Brawl Stars to the Moon? A monetization deepdive! GameMakers x 2.5 gamers crossover

this is not a a supercell problem but there's also business reasons why you're going to want to sometimes Spike Revenue during certain times of year especially when you're like considering UA budgets and that type of thing right like you might be okay with a hangover effect in February or whatever you know or vice versa maybe not um so outside of those like core monetization and economy changes there's been some really strong social featur so they have new 5v5 game mode this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half gamer sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously jump in on the intro Monte but do you want to or do you want me to I think you know what can we do like uh we can jump straight in my name is Mel ancher we have yakob we have

J and we have Ken and this is another crossover episode because you love it we love it and it's always fun before we start K can you give us a little intro from your end because you are the mysterious guy in yeah I'm Ken Landon I'm a director of product at hitfactor which is a web 3 gaming company um and previously I've worked at congregate at scopely Activision Blizzard working on mobile games PC games um console games and I'm a a Big Brawl star fan if you guys can see the video I have a brawl star on lot ofar I don't think we really establish what we're talking about so maybe I could just jump in or yeah okay so go on guys so as a lot of you guys know we did a crossover Monopoly go on Monopoly go profitability controversial so given how successful that was we wanted to cover a topic that is not so controversial which is brawl stars is going freaking nuclear right or

it did now we expect that from like you know Christmas kind of push things like that but we have not seen the kind of numbers that we have recently seen in Brawl star since 2020 2021 and like 2022 2023 brawl Stars kind of started going down we'll talk about that but what we want to talk about today the whole focus of this discussion is like you know WTF is going on with brawl Stars there's a lot of stuff that is going on at supercell they talked about structurally changing live Ops and it's very surprising for a game that's this long liveed to have the kind of huge boost that we've seen in in in a game that like like brawl Stars so that's why we have brought on two of the two and a half Gamers I'm gonna assume Felix is only with one he's a half gamer so yeah we switched his non gaming appetite for you guys because you know what you're talking about right and also brawl Stars zero

ads so you know he will be just sitting here and then smiling look at that okay interesting and we brought Ken on because he knows you know like he's he's bringing the product management expertise having worked at the companies that he talked about uh I'm here more for you know laughs and I haven't played brawl stars that much but also just to like keep keep things a little bit Lively and entertaining and just to set the structure so you know what to expect we're going to basically talk about the performance of the game I'll cover some information from data. that talks about the revenue things like that we'll go into a product kind you know I don't want to call it a deep dive or a master class but you know we'll go deep on the on the product it's master class and braw stars yeah because we've got you know two of the two and a half Gamers here we'll talk about the marketing in UA and then generally talk about the long-term Outlook and conclusions um and can't share screen

today right yes you can okay yeah of course you have to you have to yeah so these visual these are visual show visual podcast we need to by the way whoever needs that I have braw star currently running on an emulator so whoever needs like direct BL star kind of game in between he's speaking just tell me I will share it anyway later down the line okay yeah yeah you should you should play we need to see how you suck in braw stars as well how many trophies do you have Jacob on your emulator what how seven oh [ __ ] once like yeah there you go you know this is not your main account right yeah sure yeah of course of course all right so I I think we can dive into performance but before there we do is there anything else we want to tee up for the conversation today for our audience no I would I would tease like uh usually when we talk about the like game growth it's product updates and UA in this specific case you know as you

know supercell it's not going to be that much about the UA rather than product side of of the equation but are are they ramping up UA or do you think they're run they're running some some new things I'm going to talk about that but like since they started making changes um it wasn't like that impactful for the growth so sorry to budget but isn't this whole thing pretty much completely powered by influencers I keep like watching you know super cells literally like main influencers they have the dev builds literally the dev builds of the game to show off all that stuff and each of those videos have like 300K half a million views with every single update and everything so my guess is that their UA per UA is like completely driven by this community yeah yeah like you remember what we what we always discussed when uh there was a new game in soft launcher close beta all the same U supercell influencers were talking about it and bringing like everything up almost zero like Trad let's call it traditional UA yeah that's the that's

new age we live in influencers are the new marketing right so for super you know how but the thing is like the point I want to make here is that these guys aren't just like you know let's make a video about this game these guys have access to death builds like literal death builds of the game to show off like for instance I was looking at all the hypercharge abilities because the guy was just showing them on the screen with just Target dummies and you don't get this thing as a normal person man yeah yeah but you know I I also had the dev build for for our recording so you know really yeah of course no I'm I'm kidding of course I'm kidding of course he's kidding I had test flight I mean it's it's almost like a death build I'm gonna I'm gonna try to share my screen so people know what we're talking about did I see okay here we go so first sponsored by data. no so we got some data from data. and basically can you guys see my screen I can't see yeah not yet you need you need to click on the on on the share

button and then on the on the actual I did I think okay it is not working right at the bottom there's like the leave button share yeah pick a window or screen yeah or top in the browser there seems to be an error uh here let me you need to click yeah let me send this to you I have uh well I have sensor Tower so I can I can actually do that sponsored by sensor tower Tower now I just put I just put the slides in the um or the screenshots in uh in slack if you want to yeah okay yep yeah yeah but I'm getting errors on my side oh well I uh yes okay one sec you need to click share then share and then no no I did that I actually did that okay there you go okay you see this right okay all right okay cool yeah so uh basically when we look at the data we can see that there was a big change so

in like 2020 and 2021 we can see I think I think this is a revenue graph but could you also share the downloads graph y so I think downloads were between somewhere like one and one and a half million on a weekly basis but then in 22 and 23 downloads Dro by half or so and if you can go back to the revenue slide um similarly we see like a much lower Baseline with weekly Revenue roughly around like six to eight million in 2021 and then dropping to about two to 4 million in 22 and 23 but you can see like the game has not had like a12 million net revenue week since May of 2021 and we've seen this big spike and so I I think as I mentioned earlier you we would typically expect a big holiday Spike from you know kind of Christmas New Year's that kind of thing and we've seen that over the past couple of years but not to this level and so like I've got three big questions for this group which we can kind of come back to as we

close this discussion but the first is like this recent Spike what do they do like how is this spiking compared to the past few years second there's been a lot of talk by ilka Supercell CEO about how they are going to be changing how they do liveops and so this approach to liveops is this reflect is is this like change because of the the bigger changes that we've made is this going to be a structural change and then third can we expect a higher Baseline now we're starting to see the drop as we would expect from a from a holiday push yeah wait wait a second look I have I have all threee games because I was also looking into it because this December was amazing like for all the games if we compare November Clash of Clans 30 million Clash Royale 19 and brawl star 12 December like Clash of Clans 57 bwar 20 which already surpassed Clash Royale with 19 and if if you look at January which is so you're

looking on a monthly basis right yeah this is monthly this is monthly so col of Clans is 37 and then brawl star 29 so up by 9 million and I think like we are going to see maybe one or two more Millions coming in when the uh the data for January is going to be closed okay and it's like by what like 40% more than Clash Royale for January it's like wow okay yeah that's kind this game's for real right yeah yeah yeah it's happening okay all right so that that's like the data um I thought we could probably probably shift into the game itself and things like that but is there any other comments or thoughts about the data from you mate or Jacob or Ken um if you can return back to that Penny graph um the ones is more granular the J sh I can just I can just do or you can put there like just what I wanted to mention for people not really following this and I guess can can can kind of support me on this one is that I think brawl stars is like the most kind

of game that went the most dra drastic design changes throughout his life cycle it was nearly killed in soft launch they literally changed the game from portrait mode to landscape like last whatever patch they completely changed the gacha system because before they would have this kind of a let's say very shallow gacha system where you would get like solid tokens where you would just get the brawler and there's nothing to it you just have it and every duplicate of that every duplicate of the BR just give you soft currency which didn't work out of course course everybody was saying that and then the other very important change which happened in 2022 uh was they removed the random loot boxes from the game which also pretty much kind of double down on the decline of the game which I think I I think Kier read an excellent article where he Lally said that like it like destroyed like 14% of the Baseline and just like I think he first he said like it it bumped up the revenue but then deined quite

yeah Franks actually are planning a talk at the upcoming GDC about that and how it was really bad for their business so it be interesting to hear okay right and Jacob to your point I I think that that's one of the stories that's pretty famous in terms of how brawl Stars nearly got killed and it was true from what I've heard that a lot of the executives and management team did not believe in the game and and the the only folks that believed in the game was the actual development team but they believed in it so strongly that they were given the the license the authority to kind of keep going and it's a good thing that they did um but yeah it's uh um it's definitely you know a good lesson learn for other people in in the industry to learn about it's like how do you make these product decisions and maybe I talk for another podcast but how do you actually do product validation and how do you make that kind of go noo decision but uh anyway another another bit of information about why the revenue dropped off so much in 2022 is that they

pulled out of Russia and Russia was accounting for a very large portion of their installed base and revenue base so oh interesting okay yeah yeah okay was a pretty meaningful part of their business and now they no longer have access to that portion of their business got it all right so maybe we could shift to product and we'll talk about brawl Star as a game and I thought that I could before handing it off to Ken because Ken's like the more seasoned guy and he's got like a lot of experience with brawl Stars but I thought it might be interesting to even get you know a a guy like myself who's more like product strategy oriented and I just started playing brawl Stars I haven't played that much but I can kind of give you that kind of New Perspective playing for the first time um and I mean I I played it years ago for like a few minutes but then that's about it and I think the first thing that I noticed when I was playing brawl stars is that the game does have like that trademark Supercell simplification I mean the the main screen is I would

say relative to like the clash games more dense I think you can you can share the screen and just yeah feel free to give it to me yeah but I think we still find a relatively tight core Loop for what they are trying to do with like eight different game modes so it's about as tight and simple as I think you can get relatively for all the features that they have packed in and from my perspective I would say that the gameplay itself is for you know in my opinion relatively simple with a heavy orientation towards micro with almost zero macro gameplay so it's from my perspective it's all about abilities SS differentiated Brawlers and you do have some you know the kind of like the basic micro Concepts around ability CC kiing all that basic micro stuff so it's again relatively simple um but in in my opinion the complexity comes not in so

much in the micro itself but you know there and again there's no macro but rather in the gameplay modes and I think that's where they make the game a little bit more interesting by having all those different modes different ways of playing um the maps are basically flat with obstacles you don't have like um macro types of um of maps with like Lanes minions Towers there's no as far as I could see early mid late game objectives no damage types and so there is I believe there was some no some notion of like a range versus melee and different kinds of range abilities and you do have some micro Notions of like Gap close for melee characters and things like that but otherwise not super complex micro and again almost no macro as far as I can tell so for me again this is like the new player perspective where the game shines in my opinion is just letting players play with Variety in the modes and easily with friends in

the way they want to play so solo Duos threes fives just having a bunch of different modes to keep things interesting and fresh and I've really been you know a a huge believer in the thesis behind enabling Co-op game experiences and I and I think like especially through Co that's been like a kind of gameplay experience that a lot of Gamers especially younger gamers are used to and looking for but from my perspective you know that's really where the the magic of brawl star comes in also games are really fast especially when you start it's basically instant matches which I believe is clearly because of bots and then matches can drag a bit as you get to higher ranks I suspect they're using some kind of hybrid in terms of bots as you get um higher up in the ranks I don't know I haven't played enough but I would say compared to a mo MOA like a league or Wild drift um you know the game is like you

know a three out of 10 in terms of complexity if AA like w drift is a 10 but that may be appropriate for mobile right and I think there's probably a bigger discussion we could have on another podcast about micro versus macro and why is like RTS not popular anymore uh relative to like mobas and and for mobile you know is a game like this more appropriate for you know again less m more micro that kind of thing but I would say that it seems that like you know they've really kind of nailed it in terms of the balance that they've struck and um kind of what they've done with the game so anyway that that's my new player perspective and go go ahead Jacob no just like one thing because I can guarantee that ma doesn't know what micro micro micro is so if you can explain that no was like like Okay so let's see like when when should I ask what the [ __ ] JK is talking about what's like what's my micro it's common MOBA

terms but yeah please JK do okay okay so so okay maybe we'll get there micro is like your actual gameplay controlling the character moving around shooting all of the like controlling the character macro would be more like things like in in a MOBA it'd be like your itemization strategy it would be your lane strategy like when do I shift from this Lane to another do I bank or not and so it's like um when you're collecting money and you're thinking about which Towers take down it really comes from the old RTS days where you know the the macro side was like you're building the base you're trying to decide what units to build the micro is when you're actually like fighting other okay enemies and stuff and so how you can click yeah and so an important concept behind the balance between micro and macro is really about um you know kind of like um you know the the amount of complexity that you're introducing into the game right because if you have to keep so there's a theory

that in RTS games today that the current audience it's just a little bit too much for them to keep all the macro and the micro like you got to be juggling a [ __ ] ton of stuff in your head in your head yeah right managing all this and oh yeah I want to make more units here and this and that and then these guys are come in here and like managing all that may be like too much um too much comp complicated yeah okay so and especially for mobile I think simpler having a heavier progression orientation so that's another thing that I I see in Brawl stars is that they do have state more stateful progression which is a little bit different from a mobile MOBA but um but I would say appropriate for mobile right um but anyway those are like again okay good my new player perspective and by the way I was I was surprised I I mean I I I was surprised at how fun and good of a game that they executed brawl star so I think that's pretty cool of them to make a game that that's so you know so good and I think

they did a great job and it's good to see them kind of pushing it more but let me now hand over to Ken who actually game knows what's up yeah I think it's interesting that you say that there's not very much macro because I feel like there's definitely not at the early parts of the game but there is like the more you progress then cover more okay yeah and I think both both myself and maybe the developers see the game more as a FPS than they do a mooba right just because the there is a lot of micro and there is a lot of uh momentto moment gameplay that is very action oriented and like uh more Twitchy and shooty versus what you're thinking of as like pre-planning um reaction and and K to your point I think that would be a smart choice right if you have a bunch of game modes then to like introduce what's called Progressive complexity right like as you develop more in the game then you might have some game modes that introduce a little bit more macro look I play for half a day so again I'm I'm just giving that new player I'm

giving that new player perspective not the by no means am I an expert in bra stars at all right I I just know product and strategy that's it so yeah JK you need to play more than half a day usually usually yeah we'll play like for a week when we try to review a game well I play for a week yaku plays for week I knew you guys were going to be on so I was like I on those guys you pulled pulled out Felix like he does this usually I think on my on my wailing account I have like 10,000 trophies that's probably like a few months of game playay in my freet to-play account I have you know six months to a year of play and 20,000 plus trophies there so it's a a lot more uh long-term experience why do you have whale account and freet to-play account it's because of different exper different uh player experience indeed as a product manager I'm trying to you know deconstruct the game I want to understand the nuances between different personas do you listen to this because this [ __ ] is

Never Say Never paying anything it's like oh well I I I want to have just freet toplayer like why is that like the other other part of the equation you need to also have the yeah K right here like K right I should be spending more in games to have like a different experience thank you m I pay for it you know the expense expense account thank you very enough I just want to say like we need to have you on the podcast more but now I'm not so sure yeah so far as um like a deep dive into the actual changes that could have U contributed to this huge uplift in uh Revenue you know during the November December time frame um the big things that kind of stand out to me um just off the bat both as a PM and as a player are you know they've added new monetization verticals they've really gone after their economy management and they've made massive changes to some of their current monetization mechanics to kind of shore up their economy they have new iip tech in the store so like new types of uh offers um that they didn't have

before which also includes access to random chances so they can you know they've sort of brought back the gacha without it being a gacha um yeah super heavy winter sales I don't have great screenshots of this to to share with you guys but um they were heavily discounting some of their legendary Brawlers and uh Mythic Brawlers during December and then also on more on the liveop side they have super focused um social events um which we can share some screenshots of in uh later on but going back to like new monetization verticals and economy management well the biggest thing by far that will be apparent to players and parent to PMS is this change to the brawl pass which Jacob's showing off right now um the first thing that jumps out at you on this screen you can see that the purchase button for both of these offers is now in um you know fiat currency only there's no gem currency purchase option um so players who were free to play previously who had stocked

up gems were you know able to buy these passes um and now they can't yeah so that's a that's a huge deal so this is the primary IP for the game you know like the the highest amount of conversions are likely on this um I and um you know we can actually we can actually check that yeah go on I will check it in then on the backend yeah no no worries um you know additionally they've made changes to the structure of this brawl pass um they've pulled out the main brawler from the brawl pass so you can no longer earn the main brawler from the brawl pass um yakob you know and I were talking before the podcast and he mentioned that you can still earn Brawlers in the brawl past through this um Star Road uh currency that they Grant you um if you have all of your Star Road complete you know uh that will be different story but um you're already not caring about the brawler in there if also um more heavily uh dropped in skins

inside so you can see that this brawl pass has two very heavily detailed skins with lots of different you know uh animations and pfx that are like thrown in on top of it you have custom models custom effects custom textures Etc the previous one I think had three maybe maybe more skins attached to it so there's a just a lot of new cosmetic content inside of here so um quick quick break uh and uh and a question for all of you like what do you think is the most uh purchased item in the game and uh these are it's not the the battle pass you're checking the data analytics there yeah I'm checking I mean for this kind of game and again I don't play I I've only played for half a day but for this kind of game that's champ oriented or brawler oriented I would assume it's a direct purchase of brers no it's actually like 170 gems it's it's a gem it's a gem purchase oh you're talking about the SK

rather than the SK yeah yeah the SK yeah well Ken maybe I could ask you a question like um usually for these kinds of games they'll release a new brawler or champ or whatever that's broken and then they'll Nerf it later is that the strategy here too is that how they monetize this game my my game design friends on the team would not be happy with me saying this but that's absolutely Happ it's ABS it's absolutely what happens always all the time that question around what uh what skew is selling the most is like a trap at the company because um the answer to most PMS is oh it's the the brawl pass but it's because the brawl pass used to be gem skew and now it's I skew so I wonder if that's changing now that that it's I think so yeah I think so this is just like all time or like some last whatever the yeah yeah by the way can we talk about um like this kind of a notion here because I think it's kind of missing the point here because if I I remember correctly uh the fortnite documents that

were revealed during the lawsuit said that fortnite is making only 16% of revenue from the pass and actually 70% from the store and if I remember reading out like stuff around like battle passes and you know stuff around these things is that they are there should not be your main monetization kind of a more like an engagement yeah more because in the end as you see even here like they are the biggest discount in your economy and we like all know how it went well for clash Royale when they introduce you know like a season pass mechanic into it so do we think that currently regarding the overall Revenue especially those big stes that we' seen lately this is mostly coming from Roll passes like percentage of overall Revenue um I think there's there's just so many different Revenue verticals it's hard to point to one as being the like the the cream of the crop the biggest one um you know that they've also we'll talk about it a little bit later but also increased the progression depth quite a bit on each of the Brawlers or

on on a bunch of the Brawlers through hyper charges which is a huge coin sync um and they're releasing those at a similar monthly Cadence so uh in the data it'll be very difficult for us to pick out whether or not it's hyper charges that are that are pushing on Revenue if it's these passes that are pushing on revenue or if it's specific um IP offers Jacob I would probably think that you're right that like if they just introduced the hypercharge in my understanding of hypercharge is like a is like a dou progression layer if I get I I would assume it's it's brawler direct purchase and trying to get that that hypercharge is would be my guess it's driving most of the revenue yeah again quite a bit just from a strategic perspective I I would guess not from playing back on the on the brawl pass they've done a few other interesting things from an economic standpoint um if you open up the brawl pass and scroll all the way to the end uh they've changed the final unlock so you know get

random star drops instead of uh set currency so previously when you went past the maximum tier I think it was like 50 coins 50 U like upgrade points and 10 of the Star Road currency for every single additional level so you can inflate your economy significantly just by pushing on that um that brawl pass now because they have star drops there which we don't know the full drop rates because it's not a purchased item they can significantly control their economy that way by throwing in cosmetics there they can do all kinds of stuff um you know but basically they're reducing the total amount of currency through that if players push past 50 now I've heard anecdotally from like their Twitter accounts and stuff that they've talked about publicly that there's actually more free currency for free-to-play players here which is one of the ways they kind of managed the the social aspect of changing this from a gem store or a gem purchase option to a cash purchase option but uh yeah that's that's kind of like a different story

because it's in the pass versus after the pass yeah I watched a few videos and the guy was literally telling like there's 30% more stuff regarding for free to-play players in the past now there's even gems which were not there or let's say the gems you were used to kind of consume into the next p so now you actually have like heart currency out of it yeah and yeah and that like overall some kind of you know 10 to 15% increases regarding the currency on free to play side but I remember there was a a lead at supercell who did a talk I forgot who it was but I think they were talking about Clash of Clans and they mentioned that they want it to intentionally move to a monetization strategy that's um lower Aro poo higher conversion I mean ano ano had that talk about oh yeah I think so yeah I think I think that was yeah that's that's right and so I I do think like um that so what you guys were saying makes sense to me like if you can um help support more you know free players but also

entice them somehow to at least convert a little bit yeah absolutely yeah very very good talk by the way you recom main thing about like how they move the player base from Lower Town Halls into higher Town Halls by like kind of rearranging the economy and putting a battle pass Sy on top of it yeah it's on YouTube like search it out y can put it in the show not actually easier we we've already sort of hinted on on hyper charges but you know they're an additional progression tier um that is unlocked at the Brawler's maximum level so you have to go from Level 10 to level 11 now and it unlocks for an insane amount of coins it's 5,000 coins per hypercharge I think is like I think it's like 20 or $30 if you want to buy it outright um they often discount that in sales inside of the store so you can sometimes pick them up for like eight or $9 but um it's a significant amount of uh new monetization for the game they're 76 Brawlers at the moment and they're

releasing these in batches so like I think three or four at a time once a month or once every two months so they have some legs there if they continue to release these once every few months for the next couple years they'll be fine U just continuing to push on on monetization for those Brawlers um the next big thing was new IP uh purchase mechanics so if you click on yeah well Larry and lri are a pretty good example here but um you can see here that there's a tier purchase you you make an first initial purchase and then you get a bunch of free unlocks throughout the time period afterwards nice um I don't know if you want to share monate the ones that we have in our our paper dock they show a little bit different because uh some of the tiers later on are gem purchases which is slight slight variation from this Larry and lri um purchase and they also include um star drops inside yeah it's it's like a variation of what's been kind of trending lately I think Monopoly

go was one of the first one to use it where you have like two free kind of steps then I purchased one then more step mean yeah those those two both those kind of work um in conjunction like uh so really what what you're seeing here is that there's a gem initial purchase that unlocks a few free purchases and what's really important here is we're we're basically giving you free gacha poles especially a legendary gacha gacha you know that this is them reintroducing luck mechanics back into the game I'd like to see them do this more you know like bring back bring back more paid gotcha but like if the community didn't like it pre previously maybe do something like it's only Cosmetics I think that would probably be supported which also makes sense with you know them Staffing up their live op team a bit more yeah but like the mechanic is really clever because like you think you're getting something free but it's kind of counted in the price of the paid absolutely absolutely but the amount of currency you're getting here so this these two images what that's uh 7,000 Coins Plus a brawler skin plus

7,200 coins plus three PS on a gacha that is super heavily discounted like like like a 10x or plus uh discount so it's a really really really good offer for for players I worry a little bit about cannibalization but seems to be working for them why why do work worry about cannibalization because effect yeah because the hangover effects typically when you discount things at 18 20x the value you see pretty significant hangover effects the month afterwards but I think they're combating this with a sheer amount of content like they are they're just pumping out so much new content that the hangovers are sort of like being avoided because people just move on to the next new thing right and they're just discounting the next new thing at the same rate and it's almost like the the original rate is isn't it like way to Hell sort of sort of I think I think it's like the original price is uh what's the right term you guys gotta help me out here um it's like an

anchoring Price Right like it's it's a fake it's it's a fake anchor right nobody really ever buys at the real price that's in the store because they're always only buying through these discounts that's like uh yeah that's that's basic game design economy yeah basic by for those for those who don't know like what are we talking about regarding hangover effects and like things like this it's pretty much just imagine uh like a baseline revenue of your game and then suddenly there's a spike because offers going in especially those 10x or whatever X discount so there's like a big spike everything looking great but then after that there's The Hangover effect which is like a valley like literally the other reverse Spike where suddenly your Baseline Revenue goes down because people have enough resources to continue playing without buying anything they don't need to spend anything and The Hangover happens when this Valley the size of that Valley is bigger than the spike of the revenue Spike which means you cut out from your Baseline anyway therefore you're in minus together yeah yeah yeah if you didn't do the the

special offer that you will be in a better place yeah now one thing about that though that some people don't understand it sometimes that is intentional and the thing that a lot of people Miss is not just like balancing your player economy but balancing your player base right so for example like if you have if you have tiered competition this is basically G the the lessons we've learned from Game of War right where you wound up having like these really high-end whale like super players but nobody to beat up on so like the mid the middle just went away and so then they started running all these sales and promotions to get lower level players up to the mid tier right and so sometimes um for the health of the not not the player economy but the player base so that you can do matchmaking and things like that you might want to like have these kind of sales to get players higher up in levels and things like that yeah I think we called it feeding the whales yeah

yes and I mean like this is not can continue sharing if yeah this is not a a super sell problem but there's also business reasons why you're going to want to sometimes Spike Revenue During certain times of year especially when you're like considering UA budgets and that type of thing right like you might be okay with a hangover effect in February or whatever you know or vice versa maybe not um so outside of those like core mon ation and economy changes there's been some really strong social features so they have new 5v5 game modes um this was introduced I think in November and December um there have a a huge range of different modes now yakob if you go to um your events uh screen you'll see 5v5 brawl ball there braw ball okay um and this just allows for a much more chaotic gameplay experience and for larger groups of friends to play together it's for me so it's like there's a lot going on on the map right now that's a lot

harder to do some of that macro gameplay that Joe was talking about because there's just so many so much damage being applied all the time that would look so great in the creatives oh my God guys if you're listening please put it in the creative seriously like this amazing 5v5 that's what you know yeah it's it's a lot of fun it's it's by far my favor favorite gameplay uh mode right now the second thing uh you can see again on Jacob's home screen um if he didn't lose his last match I'm not sure if he did or not is the the new win streak mechanic but I but it's in the it's in the in the recording so if you you know go back then it's it's it's definitely visible there go to your player profile click on Testo Matic uh there you go Max wi streak you can see this little flame thing here that's pretty cool super super smart piece of UI every single player I know that's on my friends list constantly screenshots these and share them to each other so it's like this sort of um small yeah it's a peacocking sort of

like a small wind that they used to have in the game but they brought back and now when you do win streaks you get extra trophies so you progress even faster players are really you know figuring out really smart ways to kind of maximize that by getting Brawlers that have low amounts of trophies on them and then getting it stacking a really really high win streak and pushing on their total trophy pile that way for Jacob come on man I only play for half a day come on dude yeah out hey I think mine is at like a my my Max was like 106 but I was planning on low trophy Brawlers just to choose it a little bit what yeah how is that even possible yeah um a few more Community Focus things you can hop back into the um the the paper if you want Monte because that's where we have screenshots of this so the the Crux of this is that they have these community events where um basically the community can do an action and through that action they

unlock Extra additional warts for the entire community base I think it's I don't sure if it's like just completing brawls or killing other Brawlers or winning matches I'm not sure but uh this is what you're talking about right yeah the top screenshot there is the and then we'll talk about the second one here in a second um but like by doing a certain amount of uh I think it's killing a certain amount of brawlers you unlock specific PS on the gacha you do double star drops is that first green star there um then all the way at the top end you see uh what's called coin shower which is a super super attractive um offer for all of the free-to-play players because it means every time you get a win in the game you get free coins so like every single freetop playay player is pushing super hard in engagement to try to unlock that for the community um and then the top star there is a legendary pull for everybody for free so like that there's a lot of free value for for free to playay players and then the second screenshot here you can see if how they're kind of pushing on that with quests so they have these six

unique quests here that are um three of them use this play again mechanic which is ideally pushing players to just reup the next play so they don't they they push on their session length a little bit and then the other three are play six or play End matches with a team and again these are just trying to push on sort of that kfactor type kpi where I'm I'm having longer sections and I'm having sessions with my my friends and in theory you know those types of kpi uplifts of times result in higher engagement they result in higher monetization because you're playing with friends who are also paying Etc um so those are some really cool Community focused items that are also pushing on their Dow from inside the game without having to you know purely go on Dua um yeah so last thing uh this has been kind of hard to figure out because uh it's not viewing for everybody and the only way we've sort of seen this is through Twitter but they are starting to trial adtech in the game and limited countries um so that's those those other

ads you mentioned in the beginning yeah yeah they are uh certain countries now have the option to unlock a a view view this ad to get this benefit type of thing inside the brawl pass you can um you I think you get like the second uh reward every end tiers um that is unlocked via the the ad view for some of those video okay interesting reward they're doing rewarded video um as well as like second freebie in the store I believe is also via that ad know that could be some of that could be just like people misreporting it on Twitter but that I'm fairly certain those are the two rewarded ad placements and uh I would anticipate them rolling that out further once you know this these initial tests are are going on I think I saw this screen when the the recap YouTuber was talking about the ads like these would be the perks that you would get these from okay yeah that makes that makes sense um that's pretty those are pretty significant Rewards for just watching some rewarded videos yeah you

know these types of games which have historically been pretty IP heavy when they introduced ads so long as they're doing it in a way that doesn't massively cannibalize their economy you can expect like 20 to 30% uh total revenue uplifts from them so that's a that that is a huge increase on a game that's making you know billion dollars a year or whatever is it legal now to like um discriminate players where you can show ads to one group but not another is that is that I it's been a while since I looked at this so no it's like completely normal they're currently doing it so I guess it passed inal Department yeah because if you can't I mean I would def I I mean c certainly for some countries it may make sense but I would say if you do this across your whole audience in the west you're G to cannibalize the [ __ ] out of your game in my opinion but it depend it depends on the rewards it like really depends on which portion of your econ as well is like yeah yeah but I just I just don't think that you know in terms of the the value change for an ad versus like the iip it's just so off right um just one

tid bit like if you just look at what hey day is doing currently they have segmenting the the payers and like non payers there for instance if you're a non-payer there only after level 10 they only give you even the option to watch rewarded videos like this kind of whole the thing that's exactly how you should do it if if that's legal it that's going so what what I'm saying is basically that I don't think so they really will go with this kind of usual setup like we have in you know most of the industry where there's like IPS and ads live in like one ecosystem like whatever Survivor IO whatever like these games they will probably still what's wrong with Survivor IO talking about super that's the thing so we want to get Felix on the podcast at some point talking about yes in supercell games so they will probably segment it anyway so it's like if you're a payer I think you either get this for free or like like I guess you get it for free anyway through battle pass or like having purchases but

like I don't think so they will kind of cross into the you know paying audience and even even if it's just it's up to you if you want to watch the rewarded video or not it's not intertial man it's premium experience supercell premium experience they're very Orthodox about these things okay okay okay okay whatever um yeah so uh I think the last last bit of stuff for me on the Deep dive I without I can't just talk about the good things I have to also kind of like dive back into things that I'd want to improve as a PM and if you open up the store there's a lot of like unoptimized items here they're they're not really doing a huge amount of personalization for example I'll I'll make like a $100 purchase and then the next day there'll be a bundle for like $4 yeah and um you know like we we know from uh everybody knows what everybody knows from from the hiring that's going on at supercell this is primarily done

because they don't actually have a PM working on the game and literally it's that you know like the GM is making the offers in the game every now and then and they don't have a huge team to kind of roll out this offer strategy yeah so um you know they're they need to either have an engineer create more programmatic systems to allow them to do personalized offers for different types of things right now they're only doing it on the Brawlers that you own you'll get do they have they have the data team right so they can they can create segmentation and then just you know talk to the to the team and then show show the offers Bas I I need to talk to you guys after this podcast about what they got on the team and what they don't okay yeah but but keep in mind keep in mind that before uh mate they pretty much still followed this kind of cell kind of paradig very lean teams I know for just just at Tri when we were doing battle Legion we have just one person that was doing the offers it took so much time to just do the offers properly and it

wasn't like that big of automation whatever it just Lo through Exel sheets but it has price segmentation it has personaliz we included like five four behavioral factors of gameplay into it and it could still like take one person's whole time just nothing else yeah okay how many people would you say uh work on Heyday just based on the $250 million they make here I guess it's like super small like less than 20 five people work on of course yeah it's million per head count yeah they just hired our friend Maya and as a GM and then uh most probably it's gonna grow the te quite heavily this year so yeah wait how how big is the brawl Star Team like 50 yeah they're they are growing Frank has mentioned they are growing to 45 people I think right now they're at like 39 or 40 okay making a few clearly a a departure from their old model like that like there any very big sell very if you look at

their LinkedIn they're specifically hiring in UA admon sorry UA and admon and product managers even though they're not all calling them all product managers just certain teams call them PM certain teams don't um and then some of them are also hiring in like UA or sorry in artists so that they can bring in more content you know which makes sense for live op steam yeah um so yeah back on the personalized offer stuff they they aren't targeting my wallet so they don't know like they're not sending me offers based on my wallet economy they're not sending me offers based on my spending history they're only sending me offers based on the Brawlers I have and they're what what they're doing there is just showing me um skins basically for the Brawlers I own there's a lot that they can still uh take advantage of there so when we talk about future growth opportunities once they bring in these PMs and once they have that in in that person on the team they can really Drive growth there once they start running proper UA like this is [ __ ] this is going to be on the moon

like yeah this like seriously yeah but that's that's the thing that the whole thing that you point in there m that like the biggest CU is what like some kind of a g offer which is like when I when I look at games and even when the popular one that's talk to my clients or whoever like I'm kind of working with and like first thing like give me a pie chart of your like Revenue sources on iip and if it's like more than 50% is coming from these anchoring gem prices oh it means you don't have offer system that's you know being en in the game which means like people need to willingly go and willingly click on it it shouldn't be that way yeah yeah I I would agree with you can like personalized offers especially like using machine learning uh to like optimize bundles and things like that or even just simple you know simple simp step upep step down all that kind of stuff is like so easy so yeah there's not like as Ken said there's not even the basic you know rfm formula here the ESOP one like recency frequency monetary value it's not taken into account even that's not there the Baseline and we not talking about ml stuff yeah but you know as you mentioned

again like there's actually no one on the team who are literally no one who can do it yeah so it's like all these all these like massive economy changes that you guys are seeing in the game is because they hired a game designer from blizzard who was an associate director of product at blizzard who's now a game designer at supercell and he's like also got a really strong economy mine Jeffrey Shen and he's bringing in all these new these new ideas to these uh to the econ so that like just a few highers can really make this game explode yeah well whatever they're doing I mean we've seen the performance right all those guys should get like big bonuses for whatever they were doing you can be sure that they are treated very well at supercell for sure um I still believe like this is just the beginning right yeah absolutely um there's there's like two more things I'd probably want to poke at here that they can improve on um the event structure is pretty random we talked I think Joe you mentioned that there's there seems to be always something that like for every type of player in the events right like and that

that has pros and has cons there a big Pro there is that whatever Persona you are you have a mode that you can play but from a con perspective like that's really bad for liveops because I'm not pushing people into a liveops path that I can then monetize it's just like here's a smattering of events go play them um and typically in in like midcore and hardcore games there is a focused event where you're pushing people into a a funnel they you're then monetizing as they progress through that event funnel that doesn't exist at all in um in in this game outside of the brawl pass and that's initial purchase and then no purchases really after that you can you can jump some gems to like skip levels but I don't know a single player that's a whale or freeto playay player that does that um so yeah that's that's a a pretty big issue they need to figure out sort of their live Ops event design um so that they can push people into the events a little bit better and then probably I think the last one I'd probably want to cover is just the this the season Quest Cadence this they've actually made changes um on this

recently you used to get quests I think it was like twice a week inside of season quests and now they've increased the frequency for it to be once every 24 hours I'd still say that this is not enough that's one session a day and I think if you dump that to once every six hours you'd get you know three sessions a day out of a user um you know you'd have a lot more uh sticky players but uh this is a pretty controversial topic amongst the brawlstar community because some people only want to come in once a day and farm all their wins and a lot of players uh wouldn't like to have to come in three times a day uh just experience from previous games I've worked on three times a day is better than one time a day so oh yeah that's my my takes shorter session is better than one longer uh typically because you're exposing them to things like the store more often from a prodct perspective traing kind of like a habit of playing put him through the loop more times really uh yakob if you wanted to to go on any of your other ones um like

I guess that there like pretty pretty deep dive there like what I would say is that uh I don't know when maybe you tell me uh when they added the because last time I saw B stars there was no like additional power layer through these gadgets and gear I don't know when there was actually added but I think there's a good direction now with the hyperchargers which I guess we I'm not able to share because I don't have a Hy charge there's close this out and go to Shelly close the barley and then you should have Shelly the first one yeah her number 11 you can see there yeah yeah of course thank you yeah so it's again like additional power layer here which I think also wasn't really like the like you don't see it in supercell games that much that they're going this usual kind of a you finish one power progression layer we add one on top of it and they can scarcely add like even like I don't know Town Hall whatever town hall is that currently in like Clash of Clans they don't add them like like there's no tomorrow like usual games do this like

you know let just increase the maximum level and put like one more power progr like once pretty much your kind of payers eat out the content you always want to add one more so like this is I would say one of the shifts there that like they're doubling down on scaling things through like HP damage scaling which can go forever but again broads at some point uh so that's good and that's I think is one of those things as as JK mentioned that could be the main source driving the revenue spikes here because suddenly this is new for everyone like what you do with power progression layers it's an entry point so everybody can you know start from stretch there because it's a new currency circuit everybody needs to farm it out like usually you know everybody meaning the ones that are at the end that they just have everything leveled up the same yeah so that's like a big kind of a span depth that's suddenly unlocked but we'll see later in like one to two months if it persists or not because the other thing that I would say they will probably we need to and I guess that's what that's what's happening here with the brawl pass and like the free hero

unlock they will also need to speed up the progression to do the same thing as Ana was talking in that talk in Clash of Clans that you know the more power progressions layers you have there the more kind of this kind of whole lifetime of a game prolongs for a player starting now instead of were 2018 so now we need to accelerate his progression in the in the start of the game in order to catch up with people there so now the game feels kind of more generous but again it's illusion so that works great nice okay uh UA UA UA UA here you go uh there is no UA thank you very much so much thank you yeah yeah we can we can end here thanks for listening can you we ate up all the time sorry yeah yeah let me to share because I mean uh there's very little you way Global analysis which is in the cens of T just to say what they are actually running

Google meaning YouTube and that's that was basically it until last week so that was the biggest channel for for the UA I think all all channels channels all GEOS in terms of us Germany and South Korea obviously like those are the three biggest countries for for braw star uh from the revenue perspective what we discussed at the beginning but yeah we have only two uh two channels here uh which is the the Google and and the Google so it's display and and YouTube which what I can share is actually some creatives which are a little bit interesting but more interesting are here and we have some Tik Tok coming uh finally as well since like beginning of January we can actually start with the with with this um you don't expect anything crazy it's just very traditional CGI 3D elements gameplay

oriented no nothing's fake nothing is fake yeah nothing is nothing is fake you know we have all like if we have this and is so thing is like with Tik Tok and then there it looks like yeah they are starting to pay attention to more channels since like mid January Tik Tok is one of them and honestly I see only free uh fre creatives I think uh the Tik Tok creative challenge uh would be an amazing addition here and what Tik Tok creative challenge means is you actually work with Tik Tok creators you just put the brief out there and Tik Tok creators are kind of doing all these videos for you and it's it can be anything from five to 10 to 20 per week and since they're working with so many influencers already on YouTube I mean this would be a great source of of new creatives which are not super traditional right

because we have this that's that's basically it right so it's it's kind of you know I'm a little bit sad because that's basically the whole whole UA kind of kind of operations for this game and I really hope this is going to be way more than just few videos here and there and a little bit more spending as we go in 2024 why do you why do you think that is is it because they can live off of Organics so well is it because they're just not making enough per user to buy users like why why is this the way it is not enough head count like I guess not enough head count then like how traditionally they are kind of built uh because you said like small team like they don't do that much UAA said they like all their kind of 90% 90% is is Organics but you like you can live with this to certain point but if you're scaling like this you want to grow on

the UA side and you want to grow quite quite a lot because it's just like it's a shame like not to pull like uh put gas into this machine yeah well M I'm seeing like just looking at data. it seems like they ramped up well they they ramped up uh user acquisition around January 7th yes um Y and maybe to the point that like I I know we talked about before like I think Ken you were mentioning how are they gonna or maybe it was you yakob that you were talking about how do they combat like the The Hangover effect it seemed like you know January 6 where you had big spike so maybe they are pushing UA to just try to like not have the numbers come down so much but um yeah for whatever reason it does seem like they I mean they don't do a ton of UA compared to like uh you know some of the other games that do massive amounts but that's the thing yeah it's just like making 40 million a month now uh with almost like zero UA like can you can you imagine like how much money they can make with a serious UA it do seem like

they kind of tripled or quadrupled UA from prior to January 7 all these like nice videos this is old video I remember from the lounge date so this is really the old one and it's now like they ra recently launched on on Instagram and Facebook and it's still very small I mean we might see like some some new numbers as we go but you know all these other companies Facebook Google Tik Tok Unity appin iron SCE like with this amount of budgets that you could potentially deploy in the UA like you should be everywhere just look at like look at white white out survival like you open up fridge like there's like 10 videos 10 videos jumping on in your face that is actually by out Survival how how big do you think is their influencer budget J like huge huge yeah Millions AB yeah

easily if you if you look at the promo videos for each patch you can kind of just see how much money and polish they put into Community Management it's it's insane yeah I mean like you you remember like the launch date where they kind of invited all the like creators and influencers to to launch the game and I mean yes that's like one of the one of the the pillars that you have from the U point of view but like it's it's not scalable I mean Super Cell but honestly like the whole industry has been bitching about this thing for like I don't know how many years and I think we're either missing some kind of key point or there's some kind of giant misconception that somewhere that why supercell is not spending shitloads of money on UA if the games are making so much money you know I think it's because they don't need to see that could be it literally like because for instance the influencer marketing is just cheaper and through UA it would cost more that could be one of the things literally like K said but may

maybe this is the profit maximizing UA spend I mean do we really know if more UA is gonna profit maximize would it be profitable yeah would it be profitable let's not yeah let's not go into yeah let's not go into that direction please it's yeah no but I I can still see like so many things like you know we mentioned like in terms of the creatives like different modes like all of these like this is super basic I mean really like this is that's the point I think we're missing something because like who what's bearing them from literally just like buying like full-fledged uting from some other company you know overpaying them like what's stopping nothing nothing but stopping them they have some folks I can tell you guys why but I pause yeah like yeah M so there there's no additional like audience which seems like

very wake I mean there's always there's 8 billion phones in the world there's always new billion there's always new audience and if you if you bought all of them already then like [ __ ] retarget them yeah that's a good but what's the okay maybe a different podcast but what's the what's the retargeting capabilities now I would say very little again for for Supercell well well why you have the supercell ID so you have like lots of lot of different uh kind of the head count required to do it like they they need to build the liveops team that can go and push all those campaigns yeah yeah that's true okay sure but then look I mean all of like this is you know like can be okay this is nice actually but it can be so so so much more we to see but yeah I mean that's that's another another discussion I guess uh that we don't see something all right so should should we wrap this up with Outlook guys should we close

this out looking forward to see how this is going to end uh on the moon literally if if they keep doing this like what they are doing with all the content and it's not going to be like a highway highway to hell then yes this just the beginning so maybe to wrap this up let me bring back the the three questions that I posed at the beginning of this discussion so first the first question was the recent Spike what did they do and it sounds like from what I'm hearing from yuken it was like more around offers sales and they've made some structural changes in in terms of the game um would you guys is that the basic understanding what else was what did I 95 95% of it probably is that new new sales new structures new economy management oh wait key hires key hires key hires that's what you said as well okay yeah growing the team that you know allowed them to to actually put more emphasis on

this the second question I asked was around the live Ops changes so it sounds like what you said Ken is they now they do have a bigger team they're not going like the old school less than 10 people team type of thing they are delivering a lot more content um and I don't know is there anything else that we should know about any any specific live Ops changes it does seem like you mentioned they they also have brought in specific experts in some areas like economy and things like that anything else we need to know I just don't know how fast it's going to be right like we saw the letter from ilka was like last year right it was like the start of last year and um you know they're in based in Helsinki it takes a long time to get the best mines in the world to Helsinki to work on these teams right yeah they're even starting to consider some hybrid work they've been historically vary against any form of work outside of the studio so it might be difficult for them to get the teams in you to to scale up but um know depending on how much they push we'll see I'm just I'm I'm not super

optimistic about how fast that's going to be okay and then the last big question the general longer term Outlook are do we expect a new Baseline so I mentioned at the beginning 2021 there was a certain Baseline that they had it dropped in 2223 looking now in 24 and Beyond do we expect the game to have an elevated base line based upon the things that we're seeing the new kind of liveops team and the changes that they're they're making what is your general outlook for the game I can go with mine mine a little bit so they're pretty much just few points they're much less generous now because you cannot go infinite in brw passes you cannot just you know buy with gems Farm out gems and do vice versa so that's nothing there there needs to be specific dollar spent in or normal or plus pass whatever so that's there then there was new span depth added on top of it because you have the hypercharge new

Power progression layer which I think will last for some time now because all of those I don't know 10 or how many Brawlers were added and they slowly add more but I would imagine it would be like this kind of initial blop and then a little bit more stabilization hopefully by adding more and more those rollers into the hypercharge power progression layer they can keep up a little bit higher Baseline definitely and then the last thing somebody really should optimize the offers and like all the other things hopefully this can kind of keep up the hangover or let's say the the giant Spike from going completely down and like just going the other way around and maybe can even return to back to the loot boxes or gas as they are kind of I would say slowly creeping in back into the game by changing their philosophy and on top of it we talk about ads which again could help the game so there's pretty positive outlook I would say it probably won't last that as as it is as high I would be surprised but it will definitely be higher as the 2023 2022 Baseline yeah I agreed agree with

everything iob said yeah yeah I'm already seeing quite this as as a very positive uh like beginning of of the year uh then uh on top of whatever you said guys then the more UA maybe you know I'm still I'm still I'm still all for it that can even that can help but yeah guys uh brawl Star Team K do amazing job good job yeah yeah you know and again I I I should not comment too much because I've only played it for half a day but I I would say I was surprised I was like dude a Micro Focus like I'm more of a mobile guy I love like that strategy and stuff but I know in terms of the Western Market more Micro Focus seems to be the play in terms of top down but um yeah I definitely think uh it's a great game I'll probably be playing it a little bit more and uh def definitely was surprised at what a good job they did yeah all right so to wrap this up is does anyone have any last messages for our audience

about brawl star or anything else or should we wrap this mofo up yeah we can wrap it up thanks for listening okay love you thank you very much see you around Cheers Cheers [Music] a [Music] [Applause] [Music]