two & a half gamers session #5 - Surprise crypto comments & How to tackle soft launch stages?

[Music] hello hello hello welcome everybody this is no gaming podcast 2 and a half Gamers session number five we're discussing the latest news fun stuff and dropping some knowledge uh as usual so don't forget this is 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's take it too seriously but let's dive in and well enjoy hey guys welcome Felix and welcome yob hello there how was your week how was your week busy week white nights and then games for you were yeah you were around so uh how was uh the conference face to face uh experience actually really good it was nice actually to see people again uh yeah good knowledge of both conferences I think games form was a bit more applicable to what I actually do but yeah conference season is back

well then the Pocket Gamer is next I guess it's going to take for some time until I get back to the conference's loop but what can we do my daughter is keeping me busy and I definitely want to stay out of uh out of any any covid situation and bringing covid home Felix I guess you're not definitely scared have triple vac and I've had Co it's time to not live in fear anymore I know I know but you you can still get you can still get it anyway so yeah don't worry there will be variants as usual yeah let's not get in the co dark hole maybe we should just give a brief outline what we're going to talk about today and what kind of knowledge we're going to be sharing I think today's your to sure sure thing so going to touch uh Apple enables crypto payments pubg Studio uses nfts in ugc driven open metaverse whatever that means and uh emblem Heroes approaches 1

billion revenues K is app points former poke Pokemon go product manager and then um some other news also Zinga plans to release its first nft game this year I mean that's that's pretty huge and uh well most interesting uh fact from last week like report by 2026 it's predicted 25% of people will spend an hour a day in the metaverse whatever that means whatever that means as well and then some knowledge uh from our side you're going to talk about three stages of soft launch well soft Lun is my favorite topic so let's uh so let's dive into that um after the news so let's start with the Apple so what do we have there Felix so arguably this is probably the biggest news I've read so far that's not an acquisition uh so yesterday uh a press release from Apple announced that they're going to be having their tapto pay feature for for the iPhone and that

will essentially enable Merchants uh to facilitate transactions uh using a simple tap regardless a payment method why this is a big deal is the fact that coinbase and crypto.com have come out with their own debit cards which means that indirectly now you'll be able to pay with Apple pay using crypto so how that works is that coinbase and crypto.com they convert it to Dollars like upon that charge a little fee and then yeah you can pay for your Mountain Dew in a corner shop with yeah your ethereum or Bitcoin do I get it right that it kind of converts it to Dollars during the transactions itself exactly yeah and I'm assuming these nice little companies here take a nice little fee from that conversion as well well of course they should I mean uh you can also uh take money out of the ATM uh with that debit card they will convert it in the ATM and you can uh you

can take dollars right away isn't this the part when it converts to dollars when you need to pay taxes on those that's an interesting point I didn't think about that actually yeah if you're getting gains there with crypto and you're realizing it you will be liable for tax potentially especially in the states where they charge a crypto tax yeah we also have a crypto tax here so I'm just curious because that this brings like a lot of legal implications I think you're bringing up an interesting point there because apple is so specific about how they conduct themselves and they always dip their toes in lightly to see how it goes down and I would argue that this is probably Apple's way of Dipping their toe in and seeing exactly what kind of response they're going to get and what the legal implications could be without actually going full into crypto and I believe or if thinking about like incentives from Apple this has everything to do with South Korea and Netherlands with kind the upcoming or the lawsuits that have

been going on there and I think Apple sees that their margins which are really important that they get from the App Store are being threatened and this is kind of the first for into how to allow crypto onto their ecosystem so they can also earn money from it yeah but if I get the red apple will have nothing to do pretty much with the crypto part here as only dollars will be coming to them so it's pretty much s your own troubles home base and crypto yeah exactly but if you think about it it's kind of Genius if I'm assuming they've done this on purpose because they don't do anything without a purpose of course there's only one they definitely fought this through but basically they'll let coinbase and crypto.com take all the heat see how it happens and it's the end of 2022 and I guess maybe two years down the line they'll be ready to come up with their own crypto product something like that yeah that that's that's the really important word there that it's indirect payment yeah

yeah let's see let's see I've already seen a lot of Twitter and Linkedin hype about this and like uh probably nothing comments and let's let's go and all these uh crypto crypto enus crypto curious people C no crypto curious okay so so here Jakob he said that um if you're are crypto curious then you're not crypto um fan fan or Enthusiast but or you're not even the the crypto skeptic so you're something in the middle and not taking any stand so it's like that's that's apparently called crypto curious thought it was called being swiland or yeah or Switzerland well let's uh let's go to to pubg uh well pubg Studio it's they they want to use nfts in their ugc dream open met

whatever that means is an article States the article gamer oh sorry PC G PC Gamer yeah PC Gamer PC Gamer is always uh they are definitely crypto Skeptics from from all all their articles um but apparently um Crafton is uh is going forward in nft projects and uh this announcement most probably doesn't have anything to do with the with the pubg IP pubg yeah pubg IP and they signed u a deal with a company called nav Z the operator of the metaverse platform well zto whatever that is to develop the new web3 um and the nft project name building an nft metaverse platform I mean all the all the crypto buzzwords are there and uh and they said that this is going to be the the creation tool for the US Genera generation content

creation I mean seriously what it what what's what's that going to be about sound to me like uh like an order by Crafton to to to neigh Z to build a like a crypto Roblox crypto Roblox what what ex you unack that REM yeah it's a ugc driven metaverse of course because roblox actually is a ug SE driven metaverse in itself uh okay okay well not sure if uh if that's going to happen but let's see uh I mean it's still a big deal that pubg is announcing something like this it's just kind of yeah I would say is that that that big of a big deal like uh big companies are announcing nft projects left and right currently and you know they're backtracking the next day sometimes so I wouldn't be surprised if like nothing comes out of

this ah but you know like I don't think uh Crafton will actually Crafton needs to jump on the nft train and like present itself with an angle and then they can check mark it in their book and continue I would say yep okay okay let's see what happens some mobile game news apparently really so Fire Emblem Heroes is approaching 1 billion in Revenue congratulations uh the game is launched from February 2017 and it's currently the most s successful mobile game in Nintendo Port forio which is kind of surprising a little bit but on the other hand it's not as it's like a typical Asian heavy free to-play gacha game which Asian games are kind of famous for so this is an interesting tidbit but it's pretty much just a continuation of a trend uh that's been there I don't think so Nintendo really

keen on getting full fledge into free toplay as they always were we all remember the Super Mario run whatever that was it was called three to start by that age and died immediately but I still would say like the company is not very keen into getting into freet to-play at all and they have their like really good profitable divisions with all the like hype around Nintendo switch their console and their normal gaming lineup their Pokemon IP so I guess it's more of a we tried uh we have like one really successful story that's making so much money and that's it I guess what what where they thinking I mean with the fre I think for Nintendo their IPs are much more valuable for brand perspective so they don't want to tarnish them in free to play that's as I would say would be their like Paradigm here okay and then like the the free to St is the the way to go yeah right at

least at that time it was I'm a bit at that time it was I'm a bit curious I so so bad I'm curious about so this this game is obviously like a quite a hardcore title correct yeah it's this is a typical like a gcha game you know RPG you play through the game and get get heroes from a gacha that you don't know what you get yeah how do you do uao like for these games that are quite hardcore on iOS right now like it must be so much harder than it was to two three years ago well of course of course it is way harder I mean um it's still if you can get some um some signals on the day one or day three even very little of them then that that's going to help you with uh with the initial UA uh and then you can build an LTV predictions out of that so I know these games are monetized way

after day 30 6090 but it's still you can Implement something into the first uh first session in terms of the monetization I mean that's why the U product teams or game teams are pretty much working alongside each other just to figure this out don't forget that there's this one big change between the other games this is a j Japan household name which means in Japan you have so much offline advertising for mobile games it's like you never seen this before and you never will see this anywhere else yep that's the other thing I mean uh they're pretty big there even if you count all the revenues outside of Japan it's not going to be even like 30% of of the Japanese just the one example with the Monster Strike game where they pretty much shut down the international servers and they were still making 1 billion just from Japan so what yeah and and it's a really good point I mean in Japan and uh and other countries

like this there the the the traditional UA is one thing but like all out of home TV and everything else is just even bigger like looking just briefly at the charts here uh the game is making around 6.5 to 7 million a month and pretty much three and a half of that is coming from Japan only nice it would be bigger but yeah but keep in mind it's already five years five years old yeah but is is this really small game dude yeah fair enough seven seven and a half million a month yeah that's that's pretty good I'm just wondering after five years after five years after five years yeah it's this 5-y old gun game I'm just wondering like is this a good use case for like apple search ad for gaming I know it's hard to scale there but I'm assuming for hardcore games it must be quite useful UA ch Channel

correct H how is that a useful channel for any game except except branding keywords I mean the the Apple search ads for games is absolutely terrible the brand keywords are kind of working just for you to defend some organic traffic so your competitor don't steal that but except that I mean yes you can run the the very broad keywords but it's going to be really expensive but also of course like if you have a Deep Pockets then you don't care and you can just flood your whole Japanese App Store with all your Apple search ads campaigns but most probably not going to keep in mind that these games they live on really really small audiences like I'm looking in the charts here and it's like 30k 20K download a month for a whole game that's making 7 and a half million so yeah that that's that's what you get when you get into Japanese segment like the the ltvs and like all the kpis are

pretty much crazy different yeah I'm pretty surprised you didn't mention your um poke not Pokemon Go Japanese yeah Dragon Quest game you are always Keen to mention yeah but that's normal that's that's normal Japan Japan Works differently in Mobile gaming well China as well so all Asia okay uh continuing on the trend here U with the like Nintendo IPS so Sky mavus said that uh they appoint uh a former Pokémon go product manager uh to axi Infinity to be a game product lead uh called Philip PL and I guess the expectation for everybody else is to kind of fix the economy at least that would be my expectation yeah that would be my expectation as well I mean I was really uh positive about this change but then you uh definitely well St wi said yeah yeah

yeah definitely uh because uh I'm not sure how product lead can uh be also the economy designer or well obviously he can be it's not going to be that easy to uh correct the problem there is that you know when you have things on chain you cannot just say like okay we'll rebalancing it and stuff like that people will learn this the hard way in this industry it seems okay then what but what would you do in in that case I mean what change the the smart contract or how how does no no no like that needs to stay the same like you cannot change that the problem is that with u the excess resources in the economy like there's so many cats there and there's so many um like their currency called love po cats cats you mean axis axis themselves because they have the mechanisms that uh axes or the cats can pretty much breed only seven times with increasing amounts of resources uh for each kind of breed and then after that they areep help pretty much so they cannot breed anymore

but they can still fight and kind of harvest resources for you and this is the problem that you know you still have the remnant of the cats there that people can use to to farm and then their laugh potion the smooth laugh potion thing is also accumulating pretty hard in the economy and it's not being burned away fast enough so yeah they can still introduce a lot of these like sink into the economy that you know I think they even introduced something lately that you can like combine cats and bur them out to get something else or something but yeah it's kind of hard to justify if the C itself costs like $200 $300 so you know well now there I know the cost is $300 so if you if you want to start you need threee I think and then uh you know you need to invest 1K but I know some people invested like 8,000 back in days when it was like really the hype so now they're like oh well I guess it's uh you know invest M for um experience and knowledge rather

than there would be so much Investments for experience and knowledge like that's that's I think one of the problems with this whole like fry Market that we have there that people weren't burnt yet at all oh well to certain degree yes I mean the daxi infinity high was so big what like um four months ago of course like if you check the volume on that that like nothing compared to like how it was picked how how it has picked in November or October I'm trying to find one one article where it was uh mentioned what they did in the last update and yeah there season 20 update uh for AI infinti actually and uh well they said the the token skyrockets is over 50% after season 20 yeah they went up a

little bit but just went up from their current a little bit a little bit is definitely way far from skyrockets to the Moon you know yeah to the Moon yeah that's true that's true you think he can actually Salvage uh the a Infinity economy or is it more kind of for Sky just start learning Salvage like get back to the peak values no I don't think so because he's a crypto skeptic that's the thing I mean you know uh I do think they can salvage that because I'm always I don't think so they can salvage that in here at all uh it's more of a product of like at the time when it was at its height it was the like the funnel into crypto games everybody was just talking about axi so everybody wanted to even check it out and get the knowledge investment but nowadays I guess it's matter of a time when some kind of a new improved version comes out with a what whatever company does that and people will kind of flock

into it and and remember then then comes the effect I was talking about that people can sell their stuff immediately on one crypto game and migrate to the other one pretty much burning the economy of the previous one because they're not tied to it yeah well the thing is like this uh whole Filipino market and the tier four players that are now working as a as XI infinti workers the that was a not intentional so that kind of happened yeah it was pretty much a social experiment yeah exactly so and they I know um there was the the interview with the CEO I think on the construct fund and they said like look so the game is very far from being finished so uh I mean they still have something in their pipeline so I don't think like the game is going to die I obviously it's going to be very hard to get the numbers they had uh in October November last year but

still you know of course it can continue but the the question is like if you are asking about the hourly earn rate for an average like scholar like that's going to go down okay okay okay okay and also what's going to get go down is I guess a Ubisoft because of their nft experiments as well so now they're trying to bring rabbit's IP I mean what ever to the sandbo metaverse and the sandbo announced that uh I think a couple of days ago they're partnering with Ubisoft to bring this IP and some others to its gaming metaverse and Ubisoft is is creating its land in the game to offer interactive experiences with rabbits and other characters in the future so uh good luck Ubisoft I mean um The Crusade continues let's just let's just see if they can learn from their mistakes from last time and if a billion dollar company can actually learn quickly or to

make the same Mist exact thing you were talking about it's the knowledge investment because the IP isn't so big they're not putting their Assassin Creed or something big in their portfolio they're just you know giving this this random IP lying somewhere and let's see what happens tier three IP uh nobody knows what rabbits are and uh now they're trying to do this uh in sand boox so I get I get it when Snoop Dog is building his is Henda in in in sandbox just out of fun because he can but like do Ubisoft doing this I I remember when they put them into Oculus or something like that and and you know like again like it it's that pretty much guinea pig IP that you can smash anywhere and see what happens okay yeah well of course yeah well good luck ubt okay continuing further more metaverse

stuff uh Bond damco announced that they will invest 96 million pound into IP metaverse uh yeah which people need to figure out from the announcement uh it's pretty much the publisher plans to spend Millions on Virtual space that connects the number of its Brands strategy includes building a like virtual space to accommodate three goals connecting with fans enhancing IP value and improv improving its Global presence to drive sales outside of Japan um yeah so we have the metaverse pass we there PT I haven't seen any crypto in it that's that's like we missed that yeah well uh but yeah let's see like uh they have a lot of good IP there uh I definitely agree with the last point there in the article that they would need to enhance their presence outside of Japan because it's like a Japan household name yeah and now it's going now you're going to do it with metaverse

yeah outstanding move outstanding move super weird like it seems that Japan like Japanese gaming Market is so contrarian to the Western Market cuz while we're consolidating they still have you know five six big gaming companies that are independent of each other but but it's not that easy you know like acquiring a Japanese gaming company yeah I'm sure it's like the whole thing that like Kent Market is talking about you know like Microsoft acquiring Activision or Sony acquiring Banji I don't think so it would happen so smoothly in Japan like if somebody comes in and for instance acquires uh ganho for instance the puzz and Dragons publisher or Mixie Monster Strike one like that I I don't think so this will happen at all okay well you are the crypto skeptic and the Japanese consolidation skeptic yeah but but it works differently like last time I was in Tokyo at at like the

Tokyo game show conference you could see it like the the thing works differently there he too bad you didn't bring your uh your glasses there you would fit almost immediately yeah that was the last time when Kian re was uh promoting cyber punk punk there oh yeah oh yeah yeah nice all right well uh let's back to the to the Western companies uh and and uh now we can talk about Zinga plans to release its first nft game this year so there was this uh this interview with with mad wolf bold words I would say bold words bold words yeah bold interview definitely bold interview because they they aim to to build a team uh well the new blockchain game team and now they're like 15 people and they want to be 70 or 100 by the end of the year

okay good uh good and bold plan as well but now they're calling them themselves a studio so not the department but their Studio that's definitely way more fancy than being a blockchain department and uh they're hiring for several positions including the creative director and and toomics designer of course tokenomics designer is now the Most Wanted position position out there in the gaming and crypto industry exactly so there was this hype like oh we we have all the money now now we need to make it work so we need the designer we need the designer to to do it for us so hey all the the the toonomic designers out there well I guess there's they none at the moment because it's a new position right so uh so good luck no but yeah okay back to the back to the Zinga because they also said that the the part of the team's expansion will be

you know buying uh new Studios and the Acquisitions of new Studios and then partnering up with with other companies I guess that's what they did with with Forte right at least they announced the at least they announced yeah and uh but now now there there's this the the most interesting part so zinga's early blockchain games will Target players familiar with the genre and who may not be looking for a robust game play so and then mad wolf said and this is really interesting so uh when they enter into one of these products they come at it from an investor or wh point of view so they're interested in a specific elements including yield so of course there are like different um types of blockchain players but now he said that they are only looking for making games for investors or the the players that are going to trade nfts buy

and sell for profit yeah he even said that later like uh Gamers find their fun in owning and selling of an nftd items yep so the the last thing they said they don't want to bring them something that they didn't ask for so uh you know they don't want to be the next Ubisoft obviously and it is so funny I mean I have I still think he has no idea what he's talking about seriously anyone really know what they're talking about though right now I mean it's the Gold Rush Oh yeah that's true wait wait with the metaverse part like I think nobody knows but with this part at least people know a little bit because you know you have the reference point in axi for instance and uh still the like the whole point of this is that you need to design the game in a way that it makes sense for both but if like what is pretty much saying is that we're designing an

investment product yeah but investment product means that it needs to have long-term value because you're investing in it see they just they just what they can do is just to create a set of nfts or like a yeah nft Gallery uh put it on open C and then just drive traffic there that's it it's like seriously why do they need to do anything on their side if they want to do this I still think like the successful crypto games will be the ones where you have like 90 or 80% of people engaging with the game and then 15 to 10 or whatever like small number of people trying to Corner the market trade and like do the crypto part because you have the normal distribution in in like even the current games like there's lots of people that enjoy like trading all the worker auction house all the time like it's there like 90% of gameplay they do just this that's that's completely normal but then you have the like the rest of those which is is the most of the game in itself which gives

the the the items actual value because they want them to to actually play the game and it seems like this part was omitted out of this but yeah let's see yeah let's see but uh as as you said that the crypto layer will be still only the layer and the part of the the whole whole game and the the real part or like the majority of the game will be just a normal game play and uh designed by game design and then the the crypto layer on top of it but but but this is this is the other part that kind of kind of confuses me that people still think that they like the games needs to have this investment layer on top of it like the like the governance tokens the staking tokens like all these pretty much financial instruments built into the game because if we take the world of war auction guy there's no instruments ESP much as currencies and like items that are floating around in the economy and you know you want them you get them you farm them you sell them but here it's

pretty much like a full-fledged in investment functionality that's that people are looking for but you know like that that's the thing you want to build a game for broad audience so you have a multiple types of the gamers there so you have we have the the workers from Philippines I know what you mean but I'm saying some of the crypto games they like invest 90% of their development time into just this and then you have a gameplay of like character going in an idle animation on a screen uh like doing nothing it looks like I know yeah I know I know I know but that's that's what I told you I think uh during the week I mean this is the year when I think uh lot of the games are going to be released and then we will see 50% of them is going to be because you or 90 okay 90 well that's was that was your call that was your call I I said uh it's going to be 50% they're going to be playable actually by players and everything else is going to be well

looking like and then you can't play it and then you will be just buying and selling nfts just for profit and that's it and then that's why a lot of people think it's still like crypto games is is a lot of scam and then we're going to have a successful crypto game until you take speculation out of it like I mean you don't hold US dollars when you go to America because you think they're going to appreciate when you're over there like you need to do that to have a healthy economy even in the game as well so remove the speculation part and that's when you can actually might make something interesting I just don't believe that people will pretty much switch to inferior form of entertainment just because they're all into the script to Hype Train everybody wants to have fun and you don't want to be grinding your stuff in like a two Pixel character for eight hours a day so it's for me it's just a matter of time all right should we uh leave the crypto metal layer and go back to to Earth and talk about some yeah something exactly some uh dollar

money game theme so uh US Mobile Gamers spent 4.4 billion on money theme games in 2021 um so that's the highest uh grossing games theme in 2021 and the money and treasure theme includes games such as coin Master Boingo Blitz and rumor has it actually that I'm hearing the rumor that last year Moon active made 1.4 billion roughly from coin master so you know that's more than 25% of that that is coin Master which is quite impressive and that's pretty good I mean I like the streets you're walking uh in because they're definitely way better rumors than what the yub said two two sessions ago he's definitely walking the Slovakian streams and uh it's not by the way by the way one context for this article this just exactly proves my

point people are playing a game about virtual money that they don't ever get and it makes them happy okay there you go there you go Mr that proves my point don't know how much I can add to that but kudos to them are we moving on to our uh soft launch seg no whoa whoa whoa whoa oh yeah we ski one there is the yeah no no that there's the the fastest growing theme in terms of the revenue this is important and this is really really important because um this the the theme was animal SL insect theme and that generated like 26.5 million which represents an increase of uh 94% year-over-year and the sensor Tower attributes this um or majority of this growth to the this game and this game is absolutely amazing the ants the underground Kingdom from Star

Union accounted for almost 90% of the consumer spending uh the second fastest growing theme was fashion Aesthetics and hair I guess that was like project makeover right there so the ants underground Kingdom those creatives I'm not sure if you saw those uh fix on on Facebook or Instagram that's absolute gold they're hilarious basically really like they are attacking the the players emotions I mean it's a Forex game so all those um creatives had nothing to do with the real gameplay but still it's really it's really great so you can imagine like four ends just uh are going into the forest and then there's a frog obviously the Frog eats one ant all those those free and just run away they found an electricity um cable they bring that cable to the Frog so they are just

jumping around the electricity cable obviously frog wants to eat them and then fries in on that electric electricity cable they take that frog into the the underground Kingdom and then immediately the all the kingdom upgrades and then you have the the ending screen I mean I laughed so hard on that that c and this is only one out of like 10 you can see on Instagram like almost every day so K those guys this is uh this really really great game really fun creatives definitely check it out basically somebody had the genius idea to risk in a Forex game into end team which was never done before because all the Forex games are usually like you know we have the newest one which is like Game of Thrones Lord of the Rings or like these big ones all fantasy uh I guess swimming in those high cpis and I guess these guys kind of made it yeah definitely made it and you have War paath uh which is also the type of game but this is I mean G like genius

move right let's uh let's move to the last report which is the the most interesting one yeah yeah so there's a fresh report from Venture beat uh saying oh sorry from Gartner that's a publish on Venture beat uh saying that by 2026 it's predicted that quarter of people will spend an hour per day in the metaverse whatever that means but they they have a photo of it there uh of like they're the elements of met elements of metaverse uh is it like a it's it's are they just going the internet the metaverse basically it looks like that but there there are these like uh nfts uh infrastructures gaming digital assets workplace shopping and whatever else just yeah basically covers the internet but then you have the the nft layer on top of it so are they saying that you know the hour maybe a month I spend on Amazon will actually count towards my time spent in the

metaverse of course and uh like you said before the recording zoom and the hangout recording podcasts like here like we are doing at the moment yeah that's the that's the metaphors right sounds to me like an accounting trick really does yeah well I can tell I can tell Gartner that I already spend more than an hour a day in the metaverse I I don't know for me still The Meta symbolizes some kind of 3D virtual space in a way that you can look into it through like a virtual glasses or something like that so don't know about this so you you are already in the Met is that you got the glasses of course I see the metamers in the meantime through them oh yeah well it's fine very good all right so should we just move on to the well done on your clickbait Gartner well done yeah well done well done uh what we are not doing we are not

doing any copad with the stages of the soft Lounge I mean the soft Lounge is very wide topic but let's let's take the stages um today and let's talk about them a little bit more but before before we dive into the stages there is always a discussion like oh why would we actually need uh to soft Louch a game well we were working on the game for half a year one year and then well what the Let's Just Launch it yeah guys well that's not how it works I mean you can do that but then most probably without seeing any numbers prior to the global launch well you can spend a lot of money and then um after seeing the first well not only lose the golden coh you can go bankrupt quite easily quite easily because well every developer thinks that their their game is like amazing of course it can happen and um congrats to everybody who actually did it it's amazing until it hits day one retention that's the usual case yeah

exactly yeah because uh before spending a lot of money you need to be pretty sure that uh that money will be well spent and uh with the soft loue you're actually lowering the risk of your failure you are collecting the players feedback as well trying to understand how your game works what is the game performance as well and then um optimizing the first time you user experience like trying to AB test tutorials or anything that you know can improve the numbers uh prior to the global launch but also ultimately working on the marketing test as well so you know trying to get the data from different UA channels different creatives because different creatives have different retention profiles the same applies for the UA channels and the same thing with the LTV curves as well so um at the end of the soft Lune you want to achieve LTV higher than the CPI

in the ideal state or you can aim for any day seven day 14 day 30 roas right to no nut if you don't have the enough data for the the LTV curve to see how it how it actually improves over time and if you are not able to achieve this well let's face that you can kill the game rather than just go to soft lounge with your ego and uh spend a lot of money and then never see the money com coming back so uh that would be just you know why we do the soft launch it's really important to kill the game and invest the time that we would spend in soft lunch for another game yeah because you know that's the missed opportunity right there um we are trying to improve the game for five months six months not actually moving the needle at all and um and you're just you just fell in love with your game and your product of course you can't kill it easily but you know if you want to save

the company then you should kill the game and then move on yeah I mean that's a that's a discussion always uh that we need to have and always we need to think about uh but let's uh let's dive into the the stages of the soft launch so I already mentioned that you you need to be prepared before you start spending any money so uh the first thing you can do is just to be sure that your data and tracking is is working correctly so so the first stage would be the technical stage then we go to retention stage and then monetization stage and then if everything is working correctly then Global launch and then yeah money and uh liveops right but let's get back to the technical stage so in this stage um you're focusing mostly on the data health and uh the crash rates and tracking in general so you know you want to be 100% maybe like 200% sure that you have no bucks or the critical bucks

in the game you identify that quite quickly and then fix it and then um then move on to the reten retention stage but in this in this technical stage we we only need I don't know 50 or 100 players just to be able to to say if the tracking works correctly so small amount of players ideally in the tier four countries so Philippines Mexico I know whever else because those countries have really low cpis and you don't want to spend $5 per player just to test your infrastructure check to check the infrastructure and and the tracking and uh you know you shouldn't be in this stage too long because um definitely uh wasting your time in here so one week two weeks stops maximum just to to check everything then correct it if it's if it's broken and then what are the most common like usually find at the stage is it yeah UPS or MMP is not working

correctly you can't see installs in Facebook or in in Google uh the Firebase is broken as well I mean then there is um there is a problem that you see 400 installs in Facebook but 1,000 installs in in UPS you would be surprised how many companies suffer from data loss is shoes I mean nine out of 10 always I encounter that I they had really like data broken and you know it's I I need to just um underline this again like this is really critical to to be able to have the data correct and the data setup correct because if you start spending money and then in the middle of the retention stage you you find out that you're looking at the wrong data and the corrupted data as well then you just lost like four months and lot of money so this is like the most important uh uh part I mean not the most important part very important

part it's the usual stuff where like this needs to work in order to do anything else because we're in data driven industry yeah exactly because then you're moving into the retention stage uh where you measure the day one day three day seven retention like the to tutorial completion rate like on boarding flow uh you're trying to to see uh how your first time us your experience or how does that work for your players and if you're getting wrong data then you're pretty the worst case that can happen here is that the team starts to D the data that that's like you you definitely don't want to get into this scenario because like bad data comes out team starts to doubt it that like it shouldn't be that bad and you actually find out that it's bad then it's like the team won't believe the data at all from that point of view yeah that's the worst case and yeah you spend energy trying to fix

all the data and then um everybody is on the edge and there like because that that's the usual reaction like if bad data comes out there's like a little bit of denial always yeah yeah of course like oh well this should be way better there's something wrong with the data well we did the data check already so I'm sorry but you know unfortunately this is the case instead of like uh crying about how bad the data is Let's uh let's try to improve that because that's why we are in the soft Lounge I mean I've seen very bad initial day one day three day seven retentions and then uh eventually we made it and uh it was very successful Global you know the data they don't you know they don't have emotions like it's pretty much they don't Li yeah they don't Li at all like you've been building this thing for six months and now you get a slap in your face because it has 20% day one retention that that's what happens yeah that what happens but also you need to you need need to measure

also the the day one to day three to day seven ratio and now this is pretty much um Far From Reality but you can get day one redention 20% and then day seven 15% which never Happ is not going to happen most probably but if which never happens yeah but but you know we had this case we had 25 day one uh day one retention and then day 60 was uh 8% the most important part is also uh the UA because we definitely need uh the user flow coming in to the game to be able to measure everything properly and uh in this case uh I'm moving from the tier four countries into the tier two countries uh which usually means any European countries like Poland Netherlands or Denmark and uh and one important thing to to mention here we already see quite a big increase in terms of retention between the Philippines or Mexico and uh the

European countries just uh because the quality of the traffic yeah by the nature of the of the traffic so doesn't necessarily mean that if you see 10% feel 10% day one on in Philippines uh you will see 10% in um you know Poland or or Netherlands it should be actually quite uh quite different and um what I can see is like a coefficient of 1.5 or maybe even like two when moving from tier two uh tier four to tier two countries so if you see 10 in Philippines you can see 15 or 20 it's very well I I I saw that on multiple games already so definitely something that you can you can count with um and uh and and in this stage I'm using mostly Facebook but given the Facebook latest um Quality dips I'm already trying to introduce Google um as a UA Channel and then

Unity uh just also to be able to compare the data between those channels because as we mentioned uh the beginning different U channels have different uh retention profiles as well so uh if but you know if you see low retention on uh on Google it doesn't mean uh the game is but uh you can use a different optimization methods to to bring more quality users how uh how many users do you need at these various stages from the different Goos would you say well I I always try to aim for at least like 200 a day um depends on what what we are measuring if we are aiming for day one retention then 200 a day would be enough uh if we are trying to get this the read on the day seven we might need more because uh even though you know we have these benchmarks uh from the industry like 40 perc day one uh 20% day seven and 10% Day Day 30

so uh which like 99% of games don't have yeah exactly they don't have it but still even like after first day the only 40% of your players in the best case scenario stays in the game so if you have 200 a day then uh you will end up with a very low amount of of players on day seven so definitely then um aiming at least like 400 500 day just to get um a sense of what the day seven looks like and also uh in this stage and I mentioned this uh just uh previously about optimization so um I think we will need to have a UA fundmentals uh session where I will go through all these optimization um Shenanigans but in this stage usually uh you have the mobile app install optimization campaigns but also moving into the app event optimized campaigns we we mentioned that on the previous podcast with Felix uh the up event optimized campaigns where we

discussed the ad Revenue events but in this case it's more like um engagement events from the game so tutorial completion or certain level achieved like 10 20 or something in the game that indicates that your players are actually higher quality players and then you can uh you can send these information back to Facebook or Google and optimize towards that so this is something that definitely needs to happen in the retention stage because uh good old days uh with mobile app sty optimizations and quality players are long gone so now uh the mobile I inst optimization is widely used in the in the hyper casual space and uh um the for games that you need to aim for very low cpis so that would be the case but in here we definitely need to aim for more quality players to be able to uh measure the retention properly yeah this is this is the part where most games die and are supposed to die and

should die actually re you worked on many game soft launch what's the most you've actually seen from changing the game mechanics that you can actually lift day one day seven and day like 30 retention in absolute values I would say something in vicinity to 10 to 15% on day one it's always a diminishing return so the lower you start the higher you can go um that that's like the usual uh assuming that everything works of course like there's no bugs and stuff like that that we need to take out of the question in the previous stage as M was talking and then uh day one is pretty much the reflection of your core gam play so some games you end up with just a lower or higher value because that's how they are played and that's how they work and you cannot do anything about it that you you reach a point where you won't make a dent to retention whatever feature you kind of try to slap

on it um increasing retention is definitely much more tougher than increasing monetization later so if you don't have retention don't even you know you won't get there to monetization but also think about it of course like monetization cannot be slap and duct tape on top of it that like takes out of the question but the retention is really hard and especially even if you get through the day one gate that okay your day one is good the core game play is like pretty much okay people are moving into the game later down the line day seven is like your next kill Point pretty much which says that okay you need to have some kind of meta game goals achievements people need to know what they're doing where they're striving for and then there's the day 30 which usually is driven by social features and then we are in the comp completely different Beast then because yeah like there are like some parts of

the game are responsible for some parts of the retention funnel let's say tutorials only work on your day one if you have like exent tutorial it won't help you in your day seven your meta game needs to then again drive your day seven to day 30 it won't help you in your day one at all and so on so forth so there are specific parts of the like game components that drive these but I would say uh yeah even getting through day one is just like 90% games also die there that that's that's usually like like that unfortunately because the market has like crazy values nowadays like you see let's say if we compare the latest trends on let's say the merge game genre like like what 60% day one 20% day 30 what are we talking about so the numbers are crazy high and and and keep in mind that the higher you can scale these it means the higher

those really expensive people that this marketing guys is driving to your game will stay there yeah this marketing guy also thinks that uh the merge games and the hype is um I guess almost behind us uh also like what you now see uh the mer the new merge games are most probably they need to be or need to have a new unique selling proposition rather they're consa pretty yeah because what you what you had like six months ago like these retention profiles that's perfect but now if you want to get like investors on board or like make the game profitable you need to have something Innovative or like something as a plus one not like well this is a game I mean you can you can earn money of course I mean to a c certain degree you can always scale to a certain scale you always can get thousands of revenues but Millions most probably you hit the US yeah then you

need the the USB pretty much because well like there is all already like 10 merge menion clones most probably they make some money but never going to make the same amount of money as the merge mention that's just how it is because it's not nothing uh Innovative but let's get back to the to the soft L and the the last stage which is the monetization stage obviously if we are uh satisfied with the with the retention then we move towards uh the monetization kpis like conversion rate to payment LTV lifetime value retino not spent average revenue per user average revenue paying user average revenue per da so daily active user then uh repeat purchases yeah second third conversion yeah second third conversion breaks my heart you're not bringing up any AD metrics here but all right yeah I know like maybe you can maybe you can maybe you can you already discussed it last

time so you know add Revenue metrics as well from last session so if you if we won't go into detail now they are yeah if you don't if you need to know just tune in the session four it's all there it's all there uh basically uh jokes side uh in order to measure these type of uh these type of kpis we need to move to to tier one markets uh basically why tier one because of the payment behavior of the players and uh when we compare for example Poland or Netherlands versus um UK or or Germany then um definitely more or high paying play players coming from UK and Germany rather than uh the smaller European countries can there can be some um exceptions but usually I go for uh the UK or Germany not going to Canada Australia anymore I mean it's those markets are super penetrated with a lot

a lot of um soft lounes for those were the golden days of soft lunches before last 10 day 10 years so it's just like uh really competitive really expensive it doesn't make any sense to to go there in a lot of um people said in the in the past that Canada is very much similar to the US in terms of the payment behavior I'm not sure that much yes or yes and no but um also not in terms of not only the countries but in terms of the optimizations so I brought up the up event optimized campaigns for events uh from game but in this stage we need to measure the the purchases and the payments and the payers so now we're moving forward to the up event optimized campaigns for purchases and uh later down the road we might try the value optimization as well for like whales but but most probably that's going to happen after the global launch in this case is

going to be only for purchases because uh the value optimized campaigns you want to save that for your go golden Cs and uh and after the golden as well yeah one important thing here is that you also need to measure um the capacity and the Manpower of your content threadmill that's really important because Global launch in itself is another stage that last uh into the live operation stage and that that is when the fun starts yeah ex exactly and you need to know how much it like how long it takes you to create new content from the game and then sell it because the golden cohort as we are talking about here those are the most engaged players that starts the game from the initial Global launch date and they are your super fans basically and they will eat through the content like there's no tomorrow and you need to keep them in the the game by giving them the content always so they have still something to eat otherwise they just churn and uh

yeah that's the part where you need to at least test your live operations during the monetization stage or at least plan it and and and be sure to like know that there will be something in the game because this is also one of the like crucial mistakes that games made even though they went through all these like suffering stages of soft launch and they made it and they're still alive but then they come out and the team is pretty much exhausted and has nothing you know in the pipeline and the cohorts pretty much disappear because people play out the basic content and they leave yeah and it's it look it looks pretty good after the global launch for first 30 days 40 days and then uh the content ends and suddenly the game is dead it's like well and numbers will always go down that that's that's that's usually the case that if you don't uh start really small and scale like steadily numbers from glob blunch will always go down in a way that like that's that's the

natural flow but you need to keep them at some kind of stabilized Baseline value yeah they doesn't need to doesn't need to go down if you have a long enough content for like what half a year maybe because uh even if you scale um right out of the gate to I don't know million a month uh spent and there is actually content that players can uh uh can and then play then uh you can sustain that growth still but if uh if you ramp up the spend at the beginning and then after 30 days there's nothing that they will do then of course I mean they you need to scale back because it doesn't make sense to to aim for I don't know six months or one year uh payback period when there's no content and like the the retention um profile or like the long-term retention is not there so you will see after day 30 or day 60 like there's 1% of players still in the game I mean yeah of course I mean you will never get that money back you need to be very very careful

about that and uh you know you can you can actually uh try to get these kind of data um spending um some some money in the in the monetization stage because yeah well you need to be prepared for uh for the global launch and how you can uh model the budget well based on the data you have from the soft launch because uh this is the question I I usually get like okay so what is going to be the budget for for Global L world I don't know I mean we need to look at the data and then based on that create the create the budget so usually I have like three um three scenarios like first is like the minimal budget based on the data I see so let's say it's 50k then there's the adventures budget uh based on the data which can be anywhere from 100K to 500k and then there there is the let's scale this uh game dream budget dream budget uh and that can be in millions but uh you know we have

these three scenarios it doesn't mean that if you commit to the third scenario and spending 1 million then you need to spend that if you if you see that uh you know the content is not ready then you need to scale back immediately but yeah in this stage uh definitely what is really nice to have like yakob said is the the live op systems in place some kind of in-game offers events um from the content perspective so uh you know what you can expect at least a little bit out after the global launch and uh thanks to the apple and idfa changes this is the this is the time when you start um messing around with the ska Network conversion schema and all these uh IDF nans because um usually what I see and uh back to the question you you asked at the beginning Felix the first 24 hours are really important and uh sending as many events as possible through the SK Network

schema back to the channels is important and if you can uh get it right then you can scale pretty quickly on the iOS site as well that's what what I saw for multiple games and you can even build uh prediction models out of the the day one um numbers I mean it's pretty hard to do so but it's definitely possible so uh yeah those are the the the three stages that I use and um encourage all the developers out there to use it as well uh to measure the the R numbers um in the monetization stage so they can uh they can uh expect uh what the the the budget will look like and the data will look like after the global launch any questions guys comments anything I'm just wondering like obviously you're describing it you know how to do it right how hard this is from a UA perspective this is something a CEO could pick up and learn like on the fly or is it quite difficult actually when

you're describing this it is quite difficult but uh all CEOs and Founders should definitely run at least one campaign in their life uh just to be able to see how it works to dip their toes yeah to dip their toes um yeah I'm not sure if they can uh like create this strategy and and run it by themselves but they they can definitely try I mean there's a lot of information out there that they can read get but also a lot of professionals out there that they can reach out to and um and it's the soft Louch UA is harder from the perspective of uh you know you're running the UA campaigns in very limited amount of countries so the CPI is increasing almost every time you run a new campaign so you need to also think about the creative strategy and uh how to refresh the creatives really often like every week and I usually do like every week a new video but in softline you need even like two videos or three videos a week because it's a limited amount of uh

countries and the inventory you know it's it's not getting any bigger so you are massaging those players always like with the creative so you need to have a new angle every time I think it's all about those pitfalls that if you are fresh into this you just don't know that you will fall into so people with experience will just you know live through them so they know because they have already fallen into them before so I guess that's that's like the biggest thing you get times but but the other part is that still like this thing uh evolves every time it's not that you can use the same Knowledge from five years now because as oh yeah of course I mean this is a living organ organism and also the same thing uh applies to Global Lunes yeah yeah so even now like we have the skad network Shenanigans and like the newest on that part and stuff like that so it still kind of evolves and you know in two years maybe you will be doing crypto soft lunches why not yeah well not years I mean this year for sure I mean very keen on on making that happen

I'm not probably end with the great analogy you had last time Felix but I don't have any I don't have I don't have any but no more mushrooms today yeah no mushrooms today unfortunately you you can eat mushrooms for your lunch if you want but I think yeah I think that's it guys right so uh thank you very much for listening please share feedback subscribe share with your friends colleagues if you find this interesting if you don't find it interesting let us know um we can have a discussion about that and um you know thank you very much bye guys see you see you next [Music] week wait a minute because I I see there is the my little girl just her diaper you had an electronic

one electronic diaper Mai would turn his daughter into an app like notifications coming from heric you to go handle that from my wife to go handle that [Music]