two & a half gamers session #6 - Supercell rant, why do fake ads work? UA fundamentals Q&A

[Music] oh hello hello hello our dear listeners uh this is no gaming podcast 2 a half Gamers session number six six already uh we're discussing the latest news fun stuff and and dropping some knowledge in the end as usual so but don't forget this is a 4:00 a.m. discussion conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously as we don't take it too seriously but yeah okay let's dive in and and enjoy uh so hi guys Felix and yakob um how are you D hello there good I was at the SARS K2 gaming convention in London last week uh everyone was yeah PGC everyone who's anyone was there except you guys which means you guys are the only ones right now in the entire game industry that doesn't that don't have Co oh really okay so that was okay amazing

I don't know it was really great seeing everyone again but so many people already have reached out and been like oh I got the Rona yeah yeah that's uh that's what I'm afraid I'm just sitting here waiting is this a headache or is it co we'll see I was also at this other big social event that was happening it was called queuing for the Lost Arc servers oh really okay yeah I want to I want to try lost AR next week most probably because my wife's taking my daughter uh to a cottage so oo going to be most probably alone at home so it's it's going to be me and either oldfashioned or uh multiple battles of prco and then some games not sure yet not sure yet it looks pretty gorgeous but the feature said again is just Korean so there's like so much systems I even struggle to learn them all oh no way no way way you are the like the master of PA of Exile and you are the the one that enjoys that so much so but to be to be honest throw out that prco replace with coffee sounds

like a difficult game oh well see see but but but like these guys don't mess around like the game look completely gorgeous it's like miles ahead of any competitor that's going to come out like P of Exile 2 or Diablo 4 like yeah this will be a tough fight then I'm really looking forward to it oo okay and I need to play it as soon as I can yeah okay and uh well next week is going to be a special session number seven because we are going to have a guest so uh definitely tune in next week I'm not going to tell you who it's going to be but it's a mystery one it's a mystery one but we definitely going to talk about the crypto and blockchain games so we'll see H this week we are discussing a little bit of Google uh limiting ad tracking then Spotify acquiring two major podcast Tech platforms and of course supercell Revenue increase by 4

45% and then there is the main topic which is going to be about UA fundamentals and uh I want to have a discussion so I'm going to ask some UA related questions and Felix and yakob is going are going to answer those and then and then I'm going to give my opinion at the end let's see let's let's see how it goes yeah okay so basically Google announced uh The Limited ad tracking across apps on Android but this is going to happen most likely in two years that's what they said and um they are following obviously the move that Apple did and introduced um you know couple of months ago you know all know what we are talking about these changes will not be implemented as I said not not even in last two years um it's going to curb the sharing of the user data with third parties restricting uh advertising

tracking for users who move between different apps on billion devices running on Android they said it's planned eventually phase out all the advertising IDs um but they also said this is going to happen in the privacy sendbox and they want to actually work with the with the industry to make it happen so this is actually a really nice nice change when I'm looking at the at what Apple did and they said uh this is going to happen then they postpone it multiple times uh didn't share any information about anything and now here comes Google and uh it seems they're playing the well the developers Friendly Card really I I remember Apple's working with the industry being the ads that they were running with 30 people chasing a guy and then disappearing them with just one button ah come on I mean look we'll see what happens but it's still like now we

have two years so uh I'm not going to do anything for last for for next like one and a half year in terms of like preparing for this because when the Apple um idfa was announced like everybody was like oh w we need to prepare like yeah sure well everybody prepared and then they need to change everything because it was it was changed million times so um yeah let's see let's see what happens I mean it's just quite clear that Google's and Apple's business is so fundamentally different that I think that whatever Google does change in two years is going to be so much more ad friendly than the Apple solution I remember having a discussion with a friend of mine who uh runs a dsps had a product and he says that even if you reset the idas every 30 days you'd still be able to get roughly the same amount of tracking and the same amount of conversions as you currently do for UA and retargeting and I think I'm dare to say that I think Google will probably

end up doing something like that maybe every 20 or 30 days they just reset your idfa or g g yeah okay really that's interesting but is there any kind of power grab here that uh like let's say apple did to kind of put some put traffic into the Apple search Arts like is Google following some kind of agenda here I mean come on how much money ma do you spend with Google compared to the other ones like they already have it yeah they already have it man it's like uh you know they have the Firebase uh and uh you you can run Tas campaigns which is basically the value optimization that's available on Facebook and you can only run this if you use Firebase what's Firebase Google product Google analytics so if you don't use Google Google analytics you can run the most effective campaigns and and do we do we expect any other sacrifices being let's say collateral damage lying on the ground than as Facebook uh was hit again so more more heat just on the same people most most probably I mean um

Facebook will be even more but Google is pretty much fine you have they have their own ad Network I mean uh UA Channel which is uh nowadays most powerful to be honest and they introduced even like at Aras campaigns like firstly it was a pretty like a interesting move because they said that it's allowed only when you use admob as a mediation so again like keeping everything in there ecosystem but now it's uh they finally listened and it's like okay so we they opened it up for other mediation platforms as well you just need to do some uh some kind of like um tracking of events and changing that on the back end but it's kind of easy so uh yeah I mean they're just uh empowering themselves basically okay let's see interested to see what happens I mean it's not going to be as big a slap in the face as when Apple did it so

yeah I don't think as many people are as worried maybe we'll be surprised you never know because like for for me the idfa um Shenanigans it's still like I still I'm still pretty positive about all the campaigns on the on the iOS it's just matter of Optics and a different evaluation that's it let's see and any any dates that they they at least the industry expect this will happen two years they said two years and also they also mentioned that if uh industry and and Google won't find any proper solution how to go about the Privacy they will postpone it even more yeah I mean kind of the climate in Washington around you splitting up big tech companies and regulation will also probably have a big say in this because torpedoing like all this big ad tech companies uh getting them off the G and a bad climate in Washington was going to reflect extremely badly on Google as well so these two years you know also

the whatever happens in Washington will play a part okay interesting interesting okay well maybe we'll see the Facebook Stock drops uh even more yeah I was expecting it to drop below 200 yesterday but it didn't happen so also what uh what Eric s just tweeted was also important because um you know Shopify also dropped quite heavily from like I think more than like 50% since uh summer last last year you know it's like a lot of the small businesses um advertising on Facebook they use Shopify because you it's it's pretty good um solution for them well I guess they are having a pretty hard time now nowadays if if Facebook continues the trend next week it will be 50% from the peak it's already 46% from the peak so well you you're the one that's I did hear some rumors that Pocket Gamer

actually that yeah sirel shamberg is actually not like the second Top Dog up there anymore apparently Nick kle is like viewed higher and reports directly to Zuck because he handled kind of the whole um what was it called the Cambridge analytica Scandal so much better than Cheryl wasn't he promoted he was promoted recently deal with the government so doesn't have to go there yeah I read that okay or C something during that wasn't Co it wasn't yeah nice all right let's see you know the week is still young I could still Catch Co we'll see yeah see okay let's move on um yeah next thing on the menu is the usual yearly article from supercell CEO ilap panan uh maybe let's first read the facts and numbers and then get into semantics so supercell's Revenue increased by 45% to 2.24 billion in 20

21 uh as supercell published their financial results uh compared to previous year which was 1.48 uh which was the I think fifth or sixth year of continuous Decline and this is the first time that the tide has turned around which is a 45% year-over-year increase and the studio generated profits before taxes of 852 million which is like 80% growth compared to 2020 463 million oh my God yeah but um again if we compare it to the height that they achieved uh in 2015 it was 2.30 2326 million 2 billion sorry sorry 2.3 billion something say what was the number Mr Tony rier which one again 2 billion okay 2 billion 326 billion

and and that that was their uh Peak profit also oh no sorry they took it down uh 848 was the profit so so they went over their big profit now uh the other part of the post was about Ila talking about his mistakes and pretty much it was all in this kind of a tone that uh we're amending what we were Clinging On and uh always like the Mantra that supercell always used that small teams are the ones that pretty much brings the best results was pretty much shattered I would say where they where even when you read to the the updates and the whole feature set of the games that they even mention in the article it's more based on live Ops because there weren't that many new games coming out uh from brawl star all all the games if I understand correctly are still in soft lunch so after brawl star they didn't Global lunch anything else if I get that right yeah so pretty much all the work is done based on their liveops capabilities that are steadily improving which probably

means the supercell finally got the point that they really need a much more strong liveop team as they can compete with all the other companies on the market which are really big teams running their liveops and the games are pretty much yeah well if if you have like team of uh five six people and you are uh having a game with a multi-million Revenue a day or well couple of billions uh also during the the year basically you can't run it with five five people come on and then what he mentioned there I mean this is just a really nice PR PR piece obviously it's it's really nice from him that he takes all the blame as a as a CEO he should I mean that's uh that's really nice of him but seriously like how the whole industry was talking about how see it how come you didn't see it up until now I mean the the revenu is declining six years in a row and now suddenly five

okay sorry five oh that's completely different story then if it's only five I it's like how come you can't can't see it seriously and then he mentions the the burnout of the of the people of course I mean if you're running these these liveop systems with five people of course they are going to be uh burn out but but I mean like it's completely completely turnaround here because they're even said that they have seven games in soft lunch or some kind of seven games in different stages different stages let's say that that's the other thing but also don't forget that they opened the new console PC Focus studio in Montreal which which I think is the first time where a mobile company actually goes back to the PC uh console stage I I I like do we know of any other examples where like a mobile compan is going into PC and console like in the scale of supercell I think Deep Silver did it but that's just cuz cuz I kind of failed in Mobile so it wasn't really was

kind of retreating so I don't know but I I never saw anything like this before so for for me it seems that maybe they got the word from tensent that maybe it's time to start again growing or diversifying if tent is uh standing right behind you and it's like whispering in your ear like hey but guys you hav seen seen 10 cent stock price like over the last half year with kind of the punishments in China like I'm sure he got a call from yeah yeah exactly being like hey man time to grow yeah yeah put your together and uh turn this around growing but but like I read his letter like he came across as very thoughtful um like I thought it was a well written letter I wonder if he wrote it if he had a ghost writer or if he wrote it like you you've had the most interactions with emoi like does that sound like him well I didn't have any interaction with him personally have idea here this I have no idea but but uh the rumor the words on the street

is that he definitely writes this but it's uh little bit edited by the the pr um Department which makes sense obviously but yes it was very very well written uh piece but you know all that everybody wanted to hear basically like too good to be true so I really would love to see those deep discussion he mentioned in the in the p is okay so we really thought this through and now we're changing everything you know we are definitely like um considering our um employees health before um everything else yeah sure I mean again where were you last couple of years is not like okay suddenly uh we know what we can we need to do how uh how do they run UA do you know that's also one of the big elephant in the room yeah so basically they have agency no well they have the UA in uh or

department or people in San Francisco and then they have some kind of agency somewhere nobody knows I think the Swedish agency that's what I've heard the rumor Bas somewhere in Sweden well you're based you're from Sweden so you should know Mr Swedish I have no idea I remember I remember bumping into a supercell designer and talking about stuff in PGC and he just said we don't do UA yeah EX I that was usually the official stance you would get from supercell people yeah yeah I like oh we don't run Performance Marketing like yeah sure I mean come on don't believe it still but if you compare if you compare supercell to playrix supercell is definitely very keen on their branding yes that's yes sure of course I can I get it but it's not how the U is done these days wake up seriously I mean yes brand is really important of course blah blah blah but now I mean the data

is important and if uh whatever works use it I think I think it's more of like reluctance to get your hands dirty from Super Cell side in a way that like they're trying to still preserve the kind of pureness of their IPs and everything and they wouldn't consider running let's say a fake ad thing like uh playc does all the time they just don't have any you know kind of a they don't have the balls to do it they don't have the balls to do it oh like look so there also there was some kind of discussion about why they don't have the ads in the game only in Heyday and like some of I read somewhere like okay so they were making like 200k a day but then um they said it's it's peanuts uh comparing to the inab revenues and then they don't want to destroy their brand with ADD Revenue like okay well I would also a bit of an ancient view if you ask me ex what are the percentage of people who purchase like even putting ads 5 days after like you got a user if they haven't purchased

or showing any signals that just makes complete sense of course I mean it's not like 2013 or 14 anymore it's like yeah everybody was looking at EDS like uh it's a cancer but now you know you can make serious money I mean if they're earning 200k a day on one game like easily they could be making a couple Mill a day competing with kind of the likes of uh Voodoo Theus they having but it's just they're like nope I'm fine purity of the brand I get it but you know that's what's the purity of the brand work that's a lot of money you're leaving on the table and it's a very easy of Avenue of growth like instead of risking building a new game you could take what you already have put in ads to some of the user base and then like yeah 10 cent would be happy and you wouldn't have to take as big risks building new games I I I think it was also a matter of like the let's say the portfolio Direction because if you look at their games before supera was always considered to be the most Innovative company in the industry and being the trend seter all the games that they did were pretty much creating their own

genre or remastering something that work great on PC and then putting into Mobile but lately if you compare let's say Rush Wars and Heyday pop that was this was I think like the really first time they pretty much followed the Trends on the market and didn't really innovate that much now that they have all the clash games spin-offs in soft lunch there's a lot of innovation coming from that side oh really there is one game I'm not sure which Clash it is which looks completely like Legends of Soul guard I mean that's like the same game how is that Innovative I'm talking about all of the games some of them like let's let's take for instance everdale everdale is a really really risky shot because they pretty much wanted to turn a Forex game into some kind of Cooperative Farm will which and and remember it was in soft lunch under osmium interactive which was this kind of fake account company so they're still taking the risky shots but it's not as I would say b as it was before because it's not that easy I

would say and you know what I don't really understand so they have the game in uh in soft lounge with osum interactive whatever that means mhm they have KP they turn it back on their account and then they turn it back on their account like why I mean what why would you do that already yeah exactly exactly so you're Gathering the data there so what's the point I I I really don't understand that maybe they hope that you know when you put games on super cell account the community of supercell players pretty much jumps on them and then they get the traffic that they need or you know like different kpi it's just like the lowest hanging fruit here is do Performance Marketing and put in ads for the non-paying user of the and then like such low maybe maybe you though you should go IL tell him this nobody told him that yeah because nobody again had the balls to to actually speak up but but maybe we are making this up no but yeah we don't know anything that's going on in there from the outside but from the outside it looks very clear

Performance Marketing and ads will solve most of your issues definitely all the respect super sell I mean I wish I have a company that produces multi- billion revenue of course but you know you can do even better that's the thing yeah that that that that's that's the thing that everybody is pretty much pointing out all these years that there're so much like potential that they still could get even though they were 5 years in decline in a row you know like like I said like he was stubborn then uh he was the one who wanted to have the small teams so I get it let's see how that changes now and over time in the future as well but look they said uh now they are willing to be putting more risks or like um trying to be a bit more risky in terms of uh I guess um launching more games and making not making like multi-billion hit but some Millions here

and there would be definitely I'm really looking forward to the to the PC game they will release like so much stuff that they can do like they have one of the best designers in that company to be yeah sure of course like but mobile designers not PC or console designers mobile designers are pretty much just in my opinion you just need to take care of much more uh variables than like PC designers okay because I get that it takes a completely different skill set to create something like God of War or you know stuff like that but in the end do you think they will be going for a premium game I don't think so they will be going for PC freet tolay game that's that's that's my guess of course do you think that they're really going to go for a lot sense actually that yeah that actually why would they do I don't know because they're super they can do what one of the best designer Innovative teams in free toplay and you want to diversify into PC you go into premium well look they they're soft launching their games on iOS which

doesn't make any sense so why you know oh that that's part of that brand thing I don't know let's not go there right okay let's see I mean let's see I my bet my bet is PC free to play and awesome game awesome design and to be honest I think it will be crossplatform something like genin you'll be able to play it both on PC and both on mobile okay so uh you already sent an application to super right so now you're just uh trying to get wishing them wishing them all the best yeah wishing them all the best yeah of course of course me we can we can Beach about all all we all we won but we haven't achieved anywhere close to anything we achieved so yeah at the end of the day yeah should we move on yeah yeah yeah let's do that let's move on okay so this is actually one of the most exciting admon uh news I think I've read about in like like last year so Spotify is acquiring two mjor podcast Tech platforms um they announced on Friday it's acquiring both charitable

and pod sites and these are the most prominent podcast marketing and AD attribution companies and this is kind of the like the next two acquisition Spotify has been making in a long line of Acquisitions and they have stated that they will start to programmatically insert ads into podcast on their platform so how does this relate to gaming so my theory is that they will open this up kind of with audio audio like kind of with audio and audio mob M and then they'll start running game ads in like gaming ads and ads in games as well and we might actually be seeing the kind of f fan or like yeah Google making for kind of monetization on audio ads which will be the big one so I'm actually quite excited because if a big player like this steps in you always get the high ecpm and that could Kickstart the audio outed Revolution that people

have been talking about so what I wanted to discuss with you guys was M do you think you'll be able to do UA for gaming with audio ads only H well why not I mean that's uh that's what I I mention on the the first uh during the first session I mean the audio ads for games uh definitely going to be interesting this year I know yakob has a very different opinion about that but I don't care okay let let me get this straight so do I get it right that Joe Rogan and ELO musk are talking about conquering Mars and then there's a commercial break where fake Hero Wars at run exactly yeah so you could get like so that's the big that's the big discussion that's been on all the Forum so let's say that yeah uh Lex Lex Friedman is having a discussion with Elon and then programmatically has inserted an ad about Bank of America will people want to buy that or do they kind of like the fact that the podcast people they follow read out the ads in the start that you you can skip uh so that's the big question will

this work uh I personally think yes and I'm actually quite excited about it I skip the ads all the time to be honest of course because you are uh skeptic of all Skeptics around uh the world I mean I'm not skeptic I just want to listen to the podcast of course yeah I do it as well I mean I'm pretty much uh skipping all the ads on do as well and then the ones in the middle as well because I mean I'm for listening podcast but but I have converted on like uh on these ads like uh this weekend startups I converted got some free credits for LinkedIn ads like yeah they do work yeah exactly I mean why not it's just uh it's just a new um uh new UA Channel which can be effective of course like there's going to be a lot of uh um well interesting uh information and then and like very difficult start it's going to be messy it's and but then it kind of evolves some to some degree

that you can actually uh you'll see hyper casual adopting it the first and then basically it'll trickle up into the gaming genres and then yeah if Spotify moves in and does third party that will be yeah then it will be a new format 100% what are we talking about really of course what what do you have against audio ad yeah why not I know you're the designer but like come on put I'm really looking forward to some like fake audio ad that that's going to be marvelous like that's going to be great but the problem I see it here is that I don't know if the like the you know the intent or like the the Temptation can be so big as with something visual because let's say hyper casual ads are just based purely on this purely now that I can agree with but I'm just saying it's going to be a it's not going to be a substitute could be a compliment yeah just one uh one other channel or format that you run alongside the the core UA the same thing that's

the same thing with influencers I mean it's if you use influencers as a main UA Channel well you're pretty much because you can't control it completely say it won't work I'm just saying it won't be that big of a deal because if if I like what how I'm being it is pretty much based on like the overall portion it could be like 5% to 15% of your spend that's it goodbye but my argument is if Spotify actually comes in and starts doing it properly it will be a bigger deal than your 5% of course that that that could be it yeah that was the whole point man that was the whole point I just don't think Remo wants to design any of the games he's overseeing with audio ads yeah but he yeah well he will have to in the future will see that I would rather do crypto ads or you know Mr crypto ads okay save that talk for next week huh yeah yeah you yeah yeah we'll see should we uh move on to the main topic sure of course of course Let's uh let's

do that so I have um I have some questions to to you guys because I'm I'm always getting these and I know the answers but I'm usually getting these from like Founders or game designers or admon managers or or anyone from the basically from the company so uh I definitely want to hear your um your opinions and answers to these so uh so let's start for example this is this is my favorite one so my game has amazing organic downloads I don't don't need any UA any UA at all everything is fine what would you think about this kind of statement so first and foremost the person who asked this is either someone who works at fingersoft or cybo that's probably what also was in my mind very true I would say to that probably just the fact that if you can actually to scale your game with program like with programmatic UA spend you can

reach such new levels of Revenue uh that you can't otherwise because you can Target the users that are high value or watch ads and you can scale the game to higher levels than you do with just organic and if you're not doing UA at that point you're leaving a lot of money on the table by just taking the ARA like organic piece of the pie that you also need some LTV for that in the game yeah that that how did I do yeah well you did very good uh that answer is uh is actually correct but the thing is like you can't control the Organics so basically one day Google comes or apple comes uh and then just turns off everything and then uh what can you do compan you're you're at the mercy of the algorithm pretty much exactly I know like uh for some reason these first games that uh were published on both stores they still get like thousands like hundreds of thousands Organics per day for well like 10 years

already it it was even you know I remember that famous tweet for team Sweeney when he said like stores are I type fortnite and the first thing I get is Hill CL racing that's very true but you know like the the hill climb racing is still a pretty good game but also the thing like you said Felix I mean you need to run the UA just to get uh well more money of course uh you are getting the the Organics which is very nice um extra Revenue but then the higher LTV players uh they are out there and uh you know you can Target them and uh get it's obviously not free as the Organics but still that's something that you can control and actually grow because uh you have the control over it I would say this is pretty much like a side effect of companies that have grown on the Organics because all the other ones died pretty much and then some of those pretty much stay a flat maybe

don't even not knowing why to to be honest like all respects to everybody but sometimes that is what happens because V virality cannot be really targeted you just obtaining somehow and nobody knows how and then at some point you kind of accept the fact that this is how it is and you think this is the right way to do it so you don't even think about something that you know that there's something different yeah yeah yeah but you know like this thing the thing is um sometimes the argument against the UA is like okay so when I start U when I started doing UA then um the organic the Organics dropped so I don't I won't ever do it again because I will up my Organics don't touch it if it makes money yeah exactly don't touch it if uh if it's not uh not broken it's like yeah no it's like it's really you can't argue that because sometimes it happens but it's definitely an algorithm play so you

can't influence it anyhow but yeah it's like always um fighting uh against this uh so you know like the UA is not evil is actually something that can help you grow the game and the company as well if you I always always say uh like the you need to diversify the UA portfolio and this the same thing because if you are you know putting all your eggs in one organic BAS K yeah well that's not very much leave your Revenue in the hands of Apple and Google for the rest of your life yeah feel safe yeah but that's also the other side of the spectrum here where people just mindlessly rush with UA and they think UA will save their game which is the other other part that's like pretty bad that you you definitely should not do that yeah the thing is uh yeah a lot of people think that the UA will save everything so if you have shitty kpis you know like okay so this is the game

scale it you are the UA expert ninja whatever it's like yeah well but you can scale the game until the LTV allows you to do so so if you have very low LTV you can run profitable UA but it's going to be spent around couple of hundreds a day Crash Bandicoot comes to mind or Super Mario run Super Mario that the thing that's the thing and like you can do whatever UA uh you can but it won't scale because you don't have the kpis and unfortunately you can do a lot of U creative optimization different channels um and whatnot but that's going to move the needle I don't know like by 10 20% maybe so if you really want to scale the game then you the LTV needs to be uh really high or well high enough to support the scale the thing is like the like scale uh as a as a phrase or scale the

game is like the scale is very much different for a lot of people I mean scale what what what does that even mean exactly I I I would still say like this is just like again kind of afterthought of not doing your market research properly because when you're doing your market research you're benchmarking is your competitors so you at least know who are the games that are that are pretty much doing the same or going against you one thing that you should also try to get or let's say find out is how's their UA going how's their creatives how how are the creatives they are running how is probably the height of their CPI that can also Point CPI is very very tricky you can't very much um say if it's low high in the middle you it's something you don't see so you know that's very tricky so yeah but you at least get some kind of a grasp on reality you know if if let's say you're going into Forex segment so what can you expect $1 CPI probably not yeah but

that's that's the thing I mean um that's the thing you see now the ants uh underground that we discussed they they are right now uh as we as we said like um accounting for like 90% or like maybe yeah 90% of the revenue in the um animal insect theme which is which grow grew by 900% or something like that so they're apparently making a lot of money and you know based on their ads what they are actually running at the moment I would say the CPI are pretty low but it's just my assumption yeah like that's that's the thing like it's the same thing that top war uses that top war ditched the base building gam playay for the easy merge gam playay which is this kind of a easy to approach funnel but that at some point here's the Forex game we wanton the money yeah yeah of course but the but yeah they're definitely the top war is also using like this like hyper

casual approach that I was uh predicting it's going to explode in like during 2022 and it's already happening it's already happening no but that's that's actually the the trend uh that I see at the moment yeah but it's you know looking at it from like high perspective is both on design side Innovation and UA side Innovation sure of course yeah but then design yeah again comes down to the CP LTV equation and then there there we are yeah again exactly then we are again uh okay so um there's also the question about like what is hard and and challenging about the UA that everybody can do it everybody can do it so you know uh Felix you can run the UA if you want is it true the thing what's the challenging part about doing UA yeah like because like uh people think like UA is really easy like everybody can do it it so I mean yes uh okay but I will

leave you uh with your answers okay here's what I've always wondered is it a bit like admon where you need to kind of know how these systems kind of work and like kind of know how they're built like for example knowing that in admon unity if you keep your placements non archived that will decrease performance and they don't tell you that you just need to know it from like doing it and by doing it like with all these different like bungle iron source Facebook Google by doing it there's so many cracks you can fall into that like knowing it actually improves the chance of success or I actually have no idea okay yakob uh I would say UA in these days is pretty much in the same weight as like the whole development of the game because if you do this like first part good and then you screw up UA you don't scale anywhere and pretty much your game is dead so it's it's as as same weight as as would be the development of the whole game in my opinion the other thing is that

you're it's immediately seen in effect that's like one of the bigger problems because if development team does something bad the only time you can see it is the first time they actually gain some kpis which is day one retention everything's great always with every game they open until you hit the day one retention with UA you see it immediately because immediately you see like Skyrocket High CPI because your creatives are or there's no roas or you know targeting of or even worse that you screw up your data check and and your attribution is so it blows in your face immediately whereas with the development of the game it slowly goes and trickles somewhere that it shouldn't supposed to go so that's that's the other thing the other the the other part of the coin is that you're trusting people with really big sums of money that yeah yeah yeah and that's like the the responsibility of that and you know you have usually CEO breathing at your neck that like where's the RAS when when's the money going to arrive back and our cash flow our especially if it's a first game for

the company so that's that's the other part of the thing that nobody's talking about that you're pretty much you're pretty much the person that determines the fate of the company yeah yeah that's that's what I that's what I said actually on on one podcast like many years ago like so if I screw up the company dies immediately because you know I spend a lot of money and then I you won't see the money coming back in the future like okay so bye you won't see me anytime so that's that's what I don't do I usually like grow the budget slowly from somewhere but getting back to the question like if uh if the UA is easy I mean setting up the campaign super easy anybody can do it I mean my four month-old daughter could probably do it but then what that's the thing yeah she's pretty skillful already you know this is a new bull podcast okay no podcast sorry sorry sorry sorry okay oh really okay so anyone anyone can

really do it the thing is like what happens afterwards that's the main part like like you yob said you need to be able to get the roas what happens when the campaign is not performing what do you do then how the creative uh performance look like how does your proc creative process look like when do you uh refresh creatives when do you actually add the new channels how do you structure the U UA channels in general so it's like lots of moving Parts which you know usually nobody sees because it's something that you you do on the background so that's very similar thing that we discussed with dream games and and Royal match I mean those guys they don't they do uh they know exactly what they are doing on the on the game because they already done it before at Peak even though it looks completely dire keep that in mind like you're spending millions millions and millions a day hoping not hoping but knowing that they will return and it looks really bad

on the balance sheet the thing is yeah the the thing is uh like how you look at these like paybacks uh periods so uh you already that was my question like what is the payback period we should look like look at but I will just jump right in because uh with this game you are looking at one or they are looking at 1.5 uh years but you have small small Studio you need to look at your cash flow your bank account and uh be very mindful of that and that's how you I like structure the budget and then uh look at the payback period because if you have I know spending 50k and you need to have that 50k in 30 days that's the the payback period you are looking at but you need to keep in mind you will see actually those money in 45 days of out of the Apple and Google so it's not that easy it's not that easy if you overx if you overextend you're pretty much you know cash what what would you do like you spend all the money you have on the bank account and then uh how you

pay your your employees because you will see the money in 45 days you know so the cash flow is really important the money and baying account is important and then like the tolerance to risk is also very much important and uh looking at the like the early kpi and how the LTV curve looks uh look like that's how you can um expect or when uh when the money is coming back actually I would say tolerance to risk will stress to data here in a way that you know you were in this position before you know how this goes how this works if you are you know checking these check marks along the way and and that's the difference between someone going like oh really do we need to spend that much money or like let's scale this up because we know how it will work so that's the big difference I I think it's this kind of a binary problem that you just need a person with the experience to to push you towards that because they know what they are doing like it's same when we were let's say I remember when we were developing stuff for some kind

of really really technical programming with the VR stuff that we'll be working and like five programmers couldn't solve it and then comes the one really skilled one and solves it in a week but those five programmers would be sitting on it for two months doing pretty much all they could but couldn't solve it yeah well that's the thing I mean but you need to look at it from the from the studio perspective I mean they don't have the the UA uh capabilities in house so they hire an agency or a consultant and it's really hard to actually you know trust people with loads of money because yeah I just had a call um couple of days ago with one uh one guy from a VC fund and he also said like look so it's very hard actually to find uh trustworthy and good people good UA people and agencies nowadays because there like a lot of uh fake experts and scammers around there around us who are uh speaking at different conferences and

sharing and uh and fake news basically so you know like if you trust someone with spending like multi-million a month then you know like it's uh it can backfire pretty much uh very quickly yeah usually if spending multimillion money you have the in-house UA just say um yeah well yes and no yes and no you have some in house but but you know like uh what happened uh with these like big companies in in us so you have the in-house uh UA who is just managing the agency and saying okay so you spend here you spend there and you they don't do anything basically you know and then uh if uh the agency screw up then they will just point finger oh well they they up it's not by responsibility cover your ass yeah yep uh okay so I do have some more questions but do you have any questions you wanted

to ask me actually ask you actually I'm the I actually wanted to ask like I actually wanted to ask around like the the like what are currently right now the biggest like four biggest Channels cuz everyone knows it the first two is Google Facebook yeah but like aside from that like what are the three biggest ones and can you mention some positives and negatives cuz I deal on the admon side and I know what it is from my side and what the negatives are but from UA I have no idea yeah there's a well besides Facebook and Google is Unity up Ling and I would say Tik Tok maybe these days and Snapchat there here and there like uh the big positive about Tik Tok is the very low CPI basically comparing it to Facebook which is like four times five times less quality is similar now the Facebook quality increased but um you know you need to spend spend uh some money to get um the First Data in and then switch to up

event optimization how much is that in to spend usually depends on the on the channel somewhere between like 10 20K I would say but it's just a ballpark uh but still very similar to what you run on Unity or applin because you need to get first uh installs and some level of purchase data to be able to run the RAS campaigns and that's the like the big negative because sometimes you need to run it for a long period of time and spend a lot of money and especially with uping it's just uh sometime you need to have 1,000 installs per day from one country to be able to open up uh some campaigns on appin so and you know that's uh that's not cheap that's that sounds like the lift off 25k learning like budget yeah well I had 50k learning budget for Lift of baking days which is definitely why I don't work with dsps

because I mean you know you need to spend a lot of money to get somewhere and uh you know it's uh still very questionable okay I have the burning question that I always have in my mind why do fake F creatives works for some games and for others not well the thing is uh you have uh well I'm not sure like how does it work for Hero Wars but um I guess they're running a lot of fake ads and and they already adjusted their store so the thing is even if you run fake ads and you don't have anything in the store uh in regards those fake ads it probably won't work because uh you are creating some some level of expectation for the player with the fake ads and when they land into the store they don't see it then they just turn immediately that's why the one game I'm not sure what was the name of the game but they implemented the fake ad into the first two screenshots and then even before tutorial so you saw the really fake ad

in uh in the game you mean the playable exactly like a playable and then after after the weird uh match whatever that was fake ad you actually enter the like 3D CGI amazing game with was nothing to do with the with the fake ad it's like and I was I was reading the comment hero also did hero also did that but there there there's no super CGI game afterwards yeah but there's there's one I'm not sure what was the game the name uh the game name uh but I will find out and uh and let you know guys so and if we take some kind of recent examples so let's say for instance ants Kingdom yep because because their ads are also I would say really F fake of course but there's really high quality there's a big difference between a herob Wars or Guardians SK or let's say any player game ad and the ands Kingdom fake ad yes but if you look at the Hero Wars It's All About these St and the fighting um

but that's just the new gimmick they're using that's that's before it was it was what that you know pins and falling into lava now's the towers in in like half a year it will be something different of course with these ends so it's not only about like it definitely it's fake but you're using the ends and the whole logic around these ends and they're creating a story and now in the comments I was reading like okay wow this is an this is a great epode I'm looking forward to see another ad from you guys so you know like they're creating this story it's a different angles it's not only um the the Frog example I mentioned on the previous session uh I mean they're using now way different they they have the Zeus one fall from the sky as a human that's yeah that's amazing I mean that's uh that's really great and then they are also doing this hyper casual um adaption of the of the games to to the creatives that I mentioned uh previously they do this as well I mean

they're now copying some hyper casual games as well so they they have really like very big portfolio of the creatives so you know like we don't know which of these creatives work exactly but since they're using so many of them some of these definitely stick and work but we know we don't know which so that's like a similar approach that L Garden did for instance I know mer mantion or champ on is where you have this kind of revolving story I think there's like videos even on YouTube where you have all the creatives in one coherent story with like those you know G giving the husband a pregnancy test and he flies into the sunset and stuff like that exactly exactly exactly and I mean that was really re revolutionary the the Lily Garden uh creatives but now like do you see those still no I mean that was just you know um very nice Trend now unfortunately you can't see it anymore so now you know you need to adapt that that creative strategy again to something else it worked now it's uh

I'm not sure anymore so if let's say we are I'm a company uh I'm the whatever CEO product manager doesn't matter and we are some kind of pretty good scale let's say 400 500k a month Revenue with some decent draws of I don't know four months five months return and we want to scale high and we ask you can we do fake ads will it help us what would you say well you can do whatever you like that's the first answer the thing is uh I don't like fake ads in in general I mean hard to say what is fake and what it's not fake obviously if you say a Hero Wars that's fake of course but ants N I would I wouldn't call that fake that much even though it's very put gcap ads in there or no would you put Garden Scapes ads in the category or not Garden Scapes are the Hero Wars category they're like yeah yeah yeah they're definitely fake definitely fake but you know for example Royal match is that uh fake ads what they are doing yeah but they are combining the

game elements with some kind of like fake uh Concepts but still there are the the match um mechanics there there is The King and I totally see why it works so I would say let's use different concepts let's put fake some of the fake creatives in that creative um testing and see what kind of um numbers we can get from each concept and then based on that concept we can create a new creative strategy for the the whole game basically and usually the create the first creative mix would be looking at something really crazy some fake ads something that is very much connected to the gam playay as well and then um most probably some other angle that's uh playing into the player emotions as well so you know in this case you will have like six very different creatives very different creative angles and then you will see what kind of numbers you can get out of that because you know I I can

say whatever I I want again uh you know that's my only my opinion that's the thing I mean that's my opinion I do have some experiences but data won't lie so we need to see the data and then based on that make a make a decision would that be a good answer Mr Y no no like that's that's good but I'm still not that much wiser okay okay okay Mr okay so what would you what would you want to want to hear maybe the other yes or no answer he was going for no no no maybe maybe let's reframe it a little bit how how how do you think like this whole Trend will go uh like looking into the future and will there be any regulation that actually going to cut it or like is there any even possibility in like remotely cutting this T Facebook already said that they are um cutting down the the fake ads obviously it's not happening uh so there might be there might be some regulation at some point in the future but how would you would you do it so uh you know need to yeah exactly manual checks most probably no

so uh there will be or there is already some kind of algorithm that you know um bend your ads and then you review or like make an appeal and then uh the manual review you can uh you can run it again so uh it's definitely uh not useful but from what I see and what I think it's going to work um again the h casual um games adapting to the to the real um gameplay and some kind of uh Middle Ground as Royal match is is doing at the moment because that's still you are showing some elements of the game play at least that's uh not you know uh deceiving that much do you think there's still like space for games to use something like let's say those really high production value CGI ads like let's say raion uses of course I mean uh but do you have the budget for it that's yeah of course have

you ever run any campaigns when like the creatives are like Lilith game like levels of like quality have you seen the the recent uh rise of Kingdom sites with these like really weird actors there H man terrible maybe it works I don't know so you've never run any like campaigns when it's like super high quality production values in the cat I I ran I ran that those kind of campaigns last year and when I compared the the creative performance between these like super high CGI um videos definitely high production and uh with something that is more like um gameplay related and a little bit of like Noob versus Pro type of creative guess which one won the no versus Pro obviously so this B downlo to like it's not still not worth to throw that much money on production value of the rather increase the frequency of having better no versus Pro VAR makes my life as an admon person so much easier because you never get

complaints about the high production value ones you always get complaints with the noob versus Pro ads I know the thing is I wouldn't say like okay do more Noob versus Pro ads that's yeah it's uh that wouldn't be sustainable so you need to have like multiple Concepts and different angles on the creative side even the the CGI I mean but the CGI um concept needs to be connected somehow to the to the real real game that's that's the only thing and if you you know if you if you run it for an RPG game you know the CPI will be insanely high so how do we do how did the game desire an admon person do with all these UA questionings did we do good yeah definitely did good so can I run U maybe maybe we should get into u r yeah yeah yeah of course you should definitely start some campaigns yeah we should do this next time with the game design angle that that's actually scary let's do that can

we do that like yeah I'm 100% in I mean yeah yeah okaying accepted I think yep y but you know like we have uh we have Nico next time so the the we one after that man yeah the one after at least you have time to prepare something we're going to be a bit more stupid we'll see we'll see all right yeah I guess uh yeah that's it uh thank you very much guys and uh well now you can be UA managers finally best of luck weeks I I can be a game designer as well oh yeah in two weeks in two weeks all right thank you bye-bye see yeah bye [Music]