2.5 gamers x Live AM(F)A #3 - Ask Me Anything @ May 28 5:30 pm CET

we can go live by the way so we're going live on yeah we going live on on YouTube and we are let's see if I can I can yeah I can see it hello how do you blur the picture or whatever do background [ __ ] I so you figure that out I I didn't blur anything hello Yanka right there it's okay how can I not have my friendly Cottage in the mountains here [ __ ] because you're not on Google can you give us intro give us an intro and then we'll just let yakob do his Tech management yeah because I did the tech management last year oh hello Mr Little One oh my God this is perfect it's running around free marketing yeah free marketing uh hello everyone this is uh ask me anything uh the third episode because this is live so you can live ask your questions you can see yacob's uh misery and his son running around

this is what stress looks like he's try to figure out yeah exactly exactly and I I I need to go and put live the the LinkedIn live because I didn't go live as intended but it's fine because now I know how to set it oh I don't I yeah okay so it's too late again it's okay it's fine maybe it's it's gonna go and uh and go live we'll see we'll see we'll see about that so guys uh we have yeah a few things nice few things already hello everybody I see the the chat and everything so yeah you can ask questions o three questions right away geez this is nice um should I start uh reading the questions Jakob are you ready hello I think he is hello high five cheap camera bluring basically cheap Camera blur

like hello es from Turkey yeah all right hello yeah okay so we can stop this this [ __ ] all hey nice okay so we have questions already so first question is for testing hybrid any approach to speed up testing phase for hybrid development let's say we develop a playable with partial gameplay then we can test the core Loop meta and then we can add more hybrid monetization or any approach that can speed up the more more on the testing phase okay yeah so it always starts with the core like core is pretty much reflection of day day one uh kind of retention so you can't really speed it up to be honest because hybrid is just like a prolonged hyper casual development basically so always starts with the core if there's not core working uh basically there's nothing else to test there so it's you know you

can test core and meta and partial gam playay you need to have full full-fledged core and you and you yeah and you can't half as it because if you half as the core and you know just put like one part of the core it won't be having the full retention profile of like a fully fleshed out core so basically do your core properly and once you have your core you can continue because it's much easier to build from a stronger core than anything else especially in hybrid like we've seen that like in many many games we covered that I have no idea what you just said by the way no no idea either yeah core gameplay cor game play are you are you a little bit distracted maybe dist let's go to second question yeah there's a second question um any book documentation consulting services oh by the way yob is a consultant uh I'm a consultant as well and Felix is a consultant as well ad monetization versus yakob game design and I'm the

person so maybe you can talk to yaku but as as you see he's quite distracted I'm not sure he says he has enough time um yeah actually there's two books that I always can recommend people don't think he was listening to to do and it's basically Advanced game design by Michael Sellers uh I don't have anything in like uh you know this is basically my recommendation I don't know the person but I read the book and I think it's great uh regarding like just getting on r with game design and some some of the pretty much what you said there but this is more even though it's called Advance it's not really advance I would say it's more of an introduction and Basics and then actually there's this other book called game balance which is from I shriber and Brenda Romero that's the W of wife of uh the Romero guy who did Doom she's I think a game design professor and uh of the Doom maker all right cool yeah

it's it's uh it's 800 Pages thick it's very very big uh as I said called game balance and it has very specific chapters that go into balancing specific curves specific progression meta specific metag game engine so I think that's the like the Pinacle of what I've seen these two books regarding what I would recommend pinle yeah Pinnacle you mean Pinacle jeez okay uh any any other documentation or anything Consulting Services yob you know was uh that's basically it like you have specific graphs in those books like you know shown as examples I don't think so I've seen anything more robust than these two yet why haven't you said anything about stealing from other people like games copying with pride stealing with pride no this is to learn you cannot steal if you you don't Master

the thing in the first place okay yeah Fair that's fair enough otherwise you're just copying you don't know what and then you know you end up being our favorite goulash favorite gulash right there okay nice I mean AD monetization is a lot easier you just have to you know know what it is and then just be angry and copy all it's okay okay you can copy whatever after you know what what you actually copying right so what kind of game would you make to generate $1 million as a small team without a lot of experience o sounds like the usual getrich quick scheme yeah watch our episode on Doodle magic and basically make that into a western game and if you do that in the next couple of months you probably will make a million at least every month easily yeah we'll be covering that that game closely even this week like one of the

let's say successors of that but uh is that a success though it's definitely success no no no save it for the okay because I have pickles to pick pickles to pick okay yeah but $1 million doll is a small team like basically you know the only option that you have in today's market is hyper casual train has you know sailed away so not really wait wait wait wait do don't you remember the the episode we did with Sam with lesmore and more you can go yeah they're making a lot of money but don't forget that Sam at some point said that they have lot of Contracting people which just less more no but uh yes I know but I think that's okay but the F the thing is the less not a lot of experience which is that's the problem not not a small team or contractors like but to be honest like VR Warriors is literally the closest to the example

that you mentioned here whoever's asking the question uh that yeah get get rich quick scheme because the game a viral sensation and it's easy to build it's easy to build but they know very well how they build it it's not easy to design it's easy to build that's two different things yeah that's true we have the another question it's like what's the best way to scale subscription up like Headway from €2 200 per day $1,000 dollars per day on Facebook ads Jesus Christ okay Facebook is still a thing Facebook still a thing yeah it is still a thing for uh for any any game or app out there it's a it can work to certain extent you just need to know like what exactly Works which is now kind of like static AI images made from me journey and like refreshing uh quite quickly but back to the question is

it's a very Broad and I would say very bad question uh we kind of need a lot of different kpis from from your end but let's say let's say we have great great product which is at least the same quality as Headway and we have all the events we have let's say free trials I guess subscription then events so then we kind of build up scan cor meure schema around the subscription then we connect that to to Facebook since I kind of assume anyway you're making 70 or 80% revenue on iOS almost like every other app out there uh and then you target us mainly and then some tier one countries anything else outside doesn't make any sense so that's Facebook and then you scale and then you refresh creatives on the weekly maybe bi-weekly basis and then like every third fourth day you increase the budget by 20 30% that's the question was kind of

around this I would add other channels not only Facebook because Facebook won't get you that far in my opinion I think you would need to add Apple search ads obviously and then Tik Tok and Google as well and then think about maybe some some other channels outside of these uh traditional ones I'm just thinking like uh if I'm I'm not going to add anything this cuz I don't know yeah if I'm alreadying like because you never said like how do you increase the spend do you said like how do you actually use Facebook and stuff all these but why do I increase the spend then or how you know like you open up the dashboard yeah open up the dashboard and click instead of 200 you put 250 that's how you that's how you increase the spend but then like if Ro gets worse than what

then uh well in this case um you can use the the Caps or like cost caps bit Caps or Min draw kind of things which will not guarantee you the quality or the draw but it should give Facebook enough uh pointers to actually have at least let's say 20% draw or 10% draw or 50% draw 50 is quite aggressive so you you you will most probably spend like five EUR so how to downscale no you need to play around with these these options on the targeting side okay so it's and then yeah you open up and then you just put why are you making fun of AD Facebook ads well um most probably if you didn't get the memo it's not performing that well across the games it's really expensive the they are better channels in terms of performance outside of Facebook um so that's why we are making fun of it a little bit yeah uh we have more questions I mean

this yeah basically I want to say here so so basically one question here we got from prompto uh would you even make a game nowadays without much money for Performance Marketing can I just tell a little anecdote before you answer that M because uh basically I I've been invited now when I live in Lisbon to this weekly meet up for app makers so I have a breakfast I had the first breakfast with these like four other app makers you finally started eating breakfast my God it's pretty yeah well it's for friends I don't have a lot of friends yet anyway so it's for friends but like we were sitting and discussing it I was asking them like how they're doing new app development right now and it sounded a lot to me like app development is getting a big Renaissance uh how they're all doing it is that they have small teams they look at keywords and then do Sprints for three weeks so basically they come up with three keywords that are trending right now in the App Stores then basically they use AI products to make so example here is like one guy was

like yeah I saw this Bible uh reading app was trending and the key words for Bible reading app was trending in Mexico and America so basically in one week I whipped together a Bible reading app and basically made all the artwork and all the content in AI yeah and basically just threw it up there and it took 14 days and now I'm getting tons of organic like inbound and I'm was like wow that sounds a lot like hypercasual used to sound and I'm just like the hypercal games how they making them right back in the day I'm just wondering now with the like the AI stuff cuz like I'm looking forward to going to this breakfast again I want to ask more questions about it I'm like huh that's interesting finally yeah so that's why I was thinking about it because then Performance Marketing I was like maybe it's like the the meme where the cat like maybe I should make an app yeah maybe you should make an app yeah exactly maybe maybe should made enough what how was that yeah terrible so yeah like oh let's let's do

a match threee because it's the LTV is absolutely never ending and it's it's it's a great idea well I have I have no idea I have zero experience in my building games and especially my Tre so most probably no well uh it doesn't make that much of a sense if you don't have well depends on what what's like much money I mean if you don't have any money then you can you can still do a steam game yeah you can yeah a steam game and they develop it for seven years no like jokes aside uh you can't do it the funny thing about this what you just mentioned Felix is in gaming space like Tik Tok now you can get quite a lot of organic views even though you are just you know very small you can you can use and and try to try to find examples of d dumb ways to die dualingo is doing quite well on like organic Tik Tok posts uh and getting

loads of loads of Impressions with this you can get quite a lot of organic downloads as well it doesn't it's not going to work immediately and it takes a lot of time of course dump way to die and and do alling they have their own marketing teams that are actually developing all this like content but you can do it on your own uh and you don't need like uh huge budgets uh if it's going to be a sh shot most probably no but you have a chance you have a chance you have all the reddits and all of the like uh different forums you can actually get some traffic or some some exposure but then you definitely need some some money to start running a UA and getting the the players and measuring the the ltvs and everything that so yeah I mean much money much money much money is like 100,000 no but at least like 5 10 20K yes which is bare minimum in my in my opinion next one

yeah can we develop playable only instead of the game then we can run UA on that and test the motivation meta motivation meta what's that instead of speed T of ton of money for developing an MVP yes yes you can uh the playable only you need to still kind of send the players somewhere with playables as um as a creative format you need to have an app in the in the store what you can do you can actually use that playable and kind of have it as like a standalone game and then measure the the kpis and then the retention as well and you don't need like proper MVP but whatever you call MVP can be MVP just send traffic to to game and then just test it out yeah it's possible definitely we were doing even less before like developing game based on Creative just

only yeah but the thing is like you now well you can do all these fake store tests and marketability test and I do that all the time but then if you have the game or the the APK on the store already then you can run the CPI campaigns so that means you will get the real CPI and not the fake CPI or you don't to calculate it h so this is the the closest to the truth that you can you can get with playable yeah with yeah with playable and then like using the playable in like actual game even if it's very small how much users should my campaigns convert before I can be confident with the game metrics to make kill or not decision how long how long do ad Network's algorithms need to be become reliable never never yeah yeah yeah the mushroom Theory um anyway um so my mushroom Theory your mushroom Theory yeah musroom Theory uh so quot it quot it yeah yeah you can you can you can do that afterwards uh oh so back to

the question back to the question so I usually using the soft launch like 200 players per day from the from the each campaign just to be able to say that these results are stati statistically significant anything between 200 to 500 is is well nice to have like minimum like bare bare minimum is 100 daily installs from the campaign to be able to say okay this is statistically significant not organic yeah not organic no like not organic like from The Campaign itself and ideally uh if you have campaigns that are kind of targeting GEOS in let's say three GEOS in one campaign ideal scenario you have 100 daily installs for from each goo so you can compare the 3 then check them because if you have like 20 users from let's say Poland and then 50 from um Slovakia and then you have 40 from

Sweden then you it's it's 100 and 100 plus but it's still the the results are just 50 Ma and 50 Felix's and where's yakob 20 acobs 20 doing UA since when Felix is doing doing UA yeah so like how long do ad networks need to become reliable like it's it's not like how long it's based on the the number of events so usually let's say the Facebook 50 events in last seven days Google 15 events per day or 10 to 15 events per day appin has what I think 10 unique purchases per day so it's yeah it depends but it's it's quite a lot of events not like how long it takes it needs to be let's let's say events in the last seven days that way what should be playable content in terms of duration

for hybrid casual prototype I would say it needs to be at least a little bit engaging so you need to be able to click on stuff lots of visual feedback lots of like for instance check the playables of white out survival I think those are pretty good or some kind of other similar ones where there's like lots of moving Parts on the screen and lots of visual feedback after every click but do I do I get that right that you don't need anything regarding the core there or are we testing it now or something like that because there's nothing like the core regarding white out survival my Felix is taking over the buffer no I'm just yeah I'm just yeah I'm just uh reading the question let me say let me say let me say my famous quote that I say when I don't know [ __ ] I can't even spell that but but honestly have a lot of visual feedback on the screen in the

playable I think you can go wrong with that so whenever you press something or do something you're pretty much kind of a showing the user that he's having an impact on the gameplay screen is that is yeah but it's what but that's the thing like check you know the creatives white out survival like one click and second click and suddenly you have the whole city build up that's the thing okay but then okay but then what kind of data you measuring that prototype if it's I don't know yeah maybe session time yeah I don't know okay we'll see uh what is the difference in Effectiveness between Facebook look likee ads and normal ads for user acquisition in games which type perform better I'm not sure like what are normal ads and look like ads like what's the what is this all about non fake yeah well if this is uh so I please SP like a little bit unpack this question if you can uh I can assume if this is look like

targeting or look like or you mean yeah like fake uh creatives and videos like copied or like let's call it heavily inspired by other games or normal like I'm not sure like what's normal so please if you can uh if you can comment on that that would be great because I have no [ __ ] idea okay uh what should be average playable duration of hyper casual game do you know what should be the the the playable content we don't have the we don't have the benchmarks from the the Publishers right so I think if we but I think John John was kind of touching on that in the last uh me yeah AMA so maybe if you can uh if you can go there and check it out then you will learn a little bit more or the the one that we with him in London yeah

I think he touched somewhere there okay touched you collap collap Banner app open with audio ads should time be invested develop and test these steps how much revenue upside we can expect from these assuming a puzzle game genre oh this is Mr Ed guy but I'm not sure if he's he's listening look I am yeah okay so uh audio ads um they will never earn you more than eight to 12% on your overall ad Revenue right uh you can increase it slightly if you're doing audio ads that are also inside of your rewarded Loop but that makes it a bit more like difficult to yeah Implement them but I've never seen audio ads take more than anywhere between 8 to 12% and is usually in hyper casual where they saw their most and I haven't seen it really scaled

beyond that so I don't think you should count on audio ads as like the thing that makes you a lot of money uh Banner is always dependent on one thing and that is session length so how long can you show your banner ads uh banner ads so you will not really earn significant amount of money that actually impacts your LTV unless you can show pretty much anywhere between 80 to 120 banner ads per session uh to about 70 to 80% of the users so what does that look like right your eyes will be bleeding no possible right so look at your session like so basically that's the kind of metric I usually tell people to aim for because banner ads is high volume and high frequency and low value per Banner ad right uh the kind of trick here is usually that most Publishers put banner ads at the bottom why because it increases misclicks there's research done that basically something crazy like

40 to 50% of banner clicks are misclicks but essentially like yeah Lally exist because of misclicks exactly misclicks yeah so that's why people tend to put it at the bottom it's not to make it more annoying it's to get misclicks not to make it more annoying way it pays higher right because CTR factors into ecpm so then it's easy just design the whole app around the banner with all the buttons stitching around it exactly yeah um so Apple open ads is having a Renaissance it's performing quite interestingly I'm SP launching with a new client right now but I'm hearing from other people who are currently using it that you can get uh ecpm in the States on app openads anywhere from 12 to $20 depending on your user base which is really interesting that's on the app open ads format uh done by Google uh which is the favored one because it's a bit less aggressive than the app Lovin one so app Lovin also does app but what they do is they just pull their intitial formats

and basically just take that in so it's like a 15sec 5sec closable video that covers the whole screen and whereas the Google one it's a splash screen that covers 70% of the screen which performs better there's no competition on that one though but it's still performing quite nicely not sure what else to say here but from a puzzle genre game I would expect 70% of that Revenue to come from intertial and rewarded put together yeah okay okay thanks why are you making fun of Facebook yeah we already covered that cover okay hey aob we recently launched an idol game with ISO Corp called money bouns currently at 1 million downloads day one is 30% but our day seven is only three any tips feedback on how to improve day seven uh yeah so more ads wait a second I'm not sure if I'm if I'm recording let's see maybe I need to re RIT the

because sabotage the stream no I don't guys I know I know but it's not recording so I mean no idea I mean it's it's I don't need to be recorded so it's fine uh but you're are going to be recorded Rema was just about to let us know how we turn rock into gold yes so can we continue then n one second Jesus I mean I guess uh guys let us know if everything is working if not then uh we need to re restart this again but it's it's okay we can but it's it's it's life I still see life I still see it live yeah I still see it live but I don't see recording and something happened in this [ __ ] terrible oh no I think we we're okay we're okay anyway so turning Gro to Gold um so what you do is the day one already what you said there is low so I would

start with the core because if it's 30% for core gam play and day one is reflection of core gameplay it seems is already subar and this pretty much translates to your day seven so rather than just going on features with day seven or whatever metag game features I would return to the core and try to put it 40% plus and I mean going back to the cor mean having drastic changes drastic simplifications cut out features cut out systems that doesn't add value or you know put it into different context I don't know there's many possibilities how to do these things but I would definitely return to the core rather than start building day seven you need to have much bigger core because sometimes and I've seen cores literally just core game plays without any metag game features that could translate into like day day seven 10% just by having a very good and engaging core so just saying okay um continuing there hi guys what are the

challenges for game makers to switch from IP monetization to hybrid mon AA monetization a okay so that's Felix one yeah yeah Felix one of course it's Felix one the hardest thing is starting but the beautiful thing about this right and I'm sure yakob can help me out here on like normal design features is that basically it like you like exactly like in your question is completely different monetization model right so you need to have completely different metrics or completely different things inside of your game but the hardest thing is is usually starting right like what what are the usually the easiest steps to make uh from my perspective would be you know adding some sort of economy yakob I'm sure you have something to say here about like the normal game features usually the main one also is just starting with having some kind of SKU to remove ads uh sometimes game developers don't have that so that's the easiest thing to get started that usually very basic no like it's uh but is this a game design question really um depends yeah

it's like game design pretty much is is the monetization are you a consultant like you always like hey it depends so so let me get this straight so you need progression usually I I IA games like only at Revenue gam I they don't have that much that much kind of a progression some think like permanent value added permanent things that translate between levels that you know so you're building towards something your character level increases your power XP whatever index number increases so once you have that you build stuff around it which means there are multiple kind of engines in progression systems that you can use to scale some stuff so let's say our typical very favorite one is HP damage everybody use that so you increase the HP of the enemies and increase the player damage and player HP and vice versa and numbers just Incas but it's the same game all the time then

you have level based engines which is just create more levels and more mechanics into that then you have literally visual engines which doesn't do [ __ ] it's literally just pictures unlock and they are different and this is it like for instance mob control has this kind of a metag game engine or block gem uh and yeah there's many possibilities how to how to do these things but start with progressions so so you know that you have enough content for let's say day seven day 30 and it's different it's not that I'm playing the same thing all over again that would be the first thing but I guess the challenge is also the the skill set is different yeah skill set is different because you need to have product based skill set which means systems and vectors systems and vectors against score gameplay and ads yeah okay then there is question how to scale ads from 100K to 200k a month to million ions of dollars a month and

still profit in the long run that's the golden that's the golden equation you know like I I I have 150% draw on day 30 uh when I spend 10K per day I'm G to spend million a day and the we will have the same r on day 30 that's not how it works so again CPI versus LTV equation so uh the profit in the long r I guess how this works is when you have a small budget you're targeting the core audience as soon as you expand the budget then the targeting uh kind of it's going wide and you are targeting also people that are not that much interested in your game and then therefore like your CPI is growing as well and then LTV kind of maybe stays the same or even even goes a little bit lower because of the um of the vi audience so then it's always it doesn't need to

be always uh going from 100K 100K a month to Millions a month possible because the LTV won't allow it and your LTV is always the ceiling of the of the scale so and then it's all about you figuring out the margins and how quickly you want to recoup the the spend so let's say you have this 100K per month spent and you see returns in 30 days but if you go and spend one one million a month and you still can get the money back let's say in six months and you are you are okay with it then there you go then you just uh start spending a little bit more and then like the payback period kind of prolongs afterwards the thing is uh then the long-term retention goes uh into this equation as well so you need to be very sure that uh you are not aiming for one year payback period And then after six months nobody's playing the game

okay um or if it's actually about an an monetization uh pretty simple right you just need to show if you want to make 100K a day you need to show about 30 million intertial ads your eyes your eyes are not bleeding there no to be if you want to make if you want to make 100k with banner ads you need to show about 600 million a day and if you want to make it with rewarded you need to show about 25 to 30 million rewarded ads a day and that's how you make 100 G in CR okay you go pick your next one felixs it's admon one it is all right so it is uh so try yeah you want to read it so I'm not Yeah Yeah from Sagi adman question trying to add networks all the new networks interstitials get plus 40% CTR users fail to close the ad how come anyone uses Those ads they have amazing ecpn but destroy the retention yeah hello

that's what we discussed in the last podcast sagy like oh the Boon of my existence like this is such a painful conversation to have because this is a constant cat and mouse game and 40% CTR sounds really low in today's day and age because you know some ctrs are up to like 60 to 80% right and you know users having started clicking on more ads is just the end cards and the ad EXP experience has gotten a lot worse Mis clicks yeah misclicks uh the sad truth is that basically there's nothing you can do for the long term to ensure that basically networks adhere to less aggressive formats because the arms race is already happened so basically it's in app in unities uh and everyone's of their own like shareholder price interest to basically make the ad experience as bad in terms of of user experience as possible because they make higher margins and more money right and the

only way you can get out of this is basically you send them emails and saying that this is the end card format that we accept and this is what you have to adhere to and we will ensure parity uh on with every other user so no network will lift I even had an example where applovin I try to do this with a client and then they were like I emailed them first and they were like we'll do it last and refuse to change anything until the other networks had changed it it's kind of funny super aggressive right but like thing done this on on really big clients that have a lot of clout right that like clients that you know they wouldn't want to mess around with but then what started happening was like a month in like suddenly I was seeing one minute you know uh King like Royal match ads from this one network and I was like guys what's going on and they're like oh uh San Francisco is just testing some things uh and you guys are in the test group so I'm like great thank you I don't want to be the T gr like you can't opt out of it I'm like

great so it's a constant cat and mouse thing that you have to do unfortunately and you just have to constantly message so one of the things I do is I watch ads in my client's apps from now to time to time is to see what kind of end card templates but you should run tests on this and then you should not let them get away with it it's easier if you're bigger because then they listen to you it's really hard if you're small but yeah that's the kind of day and age we live in so there there's a comment by the way like it's it's great that you you kind of missed their name on purpose when we recorded but now when it's live you you say the name of the network immediately so that's just like I mean great move great move Felix yeah uh anyway from apping is listening they usually text me it's like that's not true yeah yeah anyway okay so um we have a comment like you need to do a segment about different typ YP of new monetization platforms that is happening

in the industry I have no idea what this is all about tell me what kind of new monetization platforms are you referring to web shops steam are Ste oh I mean it's not the new monetization platform you [ __ ] [ __ ] like seriously like geez oh anyway um this is good kind of uh comment about what we should do and we are definitely listening so if you have any any ideas or anything that we should definitely cover uh I think you notice that we started doing this like uh our podcast twice a week so we have so many new things Concepts and and ideas in in our heads going from something like this obviously this is the third time and we're going to do it every every month for an hour uh and then we will play other games and record and chat during the games and we will have different guests maybe playing

those games with us and And discussing things and then we will have yakob son uh coming on the podcast as well with my yeah you can also you can also email us if you want us to do anything you see our emails here going to SL exactly that's what I just join our slack Channel which is now let's see how many people it's like almost nearly one and a half k i I wanted to say 2,000 yeah it's 1,400 people so uh you're get there welcome yeah always welcome there so yeah if you can specify this in the comments uh it would be great okay hey guys what amount of money would you recommend to start in a mobile Game Dev with a small team from scratch I have some background with subscription apps UIA so development but really interested in games well I can tell you you can you can start well are you going are you going to do the development by your yourself or I guess Game Dev team from

scratch so I think the what I have now discussed with different Studios um around the world is you can get the game Prototype or like an MVP or maybe even like soft Lun ready type of game for like 30 to 40,000 in five months which seems like reasonable outsourced basically outsourced which is outsourced yeah so a small team depends on how much money you're going to pay yourself to survive obviously because you're not going to make any money first but then uh they most probably is so anything yeah 30 40 50k uh but the thing is like yeah it depends on like what where you based as well also depends on seniority of the people actually doing the thing because I've seen for instance Outsource development go horribly wrong where the source code was literally unusable it doesn't it's not like a silver bullet so keep that in mind also okay it's expert on sour Cod yeah I I

I've I've seen a game that I worked on and it had to be literally killed because the sord C went so shitty that they wouldn't be able to update it I was in that situation so killed the whole studio by the way but how how come this name shame this Dev Studio no I'm not name shaming I'm just saying I've seen it happen no name shaming but like how how can you how can you screw up your s Cod so much yeah you do shitty mistakes because you hard code stuff you don't do it modularly you don't Factor you don't like you don't have colleagues that can help you with that like the same senior parity then you know in the bubble yeah then we're [ __ ] moving on how long would you say it takes to test an experienced Studio like a stoty or seame Studios to build a hybrid prototype ready for testing it told us this three months now yeah three months said three months I I would expect that you need to keep in mind that they have all the tooling and the Automation and the processes

throughout the years acquired in the studio on their disposal so that's what I asked those are completely different three months than yours three months yeah yeah that's what I asked like okay well and he Anon said on the the latest episode that they have all these internal automation tools or tools for automation like should be a crime I guess helps a lot to speed up the process if you're a good publisher you have literally like the features team or like the tooling team that just make tools no games just tooling that's it okay Felix for you Max have rolled out 5c Banner refresh uh beta cpms are down 30 to 40% uh Impressions 70 80% got decent upsides in revenue for now but going ahead will this with these updates sustain as a CTR have also dropped uh where are you reading that it's okay so yeah

um in the meantime I can answer the basically okay let me figure out how to answer that so I cannot confirm or deny the existence of a 5sec refresh rate now available on appoved Max because confirm so one thing that I've known from working in admon for eight years is that Google has always said that you should be very cautious testing anything below 10 seconds refresh rate because their algorithms might s show that it's basically fraud or fraudulent traffic or invalid traffic uh I've heard some developers potentially having nice upsides from moving down to 5sec refresh rates uh I've also heard of some developers not choosing to go down that route because of the risks that could happen right so yeah I mean I personally hav't

try to the the risks are that basically exactly what you outline here right basically ecms are down but basically overall the Rev goes up because you're showing a lot more Impressions personally I've been asked this question a couple times if I want to do it and usually I've said is no uh I said let other people do the testing for us and let's see what it looks like last yeah yeah because the issue is like thing how these algorithms work right if you get there's another question coming down the line about like ad mob invalid traffic yeah if you get marked as invalid traffic you're you're there three four five months there you're not getting Google demand for example and that can kill you right yeah that's very the same thing I say about like SDK updates you don't want to be the developer that does the SDK update first you want to be like a month in and checking what's going on right so if developers are I'm seeing trends that in like four months is still staying the same yeah I'm going to try 5 Seconds absolutely but I'm bit cautious

because of my historic yeah stories about it so yeah but if it works for you keep it on right like good for you get the money let's um let's speed up a little bit so we can kind of 15 more minutes it's okay and all the questions are unanswered are going to be answered in the select channel so yeah they can be go there and paste them there we can end them there what's the best you right now M yeah well go moving on Google for Android Apple for iOS thank you very much for listening next one next one by normal ads I mean like CPI ads which are run by Publishers or general demographics and look like I mean that's for the followup question from before A for yeah okay so broad targeting basically broad targeting versus the look likee ads it's in this kind of situation I always use broad targeting and uh no lookalikes um and it's also kind of tied to the stage where I am with the different game but

honestly broad works better because of the potential reach of the of the campaign and then let the C the creative different creative angles do the targeting for you instead of look likes okay how do I get out of the edop invalid traffic truck that's what Felix just well how how how do I get out of it all right so the painful thing is that uh in Google that usually happens when like the most time that you're getting invalid traffic is either if you're running fraud at a big level or if when you're a small like user base that you're clicking on your own ads so basically if you're a small user base and you click on your own ads usually you'll be done in for invalid traffic the easiest way to get out of the invalid traffic if you haven't done fraud is to basically appeal your case uh through the channel where basically you go into the policy Center and basically you you ask for a new test of your thing and that usually takes

anywhere between six to eight weeks right uh banging on your am's door doesn't help because they have a Great Wall of China so they can't speak to the policy team so unless you know someone who is sea level that Is straddling the Chinese wall for the policy team which has happened to be only once that actually we were able to get an in to someone high enough that could just be like guys these guys are okay and then it was done in half an hour right that's only happen once but otherwise you're just wait left waiting and that's the only thing you can do unfortunately okay I observed the U side cpns increase across gains for let's say Edwards but my monetization side cpms of admob don't increase simultaneously so are the networks making high margins during this time hell yes yes hell yes do youself a favor Google uh app Lovin eida margins and then yeah yeah there's the answer there's the answer Q3 I'm trying to

produce high performance playable for music game any reference suggestions inside related to epin Channel we're looking at beatstar your blog creative 2024 but it's quite not popular Channel yeah so ah yes bear is good it doesn't need to be why do we need to do it on applin I mean you have other channels right so so you said it was the best you just said it was the best it's based on iOS it's well the biggest on iOS as well it doesn't need to work on I I want to say like there is an asteris which says it's not all for all genres but you know I didn't have time to answer this but I would say beatstar and what else um the creative Trends are definitely good but there's not that many playables and um I need to check yeah come yeah just uh join our slag and we can we can discuss uh there because this is quite

specific okay hey aob could you talk about engagement stickness and what causes people to come back and play the game to help increase they one it should be fun if it's not fun they will come back day one is not engagement stickness this is basically reflection of your core gameplay core gameplay means the basic thing that's there which means your whatever Puzzle level design your whatever combat mechanic whatever that you have as as the core regarding the overall engagement thickness metagame features that goes into like progressions gacha systems map progressions collectible albums Collectibles whatever tokens Heroes I don't know what PvP meta game PVE meta game whatever you have there but day one it's basically just core just just focus on the core it won't help you with any engagement stickiness if your core is not working as I said core itself can carry the day one day three just by being very good um Q2 how to evaluate iOS campaigns

correctly and effective Q2 is a question too not Sor yeah it's like it's a question uh how to evaluate iOS campaigns correctly and uh effective so uh go to your either MMP or like well attribution provider either if it's ups singular or adust or wherever you have the scan reports and also um then you check all the scan data there in those reports uh what I usually do is depends on the budget but and number of um number of UA channels but let's say I run Facebook only uh I Tred to do I blended approach so whatever I spend uh versus whatever I get uh what whatever Revenue I get or and then let's kind of check the Baseline of revenues of what I'm getting and then adding another Channel let's run it for let's say one two weeks and then look at the the

Baseline Revenue if it increased then I'm kind of making money if it isn't yeah let's try something else on on the different Channel but he will be kind of good on the day one evaluation of all the campaigns in the scan reporting in the attribution provider it's quite quite easy okay um yeah sending regards to Manuel or to like you and sometimes they listen yeah Manuel see you in a few days by the way man yeah yeah he pitched actually a good idea about uh doing a live session there in in in Cyprus so see let's I'm going I'm gonna bring my podcast traveling kit uh thanks regarding a different idle game without with 500 SEC levels but the level to level drop off is around 20% would you recommend having short levels for better rpu or would you this reduce our RVs if the between level drop off is higher than 5% you're doing something wrong

that's usually the kind of a golden rule like level funnels there needs to be like 5% Max turn between these so it's either difficulty problem or they're kind of too long or something just by making stuff more um granular meaning that rather having one long levels have three levels in succession which can be completed with the same time gives the user better feeling of like being progressing faster because you have this like tap on the back like you're progressing just much more frequent so I would do that like block gem 3D no yeah exactly block gem has levels in segments they rather than one giant level they have like three so exactly that and uh yeah for sure lower than 5% sh between levels that's like one of the golden rules is there a healthy kpi about average day players start spending in iips it's like I'm not sure if there is like the healthy no I 80% of Spenders usually show themselves until first seven days I think that's sure but

then is different completely different right it's by genre yeah M three people are chronically slow to spend I always I always mention this battle Legion example where we had in the first seven days like 80% draws or something and then the next 20% until we hit 100% took like 11 months the first like front loading the the inaps and conversion to PIR was great in the first seven days but then it was like super slow yeah like depends on the game exactly like put a put the giant difficulty blocker into your funnel you'll see how people will start playing and how retention will go to [ __ ] why don't you guys start in your own Studio yeah that's arbitrary questions we get every time yeah yeah honestly we stand always uh on the shoulder of giants like there's a lot of people that we work with and basically like we know how to do or at

least I know how to do what I do like the craft basically because I worked in studios and networks right um basically I need someone like yakob and he's too lazy to do it too lazy to do it okay these two guys are L to do it I'm just waiting for AI to help us out that's it yeah no don't worry you'll see something in the future don't worry we've talked about it yeah about it quite a lot honestly it makes a lot of sense uh we just need a programmer so let us know let's see would be good yeah we need a CTO Holland in gaming and it's not only Holland in gaming but it's also a lot of different celebrities coming into supercell games and also hord who is going to be like yeah the Barbarian Squad see you tomorrow he will lose his job I guess no it's like it's great like why are you laughing I'm I'm I'm because he can't do like proper job other than Thor man like he lost his contract with Marvel he can't do [ __ ] just check the box office I don't care I don't care he's just going to be in he's going to be in Squad

Busters yeah video fine they're going to use it there like I don't care like it's G to be fine I have yeah I have a hard stop in three minutes and I really want to answer this last last question from slar I know I skipped over three questions but basically he asked what is the secret to low CPI creatives how do you actually find what works uh without massive testing budgets let me answer this and a ma can wrap it up or like and we can do the last ones it's crime copying and basically stealing from others that's how you get low but like low cpis you lie you steal from what's working and then you have outraged creatives so basically the bot of a human barrel of like emotions that's how you get low cpis how you get low cpis and it's it's it's it's yeah crime drama um then divorced families and like yeah ding freezing families and all of this [ __ ] which never should be allowed

on any of the channels but yeah it's actually Felix is very very true it's very correct yeah there a no [ __ ] answer unfortunately unfortunately yeah there's a no [ __ ] answer so guys uh let me just put this um join our s CH link into the into the chat because then really sure Shear Charles uh for not getting to but maybe we can answer that a bit later yeah because it's kind of already we should W Jr need to go to bed no we should wrap this up because uh it's already nearing the one hour uh Mark maybe one more I I need to go un we'll wrap up and then see you see you later wrap up and see you later what do we have here yakob some tips to improve the cor Loop yeah as I as I said like feel free to join the select Channel there in the game design one especially but core Loop Improvement is Lally depending on your core Loop itself

so it's kind of core Loop specific can really say if I don't see the core Loop but simplify that's the Golden Rule always simplify make things easier to get more approachable more easier to learn put uh attention budget out of player's head into the game rather than giving player choices do it for him so he can just enjoy the fun uh you want to do the last one there mat how to IB test in the low volume of install especially for IP numbers is hell can check prepost metrics but several times the installs quality vary so couldn't get in yeah that's the thing like we discussed um the statistical significance so if you had if you have lower than 100 installs per day then you can't measure [ __ ] so I mean that's it that's it yeah that's it uh in terms of yeah for iip numbers it's it's the same yeah you you need to have certain amount of of users per day uh I'm thinking just out loud if if I have if I run like a purchase campaigns

and with these types of data I would maybe change the purchase optimization to mobile app install plus purchase so you have a little bit less lower cpis but still can get some uh some purchases anyway so yeah join join the slack honestly thank you very much for coming because I think we didn't have this amount of questions in the previous two amas which is great together together together yeah together so thank you very much again for coming uh see you next month and also whoever is in Cyprus this week let us know we're going to be there from Thursday until Saturday because there is a GDC conference thank you very much for coming see you later cheers see you bye-bye