Meta Aggregated Event Measurement, Harry Potter flop in the West, Admon apocalypse tests (#73)

to be like significantly more casual because it's just so big like just just looking at the load out of what these it's like super super big you have all these things that you can go you even have like the dance club where other like you can you can dance literally with other players and they can like that's in the books man of course in the books uh where you you have this kind of a mini game where you need to like time press buttons and you then have ex this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast to and a half Gamers sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously okay so uh hello everybody uh welcome this is session number 73 I'm Maven m

I'm Felix Rob and I'm Doctor there we go of course I'm I'm I'm mat L cherish but I was just trying to make a little bit fun so uh today we're actually talking about Felix running tests I'm uh I'm going to talk about uh Facebook aggregated event measurement yakob is going to talk about Harry Potter huge flop but before we do that it's been a while so a lot of things happened so we went to Korea with Felix we actually got into the newspaper and uh yeah we attended amazing amazing uping event anything you want to add up to to this Felix yeah we also had our own seminar uh which was organized uh by un Ino from actionfit and sensor Tower uh we had over 200 signups for only like 100 seats so it was uh quite a cool surreal

experience uh so yeah we're very much looking forward uh coming back to Korea and next time we're actually going to bring doctor Remar as well uh don't worry he's not a real doctor he's only got a PhD in philosophy but you know psych psychology oh all right sorry almost like almost like a dentist and uh yeah also yeah almost like being doctor dentist too but uh also I just want to do a quick apology for our dear listeners because uh our dear co-host Maven m got kicked by a horse so he's super slow to reply during the podcast today but he's joining us live Tav T oh you almost got it right so yeah I'm in my hometown I'm spending the whole week here with my uh with my daughter and the [ __ ] internet is terrible I don't know like how I could play uh Counter Strike when I was uh actually young because this is this is actually my room when I was a a little boy never mind never mind maybe maybe

you played it through land maybe you no I don't most probably know uh anyway so uh a few things uh thank you for sharing all the comments and feedback uh because uh it's just amazing the lightest really really funny comment was uh I I got it through Linkedin and uh this guy said that I'm the I'm me m Maven mat is the people's favorite and Felix is not because I F his users and Felix rapes them like first of all what the [ __ ] and then second of all like these are super funny super it's very funny but let me put the record straight here ad monetization does not rape users uh what we simply do is provide a mechanism for Publishers to monetize non converting users on I while also providing an Avenue to show ads so our ecosystem

works so not raping tell that to all the supercell games that died because of those sentences why do you bring up all all the time the the supercell games when when we talk about ads because they don't have ads in them why didn't you bring up any of your uh Korean games exactly oh yeah of course they don't have that and we'll bring a Chinese game today no ads there also don't worry yeah yeah doesn't work anyway so uh we have actually major major Milestone we just hit 3,000 subscribers hey thank you very much for the support you are [ __ ] amazing we love you please share the podcast with your friends industry colleagues everybody good dogs and kids obviously because they love it but uh really thank you for the support we could see in South Korea we'll most

probably see you in in other cities as well please keep sharing the the feedback the last feedback we got was for the the South Korean episode and obviously it was live episode so the sound quality wasn't that great and immediately the first comment in our Spotify was the sound is ridiculously bad I was like yes I know so thank you for saying that we'll make try to make it happen uh or make it better on at Gamescom which is the next news we are actually hosting a [ __ ] party on Tuesday night at Gamescom and we're doing that with singular and our very very big friends at mobile action so we are going to have uh a magician a DJ and these two guys live podcast and I was thinking about

one extreme thing which might be that if you send me a message or yakob or Felix there will be a like a competition and we will kind of pick one of you and you will be on stage with us okay so send us a message if you want to be on stage and we will pick one of you see you [ __ ] there it's going to be amazing can wait and also if you want to register it's going to be the link is going to be in the uh in the show notes and then Felix I think uh yeah we'll start we'll start with admon because it's the most important thing out of any episode no no no no no no no no no no no it's not okay so I have been in my little admon dungeon running my little admon tests this week uh I have as you both know for a while um been standing on my little Soap Box uh

shouting about a lot of things uh but mostly I've been shouting about how the admon world is heading for a great big turd sandwich after October 31st this year when Google removes placements moves to bidding and shuts off addex demand for Google ad manager resellers big caveat here is that the turd sandwich has to be consumed by Publishers and not by UA managers looking at you Ma so one of my clients this week was like hey Felix uh you know this big great T sandwich that we're going to have to eat in October uh it would be great for planning purposes to know how big it will be so okay fine that's not maybe an exact quote but I'm paraphrasing but either way they wanted to test switching off Google ad manager and admob placements on one of their titles to measure what the exact impact will be in October oober so they wanted

to dive on this metaphorical sword and sacrifice their revenue right now in the name of admon science so I started doing this exactly what we did on Monday uh that's five days ago now when we're recording this so I can share some early results here and just like expected it's pretty not great uh on an ecpm basis uh banners take the Brunt and are down 20 25% on ecpm on IOS and Android on Android ecpm on interstitials and rewarded videos they're down by 5 to 8% on iOS ecpm for inter and intertial and rewarded ads are down 2 to 6% so pretty not great but if you have been an avid listener to the admon section of this podcast episode you know that ecpm as a metric gets way

too much attention uh in ad monetization and I'm going to ask my dear podcast co-host why that is because it reflects how much money you make instantly so it's it's not the best metric to use because we care about ad revenue and AD revenue is just ecpm plus fill right so ecpm is a mere component of what we care about so not the end goal so I'd gladly take lower ecpm if it means Phill goes up uh so you should only care about adarp that's what you should be looking at so what are the adarp number saying so these are the real numbers that you should care about so Android banners uh are down by 11% interstitials down by 7% rewarded videos are down by 15% on iOS down by 10 and a half percent on Banners intials are down by 3.5% and rewarded ads on iOS is about even so

somewhere between if you're looking for one figure if someone asks you what the turd sandwich will look like uh it will be 5 to 12% on an adarp hour basis uh that's how much off we are right now so for pubs running aggressive UA and that are reliant on inapp Revenue uh with small profit margin this hurts quite a lot and if you're one of these clever ad monetization naughty Nellies who's taking part in ad mob refreshes the drop is going to be considerably worse so that's what you should count on uh we're going to be running this test for another uh 10 days so I'll just report back also in like two episodes time what the actual drop will be uh but this should be kind of a little you know uh Canary in the coal mine for anyone who's wondering what to expect with your ad Revenue in October what should we do yeah there the question tell me there's a you can do yeah I mean you can't kill

everyone but the first thing I would like to say that you can do is hope to God that Google figures out how to make their bidder a lot better because right now you know it's not looking very good if you remove it they still have five months to make it better uh you know if you're hopeful like I think you know they will divert a lot of that adex demand from Google ad manager into the bidder so you could say that it will get better but right now it does not look like it's very good and uh yeah all there's a bunch of things you can do uh I'm testing a bunch of stuff with a bunch of clients I think I'll have a solution and how to make even more money at the end of this it's just simply one of these hackers are closing with a gam so you just need to find new ones uh I'll know maybe from the like business perspective so uh Google closing this means they will make more money right yeah or less 100% you can't fault them for it right it's just them uh optimizing for their own balance

sheet yeah that's the answer then like why would the the other options then work if Google make makes more money then they don't give a [ __ ] no not at all I mean they'll probably make more money now anyway right so yeah yeah because I'm thinking about it from the perspective of let's say fingerprinting so everybody saying oh well fingerprinting uh it's going away SDK networks are going to die it's like well no of course no like they make a lot of money their in their business kind of uh few they need to make this work so I think uh but this that's uh that's as DK networks not Google and gam if gam was you know trying to make more money then they would be trying to make this work but I guess uh I think you misunder understanding gam is like a tool right so Google ad manager is another Google tool what's actually

going to be like taken off is the addex demand which is a component of Google ad manager demand and that's the one that's being taken out for resellers right so resellers can still push in other direct demand into kind of their networks but yeah the addex demand which is taking up the brunt of Google ad manager resellers demand okay that's what being that's what's being cut off okay okay cool right so so so stuff's just getting worse and you can do [ __ ] about it it's worse for Publishers easy I mean it's great for Google wor for Publishers yeah I look say ah well you're going to make more money yeah fine let's just cut this off short to medium term we going to make less money but and now we know roughly by how much okay was the was the kind of a long-term uh prediction here like it's just going to be worse and worse or I mean on the like not Google people side the publishers sry you mean yeah like I

I expect Publishers to make yeah like I said now uh anywhere between 5 to 12% less money after October 31st but there has to be a solution afterwards I mean like yeah there has to be a Sol there the solution I'm testing a bunch of hypothesis now with a bunch of clients on what to do to fix it but it's just a bit too soon to say it's always like oh well this is dead this is you know this is ending like they're closing will be fine like where the companies will still live it's just like it's going to suck for a while yeah company will still live but not all of exactly not all of them yeah yeah that's true that's true okay well whatever okay uh anyway yeah I can yeah yeah thank you thank you very much uh so there's this uh thing which was kind of appearing in my uh discussions for a while which is called aggregated event measurement so first I did didn't know like what the [ __ ] is happening but then

uh I was trying to learn a little bit more in and and trying to read more of the like Facebook um guidelines it's still very unclear how you can make this work but okay this is a new thing from goog uh from Facebook and they say you don't need to use apple scan at Network and conversion schema you can use this solution to actually get almost a real time data get this Apple privacy almost real time data it's [ __ ] nonsense okay whatever Let's uh let's talk about like what exactly is uh is this so it's whatever protocol that allows measurement on the app events using iOS 14 and later devices so they are actually introducing this updates to the app campaigns it was uh live back in like like a two or three weeks months

ago on VB now it's actually rolling out on app uh app campaigns which is good for us and uh these are the changes that uh actually uh you can see so the aggregated measurement expanded to the app campaigns and now you can instead of as I said instead of app scan Network you can use this and configure the app event campaigns which are going to be available for you but I've tried I looked 10 10 different accounts only one is available so but I will get to that so iOS 14 campaigns that use these aggregated event measurement campaigns for attribution will have this re almost real time reporting this can help you and this is I'm quoting this from the the guidelines from Facebook which obviously is kind of farfetched but it anyway it can help you adjust the ad strategy more quickly I don't know I what what what is this I I I still don't

understand what what this is it's uh it's the attribution methodology from Facebook so they are using their own Facebook SDK which I want to talk about later to actually measure the iOS 14 campaigns so if you don't have the SDK you're basically [ __ ] so it's almost the same as Firebase and Google so if you have Firebase and you use Google everything is amazing you can use uh fire base for even tracking and it can help you improve the the performance and everything else here the same is happening on Facebook so this like aggregated even measurement for campaign attribution they have different uh attribution uh windows so on scan you see only 20 first 24 hours this says oh well you can use day one or day seven and you can even now well they they bring this back like you can actually compare the attribution Windows between

day one day seven and day 28 I mean nobody knows how it works yet but like it's is it to be confused cuz I have no idea what's going on man I'm super confused isn't this like yeah like we're going to break all the [ __ ] that Apple did last year and we just have this amazing thing that solves it like sounds to me exactly yeah yeah exactly like we will we are solving the pr privacy issues everything is fine you you just need to implement Facebook SDK everything else is fine and okay back to Kumbaya kbay okay yeah Kumbaya kumb of course everything everything is is okay if you if you remember when the iOS changes happened Facebook said you can't run Audience Network on iOS 14 campaigns yeah now with this you can run Audience Network as well nice well hello well hello hello so there the this like very

interesting and sneaky thing nobody knows how it works I literally looked at 10 different accounts they have this like thing when you can check uh if you're eligible 10 like nine out of 10 nothing because they didn't have the Facebook SDK but they Facebook claims I will get to it where is it I have it here so is is the fan SDK enough the Facebook audience Network or meta Audience Network SDK enough you need another one you need to have the Facebook Facebook SDK that supports iOS 14 campaigns that's [ __ ] why didn't have that one in one s in of course it's man of course it's [ __ ] and and here this so you can use uh Facebook SDK you have to verify the the Deep link which is like super easy you can you can verify because you just click on uh your push notification and then just go to to your game verified immediately but you can't

use older version of the Facebook SDK than uh 16. and if you're using MMP which almost everybody is using they say look if your MMP hasn't adopted the aggregated event measurement just contact your MMP and request that they they adopt event measurement if they don't plan to adapt it you can always use the Facebook asdk instead it's like what so it's pretty much them saying abandon your MMP and Trust our numbers instead exactly exactly and the thing is like they're using modeled conversion modeled conversions which is [ __ ] [ __ ] and the thing is here what they say oh if your MMP has adopted the aggregated measurement you are good but the MMP needs to be the latest SDK blah blah blah blah blah blah blah it's it's crazy so I that

one that's what I wanted to say UPS is saying you don't need to do anything you don't need to do anything it's already already live I have five accounts man I have five accounts with UPS Slayer zero eligible zero like because thek okay then I think I I still don't know like what you need to actually change because it's it's super confusing then I was like okay well uh then I I loged in adjust I was like huh there is this toggle which you can do and there is just aggregated even measurement you can toggle it on great so adjust it's good then Singler saying well you know generally it's not recommended to have Facebook SDK live in your game and single SDK at

the same time it's like okay great because it can cause conflicts between aggregated event measurement and scan measurement unless it's properly done it's like what Jesus [ __ ] Christ this is so hard to implement honestly I spent two weeks trying to actually implement it into like few campaigns I uh I was successful in one in one account out of let's say like that because was that because of operator error or was it because of the tools just just asking just asking it was because of the Facebook [ __ ] SDK so honestly this is just like a lot of [ __ ] but okay what what can you do you can either actually implement the Facebook SDK alongside the uh MMP you

have and just only send well there's the thing you can only send uh one event either from Facebook SDK or MMP because if you send from both you're going to see double counting of the purchases and revenues because you're sending it from MP and Facebook SDK so you can only choose one and they're like how can you how can you actually know like what to choose Facebook says this is going to improve your numbers by 20% It's like because they're making the numbers exactly it's the same thing that I mentioned in the in the newsletter I said oh well I improved the numbers by 36% and then at the end of the end of the newsletter I said I totally made it up because yes this totally made up number like they have nothing uh uh to base this on but okay whatever so they have like different the moral of the story is it if if your performance on your campaign starts dro just start measuring the campaigns

yourself and then say like trust me bro 20% better yeah trust me bro exactly trust me bro it's better the thing is so how can you how can you see if you are actually eligible for these type of campaigns you need to you need to just go to the events manager data sources and then to the settings tab which there's like a huge button which says check eligibility and you just you just check if you are eligible for uh events up mobile app installs or value so like out of all the all the the accounts I was only eligible for mobile app installs and they say maybe you're not eligible because the last 30 days of data it's not enough so you you don't have enough data it's new thing maybe it's going to change but I I don't buy that I don't buy that so you can you can uh you can actually check that it's it's super easy uh and then uh what I wanted to say is you have this scan versus this

aggregated event measurement you you can't have both of these measurements live at the like in one campaign so let's say you're running us scan campaign you can't run up event measurement campaign in the in the US because you already have one campaign so if your campaigns are actually performing well don't even bother if your campaigns are not performing well start talking to your MMP first and then obviously Facebook rep as well because I think still this can be really interesting because I started doing these mobile app install campaigns where uh I was eligible immediately I could see installs if you if you use scan conversion uh schema you need 72 hours to actually see the First Data coming in which sucks obviously so I guess like there is something that uh can help UA managers

in this aggregated event measurement but it's still very very confusing very confusing and also uh I see you you unmuted yourself Felix I have a I think you have a question I hope so no no questions no you don't okay I I have a question so let me let me sum this up so Facebook is trying to get in your bed and saying that your MMP [ __ ] use mine on the premise that you can use this new [ __ ] that I invented based on on nothing or statistical modeling out of thin air which says I'm going to solve all your problems so let me kick out the MMP that you have and trust me bro yeah trust me bro really eloquent basically yeah that's that's hilarious very good and you know like meta has this has his reputation to be a really trustworthy company so yeah why don't you remove that impartial MMP yeah and then trust trust the Zuck oh exactly I was like oh thank you Mark like this uh makes my life so much easier thank you very much now so on the

other hand like after after the sumary wait after this uh like uh summary there is also like the because it really ties into the like how trustworthy Facebook can be they started rolling out Facebook uh scan 4.0 for like all of the developers man it just [ __ ] up the whole uh reporting to almost like everybody so I was looking in different uh different accounts five accounts bananas number so you have all like Impressions the same CTR the same conversion the same installs the same CPI 10x instead of five 50 I was like what the [ __ ] is happening here and then I ask around like yeah yeah you know this is just because of the scan for for .0 is been rolled out they said the

reporting is going going to be bad but I was like that this bad oh my God so so good so yeah trust Facebook that's the that's the summary guys thank you if you have any questions regarding the the aggregated event measurement let me know uh and if you have any solutions as well please let me know because this is just like a a new thing everybody's uh yeah oh man it's ridiculous so from uh from one wizard with glasses to another wizard with glasses yeah Mr doctor let's go I guess uh time time for some PhD [ __ ] stuff PhD [ __ ] oh my God uh yeah honestly uh we're going to talk about the Harry Potter that's that is the way put magic spell on your spell wizard you we're playing Harry Potter here we go there we go yeah let me let me in the meantime uh

yeah talk a little bit about the market first then the game so this is uh let's say this year this has been a little bit more successful regarding Harry Potter because of wait what are you talking about you're going to talk about Harry Potter's new release right yeah yeah a lot of Harry Potter things yeah what are you talking about so Harry Potter as an IP had the better year this year because there was the PC game release which sold like bananas because there's no other Harry Potter Hogwarts Legacy that's on PC but just saying uh what I'm going to talk in detail now is the Harry Potter magic awaken from ntis which released in China before and now has finally come to West and we are going to talk in hard detail why it's not really working I guess as they expected but to get some real comparison like what do you mean it's not going pretty well so let's talk like how the other games regarding

mobile Harry Potter games are fairing uh in the Western Market so the oldest one to compare through is the Hogwarts mystery one which is actually pretty close to it regarding the core gameplay because hogw mystery also has this it's mainly that kind of exploration element and you're going through the story and there's like energy mechanic where it just like complete stuff and everything so it's a little bit more similar to this one but uh yeah it's like let's say not really that that usual kind of a I I wouldn't know if there's like a similar genre here it's pretty much this kind of like story exploration narrative game uh it's from Gem City uh that's owned by net marble and all together it was uh released uh 2018 January and ALT together it made already 340 million so that's that's there then we have the Harry Potter puzzles and spells from Zinga which was

released in March 2020 and for a mat three game this is going pretty well it already went through 200 million plus uh lifetime revenue and it's still going pretty strong it's going something like 4 million a month still the Hogwarts mystery one is going around 3 million a month so currently the Zinga M3 Harry Potter Team game is like the biggest one by Revenue at least if our favorite data tools are correct they like they're not yeah so take it with a giant grain of salt I would say maybe an salty Iceberg anyway so that brings us to this amazing game as you can see here which you can actually fly in the game on a broomstick which I haven't seen before is this a mobile game that you're porting again and cheating uh yeah of course I'm cheating on my emulator as always but to be honest the scale of this game is pretty much like Tria a scale like you have so

much stuff that you can do in this like it's the usual kind of Asian mobile game which is super kind of over stuff with features so yeah let's say um yeah so this brings us to to numbers of this bad boy which everybody had like giant expectations because when it launched in September 2021 it actually went super big and gross in first month something around 70 million in first month then it of course dwindled as the usual kind of a revenue going down but it's currently stabilized at something like one one and a half million a month in Asian countries so I don't know if we see all the revenue from from China like all these kind alternative app stores but like it's doing that pretty I would say yeah big decline but before it already grows all together something like if we count all

the like different stores and everything just main one in China is 200 million plus already so if I count all the like what is this taiane version or like these other versions or whatever versions were like 220 or something like that so that's there um so pretty much on the same scale as the Harry Potter match three game so everybody was expecting this to kind of blow up the West especially in this year because the Harry Potter IP was pretty big uh and it didn't actually happen so compared to that 70 million a month launch in Asian countries the Western version of this game which exactly looks the same to be honest I don't think so there has been any kind of a westernization or like any kind of big modification to it it looks exactly the same as I saw it on before like you know gameplay videos in 2021 so the game grows 4 million a day per first month per first month

for first month so 70 to four W yeah it's not really doing that well so the the original one oh let's say the Chinese version is still doing something like I don't know 50k 60k a day or something and the the Western version is doing something like up to like 100k or 80k 133k yeah yeah something like that uh you need to down down subtract some of those but yeah pretty much is in heavy decline is in heavy Decline and seems like a flop if you compare it to 70 to 4 million and you know we all know it's just downhill from there so the Chinese or let's say the Asian downhill is much higher than this one so why did it not really work because we don't really want want to bring here the successor bias

where every game that we bring on the podcast make [ __ ] loads of money then everybody think it's like so easy let's talk about why this game really exactly yeah so let's talk why this game really didn't fair that well uh let's start with actual the main core gam playay so you have this exploration part as I'm like browsing here with the broomstick around hogwards but actually let's go into the like main core gameplay which this whole thing is based about which is uh to be honest a more hardcore version of clash Royale and this is uh I would say the biggest kind of offputting factor regarding the like Western audience I would guess because the game is very very cish I would say it's even more core than Clash Royale I'll show you why because they're just like imagine Clash Royale and you just add more options and more strategy and more tactics into it har Potter

IP yeah of course you had the Harry Potter IP so how this works that you have the arena and you are actually present in the arena you can even move in the arena because you have the steps cards which means you have a limited number of kind of a changing of the movements I can walk to the half of the arena and cannot walk to her Arena but I can still move because I'm in the like beginner leagues it's like still kind of very easy now see she already use some ability and I can like get out of it so this is like one level of the strategy the other one is the usual Clash Royale one where I summon stuff like summons whatever we here we have the like Hogwart statues or we can do a dragon or whatever I have some legendary cards which then automatically attacks the opponent and he pretty much again can move and position himself and like do stuff in the meantime cast spells like let's throw poison at her or let's summon a heal healer of ourselves or so on so forth so you can see that this can

get pretty messy and there's lot of things that you need to cover so this is pretty much their core gaml because every kind of even during the exploration you are able to play some of those kind of famous scenes like for instance when I before I got here I was playing Dumbledore when he defeated Voldemort in Ministry of magic or I was playing Ron Weasley when he defeated the troll in the like toilet spoiler alerts yeah nobody nobody cares nobody cares yes so what do you get out of these guess what do you get out of these keys and what do these wait wait wait wait wait wait wait there's no doubling of keys CU of rewarded with rewarded odds no rewarded that that's why the game is not doing well yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah so of course what they do they have gacha they have Goa of course of course so let me let gacha gacha I'm very big gcha the Asian gacha pools and it's kind

of mixed um so if we go into my deck uh it's actually Bigger Than The Clash Royale one because Clash Royale deck has eight cards which is enough already to kind of create some deep strategy here you have actually three more cards which are the Companions and they go into separate slots these are pretty much like the support characters in the top row you have all your kind of a spells and whatever summons and units like pretty much this is the typical Clash Royale part but on top of it they added the companions on top of it they added the positioning of your character during the core game play like imagine that Clash Royale Towers like the king in the towers would be moving himself and evading abilities and positioning him and whatever whatever something and on top of it the Spells themselves are kind of complicated to begin with because let's say they definitely want to adhere to the fantasy and like whatever like the Harry Potter thing is doing for instance let's just take the Unicorn so

unicorn actually doesn't like summon a basic unicorn that attacks your enemy it actually summons the injured unicorn that was in the movie and that it gradually recovers health and only once is is full health he does his power attack whatever whatever something so best thing would be to combo him with some kind of a healing unit or whatever to can you know get him in full force or something so again the does work is it super complex or what it's very complex for the audience if we compare it to something like the other games which are very very streamlined because Hogwarts mystery Hogwarts puzzle and spells are very very easy and very very casual and also the PC game the one the Hogwarts Legacy one that was released is very very casual like this game has actually more tactics and strategy than the PC game like PC game is very easy PC game is like do some riddle here do some spell there flipendo flipendo AV kadavra

everybody's dead that's it here you actually need to strategize you actually need to build your deck properly you have like a leak system would you say that uh this IP is not fit uh for this core game play because it's too hard it's too and audience as well it's too Niche because the the audience of uh Harry Potter IP is more casual players yes but it is casual in the west that's why this thing grows 70 million on lunch in China that's the important thing it works in China it worked pretty well it 200 million you don't want to make 200 million game everybody would like that wait a second wait a second so it's it's well the thing is like it's not casual invest it's just like it's hardcore but in in China it works because that's how they're used to play games but invest play hardcore normal yeah but invest it's just doesn't work because if it if this was a little bit more casual then

it would work better that's my take um I wouldn't say it needs to be like significantly more casual because it's just so big like just just looking at the load out of what these it's like super super big you have all these things that you can go you even have like the dance club where other like you can you can dance literally with other players and they can like that's in the books man of course in the books uh where you you have this kind of a mini game where you need to like time Press buttons and you then have like some score and you're actually dancing with other players this reminds me the the chat with the V yeah yeah but like to be honest like for a person in Asia like this is the perfect game because it fulfills your like Harry Potter IP fantasy if like mobile is your main like they don't have PCS that much there because you know they just have mobiles and they G Mobile if I'm a PC G just learned that the younger audience play on iOS and a

little bit of Android but the older audience plays on PC and uh highend devices on Android so I guess yeah but this this more towards younger audience definitely yeah yeah in China I mean like w Harry Potter wasn't there during the craze when it was here in the west so yeah yeah yeah so if you look into the if you look into the shop it's exactly as you would expect you have the basic gacha which is the usual one uh which which is the [ __ ] gacha here and the good gacha there which just what's the difference between a [ __ ] gacha and a good gacha uh [ __ ] gacha doesn't have a chance to get the so yeah and then good gcha has a chance to get the legendary 2% that's that's that's the usual difference there's always kind of two gachas in uh and do we got the legendary no we don't uh and then of course we have the event gacha and event gacha is what event gacha is Ron Weasley that you can

get through playing the events and whatever and then you have a chance to have guaranteed Ron Weasley card that's it so this is actually a little bit more of a combination of that Asian seasonal GAA where we adding more and more characters and The Clash Royale one where everybody has everything and you know you just level up the cards because it's The Shard model where my cards are pretty much level up as I get like more components on that so let's say my whatever is this incend is level seven and I just need one more copy of it to level it up and then it will end up with like 500 copies by level 30 whatever so if you compare this to the P to the PC game hogars Legacy and I know we discussed this uh before you said as soon as you you you have avad kav you're just basically all good you can just the game yeah you're done in here it's like super complex yeah it's very complex because I was even battling VA vort and Voldemort was using aak Kadabra and it was doing just some damage it wasn't even like

insta killing my my creatures yeah so the mighty make it but uh but just imagine like when I first downloaded the game it asked me for three gigs that's the usual thing yeah yeah yeah and then just look how much more stuff it needs to download in order to function properly in all the things here this is like a seven eight gig game then 10 10 all right 10 yeah yeah yeah for sure yeah even more so and and just wait for the updates and every every other content they will jam into it so yeah this is the usual kind of Asian game which just is super super overcrowded with features which is completely okay for Asian like Western a uh apeg audience but in the west it's not really then how come how can genin impact is doing like such a good job in uh invest because geni impact in my opinion is a little bit more streamlined than

this yeah is it oo okay it is it's actually is because git impact is pretty much Zelda bread of the Wild on mobile okay which is kind okay interesting but this but as I said like imagine you have Clash Royale and then you add more complexity into it I'm not saying it's bad like it actually adds a lot of depth and strategy which is great which was on the China numbers because it's the G works so well there but here in the west when you have like whatever you know 30 something people with Nostalgia after like Harry Potter because there's the of Harry Potter games there's not really that big oh those I could I couldn't play this game I couldn't play this game this exactly like this would be like exactly like uh part of Exile nightmare super complex and I was like no I don't want to just put like f [ __ ] 50 hours just to learn how how to play this game yeah yeah so so my my guess is and uh

realistic Remo rating is that they just didn't care that much about like doing anything with it when it was so successful in Asia three years ago already or two years ago because they already went like 200 million plus they're probably swimming in money yeah anyway and they just say like let's release it in the west just some localization see what happens and nothing happened and yeah nothing happened because like man it you know what this reminds me the Monster Strike so they released it in in the US and then they just killed it and then just focus on the on East it's just Japanese Market only yeah exactly yeah yeah okay so if you want to release game in invest it needs to be very simplified for the or not simplified but you need to invest tied into into the like westernized yeah Western Market honestly but hly like it's kind of as I

said we had this discussion in in South Korea last uh last week or the the week before so so I I started working with like few few devs there and uh I started producing creatives for them as well and honestly we just produce creatives narrative uh different gameplay whatever else and they said look honestly this is just so westernized we couldn't even think about these type of Concepts on our on our own and I was like what do you mean like this is just like uh my bread and butter exactly like it's it's super normal yeah well we tried to replicate it we couldn't and I was like oh okay that makes sense same thing here I guess yeah it's like my guess is they just release it for the lws in a way that like probably somebody on the manager team hopes that it would be better but like yeah it's just very very hardcorish and and like the the game's overwhelming even from the beginning like this is not even fully unlocked

main UI I would guess that I if I would progress for a week more all of these kind of empty spaces be like on the border would be filled with all the icons of like events whatever trials whatever something something would be added here like it's and and and and the game's like amazing like don't get me wrong like whole thing that you have here like what you can do even with your avatar and like how can you like you have even p is for your character that you can select I can you chat with your vles in the other game ah you cannot chat yeah that is not that great but uh no but actually the the the account that you select here is the VAB Bros account the one that you I'm playing it on the same vros account that I used when I played Hogwarts Legacy interesting the same account so it's under the same you know umbrella of Harry Potter but yeah definitely not for the same brand I would say all

right yeah that's it so as I said rating regarding the Asian version 10 out of 10 definitely uh Western translation there's none so unfortunately it's still great but not for this audience okay yeah and since I'm uh lagging Felix could you take us home please absolutely uh don't forget to like And subscribe show this podcast to your dogs and cats because they absolutely love it and if you want to catch us in person Tuesday the 22nd at Gamescom ma will put the link in our show notes sign up come give us a high five and remember if you want to be in the podcast with us on the day we're recording on the 22nd in our event send either of us three a message and we will randomly pick one a random and you'll be on the podcast amazing job so thank you very much cheers see you guys later see you you

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]