Mobile games have spent the last few years looking for new ways to grow in an increasingly constrained and competitive environment. Most studios today are leaning on two main approaches.
The first is the growing use of direct-to-consumer (DTC) monetization. Some major studios and publishers now attribute 39% of revenue to web shop sales. The margin upside is clear, but these strategies tend to concentrate value among users who were already inclined to spend.
Another approach is Rewarded User Acquisition (RUA), which encompasses many different forms including offerwalls, an in-game placement where users complete actions to earn virtual currency and rewarded apps, third-party platforms where users can earn gift cards or money for playing games and completing actions within them. This incentivized traffic often comes with higher CPIs, but can yield users who play deeper and retain longer. However, the trade-off is that the rewards are only targeting new user cohorts and campaigns usually grant a fixed amount of rewards which can lead to drop off as users pivot to other games.
Rewarded play as an engagement tactic has grown in popularity over the years. According to Almedia’s Rewarded Returns Report, 77% of studios have already run a reward-based marketing campaign. What’s changing is how broadly they’re being used – moving from acquisition and one-off campaigns to the mainstream growth stack. And among users, the expectations are shifting too. ZBD research has shown that 70% of Gen Z now expect to earn rewards while using apps and playing games.
With game growth under pressure and fewer titles able to scale through marketing alone, publishers are looking for growth levers that can make a larger impact in boosting performance across their entire active user base.
ZBD Earn is a new approach that supports this strategic shift by embedding rewards into games and strengthening engagement of all users.
Introducing ZBD Earn
ZBD Earn is a fully embedded rewards solution designed to increase LTV and other key growth metrics. It allows studios to integrate rewards directly into gameplay to drive higher retention and engagement while being a value-add layer to the game’s user experience.
Unlike external reward systems that require users to download third-party apps to activate rewards, ZBD Earn operates entirely inside the game. Studios have full control to configure rewards for all users at every stage of the user lifecycle, ensuring that rewarded engagement can be customized based on user segments, acquisition source, and other parameters.
Internally, we describe this approach as: ‘Rewards for All’. We’ve seen that rewards work best when they apply across the entire user base. This doesn’t mean blindly rewarding users just for showing up, but that every user has the opportunity to earn relative to their engagement. By tying rewards into meaningful actions, studios enhance retention and other important KPIs like session duration, ad view rates and LTV for everyone.
The difference isn’t just who gets rewarded, but where and how rewards appear. When rewards are native to gameplay and tied to long-term progression, they strengthen the user experience instead of interrupting it or feeling bolted on.
Rewards for All, Reward for Everything
For rewards to work across different genres and game designs, flexibility is essential. Rather than being limited to a narrow set of predefined actions or time-bound mechanics, ZBD Earn aims to empower publishers to craft a truly native rewards experience. Studios can set rewards around any in-game action – including FTUE progression, completing levels, winning matches, maintaining a login streak, or participating in live ops events. By linking rewards directly to key parts of the core gameplay loop, studios can boost engagement, ultimately increasing retention and monetization to drive LTV.
Studios also control how rewards are presented inside the game. Depending on the theme, rewards can appear as in-game currency (like gems, stars, coins, etc.) or as fiat and digital currencies. Plus, the UI/UX modules are fully customizable for seamless integration with the game’s brand.
ZBD Earn supports instant rewards at any denomination, down to fractions of a cent, making it practical to reward recurring individual in-game actions instead of just large milestones. Earnings are credited in real time and users can withdraw to their preferred destination, including Cash App, digital wallets, Gift Cards, the ZBD App or, soon, bank accounts. For studios, all of this is handled behind the scenes, so there’s no payments or compliance overhead to manage.
Integration of ZBD Earn is handled through a Unity-based ZBD SDK, which adds around 2 MB to the final build.
TapNation’s Idle Bank is a good example of how natively embedding rewards can be a powerful growth lever. Because the core gameplay revolves around managing banking operations, the reward experience was a natural fit as users earned coins with real-money value as they played.
After integrating ZBD Earn, TapNation’s game experienced:
- +142% ARPDAU uplift
- +28.5% Day 1 Retention
- +44.5% Day 14 Retention
ZBD Earn vs. Other Reward Models
How ZBD Earn Fits Into Your Growth Strategy
ZBD Earn is designed to uplevel a game’s whole userbase, and can be highly effective to grow ARPU and LTV – reshaping how users retain, engage, and spend over time. Across every stage of the lifecycle, ZBD Earn improves retention by accelerating early progression of new users, increasing engagement from non-spenders, and sustaining long-term activity among the most high-value users and spenders.
To date, the ZBD SDK has integrated into more than 50 games, across a variety of genres and monetization strategies. Studios have seen particularly strong metrics in hybrid monetization and ad-monetization games as higher engagement directly correlates to more ad impressions.
A common concern is whether real-money rewards mechanics eat into revenue. ZBD Earn doesn’t cannibalize IAP or ad-based revenue. In fact, by retaining users longer and rewarding them along the way, incremental increases to LTV and revenue are achieved. Game studios leveraging ZBD Earn have seen that sharing 10-20% of revenue with users can grow total monetization by 80-200%.
Where Embedded Rewards Tend to Have the Biggest Impact
Embedded rewards work across genres and monetization models from hyper-casual and idle games to mid-core and live-ops heavy titles. For example, we consistently see strong results in a few common scenarios. Soft-launched games that show promising early results but struggle to scale beyond initial cohorts often benefit from improved retention and session depth across the full user base. Legacy titles are another strong fit, where embedded rewards can re-engage users and extend the tail of the game without any new content investment. Similar effects appear in mid-core games with steeper learning curves, where rewards help reduce friction and early drop-off. Ultimately, any title looking to increase retention, engagement, or monetization can layer in ZBD Earn.
Getting Started with Embedded Rewards
This embedded rewards solution is built for games and studios of all sizes. ZBD Earn can help whether you are managing newly launched titles or looking to extend the tail of established games.
ZBD also offers affiliate revenue to studios who drive traffic to the ZBD App.
Read our full Integration Guide here.