We love speaking with industry leaders, whose opinions shape our world. During our first ever gaming panel, we had the honor of hosting Claire Rozain from Gameloft, Adam Jaffe from Mega Studio, Filippo De Rose from Traplight, and Nebo Radovic from Zynga.

Our panels are very much “freestyle”. We don’t rehearse, we have no prep talk and not too much moderation, allowing free thoughts to come up. 

The topic of our gaming panel was to discuss the impact of COVID19 as well as the impact of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) over mobile gaming from the view point of people who are best suited to share their experience and opinions.

Here are some of the insights we found most interesting:

Question: How did your roll changed ?

My role changed from a UA guy to becoming essentially a data plumber

Instead of just optimizing campaigns and managing relationship with platforms - our roles became a lot more complicated, being the ones who need to understand how to handle SKadnetwork, conversion values, how to build an improved attribution model with no user-level data. 

Nebo Radovic @ Zynga

People just didn't have stuff to do. Gaming exploded!

Question: What was the impact of COVID19 over mobile gaming ?

Adam Jaffe @ Mega Studio

The entertainment sphere started growing. games that no one used for 5 years came back alive , just because people were looking for what to do during lockdowns.

The consolidation in the market is not going away

Question: Which lockdown trends stuck around? Which faded ?

Claire Rozain @ Gameloft

The changes in tracking and access to user level data pushed the industry into an M&A frenzy, and whatever we’ve seen in 2020 and 2021 to date - this is just the start.

What faded away? Tracking!

Filippo De Rose

Tracking was the most heavily impacted. But maybe not related to COVID - but to Apple...

That "Allow Tracking" Popup phrasing made me think that NO ONE in their right mind will click that

Adam Jaffe @ Mega Studio

I would never accept this popup. Ad platforms claimed 70-80% opt in. I expected 20-30%. I think I won that bet.

Question: What was the worst case scenario you expected from ATT?

Apple originally gave us 3 months to prepare

Nebo Radovic

For large companies - the original timeline was simply not possible. When apple delayed the launch there was a huge sigh of relief. For some companies the delay just meant further procrasination, but for the majority - it gave us the time we needed.

Question: Did you make significant changes to your marketing strategy?

Suddenly Android is important.

Adam Jaffe @ Mega Studio

Android never had the same appeal as iOS for app marketing, but with this change, Android became more appealing, and eventually more expensive. No one was set up to do contextual optimization. The device graph made UA manager's lives a lot easier. 

Creative WINS the game

Claire Rozain @ Gameloft

It sounds obvious - but those who had a strong creative team managed to overcome the new challenges just by having better creative than the industry standards.

You can still watch the full panel here, or listen to it through our podcast channel available on Spotify or Apple Podcasts