Aniimo Ads: Inside the Test Window Before Mobile Launch
Before its September 23 mobile launch, creature-catching RPG Aniimo ran 2,056 ad plans in 30 days, 99.8% of them on a single ad network across 51 markets.
Daniel Brooks
Creative Strategy Analyst
Published
Updated
A creature-catching RPG that launched on PC and consoles on September 16 — with mobile set for September 23 — has spent its pre-launch month running 2,056 ad plans in 30 days, and 99.8% of them sit on a single ad network. It is the extreme “one network, many markets” structure in our library, and it belongs to a publisher whose 4X machine runs on the opposite model.
Key takeaways
- Aniimo is the first non-4X title in its publisher line: Pawprint Studio, the development studio and publishing label backed by FunPlus, launched the free-to-play creature-catching open-world RPG on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store) and consoles (PS5, Xbox Series X|S) on September 16, 2026, with iOS and Android following on September 23 — so everything in this breakdown describes a test-phase buy for a mobile version that has not shipped yet.
- The test is almost perfectly concentrated: 2,051 of 2,056 plans (99.76%) run on Admob, with YouTube (8 plans) and Applovin (5) as rounding errors. FunPlus’s own 4X accounts do the reverse — Tiles Survive! puts 76.3% of its plans on each of Meta’s four surfaces across ten networks, and Foundation: Galactic Frontier runs 88.1% on the Meta four.
- Coverage is broad even though the channel list is not: 51 markets, led by the US (32.7% of plans) with 134 US-only exclusive plans, and France with 125 exclusives — the second-deepest single-market pool despite only 13% coverage.
- Images, not videos, carry the test: roughly 79% of window creatives are static images (1,588 vs 432 videos). Only 28 creatives (1.4%) are flagged as reinvested, so nearly everything running is a fresh cut.
Data scope
All delivery figures in this breakdown come from CreativeScope and describe Aniimo between August 22 and September 21, 2026, on a rolling 30-day window. Counts describe tracked ad plans and creatives — not spend, installs or conversions. Because the mobile version has not launched, nothing here is a performance result: it is a picture of how a publisher chooses to test a user acquisition funnel before the storefront door opens. Launch timing and platform facts come from the game’s official launch announcement of September 16, 2026.
One identity note: CreativeScope and the store listing credit the game to Pawprint Studio. The studio’s own launch release describes Pawprint as “the development studio and publishing label backed by FunPlus,” which is how we refer to the relationship here. This breakdown makes no claim beyond that — no revenue, ranking or portfolio judgments about the wider group — and its product-line comparison in the next section is a delivery-structure comparison only.
Where Aniimo sits in the publisher line
Put the same 30-day window across the publisher’s tracked catalog and the contrast is immediate. The established 4X strategy titles run Meta-led, multi-network machines; the new creature-catcher runs a single-network test:
| Game (same window) | Ad plans | Creatives | Reinvested | Lifetime est. exposure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tiles Survive! | 10,206 | 3,068 | 1,326 (43%) | 620.1M |
| Foundation: Galactic Frontier | 2,468 | 1,584 | 594 (38%) | 299.7M |
| Aniimo | 2,056 | 2,015 | 28 (1.4%) | 124.9M |
| State of Survival: Zombie War | 1,283 | 935 | 373 (40%) | 137.7M |
| Sea of Conquest: Pirate War | 645 | 341 | 204 (60%) | 86.4M |
The channel column sharpens the point. Tiles Survive! covers ten delivery surfaces in the window, with Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Audience Network each carrying 76.30% of plans and Messenger another 41.70%; Foundation: Galactic Frontier puts 88.13% on each Meta surface across nine networks. Aniimo touches three surfaces, and one of them takes 99.76% of the volume. The reinvestment gap is just as loud: the 4X accounts re-run 38–60% of their creatives, while Aniimo re-runs 1.4% — a classic testing posture where nearly every live cut is a new hypothesis rather than a proven winner being scaled.
Delivery cadence: pulses, not a steady drip
New creative arrives in bursts. Inside the 30-day window, seven days each added 100 or more creatives, and the bursts themselves carry new plans almost one-to-one:
| Activity day | New creatives | New ad plans |
|---|---|---|
| Sep 3 | 208 | 209 |
| Sep 2 | 175 | 181 |
| Sep 13 | 168 | 168 |
| Sep 17 | 137 | 137 |
| Sep 12 | 131 | 137 |
| Sep 4 | 130 | 130 |
| Sep 1 | 103 | 114 |
Two markers frame the sequence. CreativeScope’s 180-day record shows the account’s first pulse on July 30, which predates every store launch by seven weeks — this buy started as a pure pre-registration play. And the September 17 pulse (+137 creatives) is the day after the PC and console launch, meaning the test cadence did not pause for the storefront opening. What happens after September 23, when the mobile version the ads actually point at goes live, is the next data point worth watching.
Channel structure: one network, almost entirely
Plan coverage across the window’s three active delivery surfaces:
Overlapping plan-target coverage; shares do not sum to 100%. Meta surfaces, Unity, TikTok and Mintegral carry no plans inside this window.
A 99.76% single-network share is rare at this plan volume. The usual reasons teams give for going all-in on one network — small budgets, narrow geos, rewarded-video-only formats — do not obviously apply to a 2,000-plan buy spanning 51 markets. The likelier reading is deliberate: Admob’s inventory (search, display, Play store-adjacent placements) is where pre-registration intent lives for an unlisted mobile title, and a single-network test keeps measurement clean while the funnel is still being tuned. The trade-off is concentration risk: if the network’s auction shifts after launch, the whole buy moves with it.
Markets: English-first spread with two exclusive pools
Fifty-one markets see at least some delivery. Ten of them are covered by more than 12% of plans — a wide, English-first net with an unexpected continental European tail:
Bar length scaled to US coverage share. Coverage is multi-attribution and overlapping; “exclusive” counts plans whose delivery-country set equals that single market.
The exclusivity map is where the structure gets interesting. The US pool is the deepest at 134 US-only plans — expected. France is the surprise: 125 France-only plans, nearly double the UK’s 63 and Canada’s 62, despite France ranking ninth by coverage. Somewhere in the test matrix, France is being treated as a standalone market with dedicated creative and plans, not as another row in a multi-country target list. Japan, meanwhile, shows the opposite: 255 creatives carry Japanese-language cuts (a full localization track, as the Spotlight below shows) but sit inside broad target lists rather than a Japan-only pool. The exclusivity map and the language map do not overlap — which is exactly the kind of thing a pre-launch test is designed to reveal.
Creative formats: images carry the test
Of the 2,015 creatives in the window, roughly 1,588 (79%) are static images and 432 (21%) are video — an inversion of the usual casual-RPG pattern, where video dominates. All 1,588 images run on Admob. On-screen copy across the sampled library switches between English, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese, and near-duplicate clusters (the same master cut with a re-cut hook or a different caption) are common.
The exposure ranking also says something about test maturity. The top of the heat table is held by early-August image creatives at roughly 820,000 lifetime estimated exposure each, while the freshest mid-September additions still sit near the bottom of the ranking in the low thousands — a test batch, not a proven set. With 1.4% reinvestment and the mobile launch still ahead, the library has not yet had a chance to compound winners. That is the defining difference from the reinvestment-heavy 4X accounts in the same portfolio, and it is what a healthy pre-launch funnel should look like from the outside.
Creative Spotlight: five cuts from the top of the test
The five creatives below are drawn from the top of the window’s exposure ranking — one mascot image and four videos that together cover the account’s three working languages and both of its template families. Every frame reference below was verified against the delivered files.
Spotlight 1 — The mascot close-up (highest exposure, image)
What it shows. A single fluffy white creature fills the frame, winking, one eye a glossy blue, purple paw pads raised toward the camera against a soft light-blue backdrop. No logo, no copy, no call to action.
Takeaway. The account’s highest-exposure creative is its most minimal: a character portrait doing all the selling. For a creature-collection pitch, leading with the creature itself — not gameplay, not the world — is the honest version of the genre’s promise, and at 512×512 it is also the cheapest asset in the library to produce at volume.
Spotlight 2 — The countdown run (Japan cut)
Hook (0:01–0:02). A character sprints down a dirt path toward a distant marker under the Japanese caption “制限時間内に目的地にたどり着けるかな？” (“Can you reach the destination in time?”) — the ad opens by proposing a race.
Body (0:04–0:16). A countdown reads 00:05 at 0:04 as the character glides across open water; at 0:07 a lightning strike darkens the course; at 0:10 a glowing white spirit creature waits beside the path; at 0:13 the player rides a purple creature across a golden plain. At 0:16 the caption “Passing Out” appears over a collapsed scene — the timer won.
End card (0:18–0:20). The Japanese “アニモ” logo over key art with store badges.
Takeaway. This is the library’s core video template: a self-imposed challenge with a visible timer, real traversal systems on screen, and a fail state shown honestly. The mechanics on display — gliding, creature-riding, weather hazards — double as a feature tour.
Spotlight 3 — The same race, re-cut for fourteen markets
Hook (0:01–0:02). The same dirt-path sprint, now under the English caption “CAN YOU MAKE IT IN TIME?” — frame for frame, the same footage as Spotlight 2.
Body and end card. The countdown, the lightning strike at 0:07, the spirit creature at 0:10 and the creature-ride at 0:13 all match the Japan cut. Only two elements change: the hook caption language and the end card, which swaps the “アニモ” logotype for the Latin “ANIIMO” wordmark at 0:18.
Takeaway. Two of the account’s top-five creatives are the same master with a localized skin. It is the most capital-efficient structure in the library: one capture session, one edit, and a per-market caption-and-logo pass. For teams testing across a dozen geos at once, this is the template for keeping volume high without multiplying production cost.
Spotlight 4 — The cinematic trailer cut (Portuguese copy, Chinese end card)
Hook (0:01–0:07). A dark, cinematic opening: small figures stand before a glowing purple portal ring at 0:01, then a purple winged creature unfolds through the light at 0:04 and holds a close-up at 0:07 — a tone shift from the gameplay cuts, closer to a launch trailer than an ad.
Body (0:10–0:16). The world opens up: two purple creatures cross a lavender field at 0:10, a blue cloud-whale swims through the sky at 0:13, and a round pink creature beams at the camera at 0:16 — the roster showcase in miniature.
End card (0:19–0:21). The Chinese-language “伊莫” logo with store badges.
Takeaway. This cut is a localization-stack curiosity: its indexed ad copy is Portuguese, but its delivery targets are Hong Kong and Taiwan and its end card is Chinese. Whatever the indexing quirk, the structure holds — one cinematic master, interchangeable end cards per market. It is also the only top-five creative that sells atmosphere first and mechanics second.
Spotlight 5 — The creature parade and the cross-platform end card
Hook (0:01–0:09). Creatures approach the camera one after another in a portrait montage: a green long-necked turtle-dragon wades through shallows at 0:01, a black-and-fire golem charges at 0:04, a round white blob bounces along a beach at 0:06, and a seal-like creature waves at 0:09.
Body (0:11–0:14). A red-and-black cat creature trots past at 0:11 and a blue turtle creature surfaces in a stream at 0:14 — six species in fifteen seconds, each framed like a introduction card.
End card (0:16–0:18). “ANIIMO — Next-gen Creature-catching Open-world RPG” over a mock search bar, with platform badges for PS5, Xbox, Steam, Android, the App Store and Google Play.
Takeaway. The montage is the purest “collection pitch” in the library, but the end card is the real document: it is the only top-five creative whose badges enumerate the full cross-platform plan — consoles, PC and mobile side by side. It is also one of the few creatives in the account flagged as reused, running as a 7-ad cluster across 35 markets in the launch-approach window.
CreativeScope take
Aniimo’s pre-launch buy is a controlled experiment: 2,056 plans on one network across 51 markets, 79% images, 1.4% reinvestment, and a creative system built on one master cut re-skinned per language. Set against the publisher’s own 4X accounts — ten-network, Meta-led, 40–60% reinvested machines — the contrast reads as intent, not accident. The structure to watch after September 23 is whether the single-network posture survives contact with a live storefront, and whether France’s 125 exclusive plans turn out to be a one-market test or the beginning of a geo-specific playbook.
Related reading
- The War for Survival ads breakdown — the opposite concentration play: four networks share the coverage while one network takes the exposure.
- Mystery Dumpling: Unbox ASMR ads breakdown — another account that puts most of its plans on Google inventory rather than Meta.
- Glow Fashion Idol ads breakdown — what a single-market exclusivity bet looks like when one country gets 298 exclusive plans.
Every number in this breakdown is queryable in CreativeScope. Pull the live plan and creative counts for Aniimo, split them by network or market, and track how the structure changes after the September 23 mobile launch — the data refreshes hourly.
FAQ
How many ad plans is Aniimo running before its mobile launch?CreativeScope tracked 2,056 active ad plans and 2,015 creatives for the game between August 22 and September 21, 2026. Only 28 of those creatives (1.4%) are flagged as reinvested, so nearly the entire live library consists of fresh test cuts.
Which ad networks does Aniimo use?Three surfaces carry delivery in the window: Admob covers 99.76% of plans (2,051), YouTube 0.39% (8) and Applovin 0.24% (5). No Meta surface, Unity, TikTok or Mintegral plan appears in this 30-day window.
Which markets does the campaign cover?Fifty-one markets. The US leads with 32.73% plan coverage and 134 US-only exclusive plans, followed by Canada (28.70%), the UK (27.48%) and Australia (19.75%). France is the notable outlier: ninth by coverage at 13.04%, but second by exclusivity with 125 France-only plans.
Is the game already released?Partially. According to the official launch announcement, Aniimo launched on PC (Steam and Epic Games Store) and consoles (PS5, Xbox Series X|S) on September 16, 2026, and is included in Xbox Game Pass. The iOS and Android versions are scheduled for September 23, 2026, with Mac to follow — so every figure in this breakdown describes a pre-mobile-launch test buy.
Who makes Aniimo?The game is developed and published by Pawprint Studio, which its launch release describes as a development studio and publishing label backed by FunPlus. CreativeScope’s own record credits the game to Pawprint Studio.
What do its top ads look like?Two families dominate: minimal character images (the top creative is a 512×512 mascot close-up with no text at all) and a 20-second “countdown challenge” video whose master footage is re-cut with per-market captions and end cards in English, Japanese and Chinese. About 79% of the window’s creatives are images.
Data notes
All plan, creative, network and market figures come from CreativeScope and cover August 22 – September 21, 2026. Country and network shares describe ad-plan target coverage under multi-attribution, so they overlap and do not sum to 100%; “exclusive” means a plan’s delivery-country set equals a single market. Lifetime estimated exposure is a relative delivery-scale signal for creatives active in the window, not a platform-reported impression count, and nothing in the tracked data describes spend, installs, conversions or revenue.
Launch dates, platform list, Game Pass inclusion and the Pawprint–FunPlus relationship are taken from the game’s official launch announcement of September 16, 2026, and trade coverage of it. CreativeScope’s download snapshot for the game is zero and its release-date field is a placeholder, both consistent with a mobile version that has not launched; neither was used as a launch-date source. Because the mobile version is unreleased, this breakdown makes no performance, conversion or revenue claim of any kind. The featured cover is an AI-generated illustration with no in-game assets or text.
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