🚙 30 Rewarded Ads, No Daily Cap: How Hill Climb Racing 2 Monetizes 2.5 Billion Downloads

Why Hill Climb Racing 2 runs dozens of rewarded ads

Hill Climb Racing 2 shows how a mass-market arcade game can run purchases and heavy rewarded advertising side by side. Fingersoft ties ads into progression, tests interstitials against retention and finds payers watch ads anyway. Google adds that hybrid mediation and user segmentation lift both eCPMs and acquisition quality.

Takeaways

• Hill Climb Racing 2 earns mostly from purchases. Una estimates revenue is close to 30 percent ads and 70 percent in-app purchases, while the first game still runs mostly on ads. Social and competitive features drive spending, and permanent upgrades let ad buttons sit inside progression.
• Rewarded ads are plentiful and largely uncapped. The game has almost 30 rewarded videos, some with no daily cap. Fingersoft does not fear cannibalizing purchases and does not limit ads for buyers, because Una says paying players usually both buy and watch.
• An ad progression bundle lifted early impressions. An A/B-tested offer for new users gives some items free and others for a rewarded video, an ad-based version of Monopoly Go chain offers. Una says it raised first-day impressions for new users by above 10 percent.
• Interstitials barely move retention. Fingersoft tested frequencies, delays and removal and found retention hard to shift. For paying users it delayed interstitials until the 20th or 50th session with no significant retention change, and it also delays them after rewarded watches.
• Meta rewarded placement is the standout. Felix calls the placement, which accumulates ad watches into gameplay benefits, the best he has seen in the game. Una says a small icon marks each watch, though the placement could be more visible.
• Hybrid mediation still beats full auction. Denise says AdMob works with 180 demand-side platforms and 10 SDKs or waterfalls, and hybrid setups yield 10 to 20 percent higher eCPMs. Caching ads does not hurt results, since the best price is taken in real time and floors apply.
• Google segmentation feeds custom acquisition targeting. AdMob segments users across publishers to identify high-quality ones, then builds custom CPA targeting fed back into UA channels, with early results Denise calls really good. Una says AdMob moved from geo segmentation to five mediation tiers with key-value segmentation.

Ad design advice

• Preload ads in the background so players do not wait about five seconds at the end of a race.
• Keep ad creatives consistent with what players see in the Play Store.
• Add a cooldown after rewarded ads to spread impressions, Felix says, though networks such as Google prefer early impressions.