two & a half gamers session #51 - Live Special @ Gamesforum Barcelona

[Music] today is kind of special one it's two and a half Gamers live uh if you can please welcome to stay [Applause] phix yeah it'sing dude I can hear from all is it yeah I need this you need to do your famous intro I do okay so welcome everyone this is no Bush gaming podcast two and a half Gamers session number 51 this is special session OB we are live done it once so this is going to be very interesting so we're sharing exra insights Ro knowledge for our daytoday UA game designation jobs we're definitely not discussing the latest news but we're having some fun let's see let's don't forget this still 4:00 a.m. conference discussion live let's take it too seriously today

feelings thanks okay not let me just ask one thing first that I'm a bit confused about because like today is the UA day right and tomorrow is the Adon day like tomorrow is the day when stuff gets done like really important stuff happens you know increasing ad Revenue that's what actually drives LTV and I've got to say one thing from seeing talks here today love all you guys but UA people are so Floy and I want to ask you m here on stage why are UA people so flamboyant if you're speechless I guess you know it's GRE day what are you talking about you're still boy you know what I can say people yeah exactly you can go so anyway what are we talking about today so it's going to be well few things about ad one uh going from admob

to Max yeah talking about looking forward to having this conversation with admo people and Max in the room so usually I'm hiding behind a screen but you know I'll be honest and uh yeah hopefully the Army doesn't capture me or Army doesn't I'm not sure like how we like usually it's like can be really awward yeah yeah you're usually hiding behind screen yeah should we interact more with people or just pretend they're not there I mean maybe for my part they might have a comment or two so let's see okay yeah actually if you have any any comments leave please now just raise a hand and then we might answer I we'll try to then I'm going to talk about a little bit like how I think U and look like this year already mentioning the first session morning and then it's going to be Segway from creative actually gam sh are you I will yeah so before start

great conference I have I I'm very disappointed because I tried to get Marg during the lunch and couldn't get one and here of first problem of course okay you can start yeah so I want to talk about a couple of things on the admon front that I'm seeing right now uh the first one is is anyone in the room actually from ad ad yeah ad yeah yeah okay so no ad okay okay the reason that no one from adob is here is because right now the people that work are ad in admob are the hottest piece of real estate these guys are like small leprechauns running around because right now they have a list and they have a list of companies that they can white label on app and Max for admob bidding and admob bidding right now is the hottest like club or hardest thing to do in admon right why

so if you start using so basically the adma bidder is the best thing since slice breay like it's the best piece of technology that's been invented in our industry for adom for literally 10 years and the reason for that is basically as soon as you switch it on I've used it in 14 games with a couple of clients you switch it on and then just magically 10 days later your ad R goes up by always 12 % no matter what you do so if you get on this magical list that's guarded which is why they're not here basically you will earn your employer 10% more Revenue guarantee yeah who are you what did you do with the old Felix what oh he did he did okay where's the deci 10.2 but anyway so that's why they're hiding so they released this bidder on a closed beta in what was it September companies worldwide and they all saw

tremendous growth it was great and right now they are releasing another 40 companies worldwide so right now it's everyone's job who has a you know who has any AD Revenue in any game or app it's your job to beg borrow steal your way onto this list so the way to do it is you first need to speak to Google and then Google needs to agree with Max so it's like two parties here that you need to flee right so find these ad more people see he left see you saw see he took his list and he ran out so yeah so basically the easiest way to earn more money right now in ad mob or in mediation is just to get on This Bitter list if you get on there you're going to be you know in your CEO's good graces right so the Pres is you need to Ping your you know basically like how they do it is like they look on like company growth so you need to just you know project how big you will be as a result of the bidding and if you're a small

company then you're [ __ ] yeah right now you need a lot more finesse if you're small yeah not going to lie them stuff I mean you know dinner hey how about them how about that bidding yeah so that's the way to go how long is this going to work so basically this the the little trick right now is you can use ad mob on placement and bidding until basically they stop the roll out or finish the roll out and they said that's probably going to be like q1 next year so you get to double dip which is really nice so right now like that is the lowest hanging fruit in all of ab super easy and what happens after the I you know we all go to heaven I don't know like we'll see no guarantees no anyway and then after like yeah yeah salvation see anyway so after that uh probably the lowest hanging fruit right now in ad mediation or ad monetization is APS so Amazon publisher

Services here's another big company that's moved into Mobile and they're not opening it up for the general population and they have a list as well but these guys they don't even tell you who has this list so basically what happens if you get on the list it's like a cool Club I guess if you're on the list like your banners and justicial will make a lot more money uh the trick here is that basically how it works so um yeah am publisher Services is a amalgamation of e-commerce demand which is great you get the same ecpm as other gaming demand and then also you get a bunch of dsps that bid into your inventory that increases basically the ecpm so the trick here is you can use something called so first acronym APS Amazon publisher Services second acronym they love acronyms Jeff basos always loved acronyms so the second thing you have to work with is T I don't know what it stands for but it's called p and that means essentially you can do direct IO deals with the piece so

what happens then is that basically that means that APS can't take a margin anymore so if you get whitelisted you run this for about four weeks pick out the top three like BPS and you strike a direct deal with them you have to invoice them it's a bit more annoying but what happens is it just goes to the moon so if you do this Amazon publisher services will be your top like three ad partner on banners and NS it's amazing so how do I get on the list so no one knows Scholars maintain Scholars maintain that basically you have to go on a website that's really hard to find uh it's Amazon publisher services at something new partners M and then you apply MH and then you and then you do you don't hear anything and then 3 weeks later you either get denied or someone reaches out and says hello but what's going on behind there is they're seeing because apparently Amazon publisher Services buying a lot of inventory on PPS so they're seeing what the overlap is so basically if you have a of overlap

with your game then they'll Whit list you I know like the world is so unfair right now because like the two best like things for ad Med like ad monetization is literally Google with a list and Amazon with a list so the best Adon like thing is pre hope and kid that's the one that's the one yeah that's the one yeah why is all all these Club invitations man yeah I don't know man like you need to order a table I don't know yeah book a table yeah can you do you have anyone Amazon that actually can I met a guy who knows a guy I'm not on the list like I got lucky one so like I'm not on the list I just got lucky enough with one publisher it was really good but like yeah I'm not on the list uh I know a guy I think he's based in Amsterdam or Tokyo I'm not sure could be could be either or I mean I I I had I had a guy I was emailing with and then I had another client like hey coming like hat in hand

please sir can I have some more Impressions and they're like no so you know if you didn't that voice I would any impression yeah did anyone from ad actually walk in because that would be really good right now cuz you know that I just want to point out them oh it's good later on yeah later on maybe they're waiting for you yeah we where do we want to take it from here do we want to talk about head-to-head against admob and Max or she of course yeah yeah you know this unfiltered in front of people's easier because there's no one here right yeah of course yeah so also right now I'm wrapping up a head-to-head uh with ADM mediation and Max mediation and right now like on every video inventory you're getting 67% uplift between the two uh the main reason is because on admob mediation they're just so greedy so like admob as

a network takes up always majority of the share revenues which means that you don't get enough networks to compete for your ad inventory to basically bring it to the next level but the big downside is when you go to Max ad quality goes down because you know they have these annoying end cards that sometimes when you're running UA campaigns right Mar like what's the clickthrough rate you sometimes get I have no idea oh but you're FL boy you I was like I don't have CTR you know if you attend my panel discussion I told everybody I don't care what CTR did much Dramatics yeah anyway yeah yeah so the last thing I just want to like if you're ever doing a head tohe head test uh and you're doing something with Max just know that everything with them is in negotiation and everything can be dealt with so you can go to them and say can we change the end cards please they'll say no you're going to lose your ecpm but that's when you need to push and when you push after a couple of like tries you will get what you you want so

the thing is like Max right now looks a lot better than adol mediation but you're going to have to work for it and by working for it you're going to have seeing like a lot of more like less retention in the start because the ad formats are quite pushy especially like in the very end so they have different end card formats that are classified and they call them internally I think five plus a number like two numbers the first one refers to how much you need to wait before you can close the ad after the 30 seconds and then how many clicks it takes so a 53 means 5 Seconds waiting end card and a three click to click out so usually they start I think with a 54 so 5 second wait and 3 seconds to click out and you can decrease that to 5 + one and then that's when you basically get a little bit of UCM drop but you get a lot better retention so yeah right now between admob and Max 6% uplift if you move and it looks quite good that's right now the latest so the list and the list second list yeah that that was that was a lot of no

[ __ ] maybe you think better than to add some value than Mr flamboy UA manager most probably no uh because everybody's talking about how the future of the UA is going to look like I have no idea I mean Everything's changed so so it can be very different next month you not going to make any predictions oh no I hate Pi come on you know that okay but uh so how how I think the the UA is going to look like or like what's what is going to change so I have like few topics it's buets what kind of GS will benefit the most UA channels um then some creatives and privacy and AI automation [ __ ] so in terms of the budgets so everybody knows that you know this is some kind of like downturn economy recession whatever postco situation so now gaming companies actually getting or like spending less money but

they're spending less money because they were last year aiming for longer payback periods now because of this like times uncertain times times it's called times they're actually aiming for not 160 or 180 but 90 days or from 90 days to 60 days or 30 days and then obviously decreases your LTV certain extent so depends on the cash flow of the company as well so some companies from one year to 6 months to actually get the or actually have the cash their bank account because it's you know it's tough no of course that's that's what happens so no no prediction here what kind of games could actually benefit this the most you're the second best UA manager on on the on the podcast what what would you what would you think which kind of games to benefit the most from this in terms of iip versus ads or

genres the ones that the F so you are the second best man cookie you a cookie yeah eyes are beautiful that's what he always says so it's I assume it's going to be ad monetized cames because of the short peric periods and and L cpis for the actual Adas campaigns so Adas campaigns most on Google Unity or app plugin I work with Google a lot on theas campaigns it's it's actually working quite well uh so they can bring a low cpis and then short per periods seven days 30 days 60 days kind of like nice scale and also very good quality players that watch [ __ ] T FS that definitely keep that in mind we actually have an episode about Google Adas campaigns how they can be structured and everything so you can check it out also by the way uh who is uh actually subscriber of our Channel raise a hand nice that's nice everybody else well for

YouTube subscribe I I checked the the Subscribe uh number so keep that in mind how many how many season assists have we gotten now from different companies only one almost like two two right two two so what un I don't know man I'm not saying anything yeah yeah you guys in trouble you guys in trouble numerous times Yeah question in terms of the UA channel so uh we discussed like earlier today but moving away from Facebook is still working quite well for me um I'm adding kind of like app and IR into the mix so actually you know you're talking [ __ ] about these networks I did not yeah so I actually work with them and put them in the U yeah uh to actually help maintain or even improve the quality of the of the users and how does the the UA mix look like for me at the moment so it's always like Google un Tik Tok and Facebook and then adding up in Iron source the number of channels obviously

depends on the scale payback period and everything that I mentioned first uh first point and then in regards to the creatives you're moving kind of from the gaml focused Concepts or gameplay oriented um creatives to let's call it altered C playay Concepts come on fake ads you're using the assets from the game with fake game play maybe maybe maybe of the campaigns you run with fake ads are you part of the problem or this course I don't around fake yeah it's not fake we call it fake exactly we always call it fake I I call it altered gameplay Al maybe you really yeah of course you know so what what the [ __ ] is that you already said that it's it's uh it's fake as it's not fake alter game p exactly I said you build the C because

you build the custom levels in unity or whatever you know um level Builder or editor you have from the scratch using the gameplay assets therefore of course these custom events you know obviously they're not shown in the in the game but uh they can work quite well uh you can get pretty nice um uh pretty nice CPI sent to us afterwards uh then and you know when we talking about this altered game play Concepts think about uh rash Royale Frozen City or golden goblins CR which means you can actually we're going to show you yeah you're going to show you that actually in a second and I I had some like this like privacy and automation [ __ ] written down here so you touched that uh earlier today all these uh check GPT and then mid journey and all this AI fun stuff we all going to lose our jobs uh most probably no yeah me me first don't worry I'm first

I'm first I'm first you second and then you go why I win what why hey I you're ultimated first ultimate second I'm [Music] winning not like for me it actually kind of improved my workflow so it works well at least for now yeah of course you need to experiment 100% don't worry okay then you can continue yeah start talking about let's go what do you want I want hear the Privacy what if privacy is like you know it's still coming so I have no idea what's going to happen with scan 4.0 with privacy sandbox we have um actually guys from adig te who work directly with with Google on the Privacy s books actually coming to the podcast talk about what's going to happen from Singler the eron from yeah CTO is going to talk about the how to actually set up scan 4.0 properly

for for now there's lot of fluff and you know articles about like it's coming but I know I don't know really like how to set it up properly now I need data there are some posss coming in first few it can take months until it's uh roll up propop so yeah that's it there you go all right blow us away yeah let's go to the game you want to show the Yeah Yeah there um yeah which one first um lately we'll been talking a lot about fat on the podcast and like what there and because what do you mean fake ads altered game s okay uh so we we're talking about it a lot uh we've seen some games even talk about it on the podcast that pretty much you take an old game you pull their fake it and suddenly your revenue and download spikes like 10 times 20 times like XO example or why it works yeah why

it works why not everybody's doing that and that's that's the ultimately golden question and uh there are a few games recently that we covered and I think there's like a repeating pattern we talk about here because what we saw before in those previous games was that so we started with this kind of fake ad game play you know the EUR War spins D character in lava and stuff like that it was nowhere in the game later as we move down the line people actually started to put these play go into the game and and actually Incorporated some of the stuff into the tutorial but it's still kind of very rough it's duct taped if you go to Hero Wars R people are actually asking where are the puzzles they're playing because they're expecting the puzzles will show up somewhere there which they will never will so yeah it's still kind of a rough but works Hero Wars uh has the same Revenue as Red Shadow Legends even though R Shadow is like CGI actors I don't know who they sign up lately whatever and Hero Wars is an old

game really like I don't know six years old something old and they just were proed up by the pay so that's that's the first thing I would say uh the second step in the evolution is something better sorry I'm just trying to find the you plug in your blog yeah there it is yeah plug uh yeah so this is current like newest format I've seen it even like in more sexist way or they actually hire the porn star that narrates it now your favorite and stuff like that so they have that but anyway this is the very rough thing and in the end this is just taking a game not doing really much changes to it game design wise product wise and just faking it and slapping the the playables and stuff we talk about that then there's the second part where it actually go trying to find you need to keep up with me man no I'm trying to find the the guy on RIT who is actually still trying to find that yeah puzzles that puzzles second second example would be something more sophisticated something like Kingdom Rush or top war

where they actually build the creatives into the game playay and they are the gam playay because show [ __ ] it you can just keep up uh with Hyper casual games the game play is the creative it's easy because as we know hyper casual games are done before so you first do the Creative stest then see the lowest cpis and then you make the game the animators are actually ones doing the games you don't really make the games as like you know maybe this no no no you just make 20 40 different creatives I I remember seeing a case study or or was it a case study when wodoo took whole iio it was just a mechanic from a PC game donut country or something I think and they just like you know putting in everything like iio model that model that like 20 different kind creatives this mon performs better let make it and voila gamees so hyper casual gameplay is something that lowers CPI is very feeling and and it got got into the games these days so so we have games such as Kingdom Rush and top war which

are actually modifying the first time funnel in order to serve the creative there and it's not fake because you actually play The Little T you do stuff around it and it seems like the game is like it is it's not pretty much fake but it's kind of and now what I want to talk about today is this kind of element of adding pretty much another core game play into a completely new game so let's say let's take Fiona's far that's like a great example by the way all the games we talk about today they are kind of new and has very strong trend line numbers meaning they're making like 60 70k just in a day this one especially Frozen City that I will talk around next makes like 200k a day combining I and ads and golden goblins I guess the same so all within like Millions a month Prett pretty froz City yeah this is this is frozen City my

wife yeah that's great and you can see by the way all the games use actually the same fight it it's actually got a point all the games actually use the same exact same creative concept what's what's really interesting about it that even though we can know it's fake it's not fake and this is the real important distinction because the games out like the things that you see there like go taking out these rocks they actually have it in the game it's not fake no no of course not if we go to Frozen City uh this is I guess the the lowest the lowest kind of correlation there like you don't really like travel resource but they actually chop wood you build stuff from wood and you have the kind of resource management there in the game so again it's not that fake yeah he's the he's the like stting resource uh so we see this kind of a shift towards the creatives being the main source of lower CPI and then hitting that fake wall where you get like 30% of reviews immed that like

everything is fake it's fake don't play this it's fake and slowly games are trying pretty much to convert this into some kind of actionable game play so they can exclude all these fake reviews and and pretty much incorporate into their game play and it's working out it's working out pretty well and it's pretty much increasing the game design difficulty on this game because let's say this game Frozen City it's an idle game it's very very similar to something like I don't know Adventure communist or something like they usual Idol cure but in the end they also have animal war in the game so you battle uh I don't think they're they they don't use it in creatives I don't know why but haven't seen lately a creative that they have there they're currently using just this kind of resource one sim like to Golden goblins but they actually have a like a actual game that is pretty much animal War where you have like Auto battler RPG Auto battler built into the game so all of these games uh this is an idle game

Fiona Farm is actually a family Island game with a match stream on top of it so they actually build whole tomb blast into the game so imagine how much time it takes you to build tomb blast and then on top of Tomb blast you build family Island how much timeing all the time yeah 350 yeah so but but it enables them to do these things that even though the creatives are fake they are not fake because you actually do these things there you clear stuff you clear F altered gameplay altered game now actually work now it's altered game playay and your face what I what I'm getting out of this that we're like for you edge people not for me Product people we we're going to get pushed into the cord hey I'm the victim of this man I you know you you the main problem yeah so what's happening that there's more and more impact coming from marketing into actual product design because what is happening here games are adjusting to the creators not not the

other way around it was always the other way around now it's the like completely different because the CPI are so damn High we have all this like post Ida apocalypse that this you go you manager yeah yeah so and and you are you are pretty much trying to diminish this kind of a problem from FAS because you already can use this magical weapon or fake ads but it produces lot of these results that you don't want which is fake reviews and stuff like that it's not good for your game so you actually adapt and the other very very important kind example is that in my opinion all of these games I guess would have much higher engagement all because all of the games are usually based on timers so in this game I'd say the the real game the family Island game is based around timers you create resources it's the usual production puzzle timer here timer there and so on so for you need to wait what happens during the wait you go play Match Game what happens in Frozen City if you running on timers you're going to play the auto B what happens in Golden

goblins if you're waiting on timers you're going to play The Rock game where you pretty much destroying the Rocks so my guess is that they still keep the user in a really really prolong session for me for instance when I was playing Frozen City I could still do stuff within the first session for like two hours it literally took me like two hours until the game started so we're seeing this kind of a new paradigm how marketing creatives are really incorporated into the gam playay but properly now properly this is no more pin creative all hyper con by the way yeah this is of course hyper casual B because they lower CPI because they're very accessible so why not learn so fast yeah but I'm guessing next year and even this year we're going to see more and more of these but these are not really easy to make because for instance FAS Farm if you look into the game uh if if you compare it with family Island family island is gated by the energy if

the energy runs out you cannot dig any more resources you cannot build stuff goodbye see you in next session these guys have energy but it doesn't regenerate what regenerates are the hearts on the match tree game because it's again connected really perfectly and then the match three game is actually the monetization why because match three game has much better monetization so every game is going to be hyper casual in the future definitely not hyper casual no but like the F like the first time us your experience not even the FI it's it's like the core engine of the game the M stays during the whole game it's not like we said before with Hero Wars and like all these other games where you are just using this kind of fake creative gameplay during the three it's now completely incorporated into the game and a big part of the game like this game for instance you get match three boosters from the resource management game which then helps you to grow and cross levels in the levels you use the energy to build stuff so it's

completely connected and it's working pretty well I guess and the other thing also that's happening is that I guess we're moving more and more into this kind of Asian budget territory where Asian gamers in like Japan and like all Asia pretty much games have much higher and den feature set there so attention budget and like the feature pretty much the possibility for the player to absorb so many features and even control them is getting higher a little bit I guess so we'll see but it's it's getting more and more sophisticated and My worry is that by next year if you're building your usual match streak game your usual simulation game your usual whatever game it won't be enough you will need another core gaml build into the game to kind of offset some of the problems and enable you to use the fake creatives which won't be fake anymore and that will be your hyper casual gameplay edit to the game so next time when you talk with your production team or you know product people ours and and you ask them like what are

competitors doing how how how they're Shifting the creatives are they incorporating into the game play really is it is it common in our genre you should definitely look into it because you're going to get un drowned by these people kind of new still usual for all the new games out there it's not usual but we're getting there we're slowly getting there because the CPI wall will just push you there how how can you then go you know around like so challenging lpv we got a question we actually never get to do questions for our podcast ask me questions yeah sorry can we get one more mic please EXC ising sorry can you is not working just there we go say something here you go yeah thanks this better there you go do yeah let's let's yeah let a question questions before we wrap up it's been a long day huh yeah I think so

I have a question sure all right so I'll Just sh um uh I know you compared a few games unfortunately I have not played any of them yet H but of course you we talked about like fake ads or misleading ads [Music] and that's H so I also was the victim of watching something this look fun this looks fun and I download the game that never happens like what I play in the playable ads that never happens so I just drop off exactly so I drop off and now of course you compared the few games uh Fiona farms and also Frozen City uh but I'm just wondering if I don't know which one is more successful than the other but I'm wondering for Frozen city is it frozen city is definitely highest revenue if you talking about that good this is the other question so do you think they're more successful because of the way they played with the creative or because this is an original game that came from Steam in 2016 and they have

kind of this like existence in the markets and so people are like excited to try the game yeah I think it's just second thing you said here it's both of these games are pretty new so I would if you check those charts on like you know dat whatever you still see the line goes up so we don't know if they when they will hit their ceiling my guess is it will still take some time both of these games have a lot that that can be improved upon them like pretty much about Frozen City if you want to like just uh we have a separate episode on golden goblin at Frozen City if you want to check those out uh Frozen City for instance have very very few I'm not sure what happened but I guess it's it's our time to leave the I think so yeah so so we'll see but just to answer the question quickly yeah much city is definitely capitalizing on the niche that they created from fro because even if you look at the game they put the

temperature UI as the biggest UI thing in the whole UI so it's it's there going after the survival apocalyptic but's Farm has the potential to go even higher thank you nice good any more questions we are heading for drinks we to drink I think it's been fun yeah well I need to check the subscriber account where's the first of all don't get greedy all right anyway let's wrap up yeah oh four free new thank than guys yeah we can try harder but thank you very much no thanks for coming please subscribe you know would definitely help us to to grow even more and uh yeah you can talk after some things thank you guys [Music] [Applause] [Music]

I don't know