Key Product Trends Every UA Manager Should Know
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Building effective UA strategies today involves more than good targeting or strong creative testing. User acquisition teams need to understand how games actually operate, specifically regarding the frequency of their updates, the mechanics they rely on, the changes audiences go through, and how users respond to these changes. LiveOps pacing, creative choices, and long-term systems all influence when users are most engaged and what ultimately drives them to install and convert.
Using AppMagic’s data, we’ve looked at how top games structure their events, creatives, and long-term engagement, as well as the shifts audiences are experiencing. Combined with Gamelight’s UA perspective, this article gives a practical view of what UA teams should pay attention to in 2026: from LiveOps rhythms and reward mechanics to creative shifts, retention patterns and audience behavior.
THE CHANGING PLAYER LANDSCAPE
Before even starting to craft any UA decision, it’s important to understand who’s playing, and how this might be changing.
According to AppMagic’s audience data, the Millennial (or Gen Y) player base continues to grow, whereas Gen Z engagement has slightly decreased, especially if we look at core and strategy genres.
Younger audiences are shifting toward genres like hybrid-casual and sandbox:
On the other hand, older players seem to prefer midcore, simulation and puzzle titles.
There’s also a significant difference in terms of region: Gen X/Y shows higher engagement with Western titles, whereas Gen Z leans toward Asian ones.
Why does this matter for UA teams? Because knowing their audience and the changes it is going through can help tailor both the messaging and the channels used; for instance, gameplay and progression should be emphasized for older audiences, while interactivity, humor, and short-form engagement could be the focus for younger ones.
LIVEOPS AND REWARDS AS GROWTH DRIVERS
In recent years, LiveOps has become one of the most effective ways for studios to keep users active, introduce fresh content, and create moments that can directly support UA efforts.
AppMagic’s data shows how integral LiveOps has become to player engagement. In 2025, 87% of games launched at least one new event, with a peak average of 90 events per title reached in October.
The new event launch trend hit their highest point in April and decreased through summer and autumn, illustrating how the pace of LiveOps content shifts as the year progresses.
Regarding specific mechanics, album, win streak and lava quest are the ones seeing the fastest adoption, particularly across hybrid-casual, casual casino, and midcore titles.
Before delving into their importance, it’s useful to understand what these mechanics actually are and why they matter for engagement:
Win Streak: Events built around maintaining a winning streak, where progressing, or losing progress, depends on consecutive wins. These formats encourage repeated play and create natural tension, since every attempt is relevant.
Source: Royal Match
Lava Quest: Events structured as a sequence of increasingly challenging stages, often with conditions like time limits or a required win streak. A common version is a group competition where players who complete all stages share a final prize. These formats combine progression, challenge, and social motivation.
Source: Matching Story - Puzzle Games
Gacha: Events where players spend spins to receive random rewards. These can’t be classified as Lucky Wheel, Monopoly, Tabletop, or Casual Casino formats. Gacha events work well for driving repeated engagement because the randomness adds anticipation and a “one more try” effect.
Source: LINE Pokopoko
Casual Casino: Events that use simplified casino-style mechanics, such as slots, plinko, lotto, or coin-pushers, without involving any real-money gambling. These mechanics are familiar and intuitive, making them easy for players to engage with even if they’re new to the game.
Source: Matching Story - Puzzle Games
Album: One of the fastest-growing mechanics of 2025, Album events revolve around collecting items or cards to complete a set. They appeal to completion-driven players and encourage repeated sessions, since every piece collected brings players closer to a meaningful reward.
Source: Call of Duty®: Mobile
These mechanics help sustain the engagement between major updates, while making events feel more rewarding and time-sensitive.
From a UA perspective, this pacing creates recurring campaign opportunities. By aligning paid campaigns with LiveOps moments, like new season launches or reward streaks, marketers can align campaign timing with moments when players are already more active and engaged with new content. In this way, each event becomes a creative hook, turning consistent in-game activity into continuous acquisition potential.
Campaigns typically benefit from being scheduled around major updates, as these moments tend to raise player interest and in-game activity. Still, pacing matters: if events are too frequent or not particularly relevant, players may experience event fatigue, which can negatively impact both retention and UA efficiency.
THE NEW RULES OF OPTIMIZATION
With competition for user attention growing, creatives are evolving quickly, influenced by new production tools and changing user preferences across genres.
AppMagic’s Ad Intelligence data highlights AI-generated and social-style creatives as trends reshaping mobile advertising. AI is being increasingly used by developers to create characters, transitions and hybrid ad formats that blend real-life footage with gameplay.
Source: Toy Match 3D
At the same time, ads are taking inspiration from TikTok or Instagram Reels, using emotional hooks, memes or storytelling turns to feel more organic and relatable. Genres like casual, midcore or RPG are leading this shift, with their most recent creatives mixing ad performance with community culture.
Source: Match Factory!
For UA teams, these trends highlight the importance of testing a wide range of formats and adapting quickly. While AI can accelerate creative production, many of the examples in AppMagic’s dataset show that developers still build creatives around themes players are used to, like humor, emotional hooks, or gameplay moments, suggesting that relevance and clarity continue to play a key role in how ads are shaped.
The strongest-performing creatives are often those built around real product insights, like progression, competition, relaxation, or social play, rather than overpromising or misleading concepts. This ensures that what users see in the ad aligns with what they find after the install, leading to better long-term performance and more sustainable acquisition.
This data confirms that successful developers are combining automation with emotion. In short: the best creatives look less like ads and more like content that users actually want to engage with.
CONNECTING ADS AND STORE EXPERIENCE: THE ROLE OF CPPS
Focusing on iOS App Store, AppMagic’s data shows that Custom Product Pages (CPPs) remain a powerful, but underutilized, tool. Less than 50% of the top 100 games on the iOS App Store currently use CPPs, and the average number of CPPs per project is only around 1.3.
Puzzle and RPG titles are the most active adopters, while Strategy games, despite their strong market share, rarely use CPPs at all. Most CPPs implementations today are focused on general ASO testing, rather than on connecting ad creatives directly with tailored store experiences.
Generally, CPPs help developers cater the store experience to specific audiences, campaigns, or promotions; they also allow teams to match the store page with the particular ad a user clicked, whether through aligned themes or by reusing the same creative assets.
However, as AppMagic’s insights show, some games use CPPs for a different reason entirely: to avoid App Store restrictions, such as not including gameplay screenshots. This can be seen in the following examples from June’s Journey: Wicked Mystery:
CPPs
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CPPs constitute a major opportunity for UA teams. By aligning ad messaging with its correspondent store visuals or features, conversion can be improved and post-click drop-off can be reduced, especially in campaigns targeting specific audiences or gameplay elements.
One reason why CPPs might remain underutilized is that they require close coordination between UA and ASO teams, which can be difficult to prioritize. However, this also means that very few competitors execute them effectively, making their potential impact even greater. As the data suggests, CPPs remain an underexplored bridge between acquisition and conversion.
RETENTION AS A GROWTH INDICATOR
Because UA performance doesn’t end at the install, understanding how long players stay active has become essential for guiding investment and campaign planning.
AppMagic’s retention data gives a clear picture of where this long-term value can be found. Puzzle is the leading genre in D90 retention, potentially driven by simple, habit-forming loops.
RPGs and Simulation titles also show strong long-term engagement, mostly because their deeper progression systems give players long-term goals to work toward. AppMagic’s data shows a 2.8-point retention gap between the Top 10 and Top 100 games within each genre, suggesting that retention is not only driven by genre conventions but also by how well a game executes its core loop and long-term systems.
On the other hand, genres like Tabletop, Racing or Game Collection show shorter lifecycles:
If we focus on geographical differences, worldwide retention is in general higher than in the US; Puzzle and Simulation are the genres that remain the most stable across both regions, probably due to their universality, whereas Shooter and Sports show the largest gap.
For UA teams, these patterns translate into steps to be followed. High-retention genres are worth higher bids and creatives focused on progression and collection; on the other hand, genres with shorter cycles may benefit from fast-paced, instant-gratification messaging.
For titles with weaker or shorter retention loops, the UA strategy should prioritize clarity and expectation-setting: creatives that highlight quick fun, instant rewards, or short play sessions might perform better, as they attract users whose motivations match the actual gameplay experience. This prevents misalignment between ad promise and product reality, which ultimately protects both ROAS and retention.
Retention data also creates a feedback loop: by analyzing which gameplay structures attract the most long-term attention, UA teams can reflect these themes in their creatives, building campaigns that attract players who will stay.
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Worldwide
Worldwide
CONCLUSION
As the data shows, the way games evolve - whether through events, reward mechanics or retention loops - directly affects how users respond to UA efforts. For that reason, thoroughly understanding these trends has become essential for teams that want to optimize their user acquisition strategies.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
LiveOps volume continues to rise, creating frequent and high-intent opportunities to launch UA campaigns.
Rewarded mechanics, particularly Album, Win Streak and Lava Quest, are growing quickly, giving UA teams new, time-sensitive creative angles to work with.
Creative trends are moving towards AI-assisted and social-style formats, reflecting how players consume content now.
Retention strength varies significantly by genre, with Puzzle, RPG and Simulation showing the longest engagement.
Millennials are becoming more prominent across many top genres, whereas Gen Z gravitates toward hybrid-casual and sandbox titles.
CPP adoption on the iOS App Store remains low, but could offer strong conversion potential when aligned with campaign themes.
AppMagic’s data helps reveal how player behavior and game structures are interlinked and changing, and what this could mean for acquisition strategy. For UA teams, the most effective approach depends on recognizing these patterns and aligning campaigns with the game’s actual rhythm. When timing, messaging, and audience insights work together, growth becomes stronger and more sustainable.
DATA PROVIDED BY APPMAGIC
AppMagic is an all-in-one market intelligence platform for games and apps across mobile and PC, built to help you run deep market research in seconds. It delivers actionable insights that help developers, publishers, and marketers stay ahead of the competition, spot growth opportunities, and maximize revenue.
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