Playables, built like levels
A playable is thirty seconds of your game doing its own selling. The format nearly doubled its share of gaming ad impressions in 2025, from 6.3% to 13.3%, and the reason is boring and wonderful: people who choose to finish a demo install like they mean it.
The numbers that justify the price
Playables average around 4.8 installs per thousand impressions against 2.9 for video, and among top spenders the impression-to-install gap runs eight-fold. They also recruit better: the cohort already played the game once before installing it.
The trap the price avoids
A playable that mirrors your real onboarding usually fails; a playable that flatters the player too fast fails differently, recruiting tourists who churn by day three. The three included iterations exist because the first version is a hypothesis, not a deliverable.
How a build runs
- Mechanic autopsy. We play your game until we can name the one interaction that predicts love. That interaction becomes the playable; everything else gets cut.
- Build to network spec. One core build, exported per network: file-size ceilings, event hooks, store-redirect rules. Skipping this step is how playables get throttled without anyone telling you.
- Instrumented launch. Every tap inside the playable is an event. We learn where players drop, where they grin, and where the install button should have been.
- Three iterations. Median winner: revision two. Typical changes: fail state earlier, tutorial shorter, end-card louder.
Playables slot into the testing bench like any other concept, and die by the same rules. The difference is the stakes: at this production price, we kill a playable'svariant, learn, and revise, rather than killing the format. See how the racing client scaled on exactly this loop in the hybrid-casual story.
Playable questions
From €2,900 per playable, including concept, build, QA across the major networks' specs, and three data-driven iterations. Iterations matter more than the first build: our median playable finds its best-performing version on the second revision, usually by shortening the tutorial and moving the fail state earlier. A three-playable bundle runs €7,900.
Increasingly, yes. The mechanic just changes: a language app's 'answer three questions' quiz or a furniture app's drag-to-decorate scene are playables in everything but genre. The requirement is an interaction that predicts real product enjoyment; if tapping the ad teaches nothing about the app, a good video will beat it.
AppLovin, Unity, Mintegral, Liftoff, and ironSource inventory (which Unity is sunsetting into its own network by April 2026), plus Meta and TikTok with their own specs. We build once and export per network, because a playable that ignores each network's size and event rules gets rejected or, worse, silently throttled.
Got a mechanic worth demoing?
Bring the store link. We'll tell you in the session which interaction we'd build, and what we'd cut.
Start a run