When new examples of successful creatives appear on the market, the reason why they actually perform so well is not always clear. Other studios might try to replicate them one-to-one or switch up some key visual assets, but this doesn’t always produce the expected results.

Blind copying might work occasionally, but it often ends up wasting budget. For a small studio, this could turn into a serious issue. But smart adaptation? That can work wonders and give you some deep expertise you’ll be thankful for in the future. For small teams especially, this approach has another advantage: there’s no need to maintain a big R&D department. You can learn from others, iterate quickly, and build on proven insights.

Adapt, don’t copy 

When we see our creatives being copied, we take it as a compliment. Sure, misleads might deliver on installs, but retention will likely become an issue. Unless you’re a big studio that’s already acquired your entire core audience and is now chasing edge cases, this is a fast way to burn budget.

What actually works is adapting — at the very least — to your setting and your users. That means not just analyzing the competitor’s creative itself, but deconstructing the game it will potentially be adapted for.

For a while now, there’s been a trend: characters surrounded by tons of resources and interactions. It doesn’t really matter how the mechanic looks, whether the character is running and collecting, or the resources are simply piling up. This concept got a very warm welcome in Lumber Empire, a classic idle game with production chains.

We also adapted it to Gold & Goblins, which is a very unconventional merge idle game.

In R&D, the idea evolved into our now-familiar “flasks” filled with dense, satisfying loot.

Those visual ideas later spread to games from other companies, and even across entirely different genres, strategy in particular. These games may share overlapping audiences with Gold & Goblins, especially when they feature strategic level-clearing paths. 

In the top-performing creatives of certain projects, you can now spot visual nods to our flask mechanic — well-executed, aesthetically pleasing, and adapted to fit each game’s unique style and rules. And unlike misleading ads, these creative adaptations preserved player expectations.

Let’s look at another real case, a classic “runner with multipliers” creative. Everyone’s seen it by now.

In the original, a character runs along a track, picks up multipliers, and gets upgraded. Simply swapping in a goblin wouldn't cut it for us.

Instead, we switched to an isometric view, made the player character move freely in any direction instead of the level just moving itself forward, and aligned it with how our own game works — static levels, free goblin control. The result became one of our top-performing creatives. Why? Because beyond the satisfying multiplier mechanic, it kept the core of our game intact: exploration and loot.

This feels like a good spot to digress a little. Sometimes, deep adaptation goes beyond creatives — it creates new genres.

A few years back, interactive stories were everywhere. You know the type: stiff 2D models in dramatic situations. Girl smells bad, gets dumped, perfume saves the day. Then others took the format and amplified it to the max, focusing on flaws, cranking up the ASMR. That’s how we got a wave of games about “fixing” characters: skincare, makeovers, plastic surgery, and so on. At some point, these weren’t just creatives anymore. They were entire game genres, born from exaggerating what worked.

Why not just use AI and skip the hassle?

With ‘AI will replace us all’ being a seemingly evergreen conversation topic, it’s tempting to ask — why not just let neural networks do all the work? We’ve tested a bunch of things ourselves: AI-generated avatars, voiceovers in multiple languages, and brainrot concepts.

And yes, AI has massive potential, especially at the concept stage. But in our experience, it still can’t replicate emotion the way real people can. Especially in creatives that feature actors reacting to gameplay.

Regardless of your team size or project budget, it’s a good idea to dedicate up to a third of your resources to R&D and exploring new ideas or tools. In the long run, this kind of investment tends to pay off, assuming you have enough buffer to take creative risks. And as our own experience shows, even within a single project, the performance of creatives can shift dramatically from month to month. If you’ve got some spare bandwidth, try experimenting with AI or other novel approaches. But if your budget is tight, it’s smarter to double down on what already works.

If your current batch of creatives is showing promise, don’t rush to invent something radically new. Instead, iterate — tweak what’s working and benchmark the result. Or keeping the overall structure, but swapping in one new element, like we did in the cases described above.

One great option is keeping the setup and flow the same, and then testing a single new element. Like switching the location to mountains halfway through. You can call it ‘safe R&D’, if that term is even appropriate for our line of work.

For small teams, the smartest approach to finding hit creatives is to stay connected to the market, not stuck in your own bubble. Track what others are doing. Extract the ideas, the structures, the hooks. From there, build your own to gain expertise. It is this that will become the key point in the future.