The Art of Scaling games: The Creative arms race

That's that's the sad part about this that like you know you having greatly creative people isn't really going to win this race. It means you having people that know execution so well. So they can produce so much stuff. That's that's wins this race. [music]
Felix with [music] a two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA advers and game design too. Mate [music] feeling shaking the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early day [music] master eyes on the prize tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix stacks colors like a wizard [music] in disguise. Jack lift us to the highest. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey thick [music] got your back. Ads are beautiful. They like the way. Click it fast. Don't delay. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. [music] Ah. [music] Ah.

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Hello everybody. Welcome to another super special rare episode [laughter] for the whatever we are calling it these days. We have a special guest. So it's definitely super special. And my name is Mat Lancherich.
I'm Felix Broberg. And I'm
And we have
Ritzky. Hey, nice to meet you guys. [laughter]
Sorry I just threw you under the bus.
I thought it was a I thought it was a thing and then and then I would come.
I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. No. Welcome Risky. welcome back on to the show. Could you give our listeners just a brief intro just to remind who you are and why are you great?
Okay. Um, hey guys. Thanks. Thanks for having me and and good to be back on the podcast. My name is Ritzky Shabutra. I'm a co-founder at GVX. We're a financing platform for gaming and consumer apps. We provide non-dilutive capital, growth capital for user acquisition so you can

scale your apps to their maximum profitable potential.
There you go. Nice. And today we are going to talk about what else than creatives because as you all dear listeners might have noticed, we started talking about one interesting KPI or northstar metric or whatever Philips you mentioned it on the on the some of the last podcasts. the new or the number of new creatives in the last 30 days and we are kind of measuring this against different games that we review and Ritzky is always kind of is also doing this on his own and the team as well and just interviewing different clients and and we thought you know let's just talk about this because it's super interesting. So what have been what have you been doing recently Ritzky? Yeah. Well, firstly, let me just clarify that I'm not an expert in this. So, I'm I'm go I'm going at this problem as a journalist,
but we are. Don't worry. Don't worry. We are.
Exactly. So, but I I've been doing a little bit of primary research and and

we're fortunate enough to work with a lot of gaming mobile gaming clients. So, I just asked them point blank like what's your biggest pain point right now in scaling your games? And all of them point to their UA manager. Basically 14 out of 14 of them pointed to their UA manager and was like okay the thing that's blocking our our scaling is keeping up with creative ideation production and testing essentially that's it and then they also mentioned that the companies that they are tracking i.e their competitors seem to be increasing the pace of experimentation over time creating even more pressure to keep up. So we decided to see if we can quantify this and and dig a little bit deeper into the numbers. I'll share with you guys what we found shortly, but basically I showed this to Mate and he was like I was like, "Yeah, what the bro? How can anyone possibly solve for these types of volumes and voila, here we are. I'm hoping to find answers here on this podcast."
That's why we are here. We were also quite surprised when we looked at, let's

say, Kingshot. We looked at what else? Last war and other other companies.
Blog Blast.
Blog Blast as well. Mayong and all of these like oh how many new creatives in the last year 10,000 is
we even now have two podcast based on creatives one for AI ones and one for nonAI ones
here here it is yes which is 16,000 new creatives in the last 30 days which is
nuts
that's ridiculous yeah exactly
and sorry just just just to clarify on this because I think we're using different platforms you're using sensor tower I'm using app magic but sure
there's there's a in at least in app magic there's this concept cept of creative which is like
new
like no there's new creatives and there's just total creatives but each creative that they show on the platform is basically like
a bundle they they don't repeat like similar creatives it's like because then it'll be really really repetitive to show on the on the platform. So it's

more akin to a concept but I don't think it's a concept either. Anyways we can get into that
somewhere in a in the middle. Yeah,
for a concept you would need very heavy filtering most probably by humans which you cannot really do.
Yeah,
exactly. But can we maybe just take a step back mat and can you just explain for viewers who are just joining us like why Vita Mayayong has 3,000 new creatives in the last 30 days and the UA benefits of that
because the creative velocity is the the name of the game since we started talking about this I think 2025 in January and I said look this like PE companies with high or a big number of creatives and new creatives are going to win because every time you add new creatives the new creatives kind of get a little bit of a boost of impressions on some some channels and the creative fatigue on certain level of scale is quite high. So you need to rotate and refresh campaigns very frequently. On Facebook, it started to be quite intense

and I'm kind of adding and adding new creatives almost like two or three times a week. Even though the scale is not like hundreds of thousands of dollars, even if it's like 50k, it really requires significant amount of creatives to be able to go for profit.
TLDDR or FYI, Vita Mayong currently hitting record metrics everywhere. 8 million DAU and 400 pretty much half a million downloads a day. just saying.
So that's I mean
wow
that's the 23,000 creatives right there
because you know if you look at my kind of metric when I see like when I when I know the game is scaling is when I see their ads like five times a day on Facebook or different times. I mean like seriously I'm just browsing like Instagram, Facebook and I see the games like oh wait a second I haven't seen this game before. It's like oh okay let

me check. Okay, it's scaling five creatives. But sometimes it's just five creatives like the same creatives which can happen and then the game is kind of going to die quickly because there's not enough let's say the creative firepower. But when I look at Vitaong and I see 10 creatives a day and 10 different creatives a day, like that's insane. That's really insane. So that's like how you actually scale these days. And I don't think it's going to be very different in 2026. Actually, you know what? It's going to be even more problem, not problematic, but it's like even more like we're going to go deeper in this. It's going to be still about volumes, but the quality needs to go higher because [clears throat]
the bar is going to this is not going to be enough anymore. So, we are screwed 2026. Yay.
We haven't even start talking about playables on top of this.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. Exactly. There's whole new world which is called playables. And let's not go there because there's going to be 10 podcasts which is fine.

So wait, let's take a look at this. Right. So this is uh the category that Vameayong is in which we just looked up 23,000 creators which they're dominating in terms of downloads. Right? So this is ad monetized games. So let's just look at the top three uh games in that category. It's Vayong, Tile Explorer, and Tile Club.
So you can see that the ones that are the largest have the most creatives. So this is exactly what Matio was talking about. The more creatives you have, the larger your game will be.
The scaling is
the scale. Yeah. Scaling. Scale. Right.
This is kind of what they talked about at Amplify for App Leven as well, right? That their algorithm kind of favors new creatives and a lot of new creatives.
It's not a lot of new creatives. They also have the the creative sets these days. So, it's it's slightly changed over the course of last few months. But as even Alexi mentioned, Alexis mentioned that new creatives have like 5% of the traffic and then based on the

first 5% of the traffic bump, then the algorithm decides if it's if it's going to get more traffic or not.
Literally, if you if you just mathematically just go with more, then you will win.
Can we define what's new creative time wise? like what after 2 days it's not new anymore 3 days 1 day what would you say
the new uploaded creative that's like the new batch
but I I mean like
how long% overall traffic
yeah but how long is a creative new
how long is new
honestly like that's it can be one day it can be two months I like what like I I don't really get the question you mean new in terms of the algorithm or new in terms of like
until until reaches the 5% of the of the traffic which is Like it can be depends on the budget. So it can be one week because your budget is low or it can be one day because your budget is like 50k per day. In that case it's like half of the day maybe.
Okay. So once again so 5% of the overall

volume spent. So you spend
is is going to be allocated to new creatives when you upload them into the into the channel.
Mhm.
You will get 5% of that overall spend. It's going to be allocated to the new creatives. Okay. And if they consume more then no new anymore.
Exactly. That's just yeah the the after exit learning phase.
I'm learning stuff today. This is good. See,
sorry. Just so I understand, it's is it is it based on an impression count or a sp I guess spend an impression or related, right?
Spend an impression.
But okay, send an impression and and this is when we we had a conversation separately outside of this and I was like, "Hey, we I think I think you need to back in my old school days like four or five years ago. I was like, okay, we need to hit 50,000 impressions to like properly test this creative concept or this creative variant." Like what is that number nowadays? And it's also going to be very interesting on the different channels. I think what you mentioned might be

connected to Facebook for example. And then I and I then I said, I think you just need 5,000 impressions. And I don't think anyone [clears throat] uses impressions anymore because if you are a UA manager that working on the game for some time you add new creatives and you see immediately after maybe like even a couple of like hundreds of impressions it picks up the spend immediately the the like the winner because
what happens on Facebook and everybody has this problem is you have one or two best performing creatives and it's really hard to kind of find the new winner. So you upload the new creatives, you test it out, and there's like seven different kind of frameworks for testing, but let's say for simplification, you're adding new creative concepts into the business as usual campaigns. So you add your new creatives there. After one day, zero traffic or very very slow traffic, which is close to zero. Then you add new batch [clears throat] very similar. And then

you add the new badge and then suddenly one creative starts to spend like after even after hour of uploading
if you're lucky
you will see if you're I mean still but you will see this patterns after a while. So you don't really need like 5,000 impressions. You can see it right out of the get-go. You upload the creative is really like strong concept. It takes over the spend immediately and you will see in one day basically. So this was like kind of
it's kind of really sad that like you know some guy who's not doing this in a in a machine machine supported is like spending time like thinking about like the the smallest little detail about this thing and they have like like one hour of limelight before they get shut down is like kind [snorts] of sad
this Yeah, exactly. And you know, you can't really force this because even if you because even if you say, "Okay, you know what? I'm just going to pause the the creative winner that I have, so I will leave the room for the new creatives." You pause the winner and other creatives will take over the spend

for sure, but those will have worse results than the creative winner obviously. So it's like, okay, you you want it to happen. Then people try to do a separate creative testing campaign. So let's say you're running purchase optimized campaigns. Let's do it's cheap in a cheaper way. Let's just try mobile app install campaign test creatives and then put winners into the business as usual. It's going to work only on paper because you will find the winner. You will put it into business usual campaign zero spend. It's the same thing but you just kind of wasted five days of testing in the mobile app instant campaign.
So I have a question. I just did some quick maths which is always fun right so vayong 23,000 creatives in the last 30 days which means every day 766 new creatives which means every 24 hours so 31.9 creatives per hour how the hell do they do that I
mean do you think like they're doing this automatically it's just

obviously but like how do they do it automatically like this is insane they do vayong tile club by game of ocean they do their creative output that they do in a month they do in a day.
Well, look.
Okay. So, let's do automate. Put this into context. So, you automate a lot of stuff in the first place. That's like for sure.
Yeah. But how,
man? Just just thinksol. So, you have a concept and you put the concept into seven or eight different formats. Do you need to come up with a different concept for each format? No, you just check it out. But then
change the color or whatever.
Format format. Format like just the format like banner. what they have and it take it takes counted as like 10 or 15 new creatives which is just still one concept. So, you know, you saying they're doing 32 creatives per hour means that maybe they're doing like I don't know three per 5 hours or something maybe. I don't know. We really need localized creatives and these types

of things.
They really need to boil down to the like how much concepts like actual completely different concepts they are pushing out. It's not just like because you know you have this one concept and then you like slush it on your pipeline and then like the p pipeline automatically converts it to all these other formats. That that that's my guess which if if you're not doing it efficiently and then then you have this
with 23,000 creatives you need to have the automated pipeline for also which is going to be not only just you know uploading the creatives manually would take you like
all day. It's impossible to do it like manually. Seriously. Then what is really impossible to do manually is also translating because Vita Mayayong for example and kind of talk about this game all the time. They have so many different like languages. We we saw English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, whatever else also has to be automated
and then just uploaded in in bulk.
So how do you start with this? Let's say

me and Ritzky, we want to start a game called Peter Mayong and we want to get to 23,000 creatives every month, right? So for Peter Mayong, how do we start? Like what tools? Actually, no I'm actually curious like what tools do you actually use for this?
Well, you call Mia. That's
Yeah, you call Mia, but like come on. Like I want to hear this.
Pa Mayong is is great. No, honestly, so you have you have tools that help you bulk upload and you have 10 millions of them, so you can you can use that. But the in terms of the creative production first you start small and then you scale. I mean obviously you won't be able to scale from zero to 23 creatives overnight. It's just like you slowly build the process and the process is you have small team inhouse one one UA manager at least five video editors. That's that's my ratio because that's very important. Some people have it the other way around which is absolutely ridiculous.
Five to one creatives to UA managers. That's my ratio that I kind of think I have 10 10 most western ratio. My ratio

is I think like Asian ratio is like one to 10.
Western ratio is yeah a little bit different [laughter] little bit different but still that's the ratio you you build that and then you start kind of you build the own pipeline which is ideation production testing in my in my case testing is just up uploading them to the business as usual just not not to waste time anyway. Then from this when you start producing creatives on the daily on the weekly basis then you start kind of working with external partners. So you don't really rely only on on your internal team and then after you have like 1 2 3 4 five different external partners you start automating stuff and also in terms of the ideation and production like every everywhere where you can you just try to be as effective as possible and feelings like if you go and do payong I will say don't do it it's going to be pretty hard.
Yeah.
But no like this is how you kind of start and then just expand.

basically you use AI for video editing and change editing the videos or no
AI is more for creation than editing I would say because
you can do a little bit of editing here and there you you have new tools uh that are going on to be on the market as well but primarily if you saw like my workflow just for creating random social media post like this is the same thing that you can do for for UA so there's so many options man like I I I don't know where you Well, I know where you should start. I just told you.
I think when I think about it, I think there's a few bottlenecks, right? One is the bottleneck in terms of just creative capacity like how do you create um and then obviously edit as well. There's also a bottleneck in ideiation. Like I think some people are just like how do I even think about even as you you were mentioning like three concepts every whatever however many days because if you do that for enough months you're like you definitely run out of freaking concepts.
You go to competitors. No worries.

There's always stuff to steal.
There's always stuff to steal. Yeah, exactly. It's is actually like the ideation part for start is very easy. Go to competition, take five or 10 their best performing ads and then just use them in for Petong. I would I would try for for something else and my own clients. I wouldn't really steal this just like take inspiration. So if we're doing Pameayong, I just go to Vita Mayong and then I'll look oh this creative looks nice and it goes like this would work look 14%. This one is going to work super well
and like if you're an Asian studio you don't even do that. You just take the creatives cut off the end cards and run it
easy.
Exactly. So yeah like that ideation becomes a problem at scale but again you have tools for that and you have then if if you run into this problem it's a good problem to have
but but who is Vita Mayome copying as in

like
other genres
to 23,000 other genres
other genres like you need to go like that's why we see stuff like Royal Kingdom or Royal Match the big match three game copying King Shot literally they copying Kingshot one to one They're also doing blog blast creative. So,
right.
Exactly.
So, once you kind of capture your whole genre, you go outside of your genre because honestly, there are just two or three genres that are the best, which is Rex, Forex, and Forex. And everybody goes to Forex to steal their creatives. That's it.
And then you have all of these different things. And also when you run out of games you go to apps and [laughter] you are starting the same same roller coaster again.
That's that's the sad part about this that like you know you having greatly creative people isn't really going to win this race. It means you having people that know execution so well so they can produce so much stuff that's that's wins this race.
Yeah. It's not what creatives were in

the 60s, you know, a bunch of weed and hanging out. No, it's just copying.
But also, I found out like it's I was always kind of saying and under the impression, you know, like let's just test this and it's going to be fine. Like we will see what good data says. But now I'm not actually the same anymore because it really makes a difference if you know what you're doing and you're not just randomly testing It just like comes up like this is great. Let's see. Now I'm kind of also asking myself like for for a long a longer period of time like okay is like what is this? I mean do I care about like does really spark any types of emotions or is it just fake enough that actually grabs the attention and should it and will it is is it going to work and these questions even before I I go and upload the new creatives because then you can you can change quite a lot actually. I I we just produced one one video for for a gaming studio and it's like look, you know what? Like this is

kind of nice, but then let's just also cut first three seconds because it's absolutely boring and I don't want to see it there. Also, same thing. It's it's a headline and we we we need to grab attention. I don't care about the headline just floating around in first three seconds. No, just straight to the altered game play and then let's use that headline and just put it on the top of the video and suddenly out of one video we have free.
That's called experience. That's it.
I mean, yeah, that's true. This is a interesting discussion.
Yeah. Like, so on the back of this, right, this is super interesting. I'm just wondering, right, we often joke on this podcast about the app police, right? Do ever companies sue each other for creative copying or is just not a thing? I don't think
like Royal Match Creatives, you know, like they're so good, right? Do they would Dream Games ever sue anyone for copying them? Like match villains,
but Match Villains is just not copying them. It's I mean, if you copy it's just one to one really. And even if they do

it, like who cares? I mean, there's like again
there's also like it's it's really hard to kind of claim the IP of something that's moving so fast that's like that has a shelf life of however long. But yeah, I think that that'll be pretty tough. Anyway, so so Risky, what does like the the clients also mentioned after after you reviewed all that the creative is a problem basically like what how they can think about it like what's what was the the reasoning behind also the research and everything?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean the reasoning behind the research is that it's extremely frustrating problem and it's just like
you can definitely feel it if you're not moving or there's no momentum in your own company. you definitely feel everyone else kind of whizzing by. And so after hearing enough of it, I was like, "Okay, I I really wanted to quantify the problem." And so if you allow me to share share my screen, I'll share with you kind of what what what we uncovered. And I'd love to hear kind of what you guys think
whether this this kind of aligns with what you're seeing. But just just to

start off with how we did the how we did the the the research. So we basically took uh actually across mid uh midcore, hyper casual, and casual. I just want to talk about midcore here because I think the revenue brackets make most sense on on uh generally more IP generating games. We took the top 10,00 grossing midcore games in tier 1 and we looked from January 2023 to to to September 2025 and then we categorized them between their AP brackets like under 500K to all the way up to 2 million and above.
Um and then we looked at associated creatives uh which is what app magic describes as like multiple visually thematic similar varants and then we took a look at new creatives. So this is what we see. So if you look at the the first the first chart on the left just shows that like despite CPMs becoming more and more expensive, there's still demand for it and increasing demand for it. Like people are super hungry for for more and more impressions, despite the CPM inflation. But then if you look at the chart on the right, it shows that

that also translates to the number of creatives that they're producing. And it it becomes more and more exacerbated as you increase the the revenue bracket. So the $2 million AP revenue and above bracket is skyrocketing to like 400 plus creatives per month. This is average. This is not Vita Mayome. Vita my own will kindly skew this
but like 400 million 400 plus creatives per month on average for any any any any studio that or sorry not studio any game that's generating 2 million above on revenue I think is pretty staggering and this if you look at it from a longitudinal standpoint you you can you can sense how how you'd be very frustrated if you started in 2023 and you had the same system going on you realize everyone else is kind of shooting up
so that was like the first same system from 2023 until today.
You're not there. You're non-existent.
That's no good.
It would be really interesting to see the ratio of Chinese companies in the

last segment on the right chart.
I'm guessing it's like 50%.
I'll get back to you on that one. That is an interesting one. [laughter]
All of them.
All of them.
This echoes what you were saying, Jakob, which is basically more revenue, more creatives. Like if you have more revenue, you're going to spend it on on more creatives.
Yeah, absolutely.
Which brings us to the next slide, which is how many new creatives here. And so on average, about 40 to 50% of the total creatives are new um on a monthly basis. So this definition over here is is categorized as a monthly basis. I don't think that's that's surprising. For this 2 million plus AP bracket, it's 253 new associated creatives per month, which I think is is pretty significant. And we go back to the question of like how the how the hell do you do you do you create a system that that allows you to do this? Also noting some growth spikes. I don't know if that's correlated to new systems or tools that are available in the market where suddenly like

especially the 1 million 1 million and above kind of brackets are are kind of spiking in certain times. Is that AI is that I don't know um news? You have Jan you have January right there usually which is the the best time of the year anyway and it drops a little bit in summer and then spikes back up for
also start of the year
we seen a lot more AI models coming out into like it was something like March I remember there was like a lot of stuff coming into the market literally like every week you had another video model
it started I think last year when I was still here I started doing like all of these like AI like experiments. It was October, November. So that's that's right there. What was before 2023? I have no idea. But last year definitely.
Yeah, it's definitely going to increase increase volumes so much
100%. Like we said 50% of the gaming companies

are going to use AI next year in creative. I mean that's like if if they don't then they are not going to be in this chart unfortunately. One thing that I I was wondering and you were talking about Vita Mayong but I'm looking at this like top 2 million plus range as well like outside of the total UA of the total UA budget like what percentage or or like how much do they need to reserve to just for testing whether or not these new creatives work like how do you think about that budgeting
I usually try to have like 10 15% budget allocated for creative testing and if you are spending couple millions a month it's that's quite significant deal but I think not the main question is like how much money they or how much how many resources they should be allocating for the creative production that's even like bigger question because like it's like you know testing you can test things and even if you skip testing and just start traveling everything into the business usual that's fine but if you're spending

oh like these guys are earning 2 million so I'm pretty sure like they're spending more than that or around or people somewhere around the 2 million it's it's going to be significant portion of of the cost from the marketing P&L as well or the UA u P&L and it can be anything dep of thousands to even hundreds of thousands of dollars for per month just for creative production and I'm not even not even going into the the space about like the these high polish cinematic trailers that cost quite a lot of money. I mean now with AI it's going to be slightly less but still it's just I'm not even going there and those are in millions. So that's the real
in your in your in your experience mate like um do CEOs understand this
like that
absolutely no
they should be on every CEO's wall that should was what they should ask every morning like how many creatives did we

come out with yesterday
man Felix I worked with one company and the CEO had two UA managers halftime video editor spending 10k per pay and I was like guys this this is a very bad distribution of the workforce. I mean 10k per day can be done by half of a person not two UA managers. Where is your video editors? Like we're like where is like oh but you know we are going to start working with one company like when well maybe in two months like yeah but we want to scale now like yeah sure
we should do these like UA efficiency benchmarks man because like people don't don't even get the get the
was ridiculous. So
no they don't understand.
You know what I'm just thinking about like looking at these charts right? So this is still a lot a number of creatives right but in context of this it's even more impressive these games

that we reviewed in the last months like the tower level devil these Cinderella stories are even more magical now than they were four years ago. Insane. So there's this one one other chart that we we were running which which I thought was quite interesting but basically if you flip this and you said how many creatives does it take for you to reach a million impressions you can kind of get a proxy to how your creative efficiency because if you want to get to a million impressions how many creative creatives does it take for you to iterate and what we see here is I think other than this this the 69 the 69 one there's like a clear like almost efficiency happening over time and also over scale of revenue. So over time even this this lower bracket is getting more and more efficient getting to a million impressions but also even in 20 2025 year to date there's a clear efficiency as you spend more money so or as you generate more money
experience and you know what yeah you know what what you are doing

there's maturity in the creative system or how you've set it up and then if you survive for long enough you learn from your mistakes and maybe maybe maybe you're able to kind of do this better but I It goes back to to to me thinking about these teams who they're they're basically led by these CEOs who are thinking okay I have a thing that works for me that's generating me 500 to 500k to a million and they basically stay there for 3 years and trying to survive at that kind of that that kind of using those systems and I come to them I'm like hey your u your rorowass is positive you should scale but the third the first thing that they're thinking in their mind is like how What do I have to do to do that? Nothing has worked in the last three years
because you you actually need a pretty drastic change in your in your creative system. I think is is probably the answer. You know what's also quite challenging sometimes because the the trust of the CEOs because some of the like sometime this happens like CEO is

the the only person that runs all the UA creatives whatever which they always should because they at least they kind of starts to understand like how it works but then then there's the challenge of oh I hired two people and but they're not doing even half of the job that I was doing. It's not even close there. Like how can I trust these guys when my creatives which are just random creatives that I created are just 10 times better than whatever [laughter] they they are doing. So then that becomes a problem afterwards. So interesting interesting dynamics in all the companies.
I I was speaking this year to a person who works in an ad network who's very clever, right? And he had a unique interesting point on this, right? And he said that all these companies cuz in since 2020 mobile gaming had grown has grown compared to now in terms of revenues by 6x. That's what he said. So if your revenues from 2020 hasn't grown

by 6x that means you're behind and basically you've actually shrunk in real terms, right? And I think a lot of studios that don't understand this concept of a lot of creatives are the ones that are falling behind. Like if you're roughly the same as you were in 2020 compared to now, you're behind and that's not a good thing.
Yeah.
It's it's pretty much different way of saying what we saying every single podcast. Why is like so rolling steamrolling over everybody.
Exactly. Right. There's one more chart that I wanted to run by you guys. I thought there would be basically my hypothesis was that there was going to be like a Pareto law or like a Pareto kind of dynamic where like one creative would generate the majority of impressions. Obviously, if you're doing 400 creatives, it's probably not going to be one, but I I ran this analysis where I was looking at the top three ads of all of these games across across every single month. It's quite sizable. like the top three ads could generate like at max in 2023 there

was a couple of outliers that were generating 24% or 49% of the total impressions of of the game. um which was a huge per I would consider that a Pareto in the in in in more recent months it's it's like 11 to 18% of total impressions in 2025 which is still quite a lot considering now they're doing 400 something creatives and the top three is generating 18%. And mate, we were talking about like one company. I forgot what it was, but basically they the case study was like it took them one like they had to make 1,800 creatives for them to find the one creative that generated like over a million dollars of UA spent. And sometimes I I think like maybe you just haven't iterated enough or spent enough to find that one creative that could blow you up.
That's the thing. But sometimes you just run out of money until you find that creative. No, but like jokes aside, that's like it's it's a hit like not hit

games but hit creatives. It's just one creative. It's gonna change the whole CPI TV equation and that's it.
I mean exactly like that. Like take this game
the whole game is built on that one creative that was taken from Stormfall which is a Steam game which is their like entry gate into the low CPI.
Exactly. Yeah. And then that makes 3 million a day plus. So it's like that is but then of course it's very challenging to find this one hit creative. If it's not then everybody would be
I can't even imagine how many tries they attempted there.
Oh yeah. Exactly. Because that's that's something we don't see. Everybody's like sees only the only the winning creative but
which everybody copies. [laughter]
Exact. No. It's like it's all over the every every Forex game basically.
So yeah.
Yeah. about that one. But
if only you could find a partner that would kind of split the bill with you on the UA costs and take risks alongside you.

Yeah. I was just going to say I was just going to ask you risky what does this mean if we look at this from the eyes of UA financing market? Like what does this mean actually? So I I'll tell you like I can tell you conceptually what it means but basically in practice what we've seen our clients do is they basically started to think about their UA budget like 80% of their UA budget as accessible from an external partner right and so they're like and that includes not just the media spend that also includes the creative production spend and the media budget testing spend. And if you're able to test or allocate more budget to testing this, you're just going to be more aggressive in in creative production in in testing new channels and all of these things. And if it doesn't work, look, we share the risk uh with you. You have someone who shares the risk. If it really doesn't work for a long period of time, we're probably not going to continue funding you. So, so there's a balance there, but at least it this gives you access to to budget where you can test

more and then if you find a winner, then you know that that you can you can double, triple, quadruple the spend on that winner. That's that's how it works in practice
because that can take two, three, four months until you find that winner, which is painful, but that's unfortunate, but it is it is what it is. And when
let's say you do let's say you do find the winner, right? Let's say like you don't know when it's going to happen, but let's say you do find that winner. Wouldn't it be such a shame that you don't have enough money to spend on on that winner and then you have to now think about, okay, I now I have to go call these VCs and whatever or I have to go and talk to these banks. You ideally want some way to access the capital as and when you see those winners. That's what I I would I would suggest.
Yeah. Because if then you start raising then until you raise and get the money, the vendor is already dead and that's That's all I had to share guys. But thanks for your inputs.
All you had to share this was amazing.
Very good discussion. This is great.

Yeah. A lot of work actually by the way.
Yeah. Actually, we have we ought to generate this report for anyone of your viewers who are interested. I don't know if we can put this on the link or like you can contact me.
You can let me know and we we gen we'll generate this report at least once a quarter just to just to give you a sense of of where all of this changes. And then there's this other thing that we're that we're kind of doing because a lot of the clients that we're we're we're speaking to, they find this like yes, they have sensor tower app magic to go and like stock their competitors or or or different genres, but having to like watch all of these ads like and spend a lot of time understanding and breaking it down is kind of painful. So we we developed kind of some a few a few properties to be able to break down all of these ads in the top categories. like if you were looking at Forex, we can tell you what's in each of these ads and uh and then we we basically publish uh a deep analysis on this. Mate has been helping us actually kind of validate these insights and then we've been

giving it to our clients and they they've loved it. So if anyone is also interested in that.
Yes, people are already asking uh in the comments from our few of the last episodes because we mentioned it on on the creative trends episode that we are doing this trend reports with PVX partners. So people are asking like where they can access these reports. So
guys, this is it.
Yeah. Yeah. We'll uh we'll we'll we'll share more information about about that very soon. Um it'll be open to anyone and we'll also take requests for specific genres or categories that that you want to kind of follow and would love to feedback as well. Yeah, you should you should m really think about those UI efficiency benchmarks because we talk about these things all the time in terms of KPI product even admon and like how many impressions that but nobody talks about like how many creatives per person or like ratios or whatever all the there's lot of like efficiency that's
efficiency stuff utilized still especially in the west

yeah if you're a team of five you don't really have two UA managers
yes
half of like part-time video editor. Sure. Sure. Yeah.
So, I guess the TLDDR for today is more money means more creatives which means less problems.
Okay. We [laughter]
more more money more creatives which in the end means less creatives because then it creates more money.
I mean that was [laughter] a great episode. Ritzky, thank you very much for coming on and and sharing the data and for for the great discussion and also listeners if you want to reach out. I'm going to put Ritzky's uh this LinkedIn or email into the show notes with all the links that we mentioned. Join the Slack channel. Also, if you have any comments, questions, anything, please do that or just ask add those into the comment section under the video on YouTube and then see you next time, I guess. Thank you very much.

Yeah. Cheers. Byebye. Thanks so much for