Overview
What the game is, how it works, and why it teaches what a lecture can't.
The premise
Churn & Burn puts students in the seat of a mobile game publisher and forces them to make the same tradeoffs that real studios face every month.
Each round, players allocate resources across three competing priorities — acquiring new users, retaining existing ones, and extracting revenue — and then watch the math play out.
The three pillars
The game's engine is simple: acquisition brings users in, retention determines how many stay, and monetization decides how much each one is worth. The interactions between these three levers are where the learning happens.
Cheap acquisition floods the funnel with users who churn immediately. Expensive campaigns deliver fewer but stickier users — a distinction that only becomes visible across multiple rounds.
High retention compounds users over time but demands ongoing investment that strains the cash balance. Neglect it and your user base evaporates round over round.
Aggressive monetization generates impressive short-term revenue while quietly destroying the user base that produces it. The numbers look good for exactly one round.
The tensions
No single metric can be optimized in isolation. Improving one always affects another.
A1 gets you 500 users for $20K — but if retention is low, you're refilling a leaking bucket every round.
R4 keeps 80% of users — but at $10K/round, you need revenue to sustain it. Where does that revenue come from?
VS
M1 earns $80/user — but its -30% retention modifier means even R4 only holds 50% of users. Pair it with R1 and you keep zero.
M4 adds +5% to retention — but at $15/user, you need a huge base to cover costs. Can you afford to build it?
The late-game twist
By the time acquisition costs double in the late rounds and students must defend their choices against a valuation multiplier that rewards long-term health over short-term extraction, the fundamental dynamics of game publishing become hard to forget.
The game doesn't tell students that retention matters more than acquisition. It lets them discover it by going bankrupt.
Key metrics taught
How much you pay for each new user. Varies by channel, targeting, and creative quality.
% of users who return after a period (D1, D7, D30). The engine of sustainable growth.
Revenue generated per user over a period. Higher is not always better if it hurts retention.
Total revenue a user generates before they churn. LTV must exceed CPI for sustainable growth.