two & a half gamers session #25 - Does Ubisoft give a F! about mobile games? GD, UA & Admon analysis

[Music] let's go hello everybody this is no gaming podcast have gamer session 25 this week we continue with our mobile gaming company happy hour where we do a deep dive on the mobile gaming company from the perspective of game design UA and AD monetization still let's not forget this is 4 a.m. conference discussion Vibe let's not be too serious about everything but we would like to thank you for subscribing because we are growing we are growing and today we have Felix yakob and myself mate talking about your favorite topic deconstructing or analyzing the companies yeah no today what no nicknames today no Nick's name no no we no no no no Nick Nam this is serious

this a serious business no nicknames Let's Get Serious then let's yeah well all right we'll see we'll see because we are talking about Ubisoft today so let's see if it's it's going to be super serious or not very super serious so if you're rejoining us uh how we do this is I just give a little brief introduction here before we go into the various parts of yeah admon UA and game design but let's look at the numbers here on Ubisoft as a whole so Ubisoft as you all know is a French company uh which is reflected quite clearly in their 2021 annual financial statement the cover page that you're greeted with has two playable characters that look down on you in a sheer look of superiority Ubisoft was founded by evees gimo uh who leads the company as its CEO and he's also the largest shareholder with 18% stake in Ubisoft which is quite

interesting that's quite High that's the old guard if I get that I don't think so there's any any company De size that that's like under the same setup yeah so some general information so 2021 annual revenue uh for Ubisoft was €2.1 billion EUR that's down slightly from 2020 where they posted a $2.2 billion a billion Euro revenue and Ubisoft is one of these companies that saw a tremend mendous covid bump as revenues in 2019 were only 1.5 billion EUR so they saw a 46% jump in 2020 market cap as of this recording is around 5.1 billion euros which gives them a very good price to earnings ratio fueling speculation that they're going to be a tasty snack for a bigger gaming company to gobble up and this kind of speculation on being gobbled up has only

been en hassed even further after Microsoft's Mega acquisition of Activision Blizzard which still didn't happen exactly but you can also see this like there's been large swings in their share price and that's usually due to people speculating on possible suitors so let's do some speculation of our own as well uh because we know we love doing that so much so who do we think is currently circling Ubisoft I'm going to pass it on to Remo for that cuz you know I think you have an opinion on this Mr Speculator Mr Speculator before speculating let's look at some hard facts uh down the line what has happened before so already Ubisoft was uh kind of Under Fire from vendi in this kind of a bit for hostile Takeover in 2018 and they were able to fend it off thanks to a partnership with tent which owns currently 5% stake of Ubisoft which

in the end leads us to the speculation part where 10cent could be the one taking it off the market so that's like possibility whereas they why because they have they have already 5% and then no they see their you know they see they definitely see their numbers they know what they're doing exactly that's why they have only 5% maybe that's but but think about it that uh lately all the valuations went pretty much down so this would be a fire cell so it's you know if 10 cent and everybody's trying to look in I mean from the mobile part into the console PC part now remember that for instance supercell set it up a PC only Studio recently yeah so it should be a good spearhead for tensent going into the west and trying to get into that PC console space where they would have pretty much like well established IP of Assassin's Creed and stuff like that so that would fit well uh and then regarding the latest articles about these rumors there's also these private

Equity firms like Blackstone and KKR so that's next in line on top of it do we have any other speculation I have one speculation but I just want to talk about it when uh I'm doing the UA part because all right all right all right one connection but if that connection turns out to be true then dude I'm going to be I don't know are you excited about speculation for the first time ever on this podcast I am seems do you have any do you have inside information no no it's just uh it will be most probably a big joke but still all right all right all right okay so back to this uh back to the like information about Ubisoft so interesting thing here the first line in the 2021 annual statement from Ubisoft is basically a list basically that says delivering on key strategic priorities and the first bullet point states building major franchises in 2021 to 202 2 ubisoft's three largest Brands each

generated well over 300 million EUR of net bookings and they are Assassin's Creed uh Far Cry and Rainbow 6 so what struck me here is that their key strategic overall goal is only netting them 13.6% of their overall revenue and a whole 63% of their overall Revenue came from back catalog net bookings so they're very dependent on Old titles breaking this down further 65% uh of the revenue in 2021 came from consoles uh 23% from PC and 8% came from mobile yeah so all their yeah all their mobile titles uh made in 2021 168 million EUR I mean it's not bad it's not bad it's not bad yeah it's not bad yeah yeah and I have to say that their end of year statement is only 16 Pages compared

to the other ones we've analyzed it's very short because it contains like a lot less information last thing to know also Ubisoft acquired a couple of studios in the last couple of years mobile Studios I should say uh 1492 green Panda games catchup in 2016 CBR and they also released their first party mobile titles so mobile is only mentioned once in their annual statement and it's like not in a paragraph or anything like that it's just mentioned once by word when they do the breakout so the key takeaway I have to say from reading this financial statement from my side isoft which means it is clear that no one at Ubisoft gives a about mobile or at least anyone in their sea level oh my god oh man your French is so amazing see

so with that great tea up uh I guess we're handing it over to uh was it you mat here or was it no let's yeah's start with the yeah this time yeah yeah always talks a lot and you know to everybody yeah I know I know but we want to keep everybody like you know entertained and interested still yeah so looking at the overall portfolio just the mobile one uh want to stress that out and of course the biggest titles because just by looking at like the store count of catchup there's literally hundreds of games yeah that are mainly like hyper casual ones so we won't go really deep on those ones but just by looking by iip Revenue that we can see but I'm guessing that there's a substantial amount of uh ad Revenue coming in if I get that right uh if these results are based on the 2021 which is 168 million what we see is that nearly 88 million of that is iip so therefore it seems it's around 50/50 if

we are counting it right so the thing that I will be talking about mainly goes from IPS but again feel free to like add something between 50 some games maybe 60 I would guess ID idle Miner tyon is even more ads than IP so let's see um by looking at the last year uh performance of the IP Revenue uh idle Miner Tycoon stands of course the strongest one making nearly quarter of the whole IP Revenue of the mobile division of the company on their account then comes mid magic Heroes era of chaos which is around 16% and then come the Hungry Shark world and surprisingly grotopia which even went over the Hungry Shark Evolution which was there before yeah I'll I'll I'll cover that okay it's okay because I I didn't see any any us spent going into this game at all and this game in my opinion is run completely by community and organic and it's just that one of

those like it will just live itself and makes money y yeah they have a lot of these so uh the in interesting fact of course as we are always kind of let's say looking forward to the company's kind of health of the portfolio uh the top three games here represents 51% of Ip income which is uh I think when we're looking at roio it is a little bit more healthy because they had like 75% in first three games uh I would say they're much more Diversified which is good the other problem of course is as usual all the games are pretty old the youngest one being the idle Miner Tycoon release in 2016 which is so the Hungry Shark world is uh what like more than 10 years old right no no no Hungary Shar world is 2015 this the newest one okay okay okay there there are like six iterations of that game already okay okay okay because I thought uh some of the creatives and um it was said like this is 10th anniversary so I guess uh yeah 10th

anniversary of the whole Hungary shark let's call it IP IP was someone's lying in a creative in a mobile creative that's never happened before I know right outrageous outrageous really anyway so yeah all of them are all all of those are unfortunately oh sorry sorry sorry no no no 2019 is the youngest one the M magic Heroes era of Cs that's the youngest one yeah okay from the old guard there's the idle minor that's 2016 um yeah so if you look uh to previous uh performances uh the revenue for I APS for 2020 is a little bit higher 110 million so I would guess that they are going a little bit on a decline here this year and if we look just for the first uh half of 2022 uh there's around 28 million uh just in IP Revenue so I'm guessing it's

kind of a like a constant decline of the both mobile and at at portf at Revenue uh the games there are are kind of the same still idle Miner Tycoon M magic Heroes era of chaos and then hungry Shar world and Hungry Shark Evolution ah there there's the older one that's 2013 one so they are still leading the pack there uh nothing else entering the pie chart here so my guess is that they are kind of either as Felix said not really interested into this or are not that even hungry for m&a targets for like a like mobile Studios ging kind of stuff there because a lot of these let's say bigger studios are definitely requiring already kind of games like like they did with kbri but since that they they didn't do anything else there um so we can look at some of the games that they have in soft lunch I was kind of kind of surprised that what they have there um so there's actually

two kind of core games that they have there there's this Clash of Beast tower defense game soft lung in January 2021 which is an original I is it still in soft launch okay oh yeah there's some there's some kind of a let's say a little bit higher numbers than usual for soft lunch game but there definitely not Global lunch numbers games okay well it's the thing is uh I'm I will jump in uh into this because because uh in terms of the of that game they are spending in in US Germany UK and other like tier one countries and they're spending heavily on on iOS especially these days which means I think even for soft Louch this is kind of unusual I know some of the companies like Rio soft Louch their games in us most probably never kind of like get that uh strategy but never mind still still there pretty yeah pretty big

amount of uh of countries happening in for that game so I might yeah I would say it's out of the soft launch already maybe it's out of the soft launch but doesn't seem so regarding the numbers that it's that big so yeah I mean sir I think they could launch the game in in January and now they're just like trying to to grow uh the game but the problem here and I I don't really understand like why they're doing this they're running a lot of um campaign on iOS on the merer magic hungry shark and Clash of Beast MH but no Android almost everywhere anywhere there's like this horse breeding game only on Android and nothing else so okay you can continue you can continue uh the interesting part of this game when I was looking into it it says it's a CL of Beast Tower Defense but if you look into it it's not really a tower defense like the typical one where would you you know build towers and stop lines of units that would go and take out to your health one by one it's actually modeled around that kind

of old game called War dragons from pocket gems that was really really really yeah I good in 2015 16 uh it it had this kind of really really strong breeding element where you would breed dragons build up your Fortress and you would have these kind of scripted passages that would you put Towers on and you would destroy other fortresses of other players so this is essentially what is happening also here where you would only pick up your hero with some kind of a abilities and then go through a scripted passage destroy the towers and then get to the enemy Fort so yeah they picked this kind of a really really old gameplay style and I think they're trying a little bit to iterate on it but didn't see that much iteration regarding that also didn't seen the breeding element of dragons that I guess in 2015 16 that really can fly through don't know what's now but yeah as said the numbers uh aren't really saying that this is big so maybe it will get bigger but yeah it's keep in

mind that it's already soft launch for more than a year or potentially Global launched my theory here is that people got so tired of dragons after the Game of Thrones Fiasco 100% what's happened so so I have this uh uh this back Channel information about the dragons and and the Ubisoft actually so how they yeah how they came up with uh the Hungry Shark IP so they ran a marketability test and tried to see which animal uh sharks versus dragons are going to yield better results and surprise surprise sharks won there you go yeah and I mean it makes a allot of sense because well dragons are super Niche so uh yeah dragons uh are not that popular in in that company oh well we'll see maybe now maybe now but yeah this is this is one one of the two games that are currently um yeah maybe not in soft lunch anymore but yeah let's see yeah and then there's this wild Arena survivors that's been

soft lunch in May 2022 so just very very recent and it's basically an isometric Battle Royale uh where they're claiming that they're you're going against 40 players uh seems to me like isometric fortnite just by looking at the screenshots literally same I look at the the creatives as well I was like what the is this fortnite yeah so I don't know I don't know who who is making these games my guess is those are done by external Studios not OB of kind of a core Studio or something like that because who can even call be called like you be so mobile Co to like cbri or catchup and I don't think so these guys are making these so possibly someone outside work for work for higher or maybe work for higher don't know but yeah will be interesting to see like uh I think I saw like few of these already these kind of isometric battle Royals like Badlands or I think future play has it and like some other games in the genre but they really didn't went so big and the competition is of course super

Fier they big but they still seems to be decent in terms of the the size and I mean future play is kind of profitable right so yeah why not so I guess that's all all the matters but but yeah let's see how this fars it seems super new and yeah the graphics and everything as I said like seems like a fortnite quality but the L yeah I looked at I looked at the the creatives they have and they had only like one which is super weird for this wild are in survivors I had in my part but it's like it looks like they don't know how to soft launch so guys soft Lune over here just ping me anytime but we've also discussed this several times right you know how clones always do better than the original game oh wait oh yeah yeah yeah of [Music] course you know but you know this is like this is the plus one the isometric view is the it is definit plus one but uh yeah but the IP seems kind of like I

don't know uh whoever kind of tries to be fortnite has the problem that fortnite isn't really an IP it's like a bunch of all the other IPS they can get into their Universe oh yeah and they're having you know Star Wars Marvel whatever each month so they aren't even they're like collection of ips yeah well I'm interested in hearing the the Growtopia game because it looks like uh it's uh well really fun let's start there let's go from the oldest one so moving that next from the games in soft lunch into games that are kind of driving the portfolio through IPS so grotopia game is pretty much a free-to-play Sandbox MMO with a side view and if you look at it a little bit more closely it seems like the game play is really similar to Terraria uh Terraria is pretty much like a side Sid scrolled Minecraft uh I would say this is even a little bit uh sooner than that because looking at the graphics it's really yeah it's in 10year old game that's there but

it has very very very can the MMO aspect is definitely much more fleshed out than in Terraria or other games that you see uh like this so my guess is that it's mainly Community Driven it's still making some around like quarter a million IPS a month and having around 150k downloads or something in that matter for like yeah of course we just see the uh numbers until from since 20 16 where the data analytics tools that we use kind of give us the angle there but yeah I would say this is just one of those games that the community will pretty much play until they stop kind of you know pushing updates of it or like supporting it which they why why why should they stop if it is making kind of so much money for I would say so little effort yeah yeah that's nice yeah so that's that's one of those let's say little effort big money games uh then they have the Hungry Shark Evolution and

Hungry Shark world uh both games are getting really really really big amounts of organic Hungary Shar Evolutions is getting like four million downloads a month Hungary Shar World a little bit less something in like two million or something in that matter a month yeah still pretty good yeah still pretty good uh but comparatively they're making B around 600 500k just in I so I would may even yeah but their rewarded placements are really good in Hungry Shark like I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more than yeah like a double at least so both games I would say together like 2 million all together a month so that's pretty strong and I would say the upkeep on this probably isn't that big uh you just kind of creating new skins new events new content that I guess these games already have like templates built in so should be again like easy revenue for not that big amount of effort so these are kind of driving the portfolio

then we have these let's say um attempts so there's the southark game with the soundpark phone Destroyer that kind of went uh really big during the launch and that went downhill pretty fast died that that's the unfortunate shark Quin as we used to say oh there you are unfortunate there you go yeah yeah yeah so I would say it is one of it it was released in in the wave of games trying to catch up to clash Royale they of course using the core mechanic of that game but their plus one is the line battle and South Park IP of course there yeah South Park IP I think is pretty good uh problem in my opinion is that it seems to me it's kind of nich in a way that South Park um for one thing graphical style and the style of humor is kind of Niche not saying it's bad but it's kind of Niche uh so that's one thing and then do you think that the South Park IP is niche like I I have never met anyone who hates

South Park to like he said like Niche like 10 times in in five seconds so I guess keep in mind that sign a good luck say Niche three times okay say n three time your game will rub your forehead and you you win the lottery yeah so uh after that kind of bigger launch my guess is they just stopped the UA because they saw that the numbers aren't kind of keeping up the scale so now the game is making something like 200k a month where it's pretty much zero us spent to yeah K month not I actually have some inside knowledge on South Park really basically what they said was a unnamed Source was that they had a lot of like uh what can you say uh like storyline that was driven but it wasn't very deep so you could play through that story line really quickly that was actually like co-created with the South Park creators it's quite funny I remember the first

two three chapters like you laughed a couple times but it wasn't that deep I don't think they got a lot of contact from the South Park Studio guys so fallout shelter problem when you run out content too much because it's not like a free toplay build from scratch yeah okay yeah but overall if if I read these numbers correct they did like 37 million lifetime Revenue which is pretty neat for this kind of a game don't know what's the deal there with like the percentage going to the IP holder but I would guess so this game is kind of making easy money for them uh and then so so far man you said like almost on about every game like oh do she free money this is free money this is nice money like well so it's not that bad actually it's not that bad but if if you're ubis better it could be much better it's like it's 8% of their overall Revenue right so like I'm sure like it just keeps ticking so they're just like oh yeah yeah okay yeah and and then the the the main course is Idle Miner Tycoon uh which was acquired in

2020 February uh the game kind of set like it's it's pretty much the founder of the idol genre by itself uh that kind of yeah yeah yeah uh I would say maybe the first one would be Adventure capitalist but idle Miner can push it even more forward and iterated a lot uh by the time that they went into kind of a global lch space it was rumored that they had like 75% day one retention I remember those rumors around yeah keep in mind that the game was done by four Founders in their dorm room in like four weeks something like that so yeah really outstanding job uh one of our Cinderella stories like yeah not that many anymore like this is one of the latest ones and uh the game uses this kind of really really interesting uh core gameplay of yeah I remember someone calling it I think it was Adam teler unstable three leg chair where you upgrade something and then it puts the other two legs in to Disorder so we need to then upgrade

those and the cycle repeats so it's kind of you know Joy optimization where you have the lift the conveyor belt and the mine and you still kind of try to optimize these three elements uh after the sale or let's say after like the completion of it uh the UA kind of died down on that game oh yeah uh first they went super super ads and not really uh I APS but later on they definitely increased the robustness of the economy and added that important IP like uh but from I would say that peak of 2020 uh they're kind of declining a little bit but still making really really good revenue of I'm guessing somewhere in vicinity of like more than two million a month it's an i bat so still kind of stable the other issue with this g game or company is that they went kind of Berserk in last years on cloning it yeah in a way that you now have idler restaurant Tycoon High School Tycoon I firi Tycoon taxi Tycoon mail

Tycoon Farm Tycoon Factory Tycoon and pirate Tycoon yeah all that by the way all that there was this like taxi Tycoon which was uh some kind of like some level of spend but it's it's that that's that's the that's the youngest one October 2021 but but you literally like if if you look at the release dates they're doing like May 2020 June 2020 October 2020 November 2020 December 2020 so they released like five games in one year none of them did a dent into into the revenue and it's not really complete reskins or you know it's I definitely see some kind of iterations especially the longer you go there's more iterations it's definitely on the same engine and you can see that you know yeah doing this kind of a really really big capacity uh you cannot cannot do it without any kind of salvaging the parts from the previous game but yeah none of those really cut you remember you remember we we we did

uh we we ran the U for factory Tycoon back in the days and it was just crap they couldn't make it work yeah the I remember that at at this time uh 2020 or even before 2020 uh already the competition in the idle genre was pretty pretty much heating up by Adventure communist which really really kind of changed their game playay and implemented the gacha system much more closely into their core gameplay rather than idle Miner Tycoon which kind of duct tape it on top of it so yeah that game kind of flew off there so I'm guessing that they kind of suffered from the competition uh from there but yeah none of the kind of mutations of the idle Tycoon genre I really did fly with them so I'm guessing now that the founders left the company we'll see what happens with it because I'm kind of skeptical they can they can this this direction um yeah so that would be for the mobile portfol I have last three bits regarding their

non-mobile portfolio just like three highlights small ones all right small ones there was the UB yeah man like 20 minutes man Jesus you take the whole time that was the Ubisoft quarts attempt which was their nft initiative that famously they added nfts into ghost uh ghoston Ghost Recon where there was this uh in famous interview where one the VP of strategic Innovation said uh so it's really for players it's really beneficial to them but they don't get it for now where I remember there was this kind of a big backlash and three months later they said they're kind of ending the support on this whole feature and it's all burned down so that's one thing uh the other thing is of course a little bit of Praise where Valhalla recently hit the Assassin's Creet Valhalla 1 billion in revenue and that was the biggest one in the whole franchise that this has been in the making from

2007 uh so keep in mind this is like four 14 years of Assassin's Creed where the game practically changed JRA in between who doesn't like Vikings man everyone loves Vikings yeah the game was great I say says the only Viking in in the the podcast yeah so this was mainly driven uh I guess by their developed model where they're slotting DLCs after DLCs into already big enrich world and there's even some kind of free to play functionality on top of it so this went pretty well for Ubisoft and then the last thing which I think will be kind of highlight for this year regarding their portfolio will be the school and Bones game that's been in the making for nine years as originally an expansion to the really really good uh Assassin's Creed Black Flag the naval mode that everybody liked and yeah me personally I just played the mode and didn't care about the assassinations at all so this game uh spent rumored 120 million into its

development cost so we'll definitely see if this thing pays off uh it's lat to release after five or six delays in November 8th this year so yeah I'm really looking forward into it is that going to be a console game or a PC game or both both my guess is both I can't wait to try that like yeah I can't wait to to not play that game hello listeners it's my over here we hope you're enjoying this mobile games z hour episode where we do deep Dives on companies UA game design and admon strategies we put a lot of effort into these episodes to further your knowledge on how you can improve your bottom line by learning from the M opportunities of other companies if you consider this useful and would like to see how your company or game would far under our Audi traffic the challenge feel free to reach out to us you can find and my email listed in the show

notes below but now let's get back to this amazing podcast but yeah okay so so yeah let's get back to actually real stuff uh UA ad monetization and now it's only 8% of of their um Revenue but still that's what we do well I already mentioned that the marketability tests uh that they they did in the past which is kind of nice they they look at the even though they are actually a big Corporation well you know you know how it goes in the in the big companies like I think this should be what we do like yeah well not not here which is nice on the other hand um so I was trying to do some digging on LinkedIn as as I usually do I couldn't find any head of UA or or marketing leads or anything uh I do know some peeps that are working there um never met them uh I think there was like this time when I was leaving pixel Federation andal I was working there and uh I was

trying well I was in talks with Ubisoft to to join them but eventually picked other company and uh stayed here in Slovakia uh but still I mean I'm not sure if I could work in this big Corporation again okay cool story bro yeah I know I know I know right uh but yeah they're they they're mainly spending on six games as we as we discussed with the yakup it's it's a horse uh the horse breeding game might and Magic a of chaos chaos Hungry Shark World Clash of beasts and then wild Arena Survivor which is the fortnite CL other games are dead Assassin's Creed South Park Destroyer Pawn Destroyer horse Haven and some other games from their mobile portfolio I mean well they are not making any money so or well they are making money but I guess they're not that viable in terms of the UA but surprisingly enough they are pushing a lot of iOS campaigns uh as I mentioned on Hungry Shark mider magic and Clash of

beasts so I pretty I'm pretty sure these games are just uh Global launched and The Clash of Peace as well the main channel here uh is Facebook uh which makes a lot of sense because of the iOS strategy and Facebook it's still I mean I'm bitching about Facebook for last six months but it's still on iOS still pretty pretty good and decent Channel but they are missing out heavily on other channels I mean if you want to grow on iOS guys start unity and Tik Tok and uh you know to be honest I'm pretty sure like these type of games could work really well on Google UAC and um actually I did a little bit of digging as well and then um I found out that they are actually spending on on iOS on Google and it's like 17 to 25% of spent there is the Hungry Shark top GEOS um it's us and Japan so so yakob are sharks as popular as ants in in Japan or do you know I would guess so ends are more popular than sharks there but yeah

feel free anybody from Japan listening to us to write to us and correct us yeah correct us well for miden magic it's a it's a classic split between us and tier one GEOS like Australia Canada Germany France but also they are kind of uh big in Asian GEOS like Vietnam Hong Kong and Singapore I mean that that game could work there well right um so they they were spending heavily on their horse game on Android at the beginning of the may but now the overall spending decreased for for this game as uh as of now and they're are spending very little on on iOS I mean they're mainly targeting France Germany Switzerland Australia and then us comes after these so I mean okay well this might mean like two things either it's a high competition or big competition in in us or because the game is localized in these other GEOS and I I I took a look

on on this game and it was kind of localized even in Slovak language is interesting but okay what the population of Slovakia five million yeah dedication go yeah well in terms of the creatives so they are running different creatives on Facebook versus uh what they're running on on Google so while those creatives on Facebook look like it's mostly gameplay with different shark types of sharks but I mean they look like but it doesn't mean they don't perform right so we we already know that you already know that the ones uh that I saw on Google are super high production value there are some fun scenes and uh and to be honest like they were generally more appealing to me so I definitely like them I would I would just click on that ad and install the game but unfortunately those uh creatives I guess they're appealing only to me because

they had really low Impressions so so I'm just not the only one that actually likes them because Google and and Facebook doesn't um allocate so much spend into this but yeah J aside there are definitely they're definitely lacking a v variety of Concepts so i' I could see like three to four Concepts that're getting almost all the spend for all the games they're running so it's not only like M and Magic but it's also hungry shark and and also the The Clash of beasts I mean The Clash of beasts creatives were just really like 3D high production value I mean pretty pretty pretty good looking and um and it seems like they are not able to find any new creative winners because these creatives are really old I mean like couple of months old and in like in this in this case couple of months it's like couple of years in in 2018 but some of the creatives on Facebook

man I almost died so some of these creatives they show logo of Ubisoft in the first second who cares come on and in the second or the seconds afterwards they show a logo of the game so you have like one to three seconds on Facebook to get players attention and what you do show them your logo out is it logo of Heroes of M magic no no no no no Ubisoft logo it's Ubisoft logo and then the the logo of the game uh but the mobile game it's like yeah nobody cares then they know Ubisoft you know yeah well I know uh okay okay if you're are a big company then you need to have logo everywhere but Ubisoft in Mobile is like nothing exactly yeah exactly so I mean yeah of course it makes sense PC console Okay blah blah blah on mobile no just please stop uh there's fun fact they were actually running uh playables they were

last seen in 2020 yeah I need to be fair like since they're not running like any AD networks uh they're running only on Facebook and Google the UA and playables just don't make sense on these platforms so in terms of the suggestions I would suggest very similar thing that I suggested uh when we talked about Kink just ramp up the volume on Unity for fact sake it's working really well on iOS and since you're focusing on iOS to spend you know this would be a great move I couldn't see any Tik Tok either and I know I'm really annoying on with this and we actually had a session about Tik Tok so you know uh if Facebook is performing well Tik Tok will outperform Facebook that's I mean I'm pretty sure so and also like I'm I'm managing two games with animal theme which is very similar to you guys and Tik Tok is absolutely killing it it's absolutely

killing it outperforming everything else and uh and I had I had this thought about the Apple search ads and I know it's not scalable but if you're running the iOS campaigns just like you know just launch those um branding um campaigns you can you can talk about your Ubisoft logo how many times you want but yeah like the Jes aside I mean it's it can be I mean it's not going to be the the biggest ch Channel but it still can be pretty good uh channel for for your iOS activities but I think there is a you know as I said lack of variety of Creative Concepts so the hunger Shar Concepts look like iterations of each other which is a shame because uh you know they're showing the same thing all over again and uh and I think the UA team should sit down with the creative team I look at the data I look at the competition and brainstorm the out of out of their head as soon as possible because it looks like you know Ubisoft is

ramping up budgets on iOS for free games you have four Concepts and they are not going to run like uh like this forever so you know you should think at least like one or two steps ahead and uh with this animal theme there is so much so much that can be done in terms of the experimentation with any any ideas crazy ideas you know do you remember like when we discussed the ANS underground game mhm they are working with so many things like so so many like Creative Concepts from ants into food yeah chips into like but from there they're going through the the player motivation and using humor in the creatives and that's something that that really works so yeah well try try that definitely I mean I I saw some some sharks with the jetpacks which felt kind of funny but I mean it was really I mean still like a lot of us looked like a lot of gameplay and I'm not sure like what's up with the with the Android spent but

definitely if you're are doing well on Android uh on iOS and uh I'm all for running dios campaigns but you know uh you should definitely take a look at that and I guess there is a reason and we don't know the reason but still I mean okay well whatever moving on moving on a few words about calibri and the and the UA perspective and they started you know launching the one idle game after another like you mentioned fun fact is uh they're spending only on on idle mind minor Tycoon and even with that game uh they're scaling out the budget quite heavily in the last three months and uh there is one interesting thing their main UA channel is app can you guess yakob Tik Tok no there you go it's ch boost it's chart boost I thought that from the past yeah I was dead already but you know maybe

this means Zinga oh well take two will buy Ubisoft that's the speculation o that was thin that is thin of course of course no it's well you know it's uh it's there yeah I talking yeah I know I know 100% uh but yeah nothing too interesting in looking into the the CRA U activities unfortunately I thought that you know Ubisoft could learn something from idle Miner Tycoon inside and learnings but yeah I'm not seeing any anything in the in the data that is available for us so most probably no I guess there's a lot of lot of kind of talent left after the acquisition oh yeah yeah yeah 100% yeah you know I met the founders I know them and like man like they're living their best life now like driving fast cars like working with personal trainers just living life like yeah yeah they're checked out yeah all right so yeah I I think yeah I think that's it that's it from my side

basically so it's yeah we can move on we can move on to to ad monetization yeah so I got to say for admon this time uh 16 pages of financial statement compared to yeah Roo and um Activision Blizzard it was just yeah they were like 90 to 120 pages each there's no Snippets of nuggets information so unfortunately admon here is a bit light it's not as like Punchy as I usually like to make them so yeah as Remo said uh they made 168 Million last year from mobile which means that a like so basically IP sales were 86 Millions uh 86 million euros uh which means that 81.8 million euros came or 48% of that was uh mobile ad revenues so uh having an IAP versus ad Revenue 5050 split is probably skewed quite heavily due to the fact that they own

ketchup which is going to be you know 98% uh or even more maybe in ad revenue and then green Panda and C are idle Studios so usually what I'd expect there is that yeah 70% is IAP and 30% ads probably more on ads on idle Miner because it's just a big Behemoth idle Miner is 60% NS definitely yeah so that gives us that yeah Ubisoft as a whole earn about 225k a day in ad Revenue so they're a player but you know they're not you know one of those million a day Studios which exist so they're up there but not the biggest um so quick LinkedIn search showed me that all the different Studios have their own admon people meaning that they don't centralize their admon efforts so safe to say here that they haven't gotten one of these Mega mediation deals of moving and everything in as an integration deal and they also have the UA end monetization

specialist yeah so it's like yeah I can't fault them for that because you know when you buy Studios you promise them Independence and it's very hard to backt track on that also like doing admon for hyper casual it's such a different like ball game completely to doing admon on other titles so can't really fault them for that uh so going through these like Studio by Studio catchup I don't want to comment too much because hyper casual is a genre on admon like I know very little about so I'm not going to pretend to talk about something I don't know nice because you know this is no gaming podcast yeah yeah but what I do know yeah what I do know is that I've seen catchup a lot less lately in the top rankings and generally for hyper casual that's not a good sign yeah so looking at colb colb interesting Studio I met the founders they're super nice they're living their best lives like we said um yeah I'm not sure if they're involved anymore yeah anyway so

the da in col like we said like is all centered on idle minor Tycoon 87% of the daus is like overall for the studio still coming from this game so one interesting thing I know about them that they used to favor hiring very Junior people and training them internally um and they not really hired any senior staff so for admon that sometimes can be super if you have a junior person who hasn't done anything uh really an admon before or no Guidance with a senior person and why that's bad is everyone in admon lies and you will get screwed over a lot fix exactly and how do I know this I've been a junior person and I've been screwed over a lot a lot there you go so you get lied to on like many different levels so first there's like a first level of like level of how you get lied to and that's like who to integrate and who to work with here everyone lies

through their teeth and yeah uh so here you got to yeah choose the right Network and yeah only experience help will here will cut like will help you cut through all the noise so someone might for example tell you that yeah ad Colony are really strong and rewarded videos in India and then you might believe that even though that's not true uh yeah also for example like in my first year you know I was uh doing admon and then an am at network X told me that I should replace my interstitial placements or like replace like the ad units and just force fill with rewarded in their interstitial placement because it will pay me higher ecpm I didn't do it but you know that's essentially ad fraud and we wouldn't banned so they just wanted to boost their numbers for their own bonus for yeah that quarter so okay yeah that's the kind of stuff you have to deal with and like if you don't have experience for people above you you're like dude I should do this probably because they can be very convincing um yeah uh so also what you get kind of

when you integrate Studio this to actually work with you and work quite well they'll always fight for you to put as many like placements in the game as humanly possible and it's up to you and your experience to decide actually if that's a good idea like with the overall strategy that you're currently having because even already now I get requests from Unity iron source and fiber saying like add x amount of placements and then yeah suddenly you have you know a 100 placements in the game and that's not a good thing so you got to balance that and experience is the only way to decide if that's a good thing So cbri lately uh they've hired an admon heavy hitter so I can only imagine that whatever was there before that it only gets better from here because I can't imagine that they were getting yeah the absolute best also what I noticed on idle Miner they had before an unusually amount high amount of AD networks they were working with so usually on games this size it's actually

better nowadays to just work with seven or eight networks but you work with them really closely and like really yeah squeeze out like the most like as much margin as you can green Panda games yeah another idle maker uh yeah their SDK stack looks very like like it makes complete sense for a game like the game's this size uh 1492 they make story-driven games uh their biggest title is is it love drove vampire uh stks make sense here too but I just got to call these guys out that I've banned them at so many of my games because U Crea get so many complaints yeah to violight basically on mobile yeah yeah so all in all like I couldn't find any Snippets of information from the annual statements that could send me down like a rabbit hole like I did on Ro and King uh unfortunately and then without any first- party data where I can look into their mediation stack I won't be able to estimate how much increase we can get here but yeah better luck next time yeah better luck next

time I think uh we got pretty nice information about how they are making like Easy Money on these games and I'm I'm well I would say like hey guys like if uh if you're making Easy Money on these games like try to make it work from the UA perspective I mean if even if if you're spending like well now you're spending zero and making uh like from 200k to 500k a month uh so even if you can grow the the budgets from 50k from zero to 50K or even 100K a month then you know you can grow the revenue pretty nicely do you think that this would be important for someone who has sunk 120 million in a 9year old game okay that's that's what I was wanted to ask you guys agree with my statement that I don't think any in the sea level in Ubisoft gives a about they don't care they don't care yeah absolutely but I'm kind of I'm kind of curious like why didn't they care about nfts if they don't care about the technology that was kind of a the main thing before dude that's it's so deep

question don't know anyway just give me my Pirate game in November want to see that one okay very excited very excited all right yeah I guess that's uh that's it that's it for today yeah let's make easy money as Ubisoft mobile uh and see you until next time thank you very much by see bye [Music]