two & a half gamers session #10 - How to save $ with marketability test? Fake Ads going nowhere rant

[Music] hello everyone uh welcome again this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half gamers session number 10 session number 10 discussing the latest news fun stuff and dropping some knowledge sometimes you know this can feel like a 4am conference discussion live and that's uh that's how it is okay so let's dive in and try to enjoy the uh welcome guys welcome jacob and welcome felix and the powerpuff girls team oh yeah well yeah oh wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait darling for a mobile beach conference [Laughter] how is gdc going matey

perfect yeah a lot of people actually reach out and uh asked for uh for a meeting obviously i'm at home and uh all my linkedin uh fake news and click back clickbait posts they're pretty efficient oh well you know now there's there's rules against child labor right well it's what i heard but uh what i found out is that my daughter is way more popular than i am so from now on i'm going to use her from time to time [Laughter] it works user right yeah exactly it works no but you know like uh i think she with the with the vr headset it was super funny that was super funny i think she joined it as well the house how was your week looking forward to istanbul felix very much yes it's going to be exciting next week yeah that's why i brought these powerpuff girls up you know so you

know what's uh what's going to happen next week [Laughter] nice do you want to do the agenda of course so uh we're going to talk about netflix uh booth's mobile games approach with the acquisition of uh bost fight entertainment going to talk about crafton signs long term cooperation with solana labs in-game in-game app apps i can't speak to them i'm sure what's going on in-game ads are getting more misleading sex is a mysoginistic maybe i i read it right and uh crypto investor katie horn raises 1.5 billion the largest debut in uh increasing and female is here what the [ __ ] nice and then we're going to talk about some free soft launch activities uh marketability tests and and more so uh yeah let's dive in let's dive in so let's uh let's start with the netflix

because uh netflix is a very very popular topic of uh mr jacob remia over here we discussed yesterday how netflix um announced three more three new games that are coming to the platform and uh you know amazing discussion maybe not abused i would say yeah yeah those are from pickpock which is a mobile game developer but those are not games really free to play games yeah because they don't have the monetization there yeah but yeah back to the acquisition so netflix revealed uh they require acquired us-based free-to-play mobile developer boss fight entertainment i've never heard of this guy before they these guys uh well founded the company in 2013 and actually co-founded by three former zynga employees oh okay boss dungeon was their their uh their best known game which i know now uh who are they

and uh following the acquisition the studio will continue to operate independently across three okay three locations allen austin and seattle so um so more equal hires for netflix so they are definitely taking me seriously yeah this definitely sounds like a quieter to me doesn't seem like i remember the most next games was the same thing yeah but those are it that make much more sense in a way that next games bullet is really really familiar with working with ips which for netflix is of course like the way to go here but this is more of i guess yeah equihire that was on the market i would say because i don't see any any other connection there since the news is down almost two percent i'm wondering if that's connected to the news or is just the broader market trends well or something he's listening to me on the stork market [Laughter]

yeah well mr jr here is not definitely not the bigger fan of uh netflix game because you explain what you hate about it it doesn't make sense like they are trying to recreate another apple arcade fail or what like tell me where where this is going like do you really think that these kind of subpar mobile games gonna attract more customers to your netflix app or retain them more when you're trying to compete with disney plus or amazon like does this bring you the edge when the new lord of the rings series come out in september i think that they are only a wordle hit away like you need one hit and then all the troubles will be behind them but getting a hit in this market i do agree it's not like a direct science but what they're trying to do now i guess is assembling a team that will improve their odds of getting a hit but you know this is a hits driven business i know but this is this sounds to me like the same strategy that amazon did just like

throw more money and people at it and somehow it will miraculously solve itself didn't happen didn't work same thing for apple yeah but that play is slightly different i think as i you know mentioned yesterday with netflix and i know you're going to say uh i i try to find logic behind this where it's not obviously but i think as soon as uh you know as much as um they they want to like um start adding more games this is going to be again like content heavy so they need to start somewhere with these like you know shitty games i'm sorry guys i respect every game you put there but still most probably not going to play any of them still you know you need to start somewhere and they they already announced it they want to move forward and this is all again like a sign of them taking this seriously they want to do it uh do it but honestly like i don't even care about the quality of the games

like the games could be excellent to be honest but those are premium games you don't retain with these you retain with free to play mobile games they have better retention than normal premium games people play more clash of clans that they pay reach a tree why because the game is built like that to keep them in and also because speech three is a very poor game i told you that yes you know what to do remo do you think netflix would earn more money or have a bigger multiple or a bigger market cap if they just focused on getting these people to make free to play games and just publishing it under netflix but even from the like the standpoint that you want to retain your customers in the app like build a free to play game or i don't know just tone down the monetization itself but the mechanics need to be free to play because those are all built on retention retention is king there like there's no other metric that you need to do there first premium games and the games that they are currently building they don't care about retention at all and they're building it again as apple

arcade catalog i don't i don't see the point here oh because they wanna you know if the premise here is if you already watched all the series all the shows uh there then what you're going to do play games well because because imagine that let's say you're playing your favorite netflix game and it's it's being pumped up by content every month and you return to it and and there's still like content content content and you retain retain retain any progress to it you don't really spend money in it but you play it because you only care about engagement this could work i think but nobody said they won't do it that's the thing nobody said that but they're pumping out premium games okay but that's the you know there's the first stage they hired like 15 like senior execs from the from the industry now they're buying studios you know like why do you think like this is the end game so this is i'm still concerned game but why are they assigning these projects for premium games why they already don't work in

this already they don't work in this so why do they lose time with working on these subpar premium games because you need to start somewhere you need to launch content you know why so what those things don't work like you think people that make premium games cannot just switch immediately to like okay we'll do this small premium monument valley and then we'll do world of warcraft in the meantime that doesn't work like that man sure that's why they they acquired like two free to play studios okay let's see let's see let's see let's see bottom line is netflix is market cap is today 169 billion dollars like as a force to be reckoned with that is a war chest and a half if they need to pivot a couple times and take five years they can do it um if if disney plus won't crush them in those five years that's true very true i'll give you that yeah i'll give you that much uh should we see everything yeah every time you you say netflix jakub is triggered

everything like discussion like it's all right let me let me read the next one because uh i'm actually quite thrilled about this one and i think it's actually quite important uh especially since the fact that i have launched like lost about 50 on my money i put into solana so and that news is of course that everyone's favorite gaming company of the world like in the world dare i say but not really craft on uh everyone knows them from making pub uh yeah company yesterday announced they're signing a long-term business agreements with solana uh solana labs to support the design and marketing of blockchain games and services so salon of course is a crypto company i can see i can see my solana you know it's a protocol assets uh went a bit up yes since i mean i still

bought in 132 so you know i'm still down yeah yeah yeah nice okay sorry so the reason i personally think this is quite important is kind of going back to what i said on last podcast about distribution and like right now there's a battle royale like who will win or which will be the premium like cryptocurrency that will power most of these crypto games that are being made right now will be avalanche will it be solana will it be ethereum but like i'm not so much yeah exactly but like interesting thing is a big like blue chip gaming company like this signing with solana is a huge stamp of approval and at the end of the day the chain that has the most projects on it they will win and that's why i think this is extremely important news probably actually one of the most important news we've seen in the crypto world for a couple weeks it's still about you know yeah a hundred percent like completely underwater some new protocol takes over and you know you're completely out and that's gonna happen

for sure that's gonna happen for sure but solana now looks like uh the best solution um at the moment um well well you know let's see really and uh like would you say so one thing mr cryptoskeptic adds to this news is that let's talk about pubg news state that grafton did and they didn't really go very well that i must say which is their new pubg game that didn't release it wasn't uh it wasn't uh published by crafton it was uh it's sitting on the grafton account if i see it right yeah well let me check because uh i'm definitely not sure yeah but just saying that i think they have problems growing somewhere now in a way that uh okay creating another instance of pubg won't help you that that's like you know each subsequent candy crush will bring you less which seems that immediately the second one didn't really

fly well so i'm guessing they're trying to grow into some kind of other direction here but i still wouldn't be sure as like yeah solana is the way that will you know be the next i think i still think we're in this kind of r d phase that everybody is trying to figure out the most smoothest transition from user to get onto a chain wallet and like all the big friction that's currently in the market and people are just kind of betting on these horses and by the end of the year probably 90 of those horses will die on the track so we'll see i have a mistake question for you actually i actually looked up something since the start of the year how many nfts related to gaming do you think have been traded like average every day since the start of this year average yeah average a day like yeah 10 problems the problem is that people are whitewashing this a lot pretty much a lot of companies are having people that are there trading between themselves to increase the transaction

volume might be true but like i believe in it but like give me a number yeah nobody cared about your answer give me the number no [ __ ] no [ __ ] podcast come on dude what do you want to hear like a [ __ ] number of like how much nfts are traded currently why [ __ ] yeah take a kiss monty said ten thousand yeah ten thousand that's super small okay might be a thousand a day yeah super small okay still very niche huh yep market yeah for gaming 1000 nfts are being traded every day like um every day definitely more i think well in gaming so if you find the game like only gaming gaming just but look at the cats that's been trading on the axi marketplace

so one one correction it's yeah of course the pubg news studies crafton i was referring to pubg mobile which is tencent obviously so yeah and they they are crushing the new state by by a lot yeah yeah we can move forward we can stay with crypto and then i will end it up with the amazing article which came out recently okay i can take this one you take over that yeah so kt hound if i pronounce it correctly then butcher it completely raised 1.5 billion which is the largest but like the view fund ever by a female vc and it's a crypto one actually uh if i understand correctly she left before anderson horowitz the famous fund and then this is the largest initial fund ever raised by solo female founding partner

and she is of course very excited to dip into the web 3 new era yeah well looks like a lot of money he definitely needs to pro needs to prove a lot with these type these uh this race if i understand there's not that much mention of gaming or something it's more like a web 3 kind of more generalistic approach to crypto if i understand this correctly doesn't web 3 right now just mean gaming because that's usually what's at the forefront of these like new trendy things like it's usually always first gaming do you remember what nico do you remember what you excited about like you know uh the whole bubble of everything basically technology gaming and nfts and everything i would say this is pretty pretty big compared to like all the other improvements yeah when one plus one in crypto always equals a billion

yeah you know without the help yeah okay yeah i'm just kind of kind of waiting like where the market will top then like with these you know all these investments and everything when because we still don't have anything to show for as for like the you know you don't hear about companies making so much revenue or like having so much users and pretty much the results articles we always just hear about the investment articles so i'm still wondering when this kind of a web 3 did bubble's know what did you hear about like a greeting fund then makers fund like raising like 750 makers i think 500 or 600 then you know like uh yeah anderson horowitz again like 500 million so it's like so much money out there at the moment it's crazy that this is washing around yeah it's chasing so few opportunities like you know there aren't there aren't that many good like crypto investment

opportunities if you look more closely into it well of course but if you have like unlimited casual what would you do that you will buy a ticket in the into the lottery as you always say yeah of course there's nothing else to do here that's there you go so that's that's why there is uh you know that's the the best time to to start a gaming company which which we discussed with our you know guest special guest on our like for new segment which is going to be live next week so uh keep uh keep your eyes and ears open and there is uh yeah the last last news yeah let's step down from mount olympus and talk about something a bit closer to all of us yeah exactly so that in-game ads are getting more misleading sexist and whatever else like says the mr maretsky and that was a gdc um opening session so ads for guidance caves merge mention lily's garden there

contemporaries all the all the right culprits yeah amazing magic some of the ads i've had to ban especially in q4 this year it was like it's just ads like for like little games and stuff like and some of it is like oh a man a woman shows a man a pregnancy test and he like kicks her off a boat and rising to the sunset yeah exactly like it's it's so sad because it gets a lot of clicks i'm sure yeah and i want to hear mata's intake like input on this but the sad truth is that it's just a mirror of like darkness of humanity because basically what human wants is like a mirror and this is what humans want because that's what converts the best exactly so this like mr was a gaming consultant who worked in all the aaa companies like blizzard king disney and ea and whatever else

i mean he called on ad regulators and platforms like google apple and facebook to stop out misleading ads this will never happen never facebook said already multiple times they're already like doing something against this last year until today nothing happened because why they are making money out of it and they will be so it's not never going to happen again google same thing apple same thing and i feel except this is exactly what players want to see you know all these uh controllers controversial ads that's what everybody wants to see same thing with the ants uh that we discussed on like the third session or the third podcast like so hilarious something connected to the gameplay not at all nobody cares but you nobody cares you make quite a lot of creatives right matcha like you're in your team right yeah like do you guys on purpose make some that are controversial on purpose

yeah i make controversial ads on purpose and hilarious and humorous on purpose as well trying to stay away from um [Music] producing fake heads completely but try to do like a fake ad which is connected to the gameplay because yeah i know dream games do is really really well and why why you shouldn't try to you know maximize your marketing efforts and like uh decrease the efficiency here and there even if you are you know producing slightly misleading guides nobody cares do you do you have yeah some more some less do you have any metrics that you could share like roughly how much better it is like if you do a misleading ad let's say like is it 20 better ctr is it one percent better ctr like yeah it's better is it the thing is like nobody cares about ctr you know you don't buy uh you know anything

in uh in a grocery shop with ctr you can care about you care about yeah you care about the roads afterwards so this can decrease the cpi quite heavily and uh this is something that i have uh my slides on the uh in next week um the constructor fun istanbul event which i am showing like three different ads from the same game and three different cpi's then draw us as well and retention numbers because misleading adds a lower retention but also lower cpi but eventually you know if you just try to like um acquire as many people as possible many players as possible then you don't care about the cpi you know like afterwards there will be some whales who will pay for the whole campaign even though you know like every everything else is trash

basically of course yeah and of course i mean you know that's something that you need to you know need to work get the government yeah as well but you know like the the problem with facebook is like you have all the comments shares and everything under the creative and even though even even if they hate you it's still a positive sign for facebook because it's amount of comments yeah because getting into the auction fine tune towards polarizing content exactly exactly exactly so nobody cares if it's hate or not if if they don't uh you know x out of that creative it's still taking as a as a positive feedback and the sad truth is as well it's like it's my ass as an admon person it's usually the publisher of the ads we get the crap for it like not like facebook like google or the people who are like advertising the games exactly i've seen emails where people write a long thing about how their daughter has seen like

something misogynistic or something you start to apologize and then they think it's you and it's like that's not how it works it's programmatic but you know me i'm the one that got to deal with it it's um stop it please oh come on well i would stop but then i care about the the performance and if uh if it performs and you know obviously like there is very thin ice but i still try to be somewhere in the middle and not like being like too misleading but also trying to show some at least something from the game actually yeah i think it's it's more of a like i completely understand uh mr meretzky rand here but it's more of a you know sign of times like times have changed so much and nobody can do about it like if this is the thing that works in this environment so what you're gonna you know yeah be completely destroyed by the competition like they won't care anyway but you know like this is exactly exactly the the content you will see gdc

like crying a lot crying loud about how the market is really you know yeah shifted and going in the wrong direction of course i mean yeah so what so what at the moment exactly yeah you can do whatever you want and then like uh create whatever ads you want if it works it works and you know this is performance marketing we care about data we don't care about uh some cry baby over here at gdc it's not going to change anything i'm sorry mister that is how it is it's pretty much just how it's going to be yeah if they will actually ban it and if they would actually ban it i would guess something lose so much money do it yes but what i'm trying to say is that some kind of a new trick would be then discovered and people would hop on the next bandwagon that's gonna happen anyway of course yeah it's always i mean so this is really it's not really game producers problem it's more like

facebook's and google's like uh revenue models basically encourage these types of ads so the root cause of the problem is not the game makers or mate it's actually yeah google thank you but but you know honestly if you even want to kind of like you know you set up a policy that you won't do that it's going to be crushed by the competition and they're going to take your market share and then so what you know you kept your morals and ethics and everything and you know your creatives are all true but you know there's no revenue exactly and it's like there is one um one company from finland which we are going to talk about in april they said like they're not they're going to stay away from fake hats as much as they can and then what what happened yeah well they closed one game because it wasn't performing that well yeah i think we can we can move on and you know since i really love the q a type of our main topic now we are going to talk about some pre-soft launch

activities that i think developers should do before they go to soft launch and there are some questions they need to ask themselves so what do they do actually before even going to the development so now i'm going to ask for creating the game people are creative of course but you know like before still because sometimes what happens is as you said um two sessions ago like okay so this is uh the game we are going to clone it and uh we are going to make at least 30 minutes yeah exactly yeah that's not how it works that's not how it works so so what can we do actually pre-solved launch guys any any ideas um just to make straight like straight here you finish the game it's ready for soft launch but before you actually put it on the market to test stuff what you do

i think we're still talking about what we do even before start of production yeah yeah you're gonna be first started the production right so there's no code i'm assuming you're if you know what you're doing what you do is you make a bunch of fake ads for different games that you want to think about what you want to make and the themes and then you start sending ads to like a landing page and see which one converts the best because then you don't have to build stuff right it's like testing right are you assuming and screen your audience is first like what's the attractiveness of your concept yeah but that's you know like that's uh jumping through multiple steps already okay yeah even even some some other things that you you can you can do you know so you want to do a new game so you sit down with your uh producers team and every every everybody is like okay so now what

so what you should do before everything starts you know do the homework so you know market research try to ask yourself like okay so who is the target audience of the game who are we making the game for what is our unique selling proposition so you don't like create another clone of clash of clans or clash royale or whatever else archer or clone well there's a million of them already uh what kind of genre you are going to make the game you know if this aligns with the company strategy if you are you are trying to stay within the same genre and have the the genre mastery or the situation monetization that's the importance yeah and this is what that as well like what is the monetization strategy are going to work more towards the in-app purchases or in app ads or you know both 50 50 and the most important part like what is the the marketing team capabilities are

they able to scale this type of game do they have experience with this game for example this game runner this is very very important things because you know you will make a forex game and then you find find out well obviously you already knew that but your your team had only experience with uh running ui for casual game and then what so it's gonna be very very challenging for them if if they don't have any experiences with the different genres rather than just with some casual game so these are like some some of the questions yakubi is there anything that i actually missed that you would i would think about i would say it always is great if you have people that have done already a game from the same channel that you did already so you have some kind of genre mastery or at least you have a person on your team that's been in the genre before because if you are just going into like a new genre blindly it usually

never works out and and as i as i've seen on the market most successful games are usually the ones that are not inventing something out of nothing like even if we take that clash of clans thing the example that you did there actually what supercell did was they improved backyard monsters which was a kickside game that's pretty much was designed for them and they were just able to do it properly on mobile and improve upon it so that that's what happened here and there's numerous examples of these that you don't really create like the wheel out of nothing you you just you know do something really really good and really really sophisticated let's say a golf clutch example where you would take the charger system from clash royale and applied to a different core gameplay and completely different audience so you don't compete with clash royale at all but you pretty much borrow their expertise or let's say their progression system or something similar like the of course the example we always use the dream games one they're scaling you know

they're going pretty big but why because they have a lot of team members of the original peak games team and they exactly know what to do yeah yeah well of course but there's still what if you are trying to experiment with the new genre i mean you can't just have uh people experienced enough that are you know able to help you with the different drugs it's a chance it's a chance factor pretty much like you always need to work on your ticket yeah always always a new free to play game especially is a lottery ticket you just increase your chances even if you have a super super senior team in the same general you can still fail spectacularly like i i don't i don't i don't see a problem how much is how much is skill and how much is like looking at the data and how much this is like art like an artist person is just good or is it just art i wouldn't put art into good art is usually tested by data so that is pretty much out of the question it's more of a

if you know the current pain points of the genre and you can improve upon them so like let me give an example if you remember how warner bros want to do harry potter go with the pokemon club like it was pretty much like out of the question in a way that the gameplay didn't match the experience at all like harry potter is not because it makes sense yeah and and it it it was more of a like i guess it started from this mismatch but even though they have the infrastructure from niantic and like all the things you know all the stars aligned really really heavy big ip it still didn't make sense but it's i would say that they had the problem with some kind of product person said like it won't be a problem people will still play games yeah yeah let's let's do it so so i would say it's pretty much being familiar with the genre and familiar with also players expectations because somebody somewhere there definitely said that like do you really think that harry potter people will play this like pokemon

and and and the guy said like it doesn't matter probably or something like that happened yeah we will slap the ip on the top of the geolocation game and that's that's gonna work yeah it doesn't work it works for pokemon it's for it needs to it will work for us as well yeah i cannot i can't even imagine the amount of money that was you know drained down down the line there it was just one cell in the excel sheet yeah and now you know nobody cares nobody cares anymore but yeah you could uh if if you had a small company then you would think uh twice about making this type of game but then in the big corporations it you know they always try to say we do all these homeworks before and market research and everything but then eventually you know all the small companies that you know don't have that much money on their bank account they do it properly because you know if they won't do it then they will be out of the

business very soon bigger companies like yeah well okay that work out they can afford to fail pretty much the big companies because if the games you know you still put the team in some other different projects or you know recycle the capabilities no problem there but if it's your startup or like you know this is that one shot that you have that's it that's one shot period yeah okay and then question is like how do you how do you do the market research what kind of tools and you are using and what do you have in mind that you can use but potentially that it's free out there or any page tools as well man this is something like no idea like oh really i would start probably with even three versions of any sensor tower or all these like you mean daily data dot ai yeah data ai sorry uh even free versions are pretty okay where i remember that you see the grossing charge lines there even if you have a

free account so you can still kind of validate some of the arguments that like these games are going up or they're going down at least you see the trend you don't see the numbers but you see the trend so that's good uh one of the things i always like to use that's kind of you would say trivial but it's basic google algorithm like if you go into google play store and you google your competitor and then you see the recommended games that can give you already a really really big uh right way i use that when i'm looking at the competitor ads basically when i'm trying to do the brainstorming and always um look at the historical data but also on the competitor side and this is how i go about the the competition like go to the google store and then see the recommended games and then you can see everybody basically yeah that's really good so that's one of the other things and then uh then comes the really really hard part where you actually need to play those games and see which ones are

actually your direct competition because some games you know they change the core gameplay they changed the main progression formula they aren't really your cup of tea even though they're in the same category you just need to go through all of them you can you know cut this time down a lot by just going through the gameplay videos on on youtube like pretty much every single game out there has this kind of like first 20 minutes tutorial video that somebody did that there's a lot of those so you can skip the installing and everything and just go through there and then you will at some point you will start seeing a pattern and then you follow that pattern and try to look for it in different games and then see how they solve different problems in your game design you know genre feature set that you can apply or use in your current problem yeah so everything can be found on youtube also our podcast as well so definitely subscribe smash the like button exactly smash it like button subscribe and that's going to do the trick and you will see the the powerpuff girls

as well but yeah but this is this is the hardest part like you actually need to play those games and understand their mechanics and systems there's no way around it yeah well it's uh that's uh takes a long time but uh it needs to be done if you want to do it properly that say no that's something that you need to do because you mentioned you need to find the small bits that are pretty much hidden there that some of these games have let's say done really really well or some of these games didn't really went well and you need to discover why so you don't repeat the same mistakes these are the so this is the hard part of the homework so if i crystallize it down the first thing is you get like a subscription to data ai look at the like trends take 10 of the games from that's like in like circulating that trend and then play him crazily like amounts and then take the things from those games and then take what you like and they think what you think would work together and then kind of mismatch it together and that should be your game uh no no that's like a recipe for goulash

[Laughter] it won't work like that like let's take every good bit from every game and then we'll have this amazing game now you're going to end up with gourash and it's yeah you need to have your vision and you need to be you know you need to keep the direction on the right track you know what you're doing and you need to have some kind of product market fit in your head before this can happen yeah and you know just take the inspiration from the those games you don't because you get anything from you cannot end up in this like you know junior loop of i'm adding features to my game based on what i have played in last two weeks that's the worst like that's actually the worst because it means that you didn't do your homework properly because you are you were supposed to see those things before not each next two weeks yeah yeah yeah and uh very true very true the most important part i think that uh is

defining the target audience because um there's a lot of uh gaming companies that still you know they create a game and then ask the marketing managers or you a manager like okay so you know run the campaigns and find me the audience that liked the game because seriously like how i know even better like everybody is our audience oh yeah yeah of course everybody's going to play the game seriously and this is so wrong on so many levels and how like how do you like add features in the game when you don't know who are you building the game for because that's the goulash you are talking about right [Laughter] but there are again some some mistakes that i think yeah you can see like everybody is talking about you know motivations personas and uh whatever else i mean yes it's super useful but still if you focus on on like one persona and

it's it's going to be that great venn diagrams that yeah did you draw and then you just have the small middle part yeah that's your audience the super super small niche yeah super super small ninja exactly and then and even even if if you see that you're still approaching or like uh progressing with the with the game development yeah well there is a high chance that it's not gonna succeed because the target audience is really small you need to think about like opening up a little bit that's the biggest problem with the whole lottery ticket thing that you don't know what's your lottery ticket worth until you hit day one retention which will take you like six seven eight months until you hit that mark and that's it and you won't be running all the wrong directions until then yeah but then you know like you have the play testing so um as soon as you have the the playable or mvp of the game then you start doing the play tests right and then is this something you know that helps

you yakup to you know go of course in different directions it helps you to mainly fine-tune the ftw experience the tutorial and everything uh always you know these days things like play tesco are really really easy to use you can even sort players space on your genre so actually it's better to get you know scolded on and people pretty much hating your game because they've seen the genre and those are actually the really valuable feedbacks rather than like new ones but this won't still be the main indicator of your retention and especially long-term retention it's more of a like you can fine-tune that 15-20 minutes of experience and after that you're kind of blind yeah that's what i would say because uh usually you know like you can see a very good stars in this like playtest cloud and then you you run the campaigns and the first retention is like 20 they're like oh wow but they played this cloud guys they say like it's it's absolutely amazing game why is not working well yeah it's absolutely amazing for 15

minutes and then exactly yeah exactly so you know it's uh this is very similar to to when someone is just looking at one kpi and then not like a series of kpis because it's like okay so i i have really good cpi it's like 15 cents okay so i but so what what i mean what is the retention what is the raw as like there are multiple other questions and you you know you can you can ask and then okay well the 15 cent cpi is good but then the retention is 10 oh okay okay you're right then it doesn't make any sense okay of course but you can't just look at the one one thing same thing with the plates club okay and then there is the there's the the ui marketing um activities that uh felix mentioned already in the beginning so the marketability tests and this can go wrong again on so many levels because if in my opinion i mean this can really save you a lot of a lot of time in the

development but also can be very tricky because if you are looking at the wrong data and you don't have the experience with running the marketability test then you know it's the same thing that you mentioned when you're working with junior then you know junior is looking three steps ahead senior is looking 10 steps ahead here if junior is running the marketability tests and he or she has no experiences with that it can be very dangerous for the whole company because you're you can be looking at the very wrong data and you need to keep in mind that these marketability tests are very far from the the business as usual campaigns so you know even though geek lab and uh shout out to jesse uh the founder of geek lab you can run the campaigns which are simulating the cpi campaigns but they are not exactly the cpi campaigns so even though you can calculate the cpi from these campaigns it's still landing page view optimized

for conversion so you will see lower cpms rather than just looking at the cpi campaigns lower cpi even though it's calculated be careful very careful and then ctr is going to be absolutely amazing 3 5 10 because it's a landing page landing page view it's not optimized for mobile app installs or even for purchases or even for value it's going to be very different so using marketability tests as a directional thing for your game that's very good if you just base guidance yeah just yeah directional guidance if you based your uh you know all the decisions just based on the data you see yeah it can go very wrong but you know it's still very good tool if you skip this step then because you sound very negative like no i don't know it's you know like i just you know you need to do this step but then it means you cannot just take it for granted yeah you know

because then we're safe you know whatever we do doesn't matter we have like super good cpi's and exactly you will see really low cpi's with this test and first again like i said it's calculated from conversion it can be similar but still not the same thing then you run the cpi the actual cpi campaigns after you you you produce the game and then see oh but why we don't we see like three times higher cps than what we saw in the marketability test oh well hello of course because it's a very different optimization oh but the ctrs are lower as well oh yeah of course who would say that oh [ __ ] sherlock is it always a band of percentages so you can kind of factor it in when you do like your calculations and look at the data so you're like you know to decrease like ctr by x percent or yeah yeah i i compared these type of results when i ran the marketability tests um some time ago and the cpis i got from the marketability test were 2 or 2.5 times actually lower than the

real ones so everything that you know you see in the marketability test then multiply by three the cpi and then you're good to go and you're good to go for the that's only for cpi campaign not only not even talking about purchase campaigns or any up even optimized campaigns it's going to be very different way different but still you are trying to get as much data as possible as early as possible and this is going to be very helpful but you know it can go wrong when you don't have the right person to do it we're back at the you know lottery ticket theory what are we doing we're just increasing the chances there's no guarantee there's no guarantee at all along this hallway ever yeah and there's never gonna be yeah but the nice thing about this is uh you know you can use facebook and now iron source even uh like a couple of days ago announced the marketability test tool which is nice you need to take uh take a look at that

you're using the fakester pages which is you know you using the exactly um apple or google play looking a store page which is fake everybody that click clicks on the download button they will get the pop-up this game is not available yet please leave us an email and we will hit you up when it's when it's live or you can you can actually use a player survey at the end so you know you can ask questions so what questions to ask mr game designer over here yeah i would say i would say it's mainly based on the expectations of the the players that you're talking about and you want to make sure that the things that you are talking about and then like pretty much confirm or validate your points that you're running through so i would say definitely try to ask about the product fit give me an example mr mr game designer let's say what would you expect to see in this game pretty much like some kind of it's

always best to you know do nice open questions rather than suggestive ones yeah don't do suggestive questions of course you just can't skew your results yeah yeah and and then uh maybe even try to look a little bit more into the audience themselves like do you play mobile games do you have purchase anything uh at all in the mobile game before like you know some kind of a screening on the audience so descriptive questions this way i would say yeah i mean this can help um still it's again it's a guidance nothing yeah yeah yeah exactly that's it's a guidance so you know some some companies take these marketing marketability tests like this is this is exactly what we are expecting this is how it's going to be nope it's not going to happen and that's that's what dangerous because then you can hear a lot of people discussing oh well we are doing marketability tests so it's perfect everybody should do that and then when they see the first data they are very disappointed because it's it's something

else than they expected but you know you can test whatever you like characters visual themes the setting and whatever and then you can you know you can actually end up with uh the the highest chance of success when testing like multiple things yeah but still there's no guarantee there's no guarantee exactly there's no guarantee see i know i sound very negative but well actually i was just gonna say you sound like rhema oh yeah that's my my post yeah now i know i i really like to do this but it needs to be done properly and it's again directional guidance not something that you need to take uh very seriously because usually when company companies try to do this they use only like one idea no you should you should think about like three different ideas and then this will tell you like which way to go so you will test three different

visual designs cartoon realistic whatever else doesn't it doesn't matter you will see that the with your target audience the cartoon works the best okay so now okay what kind of characters should i use female male long hair short hair whatever then or no characters oh yeah exactly then you will see which way to go again and then this you know trying to narrow it down afterwards it's always an iterative process pretty imagine you know you try to be as fast as possible that that's like one of the good qualities that you need to hit is that the frequency of these iterative updates needs to go up or at least be very very frequent that's the that's the whole thing like pretty much back to the lottery ticket theory it's more about like how many shots you can make rather than you know to aim precisely well so it's pretty much like hyper casual this is what they're exceptionally good at compared to like casual to hard questions casual is this

lottery dictator on steroids yeah exactly and because it's it's way easier to do marketability tests with hyper casual game when you create a video easily easily because you just show the game mechanics in the video and that's it that's the whole game when you're you know compared to strategy game or casual game it takes time to create videos so you might just use static images only to save time and resources which again can be you know slightly far from the the reality afterwards but at least again it shows you the the way the way to go yeah but with hyper casual creative is the actual gameplay itself there's no you know there's usually not a difference like you don't run fake ads for hyper casuals you run the actual gameplay video that is the creative and just by i remember like people saying from hyper casual genre that just by changing the visuals of that creative they were able to tone down the cpi to a manageable level

and then they were able to scale the game that's it that's how it works even though the mechanic was pretty much the same yeah while you sound you look a bit confused confused yeah yeah felix she's so like like admon i'm the cherry on top you know like that's what i deliver sometimes a cherry can grow an apple but like i don't have a dog in this game like yeah you've never heard about it but like yeah yeah well i think uh in that case i think that's it right yeah it was uh it was pretty fun again yeah good luck with your soft punches hope they will [Laughter] oh my god okay that was a really nice ending thank you thank you very much guys until next time [Music]

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