Top 5 Mobile Game Launches: Honkai Star Rail, Monopoly Go, Survivor!.io, Marvel Snap, Frozen City

over here welcome everybody you have myself Joseph Kim and Monte Lance Rick and we are going to be talking about the five five biggest game mobile game launches of the past year there's a lot of talk about how do you say deprecation mobile game is dead everything's over can't be successful and yet we've got five games that we're gonna look at Hawkeye star rail survivor.io Monopoly go Marvel snap and Frozen season City so these are the five games that we have looked at and believed to be the five biggest launches over the past year before we dive in I know we're gonna be broadcasting this to both of our audiences game makers and to two and a half Gamers but for the game makers audience who doesn't know who you are mate and why you are the best person in

the world in the world to speak about mobile game launches in UA uh maybe take a minute think about who you are okay let's let's take community so I've been in the industry 10 years working different companies UA consultant 35 games in the past years spending around like 40 million ish profitably profitably profitable and and I'm the host of the no gaming podcast two and a half Gamers great to be here now you should introduce to the audience of three and a half Gamers yeah we had you on yes so if anyone saw the two and a half Gamers episode with me I if you haven't go check it out but I'm basically mainly known for being the handsomest executive in the games industry yeah we don't need to talk about that besides that um I am the CEO of a FPS gaming studio uh mobile first based out of India Leela

games and do stuff on game makers create some content that I think is interesting that is important critical information to give you that Alpha that edge and why we are going to be or how you can be successful in the market so now we are going to look at these five big game launches and we've got some we've got some numbers should we maybe we can go over the numbers and dive into these detail this okay or you want to go through the so yeah maybe what I could do is uh I'll go over the numbers and then maybe splice in what in in post week I can kind of show some of the stuff but yeah first game Hawkeye star rail a publisher is Julio verse formerly known as uh mihoyo although I think the way to pronounce it everyone pronounced it differently and the Chinese pronounce it differently this was launched April 26th of this

year so far cumulative downloads 54.6 million downloads is but done about 180 million and cumulative net revenue this is net and so you know in my opinion this is you know we'll talk about it more depth but this has been like a huge winner huge game massive you know kind of success but if you have 4 000 employees it's hard to wait so other ways yeah just have to be a success and we'll talk about this the other game that I'm surprised about survivor.io really um happy August 11 2022 so I launched a little bit earlier towards the end of last year it was a huge launch last year a huge huge line so you might know Happy from archero yep and this is the another game they actually launched I think like two other games last year right but these are definitely like the biggest success they launched recently snaker but not even close to the success of Survivor IO

so close to 69 million cumulative downloads right now and about 268 million in cumulative net revenues which is iip only and there's definitely an additional revenue on ads yes so this this is making a ton of money it's it's raining dollars for survivor.io so like good for those guys it's really it's really a great game as well and like a huge success next is a monopoly go by scopely launched April 12th of this year um so that's a long time ago not not in a long time ago yeah yeah team of download so far about 22.5 million um in cumulative Revenue about 28 million in net revenue this is all from data.ai data I I think we've also looked at some of the sensor Tower data yeah some discrepancies yeah and there are some differences yeah sometimes small sometimes big but you know we can talk about that as well uh next Marvel snap published by new

verse um and coincidentally I just came from speaking to the reverse guys uh so so out of the tick tock office in Culver City so literally just just came from Meeting those guys can provide a few additional insights nice October 18th 2022 launch so late last year 17.2 million cumulative downloads and about 79 million in cumulative Revenue so and finally Frozen City now I played all of these games I gotta say the game that I am impressed by and this is not just because by the way there is a fun plus angle right oh okay yeah Century kind of spun out a fun place there's some relationships there's some shared people there but I was actually quite impressed playing this game we'll talk about it December 26th of last year launch so odd timing yeah interesting time yeah maybe you can like when we get there I think you should speak about like you

know December last year we had the timber yeah and that timing uh 17 18 million downloads and cumulative accumulative download so far in about 26 million in cumulative revenue and similarly you yeah yeah that's right a significant amount of money on that as well I think it's working quite well and I mean there are some um estimations that Felix done when we talked about the game before and yeah I think it's like 30 40 on top of what we see it's uh additional Revenue ads ad Revenue wow so bad yeah not bad okay so maybe we can dive in starting with Hawkeye star rail now maybe before we dive in we can provide a little bit of context in terms of nihoyo as well so in my opinion this is a company with a very differentiated strategy right so these guys are big ballers they are coming in hard and strong and

they have a significant moat because for example when we think about gentian impact yeah you spent a hundred million in development reportedly okay and they're spending 200 million in live Ops a year so like when you think about the kinds of Studios that can compete against this strategy of super high production value right so you got massive production value and then you're launching a game with a free to play model it's it's a very different model from what from anyone else that I'm seeing and the word on the street and you know I'm one of the few people who actually hears the from China oh nice with my my Chinese connections yeah okay but reportedly kind of like the uh the strategy behind hoyoverse is actually to try to become like the Nintendo okay of free to play mobile interesting so basically like you can just go down the line of all of the like you know of

course Zelda gen chin but like you know other games so you can expect the future game strategy of hoyo verse to be we're going to look at the most successful titles on Nintendo on the switch and then we're gonna try to create a free to play mobile cross-platform version of that and by the way we have our massive Chinese team that works 996 and we have a massive budget okay try to mess with us yeah just try to follow us we're gonna you up yeah that's kind of it's not gonna happen okay now honestly if that demand of employees just like it's hard to compete right and the quality buyer for Genji in Hong Kai is just like yeah it's amazing so right now when we look can't hold your verse two top worldwide grossing games right gentian and this and they Behind These two games they are now one of the top five Publishers oh yeah in the world and

I'm just looking at let's see just checking their stats here we can see so downloads have actually dropped off quite a lot uh yeah I mean of course well yeah on a relative basis for them yeah but still we're looking at like 100 000 yeah 100 120 a day yeah which is for any other company huge that's pretty huge but the amount of revenues they're making on a daily revenue is is kind of holding we're seeing some spikes and what was what the hell was this I'm pretty sure there was a live Ops event right or or anything well I'm I think uh jakub mentioned there was like a new character introduced in the game okay and it's like that that was probably what happened around me mid-may yeah or in mid May that that really drove the revenue um I think that I didn't I didn't check um RPD here but I I assumed that you know

if we're talking about again yes it's probably going up up and to the right um was there anything you saw from like um you know a marketing perspective that did you think that they did differently or what was your take on how they launched how they launched uh I was expecting uh I wasn't expecting that honestly they would spend anything because well it just became they have ganshin but they're actually spending I have no idea how much money but I would expect a lot sure but then they have uh well I mean China's top one market right then there is uh Japan and then there is U.S on the third third spot and there are The Usual Suspects which is uh the Google and Facebooks and all of the all of the fun stuff then they have the the Moloko which is I mean that's like a Hot Chip nowadays in the UA space I mean I have no idea like what they are doing but apparently and I I see them on my side as well like that uh

Channel and then DSP is working super well on different games so you're actually buying from different networks anyway so for our audience and especially in mind they're not as tuned in to UA So when you say a DSP can you explain to the audience what you mean by that let's call it uh a programmatic buying and um let's simplify things so they have an inventory of different ad networks like uh here we can see they're buying from Unity Atco nivango uploading and others but they have their own mechanism and algorithms for like bit for bidding so and then you can just deploy a lot of budgets into it it's amazing how little Facebook is now it's very little I know right so it's very very little and I mean if we had this conversation like two or three years ago yeah Facebook would be top one yeah and Google and everything else Apple you got your way you accomplished Mission accomplishing

exactly you guys destroyed Facebook yeah yeah oh my God yeah it's I mean it's uh on Android it's just so competitive on Facebook it just doesn't work that much on iOS it's slightly different story but still I mean you have all the other all the other networks but if you are you know spending 200 million on live Ops then you need to spend across like all of the channels basically and now we actually talked about the night cross that that you mentioned uh with yakub okay and uh and even like they had this like offline Marketing in in South Korea quite heavily so I'm pretty sure like these guys have their own ways of how to Market their game in uh in these areas but honestly they still yeah the country distribution is like I said like U.S then Japan Korea and I mean we don't see the China in these tools that much but I'm pretty sure like that's like huge yeah huge huge and there look so they're creatives and uh we can we can show it some some things in the in the

post-production as well it's just so beautiful I mean right it's so good in in other games like a lot of other like um strategies on the creative side like fake ads misleading guys like they these guys that they don't need to do right at all they just use all the nice characters the gameplay it feels so beautiful right and maybe for our audience the other important thing to note is that a lot of data services whether it's data.ai or sensor Tower will not track like the alternative app stores in China and for a game like some of these top Chinese games are not only dominating like some of the charts but they're also not counting the revenue from the alternative app stores so is huge we don't have the PC uh Revenue as well right right and I'm pretty sure like this is like also like Super 8 right right so long story long story short it's good to be helioverse oh yeah

it's good to have 4 000 employees if you can afford that then of course like you can dominate the whole world basically yeah and now like you see the on the on the revenue as soon as they and if I can't imagine if they can spend more money on drivers but I'm pretty sure they will eventually and they should just go up right right and with this type of monetization I mean the UA is like basically easy but with this type of budget I guess it's just like almost the shotgun approach like you just you would just be everywhere like like mobile strike and machines on back in the days you just open up the fridge and then there's Arnold Schwarzenegger instead like this is gonna be characters from uh well I guess the whole uh hoyo verse now yeah it's nice so should we move on yeah let's move on because now like this feels like very out of the reach for like a lot of companies but it's always good to talk about like the huge successes like it's it's good for like motivation maybe the second game we should talk about let's see here we probably oh Monopoly go okay the most controversy yeah controversial

controversy everywhere is not how well is Monopoly go doing okay so now yeah we can if we look at the numbers okay by the Numbers it appears that Monopoly go is doing really well so if you look at for example the downloads it's they have not dropped off yeah not at all yeah they're going going going and the revenue is you can see the early Revenue stacking and it's it's going up like this yeah now the question though is okay these guys are spending a lot yes that's the word on the street like they're spending quite a lot of money on on the data right yeah now the also the word on the street is that the internal people from scopely are saying this is a great game this game is monetizing like crazy what okay so here's my concern okay my concern is like the amount in scale that it seems like they're spending

so like I can understand some people going hard during launch because you wanna so and there's different philosophies but one philosophy is you want to try and get launch velocity you want you want to get a lot of people behind the game especially during that kind of golden cohort phase but they haven't done that and eased off and said okay let's see where these rpus are getting to let's see how this game scales it seems like they're just yeah pedal to the metal yeah we're going guys we're rolling and it's like okay but so my concern is this okay so they were they were in soft launch for a while so I assume they kind of understand what the shape of their arpu curve looks like but when you go hard when you go much higher scale and when you go to you know focus on a a Geo like the US yeah more more specifically like will they be able to maintain

um that arpu growth over time you know how how well because here's here's what I know of scopely these guys are some aggressive marketers right they're aggressive growth guys and they go a lot off of you know basically you know it's common to go off of like d3d7 row as um I think they call they they call D7 Rose D7 recoup okay but what often happens is you you basically it can sometimes like pick your budget and you tell me like I'm not the expert you're the expert right so sometimes you'll look at your your D7 to Lifetime and you'll you'll assume a ratio yeah and they may have done that based upon other GEOS and based upon um the initial like the initial so the initial d7s that they're seeing right now they may they may you're assuming that that continues to grow and I think that they're being very

aggressive also you got to think about strategically with Savvy Savvy wants to be a number one publisher seven wants to have like strategically they want to go so I feel like you've got you've got a company known for for aggressive push in the past who may not have been profitable in the past yeah no nobody knows um until coven um and and then you've you've got a buyer and an operator now through Savvy who just wants to push with a ton of money and who don't really care about profitability yeah so I guess what I'm not so sure about is I think they're making a lot of assumptions on their D7 to Lifetime and they're pushing really hard yeah but this may not actually be super profitable we don't know I'm not look yeah we don't know I'm not saying but it looks like yeah but it looks like it's it's not there yet they're losing

money now yeah oh yeah but and they're assuming they're going to get paid back but also the other thing that they could be doing and where this might make sense because I don't know if you remember the old like Japanese strategy especially when you had the old ccg um Dolce based games like Rage of Bahama back in those days but they used to build their UA models not only off of a single game but they would they would basically have a UA UA model against a portfolio Okay so it's based on like all the games and then you have like a LTV of the whole portfolio uh LTD of the user based upon hey you know we're gonna get this user and then he will spend it every couple of games and for the Japanese had this model where it's like okay after a certain point in the lifetime of a player they're going to push them to this other ccg game and then another gotcha and they made they may model two to three games out okay so anyway that's why I'm a little bit skeptical that you can't be comparing Monopoly go

Apples to Apples against other game launches you almost probably know and that this the calling Monopoly go a success right now based upon what I know historically it's very early to say it's success I mean it the game grows like crazy that's true the revenue grows like crazy but also if you spend a ton of money on a daily basis Boards of the streets it's Millions nobody knows nobody knows if that's true yeah then it's going to be very hard to actually recoup that money and even if you are looking at what like a year maybe two years like yeah it's like the old Social Casino guys where like anywhere from 18 to 24 months right yeah at one point in time and this this category even if you have the Monopoly IP I mean it's not cheap yeah no there's gonna be a ref share here true yeah yeah of course anything 20 guessing Okay so yeah you need to make like 20 more to

actually be profitable at some point in the future with like really high cpis in this category and you have 300 000 daily installs and there's like the top one is still like us which makes me wonder like that's yeah that's a lot of money right now maybe the the other game we could talk about or think about is like it is very similar to coin Master right so if it can get coin master arpu then I think it should be okay it should do well then the question is is that so this is a this is a question that you know and I haven't played Monopoly go long enough or well enough and I don't know that genre well enough but you know then I think if you're really interested in understanding how well Monopoly will fare over time then it would be like okay what are the differences between a coin Master versus a monopoly go and does it have the ability to reach the kind of monetization characteristics of of a

coin Master well if you guys deconstructed this as part of two and a half we are planning to actually okay all right yeah yeah so this this is what you should be asking yeah okay no no because yeah we have we have talked about preparations for this and then the comparison to coin Mastery is actually that what we talked about right and how we should think about it because yeah people compare it to coin Master quite heavily but I'm not sure so sure if it's uh anywhere close there of course like there are things like these are there are different games like uh the ice streams and like there are different iterations Jacob already talked about it in in his LinkedIn post yeah I guess it's fair but in terms of the UI strategy now like they're pushing so hard it I most probably share that there will need to like slow down very very soon because it's not sustainable I mean the revenue grows but it's gonna Peak very very soon I mean I'm guessing like two weeks from now okay so now and then then we'll uh deconstruct like okay so now like yeah this is that because I

mean it's super aggressive honestly right I wasn't expecting this type of Revenue growth and the 300K downwards per day it's just like since they launched it's flat like I said and yeah well I'm not yeah I even if you compare the the the darker from soft launch it's different scale yeah it's a very different scale so it's not like apples to apples like I mean the shape might be the same but honestly with this type of budget on a daily basis it it might not be even two years right and the other thing for our audience just just like be you know UA 101 Monte is the expert I'm not the expert but one of the things a concept for product managers Executives to understand is like if you were to think of it um so I'll talk into this camera so if you think about a two-dimensional graph where you have like volume on the x-axis and cost CPI on the y-axis what happens

is you push volume is that you often get kind of an exponential curve at some point there's going to be a Bend yeah uh in in terms of the graph at certain scales of volume and so the question is they have not operated at the scale before they they were sitting in in soft for a while so oh a lot of the assumptions that you make as you start to scale up start to break down and that's the risk is that you know and that's also one of the reasons why some people will push the first two weeks and then ease off and say okay let's see where we're at these guys are not ease off type of guys they're like boom we're going and also uh you mentioned the golden card golden card is always bare yes in terms of like all the kpis the lowest CPI the highest LTV which Honestly by now it's it's over right already and so some sometimes what people will do is they'll take the golden cohort kpis and extrapolate four yeah oh yeah yeah it looks really good

yeah it looks really good let's push even more and then after three months break up like oh yeah and then when you when you've got like a 18 to 24 month payback period that original guy who built that aggressive model yeah he's already gone from the company he's like oh well you can blame it no I honestly like this is very um risky but again like if you have a new buyer a well the buyer of the company and then you have shiton of money and they're strategically yeah and we don't have the con yeah full context of course and even if they're not profitable then you know somebody comes back and builds them all that oh yeah we we're always wanted to do the portfolio strategy right we're banking on getting these Japanese companies no yeah it's uh it's risk let's let's see what what happens but yeah I'm not very big fan of this type of like Splash um uh so I'll go Global lounges anymore I

mean of course if you have the money but you gradually spending and seeing like how the courts made sure but one week two weeks three weeks and then you can actually scale yeah so one of the things that I have talked about before is kind of this notion about moving from the previous zero interest rate Market environment age of access into age of efficiency now if if you're trying to buy efficiently this is not the stupidity I had because people ask you like oh well they are doing so well it's like how do you know they're doing so well but you know like look the revenue is is increasing yeah yes but do you know how much they spend oh well I'll return but we assume like it's going well fine yeah so once you you test for scale once you see the longer term RP curve then you can go back and say ah yeah we made the right decision and again I don't think either of us are saying they made the wrong decision no no of course but we're saying they're making a hella

aggressive decision yeah and there's some risk there and risk bets for for the future right future everyone is important profits in particular all right the next big launch ah she's my favorite survivor.io now this is a game you know I you know I found it fun I thought it was very interesting how you take this you know replayable game mechanic you're adding a lot a lot of long-term progression to that game which is clever but you know can you speak to what how how do you think they're doing or so they're yeah they're doing quite well I mean yakub could talk about this for for years so he loves the like unfolding gameplay all the fun game design stuff like how you actually progress the game and then they are showcasing or unfolding the new features for you which monetize like hell but now uh well so they they made this like huge Splash lounge and they were spending like crazy there were also some like words on the street that they spent quite extensively on Tick Tock okay in the first uh a few few weeks and

months and um they used even like a different product which was called like I mean it's still called like top view it's like almost like a branding campaign yeah of course if you if you put that um in place Tick Tock kind of helps you to be on the first position like everywhere okay so that worked quite well and then there was like there were these days like look so the the revenue it's like it's kind of whole and steady with the typical event spikes things like that and they were just on one million a day Revenue in like what like four or five days since the global wow and it's like a combination of uh in-apps and ads uh ads revenue and it's like 50 50 almost split right so everything we see here which is where is it uh here which is now well ah you headed somewhere else we had it here so it's like 270 million and then I think you can add another 200

million debt revenue on the ads Revenue side yeah which is crazy yeah super super good in terms of the like implementation in the game you just want to watch those ads it's like six or seven placements and they are uncovering like different data placements beautifully done yeah so don't sleep on survivor.io guys like people are are talking about certain games as being the best game out there but it's like we got some we got some strong launches here you know I think well one clearly there's there's honkai which is in one Universe yeah it is different and then there's everybody else everybody else yeah there's everybody else of course but these guys from Hobby they're like also pretty aggressive in terms of uh yes and then monetization they have this like metagame framework that they now apply to all of their games yeah but this one it's especially working well because of the the whole like marketability and theme it's just packed into this like almost like hyper casual

visual style right which is also we are going to talk about the Frozen city which is very similar but this is slightly different they're using like these like hordes of different Monsters Everywhere is just super overwhelming in the creatives now almost all mid-core games using their creative strategy now fake ads fake but taken from survival because they created something that works really well and for our audience just so you know in terms of happy itself this makes sense because if you think about where they came from right so they actually came from cheetah she's at mobile yeah yes these guys were basically ad publishing like hyper casual experts work for a while the word on the street was they were actually already kind of working on the side on this one so they kind of knew they were going to be successful even before they left that's word on the street rumor again rumor conjecture speculation but um yeah

I think that helps you understand that this is that type of company if we talk about strategy understanding the marketability and the potential to get growth for a game even before you make the game that's where the expertise comes from and by the way not to take anything away from archero or from survivor.io but what I'm saying is like they also have that in their DNA yeah yeah 100 and also like actual was a big success like genre defining basically and now they did it again with Survivor and like it's even like better and way way better than our chair was ever like in terms of downloads and revenues and can you speak on like in terms of their marketing mix or things that they've done you mentioned Tick Tock was there anything else that kind of stood out to you that was really big um supplies on Tick Tock uh mainly on IOS and Android but mainly on iOS like now they're spending almost everything on iOS it's like a very big amount of

budgets and even if you look at like so they're spinning on iOS despite exactly exactly exactly exactly so iOS is dead they're still spending like crazy on iOS and it's working quite well for them apparently based on the revenues and honestly the mix is just very easy to understand it's tick tock Google Facebook uploading uploading actually when we discussed different game launches in the last was always like top three they're also doing something very interesting in terms of performance it improved so heavily but here I think what's most important in on iOS they are doing different mixes in terms of GEOS so you have the South Korea Japan and Asia and then they have the US yeah so they are also big not only in the US but also in Asian countries which makes a lot of all those sense and also like revenue and we don't we don't have the China the revenues as well yeah and

they're based on their developers from China so they know their they know what they are doing in that market and in terms of uh uh by the way before you move on like as far as the mix there so you see whether the different ad networks and things like that um where do you see the mix what are the top performing ad networks for a game like this for game like this it's uh it's Google way more than Facebook I mean like like you said Facebook is just minimum you want to have it in the mix but it's not the top spender it's usually Google Tick Tock and I see uploading these days so those are top three right if you have ad monetized game it's definitely uploading because of the address campaign so if you mediate with Max uh their mediation platform then you can you can run address campaigns which is basically targeting Wells but on the ad Revenue side then you have Google which you can also run address campaigns and unity as well you can also address campaigns so in this like this is I I joked around

these games just basically a UA manages my dream because you have we have in-apps and you have ads as well and if it's 50 50 you can use so many options in-app revenues like value optimization so Target Bales and then address campaigns and you can even use like app even optimize campaigns like any engagement event so you got to use max you don't need to use max okay it's uh you you just if you have a healthy split on the ad that side versus in-apps you can use whatever mediation you have and it's it's no longer dangerous to use app level well we are trying to get rid of their games business so I think they've learned their lesson yeah I think so and maybe guys you can you can dip your toes into the lot into the app loving Waters again yeah yeah honestly it's for me it's been like one of the best performing channels in the last six months so yeah I mean they've always performed well it was just the

question was a little bit Shady all right but no like this was like one of the biggest launches for sure like for last uh last year and it's still making out of money honestly so they shifted the strategy on the creative side from from using all only the and the gameplay oriented videos to actually something which is really interesting and they used it for snake and now they implement it back to Survivor IO which is using actually AI people in the ugc creative so instead of using real humans they use AI I used it as well and it's just outperforming really by far and it's easy to produce you can create like 10 iterations out of nowhere in like an hour okay it's perfect it's so funny because I I know those people are made by AI because I used it but people they don't know like I talked about it I quite feelings and there's like I wouldn't say it's just like so natural

like perfect really great like guys on the UI side and monetization side chefs really seriously that's off nice that's all right Marvel snap oh man okay yeah so um how do we start on Marvel snap so by the way I just saw these guys so I don't want to say anything mean yeah because I like them yeah but okay so let's use you saw Maneuvers guys not the the yeah yeah just to be clear on the publishing side but it's the publishing side where there's a let's just beyond okay so we you know we're kind of insiders in the industry so we hear a lot from a lot of different people um the game itself obviously is is a good game um is actually kind of interesting so just just the setup in terms of more information for our audience about snap is that so they were funded by netease I think they raised 30 million to make even more

I think it's 50. is it more okay the initial funding was third okay okay so I don't know if the other 20 additional 20 came from non-net these or if it's all netease uh interestingly you never have a situation like this where you have two different Chinese companies one does investment and one does publishing that's unusual yeah so for um for bite dance new verse to come in and do the publishing is unusual um but I would say that like the word on the street is like actually how well I mean great for a second dinner you know and by the way these are like the X blizzard Hearthstone guys and you know they know the ccg category pretty well but the word internally amongst a lot of people you know I can say this because people are tweeting about it and things like that is like that the game economically has not been great for new verse now great for second dinner and so you know on the one hand it's like okay great reverse really will push the out of a game great right

um but then if we're talking about the five best launches over the past year can we consider Marvel snap to be one of the best launches I would say one of the biggest lounges I would say sure it's one of the biggest launches but like from an economics perspective you know we would probably just like I would kind of discount Monopoly go right now yeah I probably discount Marvel snap as a economically successful big launch for now um but I don't know what do you think what's your take yeah so the thing is uh newvers is still spending a second in the money so so they are actually operating that budget and you know the lounge was when I was looking at uh at the game at that time when they launched it it felt like a Playbook from 2013 or 14. there's like huge amounts of like um installs from everywhere honestly I saw Ben broad on Facebook like 10 times a day if you think about it what are you

doing on Facebook okay okay true okay true Twitter as well by the way Twitter as well and Instagram as well and then no LinkedIn so I said that's that's my main social social media okay but I saw him like multiple times a day if you think about it the frequency of that ad it's just like crazy so they hired an old MZ guy back [Laughter] I think like that wasn't like very efficient on the first person that's why I think like the economy didn't work that well because if you do these type of like big splash gold launches you are you can't do it like we think uh Monopoly go does it because I think like they're pushing on in upside or like app even optimized purchase campaigns value optimized campaigns just because the apple is like increasing like crazy right in here it was like most probably not that down the funnel it was main

like in stars and if you run these type of campaigns you can't expect a lot of money back yeah and by the way Marvel is extensive just so people know you mean in terms of Ip and like on the IP licensing sign so you're talking about one of the most you know economically well not now the Marvel guy well it I mean look it's it's expensive yeah don't get mad at me Mom guys okay you're not showing me much love anyway so okay but you know we mentioned that they made like 80 million uh based on the data AI since the global launch so words Industries they make they spend a lot of money during the first two weeks in the global launch which baby in like tens of millions yeah and I mean I would say just based upon like I haven't played a lot of snap but I

played a lot of stuff and we you know there's people in our community that have played a lot yeah but clearly the monetization is light oh yeah yeah 100 it's very light it's like no gotcha it's uh they tried gotcha yeah yeah so but you know like ridicor also had a different monetization then they put gacha in the in in the game and then suddenly instead of making 10 or 20K a day they just start making 200 or 300 000 per day immediately yeah list of all all Community but then you know and when you say that they use the old 2013 Playbook so they did do some things like you know Sam Jackson video things like that it was only like for like short period of time and it was only live on Tick Tock I mean if you have this type of video you just show it everywhere okay everywhere they're like there is America Chavez in the in the video us which is obviously like after Doctor Strange movie everybody knows her but she's not a very popular Marvel character you have a hug you have

Spider-Man you have Iron Man like a Thor like why don't you use that right it's just it's just crazy obviously I was really wrong about um and using or like talking about uh using Bank Broad in the video because I've heard that it's performing quite well because he's a very strong um Personnel in the yeah person in the ccg community in a ccg community yeah okay but I know like if you want to scale yes nobody cares nobody cares nobody cares but in like in the ccg community apparently this works quite a lot and honestly it's not the very big market right yeah so if you want to just yeah double down on that you most probably you want to use paintballing that um I don't know for scaling for scaling you know but if you yeah if you want to capture like the whole Niche most probably yes I think this is a very interesting space just because historically it's been very concentrated right it was like Hearthstone and Yu-Gi-Oh on mobile yeah and that's it

and that's it and even Riot with Legends of room Tara I mean yeah I I mean that game's not doing well I mean that's my guess is that it's not doing it yeah I think I was I was looking into it and uh like Marvel step out of uh all these like mobile versions it was doing quite okay in terms of like uh Revenue per download and like how the curve increased over time okay but that's more you have PC and and that is and also like uh Hudson was on PC first and then they launched the model so it's like not comparing Apples to Apples anyway but in terms of yeah the the UA and and everything like during the global launch well I think it was like a big splash because it was just like and then it decreased quite heavily after three weeks and they they was like Facebook Google ad networks and everything just was stopped and then came back to Google and Facebook and you can't scale with two channels I mean if you look at the monopolitical or Survivor like they're spending everywhere now it's just yeah

now they they scaled back quite quite heavily yeah I think the um the way that I would probably think about the longer term success of snap is okay now you've got an in you know uh one big investor Plus developer plus separate yeah Publishers then you got Marvel up in there as well yeah and then you've got like um clearly second dinner has already publicly stated that they're they're they're they're more Jazz about their next game right yeah yeah so then like how much attention effort energy is going to continue to go into snap is my question and were they incentivized properly to push well I mean I don't know I this is all like these are the questions though yeah like this type of scale of the game you are still like what like almost 600 000 vaus I think okay which is not bad

yeah it's not bad and they're making like half a million based on the the external tools on a daily basis again like pretty good if you if you compare it to two other games like a lot of companies would like like those those numbers sure without the third parties and the law obviously so but I think it's still like like if they can improve on the monetization which I think they've done quite recently because I'm playing the game they introduced some like early special offers and they increased like their early monetization by a lot okay so I guess like they're pretty skillful and this is still like very much a big learning experience for them like how they can move the needle and if they can move the needle here I mean they most probably can move the needle on the next game like easily but I guess like there's gonna be a different selection process for publisher or whatever but we'll see we'll see we'll see just pure speculation yeah I don't know you don't know all right so our last game yes Frozen City I love this game and you

know what actually the interesting thing is is that um I had a game design mainly driven by a friend of mine um that was very similar to this and I'm excited just because it worked but like the production value what they did kind of mixing city building with Idol I thought it was really cool I'm really glad to see that this game is doing well and I think you're gonna see the rpu curve on this thing just you know I I think you know for me that the numbers if we just look at the pure numbers it doesn't yeah it Compares okay yeah it's like 26 million revenue and then 17 million downloads cumulative right but I actually think longer term this this uh this has got some legs I think we're also going to see other games that try to mimic this and maybe another like a few few years in development yes like take on the Frozen City yeah and I think another game that can potentially were or frozen City that iterates to

um being able to drive higher monetization because you know you're you're mixing collection you're mixing you know Saga based uh city building um and you've also got like the heroes aspect and collecting around the heroes so they have also like a battle uh element in there so you can you can take your heroes or whatever and they actually battle right right so like few actually few games within one game basically yeah and so those additional vectors of progression and potential areas for monetization vectors and systems here we are I thought because yeah always talking system and vectors this thing has great core no like you got a lot to work with with the game so I actually am very very positive on this game you know I am a little bit biased having come from having previously worked at fun plus and you know um but uh you know I I actually think this is this is quite a strong launch what what do they do on the marketing side it's a very strong launcher I mean they they were very strong on the on the uploading side I

mean look so if you have idle game and you have odd monetization the top one channel for is just uploading and it's going to work so well and this is what worked well for for them as well where we have it here Frozen City I mean even now they're still running I mean they're again pretty big on iOS and what we need to make uh mention is the 30 or 40 percent uh uplift on that uh Revenue so 26 million then plus like what 13 additionals not bad not bad and uh they're actually quite big in us and um and also South Korea and uh some Asian markets as well because I mean they are from there as well so I mean you can see the the pattern as soon as you are from from that type uh part of the world you know like what you know what to do but what stood out to me was the uploading a pretty big one Google pretty big one Unity pretty one they used quite a lot of play blades uh which is great

on Art Networks and also why I think this works quite well is the visual style of the low poly basically which is very close to the hyper casual games and low poly always for me and the games that managed before but resulted in very low CPI in comparison to other themes and then visual Styles so this is a combination of low CPI and idle which is also pretty low in comparison of a low CPI in comparison to other genres and then if you double down on ad monetization and address campaigns again like that's all like all three buckets which is like ticks all on the low CPI side so that's why I think like this works quite well and uh and also what they did the company Century games they took Frozen City and then they put it into the wide out survival which is a basically a Forex game that they have and they took the Frozen City onboarding so it's all idle until the point where

you actually play the game and then just got I think a level seven then it zooms out and you see the Forex map it's just so smooth it's it's it's amazing okay it's perfect so this was like let's call it I would say again full speculation very good taste to see how it scales and then it it worked well in terms of the CPA and retention the Dead game has really strong retention I think big one is like 60 day 7 around 30 which is not bad for idle games it's actually I mean back in the days when idle mind attack was launched it was like rumor that is like 70 to 80 day one now now we don't know how they're actually yeah actually I heard directly from the founders nice so these yeah so this is like a nice experiment like how to actually onboard players to the 4X because we know like Forex is pretty expensive and it's really hard to get players so like this is like like a whole story from launching Frozen City to actually launching right after I like

after like two months the timing in terms of the December it's just not oh yeah let's talk about that it's not fortunate but again you think about it you have golden cohort right it's 26th of December so all the like e-commerce and all the which is pretty Christmas right already like kind of Fades what is the App Store freeze uh it was before Christmas for two weeks but I'm not sure if that's that's so they didn't even case anymore okay and even if that feels like you have the well release build and kind of like The Way featuring doesn't matter anymore so yeah yeah oh man it's like it's just it's it's zero or like it's you have a bunch of downloads but the revenues just stays flat at least on Google now it's like maybe that does something but so in terms of timing it's not as bad I've even launched games in like 20 20 seconds or 20th of December it's like again like the golden card is always there okay and like if

you power through the golden cord until January it's like actually like not bad timing okay so you use scale or start to grow the budget from the end of December and then it kind of grows because January February is pretty good uh those are pretty good months overall for for UA so yeah good you see okay so maybe um those are all the five games maybe what we could do to wrap up is so in your opinion how would you rank these five games in terms of what you what you believe are the I don't know best performing or best for you but I I think we we have to uh uh because it's just well it's just number one he's just number one yeah number One's number one yeah what's your two to five so two is definitely Survivor IO that's what I would say it's like definitely uh and then I I can't decide because it's very tricky in terms of the Monopoly goal

um but I would say frozen City Marvel step Monopoly go and just because monopolygo is still pretty early and I think like it's way like that's not profitable okay yeah I would so we're similar uh obviously honkai for me number one number two would be survivor.io number three I would say frozen City guys um then Monopoly go then okay okay because I would say like Monopoly go because because I wouldn't put them fifth yeah I know we're still gonna see what happens yeah or they will see what happens we can only speculate and then snap economics are kind of challenging but I'm glad they were able to have a good push and you know they're you know by the way you know uh no new verse yeah you know snap seems like an awesome game and we're definitely um rooting for them nice okay all right I think that's it perfect anything else so much yeah all good thanks for listening bye everybody

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