How PamPam Went From 4-6 Playable Concepts a Month to 20-24 and Cut Cost per Playable 82%

The numbers first: in one quarter with the Code Maestro playable ads creator, PamPam went from 4-6 playable concepts a month to 20-24, and the cost of producing one fell 82%. On the campaigns where the winning playables entered rotation, D7 ROAS came in 23% above the previous creative mix and CPI 16% below it. Headcount did not change.

This is what a studio does when the limit on its best-converting ad format turns out to be an internal ticket queue.

Who Is PamPam: The Studio Behind Bottle Flip

PamPam is a Ukrainian studio of 50+ people, making games since 2004 and fully committed to hyper-casual since 2018. Bottle Flip (250M+ installs), Harvest.IO (120M+), Color Adventure (110M+) and five more titles, past half a billion installs between them. They describe their own craft as "simple controls, laconic visuals and a repetitive scenario."

Why In-House Playable Ads Lost to the Backlog

At PamPam, in-house playable ads were development tickets. They sat in the same backlog as live-ops features, SDK updates and release-blocking bugs, and usually lost. Each one that got built cost the roadmap five to seven days of engineering time, so the creative team shipped only four to six playables a month across eight live titles.

In hyper-casual, a winning creative fatigues in days. You do not out-think that market once. You out-produce it, every week.

Playables should be the sharp end of that machine. Liftoff's 2025 index puts playable impression-to-install at 8-16x non-playable formats, and the gap matters most for exactly this kind of game: when the whole product is a five-second mechanic, letting someone try the mechanic before installing is the closest an ad gets to the product.

The reason so few got built was not budget and not conviction: development tickets compete. At a studio's loaded developer rate, five to seven days of engineering is a four-figure creative before anyone has seen a single test result, and somebody had to decide it was worth that trade in advance.

Studios that outsource playables have a vendor problem, as GreenPixel found. Studios that build them in-house have a queue problem, and the queue is harder to see, because nothing about it shows up as a line item.

"The interesting part was never that playables got faster," their Head of UA says. "It was that we stopped protecting them. When a concept is cheap, you find out in two days that it does not work and you are not annoyed about it. That changes which ideas get tried at all."

The first one took an hour, then half a day

The first attempt was small on purpose. Someone on the creative team took a screenshot of their best-performing video creative for a tap-timing title, dropped it in as a reference, answered a few questions about the core loop and the hook moment, and generated.

The base came back in about an hour, running on PamPam's own art. It was not finished: the win animation was mistimed and the end card did not match their CTA styling.

So an engineer opened the exported HTML and fixed both. Half a day of tuning on something that already ran, against the five to seven days the same build used to sit in a sprint.

Bottle Flip Playable Ad Examples

These Bottle Flip playable ads came out of PamPam's first run with Code Maestro: the core loop on the studio's own art and an end card that sends the player to the store. More playables made with Code Maestro are in the playable gallery.

How PamPam Makes a Playable Ad Now

At PamPam, a playable starts from a screenshot or video of a creative that already converts. A few guided questions turn it into a structured brief: core loop, hook moment, end card, tone. Concepts arrive as live previews the team can play and reject the same day, and survivors are exported as plain, readable HTML for engineers to polish.

The reference is usually one of their own winning creatives, sometimes a competitor's ad worth adapting. The team is translating a proven hook into an interactive format rather than inventing one.

The creative team writes the spec. They edit the brief directly before anything is generated. The person who understands why the ad works is the last one to touch it before the build.

"I used to write a document and hope," one of their creative producers says. "Now I answer four questions, play the thing, and say what is wrong with it. That is a completely different job."

Engineers come in last. Whatever the team keeps is exported as plain, readable HTML, and PamPam's own developers tune the feel and ship the final build. Nothing is locked, which for a studio with real engineering talent is the part that decides whether a tool gets adopted at all.

"The first build is not the part I care about," one of their tech leads says. "What matters is that when I open the export, it is code I can read and change. If it had been a black box we would have run it once for the demo and gone back to doing it ourselves."

If a network sends a build back, it is plain HTML: fix it and resubmit in minutes rather than reopening a ticket. What survives contact with the network then gets reskinned. A concept that performs on Bottle Flip becomes a batch - different themes, different hook lengths, different end cards - and across eight live titles a mechanic that works on one is rarely useless on the others. This is where hyper-casual volume comes from, and it costs a fraction of the first build.

Two of those variants below: the same throw, the same grill, a garden and a living room.

Results: Cost per Playable, D7 ROAS and CPI

Scope: one quarter, the three titles where playables entered rotation, compared against the previous creative mix on the same campaigns.

The cost line has the simplest explanation. Almost all of what a playable cost PamPam before was engineering time, five to seven days of it. Replacing that with about half a day of polish plus the tool itself is where 82% comes from, counted per concept generated rather than per winner. Nothing was outsourced and nobody was hired.

The ROAS lift running slightly ahead of the CPI improvement is the part the team found interesting. Players who installed off a playable monetized a little better than the video-acquired cohorts on the same titles, which tracks: they had already tried the mechanic before they downloaded it.

None of it came from a cleverer creative. 20-24 concepts a month instead of 4-6, and the two that beat the mix stayed in rotation.

What actually changed

Engineers still touch every playable. Their work moved to the end. Reviewing and polishing a running playable takes hours where building one took days, so the same people now touch four times as many creatives without four times the work - and the roadmap keeps its capacity, which is the number a CTO is measured on.

The second change is less obvious and probably matters more. When every playable costs a week of engineering, the studio filters ideas before testing them, and it filters them using opinion, because that is all it has before a test exists. When a playable costs an afternoon, the filter moves after the data. In hyper-casual, where the install decision happens in under five seconds, no one's instinct is reliably better than the auction.

The lesson

Playables were rationed not because they underperformed but because they were expensive to make. Once a working base takes an hour, the polish takes half a day, and the finished creative costs a fraction of what it used to, the rationing stops and the format finally gets tested at the tempo everything else already runs at.