Chicken Train: the concept that became a game

Cote d'Ivoire is a Tier-3 market: cheap traffic, thin patience, and an audience that will not sit through an explanation. Whatever we ran had to be understood in the first second and had to keep working while budget went up, because at these prices a bundle burns out faster than it can be replaced.

We split-tested several products before committing and picked TopX on one criterion: simplicity. A quick game with a mechanic a player grasps without instruction survives a Tier-3 feed; anything that needs a tutorial does not. Around it we built our own creative concept, Chicken Train, rather than running the operator's supplied assets. The engagement ran on CPA.

Four creative approaches ran in parallel, never one at a time: gameplay and tutorial video, UGC with a bonus and a withdrawal shown on camera, deepfake video using locally and globally recognised faces, and comparison formats. Three to four visual approaches were kept live simultaneously so that our own ads did not cannibalise each other and inflate CPM against ourselves. Scaling was gradual and lateral: budgets stepped up slowly and new campaigns launched alongside the old rather than one adset being pushed hard. Creative rotated continuously, because the audience fatigued fast.

October 2025: $554,203 in revenue at 65 per cent ROI, with an average install at $0.80. Click to registration ran 55 to 70 per cent and registration to deposit 40 to 45 per cent. Cost per install by format ranged from $0.60 to $1.10.

The concept outlasted the campaign. 100HP Gaming saw what Chicken Train was doing and built an actual game around it. That is the clearest evidence we have that the creative work is the product here: an idea good enough that a provider shipped a title from it.