Creative Decay Curve by Genre Looks Different

Two creative teams running the same weekly review cadence can reach opposite conclusions about whether their creative is fatigued, if one is buying for a puzzle title and the other for a survival strategy game. That is not a measurement error. It is because a creative decay curve by genre does not follow one universal shape, and a refresh cadence tuned to one genre's decay pattern will either waste production budget refreshing creative too early in one category or bleed CPI too long in another.

Why decay speed differs by genre in the first place

Decay speed tracks roughly with how quickly a genre's core promise can be fully demonstrated to a cold viewer. A puzzle mechanic is usually legible in the first few seconds, a piece slots into place, a row clears, a satisfying visual resolves, which means a viewer either gets the appeal immediately or does not, and repeat exposure to a similar hook produces diminishing returns relatively fast. A survival or kingdom-builder title's appeal is slower to land, often depending on a sense of scale, threat or long-term progression that a single short exposure only partially conveys, which means the same creative can hold attention across more repeat impressions before a viewer has fully absorbed and discounted its premise. Hybrid-casual titles tend to sit between the two, since their mechanics are simple enough to read quickly but their meta-progression hooks give a creative more angles to rotate through before genuinely repeating itself.

What this looks like in practice

A puzzle campaign that holds a top-performing creative unchanged for six weeks is very likely leaving CPI improvements on the table, because the genre's fast-legible mechanic means most of the audience that will respond to a given hook responds within the first one to two weeks of meaningful exposure. A survival strategy campaign that refreshes its lead creative every two weeks on the same fixed schedule, by contrast, may be discarding creative that still has real life left in it, since the genre's slower-to-land premise means a well-built hook can keep converting past the point a puzzle team would have retired it. Neither team is wrong about fatigue existing. Both are wrong if they are applying the other genre's decay timeline to their own portfolio.

Reading the decay curve rather than assuming it

The practical fix is not a fixed refresh calendar at all, but a monitoring approach that lets each genre's actual curve show itself:

• Track CPI and click-through rate by creative age in days, not by campaign week, so a comparison across creatives of different launch dates is measured on the same axis.
• Plot that curve separately by genre if a portfolio spans more than one, rather than averaging decay across genres into a single company-wide curve that describes none of them accurately.
• Flag the inflection point where a creative's CPI trend changes slope, rather than waiting for an absolute CPI threshold to be breached, since the slope change is the earlier and more genre-neutral signal.
• Compare each new creative's decay curve against the genre's established shape once several have been tracked, building a genre-specific expectation rather than treating every creative's fatigue timeline as a fresh surprise.
• Set refresh triggers off the observed inflection point for that genre rather than a calendar date borrowed from a different portfolio or a different studio's public case study.

A worked comparison

Consider two hypothetical campaigns tracked over the same eight-week window. A puzzle title's lead creative shows its CPI trend inflect around day 9, with click-through rate down roughly 30% from its opening week by day 14. A survival strategy title's lead creative, launched the same week, does not show a comparable inflection until closer to day 24, with click-through rate still within 10% of its opening week at day 14. A team using a single company-wide two-week refresh rule would retire the survival creative roughly ten days before its decay curve actually turned, while potentially under-refreshing the puzzle creative if the same rule were set at three or four weeks instead. Tracking each curve on its own terms avoids both errors.

Where hybrid-casual sits, and why it needs its own read

Hybrid-casual creative deserves its own treatment rather than being averaged into either the fast-decaying puzzle bucket or the slow-decaying strategy bucket, because its decay pattern is genuinely its own shape rather than a simple midpoint between the two. A hybrid-casual hook often shows an early, shallow dip in performance as the most obviously curious viewers convert first, followed by a longer plateau as the creative continues pulling in viewers responding to its meta-progression layer rather than its opening mechanic alone. A team that reads that plateau as full decay and retires the creative early is throwing away a hook that has simply moved from converting on curiosity to converting on a different, later-arriving signal. Tracking the shape of the plateau, not just its existence, is usually the difference between catching this correctly and missing it.

Building genre-specific cadence into the review calendar

As UA Ledger argued in Building a Creative Fatigue Detection Cadence That Works, the review cadence itself matters more than any single fatigue metric. The genre point sharpens that argument rather than replacing it: a single fixed cadence applied uniformly across a multi-genre portfolio is really two or three different decisions disguised as one, and a team that separates its review calendar by genre, even loosely, will catch decay closer to when it actually starts rather than on a schedule borrowed from a different kind of game entirely.

Creative decay curve by genre: what to watch next

Three things are worth tracking as portfolios add more titles across genres. Watch whether AI-generated creative variants, increasingly common in production pipelines this year, decay on the same genre-specific curves as hand-built creative, or whether their higher output volume changes the shape of the curve by simply diluting exposure to any single variant faster. Watch whether a genre's decay curve itself shifts as a title matures past its launch window, since a six-month-old survival strategy title's audience may have already seen enough category creative elsewhere that its decay curve compresses toward something closer to puzzle's faster pattern. And watch cross-network consistency: a decay curve measured against only one ad network's data may reflect that network's specific audience overlap rather than a genre-wide pattern, so a team drawing conclusions from a single network's numbers should treat them as directional until a second network's data either confirms or complicates the read.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• The maths of creative fatigue
• Creative Fatigue Leading Indicators to Watch Before CPI