two & a half gamers session #42 - Sexist ads admon side, Gold & Goblins full UA, Admon, GD review

[Music] welcome everybody this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half Gamers session number 42 we are sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization drops but also discussing latest industry news from time to time while having so much [ __ ] fun let's not forget this is still foreign conference discussion VI let's not take it too seriously why you smiling what the [ __ ] come on it's [ __ ] fun so it's [ __ ] fun well of course carpo car car that's how it is uh and we have uh well actually pretty busy agenda uh so we are going to talk about some expansion on the sex is that from the previous uh session um and we're going to talk about gold and goblins game and

uh well we are going to review it before we do that uh what's up what's up 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 before they leave forever transforming a lost user into a new user increasing your revenues learn more now at addict.com [Music] what's up what's up survive another week with a kid we'll be three weeks next week congrats man I had uh I had lunch this week with an industry friend who's like oh you guys like on the Pod you seem like such good friends and I'm like yes we are but let me just say this no one knows how to piss mati off better than I

do you know is this true oh maybe maybe remember when I played that prank on you when I said UA was dead in front of another person you were angry at me for like two days before like coming and confronting him he's like why did you say in front of that guy that UA is dead and nothing's happening I was like to piss you off it was a joke and you're like oh yeah and you telling yeah you are saying this story for like half of the Year where is another story ah give me another example ex I can peace my day better than anyone else there you go we'll make a new story in Barcelona games for him oh yeah just wait few minutes until we get to the news I'll show you how to piss my off okay oh actually when I was uh when I was uh doing the post production of of our last session I I realized that uh when yakob was talking about the goddess of Victory I was actually saying something because I I tried to you know

make [ __ ] of him but I was muted I didn't know because I didn't know because I I was holding the mic uh in Maldives and I was like why the [ __ ] is he not responding like well it was kind of funny and it's like nothing and then I just realized look [ __ ] oh my God so it's it's good so uh let's see let's see let's see how it goes but uh what do we have here yeah okay so I got back from Mal of course nobody cares but I got back and I have my shirt on so we we had some some comments about me having a shirt on because the last session was we know it was too hot he couldn't have shirt but I also got back and immediately joined a singular webinar about the UA playbook play plag book Playbook 2023 it was amazing uh organization it was also very well received I um

I got already some nice feedback and messages so good job Singler it was really professionally organized man very we having so much like so many um uh questions and the team was just responding immediately and I didn't need to you know look into it so it was kind of nice uh and one of my friends told me I'm already like arnard Schwarzenegger with like mobile strike so he opens the fridge and I'm there so uh might he opens up LinkedIn and I'm there as well so I might just uh try to stay away from some webinars next year I'm not not so annoying as I am at the moment but yeah [ __ ] it yeah that's a good Benchmark if you see people in your fridge you know they're everywhere yeah exactly modern Arnold Schwarzenegger there you go carolo again we go uh also uh makers of gold and Goblin Studio Red Cell games are fans of the podcast uh so we're talking about your game which is

amazing so guys kudos to you for making a great game and uh also for everybody else from the industry thank you very much for supporting us in the battle against the sexist ads by sharing our previous podcast with your network it really means a lot to us and uh what I can say this is definitely not our last attempt to stop this Behavior so uh yeah let's let's be connected and then try to battle it together yeah so I I wanted to expand a bit actually on uh what you talked about last week because it's a very good Insight that you gave kind of from a UA perspective and I just wanted to expand on it a bit and talk about from what I see an admon perspective because you know there's two places you can kind of block this type of behavior right but from an ad point of view like point of view this is an issue like I'm faced with every day and how it works from like what I do is we show sometimes millions millions of ads a day and we have to reply like rely on complaints that are sent to us about sexist ads so we get a complaint it's

flagged and then we go into our mediation we look at ad review and then we find the ad we look at it and if it's Bann we block The Advertiser super easy right super easy Choice when it's a small Advertiser so I just wanted to talk about the situation I had with state of survival in August so pretty big game yeah pretty big game so state of survival is known to have kind of quite a lot of sexist ads and our earnings randomly in one game ramped up with one network from 6K to 12K a day and it stood like like was kind of always up there and it was statea survival that had really good results from one of our particular apps that I was managing and they ramped spend and you know an extra 6K a day that's 180k a month in incremental earnings so you have by any chance uh like any decimal points there no I don't actually any decimals no no I I I I stuck away for them because there's this like you know

schoolyard bully and then you know I was changing to try to be part of the cool kids yeah maybe if they start picking on me I can get back to my decimals oh you should well it's you need to get back to decimals because now that's your signature move there we go you need to show the bully the decimals EXA give me the decimals all right so anyway so I was looking at the ads that were shown in the game and we got quite a lot of complaints like 30% of the creatives they were showing were bad so the network that this was being shown through was Unity uh I messaged the am and I sent a particular creatives that I wanted blocked and basically I blocked the bad creatives on a creative level instead of blocking on an Advertiser level that worked for about three or four days and spend dropped by about like 3K a day uh so half the incremental earnings were gone uh but then you know they got clever and added new sex creatives and spend again like ramp to like 6K a day right extra so you know in admon you're always reactive and it's

very hard to be proactive like you can make block list and everything but it's never foolproof because new games come out things like that happen but it's only like 30% of networks that you can block advertisers on a creative level it's the exception not the norm so now you're faced with this issue like this game state of survival makes us an extra 180k a month right now so that's usually when I need to like raise the issue especially if like the company I'm representing is like a public company so in this like time like this time management was fully supportive uh we blocked them as a whole cuz it wasn't really worth it but like the deciding factor in where decision usually lands if like the app is adult and you get a lot of complaints you usually don't block this kind of stuff but by the way like state of survival is like plus 12 in the app store which is insane when you think about it and when you look at some of their creatives so where I was trying to get to with this little story is I just wanted to shed some light on

how it works from an admon perspective and from my view uh there's two things that would like greatly alleviate this situation if it was true and that is like first thing ads have to match the age rating that like of the apps that you're advertising in the app stores and the second point is like it would really help me from an ad1 perspective if every Network allowed creative Banning on a creative level instead of just on an Advertiser level and yeah I really think these two things could greatly help to reduce like the amount of sexist ads in our industry does does it mean that no networks allow that yeah yeah exactly so like for example if I'm blocking on like app Ling you can't block creative level there I think or I'm actually not sure about app Ling but I might get in trouble but yeah like it's not the norm so it's only a few networks you can do it on okay so if you don't do it on Creative level then you need to do it on publish level right yeah exactly okay but like these are the amounts that you're sometimes faced with like they're

pretty big amounts right and usually you have to get management to decide on that so it's like yeah big issue yeah it is it's fking suck uh so let's try to fight this so we don't need to deal with that anymore yeah on the both sides it's an upill battle but we are ready we're [ __ ] ready yep there you goo are you taking are you taking a bow the next segment yeah next segment very small one uh I always said this mate always disagreed here's the truth it happened as I told it will happen which means the FTC has officially said that is trying to block the merger of Activision Blizzard with Microsoft trying to block it's trying to block it's not blocked yet let's see let's see how this it's not over till it's over you know exactly so

yeah Mr Mr Bobby cotti yesterday ran an email throughout the company that everything's good and they're just going to fight it in a just trial and and everything will be great which I guess we will see how it will go but as I said it will probably not fly that easy with the American regulator which is happening these days so we'll check it closely but if if this actually gets blocked like I mean on the final final stage decision level it will send a really big shock wave throughout industry so yeah let's see how dead bun goes let's see how dead bun goes so it's not FAL [ __ ] off bunker Bobby loves a fight like come on he loves a fight bunker Bobby wins always don't just smile yet I'm super interested how the arguments will be going in the trial like what what will be you know because it's pretty easy for like the the Sid telling that is a monopoly when they pretty much take on Call of Duty and just you know put it behind Xbox and X you know everything Microsoft pretty much and take it out I

I I don't know where where was I somebody was saying it that uh it took going to happen it's go through it took the best movie of the year one month to get uh 1 billion and it took 10 days for Call of Duty it was Laura and yeah some yeah there so that that was a good good uh example of the scale we're talking about yeah but again it's not over yet so uh let's check let's check in a few months well it's not going to be in a few months actually it's going to be longer I guess yeah it's going to be long so we'll see okay we can now move to the actually the the topic of today uh which is a review of the cols and goblins uh game and as I mentioned at the beginning there is the Red Cell games behind the games guys who made Adventure communist so what a great genre expertise right y yeah we'll get

to that of course you will get to that so just briefly game made like 45 million uh scenes appearing on the App Store that from what I just uh looked uh at the beginning of 20121 and that was only Ina purchases which is a nice like three to four million a month again only for inaps I don't want to spoil it completely but I had a a peak to Felix admon part and and the game is monetizing super well on ads making it 5050 split you can do the math right so uh like do you know guys uh Felix and yob like what is this ratio or situation called within the UA managers the 50/50 split a gold mine okay one one way okay that's that's a good one the Goblins are in the mine so it's easy oh I could make gu home

run yeah come on don't know of course you don't know you're not so creative at all man make a guess you can't just make a guess the [ __ ] what's what's so hard to make a guess just say a random random word if you royal straight flash nice okay it's UA manager wet dream most most generic [ __ ] that you could say of course of course and this is how you peace yakob peace yob very easy very very easy all right so uh this is uh like giving the UA team obviously so many opportunities to drive growth and scale the game quite heavily and I think we are seeing here a nice combo of great UA team and great game developer and great game team working together so amazing work let's take a look at the country mix uh in terms of the downloads of revenues well I guess uh no surprises here us is top performing country in terms of downloads

and revenues and Then followed by Germany UK Canada Australia South Korea little bit here and there Japan France Netherlands and Norway Sweden and then some others so nordic's pretty pretty interesting up up in there in terms of the channel mix uh and the UA we are seeing Usual Suspects as Facebook Google Unity app iron source tikto and Vango but from what I see right now they scaled back the budget quite heavily in the last 90 days especially they pulled back the spend on Facebook well surprise surprise but they it looks like they actually went close to zero uh but of course uh as if they knew we are going to talk about the game on the podcast I started seeing one of their ads on Facebook very recently in Instagram so apparently they Rel launched the Facebook a few days ago

with the new creative which is a little bit different a little bit more isometric SL 3D slightly different Concept in terms of the other like uh channels Google spend is pretty stable but there is only one appears there is only one winning creative which is getting all the spend across all the GEOS uh which is the well I'm going to talk about it uh I see some pulling back of spend on other channels but not as significant as as Facebook uh there are some like bumps here and there in terms in in the last two weeks in terms of the like spend increase but um the overall scale is definitely lower than let's say a month ago two months ago so if I would need to guess how much they were spending before uh this scaling back I would assume it's somewhere around like one to two million a month and uh how did I get to this number you might ask actually well unfortunately I don't have any fan Excel sheet calculations with decimals like Mr

Felix over here but but based on on numbers of creatives that are live um number of Ed networks and uh some like downloads versus Revenue numbers this would be my guesstimate like based on what I would be actually spending so if I if I have all these creatives live all these networks live that's I would be spending maybe somewhere between one to two millions a month uh you know cats come here for decimal places not for guesstimates right oh yeah yeah 100% cats love decimals and this podcast as well of course definitely Nordic cats pretty sure I'm pretty sure all right we don't see their data but as I mentioned before this is the UA managers we the dream what kind of campaign structure my might they have uh it's kind of easy uh they're running everything they can all of the optimizations that are pretty much

available so Adas campaigns Google unity and appin and and using um purchase and value campaigns on those channels at the same time pretty sure that they're running this on Tik Tok and Facebook well at least they were so uh with this split you can run profitably even maybe even up install campaigns uh to drive a little bit scale here and there so in terms of the creatives uh they found their own creative uh like winner which is working super well for them and now they're trying to iterate on it quite heavily uh it's usually like around the creative concept is usually around like goblins Drilling and trying to find gold upgrading their pickaxes or machines to drill more and more resources uh this creative uh has actually everything in my humble opinion Resource Management it's uh showing upgrades progression drilling as well and they're also showing in these creative at Le some Concepts like what

actually player can achieve different levels or well different levels but uh what I'm bit skeptical about is the fact that this is basically only one concept they are banking on uh that works well so even if they have infinite iterations I'm not sure how sustainable it is and uh they're not using actually real gameplay so fake ads skeptic yaku might be disappointed a little bit here but actually they are using altered game playay play or well I can say just fake ads with real assets which I think is the next Trend we are going to see next year oh was it the prediction oh [ __ ] my life Felix there you go Felix quickly continue until people notice it please did you just make a prediction wait what wait no just continue now I think overall this uh this game uh performance in the UA activity is uh pretty pretty good uh if I need to compare it the with our

previous review uh in terms of the ramble not Rumble rival not even Rivals what the [ __ ] I'm talking about rash Royale is the game uh then uh it's maybe slightly behind I bet but it's only because of like uh rash Royale has a lot of different Creative Concepts they are all like all the time bringing a new and New Concept into the table this this one is just just one great winning concept so yeah there you go U I had a question following up on that so Bas so the only tips you'd have here would be to have more Creative Concepts and yeah iterate more to try to get a new concept going that also works I would definitely spend more time on the creative testing and uh and creative brainstorming because you have you know they have all the channels alive all the all all the ad networks as well like unity and then Apple I mean I checked the the The Source level performance seems

pretty okay uh nothing like extraordinary as the Marvel snap uh solitire traffic it's completely [ __ ] so this looks pretty pretty healthy good job yeah so the game is King so so [ __ ] a lot yeah so I've been wanting to do an Adon Deep dive on gold Gman for like a very long time like I really think that this game is like in top three games in the world right now with the highest rewarded impression per daily active user right now if not in the top like three it's at least in the top 1% of getting their users to commit to watching rewarded ads would you say 1.00% I was going to in my notes I calculated to 1.003 but then you know uh you know the schoolyard bullies so you know yeah didn't want to get my lunch money taken so I decided to you know come for Lun decimals yeah exactly give me your l yeah so what red cell have done so well

in the game design is to create so much harmony with rewarded ad placements and the core Loops that it just makes sense for users to watch rewarded ads and as a player you don't even bat an eyelid when you're faced with the choice you play the game for maybe around 20 minutes and you hardly notice that you watched at least like 10 rewarded ads in that time uh for those of you who not playing the game uh they have tons of rewarded ad placements some are like chests and the store random consumables that delivers like elixir coin Goblin welcome back double up placement add boost to X your profit for you x amount of time all good ad placements that Mak sense but then there is the absolute killer rewarded ad placement and that's spin the wheel placement and man wow like Chef's kissed this is a hell of an hand placement so the spin the wheel placement uh is that you can exchange for watching a rewarded

ad you spin a wheel where you have a chance to either move forward time increase Gems or increase the number of goblins uh the wheel is capped at five spins per two hours and the first spin when you enter back into the game after the two-hour cooldown time is for free so it helps Foster behavior that whenever you enter the game you open this wheel up uh so which in turn like yeah just just like so how the game Loop like works is that like the game play is designed so sometimes you're just sitting and waiting for goblins to hack away at some stones and at that like it says the exact time it will take to finish like hacking away on the stones uh the wheel like the spin the wheel has eight slots four of these slots help to speed up time so when you're just in one of these holding Mo like moments you always just go and watch a rewarded ad from the wheel and for me it's like one of my like I think like the best executed rewarded ad placements because like it's so many rewarded ads you can watch watch and it's just so good like and I think that

the the cherry on the cake here as well is during events which are super fun to play by the way uh like during an event it's a separate spin the wheel ad placement so you also have another further five spins on another cool down timer so even the shop is separate the event thing yeah exactly so like how the core loops work with a wheel is so good like so good you wanted to interrupt M what's up no I just want to say how beautiful it is yeah yeah by the way one one one misconception the wheel can give you one more high level goblin not more goblins because there's a different thing with limits the number of goblins yeah so I had a look in our favorite data tool not our second favorite because with Rush royal episode like all the SDK data was wrong so never using that one again B out so this time I looked in our favorite one only and active users in the last four weeks was 1.4 million on both Android and iOS 185k

of those were from the US and some top GEOS which ma also said before Denmark Sweden Norway because we absolutely [ __ ] love goblins in Scandinavia Germans love cars the French love cigarettes us Scandinavians we love two things flat pack furniture and goblins anyway 1.4 million da uh I'm going to go on a limb here and I think that the Impressions per da you on a normal day for rewarded is somewhere between 13 to 14 and I think on the low end their ad viewer rate is at least 75% so putting in the ecpm numbers that I've seen in the last 14 days I think these guys have made at least 120k a day from ads so compare that to their I AP Revenue that means which was around like what like 3.7 million yeah that means exactly what ma said earlier these guys are earning somewhere between 50 to 55%

from ads and it's just an absolutely amazing admon machine um so what I'm like yeah uh I know what I'm saying here but like I have a feeling that the session lengths are about like 19 to 20 minutes so but I'm pretty sure that six and a half of those minutes are spent like watching ads and this is the point where I'm supposed to offer Insight on how much like X or Y ad R venue they're missing out on so my advice here would be I don't know give a goblin sunglasses or something just don't change anything because the admon is so beautiful yeah yeah yeah don't touch it tou yeah you're GNA mess it up don't touch it no is great I see the I see the growth like uh as soon as they started uh running the the UA and there is like one interesting uh info but I'm not sure if I can share but [ __ ] it I'm not if you wanted the if you want to hear the uh like interesting

information reach out to me I thought for he's going to plug his newsletter there for a second yeah I also thought so oh nice okay well thank you very much for doing that so if you can if you want to hear that uh back Channel story sign up to my newsletter there you go marke do it but he did for me thank you very much all right I want to hear the game design stuff on this just so you know yob since you yawned during my segment this like last week I'm going to yawn during this one yeah go ahead don't worries history lesson's coming as usual because in order to understand the future and the present we need to look into the past especially with this Senior Team um so looking back at the whole genre uh back I mean really back back into the days of Adventure capitalist where idle genre was pretty much like a scalable Excel sheet uh this has come a really really long Way Forward of what's currently pretty much

driving the whole genre uh just to remind like everybody Adventure capital is as I said was just an Excel sheet increasing numbers where you know the the way to go people like increasing numbers and then you reset that and do that again so back in the days uh I think there wasn't any ID idle game that was able to drive iips heavily it was mostly ads and that that's it even even in the beginning of uh idle Miner which is the next is the example which runs of this three like chair problem where you have three nodes and if you upgrade one the two other gets into imbalance and you need to you know make the system better and every time you touch it it's get into imbalance uh it was also first running on ads mainly but afterwards the game also switched into 5050 if I understood correctly because kri added a lot a lot a lot of content and progression into it even though uh my guess is that they were adding these things after the next iteration which is

Trailer Park Boys which did the really really big evolution uh idle Miner don't have idle Miner doesn't have it that good as I would like to or let's say maybe the game was kind of too far off uh after the global launch to add it uh in in a way that I guess it's supposed to but trailer pack boys really uh introduced a gacha uh into the whole genre I mean The Shard system from Clash Royale which seems like a RPG heavy midcore gacha but in the end it's it's just a genius trick how to pce content throughout an idol game which means like you're collecting cards and you're getting better and you know seems like a collection RPG mechanic but in the end it's pretty much very well fitted for the notes of the like parts of the game which were before those like lemonade stands and all fineries in adventure capitalist is pretty much the same so that's that's like a very very big driver and what what gcha brought into the whole thing you have now stuff to

buy that makes sense and that lasts that's the most important thing because before the whole thing got reseted with Prestige mechanic and then you need to start over now with the new wave of these say gacha based Idol games uh the things that you get from gacha are permanent therefore they have value therefore you can buy them and they're appealing to be bought uh continuing on the history lesson there's Adventure communist which uh pretty much remade the game after global launch halfway through into again a gacha based game where pretty much gacha cards or what characters or what they what they were having they are pretty much the multipliers of specific nodes and like the abilities and pretty much increasing your e economy output and they also had this like genius genius liveop cycle uh I don't know if there were already in trailer par boys or Adventure communist did that where you pretty much have the short bursts of events where they last for like up to a

week or something and it's pretty much a copy of the current game and you you are able to progress very quickly because this is one of the main issues with the idle genre that if the numbers get too high the progression gets too stale and in order to get somewhere meaningful it takes too much time so starting from the beginning it's great but we don't want to do that in this this game because we wanted to ditch The Prestige mechanic so we can have the permanent gacha stuff to be bought by real money so somehow we need to do again the reset setting really really nice feeling of starting from scratch so why don't do it through events and that's what happened and golden goblins is pretty much exactly that uh it ditched the like typical idle genre UI where you have like all of these notes and like seems like yeah UI UI exercise let's say uh they switch it for this really really gorgeous mine looks like from Diablo to me to be honest or some kind of like RPG game to me is really appealing to be honest uh but the important thing is that they

added active core gameplay and this is the killer feature of the whole game and the whole iteration that you have something engaging and satisfying and very very very satisfying to do in between the timers the golds accumulation and everything kind of goes in is the barrels yeah the barrels the blocks the merging and everything like actually it reminds me of Dig's adventure to be honest a little bit we back in the days we were at pix like there was this game called dig is Adventure which works great by you going around Adventure in a 2d map and removing blocks out of your way and it's very very satisfying this game uses the same mechanic just with the twist that it takes a little bit more time it's not directly like you spend energy and block gets removed it's pretty much block gets removed slowly depending on how many goblins you throw onto it and how strong the Goblins are because uh there's a little bit even of a puzzle element into the game which is great which again like

the positioning Of the Goblins how you you know let's remove first this block and then we can put two goblins on that other block and so on so forth so it's very very engaging and it's helping greatly with the pacing that that's that's the true innovation of it that there's always an achievable Milestone that you can do all the time every session chip one blog away chip second blog away and if you get to another mine the layout is different it's not the same as with all I ID like another ID Miner m is pretty much the same reskin M all the time the layout's the same the UI is the same everything is same here the level design is different there's sideways where you need to go and dig the chests out of the blocks there's this there's that and so on so forth so there's actual level design IMO which makes the great flavor when you are pretty much going against the same and same core Loop so that's the true Innovation I would say uh on top of it and the event cycle as I said with the adventure companies they pretty much have the same so that that's like the standard feature nowadays that idle

games have these kind of Rush modes of you starting a new game and then getting on the leaderboard actually the the the rewards are pretty meager to be honest for me when I was looking at like I mean the the permanent stuff that you get from an event that will be added to your main main inventory but yeah that needs to be meager because you know if you do it many times and you run the events many times supercharge your power progression so you don't want to do that so can I ask a question here what do you think of the little cut scene videos that they have when you you get out of the mine with a goblin celebrating like so nice sa by the way they are they are kind of like generated because the position of the Goblins in before the gate are the ones that you place them they're not you know generically done so they they are they are very very nice yeah it's it's like a gorgeous game to be honest uh going back to the core game play uh goblins pretty much increase your merge like block removal power the digging power that's really good because again if you merge those you can con concentrate much more precisely they also throw in these kind of dynamites

which again bring a little bit of more strategic thinking which block to remove and which block not to remove and again optimization is the key here like people find pleasure in optimizing within these games so give them more stuff to optimize they will be more happy of course that that that checks perfectly uh yeah the barrel spawning mechanic this is also very good because usually games do it in a way that like stuff appears and you have this kind of a nice popping thing and on top of it you have the merging mechanic where again merging is very satisfying by itself but there's this very very very good dynamic head placement baked into the barrels which uh yeah I'm going to skip that part one but I get to all the X placement later but this one's pretty much a direct upgrade for what was there in adventure communist and all the idle ID idle games where they have this really really nice Dynamic placement which is usually some stuff flies over the screen and you need

to tap it in order to get it sometimes it's a direct reward sometimes it's an add offer uh but you need to consciously kind of watch out for it and tap it these guys did it even better because you don't even need to watch out for it it will wait for you there in the line with all the other barrels therefore you will need to click on it anyway and you still don't know it will be an ad or it will be just like a normal resource so feels like 30% of the time is for ad and the majority of time it's not for an ad so you always watch the ad yeah yeah there's a particular question mark by the way if you close the ad you don't want to watch it it disappears so the barrel you know that's there uh usually how I I saw this system the game checks for your answers the game checks for your answers meaning that they can then adjust your conversion Point like for how much stuff will you convert for yet so we'll offer you like a level six Goblin will we watching that no okay so next time we'll offer you more more or you converted we won't offer you more so

this is great also on the developer side to optimize the revenue there so that placement genius uh and then continuing forward as said no Prestige mechanic so yeah I hate that in idle games man yeah that that that's great that we move move past this because the prestige in itself is the gacha gacha is the prestige mechanic where you still collect the cards they are you know stable you have them every mind and they just scale up so it's it's all like there's I guess this very very big mat table somewhere and big Exel sheet that's driving this was really hard to do but it's done perfectly so that that's great well if you have the genre expertise it's not that hard to do yeah it's called genre expertise exactly like if if you are doing adventure compies before making this game you just focus on the Innovation part you don't you know really go from like how to make a wheel all the basics and the defaults already yeah yeah uh so going back to the GAA we have a typical shard gacha that looks like Clash Royale from the surface but in the end it's a little bit

different uh the other Innovation that these other games did is that we have an infinite deck slot here because all the cards are pretty much used all the time we don't choose like a composition that we use the only thing that kind of we choose is that we need to dig ourselves to specific nodes in order for those to be active but other than that all the deck nodes are pretty much used all the time so even though like every note or like a gem has their specific Goblin we have the like special notes which is like how much stuff he gets from rocks how fast Goblin spawns how fast the M shaft cards are or everything but they are used automatically so it doesn't happen like in Shard gcha games where you have the other cards just waiting there doing nothing here everything is sorry everything is being used all the time and then um it scales it scales very well it scales perfectly it's completely scripted you can see that you can mine chest out of the Rocks which is

against scripted and they pce the progression perfectly going for the ads uh there's the typical you you you also before like mentioning the the pacing like why is it important pacing GE is really important because of exponential growth exponential growth slows down progress all the time and there's problems with it we see it everywhere we see it with Clash Royale that's why Clash Royale introduced these kind of skip items to help people to move forward because exponential growth in numbers slows down and what you need to have is to keep the frequency of you progressing from point A to point B in a manageable time because with exponential numbers the time between you progressing from A to B just increases until it reaches an unsustainable or let's say frustrating level where it's not fun anymore and that that's the problem okay so basically what you need here is uh system and Victors I was waiting where these things

pops up yeah you need to have designed space and you need to create vectors in order to mediate it yeah that's right I want to hear about the ads I want to hear about the ads yeah uh continuing with the ads so shop chest there uh spin wheel yeah the spin wheel is really genius it even has its own UI placement on the bottom so it's there uh there's five of those that you can watch it's great that they pretty much not giving away that much economy because you're just giving away goblins and time and they will vanish away so time is money just not this that there's no gacha content in the wheel because it's really really cheap so if they would be giving cards or like something like that that's that's much more expensive regarding the spending depth so it's it's it's genius like you know doesn't like time doesn't matter for them that much um yeah X2 profits typical thing you can stack it four times up to 12 hours I think I've seen

that many times these days like it's pretty much a mustat must have feature uh when you balance idle game economy you always balance it around you having this feature always on otherwise if you're not always having this always on you just scrolling on the floor and pretty much trying to get somewhere it it's normal so definitely very very good conversion kind of you know best best even for user time for money uh then the welcome back uh thing that Ling your stuff as usual nothing special there and as I said like the special Barrel is for me the the kind of most Innovative at placement there I haven't seen anything else uh but I always like from my side I always best like the ad placements that are Dynamic that are not part of the UI permanent UI that can be modified pretty much adjusted based on user behavior and you know they are part of the core gameplay so that that's the best one definitely um yeah event mine as I said it's great to have some kind of a fresh beginning where numbers grow up from

lowest ones to higher ones very fast giving you a lot of satisfying feelings and change of scenery currently the game is running some kind of candy frenzy team mode so you'll pretty much in this kind of a Candy Crush Village Candy Crash mine eating candies Christmas it's around corner so yeah maybe Christmas next week yeah we'll see but these games run these events pretty pretty fast I mean like multip of those during the month so I guess they because this was what like it's three-day event so I guess the Cadence is pretty pretty high it's easy there's I didn't saw any custom functionality for this one uh there's also a leaderboard there so of course you can compete with people there and the important thing and this is really important they have a separate shop separate ad whe separate gcha sharts and separate permanent currency in that shop so everything there is pretty much doubled regarding the span depth for the short period of time and the only thing

that uh you carry over from there is that short list of rewards that you get from there which is kind of small to be honest but yeah I guess people don't really play that much for the rewards because yeah um how important is the leader leaderboard here I mean uh for this type of game in the event um games have a certain percentage of player base that is you know driven by PVP in whatever man man sure so I guess it's nice to have it's definitely not something that you would you know base the whole game on because in the end this is a PVE driven game pretty much with like the mind being your main enemy and you need to go through it so I would say yeah it's good and nice to have it it's not really some kind of a big functionality it's not the game changer basically it's just like I don't think so okay like maybe yeah I I I don't think so like even if like a you don't don't see any like social systems here like very big would it be important

in this type of game again I don't think so it is so yeah the game thrives on thrives on being simple that that's really good with it so I wouldn't complicate it that way and uh yeah to be honest the the main goal of the like the main motivation of the player base I guess PVE so it's best like the only problem that I had with it or let's say not not problem but Improvement that I don't know how far did you guys get but I'm like mine 10 and uh it's great and everything and like I'm clicking like crazy it's really really addictive but I would really like to fles out the level design a little bit more maybe do mean little bit more mechanics around the rocks or like different things maybe that would switch again the flavor because constant clicking on a rock could help you like decrease the timer I don't know like something that kind of changes a little bit between because it gets uh a little bit too more same of the same kind of

too fast for me it is repetitive kind of maybe because I saw saw a lot of these things already or just because I kind of of course because you saw all of these things already millions of times you are very big fan of Adventure communist so yeah yeah there's nothing that Remo hasn't seen man and I I I always get this problem when I hit this point those glasses when I hit the point where I've seen it all point and it's like the games like what's there to do but in these games you know it's different where people find pleasure in optimizing and like getting somewhere so what did you optimize in in your pleasure game play oh like to be honest like I'm pretty far I would say with what I did like it's like you know hoarding dynamites for the last gate and stuff like that so it's like yeah that that's good but I don't know like there's a lot of uh design space and vectors with the level design that I guess the team can definitely add up and make it more more interesting

especially in the events like if you are kind of afraid that the mechanics could be too complex or you know too problematic just run them in the events and see how the players will like them and if they're good add them to the main game that's the usual safe way to do like no worries there that's a really good piece of advice there that's good also uh there is definitely back information but I I I would say a rumor uh or words words on the street is not only this type of like event experiments uh are good advice but there is also um or might be um that they are implementing some of the creatives or like the mechanics from the Crees into the game so youor and stuff like yeah and that's like that's [ __ ] clever that's super clever yeah that would be great like an event based on that that you had like a machine to drive somewhere and like destroy everything and stuff like that yeah that would be great so uh lots of was was this the game that we've done a like deconstruction of that probably we

had the least amount of feedback on which well rash Royale as well but this I think this yeah these two definitely very well made from like all the aspects all the aspects yeah but you can see the clear Evolution here like if you know on the surface level you probably W but if you really take the history lesson and look from Adventure communist Trailer Park Boys idle Miner and like all these things how the genre has come so far it's like yeah something completely different and much more I would say engaging and the fun fun fact is that you know like not a lot of people actually talk about this game it's it's [ __ ] it's making so much money I don't get it exactly yeah exactly like it's so great it's making a lot of money it's great gameplay and like nobody talks about it come on has goblins in it going Goins yeah oh well of course uh so I guess like there are definitely flyers or like people handing on Flyers with with goblins in Scandinavian countries for sure part of

our folk lure man it's like yeah 100% 100% do you know like uh from our favorite data TOS like how the retention might look like um yeah looking at the retention numbers they seem super super super strong like something is this from our favorite or second favorite one cuz I don't trust a second favorite one anymore I think his second favorite one oo everything we're saying here take with a large grain of salt yeah saying saying somewhere like uh day seven over 25% on Android which is like super super strong and day 30 around like 18 oh that's super super strong not like that that's super strong that day seven is [ __ ] like mediocre but that's my guess is that this is because of the like added core gameplay or like active core gameplay of merging destroying blocks and like pretty much engaging with the level design that that's like driving it because it's really addictive it's super addictive and you get to destroy a lot of blocks each time so

you're not stuck into this like oh two upgrades of z z currency or DD currency or whatever alphabet number you arrived at and you don't comprehend the values anymore anyway yeah well I'm pretty sure that uh next year when we're going to celebrate our first uh year anniversary we'll get all um new t-shirts uh Mr yakob having uh the vectors and then systems on It Felix with decimal and me with like either UA diversification or ASMR sing No you don't get a shirt you don't wear shirts you don't get one okay okay okay then you just get to sit shirtless okay well that's F fine with me uh let's see what others will think about that but I think it's uh like that's that's it for for today so uh good job guys again yeah it's always great to kind of review a great product you learn something think we learn something and yeah yeah it was a good one good to see

the industry is moving forward yeah definitely and uh yeah again thanks guys for subscribing on on YouTube and um Spotify and apple it's growing really nicely and really really appreciate it so please keep doing so uh also please keep uh sharing the uh the insights with your industry colleagues and friends we love you for that and uh yeah thank thank you very much guys yob and Felix until next time byebye you my byebye [Music]