PGC London 2025: Five UA Takeaways From the Show Floor

Pocket Gamer Connects London opened this morning with the usual crush of panels, expo-floor pitches and hallway meetings that run longer than the sessions either side of them. The printed agenda names four headline tracks this year: UA, creative testing, AI in ad production and hybrid-casual monetisation. But the PGC London UA takeaways worth carrying back to the office are not those track titles. They are the arguments that broke out underneath them, which did not always match what the programme promised.

The PGC London UA takeaways that mattered

Four threads ran through nearly every UA-adjacent conversation on day one, regardless of which track a session was formally filed under.

The first is scepticism, not enthusiasm, about generative AI in ad production. A year ago the same rooms were full of demos. This year the same practitioners are asking harder questions: which parts of an AI video pipeline actually save headcount, and which parts just move the review bottleneck from an editor to a prompt engineer. That scepticism is healthy. It suggests teams have moved past the novelty phase and are now measuring the tooling against the same CPI and iteration-speed benchmarks they would apply to anything else, a discipline we argued for in Detecting Creative Fatigue Before It Shows Up in CPI.

The second is that hybrid-casual has stopped being a debate. Eighteen months ago, sessions on the genre pivot drew arguments about whether hybrid mechanics dilute a hyper-casual studio's identity. This year nobody in the room contested the premise. The conversation had moved on to execution: how to layer meta-progression onto a hyper-casual core without breaking the load time a playable needs to hit, a shift we mapped out in The Hyper-Casual to Hybrid-Casual Pivot, a Creative Playbook.

Budget conversations kept circling back to flat, not falling

A theme that would not have made the printed agenda: several buyers described 2025 planning conversations with finance as "flat, not falling", a distinction that matters more than it sounds. A flat UA budget with rising CPMs is a real cut in reach, and more than one hallway conversation turned into an informal comparison of how different studios are protecting test budget inside a frozen top line, rather than assuming they can simply spend their way to the same install volume as last year.

The specific tactic mentioned most often was ring-fencing a fixed percentage of spend for testing regardless of what happens to the rest of the budget, on the logic that a frozen top line is exactly the environment where a team can least afford to stop finding better creative and channel mixes. A studio that cuts testing budget first when a top line freezes is protecting this quarter's efficiency at the cost of every future quarter's, and more than one buyer described watching a competitor make that trade the wrong way last year.

Measurement sessions drew smaller rooms and sharper questions

The measurement and attribution track pulled noticeably smaller crowds than the creative and AI sessions, but the questions inside those rooms were more pointed. With AdAttributionKit maturing as SKAdNetwork's successor, several attendees pressed panellists on how confident anyone should be in cross-network deduplication right now, rather than accepting vendor reassurances at face value. That scepticism is worth noting on its own: measurement practitioners at this stage of a platform transition are behaving less like an audience and more like a peer review panel, which is a healthier dynamic than the more passive tone these sessions had a year or two ago.

Developer verification is an irritant, not a strategy problem

Google Play's tightening of developer verification came up repeatedly, but almost entirely as an operational nuisance rather than a strategic one. Nobody on the show floor treated it as a threat to their model. The complaints were procedural: unclear timelines, documentation requirements that differ by market, and support queues that move slowly during a policy rollout. Teams running multiple studio entities or white-label publishing arrangements were the most vocal, because verification friction multiplies with every legal entity attached to an app.

The DMA question followed people into the hallway

Even sessions with nothing to do with policy kept drifting toward one practical question: what happens to attribution once EU users start being routed to web checkout under the bloc's link-out rules. Nobody has a finished answer yet, because the rules are still fresh and most publishers are still deciding whether to build a web shop at all. But the fact that a compliance question kept surfacing in creative and monetisation sessions says something about how much bandwidth it is already consuming inside UA teams, independent of whether their own studio ships a web shop this year.

A checklist for turning conference talk into a Monday brief

The value of two days on a show floor is not the sessions themselves. It is whether a team can turn the PGC London UA takeaways above into something a manager can act on by the following Monday. A short checklist that held up across several of the conversations this week:

• Write down which claims were vendor-stated versus practitioner-stated, because a demo booth and a peer at the bar are not equally reliable sources.
• Flag anything described as "everyone is doing this now" for a two-line gut check against your own cohort data before it enters a brief.
• Separate genuine workflow change (a new step in a pipeline) from repositioning (the same step with a new name attached).
• Bring back one number, even a soft one, per theme, and mark it as heard-not-verified so it does not silently become a planning assumption three weeks later.

Day two of PGC London runs the AI-in-production and creative-testing tracks in full, and the early conversations suggest the debate over how much of that tooling is genuinely operational, rather than repackaged, still has further to run before the show closes. The fuller set of PGC London UA takeaways from this year, once day two wraps, is likely to sharpen the budget and measurement threads more than it resolves them.

Related archive reading

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

• PGC London 2026: five things UA teams actually talked about
• PGC Helsinki UA Takeaways for Creative and Growth Teams