Mobile Gaming OG Eric Futoran: (Scopely) War stories, Algorithm Manipulation, Growth strategies, ANR

if you want to sh we love it you know we like these these stories I mean at the end of the day uh as much as you care about the player experience you still to make money so there's this balance and that's where they cap like that's where we were kind of talking about the beginning like yeah I love building games I love sitting on airplane and seeing someone play YSI but at the same time I gota build a business and so uh I love giving reps as you can see for the folks listening you got to not just this no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half Gam 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 4 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously oh it's great all right hello everybody uh this is a special episode I think we this is like a 10th special episode in the row no no

it's very special for two reasons cuz we have a lovely guest but also look at what Remo yaku our resident game designer managed to do [ __ ] me yes after two and a half years of having a podcast has finally gotten a boom arm oh right all right I didn't notice that yeah because your volume is quite low so please mean it's pretty magnificent I think it's like covering him yeah for those for those who want to see the cover story join our slack I will post it there because I have [ __ ] 20 cm thick table so I need to weld the thing to it show you oh my God okay but is lucky to be based in a place where people actually still know how to weld yeah well that's true I don't know how to weld by the way I'm not sure if you see it but I also have a quite special t-shirt is that our new t-shirt it's it's our new t-shirt yes that looks so good it's our new t-shirt and there

is a unicorn in the pocket yes that's true sorry Eric I stole your thunder yeah I know very special guest our very special guest yeah I feel like that's my payment for being on here get a free T-shirt with the that's true actually yeah if you send me your size and uh I can bring it to you done oh well you know you know what we should uh you should just introduce yourself Eric that will be that's probably the best way yeah that's probably the best because have an OG in gaming industry joining our podcast Eric yeah I'm too uh Peter was a mini clip when he was interviewing me at the Pocket game where kept like blowing smoke up my ass I was like oh this is so uncomfortable um so uh L them out now I'm definitely mobile OG which makes me feel really old uh been in Mobile since 2011 so uh founded scopely uh my role at scopely was basically everything so I built the publishing business I was

the first product manager on Dice With Buddies which became Dy which then became monoply go that same team uh hired basically all the folks that are running the company today which is kind of cool um I think some of the topics you guys want to talk about like potentially like metrics IP did all of it yeah like live offs everything um also helped build max which became part of app loving that was me and Jim Payne and a few folks sitting together and like seeing what the all the bad [ __ ] that was going with attech deciding lots of good stories there uh I didn't want to run it and then I started Embrace which is basically a tool set that helps Engineers manage the complexity of mobile like anrs Felix is mentioning that to me uh all the [ __ ] that goes wrong or needs optimization that that engineers and PMs can't really solve on their so I built the product

for it it's been going when when do you sleep when do you sleep I don't know I have more ideas going I try to sleep but it doesn't work very well do we start with Max scopely what do we yeah I don't know where to start let's start Max I was just waiting when the fireworks would pop out out of the screen I know man like I can't believe I started by talking about your boom arm that's so unimportant yeah yeah it's like this is way better intro when than aomar but I I think we could start with Max I mean it's not my wheelhouse but still it's super interesting bro that when we met the PGC I was like wow okay yeah before scopely I was actually an attec guy like I built a couple attech companies few one of them got acquired uh and so it's scally part of the reason they have an attec business like it's not typical for games most game most game developers we all hate ads uh for different reasons but

thank you much for listening I'll take that back we don't love put most game developers don't love putting them in and we don't necessarily love the at tech companies that are out there uh we love the money the money is yeah so like adding into a game obviously you've got to do especially casual and Hyper so there's for Max it was uh mopb was already part of Twitter uh a bunch of companies including scopely and Zinga and others were thinking about Building attech Solutions there was just a gaping hole and to be blunt and I'm friends with all these guys like the app lovens and the iron sources and the tons of other atch companies theyve all kind of Consolidated were never really working for the game devs uh they're all about the money and I don't blame them so we built Max partially to say [ __ ] you to all those companies see if we can help the game do and then uh partially to see if we could buy mopa back because mop was a really good

product which they end up doing if you like when they acquired Max and then they acquired mopub right back into it which is uh So the plan actually came to froan just kind of in a different format so so you broke the wheel and then rebuilt it exactly was a fun problem Dan ended up running it because I just didn't have another itch company me well you have to see have to sleep right so at least I mean like how do you even like come up with these types of ideas like you mentioned also like EMB at the same time Max and like where is it coming from um I think you guys probably have tons of ideas too it's it's mostly jump on them like when you're in the depths of stuff like user acquisition and adte and live Ops for a game and just there's tons of ideas that come out uh and even now right there's a definitely a hole for adtech

there's a bunch couple companies starting to pop out I've been hearing rumors of maybe a round three for mopub and there's the at Max and like a bunch there's definitely opportunity there's been too much consolidation but whenever a pain like anr there should be a solution or like when uh when there's like inequity around financing for instance I'm just randomly ripping right now right there's been a bunch of VCS that have gone back into the games uh world because they see that there's opportunity mostly because game devs didn't have any money to raise and now they can get a big chunk of these companies um so it's just being in the rolling up your sleeves and seeing the opportunity I think it's really starting companies when founders ask me like how do I get going it just takes balls like you just gotta jump in and quit your job and do it which is scary because you're like oh now I'm not making any money any yeah but that's like where the all the fun starts like jumping out of the comfort zone

magic I think it was like jumping in the deep end of the pool you just it's cold it sucks you just gota go it's definitely the scariest moment once you're in it and you're running it's fun so from F founding Max how much of that did you take with you then to scop because they at mon team at least I know it's quite sophisticated uh compared to other companies how much of that was just yeah built from what you remembered from Max or even maybe some of was built with that from scopely like so I wrote a business plan at scopely to build out an attech and we just didn't want to do it we didn't have uh it wasn't as fun and then I hired uh the attech folks uh and then Tim O Brian who's still there runs them so s who's awesome runs attech scopy now Eric ma runs it for the UA right all those guys um so Sen's definitely been involved but no they

the stuff that uh he's trying to figure out is is the fun of running attech within a large games company okay I don't know if that answer your question okay fair should we start with maybe the scopely story maybe you can just give us three to five minutes on how you guys got started the first breakout we can listen to this for for the whole yeah the first breakout success what kind of the principles yeah I don't yeah I don't know where you want me to start start from the beginning the uh the core all the stories like oh we just buil the business from from our garage and whats you know all these like fun stuff maybe a little bit uh the first once in a while when it sold last year we were all posting pictures it was definitely like a closet uh with a big we would interview people and it' be like we're coming into a room with a couch I don't think I couch okay interesting okay and it was in a casting

office it was so no comments yes of course um that's a lot of stories for another day um we we started at the heart because in 2010 so most of the big game companies today either had started or uh were web and Facebook like canvas back then Y which most of the audience probably doesn't remember so won't get into Facebook brought few Facebook canvas games to mobile which is which was a long time ago 2011 that's the the year of Candy Crash and Clash of Clans um yeah right yeah to some extent I'd say Candy Crush switched to mobile at that point but they King started on Facebook canvas also Zing obviously did and then they switched but yeah those was the year of Farmville from a money money perspective uh no question uh I don't yeah did Supercell release that

year maybe Che either way it doesn't matter um so we started on canvas as a company that helped people connect we felt like Facebook was really shitty at creating conversation so we were seeing all these people chat about all these games on Facebook uh on the like the social news feed and like forums and all the all over the place and they weren't able to do it in the games because the games w not I mean Farmville is pretty shitty game it was just really good at monetization and social verality but from like a beauty and everything it sucked great game like obviously successful uh I think we'd all build Farmville um but wasn't great for connectivity Facebook continues to be poor at it it's why they've tried Facebook messenger and WhatsApp so scopely started there I think fast forwarding uh we did really well on Facebook canvas so did all these other companies Facebook was great for grabbing users uh

kind of the theory of mobile really good at cheap acquisition pretty good monetization really good for adtech I mean um bun applifier and a bunch of those came out of Facebook canvas as well which became the adtech for Unity uh to go really far back um and then uh and then mid 2011 is when most of the companies started shifting because Facebook killed pars shifted their apis and it became really not a great place to be like they're a really shitty partner to developers over the years and I don't mind saying that uh they they buy a company like parse which invested in brace because it's it was a great product and then they kill it and what a developer supposed to do all of a sudden you're left scrambling um so late 2011 we shifted to mobile uh and started with dice of buddies uh that's the really long story very short there's a lot of copy to that but yeah by the way sorry

for the correction about Candy Crush Clash of Clans are 2012 not 11 what the difference probably for you guys I remember because I think in World in terms of like user acquisition moments yeah because at that time especially but it's still true today we were always trying to find ways to get users as many as possible cheaply all the time and so we were looking like uh I was always watching Clash of Clans because they were just killing it grabbing users but I love talking like gree and DNA and all those which would just buy users like all of them for a period of time go whole fraud back then wasn't it like a lot of fraud right uh maybe on Facebook onbook much there's a little bit of it today too little bit a little bit Yeah I even in in on on big UA Channel like Google

for example it's just no nobody talks about it that much how much fraud do you think there is on Google would you say well on Display Network quite a lot also if you have if you run mobile up inall campaigns for the CPI campaigns you get absolutely shitty traffic and it you are optimizing for installs not first opens as an event and it that's just like you can see you buy 100 users and 30 of those don't even open the app it's absolutely terrible and now it's hard you can't call them an there's no policing but I think most users and they're trying to get you to pay it's a game like the arbitration the arbitration around the first user install and open is still rampant it's just so opaque especially iOS because Apple doesn't help they just make it it's like a black box install and then

open yeah well it's the same good opportunity for can you uh talk us through like the first success of scop when you guys were like this is something different we have and what the kind of yeah winning formulas were to get there yeah I think we didn't we weren't that smart about it back then because we didn't understand ear the best story dice of buddies was definitely our first win and then for everybody listening like we had a bunch of games that didn't work after that it's hard get your second winner um Dice With Buddies which became yatsi dice buddi is still out there I think and they're both either top 100 or top 200 games depending on both of them and it's the same game um we figured it out I think primarily because I was an adtech monetization guy and my co-founder Walter one of them uh was really good at Social and verality and if you think about what games and live Ops is it's how do you get users and how do you monetize them and what are the mechanics

and so we were really good at those we just didn't know what we were doing when it came to games so dice of buddies we kind of bought it was we bought the game it was really small uh and we blew it up like overnight in a good way like I sat there and we figured out the monetization and I figured out the what were the three things that you did that like you know on the monetization side that like [ __ ] this killed it um a good question it's great question I think there I'll give you a couple U I'll give you two uh it's a theme that I think about for any game but even for like when I help other non-games apps there's like a core Loop and yon is super easy to think about for any game like it's a turn-based asynchronous game so you take a turn the other person gets a push notification they take a turn you get a push notification back or the goal then is to how to make that fast as possible

uh and as often as possible and I think a lot of game devs lose track of the loop that's C of the game they start building all these ancillary features that actually detract forment and then their kpis actually wither away um and so if you think about monetization the best thing we did was add a bonus roll to dice with buddy so perspective we let you pay for fourth roll which definitely broke yatsi the game Dynamic and we had lots of fights over it uh but it worked so well because people so it was something closer to like when Candy Crush moved the plus five booster out of the level at the end of the level when you lose that's a good comparison kind of that moment like you're like you have three rols you're like I [ __ ] the bed I can't get I'm gonna lose this game I'm gonna buy a fourth it's a really good analogy uh so but it works within the flow um it's not like something where you leave the flow and have to figure it out which it's really if you don't think about it from

the beginning when you build a game it's really hard to add these monetization flows later um the second is we added it's not conceptually crazy but when we think about when we just kept looking at our metrics I actually felt kind of dirty uh whereas every turn we added an ad which is normal like doing the Lord's work all of them words with things all of them like the amount of B inventory these companies C is crazy but you're like you play for literally 10 seconds and then we're going to show you a originally was like a medium rectangle a medre and we're like great this doesn't pay well but we'll try it it's better than nothing and then uh then we're like oh our kpis didn't change so then I'm like okay I'm gonna show this after every turn instead of like once per day and apis didn't change and we're like holy [ __ ] we've got this is crazy then I'm like I'm going to show a 15-second video that's skiable like once per day you can see

where this is going then I'm like maybe I'll show 15c video after every turn and at a certain point you're like 30 second unskippable and people are still playing like you're watching more videos than actually playing my game I think we should then we stopped because it felt weird but uh it was a good game and then I think that's where we kind of figured out like watch your metrics uh be impartial because I think when you especially attech I was [ __ ] on attech earlier but Game Dev Engineers hate adding ads but just look at the metrics if it doesn't affect your metrics and it works within the loop no one's leaving as long as the sound bite that's the sound bite for the episode right there m right there yeah that's great what was the year here story like it seems like I don't know it's kind of nowadays like you can search these things up but it was like pretty revolutionary by the time wasn't it at least it felt to us because we were like it was it was like in a startup where everything is

heightened we were like if you add every day I'd be like I'm gonna just add another video I was managing doing n Tech myself back then like tweaking the knobs and trying to make deals like Adam fogi from App Loven was like sitting in my office trying to pitch us the first we were like one of our first customers um because we had so much inventory and I was just trying to find videos at that point to make any money that didn't screw over the like didn't freeze experience um so yeah thanks Yak I guess it was revolutionary you remember what year was like 201 what 15 that was like 12 or 13 12 even yeah I was probably must I do feel old now uh probably was just getting started and then I'm pretty sure we were first 20 customer to mopub uh as well like Facebook canas still or mobile Facebook mobile okay

mobile already yeah end of 2011 we turned off all our canvas apps and went straight to mobile which king did as well uh Jam City did as well a bunch of companies did a mini club did it either around then that kind of their games kind of lingered but we all felt the same pain we just knew the world was over Facebook it's changing yeah yeah do you remember any of the Mark Performance Marketing things you did ma needs his red meat as well man I remember those days still you're bantering about it now it feels like it hasn't changed that much no still the same [ __ ] all over again just uh well I'm I'm not sure about you but we were trying to find these small right hand side Facebook kind of as uh desktop uh placements and you couldn't even see like what's in the image

then it was like how you the are def C it was really yeah how do you get the click purely so that the ad attribution was so brutal for the installs uh it was way worse back then I mean all those companies are big companies now too just and BR and M offers back then and yeah I I remember we signed the has offers and then they they shut down the company I was like yes great thank you changed their merg to something yeah yeah I can't remember the name I always get them confused it split it merged and split into something else um yeah I don't know mon was asking me for this on the where I was kind of spitballing trying to remember things if I had to give advice I'll give you a different answer um the part I don't think is different is when people when you build and launch a game game and you want to really do UA you have to think about all

sources of traffic because they all affect each other so I think game companies and definitely UA folks they get religious on their channels so they go like you're saying like Google May suck but if it's driving installs it may be worth it because then you're getting traffic organically from like apple or go somewhere else from the store or maybe well who knows where and they affect each other like and then the more in sometimes it's better for you like the more installs you get in a short period of time especially when you launch a game definitely affects rankings um even if it's an unet art and Google and apple like to change their rankings it definitely does um that's why like historically incentivized has worked just work as an independent Chanel where you're trying to get quality users but when you get incentivized and you get and it drives organic because you're changing ing the ranking or you're creating presence or

people are seeing the ads if you look at the I call ECPI the effective CPI for that Cort of time you can be in the money um and so back then I mean we were buying [ __ ] like crazy when we game I mean that's I'm not gonna talk about the the game that you guys got talked to for but it's defin we'll get there we'll get there when you launch a game you go for the gust like you if you can do it because it's better than trickling it out and then not really getting to a place where people really know your game yes yeah can can you unpack this like uh not not I don't want to say Shady but that's like all of the like different types of traffic that uh you kind of need to think about when you launching game like a big scale because I can then compare some notes from from my end as well when you're big scale like a I mean yeah it's hard to say like what's big scale but still like like when you you've done it

like when I was building game like back the games we launched all hit number one and would that's a big that's a big scill and your goal when you had the ability to do it was definitely hit number one um so I think the I'm trying to think of where to start there's the topic of soft launch versus hard launch yeah it's different for UA completely but when you launch like worldwide launch it especially US market which is where most the money is um what channels did we use uh depending on the time period we definitely tried to to tow the line but um your number one goal is to get featured on the lawn so the first question is what is Apple especially because they're more sensitive but or Google going to do to get you featured and then what can you do to not stop the featuring um and then depending on the time period exactly they incentivized ads um I'm I've been really chewing on

half grus you saw my email I was thinking about that back in the day yeah yeah um which is Flashback for maybe five% of the people here but it's pretty pretty interesting for today's world with apple um there's incentivized ads offer walls which are basically incentivized ads I don't know traditional UA depending on channel um there's in store ads which is definitely I won't talk too much about but I mean it's an attech company in Apple and Google um there's social I consider for a launch the social component a channel how do you get other people to invite other folks because that uh even if they're not quality like the Curiosity creates installs which creates social awareness which then creates like a I mean they did really amazingly well for Monopoly go like everybody knew the game within a very short period of time which then creates free traffic yeah um

commercials TV does work shockingly well um it continues to work there was a yeah I see your face come back I think there's one in my gym I need to go check though for embrace I actually funny thing is uh at midnight I will watch TV they're all mobile apps everyone uh and then I'm like every one of these is a potential Customer because they all care so all in like marketing CU nice and I've got a good number of customers that way because they care they're advertising yeah just at midnight you'd be like why is this worth it it's free it's free it's like so cheap and people do watch TV all the time um I don't know I'm kind of rambling there's tons of Channel yeah but yeah I just want to say like uh the featuring nowadays doesn't

make that much of sense anymore but I know I remember the days when we just had to do everything we could potentially to get featured because we were getting like millions of installs over that weekend week and uh we started kind of launching the campaigns on Wednesday uh then Thursday the featuring started and then on Saturday it was like the biggest peak of traffic so we were just trying to get as many installs as possible during that like first ramp up period and then since that like Saturday we just had to keep the featuring on for whatever it takes it's like we couldn't just like no we have a back [ __ ] it let's not let's not release anything just let's keep it let's keep it running let's try to figure it somehow because that that was like in that week or two weeks afterwards even like we made so much money and uh it was just it was crazy was wor yeah crazy and

I was I was the CFO as well you were everything both sides and I'm like we're we're like three hours in we' watch the clock see the traffic and we'd be like do we want to turn this off no and we just keep spending yeah exactly like as long as the line was going this way you're like let's keep it let's keep riding it was fun yeah um yeah I mean better to spend then if the line is like this you know you're getting and you have the metrics and you get your game so you know it's going to be profitable eventually um then taking that same money and spending it two months later where you're not gonna get for the buck you might as well just go for again you go for it yeah yeah you create all the Synergy and all the everything at that like week and you just don't pause the the first campaigns until they really they're just as bad as as you would like I figure front page featuring still

works I think there's so many features that probably most of them are worthless yeah but then you scroll you scroll the uh the the store and it's just like 15 banners there was like five of them like few years ago and the today's featuring kind of is like good for one day uh but yeah if you can get all of them and you are just like on the front page all the [ __ ] time yes it kind of makes sense but still now like also the goo uh split changed so much I mean getting the US and and tier one countries back in the day was quite useful I mean obviously it's it's now useful as well but you just you only see the big big guys over there yeah we watched you're reminding me we used to use app or dat like look at every Geo see what featured I'm not sure that functionality is still there and then try to hit the primary countries like crazy um but the ranking I mean being top of full I'm sure is still valuable so it's all affects that like if people

can find your app in the store I'm sure people still browse and scan Yeah you mentioned like before we started uh recording something around uh being on the top and then just trying to get there it's it's two different things like if you start on the top it's uh it's way better okay I mean make sense yeah I mean it we no one knows the algorithms but if you start at the bottom you're in my mind you're like pegging that stat and then you're trying to grow that stat and if I'm thinking Google and how they work for adtec and everything it's the same idea same for UA like uh here's a good example Felix you're asking for a hack once once upon a time when Facebook opened up their as an example of this Facebook opened up their ability to buy UA just now I'm really dating myself um you would uh we would run so many campaigns because

the beginning like the first period of time for the campaign was it it would do whatever it wanted because it was trying to figure out how you performed learning yeah so in some ways yeah so as long as you're in that learning algorithm and you start really high you're like pegging the learning algorithm to think you're better than you are and so we would like put our best ads forward spend a lot at the beginning do all that stuff to to game The Learning algorithm we learned that it actually worked like then you're you're better off than we tested it than like doing a worse ad a normal ad spending over time and then the learning Al would be like this guy's not spending a lot that ads perform on average why would we prioritize them um the same idea for ranking like start start as put your best foot forward because it's easier this to start there and and then just stay up there as opposed to slowly dwindle but even slowly dwindling better than starting at the bottom never no one's aware of you

no one will find you naturally and then trying to grow it it's really hard I think uh when people like launch silently and then they're in the store it's they're [ __ ] up RS right off the B yeah but you know like not every every company has huge budget so now it's more about like steady growth step by step increasing the budget of course if you have a lot of money in your bank account and you have good kpi from the from soft lunch uh you can kind of justify the spent or high spend then it's easier course I think you can still do it I mean the hyper casual guys do it right like they may have money but they're not talking like Triple A type money um and they do it repeatedly and then they Peg it and then obviously the game over time drops in the rankings because that's the type of game it is like has no retention but they make it they does really well that's true yeah but not really anymore yeah I mean oh if you if you look at the

chart there's still some some hyper casual games out there some some they shouldn't be like they pop in they pick their moments then then they dive but if you can when they start at the top right they make all their money within that period of time it's okay to drop the off the charts yeah still afterwards but I think you can do it you just have to be really strategic like don't do it around like American holiday like every American holiday is money maker that's why everybody changes the icons so like valon's day is coming oh my mostly worldwide but like everybody's probably already changing their icon to Red with the heart and changing their text and putting a live Ops feature out like don't compete with that did you actually find this like useful changing the the icons and everything to oh my God you're oh okay

Jesus getting featured to get featured yes no oh I don't know if it's true today but um I think about like if my Grandma had an iPhone what would she do she never uninstalls an app she just stops using it so when you change the icon they're like what the hell is this thing and then they open it again so it 100% helped us and triggered things seen it work for other companies as well where you change the icon and you reactivate dormant users is this me or does it sound like it was a lot easier back then you tell me you're you're you guys are doing day to day it's easy for me to tell War Stories I mean it's not going to get any easier uh but it was I think less competition less Advanced everything you know I remember the days when we were just like hundreds of campaigns uh in different like narrow segments of of

users like 18 to 24 24 or 25 to 34 all of these like female versus male you just now you just run one two three four five campaign stops and then that's it basically I met the flashlight app guy at my first conference in casual connects and he was on a panel and he was earning anywhere between like 300 to 600k a month an ad and he was getting questions he's like I don't know man I just release something a flashlight up before the iPhone I don't really do anything else that's his answer on a question on a panel a friend of mine I think he likes me he was an engineer at scopely and he released a a sleep app like uh I think it was called I think it's still there rain rain same thing he's like [ __ ] I I know how to build apps I'm gonna release a sleep app and then he would run ads all night as people sleep because

they oh I love it don't know any better no one's clicking it but he's getting like whatever like a penny CPM on every Banner that's rolling by and he like two months later he quit his job of course yeah was was surprised okay wow nice you can still do [ __ ] like that it's crazy yeah well I'm sitting here waiting for you to ask man when are you getting into your blog post when are you going to come on what blog post uh we are not talking monopo go oh we're not allowed to I mean we are but like it's not fun anymore okay it's not fun anymore it's not fun anymore I mean all I do want to ask about like the IPS and like how you integrate the IPS into the games and like what kind of fees and everything you can you need to pay just out of curiosity maybe it's connected to one or maybe it's not we can go around it yeah you know we can go around it well uh what do you want to ask how

can I like yeah first like how does it the whole process just from like signing the IP like how does that work uh how do you kind of connect it to the game um i' I've kept in touch with a bunch of folks uh like the different Walking Dead folks because we all release the game at the same time um I don't think it's changed that much I think the IP have gotten smarter uh no offense to them like it just get mobile just like any of us and then over time they started realizing that mobile was probably where all the money was to be yeah as opposed to other other uh channels um I think the biggest thing that I learned I mean I signed what did I sign I signed Wheel of Fortune that was my first big IP um which is still a big game today uh at scopely um and then we signed up a bunch of other IP many games that I killed along the way which I'm not allowed to

talk about uh and then Walking Dead um and then uh a bunch of others the process or like yeah yeah the biggest thing is it's not hard to find the person who owns it like the person who in the company like Sony or Hasbro or matal you to can do both or like Disney obviously and those finding the person it's the goal is to figure out how they're wired like near-term I think it was near-term midterm long-term incentives so near term uh there's always a component that's in upfront like can you make the money today because they don't know if the game's going to go anywhere and sometimes and maybe I'm shouldn't be saying this sometimes they're commissioned on it or bonused on the amount of money they make that year yeah you can figure that out and sometimes you can just ask them you can get feel better but arrives money which a lot of game the midterm is like how do you how

do you make the money and this is where all the terms come in like netting things out all of that um making sure that you have agreement on content so I there's really three things it's how do they get paid like it's not purely a rep share for if this is where you want me to go I'm happy to but it's not purely a rep share it's like is it net of marketing cost development what do you do during soft launch like what else is it net or is it just gross meaning like if it's 30% rep share on $100 that comes in are they just making $30 generally things get netted out um and in fact early on I had no idea what I was doing and I would net everything out and then eventually this is where the long term comes in we would renegotiate the deals because they weren't making any money and then we'd never sign another IP um and so long term you're trying to figure out what the game Dynamic is g to be which to be honest you have no idea yeah like even know if the game's gonna launch so you just pitch the hell out of

it like my best my friends that do the best on IP like pitch crazy things uh at the end of the day once the game launches you're probably going to renegotiate it anyway if it's successful um because you want they're gonna ask you for more You're Gonna Want More you just don't know [ __ ] and you don't know where your kpis are until you launch it and you're negotiating this all so ear the C I'll have is some people try to get a game and then negotiate the IP and layer it on I ask I don't I can't think of a single game that ever was successful doing that approach um you can think of a lot of game companies I probably just pissed off a lot of people listening but don't worry we do it every week the point of Ip is user acquisition yeah getting Organics getting featured or ranked or whatever putting a commercial out and they see wheel for Fortune they're going to download it or uh in live Ops that's it everything else

you negot that's doesn't really matter live offs is because it gives you content like Walking Dead is beautiful like you don't have to build anything you just continue to use the comics or the TV show IP you at and just keep releasing content I mean Star Trek my own game I'm addicted to they're still releasing content whatever like six or seven years in there's so much content the hard thing is approvals so when people the other piece I'm rambling a bit I see you guys noling make sure you get the hardest part to negotiate once you figure out the money terms is the privil like uh can you use SP DS I had sjck in B white separately we didn't know that when we signed wheel fortune I know this our Trek guys that weren't scopely had to negotiate for uh like Shatner which is Kirk and those guys separately and then you're losing money if you don't have van white and you don't have like Captain Kirk the

game's going to [ __ ] suck yeah but what is the can you say like what's the the standard I don't know like deal like okay we need to pay 20% 30% of revenues or like how just I hav I don't know the current deal structures okay in it I'm sure it's an up like for a triaa IP I'm sure you're talking a large amount of money up front Okay might be able to recoup it uh as the game progresses like sometimes recouping means like if you paid 100,000 upfront which was very little back in the day so prob a million or more Millions today uh you either pay it up front and you never get it back or once you release the game and start making money sometimes you can kind of earn it down or at least a percentage of it y um another caveat for fre people listening um and then the rev share depends on what you're netting out it historically when I was back then and

I don't think I'm talking about turn we had to De remember scopely has like a developer scopely itself and an IP so it has a triple split um so you're probably looking we were generally in the 20 to 30% range went to the IP holder uh the other one scopely and the game developer didn't split as nicely because there's like it takes years to build a trip a gam basically to Rel the game so the Rev share would be all wild it's wild calculation okay and then we built in like lots of hooks for the developer side like yeah the game does really well we buy the company for instance you have a write of first refusal changes the entire negotiation but I mean sounds like fun there's no I'd say there's no there's definitely typical and if you're going to Hasbro you're going to get the typical if you're going to other folks that have something people recognize

with enough content you can probably ask them to be honest up front if they trust you and believe that you're actually gonna make a real game and then you can kind of figure it out with them so it get easier to negotiate harder if You' had a couple successes under your belt I guess then I think it's easier if you have successes and harder if it's your first uh easier because it may be more costly because they I if I was an IP holder I'd get greedy uh but they at least know your game's going to go out that they're G to make some money that like you can do something quality with their IP because even if they're incentivized for the near term they still want a cool game like the hbro guys love scopely right now oh I can imagine of course imagine not because of the Rev necessarily but it's just like like it's fun to be part of a cool game that people are yeah everybody's looking at what monopo go so exactly the whole IP is well

attached to it but then how do you kind of like do people take something like this into into like Ras calculations or like prediction models or something like that I I think people I mean when you think about LTV it's it's not really there's predictive ones out there and people and there's tons of companies that are trying to do PE like predictive LTV I personally think it's all [ __ ] I think at the heart you have certain metrics you need to hiters and like in a soft launch you care about like what's my user acquisition cost per user what channels my work do I have like something that's retaining users on a day one 73 whatever yeah um like those all feed the predictive ltvs so in some ways pltv is like your business metric but it's not something you can act on yeah and so I think all these metrics that feed into it are the ones people should think of

so does I so to answer your question does IP feed that I'm sure people try I think it's too hard to predict soft launch I think that's why I think it's partially [ __ ] too like build a good game you can measure the UA metric based on that that's the only one that'll really affect the liveops the ongoing iteration you're going to do that [ __ ] anyway you're going to find the metrics that suck you're going to release with some good ones some bad ones and then iterate and try to make them more successful over time um and then don't and then IP is just a way to get there but it's not something that's going to tell you whether you should release or like what you're going to work on have you sorry have you seen games that like because of the IP weren't profitable for the developer but IP holder was like you know kind of okayish with it because they were still getting money but by the contract you would still need to run it for like I don't know some kind period of time um because I heard about those from some of my friends can really name them but like because we were forced to run the game on the loss because of the

contract I you're def you're bringing me back I've definitely heard of that not recently where people like that like probably pretty recently actually you're right I think there are contracts where you're forced to run the game it's more like Dev shop mentality again I'm going to piss maybe your friends off but like if you're building who's working for who like if the holder comes to you and wants to build a game and then they're saying like you're on the hook for four years you're not a game developer anymore you're the you're a Dev shop for that IP holder and the IP holder doesn't know how to make games that's not their business so yeah you could get really screwed um uh and you're like working on this game forever when you rather work on something else actually I can think of one uh I can't I don't want to throw them under the bus don't worry yeah that's fine signed a game developer you can get

the list of game devs that scop Le's worked with successfully one uh definitely had this issue with uh not necessarily an IP holder but with a big Game Dev shop out of Asia back in the day and they got stuck and they were losing money on the game they released and to be honest it was their fault they never negotiate a deal where you can't pay for your own developers like if you're going to take that approach like make sure you make the money to pay your own people at least at a minimum okay yeah would suck I feel anybody going through that yeah break the contract would be awful yeah all right here I take this to an anrs as well do we have time yeah of course yeah yeah I wanted to ask as well Eric I was actually looking at your website earlier for embrace and you have an anr product and I just wanted to give you a real world example that happened to me what is it now five weeks agoing

tell me like what you think would be in the best course of action and what you think we' be doing better so uh I one of my clients is a top 20 uh Global publisher for ads so basically they're 95 to on ad Revenue 95% to on ad Revenue uh they show millions and millions of ads every day uh for some reason one day anr is on the largest title just started spiking uh it went from below threshold and it went up to almost 4% and slowly gradually over like seven days and then suddenly it just really went up and to find out the culprit we had to start turning off networks one by one until we found it and it turned out the culprit was in the end Google that had started rolling out a new ad for and on banners you you you should always start with with Google remember manual you can't because it's the biggest Revenue driver you go Google last always because if it's 40% or 50% of your revenues you really pray that it's not

the one that is you have to switch off right where's the question yeah the question is like question there is what like is there a better way yes uh um I mean when you go to the so this is what I'm goingon to assume they're doing by the way Apple probably does this [ __ ] as well they just never give you any of the information um but they're definitely tracking stuff and you can kind of see pieces of it coming out in their apis but Google has the Google Play console which gives you the rankings for those folks here right every there's like crash anr and a bunch of others there's the orange line or they change the color once a while uh so when you listen to this may be a different color but you want to stay on the right side of that line um and so for anrs if you're on the wrong side I haven't heard of anybody really you can get your hand slapped you could could potentially get your app pulled I haven't heard that happen but that what

they do threaten is the ranking um which for for a top 20 company for a big game is a big deal um like every every penny counts especially free users um the console doesn't help which I'm sure they went to first that's why I started there gives you a bunch of anrs for those who don't know it's a concept in engineering called app not responsive or application not nonresponsive there's different people say different terms but anr application non or not responsive um it's when your app freezes to the user and what Google does is it tracks the main thread uh ad providers are often using the thread when they shouldn't be or using it incorrectly but sometimes even when they ad when they take over they have to like for a video or an interstitial um and then uh then Google will track it generally when a user after a certain number of seconds like 5 to 10 and the user gets prompted and if you have an Android device you'll see like the prompt like would you like to

close the app uh they take a trace like a CRA think of a crash like you get a stack trace the stack Trace sucks doesn't help you at all and then you go to other tools like a Firebase and then you have to try to match it to Firebase Firebase also doesn't track it very well and doesn't give you the right information so yeah you end up with this shitty moment where if you're an ad based game you're literally turning on and off things I would say first don't feel alone I know that I won all game developers who do the same fraking thing uh but they all do it um there are better ways to do it like I know I will give a kudos to scopy I know sen has built some stuff where they try to like pull information in real time from the device to figure out if the network or even the ad ID uh iron source and apple oven give you pieces of the information they're going to their goal is to give you as little as possible because they don't want to be the ones turned off but that's one approach obviously uh so I'll

Kudos myself Embrace can yeah that's like the goal of collect everything because no one was collecting it and then index it by user so like if you have a frozen startup or bad ad you could just look it up and see what happened and so for anrs we actually you can look up the session and then at the beginning of the anr we actually grab Trace so when you go into Embrace you'll actually see the adver better right off the bat and then you can actually match it because we see the end of the tra end of the anr you can match it to the one in the Google Play store so you can affect the ranking um so you actually have the information to make that choice um can you do so that'll help you identify Google it'll help you identify admob can we it only we can tell you the ad unit or the campaign ID if you send it to us and we fish it out for iron source and a couple others but it's imperfect because it's like wack all um

for non-ad games I'll just say this they also have these problems uh every game has anr issues it's just it's how good you track it and how good your code is so for like Wildlife is just customer and they're okay with me talking about it they have ad based games and RPG games they both have issues uh they both freaking suck they add ones are more acute and people like to talk about it because everybody likes the [ __ ] on ad vendors like we do uh the non ones they're the same problems it's really hard problem to make sure that your users's experiences are preserved so part of what I do Embrace is like I mean it's the name of the company it's really cheesy but it's like give every engineer a hug because all they do is yeah it sounds really stupid uh but but there's no love they're just finger pointing like you Felix probably went to the company or went to the

engineering team and said like let's do this or pull out the SDK the engineers are like what the [ __ ] because you're gonna tell me to turn it off or pull the SDK and then like two weeks later you're gonna tell me to put it back in because the revenue is too important and then you end up with this really shitty moment where the engineers really don't want to work on ads ever again um but yeah like 100% uh no one collects this [ __ ] this data so the kudos to me is the company I found solves this problem nice sounds really good and like completely reminds me of my time when I was you know talking with the developer implementing the sdks on ads that were always the culprit behind the problems and then he was forced to take them out we had this discussion before on the podcast yeah you're like and then you're like but that's too much much money yeah let's put it back in and then you're like and then it's just this vicious

cycle of just random [ __ ] and then uh you know what and then yeah there's a whole I have a lot of stories bouncing through my head but all the ADV try to things to get you to stop that maybe we can uh we can wrap it up with some one of those stories if you want and then we'll wrap it up yeah yeah you want to share if you want to sh we love it we you know we like these these stories I mean at the end of the day uh as much as you care about the player experience you still have to make money so there's this balance and that's where the cap like that's where we were kind of talking about the beginning like yeah I love building games I love sitting on airplane and seeing someone play Yi but at the same time I gotta build a business and so uh I love giving reps as you can see for the folks listening you gotta not just choose the experience you got got to look at the kpis so for ad vendors sometimes they pay so much that you kind of have to take the take the issues um not anrs I think that's too

egregious because then you affect Google but like if the ad freezes and then person leaves and it doesn't turn into an anr and then they come right back because they were GNA leave anyway maybe [ __ ] it so uh uh don't let your engineers think that way but your mation your PMS definitely should um venders back in the day I'm sure they do it now they'll pay you to put the SDK in just for everybody hearing like uh early on we would get paid from I won't name the vendors but like a million dollars early on like because they just do the math on how much it cost a little bit about mediation discussions are still in the millions usually if you're a big enough company about this really this is really my favorite part of ads It's all under the category like you never asked yeah you never asked yeah on like oh [ __ ] I gotta put ad back in

little did you think that the Google guy on the other side's like how the [ __ ] do I get that thing back in there and they'll probably pay you maybe not Google but the other companies might pay you to put it in yeah just yeah I'm with you just ask yeah yob you don't you yeah you don't know a lot of things prod side it's like very straightforward like you have good game you have good kpi end of the story you know like in this end part like half of the functionality it's always behind Felix is like oh you need to ask your rep and where it's written for somebody that does you need to read my blog yeah there's a reason I like helped start Max like the mkup guys love me because that was their biggest [ __ ] to them but then I'd go get drinks and like every party they would like give me the free iPad even the opportun it's the same thing it's just it sounds like Felix you do it like

you want to be best friends with these guys but you kind of want them to you at the same time yeah what I usually say it's like you're not here to make friends you're here to make money right so you have to be you have to be the most annoying customer uh possible and you have to be forever grumpy always grumpy and that's what you have to do and that's those are the ones who win those are the ones who win yeah and they're not running away they're still taking you out the drinks they're taking out still taking me out taking Sky who's awesome but everybody loves him but he definitely be grumpy uh like no question I'm with you yeah make money oh yeah it's we still make jokes about that you can't you know pay bills with retention you need to pay bills with money actually and it's still gaming industry is still a business yes we love games we love playing games but be you know I need to make money as well all right good I think we can uh we can wrap it up with this gaming industri is

of business Eric thanks a lot for coming it was an amazing uh discussion yeah thanks for sharing the like especially the veteran stories very very enlightening stories yeah okay we can we we can continue on the on episode number two uh later in the in the future when again thank you very much and see you next time guys uh please subscribe uh join our slack Channel and then see you next time bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thanks [Music]

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