North Sky Games
Behavioral Incentive Design
Revenue Growth Through Rewarded Ads Architecture
Context
Monetization in mobile games is a balance. Push too hard and you hurt the experience. Pull back too much and you leave revenue on the table. The question with rewarded ads was whether we could build something players would actually choose to engage with, rather than something they tolerated or avoided.
What I did
I led the cross-functional launch of the rewarded ads feature across the portfolio. Players could voluntarily watch an ad in exchange for an in-game reward. I defined the success metrics, built the measurement framework, analyzed how players were actually responding, and iterated on the reward structure based on what the data showed.
Impact
16% revenue increase
Scalable across the game portfolio
The feature drove a 16% increase in portfolio revenue and gave us a repeatable monetization mechanic we could apply across titles. More interesting to me was how clearly player behavior responded to small changes in how rewards were structured. The system shaped behavior as much as it measured it.
That raised a question I am still thinking about. When you design an incentive system and tune it based on behavioral data, where does understanding your users end and shaping them begin? I do not have a clean answer. But I think it is worth asking.