Twin Harbour Interactive shifts marketing budget toward re-engagement as CPIs rise
Published 5 Nov 2026 · Games Atlas Editorial · Operational Strategy Shift
Games Atlas summary: Twin Harbour Interactive, maker of Supremacy 1914, Call of War 1942, World War 3 and a Warhammer 40,000 mobile title, began reallocating budget from user acquisition to player re-engagement roughly 18 months ago. Senior growth marketing manager Faisal Nimri says rising CPIs made pure UA increasingly unsustainable for the mid-core strategy studio. The team verifies re-engagement spend through AppsFlyer incrementality testing, splitting audiences 80/20 into test and control groups. A first broad-targeting test generated no uplift, forcing a shift to spend-tier segmentation before the method became standard practice.
How to cite this page
Games Atlas — Games Industry Intelligence (2026). Twin Harbour Interactive shifts marketing budget toward re-engagement as CPIs rise. Published 5 Nov 2026. https://gamesatlas.app/article/twin-harbour-interactive-shifts-marketing-budget-toward-re-engagement-as-cpis
Rising CPIs push UA economics into decline
- Twin Harbour had historically concentrated marketing spend on user acquisition.
- Nimri cites escalating costs as the trigger for change.
- "As CPIs are getting higher and higher, UA is becoming more challenging." - Faisal Nimri, Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Twin Harbour Interactive
- He frames retargeting as a fit for a studio with years of live operation and an established mid-core base.
Incrementality testing separates real revenue from clicks
- The studio compares its method to a pharmaceutical trial, exposing one group to ads and withholding ads from a control group.
- Twin Harbour runs an 80/20 test/control split and measures the revenue gap between groups.
- Standard attribution only shows who clicked and where the click originated, according to Nimri.
- AppsFlyer was selected because its attribution integrations already held the relevant audiences, avoiding a rebuild of tracking infrastructure.
Broad targeting breaks the first re-engagement test
- Twin Harbour's first re-engagement campaign generated no uplift.
- Nimri attributes the failure to an audience that was too broad to isolate a behavioral response.
- The studio now separates non-paying users from paying users, then splits paying users into high, mid and low spenders.
- "Recycling UA creative for retargeting is a big mistake. Lapsed players are already familiar with the game and need a reason to come back." - Faisal Nimri, Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Twin Harbour Interactive
Channel testing and timing refine the model
- To compare partners, Twin Harbour runs two channels at 40% of a segment each, with 20% held as control.
- The better-performing channel is tested against a new challenger after three to four weeks.
- Larger audiences support three simultaneous channels.
- Nimri says re-engagement performs best paired with a major content update or seasonal peaks such as Christmas, Ramadan and Eid.
Smaller studios trade statistical rigor for speed
- Nimri recommends studios with limited budgets allocate 5% to 10% of existing UA spend to retargeting.
- He suggests adjusting the test split from 80/20 to 50/50 to reach statistical significance faster.
- That adjustment shortens test cycles from roughly four weeks to two, lowering the cost of experimentation.
- For studios based in Amman, he suggests an initial test during Ramadan with scaling contingent on results.
What this means
- For Publishers & Developers: Re-value lapsed-player bases of aging live titles as revenue assets before making sunset decisions.
- For Investors & VC: Add holdout-verified win-back revenue to diligence on long-running mid-core strategy studios.
- For Service Vendors: Pitch dedicated win-back creative production to mature live-ops studios moving spend out of acquisition.