Sunday is the 16-person German mobile games studio behind the hit hyper-casual title, Cat Escape, which saw 10 million downloads in its first 3 months alone. Below, Sunday’s Managing Director, Christoph Sachsenhausen and UA Manager Sagi Rozen, explain how the studio’s partnership with ironSource helped unlock this scale and turned the game into a profitable hit over the long-term.
Our studio was founded in late 2019 - we initially focused on making idle and casual games, but in the middle of 2020, we pivoted to the hyper-casual category. And that’s what led us to our first hit game: Cat Escape.
Maximizing our game’s potential
Once we saw the early success of this game, it was important for us to find a partner who could help us maximize the business potential we knew it had. Specifically, we wanted to find a solution that would enable us to efficiently optimize our UA campaigns on iOS.
We were introduced to ironSource, and after a fantastic series of calls with the ironSource team, it was clear to us that they would do everything they could to support our goals, and we felt like we found a true partner.
Increasing ROAS and peace of mind
Previously, despite our in-house attribution solution and user acquisition expertise, for certain campaigns we weren’t getting as much traffic from high quality users as we wanted. Although a lot of our bidding process is already automated, we still needed to do manual optimization for certain campaigns, especially on iOS, which was a time-consuming operation. The ironSource team explained how their ROAS optimizer tool would solve these issues and enable us to reach high-quality users at scale, while boosting ROAS automatically.
We began using it and shortly after saw great results, increasing ARPU D3 by 50% - as shown in the chart below. We also saw a total 214% uplift in organic installs while using the optimizer tool. We expected some kind of increase in organic growth as we were scaling our paid UA activity, but this was an exceptional number. 
We also gained installs in countries that we’d been unable to scale in before thanks to the optimizer’s granular bidding across a range of sources. Our biggest breakthrough with the optimizer was with our worldwide campaigns - it provided us a level of scale that we've simply not seen on other networks.
“The optimizer provided us a level of scale that we've simply not seen on other networks”
- Sagi Rozen, UA Manager at Sunday
In addition to increasing installs and ROAS, because machine learning does all the optimization for us, we save time and have peace of mind, knowing that it's doing a job better than we could ever do manually. As a relatively small team, this automation freed up valuable time for us to focus on other tasks, like improving our product and user experience.
Onboarding more campaigns
We’re looking forward to trying out more of ironSource’s growth solutions to help us continue making profitable, hit games for years to come, and after the success we've seen, we're planning on onboarding more campaigns to the optimizer.
