From hypercasual to hybridcasual - The Homa Games story (#76)

guys like where's the scale like where's like other channels so I was like is the UA team writing case studies instead of running the UA for most for your most promising hybrid casual game I could I couldn't just believe this so I looked into a different view of of our favorite data tool and voila we have mintegral apply in Facebook digital turbine T jooy and inmo um alongside the the unity this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast to 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 welcome welcome uh okay ni welcome everybody the session

number 76 I actually didn't uh say anything wrong this time because I was listening to the last last podcast and I said 72 instead of 75 nobody noticed which is fine or well you don't pay attention which is not fine anyway my name is mat lerich I'm Felix Robert and I'm Y and we are your hosts nice that was pretty good love it so today we talk about another from hyper casual to hybrid casual story and today is all about Homa games so um we kind of you know kind of approach it from a slightly different perspect perspective again but we are talking about two games which is attack Hall and fight for America uh fight for America there's a case study uh from Homa games thank you very much guys for making our lives a little bit easier uh but we like to do our homework too so don't get too excited and then here's at Hall where is

a video about the huge success of the game so I will link this in the show notes but let's start uh with something else hyper casual isn't the dead well surprise surprise thank you Neil uh again from mobile gamer. B for covering this he was talking with uh hom games co-founder Olivier that LE I'm gonna tell you few things what they discussed so Oliver mentioned that the hypercasual death have been greatly ex exaggerated it in fact exaggerated in fact H never been in a better shape so om says that their results in in the first six months of this year uh you know they while the so the the results were great while some players have completely dropped the hyper casual space it has brought some

amazing opportunities for a player like them so they saw even bigger opportunities and the results were great they have never had so many games in the top 100 in US interesting uh they also uh he also says that hatak whole Revenue split between ads and iips is around 70 to 30 not bad and he also mentioned that the fight for America is showing very strong long metrics which we will cover and it's not [ __ ] strong at all but okay uh but you know different perspectives so he also says first of all M rude I know sorry but yeah but second of all true so no [ __ ] all the way no [ __ ] yeah that's you know you heard Samuel L AI Json we' we've got we got t-shirts printed up maybe we'll see but okay never mind um anyway hom games also re released um the games they

uh they released they with the expectation they would get under 10% day seven retention preat and they were not looking at day 30 retention at all interesting approach and uh they're trying to reach day 75% now and make sure that they are building experiences for for players that remain in the game after day 30 so let's see how the fight for America and attak Hall compare against each other on the retention in us so fight for America 47% day one retention not bad day seven 10% day 30 1% so then we have aall which is Day Day 1 35% day seven 7% and day 31% again both uh games day 61% and then day 90 was around like

0.5% so well well well you're not quite there yet right so but this is not only game thank God thanks God this is not the only game from the hybrid casual um space that we've discussed so how is dream Dale or mob control looking against fight for America so again fight for America 48% day one day 10 uh day seven 10% dream Dale 52% day 1 16% day seven and day 30 is 3% then mob control 43% day 1 15% day s and 4% day 30 well not bad uh I mean I would say way better than fight for America but the game is launching a new hybrid casual game merch Army next month so let's see we might cover that game at some point in the

future and just just something yeah yeah I of course I look into the game before yeah this looks better it's pretty much something in in a question in similar to like Art of War Legions or this is like a state iio kind of thing um yeah it's it's pretty much like Auto battler where you have those skills that you can throw up from time to time and then you merch your Army in before and set up the positioning of those and then pretty much core gam playay happens like the AL battle so looks looks kind of promising to be honest like definitely the most hybrid stuff I seen froma yet we'll get to that uh but yeah I guess we'll definitely follow that regarding the launch numbers or whatever pretty much whenever this kind of launches from because it's still in soft launch there's not really that big of a scale yeah I think they they also they're going to launch it very soon because this is uh I think an article for from

last month already let's see uh it's already from yeah I think yeah August 8th so not last mon this month so I guess like in in like mid September they're going to launch this game they looking forward to to see it so yeah no nice gotas gotas gotcha pool gotcha yeah so okay so that's that that's an intro so the hyper casual is not dead for them they there is there is no plan to abandon hyper casual so they're still launching some games so fight for America this concept uh can be tracked back to homap uh where a developer called hitia tested more than 50 games and they found this concept in one of the brainstorming sessions so apparently this was inspired by the Market's demand for engagement engaging masculine oriented games it's very interesting uh how they came up with this but okay with long-term player

value and the title A is aimed to deliver an immersive Tower Defense battle set in the United States heart aking to the Triumph of state iio so before we move forward with this interesting story let's take a quick look at State iio and this is the game um that was developed by a games and soft lunch in November 2020 in Android and then in March 2021 on iOS so late March was also Global launch for both platforms um on both PL platforms having the peak of downloads in May 2021 to this day the game has an impressive 70 million downloads that's pretty that's pretty interesting uh they also launched this game on in October 2022 HTML 5 thank you Mr a almost looks like an election map huh yeah he

maybe maybe and you you said this is a this is kind this is pretty much mushroom mushrooms look it up it's a really really old game launch in like 2009 where there you have this mechanic of bases generating units that you send to other bases and you pretty much try to capture notes and like the units nullify each other if they meet I mean enemy and and yours W that's it so not really anything new here yeah was pretty pretty interesting I found this game on gajillion websites where you can actually play it as well well and the game is like still makes around 2 million downloads a month and after February update this year the revenue is actually going up so we might you know maybe we should look into this game and other games in in one of our next sessions too so plenty of things to to cover in the in the upcoming weeks and months anyway going back to fight for America today the game is labeled as a hybrid tower defense game that blends the elements of shoot them up and Tower Defense runn so it looks like um again

the success lies in the in the concepts and the visuals uh making it accessible to players of all backgrounds it's just hyper casual as as [ __ ] as you can imagine if you play the game it's all about this uh red and then other color characters it's very simple its core the game revolves around defending the US from Invaders and providing players with a clear object objective and purpose as they progress through different states obviously to achieve uh the victory so honestly while watching a lot of intitial ads in the mean yeah a lot of ads but we will you know uh they say uh it's the split between the iips and ads it's 40% iip 60% ads so yeah we can we can talk about that but at the Su to succeed in the game you know you must strategically F off the enemies and the

title offers many choices upgrading characters placing Towers blah blah blah not really many choices yeah yeah yeah that's you know that's what they say uh you know as as you say I mean technically you have a choice but like yeah yeah doesn't anything also according according to the case study H implemented timers and rewards to enhance session length and engagement well very good job I guess so initially the game retention rate day one yeah the day one was 28% which looks like very low honestly isn't that when Remo you say that you should just abandon the game if it's that low um well that does the you know depends like how much how much how much time you invested in it already like if this is something you get after six months yeah then yeah that's a different story if you get it after two weeks but this is the thing so uh this is the thing everybody uh before from the hyper casual I was like yeah you need to make

the game in three days maybe even less and then if you can't make uh the numbers better in one week then just [ __ ] off and then go to to a different game uh but you know like this this version had only like two or three states the play time on day Zero was 1500 seconds so you could basically complete the game in half an hour and never return back but you know my friends over here can could talk about the game design and monetization improvements later on but I will continue with some facts uh about hom games and what they did to make this game better and they actually prolonged the the process so instead of a week or whatever was the very short period of time to actually make the the game better they uh dedicated six weeks uh for new builds and uh and completely reworked the game boosted the day one ration from 28 to 40%

okay not bad and then increase the play time from uh 1.5k seconds to 4,000 seconds so it was like one hour gaml but yeah no chock if you have more time to work on the game you make it better Jesus [ __ ] Christ that's that's uh that's you know that's how how it works then uh what also what they also did was restructured monetization by the way I I was talking about this this game in the previous episode this game this ad this was the ad like you're firing the gun to get better guns this is great okay uh anyway so they restructured monetization in iips so the monetization approach under a huge revamp so rewarded videos were replaced with iips and they were focusing on weapons and character upgrades they applied some Dynamic rules for rewarded videos um so varying amounts were introd um amounts of coins were introduced and uh there there was a

cool down mechanism to improve the ad LT by 20% okay not bad and then uh they extensively test AB tested um economy I guess to find in the in game uh stuff and then that was related to coins inflation upgrade prices and stuff like that but then another improvements they opened up networks yay wow okay that's it's ground Prett basic yeah groundbreaking scaling the game outside of Facebook great so that's how you do things uh in the in the UA thank you very much but they also what they did was they proposed fewer rewarded videos and optimized monetization in economy the value of rewarded videos to advertisers increased resulting in significant rise in ecpm okay so so let's let's stop here and discuss a little bit so

what so my guess is that there was no cool down rewarded ads and because gold is so scarce in like or was or whatever was the build they had before people just watch the rewarded video non-stop because okay you can why not and if that was the best way to get gold then probably they kind of watched it too much and ecpm tanked okay so your theory is basically they're watching like 1920 rewarded ads per session and then yeah cuz it's the same user watching their ad over and over again uh they ecpm tanked essentially because it's the same person watching that many ads in a row yeah which you don't want yeah okay okay then uh I think uh you're getting at the the end of the like their hacks on like how to make hybrid casual out of hyper casual game uh and they say it's content enhancement so homas creative devoted some considerable

effort to enhance the the game so they completed the US map different abilities to current states optimized performance Chinese vet ballons genius genius I'm talking about that on my part I think it's amazing that's perfect like I saw it I'm like I'm going to play this game a bit longer so funny it looked exactly like it as well that's great this this is what this is what you do I they imp like few uh a few different things the integrated mon new monetization features and expanded the game's content Beyond just a few initial States including Europe and whatever else okay now she Sherlock like more content better keep kpis thank you very much for listening we we can end here okay there was an interesting tidb for this um fight for America case study which was like that what I mentioned 40% of L TV on iOS is I generated when they

looked at um the whole iOS Plus Google play it was only 28% on the iip side and there was 3 to 5% conversion to to purchase which is not bad actually uh but you know you can play around with this to to get better better conversion with different price points but okay so revenues and downloads how does the this game look like in terms of revenues downloads so the downloads are 10 million so far okay depending on the tool you yeah again depend the tool you look at and then they say it's like 1.6 million um Revenue again depend on depends on the tool you are looking at most probably this is like two or three times more uh and honestly they make 200k per month uh on iip so even though uh uh it's most probably

underestimated when when we were looking at the previous games what it was it could be just 400k per let's say it's twice as much so it's it can be 400k per per month on the iip side so then you have uh either 600 or 700k on top of it depends on what you are looking at so what they are earning 1 million per month okay so um you might also ask how is this game doing compared to the previous games we discussed and what we mentioned so again dream Dale and MOB control so if you look at these two games again and comp you the graph actually I will show it in the uh in the post production of course this makes definitely yes so if we look at this uh July for example fight for America 200k give or take uh um then dream Dale 1.3 million this is only IP and then mob control 1.6

million and uh like these two games uh which is Mob control and dream they all started scaling quite heavily in the last two months or not started but definitely is they're growing like hell so when you're looking at the whole like overall picture uh Mob control 90 million downloads hly 90 million downloads 13 million revenues which is most probably at least double or triple from what we discussed dream Dale 18 million downloads and 8 million Revenue again maybe 14 or 20 and then we have fight for America 10 million 10 million downloads and 1.6 million which might be like three or four so it looks like that like the both mob control and dream G started doing quite well after our hybrid casual stories so you're you're welcome guys uh maybe uh fight for America will start scaling

now as well uh we can uh we can check that out later during the year so anyway let's start with the actual review Felix go you're before before I do my Adon prize I wanted to read this exert from an article from Tech crunch that I found on hom games from October 2022 uh this is right after they raised their 100 million monster Round And basically says like H's software development kit SDK helps you track various metrics thanks to built-in analytic features it can be important if you want to improve session times and retention after 1 day 7 days or 28 days H also Fosters AB testing at scale to optimize user engagement uh so that's just like they have their SDK they're selling themselves as a platform not kind of a game Studio I guess I'm just a bit curious like that sounds a bit like an MMP SDK and I also saw in my due deal that Singler was an investor in their series B so I'm just curious like have

they rebuilt like an MMP SDK here like just a bit what's what's going on well uh you have analytic features uh and then what AB testing but you can ab test I mean you can ab test with the with Firebase basically I guess this is what they use to to drive uh scale or growth for all of their games I would I would assume actually what like voodo has the same thing well they have a platform yeah honestly they have like a testing platform where you can upload your videos and then you will actually get results so I guess this is very similar but yeah it sounds like a I'd really love to see it what it actually is like right because Tech crunch is so like surface right so you never actually get in the depth or anything but I'd love to see it anyway let's start with fight for America so fun interesting to defense game with a Twist that you move around your character what Remo is doing right now to attack your enemies essentially you're taking back to United States state by state by state by state by invading it with your

character and then building Towers to attack your enemy while they charge you it's a new tower defense game uh and I guess the twist Remo is that you can move the character that's the new kind of mechanic that's an adventure right okay well okay by Felix standard Yeah by all right all right my personal like favorite point is when you shoot down spy satellites that look exactly like the Spy like balloons that like was caught Over America just hilarious I'm sure Ma you have some creatives where they have the Spy satellites like there must yeah we'll see we'll see about that so ad placements in Fight For America are plenty and bountiful uh intials uh after completing a sucess successful States Invasion and also on day two of having the game when you start an invasion I would say that probably impressions for da on interstitials is anywhere between

four and five processions I got to say here as well uh unity interstitials in particular on Fight For America are atrocious they're unskippable and they also have a 5C cooldown which is frustrating but I'm sure the ecpm as a result are nice and juicy uh yeah uh Banners are on a 10-second timer so I'm saying that Impressions here are 85 to 90 impressions for Dau rewarded place Ms I stopped counting at 12 there's just so many placements but I got to give like a really good hand to their Dynamic gold coin uh like ad placement that you can see right there on Remo screen that just went away for 150 gold coins whenever you're in a moment of pain or needing of gold that Dynamic placement shows up with the exact right amount of number of gold coins um so really good one and it's perfectly implemented I'd say that rewarded video here per session is anywhere between three and a half and four and a half uh so in the last 30 days based off a DA

of 420,000 users I think this title made around $33,000 a day from ads so on the Homa website like you said uh they have a case study that touts the hybrid casual success and that the title reach 40% in I AP Revenue uh looking at our second favorite data tool I just don't see it uh I AP Revenue since launch was 1.7 Mill milon in the last 30 days it made 170k in iips and I reckon about a million in ad Revenue meaning that 87% of Revenue is from ads in the last month so that's not hybrid casual numbers that's hyper casual at least in my book uh maybe the 40% of Ip was true like during the period of launch like we all know how important it is it was a little bit higher than that but it wasn't like uh like I see I see 200 230 K per uh per

month on I different different tool but again it's uh it's not yeah so like it's either of two things right so it's either hom games playing fast and loose with our marketing or it's our data tools that are [ __ ] so yeah I think something in between yeah something in between but I remember like yeah sorry go ahead it's definitely like more close to the hyper casual side like like said with merch Army merch Army is like a completely different be and it just by the number of vectors that are in both games there not many of them really and just count the number of currencies you see in each game how many there are yeah usually they're just Gold and Gems or like that's it yeah but I also remember like when people have reached out to us after we do these uh reviews We're Never Off by more than 50% like from the numbers right so that's terrible 40% IP so I would have to like IP numbers would have increase by two and a half X which

to me seems a bit like too much guess honestly no no no honestly when uh when you look at the the the case study they say 28% combine uh Android and and and iOS it's on iOS is only 40% so I think like here if we take into consideration that the the the tools we use are wrong and even if we double the revenue we see it's it can be very close to those 40 40% yeah anything between 30 to 40% so we need to count with the you know the the fact that these tools are underestimating yeah I mean I think it's a fun title and a clever design but I just think it's hyper casual and there's nothing wrong with that but I doesn't think that hyper casual with a little bit more IPS than the hyper casual yeah anyway that's that's my what I have to say on Fight For America uh should we cover ATT tackle later on or did you want to talk about tackle as well I can finish the game game design p

on fight okay yeah um so first things first uh remember where do we see this mechanic of walk to something and building gets built well uh um the game we covered golden goblins uh dream oh but where it came from honestly you think they took it from dream though no no what I what I meant is that I know the pumpkin you just took pumpkins and just move it to to somewhere else or what was that uh it's like a uxui design here which preserves one button control which I see a lot of hyper casual or hybrid casual games doing which is great because no clicking of like selecting a tower placement whatever nothing nothing you just walk to a you know spot on the map and then stuff happens automatically and there's no new buttons introdu for the player and this works great in dream Dale this works great here and I think I saw some some other games which I think is like a good Trend here which that

that's great like like hands up to them the design and like this whole kind of core gameplay it's pretty good I don't I don't see any problem with it it's a nice little let's say twist as Felix said that you can control a character not just Towers to be honest like the character is pretty shitty and in the end it's like all depending on the towers anyway um the other thing that the game has is that it doesn't really have that much vectors and that's like to be honest the main problem like we can talk as much as we want around the split of I and add Revenue but I don't really need to see any data to be honest to see that there's not much to it because I just cannot spend even the soft currency or hard currency I have yeah because the only thing that I saw and correct me or what whoever is watching this write Us in the comments for hard currency I can just kind of skip the weapon tiers that I have there which is again completely

linear which means that the thing I was upgrading before gets completely thrown out and I'm just going to the next thing which is just the soft currency sync therefore it doesn't really make sense for me to kind of switch weapons or like you know do stuff for different situations like maybe I can switch to shotgun because it has spread but honestly like usually the next best thing is like the thing that's in line later um the other thing is that you don't have any other like vectors of progression like just just let's imagine when we were covering mob control mob control also started kind of quite similarly and what they added was the usual gacha power layer so you have you pick different attributes out of the game and you put them behind gacha progression so here what could happen would be just imagine I would not be having my guy's weapons and of course he has also Health speed and Recovery under like one button that that's it but I could be also let's

say upgrading the weapon the the turrets from time to time I could be upgrading whatever some kind of different attributes that these things have I could be upgrading my main HQ more like I can still kind of upgraded but I think there just kind of like healing and H of it or something but it seems still pretty basic like there's much more stuff that you could be throwing at this thing to create some kind of a upgrade Vector therefore a new currency sync and therefore like a new thing to spend money on so yeah I don't I don't see a problem why shouldn't I have like let's say what even even maybe a pet or whatever some kind of a different different source of damage that that can be like introduced here an aura for instance that could like affect your your States could generate some some idle idle course there could be an idle Loop very easy to implement an idle Loop so there's a lot of I would say these missed opportunities especially if we talking hybrid casual that they could have implement it really fast the

question is again what do they like how do they look at the whole iteration development cycle because all of the dates that were even in the article and then we see that are kind of super small so could be just kind of a production pipeline Mantra where we don't really want to invest that much time because it's not worth it let's just rather you know do 10 games instead of one yeah I mean uh that's what I think that's what they they said that they uh took the the learning from on the Z defense and they implement it here so I guess they took the lessons from uh this game and then move it to merge Army maybe that's that's the different yeah the the thing is that I don't see that big of a template overlap if we like to talk about it here Frameworks yeah Frameworks like let's say hobby head or like other of these studios are pretty much I recommend them to create it they will say so much development time uh like I just see the show button

and the like character button in the same space so I guess they have some kind of T template but it's still it's like yeah like if you if you're if you're um developing like multiple hundreds of uh hyper casual games and you have a hyper casual template yeah like you should definitely have something something there in like on hybrid site so that's there uh yeah the map originally ended with us only later down the line they added America because the game would pretty much end if you like liberated all the US states I just checked it out on YouTube yeah you also said that they added Europe as well so I at all yeah yeah so uh yeah as I said for my sakes the game play is very simplistic if we talking a hybrid casual game if it's a hyper casual game it's completely great like pretty much goes over the top or let's say more than enough regarding I hyper casual but if you look at the

downloads this is the thing so if you have the hyper casual game you are aiming for [ __ ] 70 million like the sto these type of these types of numbers here it's 10 million so if if you know if you're looking at it from the stand standards of hyper casual it's it's it's a fail title are you think so no it's like I don't think so it's a fail it's just not if you're looking at the hyperal standards of like millions of downloads I mean like standards of Voodoo or yeah exactly because you're like like oh well this is a h like better hyper casual game yeah maybe from the game design but from UA perspective no I mean if this is a hyper casual game then you you want to see [ __ ] like five 50 million downloads yeah yeah not 10 Millions state. is making two million a month and it's like way far from the the global download download download download yeah yeah yeah uh yeah like as I said like a lot can be done here in order to like broaden up the the thing or even like the game play this best like you know at

like I can just imagine because we're still on the spectrum of like the revenue share of AD revenue and IP Revenue usually tell us how big the game even is because if we come to something to surviv iio which doesn't have any intertial at all just few rewarded ads but probably made [ __ ] ton of I and both ad revenue and it's complet talked about yeah it's 50/50 and the closer we get to that the the higher the iteration time the production time and everything gets that's that's that's like a yeah main thing there but yeah overall uh like as I said this is not really a hybrid casual game it's pretty good hyper casual game uh but yeah if I would need to rate it in hybrid stuff like five out of 10 oo okay let's uh let's start with UA finally then we can we can continue back to to attack Hall uh so I would say the most interesting part now part now it's it's coming but well after looking at fight for America

or atol I'm not so sure anymore but let's divide things into IOS and Android activities so on iOS uh they have four channels which is appla Unity Google and iron source and app being the far biggest Channel but I'm very surprised because I don't see it on the downloads or revenues so do REM you remember that what we discussed with dream Dale and their exponential growth so we like where they started appline just [ __ ] exploded here it looks like we here it looks like they're spending like5 per day honestly do you think they're mediating with iron Source then oh I don't know could because I saw a lot more Unity ads than I did ads but that could just be a fluke yeah I check the the SDK uh sdks from the from it doesn't matter it's the most unreliable part of dat tool anyway so I know I know but okay anyway on on uh on Android they have free channels Unity Apple and Google so I was thinking

like what the [ __ ] is happening here like guys like where's the scale like where's like other channels so I was like is the UA team writing case studies instead of running the UA for most for your most promising hybrid casual game I could I couldn't just believe this so I looked into a different view of of our favorite data tool and voila we have MGR app in Facebook digital turbine T joy and inmobi um along side the the unity and and Google as well so thank you data tools you failed as again very really appreciate it uh so yeah when uh when looking at the whole picture the integral is the top spender here which is impressive uh so mgal is starting to pop up in our discussions U and then then it's up super strong and Hyper casual they always were yeah but not like Monopoly go top two channel come on uh but no Tik Tok well what can I say you're missing out so much guys I mean

especially for this type of game and audience and you know you haven't you said something about the masculine oriented whatever blah blah game and Market this fits well for Tik Tok come on it's uh it's a great it's a great Channel especially for these type of games in terms of creative I don't know guys so a few different concepts but only with Facebook and apple I they running very weird play blend cards and no play as on iron iron Source at all well let's take a look actually let's take a look so I'm going to share this uh we can start with H with the I'm hoping the hooks are good I do like a good hook you like good hook okay Rel live weapons by the way I saw an ad when I was playing fight for America and the the hook is a girl saying I finally find a game with no ads how dare she how dare she I have this this this hook I can I can can show you but I think uh let's

start with with these amazing playables uh which is basically this is basically it this is an interesting playable end card so I was I was really confused I was I was clicking everywhere like what the [ __ ] is happening but then they have this uh this real playable where uh they actually loads like for a million years but iable Factory uh made it and it's actually the game right so but this is this is it it's not fake enough it doesn't need to be fake enough you can make fake stuff with Hyper casual really yeah it's it's actually yeah that's not working but you know that's it you have boss whatever um yeah but you can actually build things uh so it's it's actually this is kind of good the previous end card was uh really confusing and they had one one more

playable end card which was also confusing see I want to tank where's back yeah you know maybe there is a little bit of a fake in this yeah I was just goingon to say a little bit of fake and then uh we have again uh an interesting playable so this is a playable you need to tap to play and then it loads again I was like all right this I I'm not sure if if I'm not confused that much and this is another one which was only on on Unity or uping as well and then I was clicking tapping to upgrade and then I started over so also quite confusing I'm missing the epicness in those like I would imagine like you you know you sitting there with like mg or some kind of you know machine gun mowing down hundreds of thousands of these like whatever I know hyper casual people yeah yeah I know I know uh so you wanted a grade hook this is a grade hook

Wii there's a lie I try to play with no Wi-Fi didn't let me you pop a balloon with fire yeah exactly like what do you want to do it's like it's fine see this is the thing I'm talking about soundtrack oh this is a great creative he's barely scratching the crowd he's doing nothing I like this creative yeah the sound yeah the sound is perfect yeah it's also it's also 60 seconds long so this is this is already a second creative and this is only oh my God they took Texas and this is what uh what they use on every [ __ ] Channel this is the one that is taking all the spend so they just they just merged to Crea this basically so honestly yes the previous was great this is I mean I guess hyper casual is and okay ends with fail of

course but no no Wii game so they have this is a good hook as well imagine America lost the second world war and is now part of the German Empire you're the only American left you must reconquer the state California as your military base it's way harder than you think yours to be it's way harder than you think voice a voice exactly I'm missing subtitles honestly that makes a big difference in in Creative yeah oh my gosh you went to Oregon without uping your weapon pretty good yeah it's it's funny but you know that's it basically uh then they they're using the AI a voice is again the same but here have these yeah the flags that's that's actually quite uh quite clever that's really clever actually yeah uh I know this works quite well or

that definitely worked quite well when we used these type of things in in creatives oh my gosh Oregon is here as well goes to fail and then we are here again a what is this oh the same creative you you saw before but the different different order so again 60 seconds okay [ __ ] it watch watch this all over again but then we have the same thing again they're using this all the [ __ ] time the same things all over again and here why is this exactly the same again but this is is that the usual problem that no enough creative variation there's like almost no cre creative depth honestly it's just uh it's it's weird uh don't choose me I'm the new guy want to use me dear you can rely on me imagine America lost the second world go

sub at least you have some subtitles but uh yeah there was a hook again wanted to see so you saw what like four different concepts like how can you I do anything with con that big of a amount of I mean it looks like they're not spending that much uh with this like 200k let's say honestly like if if you if you if you earn like a million a month then you must probably spend at least like like 200k per month maybe even more and with with those those type of numbers I would expect way more different concepts because what you saw like seriously four and I'm very generous about four different different concepts and two

very weird playable end cards on the onity and one play One play that's yeah that's that's not definitely so uh there's only like one interesting tidbit um uh I really like how they are actually buying traffic for from themselves on minr they buy traffic from ammo fever atak hole as well and then also one other game which is tow war and I also found out that they're buying also traffic from two games I I work with so interesting but yeah uh basically Google and iron SS are non-existent there's no Tik Tok and very few Creative Concepts like you mentioned uh so if you don't know where to get the inspiration just che check your competitors they're [ __ ] killing it in terms of creatives so I would say like May rating would be like four which

is very generous honestly very very generous but yeah we can we can actually continue to attack Hall and do the sandwich again uh if you want uh so show the gamep playay R because honestly like this is a great concept like whoever came up with this like yeah just the first time you see it it's just okay I'm going to download this like it's it's interesting now the concept is great and it's really huge and it's really I mean the success is is just amazing honestly but on the on the oh you can you you want to start do you want to start don't have don't have that much here to be honest yeah yeah um yeah so for all those who don't follow this mechanics games uh legy 3 or family 3 can you pretend to sound excited at least like little excitement come on I'm not really I would say I'm actually

angry a little bit because from players perspective I was super pissed because I love these games and these mechanics like I really Lov whole IO and when it came out uh whole iio was this like they took the mechanic from the game called donut County on Steam before it even released from the trailer which was genius and they tested it on every kind of their templates and then pretty much came up with the PVP concept where your whole eat stuff during the day or whatever like the map they was and there were other players and you eat other players so you know snake I all over and it was great uh I really like that game I think it was super engaging I think it was like it's still like one of the biggest voodo games ever correctly giant colossal scale game yeah so they took the mechanic very very similarly and they have it or as I say like I I for me like when I on the surface just look up the game it seems to me like it's based on those like size comparison videos when you have these

videos where it starts small and then gets big whatever the topic like ships boats buildings whatever something well that reminds me the the worms video which one two two worms against each other one was aiming at the the the other one with one like saber the other one just I'm picking up more and more tougher weapons exactly yeah and then yeah yeah same yeah so so that's great actually if you look into it they have the mode in the game the tournament one the PVP mode it's in the game I really wanted to play but there's this one big catch it's not PVP and synced at all it's with Bots and what it does that if you actually keep or it doesn't even matter if you keep winning or whatever is the game doing it actually has this kind of timeout phase where it gets you reward after some time and then the time Runs Out doesn't matter what happens the time is just pretty much run out and for an ad you can add 30 more

seconds like literally you're winning you're about to eat your opponent alive and then it says end of match watching that to come to I think genius it's perfect yeah I was so pissed perfect beautiful I'm crying it's so good yeah yeah so yeah from from from game design perspective it's great like of course I guess the conversion here is like really good uh even this like this is complete illusion in my opinion uh and and the thing is that the mechanic and everything is is super smooth the game playay p well you have pretty nice uh you know physics or whatever they have there these games are usually uh one kind of pretty skill-based where you need to be able to consume small stuff first until you increase your size and then you take the higher stuff you don't really want to kind of bother with eating higher stuff before you are big enough otherwise you lose time and people eat other stuff like I did here in before which means you lose so the

like this is super engaging to be honest it's great so hands down they took it really good I think the twist they come up with regarding the whole uh kind of a eating ammo or whatever things and then just having the boss being killed with that that's really good we'll show it in a second like the PVP stuff is usually all about who finds the like most small objects first and then grows too big until they can be stopped uh but then yeah I would say there's not yeah see this is the half time I'm talking about there's not much that Innovation there regarding the the game play I mean by itself like from game design standpoint other than the boss mechanic oh see here we found the playground so now we grow super big and we actually do the thing that we talk about and now that we are prettyy much King of the Hill and everything's great notice

the timer on the top it says 7 six 5 seconds and here we have our unlucky guy which I was able to eat and there we go 30 seconds really that's it so this is pretty good out placement never seen anything like it before but yeah yeah it's it's very good yeah so to the norm gaml uh it's super stingy there's the pattern with Bold games where you pretty much sing your soft currency into let's say upgrades of the level and then when new level comes in all of it is reseted and this is to be honest one of my biggest kind of issues or I guess their hybrid casual challenge they don't have really strong permanent progressions I can't really invest into my hole or whatever even the character progress here there's some they're just some skins and you have these hacker skins which says like more

power and does it mean that if I had the T skin I have one second more time or like it all counts up or it's cumulative or not I don't know the Skins I think the character on the noob ones they doesn't do anything or yeah I don't know if they even do something but you can't and it's always end up in this thing that you need to upgrade these like forever if I would start the game I would lose immediately because it's just programmed by difficulty by that so the game pretty much forces you to watch these like there's no other way to go around this like from at conversion perspective that's great saying this like you've never played a hyper casual game what is all about like I'm saying from hybrid casual perspective that I'm this is not this is not trying to be hybrid like this is a hybrid Cas but could it be that's the that's the that's the discussion could it be it could it be it just matter of like how you set the rules with the progressions like what's permanent or not like I don't think so it it should be a problem to be honest it's more of like a design angle and their design priority wasn't that

like their design priority was somebody that was focused on ad conversion or whatever was there so if if somebody said like okay let's sacrifice some of the ad conversion and let's rather have more you know retention and more uh I yeah iips no Fu that ah transation hello guys saying hi pixel Federation yes so the as I said the game play is kind of Super S n uh the biggest thing you get actually by gold is by the end when you actually lose which will happen immediately after we finish watching this ad where you have that streak whatever bonus thing at least at least it can be kind of pretty generous when when you actually uh put it uh time it at the right right moment yeah every fight put up here when you you are against the boss and you unload your Arenal that you consume through your whole uh you know consumption level before yeah I didn't do [ __ ] to the yeah

thank you uh yeah skins that you get you need to reclaim through an ad otherwise no thanks yeah this is the main reward thing so if you see on the bottom the multiplier thing actually you can pretty easily hit the biggest multiplier but to be honest this is the biggest source of gold there's no other than that and if you don't really use this which means that you again need to watch sh ton of ads is this like this is an ad simul later well well I'm sorry I this hyper hyper casual game if I forgot yeah yeah it's very very hyper casual is I but as I said I could imagine that there could be different attributes because even the holes have attributes because you have those three things that def behind GAA like that's not a problem like there's just different perspectives on different you know design and systems and vectors that you could do and there like for me even like the best thing would be the zoom of the screen like with whole games is the zoom of the screen because if you zoom it

higher it means you see further what stuff you can consume in the distance which is better like just that so yeah but I guess it's super engaging like they know what they're doing otherwise we wouldn't be talking about the game having so much course man like this game it's just that it's hyper casual is it's not really hybrid like no no this hyper casual is not not is this is hyper casual hyper casual yeah this is hyper casual yeah yeah but yeah the main main point here is just it could be pretty good hybrid casual if you to be honest both fight for America and both alak goio when I started play the game I was fully expecting them to turn into hybrid but the thing is that the both both of the games main menus if you see here didn't continue adding new features on the sides as we would be used to from different games so let's say trials whatever this Vector that Vector this progression that progression coming same same gameplay all of the time and that I think is like the main problem why we're

seeing those retention numbers compared to the other games why they're so low in in the like longterm retention exactly yeah but other than that like it's super engaging like if people are willing to do that that like you know they bash their heads I think even in the video they have on their like home Academy YouTube channel they said that the VIN rate doesn't really have any effect or turn on retention yeah yeah so they just I guess roll with did that's it so yeah well problem there made quite a lot of money on this game so yeah yeah so it has to work of course but it's not hybrid casual like it's a different strategy it's still hyper casual yeah I mean yeah so attack hole like I said makes no secret what genre it belongs to it's hyper casual yeah um design super clever uh like yeah I don't think like I've seen anything like this like the first time I even saw an ad from this a couple weeks ago I downloaded it because it was just like a well that looks satisfying yeah almost like ASMR but for the

[Laughter] eyes yeah exactly like Remo says Uh there's a lot of out placements you essentially have to feed your hole uh with ammunition uh from like a short short like period of time and then you attack a boss uh super simple uh there's a lot of intitial placements like a lot uh I'd say probably 6.0 per Dau uh there's rewarded video placements to make your hole bigger get more time more power more gold magnet Su suction Wheel of Fortune and a bit more uh probably I'd say here 4.0 per Dow because I think you only really watch probably the most popular placement is the gold at the end of the games and probably like the size enlargement of your hole when you start uh banners depends like how much do you want to bash your head against the wall how much time you want to lose you order to kind of repeat the cycle until you go to beat the boss yeah Banners are on a 10sec Time uh all in all like uh this I counted on

with a 1.1 million da uh this game is clearing at least three million a month in ad Revenue uh so about 80 at same time period it made about 88k in iips So 97% of revenu is out Revenue so yeah of course but but as I said like same thing with me Hyper casual wise nine out of 10 hybrid casual wise five or six yeah pretty anyway like to sum up like all my ad Parts I get the feeling from looking at these numbers that like I've been looking at if the data from our tools are correct like I don't think that hom games have cracked the hybrid casual genre yet uh even though they're trying to tell us they have I don't think they have yeah but you know like one one thing though I would say like these two games prove that the hyper casual like genre is still alive and kicking like absolutely yeah that definitely I think uh uh you said also that they're risking

this game uh to make a hole and fill which is basically the same same thing but for food and then you fill up the fridge yeah I was going to say that like they reskinned it as well and uh like I think that's tailored more for a female audience instead and I guess they tend to have a bit better retention but like I play that game as well and it's yeah it feels a bit less pushy on the ads I don't know why but it's still kind of the same game yeah I I think uh we we have some information that they are seeing interesting results on this game as well so definitely a good one anyway atall UA briefly same UA Channel mix who would said that but here they actually run Tik Tok woohoo good job guys uh but when you're looking at the creatives onk I don't see how this makes sense because they have ugc creatives for hyper casual game guys like this doesn't make any sense you you put a

face uh on your game play immediately higher cpis so yeah the creatives are all the same it's really hard to come up with a different ideas for this game I guess but hey you know you can have always a different images built from from bullets like why not trying that because I mean let's see um I can I can show the creatives and also I mentioned this creative on the on the latest podcast uh but I didn't download it but now I now I did so uh you show the creatives because yeah watching ads he's watching ads could you just stop the the ads simulator please and then go ahead I'm stop watching ads so we can watch ads with you thank you yeah exactly exactly exactly we need to find that do you ever get a feeling that life is just one big ad it is of course it is okay so so we have this uh just basically again hardly

didn't think it's the same it's the same voiceover it's the same same voice over all over again uh but here finally we have the the Will Smith that's not Will Smith of course this that's Will Smith from wish yeah course will SM from B but it's uh it's will SM from wish uh AI will SM I guess it works it works yeah it works for hyper casual games [ __ ] it great uh but yeah that's it basically and then we have this uh this ugc which is honestly the game mechanic the game mechanic is so unique like I think these creatives must do quite well right yeah but you see this is the same gamep playay same this is the second ad and then we have uh this ad again which is again the same and the same same ad all over again and then we have uh this which is oh no it's

it's just annoying oh he's just playing the game so badly but now now it's great again that's it so so we call this we call this creative failed game play Fail gameplay I've never see cre I don't I don't see creatives that often where you succeed of course because it doesn't make sense it doesn't no won't motivate the players because usually when they see well let uh when they see the fa like oh I can do better like okay exactly what I thought when I was looking at the last one here you go this is saw myfriend playing a t and she was she was trying to get the timer ran out and when she I'm sorry I really like the mechanic I think it's [ __ ] the mechanic is very satisfying so satisfying and also the the sound when it collects the the bullets great

and the vibrations like yeah yeah and that that's basically it guys I mean seriously cool let's sum it up because we we've done a long one today so maybe we should sum it up here yeah don't worry so uh I'm pretty sure if we talked about this when they had their peak of downloads this would be like nine out of 10 I'm pretty sure but now it's just like like three 3.5 I I I think I want to have a lot of friends like are you are you are you are you grading this as a from like a hybrid casual space or hyper casual from from the UA point from the UA point of view man from the U yeah creative uh VAR or and even even even the the u channel mix it's just like I know feels weird uh but yeah I won't have a lot of friends at home games after these I guess but honestly it's just that you know we're we're talking about you know the hybrid casual really it's hyper casual it's great hyper casual with all the like things we said but it's not

hybrid no matter how much marketing material they say like this hybrid yeah yeah yeah anyway okay mer merch Army can change that we'll look at do yeah I think so I think so okay uh who takes us home today um yeah subscribe or go to our slack channel to to see us there and ask us whatever you want everyone is and then see you all at Gamescom next week or this week when you're listening to this tomorrow tomorrow see tomorrow yeah see you tomorrow yeah this tomor this is going live uh on Monday and then see you yeah tomorrow at the party if not the party Mario this afterwards ask for Felix no okay thank you very much guys for listening see you next time cheers byebye bye-bye bye [Music]

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