As the year draws to a close, industry conferences in the gaming sector tend to cluster together. As an industry observer, Teahouse often heads to these events around this time of year. After all, the hot topics and points of contention discussed by industry professionals not only reflect the ups and downs of the past year but also hint at the direction the industry is heading. In particular, the keywords that come up repeatedly are often signals of the next wave of growth.
As we approach the end of 2025, the topic on everyone’s lips is undoubtedly “game growth.” With competition in the existing market becoming increasingly fierce, the difficulty of finding new growth opportunities has become a collective anxiety for game developers, and everyone is urgently searching for a way to break the deadlock.
Just then, Teahouse noted that Tencent Ads, which is deeply involved in building the industry ecosystem, had clearly outlined upcoming industry trends and growth opportunities at the recently concluded “LIGHT・Growth Without Borders” 2025 Tencent Ads Gaming Ecosystem Summit.
01
Tencent Ads: More Than Just Advertising
For a long time, many industry peers have viewed Tencent Ads through the lens of a "traffic distribution platform." However, judging by the recently concluded 2025 Tencent Ads Gaming Ecosystem Summit, after years of dedicated development, the company has already undergone a profound transformation of its ecosystem.
Tencent Ads’ commitment to the gaming market has never been limited to advertising alone. Over the years, Tencent Ads has continuously refined and optimized its four core capabilities—player insights, creative inspiration, product optimization, and marketing efficiency—to address the key needs of game developers. From accurately identifying user needs and empowering content innovation to assisting with product refinement and enhancing end-to-end operational efficiency, Tencent Ads has closely supported developers throughout their growth journey. By working together to bring more high-quality games to market, Tencent Ads has injected sustained growth momentum into the gaming industry.
As the gaming industry shifts from a focus on “traffic competition” to “content and ecosystem competition,” Tencent Ads has moved beyond the realm of simple traffic distribution and ad placement, successfully transforming into a comprehensive business partner across the entire gaming industry chain—today, Tencent Ads is “more than just advertising.”
This is far more than just a slogan.At this summit, Tencent Ads also specially invited the China Game Industry Committee to interpret the jointly released *2025 China Mobile Game Advertising and Marketing Report*. This serves as a clear signal of its commitment to building a “healthy and sustainable” gaming ecosystem—by collaborating with industry associations, developers, and other stakeholders across the industry chain, Tencent Ads aims to break down resource barriers through ecosystem synergy. This ensures that promoting the healthy and sustainable development of the gaming ecosystem is no longer the isolated endeavor of a single company, but rather a collective effort by the entire industry.
02
IAA: A New Engine for Game Growth
Now, through the 2025 Tencent Ads Gaming Ecosystem Summit, Tencent Ads has once again charted a new path to growth for the gaming industry, which has been struggling to find its direction.
The most frequently mentioned keyword at this summit was “IAA.”
Tencent Ads went so far as to designate the first day of the conference (December 17) as a dedicated “IAA Gaming Ecosystem Session,” positioning it as a strategic segment running parallel to the IAP track. The session provided an opportunity to engage in in-depth discussions with attendees about the current state and future trends of the IAA gaming market—a move rarely seen at previous industry summits, clearly demonstrating Tencent Ads’ strong commitment to and confidence in the IAA sector.
IAA games refer to a genre of games that rely primarily on ad display as their core monetization model. In the past, such products were often viewed as a niche segment of the industry due to issues such as low monetization efficiency and controversies surrounding user experience. However, with shifts in market competition and changes in player habits, this situation may be on the verge of a significant transformation.
Currently, the user growth in the gaming market has plateaued, and the challenges posed by high customer acquisition costs and low conversion rates under the IAP model are becoming increasingly apparent. Furthermore, with top-tier products monopolizing high-quality traffic, small and medium-sized developers struggle to achieve commensurate returns even when investing substantial marketing budgets.
In contrast, IAA games are winning over more users and developers with their “small but polished” content format.IAA games are generally lighter in size, allowing them to precisely meet players’ needs for entertainment during short, fragmented moments; they also feature shorter development cycles, which can significantly reduce developers’ trial-and-error costs and financial pressure; coupled with their low-barrier-to-entry nature, they can reach a broader user base. Whether targeting users in lower-tier markets or casual gamers seeking instant entertainment, these groups can become core audiences, helping developers tap into new growth opportunities in today’s traffic-scarce environment.
Some Popular IAA Mini-Games
From the user’s perspective, players’ acceptance of IAA games continues to grow, and earning in-game rewards by watching ads is becoming a habit for an increasing number of players.
Platforms such as Tencent Ads are also continuously addressing the user experience pain point of "advertising overload" in IAA games through innovative ad formats and technological breakthroughs. Today, the widespread adoption of diverse ad formats—such as rewarded videos and interactive ads—has moved advertising beyond the era of "hard-sell" placements, allowing it to integrate deeply with gameplay.Cutting-edge technologies such as AI and big data also help games precisely match ad content with user preferences, improving conversion rates while minimizing disruption to users. This model, which balances user experience with monetization, has laid a solid foundation for the large-scale development of the IAA gaming sector.
At the same time, Tencent Ads is also taking additional steps, such as hosting mini-game creativity contests, to encourage more outstanding creative ideas to enter the IAA gaming market.
Clearly, as the market landscape shifts, it is inevitable that IAA games—once a niche segment of the industry—will enter a period of rapid growth.
At this critical juncture of market transformation, the ability to accurately understand the core needs of IAA gaming users and thoroughly grasp their behavioral patterns has become the key for developers to break through competitive barriers and secure growth opportunities.In response, Tencent Ads—having keenly identified industry trends—came well-prepared. At the “IAA Gaming Ecosystem Session” of this summit, it released the *IAA Player Insights Report* and the practical guide *Building a Hit Game from Scratch*, offering developers an authoritative roadmap that is “clear, actionable, and implementable” across dimensions such as user insights, product optimization, and advertising strategies.
Scan the QR code to access the full report
03
"Three Lights" Empowerment: Driving Game Growth Throughout the Entire Lifecycle
However, regardless of whether they use the IAA or IAP model, game developers still face numerous challenges in the day-to-day operation of their projects—such as persistently high user acquisition costs, low conversion rates, increasing difficulty in retaining users, and the struggle to balance monetization with user experience. These pain points act like shackles, hindering the growth of the vast majority of game development teams.
Faced with these common industry challenges, many platforms are exploring ways to break the deadlock. Tencent Ads has gone a step further by directly integrating its cutting-edge ecosystem, technology, and core data capabilities to create a systematic solution that covers the entire lifecycle of game development—from project initiation and R&D to publishing and operations. This comprehensive approach helps game developers precisely identify new growth opportunities in a mature market and overcome growth bottlenecks.
At this summit, Tencent Ads summarized its full-lifecycle solutions under three key themes: "Gathering Momentum to Shine," "The Light of the Ecosystem," and "The Light of Growth."
- Uniting to Create Light
To address the challenge of scarce traffic in the existing market, Tencent Ads has focused on three key areas—"new traffic capabilities, new ad formats, and new advertising products"—to create diverse business scenarios, enabling game developers of all sizes and at every stage of development to find growth opportunities that suit their needs.
On the one hand, Tencent Ads continues to expand its traffic channels, providing games with efficient ways to reach players through features such as Video Account mutual selection ads and Search; it also plans to collaborate with Windows to launch a system-integrated PC version of App Store, supporting cross-platform distribution for developers and further tapping into the potential of PC traffic.
At the same time, the platform continues to explore innovative ad formats. By introducing new features such as trial ads, puzzle ads, and "Play Later" options, it has optimized the user experience and significantly improved conversion rates. Additionally, it has launched more convenient and efficient smart advertising tools, such as "Content Amy," to reduce operational costs and enhance advertising effectiveness.
- Light of Ecology
To help game developers break through growth barriers, Tencent Ads leverages its ecosystem strengths, combining efforts across three key areas—content, technology, and services—to drive omnichannel growth for more games.
In terms of content, during the game’s development phase, developers can leverage Tencent Ads to establish IP partnerships and gain an early audience advantage;During major updates or key promotional periods, cross-industry resources such as short videos, brand ambassadors, and sports/live-streaming programs can further amplify the game’s visibility and drive concentrated user acquisition; in the routine marketing phase, the “mutual selection” feature on Video Accounts can be used to source high-quality UGC content, leveraging the “mutual selection and secondary promotion” mechanism to inherit organic traffic data and improve the conversion efficiency of paid user acquisition.
For example, this year, "Happy Match" partnered with influencers specializing in comedy and agriculture-related content, while also using influencer-generated content to drive user acquisition through "mutual promotion." Ultimately, the game successfully reached a new audience and gained 300,000 new users.
Technically, Tencent Ads’ AIM+—an AI-driven intelligent advertising product suite—can streamline the creative production process and help developers achieve intelligent, dynamic optimization of traffic. Among its features, the recently launched 30-Day ROI Bidding Tool has garnered widespread attention from developers for its core advantage of significantly improving long-term conversion rates in game advertising campaigns.At the same time, addressing the challenges of creative asset production, Tencent Ads’ multimodal models can help developers effectively improve the efficiency and quality of high-quality creative output, leading to better campaign performance.
In terms of services, Tencent Ads has always adhered to a "product-centric" approach, providing tailored support for operational needs at every stage of a game's lifecycle.
- The Light of Growth
In response to the widespread industry interest in AI, Tencent Ads has built a robust three-dimensional data foundation centered on “post-game conversion data, creative data, and audience data.” Building on this foundation, we have launched a comprehensive suite of AI solutions designed to drive marketing from broad-based campaigns toward scientific, precision-driven operations, delivering predictable growth for brands.
Currently, Tencent Ads’ AI solutions have been fully integrated into every key stage of game operations. For example, Tencent Ads’ AIM+—combined with 7-day ROI smart bidding—can significantly improve post-conversion conversion rates for games; AIGC tools help developers automatically generate game assets, addressing challenges related to creative output and diversity; and the MiaoWen AI Assistant is available 24/7 to provide developers with end-to-end support, including real-time guidance and intelligent Q&A.
In addition, a wide range of AI tools—including IP matching, scientific testing of new games, dynamic hosting, and user reactivation—have been integrated throughout the entire process, from game development and testing to operations and the re-engagement of existing users. These tools provide comprehensive support to help developers make intelligent decisions and operate efficiently. Tencent Ads’ diverse portfolio of AI tools is leading the gaming market into a new era of intelligent marketing.
This approach of empowering every core aspect of the gaming industry further underscores that Tencent Ads has long since moved beyond the realm of simple ad placement, successfully transforming into a "more than just advertising" entity and becoming a comprehensive business partner deeply rooted in the industry that drives sustainable growth.
END
Overall, the 2025 Tencent Advertising Game Ecosystem Summit not only highlighted industry growth trends for game developers grappling with growth concerns, but also provided a wealth of solutions. It has instilled firm confidence and momentum in the gaming industry to break through growth bottlenecks and achieve sustainable development amid intense competition in a mature market.
原创文章，作者：游茶妹儿，禁止转载：https://youxichaguan.com/en/archives/195228
