ConsultMyApp’s Mike Rhodes On 4 Smart Strategies To End Q4 With A Bang

[Music] hello world hello listeners welcome to the pg. biz podcast and yes this week once again my co-host Brian he is taking care of and hosting an amazing show in Scotland so we send you our greetings Brian and you've done an amazing job and another way to do an amazing job is what we're going to be touching on today because as we speed through Q4 and look at 2024 of course devs and studios are staring down the barrel of some incredible challenges but there's also massive opportunity because there's always an upside to everything and look at it as an opportunity to take some time to think about joining up acquisition and engagement and this is exactly the approach that's baked into the DNA of Our Guest today and his motto

is very simple make every app as great as it can be his customers range from Virgin Media to King and he's here today to share his pick of growth strategies that you can harness in Q4 to really hit the ground running in q1 of 2024 we welcome Mike rhs founder and CEO of consult my app Mike great to have you today really a pleasure hey hello very lovely to be here I'm very yeah very excited and hopefully uh going to provide a few little interesting nuggets uh throughout the session today so thank you very much for having me on Peggy well I happen to have insight into the talk track as the host and yes there are some very interesting nuggets but I want to start with you Mike because it's not often that someone is dedicated to advancing the entire app sector so it makes it sound to me that it's not just

a huge commitment to make every app and game amazing but it sounds like something you would promise yourself after having some fairly interesting perhaps tough life lessons what has sparked your passion here um making you say yes we have to help apps Advance somewhere there was a roadblock yes oh it's interesting actually predates my my time in the app industry because I'm I'm getting on these days uh it it goes back to you know many many years ago when I was a sort of fresh graduate working in consultancy I've always been in data I'm a computer science grad so you know I've always been in Tech development data and and sort of I hone those skills in in towards how to make these cool data and analytical models and regression models and and you know fee forward neural networks things like that which are really cool to me how to make them applicable in business and I I've always thought that the essential part of my job and role there was to you know I

guess democratize that's a word I'll use a lot that some of the real sort of highbrow techy data stuff to you know wider audiences that they don't necessarily understand the the details but to actually convey the value of of what those you know models and data uh data and analytics actually could provide to them so basically articulating the real business use for that techken data and make sort of Bridging the Gap between the two fast forwarding on to when I joined um Comal other levels they were customer engagement platform they were very good back in the day they were sort of competing with Airship and you know it was built out to be an Airship killer and then I joined company called swerve similar um similar sort of customer engagement platform I came across a lot of teams in businesses that you know they knew exactly what they were doing with digital and web and they were very very clever um but didn't necessarily

know how to translate what they knew in in those areas into Mobile so I sort of looked at that and I worked in the industry for a number of years for these software vendors and thought there's probably a space um for this sort of knowledge outside of these software vendors actually as an independent uh agency or consultancy uh and and to sort of you know educate and you know Empower all of these people with you know to use and leverage the technology and the super advanced stuff like ASO and you know sort of uh uh Tik Tok you know other media channels you know how to leverage all of this stuff to make their apps really good because fundamentally their apps were pretty good they built a solid product with a solid value proposition they just didn't know how to leverage and pull these levers to you know improve both the acquisition and the the sort of Engagement pieces to to drive sustainable profitable scalable growth uh and that's really where where I sort of came in with CMA and CMA was sort of created on that premise about seven years ago so very big ambition just from

one person you know that's really what I've always had at the back of my mind is not to patronize you know we're here to our job is to educate people and keep our fingers on the pulse of technology and you know share that knowledge with with other people in the the sector and our clients and and Prospects uh sort of alike we know that games companies are datadriven I mean that is the way they are run but they're also looking much much more at the life cycle they're looking at ways to keep their players coming and staying in the game it's a matter of product it's also a matter of Engagement now you've worked at both sides because you've worked with gaming and non-gaming apps and I'm hearing a lot more about what they can learn from each other everybody in the app world has a challenge with retention everybody has a challenge with driving higher engagement and and yes you might be a travel app and actually your level of Engagement is once every six months when people come to book their summer holidays or winter holidays uh or you

might be uh sort of hyper casual game where your level of Engagement is you know getting multiple sessions a day um it it doesn't matter that ultimately the end game is the same to drive that level of Engagement and the techniques we use and the strategy we can use um are adapted for each of those different markets but un they're sort of fundamentally underpinned by the same logic like you're trying to get people to stay with you to become engaged and ultimately to get beyond that phase to become brand ambassadors who are super loyal to your brand and will generate referrals back in so they sort of feed back into the acquisition side um all of this comes down to you know data so it's not very exciting not very sexy but you know fundamentally you can have the best game in the world if you are missing some obvious data points or or challenges in the data you're you're not necessarily going to have the retention uh the conversion to monetization

um that that you would want uh an an example of that actually is for um I'm sure they won't mind this is going back many years so Sonic Dash uh for those of you that remember when it was the game to play uh we're working with um de studio trying to figure out why there was a problem and and they believed it was a problem with I think a day three retention issue so there was something to do with the game on the mechanics of it which meant after 3 days people got bored when we started to delve into it it wasn't actually a temporal matter is actually an event issue and we found the event was at a particular a particular time in a particular level where there was a massive drop off um we looked into that as it turns out at that particular stage there was a new um uh a new requirement uh in the uh in the title that you had to press down to go under an object now that hadn't happened until that point um however that was causing a massive drop off because people weren't aware we went back and reviewed their on um their

tutorial and and and sort of shaped a couple of push notifications as well just to remind people over the first couple of the days hey don't forget if you need to get under something you press down here and you know the day three retention you know nearly doubled it's just incredible that was not a problem with the game wasn't a problem with game mechanics it was an issue that we identified by looking at data that we fixed through using a customer engagement platform so interesting really there to see how you know data and and marketing actually help solve a what otherwise would have been viewed as a a game challenge it it's really something that I pride ourselves in and and our team in that you know we know what makes a great yes game standard generic games on boarding strategy and um and how to drive that retention that reactivation know that laps prevention but we also know how to improve stuff that's in there by leveraging techniques and other Industries so Mike we've talked about your back background you've

of course worked with multiple apps across multiple verticals and in a way it's your job to see around corners not just for yourself as an expert but also CMA as the company that you have founded and where your CEO so drawing from that and your discussions with clients and games makers what is the one change coming next so therefore they have to change their strategic planning starting right now good question I think the big one that that is happening is going to be the fragmentation of the the store ecosystem and payments ecosystem uh obviously there is a a huge change coming in 2024 um where Apple and Google will be uh stopped being a a duopoly and and essentially have uh have their doors opened a little to to new app stores on both devices now you could argue you can already Sid load on Google but you know the the reality is these will be official Play Stores uh or official um

Android stores and official iOS stores uh which won't require all of the weird menu accepts and the dodginess that happens with with Sid loading um so actually it will be a real opportunity I think for new stores to come along particularly in the game sector I think you'll see some of the uh existing games uh distribution stores outside of the the mobile ecosystem start to build ones for IOS and Android that's going be really interesting because it's going to mean that uh unfortunately for developers you've now not just got to worry about the Play Store in the App Store you're now going to be looking at maybe three four five six different stores to get your Android and and iOS uh builds out on to um so a bit more work but it means from an ASO perspective you're going to have to optimize across many more stores than you you potentially are at the moment so actually getting your ASO in house before that happens is is probably uh important now more than it ever has been which is a great segue because one of

the reasons I brought you on was I saw that you were shortlisted for the app promotion Summit award and um a new tool and I'm the Curious type so I thought okay let me understand a little bit more about this particularly because I think it was made with Indie developers in mind so yeah thank you very much for that we we actually nominated as ASO agency of the year so consult my app in there I'm super happy with that uh and under our soft business applyer um has also been nominated as as app data platform of the year now we bought um applyer about three and a half years ago uh and really we bought it to to use internally but over those years we built out some amazing uh data models uh and and Tech which would be almost selfish for us to just hold internally so what we've done is we we've sort of relaunched Apple which has been around since 2009 but we've relaunched it with all of these new data models and uh and sort of things like keyword relevancy

scores you know we have our own search traffic uh search Impressions lots of wonderful stuff in there uh and it's been launched at a price point which anyone should be able to afford so it's only $35 a month which is incredibly cheap if you compare you know the existing incumbents you know the app tweets the mobile actions the data AIS Indie developers you know you need to core basic stuff you want to be able to track you know which Search terms you're ranking for how many search impressions are they generating how are your competitors doing what is your share of voice and you don't want if if you're a a match three and you are you know a sort of a new entrance to the market you might not consider someone like um Royal match or one of the biggies as a competitor so actually I want to look at my share of voice in amongst these small to mid- tier um titles and Publishers so you know having that share voice allows you to measure yourself and Benchmark yourself against the people that matter to you and focus on these are the

competitors I need to take traffic from it has unlimited keywords in any country any language so you're not it's not like you just get 10 keywords you can you add as many Search terms as you like you can use it to build your own keyword Universe if you're new to ASO and you don't know where to start um it will identify new keyword opportunities for you see how uh how tough some of the keywords are how competitive they are um you can use it to perform review analysis you can even look at your products and say actually have I got particular issues with my uh my login screen or my purchase or people you know um redeeming um some virtual coins in my my uh my game and like I said it's it's not there as a money-making exercise it's just it's there to make this data available and back to what I was trying to achieve with CMA as a business I I'm trying to you know bring everybody into the market so it has a lot of uh a lot of real real useful stuff for um for

well not just Indie developers but it is really targeted at sort of smaller developers um we we do have licenses for for some of our larger businesses that that also use it but you know these sorts of things are incredibly incredibly valuable and it's all about trying to going to use the word democratize again ASO data it shouldn't be only available to people that want to spend thousands of dollars year because the reality is we built an infrastructure in a different way to any of the other data players that allows us to offer it at at pretty much cost price um to to our our our customers you make a point you know it's about the small and midsize you got large companies as well you have King it is for the large companies as well but it's for the ones that need a little bit of a boost a little bit of a help and what's going to be challenging times great opportunities to be in all the App Stores um that will come but also you know huge responsibility to get it right so so it's not that easy you know it's not cut

and dried because they're going to be looking for longtail keywords they're going to be looking at niches you know the the opportunity in Sub sub genres and what I found interesting in reading about Apper is that you can sort of listen in you can sort of see or see the signals read the signals of of what's coming up so not what is popular but what is really about to Bubble Up from uh under the surface maybe you can walk me through that how that works this is really cool um it is uh it's something that we we speak a lot to the larger publish is about spending lots of money but is still applicable and very interesting um to uh Indie devs as well and and smaller publishing houses and this is looking at near realtime data so um if for anybody that's used you know the the the mobile actions the the data AIS you know all all of these guys their models are either large well a lot of

them are largely based on um Apple search popularity score and also if youve used Apple search popularity score uh you know uh if you ever look at it it's got a couple of limitations the the first of which is possibly the the most frustrating is that it applies a weighted moving average so you never get the intra week variances on keywords so I don't know that on a a Monday Asser ter is really popular and on a as a weekend it's not popular at all but I just get an average middle value because actually I can do a lot to adjust my in up event strategy my bidding strategy um that so that is one problem that the second is that it's 48 Hours lagged um and I assume this is a data processing Challenge on Apple's side so that means any of the any of the search scores you're looking at for keyword are two days old uh I'll give you an example of the keyword jackpot so we work with uh uh companies that that run you know

things like social casinos jackpots a really important term tends to go up and down in the US when Powerball is getting near a billion dollars uh what's really interesting is that you look at it uh in on Apple's data and it shows it peing on a Monday evening uh two days after the draw has already been won uh and actually if you look at it in our data in in applyer you've got a real view it shows it immediately dropping off so the the these sort of the accuracy of data is so so important I really I I can't emphasize you know it's the old sort of Mantra of garbage in is garbage out if you don't have quality data in your ASO strategy your paid media strategy is never going to be great if you're relying on inaccurate data um you're never going to be able to optimize your campaigns as efficiently as they should be I would love to say that the amazing results our team generate are all because our team know everything in the world there is to know about Apple search ads or or GAC the reality is yes

they do know a lot of stuff but they've also got the the advantage of having this data behind them um the having a look at how that data moves from you know day to day um is is really really fascinating so for instance um a lot of TV shows now have uh second screen apps attached to them and what you'll find is when they're on live like a love island or I'm a celebrity which I know in lots of different countries but you'll find that when they when they're on and they're advertising and banging on about the app the the traffic on that Peaks massively you've actually got a real view of that uh we can provide hourly data by the way through our API access you can actually see at any given time of the day how popular these these terms are and if you've got that data you can create a proactive inapp event strategy around it because I know what between the hours of 7 and 10 p.m. this keyword is well worth targeting so I'm going to create Ina events which operate ational at that time I'm going to tailor my custom

product pages and custom store listings to have um imagery which reflects that I'm going to tailor my um um social media campaigns to start targeting those terms on that time because I know I'm going to get far higher interest and and volume of traffic all of this stuff and all of this Insight we spent the last three years building this data model and it's just incredible go and try it you literally just create an account on it now and anyone can go and play with this for free um you know look at NBA you can see when the Peaks are in the data and when it drops off depending on what games are on are there any competitions uh and you know this sort of stuff um for all sectors but in particular sectors like Games sports streaming and gambling they are super super um influenced by um by these sort of transient terms and that's something that you know has never existed before getting that dayto day I mean even the hour to hour view that again you can get

access to the API but the the the day-to-day view of the data is is something that's never been seen because we've taken a whole different approach to it and uh uh and and made it sort of available to to the clients it's really really cool um I I I I could talk for for hours and probably years about it but you know having having access to data that is accurate is you know it's an no-brainer um so really all of your paid and organic strategies should be based off that sort of data without going too deeply into what you do you know with all your different um customers but it would be interesting to understand what that uplift could be like a range I mean there's a reason to to Tinker um with an exciting toy like Apper what could a Game Dev look at as the value ad oh that's a great great question I mean uplifts depends on how optimize your setup is to take it from a well

optimized setup to something that's World leading you might be talking 20 to 30% lift on on a sort of monthly organic acquisition volume but if it's something that hasn't really been focused on or optimized you could be talking two three 4X improvements maybe more on your sort of uh monthly install organic install volumes and it can be for some clients we've had like 10 or 15 x um in the in the right Market at the right time so if talked about a tool that will get you where you need to go because the whole idea is that we're in Q4 how do you end Q4 with a bang and carry that momentum into q1 of 2024 so you've come with your checklist it's almost like a late night show we're going to start with number one number one for $50 hunt for Trend yeah so uh Trend hunting that's something we've spend a lot of time doing and used to spend a lot of time doing and this is looking at

intraday intra week um variances In Search terms now um I talked about a bit before but but just looking at averages he's no good look at Search terms and when they're popular they might they might be sporadic they may you may find like in your massive keyword hunting Universe there are one or two terms which just pop up and shoot through the roof on certain days of the month and it might be they're connected to uh events which happen on a monthly basis like a you know a marathon or you know a competition but have a look for Trends in there because you don't want to be optimizing any of your metadata or imagery for items which just simply not popular at that given time of day that day of the week that week of the year so I have a I do focus a lot on the on the trends not just seasonalities we're not talking about longer term Trends they're super important but look for things it analyze all your data again whack it in

all the keyword Universe look at the last 12 months of data uh and start to review that and see see how it's performing you'll find stuff in there that you wouldn't think ever would have existed by doing that you'll get an advantage over everyone else so number one look at Trends look at those those intraday those intra week and week to week sort of patterns in the search data and adapts both your organic because now you can use Ina events and uh Google promo stuff you you can actually position those on an hour by hour basis so ASO just being viewed as a once a release activity is out the window so you can actually use that data organically as well as from a paid perspective to adjust your creatives um for any given time of the day of or day of the week so i' say that that that is number one the other piece that you we really need to look at is um autoc completes so autoc completes change every day um get a use a tool will show you every Auto complete every day um so if for instance you've got a sidoku game

um I would be looking at which sodoku aut completes in there you'll get some weird things that turn up I'll guarantee it every now and again Apple and Google start to index strange Auto completes which are like sidoku 983b or something weird like that the great thing about those is that people generally are lazy and they will just hit auto complete so if you actually index and put that hash 983b uh in a an indexable field maybe an inapp event maybe um your actual um keyword field you know and you can index for that and react very quickly there's probably only you and one or two other titles that are going to IND next for it so you're going to get and steal a lot of that traffic so Auto completes are in there um and then there are sort of you know uh a few other bits and pieces so you know look at categories and so forth that sort of fall under this it's an interesting one we're looking at all the puzzle games recently because I'm giving a talk at or our team are giving a talk at um uh a conference coming up soon

specifically on that puzzle games only only 30 30% of them only have one category set they actually don't use the secondary category which is you know a massive crying shame because you know you can you can actually rank well sometimes better in other categories than you kind in your primary so use secondary categories for for your game styles so there's a lot to unpack there Mike but there's a lot of value there as well because um you know puzzle games massive massive category and uh missing out on some opportunities there and you did make the point as well hunting for those Trends and some of that can even change hour to hour so again another reason to be looking at that data but it's not just about the data you have some other items on your checklist so let's get to number two yeah sure so number two acquisition and engagement um for anyone that's seen me talk over the last year well the last seven years you probably have heard me talk about combining acquisition and engagement in order to achieve sustainable growth what

does that actually mean that means influence your acquisition efforts organically and paid um from the data you're getting post acquisition so uh if for instance you're finding a campaign isn't performing particularly well um further down the funnel then you you know might seem like an obvious things to do that's probably not a great campaign if it's not converting so well but you need to feed that data back into your uh back into your acquisition campaigns in order to uh in order to essentially refine them so it's really really important that you do exchange the data and it needs to happen both ways as well so you know feeding data into influence your engagement strategy is is super important so because if you acquire someone from um let's say ASO organically or from Apple search ads versus someone you've acquired through uh a Tik Tok or a meta ad you know the chances are that they're different types of um player one is a uh a subjective

taking a punt on it uh they just so happen to have seen um seen an ad or meta or somebody said yeah that' be quite interesting and you go I'll go and have a play of this game see what it's like I think I have the people that are looking for a sodoku or crossword what puzzle you know that I've specifically typed it in and that's what I'm looking for it is so so important to give them different paths to onboarding and tutorials you you should not treat a acquisition source is all the same so feed the acquisition data into whatever you've got for your customer engagement platform whether you are using um you know sort of a a free tool or using one of the more expensive ones doesn't matter but you need to make sure that you have different Journeys and different tutorials and on boarding for those people so I I would say that that connection of the dots is so so important um because if you don't do that you'll never ever you know drive down your CPA and you'll never increase your retention and play engagement metrics um so do do consider

the two sets of data as one and feed them into a data warehouse somewhere which brings me to number three because this is a very general piece of advice but also very actionable one tell us about it Mike yeah so this is stack attack my favorite term ever of all time so attack the stack um it your stack is possibly as important if not more important than the p you employ there because you could have the greatest people in the world working for you but if you don't have the technology to support them and and allow them and a them to make inform decisions then you know you may as well have chimpanzees on typewriters it's not it's so so important that you got the right Tech in there uh and it starts with you know the basics analytics so um product analytics for anybody is super important I I talked about the example before of you know the Sonic Dash where we discovered it it wasn't a temple just a day three issue it was actually a an

issue with a particular level in the game but you'll only find that out if you've got the correct reports to look at um funnel drop off during the game so you know make sure you have that analytics package it doesn't need to be a crazy expensive one either it does get harder the cheaper you go so if you stick with a ga or Google analytics um it takes a lot more time to build the reports particularly um vertical specific reports but you know go on stack overflow do a bit Googling usually somebody somewhere is trying to create the report you're looking for uh and you know do a bit of learning that way so you don't need to spend crazy amounts of money but you do need to spend time on it regardless of how in which platform you got whether it's an amplitude or a mix panel or whether it's Google analytics spend time on it because if you get that right it'll make your life a lot easier when you're making decisions about what to do uh in terms of game mechanics or you know diff different levels or any new features you'll be able to at least make a relatively informed decision as as to what is already working and what isn't so I would say also from a an engagement

perspective um engagement in the game Space isn't just about product ux UI and mechanics it is very important that those are right but there's lots of things you can do to move the levers from an A CRM well what I say a player engagement perspective and that's by creating a cohesive push notification in that message um uh and potentially email sort of strategy that they are really really valuable in different ways so push notifications can be really valuable to either Drive re engagement um at very specific times you must understand when their their Idol or golden moments are where you can get them back into the game if they haven't played for a while um or or sort of educational pieces if they're stuck and they've lapsed you think it could be because they can't get past this point but you know these these channels are also incredibly valuable for uh reactivation not it's when you've got to that stage and you've potentially lost them you need to get them back in so what what can you do to incentivize them

to come back and either either reinstall or or re-engage with that title and that doesn't just stop with customer engagement platforms you it also involves things like retargeting on on social and uh and other uh other PID channels but your customer engagement platform you you can go as very expensive or you can go very cheap but the reality is if you get a decent push and inapp messaging strategy right and this does not mean unit is controlled by Dev so it has to be done externally by an external platform because otherwise you've got to have a new product release every time you need to change the push notifications um so don't please try not to use local notifications but but you know external uh an external platform that is capable of uh managing this as a strategy doesn't have to cost the world but I can guarantee you'll get 80% of the value out of just getting decent push and in that messaging strategy right so you don't have to go crazy um just focus on on those two channels I would say this the technology stack

super important I've talked about you know the the analytics and and the custom engagement platform obviously if you're running paid acquisition you need an MMP in place and ideally you'll have a data warehouse where it all funnels into but you know the two core pieces you can't live without analytics and and customer engagement but there's some good news in there as well because you can be Scrappy you can get some results and that's really important because a lot of people I mean that's what they have going into 2024 there's no question so to wrap it up the final number four of the things you need to do in Q4 number four Mike I'll give it to you yeah sure so the final one um I don't I hate coming back to ASO all the time because I know some uh developers or Publishers look at it I'm not ASO is super super important regardless of what your views are on it it's free assume you don't pay an agency but organic is free free if you've got um a great organic presence on the web already put

in some smart banners drive people that are landing on that page from an iOS or an Android device you know drive them to install the app straight away from the play store or the App Store these are free things you can do you can look at um real time data for you know it's $30 $35 a month just go and appy it's a Shameless plug but you know it's not much money to get access to real time data where you can start to view you know those Peaks and trusts the Trends you can adapt your acquisition strategy the one thing we do with some of the large Publishers is something called time based uh interest targeting t- bits uh and they use sort of uh the data from an API feed out of uh Apper in order to adjust dynamically their creative assets depending on the what particular Search terms are trending or popular in the store at any given time that is really cool probably only uh a relevant if you're spending you know big big bucks

you know these are the sorts of things that I think major games companies get excited about because you haven't been able to do that before without that that data um also for you know for Indies and smaller devs you know start looking at in app events you got an almost infinite source of indexing options there it's not just about promos for your games uh it's also about um you know using them for targeting search atts there's so much you can do within app events um and in app event tracking as well you can see what you compe as targeting that these These are sort of free things or or or look at back links you know what back links have you got to your uh your app on the Play Store you know Google cares about that and it actually impacts your ranking there's loads of things you can do for free that you don't necessarily need to pay a lot of money for an agency that these sorts of things you'll I'm sure it will spark all sorts of ideas in your your mind but there's some really really exciting stuff there see that's always good news for our audience you know free or or or or moderately priced as good news

particularly in the times we're in and you say yourself you know go in take a look around get excited about what you find and and action on that and speaking of excited I have to say Mike you are one of the most excited guests we've ever had I don't know how you keep this energy it's early in the morning here we are recording I have to ask you you know coffee in addition to Coffee what what keeps you excited about about the industry how do you keep that energy going and how do you stay on top of things oh man I I love the fact that it is never it never stops that there's no I mean it's it's Al it's a curse and it's a blessing as well at the same time like it's a curse in that I'm forever having to read off and re-educate myself every day of the the year there's something new happens or apple Chang Google Chang something there's like some new Frameworks or or games developer kits there all sorts of interesting stuff so it's it's I never ever stopped learning and you know I don't for one

minute profess to be the greatest expert in the world on in games or fintech but I I know a lot about a lot but but that's what excites me there's just so much change and it's always fresh you're always learning and I think anybody in any job in any Walk of Life just to keep learning is so so important so valuable it motivates you makes you want to get up in the day you're doing the same thing every day it's it's tough existence um the fact that I'm constantly learning is uh for me an absolutely wonderful industry to be in and that's what it's what gets me up in the day is is the thought of learning some new stuff and and applying it like with this cool data and models and things like I I love chatting to our data modelers like it's you know it's a real refreshing conversation there's always something new they found out some little tweaks or hacks they've they've discovered so you know I'm uh for me it's all about the fact that this is a dynamic in this week we're all learning we're all perfecting our craft learning

to be Jedi and to your point and I've been at so many conferences yeah from The Game Dev perspective it's all about staying curious so you asked them you know what are the skills you need to be working in gaming and they say stay curious so so you've got it right there so if you ever want to you know go over to the other side Mike I think you've got got a place there um I want to wrap it up the way we always do when Brian is here he always asks the question now I will as well we ask about your gaming passion so two questions to end with what's your favorite game you're currently playing right now in between all that learning and all that coffee and what's your favorite game of all time oh man well I've got a rubbish answer for the game I'm currently playing because I've just had a baby so she's uh four months old now so understand haven't got too much time bizarrely my favorite game is on a mobile device now it's actually in my car so when I'm uh when I'm sat waiting for baby to come out the doctors I get a

lot of time sat in the car so I started to play the little in car games there's one called 99 balls which I love it's a simple trigonometry based game I mean it is super Monkey simple but I love it it's like it's really addictive I keep wanting to go back and play a bit when I'm sat in the car to see if I can get further and beat my my I score it's probably not a game that most people have heard of or maybe they have but 99 BS is just simp simple simple fun it's a common concept that exists I'm sure in a thousand different formats but um it's it really is the game I'm currently playing I'm embarrassed to say it um I haven't got time to to get into anything too much too much more serious however when I was younger and I did have a lot of serious gaming time you know it's got to be Unreal Tournament one of the greatest um first-person shooters ever that was inent you know I I played a lot of Quake played a bit of Doom but on real tournament was the first one that made it awesome and playing that online was on my 28.8k modem oh Boom the lag on

that was insane but it was so much fun I used to just you know I used to do rocket jumping and I used to camp out people hated me because I be sat there with a sniper rifle and you could see when some people's yeah some sometimes when the internet connections Dro you could see they basically just be Frozen and you just be able to kill them immediately um That was cuz they were using a 14.4 board modem not a 28.8 like I was and one I eventually got into 56k modem which was glorious and I was just thinking the other point is you're proving now everything I'm reading including in PG Biz right that we're going to be playing games in our cars I've seen the ones was I think they're build into the BMW and other so here you go it's going to be the next screen you're proof of it it is and this is you know apps aren't just on an iPhone or an Android device you know they're all over so you know when we work with clients it's not just about you know I phone and Android you we're looking at all sorts of areas apps are pretty ubiquitous

these days now that also that that's also what I'm excited about is the fact that the app world is just exploding there is an app for everything and an app almost everywhere you could imagine uh and it means that we'll be very busy indeed indeed well on that note because I know you do have to go to some other calls I just want to thank you Mike for being my guest here on pg. Biz and above all for leaving us with optimistic ideas to end the year move into the next one you know what it's going to be golden so thanks so much my pleasure and if anyone actually knows of a place you can play Unreal Tournament still online do drop me a line uh I'd love to have a little a little one sesh you're on you're on we'll add it in the show notes thanks so much for sharing cheers thanks this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say

so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market and all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look

forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm peggyanne saltz and that's a wrap until next [Music] week