Lucky Defense Success: Will it conquer the West? A New Tower Defense hitting the charts

yeah it's going to be way easier than this so how do you how would you fix this REM how would you fix this uh you design the unit differently and you design the uh monsters differently because the problem here is that every map and there are just two maps has the same strategy there's no different strategy between the maps the things with let's say Rush Royale rash Royale does is that they add more units through the way through like these Arenas or what like Clash Royale [Music] this is a no [ __ ] gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition Triple Threat expertise welcome to the two and a half Gamers the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles

let's not forget this is a 4:00 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry intro this time who of you [ __ ] intro who you who you hello everyone hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode we're recording this a bit late because mate is actually mentally [ __ ] because he's been on a trip away so I'm doing the introductions I will do the UA part and we will try to communicate with mate with crayons yeah today we are doing a very special episode we are covering we are covering a very cool new game that's just out called lucky defense which we heard a lot about in China as the next new big thing

and which everybody already cloned there you're late exactly everyone oh yeah come on nobody knows about this game in in in West uh we knew about this game for a while so thank you very much for welcome my name is Mel I'm Felix robbert yeah we are it's really two and a half Gamers today cuz oh yeah absolutely yeah abut how your pass party was good good yeah I'm I'm alive speechless brainless but I'm alive that's fine GNA be gonna be better tomorrow so yakob please try to share the screen and let's hope this game is not on server maintenance like last by the way by the way for for for people asking like why why didn't we release this because we literally got [ __ ] by the ser maintenance last time we

literally set up the podcast did everything and then one minute in and the game went into server maintenance exactly in the hour we were supposed to record so yeah you could say we were pretty pretty lucky or unlucky don't worry actually we started recording and we have like two minute recording so I can I sh on our YouTube channel as the yeah because I'm [ __ ] today but you were [ __ ] [ __ ] back then so we are even my friend all right we're covering this we're covering this game because basically in the last 30 days it has about 380,000 active users and it has made already like a $6.3 million in the last 30 days in I Revenue yeah it's currently making something like 300K IP a day with I guess yeah with lots of U ads also on

top which are felix can tell us what's the exact nonexact number uh some framing before we continue this road so as usual this is a game by 1100 uh% and our listeners and those who know and guess uh these are the guys that did random dice um random dice was a game that scaled and was popular in March 2020 where it hit something like 9 million a month uh it PE there uh and then it went down the important part is that uh there was this other company called my games which did crash Royale which was basically the versed version of random dice so yes and uh here we are back again uh four years later where there's another tower defense game from this company which also peaked yet at something like 8 million a month so we'll see if the story will repeat

uh the other interesting part of their portfolio of course is of course superent as we covered uh the studio before with pizza ready and all the other hyper casual wonders so that's like these guys also have their fingers in this and uh yeah I don't think so any other kind of major games on their portfolio 11 100% um so do you think our friends in Cypress right now are just looking at this and being like nice game yes we were we were be a shame if someone westernized it yes exactly uh the other interesting thing is that Tower Defense genre itself is a little bit peculiar so let me just kind of I I I couldn't say that word today yeah so you'll see so if you go by download of course if you go by download wise um last 30 days the top games are of course Plants versus Zombies

which is everyone darling dead no it's not there's PL versus zombies and pl versus Zombies too yeah it's okay no uh that's down of course but IP wise uh it's a completely different picture because we have Ark knights from Yar being the main main game in the in in in the pack which million mon last year then we have bang Bank Survivor which makes 13 million on the revenue of sensor our chart which we see but we already know that it makes [ __ ] ton of more in China as we were told and then in the third place we already have lucky defense surp can you show me the non dead Plants versus Zombies please what do you mean in this graph uh they're not here because they're dead you didn't get the dead joke man you just too slow um so the important thing and this is like one of the other important things here if we go country

wise this game makes 80% of the money in South Korea and this is really important to say this is not your Western whatever success waiting to happen second place taian us Revenue 3% is that where the ad placements are so bad look at the the downloads you US versus versus South Korea yeah 2 million against uh 200k basically more than 2 million yeah yeah yeah if we go here also uh just to cross compare with the random dice uh random dimes already did something like 130 mil IP wise let's say 20 mil uh downloads wise sof launch in something like September 2019 yeah but look at us yeah this is a little bit of a different picture where us is responsible for something like 177% of overall revenue and 177% or like 18% overall revenue and downloads but still

there's the big let's say Asian countries in the top with South Korea doing 45% then there Japan taian Hong Kong and only Germany somewhere here so still look at look at the the ratio downloads South Korea versus us that's why there's so much more revenues yeah yeah because if we look at let's say let's look at some of these games uh let's say either Watcher of Realms or rash Royale yeah get Rush Royale compare that to rush Royal like yeah yeah I think that's that's like a pretty good comparison to look at so if we look at Watcher of Realms which is pretty much Tower Defense with r Shadow Legends meta and also the production quality this game is like very very high production quality uh countries wise This Is Us mainly yeah 45% of revenues us and even if we zoom into this chart and take off all countries filter into US filter you can see that it will be at the top of the

list ah not counting Kingdom guard because Kingdom guard is for yeah so it's there uh with Ark Knights right beside it and then Rush Royale if we go to rush Royale itself which should be here uh regarding the counter split [Music] um there we go it's nearly 200 million already from it's Inception 2020 and again us is first with 30% of the revenue is quite quite High yeah you see the mix there it's a western mix game pretty much because there's us and there's Germany 10% France okay there's South Korea but there's still UK Canada Russia Brazil Netherland switzland I can't even see Taiwan anywhere here so that speaks a lot so this is the versed version basically um not that big Delta in terms of I APS then I thought it' be bigger what do you mean oh between random Dice and

R where's the where's the random dice game 190 versus what yeah and they had two years on top on the market time so Rush Royal had a lot more ad Revenue though I think yeah 50/50 now they said yeah let me uh bring it up I have the 30 or 40% not 50/50 let me go back in my notes they didn't confirm or deny so that usually means I'm right right yeah no no they said you're pretty close yeah it was 36% okay so what this means not bad not bad it's pretty much like if we if you go by Revenue lucky defense is pretty much the third third kind of in it category by Revenue yeah we still know ads but last 30 days this this last 30 days yeah yeah so it's pretty pretty good um yeah so that's there shall we go through the game oh

no server maintenance no server maintenance amazing yeah uh so the game is very very special I was researching some stuff special episode no no no man this is like Beyond special this is beyond special because some of the system in this game those are like like I don't know it's like a Korean meme literally um so there's this very very interesting setup this games guys uh has because normally and let me switch to let me switch to normal difficulty and you'll see to the grasslands there we go which I already finished so they kept the some parts I guess a lot of learnings from random dice U that's why it's called lucky defense because luck factor is still super super strong I guess even more strong than than usual uh the game scan very hard to read what's actually happening so let's go one by one because I think a lot of people don't understand

you saying that makes me feel a lot better because I didn't really know what was going on so the first thing is nobody summons anything by 90 mobs and you literally get yelled at if you do that that that's that's how how crazy this game is for the 200 coins right yeah because there's this mission that like have 200 coins whatever uh if you hit 90 mobs on the field and only then you'll see my opponent my my teammate just right there he's got yeah because that everybody plays it like this and it's so like in my opinion this is not a good design because you're literally intending like to be this the optimal game play to not play the game so I'll get to it anyway uh you summon uh these let's say units on on your part of the field on the other hand there's the opponent's part of the field uh there's no kind of exit or whatever the mobs where they hit you and damage you they change the wing condition this is why one of the big Innovations of the game the wind loose

condition is that you cannot pass this meter on top which uh measures how many mops there are actually on the battlefield and you both can pretty much kill them as they go through this kind of uh common rout in the middle and uh then you just summon more stuff and kind of do like try to much as as much damage as possible they come in waves each wave can of produces more monsters again they stay on the field if you are too slow to kill them you lose it's very very simple you can summon these like additional Golem mobs from time to time and uh yeah I'll get to it because like you there's so many buttons you need to click in this game it's like not even funny um so you continue you see these mops you see these mobs no you don't upgrade these guys ever you don't ever upgrade the band because Bandits is the only useful common unit there's no other unit because they have a chance to get 10 Gold by attacking that's it you leave them forever

um the other mechanic that they have here is that when you merge these units they randomly merge in higher Rarity so they go from common to to like like we are here to rare from rare to Epic and then these epic guys they go to Legendary and once you have legendary you start to complete these recipes for Mythic units this is like one of the core mechanics of the game I'll get to it later but first let's finish this kind of whole set so you get coins by killing the enemies then you can summon more people here on the board and like combine them it's all random like I don't know which which merge will pretty much lead this it will just be again random Sandman guy uh I can gamble and get these special tokens from bosses and Elites and do this kind of a gambling mechanic the only thing that you need to do is the middle one you never do the left one or right one just based on the players min max preference because it's going to be very hard so you always have a 20% chance to sum on that how do you figure this out I read the

Guide online ah I just played for fun like like an idiot like got got one by a friend actually but like this is so like without the guide you just don't understand anything I'm sorry this game is just so complex I'll get to it so you have these G gambling SL which you can again you see like I just got a like a guy here let's do that you can also upgrade specific that's why I told you like upgrade the [ __ ] no you don't do that you don't do that you do the very specific thing like I literally have like a guide that tells you like if this happens by wave six you only upgrade this if this weens by really I'm not joking and but guys in hard mode you don't do [ __ ] if you don't follow that dude do do your guide say when you should watch ads or not uh when you when you want to have fun just play for fun and play for fun much you don't play this for fun yeah you play you you play game for ads so come on um so the the main goal here is to have

literally three or four of these specific like if you don't get a bad guy by wave 30 you basically lose I'll get to what the bad guy does but let me try to kind of make this a little bit more orderly there's by the way very important how these kind of ranges of these units are because you see like this is like a big range one this is pretty much a m one need to put it here um there's lot lots of stuff let me let me canum on more units here oh so many fails yeah but it's good because like in the end there's even like PT mechanic on these fails and stuff like that so yeah one second nearly died there this a shitty one okay let's try almost not this guy not this guy it's not a good one whatever so we summon a Mythic Unit C one but it's a [ __ ] one it's like we're going to lose anyway because we did did get like a bad

bad like because I didn't have lack literally like you just need the tiger Master for the for the bad guy because if you don't have a bad guy I'll show you what what happens afterwards um there's literally guide what you need to summon like the only thing that really matters and this is like one of the big problems of these games that these M this Mr Penny backs right there yeah there's Mr pennybags Monopoly man literally called like that I know um there's there's there's uh literally some units that are good and then there's other units like ninja here or useless blob they're literally useless completely useless like call the Ninja you think be decoy decoy Maness no there's a noob trap it's not a decoy it's a noob trap it's literally that's why I spawned it yeah it's a completely useless um the other thing is that there's artifacts that are affecting the game play and for instance I have an artifact because the other problem is that there's only two artifact that

matter which is a safe safe and money gun because you see my guys here why they have this exorbitant amount of damage added to him because I have a artifact that literally says every wave I get 5% interest on my current gold and then the other artifact says I have increased damage based on my current gold amount that's which literally means that the main tactic for this game is to be lucky summon the units and then just wait until the gold accumulates so high that you have so much damage that nothing can beat it and that's basically it let's get uh back to it there was like yeah we lost that one um because if if I would really go to the Hard Mode I'll show you like just like 10 times more harder um yeah here's the here's the artifact section those are basically all like a second power progression layer those are all like a just stat holding pretty much like everything's like increase this increase

that increase whatever percentage and as I said there's these two called save box increase the health coins by 5% plus 5% by upgrade each wave and then there's uh the money gun and that's it and you win the game if you don't have these you don't even have a chance I'm I'm sorry guys but the balancing in this game is horrible the other interesting thing is that all these units that you have here which are done by Shard gacha by the way like none of these matters at all only the Bandit guy matters because he gives you more gold if he kind of sticks there that's it then from these rare units only the shock troop guy matters because he gives you slow and then from the rare units only the another slow Electro robot guy matters and I think the three guy also gives reduces enemy movement speed that's it you don't care about the legendary literally and then there's Mythic ones so literally in the guide there's upgrade L aot to six upgrade Team Ag 12 upgrade Frog Prince to 12 and

have Batman guy at one that's it and you don't care about anything else because you don't even have resources to upgrade anything else uh by the way this this unit this is like the definition of luck so there's this guy called Frog Prince which is kind of shitty by itself I hope you kiss him all the time no no no it has this thing called curse lift has a 25% chance to ascend into Divine being becomes elim eliminated upon fail which means you have a 7 5% chance to just click and he disappears that's why it's called lucky defense yeah literally and if you level level him up to level 12 this chance increases the 35% of course that's great is this gambling Remo uh this is not gambling it's just like I'll show you how because like some of the mechanics are really interesting for instance the Batman guy you can enhance his stuff and I I'll show you what it does but like it's so kind of depend depend on you understanding these mechanics from some

external source that is make it completely unplayable to either Western people or people that are not uh able to put the effort to read like three or four A4 Pages how to play this game like if if like where did you get Feelings by the way like which wave did you get I can't remember but I did not get to Batman yeah okay did did you understand what you were doing or you were supposed to like honestly that's which you need to upgrade and like that no no I I I randomly realized that not upgrading units and just summoning more was better by random yeah like and it took literally like two or three days gameplay and I'm like this is [ __ ] dumb and I was texting you guys and being like does anyone get what's going on yeah so so Random dice was kind of hard but it was I would say manageable this game is like 10 times more harder to compreh it must work right I mean it's doing well I guess it works in Asia because fanatical about it like of

course but it takes a lot of strategy it takes a lot of strategy yeah yeah yeah it takes a lot of strategy but it's definitely like the worst approachability level we have seen on the podcast I think like it's it's it's and the problem is that you would think that some of these strategies are like there's this strategy the other no there's one strategy if you don't follow it you're failed that's it that's how it is uh the other interesting thing that they did to their gacha by the way and this is this is like I I've never seen this before so all of these units are done through Shard gacha you know you get this guy drop from the oh by the way the G this [ __ ] the most sadistic gacha I ever saw wait what yes you you didn't roll the gacha no okay see we'll get to it so they have Shard gacha here which means that these guys if you get a Shard of this guy you get more shards you upgrade him blah blah blah very easy easy easy but the last Rarity level of units these m units they have shared com

shards they don't have unit specific sh they these like flames and for mytic yeah and for all miic units so if I'm whatever want to upgrade my kit IM Mage guy he shares the shards with all the other guys and then the kicker is they are giving the units through hard currency so if you want to unlock them you can just pay hard currency and if you go to the shop you can directly pay for their sh cards because they're all Universal through hard currency so they literally broke all of the main GAA rules of like not direct purchase because it's all direct purchase so which which Mythic creatures did you buy ma well I have let me check which one I I think I have two but I don't I'm not sure if I bought them obviously the Ninja guy and then one one more Ninja guy is given through tutorial

I think yeah and then blob guy yeah no no no I don't have the blob doesn't matter no okay let's get to GAA because this is this is like this amazing this is a masterpiece of sadistic emotions is great no yeah so so so with gachas the current Trend I Batman what are you talking about that's great man the gachas the trend in the west is to alleviate the randomness to be able to feel that you control the randomness somehow to make it less random it's like we give you wish list so you can increase the chance for the unit that you want or we give you like three gachas so if you want weapons roll this roll that blah blah blah so people are given more agency and they feel that it's not a this thing is like on steroid random so what happens is that you can recruit five units and you press the button it consumes 30 Scrolls and then like 10 units going into their castle and then suddenly

something is [ __ ] them up and there you go and out of those 10 units just two passed in and all the others were [ __ ] up and that's how it goes was like one or two times when I got five and then I see I see the percentages so what happens is that it can go also the other way around here's our favorite guy which will just like baseball bat the unit to again there we go uh let's try again uh maybe finally we'll get somewhere oh there's a Mythic unit no we didn't get ah so close so close imagine I would do this with like 10 times more resources instead of 30 I would use 300 and would just multiply the pain it stingy yeah let's try again uh our baseball bed guy again okay finally make

it go six seven okay so what happens if five units passed in you now have another try where six units needs to pass in but again more will come uh on the road so now now you're okay so it goes to five six seven eight and eight is the last one it can go there the important part is and this is the most sadistic one every [ __ ] single meeting unit gets B off because and this is the crack of the problem if you roll uh somewhere here where is it it's probability information yeah see it's like grayscaled it's not even eye button it's like whatever yeah so these on the top are appearance rate it means what is the chance of you seeing this unit so 30% common rare 18 12 legendary Mythic that's okay like 1.8 Mythic that should be that horrible no yeah but from that 1% you have rate

acquisition rate which means probability of the Guardians being successfully recreated which means doesn't being UFO smashed bed or whatever so everything's pretty much 50% except Mythic which is five which means that every [ __ ] single Mythic Guardian that you will be see jumping down the road nicely going to your Castle will'll get fired away every single one of them literally whoa literally guys this is the most sadistic gacha I have ever seen ever like we should do a prize at the end of the year okay you can put it on the list yeah I mean we we got a prize anyway right for the best podcast so thank you very much guys for for all the nice Bo surprising we also got the best Photoshop skills award at the same time absolutely category same category anyway so yeah so

what they did is pretty much they took Randomness and they Amplified by 10 it's like as random as it can get literally are people not pissed off about that I think they're completely pissed offes um I think in Asia the mentality is a little bit different regarding approach to freet to-play games so I think people find this intriguing instead of uh annoying or like outputting because in the West my guess that would happen for this um yeah just going and finishing the features said here so there's your standard shop with some standard offers uh the typical carusel where these things can refresh some are for free then ads come in then like the artifact mine one more artifact per day per ad some free gold again which we're gonna talk about that later yeah yeah I'll leave it uh then as I said like this uncomprehensible thing of buying the

Mythic shards which are common for every Mythic unit whatever uh then we have The Shard tier of these units as we talked there they unlock abilities as they progress through these levels and they get exponentially higher and higher it's like typical Shard gacha except the miic one and then we have uh the viip shop uh then we have special offer section which are just offers in the section first purchase kind of a extra mitig unic mtig unit some more offers then you have the typical Quest system like your usual like daily engagement kind of measurement then our sadistic GAA which we talk about then we have the pass which you can by the way speed up by ads by giving kind more more points into pass as this this is an interesting one daily for stop stealing my stuff yeah just said there daily Fortune okay let's leave this for Felix uh the other important part so difficulty this thing just have two modes for now the normal mode and hard

mode normal mode is like a mode for everyone with luck as you've seen before and then there's the hard mode which adds a lot of multipliers on let's say like L it's like very similar to Diablo where you start just with like minus resist basically so you start with minus 50% slow St uh you get more rewards because you can get artifact keys out of it and there's dungeon which is by the way very important because yeah we can we can hope it there course oh yeah please do uh so yeah let's move to Heart first hello there's by the way they already te the third difficulty uh here in the notice section in the last update here but yeah we'll see about that one because even this part of the game still like update coming soon I don't know what's what's there and yeah by the way there's the artifact section which is just like passive and Shard gcha there and as I said the save box and the money gun is the main thing that you want to have otherwise all the other things that can optional so let's get into hard mode

where I go wave 40 and dungeon you haven't seen the dungeon okay so dungeon is like a very interesting mechanic that these guys added which adds another win fail State condition on the match so matches take if you finish by Wave 80 it can take a lot of time but there's a literally fixed timer with dungeon that you need to beat in 15 minutes in the meantime and what it does it pretty much creates another field where I can move you units between my board and into the dungeon and I need to cover both of them at once so me and my partner we also not only need to keep the units from passing Six or whatever on the map we also need to kill the dungeon bosses and by the way they're they're five of them not just one so how you play this you wait you wait more I I just like I don't even want to wait because lots of games just end up because we didn't summon like enough and and fast enough because people are just GNA you know stuff happens okay we need to do this

now let me give one more example okay failed let's merge this one no Bandits this is not good okay one guy has already epic one what just happened man yeah so so my my partner already got the Epic unit by by random chance which is great because he will help us a lot that means I don't have any other epic units I need to upgrade at least my common and rare unit do that by before wave six if you don't have any epic units like I just did otherwise you just won't survive that's that's basically how the game start I'm just literally saying what's happening so you're playing on left and then reading the guide on the right screen no no no I'm like I'm done this like thousand times um the other problem is that we don't have any Bandits and we should have some Bandits by this point that we should have put into the dungeon by the way you can do this and like you know follow the mobs on the map and just like try to help them but yeah not going to happen

now I still don't really understand what's happening we're trying to cut down the mobs otherwise you're going to be dead I get that part yeah um it's it it's really all all depends on like how lucky you are like what what do you get summoned like for instance just let's roll these two we that's great okay our guy go the turtle it's not really okay I don't know if we if we even going to uh get okay okay okay you can see his damage against mine damage by the way it's going to be shockingly higher yeah he's I did like 1 million he fck mil that's there there let's summon the Golem in the meantime maybe we'll get a little bit more lucky and get some epic un actually on the board luck is not your second name Mr yob this thing is like literally said this this is the problem this is the problem with this game that negative emotions are just much more potent than positive which are the only ones that will remain

in the end uh well you suck at this game K first lucky unit I'm not going to summon this guy it's not sucking it's just lucky bro unlucky very unlucky unlucky defense I have recorded a video of one of the games I did to show you what the full form look like because I knew that I wouldn't be de lucky on stream of course didn't didn't you hear what nobody cares no no no I'm I'm really curious to see how lucky you are yeah so this is I think I got like to to V 37 or something this is this is how you put the guy into the dungeon I guess this guy he's okay he's trying to do it with like normal normal mobs but like we're going to die we don't any one of us needs to have a Batman or uh Batman yeah Batman just like completely op and and this is the big problem within this

game that the balancing is so so like oneid that that either you have something like Lally binary like if you have these things you're okay if you don't have these things you're completely fine there's no middle ground like literally I'll show you why see he has a Batman there we go there we go see his damage so he'll be okay um we'll see uh the problem is that he would he he will need to P put his Batman into the dungeon to actually kill these bosses because these guys are literally just tickling him otherwise in 8 minutes we're dead anyway because of the dungeon and I don't have really good units on the field like mines are completely [ __ ] okay now at least have the bandits let me put them into the dungeon um what if you actually summon the two mythics you have there H because those are completely [ __ ] like no use of them they're not now PR okay again this sh aren't there better than they're nothing uh they're good for like one or

two ways than they're completely useless later so you wouldn't like you either rather lose faster and then like go into next game and you know doesn't matter he has a pretty good composition he has a plus n batman Kitty Mage he's missing Lance a lot there uh I don't know what's his level of kitty Mage but I guess could be good there's a super character actually like refreshes manone of these other characters um then we try right yeah yeah there you go you actually like you need to click a lot of buttons like yeah you you can't read or understand what's happening on the FI like you just need to do it by by by heart like it's like yeah I can't even summ doesn't matter anyway can't even summon [ __ ] enough game playay come on let's talk about no it's be actually you know it's a good

game I think f it is it is the the thing is that if you know what to do it's actually pretty good game but until you get to the point of you know what to do it takes a [ __ ] long time of reading guys on the internet how long did it take you to get good at this three days still didn't get there no it's like at some point it's pretty much like a resource question because just his guys are higher level probably than me like if they level 14 no no I mean uh yeah yeah that that also means that uh that let's say he has abilities that I don't have like the let's say his frog prings could be 35% chance instead of M 25 and so so forth so that could be there uh by the way at this point I shouldn't be even summoning because I should be saving uh gold for the damage which I don't have but I'm just like my units are completely useless so I'm trying very hard to kind of summon like another one of these storm elements shits yeah so if I don't get the tiger

by wave 30 it's yeah that's a problem so see let's give you the the damage comparison so I did 220 million and and the guy I'm with did 33 billion that's the difference between our damage just for you you to understand like the difference so yeah he's carrying you quite a lot man yeah I'm just literally just I could be just sitting here and like he will kill everything doesn't really matter I don't have if I would get the Batman actually I could save us because I I could put my Batman into the dungeon but I don't have a Batman every time you said Batman it's just Batman from Gotham City I'll I I'll show you maybe we could try let's try let's try at least frog Mage W there we go 25% chance King Dion this is the higher being um of the thing but it's still like he has what like 30k damage do you see his Batman it's

3,245 300 plus 30k on top of the base damage that's his damage and still increasing yeah still increasing of course because he's upgrading the legendary units here which I can also do but doesn't really make sense like the guys what like 60k damage that's yeah laughable is there a way to fix this or like yeah there's way to fix this but not in this game anymore in a way like in in the western western uh followup or yeah it's going to be way easier than this so how do you how would you fix this Remo how would you fix this uh you design the units differently and you design the uh monsters differently because the problem here is that every map and there are just two maps has the same strategy there's no different strategy between the maps the things with let's say Rush Royale what rush Royale does is that they add more units through the way through the like these Arenas or what like CL Royale and that changes your deck composition

because suddenly some units are better for this for that blah blah blah and like you do these things and also it's TVP uh this is PVE which means it's Cooperative but there's only one best strategy to tackle these units because they're not like like this units require fire guide this units require whatever water guide it's like none of these incentive systems are in the game it's just like you follow this you need to have these artifact these compositions and there's literally a guide what you what should happen after each wave and what should you click like literally and if you don't do that you don't have a chance at Hard Mode maybe you could do like normal mode pretty okayish but hard mode no like I I don't know if he's GNA get killed by this guy because he needs to move his guys see how he's moving the Batman around the field yeah and there we're going to be [ __ ] because if this guy doesn't go back to his Batman here in 12 seconds I guess we're going to kill it mine are L tickling him like my home composition

yeah game over we actually lost because my guys were slowing him so his Batman couldn't reach him Lally that's what happened yeah uh so to see or let's show you how it actually works in practice this this kind of a whole strategy this is how it actually looks so this is a game that I played before where let's a guy over me has three Batmans I have two Batmans and if you see the damage of guys it's actually 20K base or let's say 18K base 5,6 43,800 that's from one Batman and this is the problem that you either have this unit or you don't no [ __ ] Sherlock yeah also getting the minigun in Survivor iio just makes things a lot easier yeah and the other thing is this like completely op artifact that you have here the save box and the money gun which is just at some

point it gives you so much advantage that like any other strategy is pretty much useless like just upgrade these two things that's there um yeah I don't know if I forgot anything here yeah let's talk ads yeah let's talk ads maybe I 40 minute 40 Minute Podcast and mty has been at a speci the party and now we're getting to ads yeah all right I'll take it stain [ __ ] hell yeah so let's talk about ads quickly right because the main issue is that this type of game play it's not really set up that you're going to get a lot of Impressions right or the Imp out is going to be pretty much handicapped on what you can get essentially because how the game play set up but they're also kind of lacking a couple of basic game placements and notification things that we'll talk about so yeah it makes a lot of I AP Revenue

so ads would always take a secondary like place to that but I'm coming at this from a very Western mindset and they're pretty much tailored towards the Asian market which is not the same right so they have ad placements they have double points on the home screen daily Fortune after game ads uh they have the rewards for watching ads three in a rows and they have a bunch of AD placements in the store what I did before we going into like the placements right uh you can go through them now so in the store you have free diamonds that's conditioned so the first one is free then you can watch two of them they have a really interesting reset mechanic I don't know if you have to ever use that yakob I didn't ask always fcking use that because coins and then yeah use both of them because this is the only way to get Bandits to level six because Bandits at level six unlocks Loot and loot has a 5% chance to get thano when attacking which is completely G changing the reset is clever right but

it's capped at two a day right so that pretty much hinders the Imp out which from like a yeah from a really powerful like placement right and then if you scroll down you have the same one for gold there's artifact mine on artifact as well yeah do you think people go in there and like Peak all of these cuz I don't think they do right the resets yeah I all the placements in the store every day yes of course I do it all the time yeah but it's you but I'm mean maxer you know yeah and you you don't pay [ __ ] yeah don't pay [ __ ] so if we go to the main screen right here comes the main big issue from a western approach and from this approach right so none of the ad placements are explained at all it's terrible notification like the daily Fortune never has a like red notification button if you click on it you don't really know what the potential is you can get from this placement and what it does right so I looked at it

twice Fortune exactly like yeah like no one in the west is going to watch this because there's no notification and there's no description of what you can get so for a w curious this right this right no was fix saying no no no from from a western Market this is never going to get impressions right and the double points like from a western approach you don't really know what double points this gets you it doesn't show which actual unit it is or what type of like things you get so you're not from a western perspective explained in it absolutely not so you click on it and I'm like why should I watch the ad here right so these are usually the most powerful placements in a game because it gives you the notification and usually like before a game starting right so I looked back in my game notes so I looked at some of the games I've been working at that had a impression per deu on average uh of higher than eight so impression per da8

not easy feat to do right so here 40% of The Impressions tend to come from an ad unit from an ad placement of rewarded ads at level starts and then about 20% of the other Impressions come from an after level boost right so that is usually in these type of level games in the west at least what makes up the core of your impressions per Dau right and here if you start a game quickly there's no pregame and the main ad units that you see on the main screen where most of the users will actually go and see they're not explained well so basically already from this perspective they're kind of shot themselves in the foot because this is usually the most powerful like game placement that you do before a level and they're not well explained and they're hidden in the store so I have a feeling that majority of the impressions are happening in the store you go in you do your time when you're playing first during the day and

that means you're kind of capped right so usually like the percentage of users that go in the store it's not 100% of users it's not 50% of users it's 40% if you're lucky right and then after you play this for a while you're not going to go in and look at these other ones you're going to do the store but that means you're capped right it's pretty much like we put some economy resource budget behind ads and that's it exactly unfortunately and then the after level one is suffering from the same thing right so like what like I said before right so the after level boost is 20% usually of impressions of rewarded Impressions but the main issue with this game is after the level the add button for an after level add yeah is so tiny it's either this or it's on the trophies that you could increase the trophy or more rewards it doesn't explain what the rewards are or what you can get oh

you could click on the trophies you can click on the trophies yeah I did yeah yeah but like yeah so normally here for a western Market you'd put either if you want to be aggressive you'd put the add button at the bottom and only show the lobby button after four seconds after yeah no no you would put the double your button on the bottom and just leave it is ad placement you put a small X on top right that's it exactly yeah so I was just checking it on one other game today it's like that literally yeah so I don't think they're they're basically from these small design quirks I guess for being a western eastern gamer from Asia they're missing out on these key ad placements which are like really key to having a lot of high impression per Dau question does it matter I don't think so no no no no no no I don't want I didn't want to say it doesn't matter but it's the competition of Da like what kind of ecpm we can get in South yeah right okay very good question so let's get into this so let's get into the ad like uh

estimates here so basically I handicapped it at about 40 to 45% ad viewer rates because I still think is relatively high so that's usually they cut off for a good ad placement so I think they're over that because the economy is compelling enough especially with the daily ad reward that you need to watch x amount of ads which is three but basically since it's in the store and it's capped I don't think it's higher than four and a half maybe five at most because of all the quirks that we kind of went through before right so that means that they showing about 3.8 rewarded Impressions per day maybe to 45% of the user base so that means that they're earning about $24,000 a day from ads or about 11% of total I AP revenue and that's also means or that's also with me handicapping the ecpm to extremely high level because what you have is a user base that's playing the

game that's making a lot of iips and that has a very limited amount of Impressions that's shown to them right so I have looked at similar other games where I basically had crazy amount of high I AP revenue and the ecms we were getting in the states there was like $87 on Android and iOS and it's kind of the same kind of split like ad revenues below or around 10% so I think the global ecpm is probably around 38 to $45 here and yeah is really high right but basically it's because you're starving these networks of having more Impressions and it's not that many per session so they're also if we would have recorded this last week uh if we look at their like mixup of networks last week they didn't have Facebook this week they do they added it to that fxc file maybe Ser maintenance it was like one of those I was looking at I was like guys like for [ __ ] sake meta so now the only

Network they're missing is Maloo which is really strong unrewarded which is another 10% but last week it was looking worse than it is now right but yeah uh from my perspective like the biggest gains they can do is just adding notification buttons and explaining their ad unit better like that's going to get so many more Impressions but also thinking about if you can do some kind of ad placement like the daily Fortune moving that to before the level like that could be an interesting thing to do but it's just really badly explained like that's it to be honest like I think they need to put also some content or some like other more smart placements into it like for instance for I don't know if you got there but they had this PVP event at some point that was running here where you could play against other players pretty much the original random dice game where you would summon against your guy and what was the what was the win condition there something like uh I think boss or something that like

again pretty much two people on a like same same condition and whoever was able to kind of keep up with the other and stuff like that so they had the PVP mode but as I said like all the ad placements are pretty much expansion of the economy budget they're not like the usual Smart Ones like you would have in let's say like Survivor IO like one more life or whatever like I know you can do this with like a synchronous game but come on guys like they could be different things there yeah the life I looked that up as well like out of like if you want more lives that's usually also maybe like 10 to 20% of impressions as well right so it's usually a very popular out placement it's not applicable to this game but definitely they could run some other content on like or maybe maybe the [ __ ] best monetization thing in the world save the guys that you [ __ ] fired from the gacha and monetized dead but here's the thing right so let's say they double their impression per da and increase the ad view rate to 55% and get seven Impressions per deu instead of

3.8 that means they're making like 55k a day so an extra 25k a day one 16 yeah exactly and that would be 22% of AD Revenue instead like but the economy sounds like it's so like out of whack they they probably can earn way more money by just focusing on that instead right like yeah I'll I'll I'll leave my prediction with the economy by the end let's give M some space and then don't worry it's not it's not a lot of things is it two monkeys in your head right now that are bang UA symbols don't forget to to press whole screen on the creative yeah don't forget to [ __ ] yourself and mute the sound oh okay mute the Sound by way this game had Korean sound until last week they didn't even translate the sound everything was in Korean by the way yeah man like don't worry it's not going to be a lot of ads it's if we talked about the creative

depth before this on the scale from 1 to 10 two there's not a lot of creatives but don't worry uh they start working with one one great guy um recently so they they will have they will have more they will have more coming in the in the near future anyway but yeah there running the usual stuff which is Facebook Google appin molo and and even Tik Tok even though it's not here wait were they working with Malco on the UA side and they're not working with them on the monetization side just to guys yep exactly uh and in the vest you know like let's just know let's just do this in the US and it can not be in the US was because uh I mean from the game like this and from the the previous

games I manag which was very similar to rash Royale the CPI are quite high and and I mean this is a play blad uh which they have on up which is great but there's no play BL it's just like playable end card so like guys this is not an animated end card yes mhm it's not a great setup who's green oh you don't hear the music it's like uh vest like driving on the horse Go Go full screen oh yeah the thing is so this is this is the first creative right mhm not the game play obviously because even though you little bit of fakeness it's altered gaml right you like it you like it no well not really lucky this is the another one which is exactly the same they have lot of banner ads on appin which is interesting approach I would definitely

go for more playables this my friends are just an interesting iteration on the noob versus Pro full screen yeah and then there's a God afterwards so we have again two videos for now have two videos for now and then is another video which we already saw but not now yeah and let's just go to Facebook because okay we have this one as well not pluging and again so what do we have like threee for now and that's it so let's go it looks like some old build of the game with a different UI on the merging unit could be very old creative we have lucky coupon Statics there's this new one well and you are missing out a lot on the on

on the music I could imagine it's just like it doesn't really fit the game but at least you if you're lucky and it's everything is really like short and not so complex so if you if you remember all the previous creative um Trends we had before is basically okay there's the the there's no hooks either right no no hook Prett too much just wait a second oh well you have the this it's kind of funny uh and then one more ugc H one more ugc video I think is he real or is's not he is real I think this was uh this was on fa no Tik Tok running on Tik Tok and also they they run Reddit so we would definitely device to close that as soon as possible because it's Absol I think

one thing that we're missing here in the mix is that they probably have a pretty fanatical Community uh because of random dice on some caca there's a hook yeah a yeah yeah this is a new one but the the yeah the statistical chance of this is zero yeah but again see you see the the cat there yeah yeah and uh yeah I mean we have few more but most mostly static on on Facebook and everything but then let's check actually this this is way more fun and I mean I mean Korean yes this this is only in Korea and man I I would really love you

to hear this sound why he making 80% of revenue from Korea because it's completely catered towards Korea yeah no but the thing is these creatives will never work in in US yeah or in the west absolutely never in the west because they're like I mean nothing is happening there but yeah as I said don't worry the thing is like I put this to 11 labs for the for the English translation by AI I was in [ __ ] tears what they're saying yeah it's like what are they saying what are they saying it was uh it was just an interview for and talking about the the defense and chances and everything and the lack in the game I mean like this concept like if they translated this like the the interview or the press conference I love it it's cra right but it was so it was so funny when I was um

playing this this just confirms my assumption that this whole thing is just made for Korea by Korea and they just don't care about the outside world they care they really care but it's it's really hard me 3% us Revenue yeah does it sound like care it does because the thing is like with these types of creatives um they don't you know it's not going to work that's the thing that's the thing it's not going to work why they just don't copy Russ whs or like you know r is doing the most like Cutting Edge Kingdom guard snake [ __ ] and whatever game playay yeah they will they will get there don't worry they will get there it's just not there yet so like and honestly like this is it this is this all all you can uh you can see so the thing is like so low amount of creatives not very CED to towards the West audience so it's not going to get more than like these 3% of of uh of revenues in us when you have these type of these types of creative so so that's let's do should we do our

scores yeah before we do our scores give me the screen for a second I'll show you one very interesting thing where I think will happen yeah even though I really love the unique Concepts that our friends from from 11 100% produce and I think they're literally amazing I'm unfortunately afraid that this whole situation will just repeat by itself which means that the game will Peak for for some few months here somewhere around the same cap which is where we are we already there uh pretty much a million a month or whatever IP wise let's say 8 to N I don't know like this whole thing and then from that point on it will be downhill all the way and at some point somebody will do a western copy like our friends from M gay did last time are looking at this right now already doing it hello and and uh yeah the situation repeats unfortunately because uh yeah I don't see this being

even sustainable long term because their economy of the game as I said is hampered by some very specific decisions such as the share shards of the mytic units which you can by the way directly buy through the shop anyway and like there's really no Randomness like I have whatever 9,000 gem I can just go in here and I can just buy three different miic units outright immediately if I wanted to Y so it's and on top of that you have this sadistic GAA thing going which like it's it's not even like in the guide it's not even recommended to use GAA at all like SC scrolls are not the priority to be honest again which screams to me like game that doesn't have a gacha as a priority got Club bro like that's why he's wearing this t-shirt I I getting the thing like they're super unique and as I said mainly for their audience and like people that know Korea I guess it works great and that that's amazing but I guess this thing in the chart like that's probably your Peak and that's it and I don't expect this game to kind of grow from here into like whatever AR

which makes 15 million a month but give us a score then um eight yeah you're bitching about this game for an hour and it's eight because they single-handedly R like a connoisseur going to a restaurant and it's like bit upset about the potatoes oh man they they singlehandedly r r for 40 minutes about an eight some things are great the V condition is great stop stop finally stop stop eight I I I I give them a four because they have ads but they're not optimized but the thing is like what's on the table I would say is probably another 24K a day which would bring him to 20% OD like overall OD Revenue I don't know if that's anywhere close but if they do these Western changes what is the impact in Korea right and then you have to talk about segmentation so it's really difficult to actually talk about but these ad placements will work in the west and you need Place add placements that work in the west if you want to

pursue the whole game won't work in the west yeah look I will be I'll be more generous but only because they they know they are not suit well they can't do well in the west and they're already find trying to find help which is great so I will give them generous six and a half just for you know we we H Ro creativity encourag encouragement just encouragement there's huge potential and on that note it's time to end here another fantastic episode with the two and a half Gamers who this week was the half gamer was Mach after his long weekend in Lisbon but don't worry folks we'll be back again with another wonderful episode either this week or next week yeah as usual summer prophecy half a year passes and this game gets a western release I can guarantee that okay okay we were

okay cool back to the game but all right back to the game thank you very much listening yeah join our SL Channel and see you next time byebye [Music] [Music] [Applause] he [Music]