This year’s Gamesforum Cyprus brought together the themes the industry keeps circling, while adding just enough fresh perspective to make the conversations feel sharp. AI made its usual appearance, organic growth pushed for a proper seat at the table, and monetisation reminded everyone that complexity is now the default. What follows is a look at the clearest signals about where the industry is heading, drawn directly from the sessions themselves.

1. AI in Product and Game Dev: The Plot Twist Is That There’s No Plot Twist (Yet)

As expected, AI remained a major buzzword throughout Gamesforum Cyprus. While it’s making real strides in creative production, Jakub Remiar of 2.5 Gamers focused instead on its very real, very current role in Product and Game Development, showing where AI is already being used in live games and where it might still be falling short.

Highlighting some telling findings (like how Netflix added AI to its gaming strategy… and four months later their VP of GenAI left to start an AI gaming startup with the guy who made FarmVille…), Jakub wasn’t here to argue that the AI revolution isn’t coming and that we shouldn’t be capitalising off of it, more to explore when the next wave will hit, and what today’s early signals tell us.

He also underscored just how profitable AI tools have become in the wider app ecosystem. PolyBuzz (an AI chatbot) for example, ranks 10th among all AI assistants and pulls in a jaw dropping $2.5M in monthly revenue from 2.7M downloads. In other words: AI‑driven consumer products are already thriving and the opportunity for games is becoming impossible to ignore.

So yes, AI hasn’t delivered the big plot twist in gaming yet… but that is not to say that it isn’t already reshaping workflows. It’s speeding up 2D art, 3D tools like Rodin, Tripo, and Meshy are on track to make low‑poly assets a 2026 staple, and the AI‑plus‑playable wave is gearing up to supercharge production, NPC intelligence, and monetizable content. The groundwork for the real change is already being laid, and developers can start using many of these open‑source tools today to kickstart!

Jakub Remiar, Product & Game Design Consultant

2. Organic Growth can’t save a product that doesn’t want to be found

What quickly became clear from Alisa’s session is that discovery isn’t a channel problem, it’s an alignment problem. Product, ASO, and UA teams are still operating independently and in separate corners of the building, and Organic Growth is too often treated like the intern who ‘helps out’ rather than a core driver of discoverability and long-term growth. The core message? Organic Growth has to be treated as part of the strategy from day one, not just as an afterthought.

A key message from her presentation was the fact that organic growth can only gain influence from product teams in one way: data. Featuring uplift, ANR, ASO test results, keyword trends, user insights – this is the evidence which turns organic growth from a ‘nice to have’ into a necessity.

And if organic growth wants product to listen, it has to speak product’s language. This means understanding different genre quirks, lifecycle stages, player behaviour, positioning, and how product teams are actually prioritising.

To summarise, discovery works best when product and organic growth start behaving more like one team, and less like distant relatives. Alignment isn’t optional here, it’s the key to success.

Alisa Eren, Organic Growth Lead, Burny Games

3. Your Monetisation Stack Needs a Modernisation Stack

If this panel made one thing clear, it’s that ad monetisation isn’t broken. It’s simply outgrowing the tools built to manage it. Publishers are running bigger, more complex businesses than ever, yet their monetisation stacks are still behaving like they’re from a simpler era. The result? A lot of guesswork, patch‑ups, and hoping the algorithm is in a good mood that day.

The panel broadly agreed that the industry has made real progress (unified bidding was a genuine step forward, and the demand side is more sophisticated than ever), but publishers now want something more: control, transparency, and the ability to tailor monetisation to their actual audience. The studios that take ownership of their monetisation instead of outsourcing the intelligence will be the ones who race ahead.

A familiar tension resurfaced during the panel: the question of whether we are over‑optimising revenue at the expense of player experience. The consensus was that the issue isn’t ads themselves, but the spray gun method in which they are distributed. Treating a day‑one user and a two‑year loyalist the same is what creates friction. They revealed that real unlock is user‑level segmentation and showing the right format to the right players so revenue and retention rise together instead of competing.

Hybrid monetisation was the next pain point. Messy? Yes. Complex? Absolutely. But worth it? Definitely. The panel agreed that optionality is power, and no one wants to be fully dependent on a single platform.

Finally came the inevitable AI question. The panel’s take on it was refreshingly honest: most of what gets called AI in ad tech today is really just automation with better framing. Smarter rules, faster bidding, stronger ML on the demand side. Useful, yes, but incremental. The real shift is AI acting as an operator of the monetisation stack, not just an optimiser inside it.

Ultimately, the future belongs to studios that pair smarter tools with smarter thinking. Segmentation, optionality, and AI‑driven operations aren’t nice‑to‑haves anymore. They’re the new baseline.

Aliaksandra Tryfanava, Senior Monetization Manager, Easybrain
Dheeraj Matta, Head of Ad Monetization, Yodo1 Games
Ivona Pinjak, Senior Ad Monetization Manager, GameBiz Consulting
Quincy Williams, BD EMEA, CloudX