PGC London 2026 was a blast!
Three thousand attendees. Two hundred ninety speakers. We're back in Tel Aviv building, but the buzz from PGC London is still echoing through Sett HQ.
This year felt like the good ol' days of gaming. The vibes were unbelievable.
We kicked off the event with a Sett evening hosting about 100 of the most influential people in gaming. Old friends, new connections, and the kind of conversations that remind you why you love this industry. If you missed it, join us at the next one.
I took some time to gather my thoughts on where we are and where we're headed, based on the countless conversations I had in and around the event. Three shifts kept coming up. They're worth paying attention to.
1. The First Shift: Creative Velocity is Non-Negotiable
The theme was unmistakable. Every game winning right now has reached a creative velocity that was unheard of just a few years ago. The top games in the world right now are deploying thousands of videos and hundreds of playables each quarter.
Three forces are driving this:
- UA channels have become ML black boxes. SDK networks especially. The algorithms are hungry for fresh creative, and they reward volume and diversity with distribution.
- Competition is brutal. Marketing and distribution are the moats now. The game itself is table stakes, but systematically using UA creatives to find the angles that attract new pockets of audiences, each drawn to a different play style and slice of the full game is how games become global hits.
- Creatives are the battlefield. Particularly playables. That's where the differentiation happens, feeding the distribution engines such as Applovin with what they need to find audiences at scale.
Winning studios have started to engineer robust systems. A great game goes in, a massive volume of diverse, high-quality creatives comes out. It's not a creative department anymore. It's a creative engine.
The Takeaway: The studios winning today are building systems that produce more creatives and find more winners faster. The difference matters.
2. The Second Shift: AI is Splitting Between Toys and Real Systems
This became crystal clear walking the booths and talking to people last week.
For the past couple of years, there's been a wave of AI promises. Small teams attracted to shiny new technology, chasing quick wins. In gaming, this has led to countless tools promising everything and delivering… we'll see.
I call them AI toys. They look impressive but fail to create the value studios actually need.
Entertainment is fucking hard. Creating something people genuinely want to play, and then scaling it to become a global hit is an unbelievably challenging endeavor. Most attempts fail.
Embracing AI in a game studio isn't straightforward. The real problems won't be solved by AI wrappers that make people feel like they're adopting AI. A chatbot that answers questions about your MMP dashboard isn't the revolution. It's a band-aid.
The old SaaS paradigm was simple: buy software, put it in human hands, hope for incremental efficiency gains. AI toys follow that same playbook.
The real promise of this technology is different. AI that does the actual work. Autonomously. Better than humans can, by leveraging what machines are good at and complementing it with human judgment and taste where needed.
Getting there is extremely hard. It requires real research and innovation. That's why so many teams default to building toys instead.
This is what we're building at Sett. A system that takes a great game and scales it by actually running and optimizing UA. Starting with exploring and generating winning video and playable creatives. Not advising. Doing.
The Takeaway: The industry is fed up with tools. Studios want AI that works as a super-intelligent employee that does the work, not another chatbot to talk to.
3. The Third Shift: The Methodical Are Winning
One thing was conspicuously absent: APAC. The conference didn't have many teams from the region, but they dominated the hallway conversations.
The question I kept hearing: why are they winning?
The answer from the smartest folks I talked to: they are surgically methodical. Far more than Western teams.
There are other factors, of course. But the methodical part stuck with me.
It connects to the previous shift. The move from AI toys to systems that actually do the work.
Take UA as an example. What you see from the winning APAC teams is a completely different way of thinking:
- Clear loops and systems. Nothing ad hoc. Every decision feeds back into a structured process from data-driven ideation, game design expertise baked in, hypotheses generation and testing, structured and granular data analysis.
- Deep thinking over quick moves. They invest time upfront to understand the mechanics before just churning out low quality creatives because they can. Thinking about each element within a playable or a video, and finding the fun within UA creatives themselves.
- Methods designed for how ad channels actually work today. These methodologies are in sync with what modern UA channels need to find audiences - mostly speaking creating new creative concepts as opposed to mindless minor iterations.
The methodical approach compounds. Small advantages in process become massive advantages at scale.
The Takeaway: The winners aren't smarter. They're more systematic. They've designed their operations to match how the game is played now. That's at least the feeling everyone got at the event.
Stay tuned to Sett as in the next months we'll unveil more of what we're building to win UA.
About the Author
Fishi is the Head of Marketing at Sett. His brain is a chaotic jukebox of ideas with more cultural references than any feed can handle. He collects sneakers and plays chess while you’re still counting sheep.
