Game Growth is Changing, Are You?: Webinar Recap and Notes

This is a recap of Sett's webinar with Luis De La Camara (VP of Global Marketing, Rovio) and Gil Tov-Li (CMO, AppCharge), hosted by Jonathan Fishman (Head of Marketing, Sett).

TL;DR (or watched...): App stores take 30%. Web stores take 5%. That gap is rewriting game economics. UA isn't going anywhere, so the move is building direct channels on top of it. In this webinar we broke down what's actually working. Some teams already pull 60 to 70% of D2C revenue from email and CRM alone. Read the full recap and watch the recording below.

Playtika just told its investors that roughly 40% of its revenue comes from direct-to-consumer. Talk to enough publishers and you hear the same number again and again. The web store is now where a huge share of the money lands.

That stat opened our latest webinar, and it set the tone for the whole hour. We pulled together two people who see this shift from opposite ends. Gil Tov-Li runs marketing at AppCharge, a D2C platform processing a billion dollars a year for studios like King, TripleDot, and Product Madness. Luis De La Camara runs global marketing at Rovio, home of Angry Birds, now part of the Sega family.

What follows: where the money is moving, why UA got so brutal, and what to actually do about it in 2026.

The web store stopped being a side project

Three years ago, D2C was the thing one person handled on the side while doing monetization. Now it has its own org chart. Scopely has a VP of D2C. Studios are standing up dedicated platform teams.

The math is obvious once you see it. A purchase inside the app gives 30% to Google or Apple. The same purchase through a web store costs four or five percent. "The cat is out of the bag," Gil said, "and there's no coming back."

What changed in the last year is where the selling happens. D2C started as web stores you sent your biggest spenders to. Then US court orders cracked the door open for in-game offers. Now a studio that does D2C well runs roughly fifty-fifty: half the revenue through in-game payment links, half through the web store over time.

The payment link is the on-ramp. It teaches a player that the web store exists, gets them comfortable leaving a credit card, and builds the habit. AppCharge just put out a case study with Play Studios where a launch hit 60% of revenue in D2C wallet share. The ceiling keeps moving.

Where D2C works, and where it fight you

D2C didn't start everywhere. It started where the money was easy.

Social casino and strategy games led the way, Gil explained, because the average transaction sat around fifty to a hundred dollars. You only needed the top one percent of the one percent to switch to the website and you were mostly done.

Luis sees the same split inside a single IP. Angry Birds 2 is a casual slingshot game with a light RPG layer, and its high spenders behave like mid-core players with big purchases. D2C works beautifully there. Angry Birds Dream Blast is a tap-to-blast puzzle game built on lots of small purchases, and the business case gets harder.

That's the frontier now. Casual and puzzle are entering D2C even with small basket sizes. King is making it work. The pressure that creates, Gil said, is on platforms like AppCharge to invent offers that make sense at a $3.99 price point, when the whole model was built around $50 transactions. Six months from now the genre map looks different again.

On AI, both were honest about the hype. Today it mostly does analysis. Rovio is piloting an internal tool that works like a personal data analyst, where an executive can ask why D2C payments spiked instead of hunting through dashboards or waiting on someone to run the numbers. True per-player personalization of the economy is the holy grail nobody has reached, because game economies are hand-architected by designers and handing the keys to an AI makes people nervous. Genuinely useful today. The autonomous version is still years out.

The UA arms race got vicious

Then we turned to the part that keeps every UA lead up at night.

In 2022, AppLovin rebuilt its technology from scratch and built what its CEO calls the most sophisticated recommendation engine on Earth. Unity and others followed. The result for everyone buying media is the same: these networks are starving for creative. To crack them and find scale, you have to feed them an enormous volume of ads, in enormous variety.

Look at the top of the charts and you'll find APAC studios testing fifty, sixty, seventy playable concepts a month, plus thousands of videos. Luis broke down why that compounds. A UA auction rewards two things: who can bid high on strong LTV, and who's most relevant to the player. The biggest spenders win on both, fund bigger in-house creative teams, and the snowball grows.

His read on AI was the sharpest line of the day. The edge is speed of production. AI gives a creative person superpowers, more analysis and more output, but the human in the middle still outperforms the fully automated version. And he'd be surprised, he added, if the APAC giants weren't leaning just as hard into it. Picture two hundred in-house creatives, each one supercharged by AI. That's the wall the rest of the West is bidding against.

This is the exact problem we're obsessed with at Sett. The networks demand creative volume the old production model can't supply, which is why AI is already standard on the video side and why we're pushing it onto the playable side. An ad still has to be fun. It needs a hypothesis behind it. The teams winning in the East staff their creative units with game designers, because a playable is a game, and it has to feel like one.

Fake ads, real motivations

The volume game produces a side effect everyone has seen: ads that look nothing like the game they're selling. For a studio guarding a beloved IP, that's a real tension.

Luis handles it with a sandbox. Sonic, owned by Sega, comes with strict guardrails and a fan base that's hypersensitive to anything off-brand. Angry Birds, which Rovio owns outright, is a playful brand that stretches in more directions. So he defines the limits of what the brand will tolerate, then lets his creative people play freely inside them. A destitute woman freezing with her baby is off the table. A female bird with a hatchling could work. The pull-the-pin trend, a math minigame, those are fair game.

The deeper point is about motivation, something Luis unpacked on our Unpredictable Hits podcast with Sett CEO Amit. Players forgive a "fake" ad when it taps the same motivation the game satisfies. A math minigame ad for a tap-to-blast puzzle shows gameplay you'll never find in the app, yet both promise the same feeling: solve something, feel smart, earn a small win. Side-step left or right and players come along. Sell a completely different motivation and you get resentment.erforms best. That's not a coincidence.

Gil's hot take: Stop spending all that genius on installs

The strongest provocation came near the end.

The connection between D2C and UA is badly underused, Gil argued. On the analytics side, better margin only becomes higher bids if you wire the reporting back into your LTV models, and most studios haven't. On the spending side, it's worse. The industry pours its best UA talent into one problem, acquiring and re-acquiring users, and almost none of it into getting the existing base to buy more.

Ecommerce and travel figured this out long ago. With a web store, you can run paid media at your own power users, build audiences of high-intent players, and push the latest offer to people who already love the game. Some AppCharge clients already pull 60 to 70% of D2C revenue from email and CRM alone. Now imagine pointing real UA firepower at that.

"You're not going to beat the two-hundred-person teams at their own game," Gil said. "Find better arenas to do battle in." The industry stopped growing forty, fifty, sixty percent a year. The population is flat. The studios that win will be the ones that monetize the audience they already have.

What to do in 2026: Build the AND

We closed by asking each of them for one thing to focus on next year.
Luis refused to frame it as a retreat from UA. "In my world, it's not an OR. It's an AND." UA keeps its place as the channel that captures players ready to play right now. The question is what else you build around it. Better margin through D2C. Social. Brand. Partnerships. Rovio has an Angry Birds movie in theaters this Christmas, and the whole challenge is turning that moment into 360 marketing instead of leaning on UA alone. Every studio, he said, has to build its own playbook now.

Gil pointed at the tooling. Get literate with AI agents and Claude Code, and not just you, your whole team. The first step makes you a 2x or 3x operator. Used well, agents make people 100x in pockets that already exist. "We're on the business side. These tools were built for developers, so they look scary. Tap into them anyway."

Twenty years in, Luis kept coming back to one thing about this industry. It reinvents itself every time the ground shifts. IDFA, ATT, now the D2C land grab and the AI wave. The hustle is the constant. The winners are the ones who move first.