two & a half gamers session #26 - Unpacking Google ads "disaster", ASA Today's new ad, Google ＜3 MAX

[Music] hello hello hello this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast 2 and half Gamers session number 26 and we are discussing the latest news having fun dropping knowledge but let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion wi so please stop being so serious and today we have Felix Mr menb braber over here Mr vacation Remar and myself M Mr at home tired as [ __ ] L yeah well today we are discussing latest news and we will be asking each other fun silly interesting questions well we'll see uh each of us prepared a few question that others didn't see or hear before so let's see how it goes this is going to to be combination of

fun and news so hit the Subscribe button guys we really appreciate it but hey uh so it's been a while how are you how are you these days Felix yakob I mean I'm busy as hell right now but yeah I can't complain yeah all right currently vacationing in the beautiful city of Slovenia lublana and heading uh into Croatia tomorrow so Slovenia is not Slovakia right good good old joke yeah yeah the best thing is that if you if you if you like select languages here in SLO Slovenian they call it like Slovakian do they yes why why don't you just invade them it should just be one country Slovakia let's just make it one like I just decide Slovenia Slovakia just call it one thing sure but they're not your

neighbors I mean it's uh it's kind of trendy these days to your neighbors hearing a lot of problems not a lot of solutions oh yeah that's true well okay okay it has been a big news week last week yeah that's true yeah a lot of stuff happened yeah a lot of you know monopolies throwing their weight around yeah we should discuss um these fre news basically three topics and then uh let's let's do questions afterwards so it's called better ads experiences by Google then uh we're going to talk about Apple and the new app store ads to dat tab [ __ ] terrible and then again Google joins beers on Max okay pretty interesting so we can start with the with the better ads experiences by Google because that was something that was kind of like cir circling around on LinkedIn and a lot of people that had no

idea how the [ __ ] this works share their comments like hey everything is dead hyper casual is dead we are going to die blah blah blah blah okay so what is the news about so developers are required to comply with the following ads gu guidelines to ensure high quality experiences for users and they're using the Google Play apps so your ads may not be shown in the following unexpected ways for users so full screen inter IAL ads of all formats that show unexpectedly this is the the most important part typically when the user has chosen to do something else are not allowed then the ads that appear during game play at the beginning of the of of a level or during the beginning of a Content segment that are not allowed whatever that means are these two placements like 50% of hyper casual already it depends I mean it's it's really hard to draw a line where is the the beginning of the level and like the

end of the level as well I mean the end of the level is kind of like okay but then still like end and then beginning of the level like what's the difference well let's see how how that goes but then uh then we have full screen interstitial ads that appear before the app loading screen I mean I've never seen this actually so these are not allowed uh is app open up like that's what it is when uh sorry is that the app open app yeah yeah yeah yeah you click on the icon you see the at first thing yeah yeah it's like like never seen it before Oh but maybe there are some really weird examples it's been like the Talk of the Town in the last like six months these app openads like they're yeah they're apparently they get really high acpm I mean they're really Sharky but apparently they've seen tremendous growth in the last six months okay that makes sense and then we have the full screen interal ads of all formats that are closable after 15 seconds and these are not allowed I mean I've seen inters closable after 5 seconds not 15

seconds yeah okay so I know so what's what's what should we what should we uh yeah and expect expect is like hyper casual de seriously no I don't think so I mean uh most probably yes this is going to have an impact on uh on all of the monetization in terms of the ads but it's not so special right H I would say hyper casual is something similar to like a Starcraft Z glink that mutates and evolves with each Evolution round so my guess is that again the kind of weakest link will die off and then they will find out which is the kind of the next best thing working out but yeah returning back to the first two points there I think those are pretty pretty common like full full screen interstitial ads when you kind of don't expect them like either like you push the plate button or you like go between

the men the beginning of the yeah that's the beginning but even when let's say you're just browsing through the app or like going between the menus or just adjusting something in the you know whatever the game kind of goes around and then suddenly an ad appears so I would say this is this is super common yeah that's true I mean then I mean I have inside information on this so I had a chat I had a chat with uh my admob admob who's actually quite good like best ad mob am I had in quite a while which is a nice change of pace uh so I'll I'll quote exactly what he said so it's this is mostly around intitial ads that show up unexpectedly to interrupt gameplay so as long as you implement interstitials that show up between sessions or in part of the game that don't interrupt the current gameplay you should be fine based on this criteria uh we have so far it's all about unexpected wanted at the beginning

or during gaml so uh this policy only references interstitial ads that are 15 or 15 seconds or longer or unskippable so from what I feel like this is like there's some game developers that will be kind of major losers for this kind of in the short to medium time period that's what I feel but as like as long as you start making adjustments I feel that you'll be able to build around this I mean in the medium and short term it will suck a bit but you know like you said hyper casual will evolve as a genre and they'll just work around this always trying to find Loop holes come on yeah exactly and also yeah and also like what's going to happen is in the short term we're going to get a lot of builds rejected from Google if you're monetizing an intertial it's going to be super annoying and how are they going to police this I have no idea it's quite subjective what's categorized the unexpected yeah exactly so it's really going to be yeah a lot

more rejections from the Google Play Store and that's going to suck for a while but IND like what I saw like LinkedIn everyone was freaking out and I was like no this is not this is not hyper casual killer like nowhere near it way no especially after speaking to Google like it's just sounds like yeah they'll bust some offenders you'll get rejected and you have to change the ad placement yeah because there this was released on 27th last week I was like really quiet and then suddenly out of out of no like oh wow oh everything is going to die we [ __ ] like come on come on guys seriously why but I get it I get it it's just like I FAA apocalypse all these bullshits super click bitey yeah my my guess is that a lot of apps are going to yeah Felix had got build rejections and they will just need to kind of polish out their ad placements but this doesn't say like they don't really exclude or prohibit the thing where the ad is still unexpected because between the levels

you kind of expect another level but then you get an net which is still allowed so my guesses it wouldn't be that big of a hit still even if like we take those kind of let's call them kind of a shitty at placement so still yeah it's not not really really like a that big of a hit even if you take those because it doesn't say say anything about reward rewarded that which I guess no yeah it's they're going to be fine yeah rewarded is still there banner ads is not effect it's just around interstitial ads and app open ads they're putting some guidelines that you have to follow um so you know rewarded ads and banner ads that's not going to change at all and that's still a big part of yeah hyper casual so yeah sure but you rem you you placed a couple of AD placements in your own game design days like do you have any suggestions where you can put intertial that's not as annoying as before a level don't use intertial try to use reward that more exactly oh really exactly

why CH of the revenues depends on your strategy but I would say rewarded are always better because rewarded always kind of has that incentive behind it that you want to use the content of the rewarded reward in your continuous game playay whereas intertial kind of pisses you off and you want to kind of leave the app you know it's true it's annoying yes of course but it can drive pretty significant Revenue it can but it's kind of a short-term solution or like you know I would say rewarded are much more kind of a long-term just but it's just a different type of the the money I mean look so you need to find the balance between annoying people and earning an good amount of money yeah like it's a it's a you know mathematics between retention like if you're going to lose those users anyway why not putal there that that's of course there so I have a conspiracy theory here we not cons CU I

think I'm actually right on the money because two weeks before uh admob released these new guidelines that will hamper intertial they have been pushing me for literally like two meetings in a row quite hard on triing rewarded intitial which they rolled out gradually and it's now fully rolled out yeah there the thing you mentioned yeah this could also be a push to get people to really adopt the rewarded interstitial add um yeah ad format which is not covered by these guidelines so could be that as well which wouldn't surprise me that's a pretty nice conspiracy yeah I'm not even wearing a tin foil hat for that I think it just makes so much sense well okay let's see let's see but yeah I think uh conclusion is like uh it's not a big deal oh well it is a big deal but not like hyper is that big that big of a deal it's Google trying force people to use reward in justicial that's

probably what it is yeah okay okay then uh yeah let's uh yeah let's switch to Apple before we go back to Google so Apple announced it it's uh it's expanding its offering of how developers can promote their apps on the App Store and here this helping developers expand their reach making it easier to discover more of what the app store has to offer it's the first show okay so they yeah they they're now going to show ads in the today's um featuring tab which they confirmed is actually dying and not getting that much traffic anymore uh as it it used to so you know instead of fixing it what what do we do let's put ads inside so so we [ __ ] it up all all over again but yeah so until now Apple has offered

developers two ad opportunities in the search Tab and in the search results page and this is like biggest joke from the article the and I'm I'm going to quote it so both ad placements have been a tremendous success for de for developers helping them find users who may be interested in their apps according to Apple the expansion of AD opportunities in the App Store is a part of company's effort to maintain the App Store as the best place for developers to grow their businesses oh my [ __ ] god this is so man this spin doctor they have working there like they are gr that sounds so great if you don't understand what's going on but that's oh first they break it and then they try to fix it with money like I can pay to fix it a this is so terrible ah yeah so yeah well thank you very much for the new ad opportunity within the today's stab on the front page of the

App Store amazing so as we know in the gaming industry Apple search ads for games sucks really it's the the worst placement out there or the UA Channel but JS aside it can work depends on the game 10 out of like taking that back nine out of 10 games that I managed before I couldn't make it work there's one game I could make it work which I think it's just a big big exception is that because the scale is really bad well the thing is like it's a very different um Uhl is based on the intent so you know if nobody wants to uh search your game or game genre then you just can't force people to do it it's just no way can build a sure yeah it's uh yeah you can you can do that and then try to steal uh the the original games um

traffic but most probably not going to work because it's going to be expensive as [ __ ] wouldn't this work like on like viral or seasonal things you know like you know there's like Olympic Games or Euro Cup or something that people search a lot and then this kind of placement Works yes there's also a correlation between tv ads and uh search volume makes sense because you know you see something then you're trying to search for it and then bam instead of you know not paying for the organic traffic which you would get anyway you're going to pay for it outstanding move outstanding move yeah I mean is true that this can work to certain extent on iOS traffic of course because it's apple and that's you know all the Privacy bullshits they have in in their hands but um yeah if you want to just um rely on um Apple search as like a main pillar of your UA channel uh or UA strategy that's not going to work unfortunately no even with like 10 more

10 more uh ad placements maybe 10 more ad placements that would work but we will never know you know because they already said like oh well we we are not expanding anything any of these placements before how's the cadency of them adding the set placements like one one in a year or something maybe no I have no idea really and this is no [ __ ] game podcast i g to say anything but I just want to know so that one gameing company that you said you made it work um what was the scale like how much can you spend on search ads before this like maybe like two grand a day three grand a day not yeah right now it's like 1,000 a day only in the US because all other um GEOS were not as good as the other channels I mean it's still it they were pretty good but still if I can get better results on different channels and I have limited budget then I move the budget elsewhere that's just how it is uh but it's true that yes they are trying to work and expand the G and everything but still look I want to I

want to Target payers that's how it is and uh I know this is that data not rolled in in any way in search ads well you have the post Pags but you need to have uh the MMP to get those post bags and yes then you can uh you can have a like keyboard level um revenue or LTV as well which is of course really useful still I mean it's not yeah you you just can't scale only on search CH on the other hand in in the you know world of apps the Apple search is just the must I mean that's just top one top one UA channel in terms of games nah not that much so let's be really candid what actually happen here Apple rolled out the ATT tracking framework for our privacy user acquisition on iOS went to [ __ ] now they're expanding ad placements from 2 to three on Apple search ads and they're going to make billion probably after this change 100% And also you know

back in days outstanding move standing move back in days they even had their own network then they closed it and I'm pretty sure that they are going to reopen it at some point in the future I mean makes all the sense yeah if there well you know depends on how this new add opportunity in today's TP P out it's just like monopolies being monopolies love it like it's great if I was Apple I'd do the same thing but from the outside you're just like just give us another app store like you guys ruined this one please like yeah they restart the whole thing please it's all let's get back to 2010 yeah exactly the good old days right we end up in VR in 10 years oh of course hello that VR

mete all right so can I move on from uh one Monopoly back to the other one to the other one yeah of course so I'm actually quite excited about this because it's not often that admon gets really big news and this is massive news in the world of admon because last Thursday uh Google admob will find got announced it will finally be launching as an SDK bidder on app loving Max uh let's be clear here like this is really big news for admon ad admon and kind of my wheelhouse so just a little background before I explain why this is really big news so a couple of years ago um admob made a decision to only allow three admob placements per waterfall in any given country on any third-party mediation platforms the way the second you could you could you could have more but then you could or we'll get there we'll get there okay so any thirdparty mediation platforms that means Max fiber

iron Source yeah the rest of us mere morals was limited to three placements so this me meant you could only call AD mob for example at $30 $50 or $10 in let's say the UK an ad mob would only fill at those three placements meaning that the biggest ad Network in the world you only have exposure to the biggest ad Network in the world in three locations in your waterfall so this will massively reduce the amount of ad mob fill you're able to get as a publisher so uh why would ad mob make a decision like this that that would net Publishers and themselves less money and less inventory it doesn't really make that much sense until I got pitched by admob uh on their mediation platform and their key and Main pitch that they said was with admob mediation you're able to use as many admob places as you want a cynical man would say that ad mob

was using their dominant position to create an artificial reason to push developers to their mediation over competitors an even more cynical man would say that Google did this because their mediation has been lacking and falling behind competition so they needed a really good hard cell to compete against other yeah other mediation platforms maybe I'm not a cynical man but that's what a cynical man would say so how did admob police this three placement rule so they tracked ad requests and if they saw that you had more than three placements you got massively throttled and usually saw your ad revenue from admob decrease by 90 to 95% okay then you had to remove the placements and wait for the Google algorithm to bless you with increasing their traffic again and you could never speak to anyone to Google about this because it was a separate team that handled all the comp clients which was painful you had no idea for how long you

were throttled and sometimes you could sneakily I did never did this per like personally of course and you maybe sneak in one or two admal placements and you see like your Revenue go up by quite a lot you're like oh this is great and then you get busted and then everyone screams at you because you know your revenue is dropping by a lot so the big news now is that admob bidding will be coming to Max mediation and this is big news now because this will uh get publisher to get exposure to admob across their whole waterfall instead of just three price points so what I'm expecting to happen is that ecpm from admob probably will not change that drastically but the fill will increase a lot so remember ad Revenue uh is Phill plus ecpm so I'm expecting my ad Revenue to increase from ad mob significantly and that will also help by driving up the prices because of more competition so right now admob bidding is enclosed

beta on app loving meaning that just like the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory you need to be blessed with a golden ticket from admob to be allowed on that list of the closed beta test then probably in October or November if everything looks good they'll be rolled out to the masses so for those of us who are blessed with this golden ticket we have a 15-day rampup period to look forward to uh when going live in the coming days and unless I get gag by an NDA I'll be sure to keep updating on the performance on this podcast in the weeks to come very good perfect yeah so I was really surprised this happened and I was wondering like why is this a a huge win now I get it okay and the crazy thing is it's only been announced on apping Max but not on iron source so you can see if iron Source drag their fee on not getting this set up for a couple of months that's a huge disadvantage because then the average adarp out that

you're getting on iron source is going to be much lower than that you're seeing on Max but was it announced on other mediations as well or I think I saw it trying to look I saw Fair bid as well so fibers Marketplace launched it bit surprising this CH boost helium whatever that is you mean zinga's mediation yeah of course yeah our our friend from plarium I think posted it on LinkedIn um yeah yeah I only saw it on Fair and Max but I'm expecting probably to be announced on on level play that's iron Source mediation very soon yeah but if it's not that's not good yeah of course if it's not whoops exactly so the day where I never have to make a single placement again is coming closer and I'm looking forward to it do you think this is somehow related to the dinosaurs Unity merger no I see how why yeah I don't see how or why I think that

like like was the was the market share there within the mediation platforms I probably like I have no idea but I'd probably say like 70% of people are't Max these days I have yeah that's just I get where talking to people they spent they spent a quarter of a billion last year to get people to like come onto their like mediation like yeah okay it's it's kind a big Chun of people already I'm really looking forward to seeing how this this turns out because yeah this has been so annoying for so long if you've built a mobile game for iOS or Android you've experienced user turn you can win those users back but it's getting more and more expensive even more so to acquire totally new users enter cross promotion with a dict by identifying your users likely to turn early you can showcase another game in your pfolio before they leave forever transforming a lost user into a new user increasing your revenues learn more now at addict.com

[Music] well good news then very good news news all right should we go to the questions so for all of us that are listening is pure fun uh segment we have no idea how this is going to pen out but uh let's see let's see so I will start I will start actually so nobody knows what I prepared and I have no idea what Two Gentlemen prepared as well but I will make this first question super easy you know to warm warm up uh so this is to both of you and um I'm not reading my messages I'm just you know looking at my iPhone to to read the questions so what would you ask Mr Mark Zuckerberg and why and yob why is it about VR [Laughter]

okay um um I would asking probably how much is the real kind of uh or or let's say how much money do you think you will need to burn down in order to get there where you want to get because my guess is if we saw the last quarter results it was again three billion so there's so much money that's going to need to be burned down until they get there so my guess is like how how long do you think this kind of thing will work out for all the investors that going to kind of see the burn right there because my guess is that the technology will take much much longer sure but there you know it's a longterm longterm investment like I and the other thing that I would ask him regarding this why do you think you will get it first when there's everybody else literally everybody else competing against you yeah that's a good question uh I'd probably ask him why are you moving away from Facebook's core compass competi which is execution and copying like

competitors to you know innovating he's not known not known as innovator yeah he's not known as an innovator he's known as you know this ruthless executor who's the best at executing okay yeah well executing and then buying Instagram right WhatsApp these other that's execution yeah okay true okay okay yeah we you can go you can go next so we actually take turns all right I'll ask my first question I I thought we were supposed to write questions for separate for people so actually made a speci I have SE questions yeah let me ask my first one for let me ask my first one for Remo how much luck is involved in game design and what's more what's more important luck or solid game design wow so first thing you need to have both and the worst thing is that the lack Factor if everybody knew how

big it is nobody would be making mobile games that's that's my answer it's like 40% or something like I don't know how much but just look at the supercell graveyard it it's like so hard to really make games that makes a lot of impact and that are like that good because even if you try even if your game design is super solid everything's great suddenly the Market's not there suddenly it's not working suddenly the CP CPI is too high suddenly the tension is not too big and the game's perfect in the end like even from player standpoint so my guess is the lag is really big like more than 30% definitely like somewhere in 40% in a way that really good timing really good market conditions you know somebody isn't fast enough to copy you or pollute the marketing prices with the high cpis in order to scale stuff like that so yeah really really big right time in the right place right yeah can I ask my followup question question cuz ma kind of links to this one m so ma uh how hard

is UA really for mobile games and how dependent on you are you simply on how well the game monetizes so the luck Factor Plus game design so it's basically branching out to here like how much of what you do is just dependent on how well the game monetizes no the thing is like I always say because uh everybody wants to scale their game they think it's super easy because you know you hired this UA ninja whatever uh and he's like yeah okay you can you can scale you can scale my game and if he doesn't he could do he couldn't do it then nobody could but the whole marketing spend and scaling and growing the game is actually I think more on the game side rather than just the UA side because it's the LTV of the game always dictates how much you can scale so even if I can do all these like Hecks and tricks and whatever you know creative um uh optimization Channel diversification and whatever other Buzz wordss I can

just pull out of my ass it's just not going to scale if your LTV is 20 cents I mean I can do whatever but it's just like impossible so the UA is per se is like very easy anybody can just you know launch a campaign I mean you can just do it in 10 minutes but then what that's the that's the most uh important question and also so like yeah I would definitely rely on the on the game design and the whole monetization of the of the game okay there you go there you go let let me do with my favorite one this one go for M but also stretches to Felix will we ever get rid of the [ __ ] fake misleading ads a man I I saw the ASM Mark cutting ads come on guys yeah we get I said what the [ __ ] I mean you already asked this like million

times before you're not going to you know it's going to be like that unfortunately because it's still they apparently work people they they want to see them and they click on it because it's interesting for them what I'm not sure like why but whatever whatever and uh as soon as people are going to you know uh again click install and then pay afterwards everybody's going to do those unfortunately because I mean there are these like fake ads which are really funny and uh I know like they're definitely not connected to gameplay but then there are these like very well aggressive uh uh soft porn related ads that we hate those if you do those ads like seriously stop it and I hate you complaints I got of those but but but can we can we at least acknowledge that there was a time in in Mobile gaming when this method was not used and

games were scaled with with let's say like normal ads you remember there was definitely a time but you remember us at pixel Federation like seven years ago we had a train station game and we had this mini game which we then uh actually ported to what was the uh the Regio jet company yeah the company called Regio Jet and we just ported it there we used it for for Creative uh for the campaigns and it was [ __ ] amazing like best campaign or best creative best kpis ever it has it had nothing to do with the the gameplay it was just mini game pulled out of our SES and there you go it worked even before the the fake uh fake ads were fake ads so unfortunately it was always here but uh I guess yes there were the times when we had real game play but then um you know UA people

and the companies will do whatever it takes to you know to make money and uh Reach the the goals that's how it is followup I guess for me I don't care as long as I don't get complaints and like bad reviews I don't care yeah okay let's let's move on yeah okay so I have maybe in VR it will be bigger a problem [ __ ] sure of course all right so uh Felix now after the the nonintrusive ads um release like what would you ask Google uh after this release and after the release of the the max mediation Bing like what are the plans whatever you you would ask now like hey Google what the [ __ ] are you doing ask him first I would ask him like a a question just how how are you prioritizing your own mediation platform and why was it kind of lagging behind so

much like nothing has changed that I can see on it in pretty much like the last two years it looks the same like nothing has really changed and I was just wondering why they would deprioritize something because a couple of years ago they were dominant position and they just completely let it fall and then yeah that's what I kind of want to know like it would have been a great way to dominate the market for longer nice yakob what would you ask CEO of Sky Mavis cuz you're a big fan of axi infinti so I'm all years of course um I guess uh how long did it take to uh to realize that the Ponzi will not work when the money was flowing [Laughter] in that would be question number one and then question number two what are you going to do with all those funds and

capacity in order to kind of turn this around yeah did you see the the article about him moving some some assets before the this hack actually happened I guy are we still on the inside job Terror I I said it I said it all I said it before I still think it's it was an inside drop and uh I will stick sck to yeah well there were some articles about his him moving some assets I would be really really curious about the pivot because their current pivot as you as you see what they're doing is that they're trying to kind of be the publisher now and support the like creation on their platform which kind of is dying off uh like super super fast like if you look at their numbers that J one of the founders releases every week on Monday or I think Tuesday they're losing around 10% of the da every week

so by end of September if I calculated it right and they keep the space they will be under 100K Dau compared with that like 2.8 million da in the peak in November so yet there's not that much time left in order to do something around it so yeah also I had a check actually uh what was it last Friday so Q2 finished and on average the ma of all crypto games in total was one 1.1 million compare that to the same in Mobile which is 2.2 billion this is still a niche product and there's not that many users out there not yet not yet not yet not yet not yet we'll get there we'll get there like look so there are these um companies from the web 3 that are now trying to build uh the mobile clients finally and you know they're trying to soft launch their games so guess who is getting a lot of inbounds these

days gentleman srl yeah ex exactly oh I mean it's just the thing is like it's a it's an evolution that had to happen because of what we discussed before you need to have a mobile client to be able to scale the game and then put the the we like free or blockchain layer on top of it and then there you go I'm interested to see what's going to happen when the first real mobile clients of this stuff comes out like this is the one platform you can actually scale on yeah we'll see definitely this Autumn like how the Gen 2 games will fair in this kind of a let's say upgraded Version Y yeah Ma can I ask you my question next question of course how much fraud do you reckon is out there currently in the mobile UA ecosystem and in percentage terms I don't give a [ __ ] honestly honestly like this fraud topic is just one big um Boogeyman out

there if you are running um the major UA channels um you don't need to like uh worry about the the fraud that much of course there are this like uh B CH information that there there's a lot of fraud in even in like within the Google and the Google Display Network remains to be confirmed nobody knows and and uh and that's why I don't use that much like any new experimental UA networks because I mean yeah first fraud and I don't care I I don't want to just deal with that it just takes so much so much time to identify all these like click farms and fraud [ __ ] so yeah I don't care there you go all right yeah I have a I have a similar percentage one for you but I guess maybe less I don't care uh do you think we will hit the point

where more than 50% ads shown in games are non-gaming related and when do you think this will happen oh very good question Remo I don't think that will happen and here's why uh the LTV on free-to-play games is still so much higher than the average LTV you get in non-gaming apps that the users are so much more valuable to other gaming companies and unless something really cataclysmic changes where people stop playing mobile games or start spending a lot less that is never going to happen because I've seen some an analysis around like the overall uh store spending whereas apps should take over games in like five years or something like that so still you think like this this won't kind of happen don't see it happening right now like which which apps would actually have higher L TV than some of these gaming apps like unless they actually

change something in the App Store uh to actually make it harder to get the games which actually might happen on iOS but who knows yeah but if you if you think about it I think we we discussed this on the sloak podcast right that like the the app business is growing like steadily year over year and it's yeah doesn't show any any slow down so why not it can be pretty big chunk my guess is that either they come up with some kind of gamification model that you are able to spend more in normal game normal app that's not the game yeah I mean yeah the thing is like it's going to happen like really suddenly when that happens you'll get a couple of apps the super apps that will like have a higher LTV and then it'll be worth it and then suddenly boom it'll happen quickly if it does happen but yeah I haven't seen any signs of it yet because literally probably 98% of the game like the games uh or like the games I man like they have like nearly none like app Revenue

we had quite a lot of branding but like in May that fell completely out of the bottom like it's completely disappeared okay sounds reasonable really okay uh I can I can go next uh so Felix uh do you think Native advertising will uh yeah become more or will have more inventory than the well the usual ad monetization space or add inventory that you you can see in the games and if yes when man I actually have no idea what to answer to that that's a really good question let me put a pin on that one and save it for next week and I'm going to do some research on it because that's actually an interesting question because what what's happening now with the native is just it's really FL trading a lot and it's really unstable because it's it can get you really nice bump in

revenues really nice B like 3x of what you are getting at the moment and then suddenly disappears in like three days because well there's no branding yeah demand yeah I mean branding like I said before like you can track it from in May how much has gone down and like Proctor and Gamble all these companies just not spending anything anymore so yeah there you go okay uh Remo yeah Remo uh in your opinion if you're willing to say which gaming studio has had the most success due to luck mobile gaming studio what the [ __ ] is going on with the luck yeah name shame [ __ ] yeah yeah I wouldn't say I wouldn't say super cell but super cell yeah that's what I was going to say of course I know they were

really lucky they were really lucky in the way that they hit the exactly right time where it was the transition period between browser and mobile but in the end the design that they did is pretty solid luck was it like you know yeah that's the part of it that it wasn't really like where they kind of successfully ported the Backyard Monsters And even change it and Polished it up same with Farm whe into Heyday so it's like you you need the execution so it's not really luck but of course the timing is part of the luck if we can name it like that you want to say any of the Endless Runner Studios would had a better luck yeah as well like you were their first luck which is kind of a different part different type of luck yeah different type of luck okay and and then like even like when when we when I look back into the years as much as and we work at pixel that was also part like I would say lck lck part where a game that was

running on browser for like 3 years four years or I don't remember how long and then suddenly it like quadrupled or even no it it was dying the whole company had like 20K on their bank account and then what did they do invest in UA pits there you go and then suddenly the the game started to earn revenue and uh yeah they could scale or grow the game afterwards like like on mobile it was completely different Beast than on browser yeah it was and there were literally like zero changes to the you know to the inputs and like the the client stuff there like of course optimization changes but not not that that big of a kind of a change so and then then if if you're talking about luck and then pixel Federation so they they had this uh decision to make so to kill or not to kill Di's Adventure which was like a long long time ago and it was on the browser only so and they they decided not to kill the game and

now it's the you know the biggest Revenue driver for the whole company there you go and it was I I think it was pure luck no nothing else because based on the kpis and numbers that that game should be dead pixel pixel drives on these like lower lower kpis so it's it's kind of normal for them so lower kpi though that game made like 2 million a month best days so it's not low k p i mean retention numbers and stuff like that like sure like if you have like 20% day one retention in like kind of 8year mobile Studio you want to kill the kill the thing sure but if you have day 67 or 8% that's also like yeah that's that's that's thing so you can't just make a decision day one as I said like it's timing is usually the synonym for luck in Mobile gaming I would say it's like a big part of it timing is pretty much the luck if if you don't like like just take the take the different side of the coin of that Clash

of Clans story that you are the kicki uh Studio that created Backyard Monsters on browser and then you like will Harbin even said it on this like last podcast of Joe Kims that like they even look at supercell and didn't think that they were a competition for them and then didn't want to switch to mobile and then suddenly Clash of Clans blew up don't you think that's that's ego saying everything like yeah well this is supercell we don't think they're going to be a big competition I was like that's say no underestimating could be but but still um timing is is really really big on mobile gaming I would say that's the lck part okay hit me okay or Felix yeah this is for then I'll do M my last question for M if you could choose any mobile game on the market you could work on which one it would be and why oh okay it would be immediately uh I mean I have

two I have two for two different reasons so first of all it would be Apex Legends mobile because you know ea uh UA um Department it's not that great in my opinion so I would I would definitely love to work on that and I love Apex Legends and then there we build the second game uh which would be either Guardians K or hes case because I definitely want to work on more of these fake ads go there you go there you go man without a shadow of a doubt if supercell picked up the phone was like hey we need your help to put ads in one of our titles any of our titles because it's never been done before I would be like yes yeah that sounds great let me come and do that I I can just imagine like Felix yeah you want to put thats in our games no way see you see you next Century yeah yeah nice okay it's cool all right I have two

more questions left for you m but I don't know if I actually have time to run through both yeah let's let's try one and then we'll see yeah so will you get a two and a half Gamers tattoo when we hit a th000 subscribers uh of course of course dude did seen me like a like a wall for painting so will you put it like as a tram stamp on your lower back oh yeah next to your faceh no but it's like you know on my right hand there's a lot of um stuff from you know family related and then my my past and all of these [ __ ] so most probably not thousand subscribers but then we'll see depends on how we how long we'll uh we'll do no yeah it's no it's it's a yes it's a yes okay thousand and then I will I will get it there we go you can hit me and again we have more

time for sure so what was your question I have like one more question for you guys no yeah keep going let's keep it going rem's turn though okay how many years until ad mediation gets completely automated to the point not needing human input one and half years you just ready this Rob one and half years years yeah one and a half years and I cannot wait you can actually focus on stuff that actually matters so like there's a big thing in and monetization you need to do all the optimization things and like make sure everything works but it's super annoying it's not fun work all the time right like just moving placements and testing the real fun stuff I think is just actually doing the game stuff like yeah coming up with new placements testing that testing new types of AD units like that's what really adds like a lot of value so if you do a great admon setup like you increase the Adar out by maybe 20% but if you want to double or triple your out Revenue that's placements is Impressions adding new formats that's what really drives it

there so I think there will be Less ad monetization managers but they'll move more upstream and work more closer with the game development people and they'll manage way more games so yeah it'll change and they'll be less of us I think so you're going to turn into game designer some of it but like also managing like network connections because you know there's still sneaky ah like the third party stuff yeah like there still will be stuff and like I'm sure going to come up with something manual a bit to do around the biders like you can now set bid floors on biders so yeah it's evolving okay so I have a have a last question wait wait can I follow up with my question on M here okay sure sure sure how long until UA is completely automated well it was supposed to be already automated like two years ago when everybody said it's going to like UA is going to be dead again so uh I think I once said that to you and you got really angry at me yeah maybe maybe

that's true maybe that's not I I don't know no but I think it's it's not one and a half years uh it should be I think it's it's going to be more I mean there are these attempts uh where you have different companies automating your um different optimization activities which is good because you can do that on um on ad networks you know like um white listing blacklisting these uh Pub IDs uh up and down which can be automated but then you can't automate too much the the Facebook and Google I mean it's already automated in in way so you can slap automation on the automation on the black box so yeah good luck with that so couple years maybe hard to say will you also become a game designer then no was probably no I I had I had a similar question here like if UA would be completely that would you be doing brand marketing no no not not at all because there's no

way no such thing as brand marketing oh no of course there is of course there is but still 15% of my ad Revenue would say otherwise I know I know I know I know but it's like uh you know you have these discussions with u with some of the game developers and they like oh well we are going to do the brand marketing like yeah why is like oh well because performer is not enough like yeah of course like you can put 100K on TV ads or you can put 100 with K in um you know normal UA channels and uh you can then um measure the performance and see what brought you better Roi easy so yeah I wouldn't disagree right no you know I wouldn't I wouldn't be doing the the brand marketing I would just move to web free blockchain I'll see you with VR move Upstream in another way there we go okay well then uh I wanted to ask one

one last thing but it's like completely unrelated to all of these but what's okay okay I will I will ask uh and it's it's for both of you and since we discussed this quite a lot in the past like what would you ask Mr Banker Bobby CTIC and [Laughter] why there you go yeah I don't even know what I would ask him but I have nothing to say to him I would say just outstanding move covering your ass yeah yeah yeah man like I'll just be like I just be like like Bobby bunker Bobby you're [ __ ] bulletproof I mean just all all these uh [ __ ] activities that uh that were done uh it's just terrible but still I'm not I have no idea how he can be still the CEO of the company but dude he played this wonderfully like he's yeah I

would maybe ask rather you know the guy coming after him which is probably Phil Spencer or someone from Microsoft like how are we going to fix this that would be my question yeah yeah yeah that's uh that's a good question yeah that's a good question and we that question what's your F what's your favorite sports car that you got now I don't know yeah where are you hiding where are you hiding yeah okay and with that question I think um this was quite quite a lot of fun actually uh so thank you very much for uh listening to us and uh for subscribing so you heard Felix if uh subb and uh until next time thank you very much byebye yeah bye [Music]