two & a half gamers session #33 - The UA (r)evolution, from fake ads to fake core gameplay in games

[Music] hello everybody this is no gaming podcast to enough Gamers session number 33 we sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our daytoday user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs but we are also discussing latest news uh from time to time while having so much fun but let's not forget this is 4:00 a.m. conference discussion Vibe let's not take it too seriously how about that good hello there sounds great man yeah and M what are we discussing today I don't tell I just want you know I just want no we have you know I just want to say we have Felix here yakob here and myself Matty here and we are going to discuss fake ads and fake core game plays everybody is fake all everything

is fake fake it till we make it there you go lots of people actually make it it seems yeah I know uh the article I posted about fake ads got super popular but we are not going to talk about the whole article here because it's lame we're going to talk about fake ads in general and then yakob made uh an interesting research about fake core gameplay and of course uh Felix you're going to tell us we are wrong right y is that true okay perfect it's not what it's not what do you mean we'll see we'll see at the end ask us ask us how we're doing ask us how we're doing I want yeah how are you doing guys this this week hey hey Remo hey Remo what do you think I look extra specially good today you mean do you think I look how do you think I look or should I say I'm wearing myimon just for you really yeah man I know you love Japan

and everything Japanese so I thought you could love me today it's like a that's a proper Vapes I would say nice wow please um take it next week to to PGC I would love to see depends I mean seen I've seen Remo smile this much so I might have to take it with me everywhere I see him yeah well you take the the kimono he will take his glasses I I suppose what should what should I take I well I will make I will make myself a t-shirt with UA diversification and ASMR slice all right all right time to spin your sweaty spaghetti boys no no no no no no no it's it's a you didn't say like how are you I'm really interesting to hear cuz I'm doing fine thanks for asking oh how are you as usual uh yeah I you know finish Dark

Souls Elder ring we talk about that one so looking at all the other things currently I read that cyber Punk is being like uh trending super high now after they announced that uh another expansion and Anime has been released by Netflix are you going to play it finally Mr Japanese are you playing to okay once once it hits the expansion next year not not now well where is it coming live next year they said okay so we have yeah we'll see 12 more months I guess yeah but the but the anime from Netflix look looks great like uh we'll probably watch that one really of course you yeah it's it's in Japanese so it's a proper anime of course could up so uh would you say um it's going to make as much money as Dragon Quest what do you mean the expansion of cyber Punk well maybe or the anime

idea oh we'll see like I I'm really curious if they are able to kind of turn this ship around in a way that make like kind of get back the like the usual like premium owner they they got before when they were like um in the best times of Witcher uh keep in mind they already announced that they're doing Witcher 4 or whatever kind of a new project that it's not like continuation of the trilogy like a new Witcher project so we'll see but uh yeah if you say we'll see one more time I'm going to kill myself please let's not will see anymore if I can do observe okay we'll observe observe that's ready for next week PGC yep knocking on the door amazing you need to upgrade your uh your flight ticket Mr yakop yeah I'll look into it Ryan Air has business class no it's F air man no going to Finland what's the other there's no other way yeah from Vienna no no way no way

all right so uh so why do developers you use fake ads your honest opinion um yeah I'm asking you yeah I'm asking you Mr Hari oh me har yeah of course Mr har uh basically because you can get a broader appeal by lying in your creatives that your game is different than it actually is so you can lower your CPI and thus get more users into your game for cheap M because you are able to make 100 million Revenue with a 5-year-old game that was making something to nothing yeah okay interesting okay so uh you know misleading ads or fake ads work quite well from the the research I've done and from what we actually can see around us right so it's it's not only the mighty party um case we mentioned but also play and uh others and it quite

helped increase the revenues and the user base for home caves and guardiance caves I guess so they can bring a lot of money to the developers pocket that's it uh I mean we could end the discussion here thank you very much it was fun but we can we can continue so why is it happening uh and we discussed this multiple times before running and growing the game it's not an easy job and the scaling the game is even harder so you know you can go back M like a few episodes and uh listen to us talking about skelling a game you need to involve a lot of Department Department into the the scaling business uh and it's not only you know as we discussed not only on the marketing side you need to work very closely with the with the game team and analytics and you know you have to have a live Ops uh a Ace in your sleeve as well so thanks to the fake C fake ads you

could potentially lower the cpis quite heavily and if um if you are looking at your LTV versus CPI equation what can you do so on marketing side all the UA creatives ASO tricks here and there maybe like lowering down 10 20% here and there but that's not going to help you um grow the game or scale the game or have like fiveyear old game make hundreds of Millions so if you are not able to increase the LTV you need to do whatever it takes to lower down the cpis uh you know just below the LTV obviously and whatever it takes which means whatever even using fake ads so um what do players say about fake ads well I I love it on my from my end but uh most probably others don't like that too much

right I would say there's like a expected hit on the review section when you start doing this like just be honest yeah I would say last thing I was checking this it was like 20% of the negative reviews automatically turn into complaints about fake ads that's like assured basically that's true especially if the game was not doing it before uh which brings us also to that other point that why not everyone is doing it currently why not let's say supercell is not doing it or IP games are not doing it because of course you don't want to tarnish your brand that's like the yeah one of the biggest uh let's say obstacles in order to run it because you have an IP so the IP tries down the the CPI you don't have an IP and you don't have a portfolio of games making billions like king or supercell so billions yeah what's left there for you to do so you know either proper UA what are you talking about what are you talking if

you hit the CPI ceiling even with proper UA like do you think you can revive any game with like proper UA well you can't revive any any game with the proper UA it's just about the CPI LTV that's it so proper UA is just a different name for fake ads no no no no no no no come on come on and I'm not like look so even though I made this research I'm not like uh cheering up for fake ads just uh I don't I just think it's very smart and a really interesting idea how to you know fake fake it to you make it because why not I mean look so if you do if you do or think about it um you try to make money because this is still business so if it's not if you're not able to increase the LTV so that what what you do there's the other part of the equation and you know with different like UA Optics tactics and hacks and whatever you can you know L CPI but this is

definitely quite different no this is like super dramatic um change of creative strategy yep what's your like kind of opinion also so like with the rise of fake ads you've also seen kind of the rise of this like disgusting things with like yeah misogyny people hitting each other like anti-woman ad like stuff like that like I get so many complaints about it like but that must Works super well as well otherwise UA managers and creative people wouldn't be building these type of ads yeah there yeah that's the thing because if we see these type of ads and they well we see that for quite a quite a long time already it must work because I mean it's just like disgusting I can't I mean most probably I wouldn't run these type of things uh at least I'm very glad I didn't have to yet in the in my career so but you know it makes money I guess so that's that's the thing and that's why you know you can block them on Facebook on on other UA channels for sure yes but then you will find a way

how to run these ads on different ad networks and then it falls into your it becomes yeah then here comes my problem and I have to yeah deal with it and yeah quite frankly eat a lot of isn't this like uh isn't this like you know the whole social app ecosystem is wired around polarizing content and pushing polarizing content around because that you know catches eyeballs it is but this these type of ads got like get quite banned immediately on Facebook because uh it's against the rules and guidelines and it's usually like very quickly that you can see that your ad got rejected actually so you won't do that much uh action on Facebook Google maybe but it's also like very strict on ad networks but but it was this was like a recent change wasn't it in a way that like I remember my Facebook feed being spammed with the lava guy Pin creative from but La guy is

not you know Lama guy is not my surgy and you know okay you mean my surgy not fake per se not fake CS per se Facebook said multiple times in in last year that they're GNA ban fake ads but why would they they make money on it so it's like it's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen anytime soon and then there's the other aspect of uh CGI 3D totally different types of creatives which is like super high quality but it's also fake I mean do you remember like we had the train station this like 3D changing train which was absolutely amazing stff like does for instance yeah yeah exactly and you know players complain like hey this is not how the game looks like but like is it fake it of course it is but it's you know it's a different type of f no it's you know comparing apples to to oranges I guess but still players complain quite heavily but they don't understand how UA and fake KS work that's the

thing but okay so like you said Felix at the beginning think about this as a funnel so you're acquiring a ton of new players with very low cpis uh way lower than what you were able to get before with your you know regular gameplay related creatives well what can you do and like we see kind of a pattern here which means like games with really high CPI in different genes use this tactic to lower down CPI so usually it's Forex RPG games fantasy oriented themes and midore hardcore midcore hardcore yeah I mean it was used as we discussed in uh casual games in in in plays and titles but mostly and also I mean match fre is also very high high CP High C okay there you go nowadays already yeah yeah so so this is this is how you you can actually go

about that and just try to lower the CPI pretty much because what I used in the past you know I can just bring the bring up the the trans station example again as soon as we we showed gameplay the CPI was super high as soon as we showed the the fake ad that I shared in the article like CPI was super low of course retention dropped as well but then if you acquire 100 players instead of like 10 you your chance to to get players is way higher than from the 10 and you know then that's the the whole math behind the the fake ads that's it so uh it's kind of it's kind of easy you just need to try again to think about CPI versus LTV equation and like why do you see high cpis in these genres well what affects the CPI so it's genre as we said then it's it's kind of monetization strategy ad monetized game games have lower cpis hyper casual and all these

uh then it's visual theme and and obviously creatives so uh it depends on the combination of the genre and visual visual design how you can um achieve different type levels of CPI so yeah interesting uh interesting fake ads uh case study I think uh we are going to see these type of behaviors even more and why is it important to mention fake ads it's not only about fake ads as you know as creatives to make it work you need to have like an expectation flow or like seamless experience for players so if you see fake in the creatives you need to see fake in the stores and you need to say see fake in the game as well in the game play which is amazing transition to fake core gameplay research by Mr yakob Game design Japanese Master Remar

if you've built a mobile game for iOS or Android you've experienced user turn you can win those users back but it's getting more and more expensive even more so to acquire totally new users enter cross promotion with 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 [Music] yeah I really hope you're going to talk about vectors and Design Systems in the fake core gameplay no oh okay thank you very much for listening I think this is this is it yeah uh let me get this straight um so I would say this is this is like a evolving Trend currently as same as it was done with the creatives themselves like if if if we could put it as a subcategory fake basically a subcategory

of creative strategy in the end it's not that like like you said like you can have the high high value high production play x one which are still like fake ads basically and then you can have your hyper casual pin lava guy whatever misogynistic G play that that's like yeah that's been used um what happened throughout the years uh some games look at the others and I guess like one of the most tactics is pretty much to kind of see what competition is doing and improve upon it like plus one the usual one yeah because you cannot really kind of create something out of nothing if something is working and being proven by millions of spend and revenue dollars by the other games so uh as I look through it uh I see like few types or examples or evolutions of these and let's let's basically go through like let's say three types that goes from the lowest or let's say the crudest example of pretty much duct taping it into it and then to

very very smooth and I would say like pretty much evolution of the whole thing so uh let's start with Hero Wars because Hero Wars is like one of the first ones that that actually started doing this or as let's say maybe even gcap started soon I don't know like need to would need to research that based on some kind of old builds of the games but let's keep with the high LTV games because we want to talk about midcore this is for sure it was first it was first play because they stole that from mington mansion and then they applied this for Hero Wars when they bought for whole portfolio yeah yeah yeah so let's just take Hero Wars for this example so what the hero War started is that uh really really famous or I would say INF famous creative where you have the guy there's some kind of physics based puzzle you pull pins out and then he dies in like a horrible dead of lava or something like that and then it fails and then you need to click on it and install the game so what happens there is that uh

they on top of it of course they change the screenshots of the game in the store that's really important to keep the illusion uh illusion I love it but what they did is that they also put the playable creatives into the actual game playay so if you would open Hero Wars currently or let say I was looking into it uh right after the first level no no not even before starting the first level they have it as the first thing the tutorial in the like before in the game right away like you open up an app and then then you have the it goes directly into that playable and that playable is again like that nice physics based puzzle which you can actually fail and you can either retry it or skip it that that's important but it's I would say pretty satisfying to even play with it a little bit to like see the interaction all the possible horrible deaths but anyway it's there and right afterwards normal gameplay catches up with the normal tutorial and after the first where there's normal basic gameplay you

complete one level get rewards stuff like that then again another fake uh creative is put into the game play uh again a little bit more complex you can play with it you don't have to you can skip it and then game Stakes over and takes you to my menu and pretty much tutorial continues uh the thing is that if you even read the reviews or the comments on on the game people are actually expecting that these puzzles are normal flow of the game and they would be somewhere there also later in the game but of course they're not like these like yeah yeah that's just part of the tutorial uh afterwards after you like go through these two creatives you don't see it anywhere else but the Hope remains that and you continue playing and and and and that's that's the whole point of it like if you can just you know Force so many more people to continue and push them to the funnel you're already pretty much golden because you know maybe they bought something in the meantime maybe they watch some ads maybe you know they M for the next day so I think this is but it's

really good but it's still pretty basic because even if you look at the creative and and the whole flow like I mean the playable creative it seems that it doesn't fit the game like a little different graphic the style little different graphic dude it's like super super different Graphics it's usually hyper casual the character is pretty much the same man like okay the character okay in Hero Wars the character is the same of course okay yeah yeah okay but but but let's continue so another example comes in and let's take uh mighty party yeah that's my favorite it's my favorite which is a game that starts the formula a little bit different so what they do uh they start with a little bit of a story segment seems pretty high production value nice graphics and then you are thrown into their uh termbase RPG gameplay a very very short battle but immediately afterwards you get uh that favorite T number Creative where you need to defeat opponents based on

their numbers on top of their heads and you Cann go against the high fake creative immediately F creative comes in uh the important thing here what they improved compared to Hero Wars is if you win or lose it's not some kind of a random like ad based playable UI it's the game UI if you actually win you get the same chest ritual the same UI flow as you would get from a normal battle if you lose again same UI flows same same pretty much everything in a way that it seems that it's seamless this is part of the game and this is normal afterwards the game goes again into one more battle the normal one you win it and then one more more complex creative playable ad but you again win you can skip or retry if you want and then the game tutorial takes in and takes you to the town uh this again seems much more seamless much more polished and again the Hope remains that these things will somewhere show be shown later and playing pretty much but that's that's it

man like just read the comments on Reddit or anywhere else and people are like literally complain like I've played this four months and there were no more puzzles really oh okay nice literally like that that's amazing I mean look that's that's brilliant yeah of course just that's that's a hook right there but but that that's the whole thing with like you know gacha systems and operational conditioning where the thing that works the best is the one where you hope that it drops where it's not linear where you know like if you click it it doesn't drop there's a chance it could drop and this is the same that maybe somewhere there later down the line there could be another puzzle and I want to play but it's not yeah so uh the interest the other interesting part about this is that the game was soft launch in June 2017 and if you look at the charts uh yeah that's kind of old already and if you look at the charts in first two years uh the game didn't really stand out it was making something like 200k a

month 500k a month a little bit later then scale up a little bit to something like 1 million uh but only by July 2021 last year uh it was pretty much supercharged where it first qu quadrupled its daily downloads and then uh 20 times fault or how do you say it increase it by 20 times pretty much from 500K like 80 80k it was before and now it was like 4.5 million for July 2021 where the game pretty much got something like 8 million a month and it's the still the same game there were no some kind of dramatic changes in the product like we know where games do turnarounds that we know that are possible for instance Adventure communist if you want to look up that one like the game looked completely different when the game was first Global launch and they Chang it and now it makes like much more money but there was like drastic changes in The Meta game and game playay this game was pretty

much the same in the end so yep so what did they change so so what did they change yeah that's that's the question oh you can read my article if you want uh but but on the downside of it it doesn't seem that this is like a stable stable Trend as we see the numbers there because uh yeah it's not sustainable man it's is still a good thing right like yeah like 100 million shark fin is really a good thing I cannot argue against that yeah even if it's if it's a shortterm uh game I mean yeah if it's a shortterm game and you know you you breaks out and like the UA is positive it's great if it works for some time but you know it can find your next game whatever you want to do with the money yeah exactly go to Bahamas and stuff and you know buy a Act tax avoidance is that what you're saying in Bahamas are you in anything yeah don't you see the the wall behind yeah yeah it's a palm tree there I see a palm tree yeah

looks like Bahamas anyway uh so dodging all saer you I knew you were doing something this was a better example of duct taping the creative into the game play but let's let's let's continue into the third example which I think is the genius one uh when you actually create fake core gameplay this is the let's say m exactly let me just great segment I'm actually enjoying this fake core game playay because this is actually what is happening so let's let's pick uh Kingdom uh guard for for this example there's also top war that we could talk about but I'm I'm liking this like I'm liking this more Kingdom guard they they uh Target me so much with their Fair cats and I know like uh they're not anywhere close to the game play yeah exactly so Kingdom guard uh the new game or let's say recent game was uh going launched

2021 so last year uh is uh one second one second one second one second Felix do you see this resurrected guy after he got covid he's completely changed man I think it's the glasses like they were weighing down and then now without the glasses he's on suddenly everything he says it's it's it's super interesting so good don't interrupt him I want to get back this is actually yeah okay anyway let's get back to the thing so you start with uh very very simple game playay the only thing you can basically do is merge stuff uh actually if you look at it the the whole layout and and the basic concept in the first two minutes looks like merge planes to be honest oh yeah because you can just mer merge game back in days it was like exploded immediately yeah so you merge uh your Towers on top of each other and then put them on the slots on the road and like units come and there's like a basic Classic Tower Defense to defense game with merge spin uh if you need more tokens you train

them for money you again merge them and this kind of continue seems kind of easy what could there be like nice Tower Defense merch game wrong this this is something complet there's a Twist there is a twist your in your face so so suddenly when you continue this uh some things change meaning that more slots unlock more tokens unlock more units unlock and then suddenly the game offers the auto merging option which is uh later monetize with ads and even premium purchase where the game for premium would even put the units on the towers for you so you don't even need to now not only merge them but you don't even need to actually place them on the towers games does everything for you nice sounds very interesting sounds like AFK Arena or something like that you still need to push the button okay new units and they Auto merge themselves but you still need to push that one button but basically what has happened that after 20 minutes of you nicely playing

this tower defense game with merging and everything they pretty much took out all of the like needed attention and everything and it's just reduced to clicking one button and the whole thing plays itself so what would what are you done doing within the whole game so Now's the Time to introduce Forex this is the part where our famous very very good March battle map comes in and introduces all of the nice Forex mechanics where you have your town you have your protection shield for some time in the beginning you can send your units to March against other players or other units and then join an alliance and then you're joining an alliance moving your town hall into the nest of the alliance battling with other players and so on so forth okay so Kingdom guard is actually a Forex game exactly okay I look this SK at a tower defense game I haven't played yet they are targeting me

all the time it looks in like from the creative perspective it looks absolutely non Forex game at all at all I didn't even I didn't even play this is the trend like keep in mind that before uh during the days of the Glory Days of machine Zone all the Forex game would start with that never ending tutorial that upgrade this upgrade that upgrade this send this send that with the girl or k dton or whoever was there was iron SCH telling you yeah these days are gone now what we do we build a completely different game under the the main game and at some point we get rid of it or pretty much minimize it to the nothing because the interaction that you were learning you pretty much you can forget it you don't need it anymore and now comes the real part where you need to can play the Forex game this is even better than adds uh ANS uh the underground Kingdom that we discussed uh uh previously you hide you hide you hide your like tutorial behind like something

low CPI that get people in and then you funnel them into a 4X game that has a higher like LTV it's like this makes a lot of sense because a lot of a lot of companies or well not a lot of companies but um if you have a portfolio of games what you were doing just buying traffic to the the low CPI games and then just cross promoe them to to your different games where you have like no okay this in theory in theory in theory but then like it would work for King sure of course okay okay see still like in theory this works quite well okay and then um this is even better I mean because you just buy the traffic to very low well lower CPI than Forex everything is lower CPI than Forex I guess I don't know about Casino yeah SOA casino is probably the only one yeah yeah okay there you go go like next next year there will be a hyper casual

funly into Social Casino that I I would kill myself it would be amazing yeah I can already see the coin Master Pig doing like hyper casual things and they were already doing the ASMR slicing of the coins yeah anyway um okay this works pretty well um as I said the whole connection now within the tower defense game is now just like uh it unfolds features for you so if let's say I I wanted to try to send two Heroes which are not able to do anything with the Tower Defense oh they are there like standing and shooting but in the end you want to send them to like March map within the Forex part uh you need to progress the levels on the stages on the kind of a thing but just notice the gold like this is the the best kind of thing to give like I think the illusion breaks in this part and they still need to work on this because from the beginning you were they were pretty stingy on gold and like the towers were kind expensive you

know you need to learn it you can really overwhelm you and stuff like that so one spawn of the tokens cost five gold and you had like 20 gold 30 gold stuff like that but in 15 minutes you have 150k immediately because you need that for those Forex upgrades so if if we not sping still it still cost five gold to Spa those tokens and you have now 150k gold yob black look you are the game designer you can you know see through all of this I wouldn't even you know notice these type of things me neither do you think like regular player knows like oh well now I have 15 no it's it's h it's brilliant yeah yeah like it is it's really brilliant and the important part is that uh compared to something like uh mighty party if you look at the charts there's a hockey stick upwards there's not like some kind of a you know current temporary trend of this spiking up and then going

down upwards because Kingdom guard is Forex and usually Forex have also like higher ltvs than Mighty party which is an RPG RPG yeah there you go so that's that's why that could be one of the things of course and of course Kingdom guard is new and like the Polish of that game and like you know everything like now you did this kind of prople proper transition from fake core gameplay into the Forex which also top war uses by the way it's not like limited to it and also there is this ex hero um case as well it's it's RPG battler whatever it is and they they one level it's the RPG battle which like very hardcore graphics and then the the next next next L save the dog hyper casual completely unrelated to the game play and it's like also like very different visual style you beat that level you progress to the next next level and that's again super super hardcore RPG battle and then you know like they switch between these levels

it's hyper casual hardcore hyper casual hardcore and that's that's how you progress in the in the game yeah yeah like like what I would take out of this is that it could be really heading towards this kind of direction that next year or in like few years we could see that this would be like a standard thing of your tutorial the tutorials pretty much will be fake fake core gameplay hyper casual thing and there would be no way around it anyway because the CPI will rise so high yeah love it because you know i' I've been talking about like hyper casual um Concepts into your creative strategy for a year almost and it's happening and this is even better this is even better because you know now you're hyper casualized your tutorial basically yeah no it's it's brilliant your foule is just changing to get cheaper I love it it's beautiful beautiful it's a perfect money printer let's just say it like that perfect illusion yeah like it and and this is

like yeah this is the best thing of that kind of third example that they don't really break the illusion that there's some kind of you know because the game play still goes on like the Tower Defense everything I can imagine that it goes into like level like lulous like 1,000 or something and it's still there and it greets you when you start the game so you can still kind of if you enjoy it and you can still go and enjoy some dopamine for the hyper casual you know Auto merging and stuff like that in the meantime when the timers on the Forex are running and that's that's perfect oh this is so great this is going to be a trend of 2023 100% yeah yeah okay uh off to you Mr Blondie Blondie Blondie son Blondie son Blondy son all right so we were talking about fake ads Remo you had this great Insight but I just wanted to shift gears a bit and just start off by asking what do you guys think is the biggest predictor of

like good creative performance well the the emotions that are always tached to the to the creative IPM numbers go so like I have a I have a bit of a different take than both of you okay so I'm going to go on a bit of a three minute run and you're both are going to get very triggered so let's just hold off the argument until Ever After All right so basically like the one thing that you guys like there's an old like agents like learned saying that says only flows Downstream right and in the case of creatives it's very applicable right so everything that Mach makes in terms of creatives and ultimately puts in front of the users like through his UA campaigns and other games flows Downstream through a massive filter that you're not taking into account right and that filter has a much

bigger impact on click-through rate install rate than any creative content ever will as an average yeah and that is the end cards and in particular the end cards that ad networks superimpose at the end of every video credit like video creative that is shown on their UA like Network so this is not something that you control as a UA person's Networks control this do it I put the end cards on Unity on app every time yeah but are those the end cards that the user sees no right they're different the end cards that you see let me get on to it you you'll see all right let me get on no anyway yeah yeah so where I'm trying to go with this is I'm going to start off here by giving you guys a little admon history lesson last summer iron Source started rolling out a new video end C card on their whole ad network with a three click template that

replaced the old traditional one oneclick template end card so basically the end card template looked like this at the end of a 30 second rewarded video you press skip up in the corner you then had to wait 3 seconds where an app store Page dragged up from the bottom then after two seconds you could skip that and the ad closed right so that is the end card that they super impos that's not what you put in as a UA manager you mean like the the template at the exactly at the end always at the end of every end card so I don't know what the impact was the iron s iron Source saw to their CTR and IR metrics and that's how they get paid ultimately right but I do know that within 10 days which is very quick app loving had rolled out exactly the same end card format across their whole network so that's suspicious leads me to think that the impact was very

large yeah why do I know this because I had to deal with user complaints on why this 30 second ads were now 35 seconds yeah and why it's harder to click out of the ads and accidentally click through in the ads so that was last summer where are we now right now app loving end cards have two end templates a two clicks template I think they call it the 2 EC and a three click template called the three e EC so the default right now on app loving looks like it's a you finished your 30C rewarded video uh then basically a 5c video that you then watch at the end card then a 3 second popup that comes up from the app store where you can download then after that you click through it there's a two second end card screen then again with a store that comes up like as a banner at the bottom where you can press a get button that downloads the game automatically from the ad so you don't even taken to the App Store anymore so what's the

impact what's been like the impact on these end cards on CTR and install rate I wish I knew I've asked iron source and app loving but you know they're public institutions so you know they can't or won't tell me but I would love to know but if you think about it what they've done with these end cards is they've increased by two or 3x the chances of people clicking on their ads and that's massive yeah so if you're thinking this is it's also annoying as yeah yeah I was getting to that now like if you're thinking this has a like impact on like publisher games retentions you're very right I a couple of months ago asked app loving to remove this due to retention issues in the games I was mediating on Max but after a couple of weeks I saw a degradation of ecpm in those games where I remove the end card yeah as we know ecpm is a mix of historic performance like of the ads

in your games basically algorithms take into account install rate click through rate number unique users in your games over the last seven days and then comes out with a number so it would make sense that if you're getting less click-throughs or installs because of the like more inferior end cards that the ecpm would drop and then basically have a negative impact on the install metrics so in reality like micro and macro factors play a big part in CPM but I'm about to run some tests in like one game that basically I'm taking back the aggressive end cards because app loving didn't have the feature to do it like on one game it was like account wide so I'll know probably by the end of this quarter exactly how big of an ecpm impact those end cards have but I just wanted to open your guys's eyes and like yeah basically to summarize like my opinion is like you don't need to have the best creatives your creatives just need to be good enough then the ad networks aka the true Gatekeepers of our

industry or the Godfathers like their end cards will take care of the rest then it's up to Remo and game design to create a good enough foui to not have users churn after the first app open which really fits into what reman was saying so I'm just saying they have so much more power than you actually think are you saying that now fake ads are even more supercharged because of this change like better and what what was the date of this so last summer was when iron Source first not this summer but the summer before that's when they rolled it out uhuh this new click template no no like the the the the mighty party example we were talking was like the the best period was somewhere that it was july2 yeah the July 21 was was the peak yes that's true was the the 7 million they made in July and August August was the the best where they made Seven it's not bad but the thing is they

started the the like kind of supercharging the UA in October 2020 yeah exactly and then increased over time so uh okay well the thing is it's only applicable to ad networks uh is this rolled out to Unity as well I have no idea I think yeah Unity has like longer end cards now as well but the thing is app loving now I would say probably is a bigger adet work than Facebook on mobile like they've definitely taken number two position admob is probably still number one but I would say now Appling is number two so you know when you say Ad networks yeah but they're the second biggest okay now it all makes sense and all makes sense I mean I was looking into ex ex hero uh UA diversification obviously I know the you look into yeah of course the u channel mies and uh the second biggest UA channel was upload so yeah I guess uh there you might be on to

something yeah let's see if I get sued for this I hope not you definitely know I'm on to something by by the Godfathers by the Godfathers shouldn't they said like a horse head or something before yeah yeah yeah cut of fingers or something yeah or hand okay but anyway so I just wanted to like to wrap this up before we finish the episode uh my friends have actually shared some data with me that they allowed me to share in our Pocket Gamer uh Helsinki talk that we're doing at what 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday Morning 940 9:40 9:40 9:40 on Tuesday morning and basically they shared some data on actually the impact on ecpm so that's ex effective Revenue per melee that's the basically the metric that you use to take ecpm and fill into account the money so basically from a 1 second end card close button delay that adds 57% to the effective RPM a

14c e like endcard close button adds up to 188% of effective RPM increases so you see the longer the end card the more money you earn because people click through it more often okay isn't it because uh they want to close it but then you know they end up in the store that's what a cynic would say right but I'm just saying like that's real but I'm just saying like as an average like the thing that impacts creative performance the most is the Godfathers it's the like the end cards the things that they impact not what you put in the creative on average I'm thinking I'm talking averages here yeah of course of course but then then you have different UA mixes and then the the in unity and iron source is not that big and uh would be great to have this uh data for Google as well if they do something like this

I'm not sure as well and then let's maybe let's try to get someone from Iron source and uplo on the podcast we can just ask them I would love to know like it would be a really interesting discussion yeah I'm in in the talks with iron Source actually to be on their level up pod and uh we wanted to do a swappy afterwards so we will definitely you know I've talked to as well there there's rumors of having one person on so I'm just hoping to get it cleared nice all right we'll see we can ask nobody will answer there you go and with that I think uh that's it for today right have a good weekend yeah seec see you next week thank you byebye [Music]