two & a half gamers session #47 - Creative trends 2023, 1 year anniversary - kudos to you

[Music] hello hello welcome everyone this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast two and a half Gamers session number 47 you're sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization chops we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but we are having so much fun so let's not forget this is still 400 a.m. conference discussion WIP let's not take it too seriously today we have the whole crew Felix ad monetization creative Spy braber yakob game design Crystal stre Remy and myself might U Palmer yeah I did but my our uh sink broke in the in the bathroom and I was actually able to to repair it [ __ ] me

yeah maybe changing a job position soon I hope not and uh yeah so uh how are you well I don't care honestly I know okay what are the news by the way like if we're not talking about them I'm just curious because I don't think so they're much news these days like still like there's kind of a start of the Year nothing's happening is it yeah nothing is happening basic Z don't start working until mid January anyway so you know nothing can happen yeah and we anyway like in the last few episodes and sessions we didn't talk about like almost any of the news anyway because that you know we are sharing the insights From The Trenches and you're moving uh your camera always so it's it's also a fun fun discussion so please don't move uh last time it was really annoying and it was really annoying in the postproduction as well by the way ah

okay what are we doing today what are we talking about yeah nice so I was just about to say we're talking about creative Trends and uh you know Felix is going to talk about this from his perspective uh I see some trends that are coming and I think it's GNA they're going to be strong in 2023 and uh also we are going to discuss reak is's going to discuss how these creative Trends can be translated and transformed into the game play actually because that's the you know important part afterward it's not can be how they are and how they will evolve o okay okay Mr how they evolve no [ __ ] man it's like actual examples and references of course of course of course of course uh yeah we can we can jump in right away oh wait no no no no we can't because I want to mention one one thing this is our Oney year anniversary episode so it is yeah it is happy birthday to us

huh yeah so so on 15th of January it's going to be a year uh since we started doing this so uh thank you very much for the support thanks guys for talking no [ __ ] actually for a year that's kind of achievement and yeah this is 47 and we had five interviews so 52 there you go 52 weeks so we didn't miss a week is solid not lazy not lazy yeah yeah nice well it's it's that's the thing uh since we're doing this daytoday activities on the UA game design in admon we have actually a lot of lot discuss yeah lot things to discuss okay all right enough let's dive into the actual meat yeah yeah okay so in regards to what Remo was saying last week that everything is hard there's

actually one thing that's quite easy for ad monetization manager uh ad monetization managers and that is we have access to all the creatives that are shown in our games uh we can also see how many times those creatives have been shown uh so I managed quite a lot of video inventory so I looked back on all the Impressions displayed in my games for the last 14 days and I thought it would be helpful just to talk one second sorry to interrupt you because uh I need to mention this before I forgot it it's uh if you don't like from the UA point of view if you don't have like um access to sensor Tower data Ai mobile action all these like other tools that can be used for Creative research just talk to your Adon guys I mean it's like that's for free and I I real realized yesterday when I was reading the the prep like f [ __ ] like why never thought about it uh from this point of view you have like access to everything

you see yeah you see it and you well so you you can you cannot search in it can you yes you can if like yeah but I mean like if you're looking for a specific game if they don't advertise within your inventory you can see see it no no but if you have a lot of impression how you'll see it right of course yeah yeah yeah but you know if you don't have money to buy or you know buy these tools of course like you can have your cheap cheap creative search through your edmon guy yeah edmon guy and then com combine it with uh Facebook and creative libraries there you go okay well anyway I thought it would be helpful to talk through uh the top performing games and the top performing creatives at least like it gives kind of a micro perspective uh because essentially I get to see which creatives are getting the most Impressions which means those creatives are getting the most spent and therefore should have the best results so in some Crea some cases these creatives that we're going to show now have gotten more than 100,000 impressions in just a few days which is quite a lot in terms of inventory in

just a couple of days uh the top advertisers we're going to go through on iOS is Royal match by dream games Township by playerx merge mansion by metacore and on Android at the same time the top advertisers for me was Hero Wars by nexter uh top War battle game by top war Studios and of course always on Android which is a big is misplay let actually pretty interesting I smell fake everywhere you'll be surprised from the get yeah yeah like there's a few of these like that went completely like against the wall fake like nothing like is real but anyway each of these advertisers have bought at least a million or close to a million rewarded video impressions in the last two weeks which is like a really like brilliant window into the winning creative strategies because all these games have shown at least like 15 different creatives in the last two weeks but usually it's one two or three

creatives that stick out and get like majority of the Impressions so then we're going to talk about these so in terms of top iOS campaigns uh Royal match by dream games has I've seen about a million impressions in the last five days so as we know Royal match is a match three title uh dream games have tested 15 different creatives in the last 10 days so is that does that count as like quite a high impression like turnover ma or not really yeah that's pretty interesting number yeah yeah so they have 15 different creatives and like most of them have quite low impression counts but then there are three creatives that take up about 90% of the impression and one creative that takes up 60% of the impression so I think Mach is going to add on this first creative now in the background in post production but it's like an all to everything that Mach has been talking

about in terms of creative production because it's like you have to link up a rubber tube to kill fire in like another room to save the main protagonist and it has like these rubbery ASMR sounds when you pull on the rubber tube that you can pull to save the character from burning and it's like quite satisfying what's the face come on was like no like there like for everyone that want to see it like come to YouTube M will post it into video so you can see it and uh yeah they're pretty much using all the tricks fake gameplay re gameplay character dying fire ASR everything there you were laughing at me like all the time and I was talking about the as ASMR of course I was talking about ASMR slicing which slightly different but like you know there ASMR is kind of like a a trend on YouTube at least for a lot of people yeah the next best performing creative after after that is a kind of a jued position where you see half and half of like cold and hot like so it's

like a desert and a winter Tundra sorry just sorry pH I need to I started laughing because he started drinking and the [ __ ] camera just zoomed in on on him man like I thought we talked about this last episode stop it with that app that zoomed in moving so fun sorry Felix anyway so this creative is O I clicked on it accidentally so anyway this this creative uh essentially you have to like solve a match 3 puzzle and in the cold you have to bring down some fire on top of you in the cold Tundra and in the desert you have to bring down water uh on top of you to basically save the main protagonist um gotten quite a lot of you got kind of got a lot of Impressions but it's not performing as good as the ASMR tubes from the first one uh the lasted yeah the last creative uh is very

similar to this uh one where you have to compete between like water release in the desert and the one in the tundra for heat but it's essentially the same thing but you have a match three like above above yourself in a desert and essentially to save the main protagonist the king you have to solve the match 3 puzzle and then essentially you get dumped water and then you survive boring right it is boring but I see this like save whoever with with water in desert quite often these days yeah I wonder if that's like a A New Concept that is is performing well you should try it huh of course yeah of course and yeah you were posting the links and I said like oh yeah I'll put the links in the show notes as well I'll put the show notes like all the links in the show notes as well so you can like have a look at this so uh the next biggest games in terms of impression was

Township by play which of course play as we know are the ogs or original gangsters of fake ads and interestingly enough they're not really living up to their reputation right like they're not really doing it in these games so like dream games they run about 10 creatives in total so that's less than dream games in the last 14 days uh but it's only two creatives that pretty much take up a majority of these Impressions and the interesting thing here as well I want to ask you about this match is like playerx like most of the impressions are coming from bungal whereas like Royal match like most of them came from appen so I don't know like I guess like these companies have their own favorite networks that perform better and that's how it works or exactly that's exactly how it works also like depends on the actual creative concept this for for Township this is more close to Golden Goblins the simulation

uh game that we talked about before and they stole the the best performing concept from them seems like yeah so it looks like different Creative Concepts work on the different networks as well in this specific case and it's different genre as well yeah so uh the top performing creative on Township plays at least what I'm seeing on a micro level right from my perspective is a creative where you essentially collect eggs on your back and you cross the road uh to get cash to then back like cross the road again you have to avoid traffic uh I've played Township I didn't see this part at any point in the game so this is completely like nothing like that yeah uh but then interestingly enough like the second creative is not as fake as the first one it's kind of like a Sim City looking creative where you have Angry emojis and even more fake than the first one what are you talking about no you actually have a bit of a builder you have a bit of a builder like you have to do that in town uh Township where where's the

building building the elevator exactly what the [ __ ] come on man like how how did you this fake definitely okay have a look on YouTube to make up your own mind but anyway please tell us uh in the in the comments on YouTube or just send us a message like which of these creatives you think is like f f more fake more fake so now actually moving on to the third game on iOS in terms of most impression and that was merge mansion by metacore and these guys served around 750,000 impressions in the last couple of days metacore has only run seven creatives in that same time period but three creatives have taken up about 30% each uh overall like the merge mansion creatives look so good like The Branding it just looks a lot better than any other creative uh they ju the position a bit of like hot and cold just like the Royal match creatives do but obviously like metacore has their

signat like signature mystery feel on the creatives and metacore is only showing ads through unity and interesting so the first one is a creative uh of the grandma the main Grandma she's basically in a hot like place and like laying in a pool and her daughter calls her from like a really cold place and basically she looks at the phone and just throws it into the water and then like yeah yeah relaxes and then that's the whole creative um this one is probably the one has gotten the most Impressions like it's gotten maybe a couple more percent of The Impressions down the other three but then the second best performing creative by metacore is uh basically the main protagonist that you're playing as she's crying outside a train the grandma is leaving and they're waving goodbye and as the train pulls away from the station she turns around crying and you can see cuz she's turned around that the grandma has actually snuck off the train and runs away from the plat form sneaky

sneaky and then actually like the third creativ I actually think personally is the best one but it's gotten the least amount of like percentage of the creative so I think it was about like 28 or something like that percent of all the overall impression load and it's like they're cleaning in a room and they pull a bit of like uh the like uh the wallpaper off and they find a secret yeah wallpaper and they find a secret door and then that's the end of the creative what's in the secret door maybe have to play the game I thought that the hand creative always worked the best for me at least that was the most kind of controversial if you remember that one it wasn't I wasn't I didn't find that one I remember that one police yeah yeah grandma was taken by police and they was like touching through glass the hands goes down like you're next WR on oh was it well the mystery definitely works yeah yeah but like yeah the Medicore Crea looks so much more like Yeah clean

and like yeah higher on the brand quality definitely po polished really po I I wonder what happened with the KD Bates uh creatives yeah they were they were running them at they were I know they were like they were even using it for for the [ __ ] PR campaigns more than the the UA Crea because I don't know like doesn't make any sense didn't really didn't really you know like uh or maybe you you are just licensed to run it for some time if you have depends on the contract depends on contract cont yeah that would make sense like why for instance Pak games is not running grind RS anymore it looks it sounds like sounds and looks like Peak is not running anymore anything but I'm pretty sure that's not true but yeah but you know what I mean yeah yeah but I don't see it anymore it's that's that's 100% yeah so speaking of polished moving on to the opposite Android and uh so uh the clear winner uh in terms of

the most Impressions shown from one game on Android is uh Hero Wars by nexter like they shown to close to 800k impressions in the last four days and it's one creative here that takes up 90% of the total Impressions and they've only run three creatives in total in my game so not a lot of creatives and one creative takes up 90% of these Impressions uh I can also add that these guys like they have gone completely crazy on sexist creatives and actually the most running like their most running creative is actually not a sexist creative it's actually a dungeon fight where the top performing like creative basically what you're doing is you're running around the heroes running around in the dungeon fighting monsters and then you have to click on the monsters that have a lower level than you it's like a numeric like it has a number on it and if you click on the ones with like a higher number then you get attacked and it's basically you're fighting a spider you're fighting some Knights and and then in the end you

win and that's the best performing creative and the interesting thing is there's the second best performing creative which is only about 10% of the impression is the exact same creative they justed add a half naked girl in the first 3 seconds of the video and that's the only difference they made between the two creatives that's terrible yeah yeah yeah yeah I actually saw even the third version these days lately with the dungeon creative where it actually narrated by a real world por porn star so they're doubling down on the narrative well she uh well she's uh um featured in I think on all of those creatives and uh it just connected to gameplay I want to talk about it uh later on as well yeah yeah so uh then in second place on Android we have top War battle game by top war Studios and these guys just 100% fake ads there's nothing real about this like not even anything right so they have run about 20 creatives yeah

they've run 20 creatives in the last 14 days which is quite impressive right so it's a lot but one creative is 60% of those Impressions and it's essentially they've taken or stolen Ma's creative idea from six months ago and it's an endless Runner where you have to run into different like Gates and you have to choose the ones that are lower level than yours and Ma how does this feel having a creative stolen it's not it's it's not my you know it's not my idea honestly I um I was talking about top war using the hyper casual mechanics in their creatives for some time and they were like these are like the the these guys are the OG of of using the hypercasual mechanics in their creatives actually and um I was inspired by by this approach and I was trying to find like what kind of hyper casual game I could potentially fit in the games that I

manage and it was it was exactly six months ago when I was using this uh endless Runner creative concept and it was performing so [ __ ] well so [ __ ] well it looks like it's performing well as well in my games because it's got crazy like amounts of impression so yeah yeah so I'm not yeah I'm not surprised I'm not surprised that they're running this and if you if you look into their um these like 20 creatives Concepts and uh I had I've written about this a few months ago um because I was looking always uh at them uh in regards to the the Creative Concepts and ideas and they're running almost everything like uh so much of a different concept so many different concepts at the same time so I'm not surprised about to many creatives in the last 14 days I I I saw sniper creatives hyper casual creative merging creative like almost like every rner out there they they use it they they pretty much

use it yeah the the second best performing creative from these guys at least in my games is exactly the same but it has a different bit of an explosion in the end and yeah it's not performing as well but yeah it looks a bit more exciting but I guess the other one performs a lot better so then I'll move on to the third biggest Advertiser or yeah the prer to in terms of impression count on Android and that's misplay so misplay as we know it's not a gaming app it's more of an offer wall place where you can earn rewards from doing different we know that but not everybody knows that yeah that's what I'm describing it like it's misplay is like not a game it's a offer wall type of place where you go and you can do tasks like downloading games and then you get offers or rewards from doing different things so that's like very harsh this description I would say it it's an app where you can play games and get Rewards and you can actually because like you

can play games and you and I use M playay as as a UA channel so that's why uh I kind of know like their inventory is pretty much engaged players so you see like really high retention numbers and like kind of like a higher monetization because these players want to play games yeah you know like and as soon as I hear offer wall then I you know I I kind of get defensive I kind of get defensive you don't think it's an offer wall like I mean in it's Bare Bones it is right more much more advanced than offerall it's like offerall on steroids yeah yeah yeah okay offall on steroids anyway uh you know like they yeah they're friends so okay so anyway they have run pretty much like uh two creatives and it's always the same girl and these two creatives have shown about equally so it's 50/50 in terms of the most Impressions and it's kind of the traditional like that you see quite a lot on Tik Tok and YouTube shorts right now where people are like it's one person filling themselves cell from different angles and they're having a

conversation right so the top performing or the one of the creatives is essentially one girl is talking to herself about how she can't um like how complimenting her on how her like wardrobe is so organized and that she bought a bunch of stuff on Amazon to help organize the Wardrobe and then the other one complains that they're too expensive and then she says she's hasn't paid for an Amazon order in a year because she's getting so much like paid so much for misplay that's a creative okay that's a creative that's it well you just see content over here come on yeah I can imagine uh if it it's working on the other hand I was like really I was looking at these crat like what the [ __ ] is happening down I never download the misplay thanks to this CRA but that's me that's me I guess it works though because it's like yeah yeah yeah yeah if they're like the you know getting a lot of Impressions I guess it works okay so any any takeaways from all of this that that you've seen um I think it was just

super interesting because this is the first time I've actually like delv deep into it because like it's not usually what I have spend like my days doing but it's just you actually see how many creatives these companies that are big are running like it really surprises me that it's like 14 plus in just like a week or 10 days and that's kind of the norm right so usually also out of these 14 there's always two winners yeah exactly but it's just I didn't know was that much that frequently because it's just yeah it's a lot of work to create that many video creatives it is but if you're spending millions in a month then you need to have this type of uh number of creatives to be able to sustain the either like stable performance or grow growth uh eventually and it's like it's it's the beginning of the year so everybody's pushing budgets anyway yeah so uh I'll leave I'll leave all the links in the show notes and then you can just have a look on your own time and then uh see which creatives are the best creative strategies currently or in the last 14 days yeah I will I will put them somehow in a

post production on the screen so you can enjoy it if you're listening to this uh go to YouTube or just click in the click on the link in the show notes I think that's that's the easiest part so in terms of the creatives from from my point of view that I I was thinking about this uh for some time over the like Christmas period as well and from what I see uh is is running at the moment and what was working quite well in uh 2020 so as you mentioned already Felix like this is um like the first Trend and I was talking about this for a long long time last year I actually made a prediction woohoo that this is going to be a trend this year in 20202 and it was back again of course the may may M that's me that's me all over again but it was true because they I know like because I was kind of looking into the data and then

made the prediction about it anyway so adapting hyper casual mechanics and the hyper casual game Concepts in in games was kind of big Trend in 2022 and I think it's going to continue heavily because well you know like there are still new games on the hyper in the hyper casual Runner that are still coming out and uh and this is very very similar to to actually running fake ads you always need to look into new trends and new games that are coming life to be able to adapt these games and you know ride the wave uh and and looking at the top war example it's not only them I actually recently saw the same concept that Felix was talking about for Lord of the Rings rise to war see you know even IP can leverage this it's very true yeah oh look at the zoom oh that was that was amazing oh okay now the camera who runs that it's I have no idea I have no idea

who is the publisher but it's a Forex game it's a Forex game of course ntis I thought so ah there you go so you know they they know what's what's working and they are not afraid to to run whatever I would say they have a great licensing contract yeah maybe yeah maybe they they could uh fight for using different creatives so yeah you know like it's uh it's kind of uh uh something that works and uh even big big IPS can can do this and leverage it and get great results uh but we can see different hyper casual mechanics or games used in creatives for example like johonny Trigger action shooter I'm pretty sure that you've seen that game before or fill the fridge uh it's kind of used for um cooking games as well also like desert do it yourself that was really like uh on in the top charts for for some time uh recently also very good for cooking

games well I was already talking about there ASMR slicing last year so I'm not going to uh bring it up now but then there is a pull to pain obviously uh but also tangle Master 3D uh which is actually great game and it was used for some creatives uh already multiple times I will put all the links for the games in the show notes so everybody knows uh what's happening uh and then we can see prison escape games uh that was used by Hero Wars as well and also stickman run or stickman fighting against each other if we you know we see all these stickman fighting uh against each other for and we saw it for Mighty party before for different games uh you know obviously fake uh as well and also what about the save the dog game uh the lot of games use in their creatives and in the core gameplay as well well that's hyper casual game

there you go it was a b big trend on on Tik Tok it's it's a hyper casual game now everybody lever leverages that in in their in their UA honestly I tried this uh let's say save the cake concept which was very close to save the dog it was performing like like crazy immediately took all the spent all the Impressions the lowest cpis I could possibly imagine obviously like there's nothing in the game as as that and I saw a lot of come on no Bush what were the cpis what were the cpis well I I would okay so uh like the regular CPI in US was like $10 with this one was two 5x lower I mean like that was [ __ ] crazy but eventually like the DW wasn't there uh at least I didn't run it for for a long period of time if I if I look into this now maybe the will be better but it wasn't worth it because it was a lot of back back back Clash

from the actual players that were commenting in the the comment section like hey this is not how the game looks like like oh well no [ __ ] Sherlock I know okay so that's like the first Trend then the the second Trend I I already brought up like few few sessions back which was the using the altered game play and uh we could see that from Royal match a rush Royale and gold and goblins examples so it's not really like as fake as uh we could see on other creatives or games this is just using real assets from the game in like a created um environment from the game which is altered obviously it's not in the game per se but it looks like it's in the game H you know let me say just that it's completely fake and then some truth was inserted into the fake

well so you know like how does it work yeah you just take your asset you create a new level either in your own level editor or you you prepared uh for these purposes so also like this is the fun part so some companies actually uh you know they they have Marketing in their minds even before they start working on this on the game itself and they count on the fact that actually U and creatives are going to be like very much integral part of their success so they pre PR tools for marketing teams in advanced so for example build with Dev consoles level editors for this type of these purposes to actually easily mix and match the assets so they you can create the these type of creatives very easily and we used it even for battle Legion and that was like one of the best performing creative so we used this altered gameplay concept where we created a a level with let's say a millions of zombies versus one catapult obviously this is not in the game well couldn't be in the game but then like the Catapult destroyed all the like 400

zombies and that was performing the best as we we could so you know like this is something that you can you can actually use and it's uh it's going to be one of the trends then we have ASMR no no no we don't we don't I already talked about it before um so uh I would like to talk about maybe just ugc um just us user generated content uh uh AKA influencer videos AKA using real people in the creatives talking about your game showing emotions trying to you know like misplay exactly like M misplay trying to pers the player to install the game uh which misplay didn't persuade me to install the the app unfortunately but it's usually uh combined uh with the game playay so companies usually combine the influencer or the the ugc uh with gameplay to get better results and doesn't need to be necessarily only like influencers it can be basically any

other famous people from uh and you can purchase these like videos from Cameo so so this could go like in two different or well few different directions so first one it's like it's going to suck B because not every game's creative can be improved by adding a ugc layer or using a ugc concept because well um I this is like one recent example Candy Crush Candy Crush is using this ugc concept I have no idea like how this could potentially work but okay maybe we will I will uh definitely keep an eye on it this usually works well for midcore for some reason and then uh the the other option is like it's going to perform great so uh amazing you can add an additional creative concept to your backlog woo yay and then there's the the other direction

which we already started talking about with the Hero Wars creative so you don't leverage influencers but actual actors or even porn stars depends depends on your target audience obviously I I used Johnny SS a few years back in one of the male oriented games and it exploded right away [ __ ] exploit like everybody was commenting on the they created like wow this is amazing wow JN is okay for of course I have never seen Johnny s before I I have no idea who is it who is he but suddenly we found this guy on came and he performing super and even when we connected he him with the gaml the numbers even improved so amazing results and these days um you know the the concept that Hero Wars creatives are using is just featuring codyy Chase uh connected to the game and I had to ask my friends like what's her

name because I didn't know obviously never seen her before but it's like that's the there's like right now very interesting um overlap between your target audience interests and and uh and your gameplay so there you go it can go really wild uh and the Royal match also featured some like B actors um from cameo in in their ads last summer uh from different TV TV shows I'm not sure how that went but it was definitely an interesting concept I how much do you pay these people like how much do you I paid $500 to Johnny SS and I have the license for eternity no5 but that changed that changed Rec yeah yeah that changed recently that changed recently and you can't use it for eternity just for short period of time I think it's for it's for one month and it's it's I think it's way more expensive now sign the trans again there you

go last thing I remember what was it like game of war PK up 40 million or something but that was for um Super Bowl right no I think that was like they they were using tv ads but they also had John trol like yeah mobile started yeah big games had Ryan Reynolds and like all these other celebrities like what was the coin Master have Jennifer Lopez and coin Master had almost everybody Terry Cruz Kardashians and whoever else they they even had when I was looking into um coin Master like uh Geo strategy they even had like some local influencers or or actors from Germany Austria and like all of these like it was really interesting so uh I mean I couldn't understand cheat what they were talking about in the creative obviously but uh it's was nice to see some locally like yeah but it was it was creative it wasn't just like a Super

Bowl at like the of Clans example it was like solid creative that was running for months I'm not sure if it's was solid but it was running for months yeah like I mean it Go reach yeah yeah yeah they were using in in in UA for sure in in Germany and in these countries and also I think they they had UK related uh influencers as well reactors okay so one last thing and uh which is obviously a generative AI right this is the trend nobody's talking about because it's for your job yeah yeah yeah I will be R yeah I will be without the job in in in in be on Ubi doing nothing and fishing to AI yeah don't worry you the fishing will be done by AI afterwards oh like this is still still more as a like experimentation field as soon as the video generative AI comes

out well I will be the first to try it out I mean it makes a lot of sense uh I play a I play a lot uh with meid journey um just you know for fun sakes but also create images for my newsletter as well uh uh but maybe in the form as it is now the Chad uh GPT and mid journey in can be integrated into like the creative team workflow to speed up some things so this is more like a let's say Trend in terms of uh saving time and improving workflow for Creative teams so um I can already say that it helped me uh with some creative brainstorming um some notes identifying play player hooks for certain genres and even motivations and actually helped me like write a creative brief obviously it's not perfect uh but it's it's solid and it can be used um for saving time well forget forget the brainstorming and everything like can you imagine like this will work

like you know the current image to image generation so you feeded all the creatives all the play rxes all the Hero Wars all the everything and then generate fake creative with my Assets in the same Concepts and like thousands of them immediately perfect yeah yeah yeah well I think we we are very close to that at some point in the in the maybe even this year I mean it's like yeah probably like I seen that uh the video generat TV is already there probably just not out but it it's there like I've seen videos done by that of course and um and we have uh I I have one one last comment maybe more than a trend Tik Tok research do it frequently you can find really like golden nuggets there in terms of the trends so what was uh research on YouTube in the past now it's more like on Tik Tok because Well everybody's on Tik Tok I think is happening there so definitely do this research frequently

like more often than you'll find ends and chips and some chips uh save the dog and whatever else so yeah there you goob how to implement these creatives into the gameplay but very quickly because you know this is boring as [ __ ] of course my is boring fir going going super fast with these two fakers um the first thing that's been happening from the old days and that's still being happening is this kind of a I I put it into these kind three three very simple categories the duct tape example where you blatantly take the creative and put it into the tutorial of the game Hero Wars is running this I guess I don't know probably from time that uh they got kind of acquired by playrix or some somebody pretty much went there and improved the game's performance by like U I will write about the Hero Wars and the

creatives and I'm I want to take a look at like the timeline when did they start using this uh because they started with like the the good old IQ um uh creatives then moved uh the game was like three years old Anyway by the time yeah so so this happened and I I just want to see like if the like when the play acquisition happened and like how did that change the the whole creative yeah exactly like a better better example of this kind of the duct tape example where you blatantly pretty much puts the playable creatives into the tutorial or like first time user experience is mighty party which is oh I love this example yeah Mighty party does it a little bit more sophisticated whereas the UI and the buttons and everything and the flow on the creative seems like it's part of the game so you you kind of think that you are playing the game it's not really like out of sync like with the Hero Wars example where the buttons and everything there can super cartooning out of place with the like game UI and stuff uh so yeah

that would be another very very good example especially great example is the revenue and download chart when you can see where the game pretty much been out from 2017 like doing okay numbers and then suddenly they went to like four and a half million downloads a month and like 8 million in IP Revenue a month suddenly yeah without using any without changing anything in the game actually yeah without changing much in theame game so there's like this kind of giant Spike of Revenue that's probably uh the result of this kind of new creative strategy that's very creative but yeah that I would say would be The Pinacle of this kind of a duct tape example uh if we move on uh there's much more sophisticated Trends happening these days especially in the Forex genres and genres that are very very heavy on the CPI uh number so a good example will be Kingdom guard where they pretty much

implemented their creatives as part of a new core gameplay so the game now has I would say two core game plays or like two games within one game so the game starts as this kind of innocent nice merging tower defense game where you easily merge units and there's enemies coming down the line and like everything looks great and like oh there's this nice Tower Defense thing I'm going to play from time to time and then suddenly you're say sending units across the map in a Forex full-fledged battle spending thousands so that happens around like I don't know 40 30 minutes Mark where the game slowly tries to move you to the other things as the game play in the tower defense cor game playay gets completely automated you just need to press one button the towers merge themselves The Towers Place themselves like everything pretty much goes on autopilot so you don't really need to do anything and then yeah the currency and everything is in the end like becomes meaningless within the Forex score

gameplay where you actually start by having your town There's the usual bubble that you are protected for sometime from other players then you get sniped by whales so on so forth we everybody know uh so yeah that's one thing and looking at the revenue it's very very steady so this is not some kind of a random strategy that they pretty much discovered along the way they constructed the game to be done exactly like this so there would be this kind of a on boarding game that would be very very easy very kind of reminiscence of their creatives and like this kind of hyper casual feel and then slowly they would and but slowly but very smoothly they would push you to the real meat of the game which is the Forex game so that game is pring pretty pretty well I think when we were last looking at it they already cross like 10 million a month I guess it's even more now so we'll see uh another good example where the guys probably took it one notch higher

is top war where they are actually building multiple of these score game plays within the game so in Kingdom G example we can see that they have this kind of very very solid merge Tower Defense that I think it's pretty it's like a pretty new game so I guess they they will probably follow the same tactic but with top War uh being kind of a little bit older uh they are actually changing the their fake tutorial gameplay along the way so what worked before uh probably isn't working as good now so they changes together with their creatives so first they had this kind of a merging gameplay where everything were merged and like you were fighting this kind of single player experience on an island and then slowly they would Offset you into the Forex map the usual uh but then later when they started using this kind of Tetris like creatives where blocks were merged together and everything they actually change the tutorial with it so

you would be now pretty much playing a little bit of Tetris or like merge Tetris on water where you would be merging things it's actually looking exactly like the creative and then suddenly like store as well it's looking yeah like it's completely synced and then like at some point a chopper flies in and moves you to the island where you actually can complete the rest of the tutorial so yeah they had it very very smoothly done and I think their last example that when I was looking at it was that they actually implemented even the like playable fake things into the game play so it's not that duct taped I would say so in their new tutorial you find these kind of strange devices where you need to play these puzzles that's a tangle Master right there there's the tangle Master right there so they saw a trend within hyper casual and implemented it into their tutorial very very smoothly because it's not just like oh here's a random puzzle do it no the story is actually pretty much based around these weather devices that are blocking the

environment with for so you cannot see it you need to build it fix it so on so forth so it's actually a narrative driving around these hyper casual fake creatives and it seems it works great for them genius yeah it's great so so there's there's like a spectrum of how how much you can play with these and like Tinker them to your game from literally duct taping them and not caring about them of course we don't need to talk about save The Dog EX example which there's like actual X zero games left around tutorial also playc with mini games that's the all duct taping everything into the into the game playx has it differently also playx has it run as events so for instance play in U yeah their mini games in Township yeah they have the what's the voodo most famous game oh yeah the Helix jump yeah the Helix jump they have actual Helix jump during an event that's perfect man that's that's genius that's really genius yeah yeah

but it's like an event that's pretty much you know starts ends and it's like normal part of the game that you can play and like earn some currency out of but yeah uh Kingdom G and top are definitely like I would say one of the like on the tip of the spear regarding this kind implementation or let's say synchronization of creatives with your tutorial because that's going to be a trend probably going forward oh yeah 100% 100% And we talked about it I think predictions like how like different game genres should adopt this type of thing but also if you think about like Royal match they found this drilling uh creative than like saving the king that is performing well they implemented it in the game as well so so like yeah okay they have they have these kind of like bonus levels or something I think based on time and they are somehow reminisence of their creative of course like the best performing creative and the the guys uh from Golden goblins like the the developers they said well we are

going to implement the best performing creative into the game as well mean like that makes a lot of sense they just need to think about like how to do it properly and uh yeah it's uh so it's not like super deck taped but okay yeah I think uh yeah UA designs your games in 2023 that's the go there you go yes finally someone said by the time like the 20 like 2024 comes along is going to be huge no no no no don't worry it's going to be fine it's going to be fine although you know uh I have all these Tik toks back uh I look like an [ __ ] influencer now I need to put like some different background here but it's my kids room so I guess that's not going to work anyway up with the [ __ ] thank you very much for coming listening watching I will put all the ads in the in the post production in the video as well so you can take a look while we talk and also in the show notes so you can check it whenever and wherever you are please

subscribe um on YouTube Spotify and apple podcast because it's amazing thank you very much this is like very great support for us and uh there is going to be one important gift for you and for us as well since this is like first anniversary I'm going to publish the first very first episode on YouTube so we know like how bad we were and how bad we are at the moment it's going to be fun it's going to be a lot of fun well I need to watch it I need to watch I need to do the pr production so like I'm going to be like uh in a pain for a long time anyway thank you very much until next time bye-bye [Music]