UA trends, TikTok, building communities for power users: Doubl3Tap x 2.5gamers crossover

the brutally honest newsletter that I share every every week so I think like the the best thing I found out during 2023 was using actually a social media post or spark ads as like a UA videos so basically what it means if you have a game and your game is like social media presence Instagram Tik Tok organic posts basically so I take those posts look into engagement and picking up like [Music] this is a no [ __ ] gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition Triple Threat expertise welcome to the two and a half Gamers the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles

let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry welcome to another episode of the double tap podcast today we are joined by mate hello sir how are you hello um all good I mean it's better now I had terrible holidays I got Co just before the Christmas Eve so I was lying in the bed with with Co at the Christmas Eve and then my wife got it afterwards my daughter got sick last week 40 Celsius fever so it's it wasn't like very good end of the year and start of the year but now it's it's getting better it's getting better getting that out of the way yeah yeah yeah I mean like she started right now again like going to kind gu so she going to be sick next week again I guess so like that's you know family life all the fun stuff

I also realized I failed to intro you m so uh for anyone who isn't already familiar shame on you but um Mates is a UA consultant and more importantly the host or co-host of the two and a half Gamers podcast so uh yeah very happy to have you on here today thank you very much and before we get into the meat of it disclaimers out the way so the the uh content in this episode is designed for educational and entertainment purposes only this is not investment advice the opinion shared by Alex and I are our own and we we don't have unfortunately investments in M but if you are open then like 100% I think we're buying very good so it's mainly for entertaining purposes and then a little bit of knowledge here and there I think it's going to be like that that's that's how I like uh to to drive our podcast as well so let's see let's see how it goes

nice um so something we like to ask all of our guests um what are you currently playing at the moment playing oh so I just finished playing well not finish but we we are kind of reviewing different games on our podcast so now we kind of diving really deep into hybrid casual so I was playing uh Tower War uh from SE games and now kind of trying to play uh Royal match for some reason and I don't know why with dream dream games because uh it's one thing they do UA very efficiently apparently and they're kind spending [ __ ] ton of money so I just want to know like what's what is the overall onboarding flow from seeing the creatives then what's happening in the screen screenshots and the store and then what's actually in the in the game uh and then I started playing dream detective from Century games so Century games is a company from China which is

now doing really really well definitely I'm such a fan I'm such a f earned more than like 500 Millions uh and that's iip only it's in apple purchases only and it sensored to data so it's it might be like 2x that with ads and all of it and they just released one new game and uh immediately got my attention because there is like different creatives um well it's a little bit fake I would say and but they are kind of easing the onboarding with the mini games which are in the creatives but yeah it's like you know all the all the UF all the you fun stuff so we had like a yacht party in South Korea which is absolutely bizarre uh and like we invited a few people there and then like uh the CMO of century games came there and we had like amazing discussion so you know like you are actually talking to a pro immediately so it's like one of the best discussions I had and then afterwards we ended up working how how do you know

you're talking to a pro like 10 seconds 30 seconds into the conversation if you're talking about like UA or yeah because you know like you mention you mention five games and he knows every game every creative and he mentions like he mentions like 10 more like hey well you should be looking at this this and that because we already like working like wow okay like immediately know did he point you or did they point you in any in the direction for like any new games that you hadn't seen before yeah yeah so we were just like discussing this weird Tik Tok what was it like a a viral hit like coloring book or something like a meme I was like have you seen like what's happening in Like Us store like this is like coloring book up there like oh yeah I heard like something is you know there's like Tik Tok viral theme or whatever meme is happening and like immediately shoots up the the game into top one us I like okay I need to check this and that was just like first sentence like okay well this is my

guy love it you know okay cool I'm glad you brought up Tik Tok we'll uh we have some questions on that later today but maybe if we could just kind of ground you know ground the audience curious if you could talk a little bit about maybe like your favorite UA hack for 2023 maybe something that you know you've tested out a lot of hypotheses and it got to a point where you're like hey this is maybe one of the Staples of 2023 and you know if you don't want to share anything super um you know uh yeah under the hood any special special secret sauce then maybe something that you liked using in 2023 that you think might be sufficiently deprecated going into 2024 no I I always share as much as I can in the brutally honest newsletter that I share every every week so I think like the the best thing I found out during 2023 was using actually a social media posts or spark ads as like a UA videos so basically what it means if you have a game and your game is like social media presence Instagram Tik Tok organic

posts basically so I take those posts look into engagement and picking up like one two or three best uh posts from with like the highest engagement so like all of like likes shares comments putting it into the UA campaigns immediately immediately works like crazy that was like wow okay that's I mean it sounds kind of logical because you kind of have already like this like proof of concept from the the players or like your fans like oh well this is actually working for them so it should work in in the campaigns as well and that was like man that was performing super well and what kind of turned you on to that idea was it again something that was just like a hypothesis that you were testing out or you kind of saw tidbits of this somewhere else in maybe another I you know Facebook and and Tik Tok is changing quite a lot like in terms of like this like how dashboard looks like and the pl platform and suddenly I was

like oh well I can actually bring Instagram posts into the campaigns like okay that wasn't here before let's try let's try that out and then boom like performance I've I seen in a long time was really really really working well so you know you like I'm all all about like experimentation with different things and I I try to explore uh ways that you know might be a little bit crazy but you never know the same thing happens or like kind of feels for like the creative sometimes the creative that looks like [ __ ] works amazingly well do you think um that like the reasoning behind experimenting especially when it comes to like different non-typical platforms is that um kind of a consequence of like post idfa and now everyone's experimenting with like other ways to connect with with the audience could be yeah but I think

uh like after the idfa kind of disappeared obviously people try to run uh a lot of Android campaigns because that was kind of easy to evaluate and it's still like on the iOS you can run quite efficient campaigns you just you need to think and like kind of have different kind of optics for evaluation it's not going to be the same thing but it's still possible and yes of course like people are trying to experiment with these social media whatever else different UA networks and even like maybe influencer campaigns and all of like non-traditional UA lets let's go it that way and is that uh is that something that you plan to test more over 2024 like do you plan to test out these like alternative kind of distribution channels like maybe an influencer or like you suggested earlier maybe maybe like a Tik Tok well Tik Tok is one of my top channels so it's definitely going to be maybe even higher on on ranks uh for

me in 2024 actually uh moderating a panel discussion on that PGC in London in two weeks about launching games on Tik Tok it's very important but yeah like if we had this recording like two years ago it wouldn't yeah we wouldn't be talking about Tik Tok at all so yes Tik Tok is definitely there I'm the thing is you can experiment to certain extent depends on what kind of budget you have and all of these like different kind of requirements and restrictions it's I usually have like few let's call it like traditional channels and then 20 30% of the budget goes to like experimenting with new channels influencers and whatever else like crazy ideas in creatives and these things when it comes to Tik Tok Discovery how does it work in the west because um you know I have uh a bunch of Chinese friends and when they're like scrolling through Tik Tok it's they essentially have a live

streamer who'll be playing these games and then you click through and then we'll start playing and then there's engagement on that end from the content creator themselves is it the same in the west or is it a bit different it's a little bit different it's definitely like this trend is growing here as well and like some of the people are kind of trying to experiment with these let's call it live games it's it's amazing and I apparently it's not that hard to build but it's not at the same level as as as in Asia that's for sure but their engagement is there I mean look Tik Tok is huge channel for for UA and for organic kind of reach is also quite quite big and honestly like we tried experimenting with Tik Tok I tried experimenting with Tik Tok with two and a half Gamers podcast and like few different clips and we are getting more and more views out of nowhere I mean the algorithm is amazing so like okay I I will take that okay so so to move the lens a little bit onto

web 3 as that's a topic that we cover quite a lot in this podcast um are there any sort of standout issues that you see specifically around web 3 games or is it kind of a Level Playing Field at this point well issues well there are issues also on on mobile and then web as well with web free it's I guess it's kind of like slightly different issue for example what I see well obviously analytics is just like well an interesting channel for everybody web three even more uh what I also just kind of found out that there are some ways how you can well I guess trict the system for like getting better results on D radar and all of the like different tools it's like interesting things that you know like if you don't know then you don't know and it's it's kind of Shame so it's like so these are like a little bit nuances here and there uh is kind of

important to know but in terms of like the UA and then web free I've you know I've tried to experiment and work with different companies I know for two or three years already like in terms of web free and like everybody's like oh well you build a community and all like the Twitter spaces and all of the fun stuff telegram groups and chats and um q&as and all of these which is great but it's not scalable basically so then like this is one it's exactly the same as with experimenting with like the influencers and all of this you need to have like core pillars of the UA strategy which can be again Tik Tok Google is YouTube is working well for like web based games and honestly web free now is about like web 2.5 or something you also starting to have the mobile versions of the game so it's it's a combination of the traditional UA and this like again like communities and then Twitter spaces and then there are also I think well from what I heard the UA web free channels where you target the wallets and all of

this which again is interesting on paper but then like where's the inventory and it's it's not as as simple as like everybody's talking about but yeah um something that has been a common topic of discussion recently is how traditional like web 2 UA metrics aren't exactly onet to one with web 3 a good example would be like monthly active users um or daily active users because when obviously when you introduce like Financial or earning component it's like the retention as well he like farmers of like you know thousands of mobiles in somewhere I remember there was this article about oh well axi Infinity has day 90 retention like 70% like yes because it's work how can you you can't even compare that to to normal like well not normal but to mobile kpis because that's like yeah you have Financial incentive and you play because you want to earn that like that's comp it's yeah comparing Apple Store enges basically is

is there anything that gets you excited um about kind of like introducing blockchain rails especially when it comes to UA for for a little bit of context for example I know that there's some ad networks that are starting to integrate like um paid rewards uh paid like rewarded ads um is there anything that's on your radar so I think the the blockchain and then web fre adds another layer on inter of the LTV on top of what you can earn basically in web 2 games which for me kind of opens up more opportunities to spend more money because you know if I have LTV of two and then I add a layer of let's say an additional one or two dollars which can be done only on blockchain then like you I suddenly can spend double the money and still you know get the money back efficiently so that's like that's for me that's like most important part obviously from the game design point of view can do crazy [ __ ] on the on the

Chain but I mean I don't I don't know I'm curious on your your take on this so in web two right you're hunting for Welles you're doing UA to try to find some of the the bigger Spenders um in web three right distribution is is a bit of a nightmare and you could argue that the whales of web 2 are not quite there yet in web 3 and instead the whales are actually the guys that are a little bit more financially motivated so or the ones that already exist on chain and maybe are speculating or trading on chain so I'm curious from a UA perspective do you think through creating like putting together different UA campaigns or different creatives to Target maybe a web three type of whale um and does that change kind of your design philosophy when you're kind of putting together these campaigns for games so there is like different kind of personas for web 2 versus web 3 like you said like the whale that is kind of playing a mobile game and spending shitan of money it's not the same well

in web free because yeah like you have different motivation you just want to maybe flip coins and whatever just try to speculate and then that's like that's different of course like you have different types of of players on web free and then that definitely needs to go into the creative process and like how you need to think about the creative but when you drop like we kind of like discussing like how it's still about the traditional UA kind of channels and logic because then you have like these Web Two Gamers which are maybe web free Enthusiast or like trying to experiment a little bit and then eventually they can become wells in web free as well so you need still like bring them in in this traditional way so I think like thinking about like web fre personas and translating that to web 2 kind of creative Mak sense but that web free personas might be leveraging like building the community on your Discord

or maybe tegram groups or whatever else a little bit more than like the the traditional UA let's let's call it that way and at what part in kind of like the you know the go to market plan is do you think this becomes a little bit more of a material factor in kind of addressing that new type of wh that now exists in web 3 I think there's still a lot of Education that needs to be done uh in terms of like switch from web 2 to web 3 and like kind of motivating players to actually SW make this switch and uh so that's I think like the one part is like for me as a UA person to actually bring those players in on the traditional UA side and then let's let's say I would work with the community managers and like all these like people that are kind of like working with the community for to educate them a little bit more on the on the side of like how to Leverage web free type of uh technology a little bit

more so that's like that's I think that's when this becomes like very important thing like on the UA side as soon as you mention anything web free related on the channels you're [ __ ] you can just forget about UA imediately it's like it's really like still qu like wild wte you need to stay away from any web free terminology like now Tik Tok is again moving back to this like Facebook said it's okay but it's not okay the only Channel which is fine is like Google and that's it so it's like you need to be very careful about like what you kind of like say and like uh and showcase as well are there any um ways in which you subtly tease um on those channels that a game might have web free elements but you don't outright explicitly say nfts or something else yeah I think digital assets is fine yeah you know like you can find these different different words for the same same thing each if you mention digital asses that's that can be find because it

can be whatever digitalize it can be whatever you can think about but you need to be very careful about nfts and then blockchain even in the in the store description it's just uh it's it's ridiculous they check like all on boarding flow so it's creatives text in the creatives and then whatever you have in the store as well is there anything that maybe not in today's environment but at some like optimistically uh sort of speculation that sometime in the future would there be some elements of like a web 3 UA strategy that might leak over into traditional UA I think the building the community is just perfect example because right now like a lot of different companies like kind of found like hey well this is actually quite good like good idea to build a community around my games so in like ask questions of course like they're not the motivation is not exactly the same but still like we have midcore games that are kind of

building this already for some years and it's helping them to just you know build the game like build new content as well so like this is definitely something that you know is spilling over from web3 to to web 2 and it's really important it wasn't like wasn't done that much maybe back in the days like Facebook groups and all like old stuff but now yeah with Discord and even Telegram and maybe even like other platforms it's it's quite quite interesting to follow follow up on that uh point about Community is there a world where the more casual a game is that need for a community is still there or is it still something that like midcore you can't even imagine the Facebook groups I mentioned red decore all the like match free games they have Facebook groups because they you know female 35 Plus they're on Facebook and they're talking about the game there it's a super large groups really

really really efficient for for the Casual games as well and oh man like those are the core players basically for casual casual titles so yeah it's it's defin it's definitely there and it's important that's super interesting actually and when you say they're they're really efficient what do you mean by that so it it's a group where you have your best players basically and there's like no moderator so they're kind of moderating themselves and they like change like exchanging ideas different things obviously like they're developers there but they're not actively participating they're just observing like how like what's what the hell is happening in that group hey it's like it's really wild you would be surprised so moving on um you mentioned previously how there's like some unique web 3 UA incentives of like you know free nft mins or token launch or uh whitel list grinding that type of thing um what are your thoughts on them do you

think there are some better than others are some of them just uh like um trends that are going to go out of s very quickly yeah I think like air drops that was like a really interesting thing that started to to pop up and then uh all I mean I don't think the Freeman are kind of very questionable I think still um I well what I would say I'd like all of those when it's kind of creating a Synergy uh if you do only one thing it kind of I don't think it makes too much of a sense so like putting all all the pieces together uh is good basically for like the UA kind of like creating the hype because that can also help on the on the UA UA side of things so combination of everything I I think like now I don't hear about air drops too much I hear about Freeman a lot for some reason but air drops kind of like disa appeared basically for some reason but

it's just kind of like okay well you open a wallet and then suddenly you have couple of nfts there of course you want to talk about it that was kind nice you mentioned how you think some of the web 3 incentives are synergistic and I'm curious you know do you think they're synergistic with each other or do you think they're synergistic with some of the web 2 kind of or just more traditional UA campaigns and if so well I think both I think both like uh because there synergis between each other on the web free side but then like that goes over to all the UA stuff like like there's also like the example of you run TV basically in UK US well us is quite a big country so you need to spend a lot but let's say you run a TV in UK that has an effect on your UA campaigns because of The Branding reason so if you if you think about like all these like different web free elements that create kind of like hype around it and that can also spill over to like the UA uh like you know you get more engagement on the

on the creatives which creates then better slot in auction so which drives down the cpis and all have kind of like creates a really nice effect and I'm curious back to kind of our earlier conversation about the like delineating the Nuance between a web 2 well and maybe a web 3 well I'm curious are there certain things of a like certain characteristics of a web 3 Wells wallet that you would be uniquely tracking so other other words maybe this person doesn't you know doesn't have really high retention for like an idol game but maybe they are extremely active in trade volumes for a gaming token um I'm curious is that something that you would be willing to experiment with in terms of trying to go out and Target that type of user mean I I would like I would need to like get as much information as I can and then try to find like what is the the pattern that kind of works well for me in the UA but yeah I would definitely be experimenting

with a lot of a lot of different [ __ ] and not and like there are endless possibilities and combinations that's that's what's kind of exciting so yeah definitely yes so aside from building a community uh alternative UA platforms um and distribution platforms is there anything else that you're excited for going into the new year honestly terms of like UA like not that many things changing so I mean there is going to be like new Google privacy sandbox stuff nobody knows when so when I when I when people ask me this question like well not that excited to too much like for new things because not that many things changing in terms of like the the UA channels or like optimizations on the campaign side like we are basically at the end game in the end game what I'm excited about is like trying different creatives and different concepts for different game games which

I try to do now you know all fake ads which is like mini games I mentioned it's and the combination of that versus the actual game so whatever works in UA implemented in the onboarding in the game and this is something that I'm very excited about and like I think like I can do a little bit more with like the companies I work with it's obviously not as easy as it's set right so it's easier said than done but that's like that's where we are heading it's the thing is like you have multiple kind of games within one game so you have the idol mechanics you have then maybe strategy then maybe you have uh the match free elements you have mini games you have hyper casual games you within one game and then you can use all of these in the creatives and then like onboard different types of players into the game so like that's something which is like super super exciting in terms of like the changes in terms like the how the UA works not that much yeah well I know I'm the UA guy and I'm [ __ ] on way right now but yeah it's how it

works thank you very much M this has been an excellent episode learn yeah yeah yeah it's mate it's mate I will give it's mate I did so well I was doing yeah I know I'm fun till now I'm fun till now it's fine don't worry you don't need to cut it out you don't need to cut it out we won't we'll keep it in yeah but it has been a pleasure thank you very much been a pleasure thank you for having me [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]