Unveiling the Lucky Wheel: Did our new placement hit the jackpot?

Ľubomír Čelár is ad monetistation manager at Pixel Federation.

There’s something about trains. Here in Central Europe, we are surrounded by rails and take trains for granted, yet transport is always delayed.

In Pixel Federation, a Slovak independent game dev studio, we have been fascinated by these magnificent steel creatures for 14 years already. We designed TrainStation 2 as a mobile railway tycoon game, a world of train simulation that fits in your pocket.

Since its launch in 2019, it has become our flagship project, generating nearly €18.7 million in sales in 2023 alone. Recently, the game expanded cross-platform thanks to a PC version forged in cooperation with Pley.

At the start of Q2, we were brainstorming how to create a new ad placement that would be not only profitable but also enjoyable for players to use.

Finding a good candidate wasn’t easy, given that we already had many effective placements. However, we realised we were missing something that a lot of other games include – a lucky wheel.

Many mobile games feature this kind of placement, and even some of our own games have it in different forms. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a lucky wheel, think of the Wheel of Fortune from TV in the 80s. It’s a micro-game within the main game that rewards players, and in our case, it only costs 30 seconds of their time.

This addition creates a win-win situation for both us as developers and our players. Players get a fun, rewarding experience, and we benefit from the increased engagement and potential ad revenue. So we decided to add this feature to our game, TrainStation 2, and as shown in Image 1, it looks great!

Implementing a new feature in the game

In our game TrainStation 2, there’s a big train station that is really important. Players spend a lot of time here when they first start playing. We thought this would be the perfect place to add a Lucky Wheel, so our game designers made sure to put it right in the middle of the action.

They made it look cool and ensured you knew prizes were to be won.

When you click on the Lucky Wheel building, you’ll see the wheel pop up on your screen. You can spin the wheel for free just by watching a short ad, and you could win some awesome stuff.

But we didn’t want to make it too easy to keep spinning the wheel over and over again right away, so there’s a little wait time before you can spin again. We want to make sure everyone has fun and feels good about playing our game.

What we’ve achieved with the Lucky Wheel and its future

In the first few weeks, we saw some really cool improvements: The average ad revenue per daily active user (AdARPDAU) increased by 9%, the number of ads shown to each player grew by 10%, and 4% more people are now watching video ads. The Lucky Wheel has turned into a major hit.

Of course, we checked the data a few weeks after the feature launch, and we can say that the wheel of fortune is still performing well.

The eCPM for this placement has stabilised at a good level. If we look at the AdARPDAU, we can still see a boost thanks to this new placement. By the way, it’s cool to see that the more our players play TrainStation 2, the more they love the Lucky Wheel.

Even with these wins, we know there’s still a bunch we want to make better – not just for us making the games, but also for the players enjoying them across all our titles.