👾 The Rise of sophisticated onboarding funnels
UA + Gamedesign mastery = Tactics for winning in 2026
Is mobile F2P dead? No, not by a long shot. But everything is changing. Tactics that worked a few years ago (simple clones, reskins, basic ad tricks) no longer cut it in today’s market.
In 2025, but mostly in 2026’s hyper-competitive, post-IDFA landscape (is this still a thing?), game teams must blend creative marketing with game design from day one. UA isn’t just a marketing afterthought; it’s now driving how games are built, monetized, and scaled to the top of the charts. This article explores the latest UA-driven development trends – from sophisticated onboarding funnels to creative-first monetization and templated game design – and how they’re expanding beyond 4X strategy hits into genres like social casino and puzzles. We’ll also look at how studios are balancing cost-per-install (CPI) and lifetime value (LTV) in this new era.
Written with Mr. Jakub Remiar, PhD!
The rise of sophisticated onboarding funnels
User acquisition now starts inside the game. Developers have evolved the old “fake ad” model of 2019 into a sophisticated onboarding funnel that seamlessly transitions players from catchy ad to actual gameplay.
In the past, hit games like Hero Wars and Evony became notorious for humorous fake ads (remember the lava trap puzzles?) that had little or nothing to do with their real gameplay.
Those ads drove installs with low CPIs, but players would churn once they discovered the bait-and-switch. Fast-forward to 2025, and that one-step funnel has morphed into a multi-layered journey:
Fake Ad → “Fake” Game → Real Game: The latest UA funnels take a popular hyper-casual ad concept and turn it into a playable intro game, which then onboards the user into the core game that actually monetizes. By the time players realize, they’re already invested in the real gameplay loop. As Mr. Jakub quips, at that point, “you don’t even know when you’re playing a 4X” – and that’s the TL;DR of 2026 UA strategy.
Lower CPI, Higher Engagement: The initial “fake game” tutorial closely mimics the ad, making it extremely approachable and broadening the funnel’s appeal. This drives down acquisition costs by tapping into mass-market creative trends (think hyper-casual mechanics, puzzle mini-games, etc.).
Once hooked, users smoothly transition into the deeper core game, which is where monetization kicks in. The result is a larger player pool acquired cheaply and primed to experience the full game.
Case Studies – 4X Strategy Goes Casual
Nowhere has this tactic been more dominant than in 4X strategy games, traditionally hardcore territory. Chinese publishers, in particular, have perfected these funnels, essentially disguising 4X war games as casual mini-games early on. For example:
Last War (Rivergame)
Markets itself with a simple “gates” puzzle mini-game (a fake-ad style gate mechanic) to grab players. Upon install, it actually lets you play that gate puzzle for a while, increasing approachability. But soon, it pivots - the base-building 4X map layer gradually takes over as the true core.
The gate puzzles become a side activity, present just enough to avoid players crying foul about false advertising. Meanwhile, the 4X layer (alliances, troops, battles) is what drives monetization once players are invested.
This clever funnel helped Last War scale to massive revenues while keeping reviews positive (no bait-and-switch whiplash).
Kingshot (Century Games)
The biggest 4X hit of 2025 (reportedly earning around $3 million per day!) uses the exact same trick, but with an idle tower-defense twist. Kingshot’s ads and onboarding level are nearly a clone of a popular indie game (Thronefall) – giving players a fun tower-defense invasion scenario at the start.
Early on, you’ll fend off waves in a Thronefall-like mini-game (even the visuals are one-to-one with the indie game). But after a few invasion events, those stop completely – and you find yourself in a full-blown 4X strategy game (base building, alliances, map conquest, the works).
In other words, Kingshot lures players with a highly marketable creative concept and then seamlessly hands them off to a deep strategy meta.
The payoff has been huge, proving “this is how you scale games really, really big in 2025”.
Hi-Seas Hero (Century Games)
An experimental case where Century went even further – with three gameplay cores stacked in one funnel. The game starts with a cartoony action stage (cloned from Legend of Mushroom), shifts into an idle-builder phase (visually like Fallout Shelter but mechanically a Frozen City-style survival idle), then finally drops players into a 4X strategy endgame.
It’s an ambitious attempt to layer hyper-casual → idle → 4X sequentially. So far, Hi-Seas Hero hasn’t found big traction (perhaps too much complexity for players to digest in one go), but it shows how far companies are willing to go to innovate on the funnel concept. Even giants are iterating on what the optimal “onboarding game” should be to maximize funnel conversion.
Palmon Survival
Pokemon Style minigame is my favourite. Looks sooo good in creatives, right?
and it starts to perform well in terms of revenue. Finally!
Total Battle
Not so bad for an old game, right?
Tiles Survive
Tile Survive! FunPlus’s biggest 4X pivot yet and their boldest copy of Century Games’ “Dark War” playbook. From idle meta and scripted roads to resource overload creatives and meme awards, Tile Survive is showing that copying the leaders is now the fastest path to $200,000 a day.
Find out what’s new, what’s missing, and why FunPlus may finally scale back into the 4X top tier. Using what strategy? Exactly! Sofisticated onboarding!
Beyond 4X: Puzzle & Casino
Crucially, these UA-driven funnel tactics aren’t limited to strategy war games. We’re now seeing them expand into casual genres like puzzles and even social casino:
Puzzle Games
Top puzzle titles have added mini-game levels to reflect their hit ads. For instance, Royal Match (DUH!) became famous for ads showing the King in peril.
In 2022–2023, it started inserting “King’s Nightmare” levels every few stages – timed challenges where you do save the King, just like the ads showed.
The core gameplay is still match-3, but these interludes align with the marketing creative and keep players engaged (and entertained by the ad narrative).
Similarly, Playrix’s Gardenscapes/Homescapes added those pin-pull puzzle levels into the early game, so players actually get to solve the puzzles featured in the ads.
The key is that developers are closing the gap between ad promise and gameplay reality – improving player satisfaction and retention while still reaping the UA benefits of wacky hyper-casual ads.
Social Casino
Even casual casino games (coin looters, boards, slots) have gotten creative with their “slot machine” core.
Some recent titles simply reskin the slots as something else in their ads and UI – e.g. Animals & Coins uses a running bear collecting coins, Fisher Fortune uses a fishing theme – but underneath they’re still the familiar Coin Master-style meta.
An upcoming Angry Birds coin game even turns the iconic slingshot into a slot mechanic.
These are mostly cosmetic twists. However, the trend is accelerating: new entrants are bolting entire casual cores onto the casino meta. A prime example is Carnival Tycoon (more on this game in the next section), which starts as a friendly idle theme park builder before revealing its casino “spin” feature.
The lesson: from puzzles to casino, the UA funnel mindset is everywhere. If it can make 4X strategy accessible to millions, it can do the same for other genres by widening the top of the funnel without betraying core players.
Whether you’re a marketer or a game developer, read on for an updated roadmap (with examples) to thrive in mobile gaming’s new UA frontier.
Remember the Frozen city story above? That game definitely laid down the baseline for the sophisticated onboarding funnels we see now.
Creative-Driven Monetization: From Ads to Gameplay to $$$
In 2025, successful mobile games aren’t just iterating on gameplay – they’re iterating on creatives and monetization loops in tandem. This has given rise to a creative-first development cycle, where teams design games around a compelling ad and a proven monetization strategy from the very start.
In 2026, the goal is to build a funnel where the creative itself becomes part of the product, and that product is engineered to monetize effectively once the player is inside.
It’s a marriage of UA and game design that produces some truly clever (and profitable) hybrids.
A perfect illustration is the new wave of “Trojan Horse” monetization funnels blending casual gameplay with hardcore monetization metas:
Carnival Tycoon
An idle game that sneaks in a social casino: This title looks like a lighthearted idle theme park sim on the surface.
You start by building carnival rides and attractions, watching visitors have fun – a scenario that makes for great low-CPI ads and appeals to a broad audience. But after a bit of play, surprise! – out pops a Coin Master-style slot machine as the core monetization layer.
The idle theme park is essentially the creative wrapper to onboard users, while the real revenue driver is the familiar coin loot meta (spin the wheel, attack other players’ parks, etc.).
This creative-driven funnel has been a massive success: Carnival Tycoon scaled beyond $200,000 in daily revenue, quickly becoming the #4 highest-grossing title in the coin master genre (right behind Coin Master, Monopoly Slots, and Dice Dreams).
By designing the game around a creative concept (theme park building) and a lucrative monetization scheme (social casino), the developers drastically expanded their reach without sacrificing revenue potential.
Top Tycoon
Another idle/casino hybrid racing up the charts: Following a similar playbook, Top Tycoon (by the makers of Solitaire Farm) mashes together an idle tycoon game with a slots meta.
Players happily progress through a casual tycoon simulation, only to find the game unfold into a Coin Master-style competitive loop.
The result? Top Tycoon rocketed from launch to about $130K per day in just three months and now sitting on $250k/day. Clearly, a creative-first approach – make the game as engaging as the ad, then monetize through a proven framework – can lead to rapid growth.
These guys are not noobs, they have another similar hybrid in their portforlio!
These examples underscore a broader trend: monetization design is now often driven by UA creatives. Studios are analyzing which ad concepts yield the cheapest installs and highest click-through rates, then crafting gameplay around those concepts.
In some cases, they literally take a viral creative idea from another source (remember Kingshot lifting Thronefall’s design for its intro) and build it into their game’s funnel.
However, the genius lies in seamlessly integrating a high-LTV monetization layer behind it.
It’s not enough to have a flashy ad that yields downloads; the game behind that ad must be engineered to generate strong LTV – whether through in-app purchases, subscriptions, or ad revenue (or all three).
Carnival Tycoon and Top Tycoon demonstrate that when you strike the right balance – aligning your development cycle with a creative concept and a revenue-generating meta – you can capture a massive audience and monetize them effectively.
In practice, adopting a creative-driven monetization strategy might mean: prototyping ad creatives early, testing them on real users, identifying a “hit” concept, and then rapidly building a game around that hook. It also means breaking down silos between marketing and development – your UA team and design team should be in lockstep, brainstorming features that make for both great ads and great revenue.
In 2025’s market, the ad is part of the gameplay, and the gameplay is tuned for monetization from the first design document.
Balancing CPI vs. LTV in a Post-IDFA World
Ever since Apple’s ATT privacy changes, mobile marketers have been grappling with skyrocketing CPIs and murkier targeting, making the classic equation of CPI vs. LTV more critical than ever.
In plain terms: if it costs more to acquire users, those users need to generate even more revenue (LTV) to justify the spend. Many studios learned this the hard way. So, how are savvy developers adapting to this challenge in 2025?
By attacking on both fronts: lowering effective CPI through broad appeal funnels (as we saw already) and raising LTV through richer, more creative monetization
Two key approaches game teams are using to balance the UA equation
Combining Multiple Core Mechanics to Boost LTV: One way to get more revenue out of each acquired user is to offer more games to engage with. Check what X-clash is doing now:
From the creators of X Hero and Hero Clash, the Chinese studio Bin Chuang Network has evolved its formula into a powerhouse with a fake onboarding system so polished it’s practically its own genre.
From Save the Dog TikTok virality to RPG hybrids, all the way to today’s 4X fusion that combines fake puzzles, minigames, and idle systems into one seamless revenue machine.
“They took every fake trend from the past three years and glued it together into one working monster.” - Jakub Remiar
“Three years later, we’re still saving the damn dog.”
Creative Use of Ad Monetization: The flip side of raising LTV is finding new revenue streams. In 2025, ad monetization isn’t just for hyper-casual games; it’s become a crucial part of the mix even for mid-core and hybrid titles.
The key is to implement ads creatively so that they enhance, rather than detract from, the experience – and even encourage players to make purchases.
A recent example comes from the hybrid puzzle space: Coin Sort, a 2025 breakout hit, generates roughly 35% of its revenue from ads and 65% from in-app purchases.
How did a puzzle game pull that off, when many of its peers rely almost entirely on ads? By building clever ad funnels inside the gameplay. Coin Sort presents players with frequent optional ads (like bonus multipliers and “free” power-ups via rewarded videos) at moments that create pressure and temptation.
One tactic: after a few levels, it serves an interstitial prompting the user to remove ads – a move that drove a lot of players to just purchase the ad-free IAP. Another tactic: mid-level, it freezes some game pieces and offers an instant power-up if you watch a quick ad. These smart placements mean that even non-spenders contribute to revenue by watching ads, and some ad watchers convert to payers because the contrast makes the paid experience more appealing.
The takeaway, as we said on the podcast, “hybrid puzzlers don’t need to be ad-first - if you build clever ad funnels that push players into IAPs, you can scale fast in Tier 1 markets.”.
Another example is Car Match by our friends from Grand Games. We talked about the Ads as a decoy in our latest episode.
Beyond puzzles, many top-grossing games now treat ad monetization as a reliable pillar of LTV. Even in genres like 4X or RPG, you’ll see special offer walls.
These not only boost revenue per user (helping offset those high CPIs) but also can increase retention by giving free-to-play users more ways to progress. The caution is to integrate ads thoughtfully – players should feel they choose to engage with ads for a benefit, rather than feeling spammed.
The New UA-Monetization Playbook: Ultimately, the post-IDFA environment requires a holistic design approach. The lines between user acquisition, engagement, and monetization have blurred. Successful teams are the ones who:
Lower the front-end cost with broad-reaching creatives and accessible gameplay hooks (cheap CPI funnels), and
Maximize back-end value with deep, engaging systems and multi-faceted monetization (high LTV per user).
It’s a balancing act – if you only focus on CPI (e.g., by making a super simple game that appeals widely), you might not earn enough per user to profit. If you only focus on LTV (e.g., a very deep game that monetizes well but has niche appeal), you might not fill the funnel cheaply enough.
The frontier of UA in 2026 is about finding that sweet spot through innovation – whether it's merging genres, inventing new ad strategies, or even adjusting your entire business model.
What are players thinking about fake ads?
Little teaser about a next article. I run a test survey on 50 US payers. I am now preparing to run this survey on 500 payers to get clear data!