From hypercasual to hybridcasual - The Voodoo story (#70)

to compare this transition to something like we see let's say with snaker where we would have the like pure hyper casual game which just level based game play and then suddenly we have gachas here and there and like merging Fusion whatever G everything yeah and like super big spend depth unfolding game playay game modes levels trials whatever throw everything at me onlyy system system nowhere to nowhere near even to it so this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast to at 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 all right do the intro let's go go let's go I think intro is already happening man like is already talking [ __ ] Sam is doing the heavy lifting that's when we're sitting here

[ __ ] complaining Remo Remo get the limes get the limes yeah get the limes it's Friday okay welcome everyone yeah it's Friday finally yeah we're getting back to back on track with Friday wife so welcome everybody this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast it's session number 70 so my name is mat lerich and there's [ __ ] nobody's cting like hey like what the [ __ ] my name and my name is Felix Brer I do the ads I do the game the host we are the host I'm the UA person amazing we need to we need to work on this yeah should be way better I'll get a tattoo here you know adss are beautiful ads ads are beautiful I'm actually thinking about uh making it as a swag As like T-shirt with these like fun stuff that you just want a flamingo t-shirt that's what you want exactly I know I'm already working on it what are you talking about so uh anyway so this is a special episode which is number 70 because that's how

like how old is yak is 70 years old and now it's a it's also life jaob yeah it's also a length of uh Felix hair and obviously my IQ because nobody intelligent enough would start the intro with this type of [Laughter] joke okay okay H welcome everybody so uh yeah we are talking about um an interesting thing which is uh fairly new and uh we called it from hyper casual to hybrid casual the voodo story right it's G to be interesting because we're going to talk about voodo and how they invented a fire maybe not but uh before we start uh start that we are actually going to South Korea next month with Felix so if you are based in South Korea or are going to be there it's all we're going

to be there as well in July so uh let us know if you want to meet uh we're going to be there like 18th of July to 21st of July uh attending an interesting event and maybe putting on on event of ourselves with the help of a very good fan we're going to give a shout out to to Ino and yeah thank you so much for helping us out we're looking forward to going yeah so it's it's only Felix and me aob is is uh staying home nobody invited me who's playing Diablo that there's nothing to play anymore yeah we'll get yeah we'll get there we'll get there we going to record a diao episode as well uh Felix if you want to join you can I'm busy yeah I know busy with games that have had with that okay um I think uh uh we can we can skip the build the buildup uh discussion come come on what because

because it was funny only I guess for for us uh it wouldn't be funny for everybody else yeah we skip this part but we'll start now yeah yeah okay so um Voodoo is launching only four games per year after H hard hyper casual peot well welcome to the game development guys uh Soo completely reorganized uh their processes in the last two two years and there was a this article uh from our friend Neil mobile gamer. B and he talked with Mr Duarte from from voodo he's a VP of what VP of something voo uh and um he said basically said that um there there are now like two main teams uh there's a lounge team which constantly tests and prototypes and develops new hybrid casual gameplay mechanics

and there is live team that uh that's trying to evolve existing games by adding deeper content economy and meta features sounds enhanced gameplay yeah it sounds like yeah exactly sounds like the team just trying to save the old portfolio and cted to hybrid casual that's it yeah right I mean I mean you have to right adapter die oh yeah maybe you can create something new you know that's that's exactly but the like that's that's the second team I guess right that's that's the first one you read about oh yeah the first one so uh they canceled a lot of projects and also canceled a few Studios so he you know included that the vood Berlin and the next hype uh the next hype was kind of mystery to me but w burin we know so because I think it was supposed to be a casual Branch uh of of their whole um Voodoo fun fun stuff but they didn't didn't work out so unfortunately there was like I guess a bunch of pretty

senior professionals there unfortunately getting laid off uh which this thing didn't kind of work out not really U like nicely to look at but I guess that's that's how our industry works but uh yeah I guess the most important thing from the whole article was that not hyper casual is dead but hyper casual is dead to Voodoo as vo said that that's that's because they said also like the hyper is dead on like what Pocket Gamer uh conference London and everyone's oh well if voodo says hyper casual is dead then it must be de like oh well just maybe no they start they uh they actually didn't mention that it's dead to Voodoo uh but yeah it's not quite as click baity though right yeah true yeah exactly exactly but you know like uh Mr Dart also said that these teams that are not longer at Voodoo um they were not aligned with the strategy uh but the thing is like the strategy I

guess changed quite heavily and they they were aligned back then when they actually hired them right so it's like it's just like very different terminology but okay whatever uh it wasn't hyper hybrid casual back then uh and you know they're experimenting with casual mcoin vree even now so yeah of course they still announced their voodo coin remember weal about that one it's going to launch this summer as probably as they said and also like there's boards on the street uh that the voodoo is actually building something really interesting in the V Space so let's see oo so it's very confirm that though but yeah yeah yeah yeah that's very interesting was it yeah but you know so post idfa uh they went through very tough period uh before doubling down on the hybrid casual and guess what let's blame everything on Apple yeah now let's

celebrate the hybrid casual genre is the savior it's going to save us all thank you much uh hybrid casual but okay so the turn turning point came when they released collect them all and MOB control which is both games that are kind of definition for Voodoo of H hybrid casual which means hyper casual style visuals low cpis but metas that grow and deepen over time okay and yeah we are these are the two games we are going to review today so let's uh let's start with mob control I think or yeah start before you start your part Could you actually just Define for some listeners that maybe are like just starting to listen to podcast like what the difference is from a game design perspective just purely from Hy hybrid casual to hyper casual what the actual difference is hyper casual games in the period before the post idfa thing happened for for those who didn't know

that pretty much break this whole kind of advertisement Loop where you can scale these things very comfortably to very high scale uh and make a lot of Revenue which is currently not working they were working on a premise that you create an engaging core gameplay that's very very pretty much focused on core gameplay only we're talking weeks not months of development uh then suddenly you you know compare CPI like take 100 prototypes this is the one that has the lowest one you work some more on it and then you scale it to the top charts you don't really care about u i APS at all you don't really care about span de meta game long-term day 30 day 50 day 60 whatever retention you don't care about anything yeah you just care about the ad views and being able to squeeze as much kind of a revenue in first seven days of the game and that's it because you know this is has like kind a short life cycle where usually these games would live on the store on like what like five months six months that's it except Helix jump that works forever nobody jump Felix

jump exactly which has like half a billion downloads so we we know about that one but yeah that that was the hyper casual cycle uh the other problem that this one had was that hyper casuals were pretty much marketing themselves like 60% of the ads were other hyper casual games so the snake was eating its tail a little bit there and now that this whole marketing Ploy pretty much collapsed like a PA the scheme uh it's no longer working that's why you see why wodoo is coming with this is Big statement such as hyper casual is dead to me blah blah blah uh because they know that they won't survive if they don't move it's like uh you know the usual problem with the electric cars and like diesel cars but isn't that just a [ __ ] evolution of the genre I mean look at idle games like they evolved quite heavily for time so I don't think the I think so that's an evolution it's more of like one thing stopped working so they want to switch on a different thing uh hybrid casual I think was there even before they kind of Proclaim it yeah yeah like the other theme of

today's discussion is that honestly when we look at the things and like the latest news interviews and the games and as you will see it is pretty much same thing what hobby has been doing from 2016 yeah or I said on the episode like Happ as a new voodo yeah yeah like or 2017 I don't know when archero came out but pretty much it was back then and where we already saw these kind of hyper casual like core gameplay games with very deep meta game and low cpis so yeah it's very surprising to me like now everybody's talking about hybrid casual like it was like it's [ __ ] new new kid on the Block but it's been it's been there like for years yeah I guess because nowadays you know yeah cuz hasn't been hyped hasn't beeny not okay get on the hype train yeah but but it it takes a completely different expertise I would say maybe that was also one of the things why voodo close those other Studios because there's a very clear difference between someone that has worked on only on hyper casuals someone

then has worked only on casual and midcore games and now you want them to have this kind of hybrid casual expertise which is combining those two and having like plus one on top of it because yeah honestly these things are not easy to build that's why voo doesn't have a full portfolio of them like it's it's very hard to build so yeah we'll see but yeah let's start with the main example that we're going to talk about today because uh of course we scour through Voodoo portfolio we check our favorite data platform then we check our second favorite data platform we saw big honestly lately these two favorite and second favorite data FL I hate them equally yeah just not good looking at the data and then like what the [ __ ] is what the [ __ ] is happening like it's totally like two different uh different numbers totally different massive not even CL so uh then you then you talk to someone from uh from the game that the game company that we actually uh

reviewed then it's like hey guys like this numbers are off by a million you're like like you're so wrong well maybe this is what we work with that's what happens if you have data yeah if you have data please share uh we can uh we can get better yeah we can correct ourselves feel free to reach out um so we scoured the portfolio and uh omitting currently all of the beach bomb games that have been uh like the beach bomb Studio that has uh been uh uh what there was an acquisition by voodo of the beachman studio and uh what did you have a brain freeze or something something like that and they have games that are I driven so we're not going to talk about them we're just going to talk about Voodoo like first game so let's say the games that are coming from Voodoo direct account so looking at the portfolio there are two games that are currently driving most IP Revenue that we see these our favorite friends here from data platforms uh so there's mob control and

that's goinging the mall so I guess let's start with mob control because it's a it's a very good example of like how the thing evolve and how it works and like what's this whole thing about so if we currently look at the game right here it's actually uh that creative dream that we always wanted to play play and always been fed with with all of the creatives where you have two St creative has been making for the last year what are you talking about they had this game already like it's actually inspired by Fireballs 3D so yeah so so little bit of background uh Mob control was initially developed by Vincent bua sorry I'm butchering everyone from from this point on who voodo Paris hyper casual studio and he was inspired by the 2018 hit Fireballs 3D while following the multiplayer Gates Trend which is our favorite choose left or right and don't

use common mat and then his team spent you should just said you should have seen just Vincent that's it V Vincent from vood is Hy so thank you Vincent that's fine yeah notice this part he and his team spent a full week building the game so this is when this was still hyper casual and we'll talk about it why this transition triaa Studios on Console are turning in their graves right now hearing that yeah spinning yeah before it was launched by voodoo's marketing department so like a whole week of work uh that's how hyper casual works so three months after his launch the team saw some premise in it and like took four more people so we're now a team of five when you have people from Bobble Master we have people from some graphics guy artist Guy this is the important thing we have a guy from Candy Crush Soda Saga so that that seems to me like the expertise that was

bringing like the hyper hybrid casual pivot or let's say deepening The Meta game features of the game and then uh the team expanded to 10 people and currently has a data scientist and full QA support which is wow something completely normal from any gamees different than casual but let's talking about normal theme theme structure 2023 the team will grow around 20 people um I get this that oh well that's that's pretty Vo this is something completely new if you were just like killing 100 prototypes and like launching one that's like understandable but yeah it's pretty much going this way around uh Mob control was released April 13 2021 so it's actually pretty old game but this is the important part that before it was hyper casual it was not always hybrid casual so yeah that's the thing because they started scaling last year in December yeah so so the thing is November so the thing is that this is their I guess their template example

that they're currently using when they talk about these games and how the whole genre Works whereas look at our hyper casual game that we turn into this like I guess it's making a lot of money like we can only see that it's making like what like billion plus a month in IPS only currently yeah it looks like 1.2 million2 million IP so my guess is it's something like 5050 or even like 6040 oh no no no no no no no you do you think so it's 50/50 I would say it's still like more skewed towards uh wait for my part to find out yeah let's leave it to the decimal guy yeah yeah let's leave it there so so yeah we have this let's say successful example uh and yeah let's let's talk a little bit about the game so if we play It's the usual thing that you would accept from the creative that you can now actually play Within the game which I to be honest kind of like like because finally I can at least play the thing so you just shoot stuff very easily you hold your button and then the cannon spew units

and mobs and when you charges up you can have this kind of pulse unit they D throw at your opponents and they slowly kind of kill them and the fun of it is pretty much being able to aim it properly throughout these kind of gates that multiply these things and this see that's the hyper casual game mechanics right there from the from the ad like you can see the clear clear signs like one button control very easy to learn game play very intuitive you immediately know what to do there's not much if you have dyslexia yeah it requires a little bit of math uh by the way did you did you did you run into any like uh blockers or like even difficulty like to be honest like I won everything like there was like yeah exactly if you get the boosters rewarded odds you never lose I didn't even get the Boost like nothing so yeah yeah but you're playing on computer so you know you have an advantage how can a computer give you Advantage here because you you play with mouse you play with my faster movement you play with mouse

just breathe man keep going keep going keep going keep going we no we won't that's it like we won that that's it that's it that that's that's the whole thing and now now now now's the thing that actually helps when I can click properly and watch an ad and yeah I didn't click okay don't miss the button yeah I missed it man anyway uh so this is the basic cor Loop um nothing to it it's kind of really easy what we can see that if you look into the videos uh of the previous build it was even more easier before because here you would just it was more easy before like how it can be easier before because there was no metag game ah true okay yeah so before you would just have the multiplier thing at the end which you already have now that's it and that's it and then you would just have three upgrades that's it so you wouldn't even choose something or like have units and gas and and like Base building whatever they have now there's nothing and this was the hyper casual game but later down the line uh when the team start tinkering with it they actually added

this um I would say it's similar to coin master or pirate Kings I think was the first one that BR brought it where you have this kind of a visual Base building but this is not really Base building this is just like a maybe if you just close the ad and then show The Blaze building would be better oh [ __ ] sorry wrong screen share [Music] um here we are why close the ad is the best part yeah so here is here is here is the up one the old the first build from 2021 where it was kind of just just this like that was even like main menu now they added the base building element into it so after you there you go after you uh pretty much finished the multiplier thing you build your base this is as I said very similar to something like coin master or pirate Kings where you have this kind of a let's say soft currency that you're getting you're spending it on building some arbitrary visual decoration or something that is just like an index number that keeps increasing and once

you hit a cap you move to next one and that's it yeah there not not other function of that but but later down the line they added the coin Master Mechanic which is that not this one this one sorry that it means that uh you can actually pretty much have a let's say Revenge mechanic so somebody pretty much can attack your base and then you can Revenge them what is it what is this Frankenstein of everything it's like it works see the shield thing like three Shields when you know with coin master that if three attacks are on if you offline too too much meaning that you lose those three Shields people can rate your gold and stuff like that so I can go here and do some kind of Revenge mechanic so this was added later and then the final thing that was added of course was the gacha that you have the base so would you say this is an unfolding game play because they no no they start if if you play the game now

everything is accessible from the start there's nothing unfolding with it it just pretty much they were looking at the hyper casual game and they're like how can we improve the day day 30 day 60 retention let's add this metag game features because metag game features are the only one that are responsible for long-term retention so they added the base building visual thing they added the Revenge thing and now they added gacha thing with you know some kind of build but it's like a it's not really a gacha thing like if I compared it to something like Survivor iio with their like polish template is just like a skeleton of it because here like everything is not even close everything is just stronger there's no really kind of meaning to me choosing lesser part than like the next best part that I get from upgrade the gacha is very very shallow there's like what like three deck slots one upgrade slot that remained from the previous one it's like obviously duct tape on top of it like I get it it works it's not like a problem I guess the team was learning so think about it in this way so this is just like you know day they're they entering the the let's call

it hybrid casual space this is just the first game they actually experimenting with the maybe my guess is that it's not even like something like that it's more of a they were trying to increase the IP Revenue however they could so they started pretty much duct taping features on top of it that would fit the game and it fit pretty well actually like it's it's not bad I'm not saying it's wrong but to be to compare this transition to something like we see let's say with snaker where we would the like pure hyper casual game which just level based gaml and then suddenly we have gachas here and there and like merging Fusion whatever everything yeah and like super big spend depth unfolding gameplay game modes levels trials whatever throw everything at me all the key system system it's nowhere to nowhere near even to it so Leverage The Power of loyalty driven UA with missplay users discover a collection of curated games to play based on 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 it's more of like a transition and as the team was kind of doing I guess a lot of tests and like probably even tried some features that we don't see that like didn't make it or like didn't produce good numbers but yeah it's it's a very good example um I guess to be honest it also follows a little bit of hobby formula whereas of course we have the gacha thing because gachas especially this kind of a clash Royale Shard gacha is very very easy to Pace it's very easy to understand for everyone you just you know press upgrade buttons you get random chests or whatever they have boosters and then you upgrade your units you can select those and like get a new unit from time to

time so on so forth so like something like this for instance that you have units locked behind special offers or season pass like that would never fly in like a supercell game or something like that but yeah it works pretty well I guess it it I guess it increased their day30 day 60 retention and that's it um on top of it they also have a [ __ ] ton of head placements which I think Blondie here is really tempting to talk us yeah I mean when we get to my part but yeah there's a lot of them I mean it's still a voodoo game right like yeah exactly just that's that's what I mean by definitely more than 50% of the revenue coming from at yeah so so can we start here or do we want to do uh Round Up of the second G second no no I guess let's finish that placements here yeah let's let's let's continue with the with the ads and how is that how does that look look how how

unprepared he is no he's getting up to my par here by the way one new thing that I that I find like very interesting I've never seen before well before I before I uh yeah forget it they added this new currency called skip itss skip which means with skippit you can get the rewards without watching the video what yeah I saw that yeah and you can buy that yeah so you you they don't sell you the possibility to completely skip the rewarded that they give you the energy to skip them yeah they have a unique take on this and collect them all as well that I want to talk about later on but yeah so uh yeah mob control uh like by the way REM do you think the session lengths are longer in mob control than they are in collec Bal or like do you think they're about the same I guess they pretty much about the same I think collect all is longer yeah I think so too that's the feeling I got at least when when you force to think there like here you don't really need to think is

more of like action baced so but think about it from the audience point of view this is male oriented game 604 colle all is female 6040 and the other is also 6040 but female male I checked it man who plays like who plays this game 6040 I told you male female 6040 think about how wrong those data platforms are to everything man this is how we work yeah so so basically so m control has ERS and reward videos banners that I personally haven't seen yet but Remo has uh shown in the video and said that they absolutely do exist already since day one I haven't seen him and it's been day four so that means they do some kind of segmentation which is interesting uh so basically I'm assuming here that they're also doing a 30 second refresh rate Remo would you say that's true uh yeah I counted like 20 seconds but there was the same Banner that keeps refreshing itself so I probably somewhere there so inter pop up with a

shorter like duration compared to collect them all so here I give inters probably an imp out of around 3.2 uh on the rewarded side I got to say like uh I love the in-game power up placement because you have two rewarded ad slots that can give upgrades for every game like every game play that you play clever sneaky placement which is very Voodoo like instead of just doing one for the whole level they're like no you need to do two two and that's perfect right so like you know that's probably going to convert super well so I probably estimate here that rewarded video in that was around five and Banners if it's true what Remo is saying I would probably put this at about 50 uh ow and basically ad view array is a bit lower probably since they're actually doing some kind of segmentation so that brings us to a grand total based on the da which could be completely fugazi yeah based on other ones we're doing so I'll stti with the ecpm and the

impel stuff but like the DU is really where we've been I've been shot in the foot lately uh which brings us to a grand total of 115k a day which is 55% of this game's Revenue which is also based on NAA Revenue which could be wrong but what we're seeing in our two least favorite data tools yeah are these numbers that we're basing this on uh yeah but you have the like 2 1.2 million a month in one tool and then what like 500k in the other one yeah so so overall admon score I would give probably a nine out of 10 for this one it makes a lot of sense it's still good uh what's missing here is like I'll get on to that when we talk about collec all but why why they're not hitting like top numbers okay okay 55% all right well I can I can continue with theway on on this game and honestly it's like super [ __ ] boring uh about I mean I I've I know I mentioned it like million times

before but this is actually true like in this case like this is just nothing they yeah they have the creative it's not fake man and this is the thing like the hypercal looks perfect it looks terrible but I guess like that's how that's why it works I mean this is just but okay whatever almost you know all the time you're seeing the same same [ __ ] game playay like uh there's the the slide there's this and I can actually show show that as well but anyway so thanks to the hyper casual visual style they're getting I guess like pretty interesting install numbers so they picked around like 10 million installs in February now it declined to what like six million which is still I mean pretty good right six six million not 60 six six million six million there earning something between 1.2 to 1.5 million Millions a month and uh where is this Revenue actually coming from exactly us 90% is us and then we have Japan

which is like six like 5% or something thing uh and then Germany and then Canada like all the other the1 countries but it's like it's super small it's almost like non-existent at least on on IP side but I I would assume it's very similar on on ads right so in terms of uh of UA Channel mix think about it there the classic uh mix Google appla iron Source integral digital turbine that what I what I found on Facebook so I was looking only at last 30 days because when I was checking last 90 days like almost like nothing was really relevant anymore because Unity was really big in in April now it's dead same thing happened to Tik Tok and vangal so it's it just died in May so I guess also that's why we see such a big drop uh in downloads after March April so they P like few a few networks

so the biggest channel is Google but the only thanks to the like burst of fyles in the beginning of June and then we have APPL obviously like APPL is just killing it almost like cross the second second biggest like I heard now the second biggest bigger than Facebook on mobile yeah yeah yeah yeah definitely and uh in terms of creatives well well well well looks like [ __ ] which means the cpis are super low I guess so uh you know so when you say [ __ ] it looks [ __ ] but it performs amazing yeah turning [ __ ] into gold three question yeah do you think they have the same or let's say very similar CPI when they launched 2021 and now after the hybrid casual pivot how how how how more bigger than it is it's not about H hybrid casual pivot it's all about uh the the two years been between M so what would it's just the hybrid casual afterwards doesn't doesn't matter at all it just the creatives didn't make any different

like they didn't change at least like it's still the same same visual style the same gameplay everything is the same it's just like they don't show all these like uh meta game features in the ads anyway so like they show it a little bit in the play blads here and there but nothing else so so so would you would you consider the the lifetime of the CP value would be the same even without this H hybrid casual pivot it would be the same yes exactly the hybrid casual pivot does like that influence the CPI yeah no effect that that's my assumption but uh again like in terms of Concepts like hyper hyper casual mechanics who would said that so you see these Gates and then all of these but that's it basically let let me actually share the screen uh yakob so this is it I mean it looks exactly like the game finally I know finally oh man turn that down I had drinks [Laughter]

yesterday man it's just it's exactly the same here you see the different background the game I also want to have the machine gun Cannon why I don't have it in the game ah there alter game altered game play no they have they have machine gun it's a second gun no but you don't heal the sound of machine gun and it doesn't like behave like that that again here look can hear yeah that's the that's the only fun part that I on the creative like the sound but then yeah nothing else uh which brings me into this that was kind of at least little funny so again yeah is that a this is a playable this is a playable looks like from the sausage movie it's the sausage movie with Rick and Morty face from the pi yeah

pii and then they have this which was a little bit uh blocked afterward do you hear the sound just much worse than the machine gun exactly yeah yeah so the machine gun was actually pretty pretty good then you have these upgrades and that's the old build we can see it right in the creative yeah that's the old hyper casual build all hyper casual build and they are using it in the in the playables the playable was just uh stuck it was just never ending but I have the question if uh afterwards if you pay attention to this playable as well also I I usually get these questions like oh well we have new build so should we use uh should we stop using the old uh old build creatives I like maybe maybe no like but it doesn't represent the game like yeah but you know like if who cares about representing games it's not about like who cares about representing the game it's just like if something works then uh why would you kill it that's the

thing so this is happening all I look so I I just try to you know uh finish the finish the playable but nothing was happening uh and then we have this again so nothing really that exciting but if it works like works it's spr sping yeah of course does it have to be exciting if it works oh sure of course yeah of course that's I don't care it's just uh exciting is the stuff that works actually uh yeah and we have these like uh few other creatives and this is exact exactly the same thing all over again the gates the tube here and then different background that makes me a little bit easy because this is just moving but uh you actually lose never lost in the game that's the thing that's the thing like they showcase a lot of

defeat in the in the creatives and just watch this as I said like you can only lose if you forget using mat or like stop aiming or whatever or you get dlex before I get messages that I'm mean I have dyslexia so it's okay so okay so I can I can stop uh screen sharing because that's that's basically basically it right so the question is if you pay attention uh could you see the the IQ feature in the playable or the good old Einstein in the yeah no it was a it it was on the top of the creative really yeah it was on the top of the creative so you know they they they trying to to use some some like good old tricks from the other

game uh which you know brings me to collect them all because oh well no no before I uh before no no no no we will do the the sandwich thing where I just talk about the the creatives and then we we can we can do should we not talk about the game before we talk about the creativ no no we talk about the UA all right okay yeah yeah and then like so I may even my rating obviously it's 3.5 maximum just like out of 10 yeah it's just did you Maven ma rating that's what I always say that's what I always say you should pay attention usually actually pay attention to me very humble well okay let's jump to the to the collect them all creatives uh uh since we are in in the creative section which made me laugh so much actually so good old Einstein here as well and mainly in the playables uh but you know I'm not sure what what happened there I couldn't play couldn't couldn't finish the the playable there in the the collect all

but okay whatever please guys fix it maybe it could improve the performance or maybe it was just uh stuck on one of the data tools we use uh anyway since collect dem all is I think still Scot more towards female audience at least that's assp yeah you said it as well we are seeing two things in the creatives and we already discussed it in the in the previous podcast so could you guys guess what it is in the female oriented creat you like freezing woman pregnancy whatever something something almost almost try try again try again starving something dying Jesus no but we talked about it when uh we were uh discussing triple tile old people and IQ elements and all these so this time yeah we have an upgrade because they use some weird

female voice talking about your IQ and laughing at you were when you fail so let's yeah let me yeah yeah don't worry I'm just gonna yeah I'm gonna show whole Shad the making fun of people failing I know right it's just uh it's weird so okay let's uh and I will I will show you okay one second I will start I will start with this one so apparently only the people with the IQ over 180 can Sol this one uh can you I it's great like how how his IQ keeps going down so apparently only the people with IQ over can this IQ I who is this guy that's the thing like yeah so this is this is first creative look at the

the amazing iteration oh the same guy with blue shirt and we are not over yet there's the same guy with green shirt amazing it's perfect it's just I it made me laugh so so much have to stop and think for the industry we like by see what if we switch shirt color you see that he draws it with the other end of the pencil the one that not supposed to throw it I didn't even yeah I didn't even pay attention who we can here so hello hello so apparently wait is our we saw her before this is the good good old grandma from RoR and triple tile the one that I that we use in our cre but she she's not real right like this is AI right 100% this is stuck this is professional creative it's not fake creative actor

it's just like it's stock in stock bank which you can buy and you can use it how whatever you like and this this was way before any AI uh type of thing so they should give you warnings before you send your identity to the database where you end up yeah you know uh apparently you know it works quite uh quite well but uh what I see in the creatives and you can see it in here as well good good old good Einstein and brain as well people with IQ over can do you see like what's happening here it's the same weird voice the same gameplay just different background still Einstein for some reason I'm just like but what's Einstein if you knew this Al his face next to something says Noob beginner pen he's turning in the in the and then also they have this celebrities again what's your I yeah this is something that uh again IQ and then there you go

well he yeah what's your IQ but then what's your IQ what's your IQ yeah what's your IQ man you know what's really interesting yeah they have these in the game playay only people once every 10 levels or five or whatever levels you have this one you know that it's fake creative game play because you can skip it with an ad that's every every game standard that we put there playable you can it if you don't want to but we want to bait all the other players in the metime yeah so the thing is uh they definitely are copying the triple do guys because uh or at least like their creative strategy triple tile especially a little bit of voku as well with the celebrity IQ creatives they use it quite a lot and heavily in in Boku and like this is look second or third game I see the exact the same the thing is like this is the same [ __ ] footage like

they just they just took it from their ads uh so I guess you know learning from the best learning from what works I would say or what works yeah uh and on the other hand like this game makes less money than mob control at least on iip S side uh but I will get there in a second in terms of the the UA Channel mix uping again again so you guys are killing it everywhere very good job let's see what happens after fingerprinting is dead um we can talk there a lot of turmoil in the market right now we should talk about that next week it's just yeah oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah a lot of [ __ ] is happening so uh so you know there is the new new creative which stay taking over the whole spend on appla the Mr old man with the green shirt no blue shirt no red shirt the green shirt that's the you know that's the best performer it brings out his eyes it's clearly the best one like I thought so too didn't not think that yeah he wears a green shirt yeah don't

make fun of my dad [Music] guys okay back back to to the U Channel mix the top one spender by far uplo in the last 30 days and then we have uh unity and other channels like Google Facebook even Snapchat here and there and iron stores and Tik Tok so I guess like um except some fun and experimentation in Creative it's not as great as I originally thought but because the game is making what like 500k on a month on iips with the best months ever for downloads now in June it's around like 4 point uh 3.4 million which is I guess I don't know like this is way more competitive genre right right um but still yeah I would say MAV May mate rating for this one humble MAV mate humble MAV M uh it's like four out of 10 maybe uh for the creatives and the the U to be honest like this is a little bit of a cross into casual rather than hybrid casual

because it it looks like a kind of Puzzler it behaves like a Puzzler it has a Puzzler meta so it like kind of is a Puzzler to be honest yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's like it's not that easy uh to scale this I mean like 3.4 million a month is not bad number though so yeah but you know you can go high we had Tri match 3D just like few weeks ago very true yeah very true yeah yeah yeah very true so yeah you can you can continue uh the the history lesson Mr yob um not really much to it because these guys okay thank you very much that's over second so so this game isn't that let's say complex on meta game if I could even say it yeah uh but what they had before is that they had the basic corn gaml of you kind of playing the line match here where you can you know line stuff together and you need to at least line three it's like not match

three it's like line three or you could say you can go diagonally sometimes and like you know do like a very big combo it's kind of pretty satisfying so all around very good game play core gameplay and then uh when we look at the older build this is a video from 2021 you see they had pretty much nothing there they had some events they had some kind offers or whatever but you see like the bottom so they launched in June 21 2 [Music] 221 and uh yeah the game was kind of barebones at that point so it's two two years old game long as I said like I think they have a team at Voodoo that's pretty much only task is to convert the revenue of the older games into I dude like why why do you think I just said it in the beginning it's two game yeah it's two teams one is like launching new games and the other one is just duct taping this meta game meta whatever features on the top hyper so if you look at the game now uh we can see that there's the usual kind

of decoration meta game where you complete levels you earn these like whatever it is called Paint sticks and then when you have those you can have the usual like illusion of choice choose between three different colored walles which one we locked even behind an ad why not and then you can continue and there's the usual kind of gold currency soft currency lives offers boost and everything so he's pretty much like a beh like a Puzzler so that there's nothing to I think a lot of people interact with the meta game here cuz like that's my Curious was CU it's not you don't really have to like I've seen as I as I know personally a lot of Guardian Scapes players they just have like 700 stars in their inventory sitting there doing nothing yeah it's the same here it's not it's not blocking anything I guess it adds a little bit of retention in The Meta game because otherwise they wouldn't do it and you you see a similar mechanic within the mob control where you also have this

kind of visual Base building but it's also kind of fake it's more of like something visually is being done in behind the scenes on Rails so it's okay but yeah I guess it's it's a little bit of touch especially for someone that like expects more from a game to be completely barebone so that's there but yeah the core gamep playay seems kind of very very easy very intuitive uh they also have banners directly in the game play so so so this one's a little bit kind of more aggressive there but yeah I guess that's that's good this game definitely didn't went through that much iteration yet or or maybe I'm just not seeing it because it's all behind this kind of events metag game features that that are kind of hard to unlock through like playing the game only for some time so probably they have the full-fledged uh kind of feature set that people match 3D has so you know all the puzzles chests like bonus levels as I said they have the fake creat playables put within the game play so you find those you have the hard hard levels whatever something

like that so I guess it's making pretty nice money uh actually they're scaling pretty high recently if I understand correctly they have like 3.6 million just for May downloads which is the highest one so they're still going up 3.4 yeah just for for June this is the top uh top uh top month but I just uh I just wanted to check like how the retention looks like and man it sucks it's just like how can you even you know SC when you have day 60 like 1% so that's but isn't it because the you know the volume is so big so it SKS it down n it's so mob control is 1% day 60 uh collect them all is 4% Day Day 60 on iOS and Google Play yeah it's 3% and 2% on day 60 not again ex US ah there you go yeah will they get fed will they get fed no no no blueberries Only One download the game to save their lives

yeah first you need to un FR them play come on guys like come on guys yeah Jesus he terrible yeah but as I said like uh this is a much much let's less less uh like or say more shallow iteration I guess there will still add more stuff to it but yeah not really that much that you can add to this kind of gameplay it's just being limited by the gameplay itself and this is this is by the way one of the main things with hybrid casual you really cannot slap a gacha based economy on everything you really cannot slap like multiple game modes multiple whatever health and damage mechanic you need to have a metag game framework to do that yeah but it's it's will help you help you the thing is that core gameplay needs to be compatible with it if your com core gameplay isn't compatible with it you you can't do it like I've seen people trying to put gacha on poker or YSI or or like all these other things that it just won't work or like chess yeah it

won't work same as it would not work here propably because there's audience mismatch but the other thing is that core gam play won't support it and this to me is the biggest kind of a Mastery of this whole thing like being able to create these connectors between the meta game and the core game plan that enables you to have that meta game and have that spend depth and have that progression blah blah blah and all these things and this is really hard to to do and to build so are you saying not every game can be turned into hybrid casual no not every game not every game unfortunately sorry all of you who think that after watching this video you can turn every hyper casual game to hybrid casual no you can't and Voodoo is trying and we just covered the two games that were able to do it in all of their portfolio yeah and for now yeah for now but it's also quite interesting like if you look at these two games and if you would have shown me these games three years ago and basically said oh yeah Voodoo made them I wouldn't have believed you like it's so different from

like the Helix jumps so it's still you know big shift this one I wouldn't believe you the the collect them all but but mob control I would definely yeah but the thing is again like in even in the hyper hyper casual gen there was Evolution going from Helix Chum to mob control what else mob control like there like what like two or three iterations in between uh there are all these like um not even Helix jump like games but then more advanced more almost like an idle games but more hyper hyper casual you had these restaurants things and and shopping mall 3D and whatever else that was like already like a little bit deeper than as not the ASMR ASMR slicing even yes that's there you go always have to mention it's like people who do crossfits they can't stop talking it wasn't me it wasn't me it was yaku mentioned it I even I forgot about the the Asm Mar slicing you never forget about it you dream about it yeah exactly every time yeah so so how's the

ads here looking Felix yeah in terms of AD placements there's still everything you'd expect from a voodooo title uh there's interstitials banners and rewarded vindo uh the interesting thing here between the two titles you can quickly notice that the adarp out probably is much higher in uh in here compared to mob control because it cost me $9.99 to remove ads and collect them all and in mob control it cost $2.99 so um yeah also a cool feature that collect all has is that if you finish all quests you get two hours free of ad free gameplay which is very yeah I haven't seen that like it's a it's very nice interesting thing I can't believe Remo didn't mention it yeah probably I didn't he didn't pay attention to to playing those games because uh he plays Diablo all the [ __ ] time not anymore because there no more content to play how good would it be rewarded out in Diablo this feeling it's the grave

anyway yeah so interesting collect seem to pop up every now and then after levels playing about four or five levels you typically see two intertial ads so I'd say Ad viewer rate is about 70% with 3.0 interstitials per Dau on the rewarded side which is more interesting I see a lot of rewarded placements uh the one I like the most is spin the wheel that you can do four times uh per day for rewarded videos very good there's the more lives for rewarded ads play on if you lose a level unlock like Decor in The Meta game piggy bank boost list goes on and on and on and on uh the point is that this game is heavy on the rewarded adside uh which is really kind of the typical opposite of an admon strategy that you saw on typical hyper casual games where traditionally you saw heavy interent and banner usage uh for rewarded video it depends a bit how much you act interact with meta gameplay but I reckon here that you're seeing anywhere between four to five

Impressions per deu on average so this brings us on to banners so Banners are shown during the core gameplay during kind of the matching process uh and here's the thing that puzzles me a bit so I sat you know in my little admon dungeon with my little timer watch and it seems here that Banner refresh rate is on 30 seconds which is very surprising to me so normally for a game like this I expected to be 15 even 10 or 20 uh just feels like they're leaving a lot of banner revenue on the table like you know they could be leaving you know 100% of the banner revenue on the table if it's 15 seconds right so I reckon the average session length correct me here if you disagree was about 15 to 20 minutes what do you think yeah depends like what what can stop you by the way like do I run out of lives here even not really and never been an issue like yeah it's not hard it's not hard like even the hard levels

are not that hard like easy never saw anything like super hard the the thing is that uh usual sessions when I've seen these kind of games are like 10 minutes average that that's like hard data but yeah yeah so this brings us to a ground total so about 40 or 50 baners per user i' would say maybe even 60 but not with that refresh rate uh that brings us to a grand total for all ad units uh basic combined about 39K a day uh or 48% of the total revenue big caveat here is you know I AP numbers could be incorrect lately we've been like we said we've been screwed a bit uh overall admon score uh I'd give seven out of 10 simply just because of that Banner refresh rate uh on 30 seconds like it doesn't make any sense to me uh like zero so the only way would make sense to me is if they're on admob mediation in which case I'll probably even give their score lower if they actually are because being so

heavily reliant on video inventory it makes absolutely no sense to be on admon admob mediation because essentially they're really strong on banners but yeah on the other mediations you typically get a higher ad ar. boost for video inventory so yeah and so I think uh uh you got that Ma math little bit wrong because I think they're making like 17K a day on inaps if uh 22 okay depends on where you look yeah okay the Delta between the different uh the different numbers here was quite big so but still if if they make 40K on ads and then 20K on on inaps then it's not 40 so basically I got the inup from from from Remo from our least favorite data tool favorite so but it's still I would say it's more skewed towards in know adss okay yeah so I was like 640 May yeah let let me Al do around here from uh realist Remo uh so the rating for is

that the happy one or is that the negative one is the realistic one the old one the old one 70 years old uh yeah so so I'm not going to rate the games I'm going to rate the transition so mob control yeah mob control I think is actually pretty good even though we know that like HBY can do it like three times better but still like yeah don't compare to compare to I still think it's something like solid seven out of 10 I think it's pretty good and of course it makes a lot of money so why complain I guess still a little bit more could be done or there's like other design vectors that could be added that I think like a different mode or like more squeezing the engagement here and there which I share share share an example example like similar which just making those like those uh different choices actually matter matter yeah it's just the gacha doesn't gacha is pretty much an illusion here and I would definitely like to see some kind of trial mode here or whatever additional alternative mode where I no social features no social features exactly actually there's a

social feature don't sorry there's a social feature because there's the Revenge mechanic it's social yeah okay yeah so but this is but you didn't mention the social features that's that's surprising I would expect social features in this game always it's I guess they they they did whatever they could like as I said seven out of 10 and here um I would say less man they will hate me so much for my score I say less because it was not that big of addition it's just like the usual kind of Playbook but to be honest there's nothing much less or much more to add here like what what again maybe social features but they have some kind of letters here already they have the the leaing here and like at least some of the social features there are there like it's not really much that you can do with this kind of core gameplay it's more of like how much you can uh throw at your liveops that's that's the thing rather than like throwing on like additional features here so I was still say like seven seven out of 10 yeah pretty good you know what I think is just like

slapping and duct taping all of these like uh new features on the top of the game it's just like it's not adding any value what do you mean it's just like it's there control yeah it's just there it's like okay so now what now you can spend on it yeah oh yeah that's it yeah okay but in in uh Survivor iio actually makes sense right it's just uh that's like it's adding value to the to the whole yeah it's as I said that's why not 10 or like some kind of bigger value because 10 would be comparing something like snaker the previous build and then snaker the release build the releas version that that's like additional things here but yeah I guess Voodoo has a long way before them in order to be able to do things like HBY hubby does but yeah we'll see but would you say this is a good start I would say this is a pretty good start but uh yeah okay let's end on the positive note and let's revisit this exact thing in like a year and see what this progressed we're going to do

no I want to revisit like the maybe we can revisit this uh uh in a year also look at the new games they are going to launch as well yeah yeah we're definitely going to do a review of their like portfolio I status and see what what's what's driving their I and we can compare this to a different hybrid casual hyper casual coing hybrid casual Studio yes story uh which we do with say games in the upcoming weeks because that's uh been coming up in the like discussions as well yeah let's do that next uh we have a different things to cover next because as you said like it's a lot of [ __ ] happening around us uh in the whole industry so we need we want to just discuss that Diablo and Diablo and play Diablo of course let's let's end on the positive note yeah let's end the positive note uh thank you very much for uh for listening please share the podcast with your friends colleagues dogs and cats

obviously and subs don't forget to subscribe uh thank you very much again uh we love you yeah don't forget your Vex and C see you OHA cheers [Music] byebye is it Happ is the new Guru but like want to be heavy copier because the game has like what like 100 of a performance of Survivor IO or what yeah exactly I mean it's just it's like almost non-existent you can gacha now okay guys let's save this for the this is [ __ ] fun [ __ ] let's just you know into it like this I [Music]