Cross-promotion inside a portfolio, done properly
Cross-promotion between a studio's own games is not free traffic. Treated as a real channel with real costs, it changes how portfolios sequence launches.
Every portfolio studio already runs a UA channel it does not budget for: its own other games.
The maths that gets skipped
Cross-promotion looks like the cheapest acquisition channel in the business, because the marginal cost of an impression inside a live game is close to zero and the CPI never shows up in a network invoice. That is precisely why it gets under-scrutinised. An install pulled from Game A into Game B by a house ad is not free. It carries an opportunity cost, measured in whatever Game A's own retention and monetisation lose from placing that inventory, plus a real risk of moving a player who would have stayed engaged with Game A into a worse outcome across the portfolio as a whole. A studio that logs cross-promo installs as pure upside, without netting against Game A's lost session time and in-app revenue, is overstating the channel's value, sometimes considerably.
The correct accounting treats cross-promotion the way any other paid channel would be treated: a cost per acquired user, calculated from what the sending game gave up, set against the receiving game's resulting lifetime value. Where that comparison holds up, the channel is genuinely valuable. Where it does not, and it often does not for two titles competing for the same session length or the same wallet, cross-promotion is just a way to make the receiving game's dashboard look better while quietly damaging the one financing the traffic.
Sequencing by age, not by convenience
The strongest case for cross-promotion is not moving players between two live, healthy titles. It is using a mature title with declining organic growth and a large, well understood player base to seed a newer title that still needs volume to find its retention floor. An older game past its growth phase has spare inventory value a newer title cannot yet generate on its own, and the audience overlap between an ageing player base and a new launch in the same genre is usually strong enough that conversion beats almost any paid channel available.
This only works if the sequencing is deliberate. A studio treating every live title as equally available inventory, rather than allocating cross-promo slots according to where each game sits in its lifecycle, tends to cannibalise its best performers to prop up titles that were never going to retain the traffic anyway. The healthier pattern sends volume down the age curve, from mature to new, and reserves the reverse direction, a new title feeding an older one, for cases where the new title is genuinely oversaturated with acquired users it cannot yet monetise.
Frequency discipline on house ads
House ad inventory suffers from the same fatigue dynamics as paid creative, and it is easy to under-invest in refreshing it because nobody is paying a network for the impressions and the pressure to rotate creative feels lower. A cross-promo unit shown at the same frequency with the same static creative for months will decay in click-through the same way a paid concept would, and because the receiving game pays no media cost, the decline is often invisible until conversion has already dropped substantially.
A frequency cap on house ads, tracked the same way a paid buyer tracks impression frequency per user, protects the sending game's own player experience as much as it protects cross-promo conversion. Players shown the same interstitial for a sister title on every sixth or eighth session are being asked to spend attention on something other than the game they opened, and a studio that treats that attention as costless will eventually see it show up in the sending game's own retention curve.
Making the accounting honest
The single change that fixes most cross-promotion measurement problems is attributing a shadow cost to every impression served, based on what that impression could have earned as a monetisation placement or as protected session time, and running that cost against the receiving game's resulting revenue exactly as a media buyer would run CPI against lifetime value. Once cross-promotion is measured this way, it stops looking like free traffic and starts looking like what it actually is: a channel with real economics, sometimes excellent ones, and occasionally worse than anything a network would sell.
That reframing changes the conversation in a portfolio review. Cross-promotion earns its keep when a studio can show what it cost the sending title and what it returned on the receiving one, in the same terms as every other line in the UA budget. It does not earn a permanent pass just because no invoice ever arrives for it.
