two & a half gamers session #2 - UA & Creative trends 2022, Microsoft + ATVI, TOP10 gaming M&A

[Music] welcome everybody this is no gaming podcast gonna have gamers and this is a session two so we are discussing uh the latest views fun stuff and uh obviously dropping some knowledge this is a safe space for all of us and you as well so don't forget let's not take this too seriously because it's a 4 a.m conference discussion about gaming industry welcome let's dive in hey guys uh hey felix hey jakub hello there how was your week how was your week peachy oh i was having a nice troll in austrian mountains when suddenly my mobile exploded because of the biggest news of the year which can be topped still what happened you mean the biggest news me going to the mountains something like that the acquisition of course

oh well of course the news everyone's talking about we thought we had the biggest news of the year already last week but then uh this week uh which is yeah three weeks into this year uh activision microsoft has announced that will microsoft will acquire activision blizzard for 95 dollars per share in a all cash transaction valued at 68.7 billion and that's inclusive of activation blizzard's net cash so when this transaction closes microsoft will be the third biggest gaming company by revenue behind only 10 cent and sony so in this transaction uh franchises from activation blizzard king warcraft diablo overwatch call of duty candy crush will all belong to microsoft which everyone knows about in our industry but look let's discuss

you know i asked how was your week and then he just jumps right in into the news into the biggest news ever i'm excited to talk about it yeah i can see this is my week i open the refrigerator and i see activision please news but you know like let's put this in perspective if this transaction was the gdp of a country is just as big as bulgaria like it's it's massive you know what's what's the amazing thing that uh we called it last week we called it last week of felix so uh well too bad i didn't buy any any shares or any stock it's it's really interesting that it's an all-cash deal like i i like we had this saying in slovakia that like before we lived in the age of cash when like old people are blaming corruption and stuff but like really all cash of nearly 70 billion like oh everyone has a lot of a lot of money yeah just just to frame that the

second biggest activision which was the biggest for eight days the zynga one i think it was like forty percent stock of take two or something in that vicinity just to get the scale of this well i said this is this the zinger deal will be probably the the biggest of the year well fast forward seven days so not even seven days four days and then bam 68.7 billion okay guys do you think this forces like amazon to buy like ea as a counter buy because like amazon have made it clear that they want to get into gaming but they don't really have a foothold at all do you think we'll see in the next 12 months something from amazon buying one of these big ones to keep up maybe even take two like i don't know what everyone everyone is a target now yeah everybody's a target okay well i wasn't buying take two that would be a really nice surprise but i was thinking about it maybe well

amazon would buy the epic but probably would gain more from ea deal than buying epic um i think the biggest current biggest pressure is um or let's say the ball is on sony because their shares went pretty big deep there in a way that they are pretty much uh threatened by this i think even xbox was mentioning something like they will keep call of duty on playstation yeah but the sony ceo mentioned on the twitter or somewhere like yeah we are not working with uh activision blizzard anymore yeah but i'm talking more of like a financial perspective here okay not relationship one uh but yeah definitely like that this puts microsoft into i would say like a really really close to that metaverse thing that everybody is throwing around because in my head how i would imagine it like just just imagine stuff like ready player one or snow crash but i mean the

real one in the books not the movie where you pretty much have all the eyepiece under one blanket so it's really easy to do that kind of stuff and this kind of puts them really close to that matter because they have the whole pc infrastructure they have the whole cloud infrastructure now they're like just rounding out eyepiece from left to right and those are really big because xbox was always behind by station on the console space and like playstation always overruled xbox in the in the releases now i think next console cycle generation this can be the other way around but how is this closer to the metaverse they still can't see it because you have the access to all these ips okay and you connect okay into one umbrella so it means that finally one of those autopistic ideas that your item in one game can be transferred just imagine that like same system pretty much works already in battle net

where you would have like cross promo stuff so instance for instance you would have pets in diablo that are connected the world of warcraft and stuff around that and it's pretty easy to do because all those games are under one umbrella so imagine you just increase this sheer amount of games that are pretty much in that one family so it means that if let's say microsoft buys everyone in the gaming space then it's pretty easy they are the metaverse period yeah okay but still how can you use any candy crush items in diablo or in work world of warcraft or whatever i mean let's not get into detail yet ah there's no but i think about it if you actually like know you can do that you can actually start planning around it like everything is bought now in bits and bobs all over the place but if you know that you're going to be selling it as a unified thing and 10 years ahead you can start planning for it yeah like as i said like the closest references would be either ready player 1 or snow crash where you

can see how those worlds at least and the book work and i think it was pretty good already it doesn't need to be like don't think about it in a way that let's say this sword from diablo can be used in starcraft it doesn't needs to be like that it's more of a i would say the other way around that the sword from starcraft the sword from diablo and the i don't know boogie from starcraft can be used in the third world or the one that's the one that's universal okay okay well maybe we'll see we'll see so so also in the future so also like on this topic uh the benefits of starting off my career in finances is that i still have some friends in uh now i guess high places nice so i actually spoke to one of my friends who he works in an m a department in a big london bank on the entertainment desk which covers gaming he wasn't directly involved with this deal but he's read like all the fine prints in the deal and basically he said that the most interesting thing that they're discussing on his desk as a

result of this is there's a three billion dollar breakup fee that has to be paid by activision if this deal falls through so when you have deals like this it's completely normal to have this breakup clause but usually the person who's acquiring the company has to pay the fee so 95 percent of cases activision shouldn't be paying 3 billion if they don't go through with this deal which basically my friend says means that the balance of power during this negotiation was completely in microsoft's hands that they could extract this basically so he said basically that this is blizzard who wants to get sold and game theory speaking and what they're kind of discussing is the only two reasons they think why blizzard wants to be sold now is that either a they're expecting like a massive sexual harassment lawsuit to be like tied up and paid off which he thinks is like the more likely thing or because of an anti-trust issue which he thinks is less likely so basically

what we talked about with bunker bobby and his merry band executives last week i think this is 100 true and even further so basically uh bunker bobby our friend his shares are worth 385 million dollars and his golden parachute had been decreased to 293 million dollars which from the 300 yeah exactly so basically this is a lot lower than usually you get from a deal like this it's still a lot of money but you know if you're transacting bulgaria's gdp that's not that high so basically what his theory is is that basically kotek is out when the transaction closes and basically he'll take a windfall of 678 million dollars which is small for this size basically took a haircut because they think that in the coming weeks there's going to be announced that basically activation blizzard is going to pay a big big fat like lawsuit to tie up all

the loose ends with all the sexual harassment so that's what that was like like the immediate thing like how this thing went through in a way that activision stock went down because of all the like recent things and my prediction that they will be the loser of this year that still can go through even though they were required uh not sure man because that's what i heard and i think it makes quite quite a bit of sense that the premium is like what like 45 or something like that but if if you uh put it into the context that they stock lost like half of their value in the last half a year it's not that big of a premium so it was pretty much an opening for anyone else to grab them well that's what we discussed i mean uh all the all the issues they they had last year this was like yeah well let's grab them for uh well not a small amount of money obviously 68 billion is not small but it couldn't be more

like where do you think the negotiation actually started then like when the lawsuit started immediately after that i think basically these sexual harassment things have been bubbling like you read about 2018 yeah they've been piling on and i bet you like there's a big payout coming and then when they realize that that's when they're like yeah we should get sold because like say what you want a bum bug or bobby but he's he's a good businessman like you know maybe not the best game maker but he's a businessman he's going to extract the most value out of a company because that's the kind of leader he is that's what business banks do that's what businessmen do of course but you know uh it's still uh it will be really interesting like how overall like let's not not take into account the acquisition itself but just the future of these franchises and the whole company how it will move forward because i think there's also many challenges even even though we just let's say let's presume that all of the harassment scandals and

everything the transitions go smoothly what do they do in their portfolio their roadmap and like the current changing environment of mobile games or like the game market itself that they pretty much don't have an answer currently to the current setup like i don't see those games making like blizzard only i'm talking of course not activision not king i think those companies are in much more solid state than than blizzard currently is after all the brain drain yeah well diablo 4 is is going to be uh released by like 2040 yeah by the time xl2 already has a foothold in the action rpg genre oh well you are the path of exile fans so you know obviously you say that what do you what do we think like the the only thing that stands in the way of this deal i guess is antitrust like i read some article that they're actually changing the anti-trust rules like now so maybe this can still like end up there

let's see right but if you look at the number one and number two sony and tencent like american anti-trust regulators they protect americans but wouldn't they have an interest to have the third biggest gaming company in the world be american like currently i had to say like this is uh out of my knowledge leak completely oh no way no way mister i know everything hey i can't believe we found something remote does not know hey okay uh i need to make a note i need to make a note but uh speaking of the of the biggest deals in the history which definitely this is the the one so we discussed last week the number two which is uh zinga tech two but we have what eight more uh in the top 10 gaming acquisition so on the third place there is the supercell tencent deal then we have zenimax microsoft and king activision obviously politica to china let's indicate well i

was trying to find more information about the same thing that's the chinese one is it it's like gambling it's a casino conglomerate like okay okay and then we have uh four more so there is moonton to buy dance asmody to embrace her that was a very recent board game company yeah board game company very recent i loved the dof uh commentary on it it was really really interesting and then uh what else it's more young to microsoft than glue to ea okay so that's top 10 gaming uh acquisitions yeah those are like all pretty much like famous games if people don't ring a bell zany max is pretty much bethesda with the eldest girls thing and mojang is minecraft yeah okay not true true true but yeah these are the mobile legends bang bang the league of legends clown from china yeah but this thing is like when glue was uh acquired by yay everybody saw uh spoke

about wow there's 2.4 billion wow and then since then it's just couldn't be based on the food chain yeah increasing every year you know not the year every week now very weak and again like this reminds me a football player market i mean uh when christian ronaldo was sold to uh to real moderate for i don't know like what 200 100 uh million euros or dollars it was like a really big amount of money but then uh i think neymar was sold for 250 million now it's uh well it's a very similar thing here in gaming yeah all right about inflation i'm i'm just gonna practice what i preach this time and right after this call i'm gonna buy some ea stock oh there you go yeah my most probably yeah by the way do we assume that this the theory that we're gonna end up like with five companies all around in the industry is gonna

happen now because if we assume that like amazon buys ea whoever's next buys play rigs and like all these other juggernauts that means what like we're the scouting does three stage it's kind of a normal cycle of an industry right consolidation and then innovation starts happening somewhere else and when it's consolidated innovation kind of stops but everybody is talking about consolidation for like five years i mean obviously it's happening but then what then uh tencent buys uh someone else playerx i don't think so tencent will have so some so easy time buying someone else because regulations will definitely oh yeah okay okay okay okay so who buys player x like we were talking about yeah but who who buys players there's this massive company that's just sitting there maybe a russian player you don't know about like you know could be something like gross left or whatever like big big russian company that pretty much takes him under then we get enters the gaming space okay

could be like i remember if you remember the talking dome acquisition it was a chinese yeah chemical company yeah yeah yeah yeah like for one billion or something like that it could still happen like that could be oh we'll see we'll see but it's definitely happening now is uh is a turkish industry or space is booming well it's booming for some time with all the all the acquisitions there with ruby games by rovio and stuff like that but now what we saw uh was basically dream games the the game developer behind the hit game royal match he's enhancing series c million with the valuation of 2.75 billion i mean the news comes just six months after they raised 155 million at one billion valuations so wow i mean the game is performing really

well so i can i can see why is this happening and this series is being led by the index ventures with makers fund as well ivp funds and accounts managed by blackrock cora and uh baderton capital also participating so this is this is nice and uh they also said that the funding will be used for both to continue the investing in and developing the real match game and to work on the next game launch which is expected later this year so i mean they launched the royal match what like last year and since then it's it's just growing like crazy guys this is a complete party round i love it like i'm just how much does it cost to develop a new mobile game and then you look at that and you see that pretty soon google facebook maybe tick tock will have 240 million like most of that money is gonna go into ua like yeah yeah definitely yeah of course of course of course it's it's gonna be there

but look the royal match is super super polished i mean that's that's a really really good game really good game and i was reading the the the interview with the ceo i think or the founder and uh definitely really really smart guy and uh he knows that scaling of the game well all depends on the on the actual ltv so uh he said that their ltv is really high so they can afford to to spend a lot of money so keep in mind that's this yeah this is this is pretty much like the third time for these guys to launch a successful blaster uh match three game match two games yeah because they they are the original creators of toys and two mothers pretty much the masters of click to plus genre yeah they exactly they they have the knowledge they and they have to know what they are in their heads at least and they they definitely know what they're doing from a design perspective like what do you think they've really nailed like can you point to one or two things really level design like these games are pretty much run on the level design and you

need to know how to optimize the funnel on the level design and i even personally was uh once doing a match three game that like was an unforgettable experience but how did it go yeah i didn't have to say like no it failed of course i just have to say like these things are pretty much in the territory of like dark magic uh like really like some things you learn and i think this is also why like why are they so successful that some things and some knowledge you only learn and if you get to these really high numbers that you have a game that's making like 15 to 20 million a month then you know the run rates of ua did you know the roast curves that you know the difficulty curves the funnels the churns and you pretty much a b test all the important levels so this is something that you know you don't learn on your usual free-to-play mobile gaming website every day yeah of course i mean you need to you need to work on these games and you know the the other other really good thing in uh what happened last week uh in in turkey as well is well the spike games uh which is another istanbul

game startup announced 55 million seed round i mean i work with these guys and they are super super talented both um you know both both companies were founded by the people who were like you said either founders or senior members of the team of big games so they are know what they are doing so basically guys uh congrats to to meet haderina and remy you're amazing keep it up and and this is just an amazing news for the for the turkish industry scene or the the turkish uh scene in uh in gaming but it's really good especially in the current context of like the volatility in uh turkish uh currency that's still like so big of investments are still pouring into istanbul even though people are like i was speaking to some of my friends in turkey they are kind of worried a lot about like what's gonna happen with the currency because the policy there isn't really sound or at least let's say uh but yeah mobile games pretty much

preserve so that's that's like you know covet proof and economy proof well of course don't you guys get the feeling as well that like a major just similarity to helsinki and the gaming scene in finland how that started blowing up because they had one successful really big exit and basically the people from that company went on to make their own companies and then it just blows up like six years later it's exactly finland all over again it's really cool to see of course and that's that's what happened that what's what's happening to blizzard as well that's what he's got come on it's like this is uh yeah like big games was acquired by zinga and now um senior guys left basically after all the journals and everything and now starting their own companies that's that's what yeah i think i think the big biggest difference here is that uh like these kind of lottery tickets that all the people that left a peak and they started their own ones so will come to fruition much sooner than people that are leaving blizzard because yeah those are usually pc games or pretty

much hardcore games console games oriented so those takes much longer to develop so uh if pixel federation gets sold for a billion you know this will be bratislava in four years yeah of course that yeah well i don't see that happening but uh we wish we definitely wish we'll see what happens uh well in slovakia let's see let's see let's see uh but um yeah okay so uh tweeter enhanced nft profile pictures so uh i think now remo you can change your uh profile picture on twitter but yeah you need to just create a profile on twitter first and you need to you have the twitter twitter blue subscription yeah yeah okay yeah that's true that's true but yeah they they announced um already the crypto wallet support back in september but now i think yesterday they rolled out these um nft avatars for members of the twitter blue subscription

service and uh and it was all over the linkedin everybody was like yeah this is amazing hey ling dean uh do you see you you are next you should definitely you should definitely do this as well so uh well again a week without an nft a news wouldn't be a week i guess everything is uh is happening around us at the moment around uh blockchain nfts i don't see like i was missing the like when this news kind of hit i was missing the big numbers like did anyone already sold some ludicrous number nft avatar already or just like we're getting into this but what would you like why would you want to sell whatever with nft this is just like you can use the the nft as an avatar which i think you could do anyway but because like i can use your avatar if i screenshot your jpeg yeah you don't know oh but yeah this is uh yeah but if you

look at like crypto punks or the board board apes guys like those are again pictures but value that i don't know 300k yeah the big ones but this is completely unrelated to the to the twitter pic picture yeah so i think it's a cool step in the right direction it's yeah it's i think it's a cool step in the direction nobody knows nothing about [Music] yeah honestly like honestly this is the first new thing i see twitter do in about five or seven years so i'm all for it if they're going to start working on their platform and maybe did the ceo like uh leave or like was supposed to leave dorsey yeah yeah yeah i know what happens yeah but the twitter is uh you know the social media nobody was using for last but three years i think five years maybe now with the crypto happening everybody's there so i guess it's actually the social media platform for every uh nft blockchain games with web3

discussions around out of all the users that you get for different mobile games like mache uh like how many of them come from twitter do you ever use it performance well okay so i tried to either a couple of times but without any success and uh the only success i had was for apps not games that much and i know i've i've seen a lot of like twitter ads examples but i still don't see it as a good performing channel that's for me i mean never had a good experience maybe someone else uh can actually say uh some something else about twitter but not me but uh well on twitter we can stay on twitter actually uh because uh for example serena williams she she changed her profile picture on twitter uh to some nft i don't think i don't know if it was a crypto punk or

the board ape and she had a gm post obviously which is a an amazing post in the in the crypto um space and uh serena williams now joins so so rare as a board advisor and she will provide the guidance to the board on the range of topics including developing the sorers relationships with athletes around the world advising them on strategies how to expand into new sports categories including women sports as as well as future impacts initiative for making web 3 more inclusive and diverse so uh i mean this was a really well let's say interesting announcement this is the second biggest name in with the crypto investments sorry well who's the first one porter oh yeah okay okay i think so the guy sitting right next to you yeah okay feelings

he knows he knows a bit more but yeah i mean this i will be definitely uh trying to see what what happens with serena and uh the new athletes because so solaria they have the football mainly uh the current games and uh i mean now with the tennis maybe and uh the other sports as well opening up a pretty pretty nice new target audience basically i mean this such a stamp of approval is a business slam dunk like same thing when better up got prince harry as their chief impact officer is just like i've been in sales and stuff like that before like imagine this trump card you can always use if you ever have a call you bring up this person even bring him along it's like it's just a home run for the company um sounds to me like the terrano story if you know that one i think the movie will be coming soon i have no idea what you're talking about i think this sounds like tara knows me

oh no just just being skeptical a little bit as usual of course of course i wouldn't expect yeah but it's good promotion like of course like step into right direction like just compare it with let's say nordius having uh yeah mourinho yeah as as their main main guy on the icon all the time pretty much so yeah it definitely paid off before so i guess so we are talking about like expanding these uh blockchain games into the new um audiences this is one way i mean it's probably not gaming audience but still oh you have no access pretty much to serena twitter account and instagram yeah exactly her social networks pretty much as she's pumping the whatever they these guys come up with gm guys yeah yeah there you go i know i'm just a bit curious so like in the last year we've had like kate upton she's done machine zone ads chloe kardashian has done coinmaster uh arnold schwarzenegger did that mobile strike

super bowl ad much more of those even exactly but i'm just wondering like do they work aren't you like well defined work i mean define work for coinmaster jlo terry cruz kardashians that definitely worked i mean they racked up what like 186 million downloads in what seven months like organic downloads or is that like downloads from actual programmatic ads that they've actually paid for and the click-through rate and the install rate is just higher or well it was uh i think it was mainly uh the overall number so i couldn't say if it's organic or ua but you could clearly see as soon as they started doing this the the installs like went up from 2 million to 14 millions a month i think uh yeah something something around that and they increased the revenue as well like from what like 20 30 million a month to 70 and uh in one january i think last year it was actually 85 million a month

i guess it definitely works i mean uh the question is what's your margin at the end exactly yeah that's what i wanted to add like we don't know the margin i mean uh they started spending a lot these deals definitely weren't cheap but i guess it was worth it now they started with spice girls in december love it definitely love it but we do with machine zone and the mobile strike and the arnold schwarzenegger we well you know that as soon as they stopped work and stopped marketing the the game basically died yeah like that that's like specific example of a game just being propped up by ua but i think there was also like ryan reynolds one for peak games that was kind of cool hilarious i mean he's so old now

so so basically like you need to be one of these really mega big market cap companies to actually for it to make sense do you think it's also a bit of founder vanity that basically they also want to say that blah blah famous actor is our i have nice pictures what was it like actually i i think i saw great shadow legends with jeff goldblum or something like that yeah yeah yeah that was the last one they even have like a small like how how they were making it i i still think like it works in a way that the actor brings their own kind of social network into the play that you know he proves the credibility with him so why would he be doing that but again the question is of course the margin because one thing is that you calculate the downloads on the ua with the ad but you also need to take into account the actor's uh fee which i think

yeah but then you have the multiplayer for for all the social media handles and everything instagram uh followers and whatever so this is like if uh the jlo for example i don't know uh how many followers she has because if you compare millions again the reason won the supercell squid game one for brawlstars yeah oh well i i don't think so it didn't dance to the revenue at all yeah in terms of revenue not so much in terms of downloads definitely yes i mean uh they spiked pretty rapidly from uh i think later on like fif position or rank 50 and then they climbed into like rank three or four immediately after the the squid game video was uh launched i mean it was a very well made video they they paid a lot three mil or something like that just to make the video of course but you know how supercell uh does the marketing yeah it's completely different especially in brand marketing

it's a different kind brand marketing come on let's yeah let's not go there let's not go there please because brand marketing in games there is no such thing there's no such thing as brand marketing and games it's completely come on ugh we hit the sources jump out of the window come on yeah let's let's move on to the google okay cool next news google launches beat up for android games on windows pc um i think this is inevitable uh as i think it's around 400 million uh users that bluestacks emulator claims that they have and there's like a slew of other emulators behind it uh in in size so i guess in the end we are getting closer and closer to our cross platform future where it pretty much won't matter on which device you're playing what and it will be pretty much native and

uh yeah google clearly wants to cut out of like all of these other um people that's taking the basket because the emulators are they're good but it's not as it's supposed to be i think out of the box still it's kind of you need to be a little bit tech savvy even to just enable the virtualization in your processor and stuff like that it doesn't work out of the box you get stuck a lot of times so also not every game is uh yeah yeah supporting that yeah sometimes it takes a flip of a coin if it works or not so yeah play any any supercell a soft launch game because of this yes but it's it's another ui channel of course it's another channel but don't you think like the google play games as they will be available on pc that's gonna be again a placement in uh inside the google eyes as well i mean it's the same thing it's just going to be they just they don't take the cut yeah yeah exactly yeah that's what i would say there's going to be uh another revenue stream for them as well google being

google oh yeah of course how long you'd be really interesting interesting like how uh how they're approaching the the the launch or the beta so it's in hong kong south korea and taiwan so let's see it's only about three games mobile legends summoner's war 104 state of survival and three kingdoms tactics the interesting thing that this brings to the table that now there will be much less of a friction for people to use their keyboards to fight against their friends which don't have that luxury this is this is especially seen in fps genre like really if you play fortnite on like a keyboard it's much different than the typical mobile experience of fortnite yeah yeah by the way we didn't talk about this last week but um nvidia announced uh oh yeah young fortnight fortnight on ios by the way just as a

cloud something which was definitely interesting no it's there it's their streaming uh cloud streaming services and it's it's they just announced that fordham is going into it which means that it's available that the streaming service is available on ios which means that it kind of circumvents the whole yeah yeah exactly nvidia playing a really high stakes here love it yeah well you know uh if you are fighting apple then you will find a way how to um how to circumvent their rules if you want easy okay last one from the short ones uh roblox has put up a block explaining their outage that happened in october pretty much a lot of technical mambo but the baseline out of that is that it went out for 73 hours which is pretty big considering that this is not a single game this is pretty much the whole platform that have now companies

building games only solely for this platform getting out for three days straight more than three days actually so yeah pretty interesting news i think roblox stock is uh going down a lot from november peak like pretty much 50 percent don't know what's happening there but uh yeah what do you mean you don't know what's happening there like uh all the scandals around uh the controversy yeah yeah that's on top of that of course so you just well you pretty much know you you've been following this uh scandal so don't worry i will definitely talk about this uh sometimes in the future i'm sure i'm pretty sure yeah but it's interesting development that that uh like you know all the metaverse stuff floating around and everything but yeah imagine your metaverse is now offline for five years and you're dependent on that but guys like bottom line is like roblox is a publicly listed company it shouldn't be out for 73 hours and compare this to like the founders like the founders of pirate bay had a really funny post a couple like half a year ago

it wasn't about roblox it was about someone else and basically it had an outlet for about the same time and they're like we bought an oil platform in international waters to keep our servers live and they kept it live for years and years and years and basically the summary of this post was that people today are such sissies and they don't really know how to like work really hard and actually keep stuff up well there you go yes the video said like roblox was worth what like seven ubisofts [Laughter] yeah i would buy all oil platform i just keep my servers up definitely like for the oil platform then yeah uh okay so that's uh i guess that's news um every week there is uh something new happening and it's really sometimes really funny sometimes really big as a as a m a of uh activision blizzard

and uh and now i would say it's time for uh for you and creative trends uh for this year so it's not only about fun but it's actually about uh us sharing some some knowledge of uh what we saw uh maybe last year what we see coming this year because i i am i mentioned last last week that i'm publishing some predictions uh with upslayer so only one went live which was obviously about the web 3 and the blockchain games so i'm not going to talk about this here but i want to just mention a couple of things uh so basically main trend for the for the ua uh that i'm seeing right now um is the ui divers ui come on what the how ui ua okay so the main thing for the 2022 is the is the ua uh diversification

so you know having facebook or or google or only one ui channel is pretty dangerous these days and in the times when i could use facebook and spend uh 1 million a month and and say this is the only uhl i'm using because it's working pretty well those times are gone basically so the uh channel mix uh needs to be diversified this year and uh and obviously my ua go to channel still is and will be facebook even though the quality decreased heavily in the 2021 and it's still increasing even uh even this year so if you remember the q5 which is the fifth quarter which is a phrase uh invented but by facebook and it's happening after christmas basically since 25th of december until 14 of january when the the e-commerce and brands

stopped spending and you see a quite a decrease in terms of the cpms on facebook so this year didn't happen it didn't happen at all uh the cpis are cps are still like really high cpms didn't decrease at all maybe like 10 ish so uh it's really really tough um and challenging on facebook so that's why i'm definitely pushing almost all the companies i work work with uh to spend more uh on the on the different ui channels uh let's speak about like some of those so i'm using definitely google ads and i was definitely a couple of years ago speaking about google ads well not really positively let's say that way but the the platform definitely evolved and uh and google ads right now it's the best performing channel out there at least for me on most games but won't this slide but won't this get worse when google rolls their version of idfa in

well let's see i mean if if and uh i would expect this to happen this year no no not really and even even if if that happens i mean i can run pretty uh good performing campaigns on ios even without idfas there there will be ways there will be always ways how to scale and grow your way in different ways that's that's it basically and it's still on the android 12 it's the lat version so limited ads tracking and not not no idea phase yet so so let's uh let's not jump uh ahead of time just yet but uh we mentioned last week uh i mentioned last week the the biggest winner of the last year would be unity in terms of the ua so definitely running unity as soon as you can uh paired with the google uic or well google ads and maybe tick tock these days and and snapchat as well uh would be a pretty good start and uh yeah well definitely

diversifying your u8 portfolio for 2022 that's the main topic that's that's something that i will be doing can you talk a bit more about tik tok so i'm quite curious to learn like you know we have a billion users now like yeah that's a billion users how is it for mobile gaming well for now well it's uh it's definitely completely different than than facebook uh in terms of the creatives and the in terms of the content that's uh that's out there on the platform what i'm seeing at the moment is uh way lower cpi's than on facebook but that was the case for almost eternity i mean since uh tiktok was was out there running ads so it was always like this but uh definitely the platform evolved um very close to to facebook because you can target a lot of interests and even look likes and then even optimization as well so uh in this like targeting possibilities is very similar but the creative it definitely needs to be very different so using a real people shorter creatives

and what needs to be done there quite uh frequently is the creative refresh so uh you need to re rotate those creatives like on a weekly basis and like add two three four new creatives a week which is a lot of overhead so you need a lot of resources to run around it profitably but that's that's where we are at the moment definitely i'm looking forward so yeah um yeah so that that's it for the for the ua diversification on uh as something as a main trend at least for me then i definitely see and if i say definitely one more time i will kill myself so uh it's like felix was saying basically like million times when he was five times okay i was speaking about the i even wrote myself a note no fillers oh okay it didn't work didn't work maybe

next time maybe next week next time maybe next time so okay okay uh back to the the knowledge knowledge bombs what i see this year happening in terms of creatives is the the hyper casual like creatives and um you know everybody was uh talking about the personal light creatives which is a trend i mean that was a trend a couple of years ago and now suddenly everybody was speaking about it because of the idea phase oh yeah sure okay obviously but um for me um there is definitely a definitely again so uh so i would be focusing on something else so uh adapting a hyper-casual game concepts to your game creatives which is really important if you if you take a look at the rankings and um around you and like in you top us you will see what top three top five only hyper casual uh games and if you can

take those concepts and adapt it to your game that's gonna broaden up your uh your audience way uh way more than using uh for example personas or motivations because it was here long time ago but if you if you remember for example the asmr videos on the youtube i mean that um that video led to to the game development of asmr slicing uh the hyper casual game by tricky tribe my friends from slovenia and uh and this asmr game was a hit in the u.s and and i i remember actually coinmaster started using this uh this concept as well like sliced in their coins and uh and it was uh it was really popular i mean it was before the uh the jlo creatives but this is something that is also happening for war path polarix is now

going into this and i'm using i was using this um for for games managers well i mean for uh battle legion remo we we did this uh with crowd city so the mass battles is basically a a hyper casual game i mean it's a it's a crowd city but in the in the beta legion theme that's it i used tangle master for for idle panzer and an asmr slicing for cooking voyage which was like slicing a tomato that was working really well it's really really nice and easy concept you can now you can create for your game and decrease the cpi's quite heavily like on my end i'm seeing games actually implement the hyper casual ones into like short loop events like if you let's say take township township currently has like an event that's pretty much one to one helix jump in there yeah like there you go ftue why not i mean we we saw uh what was the name of the game i'm not sure but they

had really fake creatives they implemented it into the screenshots but actually even before the the tutorial so you saw the fake creative then you saw it in the store as well and then they uh they they implemented it before the tutorial so you you had to play the fake uh i mean the hero world and then you got which one hero wars not the hero wars but the the other the other one i'm yeah i can't remember the game but by the way prediction about the fake ads is anything you can't read them this year now you can see the royal match which is um not using fake ads that much but it's fake it's still on the board yeah it's fake i mean it's it's a combination of uh still you can see the match free there uh element but combined with uh with the fake uh situation but it's not it's not gameplay it's a situation that uh you know the king is going into it he needs to go to

toilet and obviously can't and stuff like that he almost freeze uh so you know it's all the all the situation that is happening but you know right now i see also top war the march strategy game leveraging this these game cons these hyper-casual game concepts as well but at least opportune game in itself but they are not using the merge in the creative that's the thing they're using completely different concepts but yeah well it's definitely uh a trend that i'm seeing but yeah i'm really really curious how the whole bad three uh whatever metaverse next best thing since brett we will do with the fake ads problem that users are pretty much you need to bring them somehow through marketing and here marketing is all about data which is the the best one wins doesn't matter if it's completely fake or the gameplay doesn't mean anything to the actual product

yeah well gaming companies will do everything to decrease the cpi's there you go i mean i don't care yeah i think the biggest trend for me in the last six months of the most ads i've blocked on the 20 games that i currently manage is always around violence against a pregnant woman yeah that's been the biggest trend and i don't know like everyone complains about it and like yeah i guess it's just about outrage like that's the main topic i see with like a lot of these creatives the more outrageous you get the more downloads for the lower your cpi gets and the more time i have to spend blocking apps yeah that's the thing if you use these kind of um creatives on facebook you will get a lot of comments and emojis and reactions and um it's like more comments or these type of things uh you get the better quality score you will get in terms of the auction on facebook even though it's like a hate comment

yeah that's the whole problem with the latest facebook controversy like the algorithm is pretty much uh you know giving support polarizing content that the more polarized you get the better the engagement is yeah yeah yeah of course but i mean um like violent uh it's uh with pregnant woman it's probably not uh not the best uh practice even even though even though the numbers show something different and comments probably but well you know um you will do everything you can to decrease the cpi's but i wouldn't go as far as as this but you know hard to tell how to tell where's the line and uh and uh one other thing that i i think it's uh it's going to be really popular these days oh well not only the these but podcasts are really popular that's why we are here of course

and that's why we started also uh you know one uh slovakian podcast as well but so why why i'm speaking about this so you know have you heard any game related ads in in these podcasts or in games in general i mean i haven't but one survey in 2020 revealed that mobile gamers would prefer actually audio ads over any other form of in-game advertising in mobile games so these days we see only the traditional ads in the in the games like banners well um i mean visual based ones visual based ones but not banners but uh interstitials and videos and playables so i'm sure people will say that yes we prefer audio ads over other formats yeah like advertising yeah about 60 of those have mute on their phone yeah i did i did a look over all the games that i'm

currently doing and it's like 75 of people have like volume like muted so yeah of course yeah in look but it would be great you know you you you like get the ad you don't even need to listen to it and then you get the in-game reward so i guess that's the answer slightly yeah i think it's slightly different uh than that but uh you know audio audio ads can be played while you play the game and don't interrupt your gaming experience so i mean it's mainly now um focus on hyper casual games let's see how it evolves over time you see already a rise of companies focusing on this topic everything looks like everything looks good on the paper as you said like 75 percent of players mute on their games but i think this year we can actually see um a pretty big growth in this space you know there is audio mob and audio as a company is in uh in this space let's uh let's watch it closely i mean i

mean i've spoken to both of them and i left both meetings feeling like yeah i want to try this however i also felt like the main differentiator you need to do to be successful with this which is why hyper casual is doing it now is you need to design it around the audio ads just like you design it around rewarded ads and i think yeah but the real thing to watch like when it's fully adopted is like whenever there's a mediation for audio ads that's when you know it's become a thing okay isn't there like the like really big problem with friction like how do you actually get the funnel there so you listen to the ad and then you need to yourself remember and so we'll willingly go to the store and download the no no no it's not like that so that they're basically there was different formats i believe both companies had two or three different formats and i think the one that made the most sense that i thought was cool was like audio ad that plays and then at the top or in some point in the corner there's still a little little tiny like banner you get the link yeah yeah i could get the links from mcdonald's his little tiny logo and it was like x times x like

centimeters that was small and then you click on that for like the conversion yeah well why not yeah let's see yeah i mean i i love to try it and definitely think it could be a thing but let's see if people turn on their um you need to give someone like users the incentive to turn on the volume so yeah yeah perfect to give in-game currency or whatever so makes sense in theory i would love to see that it's on paper exactly looks really cool um so much stuff makes sense on paper oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well um that remo so from a game designs perspective why do you think this doesn't sound good in practice because guys always think about players maximizing their you know their revenue which is the fun like how they can cheese through this like how do you build the rules to to

to stop the cheesing pretty much like it's it's always even normal ingame ads has to do stuff around the day you're pretty much giving away part of your economy so you need to set up timers you need to set up stuff that these systems aren't abused and like that's number one thing and also this goes directly into ecpm if everybody is just watching the ads never clicking like you you get gdcpm that's normal so how do you you know deal with these issues without the os and these kind of questions just started popping in my head and if i don't see immediately like really clear solutions of course they can be done but i'm the skeptic one as usual but you never you never see this you never saw this in practice i mean you never saw any any numbers according to i mean connection i need to see the numbers you just need to see the use case and like tell me like how do you design it in a way that you on first point you force the user to listen to the actual ad and then he even knows like where like give him the reward and he clicks there no i have a game that they sent me as

like the trial game they say is perfectly implemented i'm going to send you that link and you're going to play it for next week sure yeah we can yeah we can we can discuss that yeah we can discuss that later on amazing on that note i guess i guess that's it for this week uh thank you very much guys for the session number two and uh and guys please share feedback subscribe rate give us a review we definitely appreciate it and see you next week thank you guys bye see ya