AppLovin’s Daniel Tchernahovsky On The Hot Gaming Trends Worth Tracking

[Music] hello world welcome to the Pocket Gamer podcast with me Brian Bago and my awesome co-host the mobile Maven herself Miss Peggy insults good afternoon Peggy how are you today I am good today Brian and you are looking really fine I have to say you have been out again doing what I think is the coolest thing you do other than of course co-host this with me is you are out there Champion the games industry tell me about it what's going on well I I was invited to a a a launch this morning at STV that's one of the the big broadcasters here in Scotland and their children's charity are really interested in working with us for Scottish games week to help support uh children in poverty across the country and obviously video games and kids are kind of like even more than kids and Candy these days

um are a route that they're not really familiar with so I've been going through speaking to a lot of sports stars politicians you know trustees you know the Great and the good about how video games work what we could potentially do to sort of raise money and how they can tap into this huge Global Market uh to help children at every age across the whole of the country so um I thought I better look my best so uh if you're listening to this in audio only I look it's basically Daniel Craig is James Bond only you know sharper it's a look Brian keep it and uh yeah you said you were talking to the best in the brightest I wouldn't quite want to bring it in there as a segue but I will do it anyway because we do have someone who is at that level because of the impression that they have of the industry the perspective of the industry and sharing it with us because you know when you're a company this big and you share what you're seeing that's what we have to

tune in for so our guest today is Daniel Shanah hovsky he is president of global Business Development and responsible for app loven's customer facing business globally and also gaming Advertiser growth so those are the two big areas really impressive we're going to talk about Trends but you know when he's not focused on growing game studios helping them achieve profitable growth well he's also involved in growth of another kind and I think you you Brian consum your new role in life as the father of five happy Labrador puppies you will appreciate this indeed you will appreciate this because he's focused on growth of another kind because his daughter was just recently born so congratulations Daniel and great to have you thank you very much that's quite an intro very nice to be here as Peggy said we are at the exciting intersection of two different approaches to to to games ad driven games and the ones with strong

IP that know how to monetize player engagement and they were really quite separate but now they're they're kind of morphing merging and dare I say converging together is that is that what you're seeing absolutely I mean the reality is and that's kind of nice part about working for Network such as ourselves Peggy already mentioned it you do kind of see everything you you talk to a lot of clients and um we very much see it being something that companies have desired to do for a while um and it's now over the last year year and a half it's taking fruition I think if you look at the charts you see more and more games as such we also see that these combined buying strategies when you try to buy users that are both ad and IP Revenue generating they're the fastest growing types of UA types of growth that we see on the platform uh so it's definitely something that we see as well and to be fair it's probably one of the key drivers of growth for the industry as a whole because if you think about it a lot of games that don't have ads today by creating ads they will allow other games to grow and that grows the whole p

as well um so definitely very much something that we're seeing and also the acceptance I'm seeing also more research out there that it's more like this is the way it is so a blended approach you know we will accept ads we will also accept of course rewarded ads even more so but we will accept ads as part of the experience if it's balanced that's the key for sure I mean the truth is that if people are playing games for different purposes right obviously a lot of these games were historically designed with the whole hope that somebody's going to spend money but the reality is 95% of people don't and you still want to provide engagement and entertainment for these people uh and historically I think we're in a market where people would say look I'm going to monetize the 5% I'm going to enjoy the other 95 and I think now uh companies are becoming more creative in monetizing that audience in an reward basically you give an exchange right you don't just watch an ad for the sake of watching an ad you get something in exchange and I think that mechanism has been very widely and positively

accepted by the audience we see um a lot on the website we see a lot in the news stories about the growing importance of hybrid monetization you know it's all more than a trend it's a mega Trend and it's your job to kind of see these high level Trends coming and and look around the corners at what's next um would you have called this a year ago well let's put it this way I think I from talking to clients we knew that where we are today somewhere where they wanted to be um it would have been hard to predict that it would have been this successful but it's certainly something that people aspire to and the truth is there was um there's a good reason right like if you think about hybrid you're coming from two sides you have the IP world that is trying to monetize the audience that might not be spending money and we'll talk about that probably later but you also have I think hybrid today most commonly is referring to ad Revenue games that have now started to implement IP right so it's kind of coming from both sides and frankly particularly for the ones that are coming from the ad Revenue side there was a business

necessity like some of these businesses to survive to continue growing they had to create these types of engagements because otherwise the market was just becoming very very competitive is that is that just really all back to ATT idfa all of that or is it or is it something more foundational I'm always asking this question of marketers because it's like for them uh this was more important when we talk about the new normal it it wasn't post pandemic it was post idfa so it was dramatic and traumatic but is that a core core reason or is it something more it's kind of like basic economy like the more competition you have the smaller your margins become the more you have to innovate I think this is something that we've seen very much on the gaming Market as well you're 100% right ATT was a headwind for many particularly for the IP side of the world because they were quite heavily relying on the Facebooks and Googles that were most impacted um on the ad Revenue site at wasn't as much of effect

I think what was happening is if you guys think back on hyper casual games right like what was it really hyper casual game wasn't a fully fledged game per se what it was it was a concept and a mechanism of which you test hundreds and see which one has the lowest possible CPI to get an audience monetize it in a day or two and then they'll play the next game right but the more people enter the more companies enter that market the hard it was to a find a really outstanding concept but also B games were copied quicker and obviously there are only so many ways you can swipe a finger on a phone right like the there is limitation mechanisms that you have uh so innovating on that became harder and harder and a lot of these businesses were the point where they were potentially creating a lot of Revenue but they weren't actually generating that much profit from a user so they felt a need to try to increase it and obviously that goal exists from the beginning but you need knowledge and expertise to build actually really engage in games and I think that's what

a lot of these businesses have been working on for the last two years or so um also out of necessity to be honest we do have that shift because we have companies like Voodoo that was hyper casual right we're going into casual our good friend John Wright over qual also quoted recently saying you know hey uh H I don't know if we want to go that far but hyper casuals ship has failed so there looking at casuals so it seems that in the scheme of things maybe you couldn't have called it a year ago but the the the trend was already well well in process for sure I think when you when you're in that position when you have these businesses that have you have a bunch of resources you now have Parts like Voodoo has billions of installs right um of course you have a back catalog that will be there forever but effectively if a majority of your games really engages a user for a day or two maybe three many of these hyper casual games had a you say like a day seven

retention of 5% so most users are effectively gone right so there's only so much engagement that you can get from user there's only so much of monetization and experience that you can provide for these users um so naturally the goal was always to build something bigger is just early on it was cheaper like building a quick concept and scaling it was relatively cheap right like building a quick easy game takes a week cost a couple K and off you go um now that that's no longer available every company with is voodo say games hom Ric all of these companies now have games sometimes actually even games that were hyper casual games themselves mob control is a good example of that where they just added two in hyper casual game mechanics that really extended it into something new the hybrid monetization as I say we we write about this a lot but there still seems to be a little I'm going to say resistance from some developers that um I find perplexing because surely now if you are building you know you have multiple ways of making money it becomes part of your

design you know it's putting more power into the hands of the developers not less you know it's not taking anything away from you it's just forcing you to you know be more creative around how your game makes money and and you know building a value into your engagement how are you finding the response from developers so this is the interesting part on the one hand you have the the the hyper casual that's called a formerly hyper casual audience who had no complaints about because it was always their desire but they might have needed more time and expertise to build it um on the other hand you have these IP businesses and let's be honest obviously of course there's a monopoly go that comes up every couple years but some of the most successful IP big IP titles that exist in the world have been around for many years play has been in the charts for 10 12 years dream game has now been around for three four years like these businesses are there for a very long time and obviously there is I wouldn't call it confirmation bias per se but you're incredibly successful with what you're doing I risk it and I think there

are two perceptions that go into it like I've talked to many Founders developers whoever it may be in these IP businesses who sometimes have still this idea of ads being a muddying of the quality you know like a really like in in console you would say an AA an AA title doesn't have ads right um the truth is users want the experience users want to engage with them it's not like you're forcing an intertial onto them most of these games actually are going to the rewarded Direction but that's certainly been one major concern and the other one has also been that there is a fear of cannibalization now that fear is very very Justified but of course if you give a user all the possible rewards why would they spend the money so fine-tuning it is not easy and really what it requires is dedication and I've seen or we've seen a shift in that dedication of the last couple years like companies have to prioritize the work otherwise they won't do it right and that's happening now what is it then

that has to be done in a studio to do this properly is it is it different different different skills is it different people because this is a different monetization model it's built on the ones we know but it's also very different what will get studios here there in the future again I think it we have to differentiate the two sides because it's kind of different skills that's required but let's talk about the IP side first because I think that's the one that has say historically the most hesitant towards it um I don't actually think in our experience that it is a question of capabilities obviously you need big sets of data this is the one thing that maybe separates a A playx or a king versus an upand cominging mat three company these guys have millions of downloads and they can go into that datea and identify patterns of behavior that indicate where somebody's going to be a purchaser right like the simplest thing you say if somebody progresses to the first first

five levels in X hours and they only use one Buster maybe or like one bonus maybe they won't do IP but if they already there use three maybe they will right obviously it's a simplification but the more data you have the more easier you will discover these patterns um so they had the data available but I think it's a question of prioritization the feedback that we heard a lot was look I can work on a new IP event and that's going to increase my LV by 5% or I can try to integrate ads and at best that gets me another one or two% um I think these numbers are no longer accurate U because there are companies out there um it's funny I was talking to a developer the other day who claim who suggest obviously I don't know this but they're suggesting that King now is the largest ad Revenue driver in the world that they have integrated ads to extent and King for us is candy pushes these IP businesses right um so I think you see more and more King is a great example of it I think uh tomb blast and toy Blast

for p also great examples we have more and more proof cases in Industry now so hey this absolutely works these companies are growing thanks to these Technologies as well thanks to these approaches and I think that gives companies more confidence what do Studios need to be successful at really and what's the main driver of their success now it it has to happen in the right time of frame as well because you can build all the segmentations in the world but if you don't have tools that allow you to capture those audience as well then the segmentation isn't that purposeful we have to still keep in mind like for the majority of businesses in gaming 60 70% 50 to 70% let's say of their expenses as a business is UA is growth so obviously companies are very much designing their apps their content with the perspective of well I'm going to have to spend money to get users of course there are exceptions to the case you know like somebody like super sell historically grew without it but again

if we look at the big Monopoly goal whether it's King whether it's cleric whether it's dream Peak all these companies have significant significant UA cost and if you think back about how you ran UA just a few years ago it was pretty Antiquated in a way what you would do is you'd say well I'm buying from users from App a so whenever you show an ad in app a I'm willing to pay whatever it is $2 per install or $3 per install but the users that play app a could be anything right it could be an iPhone 15 user that has just spent ,000 in another game or it could be somebody really old device that's never spent money you don't know these things but you target everyone as if they were the same quality and this is an aspect where there's been really significant progress in our industry over the last couple years for ourselves we called it axon back then where we kind of moved from the idea of H justar A source or an app to tell us what type of behavior you're seeking don't worry about it we will find those users for you and that kind

of opened the door to more complexity because now you're not just saying this is how much I want to pay for user now you're saying hey look I have four or five different profiles of users that I'm looking for with this profile of users I'm looking for retention and engagement with this profile of users I'm looking for ad returns with this type of user I'm looking for IP returns in the first seven days right you now have confidence that a growth partner like yourself so others can effectively bring you the users to behave in the way that you want them to behave so now the task for the studios is to figure out how would you like them to behave now so that's that's basically the task that's on the studios now but it's been enabled by the industry I would say thinking that through do you have any any any thoughts any any advice any any any non-negotiables on trying to figure out what a valueable player looks like for our audience to to go back there and and and really think this through so the first first step is always the game design itself right before you actually

get to the marketing site you have to design games with the perception of their different ways to engage with the product right you have to design a game and I think most companies are doing this now in a way where you might as well benefit from a user that is going slow and steady versus somebody who's going super aggressive into the game right if you think of a match three game or a puzzle game there are power users who like play two hours a day and every time that there is a level day com breach they going to spend money on those boosters and go through it sure that is a type of user and behavior that you want to encourage but there's the slow and steady as well maybe there's somebody who's going to for the next two years play every day for 20 minutes maybe they're never going to spend money on it but if they watch one rewarded ad a day because you give them the one booster that they need to enjoy their day you're going to be benefiting of that user as well so the first step is is design because really IP if you think what is an IP today we use IP to limit or or increased progression

most if you think about any way where you really spend money is you have speed UPS boosters all these things they're really just a pace of progression you will have for your product right so understanding that there are different types of progressions usually part one um but then part two is once you understand that these different progressions exist you have to judge everyone differently so an easy thing that we see is let's say somebody comes in and says I want to they seven return of 10% of my outspend right I want day seven 10% Ross and that is in match three this is for example that's the metric that everyone aspires to roughly 10 to 50% but why would you ask for the same thing from these different users they shouldn't have the same numbers by day seven because they're going to behave completely differently from day seven to year one so it's going back to the board and figuring out how do these users progress what are early indicators what

should I be looking for is a really big difference right so that's I would say that's a a key and non-negotiable for every company that wants to be successful today is you don't just optimize to one number anymore so let's put that into something actionable for a moment what that could say is just like in in real investment world right spread it so you're not saying this is the ideal idea deal or you're sort of saying well these are going to possibly be similar so I will you know I won't say nurture because that sounds so cute and it sounds like it's not hard-headed business thinking which it is you're gonna spread it and you're going to watch it evolve and you're not going to go for just the one is it's I think what I'm hearing here I think that's very accurate so if you look at again if we look at the way that Partners work with us back in the day you ran one campaign with one target one optimization off you go today as you have more complexity in

your segmentation as you have more complexity in your monetization most companies with us will now run three four different campaigns to give you an extreme example there will be a game there like a hybrid puzzle game out there that is probably going to have one campaign where they pay $40 per install and another campaign where they pay $4 per install they'll still be profitable on both but the CPI could be 40 in one and four in another because it's to entirely different uses right so that requires some confidence that also requires some understanding of data because if you're a hybrid developer that's used to 50 Cent cpis or $1 cpis and now you see a campaign that throws $40 your first reaction is panic it's like oh I'll never make that money back and then you learn how these users behave you learn that there is an entirely different pattern and you get comfortable with it and that's actually a process that we've been seeing a lot over the last year plus essentially there's no one siiz fit

all approach anymore every game is individual every game from every developer is individual and every player is unique you know it's the the whole I'm going to say hypers segmentation I think is something that people are just going to have to live with we know data is valuable but what you guys are saying is that you know it comes down to chasing every single player and and recognizing value from them whether or not it's LTV CPI or other you know so again I think it's one of these realities of working in the sector in 2024 um and is that just is that it you know can developers just hope for the best and punt something out or are those days long on the truth is that patterns of behavior are result of design it's not like people will like experience your products in a way that's entirely unintended to you right if you think about IP economies you design them you price them you figure out what type of progression you want to limit and which one you want to speed up through these

purchases so it's very much something where developers are in a driver's seat um but beyond it I think we can stay away from or complications so what I mean by that is yes every user behaves differently however you can with enough data you can bucket them in three let's say three big groups you have in a hybrid model you have people that spend a lot of money you have people that watch a lot of ads and you have people that engage a lot with the product and stay in it for a very long time and actually that's a simplification but if you think again about about business from the perspective of most of your expenses as a business Rua and you have three or four types of getting users then you just have to figure out these patterns and I think the the jump in thought process is there is not necessarily such a thing as a bad user like every user is profitable if you buy them for the right price which means if you target them the right way um so easy example is some of these really big IP

companies are now running campaigns where they just want somebody who will cross level X level 40 in the first seven days because they know if somebody gets that level in the first seven days they've engaged a lot with the product and then going to play for the next two years right um that's something that's I wouldn't call it new but it is a change in thought process and that's just Amplified if you have varied monetization there's something interesting here though that's all about whether or not Studios realize that they're only monetizing a small fraction of Their audience because the old model told them go after X result not over not after an evolution track of of players so that's that's the realization um where's the innovation in moving then uh Studios to that or enabling them to even start to do that yes so I think the the key parts of it are on one hand you have

just the fact that these companies are not going for it they see the best practices that are out there in the market uh the technology that we just discussed obviously is a Big Driver as well um at the end of the day you have now more tools available to give you an example right you could now design a game in a way where if you buy uh you run a campaign to buy a user and a campaign is optimizing towards inner purchases you send them on Apple to custom product page on Android you will have the the ad ID and you can send them to a version of the game that won't show ads for the first seven days because you're now assuming that that user is going to be heavy IP monetized right whereas you run another campaign that is AD Revenue driven so for those guys you don't expect them to spend money so you start showing them rewarded from day one right so you have these tools available and they are helpful but I do think that it all starts with the idea of developers who get behind in their the upside that is out there for them and

Tech providers like ourselves giving them the opportunity to actually manifest these ideas and segmentations into growth I think those are the key drivers um but yes obviously you have to commit to it a different game for every segment is that is that going to be challenging to manage because I mean it's lovely for the player we get what we want um that's awesome but uh someone's also got to manage those manage those are they different builds maybe I'm maybe I'm missing something here no not at all so like the the the way to think of it is that you have if you build a game if you build an economy you effectively have certain you you have your level design that's the easiest way of thinking of it right and on top of it you build your economy so an easy example of it would be you play M three game and now the level difficulty is one thing right but then another aspect is before the start of level do I get a bomb or do I get two bombs do I have 20 passes to to finish the level or 15 how many lives do I have like all these things are design choices

that companies have available that will at the end of the day impact the progression that's what we talked about before at the end of the day you you build progression you limit progression you speed it up uh in relation to how the US just want to engage with the product um that's certainly one thing the other one is also the complexity and that's actually something where we're seeing Innovation now which is really honestly it's pretty funky actually to see is this idea of the game won't be the same for you and me let's say Peggy the two of us play A Match 3 game why should the level two for you and me be the same based on how I behave in level one level two should look different now you can take it a step further and say let's say you match three whatever diamonds and now there's a new row coming in should that whatever is in that row be the same for me and another person of the same complexity probably not right you can customize more and more because the goal really is to create experiences that feel tailored to

you you want a game experience where it feels this is just my level of difficulty and that's something that we're seeing more like I've talked to companies who are saying they build literal ml models to use past Behavior to decide what type of block or stone or whatever it is will come up next for every single user and that they use to increase retention like it can go pretty deep how should they think about this you know we'll have developers listening who are used to I build the game the game gets published end of story you know this is a bit of a mindset shift so how how should they be looking at this how should they be thinking about about this level of adaptivity for their players from a technological side it doesn't require much change the the systems that the you have service side changes you can build the same app with a variety of again we talked about progression with variety of engagements I think would it really requires is experimentation and data and obviously a

lot of the companies today that are building aren't really building the first game I think gaming is a somewhat matured market so like you can see for example Peak games we mentioned them before they've now built a new game uh a match game that's doing incredibly well but they have experience from building games before so obviously that plays a role and you can look at past data and you can look at it in new ways and I think this is where ml in particular or really the assessment of big sets of data has advanced a lot like you have companies now that are also service companies you have service companies now that do LTV prediction based on custom Behavior you have companies now that do data segmentation right you have companies that help you with the analysis of these big chunks of millions and millions of users data um so come like game developers can use it but I think what we've seen recently to be honest over the last year or so is that the majority of hits come from repeat

offenders um there are fewer companies out there that are net new to the gaming World um and go zero to 100 and often times actually let's take spike games as an example games is incredibly successful Turkish company it's former Peak users uh former Peak Founders right so you have you have people that are now building games have past experience that they can laborate so that's a great point and and leveraging data and leveraging um you know ex not only existing data but any of the games that you've worked on in the past uh is sounds as though it's absolutely vital but what other smart approaches are marketers missing here what could they be doing better where should they be putting their attention their time and more importantly their money so it's funny that you mention money because I think the way that you think of money is actually a pretty big aspect um what we're seeing is that companies that are more experimental tend to be more successful so even if we

just talk about money let's take an easy example let's say you take 10% of your monthly budgets and you put it into experimentation not into the beaten path of what you know should be successful but 10% every month go into let's try out this funky idea let's try out this campaign type let's try out these type of things I think experimentation is one thing that is being done more and more now but it it's evolving and so that's definitely something that I would advise everyone to do the other thing is and that comes along with experimentation is not to focus on one buying strategy if your game allows or if your product allows for a variety of player profiles behaviors try buying all of them right try running a campaign that's optimizing towards IP try running one that's optimizing towards retention try buying one that is optimizing towards maybe adus if you have them um and and sequentially think about every campaign

on its own so what I mean by that is we mentioned briefly before that you know everyone would say they seven 10% this is what everyone's targeting but now if we go one level further in granularity we say okay my v i AP Ross campaigns the ones that get these purchases in every channel now has to buy 10% A7 well that's also actually not the right approach because maybe one channel is maturing better than the other channel right maybe one channel grows better early on the users they bring and another one grows better after the fact uh so the advice that I would always give and what I'm seeing being implemented more and more is really customizing your goal setting your strategy to every channel to every Goo in an ideal setup you have every campaign that you run on every channel in every go has goal that is constantly updated based on past

historic data and doesn't per se have to be the same right so whenever I see somebody that says well I'm buying I need my 10% A7 if you don't hit that number I'm unprofitable that is no longer the case um and part of that function actually is also no longer focusing on CPI um I mentioned that example before of a company buying for $5 and for 50 it doesn't matter whether it's five or 50 at the end of the day as a business you spend money and you need a return for it so whether you get for a th000 bucks you get 20 users or 200 as long as the return at the end is the same it's somewhat secondary how many users you buy so what you try to optimize for is making your profits your returns your margin for every profile of users I think that is what sets the best companies apart from the ones who aspire to be them is constant reassessment of goals really deep segmentation building

predictions um that's the things that really make you an expert uh power user let's say in growth obviously they require data so there is a bit of a chicken and egg situation um but that's the approaches that we see I was thinking the whole time you said 10% and it's been you know it's been the basic in rest of the industry since since I've been in it so that's that's 20 years right there um coming from the cocacola what was it school Excellence wasn't it it was 8020 it was always 8020 it was 80% stays the way it is 20% to experiment and that's why you know Coke is one of those brands that we know that continually reinvents itself so there's a lot of sense to that but in that experimentation there's a lot of pattern recognition there's a lot of thinking there's a lot of thinking beyond what we're seeing um and you know that's a great place doesn't have to be but that is a great

place where machine learning can look at the data and see the patterns um gen can deliver the creatives that are going to work with those profiles is that what is needed or is it something more I mean you want to sort of use it as a tool but is it going to then therefore not be point of differentiation anymore when we all use it I've experienced this firstand by the way working for growth business the more the smarter the systems became the less useful I really became because I have no buttons to hit anymore you set a campaign so from five years ago where I was working with companies and trying to figure out the best way to use the system we now move to being more advises to their businesses of how to grow them what to focus on right so similarly yes it is true um in a world where you automate everything you won't have have a Competitive Edge in the long run from

the tools that you use so it will come down to the content at the end of the day and we're seeing this time and time again in the top charts is the better your product the more successful you're going to be right if you have a product that is 30% higher in LTV than every competitor you will be okay even if you don't squeeze out the last 5% of your UA all right so product rules in an environment where you have channels that can support that growth right so luckily whether it's ATT or others the industry has been always very good in overcoming these challenges and today there is a functioning growth mechanism that exists for these businesses so yeah the focus will always be on the the content first um but 100% there are services that you could use um you can build your own prediction modeling you can use third party Services you can uh use gen for creatives uh you can use it for a testing of characters of of backgrounds of seeing which theme designs work best

so there are a lot of applications of it 100% so Daniel you know we we had more and more guests on the podcast talking about Ai and obviously it it has value um and we can see exactly where it would fit into this sort of granularity and customization but but what else is out there that you're paying attention to you know your job is looking Beyond the Horizon what else you know do you see coming that that could have a major impact on this sector so I it's interes in that there are different let's say in gaming and non-gaming you see different applications specifically in the non-gaming world you see a lot of ideas and Notions around using chat AI to build companionship and deeper interactions right you have a lot of apps now on the market that do uh it's companion it's coaching it's Fitness it's all these human engagements that you create in an app where is for your your physical or mental health that you can help out with AI we're seeing a lot of that happening right now in the non-gaming world in the gaming world I

think AI is predominantly at this point used as an enhancer let's say right it enhances segmentation it enhances complexity it enhances comp uh let's say customization and to give you an easy example let's say we talk about ads right ideally you show ads and with an ad there's always a risk if you show an ad the user might CH because they don't like ads so ideally today the way you run ads is you say hey every five minutes I show an ad right what if the way we're thinking about ads would be that you predict whether the user's lifetime value is going to be higher if at this moment you show an ad or not and you only show it if at this moment it is higher right so that's a level of complexity that we're getting to now that probably will become reality over the next couple years I believe right so you can build that really really deeply I think where we are today today if you ask most gaming companies how they use

AI it is definitely on the creative side uh so character building ad building um again because growth is so big for you right it's such a key part of a business um building creatives is also obviously one of like you have your goals you have your product and you have your creatives those are the three factors that you really impact and um building a high flow of creative that are high quality used to be pretty costly would pay between 500 and 2,000 bucks for a video 5,000 bucks for a playbo like these are not cheap price not every Studio can afford to just churn out 20 of them a week right so lowering of cost lowering of headcount necessity an increasing output in creatives has been probably one of the impacts that's most felt today one thing I wanted to get to which is the application of the creative here Daniel because before we were hunting whales and we

knew what they looked like and we had you know the key characteristics and that there's a whole industry that did that very very successfully uh why it's the you the biggest genre in the in all the uh sensor Tower and dayi reports I mean a two billion dollar industry they did really well but now we're thinking about what's it going to look like in the future particularly for smaller Studios you know they want to hunt they're hunting something very different right I don't know what aquatic creature that's going to be it's it's very it's it's it's very segmented it's nearly as segmented as the animal kingdom itself probably so what is the thought here to leave us with something actionable to make the hunt easier I think if you're a company developing now if you're in the business of making games um the truth still always will be that Innovation is king um regardless of the way that you're trying to monetize if you can take take mechanics or you can

take Tri it and tested methods and innovate on them you will be able to out compete the market right um it is inherently competitive market so we'll see that when you create something truly new you will have a poll position there so regardless of Technology regardless of everything that we've discussed I still believe that at the core of success in gaming stands the creativity in product design that's always going to be number one and you build base of that so whenever we talk to businesses I think the feedback that we give them is an understanding of what's realistic right what are the expectations you can have from this genre how should this genre look so you know what to overachieve against right um obviously if everyone has a puzzle game that has the same metric same looks same everything by making the next version of it you're probably not going to be the winner of the market right so you have to innovate um and that's really

it's look it's much easier said than done because it's not a foolproof recipe but we operate in a very mature Market if there was a foolproof recipe it would have used so much that it's no longer reci right already absolutely exactly so unfortunately there is no quick win there is I think a mindset and I think there is an approach to it that leads to success but there's no one size for all that's fantastic Daniel when sadly we are running out of time we'd love to keep you but um we we do want to be respectful of your time and our audience as well so we're going to bring things to Hal but we will absolutely invite you back at some point in the near future because I think we've only scratched the surface um but before we go H there are two questions we ask all of our guests the first is what are you playing right now and what's obsessing you what's on your phone or what's on your console at home and the second second favorite game of all time

I am I'll be honest with you uh historically I could have used the excuse of doing research uh to play games that excuse is no longer valid given the new addition to the family so uh I'm I yeah my my phone time is is being somewhat limited the last game that I hear you ended up doing research on and kind of ended up playing quite a while and I hate that this is a bit of a self plug so please apologize but there's this game called exort which uh one of the studios associated with apple is build and the reason why I like it is because it's kind of exactly what we said it used puzzle mechanics in a way that I've never seen before and that was engaging like I actually just meant to play for 10 minutes ended up playing it for an hour or two um so that's a recent game all time I would say on Console PC it's been the max pain series I always love these you know story based short of 10 12 hours you really enjoy it um Last of Us that type of stuff um on mobile

there was a phase a few years ago where our entire office got very hooked uh too much so on pubg we would all spend our lunch breaks together uh on our phones building a squad not eating and instead just playing and trying to win um and I kind of miss those days every now and then it was a good time well it was really good to have you Daniel I'll second it we have to have you on back what I really enjoyed I have to say is just straightforward talk there's something about just literally no BS and just talking it through that I find so attractive and also you know a little bit of tough love for everyone out in the audience as well you know this is it here's how you deal with it right we have to deal with it and uh thanks for that an absolute pleasure and H we'll welcome you back at some point in the very near future So Daniel chovsky thank you so much very good very very good thank you guys byebye [Music]

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