We are Warriors live Review: Ad juggernaut, creative depth, balancing difficulty & progression, UA

when you have a lot of iaps that means you get more buying from the big studios which means that your ecpm goes up so if I adjust the ecpm levels to let's say 42 in the states and 18 worldwide which probably makes it more sense I think this game makes about 200 $210,000 a day currently in ad Revenue which means that that is about 75 to 80% of this game's Revenue 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 let's [ __ ] go yeah hello everybody uh welcome uh this is again very special episode maybe we should start actually recording some some episodes where we are just free of

us but no like this is great why are you smiling I mean yes I lost my voice what's the matter what's the matter cat cut your tongue what's wrong I just lost my voice it's fine little little teenager Maven little teenager M I know I know I know I'm growing up finally I'm growing up let's start my name is mat lerich I'm fix and we are your hosts for today and we have a very special I can do I can ASMR I can I can just beper all the all the [ __ ] time fine as well right okay J theide we're talking about we are warriors and we have very special guest Sam from lesmore [ __ ] you know what M why don't you said this one out it's just you know take a little rain check I'll take it from here my little teenage friend today we have a very special episode we have one of the co-founders from lesmore who's joining us to actually talk about their latest hybrid casual hits we are warriors and for

those of you who are just tuning in for the first time you're in the isolation Booth ma for those of you who are just joining us for the first time uh we have a special two and a half Gamers definition of what we Define as a hybrid casual title which is what Remo yeah which is that we look at stuff that's grossing more than 33k IP dollar a day which kind of because otherwise we need to look at pretty much everything which is around 1 million a month in IP do only not counting the ad Revenue because we don't see the ad Revenue in the tools so that's our kind of cut off point where we kind of oh like we should look at this thing because like it's getting big because of course this is assuming that the revenue is much higher than 1 million a month uh Al together because yeah okay okay you two you two you psyed hosting so please Sam can you give us a proper intro about yourself and the company you actually co-founded

maybe maybe that would be a better start hello special guest retards Jesus Christ teen sure yeah um yeah thanks for having me uh I'm Sam I'm one of the co-founders at lesmore I've been in the industry mobile games industry for about like just over five years um I started my career working at Cur games on idol minor Tycoon nice where I met Jerry and Josh uh our co-founders um and then a year later Josh and I left for popor to join the hyper casual rush we had a lot of success there uh built and prototyped a lot of hyper casual games so we sort of picked up the skill of prototyping a lot of games and then we thought uh hey we could probably do this ourselves so we came together and we CAU up Jerry as well and he was available and then we uh co-founded lesmore and then we started prototyping a bunch and and yeah that's

how he'd Ure and we are warriors happens and now we're 17 fully remote um yeah that's pretty much it so this company was founded in Berlin right or am I uh so the it's headquartered in Germany in in Jerry's uh family's house and so but we never bothered really to to you know update that so the time it was Co so we wanted an office but but remote was working and yeah I just just that's how are the just question out of curiosity are the hind TNS involved or brothers involved because uh you know any company that gets founded close around Berlin has like a Little Help from them or like a little bit of them in it like uh popcor is an investor okay oh nice okay easy I mean okay fair enough

so we are talking about we are warriors yakob or who wants to start or or maybe maybe Sam how did you actually come up with this kind of idea because it's great I mean it's hard as [ __ ] it's really really really hard but like how did you find this idea it's very different from last from Adventure um so so I mean a lot of people think that uh we cloned it from from Age of War uh there was definitely a lot of inspiration but actually fun fact uh it wasn't uh inspired by age of War the core Gameplay at least wasn't uh the core game play was mainly inspired by the tower I'm not sure if you guys played that but this Loop basically the tower the tower okay yeah so you basically press battle and then you try and beat this thing and then and then you lose and then you you upgrade and then you press back battle again and

then and then basically this Loop right and was mainly inspired by that but the only thing that was uh that the idea was lacking was sort of this content treadmill and so we left it on pause because eventure happened and then later on uh uh you know we were playing Age of War and we were like oh that would actually be the perfect content treadmill for this game and then that's that's basically how it happened but but a lot of people ask us us ask us this uh I think one key difference that we do when we prototype games we don't do any market research like zero market research perfect so that that might be the reason why it it seems so different to Adventure because we don't let ourselves Be Inspired too much because we really believe in Innovative momentto moment gameplay we believe in fresh mechanics uh to to to build Mega hits in in today's environment are playing the game yob yeah the game yeah okay good I love this game because it's an absolute ad

monetization bismar like a juggernaut it's a beast but I think Remo maybe you could start by just going through the game design stuff if he if he talks [ __ ] at any time just say [ __ ] yeah just say [ __ ] yeah feel free to or like no or no comment it happened with uh with Pock champs yeah was talking about something I was like oh man that's [ __ ] so yeah uh already like I I I need to kind of correct my assumption here because I thought this was kind of coming from EV Adventure because the thing that I wanted to start with is that of course this is a second game for the company which is like the hardest one I would say after the first hit so Kos to that and uh I thought that like some of the principles of the game are actually coming from Adventure because Adventure which is briefly the description would be like a cooking game on a idle simulation where again the game is built on this premise of resetting the progression and starting from scratch in like a bigger kitchen

let's say so I thought this kind of a premise was translated from to the VR Warriors again not the other way around so like yeah that I'm wrong right there there you go um regarding the game itself uh I would classify it as some kind of a strategy based Auto Battle with idle RPG elements because in the end like if you just like very very simplify this is kind of close to something like Clash Royale just again very very simplified because again we have the the energy we are spawning the units but we are not choosing the lanes we are just like you know throwing them into the into the battle and they're kind of fighting themselves so again very kind simplified strategy game uh the core where units are kind of Auto battling is again as I said simplified but still it takes a little bit of tactic for instance I'm currently stuck here at end of again you're not watching any ads man that's what you need to do just wait a second I'm at the end of timeline to anyone of You Are further

I'm a timeline to Samurai age so you're actually further than me yeah see there you go anyway uh playing again you're playing on the emulator again again so what so what so the the game can goes through this Loop of like different ages and eras where these kind of battles goes in and if I understood correctly the balance gets harder and harder as as you go like my best tactic honestly for like going through the edges was not really in about unit upgrades and stuff that much rather than like pick up a pace of farming currency fast enough to evolve into second AG because then when the ages meet like yeah it's kind of a civilization battle where more advanced technological age just always team rolls over the like the current age and then you can continue it took me took me a while if like when I understood like okay well I need to evolve to a different era just to stream roll over my opponent actually yeah but then like for instance here the game the let's say

not the Tower Defense but like the the scripted game playay a little bit uh where the units are actually coming in waves and you see these waves like this one which like how I deal with yeah you're [ __ ] man yeah you can't beat that so yeah at some point and this is really hard because I cannot really evolve here in this point of the game like I just need to beat those like there's no other way to kind of continue into into the other timeline so it takes a little bit of skill not just like you know upgrading stuff and like you need to time these things and pretty much create some kind of a traffic Gem of units accumulate enough power to steamroll into the base and like yeah I know some is smiling I guess so what people are kind of doing doing these days but yeah it's very hard and IND the end is a a lot of skill based involved at at like the transitions between the ages uh but enough of the core gameplay regarding the progression uh there's actually a little bit of like idle progression uh sprinkled there from games like golden goblins or Adventure communist where we

have these cards that are put behind gacha and the cards are pretty much being evolved by themselves you don't really use even soft currency to upgrade those just shards of the cards typically FL Roy Shard gacha is there they upgrade and they just give you two vectors one is unit health and unit damage vectors systems two vectors EXA and that's it which again increases your power in your main battle all around and like goes with you throughout the era like this is the permanent part that's kind of is the thing that's driving your progression because everything else like if I move here it resets it resets so again if I move into another era or timeline whatever I again need to buy the second unit the third unit upgrade food production base health I think is uh permanent throughout the timeline but again resets back at the time start of the timeline so that's there on the other hand there's this kind of dungeons uh secondary game mode that unlocks at some point where if I understand correctly these are basically puzzles

because you're not upgrading anything there's a fixed number of enemies going against you and you just need to somehow can of solve the puzzle and pick the right units at the right time with limited budget that the game gives you and that's it oh yeah I wouldn't say I wouldn't say puzzles I would I would just say I would say it's just a damage check right so yeah yeah but but is this affected by your like card progression cards yeah ah okay so it's a damage check okay okay definitely they not the puzzle because I thought like yeah because there's like no upgrading involved here that that like maybe I would need to kind of do some kind of thing but yeah you're right so this is a damage check them which unlocks at the start of timeline two yeah which I can just go around 1.8 failing miserably there and then there's I guess is another version of it at timeline s and timeline 15 that that's my guess here and then um what are they actually s like I'm so far away like where are the other two timeline uh dungeons timeline seven 7 97 is like stories uh where we

where we sort of yeah for example the Battle of Rome or or Spartan 300 versus a million or cops cops versus gangsters um and they give you red potions for the Run tree and then timeline 15 is against bosses like Godzilla and this like spider monster and a Yeti and they give you golden keys that give you items for your hero that you unlock later god with an EST right so so the if if I understand correctly the features you are talking about are unlocked here in Timeline 3715 that we just cannot be here which is just I I can't even imagine how far it is in like player time exactly like uh yeah I've been playing this game very feverishly I would say throughout last week and just made it at the end of the timeline too which uh yeah is isn't that far to begin with but yeah it seems like the progression is very very Steep and uh interesting part

for me is that is uh ludicrously hard to begin with from the start no it's so like slow pacing in the start like it's yeah takes forever like it it like reminds me of that Chinese game that was trending on wi head that we had here before the Sheep a sheep game which was like a tile matching game something that the first level was so hard that like whole wit head was talking about this was also driving its V virality so that's my guess this is this has something to do with the same here that like it's so hard that like you know like the Flappy word thing like it was so hard that people play because it's so hard so that that's my guess I want to hear I want to hear R yeah yeah yeah uh so I don't know I mean we played this one game once I don't know what it was called but it was super hard to progress and but I think the the main reason here is that that it I think the novelty sort of wears off really quickly in terms of seeing the new eras right so so we want to sort of squeeze that

novelty as much as possible we cuz by the time you get to sort of like timeline three and timeline four you don't really start you don't really see errors anymore and you start to start to just want to sort of like Get Higher damage numbers and you realize that it's all of a reskin so we want to sort of like lengthen that first part of uh the treadmill as much as possible but yeah look I mean we need to run AB tests I don't know may maybe making it faster is actually better yeah I I actually started playing this game in December but I was it was so hard I was like [ __ ] I can't play this game I was like and then then we were we we started having this discussion about the us being on the PGC panel I picked it up again like oh [ __ ] it's still super hard like and then I was like I'm oh my God it's growing soof I need to I need to push myself I really need to and I started playing and it's like oh my God it's still hard but now I know like how I actually play this game like now I know after two months yeah yeah it's actually like very

hard but again don't get me wrong my guess is that this is one of the things that that's yeah doesn't mean that's that's wrong doesn't mean that's wrong it's just like very specific or unique because again same principle with that same game that we were talking about cheaper sheap game like it was like having gicely high numbers in China because everybody was talking about it and my guess is that like I've seen like three copies already which is like exactly the same game on the stores like with a guy running on the triceratops or whatever was the dinosaur same color same image something something so I guess people are kind of jumping on it as I've seen like a lot of clones of Adventure when when you scale that one so I guess that's expected but regarding the like overall state of the game like it seems even like to my point seems very simplistic what it is how how it is designed in order what it already achieved because even if I go to the store it's literally very rudimentary so there's like two ads per day that you

can get like two free rolls on the gacha basically here then there's just basic anchored prices for the gems and that's it there's nothing really to it you can even buy soft currency if I understand correctly in these kind of a Loops of eras so the only way to kind of buy something and the overall IP revenue of the game is just driven by people purchasing the income prices for the gemoll currency and then they throw it all into the gacha OR correct here there is a there's the 1.5x game speed I don't know which version this is but I don't know why you can't see it but I'm in fortunate a test yeah thank you no I think you're just not update you haven't updated the game but you can get okay okay the 1.5x uh game speed you can purchase that because you usually watch an ad to get that for a few minutes and then you purchase that and that's a permanent purchase and then once the when the events are running uh there are also event offers

I haven't seen any events like yeah when are the events running yeah where are they running so again if you when you if you're updated it should tell you that you unlock it on timeline three I'm not sure which version you're on okay if you go if you go on settings and then click right us it should tell tell you should open and then it should tell you in your second screen if it cheating he's on an emulator that's don't care about him it should it should work on PC but if it doesn't I'm not sure yeah yeah anyway but but but again like what I'm trying to say that it's amazing with what the game achieved already with such an like simplistic feature set in a way that like just like even though like okay let's assume that like events are also driving the the revenue as they should because I see kind of spikey Revenue in the chart so I guess they are driving the revenue spikes and yeah you should you should just update the the game I updated the game and I see game speed forever 10 10 euros ah okay okay so I I'll do that in the meantime hope I mean it's true it is it is only that

offer look I mean in the past so we we at leso we never like to do things because everybody else is doing them we only do things when we truly understand why so we've never understood uh bombarding the player with a lot of offers or a lot of different ways to purchase the same thing we tried an AB test once on eventure we didn't see an uplift and so we just never really visited again and and we truly believe in the whole concept of T20 we believe that 80% of what drives the results of of of we are warriors comes from 20% of its design we truly believe this so so that's mainly why you don't see that many offers but I'm not saying that this is the correct way of doing it but we want to First understand truly completely valid opinion because obviously we are all not always right you're just like kind of thinking about like different things and angles like okay why is this working or not but by the way like those if you go

back yakob those two yeah yeah it's like what I just like accidentally saw like I can actually switch between eras I was like what I didn't even see that in there and until this morning I was like okay this interesting can well now I know because there's the yeah there's the timeline you can even go check how many people built this game and how long did it take uh so the initial prototype was two people and then we built it with three people so so two people took two weeks for the initial release and then three people took us about four or five months to get to the state and then we launched four or five months okay okay okay so we are we are approaching that hybrid kind of a production cycle here yeah no REM can you show the revenue as well uh yeah yeah let me do that um yeah so regarding

the numbers that we see again you can say what you think we need yeah we need to kind of use our sadness multiplier for sure it's quite new and uh and uh Sam is smiling all the [ __ ] time so there something smiling because it's probably off he's like that and it's going to be closer so that smile says it all ladies and gentlemen yeah so again the spikes series I was telling and what Sam was mentioning those are probably the events that are driving Revenue spikes here uh we see something in vicinity of like 45k a day on average let's say [ __ ] in purchases only yeah Ina purchases only regarding downloads is of course a different story something like like yesterday this says 200k downloads a day but again setness multipliers downloads usually are correct yeah downloads are more correct definitely uh but like yeah so pretty much the trend line is obviously like you can see that it's it's scaling still

higher and uh revenue on iip side is kind of I would say stable or stabilized but again we don't see the ad Revenue here so you should go to retention right away because there are some like wild numbers it says like day one is like 55% and it's usually here it's What overestimated in in I think in all platforms is a little bit overestimated but even like this like 58 on day one it's it's quite 68 58% day 1 15% day 7 5% day 30 and 5% day 60 and then there's day yeah there the thing like day 90 is like 4.8 or something yeah for 4.5 whoever stays in day 30 stays forever like a flat line yeah pretty much I don't think the cohort there is is is big enough right we started scaling in December so we that's true but still but it's yeah it's not that far off actually nice day one is a bit overestimated but it's

not that far off man that's that's amazing yeah let's uh let's go to let's go to admon because uh like yeah this is an ad a Bismark like I said so I started playing this game on the way to games Forum what is that two weeks ago now and I was playing it for the first time without ads like on airplane mode and I was just sitting there for two hours on the plane I'm like that's stupid a [ __ ] game like you can't do it's like the worst game ever then I turned off flight mode and W it's an ad Revenue Jugger because like later this game makes at least six digits per day in od Revenue there's no way it makes less how much though uh let's go down and uh yeah have a look later Excel sheet yeah Excel sheet but uh so we've covered all hybrid casual like hybrid casual games on this podcast that have hit yacob's famous threshold and basically hopefully yeah there's two main design schools for uh for ad

placement design in hybrid casual there's like Voodoo and say say games method which is banners intertial and rewarded and also like Alien Invasion crazy Labs which uses only rewarded ads and now we are warriors also only shows rewarded ads in we are warriors there are these are the ad placements so two uh daily rewarded can you show them yeah I can ideally uh on the core Loop in the main play in the main core game playay uh there is a 1.5x time for 5 minutes for rewarded ad uh there's two there's no point yob scre he hasn't updated his game it's true yeah exactly like half of the stuff Felix is yeah he not there never appreciate ad Revenue man like they always underestimate it but yeah all right there's a there's a zombie rush in the dungeon which is

unlocked after timeline one so you can do two free tries a day and then two more with rewarded ads and then after every battle you have double coins yes and then which is probably the best performing one is at the start of the battle every day with the two cap two rewarded limit cap is meat basically and that's like what's basically used I guess to progress people because this you can actually beat the other character so this must have like really like really good you have better chance you have better chance really like for me the best one is like here in the shop where you can have two gcha pools let's ask S what's the best performing rewarded ad placement here out of these ones I think it's definitely that free meat right I have absolutely no idea that's perfect answer guys there you go God know I don't know a bunch of rewarded videos where we would want a reward and then yeah releas

let's release it and see what happens is there is there any reasoning why you had it as a cap for two per day though cuz that's the one that struck out to me as the the most odd one I would say CU normal ID piece of Felix yeah would uh usually try to stack that one as much as possible but yeah well the the the initial the initial thought is that we didn't want uh watching ads to be the main strategy to progress in the game so we try to put as many caps as possible and then and then yeah and then hopefully the purchases kicks in but but yeah we I know that the 2x at the end of each battle is capped we want to cap that as well we're thinking about capping that but yeah that's that's that's the main reason because if you if you can watch if you can watch an ad for meets every battle then you're going to watch and add every single battle that's true and then you might turn you might make more money in the beginning but then you might turn quicker so the cap is used basically

P yeah so you basically the cap is used to push people to make an I I basically no just stay with the game a little bit longer because then like you have different like multiple sessions during the day and then you want to come back next day because then you have you have new two like uh placements yeah like keep in mind that this this is more like hybrid Paradigm here like even though the game definitely doesn't make like I I think like yeah it's not no not even 40% of overall daily Revenue in IPS that's my guess like it's not even hitting that it's still way off me way off it's still the philosophy that like you want to have longterm progression that's why the day 90 is 5% so you don't really want to over spam people with ads especially make them make them feel that they're mandatory that that's the big difference you shouldn't make them feel that they're mandatory by by the way just a disclaimer like so yakob did some consultant consultancy thing for us for adventure a few a few months ago we basically took all of his advice and

applied it to we are warriors nice we are Warrior sucks yeah you know who to play right you know you know so but if it works if it's nice which it's looking like has some potential long term yeah yob is your guy so if you so if yakob roasts the game you're you're roasting yourself yeah like told me that before the BGC or discussion afterwards like hey you know like we work with yaku and like we kind of like took all these advices but don't tell him yeah yeah so just wondering like when you built the game did you decide just to use rewarded only uh or did you actually think about intials and Banners as well or were you just no we're going to do the Alien Invasion way I mean the end game is to be in our purchases only yeah for less more so we want to sort of like slowly get there but yeah I mean the the main

thinking is okay if we want to keep players playing for long probably we don't want interstitials but yeah I mean we haven't we didn't think about it too much we just said okay let's let's first try rewarded only and if we break even then we just then we break even and that's what happened nice cool yeah maybe you will add some interest issues along the way in the future though there's a lot of low hanging fruits I mean don't get don't get me wrong definitely a lot of opportunities to sort of use a segment and and show users that aren't watching any rewarded or aren't making any purchases some intertial or even banners later on but yeah I mean the team is small we want to sort of like focus on on the big wins and and it makes like the big right yeah yeah although you could argue that user segmentation also has a big impact but we see we're not we don't our live op our live operation so lesm more is a new game games company right we're good at building new games building Innovative momentto gameplay

this is this is what we are good at and so publishing operations is still very dirty right we're still trying to sort of like be more sophisticated professionalized on that front but but you want to get too distracted yeah you learn as you go like that's that's the beauty P of the game development so there's no segmentations here even for rewarded like uh if you're a user in Malaysia you still see the same amount of rewarded opportunities compared to the US uh guess I didn't I didn't know that you you should use a segment based on country but no we don't you can different ways you can do it right but yeah there's plenty of ways to do it that's one of the ways you can also base it on yeah how many like ads they watch historically and then show the ones that only watch ads without making IPS more reward placements you know you know he's pitching himself because you already said you work with the AC so I was like oh well maybe for the Mich BL d anyway Let's uh let's go for the

estimations here because this game is an ad Jugger note uh active user base on sensor Tower is 830,000 Da in the last 30 days I AP Revenue like we said over a million I think the ad viewer rate for the rewarded ads is 79% uh why do I think that because that's the highest I've ever seen and I think this is probably around the same level so just about 80% of users that play this game I would say probably watch a rewarded ad so you'll guess it's you'll guess it's 79% because 79% is the highest that you've ever SE never seen anything higher than that from any admon like game I've managed in the last that's that's what you're basing off of I've never seen higher but I think it's the highest like they're saying I've never seen a higher for some reason so yeah it's the highest it's 81% so close not bad Felix not bad pretty CL all right cool all right so I never seen pretty much a rewarded imp Dow higher

than 19 but I would say that's bit too high for this so probably think it's around 14 or 15 meaning that currently this game would make about 150k a day in ad revenue or 73% of total revenue however this game has something called I APS as well right so we need to handicap the ecpm and Jack that ecpm level up because when you have a lot of I APS that means you get more buying from the big studios which means that your ecpm goes up so if I adjust the ecpm levels to let's say 42 in the states and 18 worldwide which probably makes a more sense I think this game makes about2 200 $210,000 a day currently in ad Revenue which means that that is about 75 to 80% of this game's revenue is AD revenue and there's FSE that's false don't worry you don't need to just blink

twice if he's right or just once if he's like totally wrong because we had this uh discussion when we discussed I think Legend of slime he was like oh my God this is so amazing like 70% ads 30% iips and then I was talking to the team and it's like oh man it's like the other way around actually yeah I don't think I'm wrong I don't think I'm wrong this time I'm just going to say that it's a really good guess that's what I'm going to say nice that's good because it was wrong then it would be like yeah nice that in that case oh my God like my estimations on spend are going to be very interesting as well but we'll see we'll see yeah it's just it's quite incredible like this is an absolute ad Juggernaut and what makes it so good is the fact that you also have I APS so for those who don't know that means you get higher ecms from all the SDK networks so if SDK Network sees a large user base of people that make purchases they will notice that and they will bid higher for that audience because it shows a

willingness to purchase so that means that player x uh Royal match all these guys will start spending quite heavily to get access us I sea of Conquest all the [ __ ] time just like I guess sea of conquin and top heroes I see all the time top heroes and then world of uh no World of Tanks Blitz like these threee games all day long all day long we repeat yeah which are definitely IP based games did you guys plan any of this or like how do you manage your Adon like did you like it's just it's so big it's so big for one title what do you mean plan like what do you mean just for context like one of the biggest Publishers like on a good day like a voodoo sometimes they make a million a day right so one title that you guys have is like 20% of one of the biggest Publishers in the world across a whole portfolio I don't it's probably luck right most of it is luck so but yeah no

we just focus on we just focus on good games and we believe that everything else will follow you have skills Jakob yeah I see fin something jakob's jakob's feedback carried we is you can ask ask yob cool nice very good all right we want to hear yob is loving this yeah yeah mat we want to hear your uh UA predictions that are already off by a of two no it's not they're not off actually sorry do I get this right these are the events here like I have the latest building no you don't yeah but the latest one unlocks in Timeline four uh three sorry yeah okay and you don't have the latest build because you don't have the speed button there I was like just stop [ __ ] around ah it's fine no I was actually actually you can play I just uh kind of through the some sensor to data because I was looking

into uh the split by like paid versus organic and it says like it's 30% organic downloads and then 60% uh paid which kind of makes sense uh and also from the discussion we had uh in uh in London for PGC and I was also looking into like different like session durations and session counts as well and it says like every sessions like five every s sessions per day which is interesting number it's quite High I think like yob you you said that even like super is kind of trying to get five six sessions per day that's the rum I heard yeah just to balance just to balance like the retention and then just kind of split the sessions into smaller sessions or shorter sessions than during the day gu like okay interesting but it says it's like more than like one or one minute or three minute long sessions and if I'm kind of thinking about like how I played it was more like yeah four sessions five sessions per day few

battles and then uh watched few ads they just disappeared and then waited to to next day just to get the two uh two meet uh placements but anyway let me share this first um which is uh yakob if you can [ __ ] off from the sharing thank you it would be amazing because then we have this is we have the downloads here so this is interesting so when I was looking at downloads so you have already like 10 million dos Jesus Christ that's amazing I mean you have that's entire Sweden like that's that's my country man yeah sometimes my twice Slovakia but uh yeah us obviously the biggest one but then there's South Korea which is I mean it makes sense uh in for this type of game and then we have German Germany UK France Canada Australia and then the rest and it's

still Kore only because uh South Korea only because um uh Adventure was cloned our biggest adventure clone is a South Korean game so this time we said let's let's uh let's go big in South Kore let's go in South Korea W it's amazing I don't even know is profitable honestly engines that happen go jeez that's that's brilliant nice nice look so it's like half like half million downloads and all like 300 well 200,000 iips and I'm pretty sure that this is way bigger uh like Felix mentioned uh but then uh what's interesting is actually the like 50/50 kind of split on the uh well not revenues but downloads at least here it says you're bigger on Android than iOS that's that's surprising to be honest I'm not sure like why but I would say I

would kind of think this works quite well on iOS as well I mean now it's kind of even but it was more on Android rather than just uh iOS it's just like an interesting fact but what's most interesting is kind of uh the creative that's not true by the way it's it installs bigger on Android or Revenue bigger than on Android Revenue big on Android and then we I know we have downloads free yeah well downloads are like 3.2 million for January and for Android and then 1.6 million on iOS no that's that's not true okay on I iOS is bigger okay so it's okay sadness multiplier on downloads as well good to know yeah because I was like okay man like this is 100% working really well for the downloads I'm not sure but for Revenue I is higher than Android yeah okay okay yeah that makes sense that

makes total sense uh and I was looking into uh into the all kind of networks in here I mean there are like some some [ __ ] Networks you're 100% mediating on Max right Max I smell that a mile away when you see the ads right it's 100% Max but Max it's like yeah like I I looked at the biggest network is guess what appla in all all the the surprise yeah surprise surprise I mean it makes all the sense because of the well ads R and then iip R and if you're running Blended RW and then I some iip campaigns as well like it's like it's no-brainer and then and we're using their mediation so they have all the data yeah exactly exactly exactly so that was like do you have Adam whatsa not yet not yet not yet but you know if if they're going to grow like this as you go then 100% like hello come come well I'm pretty sure you got the

the invite to Dubai event or what like what aren you mentioned like there's this like top secret Dubai event for like few companies that they are kind of growing but anyway no then yeah now now we're upset yeah we wondering why appin won't let like the communications team of app won't let anyone from App come on the podcast oh is it we've invited them four times time it never works well may maybe because you pissed them out like where when we were starting like a year and a half ago so you also also they said we swear too much apparently yeah that's true yeah [ __ ] may think about it it's very true anyway really I would have thought upin would be fine with profanity like yeah if you look at the all the end uh all the end cards and the the ads you show in the game but I was I I literally saw like so many Unity kind of ads I very

few very few up loving kind of end cards so I was I was really confused if it's level play but or Max yeah but but shout out shout out to applo like they're very good friends friends of ours some some yeah some people also ask like how yeah how much money we we get from app just to say good things about them and it's like well if if it works it works that's very easy it's very easy but anyway uh so we have like all the channels f everything like if you if you make like Felix mentioned like 250ish uh a day then yes you need a lot of money to well a lot of UA channels to to spend uh some money on to get uh that money that money back but I'm just thinking about like what is the like actual payback period because the day night is quite strong and you and we see like big growth in terms of the revenues as well so I would I would assume like

you are kind of front loaded a lot of spend and then maybe just decreased something but if I need to guess I would guess you are spending something around 150k per day is maybe on some days close to 200 but let's yeah do you you don't need to comment on that but it's like a the thing what I'm trying to think about is the payback period if it's like 90 days or if if it's longer than that or if it's actually shorter because if the retention profile look like this and I would say maybe 90 days maybe 60 days now because the numbers are looking better from the from the start and even maybe the golden cord looks like 45ish kind of but I mean what do I know like that's my guess that's my assumption you U spend you're pretty close Break Even you're way off okay it's I don't

know could be could would it take longer for Ma's voice to heal than for you guys to get paid back or would it take shorter time I mean in the beginning in the beginning it was in well the thing is it's golden cohorts right now right so it's still slowly being pushed back but if it's not if it's not uh 90 days then it's definitely not 180 days right that's what no no no of course of course that'll be I mean quite long but still you need to get that money back so you can actually spend it and then you're waiting like 45 days to get that money from uh iOS and then Google so okay but okay Revenue pays back quicker though me you got to remember that 30 days usually especially at this scale they're getting paid back 30 days okay 30 days all right for sure for sure okay but then okay then uh in terms of the creatives it easy is brilliant and I I will show you the the PGC kind of slides that we had

because there are some some interesting creatives you can talk about it but this is this is the kind of dungeon you talking about right this is I love it oops m is the plane the plane is fake obviously which is I mean could be real it could be real we could it you like I this is very very I'm going to repeat myself because I you were not the the PGC um discussion I love these like one versus hundreds of of uh of Warriors because this is exactly the same here right just one versus that's real that's 100% real that's in the game well the spawn rate probably not that real yeah exactly yeah like so again we are coming back to altered gam playay altered

gameplay yeah alter but like this is great because you have all these like different uh hooks as well and uh one sec usual so brutal clear for those who are just listening it's just a bunch of soldiers shooting a bunch of stone AG people merly with clubs exactly yeah like it's perfect like I I love this it's amazing and like you have all these like different kind of variations and obviously I see this kind of South Korean right so yeah what you mean South Korean it's not South it's not Korean okay it is it is South okay okay good like you need to turn that down okay so what do we have here I think the most interesting part is is uh well I know this is wrong uh and because when I was looking into this

oh I was looking into this yesterday and it was like one kind of one creative or yeah this one which is something already show but we have the Tik voice at least I mean I this is quite slow honestly but what do I know right again the same thing but if you look at the the January over here then we have a few different uh different things and uh we actually had this uh discussion uh about Tik Tok uh like launching games on Tik Tok exclusively right so maybe maybe you can you can talk about that a little bit challenge we told them we we told we told Tik Tok What I just told you that we wanted to scale on South Korea and J Japan aggressively so they said

hey let us localize your craters and then they cuz this is usually like the Tik creative challenge is used in uh uh us mainly when I when we were look we were looking into visard well what was like doodle Magic vard versus slime it was only in uh in US even though M that please the video is a bit too too is louder than your voice yeah as usual as usual I've don't seen I mean it's like a month ago oh that looks great that was amazing yeah wow it's perfect this is really altered gameplay because you have people people standing next SP I love this sorry I have a rookie admon question how much budget do you have to have before Tik Tok or any other company starts making you local localize creatives

like that's a very Ry question those yeah no idea so we thought they they provided that support every exactly no it's exactly exactly like that so you this is these areum Tik Tok creative Challenge videos so you basically I mean it's most probably this Korean uh version is in beta or you need have uh a Connections in Tik Tok but if you said like look you want to really scale in in Japan in South Korea then they kind of found these these different uh creators but it's it's kind of now open to everybody and you can just join the Tik Tok creative challenge you just put in like a brief in what you want to see uh you can go wild and say look do whatever you want and uh it's just five 10 or 20 new videos per week you can get from Tik Tok creative challenge do I get that right that these people like the Tik Tok influencers for their pretty

much agency yes yeah not real full-time job to just make games creatives not games creative it's just like they are big on Tik Tok so they're like let's call it creators or the influencers whatever you just said this is just like you know they're getting extra money to actually produce these creatives even we could do that if we were big in on Tik Tok which we are almost there are six followers on Tik Tok no just 4 400 something which is uh I mean it's not six are we getting there no worries we're getting there yeah don't worry we're getting there for sure I mean uh then we have the good old kind of where meta has here so I saw few I mean these are this we saw these we saw all of these as well and then seem pretty pretty kind of a let's say true like not that much fakeness mean it's yeah just altered that's it I wouldn't even say

altered most of it is just pretty much right taken from the game as there's maybe an airplane icon or whatever I like yeah the the pace of the please M that yeah [ __ ] why I mean come on because I guess the sound is not going into your it is it is it is it is it is just my volume is quite quite such a teenager today you're I know again you can hear the the kind of Tik Tok voice uh which is pretty much so how big is your creative team Sam if you can if you can say that uh three three [ __ ] okay and I also help sometimes I make creative sometimes as well okay man like for that kind of spend that's that's an interesting number to be honest last more oh that's more baby yes okay is more baby all right all

right exactly the same philosophy as small Giant games where when they got started right you get a really good team together and then with more yeah do work with a lot of external uh Partners as well or yes okay there you go okay nice oh Fair that's fair and I like this oops sorry really love this like the same thing all over again the whole philosophy thrown out of the window less more less with more Consultants yeah exactly that does make sense that's that's you work with Consultants yes yes yeah that's the sound no and look look look so I will SE like all of these and and you will see immediately okay so it's up then something some Unity over here but like basically everything is uping since like mid January which I think it's like the exactly the time when you started scaling right yes

okay okay fair we started scaling we started scaling late November beginning of December but with Appo in it was starting jary okay okay okay and then there was this explosive growth kind of uh that's what we we saw at least but yeah you have playables which is great and like multiple of them it actually makes sense because uh everything yeah is working nicely yeah I mean this is great I might kind of maybe when we kind of discuss this would call a like lack of creative depth a little bit so it's like all these like Concepts look exactly the same but uh I mean if you think about the whole theme structure and everything it kind of makes sense but there's also like this important thing that I wanted to show you which is connected to our actually panel discussion so I'm going

to stop sharing this and then stop sharing but isn't it still working like I guess like how it should because you know even though hyper casual is that we still need to preserve the hyper casual creative field CPI low cost and stuff like that yeah I mean uh look all of these like I mean we saw this right but these are some numbers that we showed on the um on the screen it's like downloads organic downloads so can you talk a little bit more about this like organic downloads because I think that's what you mentioned on the PGC kind of panel discussion that was really really interesting I that was the exclusive launch with with Tik Tok and with Tik Tok um because they're good at getting a lot of uh a lot of users talking about your game quickly especially when you grow aggressively because you know people will start to comment on creatives and there's a discussion and and you know people start to share there was a huge uh organic uplift in the

beginning and then as soon as we exited out of the exclusive and and went with all the other networks with app we found it we saw another huge explosion in growth but uh but that's not true anymore it's not it's not 50% split anymore yeah Organics and B yeah I think I saw like the 30% Organics and then like 70% it's it's kind of P yeah I think this is the exactly the point I was saying at the beginning that that perfectly places into the philosophy of like the game being very hard like similar to Flappy Bird and everybody trying to you know try their own luck at it because like if it's so hard like why you know why shouldn't I try it rather than being kind of more smoother in the beginning it's kind of you know just another average game which helps you differentiate from all the other games currently in the crowd yeah then we have that's the idea at least on paper but we also didn't run any AB tests on on the difficulty which we which we're planning on doing so CU

that's that's the number one feedback we're getting that oh it's too slow and the majority of one stars and two stars on on the App Stores you blindfolded yourself shot an arrow and hit a bullseye yeah pretty much absolutely I love it honestly like perfect oh seriously try some segmentation that's all I can say from admon but yeah I would say just like continue with like iteration speed that you you're getting like with that what you said that 8020 like think like it's kind of yeah you see it and like with in hybrids like I wouldn't go even like whatever get bed down into this like fine-tuning optimization something something like for now I would say like more content is needed but again 820 is like the way to go you've proven it like two times already now with two games so that was the hardest point I guess Coos to that yeah a love the M battles kind of One

Versus hords uh videos those are my favorite and if you then like kind of build it around some like funny situations or humor that's even like like GNA double down on the the good grade numbers and like decrease the CPI even more and like I like I really like the the whole the art style and how it looks like it's really simp simplified stuff and like that exactly that's what works kind of the only thing I would kind of which I think would work better is just low poly but this is amazing this is perfect low poly 3D you mean yeah you could try that in the creatives actually uh we saw few we saw few games that are actually not low poly but they are they low poly creatives they have low poly creatives yeah yeah any any comments any comments where

you guys usually rate where where are the ratings oh man go you're Len you abandon the ratings or what we can do the ratings it was like you can go with your comments first and then then we can go yeah then then we as always I mean great insights it's really nice to um see Pros like you guys analyze the game especially live this also why was smiling throughout the whole podcast it wasn't because you guys were saying wrong things it was just I was enjoying it it was nice and I was learning a lot um yeah and thanks thanks for having us trying to get those things trying to get those things let me start The Chopping Block jeez well just be careful because you're now maybe trying to shoot yourself in a foot so yeah you designed it you designed it bro you designed I I didn't know would be yeah yeah so my guess is like I would uh like overall I would say eight out of 10 and why eight

and not 10 or like what are the the things that I would do is that I would do a little bit more robust economy which my guess is not done there because robust economy means more content to kind of put that economy on which the theme is because it's small like it's less is more so I guess it's kind of coming and because of just the iteration process of it but I would definitely kind of enlarge it a little bit and speed up the progression like yeah it's definitely worth an AB test the easiest AB test I think is ad placement for the meat four times a day not even an ad placement what I would do is like try different timelines of feature unfolding so let's say for instance the skills and like the things that you have there like later down the line my guess is that just like few percents of users ever sold them so probably try like an AB test that kind of speeds up the progression a little bit because usually how this works is that you kind of get your new toy you play with your new toy then your attention budget again stabilized because you don't you know learn to play

with it and then you throw in another toy and like here's your new feature play with it again and then you know how Survivor I does it for instance or like these other hybrid candy even Candy Crush like introdu yeah speeding up the progression a little bit because my guess is that the I've seen it all moment kind of comes too fast where like there are still features don't get me wrong it's just they can so so lock the way behind like the progression so I would can speed it up and then again yeah I know Sam you said exactly like the opposite opinion but I would still slap some offers on on top of this like like gotcha whatever something something starter pack progression timeline progression offers just like slap progression offers when you move from timeline to Tim so like you achiev this offer because it's just like progression offer and then bam put it there that that's like my have you seen have you seen uplifts with offers before Oh that was like battle Legion was like all offers basically 90% of the revenue was offers definitely like uh I know uplift uplift I mean uplift oh yeah I've seen

so yeah yeah but don't overshoot the discount percentages like uh you know everybody can do like big Revenue spikes and then comes hangover from Baseline Revenue so you can actually losing in the in the process so make sure that like the offers are balanced around not going away from 120 to 18 2,000% kind of discount otherwise then I'm selling your economy too cheap okay nice that's there man admon I'm going to sound like such a little [ __ ] blonde [ __ ] but uh seven out of 10 uh purely for the reason like the ad placements are great the game is making a lot of AD Revenue it's hard to say for a game that makes you know nearly a quarter of a mill A Day In AD Revenue but uh this day and age I don't think there's like any room not to do segmentation so basically treating your user base in a uniform way is kind of gone uh how I would start

testing this is just enabling some user bases that have passed the point where most of the I APS take place they are allowed to watch U two more three more like uh rewarded ad placements for meat basically increasing the ad load for people that you know will never make an i AP starting experimenting around that I've seen it work and yeah as easy ways of doing it as hard ways Alien Invasion how they do it to increase encourage views is that uh once a user doesn't purchase something basically they increase the amount of rewards between the rewarded placements so if you don't interact with three rewarded placements in a row they increase the amount of things you're getting out of the rewarded placement for example but yeah there's a lot of things you can do around it if you think about it but like it's still Juggernaut right so yeah oh you said you said that there's a lot of things so if you could boil it down to one thing let's say the one thing that this this the you're you're on this game and and what would you say is the 8020 of user segmentation what's the first thing that you would try what's the

biggest uplift that you you so what time like how far in the game do people make their first purchase like on average like when is the first purchase what they ever pick a number okay let's say let's say let's say it's day 14 right so it makes no sense that the ad load for users that are stuck around until day 28 uh have the same amount of reward in like uh placements as they do before that place so it makes more sense to allow them that have clearly said they're not ever going to make a purchase to allow them to watch more ads because they are more ah so more ads yeah find like 95% you know cut off of like all the purchases are done from this point on and then the rest is getting going to get segmented yeah so I have a client for example like uh they segment users they never show in rewarded ad placements until day 28 but then after that big average uh imput out of sevenish so yeah yeah makes a lot of sense so basically find the point where you would expect the

player to make a purchase and if they don't make a purchase then start showing ads a few days later yeah set a rule like I'm willing to lose maximum 2% of I APS to test out this or to try to make it happen and then you pick that point and then that's your yeah norstar that's point where you pretty much like decide that like okay there's no other way to get to get any other Revenue kind of from this user so the only thing I would say don't do this is if you have heavy social features which you don't have yeah so you know there there's like your there's your warranty there like you don't really need to care then you know 200k a day with uh you know uh with seven out of 10 is not bad that's pretty good no I was expecting way higher I would say nine for sure I mean like uh given the the whole kind of team structure like how big is the team and I know we know Yuri and beum as well and it's like like that's kind of spent per day it's just like amazing it's really like do a great

job yeah less more you yeah you said it that's like like heads offic serious like that's really really like senior kind of approach to to the UA I for this kind of budget I would expect way more creatives in different kind of angles uh but it's just like I'm pretty sure you're on top of it already and most probably uh focus more on playables than videos because if you yeah if appin is the top spender which is apparently and I would say 70 maybe yeah 70% of the whole spend is going to appin then you need like new playables almost every two or three weeks that's like that's definitely needed but except that oh my God [ __ ] amazing like really really good job seriously yeah like uh literally the games like for me game design wise is a representation that's what you said like is more like literally you have this like small thing that's making so much power awesome can can I rate you guys now yes you sure goe

[ __ ] teenager first of all Felix I'm giving you a one out but less is more so he's really giving me a compliment guys wow okay very cool that's very cool Jesus Christ oh yeah yeah you can you can rate US if never had that before so 10 out of 10 of course 10 out of 10 every single day nice oh thank podcasting skills analytical skills humor looks everything yeah poop breaks everything all good yeah all good all good backgrounds backgrounds maybe M maybe you're a nine out of 10 but I know I know all the all the kid St in be the bigr that's that's how it works now and thanks for jakob's background looks like Ikea it's true and we oh my god look where's the where's

the fake uh Christmas tree yeah where's the fake Christmas tree are any of the plants real on the table it's all fake it's all oh yeah they're real there's like there's the Valentine's bouet I give my wife right there okay Jesus Christ okay I think that let's end it before my teeth all the sugar exactly we oh yeah my God yeah thank you very much for coming thanks for coming guys thank you very much for listening uh uh please subscribe hit the button so as many as you subscribe my voice going to be back sooner so please do do subscribe and then share comment on YouTube and uh yeah see you next time see you soon in Istanbul definitely oh yeah well uh that's true one one thing we are actually coming to Istanbul there's going to be a Google event on 7th but there's going to be a super secret two

and a half Gamers event on 6th so please be you know join our slack and then uh be patient we will share some news very soon ciao thank [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music]