EN
July 15, 2026
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When we acquired MyChips from MAF earlier this year, it brought together two teams that had both built businesses around the same core belief: that sustainable growth in mobile is all built on loyalty.
Now, with MyChips and Mistplay tech combining to power UA through the Mistplay Audience Network and monetization and engagement through LoyaltyPlay, we’re accelerating our growth to prove out that belief well beyond our traditional home of gaming.
To mark this new chapter, our CEO Tricia Han sat down with Riccardo Fuzzi, former co-founder of MAF and now Head of B2B Product and Engineering at Mistplay, to discuss what they have learned about building trust with players, publishers, and advertisers – and where Mistplay is headed now. Here are the key insights from that conversation.
Note: The MyChips technology acquired from MAF is now part of LoyaltyPlay for publishers and the Mistplay Audience Network for advertisers.
The history of tech is full of products that discovered their real audience through the process of building for the wrong one. When Stewart Butterfield and his team were working on Glitch – a browser-based multiplayer game that launched in 2011 – they had built an internal messaging tool to coordinate their own development team. Glitch struggled to gain traction and was shut down in 2012. But the internal tool the team had built for themselves became the foundation for Slack, one of the fastest-growing B2B software companies ever built, and a household name for anyone in the industry.
This story can be seen from the early days of MAF too, when the team originally built a product that looked like a consumer app but turned out to be much better suited as a developer tool. When the team launched their first Windows Phone product – an "app of the day" service that gave users one free app every 24 hours – they initially treated it as a consumer experience.
Over time, they recognized that developers were the real customers, which led them to reposition around that insight, unlocking an entirely different and more valuable product direction.
“We realized that if we focus on the wrong target, the product would lead to the wrong features.” – Riccardo Fuzzi
💡 Takeaway: Clarity about your actual customer – the one whose business outcomes you are responsible for – determines the quality of every product decision downstream. For Mistplay, that means holding publishers, advertisers, and players as distinct constituents with distinct needs, and building features that serve each of them deliberately.
The most durable businesses are often the ones that figured out how to make both user loyalty and revenue growth reinforce each other, rather than running them as separate initiatives. Starbucks Rewards is one of the clearest examples. When Starbucks launched its loyalty program in 2009, the goal was straightforward: encourage repeat visits. Today, Starbucks Rewards members drive nearly 60% of US company-operated revenue, and the program has become central to the company's financial model, and a gold standard for consumer loyalty programs in general. The loyalty mechanics and the monetization layer became the same layer.
The same dynamic has been building in mobile for years. Over the last decade, Mistplay has learned and proven that rewarded formats – where users opt into an experience and receive something meaningful in return – consistently outperform interruptive ad formats on the metrics that matter for long-term retention: session depth, return rate, and lifetime value.
The concept of the loyalty monetization platform (or “LMP” as Riccardo coins it) redefines what a performance product is responsible for delivering around that core concept. Where a standard monetization tool is measured by what it extracts from a user interaction, a loyalty monetization platform is measured by whether users return. That shift in success metric changes how the product is designed, how campaigns are structured, and how publishers think about the value of their user relationships over time.
"We are not building just a monetization platform. We're building a loyalty monetization platform. What we are selling is telling you how to get users back to your app." – Riccardo
For publishers working with LoyaltyPlay, this means a monetization layer designed to deepen engagement rather than drain it. For advertisers working with the Mistplay Audience Network, it means access to a player base that is already engaged, already trusting of the rewards ecosystem, and already motivated to try new titles. The loyalty foundation is what makes the performance layer work.
💡 The takeaway: Loyalty and monetization designed together from the start produce better long-term outcomes than strategies bolted together after the fact. In mobile gaming, rewarded experiences that deliver genuine value to players are the ones that drive the metrics publishers and advertisers care about most.
Even with one seemingly small change to the way a company serves its users can have devastating effects. Take Zappos for example, who briefly outsourced order fulfillment after the Amazon acquisition to streamline production, lower shipping costs, and (in theory) speed up order delivery. But as Zappos grew, they realized that outsourcing such a critical part of the customer experience was a mistake. Zappos’ recovery came from bringing fulfillment back in-house as well as making every employee – including the CEO – personally accountable for the customer experience.
“As an e-commerce company, we should have considered warehousing to be our core competency from the beginning. Outsourcing that to a third party and trusting that they would care about our customers as much as we would was one of our biggest mistakes.” – Tony Hsieh
That lesson can hold weight for any company in any vertical. And in the mobile app space, that transparency is something that you can build and weave through every piece of the customer lifecycle – from the very first ad (where 66% of players report churning from a game due to false advertising) to the attention and service that player receives if they interact with your support team.
In rewarded, that trust can be especially hard earned, as users can be skeptical about earning money for something as simple (and enjoyable) as gaming. For Riccardo, the Zappos story shaped a deliberate decision to invest in high-quality, internal user support at a time when the broader offerwall industry was earning consistently poor reviews on Trustpilot.
"If you are transparent and you explain to the user why something is wrong, you have [a better] chance to retain them." – Riccardo Fuzzi
That same rewarded wariness is something Mistplay has been navigating since our inception in 2015, and we face that head-on – with continuous social proof, ongoing app developments to improve the user experience, and a passionate customer success team to interact with our players day by day.
"Players absolutely need transparency around the system and the economies. That helps build more trust into the overall system and means it's a place that people want to be a part of." – Tricia Han
💡 The takeaway: Transparency is a retention strategy, especially in rewarded. Users who understand how a system works and feel respected when issues arise are more likely to stay engaged than users who feel managed or misled.
Games are inherently built around the mechanics that keep people coming back, with decades of experience building and refining progression systems, reward loops, and the feeling of meaningful achievement for users. In the last few years, the wider app industry has taken notice, and learned through experimenting with in-app gamification that users stay when they feel progress, trust the system delivering it, and see genuine value in their continued participation.
"There are three things that are really important for the player. One, it has to be fun. Two, they need to trust the system and the environment. And third, there has to be value for the player. Today's consumer is very savvy – they understand what is real and where they want to spend their time and what they get back." – Tricia Han
Mistplay's Sweepstakes program is one way that the value pillar becomes tangible rather than theoretical. Rather than leaving the rewards promise abstract, Mistplay went out and filmed real winners to show the community what winning actually looks like, and that it’s not something out of sight and out of mind. These are real people playing real games, winning real money, and it’s just one way that Mistplay continues to expand on that perfect balance of fun, trust, and value.
💡 The takeaway: For publishers and advertisers, the fun/trust/value framework is a useful lens for evaluating player quality and platform fit. Players who are genuinely engaged across all three dimensions –enerate better downstream performance than those acquired through mechanics that optimize for one at the expense of the others.
The next three to five years are a category-defining period for loyalty monetization in mobile.
Tricia's ambition for Mistplay is to become the number one UA source for mobile games and advertisers – delivering long-term ROAS at scale across all geos and platforms. For us, that also means continuing to evolve our app to be a best-in-class rewarded experience for players too, as Mistplay is truly built on a win-win-win ecosystem between advertisers, players, and publishers.
For Riccardo, the vision is that the LMP (the Loyalty Monetization Platform) earns its place as a recognized standard in the mobile advertising stack, standing alongside the SSP and DSP as an established category.
With MyChips technology now integrated into both LoyaltyPlay and the Mistplay Audience Network, the infrastructure to deliver on that vision is already in place – stay tuned on how these products evolve into the future by following us on LinkedIn.