two & a half gamers session #32 - Global launch games like a pro, Playrix GL rumour, Google updates

[Music] hello everybody Welcome this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast 2 and half Gamers session number 32 we're discussing the latest news having fun and dropping knowledge but let let not for [ __ ] sake let's not forget this is a 4:00 a.m. conference discussion Vibes so let's not take it too seriously and I just had a call with uh one guy who mentioned that this is actually a late night show format which sounds pretty funny you late late night show Vibe as well so uh it's great so we are uh here with Felix braer yakob and myself mat ler for today's session and before we dive into topics how are you both of you and there's PR good silence level

22 a little rough night courtesy of some bad sushi but I'm I'm doing better now you look you look good you than by the way I finished Dark Souls finally after so much time I know don't care but the VR version no it's the noral one but I played the mage build so like last boss was pretty much like eight seconds for one spell Dark Souls sorry not eldering yeah yeah that's like that's why you know I said no nobody car okay so so Ma what are we what are we discussing today in this beautiful episode I know right thank you for bringing the da so uh Richard asked about um the Adon or admo beer update and the iOS TI has update so we are definitely talking about that but then talking about Richard gets exactly exactly Richard we are here for you so so Roblox

to launch ingame ads next year Marvel is getting into the AR business with who else then makers of Pokemon go Marvel snap Launches on October 18th and then the main knowledge drop and we're talking about global launching like Pro because we are all Pros there you go we should have some of a jingle sound play oh yeah yeah okay it's like a proper soundboard okay I will will try to find something what kind of jingle you want you want to get bads that's okay all right I I will get that for you don't worry and again you are not wearing glasses so you know Felix yesterday we recorded the the SL podcast and you know he he wore glasses so he doesn't give a [ __ ] about

our subscriptions have been increasing and he got those compliments on not having glasses like he's turning red now so it's great you'll see well you will see well if if your eyes won't get heard too much all right let's let's talk about the ad admob Fe update okay so update on the admob bidder so keep in mind that this is still a closed beta right so the admob bder on Max is a little bit like a sports team that you really like that starts in a season doing super well and then it just starts getting a bit badly in the season and you just get a bit disappointed I love the team but you know come on guys let's get back to then you fire the the coach and then you exactly so I run at the admal bidder now in 14 waterfalls and I still only out of those like tests in 14 waterfalls I still only have four running so of those nine nine I ended up promoting five I

ended up deprecating and the four that are still like running are still super wavy so it's up and down so one day it's up 10% in Adar you check the next day it's negative 2.2 so it's like typical early beta stuff that just needs to get hammered out like some days it looks like it's the best thing that you know the goddess of Google has ever given to us Adon people and other days it just looks like you know crash and burn so average uplift on the ones I promoted is about 3 to 6% on Android iOS idfa is like always like not it through the park 10% uplift but just just a bit smaller these days right so admob like are always working to improve it so for example last Monday they released some kind of uh update to their intern RV bidding algorithm and you can really see like straight after they released that last Monday like things definitely improved so like back to my sports analogy like we're still in the first quarter of this season and like you know

adma B had a mega start then it glut fell on over and now it's picking itself back up again so uh it's just one of those things like it's what you expect from a beta product right so really it's got promise but like it's not there yet absolutely because I have very different experience with the Tas actually it starts very shitty and then it actually picks up so now I see improv improved performance over time in both us and world campaigns I guess it's like more data higher budgets and then patience is needed very much the only thing suck balls pretty much is the five days delay of data so with iOS campaigns you already have 72 hours delay uh because of the the Privacy threshold not privacy thresold because of the at idfs and all the Privacy bullshits then on Google you have 5 days delay so it's not 72 it's it's even more which sucks but what can we do this is

something that was really uh performing super well before the idfa happened so I put a lot of faith in it and I will spend against it until I gets better performance that's how I roll oh but it's still like fluctuating a lot but it's getting better and better right now I see a lot of uh like a very big deep in terms of the the budget but actually the draws improved quite heavily so patience young Pavan I guess you know like it's this is something that that also like people need to think about the same thing with uh the regular iOS campaigns on on other channels you know you can't make any uh changes or well you can but you can't make any changes based on the data because first 72 hours you don't see anything so you need to be patient and uh just wait because it gets kind of scary when you see spent but you don't

see installs purchases or any other events but you need to be patient and then after 72 hours you will start getting these data points and then you can make a decision so yeah that's it from the from the updates on the uh monetization and UA side of things on on Google products and beta programs right now let's get into the news which are Super interesting and I think the Roblox launching an in-game ads next year is actually pretty interesting because last week during the the Roblox developers conference they announced these ads will be rolled out next year in Roblox these ads will be free the well easily identifiable and they will have a native they will be native on the platform which means Billboards all of these [ __ ] uh and they said in their announcement that Brands and developers like will be able to build never seen

before at experiences on Roblox including portals that can seamlessly transport users back and forth between the experiences so uh okay we're getting there it's pretty much as as it was written like 20 years ago in that Stanford human interaction lab when I was doing my Theses the ads are getting there and they're starting to be human yeah I'm pretty sure you were right about the NPC actually being uh the ads yeah an ad that comes into your face and just start selling like in the real world guys ads are the best thing that's ever happened like what's what's your guys' negativity like seriously great Brands get to display great products to willing consumers it's beautiful yeah just wait when there's going to be ey tracking there in those headsets that that is going to be a gold mine yeah you can't wait be there to optimize

it there was one other thing that they mentioned in the in the announcement which was a marketplace where the actually the developers can sell avatars or whatever they make they make so uh you can make some roxes on those do we do we think that there going to be actually any other placements than these I mean like other plac dud you can put those native ads everywhere like build I'm okay with it but I'm talking about rewarded video look what will happen is if it doesn't like start off by getting any traction that's what they'll go they'll go traditional so like if it doesn't work and it's like not looking good they'll go back to traditional stuff that actually works like that's proven right that's what happen if it doesn't work you know what I expect uh t-shirts with actual slogans and uh and ads on them and i' I've seen those pitches actually before there are companies working on these type of

advertis Oh you mean like users in Roblox will be looking like NASCAR cars with all plastered around like logos and stuff NASCAR yeah yeah yeah okay okay yeah so you can have the default one or you can have the nice skin or you can have like the one that makes you money by wearing it yeah exactly yeah something like that I'm actually kind of excited about this like of course you are yeah it's going to be another Revenue stream for you so why why wouldn't we be right let's move on to the next news story because I'm looking forward to this one yeah let's let's continue okay um so there was a Disney's game showcase where it was reported that uh there's another try at the AR uh game or I would say geolocation run rather because there's not really much of AR other than the advertising and the first moment you play the game you turn it off because it consumes battery of course um so yantic is again yeah

netic or yeah that one oh see and this time uh after Warner BR tried with the Harry Potter IP which uh unfortunately failed uh Marvel IP is getting into the thrown into the mix and they are going to release the game sometime 2023 official date is is not released yet I mean the specific one but by the trailer we pretty much know nothing about it so the trailer suck really I'm guessing there's going to be some three faction core gameplay uh or three faction meta game and then some kind of easy to control like hyper casual core gameplay that will be geolocation based don't know hyper casual core game playay like like you have with Pokemon go it's a hyper casual go gameplay because you throw pokeballs at stuff that that's it like it's like one finger something

throwing I mean like the actual interaction with the app yeah there going to be some battles in so their track record right now is like settlers of Katan didn't work out Harry Potter didn't work out they killed Transformer game as well yeah yeah everything didn't work out except Dragon Quest wul did it though which Dragon Quest vul is the Japanese game man that makes like Millions that's why yeah that's why you work out every time every single single time he mentions this [ __ ] game miss here I really believe at some point in the future we will have an episode where you don't speak about VR and Dragon Quest or no you know what we're going to do we let's have an episode where he only talks about Japanese games and it's out of his system and then then I will speak I will speak about ASMR creatives and you diversification

but that game has the biggest rpu in the whole industry probably of course I'm most probably because they diversify the UF portf by being only Japan yeah yeah right so what do we think about Marvel this is going to work it's going to break the trend no I don't think so it's going to work unfortunately I don't have any High Hopes doesn't make any sense doesn't make any sense like uh it would need in my opinion it would need some kind of technical breakthrough like like it did with Pokémon go because Pokemon go yeah you like VR it was a technical breakthrough in the end but they had their you know it was their second try pretty much because they had Ingress and all the infrastructure and nodes that Ingress built and they just build on top of it and every other game my guess is that's being built with niantic's help is going to use that same infrastructure anyway ntic sorry yeah okay but but yeah we'll see but I guess next next uh on the chopping blog is either Star Wars or load of the Rings geolocation game I'm I'm waiting for that to happen that would actually be better than Marvel L

of like interaction so guessing that will be it why would be better it's the same it's the same thing same thing you just you know have another expensive try and then kill it that's it no come on Lord of the Rings you actually have to bring like something and then you move it and you put that thing in the 7-Eleven that would be like how can you beat this as an unit like this this small yellow red called Pikachu is like social phenomenon you cannot be did I'm sorry sure yeah it's won't be even close even if you put any any other IP on top of it just like doesn't make any sense yeah the next one REM yeah let's move on more Marvel so finally Marvel snap Launches on October 18 uh I guess everybody can't wait it's the game I can't wait so much I can wait at least it's the game from the studio second dinner which is the former uh Hearthstone team led by

Ben bro the former game lead for Hearthstone and they are pretty much trying to push the evolution in the card game genre um as seen in the game like by the things that they were publicly released the game seems to kind of pivot a lot from the traditional magic the gaing system whereas it's more close to something like gent where you are just racing your opponent to have more points on the table by the end of the turn and you take three turns that's it uh it's not the usual Magic the Gathering for where you have energy you pay for cost of attacks and like takes health and damage into the head and stuff like that so it's a little bit different I'm kind of skeptical about the the accessibility of it all like even though it looks pretty good and like definitely there's been like a lot of work put into it and SM as [ __ ] yeah that's the problem and the art also is very um I think they took the original art from Marvel Comics so it's very Niche by itself just by the nature of it it's not that you know like we see currently on the market Survivor

iio pretty much killing it with it hyper casual look it's completely different kind of spectrum so I'm expecting very high cpis but yeah they have the Marvel IP of course to mitigate that but yeah let's see how it goes because even that IP can't help with uh the super Niche visual design it's just like it's not possible you can slap 10 IPS on top of it it's still be very very Niche yeah we'll see uh the game play is definitely Niche like in in my book it's it's harder to understand than hearstone is okay well I have zero idea what you're talking about because I'm not playing this type of games but it's fine that's that's okay it's okay I'm not Evolution wise it can like add a lot into the car genre design but you know that's the problem that we all face in the industry that by making a great game you are not really making a successful commercial product that's the thing yeah of course a lot of great games get killed on the choic Block because they just can't keep up with the market cpis sure but this is

second dinner guys and they're you know uh former blizzard guys right so you know they don't care that much I guess we'll see let's see let's see yeah let's see you can talk about it like uh in uh two months from now when the Glo the game is going to be Global launched and we have launching we have some data yeah yeah exactly and we have some data speaking about global launching very good segue to our main topic today and uh you know last week we talked about um what to do when you scale a game then uh we talked previously about scaling we talked about soft lunching but we actually skipped Global launching that's uh nobody gets to that everybody dies during soft lunch yeah yeah there you go okay so thank you very much this was another another episode can close here oh it's Global Lunes went the fun starts oh I always say that uh because

it's it's you know it's really sometimes really funny uh when you see all those mistakes made uh when you Global launch a game and you are not prepared well so let's talk about all free point of views and let's start with you Felix since you feel shitty H you can start you can start thanks bro yeah so Global launching and what does that mean for ads so for ads the first thing you need to have figured out well beforehand like before the worldwide launch is what ad networks to work with and are they working properly why like ad sdks like are like a really good source of anrs and crashes so you want to add these sdks and run them in your game as like far away from your Global launch as possible because a you want to make sure that they're showing ads uh that and that your users are being rewarded properly and B that the sdks are not causing

crashes in anr because that will ruin your Google Play standings reviews and even making a featuring probably impossible I know featuring is not a big deal as it used to be quick comment for those who don't know what anr are it's just up not responding issue which is very close to to crash rate and Remo can you share the metrics that you have to hit on Google Play uh was it 0.47 exactly well done cookie yeah thank you by the way I shared it from my soft L dick so there you go that's why I didn't ask you I you're gonna get it asking that true very okay okay so uh adding the networks like early in soft launch allows you to work out any issues so you don't have it like during your Global launch where it actually will cost you quite a lot of money so so what are some good ad like a good Global ad networks to start with so let's rank them ADM meta app loving iron

source and fifth Unity so these networks are enough until you get to four to 5K a day and add Revenue then you'll need to add more so if you're launching is there any any rule of Thum so if you work with if you get 7,000 a day you need to have eight if you get 10,000 a day you need to have 12 is there anything like you know I mean 12 is probably like never advisable but like I've never actually worked more than like eight or nine like eight I think is the max I've worked with but that game was making you know like 50k a day so it was quite a big title right yeah okay okay yeah yeah so if you're launching in or you know certain GEOS like that will be your target GEOS will be like bigger than others it's a good idea to also add some geocentric ad networks to start off with and good rules of thumb here is immobi like super strong in India and good in the US uh my target really strong in CIS

and Russia I'm not sure like how applicable that is right now but historically they were good in those regions uh pangle uh strong in Southeast Asia Mina and like they're not yet in America and Europe but in the GEOS are actually active and you're targeting them they're like super strong to work with mgal super strong in America but also I've seen really great results from them in Malaysia and Indonesia so like quite impressive results so Yeah question is uh you have these five and you put these into like worldwide um waterfall and then you create different waterfall for Asia Mina or how does that work no so basically like like depends how granular you're want to get in your setup right the best thing to do is like having one Global waterfall but we'll get into that a bit later in the This Global launch we talk about waterfall so you're kind of jumping the gun because you know what that brings us to the waterfall segment

talk about right now about that okay so normally how you structure waterfalls is that you group countries together that have similar ecpm prices why so this enables you to group countries together to take better advantage of the ad mob 3 calls limits for those similarly pric GEOS and grouping also makes it easier to manage these GEOS so back to your question like these geocentric ad networks I would probably still launch them like globally because you never hurt just having like extra thing like extra yeah demand sources everywhere but like where they will actually help the most is kind of with the GEOS I explained like they have everyone's good in America usually but yeah it's good like having a second Geo that's actually quite strong okay so the issue is like when you Global launch and when you need to set up waterfalls for your Global launch uh you don't know what the ecpm prices will be in your GEOS because most likely you've not had users in there for like so you don't actually know what the average CPM will be for that game so

what I do here is you speak to whoever will be running your UA and you ask them pretty much what GEOS they will be targeting then you take the UA tiers and you mimic them in your GE group uh like grouping on the mediation platform and like this is a good start but more often than not you'll probably have to change it a little bit after about like two weeks are running because then you'll actually start seeing the true ecpm but that's a really good way to start at least that's why you asked about those GEOS okay now now I get it now you understand you know what you do has impact on what I do here we go ah a little bit a little bit no but UA like yeah it's very like everything flows Downstream to admon right so yeah it's very impact yeah highly impacted so that brings us to uh where the price your waterfalls to start off with so you need to keep in mind that during a global launch is where you see some of the highest levels of adarp out ever so I

always say you start off super aggressive so what does aggressive mean so let's say like if your top placement in other similar games let's say that's 100 uh you should add on at least like 30 or 40% here and like start with that number and building the waterfall down from there if this is the first like Game launch ever like say for America I would start on iOS since it's a global launch like 210 on on rewarded videos $200 on intials and $9 on banners for America Android I would say 200 on rewarded 200 on inters and $10 on banners notice here the Android ecpm is now like the Delta Gap to iOS like it's now a lot closer so just wanted to say a big thank you to Apple really looking forward to seeing how your search ads Revenue grows it brings me so much joy to see you guys crushing it and being so blessed to having you guys be the

custodians of our privacy data and using it only for your own ad Network keep fighting the good fight guys thank you anyway go so making enemies my friend anyway enemies I was congratulating them uh anyway yeah yeah sure sure sure then when you launch uh you want to make sure that you set waterfalls up beforehand to make sure that you don't have any like broken placements because that sometimes happen doesn't happen as much anymore but it still can happen also before launching you need to make sure that your adaps txt files are up toate on Android and your info. pists are updated for iOS so okay yeah what are these files what is ADD uptakes and then so an ad apps txt file is a website extension that you need to have basically on your Google Play like developer website and like uh like your

website it says Google Play Store it says developer website that points to your websites and on this website you need to have a extension like slad app tx. txt and in here this is where you have a list of all the vendors that you have for like the ad networks so basically ad networks like let's say you work with vungle it's not 100% direct vungle traffic you're getting because they also resell a lot of that and have a lot of resellers so basically the adabs txd file contains the list of all the resellers so basically you can actually see who they're actually selling like who actually is buying your inventory so basically having this adaptt file allows you to access all that third party data or third party like demand which if you don't have it listed you won't get any demand coming in from it and yeah info. pis is pretty much the same thing but on iOS okay and are you actually using these type of data or is it just like no I have to

update these like every two three weeks like yeah because they update them and change them quite a lot but if you take it out like the first list like item in all the adabs txt file entries is always like a direct so for example if you take out ad mobs direct entry you won't get any more demand from like demand from admob so you need to like really have these updated so it's pretty important very important okay so that brings us to AB testing during the global launch it is super important to be very responsive and Nimble with your AB testing like a cat and cats love our podcast so be like true be like very true uh the interval on when you run your ab test depends entirely on how many Impressions you're seeing in your game kind of makes sense right the more data uh the shorter the intervals of ab test like it takes for the ab test to mature so for example when I was wearing Tetris like I could do an AB test in like 24 to 36 hours because it was you know so many

Impressions but keep in mind also when you're running these tests like AB test when you're testing adob placements that are new you need to keep it for at least four to five days running because you see the spike in the first three days when admob forces fill on new placements to learn your inventory I think that sums everything up but also like keep in mind that this is only advice for like non- hyper casual titles for ads because like hyper casuals are completely different Beast alt together and why do you keep saying that why do you keep it's so different they do like hyper optimized like waterfalls are like crazy yeah they go yeah it's more stressful yeah so much work feelings is more stressful that's the only thing oh yeah only about saying hyper casual waterfalls oh no dude hyper optimiz waterfalls like yeah nightmare of AD monetization manager all right Remo what do you got yeah let's move to game Design This is

more rather than a checklist that if you don't have these probably don't even lunch rather than let optimize as you go don't have lunch don't have lunch during the day if you don't have this yeah exactly you don't deserve it so uh first things first uh content pip life from Global lunch that's like I would say the most important one because if you assume that you are going to launch and you survive the soft launch where 99% of games die CU they don't hit the kpis which is can you keep the skeptic in the closet please not skeptic is reality so uh so we assume that you have pretty okay kpi so you hit those and you are having grows there and like you know you're making money in soft lunch that's a good sign so well 99% of the games don't make money soft don't even say that because like because then half of the the industry will say like oh well they said on the podcast you know you

make money on during the soft lunch we don't we need to kill the game so like you want to hire and if you want to hire Remo to come to your company and do a motivational talk he's available Only the Good on will remain I can guarantee that very true yeah yeah oh man yeah I already did that sometimes when I was teaching my students at University I've seen that happen they jumped out of the windows walk out away but everybody else was pretty happy at the end of the year oh now we learn about game design come on yeah so let's move there uh content pipeline it's like one of the most important things there because again our favorite word golden cohort is going to hit golden cohort being the best players that is brought by the algorithm and they are the best Spenders and the most kind of engaged customers so you want to keep them as as much as possible so as they are eating through your content you need to set up a Content pipeline for increasing it so they have always something to eat pretty much that that's

like rule number one a lot of uh Global launches they're like some kind of a like let me use another analogy they like an Army push that you you know push into enemy territory but then your Logistics collapse and you don't have the ref fillment there because even if you have those new users they'll pretty much turn out of your game so that that's that's the main problems you need to keep the fuel running and the content needs to go on and I don't know how many candy crushes for instance as a good example they have like what 11,000 something levels and they're adding like 40 levels every two or three weeks or something like that's the content threadmill you need to put the content into the game if this is like the system that your game is running on how how old is the the game 10 years 10 years 10 years something 11 don't know yeah they definitely didn't launch the game with 11,000 you don't but like if I remember for instance uh Angry Birds Blast for instance another match three game they launched with like 300 400 that's what I wanted to ask like what is the optimal

amount of content you launch with I would say at least for three months for three months of what like uh for users for us yeah yeah for play time so so like not not Pure Play Time Of course just like as progression goes with normal sessioning so that would be the case three months enough though yeah that's the thing depends on your game yeah if it's a multiplayer game like a Forex game that's a completely different Beast so yeah keep that in mind uh one good advice here try to simulate your progression at least on paper uh then if you see the analytics from the global lunch you see if you were right or wrong or you are horribly behind your schedule so definitely try to have at least something on paper beforehand but wait wait wait Global launch and the same is same thing uh mentioned Felix with admon so you will see way better numbers during the global launch so you know like if the golden cohort power through the content in three months it doesn't necessarily mean the well the reg let's

call them regular players will power through the content in three months it can you know last a little bit longer right of course but you lose the golden cohort in the meantime if you don't do anything with it that's what I wanted to hear that's what I wanted to hear of course uh yeah another thing would be simulate your span depth which goes with the golden cohort because keep in mind that if people are spending money they're probably racing through the condom much faster when they not spending money you need to be able to adjust to also these because golden cohort is mainly consisting of those yeah we need to question see that's the polite way of doing it m uh so sorry about that uh spend depth like for the different kind of genre of games like what would you say is like good spend depth for different like gaming genres millions millions millions okay Social Casino like is like unlimited right but like for other ones like casual like the more core mid core it's higher I think

some numbers I know let's say Clash of Clans was like 25k if I remember when it was counted like before they added all those update like five years ago now I guess it's pretty much maybe triple that uh it also depends like how much stuff is being used into like current game for instance example would be Hearthstone like Hearthstone just uses the last three collections as something playable in the rank mode which means that all your previous spent pretty much inflates away so if you really want to go spend them it's pretty much those three collections so you compete in Kent meta and then it kind of goes on so you need to come yeah go ahead there you go this works great perfect so any tips for the simulation so what are there any tools or do you no there are no tools on paper yeah on paper if you are really kind of EX Exel ninja or there's mations IO that you can do this but usually how I would do it is that uh you get some kind of model player and start to simulate model

player Behavior meaning that you uh have this model player that is playing your game optimally let's say so he's averaging some kind of a session time and session length and by this time you can see how many sources and resources are going into his account he's like you know progressing to the thing and you just stretch it on an Excel sheet and see where he will be in 7 Days 12 days I don't know 30 days doesn't matter so and and then you start to factoring like what happens if he spends 100 what happens if he spend thousand how how fast he will pretty much you know bow through the content usually these are kind of hard to do because every single game has a different module how how to kind of simulate this most companies if the game is super big they just you really take a programmer and he will call something kind of for you with it but Excel can be kind of help helpful with it but yeah I would definitely try to at least some kind of sense because once analytics start starts to roll in you can see the reality of this how either wrong you were or you know you

overblow it or the economy is too tight too generous what's the inflation and stuff around that so oh wa but this that's why you are in the soft Lounge in the first place yeah but soft loue is one thing the other thing is that let's say when you go Global lunch the overbalance mechanics or you know PVP meta games or stuff like that really started to show only them yeah yeah of course so players always figure it out better how to exploit your game or you know play it the the the the right way let say you ID Miner and you move your date forward in the future and you get all the gold yeah exactly how to play these games anyway uh let me continue the list um have offer systems ready especially for early conversion that's also one of the bigger mistakes there that people kind of say that let's make the you know payment tiers later when we get the data or something no just have the conversion offer ready from the start at least the conversion tier yeah it needs to be

ready in the monetization stage of the soft launch yeah exactly you don't have it now no lunch for you yeah yeah yeah now because it makes so much difference in terms of the draw and the numbers after we Global launch the game and you have the offers in place already I remember when we Glo Global launched one game and uh we Global launched it in uh I think in October we had these lunch offers right there and then suddenly one of our colleagu decided to remove those global lunch offers from the offer system and suddenly the revenue dropped by like 50% and like what happened like oh well yeah you know like I replaced those glob loue offer with like what's what was something else something else Christmas offers like yes sure of course that perfect that was amazing so yeah have your have your payment system figured out at least in in the early form because the early conversion is definitely the one you're going for uh this one is kind of my recommendation but I would say you'll

run into it anyway have at least one event ready to be either immediate to be pretty much released immediately after launch or within three months of the launch because you need to have some kind of a new content people going to hit the stock state where they cannot progress really fast anymore they're going to learn the game they're going to pretty much get into state that they've seen everything and they want to see something new to remain so events changing game modes or some kind of flavor thing is the one way to do it and best thing if you can build it as a template so next time you run it you just reskin it and you you have pretty much minimal effort on the coding side so something like for instance Guardian Scapes does where you have the usual like three housee thing that they copy it from like Candy Crash where you would have like five levels in different thematic each time if you lose one of those levels and lose the streaks you get back to level one and this kind of gets recycled by the you know beyond so something like that that's really handy to have ready by global launch uh the other thing is be ready to balance the game very fast because if some kind of

imbalance in the game or mechanic or something broken that's going to be show off only if you know somebody figures it out be ready to balance it really fast because people going to be really pissed if they you know especially if it's a PVP game or some kind of competitive game you really need to act really fast and then if we at this competitive question be ready and have protection in place against bots cheaters and other things that can play your game like I've seen different games having kind of really really big problems with the Bots they can eventually figure it out but again we are losing the golden cohort that's the whole thing why we having this checklist that we want to prevent losing the valuable players from Golden cohort and for instance I remember during lost Arc launch there were like so many Bots they block you in the matchmaking they block you in the server queue you just see trains of bots going around in the environment it looks really bad like nobody's doing nothing against them then the whole chat is is being uh pretty much spam with real money trading sites and stuff like that

so just be ready because they will come if the game is successful they will come that's shed and then uh last thing make sure your game system are scalable and can absorb the influx of players because that that's one of the things that yeah if you have matchmaking for 20K players that's great but what happens if there's 200k players in the matchmaking any any vectors you need to have in the the game vectors exactly the same goes for resource management and like social systems if they are scalable if you can you know absorb the players into those systems if it can they can still work under this big load so that's that's kind of the thing that you need to cover there and if you have all of these you should you know straping and just kind of try to be as Nimble as possible because something's going to break anyway that that's how launes work that's for sure that's why you have soft lunch so you test everything uh and then even like server infrastructure because that happened to me actually a couple of times uh we Global launched the game we

had a super big featuring we spent a lot and then on Saturday where you have this featuring peak in terms of the instyles you really spend a lot and then your game crashes and you have black that sounds so expensive of course that was reallying Ferrari that's really expensive but it's like yeah well that's life what can you yeah what can you do what can you do it was super interesting but now it's the most interesting part that everybody cares about man it's going to be like 20 minutes of you talking about attribution partner selection or something like that prob no no no no no no no you have all like there are like different questions that you need to ask yourself fake ads fake ads for sure of course uh we're going to talk about fake 100% at BGC uh please come and join us uh but now back to the global launch so there are like four main questions and there are very different questions but these these are the four main ones so how much money should I spend should I spend more on

Android versus should I spend more on iOS or what what would be the the budget split between those platforms and then should I spend only in us and tier one countries or should I spend worldwide comes back to to what Felix mentioned and then the ultimately like what should be the UA Channel mix how much should I diversify the UA for Global launch never heard that before yeah I know right it's it's super new term uh running around uh so just to um you know just to confirm multiple things the Big Splash Global launching is over at least in in uh in my book uh this was the case few years ago when you spend the law during two like first two three weeks then scaled back to catch up with the revenue increase wait wait wait I heard a rumor a couple years back when player X I think when they were launching Garden Scapes and I was working at DSP at a time and they

launched and like our inventory is dropped we couldn't buy anything and it was just like every ad Network had done like play just gone to them like yeah we want to buy all your inventory for nine days and they were like what what and then like apparently like yeah they went to un like yeah we want to buy all your inventory couple days yeah well uh I'm pretty sure very similar thing happened to survivor.io when they uh you know spend a lot on Tik Tok they used Tik Tok as a main Channel but not only on the UA side but there was like a different product which is called top view I think and they cut some deal there's also a rumor I have no idea if it's yeah it's the rumor that's what I'm hearing that's what I'm hearing yeah I mean like those glub launches are I think at least for for my side it's just like not uh doable anymore it's more about scaling or growing the budget step by step so some you know some companies still have this mentality from the past even though you

know they don't have enough data from the soft loue and uh they try to do these big Global Lunes because because someone said this is how it should be done and that's you know it's always when I talk about this like don't listen to everybody and especially don't listen to us sometimes I just do your own homework and research I me we are trying to help and and provide as as much information as possible from from our day-to-day job but also like what we what what what works for us doesn't necessarily need to work for you as well so you need to think about uh what we are talking about you need to do your own homework and then just paste the the strategy on top on top of it so again what should the the global launch budget look like and what do you need to take into consideration so let's start with soft Louch kpis you need to you need to know what is the CPI in the different countries you were running the soft Lou in how did your CPI increase through the

whole soft loue period and create some kind of coefficient to be able to to work with it because if you see a $1 CPI in day one and then you see $5 CPI on day three it means that the game won't be that much scalable and you most probably have a very Niche game so you need to take that into consideration then how steep is your LTV curve is it actually increasing over time what is your day one day three day seven day 30 Ras how does that evolve this is something that you need to take into consideration because then you know uh this is influencing your cash flow situation so how much money do you have in your bank account is one thing but how much of that money is actually available for UA that's a different thing and uh could you actually scale um pretty fast or you need to go really like step by step increasing budget by 20% every other day uh based on the the cash flow situation and don't forget about the the net 30

Revenue that you are getting from ads and then net 45 on the inup revenue side that you're getting from the stores that's super important it's net 30 on some ad platforms okay not all of them some of them do like net 60 like yeah okay net 45 like yeah yeah even worse even worse than in that case because then you need to have uh some cash prepared for the for the global launch that you will see in in well 60 days at least and then it's really important to think about how like about the team experience like is your UA team experience enough to handle this high volume and a lot of stress and a lot of you know black screens and all of these things that can happen because even though I said it's fun it's also super stressful and uh everything can go wrong that's how it is super big uh if if you get featuring then uh you know it's even even worse afterwards yeah yeah have your back

ending be ready at on the phone oh yeah because you think can stress as much as they want but back is gonna actually fix it yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that's true that's true so you need to yeah you need to have a a good friends in the in the backend team that can actually work on weekends and some some night shifts as well because you know everything crashes over the weekend or during the night never during the day and the usual working hours that's that's how it is that's assur always right but back back to the to the actual Global lach so uh one more important fact is obviously creatives fake ads don't don't even don't even let's not even speak about that but important is to know how many winning creatives you you have from the soft Lun and by winning creatives I mean if you test the 10 10 Creative Concepts five of them have the best numbers the other five is just crap

unfortunately and this is completely normal so you need to have at least least five to 10 winning creatives through the whole soft lunch to be able to you know work with these on the global launch scale and uh and also you need to be prepared um because with higher budgets you need more creative so how many new creatives can you actually produce weekly um to be able to fight the creative fattig you so you know the the creative life is getting shorter and shorter few years ago it was like several months you could run the same creative these days it's like a couple of weeks after couple of weeks you see the the creative numbers or the the results kind of decrease so with all this in your mind still what kind of budget you need to or you want to spend do you know most probably know right so what I usually do is create a several plans it's usually like a b and c so like three scenarios

first one it's like very minimal budget you want to spend then there is The Adventurous budget is as a scenario B and then there's the C scenario which is STFU TG scale the [ __ ] up this game scenario which is you know if syntax or English but I don't allow it okay there you go well you know it's fine I'm from Slovakia it can go through slak English SL English sloak English uh basically you need to have different scenarios ready because uh yes you have some kpis from the from the soft Lounge but not every time those those are reflected after the global launch so you know again many questions arising uh about the global launch and now I mentioned the the soft launch kpis and you need to create the strategy around the global launch based on those kpis but not every time you see the same

numbers as I mentioned so let's let's not forget to be a bit adventurous and when you thinking when you're thinking about uh spending against uh Google or Android against iOS and what kind of uh percentage you need to spend on these platforms usually go with like 60 40 uh based on the numbers you have from soft lunch in favor to whatever works better or 7030 but still let's have that 30% of budget to explore uh what you haven't had a chance to explore during the soft launch why well because I've seen uh sometimes you you you know you see different numbers during the soft launch you don't have enough data for certain campaigns and then you open up uh different countries as well and different countries work differently on the you know iOS versus Android for ex example and then of course like you have the the whole us which you don't run in the soft Lounge

type of uh things so at least if if you are trying to you know structure the global launch budget then uh here is a simplified structure for you guys so let's uh let's do this Android us you run Facebook Google and unity then um on us iOS you run Facebook unity and Tik Tok and then it's very simplified structure you can run rest of the world on Facebook and Google on Android and then rest of the world on Facebook and Tik Tok on iOS this is a very simplified structure that I would advise you know for you to cover the whole world if you want an more advanced structure hit me up now the email is in the show notes but no like jokes aside this is very this is very simple uh structure usually I add like tier one or tier two based on the level of budget I have but if you are spending anything between zero to

100,000 even this simplified structure would do the trick if you want to spend more and definitely more efficiently on some in in some cases you add different uh Geo tiers and different Uh u channel as well I have a torpedo question yeah of course you have what happens if there's some kind of world event that collides with this thing like Olympics UFA cup or you know some kind of a Black Friday or things that pretty much pump up the advertising space well then you plan the budget uh not budget that plan the global launch not to be around these type of things because you know euro is happening in in summer so you don't uh plan the the global louer on that you don't plan the global luner on the Black Friday I did actually Global launch one game just before Christmas but it was fine because it was only like 20th of December and all of these [ __ ] high cpms and auctions and and competition

was already fading off a little bit so when we actually started High CP is [ __ ] I'm insulted ah come on high CPM on the UA side not on the monetization side of course that's a very different story and yeah uh after we we grew the budget it was already like 26th of um of December and that's already like easy easy so it's not that you know uh not that big of an issue the biggest issue is when you Global launch a game and then playerx is global launching at the same time or Apex Legends or fortnite backing days when they were just every everywhere and well everybody was playing that game as well so that was a kind of a problem so you know but this is 50/50 chance you will hit someone and every week there is someone new Global launching their games so you know it's all only about uh the level of scale of

of the the other Global launches yeah so so just hope you don't get hit by another Pokemon go yeah well most probably you won't Marvel Marvel go Marvel yeah Marvel game Marvel go it's fine it's it's gonna be okay they they won't do any any UA anyway so it's fine all right so uh any other questions this was wasn't any like torpedo question at all actually no but it can torpedo your lunch if you actually this pretty much yeah pretty much all right in that case thank you very much for listening if you have any questions please send them uh by email LinkedIn or any other medium you want to you want to choose and also thank you very much again for subscribing please continue subscribing share the podcast to your whole industry friends dogs and cats again cats love it thank

you very much byee bye everyone [Music]