two & a half gamers session #39 - How to do a game review? Rush Royale full UA, GD, Admon analysis

[Music] hello everybody Welcome this is no gaming podcast two and a half Gamers session number 39 we're sharing actionable insights got the knowledge from our daytoday UA game design and admon jobs but also discussing latest industry news from time to time while having so much fun but let's not forget this is still a 4:00 a.m. conference discussion by so please listeners don't take it too seriously we are definitely not taking it too seriously and today today we have a very special guest and this is very special episode so uh today we have Felix prer yakob Premier and Maria Gilles from Hello hatch and she is the podcast host of meta by navic welcome and of course uh it's me m lerich on the mic

looking forward to this one welcome so uh hello hello hello oh nice yeah okay so uh so what's up what's up actually Maria you're you're the you're the you know special guest so uh what's been happening in in the last couple of days for you for me yeah a bit yeah lots of rain running in the rain saw two squirrels chasing each other so that was quite uplifting yeah that's that's nice yeah we have also like yakob balloons that we discussed before we started recording so uh it's a special I don't know what special is how are you doing M yeah I'm good I'm pretty good actually congrats on turning 10 m yeah congrats yeah cheers to that by the way this is Gonic so there you go very nice yeah yeah of course I mean it's Friday uh what can you do I spent the whole day with my with my daughter

celebrating 10 years in the gaming easy easy okay stop uh with the by the way this works this yeah this is no so if if you sense anything very close to Maria just call it out nobody will get offended except yakob he's always getting offended what yeah he's a snowlake and let's see if uh if the opening the doors actually help uh Felix's internet connection because I see you're pretty blurred still yeah it'll be fine it'll be fine okay okay so uh as I mentioned at the beginning we are actually sharing actionable insights and uh we want we want to share how to do a fast product review so this is not going to be one of our classic deep Dives that we've done before for Marvel snap and the Survivor IO we want to discuss like how to do it really really quickly and how how to do the product

review and we are going to share an example of rash Royale because well I'm a very big fan of a fan of rash Royale and it's actually pretty good game so what to expect so we are going to talk about what to do when you first install the game and you play it for research purposes and where to look what not to miss how to evaluate what kind of benchmarks look at and it's going to be from the UA point of view ad monetization and product um so yeah it's uh it's great looking forward so much but before we start because these two gentlemen didn't know but Mar did you know the rash Royale was actually pulled down from the stores I also didn't know I can still find it on the store yeah where the you all Live come on how is it even possible like it was all over the news I don't have that much free time as you do man it's not yeah it's not a free time well so just to uh give this info to to

our listeners as well and to everybody else Apple removed all VK and the Mel apps and games from the store because VK is owned well wek own my do games and that owns rash Royale hustle Castle left survive other games and apps War robots War robots as well but that wasn't actually pulled from the store I check I checked the data today it was still out uh still still there for some reason or maybe it was pulled from uh from Apple but not from Google we will never know I guess but how do I know not because I have a lot of free time obviously I don't but it was announced on their Discord Channel and in the back Channel discussion I have with different industry people bum there you go on the street words on the street yeah words on the street but I was actually trying to do the research uh this week like what exactly happened and

and why it happened so there there were a lot of rumors and your door is closing feeling so I think my parents closed the door on me okay back to the back to the VK so the VK CEO is on the sanction list and because of that all their apps and games have been removed from the app store so uh what would you do well one day after it was announced well the VK announced the sale of of my games the was worth 642 million and they sold it to the company called up wake.me well I guess they you know me actually that just the publisher account it was sold to Alexander chachava Leta Capital oh that sounds familiar that name well why does that sound familiar yeah and by the way VK and Mau is the same company Mau just rename itself as its biggest product which is VK the equivalent the Russian equivalent of Facebook yeah and uh yeah when I tried

to look into it like there were let's say a lot of oligarchs on the sanction list uh behind the company so it was pretty much obvious choice if they want to get anything out of it they had to sell it out so my guess is that the new owner which is the Lita Capital Now isn't in any way related to them I guess so or is it or is it we'll see because the headquarters of the company was also in Netherlands before then it was in Moscow and then again this is again in Netherlands so it's in Amsterdam Cypress and Dubai all all great places what are those places known for again except the sun favorable tax conditions maybe maybe maybe we'll see okay should we go into the VK report as well yob or just let's go with the actually yeah we can just go just just like for the last thing my games was responsible for 35% of overall the revenue of that company so I guess it was quite a big hit but as I saw they still are setting up VK play

which will be some kind of equivalent after only inside Russia so they still you know doing games there just not internationally uh but yeah let's see how that firsts well yeah but after the sale happened actually the all the games are back on stores on Apple Store and Google Store still don't don't quite uh match the revenue they uh were producing before they were pulled off but I guess they will get there they're starting also like UA again or restarting UA again yeah I guess it's mostly matter of like how fast you can switch because I've seen some games from Russia um being kind very very hit by the change or just declining Revenue overall and then some games pretty much being able to switch pretty fast and you don't even see a budge there but what do you mean switch uh when you change accounts or get out of the country or they already on the different accounts or what do you mean yeah yeah they are but you know I've seen games that are on the different account and the revenue

was hit completely okay okay well let's see all right so the important stuff now so how do you do the fast product review because we've been hearing some interesting uh surface level uh product reviews recently on on the different channels podcast and shows so let's uh let's uh discuss how to do it properly and how I do it from the from the UA point of view and the creative point of view so I can start and then uh yeah I think Mario can go and then the Felix and then yakob as well we can discuss like what'sapp so rash Royale or well in general uh this is different from audit because we don't have the internal data uh so I'm trying to look into our favorite uh data tools uh that we can uh we can get access to and I usually look into first of all look into the geomix in terms of the revenues and for

russal it actually looks like uh like this it's obviously the first or the biggest countri is us and then there are some interesting uh interesting countries like Germany South Korea France Canada UK Russia still and Brazil Australia Netherlands and Italy so that's top 11 let's say top 11 who cares if it's top 10 but uh in terms of the spending instead um and here it's important uh to see that they are still spending a lot of money in the US it's the like top spender in UA and then it's Brazil Canada Australia UK on Android and then on iOS it's again us Germany Canada Australia Russia so US Canada Australia both platforms pretty strong and also in the top 10 in terms of revenues but when I looked at last I think 90 days the US was3 million dollar Revenue then Germany 1.2 and then the

rest was like 500,000 400,000 so it's pretty big gap I would say not as big gap as last time we discussed with Marvel snap where they spend a lot of money in elsewhere not us but it's a different story so I'm looking also um in these data tools on the channel diversification uh Felix where where are our t-shirts how to diversify the diversify diversification yeah yeah they're stuck in China they're on their way they're on their way don't worry okay per okay per so I I'm interested in seeing like where do they spend the most money and uh for rash Royale we see the classic UA um Trio of the channels from the Cent current environment that I also use is Unity Facebook and Google on the top of the spend and the biggest spend is Unity so they are actually pretty big after they got back um on store they're spending a lot of money on unity and it seems to work quite well

seems to work I have I don't have the the internal data but it's nice then we see the Facebook and and the YouTube and fun fact on the YouTube the best performing video well best performing it's the video that got the the biggest impression share is the copy C of top war merging concept on the on the weather so we we discussed this when uh when we were talking about the fake uh ads and the fake core gameplay and how top war is actually using a lot of merch uh mechanics from different perspectives and how they actually can implement it into the tutorial and there you go rash roale is copying this this concept pretty okay pretty much fine and uh I will definitely discuss the creative strategy of rash I totally love it by the way on the Google um other placements one of the best videos or one of the videos getting 70% of traffic from survivor.io and I'm pretty sure the target audience

is very similar so I I assume this work quite well too and the video is actually pretty funny uh it's a mix of cartoony characters intros and fake gameplay and you will hear me saying fake gameplay a lot because they are not doing anything else besides the fake fake ads but it's not as fake as you would you would think uh what was really interesting to see from my point of view is the Tik Tok which they tested for a day with a very slow super fake very different visual style creative which wasn't even interesting so much wasted potential but then in these very same back Channel um discussions that I I mentioned at the beginning I was um pointed into one Tik Tok ad which they started running yesterday and we are uh recording on

Friday so they started yesterday on Tik Tok and that looks amazing so great job guys for relaunching uh the UA on Tik Tok this is amazing it's it's great um great channel for UA at the moment so so that's like that's that's me looking into the the different U channels where they spend the most most uh most money and uh I'm trying to review also like each individual Channel and trying to look for interesting tid bits like uh with Marvel snip or survival IO Marvel snip running the you know the soli um Pub ID or solit sub IDs in the in unity and these things which I don't care uh don't matter I would so what's the conclusion then what regarding the review like are they doing good bad or what would we say yeah I would say they're running they're pretty good in terms of the UA and I I'm a very big fan of them it's it's actually looking really good so so it's it's Unity

Facebook and Google all make sense uh right now restarting the the Tik Tok they don't mess around uh with different uh different channels like like other other companies and games so from my book this looks great and also from the from the unity and I think other Ed networks the rash Royale is getting most of the Impressions from other games especially like a bid life simulator and Little Alchemist whatever the games uh is but still it looks good it's not like uh I'm looking at the at the UA channels and I said oh sake this is terrible no I like I was like oh wow okay it's great benchmarking this is great yeah know it's pretty good no it's uh it's B and also like based on these like um different channels creatives and then the the GEOS I usually have pretty good overview of the overall us strategy here makes all the sense they they do all the all the good work does unity usually work very well with these casual ifying

midcore games it does it does actually uh it's one of and depends on the on the mix of the the Publishers within the the the UA campaigns but for midore and on my side it looked always pretty uh it worked always pretty good okay well Unity was like very big surprise of of the last year in terms of the performance on UA like on admon like they really not not as good as they used to be especially in the last year well now they merged with iron Source there you go yeah yeah it's fine yesterday going to be fine well okay uh so now creatives and uh and um their creatives is full of fake ads but not completely fake that's but it's reasonable amount of fake like last time I saw it you know you have Towers being merged Pawn you have arrows

being shot at enemies it's pretty much the game play it just is a different you know kind of layout that I would say this is I would call it alter altered gameplay which still like a lot of other companies do on a regular basis and we've done it in a trap line with together we were using the same the assets from the game in the creatives all the heroes all the backgrounds all the attacks everything just you know trying to show different uh kind of scenarios in the game from the game and you know obviously you can't find those in game but nobody cares if it's if you know if you are getting pretty good cpis and you can uh then scale uh with these type of creatives that's completely fine that's all good all good for me and uh right now um my favorite concept is actually the one that targeted me on Instagram and uh it's like first three seconds it's uh it's CGI intro of orc running towards uh an

Archer and then it zoomed in to the fake gaml where you have archers you have hordes of fors are attacking you and that's it basically so you're merging your U Your Heroes and trying to uh trying to win against the the hordes it's very similar to what we've seen in in Survivor IO so nice pretty good and this is a very yeah if it works and I I know I know we I I think I shared this game which is like merch medieval or medieval merch and then uh they are using this type of content okay so uh so what else I think they are pretty good J they are doing pretty good job overall on all fronts creatives and diversifying the channels and um I also heard that they are preparing to get ASMR creatives in place but not sure if that's true what what did you hear that Felix as

well but no okay drugs aside so what do you have on the on the product side of things guys anything interesting because this is this is what I usually do from the UA side and uh it gives me pretty good pretty good overview who wants to get started on the product side yeah uh you can go Maria I take um yeah before before we move on I I was just curious what is what's the creative on Tik Tok that you congratulated what makes it so good it's uh again very fake or altered gameplay um they're using their their best performing scene which is basically a road um you will see until you get into the like the tower and then there is like millions of enemies and they're just trying to to kill it one by one and then merge the the heroes into one and then just you will see a big blast of

attack at the end that's something that works I guess quite well and you fail in the end I guess and you fail in the end of course you to fail yeah I didn't know the stores were still allowing altered gameplay I thought they were cracking down on it yeah well look no even Facebook said last year oh well we are Banning fake creatives where is it nowhere near near the end no it's they're even more prevalent than before I would say yeah it's definitely it's hard to ban something that you're kind of like Revenue stream depends on right exactly yeah that's they're yeah they're making a lot of money on on top of that um I'll just walk very high level of different steps I won't go into the details okay okay but then I can go into okay okay okay we need we want some details we want some details we need detail definitely yeah okay so when I'm approaching it from product management I'm trying to learn everything about the

game in terms of from the store listing uh looking at what they're doing and practices reading through reviews um and through the update history I find that it's quite helpful to just get a high level understanding of what's the sentiment uh what are the problems with the game how do they do their live Ops content how big is the team you can even see that through how often they update and then I go and look at the market and the competitors like who else appears in the stores when you try to search for this um kind of game uh in the genre who are the key players and then also looking at the developer and their history because you can see you know the pedigree of the founders um what successful games that they've made in the past have they been able to scale have they been able to show that and I just like the detective Pikachu of that you were going through of um the the the companies within the companies and then the publisher and how it all traces back it's just very fun and then suddenly five hours just pass like whoa okay how

did I end up here yeah that was my morning um yeah and then I I always go to uh sens to dat AI to go and look at the download Revenue per download um the revenue the country breakdown the platform breakdown um to get an idea of how it's performing uh again mixing that with what I found with the market analysis and looking at competitors to help Benchmark within the genre and who they're competing against because I think there are a lot of games that if you just play them they seem really fun and you'd think ah this this must be making so much money it's is very addictive but then you go and look at the data and it's not great yeah so I find that you you always have to do the two Hand in Hand to make sure that the emotional balance because you get emotionally attached to the game I think it allows um allows whoever's analyzing it to to remain impartial and then also looking at just the trends are they growing are they declining are they ping and

understanding what in the market could be affecting this like for example you mentioning um with the Russia the Russia band yeah and then when I get into the actual game I'm always looking at the flows uh for the first time user experience and I'm not just talking about the the tutorial it's even from the start into how do they present an age verification how do you present the personalized ads um how do you get how do you try to get players to rate you um how do we incentivize them to log in so all of these satellite things are extremely important to try to optimize as much as you can and just learn from how other people are doing it and then I look at the tutorial so when I'm looking at the tutorial I'm trying to understand how much are there holding the hand of the player how much detail are they're explaining how the game works and how you can become better um when do they let go of your hand and they they allow the player to go and explore different areas of the game because I think

there's just different balances to strike and it's very curious to learn how yeah other other games in the market are addressing it and then I play for I don't know an hour or two and I'm looking at the early progression the retention um how are they're getting trying to get me to convert like when's the first time that they put a popup or a special offer in front of me how do they communicate the value of the offer like how do I Benchmark whether this is a good thing to buy or not um [Music] and also just looking at everything that I do am I making progress in some kind of Milestone or some kind of objective to unlock a reward how fast do I get rewards so just yeah just trying to understand all the psychology behind those first few hours in the game um and something that I actually find is really important is whether I started playing a game for competitive analysis and then if I actually start playing it for fun purposes yeah R exactly and then I also look at uh yeah stop me

at any time I might be raming on a little bit go go go I look at the store design looking at the layout their navigation if they're just cloning the ux and UI of a competitor like Rush Royale they're not Reinventing the the ux they're just copying um The Clash model which you know makes a lot of sense I look at the ad monetization design how do I get rewarded ads I also try to understand their liveops design how frequently they do special offers and how do they tie it with content always yeah trying to dig deep into how do players understand why they should buy this like why should I convert um yeah and then sometimes if it's a deep analysis I think if you really want to dig into why a game is successful you can't just play it for a few hours even at Hutch um we have some people who dedicate to in different games and you'll play for six months a year and then you bring back back a report of how do you keep goal setting

and appealing the the gamer to become a master of the game throughout their progression Journey yeah well sometimes when you play a game for one hour you don't see the the whole picture yeah that's that's a problem with uh within our industry sometimes people do these like surface level reviews and they play it for like 20 minutes like oh well I didn't see that and that like they they are not doing this and that like yeah well of course but they didn't play it enough to see actually yeah there's actually a little bit of a trick to this uh that that can save you actually a lot of time because uh yeah if if I it's called YouTube no yeah YouTube's also very handy if you want to skip to highend gameplay of a certain game so also recommend that but uh the way usually uh if I can add on top of what Maria said uh is that I I try to look through this more to like systemic perspective in a way that system and vectors

system good and uh the the trick is that usually the best thing is that if you know the descendant or the ones that are being used as some kind of starting point or iteration or someone else and then you pretty much know the system already from the previous game and the only thing that you try to pretty much catch is the difference and the iteration itself you don't need to see the full picture because you already see the picture it's like watching a remake of a movie you already know the plot you already know how it ends and what we are currently trying to find out is those little twists different actors playing different roles and stuff like that and that way it can saves you a lot of time because you know everybody currently knows how Shard gacho Works in Clash Royale we know the arena system that increases this kind of increasing pool of tokens that unlock throughout Arenas and stuff like that that that's that's the part everybody knows that of course everybody knows that everybody of course sitting here I don't know how that works I was like oh no yeah but but if if you're familiar with the system you already know how the system works so immediately if you open the game you see

what's missing there so they don't have the chess system for the pacing of the game playay that Clash Roy uses they're not using that because if you look a little bit deeper you see that actually this is a borderline clone I would say of random dice the South Korean game that's pretty much copying the core gameplay one to one it's just different visual style uh yeah it's very different visual style uh the Korean game has very very Korean let's say local style uh yeah you you already have the you know the Baseline you know how the Clash Royale meta game works and what what they change there how they let's say adjusted the battle pass there they have that you know co- functionality which is really really prominent in the game which also adds on top of it the whole pacing of the rewards uh is again completely different because they don't have the four chest unlocking system what they do here especially in Rush Royale that's even better in that that they Pace it a lot more around the ads uh random does it also but they are not

that heavy into ads I would say it's like 60% of what rash Royale does rash roale actually heavily heavily innovates on ad placements there's like skew throughout the game all over uh it's like something similar what you would expect from an idle game actually where uh the game is balanced around you having this kind of times to boost being you know triggered all the time where here you can pretty much just trigger bonus to your resource gain before every match nearly uh after they like they have like I don't know five to six sets until the thing goes on cool down so yeah that that's the trick to it to kind of look at all the systems of previous games and then we you know going forward and forward and forward is kind of a portfolio of things that you already know just gets bigger and it's then easier to get out around that sure but you need to know uh this game was based on random like best thing to start I would say my recommendation when I'm when I'm doing this you need to know all the archetypes meaning you need to all the games that have breached literally 1

billion in Revenue like all of them are usually the ones that are being you know used as iteration standpoint yeah for instance I don't know Puzzle and Dragons Empires and puzzles that's like a clear iteration there's very very big iteration don't get me wrong it's not like a easy to do that iteration it's not a copy but still you you know the systems you know how they work and then it's again like look yeah the vectors vectors you're just looking into like a different car or like oh this is this part that I saw in this other game and it's it's now working in this way and they're using it that way so that's that's very very easy to do once you know it that once you know it that's easy so you know Maria this this podcast Works in this way so if you have a time to catch a breath then yakob starts talking and you you are just out so you need to you know you need to fight for for your word that's that's why he has so much breath for his [Laughter] balloons there you go um yeah and I don't I know specifically your audience

I don't know how senior um the professionals are but if you're just getting into the industry uh it might seem a bit scary that you have to learn all of these systems at once and very quickly but honestly over a year of your career if you're just being dedicated and you're doing this over time and going through the top grossing that yakob was saying you will just naturally start learning the pattern that yeah the patterns and you'll just have a mentor library to pull upon it's the same thing I think with admon and and UA so I I've seen things and now I I see the I look at the campaign and how the you know numbers are evolving and I like okay so I've seen this before so I know what's going to happen and I guess it's similar for you guys yeah the the second thing if you want to go a little bit deeper I would recommend is look into the company portfolio if you want to see like if there's some kind of a lineage being shared between the games and if there's progression for instance a good example would be hobby where you can clearly see that they're using the same meta game from every other kind of

a iteration of archero which they are just changing the core gameplay they have a something like a runner then they have a pinball game they have a this kind of arch arrow and survival IO is pretty much Arch arrow on steroids where they take down the kind of slow cool down Parts out of the game so you can see that they're using their tried and tested metag again all over the portfolio whereas we have since we have two product people here uh so can we have a refresher on like what's the difference between the meta game and the the cor yeah yep okay uh core gameplay is the basic unit of gameplay like a basic single segment that you can play to be counted as like a core gameplay meaning that you know that's the thing that you play when you're riding a bus or waiting in line for Starbucks that you can play and it ends and pretty much that's single unit of gameplay meta game example example uh Clash Royale match which takes like 3 to five minutes level of a Candy Crush one one battle of

Empires and puzzles you know some of these that's core gameplay you don't actually need to have active core game play that that just to mention the fact that that's even that there's active player input involved it can go automatic completely yeah the Idol idol core game but even even even not like an idle one like if we consider something like a Forex they wa wait what do they have in what do you have as your core gam playay in Hutch Maria what would you say yeah like in a couple the racing games yeah the game that I work on is this a a car strategy game where you do simulations the when we call the core gamepl when you enter the match where you have five opponents and uh five opponent cards and they're each racing on a different track in different weather conditions the player chooses their five cards that they want to bring in and then they have to match them to the opponents that they want to race against and then it does the race simulation for you to see the results that's the core gamepl yeah and then the meta is when is you're collecting the

cars you're upgrading them so I I think a simp a very simplification of two two concepts is that the core gameplay is when you have to have your eyes glued usually and you're doing things and it's fairly bite-sized and then the meta is when you can take it in a more iterative approach and you do it over time yeah meta is usually the the progression the Excel sheets that drives the numbers yeah okay how how do you explain EXO sheets to you know random people in the industry um how do you explain EXO sheets let's take Clash Royale Clash Royale in the end without the levels and upgrading would be a great chess game but in order to make money they actually need to upgrade something which means they running on this infinite Loop of health and damage which just scales but the game is the same which makes the progression that's try we are definitely going a little bit away from Russ this is amazing this is great it's great it's great oh I love it

um I think for me the most important aspect even when you learn the patterns even when you learn the archetypes it's still important in my opinion to play a diverse set of games across genres and everything is the pacing I think the pacing is one of the most delicate IM balances in terms of the progression and keeping the players stuck in and keeping them coming back and how quickly they feel powerful um and yeah the pacing is what I see vary across all of the games I play and just getting and this is why I think watching YouTube won't be as good as actually playing it yourself because you don't you don't feel yeah I guess I think feeling the game is actually a thing and it's very important to to learn over time in your career yeah I completely agree with this like like just one example when I was playing uh with like free account Empires and puzzles for more than a year I literally got zero fstar Heroes zero so that just tells something about the

spend depth of the game oh that's just telling uh how sad your life is actually as well but okay we yeah but you need to feel the grind honestly like you need to feel the grind where it hits you how how hard it is how how you know fast you can get out of it how how much even if you buy something it will help you because some games just suffer from the problem that you buy something you actually get nowhere and there's immediate buyers regret and the second conversion is is no to be seen absolutely agree also like to to know like where's the point of the game that actually makes me pay that's important I want to pay of course I'm I'm a payer in different games I I I can pay whatever I I want if if it's actually valuable for me as a player if it's not like okay I don't care sometimes they don't want to make you pay yeah of course no yeah we we discussed that uh like two two episodes ago actually yeah but I guess let's get a little bit back to yeah yeah so if you

look at the Port portfolio I would say uh rash currently Mak something whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what the what what well why are you talking we're still come on like Maria had you know oh sorry sorry go ahead Maria oh honestly I I don't have that much more to add I think I was I was very curious into what okay what yako was going to say so yeah please yeah he's always jumping into every every word every sentence he has interesting things to say I get it yeah okay okay okay I know all the balloons behind him is like pushing him to say everything okay okay go yeah um just saying that I don't see like a big pattern on the portfolio it's I guess um because of that which portfolio the my games now upw me portfolio which I guess was just acquiring company from left to right in a way that they weren't I guess probably trying to diversify uh War robots and rash are still driving the company mainly uh we can only see that rash Mak something like 2.3 2.5 million uh a month in iips but I guess that's

nearly or even more than double because of the strong ad placements they have in the game which I guess Felix can also but also they they made before they were pull off the store they made like five to six yeah deined a little bit in last two three months yeah so because they need you know they had to restart the UA it's not easy it's not easy to restart the UA and get back on track as you you were spending before yeah um so uh as we talk around like core gameplay is pretty simple it's just like a the usual Tower Defense as I said it's pretty much one to one Clon with random dice where you have some kind of a twists uh the randomness actually is very very strong as Maria pointed in the comments like it's much less controlled that's something like let's say Clash Royale where the randomness is basically coming from new cards being put into your hand and you can choose which one to use whereas here the randomness is pretty much after every move in the game where even when you spawn something it's random and when you merge something it's random there are of course some cards in

the game that can offset this like Joker cards and stuff like that but still it's very very very random so it can feel very punishing I completely agree with that and then your skill is pretty much being able to adap to these random situation which makes theability Factor very high so that's great uh regarding the meta game I would say um it lacks a little bit in the like the strategy Factor where the deck size is only 5 token strong which compared something to like Clash Royale which is eight eight tokens it diminishes the you know the need to have that many tokens because I've seen a lot of decks being just uh built around one card and all the other cards supporting it okay but then you have the the weekly uh change of um The Uplift of different cards right like I'm not sure like what how what they how do they call it but now how do they do PVP meta shifts not meta shifts but you have in the game that you know every week there's a change yeah yeah like they

boost up factions to yeah the boo yeah yeah the factions yeah yeah so you know that's that's one way they try to offset this problem but I guess it's still kind of much more uh Stronger here rather than something like let's say golf Clash which is also using the Clash Royale Shard uh meta where yeah you have eight slots even though they have seven slots because the putter is not scalable uh so here they have five slots uh 61 tokens in the pool I guess they can skill scale it a little bit more no problem with that but they already hit the problem that Clash Roy already did which is they added these can skip items which are the ones that help you to upgrade the cards without spending any cards actually that you need to get them more gold because this is like a let's say a problem of the model even though Clash Royale Sharda game model works great this is the problem when you get to those exponential numbers at the end of the level curves which gets super super super high and by adding more tokens into the pool it gets exponent ially harder to actually get a specific tokens so this way they are trying to

offset this to put more people to the end game rather than being stuck into the you know early to mid game okay I have no idea what you just said but we can we can definitely go I was curious yob I read a lot of reviews about the imbalance in the game play and like you were saying there's not much diversity in terms of deck archetypes I I read that they recently released the witch which is a used unit that is overpowered um and destroyed the balance do you think that having a game having the five slots instead of the eight slots it makes it harder to balance interesting deck archetypes or the impacts of an OP unit it affects the game even more I would say it really happens on the game playay itself because keep in mind it also have two modes and some cards have different functionality in co-op gameplay okay so that also plays very well for them because this way you want to have like one Deo already for PVP one then for Coop so already like let's say effective

deck size is pretty much doubled if they play it wisely but still I guess they will be pushing themselves into the corner long term if they are scaling to something like I don't know 100 tokens in the gacha like Clash Royale has currently like CL I think is currently sitting like 105 or something plus and they actually launched the game with like 50 so they nearly doubled the whole gacha pool and I guess these guys are doing the same and will be doing the same because the this is how the model works so my guess is like one of the best remedies to this would be to create different game modes with different twists or pretty much like you know you have a deck a for problem a and deck B from problem B therefore you need to upgrade more decks and different decks because the worst case that can happen here is that you have one deck that solves all the problems in the whole game and then you don't need to upgrade anything and the whole thing grindes to hold so that that's that's the problem because when you start adding more and more of these into the into the pool as you said like new cards they're still competing with the existing cards and yeah new mechanics probably needs to be

created and then we get to the usual power creep where the new mechanics are just better than the old ones in order for you to upgrade the cards anyway could another solution be adding some kind of tags to the cards where you can they already have defections so so they are attacked okay do they sell packs or no I don't think so not yet but that's that's like kind of trickery slope with kacha games where you cut down the randomness of the pools and then and that gets cut down pretty pretty fast Felix do you see like how they're smiling and we don't we don't know like what they're talking about dude like I was just thinking to a couple of things that you guys were both talking about and I was just like I can't even spell that like what are they talking about exactly like but it's great to Maria on the P like finally a product person I don't need to be lost in ad networks no like what do you mean yeah well he he was complaining last night like oh well I need to I need to listen to all of your UA and U UA divers ation blah blah blah come on like are you saying like we are not the

you know equal sping partners for you come on everybody's equal sping part old genre I'm actually really interested in what Felix has to say I read your prep Felix yeah let's do that no it's it's always amazing he he always do he always does these like calculations everything and numbers did it's great it's great it's amazing I love it I love it let's do it yeah let's do it sorry we finish with for the product then yeah yeah go ahead all right so uh we've gotten to the best part of any analysis the ads part right you know nothing more beautiful I keep saying there's nothing more beautiful than ads right so a analysis or kind of a mini Deep dive on ad monetization is always split into three parts uh the first is AD placements in the game second one is do the ad networks in the game match your user base and the third one is is you look at the ad waterfall setup but that's only possible if you actually

have the logins right so yeah I kind of did one and two and then kind of pearing from the outside on three so add placements in the game here of course you actually have to play the game for like two or three hours and also when you play the game you have to play like your one of the masses right and that's to say you can't make any IAP purchases you have to get by by watching ads so none of those elitist I APS starter pack buying looking at you Ma you whale yeah exactly that's me always yeah and what I looking for I want to feel I want to I want to feel like uh you know what what what is like to buy the the stter Peg and how that actually improves my gameplay elitist mat you can't do that if you're you know playing a game for the ads you can't do that okay anyway uh what am I looking for here when you're starting to play the game I'm looking for several things like what are the ad placements uh where

are they is it rewarded banners inters how long are the end cards on the ads like do they make sense so on Rush Royal uh they only have rewarded ads but they have a lot of placements I count around six or seven rewarded ad placements and this is on the higher end and I feel they're all super relevant and very compelling so you can already tell like these guys really know what they're doing so then I write it down so six ad placements is Victory chest defeat chest pre-battle PVP chest pre-battle Co-op chest pre- battle storage chest and Quest chest it's all about chests lot of chest they have they have the refresh thing on the carousel with the c yeah they have that one yeah they have the roulette thing with the ad and like I guess still a few more like those are pretty much very very nicely hidden with the dynamic placements yeah so they have couple old than on timers uh so it's about like six or seven thing ad units

you can see I'm assuming here session lengths are about 15 to 20 minutes uh that means probably a normal non AP purchaser is going to watch about four to five rewarded ads per day uh the ad placements are also so relevant that I think the ad viewer rate is around 70% which is quite High uh the ad placements for me look quite good and I struggle to think of anyone like any other ones to add except maybe like a welcome back rewarded placement I don't know Maria or like do you have any ideas what would be like another good question afterwards as well so please go on Remo any good like ideas for any more ad placements uh I know that random dies would have the consolidate like if you lose they would give you a chest or like add placement for a chest but these guys do it even if you win yeah win and lose you're getting you can still get the head placement there so Felix hypothetical question if you are making a game with which is uh well rash Royale inspired let's say that

way it's not a clone but it's inspired by rash Royale wink so uh for those who listen to the podcast um so and they're trying to to avoid the ads because of the premium feel what what would you say to to to these these guys should they add the ad monetization in the game very similar to what the Russ is doing or they can just skip it and then you know Bank on the the premium feeli this is not 2014 anymore right the player bases are used to rewarded odds player uses like players like rewarded odds and like for me it makes no sense why you would like make a game that doesn't have rewarded ads anymore intertial banners bit intrusive ad format is annoying but rewarded ads like they add to the game play and I've actually managed a couple games where something broke and people complain that they can't get the reward ads like they're a nice compliment to gameplay and I don't see any harm in it

and I don't think it takes away from premium feel away at all like no yeah and actually um looking at a pattern of data you can also see that the the player segment that engages with worded as the most are Spenders and Elder game players yeah yeah yeah okay yeah yeah that's yeah that's that's what I thought as well but you know hypothetical question of course yeah looking at you Marvel snap this is going to pop up anyway all right so once we played the game and we made our estimates on ad view array imp Dow and then we have enough to start making estimates on the overall ad Revenue in the game so that's when you log into your favorite data platform and you take a look at the Active user base and then you split that active user base into us and non us da and then you plug it in uh why do you do this ccpm is super different in America and the rest of the world America is still you know

tier one top tier that's where the ecpm are the highest so if you don't split this out it really messes up your estimates so I looked at between 18th of September and 23rd of October saw about 1.7 million users I assumed five Impressions per day I plugged in the ecpm numbers that I usually see for these GEOS and I come to a daily ad Revenue figure of 58,000 a day which comes out to 1.7 million a month uh so uh that is about 31% of their IAP Revenue but yeah something interesting on top of this so 20% of the user base is from Russia and the Ukraine and this changes everything quite a lot so before the War I was able to get3 to four ecpm on Russian rewarded videos now if I'm lucky I get close to $2 so if I plug these numbers in as well as for pre-war

levels I think that this game R like Royal Rush was making about 40% before from ad revenue and it all kind of went down after the war which is kind of crazy this is also what what I would expect like 30% of of the whole revenue is basically ads well in January I guarantee you this was 40% like 100% absolutely man that's crazy numbers yeah that's that's what I I that's what I like these guys I think like they're doing all All the Right Moves to actually grow the game and we can see it on the revenue basically it's it's growing since what like last since launch in since launch basically yeah since launch there's like a there's like a one year difference between the launch of random dice in this game so they are also very very fast to actually pull out the game together yeah yeah yeah and I think it was very impressed Al also seeing the the country mix in terms of the

downloads and the revenue they're not usually dependent on a single on a single country yeah so that BRS I had a question oh Sor sure go for it no go ahead sure should I I was wondering for a a new games company to do this kind of AD monetization how critical is it to hire someone who's an expert in this and how early in the stage I will answer for for Felix highly critical as soon as you can there you go you can ask that Felix of course he will tell you that no like honestly like yeah slap it on a bit later like just slap it on a bit later release the game and slap it on later so it doesn't really make sense with it in your core or Loops that always works out no oh okay okay let me answer that now no the economy need to take it like you need to offset the budget to the add monetization that's the most important thing I would say from product perspective of course Felix can do his magic on the like mediation external side but inside the game you need to add

budget to the game and you cannot just you know go like add just more stuff into the game question yeah no I was joking before like honestly ad monetization person dealing directly with network stuff I would say it makes sense to bring someone in around soft launch because that's when you need to get an idea of what your ad arpa will be so person like me like if you start thinking about the ad monetization already quite early and have someone dedicated to that I would say Ad monetization person around soft launch and that would make sense right and would it have to be a full-time person or could it be using consultancy or contractor consultancy were I mean it all depends on how much ad Revenue it is right so like if it's you know couple of thousand a day probably doesn't make sense to have anyone in house kind of rule of thumb here what you say is you can optimize your waterfall and everything here and maybe boost your ad Revenue by 20 to 30% so calculate how much like Bo that is a month and then you have your budget for your admon person yeah right so run a test first

test it before understanding whether should have a full-time person exactly okay yeah most probably very interesting okay what I we usually say to the companies is just uh even for UA it doesn't make sense to run to to hire internally full-time in even in soft launch I mean you need you on the UA side you have a lot of work but it's uh it's in Cycles so usually when you wait for you know for uh the new build and the improvements on the game play well there's nothing that you can do on the UA side so what would that person internally do well you can you know learn study whatever why why would you pay internally so okay that's detail sorry Felix you you're still doing your analysis okay let me go to the second part which is the ad Network mix so here again by this time I log into my second favorite data platform and basically the data is not as good but they do give the

sdks are installed in the game as in like as a part of their basic package so Rush uh Royal rush sdks they have man I keep mixing up yeah I keep mixing it up I see I see that like I didn't I didn't say anything like when you say Royal Rush before but now it's like no but dude that's what it says in the App Store keep getting so confused that me like no come on you need to so anyway they have 10 ad sdks applen meta admob iron Source Unity pangle imobi vungle Tapjoy and my target so what I'm looking for here is are these networks actually matching to up to where their user base is as you know some networks are stronger than others in some GEOS so rule of thumb here is that you always want to work with a couple of main networks and that's admob meta applin Unity iron Source but only on iOS and they these guys all have good Global

reach and they're kind of the backbone of your ad Revenue uh next thing what you want to do is match networks with your top GEOS so these guys' top GEOS are is Russia America Korea Germany and the Ukraine so they've matched these GEOS with pangle my target kind of iron Source Korea uh iron Source bungle and imobi so that looks good from the outside my target is like a must have partner for the CIS and pangle is super strong in Asia so that makes sense from the outside if you're making 20K is also very strong in in Southeast Asia right yeah exactly yeah sorry which one inob yeah so uh if you're making around 20K a day from ads you usually need around 10 networks to actually push competition uh so these guys make you know 60k a day plus so that makes sense I would say they're probably missing two key de sources uh DTX and Google ad manager and

probably that's costing them on an adarp out basis around 45% on a yearly basis um so yeah thinking behind there you can go back in a couple of our episodes and check that out uh why that is uh you can also if you want to go deep here like you can also have a look at the adaps txt file and see if everything's up to date there in terms of all the resellers I did it looked quite good so these guys are on top of it and unless I have access to their mediation uh this is where my kind of yeah analysis would end however if I did have access to their mediation uh what I would look for nice yeah what I would look for here is first you log in and the first thing I look for is to see uh what kind of GEOS split they have uh the Geo split is where you group together similarly priced ecpm GEOS in clusters and then you optimize those clusters in separate waterfalls so on smaller apps it doesn't

really make a lot of sense to do this but on apps that are 20K a day plus this is quite important because it adds up over time um next after that what I would do is take the ad ad networks and they see the revenue over the last 30 days and see what kind of percentage and share of Revenue each network is kind of contributing to the overall Revenue what I'm kind of looking for here is the more evenly spread your ad Revenue is between networks the higher your ad Revenue will be so any AD Network under 3 4% kick them out they add 0% value uh so this is also true on the opposite end so if you have a network that takes up more than 50% that's not good for your competition either so uh then last thing I look at is like how tight are the waterfalls and what that actually means is you just go into the waterfalls and actually look at the placements what you want is each placement to be filling out 1% and like contributing at least 1% of the overall Revenue in that waterfall and if all the

placements are doing that then it's looking good and that's it that's it yeah nice okay someone's getting removed from the waterfall today yeah not not today oh well yeah today I I'm most probably going to do the post production after after the dinner anyway okay no that's that's yeah that that's super interesting okay yeah I find it very helpful to share these benchmarks yeah any any other thoughts or comments like what what we should look for uh in in like doing these like product reviews obviously we went a little bit uh deeper than uh than usually but I think it it's pretty interesting I think maybe discussing a little bit about how how to pick which games let's say you've gone through all of the 1 billion plus games how do you select which ones you should be looking at yeah I would say the new ones definitely like the the ones that are pretty much you

know Survivor I comes out roaring two millions a day you definitely need to see that like no questions asked that that's that's there even if it's out of your genre out of your scope whatever you just need to know how it works just if if you're really lazy watch 10 minute tutorial video but it's not the you know you won't get the feel yeah you won't because you're lazy that's why you're watching the video we are not lazy at all of course wow okay well no I I I I I have to admit I stopped playing uh surviv iio after level or not level that that Arena five or six just got a bit like repetitive like it's just a bit too long it got boring a little bit also with Marvel snap I mean I'm what like 35ish the other thing I would say would be try to look for games outside your region M because especially oh yeah friends are coming from Asia to West very very heavily and we don't really

see these game slaps around us on ads or you know accessible immediately okay but if you if you if you don't see them like how would you find them how would you know like what to look for okay but how would you seeart you see the charts you see the grossing charts in Japan Korea Asia China you know you know that's the right answer not like Google like of course like go to go to the grossing charts look at the Cor yeah yeah of course H okay yeah okay yeah something else I do is because live Ops is so important I just tried to find games that have interesting liveop strategies and if I can see I just go to my favorite data platform um and yeah I just look at how they can Spike their revenue based on their liveops calendar and then if it shows really interesting results I'll decide even if it's not top grossing or a new game I'll still decide to go and play and just understand how it can keep such a sustainable liveops monetization then

what's interesting for you in this case then what's interesting like it's like 10 10x of the the daily revenue or like how do you find the Define in terms of yeah The Benchmark Benchmark um I think I've looked at definitely looked at examples where they managed to 3x okay and then also looking at when they 3x 5x the with the a peak do they manage to sustain it how far down does it go that also changes how I'm analyzing it nice yeah trying to learn like what what is the content how do they communicate it to the player base I think that communication with your players and how you announce it is extremely important as well to learn from nice okay yeah also there's the Hang hangover period right after the the nobody's talking about by the way like oh well we do live Ops it's amazing and they're like oh well but you know like the the the Baseline cin like 2x well okay in that case the live was not

making that much of a sense I'm curious to see where the Clash Royale CU I know they released a pretty massive update that did an amazing Revenue Spike I'm going to keep an eye on it as to well I saw your strategy but what are the consequences of the strategy to get that Spike that that's what we discussed with the with the Mr Beast video like oh wow this is amazing they they spiked quite a lot in terms of downloads but Revenue St flat like okay well there you go amazing job guys I need to actually go no it's all good I think we we're all uh all good yeah yeah amazing thank you very much much thanks for having me on it was great to join you people please more prodct people okay so uh yeah we will bring on more product people the in the future thank you very much for listening please subscribe obviously we just hit 1,000 subscribers it's amazing yeah congrats on that actually amazing

for doing that please keep doing so share the the podcast with your industry friends family dogs and cats cats are important of the the equation and uh yeah talk to you next time thank you very much see byebye [Music]