2.5 gamers x Live AM(F)A #5 - Ask Me Anything @ August 21 5:30pm CET

on YouTube and we are live hello hello everybody hello hello let's see should be good yeah I can see us on the YouTube live let's see if I can go live on on LinkedIn as well [ __ ] I just you know I just make the connection and everything oh we see should be good oh anyway how do you get to the Linkin one then for those watching uh it's it's just manage the stream just uh reconnect it's not live yet so it's the it's actually an event on on LinkedIn I [ __ ] this I will sort it out anyway thank you very much for coming everybody uh let's see who is here hey hey hey hey

and actually uh it's it's only two of us today uh because Felix is out traveling or doing whatever uh he's he doing yeah and no secret gu unfortunately because but there is Tech issues oh there is one hey there is one secret guest yes you have no [ __ ] idea who is this person secret it's very secret yes it's very secret uh and I'm just going to I'm just going to invite this person right now so you can you can see i' you will never guess who is it it's uh it's our good friend it's our very good friend so let's see uh if this person comes up anyway so thanks guys for coming hello from La hello hello hello uh it's 5 10 people I mean everything everybody's on uh Gamescom yeah Gamescom hescom well we are in hescom we are the ones of the hescom so

I mean I'm fine uh I'm fine with that no problem let's see if if this person comes anyway so and whoever wants to ask any questions and know like it's going to be less people than it was last uh last time but still last we couldn't literally stop because we couldn't stop yeah we couldn't we couldn't stop and it was really great we enjoyed the vibe and we enjoyed like talking to you guys it was great so yeah it's good oh hello that's a long time though see yes yes yes yes hello Mr philipo I I just yeah I just pitched you as as a secret guest no nobody knows uh well surprise surprise welcome welcome Philip so uh we have like a few people because every on the stream because everybody is uh in Cologne for Gamescom so oh that's why I got invited I get it

nobody's watching you're not in Cologne because you're not allowed because you don't work in gaming anymore oh well that's that's mainly you that's mainly you look philipo can you just introduce yourself uh to the audience as well we know you obviously that's why you got invited I don't think like everybody else knows you um I'm filipo I am currently the CMO at a health and wellness uh app company called fabulous uh where we have a portfolio of apps uh looking after different aspects of your life trying to make a better version of yourself uh that's me in not show yeah and and pretty well experien from previous gaming companies I would say a few years uh of experience in previous gaming companies obviously I'm

still a gamer you can probably judge from the background and from the T-shirt um czy there I really like to have that much space to dedicate to that [ __ ] well it's a time in your life now where space has to be donated this is actually a tiny room my space keeps getting smaller and smaller basically uh my personal office um but yes um about 12 years in the business uh most mostly gaming and only the last two years in uh non-gaming um where there are a lot of similarities and also a lot of differences I say definitely like we are getting more and more inbound also like out of out of gaming like asess the time goes pretty much because everybody wants to be the next dualingo these days like yeah I think there is um no I think there's a lot of lessons being learn on both sides if you want to

like call them two sides basically um but also I think that's just natural as this our industry gets bigger and bigger people are you know switching sides no but I mean you know of course there are many different vertical now even e-commerce and there's a lot of tricks that e-commerce uses that were first discovered in gaming to be fair a lot of the tricks were discovered in gaming are being viciously recycled in in other go ahead do you use anything like from gaming in in fabulous yeah yeah oh yeah um let's see first of all uh creative I know that's a subject you don't care about at all at all um you know I think um there is definitely as far as Performance Marketing is concerned a lot lot of uh

similarities with respect to you know campaign structure creative testing and so on um well tell us more I nobody's asking anything so I will be asking questions Mr Phil but don't think no so I think I think first of all high level the easiest thing to say is is the differences know so one of the biggest differences is that the product are well obviously I'm working on subscription based products so um this is hugely different in onboarding users versus coming into tutorial quickly learning of the game or as quickly as possible get engaged learn the game and jump in and as quickly as possible spend some money on day Zero uh whereas in the case of subscription apps the onboarding AKA

you know you could call it the first time user experience in gaming is a critical piece of the puzzle it's pretty much the whole deal if you don't get that right uh it's going to be tough to make the unit Economics work and to monetize so a lot of attention love and dedication goes to onboarding uh I'm not dening I guess well that's another interesting topic I know this has been a hotly contested topic espe especially two and a half Gamers uh that's that's that's we can come back to that in a second but um the no the the you know I think the the the day Zero you know the the initial user journey is fundamental because in some in some aspects actually this is very similar to premium gaming where you focus all your attention and marketing to basically telling people hey you need to part with you know what ever 50 bucks

of your money for 70 hours of gameplay and enjoy this premium title and that's it and then okay now that's changing as well because there's dlc's and all sorts of other things coming in um but the point is that's where the focus is a lot of the focus is there um because we are asking people to on board and part ways with a pretty premium priced subscription uh which is different from the concept that we've uh debated a lot Remo and I uh you know like having to gain the Loyalty of people every time they purchase an i AP right like like Bal right and and so um the sometimes there is a bit of um over indexing on this concept of of the onboarding and subscribing premium um and that that is one of the major differences in product wise and uh

marketing wise you know I think there is first of all a lot of attention given to uh retention marketing which starts pretty much immediately email marketing essentially um but also there is um I would say um depending on the size of the gaming company of course this is also true but um there is also a lot of attention given to um brand building which is I don't want to get into I don't want to get but I don't want to get the the the point is that it's the embryonic stage of that if you will when you are putting a lot of attention to social media posting and you know basically organic content marketing

right um to try to build a follower base engage them and keep them engaged it it crosses its lines a lot into um managing the community as well um because ultimately some of these products are actually quite Niche Niche obviously in the mobile sense of the world of the word it's you know several millions of people out there uh but they're not products that have the scaling potential of games right so there's a few other tactics you need to engage in in order to grab people's attention and keep people's attention as well so marketing's role becomes also important further down the funnel you know in a later stage of the life cycle much more than you know when you're dealing with a new game soft launch or whatever of course this stuff is valid for a Candy Crush right it's been around for 10 years you know like

I'm not I'm not denying that but in in non-gaming it almost comes at the beginning um yeah I think apps are definitely leveraging more like what you mentioned the email marketing and like the CRM basically all the social media Organics whatever else brand I don't want to go there but still like I get it I get it let's not do that completely lot lot of times there's like a lot of utility involved with apps which changes the purpose there which is like rather than I want to play this I need this otherwise I'm whatever lost in the map or something like that like last time I work on a fishing Gap so you tell me fishing Gap yes yeah he also worked on a fishing game but let's not tell anyone and he ask me anything please yeah how does that even work in the history of Remo yeah um but I so that what what Remo saying is actually a very good point that um

the there is obviously a strong aspect of uh providing something that people need and it's not you know it's not entertainment however there is a strong push now to gamify yeah everything yeah gamify absolutely everything right which is going back to what you were saying before with with du lingo yeah uh um and we've been working on and off uh thinking about this uh I think this this is now intensifying this focus and there are some serious uh projects going on in house to to make that happen because to to your point again before du lingo made a shiny example of this incredible example you know can we turn something boring into something incredibly exciting um well games do that all the

time and uh and and especially engaging so we are in the process of gamifying as a matter of fact we've already started so now you have like a feature in our apps which is a streak right there we go wait second there was a streak ining anyway uh we are starting to get questions by the way oh God do do I have to read somewhere or wor I I I can start I can start yeah anyways it's actually D in your alley anyway yeah yeah yeah pretty big core one from Joshua so when working on the game Concepts I often feel like the core game is good but I think users drop off too quickly it's often hard to understand why users drop off quickly though what do you do when this happens how do you better diagnose why exactly users are leaving Beyond just starting staring at funnels adium funnels and basic data don't tell the full story um

yeah that's a good one uh so day one just saying that day one retention is always reflection of the core gam playay so if you are talking like uses D quickly on day one then it's a problem of core game playay if we are talking day seven day 30 blah blah blah that means it's a metag game issue so just to kind of clarify this and regarding Day One the good thing always to do is get some quantitative data on top of the basic funnel because as you say if funnels are kind of looking okay but my guess is that they look [ __ ] if people are dropping off they're not looking okay that's the first thing uh make sure that you f tune the beginning of the game as good as possible and run some stuff on user qualitative research so yeah stuff like I don't know plest cloud or like any other of these Services where you have literally paid testers to play your game to give you something like first 15 to 30 minutes you don't really need need more than like four to

five testers per run or like per one iteration there are many of these services not saying just you need to do Play This Cloud one we don't have anything with them it just that I've been most regularly seen in that one but there's many Alternatives but uh yeah make sure that you see that uh that these tests that are coming out of this are providing you confirmation that users understand what to do because a lot of times when we were running this it was mostly just like a questionnaire if people and what's happening not like giving us ideas what we should do it's more of like do you know how to sum on units do you know how to upgrade your units do you know where do you to get money do you know why do you or where is the gcha whatever so lot of times uh yeah these things can help and if you are past this point meaning that they sorry they want around like 40 to 50 a minute uh of core gameplay then it's a matter of metrics so I would just do that like get as much qualitative and don't test the game within your employees in the company

that's not the test I'm sorry it's just biased your family or your friends doesn't matter like sorry go and pay these testers because they will [ __ ] on your game as much as possible which is valid feedback in the end yeah yeah also under one like what's the your perspective on 100% IA based games what's the best network to scale these games well up yeah that's a good point up thank you very much Felix now like but this is a UA question obviously so it's absolutely uping like if you have Max then I was just on a call with one other big company which starts with G and they were like ah yeah app is even very bigger than us on IAA games because I mean they have all the [ __ ] data in the world so Apple definitely and then Google makes sense a little bit but I app in for sure if you're mediating with with level play then I would say what

iron Source okay um I'm currently struggling to optimize user experience and day1 retention is always an issue Y what are the key things to consider for this we are working on hybrid game and just have are we add um yeah day one retention isn't really uh connected if it's a like a hybrid or nonhybrid or I whatever monetization doesn't really affect day one retention as said for the previous question it's core gameplay basically so core gaml needs to be fun needs to be understandable intuitive approachable y y all these other kind of interesting things pretty much what I said to the question before uh if you're not sure what's happening run a qualitative test if you're sure what's happening fix the thing um yeah the thing easy uh a lot of times and this is a problem a lot of times people do very small changes to the core uh iteration so let's say you do something and like like let's improve this let's improve that if let's say my

goto rule is like three iterations within like I don't know six weeks if nothing happens you either kill the project or do something like super radical super radical means like you change completely some kind of systems take out some systems heavily simplify heavily you know make sure that the thing is streamlined doesn't need that much whatever cut all the unnecessary complexity something like uh Squad Buster did did recently yes Squad Busters did one of the things but it's not really what they did there but uh what would be a good example um of some kind of a heavy iteration I think let's say automating a lot of stuff because we're mobile market and automating all of stuff is also always good because it make the thing more approachable so that that would be one thing and also yeah this could be other good thing that I've seen lot of times make sure that feature pacing is slow because lot of times people just go

in and after 20 minutes there's like 40 other UI buttons unlocked and you need to know like 50 things yeah then your day one retention is also [ __ ] because you need to have like very slow feature unfolding especially for hybrid casual games go play Survivor iio and check how fast they unlock features in that game it's literally like one button after the first match and then you're playing again for another 15 minutes and only then they unlock a new feature so the full feature set of the game will be actually unlock somewhere like two weeks in so that that's that's the other problem would you say this is true for the Western world as much as is true for yeah and that that's a very very good point Western world needs much more slower feature unlocking compared to Asian world we just cannot we just cannot comprehend that big of an attention budget this Asian games they are they are just much more heavy and much more kind of the on ramp of features is much more faster for for a casual game and if

if you look at all the games that were translated into the west from the East a lot of times the complexity was shade offic now I know what I was saying puzzles and dragons and Empires and puzzles that's a good example of how to streamline the game from east to west just look at those two core game plays go on YouTube and you'll see immediately how how big of a streamlining that happened there I checked those those videos I have no [ __ ] idea what what happened there so um what can I tell you it's pretty much just like tldr in Puzzles and Dragons you can actually pick the thing and roll it around the field and the board and like match everything it's like makes Combos and moves in EMP and puzzles you can just match one move you just take one token and move it to the other side or whatever up or down that's it so it's I don't know 10 times and you have even autoly feature there so it's like literally 10 times more more approachable

yeah am I allowed to jump in onto your previous answer as well yes yes do it because I I still do advise uh actually I'm still an adviser of a gaming company as you guys and um they are using level play okay um while IR source is okay I think um U is still better the strongest Contender okay I mean it's not a statistically significant example but at the moment it seems from others as well who are on level play that it's working it's working good I do agree with you with Max is no question yeah okay but then yeah U makes sense Google with Firebase setup and sending the revenue from Firebase to Google okay and you're like I want to just say like look this is how I feel every time like there's a question and he talks for 10 minutes always whoo yeah yeah but he's getting but but you know

he's getting kickbacks from like play as Cloud yeah exactly so so that's why I mean he's got to throw in the sponsor name little yeah yeah okay okay yeah go ahead for UA yeah we have yeah in terms of UA for Indie Dev studio with limited budget for UA how do you even start like install volume on tier two then RW campaigns on the same countries or moving to tier one countries please elaborate right so philipo how would you start if you have 5K per day uh not per day per month per day is easy B say say the say the question again because I miss her you know actually just one FYI I don't know if anyone's ever told you Remo is like crystal clear and the image is crystal clear you're slightly like sometimes you freeze I'm freeze yeah because I'm in the in the middle of

nowhere of nowhere meaning like two streets from me two streets from you stre tell me the question again how would you start like yeah how would you start um the UA with limited budget for like an indie Studio or in IND the developer like where to start what would be the there's even like like a additional part of that question install volume on tier two and then Ras campaigns on the same countries or moving to tier one countries please elaborate but it's like you know leading the witness well I was gonna I was gonna say something quite disruptive actually from experience no I I mean I think obviously the answer is uh as as the the rest of the question was posing is not an invalid answer you know this is a classic it depends answer in marketing from my experience to be honest with you it is uh more valid to see as close as possible that you can

get to a tier one proxy um even though it might come out to be more expensive but the real the hard reality is if your Unity economics are not working in tier one proxies you're doomed you know something has to be fixed so running tests in tier 3es and tier tws is eh it's not really a decent proxy anymore yeah also because those gaming audiences are yeah I think in the past we were quite used to that because the only people who played games in tier two and tier three were in some respect similar to tier one audiences right but nowadays those audiences are vast they they are you know smartphones have been distributed you know ubiquitously so they're actually getting you the wrong kind of data from tier 2 tier three when you're evaluating when you're starting

up and so the the closer you can get to tier one the much better it is because it's much more representative of the data that you need to then eventually start scaling up and and grow the game um so I would even if it's limited budget I would always say you know it's better to spend well the money to learn about the performance um not just the marketing the unity economics but also the product uh um so in my latest experiences I have done Canada and UK but uh they can be pricey depending on the genre um but you know um those Come Close another one that is also very close uh again depending on the genre is the Netherlands also because those are countries with high level of English it's only because you you you lived there for a while and I used to yeah and be extremely biased um but there is a

lot of behaviors there you should put Slovakia in there for sure if you have the Slovakian localized version why not um somebody also told me shared recently at an event that uh you know this is more for like more midcore hardcore they were purposely using AI to localize in Polish and test out in Poland because when it comes to having more m core hardcore games the Polish audience is very strong and very representative of tier one yes absolutely and because you have ai make a cheap version localized in poor non- grammatically correct maybe uh well it's it's a decent level now yeah and tested in Poland yeah so I would kind of use tier ones as well in terms of UK okay and honestly I would put just like

bunch of tier ones in in in one batch or geoc cluster us UK Germany Canada Australia maybe nordics or but Netherlands as well and then just leave this as a as a kind kind of country mix and just go for Value campaign on on Facebook because like that's the best you can get it's going to be maybe a little bit more expensive but if you SLP like 100 dollars per day you're not going to compete in the auction with all these like bigger companies because nobody cares about these smaller guys right so I mean that that can work quite well and then go from there so yeah I would also avoid tier two or tier fre it's just also avoid Google UAC for this type or Google ads for these type of tests like don't even think about it just I like Google I use Google a lot but for like starting starting with like limited budget Facebook absolutely

if you are thinking about actually doing something else than UA and get some organic traction go go to Tik Tok you know like I mean look it's it's actually pretty valid like dump waits to Die thanks to Tik Tok and the organic posts should to like the number one in the US you know how much money they saved on the like the UA it's it's insane just by organic posts obviously they have a team marketing team behind those organic posts which is also kind of like you know not indie not indie yes but still still you can but that's like that's Advanced like that you know kind of shows you like how you can do it and just takes inspiration you dualle the same thing it's just that's on Tik Tok you can get a lot of views thanks to the algo which is still

like wild west and that can help you in in those ranking and just get some additional organic installs like easy as that and it just needs consistency like our Tik Tok Channel which is like 400 or 500 you know followers getting thousands of views um for each video and uh you know that kind of pigy backs back to like YouTube or or Spotify so it can that can work don't expect wonders but that's something I will definitely definitely do okay um oh hello David yeah why does Apple like to torture me by slamming each of my products with 4.3 spam I have no [ __ ] idea what this means uh do I get there some kind of review rating or oh I guess maybe I'm missing something but yeah feel free to elaborate David maybe we can return to that maybe you know we can Google it on the on the spot while you read uh another question and you can you can

actually go into this because that's uh that's interesting yeah yeah I'll go to the to the I'm just going to go yeah I'm already have it opened um or is it yeah so I'm trying to find out how much def find the difference type of games are making but the sensor Tower free shows all of them had Revenue less than 5K last month what does that mean um yeah in the meantime uh as I can check this uh it's pretty much Hidden Object category that find the differences genre games are pretty much put into so you have big Revenue games such as J Journey Seekers notes and like per spel and then you have all these like two images where you need to find the differences which is a little bit different core but it's like within the category so I guess because you search on sensor to it plump it together but as you see here if you go by downloads you have all the find the differences game like somewhere here on top because does have massive downloads but if I go into

revenue of course we have the big big hitters there from but that's only IP revenues yeah but that's only IP revenues because uh yeah add revenue is not tracked in these tools so if we go here and we see that the revenue of the game uh during its lifetime is whatever uh 22k even though they have 22 million downloads this basically means that there's uh the game is mainly or like 999 % driven by Revenue so you're correct on that and yeah I think most of these things are like that so you're you're basically correct like don't don't need to fret about it that's that's how how it is none of the none of the industry intelligence tools is able currently to track ad Revenue that I've seen yet in some kind of valid form so we'll we'll need to wait for that no I just yeah I just think it's it's just adds nothing else yeah yeah yeah it's just that easy as that if you see like millions of downloads and zero revenues yeah yeah that's if you see anything

that has like millions of downloads and don't see any IP Revenue with any of these tools it literally means that they're either a viral sensation not knowing what to do or they're making money on ads which is 90% of time yeah okay that is very true yeah it's their death policy David added to the to the thing I don't know like I'm I'm not really the person to can answer properly the review no I just I just checked is like uh it's a design spam so it says uh the spam rejection is supposed to be given to AB when the developer makes a copy of one one of their already existing apps oh really makes trivial changes yeah oh okay trivial changes that's a nice definition yeah it's like okay what does that even mean so that's interesting okay it's like a lot of lot of things on the on the developer forums actually on on Apple like people are people are complaining about yeah yeah

like oh I'm getting all these rejections and if if I maybe if I search all bit longer I will find you David there right we do spam well in that case David like why why are you asking if you're spamming the [ __ ] app up store okay's question can you please suggest good resources to read about game mechanic design like difficulty tuning level designing Etc also UI ux yeah uh game design uh Advanced game design by Michael sers that's the guy who did Ultima Online even though it says Advanced game design is actually introductory book so definitely go for that one and for fine tuning and difficulty tuning and like much more advanced stuff take game balance from Iron shriber and Branda Romero that's a pretty new one it's [ __ ] 800 pages but it's it's it's great uh I think yakob will link it in the in the slack

channel so yeah I link in the slack channel so feel free to go to slack Channel those are like one of the most resourc books that I found throughout my career yet in in like practical knowledge sense basically also there's a new book coming uh which is called the game design Mastery by yakob Remar it's GNA be live next next year no you forgot it's game design Mastery and life ha [Laughter] ax and you should you just started writing about uh different stuff and just create blog or something yeah yeah at some point when when my kid finally goes to kindergarten properly um finally we started this week already we started this week already don't get me wrong it's just an hour per day so um okay it's a long road it's a long road it is it is fcra just launched crypto gr based game and trivia poker it looks like they have a small team so how the [ __ ] they are able to get the MVP be also quite polished well we all know Michael

Martinez right guys uh he's posting about their Journey a lot on LinkedIn and they said it's you know like they're reusing some of the Frameworks from the previous games and I know we discussed this on on the last AMA as well so like the first game there it took them to make let's say first million like I don't he made this just about this is saying yeah and then like every additional game it was the like first million was way F and faster and because they already released few games and they learned and they you know like they learned from their mistakes and then obviously the secret here is that you don't build the game you build a template of these modules basically and then you just you know run and it gives you as much shots on the goal as possible because you reuse the meta game you reuse the offer system you reuse whatever this this this and that and you just change the core graphics and whatever and therefore you can dish out five games in a year easily light version of hobby yeah ver of H we talk about Hobby's template

like everybody's coping it many many times and that's the way to go the problem with t templates is that once you start running it you can only do one thing therefore you're pretty much tied to your genre you cannot do the other thing that's the problem in templates so some advantages some disadvantages uh this is for you I think M the market timing one I'm just linking the slack because uh do you think that market timing can affect product metrics we once tested the Prototype with day one retention of 38% but two weeks later when we tested it again it dropped to 25 just update More Level I think it's not connected to the timing of the market but connected to the actual campaign and let's call it cold and cohort type of thing rather than just timing but prove me wrong philipo uh if you are just like hesitating with this because I don't think that's that's like a proper T Market timing only I sorry

was this on YouTube because I I connected to the YouTube link uh but it's not I don't see the question there was that was it there there see on live see on the live chat so look uh I if the market timing can affect yes um this Market timing effect um I um God definitely when it came to covid right so I think when you have a massive Global event yes um it I I think we we have to understand more about like what category we're talking about here but like you know do matter Market it's two weeks it's two weeks yeah two weeks is yeah like if this is the first time you're doing something like this and

you're testing on a Saturday versus a Wednesday yeah you'll you'll see differences yes you have to look at uh more time to see if if it's a problem with the with the product or it's a seasonality issue uh I was thinking of Market timing more as like a high level on yeah yeah yeah like in that in that kind of sense yes if you do it in in September versus December it's going to be obviously but two weeks apart not not really no uh this is actually an interesting uh difference as well with uh well you know depending on the game I suppose but um gaming and non- gaming you know non- gaming has a very very strong Q5 uh for really for those who don't know what Q is it's Christmas after Christmas Christmas Christmas it's it's like 25th of

December yeah sorry 25th of December around 11:59 that's when Q5 starts exactly yeah exactly and it's very interesting because again about Market timing um and for some games maybe that's also partially true but uh for non-gaming uh especially when it comes to utilities about uh you know productivity or getting your life in order like health and wellness apps you know new year new me all that theme and um getting a new device maybe as a president or whatever so um it is actually recommended to launch in Q5 for the first time when uh uh I know this is surreal to hear but uh that's that's another one of those starking differences uh I would never recommend a gameu Q5 but man I I launched the game on December 20

still yeah Fair still okay still okay yeah no but exactly it depends on the genre if you're in a genre that gets heads on to Big Brands then it gets tricky but if you're you know specific genres can't think of good examples on my head but then you're you're well maybe you can join the slag and tell everybody afterwards if you think about the the actual genre chill okay uh moving on there are many Android native side features like small popup for Ratings notification channels where can I get more details of the Native side features packages try checking release logs but not helpful uh sounds like developer Forum question if I get that right I don't think there's a question it's just a statement but there's a question like uh where can I get more details of these native side features packages for like Andro specific yeah okay okay so I think like it's a de foreign question because

I don't think so we here have like programming expertise or like this kind of technicalities zero scores so I I would yeah like um best case you go into our SL Channel and you can ask people with more expertise there than we have that I can definitely recommend um hey guys what's the most [ __ ] episode of the not [ __ ] show that's actually good question and also there's a Fallout question why I'm always bullying you which I don't think you should ask yourself I'm usually nah no you make fun of me as well quite often but you know like we need say bully yeah yeah like I'm not bully like if if he starts to talk there's like we need we need to interrupt him all the time that's okay that's not bullying that's like basically Ma and Felix speaking normally because I'm here yeah but yes yeah we'll see but what's the most most [ __ ] episode I don't know maybe some of the first ones that we've

ever done yeah in the beginning we weren't doing what we were doing now and we were pretty much just like finding what what what to do and I guess we were going like General topics a lot of times which is hard to do sometimes because it's uh yeah if you just can't give examples or like stuff I mean we tried we tried like few different things at the very beginning where I think it was TR definitely yeah all these like um predictions and [ __ ] like that which we never do anyway and then we start yeah we started kind of like going into like different topics like you know soft Lounge what what what and why and where if you want you can go and search on YouTube our Slovak version of the podcast and find the Easter egg there and the First episodes there are really bullshitty so it's bullsh oh well you mean we were starting pretty much we were starting like that was like three years ago yeah way well three three years ago I mean yeah yeah

whatever um next one how do I get into the SE I but I do I do have an answer to the bullying by the way okay tell you know the answer is very simply guess who is the smartest person in the room yeah yakob obviously always always yakob uh how do I get into the slack Channel I pay for newsletter too well it's not very it's you know it's not connected so newsletter is one thing and the channel is everything but I just posted the the link oh wait a second do you see the link by the way because I know in chat it's we see it's it's in the chat okay because I know um YouTube really blocks um links in yeah in the comments on the like under the video anyway yeah it's under every single Link in post under every single podcast video in YouTube description I don't know where we David knows David knows thanks um why do alos give spend preferences to

wa wait wait wait wa wait you you skipped one uh do you think that moving to landscape mode and building a hybrid game can be a handicap definitely not like the problem with landscape that it's definitely a little bit less used than portrait just because you people don't want to rotate their phones and like look like you know that you just want to have the Starbucks TX Starbucks bux test where it means that you can do something else with your other hand and like hold the phone with your other hand um but it can still work like the thing is that don't use landscape mode because it's a nice to have thing use it because it's completely mandatory for your unique idea and think very hard if you cannot just turn it into portrait uh good thing to study would be brawl Stars they change the game orientation during soft lunch so check that one out uh Toco has

a very good talk on this on GDC world just I I even asked the question him like during the talk at the end of the questionnaire so you can check that one out um because everybody you want everybody to see you and your question I'm not seeing there it's just my voice okay uh why do alos give spend preferences to creatives that have love Ro sometimes often philipo you know why why do I get lost since you guys are well trained I get lost in this chat it's like so much interesting yeah it's great yeah yeah it's great it's great it's great I mean this is our like fifth time we are doing this and not the last time for sure alos are giving spent preference to low Ros ads just because their top of funnel is strong so they're getting people's attention they're getting Impressions clicks etc etc comments engagement everything comments exactly thank you that's absolutely

correct M 100% um so yes if you get the classic clickbait ad that's the perfect example uh of you know massive top of funnel performance yielding maybe not necessarily great low funnel performance that's always the the discussion like you know like it's that's like the the numbers fake ads are not fake ads are not yep yep yep yep yep it's just you know like it's it's it's numbers game you have way more players and higher chance of retaining those players uh and then eventually getting them like transformed to payers that's then on on the on on the game side afterwards but yeah it's just because um the the metrics and I I see I see this quite a lot so I as I mentioned multiple times I play around with the m mid journey and I'm in like multiple groups

in in on Facebook and there are like different uh examples of of of stuff so I I found one example where there is like um a boat on the sea and under the boat there's like a huge monster is trying to eat the boat I was like you know what fear we just came back from China fear is very big emotion let's try let's try to use this but in a different way so I know I work with like one food styling game I was like let's change the ship for um for a table with food why not so I put it there everybody's like oh well the clicks everything is starting to get a lot of spent but eventually the CPI was higher than the rest because I mean it was clickbait CTR was great but then everybody just you know failed to install the game because they opened up the the story like oh what what the [ __ ] is this different but Facebook was already kind of getting a lot of spent to that c that creative even without

like the RAS signals because people were just clicking on it um more UA stuff on the road is it possible to still be profitable without scaling I'm planning for 800 USD a month on at spent there we have your typical ad thing yeah why not uh it's like still like CPI LTV formula correct me if I'm wrong yeah yeah here's the the second best VI manager on the podcast uh obviously no it's it's still exactly the same thing you can you can be profitable at 800 if if that's enough for you to run the the show that's fine but then yeah it's like if you spend 800 and make 2,000 that's fine if you spend 800 and make 850 it's I I'm not sure I mean I realize ask me anything you can't ask detailed questions

otherwise it would be we' be stuck forever on yes sure but still I mean is it possible yes there are it is possible yes 10,000 caveats yes yes there are 10,000 caveat definitely agree yeah so um wein [ __ ] episode is Legend of slime come on man the legend of slime episode is great yeah that was a great one we got Prett pretty big that was not an ask me anything no no no it's not ask we actually talked with the developer afterwards they were pretty happy with it even though m m shut shut shut shut them down on newway uh I gave them five out of 10 and they were very very unhappy about it and when I was on the call with them there were everybody was sitting in from the marketing team in the room it's like and the the intro intro statement like so we are very sad about the rating like five of 10 and I was like [ __ ] I could see those sad faces but you know

eventually we became friends they improved they improved and and like the thing was there was a lot of potential to to go to 10 out of 10 yeah and then helped them like kind of get the publishing deal afterwards we Chinese run on batteries and tears of one build one the tractor sleep is not an option okay than David uh how is optimizing mobile apps that are actually website under the hood different than normal mobile apps oh hello that's an interesting question any anything to add there filipo for that um I think I thought this was a product question wasn't it for you Remo like these are apps or optimizing yeah I suppose 5050 because there's the the word apps and there's the you know the product side so I'm fine I'm just you I'm just gonna be I will say I will say this that um if you have

uh you know websites really um this is now something becoming quite popular in non-gaming um which is having your onboarding experience hosted completely on web and uh eventually sending you to a mobile app but um attempting at monetizing while you web um so this is uh this is actually something very significant strategic and uh one of the companies I am advising I'm talking about this because I think this is one of those differences where gaming is rapidly catching up it's not as simple to do as with an app compared to gaming uh I mean a non-gaming app uh but essentially a lot of subscription apps and non-gaming apps are having that key moment for the user

Journey now the onboarding completely web based including the pay wall um and then eventually sending you to an app so how do you optimize that is uh through uh another Channel which is uh well we you know you can call it web UA but it's basically mobile web UA um web to appb that too web to app um um and it allows you to try a lot of different channels but also different campaign tactics campaign optimizations and that has been uh a big point for allowing especially non- gaming to scale but there's a few gaming companies now the bigger ones that have started building their own you know stores and web experiences in order to use web distribution as well yeah I can just add that it goes the other way also pretty heavily that a lot of people on mobile are trying to offload people into web stores through smart tactics to get

rid of the 30% store cut we've seen that like AFK Journey literally has a WhatsApp bot that you can send your Heroes to kind of give you prizes and stuff and they give you all the promotions there right there even though they have like 5% discount for this like they're super cheap just saying uh but yeah a lot of actually we work on this uh back in the day if you remember M we had giant browser game that went super super well on mobile which I think was also a little bit of accident that the UI was just translated flawlessly there especially on tablet but a lot of times it's a UI question and that's like the main thing there like if the if the complexity of the pc/ browser controls UI screen whatever like if you really need that big screen it's is mandatory or you can just jam it into some kind of a mobile interface that's a big question but you see what happened with the dungeon and fighter in China which is pretty much the highest grossing game in the world now which was just ported to

Mobile so I guess it still can work very well how did we get from apps and web site under the hood to this like Chinese monster but whatever but but and that's actually a really good example and again I know that you know the the we always talk about okay you know how do we try to optimize our unit economics by not paying the 30% yeah um there is an important point there it's distribution power so dungeon fight are doing that to find other avenues of distribution it's it's clear now it's not like oh I'm launching my new dungeon game here finding some new users um and the same goes for for what we are doing with Distribution on web uh uh it's finding new uh cohorts of users or as I used to

love saying to uh mate audience diversification back in the day let's not go there we have four minutes left and few questions there's there's the any idea how to how to remove ad serving is limited in Google admob no [ __ ] idea unfortunately Let's uh let's check with Felix when he's back so ask feel free to post that into the SL and is there any way to identify the target R for app to find the sweet spot for profit for example Ro 60 uh generates highest profit I mean yes that's exactly I mean you you run the you run the campaigns and then then you see how much money you you spend on the monthly basis how much money you get on the day 30 and how much money you get then on Day Day 60 I mean there is like a exercise which is not I guess as easy as I would think but there are also companies who can help you with that but there is definitely and this is very complex so

come yeah let's discuss in on slack for sure so it's basically please check your bank account that you can afford to yeah yeah yeah go to 60 90 days Etc the cash yeah the cash flow is very very important uh so the legend of episode was [ __ ] because of the animated slime Joshua I was so [ __ ] proud about that animated slime that so I'm yeah yeah but the slime thing is very popular in Korea like a lot of games have slime thematic there like lot of them many many many of them are there any Publishers you recommend for casual hybrid games nowadays I mean yes absolutely yeah tell me Hy hyperbeard games there you go so there you go hyperbeard then there is quali thanks to John and is is to is to approach multiple Publishers so you get multiple kind of

offers and then you can cross compare that's what I but hyperbeard are so cool to work with and you know they have an incredibly they have a wonderful CEO yeah I think can introduce you to to Hy as very happy too yeah how many second best U managers and creative designers you you need per 100K month outspend well I think one one second the best manager I would say like half of the the best manager on the podcast but one second best manager would be enough and then like two creative designers at least one motion designer maybe two motion design tell tell the frequency of creatives rather than designers well for this type of spend like one two videos a week uh that's enough that's definitely enough so if you can squeeze that uh in for like one or two graphic designers that's that's easy for 100k a month

yeah easy I would do won't yeah exactly yeah yeah that's true yeah for me okay unit economics uh yeah that's that's a fair answer but I would actually say like you know one one inous and you could work with somebody external for the time being next one yeah related to mobile app web how do you optimize a UI funnel especially with signals and event triggers or do you stick to website traffic instead no you put all the buttons on the landing page you track them with Facebook pixel or Tik Tok pixel and you fire those into back into the UA channels as conversions and you optimize for conversions on the campaign side yeah this is what's I think dramatically important to to have the engineering skills for Pixel integration and you know and other Integrations like conversion API Etc and this needs to be

done by a programmer should be should be I mean once once you yeah once you've done it once you know but this has been uh critical for us to have you know a couple of people in house that could make that happen okay I'm running these type of campaigns for like Steam games and landing pages for like adding to wish list and stuff like that which is working quite well on Facebook especially very good okay what's the model that you use to forecast R for campaign targets last one what kind of what do you mean by the model wait isn't isn't he I don't understand isn't he one of the LinkedIn Gods m is our yeah our good friend from Slovakia as well yeah yeah yeah yeah he's got some good content I I I I do follow him sorry I don't know him let's check yeah let's check this on on slag afterwards anyway

so time is up thank you very much for coming uh also philipo thank you very much for coming as well like a secret guest know anything about I really didn't know he didn't know he didn't know and uh also friends listeners thank you very much for for being here join the slack and uh see you next time byebye