Creatives end cards arms-race, why is soft launching in US a terrible idea? Night crows review (#69)

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 okay welcome everybody this is uh session number 68 today we're talking talking about uh arms race in ad monetization I'm going to talk about um why soft lunching in the US is very bad idea and uh aob is gonna walk us through night crows and like new game with lots of different [ __ ] which is um happening in in well not happening but scaling in Korea in well there's no English right no not yet okay nice so my name is mat L you consultant being in the industry 10

years soft launch 35 and Global launch 35 games around 4 million profitable spend and I'm Felix braberg about seven years in the industry don't have quite the tenure that Mach does but I do add monetization uh I've helped my clients earn over100 million in od Revenue in those seven years and my name is zier game design and product consultant to complete the trio and I've been in the industry for eight years working on on pretty much B ends uh on third party side on developer side make like five to six games from VR to messaging platforms I'm now currently primary mobile of course so there you go and we and we are your host for today so uh okay um Felix I'm start you no yeah I'm gonna start but first like I just wanted to say like on the brawl star episode that you guys released which is like from when we released this like two weeks ago really liked it was really good it's

great because we were actually discussing Squad Busters not Squad buers you know why cuz I wanted to give you guys [ __ ] cuz I listened to in the hammock and I fell asleep twice like I wish when I met at muu that guy from com.com I would have referred you guys for [ __ ] reading voices to fall asleep because I fell asleep twice which is why I'm going to be on the next one because everyone needs to hear how they could have implemented ads just saying you know knew what I said every time you said getting sleepy I'm hearing your lips move but I'm getting sleepy game dies exactly every time you say as are beautiful than one game soft Lun for super is getting killed actually yeah that's how it works man all right so I'll start uh as usual uh so today I'm going to talk about an arms race uh I'm not talking about nuclear Pro proliferation or or the nuclear race arms race I'm talking about an arms race

that's much more important to human welfare and I'm of course talking about the arms race in rewarded ad end cards so last summer we had on this podcast a big chat about add end cards uh you all remember that uh we talked quite a lot about about it back then it was a really big deal still is essentially I argued uh too much fanfare and uh triggered got much triggered uh like and I argued that the biggest predictor of CTR and install rates it's actually not the creative itself but the creative end cards that uh ad networks like app L and iron Source superimpose like on their video creatives um it was good discussion always a good discussion when you guys get triggered it was good uh so since then like everyone nobody got triggered what are I talking about well you're getting triggered now so it's good r-t triggered so everyone can agree uh that overall ad quality and end card quality

has just been heading into the absolute toilet in the last two years so what I want to do today is to spend some time talking about new end cards and creative lengths because it seems that iron source and applovin have started to roll out a more and more aggressive template in the last couple of weeks and I'm getting a lot of complaints uh but before getting into the public naming and shaming and the slinging of poo I just want to say you should be very careful you should be very careful about that H last last year we got you got us in real trouble so please yeah so I just wanted to get some set some context by giving our dear listeners a brief history lesson in creative end cards so a little over two years ago iron Source rolled out a new end card template uh that required users uh after watching a 30- second rewarded ad to First wait then click an X then again wait and then exit the ad uh so this added about a 3 to 5 Second to a 30

like second ad experience so if you think about it it really makes sense uh for publicly listed companies to like experiment with the the rewarded ad unit uh as this is where they have the hard like highest margins so a way of seeing like even better and like results is to artificially inflate ctrs and install uh and install rates by making ads harder to click out of so I'm not sure uh like what kind of results iron sours saw from making these cards but like two years ago 10 days after iron Source did it app en rolled out similar end cards and the arms race had begun so that was two years ago uh where are we today uh simply put H it's not getting better and I've had a few issues in the last few weeks with apple 11 and iron Source ads in my client's games and it's not even funny anymore so let I'm going to do a little screen share why not funny anymore I'm going to show you yeah you like

this show us so first uh wait what are my stuff um is it again about the thing that the button that you close the ad is just getting smaller and Morey can you see my screen Yeah Yeah so basically first I want to show you a nice little end card or a nice little ad from why is this not playing what is great over there yeah it's not playing oh come on yes this happens when uh when you have the the videos on on Google Drive and all your computer which sucks so lesson number two not not only history lesson about AR but you know all right well you can cut this part and I'll download no no no no no I'm not cutting anything you you'll be drowning in your

own technical [ __ ] come on there you are for sure just talk about it man I will show it I will show it in the so here is uh an ad more bad this is what a rewarded ad used to look like as you can see it runs uh basically there's some stuff you can click on but then essentially it runs and then at the end of 30 seconds there it says rewarded granted and the user can click on the X to leave the ad so that kind of the best in Industry uh they're kind of known in the industry as yeah the nicest ad quality in Industry that's Google right so then we'll move up a notch and then now we're going to look at a Unity ad and essentially here you can see the difference so add runs for exactly 30 seconds and then when you get to the end end card screen you can see this little wheel and basically the wheel counts to three and then you can

click out of the ad so that's an end card that's 3 seconds long so not great not terrible right not super pushy either three seconds are fine yeah 3 seconds is fine right and then we move on to an iron Source One and essentially this one runs for 30 seconds excluding technical difficult it runs for amazing I love it yeah the amount of [ __ ] you you gave me always when I tried to show the creatives all right anyway this runs for 30 seconds and then basically it makes you wait for 10 seconds at the end card so 40 seconds in total so that's see the C for so that's an overall inrease of 33% of watchable time so this has slowly started to happen but now moving on to

the worst offender in the industry right now so here I'm showing an app loving ad so starts just as any normal ad uh you get 30 seconds then you get this little SK overlay comes up after 30 seconds and then when the end card comes you have a 15c timer oo so it's 30 seconds Plus 15 so it's 45 seconds in total that's 50% longer than normal rewarder ads used to be before this arm St started so I'm getting a lot of bad reviews like my clients are getting a lot of bad reviews uh from these ads and it really affects retention right and it's super frustrating as these long gear ad units like are tested in games without letting Publishers know and they also sometimes what they do is remove the actual timer uh in the ad units you can't the users can't even that is like

longer so it's great for networks but terrible for Publishers so what can you do about it yeah what should you do if this is happening so well you you have to ask the networks to remove them but it's like pulling teeth from them because you're messing with their margins it can be done but it's just hard you really have to like put a lot of pressure on them to do it kind of what I usually do is you know I send them a group of bad reviews and then also an example of the actual end card that I want out and then say that yeah I'm removing it and all out ads or inaps and if you guys don't comply then I'll have to pause you guys because it's affecting our retention okay so the new Trigg is pretty much pretend that the thing is loading no what did I understand correctly like at the end of the end card like the I have no idea what you just asked like what was the question about okay I think it would make more sense if you actually saw the ads inste the post production maybe maybe uh but the thing is uh I think I saw it uh on iron Source

mostly uh you just wait until the timer ends because there's end card you can't do anything and then you just click the x button and then you try to get out of it immediately but it yeah it takes time but it's super frustrating because like I guess the Covenant that you have with the user is a 30 second thing but I don't know if there's any actual contracts with any of the mediation providers or aders that it has to be 30 seconds okay now I get it so it forces you to wait hope that you will try to get out of it by clicking on it yeah exactly but is the time there's nothing clickable for the first like 30 seconds and then after like the 15sec wait um can see it yeah same as I said like it it kind of tries to pretend this like frozen state where you want to click anywhere just to move somewhere which means you click on the ad okay you can say that okay okay let's see let's close one or two eyes it's like yes okay yeah yes yes it's Friday

I'll get a drink yes ah so but yeah you you basically try to click anywhere besides the x button and then you you are redirected to the store immediately yeah anywhere is the conversion then yeah it's a higher chance of yeah installing afterwards by the it doesn't hurt yeah it doesn't hurt okay uh so since we actually um reviewed the squad buster soft loue last time no not brawl star I know it can get confusing if you're the half gamer on the podcast it's fine uh the half game who fell asleep while listening to that's okay that's okay that's okay that's okay so so we're discussing this different strategies in terms of soft launching so supercell went this uh triaa type of uh closed beta soft lounge and uh and now when they soft loued flood Rush uh is

actually also soft Lounge in us and English speaking countries so it's not common to actually soft loue in uh in this way how do I know I was a part of pretty big amount of soft launches and uh you know people asking like okay so why not go to us right way because supercell does it so it should be good right well no first of all lot of thing doesn't work like you think it works if you are not supercell that's what I want to say so first of all you're not supercell second of all how many games did they launch in the last couple of years so how do you even know like this soft launch strategy actually works you don't so that's that's another thing but then the main point why I'm kind of confused why um people think uh us is a good way

to go because of course everybody ask oh well but this is my core audience so I want to check the game and the kpis in us well of course like that makes sense but why would you ever want to expose your unfinished game to your core audience I know your game I know you believe the game is ready after a long time in the development but no it's not usually like nine out of 10 games in soft have problems technical problems retention problems onboarding problems whatever like ftu there at like TR points for players so you can actually get pretty hurt uh when you soft Lune your game in in us right away what should you always do and try to think about is open up the game in tier two or potentially other tier one GEOS when you have but only well the tier ones only only way you have all the

features in the game and you already have some monetization in the game so you can actually check the retention and then also monetization kpis then you can ask okay but the retention the tier two countries and their retention sucks sure there the retention is lower than uh than tier one countries yes that's true so what the retention curves should be very similar in all GEOS anyway so for example of course if you aim for Poland the retention will be lower than for example Netherlands but the shape of the curve and the different ratio from day one to day three to day seven should be very similar and also the cpis are going to be way lower in Poland too so think about it as uh you're Gathering data why not to actually gather data you know for lower cpis kind of makes sense right so and also there is this like

interesting uh discussion about well supercell is actually doing their soft Lun or they were doing their soft lers iOS let's let's do iOS first oh again you're not you're not supercell so it's just very hard uh to copy anything that they do they're outstanding they're great but it's just you can be inspired by by these type of things and whatever is uh whatever is that they are doing but just please think about how to move to Android first why to Android first because of uh well they have pretty good open Beta Google features um which uh I was talking about at the thef Google event as well and I'm going to show talk about it now as well but thing is also you have Google Play experiments so better like native ASO tools and also the like the approval times were always quite short and I know there is this problem of uh millions of

devices that you need to optimize your game for but that's you know that's the price to pay on Android to like get all the other advantages so honestly if you think about the the new features that Google introduced I think it was like what I one or two years ago they pre-launch or soft launch Playbook is actually pretty good because you have these like different tracks on Google play so we have internal testing closed beta open beta and then soft lounge and then obviously there's you can do pre-registrations then go Global in internal testing you know what it is close beta you have limited amounts of downloads there's in closed in closed beta you can't do any UA campaigns which again if you think about supercell and the quote or like the Whata said they have 80% organic so they don't do UA that much which again if you're not supercell you can't rely on

these type of things because you you do a close beta nobody will give a [ __ ] it's just that's how it is they even had this um well everdale under different account for a long period of time because they were doing some some types of type of U then vallees and Villages it was called before as soon as they company yeah as as soon as they remove the the game on the supercell uh brand it's just your kpis are going to change quite atically because of the brand IP everything it's just like so yeah please just forget about supercell try to do your own thing uh because it can get you in trouble honestly it can be very misleading anyway get getting back to actually the the Google Play and the open Beta Testing which is a great tool because before you had soft Lounge in limited amount of countries you still have you still have that but in open Beta you don't have ratings and reviews which helps because what players are ruthless even now with the

close beta for Squad Busters everybody was like oh well this sucks because it's repetitive we you know there's like everything is just almost the same all the time it's like hey guys like wake up this is close beta like this is the second iteration of their build like what what would you expect just come on like provide feedback that we can actually work with anyway so this is good that you know you don't need this you don't will you don't see this reviews and ratings the game is searchable on on Google Play you have still like limited amount of downloads you have in the open Beta but you have you know possibility of running the UA campaigns you can do it on Google you can do it on on Facebook as well you can't do Tik Tok because um open Beta has its limitations but still like in open beta for two channels you're pretty good so how you should actually think about country mix in that case because of

course like us is not a great idea from the start as I mentioned so what should you what should you do how to pick countries so in order to like discover what country could be the best fit for your game uh I'm usually looking for to English proficiency type of data device penetration and payment Behavior always so there is obvious like wide range of different countries that seem you know suitable for a soft lunch um it's important to think about your target audience when picking the Geo uh for my favorite countri is for for midcore games or any well mayor oriented uh games are basically Poland because there's a really big Android penetration High English proficiency as well and very big male audience they play a lot of uh meore games and Shooters and whatever well I guess m whatever so I soft lunch female female um target audience came and I would most probably skip Poland as a Geo and try to think

about slightly different audience maybe Italy Spain whatever else I usually do this um exercise before um entering soft line just to be sure that everybody is aligned looking at multiple things like Facebook audience which is now kind of hard to get but still you have some some level of uh data that you can get from Facebook you can use Tik Tok as well uh there's like again English proficiency potential like CPI uh CPI is pretty hard to get obviously uh because well there there are some Benchmark but not as as great as you would think there's like CPI Benchmark from chus which is not not relevant anymore it's kind of obsolete uh abire has some Benchmark tool as well which you can use but again uh it's average from averages so please just uh think about that as well so I have some like examples of um of different cpis and different GEOS that that I've

done before so I usually look into my internal like benchmarks uh and come up with some some countries for soft lunching the last two in terms of the countries um you should always look into the competitor uh segment and try to look at their top two well top two top 10 or 20 countries in terms of downloads and revenue and uh and just pick two or three uh and then I can can actually I can actually talk about maybe an example so let's see let's see so let's let's take for example an auto chest game I okay what what why not tell me one properly functioning aoz mobile game on the market other than riots well you can you can you can look at the the infite tactics why not you can okay then are we doing Auto chest really like you're not Riot same applies okay you're

not RI okay so you're not super you're not super let's talk about a riot game no no no I was I was talking about like taking an example of their top top 20 countries that's it for like revenue and let's forget it's it's it's like only functioning for Riot okay let's continue okay then we can talk about let's say rash Royale for example and there are some like clones on the market uh so that's fine okay let's let's take that yeah R is already iteration random Dice from exactly so when talking about or thinking about the countries um look at all I looked at always the like the last 90 days in terms of the revenue and downloads as I mentioned and for example for a retention stage you can go with um again like what I said Netherlands Poland Denmark maybe and then adding Brazil because Brazil is still like say top eight country in terms of both inst plus end Revenue so actually there is a

big Market in uh in this this country also for midcore games and then in terms of monetization uh I would pick let's say UK Canada Australia Germany and South Korea even why this uh so you have tier one mix uh you have not only Canada and Australia well those are two small markets Usual Suspects Usual Suspects for soft launching so actually it gets pretty expensive very quickly that's why UK as well then you have Germany people ask me okay well Germany everybody speaks you know German English as well come on except Felix except Felix so that's also pretty good country for for like later stage of the monetization um and then the South Korea because you you just want to you know get some data in from that part of the world as well and I mean I think it's a lottery there isn't it like would say or you losty there

probably exactly so Philippines is out no Philippines is still still there it's just for technical but that's technical technical yeah that's technical I didn't I I didn't even mention it yeah I mention it I didn't I didn't want go there but honestly like for Philippines and Southeast Asia you know you have all these web free games which uh in that part of the world kind of works well so if you have this type of game then you need to reink the the country strategy as well if you TI of came you're already dead maybe maybe not but then I think uh the South Korea is a good segue to Mr yakob over here because uh there is a game that is trending and it's in it's Korean game and we have no idea what the [ __ ] it's uh the game about Leverage The Power of loyalty driven UA with mplay users discover a collection of curated games to play based on their interests

the more they play the more units they earn the more they spend on inapp purchases they also earn units can be redeemed for their preferred rewards including a variety of gift cards tapping into our exclusive and growing community of engaged Gamers at a global scale loyalty works for any game in genre the stage is yours 25 minutes take us in Cheers Cheers than let's go again this Asian Rabbit Hole as usually like to do so um forget about everything you know about mobile games and especially kpis because this is going to look completely different like your usual mobile game um so one of our listeners pointed us uh this new game that's currently trending in South Korea of course it's an MMO RPG called night of course yeah um I think the name's actually different because of course there's not the global client yet so

there's no English version if you want to play it go try to figure out the Korean client and good luck with that I wasn't able to how underground are we right now Jesus because all of my emulators were just too [ __ ] to play it and I wasn't able to keep up with the graphics of course because you were trying to get trying to get the supercell game up and running on you no no like you can download it normally there's no like geolocated restriction you can you just want able be to do and then the other thing is that the game has a PC client that if you want to download you need to confirm through Korean full number so sorry I didn't get that why why we talking about this game like why are we talking about this game um we'll get you'll see why we're talking about this game come on tell us tell us why yeah what's happen let just like let's just look at the game in the meantime because it's actually very very very gorgeous if you if you hear a fan that's uh

jakob's computer trying to exp it's just it's just a video yeah yeah so actually mobile game yeah this is a mobile game man that's why we're talking about it it's a mmpg taking place in medieval Europe powered by Unreal Engine 5 from weter folks that build Nexon V4 and H this looks amazing this looks great yeah and you can fly no you can fly of course you can fly you can fly that's hilarious a Korean game based in Europe with European character speaking Korean it's completely normal man and flying yeah and flying uh they have they're flying over Slovakia right there supposed supposedly thousand thousand players supported battlefields so thousand players fighting on one Battlefield PVP uh they support unrestricted onetoone player trading and they already are supposed to do a blockchain version of the game sometime this year but like

it's not yet confirmed but it was announced overall the development of the game took two years with 110 employees and the I know now why you love the game because you can ride the [ __ ] horse that's ah man you can fight even the bear oh you can ride the bear oh yeah you can ride the bear even giraffe and stuff like that oh I want to ride the giraffe of course um yeah the the publisher is we made the developer is forgot the name I'll get to it uh um the thing is and why we're talking about this because this game is currently top one gring game in South Korea which means you need to take the old guard and Old Guard is Lage because in South Korea gaming all roads lead to lineage that's just the thing that is there because lineage is a religion there um so this is pretty much very very let's say unexpected and everybody is just raving about it like how they are able to do it uh when I Wasing looking at the game and as you see the game play uh it's pretty

much an the typical Korean very very grinding heavy MMO RPG everything can be put on aop play questing can be put on alop play looting monsters even like you know popping potions on yourself like you can leave it like it is in you playing or or what what's happening this that's a video man I was already like super excited about it like like okay how can no no hands I don't know um as I said uh currently it's rumored we have the biggest user base in uh South Korea which is like daily unique users being 90k which is remly the highest among all the mm RPG games in South Korea and the other like very big differentiator is that it's the only game that supports 4K level Graphics in Unreal Engine five that's the first one on the market and notice this don't get me wrong it's not first doing Unreal Engine it's first

doing Unreal Engine five because Unreal Engine 5 the latest iteration was released in April last year so they have pretty much right racing in it I'm not not kidding you so it looks really really gorgeous and uh yeah let's talk about why it's making so much money how much is it can you say that first yeah yeah so most important part in first five weeks according to our favorite data tools only on mobile and I stress this only on mobile because we don't see the PC revenue and I'm guessing this is a very very strong PC client revenue is 43 million in five weeks in first month this was 39 million Al together the other important number is it's just on half a million downloads which bring us to revenue per download being $93 on Android and $72 on iOS what let's just take that with the grain OFA cuz honestly like knowing anything about our favorite data tools lately like faite friends they let us down quite a

lot like yeah no man this is accurate don't get me wrong this is accurate uh the other thing that I wanted to mention which is really important is that as said this game is pretty much an iteration on lineage M which is one of the many lineages in the version that they did there uh notice the difference between these games like how it how it looks so the game play and like the mechanics the progression it's very very similar and it's pretty much an upgrade but this game was released in November 2019 that's the thing and it was still sitting at the top of the charts that that that was the difference because uh it still grows to more than this game it gross 48 million during its first month during the launch and uh the end of the first month Revenue per download will actually again a little bit lower but this can be like statistical difference $87 on Android and only $17 on iOS how how can they

make so much money yeah yeah um currently just so you know currently if we recount like the thing how it's you know how the metric Revenue per download looks like and we always like to bring my favorite example of Dragon Quest walk which is like 250 Revenue per download these guys has literally a thousand so current Revenue per download of lineage M Eternal uh is lineage m is $974 on Android version but it's only like three people playing it no no no it means that there's like 1K downloads a day but it still makes a million a day that's why the metric is so skewed so overall lineage 2m already grows more than 1 billion on all mobile platforms combined only without the PC client yeah so mobile this is this is the old guard that that these guys are pretty much taking on so that's really important to say um why is it making so much money so there

are two things uh let's start with the let's say unique one or maybe both are uniques so there's uh lot of marketing around it I mean a lot of marketing and let's talk about this very very unique thing that they run it's called streamer supporting system so they have this own I don't think so I saw this kind of a play at any other company but yeah let's let's just talk about this really interesting so it's called 3le Le fund streamer support system uh and it's structured in two-way support structure so that supporters sponsor streamers so what it basically does that if you buy something in the game you then get this kind of support points whatever and you can give it to your favorite streamer and then the streamers can give it to the company and take Revenue out of it so it's basically a robu system uh it's it's actually is more close to something like picked it uh this GDC where they announced that

they're going to redistribute the revenue from fortnite into creators so this is kind of similar that clever so so you know you have your favorite streamer you bought something in the game you give him the support points and then by the end of the bth he can get the cash out and currently if I'm looking at the website it's all completely transparent they showing actually like the actual count what's in the current fund that will be then redistributed throughout all of the streamers which fank so how much how much is that how much this is this is 255k us do it's like 30 333 South Korean one but yeah but keep in mind that this is round two of period starting from June so if I understand this correctly this was accumulated in two days and it runs throughout the whole month I didn't get the number from the last month but they also had the number that's disappointing come on yob just take this seriously it's all in Korean

man there are limits to this how I can search for this nobody I pre-downloaded and recorded ads for this Remo and you can't get previous numbers come on yeah so so it's really good my guess is like these guys are like actually supporting the community very very properly and then if we continue what's the streamer rank so is this like if you are the best streamer there's the price pool that is divided into this like based on rank yeah based on some kind of a as you see like the share based on the like how much money actually gets into it and then it get redistri like it's like voting thing you know like election votes like how how much cool I mean it's Allan to me but yeah but but it's super fair and completely transparent that's the important you can really cheat it and actually it it is kind of a competition to be honest because everybody it updates by the hour so oh yeah wow that's really clever actually that's yeah yeah I see already like 2 million we were talking so Korean Won of course

uh the other thing is that the marketing for this game was completely massive just just few things that stand out to me actually you know like lately when Diablo is currently launching and it launched like today or yesterday they had this KFC promotion everybody was like oh I need to go to KFC and buy a KFC to get the skin and I'm missing out blah blah blah really [ __ ] I didn't know yeah these guys actually they had like a grocery store chain where you go into the stores the advertisements pretty much everywhere it's playing on like big screen TVs in the grocery store and the best thing is that you go into the grocery store and and you can literally buy all of the things and all of the things are branded all of them like I uh all of those things give you coupons for in-game items if you buy them like buag you booger burger Sushi whatever that is every every one of those things will

give you a different code and a different kind of coupon then you can get redeemed within the game and get the items from it so what another level of capitalism it's literally genius and and and to top it off to top it off they even have their own car wash so if you want to go wash your car you actually washed the car in a completely branded car wash and they they even have their own shampoo I love the video I love it I love it the marketing is so out the fridge like when I was looking into it like I I haven't seen this at all anywhere like I like yeah I don't know let me get the to the shampoo like actually like this is this is another level man get us to the shampo yeah see oh my God this is perfect yeah so they they of course they like spam all the big Billboards in South

Korea and everything everywhere like it's super super big different level things yeah in Asia offline marketing is like the way to go like that's that's one of the things as me saying is the second best UA person here marketing you're second best yes that yeah by by Far Man by far come on yeah so yeah the game's the G the game's like outstanding like you see it and don't want to talk about it that much um but let's get to the meat of the whole thing why is it making so much money with AME no no no no it's because this is beautiful South Korean mmpg games you know they love their mmpg games because it's like pretty much a grind Fest you grind your ass off in or to get anything in the game but the thing is that they have another level of random mechanics uh that is I would say even more sophisticated than gachas because in the

west we no GAA or no no no this istic G one level over gacha pman uh the thing is that we got somehow let's say used to gachas even though like there was a big push in the west against it and it still is but let's say okay in South Korea lineage you don't know if lineage started this mechanic but it lineage is pretty much a signature mechanic that they have there and these guys is their iterational lineage and they have also and they even oh yeah they even added a gacha one step behind because in lineage you farm for the items you craft them and then you enchant them in this game you actually get the items from gacha and then you enchant them so the important thing is that the enchanting system and this is pretty much the only way to get stronger weapons with consist like 80% of power of your character other things you level through or whatever like doesn't matter so you get the weapons here through the gacha you craft them and then you enchant them with Scrolls depending on your level you

get access to high grades yada yada yada in the end you arrive at the final grade and you enchant those and as you enchant those uh they get higher stats so plus one get more than plus zero plus two plus three so on so forth blah blah blah and at some point there's a chance that the weapon will break down if the enchantment fails breakdown means it's lost completely so it's not like in a gacha where you buy something and you didn't get nothing here if it fail Lo yeah you lose lose a lot of value o so last time when I was playing lineage Eternal back in the days like what what was it like four years ago back in the days four years ago back in the they sold insurances so actually you could buy insurances into enchanting process that would help Q so it doesn't break but it it um because

because before lineage did did that it wouldn't break it would just go one level downward actually so it's so why destroy the weapon if you can keep enchanting it up and down and keep spending because if you destroy it you know like you're pretty much quitting the game sometimes and rage quitting uh so they would sell insurances that would at least help you to retain the level if it fails uh I think these games sell some kind of like better like percentage consumables or whatever that help you somehow but in the end it's all random and the best items like it takes so much more time to to pretty much get those and you know you have those like one player being super lucky stories but in the end it's like Yeah from level 9 you need to get like plus 15 and there's like I don't know like 30% chance to to get from level 9 to level 10 or something it's so low so a lot of things breaks down and yeah and you lost a lot of value so usually how it works is that you have

your main weapon and then you have your crafting weapon that you're hopefully trying to get over your main weapon at some point and not destroying your main weapon but yeah that that's the thing how these things work so of course there's multitudes of different things to progress through level through blah blah blah like your typical mmpg thing and PVP and and stuff like that but this is this is really unique in a way that regarding progression this is I would say one uh step further than what got is in a way that just in the Paradigm that you can actually lose value by interacting with the mechanism so back yeah because we're getting back to the thing that we talk about a lot of times which why Forex games work so much because there's the struction of property and this is the same mechanic because this is destruction of property you have something in the in the game that you spend money on and you are it is possible for you to lose it permanently so this is that's why these game make so much money that it's pretty much a cutthoat monetization model at

some point and it's completely like 100% mobile like you it's cross cross yeah of course in these days like there's no way around it definitely no ad no ads yeah yeah of course no ads sorry Felix yeah but it looks gorgeous man like it looks pretty good honestly like andreal Engine 5 R Racing what else do you want to like I don't know back to back to monetization so so here uh avoiding the loss of your weapon you need to buy the insurance that's uh don't know if this game actually sells the insurance because maybe they they just don't want to like didn't really get into meat of it I just know like they have the same systems and same meta progression but you know they change throughout the years maybe they get more kind of forgiving or less forgiving depending if you want to sell it but in the end the insurance won't help you Insurance just kind of prolongs the thing like I I I went to a player forum and I heard this

very very nice analogy when one player was saying like like imagine that linage system it's like a system of you trying to get a yes from asking a girl on a date and there are three things we we she can say yes maybe and maybe later and the thing is that what these things do that always PR the way it's maybe because eventually you always destroy the weapon lit that's what I read on the player forums yeah so like in Europe you'd call this pretty predatory gameplay it's let's say very clever use of game mechanics ah it's you know I I have my own catchphrase you have my own yeah yeah it's not altered gameplay it's not enhanced interaction enhanced interaction you have your own Korean Buzz wordss okay that's perfect yeah but but the game the game looks gorgeous uh it should have um

release date in like Global release date for like the whole world but my guess is as usual it's it's not going to gross that much as yeah that's what I wanted to say like is it going to grow in us or any other like Western markets I don't think so it will be just you know like U less than 5% overall revenue of the game or something like that it's going to grow in Asia definitely and it still is making more than like one and a half million on mobile only uh per day so we'll see how how it leads but it seems that just by the looks of it uh maybe people will switch from lineage but I wouldn't underestimate lineage because that game was you know from 2019 so there's like five to four years pretty much lag behind which my guess is they already doing their own version of next upgrade of lineage which I guess they will take over this one because they have the brand Advantage yeah uh so right now like I see uh a world where HBY takes this

like tactic and mechanic and implements it into Archer or snaker Survivor IO and that's going to like apparently that could just explode don't know actually because if it would be so easy somebody would already done it man like it's it's just so entwined into the Korean style of grind that the people need to grind so much there that they're okay with it but in the West surviv I is is one big grind already come on come on come on you haven't played yet the Korean game man thank God yeah of course I grew up on lineage so yeah I I wanted to grow up in lineage but I couldn't play on my computer so thank God all right guys it's Friday night let's end here Friday night yeah it can take us home I guess uh so yeah yeah it's thanks for for listening and uh we have like few interesting episodes

uh coming up line up ahead y yeah so definitely um stay with us subscribe on your preferred platforms Spotify Apple Google or YouTube because we love you thank you very much for sending us all the feedback and also uh yeah see you next time thank you cheers bye byebye [Music] position is one thing but I uh they introdu and I was always introducing you guys as well yeah exactly you talking makes a difference I think yeah let's see let's do it let's try it I need to finish my uh full field bar what you talking all right I'll make this text a bit bigger how how long are we going M always he [ __ ] episodes when Remo says I need a long time is usually when I'm like ah [ __ ] yeah I know I don't

know like 15 minutes depends on I'll need 10 mate I'll need 10 okay if if you both can finish the 25 that would be outstanding what do you mean you're is it I will not be pushed I have a lot of stuff to talk about oh Jesus like vagu burgers with in game items promotions what what the [ __ ] Burgers what the [ __ ] are you talking about [ __ ] car wash what will okay we'll see [Music]