🚀 War Inc Review: It's not 2018 anymore! Great game, questionable UA & growth.

Why is getting more downloads? This is like
pretty good.
It's really good. Yeah, it's really good. But you know, like
maybe this is, you know, throwing it into wrong uh campaign setup.
That's what I would say. Like if you're spending on Google and Facebook and Facebook sucks for these types of games these days, well, you're not going to help yourself. See, I mean,
well, this is a problem. No, like this should be a problem.
This should be absolutely This should be 100%. And it's not. It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice drops [music] knowledge made of golden eyes with ads making those coins rise. Jack up designs worlds chasing the sky with [music] the two and a half game the midnight crew talking UA advers and game design too. Mate feeling shak bringing the insight we're rocking those vibes till the early day [music] master eyes on the prize tracking data through the cyerspace skies. Felix stacks colors like a wizard [music] in disguise. Jack crafters lift us to the highest. Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick got your back. Ads are beautiful. They light the way. Click it fast. Don't

delay. [music] Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Ah. [music] Ah. [music] Ah. Ah. [music] Ah, exactly.
Don't try to tell me what's an ad and what's not an ad.
I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We're going to the war apparently with War Inc. Hello everybody. My name is Matanic.
I'm Felix Broberg.
And I'm Yakub Breier
and we are your hosts. Why? Why the grumpy face?
I'm not grumpy. I'm just like getting ready for war, you know. [laughter]
That's not a very getting ready to war face.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's the downside of living in Slovakia. You always have to be ready. You don't know who's coming.
O, [laughter] don't don't even don't even start there, please. No, let's not let's not go there. Let's not go there. I have my things back there. So, you're talking about
numbers or game?
Game, please. I mean, people always want

to see game.
If it's on this podcast, it's definitely above a certain threshold that people know. So, basically, they know it's earning a lot of money. Otherwise, we wouldn't talk about it.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's true. That's true. That's true. How could you even get to level 226 and I know you you mentioned feelings you're 100 above or something?
I'm 148 right now.
I'm like 80 or something and it's I don't I don't know, man.
What do you mean? Like it's the perfect game from like, you know,
where's the auto spin? Where's the auto spin?
Yeah. Anyway,
where the is the auto spin? Come on.
Yeah, you go here and and you do like operation recorder.
Come on, man. like it's like it's for for normal people that are actually playing the game on mobile phone and not on the you know emulator.
I I still think people heavily underestimate the emulator community on blue stacks on PC.
No no no no it no I it's fine. I mean it's you very whatever very big. Yes. It

just doesn't matter if I I want to play a game on my phone.
Yeah. There should be an autoplay button in this already. Of course, like you know after the winning there should be like continue next stage in 5 seconds or whatever.
Yes. Yes. And that's it.
My my girls here in Dragon Tal there has so much automation that I don't even need to [laughter] look at it.
Yeah, exactly.
So
yeah, that was my point.
Take take point from spin. Even even uh with Battle Legion, we had like auto spin and it was just spinning all the time
like
but this is this is like battle legion pretty much. The similarities are quite big.
Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. I mean, it's not exactly the same, but it reminds me of Battle Legion quite a lot. Come on.
It reminds me of Battle Legion because it has four wheels, so it's also a car. It's completely different setup. Like, I'm I'm going to die on this hill.
Tell us why we're
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Prove me wrong.
Battle Legion has a matchmaking system. And it's a PvP game. This is PvE grindy
PVP game. fake PvP game. Come

on, man. I also worked on that game. It was
What do you mean fake PVP? It was a PvP game. It was driven by PvP meta. Sure. Okay, fine. This can be as well. It's just uh dressed up as PvE. It doesn't matter.
What do [laughter] you mean?
Does matter. Yeah, prove me wrong.
Think about PV Pre with UA managers is my sport. It
see prove me wrong. I mean, it's case the same thing.
There's no PVP component in this game in in this main core like zero.
There is on the side quest though on the mini games.
Mini games? You mean the other modes? No mini games. Anyway, let's go over it.
So far, you didn't prove me wrong. It's fine.
There's no matchmaking, man. There's
Okay, fine.
Prescripted. Everything here is prescripted. This army is prescripted.
Yes. If I'm a noob player, I don't know what prescripted is. And it really looks like an battle legion only that like, oh, in battle legion is, oh, you are actually matching with a opponent because

if you're a noob, you think earth is flat. So what?
Jesus Christ. Oh, this is this is your argument. Okay, this is your argument now. Okay, now Okay, great. [laughter] Come on, man.
Like this is basically the same argument you're telling me.
If I like this, it's like this.
I don't know what I'm more upset about you guys fighting or the fact I understand the nerdiness of what you guys are fighting about. So, like it's just [laughter]
you have the comments. You know what to do.
Okay, people section. Yeah. Yeah, of course. They will always
anyway in your in your opinion because they hate me anyway.
Yeah, exactly. They do. So,
they really do now. Now
they do. Now is the time.
Anyway, uh so the core is as usual this autoplay combat strategy, I would say.
Oh, I wonder which game it reminds me.
Yeah,
it's it reminds me Art of Legends, which we'll compare in a second.
But by the way, it's like frying my PC.

I don't know why. Uh, it's like extremely heavy on on the GPU.
I was playing this for for an hour and my battery was pretty much dead. And
you see how it's lagging even on my PC. It's it's just like unoptimized. But
I can make a breakfast on my phone
because of so many particles, so many kind of, you know, interactions that needs to happen during that that fight scenes. That's the like this unfortunate part of this. Let's have it unoptimized. But anyway, this is the main core. You go there and you build your army. You can, you know, reposition it. You can put stuff from your barracks, stuff like that. You merge units together between each other. That's the important part.
By the way, sorry to jump in. It actually the this build is different from the last one. I'm not sure if you play this, but I have this on my phone for over two months. And the first the previous build was you actually couldn't merge the unit in the menu. You need you had to do it in in here.
Oh, you couldn't Yeah, in Yeah, exactly. In here. That was really

annoying.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Uh there's auto deploy buttons and stuff like that. So that's nice. But uh yeah, the like here you can press this combine button. It auto merges stuff that's like immediately mergeable which is great. And again important thing about these things is that units work on instances. So it's a little bit different than a usual merge catcher because what actually means and maybe this is the part similar to that legion where you have similar instances of units which means you can actually use double of the units. So, I can use two of these whatever snowman snowball throwers and I can take these two and merge them if I had the currency because after level six they require this whatever golden tokens currency.
But, uh I can show you how it actually merges if we just summon. The interesting thing is that gacha is pretty much just in the main menu as this one button. But the problem that you figure out later this is basically sheet gacha. It just doesn't do anything like you can do this temple. it will

give you shitty units and that's great. And then again if we go to the menu we can press this button and we'll combine these guys. So if I go here here and like yeah I can merge these two into yeah one
upgrade all upgrade all and then like yeah and goodbye in the another mathematical combination of having 578,000 units again to get to seven.
So that's there. Um, as I said, even if I go into the level, I can summon directly from the level. But again, this is just gotcha because you just have shitty units from it. Honestly, like the drop rate,
the drop rate is like 3% for epic. There's no legendary. There's no mythic. So, you will never get any legendary or mythic units from that gacha, which is the one.
How do you minmax this game, Yakob? How do I minmax?
You summon on the main gachas, which is this one where now we have this uh Yeah. Uh KDA Gacha basically with uh I don't even know who's there. Night Fox. Yeah,

of course. Storm Maiden and Geommancer. Before it was King this other guy.
And this is the the normal gacha where again it's cheaper. There's not specific units and this is basically the new banner like the
exclusive thing that's kind of going around. It's quite interesting because these units as I understand want to return back or at least they don't go to the main gacha or something like that. But yeah, let's see because
it's limited only. So
yeah, it's limited only.
If you don't if you don't get them then that's that's it.
You don't have them because as I see like this kind of a core of your army it's normal. Yeah, that's
everybody will start and have those. What really matters is this like rainbow style units. For instance, this dragon which is currently
coming from the fctions.
Yeah, the faction battle somewhere in the middle. The king guy. He is by the way pretty strong.
He's pretty Yeah, he's pretty.
Yeah, he's like 20k HP just just for this one. So, that's pretty good. And uh the other thing that we have is also this wheel where we have a fake alter

from Assassin's Creed. And uh this is again like the I think hordes versus heroes versus hordes also had this kind of a gacha setup where you go you spin and you slowly take away uh the stuff that's here which kind of leaves you with the best stuff at the end. So that that's nice. Um
can you spin?
Yeah, we can spin but it won't do
Where do you get the blue gems currency from?
That's hard currency basically through achievements mainly through game progression. Somewhere here there's this achievement burid button that like you need to go through.
Oh my god is so so bad.
Until I found this until I found that I was like why am I so weak? [laughter]
Yes.
Yeah. It's it's it's quite bad. U the battle pass system that's the typical one. Nothing really to it. You have some quests on top of it. You have the shop there where there's this one ad placement that we'll get to later which is the typical hobby setup of the mythical chest, legendary chest and epic

chest for free uh I mean for one ad uh a day. Then the usual kind of soft currency, hard currency anchors. Then we have stuff like signing bonuses, stuff like uh progression rewards which is basically like a trophy road just done a little bit differently. And then we have the training which is these again scripted scenarios that you cannot control as for what units you even use. But the good thing is again teaches you the game. So that's there. And then we have the mode section which is the most important and I think interesting of all of these because this is the part where I was kind of surprised. There's also guild system which I couldn't get into because it's extremely full and everybody kicks me off and I don't have enough trophies and blah blah blah. Then we have also
yeah this is what I don't really don't really understand you need to explain it to me I don't understood what this is I think it's just squadbusters uh town
so what this does if if you look at this

increases these stoages and like gives you a little bit of gem so it's like a glorified idle mechanic but I was expecting that there would be some you know fight or whatever because you see there are towers and they have damage and you can like upgrade them and stuff so I'm guessing that either It has to do something with the clan hunt most probably or clan war. I guess it's it's a clan war mechanic because I'm not in the clan like it's I I tried.
You mean war war inc.
Yeah. So I I couldn't get but by the looks of this image I'm guessing you're attacking the you know it's like boom beach basically. So you're attacking a base of your enemy because you see there's kind of a water here. So you land here and you try to get like the thing because you can even reposition these buildings around like in boom beach style manner. So I'm guessing they're built kind of boom beach into it. I'll get to it maybe later when I get to a clan, but that's my best guess because there are towers here which means they need to attack something eventually and they're pretty expensive even to upgrade or whatever. So that's

there. Um then there's the hunting which is the boss mode. Cumulative damage, nothing really special. Uh battle drills again these prescribed scenarios. Exactly the same thing as Survivor IO has. Uh daily guesses. This is really new. So you go here and you literally guess which side wins. So let's say I don't know bottom wins. They fight it out and then you win a little bit of currency and also the percentage of how much you've been right compared to other players. If you I guess let's try to be wrong. Okay, which which we aren't because we were right. So hopefully this time we're going to be okay. wasn't really good. Uh yeah, now we'll be wrong finally. Uh which means we just get less currency and that's it. Not that much honestly, like 800 less, 500. So that's there. So it's a little bit neat mechanic there. Nothing really. 10 guests per day. And then we have Infinity War, which is again this kind of a whatever PvP style synchronous

battle if I understand or no. So, so this is PvE and then the arena should be or this is the arena. No, this is not arena. This should be battle drills. No, maybe there's no arena. I missed that. So, there's but this is the most important thing. There's co-op with pretty big rewards. And if you go into the co-op itself, it basically plays lucky defense in its full form with everything that's pretty much there. And
it's so long.
Yes, it's basically a second game.
Yeah,
it's literally a second game. We have all the mechanics. So, we have the recruits. You can can recognize the board. We can upgrade a mine, which is a little bit different because before you could put bandits into the mine or whatever. Uh, you can upgrade specific rarities of units. You can gamble away your
Yeah, but I still think it feels way more simplified than like

a little bit more simplified. Last time I played it, the guy against me was extremely good and I was extremely bad. So I guess he was he was quite quite pissed. But uh for instance, you see here, you literally need to merge like legendary units and stuff like that. So yeah, it's basically lucky defense and the same winning condition, which means it's not about units getting to your HQ, whatever.
Yeah,
it's about number of units on the on the map. If it crosses that number, you pretty much need to kill them now. Yeah. So yeah, they literally built a whole lucky defense game into this, which is amazing. So, but then the question is, uh, where do you make more? Oh, hello. Hello there. I didn't see you. Thank you very much for coming to this episode. Uh, it's brought to you by our sponsors, PVX Partners, the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing. If you're scaling your business uh, and need funding, here's the deal. With PVX partners, you can grow your game easily and your business. There's no equity

dilution. You can repay as you get paid, and it's flexible, fast, and fully tailored to your growth. So, you can secure funding in 30 days and get a term sheet in just 24 hours. Don't you wait. Take control of your UA budget without giving away uh a piece of your company. Visit pvxpartners.com and uh see how they can help you grow your game faster and stronger. Don't wait. Go to pvxpartners.com money here or in the normal game or this is just
interesting part how this is connected and I was looking into this like like why or how or whatever. So you have these tasks of stuff that you need to do which which helps of course but the most important part is the this kind of a lineup because if you want to have these whatever units you first need to unlock the units in the normal game in order to be able to merge them in the real game. So
why would I play the co-op? That's the

pro that's the thing like what's the motivation?
What's the motivation? Oh, I'll show you. Uh, [sighs and gasps] how do I escape this?
That's the thing. I had had no idea like how how the I'm supposed to leave.
Mhm.
I had the same issue. 100% 100% the same issue.
Like
I was like, wait, how can I how can I be out? Okay, here. Okay.
I was like spawning anything. Anyway,
yeah, I was like hard hard reset the game. I was like, okay, see you next time.
That's that's that's also one way to do it. So why would you do it? Because of these juicy rewards that you have here. That's why. Because these scrolls, for instance, are targeting the main banner. Gotcha. Yes,
you have legendary chests around here. Stuff like that. So yeah, it definitely pays off. And it's also part of all of the quest systems around the game. So you need to complete that. Again, you have stuff like uh where we
This one is fun. The [clears throat] world trial. Which one are you on? Go back.
Ah, this one. Trial four. Yeah. I guess

I can even go further if Oh, no. I can't
because it scales so hard.
No, not really. [laughter]
This the first time is really hard in the game, right? Cuz basically it doesn't much beating progression. This is not like you know.
So that was my that was my kind of not problem but it's like the the normal like the the usual gameplay. It's like it's easy.
Yeah, it's easy. I I hit already like a cap where I couldn't move on after 200 levels. Like you hit the cap. It's you know the usual kind of your progression. So if you don't have the power, you wait for tomorrow. You get energy whatever. Yeah, sure. But then like it's almost like yeah 200 levels I'm at level 80 and it's like okay I I need to 4x speed up the the game play because it takes so long and then that's it. I just click button.
Yeah. Yeah. By the way, this is life-changing if you can do four times speed.
Yeah, exact. Yeah. [laughter] So sluggish in the beginning
until level 30. But yeah, you pretty much never run out of energy. Honestly,
that's the thing.
Yeah. So doesn't really I don't think so

I did. Okay. So the very other important part is this. Hello. Uh we have this other game which is called Art of Legends which puts this game into completely different context because this is done by one studio called Fast
Fast Games.
Faststoneone games. Exactly. Which I'm guessing is from our favorite land of China.
I mean when I look at the UA part 100%.
Yes. So that's there and as you can see here it's quite a familiar. So what
it didn't look like this the art of legion man like this didn't look like went through few iterations of course really changed throughout the years because honestly art of legions is on our radar for a long time. Yeah,
a long long time. And they killing killing it on on the UA side of things back in the days.
You know, real time strategy is this kind of
whatever that means.
This basically means Clash Royale. So, it's a very very specific kind of a

niche, but they're there
battle
with both games if I understand correctly. So, Ard Legion is still 17 and uh War Inc. is currently fifth without the ads. So, of course, there's Clash Royale, but uh the important thing that I wanted to mention here that these guys are pretty much, as you see here, they're
templates,
not this is just two games. So, it's not a template. It's basically a better version of their first game. That's why they have time for shenanigans like building this whatever boom beach thing into it or
lucky defense like why not second game
because you see here that the units are literally the same. So for instance, if we take this fury canoner, then we have this whatever alchemist Henheim, which is exactly the same thing. It's just like they switch the brown color here. Henheim, you have to you have to change the tone of voice like Henheim.
Of course. [laughter]
Yeah. But a lot of these guy or this

whatever shogun guy you see here, it's Sakura Blade, Giniro against Sakura again. Exactly the same thing like even the same model like I guess like a different stance like yeah they tried basically so that's there even the art here see like this concentrated blade is like exactly
it's the same like
yeah yeah so they're efficient like what this means these guys are efficient like kudos to that because they know what they're doing they have the KPIs they have the level difficulty pretty much drilled down from the first game that I'm guessing that they can move on to the other parts of the game and like spend more time there to flesh it out rather than doing everything, you know, building a wheel from from the scratch where they again have these things kind of figure out.
You go into the stores for both games. I just want to see how they compare.
Sure.
Go down.
Yep.
It's pretty much the same.
A little bit different.
A little bit, but not that much.

They don't have chests. They don't have the chest because back here in in this store, if I understand, they they have the wheel like this. This didn't change because again, why they have this? Because it's monetizing otherwise they wouldn't translate it to the other game.
Yeah.
What's happening here? If I understand correctly, this is the wish list. Where's the where's the summoning thing here?
So, you summon units through where's the gacha? No, this is not the gacha. Or was there a gacha in the in the first one? I don't remember anymore. Or you
mean
these chests were there? No,
only chests.
Yeah, you have these chests on the saga and you get stuff from there. So I guess that's why they they moved so heavily into the gacha setup now because it's it's quite different here. Especially now they have, you know, gachas basically right here in the main screen or even in the level screen. So that's there. But uh yeah, I guess monetization wise this should be better long term hopefully. Yeah, let's see. If we go to

the numbers, um, so War INC is currently doing 40k a day on IP revenue and it just started scaling pretty recently somewhere like November last year. On download side, uh, it's not looking that good because it went a little bit of a shark fin with like 8K uh, daily downloads a day. I mean, this is going to have super high CPIs, right? This type of artwork in this type of game, right?
It shouldn't. It shouldn't.
It shouldn't. That's the thing.
That's the because of the art style and the whole visual.
Slow poly. And they are the the ones that were doing all these crazy with Art of Legends back in the days with all like the
Yeah.
the towers that were inspired uh or that they inspired like the Hero Wars guys and lot of different let's call it mass battles.
Yeah. Because if you look here, this is the overall company portfolio. Which means that art of war legion peaked

something like I don't know 5 million a month somewhere like start of whatever this is like first year of co and then went into decline from end of or start of 2022 into something like what like 300k uh a month. Then we have this island war which if I understood correctly was the boom beach iteration that they had. I think we covered it briefly on some soft launch sonar or something.
Yeah.
Yeah. talked about this
where we were expecting this to kind of do something similar and as you see here it was basically the boom beach style thing like literally looks like boom beach which I guess they still didn't really uh you know give up on and they put it into the game through the guild war which is a great thing to recycle your you know failed games so that's there and then um yeah like this thing did 22 mil uh the art of

war legion already did 150 50 mil basically. So, we'll see how the war in kind of goes, but compared to the Art of Legends, it's really kind of a small bump yet. So, we'll see if the they will be able to kind of push it up higher after this kind of a let's say download revenue post launch situation that they're having here. Yeah, they will need to crack the UA like that. That's the main problem in my opinion. I would also argue they should focus more on admon because basically it's a good way to get scale because here like I can see what they tried right so if you go to the shop there's only one placement that they have right
the the very difference
just one thing after I kill them or they kill me the very big difference hopefully I kill them is that art of war legions had ads after every single battle this
click it click it click it
it reload proper
and they they had done ad revenue

from what we
Yeah. which is not happening here.
Here's the weird thing, right? So I can like if you go into the shop and show the the chest, that's the only real ad placement, right? So exactly like what M said when we started like after each battle sometimes you're given 5,000 coins that doesn't scale, right? when you actually level up to watch an ad. But basically the ad
meaningless later down the line.
But like also the ad that you're showing is actually like internal 5-second interstitial ad that promotes the battle pass.
This one?
Yeah. No, that's that's the only that's the only real ad placement, right?
Yes. These are the only
what they're actually doing is just Yeah. Look, let me show you here cuz you can see they don't care about it. So I'm just wondering why to even have it in because here's the adups txt file. They're clearly on ADM Mob mediation
and they have Facebook and Google.
So like
I mean they
but it's it makes all the sense they

abandoned ad.
Why even have it in? Get it out. It's like right now it's like89% of revenue on top of everything, right? Like why even bother having that chest for an ad placement? It's just I I don't care
because why not?
I don't even get this like the the interstitial placement anymore. So after every every battle until whatever I think I had
72 I think or something like that.
I'm 73 and I I I saw it before between level 50 and 70 I think. So every after every battle there was a continue button or like watch an ad button. And I was like okay this. Like let's let's watch an ad. And then he was like wait a second like this actually promoting the own game. It's not an ad. It's an internal stuff. It's an internal video like Felix said. Like it was promoting
pretty much the battle pass. Yeah. or whatever was that, which is weird.
The first thing when I saw it first, I was like, "Oh, wow. These guys are really advanced." Cuz one of the things I've been doing with clients now is the first couple of ads you load when you get players for games that are like 7030 or something like that in terms of revenue split. We started loading

interstitial ads as the first three ads that you see in rewarded places because you can skip it after 5 seconds. So, you kind of build this loop that ads are not annoying and then you hit them with big ads when they're addicted to that ad ranking, you know? But like then I started looking at the content and I'm like, "Oh." And then I saw the adxt file. I'm just like, "Why even bother?" But like the the analogy I kind of want to bring in, right? It's just if you think about Raid Rush, they were able to get what 35% of ad revenue. It's very different game. But I'm just saying like they now do it on Yeah. 40. Are you no more? Yeah.
No. Basically like what they do is like interstitial after after each run when you haven't made a purchase after a certain level and basically doubling down on ads before and after the run. I'm just saying like majority of the users that they got in this game now early it's like longtailing going down. It'd be better to monetize when you know that they're not going to purchase anything through ads cuz right now you're just wasting this user base. It's for me it's just like a weird way of

thinking about Admon. It's just I I I don't get it. Also, yeah, I would I would also kind of uh push on ads more because of what you said. It it can open, but they need to implement Max, which way, which they will never do because again, they're Chinese company from what we understand. Even here, I found I found their website, which is why
don't by the way.
Yeah. I don't know. Maybe you can you can try
based in what was it the founders are from basically said Shanghai or Yeah. Pinga.
Yeah. That's like that this is their like the 89 trillion which is connected to fast on games for some reason
because they have this history of word link word story this is pretty much where they ads came from by the way you see it was absolutely terrible granny legend I haven't played this and then we have art of war legions right or art of war and today there's like the island war but obviously we're missing the
war inc but whatever So anyway, but I I wanted to say like this all screams

blended RS campaigns. Come on.
Yeah,
absolutely.
It's insane. But the problem I have is again they're never going to do this because they're heavy on which channels?
YouTube.
YouTube.
YouTube and Facebook. Of course,
because Chinese Yeah. Exactly. You need a Chinese move. On the other hand, I mean there's like some Tik Tok and some stuff here, whatever, but it's all pretty much Facebook and Google.
If you panty on this, how much larger scale do you think you'd be able to get with Adoras? You probably double it, right? Like
triple even. Come on, man. Like this is insane. I mean, they're not leveraging pretty much the biggest ad ad network right there with from the ads and UA perspective, which is apploining. I mean, whether you like it or not, like that's the case. I mean, and given the their actual low poly art style, I mean,

like, what the do you need more? I mean, like this is all set up right there. Implement max, put there more more networks like you always say because Facebook and Google that we will will not do I mean, kind of will do some stuff, but still you need more at least five others, right? and then just put it on on blended rows and you can do blended ROS, you can do ad draws and you can do even IP ROS because this is going to immediately have way more substantial ad revenue.
Absolutely. Like
and like come on put free placement and that's it, right? average hours to conversion by Jio and then basically when a user passes that you basically push them into an ADM mob admon uh segment where basically you show a rewarded ad right before every run right after every run and then also if they don't watch it in justial that means you're going to scale on blended row campaigns like yeah
yeah well Felix this what you're just talking about is way more advanced you just check the app apps txt file I mean come on you're pushing too much I mean

that's that could be an endgame there. But step by step, [laughter] if you if you present this solution to them, they're like, "Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa."
You can see they hate ads, right? They hate ads, right? So, basically,
I don't think they had ads because they had so many ads in Art of Legion, Art of War in Legion. So, that's the thing. Like, they don't I don't think they hate.
You know what the missing piece is here? Interstitials. You're never going to scale on ado campaigns without interstitials.
Oh, that's not true, man. That's not true. Come on. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe the thing is that this is done by a different team that is doing
because it's not in the on the same same landing page now. So might be but it's still fast on games. So it's definitely connected. I can I mean the thing is
little bird told me I know not little bird told me but I was kind of doing any any type of yeah hawk
how much money they're spending. So and this is the interesting part because people are always asking about like oh how much money they're spending. And I know it's it's counter counterintuitive,

but they're spending anything between like 40k to 70 and in some days on the weekends, which is a very interesting tactic and people should do it. They're spending goes to like 100k.
It's like yes,
this is recent because you know that from February is basically
from February day. Yes. Why is going down then?
That's the thing. I mean there are some some estimations of of these spends and there's this burst of spends. So the burst was on YouTube so they must be doing something weird on YouTube on
the whole February is like 10k downloads a day.
Yeah.
This doesn't add up.
Is it off payment stores or is it like where where they making the money? This must be bleeding cash.
That's the thing. Like if you look at the the the where is it here?
Follow the paper trail.
Yeah. Follow the paper trail. Uh, we do revenue and we go countries.
US.
Yeah, it's still it's still US. So, I'm

pretty sure they have a web shop, which I mean obviously leads me to Hello Fastpring. Thank you very much for sponsoring this episode. If you need a no drama D2C partner that's been scaling with mobile publishers over 20 years, Fastpring is here for you. If you want to just launch a new web store replacing your current D2C setup, go to fastpring.gg and call them and say two and a half gamers sent you because fastpring.gg is here for you to make more money from us which I think these guys are definitely making more money on the US traffic because it's still like the top. But it's true that like this like here when I was looking at it pretty much this bump it's was the higher spent. That's what it's kind of showing but it's not like immediately showing in the revenues. Yeah, it's quite slow. So what whoever
Pascal spend
yeah Pascal spend that could be that could be reason anyway. So I think the more reasonable spend is closer to 40k

per day rather than just 100 and 200 bursts at uh some
40k per day means literally shovel system yesterday's revenue in today's spend.
Yeah. But again, think about it in the way like the revenue should compound over time and I think
somewhere
I think these guys are kind of aiming for getting what like 60 day 90 days payback period because it I don't think it matters if you go for let's say 6 months to 9 months to 12 months like if for this type of game I don't see like the retention
we'll see I mean we can check
I don't know the thing is that the game game is quite good just saying like it's it's not at like
no like you see like Felix likes it so it's
exactly yeah so it's I mean
so it's approachable it's
I'm the least hardcore gamer here right like puzzle games and hyper
I think the biggest problem that this has is UA then because it's like
they lost their
it could be better but again yeah

they lost their charm from like the past because when they were absolutely big
which was during our battle legion days which we were going directly against them by the way. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We can we can check that as well. So I mean right now pretty much wait a second. So I can show you. So it look like the day run retention let's say it's 40 40%.
Day 30 is 3%. And then I mean day 60 we don't have yet from December but let's say h I'm not sure if this is too relevant but okay let's say
it doesn't matter man.
But still by I just want to check
like what kind of numbers we can get which is Yeah. See like even if like 1% like it's the exact same numbers
day 90. Yeah. day 90 and then debt pretty much. So you can't optimize for six months payback period. You have definitely have to do it like in two to three months which then caps the spend obviously. So I mean you can't really go crazy
or you run yourself into the ground.
Exactly. So you can't spend too much. So that's why I don't think like they're spending that that much anyway, but it's

like that 30 30 40k could be reasonable.
What's the creatives?
So this is look look at this. Look at this. and tell me what do you see? It's pretty much what like state IO
one
state IO pretty much
and I think this is actually coming from Arcane Arena from our friends from our tower board as well. But this is also one game from Voodoo which is like kind of something Clash if you think if you can find this
Castle Clashers
I think so. Yeah, something like that.
That's in the same category.
Yeah, could be. So that's like this is the this is the concept and again like this reminds me heavily the arcane arena. Uh oh wait a second that was so let's say last 30 days.
Sorry it's it's a little bit different. This looks like fingersoft cargo translated into castle. I
mean this is interesting concept. So I'm going to show you this which is pretty much the faction battle but does the job.

Then we have the same thing from here. And I I I love this because again it's from
is this AI? It's not
I think so actually. I think so.
Why is getting more downloads? This is like
quite good.
It's really good. Yeah, it's really good. But, you know, like
maybe, you know, throwing it into wrong uh campaign setup.
That's what I would say. Like, if you're spending on Google and Facebook and Facebook sucks for these types of games these days, well, you're not going to help yourself. See, I mean,
so this is a problem. No, like this should be a problem.
This should be absolutely this should be 100%. And it's not. So see I mean again like the they are using all these like old old methodologies or like the creative approaches and strategies they had before. It's the same thing. It's exactly the same thing they they've done for advision. But here like all of this pretty much it's it's it's running on Facebook or wherever for five months. What do you expect? You're going to like scale on this?
Yeah. No one's going to click on that. Yeah.
No. Yeah. No.

Wait. If you do test Yeah. new creators. I was just going to say new creatives.
New creatives. The last 30 days 500. It's not bad. It's not bad.
Yeah.
But again,
so they're just pouring money into the 5 million a month with that game. It's bad.
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
They should have known better.
100%. Exactly. That's my main problem. So all of these I mean come on guys. Like this is super basic. Seriously. Really? I mean
it's it's it's crazy to say that like put the same game in Pantheon's like portfolio and let them put ad placements in. It would be three or four times larger.
I mean, if we're talking about Pantheon, let's say,
this is the new PB.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There. The Pantheon one, Arin Arena Tower Defense. Uh, they have very similar kind of, let's say, but this reminds me the the creatives that we saw pre previously, but not exactly the same. But again, like if you check these 400 creatives, but they are not globally

launched yet. So they're not pushing too much,
but you know, they're kind of lucky in a way that the game kind of looks like Kingshot.
Uh,
creative.
It doesn't, but it can. That's the thing.
Go up. Go up. Go up.
I know. Here. I know. Here it is. But this is this is pretty much But this is not Arcane Arena.
And And what it is?
This is Raid Rush.
This is Raid Rush.
It's Rad Rush Creative. Come on, man. Like, why would you not Arcane Arcane?
No, of course. It's the same. It's the same game. I mean, see, even the end card is here, so it doesn't matter. They
didn't even bother for changing.
Come on, man. Yeah, exactly. Come on. Like, why would you why would you do this? So, but here is what they're doing really well. All these AI towers.
Yeah, they have pretty good AI.
That's amazing. And it works really, really well because we see it all the time and we see it pretty much every here. This is the one. They said I couldn't make ads without the [music] dev team. They said I couldn't understand the tech. Guess what? I just made a fully working gorgeous top to

play while eating noodles and watching trash [music] TV and taking care of my daughter. All thanks to playable makeup. No code, no stress, no sherlock.
Look.
Wow. Yeah, it's the same.
It's the same thing. It's the same thing. So,
but one is scaling and one is not and one is because one doesn't.
Yeah. Because Arcan Arena and the guys from Pantheon, they have really good creative team and I've said it on the previous podcast like they're on top of the trends and they're they have so many different creative concepts which Art of Legion no uh work inc doesn't really have. So if we go to art art of war legions and check what they're doing. It's come on. See, this is exactly what they've been doing previously. Like all these like different types of ads.
That's really good. I haven't had a laugh in a while. [laughter]
See, this is exactly what they've been doing. So, since like I know and this is

what I mean. See, like why don't you do something like this for the other game? See
again could be different team
but you don't talk to each other like come on like that argument is almost
does these mistakes man.
Yeah. But I mean don't Yeah. Don't try to see but this is this is prototype of art of art of war legions like this is exactly what they've been doing for past five years and this was working really well for them
really really well and this is insane all of these see command exactly strategic decisions whatever blah blah blah and this if if we go back to let's say a year whatever 2022 maybe let's see okay whatever if you go there 1 th00and creators still see different stuff which was really come I mean
oh there we go
you can clearly see you can clearly see like where where is this going and here like all these different
it's just crazy like you see on these ones like the content works it's just they're on the wrong ad platform it's

like it's nuts
see this is pretty much what they've been doing and the Hero Wars stuff and all of this and this is going to 2022 and again like this team was pretty much for us like oh my god like they are so good back in the days or they were so good back in the days because we're trying all of this fake stuff and it was really working for them. You you could see the the spike in revenues and and downloads. Where is this like where is it now? Like why is it not doing this? I don't get it. I don't really get it. But I know what what changed back then it was super like everybody was super big on Facebook and Google. Now everybody is super big on AppLavin and that's how you make your game successful. Thank you very much. See you next time. That was the episode. I mean that's pretty much it.
Yeah. I mean
that's all I mean like I I don't really have anything to say anyone. It's insane.
It's insane how
wasted opportunity.
Yes. Yes.
This just this just underscores how important is to know all the parts of the puzzle.
All the parts you miss one you're dead.
It's not you're not dead.

You know two and a half gamers and then you get all pieces of the puzzle and
exactly your favorite two and a half steps ahead.
Yeah. Your favorite experts from the mobile gaming industry. Yay, there you go. So, thank you very much for listening. If you want to have more, you know, knowledge bombs and everything insights from our end, yeah, let's
give us a call.
Give us a call or or just comment under the video or, you know, see you in the next episodes. Thank you very much for watching,
people. You know what to do. See you in the comment section.
See you in the comment section. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us more. Byebye. Bye. Bye. Doubt.