From hypercasual to hybridcasual - The SayGames story (#72)

pretty good before before we wrap up and finish I just wanted to ask like how would you say like if you sum up SE games and voodoo's foras into hybrid casual how would you say they differ and how would you say they're the same um or who does it better yeah who does yeah I think uh s games I think so the problem with Voodoo one is that they don't have many of these and it's still better to have like five failed pirate R this is no gaming podcast 2 and a half Gamers sharing action 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 yeah okay to take it away M welcome everyone it's uh

it's your favorite crew uh it's two and a half gamer session number 72 my name is mat lerich I'm Felix Brer and I'm and we are your hosts uh so before we start talking about our main topic today we have few things uh I I want to talk about South Korea we are leaving next week well I guess this episode is going live on Monday so we are leaving today we're flying as you hear this yes exactly so so we are above your heads obviously in the plane okay so we see you there we have the two and a half Gamers mobile Summit which is over subscribed by a lot yeah 7 70 70 people well 70 yeah 7 spots capacity and we have all like 200 people sign up thank you very much see you there uh and then we have app amplify event so it's going to be also very interesting uh see you also there uh

thank you applin for inviting us there as well and then secondly some industry friends reached out after our episode about Voodoo uh that mob control revenue is actually three or four times higher than what we uh discussed good job guys uh from Voodoo and thanks for telling us like how it actually is because we all all already had some different numbers in the tools that we use but yeah what can uh what can we do I know like one point for Voodoo and one negative point for all the data tools that we use exactly yeah yeah yeah so yeah uh today we actually continue our hyper casual to hybrid casual uh story and now we're talking about say games so again uh say games and I you know I will quote from an article uh that was published by our very good

friend Neil long from mobile gamer Bas cheers to you cheers to you Felix as well so uh in that article he was talking to to jagor the CEO of say games and uh and I quote this year uh which is 2023 is certainly going to be difficult for those Studios who relied on the old hyper casual success formula he also says that future success is going to depend on Studios ability to create the game experiences as well as Publishers uh will nurture these qualities and share expertise to help developers grow so I found an interesting update to the article and to the to the interview uh because uh they were talking about how say game is moving from hyper casual to hybrid casual but there's very big but say games Representatives reported that the portal mobile gamer. B incorrectly understood the words of the

the words of the CEO and the about the company's departure from hyper casual games so so I quote uh they we continue to work on creating new hyper casual games with our partners but at the same time we are increasing the amount of resources allocated to the development of hybrid casual games uh due to the Strategic focus on this Runner which is I mean obvious they even like five months ago uh say games published a post on LinkedIn saying uh um something about like their achievement so they achieved exceptional growth in Ina purchases Revenue reaching 37.5 million in 2022 which is year-over-year increase of 350% and they said this is a testament to their successful hybrid monetization strategy which includes Advanced publishing tools growing the expert team whatever that means and uh join shift to

life Ops games with 30 plus developer Partners so you know one tidbit the the article that Neil posted there was quoted or let's say the title of the article was hyper casual firms must adopt or die yeah maybe that was the Mis [Laughter] part well you know uh they published like what like above like more than 100 games uh and reached 4 billion I mean that's impressive um but they only have like four hybrid casual games well only I mean top hybrid casual games include dream Dale uh Squad Alpha my little universe and I think what like pirate raid as well but today we're going to talk about dream Dale and pirate raid so let's go guys game design go first or yeah just one note for those curious why

we're not talking about Squad Alpha being the second game with the most IP Revenue in the portfolio we are picking a different game because Mr Felix Hill thought it was too casual for him not hybrid casual that's one thing and the other thing is that which is Squad Alpha Squad Alpha yeah it's an iterational arch Arrow which we covered like four five times this model and this time we picking pirate rate which is not that successful and we're going to talk also why we think it's not that successful but it's a hybrid casual B and also you should say you love Pirates and you need PIR I love Pirates I'm sorry the second ship you get is the queen an's Revenge I was just like this is great and you were complaining the whole time I I'll get I like the game yeah let's continue go on Felix okay so should I start uh could you pull up dream Dale yeah uh and basically show some gameplay while I'm doing this so is it just me or is dream Dale like a casual version of the

Scavenging game last day on earth like it it just really like a lot of similarities man it's like the most happiest thing ever yeah it's great just want to give a brief intro to like what the game is all about Remo and like how it works and then I can talk about the admon stuff because it's really interesting like they've actually made some really ingenious clever Solutions here and it's going to be interesting to talk about it oh nice so he the reward video simulator but REM do you just want to give a brief introduction to dream Dale and like how the game works yep sure so dream Dale is pretty much this kind of a survival base Builder SL RPG that um seems I would say very clever it's literally the game you know from the creatives not the one you're currently watching as being forc fed creatives is one of the specialities of that game but uh but uh yeah here here you can see for

instance let me go here so you you're picking resources that are pretty much being pile up onto you and then when you need to pay them at like whatever build something or kind of do something somewhere they pretty much literally just pop up out of your backpack and it's very similar to that golden goblins creative that a lot of Market participants adapted and this is De game literally so the whole UI is pretty much offset into the game itself you see like you don't really go through there's just one button control which is very clever and on top of that they added some RPG mechanics you have uh item progression you have combat there you have dungeons you have like some other mechanics that I probably haven't unlocked yet because I was forced with too much ads and then um yeah maybe if you play on your phone you can you can turn off the internet connection or Wi-Fi and then you can play without ads I did that for the Pirate game for pirates like I actually

to to it as well but we'll get there later of course exact okay yeah I I just wanted to have all of the experience yeah yeah of course all of the experience on your PC get your bone out of your pocket but from an admon perspective dream Dale is super interesting because the whole economy is held up by the rewarded ad unit which is like everywhere it depend like it appears every time you're in need of anything any of your problems in this game can be solved with a rewarded ad as soon as you like hit a little bit of friction uh there's a rewarded ad unit to help you along there's rewarded ad slots for gaining in-game currency uh in-game consumables like pets or powered up tools that you can use for like five minutes there's wearables that appear like randomly on the game math uh game map uh honestly there's so many rewarded video placements that is hard to count uh once you watched a boatload of

rewarded videos that's when you start getting hit with interstitial ads uh they appear randomly at about a three or four minute increments at first and then it starts getting smaller and smaller the increments uh or like when upgrades have been made that's also when they pop up so what's most interesting from an admon perspective is actually found in the store uh so if you go into the store Remo oh no you got an intertial you go the store okay so you can remove you can remove forced ads uh or interstitials for $8.99 along with some wooden coins but what's really struck me from an admon perspective when you're first playing this game is that all the rewarded ads seem to have the super aggressive end cards and losted very long duration so the 40 to 60 second videos that are super annoying usually Adon managers like try to tame you know the networks like down Network we don't want to see that and basically showing

shorter and less aggressive end cards so because these longer ad formats hurts retention but dream Dale just went nuts on this long end for they just letting everyone go wild and it didn't make sense to me at all until I went into the store and what's super interesting is that in the store you can buy tickets uh with one ticket you can Skip One rewarded ad and you get the reward so my theory here is that they don't care about the annoying end cards and the long video end quality because they simply want to push users to buy these ticket tickets so they can skip it all together man genius isn't isn't this skip it as W do we discussed this in the in the previous the new hybrid casual monetization method skip it yeah so every like these tickets they work out to about 20 cents skipping a rewarded ad unit so take the Google 30% and Apple tax that means that seames is earning

about 14 cents a ticket compared to uh two to three cents that a rewarded ad impression in America will fetch you so you know it's quite a big premium on top of that so nice quite interesting so I think that they're basically trying to make the rewarded ad experience so Dreadful that they're basically pushing users to buy these tickets yeah uh so uh I would say probably from my estimates that dream Dale imp is around 11 and interstitials is around four uh I'd say that like that brings the ad Revenue to about 44 Grand a day on interest and around 120 Day on on rewarded ads so maybe 160k a day uh I APS from my data tool that I was using I guess now we're proven it that it's actually the world's worst data tool so it says here that 2.6 million in the

last four weeks on iaps so that means that 58% of that would be add Revenue so on top of that so dude I I just check I'm I exactly checked this now and they are apparently making what like 50k a day on on inaps at the moment for last like three weeks or four weeks since they started scaling so by the way do you also see that it's mainly on iOS and mainly I mean exclusively I'm yeah like I I will get I will get there why they uh sad Alpha isn't that gam so uh yeah I will I will I will say uh a few words about their they scaling on on iOS quite heavily in the last three months actually yeah but like the big factor here is like I would love to know like how many tickets they're actually selling because that's like the big like X Factor here like I don't know how many users are actually like off out of the rewarded experience

to actually buy these tickets if you work at say games and you want to tell me I've never worked on a game like this I would love to know because I think this is very clever I don't they not sending any gachas because H there's no none of those in the shop yeah anyway uh so that's from an Adon perspective um you want to take on UA M or yeah yeah would sense I want but I just want to see so like which which is the like top uh inap purchases so pack of tickets is basically one two three four fifth best uh uh pack of tickets is 40 for 849 okay so that's on the top five uh fifth place in terms of microtransaction yes so okay dream Dale dream Dale I actually downloaded this game like quite a while ago go how far did

you guys get by the way not that far not that far far as you did for sure yeah I would I'm the only one torturing myself with all the for yeah of course that's your job man you're the only one exposing yourself to the genius admon strateg that's probably the future of our beautiful industry so no you're rewarding yourself wow next time and thank you to a chair Force feeding you at yes it's my job so yeah honestly uh it's a very interesting game I downloaded it before we even thought about like talking about it and then of course forgot about it and then I saw ads and it's like oh well this is a okay I think I already downloaded it so they um they were targeting me on Facebook so I clicked on the ad and then get go directly into the game anyway so as as yako pointed out it's survival base Builder so do you know any any other similar game we reviewed in the past uh that is something close to this uh this game uh it's ex exactly uh Frozen City

or what w survival or what you said like golden goblins mean when I when I was looking into the creatives uh and I I will show you some of the creatives you will see where they are getting the inspiration from honestly my my my bet is the whole game is based on those creatives yeah 100% 100% but the so I looked into the iOS and versus Android because you know everybody's talking about how iOS is dead and everything is dead and oh my god they are scaling like crazy on iOS oh my God so they started recently and I and by recently I mean like two or three months ago uh so in June they hit 1.1 million downloads on iOS on iOS only and this was the top uh top month for them uh even more than than the global launch date uh or Global launch month and do you know what happened three

months ago do you have any guess guys it was your birthday uh no I mean important update of the game connected to the yeah well almost they started running appin and they exploded suddenly boom everything went uh into the right direction and I know exactly how they how they were able to do it and I will let you know at the end of the uh and of this part so unless I watch a reward ad right now and I can straight away uh you can you can uh offer me some skiet if you want I have a ticket of skiet yeah if if you have a bag of skiet let you know I can tell you right the way okay but anyway in terms of the uh the revenue obviously like top one is us then we have what Japan Germany UK South Korea Canada Australia France Taiwan and Switzerland Usual Suspects I guess like

this is uh Ina purchases Revenue only but uh if you look at the um the UA Channel mix appin then we have Google Facebook even integral and then vangle unit in Tik Tok so let's actually let's actually talk about the creatives so so they're playable heavy on Apple so let's let's look at this and if you stop sharing uh uh the screen I will share the screen the my my screen and then uh everything think it's going to be interesting so it's the whole thing here all right so we have where's the playable here so tell me what do you see whoops that's not tell me what do you see here that's frozen City

almost almost Frozen City try another game yeah I could mention it before gold Goins it's golden goblins one to one man it's one to one yes it's just is also cop golden goblin scen exactly so it's just like everything is connected so this is their top uh top creative basically on appin and um and it's playable obviously because but this is this is the first time that the game actually plays like exactly this yeah and honestly I was I was playing the I was playing the the the creative and it was actually amazing I mean it was really satisfying uh to play this uh this playable honestly but they have like multiple iterations of this uh to be honest and this is like their I think third um third iteration from where they started

scaling on up me so every month they have one one new playable which is good I mean if you want to scale uplo in and other networks you have playables and if you want to scale heavily you have more playables and like every other week you have a new playable so you can you can test test it out so this these everything that you know you you just you just play this all over again question y did you find actual any fake one actual yeah fake creatives mhm no only altered gameplay because this is definitely altered gameplay I mean it's but this is actual gameplay yeah I know like you do it you do exactly this in the game but this there's like no scene like this no even the three assets used are exactly the same in the game how much SP went through that creative do you know roughly it would be interesting to know I don't but it's it's a top spender so I guess like almost like 90% okay of the of the whole spend I mean

look so you don't have this scene obviously but it's exactly what uh uh what I me I mean it's not totally um altered gameplay but whatever so they have lots of different Cates and I just want to show you this uh what does it this Frozen City yeah remind you something is it frozen City isn't it right survival oh both they were really similar man it's the same thing the same game it's the same thing it's the same thing it's actually well my sticker just uh your Nelly you're Nelly sticker I was playing with my daughter so you know that was sticker anyway so they have different uh different creatives uh so let's see they have all these like gameplay oriented creatives which is just that's quite realistic man as I said this is the actual game

you literally build the whole estate like this that it's like starts an island and then you just walk up to a counter and it throws the resources in it and Bam land comes out but does it but isn't this the the hyper casual type of thing that you actually have the the creative game play Crea yeah that's that's the thing you have these like different scenes I mean I love these like different cuts I mean we we actually did this quite uh some time in like multiple times in our creatives as well just different cuts and even the music is actually pretty pretty nice this is all actual gameplay nothing fake in it man why why would you fake these things so I mean the Frozen cities I guess that's fake but they have also like these fights as well and different cuts I mean you know we said fights sces there was exploration like game

play oriented I mean everything is around the gameplay anyway so you have all these different angles that they are exploring at the moment boss fights I love it would you say actually then like the the big unlock for uh say games on dream uh like on on this title was just working with app l oh yeah I will get there Jesus get there you know they have all all of this yeah L yeah that's perfect right Diablo and okay it's this is ex like this is the cre creativity of your team it's it's amazing so you have Lilith you have like this Diablo is type of creative I was like oh well okay know from wish yeah from wish wish that's great but and this this is also

look it's a different style right so this is not how the game actually looks like yeah it's a little bit different but see this Avatar over here uh from from IOS I mean yakob you don't know but we we know it's it's it's a good use of this type of like it's it's it's different it's the only time someone has ever used it yeah exactly like I this is the first time I've I've seen it and I was like ah it's actually quite uh quite interesting this this was the most fake is that I saw yeah most fake it was different uh uh different visual style but then uh so they have also different creatives on Tik Tok obviously is he real yeah he's real yeah nobody's real anymore yeah nobody's real yeah the real Felix he died two years ago he just an avatar yeah of course so yeah this is this is on Tik Tok and

then they have another Tik Tok because this is fake the the voice is fake obviously the game play is true yeah game play is true but then like the everything else is fake but I guess uh it's okay so what's your Maven ma position out of this yeah just wait for Maven ma position because I was really excited I was really really excited about about uh about this game so you know so they have lot of different creatives I love the depth though exploration resource Gathering the there's also like customization of the character like not customization per se but they're showing the character all the all the things you can you can have 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 all the items and the avatars from IOS uh they also try to to catch attention with different Hooks and I will show that in the in the postproduction because it's like mesmerizing creative uh lot of different angles now how they were able to grow like crazy on app so it seems uh as I said like they're refreshing creatives like every month based on the the tools that we have so and I'm also pretty sure they're mediating with Max right Felix yeah most likely like I'm 99% sure this Max yeah me too me too so they're able to run Blended Ross campaigns what are these you might ask well the best from both worlds you're

optimizing for Ina purchases and inap AD Revenue in one campaign so you have Day Zero R goal of Blended iip and IIA and this works like magic seriously like this can scale like Wildfire it works so well extra good because it's 5050 probably split here on IP is and not revenue is even better I think I think here the split is even more skewed towards the ads which right yeah okay but yeah this this definitely works I've seen a few games that scaled heavily thanks to this spending from like going from spending like 20K per day to almost like 200k per day which is like 80% of that is only on appin Blended Ras so yes how much just new person question how much of that percentage share you would say would you need in order for this Blended thing to work

like what 6040 or 6040 yeah 703 tops but 6040 50/50 is the best still if if you have I mean what I've seen game with 75% inaps and 25% ads doing super well on Blended Blended RW because then the appin kind of uh takes the best out of ads so it kind of shifts the the the equation the other way around so you will get like what like 70% of on ads but then like 30% on inaps on this specific campaign Works amazing really really good really good so so that's I think that's how they can also grow quite heavily on iOS and that's like man we we can see the spike we can see the spike quite quite heavily there uh there's one interesting tidbit uh it's like they opened up Tik Tok two weeks ago I showed you the creatives uh which

is I mean I guess Tik tokish type of creative but yeah I think the app in here is just like the the best thing like most interesting bit so humble May m rating 10 out of 10 I I'm I was really really I was really really like Amazed by the all of the different creatives there's no fake creative that's the thing no fake so you're playing with what you have you don't need to use fake creatives you have playables you have UPL you have almost like yeah different creatives you have the Diablo is oriented creative and uh come on good so has Apple even made this Blended row as just specifically for this shift to hybrid casual from hyper hyper casual seem like perfect timing right no I think like well they have it for for a while I mean now the hybrid casual is just the best use use case and it's man it doesn't even need to be H hybrid casual it you have way

different G like way more different genres that have 50/50 split so you have you can have idle games uh very big ones on the Blended draw as well okay do we move on to pyro rate no game design part man wait oh of course almost almost got almost got him um yeah so the thing here is that uh it's are pretty much everywhere uh to the point where it pretty much diminishes whatever you do in the game like farming yeah yeah no finding resources at some point doesn't make sense because it's just much better to watch an ad because just by time ratio how much time it would take you to farm those whatever 200 apples where you can that which gives you 100 apples which you can sell for 200 or something gold so it's very very very skewed towards the ads like this is a completely different hybrid casual setup compared

to something like let's say Survivor IO because Survivor IO they don't inflate their economy away these guys don't have a problem which like whatever you need you can have it for the ads immediately like like whatever I do every building every upgrade they immediately have like plus 100 soft currency ad like builtin that you can watch forever so you can just sit here and watch ads all the time and you would be progressing very very far so there's no caps or did you see any caps Felix absolutely not yeah this is the main this needs to be set like pretty straightforward this is not the hybrid casual model that we've been talking about through hubbies template or like all the other games even mob control to some degree is a little bit more conservative compared to this like this is full on ads plus I so so why do we even talk about this game if it's not hybrid casual it is hybrid casual I'm saying it's just

a different kind of a side of a CO different take on hybrid casual yeah it's the Felix take why are you so mean why so mean so mean like it's the ads man everywhere you're angry you play too much Wu games that's why you're not used to these this is how a majority of like you know games are discovered these guys are just giving back to the Gaming Community by allowing advertisers to Showcase ads in their games skip it one thing that I really don't like or let's say I think it's a missed opportunity is that they don't sell gachas within the whole like they the Archer HP attack itemization I'm I haven't even see any difficulty within the combat system or like this whole kind combat system seem duct tap to it like that's what I wanted to say because the combat system is just like you need to no you need to go there because there's no way to get gems and for gems you actually build like statues and These Blueprints and all these like

high level things that they have here but the only way to get them reliable is to go into dungeons so you need to go there so there's some pull there but it's kind of duct tape so there's a big mix opportunity because also in the shop like I cannot spend on my gear there's nothing GE like you even the pirate rate has gacha in it so like there's definitely is opportunity where I think this game could make much more money on I yeah they have got they have got in there but the game is dying so well done we'll get there and yeah it's it's pretty much built on forcing you to have the skip it and the like the whole thing like to get rid of that because it's literally intertial all the way like it's not that that that bad as in the Pirate game that that's even worse but yeah it's there on the other hand the other interesting thing is that in my opinion this game was holy built by UA like I'm sorry but like the whole thing the premise very sorry it's amazing no no I was just saying like UA people

pretty much took over the job of the product people here because UA is the product fit here that's that's that's the whole thing like it's just that creative being and we we can end there thank you very much for listening it's like not saying that the game is bad like the game's actually pretty amazing from the start like I was really really liking it in the first when I buil this whole thing like you start with a small island and then you like by the way there's no map and you get lost there uh would be glad if they could have some something like that but the game is pretty good in the beginning and the genius of the concept is that they offloaded all of the like uis and buildings and whatever simulation part where you click here upgrade here upgrade there you don't need to care about anything you just walk into somewhere the game does everything for you so you stand near trees it shops them for you you stand near a building it builds it for you nothing you need to do just one button control genius that's great uh other than that is very rudimentary RPG survival so for a person

that never played this kind of a whatever like it's actually a little bit close to stard well it could be amazing like don't get me wrong but yeah it's kind of a so what gacha would you add on to this like the easiest thing to make a big Improvement but they have the gacha here like why why don't why don't they do something with it like I want to have better gear but why would I want to have better gear if there's no difficulty within the dungeons like I can I can you don't need it like why I I want to have challenging bosses or whatever or some kind of a you know gate King yeah so there's a missed opportunity definitely but my guess is that uh yeah it fits them well even with the Cent state where everything kind of goes along its way like lastly I was putting sheep into a sheep mixer that was giving me wool or whatever thing there was there yeah literally I'll show you it's putting sheep in the Sheep mixer but the game play is kind of nice they have this kind of reference design you have seen the hand from Adam's family or the cheap

lit or whatever they have there so it's it's it's still kind of good but the interesting thing for me and the like the lesson from me on this game will be UA can build your game literally like UA can build your game profitably and my guess is that by our there go accuracy standards we are underestimating the game Revenue by 50% probably oh maybe well even more I mean the Delta between the two the two platforms that we use or yeah it's like crazy it's just these numbers you can't like yeah yeah and also yeah from the the discussions we had uh so we are underestimating the revenue quite heavily so it's like what like three or four times usually so what we say yeah double or triple so my and we are we are getting to to real numbers my realist Remo rating would be eight out of 10 and if you would had that gacha you would get nine or 10 but because you don't have it like yeah

please paste it somewhere you will get much more revenue and make dungeons challenging at at some point but yeah other than that the game's like as I said builds build as a perfect funnel for UA and for everything no yeah 100% okay pirate R yeah the pirate right G play pirate right up oh my God I have very little to say this but yeah why are you so why are you so excited about the PIR game it's I love P who doesn't like Pirates man there's like deficiency of pirate games in the market we all want them and we don't you know why because yeah need to hold up my closer yeah because it doesn't work I mean it works great yeah I see I see it it's all yeah the game is why don't you have the queen 's revenge like that's the boat you should be on on that level what the game is Dead it works super well yep amazing yeah you can start Felix yeah like pirate raid I guess is another interesting take on hybrid casual uh it's got all the HM marks of a hybrid

casual it's got banners inters and rewarded videos however uh the data tool I've been using which is the world's worst I guess has been told me that the Dau is quite small so yeah it's because the game is Dead iOS is pretty much non-existent uh the game play is fun but I'm going to say something that's going to sound a bit foreign but like that admon is way too aggressive here oh this is the first yeah I know I played for about 40 or 50 like 40 minutes and like it takes like not very long you start getting hit with so many intials and like there's not that much cool down between them so like it just feels like they went way too aggressive on how many rewarded ads and how many justicious need to watch and the thing that also sticks out to me here like Remo if you stop sharing this screen just for a little minute uh so Minal have come out with this new

ncard template on interstitials and rewarded uh videos and I think they take the reward now for the most annoying incard in our industry so I just did a little recording and I'm going to share it man if I need to edit this again in the post production because you can't share then I will just see I prepared it because I knew you're going to complain so if we start with interstitial you see here it's already 20 seconds and then you can skip it right but like skip it you get to the end and there's a playable and then you can't skip the intertial after you start the playable so this is the intertial one it's not that bad so now you can Skip and then you have to click out of it it's 32 seconds but you can skip out after I think it was 14 or 15 seconds but the real Annoying one is the new format they brought out on rewarded video and man it's so annoying so first of all

you're hit with this choice you have to choose which ad you're going to watch and you have 10 seconds to choose and the thing is the thing is is if you click on one of the videos you're punished because then actually if you don't wait the 10 seconds it actually restart a timer from like 30 seconds the big thing that you want to do is for the love of God like choose otherwise you get a longer ad experience so anyway you see it kind of yeah you get 20 seconds here and you have the SK overlay at the bottom so you watched at the end of this you watched an ad for 30 seconds I'm yeah I hope you will get and then like when this finishes right that's when you expect the ad to be over but no this is not when it finishes because this is when it jumps into the playable for five seconds and then when the playable finishes SK overlay over the whole screen and then you have to click another x button and then another x button and then you're

out what so I saw I saw this like uh choose the video it's is it mgal only it's mgal only I think okay I saw it I saw it once or twice already yeah like uh admob do something similar but it's not as annoying where they basically Bunch together two 15sec videos uh like in the 30 second ad slot but yeah just wanted to highlight it because it came up yeah you can share again the gameplay oh man I mean for any you want to play the you want to play a game but then you're just watching rewarded videos well not even not even re way to like this is way too so they have banners IAL game I think like I don't know how long the game play is here but I suspect banners Impressions per du is about 50 imp Impressions per D on interal is seven and I counted myself watching seven rewarded ads as well so like it's about 5050 split or

something like that because it's so aggressive um it gives you about 13.7k a day uh me and MAA have very different da levels or I AP levels so basically MAA said it makes 3K a day in I APS and my says makes around eight and a half K A Day In I APS in the last two weeks yeah uh so yeah it's yeah either like either it's like 44% or 60% of the games yeah that's just the Delta between the two but really cool like take cuz I like pirate games but just a bit too much to play like I can't you can't play literally that's you can't play yeah you can't play so again okay so again why are we even talking about this game uh because it's too aggressive okay because uh because we're walking about failures and wins also oh of course is definitely win this is yeah okay yeah I guess yeah

we should yeah okay we should balance the the success that's true cuz this game is dead he dead so Eastern European Nelly yeah s don't worry H so it's uh it's the unfortunate shark thing happened in terms of downloads and since then uh we see decline so they had this peak of revenues which was 260,000 wasn't in March so I guess what if even if it's like half a meal from the other tool when inaps I'm not sure like this is not even close to to dream Dale so but okay in terms of the UA Channel mix uh like this this game feels like it's not on the top of the say games spending list because they have applin obviously Google Facebook and Tik Tok so applin is running since the beginning but they only have one playable which is basically a video they run so they yeah

they run the on uplo as well so they even what is it fake or not no it's just the game play was that intertial oh how surprising how surprising so they you know they even post Facebook in June so I guess they have the bare minimum to keep this game alive but for how long and what does it mean life in this uh in this by way the question for me if they at some point can concluded that this game is not worth worth like you know expanding anymore so let's squeeze as much ads out of possible so let's go Felix on it or it was like that before from the start no I think I think they saw the game is not doing that well so it's like oh well let's squeeze the most out of the players and then just slap the like intials in your face every 10 seconds I goddamn s please it's right up there yeah fight him yeah sorry because like

this is literally like if I if I would imagine Felix with like Dragon Ball Z ads power like this is it like there's so much ads everywhere everywhere you can't play it like it's prohibiting like pretty much whatever you do like you just cannot and honestly like you can you can always see like how much resource effort and and like money is allocated to each game based on the the creative mix as well and the the UA Channel mix because they have only very few different videos they see that was that was a minute and a half or like less than a minute and a half officials literally Black Mirror yeah it's just well again vad oh oh yeah we need to do the the episode where you just say which uh which network is yeah I will test you in terms of creativ and I will show it in the post production because it's uh it's not that interesting um honestly

uh it's just classic lose upgrade Vin scenarios there's only one interesting creative of Kraken destroying ships can you show it oh yeah you can show it I can show it right now who there is there it is what well I was show the post production it's you know it's uh it's not that interesting there are like few leveling up videos the you level up ship and then just destroy different things so yeah I guess again just to balance out the dream Dale success uh we need to talk about something very lame and odds heavy and I see this video creative like third or fourth time uh while you play this yeah just there but it looks like they're on a 60c time or on intertial which is it's impressive well anyway so humble humble Maven M rating two out of 10 uh and two is only because of the Kraken

video video godam Zilla is actually better at this yeah godam Zill is actually quite funny so second map okay so let me do my take this one actually looked a little bit more promising when I started it because there's what there's gachas there's like lot of spend dep actually in the game the problem nobody cares about cares about it the problem is that the core gameplay is a little bit half ass the problem because honestly this kind of a one button control you just control the ship and it attacks automatically it is kind of sporadic from the times of Warcraft 3 battl net where we all play this like genius map called battleships where if I see the age of magic add again I will just kill myself right away just wait one one minute uh yeah so there you would control the ship and it with much fire upon enemy ships itself and you would

just control the direction like very similar gamep playay you didn't need to position yourself here because here imagine like I always need to position myself I can just you know run away and it would fire I know it's it's kind of accurate but in the end it's it's a hassle to control so I would definitely remove that because it worked much better back then if you control it on your phone and not on your PC doesn't matter man you still need to move over either to port or starboard uh the other thing is that the weapons there was the whole game playay and like how it was interesting there's literally nothing to do here you just do these like whatever 50 quests that are all the same you just go in this kind of a random roundish area that have like other ships on top of it and that's it like it's fun for 10 minutes that's it like there's no like other kind content progression there's and in those 10 minutes you don't have time to watch enough ads to make it LTV calulation profitable kill you in the first place

like they they like my guess is they set up this kind of uber ad setup only afterwards they figure out it's not worth their time but there seems to have like a lot of vectors in the game in order to you have the systems but you can see with the banner placement like that's half ass like it's going on the gameplay screen like he going quick and dirty yeah yeah yeah so my guess is they they were probably trying and had like like a promising prototype and then at some point this it's screw it let's like mil it like look it's it's that after the I mean not that because the revenue was increasing until March uh then it start it peaked and it started to decline again but downloads like they stay very minimum level yeah the thing is that I've seen a few games actually on the market that are trying this exact code gameplay haven't seen a successful one yet we'll keep an eye on it because I think eventually it will be a successful game as I've seen it in Warcraft 3 battl net like DOTA came out

of it and like all the other mods like the tower defenses and everything but you need to execute it properly this game just doesn't have content to stand on its legs so even though compared to dream Dale this actually have a gacha these have like a spend up system is actually pretty heavy like look at all the abilities of the like Sailors and everything there's a lot of things to kind of go through but yeah if you don't really use it for anything else than killing goddamn zillas that gets interrupted by inter staals it's really not worth it your time so yeah unfortunately that that's bad but the other thing is interesting here that you can screw it up even though you are you know on the right track I would say so gacha won't save you that that's the other kind of a learning here that like just slapping the arch Arrow or whatever kind of six slot model and putting g in it and then proclaiming that oh it will now make money from IPS also isn't like the best

thing ever if your core gamepl just isn't worth it so I guess they had to like in my opinion whoever was prototyping this they missed the point that core game play is not only like you being able to sh ships that that's that's not core game playay you need to have some kind of like within level progression or whatever like why I'm doing this all the time if it doesn't make any sense watch ads you do this two times a matrix ad watching machine like here turn and to Felix's Point by the way why would I even upgrade any other ship because every other ship that I would start upgrading would start from scratch with the same exact stats so why would I invest the gold again like doesn't make any sense at all so some of the things are really half asked unfortunately but yeah I guess I'll keep a lookout for everybody that will actually execute this core pirate gameplay properly but the end not this one which will be nobody the last lesson here is that this is pretty much the complete other end of the spectrum like

we had like Survivor IO then we have dream Dale and then we have this which pretty much force feeds you all the ads that it can so don't do this I would say it definitely is not worth it I would even argue that adding more gacha and challenging the dungeons in dream Dale and cutting on force feed ads could help also but would definitely worth a try or a test but but yeah this this model won't work at all in my opinion like force feeding you all the all the all the things would would would probably work within hyper casual but not something that wants to be hybrid casual and it's not so let's see so yeah four out of 10 yeah way too aggressive on the effort for effort oh nice okay all right so we have we had dream Dale which is amazing or good enough oh it's pretty good before we wrap up and finish I just wanted to ask like how would you say like if you sum up seames

and voodoo's foras into hybrid casual how would you say they differ and how would you say they're the same um or who does better yeah who does yeah my I think uh say games say games I think so too right the problem with Voodoo one is that they don't have many of these and it's still better to have like five failed pirate rates in your portfolio because you actually see how many other prototypes they killed already so that're like the frequency they probably putting on is much higher and what Voodoo already has with hybrid casual not hyper casual just like not there uh the other thing is that you keep on piling knowledge also because of all these fails so as I said 10 failed pirate rates is still better than just one good mob control okay but we don't know how many failed uh games wo has um what uh you don't you you would see something at least in the portfolio why why why why say games keep them yeah that's yeah I I'm asking the same question why would you have the the Dead

game and just support it with like minimum uh a UA maybe they're working on it and trying to do a different iteration don't know but the other interesting thing is that you don't see a pattern between these two games like you would see between let's say hubby portfolio like there's a clear template there none of these guys doesn't seem to have a template which I think is a yeah yet which is a problem currently because it's even in the article from Neil it says that those are both built by individual Studios that it's not yeah yeah it's what and the other one was one they're still lack lacking the lacking the you know the synergies between it because you cannot get to the point where you're just Reinventing the wheel like you need to have just like this is the template this is the like IP system this is the gacha for an RPG this is the whatever you want to build multiple of these templates so you can like not every core gaml fits an like Ro Glide RPG and then you can you know

increase the frequency it's all about the frequency you need to have as many shots as possible to get that next hybrid casual hit so yeah it's better than Voodoo but still not there but definitely I would I would guess that the dream Dale one is like the next generation of hybrid casual games like if if we would start with archero and Survivor iio at some point this is the next gen where the creative is actually the game playay well but the Archer and Survivor IO they have also the uh the creative as a game play um yeah yeah yeah yeah for most part yeah yeah most AR Archer no Survivor I yes barer started with also has that like whatever like thousand zombies running and you know whatever bull that they don't have that in game now yes because they found out that it it actually works quite well with survival yeah but it's it's a you know it's a spectrum it's not like one to one

okay all right I guess that's it that's up yeah and play Dave the diver trust me you will thank me later oh my God yeso for later thank you Remo thank you very much for listening uh please keep subscribing share the the podcast with your industry friends colleagues dogs and cats and see you next time thank you very much Cheers Cheers bye-bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you can you can

talk yeah exactly we are all already uh already bigger so it's fine so it's okay so being bigger yeah but you know you can't be a big dick that's that's that's true how should we go about this uh uh admon first or what you want I just don't want remon to steal my thunder on the Adon side on dream Dale because it's genius I can go last like no worries there no what should we do what makes sense here oh like the usual one can you uh when I do the ad part can you show gam playay Remo yeah yeah for sure oh wait I need to prepare something it will be more intertial than game I'm sorry the pirate one keeps sending itself into [Music]