2.5 gamers x Live AM(F)A #2 - Ask Me Anything @ April 23 5 pm CET

should be live in a second should be live in a second but then you need to actually greet everybody oh we are live actually hey hello everybody hey it's five people waiting uh six watching amazing thank you very much everybody to join our live podcast again hey hey you go I can see all your faces okay you can uh you can talk and I'm just gonna make this LinkedIn live work do the magic you never do the intros you do the intro exactly it's cool I do the intro okay yeah W so hello everybody special hello

uh yeah we talk about what you want us to talk or what you ask us in the chat so feel free to use that to your kind of a maximum capacity oh my God this was absolutely terrible yeah I know yeah low energy yeah because my low energy is because if there is somebody that was able to make Squad Busters works on Android please raise your hand in the chat I would really like the advice now that's why my energy is so low um [Music] okay oh my God I have a you know what I I have a surprise for you so one second maybe I I can make it happen uh almost you know in a two minutes hey Ma yeah where do penguins go to vote oh I know that one nor must be yeah and I have way better jokes than than you

you have uh yeah yeah I just heard one today and just uh you know wrote I wrote it down so which one can February March well no but April May get more kids man and here's the special gu a I'm actually disappointed I was expecting a little bit more o from yob I thought he was going to like smash turned off yeah yeah the thing is like the no oomph because he's just bitching about the squad Busters and how he can't play he's like oh my God they could play I mean just get an Australia account like everyone else man come on what are you doing you've been in this game for too long you're telling me you don't have a Canada account or an Australia account

I was always able to pass this through like normal VPN all the time well talking about VP he's not VPN but he's VP of quality welcome John you are you are literally everywhere bro you know there's money to make what can I say you know I I get paid for a living so I need to make sure that I'm everywhere this is this is what qu PID me for um in all joking the site I do have job which is publishing games and and working on games and you know being vice president I know I know Vice look dude M called me yesterday said look we're doing this AMA thing I was like what the heck is this I have no idea what this is but hell I'm down if it's you guys you know you put the call in and I'm there exactly here we are so it's a it should be oh wait a second live I actually want to ask a bunch of questions about publish what's

going on with that market now I have no idea it's look man obviously um from from the last time we spoke obviously it was only a couple of months ago since our our amazing PGC live at PGC um event um which probably my favorite podcast I think I've ever done because you know Felix was giving me shots of Brandy whilst giving me a podcast this was a this was a highlight um but no look I think from from a publishing perspective things are are getting um are heating up and things are getting a lot more interesting I think when we last spoke we were talking about you know this progression into hybrid I think that um yakob and I had a good discussion about hybrid becoming like a bit of stepping stone for casual and I feel like you know this uh whilst it hasn't fully matured I have seen um you know companies like supersonic have just um announced that they've gone for auto

gun Heroes out from Nitro which is a casual sort of you know shooter base I've seen this week that Voodoo are advertising for midcore people right they already said when they were on our podcast they taking literally people from King and like like these kind of core me core casual people yeah we we launched um text Express yesterday so you know this is a you know we we've decided to go down the Casual route we're also in internally developing a solitire game at the moment which has been in in production for about 14 months what the can you pick a little bit uh I mean a little bit more expensive genas solitary Bo games got an maybe she got Casino know who knows who knows it's all the ra there actually like I've seen the what was the game It's called Domino dreams it's actually from the dice dice dreams guy

yeah yeah and it's scaling pretty high and it's pretty much taking the whole domino category because you have like two types of games within Domin category sorry guys being like absolutely you have like two types of games Within These Evergreen categories one is the one that's like the basic one like the one that everybody knows and it just lives on organic and then is the one like high paid UA traffic one like solitary Grand Harvest and stuff like that and this category the like the one where you actually like iterate the game playay and make it more like free toplay natural and at adaptive this is like raising up and with solitary category is already Consolidated so my guess Domino category is going to be Consolidated same probably goes with Tex category and all these other like Evergreen games I mean uh we also saw I saw the episode with Lord Toronto the other day guys about you know travel town and merge yeah you know I since since that game has been heating up we're getting people contact us about publishing merge games all the time right and

um again look going back to um what we were discussing in January you know mat you were talking about forever games yeah and maybe this is it look maybe solitire merge you know the these are the games that are people are saying you know what these can be the long-standing Evergreen forever games where investing more time and money now will pay you back over 5 to 10 years five to 10 years man you know like what what's GNA happen like next month in gaming like it's like five to six like five to 10 like it's that's a big stretch J John I'm a bit curious I haven't worked in publishing for nearly five years now like what do deal terms typically look like someone comes to you with a game like is that space heating up because I know that was pretty non-developer friendly for a while or like what are deal terms like now is it basically more profitable to go to a publisher or what's that looking like yeah I mean it it's I would say Felix that there has been a Resurgence

in publishing for a lot of people um not through maybe their own choice right the the headwinds that we have seen from sort of the economic State um of the industry we all know that a lot of Studios have been hit heavily from privacy and the ability to to do UA effectively so you know the margins that people were able to achieve before have decreased we know that smaller companies who don't have like experts like matay available are are suffering right because a couple years ago it was kind of like anyone could do UA you run on Facebook and you know mule you made money but uh it's now it's a much harder it's a lot more science behind it you need you know larger teams to work on um creative assets on a regular basis and you know the type of campaigns you have now in unity and and app loving you have you have your in ads campaign you have your in out purchase campaigns you have

like loads of different things that you need to to specialize in but because of all of those difficulties and the complexities of running UA and monetization also changing right both have got more difficult in in different ways um smaller companies and are less likely to be successful now bigger companies with more resources and more money are like more likely to be successful so a lot of these uh smaller studios are now in a position where they're making good games but they can't make them good businesses they can't make them profitable and this is where Publishers are able to utilize their size the resources and and look worst comes to worst you get a really good game you throw enough you know templates and uh enough resources behind it enough hands at it eventually you're going to see an improvement in the metrics right it's so so from a deal terms perspective there are more deals being done the publisher I would say is in a more favorable position to get better terms

on their side because of just the necessity of doing that type of business but I can tell you for example quarle we are investing in studios we are doing active m&a we are doing active um sort of investment in term of owning a percentage of businesses to ensure that they have larger amounts of cash flow to self- sustain we are doing um you know deal funding and and and covering burn rates of Studios because one of the the toughest things I think the studios right now Felix is you know you you should be really focused 100% on making the best game possible but when you have wor about cash flow no she Sherlock yeah well thank you very much yeah you know like do we have do we have an guest game good games look you know this is the truth right like but no but what I'm saying is if you are a founder of a company and you know 20 30% of your time you're

worried about where the next check's going to come in right so you can pay your developers and you have your concerned that your engineers might leave because they're going to get a better offer you then stop focusing purely on the success of the game you focus on survival and that diminishes your likelihoods of producing a successful game because you're only your heart is not fully in it so that is that's what I'm trying to get out so doing a deal with a publisher and getting your studio funded and stuff like that will allow you to double down and focus and strategize on the best game rather than the other stuff so we have the question about like what are the predictions for 20234 2023 not that great 2024 terms of U admon and World product in general so I guess John you kind of touched a little bit anything else that we likewise yeah product wise as well what Johnny saying I would say like that that's true in a matter that like

publishing you need to have a good game you need to have a good game uh the other thing is that publishing in my opinion noways means more of like you get funding or somebody to kind of lean on rather than just somebody that runs your UA which is a big difference as it was before uh then UA is like a this is a product still prediction UA is a necessary of your products like necessity of your product strategy these days so you either have like very strong IP or these kind of whatever shenanigans that we see on the market that people optimize over CPI wall everybody talks about IP name at least like four game okay three games outside of Monopoly goal with a strong IP on the on the mobile just did this [ __ ] hell squadb what kind of Ip is that super okay but it's in soft lunch okay Jesus you don't even see the numbers yet I know but it's

glob got Barbie Voodoo got Transformers obviously Monopoly we've spoken I think you're getting a bit shut down there Barbie is a great argument but has launched yet where's the game where's the game turkey somewhere turkey but I I said Global launch game we'll get there we'll get there look the year is not over baby we still got a long time to go fire it's part of the plan that's the important thing like you either have this plan or that plan so U Shenanigans or an IP if you have no kind of a advantage in the UA field you're just banging your head on the wall or you could be in this like hoping for uh endless organic club which is like you know endless organic Club well you're not fingers soft so exactly so this also doesn't work so this is a problem where product yeah it needs to be great and blah blah blah and everything John said but making great products doesn't make [ __ ] in current market regarding UA distribution yeah that's the problem yeah are you saying

UA is important o UA is more important than product these days that's the problem whoa that's a big statement y we're gonna s thaton see M run UA on that like what do you what do you like to be better in a situation that you have like great product but but functional UA or you have a great product but your CPI is killing your product so which one do you pick well it's of course it's tough I've seen many great products recently and they cannot scale because they just don't have the strategy to do it yeah or they don't know how to do it or they are not willing to kind of follow the recent Trends in UA landscape and like even even this what you just said follow the recent trends of U landscape it takes a lot of sophistication to be able to do that what do you mean so sophistication just play the game you see like what kind of ads you are kind of well being targeted with it with and then you then

they they you open up the sensor Tower and you see the [ __ ] data and so what then and remember the the cheat sheet is you could just pay for mat's Weekly Newsletter and you get every bit of information you need plug plug that as well that as well but then you kind of implement at least something you you well you were talking about this uh and we were talking about this last year like first of all you can duct tape whatever on top of which is not a great solution but at least it works to certain extent but it's like giant sophistication there are people that don't even understand like to the point like we at like at the beginning of the fun still like fake creatives fake St screenshot fake icon and then fake onboarding and like people end up still in this kind of fake funnel of UA which is still hard to do and they don't even get to the part where they need to do fake onboarding it's yeah yeah but this so that's what I'm saying yeah continue you can you can do your UA prediction now well I mean like this is basically it

yeah Felix prediction yeah um so we're in the space right where up Len is dominating the markets and they've said that everything is going to be on bidding uh by end of the year which presents kind of an interesting I guess risk as well to them but basically if you look at their eida margins they're now up at 65% uh in our space eida margins which is crazy high for a publicly listed company right uh the close closest one with eida margins that are coming close to that is digital turbine and they have I think it was 40 32% eida margins and that's coming from pre-installed and offer walls most likely not their exchange but usually what happens when you see Big E out margins like that is you start seeing competition that want to muscle in on those types of margins and my biggest prediction I think is we're going to see a new entrance into the market towards the end of this year that starts challenging app l in on the mediation side because essentially

mediation is the key that drives the UA which then eventually gets you the margin so they are moving now everything to bidding which presents kind of an interesting I guess window of opportunity for a challenger because when you're moving to bidding essentially if you don't have bid floors then you basically it could be Aras to the bottom for the different algorithms because there's basically nothing holding down the bottom it's just simple economics so what kind of would be a way of guarding against the setting bid floors but another thing to do would be having a robust pre-bid that basically acts as your bid floor so there's no company currently offering a pre-bid solution on mobile that basically bids on all the units than then before goes going going into an auction so basically if a player built a solid pre-bid and had all the major biders in their main bidding portfol or Main bidding like waterfall

that would be like a really interesting way a new market entrance could enter the market in the mediation space uh or if Apple allows pre-bid as well that would be yeah a good way of guarding against that but they're earning so much money that it's hard to do right but that's what I predict that there will be a challenger at some point uh to challenge Apple at some point okay that was quite long but thank you very much how can how can somebody challenge them if they have like so much inventory yeah it's not going to be easy I'm saying I'm saying like there is a space where that would work right now like if you yeah theoretically theoretic theoretical of course yeah I mean yeah you're still going up against app which is not fun yeah we've seen how it went for Unity last time yeah yes there's a follow question like how make how to make bit floors work testing it on worldwide starting from one cent no significant results any hints I mean I have no [ __ ] idea I would

say like I need more more information about this I guess yeah I need to look at the data so it's a bit hard to say like a uniform thing but yeah email me so Alexander yeah Jo join the slack and ask the question in the in the ad monetization channel for sure because we need more more data so but think you know questions to Felix well there's um which one the Amazon one yes what yeah what was your hint for Amazon on your or on your last last event so I guess I mean you're talking about Amazon all the [ __ ] time so yeah but they're doing this weird thing right now so you know how they were kind of this like elite club that had like a Red Velvet Rope and they were letting people in and now the Red Velvet Rope is up even for like big big Publishers and they're like yeah you know I brought them a really big publisher what was it start of this year and they were like yeah no no we don't care about a top 100 publisher uh maybe Q maybe Q2 and now I'm messaging Q2 like ah maybe end few three I'm like why do you

think that is dude do you think it's because you know the inventory they they don't have they are on all clients I have them live on on banners now globally because uh everything with with basically the cmps now basically they can get European demand every country they're live in they're competing head-to-head with the with Google so probably what they're doing is using the existing publisher base to run experiments to make it work on intials and rewarded as well where it doesn't work at all and when it's ready to roll out then they'll do a big open roll out um yeah but yeah it sucks it's like standing outside the club and everyone's having fun I'm I'm kind of half in half out because I'm in with some people so you know I have friends inside but I'm also outside I'm not on the list but I'm kind of on the list is this not just your Saturday night in Germany when you live there this is side of a club yeah exactly so Amazon is

actually beran yeah exactly Amazon is a bit like bur kind right now yeah and I'm not wearing black but also I am wearing black socks so yeah so guys by the way there's the in terms of Designing a hybrid casual game so what's the biggest thing that has changed from designing a hyper casual game in your opinions you guys to you two guys progression and meta layers definitely yeah I would say meta very simple answer on the met you invited me you have to deal with this accent yeah finest yeah shout out to everyone e16 sorry so so yeah the the kpi pretty much switched now because before always when I would talk to hyper casual people they would tell me like their first kpi like how many seconds they have in first session which is like yeah we're not really using the anymore uh and then the the other thing

is that now people I I don't I don't think so they're like that much after like this kind of giant retention they won which doesn't help you to be honest that much what helps you is the shape of the curve going onwards day three day seven day 14 blah blah blah so even games with have which have like I don't know 30% retention which was like kill territory for hyper casual before is now completely okay if you can dish out like I don't know 10% a s whatever 15% A7 something like that and you you can do that you're completely right like we we used 45% was originally like the target for hyper casual now 35% is the Target and it really does just depend on the day day seven day 14 Etc and if we see that it's going to pay back on the long tail and the curves much sort shallower but long then this is equally successful depending on you know the cpis you're able to get right if you can get a $152

CPI and you you know that you're going to you know you have a certain amount of AD frequency you have a certain percentage of in that purchase you know it's about raas raas these days mostly like uh I think Alvar also said that when he was here on our podcast that like the main metric to look for the quality of this game is the return of the advertising SP period how much you can kind of dish out doesn't matter what the CPI the retention what rpu is it just matters like if you can scale it with Prof okay but then how do like how do you kill that prototype what how do you kill that prototype like based on what you follow you follow these kind of as I said you follow the shape of the curve and when you can get the shape of the curve to the right position one by one we need like day one day three day seven whatever Milestones then you kill it whatever production Gates M right you say that this is going to take certain amount of time to get it to monetization test right and then you give it another couple of weeks for optimization and

ensuring that you know people like Felix are optimizing it effectively to ensure that it's to the proper standard but you know if you go if you implement monetization your your ad you know your RV your insal your shop economies in there and you're getting 20% day seven and the target is 100% at day 30 you know it's not going to make it right even if you uh if you were to spend a couple of months with uh balancing the economy improving the um ad frequency you know all of this stuff the likelihood is you're still you're not going to achieve it because it's just not why just yeah I mean I know why but just tell unpack that a little bit more because yeah because you know from the from the previous games and data that like 20% it's not it's not enough but if you don't have that data like okay how can you say Okay 20% is good or bad you know yeah I mean it's hard like this the hard part yeah for sure and by the way that that's

just an example right like it depending on the game and genre these numbers will be different but equally this is also the strength of being a big company you have better tools and better protected LTV modeling right we know as a company that this style of game if it makes this much roas at this point the Curve will end up doing this it's not 100% confident but we have enough data you seen it before yeah exactly exactly d this is why it's becoming harder it's never been harder to launch new games it's never been harder for new companies to launch new games because they don't have all of this history and experience and this is where the big Publishers are coming back to have this Resurgence because they can use that history to their advantage yeah that's why people pay for my newsletter because it's all about benchmarks yeah but but one other one other recommendation that I've see like throughout like my clients or whatever people are working with is like three recommendation three three it ation and then stop if you cannot move any any

kpis by three iterations and I mean like those things weeks per one and nothing's happening kill itting the thing yeah I mean we have like few few other questions by the way yeah can I say something completely unrelated about roas well I'm not sure wait wait wait you know you know you know there's actually a place called the roas hotel in Bodom turkey wow wait wait wa wait wa thickens the owner and founder of the hotel is the loop games guy and he named it roas no no you serious I'm on booking.com right now are you I'm joking right I can book I can book a night there tonight can can you zoom it zoom in little yeah look man I've lost my hair and I'm blind okay I need to like Lean

Forward okay when you get to my age this is what happens you start falling apart all right well that was my little update on roas uh if you're looking for Ras I know where you B and make flights you can be there tomorrow you can have Ro there there's a place I could get hair transplant whilst I'm there I can have like three days of the roas hotel and then I can get I'll come back with hair like you this is uh you think I got it gentics no I got the RAS you got the RAS as it baby I'm booking up the RAS Hotel trip and getting the hair TR spot I'm coming back like Felix's little brother that's it all right which one is next one the one yeah the question is uh segmentation yeah [ __ ] H this was great PLU thank you fix that's uh made my day so what are what are your no the segmentation segmentation for hybrid

casual games uh on the monetization and product side like what but we can do that together Remo right yeah yeah sure sure you can start with admon so basically for admon uh the biggest hurdle is just starting uh the kind of Rolls-Royce thing that a lot of hybrid casual like the really big ones are doing is segmenting based on user acquisition campaigns the types that bring the users in so that's like the Rolls-Royce which is not easy to set up but essentially what it is is like if an I driving campaign gets a user you only show rewarded video If an ad Ros cam brings it it brings in the user you show interstitials banners after the voui and at a lower like refresh rate and lower uh cool down timers as and it's a blended one uh I can't remember what they were doing but they were doing some kind of interesting on the Blended row but that's like the Rolls-Royce but even doing simple things as just Geo segmentation to start off so showing more um adds in your typical tier three

like Thailand uh Thailand India Iraq Iran like these GEOS they're actually used to seeing more ads so they actually tend not to mind that's like the simplest way of doing it but the hardest thing is just starting and then you can get more and more creative as you're getting along um you can be very creative with this but the main idea is that you don't if you don't have a social following on the game you can really go nuts when it comes to segmentation no which is not really the case for Hy casual anyway um but but dude like I'm seeing more people think about Community as a strategy now really yeah yeah yeah people are in you Discord channels for going back to web three again this makes sense what John is saying because the games are slowly switching to Casual midore therefore they need to build these legit communities okay okay fair enough fair enough I mean yeah look if you think about say you have 10,000 people as part of your Discord right

which you know you're not paying user acquisition these are just people that play your game and these are your Advocates these are effectively your hardcore users you start doing tailored events and uh giving them a bit more of a more premium service or going back into like what Social Casino used to do with VIP teams right you start doing something even if you give them use them uh for play testing of new features you know there's there's like a bunch of things that you can do with um communities in in nonhybrid going into casual midcore games that we can learn from which removes the user acquisition cost aspect so these are like high profitability users essentially yeah you can you can try a lot of stuff with them definitely like for segmentation I would really recommend people to watch the pocket Champs episode we did with Medbox they have it very nicely explained there where they would literally have like a progression Point within the game where they would say until 1,500 trophies you don't see any interstitials and Banners

afterwards you start to see them if you didn't pay before which is like just one of the basic ones and you can go more and more complex from there basically but I think a few other hybrid games that we covered are using kind of the similar strategy that you try to feel at least the onboarding of try to make feel onboarding of the game at least a little bit more premium in a way that like you don't use banners intials and then at some point there's a cutof point where you determine okay this is not going to be a paying user therefore we squeezed him with intertial and Banners so that's it look it's about optimizing you know each of those personas and buckets of users to maximize performance from a revenue perspective right so it's about squeezing the lemon if you know that a user after 14 days is not going to do an in out purchase and you from all of your data say that they need to do an inout purchase in the first 14 days for them to go on to be a high value user then you can set up the model to say okay these people people you have to optimize them through ads and

eventually like and then it goes RV at the top intial and then Banner like you just try and then you play around with frequency as as Felix said you can set up the same strategy for tier three markets where you know inap purchase will never happen or there'll be very limited amounts and and yeah it's about squeezing the lemon on on all of these different users and the different buckets that they fall in to maximize your overall you know Revenue performance as a business his economics more than anything I I know that face marus pulled he was thinking about Gonic when you're talking about lemon I just he's like he's like wait a second no no I was thinking if like 14 days that mention like isn't like too long because it's just 14 days of not getting any revenue and you can I don't know maybe lose other it's just you optimize to find the sweet P between the impact of negative impact of interational retention Andi imp of coming from these things you always try

to find a spot yeah this question was quite heavy now we have this uh chill question which is uh what was the last book that you that you read and uh tell about it please I can start so I can start it's like because you were [ __ ] talking all the time uh so I can start so I I read yeah I knew this was coming Shameless plug nice no I read the shout out to Kim norstrom shout out thanks Kim yeah yeah yeah thank Kim great so I I read how to solve 50% of of your problems and I read it twice what back to back or oh oh man got asked this is this a PL for a dad joke no it wasn't but when I when I saw it like [ __ ] H I need to just use you just did you just make that that you just set yourself up in like reading bad jokes before he too serious we need to

do a question a bit lighter oh has anyone read a book and then the joke wow that is some hardcore preparation you were talking for like 15 minutes what no but the question is real the question is real so yeah you you read that book from Kim yeah up down up I'm I'm nearly finished um but no it's a great book there there isn't a lot of say gaming industry business focus books I think there's a lot of gaming books that focus on development and coding but for me this was a a great sort of snapshot into the mindset and the approach of some of the most successful people in games right and you know I I have a saying guys in the office it's uh basically I've got a poster up there you can't see it but just get [ __ ] done right just get [ __ ] done just literally you know don't procrastinate just you know grab the ball by the horn get something done you know like make a move

and and I say that quite openly a lot to the guys and during this book I saw like three other people like very successful cosos also said the exact same thing just get [ __ ] done and so now easy I'm validated about swearing in the office okay Felix your book Barbarian is the gates it's like this story about uh uh an lbo buyout in the late 80s that basically the CEO was a head of a really big uh company called RJ NBC Nabisco and he did an lbo for Pure vanity reasons and it went tits up and all collapsed and it was just like an investment banker investment story that was just the height investment book really fun story like completely unnecessary and just ego driven and everything goes tits up M you have other problem books no problems I think I read

and I didn't finish it obviously uh how will you measure your life um it's actually quite good one it's a lot of lot of the things that I read there I had in my latest article about like the my journey because it's just it was so obvious like pay attention to the family you know because everybody's just screaming for your attention and you need to invest your time because then like when you wake up after 15 years you want to spend time with your kids and they're like hey hey Dad [ __ ] off I don't I don't want to spend time with you now where were you 15 years ago so it's like these type of things and uh it's very connected to the the actual like career and and the family and wasting time it's return on time spend instead of return on ad spend yes time spend I have one for time spend actually if you if you want oh yeah I could be your uh your next diary no yeah so mine mine is pretty much I'm not even reading it my wife is reading it and then then I'm reading the the parts where she

thinks it's no no it's called children The Challenge and I remember it from my University days that this is literally the best parenting book that I ever saw because it's uh if you you ever saw but never never read uh so you have like like line of these psychologist and like you know Freud Jung Adler and like all these kind of big guys and this is one of the like d when you really get into it like it it makes complete sense about like logical consequences and like how to bring stuff up to the kid so you don't cause trauma and [ __ ] and uh yeah this is kind of really helpful and it's especially helpful if you're entering the stage or between two to three years so that's that's pretty much on my list yeah already in the middle of it amazing okay so John do you have kids uh actually um as of today me and my wife got uh approved to adopt two little boys actually congratulations two two two two years of

uh paperwork but we got the official approval at one o'clock today so wow dude that's amazing news yeah yeah yeah look it's uh you know me me and my wife we tried for kids for a long time guys and you know it never worked you know for whatever reason and uh we always knew we wanted to be parents and we we both come from big families so yeah we we started on this journey two years ago in July and yeah we had a really good meeting a couple of hours ago from them saying that the two little boys one's four and one's two and they're brothers and uh essentially we've decided to adopt them and in the next s two three months that we should um transition them into our house and go from there soing from zero to two kids I need to read this bookly congratulations and welcome to hell no worries mate you will be talking dead jokes like there's no yeah give me give me six months I'll

be king yeah exactly exactly and then uh uh regarding time there is a actually a question about how much how much time do you think developers need to make the games like Legend of mushroom or last war like how long were these in in pre-production man you have some knowledge there Rema right someone told you some [ __ ] right yeah that's Legend of mushroom was already kind of viral on WeChat yeah uh we kind of the small games they have there yeah yeah that one I would guess that Legend of mushroom mushroom is uh is not that hard but I would expect something like six months with the Chinese team maybe three months like yeah 96 you were 996 uh with the last War uh that's actually years I would say yeah it's not

about it's not about the production of that thing it's about getting to the knowledge to be able to design that thing that's the most important part of that game because it's have standard Forex features which I think you could put a Time stem on it like I don't know nine months 10 10 months whatever like that's that's normal but the problem is mon yeah yeah definitely but the problem is that what are these features like which one do you pick how do you connect them especially with their UA on boarding Shenanigans like this took Rivers River game like years to get that knowledge yeah but they they have they had top war as well before now so uh yeah yeah that's what I'm saying that like you cannot say like this game takes 10 12 months to develop you can develop that without the prior expertise in the genre which took years to get and also as Heaven mentioned uh like they're all connected and they have the Forex expertise from different games it's basically like one or two teams just from one company to another so yeah it's definitely so some games it literally

means that some games you won't be able to develop ever because like you don't have the genre expertise from last five years so but that's that's the truth like if you seen for instance with supercell supercell went the Heyday pop game they didn't really have that much kind of casual puzzle expertise and it it went nowhere that's it even though super supercell a good example though what I'm saying is that you cannot really like Branch from your completely different genre because you're really good at your you know what's a good example King and Knighthood and legend of Soul guard which I mean now yeah yeah yeah yeah but they is kind of still like hey let's do something in midcore oh maybe no May yes but it didn't work out that's the thing maybe is but yeah eventually you need to sell that that game or expertise is everything in in this case if you really want to achieve that level of like three three million a day which lasts what he's currently doing I was checking just today so yeah so Tri we have a trivia game which is turn based

and they have some numbers kpi like day one reten 25 30% CPI 40 cents 95 cents and uh our fan want to know if they should double down on it or kill it I mean so first of all what is the dayree retention what is the day seven retention cpis what are the like what is the campaign optimization what are what is the go like this is kind of nice but not complete but 25 to 30% trivia game ST still they want sound still pretty low because you want Le for these games you need to start their curve much higher but if what if it's India so like would you make a decision based on this no it's like you need more data always if it's us it's not going to be 40 cents absolutely no and if it's 40 cents in us it's Google ads and that's [ __ ] [ __ ] traffic I'm sorry Google I love you but this is this is how it is they're

probably listening anyway so you know is it Facebook is it up event optimized campaign is the well no numbers for those days okay get those numbers us great this is great because it's live so they can actually they can num another respond yeah it's great and yeah uh then we have um which platform would you recommend for initial testing of a game like Chrome valy Customs Network for testing what are doing John for initial testing oh bro it hasn't changed for years Facebook no seriously thing I mean we so so we went from uh same as most companies I know we went from doing solely Facebook to now doing Facebook and an SDK Network to to start off with right so edging our bets a little bit but but Facebook is still King for this this area right and yeah

look we we'll test we we'll in parallel test Unity or love independent normally Unity but you know effectively because of the discrepancy that you can get between performance and cpis between Facebook and sdks now you can't make a judgment call on just one of them you have to you have to spread it out a little bit so and it it was in in its us and Google ads so no because the CPI for this type of game in the US are just it's just no Facebook yeah yeah fa trivia game Facebook us those CPS are going to be at least three or five yeah Splats yeah but you will you will get little way better retention in my opinion so I would definitely test did you keep the question from John there ask John where KPS decisive for hyper casual games to be seful when he was at Koda after he say CPI please ask if hyper casual is dead what it's it's

Michael just making fun of us okay I didn't actually hear the whole question you were like mumbling you know it wasn't worth yeah the question is like what were the the kpis for games when you were at Koda oh yeah I mean look 30 40 Cent cpis and 45% day one retention that that's that's it right yeah very simple and now yeah now we should ask you if hypercasual is dead I've already I've already said this on like to you all of you but yeah look my opinion is very sorry guys it is and there might be a few outliers where people can make money but it's just too difficult to uh to to you know optimize towards profitability for these games now very simply they have to evolve yeah okay and also like coming back to the question about the Chrome Valley customs and like initial testing uh initial testing I always do Facebook and yeah

Unity but for that you need MMP which might be a little bit tough for some developers but yes because at least you can compare two two channels that's what happened to me in soft Lou I was running Facebook only it looked like [ __ ] we all wanted to kill the game but then we eventually added Google and and unity and game was Global lch because on outside of Facebook it was working quite well so and it was a long time ago but yeah for for the premarket testing or initial testing it's always us Facebook and then additional Channel and ideally Android so you don't have a headache of iOS okay so yeah that's what was the best UA channel for iOS in 2024 in your opinion except appin and newcomers were testing much so yeah it's Tik Tok % get back on Tik Tok as soon as you can with all those Tik Tok creative Challenge

videos it's great uh Facebook even though I'm bitching about it all the time it's still okayish but then yeah like yeah app in this case I would try I would try molo for iOS that's working quite well for me in us and some European countries and then we have like does it have the scale though dude do you feel like it's a comparable channnel as I know they put their K now and stuff like that but do you feel like molo could keep up with the likes of like Unity or or app yeah it's performing better than Unity for mosta in most cases for me uh seriously and do they have that minimum budget [ __ ] well I mean everybody has the minimum budget [ __ ] but no it's like it's not like it's not like the old days need 50k to go it's not lift up now like hey give me 50K and then and then after we spend 50K then we can talk about learning like yeah yeah we might be able to make some money after the first 50k

the first 50k is burn how about no so yeah exactly I miss those days yeah I no not actually so yeah what else do we have um what money potential do you see in up distribution in alternative stores like Amazon Samsung Etc HTML 5 platforms oh man so this is something that I think people speak about a lot right because they're waiting for the Messiah to get us rid of the look man my honest opinion is a lot of companies are doing this and it's an easy way to make a little bit more money but it's you're talking yeah for yeah look for 5% or 10% or something like that more Revenue but I don't see it as you know it's not as impactful as the other channels and unless I think changes dramatically then if you're a big

company it makes sense right because 5 to 10% can be impactful but if you're if you're a small company I don't think it's um it would be too worth your time unless something changes in the near future so we're for that epic store to hit the stores by the end of the year mean I just put that uh into my uh next articles about alternative view channels and whatever else I just put epic store there but now this kind of got me an idea about talk about Amazon because Amazon is still a valid store it's kind to certain extent scalable I ran Kindle Fire V scen campaigns and you can run it and you can spend like 200k per month even like half a million a month which is not like that bad it's just you need to think the audience and it's female mostly 35 Plus 40 plus which is quite suitable for any like casual games and not bad really really not bad

and the only kind of transformation in our like launching on Amazon is just you take the Android APK and then just put Amazon payments in it that's it it's just it's really really easy so if you have a if you have a casual games oriented females yeah just go there uh Samsung most probably like too much hustle not really any UA CH well yeah few UA channels maybe you can run the the campaign is there but for Amazon you can run Facebook Wango Unity I'm not sure maybe uh the V screen campaigns and then uh I guess some other channels as well iron Source maybe or CH boost as well so it's like just it's not yeah last thing I want to add here is that I still think there's currently shortterm time wise is bigger potential in web stores these days that rather than going for a new Amazon epic whatever store just make sure your web integr ation is very very kind of smooth like we covered in AFK Journey which is

excellent Web Store integration why is it excellent tell me because they send you messages on Whatsapp promote the store and they have their own payment provider which is just serving lit games Honestly though man I don't know how like 100% legal this is like I like I I feel like there's got to be a breach of some legislation somewhere from from from this like apple will end up find not them legally but I think Apple will say contacting them outside of the app by this means will be in breach of some sort of uh I I I don't yeah basically I don't know how kosher is but we when we cover the news of this whole dma or whatever we already expect that this will happen that people will never do direct payments and then give Apple its share they will try to get the users there first and then pay them separately

through different session which is already happening and my guess is it nobody will try to do it the apple way nobody it's like it's uh it's too exp the 27% like that's that's too much like it doesn't make sense to even try if it's if it's like that yeah yeah exactly there's a question for me hey hey thank you so how many yeah how what kind of budget and how many creatives you're using for a creative testing campaign and when do you find potentially I guess V your creative how do you test your iterations so we can be here for 20 minutes which we don't have so have eight thank I'm out of here on the dot me too brother me too no no no we yeah we end up like at six anyway so quick answer is check your competitors well it's about budget and how many creatives competitors let's not go there

yet I mean the whole brainstorming session everything like how you actually come up with an ideas like that's that's a different part here like I'm kind I kind of have let's say 100 150 per day budget let's talk about Facebook and very simple simple creative testing campaign 150 tier three tier four countries two or three maybe four countries at the same time purchase or value optimization because that's like that's the main optimization I have in the the business as usual campaigns and I test like four or five at the same time with this type of budget four or five creatives as soon as I see a creative that has either the highest spent or the highest IPM or kind of decent draws decent draw meaning anything about zero in comparison to other other creatives I just take that creative and then move it to to business as usual campaign this is very very simple simple test testing framework you can have 10 different testing Frameworks you can have IPM based campaign where

you have CPI optimization and then just take the winners in terms of the lowest CPI highest IPM and then they you take it and then just ship it into the business as usual campaign or you can have multi-step testing and different things but honestly up until I spend let's say 300,000 per month what I and I have let's say for up to four C new creatives a week I just take these creatives and just put it into the business as usual campaign let's not over complicate things because then you have the testing campaigns and things and just it's not worth it and it's the budget is not that high that you actually need these type of operations that's yeah that's right and if you're not in our slag join the slag and then uh we can talk there oh because it's like it's a very complex uh complex question and uh I had a

presentation at Ma and I was talking about this for like yeah 15 minutes basically yeah I also had this presentation when I was playing you yeah exactly you playing me in cypers thank you very much what did you yeah what did you what did you tell the audience what was it like being M for a day it was it was 30 minutes only 30 minutes don't worry 30 minutes 30 minutes it was nice and people are taking a lot of pictures of the presentation so yeah I can't imagine you in a Gucci hoodie with you say that fny say that it wasn't a Gucci hoodie it was a GDC hoodie so it's almost the same I said you know I earlier m is officially the gu Gucci gang General that's what I call him g g g g making fun of you already no jide j mik so uh Jes aside like for the the K in

gaming what's uh your biggest achievement game systems campaigns whatever all that you are really proud of and that you can share as well John you are the the guest so we can we can start with you oh man it's a tough it's a tough one yeah look I think for me the thing I'm most proud of uh so most of my career was done uh on the tech side of gaming right it wasn't actually on the game development side I you know I worked at monetization UA growth strategy for you know companies like I and and unity Etc the the highlight of my career was joining Luna Labs as part of the founding team as Vice President of Operations and then you know growing that business vice president all over again I think vice president baby two VPS my career doesn't two VPS make a SVP I guess we're making a merge game we'll make a merge

game I have a I have a t-shirt for you which is VP and then SVP at the top oh my [ __ ] god yes okay we do but no that that was the proud moment my career was um going into a startup of less than 10 people growing it to you know 50 plus people within a year and selling that to to iron source and having my first exit as a professional so for me that would be the the big one for me guys nice Felix I think is this podcast with the the basically I've been approached a couple times with people that said they got a lot of out of it for ad monetization and being able to make deals that the otherwise wouldn't know about because it's a very opaque space that no one really talks about so I got a lot of than for I I'm quite PR what your yeah they don't tell you you don't know the questions then how can you if you don't know what the questions to ask like yeah of course no that's that's amazing yob yeah uh I don't know there's

like few of those I would say uh one of it is let's say being part of the team that was able to ship a VR game on a completely new platform that didn't exist like three months ago maybe we were still doing Oculus that was like a wild right we did there uh then being able to help a studio scale the game to like 2 million a month pretty much that was really good being part of that team and then yeah basically like I don't have like a specific like I work on Candy Crush whatever achievement I guess it's more of a like when I work with lot of my clients and at the end of some of those Cycles you hear like this really helps us out or like we didn't know this before and now we're just much wiser or like literally had a friend who like just in stano in March he told me that like yeah thanks to your feedback we completely changed the game to better and we are having killer numbers killer retentions ker you know kpis and scaling so much now yeah I I remember when Sam

from lesm told us you know like the we are warriors game it's killing it you know like we because we took all the [ __ ] feedback from yakob was gave us for eventure just did like oh oh yeah the game makes like 250k per day I mean if this is not achievement I'm not sure what it is you need to be quick with your achievement no worry yeah my achievement very quickly uh I think me going solo and just going doing this consultancy thing like open so many so many things doors and I'm really happy to be in this position because I can spend time with my my daughter and just you know work as well and the S thing working out that's the thing oh yeah the yeah yeah yeah it's not bad better than twerking it's better than twerking guys thank you very much for coming John thank you very much for jumping on really good uh the surprise guest and uh yeah Joy I will share like Channel invitation in the in the chat and then see you next month

thank you cheers byebye guys take