How LightFox Games Scaled from 0 to Hero
From launch to Top 100 Grossing in App Store, Knight's Edge scaled 9.6x while keeping CPI's below industry average.
Winner
9.6x Scale at 50% Lower CPA
MeasuredFull-funnel results
From launch to Top 100 Grossing in App Store, Knight's Edge scaled 9.6x while keeping CPI's below industry average.
The Challenge
LightFox Games brought deep pedigree but translating product expertise into scalable user acquisition required a completely different playbook. Knight’s Edge was live and gaining players, but growth had plateaued on a narrow network footprint that couldn’t efficiently reach the game’s audience at the volume needed to compete at scale.
Two constraints made this especially difficult. First, the game required users to reach meaningful in-app milestones before monetization events fired, making standard install optimization setups a poor proxy for actual ROAS. Campaigns optimized for installs were cheap but attracted low-quality users who churned before converting. Campaigns optimized for late funnel events had better accuracy but couldn’t generate enough volume to train algorithms effectively.
Second, as an independent studio, budget efficiency was non-negotiable. Every dollar of media spend had to demonstrably contribute to sustainable growth. LightFox needed a partner who could diagnose which optimization setup would actually drive profitable players, not just volume - and scale from there.
The Strategic Insight
The real bottleneck wasn’t creative underperformance or insufficient spend. It was event optimization architecture. Early testing revealed a significant gap between the events UA platforms were optimizing for and the in-app behaviors that actually predicted high-LTV players for Knight’s Edge. The standard approach was systematically training algorithms on the wrong signal.
The strategic insight was that mobile gaming UA at scale is a two-variable problem: which event drives ROAS, and which network mix can actually support the volume required. These couldn’t be solved sequentially. Solving event optimization on one channel while ignoring network expansion would hit a ceiling, and expanding networks without fixing the optimization objective would just amplify the wrong signal at greater cost.
The path forward was simultaneous: build a rigorous multi-event testing framework across the existing footprint to identify the in-app milestone most predictive of downstream revenue, while in parallel architecting the network expansion required to support growth. All while honing in on creative strategies that resonated with the most valuable player segments.
The Execution
The initial network footprint was expanded from 2–3 primary channels to 8+ ad networks including Meta, Google UAC, TikTok, and multiple DSPs — each built with platform-native campaign structures rather than replicated configurations. Audience architecture, bid strategies, and creative specifications were adapted for each platform’s unique inventory and signal environment.
Geographic expansion ran in parallel: Knight’s Edge launched across 50+ countries with individualized strategies per region, accounting for differences in competitive density, CPM floors, and monetization rates. High-volume Tier 1 markets ran aggressive acquisition strategies; Tier 2 markets offered scale volume at efficiency where competition was lower and creative resonated strongly.
The result was a diversified media portfolio that eliminated single-platform concentration risk, ensuring the acquisition engine remained resilient to platform-level disruptions while maintaining clear performance accountability across the full mix.
The creative strategy underwent a full overhaul. Legacy creative, primarily game footage and statics, spoke to core gamers while underserving the casual competitive audience that Knight’s Edge’s 3v3 format could realistically acquire. The team diagnosed a creative-market fit problem and rebuilt the approach from the ground up.
A UGC creator content pipeline was built from scratch, sourcing and briefing creators to produce authentic gameplay reactions, competitive hooks, and first-person match recaps. Hook testing was systematized: high-performing video hooks were isolated, iterated across formats and lengths, and scaled once they demonstrated consistent performance signals across multiple networks.
The pipeline was structured for high-volume output at low cost-per-asset, enabling simultaneous creative testing across all 8+ networks rather than sequential rollout giving the team the speed advantage needed to identify winning concepts before competitors could react.
The measurement work began with an event optimization audit mapping every trackable in-app event against downstream monetization data to identify which event best predicted high-LTV users. This was a structured multi-variant testing roadmap, rotating each network’s optimization objective while holding creative constant to isolate the variable.
Once the winning event objective was identified, campaign structures were rebuilt around it. Attribution was configured to account for view-through and cross-network overlap, preventing double-counting across the expanded footprint. Performance reporting was regionalized, aggregated global numbers masked significant efficiency variance by country, so optimization decisions were made at the region level.
This measurement infrastructure made the 50+ country expansion manageable and gave the team clear signals for when to increase investment, hold, or pull back in each market. The outcome was a systematic feedback loop that compounded gains over the 12+ month engagement.
Client Testimonial
We evaluated several companies when looking for our marketing partner. The expertise at Neon Growth helped us achieve marketing spend profitability after just weeks when others had months to try.
The Results
Knight’s Edge achieved what few independent mobile games accomplish: sustained Top 100 Grossing ranking on iOS App Store while maintaining profitable unit economics. Media spend scaled 9.6x from engagement start without CPA regression; CPIs actually were 50% better than industry average. The event optimization framework trained on increasingly accurate signals and the UGC creative pipeline produced consistently high-performing hooks.
Incremental revenue grew 3x, growth directly attributable to the expanded network and country footprint. The 50+ country expansion contributed meaningful volume at efficiency, with several Tier 2 markets outperforming initial projections due to lower competitive density and strong creative resonance with local audiences. Network diversification reduced platform dependence, ensuring no single channel disruption could destabilize the overall acquisition engine.
The engagement validated the core thesis: the path to mobile gaming scale wasn’t bigger budgets on the same channels, but diagnostic precision on which events drive ROAS, combined with structural expansion to the networks and markets where the creative approach could find new audiences.
Case study Summary
Neon Growth helped LightFox Games scale Knight’s Edge media spend 9.6x while keeping CPAs 50% below targets through systematic event optimization testing and multi-network expansion. By identifying the in-app event most predictive of high-LTV players, expanding to 8+ ad networks, and building a UGC creator content pipeline, the game reached Top 100 Grossing on iOS App Store.
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