JigSolitaire Review: The Jigsaw “Solitaire” ad-monetization monster

AP revenue 0 in the last 30 days. But downloads nearly 11 million. But the most interesting thing here, which is why we're talking about this, is the active user base, right? And this game is right now 2.2 million active users, getting closer to 2.3. Knowledge made of golden [music] eyes. Failix with ads making those coins rise. Jack up designs worlds chasing the sky. We're the two and a half gamers. The midnight crew talking UA advers and game design too. Mat feeling [music] shak bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight. But hey, master eyes on [music] the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Feeling stacks colors like a wizard in disguise. Jack with us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking [music] smack. Slow hockey sick got your back. Ads are beautiful. Like the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. [music]

Uh-huh. Ah. Ah. [music] Ah. By the way, there's no way we're starting.
There is no B way. We're starting and we are here again for talking about another game, another great success, slightly different game that we usually do. It's going to be a Felix show.
We haven't seen one of these in a while, huh?
Yeah. My name is Matthew Lancherich.
I'm Felix Robert.
And I'm your host. We're going to talk about Gig Solitaire. So, the question is like where the [ __ ] is the solitary in this game?
Or is it just like
in the organic?
Oh, yeah. Fair, fair, fair enough.
Solitaire is having a resurgence. There's so many solitire games that have made it into the top downloaded games. And you know, we've been saying on the show that Hyper Casual is dead, but every now and then we get woken up and said like,
"Who said

to correct this? There's no resurgence. There's just people that finally noticed the giant organics and they're coming after it. There's the resurgence."
Yeah, exactly.
A better way of putting it
because and I I'm really surprised Yakob didn't mention it. Yakob had this in his predictions for long time.
I think from Korea.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's almost a year now. So yeah, exactly. It's because it's so simple game and it makes so much money. It's amazing.
Yeah. And it's no solitire at all.
Yeah. Are we are we doing a predictions episode or not? We should do that.
I don't know. By the way, we'll see.
We do predictions episode pretty much every single month when we talk about this.
That's what I want to say. Like we we
just Yeah. I just need to put together all the all the episodes from this year and then that that's your huge prediction right there.
The greatest hits.
The great Oh, greatest hits of Yeah, exactly.
Put it into an LLM. Yeah.
Greatest hits of
five.
Yeah.
Yes, please.
I mean, it's going to be really quick.

Yeah. Um, so yeah, this is how it starts. It looks like what? Where's where's what? Like Yeah, you play it.
I actually got to 27 as well.
Yeah.
This for the unlocking of the feature album or the album.
Yeah. So there's no solitaire, spoiler alert. There's jigsaw puzzles
and there's maybe some like art that resembles cards like solitaire and that's it. Yeah, you see all the solitire there is. The jigsaw on the other hand is pretty good in my opinion because it has some things that I think a lot of other jigsaws don't have that well which I think is one of the reasons why it's scaling so well. So first things first, these thing kind of kind of fuse fuse together. But this is not new. This is this is not new. What's really
So if you if you move it, you can actually [ __ ] up the fuse.
Yeah, you can Yeah, you can [ __ ] up the fuse. So it's like Yeah, that's not the problem. The interesting part is also that it kind of automatically switches places with stuff and autofuses even if it's on the on like the one that you're

replacing. Actually,
it's very satisfying.
Yes, it is. I I argue I would actually if there is a haptic feedback maybe that would be even better
probably.
Yeah,
that would feel way more satisfying honestly.
The thing that I wanted to mention is just it just plays very well. Like honestly it just like again the the all all the feedback or whatever they have here with this one. It's again just done very very well. We are actually in a harder level than or it was like even proclaimed that there's like a hard level than usual because you actually start with levels that are like six pieces or or like eight pieces or something. N was like extremely by like
I was like what the [ __ ] is this?
Yeah.
And then I was like a hard level. Oh, okay.
Yeah, I see what you're doing here.
Because we are again in one of those games that mainly wants to keep you in. Therefore, the difficulty isn't the biggest kind of a driver. rather the level design and keeping you in the levels is so that's there I guess. So

that tree is then here. Yeah. So that's there mountains somewhere here. Yeah. In between I'm talking about this. I guess Felix can just wrap up some numbers in the meantime because this will take some time.
So yeah, this game is made by Gaming Cat which is based in Tokyo and Tokyo I guess like all of Japan besides Kayak. when we were there last year, one of the things stood up as soon as I talked about ads with any developer, they were like, "No." So, I guess it's like not really the the geo that's really known for making hyper casual titles. But, let me just run through some numbers here while you're uh solving that beautifully. So, AP revenue 0 in the last 30 days,
but downloads nearly 11 million. And the downloads are also coming from like it's US, India, Mexico, UK, Russia, France are the top geos. But the most interesting thing here which is why

we're talking about this is the active user base, right? And this game is right now 2.2 million active users, getting closer to 2.3. Oh, hello. Hello there. I didn't see you. Thank you very much for coming to this episode. Uh, it's brought to you by our sponsors, PVX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing. If you're scaling your business uh, and need funding, here's the deal. With PVX [music] Partners, you can grow your game easily and your business. There's no equity dilution. You can repay as you get paid, and it's flexible and fully tailored to your growth. So, you can secure funding in 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 hours. Don't you wait. take control of your UA budget without giving away of uh a piece of your company. Visit pvxpartners.com and uh see how they can help you grow your game faster and stronger. Don't wait. Go to pvxpartners.com,

right? Because how this game monetizes is with beautiful ad revenue.
And after talking about a lot of AP games, it's the first time we're actually doing it here, but this is old school. So, what you could see when Yakob was first on the menu is that it starts monetizing as soon as you open it where it has an uninterrupted banner placement from the main menu going into the game play. That's done on purpose. Why? Because you can increase the imp. So, as I've been saying for a very long time, banner revenue is almost dead. My kind of theory on why banners have gone down so much in ECPM compared to video is essentially both interstitials and rewarded video networks play around with the end cards and the creative length to basically get people to click through the ads more that increases the eCPM. Right? Banners have been the same since they came out. Like there's nothing that really happens there that's very innovative. But here they still have the banners. And then once Yakob finishes this very hard level, uh you're going to see what happens.

2027.
Yeah. 2027 [laughter] cuz he's showcasing one of the most annoying things about this game, right? Which is if you don't know where the image goes, you want to put your head through a window. But the interesting thing here is right so every time you finish one of these levels which can take anywhere because the easy ones take maybe 30 seconds 20 seconds to finish and these hard ones can take two three minutes maybe sometimes longer maybe shorter right the interesting thing here is did you guys get ads between every level or between every few levels?
Every three levels from the start honestly. Every few levels and then I think even until level 27 it was every three levels.
Yeah. So, I got it on every level and it started for me after level five, right? Which says that maybe they do something with difficulty or seeing how long basically it takes you to solve these levels and decides to add frequency based on that, right? Because I'm getting it on every level, which is interesting. But, oh, Jakob is almost finishing it before.
Did I just hear the word difficultiness?

It's getting really difficult.
It's difficult. I know it's not difficult. It's just time consuming, right? Yeah, it's time to because again like we're we're going for the banners. We're going for interstitials and all these other whatn not things.
I guess what they're built to design it for is just here you go.
Congratulations. Well done.
Show you can spend these coins on.
Yeah, there we go.
Like all I have all I had all like kind of card games and a lot of schedule games in the banners that I've seen actually. But he's kind of like my my type of game.
Yeah. I mean like you might think we're actually sponsored by Vita Mayong, but we're in fact sponsored by Fastpring. And now Matthew has a nice message about them.
Exactly. Because Fastpring, their drama D2C partner has been scaling with mobile publishers for over 20 years. And whether you're launching a new web store or replacing your current D2C setup or adding a bakeup bacup plan

bacon
fastring is here for you because they know the space they move fast and they don't going to waste your time. Check out fastpring and also check out the latest episode the chip where we talked about the current landscape of the D2C. So fastpring.gg GG. Launch your amazing web store there
and get your bacon.
I don't think it's the get your bacon. Get your bacon.
Bacon.
So, if you go back to the game, I guess you can show the only place where you can spend the coins.
Yeah, which is There we go. Which is the daily challenges which we can play for ad. And then if you watch an ad, we can spend coins. Do I get that right?
Yeah, pretty much it.
Yeah, that's Yeah, there you go. That's
the beauty of this, right, is like, yeah, you have the collection and then that's when you finish one,
which is this big big feature thing. I thought they had the sticker album on level 27 and it was uh no

see how many collections they have. I still can't get
it's fake. It's fake.
Most probably
it just never ending loop of uh just locked
10,000 10,000. Yeah.
I don't think that's real anyway.
You going to play a daily challenge as well or no?
Yeah, I play already one. It's It's like even more harder.
It's actually pretty hard. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Again, depends on the picture, but yeah, you'll see. It's like in an hour. [laughter]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Please come back. Yeah. Please come back in 2027, Yaku. It's going to take so long.
Few minutes later.
Few years later. Jeez.
We won't do this.
But yeah, you can play the daily challenge. It's like, as I said, it's not hard. It's extremely hard and extremely long. So that's what you get here. And then you just play this. And I was expecting a little bit at least I don't know one more mechanic. No.
Why? It needs to be simple.
Yeah, I know. I know. I'm just like used to much more IP progression stuff, I

guess.
Yeah, that's there. But the game, as I said, it's perfect case of like we again built the game that Solitaire teamemed that doesn't have anything to do with Solitaire. It's basically completely jigsaw puzzle. But again because solita has better traffic than jigsaw puzzle they actually taking both traffic sources now which is great. So we can have giant like whatever the US currency.
Show the show the downloads and like you saw the trend from all time and just Yeah.
So these are the downloads which were doing literally like 800k a day the start of November still doing like 350k a day. So that's great. and active users as Felix mentioned is already like yeah two and a half million basically and these are not if I understood bad users this is like pristine stuff with 27%
semi semi right like yeah but
it's okay Japan there's even more pricey than US
as for the eCPM I guarantee

come on yeah that's true
what you're saying the ECM is higher in Japan than the states no
what come on want to argue about users that are doing 500.
Yeah, I I do this for a living with many clients. I have never seen a higher eCPM in Japan than America. Like, you're not right. Like, what?
Maybe maybe they don't play stuff in IP games there. Okay, maybe I overshoot this.
I'm sorry. This is the first time in your life you're wrong.
Probably.
And you you can't do anything about it. You can't do anything.
You will not talk through this. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter]
Although you got me there. I grew some flu yesterday. No, you didn't.
No, you didn't. Oh, I did. Yeah, I did. Come on.
Makes complete sense anyway.
Yeah, on paper.
Yeah, on paper. Yeah, like if you have one impression in Japan, it might be like $1,000, but you don't really get Anyway. Yeah.
Yeah.
All right. All right. So, this game is at least pumping out 12 impressions on interstitials uh on this 18minute like

session length per day, right? So this is absolutely on only interstitials is generating somewhere between 100 and 120k a day right now. It's going down, right? Banners generating
70
if I looking at the if I like it's like 6,000 and it just rewarded probably another like 10,000, right? So, this game probably is generating anywhere right now between 130 to 100K, but it's going down, right? And it's going down slowly, but you can see where it used to be and where it is, but still like pretty good revenues, but I have no idea what they're spending on. Do I wouldn't say that much if you go to actually source download by source. I'm not sure if we already are there.
Yeah, nothing to it. Download by source where do you mean?
If you guys just check the downloads report and then click there and then just advertise it somewhere there which is download by source. Yeah,
download channel.
Download channels. This one.
Yeah, they changed this.
All paid. There you go.

Yeah, all paid.
So I guess it's cheap, isn't it?
Yeah, pretty much. For sure. If it's if it's ad revenue based then yeah it's cheap pretty much like if you go into
but basically this is what it takes now to scale a purely ad revenue game right like before it used to be seven interstitials right and now it needs to be 12 it's getting harder and harder
this is the exact same thing as we've been talking about last few games that we reviewed you need to mask it as a different game and then get the free CPI organic whatever uses
and the bonuses the bonuses
exactly and then because this is under jigsaw actually like is at least categorized properly. It's not solitire even though it's like the whole name is solitaire. It's the best jigsaw game. No [ __ ] Sherlock.
Well, best/ biggest.
Yeah, because
I would really I would really kind of want to see like how the retention curve looks like because that's the most important part in this case, I would say.
The long-term retention in this game must be terrible. Like exactly good.
Exactly. That's why it's kind of like

dying quickly because
I think so there will [snorts] be numbers here
way too early. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know.
Let me
I know it's too early. It's just I was just kind of figuring or thinking about like what it could be pretty much
one more thing
because it's if this would be blogbust level of retention then this is [ __ ] golden but I don't think we are no nowhere near
the retention numbers for for block that we are seeing here. Absolutely right.
Yeah. So wanted to do this. So, what is this? Yeah, this is solid. Tell us more what what we're looking at. Okay.
Yeah, we're going to look at Solitaire overall download,
which is very stable,
but it's still something like uh let's do monthly.
Still stable, but still kind of going up.
Yeah.
See?
Yeah. Yeah. But it's like 32 million downloads a month. revenue is going up
seven
from like 5 mil a month to

30 mil a month.
Sure.
90%.
Yeah.
Yeah. But put put 90% more on
basically and and play Tika and and the guys.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Disney.
Yeah. So So we have this and now let's switch over and instead of solitire let's put Yep. But I don't know until underwater jigsaw drawing and coloring tabletop cards. No,
I'm learning so much about the functionality of sensor tower with you Jakob.
Well, we know how it works.
Thank you, sensor tower.
Yeah, thank you, sensor tower. And it's under under what?
Puzzle here.
Puzzle. Sure.
I think it's puzzle. Yeah, you're right. Maybe it's puzzle jig. So, yeah, you're right.
There we go.
There you go.
So, it's going down. It's going down a bit
time month.
We know we know what this said.
So see it's it's very stable but again it's 2 million against what was it? Uh

the download
30.
Yeah. 32
30 32.
So like 15 times bigger category. So we took the engine of the game from small category and took the traffic from 15 times bigger category which means we have the biggest game in the category now. Period. So we lied. We lied. We lied. We lied. We lied.
Hello. Hey. Hey. App police.
Yeah. Because he's lying.
Yeah. That's Jigsaw. Jigsaw. Jigsaw. Yeah. Basically.
And the comments. I've read some of the comments and like no one's complaining about being lying to. One of the top comments was just like, "I've played 2,000 levels. It's a lot of fun." And you're like,
"Exactly."
Yeah. It's
because But I was talking to to Andre from Playable Maker. I was like, "But where where the [ __ ] is the soliter?" Exactly.
There's no solar.
Exactly. That's the point.
There's no soliter. That's exactly.
So, see, you have like jigsaw puzzles from Mini Clip, which is like 21 million

downloads, which I'm guessing
Mini Clip has every [ __ ] game on the market. I
I know. I know. You do. Yes.
Exactly.
Yes. That's
again, what I wanted to say, this game is like old as hell and it's like Yeah. It's
Yeah.
still still running. It's like this like yeah evergreen titles that are kind of if you have like 20 of these like it's you're capturing the organic traffic like
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
That's there. But again you see this this whole point of this operation. It's just like again classic bait and switch stuff that we see in the market being the only strategy for UA. The only one no other. Or you have like super strong IP which nobody has.
Exactly. And even then
how help you?
I mean
it's 100.
Yeah. like 90% paid. I wanted to say it's great, but it's it's not really
it's cheap, therefore it's paid. It's cheap.
It's But you know, like the thing is uh and I kind of understand the the whole advertising business they are running at the moment. It's like it's 95% uploving.

One second. Share this instead. It's 95% [snorts] up. Seriously,
blue sea. Exactly. Blue sea everywhere.
I mean, if you're listening to this listeners, don't forget to pick up some uplo and shares. Jeez.
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. because I was like, "Okay, well then I they must run something on on Facebook." So I found this jigsaw. No, Android, but adenroid whatever generated pages
kind of whatever. Yeah, I do have no idea if and see I mean
is that
I don't think this is it. I don't I don't think so. I mean it's something else because
it's a jig jig jig merge puzzles. Jig mersh puzzles but they're like category, mate. Puzzles is the
Exactly. Yeah, puzzles is true. Yeah, that's how Exactly, bro. You don't really go there because Yeah, right. Because here it looks similar, but it's definitely not there. Not the same game, but it's kind of
This dog is one of the levels,

right? It's like, is it though?
I put together a dog.
Really? I
I put together like five five different dogs. I had the
one. Yeah. Not this one.
Yeah. Not this one, but
did you get Felix? level I think
seven check.
Yeah,
pretty much it was level seven.
37.
Okay.
Okay. Nice. I was Yeah, I'm Yeah, I'm 27 with you on this one. But again, like Okay. So, I guess like these these are not them. So, it's something else, I guess. Which means they
invented a new OS.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Android, which is great. But they don't really have
Let me just turn off the the sound of this
by the way playables. K download downloads. They have only
exactly
few creatives again.
Exactly. But think do this.
It's all it's all up loving and it's all playables almost. Look
differentables right there. Yeah. It's going to go down. There are like so many different
I just realized I need to ask you something Matthew that counts in here.
If we're looking at this whole that

we've been talking about so much how the amount of creatives you bring out every month is the most important metric, right? How does a playable count as a video? is every playable is worth two videos. So you could have 500 playables and that's worth a,000 video creatives. Or how does that
No, it's it's it's just another another piece of of creative. It doesn't really say like if you have one playable, it counts like two videos. It's just another another.
Don't expect playables to be like doubling or amplifying the strength of the creatives. It's just like another source.
Exactly. It's just it's important. Yeah. Kind of. It's important
to have in the mix but you cannot rely on it to be the only thing driving it.
That's why I want to say like if depends on the the channel mix because here it makes a lot of sense because they are running 95% of appliance. Yeah, eight. So let's say they have 15

different playables which is great. But if you if you look at new crees, it's it looks like they're kind of starting now. But is it true? Not that much. So, as you know, we talked about it in the in the episode before. You need thousand creatives for launching a successful game or to have a successful launch. So, not to die immediately with AppLin only. This is not really as kind of creative volume play.
Mean is not that creative intensive.
Exactly. It's not. Yeah. You can you can work with these. let's say 15 playables for 3 months
because the channel is just more powerful.
It's a slightly different uh creative refresh
needed for uploading and because the inventory
on app
because yes because then you can you can do different things like video plus playable and then suddenly you have another variation of it. So it's like it's not as like you have only videos on Facebook

new concepts rather the combinations.
Exactly. And you can also have these different kind of workarounds as for iOS you have a custom product page which then if you combine this creative with the new custom product page and even the creative is old you have new custom product page it acts as a new creative. So again you can add artificially so many different variations
new creative in the algo.
Exactly. And you just need to do a different custom product page which is basically easy to do on on iOS. So like these are the different things and and I was like wait a second. I mean this reminds me something and obviously since everybody knows I'm I have a playable maker which is a playable tool. Well look we have a we have templates and one of the strongest template recently. Can you see which of these is
Yeah. One theme puzzle too. See, it's the same. It's the same thing. And this is so so powerful in terms of like you can slap this on any game
any game.
Exactly. And it doesn't really So,

exactly. This is jig solitary.
So, I told my boss I made a playable [music] with Playable Maker
and he said to me, "What language did you code it in?" And I said, "I don't know. With Playable [music] Maker, all you do is drag, drop, click, and it does it all for you." So, again, he said, "What language did you make it in?" I mean, I don't know, English. At the end of the day, [music] as long as the playable maker does it all for you, why do you care? It's just like magic.
So, you can and I've seen this working well for different different casual games from from the data we have. It makes so much sense why this is scaling so so so rapidly as a jig solid
and
because it's a creative concept like new gates mechanic.
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, and I've been I'm seeing this work so well for some of the games even I manage. And it's just like so easy to do to create. So, that's why I'm kind of puzzled by these guys why they don't have more, right?
It's not the same, bro.
Come on, man. Like, why? Why?
It's not the same. Like,

I just want to see the number.
23,000.
Okay.
Why?
Okay.
Like,
come on. Like, we don't we can't we can't do this. We can't do this. So, but see, but this is the difference basically.
Yeah.
But that's pretty much it.
But Vio is like running a similar format and it's still scaling the same. It's not dying. It's still scaling up.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not going to go anywhere.
The big difference if you look at the chart of Vayong, it's just gradually scaling up. It just now hit the volume that uh
Vita Mayong
we already talked about
because every single ad in this game I get is Vita Mayong.
Exactly. It's it's interconnected, man. like it's it's really really connected. So So that's that's that's there pretty much. So I mean this as simple as it gets, but it's really really powerful in terms of like how can you know like because you're talking about how this was just combination of the jig saw puzzle and solitire and I'm I'm also talking about how this can be used for any other casual game as a creative

absolutely perfect because you take a scene from a game make it into jig jig solitire. Thank you very much. See you next time. Absolutely amazing. And it's it's going to work because this is scaling so [ __ ]
solitaire players hate this one trick.
Yeah, exactly.
Good one. Yeah,
good one. Pretty much. Pretty much. So, dear listeners, there you have it. Uh Jig Solitaire, please join the Slack channel. Comment under the video if you play this game or if you have any other suggestions for games that we should cover. There's a lot of them and we love to cover these games. So, thank you very much again. See you next time.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.

[music]