🦉Making $70 Mil. a month ? How Duolingo is plundering all the game mechanics 👀

It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice. A day [music] drops knowledge made of golden eyes. Felix with ads making those coins rise. Jack up designs worlds chasing the sky [music] with a two and a half gamers. The midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too. Mat feeling shaking the insight. We're rocking those [music] vibes till the early day master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies. [music] Feeling stacks like a wizard in disguise. Jack craft real to the highest. 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. Uh-huh. [music] Uh-huh. Uh-huh. [music] Hello. Hello. Oh, this is Two and a Half Gamers special solo episode as usual. And this time we're going to do a little

bit more of a different type of an episode because we're going to talk about apps. Or are we? Or we're going to talk about games. You'll see for yourself. Um, yeah. So, this is a really good time uh to recap basically what I was saying in London for those of you who were not there. And the main topic of today will be uh Dualingo because Dualingo is really killing it. I think it's especially now with the recent updates is really worth looking at uh and pretty much reminding us why this thing works, how it works, and what it's actually doing. So, let's get to it. Um, this is literally the best time to talk about this because as you see per sensor tower report apps finally caught up to games and I mean not caught up but they're basically going over them because games here are still kind of in this after corona I don't want to say decline but definitely not growing as

they grow before. They're growing but they're not growing that steep. And of course you see how strong the apps are growing in between mainly driven by stuff like generative AI movies which means micro drama social media utilities and so on so forth. So yeah uh apps are really killing it and they're plundering our knowhow and you'll see why in a second because who's the best to talk about regarding this? It's Dualingo. Uh, this little green bird is doing atrociously high revenue these days, which means they're literally doing like 70 million for last month. And they're doing 20 million downloads. So, it's hitting record downloads, record revenue, and record DAU numbers of 90 million. There goes Felix Blood Blast. So yeah, they already passed lifetime 2 and a half billion, which I'm guessing is even higher, of course, and more than 1.3 billion downloads. So yeah, they're

not, you know, kidding around. uh and they're completely wiping the translation or basically language apps category because you see here that even though uh they're being followed by all these AI language apps and honestly if you ask a language person which app you should go they won't tell you Dualingo. Dualingo is great but uh there are better apps for learning languages of course. So why are they wiping the floor with everybody? Because it's a game. It's not another language app. It's a game. It's not language app anymore. That's why. And this goes to our usual use case of app being great with app with gaming knowhow being stuck into the app category having much cheaper traffic, much better or let's say much less competition and so on so forth. So we talk about these a lot of times like impulse for instance that's a great example of another one. But these guys are really killing it. um some few

updates or I mean the product things that they've been going through that are definitely worth mentioning. One of them is pretty much their overall UI change as you see the left picture where it was the old one where it seems this kind of incoherent like do this do that do that and of course it was more of a you can see literally like this is when they were still focused more on the language learning. Now what do we see here on the right? It's a game UI. Of course it's a game UI. There's a saga here. There are these nice icons, currencies on top still when they had lives. And you see here, this is Pixel Flow. This is uh current build of uh Dualingo. It it looks quite similar. And basically, it's a game UI. They started doing game UI because there's both there's like very nice and easy progression. Uh let me show it to you here in the meantime. And you see like you have a normal saga here. It's just from top to bottom instead of bottom to top. That's it. And then you have your events like for instance the Brawl Star event. By the way, they're running because they plundered a lot of supercell mechanics.

So why not? That's a perfect way to do this. So of course they they doing this. It's working perfect for them. Uh next thing that was quite important and I think it's also one of the things they did uh mainly because they saw it how it perfectly works with apps uh I mean games is adding energy instead of lives. So you saw that they had lives before. Now they have normal energy. And by energy I mean it's a little bit on steroids because uh not only before they would be stuck in this binary situation that you have lives or don't have lives or if you're fatalist and so on so forth. with energy. What they're doing actually when you go and you're doing these combos and answering correct answers, they actually give you more energy and uh pushing you to pretty much more engagement, rewarding you basically. And if you do mistakes, of course, you lose some. And like if you again do a lesson, you lose some energy.

But it's not this binary situation. And now they can finally also monetize it much better because uh yeah this is literally their investment report. Energy is a pacing system for free uses that replaces hearts. Unlike hearts which penalizes mistakes, energy is usage based and rewards success. A carrot not a stick or a carrot on a stick. Each exercise is uses a unit of energy regardless of whether the answer is right or wrong. But learners get back energy when they get multiple answers scoring in a row. So you see this is a great example how they went with gamification before and they just used the you know standard solution but standard solution wasn't good enough for them but back then they didn't know and this is again very very good example of like how much better thought and much better you know adaptation of like how their core works which is basically doing these lessons and lessons are basically levels uh just fits them much more and and again it's perfect because you see how it works. So this is if you have a full

energy window. This is if you have some depleted energy to again back in like 18 hours or so. You can recharge it for hard currency. You can watch an ad for five energy. You can get free for five and then you get some more in 1 hour. And uh why is this familiar? Because this is exactly the same UI as all the rog light games from Hobby or Gorilla or whatnot are on the market are using. Like you see the buttons are exactly the same. We have the hard currency bot, we have the ad bot, we have the free one. So the only thing missing is this kind of unlimited subscription trial. All these buttons are exactly the same. So it's completely taken out of, you know, Rogai RPGs game UI one to one. Uh the other thing that they added is these daily quest systems again with chests. they pretty much swinging around a little bit differently and I think very very nicely because again they don't need these daily weekly attendance achievements whatnot and like very robust way they streamline everything so

whatever they they they take they streamline it and here uh you can see that again they have just those daily quests again we can look on the live version how it looks there where follow your first friend uh daily quest start a streak listen to the ask for 80% three lessons and get these different chests with different varieties. Basically, just gives you different amounts of gems or uh now that there's an event, maybe it's something different, but again, it's streamlined and very easy to do. Uh and uh how it actually looks. So, you get these chests and oh, what do we see here? Where did we see this? H chest with a chance of increasing the rarity on the chest when they're opening them. Where is this coming from? Of course, it's coming from Supercell. This is standard textbook uh Brawl Star Chest and they just again took it. Similarly, High Copy Barago took it because it's very engaging. Even though they are not able to give you all these characters or like gachas and all these, they just

give you more gems basically. So again, if you see here, if you open a common chest, you get uh what? Four gems. If you open a rare chest, you get eight gems. Perfect. That's it. I don't I don't think so. There's like different rarities in the pool or something they can do it, but it's about this anticipation. It still gives you a lot of engagement, you know, gives you this maybe I can get a rare upgrade or something. So, it's much better of course and again it's taken from the supercell chest system one to one same as everybody's copying it. Uh then we have some other things that they're doing such as these flesh events. This is again very very common with the coin looters meta systems and all these other things. So now the puzzles are being driven and so on so forth. So not only they run it, they also run it on this timer which is also nice. Again, another hook and carrot on a stick. Uh again, it's exactly similar to something like Monopoly would run with these flash events like very short like 10 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute events. We just can

try to suck out more engagement out of you and keep you there. Because again, if I stay for five more minutes, I can get double the amount of currency for something or 50% off for building something. This is the same thing. You get triple XP for 10 minutes. Just play 10 more minutes. So again, it dish out dishes out more engagement. Exactly same thing. [snorts] Again, here you see some examples that monopoly is pretty much shuffling around. And again, very very similar design. Uh the other important thing that these guys did as I said now that they know their core which means the core is starting a lesson doing a lesson when you get these energy you know kickbacks and then you finish the lesson and the lesson is now giving you XP points. Oh like what do you mean XP points? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, we have XP points and you have a level and there's leaderboards. And in these leaderboards, as you see here, you can get better standings because you get the XP. That's it. So again, they have XP

system and that's why when they have the XP system, they can run these things for double XP or triple XP flash events. So again, a very very nice thing which again just basically shuffling rewards around the place. you would be doing the same thing anyway. You know, you want to learn the language you install this app for. Uh again to give some more competitiveness and cumulative progress. And now comes the streak part. Like this is their masterpiece. Okay, real talk before we start. This episode is brought to you by Potencus. And if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, listen up. Potencus is a premium ad network built by people who have actually been on both sides of this industry. game publishers, agencies, successful exits. So, they get it. Here's the thing. Potencus has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. It's not programmatic. It's direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs. No

middlemanex. And they handle everything with their in-house team in terms of the critics. Plus, they've partnered with playable maker V. So they will take brands YouTube videos or static images and actually turned into play or revert video proper interactive format built for gaming inventory brands getting a gaming native creative publishers are getting a higher CPS everyone wins. Head to potensus.com to get started or check their creative portfolio in the link in the show notes. Thank you very much Potencus for sponsoring this episode. Uh I think this is the best streak ever regarding like how much robust it is finetune and like all these things they are doing around it. These guys are known and like most of the time I think people are living literally just by keeping their stick because they just don't only lose it is pretty much too big to fail too big to lose. So what they have they have the freezing mechanic of course when you can freeze it and they're pretty much loss

as boosters like these freezers. Uh the other important thing and this is now very very popular is this widget thing. So they push you very very hard to kind of put this widget on the you know your home screen and there it sits there with a number. The number is the streak. So yeah this person has 2,684 day streak. Sure. Well he don't want to he doesn't want to lose it. Uh, but actually there are these super vig emojis that they just updated. I think they're pretty new. And duo the owl basically changes during the day. And you can see how more and more pushy he gets where again like practice now. Let's practice. Save your streak. Practice. Let's practice. Don't let it break. It's getting late. Save your streak. And you see that it's basically turning into memes. then it gets into like Darth Vader and ends up in like

bones and so on so forth. So again, lots lots of thought and lots of, you know, production value went into this. So this guy is pushy as hell trying to get you back into the game to save that streak, which is perfect. And again, this is, [snorts] I think, the best in-class streak mechanic that I've seen yet. Um, one thing also to notice that uh, yeah, shout out to Neil that uh, he has a mobile game abyss reporting this from last year. Dualingo bought u, space ape as an aqua hire because again it's gaming talent and they did very very well with gaming talent and again you can see it on the game. There have been game mechanics implemented into it. So it all works perfectly. So just uh, again if you like where they're getting this like of course they hiring gaming people. That's what uh a lot of apps companies are doing I think these days either consultants or just gaming talent because the knowhow translates very very well and recently this is the the latest

one that I wanted to show you. Uh these guys actually added something new called um Junior's Toy Hunt 30-day event. Hm. Let let me check this. What's What's this thing? Oh, wait a second. 30 days. Two lessons to earn puzzle pieces. Collect puzzle pieces to earn each suit. Wait a second. Where did we seen this? Collect all 54 pieces for grand price limited edition. What's this? This a collectible album. This is basically a stream version for collectible album. Thank you Anastasia for [gasps] uh heads up on this because I didn't seen it. And yes, it seems Dolingo added a collectible album and it's very very nice. Uh nicely done. I think it still have some hiccups. Can talk about that. But again, you have these puzzles which are basically just pieces and the costume is cut into nine pieces that you need to unlock and get. Uh as you see there, there are different costumes and

you have different rarities. Same as the usual collectible album setup because each of these pages requires more and more rarities. Therefore, again, requires more and more puzzle pieces to collect because it's like gotcha and so on so forth. Uh see, so this one is even more and so on so forth. So there's a golden one. So typical rarity stuff. Then we have the the final piece here, which is just super rare because you get it only after you collect all of it and get 5,000 gems. Of course, the problem that's here is that they still get give it through daily rewards. So they don't have the robust uh events trigger meta where if you know in royal match and all these other album focus games, you have a lot of these packs being out from that. So, that's a little bit of a bummer, but it's still okayish because again, you can get these pieces. But the problem is that uh as I was looking at player forums, the gacha isn't really that robust because lots of duplicates,

lots of these other things. And again, they're missing on one of the best mechanic of the album. And if I understand correctly, you can trade them. You can trade them with other dual players, which I think they should really go for. And they should enable this mechanic because of course it speeds up the album and this is like gives such much more engagement and this is all like why these albums are so powerful because they force or let's say push players to think about the game outside of the game. Just go on forums, Discord groups, Reddit groups and Facebook groups to trade the stickers or pieces of the album. So yeah, we'll see how this goes. I'm definitely thinking this first iteration will get upgraded. There's going to be more stuff added into it and uh yeah, we're going to review it again most probably because as I said, Duelingo for me is one of the best in class regarding gamification or like stealing all our basically and they're doing it pretty well. And again, kudos to them. You see the record revenues, you see the record uh numbers that they're pulling. Um yeah, it's

basically one of the best uh gamified apps on the store. There are other apps of course you can look for. For instance, Finch, we had the full review. These guys are also perfect pretty much [snorts] doing uh reward system out of real world actions. So that's also like a very unique idea and adding pet system, cosmetic system and whatever on top of it. [gasps] That's there. And then the last one in these like uh you know in this row of apps that are being gified I still think we will need to see more gamification being done in micro drama because real short is doing great. Again we have the full review on the channel. It has you know soft currency has some stuff on top of it but I would still think they have lot of lot of space to improve. Same as dualingo as again even this week you see how a major feature that they added because they need more light bulbs otherwise again need to just guys you know what you need to do just like follow royal match monopoly go it's quite easy just feature set is there you know what to do so we'll definitely keep

an eye on that and also on other apps that I'm guessing will be following the same playbook because again dualingo is the one that's kind of pioneering it really is just taking specifically what it needs and all the apps will follow so until that uh we'll get another app review for you. Subscribe, follow the channel, leave comment, and see you next time. Ciao.