New Games, Rising CPIs, and Why Great Executives Stay in the Details

We sat down with Yair Melamed, Senior Vice President Games at Zynga, to understand what it really takes to lead at the highest levels of mobile gaming, and why even while managing over a thousand people, the best executives stay obsessed with the details. Yair walked us through how that obsession is what enables strategic thinking, not the opposite.

This episode moves through the tension between details and strategy, how to optimize an existing portfolio of live games, the art of launching new titles in an era of rising CPIs, the competitive threat from APAC studios, AI's real impact on game development, and the personal moments that shaped his leadership.

Building a Broader Base

Yair's career started as an engineer at a time when product roles barely existed in Israel's tech scene. Instead of chasing vertical promotions, he made a deliberate choice: go sideways and build a wider foundation.

He moved from engineering into product, then into game economy (a discipline that didn't have a name yet) then into monetization, segmentation, and live ops. Each move added a layer.

A mentor told him early on:

"If you have a broader base, as you grow, it will be more stable...you won't fail. If your base is narrow, once you get bigger and bigger, it gets shaky, and that's when you can fall."

That sentence shaped his entire approach. By the time he stepped into his first GM role, he could drill into every discipline of a game studio (and he still does).

The Details Enable the Strategy

Yair manages multiple studios and over a thousand people. His answer to what makes a great executive is counterintuitive: stay in the details.

"I spend at least my first year drilling into every detail: the product, the players, my team, the risks, the opportunities. And because I ask so many questions, the people around me start to become just as obsessed with the details."

The logic is simple. When the team is stronger than you in every function — better CTO, better product lead, better economy person — you can trust them with the details and shift into strategy, growth, and what's next. But you can't skip the first part.

It's not one or the other. It's a dynamic journey: details first, then strategy, then back to details when a new challenge arrives.

Why Copying a Feature Never Works

When Yair talks about optimizing live games, he draws a sharp line between copying a feature and understanding why it works.

He tells the story of the Piggy Bank, a feature born during a hackathon at Playtika, where he worked for over ten years. It was pitched by a non-technical employee who served sandwiches at the company. It became one of the most successful
monetization mechanics in mobile gaming, generating over $1.5 billion across Playtika's titles.

Dozens of studios copied the feature. Most saw no impact. The reason: the visible mechanic is only the surface. Underneath, there's sophisticated segmentation, player-specific economy tuning, and behavioral logic designed for different personas.

"When you design a feature based only on your own experience as a player, you miss ninety-nine percent of the opportunity."

The real work is understanding that every player is a different persona, motivated by different things, at different stages, in different contexts, and then designing one feature that answers many motivations at once.

Launching New Games: Three Phases, One Hard Truth

Yair breaks down new game development into three stages: finding the concept, finding the fun, and scaling it into a business.

The concept phase is a thinking exercise hypothesis-driven, relatively low investment. Finding the fun is harder: can you make your hypothesis engaging enough that players stay and come back?

But scaling is where most games die.

"When CPI increases by thirty percent every year, you need a much higher LTV. You have to trust that in year two, you'll ship enough new features to keep growing LTV without burning through your margin."

There's a joke he shared: there are two things that are certain in life: death and the increase of CPI every year.

And yet, he pushes back on the pessimism. Ten years ago, people said no one could launch new games anymore. Five years ago, the same. New games still appear every year.

The APAC Competition

The conversation turns to the rise of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean studios aggressively entering the Western market.

Yair sees two clear advantages they hold: superior reverse engineering and the ability to run many more bets in parallel.

Where a Western studio might justify fifty people on a game, an Eastern studio can deploy five hundred at a fraction of the cost, running ten attempts where others run one.

Their marketing sensors are also sharper. They detect what's working across the market faster, and they double down harder.

What AI Actually Changes

Yair sees AI in two distinct phases. The first, already happening, is efficiency: faster art
pipelines, faster content creation, better data analysis. What used to take a month now takes a week.

The second phase is more radical: machines that understand billions of data points from player behavior and can predict what will excite them next. He believes it will come, but it's a much harder problem than execution.

"The execution part is getting cheaper and easier because of AI. So everybody can execute, but not everybody can win. How can you be unique?"

The most interesting near-term application he sees: AI agents simulating different player personas to reverse engineer why features work and to design new experiences that answer multiple motivations simultaneously.

But he draws a clear boundary: Entertainment is fundamentally human and unpredictable. A game that thrilled players five years ago feels slow today. Excitement levels shift constantly, and designing for that is a different challenge than automating production.


Wrap Up

Yair's perspective comes from having built his career one discipline at a time — engineering, product, economy, monetization, live ops, and now leading at the executive level across multiple studios. Across all of it, one principle returns: the details are the foundation.

A belief that the best teams are built by leaders who go deep before they go wide. A recognition that copying what works on the surface misses ninety-nine percent of the opportunity. A willingness to bet on yourself when the foundation is strong enough.

And a reminder that in an industry where AI is making execution easier, the hardest problem, understanding what actually excites people, remains deeply human.