Voodoo’s Secret Sauce with Gabriel Rivaud, VP Gaming

essentially anybody who touches product of voodoo we want them to be able to become a millionaire in around 3 4 years if they make it a good [Music] [Music] product Gabriel Ru welcome to the podcast thank you I'm happy to be here can I introduce you please do all right uh Gabriel you've been at woodoo for eight years you are heading gaming as a VP of gaming that's great and for those who don't know woodoo I mean everybody knows woodoo but here's some stats about woodoo 600 million in Revenue in 2023 100 million in ibid 7 billion in lifetime downloads probably way more than that but let's round it down to 7 billion 150 million in Mau 750 full-time employees out of which 500 work on games

that's correct did I live anything out no it's all good we're here in Paris let's say that indeed in our offices yes in your beautiful offices so we're here to talk about a lot of different things we'll talk about hyper casual we'll talk about hybrid casual I'm very very interested in understanding just how do you run a scalable business for such a long time uh and I'm very interested in in how the business has evolved because when I look at your this this morning I just look at your quarterly downloads just on sensor Tower and I put in like 2018 2020 2022 and then the latest quarter q1 and 24 uh it went from about 350 million downloads in 2018 per quarter uh then up to 500 million downloads in 20120 when everything is booming down to 150 million downloads in 2022 and now hoovering around 130 kind of scaled to less than a third from the peak years um what happened

yeah so that really reflects our change in in business uh model because we were we started in 2013 working on hyper casual games and we transitioned towards hybrid casual games um in 2 we started in 2018 and fully transitioned in 2022 um as of 2023 50% of our Revenue comes from in our purchase not anymore from ads the hyper casual business and um our hyper casual games that we don't build more hyper casual games since you know around four years M but the portfolio still generate 25% of Revenue um the rest now comes from the new generation of hybrid casual games so hybrid casual games used to make a lot of downloads but monetized very very lowly whereas hybrid casual games we do less downloads but we monetize better okay so before we jump in into this transition just to make sure uh not just to make sure just to align on the definition what is a hyper casual game and what is a hybrid casual game so a hyper casual game is a is a is a very

straightforward engaging um gameplay which is tends to be snackable extremely marketable uh a big focus on newness so Innovation uh things that users are never like gameplays that users have never seen so that's more on the product side on the on the business side of things it's uh a game that is extremely marketable so has a low CPI and also monetizes through ads essentially uh 99% of Revenue comes from ads uh on the other hand H hybrid casual games are games that um have a more engaging core gameplay people will usually stand to stay longer in those games and um the monetization is mixed between uh in purchase and ads usually 50/50 got it and um on design side so I i' I tried to kind of like understand myself what is a hybrid casual game so please correct me if I'm wrong so I looked at it on four

different aspects I looked at design mization marketing and production so on the design side as you said like a hyper casual core something that is that stands out that is innovative that looks simple enough um then you add progression then you add liveops and that those two additions build retention because in hyper casual you didn't really have liveops there was no sense of doing liveops you just scaled it put in more people had them engage for a week maybe two uh extracted the lifetime value and then move them to the rest of your portfolio then on monetization side as you said inap add Revenue when it comes to the core monetization and then inap purchase Revenue when it comes to the meta progression element that has been added uh on marketing side so I guess the goal is to acquire at the price of a hyper casual but then monetize it with the addition of of enough purchases and then on the production side you still keep the uh the low value production um highpe speed

uh the the testing that comes in both with the core as well as with the with the with the U with the marketing but then you add also the uh the liveops that's a very complete answer that's correct I think um hybrid casual games are a subset of like of hyper casual games that can actually monetize through net purchase so they have to have a loop which um either you can scale the power of the player and therefore you can limit their growth and make them pay at one point or um the the core game play um in the core gameplay you can add difficulty and um and so then you can also uh block the player at one point and frustrate them to make them pay but the player should have a feeling that they have agency um so it's not the game designer that's just limiting their the their progression but actually that they didn't make the right strategic choices and therefore it's kind of their fault and therefore uh they're willing to to pay to progress interesting so slowing

down the pace of progression by by making it more difficult and then I've noticed that as of late I don't know how late but the games that I'm playing a lot of hybrid casual games are now puzzle games as well we have that typical level progression and that puzzle monetization mechanic where if I fail it was just unlucky but if I win it was because I was smart uh that that type of a feeling and then the ads have been placed right on the board and it and it almost makes it necessary to watch the ads the ads so much value to your level progression so it's uh it's interesting how howd casual is kind of the way I'm seeing it moving from that arcade core to almost any core possible that's true um there's a lot of hybrid casual puzzle games you know I I think the like the the best type of puzzle game is a match three game it's it's it's so deep and strategic that you can it's there's a kind of a Playbook to monetize it right and uh what we're trying to do is trying to find um new

typee of puzzle games that are also very deep and strategic we haven't found one that is so as good as a match 3 but there's certain like block Jam they are extremely good and um and so we can you know through a restrictive economy we can we can actually monetize players through in that purchase that requires a lot of work on level balancing and and the economy to do that so yeah it's it's possible even with a new type of game play let's let's jump in on on the most important question from the beginning the death of hyper casual what happened yeah I mean long story because we started hyper casual in in working hyper casual in 2013 but uh we had an amazing Run 5 years of of hyper growth uh on a new genre um that gaming hadn't seen before but things ended with uh with Apple's uh privacy changes essentially what happened was that um Apple required app Developers to ask for

explicit consent from players if you wanted to track user data such as Ida um idfa uh allows ad networks to know what which games a player downloaded to recommend them a game that they would like to play in an ad and uh without that data um they couldn't match uh the right ad with the right player so what happened was um that UA marketing became more expensive cpis went up and at the same time uh our ad-based uh business model uh was affected because our inventory had less value because we couldn't Target the right players I mean advertisers couldn't Target the right players within our inventory and therefore cpms went down so had compression effect on our margins um and uh and so at the end of the day hyper C wasn't a sustainable business anymore interesting and and just to dive it a little bit deeper into this so sort of understand correctly CPI so cost per

install is CPM cost per thousand impression divided by installs per thousand impression which is IPM and what has made hyper casual games so successful was that the IPM was incredibly High whenever you saw the ad you downloaded you played it they were accessible and all of that stuff um and then on the on the ad model side and so sorry I assume that CPM went up because IPM probably stayed the same so the cost per thousand impression went up in the stores so yeah so I mean if we if we look on the monetization side the money coming in went down because um the inventory had less value the CPM went down on the monetization side on the acquisition side CPM went up oh wow so that's like a double whammy exactly yeah damn and is part of the fact that on the monetization CPM went or CPM went down is is because most of the inventory was sold to other hyper casual Publishers

and so that became much more difficult to track and and that kind of brought down the whole business yeah so hyper casual since the so we would we would sell our inventory to hyper casual uh Publishers but also casual Publishers for hyper casual Publishers their margins went down so they could spend less money and therefore we made less money but also for casual Publishers without the idea of f tracking it was harder for them to Target the right players for their games in in our inventory and therefore they uh spent less money too interesting and the the effects that we're seeing right now in in many games in casual games as well is that there's almost double the amount of ads because the ads are just not bringing the same type of Revenue as they're bringing before idfa deprecation that's correct I mean in a game that can't monetize uh with in a purchase for example but can only monetize with ads the only way you're going to bring up your um your LTV is to show more ads

essentially and you have to do that if you want to support um the rise in in in CPI right otherwise you stop spending marketing and your game collapses so what happened with a lot of hyper casual games um that had an ad monetization they would add more ads into their game their engagement then therefore went down and and it was kind of a death cycle super interesting so you said um let's go back to you said that woodoo was con like focusing on hyper casual games between 2013 and 2018 and that's when the uh the um the transformation started 2018 that was before archero right that was yeah before archero how come like what what what did you see where you started making these adjustments yeah um we what we saw is that we were kind of cap we in terms of LTV capped due to ads um so we knew that we added toad uh in our purchase and so we started exploring that in 2018 but we BL it with teams that were making hyper

casual games and so with all our tests we never really we never really made it and it's only after like three years four years of testing that we finally hired the right people and started making successful like games that would uh monetized through in that purchase got it and what the transformation looked like like what is it what does it look like from from the team composure perspective like hyper casual team is probably the one that is just focusing on putting out new prototype every week and then hybrid casual team is yes you have to have the prototyping in the beginning but the game monetizes through lifetime value mean that you have to retain for a longer time means that you have to have more content and you have to run live operations to really push the monetization as soon as they get past that day seven so how do how did how did that type of a transformation happen because it's a fully different business model yeah so the mistake we made at the beginning was thinking that um the hyper casual team that built the

Prototype uh could do the liveops and continue building the game for the next five to 10 years um so we iterated a lot and what we figured out was that there's two very different skills between finding a new core gameplay and uh building that really fast versus operating the game for uh on live Ops segmenting users adding levels uh honing the economy and doing that for a very very long amount of time it's bit of a Sprint versus a marathon so what we did is we essentially built two types of teams the first were people that would only look for Prototype they would prototype a game every week MH um and then the second types of teams we call Life teams would be Veterans of the industry usually bigger teams around 20 people that would take their best core prototypes and then build them on uh to become big hits um so very two different types of skills interesting so you essentially before it was you had core

developers so both and Voodoo is a big publisher so you had teams internally but then you have teams externally probably like 100 different Studios that you work with around the world um and then you had growth teams that scaled all these all these titles and probably part of growth is monetization I would assume that monetization is is there and then you added this new function essentially in between them called live and now once you pass the core phase you go to a live phase under a different so once the game passes the core phase it goes into a live phase where it gets built to sustain live operations and then moves into live operations and then growth is still working with core and live or how does it work yeah so uh it's true it was a very it was a radical transformation for us um firstly you know before we used to work with around 700 Studios all around the world wow so that was before doing hybrid casual games just on hyper casual um um we

narrowed those teams down to 100 people 100 teams that could actually build more complex games that would become these hybrid hybrid casual games so working with less people um and then when they build a good prototype we match them with a live team um and the growth team does the transition so you know there's not much Growth work at the beginning at the Prototype stage even at soft launch stage because you don't need to create so many creatives the CPI is usually rather low at the beginning without scale and you also don't want to focus uh your energy on optimizing CPI you really just want to build up the LTV so we don't do much creative work it's just a UA manager building doing campaigns testing on different networks to see if one network is better than the other we can reach better users um and it's really when we transition the game into full launch as it gets handed over to a life team where a big growth team starts working on it making loads creatives scaling to loads geographies um testing on more networks

plugging in more monetization networks Etc interesting and so transitioning is that's that's the uh so we talked about transition in many phases like transitioning of voodoo but also transitioning of a core game to a live operations so how does that happen like let's say um me and my buddies in Finland made this really nice core and woodoo said let's go this is really nice we actually tested it uh the retention is phenomenal day seven looks good day 14 looks really promising uh let's get it into the hands of our life team what happens next so we go it takes around six to 9 months MH so we once we test a prototype and we have promising metrics what we look for is um retention a CPI that's not too high um it's not the most important factor but you don't want it to be $10 either uh because that just means that it's not marketable that the G play is not new enough um on retention by the way we'll look for day one retention around 50% and day seven

retention at the Prototype stage around 15% i''s say that shows that there's there's potential okay so once we have that uh we go on to the soft launch stage the core Studio still keeps uh the game and uh they get helped by a team that we have in house called launch chops which is kind of like the the engineering um counterart for publishing and there's also artists in that team and we kind of coach the studio the core Studio to add loads of best practices into the game whether it's a battle game or puzzle game um we'll add um we'll you know look at the economy add better levels work on difficulty um we're not going to add loads of meta features we're not going to do any meta we're just going to focus just on the core but make that core perfect and get that Loop um uh perfect um so that can take three months we uh add in monetization add SDK at sdks we also start putting like basic

offers in there what we're looking for is um a Ras which is predicted rows of 150% sorry 120-day predicted row of 150% right that tells us that this game is sustainable um and we grow the spend with that uh Target in mind to around 5 to 10K so it also shows us if the game is able to scale a minimum or does CPI just go crazy once you add a bit of budget once we uh validate that it goes into full launch we grow the scale um we then uh match the game with a live team that takes over gradually starts adding features live Ops Etc and we'll go on from that um and then we try grow the scale as much as possible um we're usually growing by 10K per per month got

it so okay very clear so you look at the shape of the curve and how it how it shape of the curve meaning the shape of the LTV curve versus the customer acquisition curve and and that's where you kind of start seeing the 150 you're not expecting it to be like in any type of a mid core or casual game where it's like never ending and kind of like going constantly up you're fine with it plateauing but as long as it PL is at around 150% exactly appr proxy is uh by the way is um day 30 retention we look for 10 10% day 30 retention means that there's a core group of players that really enjoy the experience and going to stay there for a long amount of time we don't need uh we just want it to see see the curve plateauing because we know that if we have good Basics good fundamentals then we can grow that through liveop segmentation Etc the twox and so forth exactly or or 90 days to 150 yeah interesting and then um I have a couple of questions here so with this transition part uh at what point does

the core team lose access to what they've built or do they ever it takes I mean it takes time uh I think a full transition can take up to uh 18 months uh the core team these are you know these are the people who created the core gameplay they usually have very deep Insight on difficulties what type of levels are the good levels um there's a lot of innovation in that too there's no play right so it's really important that the course team stays on um and Works hand inand with the life team um however in transition is really important that um there be one single uh decision maker on a game uh when you have two captains it doesn't work and things go slow so you need to say okay uh at full launch the live team uh general manager is now the so decision maker but that general manager will work with the core team right so it's a long transition uh and um and I would say after 18

months there's no point for the core team to still work on the game and they usually prefer going back to prototyping that's really their Forte they they prototype and that's what they'd like to do so they go back to prototyping they usually go on the course follow the road map give it some some opinions but after a while they they stopped doing that this is a very mature way of of making games like I mean Scully probably is a good example of the supercell seems to be functioning that way now and a lot of other Studio are finally recognizing that these are totally different skill sets making new games and operating games it's like it's a different job absolutely I think what's important is that it's very clear from the get-go yeah when you tell a team uh if if it's not clear for them that they're going to hand over the game then they get very disappointed if it's your baby you always want to and it's successful you always want to keep it right but from the get-go we tell Studios uh you know what do you want to work on do you want to work on prototypes it's going to be very very hard to do that is that your skill set uh if it is you're going to have you should focus just on that um or

do you want to work on live team on live games in that case you're probably not going to start prototyping uh because that is also extremely that's very hard um but you're only going to you know you're going to wait for Diamond the rough to arrive and then you're going to polish that diamond and make it something huge and um there's a lot of people who like doing that too and then you have both internal core teams so Studios owned by wodoo and then they have externals so Studios that are being published by by woodoo what is like the contract part is the most important part with the publishing work how do you make sure because like the way I would think about it is is I mean the Scully model is probably the best where as soon as the game pass a certain threshold I think for them it's going global then they just simply acquire the studio and after that there's everybody's on the same roof and everything is clear and I've been in companies where we H we were working with an external studio and once

the game starts scaling and making more money that's when the arguments start it's like whose money is this and like well I'm investing into UA well I'm doing this we should be getting a cut and so forth kind of like those type of problems arise how do you how do you escape those problems yeah I mean we've money problems we've been doing publishing for 10 years now so we we we know how to communicate with Studios that make contracts very clear um and I it just comes down to being you know upfront from the very beginning um there's a contract in place um what happens usually is you know a revenue share split during a certain phase um of the game when the core Studio has the game but when it gets handed over to live team the revenue share is going to be diminished right because there's more cost Associated to that project um so it just has to be very clear from the beginning um we do we work with external studios around 70% of our core Studios is external 30 30% are internal um it doesn't really matter to us what's important is just finding the right

talent and then figuring out how can you work with them certain Talent want to be stay entrepreneurs um and you know raise money with investors and do all of that other talents want to uh just just focus on the product they don't want to do the finance part they don't want to raise and so we just say hey like probably the best solution for you is become an internal Studio you're not going to have to do anything else than work on product and certain people like that is there a lot of Studios that are you know looking forward to working with woodoo like I mean you went from 700 to 100 Studios it seems like it like how do you identify them I think that's a better question like how do you identify a studio you want to work with because there are so many I think I think that's the the1 billion doll question uh I think it's even more important than how do you make a hit game is how do you uh you know how do you identify and and build a hit Studio there's a few common aspects to amazing cor Studios um first thing is uh

these are people whose life mission is to make games they they they don't have a plan apart from making games um I usually ask Studio directors um what would you do uh if in 10 years if everything went well and if they say hey I'm going to be you know i' would love to go to cinema or I'd like to I know like uh start a VC fund and I say like hey why don't you do that now you know instead of building a studio so the the best studios are people whose life mission is to make an iconic game um the second thing is uh for core Studios it's really small teams so uh the talent usually has to have several um uh skills so you so the studio director is usually an engineer or an artist and each talent in the team which is around four people five people Max should have should either be like uh either their product and data or their engineering and data or their art and product you know they

usually have several skills kind of generalists and yeah that's those the only two things I can see in common between Studios because otherwise they're all over the world yeah uh they come from loads of different backgrounds we've tested people that come from Consulting not at all Gamers some work uh some some make it um there's a lot of talent that come from uh hyper casual games other talent that comes from casual games and converted towards hybrid um so it can come from everywhere except triaa no that's yeah I've never I've never seen that's a that's such a different way of making stuff um do you think that an individual Studio can like a small Studio can become successful these days in 2024 as a hybrid casual developer and publisher um it's possible uh but they probably have to be very lucky um today the market is so much more complicated first ly uh to build

you know to build a a new good core prototype you have to test probably 100 prototypes so um you're going to have to have a lot of Runway to do that right and if you're doing that alone you're not going to benefit from the learnings that a big publisher will will have that you know Pro prototypes and tests hundreds of prototypes per month um so it's just going to take more time to find that product that good product second thing is doing marketing and AD monetization has become way more complex uh post idfa uh post uh Apple privacy changes and um building that whole stack is quite unattainable uh to a small Studio okay so one core is 100 prototypes on average essentially yeah going like yes as you said you have to get lucky but let's talk about your operations what is your volume like if

one core requires 100 prototypes how many games do you have in core phase at simultaneously simultaneously we have around 100 prototypes uh being prototyped into a given time we test around 1,000 prototypes per year out of those 1,000 prototypes around uh 10% so 100 prototypes per year get iterated on uh we see potential uh we start adding adding more levels you know tweaking the economy Etc out of those 100 I'd say 30% around 30 go into a soft launch phase uh we start adding more budget uh to the campaigns we open up different networks and out of those 30 games uh around four really make it a full launch and one of them is going to become a big hit that can sustain probably 100 million run rate uh in Revenue uh per year okay so

0.4% uh hit rate essentially yeah so this is A1 for a big big hit what is a what's a okay so what is out of those four what is a hit and what is a big headit in terms of let's say daily revenue or yearly Revenue yeah so for year because it fluctuates a lot depending on the month and and uh also day of the week for yearly Revenue I'd say uh around 100 million uh Revenue uh with a healthy profit margin because we don't only look at Revenue we also look at margins yes uh for us a 40% margin is is good even a 50% is better um and that would be we're satisfied with that we're happy with that um though we're now striving to build games that will be hitting more than 1 billion Mark interesting so 40m 40 million is need be die essentially on a title yeah and you're trying to ship at least one of those a year and then if it's a smaller title are we talking about um 10 million to 15 million maybe 10 to

15 million uh gross margin um and uh but those will really be our priority too and we'll always be waiting for that big hit to come and then we'll switch the studio towards a higher potential game and then so so so these are like the advantages that you get only through scale this volume advantages is it like and you mentioned something that because you you have this volume because you have this data how do you coach Your Studios to to uh to use this data because a lot of like let's you know work I've seen worked a lot of companies they have the knowledge but they're not very good at sharing that knowledge it's like the knowledge inside a few people's heads how does it work at youo yeah so we have uh a team of publishing managers uh have 10 publishing managers uh that coach Studios every single day they do around eight calls per per day and they coach Studios through uh essentially a craic method like we you can't really tell a studio what the answer is because no one really knows what the secret

source to hit is right so what we do is we we let them test new ideas within but we give them all the learnings that we have um from all the tests that we've done and with each single which each test we try to figure out like what didn't work what was good uh to prepare for the next test um and we do that in a very iterative Manner and it will take yeah essentially up to nine months before Studio can find a promising game uh we also recognize that we need to train Studios so we will create small teams of around four people and then we have to train them and and that training can take up to you know one year it goes through different phases of benchmarking testing games that rather relatively simple then more complex and so yeah it will take really time before somebody can get to the level that they've become an independent good core Studio super interesting what is the culture at

woodoo like because when you look outside this is a tech office there's no woodo signs anywhere nobody's playing games people are you know chilling and having fun and so forth but this is not a gaming studio so can you talk about like how this office reflects the culture of voodoo sure I mean first thing is this is this is HQ right so this is publishing growth engineering and data uh teams uh the studios elves are remote uh they have their own offices with their own you know Vibe culture all around the world but here it's true that we're very much um focused on on on a few things so the first thing and we want to reflect that through our offices so the first thing is we are extremely performance-driven um we really look to make big games with and and big business right but that culture comes with a big side of ownership too um um we uh teams product

teams have ownership over their road maps they also get um a big percentage of profit they get up to 10% of the profit of a game if they're successful essentially anybody who touches product of voodoo we want them to be able to become a millionaire in in in around 3 four years if they make a good product um and finally one thing that really characterizes us and I think that differentiates us is that we're focused on Innovation to give you an example you know products we um we're not really in this uh vision of taking a successful game let's say match three or tiles and then iterating upon that what we try to do is look for the space that's um that's adjacent that no one has explored and that's what we try to do with our 100 uh core Studios always prototyping new gameplays that no one has ever seen U because we really believe that's where we'll find long-term success so performance ownership and innovation is this typical for a French company because people outside France would have

a specific perception of a French company is woodoo a typical French tech company um there there are good french tech companies uh now SE France is is quite the uh like even looking at the investment side a lot of investments in the Western Europe is going actually in the French gaming Studios and tech companies so I'm asking out of interest because you know this is quite booming yeah I mean we our culture is of course been very inspired by you know silken Valley companies like Facebook and um and and a bit like Google too uh and then we've created our kind of our own uh culture right and uh I'd say a lot of startups in Paris that more Tech startups have this sim a similar culture the but gaming studios are usually very different uh right and it's not the same same culture um however if you talk to any French company in the scene today they always tell you that yeah vood is very unique oh interesting yeah um

another thing about French companies is that people assume that they only speak French at a French company is that also the case at wodoo no at all uh the main language we speak is is English we speak English in all all meetings we have around 40 nationalities at Voodoo um and yeah we've switched I mean yeah we switched from French to English around six years ago oh wow okay and why did you switch are you running out of the talent pool or like is is are you scaling still like what's what are the the Ambitions and and and the hiring that is happening in woodoo yeah we want to hire the best people the best talent around the world right and uh there's a limited pool in France there's really good Engineers really good artists in France but yeah it's limited right so um we're going a lot to Turkey Israel Eastern Europe uh to hire good talent these people speak English so we have to be working with them awesome all right thank you Gabrielle this was

uh very insightful I ran out all my questions the floor is yours what would you like to tell our our listeners thanks Michael um yeah I mean the market has really changed in these com in these past few years um we've transitioned ourselves from hyper casual to hybrid um and now moving towards casual uh We've tested over 20,000 games out of those 2,000 games there's you know a couple that have become successful uh to give you examples mob control and block Jam uh both on 100 million run rate um uh at the moment uh per year and um I think the the message I want to get through is that what we're looking for is talented GMS that have uh general managers that have um that the will to build iconic games that want to work on the prototypes that we've really um filtered down that we know have potential and scale them towards big big games um

these people need to have this performance driven mindset and uh should be willing to take over um the ownership of the game and what we and what we promise these uh these GMS is that they will have ownership over the road map but also ownership over the profits of the game thank you so much for doing the interview and thank you everybody for listening [Music]