Guest Host Trio Debates Marvel Snap

Welcome to all. We're going to talk about Marvel Snap. Today the regular hosts of the show are unavailable, so I have recruited the DOF Avengers. Introducing first, one of the most successful user acquisition specialist in the world. Now he's in the Maldives, so that's how successful he is. He's the host of two and a half gamers show where they did an excellent reconstruction of Marvel Snap launch and marketing. The man who beats user acquisition into submission, Matej. How are you doing? Very good. Thank you very much. So if you hear weird noises from the background, it's because I'm sitting well, I'm lying on the beach in Maldives. So thank you very much for having me on the show. I tried to enjoy talking about Snap. And on the other corner, hailing from the frozen wastes of Stockholm,

is a veteran game economist. He's been in EA, Amazon Games, Scopely among others. Now a game economic consultant. He also did an excellent analysis of Marvel Snap at gameeconomicconsulting.com. The prodigy of game economy, Philip Black. Oh god, stop you. I'm doing great. I would say I started to become a little bit worse when I came on this podcast and I'm now looking at the Maldives on this video screen and then I look out here in Stockholm. It's another great day. I'm questioning my life choices, but you know, we'll survive. Yeah. And last but not least, the voice that you're hearing, which is not Ethan with a flu. It's Javier Barnes, a professional grafter and game designer. I've done a little bit of everything. You can find, by the way, links to the contents of these two amazing guys Um, and content done by myself in the latest blog post

in the constructor fund where we talk about I talk actually about Marvel Snap and should be released by the time that you're hearing this. So check it out. Um, today we're going to talk about Marvel Snap. This is a mobile card collection game by Second Dinner the new studio founded by several veterans from Hearthstone. This game launched globally about two months ago after soft launch of three months. And correct me if wrong, but the launch numbers seem unprecedented for a CCG. If we look at the list of the major KPIs, so that's like 9 million downloads, about 12 millions in downloads in in two months which are numbers that are fairly high for a game of this genre in mobile. Um, so first question, who are Second Dinner? Who are these guys? Well, before we start, Javier, the intro of us, you put us as a

as a B team from the bench. Come on. No, no, no. We're the Avengers. We're the Avengers. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. That's that's better. All right, so so based on the on the LinkedIn research that I've done before, it looks like there like there's 60 people on LinkedIn at least. So I guess that's the company size. And I think that's really lean organization. At least that's that's my opinion. I mean, I usually do these LinkedIn background checks to understand better like the the company situation and like the experience they have in different fields from you know, the game design, the UA or the marketing point of view and and just everything. Just understand. So do you know guys that when you say that it's really lean, Do it's a small team? Because like that seems huge. 60 people for a startup company. Well, I mean they scale. They scale, too. Remember they they've been cooking

for I think it's around 4 years now. So, they've been scaling. I mean, I still remember the original pictures Ben Brode, who is the design director, would post leaving the Hearthstone team sitting on a couch saying, "Hey, we're starting something special here." And I think, you know, those funding rounds have certainly helped grow their head count. So, 60 60 feels like a good exit velocity for game of the scale to get out and live. I don't know. I don't think that's fat for a for a mobile game these days. They're They're not in an expensive location, though. Right? Well, I mean, California looks expensive everywhere. Yeah. Of course, but still like in terms of like lean organization, I meant not like super um let's say like heavy in terms of like management layers because I've seen game designers and marketing and then devs. That's it, basically. Not like senior manager or whatever. So, I guess, you know, there are some people in the marketing, some some game designers, and then the

founder team, and that's it. That's what I meant. Yeah, so it's kind of This is a very interesting topic because uh they do seem like a very game design driven company, right? Like Yeah. Ben Brode historically, which is the uh I guess the ultimate boss of that company. Uh he's a very into game design. Um do you think that may have influenced uh some of the decisions? Uh both The the three of us in our uh different contents have agreed that monetization looks kind of um uh it looks kind of weak. Um I think we have different degrees of how negative we are towards that. Um but do you think that, um, that may be a deliberate strategy that they or is um, something that they have inherited from coming from HD and premium um, and being so design-driven and maybe

not enough product-driven? I mean, I I kind of group a lot of what's happening at kind of ex-Riot and ex-Blizzard companies in kind of the same bucket. You know, they're they're similar cultures in that, you know, if you're to join these companies it very much becomes a lifestyle. There's a campus. There's a lot of things going on. You build your social life around it. And so, I think you adopt a lot of those principles when you leave the company and you go to start your own companies and we've seen a lot of ex-Rioters do this and I think this is the first one we've seen from ex-Blizzard um, veterans. I think Frost Giant is the other one that's making an RTS and you know, they're pivoting to a genre or excuse me, I think really making a mobile game which they haven't done before. So, not only do you have, I think, Blizzard's views on monetizations which which I think are kind of well-known. They're they're soft. Um, you know, they have a very different view and I think you're also looking at, you know, an HD developer that hasn't dealt with direct mobile monetization yet which feels like a a pretty strong uh a culture that they're carrying forward at least so far. That being

said, you know, I see product managers. I see product managers listed on their company page and you know, I know we'll be talking about monetization later, but I can only imagine that a lot of the internal conversations are between product and between design. But uh, from what you said, not only yes, so it's not only in terms of the the product and game design like the the marketing department uh, of the company like what like how many people work in that department? What do you think? You just guess. I know the number, but I watch you show. Yeah, of course you know the number. But, initially initially I thought it was only one person, but then I was corrected on the DOFs like obviously where we had the discussion about the game and about the the show and everything and then it's actually two people. But they have limited your experience. So, you know, like if you are launching a mobile game like

with this like IP and most probably like with like very big amount of budget in in mind, then you definitely need to have like I either a partner who is going to run the the UA operations or a very skilled team. And yeah, thanks to the different news and conversations we had in Slack channels, then now we all understand like the UA is done by the the publisher New Verse. And from the outside, it doesn't look that well. I think we will get to it. Um actually, I think we can enter start now to talk more about the game and one of the key things would be to talk about the launch. As Philip already mentioned, the game had been under works for quite a while for they they I think at least I've been hearing that the game has been in development for about 4 years, maybe more.

Um and before it globally launched, it had a soft launch. I actually um don't show any of these data on on the article just because I think it's more interesting to discuss the global launch, but one thing that I found quite interesting about the soft launch was that first it was pretty short. It was only 3 months of soft launch where Uh which kind of sounds weird to me because I mean to really assess ROAS like in this type of genre where the I assume that the CPI is pretty high. I would assume that that takes way more than 3 months. Um in 3 months maybe you can find like maybe I don't know, promising KPIs or something. It's not about the uh like how what kind of KPIs you can you can find. It's about like how and uh like what how the KPIs measure over time. And with 3 months what what do we have? Not not that much because uh it takes time to actually check all the technical stuff that you have in the game, then

try to check the retention, then move to monetization KPIs. And it's like 3 months super short. I mean usually or and ideally you are in the soft launch anywhere between 6 to 9 months to actually see from the monetization point of view like how those cohorts measure over time and like what kind of LTV or ROAS curve you can expect after global launch. Yeah. Actually um one thing that for example interests me that perhaps was missing in soft launch is they have not yet proven the uh or not experienced the uh flow of release of new content, right? And they actually kind of pivoted that uh quite a bit because they were like few months but very intense. Um, I remember they um had this Nexus event uh with Mhm. some sort of loot boxes. Uh I don't know and and that didn't work out. They actually removed it. Then they now have are going for something completely

different. They launched They launched with something and now they're they're bumping up another thing. But I'm not sure if Philip, you want to maybe talk a little bit more about this Nexus event with what it was. Well, maybe let's talk a little bit about the soft launch period. You know, I think the soft launch period is interesting. I actually wonder if they should have stayed longer to fit in more features. I don't necessarily know if getting a read on ROAS is a good opportunity in soft launch. Mostly because you you don't have your UA creative optimized. So you're not really getting a good read of CPIs. You're generally operating in countries that aren't your majority market. You know, it might be Australia. You know, in live that might be 2% of your revenue, who knows? And I would say the other piece is that monetization is so there's so much variance in monetization that I think it's hard to draw predictive analysis between what you see in soft launch and what you see in live, especially when there's so many things are changing. And so, it feels like the new model is just a test for retention. And like that would be my guess here is

that they were testing for retention. I think perhaps the other thing is you remember, you know, there's a lot of HD background here. They're used to very big brand marketing spend budgets. You know, it's not as much of a LTV minus UA equals equals revenue equation. And so, you know, they may have just been testing for retention and say, "Hey, let's get this thing out the door." Similar to the experience they had in Hearthstone. And they From what I can tell, they spent a lot of money on brand marketing, you know? You know, it doesn't seem that there was a ton of performance stuff. I would love to have known more about their budget breakdown, but it felt like brand marketing was a really big piece of this game. Yeah. Interestingly, they don't even start me on the on the soft launch because I think we can have a very spicy discussion on that. And maybe I will just actually invite you to to and a half gamers to to talk about that because here I think they might have tried different monetization tactics that like Javier actually suggested because they tried loot boxes. The community really hated it. So, they

switched to something else, which obviously they liked, but they switched it to like, you know, earn less money, I guess. Yeah. Interestingly, the soft launch data if you compare um the revenue per download uh to and even total revenue and downloads with other uh CCG titles like Magic the the Arena, it's not that different. But then that has nothing to do with uh the the data that they generated in Australia, any of these games have nothing to do with the data that they are generating in the US. So, I completely agree with your point, Philip, that they probably were looking for uh retention, not really monetization KPIs. Um So, then we jump into the um launch. And um yeah, as we said, in the launch uh they've gotten a lot of downloads,

like huge flow of downloads. It has now gone down, though. It has the number has normalized. Um They uh have they have made about uh 12 million in revenue in 2 months. That pretty much sets them in uh bit of an intermediate cate- uh point in um revenue per download in the CCG genre. Um actually a bit low compared to Magic the Gathering Arena, Hearthstone, and other And if if we go for mobile-first CCG games, it's even even lower. Um And uh I want to uh make some questions to you, Mate, on uh user acquisition. Um Yeah. Cuz on your uh show, you talk a lot about like that you think the game is not preferable, that the UA doesn't really make make sense, like the

numbers do not make sense. And um they probably are spending too much for you for user to acquire users that they're not going to be able to pay back. Um but I wanted to ask if does the math change if we take into account a sig- significant volume of organics and brand marketing? because my assumption is like I think this looks a bit similar to maybe cases like Brawl Stars where maybe if you look at the revenue per dollar it doesn't it doesn't really make sense but if you take into account the traction that they're getting in downloads and in place from other sources that are not paid the math that that actually becomes a profitable game. Not sure if we're in this situation here. Well like how does the math changes? I mean if you spend more but it doesn't reflect in the revenues but only on the the number of downloads. Like how does that math changes? Okay, it changes but it's actually even more unprofitable than

than on the other side of things. Yeah, but my point is um is it possible that although paid user acquisition isn't good like programmatic UA isn't isn't good um actually if we take into account the ECPI the game works well and they maybe just need to uh invest in other types of marketing. Like content creators. Sure, I know I know what you mean but uh usually these uh these activities even on in the in on the brand side of things have a big impact on downloads and then on the revenues afterwards. But the revenue stayed flat until the season changed which was a big spike and then it decreased again to to some level of uh stable daily revenues. So like it looks like from the start when I was commenting on the the global launch UA strategy

there was a huge spend or at least like huge um share of impressions on Facebook, Google and then like basically every channel out there. I have my comments on that but every channel on every channel basically. Now it changed after like three or four weeks. And uh now I see only the impressions on on Google, Facebook, and then here and there some like Apple Search Ads, and iron and maybe Twitter. So, that changed a lot, but thing is like you usually do these like big bursts, so then you can scale down, but revenue is increasing over time. So, that that was the playbook which was applied in 2014. Usually, you spend heavily in the first 2 weeks, then you scale down, and then you see the the the revenue increasing over time because you stack up the the revenue. And that's not happening. That's just not happening here at all.

It's actually on the right like like the the opposite direction. So, the revenue was flat here and there. Season changed. Now it looks like the scale down, and revenue is scaling down as well. So, something is not working. Yeah, I I would maybe argue that I don't see the revenue going down though. Like the revenue is flat, which it's the downloads that are decreasing significantly, but the revenue is kind of It depends on what what tool you are looking at. All right. Uh but when it when it comes to revenue, what I've seen is that it has plateaued basically. And it had a spike with the release of a new season which introduced the new battle pass and like a bunch of in-game content to acquire. Um what what it is true is that the flow of downloads is not translating into uh it yeah, a constant growth of on total revenue. Um but at least my analysis has been in the

direction of Okay, if if the revenues is remaining more or less flat despite the downloads going down pretty fast, that probably means that the game has pretty good at least short-term retention. And I'm thinking here on another game that we analyzed at the Constructor Fun, which was Pokémon Unite, which also had like a even bigger burst of sta- early downloads, but the revenue was one-one linked with the downloads. So, when the downloads went down, the revenue immediately went down, which probably indicated that the game didn't have very good retention. And it only monetized the beginning from tourists, basically. Do you think this is Philip, do you think this is the case here, or you think What do you think about the retention? I You know, I'm not quite sure yet. I mean, I would This game isn't your traditional mobile free-to-play game, right? It's from HD developers. There is not a strong sense

of vertical progression, like you would have in Clash Royale. You're not just getting better, right? Your card collection is horizontal, and this is something I'm sure we can talk about, you know, in terms of the game design. But again, if you if you contrast this with Clash Royale, Clash Royale's main mode of progression is ranked. It's just gaining trophies, and you gain trophies by winning and losing. And so, that ends up going to a much smaller portion of Marvel Snap. Ranked is a much smaller portion of your ability to progress. And Clash Royale can do that because they have all these RPG-like mechanics, right? You can take a card, you can give it plus 20 health. You can't do that in Marvel Snap. And so, with such a long, you know, horizontal collection mechanic in Marvel Snap, you know, that's not something we're used to in free-to-play. And we know vertical progression retains people. People want to win. And so, if you have a guaranteed relationship between the time I invest and my ROI in terms of win probability, I think it's an incredibly strong charac- carrot to

keep players around. And this is going for a very traditional CCG, which is about puzzle solving. And Ben Brode came out and and mentioned this on Twitter, and I agree with him that I think to me the best CCGs are the ones that put you in bizarre positions that you need to problem solve. That is how they get flow going. And they've chosen to go that route. And so, I wonder if this is just going to be a different audience than your traditional free-to-play product. I think we're already seeing that. Like, this is a more traditional HD audience. You know, they might play Apex Legends. They might play Call of Duty. I don't think they're logging in to Game of War or to Clash of Clans. I think this is going to end up being a Hearthstone audience that is finally trying to pick up mobile for the first time or probably has dated mobile for a little bit and and might be looking for a longer term relationship. So, I would say, you know, I think there might be short-term retention problems. You know, to me, I'm not so concerned about the downloads going down. They did a brand marketing campaign, you know, a PM I worked with called it the scorched-earth strategy. They're trying to build a war chest of DAU that they can monetize later on once they get their monetization into a

better place. I'm not sounding the the alarms yet. I think they're going to be fine. I think that they are going to find a really long-tail retention cohort that is going to be into this game. I'm not I'm not so concerned yet. Yeah, I agree with bunch of your points. Uh definitively, uh I don't think that they have a retention problem. I actually think that the short-term retention is pretty is probably pretty good. Uh which is the why the uh revenue is is uh pretty much stable despite downloads going down. So, I think that points out to solid retention. There is the doubt of long-term retention, of course, cuz the game just hasn't been out in soft launch or global launch for that long. I'm not sure if they have or and how reliable the data that they obtained during their closed beta, whatever they did, uh is. But, I mean, obviously, like

long-term retention is is the big question a big question, but I don't think it's I think that they the short term they're pretty good. I mean, I would go back to our conversation about soft launch and whether or not they they went too early. I mean, we know when you're making a decision to stay in soft launch or to launch, time is money, right? So, ultimately like the equation you're trying to solve is am I going to get more money by keeping my game in soft launch by adding more features and then when the game launches, I'm pairing the best version of the game with my audience and overall I'm going to get more money rather than, you know, keeping it you know, keeping it in soft launch. And so, you know, I start to wonder with this game if they should have added one or two more modes before going live. They have one mode. They have one main mode. You log in, you click the play button, and you're into Marvel Snap. It's incredibly simple, but also is incredibly limited. And so, I wonder how fast they can get to those additional modes. It's something that's not really mentioned on their road map, which is

already pretty compelling, but I was surprised not to see more modes, more ways to use my cards. It's just kind of the simple modes. They have announced it. A non-ranked mode. What I'm I'm not sure if they have announced it more like modes with like card restrictions or like specific rules, that I don't know, but at least they have announced it a non-ranked mode, which is great because now there's no way to safely test new decks, right? Um But yeah, that's actually quite in interesting the length of the of the soft launch considering there was the game has been in development for like 4 years. What I would expect is or what I assume is okay, they have been polishing the gameplay for about 4 years, but maybe they should have launched a little bit early. It's not like if if you have been developing the game for 4 years, it means that I I don't understand if if that means a cash problem because like they clearly

have a cash problem I'm sure they will fund it. They clearly had the funds to develop for 4 years, right? So why wouldn't you stay 6 months or 9 months in soft launch? That's kind of weird for me. And second dinner devs, if you need money, reach out to me. I will personally write you a check. I just let me know, reach out, whatever whatever size you need, I can I'll figure out a way to make it work. I'm a believer. Yeah, so it's it's pretty weird that they did that. But you know Javier, look. It might be also connected to the IP. You know, we are dealing with Marvel, which is a very big IP and we don't know like how it's how it's you know, working on the back on the background. You know, maybe they pushed it pushed them to you know, like hey, you need to launch now and you need to spend X amount of money. We don't know that. Yeah, that's possible. That's possible. Actually like in the conspiranoid circles, right? Like there's been a lot of discussion like oh no, no, they had a mandatory launch date and that's why they launched. But who

knows? They only they know, right? Um Yeah. It's all speculation. out getting out of the jungle of suspicion and into the facts um I would like to spend a couple of minutes discussing on gameplay. I know that Do you mind if we talk about one more thing when it comes to UA and creative that I've been Please. Let's go. So the you know, we kind of have the UA and the creative, but when you kind of look at the product from a UA perspective, it's all comic book characters. It is nothing in regards to the MCU, which Marvel has spent an incredible amount of money building an audience and recognition worldwide around. It is a very comic book UI art style and all of the marketing materials feels very comic booky. And so even when I look at the cards, you know, I look at at things like Dazzler. Can anyone tell me who Dazzler is? I have no idea what Darkhawk is. Of course. Like, who are some of these characters?

I know, but I'm I'm pretty nerdy. Yeah, I thought I thought I was nerdy. Like, I I I read I I read some comics. I mean, this is like they're reaching deep into the the Marvel barrel for some of these cards. deep. Very deep. So, I have a Marvel sleeve, and I had the all these like Wasp characters and these type of things before it was even like in the movies. Nobody know Nobody knew about it in my uh area. But, here, I mean, exactly what you said. Like, there's like America Chavez in the creatives. Nobody even heard about America Chavez until Doctor Strange movie came out. And that's super nerdy. Super super nerdy. So, I if you want to, you know, try to appeal to wider audience, like, just use different Marvel characters. Come on. There's like several different more popular heroes from the MCU than America Chavez, and I can probably name 10. And that could have a big impact on the

CPI. I'm not really sure how the um uh how the uh what what are the characteristic of the license agreement that they have. So, maybe they cannot use um MCU. I'm I'm If I was them, I would probably be looking for a different character. They have these characters in their videos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Iron Man. They have Hulk. They have everybody there. Venom. All of these characters. They're all there already. You just need to put them in front of the creatives. And it's even more puzzling when you consider where they've gone with a lot of their cosmetics. And again, like, I don't I don't look at this necessarily from a monetization perspective, but from a from a CPI perspective, from a marketing perspective, yeah, why is some of the first variants you're going live with I and I believe it's original art like these pixel variants. It's it's taking a character like Rocket Raccoon and making them eight-bit. That is something I have zero emotional connection with whatsoever. That Who is that? Who is eight-bit uh you know

Rocket Raccoon? I mean, you know, there's that famous you know Todd McFarlane Spider-Man cover from a really long time ago where he has you know he's he's uh the spiders are coming up you know it's crawling onto his body. You know I have a t-shirt with that. I'm not a comic book I'm not a comic book nerd but that's such a striking image to me. Where is kind of these moments in time in Marvel history in this art? Where are the MCU characters as a variant? Why can't I Where's Robert Downey Jr.? I would love to collect Robert Downey Jr. you know even if even if that's a licensing barrier I still would have loved to see them open up more of the Marvel comic book library and I can only assume they're going to be doing that in the future. It's just weird to me that they didn't do it for launch. Honestly uh the creatives I think we are now dealing with the the new verse team who is who might probably those guys are not as nerdy as we are in here. So you know like even if you know if you are talking about Marvel like all the other like people around me is

like ah well yeah Marvel Iron Man here and there whatever. Nobody cares. Maybe they those guys are just you know not interested in Marvel IP at all and they just use whatever they have in their um like creative folders like okay slapping it in the in the Facebook Google or or any other UA channel. And it's how it looks like unfortunately. Yeah that's kind of interesting because when you start playing the game uh you get a lot like in the starter deck you get a lot of characters super recognizable you get uh Iron Man the Hulk yeah um I think exactly. Jessica Jones is there and Jessica Jones is fairly popular. She had a um Netflix show. Uh so like the starter deck is filled with the many very recognizable characters. Yeah, it's it's pretty interesting that many of those have not been used to the extreme in the in the creatives. That is pretty weird. And

I I completely agree with the The creative strategy looks like the the weakest point. That's what I think and I What like one important an interesting fact that I've seen when I was looking into this around the global launch was the TikTok video with Samuel L. Jackson and they used it quite heavily in TikTok. Now they post TikTok completely which is a shame. I think it's like very I'm very disappointed because it's one of the best channels out there right now. And if they can use Samuel L. Jackson, why you know, like you tap in why you don't tap into Samuel L. Jackson in like very different creative concepts. At least, I mean, that's a very recognizable character. And that that can help super super well. And Phil is the That's already. Preach. That's that's very interesting. I I wonder if they're going to I can only assume it's going to double down on that. Yeah, exactly. To be fair, like I mean, to to give more credit to the team, you know, they've

been timing the most recent battle pass with the Black Panther movie. Yeah, the Black Panther yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, this is pretty common across all games that have the Marvel IP is making sure that you time your content releases, making sure that your content that you're actually releasing and the time it's releasing is tied up into a movie. Like, you want a free ride on all of the brand marketing that they're going to dump into these films. I mean, that that should lower your CPIs. We see this all the time on games that for instance are tied into a TV show. When the TV show comes on, CPIs will drop during that TV show. We always used to see it on The Walking Dead. And so, you know, I think they are starting to take advantage of that which is which is wonderful to see and all the credit to them. Yeah, actually looking at the future, that's probably one of their biggest opportunity when it comes to uh growing the game, right? Like um if they keep this a strategy where they time um in-game events with uh brand marketing paid by uh you know, by Marvel Studios. Um

that they they may be able to write write that wave in order to help the game grow. And that's why I was mentioning that at least in my opinion I while I can agree with with Mateus on the on the topics of analyzing their programmatic UA and and paid UA in a more uh standard structure, I have a lot of uncertainties when it comes to the brand marketing and how they are going to be able to leverage that into the future of of the game. Um but guys one one quick question. So, even if you if you time everything into like the the movies and brand marketing and paid UA and whatever, if you can't pay properly in the game, like what would you do? Like how would you monetize those players afterwards? Yeah, that's the main question. That's a good point. That's the main question. That's a That's a good point. Um we'll deal with it. Before jumping into that, I would like to Okay. at least go quickly through the uh

gameplay uh cuz one of the topics that you folks have mentioned you uh around a couple of times uh was that okay, these are clearly the HD veterans and and they come from a different platform. Um so, maybe there's like rules and like standards of mobile that may not be aware of. I love it. The game is is awesome. Like they're clearly they're clearly something else. Like very good. But But we said about like, well, you know, for a more traditional mobile point of view, maybe we we would have handled this in this other way. But, on the gameplay at least it's pretty it's pretty interesting that the game to me seems the best CCG adapt like the best adaptation of the CCG experience to mobile, right? Cuz if you look at Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering, Legends of Runeterra, I played them all. Um

but uh they on mobile they're somewhat awkward to play and actually this is something they uh point out in the article that a lot of these games have and have very weird mix-up between iPhone and iPad. Like, they monetize too much on iPad compared to like the average, which kind of to me kind of points out that well, try to play Magic Arena on a mobile. It's difficult to play, but if you play it on an iPad, it's it's cool. Um but so these are games that are somehow awkward to play on um on a mobile, but that's not the case with this one. Like, this one really well it seems really well adapted in terms of of gameplay when it comes to playing on a smartphone on a smart screen. Um so that I find that surprising, right? Like, it's so well adapted to mobile considering that these are developers that may not have uh traditional background on mobile, right? I I

I'd go as far as to say I think this is HD developers strike back. I think we've started to see this over the last, you know, 5 to 10 years is that HD developers have kind of you know taken taken a couple kicks in the pants in terms of catching up to where mobile has been in terms of live ops, in terms of production, in terms of UA, just so many things that go into building games as a service. HD has been slow to adapt. And I think this is the first time, well, I wouldn't say the first time. I think we've started to see inklings of this over the last 2 years with Call of Duty Mobile, some of the conversions happening of like more traditional dual stick shooters. But, we're starting to see HD developers coming in on mobile. And while they don't necessarily have all of those things that we were talking about solved, what they do have is not giving two shits about the mobile design paradigm. They're not going out and just building another 4X game or trying to add one additional feature to the match-three title that will, you know, that will, you know, perhaps change the paradigm. They're They're They're coming in with a completely different framework. Um and they're exploiting what you know, what previously exists.

And that's why I think like there's been so much chatter about this game is that it has this this vibe that was similar to when Clash Royale released is that it sends a shockwave throughout the industry. You know, maybe it's not going to end up being this incredible, you know, monetizing game for the next 10 years, but it's something that we're all starting to think about and to to chew on. And if this is This is just one title. I guarantee you that there's more in development we don't know about right now that'll be hitting mobile. But, I think the boat's going to be rocked quite a bit on our traditional mobile paradigms. I mean, we have match-three, we kind of understand what that is. You know, we have we have the puzzle genre, we have 4X, we have, you know, kind of these mid-core ARPGs. Um you know, this is an opening shot. This is an opening shot to those paradigms. And I think we're going to see more and more HD developers start to rock the boat. Yeah. I I uh I think it's an interesting point. I would maybe argue against the fact that well, they're It's not like they haven't touched mobile and they just discovered smartphone like um

because like even if we take a look at Hearthstone, Hearthstone has been in mobile for quite a while. And probably it's a game where the limitations of mobile when you try to port the timing and you try to port the usability and the amount of information that surfaces on on bigger screen or on a or on a different platform have been very I'm I'm sure they have a struggled with them, right? What I find very uh um it has a lot of merit, in my opinion, is that they have understood very well uh the limitations of the tabletop format, the limitations of the standard of digital CCG, uh and uh solved that in in a very interesting way when it comes to to mobile, no? If there are several things on that, like the amount of information that you manage during the match, it's pretty small. The amount the the tempo of the gameplay

loop, which I think it's something that um it's it's it's key, no, for for how much suited for a hobby or for a habit um a mobile game is. That's That's pretty cool, like the matches are super short. They generate this uh oh, just another match, just another match uh sensation. So, when it comes to gameplay this is really good. I think they get an unbelievable amount of credit for just how much time they've spent adapting to the mobile medium. You know, you were mentioning Hearthstone as, you know, a game that has been from Blizzard, from this team, but you know, that that feels like an HD game that got ported to mobile by the wishes of some exec. This is a mobile game that's been built from the ground up for mobile, and and specifically what I mean by that is it's horizontal. So, I think that's just a more natural way to hold the phone. It's much easier. It's way you you're naturally holding the phone to check your email or, you know, whatever it may be. And I think the other thing is they spent so much time on trying to get session time down

to maybe 3 4 minutes, and it feels quick. It feels quick when you're playing the game. There's only six turns. There's a fixed number of turns in this game. And not only that, there's a fixed turn timer, which is is something that if you're a Magic the Gathering player, you wish for every single day as people continue to waste your time in between turns. And not only that, they've introduced this retreat mechanic. And this retreat mechanic, not only is an interesting game design mechanic, but it also can shorten matches. So, you might have your match end at turn two. So, there's a lot of different types of session times I can have within the game. Um you know, again, like just missing the Clash Royale meta, like the only session that I can have with this game really though is a gameplay session. There really isn't a whole lot else to do. Maybe I browse the store, but mostly I got to go in, I have my game. And just the other thing I want to call out here is how incredible their matchmaking is. It is on par with Clash Royale, and that as soon as I hit that button, I don't even have time to get the cancel button if I made a mistake. It goes so fast. Um which is which is almost frustrating.

But you're able to get into a match in what, 2 seconds flat? Unbelievable. Unbelievable kind of session. though. Probably playing bots. Yeah, from the beginning for sure. Probably playing bots. Um but you know, I got to give credit to them. It's still an incredible experience. It feels buttery smooth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I uh completely agree. Um for those that haven't played, uh this retreat mechanic is related to a lot of betting mechanics involved into the game, right? Uh I think this is a trademark of Ben Brode. I don't know I'm not sure if it's him or somebody on his team, but like a lot of the Hearthstone also it's a another game that plays a lot with randomness and uncertainty. It's kind of its trademark. And uh here they move it to like a whole completely different level, right? It Many of the mechanics are seem very extracted from poker, no? Like the locations being revealed, that's Texas hold 'em uh kind of thing. Um the betting that

that something interesting is that uh and I'm not sure if it's a mechanic that is very unique, but um it's the first time I see this on a game is that you can bet your trophies called here cosmic cubes if I'm not wrong. Um you can you can bet on on doubling how much you're betting on that on that match. Your opponent can also bet. So, instead of uh um if you don't bet, you advance at a base of if you win a 2 by 2, but if both of you do this a snap and double the amount, you can advance at a um uh rhythm of uh eight trophies. And I found that like that's really cool. At the beginning it was like, "Well, I'm not sure. It doesn't really changes the but now that I'm far more advanced into the ranks, if somebody snaps and I don't have it sure, like that's a very deep decision.

Like that's a lot of effort that the opponent maybe still in front of me, right? And I think it's another design innovation for the team. And I look at it as an outgrowth of really I think Apex Legends started, which is really playing with ranks and playing with the idea of ranked or progression as a currency. And the idea that you can you can have something you can wager a variable amount. So, normally, you know, I win, I get plus one. If I lose, I get minus one. But now they're adding a little bit more complexity and sophistication to it. I think it's the same thing we see in extraction shooters, right? Now, it's not a you know, a direct linkage, know, if I'm playing Escape from Tarkov, I can go into that game with a bunch of gear. You know, I can acquire more gear and then I'm essentially making bets on you know, do I want to take what I have with certainty or do I want to risk it to get a little bit more? In Apex Legends, you know, I was entering particular matches by putting up a certain amount of ranked points. And so, I'd love to see developers play more with these ranked mechanics. I think they're super fun. I think it adds a lot to Marvel Snap even

though it wasn't really well explained in the Fatooi. Uh Marvel Snap developers, if you're listening to this, please tell me more about the the snap mechanic in the Fatooi. But yeah, it's it's a ton of fun. Um I also think we'll be seeing a lot of really analytical deep dives on on the best way to think about, "Hey, do I up the ante or do I not up the ante?" But, you know, more credit to the team. Another great design. know there's a snap mechanic until I played like 40 matches. I was like, "What the is what Who snapped? What what what's happening now?" I was like, "Oh, well. Oh, I love it. It's amazing." To be honest, it it it it it Yeah, to be honest, it grows in relevance as you progress. At the beginning, it's not really a game changer. But like once you're advanced, like the game is about that right big part of the game is about that. Um and I found that um compared to other games because I've been like long-term player of Clash Royale. I have like five accounts. Some of them that I max out I I'm I'm bored I leave. I start another. And uh what happens with those games is that they plat the ranks plateau, right? Like

at one point it's like, "Sure, like I'm playing and winning some, losing some, but there's not a lot of dynamics on the or dynamism on the ranks." What I found in this one is like that this um multiplier on progression that can can go uh well to you or against you, it dynamizes a lot the ranks. It makes you flow up and down quite a lot. Um and that makes it that makes the matches way more interesting. I'm I'm pretty sure this is a mechanic we're going to see replicated in more games in the future. Um and just uh to wrap up the part of gameplay and jump into monetization, which is what we are going to kill ourselves. Um Another thing that I found very interesting when when I saw at the beginning the game uh and the focus that it has on power, I thought like, "Oh, this is very power creepy, right?" Like you can, you know, release a new collection with 7% higher

points and that's going to replicate the meta. Maybe that evolves into that way, but something that was a bit surprising to me was or that was quite surprising is that how or orthogonal differentiated the design is, right? Like um you have characters that that the character skills that at the beginning of the game do not matter that that much. They really are game changers, right? That makes every card like really recognizable. I would even argue more recognizable and game changer than cards in Magic the Gathering even. Don't you think so? I mean the the the way they've built these abilities is just unbelievable to me. And I also I also wonder sometimes if they've gone too far with some of these abilities just in the way that they they screw with the traditional way of thinking about the game. I mean, to give you a small example, like they have Agatha Harkness out of recent consideration. You know, that's a one is amazing.

if you have this card in your hand, it plays the match for you, which is just absolutely mind-blowing that they would introduce a card like this into, you know, this particular type of game. You know, there's some other cards which I start to question whether or not they went too far. There's another one called Nakia, I believe, and what this card does is it gives the two leftmost cards in your hand plus two power. You might say, "Well, that sounds like a pretty generic ability." But the thing that it forces you to do is that can't rearrange your hand. That's something that they've made it a design decision. So, if you're a Magic the Gathering player, the first thing that you're going to do is you love fiddling with your hand, you love organizing in particular ways. And so, they don't want you to be able to set up this play where you're going to put the two most powerful cards in your hand into the left part of your hand. And so, sometimes I wonder if they've gone too far in some of these design choices. And on the other hand, I'm just happy to see them do crazy stuff. Um it sounds like an absolute blast to see some of these cards in real life. There's another one, Captain Marvel, also out of MCU fame

fame, which will move to the lane, which gives you which lets you win the game if it's at all possible, which is just again another mind-blowing card. Usually, you know, we rarely see cards that kind of play with the mechanics of the game at that level. Platinum Angel in Magic the Gathering says you can't lose the game. You know, that that's like a mind-blowing card that magic would do that, but it feels like that's just another you know, walk in the park for Marvel Snap card designers. They always seem to be asking, "How can we push the limit? How can we break the mechanics? How can we screw with the engine?" And it's just really fun to see that come alive. Yeah, it's it's pretty amazing. I think it gives a lot of value to new content cuz whenever a new mechanic is new card appears, you really need it to for a specific strategies. They also have these um locations that uh well, they they change the probability of appearing from time to time and they generate effects and that I've seen that once you advance quite a bit into the game, um

they make you tweak your deck or even use alternative decks in order to maximize the capacity of um well, or in order to synergize with those locations. So, it's for me it's been really really impressive how with cards that have so little elements and are so simple compared to other CCGs and short matches, small deck size, um they are able to generate decks and experience match experiences and strategies that are so different. I think that only speaks to the ability of of the team to create incredible gameplay. Um so, it's about time we jump to talk about monetization and systems. Is it that time? Is it that time? Let's get spicy. Let's get spicy. Let's talk about money. Yeah. All right. All right. Um yeah, so monetization there's not a lot of to it and systems. There's not a lot of to it. Um the game

has no live ops. Barely. Live ops, maybe the only live op that they have is their location probability changing, which doesn't really change that much the game. It doesn't introduce new content. Um There's a battle pass. The battle pass introduces one new card uh so far per per month. Um Yeah, there's not a lot of things. Uh maybe the most relevant things when it comes to systems that I found is uh the relationship of cosmetics to progression, right? Yeah. Any of Any of you want to explain how that works? Yeah, I I think I think it makes sense to talk a little bit more about kind of the value flow in Marvel Snap. And so you're you'll go into the game, um you'll want to spend money potentially. Yeah, and can't. What you'll do is And you can't. And so what you'll do is you'll, you know, you'll have your wallet ready to go and you'll buy gold bars. And your gold bars let you buy a couple different things, right? One of

the things they let you buy are uh credits and credits are a currency that you need to use on all cards to frame break them or cosmetically upgrade them. And by frame breaking or cosmetically upgrading your card, you are rewarded with collection points. Collection points increase your collection level, which is very much like an account level progression, and that is the main way in which they source rewards in Marvel Snap is by you getting credits and you're combining it with one other thing, which is a character or card-specific XP. They call it boosters, and you earn these boosters in a variety of ways. Sometimes you can purchase them in a rotating store. Other times, and mostly, you earn them through either the battle pass or through playing matches. They'll reward you some boosters at the end of the match. So, you need to merge both your time, predominantly, and you can also merge a little bit of money in case you're short on the credits. Because remember, you need credits on all of

your cards upgrade them, while the character boosters are card specific. And so, the collection level is ultimately where they're going to source you new cards. That to me is what players want. They want new cards. They want to win. They want to be able to have new tools to go out and to solve puzzles. They want to have a lot of these crazy cards we were talking about to also have new experiences. And so, it's absolutely wild that they don't deliver this, in my opinion, through loot boxes. Now, in some sense, they do, which I'm sure we can talk more about. But ultimately, it's a very strange relationship between monetization at the top of the funnel of, "Hey, I you know, I insert a quarter." Versus ultimately getting the thing you want. There's a lot of steps to go through. So, remember, you got to go into the store, you got to, you know, take out your wallet, you got to buy this gold, and then ultimately with that gold, you might buy some credits, or you might buy some more ammo in terms of variants. Those card variations we were talking about, because those variations or those variants are more opportunities for you

to increase your collection level. Remember, more collection level means more new cards. So, it's a very strange series of relationships that they've developed in this game to monetize, ultimately. And of course, Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. What is this which is just Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So, then there's there's This is the crazy stuff. This is the crazy stuff, in my opinion. What's important? Like, how much money player can spend? Like, what's the spend depth? I I I mean, like Do you know how low? I I'd love to Yeah. I don't know off the top of my head. But we know it's time gated, right? We know it's We know it's time gated, because when When go to buy these gold bars, the next thing you want to do is you want to buy credits, right? Because credits are ultimately are what's going to be allow you to unlock um your to frame break them. and there is a timer. And there is a timer on this. And there is a daily timer on the amount of credits you can buy, which just is absolutely mind-blowing to me. It's ridiculous. And it's

and to be clear, you know, one thing I really want to push back on sometimes that I hear from HD developers is like they they want to craft some sort of experience that they feel like is favorable to the player. This to me is not favorable to the player in any in any bit. This to me is an incredibly negative experience both for payers and for non-payers. And we've seen a lot of frustration for players saying, I want new cards. I want to be able to experience new cards, and you're limiting my ability to do that. And so really I think the spend cap on gold to credits, which again ultimately limits how fast you can increase your collection level, which will limit how fast you can collect new cards, is an incredibly negative experience as a player. It's very frustrating to me. And so it's either that you're going to spend these gold bars on credits, which are limited, or you're going to have a very small selection of those cosmetic card variants we were talking about. And again, that's limited. It's limited by what? I think it's six cards that are in the shop. So the game has just these really small spend caps on a time basis

that I find incredibly frustrating. And ultimately, they've they've set a ceiling on their LTV curve. It can only grow so fast, right? They don't have infinite monetization sinks. And this to me is the ultimate problem with Marvel Snap is because everything has these low ceilings. Put loot boxes aside for a second. Put that aside for a second. That's a delivery mechanic. Just in terms of the maximum amount of money that you can spend in this game, it's incredibly limited and it's based on the amount of time. There's a fixed amount of LTV I could get to. And it is it is 2022 folks. We know what mobile free-to-play runs on. We know what makes this different from every other form of gaming, which is really high LTVs. And so to to to to to to go into like, you know, I wouldn't even say it's like tying your left hand behind your back, I think it's like cutting off your legs. It's just really unfortunate to see this and I don't think they've made anyone better off. I think they've made the players worse off and it's just very frustrating to continue to see stuff like this.

And the thing is CCG CPI levels. I mean, even if you have a Marvel IP, of course that's uh decreasing your CPI, but CCG CPIs are super high. And if you're limiting your LTV, come on. How can you even grow? It's really it's really tough. Yeah, that's that's a very interesting. Um here there are two things, no? One when it comes to like the system itself, uh just to clarify to the audience, so I think that the they did uh great job explaining it. You basically uh on a request to get all the cards and basically every single thing that you can pay is an accelerator to acquire uh to the time that you require in order to acquire um those cards. What I have felt so far is that the biggest pressure is on uh credits, the soft currency, just because maybe I play a lot and uh I have I never um

block it when it comes to boosters because every match I play gives me boosters, gives me these uh XP or shards of of characters. So, I can always have more things that I could upgrade if I had enough credits. Um but then the sources of credits are very limited. Um But yeah, I cannot I cannot s- and and I cannot I'm limited on how much gold I can spend um to acquire credits per per day by these spending caps. Clearly, um if we take a look at short-term revenue per download, which is what we're looking at at it now, right? Like, the things that could move upwards this revenue per download would be things that uh improve a lot the life the lifetime value at the beginning of that curve. So, definitely capping the ability of uh super sup- top spenders, people that wants to get in and spend 400 bucks or more on the first day, not allowing those players to do that, that negatively

affects um the lifetime value and definitely uh pushes to the future and maybe to the the break even break even point for for acquisition. So, this is for me it's very very confusing. I really don't understand that decision, not only on limiting the amount of credits that you can buy, which is like, why would you do that? But also not providing more ways for players that come in in order to catch up with players that maybe are more advanced into the progression. And it also means that if you're a very competitive player and you get into the game, it's going to take you a lot of time to be able to compete with the folks that are in the highest ranks just because there's no way you can pay to skip the the progression to to catch them. Um I wonder if maybe they they did that to try to attempt I don't know,

reinforce retention or something? Yeah, that's what I was going I think this has Blizzard I think this has Blizzard design fingerprints all over it. I I think this to me is clearly a decision that comes out of Blizzard. Um this to me feels like a Blizzard design decision. I think the PMs lost this battle for sure. And I think, you know, going back to what you mentioned earlier about the Nexus event, you know, to me the Nexus event was and again, I know nothing about what's happening internally at Second Dinner. But it felt like this the Nexus event was an opportunity for the PMs to come out and say, "Okay, we got to we got to do some interesting monetization stuff. We ceded all this ground to the design team on kind of the core mechanics. You know, we didn't end up using the Clash Royale system. We kind of have this convoluted frame-breaking, you know, credit-limiting thing." And the Nexus event kind of blew up in their face, at least from a PR perspective. And so, I think the PMs have just lost a series of battles here. And ultimately, you know, that's unfortunate to me cuz I think the game and again, I I just want to make sure that I emphasize this enough. The monetization system that they've

created, it's not just about, you know, the business mechanics or the business economics. It's about creating a great player experience. And this to me is the difference between HD and mobile developers so far is that mobile developers understand that monetization does not take away from the player experience. There is no trade-off. It is something that enhances the core loop and enhances the player experience and increases retention. Whereas HD developers see it as kind of something that is always a trade-off. And so, when I look at decisions like this, this to me just feels like something that would be straight out of Blizzard. And it's something that we I think we started to see inklings of in Hearthstone. Matey, do you want to add something to that? just Yeah, I just wanted to ask like if the the those timers are just not like a retention tactic to to boost that, but I just heard that I guess no. I mean, that would be a silly retention tactic to me to to limit, you know, content in that way. It feels It feels bizarre. Yeah, of course.

I really don't understand. I I don't think it's a good source of of retention. I don't understand the reasons of of the decision. Uh but be very interested on knowing if they even A/B tested that or something like Oof. But Come on. But I don't think I don't think all hope is lost here, right? I And I know we we've kind of um, you know, we we've we've criticized kind of their core monetization. And to be honest with you, one of the other things we should talk about is the new new collection token mechanic. And because they've moved away from because they moved away from Royale, they're doing all this Reed Richards-type gymnastics of stretching to kind of solve all of the problems that Royale was trying to solve within the paradigm that they've ended up creating. But I think the saving grace right now is the battle pass. The The what? The main source of monetization? Yeah, I think the battle pass is their saving grace right now. Um, you know, their battle pass takes a very different approach than many battle passes before. I think they've bet very big on the

battle pass. I can imagine their PM saying, all right, this is our saving grace. We have our battle pass. And the reason the battle pass is actually, I think, really well designed here is that they're able to increase ADMC, or average daily monetization cap. So, this is one way you can look at battle passes is that you can say, "Okay, how much does it cost to enter? How many tiers are there? What does a tier cost? And how long does the pass run?" And what you can end up getting out of that is what is the maximum amount of money I would spend, on average, per day if I were to reach the monetization cap of the product. So, when you think about Fortnite, for example, it has 100 tiers, it's a buck 50 per tier, and the battle pass runs for about 84 days, about 12 weeks. And so, if I wanted to max out the spend cap for Fortnite in their battle pass, it's about a buck 90 per day to be able to do that. Marvel Snap has $3.66 ADMC. It's incredibly high monetization cap. And the way they do that isn't by changing the entry price of the battle pass. It's still your usual $10. And

again, the other thing I want to point out here is that it's priced in USD. It's not priced in hard currency. So, you can't get more passes just by completing the main pass. And that's a change they made in soft launch. They realized how silly that is to give players a lifetime stream of battle passes for one purchase. So, they have that going on, but it's still $10. And what they'll do is they'll go from 100 tiers down to 50. So, again, you would think that would decrease ADMC. But, the thing they're going to do that really changes the equation they have these things coming out monthly. And they're able to keep this really strong monthly pace up because they have such little marginal cost content in the past. A lot of it is stuff that they don't need to specifically make for the past. So, a booster, for instance, is control C, control V for the developer. It's just a number on a screen. Yeah. Giving people soft currency, hard currency, costs nothing. And so, there's only two or three items in the past which are specific to the past. You know, in the Black Panther Battle Pass, they have a variant of Black Panther and they also introduced the card Black Panther. You know, that's pretty cheap. And being able to keep a monthly cadence

for a Battle Pass, even if there's a lot of zero marginal cost content in it, to me is a really good strategy. And they are able to get, I think, some stronger monetization out of that. enough. Easily enough. I had zero motivation to buy that Battle Pass. It's just like it's not adding so much value. I I disagree. I I I disagree on that. I mean, I think I agree with you in that I think they need to do a little bit more in terms of the cosmetics. I think that just comes from increasing the value of collection. I mean, we're talking earlier about these pixel variants. I mean, no one cares about pixel variants. But, if you're telling me I can collect, you know, all of the MCU characters, I have all eight-bits eight-bits tattoos on my on my fist. So, I of course I care about those. Come on, man. I I I think they can get a little bit better with the cosmetics. I I think they'll up that. I'd like to see them introduce a little more, you know, gameplay into the Battle Pass. But, you know, the Battle Pass has been compelling enough for me to purchase. Again, it's not enough, but I do think they deserve a lot of credit for this.

And I think it's a bright spot right now. Yeah, I think personally I think that the Battle Pass, if I had to say like what is is there anything else that is more worth buying than the Battle Pass in the game. There's nothing else. Like I don't think there's anything else worth buying. Because that's yeah. The battle pass gives you a I mean, it's not even worth buying the hard currency. But I mean, I I if I was a player, I'd much rather buy the battle pass than any hard currency. Absolutely. What what is interesting about the battle or I found it interesting is that it gives you um about right upon purchase, it gives you an exclusive card. That actually in any other game would have been very aggressive. Like if I imagine in Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering of like like there's a card that it's locked at least while the battle pass lasts, and that card is key to the game play, and it's locked unless you pay the the battle pass. That's pretty aggressive. Um and that actually gives you a main great reason

to just just buy it. Uh we actually when the new battle pass with with the latest battle pass was released, we saw a significant spike in the revenue that the audience can also check in the uh uh article at at the website where we put the numbers. Um so definitely adding that generated a spike. What what I found interesting is that um uh it's not only that the spike was big, but the the um average revenue in any other days actually pretty high. Uh in fact, I would say that the difference between the spike and the regular revenue, it's it's smaller than the difference that exists in other games of the category. So, that means that as Philip or what I understand is that as as Philip says, the battle pass is good at making people monetize further somehow, maybe through the acquisition of the daily quests or something. the unbelievable pace they're able to do. I mean, they're able to go to monthly releases. And I think we started

to see inklings of this really with Call of Duty, which also they to restrict a little bit more about how long the passes were going for, you know, Call of Duty's goes for about 56-60 days, whereas Fortnite started at 90. And so, I think we finally started to realize that battle pass isn't a great monetization mechanic. You know, everyone all the developers I've worked with, you know, initially when they present you monetization plans, it's a rotating store and a battle pass because they they don't want to deal with PR issues. And you go on to explain to them how little money these things generate if you don't have a bajillion DAU. And they're kind of shocked by it. And then when it actually ends up happening, they're like, "Okay, how do we how do we do this?" And so, I think we're starting to see developers play more with the fundamental equations of the battle pass. And this is the first time I've really seen it in such a high-profile way. And so, my hope is is that when other developers see what Marvel Snap is doing with their battle pass under the hood, they'll start to they'll start to change more and more of these mechanics and we'll start to see more and more innovation here. Absolutely. But answering to Matek West

question on if it's enough, I I think it is clearly not enough. I think that one of the reasons why I mean, it works great, fantastic mechanic. The problem is where everything where is where is it everything else, right? I think that the great system at least in my opinion, it it seems everything that I can pay for in this game is very indirect. It's like, "Yeah, in an indirect source, you do this and this, you know, moves these levers, blah blah blah." And it ultimately translates into a new cards, which is the only thing you really want or you primarily want. But it's it's kind of weird. It's I'm I'm paying for some things that I'm really far away from the thing that I would really want to buy. And I wonder if the collection tokens that they have announced, which just for people that maybe have been playing the game but not aware of the

communication is a new currency that you're going to obtain by playing and you're going to be able to spend it on a rotative shop. Um, where new cards are being shown. So, basically it's a way to buy new cards, but it's still not direct because that currency, I'm not sure if you're going to be able to buy it. Uh, and if you're going to be able to buy it, it's going to be on offers on like very limited sources for acquisition. There's a There's a very small hack they can do. There's a very small hack they can even completely change this, which is First of all, they they're implementing a reverse loot box, right? So, if you put a randomized card on the store on a rotating basis, that is an inverse loot box, right? It's you just have the option to buy or not to buy, which is something FIFA's been experimenting with. But, if they if they want to add a single feature that I guarantee you would generate them a lot of revenue, it's simply implement a refresh button on that card for amount of hard currency. There you go. That That is the solution. I mean, that I think can take them a very long way. It's a very simple idea.

Again, it still is an inverse loot box. And again, they have loot boxes in this game, they just don't have the animation with it. And so, if that's been the barrier to them is that they don't want the animation, they don't want at least the PR associated with it, just put that hard currency refresh button when you launch these collector tokens or whatever that card is in the store, and I think it'll go a long way to solving some of their monetization problems. Yeah, I think that's that's a I think that's a good point. Uh, right? Like, if if you could pay for refresh, then it becomes It's a loot box issue that it's more of a like the uh latest FIFA loot boxes that they show you what's inside and then you choose it to buy or not. Uh, which I I think it's cool. I I personally I think like putting straight out of the like standard book, uh, gachas would be problematic with with the audience. I'm not sure if it would be the the right option considering how the product is and and so on, but there's

definitely more than they can do in in um in that direction. Um another I think another big inconvenient uh is that if especially if I compare with Clash Royale, you know, like Clash Royale the depth of the spending per card is is huge, you know, because they have card upgrades, but they lack this. And uh you you can see the Clash Royale revenues as well. That's the thing. Yeah, and and uh in my head I I go like, would it be a good idea to have an upgrade system for cards in this game? Because I got at the end of the day cards are a lot of the cards are power base, so maybe they there could be room for that sort of pro grade. Not not really sure uh if that would be the idea, but the the good good idea of that is if there is design space that would really make it possible to have an upgrade system. But at least for

me what is weird is okay, so you cannot have an upgrade system like we get the collection upgrade system. Well, what I find weird is the lack of some sort of evolution system where it's like, okay, I need to upgrade these cards and like maybe merge them or something so I can acquire new cards and by that we expand the acquisition of cards, which is the what the players care about beyond the collection level and we're able to generate additional things to collect, maybe cards that you're not interested on collecting because of the card itself because maybe you're not going to use it, but you're going to use it in order to acquire another card through an evolution system or something. I think that it would even fit a lot with the theme of um of games, right? Like with different hulks you maybe can craft a different type of hulk. That sort of thing I wonder if any of those mechanics would have made sense in order to to spend the to increase the spending depth per card. And maybe I'm completely wrong. No, I I think that makes sense. I I

think it's tough to do vertical progression in a game like this. I mean, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, but when you have RPG-like mechanics in your card, you know, adding plus 20 health is nothing. Doing that in a game like Marvel Snap just risks throwing off the balance of the entire game. I I think they have an opportunity to kill a lot of birds with with one stone, and to me that's drafting. And so I think drafting not only gets you a lot of engagement, it gets what Ben Brode referred to as, you know, this puzzle solving you got to do when you're put in unique situations, but drafting is also an infinite money pit, right? And we've seen this in almost all CCGs. And for those unfamiliar, drafting is when you pay a, you know, entry fee of let's say $2, and then what you do is you're building a deck from a random assortment of cards. So, you're doing a lot of really fun puzzle solving, you're facing other players that are doing that as well. And so, you can potentially spend unlimited amounts of money on a mechanic like this. idea what you you were talking about, so thank you very much for explaining. It it it's a more I'm not the more revenue generator. Yeah, great. That's it?

So, I think that's one thing. And I think the other thing they can do is that they, again, going back to the more of the modes idea, is thinking about how you can increase the incentive of horizontal collection. And I think we know this playbook in mobile, right? We know this playbook from Hero of Galaxy, Summoners War, all the ARPGs, is how do you get people to buy more characters? How do you get them to expand their roster? Well, you create more modes in which they need different collection of characters. And I think they're partially trying to do that with some of the site locations in the game. If those unfamiliar, you have these lanes in Marvel Snap, and again, you know, they have these poker mechanics where the lanes flip, and there's some sort of event that takes place in a lane, they might, you know, destroy a certain card, or might incentivize certain cards being played in that lane. That to me is pretty weak. I'm not building my decks around those lanes necessarily, but I think introducing more modes that incentivize me to want to collect different cards and to generate value or inject value into cards I already own would be a major step in the right direction. But still, I think drafting gets you that monetization angle. Two, it gets you the engagement angle. It

gets you a lot of different things. I was just really surprised not to see it on the road map for the next year. They have a lot of really great things on the road map, a lot of things I agree with, but not having drafting to me felt like a really bizarre choice for a game that I think would kill it when it comes to drafting. There's so much problem solving I want to do. There's so many cards that aren't viable right now in the meta that I think I'd love to see in like a lower stakes or a different environment be played out. Yeah, that would not only be the money, it would also be like hell of fun to to play, right? I mean, I'm a drafter, too, so I'm a little bit biased here. I I think I don't know if if you do Magic the Gathering drafting. Well, I mean, I think we can talk about that. It's an infinite money sink, right? I mean, I've spent hundreds of dollars on drafting, and I don't do it for the rewards. I do it because I love the experience that comes with crafting a deck. I love the theory crafting. It's very much tied to a CCG. I would say maybe the only challenge here would be that draft, at least in MTGA, it's a great way

to get specific cards that you may want in your collection. So maybe when you do the deck in the draft, you select you do a specific picks uh thinking on how they are going to contribute to the collection and not that much to the match that you're yeah, to the tournament you're about to play. Here, I think the collection is not that big, actually, at least at the moment, and it's not growing at at the pace at like other games grow. So, drafting would be a bit more complicated in the sense that um the value that you could extract from the drafting, if you keep the cards afterwards, would be massive, right? Uh but other than that, if if definitely, I think that would be a a mode that would be really cool. Maybe they could even double that It could actually, you know, double down on the competition. Maybe you keep the cards if you get in the top of that leaderboard. And actually, the cube make the cosmic cube mechanics, which right now uh you move in the ranks, and that's

valuable. But at the end of the day, you generally, you try to play safe, or you get at least progress by playing it safe. You just more matches, winning two two two. But if it was a tournament where the amount of matches is limited, the cosmic cube mechanic the snap mechanic becomes mind-blowing, right? Because like snapping or not the snapping costs you the the tournament, right? So, I I think it would definitely be a great um a mode to add. Uh hopefully Hopefully, they listen to this and then they add um And uh definitely, I think that horizontal exploration There are many mechanics that they could explore. I was actually pretty surprised prised about the lack of tags card tags, like Avenger, right? And you And even skills that improve start or synergize with other Avengers, which would be a way to make people try to do like decks theme themed decks, let's say. Um and there's nothing like that. The

And that could actually, you know, allow you to do like, "Okay, in this tournament, you It's only Avengers against uh advanced it mechanical ideas." And and that sort of stuff, which would be fun and would would allow to, you know, generate a lot of of uh opportunities both in gameplay and for horizontal exploration. I guess that's coming at one point. Like I I I could not see the future of the game where they don't go in that direction at one point to incentivize horizontal exploration. So, maybe it's time to wrap it up. Uh I just want to want to wrap it up with uh a a question. Um Felak, you will go first. From 1 to 10, how bullish you are in Snap's future and why? Oh boy, can I say an 11? Look at Look look, I I definitely I definitely have criticisms with their monetization. Um you know, I think they really handicap themselves and I I think it makes the experience worse off. And we didn't get to talk about it, but

just like every part of this game is just dripping in production value. Every single card has a unique animation. Unbelievable. Just absolutely unbelievable. The innovation in this game is unbelievable. I really trust this team who has worked together for a really long time and are clearly genre-leading experts in CCGs to be able to solve any design challenges or engagement challenges that come out of this genre. And I do think they're going to find answers on the monetization piece. To me, I actually ask more questions about Second Dinner. And I think they're going to really need to make a decision about if they're going to be a one-game company or if there's something else beyond the horizon. And so, if they're going to be a one-game company, if Marvel Snap's going to be the thing that they really bet the house on, then I think, you know, I become a little bit more skeptical and a little bit more critical about their monetization because they're going to they're going to need to have a war chest of money to continue to keep these things going, to continue to keep the content funnel going. You know, I don't know what Wizards of the Coast's head

count is on Magic the Gathering, but running a live service CCG takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money, and especially if you want to grow. So, to me, I I think it really comes down to what is what is Second Dinner want to do, right? Do they want this to be their masterpiece? Do they want this to be a billion-dollar franchise? Or do they just want this to be a successful game? And I think when I look at Ben Brode's posts and I, you know, from following him and seeing him as a human being, I think he wants this to be his masterpiece. And if that's the case, um I think he'll invest the time and the resources to figure it out. I just hope that he takes advice from his product managers and doesn't look down on monetization and keeps community in one corner. We use that word community quite a bit and I think, you know, I I look at community as really just social media when we use that word. I think he needs to put social media into one bucket and not get too caught up in social media and remember to look at the whole health of the game, look at the health of the business, and honestly the health of the player base beyond just social media, the people who are the loudest on forums. Just remember to take a break. Don't Don't have our Marvel Snap open in

your Chrome tab, developers. Don't do that to yourself. It's a bad place to be, but at the end of the day, I think this is an incredible incredible product by an incredible team. Um I'll write a check to them. I'll write a personal write a check to them. I guess I already have. I you know, I've been I've been buying all these battle passes, but I'm very bullish about this game and I think it's going to mean big things for mobile. Um I I really has has shaken uh shaken stuff stuff up here. And I hopefully we'll continue to see more games that challenge the paradigm. But yeah, 11, I'm bullish on this one. Um I'm willing to take some time. right. Mate, what do you think? From 1 to 10, how bullish you are and why? Well, I'm definitely bullish. I think like it's eight out of 10. Uh I still think they need to figure out all the all the monetization Phil mentioned. I mean the thing is like the LTV caps or limits the spend uh in terms of the UA. So, I you won't be able to grow until you increase the the LTV of the game and that's the biggest challenge. And we all agree the game is absolutely amazing. It plays I mean I I love it. It's It's It's

great game. So, I think like players love it as well. But I just want to spend more and uh until they figure it out, uh I think that's going to be a a little bit, you know, time and we we need to give them the time. And that's completely fine because everything uh in the game is like like a game changer in terms of the like a game industry and the CCG genre as you mentioned. So, yeah, it's it's an innovation. So, let's see how it goes. But, yeah, I'm I'm pretty bullish about the game. All right. All right. Um I'm actually surprised cuz we pretty much agree on on some stuff. I am going to give it a an eight. Nice. that games game design tells you a lot about the personality of the people that designs them and for ex- as an extension for the companies that they run and um Magic the Gathering, you win the match before it even starts in many cases. Uh in Hearthstone, it's about playing and

with more uncertainty, you don't have everything figured it out. In this game, it's even a higher uncertainty. Like, you gamble your way out of the match to the victory and I think that tells us something about this game, right? Like, they have had a short soft launch. Um I think they don't have everything figured it out. But, uh they're to their merit, I'm going to say that they are moving. They are now adding a new thing. They So, they are aggressive at sorting out the difficulties that they find in the way. I think that if they keep this energy, they keep on pivoting, they finally are going to uh figure it out. Um I'm not sure Well, I don't think this game is top 10 material. I think that to be on the top 10, it's a different thing. It's has more to do with the size of the audience. It's It's a different story. I think that the But, this being on the top 100 on a regular basis, that's already an achievement cuz this genre doesn't

belong to the top 100. It doesn't have enough uh population. There's no other games of this category in the in in those positions. So, this game being there already means something. I think that the key for the future is going to be how they can grow the game, how can they acquire more audience, how they can they uh improve their user base and be able to uh not only retain them but make them bring come back often. Um So, content is going to be very relevant. Um Uh and I think that ultimately the the pillar of the game, which is the gameplay, that's really good. And when when you have a gameplay that good, a lot of the you can afford on figuring out other things in the in the way, provided you have the money and they do. So, yeah, I'm I'm actually pretty pretty bullish. I'm going to say an eight out of 10 and I plan to keep on playing this game for a very long time.

Oh, yeah. You know, before we go, I think we need to say like one last thing like guys, kudos to you, Second Dinner. The game is making like 400,000 a day. I mean, that's not small amount of money. I would take that immediately. So, I know like we criticize a lot of things, but still the game is great. You have definitely great potential. So, yeah, great job, guys. Amazing. Absolutely. We I mean, we criticize you folks criticize in your pieces more way more That's true. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, of course. It's true. Yeah, absolutely. If there is any developer listening to this, take any criticism as a love letter because I think we all agree that we love the game and we want this game to succeed and all criticism is directed towards making this game as big as it can be. We're really rooting for you.

So, kudos for everyone involved. Um With that said, I'm going to wrap this up. We went overtime unsurprisingly. Thank you all for being here with me on my first ever hosted podcast. And uh hopefully you enjoyed Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. Bye. Thanks for having me. Bye. Bye-bye.