In an increasingly difficult user acquisition landscape, gaming companies are looking to use artificial intelligence to onboard new users in 2026.
On day two of GamesBeat Next 2025 — GamesBeat’s industry conference in San Francisco last week — representatives of Amazon Web Services, Zynga and Windwalk Games sat down for a lively discussion of the latest challenges and innovations in game discovery, user acquisition and retention. This panel of experts quickly settled on a surprisingly frank consensus: that traditional user acquisition funnels are gradually failing, spurring both publishers and developers to adjust their strategies using new AI-powered tools and insights.
“GenAI is the hottest topic, or one of the hottest topics, out there, and one of the things is, how does that integrate with games? How does that help with game generation, testing analytics and analyzing the data?” said AWS generative AI labs solutions architect Patrick Santora. “All those are super important, especially right now.”
User acquisition is getting harder for everybody
All three of the panelists agreed that user acquisition had gotten more difficult and more expensive in 2025, with costs per impression rising across the board. As a result, it is increasingly dangerous for advertisers to spend on user acquisition without being able to accurately and consistently predict the results of their campaigns. In this new environment, traditional UA wins — like App Store features — no longer carry the weight they once did.
“Discovery isn’t going to happen on the App Store. Yes, if you’re lucky, you get a feature one day and you’re going to get some lift — but your discovery is fundamentally not coming from there,” said Windwalk Games chief revenue officer Lennon Arcaro.
To make up for lost ground, publishers are getting more creative with their approaches to user acquisition — and leaning into newer channels that are heating up in 2025, like creators and influencers.
“It’s about diversity of creatives, at the end of the day, and about trying every channel you can, and then trying to do 360 campaigns by using influencer brand integrations in the game,” said Zynga chief product officer Scott Koenigsberg. “Not necessarily full IP integrations, but brand integrations to make your game feel new.”
AI tools represent a potential solution
During the session, both Arcaro and Santora flagged AI tools as a potential path forward for gaming companies looking to overcome the growing challenge of user acquisition. With a wealth of data coming from multiple sources, generative AI can help make sense of all the noise — for example, by ingesting large amounts of data and pointing out trends.
“There’s a lot of data coming from multiple places, and it’s hard to wrangle sometimes, especially when you want to find that trend quickly, “Santora said. “Generative AI — artificial intelligence — has the ability to help with such things.”
Arcaro said that Windwalk Games currently uses AI tools to provide sentiment analysis around players’ activity on non-gaming channels, which he said enables the company to translate large amounts of social sentiment data into “actionable results.”
“We’re going into Discord, we’re going into YouTube comments, and then we’re delivering to you the message about what your audience is actually saying about the games — what points they’re liking, where they’re churning, how they’re trying to find their friends,” he said.
Communities are the new UA
Another point that repeatedly came up during last week’s panel discussion was gaming companies’ growing focus on community platforms as user acquisition channels in 2025. Developers are investing directly in community infrastructure — from private Discord servers to micro-influencers — and increasingly viewing jobs like community managers as strategic user acquisition roles.
“When you’re actually taking community as a growth tool, what you’re going to find is that you’re going to get a lot of really deep personal information — zero-party data — about those players that they voluntarily give to you,” Arcaro said. “And that helps to inform what a personalization can look like, and how you can segment those users into really bespoke cohorts.”
Disclosure: AWS is one of the sponsors of GamesBeat Next 2025.