The request for strong, AAA, or licensed IP games is really a request for engagement – and IP has long looked like the shortcut. But the machinery of user acquisition has shifted, and the shortcut is no longer the one it used to be, says Robert Schmiedl from TuuT s.r.o.
Ask almost any operator what they want from a games catalogue and the answer comes quickly: strong IPs, AAA games. It is a reasonable request – and it is worth taking seriously rather than arguing with, because the instinct behind it is sound. What operators are really asking for, however, is engagement: content their subscribers will open, enjoy, and come back to.
A famous brand or a AAA title simply looks like the safest shortcut to that outcome. The question worth sitting with is not whether engagement matters, it plainly does, but whether IP is still the reliable shortcut to it that it once was.
Is an IP really an engagement guarantor?
The honest answer, looking at where players actually spend their time, is not as reliably as we assume. In the genres that command the most attention and the most spending, the dominant titles overwhelmingly carry a brand of their own rather than a licensed one. The games people play the most built loyalty on gameplay, live-operations, and design, not from a logo borrowed from film or television. We develop that point fully elsewhere, here it is enough to note that engagement and external IP are far less tightly linked than the request for IP assumes.
Which raises a fair follow-up: if IP is not the engagement guarantor, why has it remained so firmly on every operator’s wish list, especially in the VAS world?
Why IP earned its place – and why that’s changing
The honest reason is that, for years, IP genuinely did guarantee something measurable: acquisition. A recognisable brand lowered the cost of bringing users in and, in a subscription-driven VAS model, cheaper, higher-converting acquisition flows straight to the bottom line. That belief was not folklore; it had numbers behind it.
In Sensor Tower’s read of the 2020 market, IP-based games were only about 9% of titles yet captured roughly 23% of player spending and 17% of installs. If you set your acquisition assumptions in that environment, asking for strong IP was simply good business.
The reason to revisit those assumptions is not that they were wrong, it is that the machinery underneath user acquisition has changed on two fronts at once, and both fronts happen to be exactly where external IP used to earn its premium.
The first shift is on the creative-production side, and it is the one that matters most. The single biggest cost of running modern acquisition is producing enough creative to find the few ads that actually work, and AI has collapsed that cost. As UA specialist Matej Lančarič puts it: “AI doesn’t replace creativity, it enhances it… need 100 different ad concepts by tomorrow? Give an AI some prompts.”
His read on the year ahead is blunt: “Creative quantity will win over quality, it’s going to be a volume play”. This matters because winning creatives are genuinely rare: AppsFlyer’s 2025 study of 1.1 million creatives and $2.4bn in spend found that in gaming the top 2% of creatives drove 53% of all spend. When the winners are that concentrated, the team that can generate and test the most variations finds them first, and AI has made generating that volume cheaper than it has ever been. An expensive license buys you one strong starting point; AI tooling buys you a hundred shots at a stronger one. There is a cost ground, and a conversion floor, with, or without well-known external brands. The expensive shortcut is not needed anymore.
The second shift is on the buying side. The algorithms that now run acquisition, target the users most likely to install and bid on each impression by its predicted value. They optimise on signal quality and creative performance. Brand recognition is not one of the inputs. Low quality signals equal low-quality results, the system rewards clean data and strong creative, not a famous name. The buying engine and the creative engine are pulling in the same direction, and neither of them is looking at your IP.
Put together, acquisition has quietly shifted from which brand you licensed to how quickly and how widely you can produce and test creative the algorithm can run with.
What the evidence shows about IP today
You can see the shift in where IP does and does not show up. Analytics firm GameRefinery notes that none of the top 10 grossing casual Match3 games use any third-party IP and that licensed titles in the genre exist but “none of them have hit it big, even when the IP matched the target audience perfectly.”
The most telling voices are the ones closest to the biggest IP successes. Writing about Monopoly GO, one of the most prominent licensed hits in the market, Again, Lančarič said he remained “skeptical about the power of the IP,” crediting the game’s results to execution and spend rather than the brand, and noting that the license itself carries a roughly 20% royalty cost.
Scopely‘s own marketing leadership framed it generously but unmistakably: “IP cannot create success. It’s a platform. It’s an opportunity.” From the people who run the most successful IP campaigns in the business, that is about as clear as it gets: a strong IP is a head start, not a guarantee.
What this means for the next five years
If the request for IP is really a request for engagement, then the smart question for an operator is not which license can we secure but which platform and catalogue will actually deliver engagement and acquire users efficiently without leaning on one. This will be decided over the next few years.
The platforms that win will be the ones carrying games with solid engagement rates, minimal friction, and strong gamification, platform that hold players on the strength of the experience itself, not on a borrowed brand. The frictionless side of that- the no-card, carrier-billed checkout – is a strong asset in the operators’ hands. What increasingly sets a platform apart is the experience built on top of it and platforms like TuuTap – gamified, competitive, instant and rewarding – are made to deliver just that. A popular IP, in that picture, becomes a welcome bonus rather than a precondition: nice to have, but definitely not mandatory.
If IP doesn’t guarantee engagement, and no longer guarantees acquisition, then what subscribers are actually paying for is something more fundamental than a catalogue of names or numbers – a delivered experience. That is where we go next.
Author
Robert Schmiedl is Co-Founder, Business Development Manager & Business Strategist at TuuT s.r.o
