two & a half gamers session #31 - survivor.io redemption story, You scaled your game, now what?

[Music] hello everybody Welcome this is no gaming podcast 2 and half Gamers session number 31 we are discussing latest news having fun and dropping knowledge but let's not forget this is still a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously and we are starting with amazing news we just crossed 400 subscribers on YouTube thank you very much this brings us close to 800 in total if we count Apple Spotify and YouTube so you're amazing thank you again for the support please share this podcast with your industry friends family dogs and cats and especially cats they love it so yeah and uh one second I just wanna you know I just want to welcome Felix and yakob and myself M uh to this

session so thank thank you thank you guys for coming and I'm looking forward to it so thank you everyone who subscribe to us we've actually discussed amongst us and when we actually hit a thousand subscribers not only will ma get a tattoo but we will be doing then an episode fully dedicated just to answering your questions if you have any questions regarding game design admon or UA pleas please send it to Ma and if you can spell his his last name because it's Mach at.me then basically if you can't pronounce it look in the show notes there you go amazing also thank you very much for all the last Global launch case study session it even triggered the true Redemption story is that true phelix yeah so before we do our little brief share of news today jumping before jumping onto an educational topic which is you didn't introduce it m no

you need surprise as always it's surprise it's surprise surpr surprise surprise all right so yeah before we did the news I wanted to share my true Redemption story last during our last episode on survivor.io myself and my lowly and innocent level two survivor.io character got called out on my analyses by none other than my fellow co-host M larish after the episode I was down I thought it was over then I picked up my phone and I got playing and I played and I played until my fingers hurt and now my character is an impressive level eight and I've seen more placs lazy and to redeem myself with an updated ad earnings estimate for Survivor IO and I know Remo you've seen more because you're on what level 17 right now yeah 17 exactly but I think I'll have to write a blog post about this because the gradual

increase in ad placements after time spent in the game after spending no money on iips is a true Testament to like absolute brilliant admon design so before getting into the analysis simply just a want to send a chef's kiss to have it well done well done guys yeah done guys so ad placements in Survivor io on day one and day two users are the EDF supplies and 300 in gold so for D1 and D2 users I still think that the ad viewer rate is somewhere between 50 and 60% with an imp out of 1.5 so it's not clear like yeah how many users actually retain to different levels because we can't see that yet which is a bit annoying but that means that for day one and day two two day two users adarp out is around 1 like 1.1 cents on Android L

it's around 1 cent and idfa it's around yeah 1.6 cents so after D3 that's when their ad placement strategy morphs into something that more resembles what mati was saying last week of them being an ad Juggernaut so after D3 the ad placements then balloon to free gold with increasing amounts every day you can watch an add with gems two times uh to get more gems and also the famous one that we discussed last week and on Revival after death the interesting thing is here after watching three or four ads you're actually shown a cooldown timer of five minutes meaning that they're actually throttling the ad watching the timer is only shown in the gem placement by the way and all the other ads just go grayscale in a way like it's not ready but yeah I think on top of it there's also the daily deals ad that pretty much starts there every day and then later down the line and you

as you unroll the the idle mechanic pretty much the pat roll feature you can also watch an ad uh instead of SP like bursting energy to kind get ahead on the idle timer so there's also another one there do you feel the energy dude yakob is completely different man no Co no glasses who that's amazing welcome no delay I think we're going to call episode uh remot like unskinned unskinned unskinned nice REM here we go one thing one thing I want to add here is that uh what Felix is pretty much saying that they are sacrificing the smoothness of the ftu or let's say the ad ad placements for the smoothness of ftu because if you really compare the game it unlocks really really slowly I mean very very slowly like I'm currently like something like day 10 and only now I got the gold mine feature the daily Quest thing for the gold pretty much which is very very far down the line and you you can slowly see

it as the main UI of the game is pretty much super clean there's nothing there and slowly populates with more and more and more icons and now I have like three to four UA bars now yeah it's it's unlocking when you when you move but this again goes into that same thing that hobby had that they are like the the masters of this kind of casual mcore pretty much something between hyper casual and Casual where the economy is very very strong because they have currently like three battle passes in uh that you can buy it's still like the gacha is very very strong there it's super annoying now because I'm having like every piece I have two of something but I'm missing the third one so that's great and I'm scouting the daily deals that I finally can buy the third one at least the inventory is not limited because that would be super greedy if it would be limited so yeah H there just wait yeah just wait just wait it's going to get there but but overall like the spending that is super super high like I can I can see that even as we see

currently on like the data analytics platforms they're hitting like 1 million a day in iips already so it's very very robust yeah so taking it back to my Redemption story here uh so I would say on day three users reten uh like ad viewer rate is at least 65% with an imp Dow around 3.8 and I think even for like the day 10 users uh Remo like it's probably what we decided before like imp out was probably around six yeah so the annoying thing is here I wanted to kind of do a breakdown based on retention to actually figure out how much they're actually earning but our favorite data platform hasn't been able to deliver on the retention numbers yet so I haven't been able to do it's it's too soon it's too soon it's they're not even like one month month out yeah it takes usually like a month but yeah keep in mind that they're making so much like currently I would guess that already they cross like 20 mil in iips only in like it was 15 15

million last week on Friday I think so it's it's way past that but the da since even last week has absolutely exploded now they have like 4 million users on like iOS like it's incredible like it's insane yeah and we still don't see the China numbers exactly we don't see the China numbers and what's important to mention is that the the UA Channel mix is changing it's not yeah yeah I'm not going to talk about that yet but that's very that's very important let me finish up here so by going on the ad metrics on day three so that 65% ad viewer rate and 3.8 Impressions per Dau with a new updated da numbers they would be earning around $315,000 a day on just ad revenue and if you take the day 10 metrics that Remo and I were looking at ad V probably still around 65% about six Impressions per da that would bring us regretfully

I'd say to $498,000 a day $2,000 away from mach's estimate I don't think it's that high though because you know that's only by day 10 you're like subjugated to that but we can update this again actually we see some retention numbers and then we can come up with real numbers so the Delta here I would say is somewhere between 300 to 400k a day that's where I think yeah the the only thing I have on top of it is that please hubby somehow advertise the evolution mechanic it's the most important thing in the game you never said it anywhere like I had to literally go on internet and like search strategy guide how to actually evolve the things and if you don't follow the evolution mechanic meaning that you are picking the right supplies and right weapons and then they evolve into something 10 times more powerful you're not progressing anywhere well you need to play the game

and then uh you know you will find out it's pretty it was pretty obvious the evolution of the the I would have say so just go and search on the survivors Reddit there's so much people asking about it well uh okay but yeah look so yeah well you're you're right because I found out about the evolution just by Co coincidence when I evolved the shurikens I think and I was just like wow this is amazing weapon but then I had the shotgun and then just evolved into Gatling like oh this is even better so yeah yeah yeah that's true okay I was well what can you do well you just play a game and try to read between the lines as is a hardcore player but it's hyper casual game man from the beginning it's not a hyper casual game it's just a it's it's not hyper casual it has num it's core game dressed as hyper casual there you go show the show the proper dress that's it

just right there please collect Evolutions guys let's leave the topic of Survivor iio let's all give him another chef's kiss cuz you know Well Done guys perfect yeah well deserved well done and also you know everybody seems to to love the de constructure of what we've talked about last week so I guess we will uh we will do another round somewhere in the future yeah once they add more features definitely looking for that yeah it's going to be labeled as Evolution mechanic Survivor iio Unchained and unskinned evolved survivor.io evolved okay so drugs aite is one piece of news obviously self-promotion because well we can do it on our own podcast I just published UA UA tips article go and check it out in the in the link it's in the show not uh I already published 12

tips for killer UA operations three months ago it was super successful well meaning I got a lot of a lot of positive feedback so now I did a q free version so check it out 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 motion with adct 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 addict.com and now we have the main topic of today which means uh it's called you scale your game now what because this topic um nobody talks about it and uh and Remo actually

brought it up recently because it's super easy to talk about um soft launching and Global launching but we're not talking about like what what happens after the scale so there are different things that we can uh we can talk about and we will do each of uh each of us the part of obviously UA ad monetization and game design and uh yeah let's start with ads and then we go for game design and I will close it with UA closer yeah all right so sure first things first what does it mean for ads like what does it mean to be scaled with ads in a non- hyper casual game so for me that means that the ad viewer rate and Impressions per da are high enough that they're actually contrib contributing significantly to the LTV uh LTV of the users in the game without dragging down on retention so in this

day and age that means most likely you're working with rewarded video and the ad Vier rate is between 45 to 70% meaning that that's the amount of users who opt in to watch ads every day and if you want actually by using RV to actually contribute to your bottom line in a meaningful way that means you need to have at least four to five Impressions per deu on rewarded below this level ads won't really contribute in a meaningful way to your LTV so you won't be able to drive any more UA to then hit the scale so let's assume you've hit those metrics you probably be earning somewhere around yeah 5 to 10K a day plus uh from ads and probably in majority like tier one or tier two countries I'd expect you then to have a mediation setup that's optimized and I'd probably expect you to be working with at least five or six networks the ones they absolutely have to work with to start off with is admob absolutely

strong on both IOS and Android meta really bad on iOS right now they don't even bid on L users anymore they're out of that thing they're not even going to try so you need them on Android app loving probably right now third biggest ad Network out there like they've grown into a monolith iron Source not as strong in Android but really strong in iOS and unity you also have mgal there that you sometimes add but those are the five core notes works that you should be working with if you're earning this type of AD Revenue so this means that all the lwh hanging fruits is gone and if you want to move the needle on ad Revenue you'll have to roll out new ad placements to increase the Impressions per dayu further you need to roll out the sleeves yeah I need to roll out the sleeves yeah get to work yeah enough enough time spent uh you know hanging out on the rou carpet now you got to get down into you know the salt mines and

actually do some work yeah fun starts now yeah so why am I saying that you should keep working on rewarded instead and not adding banners or interstitials so uh if you've hit this scale with rewarded video that means that your ad play placements are actually enhancing retention and helping with progession when you install interstitials or banners you're like basically the retention that you work so hard for will always like take a hit so interstitials uh I've tested this many times to roll out interstitials on a portion of the user base different like meth like different time scales between actually rolling out intials but doesn't really matter when you roll out interstitials and how much like of a pause between the interstitials you actually do your day one and day seven like retention will drop around like 8 to 18% like depending on you have to implement it that hurts right especially

if your game is maybe 70% IPS like I really recommend if you can stay away from this format like yeah if you don't need it don't implement it never do it period no why come on like if if you're going for the longterm now you scaled and you have 70% I putting in banners and intitial is just like a suicidal thing sorry why so it's like because the hit on retention will hit you so bad on the IPS okay but when when you do this uh for segmented player base so meaning you will show interstitials and Banners to the guys that don't pay at all okay but that's a different different scenario if it's segmented why like you said don't do it period nobody's talking about segmented yeah I think I think Remo's uh I think Remo's changing the rules here yeah come on some some game designers are more equal than others oh yeah of course you know he's super super aggressive and sharp like look I love it yeah it's like Co just sweated out all

the if you remember it's like the co did the same thing to me when I was in US you said that like oh well Co changed you way so there you go you go Evolution amazing all right so banners Banners are great but you'll still hear you'll take a hit on retention figures uh especially if you move the refresh rates to 10 or 15 seconds that's when you really start seeing yeah you're kind of your retention really take a hit also you got to keep in mind the ecpm for Banner is so much lower compared to intials and rewarded you say here like a good rule of thumb is that in a casual to midcourt game banners will never account for more than eight to 10% of AD Revenue right and it's often a lot less than that right so that's the Gams you can get but it's not worth risking your retention but okay so one question what means refresh rate refesh is how often you switch out the banners and actually

count a new impression so admob have this as standard like in their mediation as 30 seconds so every 30 seconds they switch out the banners app loving you can go as low as think 10 seconds so it's like every 10 seconds you get a new one okay it's annoying because it's flickering for the user but every time you show a new impression you get paid more for that so more impr for users b a specific AP yeah yeah yeah okay that's nice thanks and uh the new thing I've seen uh games where the banners actually make more than 10% it actually makes like 50 to 60% of the revenue and it's casual game yeah but it's usually like a chess or like a board game right or no no no no would you all to share which game it is uh I might let's say it's a it's a coloring app uh I would say that's kind of on the same level as like you know yachi or chess or anything like that you know like it's just yeah core game but

that doesn't really count I think talking more what the like how like how is this it's really hard to say blanket terms like it's really hard to say blanket terms but like of course yeah they are exceptions they exceptions extion to every rule yeah today Remo's not wearing his glasses they are exceptions to every rule of course anyway so I would say when you hit this level like stay with rewarded ad rewarded ads as your way forward and I just wanted to share some cool rewarded placements that I've seen lately that have added quite a lot of like value in terms of yeah a lot of clicks on them and the best thing I'm seen lately is kind of floating ads and that's a rewarded ad where basically at some point during game play you see some kind of yeah some person run across the screen with like a sign or like someone pop up or something flies over whatever like just to get your attention when you click on the button usually you have different like cool down timers on when this person or this ad unit actually appears to float across your screen but

when you click on it you either get an option to get X extra hard currency or Y extra like y extra soft currency for free but if you also click a rewarded placement you can 2x that amount and like I've seen it implemented I've seen it done and I've seen it happen to me in games and I always click on it because it's such a good deal you'll need to like kind of ab test this so you not giving users considerable amount of like inflation in the game when you're doing this but it's relatively like not that used right now and since it moves you always get attention on it for users and it's a good deal and I also wanted to pass this along to you Remo because you know you're the in-house specialist when it comes to you know game design and placements so do you have any other ones that are quite interesting that you wanted to sh yeah just want to add to this one like this is pretty much standard Idol genre mechanic uh Adventure communist is my favorite example here pretty much perfected It to the Limit where you first fly the plane around and just by clicking on it you already get the soft currency there's no

popup so this way you train the user slow down wait slow down I don't get it say it again so you always the plane flies and you always get the currency first meaning that you first train to user to click on it so there's no popup at all so this way you first train the user to click on the plane and then later down the line plane will come up with advertisements meaning that there's a popup and you can choose if you want to watch the popup for soft currency or not and if you then exit and close it it the plane will start to bring more and more kind of Juicy deals to get the conversion point right meaning that it will increase the amount of soft currency or even go to hard currency to try to convert you that way the mechanism will kind of learn your conversion value for how much you are pretty much willing to watch an ad and then it won't go over it meaning that that's the most efficient best implementation I've seen yet regarding this mechanic nice and I'll let you finish on your

favorite last reward rep placements because I know you had one more you wanted to discuss yeah this one's pretty rare I haven't seen it uh much I've used it like multiple times in different games uh one kind of a golden rule that I always have regarding rewarded videos try to make them like try to make the placements Dynamic meaning that they won't pollute the screen and you can easily moderate them cap them or pretty much you know do whatever you want with them uh so they're kind of hidden and they always pop up only in the context of it so let's say events which like we scaled our game so now we expected to have some kind of liveops functional or events and having ad placements in the events is really great especially if you're monetizing the engagement itself not the economy so I'm talking about stuff like tries rolls or kind of Lifesavers like one last you know you died maybe you would refresh your life or something in that matter where you're not giving away the economy value you're just giving like more chances or more

shots at at the goal for the player therefore these are kind of really cheap for the game economy to do but on the other hand they're very effective because you know you're monetizing the engagement for the player and what I've seen uh throughout the days is that uh if you run these events in some kind of like normal manner every month or something there's a constant really big optic in at Revenue coming from increased uh Impressions so that that's like very very kind of easy to do and as I said nobody really does it but if you are at the point that your scaleio game this is one way to do it where pretty much events bring new gameplay modes and new gameplay modes more space to put more at placements nice okay any examples um yeah we did that in battle Legion on the hunt event where you would giving away Secret Sauce are you yeah I think I already talked about it on some lecture before or something like that or yeah anyway game Camp so you would have

you would have contracts on this kind of event uh and those contracts will give you some points towards some kind of specific Big Goal that takes like two weeks to do and like an easy thing to do would be that you are not satisfied with your contract so you can roll it for an net or you run out of your contracts per day uh get a new one for anet because even if we give you a new contract it doesn't mean we're giving you more value we're just kind of speeding up your progression throughout the two weeks event meaning that if you hit it sooner yeah you hit it sooner that means that you know pretty much you run out of it sooner that's it but on the other hand if you're not playing the game for some time you could catch up because you know you didn't like full your daily quot of contracts therefore it's easy easy conversion for people that I like limited amount of time cool that's it for my side I guess we move on to game design because it just so smoothly yeah before we do that need to you know give a proper

introduction to the to this section so Yak we should edit this and put that in the front yeah no no no no no no no no yakob will do a short example case study how adding design vectors into the game helps with long-term content monetization dude this is my life this is like a GDC um topic for a presentation but it's normal man like you just don't talk to game designers it's it's normal like you know you use specific word because you want to talk about specific things that everybody they know the word knows about and then you need to you know explain it to other people that's how it works you only speak to you know networks and ASMR people like yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah well I need to introduce yeah ASMR design vectors into creative framework so again uh same scenario as Felix had uh we are somehow scaled and

uh what happens after global launch let's say half a year three months uh like yeah you definitely need to have a plan for it even before Global lunch just saying but yeah let's say we something like half a year after global lunch so what happens is that your most engaged users The Dread that golden cohort that you have from the global run starts approaching uh the end of your content meaning that they're hitting the I don't know end of your Saga levels end of your map end of your whatever their heroes are getting pretty much to the limit of their maximum level their clown base is getting on max level stuff around that so what happens is usually that you add more content to content threadmill if you build uh the systems to be scalable meaning that of course you add more levels you add more levels to the clan hole you add more maps you add more Heroes into GAA stuff around it that that's basic uh but the other thing is that at some point you really need to add new design vectors as M likes to say which are pretty much like extension of

your current progression so it's like another progression layer put on top of your current one so let me get some kind of like uh industry example which is a good good I would say case study to show where it pretty much deepens your spending that but also your content meaning that people can play the game for longer without running of stuff to do that that's the important part so usually when you do this thing it is recommended to do it on a separate currency track because you need to create also a good entry point for new players and this is the tricky part because if you create it on the original currency it means that your like high level user base that been accumulating it for some time because they had nothing to spend on already jumps into it and pretty much streamlines through it and your new players are not able to catch up for like very long time therefore if you put it on a new currency track you create this kind of a new entry point meaning that everybody can start gaining that currency from some point point from that time meaning new players jumping in can CAU up with

old players that are also just jumping into it so this is also very similar to something like World of Warcraft expansion that that's like very very similar thing but yeah let's go back to Empires and puzzles so what I'm talking about is the talent grid system that they put on top of the heroes meaning that once you level up your Heroes to maximum level they unlock this kind of a skill tree where you are pretty much investing Talent current uh into their stats so I would say I don't know who balance it or how it is balanced but my guess is that let's say our hero on max level I think it's level 70 or 80 does depends on the star rating has 100% of power but if we fully unlock the talent skill three we increase it stat by another 30 to 40% or how much you want to pretty much focus on with this mechanic and how much kind of a focus for the end players you want to bring it because it cannot really diminish the the previous progression

but it needs to be attractive enough to make an impact further down into the end game so what they did here they again created a custom currency called Talent points or whatever uh they have 10 classes into the game so that plays better because of course you get some currency for other class you don't get the currency for your class that means you need to farm more stuff around that and you're again investing it into your Heroes again uh if players are new players are coming into the game they are just getting into it and nobody has like super big head start against them meaning the senior players are just as the new players getting into the mechanic and again they created a really really nice sync with it because they also tie the new the old currencies into it so also you need to burn the food iron and the normal stuff that is coming from your camp in the economy therefore they created this kind of a new B layer that now everybody can you know how much time it will take I don't know whatever six months one year again to max out and at that point uh this scenario repeats and they need

to come up with some another progression layer and this is how it works um the like there's a scale I would say on how much functionality you want to invest into it because this system is pretty simple to do in a way that it just scal stats so pretty much what you do you're increasing number in the Excel sheet of those Heroes so more hit points more damage more armor or whatever but there's no new functionality and this is really the crucial part that some power layers or some kind of a progression extensions are better than the other when you are really investing into new functionality into the game but that's really really really hard and takes a lot of production time but can you can you scale it to Eternity this uh these points the stats um yeah ask people that are doing World of Warcraft that would be a good way to do it okay uh but let me give another example where where you're pretty much doing nothing and you're just doing the Excel sheet so that's also our favorite game called Diablo I which what they did

when they I guess unfortunately got cut down on the production team uh when everybody was pretty much swimming in legendary items that were already decked out what they added were ancient legendary items meaning that every Legend like 10% of your legendaries would be Asian legendaries that would with increased stats and what happens after few seasons where again everybody's decked out and pretty much all in Asian legendaries they added Primal Asian legendaries which again would be more rare than the Asian ones and have 10% more stats than the previous ones so this is kind of like easy Todo design in a way that you're just again extending cells in an Excel sheet uh I think they even cut it down later down because it was even silly to them so now Prime legendary items are only the ones that have perfect rolls it's not a 10% stat increase but they they are just there so you have something to Chase that's the important thing for like power power

lazy game design because it sounds yeah I didn't want to say the word but it's it's like it's a game design that what you can do with minimal amount of production capacity because my guess is that what would you do differently then uh if you have minimal amount of production capacity there's no way that you can do it because you don't have coders to to code a new functionality and that that's the main problem that this is pretty easy to do because you just spend it's not lazy game design it's like actually pretty efficient super efficient but the the the problem of this is that if you scale it too high you end up with something like Diablo Immortal where the spending Gap is like super super high and it's like 100,000 or something but the only thing that you get there is higher numbers on some you know on the gems that's it and that's that's that's that's a problem in my book like I think uh of course if you don't have production capacity there's no other way and you need to give people people something to Chase Chase for like otherwise they just

leave because they finish the game you never want them to finish the game of course but there's different ways how to do it and usually It Go BS down into like adding features features such as you know new game modes new twists ped of Exile actually has it really good way of course of course you mentioned ped of Exile no discussion when you don't mention P of Exile about diao what blizzard said lately when they were talking Diablo 4 I I don't know why nobody's talking about but they're pretty much taking a lot and lot of points from P of Exel progression because what P of Exel does is that they come up with some kind of funy mechanic that puts a Twist on their game they run it for three months and then reset it again and this goes on and on and on and on and it works for seven or eight years already and they're just increasing in the Au of course it's really good but but the problem is that you are pretty much forced to create new expansions every three months and this is very very hard sometimes I remember some of those modes

went pretty bad meaning that when they released it the game was literally unplayable at some point so it's very very hard content threadmill but this is the other end of the spectrum I was talking about one is just increasing cells in the Excel sheet the other one is doing new functionality which needs to be tested and needs to be properly designed which takes a lot of time yeah so from my Noob game design point of view this is happens in Candy Crush um later levels when they introduce different things into leagues and okay a okay all right yep yeah so that that would be like uh let's say the most of it I would really like to like hold on to this once we have new features in something like Survivor iio for instance that we can then compare like how how it works out regarding the power progression how it works out regarding the feature set and if they really go into new functionality or not and how

that actually um had an effect on the level of spend yeah because what we usually see in our um favorite uh tools data tools we see a like a flat spending and then suddenly super high increase and then we just try to find out like what happens and I think would like game analytics or game refinery has this uh timeline feature when you see what kind of um changes they made in the in the game that's that's super useful okay so uh and that's a kind of good transition to the UA because um I think there is not such a way as or such a thing uh we we do we call like ice scale the game and now what what what we can do it's like uh the spent like maintaining the same level of spent with the same level of roas and Roi it's it's

very high it's it's going to fluctuate um a lot depending on the uix seasonality different things and uh usually you see pretty good numbers because on at the beginning after the global lunch everybody's happy then it starts to decline because golden cohort kind of disappears you don't have enough content and everything starts to break but we we don't see this Behavior because we are better other than that we have enough content the golden cohort was just beginning and we see um an increased spent maybe just for like easier understanding what's golden cohort for people that are not used to this word if we are going design vectors today oo design vectors well you brought it up first so you can go with the explanation but um golden cohort is a is a hardcore not hardcore it's the first group of users that are power users who are going to power for your content

pretty rapidly from Global lunch and they were hand pick by the algorithm as the best ones yeah exactly so they usually have the lowest cpis and the best uh Roi but that the the size of the golden cohort is uh is a mystery I mean it's like you always like we had always the discussion about like how long it lasts or if it's like kept by number of players but nobody was able to give me any answer but from what I saw during these uh these Global launches I had uh it's mostly dependent on the the target audience and um of the game so if you have like very wide and Broad appeal the golden cord will be higher or Survivor I Survivor IO for example yes if your game is pretty Niche I know RPG whatever our Forex game obviously like this golden coh will be really small so but you know that's uh that's

pretty usual what happens and this is something that you can see also in the soft loue because if when you launch the first campaigns you will see great numbers but then the numbers kind of declines as long as you you go through the soft loue if you are in the soft loue for three months four months six months in the same country it's going to get more expensive and this is also the the fact that you scaled and you see very different cpis on the level of spend 1,000 a day 10,000 a day and 100,000 a day so it's very different cpis so uh if you are spending um let's say a million a month you will get more room for experimentation because you have higher budgets and you need to experiment quite heavily to find new ways how to run the UA profit you need to run multiple creatives and

you need to think about what to do where to go and stuff like that so then um you know if I scale a game means you are um sustaining some level of um of spend and performance you're comfortable with okay we can uh we can talk about that so you need to develop and perfect your experiment experimentation process so you slowly start adding and uncovering new UA channels and stting adding them to the to your UA mix so as I said like with the high level of spent yeah I think 1 million plus a month it's really hard to say also like the True Performance of the each Channel because ideally with this kind of spent well you have your own data team that helps you with the the evaluation and running incrementality tests so uh if you don't call call our good friend maer from incremental they will help you or let me

know I will hook you up with with with ma but back back to to the the actual business what is what are the incrementality tests so let me give you an example so you are running a Facebook uh UA Channel and unity um in certain GE let's say Slovakia I I guess that's not a pretty good idea but you run you run these two two channels in Slovakia but you with the running an incrementality test you might find out that uh if you run only Unity you could get better results in terms of install and revenues because those two channels are actually cannibalizing and there they are targeting the same same people all over again so if you pause one you will get better results and stuff like that so the very simplified incrementality tests so in with this level of spend you should you want to Target players only once not not 10 times ideally because that's not like very effective spend

levels so do I get that right that like the result of this test is you actually scaling down because you just let other channel work better alone no you just uh move that budget back to for example Facebook mhm and just uh it's more efficient that way to optimize the mix mix diversification ah there you go not only me that I talk about top five like I did in terms of the networks that you should be working with from an early stage like I said like a SC so uh even though I about Facebook it's still up up there but I would say it's Google Unity um Tik Tok for sure appin and then Facebook and iron Source might might be the in the top as well so Tik Tok is so Tik Tok is not there yeah it is is I said TI Tok yeah third place for sure I mean the Google should be the well should be you

can do whatever you want but yeah in my in my UA strategy always it's uh it's about Facebook first adding Google then Unity then Tik Tok then up loving and then uh everything else iron source as well because it's not like up in those levels of spent uh and I always say this uh you have as a UA manager you have problems when you have low uh budget and high budget below you need to be super efficient and you need to be very careful about the spend and the same thing with uh with high budget you most probably tested all the channels out there and now it's uh it's in the levels of hey okay so I need to be very efficient and try to pick um different GEOS on different channels different platforms as well so and also like with this like higher level of spend your UA Channel mix is going to change on a weekly basis most probably because as I said with the Survivor they started super high or

super big on Tik Tok now it's shifting and it's always going to shift based on seasonality based on the numbers and everything the most I would say so not fluctuating that much channel would be Google depends on the level of spend and amount of um events you can pass back to the to the Google because if you if you don't have enough data then uh you're pretty fact then it's going to get fluctuate fluctuating a lot but we are scaling and spending million a month so this is not a problem fine which is great and also when uh Mr Game design vertical brought up this topic he mentioned also like hey so you yeah VOR sorry design Victor even better design Victor yeah design Victor hey uh so so talked about like hey so you can you can mention how to do better creatives which is you know which is kind of funny because uh for UA this is a day-to-day

job to to to bring uh or you know to find the best performing creatives uh on any levels of spend it's true that with the higher levels of spend you need more creatives and more Creative Concepts and by more I mean at least like five new Concepts a week ideally 10 new Concepts a week which depends on the level of spend you have so you know usually different levels of spend different spend what's a New Concept is it like my guy that's falling into lava is now falling into water and then falling into like uh spikes that's new New Concept think about it is that the new no it's not yeah it's that's just like a completely different story board yeah exactly well okay you can have a completely different story board for the lava guy but yes you know it's it can be a pull pull the pin that's that's one concept and then the the lava guy lava yeah that's a different concept so yeah

different levels of spend different number of new Concepts are required uh and also with these like higher levels of spend it's a good time to introduce a new pair of eyes either on the UA side or creative side or well ideally both because you know you have lots of money you are spending and uh you can afford uh multiple companies multiple external companies agencies or Consultants like myself sometimes it really helps no but Jokes Aside sometimes it really helps because we have like more experiences from different games and uh that can help you to you know find different ways how to even scale the the budget you have at the moment because just you know let's let's face that uh if you have small team that uh all like always worked within one company it's not a bad thing it's just like you don't you didn't see that many games that many scenario iios that could happen in these levels of spend so when some yeah when um someone

like me come in and uh you know the iOS numbers are not looking that great and around the campaigns and suddenly it looks like uh it's a scaling it's because of the experience so uh I don't think about um adding these external agencies to your uh team as like a competition to the team and like we I'm speaking from from my experience when I was a pixel Federation we always we always thought about external agencies as a competition like yeah well they are going to steal my job like no honestly I I have no intentions to steal anyone's job it's it's not not my motivation and I think even the external agencies don't have this type of motivation as well so when you're talking about like fresh pair of new eyes I can already see you with that Blade Runner quote like I've seen things you people wouldn't believe oh yeah

definitely exactly but no yeah it's always good to also like even if if you bring someone just to discuss uh and check the data and check the strategy and check like the the UA Channel mix that always helps there you go how about that how about that right pretty new one also learned the new kpi here perfect yeah exactly and uh remember guys if you have any questions on admon game design or user acquisition email them to ma larish me and if you don't know how to spell it email Napoleon l. me and also also also there's going to be a nice surprise from our side if you are attending PGC uh later uh this month we are going toink in Helsinki we're

going to be there having a live podcast discussion uh on stage for 40 minutes on Tuesday morning so uh if you're there hit us up and uh yeah until next time guys thank you very much see y bye see [Music]