How Hyperbeard Became Mexico's Top Game Publisher

In today's increasingly challenging gaming landscape, you need every advantage that you can get. What if just having a great game with high LTV just isn't good enough? What if a competitor at larger scale with a portfolio of games rather than just a single game was able to drive a higher portfolio LTV relative to your game with only a single game LTV? Further, what does a modern-day technical growth stack look like in a post-IDFA and post-fingerprinting world? Today, we learn from the lessons of Mexico's largest games publisher, HyperBeard, along with two of HyperBeard's partners, Tenjin, their MMP or mobile measurement provider, and Sonamine, a game data analytics and monetization consulting firm. Both companies have worked to help HyperBeard achieve success, and they share their secrets with you today. So, coming up, an introduction to HyperBeard, its partners, as well as discussion on the concept of portfolio LTV, and what a modern-day growth stack

looks like. Stay tuned. Hello everybody, and welcome. I'm excited to have a number of guests today to speak about two things, really. At the high level, we want to talk about this concept of portfolio LTV, and secondly, we want to talk about what does a modern-day growth stack look like. And with us to talk about this, we have Alex Kozachenko, who is the CEO of HyperBeard, which is, correct me if I'm wrong, Alex, but is it It is Mexico's largest games publisher and developer. Correct. And you guys have a ton of Is it over 100 million users or something crazy? Yeah, 250 million 250 million downloads over the last 5 years. Nice. Nice. Nice. And also joining us, we have Chris Farm, who is the CEO of Tenjin, an MMP provider that has also worked very closely with HyperBeard. And also, Nick Lim, the president of Sonamine, who also works on Is it monetization solutions, Nick? And we'll we'll kind of dive into it later if you can provide

more context about what you guys are doing, but how would you describe yourselves at a high-level? Yeah, at a high-level we are sort of a data agency for games and publishers. We just are very good at using data to help improve things at games. Great. And so for our audience, we are you know, I think in the current environment it's so difficult to achieve success in mobile. And yet we've got Alex here with HyperBeard and there were a number of case studies that both you developed with Chris and with Nick separately in terms of some of the things that you guys you guys have been doing and I thought we could go into that, but Alex, maybe we could start by having you speak a little bit more about HyperBeard, what you guys are doing, and then from there it'd be great to kind of understand the relationship that you have with Chris and Nick. Sure, absolutely. So, HyperBeard is what you would consider a boutique publisher. This is kind of a term that was thrown around a bunch maybe five or six years ago. Kind of publishers that really specialize in a very

select particular type of game. You could argue even like Zynga was one of these publishers. They obviously had all the matching games and eventually they kind of branched out into other other titles. So, what we have kind of stuck with is this audience which is females 18 to 30 kind of young adult female who like a particular set of games. And the kind of unifying word we have for our portfolio is cute. So, we like to think of our portfolio as this cute bubble. Basically, what we try to do is get users in whether it's through some of our legacy games or some of our newer games, figure out any way to get them in and then have them kind of move around the portfolio. And in order for that to work, the games, you know, they can vary a bit from genre to genre. They can even vary a bit from audience, but there has to be enough overlap where enough users are moving from one title to another. Because obviously one of the main challenges right now is getting new users and getting them at a price you can afford. And for us, being casual and having relatively low LTVs, especially with our audience, you know, we really need to measure LTV across the portfolio

for UA to make sense. Right. And Alex, just for our audience so they understand your business better, could you talk to us about how does your portfolio currently kind of look like now in terms of the number of games that you guys have as well as how many new games are you introducing on a regular are new games coming in at a regular cadence or how does that work? Yeah, so we probably have around 20, maybe possibly even 25 games that are live on the store. You know, 10, 15 of them are really not operated anymore. They just kind of exist, but they still get downloads. The thing about Google and Apple, both stores, is they're very historically algorithmically driven. Driven. Once you get traffic, you continue to get traffic. And so, the 10 that are operated, we are both operating internally and we're also operating with our publishing partners, so our developers that have built the games. And some we even take on or we acquire from our developing partners at some point. But yeah, that's that's kind of how it works. And then in terms of the new games, you know, we we try to release around four a year. Last year we

did two, this year we're on track to do around six. You know, that's kind of the sweet spot we found for kind of just the overall kind of organic uplift. Too much and you're cannibalizing yourself, too few and you're not taking advantage of enough organic opportunities. And we just try to kind of, you know, in a in a way, you know, not to compare us to Netflix, but you know, we're we realize that at some point people are going to get tired of one game and they're going to want to find other games. We want to make sure we're providing something for them. Great. And as far as the relationship that you have with Chris and Nick, could you kind of describe that at a high level and then maybe I could kick it over to those guys to go into a little bit more detail. Yeah, absolutely. So I've worked with Nick at Sonamine for a long time and his team. We are, you know, we were laughing earlier when some someone said I was sophisticated in the way I think about things. I I like to think think as pretty data dumb. You know, we like to obviously we we collect the data that we can, which is limited for obviously a number of reasons, a bunch of privacy reasons and whatnot. But, it's really not my background, not my expertise, nor is it anyone on my team. So, they can really help us to interpret

the data that we have and find opportunities for for growth, for monetization. Obviously, it's all tied to growth, right? You need to monetize better in order to grow. And so, Nick has helped us over the years to do that, largely centering around kind of UA as a principle. Right? Cuz you need that calculation to make sense. And then where where Tenjin comes into play is Tenjin is our MMP, and they are the ones that have allowed us to kind of put all the pieces together. Both through the product that they offer and also through their custom dev services. And that's kind of where portfolio LTV came in for us. It's kind of been a vision, honestly, for the last two or three years. It just was never the right time internally to kind of set that project until we kind of had the right partners to help us get there. Right. And maybe like starting with you, Chris, could could you explain to the audience what does an MMP do? And then there was like some concern that with IDFA deprecation that the role of the MMP would change, but can you speak to whether that has changed at all or is it basically the same? Yeah, sure. The role of an MMP historically was to figure out like

which sources of traffic that you are advertising on produce the highest return on investment. And I think that's still the case, but it has changed a lot from like IDFA deprecation and moving to a world where things are less transparent. And so, one of the things that we kind of differentiate on is that we try to pull all this data together in like a single place. And that hasn't really changed. Like we we provide like these data warehouses as as a service so that companies don't have to like build their own data warehouses as well. This is one of the ways that we're kind of different from a lot of the other MMPs. And as a result, even with kind of the deprecation of IDFA, like our belief still remains that you can pull all the different types of data that you can get, and it's even more necessary, arguably even more necessary that you do that and have partners that can

analyze and look at that data appropriately. Right. In In terms of like your relationship with Alex and Hyperbeard, so part of what I read in terms of the case study was it seemed largely oriented around this notion of portfolio LTV, but was that Alex, when when you guys were evaluating Tenjin, was that like one of the primary use cases that you were thinking about, or was that just also a nice to have, or maybe you could speak to Maybe Chris, you could speak to what what is meant by portfolio LTV, and then Alex, I'd love to hear kind of what went into your decision about choosing Tenjin versus other MMPs, and like what are the sort of metrics or bases of competition that you think about when you think about MMPs? Yeah, sure. So, the notion of portfolio LTV, I don't think it was something that we were looking to do from the very beginning. It was just sort of this natural thing to look at

once we understood kind of what the customers wanted to do, or in this case Alex wanted to do with the data. So, at a high level, what we think of as portfolio LTV is if you have, you know, more than one or two apps, you have the ability to or you have some control over the way that your users can experience your your game. And when they get tired or they feel like they're going to churn from the game, you can you can try to incentivize or motivate them to stay within the rest of your ecosystem of apps. And, you know, we started to see through the data that it was very natural for customers to want to feel like and play similar games in your portfolio of games. And so, it kind of naturally generated from that as an idea. At least that's what what we kind of thought of. And that germinated into a lot of

different analyses that we tried to do and kind of optimize that experience for the customer. And I think it's still very very early stages of the industry where people think sophisticated in in a sophisticated way about this. There's a lot of things and opportunities that I can personally see that you know, if you can create like a branding around your portfolio, you have like a very good shot of doing something like this. And there's a lot of product ideas that can spawn from that like and I don't think people have even tried them yet, but you know, having like a universal currency across different apps or like very similar experiences or sharing different types of virtual goods across apps like that becomes a lot more possible when optimization is is and and metrics are there. Right. And Chris, maybe what I could do is just for our audience just to kind of explain a little bit more of of what you mean by portfolio LTV is and maybe I could try to explain it in a in a little bit simpler way for our audience, which is to say that

today and we're talking about growth right now and talking about you know, how do you acquire users for not only your game, but in this case what we're talking about is if you have multiple games and you can cross promote from one game to another, then essentially when you acquire a user, you may be acquiring a user not only for the single game that you're advertising for, but because there is a form of cross promotion that that player that may then get go to another game actually has a higher value than you would have normally anticipated just from advertising for a player to a single game. And maybe a a good example of the historical examples of this we we saw in hyper-casual where a lot of hyper-casual games had low ARPU, average retention days, and so as you were pumping players into one hyper-casual game, you'd already be cross-promoting them to the to the next game. And a lot of the hyper-casual publishers then looked to build a large portfolio of hyper-casual games that were releasing at regular

cadences so that they can move players between those games. And the Japanese also had this notion of like their old gacha games of taking a lot of players to one gacha game and then at a certain point of time start shifting them to other gacha games. And so you would think about to your point a portfolio value. And so it does seem like in this current extremely competitive marketplace that these kinds of notions and the ability to think beyond just what everybody else is doing would potentially give you strategic advantage. But would you say that I've characterized that correctly, Chris? Yeah, from like a mathematical perspective, you can effectively increase your overall return on investment, right? Like you can acquire a user in one app and essentially be it becomes just this mathematical game of if you acquire a user for let's say a dollar in in your first app you can basically cross-promote them into another one of your portfolio apps at a much cheaper

price. I mean, there's an opportunity cost there in the sense that you could have shown an another ad, right? Of another publisher. But it's a much lower opportunity cost and you can build your LTV this way. And it's actually one of the ways that the math of hyper-casual publishers existed. I mean, they would be acquiring users for much more than they could make in any single app, but like as a taken as a whole, like it was it was generating profit for them. So, that's kind of how they thought about that. Right. And to some degree, what we're seeing in a lot of 4X games now where they basically have now created one more like kind of a casual game and then turn into like a 4X game like Whiteout Survival or Last War, for example. Uh that that's kind of a little bit of taking this notion and and just kind of integrating into a single game, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And and I think it's actually exacerbating the profit you can make,

you know, even with the rise of things like hybrid casual. Yeah. You know, the profit is get the margin's actually getting thicker because if you can do and implement this strategy, you might be able to acquire a user in a hyper casual game and cross-promote them into something that, you know, has in-app purchases or subscriptions or things like that. And the the margin can actually be wider in some cases. Alex, have you thought about doing something like that given that you've you have this broad understanding of your audience and you have a number of games that are casual in nature and that have potentially very high conversion rates and and IPM, for example, that you would then do kind of like a Whiteout Survival type of strategy where you you bring in players to one game and then and then the game kind of transforms into a a higher monetizing game. Have you ever thought about doing something like that? Yes. However, building a Whiteout Survival is a more of a challenge. So, both because it's not necessarily a good fit for our audience, but also just the product expertise needed. Sure. I said, we're not we're not an especially data savvy company. So, you

know, our LTVs may differ 2X between games, but they don't differ 50X, which is kind of how you'd probably compare the LTV of some of our games to like a game like Whiteout Survival. So, we do have the feeder principle, which is basically that certain games will have substantially lower CPIs, but also extremely low LTVs. And those are really just games that want to run UA into or drive users into to get them into the portfolio to then go somewhere else. Right. That's still something we're really trying to explore and we're even opening up the exploration to our legacy titles since we have a ton of downloads on those historically, but we know that the LTVs just can't sustain UA on a one-to-one basis. So that there are the nice thing about portfolio anal- analyzing at the portfolio level is it really does open up the opportunities. You don't need to just have a single game. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Obviously, there's a lot of advantages as well in terms of product expertise and aligning marketing and everything. But we're not reliant on any one game being successful. We have a bunch that we can go push people into. Right. And before we kick it over to

Nick, Alex, could you also just comment on that that other part of the question that that I asked? So, when you were looking at Tenjin as an MMP relative to some of the other MMPs in market, you know, how did you make that decision? And again, was was this portfolio LTV feature a key part of that or that was just like a nice to have? Yeah, so I don't know that we had the discussions about portfolio. So, we were thinking about it before, but it was something that was still a step away. One of the things that Tenjin did offer was custom dev services along with the contract that we had, and that would allow us to kind of um build the BI. And so, we knew that was the case and that that was ultimately the vision that I had for that. Although, I don't know that I expressed that to them at the time. And that's eventually what they did. And obviously, um Nick um and his team at Singular Mine also helped us to build that cuz again, it's not really our expertise. The other thing that Tenjin uh allowed us to do was to kind of expand our UA pool. The thing about, you know, having low LTVs is you really want low overhead

on top of your costs. And ultimately, most MMPs are charging you on a per install basis tracked back to a UA source or any sort of tracking source. So, you know, some of the the bigger MMPs out there are not especially cheap. You know, if you want to expand outside of tier one, good luck. You know, and it depends on obviously the scale. You know, if you obviously if you have massive scale, you can you know, you can negotiate a deal, but we can't pay 2 cents on an install in India where the LTV is 1 and 1/2 cents for example. Right, makes absolutely no sense. So, this has allowed us to kind of open up the pool and right now we're actually seeing a ton of success with our global campaigns that we're running which we wouldn't even think about running on an MMP if the cost structure didn't make sense. Right. Right. Okay, so Nick, coming over to you and I know you wrote or I I don't know if it was you or somebody at Singular Mine had written a a case study about working with HyperBeard. Could you kind of dive into that? And maybe also talk about

some of the services that you provide because it you know, what I read is you provide end-to-end solution packages, but what what does what does that specifically mean? Well, thanks. Let me just touch upon working with Alex. So, he's right. We've actually worked together a long time. And prior to Tangent actually, we're working with another provider with some ideas around that too and the data wasn't as well put together which is why it was really actually great to work with Tangent's data warehouse. And once all the data was sort of put in one place, it's fairly easy for us to help Alex sort of answer some of the basic questions like you know, how do users move between the plat between the games? Like did they come in here? Did they go into this other game? So, we did a lot of that initial exploration to help them out a little bit. And I think we discovered a lot of opportunities that allow Alex and his team to sort of strategize and prioritize where they would be putting some of their UA efforts.

One of the reasons that we were called in I think is because you know, when you look at the traditional MMPs, when you run a campaign, you get the cost and then you also get the revenues associated with that campaign, but they tend to be tied to just that one game. So there's no real easy way to actually see the portfolio LTV for that campaign. And so I think that's where we will be able to help Alex and his team figure out a different way to do it and to see it so that they can use it every day to figure out the revenues for each campaign that are portfolio wide. So could you could you maybe dive dive into that a little bit more in terms of like what specifically So it sounded like you're helping HyperBeard with some data analysis of some kind. Um, you know, I I guess you're you're doing that even with IDFA deprecation lack of user level tracking. So it'd be interesting to understand what you're specifically looking at and then are you

helping more on a UA basis or or more from just just trying to understand exactly what what you guys are doing together? Yeah, Alex, do you want to take the analysis question and then I can do the what else we have question? Yeah, so you kind of helped us take that I would say tangent was the tool that we used to and in Growth Stack was the tool that we used to bring the data in, but obviously we need to clean it up and make it serviceable. Which means creating the right dashboards, the right reports. One of the things that they did also was just a custom analysis to say, "Hey, you know, do you have this percentage of users moving between two games, this percent between three, this what percent between four? Here is your largest feeder game, the one that users are coming into. This is the one they go to most most likely and then here's the next one, here's the next one." And some of the things that we can do with that for example is we can structure our cross promo such that we show ads in those proportions based on where users are likely to go and also where they're likely to monetize, right? Cuz the whole idea of the you know, the Whiteout Survival question is you know, you want

users to go where they're going to give you the highest LTV. But obviously you need a higher probability that they're going to go there otherwise you're just showing an ad for the sake of showing an ad. So, those are some of the use cases that they've helped us with and like I said, it's because we don't really have any data analysis in-house, that's been very helpful to have their their help. Okay. Yeah. And in terms of you know, we think of it as data is sort of a journey. So, when you start out and you have a game and you are you know, UA'ing, that's where you start because you got to bring some users in. So, we help on that front. If the data is present, we can generate scan prediction models, for example, that's something that we have looked into uh with Alex as well, where even though there's IDFA deprecation, we can still with the conversion values that are coming in predict to within 5% of accuracy what the LTV would be like based on the conversion values that are coming back for that particular scan campaign. And but sometimes what happens is we realize that the scan conversion value schemas

are actually restricting what you can predict. So, we will go back and help developers figure out, hey, actually you should use a bigger and broader scan schema that can capture more conversion values, not just revenue. That's the go-to for most developers today is just to put revenue buckets in the scan values. We actually recommend that you don't do that just because you've lost a lot of data already. So, we will help design the scan schema to get you better predictions at the scan level, if that's something you want to do. That's on the UA side. So, Remerge also helps on the monetization and the retention side. So, the minute a user starts playing your game, that's only half of the half of the challenge. Now, how do you keep them and make them spend money when they feel like they're getting value from it. So, we run AI predictions on top of the data that you have and we identify segments of users that are about to leave or to convert and we help you nudge them along if they're going to convert. And

if they're going to leave, we help provide some rewards that you think might help to keep them. Okay. So, if I were to kind of summarize the the stuff that you guys have worked on together and potentially other services. So, in terms of the data infrastructure stack, did you guys put that together? Did you guys implement that for Alex? Is that one thing that you guys did? So, actually Tenjin has a data warehousing product. So, they grouped all the data together. But, we had to go in and do some cleaning. You know, so quite frequently, as an example, every app might have a different user ID or a different device IDs or the device IDs might change over time. So, we need to kind of match them up. So, we did a lot of the work to help match up IDs so that you could match up an ID in in the first game to the second game. They're actually the same player. Right? So, we did some a lot of the work there. So, we cleaned up the data. And then Alex shot us a bunch of questions. And then we answered the bunch of questions through analysis. And then we

showed them in reports so that his UA team can actually run them every day and basically make buying decisions based on the LTV portfolio LTV of each campaign. Got it. So, uh Chris, so at Tenjin, do you guys store all the analytics events? So, all the telemetry stuff is going into Tenjin data warehouse? Is that Is that how it's working? Yeah, more or less. I mean, we we store all the analytics events. We do all the attribution events. All the scan stuff. And even to the extent that you have like external services that you want to like pull data from that are like separated, we can get those as well. So, that's I think we're trying to just again, like we're a little bit differentiated in this way that if a lot of big companies will build this themselves. Like, you you go to like a Zynga, they'll have like five to 10 engineers that just do that. Then on top of that, those five to 10 engineers will kind of take the next step and do what

Nick is doing. Like they'll clean the data and like make it usable, right? So, the way that we kind of play a role in this sort of setup is we pull all the data together and then at this point like Nick and some of my will take that and then clean it up and make it very usable and actionable. Right. And then Nick, it sounded like the other stuff that you guys were doing is like some PLTV analysis as well as churn analysis and then you are also managing Hyperbeard CRM in terms of like notifications, messages, things like that or or working together in some way to to manage that? I'll throw that to Alex since he's on it. Yeah, so yeah, so we're relative so we've always kind of had like one hand in the in the new game cookie jar and then one hand out whereas everyone else has shifted kind of 75, 80%, 90% towards live ops. We're starting to shift that way too, but I would say up to this point we basically been 50/50. So, that means our

live ops teams are very lean and basically just focused almost entirely on content and new features. So, we haven't really had an internal CRM tool or a team or a person. So, we've kind of pushed those initiatives off, but it is something that's on our road map as we kind of make that shift towards more more live ops focus. Yeah, we since we do a lot of that we at least provided with Alex with some recommendations on at least some changes that need to be made in the current implementation to sort of make that easier and make it so that it will scale. Because you know, you've got four game launches, six game launches a year. The last thing you want to do is to repeat something that takes a long time. So, it's got to be highly efficient. Okay. Yeah. And so like Alex, so you've got a game and let's say that the LTV for a certain game is like, I don't know, $2. But then you there's also like a portfolio value or or maybe Nick, could you explain what what you guys do or Alex, either of you guys explain how how do you get from like the game specific LTV and then how does the

portfolio LTV then override that specific game LTV? How do you guys think about that? What what kind of analysis kind of goes through your head? Sure. So, one of the one of the reports we have right now is I think it's the it's the portfolio multiplier. So, basically it just says it takes your total measured app LTV revenue and then your portfolio which is taking all the users that were acquired in that one app and then measuring their value across the portfolio. And some games it's plus 20%, some games it's plus 50, some games it's plus 100. Usually the ones that are the higher ones are tend to be the kind of smaller ones cuz they they feed kind of some of the bigger games and the bigger games can be smaller cuz there's also those are also the ones that tend to you acquire more users for. But that's just kind of one example of, you know, how we're looking at it. If we can go drive those percentage just higher than if it's for example plus 25% on Pocket Love, you know, we can hit what is it? 75% um ROAS and that's still a positive

thing for us, right? Whereas otherwise we'd have to hit 100% or obviously additional with margin. One of the things that we've really struggled with historically is measuring organic uplift. We can't we could not assign any sort of organic uplift value to UA because we were so organic and we'd hit these organic spikes all the time where we'd start a campaign, you know, it would go up a little bit then we'd just tank and then it would go spike way back up and it's all based on organics, it has nothing to do with UA itself. So, as we kind of get our spend higher, we can actually see the effect of UA on the organics as well which has been kind of something that's really important for us. We know it exists, it's just been immeasurable up to this point. Okay. And something interesting about the multipliers is that the multipliers change, You know, they're never static. So, you know, when analysis team changes the cross promo sort of percentages or algorithm, then the multiplier changes as a result as well.

Right. can tweak it because now they can see, you know, the downstream game that they're promoting to the LTV has changed in some way. And so they can tweak the cross promo to go to different games. And then that affects the multiplier which then goes back into UA. Right. So, you've got a game that's feeding other games that then kind of add to the LTV of that game. And so then you can kind of come up with a with a higher value basically for that specific game. Correct. Yeah. So, yeah, so so the the Pocket Love example is a good one. It's yeah, if you have plus 25% then you can, you know, you can lose that margin on ROAS for a particular campaign and you still know that that campaign is still a positive or net break even which usually for UA is is an okay thing. Okay. And sounds like you've used this strategy to great success in Mexico. Um but maybe I could also just ask you a broad-based question. Uh since IDFA, the way that you you have been doing user acquisition, like how has it changed if at all? And uh you know, what what is the

current like how how do you how are you successful in the current UA market today? Sure. So, most of the portfolio LTV stuff has been Android centric just cuz it is easier to track. It is easier to get more granular in terms of the measurements. And when IDFA was deprecated or you know, you started asking for permission for it, it really didn't affect us to be honest. We're we're been a very brand-focused, brand-centric developer publisher. And that actually is the main way we actually get users to move across our games. It's not even necessarily cross promoting them. People would always ask us, you know, are users moving across your game? We would say yes, um but we had no idea how much. Now we actually do know cuz we're able to measure it. Again, that's most of those measurements are focused on Android as opposed to iOS. But you know, you can still get a decent amount of data from users that do opt in and you can use that to predict across the portfolio or the other iOS users, you know, what those percentages are. But, it has become more challenging, certainly. That being said, you know, I don't think IDFA deprecation hurt us as much as it hurt a lot of other companies.

Right. And maybe now shifting to this notion of a growth stack and sounds like based upon services like that Chris and Tencent have that that can be a little bit more integrated, especially as far as like data is potentially concerned or that your analytics stack it being part of the M&P potentially. But, could you comment on what your current growth stack looks like and maybe Nick, since you're you're kind of implementing some of this stuff as well, how would you trade that off against the kind of stack that other companies might be using when it comes to growth? Yeah, sure. So, for for analytics right now, we're using Firebase and Google Analytics. Again, we're not looking to add additional costs on, so it's a free it's a free service and works relatively well. Not to mention you have to have Firebase in your in your game if you want to run Google Ads successfully, at least that's what they tell you. So, we have that and then on the advertising side, we use Unity Level Play. That feeds our advertising revenue into Tencent directly and obviously Tencent is our M&P. We use Growth Full

Stack for our BI and I think that's pretty much it. I might be missing something, but that's that's the gist of it. Yeah. I think you guys use Google Looker Studio for reporting, so I think that's what I Yes, we use Yes, correct. Looker Studio for dashboarding. For dashboarding. That's stuff we helped you with. Um so, we So, we tend to work with any stack out there. Um honestly, I think all of them all the different growth stack folks are trying to adapt to the post IDFA world and whether it's scan related or sandbox or whatever new changes are coming out. So, we've seen all of them trying to find ways to integrate new capabilities like scan schema or scan modeling specifically on the stack that Alex has talked about. So, we work inside the data warehouse that Tangent has built out. We work with others, of course, as well. But, all of them have started to push data out. Uh they I think they've

all started to recognize the importance of data and trying to find a way to integrate um all the data in a way that can be useful for the advertisers. I hope that's sort of where you were leading towards. the question. Yeah, I mean, what what other type of growth stacks do you see out there, Nick? And what would be the trade-off between using this kind of stack relative to to what some other companies might have? Yeah, so I think Alex was was right when he mentioned that some of the really larger sort of MMPs tend to have a different cost structure than Tangent. I think they also focus on a different segment of the mobile games industry. I think as a result, they've also invested a lot more in sort of advanced modeling capabilities. So, many of them will have some advanced fingerprinting which may or may not go over shortly. They will also have some kind of scan let's call them V1 or V2 or V3 offering which, again, given that it's so much in flux, it keeps sort of shifting. But,

they keep putting it out there because I think it's useful for their users to have the option to use them. We typically get called in because a lot of our customers don't know what to do with the larger MMPs offerings. It's just very confusing at this point. Chris, do you do you feel the same way? Do you do you think what what you guys are offering and the other folks offering, is it very confusing? And what's the cause of the confusion? And then how how are you able to provide like uh costs at a a much lower price in in kind of these like third world countries or like India and some of these other countries. Sure, it's just built into the way we I guess architected our system, but the primary way that we think about ourselves is the way of acquiring users historically is like it's just very complex and there's a lot of kind of bells and whistles that I think are not necessary

for developers to actually do things. So, we kind of focus on that segment of customer and try to provide them with tools that are easy to understand and let them compete with like the top 1% as quickly as possible. You know, building building out a data warehouse is not a trivial task, for example. Whereas with someone like us, you can like push a button and then it just like shows up. You can just log in and like go to it and you know, you might not have the sophistication and the personalization of let's say a Zynga team that has like 20 people doing this on a daily basis. But, you're at least 80% 90% of the way there and you have some control over customizing that as you grow as well. Um especially with partners like Nick, the customization becomes much easier. And so, that's kind of how we think

about helping some of the smaller developers grow into medium and hopefully bigger sizes. That's sort of our our view. I think in terms of how we talk about portfolio LTV as well, like one of the things that we're trying to do on like at the end of the day, all you really want to figure out is what is the optimal user journey through your portfolio of apps. you know, giving them like the best experience and with an association with your brand. And I think this is part of one piece of just putting all the data together and getting it together. And I think actually smaller and medium-sized developers have this unique advantage to do that because they're not there's no inter-competition between like studios and like larger companies where might actually have two different studios competing for the same user and

they're not going to want to share it as easily. So, smaller developers where they have full control over their their apps and they're not separated sort of by bureaucracy, they, you know, of course want to do that more and like figure out what's best for the user. And I think those experiences for users will actually be better than if if they're playing like a studio game. Right. And maybe Alex, one question I could ask you is that there's been a lot of discussion kind of informally in in in the games industry about this notion of bundling versus unbundling and and most recently we've seen Embracer which is now splitting apart. And so there's a case for when does it make sense for for game studios to have some level of of M&A and acquisition and what is like the size in terms of the company and the portfolio that makes the most sense. And Alex, I it would seem like from you what you guys are doing and what you guys have been

you know, uh writing these case studies about, it would seem like if you have a reasonable portfolio of games and maybe there is competitive advantage of not just having a single game and being a single game studio but having a portfolio of games. How would you characterize the advantage of this portfolio effect? And then how many games do you think a studio should have to be able to take advantage of this kind of portfolio effect? Sure. So, I like to think of it kind of mathematically to say that, you know, for a studio to start from scratch right now and create a successful game, you'd have to have a game that's in the top 1% of 1% basically. What we can do is we can take a game that's in the top 5% or top 10% and make that game successful relatively usually for where the developer is and, you know, what our cost structure is. You know, that could be a few hundred thousand dollars a year, that could be a couple million a year, you know, whatever the case is. You know, it's not going to be the game that's making 50 million a year. Um but we can take cuz that the game that's in the top 5% can't

do that, right? You have to be in that top 1% of 1% to scale. So, that's our strategic advantage and the reason we can do that is cuz we have so many users in our ecosystem and so much ability to drive users in organically and through cross promo that they can get users basically at a much cheaper rate effectively, you know, cuz uh most of them are for free. Right? Not to mention we've built an expertise in this particular audience and in a lot of these genres where we can help them optimize the games. And so, that's where our strategic advantage is, which is why we we also try not to venture too far away from what we're doing because we do, then we're just competing in the same space as everyone else. If we were to release a 4X game into our portfolio, yeah, it would be great for the users that we're able to push into it, but we may get attract, you know, 1 to 2% of users. It's not enough to really be any sort of strategic advantage. And then there you'd look at the company's UA capabilities overall as a better indicator of strategic advantage, right? So, we would lose out. And then what was your se- second question? My main point was just trying to characterize this how much of an

advantage you have and then like how many like if if you were to if that was significant advantage, then at one point do you have diminishing returns? Like how do you think about the number of games that would give you that advantage? Sure. So, so there's there's a lot of advantages in size. You can negotiate deals with media ad mediators, ad networks, piece. Basically, the the larger you are, the better deals you can negotiate. And I think you've seen these things happen. You know, I I don't know for sure, but I think triple dot is a great example of this. They took a game and multiple games that were not really new to the market at all, and they just negotiated the right deals, executed very very efficiently, and now they're worth I don't know how many billions of dollars. And so and and they did it extremely quickly, too, right? So, you know, there is value in size. Where it becomes a disadvantage, obviously, is when there is growth potential for a particular game and the studio is not well aligned enough to make that growth potential happen, right? So, if there are game if

there is a game in the 1% of 1% for example, it does have the ability to scale, it has the metrics, you know, it just needs a a team around it that can kind of specialize in that one particular game. Then that's when you want to break it off, right? Because the portfolio is not adding as much value as kind of the specialization could add. That those games are hard to find. Obviously, there are other cute and cozy games out there. You know, we're not the only ones. We're just kind of known as the publisher who does them. We also get a lot of these cute and cozy games associated with us even when they're not. I think I think what the question you had earlier was when can you take advantage of this portfolio value? And I think the answer is you just need one game. You need one step of success, and then you need to kind of bridge that into next one. Obviously, one game is not going to be as powerful as two, is not going to be as powerful as three. At a certain point, you could argue, "Okay, well, 25 is no different than 26, certainly." But, you know, when you've got that base, you've got such a an advantage over even the companies that have one, two, and three still. So, cuz there's,

you know, you don't really reach those diminishing returns till you're very far down the line. Yeah, and and for us it's just kind of been, you know, part of it is we're not we're not expecting to necessarily build the 1% of 1% game. It's just not in our DNA, so to speak. So, we're just going to keep cranking out games that we are relatively successful, ideally making them slightly better year over year. And eventually, you know, that equation will crack to such that we can really scale it with UA because we will have such a strategic advantage in the space. I think maybe we can end with one last question for me for each of you, which is like in terms of your respective, you know, areas and scope. And so, Chris is as an MMP, and Nick is somebody who's working in, you know, PLTV, monetization, churn, things like that. And Alex is is a publisher. It'd be great to get kind of your forecast in terms of what you see as potentially big trends or upcoming things that are that are coming up in the future. And then just advice to our audience if

who are largely game developers and studios out there in terms of what should they be looking out for to try and be successful. And maybe we can start with you, Chris, and Nick, and then Alex, you can close us out, but what do you think, Chris? What is the future looking like? I think the future there is at least for now, it's just getting all the data together so that the sophistication can be simplified into something actionable around ROI. That's I think what the future is, and certainly projects like this one become more I think they become more valuable. And you can even see it even at like the biggest scales, like you think about what Facebook is, they're like now they have like five apps or something like that, right? And even the way they report in their own earnings is like they say their DAU as a function of those five apps. So, there's this network effect there that they're they're encapsulating without explicitly talking about. So,

you know, they have like Instagram, Messenger, the blue app, etc., etc. WhatsApp. They're They're not thinking about their users in They probably are thinking about it in each app, but they're thinking of it as like an ecosystem of things. And then it kind of I think that broadens to like all of these types of developers who want to create those similar types of experiences even at a smaller scale. So, I think And And also with the notion of kind of linking it to hyper-casual, they're trying to create like own network effects, building out other types of experiences with hyper-casual IP, subscription, all that type of thing. They're trying to create like this image around like that ecosystem as well. So, I think that's that's generically what I see where I see people moving toward. Okay. Nick? You know, I've been in the data space for about 30 years.

And what I can say in terms of trends is that, you know, what the big companies start with and create a competitive advantage with eventually goes downstream. Eventually everybody will get to it. And so, my sort of view on the future is tools like Tangent that, you know, make it easy to combine all the data together is just going to make it so that every game developer in the mid-size, casual will be able to access all the data they need. So, I think it's time to be creative a little bit about what you can do with it, you know. So, big boys like Zynga and so forth were doing AI 8 years ago. Well, now the data's all together in one place, even a small indie shop should be able to do that themselves. So, that's what it really gets us excited because we're just in the early innings in the data play for games. Okay. Alex? Yep. So, from a Yeah, from a data

perspective, I'd say predictive modeling is kind of the future. I think it's going to be I mean it already is, but you know, we we have enough data signals right now where you know, we can extrapolate you know, the larger portfolio where you know, it's it's not you know, we're we're predicting maybe 30% of the portfolio. We're not predicting 70 or 90% of the portfolio. Eventually, we're going to get 10% of the data and we'll predict 90%. And you know, it's it's it's due to all the data privacy laws. It's obviously due to the changes that platforms are making. Um we'll see when Google, you know, actually does decides to roll out their thing. But you know, I that that is going to be very interesting because we're going to be very reliant on, you know, the data signals that we have and and getting the right modeling models in place. Um which is going to be kind of scary. I think I think one of the things about data which is always I guess frightened me is that um good data is great, but bad data is even is is by far worse than good data. You know, if you have the wrong signals pushing you in the wrong direction, you can really get off course quickly. So we have to be very careful cuz again, we're not going to have very many. So I I think that's kind of you

know, where things are headed. Great. And Alex, just I I forgot to ask. So for all your cross promo management and things like that, did you guys build your own tool or is that something that Cinamaker built for you guys or We we currently build our own tool. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And right now right now we're adjusting it manually, but we are talking to Tangent about automating that process. Okay. So Chris, will you guys have like a like a cross promo product in the future? TBD. I mean, I I think this is one of those iterative things where we learn what is needed and like how they're using it. I think it's very native at the moment. So being able to uh understand that and help them in the right places is kind of where we're going next. Great. All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for your time and insights. Really appreciate it, Alex. Congrats on all the success and Chris, sounds like you guys I I I should definitely reach out to you when we're ready to look at

but yeah Nick thanks for your time as well but yeah thanks again guys and for our audience we will catch you next time thanks guys. Bye. Sounds great. Thank you guys.