Brazil and LATAM: payments, pricing and UA

Pix changed the payment conversation, not the whole market

Brazil's Pix instant payment system has done more to lower purchase friction in mobile games than any single infrastructure change in the region's history, and studios that adjusted their store pages and purchase flows to lean into it have generally seen the payoff in conversion. But Pix is a Brazil-specific rail. Treating LATAM as a single market with a single payments story is one of the most common planning errors this desk sees. Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile: each has its own dominant payment methods, its own currency stability profile, its own purchasing habits, and a Brazil-tuned purchase flow doesn't automatically translate to any of them.

Price localisation across the region needs more care than a simple currency conversion. Argentina is the sharp case. Its currency volatility has made static regional pricing a recurring problem; a price point that looked reasonable at the start of a quarter can look badly miscalibrated by the end of it purely on exchange-rate movement, independent of anything the studio did. Studios operating seriously in the region review LATAM pricing on a shorter cycle than they review pricing elsewhere, precisely because the currency risk is higher.

Android share and the creative implication

Android dominates across nearly all of LATAM. The profile is similar in spirit to India's, though the specifics differ: mid-range devices outnumber flagships, and network conditions vary more within cities than between them, in ways a purely national-level plan misses. Creative and technical builds that assume a stable high-bandwidth connection show weaker completion rates than the same creative tested on lighter builds with more forgiving load behaviour.

WhatsApp's dominance as the region's default communication layer creates an acquisition surface that doesn't map cleanly onto categories built around Meta or Google inventory. Community and creator activity increasingly happens through WhatsApp groups and channels rather than the open social feeds Western UA planning is typically built around, and studios that have found early success with creator partnerships in the region often describe the real distribution mechanism as WhatsApp forwarding rather than the platform where the content was originally posted. That's hard to attribute through a standard MMP setup. Treat it as a qualitative signal, not a line item a dashboard will show cleanly.

The football calendar is a real planning input

Football's place in the region's culture isn't a soft cultural note; it's a UA planning input with a fixed calendar. Major club and international tournament windows produce measurable shifts in both attention and ad inventory pricing, and studios running sports-adjacent titles in the region, along with plenty running titles that have nothing to do with sport, have learned to plan creative testing and budget pacing around the calendar rather than through it. Launch a major creative refresh during a marquee match week and the campaign is competing for attention it is unlikely to win. CPMs across general entertainment inventory firm up around the biggest fixtures regardless of category.

Building a test plan that respects the region's variety

Split Brazil out first. The practical shape of a LATAM test plan starts by separating it from the rest of the region entirely, given its scale together with its Portuguese-language requirement on top of its Pix-driven payment behaviour, rather than treating it as one market among several Spanish-language ones. Within the Spanish-language markets, Mexico usually carries enough scale to justify its own budget line, with Colombia alongside Chile and Argentina tested as a smaller cluster where the team tracks currency and payment differences but can largely share the language and creative approach.

Studios running this kind of test plan through the current GDC week are also likely to see regional publishing and localisation vendor conversations pick up, since GDC is one of the few points in the calendar where regional specialists and global studios end up in the same rooms. That's a scouting opportunity for the coming year's LATAM vendor relationships rather than market news in itself.

Brazil is not LATAM.

The through-line across the region is the same one that applies everywhere UA teams try to run a single global plan against a genuinely diverse set of markets. A plan that treats Brazil as a stand-in for the whole region will underperform in every market it didn't actually build for.

Related archive reading

• Every platform privacy change is a pricing change
• Building an experimentation culture in a UA team