Epic Games × AYMI
Rebuilding UA + monetization as a single system — moving the meter on in-game purchases, not just installs.
The brief beneath the brief.
Epic came to AYMI with a unit-economics problem dressed up as a creative one. UA spend was efficient at the top of the funnel — installs were cheap and plentiful — but in-game monetization had plateaued. Players were arriving, sampling, and bouncing before the first purchase moment.
The internal team had iterated on creative for nine months. The problem wasn't creative quality; it was creative-to-cohort fit. We were brought in to rebuild the funnel from media-mix to in-game moment — not to make more ads.
The Method, applied.
Five movements: Discovery, Strategy, Creative, Launch, Optimize. Each one feeds the next; the loop closes on Optimize and starts again on Discovery.
- Step 01Discovery
Cohort analysis across the full set of player segments; mapped purchase-trigger moments by playtime quartile to find the real conversion windows.
- Step 02Strategy
Re-architected spend allocation: pulled a meaningful share out of broad UA, redirected to mid-funnel re-engagement and tutorial-completion remarketing.
- Step 03Creative
Built a broad library of asset variants tied to four player archetypes; tested gameplay-cutdowns against UGC-style and character-driven angles.
- Step 04Launch
Rolled out across Meta, TikTok, programmatic, and in-app networks. Instrumented post-install events with deterministic IDs for clean cohort attribution.
- Step 05Optimize
Weekly cohort reviews; killed two archetypes by week three; doubled budget on the two that compounded. The cadence is still live.
What the numbers carried.
Inside the campaign window, in-game purchasing moved — driven not by more players, but by better-matched players reaching the right monetization moments. The new creative system attracted higher-intent installs, and those players stayed longer past the first session. Paid UA became more efficient even as spend scaled, because the cohorts we were buying were the ones that went on to convert.
Player LTV — the metric Epic cared about most — became the number the whole funnel was planned against. The system has run continuously since launch, with Optimize cadence baked in as a weekly ritual.
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