The Death of the “One-Tap Wonder”: A Veteran’s Perspective

If you were in the trenches of the mobile ad-tech world circa 2018-2020, you remember the “Golden Age” of hyper-casual. We were building DSPs designed to ingest millions of events per second from games that were, quite frankly, little more than a core mechanic wrapped in a SDK. The math was simple, elegant, and incredibly profitable: buy users at $0.20 CPI, show them ten ads in a three-day retention window, and pocket the $0.10 margin. Scale that by ten million installs, and you had a unicorn.