Why We Don't Interrupt Your Run With Ads

There is a standard playbook for monetising a casual mobile game. A full-screen interstitial every two or three runs. A rewarded video offering a second chance at the moment of failure. Escalating frequency as the session extends. It works, in the narrow sense that it produces revenue per session.

What the interruption actually costs

In a timing game, the player is doing something specific: building and holding a rhythm. That rhythm is the skill, the pleasure and the reason the game is worth playing at all.

A full-screen ad does not merely pause that. It destroys it. The player comes back after five seconds of unskippable video and their timing is gone — not because they forgot how, but because rhythm is a state, not a memory. The next run is worse. They notice it is worse. They conclude the game got harder, or that they are getting worse, and neither conclusion makes them want to continue.

The metric that hides the damage

Ad revenue per session is easy to measure and moves immediately when you add placements. Retention moves slowly and gets attributed to a dozen other things. So the interruption looks free in the dashboard even when it is not.

The honest version of the trade-off: mid-run ads increase what you earn from a player today and decrease how many days you have them. Which side wins depends on the game — but in a genre where the entire product is feel, it is not a close call.

What we do instead

• No full-screen ads during an active run. Nothing gets between you and the next obstacle.
• One rewarded video, offered only after a run ends, only if you want to continue. You choose it; it never chooses you.
• Optional purchases exist on Android, and nothing is locked behind them — no level, no mechanic, no score.
• The restart path stays as fast as the platform allows — failure to playing again with nothing in between.
• No mechanic that makes the game worse in order to sell the fix.

Being straight about the cost

This is not a costless principle and it would be dishonest to present it as one. We earn less per session than a game running the standard playbook. That is a real number and we chose it deliberately.

To be precise about what does exist: a rewarded video you can choose after a run ends, and optional in-app purchases on Android. We would rather name them here than let you find them in the store and wonder what else we left out. The rule we hold is narrower than ‘no ads’ and easier to keep: nothing interrupts a run you are in the middle of.

A game that respects the player's attention is worth less this week and more this year.

For a studio our size, the only durable asset is whether people trust that opening our game will be a good few minutes. That trust is slow to build and quick to spend. We would rather not spend it five seconds at a time.