two & a half gamers session #37 - Marvel Snap global launch case study UA, GD, Admon view

[Music] hello hello hello welcome everyone this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast to Gamers session number 37 we are sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization drops but also discussing the latest industry news from time to time while having so much fun but let's not forget this is still 4:00 a.m. conference discussion WIP so let's not take it too seriously today we have Felix ad monetization Thor braber yakob game design Iron Man RR and myself mate UA Spider-Man luncher because today today we are going to discuss another Global launch case study and this time it's Marvel snap there you go like a bit further away from your mouth it's B Echo a little bit no way

no okay great so uh so yeah how are you guys oh man it's been a while now you know I like I got to say you did a good job in an interview with Eric like I I enjoyed it usually VC interviews can be sometimes a bit boring but this one actually felt a bit refreshing like I've never heard of VC before say when you shouldn't take VC money which was quite refreshing that was great that was great it's been a while yakop how about yourself what's what's up yeah I've been playing Marvel snap a lot I would say that's that's like that's the Highlight for me because I I really like the game and the core gameplay itself nice uh we'll talk about the progression later but other than that like the fun factor is definitely there so beening we we are holding the M like we are two guys holding mics and then Felix is the the arm arm guy and also I'm I'm sitting in my uh I mean in my kitchen with the balloon it's important you know like in

order for you to be able to drop the mik you first need to hold it who is this shark you will see at the end I will see at the end okay so I I have my popcorn already so fine uh but before we go to to the actual um deconstruction of all of this it's definitely not super high level it's actually well we dig we dig really deep into every everything so before we do that uh I would like to say big thanks to all of you and especially big thanks to Felix and yakob for well contributing in this uh crazy late night show no thank you guys for the support and for for everything and also you guys too you know thanks for sharing everything we've been getting pretty like nice and positive feedback lately uh on LinkedIn and uh in my email inbox so yeah please keep doing that and also please keep sharing and subscribing

we're almost at 1,000 subscribers and when that happens Felix coming to BR and I'm getting it to two so um it's G to happen sooner or later but yeah okay let's start with the with the actual UA uh and some like I've done some LinkedIn research and uh for like the company background based on the LinkedIn research the the compy is really lean and we are talking about second dinner here so second dinner launched Marvel snap really lean 60 people on LinkedIn and based on their uh profile Second dinner is an independent game development studio uh that is here to make the most fun games in the world ah not super fun games not super duper fun games they mean the most fun games whatever that means ah okay okay whatever but the

first game Marvel snap uh they're partnering with Marvel so they are getting to play in the Marvel Universe all right so I throw up a little bit when reading that but it's still like really nice H so 60 people and guess how many there is from the marketing team guys guess how many people is there mobile games the lifeblood of UA yeah yeah yeah just give me a number give me number five five okay 10 okay yeah okay so it's one yeah exactly one person and uh everybody else is just design oriented and they kind of forgot that you know there needs to be a UA Department analytics and creatives team to be able to run some marketing operations for mobile game obviously the background of of these guys is more like triaa and uh blizzard is so not super mobile but still I mean it's it seems like like a

pretty good like Allstar team but focusing on a different platform anyway so my assumption would be that the VP of marketing is running uh everything by himself so kudos to you uh if you do it uh but since I've checked it uh on LinkedIn and this person don't have or doesn't have any UA experience from the past I doubt he running the show because well it's kind of uh you know important to have an experience with global launching and we discussed that in the one of the sessions yob stop typing for [ __ ] sake yeah seriously M that's very rude it's it's really annoying and rude seriously yeah seriously at least mute yourself if you're gonna yeah mute yourself or just listen so uh so again there's no U experience uh so I doubt that he's running the show which means they also work with the an agency uh out there uh

but then again like nobody actually announced any partnership with uh the second dinner which obviously everybody would immediately do because well how often do you work on the Marvel game or they're running it uh or with their Partners which according to the news second in your partner with newers which is owned by Tik Tok develop bidens so I guess uh there is something uh in the middle so whoever runs this and the spoiler it's not looking super good oh my God I thought you're going to sing its Praises what no no no no no no this time uh not it's it's pretty chaotic so let's let's start with the channel mix and uh uh obviously like Facebook is the biggest channel in terms of the spend both on IOS and Android which is not surprising to be honest but uh what is surprising uh is the fact that I downloaded the game from the story

immediately after uh it Global launched and I'm seeing the ads targeting me all over again and uh it's just ridiculous and I can see I I I don't see all the ads but I see all over the same ad hey there's the the B bro the founder of of the company hey I'm so excited to tell you we launched Marvel snap oo amazing there's a pro tip guys uh check the comments under the video player players are commenting like hey guys nobody cares what are you ex exciting about excited about uh the game sucks uh which is not true because well we had a pretty good fun while planning playing it but still like if you see this type of uh comments on the on the creative that's all that's not that's not a good good sign so also you should be excluding players uh the existing players uh because now you're are put pouring money into the drain which is a waste waste of time

waste of resources waste of money just if you it's it's one option and it's very easy just exclude everything everybody who actually downloaded the game already and then well the efficiency and um profitability could improve quite immediately and I'm seeing they're not using custom placements so uh usually what's what that what that means is they're running Square formats in like stories instead of the vertical formats I mean it's not a big problem but it's annoying that's the first thing uh then the second thing is like if you put few perc here few per there of an improvement and suddenly uh you can you can get profitable at some point so from the geomix what they are running at the moment or well what are the best performing uh GEOS it's like us is on the top not surprising then there is South Korea Japan Canada UK France Germany and Hong Kong and some some others but there's a very big big gap

between those CH those GEOS so it's like 1 million is on us there different tools have very different numbers so it's not very consistent but still it's 1 million in US and then 100,000 in South Korea and then Japan is 880,000 and this is like 14 days uh since the global launch or like last 14 days which is last seven days from the global launch because well it's it's been out from from 18th of October h i mean that's that's very big big gap but according to the tools we use uh they're mostly spending in these countries and on Android it's Korea Thailand Australia New Zealand Indonesia and then there's the US on the fifth place I it's ridiculous iOS it's Australia Korea New Zealand us on the fourth place and then Indonesia again I mean why would you do that

I have no idea I mean it's like if us is your top country spend there is most as you can I mean it it doesn't make any sense it's just like most probably like a lot of featuring organic traffic which is um you know pumping up the revenue because this is this doesn't make sense but well what can you do I mean uh different uh UA managers have very different uh tactics and strategies I guess uh like but what other UA channels are they using so it from my point of view it looks like uh they do this like shotgun approach let's sprinkle budget everywhere because you know that's what we should do that's that's how it looks like it's super chaotic but they're definitely running like everything that is out there which is like iron Source Google app Tik Tok vanga and unity and even minr and there are some like small

test on Yahoo Japan so yeah who those guys for UA diversification you know I hate I hate to say it but your tagline what's your tagine no of course diversifying the UA but this is not the proper way how to do it but okay so as we discussed like multiple times setting up campaigns it's super easy you can do it you know in couple minutes but what happens afterwards is that's the important part so guys uh whoever runs this please open up your ad networks mainly iron source and unity and start optimizing the campaigns because it looks like you never run actually a card game uh UA before on our networks because you know there's a fun fact you have cards in the game well sure unity and iron Source or any other network algo thinks that you're are a classic card game therefore your best sources of traffic guess what

soliter games it's like [ __ ] amazing so you're getting like 90% of traffic from soliter games so yakob could you tell me please like uh what kind of audience play um or plays the these type of games solitary games casual puzzle is it is it very close to ccg women 45 plus is it yeah it is of course but is it close to Marvel sniper or like uh any this type of game I guess no of course it's not seriously like like what the [ __ ] but I mean I've been there because I also didn't have a ccg um experience on the UA side before and this same thing happened to me as well in soft launch so I ran unity and the minute I checked the sources it was solit only it's like what the [ __ ] is happening but then he like yeah well cards and Al go so so guys you know

like uh this is the good time to actually speak to the Reps from Unity iron Source or whatever I mean obviously they don't care because they earn money from you guys but you don't earn money because it's like wasted uh resources obviously so just talk to them get get um a list of IDs or sources that you can actually try which has or which have better or closer audience to your your game and that could immedi immediately improve the performance like like Hearthstone like like HearthStone for example yeah like Hearthstone so I mean the the whole UA setup looks pretty weird I only see like German creatives on applin Unity runs pretty much on uh Japanese creative with top sources also like pizza delivery and coloring books okay it's like pizza delivery games uh that was like one game that's that uh

really was weird and then the cing books okay so everything feels pretty random it looks like you know somebody just uh called them and said hey you should run all the main networks that's the what big companies do but they forgot to tell them that they actually need to optimize the the the whole UA and so they got the first half right they need a diverse UA portfolio like diverse like channels but they didn't optimize it so half yeah yeah yeah exactly well maybe 20% right because they run they run like everything that's there basically but it doesn't make sense it's just like yeah like hey here's the here's the the budget just let's let's run it and uh let's close the the dashboard on iron Source or unity and never look back let's just run it that's how it looks like but uh well at least you know like if you have this uh like Baseline you can you can improve it quite

heavily yeah that's that's a good sign of course uh and then I definitely need to talk about the the Tik Tok strategy obviously well if you you are a new verse and uh well parent company is actually Tik Tok so uh you should know what to do on the creative side I do appreciate Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury in the creatives way more interesting than Ben bro sorry Ben I just you know you can't compete with Samuel that's how it is uh but guys I'm not sure if uh someone from you know your parent company told you like the Tik Tok best practices for creatives it suggests to use short videos no 30 seconds but more closer to like 10 to 12 seconds and not I'm not talking about the one minute long version of Nick Fury obviously great perfect but these creatives would be definitely great performers on YouTube long form videos perfect move it

move it use something else on Tik Tok maybe if you have Samuel Jackson great cut it today actually Tik Tok published very very very good uh best practices on the the creative site for casual games and guys there is ASMR slicing as well not slicing but it's ASMR is there so what would you slice Nick Fury yeah yeah I would slice Nick Fury the eye I would slice his eye I would slice cards of course you can slice cards and then yeah you know it's like ma UA Bingo these words I love it course yeah okay okay okay okay uh we can move to to the like the creative strategy and what I actually think about the the whole whole shenanigans on the creative side it's ridiculous because the ugc uh creatives with developers honestly this is pretty hard to watch for me and I mean it's not interesting enough like how how should this persuade the players

to actually download the game I know yakob you mentioned that like Ben is uh like the It Works on premium because people in the card play like card Gaming Community know these developers and they are like very very senior and very famous yes so I can get where the like influence is coming from sure but okay but if you are launching a mobile game that that that has a Marvel IP nobody cares about Ben this just like this this not how it works I mean you have one or three seconds to grab attention and you put the co-founder in the first two seconds of the video all like the players that that don't have like anything that don't know anything about like developers they will just you know close or just swipe no nobody cares so in the first two or three seconds you definitely don't want to show Founder's face and the the thing is like you have the whole Marvel Universe for f s so if you can use Samuel and Jackson use him

wisely not in a not in a weird not even a funny way it's just like you know you can use it a little bit more efficiently so do do your research about like the most popular Marvel heroes and use them in the creatives I'm pretty sure like America Chavez is not the most popular one from all the heroes and I think like nobody even I I would be careful here because keep in mind that some of the Marvel IP is behind these kind of Licensing Wars such as Spider-Man and everything so I don't think so you can really use everything from you know marvel portfolio they they're in the game though right they're in the game they're in the game yeah they are but like Spider-Man wres uh were sold to Sony so it's it's some kind of mutual deal to Marvel and everything you know like it's it's I wouldn't say it's that easy just to give like here that it's not that easy I would guess so to use Marvel rights however you like to okay fair enough fair enough that uh it could be

um an interesting point but uh you know again still like America Chavez uh until Doctor Strange movie happened like nobody even knew like this actually exist that's from like not not not the core um Comics fans of obviously yeah not core audience yeah yeah so so that's you know like I was probably if you don't not if you don't if you can't use um Spider-Man you can use Iron Man and maybe there is some other character or hero that you can actually use which is more popular that's that's that's my point that's my if I get that right Spider-Man is the most popular well but okay still but then you have 10 10 more it doesn't need to be Spider-Man but you okay but okay I I get the point it's fair fair enough uh but also look at different games and get an inspiration from them and I know like you said it's hard for because of the Marvel license and you most probably

can't use everything but it should be doable and also I would definitely showcase the you know upgrading the cards all the visual improvements different game scenarios from losing in the in the game changing the strategy Ving so much so much stuff can be done here and uh and main question is like why are you not showing the game because it's fun it's actually very good game you mean game playay actually a game well gameplay they show gameplay here and there but it's like it's not very interesting from the creative point of view they just show bunch of cards and obviously they have a lot of lot of them there but nothing really concrete so it's really exciting when you win and really exciting feeling when you win and again creative should be about emotions but you know player emotions obviously not about Ben emotions but but uh so I think what about iOS and

strategies uh but I think I can talk about this after yakob shares his insights about the the game and the especially the monetization of the game because it's a very crucial part in the in the iOS strategies in I UA okay so UA rent over yeah yeah sounded pretty damning man didn't sound like a yeah the thing is like the game is so great or like it's fun it's fun monetization eh whatever uh it has really good IP it there's so much potential so much potential but okay it sounds a bit like exactly like my part man because yeah so if we move on to ad monetization I just want to start off as well as saying like I like this game I love Mar snap it's a fun game you need to use your head it's not just endless clicking and I get to see cool familiar MCU characters uh I've played now till collection level number

24 and I've still not seen any in-game ads so I logged into there won't be any yeah so I logged into our favorite data analytics platform and had a look at the installed sdks and our favorite data platform analytics like analytics platform didn't have any sdks to show because it's locked away so I had to lock into my second favorite data analytics platform and to see that uh the sdks and iOS has no ad sdks installed but Android has the admob ad SDK installed on the 8th of June I don't think it's in use since it's the only one so I think it's safe to say that Marvel snap uh is going at this launch the old school premium way and they're not having any in-game ads couple of things here my guess is it's part of the licensing you won't be having any couple of things here look look I like this game and I think it

deserves a good user base but not launching with a rewarded ads in a game like this is just puzzling to me like rewarded ads have become so accepted in Mobile in the mobile gaming community that in my opinion you're doing yourself a diservice by not launching with them like not launching with rewarded ads you limit your UA like team's potential reach as you're taking away from the overall LTV that means this means you're forced to pay a lower CPI which in turn means that you put like an artificial cap on the true potential of users that you're able to profitably acquire for your game so I I get your argument Remo that like it's a premium game and the ads take away from the experience blah blah blah but I think that's [ __ ] even you have you have candy crush even like these days say I'm just saying that my guess is that part of the deal where you were selling your soul to Marvel was you won't be having any ads period anyway but like you have you have like even Candy Crush these days push

for rewarded ads you have some premium hold outs like supercell but I guarantee you within two to three years like supercell will also Candy Crash is a mobile game IP not a movie Blockbuster franchise okay sure but like how ads like uh do any harm to the brand and to the license like how how like I don't work in the film industry honestly like honestly I don't get it because like I don't get it because Marvel's owned by Disney right and Disney has a bunch of Marvel show on Disney Channel and they have advertis so like I don't think it holds water so so basically like as this is a new yeah like yeah it's true yeah like as like okay also like as this is a new game launch like I can't stress enough like that during game launches that's when you'll see the highest ad artiles of your game's lifetime so like let's go into the realm of speculation and see how much Marvel stuff could be making from ads million

so so uh since the active user based numbers are a bit wonky in all our favorite analytics dashboards I had to go by the download numbers instead of active users so I'm going from download so take you know a little little bit of margin of error either way I assumed an ad Vier rate of 55% and an imp Dow of two on rewarded which Remo will tell you is probably on the Lower Side what you can expect from a game like this so I just happened to have been involved in a large Game launch recently so I took the average ecpm numbers that I saw during the first two weeks of launch and I applied it to Marvel snaps GEOS so these early ecpm numbers tend to be about two times higher than normal ecpm because ad networks absolutely love new traffic sources and it's also when you do the most UA so basically that will drive up ecpm even further so I plugged all the

numbers in and what I got from their 3.1 million downloads which is has many downloads they got when I did this analysis this morning they should have earned about 85k in ad Revenue which is about 4.67% of the I AP revenue from the same period however that's not how ads work because you earn it every day so if ijust for a D1 to D7 retention a linear drop off off of 50% on day 1 to 15 on day seven I get a total ad revenue for the time since launch uh period to yesterday to be $250,000 which is 14% of their I AP Revenue in the same time space so these guys have sacrificed 14% of the revenue to the gods of Premium mobile like branding and I don't know why and guess what mobile guess what and guess what and guess what here's a scary thought if

you assume a 4.0 impression per daily active users instead of two which is not in the realm of impossibility that figure jumps to a little north of half a million dollars which would be nearly 30% of the current game Revenue like let that sync in yeah that's normal midcore games or let's say you know these RPG games they go 7030 uh I AP sets that's normal model yeah I mean there's being being protective of your brand and there's being fiscally irresponsible like sure ecms will drop after two to three weeks to more realistic levels but I can't stress how much like important these first couple of weeks can be on your ad Revenue during a game launch and now this opportunity is gone because their ecms will never be the same like potentially it's just yeah anyway anyway anyway let's go to game design oh look this is this is the best part of rema's

week I can see it yeah definitely are you are you going to be singing more more uh let me guess they didn't leave any money on the table oh well they cut down the table um the thing is that uh yeah I want to stress this like this is a team run by Ben bro and you can see it and like this guy has like infinite amount of energy I've seen it during the Hearthstone years where I pretty much grew up on all the blizzard games and like the team that he has there like it's super senior design wise these guys like hands down all respects like are literally like on top of their craft like just this week I was reading some things how they did some design issues with the whole Mulligan mechanic which means that if you don't draw into like a card that you can uh use on the first turn uh there's like a very bad feeling so usually card games do it with Mulligan which means like you can switch your cards for some kind of penalty so what they did they actually designed a card that actually if you have it in your deck you will always throw it on the first turn on your in your starting

hand so now I understand the whole Twitter post thank you very much see I have no idea I no idea what this was about that's an excellent excellent example of game design problem solving because again you you pretty much elegantly created the solution for people to pretty much get rid of that frustrating feeling of you not having a card to play the first turn because they can still risk it and like don't have that that card in your deck if they're you know that's their choice but they can have it and this this like gives you or doesn't give you advantage on your choice I created the second deck and uh dropped the quick silver uh from from the deck and we'll see how how that affects my my game play yeah so so so just like just to to say say it first like yeah the design expertise and everything like like how they make the game snackable for mobile how it's run how the core Camp playay works that's great so we we make a lot of fun uh and

like have funny comments but it's really yeah kudos to a great game like it's so much fun playing I I was actually pretty surprised like I thought it would be yeah we'll get to that point but I was I was like very very pleasantly surprised I thought it would be like a bigger problem to like squish this all into Mobile thing but it actually like plays really well uh continuing with the game uh this is one that may be confusing to some people because Ben bro and his team are ex Hearthstone and Hearthstone is pretty much a s like Genius simplification of Magic the Gathering which is a type of card game that that's like like a completely different descendant Tre and this game is actually much more close to something like gent which is the original card game that was introduced in the vure 3 game like this little side game and this is much more similar to that so I would say it's Ascend and in that three so don't expect something like health and

damage being part of the game or you upgrading something or like this won't have ever happen in this game this works just differently this is not the magic The gaing Descendant uh regarding the Gwen itself just want to note that uh the game was taken by CD project red from Witcher and put as a standalone game it's that was actually the most similar version to the current Marvel snap game and then they did a very very big pivot and tried to kind of turn it around because my guess is that it's still making uh like not making any money and C project already is just running it a loss because of their love for The Witcher Community but it it's like a very specific game and probably one of the things why they tried to Pivot it so hard because the progression in this game is very very shallow unfortunately yeah and we'll get to that make any money uh yeah that's that's the thing um so just like basic facts the whole cor core gameplay is very very simple you just need to win

two locations against your opponent meaning that at the end of turn six you need to have more points at least two locations than your opponent that's it it's it's very very simple very very strategic every turn there's like lots of decision because they added the locations random abilities that change throughout different matches so every match feels different like the replayability factor is over the RO that's great it's very snackable very tactical very strategic they even added this bluffing mechanic which is the whole snap thing that you can pretty much raise the stakes if you feel like so to either like you know you have the winning card so you know you win or you Bluff your opponents I I I have bluffed some people already in a way that like I didn't have much but I risky than than they leave because then you can pretty much save your trophy count because in the end these snaps or like the currency those are pretty much your trophies so you increase your rank you faster or you know you can you can save save some Trophies by retreating yes someone did it like today like they snapped and I was like what the [ __ ] is

this what the [ __ ] is this it's actually great because like that's the best feeling the game can offer to be honest when somebody snaps and then you snap two and then you win and you win like eight trophies it's like sweet sweet tear only done it once it felt really good yeah it's great like to be honest the game the core gameplay and everything it's great it's very novel very innovative if like it's like yeah well deserved uh now we come to the progression part and as we know in mobile games progression equals monetization so what can you actually get in this game and what can I buy for hard hard cold cash um so the whole game is pretty much just the base cards and you don't upgrade and you don't do anything regarding game playay Power you just upgrade their visual so that's that's the only thing that's happening in this game uh currently it's set up in a way that your car collection is pretty

much your whole like overall player level or progression uh first 18 collection levels are prescripted and this is just the tutorial so everybody gets the same cards and then it goes into this very interesting system of prescripted pools where it's pretty much semi- random where you slowly get in cards from progression one by one through these kind of mystery Milestones on the collection level but they they are actually going from three predefined pools of 46 card 25 cards and 74 cards and afterwards after collection level 498 if I get that right you pretty much have all cards in the game as for the base collection so this means that there are 145 cards in the whole game not counting the variance which means you can have multiple instances of the safe card with different skin so I think I think there's like six of them yeah something like that uh actually there's more just let me finish and you will see because you can create

them uh regarding the monetization the first season pass is actually completely free you cannot even buy it that and I guess most there and ux it's terrible most people won't be even able to see it because you you don't see it and it takes like some time actually when you complete it and then you get the paid one and if I understand correctly the paid one regarding gameplay power only holds the base card for the new Spider-Man Miles Mor Morales one and that's it that's the only thing regarding like content behind pay wall and other than that it throws some bunch of resources on you and some Varan cards teamed around Carnage and stuff like that but if I get it right by 10 by buying that season pass for 1099 you can only unlock like something that you cannot unlock anything else everywhere anywhere else in the game by money is just that c so that's it okay uh yeah I guess like it speeds up

the progression a lot like so it's a really good investment but uh yeah it's very very friendly to free-to-play Players let's say I'm guessing too friendly the starter pack with Captain America uh if you get that one uh yeah you get the VAR end of Captain America and his Avatar and some some gold pack but the thing is that you can still get Captain America normally from the game so they're not looking any content behind this I I wasn't even motivated to to buy that special offer I still have that free 45 Captain America but it's like no why why why should I why should I seriously yeah uh it's it's kind of hard for for this game because again game play Power there's no like power progression in this game it's more about like tactics and everything and keep in mind that they done it in a way that those pools as I told you the pools that you are getting the cards make sure that everyone at the kind of a near same progression have all like all the same cards at their disposal because these games Works in a way that you have some

deck and then you encounter another deck and that deck counters your deck so then you change your composition because that deck that beat you is more prevalent in the current game progression so you change it to counter it and this goes on and on and on and on forever as The Meta shifts when you add more cards into it so by that thing that they make sure that the experience is kind of same for everyone so it's not that imbalanced so I'm getting like you know the cards from the end that that destroys all your cards and everything like that so it's more more close to something like chess where everybody needs to have the same ability to counter everyone's other move so rock paper SES pretty much uh yeah so that's there um so other than that uh we can upgrade the collection and progress in the levels and that's the main thing how to actually get new cards because as I said by increasing your card visual level from common to uncommon rare epic legendary Ultra and infinity if I get

that right uh you increase your card collection level and then you unlock more cards through these kind of mystery cards which take from those three pools and then you get the base game uh if I get that right I uh read somewhere that uh you get after you upgrade the card to visual upgrade level of infinity the card splits into two copies and then you can reset the process again and you get some kind of visual thing so you can do this at infinum if I get that right yeah I didn't Crea like different Varian of cosmetic upgrades or something I don't know but yeah seems they have this functionality let's see um the important thing here um and this is this is the main bottleneck with the let's say LTV spending depth discussion here uh in order to to upgrade these cards you need credits credits are basically a currency of the game and you need boosters and every

card have has their its specific boosters meaning that when you play a game you have a chance to get boosters of one of your cards in your deck and every upgrade cost more and so and and so on so you buy uh five boosters and 25 credits for the first level 10 50 and so on so on so on meaning that you cannot really speed up the game with money because you need to have that game play time for the boosters in the shop there is a section called Fast upgrade which offers three cards at random that they will sell you the boosters basically to for just like a single sum of credits but that's it if I if I want to just throw 100 or2 200 EUR at it and like please let me speed up I can't I I can't like I what I can do if I could like really like squish money into the game I can buy uh the Varan of course so I can buy more level one cards that I already

have pretty much usually and then these fast upgrade things and uh and the season pass that's it and and of course Captain America bundle and that's it like I need to return day I need to return the next day and wait for the timers because the fast upgrade cards they have like a very very long timer so they reset the next day and only then I can buy them and also credits the soft currency of the game re have a cool down of like 69 hours and recess the next day which bring us to the calculation that uh how much it would actually cost to like buy all the cards in the game and speed it up if we would omit the fact that the game is showering us with free currency anyway so if if we cut this one out it would mean that uh we would need to get to level 498 uh which if we take the let's say the normal like omit the thing that the first level is 25 C but every other level uh recalculated is 50 credits per

level and of course the boosters that we need to play which would need something around like 25 25,000 credits and which would need recalculated into gold bars buying the best gold bar pack something like 19,90 gold bars which equals to € 276 and we would need to go there every day for 35 days to buy all the credits for the gold because you can only buy 700 credits per day if I get it right from the uh from the shop and afterwards you need to grind it so either play the game season pass whatever something something something so you can actually speed it up how does that compare to like Hearthstone or some other games that you can throw out has like uh yeah hearstone Works um in a way that you actually rotate out the collections and I guess this will also have happens to this game because every card game is usually you rotate out the

collections because you know you need people to play the new cards and they cannot play the old cards so you take them take them away for them or you create a separate mode where this is the ranked one and this is the wild one which means like the one where you can use all the cars nobody plays and the one that actually people need to care about is the rank one and that also takes into account like hearstone has just last three collections so the cards would be pretty much inflated away uh this way Hearthstone has like some of the decks if I remember those had like kind of big spending depths depends on how much you want to push it because they had all the like gold card mechanic everything but we're talking something like in vinity of thousands sure but this this feels super small this feels super small like two 276 276 is me going there 35 days in a row buying 700 credits and yeah and then I need to still play the game to get the boosters or I can like speed it up and maybe like throw a bunch of money on the

fast upgrade thing but keep in mind that during those 35 days the game is showering me with the soft currency anyway yeah and I didn't even count the battle pass 1099 how much soft currency I could Grind from that one so the spending dep is very very low well with this type of if I if I if I recounted it wrong or I did some like wrong calculation feel free to write to us and correct my gu this is it is like inity yeah with the revenue per download like 30 cents uh this could be actually correct right so well 30 cents with this type of like spending depth uh the LTV of player is most probably like very small so it's not but but the main problem is that you cannot really spend that much like I can I can even imagine like what would be in like a like $20 pack or yeah $50 pack what

would you put that just like another variet like just Cosmetics well of course I mean look or just like boosters to like increase your but you can you can have this like yeah you can have these like uh special offers uh boosters credits and then um different cards actually like multiple of them not just Campa Captain America why I mean I could buy like if there is I don't know some some hero that I really want Spider-Man yeah I'm really curious what will happen like like there is a definitely like a like a time that they expected when everybody will be hitting that like 438 level of like having the full collection of the base game and what will they do it will happen in two weeks I'm pretty sure no no no no no no that's not two weeks it's somewhere within like uh just the credits to get there is like 35 days but I guess uh the boosters are kind of hard to to grind because if you let's say less of turns

you play less bur boosters you get I think there's I don't know if there's a bonus for win or not but it's pretty random because you have how many like 12 cards in your deck or something like that but okay uh you mentioned uh there is like tutorial until Level 18 and basically what what is what what that does that mean actually is that like you're playing against bots uh until at that point or yeah I would guess so like the like everyone that I'm talking to is saying that they're winning a lot I would say there definitely should be Bots and they are Bots because it's notoriously known that uh moderating artificially the VIN rate in the beginning increases retention like I've seen it in many PVP games and you don't want people to lose like even today we were having a discussion uh with colleagues about like some PVP Concepts and one of the points that the friend brought up was that there were some study on simple game of chance and fairness and roughly 70% win rate is

needed for random participants to feel that game is fair yeah so so that's just human perception that course you know and it's like the feeling is is always good I mean I played Call of Duty on mobile and I was winning I was like oh man this feels great I'm pretty good in this game it's like okay well let's see then I start started playing against real people and like oh whoops I suck getting beaten by some 12year old 100% I like 50% that's pretty rough man like I know it sounds fair but it's not fair at all if you're on the losing side yeah of course exactly no I I like I think I'm level 23 or four I lost twice and it was like in like like two two hours ago so it wasn't like on the level 18 it's after after that it was I mean it was pretty I made uh like very bad decisions uh like from the strategy point but then uh they they were pretty good like those two opponents were good actually yeah nice

okay yeah I would say what I'm uh expecting will happen so probably later down the line then we'll either expand the collection through like like hearstone has it that hearstone has a base set that everybody has and then they rotate these three last collections so they will probably add uh like new keywords because that's what expansions do with card games so they add new keywords like you have current like reveal ongoing and some kind of new ability into the game and the collection like the new uh expansion will focus on that so we want to get those cars because they will be pretty good but in order to keep releasing those at some point they will need to offload the previous ones because you just cannot and it's normal within card games that you reprint pretty much the same same abilities and same gameplay things with like within the new collection what would you expect for a CPI normally like in that genre no well I would

say 20 30 uh dollars in US maybe even more depends on the optimization and0 yeah for CPI of course that's even that's low low end you thinkone has 20 to 30 CPI it could have yeah wow but what I thought a little bit less like 10 to 15 no no no no no no no no wow man and the LTV right now is 30 cents no it's like it's RP okay RPI we don't know but yeah it's it could be like even hearstone I think it's it could be like more than 20 this one thanks to the Marvel IP maybe that's like lower but it's still yeah it's still really high it's like yeah but you can see make those offer systems yeah exactly you can see you can see it on the you know on the reeven and on the downloads I mean they they have like 500,000 downloads per day and

they only make like 200,000 a day only of course if I have if I if I had a game with 200,000 uh daily revenue then I would be I would be pretty okay I guess but still it can be so much more it can be so much more I think that's the Red Thread theme kind of that we've been talking about for the last hour yeah yeah all right so any uh any last uh suggestions and uh comments for for guys or for anyone looking forward to your live Ops like really Che you% it's been fun game well done guys well done all right thank you very much for listening subscribe and uh yeah see you later thanks see next week byebye [Music]