Newsletter 008: UA Creative Strategy in the AI Gold Rush + Rovio’s vp global marketing podcast
From the Editor
What's up friend?
Big one this week. We hosted our AI Gold Rush webinar with Gonçalo Martins, BoomBit's VP Marketing, and John Wright, CEO at Turborilla. We also had Luis de la Cámara, Rovio's VP of Global Marketing on the podcast talking fake ads out loud while the rest of the industry whispers about it and dropped a sh*t ton of wisdom.
On the industry side, Supercell dropped $3B in revenue and Clash Royale somehow doubled its re-engaged players. A game called Cell Survivor makes $6M a month looking like absolute chaos. And Metacore's CEO wrote a piece about 2026 that I think everyone in mobile should read.
Plenty to dig into. Let's go.
Webinar Recording: UA Creative Strategy in the AI Gold Rush
The webinar with Gonçalo Martins (VP Marketing, UA & Monetization, BoomBit) and John Wright (CEO, Turborilla) is now available as a recording.
Hey, I even dodged an Iranian missile live on air. Was lots of fun!
On the ground at BoomBit: About 50% of BoomBit's winning creatives already have AI-generated components, mostly hooks. But they didn't shrink the team. Gonçalo is personally going into AI tools and producing videos himself because the feedback loop with the creative team is too slow.
The production bottleneck moved: John Wright ran a 40-person creative studio at Kwalee. One video editor now does 100x what they did before. The problem moved downstream. You can produce thousands of creatives, but you can't test thousands. Networks won't allow it.
Playables are still a different game: "Very far from out of the box AI making anything end to end or even making anything," Goncalo said. The models never saw your game. They don't know your characters, your mechanics, your progression.
The networks are coming for your last lever: AppLovin is building creative tools for ecommerce. Meta is automating video production. John's prediction: creative production inside the network is a two-to-three year inevitability. Gonçalo's pushback: networks don't know your game well enough.
The anti-AI backlash call: John sees a world where a segment of users gets turned off by AI creative slop. Turborilla now has a "release manager for creatives," a QA role that didn't exist before, specifically to protect the Mad Skills brand from off-brand AI output.
Unpredictable Hits S2E3: Luis de la Cámara, VP of Global Marketing at Rovio
Nearly 20 years in gaming. EA, 2K, Gameloft, King, Scopely before landing at Rovio. Luis de la Cámara joined us for a conversation about what it takes to market one of the most recognized IPs in mobile gaming.
On fake ads: Everyone in mobile knows misleading ads work. Luis breaks down why, out loud, while the rest of the industry whispers about it. He also explains what that means for brand protection when you're managing an IP built to last 100 years.
On player motivations: Player psychology drives every creative decision at Rovio. Most teams skip this entirely. Luis walks through how understanding what motivates players shapes everything from UA creative to campaign structure.
On APAC winning: Chinese and Turkish studios are winning the battle for the West. Luis praised Turkish studios for their speed in prototyping and creative production, and warns against underestimating Chinese studios entering Western markets.
On embedding marketing in game studios: Rovio puts product marketers inside game studios from day zero. They analyze the market and think about product-market fit before a single ad runs.
Listen on sett.ai | Apple Podcasts
Metacore's CEO: Why 2026 Is the Defining Year
Mika wrote a strategy piece that maps out where mobile gaming is heading, and I think it's one of the sharpest takes I've read this year.
Five shifts from 2025: Chinese publishers reset the competitive bar for Western markets. Roblox evolved into a core platform for younger audiences. Hybrid casual stopped being a category and became a mindset. Casual games returned to growth in deeper, more stylized forms. App stores started losing their grip on the transaction layer.
On 2026: The boundary between game and ad is becoming blurry. Teams producing hundreds of creative variations daily, not dozens. AI-generated creatives moving from novelty to foundational capability. Game design and UA testing beginning to merge.
"The companies that survived did so not because they were the largest, but because they adapted the fastest."
Seufert x van Dreunen: AI Won't Devour Gaming
Google showcased Genie 3 and gaming stocks crashed. Take-Two, Unity, AppLovin, all took hits. The market decided AI would devour the gaming industry. Eric Seufert and NYU professor Joost van Dreunen (also CEO of Aldora, co-founder of SuperData Research) sat down to argue why that reaction was overblown.
Van Dreunen's core thesis: AI is arriving when the industry needs new distribution models, not just cost cuts. Gaming goes through oscillating phases of content innovation and distribution innovation. We're in a distribution phase now. The immediate interpretation of cutting headcount 20-50% is a mistake.
The printing press analogy: "I want AI to be a printing press." Democratizing creation, not concentrating power. Once AI is cheap enough for everyone (small language models running on phones), it becomes truly disruptive.
On game companies: "Game companies are not tech companies. That's the fundamental thing." The key mistake the industry made is treating creative businesses like tech businesses.
Industry Buzz
1. Pixel Flow and the Rise of Sort Puzzles
Pixel Flow didn't come out of nowhere. The team built Twisted Tangle first, learned from it, then applied those learnings to a sort puzzle with integrated design where product, monetization, and UA were built as one system.
The monetization question: "What kind of puzzle failure creates a monetizable emotion?" Pixel Flow's tray mechanic works as an active planning element visible to the player. Players pay to expand it because it feels strategic, not punitive.
On clones: They're already generating real daily revenue. But as the article asks: "Can you survive worsening CPIs, weaker retention, lower product quality, live ops pressure?" Most can't. Getting installs and building a durable business are different problems.
2. Cell Survivor: $6M/Month in Chaos
Cell Survivor generates $6 million a month. The onboarding is confusing. The UI feels like five different systems glued together. Gameplay clarity is questionable at best.
The lesson: Players tolerate friction when progression feels rewarding. The game combines "near-death experience" style UA creative with dragon-themed hardcore gameplay and endless spend depth. Optimized for Asia, not elegance.
As Lancaric puts it: "A perfectly polished game with weak monetization loops will struggle. A chaotic game with strong progression systems can scale to millions."
3. Supercell: $3B Revenue, $1B Profit, and a Decade-Old Comeback
Supercell posted $3 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profit. But the real story is Clash Royale. A decade-old title doubled its re-engaged players and grew new players by almost 500%.
The governance shift: Supercell's iconic "small autonomous teams, minimum management" model hit its limits. Squad Busters exposed it. Now: tighter runways, stricter gates, clearer splits between franchise operations and new incubations. "Autonomy without hard gates becomes expensive optimism."
The creator incident: Creator Jynxzi and the broader creator community felt omitted from the Clash Royale comeback narrative. Supercell edited the CEO letter to acknowledge them. Creators are no longer distribution channels. They're negotiating parties in public game narratives.
4. Unity Launches D28 ROAS Campaigns
Unity Ads launched D28 ROAS campaigns on March 6, powered by its Vector engine. The argument: D7 optimization creates selection bias that systematically excludes high-value users whose spending materializes in weeks 2-4.
Early results from Homa: +14% ARPU and +63% retention compared to D7-only campaigns. The recommendation: run both D7 and D28 in parallel. D7 catches fast monetizers. D28 catches everyone D7 was blind to.
For IAP-heavy games, this changes how UA teams think about optimization windows.
Also Worth Reading
Pet Rescue Saga: $1B+ and Still Going - King's Oriol Caro on sustaining a mobile game for a decade. The playbook: define an "emotional promise" as north star, layer incremental improvements, kill underperforming features to make space for what works. "It wasn't one big bang moment. It's been lots of small, consistent improvements."
Read on PocketGamer
Kingshot Crosses $1B in User Spending - Century Games' second major hit behind Whiteout Survival. The interesting gap: Kingshot surpasses Whiteout Survival in monthly downloads by 56% but trails in monthly revenue by 30%. More users, less money per user. Showed a slight decline in February.
Read on Gamigion
NCSoft Acquires 70% of JustPlay for $205M - Legacy PC/MMO publisher buying a Berlin-based reward gaming platform. Latest acquisition in NCSoft's mobile casual push (after Indygo Group in Singapore and Lihuhu Games in Vietnam for $104M). Legacy publishers are buying distribution infrastructure, not just content.
Read on Gamigion
Dicero!: Habby x 111% Ship Their First Collaboration - Dice-based roguelite RPG launching April 22. 111%'s design innovation meets Habby's proven monetization meta (the same framework behind Capybara GO and Archero 2). 111%'s existing title Heroll pulls $300K+/month after a year on market.
Read on Gamigion
Wrap Up
That's it for this one. A webinar full of uncomfortable truths about AI creative. Rovio's marketing philosophy. Supercell's comeback. A $6M/month game that looks like chaos. And Metacore's CEO making the case that 2026 is where it all gets real.
Good times in mobile gaming, the future will be hell of a ride!
See you next week.
Yours, Jonathan (the missile dodger) Fishman
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.
