🚙 30 Rewarded Ads, No Daily Cap: How Hill Climb Racing 2 Monetizes 2.5 Billion Downloads

We have the app progression bundle, which is targeted at new users. That was an experience that we did some time ago. We did it as an AB test. So yeah, basically you get some of the items for free. Some of them you have to watch a rewarded video.
It's mimicking those chain steps over.
Yeah, yeah. It's been a very I think it's been very successful in terms of like converting new users into rewarded video watchers. I think that the impression uplift for the first day for new users was was like above 10%.
On this scale actually.
[laughter]
Yeah, the scale is huge. So
It's 4:00 a.m. and we're rolling the dice. But they drop [music] knowledge made of gold and ice. Felix with ads making those coins rise. Check out designs world chasing the skies. [music] With the two and a half gamers and midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too. Matej, Felix, Shako bringing the inside. We're rocking those [music] vibes till the early daylight. Matej, you and I have your eyes on the

prize tracking data through the [music] cyberspace skies. Felix ads dollars like a wizard in disguise. Check out his craft and rolls lift us to the highs. Two and a half gamers [music] talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They like the way. [music] Click it fast. Don't delay.
[music] [music]
Hello and welcome to a fantastic and extra special episode of the two and a half gamers podcast. I can only say that we don't do that many ones live and I can only say that we're pretty much live I guess from Mount Olympus because we've been doing this podcast for almost four years and there is
Five years.
Five years, that's true. And there's only a couple of games that we kind of avoided waiting for the perfect opportunity and one of them is Hill Climb Racing from Fingersoft in Finland.

So, today we're going to be dissecting Hill Climb Racing 2, one of the most downloaded games on the planet. But before we get started, my name is Felix Broberg.
And I'm Yakov Burlyaev.
And we are your hosts. And today we are joined by two titans on Mount Olympus, Denise and Oona from Fingersoft. Do you guys want to give a brief introduction of yourselves?
I'm Denise Farley. I'm working for Google representing Europe, Middle East and Africa. And focusing mostly on monetization. So, we work with partners big and small and grow and scale their business. But we also work with Oona and the Fingersoft team. Um so, yeah, I'll pass over to Oona.
Yeah. Uh hi, I'm Oona Kaarpinen. I've been working at Fingersoft from for 6 years now. Um I'm an ad monetization manager. So, working with uh ad networks, mediation, um also working together with the game teams with uh thinking of like what we should

do with the ad placements, how we can improve them. Yeah.
Yeah.
Perfect. So, today we have a special episode because we're here in person. We're going to talk about the game design of Hill Climb Racing 2, the ad monetization and the UA. And hopefully uncover why it's been downloaded so many times. But Oona, how many times has it actually been downloaded, do you think?
I I know that like um all of the games combined have been downloaded the Hill Climb Racing 1 and 2 and then other games as well that we've published have been downloaded at least like 2 and 1/2 billion times.
It's in the billions, yeah.
Yeah. It's It's But it's been a long time already like those games have been out in the stores over 10 years. It's crazy.
[laughter]
Yeah, very crazy. So, Yakov, do you want to start by maybe talking about the feature set? I think we We a video as well. So,
Yeah, yeah, we'll we'll talk this. So, let me start what we have here. Um this is one of those games that are pretty much main pillars of the mobile stores. It's been there I guess still

remember the comment of uh Tim Sweeney, Epic CEO, when he said like when you search Fortnite first game you get this this instead of Fortn- Fortnite. So, that that's that's a real tweet. Uh and yeah, it's it's been there uh in its first form of course Hill Climb Racing 1. And we're talking about Hill Climb Racing 2 here.
[snorts]
Which we could say is pretty much like an arcade driving or arcade
It's the arcade driving.
Uh it's played landscape. You have these two controllers basically. One is uh hitting the gas, the other is uh actually lowering the speed or braking. But what's really important is that you actually need to balance your car around the fact that you shouldn't drop on your head. Otherwise, you are pretty much ending the race there. Uh on top of it of course you Yeah, there we go. Of course you are collecting points and fuel. Fuel is still quite important because if you run out of it, of course you're going nowhere. And then uh the car has different parameters that are scaled throughout the game on different progression layers basically.

And this is one I think one of the things that Hill Climb Racing 2 does much better or you can see the evolution between the two games. It has many power progression layers that like the game kind of expands on. Uh again, each car is different and you need to upgrade each car separately which already offers you a big soft currency sink. But the real gacha or the loot box system comes from the parts because each car can be fitted with different parts that are boosting its performance going all the way from boosts, special abilities, and so on so forth. Yeah, here we have the chest opening as the parts were right there. Uh the game has many modes and uh again, it's been I think Yeah, how how long has been it around?
Uh Hill Racing 2, I think it was released, if I'm remembering correctly, 2016 end of the year.
So, I think it's the 10-year anniversary. Happy anniversary.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, so, yeah, I think there were a lot

of changes to these progression layers and I think there were a lot of them were added throughout the years now.
Yeah, there's been lots of like visual changes and improvements, I think. New game modes. Um, also the social features have been developed further, I think. Uh, like during the past years and I think the competitiveness and the social aspects really like increase your motivation. Probably like uh, increase your motivation to like get cool skins for your car, other
I think part of it is that you can play with three other players as well. That's a big distinction.
Yeah. So, that brings out its sophistication and I think that really from a competitive progression perspective, that really like encourages users like under the hood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's a big uh, [snorts] unique selling point.
Yeah, exactly. And uh, besides the competitiveness, also like the team features where you're playing like in cooperation with other other players, that kind of puts the pressure in you as well.
Yes, exactly.
It's hard to master as well. Like I

can't avoid that. Like it's very easy to play but hard to master.
is hard to play a lot of these games.
Physics plays a really big part in it and you need to really make sure what you're doing and even the level design in this one is, I guess, well, much more advanced because again, different cars have different attributes that let them, for instance, jump or move or do different pretty much actions there that are required by the environment themselves, which is driving, of course, the collection aspect of you needing to upgrade every single car because otherwise, again, if you upgrade just one car and solve our problems, it's not going anywhere. That's like main design mistake there. Uh, but as I said, the parts gacha is the one that's that's been, I guess, driving most of the revenue on IAP, I'm guessing. Like it's
Wait, wait, wait. What is the split between IAP and ad revenue? Cuz the first game was completely ad revenue based, right?
Yeah, yeah, it's still kind of is because of the nature of the game cuz it doesn't really have that much of social and competitive feature, if at all. But I think in Hill Climb Racing 2, the last time I checked, it was close to like 30/70, majority for IAPs.

Yeah. Yeah, that's that's what I'm saying because this game is much more power progression based, which again is much more easier to monetize because it's permanent progress and so forth. And again, you have not only again this layer of cars, but again you can fully upgrade the car then you have unlock the mastery and again you go from there, which is again another vector. And it's the usual kind of cat and mouse thing where, you know, players go, they play the game, they upgrade everything and again developer needs to add another progression layer because again if you upgrade everything there's nothing to play with, you churn. That's That's the thing that happens. Yeah, I think it's quite innovative as I was looking at the latest variations these days because as I said, lots of ad placements are put directly into the upgrade buttons either of the parts or the properties of the car. But for instance, if if you're familiar with these chain offers that been coming from games like Monopoly Go where you have like free free paid free free like which is like steps, you have a iteration on the with ads, no?
Yeah, we have the ad progression bundle which is targeted at new users. That was an experience that we did some time ago.

We did it as an AB test. So yeah, basically you get some of the items for free, some of them you have to watch a rewarded video.
Yeah, it's mimicking the chain steps offer.
Yeah, yeah, it's been a very I think it's been very successful in terms of like converting new users into rewarded video watchers. I think that the impression uplift for the first day for new users was was like above 10%.
On this scale actually. Yeah, the scale is huge.
Yes,
it's rewarded video and interstitials mostly, right? From a formal perspective.
Yeah, only rewarded and interstitial in this game. In In Hill Climb Racing 1, we have banners as well.
Yeah. Do you Do you hide the rewarded videos or anything like that for payers? Cuz if you're 30% payers, that's still at this scale, cuz you're getting millions and millions of DAU. It's a lot of money. Do you Do you slow down rewarded ads or do you use to hide interstitials?
No, actually, like I was looking at

um like a table a few days ago which has like all of our rewarded videos listed. They're almost 30 in the entire game. So, there's a lot. And some of them don't even have necessarily like a daily cap. Yeah, you can you can watch like basically as much rewarded videos as you like. Uh and our philosophy kind of is that we're not that concerned with I cannibalization when it comes to IAPs. Uh so, we don't limit this for purchases, either. So,
Yeah, but like this is because the fact the economy is quite deep here.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. And especially I've seen like for instance very smart ones like again rewarded ads are usually done in a way that again fortunate we give you some resources, but again you're giving away your economy. But I've seen again some really really smart ones like for instance if you miss your streak of winning races, you can restore the streak with an ad, which again is not giving away any resources. It just give you the chance to kind of go on.
But you can also restore it by restore by using gems.

Uh I don't know if it like always offers the ads or
Yeah, I I got the offer literally today. Like yeah. And if you can give a rewarded video for a chance or something that's not giving away direct resources, cuz it's much more harder to design and especially to execute. It needs to be impactful.
So, actually something that we've noticed is that purchasers are also very engaged rewarded video watchers. So, that's also why we don't want to limit the rewarded videos for them, either. Um I know that some some games do. And I know that maybe in some cases it can drive up the purchases. But we've noticed that purchases usually they do both. They buy and then they watch ads.
What do they buy? What's the biggest conversion point? Like is it buying gems from offers or what do you think Jacob? Maybe you can answer but yeah.
I'm guessing the chest system.
The chest system.
Yeah.
Because it's running on like a typical shard gacha base system that Clash Royale has where again it's scaling components so each part can be upgraded with its duplicates and then also

there's the time chests that you get through racing which is again limiting the gameplay to the fact that if you like pretty much make your slots full you can still race and play the game which is great because again you can play it forever basically but it's limiting the rewards. Again you can speed them up with ads, do stuff around like like pretty much invest some more resources but it's nice I think was there a fuel energy before? I don't remember if it was.
Uh energy original
You mean like limiting the session length?
Yeah yeah that like you run out of the energy.
I don't think not at least during my time.
Yeah yeah I don't think so there was there was. Sorry so having these like just thinking just like thinking out loud. How it works but again it's it's very nice design again because it's supporting lots of possibilities of this very deep economy which is quite hard to pull off for a game that has pretty much a hyper casual core.
Yeah yeah yeah that is true. Yeah. Actually like what you said about the the energy mechanics that is something that we had in the Lego Hill Climb Adventures. So that's

but that's like a side note.
Yeah yeah.
Yeah yeah yeah also also like just really want to like point this out because this was super creative. Like currently the game is running a Halloween event where he'll literally just smashing pumpkins like with a baseball bat and looking how far they fly away.
Yeah I love these public events where you have to like throw the ball or the pumpkin or whatever. Like that's so fun. I I keep playing them for like like I don't know like an hour straight so addictive.
I think that that's what makes this game legendary and like why people continue to play it and invested in it like is the the social events and the public events. I love that.
It's a great to drive impressions. Like I'm sure you see a huge spike in impressions every time you do an event right cuz it's
It's time limited.
Yeah, exactly.
But but this is great because from design perspective it switches the core. You are doing something completely different. You need to first learn it you know learning is fun. That's the first thing and the other thing is that

it switches the pace. You're not racing completely all the time non-stop. You're just doing this very fun activity and especially super nice because I think Hill Climb Racing was one of the things that like one of the games that can invented ghosts if you know ghosts being other players replays which are much more tempting than just brute forcing it with bots. Therefore your gameplay is very compatible with this asynchronous trick I would say which gives you the opportunity to have like giant matchmaking possibilities without these hiccups. So yeah that's there and I'm again I was following the game quite closely and its evolution. I know work with it indirectly before in the past but it's quite robust I must say.
Let's talk about the ad monetization. It's quite interesting right? So obviously rewarded video is probably the biggest revenue driver right? But it's also quite a lot level based right? So interstitials after levels. How do you guys
balance the interstitials with retention cuz it's also what absolutely can destroy retention at the same time.

Yeah. Yeah, we've tested um interstitial frequencies um we've tested like delaying interstitials on certain markets we've tested like um in like removing interstitials altogether uh for the players and there's been like um the results have been varying.
Mhm.
And something that I've noticed like throughout all of the experiments is that it's quite hard to like get the retention up significantly
Mhm.
by altering the interstitial experience. I don't know if it's because players just love the game so much that they're playing regardless. We also delay interstitials every time you watch a rewarded video.
Mhm.
So maybe like if some players like watch the rewarded video placements like frequently enough, then they won't be seeing any interstitials either.
That's why I haven't seen them. Yeah,

[laughter]
That's like this on several clients, right? And what you're kind of doing is suddenly nudging people to watch rewarded ads. So like if you have a cool down timer of 180 seconds after each rewarded ad, you're doing two things that actually make you a lot more money, right? One of the things you're doing is you're encouraging people to watch a higher paying ad units, which is the rewarded one. But also what you're doing is you're able to space out the impressions between them. So ad networks like Google, you guys prefer early impressions because you assume people have more attention. So if the first impression is being paid $100, right? For a rewarded ad, the second impression might be paid 95. And there's bigger drop offs the higher the eCPM is.
Yeah.
If you space it out, it also recovers. So Yeah.
Yeah, that's true as well.
It's quite an interesting concept because again with I deal with so much sort publishers and it's a bread and butter there like level around 15, 16 interstitial just kicks in. Maybe a little bit of segmentation for lower tier traffic which is makes them go sooner, a little bit more for

higher tier. That's it. And and basically there. And the rewarded aren't really the trigger point here. In your case if if they are trigger point, especially with this robust economy, that seems like a very good thing to as you said because they're not exclusive to payers of like payers paying and watching.
Yeah.
And then they pretty much again if they keep watching they don't get hit with interstitials.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um but like to to summarize, uh we haven't really seen maybe interstitials as something that's um dramatically um decreasing retention of your players. Like even um for example, for paid users, we've run experiments where where we've delayed interstitials into like 20th or 50th session.
Mhm.
But still there was no like significant impact on the retention numbers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Before moving on to UA, I just wanted to say the best ad placement I think I saw in Hill Climb Racing 2 is the meta rewarded ads placement. So, for you

basically get rewarded for the more ads you watch in total gets cumulative like cumulative and added up together. And then essentially, if you watch 15 ads that has an impact on your gameplay. If you watch 50 ads, that also does it. So, you're rewarding users for all the ad watches they've done. It's great.
Yeah, exactly. I I like like that one, too. I think we just maybe should place it somewhere else cuz currently it's a little bit
it up You have it as a bar visible at all times, but
Yeah. Yeah, there is I think there is like a small icon that shows
Yeah.
Yeah, like every time you watch a rewarded video, but uh other than that, it is a little bit hidden. So, I would like to place it somewhere where users can really see cuz I don't know like if if you don't go to the shop to actually look for it, uh if many players are like missing the
Oh, there's there's notification like it but it again, you
You know better than I do.
[laughter]
It is quite a robust shop flowing. But but this has been like a mainstay with

like idle games where you would have these app app hubs where like Legend of Slime, Legend of Mushrooms, and all these other games where the more ads you watch, the ads even like leveled up your ads hub, meaning that it gives you more rewards per ad. like if you hit these milestones, and then you can even buy them.
You can even watch an ad to increase your rewards in some ad placements.
Exactly, so they they put it into this kind of a little game. So, again, you can you can go even that way if you want. Because if you're that ad heavy, again, it's just a matter of like how do you measure the progression of it and show it to the user.
Yeah, yeah.
But again, it is quite nice already. It's just again, it's great that the game is so robust because there's lots of stuff to sink in the currency.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah. So, you've been studying Hill Climb Racing 2's UA as well. Do you want to summarize basically
the game, but I wasn't very good at It was the suspension.
Yeah.
Um yeah, no, like uh our team, so the Google AdMob team have been working very closely with Fingersoft team, so Una and

and her wider team. And so, actually, Una's team have gone very deep from uh sophistication perspective in terms of monetization. So, using user segmentation, which is across uh all publishers, uh you were able to understand um the high-quality users and the casual ones. And by looking at behaviors or the physics of the game or how they interact with the coins or the chest, um we were able to get more sophisticated data on those users. So, rather than just considering you uh geos or passports, um you're looking at individuals, which I think was really, really important, and we were able to create custom segmentations, so custom uh CPA targeting, and then feed those custom sort of audiences back to UA channels,
Mhm.
which has been really uh successful, I would say. Like, we're

still early testing and and working through that, but really good results.
Is this a new add-on for the ad revenue campaigns you can run with Google or is it something different?
So actually it's something that Una's team developed internally in terms of segmentation. Yeah, and so we created these custom CPAs, so cost per action um events. So you can use it with any of the networks, not just Google Ads. Yeah.
Okay, interesting. And do you set up separate ad unit waterfalls for the different type of segments then or how does that work in AdMob?
Uh in AdMob we uh have during the past few years moved completely away from the geo segmented mediation groups. So we have a set of I think five tiers and we use so Google's key value pair segmentation to do like impression value uh segmentation for the users. So um the groups are dynamic so that the users move between those and each mediation

group has like its own range of eCPM. So that kind of eliminate some of the need for uh manual uh updating of the floors inside the groups and also eliminates completely the need to do any geo segmentation in mediation groups.
And like on top of that, we were looking at two-tier or tier two should I say, tier three. Um but actually they were bringing tier one CPMs. So again going back to individual behaviors and how they engaged with the the game itself. Um so you were able to look at like that high-quality engaged users, so like the VIPs let's say versus casual gamer that wants to watch 10 rewarded ads or is happy to to get coins or unlock a chest. So yeah.
eCPM is universal, right? Like you as Google, you don't mind if someone has a $100 eCPM in Saudi Arabia compared to America. They

basically shown the same characteristics to be worth that ECPM, right? Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. And that's what I suppose the the Google Analytics we were linked to it as well. And that's what we found. So, that was able to then feed back talking about the flywheel into the UAP so make it more sophisticated.
What's the best AdMob setup you can run, I don't know, in pro or not pro to basically capitalize on the fact that ECPMs are universal?
Um ooh. Well, the best setup I think is hybrid monetization. I'll always go in with that one. Um you know, we've been asked why aren't we going uh fully auctioned. Um but like we're working with 180 DSPs, 10 SDKs or waterfalls, we still feel well, we still see the results like up 10 20% that you'll get higher ECPMs through the hybrid model. Um can we make them universal? I think in

that way we can.
Mhm.
Because you've a higher density in terms of the user base and so you've more intelligence around your audience and you can segment your audience based on that. So, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there's gold in them hills and Hill Climb Racing can grab it, right? So, did we want to talk a little bit about the creative strategy for Hill Climb Racing 2 before we wrap up because I think that was a good feature set overview of AdMob, but uh yeah, do you want to talk a little bit about Hill Climb Racing creative? So, so Hill Climb Racing is a organic machine, right? It's like hooked into the mains like a geyser of downloads. So, I don't know how much like how much of UA you actually do, but must be a little bit, right?
I think something like from my perspective or what I could talk to maybe is um the things that both uh Fingersoft and the Hill Climb Racing 2 team have done themselves and we've worked with them. We've we've similar features is uh preloading. So, like you're in a gameplay, um you get to the end of the race and you have to wait like 5 seconds for the

ad to load. Um never good. You're going to lose that impression.
Seconds if you're running a hybrid setup.
But if we have pre-loading in the background, which we've used, um well then that ad's already loading in the background. You finish the race, you see the ad. So no latency issues or you know, you're doing the caching beforehand. So that's one thing I would say.
Question on that I've actually always wanted to ask, right? If you're caching a lot of ads, does that impact you negatively for not showing them from the networks on AdMob mediation?
No, I don't believe so because again, back to the density of what we're pulling from. If you're looking at hybrid mediation, you're doing it in real time between the main mediation and the waterfall setup. So you're still going to get the best price for your partner. And like the partner has still floors in. So yeah.
Una knows what we're talking about.
No idea. It's great.
[laughter]
Slightly.
I think we can finish there because I

think we dissected this absolute AdMob beast quite well.
One thing I will say on the creatives is and again, I think Hill Climb Racing do this do this quite well and I know Yakup is a big fan of creativity and innovation. But like simple tip to developers is make sure that your creative or your you know, what you're sharing from an ad perspective matches what you see in the Play Store. And because again, you don't want this really a cool looking game and then you go into Play Store and it's an old image from 2006. So like being creative, making sure you're continually innovation in terms of your content, that's super important. Because again, a user sees that you've lost the user. They want to see this like really improved creative game. So I think that's really important.
Except for except
Except for except yeah.
Yeah, well, I think you probably must be uh Finland's number one export in terms of downloads, right? So, congratulations.
I don't actually know. I I haven't

checked if we are, but
way than Supercell. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
Big margin there.
Yeah.
By the billion downloads, so yeah. Congratulations for the last reason. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing more games.
It takes a lot of effort to actually keep this running for so long.
Yeah.
Yeah, really.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, I'm really proud of the game. I love it. I'm a huge fan. I remember playing Hill Climb Racing 1 when I was like 15 at like my some of my first summer jobs during working hours. It's uh it's really nostalgic for me and it's so fun to work with these games now.
Yeah, and the team really care.
Yeah.
Uh I think both gameplay which I think I always think when we we visit the offices and go in region. I think that whole region is very great like good in terms of being transparent as well and ad quality is really important, so
Mhm.
I think that all all those things really help.
Sending regards to Otto. I hope you're watching.
[laughter]
Yeah, I think
We all miss him.
we'll probably end there. Uh this has been another terrific live episode. We

don't do a lot of them, but thank you so much for bringing this together. And uh yeah, if you want to connect, I'm sure we have some emails here that we can put in the show notes below. But yeah, thank you so much for stopping by. Bye-bye.
Thank you.