Is SKAN 4.0 the Solution to Scale iOS UA? - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] when I get this equation like where do you see yourself in five years I always like come on man I can't even know I don't even know like what's gonna happen in next month or two months how can I how can I answer that question [Music] hi friends welcome to the metacast Roundtable Dynamic today I'm joined by David Amor CEO of playment you know David and Mente lunch at each user acquisition and marketing consultant and founder and host of Two and a Half Gamers thank you very much nice to be here nice to be here and it's it's quite refreshing for me not to do the intro actually to the podcast amazing if you give your um give your podcast a plug is it all about UA and a

mobile yeah it's all about the UA admonetization game design uh more like sharing the the insights from date from our day-to-day jobs actually so something that we encounter on like a weekly basis and it's kind of like a pain point for other companies yeah yeah you touched some some really relevant topics pretty cool thanks how you been Maria me I'm good I just came back from Essen so I was in a board game conference board game conference okay yeah I go full-on nerd um it was good it was actually really really fun but then I realized my brain I played too many work replacement games and my brain now doesn't know what to do how are you doing good I've it's been a busy month there was a big craft founder Summit in New York shortly followed by a play Ventures founder Summit in Singapore so I've been irritating my

family by being away from home quite a bit Yeah was it was it useful yeah super useful they uh he can't say it wasn't you know no hey this isn't about Founders events this is about getting out of bubbles right so you're in people talking to the same set of people all the time and it's just super useful to go and talk to a different set of people and hear what's going on in their world what's important to them sometimes you know it's nice to find commonality in the same sort of problems that you face and uh have a beer with them and you know Singapore is a city that a country that I'd never been before and uh that's an incredible Place really good yeah and also super crypto native [Music] and when we describe what we do often when I describe what we're doing it's met with confused looks from people in the west but when I was in Singapore I was treated like a king it was great

nice it must be good for a change of pace to just get that off about appreciation for yeah yeah no it's uh it's uh yeah it was a great trip um and on a note of Happiness uh it was a world mental health day on Monday so yeah I hope everyone did something of treat yourself as they say in parks and rec can I bank it and do it on Friday does it work like that yeah it totally works like that if it's still in the in the same week it's fine okay um so today we have uh the chief UA expert mate with us so we're going to do a UA focused uh episode we're going to be talking about scan for scad 4 I don't know I'm gonna tell you have to teach me how I say yeah this can 4.0 actually scan 4.0 and we're going to be discussing is it going to resolve all of the iOS post ATT issues and we're also discussing why Channel

diversification is important in user acquisition and wrapping up with unity's mobile blockchain gaming insights that was a post after the Pocket Gamer connects to Helsinki very cool yeah it's a sort of is it a mobile heavy episode uh I mean Mateo's the guy if anybody's here to ask then we've got the right guy so as I said I I'm very much an observer here I'll weigh in with opinion but I'm really fun I'm ready for the Pearls of Wisdom from the two people you've been in the industry for a while so yeah we're talking about it all right all right I'll plug it um I bought I brought some extra self-repared I think yesterday I put Rihanna playing and then I was going to prepare one topic and I did four I don't know I just entered this Zone but I'll reserve them to the end I just want to make a massive announcement this is the most important announcement of this week meta's social VR platform the avatars

are going to have legs now the public get what the public wants yep it was apparently their most requested roadmap feature can I please have legs really yeah amazing I made a whole game once with um where we're pretty self-published games so we were careful on budget particularly careful and we're trying to figure out how to cut costs and that was one of the ways and nobody had a body from the waist down and then we got away really we just made sure the camera was always pointed out but it was actually incredible take yeah it costs time and money to make those legs I understand my Zuckerberg's coming from Facebook is pouring so much money into the vrs come on yeah yeah they should be able to fold the legs yeah yeah yeah and one of the topics is I looked into what happened essentially with X hero because we did an episode about X here on mobile and then it was gone from the App Store so that was exactly it's back well it's back but it deleted all of my

progress so I'm not sure I'm very happy did you go in that game I mean I played like 10 minutes just for like research purposes and then I just closed it immediately I go about unlocking half way of the city so I didn't fully finish the onboarding experience but anyway that's for later if we have time all right we need to focus on on our main topics all right scan 4.0 yeah okay I got that acronym right yep um all right I'm going to give just a flash context as to what we're discussing so in the developers Conference in June this year Apple uh published some documentation about the next version of their scan Network um so this is Apple's privacy focused attribution solution that existed before ATT uh but it wasn't very good so people wouldn't use it but then they were

essentially forced to start using it because ATT uh was released sorry it was enforced iOS 14.5 which was released in April of 21. and it meant that users had to now opt in before companies could use their idfa for ad tracking there were some problems with scan that still exist and hopefully there'll be a result with a 4.0 version one of the problems is that it provides a single anonymized postback and the single postback is very limiting for products that have complex conversion flows such as mobile free-to-play games because you have multiple steps to take you to give you those signals of the conversion and the long-term LTV there was a random timer on receiving that information of the conversion reporting which meant that it was very difficult to create predictable models based on install cohorts and there was a very limited there's a very limited set of campaign IDs and UA

Performance Marketing is all about ABN testing you're testing different creatives you're testing different bids and by having a limited set of campaign IDs it means that you can do less testing and there's also a privacy threshold where if you don't get a certain number of installs I think let me tell you can yeah yeah I can yeah I can I can tell you what that you wouldn't get any data back because it basically didn't you didn't have enough data for Apple to say oh yeah we can guarantee privacy and give so yes it's uh Apple didn't actually say what is the the magical number but it's based on the uh channels for Facebook is 88 instas per campaign per day on Tick Tock is 19 Styles per campaign per day then on Google I think it's it's 100 and then there is Snapchat which is 75 installs per campaign per day so you pass the Privacy threshold if you don't pass the Privacy threshold you won't get any postbacks you won't see anything that is happening on your

campaign level how do you know what magic number is well there are certain ways how to find out uh but not like that the uh channel is actually posted that on on their guidelines for this type of things you know I I read a lot and I write a lot as well so you know I need to be on top of the game yeah and if you haven't checked out Matey's blog do check it out yes well you you essentially kicked off The X hero frenzy I think oh definitely and just to complete the the intro so some of the scan 4.0 features is that now you'll be able to receive multiple postbacks I believe there are three post box in different uh links since the install so it means you can get a bit more insight into the conversion however for privacy it means that you cannot link these three postbacks to the same individual user so I'm not sure I think we'll dive into a bit whether this is going to solve the problem of a single

postback it also means they also releasing a feature where now the Privacy threshold instead of being all or nothing there will be different thresholds so you'll at least at least get some data and then as you get higher through the threshold you'll get all of the data that you expect they're also expanding the number of the campaign IDs and expanding the properties that you can assign to them I believe yep uh tracking parameters that's what they're called and they're also introducing uh web to app campaigns but only for Safari so can I jump in here yeah um and make sure I can be the Luddite here it's been a while since I've done mobile free to play so some of this is going over my head I think we're just is this true that uh Apple are introducing a new version of their attribution system that mean that for people that are saying that I'm happy to be opted in and it's a more sophisticated version of allowing companies to figure out what

um what ads are bringing in their best players is that isn't opted in actually just the other way around oh really okay so it's a non it's anonymized information about uh what is the sort of more restricted version of what we had before but it's still telling players sorry it's still telling game makers which uh ads are bringing in the better quality players have I understood that correctly yeah unfortunately it's not going to be on ads level but on the campaign level still so even now okay uh channels are using like modeled conversions on the iOS side so if I want to check uh performance on the creative level it's still modeled so it can be basically anything uh I'm not sure that's what I see can you dig into that I don't fully understand what's the difference between the campaign and the ad level well the campaign level is

Let's uh uh you have campaign and different levels of the campaign so campaign is the first uh first layer then you have other groups or asset levels where you can put different targeting options and then there is a third layer which is a creative layer so usually you look at campaign level Ross so you can see like what uh what kind of money you can get from the campaign but if you want to dig deeper into the performance then you want to see which targeting is performing better under the campaign or which creative is bringing more money into into your pocket basically and if you look at this on iOS it's not very much well accurate let's say that way you have thanks to Facebook algorithms and everything and and the Google's algorithm as well models conversion so it's kind of what Facebook thinks this creative is bringing you so it can be true but it can be also like very very

not true it's like it's it's somewhere thanks to the the Facebook algo so you know you can believe what Facebook is telling you or you can because well you know you don't know if it's true but I usually rely on those modeled conversions because there's no no other way unfortunately and that was a problem that existed before the app tracking transparency change before uh we had all the visibility that we have now on Android so basically I could see on Android what uh what kind of creative is performing the best I need some model is actually true Ros on the creative level which is now which is not possible on iOS this was possible before that it happened and even with with uh with scan 4.0 this is not going to be possible it's just you're going to get more postbacks on the campaign level which is I mean it's good but it doesn't solve all the issues but it's definitely like one step forward because now it's uh it's kind of limited you need to know

what's what's what what are what's happening on the first 24 hours or in the first 24 hours now you have 72 uh or then like a something between the 8 and 35 days for the third post so that's that's definitely better for the performance evaluation but now that kind of triggers different problems and different headaches because now if you have first 24 hours you just want to maximize the first 24 hours in terms of the getting the as many information from the game to uh Channel as possible let's say you're optimizing campaigns for purchase so you want to get as many purchase um events as possible in the first 24 hours so you can optimize the campaigns now it's gonna be three days or 80 days or 35 days so it's the whole like evaluation process is going to be prolonged for this type of uh purposes but that's gonna help mid-core hardcore games that are not

able to monetize s as quickly as the other games in the first 24 hours so this will put less of the emphasis on having to convert players as early as possible yeah yeah one okay although I would still I would still do it because yeah for now well for me as a UA manager now it works super well so I can I can see really good performing iOS campaigns thanks to the fact that I'm more closer to the game teams as I was before because we need to figure this out together so obviously like to get as many uh payers as possibly in the first 24 hours or these it's not easy and I don't want to just mess up the economy because well of course I could maximize the the first day and then what would happen the economy could would crash afterwards which is not ideal so that's why you know we need to try to find The Sweet Spot and that's that's

how we work with the gameteer very closely so what are your overall feelings about uh scan 4.0 sounds like it's not going to solve all the problems do you think we're going to see some support in terms of performance because I think a lot of companies have been struggling of course I mean this kind of 4.0 won't solve all the problems and also like um some companies will still struggle I'm all I was always optimistic about iOS changes and I'm still optimistic uh now even more with the scan 4.0 so yes we were going to get more information on the campaign level which is nice uh definitely helps again creates different different kinds of headaches for for me because I need to wait for the the data longer uh now I just could most probably just look at like first first day maybe day and a half two days depends on the conversion schema and the the conversion window and I know you mentioned like the

prediction models that were not as effective as um as they could be on the other hand I've run pretty good campaigns or pretty uh profitable campaigns and using prediction models on the day on like first 24 hours it's still possible I mean it's not it's never going to be super accurate that's like that's how it is at the moment evaluation got really hard but it's still possible for a lot of companies just requires like hard work an extra extra time can I ask yes I I'm going to speak to other mobile companies they they've and I didn't talk to tons but they're talking about the fact that they've seen a drop in Revenue through ATT and the um inability to Target Spenders accurately or at least inefficiencies and targeting which have happened in the last year or so um who do you think I mean I guess how much does this

um help that and who are the winners and losers in in this not just about this update but just more generally is it uh the inability to Target whales you would affect you would expect to affect some companies worse than others and how would you generalize it that's the thing so even now some companies in the Social Casino space are doing quite well of course they do more retargeting but even on the US side so it's just you are setting up the conversion schema which is based on revenues so you have these like bits and brackets so you have 64 bits on the conversion scheme of Revenue and it's 64. so every bit is like one dollar bracket so you have 64 dollars and if the if the purchase happens Within These intervals or in these brackets it's going to be sent to Facebook and then you can actually use value optimization for targeting Wells

so the targeting options went from like interest lookalikes to actually event targeting which you can then Target Wells these companies or these brackets it's actually up to you how you can Define so if you see your players make purchase let's say they spend thousand in the first 24 hours you put that in the bracket in that case you will get that information back to Facebook and you can use it for the campaign optimization so it's it's you know transfer from the the usual traditional way how you can Target people with uh with different targeting options to even the based targeting which is more data oriented so yeah I think companies with uh bigger data teams will definitely win uh I work with some smaller companies they don't have the data teams so if you don't have the data team you can't use media amongst modeling incrementality tests and then prediction models on the

day one but you can easily look at what you were getting before you started spending and then what you're getting now with like some level of spend and you just compare the the differences between spent and the incremental revenue or additional Revenue so it's Blended Ros I know it's not super accurate but for smaller companies it's not there's not no other way unfortunately it's just you know you need to be brave a little bit and experiment yeah that you know being brave and experimenting is a lot easier in a big company with a oh yeah Revenue stream yes smaller companies like it's bigger companies yeah but if you're a small company and you know you need to solve it then you need to do whatever it takes to actually make it happen because if you don't solve it then you are in a big trouble because relying only on Android it's most probably like not the best scenario Yeah you mentioned that there are ways to go around the current constraints and

still find modelings to allow you very similarly so before the ATT changes a similar level in terms of the Performance Marketing do you think that the mobile game developers who just went okay we need to put the past behind us and just figure out these new ways rather than hoping that for example updates to the scan technology would allow them to reuse the strategies of the past well now most probably no I mean what what worked like two years ago it's not gonna work now and not going to work in the future for like 100 it's it's not gonna happen so if you're still trying out still hoping for anything that happened anything that worked in the past that it's gonna work now please stop immediately try to adapt as soon as you can I mean that's like the beauty part of the game industry like we are kind of going through a change whatever change out there like almost

every quarter so we're good in adapting so just try to you know speak to other developers it's also very nice in the industry that we try to share and help each other so just ask others like how they do it or ping me no jokes around not really I mean I was really hating yeah it's really helpful too for for like you know talking to others yeah I'm always optimistic about iOS I can't help it really do you think do you think the pace of change in strategy was as fast before uh you know 14 14.5 so post ATT 14.5 yeah yeah was it as fast before that you had to continuously change strategies in UA or has it accelerated no I think I think actually like this year uh when everything changed uh around these four 14.5 everybody just not everybody but like most of the

companies stopped spending on iOS because they couldn't evaluate properly which is on one side is I mean it's smart move on the other hand like those players and players didn't disappear they're still there you just need to find a way how how to actually get them uh and Target them and acquire them which is now people are starting starting to talk about like it's like iOS um UA is still possible there are still like companies that say well we can't run profitable UA and they're you know making this the ATT as their excuse how how they don't or can't run it unfortunately but it's still it's just hard work just you know that's that's it no there are companies that are really like uh can't can share that it's it's actually possible to to be pretty profitable on the iOS side and it's working even better than Android because it's not that competitive anymore do you have some oh sorry yeah because

again like we're getting back to the fact that uh still some companies are not spending or not spending that much as they would spend before so the competition is lower and I can see on some games lower cpis uh and better raw as numbers on iOS than I can see on Android because it's not that competitive do you have examples I don't know if you can share those examples of companies other game devs should be looking at oh I I'd love to learn more about this who should I go and explore yeah I've only nobody shares this uh um well too much publicly but if you you know if you go for a drink with uh some fellow developers they will share they will share a lot as well it's these conferences David is going to this is how you're doing this yeah exactly during this yeah yeah the conference is it's all about you know getting uh get together and uh just talk about the issues and then the solutions

and you know my view is the UA never stays still anyway I remember yeah interest targeting targeting the tendency to look alike targeting it took it turned into event targeting and value-based targeting and you know I sort of left mobile if we'd play at that point but then idea for an ATT now this seems like a big one but it won't be it always seems to be changing in some way all the time keeps things interesting I've been hearing UA's dead for like last four years like every year is like oh well now us days like come on give me a break you raise a zombie we should just say yes yeah it's it's more probably just going to evolve into something else you know a beautiful butterfly well that's why a lot of companies are also moving to web 3 and David are you do you have to deal with these decisions in your startup well it's not a startup payment I don't know I don't know anyway

um uh well a couple of things one other thing it depends what you're doing and there's there's quite a breadth of different things happening in web3 what I hear a lot of talk about I'm sure mate has an opinion about this is wallet targeting so um you know particularly in the light or the Privacy idife things are going on on Apple then my way of contrast if you hold your assets in a wallet as it's being cryptocurrencies or nfts then those wallets today are completely open you can query that and you can see you know what what a fantastic dream this is this is a UA person yeah you can see in a wallet you can see what they spend and where and how long they spent on it how much yeah everything like what kind of assets they have yeah exactly perfect everything no because a sort of Gap in that is that you might be able to see those wallets but you don't know who owns those wallets you said you can't associate an email address you can't message them you can do you can airdrop

something to them yeah but it doesn't mean to say that they'll act on it so to me that this is like uh a lot of people talking about that as a solution to some of these UA headaches not you know and maybe web3 is interesting partly because there's a new method of reaching uh players targeting players now but of course they to me there seems to be an unsolved gap which is sure you can look at their wallets and see what the spend patterns are and see whether they have an affinity with the game that you're building but how do you message them how do you actually get them to what's the call to action there so there's a gap but it's a tantalizing one right because if you could solve it then there's a whole new kind of UA is there are is there analytics technology or you know Performance Marketing technology can you is there anything that you can type in you know find all of these type of wallets and do this to them and then I can track if they use the thing I ear drops to do so probably not we're in a stage in web 3 where people are still

building this infrastructure so it's like I don't know if it's year one or two whatever but anyway to early days so I think there's a bit of a scramble to try and build interesting technology the same with analytics like uh an interesting aspect of um analytics and web3 is that you can query anything that's happening on the blockchain whether if you go to June analytics which is the sort of go-to a web 3 Analytics tool then you can see you can query everybody's game it's uh not just your game but you can look at the performance of other people's games which is not not through Center Tower or through app any but just by querying on-chain data so it has some weird elements that that the the design of blockchain is to be an open ledger so by Design it's supposed to be transparent you can see who's doing what even if it's anonymized wallets so it's a sort of a tantalizing new form of of UA and

new form of analytics everything works a little bit differently currently web3 there may be EU legislation that said yeah sure you can look at wallets but you don't get to do that anymore because that's you know maybe there's legislation that pushes against it I don't know but uh it's certainly slightly different in web3 but then you have that right there and uh you can check like uh what game or like how does the game actually perform but then it's not that like totally true because it's like only measuring like wallets so what about the other players well I mean depends what the game is so if it's a game again that requires a wallet then yeah you can see all of that bullet activity I think decentraland yeah yeah that's exactly this one I'm referring to so the story that is laughing about is the fact that the central end that are valued at 1.6 billion or something like that yeah had a wallet activity daily active wallets

of 28 or something and yeah 38 it's like 30 years still super small and the the pushback was you know which is 8 000 Dau uh it's just the majority are on doing wallet activity in your measuring really active I'd still say that 8 000 Eau is it's still pretty small yeah but you're right which is that it's only that sort of analytics is only able to measure people that are using their wallets for their game and if your game doesn't require that then maybe you don't get to see it yes I imagine a lot of games are going the 2.5 route and not fully on chain where some elements are chain are on chain but the rest of the elements are not yeah and you know and even in uh there's probably some good ux reasons for not throwing a wallet in somebody's face as soon as they start playing a weird pre-game right it's a not a great ux experience so maybe by Design even if

this is a very web free heavy game you want to find a method of not requiring players to have a wallet as Step Zero you know uh for Nila we're here he could take us all through his last real onboarding flow and next time so I was wondering your topic is channel diversification material is that one of the solutions in terms of these new strategies that could be beneficial yeah I think uh this specific article well even though I was mentioned in the article as my case study I'm I have some problems with it because it's not only a solution to like iOS it's I know I don't want to say solution because I think this is going to be a trend and I've been talking about this for for a lot of time and my co-hosts uh two and a half gamers are laughing at me every time I mention it but it's actually true because now I see the the landscape is shifting from using one or two big UI channels and spending heavily

on Facebook or meta or Google towards using more channels with smaller spend and this this articles suggests that like thanks to the ATT and the UA perform that thanks to the ATT UI performance dipped and small developers struggle which is true but on the on the other hand not that much and like the UA diversification should be more about your goals and the ROI you want to achieve so if you are looking at let's say short per payback period which is anything from 30 to 60 days or maybe even 7 to 30 days then most probably spending a lot of money on one channel is not going to work because as soon as you start spending more then uh you can get from like your Niche target audience then you're opening up the the targeting then the payback period is actually prolonging always so if you have let's say 1 000 daily spent you can get the

money back in 30 days amazing if you do 22 000 a day you'll buy you are widening up the targeting and then you will see the money back in 90 days not 60 but 90 Maybe 180. this can actually like the UA diversification can help uh because then you're spending 1 000 on Facebook 1000 on Google 1000 on Tick Tock and then in total you're spending three thousand a day but you still can achieve that 30 day uh payback period so so that's that's not only for iOS it's also for Android I mean it's uh it's not only like platform oriented it's it's all the UA and that's that's what I think it's going to happen and I think it's already happening thanks to Facebook decreasing quality in the last year now developers are shifting towards different channels and of course if you if you find better performance on different channels that you will spend there so what this article article also says

about challenges like the ad monetization um based on the well uh ads in the game kind of like those developers struggle yes and no I know we discussed it with Felix uh that even if you have the ATT prompt in the game you can actually capture 40 to 60 percent uh opt-in rates and get the idea phase therefore like earn more money on these type of players because well you have idfa and there are different tricks how to improve those uh those opt-in rates even to 80 for example so those and you have of course I mean it's all about the testing and you know trying to get as much as as possible from the from the eight or even pre-prompt uh because you know you showed that to players like hey we are a small developer please help us uh give you targeted ads and you know uh make a better experience for you there's like some some messaging you can use

that can help you increase that so those like days where everybody said it's the ATT operating rates is or the idea of help you know it's around like 20 it's not true anymore it's 40 plus on some games of course on some some genres this may be around 20 but still hyper casual those guys are still like good they are running good business even after ADT so let's let's put it that way and then yeah I just want to say that I always opt in you know for the sake of the industry of course hey I do that all the time me too of course I do that all the time of course even even I uh when uh a game wants to send me push notifications I say okay yes you can do that well I want to see what the you know what kind of messaging they are using so I can use them for research purposes yeah so I can use it as well but uh this this article by appsumer actually also

suggested that your performance deep as we discussed because of a lack of data science teams well sure if you don't have a data science team it's it's harder but if you're a small company you can also look at Blended data most probably you won't be able to like grow the budgets as if you had the data team because you are on your own but you can still do it step by step you add one one uh Channel you measure the performance or the like the revenue increase in two weeks if you see you are actually able to increase the revenue you can either increase the budget or add another UA Channel and then again two weeks period or three weeks or whatever you want to measure if you are able to increase the revenue or the revenue difference if yes perfect then you stack up another another Channel I mean it sounds very easy because I've done it before but uh of course like I understand it's not that easy for a lot

of companies yeah because if different types of create better or worse than the different channels for example I know that Tick Tock from what I've studied needs completely different creatives to for example what you do for meta so yeah that's what everybody said that's what everybody says true look at the the survivor.io case they have they had zero real people in their ads and they were able to spend quite heavily on Tick Tock with a lot of money going back to their pockets because you know we've seen the the the growth of that game they're making 1.5 million a day and that's only for in-apps we don't see the the ads unfortunately which I think it's somewhere around 1 million at this point and there are zero people in those creatives so yes that was something that everybody was talking about like a couple of months ago maybe a year ago now whatever works on

different UA channels as and do you have a winner creative it works on tick tock Google Unity or whatever you have because it's really creative and it performs well so it will perform across the whole channels what kind of creative sorry the winner one like the one that's performing the best of all the creatives you have oh I see the winning one the winning one yeah so of course if you put people inside or use the ugc type of creatives it can help the performance but if you don't have that just use whatever you have uh from different channels and start with that I I could see now it's performing well and there's also like one like case study or like well if you talk to Dick talk they will say like there is a a best practice if you use like a gameplay it's like a couple of sequences from gameplay you will see higher higher conversion rate to install and they're

like better rollers afterwards so it's shifting again from like this ugc oriented type of creative so you don't don't make creatives you make tick tocks I'm laughing at that like so much they just now it's it's definitely a different landscape or even on Tick Tock why why has it has it changed because I all the studies that I read is about companies saying oh we try to use the same creatives we use on Google and and meta and then they didn't perform and so we stopped exploring Tick Tock yeah it depends on what kind of uh um companies are writing these case studies if you're looking into like agencies writing this then obviously you need to have a context or like a motivation for for writing these type of uh case studies because then you know you need to understand so we need different queries for different uh channels of course because that's more work for us so we need to we need to charge you more there you go wow so it is you know read

between the lines as well and in terms of picking what channels do you when I used to do this I suppose I went through the apps flyer list of best performing now you know that yeah they just yeah they just released the the performance index the 15 one I usually yeah I usually do look into this but I have like three or four let's say best performing or the ones that I start with always I beat you about Facebook and the performance I still run campaigns on Facebook but then Google unity and Tick Tock are the like the top four for sure right now on iOS Facebook and Tick Tock is performing amazingly well amazingly well interesting why what do you think it's taking potentially taking companies a long time even well established companies I don't know this is all hypothetical um from moving moving from investing the majority or the budget into meta Google

and is it Apple search ads as well yeah yeah the the article suggested you should spend uh if you don't spend up until 250 000 monthly then it's Facebook Google and apple search ads which in gaming space episodes don't work that much in app space amazing for games not that much so even like for for iOS campaigns I would suggest uh Facebook Google not at all it's not performing that well you have five days delays of data and nobody wants to wait five days until you see the the data so that's why I use Facebook tick token Unity Google on the other hand on Android performs Super well so I don't have any problems with that but on iOS not that much so do you see companies being reticent from moving from these big big um channels into networks the smaller Networks you're talking about well if you're a big company then you most

probably test it out every every uh Channel out there it's just about what kind of goals and Ros numbers you have in minor kpis you want to hit and and how patient you are or like how hard you need to work to make the the uh Channel work as well for you because of course everybody can say okay I spent 50k on unity and it doesn't work well how can you say that I mean it's it's not like black and white you need to work you need to optimize you need to then use different optimization uh Types on the campaign side so not using only mobile app install optimization but also Ros based optimization so that the value and optimized campaigns is where you target purchases then you can do different optimization on the uh the sub ID level which means that's the targeting on that networks so instead of um running interest campaign on Facebook you have sub ID level where you are

showing your ads in in different games so then you can exclude the ones that you that are not performing that well and then just increase bits to get more traffic from the ones that you see pretty good performance I honestly gained such respect for us acquisition every time I hear someone talk about it I mean I always say it's super easy to set up the campaigns uh because of course I mean you can set up the campaign in 10 minutes but then what yeah if something breaks what would you do that that's the the most interesting part and the most exciting one that's why I always I know before you joined I said uh today like I I love campaign management I still love to get campaigns executed because it's it's amazing it's great it's great experience I love it so when you say work hard it's experimenting different types of creatives and also different types of campaign setups in the different channels exactly because these like Channel diversification it's like one

big topic you can then diversify even within the uh the the channel itself so you have different types of campaigns so if your game monetizes on ads and in-apps you can run purchase based campaigns but also at based campaigns so you're actually optimizing for ad Watchers and actually using the the value you can earn on the ad monetization to Target like Ed Wales if I can call it that way so so that's always like within the one one channel you can have multiple optimization multiple campaigns and also not only this but you can run value optimization purchase optimization different events uh optimized campaigns and even the mobile app is the optimized campaigns which which are the basic ones so like there's like the whole tree of possibilities you can do even like within one one channel so that's why when I when I hear like oh well we tried that and it didn't work like what do you mean what exactly didn't work like tell me and then when

we when we tried to find the the things that it didn't work did we find ways what worked and then just you know move to that direction because of course it's not easy to unpack everything oh mate thank you that was awesome um we are ready stop stop me now I mean this is this is great I mean I love to talk about the UA of course I I know that um we're coming to the last 15 minutes of the episode and David we're going to talk about uh web3 UA but we kind of already did that uh however part of your topic was also um some insight into predictions of web3 coming to mobile oh I mean um I feel this isn't really a story I just noticed somebody a friend of mine on LinkedIn who was a pocket game in Helsinki it seemed like the sentiment were one of the comments there one of the you know people do these reports I always find them interesting what what's the vibe there and one of the points in

in that that she wrote was Hey you know I think a lot of people are seeing that Webster is five years away uh at the earliest and I'm thinking um that that's a surprise for me that's like uh obviously there's a bit of selection bias if I go to if you go to a mobile event then people are gonna not in a hurry to tell you that hey I'm working in the wrong part of the industry equally if I go to with three of them people are saying I should probably should be making mobile so there's definitely some selection buyers there maybe there's just something interesting in the fact that uh two different forms of uh two pretty different uh opinions they're of course different parts of the games industry and I don't think anybody in web 3 games is saying the market is here right now but I don't think they're equally I think uh most would say that the the market is closer than five years away and um as I said it was just a small comment on a report but it just sort of highlighted a difference there and I

suppose we're seeing like about in terms of investment in startup games companies probably 10 billion dollars a year going into um startups which is so certainly investors are placing a big bet in this category of the games industry and I would expect most of them not do to be expecting product Market to fit to a to happen earlier than five years away so um yeah an interesting point um that uh what do you think about that Mateo you've got your foot for well I want to say you've got your foot firmly in web 2 mobile even that's a dismissive comment isn't it sorry I apologize about that what I'm trying to say is we're in slightly different parts of the games industry so what do you think of that thought now I think what's uh what's happening now I I think you mentioned before we we started recording the the web 2.5 which now like all the mobile company not all but a lot of mobile companies have the um crypto layer or like web free layer on top of it

because what I think web3 is great and I I really I'm really interested in like what's happening there but it's from my point of view it's not scalable that much so so that's why a lot of web free companies are now or well some of the companies moving towards the mobile with level of uh of blockchain in their games to be able to actually hit the let's say the mass Market in quotes the much Market or more players of course you build community but that's like thousands of players not Millions I guess yeah and and I suppose I've never really got to the bottom of how much Apple has changed their policy on this and maybe you covered it in previous weeks but certainly it is they wanted to cover it but never happened right oh we did we covered it we covered it a last episode yeah well Apple has not formally made a communication but a lot of people are reporting you can sell nfts if they are purchased through Fiat you cannot purchase through crypto which I don't

think is a huge change in any it doesn't matter yeah they take 30 yeah so I suppose um a lot of and this is what you're saying would tell you A lot of people who are making mobile games not quite seeing that positive return on ad spend they're saying maybe we can get an uplift from embracing some web 3 ideas and that sort of you know ending up maybe not being quite being web3 but with 2.5 or something so I'm seeing quite a lot of that and I don't know how effective that is and uh I think we will see well because everybody's talking about it but I haven't seen a game to a certain extent that actually utilizes this that much at least not now I mean we'll see what happens in Q4 but I'm not sure if that's like well I think I think the most traditional traditional you know most games companies that saw investment where pre investment happened middle of last year and onwards and there and it takes a while to make a game so I think that maybe from the middle of next year

you're going to start seeing the fruits of those Investments that happened in the middle of last year hang on this year you know it takes a while to make a game yeah and whether that's mobile or desktop or whatever so um um yeah interesting to me five years sounds like a man five years and video games is a long time yeah it is and if that was their sort of optimistic View and how quickly this would happen then wow that's it that's a certainly a different opinion from other people I speak to many industry yeah and when I get this question like where do you see yourself in five years I always like come on man I can't even not I don't even know like what's gonna happen in next month after two months how can I how can I answer that question yeah and in web free I mean like five years come on that's that's no everything's changing like every well month basically I guess there's some things that work on a slower timeline

like I wouldn't I wouldn't bet against VR and AR um and yet the speed at which that Market's come to be something interesting is slower than people imagined and I imagine the metaverse whatever that is is probably on the slay timeline as well so uh maybe things move at different speeds yeah well meta announced their new headset not to change topic but it costs 1 500 USD wait until you hear the cost of the apple one yeah oh but it has it has two hours of battery life that's good is it no it's no idea it's not good it's not good do you know how long these snap glasses last for they're 15 minutes are they really so two hours is okay oh wow yeah it makes two hours if I sound great Everything's Relative yeah yeah I think um I don't I don't think I can fully make up my mind in terms of how successful web3

games can be on mobile until I see an example going to Market and trying to scale because going yeah having a game available for players to play and how many players you can bring in without tapping into Mobile UA where you're relying on the web 3 and the community building and just organic UA in a way or I don't know if community building is organic probably not yeah not too much but yeah but versus you you can yeah you can have some help from the marketing perspective yeah I'm I'm curious how much do the onboarding and the f2e flows in terms of the wallet and the setup and the account and trying to onboard players who don't fully understand what an nft is or why it's important is that they're getting the actual asset instead of just having a character like is that going to be detrimental to the attempts of scaling I I don't know

we'll see well there's like what you would say is that there's a hundred companies or whether it's at an infrastructure level like trying to solve some of the wallet problems you described there Maria or whether or not it's content whether it's the games there's just hundreds of companies all having to run at that very talented companies so the idea that one or more wouldn't break through and figure some of this stuff out seems unlikely to me and I put it in a shorter time frame than five years do you think we're going to start seeing a lot of because you said there was investment in this year and back end of last year and it takes a long time to make games do you think that we'll we'll see an acceleration of gains being released next year or do you think it's going to take at least 2023 for building and then 2024 is when we might see that no I think we'll see games next year that are built by people that have experience in making games and have uh

properly implemented crypto elements rather than you know webview elements rather than just bolt it on as a method of improving LTV um yeah I think uh maybe first or second half of next year okay right we got five minutes left do you want to talk a bit of X hero is there a moist to dig into web3 oh uh I don't think there is like that much that much of things that we can uh discuss with the X here I mean it was turned that took out from the store because of some interesting things happening on the on the side which I was reading into one article that they said that I was taking players to like third-party websites uh when they had to spend I mean I don't know like how can you be forced to spend more money on the website but whatever and then uh the players didn't get a lot of refunds well they didn't get any refund basically yeah that's why I saw

players claiming fraud that they spent they didn't get any of the items they had spent for and then when they reached out to customer support they got banned but this is just a player's perspective because I read it on another thread that the developer had a a serious bug in terms of the IEPs and some players exploited it and that's why they got banned who knew it's not the truth is yeah nobody knows but it's it's back up I I saw it today so let's see how the growth continues because they made like seven million dollars last month which is incredible uh when we compare it with their like 50k a couple of months ago so it's an interesting growth but I'm not sure like how that's gonna grow this month most probably not that much since they were out of the the game for some time but then we'll see what happens until the end of the year when you looked into it do they have did they have epic Heroes save animals on Android

they they didn't have that when I was looking into the the game it was only iOS they added they added Android I think a week after I posted the uh the case study that makes sense because when I analyzed that it wasn't there as well and now it's instead of save the Doge it's the animals and you have the Doge and some other animals so they're still the same Idol RPG game I don't know what to make of this I'm still I've been trying for the past two weeks to create an opinion on this I come to the Amazon still I don't know I don't know what's going on and what's funny about this is you shared earlier that you got like halfway through that game and you're sore about the fact that you lost your progress when it when it came back again so it seems to me you spend a lot of time before you're halfway through a game but still haven't quite made an opinion about it is that what you're saying share my thoughts on it and when we did the X hero I like to play it a bit more

just to understand the progression a bit further in the experience [Music] yeah I was just more how do you call it disappointed because I wanted to continue slowly checking in how the game was doing and experiencing it and I found it surprising that they just deleted my save and I don't know if other players have have gone through that as well yeah I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened to others as well yeah yeah it's still very like a weird case that's happening the mystery continues yeah yeah exactly I'm looking forward no I just want you know I wanted to dig way deeper into this game but then I couldn't find it on the Stars I was like okay well let's see what happens but then yeah if this continues to be live and I want to just play try to research more and deconstruct like how is it possible this is making so much money I mean I already know why and how if I want to see if

it's sustainable because all these fake ads are just all the trends are Trends are changing so fast so this is based on like a tick tock trend so if there is a new trend I assume they're going to change it again in the game because that's what happened to Mighty party Hero Wars and the top war and Kingdom car that's what happened so now I'm really looking forward to see what's what's going to happen to this game are we going to have a part two Matey's vlog 100 nice I look forward to reading that all right well if you want to add anything to the conversation you know you can find us in the navic Discord and yeah David mate thank you so much for joining good to be here it was amazing thanks thanks everyone see you next week [Music]

thank you [Music]