Metica Solutions Series
9 min read
By
Phil Mohr
Puli Liyanagama
CEO and Co-founder
CTO & Co-founder
Jan 7, 2025
We Set Up Metica To Help Games Win
We understand the challenges games face—being at the mercy of ad networks and app stores makes margins tight and profitable growth hard to achieve.
Our mission is to empower you, the games, by putting control back in your hands. Using machine learning and AI, we're transforming "Game Optimization" in ways no one else has. With over 15 years of experience in gaming and a team that has been with us since our days at King and Apple, we’ve spent the last two years refining our product through close collaboration with select games.
The results speak for themselves—our early adopters are seeing up to 40% LTV uplift. Now, we’re ready to take Game Optimization to the next level and show you how our product can make a real difference for your game. We’re very excited to introduce the Metica Growth Loop, but first, let’s set the scene.
Why Current Game Tech Solutions Don’t Cut It
The gaming industry is flooded with companies offering tech solutions, typically divided into five categories:
LiveOps Orchestration
Offer Management
UA Management
Game Backends
Experimentation
While there are strong players in each category, most solutions focus on just one or two pieces of an incredibly complex puzzle. This limited scope results in marginal uplifts and a heavy reliance on human intervention—both from the game studio and the solution provider. These silos created by treating all these functions as separate entities creates friction, drive up costs, and ultimately lowers overall returns and profitability.
Metica’s technology is different. The power lies in its holistic approach: our technology integrates all five categories into a single, unified product. By breaking down these silos, we enable seamless data flow across every area of the game. This means data from one area feeds directly into optimizing the next, creating a compounding effect on performance.
Take LTV uplift as an example:
Even a modest 5% increase in LTV can unlock a significant increase in ROAS.
Better ROAS unlocks more and new UA cohorts.
New UA cohorts generate even higher LTV...and so the cycle continues.
This compounding loop drives exponential growth that standalone solutions simply can’t achieve.
Metica’s product is an Actionable Machine Learning Framework. Unlike other solutions that merely make suggestions and demand significant human input, Metica takes action. It doesn’t just tell you what to do—it does it for you. By continuously iterating, learning, and optimizing in real time, Metica addresses the complexity of today’s gaming landscape, where players increasingly demand personalization.
The reality is, this complexity isn’t humanly scalable—but AI and ML can handle it with ease.
It's not just the better way, but we believe the only way for game developers and studios to thrive in an ever-more competitive environment. On top of building a great game, of course.
The “Perfect Storm” for Games: How We Got Here
In April 2021, Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which hit the gaming industry like a tsunami. It wiped out the ability to effectively target players, making it harder to buy ads profitably. Acquisition costs soared as games had to broaden their ad campaigns to get the same number of installs.
At the same time, games that depended on cheap equity for UA funding hit a wall due to tighter funding markets. Global gaming VC funding saw a 67% drop in 2023 versus 2022. While 2024 saw some recovery, funding remains down year-on-year. With limited debt funding options and tough terms, the pressure on studios remains intense.
The Metica Growth Loop: Merging UA and In-game Monetization Through Personalization
We really believe that to thrive in today’s environment, studios need to rethink their approach. Creating a great game is essential, but it’s no longer enough. Taking all of our experience, and learnings we have created the Growth Loop.
The Metica Growth Loop connects all the dots within a game’s player journey. Think of it as an LTV-ROAS reinvestment cycle built around two core growth drivers:
Leveraging personalization to boost LTV through In-game monetization tools (IAPs, LiveOps, gameplay optimization, and in-game advertising).
Connecting in-game data with attribution logic and predictive models to optimize ROAS.
This creates a self-sustaining loop:
Personalization drives LTV, generating valuable data and increased revenue.
Accurate player-level LTV predictions are used as optimization goals, improving targeting and ROAS.
Accurate ROAS predictions and monitoring guide smarter UA investments.
Higher scale taps into additional, more diverse audiences where personalization ensures maximum performance across all monetization strategies.
The Metica Growth Loop ensures every player interaction maximizes both LTV and ROAS, turning each step of the player journey into a growth opportunity.
Now imagine adding external UA growth funding to this. That is the next step for Metica in the next 6 months—offering our customers UA funding to supercharge growth. You can expect more on our plans here soon, although if you want to be eligible it's worth getting in touch with us sooner.
Personalization Is At The Core, but Why Does It Matter?
Personalization is at the core of the Metica Growth Loop . For some, personalization still means targeting by segments—but that’s outdated. True personalization means tailoring experiences for individual players, powered by AI and ML, with zero segmentation.
The proof? Our customers are seeing double-digit incremental LTV uplift by leveraging this approach. We have written extensively about personalization. Here is a list of the blogs on this topic.
5 Reasons Why Games Need A Personalization Strategy to Win in 2025
Enhanced Optimization: When A/B Testing Falls Short, Contextual Bandits Are the Answer
The Hurdle: The False Dichotomy Between UA and Retention
If it’s so obvious, why isn’t everyone doing this already? We find that there are three main hurdles:
The tech is tough to achieve.
No one else has attempted it like we have.
In many studios, UA and Retention are managed by separate teams, leading to siloed thinking and an unwillingness to change.
We partner with studios to break down these silos, driving collaboration and creating a sustainable growth model. Our technology empowers teams—not replaces them—by automating mundane tasks and providing data science insights. This gives studios more time for creativity and growth.
Some of the best feedback from our customers has been that we got them excited and drove more collaboration internally. This is what we are about - making life easier, more creative and more collaborative, and your game more profitable.
Conclusion: A Path to Sustainable Growth
The challenges facing game studios are real, but growth is still possible with the right strategy. The GG Loop merges UA and In-game Monetization into a unified approach, with personalization at its core.
At Metica, we’ve seen how this framework transforms growth strategies. It’s time to move beyond isolated strategies and embrace a unified approach that maximizes player value at every stage.
Discover how we can unlock opportunities for your game with a free analysis. Book a call with us to get started.
Want to find out more?