Five game-changing lessons from one of real-money gaming’s most accomplished heroes.
Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of their current or former employer.
In mobile gaming, retention is a competitive advantage. Few know this better than Nancy MacIntyre, CEO of WorldWinner and a veteran of iconic brands like Hasbro, LeapFrog, and Lucasfilm. Her approach to growth, engagement, and monetization offers a blueprint for marketers operating in high-stakes categories like real-money gaming.
We sat down with Nancy for a wide ranging conversation about the ins and outs of marketing to real-money gamers today. From making gameplay genuinely fun to earning player trust, her insights will help you build stronger, more profitable relationships with your audience whether they’re casual players or high-value VIPs.
Watch the full interview below, or read on for a selection of key takeaways.
Key Takeaways
- Prioritize user enjoyment before building monetization strategies. Revenue follows when audiences love the core experience.
- Create broad appeal to let high-value customers emerge naturally. Mass engagement ensures your best customers identify themselves.
- Tailor experiences with segmentation and personalization. Customized offers drive engagement from casual players to high-value VIPs.
- Invest in trust-building as a growth strategy. Fairness, transparency, and credibility reduce friction and increase conversions.
- Enhance products with brands only when quality is assured. Partnerships amplify strong experiences but cannot rescue weak ones.
Make Fun the Foundation of Your Product
A core lesson from Nancy is to prioritize user enjoyment before monetization. If your offering isn’t genuinely fun or valuable for the user, no monetization strategy will save it. Engagement must come first and revenue will follow once people love the experience. As a marketing leader, ensure your team focuses on creating products and campaigns that users want to interact with, not just pushing sales.
“You really have to think about monetization, because great games without monetization are not so great in the commercial world. The reality is I always start with what’s fun for the player. If the product isn’t fun, it’s impossible to monetize it. At WorldWinner, it starts with the games. What’s the hook that makes people want to play? Once we know it’s fun and engaging, I look for customer behaviors. The monetization really starts with that combination of fun and understanding the player and their behaviors. Then the monetization comes from that, but it starts with the fun.”
In practice, companies that put user experience first see long-term payoff. Duolingo is a great example. The language-learning app spent years making its product gamified, addictive, and fun for users, long before ramping up monetization. By focusing on engagement, Duolingo amassed a huge user base. Only once learners were hooked did they introduce optional subscriptions and ads. As a result, Duolingo grew to over 100 million monthly active users and more than $500 million in annual revenue.
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Broad Appeal Brings Out Your VIP Customers
Nancy advises against hyper-focusing your product or marketing only on “whale” customers. Instead, make your product broadly appealing and easy to enjoy for the many and the super-engaged users will rise to the top on their own. By designing for a wide audience first, you create a larger pool from which high-value customers (your “VIPs”) will self-identify. In short, get everyone through the door; the big spenders or power users will reveal themselves.
“My philosophy is that you will get VIPs if the gameplay is engaging to most people. It starts again with fun and engagement being appealing to everybody. I don’t think you should market a game to attract VIPs. The VIPs will self-identify – they choose themselves because they find a game so compelling, and they see in competitive gaming that their skill is progressing. That’s giving them confidence to keep playing, because they think they could win. In the end, becoming a VIP tends to happen organically, because they’re building skill, they start winning, and that encourages them to play more.”
We see this strategy succeed in many industries. Pokémon GO launched with simple, accessible gameplay that appealed to a massive casual audience worldwide – not just hardcore gamers. Within weeks of its 2016 release, Pokémon GO attracted about 45 million daily active players. Niantic didn’t specifically target big spenders; they focused on engaging everyone and making the experience fun. Naturally, a subset of highly enthusiastic players began to invest money in the game. In its first year, Pokémon GO grossed over $1.2 billion in revenue, largely driven by a smaller segment of devoted users purchasing in-game extras. The broad appeal created a pipeline for VIPs to emerge on their own.
Personalize Engagement by Segmenting Your Audience
One size does not fit all in modern marketing. Nancy highlights the importance of tailoring the experience to different user segments so each group stays engaged on its own terms. Casual users, loyal power users, and everyone in between should feel like your product or campaign was made for them. By leveraging data and segmentation, you can serve the right messages, offers, or features to the right people, increasing the chance that each user finds value and sticks around.
“It applies to everybody, but it’s very tailored. The days of giving everybody the same offer and hoping they respond really don’t work. Whether you’re watching Netflix or shopping on Amazon or Ticketmaster, all of your offers are targeted at you. It has evolved that way and will continue to evolve, because that is really the key to monetization – tailoring everything that the player experiences to the things that are most important to them as a player.”
Mobile esports platform Skillz runs cash tournaments across multiple game types, segmenting users by skill and engagement level. Casual players see low-stakes competitions with small buy-ins, while skilled competitors are matched in higher-stakes tournaments with larger prize pools. This segmentation keeps both types engaged and has helped Skillz distribute over $2 billion in prize winnings, while retaining a broad spectrum of players
Earn Trust to Remove Friction and Fear
Trust isn’t just a feel-good idea – it’s a practical growth strategy. Nancy points out that in her industry (real-money gaming), user skepticism can be the biggest barrier to growth. The same holds true for any business where customers might worry about security, fairness, or credibility. For marketers, building a trustworthy brand and product experience should be a top priority. When users trust you, they are far more likely to convert and remain loyal, because you’ve removed the anxieties that make them hesitate.
“One of the biggest barriers to playing real money games is trust. People worry about cheating and fairness, and they hesitate to put their credit card into game companies they’re not familiar with. Most of these companies aren’t well-known brands. We’ve been in business 25 years with a five-star App Store rating, and paid out over $2 billion. We can be counted on to provide a fair environment, protect customer data, and make withdrawals easy. We work hard to emphasize that with our brand. Good performers need to build their brand — when you think skill gaming, you think WorldWinner, and you think trust.”
You don’t need a massive budget to emphasize trust; even smaller studios can benefit by making credibility part of their brand story. Developers should highlight certifications, showcase player testimonials, and make withdrawals or refunds straightforward. Consistently delivering on promises (like fast payouts or transparent promotions) builds confidence over time. Outside the app itself, strong customer support and active communication channels reassure players that someone is there to help if something goes wrong. When trust is established, players don’t just enjoy the game they feel secure investing in it, which dramatically improves retention and lifetime value.
Don’t Lean on Brand Name Alone
Licensing a famous brand or partnering with a big-name IP can be a powerful marketing tactic – but only if your underlying product or content delivers. Nancy warns that slapping a popular brand onto a mediocre offering is a recipe for failure. Customers might show up once due to the name recognition, but they won’t stick around if the experience disappoints. The actionable insight: focus on authenticity and quality. Use brand collaborations to enhance an already great product, not to compensate for its weaknesses.
“The golden rule is that a license can’t be a crutch for poor gameplay. A license is the fastest way to kill a game because it attracts lots of players, but often if you have a license, you think you don’t have to work as hard to make a fantastic game. There’s been hundreds of Monopoly games built, but it took Monopoly Go to build a fantastic gaming experience that happens to be Monopoly — which is quite different than just slapping a license on something. If you take a license and build a game, and it doesn’t deliver, it will get dropped very fast.”
Consider the recent success of Monopoly GO! on mobile. There have been many forgettable Monopoly-branded games over the years, but Scopely’s Monopoly GO! broke records because the developers created a fresh, highly engaging experience first. The difference was that the product itself was outstanding – the familiar Monopoly brand simply acted as rocket fuel for a game people truly enjoyed. By contrast, history is full of cautionary tales where hype exceeded substance. Remember New Coke? Coca-Cola’s famous brand couldn’t save a formula consumers didn’t like, forcing a reversal of the product launch.
Retain to Reign
Nancy Macintyre’s lessons are critical reminders for any real-money gaming marketer. Remember, a delighted player is a retained player. Games that cultivate goodwill by being generous, fair, and caring with their community reap the rewards in retention. Word spreads fast in the era of social media and app store reviews. When players share that “this game’s support actually helped me fast and even gave me a little gift,” it draws others in and reinforces loyalty. To learn more from Nancy, follow her on LinkedIn, or check out WorldWinner’s website.
Ready to delight, retain, and re-engage your players? Adikteev helps real-money gaming marketers boost lifetime value with data-driven personalization, seamless retargeting, and creative excellence. Whether you’re looking to win back lapsed users or keep your VIPs engaged, Adikteev’s platform gives you the tools to turn player trust into long-term growth. Discover how Adikteev can power your retention strategy.