Fishing Time by BGaming: 52% ROI in Malaysia

We had been working the live-fishing theme in Malaysia for months and kept seeing the same pattern: the audience responded to this setting. The market was ready. What was missing was a product able to realise that potential, with mechanics dynamic enough to hold a player past the first session. There was no benchmark to buy against either — the genre worked, but nobody had numbers on a specific release.

When BGaming shipped the Fishing Time crash release there was nothing left to doubt: a proven setting plus dynamic mechanics. We split-tested it across several products immediately, and one partner, TopX, started returning outstanding economics. After that, what to scale was not a question. The engagement ran on CPA rather than revenue share, and that was a deliberate choice: a fixed payout per first deposit gives a known margin on the day a campaign runs instead of six months later; the reporting that decides the income does not sit entirely with the operator; and player-value variance stays with the party that can actually influence retention.

As we scaled we kept reworking campaign structure. We tested OS splits, age and gender splits, geo-targeting inside Malaysia — not one of them beat Broad consistently. The single pattern that held across the whole volume was men aged 25 to 44. That segment moved through the funnel better and carried the strongest economics. We committed to three creative formats. Gameplay — video showing real play and a balance top-up — produced the best conversion to deposit. Emotion — big wins with simple storytelling — produced the highest CTR and the fastest volume. AI static — banners generated by neural nets — held volume through scaling without losing quality. Language versions mattered on their own: with localisation, campaigns stayed in delivery longer and rejected ads were replaced faster.

From 1 May to 10 July: 174,350 installs, 94,842 registrations and 28,311 first deposits — a 54.4 per cent install-to-registration rate and 29.8 per cent registration-to-deposit. Media cost of 742,865 dollars returned 1,131,843, leaving 388,978 in profit at 52.36 per cent ROI. Average first deposit held around 75 dollars, an install cost roughly 4, and the average CPA payout ran near 40.

Sometimes the key is not inventing something new but spotting a strong release in time, testing it fast and scaling before the window closes. Almost every hour spent building audiences was wasted — the product did the targeting. Speed of entry decided it: the gap between a genre proving itself in a market and the auction filling with competitors is very short.