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

[Music] hello hello hello this is no [ __ ] gaming podcasting up gamer session number 26 and we are discussing the latest news having fun dropping knowledge but let's not forget this is a 4am conference discussion live so please stop being so serious and today we have felix mr men van braberk over here mr vacation remyart and myself my team mr at home tired as [ __ ] yeah well today we are discussing latest news and we will be asking each other fun silly interesting questions well we'll see each of us prepared a few questions that others didn't see or here before so let's see how it goes this is

going to be a 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 jakub ah busy as hell right now but yeah i can't complain yeah all right currently vacationing in the beautiful city of slovenia ljubljana and heading into croatia tomorrow so slovenia is not slovakia right yes [Laughter] good old joke yeah the best thing is that if you if you if you like select languages here in slow 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 should decide slovenia slovakia just call it one thing

it's kind of trendy these days 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 it's true yeah it's like a lot of stuff yeah a lot of you know monopolies throwing their weight around yeah we should discuss um these three news basically three topics and then uh let's let's do the 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 today tab [ __ ] terrible and then again google joins bidders on macs 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 circling around on linkedin and a lot of people that had no idea how the fact this works

share their comments like hey everything is dead hyper casual is dead you are going to die blah blah blah okay so what is the news about so developers are required to comply with the following ad sky guidelines to ensure high quality experiences for users when they are using the google play apps so your ads may not be shown in the following unexpected ways for users so full screen interstitial 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 gameplay at the beginning of the level of a level or during the beginning of a content segment that are not allowed whatever that means and then replacement like 50 of hyper casual already well it depends i mean 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 the value is kind of like okay but it's still like end and then beginning of the level like what's the difference well let's see how that goes but then 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 isn't the app open up like that's what it is when uh app open up add right yeah yeah yeah yeah click on the icon you see that first thing yeah yeah it's like i've never seen it before well but maybe that there are some really weird examples it's been like the talk of the town in the last like six months these app openods like they're okay yeah they're apparently they get really high ecpm 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 full screen interstitial ads of all formats that are closable after 15 seconds and these are not allowed i mean i've seen interest issues clausable after five

seconds not 15 seconds oh yeah okay so i know so what's what's what should we what should we uh expect this yeah and expect they expect is like hyper casual debt seriously no i don't think so i mean uh most probably yes this is going to have an impact on all of the monetization in terms of diets but it's not so special right i would say hyper casual is something similar to like a starcraft zergling 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 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 play

button or you like go between the menu that's the beginning of that 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 super common yeah that's true i mean but then i mean i have inside information on this so i don't know i had a chat with uh my admob admob am it was actually quite good it's like best ad bob aiden am i had in quite a while which is a nice change of pace uh so i'll quote exactly what he said so it's this is mostly around interstitial 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 we have so far it's all about unexpected content at the beginning or

during gameplay so 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 are 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 i'm just you know was always trying to find the loophole exactly come on and also yeah and also like what's going to happen is in the short term we're going to get a lot of bills rejected from google if you're monetizing an interstitial 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 unexpected 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 in just like what i saw in like linkedin everyone was freaking out and i was like no this is not a casual killer like nowhere near it yeah no way especially after speaking to google like it just sounds like yeah they'll buy some offenders you'll get rejected and you just change the ad placement now because there's this was released on 27th last week i was like really quiet and then suddenly out of out of nowhere like oh wow everything is going to die we are [ __ ] like come on come on guys seriously why but i get it i get it it's just like idfa apocalypse all these bullshits super clickbity my guess is that a lot of apps are gonna yes felix said good 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 the net which is still allowed so my guess is it wouldn't be that big of a hit still even if like we take those can let's call them kind of a shitty ad placements so still yeah it's not not really really like a that big of a hit even if we take those because it doesn't say any say anything about reward rewarded that which i guess no yeah it's they're going to be yeah rewarded those are still there banner ads is non-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 but you sure you you place a couple of ad placements here on game design days like do you have any suggestions where you can put interstitial that's not as annoying as before a level don't use interstitial strategies rewarded more exactly oh really

why interstitial change 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 gameplay whereas interstitial 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 a pretty significant revenue yeah 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 it's just the game here 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 uh 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 that's of course that i have a conspiracy theory here we're not

conspiracy theory because i think i'm actually because two weeks before uh admob released these new guidelines that will hamper interstitial they have been pushing me for literally like two meetings in a row quite hard on trialing rewarded interstitial which they rolled out gradually and is now fully rolled out so i think this could have all the things you mentioned before it could also be a push to get people to really adopt the rewarded interstitial uh ad um yeah ad format which is not covered by these guidelines so could be that as well yeah which wouldn't surprise me um that's a pretty nice conspiracy i'm not even wearing a tin foil hat for that i think it just makes so much sense oh yeah 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 uh high percentages google trying to force people to use

reward interstitial that's probably what it is oh yeah okay okay then uh yeah let's uh 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 hear this helping developers expand their reach making it easier to discover more of what the app store has to offer since the first show okay so they [Laughter] yeah they they're now going to show ads in the today's featuring tab which they confirmed is actually dying and not getting that much traffic anymore as it is used so you know instead of fixing it what what do we do let's put ads inside so so we [ __ ] it up all over again but yeah

so until now apple has offered developers to add opportunities in the search tab and in the search results page and this is the biggest joke from the article the i'm going to quote it so both ad placements have been tremendous successful 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 efforts to maintain the app store as the best place for developers to grow their businesses oh my [ __ ] god this is the spin doctor they have working there like they are good that sounds so great if you don't understand what's going on but that's yeah oh oh first they break it and then they try to fix it with money like i can pay too fast so yeah well thank you very much for the new ad opportunity using the

today's tab uh the front page of the app store amazing so as we know in the gaming industry apple search it's for games sucks really it's the the worst placement out there or the ua channel but um drugs aside it can work depends on the game 10 out of like taking that back 9 out of 10 games that i managed before i couldn't make it work there is one game i could make it work which i think is just a big enough big exception because the scale is really bad so well the thing is like it's a very different um you actually it's based on the intent so you know if nobody wants to search your game or game genre then you just can't force people to do it it's just you can build a goal so yes sure yeah it's uh yeah you can you can do that and then try to steal uh the

original games um or traffic but most probably not gonna work because it's gonna be expensive as [ __ ] wouldn't this work like on like viral or seasonal things you know like you know there's like olympic games yes of course or something that people search a lot and then this kind of placement works yes there's also a correlation between tv uh ads and the 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 while studying yeah i mean it's true that this can work to certain extent on ios traffic of course because it's apple and that's uh you know all the privacy bullshits they have in in their hands but um yeah if you want to just um rely on apple search as is like the main pillar of your ua channel uh or ua strategy that's not gonna 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 are not expanding anything any of these placements before how's the cadency of them adding these no idea one one in a year or something maybe no i have no idea from this is this is not a [ __ ] before gameplay like maybe like two grand a day three grand a day not more right yeah right now it's like one thousand a day only in the us because all other um geos were not as good as the other channels i mean it still they were pretty good but still if i can get better results in different channels and i have the 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 geos

and everything but still look i want to i want to target players that's how it is is that data not rolled in [Music] well you have the postbacks but you need to have uh the mmp to get those prospects and yes then you can you can have like keyboard level um revenue or ltv as well which is of course really useful but still i mean it's not yeah you you just can't scale only on episode chat on the other hand in in the you know world of apps the apple search is just the must i mean that's just the top one top one ua channel in terms of games not that much so let's be really candid what actually happened here apple rolled out the att tracking framework for our privacy user acquisition on ios went to [ __ ] now they're expanding ad placements from two to three on apple search ads and they're going to make 20 billion dollars

probably after this change 100 thanks guys also you know like making days yeah 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 yeah makes all the sense if they are well you know depends on how this new ad opportunity and today's type will uh just like monopoly is being monopolies love it like it's great it's just like you act so like i mean they can do whatever they can from the outside you're just like just give us another app store like you guys ruined this one please oh yeah yeah restart the whole thing please it's so let's get back to 2010 the good old days right yeah okay [Music]

all right so can i move on from uh one monopoly back to the other one so i'm actually quite excited about this because it's not often that admon gets really big news 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 admob at 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 meaning [ __ ] but wait a second you could you could you could have more there well then you will get there or so any third-party media performance

that means max fiber iron source yeah the rest of us mere mortals was limited to three placements so this meant you could only call admob for example thirty dollars fifty dollars or ten dollars in let's say the uk and that 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 admob fail you're able to get as a publisher uh why would admob 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 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 admob was

using their dominant position to create an artificial reason to push developers to their mediation over competitors and 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 sell 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 decreased by 90 to 95 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 at google about this because it was a separate team that handled all the complaints which was painful

you had no idea for how long you were throttled and sometimes you could sneakily i did never did this perf like personally wink and oh yeah maybe sneak in one or two admiral 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 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 is fill plus ecpm so i'm expecting my ad revenue to increase from admob 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 ramp up period to look forward to when going live in the coming days and unless i get gagged 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 huge win now i get it and the crazy thing is it's only been announced on uploading max but not on iron source so you can see if iron source dragged their feet on not getting this setup for a couple of months that's a huge disadvantage because then the average ad arp diode

that you're getting on iron source is much lower than that you're seeing on macs it was but was it uh announcing i think i saw it i was trying to look forward to it i saw fairbanks so yeah marketplace launched it so it's a bit surprising and there is the this chart boost whatever that is which yeah of course yeah our our friends from plarium i think uh posted it on linkedin yeah i only saw it on fairbed and i think max but i'm expecting probably to be announced on uh on level play uh that's iron source mediation very soon but if it's not that's not good yeah well yeah of course exactly so the day where i never have to make a single placement again is coming closer and i'm looking forward to it [Laughter] do you think this is somehow related to the answer the unity merger no yeah i don't see how or why

i think like probably it wasn't what's the market no idea like 70 of people aren't max these days i have yeah that's just the sense i get when i'm taught you i was talking to people they spent they spent a quarter of a billion last year to get people to like come on like mediation yeah it's it's got a big change okay i'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out it was quite an opposite 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 addictive by identifying your users likely to turn early you can showcase another game in your portfolio before they leave forever transforming a lost user into a new user increasing your revenues learn more now

at addictive.com [Music] well okay good news good news then good news all right yes did we go to the questions so for all of us that are listening this pure fun uh segment we have no idea how this is going to pan 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 these uh two gentlemen prepared as well but i will make this first question super easy is you know warm up so this is both of you and i'm not reading my messages i'm just you know looking at my iphone to read the questions so what would you ask mr mark zuckerberg and why and jakub why is it about vr [Laughter]

okay um um i would ask him probably how much is the real kind of uh 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 3 billion so there's so much money that's gonna 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 couldn't kind of see the burn right there because my guess is that the technology will be very much the longer term long-term investment like i did 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 why are you moving away from facebook's core competency competition which is

execution and copying like competitors to you know innovating like he's not known he's not known as an innovator yeah he's not known as an innovator he's known he's the best at executing yeah okay yeah oh executing and then buying instagram right that's execution all these other yeah okay true okay okay yeah we you can go you can go next so we actually i'll ask my first question i thought we were supposed to write questions for separate from people so i actually made a special one from remo yeah yeah let me ask my question how much luck involved in game design and what's more what's more important luck or solid game design wow so the first thing you need to have both

and the worst thing is that the luck factor if everybody knew how big it is nobody would be making mobile games that's my answer it's like 40 percent or something like i don't know how much but just look at the supercell graveyard 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 cpa cpi is too high suddenly the retention is not too big and the game's perfect in the end like even from player's standpoint so my guess is the lag is really big like more than 30 percent 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 cpi in order to scale to be stuff like that the right time

kind of links so 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 basically branching out to here like how much of what you do is just depending on how well the game monetizes now the thing is like i always say because uh everybody wants to scale their game and i think it's super easy because you know you hire this ui ninja whatever and it'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 scaling and growing the game is actually i think more on the game side rather than just the ua side because the ltv of the game always dictates how much you can scale so even if i can do all these like hacks and tricks and whatever you know creative

optimization channel diversification and whatever other buzzwords 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 like yeah i would definitely rely on the on the game design and uh the whole monetization of the of the game there you go there you go okay there you go let me let me do with my favorite one this one goes for mati but also stretches to felix will we ever get the reason for the [ __ ] sleeping guys yeah

yeah we get i said what the [ __ ] i mean you already asked this like million times before you're not gonna you know it's gonna 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 whatever 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 uh ads like seriously stop it and i hate you how many complaints i guess yeah it's it's really i mean no

but but can we can we at least acknowledge that there was a time in mobile gaming when this method was not used and the games do you remember 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 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 gameplay it was just a mini game pulled out of our asses and there you go it worked even before the the fake fake ads were fake ads so unfortunately this was always here but uh i guess yes there were the times when we

had real gameplay but then um no ua people and the companies will do whatever it takes to you know to make money and uh reach the the goals follow up i guess for me that's how it is as long as i don't get complaints and like bad reviews i don't care yeah yeah yeah okay so i have okay let's let's move on maybe we are sure so uh felix now after the the non-intrusive ads um release like what would you ask google uh after this release and after the release of the the max mediation bidding like uh whatever players or whatever you you would ask now like hey google ask him but first i would ask him questions 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 yeah nothing has really changed and i was just wondering why they would de-prioritize 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 yeah coop what would you ask a ceo of sky babies because you're a big fan of axe infinity so i'm all ears of course um i guess uh how long did it take to realize that the ponzi will not work when the money was flowing in

that would be question number one and then question number two what are you going to do with all those funds and capacities actually happened i had there were some yeah there were some uh yeah well there were some articles about he's moving some assets just before yeah 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 like super super fast like if you look at their numbers that jiho one of the

founders releases every week on monday or i think tuesday they're losing around 10 percent of their dau every week so by end of september if i calculated it right and they keep the space they will be under 100 kdau compared with that like 2.8 million the eiu yeah also i had a check actually so yeah there's not that much time left so q2 finished and on average the mau of all crypto games in total was 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 yeah not yet not yet not yet not yet well we will get there okay 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 gentlemen srl yeah exactly exactly i mean it's just the thing is like it's uh it's an evolution that had to happen because of what we discussed before i mean you need to have a mobile client to be able to scale the game and then put uh the web like pep 3 or whatever change see what's going to happen real mobile clients stuff coming out like this is the one platform you can actually scale yeah yeah yeah yeah me too yeah yeah yeah yeah we'll see definitely this autumn like how did you can ask him a question next question let's say i'm 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 the one big um boogie man out there if you are running um the major ua channels um you don't need to like uh worry about the uh the fraud that much of course there are these like uh actually information 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 uh and that's why i don't use that much uh like any new experimental ui networks because i mean yeah first fraud and i don't care and 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

do you think we will hit the point where more than 50 percent at games are non-gaming related don't think when that thing 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 gonna happen because i've seen some analysis around like the overall store spending whereas apps should take over games in like the fact that you're swinging right now like which which is still actually the entire ltv some of these gaming apps like unless

they actually change something in the app store to actually make it harder yeah 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 slog podcast right that like the app business is growing like steadily year over year and it's yeah it doesn't show any uh any slow down so why not oh it can be pretty big chunk 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 or like the games i managed 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 hmm well really okay uh i can i can go next uh so felix uh do you think native advertising will uh yeah become more or we'll have more inventory than the or the usual ad monetization space or ad inventory that you see you can see in the games and if yes when i actually have no idea what to answer 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's happening now with the native is just it's really

fluctuating a lot and it's really unstable because then it's it it can get you really nice bump in revenues really nice bump like three x of what you are getting at the moment and then suddenly it disappears in like freezing i mean branding like i said like you can track it from how much has gone down and like procter gamble all these companies just not spending anything anymore so yeah there you go remo okay remote uh in your opinion what else is willing to say which gaming studio has had the most success due to luck mobile gaming studio is going on in the lack name of shame no [ __ ] yeah luck um i wouldn't say superstar but yeah i

wouldn't say of course i know i know you i was going they were really lucky they were really lacking the way that they hit the exactly right time where it was the transition period between browser and mobile but was it luck but in the end the design that they did is pretty solid in a way that 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 farmville into heyday yeah so it's like you you need to execution that's more of like you were their first lack yeah which is kind of a different different type of luck and and then like even like

when we when i look back into the years oh i guess we work at pixel that was also like i would say like luck part where a game that was running on browser for like three years four years or i don't remember how long and then suddenly he was dying the whole company account and then what did they do invest in ua bits 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 a completely different beast than in browser and there were literally like zero changes to the to the inputs and like the client stuff there like of course optimization changes but you know yeah talking about luck and then pixel federation so they they had this uh decision to make so to kill or not to kill diggy'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 the game should be dead no there's like like big pics pixel drives on these like kpis [Laughter] sure i mean retention numbers and stuff like that like like if you have like twenty percent day one retention in like sure but if you have seven or eight percent it's also like so there you go yeah so you can't just make a decision based on day one retention i think yeah yeah but it's 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 you 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 kickside uh studio that created backyard monsters on browser and then you like will harbin even said it on this like last podcast of joe kim's that like they even look at supercell and didn't think that they were a competition for them and then don't you think that which is mobile and suddenly yeah this is supercell we don't think they're going to be a big competition i was like let's say you know underestimating the okay yeah this is for both actually this is for both actually if you could choose any mobile game on the market you could work on which one it would be and why 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 garden skills for homescapes because i definitely want to work on more of these fake ads there you go in one of our titles any of our titles because it's never been done before i'd be like yeah of course yeah that sounds great let me come and do that [Laughter] yeah i can just imagine like felix yeah you want to put that together

no way see ya see ya i have two more questions i don't know if you actually have time to run through both all right yeah so two and a half gamers tattoo when we hit a thousand subscribers uh of course of course do it dude for yeah next to your face no but it's like you know i on my right hand there's a lot of stuff from you know family related and then my my past and all of these [ __ ] so most probably not thousand subscribers but then so no it depends on how how long we'll do this yeah there we go it's a yes it's a yes okay thousand and then i will get it

you can hit me and i can we have more time for sure what was your question i have one question for you guys you can actually focus on stuff that actually matters one and a half years so like there's a big thing in 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 placement and testing the real fun stuff i think is just actually doing the game stuff like yeah coming up with new placements testing mats testing new types of ad units like that's how it really adds like a lot of value so if you do a great admon setup like you increase the adapter by maybe 20 but if you want to double or triple your ad revenue that's placements it's 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 some of it but like also managing like network connections because you know they're still sneaky they're gonna turn into game designer yeah like there still will be stuff and like i'm sure they're going to come up with something manual a little bit to do right now you can announce that big floors on bidders so yeah it's evolving wait wait can i follow up with my question on monster here okay so i have uh how long until ua is completely automated okay sure okay well it was supposed to be already automated like two years ago when everybody said it's going to like you actually once said that you and you got really angry again

so uh yeah maybe maybe that's true maybe that's not i know 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 gonna be more i mean there are these attempts uh where you have different companies automating your different optimization activities which is good because you can do that on on ad networks you know like a white listing blacklisting these pub ids up and down which can be automated but then you can automate too much the facebook and google i mean it's already automated in in a way so you can slap automation on the automation on the black box so yeah good luck with that so a couple years ago then hard to say no i was probably not i'm gonna yeah i had i had a similar question here

like if ua would be completely that would you be doing now in marketing not no not at all because there is no way no such thing 15 of my ad revenue of course of course there is but still uh i know i know i know i know but it's like uh you know you have these discussions with uh with some of the game um developers and it's like oh well we are going to do the brand marketing like yeah why it's like oh well because uh performer is not enough yeah of course like you can put 100k on tv ads or you can put 100k in you know normal ui channels and you can then measure the performance and see what brought you roi easy so yeah i wouldn't be doing uh you know you know i wouldn't i wouldn't be doing the the brand marketing i would just move to web free move upstream in another way okay i'll see you with vr

okay well then uh i wanted to ask one last time like completely related to all of this but uh oh okay okay 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 kotik and why you know what i would ask him oh nothing to say to him like yeah yeah yeah man like like i'll just be like you're [ __ ] bulletproof tank man yeah yeah yeah heads off heads off i mean just all these uh [ __ ] activities that uh that were done uh it's just terrible but still i'm not i

have no idea how wonderful can i be still in the company but yeah oh yeah true i would maybe ask rather you know the guy coming after him which is probably phil spencer or someone from microsoft like yeah that's a good question that question yeah where are you hiding where are you yeah okay and with that question i think um this was quite quite a lot of fun actually so thank you very much for uh listening to us and uh for subscribing so you heard felix if uh you getting 1 000 subscribers i get to get two and until next time [Music]

you