In 2019 I wrote that the coming privacy wall would quietly blind paid user acquisition — Apple killing third-party tracking, attribution data drying up, and the targeting edge that made campaigns predictable going with it. That was two years before ATT actually landed. The conclusion wasn’t that advertising was dead. It was that the advantage would move to whatever privacy couldn’t take away: store-page visibility, real relationships with the platform’s editors, and the data you own because it lives inside your own game. I’ve built every studio since on the parts nobody can revoke.