Marketing Analysis: Garena Free Fire Max and PUBG New State! Ft. Matej Lancaric & Nebo Radovic

all right hello everyone welcome today we are going to be reviewing and comparing the mobile marketing activities between two new fps mobile shooter games on the market we will break down both garina free fire max and pubg new state comparing and contrasting the mobile marketing initiatives deployed in both of these games but we're first going to start with a high level overview of the top three mobile shooter games that would obviously be pubg mobile call of duty mobile and garina free fire and joining me to review discuss and add meaningful insights to actually a presentation from socialpeda we have two of the best mobile marketers in the world first we have monte lonzerick current ua consultant but formerly from superscale and a bunch of other companies who has launched a ton of mobile games throughout his career

and nebo radovic formerly from a bunch of really great game companies but currently doing mobile marketing at zynga did i capture your backgrounds properly guys amazing thanks for having us it's great to be here all right it's been a while yeah very true i think last time when we recorded something new you had the mustache yeah which was long tango yeah covey yeah that was probably a few years ago yeah yeah well i was really interested in the relative performance of pubg news state relative to karina free fire we had seen a pretty kind of you know big gap between the performance of both of these i was interested in understanding if there was actually not only like game differences but from a mobile marketing perspective what were the differences between how these both of these games were marketed unfortunately the fine folks at social pd peta basically came up with a report examined

this issue and sent us the report that they actually were going to have somebody present their support to us but we had a number of technical difficulties so i will be presenting this presentation for social peta but fortunately we also have mate and nebo on to help us through this so let's get into it guys green a free fire max versus pub g new state um and ahead of that though i i i think we're gonna start with an overview of the top three mobile shooter games and just get a lay of the land in terms of how these games have been doing from a marketing perspective and just from a relative performance perspective as well so again the top three games in market are pubg mobile call of duty mobile and green of free fire from a release perspective um you know interestingly i i wasn't aware of this but garina free fire seems to have released first to market november 2017 followed by pub g

um released in march 2018 then call of duty mobile from a creative's perspective it seems like um something interesting is that green of free fire seems to have almost i mean it was certainly released earlier as well but double the number of creatives from pubg and call of duty mobile call of duty mobile was launched about a year and three months after pubg but also has a similar number of creatives in mate and nebo you know please you know i think you guys are going to have to help me present this as well but when you see the number of creatives is this does this strike you guys in any way or um in any um anything you guys could comment in terms of the number of creatives from what you're seeing 53 000 means like probably all the resolutions everything and and all the all the channels together well for five years okay i mean it's impressive number god knows what is exactly what exactly does it mean

yeah it's probably variations um especially like with garina free fire that game is available and a lot of markets very popular in a lot of three tier four markets so they're probably doing you wait there and when you multiply the number of countries with the number of channels with the number of platforms the number of sizes that's how you get 50 3 000 but the number of actual concepts is probably smaller got it all right and then from a performance perspective and i this is data from social peda itself but um in terms of the revenue relative to downloads i think one of the things that's interesting is that we actually see that green of free fire is uh performing very well both from definitely from a downloads perspective they're getting a large the they're doing the best in terms of downloads also from a revenue perspective overall although interestingly we see that uh pubg mobile despite lower downloads on the ios side is is doing fairly well

um but yeah certainly these three games when you look at the total revenue and the download volume definitely very very high i would and i believe that from an organics perspective i'm not sure if there is a genre of games outside of shooters that does better in terms of just organic downloads um can you guys think of any like if you were to think of other categories where the number of downloads organically is really high like besides let's say runner are there any other categories you guys rather would be the the genre i would say i almost immediately yeah then there is the well you know the fingers of the guys with the hill climb racing they have loads of loads of organics since the day they won i'm not sure if it's like what arcade something platformer i would say that's definitely a huge organic game and i think the hill everything in that

category looks to be pretty good in terms of the organic so i'm now managing one motocross game and definitely getting around like 30k or 50k um daily organic installs right yeah i would add to that um that there are these evergreen kind of games that have a lot of organic demand think about solid air or tetris for example that i worked on when i was a network um so these games they're simply like organic demand and they drive a lot of installs as a result of that any kind of game that has a deep social mechanic um like shooter games where you have to play with your friends or other people that definitely helps with organics so i i would just look at those two categories as well right and just for the audience the the the reason why or where i'm getting that this is mainly organics at least for shooters is um just looking at app annie's organic to paid downloads data that's what that's kind of where i'm

that's why i'm assuming that most of these organics are organic one more thing i would add here is organic organics are huge among uh big ip games right so call of duty is a perfect example of that i've assumed that most of their downloads are actually getting just simply due to the fact that the ip behind the game is so strong and well known among among gamers right and that's a huge category that we forgot to mention right and i think we're probably going to see some data on geographies later but you know i the the general narrative behind green of free fire is that they're more performant on lower end phones android it's a you know kind of more emerging countries so latam southeast asia so i assume that's where some of this um uh some of the downloads why they're 100 down 100 it's like 200 million downloads all tier 3 tier 4 maybe countries an android loads and devices right well we'll see i think they've got some data

on that all right so insights into page user acquisition strategies so here is data in terms of um user acquisition for pubg mobile in and this is all for 2021 looks like um 84 of ad creatives are a video type they're using 16 networks um is there a pinterest wow okay that's interesting we don't expect the interest for a shooter game definitely [Laughter] yeah that's interesting um and we actually see this kind of spike here in android um guys when we see when you see this spike do you guys have any theories in terms of why the the i guess user acquisition or this would probably be the creatives deployed or let's see i

think it's also it could be also a tt release you know last year yeah but you know when you see like a big difference between platforms it's usually like a sign that the ua team is doing something um uh optimizing towards ri for example if you want one great idea um for ua teams out there um so it could be that it could be that they just improved the the the app built the app to work better on lower end android devices and they had like a push around that um right usually it's like a combination of product anyway or or they they couldn't figure it out figured out how to track properly on the ios and then like moved all the budgets to to android and then somewhere in the in the august then they tried to maybe push some some new conversion schemas and then you know there is to the bump so maybe we're doing that well exactly [Laughter]

yeah well the timing certainly seems to coincide with idfa deprecation so um definitely and then we we see like a lot of western country mix here for for pub g um actually the countries are quite interesting between these three games and and you can kind of because we mentioned call of duty being a big ip you can definitely see an impact of ip on the country mix um you know the fact there's egypt turkey saudi arabia here it tells me that they're either again optimizing towards ri or that they're just like a massive uh organic volume in those countries for shooter games right um yeah they'll see like quite a different mix country mix between these three games which is quite interesting right and when you see 84 percent of ad creatives are video type i assume the other 16 are just you know static uh examples definitely playables you know you can see some ad networks there i see iron source and something else

right so i'd say they treat playables as video nowadays as well really i mean it depends on on the tool but in a lot of cases because it's the same kind of container and or like ad type yeah you have the the video plus uh creative well the playable end card yeah on most of the uh okay yeah but google is like partly you know has static images like maybe facebook as well every day we're testing so yeah well pinterest definitely static images yeah it's okay beautiful network to test highly visual game all right and maybe looking at a call of duty mobile here um yeah it's similar like you know this the the trends here would certainly seem to indicate that something idfa deprecation related is kind of causing some changes to their mix looks like

these guys are deploying a lot of creatives relative to pubg if i were to look at the daily and peak on both sides looks like they're they're kind of deploying a lot uh huge u.s uh concentration here a lot of western countries um which it's a little bit surprising in the sense that um i would assume that the monetization would be stronger relative to what we saw from the revenue data um given this mix of countries but i don't know if you guys have any thoughts there and then certainly like lower percentage of videos and more networks uh anything you guys would read into this it's uh it's uh interesting the the focus on the us and the english-speaking countries rather than the saudi arabia and others which is uh definitely surprising to me at least but yeah it can be connected to what nemo said about the ip

yeah i think that their efforts are combined like a combined efforts of a brand in ua um you know they're probably going like stronger going banking countries where their ip is well recognized um you know having a strong mobile game helps helps their consoles gain sales as well probably so that that's why they're not investing a lot in tier three markets it could be that their game is not as performant in you know brazil and uh indonesia where where pubg garena free fire has a lot of players i would i would definitely say that the dau of call of duty is way smaller than what's the case with the other two games and and that the difference revenue comes from the diu not necessarily from rpi simply because you know they're focusing on western markets they're highly competitive that are in the end limited in terms of the audience like audience size um yeah you know how many shooter plays can you find in the u.s australia and canada

compared to like adding massive geos such as you know indonesia vietnam uh brazil et cetera et cetera so i think that that's the key difference when it comes to uh absolute revenue numbers between call of duty pubg and garina free fire call duties look definitely like heavily focused on the western markets and on countries where their ips were recognized and uh doing well right and to your point new i think it'd be interesting to see what their lower end device targets are i i think that you're probably right like if we were to look at it i would assume that that it requires higher higher end devices to run call of duty mobile relative to probably pubg and garina yeah one one way to look at that we could isolate just one country and try to understand what the rpi is in those countries between these three games there'll be like an interesting follow-up like you know let's say for sale again and compare rpis in brazil between these three games and install numbers and would you guys read anything into the fact that the they're they seem to

be running fewer video type ad creatives and are going for more networks is it because they are doing to your point nebo brand and performance or what is there anything we can read into that or no i'd love to see these little icons here like it's a little hard to see but i think they're just running a ton of smaller networks where you simply have to run uh static ads or you know social pedia cannot really analyze some of the ad formats on these kind of like less known networks and it does seem that like from the creators perspective relative to pubg i mean they're running so much more that maybe they're trying to scale their ua much more strongly than pubg and so they're they're they're kind of trying to max out uh ua spent so they have to tap more networks to get more scale it was that yeah it's a public company too like you know they probably have a defined budget that they have to spend each quarter

you know that that's also why you know like maybe they have a pretty aggressive spend they end up adding a bunch of networks versus scaling you know facebook more aggressively um could be the case could be that they are working with agencies i actually don't don't have a lot of insights in what what uh what activision team looks like nowadays um but that's that's my first guess and interestingly they seem to have scaled down in the you know call it you know august period here relative to pub g which um on the at least on the android side you know they they just kind of went crazy and here these guys are scaling down versus uh pub g which was scaling up their their android creatives yeah what's uh really a pity that we can't see uh the spent across the the ui channels because here we can see facebook at least i'm guessing that's the first

network so even if we say okay so facebook was the largest spender there there was the time when the facebook started to suck really the quality decreased quite heavily last year which was around september end of august and if you go back to pubg there was the the google ads on the first place so maybe they are scaling on the google ads rather than on facebook which would make a lot of sense because that was the opposite like google definitely the google quality definitely increased in the q4 last year okay and also if they pause on channels you'll definitely see fewer creatives um so that that's a little hard to read makes this a little hard to read okay and finally green a free fire um similar we're seeing changes in that june july kind of time frame and then they're kind of ramping up and ramping down so it's like um

certainly seems like the the narrative behind idfa deprecation have an impact makes sense um general story of having more android creators relative to ios here also seems to be true they're tapping fewer networks and interestingly i i didn't you know it seems like they actually have a strong penetration in u.s even compared to pub g mobile although a little less than call of duty mobile and some of the countries here make sense we know they're strong in brazil latin america and southeast asia indonesia vietnam but um anything that you guys would read into into this i think it's important to like add some historical context um here about guarana free fire uh this game was i believe number one like the top grossing game in brazil for a very long time uh like three four years at least they've been doing really really well in

uh tier two and tier three geos and i believe that in the last year or so or maybe the last two years they started focusing more on the us trying to break into like top 100 us games and i actually think that happened especially on android um i haven't chat recently but they finally managed to break into top person get the us and that's probably why they they've been so heavily focused on on the u.s market um i can check right now uh by the way nebo do you recognize the first icon there is it like audience network or that's obvious network yeah okay so audience network yeah basically you have 50 networks but three of them or maybe four of them it's still facebook basically because zodiac network instagram facebook news feed and it looks like messenger as well yeah ish so okay so maybe the overall number of networks is slightly different let me see what is the top pro what is their uh top grossing position

right now in the us uh it's actually their number 14 overall oh okay so and they made uh they made a huge uh you know huge jump in the last two years they were i i don't remember them being in top 100 uh so this this all comes from the last two years and and the ui efforts they did here right and mate to your point about the different networks here we have the the this nice look in terms of the different advertising platforms for pubg mobile call of duty and green of free fire certainly we're seeing a lot of facebook um oh yeah so yeah it's pubg it's definitely 35 is google ads okay so now it makes sense right right garina is like 80 facebook interesting yeah yeah i would assume garina would be very big on google ads i mean that makes a lot of sense to me but now there's like eight percent of the

of the overall spend going there yeah that's right okay maybe they're just focusing on mobile app install campaigns and low cpi i mean i wouldn't be surprised i think their audience is also slightly different it's probably younger younger players um you know that they can find on instagram and other true but then you know why wouldn't you run tiktokats i mean that's yeah you can you can get like four times lower cpi in in the u.s on tick tock yeah comparing to facebook and the quality is similar let's say these days yeah i assume like you know that depends on like social p does uh tracking as well whether they are attracting tick tock i think i saw it yeah i think the boss there definitely in the yeah that yeah so you know we we would need more information to kind of discuss this one uh but guys from magarina free fire don't hesitate to ping us we can uh we can

definitely help i can't i can't but okay i can i can i know a guy it's great any theories on why pubg is like um so so big on google relative to to the others yeah because i think that's that's normal yeah okay uh that's like when you're optimizing your ua campaigns this is what your mix looks like uh maybe not anymore but uh google used to be 30 40 for a very long time and now in my case uh it's even more for some games because well facebook as i said like definitely the quality decreased quite heavily you know i need to be very careful what i say because i already had the ban of my personal account on facebook so you didn't say anything but uh yeah like people said it's uh how your mix uh look like after

some time when you run ua you just lean more towards google right do you think the high concentration of uh greena in on facebook could be because of a a deal not sure most probably most probably not okay but also now that i think about this this could be just the number of creatives and not necessarily uh uh media spend i see and with most of these platforms like fungal you're not really running a hundred creatives it's more like uh five that are working really well and with facebook you kind of have to like iterate on creatives all the time because they their average kind of lifespan is very short right and it's similar with google like you know it's google you don't necessarily have to change creators more than once a week yeah um so i think that probably that's probably why the breakdown here is all yeah but it's true but also like with higher

spend you need more creatives so can you so they're correlated but not necessarily okay yeah exactly yeah just with facebook you need disproportionately more creatives yeah yeah i think that what's the case with one goal for example yeah yeah that's true okay so insights into popular creatives of these games and so here they're calling this scenario display of new items and livestream and kol i don't know what ko i know i know i know i know so okay with kol i know that because i started working with one um blockchain game and in kol in the the web 3 um phrase is the key opinion leader so basically an influencer ah okay influencers i'm not sure why it's like why it needs to be so different like yeah okay so yeah just say inflator that's it yeah because the the the web3 you know you need an abbreviation for everything

you want yeah that's true that's true yeah okay and i don't know i mean we could actually watch some of these but um maybe we could just watch this one um and how they are integrating livestream and yeah actually interesting because it's not like uh key opinion leader he here is ronaldo so it's not anyone they they found one of the most popular celebrities ronaldo probably has like more instagram followers than right they're like video than me for sure like not that much but you know a handful yeah uh so they're they're also going super broad they're so big and popular that they're they're not just in like pure ua anymore they have to kind of branch out of like pure ua efforts and work with uh you know uh brand ambassadors uh celebrities etc and i think ronaldo is in the game as well which is quite interesting yeah it was in the in the clip there right interesting and it certainly reflects their focus um

at least some of their primary focus on latin america uh i guess um you know and i know mate we talked about this before but um when when we look at the most popular creatives and i i don't know what you think about personas or motivations or themes or trends or things like that but when you think about you know creating popular creatives that resonate with an audience um and we see these different kinds of creators whether it's a focus on you know a specific personality or here i guess they're focusing on new items and i don't know what scenario is maybe i could play a bit of this to see what they're talking about but how do you think about coming up with different kinds of creatives that would resonate with with an audience yeah you always always have like multiple creative angles that you use on a regular basis so i mean this is just one of the angles that they use for for sure so they have this scenario then

they will most likely have also display the new new items they will have a lot of uh like crazy and weird uh uh gameplays um from the pubg mobile well we can see that already there yeah so i'm always trying to look at what you know competitors are doing that's one of the angles then or try to think a little bit crazy so for example i used johnny since in one of the one of the games i managed because it was like episode like uh game so the target audience was definitely very happy about me using johnny scenes in the in the video and uh and here with uh with ronaldo i guess uh they definitely want to go abroad with uh like a lot of football fans or like soccer fans as well so that's why they're using uh him in the in the creative so it's always about mixing and matching the the different creative angles

so you know i tried to have like at least like four different angles like yes personas whatever else but then now i'm trying to look at uh how the hyper casual games um look like and uh what kind of games are in top ranks and using their basically like mechanics and adapting it to the game i manage in the creatives and that's something that really broadens up the the the target audience as well right and i guess they uh so social peta has kind of looked at some of the other types of creatives here using story lines things like that and nebo i know i i recently had a chance to talk to bradley at seeing a bradley fuco and um definitely seems like there's a pretty interesting general approach in terms of having a structured process when it comes to coming up with creatives but um you know any any thoughts on some of the creatives you're seeing here for pub g

mobile or um just general advice in terms of coming up with creatives yeah i think what we're seeing here is uh something we probably talked about last time two years ago it's like targeting with creative um versus targeting with uh using actual targeting parameters um just trying to identify different personas and try to kind of bring the game closer to to those different types the only kind of caveat here is that for some games for certain genres this doesn't necessarily work um if you know having like super casual creative can lead to a pretty low retention which which is why you kind of have to balance the two and know like how far you can go with with your misleading or uh uh with your creativity but here i think because the game shooters are extremely popular you know they're you know when you think about game first game like most people played it's probably like quake or you know counter-strike etcetera etcetera like so um maybe super mario

but you know like these are these games are super accessible they're played by everyone so you can you can you know play around with different concepts and all kinds of interesting angles here quite a lot right um i mean maybe one of the other things too just kind of thinking about the use of creatives and kind of like the problem we saw before with to your point nebo about misleading creatives that sometimes you have a higher you know top of funnel conversion or like you know high ipm you know high app store conversion but then downstream the conversion ultimately because it was misleading me may not lead to a higher ltv or a higher you know kind of downstream um back-end metrics um with idfa deprecation you know how would you guys think about you using specific types of creatives that may increase top of funnel may increase your your ipm conversion but you just like

is there any way to think about what the ultimate impact of some of these creatives would be even even if the the you know sort of top of funnel metrics might be pretty good yeah that's why i use uh some kind of like fake creatives but i'm always using the assets from the game and trying to bring the gameplays uh or the cr the fake creative as close to the gameplay as possible so it's not like really fake as uh the famous uh player x fake creatives from back in the days yeah so there is definitely a middle ground that you can do you're still using those yeah i know i know i mean i believe we talked about this as well it's uh it's really again you know going after a different audience um and trying to find like uh the next 100 million users or a billion users with these creatives and you just need to understand like what's the impact of of running those creatives and you know

the number one thing everybody sees is lower retention but you know if we look at some hybrid metrics like cost per retained user or cost per payer then it could be more efficient to drive users that way than using gambling crates it's usually not the case but there are some when games have really high retention and they can kind of be played by anyone like shooter games you can actually run more misleading concepts and then just not optimize for cpi or early ross but optimize for you know cost per engaged user or retained user and then try to kind of monitor what their kind of retention profile looks down the road whether it's significantly different after seven days and then try to estimate the ltv and and you know what the kind of cpi targets are for this type of campaigns and efforts but in some cases i think with players it's more like you know they probably have a cpi target they they go crazy you know spend a lot of money for two three months and then they just pause everything until they find the next kind of successful concept because they know that one in a thousand users will pay

for the whole cohort um you just need to kind of understand the math behind it got it and then it looks like this kind of shows the different kinds of um creatives being deployed by format so image video and carousel i i think the text here is very small to read but anything that you guys would interpret from the the kind of mix of types of creatives that that are being deployed here well the castle is definitely used both on on facebook and then on iron source i think in the in the end card so i'm not sure it's it's pretty blurry honestly yeah it's hard to see and i mean those two graphs are complementary so uh it could be that just you know they paused campaigns for like a few days or they pause a certain channel that has more uh video creatives interestingly for like pub g mobile in

october it seems like on ios they ramped up so this is actually video so video got ramped up image plummeted and on the android side um you know just shortly thereafter looks like video plummeted and images skyrocketed so there's just kind of like an inverse relationship there between ios and android in terms of the mix of video versus images i don't know if there's any reason why they would do that or if you guys have any theories on that but uh that that's kind of interesting you know and i think the pubg um had the highest uh spend or well the highest portion of creatives on google ads so if they added a lot of um static images into the google ads campaigns and then that's how we see this like skyrocketing of the images in that time frame basically it seems like in

december at least on the android side this was starting to flip and this is yeah it was starting to like re-correct so i something happened in this sort of november october november december time frame yeah so they had the call with the with the google rap and said he or she said look you definitely need to use the static images in your in your campaigns oh wow okay let's let's do that yeah banners are crushing it more bad yeah and the 30-day quite threw me though yeah exactly all right call of duty mobile we did see there was a focus on the display of new types of items for new seasons um maybe this also has to do with um maybe having you know at least i i would guess uh potentially a focus on re-engagement when you're showing uh trying to show new items that are available in the game but i don't know if you guys have any any thoughts on

um on why call of duty would be using this type of creative in in terms of displaying items but yeah and then the popularity like it does seem like in terms of estimated impressions that there's like a big gap between these uh this one having 2.9 million versus uh this one maybe we can try to see why this one did not perform so well yeah there you have different durations as well um basically 24 days versus 86 days as well can't play those v1 okay also to your point yeah for for engagement definitely makes sense but also you know like for for ua and attracting new players you know it's it's new content you can you can use in the creatives it's a new creative angle why not to use it you know you already built the content so and sometimes they are using uh again like a licensed content yeah if you

remember like fortnight when they introduced marvel characters arena valor as well worked with dc you know sometimes they just have like you know new content that's different and unique and it kind of targets a different audience i mean if you remember like a legendary we did a helpo event yeah we're targeting hellboy so usually new content helps on both on both canal like ua and reengagement uh side of things and you know that's kind of like why you want new in the game pretty much just to kind of try to find a an incremental audience yeah oh this is this is uh interesting as well so this blue line is video this purple line is image and we it does seem like we're seeing this crisscross on platform and then you know like on android it is is this typical where you're you're just running one or the other primarily um i i i think this is just like the com comes from social pitas ability to

basically find these ads in the wild so that's why it's so you know i think something like a moving average would probably work better here than absolutely uh because i think it it's a little hard to interpret this because because of the so so much volatility but you know like in static images equal banners and like static ads uh such as like static interstitials etc etc and they're just not so common nowadays banners are but not with like facebook maybe with google and some dsps it depends on the game i mean for mobile shooters i'm not sure but definitely for some cooking games or casual games i used a lot of images and that something that works really well on facebook even and also static image cpms are lower so maybe in q4 they just want to run more static images versus premium video where they have to compete with brands uh even though brands cpms are not that high one of them

we saw more of a focus on these kind of influencer type folks we have uh you know kind of people speaking on on over the the ad so yeah maybe maybe that speaks to more of a uh competitive or well i i guess uh maybe not competitive but um maybe speaks to the fact that in these areas uh some of these influencers may have a disproportionate impact on on an audience i i know that at least on the pc market influencers have a huge impact in terms of like marketing user acquisition um we've seen that less mobile but maybe maybe mobile's starting to hopefully will will catch up later as well yeah one more thing i'd add is that they're probably trying to position themselves as an esports game and to maybe bring the game closer to to

younger twitch uh users and and you know players who play pc games uh that you mentioned because it is like a shooter game just played on mobile um a lot of advertisers tried this approach in the last five years like working with the influencers their companies like you know opera event they help you build these ads right so you know this is again like a fairly common strategy um a lot of folks did cameo ads i think that they probably saw those as well where you work with like a celebrity to get a shout out for a game so this is just like a common trend in the industry and uh i don't think it's particularly unique except for the ronaldo cristiano ronaldo ad yeah okay uh and then again to your point maybe there's not a whole lot we can interpret here in terms of the mix but here is the mix and finally looks like

tournaments are crowded expanding the audience for the game okay so it looks like they they do have like a um more of a like competitive esports focus for all three of these games and um and so i don't know if if you guys if there are other genres of games where this is important but uh when you guys think about esports for [Music] for for games do you guys have any thoughts on how important that aspect of the game is for you know just for the popularity of the games well hard to say i mean for shooters and pvp games definitely something that's really important but in terms of the marketing it's just uh one other marketing activity you know it's not directly ua related although it can have some effect but

not so huge right maybe it's it's more from the perspective of creating a motivation for for you know elder players to to remain and stay in the game by by showing them at you know like if they become very competitive that there are potentially rewarding retention and the potential to become you know to to get rich or something like that okay all right now i mean we spent uh a little bit of time maybe we can speed up a little bit so green of free fire max versus pub g new state smackdown let's see what what actually happened here all right so both of these games released relatively seems like around the same time so free fire max released september 28 2021 uh pubg news date november of 2021 um it seems like from at least from a creator's perspective we're seeing dramatically five five x more creatives at least

um on the pub g new state side relative to free fire max um we can see what we have here um from a downloads perspective what do we got so we've got a pretty healthy number of downloads so from initial launch looks like we've got 12 million and then wrapping down to seems like two million with the for a total of 50 million uh from a platform or from yeah from a platform perspective uh we've got you know a little over 3x on google relative to ios so certainly seems like free fire max is doing relatively well uh revenue wise um [Music] yeah so looks like a combined 37.2 million over [Music]

okay so this is over two months so that's pretty good i i wouldn't mind doing that much revenue in like in a couple of months uh and let's see how new state did so downloads wow 70 million uh so that's quite a lot um and actually interestingly it seems like we've got a lot more downloads on google so that that doesn't seem to um that doesn't seem to fit the story that um that that we're seeing with like regular pub g and regular free fire in terms of the the mix in terms of app store versus google so this is kind of interesting i wonder what's going on there it could be a strategy too right because garina absolutely crushed it on android and i think one thing that's really unique about

garina free fire is that they they were kind of operating in the in the blue in the blue ocean um uh because everybody was focusing on on whales and these like high value ios users kind of like what wish which might not be a great example but what which did with e-commerce they just focused on kind of lower household income um uh uh lower android like lower quality android devices to grow their per day business these guys did the same with with the game that simply worked on every single android device because there is there's a plenty of players which is there they don't there's not a lot of content that works on those devices and garina actually built a game that works on lower end android phones and built the massive business around it and i think both like call of duty and pubg like saw saw an opportunity there and and are trying to build games that are you know working or like more accessible for lower end device lowering device users

okay revenue wise um i would so looks like um six million compared to what would be c4 37 37 wow so uh from a revenue perspective um certainly uh greener freefire max has done um much better yeah well this is this is the thing uh everybody was talking about pubg new state really sucks in fact revenue shows exactly that yeah and if you look at if you like calculate rpis on android and ios you'll see a massive difference because of the massive difference in the number of downloads so it could be that they wanted to build a game that is huge in android but they kind of failed uh when you look at the revenue the monetization most probably is not that very well adapted to android devices and especially low-end devices so definitely seems like from a game

perspective uh this data would seem to indicate that there's something going on with the game but let's also look at the marketing uh so free fire max um compared to when we looked at the top games uh only 56 percent of ads are video type here it seems like um relatively lower amount of daily and peak daily creatives on both ios and android and looks like we have a huge focus on pakistan and um you know southeast asia here uh so that's kind of interesting why why why would there be 30 coming from pakistan any thoughts on that guys no idea i i have an idea but i'm not sure i'm i'm right um when they were releasing arena agarina free fire i think they did like

a slow rollout as well so it could be they just pushed the game in pakistan there was one of the soft launch countries and now they have significantly more dau there and that they just released the game in the us also it might be just again a number of creatives and and they might be paying two cents for an install and spending tons of money in practice or like driving tons of installs in pakistan for you know right do you think that the relative mix of few of a less percentage of video could do could have to do with the fact that they're pushing into some of these countries where maybe video may not be as popular yeah could be or not yeah it's not about popularity it's more like cannot really there's no like uh data is very expensive uh and and you know you can you can just like render static ads on lte whatever and looks like pubg new states similar in terms of a much lower percentage of

video type but here we're seeing a much higher percentage in terms of u.s saudi arabia russia germany so certainly country mix is much different here and looks like they're pushing a lot more creatives at least on the android side than what we saw in green of free fire so just kind of looking at both of these games do you guys have any high level thoughts in terms of whether any interpretation in terms of what they did and as far as like in any thoughts in terms of like at least high level whether you think these strategies were correct or not or how you may have changed things well i have one comment like for the pubg news state the court like the u.s here is uh like 9.5 percent and uh i'm not sure if that's translated very much to the actual revenue so i mean that's very very poor marketing activity there i

mean you know you're running in the most expensive country out there and you should definitely focus on some or other tier one tier two or even tier three countries where you can actually grab some money as uh the garina free fire did or the new game i think there are two different schools of ua as well or marketing here uh at play um garina is still a startup though it probably has a few thousand people um and and you can see that they're probably optimizing to work like you can see they're optimizing traffic it's not just you know we're planning to launch in these eight countries this is the budget let's spend the money and see what comes on the other end of this kind of equation um and and you can see that with with the original game as well how they move the budget what is the platform split etcetera etcetera just they are optimizing they have certain goals and they're optimizing towards those goals and

they seem to be somewhat successful at it with with pubg i feel like it's the brand plays a much bigger role than uae it's a huge brand it's like it's a game of you know huge companies behind this game and and i think they definitely have a different approach it's not necessarily performance first when it comes to launching these games which is why you know the revenue might not be following the the install volume um in nebo mate we're seeing that you know end of end of the year all the creed has kind of dropped down for both both uh both companies does that have to do with like the app store freeze or how would you interpret you know it's q4 that's a normal q4 uh it's happening always every year every other brand's and e-commerce are just pushing before christmas and well after christmas as well nowadays um and like this year um there is this like term q5 which was uh

invented by facebook so everybody spend a lot of money there because they say like the the cpms drop in this q5 uh by 30 which is starting in 27th of uh december yeah so [Music] yeah and then until 14th of january so and like there that's the time where you should spend more this year i mean it was even worse than the whole q4 in general so uh that's maybe what we saw there because they tried or they even like stopped all the ua because it was super expensive anyway okay and i think both of them as they were like doing launches they just scaled things down by the end of the year okay got it and here it looks like the advertising platforms for green of free fire um in terms of this mix and i i assume it has to do with um to

your point nebo from before number of creatives anything surprising for you here um it correlates with the number of static images i think the the google there uh definitely has the biggest share of the creatives which can be again static mostly yeah we're seeing i don't know why they didn't show unity ads here and this is estimated ad impressions okay cool um and pub g new state i mean pubg is like 80 facebook yeah yeah yep which again tells tells a lot about how the launch was performed done yeah assuming these numbers are accurate obviously right okay and then uh insights also similar to when we looked at the top games the

popular creatives from pubg news state um types of creators the pursuit of computer version of the game's reductiveness and heavy combat stimulate users adrenaline soaring feeling all right okay well let's look at the one that performed the best so this one has 16.2 million impressions hopefully this thing will play they might be just a game pla a trailer yeah okay this one might be kind of long yeah by the way i need to write okay so we kind of get a sense of what that's more like a movie-like version of um of the game more like a trailer to your point nebo uh we can play those over here hey guys okay i guess i need to i need to run i wrap up because uh my my daughter here and uh she's already screaming so i need to okay

all right well thanks mate i know we ran a little long i think we've got three more slides so maybe nebo and i can just wrap wrap it up but um perfect all right catch you later mate thank you very much guys for having me thank you all right and let's see just the two of us yeah any thoughts on these should i uh do you want me to play any or should we just roll on yeah we do again similar you know a similar comment i had before i think most of these are trailers really they want to showcase new gameplay uh that i'm pretty sure tencent is huge on the pubg brand in general they care about the brand they care about you know this franchise they want to grow it in the years to come and that's why they're focusing heavily on on on the brand side of things on the visual side of the game etc and not necessarily on on ua performance yeah just a quick note on that um nebo i think pubg new state is crafton's

version relative to pub g being like uh 10 cents version okay yeah yeah that's the part i didn't know yeah yeah and so that that's something we didn't talk about but yeah i i do think that that was also a potential headwind for pub g new state is that as as crafton was kind of trying to market and launch their game i i think 10 cent likely competitively advertised you know pubg relative to pubg new state so yeah that's quite interesting i'm wondering for both games like you know whether there's some cannibalization going on so how you met how you manage you know promoting um how promoting two two games from the same franchise at the same time it's not a small feat it's like there's a lot of things you need to think about like am i gonna target only like turn players or am i going to target like a different audience with this game because you know

they could easily cannibalize the main product and i'd like to like look more into that and understand what's going on right and what one thing to to that point nebo is that pubg mobile versus pubg new state they are two separate games relative to green of free fire max which actually connects back into to the original green a free fire game as well but they do have two builds right it just probably the username is the same right um yeah i'm not i'm not sure exactly how it works but i i do think that you know any progress that you've made is shared to some degree and and the user existing user base is is kind of um you know you can play against other players and things like that they make sense i mean they just need more new content for it you know churned audiences and like all players and it makes absolute sense to release a new build every little while but keep things the same in in one way or another um i mean we can skip this part it's like a little hard to to analyze um

maybe the more most interesting part is it seems like they started on android um much earlier and and then ramped up ios right yeah again they they did drive significantly more installs on android as well right um and i wouldn't be surprised if their target was going growing every fire and they just wanted to try to like you know get you know grow their market share there first right so strategically to your point nebo maybe what they were thinking is pubg new state is their response to garina free fire exactly they were actively trying to target android and then they they lit up ios later yeah yeah that's interesting okay because it's it's a huge opportunity again garina free fire is probably i don't even know but i wouldn't be surprised if they like made over a billion dollars so far or you know hundreds of millions of dollars for sure i think you showed that in the beginning so um you know the game is doing it really well it's a huge opportunity for you know

someone who can execute a fps game well on mobile yeah and i'm not surprised there is more and more content in this uh genre yeah and i i think that also speaks to like even when we think about like not even green garina or pub g but fortnite i remember when they first launched like they they were certainly a top grossing game game did really well but what if fortnite had done a separate sku for android for lower end devices because at that time when they launched you know out of you know the top 100 grossing games they might they might have been the top in terms of you know revenue but in terms of device performance or the ability to be compatible with lower end devices they were number 100 out of 100 in terms of like you know of not being very compatible yeah i think that's exactly the blue ocean kind of strategy uh right briefly mentioned it's and that's an insight

that you don't really have when you work and operate in in the western markets um that you know there is like a ton of players who don't have you know tier 1 devices and they have some money they want to spend or they just want to see you know you can monetize them with ads um it's just like a lot of people don't really focus on this segment of the market you know when you're fortnight and you like when you're epic invest billions with ours in fortnite you want to focus on you know premium users and premium devices because that's where the majority of revenue comes from but you know there's this whole other world uh like hundreds of millions of players who want to play and they have some money to spend but right the the math is a little different you know the numbers like are a little different and you kind of have to know how to operate in that world uh and that's why this game came out i think arena is from they're from singapore in thailand but they're from apac for sure um and i'm not surprised they were the ones who executed this all right uh so here the

create types of creators game modes game props are constantly updated bringing new experiences to all kinds of players so it looks like they do for max they have a focus on kind of guns and equipment very similar to how call of duty mobile had a focus on different on guns and things like that and i this is the last slide but here we see that um kind of the the opposite of it's interesting to see when we look back at pubg new state focusing first on android and going after ios freefire max had the opposite it seems like they're going after ios and then and then turn and then lighting up android later yeah yeah i mean it's the same for them now like their goal is to get into like top 10 grossing on ios i mean maybe they're getting really close to that so right they have enough money to execute that so so i'm not surprised uh can you just show one video before we wrap up and the previous slide um just the last one um this one what's

interesting here is is i think the color scheme is very different to to the original grain of free fire but i may be wrong it's very bright it's colorful it looks like fortnite into a sense um this is again you know an accessibility play you just want to make the game look like a very fun and interesting game to play because that helps on the on the creative front as well versus having like a dark themed uh fantasy or even like a modern combat type of art which is not necessarily the most accessible so i think they could that they probably wanted to make the game even more casual and go like go stronger in is where you know most of the revenue it is coming from in general uh at least in the western world and and it could be the dead ones they're going to play here right and i'll stop talking here yeah and interestingly they you could see they deliberately made like the vehicles and the guns read so to make it pop and stand out yeah

and in the creative but um all right yeah so interesting uh it definitely seems just based upon the data that um free fire is going after they're they're trying to come from like you know emerging markets um android lower end device to higher and going after you know um more uh you know kind of like higher end countries and things like that uh pubg was clearly going the other way um from what we've seen from a revenue perspective it seems like green of free fire max had had a bit more success and yeah it's very interesting to see this this all play out um and that is it that's the end of the presentation for our audience thanks for sticking with us uh if you have any sorry no worries anytime i i mean they really liking doing these as you know um yeah you know i miss are you a coffee talks it's just a little harder to to you know make time for it for like uh

our little podcast but uh yeah if you want to know more about coffee from today it's uh it's verve which is out of santa cruz okay yeah i had a cerberus myself but um anyway um cool okay and for the audience you know so this presentation was created by socialpedia peta they are a you know marketing intelligence company i i i didn't even realize that they had like um you know like kind of revenue and download data but certainly i i know they've got a lot of information on creatives and things like that um so check check them out and yeah as always nebo it's great having you on uh great having mate on and please do come back for another ua coffee talk in in the future yeah we we all review ua coffee talks to our audience so yeah let's definitely do more of these all right cool all right and with that to our audience we will catch you next time bye

[Music] you