Scaling Up a Merge Game with Antti Hattara, CEO Starberry Games

welcome back to the podcast i think you've been a couple of times before right might have been might have been yeah you're a busy man so we could start about talking about our previous future have i've known for you for um for about 12 years how i worked under you and how you started in games so we're not going to do that we're going to talk about merge mayors that's your latest game from your company strawberry games and word on the street and it's not a word on the streets i see the numbers so you guys are blowing up like what's going on yeah no no it's it's been a while um and and things are looking very very positive it's getting excited in berlin so so of course merge mania is going on um that's hype in the subgender within the industry we've been we've been here fairly early on we we've been big fans of playing merch mansion already yeah 2020 when we

raced the the seed round and kind of uh had eyes on the genre for a longer time uh we made it happen then last summer uh pivoted to the john rand and now of course uh we've we rushed to the market got out early for for the global launch and yeah ever since april it's been a a nice nice curve to race after the big guys of course like this this year there's been big news 150 million credit for expansion so we're against fairly tough competition but but we made our biggest so revenue day yesterday we made our diu uh highest number yesterday it's four and a half months of up uphill and growing numbers yeah so so you when did you self-launch because i remember uh we were doing the the predictions on the constructor fund in january and one of the first ones and merged predictions like i talked about uh future plays game that is now under plarium yep that's done and the second one that was talking about was of course

merged mayor like i'm i'm very bullish on this so of course i'm very biased because i've made the other prediction that you guys will be in top 10 if not this year then most likely next year for merge games uh and that's why i'm like following up because you're hitting records every day the growth rate is is really fast so so walk me through like when do you think you'll like what's your prediction given the the current growth rate when can you pass uh merge let's say merge magic yeah i don't from zynga yeah milestone by milestone i think last month we grew 30 month over month on revenue so so that's uh that's been going well um on iap yeah that's really well pre improving the game we if we put more fuel into the tank i think we can accelerate even faster we've now gotten data since the april so we know how the game's really like over performing uh our expectations on on month three four and so on and i think we're gonna

really see nice long-term numbers for 180 270 and 360. for kind of the next next target on the list merge merge magic i think q1 uh knowing their numbers on on how much revenue they make per month and of course there's the the leading star in the category for us merge mansion is as uh as uh we'll see 2022 is something where we we think we can challenge it yeah executing fairly fast on on merge mayor we've got our own differentiated angle and uh it's yeah then it's pumped fuel 150 on on credit line for them is yeah it's it's a pretty pretty big you know they're on that supercell tap so they can do pretty much whatever they they want to do um i wanted to ask like how do you you said differentiate in merge games so let's be honest i do not play merge games [Laughter] surprise um not the uh not the target audience but you know i've dabbled i've

dabbled in some of them you know i mean by dabbled i mean one session and uninstall so uh how do you how do you differentiate in this genre because it seems like looking from from just from the above looking at all the games in the genre they're they seem to be aimed mostly towards the same audience you know whether it's the merged manchester merch dragons or the uh the merged dragons or even the merged mayor they kind of have the same type of um audience targeting so i would say you know 60 female is that correct yeah yeah no i guess that's two questions kind of like what's what's there in the market at this point and how do you differentiate exactly i don't know hundreds or thousands of uh merged games with playrix graphics 2d uh grandma and a daughter and a broken villa so like i'm not playing these games anymore i think there's enough and there's like the winner of that teller korea is clear so i don't think that's kind of everyone's kind of that's the center of the market trying to go there i don't think that's going to work too well uh we see of

course in our discord community we've got some thousands of people actually actively discussing this comes as a surprise for the audience for the kind of 25 to 55 year old uh women i didn't know they're on discord but they're active and we see that they're playing multiple merge games they're discussing them that's been a nice insight to seeing kind of uh their thoughts and and so on and i think the other so that's kind of where there's too many games of grandma and the broken villa few are differentiating we of course have our own kind of angle with the 3d pipeline on graphics we we think that's going to be kind of a fundamental difference and helping us on everything and i would say under the the radar bubbling under there must be kind of more quality merge games being worked on because the mechanic's awesome everyone's seen the engagement and even with the kind of uh clones or so on

everyone's saying audience engagement is crazy good they see nice day one day seven day 30. so this is the thing that gets me excited about merch that there's audience demand there's an audience playing them then you just kind of need to find your segments on on i think expanding the category we'll be finding tapping the different audiences we've got a lot of guys going at the playwright style audience that's the older female demographic i think there's something with more maybe story and hidden object audience there's something more with casual puzzle with kind of much more brighter stuff and maybe not a broken villa and and even well even there's hyper casual ones but i think kind of the um the next merge mansions are are the ones that really like uh differentiate both on feature sets and and our kind of audience with merge mayor goes more towards the simulation i think we're we're the cityville of merge games that's kind of where we're going so we can build a city of merge games going for that i'm getting ptsd dude so

i don't know cityville is i think that's kind of that's my my research into is there an audience cityville 2019 in 2009 december they added 100 million players in one month so like i think there's a lot of casual simulation city builder people out there that want to play that experience and that's how you kind of then differentiate and interesting enough i i remember ea soft launch they're sort of a city building merge game and they they just close it down and you guys keep growing so that's uh you know yeah they went with because there's a kind of division on the merge category right there's the isometric uh-huh um more like simulation uh one and then there's this puzzle board or grid merge grid which comes with merge mansion i i noticed the ea one with i think that was more on the merged dragons and the simulation and the isometric one that's a tough one to kind of uh

i think that might be a different audience yeah they still kind of merge into everything into the merchants yeah yeah and and with the with a big publisher like that's that's what's interesting about the merge genre is um the companies that are growing are are fairly smaller i mean of course there's zinger there's a big fish but their structure is a little bit different like zynga purchased ground games that is still a small and nimble studio and is able to grow their game same thing with a big fish big fish is a sort of like a big publisher and the uh ever merged is more like a coming out of a smaller studio that i think they acquired so it's somewhere in um in ukraine or belarus or eastern europe like eastern european you know vaguely speaking eastern europe actually like more closer to ex-soviet union but you know whatever just called eastern europe but um but that's that's the interesting part and then kind of seeing like these bigger publishers coming in to emerge and and going away from it you know citing the

markets hiding this setting that and i think it comes from the uh from the point that they don't have the patience of growing like you've been growing merged mayor since when was it self-launched yeah kind of the history of we were supposed to make the next big idol game uh and that i think that's kind of part of what you just spoke there that bigger publishers i think they observed for a while in terms of like potential of a category and and merge in a way as something that's been observed and it's going to take a while for placing those bets at bigger companies because you've got opportunity cost of going at new opportunities and if they don't really like it doesn't right away seem like a billion-dollar market because it's not it needs to grow there yeah uh then um that's kind of one part but yeah so our story we were about to build the next idol game we hadn't been looking at the merge played merge mansion figured that timing is now let's peel it we've got some experience with pivots i went from facebook casual messenger games into back to the app stores

direction of the company changed we even renamed it back then and and so we did this pivot in the summer of 2020 so it took us two months to build kind of the merge basics and get out to the market to test it i can tell there was a fairly big difference on day one day three that's the kind of early launch metrics that you kpis that we measure what we saw with the idle village version of the game in may uh no in june 2020 and in august at the end of august 2020 we had merch mayor the same game same graphics but merge experience and and yeah there was i don't know like a hundred percent increase that they doubled to double day one and day three so so that's interesting part that you said it took you two months to make the other merged game and that seems to be the story around the industry it's you know i think your camera had had a webinar of like how to build a successful merge game in eight weeks two months yeah yeah it's like it's like this is the uh this is the time that it takes and and that leads me to uh to an

interesting um point if it's so easy to make a merge game and there seem to be merged games coming in like you know almost like almost like you're merging them together they're just popping out of everywhere everybody can make it you don't even have to have a very senior team to make a merge game the uh the early traction is fantastic day one is usually very high day three tends to be really high i've heard of outrageous day sevens but not everybody gets there why do you think this market is i mean why do you think like yeah why do you think this market is still there if if anybody can make a merge game yeah i think first days first seven day experience of a merged game is something fairly like easy to nail and that's what we got right in the in the two months as well you look at the other ones you have the merge board it's uh there's frozen items that's going to be kind of your first three days of player engagement there's just something i don't know psychological or something about kind of going and cleaning the board you just kind of you're obsessed

with that old facebook games they you know yeah and all those like the whole kind of ftu here in the kind of leading into that and that's easy to get right because of course like it's easy to benchmark and do it and uh and then that kind of leads to day seven if you get the right amount of balancing with the kind of progression of the game and so that's definitely a good sign that it works uh now i would say it's gonna get tougher by the month or the day as there's more and more maybe even with better quality um coming out but i yeah your point or the question on on that one is going to be then the day 30 day 60 day 90 day 180 it becomes a very different game after that so maybe early days of match three with a saga game like 2012 we were making jelly splash at wooga no anything with a matching like mechanic and a saga map you kind of boom you got into the race and things worked and engagement was there and

monetization as well because match 3 is good at that and now i would say well we'll see kind of the the play of starting for merge games because you you kind of need to get the data for day 90. but tell me why why are you able to get get into the playoffs and others are enabled like yeah since everybody can start like like i just want to understand how you know what's the uh what are the key elements so that you know investors like like like yours truly can pick up the winners in the market true yeah i guess that took us almost like from end of august 2020 to april so working on on uh the balancing the tools the whole experience and building that content and i yeah there's kind of like fast ways of trying to take a shot at it the kind of the audience engagement and the kind of progression in the game how does it feel what's happening and i have to say kind

of it took us a long time it's almost up to date to build for us like a year after the soft launch going with when you complete missions what is being asked how does the progression uh kind of open up in terms of how much you have items different generators what's kind of the reward there's a lot of polishing uh to that and how it's all kind of played like uh presented to the user because of course kind of a merged game there's a lot of grinding that kind of comes from i guess simulation like yeah that's you need to enjoy grind we kind of know audiences yeah that's that's called the game industry so uh but i think kind of getting those right it's that's gonna take a while and and i think that's where you see the kind of playoffs if if the contents just stretched and you're not really like you don't have the capability to to really put on that um like quality there i would say merge mansion good example what they launched with and and how it took them

also kind of like a year since their global launch there's still big gaps in the game i think might have been in in some broadcast or somewhere where i've discussed kind of those points in merge game when you hit then the next one is kind of like a level gap yeah yeah like three weeks to get the next thing just writing for xp yeah but you've seen merge mansion fill those gaps with content like new areas in the game and how they're not stretching it it's kind of not replicating the content it's not always cleaning leaves there's actually something interesting with the story and stuff happening when you progress so that mastering that is almost like match three games all of that the modifiers the spawners the kind of level progression that kind of you just need matching isn't matching for 2000 level in candy crush there's new obstacles blockers and all of that balancing of the whole experience it's it's kind of vital to make it work so you're saying they're

quite similar to puzzle games where they're deceptively easy because you can you can get into it but in order to make a successful puzzle game and as we know uh with peak being the outlier pretty much every other puzzle company has gigantic teams where they are optimizing to the uh to the minor no need minor details of of their games so that's one part so probably the the experience of of optimizing games especially puzzle games is a good is a good indicator of success of the company so of course you guys uh you worked at wooga and back and then you will have the puzzle studio so so that's that's clear and the second element that i'm seeing is is you have to have the publishing power because as you're saying like you're slowly growing and growing and kind of investing more and more really looking at the paybacks we're looking at the audience trying different type of audiences so even though it's easy to go out it's easy to kind of get the first the first you know the first facebook

audience to come in into your game but how do you expand from that how do you find uh new audiences like is the publishing element the second important thing yeah that's well that's thanks for helping there because that's actually uh one part of the playoffs or the second kind of uh second section of it that how do you compete because the good numbers really good numbers small small uh cohorts that you acquire from facebook like our soft launch numbers were phenomenal with that as well because it just facebook just finds you the the right people very efficiently yes so that's all shout out to facebook yeah and but yeah it's true that when you start scaling and at the moment the playoffs on on merge games it's kind of like start looking at who's who's reached over a million installs and still is able to kind of keep the numbers growing that's then other part of the game an ltv performance and then the other comes from kind of your your ability on on the whole

ua performance marketing side because of course these aren't viral games and at the moment i would say kind of like match three the soft launch time for dream games or something like that like it's probably of up to a year and you really need to see the shape of the curve that you've been able to figure the kind of uh rawas by 6 months 12 months which helps you then to set the bids and start scaling yeah and that's that's that's gonna kind of merge mansion's already doing it with with very big budget and and openly saying that the other payback is set to fairly long time and that's kind of squeezing out i would say anything if you have something a similar experience yeah you can get it to some amount of players but really kind of breaking through as then you really need to know your uh long term uh ltv or or kind of the day 180s the 270s and be able to compete on that and have the well the bank and this the scale for the publishing to be

able to push on it so of course tell me about like what kind of asses you you guys were out before idf 8 application what has been the indication of of idfa going away like have you shifted more towards android and that's where you're testing has it impacted your growth rate on ios has impacted your growth rate overall through the increase of cpm and cpi has it decreased your ad revenue because i understand ad revenue is also a sizable portion so uh talk to you about idfa yeah that's maybe the last thing first ad revenue yeah unfortunately did see a fairly like decent hit there we were um we were doing 50 50 first but now we've uh we've scaled our ad revenues uh or scale the iep way faster than the ads so there was a i was a hit on that but uh and we're still 50 50 android ios pretty

much and i i kind of think it from another point of view it's when there's shake in the market and we kind of global launch in april so for us this is we're building for the for the new world uh and scaling in the new world so for us it's it's an opportunity that someone else has way more to lose on ios yeah and we're there to leverage this opportunity and and take advantage of it and so i think luckily of course this is also casual genre so you're we're able to look at even kind of country level roses and then kind of it's a mix between ross campaigns and and install campaigns so kind of reaching more broader and i think these are kind of something that help you operate even in the future when there might be like so you're also something because because merge games like i remember when uh when merge mansion was was popping like the same way as as you guys are now but but that this was a a while back and i remember um i remember them them talking about that listen it doesn't matter what channel we

use we get tremendous traffic like they were just posting on the streets of helsinki that they are just like dropping any channel and every channel works and that was i was taking it not not like they were boasting about that but i was taking it more as um as the um the game is so widely appealing that it doesn't have to find niche audiences and and then i'm thinking about your game it's kind of the same thing like city builders are 50 50 and the core mechanic is quite appealing like does that help you with the with the idfa being deprecated it doesn't have that big of an effect because of the wide appeal yeah exactly that's i think the install campaigns that you're actually able to make those work that you don't need to kind of go and and just very targeted very specific which i would say is probably kind of core game experience uh or core games uh ua that you really need to and you can make it work on that equation

and that that was the whole thing that performance marketing got so effective because it's able to find those users and now that a little bit of the data is taken away or the privacy is there then you're just yeah shooting at the wider uh like with a shotgun and trying to make that work so yeah so for us i i see there are a lot of opportunity so shotgun works for for merge yeah yeah that works for merge i think and and um just out of curiosity like when you're testing your creatives are you testing them on on android and then kind of putting them on ios after the after they they're performing on android or do you have uh some kind of a specific process there yeah testing actually on facebook and and that's probably both platforms so android of course gets you more more kind of detailed data but we can look at kind of for us it's not yeah we can look at that on a higher level so i think ios you can make work when you have a bit more scale uh just kind of had the calls with facebook and they mentioned that yeah like

with smaller scale that privacy things is not going to make it easy when you have a little bit bigger scale even for the testing part if you can do it at a decent amount of installs there's kind of these thresholds eric the smart derrick knows all about it and then i've been educating myself by listening to you guys talk so but but the kind of uh conversion triggers or whatever they send it's kind of there's some quotas that you thresholds that you need to hit so what is what does your publishing team look like yeah it's something that we're going to grow uh it's me it's our marketing director yuri comes with experience from muga from popcor uh an amazing uh talent and we've got data analyst and that's kind of the publishing team for now and we are using that and everybody wears an abercrombie and fit shirt like you do right now right well that's on the business side right yeah you got it so it's only for the podcast yeah yeah yeah the team is 20 people so like we're very

focused on kind of making like all efforts are that's our background that's our kind of i would say competitive advantage yeah the experience on the industry you can see on merge mayor it doesn't look like a clone there we've got our 3d pipeline that's something that's not as easy necessarily to build the whole casual uh style and the attention to details is something that uh yeah i was just asking because you know sometimes if like like i'm asking these questions to see if things are like tapped out meaning like it seems like there's too much already like okay that's exhausted let's see if there are other growth opportunities but seem like you're you're very very lean so you talk about how important it is to create content in these merge games to keep to keep players progressing with relatively the same speed just like they would do in puzzle games like like it doesn't work like back in the days when i played jelly splash in 2000 whatever 16 i got no it was 2013 i got stuck for one level and for like a

week because you guys like to do it so hard like that wouldn't work today the same uh the same thing kind of applies to merge like you know you don't have levels but you need to have that content keep players progressing otherwise they will quit because they're playing multiple merged games at the same time so with your size of a team that is 20 with publishing and everything it's still uh quite small of a team so i'm assuming you're growing your team yeah that's kind of uh big plans we can talk kind of the future some soon series a team growth all of that but uh for now i think there's uh luckily i gave my presentation at the iron source um level up yeah i've heard about yeah about the self-publishing and went through a lot of the kind of tools because that's i think one way to leverage kind of and stay ahead of the curve it's all the technology that you can you can you can use nowadays and a lot of the things what used to be built inside in-house at companies are now being offered as services i don't know like helsinki

definitely it's one of the place where talking to metaplay or or these guys is kind of they're offering a service of something that's going to take you a 10 person team to build yourself uh and plenty of other things on the whole kind of everything from ua and then the whole publishing part so that's kind of democratizing it nicely that that small teams can take take advantage of those and this yeah there's way more on the ua side aiml driven things that help us not have a army of ua managers tweaking bid levels and whatnot on a daily basis it's it's kind of trying to of course and facebook and all of these guys are rolling out more automated tools that you don't need to shuffle creatives it's triple a uh campaigns or the automatic ad pads and that stuff but yeah definitely looking forward to to grow the team as well as with scale so how much how big of a team do you think is it going to be like plus 10 people and and mostly in um mostly in content creation

yeah series a double the team in 12 months okay we need like set a target of that uh probably publishing any like that's it's the benchmarks we're looking at how does dream games operate a almost a million dollar game a day with ua budgets probably in the ballpark of that as well in a day how many how many people do you need for that how do you leverage the technology and i think there's small teams that that are able to operate like massive businesses and these are the ones to learn from and look at so but in terms of uh for us it's building a portfolio we've got merge abstracted into into a unity project we're looking how to to then build kind of what what we should be thinking now is what's 2022 kind of a merge hit so we've got something else kind of coming up as well and that's a challenge for uh for a small team to to focus on two things at the same time so of course uh

yeah plenty of challenges as well yeah but those are those are good challenges like you have one game that is growing up growing and then you're investing into it and at the same time you could start a second game if you'd have the resources for it and um and you're you're out of berlin is it are you scaling purely in berlin are you thinking about other locations are you guys fully remote or non-remote at all like what's the uh what's this what's the spiel so yeah nine months i was alone at the office we were remote due to lockdown in germany and we were just back to the office on wednesday with the team a lot of people seeing them for the first time and energy was great and i think that's kind of what like fully remote on production time was more efficient for us than than kind of being on site and i it's like we were able to execute a lot and it feels good that okay this could be kind of the future but having seen the energy and so we're going now for two days at the office we'll try this uh as our model hybrid model that monday friday at the

office tuesday the thursday at uh work remote i'm marlene right yeah that's my mother not sure what you're referring to minecraft so uh yeah we've um we'll see how that goes we're hiring with that in mind relocation to berlin i think there's benefits in game business to to work at the same space and and because of the fact that companies in games don't need to be hundreds or thousands of people you can still have world-class teams and 100 people so it's decent to assume that it's efficient to be in one city i i agree 100 i mean we we also have a studio in berlin and we also are focusing on that berlin is a it's a great city for for to relocate um yeah it's ten years but most people would a very international city you can find friends it's not that expensive it's of a good size like a three million people

building a games company very like helsinki is a bloodbath on on recruiting i would expect yeah we yeah we're 20 people i think we've got 13 or 14 nationalities now tell us a bit about kind of and all of our our recruiting calls reaching out like outside of germany talking to talented game developers a question of would you be okay to relocate to berlin it's like no i want to move there i remember doing the interviews at digital chocolate and asking the same about helsinki and now yeah sweetness great or whatever how bad are the winters yeah yeah it's not even it's not even that it's a it i think i think berlin is it's just easier for relocation like like the the culture and the fact that a lot of people are coming from outside berlin like i'll give a we we have now 17 people in our company not a single german and we have most of our people in berlin and it's like uh that's how international the city is it's very international yeah it's very international and through that that means people are coming from somewhere and because people are coming from

somewhere when you come into uh to a studio in germany it is very easy to make friends and that's eventually what retains you in a city is that you're able to connect now when you come to finland no offense but you ain't gonna be invited to no dinner parties like like finns are keep keep to themselves so much that they go on like a summer cottage for a month where they don't want to see you during the vacation yeah there's yeah no i have to say in terms of uh all the kind of factors of culture uh nordic healthcare system and all these things it's kind of uh i was positively surprised to see how well things work in berlin so 10 years with a family here kids in school things things that we typically appreciate about nordic countries and systems there they're actually pretty well organized over here as well so a nice combination of of a little bit more world uh the city but still with those uh

like life would you say berlin is like helsinki with a flavor yeah well it's kind of one part of finland like really i read news about my city in helsinki and sanam the helsinki newspaper on a regular interval so it seems like there's a there's some sort of a spiritual connection there yeah yeah no it's a it's it's a great place it's a great place for uh for growing games companies so that's really cool and you're you're thinking one location i and i by the way i do have to agree 100 that working together in the same space and that's why we're kind of focusing on one studio as well uh scaling one city at a time as well it's just the energy is totally different the pace is different people are talking to each other um i i have my serious doubts about most of the companies that are saying that they're doing fully remote because what's the difference there's then you're just contractors like why do you even hire the person just just contact them just outsource your game after after a while like if nobody's seeing anybody so so i think multiple models

will work for different companies you know kind of need to figure it for yourself and for your company oh you know it's um it is what it is i i think i think your model is is much more sustainable and in the end you create that that sort of a team spirit and culture you can't build really a culture through uh through zoom calls or hangouts it's a totally different thing so now everybody's seeing each other and and um and hanging out going for lunch and so forth so that's uh that's a big thing because people join game companies not only to work on a specific game uh they also work join game companies to work with other people who play games uh who have similar type of background and and you know to make friends to being a part of a community and and that's impossible if you're doing it through through a zoom call it's tougher we've tried the the nine-month uh lockdown and we tried all kinds of like comments hey they're the saddest thing and of course like my wife works a little bit bigger company and yeah they're the saddest things we're like hey let's do a cooking class through a zoom like what

are you doing or like a wine tasting that's like a that's like don't blame me trying them i think it's good to try and but yeah it's good to try it's good to try i mean the easiest thing is to just play online like that works really well in the gaming company because everybody can just log in and play together that's what we'd normally do and that's probably the best way to hang out but don't get me on a zoom cooking class like i'm not doing any of that um all right so next for you guys is is really picking up the pace uh going through series raising a capital to to fuel your growth yeah for acceleration we kind of need uh that's this now it's the time so we came out of summer have all these measured and figured have a bit of a vision of how we kind of approach the genre and it's going to be calls in september already had a good munch and and i think uh so let me ask you a question what if what if uh like just do these predictions all the

time what if what if certain you know israeli company or or one of the one of the big boys called you up and say hey dude good work on on on this little merge game let's let's add some rocket fuel to this this little ship and let's go to the moon like are you really keen on is it only going through the uh like you want to scale this yourself are you open for other opportunities yeah i guess we'll talk have the calls in september it's you always figure kind of yourself um everybody build everything yourself and just add money or then kind of the partnering parts but uh so it is nice to explore but i think we've gotten grown confidence in our ability now to also push on on kind of the self-publishing route it's been fairly quick learnings on that and it's about the talent and seeing kind of the references there from other companies that small teams going at it and perfect we do think that maybe maybe there's also a somewhere halfway that investors that are actually going to be able to

add value on on exactly that not only capital for strategic investors well strategic but also i guess some vcs have now a nice nice angle on on being able to help on actual like hands-on stuff so so we'll figure at some the rocket's ready it's already on its way add fuel so i understand i understand the primary thing like you've been able to prove out so many things and scale so nicely that that like i i hear from you that the primary approach is really kind of growing yourself uh you can see you can see the growth and you and basically all you need is capital and and vcs are are good at that like that's that's really what they do you're happy to hear the news yeah no it's a that's a nice message for for series a yeah kpi driven uh kind of very very clear to see that this like we can we can push this much much uh faster and and further with adding capital and yeah that's

all right auntie i'll let you out on this final question what would be yours your your um your message to all the aspiring merge companies which there are many and they are now working through they they've gone through their eight weeks boot camp of making a merge game what would be your advice now kind of being a senior in the game and in the playoffs going towards the finals yeah classic ice hockey reference gretzky don't skate where the we lost 90 percent of our audience just now when you when you mentioned where the is going yeah no so that's of course i think it's a good idea to like everyone who's like quickly done something spun it out i think you learn a lot by doing that i i kind of fond memories from digital chocolate like backtracking or re reverse inter engineering um oregon trail or the uh what's the first frontier building frontier wheel so the learnings we had with just reverse

engineering and kind of doing that this is uh that's a great way to get started but then the next part is kind of like maybe don't get hung up on that one one game and try to fix that maybe there's a way to to uh look at more at 2022 and because it's moving at such a speed that when you're building now you kind of need to think a little bit ahead uh and then try to figure what's kind of something that separates you from the rest of the pack i would think there's a positive you'll take a risk but then again like yeah there's no safe way in games to kind of just oh yeah this is going to be a fool and a formula to make it you need to take the risk you need to have that vision and just go at it and and because yeah all the way to win in a purely american way i'm gonna reiterate and that is understand what works what doesn't by deconstructing existing merged games to understand the market really well don't try to reinvent the wheel but once you get that and once you get your core

working differentiate because you're not going to win with small incremental innovations you have to stand out in the market otherwise you'll get drowned as the as the market moves so fast the cpis are growing uh the bigger are getting bigger and the smaller are dying off yeah playoffs going on that's it that's going for the cup all right uh um thank you so much for for joining i know you're busy scaling up scaling up your your games coming up your company uh best of luck looking really forward to 2022 when emerge mayor is is hitting the other top five yeah working on on making predictions happen yeah exactly exactly thanks so much and um and launch mania continues it's yeah nowhere near at its end so it's going to be crazy next year yes at the start and how people can get in contact with you the best linkedin on starbear.games email i think that's uh perfect it will be in the description of this podcast below so shout out to auntie shout out to star

wars shout out to berlin and shout out to everybody listening to this podcast hope this was uh this was a learning experience when it comes to merging games so on that oh cool thank you mr thank you bye bye bye