East Side Games sees better performance with Creative IQ

Established in 2011, East Side Games started as an indie game studio in east Vancouver. Today, as part of East Side Games Group (TSX: EAGR), they’re a game developer, publisher, and technology provider. East Side Games enables creators to successfully deliver memorable mobile gaming experiences that players engage with every day. Through their proven tech kits and beloved brand partnerships, ESG’s games empower passionate fan bases to explore their favourite content in a fun, convenient medium, available in the palm of their hands.

Known for culturally inspired titles like RuPaul’s Drag Race Superstar, The Office Somehow We Manage, Squishmallows Match, Cheech & Chong’s Kush Kingdom, and Doctor Who: Lost in Time, the company runs a lean but prolific creative operation across multiple mobile game properties. The Growth team, which includes UA managers and a dedicated creative team, is laser-focused on building, testing, and scaling ad creatives that drive installs and revenue. Collaboration between teams and fast iteration is crucial to their success.

The best part is, they’re fans first, which makes ESG’s games and team work toward the same goal; to be inclusive and for everyone.

Before adopting Creative IQ, ESG’s creative review process was time-consuming, manual, and fragmented. Here’s what they were dealing with:

• Creative and UA teams were working in silos. Creative decisions were made without real-time performance insight.
• Creative reporting took 1–2 hours per game title. Data was manually pulled, cleaned in Excel, and shared via Slack.
• Teams lacked visibility into which creatives were driving results across different campaign types.
• With so many titles and tests running, strong-performing creatives often got lost in the noise.
• Creative strategy was reactive, not proactive.

East Side Games chose Creative IQ for one core reason: they needed a better way to analyze creative performance and turn that insight into action.
Creative IQ offered exactly that. CIQ’s Creative Gallery gave the ESG team a visual, intuitive way to see which creatives were working and why. It integrated directly into their weekly UA-creative syncs and gave both sides of the house shared access to performance data. No more delayed insights or gut-based decisions.

How it helped
Singular didn’t just reduce time spent on reporting. It changed how ESG worked. Here’s what happened:

• Instant visibility: What used to take hours now takes seconds. Instead of pulling reports and cleaning data, the team gets a real-time view of creative performance.
• New weekly rhythm: A dedicated weekly meeting was born out of Creative IQ. Now, UA and design teams review creative performance together and plan next steps collaboratively.
• More iteration, faster: With better data access, designers can now identify winning themes, tweak concepts, and test new variants faster than ever.
• Scalable wins: ESG reskins successful concepts across its game portfolio, applying winning creative formulas across multiple titles.

The impact on East Side Games’ creative learning and iteration process with Creative IQ was instantly clear:

With Singular, ESG moved from manual, delayed reporting to real-time, actionable insight. The result? A tighter feedback loop, better performing creatives, and a team that’s more aligned than ever. If you’re trying to scale user acquisition in games, take a page from ESG’s playbook: your creatives are only as good as the insights you build them with.