What’s in store for hyper-casual games in 2023? Live reaction to benchmark report from Q4 2022

hey there this is Roman from tender today we've invited a special guest guest please introduce yourself hello uh so I'm the UA consultant slash host of uh two and a half Gamers podcast so uh thanks for having me here like today is a special day at least according to LinkedIn it's one year for two and a half Gamers is it accurate or this is a random man it wasn't to to today but it was this month I restarted uh recording uh two and a half Gamers uh which is no gaming podcast by the way we started in middle of middle of January so yeah yeah this is a special month for us super super um then um yeah the reason why we're

here dungeon have released a new report of course like hyper casual I go with like hyper casual Benchmark report and today we want to record like a reaction to the report right so mate maybe briefly saw something in the media but not not the whole report so I will just share a screen and we start discussing and looking forward actually yes he's been all over the LinkedIn but uh here we are I didn't have time to check it completely yes yeah if you're doing like marketing like LinkedIn is a king like a lot of people are doing Twitter but I don't know on the side note yeah I've never found any success with with Twitter uh definitely LinkedIn is this is way way more fun as well and uh way better in terms of the reach as well yeah look do you see the cover right yes I

guess not nothing surprising here I have uh like executive summary and then I have like about tangent here we don't need your reaction why come on I use tangent I use used and used engine quite uh quite a lot for the hyper casual games because well uh it's all about the margins and you come pretty handy casuals yeah yeah that was not so we didn't do it on purpose so yeah thanks a lot uh any like expectation like any numbers that are going up down so we have like cpis we have ad spend per platform we have countries like any first like expectation from the report so I would uh I would like to see the the evolution of the cpis in the between query free and Q4 Maybe and potentially if a budgets spend uh shifted from Android to iOS or other way

around and what kind of GEOS are important for example visual gaming companies then here you go here is an ad Spencer we have 52 for Android 48 for iOS it was uh 57. okay Q3 what's going on here like well okay I guess uh finally people are starting to to get into into iOS more and more and not uh they're not scared anymore uh to actually spend against the iOS kpis you know it's like I was always the uh the most or the biggest quality right did they figure out scad Network I hope so I really hope so I just heard that there is like a 30 um of the UA people that actually figured the SK Network framework uh and

the rest is just still trying to yeah trying to understand well now they need to relearn with cadment work four oh yeah yeah yeah it's good it's gonna be a lot of fun I'm looking forward to it I have no idea well I have some ideas how it's going to change but uh you're still in the dark everybody's talking about it but we only starting to get like first post packs now now yeah man I mean just like with Google like yeah like 2023 for me is like if anyone is asking me I'm like oh Android I'm doing what I know what I can do and yeah it's the same thing with uh when the idfa uh um an old iOS changes were announced David was like oh well we need to be prepared and then everything changed so heavily it's like yeah I'm trying to be prepared in terms of the like the information I can get from

different sources but then actually like when it hits then uh that's going to be the interesting part because then I see the data I can make decisions based on data and then it's going to be way easier now it's just all you know theoretical yeah um I will switch to probably the most surprising flight here is uh iOS API it's now 42 cents is this uh is this like average or us only or what uh it's medium median I'll have media okay I see I see it I see it now 40 cents median across the all the countries I mean okay I would expect lower uh than 42 cents this is uh I I have a correction all the countries that uh we just spent more than one million this is based on our

data set so okay there are some filters this is not okay okay okay good makes sense uh well it's you know it's Q4 so of course it's the all-time high yeah that's the question right so Android by five cents is fine by me right of course the CIA is growing this is a lot of like I'll call it 68 like I have an idea but maybe you can tell me if that makes sense or not so um iscpi has grown but if we go to the is it my countries yes here is the USA probably this is a bit more sense to you and the experience US market actually decreased by six cents nice okay but as a tier one countries like France Germany for example there were also like some others

have increased in the CPI so this tier one countries are bringing them overall medium up yeah okay uh look so I think in in Q4 uh and it's it's always like every Q4 the competition is super high so all the CPS are starting to increase after Black Friday uh happens and it gets crazy until the end of the year so so that like increase by 17 cents it's not surprising it's a surprising thing here is kind of like the CPI decrease on uh in US just kind of exactly the opposite what I would expect uh and I would expect like when you said that on where we saw that there's the increase then I would say like U.S is actually driving that increase up not the other tier like uh tier one or the European countries because of the seasonality right yeah yeah yeah exactly hey I I saw like very

big um changes in the U.S specifically for uh all the all the channels and games are managed so that's why I was like oh okay I guess it's U.S but now well it's interesting to see yeah and um I mean we have some like really good sweet spots here in the Q3 I've indicated like versus EU it was number three by Ed spent now it's already number two I'm not sure maybe people are listening and the sand for Brazil is like um right so maybe maybe you know something like that for uh iOS or Android like really makes sense so I when when you mentioned that the five cents uh increase on on Android is kind of fine but uh if you think about it and you have seven cents in uh in Brazil or lower sense uh all over cpis in in these countries or tier two tier three

countries where the five cents is kind of big difference so oh yeah and overall it's like oh well it can change the whole like cpil TV equation man uh it's uh it's even like 20 cents range it's very different of course like if it's like five dollar CPI and that's changed by five cents but that's fine that's okay that's okay but yeah it's like I think uh for a lot of hyper casual games uh these would be kind of like uh an end game it's like oh wow The cpi's increased quite heavily but no it's like of course I'm joking here but still like it's it can be very dangerous to increase even even five cents in some views no true true um I wonder well like let's look at maybe at the ad networks and CPI so it's gonna be fun right here's an Android for you man

Snapchat who runs anything on Snapchat still yeah yeah of course of course yeah but it's like uh come on why it's the most expensive one the first thing and like every every time I tried something on Snapchat it doesn't work okay maybe I'm doing something wrong maybe it's actually like three years ago like we've seen it like in the top five yeah yeah not so much so this is a surprise number one any other surprises here uh yeah integral up there not that big surprise uh the Facebook is down kind of but yeah I think it's it's anyway dying quite uh a long long death but then at Colony I I'm not using Adco in that much uh these days or maybe in the last last year or so so that's that's kind of surprising

but still uh still pretty viable Channel iron source and unity emerging I'm not sure when this is going to be complete yeah and that's the thing like I everybody asks me like what's what's going to happen with the inventor if it's going to be one big inventory or if it's going to be only Unity inventory or what's gonna happen because if honestly if these two became one and uh I I'm not sure if it's gonna work because you iron source for me not working at all Unity always so it's like a quite opposite direction yeah this is like a branding task oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah 100 maybe it's gonna be uh split by genre because I can I can understand why an iron sword is working for hyper casual because well of course supersonic yeah yeah an uploading as well who would say that right yeah

yeah absolutely makes sense um let's look at the data from our friends from game analytics um they've provided like uh they won and they sound retention to this report nice this time we have like top two percentile 125 and also like a media media was there 22 percent yeah yeah but the thing is you need to we we had also a discussion there with the analytics thing like their clients not always advertise games so all of those prototypes right that they've insisted to include that students right yeah then then there should be uh at least uh one cent is like hey so these are all games right

um so I'll just hide it from you just yeah yeah yeah now okay 45 so the thing is like 45 some some of the the hyper casual games would say this is not enough for example and 38 definitely not enough dude you know to cut it for uh for the top ranks and uh like some profitable UA at some point it's interesting like it maybe it also shows that it's like the difference is not even in the second percentile or it's even like higher yeah only like selected number of games Okay can really make it right yeah of course that's what I always uh discuss with other other games as well so you have day one which is 45 10 day seven if it's 19 okay some games have let's say 25 30

day one but they still can't get 20 day day seven so that's like the important is the the ratio between those uh those retention numbers I mean one question from me here is that um I heard that the gap between IOS and Android is increasing like basically Android retention is getting worse have you seen that yeah man but it's like it's based on so you should you should well you're not comparing Apples to Apples here because there's so many devices on Android and that's like the the low end devices uh are dragging the retention down so much I've seen this uh in in two or three soft launches very recently so so that's uh if you look at the high-end devices only you will see very comparable retention uh to to iOS I see yeah so okay that's these days you can

buy Android phone for like what like twenty dollars forty dollars it's shitty device you can you can't even play properly any hyper casual game deck right but yeah yeah so that kind of sucks yeah poor UA managers now they need not only platform filter but device model oh yeah yeah all of the devices right I would thankfully you can you can do these filterings on uh not all the channels but there is definite on Unity it sites you know beta you can do it on antique so you can do it on Facebook as well it requires a lot of uh like work on the sides to actually get these devices right or thank thank you Google Play and Android uh the new OS which is OS 12. actually can run only on devices with ram 6 Gigabytes uh that kind of excludes all okay all the login devices

but then then you can still get pretty good results on the like three gigabytes of RAM until the six so you can still need to do some some uh some tricks here and there yeah but that's a good differentiator it's better than to remember all the oh yeah of course yeah of course okay uh maybe I have like one final question though I'll come back the title page uh like seeing this like what happens with the hyper casuals now like I I'm not saying that that I don't like everything is no I don't believe that of course like people will start like doing hybrid casual whatever or and they'll be hyper casual games too yeah of course yeah but if you are maybe let me rephrase what is your one advice to Young promising uh hyper casual publisher that only like now starts to

develop and publish their own games oof yeah now it's kind of late to the party but I guess it's it's the first uh entrance to to any uh gaming genre and it's still like the easiest to make so uh I what I and actually I do like two years ago so uh we tried this to build the hyper casual games uh with some of my friends obviously who didn't uh and we we actually built one game uh from scratch uh which didn't get pretty good results but eventually we wanted to learn so we build it we ran the UA we tested all the all the analytics tag all the waterfalls all the monetization like things so we actually learned how to do it properly uh so when they actually the the success prototype comes in so we are prepared and we can then like push it so it's all about learning experience I guess uh so even if if the game kpi

sucks just go through the whole like development cycle and and publish first first campaigns and uh like build everything it doesn't need to be a huge scale it can be still like 40 dollars spent but just go through those uh those steps it can definitely help you with uh any other like new prototypes afterwards right um have you ever bought like a game I wonder if I would want to learn like to do a UA I'll buy myself a hyper casual game and do all sorts of stuff I was thinking I was thinking about it actually uh and I I had a few discussions about about this um with some people but then eventually didn't go through it because I I thought the game sucked in the game guys okay it wasn't worth uh the price but uh I might just you know just for the sake of learning and having fun might buy a game if the price is right in just one

cost like 100 000. yeah yeah it's a different business yeah so yeah but yeah it's it's kind of like a a good middle ground I think got it all right we'll be wrapping up uh I'll leave all of the links to mate uh two and a half Gamers websites uh wonderful reports so we haven't showed you a couple of things here um thanks a lot for listening and watching us yep thanks cheers