➡️​HexaAway Breakdown - The 6th-Biggest sort puzzler you've NEVER heard of

This game is actually the sixth biggest sword puzzler by revenue after Pixel Flow, Magic Sword, Yarn Loop, Marble Sword, and Geeko Out, which is all the big guys in the category such as Loom Games, Grand Games, Combo Games, Voodoo, and Rollic. And afterwards, we have pretty much all of those. By the way, Jelly Busters seems to be catching up. It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice. M drops knowledge made of golden eyes. Felix with ads [music] making those coins rise. Jack up designs worlds chasing the sky. We're the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA advers [music] and game design too. M feeling shak bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight. Kua [music] master eyes on the prize tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix stacks colors like a wizard [music] in disguise. Jack real to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful, they light [music] the way. Click it fast, don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. [music]

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Is it just interstitial rewarded like hexo and
banner? Everything is there. Everything is there. And we are talking about hexa away. Hexa away. And you know why? Because it's it was produced by the the developer who's you know produced Jakob's favorite game ever, Uma Derby Party. What?
I mean I told you that
it's on cyber agent portfolio. Okay.
Cyber agent portfolio. [laughter] It was on cyber agent portfolio before. Now

it's good droid whatever. But it was way way way before it was only cyber agent and I was like why is this here? I was talk I was talking about this
by sitting there
seven or nine months ago [snorts] about like creatives and different things. So here we are. And [laughter] here we are. Don't you dare talk about Mus.
Okay, I won't.
Thank you very much.
Anyway, um why are we talking about this game? Let's go to the game first and then
nobody knows.
Go to the charts. I'll tell you why. Because why is this significant and what's there and this will be short and useful.
Short and sweet.
Exactly.
Their UA is is insane.
Let's go. So
hexa away is one of those combinations of or I would say successes that is trying to put on the arrows mechanic and put it into IP revenue finally because

there's been many different kind of let's say attempts but this is for now uh the best one. So let me just go maybe to home screen and get an interstitial or I will of course I will get one
anyway and maybe numbers in the meantime. Uh so the game was launched actually in 2024. This is quite critical. But then you see how it kind of slowly scaled up and there's this giant bump in April this year to something like 90k a day IP and then
yeah a little bit declined but I guess they like overshot it or whatever because they went like 150k downloads a day for a few days and then
just back to like 30k. Uh if you look at the active user base it's still going pretty good like half a million for IP puzzler. That's that's pretty good. uh countries wise it's uh yeah it's very pristine

pristine traffic so it's quite you know
pricey uh and the other very important thing with this is that this game actually if you look at our favorite favorite category which is sword puzzlers and by
sword puzzlers
revenue this game is actually the sixth biggest sword sword puzzler by revenue after pixel flow, magic sword, yarn loop, marble sword, and geeko out, which is all the big guys in the category such as Loom Games, Grand Games, Combo Games, Voodoo, and Rollic. And afterwards, we have pretty much all of those. By the way, Jelly Busters seems to be catching up.
If you remember, this is the Pixel Flow followup from Moon Active that we thought like, oh, these guys missed the train.
Seems they kind of hopped into the train. Let's see. Wait, wait, wait. Put inside there. Put loom games as well. Put uh pixel flow against it.
Against what?
Here. Jelly busters.

Why?
Why?
Just want to see what's happening.
And it's too small for doing anything flow. Yeah.
What? What are we talking?
It's declining. Oh, I don't think it's because of this is this is quite uh we covered on the sonar, so it seems they went in with it. So,
well, 80k per day is not bad. Although it's not 70 mil a month.
Yeah. Yeah. But you see it's kind of quite a big spike.
It's going up. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. We'll definitely get to it if it survives the scope season.
So, let's see
because I'm guessing it will it will like something will happen anyway. But, uh back to the chart here. So, this is a pretty original idea. As I said, if you look at the download chart, uh arrows is killing it because we have arrows. Arrows go, arrows original, and arrows puzzle. Basically, arrows being the best trend in puzzle now regarding uh at base games. So, it was just a matter of time until some somebody actually do it. And it seems like these guys I don't even

know how old these arrows if they were able to kind of go from there.
Not that much
because arrows definitely is not 2024, is it?
No. No, no, no.
It's def definitely after the acquisition, right? So definitely counts towards the
earnout five and this game is was sooner. So yeah,
sooner but I don't think it's it's that like it's arrows. It's more like hexa sword rather than arrows
sword with. Yeah. I don't know.
And arrows are just on top of it. It's not the main thing there in this game.
But now it's it's trending basically. So I guess it's used a trend to kind of
Yeah. But it's it's different, man. Like how can how can you compare arrows?
Yeah, it's different. I know. I know. I know. I know. Anyway, uh typical level saga. Uh no package, starter package. Uh welcome pack missions unlock from level 30, skins unlock from level 35, shop, nothing to it, like quite rudimentary as

per usual kind of puzzler that is scaling up. uh you play the game and the interesting part is that with these you actually have much more let's say tangible blockers because with normal arrows you need to kind of
put it in your head here you have the hexag grid because hexagons are the bestagons and in that hexag grid uh you need to kind of count with the grid itself a little bit so it's a little bit I guess more predictable than arrows itself which makes it good, but also it gives them a lot more vectors to put in other mechanics into it. I'll show you later.
Just want to give you a little bit of flow how the level works. By the way, I'm quite stuck here already. Do I am I
which one? Which one you are? You're not
It's hard to talk and present and play.
You're not built for this game. You're not built for this game
to think. It's hard to think because again, you see, you cannot just like go

randomly. Ah okay sorry I like empty space is also count this is the thing that grids helps you because grid now gives you the game design vector of putting like all escape roads into the picture itself which arrows stack
no but arrows couldn't do this because arrows is on a 2D plane this is on a 3D space with physics
exactly
so again just tells you like how better of a concept this is for this mechanic
so this is how it works and you pretty much need to get rid of all of these arrows as as you nothing really like that that hard but it gets hard as you go because there are different mechanics and things. So to show you a little bit more out of the like levels on top. So for instance here you see you have spaces that that uh you can
ah
it's the equivalent of from hexaort. It doesn't go that that fast. Or we have stuff like uh where we are spaces that

you don't know the color until you uh get get to it actually. So that's there. Then mechanics like uh where we are these kind of counting blockers that you need to kind of go and like move away stuff from them. These these these are my favorite where you actually can use these let's say teleporters or switchers that when you get to it, you actually switch the positions of the two blocks that are attached to the crane or whatever this is. Just wait a little bit for the guy to click it. Yeah, here we go. See?
Oh, they switched.
Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah. Yeah. So, lots of these like different mechanics that they added into it because again, if you have IP revenue, you usually need to have a blocker framework because you need like these different monetization mechanics that are just there because we're monetizing on difficulty itself, not

just gameplay and engagement, which is the difference between the adbased one and the IPdriven one. And as I said, there's like [ __ ] ton more mechanics as you go. This is like levels 240, I think I saw even some Yeah, like bombs there or whatever. Yeah. So again, they're like the typical stuff. As per usual, the mechanics curve of a sword puzzler is much more shallow than match three game. Match three game adds like a new mechanic every 40 levels. I'm guessing these guys are adding every 70 on average. You just you just like pixel flop has like 14 mechanics by level 300. So much less than your usual candy crush or royal match or whatever. But those mechanics are also quite uh similar in in match three games. They just have different visuals and a little bit different parameters. Anyway, uh yeah, that was the game. Nice and sweet. I was really waiting for this.
Thank you very much for coming. This is it [laughter]
until until somebody is able to do this and put arrows in IP gameplay setup. And again, we'll be watching it closely on

the not this one on the sonar because the revenue seems to be a little bit of a decline. But again, it could just mean that they just overshoot the UA because the EA is definitely not going down. So maybe it will still go up. And keep in mind they most probably don't have fully fledged live ops yet because these games I added as last thing. The main thing that you want to go through is level progression. Okay. Yeah. Uh I didn't play the game so I'm apologizing to the listeners already. I screwed up but I did calculate the ad revenue really quickly. I can just tell you the averages. So uh what I used I used four rewarded ads on 25% of the user base. Interstitial eights on 75% of the user base and banners about 120 because of the refresh rate. Uh which would bring us a grand total of $42,000 a day which is 36% of the total revenue which kind of makes sense

if it's an AI game.
Check my math there. Yakob or not,
but I would say like good checks out
like these these these
sniff test
quite heavy revenue compared to IP1 still.
So 40% probably is exactly around this. So yeah, so over 100k a day.
Yeah, that's still great. Mate,
man,
over to you.
What can I tell you?
We don't already know. [snorts] Four creatives.
Four creatives.
Four new creatives.
Shut up.
Four. Four new creatives in last 30 days,
man.
Oh, I saw four creatives in total. I was like, no way.
Was that the home run? Well, with four creatives, absolutely a home run. [ __ ] home run. This is just sad.
Like turn off new creatives like how many they have.
They were running one creative on Iron

Source. Yeah. Plus,
they have like 200 creatives.
Yeah. Not even 200 creatives. And then like the creative which is getting majority of the spend or impression share is [ __ ] banner. And this is the first thing I I turn off when I'm running an apploving campaign. Why? Because I I just launched one campaign for my my app and I was like, why I'm getting like 2 million impressions and one in
paying nothing? Paying nothing.
What the [ __ ] is this? And then like I reach out to the rep and she's like, yeah, you know, I would turn off the icon. [laughter] I like, yeah, okay, makes sense. Uh can you put in the the February period when they had this giant spike like how many creators were running there?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Definitely. Yes. February.
Maybe go go go February 7th till

it doesn't matter
or whatever. Yeah. Just go there.
Just February.
February.
Ah there we go.
Still like my life.
So it means that they downscale UA completely. They downscale UA completely and I don't think this is actually like a great thing. Although me integral makes sense for this type of game. Applavin makes sense for this type of game. Even mister
Mr. Einstein again
Einstein makes sense for game like this. Sure. It's man guys start listening to to to two and a half gamers you will get way more creative inspiration tap to hexa. Okay. Hello. Hello. Hello. Okay. And this is
So why do we think they downscale UA so much?
Because of [ __ ]
Because of the summer.

No, because of the [ __ ] It's like let's see analyze advertising and like what actually they were running here which is I guess yeah Apple integral and pretty much almost nothing else
oh man like terrible setup terrible terrible setup like you would definitely need more at least more
set yeah diversity for sure but at least way more integral in this case I mean even this like 90 90% and Applav that's that's not really that great because as soon as something happens on Applavin you're [ __ ] So something definitely
something happened in April and then they turned it off.
Something definitely happened. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Cuz I assume I mean these
So they went full on epin scale
full scale there and then
big jump in revenue and then hit the peak and goodbye like $50 CPI or something. M
most likely because this is fine. Okay,

let's just do
you think they've burned through all their uh the users on up that care about the game or what?
Yeah, most most probably.
Yeah, because if they didn't they would be still going faded.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. They have some loco here.
Okay. So, yeah, I mean a lot of these [ __ ] banners and and icons. It's just I don't get it. I
because the traffic is not bad. Like if you look at the active user traffic, it's like US a lot.
I mean obviously if you have all of these
like 40% USDAU and then UK, Germany, France, Japan.
Yeah, it's it's definitely going up and it's mainly US. Yes. US, UK, German.
So it must be very expensive. So I guess they burn themsel.
Yeah, exactly. That's that would be my my assumption. But if we go from February, uh, oops,

until now. Yeah, there you go. Scaled to 800k and then just died.
I mean, it's still 200k. This Yeah, this if downloads,
not this the same picture.
Yeah, it's the same picture. So this February period was definitely expensive and then they realized like oh
the Ros is not getting back.
I don't think it's Yeah, the ROS is not going to get back that quickly. And you know what we can actually check since this is an old game older game retention. Ha.
O% day one
4% day 30. Come on.
For an IP game, that's that's not great.
That's not great. Yeah. And if you go just US only February, still 4%. Like this is this [ __ ] man.
If they increase that by 25 or 50% like

boy,
man. Like for that level of scale.
Yeah. You need like 15 10%.
That this needs Yeah. 15 15% at least.
Day 30.
Those users, they are they don't exist anymore in the game. So they don't stack up. So that's why I mean you scale and there's like oh
you can kind of stack up the
Yeah, [laughter] exactly. I mean not 20 30% like this needs to like 4x better [laughter] than 4% at least to be able to kind of scale that much. So it was a very interesting experiment. So day one is okay but then like the curve looks terrible.
Looks like a very expensive experiment
and you know what like this is app loving traffic. So this needs to be way more. Usually Apin has better retention numbers against like different channels for my game like average is let's say 45% day one. Day seven is maybe 15 or

yeah 15 let's say and then day 30 is what like 78. For apploving campaigns it's the it's 45 day one but the day seven is 25 and day 30 is like 10 12. So it's better and if this is majority of this up loaving traffic and day 30 is four then other channels is like go like wait one [laughter] pretty much that's the whole kind of math behind this. So yeah, they earned cash like
so everything that that was you know like everything they earned on in one day and um mus everybody they just spend here and then it's
right
they'll be fine umamus over them.
Yeah.
Horse girls will take care of them.
Yeah. Yeah. It's like okay I way to the horse horse girls.
Okay.
Pretty much
that was it.
That's it. Yeah. I mean that's that's pretty much that's what we we can talk about this. I don't think we can talk

about it more. So yeah hicks away money away as well and
we're going away everyone going away as well. See you later select channel.
Bye ciao.