Solo Leveling: Arise - Depth of Content & Progression Layers Exploring the Predatory Monetization

so you have these yeah do you want to look at the offers for five gems and like three times during the session they're super super aggressive I never saw this ever basic like a rewarded push to rewarded push for an offer it's amazing I was like this is the most aggressive thing I've ever seen they giv me five gems just to click to the store so I might buy it do you do you think that's going to be like adopted by you know hybrid casual [Music] games this is a no [ __ ] gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition Triple Threat expertise welcome to the two and a half Gamers the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles

let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry hey welcome welcome everybody this is Felix acting as ma welcome to this special episode of Two and a Half Gamers where we have a special guest and everyone knows him everyone knows he works as Kali he's not the SVP but he is the VP John Mr Vice President is joining us again you call me Mr Vice President you Mr Vice President uh today we're doing a special episode uh but before that uh hi my name is Felix braber hi I'm yier and we are your oh yeah John me and I'm Mr Vice President John W if you haven't heard already exactly and we are your hosts and today we're doing a very special episode it's very special because of two reasons uh first reason is that

is taking a well-deserved holiday so I will be covering the UA because I the second best UA manager on the podcast yeah and what makes it special as well is that we're covering uh a newly launched game by net marble called solo leveling which Remo and John are very excited about so rise so Le a rise obviously R don't forget the very important without much further too the game looks amazing uh currently on mobile it's making it started off making about 2 mil a day and now it's currently still making about a month after launch about a million a day I'll get to the numbers no worries but that's what makes it interesting right so let's turn it over to yakob and John and then uh let's talk about this beautiful game yeah so actually this few next months it will be like very and it's already packed with anime games so I guess this is probably not the last time we're talking about these because there were three big or let's say they are three

games that we closely following one is solo leveling rise which we're going to talk today yeah there was the other game that was released by Kuro which is wering waves which is also currently making 1.3 million a day and then on July the 4th there's the third game from the ging guys Zen Zone Zero from mihoyo which also everybody will be looking for how it will perform let's let's see if there's going to be cannibalization on cannibalization right see if they they've managed to crack a new audience or it's going to be eating sharks eating sharks again that that's kind of the big question right because that's a theme me and yob have argued about a lot of times when we're covering these anime style games right because basically my understanding is that they're also chasing around uh a pool of users that monetize very very well but basically that pool of users might be anywhere between 24 to maybe 35 million globally right so yeah yeah that's the thing that like I also want to talk a little about today which is like the anime game segment by itself let me share the

screen as we go and we can because like the important factor here is that uh rather than some of our industry peers think this is actually getting a little bit more mainstream than it did before one thing that's like just few highlights that I've seen few months is that for instance we got uh first images to look at the new Lord of the Rings movie which is done exactly as you see on the screen in fully anime style there we go so can't wait for this one this should be the war of the roim by the end of the year the other interesting tidbit that I found that Blackstone bought the biggest Japanese manga firm for 1.7 billion this month it's all fun and games until Blackstone steps in so so you can see the importance of anime right now uh the other thing is that one piece uh is celebrating its 25th anniversary and the franchise is ated to be worth 21

billion it was of of course featured with the liveaction series now on Netflix to everybody else outside there and it's still is still going if I understand correctly it's already passed 100 1,00 chapters in the Manga and Anime over 1,000 episodes so this is the last anime from The Big Three as we used to say during the old times that's still going big three being bleach Naruto and one piece and one pie is still holding the line there Naruto I would say also kind of holding but it's boruto now where Nar yeah B so yeah you can see that the other interesting thing I always found these charts that were done on sensor Tower I don't know where and when but there's this kind of an interesting chart that comes from time to time this is from November 23 which has all the games from anime segment ordered and their monthly revenue and you can see that is that only mobile or is that also including the web shops and steam how do how would they know it's only mobile you could see you could see some of the things things here with the list

starting with like 54 million with engine last November n 30 mil honkai 20 mil p and Dragons 80 this is all games that are using the anime style of of of art not really like based on anime or something this is just like but the audiences and everything and yeah you can see the let's say the last game on the list is yeah this is making pretty low Revenue here but still somewhere in the middle you still like 2 million a month so there's a lot of stuff there has been fairing so now to the games so we don't uh kind of go too far away from the scratch so s leveling arise launched uh on March 20th 2024 um yeah to something like 2.7 million a day and now it's kind of stabilized it stabilized not going still kind of that low to something like 700 650k a day with downloads wise also stabilizing to something like I don't know 60k a day but the important thing is you need to keep in mind and you'll

see very soon this thing was also released on PC version and will be later this year released also on Steam in Q3 so they had a proper crossplatform release uh yeah the PC client is amazing we'll go through it shortly but just saying this is pretty much on the heels of the where we are on the heels of the games like uh GHIN impact and honkai star where you have a game that's completely crossplatform from fully functional both on mobile both on PC I guess they're just missing the console launch and there they go so it's a fully fles Triple AAA Mobile game uh regarding the source material this is also interesting so the solo leveling Manu not manga which is also a big difference because this is a Korean comic these are called Manas not mangas so just a little history for everyone here this was actually written in 2016 and then then only now it was

produced into television series which also air during the launch of the game which was great and the series is great also and the game is pretty much following it to the last line and uh yeah as we finish the thing just like a little bit of a look on the wering waves uh where they are as they launch on May 21st and currently doing 1.3 mil as I said I guess this was some kind of a gacha pool this Spike I would expect and then the last chart that we will be all looking at is the mihoyo guys genin and honkai which you clearly see that if I just take out honkai from the chart you see how GHIN pretty much drops but if I put honkai back you see that the line is pretty much stable which means heavy cannibalization as we talk there so everybody's eagerly waiting what Zen let me stop here so basically it is kind of true then that basically the pool of users it's about maybe 25 million people that play these type of games and basically all these companies are coming competing user the users that

are attracted to games that mihoyo does uh it's also mainly I guess because the progression is completely the same it's just the core is different honai is a sorry GHIN is an open world game where you have characters that kind of jump in jump back similarly to Soul leveling these eyes are kind very very similar to that core uh but honkai sty is a squad based stpg term based with the heavy autoplay features so that's a different core but in the end the progression the mechanics the story are very similar to genin so that's why they're probably canalizing the audience the Zen on zero also had the same progression but they have this kind of hecken Slash actually it's very similar to Soul leveling so it will be like Battle of the big and we'll see probably heavy overlab with the audience is there want see there okay I've got to say yob in the last couple of years I do see a lot more people gravitating towards anime influence games right there has been a rise especially in the west I do feel it's

becoming more say fashionable for people to like stuff like bleach off the the Netflix live adaptions um there's definitely yeah there's definitely a trend of more people becoming you know interested in this area so I do think at least if we were looking at splitting this by say the US like I feel like apack would be would be flat but I feel like the US would steadily be growing yeah I don't know for sure cuz I haven't checked the data but I would I would surmise that there's some growth there like us if you look here regarding downloads wise and revenue wise is the third biggest country here after China and Japan of course in G but it's still third of course there's the usual suspect is South Korea and Taiwan and then we have Germany and then we have whatever Canada LA to somewhere there and so on so forth so it's still strong in us but definitely not the strongest that's that's still to be said if we for instance take uh the picture on so leveling rise and check the country

filter there how the revenue composition is there uh it's definitely stronger I would say you see that the US is already doing something like 177% of the revenue it's on the second spot after South Korea so this is definitely much stronger in us than the usual kind of targeting of Miho I guess it's also because that the game is fully dabb the anime is fully dabed everything's kind of accustom there so it's not really just kind of going for Korea and overlapping to the West it's like fully Global kind of targeting so so basically if I'm summarizing there like why people should care is basically that this is moving more and more mainstream in the west and basically we'll see more and more growth in this genre in the future yeah definitely and he's also bring you know it's all to set of monetization mechanics which is the you know the power of Asian gacha which is unmatched I think great compared to the Western model of gacha games or loot box games explain the difference for someone who's just joining the podcast and hasn't listened to any episodes pre previously

yeah so these Asian games they have much bigger span depths because they work on a premise that to get these characters and let me just get to the gacha uh you have literally very very small chances to get them because if we go to the rates it's just like 0.6% on the rate top so normally 0.0 4% whatever so usually all these games work on py timers meaning that you have a fixed py timer they have very very similar pool to honai and GHIN where it's pretty much guaranteed that at some kind of a cap which is 80 draws from the gacha you will have a 100% chance to get a character that's you're going for I don't know which one is the P timer here because in gion is like 50% for the character on the like a event banner and then the next one is 100% so you can get to 100% but it's a lot of money lot of money for a character that you still need to invest another [ __ ] load of money in to make it work

and level up to your catch up to your current team although Jakob I have got Alicia Blanc and I got her from a standard gatle and not paid a penny really you can get it yeah I got her yesterday as part of the event did you did you get like an intern at Kali to play for you no I I play my own games thank you you know I could sit in my private office you know put my feet up on the desk and play my own games that's what the benefit of being the boss you know did you did you did you have her in the rate up wish list or no I did I did have her in the wish list yes this this is the thing this is actually coming I guess a little bit very contrary from the West to the east where Asian games are trying to mitigate a little bit these kind of very very low percentages where they literally help you so it's basically standard feature these times I think genin and honkai they don't have that but this game has it AFK Journey has it AFK Arena had it like a lot of

these and Asian games has it where you can pretty much boost up the chance for your character that you really want so the game gives you a better chance of having a better chance of getting it pretty much through this wish list mechanic uh I also got like I literally got the SSR on the first pool here first pool yeah yeah on custom it took me a long time like every day grinding every so I got on the first pool I got the the lion guy there then I got then I got Emma when I was rolling for Alicia and then the start the game please important thing it's monetization we we have a lot to cover in the monetization and the aggressiveness of the some of the features here I've got some stuff to say one intertial no intitial ad need it when you've got I APS like one of I AP for £25 to unlock a certain character and people are paying for it why do you need to spam people give people look at this it's treble a

look at the production value you don't need interstitial breaking it's beautiful get into game play let's let's see yeah yeah let's go into game play we're at the same place as well I'm on chapter eight but I've done the side missions yeah yeah okay uh you you talk now Johnny I play so let's let's do that okay so I mean look from my side guys obviously it's kind of the traditional sort of Treet Auto battler so what you're going to see in the top left hand side after sort of the entry animation you've gone in to the story that actually mimics the anime quite well so your your character who's Jun Wu who's the protagonist um essentially he goes into a dungeon raid he's what we call a hunter so a hunter is people with special abilities and that are born into the world and they go into Dungeons and try and basically save the world from Monsters coming out of the dungeons no they D to save it from fossil fuels because they're farming clean energy get into the real minutia here okay I'm

giving the the highlights but the basics is highlights the basics is your character the protagonist he's trying to save the world right so these um gates open up and these monsters after seven days these Monsters Just Can't spilling out the gates unless the hunters go through kill this dungeon boss so what jakob's doing right here is he's fighting through the the lowlevel mobs he's usually he has an P of ability in the bottom right and the idea hands but but this is also traditional Auto battler right if you look in the top left you can see that you can either have like Auto semi or play and the especially put it into like even three settings so you can have semi-auto for fighting only Auto attack and you press the skills and then Auto as for moving to the mops you can also automate that yeah so the idea and they've a nice little animation scene here for the

super move right so the idea here is very simply you can either play it as if you would a steam or PC game right where you're actually fighting through and controlling the character yourself or if you're one of those people that just want to grind right or or do the meta and of worrying about the Collectibles and the vanity and all the other stuff you can literally just set it to auto play they also have like skip functionality and some of the other sort of um the yeah sweep mod exactly so we have the sweep function which also again ties into the monetization you have a certain amount of sweeps on the gates that you can do per day there's certain after a certain um grade so the gates go from E to S which is also in line with the anime um and anything over a gate a and a gate a you have to do or you have to pay um for subscription or something else to be able to do that so there's just many many Hooks and so obviously you can see on the left hand side

there's some achievements and some missions as well styish ranking and yeah you've got your s ranking sort of stuff as well but all in all production value is extremely high this can be played as a mobile game very easily because the auto function and not worrying about being sort of too um clunky on a mobile it will translate onto um you know PC console very very nicely the same way that Mi hoo has done and all in all like I said the and also the depths of the characters the different powerups the progression system the different um weapons that you can get there's just this is you know I would say jrpg classic influence with auto batt but obviously very very Korean influenced um and also I've got to say I love the fact it's a Korean man did you it's not manga what did you say it was called J mana mana I love his Korean mana and it's also net marble is a Korean Dev yeah he one of the big ends Coran SES of net

marel and Nexon so yeah I love the fact they kept it you know in the family so to speak yeah like do I get that right the anime was pretty much created together with the game because it's literally like if you watch the anime it teach it's like a tutorial actually it literally teaches you like what to do like how to do daily quests and the guy gets punished for not doing his daily Quest they even has this mechanic that you can heal on the last point if if you did your daily Quest because it Alo heals you so they have it like everything is like so synced up it's literally created by one person but this the thing is though there's quite a few Animes in a similar format yob right you have these like um like I was reincarnated as a slime right you know it's a bit different in the sense of with slime the prot you start opening the anime the protagonist gets stabbed to death and open and and awakes or awakens in a different world right and then it's like he's awoken as this slime in a another dimension Universe whatever

and then but he's still a player in this what um the character does is he unlocks the ability to be a player um and in the law of the Mana um essentially everyone who's a hunter is born with a certain amount of power a certain amount of Mana right which is you know this the normal hpmp sort of RPG thing um and through like a very graphic very sort of um quite scale the anime super graphic on Titan level graphic people get chopped to pieces in the first episode Lally exactly exactly so it's very gory but he ends up completing something what they call a secret secret Quest or secret mission and then he unlocks like a um super abilities which you know he becomes a player and it's kind of weird it's like they're living in The Matrix almost it's like you know it's like they're in a digital world they just don't know it and now he's a player he can see it's a digital world and he even says like it it feels feel like a game

yeah he's looking at it like that way very strange for me this is literally like a very nice kind of spiritual successor to sword Ard online yeah for everybody to know it's an anime about kids fighting in a virtual world and trying to beat an RPG this is literally built around the RPG tropes and elements and stereotypes like people pretty much going around like oh this noobs those are C ranks D ranks they cannot take this boss we need a Healer there are no healers around which is again the usual thing that happens MMO RPGs so it's all really really designed towards people that play RPGs to kind of feel related to all these situations it's done very very nicely I must say like I was really really really pushed to the like limit what what these things can do and how they can like organize it and never seen it before sort I don't like heads few of the games but I don't think so at this kind of level of syn with in the anime ever yeah I agree there was a few mobile games there also PC console games of sort of right yeah and obviously there's

different styles to sort out depending on the season and there's a lot that you can do with it basically um but yeah all in all I think um very much in line even like the keys for the instant dungeon you collect keys in the game and that's part of the whole anime law is you know after you've started leveling up as a player and where the solo leveling name comes from is the fact that he as a player has the ability to solo level in these instant dungeons which or a different dimension where people can't see and he goes in there uh after doing some training I don't know if you noticed Jacob but he's training schedule is the one punch yeah ex schedule this is the thing this anime is pretty much when one punch man and sword out only had a child yeah yeah Felix has no idea what we're talking about right now I can see Felix's face is just like going phz is about to go into a different dimension he's going to fall through the guys like I pay hybrid casual and like pretty much

games on my phone like I I watch ads for a living like this is just yeah me sorry go on carry on go go ahead go ahead I was gonna say this is the sort of game though where people will spend 500 bucks or a thousand bucks yes yes very easily very easily is it's monstrous just like the amount of G P that you need to get say your star character or your star sort of uh sort of weapon like the SSR version of of your weapon and character like and because the amount of depths of characters like yeah you you can literally spend hundreds of dollars M sub yeah yeah yeah but this SE segment right like uh let's say the segment like hypothetically made five billion last year um and this year they're going to make five billion has it changed the segment like is it growing or is it kind of just the same and these new games just come out they make roughly the same like as a market definitely growing because you have ju

just look at how much Netflix is investing into anime production and how they're trying to plus yeah Disney plus also yeah see go watch Cartoon Network see how many times they a Naruto during the day uh it's pretty much that this audience you know it it's growing up because Naruto's what like uh 17 years old 16 years old yeah yeah and remember Naruto is that type of anime like Harry Potter where the character gws up with you the last season of Naruto was completely different genre even than the first season where it's like a kids anime so these people grow up and they want to have the content for them and now they have the money to buy by so yeah it's definitely something that I think we'll be growing up um let's let's uh maybe leave this one and uh let's let's talk about the power lers in a little bit more kind of concerned fashion because so regarding the core as you see is actually following uh I would

say the closest one as a reference I would put gin impact even though it's not open world it's it's still Corridor based but it has the system of hecken SL RPG where you can take different characters from your party to fight with you or as you during the game play but not all at once even though they have some kind of missions all at once where they they need to be there but some missions for instance the gate Gates mechanic if we go into the gates uh where we are here we are uh so this is pretty much your standard daily daily dungeons that you need to run the gates mechanic so if you go here for instance yeah let me buy a key for this one here we would need to go with jinu and then three characters so the incentive is you know to level up your main character and all these other characters then we see the passives and you know how usual Elemental system of

the boss which for instance Alicia here she has she has a resistance to to water so I guess she we shouldn't bring her up or so on so forth then we have these other missions where uh I don't know if this is actually the one where not this one maybe let's should do a resan because I know some missions yeah there we go there's a missions where jinu isn't even involved with the missions it's just your Hunters which again puts the emphas is on you needing to level up also your Hunters not just your main character then if we go to other modes such as the where we are the trials modes yeah the battlefield trials is pretty much one for you only where you go only with Jin Wu and then one for your Hunters where you go only with your Hunters so again different bosses different things to kind of catch up then you have anchor missions where you have just chinu against the boss from the story or multiple tiers of

progressions uh these are also in line with the anime yeah major boss fights in the anime are completely aligned with this the very interesting appointment mechanic that they did here with the gates here is that once you kind of finish the Dungeons and even in the anime people need to go and harvest these crystals because these crystals they sell them and they power the electricity through them so they can have clean energy so it's actually an e ecologic anime but once you have these gates done you put them here where you need to farm them where you pretty much as I finish this one uh or maybe let's let's get a sweep one so we we see how it goes so let's say this one let's sweep it yeah there we go so autoc complete mechanic and now we have the gate pretty much ready so we send the mining Squad there and in three hours we can pick up the reward so you again nicely can appointment use these appointment mechanics to like do your sessions do your sessioning and you need

always uh come back to the rewards this is this is very very interesting system I don't think so where I never saw this one it was always the other way around where you just select the timers but here you need to First Farm out the timers so even have them so this is basically your bread and butter story mode we covered that this is like whole progression is lock behind that if you push too far you're going to get stopped by XP progression where you know your character just doesn't have enough XP XP humanly gain gain through Gates where you have these kind of gate missions first one of the day is the ones that give you XP then it just hard soft currency so I'm already did did mine today I also like the replay functionality because of the trophy system so obviously to get like the the story mode if you want to get like the last reward so the reward like basically if you go into yob you see here Felix it has like one trophy out of three to get like the ultimate reward which is the two G pole tickets like you have to get

do every um every Mission fully fully completed yeah exactly yeah it gives replayability right and even though there's a lot of depth of content it makes you replay it right which is which is great for session length exactly and there's also hard mode so why not do it all over again uh yeah you haven't shown them the best part yet the rock paper scissors game yeah exactly most frustrating thing in the world just getting there by the way this is amazing uh let's just finish the the money part and then we'll get to the fun part because the money part is very important there's also by the way an idle mechanic that you should just go and like collect every day which a part that's hidden behind the subscription which is given to you for four days for free once you start the game so literally these kind of special funds they are because of this whatever is there special sweep daily growth support package that is $9.99 and you get these for four days uh instantly basically

once you start the game so you are going just much much faster so if we just go to the to the progression layer so we have gin Vu and the hunters we have weapons artifacts and bonds and other things but let's start with jinu so we have Jin Who as a basic character you get him you increase his stats these are scripted level based as you progress you have two weapons that can go all the way to SSR you have your kind of classes which is Assassin night some kind of scripted progression as you can grow bigger faster more badass so on so forth but the money part is mainly behind the weapons the artifacts which can be enhanced by the enhancing of the artifact is very interesting because you select the tier yeah let's say 13 and then you Auto enhance and the system just tries and pops up currency so you're just looking at this Auto enhancing itself but you see how the chance goes down very very fast so it's just now 30% and otherwise I just burning

resources uh but yeah there we go so nothing was done there uh this is another layer then you have skills these have runes which can be crafted again another giant progression layer which you can get you can then level them up so on so forth so lots of lots of Standards usually everything is gated by Soft currency and a special gating currency in this kind of a combo So Soft currency spreads around all the layers together with these other specific currency and then we had uh the hunters themselves which are gacha based they also need a weapon and they need also duplicates so they increase their level once your character increase their level so the level cap is based on your main character but you can have multiple copies of those which I don't even need to tell you how much money it will cost you to get another kind of SSR character to unlock all her other skills that she has here with whatever like pretty much

these Stars so for instance this character is two stars so I already 82 duplicates of him and slam it into him basically um the other thing is again these guys also need artifacts same as you the weapons that they have they are different to the guy to the weapons that jinho uses so kind of very specific weapons and then of course they also have their own skills that you need to level up again based on special currency so loads and loads of loads of the weapons also have the same Advanced system which is when you combine the weapons and you get like boosts based on like the it's actually a merge mechanic yeah exactly you merge like five swords together a top sword yeah yeah yeah exactly I think I have U not the Gin Vu weapon but hunter weapons yeah I have this kind of a yeah this one I already put on like second star whatever that just eight axis that I can kind of slam into it so same as characters with imagin another Power progression layer that's gacha based and that eats a lot a

lot of lot of duplicates so all these things are coming from the main gacha pools again works very similar to genin and honai in a way you have the reward event banners which are on limited time and then you have your custom Banner which you never want to spend your hard currency on you want to spend just the tickets that the game gives you and all the hard currency usually wants you you want to spend on these event banners because you have a chance or RAB of a character that you're chasing in where here we have the RAB list which is mitigating the low Drop CH of the characters that we want to get that's there um finishing the monetization so some of the tricks that these guys are doing this offer systems and all the offers within the game never leave their notification ever ever it's annoying as hell the red flag on the shop is annoying me every session every session it doesn't even go off when you buy some no nothing you can go scroll through this all the time it just sits there then there's this girl which is pretty much some of my clients need to pay

attention I've been trying to argue this like notifications make money this girl is the money maker because she has these two notifications always on one is the hunter grows monthly bundles which are two subscriptions and then there's this uh Hunter Association benefits which is pretty much a giant membership card that you need to buy and uh yeah this one yeah 9.99 a month which is just giving you bigger kind of Engagement levels of like one more mission one more blah blah blah one more this one more that so you can do more pretty much with less time uh then they have this thing that these offers that pop up for instance this one yeah of course why should be leave the notifications if I already see it never they literally bribe you to go look at them so you have these popups GS yeah do you want to look at the offers for five gems and like three times during the session they're super super never saw this B like a rewarded push to

rewarded push for an offer it's amazing I was like this is the most aggressive thing I've ever seen they G me five gems just to click to the store so I might buy do you do you think that's going to be like adopted by you know hybrid casual games in like the next 12 months because I've never seen that before I don't know but it's like I you know you know how stingy honkai and uh geni compared to this like predat someone say stingy other was said predatory but go ahead yes you no no no man they're not predatory they're using the same like both are same Predators just like better weapons uh so so these guys for instance you talk to these NPCs always you talk to the NPCs you have five gems in honai and and genin you have like sometimes you get some gems and you need to talk to everybody all the time for instance and the offers let's get to special summons offer this is a like baby go its own this one I you go is go best best thing I've ever seen

in monetization this is the most aggressive thing I've ever seen please describe this because this this nearly got me this nearly made me spend money on this game if it wasn't if it wasn't like 22 pounds I would have spent money yeah can we can we do 15 more draws here can can we do that oh no we can we push push another IAP push another IAP so what this does basically you get to five times do a 10 roll on a gacha and you get to select which rolls did you like from all of those 15 rolles so these are that you see here are the rolls that I really liked and I push them into the offer and now I can go and select these roles and literally buy them for those of you who have not been to Las Vegas this is how a slot machine works no no no no man this is a slot machine that you dictate what it should roll and then you pay for it exactly it's like you know what the results going to be and then you give more money

because you know it's going to be the result you want it's amazing so yeah I I I don't think so I ever see this one yet like also it's got a subscription as well as a purchase so it's like you don't have to just spend 26 EUR you know don't worry about that baby you can spend 10 EUR but it's per month okay yeah this is this is really amazing like some of the things that these guys do regarding monetization is is like amazing the shop itself uh by the way is also pretty massive you have all of these monthly bundles special currencies Step Up step you know one by one all of them all of them they have all off progression offers only when you level up double up whatever Mission offers yeah claim it please claim it no pay yeah claim this offer and pay 26 for the privilege the privilege of claiming this offer crazy so so this is basically like Advanced version of piggy bank you keep progressing and and then it kind of unlocks itself but in order to claim it

you need to buy it yeah oh but don't forget they have the hard mission pack as well which is different you know you got you got to you got to do both which is separate um where we are this is hard currency anchor and exchange shop yeah this is just like so many currencies yeah let's go to the fun part this is this is really fun part so the event system by the way they have a GAA in the game it really is a gacha for those not watching a GAA for a GAA yeah it's literally a capsule gacha from Japan which you can go and literally pick and draw and put the coin in and and roll so I've already got the SSR this is uh Alicia's SSR so I've already got this already unlocked it yeah yeah then you have these kind of dungeon exploration packages where it just rewards You by some points on the leaderboard so on so forth some tournaments again another thing there's even an Banner that announces the next event it's going to

be around there and now the famous rock paper scissors let's go baby so let's go rock paper scissors is this kind of a mini game that you play in order to get rewards and yeah you select one of the Rocks papers and scissors kind of weapons but the thing is that you see what the other like our tactical yeah it's very tactical so she has only scissors click Rock click rock and destroy her she beats me all the time I'm very upset click rock yeah let's go baby let's go we did it we this this is what happens basically uh now she has only scissors and we don't have scissors but we can draw we can draw or we can go and do the where is the store no no no no no you can actually exchange money different boosters to kind of continue because you can not only do this you can also go and

exchange the rewards so for instance if I want this weapon enhancement gear to scroll it cost 30 kind of of this currency that you win when you beat the lady so this is a very very nice event that they're running here and it's actually pretty tactical again never seen that ever yeah yeah what do you think is going to be the first collaboration event this one uh I know but but like for me it's going to be something something pretty big sword out online would fit really really well SW super well like so Felix just so you know there's a a big sort of Trend in these style of games where they get collaboration events other sort of animes right so yeah you would see like a character from you know Dragon Ball Z in a game and it's like YouTube creators collaborations when do like little sprinkle on other channels exactly it stays forever you get the

character into the event ban from aacha and stays within the game forever yeah that's the thing yeah and I also think like things like Call of Duty were influenced by this right like you have those like um in Call of Duty I have like Shredder and Rambo right and these other characters that I bought on The Limited Side Event in Call of Duty and that was two years ago and I still use those characters like two years later right all the time mix pleas sense it's Rambo of course I mean I I do use Rambo Rambo or Shredder I only go for the geek ones you know I'm not buying like the Tactical ones which have like the camo gear and like I'm I'm looking I've got a purple cape running around you know everyone's shooting me um yeah just finishing some of the things they have there there's still loads of content that we didn't even talk about or unlock for such as like the another game modes that I lo behind chapter 10 chapter 15 chapter N9 chapter 14 this one isn't even updated within

the game so it's literally like a car on a stick white players we going to update it later because even if I check their website actually if you go to their website you can pre-register for the update itself so the next update is going to be the Demon King Baran update and you can pre-register to get the rewards so these guys are not pre-registering for installation they registering to even get you on the update to be honest because that's how these games monetized if you genin Hong's Revenue the biggest spikes and why this game will probably do a spike similarly like we see here in wering waves where it can Spike to 4 mil a day will be because there will be a new gacha pool when the gacha pool and reward Banner ends on Alicia and Min if I understand correctly which will be exactly in 4 days and N hours where the game Revenue will again Spike up that that's how these games live it's very very kind of a content content driven not not you shouldn't look at the current Baseline is like oh this game is going down no the moment the revenue

Spike the the new Banner hits the revenue spikes up that's kind of pretty much granted um yeah so what's the overall field John how how far did you get by the way I'm I'm literally the same place as you dude I'm chapter eight um but I've done with the good thing about this whilst the the chapters do follow the story there's also these like sub chapters so off of like chapter six there's like three different um subects of B it so if you go yeah see here Sub sub quests or sub chapter yep uh so you basically um you can go through there's more depth like of like side missions and stuff like that so I'm I'm on chapter eight which is basically where you are dudes we're about the same level I'm 27 I think you're 28 I think the the most amazing thing for me though is that all of us or we both of us have had SSR characters and weapons and even though we haven't done any in that perfect so it does show that you can through grinding make it work so

the balancing I think is in a good place however they might rebalance it and make it more difficult in the next couple of months if it continues to not see a high level of percentage of paying users right to be honest this I would call the Asian gacha game honeymoon period because the important thing that uh or let's say how these games are played they're even played based on this roll mechanic roll mechanic means that you start the gacha game over and over and over until some point in the game where the game gives you faster a lot of free resources to throw at the gacha until you get the character that you want if you don't get that you restart the game and repeat this process all over and over this is standard standard thing with these games and this is how it actually works if you go in these games if I complete the story and all these missions until I get stuck and until the period I get stuck it's throwing resources at me all these pools all these SSRS everything everything's look like walk in the park but once I get

really stuck and I get to the grinding phase it feel be then very hard and usually I think these games make the most money on like something like second third even banner I remember when I was playing honai very very kind of intensively pretty much every day I could get like every third character from the event banners just staying free to play but just every third Banner so it means every three three weeks basically otherwise I would need to pay even though I did everything I could regarding the game resources that I could get but I still wouldn't be able to get every single time an event Banner character so these games I think it's just a slow start and then they can continue the machine of these spikes on event banners and continue continue continue continue so I don't expect any rebalancing to be honest it just they actually thrw more resources at you because you will need more stuff to upgrade actually they will increase the spend them because what will usually happen is that our friend

jinu who is currently I don't know uh doing I don't know how many progression TI artifacts skills uh I don't know basic stuff room crafting yeah yeah whatever even by the way very very stylish clothes and and skins that you can get and bu uh what's going to happen they're going to add another progression layer so literally this tab on the bottom there's going to be new tab added in with the thing that you will need to collect then which will be loged behind the end game which will extend the end game progression and will be the best thing to farm form and this will continue on and on and on and on and on okay yob I feel like we've spoken a lot about game product and law I feel like we should probably get Felix to talk about something before the end of this so Felix UA yeah you yeah yeah there we go uh of course this being a AAA title there's no ads no banners no intials and no rewarded because as John

so and AIT pointed out what is the point if you're earning two million a day and you've won capitalism to even enhance capitalism with ads right I saying the game ears much more than we see because it's on PC client just say probably double than what we see you show theop there's no weop right yeah U I don't think so there not the web shop but uh if you buy stuff through PC Clan it's basically the web shop yeah exactly so uh we're going to go through the UA stuff right so I'm going to put on my mate cap and uh you know I got my fake tattoos here and we're as the second best UA manager on the podcast we're going to not talk about the UA so uh solo leveling uh arise did a very hardcore push for their pre-registration not as hardcore as we saw on Squad Busters but essentially on the 23st uh 23rd of May uh they opened up here a pre-registration and from announcement from the company I can see that the company had 12 million pre-registrations

worldwide is that kind of in line what you guys were expecting for this type of genre so point of comparison right Squad Busters fam famously had 50 million pre-registrations just as a point of comparison well I think like it's look Squad Busters cross promotion from two of the biggest you know uh dow games of the last five years I think if you compare 40 million to this I think this is actually done better in terms of target audience and in in terms of converging to installs I guess maybe because the thing is that we still for instance like first day second day they were doing something like million and and 300K per day downloads but keep in mind a lot a lot a lot of people will play this only through PC CL a lot of them you'll never see them on mobile ever yeah so normally when I was back uh working in a mobile publisher pre- registration you were lucky if you got 50% of them signing up for the game but I imagine for this type of genre

it's a lot higher than basically any other game but that's the first thing that sticks out right so uh looking at the network mix uh which is uh pretty much the first interesting point you can see here that the amount of downloads on release day May 8th uh is significant and then it basically drops down to what we're seeing now and now we're seeing about yeah in the US about 9,000 downloads per day yeah Us in us only right and you can see here that the network mixed is almost exclusively you see little ad mob little applovin little bit of bid machine little bit of Facebook little bit of Mobi little bit of Instagram a little bit of liftoff but when you scroll down you see that majority of the spend is taking place on YouTube and that's where they're spending most of their Firepower right if we shift this to South Korea

you see it changes a little bit but not too much pretty much the same Spike the same spend on admob noticeably they're spending a bit more on digital turbines so yeah your dsps uh meta has more spend but essentially majority of the spend is happening in a very small burst and it's all happening on YouTube so as the second best UA uh manager on the podast this means for me obviously only one thing right so this means that we're probably should expect some tripa creatives and really high production values which is exactly the type of UA creatives uh that they're utilizing so let me just go in here to the creative Gallery but I can I would imagine that because of that like heavy UI spend that even like emphasizes the thing of the PC client people just go directly from PC exactly but basically the interesting thing here is

that one thing that Mata always talks about is like the creative mix and the spread on networks here and you don't see it here right so that would be one of my big like issues I guess with this game which maybe they don't need I'd have to be a m to answer that completely but essentially majority of the UA spend is spread across four creatives we're going to watch all of them oh four creators only okay yeah four creat uh but basically these four creatives I would say is like anage to two things uh Triple H style of games and also rock music because they have utiliz very pumping rock music and everything you're telling me there's no Kpop in this no no so let's watch keeping it in the family what about being pro Korea man don't Don't cheat out and give some us you know some American your music basically basically this creative that we're about to watch is uh they've been running heavily on admob and it's

31% of The Impressions that they're showing overall is this creative so this is by far the heaviest most heaviest utilized creative so let's go [Music] arise solo lovely the very first game adaptation [Music] it's basically using anime oh no no it's game play game play G play yeah but the the guy speaking Japanese y play now so yeah exactly what you expect like a crossover between a movie and uh yeah a game it's what you want though like with if you think about it what people like about these games is the fact it's Treet high production you know it is PC uh um steam quality game that you can play on mobile so people are not looking

for some sort of basic ad right they they want something that has Grandeur something that has like the Cinematic element that it's like a movie trailer dude right you want to see bits of the the whole movie that entice you in so and that's what that does I think that also mirrors is where they've been spending so obviously this was on the adom network right so this is through Google so basically this is through the adom Audience Network I guess so this is through SDK traffic right so you can see the top Publishers is all non-gaming and basically also in other net marble games uh but then rather randomly you see that monster Survivors by youu Voodoo is what's pretty much the first game that we kind of recognize and basically bounce and collect which is where they're spending significant amount of Revenue so I guess they're targeting those Publishers because of the reach that hyper casual has so that's quite interesting thing to note uh then uh the second creative

that's been getting the most spent are about 25% in the last month is on Instagram so you can see kind of the creative differences here so let me play that just now uh can you put just the sound a little bit low FOC on the law yeah it's basically a movie trailer [Music] yeah SOLO lovely arise play now by the way I think I don't if you can hear that rock music but it's very we can yeah we can hear it also very loud no worries but I think the the end

Card voice is done by the English English D actor actor it's very interesting I thought they would to focus more on the you know yakob in the opening episode the whole thing is around the God right like it's that and it's freaky as [ __ ] it looks like Attack on Titan big literally looks like a second title it does right like I thought so you you thought the same I'm surprised cuz for me that was it was quite like quite haunting actually when it smiled it was very like Attack on Titan reminiscent I'm surprised ugc ad this is what I was waiting for exactly so this is this is like the other ads are pretty much similar like high production values kind of on YouTube and stuff like that but the most interesting one I would say there getting the least amount of spent or the least amount of spend is like the GGC type of content I'm just going to play this right now but it's basically exactly what you expect rock music mhm game

play yeah they literally made the same scenes within the anime and within the game like one to one there looks like so many combinations holy [ __ ] this animation is czy did he just swear did he go holy [ __ ] yeah he didn't swear too dude looks is yeah this is the guy Bravo in your eyes that's all I have to say how can you not play this game you love so they pretty much did a streamer show real yep EXA this this is more steam based right dude like this is what you'd expect from promoting a game on PC yeah exactly yeah uh yeah then you have a couple other ones but pretty much that's the main ones and I if we look into uh maybe

if we look into Japan as well just to check that you can see that it's uh yeah pretty much the same split uh with the same types of creatives but yeah I I guess that would be if ma were sitting in my seat right now that would be probably one of the main things that he'd be claing no differences with South Korea we can check but pretty much South Korea like right now home ground like if [Laughter] loc because yeah even the names and everything that you can see it's Korean it's not Japanese yeah the names like Jun wo is very Korean right all of the names all these other names those are like Japes do you know any other big sort of Korean um based animes like obviously you've got like a mortal King which is Chinese right and they've done the whole like that's in Mandarin rather than you know you know Japanese influ like actually made in Japan and speaking Japanese so obviously China Korea these

company these countries are obviously starting to develop and find success but I don't know like any other big Korean animes at least now yeah um yeah I'm just looking at it solo leveling is on third spot on the biggest Mana of all time and there's like Horizon the greatest estate developer windbreaker season of Blossom LS seed nothing really nothing is saying this these things and saying nothing to me I don't know I guess we're just just much more D of God 19 that's a 10cent game I know that yeah that's adapted again that's number 19 here but yeah most of these I don't think so it's just Japanese manga still has the forte in the market but Korean Korean Manas and even Korean series I think they're really really going breakthrough on Netflix the TV series yeah TV the TV drama and stuff is it Kingdom like even even take

U squid game for instance like you know s Korean physical 100 Love physical 100 yeah yes uh the creative in Korea were they're exactly the same just in Korean that we saw in the States but yeah okay do you guys want to give it a rating of course uh you go first M so let me put on my Fe Le kept first since there's no ads to get a zero because they're not even competing so zero out of 10 on the ad monetization but as John so astutely pointed out doesn't really matter uh us your acquisition I have to give them a solid two because you know they only working with a couple of networks and basically I guess they had a successful pre-registration campaign but I guess this is one of these type of games that if you know you know because they have such a devoted fan base so which is why you see these download spikes only on the first day because people are waiting for the the pre-registration so I guess majority of the UA campaigns were taking place then

but the IP here is probably one of the most important things and that's probably also how they're scaling so it's a lot of Word of Mouth a lot of also probably offline marketing but yeah I was just looking into Reddit the solo leveling game Reddit has 20K people the solo leveling manva Reddit like the IP has 300K Reddit users just saying right so there we go John yeah I mean that makes sense but from my side guys I think the fact it has no ads is gives it a 10 okay look look man I make money out of ads every day right but I'm a I'm a purist you know like I I know the economies of ads I love ads to make money but do I want adds in my in my treble a experiences no so you know this this is this is the the purest gamer in me but overall I think if we look at production value gameplay everything like that it's got to be like a solid to 8.5 and there's still some development and stuff some some other things that need to be added but yeah overall it's

definitely my type of game I I'm enjoying it I'm going to keep playing it after this and I'll probably end up spending some money into it so yeah yeah I would say for me it's a solid nine even nine plus basically what I really hated about this guys you can really fix it don't force me to log in through Gmail every single time when I'm going through PC client please this can be solved I don't need to click through more windows like honai has it on default like it's physically possible and then uh yeah probably just like few nuisances that I think still can be fixed and like some stuff that's kind of could be done a little bit better but other than that the monetization like the tricks that we shown today those are like first ever seen amazing to me so that's definitely plus for me yeah cool and on that longell I think it's time to end the episode so don't forget to like And subscribe uh tell your friends tell your dogs cats cats particularly love our

content uh yeah your knows yeah yeah uh any shout outs you want to do John uh shout outs obviously uh shout out to man matay he's on a boat with jealous that he's on a boat and I'm here with you two Schmucks but you know is thank you for the invite as always I'm always happy to be here and help grow your ratings um you know tell a few jokes but no a great time uh actually talking about a game I really wanted to talk about rather than something that's like you know that's great like really really thank you Mr vice president for joining us so now we know what you do in your time which means you play anime games yeah we're going to do this this is the Korean sign off if you don't know what this is this is the love heart is you do this in Korea it's the love heart manage team in you know

anyway all right well let's end it guys around see you next one byebye thanks guys [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] he [Music]