Driving Cross-platform Gaming Success with PC and Console Attribution

The gaming industry is moving at top speed, driven by the pursuit of broader audiences and higher revenue streams. As game studios aim to expand their reach from mobile, many are bringing their titles to PC and console platforms to meet the growing demand for seamless gaming experiences across multiple devices.
In 2024, the gaming industry's revenue was $187.7 billion and is projected to grow to $213.3 billion by 2027. PC and console gaming combined accounted for 51% of the revenue in 2024 and are expected to continue showing steady growth.
(source: Newzoo Global Games Market Report 2024)
Several key factors are driving this trend, including the demand for cross-platform compatibility, free-to-play monetization, and influencer & eSport streaming.
Players today expect a seamless gaming experience across PC, console, and mobile platforms. This growing demand has fueled trends like cross-platform play, cross-play, and cross-progression, which allow players to engage with their favorite games on any device, anytime.
By embracing these features, game studios can deliver the seamless, flexible experiences players demand, ensuring greater engagement and loyalty across all platforms.
F2P model has made games more accessible to wider audiences while opening up new opportunities for revenue growth. By offering flexibility in monetization strategies, developers can tailor in-app purchases to match player behavior and preferences, ensuring sustained engagement.
Games like League of Legends, Apex Legends, and Warframe have successfully adopted the F2P model, using it to maximize player lifetime value (LTV) and grow their user bases. As gaming shifts away from one-time purchases, understanding in-game player behavior across platforms has become essential for optimizing both engagement and revenue.
Platforms like Twitch and YouTube Gaming have turned gaming into a spectator experience, with influencers and streamers playing a pivotal role in promoting games. Developers recognize the importance of enabling streamers to create high-quality content, as this directly impacts a game’s visibility and popularity.
PC games like Valorant, Overwatch, and The First Descendant dominate streaming platforms due to their superior visual quality compared to mobile games. By making games more accessible for streamers, developers can attract larger audiences through influencer-driven engagement.
With multi-platform games now the industry standard for success, player journeys have become more complex. This underscores the importance of accurate cross-platform measurement as the foundation for user acquisition (UA), engagement, and monetization strategies.
In this post, we'll explore how to transform PC and console platforms as performance marketing channels, leveraging precise cross-platform attribution to accurately measure marketing impact.
PC·console game marketing extends beyond acquiring users; it involves securing high-value players, maintaining their engagement, and driving conversions. To achieve this, marketers need to require end-to-end visibility into the player journey, from discovery to in-game purchases.
Here are two key reasons why PC·console measurement is challenging and why it's essential.
Players discover games through a variety of UA channels, such as search ads, display ads, social media, streamer and influencer promotions, and email marketing. Accurate measurement is critical for identifying which channels are most effective at reaching and engaging target audiences, enabling marketers to optimize strategies and drive better performance.
As players actively switch between multiple platforms and devices, they follow diverse paths to install, play, and make in-game purchases, creating complex cross-platform flows that challenge measurement. Now, marketers need to understand player flow by actively tracking cross-platform UA and in-game scenarios.
Airbridge offers comprehensive cross-platform measurement, providing a unified view of user journeys across mobile, PC, and console platforms, from UA to in-game purchases. Conversion events from PC, console, and mobile platforms can be collected by Airbridge, allowing for seamless integration of these data points to optimize ad campaigns across all devices. With Airbridge, marketers can measure performance regardless of whether they have a dedicated marketing landing page for their multi-platform games.
Airbridge’s cross-platform measurement links ad clicks to in-game actions, giving marketers a clear view of the user journey to optimize campaigns.
To drive high conversion and engagement, defining and tracking key player interactions is the first critical step in optimizing cross-platform game marketing. To get started, consider setting up the following metrics to understand player progression and monetization potential.
Nexon utilized Airbridge's PC·console measurement to optimize the launch of The First Descendant. By providing actionable lower-funnel, in-game metrics, Airbridge enabled The First Descendant team to move beyond traditional upper-funnel metrics like CPC, CPM, and CTR, which are limited to branding and awareness.
With Airbridge, The First Descendant team gained comprehensive visibility into user journeys from ad clicks to downloads, in-game purchases, and conversions across both PC·console platforms from a unified dashboard. This insight allowed the team to rapidly iterate on new ad products, identify top-performing channels, campaign types, and creatives, and strategically allocate resources to attract high-value players. The First Descendant achieved success through the following strategies:
Since PC·console games primarily operate in a server-based environment, Airbridge integrates S2S APIs to track events accurately. For instance, when a player completes their first in-game purchase, marketers can send this data to Airbridge via API, enabling precise marketing attribution and campaign optimization.
Airbridge uses probabilistic attribution, employing statistical modeling to connect ad clicks with conversions across platforms without relying on cookies or device IDs. As ad-blocking and privacy restrictions increase, this method is becoming vital for providing accurate performance insights while maintaining strict privacy compliance.
Ready to level up your game marketing with Airbridge?