The Original Rewarded Playtime: What Makes Users Stay Past Day 30?

Most teams who try acquiring users with offerwalls live the same story: strong tests, retention and ROAS – great while the reward is live, but the moment incentives go away, the cohort collapses. 

But that’s basic offerwall. Playtime writes a completely different story. It’s engagement-based rewards that can actually deliver users who stay on Day 7 and Day 30, and keep spending when the easy points are no longer the main attraction.

Let’s look at Playtime from this angle:

• how its logic differs from classic offerwalls that pay once and disappear,
• what the data from campaigns really says about D7 and D30 ROAS,
• and how that lines up with independent research.

Rewarded Playtime VS. Traditional Offerwalls

In a classic offerwall, a user gets rewarded for a single action: install, finish the tutorial, hit level X, make a purchase. After that, the story is over, and the campaign logic has no real opinion about what happens next. 

Playtime works differently. It rewards ongoing game activity and continuous, long-term engagement. 

Users keep benefitting as long as they keep engaging with the game; it’s built to follow the player deeper into the gameplay. That gives you a much longer window to see who actually likes the game, how they behave, and how their ROAS looks once the easy points are no longer the main reason they’re there.

Playtime supports two campaign logics you can mix in your UA strategy:

• Time-based campaigns – users earn for the minutes they play. 
• Event-based campaigns – users earn for continuously crossing specific milestones: reaching levels, completing achievements, and so on.

Together, that builds conditions for a sequence of rewarded moments that can stretch across days and weeks with the game. This way, acquired users are far less likely to be churn-and-burn.

Playtime runs through direct integrations in established consumer apps with loyal, repeat user bases. In Taiwan, it sits inside LINE as a mission-style earning surface. Fetch in the US, McDonald’s in Costa Rica – the list goes on.

// That spread across markets matters for UA: you get access to exclusive audiences globally, and you can scale market by market based on what your game needs.

The core difference comes down to the context of the placement. Traditional offerwalls typically sit inside gaming apps and push one-off rewards. Playtime, however, is inside daily consumer apps people already use, love, and trust. When a user sees an offer in their favorite app, the game offer inherits the credibility of the host brand. 

Why Users Keep Engaging in the Short Term

With Playtime, the first reward arrives fast. A user installs, opens the game, plays a short while, and already sees the reward moving. The loop install → try → get something back closes quickly, which makes the experiment feel worth it from session one and eliminates early churn.

Entry into Playtime is deliberate as well. People open it from inside apps where they already came to earn something: cashback, loyalty points, mobile wallet perks, and similar. They are not thrown into a random placement between levels; they go to a section with a clear purpose to play. Then, Playtime’s reward system softly encourages them to enjoy the game.

That intent gives you a cleaner starting point than an accidental tap on an interstitial. 

When 4399, one of China’s largest game developers, wanted to grow their Legend of Mushroom through high-intent user acquisition, they implemented the game into Playtime. Shortly after, D7 ROAS grew 33%, signaling the developer to increase the share of rewarded advertising in their budget. 

Why Users Keep Engaging in the Long Term

The real test for any rewarded channel starts once the feeling of novelty wears off. 

Playtime is wired so that rewards stay present across user’s journey: progress bars filling, timers moving, points landing. As players get comfortable with the core loop, those same rewards feel less and less like a crutch, no longer the main reason to open the game. 

The game now has its own gravity: meta systems, social features, progression. 

Because the game list is tailored per user, and the game choice is deliberate, the titles they pick tend to feel like something they have discovered on their own. Once a player latches onto a game that fits their taste, the rewards only amplify the natural interest. 

// You can see this pattern in practice. For Hello Town by Springcomes, shifting from install-based buying to Playtime’s time- and event-based model pushed Day 30 ROAS up by 69.3% across 52 markets. 

Targeting and ML: Why Playtime Users Behave Differently

The Playtime system doesn’t show every user the same wall of titles. It looks at opt-in device signals and past behavior, then uses machine learning to surface games with a high chance of keeping that specific person engaged longer. Someone living in idle and merge games will see a very different line-up from someone who grinds RPGs. 

You’re nudging them toward games that already rhyme with their taste. 

Across markets, Playtime typically runs in the 60–80 IPM range, while many networks would already call 25 IPM a success. That gap exists because people arriving through Playtime actually mean to try the games they pick, and the games they see are pre-filtered for engagement potential.

External data points in the same direction. 

// Unity’s 2024 Mobile Growth & Monetization Report shows that users acquired through offerwall-style rewarded formats post 45.8% higher Day 1 retention, 86.1% higher Day 7 retention, and 71.7% higher Day 14 retention than users coming from rewarded video and interstitials. Their LTV curves stay higher too.

So when you look at Playtime performance, you’re looking at what happens when rewards, game matching, and intent-heavy inventory all line up. That’s usually why the D7 and D30 numbers look less like a temporary spike and more like a user base you can actually plan around.

You’re in adjoe Playtime. What’s Next?

First, expect early numbers that make sense. Time-based campaigns should give users their first reward within minutes, which means your install-to-first-action rates ought to look healthy straight away. IPM in the 60–80 range is normal for Playtime in mature setups. Anything far below that is worth a deeper look at creatives, targeting, or game fit.

Second, expect cohorts that survive past the honeymoon phase. With Playtime, the pattern you want is: strong D1, solid D7, and D30 that doesn’t crash relative to your other paid sources. 

Third, expect players who look like they belong in your game. The targeting and ML are there, so you don’t pay for people who have no business installing your title. High IPM and decent mid-funnel metrics are the first hint. Session length, progression through early content, and IAP behaviour will confirm the match.

Finally, treat Playtime as a way to buy behavior. The whole structure is set up around actions: minutes played, milestones reached, loops repeated. When you brief campaigns that way and judge them accordingly, Playtime stops looking like “yet another reward network” and starts looking like what it is trying to be: a format where incentives, context, and game fit line up to bring you players who stay long enough to matter.