Taking Snake.io to the next level and building multimedia brands with Kooapps CEO CK Wang

[Music] hello world this is the pocketgamer.biz podcast I'm your host Peggy and Sals and today we have an episode looking at what I think a lot of gaming companies are looking at and wondering how to do which is brand and we're going to talk to a company that is working on that it's made tons of titles and now it's going to take that all to the next level and who better to talk about it then my guest here CK Wang CEO of c apps c apps of course made over 30 titles including snake.io which is all about what we're talking about right CK uh you are the real deal and you have had a number of Milestones the least of which is BR

bringing snake.io to the next level and it's great to have you I'm pumped to have you and talk about bringing it to the next level um yeah great to have you and you are very passionate about games I understand uh not just making them as CEO of kaps but you play Starcraft every Friday night with your brother is what I understand so what's that like how long have you been doing that yeah I grew up playing games I played Starcraft 1 like 1995 uh gosh Middle School elementary school I can't remember anymore we' have land cafes back then invite friends over they'll bring their you know huge gigantic desktops and we'd land party uh those yeah those are good days and yeah and even after Starcraft 2 came out over 10 years ago I played it and and now uh yeah it's a bounding moment um my brother's in Hong Kong and I'm in Seattle and we don't see each other all that often and so we play Starcraft

every uh Friday night and we're about the same skill level we're both around like diamond 2ish uh he prayed protos at play Zerg um and so it's a lot of fun because sometimes I save him and sometimes he saves me and it's like a commander and uh yeah I remember sort of like our Childhood Days and so it's a lot of fun and a fun fact my uh my APM is 160 I'm capped out at Diamond zg is you need like 400 APM to go past uh Masters and Grand Masters so um but it's still a lot of fun solid CK and and absolutely it's about games it's about bringing not only players together but in your case families it's all about connections as I said at the top we're talking about brand but starting off I've also been reading a lot about um qaps and also you before you were qaps because you were at Microsoft research so diving into the depths of Twitter streams was what you were we doing and uh that's quite a

shift from diving into the data um that you need to build a gaming company what what's what what does it take or what's an unexpected Insight from your time at Microsoft when you think about what you need to not only analyze lots of data but capture millions of players worldwide yeah now looking back like all the dots magically connected somehow but um but yeah the time I actually started at Microsoft uh in the game studio uh Microsoft game studios I worked on Fable 2 Xbox 360 uh so I was in Redmond we worked with the lion head studio in UK uh so I was there for about a year uh and then I realized that Microsoft game studios uh was not a game Studio they were a publisher um and so uh it wasn't as creative as I thought it wasn't as fun and working more in the platform side and building tools and it was still a great experience I got to see a lot got to

um see how games are made especially on the production side with the timelines and all of that um but the other passion of mine is of course Ai and so I moved to Microsoft research I worked on machine learning uh I worked on three token language models uh nowadays they're like you know tens of thousands of tokens and millions of tokens uh but back then uh it was not GPU trained it was CPU was three token language models we analyzed the Twitter stream which you know would be like hundreds of millions of uh tweets back back that you know 2009 2010 uh and because there was only three token language models we tried generative actually but it just didn't work um so all we could do was it was too early right yeah it was just too early yeah yeah with three token language models what you could generate is phrases not sentences and definitely not paragraphs um and so uh all we could do really was to tag sentences and so instead of generating you know huge paragraphs or texts like AI does nowadays

it'd be more about tagging so like if uh it would analyze the whole paragraph and say okay this bush that you're talking about is Reggie Bush not George Bush um and and not George senior Bush for example and so' be able to do things like this and so uh so that the machine Lear ter uh space there is called entity extraction uh uh and then entity resolution to specific Wikipedia articles uh was what I worked on goes full circle CK if you think about it because I mean here we are we use AI um to to to make and and Market games and you were very early on in that um so obviously you've brought a lot to innovate and that can lead to some amazing outcomes it always makes me you know just very excited to see people unlock and explore and that's what you've done at kaps because you've recently celebrated I give you high five if I could right snake. I's anniversary expanding into new territories virtual

currencies everything's on the books first of all congratulations stuff had been a long journey uh we worked on the game for many many years and especially the new uh hybrid casual transition which we actually call unified casual uh which I'll get into a little bit later but uh our hybrid casual transition we've shipped so many new features uh over the past uh 12 months that we've been working on quite rankly over the last 3 years uh we we worked on our uh coin economy me probably two three years ago uh finally shipped that this summer uh we're working on party mode right now where you can create a party and then just add friends via referral code and play together in the same room um our rooms are quite small each room has 30 players and so it's kind of hard to find uh uh your friends but now we now we're shipping party mode uh next month and so it's really really exciting uh chance for everybody to play together um and we also released our comic uh earlier this year a couple months ago uh our snake

iio comic uh where a glow the main character uh uh goes on to a journey and uh yeah wants to grow in the world and meets all his friends and joins the snake competition and uh yeah tries to win and uh yeah you know going back to what you mentioned Peggy about brand like we're all focused on brand we've seen uh organic downloads uh grow over time as we focus on brand half of our downloads is organic and uh yeah it's thanks to all the effort all of our teams are putting in to continue increase our increase our brand value I mean you've gone off in so many exciting directions and there's so much for our audience to learn there I mean have a comic it's not rocket science and you know you can you can build these stories you can ask other people to do it you know it doesn't always have to be in-house so these are all possible I'd like to step back for a moment CK and understand one of the drivers here because it's one thing to say you want to be a brand but you had to

see ahead of time what we're all seeing which is that hyper casual has evolved you know it's hybrid casual you're calling it unified casual but you really had to see that coming Yeah Yeah we actually started off making word games so when I left Microsoft in 2012 uh we launched Picto word our first big hit game organically grew to top 25 on the App Store uh and for the next you know five years we worked on work games we worked on a family simulation game called pocket family and that was sort of really our category we stumbled upon snake.io uh we actually purchased the game from a Turkish developer uh and at the time was a pure hyper casual game had white background no characters no faces on the snake uh and we said okay well uh yeah this looks you know kind of fun but there's a lot of things missing like you know I play StarCraft I'm a hardcore gamer our entire design team is a hardcore gamer and you're like oh yeah there's so so many things missing why

don't we just make it a real game uh you know make it a complete Game it felt like a prototype of a game um it didn't feel like a complete game and so we redesigned all the art redesigned uh or there actually was no uh skins we added all the Skins there was no progression uh we added all the systems the game Design Systems daily quests uh uh challenges missions uh we added in Live Events we added daily challenge uh now uh the summer we launched accessories in our comic actually have biomes actually in the game each of these snakes come from different biomes and different uh uh looks and attributes and all of that and so uh yeah you know we've just always been our entire game our entire game design team and our entire team here has always been Gamers and so when we look at a game we're like oh okay like that's interesting oh why are these things missing so we stumbled upon uh hyper casual in 2019 and and just looked at and said okay yeah this is cool but I think we can do so much more I think we we can add this we can add this that are

like usually just in normal games that we play and so we just kept layering all of those uh things on top of what you know what turned out to be hyper casual um and it became hybrid casual um and when you know I think when the Constructor fund coin that term we actually compare it's like okay what is our definition of hyper Cas hybrid casual versus theirs and it still ended up being a little bit different which is why we call our approach unified casual uh and it unifies the brand that unifies uh Live Events unifies the community uh we're trying to build you know games for all culture all genders uh all uh ages uh and that's where uh that's where unification comes in uh we uh with have 3 million daily active users now 30 million monthly active users and a lot of that is actually International uh our big Geo is Brazil um AR Arabic countries Saudi Arabia uh is actually our number two Revenue Geo which is very very uncommon uh for hyper casual games I

think Brazil is very common but Middle East is uncommon um and yeah it has a really Testament on the content that we create uh and the brand and the features uh and the local we localize in 23 different uh languages uh we have huge localization efforts uh thanks to you know uh upwork we use contractors there and then now uh chat gbt to help us localize but um yeah we spend a lot of uh oh and also low-end devices uh that's another huge part that we spend a lot of effort on uh in really creating a unified casual experience is to make sure that our games work on low-end devices and so we support Android 5 we support uh iOS 11 or 12 uh which are really really old OS versions and uh I think goes all the way down to like iPhone 7 or iPhone 8 uh that we're supporting and these are you know it's a really big engineering effort uh we have to make sure that our code is very efficient uh despite all the memory that's taken up for ads for example and

all the content um and so yes we op yeah we do a lot of optimization of huge optimization team are constantly testing on lowend devices uh making sure that they're smooth and not laggy so that players love them and uh uh and all these devices from uh developing nations can work very smoothly there's a there's a lot there CK but and if you if you took it apart and put it back together it's like a blueprint for how to do this because that's the point unified casual so you've brought together there's like the inclusion there's the old devices so the international reach there's the brand the accessories the merch all of this comes together and that's what makes the experience and that's why probably you didn't you weren't really impacted At All by The Fallout and sort of the the the Meltdown when hyper casual when we found out that that model wasn't

working it had to be more it had to be more than that and you were already doing that you were already enhancing the player experience to keep people coming back for more than 14 days right yeah that's correct we kind of left out there because we had never really done UA until 2020 uh prior to 2020 I was a big YC Paul gram uh sort of fan uh and he said something uh make uh uh make things a few people love um and what uh what I interpreted that was okay don't do marketing don't do pida when people are going to make things that people love and people are GNA come and we're not gonna have to do UA uh didn't quite work in gaming space um uh and so we started doing UA only 2020 um and so uh so we when ATT hit you know 2021 we just weren't that advanced yet uh we just never did any sort of user level targeting or oaz campaigns we just hadn't you know we're just on simple CPI campaigns because we started late to learning how to do UA uh and uh and so when that went away it

just didn't affect us because we weren't doing any of that so how is it going now how are you actually um monetizing the game is it is it ads is it admon because you know you've got a a dedicated user base you know you can certainly um be monetizing that audience as well as um advertising elsewhere yeah totally uh so we monetized mainly off of ads like a lot of hyper casual games uh we just launched our coin economy this month uh on Android we haven't launched on iOS uh we're launching next month on iOS we're expecting the inap purchase uh to grow over time uh we've already soft launched and we're seeing very very good results probably like 10 20 30% IP revenues where team is super excited uh we're working hard at it uh the interesting part is when you make an ad a monetized game uh the polish doesn't have to be as hot uh whereas when you make an inapp purchase game we have to redo all the animations we have to redo all the assets we're actually redoing the entire ire uiux the whole game and we've been

working on this for over the past like year or two uh past two years in redesigning all of these assets um when people spend even a dollar they feel entitled like this this character has to be you know cute or or or cool or awesome has to have a story behind it and that's why we launched comic uh so we're planning to every new skin that we launch we're going to release comic verse uh you know pre-sale probably pre-order uh the skin and then finally sell them like they um the Polish the level of Polish is just you know 10x 20x higher uh and so uh it's a lot of fun it's very very exciting it's a lot more polish um currently we are monetized off of ads but uh in ad purchase and subscription will be a big part of our future uh on the ad side we've also done a lot of innovation uh We've uh worked on uh iname uh in-game ads and not like in the menus and all that so typically with RV uh or with ads interstitials is

you know of course a little bit jarring because it pops out RV is a lot more acceptable a lot more desirable for uh for players uh and so now the trick is how do I get rewarded video into the game um the the vanilla sort of implementation is at the end of your level or in the coin store uh but most of the time uh people are spending are actually spending in the actual match like while I'm while I'm controlling the snake uh and so uh I think I think from our data uh people play about 30 minutes a day and I believe only like you know two or three minutes is outside of the game right like people come to play like the actual round in the game while they're Turing the snake that's the you know that's what people want to do and so how do we put ads while you're in the game is uh is a big part of what we're working on now so we're very very interested in audio ads uh so you can pick up in Gig boost and triggers audio ads we're testing audio ads currently um really excited about that uh we have a new feature called uh a rewarded video

portal uh where while you're in the game you can go into a portal and then buy stuff right uh and get powerups and those are ad monetized but you're you're then able to essentially take a break from the actual gameplay and then watch an ad uh get your power up and then go back in right so let's say if it's like you know there's this uh there's this enemy or this CH you know there's this player that like you played with and you're like okay I really want to get back at them but um you know my snake is too short it's going to take me 20 minutes catch up maybe by then they've already left the game okay like I'm going go to our rewarded video portal uh and speed up my uh uh uh my size increase and then go fight against this uh player and so uh we're seeing really really good results uh from this uh and we're trying to scale this up even more I don't know that I've heard about reward video portals but it makes sense because I I can't once I leave the game play you know how do you get me back it

makes sense to put it at where everybody else is doing you know somewhere at the end of a session at the beginning of a session but how are you putting it in there CK I mean you have to build your own way of getting the rewarded videos into this portal it's like making a space for them yeah yeah definitely uh yeah your own IP is what I'm saying right yeah exactly yeah so with our own IP know that yeah yeah I think the future of ads is going to be dietic like it's got to be you know in the experience it's got to be seamless uh and the better we can do that as a whole industry I think it's the better for everybody and so we're at the Forefront of testing that we're very very excited uh especially for uh games where the mechanic is an endless mode uh so in snake.io if you don't die then um then you just play forever right you could play for like an hour without watching any ads uh whereas with Hyper casual games sort of like the ads per minute uh is a big deal uh in monetizing and gring your LTV uh and so being able

to show ads diagetic while you're playing and it being a smooth experience an acceptable experience uh that's a huge win and I think that's actually where the next level U hyper casual know companies should should look at I'm very excited about that I have to watch that because this might be sort of like the blueprint I mean it's sounding like it for me of those games that are casual because again hyper casual I get that that's a different Dynamic it's it's going to work really well and already does work really well with rewarded but there's still that interruptive experience whereas in where you are in unified casual and Casual you want to get people literally into that flow and you can do that when you have something like a portal so when you when you're ready with that I want to hear about that yeah and I'm sure that our audience want to hear about because they'll either want to build it or buy it from you um you might have a side a side gig you know a little bit of a hustle here if you want but let's talk about another

aspect of your success here is not just the experimentation but it is the exploration the building you're doing what every game Studio tells me they want to do and build but only a few of them can how do you know or how can we say to our audience how do they know when they're up for it when can you build a brand when does that work is there a certain time in the EV ution of the game a certain stage when it makes sense what was it for you uh we actually continue to ship new games as a hyper casual game so we'll uh we'll make hyper casual game just the core mechanic we'll launch it in soft launch countries typically IND the Philippines we'll test it make sure day one roaz is good day one retention is good when that passes we then move it to hybrid casual phase where we'll then add uh daily mission to add customization to add rewards progression uh after that we uh we look at the data and we go okay are how long

are people playing are people playing past 30 days um are people talking about the game are people posting YouTube videos and sharing on social media um are there Discord channels talking about this game uh and how strong is this community ultimately because the community is what creates the brand uh and so this uh phase you know not all of our games make it the unified casual of course um just like not all of our games graduate the hyper casual phase as well I would say the hyper casual phase is or like a 5% success rate like one in 20 games that we test um will pass to the hybrid casual uh where we add in like layers of game systems and game design and new art and all that we actually redesign the art uh for hyper casual games we just use Unity assets store art uh whereas in h uh hybrid casual phase we redesign all the art to be AAA um and probably right now we're seeing maybe like one one in five games on the hybrid casual phase make it to the unified casual phase where we go okay the community is really excited the

community is really strong uh this game can really you know uh grow Beyond a hybrid casual game into a unified casual game that has a brand that we hope lasts forever you know like the like Tetris and uh and such so what advice therefore would you give other Studios because yes it is about making a brand but it's in your case you have have built a robust brand it's a brand that we know it's a brand that has legs because we can see it in merchandise we can see it in comics so it's not just a brand like I will search for it in the app store by name it has a lot of richness to it how do you take a game to that level I don't think uh I don't think anybody can say we have a fure and I don't think we do have a fure path uh I think it's a lot of testing I think it's a lot of data uh I think it's being

very strategic on like what kpis we use that passes the next checkpoint so from Hy hyper casual to hybrid casual it's very very numerical but from hybrid casual to unified casual it's actually very very uh uh qualitative it's actually you know the how strong is the community how strong is the brand uh we actually uh uh interview uh customers a lot like we actually go on Discord channels and ask them like hey you know like what do you think about this what do you think about that and uh and actually posted on our uh on our uh App Store reviews on Apple and Google uh will respond and say hey what do you think about this what do you think about that and so um uh yeah it's you know uh yeah it's really about the community um and uh yeah and and we oh and actually also YouTube YouTube is actually a huge part where we'll search for like videos of uh of YouTube and uh see who's posting and uh sometimes even comment and ask and like hey you know like what do you think about the game uh why do

you think this feature is like this why do you think that feature is like any feedback and so it's really engaging with the community uh and hearing uh what they have to say uh and really you know like using that to then improve our brand like with the comic when we first launched it um uh it was really cool I think uh I think a few weeks after we launched uh the comic uh the we saw a couple of tweets uh uh on Twitter uh or x uh saying oh wow this is so cool like mobile games are not allowed to have Comics uh can't believe they're doing this uh and so yeah it's yeah it's amazing uh we uh yeah we're really excited uh there is a luck component of it of course uh not not every uh you know mechanic that we make uh has good metrics and not every uh you know good metric game can have a lasting brand uh but it's definitely a lot of you know sort of uh keeping our uh ear to the ground um making sure that we're listening to the data listening to the

community uh and constantly improving the game and uh yeah and building continuing to build brand and it's definitely over years like I think you know Pokemon like I think uh all of the big Brands uh whether they in gaming or not you know took you know many many years to build up uh you know Disney Mickey Mouse took amazing brand took many many many years to build up uh and it's the same I think for all game developers uh I think the uh yeah it takes a lot of time and during that time you know I think it's just hard work keeping our ears to the floor and continuing to improve the game with what we believe is correct and shipping you features uh of what players want and it's so important to listen to what the community has to say and that's what you're doing not many really do they're looking a lot at the data you're looking at the data too but you're also asking as you said yourself you're asking in the App Store reviews you're asking in Discord curious how that makes its way back to product and makes its way back

to making all the improvements that you have I mean either it's a system within your team and it's very internal and very unique to c apps or it's something where it's like a process that maybe you can share what makes it possible to not just listen but also action uh so every week uh uh our marketing team actually sends out uh all of our reviews uh to the whole company uh and we send out the good reviews to everybody and then we send out the bad reviews uh customer suggestions uh to uh to the stakeholders uh and so for example to the game design team the game developer team um game programming team and uh and we do that every week like so we're we're keeping you know literally uh keeping our ears to ground on like you know what are people talking about like what are they happy with what are they unhappy with and we care a lot about that uh we try to reply to uh every single review on the App Store

uh we try to uh we definitely read all of them and uh we try to uh yeah improve our game um and of course you know there's always development is always hard delays always happen and things need to get prioritized or we definitely have a huge huge backlog even uh with uh yeah with all the hard work that we're putting in uh but but we listen and we care about it uh and uh and actually um for uh for the email review uh for the email uh uh uh uh customer support uh messages those actually come straight to me even so in game uh we have a tool that we built called Help chatter and and it's kind of like uh WhatsApp uh and so you can chat uh uh with our customer support that one goes to our team uh but if you email from our website uh and you email us that actually goes to me so it's kind of like okay if somebody is going out of our app and emailing going out of the way going our website and messaging us uh I actually uh see that uh and so uh yeah I think it's you know

a lot of things I think it's you know making sure that there's constant uh flow of information like our weekly uh emails for the reviews I think it's tough from top down like you know what the CEO cares about and the CEO uh spends his time on and asks I think the rest of the team will have uh yeah we'll have a good focus on that and so uh yeah so I spend my time also doing customer support customer service and we We Care a Lot About That I haven't heard that very often from CEOs that they are into customer support and service and it's kind of I'm TR I'm kind of like seeing you you know sort of like on the bridge and like you know the buck stops here and then the emails come in and you're looking at them um obviously you've built some systems to do this which I think is very cool you've done a lot of your own building I mean your portal is your own this system of sort of review and um the the the democratization of the data throughout

the whole company probably also you've built it what have you maybe for a couple of tips because it is a blueprint to follow Studios want to be very similar to what you have they want a brand they want a community they want the community to flourish are there any tools that you have that you just love that you haven't built CK tools wise um yeah I don't think so yeah yeah yeah tools wise we use all The Usual Suspects like I mean yeah we use slack we use we use Facebook we use Twitter we use Instagram we have all of those accounts I'm sorry CK what I meant was like you know these little these little shortcuts within the company you know there's all the ways to automate reviews and how you respond you know but but it sounds to me really like

you like you've built a ton of this yourself but I'd love to hear what you haven't built because people I don't want you to plug any particular vendor that's not the point but I want people to understand like what kinds of tools they can put together to um to listen and improve their game yeah internally we have a platform we call Phoenix Cloud uh and what that is is our internal bi tool that we uh that we can analyze it data we automate a lot of our analysis uh what we've seen is when uh a lot of game developers uh when they make updates to the game uh they're like oh wow this this feels good and then when they release it actually metrics go down and they may or may not know uh so this happens to us quite a bit too and so we end up reverting builds a lot um and so uh being able to automatically know whether or not your release is good like whether it's you know stability metrics like crash anr uh nfes Unity has a lot of nfes um or you're know your frames per second and all that or even just

like engagement metrics all of that for us is like automated now uh with our internal bi tool and we're able to see okay like this release is good this release is good this release is good this release is good uh so that's like a big we're a big team on this and so that's our number one tool we have inhouse that we're also trying to improve further more uh we're actually uh uh uh towards the end of the uh Year we're actually going to integrate uh AI into it so that like any team in our company can and then talk to it and say okay what's our daily active users or for this uh for this RV portal feature like how many people today entered and what is their turn like uh we want to be able to do that you know via like natural language human language um and with the help of uh uh chat BT and LMS and uh all that like we're able to hook that into our internal bi tool and uh yeah and make everybody in the company uh very data Savvy very uh real time uh and be ble to you know keep their ears ground even closer and and uh uh yeah

just understand everything that's going on and and that's actually uh what we think will really help us Propel and improve our brand uh over the long term I think you're absolutely right on that count I think that's very exciting with the AI integration and probably people in our audience are just a little bit sort of wouldn't say jealous but it's great when you can build these tools yourself you have so much more flexibility in how you do what you do how you react as you said yourself even pulling sometimes the games that you thought you know this feature is going to really fly data tells you something different you make that decision you make that tough decision um just curious CK these are a lot of things that you're building obviously your company is very very lucky you're you're you're the CEO you have this

training from your days as far back as as Microsoft as early on um are there any shortcuts out there for everybody else who really can't build this from scratch I actually give a talk called uh Indie survival tactics a lot uh I gave it uh last year at GDC uh and uh yeah and a h I'm a huge proponent of helping Indies helping the small guys uh I actually uh uh yeah for you know add me on LinkedIn and ask me questions uh happy to help uh so in my uh in the survival tactic talk uh uh I talk about how to get free users how to get free and cheap users how to increase your attention how to you know make sure that like we end you know keep the lights on make ends meet uh and so yeah over the years I think I've spoken at Pax as well and Pocket Gamer um indicate all about the same topic which is like you know as an indd uh where you don't have large budgets like how do we you know yeah how

do we do all of this like you know how do we do all of this uh how do we take some shortcuts what are some of the growth hacks uh and uh yeah yeah and it's you know it's really I really want to give back to the gaming community that that has given me uh and us so much and so uh yeah so I do have those talks i' would say you know first off um you know definitely uh uh uh make uh work with people that you're excited to work with uh I think having really strong Co Founders uh has been the number one uh big thing uh you know shortcut or not like you know this is going to be a marathon um and uh you might be able to shortcut some features some you know UA parts and all of that but at the end of the day it's still a marathon and finding amazing co-founders so Solon is my middle school buddy Middle School best friend John is my college best friend and you know we've been together for 10 plus years uh and so I would say that's number one um I would say number two to um uh UA wise like it's not true

you don't need to spend $10,000 uh you can spend $10 a day but that's actually how we start all of our Gams it's a $10 a day UA budget uh and only when the Raz is good then we increase it uh but when the Raz is good return on and spend is good uh we increase really really fast like it's like you know $10 100,000 uh daily budget you know 10 grand daily budget and so we increase it really fast when the math works but but we start very very small uh and so uh so yeah so if any you know uh yeah anybody tells you no you have to spend you know 100 Grand you know so really you know take uh take it with a grain of salt and you know do your own testing uh we test $10 a day uh to make sure that you know everything works and so and in which re which regions CK you T yeah yeah on in India and Philippines uh is where we do our soft launch uh and we test $10 a day uh and the typical cpis that we're able to see I you start with 20 cent CP course but it actually goes down to like uh two cents and two or

three cents and you can get like hundreds of users with $10 uh and that's for sure enough for you to you know test like to see if to see what retention is like test if they have any bugs you know the worst you know I've seen some uh uh indie game developers where they're really excited they launch and there's like a huge bug right like that really shouldn't happen if you know you have hundreds of players every day playing your game and helping you essentially test right like um before you go world and so so we do that a lot uh and they have $10 you know it's it's almost like a cup of coffee these days uh and so uh yeah i' say those are the probably like the two big ones but like yeah probably have like 15 more that like I say talk um yeah no but I think in these survival tactics like I try to you know uh yeah yeah share you know once a year those are really interesting and inspiring because yeah it is truly the survival kit and it says that we can do a lot with a with with less which is

what everyone is under pressure to do um have to have you back and maybe like do your you know do just a run through of these that the $10 a day has got me really Blown Away CK I have to say I mean I've heard about starting low but it must be it must be the kpis you know exactly what to look for and if you're saying like roaz is the North Star or you're looking at retention I mean you know what to look for and then probably having some modeling to say this is what it would look like if we dial up exactly yeah yeah yeah and so you need to know exactly what to look for uh but but I would say even for somebody new that didn't like I would say just start with retention start with Raz start with $10 a day uh you will hit some cases where when you dial up it doesn't work but but at least when it's small it work then it help you you know test and get some feedback and get some metrics to work with um and uh yeah that's you know way better than uh you know nothing and also

way better than spending 10 grand and then realizing oh we have so many bugs that like you know this data wasn't even that useful um and so yeah you know yeah that's yeah and and you feed it back into the game because that's what it's that's what it's all about product it's about product it used to be performance Now product is pulled ahead of that you know you could make up for mediocre product with super amazing performance but that's not how it works now it's all about product so $10 a day you can at least know do people like the game what's happening will it crash um and do all of those so your path is so amazing CK you must you must must like P yourself thinking this is is this where it is you know you've gone from being a game step by step that's what I admire here step by step up building always building on the next as I said now a

multimedia brand when do we see the movie in a few years we we have talked talked about that uh movie retail stores uh yeah like animation like yeah it where uh theme parks even like you know that's that's the Dream well I'm going to book my my place there but no it it's possible though I mean look when something is popular it's it's cult it's a phenomenon and we want to experience real world physical world Digital World um what's next then I mean we've gone from uh you know skins I remember speaking with you when it's like oh we've got skins this is really cool and you know we're going to have you know virtual currency now you've got your currency set up Community you have your comic book what's next what do you want to do next and how do you make that decision uh about what to introduce next

yeah hopefully and the next year we want to be able to launch user generated content um and we're working hard at it uh we have it working internally uh it's of course a very very Grand feature and a lot of uh a lot of code a lot of um you know optimizations that we need to do but user generate content uh we were're very very uh bullish on we're very very excited on actually think you know almost any game uh could uh could take advantage of it but I think especially for us with snake uh we're already getting people messaging us and saying hey I drew a snake can you put this in the game you know and we're currently we're currently doing it manually already uh with ugc uh and so different game modes we're all ideas from our community you know different skins or ideas from our community uh and being able to you know give those tools uh to our community directly and have them created um is uh yeah is our future and that's where uh that's where we're headed that we're working hard on but it's of course very very yeah very big

feature to ship and so you just have to give them the tools and they will let loose and uh I like the idea that you're going to use real influencers no nothing nothing against all the ways to supplement that or or extend that with um AI um but I think you just have such a real community that you can you can start real yeah yeah we partner with influencers on Tik Tok yeah that's what yeah that definitely helps the brand as well uh we do that every month uh probably 20 or 30 influencers that we work with and they submit their video we take a look at it sounds good you know please post and we partner with them and so uh that's also an area that uh uh uh yeah that we're excited about that we're going to continue to increase um yeah hopefully to hundreds or thousand and and the and the audio ads how's how's how's that ex how's that progressing as well because I know a lot of companies testing that and it makes sense it has

to be a sensory experience and sound is a sense why not make more of it what are you seeing we're very excited about the concept uh we're currently testing it um but uh but we're still running into some issues on like uh you know that uh there's some crashes there's some performance issues and it's a very very new ad unit I think for uh for the entire space uh we're very excited we're committed to testing it um but uh yeah there's yeah there's definitely sort of like a couple of things and for example like there's no mediation for it like so you know how do we show which provider we kind of have to uh hack it together ourselves so uh yeah that space is really new um but I do think uh yeah I do think it's uh it's going to be uh yeah it's gonna be very exciting and I think all games can then use this uh and it's going to be yeah it's it's a very seamless experience I'm thinking the whole time if we just want to test something new we just come

back to you CK because you've got reced portal you got audio ads you got ugc maybe even a movie we know where to come we want to find Cutting Edge things when we watch a movie you'll have front row seats Premier seats I promise I love it I really do love it I love your spirit CK you are always looking for something new and speaking of that the new game that you're playing most because we always talk about what are you playing what's your favorite game of all time we know that we know that from the beginning it's the one you're playing with your brother but the new game the favorite game you're currently playing what is that that's S I haven't played new games in a long time I think the last one s Sor the last like new game that like I really really got into it's actually Clash Royale and that was like a long long time ago uh I think like having kids uh I have a four-year-old in I have a one and a halfy old and uh yeah and that's my new

thing and uh yeah and they're they're very cute they're very fun um they're very very active they're both boy two boys so they're they're very very active and so that's enough to keep me busy um but uh yeah but no when when we launch ugc I'll be playing a lot of the game modes that our community creates uh I've played a few already that uh our our team has made internally um new game modes with our EGC tools so those I played but yeah haven't launched yet so well I'll be seeing you then at one of these shows coming up that one maybe uh may maybe a Pocket Gamer Helsinki London what's coming you know GDC it's all it's all in the books it's we've got a lot to do a lot of places to go after the summer um just great to talk with you CK and we'll have to have you back I mean you've really intrigued me now um with an update of your Survival Guide because

I remember these talks from before but hey now we're in a very different time totally some would even say even more desperate uh where we just need good ideas and Good Vibes we're gonna get them both from you CK for sure thanks so much feggy thanks for having me this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market and all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast

and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shoes and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future