Is Monopoly GO profitable? GameMakers x 2.5 gamers crossover

this is very you know this could be very difficult I I remember just to be fair just to be fair to to the the licensing fee like if if they take 20% I mean they the the IP kind of works also in favor for the game because they have definitely lower CPI then coin Master get you it could get you Organics and things like that too organic that's that's not yeah I'm not saying licensing IP is bad I'm not saying it's a bad Strat you just need to count with that 30% which with 1 billion is quite a lot of money I'll give you this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half Gamers sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our Day-Day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously hello everyone and welcome today we are recording a special podcast featuring mate lanr myself Joseph Kim

and summer L from Mobile gaming data analysis from social paa we have another collab between me and mate monate we've been doing a lot together so that's that's awesome very true and we are here to discuss a fairly a very controversial topic is the game Monopoly go profitable or not there's been a lot of drama which we'll jump into in the industry I know mon you've been at the center of this very try very true this uh hurricane Whirlwind whatever is going on but before we proceed I just want to make it clear to our audience to the games industry we aren't here to cast stones at anyone we're not here to disparage scopely or Monopoly go no one is arguing that this is not a game that has I mean it's achieved a lot nobody's disputing that and I know Monte and I and I'm sure summer we're all big fans

of anyone achieving success in the games industry so let's just be clear on that one big reason however that I want to jump in and discuss this topic partially because I I think there needs to be a bigger discussion around Nuance in the games industry and there's just so much conflation of a bunch of different issues and so I I felt like a a more nuanced discussion was necessary and so to discuss this with topic to so to discuss this topic with mate and we also have summer here to get not only our our thoughts and experiences but also external data points and to see what Monopoly go has been doing from a marketing perspective we're going to be able to share uh with you guys in terms of some videos and some screenshots in terms of what they're doing we're gonna jump into that but all but I I think the big issue however in a lot of where a lot of the confusion and all the high emotion and

heartache is coming from is the basic definition of the word profitability and the problem is that as an industry we don't have like a clearly articulated or widely accepted industry standard definition of what we mean by a game being profitable but we're going to jump into that so just to set the stage for our discussion today first backstory we're going to give everyone an overview of the article and post from mate then the the Kur fuffle yes that ensued and attacks on mate since that time second the aftermath of this I'd love to hear from you mate some of the blowback that you've gotten people coming after you I I've seen some of the the attacks I'm just like man anyway we'll do that third we'll talk about data some of the data points from data. I think Monte you've got some data points from censor tow some you've got data points from social paa fourth

marketing analysis this is where Summer's going to come in and show us exactly some of the stuff that Monopoly is doing Monopoly goes doing from a UA creatives and AD perspective fifth um we'll go into a discussion about profitability and some of the Nuance that so many of you guys in the industry are missing especially you scop PMS Jesus guys learn something learn about some basic economics guys and then finally our takes so so what what do we think is this game profitable or not how would we Define that that sort of thing so we're gonna get into it but just to kick it off I want to kick it over to you monate let's go back to the backstory can you take us through this origin story and and all everything that happened yeah yeah because I was kind of so we recorded a podcast about Monopoly go when it launched on on our podcast two and a half Gamers with the aquan Felix and I mean honestly like it

was an amazing Lounge we went through the all the UA stuff all the creatives all the game design and well ad monetization there was no ads basically at the time but now they added two placements so there is some other monetization and other Revenue coming so so we were talking with uh afterwards with Neil from mobile gamer. B about like how what what do I what do I think about like how much money they spend and all of this so I was running for some like you know some of my estimations based on censor Tower data and and mobile action and all of like the data AI as well so like all the external tools so I don't have the visibility on the cpis or how much money they spend this was just an estimation and oh boy that estimation a lot of people crazy lot of people crazy but like here are like the initial thoughts so so I ran like few Social Casino Games before and if I'm being honest like what I've seen in terms of the CP were just like

anything between 20 to $40 in us on like purchase campaign purchase oriented campaigns why I'm saying purchase oriented campaigns because if you target purchases CPI are going to be higher also what you need to think about is the level of scale they are kind of having so they are adding 400,000 insts per day which of those 400,000 installs like 170,000 it's from us only and you us is the most expensive country period that's how it is full stop and if you spend more money the cpis are going to go high obviously if you spend few hundred dollars per day the cpis can be anything between1 to5 five dollar if you spend hundreds of thousands per day it's not going to be 10 it's not going to be 20 it can be 30 40 50 but originally I thought the game has like 30 to $40 cpis in us but then what happened was like

that there was you know there was this rumor that they're spending two and a half million dollars per day since the global launch and then like there was also rumor that they're spending 1 million a day so nobody knows nobody knows then we had this like yeah nobody know yeah of course like somebody knows cople obviously then we had this like uh our own two and a half Gamers uh y party in Busan South Korea with with our friends from Lo complete and then there were some developers which you know actually uh Joseph from China which are super successful with their Forex game at the at the moment and we were discussing this with their CMO like the cpis could be somewhere around 15 to $20 from what they heard and kind of like well pretty sure that they are very clo they're way close to the to the like actual numbers than I am because of different sources but anyway and also because of the Monopoly go IP so let's

assume let's assume like we are we are or they are seeing like $20 CPI in us still quite skeptical about this like this power of the IP can be that you know that strong but let's let's go with that then I was kind of assuming that uh the tier one countries like Germany UK Canada Australia those countries can have $10 cpis and then rest of the world we see like anything between 3 to five so as I said like overall traffic from us is 30% then 15% goes to tier one markets and then rest of the world is just 55% so you know if we take this what I mentioned like 150k in, installs per day in us it's can be anything between two to three million a day based on the uh the cpis I mentioned and then it can be an additional like half a million to 600 100,000 per day spend in tier one and

then there is like a range of half a million to million a day for the rest of the world kind of uh countries you know and that still feels like very low and conservative estimate I was looking into like the total downloads which is like 100 million downloads since Global launch I mean wow that's that's amazing so kudos to the whole UA and marketing team this is amazing like no doubt about no doubt about it there's the like total revenue which is um in szor Tower kind of close to like 900 million so it's almost like a billion so there was always like these also these articles that they already achieved a billion revenues so different tools different numbers so I guess only we on there so so a couple things mate just for our audience because I think this especially you scopely PMS pay attention learn some [ __ ]

so so one is like as mate suggested um CPI is highly dependent on scale so if you were to think of like um xaxis being uh volume or like just think about about it as like um installs per day or or dollar spent per day and the y-axis being CPI it's not flat yes it goes up and it can go up significantly especially as you get as you start running out out of inventory in especially in in a bid-based user acquisition system so that's one the second thing is as mon mentioned a lot of the volume for AC for user acquisition here is the US right and so if you look at you got like look at your data sources right look at the GEOS in US 75% revenue is coming from us exactly exactly right and so you're doing so much spend in the US so your cpis are going to be higher

now um word on the street since you know we are kind of pretty well connected in the industry there's a lot of different a lot of different people are saying a lot of different things about this game um I have heard word on the again these are rumors that Monopoly is only spending 25% of net Rev on UA I find that a little bit hard to believe but that's something that somebody has said yeah um but then you also see and what others have suggested and based upon you know the data that you look at that you know during a time that as much as 90% of the installs were paid um I think if you look at at various data services you'll see that uh like closer to like 60% now and when people talk about CPI you have to understand there there's always this context whether it's profitability or other things that you're discussing in terms of when somebody says CPI well then what do you

mean do you mean worldwide Blended do you mean us do you mean India you know like and so again and the few hundred dollars per day or you mean for a few Millions per day yeah exactly and so the thing that's really frustrating to me and the reason why I wanted to have this discussion is that there does seem to be so much confusion conflation just like you know there's like so many Halles in this story like like it's is it doesn't add up that's the thing yeah there there's that too and I totally agree with you on that but there's also like this stupidity around arguing apples and oranges right oh you know it's just like okay we we'll get into that anyway so after M so I I saw some of the blowback on you monate but you want to tell us like some of the some of the stuff that's happened since then I mean uh it's quite fun thing I think happened like on LinkedIn where like scopely employees start commenting uh these LinkedIn posts and then

suddenly you know like these comments were deleted out of nowhere and you know I think you know honestly it wasn't meant to be controversial I was like it doesn't just it seems a little bit fishy when everybody's like saying like this is profitable scop won't be unprofitable oh well I work there and you know we were buying profitably it's like okay then there's like one one other podcast mentioned my name something about like this being out of my league it's like okay well I didn't even listen to that episode yet but was brought to my attention I was mentioned like as as usual when I say something controversial people talk about that talk about that a little bit but like this like well I work there and this you know we're buying profitably reminds me one story from like one of my former like workplaces where I worked and you know there were like nonua people told me after I left the company like oh you know like everything looks

amazing we just had like all all hands meeting like well you know like all all the numbers are looking great like we were growing like okay well I opened up like the UA dashboards because I still have the exis and everything looked like [ __ ] absolutely terrible I was like okay well it's you know you don't always believe like things being said like being said on the old hands meeting like in front of a whole company if you don't see and D it so it's after that yeah after that article like some like a lot of people from scop actually viewed my LinkedIn post but nobody nobody said anything to my face or in in like directly in in the messages like always like I heard this guys are talking about what you said and it's like okay well what can I do but then I had this another discussion with the former employee of sculle she or he said that and like all the alarm Bells

must been ringing like in the Scully office because of what you said it's just like it's like man you you can't even imagine like they you know they really should be like most probably like panicking the office upside down when they read the article because I mean well they released the statement after the article as well so it's definitely PR uh thing going on so yeah well a lot of fun but nothing that I'm not used to actually uh yeah I I heard or somebody had mentioned that there was an all hands to address you m or something but uh anyway well let let's let's talk about the data and let's also just just to look let's give scopely their du like I don't know the scopely of today but back when Jory was running scopely like I had a lot of respect for the PM organization at scopely and for the PMS that I met were all like very very professional very

sophisticated I'm not sure what happens today I'm not sure what's going on over there now but like uh back then under the the the the jewelry era they they were like a a they were a very very good organization uh but anyway let's let's also give the game it's due based upon amazing game like it's like like it's getting like what like 100 million Revenue per per month yeah I I would say amazing from a Topline perspective know yeah yeah yeah and it's a very wellmade game I mean it's really polished and like definitely different level than coin Master nowadays so yeah not when I played but uh yeah maybe it is now may I've seen a bunch of stuff on LinkedIn like oh master class in this master you know it's it's amazing how many people are suggesting games are master classes after they see the data you yeah yeah I mean honestly like if you

think about like the game was in softland like for seven years like remade from like it was apparently originally something very different when when the first game first launched I checked it out it to me did not have the characteristics of a number one billion dollar game at that time now I've seen all the the LinkedIn guys piling on about how it's great so maybe it's improved a lot but by the data um and in basically the data. data that I show shows about from you know kind of Life of product to date today about 700 million you yeah you can't have a bad game to make like this the for sure for sure for sure yeah yeah for sure but is it number one is it the best we'll see okay so like yeah 700 million in worldwide net revenue since launch meaning a billion in gross revenue yeah and for downloads I'm showing roughly 95

million in cumulative downloads life of product to date and M I know you've got some C Tower data i s 101 million to this state okay so St ballark what about revenu is is censor Tower showing roughly the same so I think uh centor Tower is showing this like 870 million yeah7 million okay so so I think data. AI has a a little bit lower what about on the social Pita side well uh I got to say uh on our one minutes I it should be like some very very close to what what we see as well we yeah pretty close to S Towers let me yeah pretty close to S Towers data and nice yeah so it's I mean honestly the the truth will be somewhere either in the middle of what do you see ra and what what we see

like day versus Sor and I've seen so for smaller games like there you know we call it sadness multiplier because we we have to just multiply the revenue by two or 1.5 but this because like there's not that much or that yeah don't that much data but here is like you have sh ton of installs and revenues as well coming through so it can be pretty accurate so I don't think like we need to like multiply maybe in terms of geographical concent ation from data. I'm showing like o like Revenue in the US uh you know huge concentration over 10x of the revenue from us relative to other countries but other top countries would be like UK France Canada Germany y yeah yeah pretty much consistent yeah that's pretty much Social from like our our data VA database uh well they are like a marketing uh efforts is you know a little bit a little bit from this GEOS

yeah definitely us runs the top us Focus right Focus yes focus but speaking of you know the second and third it's uh like in New Zealand Australia also UK yeah the top one what what about RPD what what are you guys showing on an RPD basis and and maybe that's like one way we can compare economics is RPD for audience Revenue per download um ideally you want like an RP number a DX RP number but you know just roughly speaking in terms of what we can get from data services uh RPD is a good enough proxy but like mate do you have RPD data for like uh Monopoly go relative to uh I would say the top games that we should be comparing this to would be coin master and the game that they've been in a death match against Royal match yeah so if I look at like RPD the

coin Master is like 10 point and this is just average I would say oh let's I can I can do just a us only okay so Monopoly go in US RPD is like 19 Royal m is 20.7 okay so similar coin Master is 24 okay basically so it's not yeah it's not that it's quite close yeah quite close what about um but you know like if this Royal match Royal match is 20.7 okay okay yeah so coin Master is the the best then we have Royal match and then we have Monopoly goal okay but like if you think about like if this is profitable like from whatever point of view you need to have CPI slower than this basically which I find very hard to believe very hard to believe the the other thing too though

is that Monopoly because it's licensed it's it's a licensed IP yeah uh my guess would be like call it 20% right so it's gonna have to monetize yeah an additional 20% additional 20% yeah yeah yeah exactly okay yeah but that's the thing like and that's I think like what we all kind of like talk talk about in the profitability because like well what is kind of in this equation C IPI versus the LTV do you count only marketing versus Revenue well not really in this case because well in that case you could be just looking at spend versus gross revenue because well it's it's gross revenue right so I don't care like some from a social paa perspective do you guys have any like RPD data or whatever your variation of RPD would be yeah yeah yeah we we have uh arpu we have arpu and yeah from our like dashboard in like

recent NAD days the average one for our SVC is around uh 12 12 US dollar and for Androids it's $430 us for for a arpu for Monopoly go do do you have any are you able to pull up like Royal match and queen master and compare no really just okay okay sorry okay we can yeah we can add the that into the subcription afterwards sure um okay so Okay so we've talked kind of the context aftermath data fourth thing we're going to talk about is marketing so Sumer maybe I could hand it over to you can you kind of show us so what are these guys doing what are they spending all these these millions and millions of dollars on in terms of marketing what what what do their creatives look like and where where are they spending their money what channels well well yeah good question and let me open

the the file ni okay cool we have visuals amazing amazing amazing I do prepare some you know yeah great perfect yeah we see all of it amazing yeah yeah F first of all we always start with you know the overall Insight over all figures and uh it's yeah it's officially launched in uh April last year but we can see that in our dashboard we can see like in the red red paragraph by our Su what are you sharing I'm only seeing the initial screen C can you share the specific screen yeah nice no it's fine no no no yes I shouldn't okay okay all good yeah we see it we see it yeah yes so we just talk about the CHS and the top countries we see in our dashb that I can

mentioned the top one definitely like us but also it followed in like Australia New Zealand and uh uh also Canada UK and uh uh even though it's just officially launched in April uh we can see that the start do like soft launch or we call it like pr- registration from the very beginning from January uh January last year because you can check it from uh the red paragraph red paragraph and uh yeah they run campaigns mostly media social media like yeah Google Google admob runs first and then uh Meta Meta series and also like Aon sauce YouTube and App 11 yeah those are like the top top platform they ever used we can also see from like the total figure uh in in

last year in total they run almost 30,000 ad creatives in total and I saw yeah I saw that like the ridiculous High number yeah and also you can see the need to uh manufacture almost half of the creative each month yeah half of the creative they are they they they active in each month are new fresh Al creatives like lots of videos we can see it in uh like the second slide yeah yeah and just to compare just to compare Royal match I think a Royal match has like 4,000 creatives per month or per per platform as well so it's like 8,000 something so if if if you look at like uh number of creat creatives per like iOS I think like the Royal match is top one and then we have like some some other games so it's it's a beast as well yeah yeah and uh well also they have a you know I I think they did of lots of campaign

around like August last year and September last last year yeah that's that's that was a peak yeah someone also said that they kind of scal they he heard they scale down in October it looks like that on on downloads and revenues well on revenues not but downloads yes but then they started scaling up again like end of last year and now you see like it's it's kind of blowing up maybe because they saw like how coin Master went from 100,000 daily installs to 400,000 daily installs and like okay like okay so now it's now it's on the game is on and it's it's really really good to watch is this like that Kim cardashian versus applo and battle 100% back in the day yeah so it's on yeah okay sorry s that's okay I I personally I think

your video about K Kash all the family one is uh pretty pretty funny and uh yes also we see uh they have like I mentioned like a video creative dominance and then also they play a picture uh Carone and playable as and uh we can also check you know the the top all the popular formats and dimensions for picture and video Yeah and uh yeah here are some specific cases specific cases I yeah the first one is on YouTube let me uh play it yeah nice what you play go yes like classic but different different how first of all it's free to download in the app store and on Google Play you can go online friends

easy always work oh my God they I mean I can't believe that's a winning creative yeah I mean it makes it makes sense on YouTube it makes sense on YouTube but like there's like so many different like better looking creatives more polished like oh my God but I'm yeah I'm not surprised that much because it's I mean it's the classic coin Master kind of like Revenge Type of creative which definitely works you you're right I also have another Revenge one but but I choose this one because you know you're right it's a very classical it's very uh you know like a stereotype and uh but you know in our system we see it's been uh active for quite a long time on YouTube and uh another reason is like uh you

know for for real people acting and have a the Revenge one is yeah it's like the trend in recent years in recent years yes especially for this this rra yeah yeah and the second one the second one you know uh this one is uh we call it like a ugc and uh the reason I picked this one is because I saw like the CPI on our dashboard for this specific creative and and I think it's let's be clear here though summer when you say a $150 in CPI you're talking at low low low volume right yeah yeah yeah you're right yeah that's it's like second because you have four million impressions and we don't see like for how long this actually ran so it's like yeah it's not I wouldn't say like it's very high spent yeah yeah yeah let's take a look if you like classic Monopoly you're going to love this it's Monopoly

on your phone now who money will I take today time to pay up my friend but to really win you've got to level up your game strategy because each player has a board right London Tokyo Venice so you steal money from your friends to BU your own board and land on the railroads to theirs you can make even more money by completing sticker collections swap with your friends if you need to play Monopoly Go for free and challenge your friends to the ultimate Feud yeah so when when recently like uh lots of like advertisers they choose Tik Tok uh to play to to run campaigns then we found that like this vertical video vertical video is like the trend so you can see this can involve some K inspiring and inspiring people to play the game and also like the vertical one uh game play SC plus uh the you know the KL yeah for the audience K is key

opinion leader in in our terms an influencer or ugc creative yeah thanks for like yeah I I had to learn this as well in the past yeah well uh this one is also from from my point of view it's uh normal but maybe I think because you know uh like a monopoly has its own y so we had this like a game where we spend like 150k per day and we had like every week a few new playable ads just to rotate them in the in the campaigns because that's what you need basically to maintain the the scale and the the kpis you want to see and summer did you have another uh look I'm kind of looking at your screen was there another no okay just more about social paa okay yeah yeah yeah yeah nice yeah that's all it cool nice

thanks all right well yeah thanks for that summer and so now the fifth part of what we want to talk about is profitability and so this is this is a part where I I I really want people to understand that there's so many like discussions and emotions and this and that around basically arguing about different things apples and oranges and this is the tricky part about the mobile games business and the free-to-play model because you know it's hard to Define quote unquote profitability and we've had a problem in our industry where there were many so-called profitable games during the era of zerp and the age of Highly optimistic UA you know spreadsheeting where we'd call profitability for games that were not truly profitable in the most basic sense that we think is in like a Layman sense and we've had situations where where you know depending on who you believe where

you know there may have been like like let's take the the the glue acquisition by EA and all of a sudden UA drops why you know weren't those games profitable maybe maybe not but like I think the basic sense that most people would think about profitability is if I spend $10 to gain a user does that user pay me back over $10 on average or over 10 over 10 yeah because you know you got you you got to pay your fixed costs and whatever whatever you know or does my highly optimistic UA spreadsheet suggests that over a long payback period we will hopefully get $10 back um and I I do want to be very clear here let's just be honest in the past in our industry many Declarations of profitability for games have largely more theoretical than actual that's just a fact and that's not

to suggest that Monopoly go is not profitable however you want to Define that but what I want to do is to kind of explain some of the nuances to this word because there are so many people are you hearing scopely PMS uh there are many nuances to this word and what many people I have few friends scopy but I think I can call them for friends M yes there's a lot of nuances to this word and it's just shocking to me how people just don't understand right and it's just so there's so much conflation and just ignorance and naivity but like let let let's take like for example um one thing I like to explain is sometimes people are talking about not about you know like the basic Layman's understanding of profitability but operational profitability meaning that the game makes more Revenue than operating

costs but may not include other costs such as contribution to your fixed cost like your your rents your utilities things like that recovering development costs yeah if game it's like it's soft Lun for seven years like how many people worked on on that game where are they based like they are they based in US office or is like in in Barcelona office like that makes a lot of difference like in terms of the additional cost obviously right 20 50 million here and there when the game makes a billion of course it's it's peanuts right but it's still there it's still there right you might have a central team are you paying for your contribution to Central uh you know the other big issue that coin master and Royal match don't have is these licensing en royalty cost uh licenser Hasbro for Monopoly I would guess it's probably something like 20% again I'm just guessing here but you've got those costs you you've got an mg you

probably need to pay back things like that and so this is very you know this could be very difficult I I remember just to be fair just to be fair to to the the licensing feel like if if they take 20% I mean they the the IP kind of works also in favor for the game because they have definitely lower cpis than coin Master it could get it could get you Organics and things like that organic that's not yeah I'm not saying licensing IP is bad I'm not saying it's a bad Str you just need to count with that 30% 1 billion is quite a lot of money I'll give you I'll give you an example of why I don't I I don't engage in these these discussions anymore because like I was part of a private slack group and there was like this flame War about Marvel Strike Force and I was like dude I I don't think the game's profitable and so I got into it with this guy and all I have to say is just just like in the end I'm like okay dude are you including the royalty cost when you say profitable are

you including the royalty cost tomor he's like no I'm like then shut the f up Soh so there's that so there's just like this notion of operational profitability or not and um and and I think the other definition of profitability I want to talk about is UA modeled payback profitability but before we get there just want to for our audience explain this notion of Payback um so because we are in a free-to-play monetization model payment occurs on an unscheduled oftentimes unpredictable basis and so um so you know when when we acquire user that player May pay on day one on day 30 whenever we don't know but this is a notion of payback is when on average are we gonna for that you know for that CPI that was paid that summer suggested if we spend you know $20 for a player when

do we on average get that back right and some and then there's all these other nuances in terms of like depending on the cohort the uhel things like that but there's that yeah but also there's like the the genre kind of uh LTV curves you know and the pay periods which are kind of like common for let say match free games so Royal match most probably anything between one to two years coin master and Social Casino ALS so two years maybe one to two years one is quite aggressive but then like two years kind of Mak more reasonable because that's like that's how it works I mean the the retention is really high and then like the the hooked yeah the hooked players are kind of paying afterwards not on the short in the short term but long term like that's how it works yeah and if you are if you're generally going for scale and trying to become the biggest player and like if you're being acquired by the Saudis obviously they have unlimited money you likely are gonna go aggressive

on the [Music] payback why are you attending games from Barcelona 2024 share insights and knowledge have all gaming experts in one place networking great lectures meet new people to learn more about the industry games forum is one of the best places to get mobile marketing Insight see all the conferences and panels staying up to date with the market I'm going to meet their amazing people the experts in their fields insight and networking register now in join 500 UA products and Apple Managers at gains from Barcelona February 7th and 8th and and and so the problem there though is that so we have models so like we do have models based on historical data and averages and hence profitability in this context when we talk about modeled payback profitability it's based on a model for how much game will recover in a way that

has it's not based on science guys it's based on a Model built by a human being with judgment involved and as with all models and anything that any human being has ever put into Excel these models can be easily manipulated and there's a lot of tricks and things and I I don't want to go into all the Nuance I'm not I don't want to bore everyone we can go into maybe some of this stuff in a blog post or something yeah but the the thing is is like you've got like operational profitability you've got a bunch of costs which you may or may not include and there's all all of that you've got this UA model payback profitability on top of all this stuff you know from a financial reporting perspective you've got things like adjusted ebitda which I don't want to go into but you can window dress through measures like adjusted ebitda which you know if you're are follower of guys like Charlie Munger or really respected investors they don't like because you know just understanding the true economics of a game

is my point being there's a Nuance here and so when people uh are naively say oh of course the game is profitable it's like what do you mean how do you define profitability it's like no no the game's profitable well what do you [ __ ] mean right it's like what is your definition then this is the kind of stuff that that um that's when I usually just try to like do my ninja smoke bomb and like disapp from the conversation but because a waste of time yeah then I always bring you back from from this like oh well let's let's talk about this so so yeah so the trick is like what is your definition of profitable and look I I've just given a very high level um kind of overview on the stuff there's a lot more Nuance in the weeds in the details and there's a lot more tricks and things like that that we could potentially go over there's so many tricks in terms of like accounting and like adjusting so you can kind of look profitable and I'm not

suggesting anything it's just like there are lot so many things you can do but so many times we are often comparing again back to the point it's it's all like all I'm seeing all the stupid discussions on LinkedIn all the slack flame Wars it's it's generally apples and oranges that we're discussing pretty much so yeah coming to the close here get ready to wrap this up now that we've talked about some of this Nuance we've kind of shown you guys some of the marketing stuff that's been happening we've kind of discussed you know um kind of the the the the context of why we're not casting Throne we're not casting Stones we just like asking a question about you know is this game not the go is it profitable not maybe maybe not right it's an open question um scopely PMS please learn basic game economics please and uh so that takes us to our conclusion here what are our takes on

Monopoly go what do you think mate this this is this game profitable profitable so profitable at some point in the future definitely yes or at some like day uh so I I have also like this I mentioned this former employee she or he or whoever that is uh also mentioned this fun backstory when uh she or he the like talk with some of the like Monopoly go or like employees of scop that they said like the campaigns are profitable between like 15 to 45 days which again like very very hard to believe because honestly if I have this game with this but but here here here's what you know when they when people say that they talk about one cohort in one territory you know what I'm saying but it's like okay across Ross everything really is that is that your Blended worldwide average or you you know what

I'm saying yeah because like you know like to me this seems like really ridiculous if honestly if this is the case for all all the campaign or let's say for us like why don't you just put all the Saudi money into the all the channels and buy all the [ __ ] TV inventory in the whole us like let's let's just go machine Zone Arnold foregger looking like jumping out of the fridge and everywhere just like why don't you do that I mean they've ran like a TV uh in us at the lounge OB we don't see these costs anywhere which obviously it's not very cheap in us and running this but I believe like the pltv and the p r or the projected ra is 100% at some point in time so if I have to be very very very adventurous I would say it's profitable somewhere between 180 and free 65 days

and by all means the UA and the creative work is just outstanding the game is great and makes [ __ ] ton of money right but is it but if it's so profitable on all fronts like why don't you spend more money and why yeah just like why don't just scale even more I mean 300,000 um installs per day coin Master can get 400,000 per day so I'm pretty sure you can get even more so like yeah if it's so profitable just yeah go and just spend it all spend it all but anyway yeah that's that's my the end it's sum summer from a social pedia perspective are you able to take a stance on this sure sure we we well the easiest way the easiest way to tell we whether they are profitable or not to be frank is whether we continuously to see so much as and the curve of their you know campaigns because at certain point they

definitely request it needs to be profitable but if they are not they will cut down cut down the efforts of campaign well but the Saudis say they're going to spend another 30 billion investing in games and they say they want to be number one so I think you got a long ways to go before you ran out of well well when you talking about like how the uh draw up like the data in Excel whether they are profitable and when they will be profitable you know in like Asian Asian game studios or even with the big uh game Publishers the if they you know they has this kind of modules modules and uh uh they will have this kind of request for the marketing leader once the comparing like they are oi within uh maybe the uh third or the fourth month

after all the big scale up all the campaign they didn't the figure didn't meet The Benchmark of the historical data they will think about to call it off because uh for for certain Studios we corporate or the Publishers like elect for example they have been successed on Kings of a clash a king sorry A Clash of Kings and then they may have other projects which are also for SLG games but maybe different theme they have the successful models successful historical data so it's easier for them to judge whether to continue or not and you you you talk you mentioned like one year or two years for for Asian Studios they are not that patient they are not that paent yeah maybe maybe yeah Monopoly go can be uh very longterm long-term and the classical one and but but you know uh

the environments in different uh culture might be uh different uh as far as I know say only uh the games like Gan impact they can nurture and manufacture it so well and uh wait for a long time to do the campaign yeah so okay also one one reason is they have another very successful games can raise all the uh game employees so this is how they work yeah I think my what do you think what do you think yeah yeah so my own take on this is that I personally believe Monopoly go is successful okay now I'm not saying profitable but I am saying successful especially if it's like in successful meaning like it serves the purpose of what they're trying to do like they want to be a number one player in games and

they want to you know they want to be a major player and so as a vehicle to enable them to be number one in the charts and things like that if you ask me if the game is successful absolutely absolutely successful you know yeah absolutely Topline growth I mean it it serves that purpose now if you ask me if the game is profitable I'm going to have to ask you to Define what is your definition of profitable first and like I said said when the first when the game first came out I cannot say that that is a game whose economics I would prefer over other like 100% for me you give me Candy Crush Royal match you know coin master I would rather have those games 100% absolutely no question I haven't played the game recently but during the initial launch there's no question to me what the better game is is from an economic perspective in my opinion this is my opinion right now one of the other

things though that to mate's point one of the great things about these kinds of games whether it's Forex or like a coin Master type of game or Clash Royale or like a genin impact is that these arpo curves continue to go up and to the right that's great for longer term essentially what Monte is talking about is your eventual roaz recapture at some point in time Y and so if you have games that have that kind of character istics then you've got some margin for error in terms of ah we kind of [ __ ] up yeah we didn't you know we were hoping for an 18 month payback that that RP curve just keeps going okay 24 months 36 months eventually it's gonna hopefully hope hopefully and if you're the Saudis with an infinite bank roll you know I mean does that time frame matter to you no I mean it matters to cash strap startups who who who who need to like make payroll but it doesn't matter to them and so again success yes

profitable I don't know yeah um so I also agree with my oh actually one other thing too that we we we didn't we didn't discuss is like like the other way that they may be reducing costs on the UA side is like they do have a lot of um Remnant ad inventory you know they've got these games like stumble guys and these other these other games and so so they could be like reducing their their their ad cost through through Remnant now that go go ahead if you think about the inventory or not the the audience of stumble guys versus Monopoly go it's very hard to match the same audience in those two games yeah they could yeah they could be cross promoting and then how do you account for that too right and then it is profitable well again we we go into this yeah that's rapid Hall week talk about too many too many rabbit HS so anyway all I have to

say is like um you know uh is the game profitable not show us the numbers show us the numbers and yeah we can End discussion we can end the discuss that's not my point my my point is I hope people understand the nuances behind what they're talking about a little bit more please do your research please understand the economics of these kinds of businesses and uh and before going out and like attacking people and just showing how naive and ignorant you are just like like learn your [ __ ] first and then have an argument okay um that that that's all I really have to say because otherwise like you know you're gonna see guys like me like if you ever see me tap out of a conversation it's it's because I don't want to get involved in this apples and oranges type of thing and I I feel sorry for you Monte because I know you've you've had a lot of blowback and things like that around this oh come on like it's not the first time and

definitely not the last last time I'm I'm getting this so all good all right yeah nice so okay well guys there you have it from game makers two and a half Gamers and social paa we have discussed Monopoly go the big controversy is it profitable is it not uh let's have more flame Wars yes and yeah that's it guys until next time thank you summer thank you and see y'all later bye see all byebye bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] he [Music]