10+ billion installs x Azur Games Review live: Launching hypercasual with long ROAS

uh we started maybe we were the first who started publishing games with flexible kpis to tell the truth it was the main secret like uh three years ago I remember that uh many Publishers they were hunting top metrics top kpis in order to launch Heats and so on and uh to tell the truth nobody wanted to work with us [Music] this is a no [ __ ] gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition Triple Threat expertise welcome to the two and a half Gamers the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles

let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously tune in now and stay two and 1 half steps ahead of the gaming industry hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of Two and a Half Gamers it's very special because today we are joined by Sergey from Azor games it's going to be a great episode but before we get started hi my name is Felix braberg I'm kuier and we are your hosts and today like I said we're joined by a very special person from a special company I'm excited for this because uh we attended a presentation from applovin on amplify in Korea a year ago and they showed the state of the hyper hyper casual market and the biggest slice of pie in terms of download was from one company and that company was aor games in terms of downloads this could potentially be one of the biggest Publishers in the world yeah we looking

yeah yeah yeah we are maybe uh I'll let you to introduce yourself Sergey and maybe you can give a little intro about about a s as well guys thank you so much for inviting me actually it was a funny case because I met phelix uh after the conference uh chilling near swimming pool and so on it was quite inal quite nice Felix had terrible hangover me as well but not so Terri well yeah my name is Sergey I'm almost five years at a games I'm head of In-House studio so I know all the pains about development and so on but I started in at other games as a publishing manager and now I publishing lead as well as doing Merchant acquisition deals publishing deals tell the truth doing everything doing trying to do everything and uh as much as I can and yeah when I joined azur we were like maybe top 15 maybe top

20 publisher and for last two or three years we are top one publisher due to downloads yeah so very nice to be here hope it will be interesting for our viewers and uh for you for me yeah for everyone so according to sensor Tower this sorry I just say this right so Voodoo has about 50 million downloads a month and according to censor Tower it say about 100 million for a zuro game so just want to put that out there for our listeners yeah yeah maybe uh you could just give an introduction to like Azor games as a company like what your guys' strategy is I know you said some interesting things to me by the pool when I met you but maybe you can just give an intro and then we'll take it from there yeah sure uh so initially we are not a publisher but in house studio and uh so we are doing midcore titles like we will speak maybe later about our world war heroes shooter it is our internal studio and um then I

I I don't even know how to start this actually good question good question but in general we are a publisher in house studio and we are very we are very open and flexible company uh we started maybe we were the first who started publishing games with flexible kpis to tell the truth it was the main secret like uh 3 years ago I remember that uh many Publishers they were hunting top metrics top kpis in order to launch Heats and so on and uh to tell the truth nobody wanted to work with us because we were like no names and yeah we had some decent amount of downloads but uh uh Voodoo and other Publishers they were maybe looking more preferable and uh all

developers were trying to make a hit with Voodoo and we just started publishing everything we can do everything we can publish and good for us we have very strong bi instrument our own bi instrument on predicts and we were probably the first on the market who started launching hyper casual uh with long Ross and we found out that come on even on some hyper casual titles LTV from day 14 till day 360 can be doubled for most of by the way for most of our hyper casual titles I mean mid performers I call them mid performers uh can you can you put this into a time frame s like when when was this when was this what year oh my God it was maybe when you can see the growth maybe from

19 by the way when I joined other games we started like acquiring more games publishing more games and you know what uh then we were the first who started uh iterate HP old hyper casual titles in order to prolong their life and what we see right now right now the titles we took like two years ago and they were uh low kpi trash games so I don't know how other Publishers call them but right now it is mid performers because we like iterate them not B uh we do our technical updates some content updates with our Studios sometimes inhouse and uh that's how we increased our portfolio uh I don't know any game uh from my team I don't know any game that stopped uh acquiring users from 19 from 2019 every

game uh I published uh it still acquires some users and uh it still has active UA campaigns at this kind of graph with the with the general you speak about some titles right there uh you can also take uh into consideration that we acquired portfolio of good job and of tasty peel and right there I can see that uh for example you may see funraise 3D it was not our game at that time it was Game of good job uh we also acquired some games of plender and uh it's it is also important when you see at all those games and on our uh growth uh from the perspective of last years it's difficult because you will see all the analytical instruments they do not show this transfer you know

yeah yeah it just shows as it is as your from the beginning as it is but on 19 we didn't have uh those titles 200 million downloads a month no way no way it is it is the pain of all analytical instruments because they do not show all those transfers and that is the issue but anyway if we see our growth in terms of like graphic I can see I can I can show you you know I can show you like it it is like that always up anyway uh with acquiring games we publishing our own games like I have a joke uh once you don't know how to make games you can buy games so we struggle guys we struggle we love games we really love games we really love uh our partners and uh we were first to publish flexible qpi games uh because we

saw the potential in our partners in our games and moreover right now we have several premium Partners who providing us with amazing games and we started Slow Down slow down slow down we'll get there we'll get there let me let me ask you should interrupt me because I so I usually do that with yakob all the time but let's just start it from your perspective right because these downloads share quite a big story uh asor is a Hy hyper casual uh publisher right can you kind of explain what's going on right now in the hyper casual market and explain kind of your outlook for the future because you know the popular term is the hyper casual is dead not really in Decline let's say most of the companies the big guys are switching I heard this phrase uh four years ago that hyper casual is dead I swear four years ago there were a lot of takes uh from uh big Publishers and the cool guys

hyper casual is dying hyper casual is dying now he now it is also dying you ask me what's happening uh it is dying as always but we anyway see that it acquires downloads but okay if you don't joke I will tell you uh hyper casual finally as the whole mobile market faces the crisis since ecpm is the only like Health indicator ecpm it is who who don't know our VI your uh it is cost uh for 1,000 impressions in your game and it is the only uh metric that important uh if we speak about monetization potential and so on like the core metric and it faced just the market rules because uh during covid we saw a tremendous increase in ecpm because like uh those Impressions

where advertisers were ready to pay for them and it boosted a lot e CPM uh but everything within Market loss like we have demand we have like Supply and right now we see that demand is not so high actually but demand but uh demand not so high but Supply is crazy you see a lot of titles a lot of games try to sell them Impressions actually the market loss work for ecpm uh the same way right now we just see that competition is crazy competition is crazy the volume of the whole Market is not growing the way uh the way I see new games grow because we still have all titles uh who that Acquire downloads we still have new titles and uh what about the CPM right now it

is decreasing yeah uh and the competition is growing the quality is growing so actually what's going on competition happens you know competition finally happens well that's what's going on on the hyper casual actually just briefly if we speak so does that mean uh you guys are going to make a transfer to hybrid casual or is that the solution um you know like hybrid casual it was always what uh everyone tried to reach I mean uh everyone tried to uh attract like longterm Revenue to to yeah to hit both uh like Ina revenue and AD Revenue if they can because I remember that even three or four years ago there were some such called hyper casual titles but we strong up when it is you know it is a problem of definition uh I

see that there are some games that may be called hybrid casual but it is core domain it is very well made games with a lot of content and uh so on so I don't know what is hybrid casual like the methods of monetization probably but it is not General tell them tell tell them our definition our definition is that hybrid casual is more of a revenue profile than a genre or or game kind of a system setup it's more of a some a game that makes most of the revenue usually through ads like more than 50% but then the other half which is from 40 to other 50% is made by iips which by the definition means that the game has much more stronger retention profile and and monation profile it's very strong in up share by the way as for me 40% of in up share it is not hybrid casual it is like casual or even core domain because you

know uh as for me from my perspective of view I see that uh mobile G mobile games Market is ocean and uh you may you may feel that you understand what's going on but uh only those who dive really deep they understand how deep it is and how many things we don't know actually and to tell the trth we pretty deep don't don't get me wrong look look and uh because when when I talk to developers external developers uh they telling me we want to do hybrid casual and uh I answered them okay what you know about hybrid casual how many uh in up share you going to have and I always receive qu like something like maybe 60% maybe 50 maybe 40 like it varies so critically but as for me from what I see that uh starting from 20 20 to

40% of Ina Revenue it is like something like hybrid uh casual because actually a lot of cool titles even idle RPG very trendy generes for me I love this gener Idol PG basically uh it shows tremendous amount of inap Revenue like about one a lot of titles is 1 million up Revenue but I know because I talk to guys directly I know the numbers and for most of them X revenue is about maybe 50 or 60% so they earn even more uh but but as well one problem I see uh developers uh don't know how much games can earn they see 1 million in up revenue and they think that the game uh like earning the same sum not profit but it may

vary it may VAR critically so Rema do you maybe want to ask your game design questions I think that's a better segue into the whole thing cuz I guess let's maybe let's maybe jump from the portfolio perspective uh into like U some numbers and benchmarking there and then we can jump like I definitely want to talk about the Slime Castle game which is very very interesting and it pretty much fits into into our Christmas prophecy for those who know so maybe you you heard about that also Sergey but uh yeah regarding the just the portfolio so as we see as yeah Felix mentioned you're making more than 100 million downloads a month Revenue wise IP wise it's something like I don't know three million but again this by Rise because it's a sens to data if you're this size I'm just saying I would expect their daily ad Revenue to be anywhere between a million to a million four but Cy doesn't need to comment on that but that's what I would expect it to you mean you mean you mean total revenue Revenue daily revenue daily revenue

maybe even more maybe even more okay there we go yeah um yeah can can you define Serge just like by estimate how much kind of Revenue is coming purely from hyper casual games meaning games that are making like I don't know 90% 90% driven by I revenue and then the rest of the portfolio such as the midcore titles or the Casual ones in general actually in general uh come on guys if I tell you you will know the numbers but okay uh in general I see that it rise and our Ina share is about anyway maybe 10% maybe even lower yeah we have some Ina titles we have some cool we have some cool titles but still our inup share from total revenue is uh uh let's say let's say less than 15% okay that's enough for us that's that's that's that's like very very good

definition so yeah we have some cool titles but still uh we have a lot uh revenue from ads monetization and we really love it we know how to work with it once again we were the first on the market uh who started launching the games in very long Ross hyper casual games I mean it is from my perspective of you maybe I'm wrong but anyway I I was in closest touch with the industry during 192021 when I was working as a publishing manager and talking directly to Studios how they work with Partners what Target metrics they have what draws they have uh what bi instruments they have and uh and I understand that yeah it seems like we were the first who started launching hyper casual in Long RW uh because we really see potential in

that monetization it will never die uh yeah now it faces turbulence but anyway what what are the metrics you actually look for right now right now we try as everyone to make more launches to make more stable launches with uh good strong long-term retention right now we don't look at CPI at all uh we finally switched to the face when all the experience we accumulated uh in games in PC games in midore titles uh in casual titles we finally finally uh trying to do unique uh cool titles not to try rethink something but to do I call them I call them just unique games not another uh attempt to rethink someone for example our recent title Bonker Wars it is RTS

game uh looks similar to mushroom wars but with its unique uh and Charming setting but we don't look at CPI we mainly look at day one retention day seven retention as everyone it's about ra Target because we hear a lot of times from the big guys like they have a ra Target for instance like 120 days 150% R would you have something similar as for definition more F basically we are more FX even lower yeah it can be even lower we anyway see the potential and uh uh it can be even lower for example uh slime Castle you showed us uh it was rejected as far as I know by several Publishers and but we saw longer Ross and uh good numbers there and uh okay the same situation by the way was with our worms Zone it is one of the

biggest our titles it has about 500 million downloads or even more uh right now and it still requires a lot downloads and it it performs perfect uh it was also rejected by several Publishers five years ago just because it had bad metrics such called bad metrics but bad metrics were only in United States what about worldwide it was perfect and moreover there were times when around uh like maybe 5% of the whole Indonesia were our da it was our daily active users around 5% of the whole population of Indonesia so it is strong stuff you know and just just going back to this retention like is it the classical 40 3050 like the day one day seven and day 14 like or what is it looking at un unfortunately I will not tell you anything new there uh but the

only difference is that we still very flexible because we love games we love when Partners uh earn cash with us as as well as we we also love earning money and uh to to tell the truth we can be flexible and that's why we try to give a shot to everything and to see what's going on on the one hand maybe let's let's sorry let's turn the other way around so if you say you're flexible what's the what's the point when you stop being flexible and you say like this is outright not part of your you know publishing um peline when we do such a called stress test when we make a test with a tremendous amount of downloads of AD costs like increasing ad costs around maybe at least 1K daily at least 1K daily and we see that we don't uh our kpis are not matching with our understanding ing of how game May

perform for example we see Idol RPG and we see that uh uh for example day seven is uh 50% Ross for example we understand okay maybe not but for example if you speak about time managers games is a general of time managers uh like cooking games and so on uh it can be so it can be like day seven even 50 and it will it will have Ross of one and a half years as a strong casual title mainly with ad monetization but it will work out you know I know a lot of time managers that build mainly on ad monetization and they do have they have Ross like one and a half years as the Casual titles is amazing in a but that's basically like normal casual

title like you know cook and stuff like that but normal casual title normally provides you with a decent amount of inapp if you speak about classical time managers it's more about ad monetization uh so in that way we are flexible we always see and try to uh understand our expectations and our understanding of specific genre and of specific game we test whether it is something that may show us LTV higher than CPI anyway uh we work in this parad so basically profitability is the main goal if I understand correctly uh at least if you speak about flexible and uh uh low margin but stable titles at least uh 12% uh it is what we can give a shot maybe even 10 it depends how how much U budget you usually need to spend to be

like yeah this is good this is bad it also depends on the general look we have a lot of hyper casual titles we acquiring right now hybrid uh casual we have midcore if we speak about hyper casual uh suchal mid performers it's about maybe 15K daily 15K daily it is mid performer maybe 20K uh Heat games in hyper casual it's about 30 35 50 uh K daily or even more you know if you if you may spend more you will spend more so of course the more the more the better if we see that Ross still good for us uh what about casual titles hybrid casual core and so on it varies critically you may have very high margin game but uh you can't scale it up it remains only like 3K daily it's it's very high

margin uh it is what we see for a lot of shooters by the way a lot of Shooters suffer from that we have strong expertise in the shooters and uh you may keep them nice at low budget but uh once you scale it you can't compete with the biggest uh fishes on this market and keep low so it is the matter sorry do I get it right that that is basically the strategy behind the two world like mod strike online and world war heroes basically which are I guess I don't know if you acquire those or build those yourself but one is well one launched 2016 the other 2018 and they are pretty much pretty stable performance in the portfolio Legacy Legacy it is the first titles like one of the first titles and uh yeah it is what we trying to do there we always like uh looking for nice so

the best uh proportion of organic we have of add costs we have and of course Ross but anyway the we developed the projects and uh in the Autumn we will have kassing collaboration for world war heroes uh I cannot reveal any details but we still doly Bops there and in in the Autumn somewhere in September or October uh it's going to be very cool event and very cool collaboration so stay in touch sounds good maybe it's something like Sabaton or something I hope so uh I've seen that all the time on war gaming portfolio anyway so if I get it right those are like two legendy titles all together making like 1 million in IPS a month pretty much and then there are other games we talk about which are stuff like Kingdom Clash uh tank stars and battle

lines which are let's say uh newer kind of M hybrid Mish titles if I understand correctly tank stars is something that is following up on bow masters from legendary looks it was also acquired it was acquired legendary yeah right now we do everything in house we took the games for our iterations for our uh live Ops and uh like right now we trying to boost them by our by our own mhm okay and then battle lines if I get it right this is something kind of closer to like art of oh sorry not not this one it is puzzle RPG yeah this is closer to Empires and puzzles if I understand so there's like puzzle on the bottom and fight happens on the top which is again uh puzzle RPG and then the other title uh sorry which was it Kingdom Clash yeah this one reminded me a little bit of art War Legions where there's like M Mass battle interesting stuff about those games art

of four and our game uh it is in house development by the way uh and uh of course initially we tried to uh rethink Art of War uh but what's funny is that uh they see some cool uh features from our game and now Implement as well so they're copying you now okay if I'm not mistaken I'm not I'm not going to like declare about it but uh the funny fact that uh our guys probably were inspired by AR 4 uh but some features when I discussed with producer of Kingdom Clash that yeah some features were taken in Art of War from our game so okay it is still it is still in soft launch it is what you see soft launch already making 10K a day in I it it is soft launch guys yeah okay because tank stars that is making something like like 2K 4K but it

is all title it is all title andle we struggle right now with that and then the uh the battle lines this is again making something like 3K a day also we it is still in the preparation stage like we took this game for publishing and uh as far as I know it is not uh it is not a global launch yet yeah yeah okay so let's let's get to the main main main thing which is the slime Castle game which if I understand correctly will uh in a few months show up on my radar which is 33k IP Revenue a day after two months after two months live yeah after two months live or something it's pretty recent title actually because it says here it's launch May 4th so basically just few weeks out and as as I said it's pretty much a iteration on our Christmas propery what we said during Christmas Eve last year when we C Dole Magic versus slime yeah where it's a tower

defense without the road yeah and actually you or let's say yeah we can talk about the development but it's a very very nice iteration here because what happened and we covered it on the PO few months that uh the guys from doodle magic actually copied themselves and create bang bang Survivor which just make 10 times more Revenue but this seems like finally a proper itation for Western Market whereas the game play is now sideways it's not coming from top to bottom that's a giant iteration which probably was done because this is not a r Glide game this is something more of like an let's say modification of idle RPG whereas instead of choosing abilities between the waves you are actually kind of doing this kind of Rog light idle RPG run where you slowly upgrade the abilities of the Slime and I mean in a lot of vectors not only during the game play but also outside of gameplay in into the meta which just pretty much moves the things around so

if I upgrade my attack to let's say I don't know 500 the starting upgrade cost will stay the same but it will push me higher and higher and I'm always kind of moving into the waves further and further uh regarding the progression if I go here again this was streamlined because the game uses I think even more streamline inventory than the usual Survivor iio Where We Are D here we are where we just have four slots usual attack on the left side Health on the right side with the classical merge gacha so again streamline from Western audience this screen literally comes from Legend of SL if I'm right this a one-onone copy right yeah ah not oneon-one it's kind of very very similar where you have these like different Rarity slimes which means that there's still more slots than the inventory themselves because you also have the Slime by the way amazing move with the offers here where as you progress through the game there's like

you know all these features unlock because when you start the game there's nothing here which is like the unfolding is pretty nice that that like I'll really give you that but this I never seen before where literally an offer comes up but before the offer it says new feature unlock the feature is the offer basically why not yeah it's great because it nicely kind of fits into the feature unfolding whereas after you level up like there's new features coming on so on and by the way this new feature it's called an offer so so that's there and there's like the usual kind of liveops kind of hubby meta play past into it that's really good there's the usual kind of gacha uh which I think is very very nicely done again much less better for the Western rodians than the usual kind of the thing that basically doodle magic and the bang bang Survivor has where you have six inventory slots with each of them having five gems therefore like you need to like merge 30 gems and so on is a giant hassle so this looks much better and do I get the right this is currently the game with the biggest IP Revenue per day in your

portfolio right now yeah if you speak about already launched uh yeah because we have some cool stuff to be prepared uh we do a lot of uh right now cool games in house uh but right now from what we have launched uh if we speak about inapp yeah for sure it is like our main title right now in terms of in updated Revenue but let's see let's see because uh we right now talking with a lot of cool Studios and deel develop a lot of cool titles actually as everyone I I like what's going on actually because the games are becoming uh more deeper more uh like similar to what we receive from Indie uh games from Steam and by the way uh from what I see it is strategy of voodoo they just uh take a lot of cool mechanics from Indie Games so from Steam and try to adapt to

mobile as I think that was the whole point behind whole iio where it was like on in a game on Steam that wasn't even released and it was taken from the trailer as the mechanic yeah and the same stuff what happened with survivor. actually they took the whole balance uh they took everything from Vampire survivors like even the balance even the number of damage uh you deal uh to enemy is uh if I'm not mistaken I don't know how now but I compare the balance like they they switch during development because it was actually two years in soft lunch the original Survivor I game look completely different but original yeah originally it was just the same but by the way what about slime Castle what about mechanics itself nothing new there uh it is like I don't know whether you guys know uh such a game the tower it is radial radial Tower Defense the tower you may right now like try to find Z Tower uh it is made by a studio from

United States Tech 3 probably I don't remember exactly uh the name yeah amazing tower defense game God it is amazing Tower Defense radial uh simple setting but quite charming and actually the main tower defense principles are from here uh mhm but not radio as you mentioned it is from uh like left to right yeah yeah sideways basically and can you talk a little bit more about development of this game so do I get that right that this is done by in-house team or external team or it is external team more moreover the Chinese and uh like uh it is our first Chinese studio and uh it is external Studio it is what I can tell you right now that's that's great like I don't think so there's much kind of U

movement coming from east to west regarding publishing Chinese people or Chinese developers in the west uh by the way we also trying to work more closely and we are discussing right now several deals uh not only publishing but Merchant acquisition with Korean companies and because I really love Korean mobile Game Dev it is amazing I vouch to that I really love them too what they do in Mobile it is absolutely amazing really and uh not only Idol RPG but Battlers like you can just mention dungeon and fighter currently which makes you know how many millions for sure and of course of course we see right now joinet uh phenomena with mushroom wars with uh Legend of mushroom I'm sorry Legend of mushroom or with their survival Arena uh I don't remember Survivor Zombie IO

zombie IO yeah like amazing phenomena but anyway Korean game development in average quite high performance and uh uh quality but it is because when I talk with them they all have 20 years of experience in Game Dev and I'm like crazy every time every time I reach those guys who make all those cool games they have 20 years of experience in game dep oh my God how did you by the way even find them or like how this happen because do you think like it was they were kind of pushed a little bit by the local forces as they have struggle publishing stuff there because of the government ISBN legislation actually uh it's not a big deal uh to to to do a deal but to reach out is a problem because they do not normally use LinkedIn as we do and social networks y yeah they're quite closed and uh for

example what about me I have to ask my friends from there to do some uh intro uh good for me I have some friends uh in Korean game dab and uh I hope to acquire more and I will be at pan uh gar this year as for me maybe one of the coolest conferences that oh yeah we were there last year also was pretty good yeah are you also coming to China Joy this month uh not me but my team guys from my team they will several guys we will also be there we'll be there cool cool cool can you uh open up the creatives because I kind of want to shift a bit to chat about UA y yeah sure because I'm ma because I'm the second best UA manager never run a UA campaign but say he's out of town today um basically if you take out all types is takeout we only looking at videos uh

basically uh there's a lot of concept here that we discussed on our last episode where we're discussing Creative Concepts our question was kind of just around like what is your creative process and how do you come up with creatives uh to use because it's such an important aspect of mobile UA actually mainly uh we just look what other guys do and we try do better or repeat the same uh like we anyway start with our own own benchmarks uh with our bench creatives um mainly started from like from what we see going on the market and then try to do iterations and improve improve we actively use AI really actively both for development and for creatives uh right now we are in the phase when all our artists uh they right now teaching how to they are taught how to use Ai and uh so actually as every

big publisher we have the same processes like creative teams have brainstorm sessions uh they explore what's going on the market and uh we have a lot of motion designers and uh we do a lot of creatives and test them like you know it's a tough job but uh do you have a central creative team or like within Studios or within genres or how does it work yeah we have a lot of different teams they are divided like we call it groups like group a group b Group C and so on and different groups they have different uh games due to genre due to Priority maybe and they work within this structure uh so we have the structure like uh there is a game produ there is a creative producer creative producer has in team about five or six motion

designers and we have a lot of teams like that to tell the truth we have uh about maybe 50 about 60 or 50 motion designers only all together Al together maybe even more not yeah which channels for UA are you running right now like what's working good what's not working it's not a secret historically like we are very strong on applo on Google minr uh what about new games like slime Castle uh you will see soon new channels it is what I can tell you right now but not revealing some details but right now right now it is YouTube uh which is normal for Idol PG right now it is Facebook it is applo it is all the standard uh uh hyper casual and hybrid casual public your media sources but uh

we will see soon very soon New Media channels and yeah we so if you take us funny [Laughter] creative creative guy that's not something we probably look from someone that's what so get that straight so if you take out Google and appin uh what are some other strong channels that you guys work with cuz uh yeah they kind of been killing it lately both of them actually you may to compare I a Google yeah once again I miss a question sorry look uh what about hyper casual uh like app uh probably more much much more than Google uh we we got a lot from Apple really a lot but we try to increase Google we always work with them uh with strategic sessions uh so we have workshops made by

Google to us and we always try to improve uh performance on this channel and uh it is increasing we growing and uh we like both I can't it depends on the genre it depends on the games but in general since we are hyper casual mainly publisher and our mediation is upload uh like uh we mainly get downloads for hyper casual titles from applo if you speak about are all are all your titles on Max or do you also put a certain percentage on other mediations to compare and kind of hold their feet to the fire as far as I know we test but uplo our mediation right now yeah okay cool I I don't see any reasons um why it may like change change soon maybe I don't know but right now yeah right now do you want

to put up pull up Rollins unless just compare some of these creatives to actually Rollins like a big hyper it is my it is my team by the way Rollins amazing title oh cool okay how's the name once again r o l l Rollins a n c yeah there it is we also have action balls but the same title but Rollins it is in a realistic setting and uh it is reworked in terms of physics and it it requires a lot of users it spans good right now we spend about uh maybe 30k daily or 35 something like that it's pretty nice for hyper casual title and yeah it is the title it is semi realistic setting there's this there's this new trend that I keep hearing about that like creatives are done with like in engine ing game gaml and then there's like a real world background we did that stuff with our stack Ball even three

years ago and it performed amazing it performed amazing it is best practices by the way one more thing about our marketing team uh we have some best practices from other genres from other games and we try to test the first first of all we want to try to test uh best practices from other titles for example this uh back realistic background it is what we did with stag ball uh and what we do with stag ball for several years and it works amazing right there it works as well yeah okay for some no but works I'm a bit curious actually like so you're one of the largest you are probably the largest publisher in the world like how do you evaluate new ad Partners like in on the medi on the monetization side like is it bonus payments Word of Mouth like cuz I'm not sure all netw Works can afford the bonus payments that you would be asking

for uh you know you know the St Felix know to tell the truth right now we are more focusing on uh increasing our in-game metrix and uh we are not looking actively for new partners like we are reached out by many of them and we are very careful we test sometimes uh uh even without bonus uh we are open to test but um we haven't uh yet like switched or increased dramatically uh someone in our portfolio of AD Partners cool and another really hot topic I guess on ad monetization is the use of skip it or the ability to like pay to skip rewarded ads voodo is doing it s's doing it what's kind of

hisor take on this is it a good thing to pursue or is it you know it is a matter of the whole composition of the game and uh skip it skip is just uh as a solo actor we tested them for our portfolio they don't work well so we decided not to uh not to put efforts there because as a solo actor it doesn't work it is the whole composition the whole looking feel of the game like for example the game like slime Castle uh it will work probably uh for game yeah for games like uh uh Kingdom Clash uh tank stars and uh some other titles probably as well but what about St ball uh or Rolland from our perspective it will not work it

is about the whole composition the whole look and feel of the game and uh of course you may put to all games the skip it and you will increase in up revenue on two or 3% but uh we would better add new content new mechanics and increase at LTV uh 10 or 15% you know it is by the way our strategy what we are doing right now with old hyper casual titles we are not trying to fool ourselves we understand that most of the games are just hyper casual by the whole philosophy they were created as hyper casual uh if you put a lot of mechanics a lot of meta gameplay and so on it will not become hybrid casual you know uh it is about the H composition so since we know this basic understanding of the

game for example rolance we will not try to do rolance hybrid casual we are working on filling we are working on content and uh we boosting ad monetization very well as well as state iio state iio one of our biggest title as well in hyper casual uh it is very high margin very high margin product up jaob yep and uh we also we increased critically LTE like by doing ab tests by adding new features adding new content but it is hyper casual do you segment users as well like showing different types of users different ad experiences or is it all the same because it's hyper casual uh no actually we do segmentation

like uh country uh uh sex and uh payments possibility to do payments look look alikes uh we do like three groups it is basic stuff we test it normally we test it for example rolands it is uh not a female game but action balls the same game but another setting it is uh more about like uh proportion the same uh we always so you play you play around with the cool down timers on intertial and like when you show rewarded ads or like what kind of segmentation is you actually do yeah as well as well we do such kind of ab tests uh via remote configs and uh we test those things but once again I

call it small twixs it is small twixs like the timer of intertial we're trying to do big iterations to do big steps really to tell the truth um it is not widespread practice for us uh to do small tweaks like uh interstitial cool down and so on for us it's better to focus on big steps and when we understand that uh our backlog for iteration is fulfilled yeah we have some time or maybe when big iteration is preparing by developer yeah we may like uh test some small stuff can you can you talk a little bit uh about the studio setup basically in a way that how much if you could pretty much categorize it into percentages how much percentages or let's say how much of the developer team percentages are external internal and the big question of course do you have a core team that only works on features and you know not

games per se but like these kind of internal tools that help all the companies in the port all the yeah companies and external developers in the portfolio uh we have a core team uh we have in-house team dedicated several in-house teams dedicated to the games we acquired for example uh games acquired by from legendary or from good job games uh uh but we acquired not uh full games by good job some of them we still have publishing contracts and we pay royalties to Partners so we acquire right to publish to tell the truth and uh but uh we still uh acquire even our old titles some our old hits are already Acquired and we do them we iterate in house I can't really tell you uh number of teams because once again when you have from 500 till 1,000 something in

average pretty big buffer yeah uh big anyway anyway it is a big uh team and we have different managers I have my team I have uh strong in-house team around 30 people and we do several stuff we do both uh iterate uh some titles that attached to my team we create uh new title for example if you speak about hybrid casual domain uh it's normally for Prototype stage one game designer two or three developers uh one artist uh one game producer and uh it is like a normal uh Team for one prototype in hybrid casual and the time frame is what something is like one to three months two two three sometimes even four it depends on the gener when it is a mixture of uh uh a lot of layers of game play uh it

may took even up to half of the year we have even such titles in development right now uh we reworked we reworked a lot the whole business philosophy uh we still have a lot of resources to work with external Studios to tell the truth I can't evaluate because in our slack there are 4,000 uh members including in external Studios uh and their employees with most of them we don't work already but they still in hour slack uh but just for your basic understanding when I joined uh it was about maybe 1,000 uh with the external guys right now it's about like year four and uh it's pretty massive slack CH yeah I mean with guests I mean with course of course so what about the whole proportion we we do not have any how to

say any frames or any qpi for it and I can't even evaluate because uh if we see that publishing needs more cool producers game designers we try to find them and to increase the team as well as if we see that some team that made a good prototype they need a new me MERS we also try to uh enforce that team and hire more people we didn't have layoffs we only higher higher and higher uh we did some optimization yeah we fired some guys but we hire new one and uh to answer your question I can't evaluate the proportion to tell the truth but we have uh a lot of In-House teams in ouru more than more than 15 more than 15 different in-house teams that doing

different stuff that's what I can tell you and and do do you prefer to work with external developers or let's say do you prefer to take external developers in or work with them externally because some of the big Publishers that we talked to they literally told us that they're switching into rather than working externals acquiring the the developers full-time together with the game or by slow like step process but they prefer internal now because of the product KN how that it stays within the company so do you have a similar take or you just can completely okay with whatever the guys want or just external publishing is okay what's the stance cool cool question you know external publishing is always okay when you have amazing partner when partner understands everything they do good the problem is that amazing we always we always Struggle No our partners are amazing but we always struggle and uh we are we like uh acquiring knowledge with our partners together and uh we have some Rockstar

Studios really but from my perspective of view our competitors they have more Studios like that who don't actually need support product support of a publisher I know that uh our competitors they unfortunately have more such Studios but it is just historical fact it is how it is uh we struggle we acquire knowledge with our partners and of course it is as for me I'm a person I'm a external producer by my mentality for me much much easier to work with external guys but I also struggle I acquire knowledge I have in house Studio I I'm head of this studio and we do a lot of different stuff and we also try to make good question to ask the last one if you

have nothing else to add of course of course yeah so let's say I have a game studio is hyper casual Remo has a game studio is hybrid casual he's working on a game uh you're head of publishing when should we try to reach out to you uh what stage of development actually I always give feedback even on uh the stage of idea uh a lot of mistakes uh developers do on pre-production stage really a lot of developers they are shy they shy to reach out Publishers but yeah good for them you may be shy if you want to ask for uh Advanced payment for your prototype yeah it is like normally Publishers do not respond actively when they see that someone is trying to resp CFA to prototype model something like that but if we speak about the whole

ideation process if uh developers have some ideas it's better even maybe to be a little bit to use this tricky moment really it is inside for developers use this tricky moment even with me you may Reach Out publisher and tell them okay guys we have ideas we don't we do not need any advanced payments but we need proof of concept we need like uh uh we need your opinion about the the ideas we have if developer anyway ready to do by their own the game it's much much better to reach out someone and uh to discuss it and a lot of mistakes uh I see on this stage because uh developers they don't understand the whole progression of the game uh how much content it will be how monetization will work and right now it is especially important yeah everyone

tries to do hybrid casual game but they they don't but they don't but they don't understand what they will monetize what are you going to monetize that is the question to you guys uh and when you will speak uh with the publisher you have some chances to receive just for free some kind of thoughts and probably at least at least at least you will have some information and in the best scenario you may even find maybe some kind of advanced payment because yeah everyone says that pay to prototype model doesn't work and so on but anyway all the Publishers they still not in a very active way but they still support Studios as well as we do so don't be shy better Reach Out someone share the idea receive feedback and then decide what to

do with that feedback if you like feedback and if you anyway do game by your own and if you like feedback you may finish the game and go to this publisher and test the game what about us if we see potential at least at least small potential but we see potential we support teams with payment we pay for iteration even if we understand the chances are low but still we see some chances uh we are ready to pay for iteration and this model works perfectly yeah unfortunately right now it's very difficult for a studio to receive uh Advanced payment for Prototype but for iterations it's not a problem I believe and for iterations you mean if I I if I understand it correctly so they come to you you run the test there's some kpis you still see potential so you them feedback tell them like we can support you one month of iteration let's try it again and then the whole can cycle

continues and you'll see how the test for being so open with us sharing so much uh yeah we'll love to have you on again in the future and talk about any other hit games yeah really useful hope it was useful man because it was really really nice like I I really like the really like the you know the the relax thing of like everything dying nothing's dying and know can you can catch us in China we'll definitely reach out to your team yeah my team will go we invite to our events uh we're doing EV I will introduce I will make an intro all right wow yeah perfect perfect perfect anyway anyway we will see each other soon thank you conference because yeah is what we do thank you very much Serge

thank you guys it was pleasure thank you byebye byebye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] he [Music]