Creative trends Q3, Merge mansion Japan, Admon tips, Habby: Souls review (#87)

most of my clients have found out who the culprit is and is actually like admob and you can correlate the anrs with how much Google bidding is scaling up so if you remember back to our episode we had with man manual yes we're kind of in the situation now where it's just Google have this anr threshold right and if you get over it you lose your your Organics and that's really painful for gaming companies right specifically ones are like really like reliant on ad Revenue so what's happening now is that Google have brought out an this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast 2 and a half Gamers 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 hello welcome everyone this is uh no [ __ ] gaming podcast and this

is uh session number 87 87 and my name is mael ancher I'm Felix bber and and we are your hosts and we are also your Consultants because we are working with you on growing your games on ad monetization game design and user acquisition side so what are we talking uh about today so I'm going to talk about the creative Trends in the last let's say 30 to 90 days uh Felix you're talking about best practices tips Network tips all of all of the tips for like overall Q4 or just overall Q Q5 Q5 I hate that term always did but exactly that's what I'm doing just a little tune up what you should be doing today is also Black Friday so you just want to see we're recording on Friday so all our listeners I hope you earned a lot of AD Revenue when you heard this like hear this message like when you hear us it's that magical time of the year right IAL time [ __ ] you I saw like cpis

went up like 400% in last 3 days yeah that's because of this guy yeah it's like oh yeah everyone you should you should squeeze the most out of everybody so beautiful yeah yeah the fact that I know you have to work a bit harder to change campaigns just makes me a bit happier because I've done all my optimizations this whole week would been stressful today's Friday you're not touching anything yeah yeah yeah and that's why we're wearing our Sunday Best kimonos yeah that's true because also uh I'm going to talk about some Japanese campaigns as well um but yeah and then yakob we are going to talk about souls yeah the new Global launch game from Hobby not really that new but like we finally got to it yeah I've I'm see I've seen few creatives and I looked at the numbers didn't look that great to be honest uh I think the numbers look kind of okay the problem is that if you compare anything to Survivor iio like yeah everything looks bleaky compared to

that that's true yeah that's true that he's already making more money than archero oh oh nice oh that's yeah that's talking about it okay arer is Peak orero now come on okay so who wants to start you start Monte I want I want see some creative as long as there's some good hooks uh okay so but first um there is a a lounge in Japan um so friends from meore and merge Mansion luned their game not loued but localized a lot of things uh to Japanese and we kind of saw tell me ped pascala speak anime let's let's start with this one that you shared with me Cu uh it's actually an interesting uh interesting outdoor maybe it's [ __ ] going to work oh the 3D ad yes you are you able to see it because it just there we go Jesus

Christ now we thank you very much Riverside making my life easier my life in the postproduction okay I'm going to sh stop sharing this wow what a creative right amazing wow worked so well let's try again so good that I didn't see it yeah yeah let's try again let's try again yes you should be able to see it now yep oo want to go full screen maybe I'll do this this yeah so it's uh I like this 3D [ __ ] no way it's quite this is good what about end but let's see let's let's look at this there is a slot machine and and coins right afterwards right afterwards perfect um we can actually then like check what else they they run because I saw quite different creators on um on YouTube when like

guys were sharing it and this was really something that caught my attention oh wow this seems super localized that is really loal yeah but I mean I when I look at different creatives as well it's just like how they this besides but this is just not localized it's just the other text is uh translated and then like this is all the running all was the Japanese currency most probably yes oh wow I mean you know all the [Music] details that Grandma's always up to Mischief of course so here we go this is this is basically it uh and then they have like a other other things which are obviously

English Jesus CH why is it so so loud but again so we were talking about like these long form creatives and uh I'm not sure if you if you manage to to see but this is one minute long the previous one was 40 seconds the previous one was also like 30 plus sounds like they're doing a lot of UA on applo then ah maybe we are still talking about Japan so this is Japan and Japan only I will I will talk about like the the wait let's see what it says does he live does he live what he's alive he's alive okay so we all saw all of these all these creatives and then we have also like wedding [ __ ] 54 seconds 58 seconds this is something which might be a little bit localized because there's some Japanese text logo maybe logo yeah well all the all the fun stuff

all over again but anyway this is not uh not Apple Ian it's actually iron Source interesting it's yeah it's very interesting do you know like if they have uh they don't have any ads they don't have any ads n no no ads at all interesting I know this for a fact but I'm sure they're ad curious because all the competitor the older competitors have ads right so yeah ad curious is very interesting it reminds me web free curious no but like all their competitors have ads right so like all these like yeah they all have ads right so yeah I'm sure it's just a matter of time so yeah so they ran iron swur you Google LIF off and then something else as well if you look at it in here it's a Facebook as well obviously so and I know and remember that from from the past the Instagram was quite big in in Japan

he has all like 30 plus second videos okay so this is just like a like a Japanese plug because we know um they were just launching in Japan very recently so if we kind of look at like how the the revenues and downloads kind of reflect the lounge doesn't look like uh it's doing anything anything yeah it doesn't look like he's doing anything which is uh a little bit little bit weird but I guess like look so here it's a it's some a special event duration 9 nine days which still should be going until next week so yeah well can happen I mean here's a valy of low revenues and now it's it's actually kind of doubled but now it's it's back so it's more connected to the live event rather than just localization and the the campaigns but yeah if you are uh if you want to share a little bit more about the Japanese Japan loung

um guys from metacore let us know my guess is that there will be more kind of offline advertising as it's custom in Japan for mobile games meaning like actual like subway station Billboards blah blah blah the 3D uh yeah the 3D thing outdoor cosplayers cos cosplayers but okay so we we can kind of look for look at the the top creatives in uh I would say let's say November which is a little bit more uh relevant to us and this is where I usually go so we I use a combination of sensor T and mobile action and now I think uh we can go and look into sensor T and like how how it looked like in in us especially on Facebook I tried to look at Facebook and then kind of combine Google unity and in other channels because I can I can actually do it here but on Facebook we should you always see the weird [ __ ]

and Facebook requires a lot of uh different creatives um and a lot of uh creative refresh so in here uh let's use games then we can if you want we can we can take a look at some like different um category in here but I would just go games and look who is here Warcraft Rumble who would said that I mean and it's static image which breaks my heart it break really breaks my heart because come on guys Blizzer you can do way better but we have we have also a video on over here so what is what is actually this it's like top top Jesus [ __ ] Christ almost she seems too alive to be AI based no no no this is this is not not AI this is I know her really you do no of course you don't oh it's only 5 Seconds which is quite interesting

it's so loud that's true yeah I think every everything it's like too loud anyway but then we have Monopoly go obviously uh we can try to look into this as well exactly is this you I was having this discussion with someone on on LinkedIn do you think that they profitable or not do you think like they' managed to spend more than like 4.7 million a day in UA since they launched or do you think they're profitable now I don't think I need to check the data and then try to estimate the the spend you you would know [ __ ] from the data man because you don't know the RAS I don't know yes but if you assume they are trying to get the money back in two years that's what I would kind of guess for this kind of a game this kind of a game yes um then uh I don't think they're kind of spending like 4.7 million a day I think like the rumor was like around 2.5 at lounge and now from our discussions uh in in Busan we kind of of got like what kind of cpis

they could see thanks to the Monopoly IP so what we can just then do is a calculation on the like number of installs they have and then kind of multip multiply that with the potential CPI that that they see which yeah the the the the thing was that like rumored the team really reduces the CPI them you mean IP yeah the IP IP IP yeah so then yeah I'm going to kind of like work on this and then uh our friend Neil from mobile gamer. B already reached out to me thanks to your discussion phix which discussion oh yeah about yeah the one you didn't reply when I tagged you yeah yeah yeah yeah of course I mean my two cents are going to be in the next article they already with Revenue like they pick from September higher it's still somewhere like 3 million a day or something like that no but think about it now obviously

the CPI increased heavily and then they will I I think they already have like a Thanksgiving like a event and special offer they've also added ads and they also added ads yeah but they're they're still like pumping strong like 350k downloads a day yeah like not really going down yeah so but yeah like what's this all about yeah I think that it's just still the same thing but now we're kind of like showing up the Julia element and that's it it's all it's all boarded if you remember uh the creatives and like the what we discussed with uh about Monopoly go it was all about like boards and like different just angles and board obviously it's nothing that new but at least like this is something that kind of gets a lot of Impressions these days but it's the you know it's the most recognizable thing from Monopoly dead yeah exactly yeah the board well then we have hooked on whatever else it's gaming no idea what that is uh then PlayStation console Call

of Duty Modern Warfare okay whatever I don't kind of it's like it's a lot of different uh different companies pushing too much oh my God was that the Monopoly go without the board oh no not under it I mean no no no this is like math and English but we have also like daily thin crossover like I've seen these like different static images for word games and cross Wars and all of these like so much in the last like last month or two months it's it's incredible there are gaming uh games and categories that kind of uses more static images and static images work a little bit better than than the rest word games and cooking games so if you have any of these use static images then let's look at like what's work

we oh now yeah I think this is the global launch it's a different uh different music wa yeah that's quite good it's pretty good yeah it's pretty good I love it okay I don't want to see Spider-Man I don't care uh Spider-Man I don't care about I care about Evon obviously and marel snap there you go and static image as well well let's see every oh there is a new iteration new iteration on this yeah but this is there ah zombies there you go not no zombies before why zombies has so much power cuz everyone is afraid of them maybe well I mean like the team is so strong it's very strong and like and it's like this for like so many years I remember that also with like met Legion we we had zombies in the

creatives and immediately was like the best performing creative download now every fish lady okay that game is not anything like that yeah at all at all all zero if you see this creative on on Twitter it says this is not representing the game playay aware of that okay K create and play okay I mean this this is load more KS come on like I was expecting something else because US ah okay there you go finally found a game with zero ads and lots of dragons drag in this at lying through your teeth okay the I want to tell you about is called her Wars it's the best game right now this is not a real voice either right no no that's what I was say at least they have smooth animations here but the intonation Is Not a Human

Being yeah of course but again one minute long I mean I I saw these like new new iterations of their creatives on Facebook and I was like oh man I'm really Wi-Fi hook of course but I was I was so intrigued to like watch more it was really interesting I was really looking forward to like how the creative develops What's Happening by the way dragons are more kind of a CPI reducing than uh no pulling swords out of cleavage no most probably no but if like the thing is like here look this is the hook yeah this is the important thing first three seconds is the the ah most craziest [ __ ] we ever seen but apparently but look they are kind of now it looks like they're moving from yeah the cleage and towards towards dragons because you see it in the in the icon as well and it's in the in the creatives

too so guess uh that's very important oh man okay so we have Monopoly go that I kind of overlooked but then this is interesting because I've seen this for fish doom and uh what else was it ship the same hook basically with the cat it's oh it's our new friend I do like cats I know like this is quite good and then we have also like some other toship which is this super super interesting golden goblins yeah yeah but this is again like a new iteration yeah it is new physics based another thing that's totally on the game I mean like nobody cares if it's in the game or not

Crazy M so really like yeah B hand it down to them like this looks really good I play this game 45 SEC 45 seconds so it's like again like moving from 30 seconds to 45 seconds and oh man they're doing so okay this is very good this is perfect this is really really and you can you can kind of see this I think from like next month elsewhere like for like idle games Farm farming games as well just using exactly this very satisfying to watch very satisfying and then we have them as well and this is also man like dead hook whoa pretty good right is it is that a running up for a Captain Hook uh could be yeah could be could be actually yeah could be because like they have I think they had this like a lot of

time before as well at least like the that that kind of hook in here should have gone for the time 10x yes oh well is there the people are going to be so disappointed when they find out it's just a m did I hear that correctly that there's like pares of Caribbean tune playing in the background uh it is yeah maybe they both the rights to it oh it's like um it's not the one it's just like modified yeah I think so yeah I think I think it is no it's not it is yeah it is similar but it's not I mean yeah similar but it's not like our Samuel yeah yeah like our like it's like it's like P of the Caribbean theme from wish but that's the one that you can actually use there's Mone you can use

yeah exactly and then we have uh gotta god well hobby guys Jesus Christ it's a bunch of rare gear everyone else has SSS gear why luck so bad forget it I'll just I'll fuse these two that's really bad that's really bad like wow does does sense is it's surprisingly powerful because they used it in different language obviously yeah but at least we see like a hobby still pushing it Dragon hair Marvel Spider-Man 2 okay nobody cares and then what else we have hey I think really oh let's see this is going to be good idle Lumber yes I I see idle Lumber quite a lot and they're using quite a lot of golden goblies as well I haven't played that

game does it actually look like this uh no I mean it's just uh man why you get get like scam by the creatives every yeah like come on like how long are you in the industry like two minutes whole section F industry two minutes and then yeah come on man oh I can the is really nice yeah yeah yeah they do it quite uh quite nicely obviously you you can see the patterns like Township golden goblins idle Lumber and then something else as well it's just like same creative one person innovates and then like in the everybody yeah exactly exactly that's it basically but it's like again like quite satisfying and there's upgrade there's like a lot of different uh uh mechanics in this but this is exactly what I wanted to show you you know uh do you remember our cute friend from like 5 minutes ago yeah mhm

oh my [ __ ] M so same hook but different different it's like combining different core game play with different progression that way you can only pay the you only have to pay the cat ones exactly pay the cat ones and then like you just multiply to all all the other games I first I first saw it in the in in fishdom actually but okay uh I think uh wait a second oh go Nik one no no wait wait so M what the [ __ ] is this okay I love this only left brain finger so this is definitely like a you know why ma likes this rumo why tell me ASMR there like a click it's not not notr ASMR it's not the ASMR it's just like what

the [ __ ] is this game about is that usual fail fail creative it is but it's undertake two interactive uh account so I'm really I can't I don't come on what's the game for it tap away what's that like what's uh guess how much spend do you think you have to spend to get on this list um I have no idea actually it's just uh based on the number of Impressions number of impressions so whoever is these priz picks spending a [ __ ] ton of money and then we have Warcraft Rumble then we have Monopoly go okay so it's still so you need to spend a sheit ton of money to be on the list yeah yeah pretty much uh we can we can look at the the N but it's like yeah it's starting image Red Hood Red Hood yeah and then oh let's let's look at this one as well if all yeah right here oh that's the the same one oh my

God okay don't need to look at that anymore we already saw it in the uh Rumble video oh but the okay let's let's look at this uh puzzles and Survivor that's zombies again zombies again yeah zombies again oh see they have some promotion with so ah nice interesting yeah yeah that's very good dep so okay that's that's pretty I mean interesting that's relevant actually it's very yeah it's very relevant okay so what do we have we have cats amazing cats and dogs love the podcast so thank you play for uh supporting the podcast the podcast yeah cat we have very yeah satisfying Township play fish do as well and then we have again like a new Hooks and Dragons for so does this mean that that if hero Wars is using dragons everybody

will be using dragons in the month yeah in like next month for sure 100% because yeah that's how it works like if and then we have Monopoly go obviously but it's like the thing is like how people kind of don't really think about anything it's like if one like supercell does it it means like everybody's is supposed to do it if hero Wars does something yeah we need to replicate that as well and that's why you could see so many T kind of uh creatives in the past and it didn't work for a lot of people so like but this is kind of like an interesting take of like different creatives usually uh how did how we did it in the past we looked at the Royal match but they are again like we don't want to see King dying 4,000 times in a different angle anymore we we we looked at the Hero Wars uh we usually looked at top four but top four is kind of

um not dying but if we look at white out survival they kind of they are killing it they make around like 60 million now which a month yes on iips yes they're like they're scaling heavily whoa yes why did that scale up so much why or when no when when when like in the last four months okay it's just going up it's just going up seriously going up yeah it's pretty good game you remember they have that special thing that nobody has which is they have a separate game just to reduce a CPI yes exactly yeah clever very clever yeah that's uh that's basically it so if you're listening to this uh you should already you should go to to YouTube or just look at it on Spotify just to see all the creatives we were talking about um now so I guess it's over to me then yeah it's over to you like always the most

interesting part is always the ad monetization one cuz you know it's Thanksgiving weekend and who is this person again you talking about the last what you want to go you want to go second Remo no no no I said only the best go the last ah right which is very true yeah anyway so it's Thanksgiving weekend right so what I wanted to do is just run through a couple of best practices for how to treat this holiday season so you can turn it into a Q true Q5 instead of just a Q4 uh but I just wanted to say one thing that's super annoying which has been kind of a dampener on the holiday mood across people who are monetizing with ads right now and ads heavily particularly on banners and that is like three of my clients have started getting a lot of anrs in the last couple of weeks and it's been slowly creeping up but steadily creeping up and then we're trying different sdks trying to figure out which one it is it's always a pain right right and then like this week most

of my clients have found out who the culprit is and is actually like admob and you can correlate the anrs with how much Google bidding is scaling up so if you remember back to our episode we had with man manual yes we're kind of in this situation now where it's just Google have this anr threshold right and if you get over it you lose your your Organics and that's really painful for gaming companies right specifically ones that are like related like reliant on ad Revenue so what's happening now is that Google have brought out an SDK and then their SDK is crashing like anr getting it way above threshold we can't turn off Google because it's usually now like probably like 40 or 50% of everyone's ad Revenue across Android right so it's Thanksgiving weekend so what's happening is anrs are rising and then we're going to get punished by Google for an error Google made yes so it's just like you know all you can do is smile and wave you know like this is great for those who don't

remember anr means up not respond not responding status yeah so it's terrible because then also manual said that uh you need to be below the threshold for 30 days to get back on track yeah so it's not like it's fixed after you fix it basically you need like thanks Google like you know you're bringing us the CMP taking bidding and it's just like now it's just oh so yeah little bit of a you know Annoying start for a bunch of Publishers but anyway I wanted to share some best practices on how to think about the holiday season and what kind of setups you should be running um I thought I was just going to start talking about best practices across the ad units and then I'll walk and go into some Network specific tips uh yeah and if you guys are able to correct me on any of this I'll give out an award for you know second best uh admon manager on the podcast okay let's see all right so let's start

with banners so banners here uh we're moving into a period of time where ecpm tend to be higher what's usually causing this is the fact that normally uh 80% of the ads that you show in your games are usually other games and what's causing the increase in ecpm is that e-commerce and branding ads are moving in and then that pushes up the price pretty simple supply and demand so there's yeah more demand SA stage chasing the same amount of Supply then the ecpm goes up so what's a good way to capitalize on this a really good idea is to if you don't have Banner refresh rates set on 10 seconds then basically set it on 10 just for this Black Friday weekend and kind of for the peak times during Christmas Pro tip here is if you're on admob mediation they don't actually let you change the banner refresh rate but you can email them and ask it because they can change it on their back end and then you can take it down to 20 seconds but only if you ask how the hell do you

know you have to ask these things tell me exactly hon how is literally like it's the the best way is like it's like the Middle Ages and people can read and people can't so it's like either you know or you don't so like that's why I'm here wearing a kimono to teach people how to read no essentially but yeah you you don't know these things unless you have experience right so the thing about ad networks is they don't tell you these things you have to ask and it's is like oh yeah how do you know like what like what questions yeah like what what to ask you listen to two and a half Gamers okay fair enough yeah but it's really like that right so how did you how did you find out it's like that [ __ ] movie joke like oh how could you do this oh you never [Laughter] asked yeah Jesus okay never okay anyway so another another tip on banners is is that uh a lot of people that I've worked

with they only set up like Banner placements with like admob and Google ad manager like in the waterfall but there's actually another thing where you can set up something called admob native and admob uh Google ad manager native slots and people don't often use this and this is actually where you get access to a different type of inventory the banners that kind of move and like are interactive and kind of native uh a lot of people don't use this if you don't set it up that's like getting a whole access to whole new demand Source but definitely have setup because a lot of people forget about it so interstitial ads so here kind of the same thing as with banners a really smart thing to do is doing a short burst of setting a shorter uh short shorter cooldown timers just for peak times like 24 hours or something like that and that essentially allows you to earn more money for like the peak times a really clever thing to start doing as well uh during the holiday season especially in December is to start playing around with bid floor so bid floors is where you can set

essentially I will not accept to show an intertial ad unless I get paid X so what you do then is you help your retention uh and you only show ads over a certain level so this takes a bit of experimentation to get right and also what you do then is you move up all the biders to a certain level and that helps you earn more Adar though but it's a bit fiddly so you have to spend a lot of time testing this but it's worth it uh yeah yeah so if if I understood correctly it means that if you don't get paid enough what you wanted you don't show any ads exactly so usually how it works in waterfalls is that usually you can find a price point in your waterfalls so basically go into your mediation partner and the way you do this when you want to start testing is you go into the mediation platform you look at your whole waterfall and then you look at where about 70% of ads like are the ad revenues earned at different price points you usually for rewarded ads this is above $18 so 70% of your ad

Revenue comes above $18 that means you can start experimenting with like bid floors maybe around 10 somewhere around there to start off with and then see like how you get on uh good Pro tip uh moving on to rewarded ads so here it's really important to remove a lot of latency so that means that any placements you currently have that are filling below 0.02% on fill rate be careful about latency last time you were talking about latency to got you in trouble almost all of us got in trouble so yeah I mean be careful thanks for taking you know going down with me but yeah it's just a good idea to remove any like lower like fill placements because just kind of helps with the with um yeah the smoothness of the the bid flow right okay rewarded ads is like there's not that many pro tips you can ask here but yeah so now moving on to Google ad manager so yeah yes Google ad manages so right now this is

the best time to refresh and start doing refreshes of your placements so doing gam refreshes is like exactly the same thing as doing ad mob refreshes because they work on the same way things I'm not sure if it's allowed or not but anyway you can do it and you'll make a lot of money yeah enjoy until it uh yeah exactly gam will go away at some point uh but you know why not you know pretend it's the fall of Rome you know party like it's the fall of Rome and you just do it a lot because it's kind of free money until then yep um Amazon publisher services so again yeah Amazon yeah my Amazon my amazone so APS has finally started with their interactive like end cards on intials and rewarded so that's started to improve quite a lot and it might be time to start testing that I haven't seen like that much bidding on it yet but it's starting to look a lot better

in terms of the banners uh Tam is still an absolute must if you want to scale on this and usually if you have enough Tam Partners usually Amazon will be your number one Banner partner in the US um it's very powerful the top 10 Partners I see on banners right now is Rubicon inmobi smato Verve and sander so how this works is send them an email and be like hey I want to be Tam partners and then they'll send you an IO and then you're off to the racist that's all you have to do is sign the io easy super easy yeah um oh ad Mob D we need to talk about this I've talked about this so many times right you know yeah yeah uh they're kind of transferring over from bidding right now so ad mob is going down while Google bidding is going up but it's still worth doing refreshes until you lose all that Spike so just keep an eye for that uh that was it that was Felix's 2013 holiday edition

and living in the past Jesus you know I'm a traditionalist that's why I we Kono very good yeah I can I can add one more secret tip yeah okay go wait yeah go don't be afraid to use rewarded video ad placements in your holiday event live op Remo oh second best ad monetization manager on the Pod because it doesn't really does really break your stuff and I've seen likees 20% increase in ad Revenue just because of this and usually what you do is you set it up in a way that you just speed up the event you don't give any like direct resources through that so worst case scenario people just get faster through the event but you know if you're good you plan the event to cover the whole holiday even New Year so that's there yeah very good very clever Remo um so we' have been talking about hubby all the time and were never actually talking about their new game yeah because it's [ __ ] um not

[ __ ] definitely not [ __ ] um can you closer with the mic man it's a bit far away from your mouth yeah yeah here we go here we go um you can give a little bit of love to the mic finally so hobby um this is not this is not your usual hybrid casual stuff that we've been talking all along uh this is it seems like a completely different developer the D publishing and that uh is making an iteration of AFK Arena so the game is called Souls very original uh It Go soft launch on May 30th 2023 and it got Global launch in August 22nd 2023 so it's kind of already uh few months after the global launch what I just I'm looking at last 30 days but I had I had Japan only because of men it

makes $3,000 in Japan no no actually this game doesn't really fa that well in Japan it seems uh but really well in South Korea yeah so like South Korea all in all like South Korea all in all after pretty much like uh he it's like yeah 30 30% of the revenue it's coming from South Korea interesting yeah so after 3 months pretty much match uh which is yeah somewhere here uh the game has something like 4 4.5 million downloads and 13 million Revenue which I think is not really that bad but yeah as we talked before everything on hubby portfolio gets compared to Survivor iio and Survivor iio just makes so much money so it's a little bit unfortunate with your uh bigger brother is just like 10 times bigger than you are yes exactly sorry Remo why would you abandon the most profitable template in our industry to do this it's not you need to

no no no man you need to think about it from like hubby strategy because they have the template but this is not a game that can be thrown into the template because it's not an action RPG Road Glide which means it doesn't fit the template and it's actually like pretty massive so yeah let's look my question is why would you abandon your core competency where you're making all the money you're not abandoning it doing it in parallel this is their publishing business this is their publishing business and then they have the hybrid casual template publishing business which is not it so my guess they're kind of like diversifying that's it yeah yeah which is really good because you have some hybrid casual stuff and then you have some kind of very midcore core stuff that is this yeah they still make like 130k per day uh which can be like easily double right yeah which I think yeah it's for now it seems like it's stagnating it's like a straight line it's definitely not the declining but definitely not rising up um because it's

Q4 because it's Q4 so I guess they're waiting a bit and uh yeah the game at the art the game seems amazing the music and everything like it has I can't hear [ __ ] so very good journey journey yeah it's good it has this journey Vibe but even like the iteration on the main menu like you know how AFK AFK Arena looks here in like the main menu like they have this kind of a infinite Journey there's this the bird is actually you pull it out on that uh your kind of computer yeah somewhere not not that uh just put AFK Arena next to the yeah not don't have AFK Arena here now because I have another AFK arena in my pocket I will talk about in a second right good yeah so uh just like quick round down of the game it's your usual AFK RPG uh the game playay Loop or let's say the core gameplay loop it's a little bit iterated compared to FK Arena because here it's a squad based RPG whereas FK is also a

squad based RPG but actually they don't really respect this kind of termbase combat AFK Arena Works in a way that everybody charges everyone and then they have this kind of chaos stic battle which you can even use the abilities and time them out with Heroes here it's completely automated I cannot even select that it's like whatever do something I can just increase the speed of the animation that's like you can't interfere yeah you can't interfere at all what you can interfere is like the setup of you know the pre- battle interfer is it round like three out of 15 yes what oh my God I never got to 15 no no no it's it's like it's pretty fast okay so you kind of win this is my stuck battle so I'm I'm not going to win this one because I eventually get stuck on the main progression yeah yeah yeah so that's there but yeah disin so is a squad based term sad based turnbas RPG uh which is fully automated there's a little bit of

iteration compared to FK Arena uh you have your usual like super massive economy let's say there's like just like these kind of usual like I call them notification events because these events are just like you going to pick the rewards and that's the whole event like okay pretty much like like missions and stuff uh then the limited event which is again like a little bit of shop here and there and that's it like nothing big here yet uh the shop itself like it's massive as as usual perf Kina every tab has like three different uh subtabs wow like what not yeah so this is just like the the shop section so how much money did you spend in this game zero as usual oo zero okay that's what I that's what I thought so there's the as a

usual yeah now we really want to watch the Youtube video thiso Remo Remo if I sent you € 10 but you had to spend the money on iips which game would you spend it and what would you buy I won't spend it on the game that I won't play from L the end of the podcast man but why I mean because I want to see the freet to playay tightness but you will see also like the benefits of paying and like how that kind of increases the pays of like a different different different set to do something not everyone can be an upper class iip whale like yourself you know see I'm VIP already be so classist I I'm I'm what they talking about VIP one already so what does that even mean how can you be VIP when you didn't spend anything because they give it out for free what Remo did you know that M's VIP 10 yeah exactly $ th000 doll in one day he won't even start this anyway um yeah so continuing

here there's a usual kind of load out there's guilds there's uh like yeah gear enhancement the heroes are kind of massive as usual like so many vectors of progression you have the Hero level the skills the equipment the like limit breaking the fusion system show us the gacha pools the GS let's let's look at the gacha pools where they are here they are the gacha so yeah we can summon someone just no well really goes against your yeah yeah because we yeah we summoned one instead of 10 but yeah those were free tickets anyway um yeah like very standard compared to like AFK Arena don't I mean he he needs to start the podcast because this is so much [Laughter] fun so that's there like the recycling the let's say soing mechanic this is the one that like helps you to bring the other Heroes to up to part to your

current Heroes so you don't you know you keep using new stuff doesn't really need to kind of level them that much the one interesting thing that I never saw was this kind of a cave of Abyss because they have the usual like asynchronous PVP that's like the you know your usual thing doesn't really kind of you know that's there everybody knows that there's the tower which is like increasing difficulty forever blah blah blah there like nothing new to it but then they have this like Cave of abys and this is interesting thing so there's this kind of cave I thought it would be the rad glide mode but it's not Cave of a be yeah it is oh so if you go there it's actually like first person view check this out it's a first person view I just I keep getting back to this thought don't I like these games could because I'm dumb it's so complicated it's not complicated at all like it's veryy see we found the boss oh nice I have no idea what this this is this is kind of interesting like I never seen this mode in any other game

because it's some kind of a you're progressing with these torches which you need to see in the dark and there's this like first person view animation and something but you're not really kind of getting more power it's just like your main load out there so yeah it's some kind of nice like side side mode progression they have there so let's see um but yeah you see the animation production values and like everything else is pretty much outstanding that's why probably they're making consistently 130k a day still after global launch it's like the the revenue really didn't budge no but yeah the downloads decreased quite heavily downloads decrease but it's usual with your midore RPGs like they have the bulk of downloads in the global launch and then how this Victory you just died I didn't I damaged him and then uh get as much treasure as possible it doesn't matter that I died in the it was a tactical Retreat Mach tal retreat there we go exporation nice okay it's pretty much

your usual AFK arena with a little bit different core that that's there which makes a I would say pretty big nice amount of money for October they did something like 4,300 for September they did like 5 million so yeah that's that's that's there it's as I said in hubby portfolio if you're looking at it survivor iio makes something like 8 and a half million I only which could be easily doubled with ads so but there are no ads in Souls yeah I never seen any ads here as per usual setup of AFK Arena so but it's quite interesting how like you said so the the revenue is since the global launch like 130 to 150 per day there's like no up and up and down like yeah like there's one day on October it's like 200 something but then like it's flat yeah and by keep in mind it's like 32% us 30% South Korea regarding the revenue very interesting split I was I

was actually U yeah it's true yeah expecting to find something like Taiwan or like all these other things somewhere there but they're kind of down like the third place is France and then there's Germany Germany yeah I mean you have Singapore Vietnam Japan but yeah right after there but like you expect much higher yeah that's true Taiwan yeah 2% of I guess the team is very appealing to the to the West still because it's not your usual anime Bas no no that's true yeah it's not it's not so you know for HBY regarding the portfolio this is as as weal this is really nice diversification of their portfolio to not have everything in like one bucket of H you know what's really interesting it's like 50 50% split on Android versus iOS oh what yeah yeah it's 50 like 52% vers on on Android versus 47 on iOS it's like almost the same thing that's interesting yeah yeah like it's I would say a pretty good move from them like

keep in mind that their their template machine is not stopping because of this it's just like it's a parallel publishing process yeah it's another Branch if you built a mint press why not try to Branch out yeah why not have like the other press running in the background so yeah yeah and the interesting part why I'm bringing this up is because lth Lilith the original makers of AFK Arena have their new game uh actually they relaunch it last week called AFK Journey Pioneer which was soft launch November 20 2023 yes so so and it's if I understand an iteration of AFK Arena what they had before which will be competing with this game directly and directly with their own game so now it seems we're going to have three AFK Arenas on the market very soon because the AFK Journey from L was first soft launch in April yeah but it's it's not live

anymore I see saw it in on their account I think it's just they relaunch it last week into that Pioneer thing cuz when I went trying to look for AFK Journey oh this AFK Arena Journey no I don't see check check the portfolio um yeah okay okay I I will I will yeah yeah anyway uh it seems to me that like there will be again a big battle of idle RPGs probably somewhere like start of next year we'll see if like this one was going to be scaled higher or just going to be how it is and then just L it's going to take the take the crown as usual or yeah but we'll definitely kind of return to it once it's going of be released because it's a little bit similar to the dragoner game that we talk about in uh I think soft lunch sonar that was also launched recently and a lot of these idle RPGs are implementing like map engagement mechanics when you go can go actually around the map like

physically and like do stuff there like something similar like dream Dale in way so this is still the old let's say old in parenthesis model of AFK Arena progression so this is more old schoolish but the new AFK Arena the AFK Journey will definitely get back to it once it launches to kind of get some more drill down on this this seems like a great uh yeah diversification for hubby it's not that big but it's still like they're currently their second biggest game in portfolio anyway after cool yeah yeah and by the way last thing last thing tell us I got an invite into zenes Zone zero which is the third honai uh mihoyo game the makers of honkai star that we're going to talk about next week if everything goes accordingly and what else is happening next week Remo and we're going to Helsinki we are and what are we going to do in Helsinki Remo we're going to chase

those Angry Birds we're going to R nice enjoy enjoy the theia con and slash afterwards I'm going to be lying down on the beach again so it's going to be exactly the opposite of world because you're going to be freezing to death and I'm going to be sleeping Margaritas on the beach it's going to be you know it's going to be usual Finland which is great yeah great gray dark and SAS true yeah we will see you next week byebye all right thank you very much for listening uh don't forget to subscribe share the uh the podcast your industry friends colleagues talks and cats because cats are great Hooks and great listeners and subscribers see you next time thank you cheers [Music] [Music]

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