“Player acquisition is the lifeblood of any game - and the most important challenge for game studios. Mastering marketing has long been difficult, unpredictable, and the single largest expense for game developers,” says Robert Huynh, co-founder and CEO of Reforged Labs. “And we built Reforged Labs to tackle that challenge.”
Reforged Labs’ focus is on video ads, which dominate UA across every game category and ad platform. They are indispensable and effective when done right, but they also present constant hurdles - in the form of ad fatigue, increasing costs, and complexities in managing experiments.
Today, game companies must spend weeks conceptualizing, producing, measuring, and iterating on each video ad. And to do so, they face two equally inefficient options - divert time from in-house designers and analysts, or rely on pricey outsourced help and cumbersome data tools. And neither approach ensures reliable ad performance.
In February 2024, we started Reforged Labs to give studios a better alternative. As a team of serial AI builders, adtech experts, and gamedev veterans, we wanted to channel the power of AI into a solution that lets developers make more hero creatives that are effortless to scale and test, and evolves automatically with competitor and industry trends. And against a backdrop of softer player spend and weaker ad targeting, we recognized that an AI product that is simple, conversational, and requires only a few inputs and levers, will go a long way to helping studios create and optimize more successful video
ads with less time and fewer resources.
Over these past months, we have worked with a dozen partners to pilot our AI ad platform, ranging from young founders looking to amplify their first launch, to marketing leads at AAA studios, tapping into AI to understand and replicate the success of their ‘hit’ ads. We’ve made their workflows light and concise - shortening the cycle for ideating, storyboarding, and developing video creatives to a fraction of the usual time needed.
Across the board, we’ve seen consistent results and strong, positive responses from our pilot customers. Reforged Labs increases the speed of ad conception and storyboarding by 5x, minimizes laggy feedback loops between designers and marketers, and noticeably lifts click-through rates and ROAS on video ads generated with the help of our platform.
We aim to extend this technology to more game companies, and to grow it into a solution that can act as an accelerator and copilot for every step in the marketing cycle. To do this, we will use our newly raised capital to continue sharpening our AI capabilities and fine-tune both our creative and performance models for the unique elements and demands of gaming ads.
“Reforged Labs stands out in the AI space by going narrow but deep.” Says Hurst Lin, founding partner of DCM, our lead investor. “By being laser-focused on building AI models for game marketing, they help game studios master ad performance far faster. The games industry is primed for AI innovation, and Reforged Labs has the right team and technology to lead that charge.”
In the coming weeks, we’ll share more on our plans for a platform that can automatically analyze attributes in top ads across genres, generate competitor ad insights and benchmarks, and integrate the latest best practices into every new ad creative generation, allowing game marketers to experiment with video ads, affordably and at scale.
“The technology that Reforged Labs is building will make it much easier for game studios of all sizes to experiment with video ads and achieve better, more consistent UA performance at scale.” Says Sebastian Knutsson, founder of King and industry veteran behind the Candy Crush franchise. “Other players try to address the individual factors that make game marketing successful - the creative, analytics, or performance management pieces. But Reforged Labs has the ambition and unique ability to deliver a solution that improves on the entire marketing cycle.”
Reforged Labs is changing the way games are marketed, and we’re putting a call out to developers - if our vision resonates with you, reach out to us at hello@reforgedlabs.com. We’d love to show you what we’re working on, and help you ‘reforge’ how you take your games to players.