How Will COVID-19 Affect The Hyper-casual and Idle Games in 2020

hi everyone thanks for joining us we've got a great panel for you today and we're gonna dive into some great research front-engine talking about the impact of Co vid 19 and how it's affected CPI is eCPMs in hyper casual and also idle games and where we see this all going as things start to recover I'm John I'm your host for today I'm VP VP of publishing at bubut and I got to let everyone else introduce themselves hi I'm Carol I'm work attention so tan Jean is a wine one-stop shop for a night six and a tradition and we've actually focus on the epic casual industry I'm like managing bodegas on Steam and also having the EMEA business everyone West found her fun games I've been in mobile gaming for the last ten years from ad network site to agency side to now minding my own studio fun

games specializes in making hyper idle games so it's quite good fit for this Panem hi guys hi oh like public currently I'm working at it as a director of user acquisition dot follow me prior to article on and I was like you know working two years as a human managers manager like across a few gaming mobile game experience great thanks everyone so I got a hand over to Carol now who's gonna walk us through some of the Tenjin research on the trends that they've see drink Ovid thanks a lot John so effectively we decided to put two country China and the US China because it was the first country to go into lockdown in January this year and it's an important country for epic casual and also us is the top country for deeper casual and also one of the latest country to go into lockdown so we thought it would be an interesting comparison my first slide is

showing install an ad revenue and for China and all the slide will only be for iOS and as you can see these two metrics are following each other so that makes sense and what was quite specific with China is that the lockdown happen right during and after Chinese New Year so you see around the 20th of January but Chinese newest out so you see an increase of install ad revenue and normally for around 2 or 3 weeks you will keep this increase and then there should be a back to normal situation and what's happening here we belong down is that back to normal situation did not happen install an ad revenue stay quite high and just slowly are decreasing up until end of April the level of ad revenue and in still stay much higher than what it used to be before another thing that is quite noticeable is that before the Chinese New Year the seasonality of the weekend was very

noticeable but scenes were locked down and up until end of April but we can basically complete disappeared so we looked at the same timeline for the u.s. so that includes the holiday seasons but you can notice around December and similarly to China at the lockdown in that happened in the u.s. around mid-march the Society of weekends that disappear like while between Christmas and March you you can see the spike every weekend this kind of stopped happening however in the US the increasing in stolen ad revenue was not as pronounced as it was for the holiday season and quite quickly after two to three weeks you can see that there's a little bit of a back to seasonality even though we can I'm not as much of an increase that used to be you can still see that there's a pattern of society coming back

then we decided to look at CPI and this time we have both come from on one slide so the blue line it with Wes and you can see that CPI is much higher in the US but in China already before the style of Chinese New Year CPI starts slowly decreasing and kept slowly but very slowly decreasing during the lockdown up until end of April in the US right at the start of a lockdown you can see some drop of CPI but CPI is now is kind of picking up and we don't see a strong impact except again the Society other weekend where the CPI is not getting as crazy as it used to be on Saturday Sunday the next metric we looked at is eCPM and I think that's one of the very interesting one because China used to be a very big market for either casual because that eCPM is so much higher than in the US and during Chinese New Year

bczpm stay high but right after when mole is Chinese New Year should have stopped and the lockdown was continuing that's when you start seeing a decrease of the CPM and since since February like the eCPM of China kept declining so but now it's almost comparable to the recipient of US while I in the US when the lockdown happened only the seasonality of the eCPM disappeared but otherwise ecpm stayed pretty stable the last metric we decided to look at was g7 retention and that's actually one of the most interesting because it's the most impacted matrix for both country China and the US you can see that retention was very seasonal before the lockdown like there was a very high retention for the Saturdays and they sued as soon as lockdown happen with retention dropped generally speaking but also vicinity of the weekend totally disappear so is it because people suddenly have so much more time at that

just explore more game and play so game much less that could be an explanation but what it seems is that retention unlocks cannot go back to what it used to be that's it analysis thanks Kara those insights are really really helpful so what are Tenjin predicting for the rest of the year in terms of CPU CPI retention for hyper casual games I think so our retention and fortunately things are gonna say is that the retention is gonna stay low just because lockdown just accelerate the trend of more and more competition in the casual industry so people are just gonna start playing the epic casual game even less than what it used to be for CPI I think a potential industry like any other industry at some point will see the impact of kovat 19 like so far we've been pretty protected but I would expect that in a few months CPI will also drop and might also keep decreasing and you know things it's

interesting times in hyper casual right now is your research shows you know there's a there's a massive challenge around you know day 7 retention you know more games being publishing ever before but games are you know disappearing from the charts kind of as just as quickly as they arrive so if you've got any tips for developers publishers that are looking to cut through all of the competition in hyper casual games yeah but it's is that certain publisher already start implementing this looking at your retention might not be as important it is used to be a year ago and that you're testing should fully focus on CPI and testing with ads so that very quickly publishers can see how much I can make and your combination of ctrl T V would make your game worth publishing regardless of every tension call that's really interesting feedback because I feel that at the moment there is this you know real obsession with just a certain process across sort of

all of hyper casual and I feel that it needs to adapt with the way the hyper casual gameplay is changing and monetization is changing Pavel it's let's move on to you from from the network perspective are you seeing any differences in eCPM trends by country region outside of the US and China so actually we you know we don't see any significant trend as it comes like an old CPM in the u.s. in as well as other markets we notice actually like you know one only one day very high peak but it was around 23rd of March but this is CPM peak went along with installs and depression right what's interesting on the other hand what's interesting we see is their new wings of track that's it so like basically we do not observe back to normal situation I would insult meaning

that we are not able like even like correlation like we as well like are not able to distinguish weekday and weekend after the peak right so we see on average the same number of installs every day actually where is a weekday or a day at the weekend and this trend actually continues and do you ability at colony you're powering like a range of games not just you know hyper casual you know Idol merge Mick or RPG are you seeing similar patterns in other game genres as you've just explained in hyper casual yeah yeah we see we see that because of the recent stay at home orders right during the Pend Oreille like half costs those soldiers had cost them a big boost in mobile usage we like also as an art colony provide support in the MoMA getting a real support by big breasts right not only gaming and we see that

across the globe people are spending more time on this mad phone our smartphones and specifically among and when we analyze the reasons for this demand from other games actually we saw that they take away people from everyday thoughts let's say with strokes session times right and as we all know like you know short session times is one of their let's say course of the hyper casual games right so we see actually big growth vision as well but maybe let's say to be more specific we see the biggest uplift like from 12 to even over 20 percent in downloads in genres like word board card casuals and hyper controls and this general degeneres have similar big uplift but also as it comes to like you know other genres we also

seen a lot leave but it's around like no to poo from tea to 4% in a journalist like casino like trivia like family sports and puzzle but yeah like long story short we see significant athletes all mobile generous but the biggest one is in the casual oh yeah I think that's really interesting thanks for sharing that I mean sure I'm hearing that a lot particularly about puzzle and you know I'm wondering if a you know an impact of that on hyper casual is these players desire now for you know visually and technically more complex games and I think you're starting to see that creep into some of the hyper casual games well let's let's move on to you and get the developer perspective so you know to me some of the thing is you know the the research that Carol presented it looks a little bit like the US stock market

recovery of things seem to be back to a normal level what are you seeing in to the CPI's on on iOS so they are they back to pre coded now yeah we well no in short-term not for us so we might be a unique case but we definitely see a slight increase on CP ice since pre lockdown and during lockdown so we saw that increase happen and we especially notice it with prototyping new games as well so existing titles our supplies are higher than they were like February January time and now they're still higher than they were but we've taken quite a different approach to your way during this period then maybe some so I can talk a little bad that actually if that's interesting yeah go for it I know you've approached yeah so and typically we do everything that nobody else does but what we did with the user acquisition during this time is we wanted to test what the impact would be on organics if we switched off anyway or it drastically reduced it and we

actually saw very consistent Diu despite dropping are you a spent so as we saw the costs go up of you a we just diminished it overall spend across our channels and actually works out really well for us for this period because obviously is much more profitable to have the same amount of users spending typically the same from what we've seen so just to give you an idea hyper idle 30% of revenue is in-app purchase so 70% revenue for us we did see a dip in CPM the last I kind of mid March April time around about 20% in the US we actually saw so quite quite a significant drop on CPM but we are back up to normal normal places now with where they are actually slightly higher in terms of the CPM for us in the US and where it was before lockdown began so it's been really interesting period for us and I think it's actually been quite a quite a ulster to the hyper casual hyper idle space it seems like a lot of new players has entered the market will Ganic leave that's how we interpret it which as a

game developer I'm pretty happy with and obviously it better circumstances would have been better but that was a business use case we saw just just an on CPI eCPM question for anyone watching can you define hyper idle you so for us hyper Idol which is a term I'm coining and trying to get into the market is it has the mass market appeal of hyper casual there's some more the sophisticated monetization mechanics of hyper Idol so our logic being huge funnel and as I said thirty percent of that revenue that we typically cry because you would all be a hundred percent ad revenue is in that purchase so we have kind of more in-depth Malaysian layers in there to help drive the volume so scalable and more profitable is the goal of this genre for us and I know is the perfect mechanic for that okay we heard it here first hyper Idol fun games keep an eye on them

yeah like I think I think we've been incredibly efficient that was our goal because attention spans are pretty sure everyone's getting bombarded with webinars I think we've been as concise as possible so we're going to we're going to wrap it up there's going to be a link to the full report around Covina and hyper casual from Tengen link to and the video we've put together today all everyone's contact details are gonna be on there so if you want to chat to anyone in more detail feel free to reach out to us and yeah for everyone else stay safe and carry on gaming thanks for joining us thanks everyone thanks for having us