The Fingerprinting Problem Destroying Mobile Growth

in today's conversation we talk about one what is the current state of mobile Performance Marketing two what are the channels and tactics to achieve success and three how should a game Studio build a mobile marketing team in today's market in this conversation I speak with Warren Woodward who is a co-founder and chief growth officer at uptick one of the industry's most respected mobile growth agencies he's also one of my favorite people to talk to you about ground level truth without BS and without avoiding difficult topics so for anyone interested in Mobile growth or with plans to engage in Performance Marketing definitely want to check out this conversation stay tuned we're coming out you right now so Warren thanks for joining I think that of all the people that I talk to when it comes to user acquisition I think you in particular are great to speak to and the reason why I like speaking to you is that you provide some specific insights whether it it it's like incentive or some of the problems

that we're seeing in the industry that other people just don't talk about I don't if they're too scared to talk about it or if they don't realize but some of those nuances I think are very critical and important to understand especially if you want to have success in Mobile gaming and certainly growth and user acquisition is a core pillar of success in today's market so jumping right in and just to like get get rolling on this it it'd be great to kind of get your assessment about where are we today and there's different different things that I'm hearing when it comes when when I speak to different UA marketers as well as gaming Executives but from your perspective Performance Marketing for mobile gam gaming Studios what's working what's not working what's your current take yeah Joseph great to be back with you um always some of my favorite conversations uh when when me and you can get together either on rpod your content or or anywhere in between um and maybe kind of one one macro thing to your comments earlier before getting into this question about you know why

myself and the team at uptick like to talk about this stuff like there's kind of a weird um structural problem with sharing user acquisition knowledge the way that the industry is constructed because most user acquisition teams that are any good are internal at a publisher or a developer so they're uh really highly incentivized to not openly broadcast out um yeah when they find something that works our strategy here at uptick is a little bit different like ultimately for a little behind the scenes like what we're really trying to build is like a software and tooling business of of UA tools um and we kind of treat our kind of agency Branch as our laboratory so like our our philosophy is like be in the trenches be figuring out user acquisition and growth problems productize them and then make them into toolings that you know small and large teams can use and this is also why we try to be very open about sharing um the tactics that we're kind of uncovering when we break things open like we we are really trying to like you

know put those in a box and then open them up to larger you know large a larger community of of teams to use so that's just a little bit about like kind of our philosophy of the relationship between our software and and agency side and why we really like to share this information um so your question is very big and Broad um where are we today what's the state of Performance Marketing for mobile game studios there sort of we were chatting a little bit before the recording there's sort of like the narrative versus reality and I think it's important to maybe identify both um The Narrative is super bearish right now still um and we see this kind of at every scale I'm curious if you're kind of seeing the same Trends in your circles Joseph but it's like there's continue to be like layoffs downsizing of user acquisition teams decreasing marketing budgets um I've seen more and more teams just stting more pain coming yeah yeah no just just you know literally you today before the podcast I learned if another

thing yeah I won't say yet because I don't think it's announced but um I'm seeing more and more teams stay as fact of like user acquisition no longer works fact like statement and just moving to other tactics of like we're going to you know work just with content creators and influencers we're GNA just hope the game succeeds off organic um and that's pretty different from the actual reality and we've talked about this a lot at length in kind of different venues just to put put a bow on it the rules just continue to change and it's just more complicated now some things are are actually much simpler and more dumbed down like I think we're going to get into like rewarded video networks those are really dumbed down from what they used to be as far as like how much of an expert you need to be but some things are much more complex like the largest channels on iOS uh meta Tik Tok Google um these are like non-starters if you don't have like a data science function of some kind to work around the Privacy limitations

and we'll probably see eventually see something that rhymes with this on Android that's had a cascading impact of you know cutting out the big channels on half of the ecosystem that pushes more competition to the other channels increasing cpms increasing competition in those um and then I also see sort of like a neg a vicious cycle of like as margins get leaner team's trying to trim resources um putting fewer data Resources with a growth team cutting creative down to the bone like how can we get creative as cheap as possible and that also having like a vicious cycle of deprecating results so yeah that's all to say Yeah in reality like you know when we just look at Like Apples to Apples our longer term games where we've just been like kind of navigating through the trenches like performance is not worse overall we've just had to really change our results with the times and we have a little different vantage point because we like growth is our business games are not our business and so we have every incentive

in the world when the rules change to like throw our engineers at it throw our cross-disciplinary teams at it and solve these things and I think a lot of growth orgs are not they just don't have those resources in house so um that's all to say sorry I'm kind of going on a rant here most growth orgs and game developers only have marketers to Salt these problems and a lot of the problems these days cannot be solved by marketers alone and that's kind of the theme that I see and kind of the disparity between like The Narrative of a lot of game game Publishers and developers of like why UA doesn't work anymore and the reality of like what we see if like the problems getting more complicated to solve but you can solve them and you can have returns just at the rate or in some cases greater than there were um particularly in iOS than than past years long Preamble yeah yeah and I think like part of the problem is there's so much situational you know specificity with

to how do you win in the current Marketplace and there's so many like conflicting to your point like narratives and stories about what's working what's not working uh I think the general thing that I've heard is for many game studios they have seen like um well it seems like for some of the what I've been hearing is for some of the top games like UA has not Material changed very much at least for some of the folks who I talk to on their top games but then they also say but for the other games they've uh the performance is been declining and the ability to do UA against some of their other um you know long longer Tale games has been more difficult but I I I think that you you could probably provide a little bit more uh Nuance around why that may be happening and things like that but um I guess what you're saying is that overall you think that performance is actually about the same is that fair yeah I would say high level macro so you touched on something important which is like there's been there's been essentially parody Or I

would say actually increase at like the top of the food chain yeah and more pain in the mid to lower tier of the food chain what is the main differentiator between these it's resourcing so there's a bit of an arms race right and and here's the other thing that's odd is like I'm now starting to see huge like I don't know about UA team but UA creatives team for some of these top games of 100 to 200 people right so like we we've talked before about how UA teams were getting cut in half at during during like a few years back and now we're starting to see certain teams where they're kind of going Allin on UA creatives growth with these Mega teams and so yeah kind of understanding that and understanding also that there are some nonlinear and scale effects from the amount that you spend and things like that so it's just a huge and complex market and it I think it'd be great to get get your uh you know get

your thoughts on exactly what what's happening in the market today but in terms of some of the the things that I've been hearing would you agree with that yeah absolutely I see that um you know I am trying to be mindful of like you know ndas in respects of like agreements we have with our clients and teams that we talk to um but if you just look at sort of like where some of the big funding has been in gaming over the past couple of years when we talk to those teams it is much more common to your point that when we're planning a launch with them they'll kind of come in with the idea of like all right we want to plan a launch with you know maybe a 100 creative to start it's very different from like your password sort of like what's the bare minimum amount of creative we can make to like be be viable um big picture like you know our team always talks in the framework of like what we call like the three pillars of growth nothing original here but just kind of how we break it down those three pieces are like the the creative side the actual marketing operations side of pulling the lovers the campaigns and then the data and and

modeling size are just you know creative data operations right the big macro change if I really simplify this is the importance of pulling the levers has never been less okay and the differentiator that you can get from like a expert lever pullar versus like a mid-level lever pullar is like incremental at best this used to be like a 10x 20x Factor you know back when um you know I don't know what what year did you start in the industry Joseph first 2010 2011 okay so you actually started a couple years earlier than me I started around 2013 2014 um but back in those days when I was kind of grinding my way up there was a ton of edge to be gained by being really good at pulling the levers within Facebook or within iron Source whatever Channel you wanted um that part is you know in the age of advanced algorithms and going into AI more of that is just in the hands of the algorithm now right um and to your point of like why team the big team's

resourcing more for Creative those other two pillars of creative and data modeling the importance of those is vast vastly escalating let me put that another way anyone doing UA has access to like a top tier um media buyer now because of the power of the algorithms right so your differentiator from your competition is going to no longer be oh I have a really senior UA guy doesn't really matter that much you know um they might it might matter much as far as like their ability to like work cross disciplinary to understand the games to understand what types of creativ are working but it's not going to be like this dude can you know optimize his Facebook campaigns 20 times better than than this person over here does that make sense yeah absolutely and I think that's I mean it it did seem like when when Facebook was really you know developing all their AI models with vo AO that that was starting to be the trend and I I think that now we're we're seeing that you know to a much higher degree than I've ever seen

before in terms of some of these huge teams uh focusing on creative and so so maybe like um one thing that has been a little bit confusing and that's been discussed a lot was the impact of idfa deprecation and I think I was wrong before because I felt like um Forex and Social Casino would be strongly impacted negatively because of the inability to Target whales now we still have fingerprinting and things of that nature so I think that's what has been keeping those games going but can you comment on you know what you know just just for for people in the audience to understand what has been in your opinion the impact of idfa deprecation and do you have a perspective in terms of fingerprinting and what will happen with fingerprinting and if it goes away what what would happen yeah a very meaty question so let's break that down in a few s so the actual impact of ID idfa

deprecation the direct impact was to the self attributing networks on iOS which was Google meta and Tik Tok to some degree um Tik Tok has sort of like they're they're doing types of fingerprinting now depending on your MMP and implementation it's kind of in a gray area right now that's the direct impact those channels are so large that it then has a trickle down impact to all the other channels um because when you have a target of continuing to grow your business or your user base and you lose let's call it like 25 to 30% of your addressable Market by losing those two channels very roughly that's going to all it doesn't mean your business goals are any less so all of that trickles into the other channels um so that's the indirect impact of it as well um the second question is there still fingerprinting yeah absolutely it's called probabilistic modeling by the MMP so that don't get in trouble from uh from

from Apple but we still see this um definitely on all the rewarded video channels um and you know meaning like iron Source uh appin Unity as probably the big ones right now bungle to Lester degree basically everyone except for those self- attributing networks I named earlier they're all still doing fingerprinting um will it go away also probably yes I think it's only a matter of time um and a lot of people that write in the spa sufur and other people that write in the space I think you know agree with this it's just we're sort of seeing like incremental enforcement over time I think it's not Apple's top issue right now but it does seem like inevitably marketers will have to make playbooks that don't rely on what Apple has clearly said like it's not in the spirit of of their policies so what would happen then if fingerprinting goes away then does my original prediction that has not come true yet of Social Casino and Forex declining significantly do you think that

happens so it's all kind of about the the we all are playing the game of user acquisition growth based on we all have to go into battle with the same rule set right yeah so as long as you have the same limitations or opportunities as your competition I don't think that anyone is truly forced out but to your point I do think that some sectors are going to be more impacted than others and I think your intuition is correct here whether or not it's it's panned out and I'll kind of explain why um this is kind of connected to like their question of like what happens when it goes away so we already know because we have this in certain sectors right so the way we approached um the channels that don't have fingerprinting is we built like a living data model for for our our analytics and platform um which essentially it's doing like live surveying of of user groups so

we'll always have the install from from the scan install what we lose is the post install data y so what our data model is using is is it's very simple if you opt in and agree to if you consent great we're essentially doing a dynamic survey and using the results of the consent users to apply assumptions of the rest of the cohort um that's the the philosophy at a large scale and for us it's just very clear because we're already doing that and a percentage of the UA channels we would just apply the same methodology to to all channels as as they become impacted and Android becomes impacted right and because your experience with that so if you're sampling data and using that to you know kind of estimate like if you don't have I mean I can't I I think at at scale sampling should you know law law of large numbers I mean I think it should work well but you don't have the level of data Precision or measurement that you would if you know with with

fingerprinting or with with identifiers and so is there a risk there or how would you characterize how well that this current methodology that you're using works because to your point using your sampling methodology even without fingerprinting you can you can at least forecast or estimate what reasonable you know performance is of various user acquisition campaigns yeah correct so absolutely and this is why you know going back to those three pillars of growth of you know the operations creative and data this is why data is getting so much more important like if your if your team doesn't either have access to a data scientist or some tooling like what we build there's probably other people working on this problem as well that will basically automat automatically solve for issues like this you are a huge step behind your competition yeah um so it is it it's not perfect data anymore um but the good news is like it's it's the same

rules for everybody so we actually see with the cbats that like we're you know we're modeling off of a subpopulation but in Aggregate and and validated for like apps that we have at really large scale we actually see better performance in these channels that have um consent prompts and and sorry the channels that are scaned directly impacted and the reason is very simple is there's less people buying on performance on those channels because a lot of them have resulted to more like CPI style buying they just not cross this Chasm um so you just have to look at like how is my competition also buying on this channel and do I have Edge I can get here and the imple the implications of ATT and scan are that there's now Edge to be gained by doing data modeling where there wasn't in the past when everyone had perfect data right and I to your point I I do see more of the at least the studios with big hit games having a you know sort of data science team in more than I have before but it does seem

that they kind of have a split role one part is for UA and then there's also one part for like AI applications and trying to figure out how to integrate AI into um into their games but yeah that certain certainly I I I think I I think you're right about that that framework that you present and the importance of data analysis and science yeah absolutely and there's you know we've had the pleasure of working with with some of the biggest gaming companies in in the world and some of them have like pretty Massive Internal analytics and data science branches there's been more than one time where like when we get to know how they're currently reporting on things they essentially just have like uh no Revenue reported for these sand channels because they don't have an internal data model where they haven't established a best practice for it so even with some of the large teams there's still big big gaps here um I do want to speak to like the idea of like is this going to be less accurate than fingerprinting absolutely um but we just have to look at uh what I

recommend is like just having a as long as you have an Apples to Apples methodology that you're applying to all of the channels to look at their success side by side that's still ultimately going to let you assess directionally which channels are higher and lower performing and you can take that on down to campaign level and creative level to Resource your budget it's it's something that like sometimes even when we're getting to no teams talking teams there's a lot of push back to it because it's a big transition to make from like knowing exactly what happened which is the world that you and I kind of came up in to like wait so now we have to kind of you know quotequote guess or like just kind of model out what's happening and you always have the I mean the alternative is that you're just looking at your Blended Ras and doing like you know mmm stuff and it's like that's kind of like a fallback but it doesn't let you make the operational decision of like is this campaign performing better than this campaign is this creative performing better than this creative like the actual usability of those approaches to making UA decisions

there's like a huge gap so you you we're big proponents that you need some way to model at a granular level of just like what's working and and not working and so in a world of imprecise data are there general characteristics of whether it's RPO or payback that are favored so for example you know I've worked on games before where the initial retention was absolute trash right so like call it 25% D1 you know uh maybe 3% D30 but the d365 was like slightly less than 3% too so and and they just continue to monetize over a long period of time and we'd see Revenue stacking over a very very very long period of time but I I would assume in a world where there's a lot of imprecise data that I I'm not sure if you'd be able to um one one you you're going to have to wait a really long time for those kinds of games they're they're not

that common but then being able to tell whether the game is actually profitable over that super long period of time um I I I don't know if if you can do that anymore in in today's environment no and I realized we kind of passed over that but I do think that there's sectors of gaming that are going to be higher impact in line with your intuition Joseph so it's like um okay so let's take a sample number okay um which is that uh Ona an opt-in rate that we might see typically is maybe like one out of six to one out of seven users um Okay cool so say that you're uh that means whatever data point you're using for optimization if it's Revenue if it's an event that you're essentially lose losing you know like five five six of that of that at least right um if you then think about different game models um the games that we've probably seen navigate this the smoothest are those that have frequent data to fuel the

algorithms like frequent small purchases right or a lot of AD Revenue um so like even though you're only getting a subset of the data you're still getting enough to where you can get insights down to a more granular level and you can also you know have more data points to feed the algorithms if you to your analogy earlier of Forex or these games where maybe only a small number of users um you know the machine zone model where like it's a brutal funnel but those that make it through the funnel spend a lot yeah if you this methodology is going to have or any methodology like you're you're only going to have the consent of now you have like a a fraction of a fraction so I do think that those games are still going to be challenged on the consent managed channel so at the least like this kind of methodology will you view what's working and what's not working but there's just going to be less data points that make it through these algorithms because of because of this impact especially as it starts applying to more and more channels so I think

like I'm not a game designer by trade but if if I was a game designer what I would be thinking about is implementing some sort of data point for optimization that's going to happen frequently no matter what and one thing that we work on with like our games that are maybe deeper funnel mization is like okay cool well let's set Revenue aside for a second do we want to optimize campaigns to like a tutorial complete or some sort of like CPA methodology where we're going to get a more frequent firing and data signal um to kind of bridge that divide to be more actionable for some of the folks who might be listening or watching that are that are working on games today and and trying to do user acquisition for games can you talk about since you you have been working with a lot of different clients and you you have you know the you've got visibility on a lot of different types of games and user acquisition strategies so in terms of channels and tactics that have done reasonably well have been actionably scalable in you know sort of like earlier this year this this second half

2024 and what you think will continue to work in 2025 can you talk about what you've been seeing yeah I I think the good news here is there's really only a handful of types of channels that people need to master um earlier in not to keep going to Back in the Day stuff but it used to just be like I'm sure similar for for you and your friends like we go to go to a trade show go to meu or whatever and come back with like a list of new ad networks that we want to try right it's not really that anymore um it's sort of like you identify who has first-party inventory and and just I'll clarify like my definitions of that you master those channels and and that's kind of it and so to break that down specifically we have the large sanss um which will'll just basically identify as Google meta um Tik Tok and then to a lesser degree as far as scale I'd put Snapchat and uh Apple search in this bucket as well um those are all great first party channels to master and um

Tik Tok meta and Snapchat are all going to have very similar methodologies uis tactics Etc so they're all kind of in one bucket the next bucket is the uh inapp rewarded video networks essentially iron Source Unity Apple uh metr has been a good one lately they're rewarded inventory specifically vungle smaller but kind of that that pocket um what we've generally cut out of the diet and this is no shade to my friends who work at dsps but we see in this new world like dsps adding very little value to the ecosystem and it kind of comes back to what we're talking about up top which is that um the algorithms are a dsp's value is really they're plugging their algorithm in as a middleman and you're paying them a margin they do not have traffic of their own as the algorithms of first-party sources get more advanced the incremental value and giving away like 20% I've seen 40% margin at some of these dsps it's not

worth the cost of admission you know if you have like a halfway competent buying team and you're using leveraging the algorithms and best practices of these networks like we have dsps in our Stacks less and less and I'm probably going to get blown up by a few of my friends that work at dsps for this but that's just kind of what the data is showing us you know it's like I can't come up with another business case to invest heavily with a DSP especially like what we see in in our testing maybe I could ask you maybe I could push push on that a little bit in terms of yeah like so the last couple of conferences I attended and just speaking to a number of folks some of the things I've been hearing is that on that side in terms of talking about the APPL and unities and those two companies in particular kind of the narrative that I've been hearing is that apple is just killing it they're taking a lot of share and that Unity is declining relative to applen and so wondering whether you would agree with that narrative and whether you can comment on maybe what the potential Dynamics that are occurring there are is that happening

and if so why would that be happening I also hear anecdotal evidence of that we do a lot of business with both companies so they're both good good partners of ours and so I won't sh stay I won't State any shade to either here but I'll just kind of tell you what we're seeing so in our portfolio definitely not the case um we might have a slight bias towards if anything towards uh Unity iron source as far as like we're we're spending a little bit more profitably but this is actually no shade to appen okay and what you're hearing might actually be correct and it's for a very specific reason which is like appen is always just had the most ruthless and effective sales team I think from a ad Integrations standpoint and so why does that charismatic too those guys are like legendary Right um love them or hate them like they're really they're really good at what they do so I think this this has like um an effect directly to UA as well and so clarify why so especially in recent years if you are buying on uh

either the you know the iron source side or the app inside if you also um uh if your app is also doing admon with them um you're going to get a level of granularity of data you're basically going to get the the admon data in a direct stream in a way that you wouldn't if you were using the other mediator so sorry I'll say it a different way if a game is using a ads app for their mediation they are almost certainly going to see better performance buying app traffic than buying iron Source traffic conversely if a game is using iron Source mediation they're going to see better iron Source performance than app that's kind of what we've seen across the board pretty neutral so why might App 11 I don't know if they're doing better or not honestly but I could see a world just because they are always so on point and aggressive with their scales and their sales process and getting Integrations if they are claiming more market share

from an integration standpoint that's going to have a follow on effect of probably getting more UA market share I haven't seen enough data to know if that's actually the case but there's going to be a direct correlation between who's getting the mediation Integrations and eventually over time that leading to more UA market share as well does that make sense yeah makes makes sense and yeah and just just to be clear like what I've been hearing is very anecdotal so you know talking about maybe like five data points so very you know not not comprehensive or conclusive at all so yeah ours is anecdotal as well too because it's like even though like you for for reference we manage maybe currently like mid uh seven digit uh monthly ad spend budget but that's still like call it you know Max 20 concurrent games that are current size that we're doing so it's still a tiny slice of the industry if you even it's s the bigger game so we're gonna have an inate bias just towards the mediation mix in our portfolio right so maybe the other thing I can ask you about and I kind of really like your framework in terms of like you

you were saying like data the uh operations and then the creatives right and so when you think about a modernday Performance Marketing UA team today how would you then think about how you would construct that kind of a team early on and then at scale you know would you then also go to like two 200 people in creatives and and things like that like how would you recommend for a mobile game Studio out there trying you know thinking about you know launching a game and starting a mobile marketing team how would you think about constructing that team what roles how many people what would that look like to you and what are the specific variables that would influence what that team looks like yeah the way we think about it is less so much as a as people specifically but you need to address those core functions okay and there's sort of this

spectrum of like humans to tooling that like the the the percentage mix can can can vary by these functions so to to say a little more plainly like when we started uptick and like in my past working internally on growth teams at Publishers it was sort of like okay cool every game we're working on has a creative lead a UA lead and an analyst responsible for the data function as we've built up up to here like you know we've because the the easiest thing to kind of automate and reduce the human capital just to be like really it might sound blunt or crash is the data function because the problems that you need to solve are very redundant um between project in between company it's like you need to build these 30 dashboards you need to build a scan model you need to forecast Ras you need predictive LTV you know like the problems are the same and what I saw in my career is like Okay show up on new team build the same 20 dashboards build

the same data model it's like so this is stuff at uptick where we're like okay well let's just productize this for at least for ourselves first and foremost so we don't need like an analyst to rebuild the same 20 dashboards every time we spin up a new game so that's all to say like of those three elements like the the data modeling site I think is the easiest one that you can maybe use tooling instead of just like human cap capital and Brute Force the the other two though are interesting to touch on like UA also like the amount human capital is going way down that you need to invest because the algorithms are getting more advanced the the third one that we haven't dug into as much is the creative side this is probably the E the most interesting one to watch like in here in 2024 because that that to overuse it but like AI is is making an impact here um it's not yet at the point where we're like okay we don't need humans to make creative anymore and I don't think it's going to be that anytime soon actually within our departments you might think that like our engineering team is the most AI driven it's actually our

creative team that's the most active users uh in Forward Thinking with AI here and they're sort of leveraging it to like use improved pieces of their funnel like they might use it for like uh producing like quick and dirty concepts of something or producing an asset or making making an element to be used in a creative that might have taken more manual production before so it's being streamlined but it's still like it's still the area of those three pillars where you kind of need the most human capital to to get a good outcome but that that framework is all to say like all of these have these mixes of kind of what can be automated and what what is human and these things are always kind of variable over time depending on how their rules change so I don't know if that's like too broad of a a framing is it makes sense yeah or may maybe just more specifically maybe selfishly I could ask you since we're we're going to be launch we're going to soft launch a shooter game early next year how should I be thinking about building a marketing team like um and and and does seem like I am seeing more

anecdotally that it does seem like for for companies that are early until they achieve product Market fit to scale like working with companies like uptick or you know with with mate or whoever's out there's a bunch of folks out there seems to be like the better approach than to you know build a huge internal team it seems like the better approach is you know hire one or two internal folks to work with a a a growth agency of some kind and then at scale maybe then you can bring it back internally after a certain level of scale where it makes more sense but I don't know how would you think about that or are are there reasons why you should just have an internal team and build that out and if so what would be an example of how you would split that up in terms of like roles and the number of people yeah it's a really good question I'll try to answer this you know as neutrally as as possible like you have to be really careful with a agencies you have to really look at like what their incentive model is like how they what

are the scenarios where they make more money and is it correlated to your success or or antithetical yeah you know if it's if their main kpi is is AD spend um there's going to be some like uh natural tension because your goal as a a model I mean it's been a little while for me but it's generally been a percentage of AD spend in the past right is that the current model or has it changed I think it's still it's still probably the default model we position ourselves a little more to like a fractionalized staffing service so it's sort of like you get a fraction of a 40% team um and think of it more like model out comparative to headcount um so it's a little different business model here and I I don't want to go and don't turn this into like like too much time on uptic C bit but what I would say like if you're trying to be really lean yeah um you know Joseph if you've launched and been part of a lot of game launches like most games even with a good team are not going to be hits so I think there's a lot of risk in building out a full growth order before you have that data yep so I would

always advise any of my friends that are building games in like kind of think in two stages with just like proof of concept to and and scaling um for proof of concept you want to be as lean as possible uh for someone like yourself that has a lot of experience you might not even need a dedicated like um you know marketing director user acquisition director you clearly have enough working knowledge to understand if you know whoever your partner resource was that was doing UA to like you could understand that data someone was talking it through some teams don't have that so they need you know one executive level that at least understands and can communicate with whoever your marketing arm is whether that's internal or external that being said you don't need to solve like all the problems that we talked about today you just need to get a few thousand users through the funnel and and do a soft launch you can do that on one channel you can do it without having this Advanced modeling and you just need to see if the game has a pulse and work out the issues like and I really recommend teams do not ramp up their marketing orgs before they see if

they have this proof of concept because I'm sure it's happened to you I mean it's happening to me on like half the soft launch games we have right now where like you go through soft launch great team and goes to soft launch it's like ah crap there's actually a lot we need to fix here you know and so if your burn rates up here because you built out the 20 person marketing team that's like can be a death sense in some cases right um so that's like the proof of concept phase I'd say like you want zero to one internal marketing hire and depending on if they're comfortable like operating those campaigns it could just be them you know operating one channel doing soft lunch from that if not you can use you know an agency a consultant something like that but just make sure it's someone you trust that's like got an A aligned incentive and that's not going to be telling you to spend more in soft L want to spend like the minimum minimum viable dose to like get the sample size you need right and then review that data together right so that's kind of stage one and then oh go ahead sorry yeah and then and then if you get a proof of concept yeah that okay cool the the ARP looks good retention looks good um then you need to

set up for scaling that's a completely different ball game this is when you want like the at least the power of an army doesn't but that's when you have to do kind of like the buy versus build approach of like cool we think we have a good proof of concept who are we as a business um do we want our B like and I think for a publisher there's may be a little more incentive to build the internal team and resourcing because the publishing is your business versus like if you're a developer right the game is your business and maybe that's where like using a partner can be more effective so that's high level just if you take one thing away from this like you want your proof of concept before you make the massive investment in your goto Market resource right and one thing you mentioned earlier in this conversation is that kind of like potentially the new Alpha is integrating a product team with user acquisition and I I know people have been talking about that for for a long time I I think that the uh probably the best example that we've seen today or more recently is with games like white out survival and uh Total War where the the marketing

function is you know intricately linked with the actual game design and the game product itself but you know as games and marketing data continued fragment um how should game teams think about unifying their data aligning different teams how should we be thinking about teams data so that we can achieve profitable games growth and and be a lot different from like the the Zer PA where there there was a lot of just like Shenanigans yeah it's a really good topic so it might sound like I was maybe talking trash on like the the user acquisition or growth profession earlier when I was saying like a lot of the operational work is is dumbed down um for the smart teams what growth marketers are doing what we try to do on our you know UA or growth marketing function is like move up the value chain like you now because you don't need to like pull up a massive spreadsheet and optimize every subp publisher on Unity manually y That's you know the

algorithm's handling that now the AI is handling that now cool move up the value chain work more closely with the product team understand that when the overall metrics are falling short okay Raz isn't hitting the Mark um rather than just uh diagnosing it from okay what are we you know on the UA side what are we doing and that blame game of like is it UA is it product like just crossing that Chasm right and working hand in hand with the product team of seeing like okay cool we're seeing breakage let's like that and see which parts of this breakage are within our control as your marketing resource and how can we help you diagnose the product resource um and what we learn is like we're definitely not game designers we're not product people but just launching 50 plus games we start to see patterns and so where we've started adding a little more value is happens all the time we soft launch a game metrics aren't there before we even start having like a blame game of like okay is this does this mean you're bringing us the wrong users UA we're like okay cool uh everyone everyone on the uptic team let's log all of our feedback for a developer partner let's

let's do screenshots cap capture video and let's basically like help them do funnel analysis because they maybe haven't don't have those reps in place so at that point we're we're kind of like triaging with our developer and I think that does a few things it shows like Hey we're all working on the the same funnel together um and also like we're not trying to play a blame game here we're just looking at both stuff in our realm and in your realm and I'm not sure if people fully realize this this this issue that you talk about like UA versus product team the blame game I'm not sure if people really fully understand how much this happens and how toxic it can be when in fact you're the same team right it's it should be you know one one team one goal and uh it should be to your point uh this could be a great opportunity for marketers to to your point move upscale to align more strongly with the product teams and and to actually you know consider themselves as part of the same team because I do think some of those conflicts lead to

not only a blame game but then wanting to prove your point about this or that and not helping each other out just because there's you know there's these internal conflicts that are just kind of nonsense or just just kind of like silly yeah and and one way that I find for anyone working on the growth through UA side one thing that's helped us a lot to navigate this is basically set expectations before it happens so like say that we're starting a tech launch in the the Philippines for a game we might we will try to let our partner know ahead of time like okay we're starting a tech launch together you're probably going to see when we start this Tech launch that you see like low LTV from these users and we might see really bad retention and more crashing than you expect this is why we might see this in this phase these are the aspects of this that are related to UA such as like our choice of targeting types or choice of countries these are aspects related to your product like you know where the market we're going to is going have more lower quality devices so you might see a higher crash rate also there's usually

in a soft lunch there's going to be some technical issues and coverage in this first phase yeah so we find that by like essentially it's a lot easier to tell someone bad news before it happens than try to justify it after the fact and that's that's been a very productive thing to to implement um and then yeah we I mentioned earlier but I would really restate too when you're trying to Tre these problems have your marketing team playing the game and identifying um where in the funnel things in the game could be an issue like there's been a number of times that we found out like scan implementation was off or that there wasn't a proper foule just by spending a little more time actually in the app and there things that sometimes developer might take for granted because they're living in the world of the game and might forget some of these things that are like blockers to net new users from either a data Telemetry standpoint or from just like a userflow standpoint right and maybe like maybe two more questions I have for you uh but the first one is like you know back in the day that the Heyday of user acquisition uh which you know um iconically probably

represented by Machine Zone in Game of War where they spent hundreds of million dollars of year dollars a year on mobile game marketing there were these huge campaigns and things like that um how would you how would you characterize whether those approaches would still work or how things have changed since then that's a very interesting question I mean I know said before we started recording that um I wouldn't talk about any web 3 stuff on this one but I will I think there's something that rhymes with it so um we're recording this on October 15th and last week we had a really big breakthrough um in the web 3 space of a game called off the grid um and they basically went to you know the on the game side like they just avoided a lot of the cry the the pitfalls of crypto games of putting the web three stuff at the Forefront they just made it a a really high quality shooter game but the reason I'm bringing this up relative to

machine Zone in the Heyday is they went to the very top of the food chain for the streamers and content creators they worked with you know so they worked with like people like Ninja on the launch okay and that's something that usually games coming from the web three space they would you know either they wouldn't be accepted by those content creators they'd be working with more the mid-tier or like the crypto native creators they really broke through because they went to the top of the food chain and even though there's a lot that I disagree with you with with with Gabe and some of the approaches that machine Zone took I think one thing that is a takeaway and can rhyme with current conditions is like it's dangerous to get caught in the middle of the pack and this is like speaking very broadly so it's like if you're working with content creators it's almost like you need to be at the top of the food chain or you need to really be arbitraging and kind of playing Money Ball and I think there's a case to be made with UA as well like we can say something like I don't know the ins and outs of of Monopoly go and like like how that performance actually is there's a lot of disparate opinions on this but my sense is that they did that topof the food chain approach of like

we're just going to dominate the ad networks um and with the right product and dependent on your business goals like that can still be a winning strategy my God is it a risky strategy so definitely not recommending this yeah um but I think that's yeah that's sort of like I think the if I think of the positive side of what machine Zone learned it's sort of like there's a positioning at top of the food chain that can unlock certain opportunities and maybe just to push on that a little bit more as well because I recently recorded a podcast where we talked about 10cent and one one of the things that um that I think 10cent I don't know if they popularized it because it's largely 10cent doing these but like the the launch velocity type of approach of having a lot of scale behind your UA and the thinking being that after a certain amount of scale there are nonlinear benefits and advantages to having like a huge launch and so 10cent for example famously has specific minimum number of installs that are in the tens of millions and um and they believe and

this is I'm I'm sure backed by many launches and data that they have that that once you reach a certain amount of scale that you then you know your your cpis are lower there's uh Word of Mouth effects there's all these other effects that are occurring and as we see more people that are starting to play games as a group and now we've seen like the emergence since Co of group based Behavior becoming much more prevalent and things like that so how do you think about minimum scale and that kind of effect where you know I am seeing for some companies and some game Executives I talk to like a minimum budget that might be you know $5 million in some cases maybe like $3 million but they're trying to achieve a certain level of scale to get those nonlinear effects in in but to your point that could be a very risky strategy if you're wrong yeah yeah so there's there's a couple of very practical benefits of scale so if we were to like dotplot out like all of

the games we worked on and their level of users coming from Paid marketing and level of organic users you would see a very clear correlation so like the K factor or correlated uplift from Paid marketing absolutely exists and there's like uh breakthrough points like um if we see that halo effect as a percentage or k Factor tends to increase as a proportion at larger scales and I can't say without a Shadow of Doubt of why but if you just think about it um so I just mentioned that game off the grid yeah what we saw is that by working and getting a critical mass of content creators they started getting a ton of earned coverage as well a lot of um non-paid content creators started covering them more gaming press started covering them that's not going to happen if you work with two small creators there's a 0% chance of that and I think it's the same thing with paid markeing to some degree if like there's breakthrough points where um you know in

the old days it was a very clear of like oh cool we're higher on the charts and like a higher chart position gets you more downloads that's not really a thing anymore because the charts are buried yeah but there's still sort of like um cultural consciousness of just sort of like is your game being played by a lot of people are they talking about it is it part of conversations on organic media one of our biggest games now has never paid a content creator in their life but it's just such a big game that they got to get a bunch of organic coverage and we'll see huge spikes when organic content creators might pick it up in a certain week right um so that's absolutely one benefit another benefit is a lot more crass um and this is probably something that I'm guessing machines Zone leveraged a lot too going back to them which is you just have a giant hammer for negotiations so definitely I've been part of projects where we're just able to straight up negotiate with ad networks that they need to reduce their their margin reduce their their take on the campaigns in order to meet our business goals and like many other businesses if you if your scale is large enough you can reduce the margin um of AD spend through

negotiation kind of Brute Force I've heard fantastic at those kinds of negotiations I I'm sure they were yeah absolutely so yeah there's a lot of advantages that you get at scale um and a really basic one is just like Account Support like anyone who's Tred to do launch a campaign on Facebook for a small game or uh God forbid a game with any kind of Social Casino real money knows that like you'll just get your account Frozen and like you can't talk to a human and there's like no route to actually getting it resolved if you're not above a certain scale for a lot of developers right and to your to the other thing that happens is sometimes your ad your um your ad reps will give you certain information that maybe sometimes you shouldn't have if if you have a certain scale of business with them so that's definitely thing as well all right so final question I have Warren is so what do you think is coming next is so if if you are a UA marketing team or you're a game executive thinking

about 2025 what should we be keeping our eye out for maybe it's fingerprinting maybe it's something else and what what are specific things we should be watching out for maybe potential risks we should be looking out for in 2025 yeah this is maybe a hot take and I didn't think about this ahead of time but the place my head goes immediately is I think in in the current economic conditions mixed with the growth trajectory of AI I think we're going to see a lot of game Publishers trying to like Elon their organizations like you know Elon took over Twitter and just tried to it I think they both have permission with the current uh what their peers are doing um and the macro conditions and kind of the wish and promise of AI that I think we're going to see you know the last um webinar we did like we we were kind of talking about the concept of lean growth like what's sort of like the minimum dose and like what's the leanest you can make

your operation and still get a meaningful outcome right and that's something that we're thinking about a lot because that's where we're predicting the macro is going to go in the game industry is just sort of like brutal efficiency right of like even whether it's going to work or not I'm predicting that in this next few years we're going to see just sort of like teams cut down to the bone teams trying to leverage AI in ways that both will and won't work and just sort of experimentation with how lean can we make make the human function of the marketing team I don't know that it's correct or what the optimal mix is but I'm expecting a lot of that type of experiment um and part of this we kind of go back to what you said up top is like a lot of teams are just not seeing the results they want with approaching things the old way so I do think it's going to be a forcing function of just not seeing the results they want that people are going to get pretty brutal with their experimentation yeah I totally agree with you one of the things again from the last conference I was at that I've been hearing is like spend by mobile games stos is like an alltime low like nobody wants to spend any money right now and so to your point I and speaking

to other game exacts and others uh so yes more layoffs are coming unfortunately still uh probably throughout the end of the year and and maybe into early next year and I am starting to hear a lot of conversations about you know how do we get more productivity yeah there's GNA be some of that needed especially for anyone that's you know building from a from a smaller stage like it's it's going to be period of brutal competition um and we're going to see a ton more thrash in the industry but like these periods are painful but they also kind of get me excited because this is like where teams can get their Edge like in the in the Zer environment it's just sort of like who can throw the most money at the problem a lot of times when people aren't really metrics driven but yeah I I kind of embrace the chaos and we you know we just look for like oh is there something we can build there a new strategy we can can we adopt to kind of like get our Edge in in this chaos yeah it's it's like the you know like the the the famous saying behind the the Chinese characters characters behind

risk right danger and opportunity so I I think that yes that that I believe for me is is what really characterizes 2025 and um cool all right uh anything else we should be looking out for in 2025 that uh you you think would be relevant or is that generally what what you're what you're seeing or what you believe will be happening um yeah another pet project of ours I shouldn't say Pet Project a big area that we're trying to build build out into and you know maybe we can regroup and talk up to this talk about this sometime next year is like uh it's clear that like especially if you look more at the PC console sector like creators are the main channel for for growth y it's such an immature Channel though as far as like taking a performance mindset to it um so that's where a lot of our R&D is right now is like building out tools for like taking a performance mindset to Creator marketing um and in housing and building techr more of that so I think uh as we grow our business Hur upsite like our vision is try to you know just be growth tools for for games across where they're

going from and that's kind of what we see is like the ripest untapped pasture right now is like there's a ton of money being dumped into Creator marketing for PC and console and a very little sense of like what's working and what's not so that's going to be an area that I'm me and the team are focusing on a lot in in 2025 and I think um probably going to be an area that to your point if more traditional Performance Marketing is is not viable for certain teams they're going to try to unlock probably some will work and a lot of money will be set on fire as well too right okay well Warren as always it's awesome having you on I think that again the advantage and and I I I hope our listeners understand that like getting real talk on on on UA and marketing is is very rare So I absolutely appreciate your insights and uh sharing your your knowledge about the industry so thank you for that and I think you know I would love to do a follow-up interview uh discussion with you next next year

when whenever it makes sense and for audience I hope you learn something today and we will catch you next time thanks everybody thanks waren thanks y [Music] n