On January 15, 2026, Youdao Ads and SocialPeta jointly hosted Going Global in 2026: A Guide to Efficient Game User Acquisition in Guangzhou, as part of the NextWave Global Expansion Acceleration Program.
Focused on taking games overseas, the event brought together practitioners from four leading industry platforms: Youdao Ads, SocialPeta, AppsFlyer, and Google. They shared practical, high-value acquisition solutions across four areas: advertising, data forecasting, intelligent growth, and product developments. The sessions offered actionable insights and lively discussion.
Here are the event's key takeaways.
Chen Xiaoyu, Head of Programmatic Business at Youdao Ads, identified three persistent challenges for games expanding overseas: difficult localization, high marketing costs, and rapidly declining performance. In response, she proposed an acquisition formula centered on AI × the Golden Triangle.
The formula uses AI to strengthen three areas: creatives, KOLs, and paid user acquisition.
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Creatives: Production combines a three-second hook, moments of satisfaction, localized cultural symbols, and lightweight secondary gameplay. Marketing tests combine emotion, gameplay, culture, monetization hooks, and remarketing hooks.
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KOL marketing: Move beyond conventional approaches through partnerships with creators from other fields, meme-based content, and collaborations with major IPs to reach new audiences.
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Paid acquisition: Use a 70% major media platforms and 30% demand-side platforms or DSPs allocation, adjusting it dynamically across the initial launch, major promotional scaling, and mature stages.
Chen emphasized that AI acts as a performance multiplier: generating a hundred creatives within an hour, matching KOLs quickly, and monitoring acquisition campaigns around the clock to reduce wasted spend. Coordinating the three elements can deliver an effect greater than the sum of their parts: 1 + 1 + 1 > 3.
Jin Xiaojie, General Manager of Business for South China at SocialPeta, used global mobile game marketing data from 2025 to identify four major trends for midcore and hardcore games expanding overseas in 2026.
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Continuous creative innovation: Creative competition has intensified, with an average of 84,000 advertisers active each month. More than 80% ran new creatives, and the source also reports a peak figure of 63.4%. Continuous innovation is now a basic marketing requirement.
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A reshaped competitive landscape: Strategy games remained the leading midcore and hardcore category by advertising activity in 2025. Casino games accounted for 43.4% of advertisers, increasing by more than 20% year on year and becoming another intensely competitive category.
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Clearly differentiated regional strategies: Mature markets require more refined operations to overcome competition, while emerging markets require rapid localization to capture the window of opportunity.
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Different approaches by category: Strategy mobile games emphasize lighter presentation and a combination of secondary-gameplay acquisition hooks with demonstrations of the main gameplay. RPGs focus on emerging themes such as AI, cyberpunk, and xianxia fantasy. Simulation games combine core management gameplay, secondary gameplay, and narrative to increase appeal.
Shining Xie, Senior Account Manager for Greater China at AppsFlyer, presented developments in advertising measurement, focusing on creative management and cross-platform user journeys.
He noted that just 2% of creative variations consume 55% of advertising budgets, while nearly 90% of budgets go to the top 10% of effective creatives. Producing one hit requires testing 55 variations, and successful assets can decline quickly. This highlights the need for continuous testing and iteration. Current bottlenecks include fragmented data, insufficiently detailed insights, and misaligned objectives between user acquisition and creative teams. To address them, he introduced AI-driven creative management tools that use computer vision and natural language processing to analyze creatives and consolidate data, supporting optimization decisions with actionable insights.
He also noted that cross-platform growth is now an inevitable direction for games. Players use consoles, PCs, and other channels as well as phones. As a modern marketing cloud platform, AppsFlyer can use AI-powered updates to help advertisers view attribution across platforms, measure each environment, and avoid fragmented or duplicated data.
Chen Zhao, Gaming Industry Manager in Google's Greater China Key New Customers team, shared product developments and explored how trends can translate into value-driven growth.
Drawing on data, he argued that the industry has entered a value-driven growth era, with midcore and hardcore games, including strategy and card games, generating substantial revenue from relatively low download volumes. He analyzed the success factors of strategy games reaching new audiences, including lightweight creatives and hybrid gameplay, and discussed Google's iOS product updates designed to improve advertising performance. Further details will be shared through future NextWave events.
Swipe to view more event highlights.
After the presentations, participants joined group discussions and interactive exchanges around localization practices, acquisition strategy optimization, and product innovation, then shared their conclusions.
The event focused on practical acquisition for games expanding overseas. It combined experience from leading industry platforms with actionable strategies and methods, while face-to-face exchanges connected partners across the ecosystem.
Youdao Ads looks forward to exploring new paths to growth with more like-minded partners through the NextWave Global Expansion Acceleration Program in 2026.
