🔨​ Forge Master review: Forging $3mil/month Revenue. Legend of Mushroom, westernized!

I mean
forex it as I said
forex it there's no other way just forex it
just forex it you don't really need to do like a lot of sophisticated onboardings first I mean just find this like best performing creative
all all all roads leads to UA as usual
coins jack up designs world two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too feeling bring in the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix stacks like a wizard in disguise. Challenge cfters lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey sick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They light the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Hello everyone and welcome to part two of another special Two and a Half Gamers podcast. This week we are diving deep more with a new Lessmore game. As you may or may not know, we have covered two of Lesmore's latest hits. Last week we covered Arrows which is an admonetized hit that's earning estimated about 300 no 250k a day. Today we are looking at their new game which is Forgemaster which doesn't have any ads or at least I can't find them.
Thank you very much.
My name is Michael.
Yeah.
And we are your hosts.
And Felix, how do you know I'm not going to release this episode first and then the arrow? But I just pushed you into a corner. So you have no choice.
I know. It's fine. It's fair.
Or if you want to make me look stupid, you can do the other one.
Like what are you talking about? Like this part like oh I like

anyway.
Anyway, let's start with the game first.
No, no, no, no. Let's start with the PGC stuff because we are having a because you were already lost. So let me get this straight. So Monday we have a Google singular event which is starting at 6:30. So please join. Then we have
invite below.
Invite below. Exactly. Then we have uh one pregame event on Tuesday which is happy hour that we have with TV scientific and al media. It's going to be five or 4 to 89. And then right afterwards, we're going to join the game of tones, the karaoke night with everybody, Tab Nation, ZBD, Aro, whoever else until the very early morning. So come. All links are going to be in the show notes. Well, see you there. Let us know. Also, the unofficial birthday party on Sunday. That's only for the invites. Let me know if you want to go there.
And unofficially, how old are you turning?
37. old old already. It's fine. I

can manage. But anyway, enough of this I mean, we're absolutely thrilled to see you in the PGC, but we are here. We're here to actually talk games.
Forgemaster. So, yeah, let's go.
Forge Master. Yeah, let's go.
I agree, Yakob. We should start with a game this time and then we'll do numbers.
Yes.
Okay. So, we have Forge Master by Lesmore. Uh, you may find the graphics quite familiar. The last time we were talking about VR warriors because they are nearly identical artwork they borrowed.
I guess they're identical.
No, no. Like this is exactly the same. It's one to one. Even the rifle is is exactly the same.
Yeah. Yeah. Um Yeah. So what's happening here in
No, I'm just I'm just going to I'm just going to do the intro. So this is VR Warriors meet Legend of Mushroom. Thank you very much. This is the shortest episode ever. See you later.
That's it. That's pretty much
nothing. There's nothing of We are warriors actually. This is what we warriors.
It's the artwork, right? Like they use the same character.

Yeah. Just the art. Okay.
It's the artwork and the road is kind of the same because legend of mushroom. It fits
legend of mushroom. Yeah. It's legend of mushroom. I was like, "Oh my god."
Yeah. So, we have the Legend of Mushroom uh style inventory based gacha which in here is this kind of a forge thing instead of we touching uh the Aladdin's lamp. As usual, there's auto as usual because again you need auto play.
Where's auto? Where's auto?
Auto. Hello. Auto.
Auto. Where are you?
Jokes.
So you select the filters.
Is riding a wake up.
Give give control to auto and and and auto then selects your gear automatically from the gacha.
Auto the forge master. If you're lucky enough and you hit the small percentage of the actual upgrade that uh will actually help you and then it gets stuck and you need to actually click it and decide because then auto stops. So that's there. Uh as you progress through

the game, you get more and more features as as as always. So we start with some more progression layers with skills which again is the exact same thing as legend of mushrooms with clash royale star shard gacha which again you select one and I guess you'll be able to select more as you progress and these have various effects mostly they have also passive bonuses because again this is an idol RPG as it is uh upgrade or quick equip and like yeah you don't really need to think here uh use summon through the typical again gacha state setup, which means the more stuff you summon, the better rates you get. And as you see, you slowly kind of work your way into higher rarities, and it takes like a lot of time. Uh, then we have pets. This, I think, is like one of the small iterations that I saw there compared to legendary mushroom. Legend mushroom, the skills and pets works exactly the same. So, like you just equip more stuff. Here, you actually need to hatch them. So, you get the pets. Uh, and once you

have them, you just get the eggs. And you need to pet the eggs into these hatcheries and they go in 30 minute timer. I was like, "So, are we going to get ads for this?" Like to skip the timers. No, we won't. Even here, I'm currently upgrading my forge. No ads. No.
Like literally like the kingshot style of no ads. No.
Yeah. It's like day and night. All right. But the funny thing is they start when you open the app the first time they have you click on a ads accept note, right? So I think they must have ads somewhere. I just I'm further than you in the game and I haven't found them.
Yeah. Yeah. So I also haven't found them. So again, there will be another progression layer after uh 4.1 I guess.
Yeah. It's uh it's the tech tree uh where you build out uh the forge power or skills and pet and
passive upgrades basically.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's old currency and I'm guessing you will get the currency here.
It's the gems. It's the gems currency.

So yeah, exactly what you think. And then you have to upgrade into a skill tree like this and you have to upgrade each one on each level before you can actually go down and get the next one. It's
great. Thanks for showing it. It absolutely I can't see Seriously. Wait a second.
I can't wait to go to your birthday party, Grandpa.
He's a granny meme. Anyway, so how do you get all of these other currencies? You get them in exactly same fashion as Legend of Mushroom, they didn't even have the nerve to call it differently. So in Legend of Mushroom, there's lump teeth. Now they have hammer teeth because why not?
I mean,
so that's you get the hammers there.
Wait a second. Oh, app police is calling me.
Yeah, the up police. You're in trouble now.
Ring ring ring.
So, you have the hammer team which gives you hammers, ghost town, which gives you ghosts
tickets for the skills, and then you

have invasion, which gives you eggs. No context whatsoever. You just get the currencies. There's the PVP uh feature released quite soon which I was kind of surprised to be honest because this is not the usual rule book of Legend of Mushroom. You would put another layer here actually like an idol idol collection village or I don't know what they have a relics or I don't remember what's what's next in their stuff. But yeah, so they have this like typical asynchronous PVP feature which I guess again we can test here uh to ruin someone's day asynchronously which again it just shows you like this kind of a small battle and uh yeah that's it. It's really frustrating cuz sometimes people have way less like skill, they beat you because they have better like setup and then you realize how bad you actually are. But then you actually remember that it's not really you setting it up cuz it's all by

chance. So it's like
Yeah. And I'm guessing these are 90% bots anyway.
Yeah. So for sure
that's there. Uh so we defeated the poor soul and got two stars into ranking which move us to spot 64 and season ends in 5 days. And if we win something, we get again more hammers and more soft currency. So that's great. Um, yeah. And do you have this thing, Felix, on 415?
Yeah, it's a clan system, so you can join clans.
Oh, that's nice because I was
I can put it and show it again, but I think Mache would uh
Yeah, Mate would die from his
I'll show it later.
Thank you. Thanks. Thanks to your fake background, you were just doing this and the end disappeared basically. It's
magic. I've been practicing now for weeks.
Yeah, it's amazing.
I love it.
Yeah. So, there's uh let me just kind of supplement this.

There we go. So, there are clans and they are wars. And this is again coming from Legend of Mushroom because there are wars in Legend of Mushroom. So again, it's one of those really really nice features where if I understand uh you select the if we get here actually there was actually this kind of a Dota map that you would select and put your soldiers in this kind of a synchronous battle that would take few days on the world.
How funny would that be if it turns into a Forex?
Oh yeah,
if it turn into a Forex.
How funny if it turns into 4x.
Yeah, I guess it be hilarious.
Didn't turn into Forex. But there's no screen of that that here. Yeah. So that's there.
This is like a map and then you send your troops to march.
This is it, I guess. So Oh, so it seems it's also like points for Oh. Oh, okay. So it's PvE based, not PVP, which means you need to do stuff as you see. So you have a points point system there instead of the should

basically be active and like be more active than the other.
Yeah. If you play a game, you actually need to do stuff. Yes. Yeah, I mean that's that's the whole point of playing a game.
Yeah, but again
unless it's an idol game.
It doesn't.
Anyway,
nice try.
Yeah, I thought so.
Moving on. So, because I was I was looking into it because I saw the clan power rankings in the profile menu and also the like player power rankings. So, that's there. There's people doing like stuff in millions now in their power. So, that's there. And um yeah, they throw offers at you immediately where there's this like modern way that really
really I couldn't help myself.
Yeah,
it didn't solve much I got to say and I'm quite disappointed with that
because it's It's like fourth uh you know fourth u rarity like you know you have so much more and this is like 10x usually as for the difference of of scale like each of these is usually 10x stronger than the previous. So let's

see. But takes like a lot of time like again I I cannot even move it further as as I would. But again we have the mounts which would be again another layer again same currency of legend of mushroom uses exact same kind of
it takes forever to get to the mount.
Yeah. And again see how much like it would take even to get like to the mythic mount. So it's like it's infinite treadmill basically and giant excel sheet. Then there's also the progress pass, which is basically the battle pass that they have here. That's nice. Uh I think Legend of Mushroom has like five five of those. So that's there. Then we have the idle mechanic without any ads. This is extremely strange because even Legend of Mushrooms, even though it was making heavy IP revenue, had ads to some degree. So now I'm kind of puzzled. Or maybe they just like trying stuff up or I don't know. or we are in some kind of very heavy segmentation test or I don't know because lots of these mechanics actually scream like ads like for instance this upgrade stuff like if you put in giant timers in it like

why
also the forge you know like how long it takes you to upgrade the forge which is the most important upgrade you can do right
but you skip it with uh currency hard
currency so yeah yeah well that's why it makes makes so much money on
yeah but even in the store there's no rewarded out of replacement, right?
It's nothing. Nothing.
Yeah. Yeah. But that's why it makes so much money on IIP site. I mean, like what you put ads there like how much how much more you you could get like 10%.
Yeah. 105,
right? Exactly.
If if you're going for legend of mushroom traffic.
Exactly. Why bother? I mean
I mean there's a UA argument, right? But
what do you mean by campaign? What UA argument? Like if if there's 10% ads, like you can't do with that.
You can probably get 20 30% on this quite easily.
Ah, come on. on. All right, let's see the numbers and then we let's see the numbers. Let's see the numbers and let's see the DAU and then let's see
that's that's your W dream. This can get 20 30%. I mean, come on.
So, just think out loud less more with

heavy like ads experience and with games with ads some 5050. Yeah. 50/50. Why would you not put ads in it if it makes kind of sense? You have the experience
because it didn't make sense after you put it there and then you turn them off.
Exactly.
Yeah. This is like the only logical solution to this.
Yeah.
Because they are the masters of ads. So they
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. They they know what they're doing. So I mean
Yeah.
What's the ideological way? Like it does doesn't make any sense.
Yeah. Logically it means that they tried and it was e either worse or it's like you know it's
They definitely tried. They have the they have the oped screen right. So yeah
exactly because you know what would be what would be interesting after this episode timer goes to the camp like guys
we forget for Yeah. We forget to put ads in it. hell.
Sorry, mini clip.
Oh my god.
Yeah.
I hope this happens.
Yeah, guys.
The guys. Oh my god.
All right. I think we covered all the gameplay. Let's look at the numbers.

Yeah. I'm just
pushing like he's trying to make the he's trying to win the third 317 chapter. Whatever he's trying to do.
Trying to win for the whole day. No, I'm just like looking at it uh on like a old video. like this is from August if if like if I see any ads.
Yes. Okay.
But I don't think so because like see there's no like let's keep plugging to 15 minutes.
It's just another like proof that ads as a monetization mechanism is just getting
a come stop with that Come on man.
What feeling defeatism?
Yeah. Oh it's good moving away. Yeah. You are saying this after we re reviewed Arrow Escape making 250k per day. Like you're making this point after reviewing that game. Okay, fine. Makes sense.
It's just that stuff stuff shifted. It's just like, you know,
no, it means you don't really need to slap ads in every placement,
which Legend of Mushroom did.
Yeah, but they have no idea what they're doing.
But Legend of Mushroom was like 3 years

ago, four years ago.
Yeah,
can double check. I don't see anything else here. It's like, yeah, if they were not four months ago, I guess they tested.
They probably tested already one of the chunky chopsticks whatever accounts there. So anyway,
so uh so this started
go and try to find the Legend of Civilization.
Well, it's right here.
But
no, on YouTube.
On YouTube.
YouTube.
Mhm.
That's old build, right? So I mean that might get
might be a little bit better in terms of
Legend of Civilization. Is it actually it if there's like these things? It seems like a different game.
I don't know. Maybe.
I mean, it must be the precursor. Surely.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
I don't know. Problem is that Legend of Civilization was probably specifically chosen to, you know, flood me with civilization.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. Yeah. It's okay.
It's unfindable basically.
Yeah. Okay. It's okay. I mean, it's legend of mushroom but with civilization. So, it's fine.
Yeah. No way.
It's okay. Okay. This will take me like

like a year.
It's okay.
Anyway,
preview this next year.
Yeah, but this seems like more we are warrior style or whatever. I don't know.
Okay, let's see here.
So, the starter scaling in October and currently hit something like 70k a day. Uh active
size multiplier. Let's call it even 100.
100. Yeah. Yeah.
100. Yeah. Downloads are very small and even going down. So, something like 5K a day. If we do the filter, we see that it's very high traffic of course. Same user base for revenue. What do you mean user base? Uh the active users
active users is not seen.
Oh, so small. It's uh all right. Yeah,
because this is the thing, you know, with this these many downloads, what do you expect?
Yeah. What do you expect? Exactly.
It's like one of those. Let me put in the not this thing. Let's kill this one. And let's do the revenue. What is it? Revenue per

download. It's like $5. $5. It's It's a lot.
It's like ARB is not seen, but I'm guessing like it's very high. It's like
Yeah, it's like very low traffic on very high LTV. Yeah, it's basically Legend of Mend.
I can I can I can shoot here. Legend of Mushroom, right?
Shoot auto.
Shoot auto. So see this is forge master. So legend of mushroom is now
do us please only
yours only.
Yeah point.
Okay at the top you can take out.
Yeah just go all even like
take out everything.
Yes. And then in each country all countries on the top you just select US there. Yeah.
Mhm. So $16 for legend of mushrooms. Uh forge master is still growing to something like eight.
Let's call it seven.
Half of it.
That's pretty good. I'm absolutely sure like the CPI is way higher than the than this
giant screen.
It's like Yeah, like 30ish.

It's basically mushroom.
Yeah. So, it's like heavy heavy. How they how they doing by the way?
This is spike.
What?
I don't know what happening here. It's like joined games or 20 different.
Yes. So it makes three and a half million a month still from its height of 60 million in March 2024.
Yeah. And download wise. Yeah, I guess it's
this is really expensive genre.
What's Spark game? This new thing by the Legend of Elements is still kicking. We talk about that game.
Let's get back to Forge Masters.
No, no. I was just I was just Yeah, I was just about to say like thank you very much for
Yeah. adding additional games into the review.
Go back to Forge. Come on.
No, no, no. Let's do Legend of Elements again. We didn't talk about it enough in the in the episodes where we review it. Oh, it's good. Now you're showing Forge Master and Legend of Elements numbers. That makes all the sense in the world.

That's great. Yeah, thank you very much. Anyway, uh yeah, there there it's legend of mushroom basically on legend of mushroom westernized I would say because the inventory is also much more easier for now or at least does seems to be there much UIX to scale it. So I guess two more icons or three more icons.
I don't see making the same amount of money as legend of mushroom. The problem is that also the users are different, you know, like in west we don't have really these like super high LTV clusters of like hardcore RPG players because again the last thing that I wanted to show was the
development. Oh, that's a great game. I know
this one. This one. So if you go to Idol RPG, which this is from so downloads wise, there's still the new Maple Story game which is killing everything. Oh, we should definitely talk about it on the podcast, which I cannot play, but I'll get to it. Revenue wise is the same. Is doing 50 million a month, and I'll definitely talk about it once I get my

hands on it. Finally, Legend of Mushrooms is on the fifth spot, and Forge Master is actually on 17 spot over Idol Heroes, over AFK Arena, and
over High Seas Heroes. No. Oh, no. Below below Heroes, I think below below below. Yeah, but how hero is still in like iteration state?
Yeah, because there's stuff like happy bargo. Hero clash is here and this
hero. my life. Like how he's the divid RPG. That's fine.
This this is an enemy IP. Anyway, so yeah, I RPG is basically stuck and Maple Story is killing it. So that's there. We'll get to this game because it's like the this is like a mother of freeto play. As for the IP itself, let's see some creatives.
No, no. I want to hear more about like these other games. It's all so interesting. It's It's adds up into the history lesson now. Wait a second. I need to go there. So, already talking about their testing, but

GD GDPR pop up. That's the interesting thing.
You mean like you left there only for Felix to kind of look for the ads?
Yeah, exactly. I'd
be pissed that he didn't find them.
I played more than you did. I
mean, uh, fair. Do you have two kids less?
Yeah, we have two kids less than we talk.
Anyway, I think you can clearly see the focus of less more. It's 570 creatives, which is not bad for 2 million a month almost, right? Which is decent. 300 new creatives. I mean, I don't know. I don't I didn't really I didn't really know what to what to think about this. It's basically all the concepts that are kind of was were working for
We are warriors.
Yeah, we we Yeah, exactly. We are warriors.
Mouse battles.
Yeah. Which is I mean logical, but don't you think this needs a little bit more? I mean it's like it's very niche audience. It's very hardcore

kind of. Do you if you want to grow definitely need to broaden.
Can you forex it?
Uh kind of. I mean, in terms of the creatives, that would be great, right?
Do I say gates or no?
No.
No, I mean, I'm just I'm just think No, I'm just think No, I'm just thinking out loud, right? So, that's the thing because
because we're in this traffic category of like very high LTV, so let's do everything to take it down through whatever shenanigans on CPI.
Yeah.
Yes. Exactly. That was my whole way of thinking how to approach this because I mean this is nice. I mean, you have, you know, she sitting with was it a dragon or what the I mean, I don't know. Nice. But who cares? Who cares?
You need that hook. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. But that's why this whole category basically failed. Honestly, I mean, idol RPG as it is. Like the only big game is the Nexon one and Nexon one is because of the IP because it's Maple Story.
That's it. And see, I mean, this is exactly the same creative, which I'm not saying it's not working. I mean, they

are growing 70 100k per day now. So, it's more even more than than 2 million a month, which is nice. But again, like it's not going to be anywhere near the the legend of mushroom. And this makes solid money. I'm pretty sure this can grow even more. And again, like broadening up the the whole target audience, like that's that's how you do it, right? And you have like you have the Forex playbook in front of you. I mean, you don't need anything else. Even even if you look at even if you look at the the carnival tycoon even they using like how many gates and you can use gates in like whatever kind of angle you want.
No one cares. No one cares.
No one cares. Exactly. No one cares. That's the thing cuz here let's let's just do this. I still think they're just on the like the beginning of the journey. I'm like my opinion because if we do days it's start started to grow quite heavily on Instagram and I started getting Instagram ads almost on a daily basis like million times but I would absolutely

expect like Tik Tok as well. I mean let's just do it. I mean this impressions by network might be a little bit misleading. So let's go and see if they have the Tik Tok site. Where is it? Yeah.
No, they don't. And if you remember the we are warriors global launch strategy was basically huge on Tik Tok.
Yep.
There's nothing
because it was very hard. It's basically Flappy Bird style.
Yeah. I mean this this is quadish. So I mean I can I can understand but still right. I mean it's kind of nice.
Basically your big tip here would be just go and see what Century Games is doing for its Forex games and just steal all the creative uh concepts.
Pretty much.
All right. And yeah, I mean it's is awesome, but you know like what everybody also is doing the in this not in this category but still can do like survivor IO type of ads like here for this it could just fit so well and it's I mean it's kind of misleading but who

cares? Who gives a
Yeah, I'm just looking at the whole whole category and basically from the peak of the category which was in Legend of Mushroom in March 2024
it's just dying. Yeah, it just like went to half for last October. 100 mil a month to 50 mil a month. So, rough times at idle RPG.
Yeah, kind of. I mean, there are creative ways how to how to go about it. Okay, let's see.
You mean like put idol before Forex? Yeah, but but also this could be this could be one of those things that is like sucking up the players there, you know, like the forex games are pretty much taking all the idle players from the idol RPG itself because they give them the idol RPG to begin with, which is basically frozen city mutation and then they
idol RPG.
What do you mean frozen idol RPG? Frozen City is idol RPG.
Oh yeah, it's idle RPG. Okay, fair.
And they put it in front of every Forex.
Yeah, I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. But I don't like I wouldn't compare Frozen City to exactly this kind of slice.

Yeah. Yeah. This is this is like super heavy Asian style RPG.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I'm
But they also did this that didn't work out, you know. It's called High's Hero.
Yeah. I know. Yeah. I know. I know. So, yeah. I mean, fair point. They're stealing their players, but I mean someone's stealing from you, you can always steal from them back. No. I mean, just use the same tactic. You mean go against the Forex guys with the much uh worse LTV engine because they have your LTV engine plus their Forex engine.
Yeah. Yeah, I know. I know it.
To suck out all the money. So, no.
All he's saying is you can still take their creative concepts. They work.
No, you can take their creative concept, but you don't have the on boarding to uh to, you know, execute it.
Only if you could do it on the web. Only if you could do it on the web and then go there. I mean that's a possibility.
Yeah, that's a possibility. I'm guessing also ID RPG is making money on web.
Did anyone say web revenue? Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Fastpring, the no drama D2C partner that's been

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We just because again, running in your browser or whatever somewhere on PC client like that's what it was made for. Of course, you know these things.
Exactly. Yep. I know. Yeah. I think that's that's pretty much it. Plus more. Again, kudos to you guys. Well done.
Yeah. We'll definitely keep this on the radar screen to see where where this goes. I
mean, that's that's your job, man. You have to.
I guess like the whole category needs to evolve somewhere else. Like after this

bigger planters by Lilith, we're throwing like super high budget whatever graphics things didn't didn't work at all. Is is just the problem that CPIs get so high that only specific types of metagame engines can pull up the LTVs to kind of be sustainable?
Let me tell you one story before you go to the like the metag game on boardings whatever stuff. Legend of Slime best creative I made for them was survivor I type which was absolutely nowhere near the actual gameplay.
So I told my boss I made a playable app with Playable Maker and he said to me what language did you code it in? And I said, "I don't know. With Playable Maker, all you do is drag, drop, click, and it does it all for you." So again, he said, "What language did you make it in?" And I went, "I don't know. English." At the end of the day, as long as a playable maker does it all for you, why do you care? It's just like magic.
Nobody cared. Nobody. There you go. I mean,
forex it. As I said,
forex it. There's no other way. Just forex it.

If just forexing it, you don't really need to do like a lot of the sophisticated onboardings first. I mean just find this like best performing creative and don't really need to do it.
All all all roads leads to UA as usual.
Yes.
There we go. And on that note, it's time to end.
Exactly. Thank you for listening. See you next time. Oh, we'll see you at PGC. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Byebye.