ChinaJoy 2026 is a wrap. Three days at the YouAppi booth, meetings from open to close, and a night at the Legends Party that carried the same energy into after-hours.
Acquisition and retention have always been two sides of the same growth equation. What stood out at ChinaJoy this year was how much airtime the second one got, and for gaming specifically, that shift matters more than it does almost anywhere else.
Most gaming revenue doesn't come from the install. It comes from what a player does over months of play: in-app purchases, ad engagement, live-ops events, seasonal content. That makes LTV the metric that actually determines whether a UA budget was well spent, not day-one downloads.
The problem is that curve keeps getting harder to protect. As we shared in our recent piece on CTV, median Day 1 retention across mobile games has slipped to approximately 22%, down from the year before, citing GameAnalytics' 2026 benchmarks. Every point of retention lost is LTV that never gets the chance to build.
That's what made retargeting the center of gravity at our booth this year, not a side conversation to acquisition, but the mechanism that protects the LTV a studio already paid to create.
Gaming audiences churn and return in patterns other verticals don't see. A player drops off after a tough level, a slow content update, or simply a few weeks without a reason to come back, and can often be reactivated with the right signal: a new season, an event, a reward tied to exactly where they left off.
That's a different retargeting problem than, say, an e-commerce cart abandonment. It requires reading in-app behavioral signals, not just install and session data, and creative that speaks to where a specific player is in their game, not a generic reminder to reopen the app.
Gamers are also heavy second-screen users, streaming or watching TV while playing, which makes CTV a natural extension of a mobile-first strategy rather than a separate channel. Recent research backs this up directly for gaming: within the gaming vertical specifically, casual, social casino, and skill-based titles have produced some of the clearest incremental results from CTV, reaching users mobile retargeting alone was missing entirely.
That's the conversation that came up most at our booth this year: not whether to run CTV, but how to sequence it with mobile retargeting so the two work as one system instead of two separate line items.
Nisan, our CEO, was on the ground in ChinaJoy 2026. Here's his read on where the industry is headed:
"The gaming ecosystem is increasingly becoming a cross-screen experience, and for gaming businesses it's important to connect the user experiences across devices. At YouAppi, we see AI-powered intelligence, cross-screen engagement and returning user conversions working together to help brands deliver more relevant experiences, strengthen player relationships and drive longer-term value." — Nisan Schitrit, CEO of YouAppi
Klaus, our GM in China, also spent the three days talking with teams on the show floor. Here's what stood out to him:
"What stood out to me this year was that the conversations at our booth were no longer just about acquiring more new users. People were increasingly exploring new traffic opportunities, such as CTV inventory, as well as how to re-engage existing users whose value has already been proven through retargeting. These two areas are gradually becoming increasingly important topics in app marketing, reflecting a broader shift in the industry from simply acquiring more users to unlocking more value from the users we already have." — Klaus Cui, General Manager in China
ChinaJoy 2026 confirmed something we've been saying for a while: in gaming, protecting the players you already have is what actually drives LTV, and retargeting and CTV are the tools that make that possible.
To everyone who stopped by the booth, joined us at the party, or made time for a real conversation in a busy week, thank you. If any of this sounds like where your team's at right now, let's talk.