ad monetization, and the competitive set — to illuminate high-ROI opportunities to grow LTV and to establish a clean baseline of profitable UA with reliable data flowing.

And of course, we consulted our vault of past initiatives, including over 900 A/B test results, for additional perspective on what types of initiatives might be high-ROI bets.

Then we redesigned and rebuilt the economy: a new single-player experience and a deeper IAP economy to lift spend depth; a redesigned store, offers and merchandising; and an optimized ad-monetization stack. The highest-leverage piece — a loss-aversion economy — is rolling out soon. We estimate a +25–30% IAP ARPDAU lift once that system is optimized and tuned.

On growth, we tested new channels, moved spend toward what paid back, and stood up a creative-production and testing pipeline so the team could experience the benefits of finding creative winners on a regular basis.

The result

Testimonial

"We needed help going from indie game to full-fledged publisher. Turbine worked closely with our small team, built out our ad-monetization infrastructure, and gave us actionable insight into translating our physical presence to digital. We highly recommend Turbine to any small team that's impatient to accelerate performance and learnings."

— Brand & Growth Marketing Director, anonymized client

Matt's take

"This team was a dream to work with. A high-retaining, defensible product with natural organic volume, but needing F2P-economy and performance-UA best practices to unlock their next era of growth. Loss aversion will roll out soon and I'm very excited to see the results!"