"With IDFA going away, it's a really scary thing for content creators, developers and advertisers," said Gamejam CEO and co-founder Christian Calderon.
The comment was made during a panel on 'The Effects of IDFA on hypercasual' at PGC Digital #4, which also featured Umami Games CEO Riley Anderson, BoomBit product and partnerships manager Heba Guirguis, Newzoo mobile market lead Tianyi Gu and independent business consultant Alina Gribanova.
"It's something that could have really negative impacts on the entire industry and ecosystem, both on the monetisation and user-acquisition side," Calderon explained.
"For me particularly, with IDFA going away is that without targeting on the UA side we are heavily reliant on the creatives that we use to reach out to users and advertise."
Apple announced that it would be changing its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) rules in June this year, which will now require developers to ask users for permission to gather their data across apps. The implementation is expected to arrive as part of iOS 14 in the first few months of 2021.
"Consumer-focused"
"I think that one good thing that is coming out of IDFA is that for consumers it's more like the whole market is moving towards a more consumer-focused," Gu commented on if there are any positives to this move.
However, Gribanova admitted that "developers are worried [about] how it's going to impact games they're launching" and therefore are trying to get games released sooner to beat the cut off.
Calderon stated that there isn't an "alternative" to IDFA for developers, since Apple has not offered another option and third-party tools may be in breach of the App Store contract.
He added: "I think how this will fair out is that the ones that are prepared (or are preparing) themselves for this structurally [and] how they structure their legal agreements with ad networks, partners… and how they are looking to protect their backends, these are the players that will end up winning in this type of environment."
TapResearch co-founder and COO Greg McCullough previously spoke about the impacts of iOS 14 IDFA changes on app monetisation.
PGC Digital #4 will run from November 9th to November 13th. To keep up to date with all of our coverage, check out the roundups here. There's still time to sign up - to find out more and book a ticket, head to the website.
