Hypercasual Game Marketing: Complete UA Playbook

The game was live for exactly 72 hours before everything changed.

We'd built a simple stacking game—blocks falling, player tapping, satisfying physics when towers collapsed. Nothing revolutionary. Our designer made it in two weeks. We expected maybe 10,000 downloads if we were lucky.

Then we uploaded a 15-second video to TikTok. Someone failed spectacularly on level 7, tower crashing in slow motion. The comments exploded: "I need to try this." "Where's the download link?" "This game is going to ruin my life."

Within a week, we had 2 million installs. Within a month, we'd burned through that entire audience and revenue was cratering. We'd caught lightning in a bottle—and then watched it slip through our fingers because we didn't understand hypercasual economics.

The Math That Changed Everything

Here's what nobody told us: hypercasual games don't follow normal marketing rules. You're not building a sustainable user base. You're strip-mining attention.

The numbers that actually matter:

• Target CPI: $0.15-0.50 depending on geography. Yes, cents—not dollars
• Day 1 LTV: Must exceed your CPI or you're bleeding money from minute one
• D7 ROAS: 60-80% target. You need to recoup most of your spend in a week
• Revenue source: 95%+ comes from ads, not purchases

The Creative Testing System We Should Have Built

After our first accidental hit crashed and burned, we got systematic. We started treating creative testing like a science experiment, not a lottery ticket.

The Numbers Game

• Test 10-20 new creatives per week. Not per month—per week
• Video length: 15-30 seconds. Any longer and you're wasting impression time
• Show the core loop in the first 3 seconds. If they haven't seen gameplay by second 4, they're scrolling
• Fail-and-retry moments are gold. People engage with frustration

Creative Types That Actually Convert

We tested hundreds of creative variations. These four categories consistently won:

• Gameplay capture: Pure gameplay, no UI overlay. Raw and authentic
• Fail compilations: Those frustrating moments that make you think "I could do better"
• Satisfying loops: ASMR-like satisfying actions. Oddly addictive to watch
• Challenge format: "Can you beat level 7?" Direct engagement hooks

The $500 Test That Saves $50,000

The biggest mistake we made early on: building games before testing if anyone would download them.

Now we run marketability tests before writing a single line of code:

1. Create 5-10 video ads from a rough prototype (even mockups work)
2. Run $500-1000 in test campaigns
3. Measure CPI and CTR obsessively
4. CPI under $0.30? Proceed to full development. Above $0.40? Kill it immediately

"I've watched teams spend six months building a game that couldn't acquire users under $1. A $500 test would have told them that in 48 hours."

The Scale Playbook We Built From Scratch

When we finally had a validated game, we needed to scale it before copycats could clone our mechanics. Here's the channel mix that worked:

Channel Allocation

• Facebook/Meta: 40-50% of budget. Still the most reliable scale engine
• Google/YouTube: 20-30% of budget. Great for incremental reach
• TikTok: 15-25% of budget. Where hypercasual virality lives
• ironSource/Unity: 10-20% of budget. Gamer-specific inventory

Geographic Strategy

• Tier 1 (US, UK, CA, AU): Highest LTV but highest CPI. Start here to validate
• Tier 2 (EU, Japan, Korea): Good LTV, moderate CPI. Scale here second
• Tier 3 (LatAm, SEA, India): Low LTV but very low CPI. Volume plays

Why 90% of Our Installs Disappeared

That first viral game? Day 1 retention was 28%. By day 7, we'd lost 95% of users. We were paying to acquire people who deleted the app within hours.

Now we optimize for retention before we even think about scaling:

• Day 1 retention target: 40-50%
• Day 7 retention target: 15-20%
• Session length target: 6-10 minutes
• Sessions per day: 3-5

The Mechanics That Keep People Coming Back

• Daily rewards that actually feel rewarding
• Level progression with just enough difficulty curve
• Collectibles and unlockables for completionists
• Time-gated content that creates appointment viewing

The Mistakes That Cost Us Millions

Looking back at our first two years in hypercasual, these are the mistakes that hurt most:

• Scaling before confirming D1 ROAS: We poured $50K into a game that was losing money on every install
• Not refreshing creatives weekly: Creative fatigue is real. What worked Monday doesn't work Friday
• Ignoring ad frequency: We showed the same users 12 ads in 24 hours. They reported us for spam
• Over-complicating the core loop: Hypercasual means hypercasual. Three-second learning curve or death
• Waiting too long to kill underperformers: Sunk cost fallacy killed more games than bad mechanics

Hypercasual is a numbers game played at impossible speed. Test fast. Scale winners aggressively. Kill losers immediately. And always—always—have your next game in the pipeline.

Because by the time you've optimized this game, you should already be testing the next one.