Pocket Champs live review: Exceptional growth, Clever game design, Ads playbook w/Arthur Michel (94)

so I think based on the numbers that you what we see and we talked about the spend December around like 30 to 50K per day and you can blink twice if I'm closer to to to the real numbers or once if I'm totally wrong based on the numbers yeah I think like this is somewhere like the ballpark I would say maybe maybe now it's even like growing since it's January and looks like it's it's picking up this is no gaming podcast 2 and a half gamer sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously it's pretty dramatic hello everybody uh this two and a half Gamers we have a special episode again we're doing a live review uh my name is Matel aner I'm Felix Brer and

I'm yier and we are your hosts we also work as consultants on the UA admon and the game design side but you know most importantly we have a special guest Arthur from madbox can you give us a short introduction so we know who you are and where what they are doing at M badbox there hello everyone thank you very much for having me really happy to be here today A bit stressful as well I have to admit um but yeah I'm working as a game director at madbox on the game poket Champs so basically uh my background is a business school guy that was passionate about games and I wanted to create Universe for people and create cool experiences uh I could had the chance to go to gamelof and Ubisoft before madbox and I was looking for a place where I could have more impact and finally ended up finding finding Mbox so I started as

a producer uh on working on many hyper casual titles at the time I was helping five or six teams building hyper casual games it was a very interesting period of you know failing a lot a lot a lot and just having a good idea failing it having having a bad idea failing it having a random idea and succeeding you don't really know why in the end we ended up finding out why but you know it's it's this period where you get to learn a lot uh and this experience got me to game lead um some projects and eventually gam poke Champs uh that validated great kpis weed it and we ended up scaling the game uh in August 20121 and now I'm working with a a super talented team on making this game even better for players nice yeah we have we have um poke CHS on our radar for a long time

actually for a long time I put it into our backlog I think like a couple months ago and I was like oh I think maybe April even maybe it was long ago yeah yeah I think it was after um after the games Forum because I met one of your colleagues I think I met you both or someone there and then uh it was just like okay let's let's take a look at this honestly I even produced like few creatives for for the game with my team back in the days oh nice yeah I didn't know that that's cheating for UA part M that's not not fair it was last year they're not live I was I checked that I checked that they're not live don't worry it's fine it's fine uh so very cool to have you on so uh our audience is you might have noticed we are doing this live review with Arthur so you you know now we are going to know if we are wrong right or uh what the we are doing actually and talking about I think I'm most nervous about the add Revenue

but let's see yeah yeah you should be you should it's hardest to get right cuz it's just yeah you should be you should be because well I I got this fe uh feedback about one of my previous episodes where I talked about UA that I was absolutely correct so let's see let's see helps I was off by 50% last time so that's S I mean look we Ed the external data uh and I used external tools and like censor Tower and then all like data as well for like estimating the spend of Monopoly go and oh boy what the storm that was when I published the article with Neil but don't worry we actually recorded a podcast with J Joseph Kim from game makers yesterday um so it's going to be on our uh storm continues she continues gonna be on our our podcast and his podcast as well it's another crossover episode but enough of this let's dive into pocket Champs yakob uh can we start with you yeah I guess also Arthur anytime you

want to jump in and say this please do so you are a meter and if we say something that you don't agree with you need to call us out and tell us that we are wrong and I hope this happens a lot because that's when the magic happens or even if you want to add something of a background what has happened or you whatever you can share we'll be glad don't be nervous everything is fine uh so you are you are the uh the police like like Felix mentioned yeah sounds good LIC to kill oh yeah um yeah so a little bit of a history lesson what I got to dig up um just looking at the current charts of pocket Champs uh as I was kind of going through it the first one I saw being soft lunge on January 31st 2021 um here we have a chart of Revenue and downloads uh based on that we would see that the global lunch of the game happened actually somewhere at August 2022 where we can see like a clear onramp of downloads to something like 120k a day

and then uh a little bit of a decline and then I would say kind of stabilization on Rue side it's like it's a more granular picture here because on the revenue side we could see the spike there on the global launch to something like 70k a day than like decline to like March last year to like 20K and then suddenly there's a pretty big SP stick continues to like 100k IP Revenue a day um as I was looking through like overall number lifetime numbers says 35 million downloads 30 million IP Revenue only without counting the ad Revenue December numbers landed at 1.5 million downloads and 2.6 iip Revenue only and currently the game is doing something around 100K IP Revenue a day and 7K downloads a day so that I guess would be it I I would just jump in and use our sadness multiplier so if we if we are looking at these num the sadness multipliers for our dear listeners and Arthur okay so the sadness multiplier is basically we as we had

these discussions uh with different Studios which they said you're wrong or right uh based on the real numbers we kind of develop this term sness multiplier because every time you're looking at sensor Tower data or any other external tool we need to multiply the numbers by 1.5 sometimes by two depends on the amount of data so usually when we see 30 million in in up revenues in sensor Tower it can be maybe 40 or something between the 30 to 45 or maybe 50 so I usually I'm a little bit more conservative and say in my opinion you overall the revenues would be yeah 40 40 million Sor about that on iip side on iip side only so I guess you are earning way more on the ads as well so yeah I think it's something around that definitely

nice that's very very good glad glad that we are not completely wrong I me you know we devel sadness multiplayer quite uh well the sad mullier makes us happy yeah player in the end yeah yeah yeah going to the game design part uh yeah I was very surprised when I was uh playing the game because I thought it was kind of more player input heavy or like I don't know why I did that you when I was putting into the our back catalog and mat mention it but it was actually it has very very interesting design around fully automated gameplay so if we would run through like the basic go Loop we have our pocket champ or whatever it's pretty much the the character here I it's a carrot no I think it's a parrot I I just missed the strawberry skin with the event yesterday unfortunately anyway uh going into the game play uh the interesting part actually starts even before the gameplay play starts because there are these

stats which are very very important meaning there's four different vectors run swim climb and fly of transportation that the game is pretty much uh you know build around um we can see that there's the usual Clash Royale gacha progression I'll get to that later but uh the core gameplay mechanics are more interesting one so actually the whole tactics or let's say player input starts before the game where it's very very important to select the right gadget for the track because if I understood correctly uh the four stats are kind of Baseline levels that I'm still upgrading through my chest and like my progression throughout the game and then the gadgets affect those stats based on the terrain of the track so for instance here that we see for those just not seeing the video we have some kind of a straight line that's been cut out into segments which means that between the segments I fly on the segments I run or if there's water I swim swim yeah yeah or there could be

also climbing segments if there's elevation but it's not here it's like actually the opposite so for instance here uh actually the game gives me some kind of a boost for specific uh gear and that gear is uh sport one so the gear actually has multiple vectors also where those are categories that pretty much the tag words that is being played with such as like sport one mea one whatever like different tag lines that you can imagine as a usual like charmand Pikachu Squirtle elements that are pretty much being streamlined into the game and then when I select the gear I press the race button it kind of collects the Champions which I think a lot of them are Bots unfortunately and then uh it goes into the game playay why unfortunately why unfortunately why is that it's like matching is very hard but let's let's see what Arthur has to say on that yeah well well I would also like to hear that and then uh the race pretty much goes without any of my kind of player input I just kind of see it and yeah I can I can put some smilees there and like yeah is

a lot of yeah because I'm I'm last here going to push we're going to push because yeah we had the flying gear uh yeah and we landed on four place which is unfortunately the place which is the cut off for trophy gain what happened to you in the last episodes you suck in every game we talk about really terrible yeah really bad yeah yeah really what's your level tell me what's your trophy level wa wait let's ask Arthur last and I'm gonna tell you because mine is uh 3,100 3,100 you pushed yourself yeah yeah but still less than yaku right your F it's always less than yob it's always less than yob because yob is cheating on his PC yeah he plays only on PC so terrible no no it's fine yeah you're good yeah okay fine what's your level uh I would rather not say oh see there we go there we go like come on like I can play only one game in like at the at the time so I you you play two games at the

time so you know you're cheating so I just say that yeah so that that was the like the main kind of interaction regarding the player like strategy and stuff like how this kind of system works I think it's very elegant in a way that it uh like offers the usual like you know Place square into square triangle into triangle kind of solutions it actually makes you think a little bit because let's say if I go into some different tracks here in the event section to change the gear based on the track yeah yeah you need to some some tracks literally like even have so much restrictions that uh you know there's a very strong push to upgrade other parts of your collection because for instance this track it requires something that I don't even have so because there's you know there's always the like two models how to approach this there's like soft soft limit and hard limit soft limit is like we allow you to like you know compete with your shitty gear and you will be just banging your head against the wall we're okay with that or we just put like a hard restriction and you can't even compete with it and which I

think is like one both has its trade-offs this is probably better because you know I'm not pretty much making my head against the wall I won't even be kind of losing all the time which is probably best for the audience here but if you look at the other kind of events there again different sections for instance here we have an nice section where there's a climb section again to to water kind Parts there yep no it's running Parts actually but maybe the was a bit misleading yeah okay sorry uh but the interesting part here what I wanted to mention is that let's say those gear aren't really like just like power progressions for instance let's say swimming one so let's say there's three different swimming gears and each I would say have their own kind of place where they will shine because for instance the the swimming gear is like Faster by default it's the of course it's the common one is the one that you always get first but it's can assume that you have something like there will

be a lot of water surfaces then you have the sa board one where you have boost on multiple sections which we could apply also here because there are multiple sections and there are uh the water backpack one which is like the more you swim the faster you go which again implies completely different track so you already see the decision here for instance if this would be like pure kind water surface I would probably select this one because it would speed me up because there are these like run and swim uh switch is I will probably select this one because this gives me probably there's more running surface so I would say something for running but anyway just for sake of example I would select this one I've seen even U like this kind of nice parameterization between the Gear I guess that was like one of the hardest part regarding the design to how to create enough of a collection for player choices to be inex strategic and engaging and also to create the input for players to have the incentive to upgrade them all because as we all know that's the Deb of every gcha if you like one part of your equipment can solve all

your problems so that's that's I think that's uh done here very very cleverly um continuing there with the progression uh as I said there's like pretty big kind of a like how much stuff you can collect gadgets yeah pool of gadgets so there's like 24 from the trophy row 23 fora yeah the gcha was very interesting here actually because we have the usual we have yeah let me that we have the usual Clash Royale Shard gcha here which is you know do you see like how excited he is like this is the yeah excitement there's nice iteration within the game you actually learn something that yeah this new thing it works because what the game does is it has the usual like Clash Royale sh G which is as always like gold scarcity driven economy I mean soft currency where you have always more parts to upgrade than you have gold to upgrade for like this is the number one rule here the other rule here that these things are kind of com mentary or let's say you need all of them they are kind

of pieces you don't really kind of let's say let me just focus on one legendary and it solves all my problems it's not power progression so that's great because I need to upgrade all of them in in order to progress in those different modes and different types of tracks but the other interesting part that these tokens are kind of mixed into the pool so you're not only getting the I think yeah here we here we see so we're not only getting cards for the gadgets we also getting these kind of training tokens for or different kind of all those four like ter in vectors even the chests have different symbols between the meaning that they have an affinity toward some kind of let's say for instance now I guess I want to probably select some kind of swim one because that's my lower attributes and I you know don't want to pretty much abandon one of the attributes because then I will get stuck or something so that's done very very cleverly and then the like one of the other very interesting thing for me let me open one chest here we can probably

show uh that we have the usual kind of soft currency hard currency running points and then there's a choose mechanic so sometimes you have to choose which one you want to pick which is very good again more strateg options and then the best part is there's always an upsell which is very very clever in every chest there's always an upsell it's not rewarded at always sometimes it's just hard currency but there's usually always an upsell which is very very good and I think this this is pretty smart so that's there for the like progression yeah here we go REM REM let's let's get Arthur in here and just ask him about the Bots are they real are they Bots I could feel you really wanted to know about it um yeah it's a very interesting question because when we started the game obviously we went full butts to just iterate on the game and see how it works um and we we had a tons of question around what's the best design for these opponents because of

course you tend to master more buts and you can provide a better experience and we ended up finding a system where uh we just using online player datas it's profiles online player profiles that you would use in the game uh sometimes we override some aspect of it but it's mostly player profiles from players from the store but we can use it the way we kind of not not bot version of both yeah yeah with tweaks on the on the matchmaking depending on what we need but overall it's cost how much time you would you would say it would would would you take when you say like we're satisfied with how matchmaking works because I think this is one of the biggest problems that games face definitely for us it's even it's a very special case because most of the games that uh do PVP have are skill-based games and uh the skill involved in Pocket champ is quite quite low it's a lot of meta systems yeah it's very very small so it's very hard for us

to matchmake your on how good you you play the game um so it has been quite challenging to find how we can matchmake players and a lot of the matchmaking comes down to your ranking which is very related to how powerful you are so I would say we're not happy yet with how matchmaking works and we would like to evolve how you progress in the game and how we can matchmake you with players in a meaningful way but I think in like three four months at the beginning of the game we managed to get something that that was like quite okay and that some rules big rules that would work overall for your progression and make it fun all along so yeah perfect matchmaking doesn't exist yet yeah yeah like that's that's the usual answer like how satisfied we not because it's like always an iterative process goes forever is like I remember that like literally when we were were working on like um when I was working on Battle Legion we would literally do like matchmaking um kind of like hand holding thing there which would like increase the V rate ratio for early players and something and suddenly like broke down

and like why is the retention so bad oh this thing broke down and the matchmaking is actually working like it should without the player helper so yeah that that's what you get there so whoever thinks like matchmaking is always fair is not and it shouldn't be fair because it always needs to be like in in favor of players what's the thinking behind there I felt like I lost maybe every sixth to 9th race is there like any thinking behind that or was it just me being making poor choices um I'm not sure but no no I'm sure you did the perfect choices but gamer I would say the gamer I puts in the games I'm the most hated no there's no rule for you to lose on um like on a a rate that we can control it's really just systems that behave so I mean you're going to go up in ranking and the the higher you go in ranking the stronger your opponents are so you're going to get stuck you're going to lose and then you just exit basically yeah definitely there's no

hidden system we we I I was really in favor of that at the beginning of the game because I knew very little about how to make these games actually fun and it was a terrible mistake because you end up not controlling the player experience because your system override what you think it's going to do uh so I think a very old good Excel file with a good curve is always better than than a strange system that override everything nice yeah this is this is the big meat behind like PVP games that nobody sees and everybody assumes it's easy to do but it's actually like so much work to kind of get done right and like and then you have people assuming that like oh I'm not playing B I'm playing rep sure yeah Jesus I'm I always know like when when I win too much it's just definitely Bots and then later down the line when I'm actually match making with the real well I think real players I'm losing all the time yeah my guess is that the the matchmaking is completely different on the event side because when I was going there like like for this one I'm stuck

there from day one like I just don't have any of the reced gadgets for TR I know why because I didn't pay no because you suck very little skills involved but enough is involved that you I literally like like tried all of the things that could like work here even like maybe these water boost will like on these short section would give me the edge no it didn't it just like yeah because this is like at at some point Point these run challenges I guess those are the probably the best conversion mechanisms for your conversions here because they they're turn into duels so you're not like cannot hide within the like whatever third place second place on the leaderboard they literally duels if you lose a duel yeah you need to win and then if you don't have like the recommended gear you usually paired against the guy with the recommended gear so there you go yeah you will eventually win if you manage to train enough but yeah you can get stuck for a good amount of time and um there's this feeling where you know you can going to

get something cool if you finish the event so spending a bit on one training bag or on something will allow you to get what you have and then go on the event finish it so it's actually it's actually quite interesting and we mostly using these events as a way for for players to have a progression that is a bit splitted from the main trophy road that gives you the main changes of the game and propose other changes like challenges you more on one part of your collection changes more on I don't know where how good you're going to be able to train so yeah it's a it's a very interesting tool for us indeed to create specific challenges for players yeah and if I understand correctly the correction is kind of split up into the trophy Road and events one meaning that the events one section only comes from events or can be only used within events which which I got wrong they only come from EV they come only come from yeah yeah okay that's good because then they're exclusive and they're the good conversion point of course yeah yeah yeah we try to make it so yeah and it's also a design principle we have where we try to have it's a collection based game

so you want to have unique contents everywhere in the game as a player so you want to engage in the tournament feature in the event feature in the main progression if you want to complete your entire collection so was very important for us to have unique contents there that sounds good there like there's the like Hall of Fame mechanic also that kind of greatly supports this Hulk kind of thing where you you literally have this kind of sticker album that gives you this like Head Start things there in each Factory if I understand correctly so I guess that's like a later feature when the correction was more robust added to kind for the collection aspect that's great um yeah and like talking about the event system and this whole thing that would be my kind of first question for you because I was looking at old builds of the game like really really really old like November 2021 and there wasn't even any event button or like the whole screen was kind of a little bit smaller uh on the side so I guess no more events or tournaments what would you say would be the like biggest feature that you added from the soft launch of the game like January 2021 that that got into the game because I know yeah let's do this and then I have

another question afterwards sorry one question of the time when you say biggest thing what do you mean the thing that had the best impact for players yeah probably like uh from products perspective after the soft launch what would you say you added to the game that would be like a significant feature that moved the needle well that's a different question because if there's like for that was aim for players uh couldn't be could be something else right I mean the game has had two Big Boost right one in March of 2023 and then one in June of 2023 so they must have done two things that really made an impact um the the first one uh so March 2023 is uh I think is interesting moment for us because it's a it's also a moment where we changed a bit our philosophy we just scaled the game like five months ago six months ago in August uh and we had great success and it was like a crazy moment we've been working for years to make this game happen we you

know madbox was building hyper casual games and we chose to commit to follow our dreams and go to bigger games so amazing moment we scale a game we're super happy and we try to to be like okay we're gonna do like other top grossing games do we're gonna have live UPS event we're gonna throw a lot of content and uh it's going to be amazing and after a few months we kind of realized that we were not investing enough in uh you know making the game evolve and were not R taking risk and the game was slowly declining and slowly dying of course you can milk Revenue out of a game by adding content by having a lot of events uh but it's just the I think the usual trap where your game slowly goes down and dies so we we really wanted to like it has always been our goal to make games that you can play for for years and years and and games that are played all around the world so we felt like okay we're not really following our objective here and we need to Reg just so we beginning of 2023 we we really went for taking risk and it

was a bit of a stressful Moment Like bigger versions where we changed big things in the game and the first one was update based on progression systems basically so we re workk the trophy road we gave you more objective as a player player clearer objective reworked events you have more more challenges and more variety in the challenges that you have and we added a bit of content uh and we rebalance the whole game basically like from day two day three the whole game has been rebalanced so it was big risk because when you build such an update you can also end up uh likeing definitely um but it it eventually paid off we have a very good release pipeline we we have a very strong data team in house as well so we we've been able to learn from what didn't work and just to just have the version on store in a very good shape and this started the growth you can see from February March uh can you share the screen on the revenue sure sure sure me just change that cuz yeah it's it's quite impressive it

went from 20K day to close to 40 and then up to 80 in three months yeah that felt so good this is the period after like August 22 of global launch and there's the decline that Arthur mentioned and then somewhere here the March 2023 where Turing Point yeah some something like snaps and like double the revenue double the revenue and so on so yeah we also we also have very strong I don't want to be like the product guide but we also have very strong team in house and creative teams in in house yeah definitely we need to mention them because a lot of the success is also on their side like we found very great creative at that time we had like very like new opportunities that we explored as well so that helped definitely on top of the product improvements for sure yeah so but you sorry you mentioned like uh you kind of found out what

didn't work so what was that if you can mention at least one or two things like okay well this definitely didn't work so we need to change that um the most complex things thing about this game is that you mostly progress uh with your power training so a lot of um the the challenges you're going to face you're going to be able to overcome it by training your champ coming back to the game being stronger and overpass The Challenge and um it's been quite challenging to make this fun on the long run because it's really pretty much you come back to the game you get X power you're stronger and now you can advance from X and then you're stuck and you go again and this is fun for seven days maybe 14 and then it becomes less and less fun yeah so we just had to find ways to break this progression down into smaller pieces where you have short short and Midterm objective more like different challenges around your Gadget collection around I don't know like a different

area where you're going to race with different rules um so it's just more fun to advance towards this challenge so I think it was a bit of content and balancing to make this progression actually f for longer yeah s sounds to me like the usual kind of RPG problem where you have like you know everybody can eventually get stuck on the main road and there needs to be enough content to keep the player happy until he builds up his strength to continue on the main Ro therefore you need to have those side modes those other meta game systems that can keeps them returning even though they know like they cannot progress the main but they still like the other parts of the game and there's like I think your your current kind of event bar here and like as I there's like so much stuff that's currently being there the other interesting thing that I seen there is is like the offer systems seems very very robust and like the yeah the upsell on the gacha chest is like one thing but the offer system is also kind of very very strong there's also the battle pass system there uh somewhere that I or or left Mission bottom left next play button there there

it is yeah yeah which is again done very very good because there's the usual thing where you complete missions that you cannot get claimed for because they're part of the battle pass so that's a very very strong kind of conversion point right there just to read out the top in up purchases uh special offer four is a top one $9.99 special offer five $1 19999 is the second best selling offer so yeah nice yeah a lot of offers we we managed to to have I think this Balan monetization where as a player every aspect of the Mon Mon monetization sorry serve its own purpose so you want to maybe have the mission the VIP pass if you are very engaged players and you're willing to spend this money but on top of that you will still need uh if you if you face a certain challenges and you want to you know convert to overcome it uh the offers can still relevant where I think sometimes some games struggle to

make their whole mation panel valuable it's something we we manage to maintain it's not yet perfect but U but we're quite happy about it yeah I think that that's driven mainly through the point that like your like your kind of let's say incent gacha incentive system is done very good through those tracks because those tracks are those you know charmand Square 12 Patu elements where you definitely need the gadgets for the right track therefore you need all of them not really just one of them which then greatly sells and by the way the discounts on the economy I really like those that because they're not that big which means that you're not really undercutting your economy that much as you see like a lot of these games they have like I don't know 300 500 and trust me players can those that they you cannot them on those because they are anchored from the shop so like I guess this was part of the rebalance package I would guess when the economy needed to be kind of like more robust Stronger Yeah last thing answer that let him answer that yeah sorry sorry sorry no no no problem no we we had no issue with economy inflation actually we've

always been too um let's say our economy has always been quite robust in the sense that we we don't want to just discount everything and make it crazy we I think we really try to make this game fun for long and it's very important for you as a player to understand what's the value of everything in the game uh so if you have a super discounted offer it can really change your perceived value and maybe next time you think like oh no this item doesn't have the same value because it's very cheap in the shop for example so it's really something we we we taking care of maintaining like a a good economy that can sustain a long time and that feels things feels valuable as a player all along your progression so we didn't really had any issues with that in the past that sounds good uh yeah last thing that I think would be a good transition to Felix is that uh yeah interstitials start showing after 1,500 tropies until then no intials there you go Felix so now we're on to the ad monetization part which is interesting

because you guys have done something that's very hard you get users to watch a boatload of intertial ads which is usually a retention killer and by my estimates I would say that majority of the ad Revenue actually comes from intertial rather than the rewarded ads um no that's not true that's I'm sorry I was trying to find a thoughtfully c way to say it but no no no we we do way more revenue from reward that and no we don't print we print a good amount of intertial but compared to what we're able to do with Hyper casual games it's actually way less okay interesting well go all right uh yeah okay thank you very much for listening let's godamn I'm sorry Felix I'm sorry yeah no worries it's good to be honest but okay so let's start with the the rewarded placements because they're really clever uh especially uh how it's done do you want to start by uh just

showing off the rewarded placement Remo with the Maybe the cool down for the training bags yeah it's it's right there you can you can see it okay 30 minutes so here we have the one I think is the most clever uh most of these climbing or training bags uh they're on a timer and usually you're able to shave most of it off but not all of it and you can do that by watching a rewarded ad for uh getting minus 30 minutes on this uh yeah on this timer and essentially yeah you can get it on the one that's a opened and you can that's on a one day cool down correct and exactly it res at midnight basically yeah and basically the number five uh tells me one thing that whoever is doing their admon really knows their thing because after five if you watch more than five rewarded ads in a session uh basically the recency effect comes into effect where basically you start getting paid a bit less because the ad networks assume that you're like not paying attention so the number five here I'm sure it's not by accident or is it

no it's not by accident it's not the only placement in game so we try to apply in in poke chimps as well and yeah this one is is one of them yeah nice cool and then we have the ticket offer and the chest in the shop think we have we saw this chest as well yeah the chest and then a after every race event you have a bonus uh reward as well which is also a very clever design feature so you have the intertial ad and then separated by two Victory screens after or whatever happens so basically get some distance away uh from the intertial ad uh then that's when you show the opportunity to watch a rewarded ad which is yeah quite clever uh basically my thinking here is you guys just wanted to have a bit of distance between the intertial ad so you can still show the intertial ad at every race and then also uh the rewarded out yeah that's exactly the case and also the the the addition rewarded that you mention is is not a system

systematic one it's one you can have if you have a chest it's basically one you proposed if you open a chest in the game so on the main progression you're going to open a lot of chest uh so yeah it's just the way it's designed so from time to time you're going to open you're going to have an interstial then open a chest on the on the trophy Road or anywhere in your progression and at that moment you might have that bonus reward we have a rewarded propos to you yeah that's the upsell one yeah yeah yeah is there any no ads buying anything removes interstitial ad but I believe you never remove rewarded ads correct yeah yeah this is it yeah we tend to propose everything that you can get we've rewarded with gems as well so if you want to be a premium player you can just buy gems and I have the the same same advantages did you ever consider skip it or anything like that or using hard currency to skip the rewarded placements uh it's actually what we're doing in some placements like for example the bonus reward that you get in chest you can or get it with gems um just not

branded as skip it no it's not branded as a skip it yeah exactly it's more branded as a bu it with gems so no we never consider that but maybe it would be interesting in in certain area of the game yeah and intertial ads start as Remo said after 1500 trophies uh I'm assuming you just kind of want to get the stickiness of the app before you yeah start Plastering intertial ads uh just out of curiosity do you guys have any bid floor set up on interstitial ads so you only show interstitial ads if you can get a certain ecpm price or maybe that's too detailed no it's it's a very interesting question actually I we never really explor that and I think we should do you think it's something that can have a good value uh usually what you tend to do like on big interstitial right now like you know I thought you guys were earning mainly from intial l so I assume but I was wrong I'll just say it but uh usually what you do is you start experimenting you start from maybe like a dollar so basically or $2 so

basically you only show interstitial ads when you can get at least that and you work your way up and then you see basically on retention what earns you more in the long run and usually what you're able to find is maybe around like five or $6 you find some kind of equilibrium where retention picks up so much that you don't lose any money uh but it's a clever little hack and you can do it also by Geo it's quite clever uh takes a couple of months to get right but your admon person can definitely set up those tests quite quickly that's super interesting thank you very much for for sharing how many people do you have in the admon team uh I think we we don't have people specialized in ad mod combination yeah it's UA team basic yeah Okay no Okay makes sense makes sense I'm assuming also given the fact that I saw mainly Max App 11 uh ads you guys are 100% on App 11 Max as a as a mediator right yeah ask me if if you look at the the UA channels and I see

apple having like seven times on the one page like this is Max 100% % Max you got it it's Max nice all right so here comes the the ad Revenue impression before we get onto my estimation before we get on to my questions but I estimated uh in total you guys are earning anywhere between 39 to 45k a day in ad Revenue uh which is about 40% of the overall ad Revenue without taking into account the sadness multiplier so it's probably closer to 30 or 35 uh that's ecpm from late December though so it could be a bit inflated no but it's actually quite close from the reality yeah okay so I'm assuming then that I estimated that your interstitials are nine on average uh and the reward are around six but maybe that's a bit too high on justicial then and that should be reversed yeah yeah but it's uh a bit high on intertial right um and I think

you're not that far far rewarded so so you can just tune Same by the Numbers yes at least yeah yeah but it's interesting like if if the the split is 35 maybe 40% uh ads and six well 60 65% iibs that's I would expect like yeah 5050 oh no yeah 40 60s yeah that's that's reasonable yeah my first question is like I have this question so much with clients that are like intertial ad curious because I think it's one of the hard ad unit hardest to get right obviously reward is really hard to get right but you guys have such a robust economy that I think it's more interesting to listeners to kind of just ask how did you start experimenting with interstitials because it can absolutely destroy your retention we we had a lot of experience with interal with our hyper casual background we scaled several big hyper casual titles so we could experiment with where do you want to join intertial to happen how you want to um to

parameter it uh so it's something we knew and uh to be honest we didn't iterate that much on pocket GS we knew we wanted it to happen on endgame um so it's like a moment where your game play is finished uh but before getting your reward so you you you get to see the intertial before getting rewarded by the game and then um I think the rate uh like how often you see an interstitial was the ones we knew were the one that don't damage too much our retention while still bringing a good amount of Revenue and we really went for that you know medium scenario and we never really tweaked it again it's something we want to iterate on because we we would like to get out of interstitial little by little with the the game like we as I said we have a longterm vision for pocket jums it's a game we we truly believe we could we could bring super high in the stores and uh and in many more players hands so we believe removing industrial at some point will be valuable but from our

latest test you know I don't think industrial have that have this much impact on retention at least from my experience on early retention nice so so it's a balance to find and now we are kind of in the medium scenario that we found out was the best one from our hyper casual experience cool and I can't help the notice but there's no banner ads what was thinking behind that's what I wanted to ask yeah like I was so shocked you know like from the hyper casualties this banners I was expecting to see it so badly also you have quite high daus right so I like they would would kind of make sense probably uh to be honest I don't want to be too much on this is good or this is bad but sure I had this discussion a lot with with the UA team of course you can imagine me a little game lead that iterates on the game that is not recouping yet and it's a bit weak in monetization and I'm like no I don't think we should have banners now uh we want to get strong on in purchase first so yeah our Focus has always been to build like a game that can last a game that

can be fun for long and we really think in a purchase is the right thing to do like you know your good casual games that you can play for yours um I don't think banner ads is is a bad thing it's just it's not really fitting the the image we want the product to have and I think there is a lot of things around the Game Matrix uh that has is harder to measure on perceive the like the player perception of the game and I I think the banner can have an impact on that um and it's an impact you would like to reassess every time you you improve your game we still building this game we're still iterating on the game so it would be pretty hard for us to you know reassess all the time is Banner a good idea or not for players so we chose like the game is profitable it's it's doing good we're aiming long term we know we're gonna keep building it so I I think it would be interesting optimization eventually but maybe arming our product vision and and the long term of uh of what the game can become so we chose not to have it from our estimate

at the time also it was a small chunk of Revenue compared to what we have with rewarded intials and in in purchases so yeah we chose just not to have it but maybe we should be challenged more on that and we should try it I don't know it was just first thing that came into my mind as well it's like okay da is quite High where the where the banners basically yeah fair enough like very good answer actually makes makes a lot of sense yeah so I have two more questions and then we'll turn it over to the UA lead and he can uh show us some fun creatives but oh yeah just wanted to ask also like uh you have the most aggressive end cards I've seen on like a scaled game on rewarded ads like do you guys like try to speak to your network Partners to limit these end card formats or do you just let them go completely wild cool that's an interesting information uh I didn't uh I didn't know that we would be assessed this way but uh no it's just that the only thing like I like I I manage some clients that have like a really large daily revenue and

all the things that I realize from the ones that have a large daily ad revenue on especially rewarded they're very picky about end cards and how you show end card especially on it justicial and rewarded because it impacts uh player retention so much even fact that people some people have considered just going on admon mediation to have better ad quality because the retention is so like much better and what a lot of people don't know is you can actually speak to your ad networks and say like hey get us the out of my game because I don't want it there because I shouldn't see 60c videos with six clickable end cards my my life you should play to war more more than like 10 minutes that was like 60 second videos 10 clicks it was just and then it was also playable ads on top of it I had like h a hard Attack Just closing the ad just by closing so I I've tested this and if you remove n cards and say 30 plus 5 and three clicks to exit which

I think it's fine uh usually ecpm drops by about like 4 to 5% but usually that offset an ecpm drop is always offset by higher redention yeah no but it's definitely something we're doing like we we really taking care of making sure the experience is great under all aspects and AD this part of it so we're talking with the ad Network and we're trying to remove everything that is too aggressive so maybe you've been unlucky or maybe there's something we didn't cover I don't know um this being said sometime we tolerate things that are a bit in between like industrial ad that can be a bit longer than 5 seconds or these things but overall we really try to like maintain something that is not too aggressive on that side but it's it's a very interesting point that you rais and it's really something I want to discuss with with the UA team now all right last question before going over to UA why are there no ad related daily missions or monthly missions that's a very interesting question actually there are but not the way you would think they

are integrated they're just indirectly pushing you to or encouraging you to watch ads because for example you can claim 10 daily deals if you just claim the free one you're going to get one progress in your mission if you watch an ad you're going to have two for example uh you want to earn power uh reward that would help you for that so we went for this integration that is a bit indirect uh but serve I think the same purpose of encouraging player to progress in the game and to actually Advance everywhere but we felt like it was um like the way we integrated it without having directly asking you to watch ads uh was more in line with the vision we have for the game because we want VIP players to or all players to have you know like this good experience where if they don't want to engage in certain aspect of the monetization they won't get completely stuck or they won't lose something forever um and losing one mission is a

is a tough moment because you you can't um you're going to get slower to get your skin in the end and all of that so yeah we went for the indirect uh integration I'd say here so basically here the 10 daily deals that's the the one that you would say is ADD related to No I say almost all of them are because Spin The Fortune Wheel you can respin the Fortune Wheel with a rewarded ad so you can double what you get here we' rewarded claim daily would be uh get power you can you know reduce your training back times with rewarded so yeah I would say almost all of them are in the end like closely related to to a reward rewarded placement yeah for for for for those wondering like some game what fix is asking some games literally put here like watch an ad Mission that's the practice yeah all right all right great seriously great job like some of the like the feature special the five on the the opening of the training bags I think is really genius so well done thank you

so much well done on the on the UA side it looks like uh you did well with your previous hyper casual games I see a lot of inspiration in terms of the creatives in uh in those uh one sec in those creatives let's see so I'm gonna okay maybe I will start yeah I'm going to start directly with this because uh it's it's a lot of it was a lot of fun and it's really clever yeah I would say Innovation but I would say also take in of these like Gates creatives because I haven't seen this before I mean the the gates creatives and the concept is quite old but it's usually connected to like numbers and multipliers and then other other stuff but this was just absolutely brilliant so if if you if we start watching these these creatives look at the gates so it's not not your typical numbers but it's

animals it's amazing seriously I was like oh my God this is perfect I love it I can I can imagine like this is definitely not the first iteration uh of the of these Gates and would be great to understand like how did you kind of come up with the with the animals or like how did you end up with the animals but oh my God like it's different icons as well and uh just different like takes on this I mean the overall concept is quite clear love it Gates perfect but the different icons and different animals that's I haven't seen that before so we have a lot of these that I found uh in the in sensor Tower as well as uh as in in Facebook ads Library as well so we have this again any any you you see the the combination of different animals different visual style of those of those those icons and then also kind of different backgrounds as well I love the

music as well it's just very cheerful and also the humor in the creatives that's that's that's what I I really like and also like a lot of um male players like these types of things as well so it's a combination of hyper casual humor and then uh fail as well I mean the fail stale kind of kind of works well then we yeah no just like for those not watching like yeah the usual Gates creative got turned into like you choosing between animals and then the fail ones are actually you choosing an animal that's not appropriate for a Terrain so you drown fly down get killed and stuff like that funny moment you have these gadgets as well and again like different visual Styles which is great so I like love this uh it's like multiple of those what I think uh this was also quite quite interesting are they not are they not lying in any of their creativs what I mean look you have the game which looks like

hyper casual why the would you lie like just like you want to just showcase the game play because that's what you know that's why you have the the low cpis basically but then there are some some different things and this I mean I almost fell from the chair because I I know few hyper casual games and uh this was taken from like car I think Hutch had this like one car game and this is like a hyper casual mechanic it's brilliant and this what what we've been talking about for a long time like using all these hyper casual kind of mechanics in the in the videos to get like better cpis and find these different hypercal mechanics that kind of suits your suit your your gameplay it's I mean it's super clever it's super clever it's really and I think this is the most fake one yet this was the yeah yeah because it's uh oh well let's let's look at this I mean it's still mobile gam right I thought this is

like a like my perfect Hotel type of creative maybe a little bit yeah I think it was one of the inspiration definitely I was like yeah I was like oh yeah 100% is my Prof doesn't it can't be anything else okay so idle gameplay yeah yeah so this is you know I would say altered gameplay but then something we're exploring like it's really something we want to explore how the player will be able to have deeper progression system and like maybe upgrading what what the the machine you're training on such things so it's it's also kind of exploration for the game as well at a at a look into um what uh Township is doing on their simulation like uh the creatives they have multiple kind of upgrades and even it's it looks like different progressions in in that in that creative which is like 45 second long you have like all the the classic

golden goblins start and then you are upgrading the farm and everything it could work quite well here with the gym and then the tracks and all the different gadgets it's it's very interesting and this this is quite nice and this is quite old this is quite old as well I think uh it's 52 seconds really nicely done and I I think I saw it multiple times yeah it's it's really nice nice it was for the the worldwide of the game we we went for a full fully fledged trailer and it was like as a game maker when you have such a trailer for a game you worked on it's just an amazing feeling and it ended up working well also in Creative so you know it's a double yeah it's yeah exactly it's and also like it's very well made and like the whole kind of narrative and like how how it looks and like how it progresses from start to the end you would just want to watch it just want to see like okay well how does that end up now all the twists and everything yeah it's

great and you see yeah nice so yeah that's that's that and then obviously we have some like ugc type of things which is uh quite nice but yeah oh yeah you can hear like is that a real guy yeah that's a real guy it is it is yeah yeah it's actually commenting like what what's being done in the game like yeah so it is real real person who's the guy do do you know him or is he no I don't know him I would have like but no I don't yeah it's random Creator but that's that's uh was there and then we have you know this is how it's done yob so this is how have you end up first don't suck it was a tutoral video for you yeah yeah you know I I was like yeah I'll have one more question after to finish the show real because something downed on me what different game a different game okay so yeah it's uh basically look at

this is quite nice actually yeah so ugc type of things okay uh so I think yeah that's uh I have some more but yeah it's it's mainly around the gates which I think that it's something that works for you quite well uh recently in different iterations of it which which is it's actually the the best way we found to allow players to because it's quite important in the creative you want to quickly what's going on and you want it to fit with your game and if you just have the car game play of of poke chimps playing it's not really clear what's going on and the gates was a very interesting tool for the players to understand that you have to make a choice so it's a very simplified choice between something that flies or something that swim but in the end it's actually the type of choice you can in the game nice yeah the issue we have with that is that often players feel like they will be in control of the champ which is not the case which can be frustrating for some players so it's still something we're exploring um but uh but it's it's quite nice for you to what's going on yeah very very clever

way so Yak what's what's on your mind the question for your Arthur have you got any inspiration from um musum a pretty Derby uh I don't think so I don't know is this games oh there you go okay because it's a it's a like very very famous Japanese uh like horse girl racing game and it's like also automated game play and you also increase like five attributes of their like horse girl and you know pretty much you just watch the races and you train her in between and the game was launched in February 2021 which is like one month before your soft launched okay yeah I got it I see what game you you're talking about I I played very like not that much uh but uh but no no no no specific uh inspiration for this from this game but I'm sure they have very interesting mechanics we could look into but uh no I don't think so nice yeah because I was like where did I see like a similar screen with those four stats because yours is super unique and like this don't on mean like

yeah I've seen somewhere there but yeah just like of designer off topic yeah okay okay so then then you know like I I was looking into the creatives and then I I opened up this creative gallery and then you see uping 10 times here it's like oh okay yeah it's like 100% it's it's Max then we have like these creatives that we already saw and it's like you're going to be de by after watching ads but uh obviously uping you need you need to have the the playables which is which is quite nice so we can oh I need to play this okay so that's that's the thing uh is it is this kind of working uh by the way I mean I guess it is because well you need to kind of play the game in playables even though the you don't play the game afterwards right yeah but it's not it's not working that well compared to other creatures okay okay nice uh all right so what from what I see here when I was

looking into this like all countries in worldwide obviously like app popped up because from my understanding you would you would use well first us then you add tier ones and then you open up worldwide so you know there you go uh but then it's like there's like a uh YouTube integral and I saw a lot of um Impressions on Instagram and Facebook especially in us and also Tik Tok so I was like okay but it's interesting mix uh because I mean if if I look in here like you have basically everything which is which is available I Unity is is there and I would assume you use also MCO but yes we do yeah yeah okay so that's like all these like bat machines and whatever else bullshits but um I wanted to say something and I totally totally blinking on it never mind oh oh yeah I know so you are definitely running the like hybrid rust campaigns on on appin and I

guess on Unity as well and I would say Google too since you have this like amazing split like 40 to 60 which is nice and my assumption would be and uh let me just uh change here so I see your face when I'm talking about the about the estimates of spent so I think based on the numbers that you what we see and we talked about the spendy somewhere around like 30 to 50K per day and you can blink twice if I'm closer to to to the real numbers or once if I'm totally wrong based on the numbers yeah I think like this is somewhere like the ballpark I would say maybe maybe now it's even like growing since it's January and looks like it's it's picking up a little bit and based on the retention profile which is something I see here so we see like or let's say 50% day one

retention which we also know that this is kind of overestimated yeah I think yeah retentions are well overestimated in both tools every tool so day one is actually lower than that yeah it gets lower and lower with time um yeah that's what I want to say like if yeah there's like day 0 which is like 1.5 so if this is overestimated then let's say it's around one so I would say you were kind of optimizing for like maximum like day 60 uh payback period because then after day 60 it's it started to be quite flat so that's why I kind of like ended up with this estimation of like 50k maybe up and down 10K per day so let's see maybe I'm totally wrong on this but maybe it's uh it's even more maybe it's even more it's like I maybe I think it's that to be honest but I'm not I'm not a you expert so I'm not sure but I think

more okay yeah yeah I would say it's it's a little bit more I wanted to be conver conservative here but yeah if we're talking 50 maybe it's like 60 70 depends on the on the latest numbers because the revenue is growing it's growing and and honestly it needs to be very short p period because of the retention profile so so that's that's that so yeah good job we we're really struggling with long-term retention now with the game uh it's something we we want to improve since the beginning and that would really help stacking even more revenue and growing our player base so we really focused on that and uh yeah it's it's uh I think it's it's the main conversation we are having today at madbox is how do we make this game engaging for longer and that would completely change the way we I think we do UA and the way we manage to oh yeah I like that like Improvement on day 90 that would like unlock so much more budget honestly like way way more

because then you could optimize for long long payback period like all the like casual games basically and it's like yeah it's like you can spend Millions nice one day yeah very good job yeah I mean like it's on a very good trajectory towards that towards that is there anything you want to add to like uh the game design admon or UA analysis before we let you go on your Merry way that you think think would be interesting for listeners to kind of hear from your journey with building this game there's so many things I could add but yes no I I think the the most interesting thing on our story and how we manag to to build pocket GS is that we we really made it like it's it's a product we think since the beginning uh as an experience a new experience an Innovative experience we want to bring for players and thanks for your positive comment on the game is super nice and I I we can feel that we we man to bring something that is a bit different that brings an experience that that is new

for players so it's been a lot of struggle and it's not an easy path it's you know as failing for on your hyper casual game and failing again but it's more looking U looking what you're building and just trying out new things so yeah I think it was a very interesting adventure and the most interesting thing for me is really what we're building today which is you know aiming long long term trying to take big creative bets make the game evolve as we can see on many top grow games tend to to do and reinvent them themselves I'm thinking the supercell games of course but many games are doing as well U and I think it's what makes like the the the story behind this game unique it and it what makes the you know the current growth we're experiencing that is that feels super good also for us because also you know yeah it's encouraging it's it's an Human Adventure on top of everything and uh when you see that it pays off feels quite good so nice Definitely yeah

my if if you do the typical round to end up here uh I would do nine out of 10 uh realistic Remo here because like really outstanding job on like taking something that's like not really like you know clone to Hell on the market and like pushing is somewhere completely else especially like nine goes for the U-turn because I don't really see games to Make U-turn like after OB launch you have the shark fin it never recovers and there's very few games that I've seen that like are able to do the uturn and actually go over what they did in yeah that's that's like literally like unicorn there and uh the only thing like why is nine not 10 out of 10 is that I think like your biggest challenge as you said is your metag game to widen it even deeper to like push on that progression and make it even more bold in a way that like yeah like events and everything they are great but you need to keep this kind of very very specific thin eyes of attention budget of like you cannot go very deep on the system because they will tune turn the game like more chish which you don't want to know but you

also want to kind of inject more flavor and more kind of different things into the meta game that would like increase that like level sorry day 30 day 90 kind of feeling so that that like what M mentioned that uh Mr Auto fire is kind of doing on their their end for long term yeah yeah yeah that that's like they added like all those different modes different kind of Sid things and like different social features and social features and all of these fun stuff players the thing is that you need to you know you need to get the right one you cannot just overflow the game with 20 different features then so C that you lose M play audience so it's very delicate it's not really like it's not like oh just we go over the list so guil system Clan system blah blah blah blah blah it doesn't work like that every every one of these can tank your retention actually down yeah yeah yeah and it's one of of the pit4 we ret try not to fall into something I'd like to mention is that here at madbox we really have this production philosophy where the team are in control of their game so I with my team have ownership on this

game so we can like and we finish to really know the game we're working on after two years on it so we we really try every time we approach a feature not just impart something from the market and say oh this could be added to the game but really finding the purpose behind it and what what new experience it would bring bring for the player and how does it actually connects with the existing game because the risk is often you add something new you've seen the market doing something you just added to your game and it doesn't really make sense in your uh in your game so this is taking a lot of time and a lot of iteration but it's really like passiona flow and it's the current conversation we're having now in the company are actually how do we find these features that make sense that will make the progression deeper and of course social is on the table but we don't want just to copy paste a clan feature from another game we want it to be connected to uh the the systems uh and to the overall experience so it makes sense so it's a very interesting design and just creative work but it takes a lot of time and and energy so you have to be

passionate about what you do definitely oh my God it was like amazing wrap for for today Arthur thank you very much for coming it was really really great one uh I actually enjoyed it quite it great thank you so much for coming and great job great that was a pleasure nice uh thank you very much listeners as well uh please uh join our slack Channel we already discussed pocket Champs there and like you have quite a lot of fans there in our slack slack groups from what I can I can see uh definitely subscribe to YouTube channel Spotify give us a rating whatever you want to do please do and uh see you next time thank you very much cheers thank you thank you bye [Music] [Applause]

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