Case Studies /
WildCard Games
The Story
WildCard Games has been making mobile card games since 2008, with a reputation for making bold choices.
In the past few years, they've overhauled how product, monetization and UA work together, creating a system that is now delivering impressive cash flow. Behind much of that success is WildCard co-founder, President and COO Josh Chandley, who has become a widely followed voice in mobile ad monetisation.
When WildCard came to Metica in 2025 they weren't looking for a silver bullet. They were looking for the next compounding loop in an already successful business, and found a 17% lift in ad ARPU on Android through Metica's AI-driven Uplift platform.
Josh and his team saw the writing on the wall early, recognising how the ads market was changing and what it would mean for publishers before many others did.
The problem nobody likes to say out loud
Josh has a habit of naming uncomfortable truths clearly. In a 2025 interview with GameMakers, he laid out the tension every ad-monetised studio faced as bidding took over from waterfall:
“The algorithmic shift from waterfall to bidding has taken away our negotiating power against the ad networks, even if it's not outright price-fixing.”
— Josh Chandley, Co-Founder, President & COO, WildCard Games, in a 2025 interview with GameMakers
We don't see the shift itself as the problem. Bidding fixed real inefficiencies, whereas waterfalls were slow, price discovery was crude and fill rates suffered. What bidding changed was control. In a waterfall, publishers set the floor and decided who could bid at what price on which inventory. In bidding, that lever moved to the auction. The floor stopped being something you enforced and became something you hoped for.
The data backs it up. Josh described watching bidding adoption track almost perfectly with CPM declines, with CPMs falling more than 40% from peak to trough. Many ad-monetised studios didn't survive it.
WildCard had already identified the new levers:
“In the bidding world, why not just have three ad units? One has a 50-cent floor, one has a $5 floor, and one has a $50 floor. You can start enforcing prices and running auctions that only allow certain floors... we're starting to figure out ways to slowly pull back in pricing power with dynamic auctions.”
— Josh Chandley
Josh took that vision for dynamic price floors one step further in the same interview:
“Right now, I'm seeing some cute implementations where we have the same ad unit at three or five different floors. But the ability to have segments of one for price floors and really understand, ‘No, for this player, I'm not going to take less than this,’ is going to be incredibly profitable.”
— Josh Chandley
That's exactly the problem Metica was built to solve. Josh was spot on in describing the destination, and our technology gives games a way to get there.
Why Metica
There were other options. Some required heavy integrations. Some asked publishers to migrate networks or restructure mediation entirely. Some worked purely server-side, optimising from data that arrived after the auction had closed.
None of them fit.
Metica runs as a layer that gets even more out of MAX without requiring network changes or mediation restructuring, eliminating the migration risk that comes with rebuilding the stack. For a team that had spent years building a system designed to compound learnings across a portfolio, the last thing they needed was a new dependency that could destabilise it.
The other thing that mattered was where the intelligence lives. Metica optimises on the device, mid-session, using signals server-side systems can't see, like connectivity, latency, fill rate, and session context. For players dipping into card games in short bursts and across variable network conditions, those live signals matter because the optimal pricing decision can change from one ad request to the next.
Then there was how the two teams actually worked. Metica never shows up as a vendor just delivering reports. We come in as a design partner on the product itself. WildCard's team had a direct hand in how price segments got built, how mid-session logic reacted to live signals, and how every result got tested before it shipped. For a studio that runs on evidence over opinion, having a seat in that process mattered as much as what it produced.
Trust, then scale
Integration was the first step. WildCard went with the full SDK to get the full benefit of Uplift. Everything that drives the uplift comes as standard: per-request personalisation, dynamic mid-session orchestration, real-time switching between multi-call and single-call based on live conditions, all inside a controlled price range with built-in failsafes. There was no need for configuration gymnastics.
WildCard ran with it for a few months before drawing any conclusions. Then came the real test, and it wasn't about uplift. It was about data.
WildCard is known for its data sophistication, and that showed in how the team approached validation. Before treating a single number as real, their BI team put Metica's reported lift through its own checks. They audited Metica's reported results against the raw data, independently re-measured ARPU over a 90-day window, and cross-checked the results against AppLovin MAX's own reporting and their own holdout analysis.
The numbers matched. The lift was real and incremental. That independent verification deepened the partnership, and Metica has since rolled out across WildCard's full portfolio.
The results
WildCard's eight largest Android apps see Metica Uplift of +17% ARPU with statistical significance. Results have improved from +14.5% in March to now +17% in the latest measurement periods.
Beyond the headline number, the team got something harder to quantify: time. Pricing decisions that used to consume part of the monetisation team's week now run themselves. That freed up the team to spend more time on game economy design and monetisation architecture for new titles.
For a team that thinks in compounding loops, the value goes beyond the immediate revenue uplift. Metica improves monetisation today while giving WildCard's team more time to build the systems, economies and titles that drive growth tomorrow.
What's next
WildCard is now Metica's design partner for the next generation of ML uplift products, extending the same on-device, real-time approach beyond floor optimisation.
Metica improves monetisation today while giving WildCard's team more time to build the systems, economies and titles that drive growth tomorrow.
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