Japanese studio Barows’ ARPDAU surges across all their titles with Unity LevelPlay
Japanese mobile game studio Barows has been creating games for the Japanese audience since 1994. Recently, the studio looked to introduce in-app bidding in their mobile games, turning to Unity LevelPlay for their mediation solution.
Read on to learn how Barows came to partner with LevelPlay, how the Unity team supported their in-app bidding implementation, and the results that led them to migrating their entire mobile game portfolio to LevelPlay.
The challenge:
Creating games for 3 decades, Barows has seen multiple shifts in the gaming industry, from the rise of flash games to the inception of free to play, adapting to the challenges and opportunities of each. Now, the studio looked to implement in-app bidding in their titles to uplift their revenue.
Until recently, the studio had relied on a local SSP. However, they saw there was room for improvement when it came to their profitability. They turned to Unity LevelPlay thanks to the LevelPlay team’s reputation for robust customer service and ability to deliver strong results.
The solution:
To start, the studio integrated LevelPlay in Barows’ Match3 Puzzle Game and CraneGame. Before implementation, the Unity team worked with the Barows team and engineers to provide guidance on optimizations, network selection, ad placement strategy, and LevelPlay best practices.
The Barows team followed these recommendations while staying in close contact with Unity’s support team. The results were positive across all apps. For Match3 Puzzle Game, on iOS and Android respectively, ARPDAU increased 46.6% and 8.4%, while for CraneGame ARPDAU increased 33.3% and 47.3% on iOS and Android.
Alongside these results Barows was impressed with LevelPlay’s features. Particularly significant to the studio was real time pivot, which enables them to assess latency by network, and Ad Quality.
The results:
After initial testing on LevelPlay and the accompanying positive results, Barows looked to implement LevelPlay mediation across their entire mobile game portfolio. With it fully integrated and active, the studio saw a major increase in revenue. Using in-app bidding, their titles outperformed their previous monetization solution leveraging traditional instances - with an average ARPDAU increase of 33% on iOS and 32% on Android across all their titles.