Stop calling it user acquisition

Names shape budgets. Call a function user acquisition and the company will measure it on users acquired, staff it with people who are good at acquiring users, and judge it on the cost of doing so. That was the right frame when installs were the scarce resource and a downloaded game was a monetising game. Sensor Tower's February report put installs down about 7 percent and IAP revenue up 1 percent for 2025, and the industry has spent the months since agreeing that the volume era is over. The vocabulary hasn't caught up.

The proposal is simple and will irritate people who have "UA" in their title: stop calling the function user acquisition, because the name describes the least valuable part of what it now does. The install is a receipt. What the team actually buys is a player's attention, an expectation set by the ad, and a first session that either honours it or does not. Those three things sit across three departments, and the name keeps them there.

The mechanism: the ad now designs the first session

Consider what a playable ad does. It teaches a mechanic, sets a difficulty expectation, promises a reward loop, and then hands the player to the game. If the game's first level is easier than the playable, the player gets bored; if harder, frustrated; if the mechanic is different, deceived. We covered the retention consequences in "From ad promise to first session: the funnel is collapsing" and the design consequences in "Why the first playable level should not be level one." The common thread is that the creative team is making product decisions whether or not anyone has told them so.

The same holds for video. A hook built on a fail-state that the game never produces recruits players who wanted a different game. The ad set the expectation. The tutorial pays for it. And in the org chart, the person who wrote the hook and the person who built the tutorial have never met.

This is not a coordination failure that better meetings fix. It's a structural mismatch between the desk that makes the decision and the desk that carries it on its budget. User acquisition, as a name, tells the creative strategist their job ends at the install. It doesn't.

The name persists because it is convenient for everyone except the player. Finance likes it because it produces a clean cost line; product likes it because it can blame retention problems on bad traffic. UA likes it because CPI is a metric they can hit on a Friday, and because "acquisition" sounds like a discipline with a craft rather than a service to another department.

Networks like it most of all. A function that buys users is a customer for install inventory. A function that buys attention and expectation would ask harder questions about what an impression actually delivered, and would be less impressed by install volume in the reporting. The industry's vocabulary is, in part, a sales frame that buyers adopted.

The second-order effect: the name decides who gets hired

Here is the trade-off most coverage misses. A function named for acquisition hires acquirers: buyers, bid managers, people fluent in ad managers. As automation removes bid decisions from the console, the skills that name selects for depreciate, and other teams end up hiring for the skills the job actually requires, which sit closer to product analytics and creative direction.

The result is a UA department full of people whose expertise the platform has absorbed, and a product department full of people who understand players but do not control the traffic sent to them. Renaming the function does not fix this on its own, but it changes the wording of the job posting that follows, and job postings compound.

There is a cost on the other side. A growth function with a broader remit is harder to hold accountable, because the clean CPI line blurs into shared metrics with product. Studios that have tried a unified growth team often report that finance struggles to attribute outcomes and the team struggles to prove its value in a quarter. That is a real problem, and the framework below keeps a hard number in the frame while widening the remit.

A framework: the three things you actually buy

The alternative is to define the function by what it purchases rather than by the install. Three purchases, three metrics, one owner.

Attention comes first: who was reached, at what cost, from whom. The metric is cost per qualified impression or view-through, by source. Media buying still lives here, and automated platforms do most of the work.

Expectation is the second purchase, meaning what the creative promised and how accurately. The metric is the gap between what the ad shows and what the first session delivers, measured as first-session completion and D1 return by creative concept. Creative strategy lives here, and it needs a seat in product's first-session review.

The first session is the third, the moment the expectation gets tested. The metric is D1 retention by source and concept, owned jointly with product but reported by the growth function. This is the receipt that matters; the install is just the timestamp on it.

A team measured on these three has a hard cost line, a hard quality line and a shared retention line, and it can no longer describe a low-retaining cohort as somebody else's fault.

A worked illustration

An illustrative hybrid-casual studio runs two concepts. Concept A is a fail-state hook with an install cost of 1.40 and D1 of 28 percent. Concept B shows the actual core loop, costs 2.10 to install, and returns D1 of 41 percent.

Under a user acquisition frame, A wins: cheaper installs, and retention is product's problem. Under the three-purchase frame, the team computes cost per D1-retained player. A comes to 5.00, B to 5.12. Nearly even, and the team now has a real decision rather than a false one. It then looks at the expectation gap: A's first-session completion is far lower than B's, meaning A recruits players who leave during the tutorial and never see the loop. If the studio's monetisation depends on players reaching the loop, B is the better buy despite a higher CPI, and the team can say why in a sentence finance will accept.

None of that analysis was unavailable under the old name. The old name simply gave nobody a reason to run it.

What to call it instead

The honest answer is that the label matters less than the remit, and any name that puts attention and expectation and the first session in its accountabilities will do. Growth is the common choice and carries its own baggage. Player acquisition is marginally better because it at least implies a person rather than a device.

The practical change is in the charter, not the letterhead: write down that the function is accountable for D1 retention by source, give the creative strategist a standing slot in first-session reviews, and change the next job posting to ask for cohort analysis rather than console fluency. The name will follow the work, and the work has already moved.

Related archive reading

• Discord as an acquisition channel for mid-core
• Agentic buying and the end of the ad manager