Panel: How to use UA Funding Effectively

so next up we do have a panel discussion the panel is on how to use ua funding effectively the panel is going to be led for us by sam fisher from hyper hippo looks like sam has joined and some of the other panelists are jumping on as well welcome sam welcome panelists thank you for that i'm uh thrilled to be here yes i'm sam fisher ceo of hyper hippo entertainment uh i'm coming to you from western canada we are a canadian developer on the west coast and uh we've had some fun doing some some of our bigger titles would be a venture capitalist adventure communists and primarily in the idle space so

great people a ton of experience here that's why we're going to dig in and go straight for these people and i will go through on my screen i have adam flanders uh who is in florida today i believe and charge up games and we'll hear more about that brian sappenjam city down on the west coast uh hey so you're in san francisco have a motto of uh matamoki and george gilren of that little game company platika which we see everywhere and i see best beans everywhere and a good job for you so let's get right in because there's so much experience on this panel our our topic today is to talk about how do you use ua funding effectively so not just how to spend money but how do we do things effectively in today's new world so i thought maybe we would just jump in maybe um if i could hear uh let me ask you uh maybe so i'll start with you and then go through the others say a little bit about what you're doing

uh explain uh what you're up to and then uh just to sort of start us off i thought it's been a really dynamic time uh it's internal milestones in our industry over this year of 2020. what's some of the things that you've really seen that have been just so that you really learned like the one thing that boy just really surprised you this year and you're really surprised about what the game industry has been doing and just kind of lead with that tell us about what you're doing and then i can go to adam and then brian in the drawer if you could kind of follow on that what's the one thing that 2020 just really surprised you with and especially in regards as we're talking about ua and ua campaign um so metamoki we're a boutique studio game developer in san francisco we are best known for wiz khalifa's weed farm weed inc we have two other games that came out this year that were slowly growing once called fishing idle fishing story and dungeon shop

tycoon i think the one thing obviously well so we're a remote studio we've been a remote studio i think uh for at least five years um so i guess maybe we were ahead of the curve when covet hit but um you know i was impressed how quickly the games industry and you know i mean basically all of our colleagues um yeah basically no one really skipped the beat uh when it came to uh yeah i think back in march and april uh when the uh shelter and homes uh shelter in place first happened i mean basically that was like one of our biggest months ever and uh we're still growing um so you know basically you know i think it's been great for the games industry um i don't know what you guys have seen if you've seen the same thing as well

adam let's go with you sure um we uh let's see i've actually been in video games for 21 years and uh mobile games since 2003 which is a lifetime um just launched charge up games in uh in june and it's a it's just a it's kind of a boutique publisher um really focused on focusing on uh working with a very small number of developers uh in really trying to help those developers across the board versus maybe just a you know a publisher that helps more with ua or certain things we're really just trying to be very very hands-on with a with a small team and a small amount of publishers um in terms of in terms of covid and and kind of the last six months i think one of the things that that really stood out to me and you know after being in the in the in the industry for 21 years i think sometimes you can lose sight of

of how fun an industry is uh and i think you know for me it really kind of put a new perspective in my head and it made me realize hey how lucky we are i mean yeah there's almost this this feeling of survivor's guilt it's like wow we work in a not only a cool industry with cool people but it's thriving right now uh so you know we saw a lot of increased activity around that time and uh it just made me it made me excited to be back in this industry again cool that's so cool that's so true we're so blessed brian can i ask you to continue sure um so yeah brian sapp i oversee the ua marketing team at jam city gym city is one of the leading casual game developers in the west we have games like harry potter hogwarts mystery panda pop cookie jam um

and i think that you know the panelists hit on it here is you know we kind of always knew that entertainment was recession proof but i don't think we really knew what was pandemic proof and gaming has proved to be um a great escape and and i'm very thankful for that and feel very fortunate to be in an industry that not only is doing well but is entertaining people during a tough time um i think one other thing that kind of related surprised me during the start of this was i think i ever see the ads business as well so i'm able to kind of you know see what trends are happening on the ad modernization side and apply to ua and vice versa and so when the pandemic started conventional wisdom like for me and my team on the outside was that brands only made up about 10 of our revenue and we've kind of just held that you know for years um but we saw our cpms drop by about 35 to 40 percent and and you know the feedback we were

hearing from facebook google was brands pulling out so i was surprised to see that brands were making up such a larger part of our of our revenue on the ad side and of course um you know on the ua side we took advantage of that when the cpm's dropped and the brands kind of pulled out but then you know going back to like why facebook and google stocks doing well the resiliency of these platforms like you know that that vacuum didn't last long before other industries kind of filled it up right so um so i think it was just you know a couple things it was just like didn't realize how much brands were impacting the ecosystem in terms of costs but then when they kind of moved out realizing that you know performance marketing is performance marketing and people are going to find opportunity when when that vacuum exists i mean how quickly it kind of bounced back so wow wow yeah you'd have amazing insight on that so that's great to hear so you're seeing quite a difference then for brands coming back in uh i wouldn't say brands have come back in but i think direct you know there's a lot of non-gaming

direct uh performance marketing companies that have filled that vacuum direct to consumer right um as well as gaming gaming wasn't gaming the moment prices drop gaming is going to jump in and be aggressive so um between all of it cpms are back to normal okay thank you thank you george your perspective tell us tell us about what you're up to at playtica and and uh and you're learning learnings for the last uh big learning for the last six months so uh my name is law and i lead the performance uh marketing team here at fletica not sure if someone needs uh to know what what platika is or i'm not sure that anyone doesn't know platika but uh right now we're looking at ourselves as the top gaming company uh in the world or looking to uh and uh our mission is to to entertain the world as we say and uh i've been in the business for uh seven years now and um regarding the what we have

learned in 2020 in this this period i think that i'm relating to what adam said it's the first thing that i thought about was that we are we are we are lucky to be in this industry it's it's a good and this is the right industry to be uh it's not a trending one and it's here to stay uh then i think that uh working remotely from home we understood that the importance of a great team a strong team and it's a team that goes with you uh along the way that you can uh depend on them and i think that the the most important lesson that that you have to be flexible and agile in your ua efforts you know uh we we had to react very fast during the corner period uh we pushed our budget very heavily and in this uh kind of uh business you have to react very fast and identify all the opportunities because what is working well today not not necessarily will work uh very well

tomorrow and vice versa so this is a great lesson for us during this year yeah the agility of things i would love to hear more about that as we go so so as everybody who's listening can hear there's a ton of experiences here i i was joking before but if we took all of the budgets we've managed over the years uh on boy it would be an astronomical number uh of what's what's happened on the ua campaigns and so i thought it'd be good for us to kind of take a look at it here about a baseline about where we're at about how to use ua funding effectively and the key word there is not just how to spend ua funding it's how to use it effectively and especially in today's time so i thought maybe adam you could start us out a little bit on this is like what does effective mean right like in today's world what what is effective campaign you weigh you know shockingly um i still

and you're probably working uh in in the past seven years of uh of mgp in charge of games we've probably worked with just small to medium-sized developers um and what's shocking to me is that there's there's such a such a rush to want to spend money um you know there's lots of talk of how big the budget is going to be and how much we're going to spend at launch and things like that and you know i just kind of try to bring the developers back to the point that let's let's really focus on things outside of ua that are going to affect your the eventual span so you know things like uh page conversion aso making making sure that with any testing done on that end on both i say either end of the spectrum so on the kind of aso side and making sure that when someone does you do pay for a user and they do hit your page they have the best chance of actually downloading the game and then on the other side things like retention

and monetization so before spending any money i think just even small changes on either side of the equation in terms of retention modernization and then asl and conversion is going to have exponential improvements on cpi and it's going to just in terms of long-term spend is just going to help out massively that's typically where my head goes when i start talking to a developer about ua spend it's like let's not focus on let's not so much focus on how much we're going to spend let's focus on making sure that what we do spend is going to be the most exp effective spend as as possible right and and uh it's kind of hard to get that through sometimes but i think uh get people you know some of the other guys in the panel probably don't have as much this problem but yeah yeah yeah like brian and george yeah particularly uh issa and i are a

little bit more boutique-ish maybe you have more perspective on that as far as effectiveness how do you define effectiveness well i i think it really depends on the company and the company's high level strategic goals right so like uh you know a startup and a small team is going to be a very different spot than a 500 million a year one billion dollar a year company um whereas a small team obviously is probably more focused on cash flow and and they're going to be looking at that payback period and optimizing to that managing that because if the management business um you know company like jam city could take more of a portfolio approach um so we might have new games that are we consider growth products that we might take a little less margin on and we might take more margin from some of our legacy games and we're trying to balance that right you know obviously you know larger companies are going to have quarterly and yearly revenue targets and then contribution margin targets for the year that that are going to dictate a lot of it um but

in a portfolio level you know we're looking for the best direct paid paid payback um and then from there everything is going to bleed down into all the teams that support that so when i think about effective ua there's obviously the high level budgeting but there's really around setting the right kpis for all the teams and so for for the ua team it's generally row s but there's a lot of secondary metrics that the team's going to look at like cost per day 7 retained cost per purchase at a channel level you know absolute profit depending on how much you can spend with a specific channel um for the creative team it'll be ipm number of new creatives number of new winners uh so you know you're kind of setting a lot of kpis across the board in in to align with that high level goal right so you and draw managing portfolios not just single games or a couple games and so when you look at it are you sending different kpis on your different games like is there sort of a different kind of segments you're that type of game and that type of game in that game i mean are you two kind of

looking at it do you see quite a variety amongst your portfolio i'll take that one yeah i think that's yeah we definitely set different set of goals for for each game uh it depends on the maturity of the game and and how well we can monetize uh so uh theoretically if a game monetized very well i can i can live with a lower ross target than a game that doesn't monetize as well i i think that me and uh brian are looking uh a bit the same on things because i think that yeah being effective is primarily about your marketing objectives you know if you set them up then you can effectively using your budget and uh you know it's it's not as simple as as ross like like brian said and uh i think that for us what also uh uh unified here in in inflated guys that we are uh also deciding to to invest heavily on retargeting uh because we understand that with uh

with the current cpi's in in the market we sometimes prefer to to invest more in retargeting channels than in the ua ones uh because uh it's better to to acquire back a payer than just to buy a a new user with very high cpi so again i think it's it's all a matter of of the the specific game and the strategy that you determine okay okay yeah so you work with more independent and some outside partners with you on that so how how is it different for you yeah i mean for us we're we're a small studio so we're about nine people um i manage ua monetization a product is actually split between myself our ceo and our cfo uh see cto sorry um and so you know our wii games are kind of pretty much evergreen and uh i think going back to what adam was saying like um

we we actually you know had a couple of titles um we wanted to do some non-weed titles and we had a game called like idle food truck tycoon where you know we're just like oh we should just spend a whole bunch of money like right out the gates um and you know we really had to kind of change our strategy there because you know we're kind of pumping in a lot of money into this game and then we weren't really seeing a lot of that come back and there was really no hurry so um you know right now our strategy is to you know maybe it works better for you know smaller uh independent studios but um we've done a lot of uh testing on concepts so um you know basically we're in the idle genre so a lot of the games that we came up with after our week games the food truck games the fishing game and the dungeon games we all tested you know fake app pages like we were using split metrics uh we tested a whole bunch of creatives

and then we kind of like honed in with the ones that had the best like uh performance let me you know click through click through rate wise and you know cheapest like potential install and i know that some people say that it doesn't quite work because um you know you don't really have a real game so you don't really know what the retention is like um but you know i think at least on the front end side of things you know um you know we've got a potential winner um and then the team just has you know some time so like you know fishing and a dungeon right now we're just you know improving those games and we're making the kpis better so a road is better so that's what we're doing okay okay cool cool so the people who are what oh sorry sometimes that you know for for me working with smaller smaller game companies and it's playing different with uh you know the bigger guys like james city but um you know i try to get through these

guys you know a lot of times think of it as a marathon not a sprint right uh you know it's it's there's still that thinking the thought process about global launch it's got to be big it's got to be this but in reality some of the best most successful games that i've worked on have just been have i wouldn't say slowly but just over a long period of time grown uh you know up into the right and so it's those guys who really just focus on testing and spending and testing and spending and not just going big unless of course you've done a ton of testing before that and you know that you you know have the ability to spend that much yeah um brian maybe you can lead us up on this so okay that's what effective is the people who are listening here what they really want to know about is the next 18 months what do we do different how do we do good campaign how do we do good ua and so um are there a few things that we

need to be working on is it is it really that simple is it really that complicated over the next 18 months what are the things that people here really want to be focused in on and what and then we can go through and share some of those insights what what is the experience when this panel say the next 18 months is going to be looking at and just as a side while you're thinking about that some of the comments some of the questions that are coming in people are asking about uh fraud uh some people are asking about programmatic so just using just putting those in everybody's mind as well as far as things if you're speaking to any of that as well so 18 months that's a that's a long time imagine 18 months ago imagine everything we just talked about we wouldn't have guessed it um you know i think obviously the big one is ios 14 on the horizon and you know with respect to the sense of granularity that we've gotten used to um uh some of that's going to go away and i think um first off just kind of like net net i think it's a good thing for the industry

um over the long run i do know that there's a lot of like fear out there that we're losing um you know a lot of tools and and data points that we've gotten accustomed to and built an ecosystem around but um you know we we anticipate that cpms will drop quite a bit um and and i think that's a good thing for the industry uh now now is a good thing for everyone probably not um and that there's gonna be you know smaller teams with less resources that are more niche products are going to be you know in a little bit of a tougher spot because a lot of the campaigns that they were relying on especially value optimization with facebook and revenue optimization with google uh are likely going away or the effectiveness of them will be uh drastically reduced um so you know in terms of like what products are being built out of this that's gonna change and we're gonna have to think more broadly and then and and ip becomes more important um i think in terms of ua operations um

you know over the last three years you know creative has become king and that's going to continue and so and it may even become more important post ios 14. outside of that you know i think bigger teams will be able to kind of look at the tool sets available to them to make good decisions uh and i'm talking about things like making sure you have strong predictive ltv models understand and a good understanding of your blended you know paid and organic roasts to like optimize the business causal impact if i'm spending x with this channel what is it doing to my to my overall um revenue and then media mix modeling so these are all tools along with probabilistic and deterministic attribution that we're going to need to leverage come is 14. i don't think anybody has it figured out we're going to kind of like feel our way through it as it goes but the the studios and the teams that have more of those tools available will be in a better spot

and i think i do think that's going to negatively impact the small guy um a bit and it's going to make you know new entrants a little tougher whereas before you could just rely on facebook and google we can buy those smaller guys that's true yeah yeah and that's and that's i mean that's that's a trend that's already been happening right where where where is consolidation of the industry and there's a very good reason for that because costs are going up and you need this sophistication around ua and analytics and so that'll just continue to to accelerate as well that's a good point right right and the reason i asked about 18 months is because it's kind of like we all see kind of ios 14 and stuff like that like ios 14 is on everybody's mind it's there it's there it creates some panic i think in some people as far as what we're supposed to be doing but the game industry is going to continue on after that and people there's going to be game developers who are doing that so you're the leaders in this industry so what do you see kind of the new world what it's going to be after that and how it's going to move

forward so drawer i'm really curious on your your thoughts on this too as you see it from takika um i have to say it's it's the ios 14 is is a great challenge uh for us but uh to be honest um we are developing the tools that brian uh talked about but no one really knows how to predict the impact but uh when we're looking about 18 months ago we first of all if people from the audience are listening i think that the first thing that we like to do here in platika is to diversify our portfolios i've known for lots of companies that just like focus on on facebook and google but i think that uh you don't want to put your your eggs in in the same place uh since in all sources has potential and i think that one of our strongest uh things is having a large portfolio and large lots of sources and i think that this is what the ua team should focus uh within the next month to to increase the number of sources that they are running and regarding again ios 14 i

think that it gives a good opportunity for for innovation in the marketing because you know everyone is like like brian mentioned again ross on facebook and value and google uh with the firebase sdk and and it's challenged the way that we are working you know it can be from from the looking at the traffic more than you know paid in organic all together and just like look at as an ecosystem of ios without uh drilling down but uh for us it's a challenging period and uh i think it's always important to look for new ways of of running our traffic and ios 14 gives us this opportunity even if we not exactly know what will be the impact but we know it will be innovative and and this is what we we are uh we are looking for so you're looking at new channels new new different types of ways is there some can you give us any type of insight or what that might mean what we might need for example is like looking at specific geos

and and target them uh and and looking again as as a whole ecosystem not only from a ua perspective but like uh understanding the impact of a campaign in in specific geo by looking at the overall aspect including even the influence on existing players and i can measure an eroi that combines ua efforts the organic direct and even the the impact on existing players uh so i think that it's a combination of again when you have less information you need to uh look at broad to have a broader look on the traffic that you are running and again it's it will be very challenging adam and aso comments on what this next period is going to be like what should we be doing yeah you know at a high level i think that um we've been throwing curve balls like this many times in the past and uh a lot of times

there's no there's really no heads up given um and my feeling is that we've always as developers we've we've always figured to figure out how to deal with it and move forward um even if thinking back a long time ago to when uh they just started rejecting games that had offer walls in them because i think 40 40 of our revenue just like went out the window overnight um but you know what developers adapted we adapt we figure it out and and we move forward that doesn't i'm not giving any very specific detail or anything like that but pardon me also one is about google and what they're going to do they typically follow suit um when apple does something like this so another year from now is google is google going to do the same thing with their advertising id so you think that that's something to prepare for yeah yeah you would think that that's probably on the horizon maybe not six months from now but i mean 18 months we're talking 18 months it might be might be there as well

yeah same same with us i mean ad revenue is a big part of vital games so you know we're just uh forced to figure out how to monetize iaps better so all right get on yeah yeah yeah um george you talked a little bit about um the uh geo markets going into geo markets specifically now i'm curious because there's people we're we're we're virtually all over the world here we're on a digital platform but um you're doing stuff everywhere around the world particularly and i know jen city can you can you talk to how things are changing particularly on an international marketplace and what is it that you are looking at different i mean geopolitics right now is crazy um i'm sure it gives you some unique challenges that you maybe had or didn't have before i don't know but what about international like what what's your view on that as far as the ability to

to expand internationally and is that an area that like where are you focusing on what do you think the opportunities are so uh actually it's it's quite really uh related to pledika because we are very tier one oriented uh company uh but we definitely and totally understand our need uh to expand to different geos uh so we have a dedicated strategy team that uh um you know look look always constantly fall for uh opportunities uh and and they just analyze of opportunities per game of course you know we have like we have a lot of variety of games but for each game we look at the market size we look at our market share uh and and we try to understand if the product uh is is relevant to this audience this is from a strategic point of view but also we look at from tactic point of view uh what are the growth options in this country uh what are you what our our current ua efforts uh uh in this market uh what are the prices and and

should we do it only through digital marketing or we need also to to combine it with some offline or with some influencer activity so for each and every game we try to analyze several markets that can be an opportunity for us but we do understand the the need to go out of tier one definitely but you've been tier one primarily at this point um yes primarily but uh you know it's changing i think the percentage of tier one is is declining over the years but i think we still have lots of room to to grow internationally okay okay uh others brian i mean how are you looking at uh uh international growth yeah um i mean i think similar to kind of diversifying the risk away from facebook and google you know we look at diversifying the risk against the us right so um we have been increasing our market share outside of the u.s for the last couple of years and continue to do so i think um two main areas that we look at is

obviously the portfolio just looking at you know our own data and how we're performing in specific countries another one that's a big uh source of information for us is the uh ad intelligence from sensor tower and app annie on our competitors going in there and you can see who's spending in what countries and what networks plus you know looking at rpi for those games to kind of understand it for under indexing or you know how we look versus competitors and thirdly uh one that i think is you know have the best source of information is our partners like apple google and the ad networks themselves they can quickly tell you when when they see like you know changes in behavior or new traction um in specific geos and so we'll often devise tests uh in partnership with them um you know whether it be around geo clustering or whatnot um and then i think uh you know in terms of operations um looking at the creative is a big one are we not only localized but culturalized in

the right way in specific geos that are important enough to make that effort are you guys seeing unique geos coming like things that people just should be watching or looking at a lot of folks talking about india and um you know and so we're trying some strategies around india in terms of ad supported plus iep there's a growing middle class in india predominantly our games are iap and so we the ad revenue is a smaller percentage so i think that that kind of changes the geo mix a bit um but we're we're experimenting there atom and aso things from a smaller perspective what you would see what is i think you know for the smaller guys uh you know it just comes out of testing typically there was a time remember time when when apple and google used to kind of encourage to launch the game in 15 17 languages and now it's more of it just do the languages localization culturalization that uh that makes sense

so if we see something that looks like it might be a winner do some localized tests see if you can drive some additional revenue there um we actually and brian you mentioned app annie but we just did a project with them on a product called game iq which hopefully will help going forward be able to identify genres and subgenres and where the money's being spent or you know actually where money's being driven from at a country level so that could be a really cool tool to be able to use um i don't believe there's many tools out there like that right now but it could help in cases like this or in case of the market research we're trying to figure out where your type of game may work right but i think even even with that even with that data it's still going to come down to testing yeah we're slow at uh localization you know i think our our newest games

i think at minimum we try to do e-figs and i think surprisingly our last game uh like germany was like the second biggest like you know market so we're just like really surprised but yeah we haven't really tried any uh asian languages or arabic languages but i do play adventure communists in japanese i'm glad oh thank you yeah what can i say oh god bless you sorry guys that's our game so i'm grateful for him to do that so i'm just going to we have people who are listening and they do have some questions um can we do targeting on display ads and get for html5 formats in ios 14 or are they too dependent on idfa um do people know the answer to that can we do targeting display ads in ios 14. i don't know okay um fake app stores one of the things i want to do well the opportunity as well

is that teams are always a big part of whatever we're doing and maybe you're looking to hire some people or you want the type of people who are coming in so i'm sure as for for here's an opportunity for you to do a shout out are you looking what type of people are you looking for what do you think the opportunities are uh what do you look for in a great great person to join your team i'll be leaving that open personally yes i'm actually i'm uh on the hunt right now for someone to help out with you hey my i tend to look for people who are uh especially in this role they have to be lifelong learners they have to be curious you know you can't there's so many changes happening all the time there's so many uh things that you could that you need to be able to try and test so having that you know you have to be willing to test not afraid try new things you know you really just have to be curious about digging in and really learning this business and

figuring out how to do things better than the next guy the competition's huge i mean most companies most developers can't can't build a game or you know perform ua effectively as we talked about um so this person really needs to be willing and able to just dig in and find it fun i mean you really have to find fun right i kind of look at ua as a it's almost a it's a business within a business you know what you have to have all the you know you've got to be a salesman you've got to be an analyst you've got to be a creative person you've got you've got to have all these things that typically you know the company needs but within this one area of the business it's difficult to find yeah wow yeah i totally agree with that i think people ask me what the most important quality is i think you hit like intellectual curiosity is the term i use like it's just willing to

un pull back the layers of the onion and keep going to figure out the why and like really enjoying that i think what you just hit on adam was like you know whether it's a small company or a big company i really think um individuals have to wear many hats and learn how to wear many hats even if it's a big marketing org or small marketing work because what's happening is the convergence of all these disciplines right so like creative is getting more data driven whereas five years ago on my own little lane i don't have to worry about the data right product marketing is it has to understand the channels and how users are engaging with the ads you know ua has to understand all of that you know who are we targeting what's the creative look like not only the data side so you know i keep saying to my team and to others like like the future marketing marketer looks like all of these things in one and yes we have bigger teams where you're more specialized but you need to understand all the other fac like uh disciplines to be effective and to pivot because you know with ios 14 the needs will change and team has to change what those need

yeah i often talk about instincts looking for people with instincts because you can have skills but those skills may quickly get outdated if you're not willing to adapt and continue going forward with it so it's always what the instincts of the people are so other thoughts anybody else looking for we'd love to find somebody who's some marketing genius artist slash engineer engineering part you know just working with him and he's working on ios 14 understanding you know just you know basically that the tech side of things so i think sometimes um you know a lot of people take that for granted like yeah sure i can do ua um but you know i still have to put in the sdks and you know figure out you know all the data points i need to put in uh you know all the events that you track um so yeah it's a combination of you know a lot of disciplines okay we're going to be wrapping up here

shortly but uh if there was one thing that you could change innovation always comes from what we can't do if there's one you're struggling with right now what's one thing that you would just like i got the magic wand and just you know got it through the screen here we are boom this one this one we haven't been able to crack it is there anything like that that kind of comes to your mind like boy if we could just figure out how to do this what one sdk that does everything god bless you god bless you seriously i keep thinking that the one company that comes up with that you know one that does it all dynamically and helps just helps you make decisions and um they're gonna they're gonna be a huge company um that's probably unrealistic though well it is maybe but we're trying to build that one sdk within our own company for our other games so it's like okay boom can i imagine other large companies who are bigger than us probably are doing the same thing or have done the same thing but i don't know if it's part of that if i could change that

maybe one of the things too interesting anybody else [Music] um maybe we could eliminate ios 14 threats this is something i would ask for uh but uh i would also i would also try to uh to look at the correlation again between then it's something that uh we discussed here about the correlation between the creative and the performance i think uh this is really something to to be to be more effective in your ua uh buying you have to understand this correlation because it's not it's not uh it's not a direct one sometimes you have a lot of parameters from their creative point of view and any of the outcomes in the in the in the ua um and i think that from us uh we are trying to try to to analyze the creative from from this point of view and then this is something for us to be effective during next year i think mine's similar it's wishful thinking but it's just to find more creative breakthroughs

faster and unfortunately it just takes a lot of work and a lot of testing and a lot of iteration and that's how you get there but man i wish it was easier you know i wish i wish i wish we were taste makers right like we could just be like yeah that's the one that's going to work but yeah of course and then every time you say that actually it's the one that doesn't work so yeah no no never works yeah that's definitely the most time consuming part of my job is you know i'm not even an art director or creative director you know i've designed directors uh under me and our player experience folks but um yeah just trying to getting you creative you know spending a couple thousand dollars you know getting feedback no this is what we want you know just the back and forth that's the most time consuming so yeah anything to kind of figure that piece out all right um we have the opportunity uh you guys are doing such a great job where we have a little extra time so uh i have a question from the audience here if i can share this and

i'll let whoever wants to jump in what would be your advice with ua budget if a game studio has three to four potential games ready before lit is widespread what would be the best way to transfer the learning down to post idfa era what would be your advice with ua budget if a game studio have three to four potential games ready before lit is widespread what would yeah okay what would be the best way to transfer the learning now to a post idfa error hey listen i think uh android's not gonna switch anytime soon so just validate that the learnings you're getting on android carry over to ios and just like use the time to do that and then and then test as much as possible while you can focus on diversifying away from you know facebook and google on their unowned properties so you know rewarded video and other channels um uh and then but really just like

you know you want to be confident once that granularity goes away that your learnings on android can carry over so you see using android as a proxy for we're going to have to right so you know if the data shows that it's a pretty good proxy it might not they might not you know i think it's probably being product specific are you guys looking at other platforms like besides apple and google i mean this is where i think like the size your company matters like you know if you're 500 million a billion dollar company the other platforms aren't that interesting um but if you're a small startup they might be you know we found i i've found that just the the additional work sometimes well almost every time i've tried to go on different platforms the additional work required to get another platform is just not worth the minuscule revenue that you're gonna hey that's also i have to you know caveat

that um different types of games obviously obviously we're better or worse on different platforms so there are plenty of plenty of stories of casual games doing extremely well on other platforms outside of apple and google but the types of games that i have typically worked on have been more i would say mid-core are any of you doing cross-platform like pc console and seen any type of there no yeah yeah we used to use steam as sort of a proxy to start when we started out on some of our games and found that as an interesting tool and then we saw yeah there's some differences that are there and then we we did do some on console which we haven't kept up with but we basically paid for all of our work in the first 30 days and it's been going for the last four years and it's just but for a smaller studio like you say it kind of helps take care of some things but it's not your main source so you're not going to spend a lot of time

but if you're a 500 million dollar company so uh anybody have a question they want to ask each other this is a unique opportunity come on how often do you get to talk to each other so i think i had a bonus question which is just kind of did anyone i mean how much how much more did you know your company spent during you know the beginning of the pandemic and just knowing like pre-ios like just from us like we're like oh we better start buying these users like as soon as possible in august right on ios so i'm just curious like you know do you guys end up spending a lot more we certainly ramped up when the cpm's dropped okay i mean like in the early in the early march april pike period when the cpms went down you followed the cpm curve yeah yeah the opportunity yeah and glad you did so yeah

once in a hundred years which speaks to the ability to be fast in instinctive and have people who feel comfortable to do that when the time is there yeah you didn't you don't want to be sitting there waiting for somebody to approve your budget like three months later right when the win when the windows when the window's gone yeah yeah do you find uh do you find the industry is generally responsive like that i mean i mean you guys are kind of in unique situations i don't um uh like do you see more consolidation kind of happening or do you see that people are um do you see opportunities for some of the smaller players to kind of come up and and uh play some new unique roles and i guess we got two people who are sort of in that boutique and two are in that large so i'm interesting that there's sort of a paradox or you see things the same way yeah and for us we hope so right um

i guess it comes down to what people consider success i think they're they're obviously the big huge companies that are that are you know doing billions um but not every kind of not every company has to make billions right so you know it really comes down to is a certain amount of revenue good enough to keep your your lifestyle going and letting you do what you really enjoy doing um it kind of comes down that yeah i don't think it's going to work for brian's company but um there's definitely a lot of developers out there that would be happy with a couple million a month right okay okay yeah i was just gonna say like i think um innovation comes from anywhere and there's a lot of small teams out there that are you know very solid teams that are going to build great products and um companies like ours and other companies are going to look to nab them up you know yeah and that's

this is that's a growth strategy in and of itself that almost every company that's been around for a while is doing so that's going to contain a lot a lot of your portfolios have come through those type of things as it is right now so all right well good damn you ready for me i'll jump in we're we're happy to have you here absolutely and i i could ask these guys a lot more questions because i'm keen to know what their brains are all thinking it was a really good panel yeah i like the points that um brian made about india as an emerging market and adam made about kind of your localization strategy and how you can target that through the knowledge you get um so thank you all for participating sam adam brian iso draw thanks for being a part of pocketgamer thanks for having us thanks for having

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