two & a half gamers session #18 - How could King make 30% more revenue? Full UA, GD & Ads analysis!

[Music] hello everybody Welcome this is no gaming podcast 22 Gamers session number 18 but this week we we continue with the mobile gaming company happy hour where we do a deep dive on a mobile gaming company from the perspective of game design UA and admon but let's not forget this is a still a 4:00 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not be too serious about everything and today we have Felix the admon guru braberg in the house yakob game Des game design skeptic Remar and mate UA bro lch hey guys hello hello mate how are you like postco survival ma is so much

nicer than preco March well there you go things happen Co evidently changed me a little bit but I feel fine so all good I mean it's been not so long since we recorded the last one so what's changed the last couple of days yeah this one uh this one is going to be uh more interesting I think than the Robia one uh at least for me it took me a lot longer to get to my concl clusions with the other one yeah for me too and uh this this episode is brought to you by well that could be your name guys but it's brought to you by us so oh next time maybe yeah after hearing from our sponsors now let's just dive into it so as Mach mentioned we'll be discussing King today so uh before diving in

uh just like last time here's some Topline information about King so king of course as everyone knows is owned by Activision Blizzard and 2021 Activision posted 8.8 billion in Revenue which was their highest ever Revenue King made up 28% of that coming in at around 2 and2 billion so that's in 2021 and this was their best year to date so in 2021 King grew by an impressive 416 million compared to 2020 numbers or by about 19% but you know on such big numbers that's really impressive something to pull like something really impressive to pull off so the interesting thing here is that Activision Blizzard in 2021 only grew or

only or grew by 800 million which is around 10% which means that King was responsible for nearly half of Activision's overall growth in 2021 in other words King is an absolute Beast so we have quite a mighty task here to look for chinx in his Royal armor so starting us off today let's start it off with UA Ma of course but again uh just before I start uh I just have one announcement to make uh and we are officially the biggest two and a half game Gamers YouTube channel thanks for subscribing there are some other uh like irrelevant dudes that are having the same uh same name as we are but now we are officially the the biggest YouTube channel so thank you very much for the support please keep on subscribing and now hit the Subscribe button before we go into the UA so I

yeah it was a kind of a a nice task um I did a lot of research um not only uh putting together some information from various tools but also on the LinkedIn and I divided my part into like general information about the UA then um some uh spent and the UA Channel mix and then obviously I'm going to talk about the creatives and uh present some interesting facts and then so I want to just present also suggestions so I'm not only talking about what I found out but also what I think could be slightly better or what they should do so let's start with the general information I found out on LinkedIn mostly uh because LinkedIn is my type of social media where I hang out the most the UI team is called Performance Marketing team which is in gaming a little bit um

well different from all the other companies but I do see that they are um divided into social and AD networks so basically their UA team or Performance Marketing team is divided into the UA managers they are taking care of the socials which is mainly Facebook anyway from the UA channels they are running at the moment and Tik Tok of course but then ad networks and um they have hired uh their head of UA only 6 months ago and uh she was um leading um UA at match which is an online dating app so this is interesting you know if you are a a big company as king I know like the talent pool is is pretty limited out there but still if you if you are hiring a head of UA or anyone in terms of UA I would just more most likely go for someone with exactly like 7 years of experience but from gaming not an online dating app so

and what we found out today the head of marketing left from uh from king after I think it was like six years something like that seven years and who do you think he joined dream games as a as a CMO that's quite valid though cuz I'm assuming whoever is CMO or King right now like that's pretty entrenched like why would you want to leave that position like is there a bigger Mobile gaming company you help to quite hard yeah but there is a king is a corporation basically it's like three almost 3,000 people and they are hiring like crazy on the multiple UA positions which could mean like a lot of things but from my understanding I think you know they definitely need even like more manpower to uh to run the UA efficiently and I see or saw a lot of

people leaving and now you know maybe they're trying to replace them but also my assumption could be that king is not paying that much which you know can be very wrong but why would you leave such a good good position after seven years then just to you know have four four months carrier break and then join dream games but that can be only my assumption obviously on oh man no come on like obviously head of marketing ones wants to be a CMO like it could just be that he got a anyway yeah I digress come on and also what I found out uh when I was digging into the King employees that one of their employees whoever that might be is actually working with me on one one project which also suggests you know if you are trying to find a different side jobs then most probably you don't have

you know you are not paid well and you have plenty of time as well so but it's okay let's uh let's let's stop with all these uh assumptions that from my side but from the LinkedIn um research I also found out also like talking to some some of the the guys from the industry King doesn't love agencies and they don't work with anyone from the UA uh external work and they do everything in house you know they do they do work with an external agencies on the creative side so that's uh that's kind of interesting I'm not sure why is this happening or maybe I am because you know it can get a little bit political um on these levels with these big companies so you know if you are in House UA and I think we've we've seen that even that pixel Federation we were always skeptical about bringing any any external help in house because uh external help because you know like oh well what if they they do it better than us

does does it mean that we get fired is that is that why Remo started wearing sunglasses so no one could see like his expression exactly yeah now he's playing he's playing Seven other tables of Poker on the on the side you know I hear the clicking the camera on I hear the clicking every yeah yeah so in terms of spending they are spending mainly on four games which is Candy Crush Soda Saga the then Candy Crush uh Farm Hero Saga and Pet Rescue Saga and um from what I saw in in different tools they started to ramp up the UA activities in the last three months and mainly maybe like one or like last one or two months and uh and interestingly enough uh only Candy Crush the original one is is spending heavily on iOS not other games which I mean why this could be any any ideas guys because they don't need to do UA anymore cuz they beat UA

what what does it mean they don't need to do UA anymore you know like I know like and then like they can just like live Ops and they just keep making money and no one ever leaves because it's a never ending cycle yeah yeah but they still run UA on Android so why would they run UA at all right so that's uh that's a different story but would be great to actually check their iOS strategy with someone from the from the uat because maybe just Candy Crush the original one is just big enough to be sustainable on the iOS it's getting bigger enough every every month every month yeah exactly yeah but this this could be just like a only viable option for them because every other game and I know we discussed this like every other game that they launched the is having like lower revenues than the original Candy Crash iaga so might be might be I would still love love to love to talk to someone

about why the they are not running it because this is leaving a lot of money on the table guys okay the let's let's get back to to the UA and and the top channels they are um running and like what kind of channels they are running at the moment and the one of the biggest channels at the moment for almost all their games is a big surprised dram roll priest up blowing what what was it what was it it was upav so uh yeah it's uh I mean I know it looks like uh we don't like appla from the the sessions that we are discussing in the last couple of uh times but it's actually quite you like app what are you talking about yeah we do yeah we do qu qu yeah we love you guys so uh but I was really um surprised but then I was thinking about it a little bit more and it actually makes all the sense because they have the matching to menion project makeover and

these games they SC UPL is scaled heavily so I bet this is mostly thanks to the uplo inventory so oh I hope I don't get corrected after after this sessions but guys from uplo if if this is not true let me know but I still I still believe that like uplo inventory is very suitable for the match Free Run R and therefore Candy Crush is candy crushing a don't [Music] wa well I'm I'm I can do these dead jokes now so but main uh an original Candy Crush I think we see the same pattern as we discussed with Roo so mainly so this is the only game that is not uh heavily reliant on the uplo although they started running upin uh this month or well this month it's already June so in May last month but the main channel for them is is Google UAC so all the game running a lot of UA

channel uh UA activities on Google makes a lot of sense because uh that's how it works uh these days but in terms of the companywide um UA policy or UA activities they're running 15 channels besides main ones which is uh Facebook UAC Unity iron source and applin we can see traffic coming from Tik Tok vanga mintegral interesting and then at col CH boost and Twitter but we also see a very small test on Reddit Pinterest Yahoo and some like very small no name uh U channels here and there so if if we compare King to Roo I would say king is diversifying the UA portfolio way better and I mean if we compare King to roio King is like what triple the size of we need to compare play with king that's that's the thing you want to compare did we just pick our next one oh my God

I just wanted to do comparison to Rio because we discussed that and yeah now we need to I need to play discuss plays I guess all right thanks thanks yob so some interesting facts so I think um I found out yeah like the candy is spending 90% of the budget on Google UAC and then we have Facebook unity and wangle and as I said they're starting to push a ling in May in terms of the countries and this is um most probably way different from the other other games I I managed before and and in terms of the top countries in terms of spend they are spending heavily on iOS in Germany which is okay then us Austria a Australia and Canada so the Austria there is uh is definitely a big surprise I mean it's a really small Market but in terms of the Google Google Play they're spending heavily in us it's is not a surprise but then Canada Australia UK and

Indonesia okay well whatever that means whatever that means do they have soft launch now right REM we'll see depends yeah it depends on the game but uh do they have uh well I haven't played Candy Crush for a long time do they have already ads in the Candy Crush the original one they do they do uh this is like like a problem I ran into today when I was researching some last bits on this that there are people that are actually complaining on Candy Crush forums that don't they don't have ads anymore and they have them before and they're like oh you're not part of the test group blah blah blah stuff like that so they're saying I was getting ads I've been playing it a lot lately for this ad and and then there I found out people complaining that after they paid they're never seeing the ads or the possibility to get ads and stuff like that so I'm guessing it's kind of something in between it's not the staple but definitely there ads was there it's

not not that there were never ads like in a supercell game okay yeah I know I know they were just uh in the middle of experimenting with ads uh the Candy Crush guys yeah okay well is interesting because this is not the first time I'm I'm hearing this that some of the the players actually complain about these are for from last year so this is pretty recent okay all right okay and with the with the three other games that are um that they are spending heavily we see 30% of the whole budget goes to applin and then we have Google obviously and then Facebook and unity in terms of the creatives and this was the most interesting part and I was laughing so hard like guys you are King and I know like you have the brand department so you can't around too much but why the are you working with game play Only In creatives it doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense

repeat after me it doesn't make any sense to run game play only there was like one iteration uh which I found kind of like cute and nice they put little faces on their candies and so as soon as they you you match them they smiled and just ran away I mean this is nice but it was like only thing like only Innovation seriously I'm creatives are super high end as well like you know AAA like really wellmade like polished to a t as well it's the game play Nothing Else okay dude it's I mean they I found two iterations one with uh small eyes and then the the second iteration with like huge black eyes that I posted in the in the dock so that was the only thing that they been running on on multiple channels plus they're definitely leveraging the the power apps on in the

in the creatives but that's it in terms of the Candy Crush so I know they're using like a hand a female hand but it's not consistent enough it's just one time is without any nails then you have a hand with the red nails and I know like this was heavily uh experimented with uh at Peak so they found out actually like if you have like a red nail versus pink nail it makes a difference in terms of conversion which is interesting but here not that much so I also found out they are still running a winter creative so hey guys um if you're listening to this check your Unity saw the S account and also maybe Facebook and Google account and see if it actually produces results because it's it's June already and I don't believe this is actually performing well on the other hand what I believe is irrelevant if it makes sense for you guys then of course run it as long as you want but still

this from from the outside doesn't make any sense and uh and with Farm Hero Saga they're trying to actually copy the Royal match creatives which which could be good but this is very weird combination with like something like leather boards and tournaments for me and and female oriented players I'm not sure if this makes so much sense uh but again this is only my uh my opinion but you see a classic m free help scenario in the farm hero saga creatives but they're showing a lot of headlines into your face like hey tournament be the first in the Lea boards like what the is happening I I didn't know where to focus in that in those creatives and if I can't do it like how would you think uh your female core 35 45 Plus in the US can actually focus in in that crazy like what what do you think they can they would do it's just to flash

and uh one other I think like one one last P Rescue Saga with with the Royal match creatives as well they're also trying to trying to copy this but we always see a positive outcome of the of the rescuing creative which is the quite opposite of what is working actually for the for the dream G dream game guys and Royal match this this creative Works mainly because you know you see all the all the suspense it's just like you really want to save that uh that King and like all these like puppies and and pets but actually you fail so you know after after the creatives uh is shown you just want to re really rescue the what whoever is in the creative and then what what do you do I download the game and then rescue rescue them by myself that's that's the you know that's the main assumption but uh okay so I have some suggestions uh to you guys

actually and um and I would start with ramping up the volume on on Unity for Christ sakes Unity is working really well for merge games cooking games and other female oriented games so why would it wouldn't it work for you guys as well you just needs some extra manpower to pull that off and since you are hiring a lot of a lot of people in a lot of different positions I think I it should be doable um then I would experiment with uh the external agencies it doesn't need to be like you need to onboard like 10 uh external agencies and I know like it's very tough job to to find the the proper external help but uh you should definitely try to do that at least once or twice because that those external new power of eyes can be helpful and I know as I said it's Can it can be political but it help uncover a lot of things that you don't see since you are you know in vids and trenches are just too

much and in terms of the creative I would very much suggest to try ASMR creatives slicing all your candies slice ASMR slicing was the top of hyper casual game for some time and even um coin Master started slicing their coins and it worked really well for them so I would definitely suggest to do that for you guys and uh you know I see similar creatives uh for calm the the meditation app and they are doing these like ASMR Concepts relaxing and calming um which can work pretty well with relaxing with with Candy Crush and also when you copy competitors be sure that you understand like why the creative is working for them and try to improve that for you and not the quite opposite all right questions comments yeah I have a great example in my part regarding that new pair of

uis there you go amazing so we can get to that but uh yeah pretty comprehensive I would say are you suggesting that let's say if you would compare playrix versus King which are the let's say the biggest Rivals here that play is pretty much using their marketing creatives to its fullest they would put them into the pocket this is King and like bum to the pocket that's it player those guys are Masters in terms of the creatives they invented all these uh shitty creatives but nobody cares because uh you know they don't have the brand Department thank God because they you know they like to earn money and grow that's how it is and I know I will get uh eaten alive but by for saying this but I don't care I don't really care even though the Candy Crush is still growing heavily these days and player can suffer uh like a decline on downloads last half a

year yeah but they can grow they can grow even more that's the thing did you see like when you're looking into it like is this UA fueled growth or is it them getting more from their existing user base which is really big yeah you mean King Remo said yeah Remo said it's it's no no player is decline in terms of downloads King pretty much stays on the same level but the revenue is still coming up because they are super super like hyper efficient with their life Ops like pretty much the of liveops there yeah that's the thing I mean if you have like really good liveop systems that fuels the UA so like and and I I don't say their UA sucks that's no that's nowhere near I I wanted to say it's just this can be so much better this can be so much better of course guys like kudos to you you're doing such an amazing job I mean uh running so many games heavily pushing

on four of the main uh main games on 15 channels that's not an easy job of course it's really great so good job cool I guess that brings us to admon so this one was quite a big Challenge from man's perspective uh King as we said before is a abs absolute Juggernaut uh plus their costs and revenues are not really Broken Out In Activision Blizzard's financial statements so how I went about doing this was I started playing everything from Candy Crush to Bubble Witch 3 to crush Bandicoot and I got to say like Candy Crush man it's so polished I haven't played it for like two or three years but it's so clean it's just such a shame I was playing it for the ads

um so most of these T titles of course except for crash are super I AP heavy uh but I did start getting ads after some time in pretty much all of these games and very like I got a very well-made at prompt in all the games when I played on iOS so and it even showed me like a list of all the possible ad sources so no easy win there and I heard a rumor a couple years ago that they only do branding ads but I got gaming ads from Unity ad mob iron source and Facebook so no big warning flag there so I was starting to lose hope if I was a bit honest I was like should I call Remo and just be like how about the M placement huh what what kind of uplift do you think but I didn't so basically I stopped uh by playing the games so the hunt led me away from the game and into the Activision Blizzard 2021 annual

statement which by the way like compared to roio's annual statement this one is boring as guys have you ever heard of colors like no I guess when I guess when you make like8 billion a year like you're not allowed to have fun anymore and that really shows in your financial statement yeah it needs to be boring one like this one is nothing so anyway so I started reading and nestled in on the bottom of page 61 of this 68 page document thanks a lot for that I found my like ad in King's Royal ad armor and it reads I'm going to do this reading so this is a direct quote from page 61 the pricing and terms of all of our kind of Revenue driving advertising arrangements are governed by either a master contract or an insertion order

the transaction price in advertising Arrangements uh agree Arrangements governed by an insertion order is generally the product of the number of advertising units delivered Impressions or videos viewed and the contractually agreed upon price per advertising unit so what does it mean does it mean custom mediation no this mean that king is not selling their Impressions on the open market and it's selling their inventory the old school media Way by negotiating prices with networks in a contract and then selling it to them directly what no mediation boys yes not to call Remo I thought it was custom mediation so w this got me looking uh so basically uh I logged into our fa analytics platform and I took a quick

scan of the sdks of the top nine games by da so Candy Crush had the most sdks it had three ad sdks iron Source ad mob and Facebook and all the other eight games except for Crash Bandicoot uh had two sdks admob and Facebook nice okay which means that these guys are selling direct to either admob or Facebook for the majority of their ad trans actions so general rule of thumb here is that the more ad stks you have integrated or the more ad networks you work with the higher the ecpm due to competition when you're selling it on the open market so kind of from here I was able to make some educated assumptions based on my own experience and the data I have so I took the nine biggest king games by da which start at 20 million Dau which is

Candy Crush and went all the way down to Bubble Witch 3 which has 28,000 da so I only assume wait wait wait wait wait bubble wi free has 28,000 daus yeah is is that dead already what the why is that so low bubble wi three no it makes makes something like uh three three 3 million a month or something Bubble Witch 3 has 28,000 users when I checked it on our favorite data platform yeah nice okay yeah as I said yeah okay still pretty big Revenue yeah quite impressive I mean it's still the king we're dealing with here guys like I know I know no assumption yeah okay so yeah sorry sorry yeah so I only assume that they had rewarded video ads uh because it's the only one I ever saw so I estimated the ad viewer rate to be between depending on the game between 20% on the highl TV games like Candy Cross and 60% on like Crash Bandicoot so I

kind of handicapped it and Impressions per Dau I also had to handicap for the nine games to be somewhere in the range of 1 to four so the same rule here so you'll get the higher amounts like in the lower kind of yeah lower I AP games so due to their large user base this brought me to a number of around 30 1 million impressions per day which needs to be taken with a grain of salt because there's no way I can actually know that but that's an educated guess uh this brings us to ecpm here as well I have no way of knowing what they ecpm is because they actually negotiate it between mainly two networks Facebook and admob so again here grain of salt so I picked an average global ecpm of $17 so here's the big caveat if you work

at King and you know this number and you want to leak it to me I can easily plug it into my model and then it will be more accurate so I will leave my email in the show notes and I will keep strictly confidential yeah yeah the same way I I didn't mention who this person is working on the in the UA field and working with me on other project so I went a bit low here since it's negotiated uh with only like two or three Network networks which in my experience would never give you the same price as if you're doing it on the open market but what this does this brings us to roughly around 250k A Day In AD revenue for king or about 91 million dollar a year so do just pass kind of the sniff test this is around three and a half% of King's overall revenue and I think that sounds relatively reasonable um so that would be about 1% or 1.04% of overall Activision Blizzard

Revenue comes from actual King ad Revenue so if you launch a normal game on the open market in terms of mediation with only two networks and you have the scale that King has I guarantee you you will not be reaching your full adarp out potential so usually what you say here is like any game over like 20K a day you need at least 5 to six different networks to really unlock like the highest ecpm possible yeah because you have a lot of daily users so it needs lot more um and networks yeah exactly so I've done this on some larger games that are around like 25 to 35k a day where you go for maybe three or four networks to six and kind of the general number I see here is usually with optimizations you get about a 30% bump in ecpm after doing like really good optimizations cuz also ad networks favor large sources

where they can get a lot of Impressions so they can really get the big guys in and spending uh so using this number I estimate that if King sold its inventory on the open market while also adding more networks they will increase their daily ad revenue from 311 uh to$ 311,000 a day which would be about 113 million a year so that would mean roughly a 1% increase in overall revenue from king or about a 3% increase for Activision Blizzard as a whole so these numbers are a bit shaky since I don't know the starting ecpm but what I will stand by here are the ratios yeah so like that is to say like whatever the starting point is I believe that there is a 30% gain Plus to be made if they move to selling their inventory on the

open market through mediation instead of just negotiating between two or three networks so there you have it I think at least $22.7 million more a year can be easily achieve for King but I want to add like if these contracts aren't well negotiated uh it could probably be even double that so yeah that sums up admon nice yeah I still think the The Branding kind outweigh the you know focus on Adon here like if we imagine let's say when was it last year or the year before there was a Candy Crush teamed reality show in America which I guess was like a pretty big marketing expense so yeah the brand is still super strong so I'm not really kind of think that they will get their focus back on that yeah is it that strong as uh 46 million a year I'm not sure sure I definitely it is here's the thing though here's the

thing like like even if you adopt it like what's like what's this game like what's the percentage conversions to payers like 3% maximum maybe even bit more since the king yeah Candy Crush don't know like uh the thing with Candy Crush is that it still actively growing yeah and I I'm I'm guessing you want to keep that kind of a premium feel of this is the mighty Candy Crush which won't really you know infest your game with ads to kind of use a more negative term here yeah I mean okay but you know like this is very similar to what we discussed with supercell I and why supercell should Implement ads and you know Candy Crush shouldn't super won't have a choice except to implement ads at some point because it's 10 cent that runs it so yeah I know I know but here it will be soon Microsoft who will in the end run there you go yeah exactly anyway like how would like can I

kind of like tie this off and before we hand it off to Remo who probably has the worst segment to do I just want to tie it off and saying like this is a CEO decision like that's something a CEO and sea level will decide like you present the data as you find it but there is definitely a lot of more Revenue you can unlock here and if you put blocks in place like only showing ads to a certain number of users or subset you can probably negate losing any of kind of yeah Revenue in from I pre premium feel yeah yeah I think it's more about the premium feel or let's say Prestige feel here Prestige field Prestige field cols i w to I want to it over I want to hand it over to Remo now because you have the shittest job ever because you have to like critique this on game design when they are the kings of game design yeah something in that matter like we have but our day but our day question yeah let me just start after

this short break yeah let me just start that uh yeah this is definitely not the comprehensive like super super big overview of the whole company because it's just too big so I'm trying to kind of pinpoint like let's say the biggest facts and the biggest key takeaways here uh from what I can why are you saying all these excuses be even before you start it come on there's no gaming podcast dude just stop whining and start yeah you say like I have done the best ever like analysis here it is okay let's start the best ever analysis yeah there you go a that's Spirit yeah so um yeah first thing let me just borrow this piece of data that was uh in the Constructor of fun predictions for this year that's like always uh good to read and they have it a greatly frame here uh because I think this is really important to tell especially when we're talking about the creatives mate here mhm that King is the biggest competitor to playrix and play

is the biggest competitor to King and these two are Prett think switching the Throne of the pzzle genre where puzzle genre is currently dominated by puzzle and decorate which is the guardian Scapes homecapes and fish them games which compromise of pretty much 60% of this puz and decorate subcategory which is 36% of the overall uh puzzle Market which is currently something like 2.5 billion uh and then the classic match as the taxonomy would call it the classic match three games represented by Candy Crash those are 30% of the market share reaching something in vicinity of 2 billion whereas King portfolio is currently taking 70% of the market by mainly Candy Crush Candy Crush Soda Saga and all the other crushes pretty much uh the important fact is also that Candy Crush this year turned 10 years and it has grew almost 50% in the last three years like I could end the

report just here just now yeah okay thank you very much and that's it yeah so this is like a miraculous feat literally uh I don't think so there's like an equivalent here in the industry even if we take let's say Clash of Clans that could be like a good example of a Evergreen game which is turning I think 10 years again either last year or this year uh and it still didn't grew 50% it's stable and like pretty much holding the really good Revenue that he's making but he's not growing 50% which for a 10-year-old game is yeah out outstanding that's really impressive yeah that's really impressive so as I said uh every year King and play pretty much are NE to NE in race to be the top publisher in 2020 play was Ed by King again and uh um yeah yeah sorry play outed King and then in 2021 King took again the throne uh to be the best puzzle publisher so that's as for the market uh regarding the like

other thing that you can see in the market uh there's the puzzle and decorate sub those are the G escapes HC games then you have the classic mat three represented by King and then you have the tile blast games which again are catching up a little bit as the new kid on the Block uh not that big but represented I would say by one of the biggest grow here mainly by the guys from Turkey uh Peak games they were acquired by Zinga now acquired by take two and then of course dream games which is the new unicorn on the Block I guess waiting to be acquired with their Heat game Royal match let's not go there let's not go there yet yeah let's not go there yet yeah so if we look at King hold portfolio regarding the iaps uh from last year uh they're making around 1.5 billion of Revenue uh just from the IPS so I'm guessing there's some additional millions or hundreds of Millions somewhere there in the ads because yeah we cannot see that through our data

platforms that we're scouring but uh yeah it's 1.5 bill and the interesting fact is that again there are three games that are making 87% of the overall Revenue here which is Candy Crash sitting at 58% something Candy Crash Soda Saga 20% something and Candy Crash friend Saga 7% something and then there's just less and less percentages uh yeah what we can see from this similar Trend with roio where the games are really old Candy Crush as I said is 10 years old Candy Crash SAS Saga is 8 years old and friend Saga is the newest one even though it's the newest one it's already five or six years old yeah true but they they're not at least they're not heavily investing in that title according to what I saw it's uh rescue and yeah the FR obviously spend spending something but not as as high as the other yeah that's the main problem with this whole

Candy Crash morphing business where there's this rule like Mo law where your every like every next Candy Crash is making less than the previous yeah yeah yeah unfortunately so I remember back in the days where let's say you were comparing something like uh let's say machine Zone games where you would have mobile stri and Game of War those would be making pretty pretty much the same there wasn't that big of a diminishing returns Factor uh these games work a little bit differently so yeah let's see it's different genre so you can't compare that yeah but also different you know marketing formula whereas there you were you need to keep the audience there and and and and by the way King regarding their portfolio is the biggest example of cross portfolio marketing or cross cross game marketing however you want to call it I remember there were like a lot of these kind of suggestions

in the industry oh yeah yeah we're going to drive traffic from one game to the other and they're going to you know be hanging in our ecosystem forever and blah blah blah no yeah you can't there are just few companies that can do this and King is one of them like I think the prime one of them so they they really know what they're doing here so uh if you look at those three big games uh Candy Crash yeah that's the original game that pretty much brought it in started on browser before on Facebook games in 2012 in April and then in uh November it was done it was released also on mobile one of the let's say biggest things that Candy Crush did was its monetization model I remember seeing like a case study from King where they were showing how pretty much like one study changed the monetization of the whole game because the interesting part was that before on the browser if you remember to plus five moves s you would have it during the game play so you

could use it any time you want but what they did during the test what they put it only after you lose at the end and only then you could use the yeah the power up and this simple change had so drastic effect on the monetization that that was pretty much the mat three formula right there that you like the game the puzzle games from that moment were created in a way that the balancing and the you know the mathematics behind it is the biggest problem of it all and you need to create the levels in a way that usually people end up in this one more move formula where they have this sunen cost FY like they have been you know trying to beat this level they're really frustrated they have even these kind of frustration ratios and churn prevention ratios and like mat three games are literally like data science and if you frame the Plus five or plus three moves and and players already see

it that that one move will make them kind of past the level they will convert and they this is this is the money-making machine of those games the best principle there is so Candy Crash is literally the behem in the industry it's still occupying the top charts every year uh currently I'm guessing it's making its biggest Revenue in its lifetime which is something to be hold of uh it's somewhere on only from iips I'm seeing something in vicinity of like 80 million here 80 81 million plus this is just from mobile iips per month per month yes per month of course for which game for which game Candy Crush Candy Crush Candy Crush Okay Candy Crash iOS Android mobile only only iips so if this is around 81 million then we add in the ads the mystery number that we don't know and then probably browser is also still making a lot of Revenue yeah yeah for sure for sure we're probably Crossing 100 Mil already oh yeah yeah so

this is yeah that's kind of nice and as said before Candy Crush just keeps on growing and growing the biggest kind of a change was somewhere during year 2017 where the revenue nearly doubled uh happened know I think that's because of the Mastery of lops that King pretty much brings into the game the really important part is that they have the content threadmill and by content threadmill I mean Candy Crash currently has 11,825 levels man just imagine I started playing it this week imagine that like playing through on that you can play this for another 10 years yeah because uh these games you know there are big content consumption machines you need to Fe feed the levels in like I think I was comparing it at one point when I was doing some M research that you add like 40 levels every 3 weeks or something like that and people just eat it and and then you add more day and you keep yeah yeah and keep

in mind that you need to also add in new mechanics and twists so usually the rate of like a new mechanic will somewhere between like 40 levels or something like that and then you try to kind of switch it around and see what happens but yeah the level design on this game like there's yeah outstanding when you say when you say liveops Mastery in 2017 can you just pick like something like yeah they into their game let's say BR League Le golden leagues you know really competitive leader boards events they have like okay 20 different types of events that they rotate those are kind of twists on the game play uh a lot of games are using those like I I know let's say play also did some of those initially when they were ding so yeah they're really the masters of the livel here and and of course you just keep progressing on the Saga and you know eating have, levels so wow so this is this is yeah this is really great like uh anybody that is going into Mobile

gaming you should check out Candy Crash and how they did it this is one of the Staples in the industry so that's there um yeah going later let's say uh Candy Crush Soda Saga which was released in 2014 still performs really really really well the game again casually Mak something around 25 million a month I pce even though it's like three times L that it's bigger sister it's still making like so much money because again this is based on that cross portfolio effect where you run out of lives on Candy Crush you can still have your liing Candy Crush Soda Saga which king I guess utilizes to its limits and it's completely okay for M three players to be playing multiple match three games so this fits well really in their portfolio so yeah this is pretty much as again another Twist on their usual Candy Crush gameplay with some kind of different mechanics you have those flying fishes around that that the staple for Soda Saga which is all tned around like bottles and sweet sweet juices so that's

there uh and then then we have let's say the newest of the entrance which is Candy Crush friend Saga but actually this is the fourth iteration of the Candy Crush formula because before we had Candy Crush jelly Saga that was released in 2015 but uh Candy Crush Fraga makes a little bit more but it's still really really small compared to its sisters where candy car faga currently makes something like 4 million a month compared to its biggest system like main one which makes 800 plus so I yeah let's let's stop here so what you're saying they have a pretty interesting um growth of all their old games but what kind of games they actually launched in last three years besides the C the CR picut yeah we we have some notes on those let's continue oh very good okay okay yeah so this like this is the end of the Candy Crush uh let's say live family of the

main IP which is Candy Crush as I said candy crush candy soda jelly and then FR Saga uh then we have the PED Rescue Saga which is really old one still casually makes around 3 million but note that this is the only game that's a blaster game in their portfolio which is click to mat match one uh then they have the bubble wi 2 and bubble Wich 3 Saga uh those are Blaster ones like a Panda Pop similar game those are I think all coming from the old Nintendo game mechanic forgot the name of the game but yeah this is pretty much that one uh these are still making somewhere in their usual like a back burner game with four millions or three millions a month so yeah yeah decent still super good decent still super good but again not like a main main game and then uh I would say this is this is like the main M three portfolio then we have games in the other genre and the midcore attempt

let's call it yeah yeah we have we have notes on those so let me just uh say that last game on their main account is candy uh sorry Crash Bandicoot yeah which yeah um to me it seems more a brand flop yeah unfortunately it's an endless Runner U which fits the genre because original crash bandicot was an endless Runner itself it had a really big spike of like 30 nearly 30 million downloads during the lunch month uh but translated to revenue it did something in vicinity like 1.3 million and currently the game is getting something in like a million downloads a month compared to 60 K IP Revenue yeah they haven't really like done a good job on implementing ads like crash 100% an OD game like 100% like look at all the other endless Runners that have made it like yeah like ads but you have the brand work the

brand sure but still you you on one hand you have the brand but on the other hand you have still uh you know you're a public company right so you need to you know I would say Surfers like I don't think they make a lot of money in iips it's add Revenue it's add revenue of course but I'm just saying like of course this is not really utilize potential to its fullest but I would still say probably Activision or whoever is the original of the app step in and you know they still have the priority within the PC game I remember Cy crash Pandy could release their PC collection somewhere recently like two three years ago I guess that's still the you know main thing so this could be still considered as some kind of branding Gap rather than like a cash machine yeah yeah okay yeah but let's say what's there next in their portfolio so there's this interesting soft lunch uh soft lunch titles that were soft lunch the same day on December 2018 which is Candy Crush cubes and Candy Crush

tails and those were both I guess in their day attempts to catch up with the competition because Candy Crush cubes is pretty much a tile Blaster again so yeah this was their attempt to catch up with Peak but the last update of the game was 2019 so this seems dead it did and yeah this didn't age well uh and the twist was that instead of you making like restoring a town you were making a town yourself and kind of building It Up level after level but yeah this didn't fly and then wonder where they got that idea from yeah then they have the Candy Crush Tails which was I guess killed a little bit later December 2019 that's the like last update date and this one is actually a direct uh you know punch at gardenscapes where the game is even landscape you have the usual restoring environment formula where you need to

restore the candy L out out of the evil salt that's covering everything evil salt yeah wow you know it's against sugar so normal sure of course okay okay Prime enemy of sugar make all makes all the sense exactly and you even have the usual candy uh Guardian case formula there like if you repair something you have you get to choose out of three you know pretty similar equivalents and then you progress so so this didn't again fly off but and this is very similar to what they do on the on the like copying the competitor ads it's just like don't work yeah unfortunately but other than that there was nothing regarding their main account so these are the last titles Last Thing released on their account is Crash bandicot so that was released uh okay was the date sorry Global launch March 2021 year ago okay yeah so we consider these games the soft lunge one not really flying well and then we omit Can

U crash bandicot pretty much the most successful game lately is still the Fraga from 2017 yeah yeah I would be like oh that's a o but like yeah that's a o damn yeah but then we have this other thing which is called the snow print Studios that King uh but s is now yeah oh no no still part of their portfolio man really okay yeah yeah cuz now they're you know they took back their game the legends of Soul guard and uh rebooted it and it's actually making a kind of nice amount of money uh it's currently making something in vinity like 50k a month 50k a month yeah way way more okay at least when I checked it was way more uh maybe you checked it somewhere in December 2019 or okay that was like what like they milon were able to pump it up to like 700k a month okay but after that

they pretty much went down again so yeah let's me start with Studios uh snow print founded by Alexander ewal the former director of product at King in 2015 where we we are saying hi to Alexander because I know him so be careful on what you are going to say yeah so so they closed their 5.7 million fing ground in June uh 2015 if I get it right and yeah the uh investment round was made in exchange for nearly 20 29% of shares in the company valuing it almost at 20 million at the time and even there they were saying that the by Frost uh RPG was kind of delayed and this is the legend of Soul guard if I get that right so Legend of Soul guard was soft lunch in Two October 2017 it's an original Ip but actually it was Global launch in July 2018 um as regarding the game play um

curiously it is using the gaml of a really really old Heroes of M and Magic game from Ubisoft released in 2019 M and Magic Clash of Heroes where you have this kind of Puzzle Battle gameplay where you merge units before you attack and then the merge units attack on the battlefield uh by the way supercell has a kind of similar core gameplay in their soft lunch currently with cl Clash Quest Clash Quest so there there's a lot of tries on this genre but uh yeah as they release it uh you can clearly see pretty much the UA pump in the yeah in the downloads then it didn't really go well and then after the global launch they probably tried some kind of a new iteration or yeah they reworked the whole core basically and the and they were able to actually pump it up to like 700k a month but after that uh yeah the game's pretty much in still in Decline so as I said okay well they they have now like two new games so maybe they are

just focusing on that like rard and then there's the war Warhammer something yeah we'll get to that uh immediately just want to say that the yeah the soul guard thing was pretty interesting uh especially as he tried to kind of mitigate that premium Heroes game into the mobile thing I guess there's something behind it when even supercell is doing some kind of similar core gameplay currently but yeah this didn't really kind of took off so then we have the rengu guard game which is is uh maybe taking a little bit of something from Heroes formula again because you have this kind of turnbas combat RPG where we are using uh your units in the turnbas gameplay on the grid whereas you know some grid tiles have advantages or disadvantages based on your terrain uh and stuff like that so this was soft Lun in July 2019 and Global Lun in January 2021 and again the same scenario as Soul guard currently uh it it was able to pump the revenue to somewhere like 300K a month but then

again ended into the same vicinity of 50k a month currently so yeah unfortunately trying to be successful in RPG gen is really really hard so know that from my own is hard yeah that's that's how it is and the last in snow print portfolio is Warhammer 4K tacticus which soft launch in Octo oober last year and the last update was last April so I guess this is still going to be Global lunch at some point it is using the Warhammer IP and by looking at the game it seems It's using the reng guard core where the combat is pretty similar and the you know the whole formula seems pretty similar so I'm guessing they're either like improved on ravengard or just like use some of parts of that game there is is any like is the Warhammer fan base big enough to actually sustain like a really big Mobile gaming success cuz they have so many games out like

it's not like why everybody see right why everybody so excited about warham R Miniatures are so big like the physical products they're so big but not the mobile ones yeah because of course you would rather spend on real figurines that you need to paint you know that's that's what Warhammer is about yeah yeah so I don't know like the IP is pretty big like if you know the story this is the original Starcraft IP by the way that uh that no sorry that Starcraft wasn't allowed to use Warhammer IP so they created that own and that's how Starcraft was born I think that's the story so they were supposed to use rammer one but uh yeah last thing in the midcore attempt let's say is the nigh Hood game and this is the most interesting one of them all uh because it was s launch in July 2018 as an original Ip and then Global launch in February 20 20 it has really really interesting glue where it's the

action driven turn-based combat which yeah the the things I can't even I can't even say that I can't even say that properly but yeah those are pretty much opposites but uh to imagine it you pretty much use an ability and then during the usage of that ability there's a QuickTime event that you can use different abilities so there's the action but it's term based so you know the normal normal Loop there it's really really unique very stylish Graphics uh after they launch it again there you can see the easy UA pump a really really big one where the game was able to reach something like 1.7 million a month but then again it declined sharply with the unfortunate shark fin but the interesting unfortunate shark fin that's what happens no that's going to go that's going to go to the quote of the week in my newsletter unfortunate shark Fe but then the interesting part the interesting part is that uh this game

was taken by Phoenix games in uh June 2021 uh there's a studio I think currently by CLA carti uh which yeah yeah it's the new flare games and if you look at the numbers actually by the time there you see an increase in U activity and actual scale in Revenue going up so they took the game somewhere in something like 300K a month and now the game is doing 500k a month plus so that's nice yeah so that's that's that's the note that I was mentioning with uh like fresh new eyes on UA as M said that actually another company took the game and was able to you know scale it a little bit at least but yeah 500k man isn't a bad game of course it's like a really good result it took you only 50 minutes to go to this conclusion thank you very much oh my God all right yeah yeah but yeah

King pretty much sold the right so again another one of their kind of midcore attempts by the dust so we'll see what happens with the Warhammer game but yeah I'm guessing they really really want to diversify and they really really need to but probably they should go through m&a road but now that they yeah that's what I to ask they themselves are being m& by Microsoft I don't think so they will get to that you need to m&a your m&a bro yeah we an M do you have an m&a bro that's that's that's the thing yeah so any any questions on the portfolio or the games man it's just like when you have such a Jugger that is King like normally you'd be like oh yeah they failed their midcore attempts but like dude it's fine their games are much money that it's just like it's it's riging money like it's okay yeah it's okay it's okay but still uh wouldn't you be worried that you didn't launch a new

game in last four years or five years uh even in in the Candy Crush Universe I mean that's that's kind of worrisome yeah like if you compare it to the biggest competitor which I would say is plays on the sub gener plays kind of escaped this problem because they had the clone of Empires and puzzles that they did or they had a studio did for them on their account but they invested or acquired nexter which is an RPG yeah which is the big diversification they they have on top of King yeah yeah because they yeah this like puzzle um puzzle RPG they didn't continue right they killed it yeah yeah but hero was is killing it like I don't know how how many millions of course yeah I know I know I see their their ridiculous ads almost all the time all the time okay so what would be your suggestion to to King except the m&a I mean like hey guys like wake up um there's the usual kind of innovation depth that's being

increased every year as I like to say so yeah Innovation depth is my favorite yeah so maybe there's something cooking that we don't see that's not being soft lunch or you know that could be in the works maybe under the different account yeah or maybe even you know hidden soft Lun under different account even supercell did it last time so why not so I'm guessing they have something up their sleeve uh yeah I would definitely try to get something out of the puzzle genre because yeah you're trying to you already like tried to get over the tile Blaster genre that didn't go well you are the king of the classic match three genre already uh maybe you know starting to be king in a different genre is easier than trying to get in your you know those last bits of your own genre so yeah I guess just innovate and innovate I would say because you they have the money to do it like you know they can they can they can create three or four snow prints Studios that can innovate midore for them yeah of course or or buy buy one that's already done

buy I would say buy because even if they create a another Studio like snow print if they create it from their own employees it's just not going to work because they don't have the expertise it's just like yeah they don't have the expertise unfortunately that's you know that how it works yeah but that that's the same as let's say another example would be Voodoo for instance so Voodoo ALS also wanted to have like a casual studio in Berlin and still there's like not the game they the Casual studio and yeah they killed the game recently yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's it's like this kind of a diversifying thing is really hard for for like one one genre white Studios it's of course it's hard I mean the whole game development is hard yeah but that's uh that's why we all love it that's why we all yeah but easiest way out of this would be again acquire someone that that that is there but don't know if there's some someone in in in their like needed size on the Block currently cuz you would need something

in in like I don't know five 10 million a month that I don't I don't think so there is at least at least yeah yeah at least to be relevant in the portfolio yeah to be relevant yeah yeah you know like you don't you don't buy a company then uh you know then you see like okay so we need to teach them how to do things and not the the opposite that's what we wanted to do okay so this has been our longest episode ever I think so should we I think so thanks thanks yob yeah thanks uh now yeah I think I think yeah I think with with that in mind we discussed uh what they should do on the UA side on the on the monetization side and then uh also in terms of the game design and just mention again um you are doing such a great job and uh you definitely made our job really hard to find these uh you know chinks or in the armor so thank you very much for doing that and also thank

you very much guys for listening in and for subscribing so hit the Subscribe button now and uh until next time thank you very much bye-bye see you [Music]