Key aspects for Mobile Game Growth in 2025: UA, speed, monetization & globalization with Airbridge

players who are more likely to spend on iip should see less ads what that used to look like before was you segmented it based on geographies but now we're seeing more and more examples of more sophisticated Studios actually segmenting and changing the game play experience for players based on what user acquisition campaign brought players so what that looks like is that if we look at a game like hexas ring the made of gold and Ice fix with making those coins R jack up World chasing the with the two a half Gamers the midnight crew talking you and game design to M bring the inside we're rocking those vies till the early daylight on the pr tracking data through the cyers Felix dollers like a wizard in Disguise Jack cters us to the two and a half Gamers talking smack slow hockey stick got your back ads are beautiful they light the way click it fast don't

delay [Music] ah hello today's episode is sponsored by pvx Partners that's pvxp partners.com the ultimate marketing credit line for games it fast flexible funding for your gaming business with pvx Partners you get no equ quity dilution you don't really need to sell your soul and you um repay as you get paid get your term sheet within 24 hours and get funding within 30 days so don't wait visit pvxp partners.com now and fuel your growth now let's get back to the episode well hello everyone and welcome to this special interview with two and a half Gamers a world famous podcast for all the gaming gross access experts and

professionals so I'm Roy Nam CEO and founder of airbridge a leading mobile measurement partner MMP trusted by more than 400 mobile businesses worldwide so today I have this privilege of sitting down with this Brilliant Minds behind two and a half Gamers mate yakob and Felix so hi everyone hello thank you hello so it's such a pleasure to have you here today so maybe to kick off things um let's break the ice so could you could each of you introduce yourself for the audience yeah sure uh I'm Felix Brer uh that means good mountain in Swedish uh I do ad monetization I'm an ad monetization consultant I've been in industry for about eight years I've worked in ad networks dsps always on the supply side and now I help large companies with their ad Revenue it's great yeah um name's Jacob I do product game design played too many games I guess so now I'm doing it uh for over 10 years in in the industry yeah same

working as a consultant with like seven to eight Studios on different genres different games and speaking to these two guys every week maybe two times a week regular maybe too much so my name is m I'm the UA and creative consultant I've been in the industry for 11 years working different companies I have my own creative team as well and we started this great um podcast few years ago and it's a lot of fun helped 52 games soft lunch and Global launched and I love it UA is amazing thank you very much for having us right yeah thanks for the great intro you know as a long fan of your podcast I've been always curious about the origin of this name TF Gamers like why did you guys name your podcast as TF Gamers like what made you yeah name this this podcast that well you can give the first one and I'll give the second okay okay okay okay okay okay so there are two two stories when you saw

us standing next to each other I mean you can clearly see the two and a half Gamers so he's the the good mountain is really tall and obviously I'm the short mountain in this in this scenario so yeah exactly so so two and a half I'm the half in this in this context and then there's the other way Felix maybe you can tell uh I'm the half gamer cuz I don't game that much I have a console and they don't have consoles they're all both PC Gamers so yeah I game less so I'm the half gamer yeah so we usually play games for the reviews he plays usually the most then I play and he's like have you played maybe so like yeah we play he doesn't yeah we play well makes sense makes sense so when did you start this podast yeah we just discussed it it was actually 3 years ago in January 202 too and it was first week of

Jan I think the first episode went live ond 14th of January yeah it's been hell of a right yeah we actually had even a previous podcast only for the Slovak community in Slovakia trying to help the local community like get get on like the mobile gaming track and everything but at some point we kind of said like let's switch to English because people know English in Slovakia like we kind of cornered the market there so nothing really to do there and we talk to each other anyway like almost every week and then it's like okay well let's just record those conversations because it's quite useful it should be useful for for more people than us three yeah the thing is that we do like we would need to do these things anyway like play those games look at the news look at the latest trends because we work there like with the studios with wherever we do and we just kind of talk about it for everyone else to see that's it got it I mean as one of the you know one in a community I've been always uh been

inspired by your like you know all kinds of these creative ideas and Inspirations from your channel and then definitely want to extend the you know gratitude and appreciation to appreciate what you're doing yeah well today what we're trying to discuss is that we're diving deep into what it takes to build successful games and expand them globally so many of the questions I prepare today are based on discussions from your podcast uh and newsletters which I find incredibly inciteful so you know mobile games particularly hyper casual and hybd Casual games have become significant export products meaning that they export their games globo so we're seeing developers from countries like France the UK Cyprus Vietnam China Korea and turkey and other countries creating games for Global audiences so maybe as a first question uh I want to ask you like how do you see uh this trend evolving do you think we're still on an upward trajectory or have we already hit the

peak I can probably start there um so the interesting thing is we actually took a look at the amount of apps in the App Store and how it's progressed throughout the time uh since the launch of the app stores and the amount of apps on the Apple App Store actually doubled uh from 2022 to 2023 so there's definitely some sort of upwards Trend uh there are headwinds user acquisition is harder you love to ask ma about that tell me about it Christ but there definitely seems to be an upwards Trend in the amount of developers interested in building games uh particularly from yeah like you said China Vietnam seems to have the biggest growth in recent time and uh yeah we always joke that China's coming because China is coming well but mo mobile gaming is dead what what are you talking about yeah the thing with the developers specifically is actually I think good to put into context of Corona where during Corona when we see this kind of giant uplift

that like lifted everyone pretty much every single genre but it especially lifted hyper casual and a lot of developers got into the industry through hyper casual which now is being Consolidated into hybrid casual and not everyone else is able to make the switch so I think that's a really important context to kind of see there whereing the headwind that hybrid casual as it is is getting more and more and more sophisticated but H hyper casual as it was still lives within the industry not as like a strong kind of genre on the charts but its mechanics and its tricks and principles are spreading around the industry more and more as we see in Forex like we seen all these fake creatives hyper casual inspired creatives mini games on boarding to over the CPI so that I would say is like the important part here regarding the oning trend yeah but we are we were talking about your visit in Vietnam and like how companies from Vietnam have quite a lot of still millions of downloads basically

each month and they're still earning a lot of money so it's still pretty much going upwards that makes sense just to recap um so we all agree that there was an explosion of these apps during the covid times because we cannot meet each other offline and then people wanted to meet with this Brands Brands and the games wanted to meet with the customers so there was certainly an explosion and increased diversity among that time and the market that we knew doesn't doesn't exist as it at the as it was now uh as it was before but we're definitely seeing uh growing Trends still like uh this trend growing across the globe and then especially from China from Vietnam and all of these countries really creating new styles of these game New Concept of these games and you think it's growing right if I can just add one thing to that like there's a lot of chatter that mobile game growth is slowing down it's not as quick as it used to be it's really big right so the rules of big numbers apply but there's also one thing that a lot of people are

not taking into account that there is this huge dark pool of money that's not accounted for at all in these rankings because more and more people are starting to use web shop to circumvent the App Store payments right and I worked with some people that have had 50% of payments going through web shops right and some of these large Gams that use web shops they're going to have significant amount of money that's not accounted for so I still think mobile games is growing double digits think makes sense so so despite all of these hawis um you still believe that the market is growing and then because now just of these you know traditional app stores that exist in the market you also bring up this topic of the web shop which is kind of becoming another source of the revenue for many of these gaming companies yeah yeah got it got it also before we move on with the conversation I just want to add uh after our CH China visit we were quite amazed how far far ahead China is and all the developers there because if we take an example with lucky defense

launched here and then launched basically globally half of the industry in us or in in Europe they didn't even know like it exists and until we actually talked about it on the podcast but then we came to China and it was already like 10 gaming companies working on the lucky defense clone or or an in iteration mhm or be the working prototype after two weeks that lucky defense launched it's insane and until this point I think there's like one or two companies in in us or or west that are kind of thinking about it not even having a prototype so that's how far ahead like China and a definitely I agree um Chinese developers and Publishers are super fast they always explore the new trends and then if they catch the trend they always jump in and they really do something about it in a fastest manner yeah so while speak speaking of these countries like China

and Vietnam do you think there are other countries to attend to like those Rising countries in this scene of hyper casual and Hyper casual gaming industry yeah I think Vietnam was the the the biggest at least from the trends that we saw before turkey is still on the rise turkey is on the tury is still very On The Rise not only in hybrid casual but also like casual like you could see let's say the latest hit from Peak which is still got back on track with MCH Factory so it's not hybrid casual I know but saying like it's not only hybrid casual and also casual in okay but if we not talking about hybrid casual then I mean we are seeing South Korea and you're doing some amazing stuff as well pretty popular here one thing we can agree on is the growth is not happening as much in Europe as it was 10 years ago it's yeah it's shifting East well I mean the new innovation is definitely happening uh all started from these um European countries in the US so still there are a lot of strong gaming companies in Europe and the US but you're seeing a lot of

these U New Rising companies in China Vietnam turkey and so on and South Korea as well yeah because because the the work ethics and approach to work is different and it's becoming 4 day working week which is which doesn't really yeah it doesn't really make any sense if you really want to progress and move fast it just doesn't make sense and this is becoming a standard in Europe and the us as well so it's just becoming super slow while here it's the other way around and the thing is also that in in the west there are much like much more games that are kind of established and just like scaled up and working big like stuff like I don't know Candy Crush play games I don't know Call of Duty and stuff like that from East we see much more diverse and new games coming in like all the time new stuff not maybe it doesn't scale that far but still it sometimes like breaks the shards completely like I don't know let's say the new Pokemon game from DNA like it's 300 million already yeah yeah insane

makes sense so it sounds like the speed is really becoming a key to success in this industry so maybe before going into other questions I want to ask you like since the industry is changing so fast how do you think the gaming companies what should they do to really stay ahead of this trend ahead of this like Fast changing industry what should they do one thing that's really obvious is you need to listen to the two and a half game what I want to no no I agree Shameless PL exactly Shameless plck and we also have a Korean Channel at the moment so you should definitely subscribe no but seriously um we are usually looking at Trends in Tor T trying to find the the new hidden gems that are launching um usually coming from from East anyway and then translate that to to West like we we were discussing this with joed games in in

Shanghai because all their against Legend of mushroom is really hardcore and you need to kind of streamline it for the vest audience like that's don't translate well back to the back to the speed questions as you say I think this is can very critical especially this year that it seems to be kind of mandatory that if you don't follow this kind of model of templatized like the best example for this is always hobby where if you look at Hobby game games it's pretty much all done within their kind of internal template of roll Glide action RPG meta game which they kind of keep perfecting throughout the years from 2019 and they just switch to core gameplays now the last one being capy barago but also other companies like let's say mihoyo for instance if you take genin impact honai star and leson zero all the same meta game just different core and this is something that you just can't catch up with because if you're working on your template and your meta game and you have data from users for let's say last five years you know how it behaves how The

monetization Works everything you just change the core change the visual produce a completely new game but in the end it's just a perfected version of your previous game there's also the cannibalization question which I don't want to get into but still it's about having as much shots on the goal not as like believing in one giant hit driven game doesn't matter if let's say it's third fourth fifth game what matters is the speed of the next game and how fast it takes you to develop it makes perfect sense so it seems like now the crossb Insight exchange and Inspirations that you get from each other is getting more important and that's the reason why you should subscribe to 2 Gamers to get that Insight uh on time uh ahead of [Music] others so maybe we can just go into some of these questions uh about growth itself so what are the things that any company would need for a successful launch of of their game and as growth so

I know this question is quite broad uh but I wanted to open up the conversation by asking you guys this as you must have your own framework for the launch and the growth of these games globally yeah I do but I think it started with the game right starts with a game yeah it starts with the game and it's very cliche answer but you need to have a good game right I mean okay game okay game let's say let's say decent numbers to be able to to grow and then in terms of the the actual framework well a soft Lounge is super important obviously the the data pipel you need to have a good Data Tracking and everything it STS starts there retention at certain level and then the it all goes back to the CPI versus LTV equation I mean it's nothing else if if that doesn't work then you you can't Grow Let Me Maybe shift it a little bit um having good game is not enough having a great game is still not enough in these days you actually need to have a great game

know your genre expertise be iterative not just you know purely cloning having some kind of a let's say like the product is exceptional but it's still not enough unfortunately and in because it's a UA play yeah it's a UA playing these days so even if you done all of this it's still unfortunately is a not enough because you're competing in a very saturated Market Performance Marketing is pretty much everything so if you don't have some kind of a yeah mat is saying UA play but in the end it's a UA trick pretty much which means that let's say this fake onboarding fake creative funnel or an very strong IP which is drawing users from all around the world because it's lowering CPI or some kind of a additional UA trick basically like cross promotion cross platform whatever doesn't matter but if you don't have this kind of a plan for your user distribution you just won't make it in the current market Stills come back comes back to CPI versus LTV

that's that's it it's it's simple as that obviously that CPI MH in that equation yeah it's all the U UA stuff different channels uh creatives and then of course like onboarding like you said borrowed from different genres H that makes a very big difference well I think that's a great point so the great game is something that you also you have to have as a start but that isn't just enough it's just the start you need a great UA strategy as well as all these data pipeline retention strategies and a soft launch all of these things combined with the great product the great game can make you successful but the thing is what success is you need to Define that if you have if you don't have a great game you can still run a profitable business it's just not going to be scalable that much for some companies having millions a month it's just not enough for some companies small teams that's like it's that's amazing so that's like it's you need to put that perspective as well I think usually

people will consider it as like is the game able to cover our burn rate and something on top like that could be already successful for let's say smaller teams but yeah for some companies let's say if we look at like the top of the top let's say supercell yeah they just kill all all the games that don't me their Benchmark because it's just giant opportunity cost for them so why they should be sitting in their portfolio which would be already a profitable business for a lot of other companies but for supercell doesn't make sense so the thing is for for some companies if you make millions a day that's just not enough for example if you have big company it's different you can make a lot of money on a daily basis and it's not enough for them but for small teams that can work quite well and they can be profitable so that's that's different thing that makes perfect sense I think you also made a like great point so great games great UA great success but still with good enough quality games with great UA still you can make yourself into a profitable gaming

company yeah and if you have small team uh it can make such a big difference if you make few hundred thousands per day while as yeah for super they would just kill the game and it wouldn't be enough for them that's great so well since you have have all mentioned the UA and marketing let's talk first about this like lately uh I've been hearing a lot about UA Channel diversification a term that you guys have been mentioning a lot in your episodes so can you explain what Uhl diversification is and why is it so critical for gaming companies looking to scale globally yeah can you explain the two and third best UA people on the on the as person who's never run a UA campaign in my entire life I can tell you that UA diversification is extremely important to reach all your users from different platforms because your users are in different places correct you go on go going I can go on uh yeah it's just very important to

kind of know what works for you and like test it test a lot of creatives test lot of stuff different platforms with different rules different kind of traffic setup so on so forth so just being able to experiment and have as much kind of coverage as possible is just necessary so the worst problem that we see which we see on the podcast is that if you don't have enough Creative Concepts for different platforms even you don't even try these different platforms so it's just like more of a yeah and these guys are sitting with me every week and they don't don't listen to me at all so I thought that sounded quite good I mean yes but doesn't really answer the question I mean it's just okay all right take it away then so you diversification uh so it comes back to the point that we we made just before this question you need to have multiple UA channels running at the same time because every channel has different inventory yes different creatives yes

but also different LTV curves as well and different cpis and also in terms of the CH the UA diversification doesn't need to be only about channels but you can diversify the the traffic and campaigns within the channel for example you have the hybrid game you have ad monetization on the one hand then you have Ina purchase monetization so it's 50/50 split you can run in a purchase campaigns optimized for us for in our purchases you can add you can have addas campaigns at the same time or you can run Blended Ras again there three different types so and three different types of campaigns three different LTV curs as well and CPI so again CPI versus LTV per Channel per channel so you have hundreds of channels so you can have so many different campaign types and diversify the basically the U portfolio and it's really important because every channel has a ceiling so you can spend let's say 100,000 per month on Facebook

but then you can spend another 100,000 on on Google Tolo in unity Tik Tok and suddenly instead of one channel which is 100,000 you have five which is half a million already which is 5X basically and it's sounds sounds pretty good which would be impossible if we do just have one just one channel if we had this recording 10 years ago I would say yeah well just spend everything on Facebook and you're fine it doesn't work like that anymore total sense so what you're saying is that um typically people actually have this perception in mind that oh like if I spend more maybe the economy of scale will come and then the efficiency will get better um as I spend you know more so but in reality what you're saying is a lot of these channels they have their own advantages and they have their own weaknesses and maybe some of them can easily Mex out and that is one of the reasons why you have to diversify the channels yeah absolutely and also it does if you increase the budget doesn't

really mean that you will get more installs you increase the budget then the CPI goes up as well so basically you are getting less for more money on one channel whereas you can just spend the same like the incremental Budget on the other channels and then you can get actually more users I know this is kind of a silly question but I I can actually I I really have to ask like how many channels do you think is kind of the you know roughly ideal if we actually reached the level of UA diversification h i mean I usually ran at least four at the same time I think that's the base which is app Facebook Google and Tik Tok and then you Branch out from there you got a Unity iron Source kind of and then all you have rewarded U channels now which you need to run in bul so it goes from 4: to basically 10:15 I ran a survey on subscribers and the average was anything

between like 8 to 12 8 to 12 and the the budget was yeah like anything from 100,000 per per month to few Millions I see that's really great practical tip like thanks for sharing that so you actually not only just mentioned about the channels but you also mentioned that you have to diversify the campaign types and the strategies of the UA can you explain further on that topic please yeah of course so I I mentioned the the hybrid kind of types of Campa because in these times you have the mobile app install campaign optimization which is which was default on different channels there like doesn't really work anymore so you need to go to up event optimized campaigns and then purchase and then value because that's where your the quality of the players is and that is different from channel to channel so you have appla which is pled R you have appla Ina purchase R campaigns but but then you have value optimization which

is getting kind of like the whales into your games on Facebook Google which is called theas and the same thing on Tik Tok so you have endless possibilities basically got it yeah so diversify in terms of channel in in terms of like campaign optimization goals and all of the other pillars as much as you can to reach the efficiency the the example so for V value optimized campaigns on Facebook let's say you have cpis of 50 for for match free game but also the LTV is is quite high but you optimize for two years pic period if you if you run a mobile app install optimization maybe the CPI is $5 but the LTV doesn't really exist because the quality is really low so you need to mix and match different optimization types and diversify the the user profiles so that's that's the also if you target purchase optimization it's again $30 Maybe but the revenue is coming maybe in two

and a half years makes sense so lower CPI doesn't necessarily mean that is good because it always comes along with this uh Ros and the LTV so like low CPI low Ras doesn't mean anything like high CPI even higher Ros uh better so that's the reason why you have to mix things and balance things out yeah exactly it's quite scary to see these types of cpis obviously but then yeah that's that's the reality these days makes sense I it's not getting any easier well then you must have to be very brave to you know embrace all these CH changes and really just look into the data closely to you know make agile changes to your strategies that's great so how do you think do TR of UA diversification shaping modern UA strategies do you think this trend will evolve in the coming years and just general advice to the people about the UA would be appreciated I think I've been talking about the UA diversification for some time it's not long as I've known you yeah

it's not it just changed a little bit because I a couple of years ago I usually said if you hit 1 million a month on Facebook then you diversify and I diversify immediately you run multiple channels so I think what's coming next as this UA diversification for different UA channels is the rewarded UA channels and then you need to kind of run multiple of those at the same time because they're also not scalable M so now it's just more about like comb three ones right now the I have no idea we're never really right now I would say what like misplay game light ad Joe is doing quite well and what else Al media is there as well in the mix so it's like it's growing like crazy I mean it's it's like few years ago it's B play now it's like 20 of them or maybe 25 so yeah coming back to the question and the actual like the the tip there so yeah you just need to start uh multiple

channels from scratch like from the day one basically which wasn't the yeah wasn't the case a few years ago H okay so it's a great like uh suggestion and recommendation like these like reward based um ad platforms are also picking up some speed nowadays in the market oh yeah it's great so uh since we talked about the UA I want to also tap the monetization as well um so I think like hybrid monetization is definitely the hot potatoes the key to success of these hybrid casual games so what's the key to the success of hybrid monetization what it actually means and why is it important why people think it is important yeah time to shine Remo I can take it off after you yeah okay let let me start here um yeah so hybrid is um it's pretty much taking the best out of hyper casual because it has lower CPI it has very approachable gameplay big total addable Market but in the end it unfolds

into something like casual to midcore progression which on the other hand gives you the LTV to support big spend big numbers big economies but first we need to have those economies of course the good uh good point about this thing is that of course hybrid casual and for instance our internal definition of hybrid casual because there's none of it in the market and usually people kind of everything is hybrid casual these days we consider hybrid casual as a revenue profile so it's not defined by some kind of genre mechanic or whatever we consider it as a revenue profile where the game makes something around between 40 to 60% of the revenue by ads and something like 0 to 40% even can go to like 5050 but it's very hard to hit uh by IP Revenue so you combine those two and then you have hybrid monetization which means that the game needs now to have an economy to have like enough spend depth like spend dep is a big problem that people so don't kind of work enough with sometimes even when I work with Studios

I tell them like your game economy spend up which means like the amount of money people can spend your economy is like $100 like there you go and like is it enough probably no if you're expecting like I don't know $2 $30 cpis so you build an economy you have your progression and you slowly unfold the game and this kind of a slow unfold is is the key here because at that point comes a lot of tricks that let's say this guy employs which is ad monetization because you need to able to fully and efficiently utilize your funnel whereas let's say at some point you put in intertial you put in rewarded videos you put in banner ads and stuff like that even when before in the start of the phone there were none of this so it's it's like very delicate combination of these things there are few key players in the market that are really excelling at these all the big hyper casual Publishers are switching into this and openly proc bling that they're just moving into hybrid stuff like I

don't know Voodoo say games uh W control as the best month last month I guess it's growing like crazy exactly there are still Studios that Proclaim that they do everything they still consider hyper casual to be way to go like aour for instance all the like like we talk like a lot of games from Vietnam are still like exceeding at like ad driven only games with like very very low IP monetization but to have a game that you want to keep for longer times and times I mean like 3 four years life cycles you really need to have that IP economy spent in the game so we've analyzed close to 150 or 200 Hybrid casual games and I think the most important thing to remember and the thing that's the tip of the spear is user acquisition teams that have good user acquisition that trickles down to how you do segmentation to how you get users everything is about user acquisition It's Quickly becoming the most important thing to get rights for these things always the most important thing it's always I mean I hate to admit

it but it really is like without that you can't have ad monetization without that you can't have yeah cheap cpis to get users yeah he talked about the hybrid monetization but it's really important to have the hyper casual looks of the game to be able to get the lowest cpis possible for that's important part of the hybrid casual like borrowing that marketability from hyper casual and then getting the spend depth from the casual or M games like that's the The best scenario yeah this this combination is actually very very hard because a lot of times people brush it mhm and they don't get that you need to have this kind of delicate unfolding that when you first start up the game it needs to literally feel like hyper casual so one button control easy to do no mechanics no nothing like everything in the UI is just just clean hidden and then it slowly unfolds and like one by one the mechanics get to like just you know go and play Survivor iio Archer you'll see

it or even even mob control and all these other games they slowly kind of increase the feature set the attention budget and then like slowly take you in because it's all about just having as big total addressable Market as possible which lowers the CPI and then in the end you kind of train the players to play a game that in the at the beginning they wouldn't even say that they will be playing a lot of great Insight so maybe I um I should recap just a bit so yeah you mentioned that unfolding the games slowly and delicately and placing these monetization opportunities along this unfolding structure is the key to success in monetization it seems like you're telling us that uh the monetization is tightly should be tightly integrated with the gameplay itself and the F you Al fex you also mentioned that it all comes down from the UA eventually in mat usall and the UA is definitely influencing how monetization should be done and you actually interesting match about this keyword segmentation can you elaborate

more on this topic yeah um the idea of segmentation is that you have different experiences for different types of players uh in ad monetization that usually means that players who are more likely to spend on iip should see less ads what that used to look like before was you segmented it based on geographies but now we're seeing more and more examples of more sophisticated Studios actually segmenting and changing the game play experience for players based on what user acquisition campaign brought players so what that looks like is that if we look at a game like hexa sort if a i driven campaign brings a user to that game which monetizes 30% or no 70% with the iips basically they don't see any intials banners for the first three days right but then if a user is being brought in from a adro campaign they see it after the first time user experience they start seeing banners and IAL so they monetizing them quicker yeah well I

think that's where we should kick in as an attribution solution and they really provide is you know source of attribution to uh the Publishers in a timely manner in real time so that you can segment based on that and monetize accordingly yeah yeah based on the campaign type that's the the key segmentation it's very important like remember and this is also being translated around not only hybrid casual but the whole industry like Felix if you can tell like how did you discover how Candy Crush has ADD yeah so uh we did a deep dive on Match 3es basically to find that they had ads I had to look at game players from Indonesia and basically they have a different ad experience and yeah they see ads sooner so yeah I had to find players who were bad in Indonesia on YouTube on YouTube on YouTube yeah on YouTube that's really a great team so segment the users based on geography attribut and result and especially the campaign that they're coming from it's awesome yeah well

thanks for sharing this great tip so um are there any like other monetization related best practices or advice that you want to give out to the audience after um you should be able to spend you should be able to spend yeah like have a robust economy like definitely that's like my number one tip in a way that doesn't matter what the game is just have robust economy which means you can have enough current it's not about like having many currencies just like having enough s and like content that people can go through you can always simulate this and and play around just in your head an Excel sheet and just compare it yourself that's there and then um the other thing is back to segmentation please have offer segmentation like don't don't really you know throw away all your monetization into the drain by let's say giving high value offer to like low Spenders which will be actually they will be repelled by it and like don't want to buy it and like I remember remember this like one one occasion where I remember R Shadow

Legends was running this like very big offer and they run globally which is the worst that you can do unfortunately where like to the whole player base and all the like low Spenders were just like complaining all over the place and the community was like very very in big uproar whereas if you would just segment this and Only The Big Spenders would see the offer and the low Spenders would see their own kind of custom t offer they would prevent it at all and nobody would be talking about anything that's great that's really great summary there thanks for all these like components like U you know robust gameplay and segmented offer and also great UA and spending as well [Music] yeah sounds good uh so we want to also tap into creatives um you know playables we all know that it's widely considered one of the most effective at foras for hyper and hybd Casual games however we also understand that uh you know playables are not easy to develop as htl 5 based and a lot of Developers developers hate being involved in creating these creatives so how can we

really do well with dis playables I mean it's actually not that hard to to build a play it takes a little bit longer but as soon as you have again template then uh it's it's easier also I build a playable tool which transforms videos to playables it's all it's not like HTML 5 hardcoded about but makes life way easier because you need playables it's playable maker.com it's a you need playables for all the SDK networks if you run Facebook and Google it doesn't matter but appin you absolutely need it for all the like mintegral molo as well it's critical so you need these playables to use it as a playable end card because that drives up the conversion and then you get more more players obviously and it sces I mean it open UPS different inventory M so yeah it's just I know it's it's

painful to build but you need one programmer basically you need one programmer that's you okay it's not that not that big of an issue right well I think it seems like if someone needs to build some cre U you know playable creators they can talk with you and then yeah OB obviously obvious obviously yes but honestly yeah like you already you already building games right so you just take the the first part of the game let's say it's part of tutorial and start there it's it's it should that's that's pretty easy I mean everything is easy because I'm a UA manager so I don't Co I don't program those so I mean sounds easy on paper but yeah like it's just take these first bits of the game and then just translate it to playable you didn't one really one person I see so another thing to ask you is um T is uh you've highlighted in some of your episodes and in your newsletter that uh Tik Tok created challenges and AI generated user you know generated

contents UCC are game changers nowadays in terms of their effectiveness well could you share some of these examples and insights into how gaming companies can leverage these new opportunities so for Tik Tok um the Tik Tok creative ChalleNGe Program I think like that's the the only way how to use creatives on Tik Tok especially because uh you just create a brief just share it with Tik Tok creators and then you are getting basically creatives for free I mean you just need to spend on Tik Tok you can't use them outside of Tik Tok but you can use AI to rebuild them because the basically you're giving the brief you need to be a little bit more specific uh you need to say things like just show your face on the on on in the video talk with your voice don't use AI voice and subtitles and all of these and then you will get pretty quality out outputs from the creators and that definitely scales on Tik Tok outside of Tik Tok you need

to actually use the the AI people just to recreate the the best performing Tik Tok creative Challenge videos and you're the Tik Tok creators are using your assets so you just kind of I mean it sounds pretty bad but you just replace the person the real person with AI there you go but AI I mean the AI ugc stuff that I use and I using it for almost two years it evolved so much I'm going to show it in the during the event later today it evolves so much and you can't even tell it's an AI person you you can't even tell it's like it's not only now just the head talking head it's actually people in Motion in different situations and it's performing even better than real people that's our favorite game by the way on the podcast when mat is showing the U I always guess like if this person is real or not is real is he real or not like yeah you you

can't tell and the thing is like it's so easy to make nowadays uh I use different tools uh for example I use pool day Ai and you actually just export one video with 10 different AI people in like five minutes and and this this year the whole kind of creative Trends and play is going to be about the the the velocity of creatives basically like how many creatives you can actually produce because that's how the algorithms work these days especially on Facebook and Tik Tok you need to just refresh the creatives often like every two or three days and if you don't use AI tools it's it's impossible you can't make so many creatives you would need to have like hundreds of people in your creative team to be able to kind of keep up the pace which Chinese companies I mean yeah of course like if you're yeah if you're Century gam you have 100 people fores white out survival it's a different thing but most

companies don't have hundreds of people in the creative team so that's why you need to leverage tools and like these days I can make creatives I can make creatives and I'm the U manager and like that's the key so yeah hope I answer the question I mean it's such a great Insight that these AI tools are really innovating the way that you generate these creatives the velocity has been much faster nowadays yeah and you know this is exactly the same as what you've been mentioning in in the pockets like the the creative quantity will win over quality and that the marketing is becoming like the volume play so what do you mean by this and how can companies strike the right balance between quantity and quality and really utilize these um Solutions well so it's uh the The Sweet Spot is you have your own creative team building the let's say quality creatives I mean

doesn't really sound right but okay but still like yeah they build there the concepts different unique Concepts and then on the side you play around with the AI tools and that's kind of balancing the the volume play so you kind of add your own creatives from the team just refresh them into like add them to the campaigns and then you play around with AI tools cling AI Sor is doing oh Sor is not that great an example but cling AI is good Runway ml is good and you just need an static image and then suddenly in few attempts you have 10c video that's great and you can you can that you can run that as an UA creative and these days yeah that's what that's what matters and that's what performs got it um I think the important fact here that like your team building the creatives usually means your team iterating on the creatives of your competition mhm I mean kind of yes but kind of

yes yeah because it's again like it's coming back to what we said before the chi Chinese companies they're so far ahead and everybody's just getting let's heavily inspired by the other games I I think there's a big thing in the app space right there is no app police there are no laws there's no black and white there's no yeah there's no app there's no app police like yeah you can copy your competitors's creatives I've seen examples where they just copy pasted it and then just stuck on their own Watermark and then ran UA well obviously Inspirations and benchmarking yeah yeah exactly because i' I started this uh creative investigation column on on Friday on LinkedIn where I just go exactly and try like deep in this and then try to to pick different games and like who is actually getting inspired by who and it's all like it's the same games all

over again it's you know what starts with Evon then it comes to Royal match in two weeks and then after another two or three weeks it comes back it comes to fish them like it's it's ex like the inspiration is just from Forex well okay so from hyper casual or idle to Forex from Forex to actual match free and then to other CH like this is how it works now you don't want to reinvent the wheel if you see the creatives Performing because you see them all over the place so it has to be performing you just adapt it and that's it well seems like the part of velocity is definitely coming from getting aspired by others and especially your competitors yeah competitors yeah and then then yeah the the as well yes and the part of equation which is really important is like the the AI kind of evolution because I've been playing with AI for years mid Journey being really good asset for for Facebook in terms of the static images but now that mid Journey static image is

actually becoming a video and that's a game Cher that's basically Game Changer so two Dimension becoming like threedimensional videos and all these like creatives like simplistic creatives evolving into the better ones Power by AI tools that's just amazing yeah yeah because now dark war which is a Forex game uses all the AI driven creatives and it's static images becoming a video and it's sequence of let's say 10 of these videos with the story driven narrative and then AI voiceover you can build this in in an hour seriously like that's great yeah so mid journey and some of the tools that you mentioned like cing Ai and Runway Ai and all of these tools getting mixed into one like set of combination it really works well for now it's great so like I want to actually tap into one interesting topic that we already talked about UA influence the other components of growth and you said that everything just trickled downs from UA and it seems like

UA marketers role is changing as well rapidly like they used to do media execution and optimization mostly that but now they're going beyond their role and then now they're really starting to influence demonetization the game playay and everything about the soft lunch and all that so do you think this consolidation is happening in the industry if so why is it happening and why do you think it's necessary yeah because H the UA I mean if we are hearing the UA is is dead for 10 years basically performance performance yeah it's kind of the thing is like it's kind of evolving and you need to wear multiple hats obviously and sit on multiple chairs and this is the part of the the reason so you need to be able to to run the marketability test be able to to be a part of the product team for soft launching and like kind of exp play different uh kpis and and cpis and the the numbers to the team so they can

change the onboarding for example also the same thing with creatives and also the comes back to the AI point because now the UA manager kind of needs to be a motion designer not the real motion designer but still all these things like it's it was a critical part of the UA for years it's just UA managers are lazy no I mean yes and I'm pretty sure I'm going to piss off a lot of people but here we are usually there targets and kpis you managers need to hit it's usually one number which is day seven r or day 30 r or whatever R it is they hit the goal and they don't care what happens afterwards and it's like yeah well I hit the goal so I don't need to do anything else but now when the market is really competitive and and hard and the UA is really important and coming not only the media buying but also all all the rest

like that's the differentiation between the good manager and good UA manager and regular manager let's say regular regular let's call it regular regular yeah it's okay so maybe that's the reason why you three are actually you three form a team to really solve these things together and then wearing multiple hats is now becoming a necessity for all the Professionals of growth absolutely yes yeah yeah [Music] well I mean something that we observe in a market that is really interesting that uh really interesting is the agile marketability testing well I listened to one of your recent episodes where you discussed using mini games for testing rather than the full game uh could you elaborate more on just tactic and some of his advantages yeah it was it was actually you that brought the great point of uh fun PL and for fun using yeah for soft sonar we uh I mean it was back in the days like you just had a video you ran a

video and then that basically was your hyper casual game but it comes back to the point you run the CPI test and you need to see the CPI so you kind of need the the game on the store something that's installed and yeah exactly because the marketability test before is all like CTR tests but it really doesn't give you the real CPI there are some multipliers that if you ran like Voodoo or any these like big Publishers like they had the very big amount of data so you can kind of see what kind of what CPI you are going to get but you need to really have the the APK on the store be able to install the game so now we see companies from China again having different on boardings as you said like the mini games for the same game for the same Forex game and they're just tting in different on boardings just different mini games to see how the CPI for these

different mini games and on boardings kind of evolve that's that's that's pretty much because they have the end of the funnel already they know it will be a Forex game which they perfected mastered and everything but they only care about lowering the CPI and as M said just running basic CPI test is not enough so what they do they just you know take the first I don't know 60 70 minutes of a game cut it and like version a a b c d same game in the end and just run it oh that's really interesting yeah that's what we literally see on FAS portfolio for instance makes sense so CPI although is an important metric but because like you too much be obsessed with the CPI actually you could have missed the other components that you can care for yeah okay makes sense well I mean we're heading towards the end of this interview and then maybe amongst the last of the few questions I want to ask you mat that about this you know predictive LTV so recently we're we're hearing a lot from these gaming companies that the payback period has been much longer than before and that is

exactly the reason why they can't wait for another like 14 to 28 days to see the actual Ros rather they choose to just come up with their own pltv models and just do it uh like predicted early on to make faster decision so do you do you think that this pltv uh you know getting important is is is kind of a trendy thing and is it important or what are your recommendations on how you can build this great pltv mode and why is it hard yeah it's really important obviously uh it's again back to the day seven R point and goals you need to have the numbers on a daily basis and ideally for the cohorts like in the first three days if you are waiting s days to make a decision like that's already too late so the P TV comes really handy in these situations if you have the pltv on day one day two day three you can make decisions faster because people and companies are not well not now but different genres obviously um Target different payback

periods you from what I see and the PTV is really common is for the games that are optimizing for one year two years pay periods so it's really important but it's really hard to build most people most companies fail that also what most companies don't do is that they build a pltv model and that's it they don't refresh they don't look at the historical data it's like and then it's a mess I've been in the situation where I started working with one company and I found out like guys like the predictions and the reality does really checks out like what do you mean like yeah well look at this it should be 150% Ross but it's like 90 in reality oh wait a second they went back check the check the data and then had to restructure the company makes sense because yeah it's like it wasn't just um recalculated or it was really infl basically than so build and forget isn't something that you recommend you should

definitely Cate the model continuously with the actual history of course every 3 months just recalculate the model I mean build them forget and then be surprised oh yeah yeah and you you have already seen these companies just building one and just forgetting about it we have yeah we have the pltv and that's like come on surpris face okay well since like many of the audience today uh listening to this interview are coming from China China South Korea and Vietnam and some ape countries like I want to actually ask you just one special question that what what do you see as the biggest like pitfalls uh and mistakes these uh Apec based companies could make when they go Global what advice would you give to these uh companies uh when they want to go Global more effectively and without falling into this Pitfall yeah I think it comes back to the the creative approach because we I mean on different conferences like years ago is like oh you know if you go to Asia you need to have very different creative approach

and it cost same way like oh well it's the same just the other way around you need to go and have different creatives for let's say Western audience because what the works here doesn't really necessarily work in us or Europe and I've been working with with different companies in Asia and I also work with with L compl on the legend of slime and we had very different creatives and when we were discussing this with the team like yeah well those creates are really westernized and I like okay it was quite surprising for me but then it makes all the sense so like that's like that's the biggest thing you need to do just maybe actually work with someone from West I mean not necessarily me but but no like seriously yeah I need to stop with this uh but you definitely need someone uh that has the the experience for the for the different Fashion on Creative expertise basic I basically that not recommending going like to the global recommendation but

the Western recommendation I think this is the biggest friction there like AP companies going to the West Europe and us is that feature sets are just much more robust in Asia and I mean like three times more robust because people in Asia are just much more feature hungry they they are okay with like very heavy feature games with like lot of systems lot of progressions lot of stuff especially even from the beginning like lucky defense is like a great example that like if you give it at the us or Europe basically lost so and in Korea it's like super popular because people like it here and it's like very as I said localized adjusted to the audience so whatever you do when you're trying to move your game to the West make it more streamlined make it more approachable more easier and we see this all the time like for instance if we take let's say Rush Royale the games from my games which is just basically this kind of process done from random dice m exactly that just streamlined not like Korean art is taken out into like streamlined

westernized art much more approachable funnel much slower mechanics build up that's it that's great advice from both of you I mean embracing the Western nuances um in terms of your creative is such an important thing and also like you know apath based games tend to be feature heavy but still like you want to make it approachable and easier to play for the western game I think that was a great point so the most fun question how can we work with how can we find you where can we find you yeah I already said like 10 plugs but yeah I think you can you can join our slack channel for sure and find us on LinkedIn M lerich on on LinkedIn and I have my website or you can subscribe to the brutally honest newsletter as well yeah I think like really really good point is to join the slack Channel because it's kind of pretty big nowadays like more than 200 2,400 people now or something like that we have people all over the the world there it's completely open to everyone like not really making any kind of

differences between anything and people tend to even kind of get the questions themselves so not that we like we answer questions there of course but you can get a lot of answers from the people that having the same problem there and we also put a lot of our content even beforehand like people like to know what we're going to cover we just say that we're going to cover this game that game so on so forth It's like a very friendly like welcoming Community we can add our emails into the show notes as well sure it's great yeah so definitely you should sign up for the slack Channel with 2,400 industry professionals follow the channel and of course you can follow them respectively on the LinkedIn as well yes so thank you m um yakob and Felix for you know participating in this great great discussions I really hope that this is helpful for the audience who are listening to this uh interview and also uh this is parted by Aur dmmp uh you're your fellow friend when you want to measure things correctly so we're here with you .io so thank you everyone for joining this session so I want to close it right now thank by bye

bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] he [Music]