two & a half gamers session #40 - Q4 Live ops tips, Q4 UA Budget optimisations, Admon bidder updates

[Music] normal history where the hello everyone this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half Gamers session number 40 sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day UA game design ad monetization jobs also discussing the latest industry news from time to time while having so much fun as you might heard at the beginning let's not forget this is still 4 a.m. conference discussion wi let's not take it too seriously welcome yakob welcome Felix and uh well I guess I welcome myself hello it's me okay so uh we have full house here uh how is everybody doing good man great so except yeah like are the rumors I heard about you true M like I heard some

rumors that you took delivery of a sports car Cabret today purple one is that true be true yeah it might be true yeah yeah yeah I had to Chas the deliver man in the morning across the whole bra laava because someone I have no idea who that was actually sent me a Barbie in a car in a sports car you said you want a new car of course so just to give a context our dear listeners uh so Felix owes me so much I actually told him to to buy me a car and that's the carard that I got today so I guess no intro for you Felix in in the future anyway yeah anyway Jokes Aside uh it's been a nice week um so what we are talking about today so we have actually news it's been a while finally yeah it's been a while of course I mean we are here to provide value and not rant about

whatever is happening around us but this time we might just comment on something and then we're going to talk about some interesting stuff well you should be here and listen you will see what it is usually Edmund UA and game design so what should we do oh well first of all I um I have to confess and there's some uh some things that you know we talk about from our UA game design and admon stuff and activities and we always try to assume and comment and try to you know um bring the information that we Face day to day and thanks to you guys our listeners we are actually um manage to find out that we are getting better and better each time we are trying to review a game and try to assume what kind of numbers they see and then like from our recent conversations we had with you guys uh well our assumptions were almost one to one to to reality so it's It's [ __ ]

amazing kudos to us I'm going to take I'm going to take my little admon Victory lap here then because you know yeah you can you can do you can gamew what oh well you can do it right there by the way I mean for a game review last week uh anat who's the head of admon uh at my games or what's it called now my games still my games let's yeah still upake me no yeah he reached out and he said I was pretty much right about everything except like except what ad networks they were working with and like you know I got that data from our or from my second favorite data provider on which sdks they were using but it turns out they were all wrong so now the second favorite data provider is probably my least favorite data provider thanks guys and also our listeners are actually calling out sensor t or data AI to to sponsor us so guys if you're listening don't be shy and get in touch yeah let me get let me see those sdks as well

that's super useful don't hide it behind the pay wall yeah also also many thanks to people actually reaching out to us like we like that very much and yeah thanks for doing that because you know you did the game we just reviewed it so great it works and some finally uh you know yakob is uh is now able to talk to other people than us too so that's great as well please continue reaching out to him as well he loves it he's starting get some friends actual friends it's great and not the balloons behind him so it's good by the way like why are they actually still well there still there because my my wife want to still keep them there I know I mean like uh they didn't die I mean it's like one week since uh we saw yeah they're pretty durable it seems yeah honestly I have like a balloon with like number one obviously because my daughter turned one last last month and it's still alive still there still flying in our living

room it's great okay let's let's cut this [ __ ] and move move to move to actual the news yeah I want to talk about this one piece of news that I read in Pocket Gamer that actually infuriated me it was just like oh the clickbait on this and then like when you dive into below the surface it's just like man it's just not at all what the title says right so I wanted to talk about this welcome to journalism I know right so basically it was the news forecast from new that suggested that the mobile gaming Market will shrink with 6.4% year onye and yeah it's expected that the mobile games Market this year will generate 92.2 billion in 2022 which is a decrease of 6.4% and yeah basically that's an 11% decrease from a forecast that said 103 billion 103 and a half billion and then there was a big title that says is the bubble bursting and then at the bottom in the last paragraph of course because no one

reads all the way to the bottom and it's like while open up that forast yeah and then while the figure may seem disheartening the game Market still generated almost 43 billion more in 2020 to 2022 than originally was forecasted prior to the pandemic so basically like my high school like science teacher would be turning in her grave cuz essentially he like whenever you have a data set and you have outliers you take them out and honestly like you can't fact in like revenue from two pandemic years and you can't look at that like if you're looking at mobile gaming you just need to take those two years out like they're outliers and we're still growing compared to 2019 like things are good sure but nobody would read that I mean this is definitely more ey catching come on I just got angry I got triggered I got triggered yeah I can see okay but what okay but because this is not not the like a podcast where we rant but we also provide Solutions so what would you then like right in the article I would

say in the headline I would say if you take out the pandemic years which were outliers that's already too long man nobody his long wrong L all right fine no I it's like you know uh yeah I would definitely put that last paragraph in like the first place like hey so we click bited you here so thank you very much for coming to to read the article but it's not as bad as as the headline suggests exactly do we do we expect growth next year here or still shrinkage well I have have no idea actually that's the magic question that's the magic question not this rambling no okay I think I want to answer that in like after I see the Thanksgiving numbers yeah what what would that tell you like how was that like okay so the the world is heading into a recession right and what happens during a recession is like usually branding uh branding pulls a lot of their spend right and at least my world like ecpm increase quite a lot in

Q4 because of branding spend moving up and that's what pushes performance spend to basically also have to go higher to kind of maintain the same amount of installs so for me I just want to see if branding will keep spending because that will determine a lot of the advertising revenue and I'm sure the advertising revenue is only about 25 billion of that 92 billion but still like yeah then I'd actually be able to weigh in on my area of expertise and say like we'll be fine we'll get growth or not H okay good answer thank you nice let's see after the Thanksgiving one then well yeah I will ask for sure don't worry yeah oh I might be on the beach after Thanksgiving so let's see yeah in your sports car yeah in my sports car Barbie sports car is Barbie of course do do you want to take the next bombshell Remo yeah yeah um so there's actually a reuter's article that's been Tak taken by Pocket Gamer uh talking about

everything law claim uh that Google stack a 360 million deal to prevent Activision Blizzard creating its own app store if you read into it it even said that there was a 30 million deal with Riot games also and uh throughout the article I think it talks about 24 deals uh with app developers that Google pretty much did throughout the I don't know from when but it was said that this came out from the famous or inFAMOUS Google versus epic uh trial in 2020 and it seems that like this kind of a unredacted copy just got out to the public if I get it right if it's on like reuter for page and yeah I guess we're more and more close to this recuring team that uh people want to get out of the kind of a store thing

that we currently have store thing mate you missed the best part whole you missed the best part of the whole article and that's what Google called this project internally and they called it project hug H okay yeah that's perfect project the hug okay amazing what was the last shot fired this way uh Microsoft talking something about creating their own mobile app store yeah I think that's the last it's not going to happen anyway the thing is but they're pretty far ahead with like the Xbox uh Game Pass thing I would say that's not going to further in the crowd okay we'll see we'll see the thing is Google's king of these deals because they pay Apple a billion a year so that their search is like the official search of the iPhone so like they do all these type of deals so it's like I'm not that surprised to read it and you know the anti- competitive like monopoly laws in America is you can get in trouble if you can prove that the consumer was hurt and they have to pay more and that's how

they were made in the 1920s so how I'm assuming Google is arguing this is like well the consumer's okay most of the games on our platform are free so what's going on there's nothing wrong here okay please continue with that voice until the end of the podcast please if you can it's amazing I love it okay good so so what's going to happen with with this slow suit what should we expect I guess it will be direct to the infinity I guess absolutely until the enemy runs out of money against the monopolies it's like you read this and you do the surprised meme face like and then nothing happens no way no way happening yeah okay yeah we can move on let's see let's move on from Project hug yeah project hug to actually what's happening in our day-to-day life if you've built a mobile game for iOS or Android you've experienced user

turn you can win those users back but it's getting more and more expensive even more so to acquire totally new users enter cross promotion with adct by identifying your users likely to turn early you can showcase another game in your portfolio before they leave forever transforming a lost user into a new user increasing your revenues learn more now at addict.com [Music] start so start Felix nice I can like I'm going to be a really quick update today um but I'm just going to talk a bit what I'm seeing in the market so far uh we're one week away from Thanksgiving weekend with Black Friday and you know it's a very important weekend because essentially we'll act as the canary and the coal mine for the rest of the year so we'll know from the ecpm numbers we're seeing next week if it's going to be a jolly Christmas or not so winter is coming either winter is coming or it's going to be a Holly Jolly Christmas and we're all going to be okay

so what I see is the Google bidder that I've been talking a lot about in September has absolutely kicked it like life into an absolute New Gear so originally in September I saw uplift in like 60% of the games I like managed where I tested it in and I added again to test it like last week and yes to the Moon of those last 40% of the games that were bad before four like average uplift 10 to 12% on adarp which is like massive wins and that's like AB test I've kept for 2 weeks and like the biggest loser in all of this is on Android the Google bidder absolutely munches up meta demand and you can see that most of like the share of Revenue that gets taken is just meta being absolutely demolished and here's a little top tip that I'm giving to give for our listeners I've heard that right now they are looking for another batch of like

beta testers so right now so in September they open up for 15 companies and now they're going to open up for I think 30 or more and they're choosing who it is right now so you know if you're listening to this and you have an admob AM and you want to make more money time to start yeah bugging your admob like AMS to let you take part in this beautiful yeah bitter testing nice okay second Facebook is getting getting right UA and admon amazing yeah like it's not looking very good like poor meta There Goes My V headset also so the other surprise that's like a nice pleasant surprise is APS Amazon publisher services so they always said it was only for Banner demand and I'm hearing from people that have actually set them live on reward

and interest that they're actually starting to see some sorts of life and pretty good results also on interstitials and rewarded which is completely from Left Field because I haven't even made any announcements about it so yeah favor fortunes people are just trying stuff I guess of course and here I've been told that the like the secret is to getting really good results is working with the top five dsps on Tam Tam so basically then you have to do a direct I relationships with some DSP and Publishers are telling me that's the secret Source I've just now started to test this myself and the early signs is that when I've signed a direct IO like contract with yeah a DSP like it like demand from these dsps triple or double so like you actually get a lot better performance it's a bit more annoying getting paid from like 10 different sources instead of one yeah but I can kind of think why because Amazon's cut when you sign a tam agreement goes from 12 and a half% down to like I think they take 10 cent

or like one cent per impression so it's a lot less okay and also kind of building what I said before like I get I've been getting a lot of questions from people who heard like last week's podcast like how ecpm are currently doing it's a bit too early to tell I think probably by like Wednesday Thursday next week we'll know too early to tell come on we were week away let's try again let's try again okay let's try again next week okay we're going to try no no but next week I'll definitely be able to share some stuff and then I can actually make my Christmas like predictions and maybe then I can even buy Remo a Barbie car Christmas prediction who gives a f a Christmas prediction I do really what do you want to predict what do you want to predict you hate predictions yeah yeah yeah yeah I do I really do I'm getting I'm starting to get emails like hey well we would love to hear your predictions for next year like yeah my prediction is that Mach is going to get angry yeah of course yeah like okay [ __ ]

it that's it from my side this week let's it yeah okay so well the the Q4 as we discussed it's a silly season for you Felix so it's uh you're happy get to be the hero I get to be the hero pretty happy now now for for me and and the developers some at least some developers it's not that amazing in terms of the US and uh in terms of the like rising cpis and Rising costs uh for the same players basically so so some of them you know you can't compete with the the big players um during the year and now you need to compete with uh the brands and e-commerce as well which kind of sucks so so usually what's what's going to happen well even even if you get pretty good quality traffic you can't afford it because uh well the C is increasing and then well the the payb period is

increasing as well so the smaller companies and some of the companies I work with as well um they are trying to think about like how to work with budgets for Q4 and what to actually do so uh so they you know and I I do that as well I always look at the the bank account and the the actually cash flow situation of the of the company because some there are like we wild ideas like Okay so let's stop UA completely for Q4 it's like well okay you could do that basically because then of course you don't spend like 500k a month and then you have um one and a half Millions uh basically saved from the not spending but then your Revenue drops quite heavily as well and uh if you compare then you will obviously still have some

level of Revenue and then that turns into profit which is something that RoR have done this year they were spending heavily and then they stopped spending completely in August or September so basically now they're just cashing uh in the profit but it's a very different baseline from when you are spending few Millions a month and then uh from uh where you're spending zero actually a month as well and also you can't comp compare the quality of Organics and the quality of paid users it's usually very different like paid performance and the roas is is very different even even ecpm are different Felix right on on the Organics versus Spade yeah absolutely like ecpm so what happens is when you do UA so let's say like you do UA with unity or any other network and then usually what happens is like you also monetize with unity or any other network what happens is like they tag the user so they know that this user was brought in already so they're

willing to buy more for that user because they know they click on ads and they convert so that brings it up and also big part is when you're doing UA you get a larger amount of unique users and one of the key factors of calculating ecpm is how many unique users the algorithm see in the games so yeah very big very very big part it's very true that also the the Facebook vo and purchase campaigns and the the well in general the purchase campaigns and the value optimized campaigns those have better ecpm as well right yeah absolutely yeah okay so yeah well that's that's something you need to think about so so again like with lower budgets you can expect lower organic uplift as well and uh but there also like very big part of obviously like what H what also happens when you lower down the budgets so as we this is the reverse actions when we discussed if you're growing the budget then you might see your payback period actually well

long prolongs to whatever uh days in the in the future in this case when you're narrowing down the audience and decreasing budget then you're only going to buy the core audience that is interested in in your game which is which is good right well yes but also no because in this case you are getting the same amount well you're getting the same players or like the best players but with the higher cpis because of the competition so you will get actually less players for your budgets then uh you would get in January or after Christmas so what I usually do in these cases um when you we need to you know think about how to decrease the budget should we decrease the budget across all the UA channels should we just shut down some of the UA channels so this is like what I what I usually do and since I I I have the list of the campaigns I I usually run and the draw numbers next to them so I just list them

from best dra as worst obviously and I look at the day one day three or day seven benchmarks and because you're also skilled enough to know that if you have day seven R 50% that means in your case or in my case day 30 100% And also if I see 20% on day seven that actually means I can get the money back in 180 days or one or or 365 because this because I have the benchmarks and I have the data that I can see from the previous campaigns on the same game for the same game Yeah Yeah from the same game because I know asking for UA noobs of course no no no of course not that it's good but this is like how how you should always work so you have different benchmarks for for different scenarios so if you want to get money back in 30 days that's like 100% that means that you need to get day seven 50% one 20% if you if you have

this curve perfect you will see the numbers if let's say you open up budget and you are aiming for 180 same game you know widen the audience then the overall rust decrease the payb period prolongs but you can still get the money back but the curve looks different then you you will see day one 10% day s 20% and then eventually 100% in 180 days so in this like for tough situation with higher cpis I would assume you want to see the money back quickly so you have enough cash uh in your bank account to start next year very strong that's why I usually aim to do so again looking at the campaigns take the bottom half [ __ ] it pause them right away that's just like I mean what like there's no no speculation just if if something is underperforming and you have like 10 10 campaigns and five of them is like showing great results and

the the other five is just below the the standard [ __ ] it just POS it right away and I know I know like if you lose all the learnings for example unit to app or any other network and you need to restart the UA Channels with the CPI campaigns all over again next year and it's a really painful process you need to spend the money but if that helps to get your money back quickly but why wouldn't you do it and with like this budget decree you will still see best performing campaigns up and running and that you know ensure that your money is going to well be in your pocket even sooner than than before because lower budgets only best performing campaigns well there you go well with overall daily and monthly well your overall daily and monthly Revenue will most probably shrink well it's it's no doubt and you need to count with that uh for next year which means most probably like a little bit longer ramp up period and Pro for early next year but if that still means that um you

know you will save some money it will help your cash flow let's go I mean it's a it's a b basically at the end it's a business decision that every company needs to needs to wait in yep uh if let's say this would be the right way to go to optimize cut down the crap and just keep running the best things possible on a lower budget mhm and everybody would got the same idea why are their budgets getting higher than during this Q4 period which budges are getting higher in this Q competitors well because if you're big big company and you don't have problems with cash flow then you you can you can actually outb everybody else so this is the thing I mean if you if if and I I would I would do the same in in a different scenario when I see like the cpis are higher my um payb period gets longer a little bit but I still can't afford because I have tons of money on my bank account I don't so if if we're

doing like Q4 tapes from Mega Corp yeah go for it I mean you need well for Mega Corb you need to spend the money because if you don't spend the budget you won't get any budget next year that's the thing so I I actually had a question so I spoke to a game developer who was actually they're going to be launching a IP driven game quite a big Studio on the 14th of December and I'm like that doesn't sound very clever but is it from a UA perspective it's not as bad as you would think because yes there is a big competition but then you still have like 11 days until everything else like like Fades off well not everything else but the e-commerce maybe like few days after Christmas as well I launched the game on 20th of of December it was fine uh I mean it's not like the the best time window most probably I would move it after Christmas but even if you do that like you still have the golden cohort and uh and even now we launched

one game and the cpis are like 20% higher than what we would see may maybe like a month ago it can get crazy in December but from what I see now it's not as crazy as last year the CPI are increasing for sure there is definitely an increase but not as crazy as last year mean last year at this time it was like 5x what I what I see at the moment so it's it's not as bad I wish someone have told me last year like carpm carpol you know sees the day yeah please yeah it's that needs to go either in t-shirt or in a bingo it's like that's that 100% Caro uh what else you should do you should do in the what I do usually when I I I have the like lower budgets I usually focus on like let's a rapid creative testing in this period And I know I mentioned

that you should have lower budgets but even with these lower budgets you're still you should still allocate at least like 10 20 15% for Creative testing now maybe even more uh depends uh and I would go for like crazy ideas iterations of the winners or and some holiday creatives well no holiday creatives is [ __ ] so no no no holiday [ __ ] why I would test it now and and like this are call it rapid testing because then you will have have um enough winners in January to very much Bank bank on and uh start growing the budget so uh so that's that and then what I'm not doing in Q4 at all it's just I don't experiment in new UA channels because it's always like fluctuating like [ __ ] so yeah let's let's keep that until next year when the landscape is a little bit better there you go nice next time we're doing Q for UA tips for Mega Corp how to get more budget next year how to get more budget

make sure you spend it make sure you spend it against zero R that's fine make sure you watch all episodes of House of Cards so you can play politics yeah make sure you also make sure you you watch all the episodes of Two and a Half Gamers that can help you definitely and also subscribe on YouTube and other channels and share that with your colleagu so you know you can get you can get the budget let's cut the shield let me go now with my product you mean cut the shield we are growing and then that's only thanks to our amazing listeners so there you go so what cat the sh and cats yeah please your cats are super important very okay product update um product upate Oh My where's your emotion come on like wait a second okay okay uh yeah so I I'm just kind of keeping an eye on on can of L ey on these few games I'm still playing Marvel snap and I'm

waiting for that like next big update uh yeah the currency cap is hitting me pretty hard uh I don't really like it and even less like I'm playing the game as a free-to-play player currently and it's very very annoying that you literally cannot complete missions because you are over your currency cap and you don't have I don't have anything to spend because like I play just the minimal amount like to finish the missions which means I don't have enough cards that that have boosters ready to get upgraded I buy all the thing from the fast boosters in the shop and then like where's my optimal way of playing the thing like it's it's nowhere would you say that it would be better with ads 100% 100% you you wouldn't even be able to watch the ads because you couldn't accumulate more currency what would you get for the ad like the nothing just pleasure just pleasure it's fine it's beautiful anyway yeah really hope that this this can go somewhere or there will

be some kind of big Christmas event or whatever some kind of liveop stin SO waiting there was a there was a season change no yeah there's the Black Panther like wakanda for everything currently running in I guess tying with the movie but uh it's pretty much the same as the Spider-Man season pass before like no additional functionality yet so let's see but I guess it's like first month so that understandable um yeah so next in line Survivor iio still going very very strong uh check the latest update it's still not no new functionality but my guess is that they will need to do something uh it's still going something around like 1 million a day in iips only so I guess with 50% more from ads or even more I guess that's still super super strong did like 40 40 m in last month really yeah there's a new creative th much sent it to me over the the Instagram and it's you know golden goblins right like that yeah it's exactly the same so there's

the the main character just uh trying to get all the all the crystals up and uh well also it's it's the same as top four basically yeah they're stacking all everything behind in and now he's he's buying the the upgrade ah this is amazing it's perfect I love it beautiful amount of fakeness driven beautiful of course of course yeah uh yeah and the other thing is that hordes versus heroes is still going I would say pretty strong and it's already hit something around like 10K in I only which I guess is just like 40 to even less percent that's great because last time we talked about it was like what like 3K a day oh I think something like eight or six something like that yeah but it's like the line still goes up and the the downloads have kind of stabilized but still kind of pretty nice so for a fast follow game here I guess

from a small team that that's pretty good so we'll be checking out still if you compare 1 million a day and 10K a day it's just like you know uncomparable of course but but still yeah it's still I would take 10K a day it's fine yeah you know we need to look also at the small mes not the big ones oh yeah yeah very true very true because there's those are the hidden gems yeah and you learn a lot of those especially even if the game like you learn the most from the games that fail actually like to be honest so that that's the uncomfortable truth um yeah the Q for live op tips or prep let's say uh so during Q4 we have the uh Trinity of these nice holiday combos which is Halloween Black Friday plus Cyber Monday and Christmas and New Year which before you start I need to say that uh the combination of UA and live Ops can actually help you get the money back even sooner so if you are

well decreasing budgets well this can actually prevent you from decreasing budgets because then you know you you bring you bringing people to the game and then you're monetizing them right away in their faces with Black Friday Cyber Monday Halloween and Christmas and New Year so please think about liveops as well yeah do your liveops do your homework do it do it uh yeah so for Halloween which already passed this year so didn't catch that one up uh this is a very good holiday especially in US Focus games I would say it's getting pretty International already so no problem there but it's pretty good uh this is one of those three that's kind of more long-term uh which means that it's great if you have the liveops running before and after and Halloween is just some kind of middle period that connects it all together uh this is the time where skin or let's say cosmetic content works I would say pretty well because you have the theme of the event all the holiday bed in into it so pumpkins all the way and like

Jacko lanterns you see them everywhere so this is the actual time when the things actually works I would say because otherwise cosmetic content especially in power progression games doesn't make a dent uh as I said this is a period where you want to have like more engagement therefore I'll be talking later as I finish these about like how to get more engagement cheaply and they're more costly during the liveops thing uh Black Friday Monday this is a more of a like offer segmentation or special offer combo I would say uh it goes from Friday then takes the weekend and then of course last thing on Monday uh it's kind of a short burst people are kind of programmed already from the general kind of buying frenzy in the world so they are buying everything everywhere I know some games are doing like even like 10 minute offers or like just pretty much bombarding yeah I think even supercell did that in Clash Royale like very very like flesh flesh fles sers uh but you

know a lot of them during the day uh one of the things I would become very very concerned here is that Beware Of The Hangover effect because I've seen like the best sales in in like everywhere during this period but also keep in mind that everyone can do very very good sales if you just discount your economy completely and then there's like very very big hangover and your Baseline goes to [ __ ] for like a month so think carefully what's the actual discount that you're going to slap on those offers yeah like if you're doing like 600 700% like that you're already like battle pass territory or season pass or however we call this kind of biggest discount on your economy already so beware people are as I said programmed to buy these so they should have good conversion anyway make sure that you're not cheap and you're not doing the thing that you've done before just in different skin uh exclusivity content definitely helps if you can afford it so some maybe even some Cosmetics but the problem is that this H isn't really kind of cosmetic themed so I would say more

of a kind of a good deal or better bargain is the way to go here uh and make sure that you run them in a way that like definitely Friday definitely during the weekend best thing is to pretty much offer them on Friday and run them until the Sunday Sunday end of Sunday and then on Monday have the kind of final combo with the Cyber Monday like Last Resort thing off first so okay I know I've seen like even discounted battle passes on like even more like even more like 100% that sounds extreme yeah yeah but the conversion were like up to the roof you know so it depends like what get out I know we've done that actually yeah yeah well actually yeah I remember okay yeah yeah true that's there uh last things of course Christmas uh this is the period when every game competes uh against players attention so everybody's focusing heavily on engagement this like already you should start like December even before December

with these events and liveops definitely not go somewhere like 10 plus 15 plus December already make sure that you have stuff running there because people you know take holidays have time with their family they're watching movies together and what do they do in the meantime they play mobile games or they in a car or going to the holiday wherever they go there's a lot of free time to spend on mobile games by the time so make sure you have a lot of content and engagement uh cosmetic content again works great because it's ch and you know Santa Claus things is pretty much being thrown around all the time yeah um make sure that you factored in the engagement even after the Christmas so not only until 24th but actually until New Year and afterwards so something like three day five days after New Year so the whole liveup should be scheduled around 1 of December I would say end of end of the First new new New Year's week or something like that yeah like sth of January or something yeah yeah something like that so that should be the calendar not just 24th or like five days around 24 or whatever so but that that's important uh

as said engagement is the king here so you want to can of keep people coming back to the game and making sure that they can get something for their buet it's not like their usual grinding session or something like that so let me go like kind of briefly through three of the events that I've seen uh been done there and they would perform pretty well and I would yeah I would categorize them in three setups which is the most lazy one the more effort one and then most effort one which is like pretty much building a new game so the most most lazy setup which is very very easy to do like I've seen many many games done this anyone can do it just like that's what I would do yeah yeah it's like few few artist um like a few programming hours and stuff like that usually if your game is modular enough this can be done very very easily so what you would do you would slap an event currency on the current corbe of the game and set up an event shop with if you can offer it

exclusive cosmetic content power based content of the game so normal content and pretty much if you can afford as I said cosmetic content uh what happens here is that people play your game anyway and they get some kind of additional rewards out of it of course economy takes a hit but engagement time goes up that's the important thing and you want to keep them during the festive period in uh players play normally like you know you have your session limits and gate mechanics already so it's it's pretty much done for you already because you reward them for doing what they did before and then they can just spend them uh good thing is uh if you want to be a little bit more greedy uh you balance the event shop or whatever like the whole thing currency gain around people going throughout the event and then not having enough and then you can sell the event currency for real money of course because you're not selling the items in the event shop for real money as you want to go through that currency conversion change always always if we can yeah so good

example is something like survival IO which they R daylight as even Autumn Leaves I think was it when you were collecting these leaves during Autumn and again same principle another one I remember fondly was hustle castles dragon fire event which they have like even Cosmetics thrown in lot of power bundles and like very very good abilities again very very good type of event but I would say pretty cheap on like how much functionality you need to actually C in yeah let's move on the more effort one uh this actually takes a lot of effort I would say uh well what what does the most effort then take uh usually it concerns like a special in-game functionality or something that was not there or is not accessible there uh before so it is some kind of a new mode on a spin on a new mode like some kind of Showcase of content that somebody actually needs to code in and this is accessible only during the period of events so everybody's playing like crazy because afterwards it goes away uh best thing you can do is do in a template and then you know Rift Shuffle it later either in the next festive period or the

immediately next festive period like Easter or something like that a good example would be uh for instance Halloween mode during OverWatch where you have pretty much like a tower defense game where it's still like a different mode it's not like that big of a thing because you just you know created this kind of little bit of a tower defense game where you're defending your Fortress against NPC Mobs with four players and stuff like that it's not your usual 5v5 PVP but it still takes some kind of effort lots of Graphics capacity actually there because the game is cosmetic wise but yeah it works and it brings a new flavor to the game and you know festive period everybody wants to rest they don't really want to do the typical green but they still want to play our game I know we done this in battle Legion when we did like the Monster Hunt event which was kind of like a PVE functionality thing in within a PVP game where you would pretty much were task to hunt like specific like imagine it let's say in a clash Royale you would have Quests for

defeating specific characters during battles and you would need to complete those let's say kind of very easy one again you switch around um like a different game mode or something like that it's pretty easy to do the most I've seen and this is this is literally like building a new game uh I would say this is more catered towards like casual games or games where grinding is kind of very very stale and like the whole game play is like last attention demanding where you have the time so there's like lots of timers in the game and stuff around it that you need to click through and the whole metag game is pretty much clicking around so I've seen games do like a completely new core gameplay or a mini game within the game uh one of the best example is of course auran my favorite one of course of course uh where they would do something like a board game like literal board game where you like throw dice go around like a board and collect stuff there when you play the game the event can are the event throws or this one like I've never seen this one done anywhere else

like you pretty much have a coloring book with like a hidden picture and you collect the paint during the core game play and then you color it in the meantime clever yeah yeah so like and but you know pretty much completely new functionality like in an RPG battler or something like that so this is this is something that you can build also if you have the time and capacity again best thing you can recycle it of course because you don't want to just have like one time event but again it helps to refresh the game during this kind of a monotonous grin of like you doing all the time the same thing and you know makes the game better a good example would be also like Township where they would have their events run through this kind of event center where they would had literal hyper casual games being reskinned there like there's like a direct resin of Helix jump there I haven't seen that that's that's great yeah you can can play hel jump there in the game that's based on timers running out that's it great yeah yeah like they

they put mini games in their UA videos and then they put it in the in the game after that's super super clever and you know you again switch these things around have multiple templates and rking them run them around so you have those kind of lops things running around for you and then you don't need to do anything so that that's the best thing you can do but yeah as I said uh the laziest one just sling the current is pretty easy to do this the last one this is kind of hard to do because you pretty much need to build a new game within it but if it's possible it's great because it will pay off in the long run as you can reuse it so that's there but the main thing with especially those two Christmas and Halloween is engagement so you want people coming back that's how you provide more engagement perfect nice I gu yeah I guess that's it guess it great and thank you very much uh guys thank you very much for listening please again subscribe uh we appreciate your support

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