为什么用户获取中的万圣节峰值早在九月就已出现 —— GameAnalytics

Halloween is this week, at least for regular mortals, but for user acquisition (UA) managers it’s already over. The seasonal creative window used to peak in late October, right when the holiday hit, however in recent years it has shifted closer to mid-September and has been winding down from there ever since. The pattern is bigger than one year, bigger than one studio, and it has implications for every seasonal moment on the calendar. Christmas and Valentine’s are next.

This piece looks at the three-year trend in Halloween creative volume, the two forces most likely driving the shift, and what the top-performing Halloween ads of this October actually look like when you examine them closely. The data comes from Ad Insights.

Three years, same pattern, bigger each time

Muhammad Asad Sohail already pulled the data on this year’s Halloween shift:

Muhammad compared 2025 and 2026, and I extended the view to three years. The shape remains the same: Each year, more Halloween ads show up earlier. The September 14 numbers tell the story most clearly. In 2024, around 570 new Halloween ads were live by mid-September. In 2025, that number tripled to roughly 1,670. In 2026, it jumped again to over 5,000. By October 31, which used to be the peak, the 2026 number has already settled below where it was two weeks earlier. The Halloween season isn’t ending later. It’s starting earlier and plateauing sooner.

So why is this happening?

The simplest explanation is attention arbitrage. If everyone ships Halloween ads in late October, nobody wins. Networks saturate, CPMs climb, and your creative competes against hundreds of near-identical seasonal pitches. The teams going in early capture attention while the signal-to-noise ratio is still high. So while being first isn’t a competitive advantage, not being last surely is.

The second explanation is creative economics, though not the version you might expect. The obvious framing is that creative matters: a 2026 analysis of mobile UA strategy estimates it accounts for roughly 56% of what drives incremental app installs. If that’s true, you’d expect every studio to be producing fresh seasonal creative for every seasonal moment. They aren’t, which points to a different conclusion.

To understand why, we should look at how UA economics have shifted over the last few years. Post-ATT and post-Privacy Sandbox, targeting precision has collapsed, and the then-traditional targeting signals UA teams used to rely on (device IDs, deterministic attribution, granular audience lookalikes) are either gone or heavily degraded. What’s left is creative as the main lever a team can pull. If you can’t target the right user, the creative itself has to do more of the work: catching the right eye, filtering for the right intent, converting the right install.

A bespoke seasonal creative that costs five figures to produce and runs for two weeks has to carry its own production cost plus the opportunity cost of the proven creative it displaces. A creative that’s been running for 300 days, by contrast, has a known conversion rate, known CPI, known fatigue curve, and known profit margin. Every day it runs is a day of extracted value from a sunk production cost. Replacing it with something new, even something seasonally themed, is a bet against evidence.

Eric Seufert at Mobile Dev Memo has long been skeptical of the ROI math behind expensive bespoke creative production. His broader position across his writing and podcast is that UA economics favor extracting runway from what already works over producing novelty, and that the industry systematically overinvests in creative production relative to what the returns actually justify. The Halloween data makes that argument visible in a specific way. The studios ranking highest for Halloween impressions right now aren’t the ones who commissioned bespoke Halloween creative in October. They’re the ones who kept their proven assets running and added a thin seasonal layer on top.

The cheapest way to make a proven creative “seasonal” is a copy swap. A new title card. A line of overlay text. A revised opening frame. These are production tasks measured in hours, not days, and they preserve everything that’s already working while adding just enough contextual relevance to catch the seasonal attention bump. The math on a copy swap is close to free, while the math on a bespoke creative is anything but.

What the winning creatives look like

Kavindu Priyanath looked at last year’s Halloween creatives across genres and found Halloween showing up everywhere, from midcore to coloring apps, with many creatives continuing to run long after October ended.

The top 12 Halloween ads so far this October

We pulled the top 12 Halloween-themed creatives by estimated impressions in Ad Insights for October 1-23, 2026. Three patterns stand out across the list.

The first pattern is that the highest-impression ads are not new. Bubble Shooter’s top performer has been in market for 715 days. Hole Em All has been running for 508. Magic Tiles 3 has been live for 360. The ads at the top of the Halloween chart right now are ads that have been working for one to two years, with the seasonal layer added on top of a proven base.

Full-themed Halloween creative does still work, but it’s concentrated in specific genres. Screw Sort Puzzle (Pin Jam 3D), Halloween Jigsaw Puzzle Game, and Halloween Jigsaw-JigsawPuzzles are the exceptions to the long-lifecycle pattern. Each is fully themed around Halloween visuals, and each is a puzzle or jigsaw title where seasonal theming is additive to the gameplay rather than imposed on it. The bespoke seasonal approach isn’t dead, it’s genre-specific.

Of the 12 ads, only 7 have Halloween visuals on screen. The remaining 5 use Halloween purely in the ad copy or title cards. Hole Em All opens with “Enter a world of Halloween” over regular black-hole gameplay. PUBG MOBILE’s Halloween push, “Brainrot But Halloween Version,” is a seasonal copy swap on the Brainrot creative that was already running. The gameplay footage is identical to the non-Halloween version. The only difference is the title treatment.

The dominant creative strategy for Halloween 2026 isn’t “make a Halloween ad.” It’s “make a proven ad feel Halloween-adjacent through the minimum possible change.” For the top-performing creatives this month, that minimum change is often a copy swap. One title card, one line of overlay text, and an evergreen creative becomes a seasonal one for six weeks at near-zero marginal cost.

This doesn’t mean bespoke seasonal creative is dead. The puzzle and jigsaw titles in the top 12 are counter-evidence that fully-themed Halloween ads still work when seasonal theming is additive to the game’s own aesthetic. For everyone else, the appropriation-through-copy move is quietly becoming the default.

What this means for your UA planning

If your Halloween planning starts in October, you’ve already lost the window. The teams winning in 2026 started their Halloween iteration cycle in late August, which means the planning cycle starts even earlier.

The same compression is almost certainly coming for Christmas and Valentine’s (we will keep an eye out). If the three-year trend holds, Christmas creative that used to peak in mid-December will peak in late November by 2027, and Valentine’s creative that used to peak in early February will peak in mid-January. The teams building their 2027 seasonal calendar now should plan backwards from a season that starts six weeks before the holiday, not two.