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To all,

With every big change in our industry, we can expect to see new winners and new losers based on the new environment.

New privacy restrictions including the loss of IDFA on iOS, and whatever policy Google chooses to adopt, change the rules of the game. We are already seeing dramatic shifts beginning to occur in user acquisition with some games.

Note that the degree of impact depends on the kind of game you are operating (whale targeted, deeper monetization, etc.). These changes include game studios’ ability to acquire new users, daily organic install volume, revenue, and ARPU profile of new players for their games.

Speaking honestly, I have to say there is a lot of bad information being published about what is happening. Although, I don’t want to call anyone out specifically. However, in response, I wanted to talk to actual practitioners with real data about what is actually occurring and what we can expect to see from IDFA deprecation.

The speakers:

Brian Bowman, CEO of Consumer Acquisition. CA has managed over $3B in social ad spend and they are running about $150M every month through their platform.
Matej Lancaric, Growth Consultant. Has launched 28 games and personally oversaw $20M+ in profitable spend.
Warren Woodward, Chief Growth Officer of Upptic. Led UA at Nexon and Wargaming. Upptic is managing multi-million dollar growth profiles for Candywriter, GSN, Experian, and Mino Games.

Key Takeaways

The Data

Brian is seeing revenue down about 15-20% across the portfolio of companies he’s working with, the specific impact depends on the kind of game.
Brian clarifies that the games most impacted are those that specifically target whales. Warren noted that broadly appealing games he’s seeing as having minimal impact. Note: Both of these impacts fall exactly in line with my exact predictions on this from last year. Further, see the current data I pulled on last week’s Games Radar covering Social Casino.
Some of the loss we’re seeing may also be attributable to returning back to work, school, and society getting back to normal
Applovin noted they are seeing 80%+ from their network of iOS devices have now updated to 14.5 or later. They are also seeing consent rates at 20-25% on the low end and 60%+ on the high end depending on the app.
Zynga has warned IDFA will have a material impact and suggested 2nd half bookings could be down by $100M.
Apple also noted their revenue from ads will be down.
A lot of small and mid-sized devs have paused spending on iOS and shifted to Android for now.
Matej believes that the big spike in Supercell games I noted is because of IDFA.
Warren suggests all of the old UA models from June likely need to be thrown out and all need to be redone.
For mid-core games in the US Matej is seeing $4 on iOS vs. $12 on Android. This is crazy.

Google vs. Unity Performance

Anecdotally, Google's performance on iOS seems to be “horrible” and they seem to be adapting to IDFA loss the worst.
The clear winner over the past few months has been Unity. The performance and how Unity adapted to IDFA loss have been the best. Unity raised its 2021 guidance by $50M.
Unity captures and analyzes 50B in-app events every day according to their financial filings.
My read on Unity’s performance: probabilistic/fingerprinting. If this is correct beware that this advantage MAY NOT LAST LONG. Most people in the industry aren’t understanding this. They don’t understand how Unity is overperforming on ads. Therefore, be careful if Apple cracks down on this as per their clearly stated guidelines on this practice.

Specific Changes to UA

Warren: How to model campaign performance needs to change - every team needs to get into the game of prediction. Need to track opt-in and opt-out events. Greater need to apply data science to the models.
Brian: Focus on creative to drive performant ad spend. Need to use more CPG forms of approaches like Mixed Media Modeling. These approaches suck but best of what we’ve got.
Matej: Sticking with incrementality approaches.
More focus on ASO.
SKAdnetwork Conversion Value likely has limited value and is likely not a long-term solution.
Brian: Creative testing on iOS is pretty much dead, everything moving to Android. Good testing in India. Testing now is super low cost.
Reactivation campaigns are now dead on iOS. It was never a huge percentage of budget ever, say 5-10%, but now it’s fully dead.

Product Implications

Early monetization signals, onboarding flows, and persona analysis become much more important.
SKAdnetwork conversion values are only valid for the first 24 hours so early signals become more important.
UA has been having more meetings with product teams than ever before with a focus on how to get a high-quality D1 data signal.

Winners & Losers

Winners:

Unity is a huge winner until Apple cracks down on probabilistic/fingerprinting.
Google is a big winner if they don’t follow Apple down the same path of privacy as Apple has done with IDFA.
Mid/hardcore games with broad monetization and less whale-focused.
IP owners including Netflix.
Big game studios with lots of first-party data.

Losers:

Smaller devs that spend < $1M month will be negatively impacted, and those that don’t have the cash flow to map out long ARPU windows.
Retargeting companies will need to adapt to survive since these capabilities are now dead with IDFA.
Studios that rely primarily on ads will have some negative impact.

Final Message from Speakers

Brian:

10x your spend on creative testing, it’s important as a form of sustainable advantage

Matej:

Don’t believe everything we say, do your own research and see for yourself

Warren:

Don’t be in a hurry to spend your money, save your bullets and work on your models and focus on annual budget vs. short term budget
Things will get figured out over time

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Details:

Date & Time: August 26, 2021, at 10AM IST (India Standard Time)
Focus: Discussions and sharing of best practices to help evolve and strengthen the Indian F2P game development community
Format: 5 sessions covering industry growth, strategy, game design, technical challenges, etc.
Speakers: We have an all-star cast of speakers from the best F2P gaming companies in India, check out more information below!
More info and signup: https://indiaf2p.splashthat.com/

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IDFA Loss: Real Data, Real Talk, No 💩