Voodoo super growth w/ Alvaro Duarte: How to 10x IAP revenue in 2 years? Healthy margin! (#98)

driven towards uh margin I think sometimes we see um a lot of podcasts and many people focus on revenue revenue I think for us it's about we had this discussion about profitability for us it's really around yes we look ideally 150% Ras after 120 days nice this is what we we feel that it's a healthy business this is no gaming podcast two and a half gamer sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously of course welcome everyone uh welcome to this week's episode my name is mael anich I'm Felix bber and I'm and we are your hosts and

we have Alvar over here which is our special guest from Voodoo we'll give you a time for your introduction because you're are very special guests and I mean we know each other we had a call after our um latest episode about Voodoo so uh you know we thought we should bring you on before we start the same we the same very good that's very good perfect so we're going to discuss the voodoo gaming portfolio and like how you kind of approach the hybrid kind of monetization what we are doing on that side H before we go there um so we are you know we want to invite all of you um to Istanbul because there is also Google event happening on 7th of March and there is super secret two and a half Gamers event happening on 6th of March so apparently like everybody's traveling already on like one or two days before so we thought we're going to have a small 200 people knowledge

sharing uh sessions so we have few talks lined up and then there's going to be after party I'm going to share the landing page as soon as soon as it's ready so you can start registering uh is that is that good enough for for intro alar intro himself as well good intros yeah yeah yeah who are you alar yeah please yeah please let us yeah yeah it's a pleasure to meet what's your star sign it's a my star sign Aras does it mean no um so yeah working at Voodoo I joined voodo three years ago I am helping voodoo actually to move from hyper casual to what we call hybrid casual SL casual uh before that I worked at King for almost 7 years managing some of the key franchises in Innovation for the company and before that uh was managing studios in Asia for game love so like 17 years in Mobile gaming and at the moment I'm focusing on leading what we call

live games at vus so basically the games that are available to be played nice sounds pretty solid that's a sexy that's a sexy job right now right it's so right in time right perfect yeah you said so you are in Wood fre years so it took a while until you get got here right like in terms of the like turn turning hyper casual to hybrid casual kind of stuff that's right it's not it's not easy it's not easy it wasn't yeah but yeah apparently you are doing something very right from from the numbers we see I mean external tools obviously so it I would assume like this is even even better than than what we see EX in the external tools maybe I can start off by just asking of our like is hyper casual dead or is it alive and kicking I get this question a lot I really believe that as a business model it is dead uh I think I think like

players I think they will still enjoy fresh core game plays that can be played for a couple of days but due to the rise of cpis it's just not profitable enough to see growth does it mean that dead like today well I think that there are still marginal uh uh revenues that could be done but Investing For That on the future I personally don't believe so and and Voodoo we completely stopped and we move completely to to hybrid casual and Casual um I think and we are not the only ones observing that I think some some studios are clinging to to hyper casual I think it will be um complicated yeah you know because big companies are moving away from hyper casual so does that mean like there is maybe an opportunity for small game gaming companies to just start or is like super late already I mean I think it's late I think it's late it's already late yeah yeah yeah

okay yeah I think it's late I think uh the changes on idfa like cpis are not going to decrease anytime soon like uh the big companies are typ meaning never that's right and you can see also like the the big actors are like spending uh considerably right um just doesn't uh fit to be uh profitable I think yeah yeah let's Okay so what which game are going to be talk about and by the way I'm very disappointed Felix and the because you didn't didn't mention my flamboyant uh Flamingo over there flamboyant enough that I don't need to mention a flamingo behind you I brought another guest in this a little bit of overview I would say uh will be warranted here um so we for those who don't know we covered the blockchain 3D control in separate episode independently before and collect them all as well so do more thank you for doing that yeah yeah yeah something like that so so we just going to like I

just want to kind of briefly FR it as I usually do there so looking at kind of a voodoo Evolution as like a whole that what we see here in the Sens of tower we can clearly see the trend that like downloads are kind of stabilizing or even declining and I AP and I stress that I is skyro down that graph yeah exactly yeah so it's literally screaming to me like like the peot is happening there that that's definitely there the games that I mentioned before uh Mob control here when we clearly see the trend there like the game was launched as hyper casual success and then later on after I think like this is like nearly two years it got morphed into hybrid and same uh I guess a little bit different stor with blog this is absolutely killing it I mean I'm really like Kudos like heads off it is just amazing the teams are doing an amazing job the fresh estimates that we see here is Mob control is doing something like uh let's say 60k IP a day

and W gam 3D is doing something like 75 in which you you kind of need to calculate the sness multiplier which we kind of yeah and since Alvar is smiling this is definitely underestimated yeah and I estimated about on Mob control I estimated about 50% out revenue on top of that so yeah yeah yeah so good good estimation so maybe maybe yeah nice maybe my first question here is that because it will lead probably to more question here is uh how do you see the evolution that mob control underwent or like if you can talk a little bit about the background changes because I talk in like in numerous talks about this how the game shifted from this can very very simple just three upgrade buttons at the bottom game where later down the line the the visual progression was added the let's say streamline version of like stuff that let's say social casinos use like coin master all these where they just like literally like just index

points that reveal or refurnish some kind of a visual picture then moves to next one and then the I guess the biggest upgrade that really kicked into Revenue was the addition of gacha and turning those three upgrade buttons into like separate like token economy on Shard gacha Bas basis by by the way I searched the player forums tried to calculate the spend that the mob control and just the gold that I found there like some calculations of guys that were just like how much currency s currency to upgrade these cars not counting into cars like if I anchor it correctly it was something just 30k just for the gold all of them this is Jakob saying he's very excited to have you on the podcast and talk about this pretty deep so you did your research that's yeah if you can talk a little bit about the background or how mob control went uh like into the stage that it's today yeah uh it would be difficult to summarize the the whole work from the team right and uh but I would try to give a bit of Justice I I

think I think what was what's really amazing with the team behind mob control um is that they really had from the beginning beginning a long-term Vision right um and I think it sounds cliche to say that but I think that's really what makes this game stand apart is that every feature that is being built Sprint after Sprint goes towards a common point and yes you are mentioning topics um around the Armory around improving your your weapons and with GAA mechanics but you will see that actually the more you play and this is I think true for all the other hybrid casual games at Voodoo the more you play the more you will see sophisticated gameplay so for example one thing that probably you are not um seeing so much now is how actually mob control gets into realtime competition like a real PVP uh many players thinks uh in the beginning that

is actually faked but all the pvps are uh are true and leader boards and competition actually drive a lot of uh retention here and it's a game that just keeps on getting more and more fun um uh to be played the thing is that we we really time very well when some features appear the unfolding we we are very Progressive so that's one thing uh as well and obviously uh live Ops I I think all the companies are doing the same but good live Ops and a good calendar of liveops uh help the growth obviously with uh unique uh items that you can unlock uh through also season passes I think each season pass has your set of missions but also your special reward so yeah and the game is getting more and more sophisticated I wasn't mentioning

and you will see I think you you will see a big big change as well in the in the coming uh weeks as well that we are very very excited about um to be honest I think any teasers any teasers that you can share it will make even better uh the sense of progression nice way more visual way more Visual and way more meaningful so that's for the the teaser and to be frank I think give it a couple of years I think this game will be a full-fledged M core game I think it will be difficult to still refer it as an ibrid casual because of the sophistication of of the features yeah it's definitely going there like my one grip with the gacha would be that it's uh kind of linear progression without the incentives in the core game play because usually how gachas work that there's some kind of a requirements Within game play where I let's say would need to build the second team or some kind of let's say you know

like let's say yellow guy cannot be used in this level I need to use whatever another guy which I think is kind of missing currently but I guess that is like like just the evolution is part of it and down line it's there down the line for example we have something called the loadout challenges that really it's opin uh challenges that um but you need to use different set of equipment uh you have different missions and again and also when you go into like the upper leagues of uh Mob control like it really gets highly highly competitive and you really really need to level up your units and so it just takes some time to to unfold I know I know sorry sorry I I I know I remember when we had the call after our episode you you also said that the col them all kind of like changes dramatically after let's say level 100 or something and it's absolutely and I saw I saw this week or last week an article about this from one of your colleagues that's saying oh my

God this is actually not hyper casual but turning into casual game down the line yes yes and and I think it's it's it's the onboarding is really an onboarding that takes a bit of time it's also due to also how we acquire users as well and we are constant constantly testing when some liveops actually or some features are the good place to be introduced and and and which try okay let's introduce that sooner and sometimes the players don't react very well but it's something that we are constantly constantly tweaking and yes um collect them all level 100 very different from the level uh one for example experience it's it's a very different game yeah yeah I think like this is really the key part here like the let's say the Heap of knowledge behind all of those AB tests when to unfold which feature because we're not really talking about our usual like let's just SL a casual game tutorial on it with like 30 minutes and then unfold

the whole feature set because it won't work here and this is exactly the point where I guess like that steady pace of Let's test this feature like I don't know day seven day eight maybe it's too soon maybe move it to day 14 something something which kind of gives you the edge then that okay and that brings me to my other question uh when you were pretty much scaling up blog gam 3D we can see that the progressions are pretty much the same except the PVP element that that's like the big change of course because in mob control other people can destroy your you know visual points here and you can receive attacks Revenge attacks stuff like that of course this is not applied to block gam 3D but the progression style is kind of the same correct so the question would be here like if you saw the positive impact of the numbers on Mob control did you immediately just like told the team like hey guys we know this meta feature Works should be implemented or we immediately tested it within the build the the good thing I think it it's part of having um a culture in our

company that is really extremely pragmatic and all AB tests results are shared across the board and when something works we try very very fast yes um so obviously you can see the inspiration where it came from and it and it worked um will it stay like that forever I don't know uh but but for this element uh of the progression it's h it was the right move um to take from Mob control and defitely we always share constantly and a lot of features are cross-pollinated across all our portfolio and very very fast you you don't need to convince the teams like the because the the teams are actually very driven by by the success uh of their G see Revenue growth and then it's like yeah I don't think anyone needin right uh do I get it right for people just

like maybe omitting the fact here that this is of course published by Voodoo but in the end make by two different external Studios that are working with Voodoo uh no actually now everything is eternal part is already kind of like part of vo vo vo and and the team looking after mob control is in internal Studio as well okay so there's a big shift there if I understand here um so it's um party up uh these guys are amazing they came up with this and they decided to join us yeah because I I think when when I was like few of my talks before like especially last year I was talking exactly about this topic that hyper casual Publishers would struggle with the problem that they were used to kind of working with external Studios mainly which means the product know how usually either left or stayed there not internally so I guess this is the answer to that kind of a challenge from your side that you're internalizing teams now it's it's a part of the answer yes and I think the second part is we

were we took the radical step um uh yeah one year one year half ago to actually divide the gaming um teams in actually two tracks one we call it the core team uh so it's led by Sha and tibo and basically those people are really in charge of coming up with successful prototypes and testing thousands of game plays right and the other team what we call live games those are the teams that actually take the game from one to 100 where the others took it from zero to one it's equally as hard but it requires a different uh level of expertise so internalizing Studios is part of the answer but also we are dividing uh uh the work and I think many companies um are actually reaching the same um how can I say conclusion because life management it's it's actually very tough right when you are scaling a game is

very different track this year yes yeah super sell and it's amazing right uh when I was at King also we went through um that division as well life management when you want to keep a game relevant for the next 10 years and if you have hundreds of people working behind successful titles it's an expertise on its own and sometimes you need also different type of mindsets and different type of experience I would say and would you say then that you also have like a dedicated liveops team as you mentioned the core team liveops team is within the the live Studios yes definitely it's something that we are putting more and more uh how can I say focus on because live Ops can mean many things right you're are talking about calendar and you are talking about content but you so are talking at some point about economy about segmentation about customer

relationship so when you go in the rabbit hole of liveops you it can take you very very far yes could I just butt in here and ask a question because ad monetization you know it's the most important thing so basically is cool yeah it is yeah so basically I wanted to ask a question around skip itss right so Remo if you can go into uh mob control and just open up the store and show off the skibs so it's quite clear that now in the hybrid casual push it's kind of split off into two main schools of thought it's kind of one Le led by you guys and one by seame so Voodoo you guys pretty much started with the skip hits basically tickets that you can utilize to skip one rewarded ad basically unit cost for tickets and then you have the s games method which is kind of us splintering off and kind of allowing users to use premium currency to skip the rewarded ad and just cutting out the skip itss can you just talk a little a little bit about the thinking behind that and what

the cannibalization or incremental results have been for you guys from implementing skiet well I think maybe we'll be disappointed by the answer but it's just a question of a testing different solutions and see what actually uh works best and drives more LTV the skip bits work pretty well in mob control um because also you have to couple that with the subscription packages that mob control has for example all all the top players are subscribed to mob control um and the skip hits really bring a lot of value because it allows you actually to go very very fast will it work in every game um we test it but sometimes the results also depend so it's I think it's a really a case by case rather than a general rule and it all comes back also to the first thing that I was mentioning about what I think mob control is so so special is because they have this really good Vision that

everything fits very well and I think mob control you play it still feel very how can I say day one you can still build a lot of features but everything is very cohesive um and the skips I think are part of that uh uh experience would uh I don't know like I don't know if you're allowed to say but on an LTV incremental average percentage are we talking about single digit uplifts d or triple digit like uplifts in terms of overall user LTV you don't need to say specific percentage but I'm just bit curious It's a good it's a good uplift it's a good and and um I would say uh at the moment the revenue between ads and Ina is as you mentioned is like around 50/50 on on Mob control but the inaps are really uh growing uh steadily that was kind of my question if if you increase the iip revenue does it always mean like you cannibalize the ads and like it depends

it depends to who you show ads and in which products right I we shouldn't never see ads as a bad thing right ads are actually very very cool like ads are beautiful ads are beautiful yes I mean if it's well implemented it brings a lot of value and and it's a reality that some players will never pay not because uh of a lack of money but sometimes um some players they are yaku bremier they he doesn't pay he never made an i in his entire gaming career I did some players they feel that actually when they pay they are actually spoiling the fun and other players they think like no actually I'm spending hundreds of hours and actually this is my main source of fund and it's all logical that I invest um ads is here also to how can I say be there for a different specific set of needs and players I really believe that when it's implemented it's actually triggers

value I agree last thing I could add here is just like it needs to be budgeted into the economy like the output of how much stuff ads are giving you needs to be budgeted into the economy you know master sheet and that's it if you do it properly then it's great if you screw it up it's you know absolutely and ads some I usually I recommend is that ads they bring you a specific products and other products can only be driven for example within apps and you can Define patterns but yes it brings a different level of complexity because you need to understand will this player will become a payer yes or no uh you and and testing ads is I would say is not a oneoff thing like you need to constantly retest when is the good introduction of ads in term of interstitials at what level what how many game play and it depends on the cohorts it's it's a discipline but it allows uh the games uh to

scale absolutely yeah I'm assuming you must have done some tests around skip it versus uh letting users use premium Eon currency to skip rewarded ODS like uh would you ever like try the other thing and go kind of the say games route or is Skip it's you think the best solution for it I think I think it's a I wouldn't break something that works for Mob control yeah yeah uh that's more a and say games I have a lot of respect for say games but I think mob control is has his own Journey yeah and driving like I think features that I think are very Innovative uh obviously there are things that are uh in true Innovation is also comes from inspiration but I think mob control is not a game that uh is following I would say yeah I think here it works yeah yeah keep in mind that like mob control has like kind of a different economy because

if I understand correctly there's not really a hard currency in it per se because even the let's say let's take like the the other side of the river hubby template usual hubby template is is run on the gacha shop with hard currency but if you go into mob control I guess also the other booster packs are from direct money purchases not for hard currency which is a giant difference which I think is also Big Driver of conversion here so the economy would need to work completely different if you would even want to switch the SKS out of it yeah I think it will be the wrong priority to actually uh because when you have games that are successful um you go through a lot of internal challenges right you need to grow the team and scale the team uh to follow the success and obviously everybody has tons of ideas and suddenly you have a wish list like this in the road map uh and it's difficult sometimes to decide what to do next quarter right definitely this is not something that I think uh should be touched uh in the

short term or medium term yeah yeah that that's like sounds weened okay um I know yeah we can talk a little bit about blockchain but like don't want to talk that much to be honest uh you don't want to talk that much oh my God like who are you beginning like what are talking about I have different game here running that that I want to talk about which I think is very no let's go back and I will tell you why it's like you are Level 32 I'm level 40 that okay that's that's my answer to your thank you both for playing the game first yeah but the it's really hard actually yeah I love that to to be honest blog jam it it has this like very very nice meta game of these kind of let's say time events that are like literally my guess is they are kind of probably mostly B run or I don't know how but like they literally pair just very small cohort or players in this very very Speedy schedule like literally

within hours you have just you know the time to kind of finish there and all it's nicely done to just reinforce playing the main core Loop nothing else like all these all these like everything like it's happening like something is happening always you don't really need to learn like new mechanics or whatever it's just happening on its own it just nicely reinforces the core game play something similar like let's say Monopoly go has I think like the similar progression there because these users probably don't want to get here into like whatever deck building Theory crafting something so again we see the nice push with like simplified same visual progression but completely different kind of meta games and you don't even know like what's happening after level 100 in this game as well you mean like 100,000 I yeah the leaderboards in this game is insane I want to ask is it real people in that leaderboard cuz uh like I go to the global one like you have that many levels well what no matter what in the future we want it to be more and more um how can I say real

interactions I think and I think this is also a game that the more you play the more features you unfold this is really really uh the beginning the game was released recently I would say um uh the team is doing a very very good job and like I think it will be interesting to take a picture of what the game is today and you take the same picture in one year I think you will be very very surprised uh and this game to I think we it's a casual game yeah yeah I think like hybrid of course uh there is ADS but I think it's not enough to to have ads to be called hybrid but when you% I said I'm not sure might be too highs you close inaps are even a little bit stronger than that and uh but when you see the retention the inaps and and the trajectory this is a full-fledged puzzle casual

puzzle yeah and and we and we are we we we believe it can go far it's a very very fun game and it's already went far like yeah it's already doing really well it's like we are very we are very ambitious and yeah that's what I want saying I feel I feel like this is just the beginning yeah do you think like you would like eventually end up like you know getting U shoulder Tosh shoulder with people like play rcks or you know dream dream games are like these guys here that's that's our goal in the long term yes I think there is absolutely no reason why at some point we cannot position Voodoo as a top tier casual company I mean when you look at our capacity of marketing is is world class because of I mean the number of installs that the marketing Drive is just after Google and Facebook right and when you look at the sheer numbers of prototypes that are being done and and this p that we are doing I mean it's a different approach

to casual and I have only respect for dream play Peak and King but yeah the idea is really that Voodoo uh needs to be there uh in the in the medium term absolutely yeah think about think about this we had Sam from Les Moore on the last podcast they're small team can you imagine like how many teams like these small teams are in in Voodoo at this point like making new prototypes the court is like my God like what I'm pointing at that like it seems to me that this will be later down the line the mandatory way how to do things because of the CPI hurdles because it's like you can build your own second best manager on giant whatever casual game and like have progressions and whatever but like it doesn't make sense if you cannot just you know breach the CPI wall there and the only way to bridge the CPI wall is to know position the game at least from creative and like this kind of onboarding standpoint as a hyper

casual and we see this not only on the Casual side we see this on the core side like our friends from Century games like it's all about that exactly like core people are also kind of trying to use these let's say latest tricks here to position the completely core not midcore just core games to look like hyper casuals to begin with from creatives to the whole on boarding so it doesn't need to be only hyper casual but also like different types of gameplay as well yeah absolutely yeah definitely companies need to be AB the proficient on cbii I think I think we all heard the successful stories of dream um yeah but it's true that for one company like dream we don't see the thousands and thousands companies that failed right um so here I think each company finds their own Journey uh and I think we somehow managed to transform ourselves but kept pieces of the DNA that allows us uh yeah to build for for the future yeah you ran UA for a lot of games and you know

like that's a very good experience and very good base for like the upcoming years yeah it's a difficult expertise difficult expertise now to moving on a little bit to paper.io because I know alaro mentioned to me before and I just want to kind of highlight it not really as some kind of a like a yeah everybody needs to talk about it just but I think it's a great example of like what is happening and we can talk about a little bit there if I find the right after maybe if you click on some of those tabs get somewhere this is the one that I'm I'm trying to get there because if we see the launch of paper R 2 it was somewhere in 2018 giant launch Lally like millions millions of dollars a day day I'm not kidding here looking at the chart and now we see that the game actually uh in 2022 it actually tripled or quad druple the amount of downloads that he currently doing but the interesting part

is also on the revenue side where of course there were some Revenue because of the giant amount of downloads before but we literally see this kind of giant U-turn Valley where suddenly iips started scaling up alemy yeah and how how this went on and I was looking at the old builds of the game uh again similar case as mob control I would say where you have like I think there wasn't even like main menu it was literally like just like put back the the sensor Tower to to the background it's uh it kind of it's it's quite nice if you have those games and then oh this one this one okay yes now this yeah this is good okay uh yeah so the thing is that the game again went uh like very very heavy like let's say metag game uh changes like as I look through the game U let me play just like one match to understand how it's going so the game is a little bit I would say harder to understand because I was a little bit lost into it but it's

basically some kind of a yeah then I got killed some kind of advanced version of snake where you are pretty much creating your own territory by completing a line around your territory and ending there and at any point whoever crosses your line kills you or if you yourself slams into your own line you also kill yourself which also happened to me a lot so and uh by that point on actually when you get the hang of it it's pretty fun possibilities to kill other people to come up with these kind of different tactics to kind of just stay near your territory play it safe then like swiftly Go and Kill the other guy so it gets progressively like I would say skill based you know harder and then uh the important part is that there was like a lot of yeah lot of visual progression again added into the game like we see here so the main main point of the game regarding the meta game features is that you are painting the whole world with

like your color of your skin that you're currently using and this literally like continents that you have there like I'm currently in whatever this is Mexico yeah us I'm in Mexico there's like other countries there I think there was some kind of special giraffe yeah I'm using a giraffe there was some kind of special special event for Guatemala that I could like try to kind of get some kind of swiftly it's also a little bit of idle progression because you can claim soft currency that regenerates by hours uh there's actually a progression of the boosters now so you can upgrade the boosters and I think this is like worth mentioning you can actually have one more Life by default by spending 50k of currency just for the first one why not and then of course there's the Skins which come all the way from epic to specials which I guess come through some achievements or events and then there's the show which again have skip it there

we go and then there are these events I think I even got the special offer badge here uh today but it going run out and there's a little bit of a like killing event here where it just counts your kills and pushes you on the leaderboard again to reinforce the main core gam playay and then uh occasional add or occasional booster that's like right there in the main menu the rewarded uh placement right here so for a second here I just want to I just want to get alvaro's take like what did you guys do did you repurpose this for hybrid casual you took it out of cold storage and just slapped on some skiet and some Meta Meta core G or like what was the thinking I think this will would not give Justice to the work that was done by the paper team uh actually what you see the rise here on the curves yeah at the moment it's a game that is still very very ads driven um and the the the rise of inapi is fundamentally doesn't show actually how paper is becoming actually one of

our key games uh at Voodoo um it happened because the team really focused and it took a long time actually feature after feature to improve the the retention yes we moved some of our how can say inhouse learnings but the reality is that it took more little tricks here and there to actually they multiply the the this3 by five after one year of work right and suddenly it's actually yeah wait by five 5x the d3t 5x yes can you stress the time please Al so people understand like how much this process take because I think this is crucial this is after one year of of work yeah yeah on paper um and I think it's only the beginning because as you mentioned I think the game play is

really really fun uh once you get the hook of it and it opens a world of possibilities um and yes with cool liveops uh cool meaningful progression cool depth I think this game could be much much bigger uh and it's fresh it's a it's a game play that is still fresh nowadays and when you see the game from a visual standpoint and feature standpoint again I feel it's only day one and when you say key one of the key titles is that in sense of Revenue or were you getting the most amount of learnings like what is that word Reven okay revenue is one we consider it one of our top hybrid casual games but uh among those uh paper is the one that is really uh mainly driven through ads yet for now which is not a problem which is not a problem yeah uh but definitely at some points the more you go the more because you cannot just put skip bits I would say like you need to deliver value

for our players so that they use skippit and uh and at the moment I think uh it's more about the gameplay and the fun and making longer playtime sessions and coming back more and more and at some point I think with the features that will be introduced probably inaps will be justified because of new experience we are introducing yeah keep in mind guys what I said that at the beginning that uh the download numbers the daily amount went from 50k to like 200k a day current day so and this is cool this is cool because it opens the door to maybe in the in the back catalog of hudo you have a lot of legendary games yeah uh that maybe could receive the same treatment and this is something actually we are actively uh investing as well uh I don't know know there are a lot of failures of course um paper is a

good success and I hope we can replicate that in some of uh the successful historical titles that are still heavily downloaded with good metrics and still well beloved yeah I I I talk about a little bit with Nikolai when I was on a panel with him at Barcelona and like literally used it in my slide like so what's the next progression for H iio and uh Helix jump you are well informed it's absolutely we are looking at these games it's among the games that we are looking for it's very logical that you actually look into those games because there those games May made hyper casual hyper casual like like the legendary games yeah and it's difficult to to actually find how you improve from there like it's you don't have a playbook for that right it's really a tailor made uh uh approach and that's why we are hiring veterans um to build a studio just around this that's

what I wanted to ask like what is like how the skill set needs to be different like what are the different skills that you need to need to have now to actually build these like iip based games because yeah we're used to some other skill set as well before I would say we favor at the moment recruiting veterans from the industry that people that operated large games uh and games that were available for a long time I think this is about the people that we hire for live Studios so we we look at people that are experienced in this and that are motivated as well to grow one game for the next years right and and sometimes this Mission can drive some people mad right some people they really need to to do prototypes one after the other and that's how they find their Drive which I totally respect and we need those people but yes uh veterans and people that are truly passionate

around life management and life management means improving the game by staying also true to the original game play uh and that's something that requires yeah a certain mindset and discipline yeah definitely like it's it's no no joke to work on a game for like five years straight it's like yeah you need to have some kind of endurance for that not just creativity for me I personally love it because every quarter it's it feels like a new it's like like a a TV show like you have season one season two and it's just like surprises and CLE fers you never get bored but from from the outside life match management here can look um it's mean but in reality it's not uh it's it's a whole Adventure yeah I think this this really kind of brings on the edge here with the setup because because um with Hyper casuals of course like there's definitely some

learnings and stuff that can be passed on like different Studios doing different hyper casual games but I think it's more inverse of like marketing or like every game is kind of specific but when we talking live Ops uh I think it could have literally like a multiplicative effect on whole portfolio if you know like let's say oh we Tred this new you know offer set up we try this new other whatever metag Game feature that like let's say five other games can Implement in your portfolio and you're you're sure that like the results were positive absolutely and the hyper casual DNA also allows to have teams that are ready to do that it sounds trivial but sometimes you can be confronted uh within your own company when you have successful learnings that they don't scale across the portfolio yeah just can can you just get back that that ad it's just so weird Okay C okay yeah your conqu okay um and the good thing is that hyper

casual people mentality with a DNA they have really a performance driven uh how can I say drive and and pragmatism right so you don't need to spend time on doing internal PowerPoints or hey and and knocking at people's door and say hey have you worried about this feature it there is a natural agility towards and uh believe me this is not something to be taken for granted definitely because you you were in that position so many times thanks to the pro prototyping of hyper casual games right so you know how it's done yes because when you do hyper casual I think you realize how hard is gaming yeah it's like you see really like oh my God it takes like thousands of failures to make one single successful prototype that every successful feature um people they they approach it with open arms I think

this is one of the reasons we can go fast as well there's you know like people are saying oh my God hyper casual games there are not even games like well everybody can do that like yeah well you can say this because you never tried so you that's right yeah like yes it's when you have to do to ship prototypes every four weeks three weeks when in hyper casual and repeat repeat repeat and failed GRE need is it can be desperate for for some teams yeah how this like the prototyping kind of framework changed now you have good question um it changed in the sense that we are not prototyping for hyper casual anymore okay which means all the funnel from the prototypes are aimed towards hybrid casual that is game plays that are built to be sced up scaled up and to have a longer uh how can I say experience uh so the type of game play

the the type of tests the time we spend on the prototypes um it's completely different um we still use the mentality of hyper casual to diversify our Bets with a publishing internal Studios and and a sense of speed but we had to update the processes right um and all the games are aimed to be hybrid casual we have to have a deeper player experience and the deeper economy so how long does it take to actually go from zero to have a prototype and do we work on the Prototype I think more than the time I think it's the number of prototypes and we are testing thousands of prototypes a year like I gave this statistic um uh to somebody else like if you if you had a studio of like three four people and you were taking a month or two months like to do a prototype just for a core game play to have the number of prototypes

that we test it would take you 50 years it means you could spend your life and career to find the one right yeah so so it's there is and never find it right and it's a question of uh volume but also we are allowing processes also to aim towards higher quality and um and also higher yes depth of gamepl so let's say if if you have a hyper casual game build prototype in let's let's say two days now it takes what like a month two months to just build that yes and uh and if it goes well we would continue as well at the core team for a longer to okay uh to scale and try understand how the metrics um sustain uh with more uh UA because we only send games to to live teams when we feel that okay those games are sustainable we don't want um how can I

say to move a game from core teams to life teams if there is not uh how can I say um progression figure out yes and and some conviction kind of scalability as well right so exactly conviction about this could scale how like you mentioned yeah sustainability or like like how like what are the kpis if you can say like okay well this good but what does that good mean for us we are very driven towards uh margin I think sometimes we see okay um a lot of podcasts and many people focus on revenue revenue I think for us it's about discussion about profitability for us is really around yes we look ideally 150% Ras after 120 days nice this is what we we feel that it's a healthy business okay that's very good specific number thanks for sharing

that yeah that's you can kind of visualize like okay well now now you know I also wanted to ask so it's quite obvious that voodo is still probably one of the biggest Publishers in terms of AD Revenue right still globally today uh we can see from the conversation here where this is heading right you're going more I AP Revenue in how long orever do you think that 80% of voodoo's Revenue will be IAP H that's a good question I mean again I have nothing against ads uh like for example if I if we had like 10 games like paper and um I there will be absolutely no problem right yeah um I think it's more about scaling bigger games but it's true that if um if games like mob and block Jam continually this this growth well fundamentally it will change vodu uh to be a more Ina driven uh company but not by Design I would say it's

uh the the balance between ads and inaps is really something Case by case and we don't give targets as okay this game needs to be inaps no actually what we look is LTV and good LTV good good margin and margin can comes from different ways yeah that's right and uh that is true that the more games like mob and block Jam take more space it turns also uh Voodoo towards a more Ina driven organization and it's also true as I mentioned more and more we will I think be uh positioned at the same level as historical companies like King play and dream uh in the medium long term and this fundamentally will be inup driven uh Revenue games simple question like how like when we can actually expect this to be 80% I IPS but do you have like a goal for let's say this year we we want to grow the iip

revenues by 20% or 30% or 5% no we don't think like that we we set ourselves uh Targets in Revenue in gross margin okay so for example last year I don't know if you seen the the blog from our CEO Alex SD was sharing and yeah and uh about the key figures of 2023 and obviously we want to grow from there yes to move from 600 million to let's see how far can we go this year nice but gross margin is really really important I think and it's normal that you look at this right when you have a market that is a little bit like more tense I would say it's normal also that you are sure that you can self- Finance yourself right you cannot be in a situation that companies depend on external VC funds right yeah and when you have when you are bidding a lot of venture it's important to have healthy practices that you can be truly independent and

you are not taking decisions based on oh my God will I get that funding in the next six months right so would that also mean that like just like very very thinking far ahead like that's also that you would also have some kind of like webshop strategy that we keep hearing all the time in these days that like every company is trying to move players to you know web stores uh excluded I mean we have already direct interaction with our best players for example for we were talking about mob controls some of the best players are talking like almost in a daily base with uh the team like uh and it's really an interesting interaction right it's not uh how can I say abnormal to think well if there is already a real communication why not to have also a real relationship regarding transactions right yeah again it needs to be done in a way that makes sense for the players so something that doesn't bring friction

something that is well um how can I say integrated yeah um and it's not something like it's not that one solution fits all it's something that takes a bit of time we I don't think it's a shortterm preo but definitely I think it will be there at some point maybe not through the form of we it can be actually direct transactions can take the form of very different forms and not just with the traditional web portal right yeah yeah of course of course that's just like for ahead um one of the other things that I had here uh maybe I'm putting uh UI had here is that did the UA change now kind of dramatically that we have game or let's say you have games that have 5050 split on the portfolio so let's say mob control UA before UA now or paper io2 UA before UA now now that like there's a IP element in it yes and no um yes it changed because the prediction

models need to be updated right um in the sense of capitalizing on it's you move from a game that drives most of LTV in a couple of weeks and you are looking at prediction models uh way longer term and you adapt your acquisition towards that um no it didn't change in the sense that we keep on brutally testing tons and tons of creatives um so that's I think a strength of voodoo is a the sheer capacity of finding these best creative that suddenly will unlock growth and I think they are the the growth team sometimes they are the Hong song Heros behind it all because when you look at the trajectory of mob control yes it couldn't be done as well with uh the expertise from The Grow teams yeah 100% And yes it changes as well that sometimes you're trying to look for different type of players and you and different type of um how can I say

methodologies and looking at more sophisticated player ads playable ads sorry yeah um and and sometimes you you are constantly testing in this transition phase but again the DNA from the past is super useful yeah yob I can I can also add uh so you move from ad campaigns which are like Alvar said like optimized or like goal is to have RAs in what's say one week two weeks one month and now we moving towards like purchase campaigns value optimization which then takes into consideration that you you want to see your money back in six months or yeah four months and then like that's changing the campaign structure would be most probably the same the creative strategy has to be the same because that's like that's the main point of hybrid casuals right you're kind of borrowing all hyper casual yes you just yeah you just change in like new audiences payers and that opens up again like a lot of new opportunities on the

Blended R campaigns I was checking paper.io to like obviously app is Top Channel at least from the sensor Tower we see which makes a lot of sense and like that's it like that's you go from ad Ras to hybrid Ras or like branded Ras and eventually iip Ras as well and value optimization yeah can you just remind blenders R shortly for people blend when you have 5050 split uh inap purchases and inap ads you are taking both ad revenue and inup revenue into consideration so that's that's happening yeah on the campaign level good summary absolutely yeah sounds great last just a question here last one what's headcount right now at Voodoo it's around 600 700 people I would say if you look at all uh also the the companies that join us and uh and I think we we are actually recruiting many people on uh on live Studios so I take the opportunity like if you if you feel

that you have uh the chops and um and your align with our ways of working yeah we are looking for veterans uh to manage our key games yes yeah that's definitely uh sounds sounds good um any other question guys that was really insightful I think yeah yeah yeah like thanks thanks for sharing the knowledge I cuz it's not a lot of times that people actually talk numbers real numbers yeah God yeah no Ministry of Truth it was good like yeah good I appreciate you guys inviting it's really a pleasure like uh and yes I think we sharing some numbers I think it's I think it's part of our culture I think like we a bit of transparency we very no not and very transparent and way and I think it it translates um somehow here but it's really a pleasure and I think maybe we should talk again maybe in one year and see a little bit that's I wanted to say yeah we can cross check like how how

everything is going because this is what like third third Voodoo episode so we looking very closely what you're doing I know I know like you know your podcast was really discussed a lot internally when we were saying okay okay this is right no this is wrong this is wrong and they say oh this guys they figure out so it's really really cool that's yeah because like we literally entering that exact phase as you say like there are now on the market like couple of really solid hybrids and like there will be more my guess is that there will be 10 more this year that will breach that like 1 million the month in I Mark yes at least at least 10 more at least at least and the market will consolidate and then it becomes another you know level up of this game which means liveops you now need to sustain those hybrids AB create the hybrid and then what and and definitely I think it's highly probable that hybrid casual is just another transition phase

yeah it's highly probable I it will be difficult to tell how long will be this Milestone but definitely I think what is cool about Voodoo is we don't wait for the things to decline to start immediately about the next growth right so for example when Voodoo was leading a hyper casual voodu had the mindset to immediately start creating hybrid casual and because it takes a lot of years to figure this out and we at at this moment we are already uh venturing in like what is the next step after I bre casual because it will take time it takes on learnings but we don't we cannot wait for the things to uh to go down because it's very difficult to transform a company if everything is burning around you because it brings because it's stressful your lack of resources is difficult to attract talent because talented people um join companies that grow uh so it's a anticipation it's

easier said than done but but this is really something that I think is um is part of our culture cool nice see you year yeah yeah thanks very much Alvaro for coming and a real pleasure I will definitely take you up for your word there like uh we should definitely do this it's like let's say this post hybrid phase of the yeah will be a pleasure I hope I will have the same smile in one year I'm I think I will I think yeah I think even bigger smile on the so we are seeing the grow trajectory and thank you very much and thank you guys for listening uh also please join the slack it's always in the show notes always there is a link so please who don't know yeah for those who don't know we have a slack channel it's almost thousand people from various companies different positions it's really good always good conversations are happening there if you can't get in

that's because ma blocked your email because you weren't following the guidelines don't email me email M we have rules you you need to have a photo you need to be able to there's also special stuff we announced that for instance the game that we play on the podcast that get announced week before so you can tag along so to join yeah and then please give us a Subs subscribe uh also share the podcast with your friends colleagues dogs and cats it's uh there's a grand piette behind Felix and then our flamboyant flamingos so you know animals like us quite a lot yeah yeah okay enough thank you very much guys see you next time thank you bye bye bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] bye [Music]

did you get these like magic numbers you talk about this all the time no we don't I've never heard about it our last podcast was 1 hour 8 minutes long and it was like exploded as soon as we put it out it was guaranted you know good content oh Jesus Christ ah uh anyway um did you get the notes Alvaro the the on ient now okay should we get started then yes or yeah should we just get started no just remember this this is no podcast so you know any anything that you say it's you know it has to be no yeah but but honestly like whatever you feel like doesn't live by this rule today though but whatever you feel I'm just saying that like say yes no or no comment or like you know maybe like that's that's maybe this is the real deal sounds very

good do you have the all the games open in the emulator yeah yeah yeah I have the oh perfect very very good so let's start M can you give us shout out for turkey as well in the intro and then uh we'll start