Anonymized Case Study · 2-year engagement
PVP Casual Card Game
A small, private consumer-products company with a hit physical card game.
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
- Weekly revenue went from a 1.0× baseline to 6.4×.
- IAP ARPDAU rose 80%.
- Ad ARPDAU rose 162% across the engagement.
- D30 retention held above 15% — high for the genre. (We don't take any credit for retention; our job was to avoid making it worse!)
- And the single biggest lever — loss aversion — will be shipping very soon.
"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."
"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!"
Turbine helps mobile game & app publishers make numbers go up.
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