How to reduce ANR's & crashes, organics improvements, ASO, SDK utopia & Manuel Prueter (#60)

[Music] all the fun stuff all right uh yeah welcome everyone uh this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half Gamers session number 60 60 sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from a day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs definitely not discussing the latest industry news but we are having so much fun let's not forget this is 4 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously uh it's yakob over here Felix myself mate and we have a special guest CE of Co games Manuel hey so we're going welcome we're going to talk about the topic that Remo and Felix keep arguing about and that's anrs and crushes uh what causes them and how ads are loaded and why is it such a pain and what else whatever whatever else talk a bit about ASO as well right

uh but yeah um but first Manuel why don't you give us a little introduction of yourself we are doing uh how do you pronounce your last name yeah how do you pronounce that last name especially that because it's a you know you said you said it's challenging yeah it is it is indeed um should be should be okay for us to say so it's it's obviously like like like a German word uh that uh went through some transitions coming from the panian tri which was the Russians uh the prussians um back in the in the Middle Ages so somehow it morphed into this name so just call me Manuel uh I'm CEO of colossi games we have one game out since about a year U Gladiator survival in Rome um which just now dropped into Early Access on Steam as well um so uh yeah I've worked with Felix together and that's how we somehow meet so yeah you don't work with with the aore me so

I think that's the end of the podcast thank you very much uh we we can end here yeah but I played the game it's really interesting oh wow what the [ __ ] is with your mic so last episode it was really quiet now it's like you're [ __ ] shouting it doesn't have a boom boom arm and he's too cheap to buy one even though we have nearly 2,000 subscribers he still refuses to buy a boom arm boom arm is my arm oh my God tell all your friends to subscribe yeah and your family as well have your uh your son subscribed already cut subscribe does have YouTube yeah anyway uh so I I saw the the LinkedIn post about steam Lounge like why are you so excited about steam um firstly because it's it's um the first time that we actually launch on Steam all of us come from the from the mobile sector and uh um well nowadays um you kind of want to have like more PL crossplatform experience right um so we need to get our feet wet and and that's

basically it so we need to to make it happen and see from you know own first party experience how that stuff works there and uh not just um it's a free-to-play game on Steam right so uh that that's obviously very very different from from all the by to play products that are hyped up by PR agencies Etc you do not have uh like uh PR splashes or whatever so um it's really the dirty thing the dirty business to try to grow um o yeah we love dirty businesses and and growing in that that way so I guess we need to have you uh back on when uh you have more data to share from the steam as well that's it's super interesting so are you leaving mobile because mobile is dead no no no no no I love mobile I love Mobile H all all the all the you know doomy and gloomy people oh mobile mobile mobile mobile no they are wrong it's still the biggest platform um everything

what players do is on a whim you know they act on emotions and mobile is way more accessible for this uh than on PC are you by the way considering your own client uh parallel to steam in a way to you know mitigate some of the fees maybe maybe um yes but steam is like it it gives you like sort of free visibility um which is MH um which which is helpful to you know Tinker I mean we we launch An Early Access right we need to Tinker like the control set the pacing is obviously different from from Mobile to to steam uh you need you kind of need to strike a good balance there and um uh pushing out the updates both on mobile and on Steam at the same time it requires some technical um knowledge as well right so for us this is more a learning experience if it if it it will go tremendously well okay be my gu

yeah you know okay yeah why not also there's this PC Google play thing uh Android that could be interesting which obviously [ __ ] uh blue blue Stacks in there oh yeah blue Stacks no Etc all of them are crying yeah okay bought at some point by unity or so but no oh no no I don't think so I I might be like just hallucinating here yeah they were I never heard about that but um we have uh heard that been called the king of organic downloads no jokes the side i' yeah I've seen you know like a lot of your posts on LinkedIn as well and um and I even downloaded the game and it was actually localized in Slovak language on App Store I was like oh okay so you're definitely uh involved in in any organic t types of activities so any any ASO

stuff that you can actually share that uh you know help you grow organically um because I'm interested in in hearing that so what what was your prep for launching the game in terms of the the ASO so one king of Organics I'm not too sure yeah that's Felix you but um it was told to me like so it's not me saying it it was told to me by a fin and then okay okay there you go nice I could guess who um no I mean our game has about like 90% organic downloads right um and uh so like almost 4 million um so far and the one that I've been involved with uh before where I was a soul marketer it also had like 7 million the first year or so um so and the the way to think about ASO is um first of all you need to you need to split Apple and Google into into different different beasts right so Apple doesn't care about the revenue um

Apple cares about the experience on the phone apple is ultimately a hardware manufacturer and they want to sell their Hardware they want to sell the good experience of their Hardware um so everything there is geared towards conversion and platform experience basically so they care about uh review score they care about um the conversion from the search term to to actually an install um and that's what you optimize there for on Google it's a different piece Google is an Network so when you open Google play uh today on your on your Android phone uh you will see ads editorial content like events New whatever ads ads ads um uh pre-registration another round of ads and then at some point Come the Organics which are automated app collections um so you cannot well you can buy your way into it with Google ads uh because Google is the only one who can advertise there um and you should uh I mean mate

explains it needs to be in your mix and he's absolutely right because it's the the the front page exposure um but at the same time uh um Google gives you a lot of opportunity to be like in similar app categories and in these automated app Collections and stuff like this um so there you just need to localize your experience and uh to uh get into as many Auto collection lists as possible that you qualify for um however Google obviously cares about much more right how do you qualify for this out the collections and also like the similar apps so there are this there's this rumor like if you have a certain amount of downloads per I don't know a day or something then you you qualify for the similar games type of uh placement within the organic which I have no idea if it's true or not so I I don't I'm not sure if uh downloads per se play a very big role there um everything on Google especially in these

automated app collections is uh very user Centric or user Behavior Centric so if you play that game and then you get suggested something that is actually similar by by gamer stats meaning is it in the same category is it uh targeting the same sort of keyword Cloud it doesn't need to be the exact keyword right um so if you're an ASO practitioner uh now stop stuffing your text with your competition um brand names yeah yeah it doesn't do much it's it's it's a keyword Cloud that that Google draws from with machine learning um and then Google loves Revenue I mean they who would have said that surprised and and you know what what what Google loves more than just revenue revenue as quick as possible so um the monetization design needs to be in a way that you monetize your user basically on day Zero or day one um that's just the way the algorithm Works

um and and then come like um app health things um which leads us uh to the to the next big topic of today I guess yeah app house what does Google think is app Health we're gonna start getting into anrs aren't we we do we do it's a very quick slippery slope here um um yeah so maybe some Contex I can just give here so me and Manuel we worked together uh on ad monetization I suggested some ad placements to improve and you went on this hilarious rant about ad sdks crashes and anrs and just to start off and I'm hoping we can actually repeat that rant and actually record it but just to start off super simple like what are anrs like why are anrs and crashes actually an issue yeah so what is an an anr first of all so uh anr means application not responding um that like in Google's terms it splits uh

between um user facing anr that's the one that is important and general anr um we will come to what the difference is um so application not responding basically means um the device doesn't react to the to the input of the user anymore um for a certain amount of time usually it's around 5 Seconds um so that can be prolonged slightly but uh 5 seconds is a is a good thing um so that affects everyone it's normal that that anr happen um on especially older devices because well games get just more sophisticated and get just more massive basically right so um and why is that a problem because um Google set um thresholds uh and how many sessions um what percentage of sessions uh these anr or crashes uh can can occur and the

threshold is 0.47% um that's you know why it's 0.47 like or is that just arbitrary yeah it's mag magic number it's it's a well um the official explanation is um if you are above the threshold you're in the worst 25% of all apps which is a little bit disingenous in my view because you have you know a lot of app there that have 10 downloads 50 downloads yeah uh that will no never occur you know an anr in there right so um but everyone who is exposed or more successful uh in countries that have you know a lower spec device penetration uh yeah so and then then comes then comes a tin foil Hattery right I mean uh Felix already said I should be uh you know ranting a little bit uh but okay here's tinl haty now go back to what I

said about the Google front page um on Google Play front page ads ads ads ads ads who does not care about ads uh about anr uh at monetized games no not at monetized games um um uh ad driven games sorry so if you have an ad the user downloads anyway it does not matter um an anr however um cause you to um to drop if you about the thresh short uh drop the visibility in in organic rankings so um if you're a bad boy and uh put a lot of sdks in and AD networks really want to have a lot of sdks um you kind of um you know set yourself up for failure um if you are relying on organic traffic and in the way that most midcore games actually do for hyper ual it doesn't really

matter I no one searches for the next um new hyper casual game yeah 3D yeah but let's just like so kind of building up what you said about ad networks and you know if you're a bad boy and they crash it like when it was a big issue for you but just like technically just before we get into it like can you kind of just explain what happens when a user opens a game and what like the SDK loading process looks like and how ad networks usually screw that up or screw that up so you you have your phone open you click on the icon or tap on the icon um then you send a signal basically to uh to the operating system to load a lot of activities um so and these activities are like you have the game engine you have um your analytics SDK you have um your game assets for the first scene um which is why you should not make an open world game in your first scene while you're kind of setting yourself up for failure there yeah um your download size

will be 10 gabes yeah yeah yeah you know I mean especially some asent developers think like oh yeah everyone has just 10 gigabyte free on their phone right so and load everything up on this in open world game no um so all these assets need to be loaded uh uh sound Etc um um SDK need to be initialized contact uh the corresponding server like hi I'm here uh please uh give me an ad to preload blah blah blah blah blah you know all this kind of stuff all of that happens in parallel you know it's like but you have only a certain amount that a phone can process um at the same time um so there you have your first um choke point choke point choke point yeah yeah your Lo loading time is 10 10 well 10 seconds is it's kind of on the lower scale if you have like millions of sdks it can be like a minute so basically like when you start off the

sdks they load ads and I remember you said something about dual core and sometimes like these SDK only loaded on One Core was there something around that it's it's it's about thread um like you have of course like the main threat in unity that handles a lot of things I think it's getting a bit too technical for your audience oh no no no no no okay I want to know we want to know yeah I'm I'm not a programmer either I I try to weasel myself out to not give you uh the the yeah yeah yeah but what happens then when like a user closes a game or app like what's the unloading process like cuz you need to yeah I'm I'm I'm jumping ahead a little bit to understand why why there's such a big difference because if you unload like all the stuff needs to be uh unloaded again from your phone and causes some some is so when you when you um um open the app and you have this initialization process of all this stuff as a programmer you know that is happening and you can space that out go from parallel to sort of sequential um

um ordering so to speak you can order as the case not to load in the first whatever seconds um you can have not an add placement uh in your tutorial scene where you have most of the users uh coming in right I'm I know Felix it pains you to hear that and especially for for all that uh you know ads on App open initiatives that uh we hear um more more Google Google pushing the app open ads yeah oh god um so but as a as a programmer basically you you have uh the choice of like how to in which order to load kind of the things on closing you don't and it's not just the closing also like on pause the most anrs occur um when you you tell um your app go on pause for various reasons there's there's a WhatsApp message coming in uh uh mommy is calling um you are you are

in the middle of um a purchase event yeah which gives that overlay so the the game progress stops um you are asked to do a review uh for the game again the The Game Stops you have the on pause event um in in unity all I'm talking about is Unity because I have no idea what's what the hell is happening in unreal right so um so you as a developer however do not know when the events occur for the most time you don't know when Mommy is calling right um and the same thing um on um on app closure you do not know really when when that happens so um everything's unloaded at the same time and it's not just unloading it's like every sdks is like ET they want to phone home the session is ending um here is here is um you know the save game needs to be put into the cloud um all these kind of things happen suddenly and you

know you have then the confirmation you know you send it out you have TCP St it comes back and uh for this you need to wait and um all of that just compounds into one big blocking mess and then the operating system is like why is this app that is on pause consuming such resources right so 5 seconds are gone [ __ ] off you know no no input anymore yeah it's like go away go away um and that's that's that's what what what anr essentially is now you have some ways to mitigate that um so when you ask a user for a review uh or for the purchase event or for um uh instead of the user just you know swiping the app away so to speak uh so so it it closes uses actually the back button um then you can make like a confirmation window um and steal a little bit of time unload

something already in this little time that the user needs to you know press the button so who who the [ __ ] presses the back button yob you are the Android User but he US computer uh yeah true okay you you'll usually swipe anyway so but true yeah yeah you can buy time okay yeah so so before actually like going into maybe how developers can reduce anr and crashes like I'm just wondering like why does iOS like do they care as much as Google or is it only Google it's only Google I never heard about they in Aron iOS exactly it doesn't do you know why that is you do have crashes of course but um I'm not sure if app Health actually matters in in in in iOS that much other than generally being uh maybe considered for featuring or something you don't want to have like CR right it's definitely part of it yeah so okay let's get to the question

here so what's the best way developers can actually reduce anrs and crashes and you do but what should you do if you're about threshold like I know I know there's some game developers that don't care about the anr threshold and they go nuts right um first of all yeah they should care because they should care for a good user experience right um that the the the pride of the programmer should dictate that already to De deliver a good product in itself uh but anr um like I said it matters only if you're above the threshold um if you have organic traffic most apps most downloaded apps usually do not care uh about organic traffic whatsoever um it goes back to the ASO by the way um um you you need to think of how do you sell the game to your user what what does the user search for um typing into the search bar what image does he have in mind uh to come to that game so I'm not

sure how um the 1000 iteration of uh any kind of match three game would spark a user or today I typing in match three and I fully expect a new game to be presented no that happens with uh with ads all right so and then you bypass the the entire problem so to speak it's it really just concerns app developers that that uh rely or want to have organic traffic what was the question yeah like what what people can do what we can do right so reduce the number of sdks that will make fix very unhappy but sdks does not just mean add sdks right it can be well usually usually does it's it's biggest amount of them sure um but sometimes people think oh no I need to have two sources of

Truth uh and Implement two analytics sdks um for example so if you have two analytics systems um both of them phone home right both of them on on every pause event uh uh need to you know feed the database with with any kind of game events um then you have Firebase as the big elephant in the room but there's like smaller Niche um um as the case for crashlytics for example ex they also record a lot of stuff and um um I'm feeling a little bit bad for the Google people but they brought it on themselves um Firebase we in the last uh update prior to to the one that is currently live we excluded Firebase to see what is actually the impact of Firebase itself of the SDK everyone is using Firebase turns out our anr rate dropped by 0.1 and 0.47 is the the threshold right yeah so

b a quarter ofr is just gone and we like wait let's ba test that put Firebase back in in with with a recent update it goes back up and you're like Hey Google people what the [ __ ] are you doing you know it's like I mean there's it's amazing I don't know God knows how many people find the Smart Ones fix that [ __ ] it's crazy how they come up with a with a threshold um then yeah 25% optimize and the second biggest offender in terms of of case uh sorry for name dropping but it's Google ads it's it's a Google as SDK admob SDK yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly so you're like how the hell is the one that defines the rules is also the one that you know makes it really hard to actually adhere to the rules like insane to me I love Google they

they they earn us the money basically right they give us the visibility um I I just don't really you know understand how these products are not that optimized in such a big organization and that affects so many um developers make so much more money essentially um if they just fix their [ __ ] you know what's your theory on that like why do you think that is is it is it really hard to write sdks is it really boring or like what is it yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's sfall time there it's I love it let's do it maybe um so first of all again Google is a very big uh Corporation and in a corporate environment uh approval processes uh are are crazy um people are getting you know promoted every two years are not very familiar with the product or you know stuff like this happens um but then there's also if your your half of your front page um of the store is fed by admob um and you make

money off this and there anr do not matter I leave you guessing yeah there the thing I do not believe this is like intentional I do I I honestly do not believe this is intentional it's just there is no no real incentive inside um to matter of priority yeah I mean if if you look at Google Groups um uh every developer Under the Sun already has has like complained about this and only receives like uh blah blah from from first level support and nothing is ever being done about it right um on the contrary um ad networks um are incredibly quick to to acknowledge okay here's something wrong uh with the adapter here's something wrong in the SDK um yeah we we see what we see what you

mean and thanks for the crush lytics Etc um we will roll out an update uh very very soon that's what I usually tell uh the people I work with because like usually ad networks they always reach out like oh we have a new SDK it's going to improve performance you need to update it right away never do it in the first week like you're taking the risk then like cuz like sometimes you update it and it's just causing crashes there was an issue with a Unity SDK a couple weeks ago and then like you couldn't close rewarded ads and it's like oh sorry yeah amazing great experience they did they not uh you could not or they just wanted to spike their CTR no I don't know hard to say hard to say hard to say hard to say right yeah I want to say like if you if you tell some developers out there uh like hey so do you know what anr is or maybe like marketing people no they have no idea yeah they have no idea just just just to to to to give you like the Varity of this so around the

time two months after launch so we were we were clocking in at 25,000 donals a day and we implemented the ad stack before we only had Unity unmediated uh because um because someone Felix told you oh well you should put more more I I I I do not confirm or deny these allegations um so in April um like end of April we we implemented like all these networks um um put it on on uh I marks Etc so um virtually the day that thing went live we crashed from 25,000 downloads a day down to 15,000 next day down to 10 10,000 it's like boom and and it's like it's like a perfect cross a anr up and uh however now the problem is if you want to get back to

gloryland um you know below the threshold Etc the rolling average is what counts right so you to have 30 days um of you know be a good boy you know prove that you are not um you know and only then you you regain slowly the visibility you that's so frustrating because you know it's based on the average right you said you're 25% like of the worst offenders that's based on an average and for 30 days like that's oh yeah is really hard it is hard I mean it's great for UA managers they have more jobs to do then to yeah I'm not complaining maybe maybe mat is behind all of this yeah so if you put on the tin fo you think it's actually on purpose so they can spend more money on the UA networks I don't know anything about buy some new users then if you lost your Organics yeah ex yeah exactly exactly yeah from from a from a platform point of view uh um um it's not too far off to think that

way that there is some sort of uh disincentive let's put this way to to treat this problem as super high priority if you can you know not only make the the the inner purchase Revenue but also make the ad Revenue so yeah okay so you also talked to me a lot about slow code and like what happens if you have slow code combined with like ad sdks like can you talk a bit about about the effect wait wait wait wait what what is code let's tell you that yeah what does it mean exactly Felix what does it mean you probably mean like unoptimized code yes exactly unoptimized Cod right so uh things that that that happen that makes your device slow essentially um so a lot of when when we are blaming sdks here Etc um this is not everything like programmers can also be [ __ ] lazy and um artists can be you know just creating scenes with ultra high poly whatever and all of

that matters so um you need to look at home first um what can you do there um and um use the really really good uh tools that Unity actually provides um uh for for performance and um memory analytics um so it will give you a lot of hints what you can do if you never ran these tools do it now and you will be surprised you will be surprised how amazing your text tag is so all right I definitely do that first before you know I I I do not you know you cannot run around uh with with 2% 3% 5% I saw even uh from you know some friends and R rate and then oh Google no no no no no no no my friend this is you know wait wait wait a second this is on you yeah so so I think we're like we're 30 minutes in now so now time for the million dooll question probably why we

Al also invited you CU this is the question I mean Remo have been fighting about for six months this the million-dollar question right we argued at length about this how hard is it to add a new ad Network SDK no [ __ ] version yeah no [ __ ] version please cuz you know well depends on which networ uh yeah okay um how in terms of actual diff difficulty almost zero uh I'm I'm I'm I'm pretty sure that any kind of experienced admon person even could do it it himself um because all the ad networks provide cold Snippets and uh most of the time you even just connected to an to the to the uh mediation adapter right all right end of episode let's finish there it's it's it's literally a take off the Box however however now comes my part no oh no so where my

popcorn some networks um uh make you jump through hoops to even get uh signed up and you get like a a response from their bisf team uh you know after some time and then you need to give be given credentials for the platform Etc so that takes time um and it is sometimes more the smaller ones uh granted or the the the Google ad manager uh networks usually have this kind of process say um but more importantly it's also like a business thing um so if your ad revenue is let's say not where some of the recently discussed on this pod uh uh games um level but more like what what the what what the broad Strokes basically in the story is right um so you have an accounting thing you for for every single uh source of income you need to account it for every month

you need to you know make your V declaration you need to do all of this it's just creating additional headache you have the business point of view uh like um do you really want to complexify your stack um with with anr uh impacting um sdks Etc um for another 100 or 200 um dollars I'm not sure about that um you know if if you risk something and then risk you know losing organic traffic on the other side that's a very very big decision um so um full disclosure Felix asked me implement this Implement that and I'm like oh let's hold our horses here a little bit um simply because of these like the difficulty is on the business side it's not on the on the ACT Implement once you have a mediation uh um um service whichever your preferred one what I heard what I heard as well

like M has this thing when uh when you have a monthly Revenue uh you need to go to the uh to the the tool to go to the dashboard the claim the money yeah yeah when they send you the in email you need to do it in 24 hours if if you don't do it then it's it's going to be for next month Revenue true uh fiber is the same um you have 48 hours um W I'm not quite sure if we ever claimed the wangle please send me my money um yeah please if you listen please send man money because it was so so so little amount basically and we we kicked it off at that point yeah it's different amounts for different uh networks yeah everything from 250 to a grand yeah yeah so um that it just is complexity really so so Felix you

basically need to project the additional potential money and then you can see like oh well this is interesting and this is actually Worth US implementing that ASD we've had a couple of these discussion as well when I was working with you right well like uh yeah we had a couple of those like um maybe maybe let me offer a little bit of a different VI how I see it I think I haven't asked you anything let me just let me just go a little he was sitting there for 30 minutes waiting for his time so what Manuel said is great in like you know this utopistic reality and even Felix can implement the SDK immediately because he can do the Snippets and everything it works just like charm but in the real world this is done by programmers and programmers are usually doing features on your team which means you need to pretty much shoot yourself in the fot and slow down your feature pipeline because you're offsetting the programmers to now do the dirty SD X Felix wanted and you won't get your update as soon as you want it

so this is usually the the case in my opinion when I was talking with the teams that somebody from the programming team which they probably don't like at all because they never either done it before if you don't have it or they hate it to do it because why they like you know they want to get back to their features whatever they were coding before and they need to dedicate their time to do it and then something doesn't work suddenly and the process gets more and more complicated so so they start to talk with these third party sites with iron swords with everyone and troubleshoot the whole thing and something is now two two weeks from three days and so on so forth so so this problem you agree with you should this is real this is real this is reality not that utopistic thing that Felix will code in your SD case yeah never said I could I'm a Blonde boy I can't c yeah I mean it's it's a it's a it's like a management thing right I mean uh you you come to your to your to your uh most paid priz horse in the stable um of you know stuff I mean programmers usually are uh relatively far up and you tell

him implement this okay first time he does it then you come to him disable this and he's like am I working for the paper bin or what is this um you know it's there's there's a natural rejection of a [ __ ] task basically if you do not know the outcome of anything the first time you get away with it the second time uh you you have a lot of convincing to do um that this actually is a good idea yeah and and only then comes the problems and you're now the culprit of those problems because you force your programmers to put [ __ ] into your game that's now crashing and making Community red up and everything always crashes it doesn't always happen like it's not only yeah 0% of I can imagine like there were like dozens of daily meetings on like each month like the game is crushing again oh yeah yeah it's this SDK we kick it out well but you know like yob you should you should then educate your programmers

like why is this a good idea and how much money it can I'm not saying it's is a bad idea I'm just saying that in real world it works like this it doesn't work like the now we recording this so you can you can show the video around you know we we show both sides right it's like do you uh do you currently exclude any like devices from showing ads completely CU they just like not good enough to see ads yes um so first of all you should anyway maintain a a healthy uh device exclusion list on on Google play um for just games that cannot realistically run your game well um instead of dumping down the experience for everyone is better to you know just kick out uh most of the old us devices um and then you can you can set up either direct exclusion um lists um even like in terms of UA um you can Target uh uh just Android 12 as M I think suggested last

time um um or you you you can make in in some platforms you can even make device exclusion discs um and you can do it like by programming right you you just do not show that there is an ad available for a user that uh runs a device that meets the device criteria in general but is known uh you know to to be coming from a device that is really really bad um so since since everyone gets gets their their share of name calling today um I also want to shout out to tell me that never updates their own um device catalog uh on OS with the newest web view version um so when you when you look into the device uh analytics out of the top 20 devices um uh that that are culprits of anr the highest you know winners on this list not really winners um are

chiai devices red me directly tell me uh I think Poco belongs to those um and that's that's even even like Flagship models from like three years ago that theoretically do have enough RAM um but um so web view is a Felix do you know what web view is what it does I don't know okay so when you when you call an ad basically in the in the game um you you stream it basically in right and that happens inside uh so-called uh well it's like a browser on your on your on your phone so and the browser version if that is not updated you call on some older browser version that needs to now enter some compatibility mode to stream the content of the ad into your phone so the more there's a discrepancy of the the the origin it's like when you when you stream right you're your um you deliver

in a certain uh bit rate and um stoage version of browser yeah you see what and that's the same thing that happens there and that causes um lockups that causes an anrs right because it needs a lot of buffering in in between and stuff like this so um and it is not in the interest of smartphone makers to update Android components however the game developers cannot from their app call to update basically the an OS component um operating system component right so um if they run an older V VI version um you you cannot educate your user to do that I mean yeah sure you can go to your user and say if you have problems with ads go into the Google Play Store search for web View and update that version please sure you can do that however really istically users come to play they do not come to

maintain their device right no they will do that yeah and uh and and then you have you know some sort of uh incentive of the smartphone makers uh that um at some point they just discontinue the support for a certain OS version and if the user does not um upgrade that OS version to the to the newest one you're stuck basically with that users um so all we can do as developers is then basically Target those and and say no ads for you sir no ads for you sir yeah no rewards for you sir yeah no no rewards I guess we already did a bit of naming and shaming you said Google go and buy add uh a blocking you know in in the game yeah so you get the rewards but don't have to endure the ad everyone should do that anyway so yeah that should always be an SKU you should sell as an iip in my opinion but uh you already name and shamed xiaomi name and shamed uh Google any other sdks that you want to name and shame that you think is the worst or any horror stories you want

to shame like now is a good time to get it off your chest I love all of them okay all of them somehow make make money for us somehow uh help us uh you know pay our the employees um help you know create game experience so I come not from a place of hate I come with a call to pay attention to this is a real problem right um this this is what what what need to be understood everyone um uh is generally trying their best usually and if it's just a thing out of focus or you don't have the context then um it's it's good to be reminded sometimes to you do something so um but I I would I would think the ones that I named are the ones that are most impactful we are currently investigating a little bit more into into uh Unity so we exclude Firebase and use um Embrace as um uh analytics stack it's a little bit more detailed um so we we we we look

at all the threats and uh we we make basically captures of what happens on the technical side just be before like an anr happens just before a crash happen and then you you get some good idea of um how to space out things um how to mitigate things and yeah ultimately it's uh sorry Felix show less ads has quite some impact um however that being said most of these devices come from um from countries that let's say make not that much of a difference to your ad arpu is also the fact that you have an open world game where you have quite a lot of like things being loaded also part of the issue right sure yeah that definitely plays a role okay but I mean you can have a small scene you can have like a very closed world and have just unoptimized art that's why I said earlier um do your homework first right

look where you can optimize your own assets your own um whatever you load into the game just you know strip it off the sdks and make a test version and and let it run a little bit um ideally in soft launch um um and look how bones right yeah yeah yeah and yeah how do you structure like the team capacity around implementing and also upkeeping the maintenance of it SDK is like is that the program or or QA or like how do you go about that in colosi uh the so the the real thing is about uh uh programming work here um the the the QA can um well given the task um you know investigate this close and try to force himself into situations where on the device this thing would occur so you will have a number of test devices that are really on the lower end of the spectrum um to to make it happen uh But ultimately normally QA people just

report something that a programmer then needs to fix anyway um and the programmer usually needs to be um um you know smart enough to to understand what happens in in in which um order uh inside the code and uh by by by the user Journey um how to fix things but senior QA people might be able to even T some of I I work within that team that was exactly doing like this that senior Q who were able to handle like 90% of these things only afterwards the programmer was called yeah re you want to ask the last question I know you uh you're very keen on this one about capacity yeah uh you mean the choosing one yeah of course yeah so the question is if you had to choose would you implement either new SDK or put the capacity into a new Game feature why and when and what would be the factors that are you know forcing your decision money yes great answer no but like yeah

it is I mean how do you pay how pay the salaries yeah how do you pay the salaries yeah with the retention is is always like this like let's let's not go there yeah Jesus [ __ ] Christ come on this is this is is a real question um that every business owner or or product manager whatever uh producer needs to needs to answer like the feat that I am currently advocating um and harassing everyone you know to to approve this Etc does that bring money to the company does it Advance the game significantly not just first order but also like in terms of second order effects right um um like if that feature only that feature enables other stuff um versus you know tinkering around with an anr then it's like it's a gamble right if you ever fix n r it's a gamble uh maybe you will never drop below the the

the magical threshold unless you sacrifice all your ad Revenue which makes your admon person very very unhappy probably um probably fires him to be honest as well yeah but you know I wouldn't care if he's unhappy if the game makes more money on iips and have more Organics AB then the you know what if the admon has three kids to feed that's not yeah that's that's not problem yeah that's not my problem it's unfortunate but like they he will he he or she will find another drob wherever he you it's necessary yeah it also has a little bit to do with like capacity uh of the of the of the people that you have access to actually is right like if someone never did a certain you are kind of maybe pick the low hanging fruits first especially if your Runway is Target you know in danger Som yeah but I I would say like the Fe side of it is pretty much the same regarding the risk because you know you implement a lot of

features retention move [ __ ] Revenue move [ __ ] it took through two months and so what maybe that SDK was a better option after all yeah yeah but that's you know that's your decision to make you always have a yeah set of um information that you can make the decision based on and that's that's that's what you do it's already a luxury that you can choose to be honest true like sometimes you you you have put out a game that by all you know best estimations will never do anything because it's in the in the wrong genre because it's you you do not have uh the right people that care about uh distribution meaning UA people you do not have enough capacity um in in in your economics design um uh maybe you you just build uh you know a free-to-play multiplayer um 10 versus 10 shooter game well good luck good luck my friend if you you know just raise 2

million on VC money well the VC can already write that off as soon as he wired that money out um but I mean this this is this is reality and then that studio has to deliver right um they they got the two million for for for this thesis we can make it happen yeah you will not um because your problem is the marketing your problem is your unmonetized um realtime cont content in PvP because you know otherwise pay to win is the death of any kind of multiplayer game um so and then arguing should we Implement an ed SDK or um you know yeah it doesn't even matter it doesn't matter actually it matter go deeper so if you if you have the luxury to choose uh uh you know do do I release a new map or uh like that that or like live event or whatever um that will probably make this amount of

money or you have an ad Network that according to best estimations of your admon uh person will deliver another 10% uh that's a admon person will give you decimals 10.45% always I wish always I wish oh I think with you know with that in mind uh uh I I think that's it yeah that was amazing thank you so much for coming this was great no problem yeah I will ask Felix yeah I will ask Felix and and S like what what are his takeaways um I can I can actually uh as as bonus content uh for for uh viewers of this I can drop a link um in under the video or you put it in the show notes put in show notes of of a GitHub discussion that is actually done by by my CTO right oh nice so um there there is a lot of actually data from us um

regarding anr and uh traces Etc where other developers have chipped in already and there's been information be great please so and and some some attempts on how to solve things so um nice sounds super constructive yeah even even better yeah right yeah thanks Manuel for coming uh thank you uh everybody who who listen listen to the episode and please keep subscribing we I guess we are very close to 2,000 subscribers overall which is amazing you don't care about the numbers but it's it's kind of good good good to know that you you actually like thank you until next time cheers byebye bye [Music]