Product Deep Dive: Whiteout Survival's $400M Loot (Century Games)

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the first ever uh deconstructor of fun product deep dive podcast I'm Laura Tanto you've heard me a bit on twig I'm the senior director product at Big Fish Games and I have Jen here with me hi I am your co-host of the product Deep dive podcast I'm Jen donaho strategic marketing consultant at beta hat and Jaden Inferno Laura and I are teaming up on these new product deep dive podcasts which are going to just drop into the deconstructor of fun feed we know that you love marketing versus design versus product banter go team marketing so we're going to be covering games from the two most important sides of product and marketing each of us kind of lending that lens and really diving into products that we don't get a chance to do on The Twig series we need more product and marketing banter because we

are the essence of a tag team of what can make or break a product I think this differentiated from twig and the fact that twig typically covers industry news Misha and Jen also do interviews with leaders in the industry and there wasn't really any product that was kind of digging into specific games we'll be looking at Big Market games that you know crust really likes and then also what he considers mice nuts that I really like a lot of these games that you know might be considered smaller end up either represent a future Market shift or a strategic play that we want to highlight and games tend to build Mountains from mice nuts so I can't take credit for that quote but I felt it was very appropriate um I think the key here is we want to find products that are bringing something interesting to Market that you can take with you and you can apply our product and marketing insights that you can take and listen to and be like oh I can bring this to my game and it should feel like you're stepping into a med meting with two of us figuring out

how to make and Market the next great game by deconstructing what we consider to be winners and we're open to game ideas so we have a little bit of a list already of games I you know we were both thinking about that would be interesting players in the space right now but you know if you have any games you're like oh I just need someone to go in and analyze this post it in the deconstructor of fun slack and we'll take a look always happy for input awesome so here's what you can expect from from the structure of these product Deep dive podcasts so we're going to try to keep them a little bit shorter I say that now and this one is for sure going to run long because we're doing this whole intro of what you could expect but we want this to be a little bit more bite-sized and consumable so you don't have too much from us in your podcast feed so we're going to start each pod with the games three to five key takeaways and then dive into the data data did I mention data so we're obviously going to pull data

from data AI so you don't have to we are here for you to be your data ninjas At Your Service we're also going to offer insights from both you know as Laura said earlier like the product lens the marketing lens since we believe that there's a OnePlus One equals 3 a one team one dream philosophy especially for life service games mostly we're going to deal with Mobile on this call but if there is some burning desire for something else I got my Xbox behind me I can whip that out just don't ask me to play any PC games I super suck at PC games me too me too give me like we got anything that's covered on PS5 or Xbox we gotcha all right let's jump in so we're covering Century games you would know them because they made white out survival and Frozen City before that they also have a couple other games that are a bit smaller in different sub genres we wanted to cover them way back but it was finding the right place because it is a big game I think this

somewhat stemmed from twig 264 we talked about changes in China's regulations around games and there we touched on what we consider you know Century games to be a rising star we're going to focus on white out survival and then we'll talk a little bit about Frozen City because they are related and then lastly friend of deconstructor fund Neil long his blog is mobile gaming. Biz he ended up surveying a bunch of us asking us what we thought was a game worth mentioning like what games do you think are really great and this game white don't survival came up not just from me cuz that's the game I suggested but it actually came up by a couple other people so we figured hey this might be a great first candidate yeah and it pass crest's not mice nut bar I think it's a top 30 Global Revenue game I'll actually get into that in a little bit okay so here is the section if you didn't make it past this section okay we understand we are pulling all of the summary bits up

front here are the five takeaways from our analysis of white out survival and Century games okay let me give you all five of them and then we'll dig into each one of them a little bit more so number one hybrid mechanics have become MVP you know minimum viable product for top grossing games and are key to White out survival success so hybrid mechanics have become MVP number two the complex Made Simple through thoughtful UI and signposting so UI is just chef's kiss in this game hyper casual UA ad creative can work for midcore or core games even though you might feel really gross about it I tell you when you go in dayi and you look about all the ads I had a blast and I did feel gross number four adding Social Casino SL limited time mini games and monetization can absolutely again work in a midcore game I saw it just so much of that I've been playing I haven't

been playing as long as you but I was really struck by this and number five social matters beyond the obvious there's so much in here obviously if we didn't mention it already which we didn't this is a 4X strategy game and by the way Laura and I admittedly are not the target audience for this kind of game we don't play these kinds of games so the lens that we're coming at this from is how do you take the insights that we saw and apply them potentially to other genres this is not an episode on how to make a better 4X game really want to be clear about that this is more like what can you learn from this and apply to almost any genre we're trying to keep it a little bit more broad here in some cases we might you know dig into a particular genre but that's our goal here so Laura go through number one this is what you put down as your biggest takeaway all right so hybrid mechanics are the MVP hybrid mechanics can be pretty broad but the way we see this and

it applies in this case to Forex games but also most games puzzle or otherwise is that if you're going to make a game the combination of mechanics you choose will keep players in the game I think you need a lot more content and there's not just more levels at the end or more bits of what you would consider the content pipeline you need a fully featured spec out game I think gone are the days where you have a simple meta and a single engine that is just not what we're seeing even if you do have a new game and you think your engine is profoundly unique you'll still need a range of meta features Live Events return reward mechanics within a balanced economy that is one takeaway that is the way forward many of the same features things we see like the season battle passes rewarding purchase chains mini games task list all work in these types of games so that is they tend to be a little bit a genre agnostic however they do need to be adapted to to your game Loop and then your game systems and

your overall game economy you can't just copy paste it's not going to work it does need to be adapted and thoughtfully worked in and what Jen's going to touch on a little bit later is they need to be explained in a bite size easy to understand explain to me like I'm five kind of way because the one reason that we want these lots of mechanics is it's maximizing your appeal and your adoption you are going for a lot more player types and this touches a little bit on what we're seeing today with it's very difficult to scalate it is expensive there's no more whales tting so how do you maximize appeal yeah I think just to expand on your number one I see a lot of squad RPG elements executed really well in this and that hits a strong monetization angle you know it's got some of the gotcha magic that we know you know works for the honai star rails and the ginin impacts combined with the Forex I mean I've never seen as many monetization hybrid monetization pass as

you do in this game so that's why number one is number one that's why number one is number one and number two is related to that in that you're going to have all these complex systems and this complex game well for the Forex lovers that didn't know we were Forex lovers like one thing that is a very important takeaway is they take these complex systems and they make them a really simple the thing that really resonated with me as I played this game was how easy it was was to really understand what the game wanted me to do so I learned the term at scopely on Walking Dead We called it signposting we actually really sucked at sign posting in the game for Walking Dead Road to survival and so for anyone that doesn't know what signposting is it's the use of visual and audio cues to guide a player through the game World these cues can be anything from a change in lighting to a specific sound effect to you know the little like finger pointing on certain buttons and this is usually really helpful for players to understand where

they need to go and what they need to do next I don't think I've ever seen a game that has done it better than this game like literally did you feel the same way yeah 100% for taking something that is considered kind of Hardcore game and mobile that's tailored for a a very specific audience type that wants to figure out how complex systems work and optimize against them like figure out the rule book figure out how to take advantage of it this game does it great the only people who like I'd say are another great example that are Nintendo they are probably the Specialists on this yeah but different platform right like so very different environment one thing that I knew when I was playing this game I knew that it worked for me because I was still playing it like weeks later and then you said to me let's do this and I was like well this is great because I'm still playing this game and you've got to get a little Elder I think I'm on furnace level 23 now which actually just unlocks some brand new features that I got signposted through incredibly well and now I know what to expect all right so that's

number two number three just to dig in a little bit more hyper casual UA ad creative can work for midcore or core games even though you might feel gross about it so to get an understanding of the UA creative right the one of the first things I do on games is to see how you communicate your game to players you look at the UA creative and what are the different things that they're doing and so this is not a separate Silo anymore from the game it has to be fully thought through because as you go out and you invite people into the game you want to make sure that a player is going to know what to expect when they download your game right we don't have whale targeting you know as much anymore there are some like slight ways to do it so you know really making sure that you've got a theme that captures the widest possible audience is really kind of what makes sense in this space so what we see working really well in ads is hyper casual right like these hyper casual mechanics very lowquality Graphics the

little character with all the piling up on their back running around collecting resources is like the hyper casual ad of the moment like almost every ad is at so what they did in this case is they took that mechanic they layered on the snow and ice theme and they combined that and almost all of their ads that I saw that were running the longest the way that you kind of do this on the outside perspective is you go and see what creative is been running for a month or longer and then you know that creative is successful if the creative is running kind of under a week you know that's a failed ad give or take right this is an outsider's perspective this is my way to kind of take a look at it the ads that were still running were these hyper casual meets white out survival I'm running around Gathering fish I'm running around setting up my fire and that was what was really working so here what's interesting is you may want to consider and this is what Envoy did back back in the day is you may want to consider having some of

those modes unlock and be available in the game so that players aren't upset when they don't see that happen in the game and that's why I feel gross is and we did this on Walking Dead too where we did these we call them Choice ads which is Walking Dead if you don't know it's all about it's a zombie apocalypse show right so it's about morally great choices you have to make so the ad we would give you a fake Choice do you want to use the one bullet left in your gun to kill the zombie or to kill yourself like that was yeah and they were all like awful choices like one had a kid like do you kill the kid or the like all kinds of but this is the show and it's on brand and that was okay but so some players would come into the game and they would turn out cuz we had a squad RPG game that wasn't about the choices that you make in the story so actually what we did was we in the story portion of the game we added some of those Choice elements to make sure it didn't feel completely off of them that so that's my advice is you may on the game

side need to react a little bit to working on the UA side and vice versa one te1 tree you I remember the days where marketing and product could be completely siloed that's just not the case anymore as you say you have an ad that works really well and there's a little bit of pressure externally you want your games to have a cohesive theme and feel like what you're seeing in the ads is actually representative in game but there's also pressure externally to make sure that you're representing the game from an just from a pure advertising point of view this is what you get so never before previously at least in my experience in Mobile has there been a requirement as much so is now for marketing and product to be approaching game development together yeah and we'll talk about this on this bullet point number four is adding Social Casino limited time mini games and monetization into the game so as a non forx strategy gamer it was very weird to come in number one and see a liveops map did you have you seen the calendar in white out survival there's a

calendar and it's literally presented like a Gant chart that goes through and so I've been playing for over a month maybe 45 days and so what I've seen is multiple Social Casino inspired mini games that have popped up so one is it's pretty funny one's spin the wheel and you get your benefits and you buy more spins one is a go fishing event did you play the fishing thing that was pretty cute it was kind of cute you go fishing another one was a roll the Dice and go around a board I wonder next like Monopoly if Mr Monopoly in a fur coat is going to show up in this game as a playable character is going to be totally my guess of what comes up so in any event what I'm seeing here is if I were them this would be my next UA strategy is to figure out how you tie in some of your ads to these miname monetization moments and you can tell this is just for the folks who want to do the I want to gamble to get more reward Behavior this isn't I want to

unlock my furnace I want to speed up things this is a very different monetization path what did you think about this were you like mind blown Forex game meets these things you always need something for the players to do and they do a very good job of making sure things like the wheel and the fishing and the stuff you need to participate are part of some sort of either separate kind of missions chain or part of the main missions chain uh old old acquaintance of mine used to say when she was in uh retail Sal she was like if you want people to go shopping and buy your stuff you get them in the dressing room and you keep them naked you just keep throwing stuff at them to try and I feel like this is the equivalent of that you keep giving players something to do so they don't have a reason to leave your game and that's not only true for this game but there's future games I want to cover that is a trend if you're going to take away one remember one thing remember that that is the trend keep them naked in your game I am dying is so happy he is not on

this podcast right now he would be blushing and running away thinking he would get cancelled that is pretty awesome only we can say that so social I mean social I feel like is one of the buzz words when people want to start a new game they're like oh social needs to be core that needs to be part of that core game Loop core experience I actually think white out survival does it quite well there is a certain point in the game where you get to this ramp up you're not overwhelmed and that you basically have to join an alliance other wise you're not going to continue progressing at a steady state even playing multiple times a day which I have been doing is not enough to catch up to those who would be participating in Social in the alliances and or paying and I mean paying and social is probably if you want to progress and become the top of this game you need to be doing both it's like games and games and games they've created an entire world to explore and Conquer and that you really need to be part of an alliance for and what I like about this game is this is not something that they really could have just elbowed in halfway through

development or even through soft lunch to be like oh we forgot to do this whole aspect of it this very much seems like it was designed with intention from the start they understood where in the game the pivot would happen and it wouldn't be too early where it would be confusing because alliances yeah there's a lot of pressure you got to participate in them if they're widening Their audience you're going to have to find the right way to onboard people so it doesn't feel overwhelming or like a chore what I will add to that is having been in many alliances in casual games and midcore games what I loved about their execution beyond the obvious is that you you don't have to be in a Discord to run the game right there's a good chat in there there is enough again signposting and very very wellth out Alliance menu I can engage in most of the actions without having to go outside the app and get my Discord or my line or my cacal set up to work and coordin with my audience and so that's the piece that I thought was

really interesting and folks should look at is like how do you set up a social and a chat and a communication system organically within the game and not make people rely on Discord all right so let's talk numbers we are going to talk numbers and data so I went in as your data AI analyst and uh pulled a bunch of of numbers which was interesting I found that they're different than some of the publicly reported numbers but let me talk through it okay so today lifetime white out survival is at 365 million worldwide revenue and 31 million downloads since it launched in February 2023 so this is a little different than the app magic data that was reported there was a Pocket Gamer article from a few weeks ago and it claimed that it passed 400 million in Revenue listen all of these Services take their own guesses that's a pretty big swing that is a swing that we see in these data services so take it or leave that so to be a little closer to the action I I went in and I pulled data from the last six

months because I wanted to make sure even though the game's been live titl up in months I'm like how has it been doing since it's pretty much like ramped up so this will be data in the last 6 months and by the way again IAP only this is no ad revenue or our web shop data there's no ads right I don't think I saw any ads in the game there is in Frozen I believe there is in Frozen City but Frozen City for sure yeah but not in white out survival yeah and I don't know if they have a web shop I didn't actually look but still so this is only IAP Revenue okay so it is a top 13 Revenue worldwide game with 235 million over the last 6 months by the way this is just one spot below pubg and one slot ahead of Call of Duty mobile and ahead of one other game a massive strategy game called Clash of Clans so white out survival is beating out Clash of Clans to take the number one Strat strategy game worldwide game

by Revenue spot so 235 million is white out survival and clash clans is like 216 million and that was worldwide right so Western are tier one markets and so when I do this I pull North America Europe Oceania Clash of Clans does still top white out survival 164 to 131 in Western tiers so the reason is South Korea South Korea is like a major it's the number two country for white out survival so all of this is especially impressive because so few new games can really come in and elbow out the existing games and this means that players are open to new game thesis right right like how many times Laura do you see new games coming in I I don't know not many I see a lot of games trying to do the soft launch and then Vanishing yeah but I think these types of games and seeing how they can grow their game shows that the thesis is not that players don't want

new games it's that players want the right new games fair fair point and they want it regionally too so here's the interesting Regional split us and South Korea dominate representing half of the revenue number three was Taiwan then Japan then Germany downloads are dominated by the US which is like basically 5x more than the number two country which was turkey and then Japan and Germany so it was interesting to see that South Korea must have whales right because they didn't even show up in the top five for downloads so let me just talk a little bit about iOS to Android split so this was interesting so for worldwide in tier one it was a fairly even split on actives downloads and revenue so usually you know as as we all know usually you see iOS Revenue chart a little bit higher even 2: one in many cases over Android but it was pretty even and then I looked at this against Clash of Clans which over indexes on iOS on Revenue as expected right so they're

doing something right to get Android to kind of come up and even out against iOS so on UA it looked like they were spending on both platforms with the funniest fake ads as I mentioned and so from a spend standpoint you know obviously I don't know any numbers but they are promoting both platforms so it looks to be they're monetizing well on both platforms so there's your business update dat is awesome okay I'm going to do a little bit since we covered the business now who are these people behind the game very short so Sentry games Chi Chan is the CEO as of 2018 who came from fun plus and Spiel games it's headquartered out of Beijing now the company has about 1,000 employees globally this is no small Studio it was acquired by Jang Century Hong in September 2020 and it's interesting because this this company their business was actually split between the

development of games as well as the production itself itself of Auto Parts was not expecting that but they pivoted to gaming in 2014 and Century games was second acquisition as I understand it white out survival wasn't their first game with this snow Frozen survival theme I didn't even realize it was a theme but I guess when you think about media like snow piercer it makes sense I actually took a player survey inside of the game which was beautifully done by the way and one of the questions it asked is do you enjoy the theme and I'm like what's the theme and I so I guess like snow survival is a theme I don't know I was like okay you know it's like walking dead but with ice instead of zombies who were the killers I guess is the idea so I'm with you yeah I was like here here we go but this wasn't their first attempt didn't they do something hybrid casual with frozen city is that the other one yes so to understand white out survival or try to get through this relatively quickly I think you need to

understand Frozen City their previous game and then for those that are super Keen we we'll also cover a little bit of frost Punk and Adventure capitalist so all of these things kind of were in like a cauldron and popped out white out survival so Frozen City Mobile tycoon game with idle elements idle think of hyper hippos Adventure capitalist Frozen City Soft launched in November 2021 hard launched in December 2022 and the theme that is this question do you like the theme actually come comes from it's it would say it was inspired by Frost Punk and that game was launched in 2018 for PC the platform gen and I do not cover that much it is very similar so it's a city building Survival game developed by 11bit Studios if you don't want to play it watch a video of it you'll see how it was inspired and Adventure capitalist I'm sure most people who are going to be listening to this are from mobile that was an idol game launched in 2014 and that was your always want to describe Idol games as cookies for cook cookies because of cookie clicker you are basically earning

cookies and then spending cookies to make more cookies so it's that type of game Frozen City positioned this that it's a lighter version of frost Punk so it was definitely casualized for a wider mobile audience I mean the goals are super clear to help your people survive a frozen apocalypse while maintaining the quality of life that was the original game and that was taken from also into frozen City these games have a lot of resource management at play the Idol comes in their upgrading system again cookies for cookies so you want more wood spend wood to get wood or spend or to get wood what they do though is they expand a little bit they added Heroes you have your resource management and then they have added Heroes that basically augment your ability to produce various resources now this is where we get into a little bit of the discussion of game loops and economy so heroes are required for different aspects of the game it's not just Resource Management not just production chain management also this is where you kind of get into what make the feel a little bit Squad RPG is is that you are battling things you are forming teams of

these Heroes and you're also battling so you have to figure out the basically upgrade and manage you have these 50 stage raids you want to complete they're displayed in separate screens it is basically now we're getting into the whole idea of a massive game with lots of pieces for everybody now what makes this interesting is that with Idol games there is a waiting element you have to wait to you know bake your cookies before you can spend the cookies and this is getting into the whole hero aspect and the battling aspect runs complimentary to that because it gives you something to do while your city is producing an upgrading the resources you get which you get from various parts of the Frozen City and also you will be getting the in white out survival you're maintaining your city and it's a completely separate Loop so what I want to call out a little bit here is one of the interesting parts of Frozen city was that it did Lean more heavily into the production chain than they decided to take for white out survival you actually have to put time and consideration into how you're managing

your furnace because there is a chance your furnace can go out and in this is kind of the whole essence of the game if your furnace goes out your quality of life goes down because you're in a frozen apocalypse and it's cold and then what's going to keep your survivors warm nothing nothing and then there's an element of balance that comes into you're this Chief this is your little Frozen tents of icicle people how do you make them not icicles and are you going to overwork them to make sure that you can upgrade faster and run your city or are you not what are these challenges you would expect to face as a chief lead or some sort of captain of a group the workers are key to production and if you only greedily think about their output and not their comfort they can run away so they have like they do make you think about in a leadership position how you would manage and then little note with the heroes as well so so they can buff your resource production they're also our managers so

you assign them to various areas of development so you have something again produces wood assigning Heroes and the benefit of Heroes winning battles progressing faster and then also buffing anything you do in your city building aspect yeah so first of all F you Laura you tricked me when you said hey let's cover white out survival oh by the way did you know that they based this off of Frozen City and so of course I jumped in to play that and then I got two games for the price of one for this podcast which meant double the time that you and I got sucked into frozen City I really like the hero booster idea you know again from a squad RPG element that they serve a role inside of your city building was really interesting to me it was also really frustrating to me because I didn't want to spend money and because you are so dependent on running your city if you don't have one of the heroes boosting production I was like having a hard time keeping my

city running without having one of those Heroes and so I felt that was too Pinchy and I could see why they didn't take that into white out survival I wish they would have found the balance because I think it was kind of cool and unique the way that they thought about it the heroes I believe were part of a loot system so that was the push to how are you recruiting More Heroes in and in like pulling the lever I'm also glad they adapted it for white out survival and they didn't take it exactly and not I don't want your wrench and anything that I know how much you love grid merge games so but I will drop a little enough here that they have made a merge Mansion inspired merge game so I mean if you decide to you know pick up a new game you might like this one what it called so I don't play it merge dream detective oh jeez is that going to be our next game I'm downloading it right now Laura jeez so while you download that I was going to do quick monetization from data AI on Frozen City so Frozen city was about a $50 million a year game I AP they do have video ads I would finger in

the AR guesstimate it's probably 15% of Revenue on top so let's say the total would be 60 to 70 million a year and China was not included in the day data AI number so a bit more for China video ads I'm going to give credit here to two and a half Gamers they cover it very well I'm not going to go into a deep dive into video ads here because what we end up wanting to cover is white out survival the main monetizer in the game so how they're earning all this is the Goa system we mentioned which integrates into the hero collector buler we actually covered this quite a bit so I'm going to jump a little bit ahead in terms of the other things that are generating I spend so they obviously have a lot of offer packs for beginners for seasonal packs and a few hero cards for each level to get rare Heroes at higher levels the special sets contain chests instead of specific cards hard currency is prevalent in white out survival you spend it on Loop boxes hero upgrades Ascension currencies resources and time skips time skips is something to keep in mind because that's something they definitely take into white out

survival they have subscriptions with three sets of benefits gems plus a fixed amount of hard currency ads plus no ads and main city plus you can just make overall improvements and then they have a VIP system which is also in white out survival this is going into your production chain so you're basically earning even more resources even more cookies to spend on more cookies so looking at the data Ai and how they look at downloads I don't think they had a traditional soft launch for Frozen City it looks this actually looks like they just open the fug Gates and went for it they were like let's go what you normally see is a little trickle couple countries here and there and then a w they actually looks like from their initial downloads they went a little bit harder on their soft launch yeah anything else on Frozen City this we should actually build this as a two for one because people just got a whole frozen City download all right so we're going to close out on on Frozen City but we needed to do that because what's

interesting is a lot of that plays into wide out survival and my assumption would have been that this was the predecessor that this game would have been the learning game you know we launched Frozen City we're going to look at it we're going to learn what's working what's not but when you look at the timing and you look at the soft launch of white out survival overlay with the timing of Frozen City my guess is they would have had to have started white out survival in such a way that both games are going at the same time and so you know after working with tensent for many years is they kind of it's kind of like the Hunger Games of game development where they're like all right Frozen game Forex you guys do hyper casual take you guys do you know the supercell looking cartoony version go and let's Hunger Games at Al is that what you thought so doing a little Calendar Math there were seven months between the soft launch of Frozen City and the soft launch of white out survival so there's a chance that concepted and self launched the game in

seven months I just don't think so my guess if I was going to have a wager it would be they had Frozen City out they saw super strong early retention metrics they probably saw something there that was worth exploring more my guess would be they pivoted white out survival which was probably already in production so a bit of the tent approach they maybe were taking a couple gambles but then they pivoted as soon as they had good reason to that would be my guess just because even within a thous person company there's no way a thousand people are on this one game they're definitely looking at multiple things I just don't think having something turn around that quickly it's unlikely are we ready to get into gameplay and economy and again F you for making me play this game I probably have spent well over a hundred bucks I'm broke have you really yes like so the other lovely thing about now working for yourself as a consultant is you can write off all of your IAP expenses as game research this was research and so I actually didn't mind dropping a little bit of money I and plus I had to catch up to you but the

amount of places you can spend five bucks and they must have done all kinds of conjoint analyses to see that the $5 price point is a magical price point because it's everywhere in this game so to be able to understand this game I created a game loop I had to create a game Loop okay so I'm going to show this you can see my 5,000 tabs just briefly I am a that's ugly but just to understand it took a lot to figure out this massive game there's a lot of pieces to upgrade you want to build up your city produce resources you really want to upgrade your furnace because it starts to become a lock to be able to upgrade the rest of your city you got to train troops this is for the exploratory Parts the Conquering exploring alliances bit troops are consumable this I'll mention later this goes into the massive amount of spend depth this game has you upgrade your hero so you want the troops to also participate in Exploration battles which feeds into the hero economy Loop and then you're exploring expanding conquering so you're going out into the

world this is the only way you can really get resources you need quickly to build your city upgrade your furnace because at some point you just can't produce fast enough even if you consistently upgrade and hit the upgrade limit the rest of the game can I think supports it you have your gcha so you have this how you get new Heroes but at some point you will collect all the heroes you can get from gcha and then they force you to other parts of the game and other features and other Live Events to be able to get specific Heroes you have your alliance this starts making other things cheaper there's a lot of things you can do your alliance members help your building they help heal your troops so they don't disappear and Di which you've invested time and resources into and then they have a really interesting Tech Tree so think of everything in this game is a variable everything the rate at which you produce the rate at which Your Heroes how much they can attack how much they can defend everything is a variable in this game that you can upgrade and you upgrade it in very small increments but this ties

directly into the spend depth between the timers and the tech upgrades there is no shortage of what you can do to spend in this game yeah Phil would definitely point to this as the systems creative genius I think a couple podcasts ago he was like yeah they definitely have done and I I don't think there is crazy innovation in the core Loop versus what I know to be from Forex games we just kind of want to set the table Stakes for you of what they do have and you know what we saw that was kind of interesting like I was particularly sucked into so many of the of the upgrades although one of my knits to pick is the gear system upgrading the gear system is a little bit painful cuz you're always getting like consumable gear to then put upgrade the gear on your hero and they don't do a good job of you're always going in to upgrade but which hero should I upgrade the stuff and that menu

system wasn't it's like probably the worst UI in the game is that system it felt a little bit tacked on but that felt like maybe that's where some of the Innovation was that's the squad RPG aspect so that might be my one like hey Squad RPG does it better so here we go the gear system that Jen is talking about all of your Heroes can actually equip gear and then there is so you can see M all of my gear has plus 9 plus 7 plus two there is a whole there's a a whole place to spend on just enhancing your gear which then helps you become stronger yeah and then the gear spots are different by the level of character which kind of tracks to other games like your epic characters have six seven gear slots maybe and then you know I think there's three tiers of characters yes I think you're at you're on one of the lowest tiers right now yeah the Orange is the Epic and then the purple is the and then the blue is the basic one and then yeah all the equipment has specific requirements on who they can actually wear it yeah and

they did a nice job of the color coding I feel like the color coding of leveling is consistent across all their systems so like later on when we talk about the lighthouse that color coding matches up where the orange yellow is always the highest level is always the epic level of everything and those are the small details that as a player you're like ah you've used color to clearly communicate to me the hierarchy of things in your game and so this is where from a marketing and branding standpoint I hope they're tying all of those things together right as you're utilizing this color system to denote what is the best possible thing to the not as good thing to the lower tier thing so I usually go in through my worlds and now you're getting a little bit of a preview here's my alliance but this is one of the features Jen I feel like she exhausted hers so we're using mine cuz I have not exhausted all of my the play house options yet we call it your housekeeping and so

as we were working on this at scopely it was like okay how do I keep my housekeeping activities to a reasonable amount of time that I'm asking a player to do every day so you come in to your Lighthouse you have all these different Adventures again like the orange yellowish ones are the highest level with the best rewards kind of going down in that same path and so this is part of your housekeeping you got to come in and spend 10 minutes wiping all of this stuff out although if you purchase the auto hunting do you know about Auto hunting oh you did yeah I did that too and I WIP out the it's the best thing ever another great smaller monetization idea is to allow for auto grinding right so many of idol games or many Squad RPGs allow for this for free in this case it is you have to pay for the service and then there's consumables like you can only Auto hunt as much as what is it some sort sort of can I your cheap stamina which before I bought the auto

hunting and auto hunting is a purchase you get it with a purchase before I purchased it and basically had these people on a loop just killing things to get resources I could never spend all of my chief stamina this was a game Cher this was a game changer I had like 300 and I'm like how do I like there's not enough stuff for me to kill and then I got that and too long in 15 minutes I wiped out my stamina in a good way and then guess what you can buy you can buy more you can buy everything in this game more stamina yeah so for somebody like me who pays for convenience this is why I don't play these kinds of games is because I get sucked into oh it's $5 here next thing you know you're $50 in with all of these different purchases between the daily deals and everything you got going on so yeah I just wanted to talk about a couple of you know of those things that we're looking into again like the UI across the bottom the way that they use the the small red dot or the badging is is so well done like

it it gets a little intense and sometimes the Red Dot badging is on you shouldn't really badge like a free refresh of a thing like this one annoys me there's like the mystery store and you got to hit the free refresh to make the badge go away CU I am that human who cannot have a red dot on my phone I I just it bugs me and they know this right so you got to go into each one of these different systems clear it out but it is helpful to know what you need to do again in the world of signposting super super helpful to know that there's a message now the way that they have gone in and done some of the like have you seen the press and hold so go into your alliance yes I have seen that so I help a lot oh not sorry that's I'm helping in a different way the tech research there's Tech trees also related to your alliance so I do contribute so what it did that was so lovely so they allow you to contribute 25 times to your reliance's Tech and so

I was doing the old school I'm hitting my finger 25 times really fast so there was a brand new upgrade where all you have to do is press and hold and the way that they told you that and it reminded me cuz I was trained to do it differently so on like the third time it stopped showing me because I had learned to press and hold instead of go like an old person and those are the little things those quality of life improvements again when I was at WWE champions We had this reward system that we had built the game was so old that you had to collect every reward individually the day that we put clay all into the app you would have thought we launched Hulk Hogan in the game it was the best quality of life feature we had ever implemented the amount of thanks we got so sometimes sometimes quality of life is as big as a brand new feature in you know I so I just want to

help developers understand that as well because those are the things that are always deprioritized and I'm like please the community if you did one thing to help us help them it's this so so I'm going to jump a little bit into the so what I would consider Playbook features for them because what they end up doing is they reward the actions that they want you to do so they reward you returning to the game with a lot of rewards they also reward you for purchasing and so this is why they have so many things places in game that both encourage you to come back and they encourage you to spend so I'll talk about so offline rewards we have here you can see this is one aspect of it exploration has um offline rewards and then your overall city has offline rewards and there's a certain limit at which you stop losing the benefit because there's no point in Waiting longer than as it says 7 hours they want you to come back every 7 hours so it's very clear what they want you to do and they incentivize it what I also really like since Jen and I are both Spenders I've spent about $20 because I'm cheap

Jen has spent $100 because she loves the game and they have a pretty good VIP system it's very hard to refuse you buy something you get a prize your alliance gets a prize you get a car you get a car everyone gets a car thank you Oprah and this kind of ties back into as well most of everything we see that's an offer or purchasable has some sort of free claimable part of it so you get a little bit of it that is ALS on a reset timer this game does the timers very well there is always a reason to come back and every time you do come back you are getting something this is what I thought they did well versus Frozen City so Frozen City I would get to a place where I had to leave the game there was literally nothing else I could do exactly in this game it feels like and it there's generally always something for me to do they balanced it incredibly well now I'm a little bit like on my city building when I upgrade my furnace it's like 3 days yes right so now it's super painful to wait for that type of

thing but I do have more capabilities and more events have opened up that I can start to engage in what I also enjoy is that some of the events don't require that i' be online you can Auto join you can sign up you can kind of register for them and then you participate not being there so a pain point for me as an elder player in many of the squad RPGs is I had to be on my phone all weekend long engaging with the game which my wife was very unhappy about and now I don't have to do that yeah this was the one where you sign up you place your squad and then set it and forget it yes they have a huge number of events they have tons of back to ones the fish and we met the fishing we mentioned before Twitchy and active and they also have completely passive events it's there is literally something for every player type and they change and let me see if I can find so there was the events calendar this is what Jen was mentioning in terms of planning this is the it's basically like

as if product had made a road map the liveops manager was like all right here's our road map for events make it pretty and ship it this is how you end up planning how you want to spend your resources in game you might want to wait to there's certain event that if you spend a lot of Chief Salina to explore you get rewarded for that or you get a partial reward as part of a larger Mission the stone so this allows you to do a whole lot of planning and I know this is also some other midcore games but allows you to plan how you're going to spend your resourcing for optimal usage well well optimal outcomes I think the takeaway for developers too on this is I was talking to some friends of mine who were like actually asking about merge and the idea is not like oh there's one thing then another thing it's like you know there are all of these overlapping events that are oriented in time very differently but again it goes to there was always something to do in the game that there's always the progress that you're making in the core game is feeding into these other events that are

going on that give you great rewards that are feeding on different motivations right so some of the motivations are I want to compete against somebody else and beat somebody else some of it is I need to do this solo against a time and I'm motivated to complete this event by a certain time and I don't even I'm not even going against anybody else so I think the key for everyone is look at what the motivations for your players what is driving them to do things craft events against those motivations and then stack them on top of each other so that you can have always something going on the player feeling like that sense of accomplishment if that's your core motivation right I don't play for you know travel town and merch and gossip Harbor for a sense of accomplishment I play it to relax and zone out and so I don't need something complex but I want to earn a ton of rewards that allows me to play longer so I can continue to chill and relax while watching True Detective the new season

which is very good by the way so this one other thing I want to cover which we've talked about which is the spend depth so the rate so this has to do directly with how you progress in this game how you progress in the early stages especially in the beginning as with most you know XP curves it flattens as the game progresses right so it's super steep in the beginning and then it goes flat and I want to quote Chris fago he actually summed it up in a way that I thought was very eloquent we need to recognize that the entire experience has price anchored the system helps how this was designed the player understand the value or the price anchor then the game can act generously accordingly so this means that you're doing this fast rate of progression and that is how we're anchoring ourselves to all the things we're getting how fast we're being able to move through the game upgrading our furnace upgrading our city there's a certain expectation there and a certain value in that so so if we want to adapt to that speed of progress the game is basically setting how much it's going to

cost and what that value is so when I get most of the items in this game go into your backpack and this is I mean this is not unique to this game but we have things like resources that you accumulate and then speedups as Jen mentioned it takes three days to upgrade your furnace you get a lot of these speed ups but there is no low point or there's no bar that stops the sink from ever draining yep they are very good at making every a place that requires consumable resources unless you don't want to progress anymore then by all means do nothing but I think that this game in terms of how they've sliced and diced these variables they've done this very well I have two other last points just send the Elder player gameplay and Jen is more of an elder player than me except in one one part I love their thought process around this they're like at 60 days you're going to unlock this feature that time in game and I'm sure they saw a drop of 60 days I would say the product person was like what is something that will change the gameplay that's probably causing a w you unlock

pets I've just unlocked it because I've been in the game 60 days but I think Jen you have not unlocked this yet even though your furnace level is higher than mine that is correct so this is a Time based unlock and I am so bummed because I want my pet so these we had a little pre-show and Jen was like is it like the ones in coin master I was like actually I was like I don't know then I opened the coin master and I was like ah yes it is similar you go to the worlds you capture these animals and then you you basically upgrade them and they become Buffs for your city the only element that is a little bit new is that some of them are actually Nerfs so you have to decide where you want to buff a Nerf to optimize and I think this is going to make the Min maxers and those that love complex systems very happy the only other thing is as with most Idol games they have a they basically struggle with like Elder player gameplay and long-term retention because it gets very repetitive very quickly unfortunately I

have not unlocked it despite my sheep spend and best effort but there is a whole aspect of this game that starts after furnace level 30 and you're basically starting to unlock something called fire crystals and you enter in something to the fire Crystal age and they foreshadow it pretty well you know what's coming I'm collecting these things for a reason that is going to be a big reveal and basically it's now this one currency it becomes a requirement and they're basically part of mission requirements and building requirements I think this is a full acknowledgement of what type of players are going to be reaching level 30 furnace it's going to be your deeply engaged in your Spenders and this is a whole another dimension another place that you can spend and another currency human Max nice something to look forward to I don't know if I can stick around no my pocketbook is going to suffer if I have to hit Level 30 I think we can jump to the wrap-up is there anything you want to cover for the wider audience appeal I feel like we covered a ton of that yeah I I I think we did I think part of why

the game is doing so well is it is hitting on everything you need to hit on with Forex being attractive to folks who are coming in through that more casualized UA offering that they have and they're finding a way to get some of those people to stick and then spend and so from an audience and a motivations perspective again chef's kiss to what they are doing from a markeet standpoint I think you know it's the combination of a great theme with they're figuring out how do you leverage the type of eway that's working to bring people in the art style and the gameplay are all really coming together an incredibly well orchestrated game so good job Cent yes let's do a merge battle next episode let's do their new merge game versus gossip Harbor versus travel town and then I don't have to do homework cuz I already play the other two love that love finding ways to work smarter not harder all right so we'll wrap this okay so if you just skip to the end and

you're like all the juicy bits are at the end we're just going to reiterate there are opportunities everywhere identify them never give the paying player a reason to leave the game combine mechanics features expand the list of things to do experiment with new ways to present events and offers you got to keep throwing stuff at them and then make sure if you're going to do anything and less for puzzle but a little bit for puzzle the spend depth have a robust economy that can handle all of these features so make sure you're setting your game up in a way that creates endless opportunities to sync we it's so easy to reward we love being generous oh you get all these things but make sure you can actually sync them and this white out survival does incredibly well and I would say just you know just like we're friends on this podcast product and marketing should be best friends yes um I think Jen's summary don't assume ads popularized by other subj gen won't work we can see that they do work and just like you can take mechanics from puzzle and apply them to midcore you can

take learnings from hyper casual ads Playbook and apply them to midcore as long as you're adapting them everything appropriately the barriers have been removed if you need a little bit of help getting there this is where Jen can come in and be like I've got my magic D and I can sprinkle it on oh you're funny yes yes pixie dust is my specialty not at all well this was super fun this is our first one we went long but we told you we would so at least we set your expectations hopefully this was helpful please go into the deconstructor of fun slack Channel if you need to apply go to the website deconstructor of fund.com apply to get on the slack Channel give us feedback we'd love to hear how you thought this went things we could do better things we can eliminate and games you want us to talk about there you go all right there we go until next time everyone see you bye