Unicorns, Camels, and Hogs: How Smart Ad Monetisation Saves Your App from Getting Eaten Alive

[Music] hello world welcome to the Pocket Gamer podcast with your hosts me Brian Bago and our Regent of royalty the mon monetization Miss Peggy and Sals hello Peggy a pleasure to see you again oh and so good to see you as well Brian and uh monetization good of you to bring that up because that is really something we're going to be watching more and more and um brings me to Our Guest as well Patrick MC you are an ad monetization expert your Logan Square Consulting so you have been transforming how companies approach Revenue generation for over two decades I saw you at an event I said yes bring you here because you know your stuff you've helped more than 50 games and 30 apps reach their full potential through Innovative ad strategies monetization strategies so I thought this is it we're ready we're gonna have

a deep dive and uh and welcome you Patrick great to have you uh thanks great to be here just something there because I was thinking let's talk about the name of the company because we were chatting about that offline Logan Square Consulting I thought Logan's Run but it's not what is Logan Square Patrick uh Logan Square square is a super hipster uh gentrifying used to be a blueco collar Hispanic neighborhood and I happened to live there uh for I don't know 10 or 12 years when I was in Chicago I think at one point it was one of the top uh five coolest ZIP codes in some magazine uh I assure you I was an outlier in in those zip codes uh but uh you got to name it something so my uh oneman consultancy is Logan Square it it does sound like a reboot of the 70s classic staring Jenny AG but Tim yeah for anyone who's going to Google that the movie not the TV show

had managed to somehow obscure and forget the fact that they they had turned it into a TV show so yeah yeah that was a defense mechanism I'm sure it really was it really was lovely to meet you Patrick thank you for joining us today so Patrick one of the things that really stands out for me in your work is your Mantra rate of learning is everything it's a really powerful idea and in today's rapidly evolving mobile space it it's more relevant than ever can you tell us how your mantras shaped your approach and why it's so important when it comes to ad monetization it's kind of a fundamental tenant of innovation thinking and I really started embracing this uh in my first job dealing with adtech uh which happened to be in an innovation lab where all my co-workers had like these super powerful uh mbas from the most prestigious Innovation um departments of the most

prestigious uh us MBA programs I was working in this thing that was a start in in a big sty American company and like we only had so much time to prove that the concept works and every startup only has so much time before they need metrics that are good enough to go get more money or they run out of money uh right so like no fooling uh pace of learning is everything and you know fail fast learn rapid iteration like all that stuff uh you just have to go do it and in an increasingly competitive world for people's attention more and more Studios all the time uh user acquisition is more expensive and more complex for reasons on other podcasts right uh Google changes their alos all the time so they can make some more money sorry Google but we know you do that [Music] um there's a million reasons but uh it's just super important to go as fast as you can so it's important to go as fast

as you can but I want just want to follow up on what you said Brian you know it's like the why now and is it the why now with ad monetization because there's a a learning curve or a gap here because the pioneers of UA are in gaming that's why it's so exciting to interview UA managers here on the show but you know there is that feeling that ad monetization might be the ugly duckling here or the the the truly blue ocean that we haven't been trying well I would I would say yes and uh this this is like one of the big push backs that I I always hear um the simple fact of the matter is that game people in in my experience are just kind of fundamentally different personalities than app people so app people tend to be business thinkers and they come up with this idea and they work really hard to like tweak the user EXP experience and

uh remove all the friction in onboarding and just really really work incrementally uh for little gains to get where they want to go and game folks are not fundamentally business thinkers they're fundamentally creative people right and it's been dozens of times when um I talk to a CEO and say hey you're making good money from 5% of your users why don't I help you guys make good money from the 95% that aren't going to do in apppp purchases the producers and game Builders are typically like no no I want to work on my feature now those folks are usually very smart to get that job and have a pretty good track record of success and maybe their features are hitting one out of four right and that's a pretty good track rate for bigger risk bigger builds bigger things in a you

know sizable game uh but they just want to do that work because that's how they're wired that's who they are so most of the objections around let's not do ads are basically this bias of I want to do the work I want to do right there's just there's just a lot of that so uh if we rightsize the amount of work around ad monetization to keep it small and and we learn quickly and we demystify the obvious push backs right you know what I would call from a sales perspective false objections you know not the real reason you don't want to do it just the stuff you say to get out of the conversation with the person at your door or whatever uh once you demystify that kind of stuff it's like okay well I guess if we think about this and we put this much time against it we should be able to quickly grow Revenue into something you know meaningful

um in in that sense I'm sure uh admon especially is the ugly ducking because people just don't want to do it it's absolutely hitting the nail in the head Patrick you really are um and it's one of these things that I I've run across from you know really new really young Indie small Studios micro Studios all the way up to some of the big guys who you would imagine know better um but even especially in this m Studio scenario where you've got the key roles programmers are animation maybe a producer and you go in and ask them whose job is it to decide how this game makes money and you get into this Mexican standoff where they'll look at the next person and their next person's looks back at the first person and we get this go around and for me it misses the fundamental point which is how your game makes money is now part of your design process you know you can choose how your game makes money you never ever have to ask your to put their hand in

their pocket you know and you can as you say Target the 95% of people and more and more on this podcast Peggy and I hear about hybrid monetization um where it's not just IAP or DLC it's not just premium content it's a variety and you allow your players to come in and meet them where they can where they can we can meet you and get value out of them so it it's hugely empowering so I'm I'm with you 100% and hopefully we're starting to maybe change a few Minds through through this podcast and some of the some of the people that we've spoken to I I talk about this one conversation I had with these four guys here in Finland so there's a university program that's an accelerator for teeny tiny startups and one of the first things I did when I moved here just to get to know some folks and be helpful was uh agree to be a mentor it's kind of now my standard uh soapbox

Spiel uh when I have a first conversation with somebody so uh four smart guys they tell me about their game uh what it's going to be what it looks like how far along they are and I go okay so what is your business and they go what do you mean I'm like well what is your business and they're like oh well but it's this game I'm like no you tell me what you're doing you didn't tell me what your business is and it's obviously a leading question and they're like all right fine what does he mean and I go well your business is actually a lot like Netflix you're trading entertainment time for revenue for your company that's your business you're doing it with a delightful game but that's your business so like plan some business in your game dude like that needs to be part of it and uh the first time I I said thatth this sounds super cheesy but one of them's like oh that's a mic drop and I'm like yeah maybe I'm not that interesting

but I just couldn't believe that they were just like oh like they kind of didn't get it now these are young guys who are technically really uh sharp and they're barely in their mid 20s and they had a good idea uh and they just wanted to go build stuff and lots and lots of gaming people are just like these four Dudes um what's frustrating for me is three or four startups later guys in their 40s no no no we know what we're doing this is how we're going to do it and they're all relying on having their one game magically be so much better than everybody else's to be really successful and I'm like you can get real far by grinding there's a thing I'm I'm writing that is probably going to be called unicorns camels and Hogs okay everyone wants to be a unicorn right like the that just goes forever

now camels in this context have been described to me as uh don't need a lot of food don't need a lot of water can do an awful lot of work and live for a really long time that sounds like a pretty good business to be in if you can't be a unicorn make sure you're a camel and then Hogs there's this other metaphor um you know pigs might get fat but Hogs always get slaughtered right like Hogs don't last like they they take a lot of resources in and then it's over right the idea is just to force people to think about making money along the way because if you're if you're relying on your game is so much better and so much cooler than everybody else's when there's just not that many things that are truly new and unique that are coming out then you better be really good at the basics you better have a user experience that's maybe not super difference than everybody else but you really paid attention to the details and it monetized as well

and if that's how you're going to compete ads need to be a part of that because that can be half your Revenue easily we need this carved in stone piggy exactly I love it written in neon and lights it's um it's so true you know we have we have such disdain as an industry for for the business side of things um and despite the fact that you know in that huge 200 billion Global games Market Mobile now accounts for well over half of it and you're you're absolutely right this is this is something that far too few studios are excited about um and I think we we we can absolutely get on board with the the the unicorns camels and Hogs metaphor I thought the hog metaphor was going to be what comes out the other end rather than what comes you know well it we we could uh we could go Brown proverbially if we needed to I'm not I'm not above these things I I can assure you we need to Workshop the metaphor a little bit more but I think there's a book there definitely there is it's a title anyway

I love it but then the question for me comes in each of those unicorn and um camel and the hog where does the admon fit in there are is there still admon in that and how they work with admon is that influencing the outcome so a unicorn is an idea that's so new and so amazing it's words with friends before anything else showed up it's Angry Birds before anybody else else got there um it doesn't need much because the idea is just so amazing now game folks have unbelievable um resilience and confidence and and unbreakable like hope in naiv even that like their idea is that cool that they're just going to make a bunch of money because the idea is so great and while I don't want to dampen that enthusiasm uh as as my dad used to say to me uh long ago um you can usually

judge your success in life by how effective your plan B is if plan a is being a unicorn Plan B needs to be be a camel in this context and camels absolutely make a metric ton of money on ads because they figure out how to do it and they don't leave that opportunity untapped Hogs perhaps don't they just eat up a lot of resources and spin around trying to do stuff that doesn't quite ever hit and then they run out of money and they get eaten exactly that they get eaten I like that in your metaphor that's exact what happens tastes good yeah oh yes okay so this isn't just a book this is a picture book you've got something here Patrick this could be like a little fun car canot think we're speaking metaphor so I I'm just stuck with this kind of a brain I don't know what to do fear and lothing in the games industry it's a beautiful thing got the reference good man I love it oh this is not Santa cosplay

my friend I am that old but uh but thank you so okay I'm going to I'm going to try and drag desperately drag this back on track so when you actually walk into a studio um what what's your approach when you when giv everything that we've just been talking about you know the resistance to new ideas the fact that it might not be seen as necessarily creative um how do you begin the process do you do you just sit down for a conversation what what how do you make this happen for a studio that might even be hesitant or you know standoffish about the whole notion of making money what I really like to do is try and get folks to out themselves about their objections or their negative experiences because when they put those things up just like a seller would do I can uh reassure invalidate uh provide other information um uh just kind of chip away at at that

stuff and then I'm in a more collaborative Place versus somebody two levels above you hired me to do a project you just have to do this stuff because generally those guys like they have their own agendas they have their own features they want to build you know or just other stuff that's on their road map like I need Dev time I need you know I need to give you stuff from my road map I got to get this crap done for you and how many cycles like nobody loves that uh I'm I'm I'm not often uh super warmly received by product owners in in in that way but if somebody says we tried it and it didn't work that's kind of one of my favorites because I go okay well what did you do and how do you do it and shorthand is if you slap a bunch of ads in there and you plug in a couple of Partners and you don't really have much expert then garbage in garbage out of course it

didn't work of course it's going to fail because you helped it fail by not doing anything iterative to learn anything and not wanting to do it in the first place now you got the results you wanted so you can just build more features so like that's a thing that happens so um folks saying that uh that's that's great because like can tear that one down in a in a heartbeat uh one of the other ones that's much more difficult to get people to like actually really believe is that well it's going to cannibalize my IAP yeah and I'm like no it doesn't have to do that you can make big big obvious mistakes and cause those problems but they're very easy to avoid and let me tell you how we're going to make sure that doesn't happen and there's a whole there's a whole bunch of conversation around that um the shortest version of that conversation uh using the UK metaphor of

the London Tube is mind the gffs um you have a great big game if you put rewarded ads in there so people can grind through some ads and earn a few more gems or specific items or whatever you can give people as much of that as they want to do and yes when you get Sophisticated You should segment your audience understand the real value to the advertisers of those different ad grind segments and give them as much stuff is that's required for them to do the behaviors that they're willing to do there are ad Grinders out there who will do anything for the little reward in a game and I know this for a certain fact because there's tons of games that don't do Rewards or rewarded ads where you have to go through all kinds of ridiculous little things uh to get these teeny tiny Rewards well instead of going through 15 Steps in Lords mobile or

Clash of Clans you can just spend 30 seconds for a ad right so like the behavior already exists just tap into it if you mind the gap between those people and what they get and what someone gets for that 99 cent purchase you're fine no cannibalization the other thing is there's a huge segment of people and you can identifies these guys through through data easily who are never ever ever going to put a credit card in a game they're NE they don't have a a Play account they don't have uh a iTunes account where they can just spend and get build through the stores those people aren't buying might as well show them ads no problem like there's just so many ways to solve for that right so many ways so so let's stay with that Patrick let's just keep going with the myth busting here because we started and you seem to like it you like it when people come into a room and just sort of yeah just bear it all almost like you

know admon Anonymous or something they come in and they tell their their experiences and their worst nightmares and you address them it's really about rethinking it's not it's not a Band-Aid you can't put admon on something now there's a bunch of really interesting uh ways to look at like when is it really time to build out your monetization strategy and relatively early on people know what they want to do well this is a subscription model obvious uh oh we're going to do IAP like fairly obvious very common well maybe we'll do ads once we get all the other stuff done or once we get enough users you know then we'll start to get ads and like that makes plenty Sense on its on its face um but if you have a smallish game maybe you want to do the ad work a little bit earlier so you can get your LTV

up so you can have a better chance with your conversations with Publishers who you need to provide all theer acquisition money so you can scale that bad boy there's a lot of different circumstances that would mean do do more earlier or or do not as much uh early but sooner or later you're going to have the things for sale that you're going to have and you're going to have an audience that isn't buying and like if you're selling things to 5% of your audience you're killing it most people would be thrilled to get four uh five you're absolutely hitting it out of the park but there's still 95% of your users that for one reason or another just don't spend money in your app or maybe in apps in general uh you can make money off of those folks and it's not like the world doesn't know what an ad is people don't get offended when they see an ad unless the ad is somehow outrageous and they're pretty well policed not perfect but they're safe

enough uh you know Ford's not going to put an ad out there that makes Ford look bad or or freaks out your users uh but they will pay an awful lot of money if they think your users uh might be interested in buying a car sometime soon so like there's real money to be made let let me build on that for a second let's make the ad experience completely voluntary MH that's a rewarded video yes yeah if you don't click on it you don't have to see the app lots of people maybe 20 or 40% of users depending on what specific game we're talking about might want to get something extra to move a little faster in the game that they're playing because they want the the the Box they want the gem they want to get enough of something to kill the dragon on level seven just that much faster they already told you

they're down so at a $10 CPM you're basically talking about a penny per completed ad so if you've got 100,000 users and 30,000 of them will look at three or four of those a day like that's real money folks who do do rewarding video this is maybe like a little bit of like a pro tip or a hack uh will typically do something that looks like a film strip with like the triangle on it so like press this button now what I typically ad folks to do who have those in their game is to draw attention to it because it's just background on a home screen right so put the exclamation point there when you know a rewarded video is ready so there's some technical stuff you can do super easy to know that there's a video ready to go well when that video is ready to go make a pulse three times yeah we're we're mammals when things move around we notice them like that's hardwired in human behavior you

don't need to make a buzzer go off or a loud annoying noise but maybe like a little something like this for a second and then if you're really worried about does that piss people off put a popup box of and say do you want to do you want to turn off these notifications for three days take it off like there's all kinds of stuff you can do it's just a matter of thinking about it one of the things I'm really curious about Patrick is is where do you see developers going wrong most commonly is it is it you know we've talked about avoiding it we've talked about implementing it poly but outside the sort of the resistance against ad monetization what are the most common mistakes where do you see Studio after studio um falling into the this same Pitfall it's more lack of focus than than anything else it really doesn't matter how well or how poorly you set up your Tech stack initially I mean better

obviously is better uh but if you just ignore it then like you get a little bit of money but not much I mean if you want that Garden to grow you got to pull some weeds out and you got to water it you got to put a little something in it to get a return uh I I think you don't have to put a whole lot into it I guess we should talk about this perhaps another time like what a low touch easily maintained text stack looks like that gives you lots of options uh like it's not that hard to figure that out there's a couple of basic choices about who your ad server is going to be there's very clear indications about do you need to put more Partners in there's basic housekeeping about how you put uh sdks in and how you maintain those and like there's a certain amount of tech debt that comes with that it's not much particularly if you are thoughtful about how you do it or you get a cheat sheet from a guy like me uh it's just not that

hard but the biggest thing is people just ignore this because they want to do other stuff um I would put it down to uh essentially intelligence bias and this gets us back to the whole feature thing we're picking on guys who believe in their features folks that get those jobs to be product owners are typically quite smart and people who are quite smart are not wrong very often and they know that and that means they have extra and unwarranted confidence in in all of their decisions oftentimes in areas where they don't have any expertise at all and the smarter you are the more risk you are of this particular bias it's Insidious uh and in in this space uh just talking about product owners they're always going to have confidence in their own ideas and they're always going to want to work on their own ideas and they're going to be

transformative or the best way to meet the next kpi that they have right so they're going to be really willing to believe that and they're not going to want to do this unsexy unfun not their idea stuff and like that's the that's the real Pitfall and it's it's just human behavior um I don't like to do the things I don't like to do and it's hard to get me to do them you can ask my wife she'll tell you like I'm like everybody else there uh but in in the space of of admon there's not a lot of enthusiasm for it however there are a lot of proof points that it's a really good idea to spend some time there there are a bunch of game shops I'm thinking of one in particular in Germany they don't bother with I AP they monetize very very well with ads H many titles they do not have user experiences that are hard to retain

people they just manage their rewards in the pacing very well yeah in terms of the progress I'm not talking about hyper casual stuff that's going away I'm talking about midcore stuff like there's ways to do it you can make a great living as a business by monetizing people who are not going to make a purchase and from a data perspective those folks are very easy to find and identify and then you just treat those cohorts a little differently you know you talked about the product manager you talked about that you know the people who bring you in which I'm I imagine is normally the senior leadership team but whose job is this because I I've seen it in so many teams you ask who decides the business model and everyone looks at everyone else and nobody steps up there's an expectation it's the guy in the suit the guy in the corner office who decides this not the people making the game is that the case and does that

even work theoretically the most responsible person in the company the person most responsible for financial success you know back towards investors or owners or whatever it's got to be the CEO if they don't care no one else will um it can be Folks at other levels who are aware that there's Revenue pressure I mean if if you think about it everybody seems now to understand the concept of of LTV yeah and how retention plays into that like the longer they retain more opportunities to to to get the V higher the value higher right and that cost of acquisition is what it is and you're either positive or negative as a business overall and then on each of your acquisition campaigns right everybody kind of gets that well one of the easiest ways to improve LTV for players that are going to be

retained but not bu is to make them contribute to the games economic success get them to do something that pays you watch a ad get a penny from them now if you can get 20 or 25 cents from a user before they churn who never purchases that goes a long way in your overall LTV math and can be the difference very easily between is this game scalable or not will a publisher take us on and in you know stair step drop a million bucks to help us get to 400,000 and you know kickass through all of the alos in ASO and like really get big enough to be promoted high enough to get a huge viral lift and like really be a big game but that publisher isn't going to open up the wallet to do that if your basic math isn't there so like how can

you afford to ignore that and my whole argument is of course you can't or maybe you're going to be that pig that we talked about earlier get slaughtered a lot of them are getting slaughtered I think that's why it's so important to listen to here really understanding the potential of the non-s spending audience I mean you talk a lot about rewards where's the creativity in that the way the whole ecosystem system works it was built by the advertisers so they decide if they want to offer an ad to your to you as a user in whatever app or game right and they decide what it's worth so all you have to do is find a place well sorry all Brian has to do in in his app that you use Peggy is decide like where a okay place to provide that opportunity is like that's it and then he's got to set up a text act that that makes some people compete for that spot

that chance to have a ad uh go to you and like that's it and with something like rewarded video it's completely optional so the creativity is calling attention to it in the user experience doesn't take much just do a little something like make it pulse make it flash make the little logo bounce three times and stop just a little bit of motion like one one hack some sort of motion that's it and the people that want to do it will do it and the people that don't want to do it won't you will have offended or irritated no one no friction retention doesn't suffer like that's all fear-based myth and false objection to me uh but then all of a sudden Brian's getting paid a penny a go every time somebody decides to do that for the rewards the only thing the game designer really has to Think Through is how much Advantage is provided to those Grinders now things that people forget

are along the lines of you don't have to treat every player equally if there are players who provide very little value to the advertisers when they look at ads it's not a great idea to show them infinite number of ads causes your other problems in your monetization uh if there are people who are extremely valuable to advertisers because they spend tons of money on phone and the ecosystem knows it then maybe you give them 5x rewards that the average player gets and who cares you don't you don't owe it to anybody to be you know fair in in that sense in like pace of acceleration through play right uh you just owe it to your business to be smart and do your best to make good money to continue to thrive and exist uh my favorite example of this is for like the spinner wheel you watch the video you

get the spinner wheel right everybody does spinner wheels at some point most people put way too many things on it and don't recognize that you can set up dynamics that make people feel good here very easily okay what I would tell somebody to do with a spinner wheel is put four things on there five Max make two or three of them unsexy not very interesting rewards and set the percentage allocation for those three things to zero oh why would you ever give somebody the crappy reward why would they want that they're not going to want to watch a new ad just to try again to get the better reward but why give them a why give them the negative experience give them the second best reward which is just something that you freely would give away anyway like 75% of the time and give him a very good

reward 25% of the time uhhuh why wouldn't you do that you want that dopamine hit you want that hey I want something oh I got the really good one man I'm on a roll I keep getting the really good one well of course you did because you know Brian The Game Dev wants you to have that feeling because it keeps you in the game and it pays him and this is the hard yeah yeah it's not Patrick but again because it's not core gamepl it's you you tend to get it overlooked because it's it's a business thing you know it's like every racing game in the world has some sort of catchup mechanic so if you do something really badly you can catch up you know you don't have to quit out because you're never going to win um and so many studios so many developers understand exactly that sort of thing is give your players that are fighting chance you know make them happy give them that dopamine hit as you say but because this is this is seen as as business yeah yeah you can't mess with

that um and it's it's absolutely not the case I think you're you're again this is top quality information folks you should be writing this down we will be asking questions later there's a quiz no but seriously what's blowing me away here is exactly that it's the psychology of it it's really not hard to do it's the presentation the thinking of it that's to your point Patrick that's where the creativity comes in and that's probably where you're offering the most advice and again so long as you're managing like the pacing of the game play reasonably you can give away anything you want it's a it's a virtual currency it's not a real thing it's just about pacing and you know if you have somebody who's just a regular product person not a hardcore data nerd let alone a data scientist because like those people are very hard to find uh you can easily sort out who is it that uses these things a

little a lot and never and you can start building player segments and customizing user experiences around ads based on demonstrated behavior and like that's what you do with gameplay just do it around making some money you know we're hearing so much that what we sell is not a product what you're selling is the experience so it makes sense that the ad experience is as well architected is as well thought through as the player experience and both of them matter and hey guess what you could actually make money because it's voluntary so if you can't have that argument it's killing my game or it's killing what I'm doing it's not it's an option for me if the option's good maybe the money will be good and you know the other thing that I I I can't believe I haven't said already in in this conversation is you can ignore all of this stuff and you can just hope that

your features or your user acquisition or something about what you're doing is uh effective enough to compete and help you you know survive and thrive but Darwin has a much better chance of sorting you out the hard way if you if you don't do everything you can do to make money you know the one thing that I think everybody understands is the competition is getting way more Fierce all the time costs of Acquisitions are going up because every publicly traded company in the ad space needs more Revenue every quarter and like they're not our friends right we we need them but they're not here to help us uh they're they're here to enrich their own stockholders and owners and whatnot so like if you ignore this stuff you really do it at your own Peril and uh again like Darwin will sort you out why would you not give yourself a fighting chance give yourself the the the best possible opportunity um and if you're pouring time and money and resources and love and attention into your game surely you

want the game to succeed and players to be happy so yeah I I I I hear you man well like I was saying before it it it doesn't take a ton of creativity you just need to find like a reasonable place to put the opportunity you need to draw attention to it to prompt the behavior you want and with rewarded ads you want to make sure that you have meaningful rewards to make the transaction worthwhile to get people to do it that's how you get paid you just have to look at the data and and put a little effort into things you really should look at uh different user behaviors and and have different segments of users who behave differently have a slightly different experience because like that's that's a big way to drive revenue and it's super easy to go wow I have a bunch of really really high paying high clicking High uh High interest in

rewarded ads folks and then you can go oh well there's only 14 of them so it's not really worth any effort but that could be 14,000 out of 100,000 and if it is then you should know what to do like just basic basic arithmetic kind of gets you through what you need to what you need to know there um and as as as Bland as this is going to sound um every one of the ad providing uh SDK ad serving companies out there they have a bunch of best practices just read that stuff just start with that and like they'll tell you how one not to violate the rules into like where a pretty good place to put stuff is and then make sure it's noticeable the real creativity to me is in thinking through how to incen device people to do these things that drive your

Revenue it's not just what item for 99 cents what is the price point for 99 cents I mean most IEP I do a lot of work with IEP as well um they don't even segment stuff based on like countries and currencies very well right so like if someone's making a bunch of money on I and they're doing 99 cents in a place like the Philippines or Indonesia in the US that's an Impulse buy for people to spend freely that's not an Impulse buy that's a $49.99 purchase if you're a player in some TI or three markets right so like you just gota grind through the data and like put the effort in it's been really enlightening just knowing a few of the little shortcuts and tips and tricks because guess what Brian it's not rocket science and it's so relevant now it it absolutely is it absolutely is and

can I share one little anecdote that there's a game that made me think about this totally totally different little game called Rodeo Stampede um I don't know if you played it it's a Distance game and you you're a cowboy and you jump from the back to back of different animals and try and get as far as you can um and the very first time I played it you die if you crash into something and then it came up and said add to continue and so I I watched the ad and the beautiful thing was the game immediately continued and it was only when I died the second time that I watched ad before it gave me all of the bonuses and all of the coins and everything and I was genuinely blown away I went oh my god of course why would you not do that you know so the ad did not get in the way of the game play they waited until the end and for me that was the that was the switch and I suddenly went I need to start thinking as a developer as a designer I can be making decisions about this that absolutely

impact not just the the levels of gameplay the mechanic the player experience and how I make money so I've used that and shouted about it for years now and it's still just the simplest little thing that made such a big big difference to to the game overall that is a fantastic idea that I have never heard of um that's uh that's just absolutely brilliant if just dialing back to other parts of our conversation uh if somebody went oh everybody's going to see that and they're just going to leave well there's part of the now dying defunct whatever uh hyper casual uh Market did things like that right they just ran banners underneath provided zero value to advertisers which is eventually why all that stuff died because the advertisers just weren't gon to have it anymore I'm amazed it lasts as long as it did uh but for something like that you get a couple of Lies okay you watch an add then you get all your bonuses and

your upgrades gives you a little more time to get hooked that's very thoughtful that's smart Patrick we could go on all day um there's so much more but we're just going to have to settle for inviting you back for another session and we can drill down into waterfall and some of the sort of the real nitty-gritty and and get their hands dirty but before we let you go there are two questions that we ask all of our guests just to bring it right back and land it in Games first is what's the game that you're playing right now what's in your pocket what is on youren screen that's obsessing you right now and the second one because there are no small questions here favorite game of all time you really want me to say this out loud don't you yeah yeah kind of it can be guilty pleasure okay there are no wrong answers uh I have a ancient Windows 95 HP laptop that I just pulled out of a bin quite a while ago from from long long ago right I have my old think right here I have some ROM games there you go

and the one I pulled out is called Panzer Blitz it is this yeah unbelievably deep historical thing that has every bit of mechanical equipment uh or ever used in World War II including you know by lesser known combatants like the Italians and it's hex based and its turnbas so you got to move everything hit the button let it grind for about 20 minutes and see what gets wiped out and what doesn't and like I remember it well that's good for like an hour and a half while I'm not really paying attention uh to what's on Netflix I just pulled that out of the box a little while ago and it's like deep old school geekery man that's oh that is deeply deeply geeky my friend yes yeah and how about is that is that the one now what favorite of all time that's the one I'm I'm kind of playing

uh favorite of all time is really really tough um as a kid before video games became part of my life uh my family's always been like a card playing family okay so I think my absolute favorite has got to be as as simple and silly as Hearts right because I just love dropping points and dumping on the other guys I just like nailing people I just like going here you go oh uh and it's small and it's harmless it's an easy way to do it without actually causing trouble uh and it is in fact the point of that game so I I guess I'd have to say Hearts um just like conceptually um bunch of other ones I like and I I still play from time to time any physical physical game which has mechanics which is designed to essentially trigger family Warfare has

to be a good thing so you know we we can I think we can all get on board with that two games with Warfare yes I have to say Patrick this was a delight I'd heard you speak and I thought let's see what we'll do on a podcast and now I got to say we're hooked you're coming back um and oh would love to thank you that's very we have we had the beginner course now we understand there are no objections now can have the intermediate we can go we can go for brok here this is great yeah um happy to talk about how to set up a low touch Easy Tech stack and get into whatever level of detail about like why you want to do it one way or versus another depending on your level of sophistication your scale that kind of stuff that'd be that'd be an easy next conversation I'd love to have I'm for we shall make it happen indeed wonderful thank you both this has been wonderful for me as well this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing

game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games Market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter @ PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the Pocket Gamer Biz website tune in again for the next edition of

the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm Peggy and saltz and that's a wrap until next week