💰Marble Sort Review: SORT FTW! Voodoo is suddenly doing $1M/day in IAP revenue

So why this is also important context of this whole voodoo thing because for last year this was kind of flat and it was the usual song of mob control cabes and every one of these game like subundk a day games let's say but now it seems something switched at the start of this year and voodoo is suddenly packing like 1 million a day in IP revenue. It's 400 a.m. and we're rolling the dice. Mate [music] drops knowledge made of golden eyes. Felix with ads making those coins rise. Jack up designs worlds chasing the [music] sky. We're the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA advers and game design too. Mat feeling [music] shak bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyerspace skies feeling stacks [music] like a wizard in disguise. Jack realms lift us to the high. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. [music] Ads are beautiful. They like the

way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uhhuh. [music] Uhhuh. Aha. [music] Uhhuh.
Cut it out.
Just know whatever. This is a voodoo game. It's great voodoo game.
Yeah. That's not what you said before. [laughter]
I don't like it.
That's what you said before.
I don't like it.
Yeah, we can't like like all the games, right? Which is fine.
Yeah.
Well, hello everybody. This is to Enough Gamers and it's an episode about Marble Sword. We can't really stay away from this game. I mean, we would like to, but it's growing like crazy. And I still think like all of these, let's call them small games which are making couple millions a month. They could be just a mini game inside Royal Match or Royal

Kingdom and nothing would change. Anyway, we're talking Marble Sword. My name is Matthew Lancher.
I'm Felix Broberg.
And I didn't get what this was all about.
This should be just a mini game. Like why would this need to be a game out there? It's going to die in 3 months. Why do you think so?
I think so.
Because that's the halfife of all these voodoo like puzzlers like
you forgot this one important tidbit that sword category is the new
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Prove us wrong. But yeah, show us.
Have you heard about this small thing called pixel flow?
Yeah. Because every time that there is the sword game, you need to bring the pixel flow. Yeah. That's one game. Great. There's a lot of games making five, six mill a month.
Sure. For how long?
Yeah. Yeah.
We'll see. That's why we
We will see. Exactly. Yes, we will see.
We will see.
That's why we're talking about
We will see.
Let's start from the big numbers then. If if we

Is that Pixel Flow? Oh my god. This category is on fire [laughter] lately.
Do you know they got bought by Scopley?
No way.
Did you know that they got bought by Scopy for close to a billion? You
You know what I mean? I heard that there there's one game designer who has predicted the sword is going to be the most important category and it's going to be on fire. Oh my god. Who might that be? I don't know.
No. Do you know him?
No. I don't know.
Right. Right. Right. Let him let him do his amble. Yeah. Let him do his preamble here.
Okay. So, genre is exploding as always. We are pretty much covering each game on this chart here. I think we're just missing what? Geeko out. Can you can you [ __ ] die already? Like where's the where's the energy? I mean you you are here just pushing pushing swords [ __ ] Oh my god. Like the basic this whole category is like going to like the fair when it comes to town and it's basically playing these games that you play for stuffed animals like all these games.

Yeah. But but Pixar Flow it's 22 million a month. Have you seen Arrows for instance what they're doing like with like 30 mil downloads like 50% growth?
It's best played game on the on the fair.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So 30 million is definitely getting its earnout. You can say that for sure.
Yeah. Like it's just like
but don't go there. I don't care about arrows. I mean we talked about arrows on the podcast and you can go there.
It's crazy.
Anyway, so back to Sword. So, there's this game called Marbles Sword, which uh we're going to play in a second, but just to give you the the scale of it. Marbles Sword itself just kind of exploded recently and it seems that it's going to be yeah, from March pretty much this year already went to something like 200k per day quite fast. If you look at the overall,

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Exactly. So why this is also important in context of this whole voodoo thing because last year this was kind of flat and it was the usual song of mob control heroes and every one of these game like subundk a day games let's say but now it seems something switched at the start of this year and Voodoo is suddenly packing

like 1 million a day in IP revenue because there's Castle Clashers which we already talked about which is doing quarter million a day and there's Marble Sword which is doing 200k per day and yeah
so what what happened there in
suddenly Voodoo just I don't know got like a great hand finally because I'm guessing this is all publishing
I think they figured out
more stuff on the hybrid side but also what's happening on the backdrop there is they're
angling to go public and basically that's expected to be this year or next year that they're going to go public.
If you if you if you want to go public like magic or luck doesn't suddenly happen
also. Also, yeah, that's not a strategy.
Just squad busters. So, you know, doesn't do it,
man. I I know what happened.
What were you going to say?

No, no, no, no. I'm just going to say anything.
The ambush.
No, no, no, no. There was going to be an ambush and I messed up his ambush. He's angry. Of course, it was ambush.
Yes, you did. Oh, hello. Hello there. I didn't see you. Thank you very much for coming to this episode. Uh, it's brought to you by our sponsors, PVX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing. If you're scaling your business uh, and need funding, here's the deal. With PVX Partners, you can grow your game easily and your business. There's no equity dilution. You can repay as you get paid and it's flexible and fully tailored to your growth. So you can secure funding in 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 [music] hours. Don't you wait. Take control of your UA budget without giving away of uh a piece of your company. Visit pvxpartners.com and uh see how they can help you grow your game faster and stronger. Don't wait. Go to pvxpartners.com. Anyway, so if this continues, it seems that even

like maybe Marble Sword get even bigger than Kasa Clashes. Kasa Clashes is also like uh getting quite big. But again, let's get to the actual game. So marble sword as usual looks like any
What the [ __ ] is this?
This is Marvel 15. That
doesn't matter. It does matter.
What's your level? Did you [ __ ] juggle it?
17. Felix
14. I hated this game.
Okay. Mate
one six load.
Mate Granny boots up his level 3,000.
26.
Yeah. Yeah.
26. Well done.
It's fine. It's way better than you. Jeez.
Sure.
I don't even have the the events on the left. Actually,
I also don't have them because I need to be level 14.
No, they're not here like physically.
You don't even have them I don't have a meter on iOS. No.
Okay. So, Android for the

Android power.
What this game is about is that again it's another one of those
all the players.
But the interesting part is that again we have this tray mechanic which is again coming from our favorite pixel flow thing which is like the thing that popularized this thing. And what's happening here that we're clicking on these balls, they're dropping down and then they kind of go here. You could say that physic is involved, but as I see it, it really is not.
He has left the ch.
Yeah, because like they just drop here and add it into the conveyor and like that's it pretty much. The very important thing is that they also come within these boxes that are having nine of them and all the sorting whatever boxes need three of them. So you need to pre-plan that kind of pretty importantly and you see you have again limited space here when the space get
Yeah. But even if you if the the conveyor belt is full you still play.

There's only one time that happened to me that I actually break it only once.
Yeah. only one. So
the levels after a while you have to actually start planning it. You can't just click randomly, right?
Yeah. You can click randomly from level five basically. Yeah. Just like you need to really plan. Yeah. So what you do, you pretty much click on these balls, move them to conveyor, build them there and get like automatically put there. And again, what's happening is like there's no timer, no nothing. You need to really plan this. So and there's no slinging mechanic by the way. like this thing that can be done in pixel flow where you just link more piggies and you click fast and da da da. This is not happening here. It's just like
it's very
if you screw up if you screw up and then you realize if you really quickly tap you can get some balls stuck in the bottom. So it's a little bit of scale based there. Like I've done it a couple of times. That what
if you [ __ ] up then you can if you quickly tap and then you get the balls

in front of the the other patch that you did then you can still
while they're going down. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's not
But you have to be really quick.
You mean it's not What do you mean? It's not
But okay. It's like
continue.
It's not comparable to the pixel flow mechanic because pixel flow
but it's different game.
Yeah. But but I'm talking about the philosophy of bringing reflex based gameplay to puzzle which is not happening here. This is term based as it is as usual puzzle. And again we are having deterministic puzzles which again pretty much all major I think all of them sort games are deterministic puzzles. This is the core again. We could do this for quite a long time. It's using a lot of the usual mechanics
get to the level 20. Yeah, from beach.
Let's go to 97.
Yes, please.
If Marty wants to see it. So,
it do take me few few flights to to

America.
This will take you few years. So what's happening here again is the usual where we have the typical mechanics curve as like more mechanics are added into the game with like locks with stuff that's like popping out of these whatever tunnels and so on so forth move based stuff stuff it's very similar to block gem 3D or car match or how do you want to say it like this pretty much upper part of the board is quite similar to it and then the lower part is where this kind of innovation through that conveyor belt happens like that that's pretty nice. But it's again, it's this combination of like very very precise planning that I think that that needs to happen here that makes the game so great because you also see that there are mechanics on the bottom side of the board. Again, similar to something like pixel flow, these blocks that you don't know their color until they get to the top, so on so forth. So that's there. Yeah. And that's it pretty much as for

it from the gameplay perspective. I'm guessing that as you saw here there is some kind of a live ops happening but these puzzlers they have very limited live ops in the beginning of their life cycle because live ops is not what will help you out live is what will amplify your success. So if you're making it again pixel flow did like whatever was that lava quest on level something something when it was already making millions a day. So you don't need strong levelops with these sort whatever puzzlers. You need strong level based like level design and strong level curve and all these other things. Then you can add live ops and amplified of course. But yeah, when you're designing these levels, what is it that these companies usually track? Is it like time to complete a level? And they have a time in mind that they want users to complete a level or like how do they
track? They literally track everything. One of the most important thing is APS curve attempts for success. How many

tries it takes to actually win a level that's like the first you start from there and all these other other metrics get added. For instance, one of the things that is being tracked is pretty much like mechanics conversion index. You add a new mechanic like a new blocker and you check check for churnfunnel and the conversion funnel and literally you create an index out of it like how much the new mechanic is going because it could have like big churn and low conversion which means is bad whereas it could have big conversion and still big churn but it's good because at least it's bringing money even though you're turnurning players. So again you create an index number out of it then you cross compare between your things. So the so the the thing that you're actually
so the thing you're actually measuring for and that's where the experience comes in you have a win fail ratio in mind at different stages of the game
it takes 30 dashboards
like literally
okay
even just like basic stuff like for instance we go here
what you measure also is the booster win

ratio levels that are
like levels where players use boosters and then win rate compared to levels where they don't use boosters and you check if they work because again if boosters don't work and the win rate is the same like you know you screw them up. So it goes to the latest detail with these games and that's why it's so hard to design these and that's why the knowledge is usually only in Turkey or you know king player and so on so forth. uh with sword is is a little bit different because I get as I said this is deterministic not random but is a very specific type of knowledge in order to build these puzzlers because it's all about level design level curve and difficulty curve balancing you need
multitudes of your AB test of first 100 levels in order to fine-tune the curve
I think you should do a solo episode on this that would be really interesting like the dashboards and stuff like that this is a great content yeah for sure anyway yeah keep Yeah. So that's there. Again, I think

it's getting a little bit more closer to like I I'm honestly I'm surprised that we see this on voodoo portfolio. I would expect this to be from Roric
normally like it seems to me like that's
why why I mean they have this is blast. So I mean they're already kind of going in this direction.
This is blast this.
Yeah, you can say that. I still would be curious. Maybe somebody can tell us like what's the background behind this? I mean like the
Oh, you can tell us what's the [ __ ] background behind you? Like you're just
Yeah, it's a factory. Like
the factory is full of steam, right? [laughter]
Yeah. You know,
I'm so glad you finally bought your steam shower
and that you put it in the kitchen even though your wife didn't want it there.
Crazy. No worries guys. We're making we're making steam stuff here.
We have bring bring it to the steam

steam steam head.
You can't make fun of Yakob. You can't make fun of Yakub's like sweat shop.
Anyway, just saying that like voodoo keeps kind of quite improving with these things. So I would be really glad to know and we probably will have to figure out the background like which studio, which publishing, which kind of this thing happened. quite interesting. Yeah, you can.
Are are you doing ironing services as well? Because
I can next time for mu I can get my iron t-shirt my why should iron at your place. Okay. Oh, let me just quickly do admon because one of the interesting things, right, at least for me, right, I started getting ads already interstitialized after like level five and the biggest trend we saw like with word sword games and everything like that is how they push the interstitials later and later on. But here they just do it early, but I'm assuming there's some voodoo magic background when they actually roll it out, but they show

interstitial ads and they show quite a lot of them. I think about eight on average per daily active user for this. So obviously it's about 32% of ad revenue coming in today at $52,000 per day in ad revenue roughly.
That's really nice.
So it means they're doing like quarter mil a day.
Yeah. Yeah.
Why did you mute yourself?
You want more? I want more steam.
Full steam ahead.
Full steam ahead. Full steam ahead. Man, that's great. I was wondering like why the fact that I did not see any ads but then I was playing on airplane mode so literally zero which is great which is great
which is also M is hitting on one of the most interesting hidden things in our industry that if you just put your airplane mode on usually you avoid
but you can avoid it with rolled games because they say nope you need to play them online also same thing happened with Pixlow until level 20 I was able to

play it with airplane mode but then it's like no no no No, no, no. Online go and we want we want your money. We want your ad revenue. Mr. M.
I remember also with the there was the hack back in the day. It doesn't work anymore, but like Collie games when you're playing that old fortune like was it with the mining company you could just change your date on your phone and then it all the timers. Yeah. Idle Miner is like
mining company man.
The idle miner. Idle on Idle Miner Tycoon. If you just basically take your date, the date on your phone and you just put it ahead like a hundred years, you got everything in the game and you basically go to the end.
Well, of course. Like that's how it works in the factory.
I love my idol mining company.
Mining company.
That's what Yakob's doing. It's an idol mining company.
I was doing this [ __ ] also like setting timers on phone and stuff. That's what's nice. At least these guys know like how much

or how many creatives you need for for a global launch which is last 30 days is 1,00 almost 200. The really sad part is six playables. They said I couldn't make ads without [music] the dev team. They said I couldn't understand the tech. Guess what? I just made a fully [music] working gorgeous top to play while eating noodles [music] and watching trash TV and taking care of my daughter. All thanks to playable makeup. No code, no [music] stress, no cheap sherlock,
six playables.
They're running up but this like uploading is here pretty much a video, right? That's it. which is really weird. I mean, the videos are great actually. I mean, they put some thoughts into this and this reminds me Cub Heroes

with all with this kind of games here. But it's it's actually pretty good in terms of also like visually and 60 seconds for uploving, right?
The pipes I guess is Mario or like not really.
Whatever you want you want it to be, honestly. does doesn't matter. They're playing with long form videos which is great. Finally gameplay.
Yeah, I mean like this as well. Or maybe not even this might not be even altered actually.
Oh, this is pure gameplay.
Yeah, it was 2 minute long though. It's too many long
but this is definitely Yeah, this is altered. Wait a second. Here. So we have
I'm thinking if like they need the physics for the creatives or something because for game itself it's not that important.
It's nice to have I say
like gameplay wise it's like minimal

impact. Yeah. I mean, sure. You know, it's just if I have this like in real life, it's actually it's really ASMR stuff that you can It's also for kids like all I'm not sure, Yakob, if you had this
uh toys, you can just pretty much
touch it. Yeah. And yeah, as squeeze and whatnot, then it's actually really satisfying.
So, I mean, in that case, I can understand like the the marble stuff. I mean, as we saw this, it's actually quite a lot of different concepts, honestly. Oh, here's a playable. Hey, thank God. One of the six. Let me play this [ __ ] Okay, so it's pretty much fake. Well, not fake, but altered. See, I need these. This is exactly what happens. See, you can you can clearly push this into this

happens also in the game actually. So, you can't break it that easily. Even though it looks like it you can
basically hyper casual style you
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. But they have some some interesting stuff on Facebook honestly.
I think I see one AI ad.
Yeah. Really? We need to show it afterwards. I didn't see any because it's it's not really that that interesting.
Come on. They might make this with AI anyway, right? 12 like 1,100 creatives like
Yeah. I mean this is pull the pull the pin. Yeah. I mean I actually like this concept. Makes sense.
Yeah. It's clever.
Yeah. So yeah, they know what they're doing. I mean with a thousand creatives clearly you actually paid a lot of effort to build this and it looks like it's working on the on the numbers, right? So that's great. all of these and this is pretty much like old old creative from oh not about 27 days but look I mean way different

gameplay way different game play
okay
let's just do new creatives only in the last 30 days 800 there you go back
still quite big yeah it's big wait a second I like this different different images. But then okay, let me just
How do they make these creatives do you think?
He's not AI, man.
No, this just But like he's still turning out 800 creatives. Like how do they make creatives? We
have inhouse team and he's like pretty much just capturing gameplay.
Yeah,
here's the one. No. Yeah, this is the one. Thank you very much.
This looks like your old ASMR creatives that you 10 years [laughter] ago.
Exactly. Good old ASMR creatives. Slice slicing the the cakes. So, this is

nice, right? So, but then Oh, this is the same thing. Same thing. And I mean, not that many, you know, like that different. So you have all of these. It looks like it's all the same.
It's core gameplay always.
Yeah, exactly. Call gameplay.
Variations of like pipes and stuff falling in different physics aspect.
So you can you can do like millions of these, man. Seriously, it's not that hard.
UC stuff.
I also like why would you do UGC on this? Seriously. I mean like the images on the bottom.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But still I mean Oh, this one. Okay. And Yeah. I mean honestly again really positively surprised. I mean this is all again like this is pretty much cup heroes. Come on.

Yep.
Reverse cup Heroes.
I think maybe that's why it kind of works so well because they know this
kind of creative concept so well.
That's true. It's pretty much just like
here was based on that concept.
Yeah, exactly. It is more casual because you're not actually fighting, but you're just doing the same thing in just marble sword. Yeah, it makes sense. That makes all sense. And then we have this weird impulse stuff.
What is that scary thing? What is that black thing? Yes, should be should be a finger. Claw
finger with high nail. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, let's me just do Yeah, we can looking into here like if there's something else that we didn't see, but it's all all the same pretty much. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. You can get we can get to the AI stuff. Well, we can't. There's one that I showed you already.
Yeah. Okay. Guys, that's not AI. I was I'm joking. What? No,
no, no, no, no, no, no. Based on our today's AI. So, that's like this. And then there's the the tracker video. This one. This is better.
Is this from Truck Star? They stole it.
I don't know. Like just guy yelling at the other tracker to stop playing and he cannot stop playing and that's there basically. Yeah, I think
interesting hook. Yeah, interesting hook. But that's it. That's it pretty much.
They have pretty good creative velocity here.
Yeah, that's true. But also, like we discussed with with our guys from Triumph, the velocity is one thing, but you need actually a diverse concepts as well. So, it's not only like if you slap like 5,000 creatives on top of each

other, it's it's nice and it's one step forward, but you also need very diverse concepts because then it's just not going to work. Okay. Yeah. But again, this is quite interesting because it seems this is as far as we'll do was ever in the IP train.
Yeah.
So, we're going to watch closely how how like if if they're going to switch to Rolic or whatever because Yeah. This is still color block gem, but they have pretty much the revenue of color block gym now because those two games together is like half a million that day.
Yeah. Which is great.
Yeah. IPS.
I mean, they just they just also announced a new P the Mecore Studio again. It was like two brothers.
Really?
Two French brothers. Yeah. One second.
Yeah. Yeah. I read about that, but yeah. Can't remember what it was.
I missed that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's quite interesting how much IP based stuff they have. The castle clusters. I really like I'm like like positively surprised they already went this big. I know you were very skeptical. Four days ago, Voodoo launches new internal midcore studio led by former Keer

founders. There you go. Alexandre Colin Noir and Antoine Colin. There you go.
Okay. When was this?
Four days ago.
Four days ago.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just announced
a race or just like a setup.
Launches a new internal studio.
Okay. Internal
focus on midcore PVP mobile games. So I guess Voodoo is going to be trying to go public then in the next two years. That's what they're all trying to do.
Okay. Yeah.
Now they if if these games continue scale or at least like stabilize it will be great because they will find wait. According to the post, the team is already taking over a prototype that has shown excellent results during soft launch with long-term ambitions of building title capable of reveling games like Clash Royale. Good luck.
Rivaling games like Clash Royale. Really?
Yes,
dude. It's PR hype, man. You can just

put whatever you want, you know? Like, yeah, we're going to recreate geometry dash line. Like, you know, it's just hype. Then you have to do it.
Best thing since bread. Yeah, exactly. They should open like a internal category.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're definitely going to keep looking at this because it's quite important if Woodoo actually switches to IP or like more more stronger IP.
Do you have a cat there or what the [ __ ] is there? Is what is there? It's a tail. Okay.
Oh no.
Oh, we didn't have this.
No, not again. Not again.
Blast from the past. Thank you very much, Yaku, for reminding all of us this amazing episode of our lives. But you were Iron Man. Love it.
Next time.
See you next time. Well, actually, actually, see you. See you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Ciao.