Vita Mahjong Game Review: Ads in Gaming? Yes!

Speaker 1 Go to US again, it was like 400,000 DAUs.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 like half a million US DAUs.

Speaker 1 I would go with

Speaker 1 350.

Speaker 1 No, no, not that, not that much, not that much.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. Because basically, the big difference here is that interstitials is the bread and butter, right? That's where the majority comes, right? So

Speaker 1 the the amount of rewarded videos people usually watch in these games is not that much because it's not integral to the gameplay, right? So it's gonna be lower.

Speaker 1 And banner revenue, like when you have long sessions like that, is not as high as you actually think it is, right? So the interstitial is like 70% of the overall revenue. Okay.

Speaker 1 It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice.
Mate drops, knowledge made of gold and ice. Felix with ads making those coins rise.
Jack up designs, worlds chasing the skies.

Speaker 1 We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew. Talking UA adverts and game design too.
Mateish, Felix, Shaku, bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight.

Speaker 1 The K U A master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyberspace skies.
Felix stacks colours like a wizard in disguise. Jackups crafted realms, let's just to the highs.

Speaker 1 Two and a half gamers, talking smack. Slow, hockey, sick, got your back.
Ads are beautiful, they like the way. Click it fast, don't delay.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Oh my god, this is moving.

Speaker 1 So for the listeners, don't go to YouTube because Yakubi is dancing and the camera is moving. No, Yakubi is moving and the camera is dancing.
You got it's all wrong.

Speaker 1 Man, I was so annoyed at you last episode.

Speaker 1 I was just looking at that camera move, and then, like, I knew if I said anything, Matia would just like, oh, it's fine, and then I would get even more annoyed.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, I was just sitting, like, what has this come to? This podcast is just so going downhill. I was angry at it for a day.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know. I saw you like, what was it? Come on,

Speaker 1 when you said thirst time, like, you turned it off,

Speaker 1 I knew you were super annoyed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay, but anyway, my name is Matteo Ancherich, I'm Felix Broberg.

Speaker 1 And we are your hosts. And we are going to talk about Vita Majong.

Speaker 1 Is it Majong or Mayong? Mayong.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Jakob, do you know?

Speaker 1 Meow.

Speaker 1 Okay, meow. Okay, that's a great name.

Speaker 1 Okay, meow.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we're going to talk about this game.

Speaker 1 And for our core fans, I'm pretty sure you're going to remember this game and some of your creatives because we already talked about it in the super special episode. It's called Inspector Budget.

Speaker 1 There it was. See, I thought it was recently.
Yes, it was the very beginning of the year. Which brings me to the fact that we need to record another Inspector Budget.

Speaker 1 Because then we can actually

Speaker 1 uncover some interesting hidden gems again. You mean interesting budgets?

Speaker 1 So, yes,

Speaker 1 unless you've been living under a rock or not interacting with mobile games at all or not seeing ads, you have seen Vitamin Young ads because it's just

Speaker 1 everywhere. No, no way.
I saw it first time when we were talking about it on the inspector budget. Yes, you've never seen it.
It was

Speaker 1 everywhere. No, man, it was just in your group.
Like, we play games for ads. We are not there.

Speaker 1 Groups.

Speaker 1 What else is under?

Speaker 1 No, I think, yeah, it was the first time I saw it. So

Speaker 1 it's been downloaded 9 million times in the last 30 days, right? Like

Speaker 1 quite a lot of downloads, right? So that means probably you show how many ads? I don't know. You know that from UA.
I don't know how many ads you need to show to

Speaker 1 get 9 million downloads.

Speaker 1 Way more.

Speaker 1 Way more. 200 million impressions.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so yeah, we're going to talk about Vita Mayong.

Speaker 1 yes, Jakob, do you wanna?

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 1 there it is.

Speaker 1 Yes, beautiful.

Speaker 1 Why? Why is it beautiful? Because I don't think it's actually that beautiful. Because if you read the reviews, then we should we're definitely gonna go there.
Uh, people really

Speaker 1 are pissed because, oh my god, these fake ads, they're saying there's there's no ads, and there's lots of ads.

Speaker 1 You should not lie to yourself by by someone on the internet.

Speaker 1 No way, no. No way.
Wow, like that's that's wild, I know. But the thing is,

Speaker 1 it's yeah, it's in creative, it's like no ads, it's like ads-free. And

Speaker 1 there's one comment we need to, we need to go there. Okay, well, we'll get to that.

Speaker 1 Okay, so let's go from the usual kind of let's go from the gameplay product side, then numbers, and then we'll go.

Speaker 1 So, uh, it's May Young. Thank you very much for listening.
Again,

Speaker 1 it's very, very simplistic. Like, I It's not my own.
It's simplified Mayong. It's just not real Mayong.
It's just matching.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 I don't know. You're a Mayong champion.
I'm not.

Speaker 1 Mayong champion.

Speaker 1 Mayong champion in Sweden, top one rank.

Speaker 1 So, but

Speaker 1 I think it's like a pretty. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember.
Mayong is something like Scrabble.

Speaker 1 Like, you to have like count stuff and like complicate your board and like this is not it, this is just simple

Speaker 1 like similar similar to domino dreams, I guess, or something like that. Yeah, tile match we're talking about.
Um,

Speaker 1 yes,

Speaker 1 yes,

Speaker 1 yeah, yeah, it's kind of tile match, yeah, without the board, yeah, you know, without the board at the bottom.

Speaker 1 Uh, the first thing that I'm gonna say about this game is very simplistic, it's just basically the core, and that's it. And

Speaker 1 one occasional event like this,

Speaker 1 you have block blast. Here, here we are again, yeah.
This is blockbust, like this is exactly what they're doing, and I think this is the reason they've scaled, but we can talk about that later.

Speaker 1 But, yeah, yeah, probably there's a lot of stuff moving behind the scenes regarding difficulty settings and all these other things, as you know, as we know from block blast, but yeah, otherwise, on the surface level, the feature set is super shallow.

Speaker 1 They're just the core, and like a few of the I've never seen more than one at once. Did anyone of you seen more than one? No, more than one what of these events running here.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, no, yeah, like you know, there's no royal match, whatever six events here, five events there, three offers there, nothing, no offers, by the way. Yeah, no, not even a shop button.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, the only thing you can do is like you can change the themes, which was the like a horrible idea when I did that because I just learned all the things to match on the previous style set and then like I was completely lost on the poker one.

Speaker 1 Like, I was like, oh, this is gonna work better with numbers. No, no way, no,

Speaker 1 how about no? Yeah, so you go into the.

Speaker 1 By the way, you don't even get to the menu. Like, if you don't forcefully.
Oh, here we go with that.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It looks like some kind of a prehistoric forex.
No, it looks like the game. No, no, no, no.
I want to see what was this. It looks like the.

Speaker 1 Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 You can skip it already.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can skip it.

Speaker 1 Skip it and I will never know.

Speaker 1 We'll see where it bleeds. I want to see

Speaker 1 what's the game about.

Speaker 1 It reminds me

Speaker 1 one game from the PC, but I've

Speaker 1 blanking on the name. Pocket chaos.

Speaker 1 Okay, thank you.

Speaker 1 Now you can skip it. Is it playable? Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Ooh.

Speaker 1 Alright. Did you just press install? Yeah.
Azur. Azur.

Speaker 1 That's nice. Okay.

Speaker 1 So we got an interstitial red in our face.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not going to be the first or the last time. Yeah, then we have the banner ad on the bottom.
This starts from level 11, if I understand correctly.

Speaker 1 Uh, banners start a bit later, uh, they start a bit later, but after level 10 is when interstitial starts.

Speaker 1 But basically, they have yeah, interstitials between every level, but the interesting thing is in the level as well,

Speaker 1 yeah. Yeah, and then also the interesting thing is like if you open the game first time, you don't see it usually for the first day or two, the interstitial, like when you first open it for a a while.

Speaker 1 So basically,

Speaker 1 they're really adamant about in the start not spamming you with interstitials.

Speaker 1 But yeah, interstitials is the main breadwinner here, and it's massive. Just saying that this revenue is pretty big.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 By the way,

Speaker 1 where is it?

Speaker 1 Never mind. I'll get to it later.

Speaker 1 So here we are at the core. It's basically tile match, as Mate said, but we don't have any bench.

Speaker 1 Like, there's no bench, there's just boosters, which is undo, give me a hint, and reshuffle the pieces, which happens a lot of times.

Speaker 1 There are scores which, like, if you do stuff, it pretty much scores you. There's the level count number matches is what? Like, how many available matches I have currently? I guess so.

Speaker 1 Like, that that would be the it's so simple you don't even understand. Yeah,'cause it's like oh, no, not much, like, no ads.
Oh, there's an awful lot of

Speaker 1 people are actually actually

Speaker 1 talking about $5.99 in dollars. So they're segmenting, I guess.

Speaker 1 I think I never got a pop-up in my face for the offer.

Speaker 1 Anyway, more money with the ads, so you don't want to really put it front and center. So what you do, you match the similar symbols

Speaker 1 that needs to be at the end of like a zone basically. String

Speaker 1 string. This one I cannot because it's been blocked by these others, like only the ones that are like at the edge.

Speaker 1 So for instance, I can match this one with uh, yeah, it's counterpart, which I don't see, or I can match whatever

Speaker 1 uh, like for instance, these two,

Speaker 1 you really suck in this game, yeah, no, like it's okay. What's your levels, by the way? Zero, I am level uh 2018.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 so you don't really want to play the ads simulator, guys. Like, seriously, but this is this this game is designed for

Speaker 1 older generation, right? Like, this is the

Speaker 1 people who are not.

Speaker 1 Notice the important thing. Do you see any immediate fail states?

Speaker 1 Like, time pressure? No. No.
No. It's just the combinations, right? It's any moves.

Speaker 1 It's just a streak. That's what you have to do, right? No, no, no, no.
You need to keep having possible matches. Because sometimes you have four.

Speaker 1 Yeah, now I have four. So if I let's say do, I cannot do that one, but I can do whatever.

Speaker 1 I can do this one and this one. And this unlocked like another set.
So now we're back at four.

Speaker 1 We're still at four.

Speaker 1 And some point, whatever. But notice the important thing.
So these are not exclusive pairs. Like those are not always like only two of a kind in a level, which means you need to choose and strategize.

Speaker 1 Like if I want to match this, this, whatever

Speaker 1 rectangle with the other rectangle or the other one.

Speaker 1 Good sort. Yeah, yeah, a little bit.

Speaker 1 Then there are these Joker tiles, which have these images or whatever with characters near them, which is like whatever you can match, like whatever they are with different types.

Speaker 1 Then there are the gold tiles, which are the event ones outside of the metagameplay thing.

Speaker 1 And then there are...

Speaker 1 Where they are.

Speaker 1 I think that's it. Like that, that's basically everything that unlocked for me yet.

Speaker 1 But the most important thing is that tiles are being blocked by tiles on top of them as per usual tile match mechanic. Only the tiles at the edges can be matched.

Speaker 1 And then, if you run out of possible matches, you lose and you go into fail state. And then you need to either shuffle or like reshuffle the board or you lose and you need to go from start.
So that's.

Speaker 1 Watch a reward video, pretty much. Yeah, watch a reward video.
Levels take very long time to do.

Speaker 1 Levels take up to like 10, 12 minutes some take shorter it depends on the level right some are 10 minutes some are 10 minutes yeah i guess from from some time like it's it's something like seven to ten minutes per level like all of them i didn't really see that big of a difference between like hard and easy or like not hard levels difficulty it just like takes a lot of time because

Speaker 1 These things are, as you see, are kind of similar to each other. So it's easy to not see which one you are looking for.
They're not really distinctive.

Speaker 1 They're intentionally very similar to each other, so you lose yourself there, and you're just like watching at the screen all the time.

Speaker 1 Look, it's designed for seniors, they have plenty of time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, by doing that mental champion thing that goes in the middle, like you increase your IQ, like, yeah, I guess add section or UA section will be very, very

Speaker 1 as usual. Yeah, you remember the Alzheimer stuff, so

Speaker 1 basically

Speaker 1 similar to impulse, basically. Like, we train your brain.

Speaker 1 One thing that I was interesting, I made a note of when I was on level 12, basically, I bricked a level, and it was one of these things.

Speaker 1 Had I just looked a bit harder and been better at the game and like been thinking about the moves a bit ahead, I would have seen it and not bricked the level.

Speaker 1 And basically, I think after that, the game was easier for me because basically I probably got slated in as like a bad player.

Speaker 1 And I just made a note of it because it wasn't until I bricked the level. After that, I never had any issues.
Like, it's just so much easier.

Speaker 1 So, like, there must be a lot of stuff happening on the background. Dynamic difficulty adjustment, similar to Block Bus, Blocks Mac definitely has it, like, it's like 100%.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, Block Plus, someone told me after we did the episode that they have 150 people working on just the difficulty and like the ML A-B testing, exactly. Yeah, they said, like, maybe

Speaker 1 testing. Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 1 Yeah, do you want to show

Speaker 1 the level so

Speaker 1 we can get the mental ad or mental achievement? Yeah,

Speaker 1 Mental achievement. What is really

Speaker 1 reshuffle? Oi oy oy.

Speaker 1 Shuffle, bitch.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. So not here,

Speaker 1 here, and here. What are you doing, Jakob? Wow, well done.

Speaker 1 Good.

Speaker 1 You're better than 82% of players, I'm sure. Not yet.
I think I'm like 90 or whatever.

Speaker 1 That was a tough one, but you handled it beautifully. It's like Fortune Cookie.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and every 10 levels, you get extra boosters. That's basically it.
And nice, warmy, fortune cookie quote. That's it.
And that's the game, basically. Like, you've seen it all.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 interstitial ads. It's basically interstitial simulator.
Nothing else. Or ads simulator.

Speaker 1 It's like all of these, like addictive, small, easy to approach, easy to get into, very, very uh, high dynamic difficulty adjustment.

Speaker 1 Games do basically, do you want to show why we're talking about this game? It's like, probably not the most interesting from the outside, but from the from the numbers perspective.

Speaker 1 Why are we talking about this? And we got talked into this by Felix.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 so yeah, recently by Felix, come on,

Speaker 1 I didn't, I didn't hear you talking about this at all. I mean, I thought I was talking about it on the podcast, so yeah,

Speaker 1 but like,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 we saw it there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 that's okay.

Speaker 1 Um, so yeah, doing something like 300k downloads a day and still scaling up from go to active user base. Yeah, okay, look how happy because that's the most important stuff.

Speaker 1 I know,

Speaker 1 because this is an ad-driven game, right? Like, it's it's 98% ad-driven, right? So it's mainly

Speaker 1 3.4 million daily active users, which is pretty crazy. What is the bullshit filter? Yes.

Speaker 1 USA, baby. USA.
Yeah, US being first is a really good sign. Then Brazil, Russia, Mexico, France, Colombia.
Yeah, these are the things that I've seen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, download twice, I would guess the same. It's a mix.
Oh, no, no, no, oh, yeah, okay, sorry. Where's Japan on that list? Because ush usually Japan is quite big for these type of games.

Speaker 1 No, but it's

Speaker 1 2.1%.

Speaker 1 Not really interested. I think they're playing Pokemon Pocket and Pokemon Go.

Speaker 1 Pokemon Go. No.
Not any Pokemon.

Speaker 1 If you look at the rankings, it's a head Pokemon. So it's in the same ranking for some reason on Sensor Tower.
Oh, really? Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 so in. Oh, really? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Is it in the Mayonk subgenre? Okay, so let's check.

Speaker 1 There you go. Whoa, there we go.

Speaker 1 And I would guess they're first, and they're completely wiping the floor with everyone. Literally.
Literally, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And the next company behind them is something from Tencent, which I cannot read. You know, this is way way better category than the solitaire.

Speaker 1 Way better.

Speaker 1 The king should have made a my own game.

Speaker 1 QQ Mayong, I guess. There you go.

Speaker 1 But Vita Studio is Chinese, right? They're based in Singapore, but they're actually owned, I think, by learnings.com.cn because basically their adapts.txt file

Speaker 1 on Vita, which is based in Singapore, is actually

Speaker 1 for learnings.com, which is a Chinese company.

Speaker 1 Everything Chinese with me ta uh with my my own, but is it my own plug originally in uh like

Speaker 1 Chinese, I think, yeah. My own is originally Chinese, yeah.
Then you put the revenue, which is on the first slot. Look,

Speaker 1 yeah, for people with revenue, yeah, where's Vita? Where's your Vita here?

Speaker 1 Well, our Vita is not there. Yeah, it's not there because they're making money with ads.
Yeah, exactly. Beautiful ads.

Speaker 1 So, what's this? Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 This is amazing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we should play.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this looks way better. This looks way, way better.
Yeah, we sure should have done this game. This actually had features.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I'm not sure you're going to understand what they're saying. I think I don't care.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 so basically, this is gonna be the block blast of oh, wait a second, this is a casino mode of my own.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 this is a slot,

Speaker 1 geez, right? There's oh my god, this is getting better and better. I think you should you should check the skew

Speaker 1 English skew

Speaker 1 English skew if they have one, if they have one, which they don't know they don't

Speaker 1 okay. You see, it's not available in China and US.
What's the second best one?

Speaker 1 This looks actually at least like my own.

Speaker 1 Yeah, b because there's the

Speaker 1 oh my god, this is so good. This is a nice rabbit hole.
Yeah, this is a very nice rabbit hole.

Speaker 1 What even is this? See, this is actually my own.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is my own. Really my own.
This this is how it actually looks like. It's like uh yeah, like it looks like Scrabble from an outside perspective.
Scrabble from wish almost

Speaker 1 like hardcore scrabble hardcore scrap yeah

Speaker 1 all right let's get back

Speaker 1 yeah yeah let's get back to vita let's go back to vita

Speaker 1 go to go to active user base so here's the cool thing right about our podcast because we also calculate the ad revenue so how much do you think that these guys earn in ad revenue every day on 3.3 or 3.4 million users whatever it is in the last 30 days go to us again it's like 400 000 daus

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 like half a million US DAUs.

Speaker 1 I would go with

Speaker 1 350.

Speaker 1 No, no, not that, not that much, not that much yet. No, no, no.
Because basically, the big difference here is that interstitials is the bread and butter, right? That's where the majority comes, right?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the amount of rewarded videos people usually watch in these games is not that much because it's not integral to the gameplay, right? So it's going to be lower. And

Speaker 1 revenue, like when you have long sessions like that, is not as high as you actually think it is, right? So the interstitial is like 70% of the overall revenue.

Speaker 1 And that's the thing, right? So then what's going to be 100 to any?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so basically it's $146,000 a day, I think, right now, which means a year this game is making $52 to $55 million a year in ad revenue. Which is not bad, man.
Have you noticed this thing?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, this real May On game is like 100% like run by China. That's understandable.
Where's China in this thing?

Speaker 1 There's no app stores in China, or there's no iOS on their iOS. There's iOS stores.
Go to their

Speaker 1 account

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 it's a

Speaker 1 different app.

Speaker 1 Probably

Speaker 1 the case of Vita Studio. Let's check.

Speaker 1 That's possible.

Speaker 1 So, can we get a country filter here or we don't?

Speaker 1 You have World Wide Up on the top, all countries next to the date range. Yeah, you're right.
There you go.

Speaker 1 No China. Nope, no China.
All right.

Speaker 1 Is one of those usual Chinese studio not having Chinese revenue?

Speaker 1 Yes, most probably. It's interesting.
Or, or.

Speaker 1 if we just don't see the account, it's on WeChat. Yeah, or is it on WeChat? Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's just most probably it's gonna be on WeChat. There is a big demand for these games, right? That's what's interesting, right?

Speaker 1 The super simple gameplay, you're kind of cleaning, you're kind of matching up, and basically, it's tailored for seniors, right? But you know, it's literally like Domino Dreams, man.

Speaker 1 It's pretty much Domino Dreams, yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah, but only ads,

Speaker 1 only ads, only ads, yeah, beautiful ad revenue, yeah. But do you think this would work with uh, with more like features and

Speaker 1 IIP revenue?

Speaker 1 Like in my own game. Yeah, it works.
It's it's called

Speaker 1 I don't know how to read this.

Speaker 1 Oh, but I mean the same

Speaker 1 I mean

Speaker 1 the same game because it's uh it doesn't really work with Block Plus, but they did it. You mean like if if if you could add IP to this game? No.
Yes. No.
Why why? It's too shallow for features.

Speaker 1 It's just like nothing. But what would you need to add? What would you need to add?

Speaker 1 Compression, more aggressive fail states, more...

Speaker 1 Okay, see if you played one level and you failed once.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, man. But I think this cohort of users are going after the seniors, right? It's like they don't want complicated features.

Speaker 1 They just want a super easy game you can pick up and play, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, tell that to all mesh-free gamers.

Speaker 1 All blockmark mass clones. Yeah, yeah.
Come on, man.

Speaker 1 Difficulty is the single hardest thing with this game.

Speaker 1 You need to hit the flow thing, you know? Not frustratingly difficult, but not boringly easy. Something in the middle, which is very hard to keep.

Speaker 1 But they're definitely doing something right, right? Like it's scaling through the moon, right? So it's like it's just a

Speaker 1 straight line. But

Speaker 1 yeah, I'm waiting for the ads. That's the interesting part.
Yeah, I could go to Google Play if you have the. situation

Speaker 1 at your fingertips. That's how it's

Speaker 1 just saying.

Speaker 1 Okay, go to

Speaker 1 Vita Mayong Google Play account

Speaker 1 and read the reviews.

Speaker 1 You're going to shoot your

Speaker 1 pins. Okay.

Speaker 1 Where are you going?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm going. It's just like I'm getting there.

Speaker 1 Google Play only?

Speaker 1 Instead of just

Speaker 1 clicking.

Speaker 1 Oh my god. we'll get there.
Where's the review part? What are you just going to that fucking store?

Speaker 1 Are you in the real part? Go down, go down.

Speaker 1 Where?

Speaker 1 The real store.

Speaker 1 Like you want me to go on Google and Google Podcasts? Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes, why are you clicking here? Because Cesotao has a

Speaker 1 review for

Speaker 1 the picture.

Speaker 1 Let him fry.

Speaker 1 Man, I wanted to to to get the analytic tool with the reviews, not just go randomly. Oh, nice.
Very good.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Let's call that. And there you go.

Speaker 1 Zoom in, zoom in, zoom in, it's very, very

Speaker 1 good. I was going to really enjoy this game because they put there were zero ads on it.
However, it's absolutely polluted with them. Finish a level and you get an adult.
You have to sell it again

Speaker 1 in the middle of the level, yet another ad.

Speaker 1 Other freak ads don't have as many ads and some don't have at all. Fix the ad problem and I'll change my review.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 Just pay the $5.99 to get rid of the video. I'm really sorry to hear about your frustration.

Speaker 1 They want you to be frustrated. It's you know like it's it's just like like the the the joke video or like the meme where where you just cry and and wipe your your

Speaker 1 tears with money.

Speaker 1 See like with the studio. I'm really sorry to hear your frustration like we actually know shit.

Speaker 1 Your feedback is valid and I'll make sure to share it with the team so they can take it into consideration. Thank you for sharing experience.

Speaker 1 They didn't share anything.

Speaker 1 Of course, yeah, I was scrolling. The ads are incredibly annoying.

Speaker 1 And then, and then there is another one, which is, yeah, this one. I hate ads.
Like, no one like the ones your marketing people put up for this game.

Speaker 1 I'm a senior, but I'm not a mind.

Speaker 1 Not a senior old fool.

Speaker 1 This is exactly.

Speaker 1 This is great.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 no annoying ads.

Speaker 1 It's gonna be five-star reviews then.

Speaker 1 Ah, man, you can buy those.

Speaker 1 People game the review system, right? Like, that's the same thing. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 We have 1.6 million reviews. Like, seriously? No.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. It's not five stars.
Like, this is all people care about. It's just ads.
And it's all ads.

Speaker 1 Like, really annoying. And there's, yeah, absolutely love this game.
Three stars, it's you see,

Speaker 1 yeah, so it's uh annoying ads. I hit the level 30 BAM ads every before every

Speaker 1 promote, okay. Yeah, I appreciate the no-ad version to purchase.
I had to be told to go settings while playing board cannot be done when you first load. Kind of silly,

Speaker 1 you have

Speaker 1 to want you to bond.

Speaker 1 They don't want you to buy out, right? Because basically, you earn more than the 590 million. You can't play LTV, yeah, you don't

Speaker 1 exactly, yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I want to see the creative for this because. Yeah, don't worry.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's so much fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We should do like review, review radar or review reading.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we already

Speaker 1 discussed that. We already discussed that.
We need to do it. So.
Man, four

Speaker 1 reviews. Four Euro Wars reviews.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know, right?

Speaker 1 Oops. I want to share why they changed a little bit.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 I want to actually start with this displayable, which is an absolutely an amazing. There we go, our stereotypical doctor right off the bat.

Speaker 1 As a neurologist, I recommend Vitamayong to my seven-year-old mom.

Speaker 1 Sell your soul in the first creative. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No annoying ads. No Wi-Fi needed 100% free.
Yes, this is great. Designed for Senior.
Prevent Alzheimer's.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, I don't know about that. Did you say that he sold his soul immediately?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I look, he doesn't have a soul.
You see it in his face.

Speaker 1 This is a random doctor, man.

Speaker 1 There's nothing to do with this.

Speaker 1 It's kind of interesting. Oh, this Jesus guys, what is this? Portuguese?

Speaker 1 Hello, Felix. You can't.

Speaker 1 No, but it's different languages, no, or what is it? No, I don't know. Anyway, so this is this is the funk.
Uh, let's just go to February, actually.

Speaker 1 By the way, Sanders, thank you very much for adding Moloco into the mix. Finally,

Speaker 1 we see we see stuff, and they're, I mean, they're running quite a lot of a lot of ads outside of Facebook. Well, no shit.

Speaker 1 If it's ad revenue-based, then obviously

Speaker 1 everything is outside of Facebook. If they're earning $146K a day, right? Yeah.
You just assume that they're spending 70% of that in UA a day? Would that be a realistic? I would say so.

Speaker 1 I would say so. Maybe even more and they're running it, you know, and the cost now to just scale it up.
Or maybe or maybe they have a partner for funding. Partically, you get a lot of money.
Because

Speaker 1 today's episode is brought to you by our sponsors PBX Partners. The simplest and most effective grade line for marketing.
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Speaker 1 Awesome. Awesome.

Speaker 1 Awesome.

Speaker 1 Awesome.

Speaker 1 Come on.

Speaker 1 You need to be, you know, I need to be a little bit more aggressive with this. Yeah, I know.
Next time I will be. Oh, yeah, you should.
You should. Anyway, so

Speaker 1 we have Unity, Applevin, and Mintegral. And I guess that's pretty much it.

Speaker 1 Do you think they're mediating with Max or with level play? 100% with Max. Yeah.
Yeah, okay. That's what I thought.
That's what I thought. So we have two,

Speaker 1 three,

Speaker 1 four, five.

Speaker 1 Back to the original question. So do you think they're running at cost?

Speaker 1 I think they definitely

Speaker 1 aggressively.

Speaker 1 I think they are spending like 70, 80% of the budget. Of the revenue.
So shovel is. So basically 100 to 110k a day.
Yeah, so that's revenue in today spend.

Speaker 1 Not that much, because that's a bullshit strategy, I think.

Speaker 1 But it's definitely, I would say, 70, 80%.

Speaker 1 It's a lot of UA spend.

Speaker 1 Just payables. Yeah, it's payable.
This is great. Okay.

Speaker 1 So we have again

Speaker 1 and another doctor, another neurologist.

Speaker 1 No annoying ad.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's the

Speaker 1 demo on this thing?

Speaker 1 Oh, I can see. I can check.

Speaker 1 I'm checking right now. I don't need to.
I can continue. Okay.

Speaker 1 It's unisex. 53, 47 female.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't say it's just for female. Average age 38.
Look, this is great.

Speaker 1 What is this? Do you know? This is Hebrew.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but kind of the text.

Speaker 1 The good old

Speaker 1 wall of text. uh, creatives.

Speaker 1 This is nothing else, it's just text coming. Look, it's a one minute of text, good old wall of text, good old, good.

Speaker 1 Chinese studio, how much do you think they get inspired from competitors creative?

Speaker 1 300%

Speaker 1 300%.

Speaker 1 This is just uh very

Speaker 1 single creative, they don't. Well, they have it here, but

Speaker 1 I don't don't think they have it everywhere, honestly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they don't. Oh, that's the girl.
That's interesting. You know, the girl who is the painting.
Yeah, she's from that famous painting. Oh, yeah, the milkmaid.
Milkmaid painting. Yeah, no idea.

Speaker 1 That was AI, basically. That was

Speaker 1 quite cool.

Speaker 1 This was AI. Yeah, I think this is AI.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah. She's literally like, imagine like Mona Lisa playing it, basically.
That's what this is.

Speaker 1 Aha, okay, okay, okay, okay. Also, the

Speaker 1 text at the

Speaker 1 back. Yeah, it shows AI.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what I think. It's five seconds, so that kind of makes sense.
Anyway, so we have this

Speaker 1 another AI. What? That's a nice hook.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 Scared me, there.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Is he speaking like if you can't sleep, you play this? Exactly. Because it heals nightmares.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it healed nightmares.

Speaker 1 That's what we have. It makes me...

Speaker 1 This is another one. As a neurologist.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 And this is kind of, you know, like my 60-year-old mother. I mean, come on, guys.

Speaker 1 But still, so I think this kind of works.

Speaker 1 We all always make fun of the Alzheimer's, but I work with one gaming company and they said they also use Alzheimer's as a hook, but

Speaker 1 they're using it because they were getting actually reviews and messages from players that actually helps. And it's a match 3D game.
So that's why I came directly

Speaker 1 to the reviews to see if there is something like this.

Speaker 1 Obviously not.

Speaker 1 But so, I mean, that Alzheimer's stuff, it kind of comes from a real

Speaker 1 real case and use case. So but I don't believe these guys.

Speaker 1 It's kind of helping with sleep. Well, let me just kind of check

Speaker 1 this one I wanted to show you.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this is perfect.

Speaker 1 This is awesome. All of this.

Speaker 1 Does it hurt her hair?

Speaker 1 I don't know. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 These cringy ads.

Speaker 1 All of this.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 there's some interesting stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 Interesting stuff happening. It is only on Facebook.
How robust is their creative

Speaker 1 diversity?

Speaker 1 Once you can sec. Yeah, it's kind of

Speaker 1 a lot of different 400 pages. Okay, they're pretty.
This is Facebook only. This is Facebook only.
Yeah, depending on it. They're big.
They're big. Yeah, they're big.

Speaker 1 This is nice. Full trivia.
It is. And they hate, right?

Speaker 1 Kind of. And they have a lot of localized ads.

Speaker 1 You just see it as well, right? So that's an interesting approach because then that means that you're not going to be able to do that. Because they're being seniors.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there you go. Better sleep.

Speaker 1 You know where this is from.

Speaker 1 We've seen this already. Important.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Five things with the colours.

Speaker 1 That's true.

Speaker 1 But then there was. The move doesn't even work.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there was actually

Speaker 1 person there.

Speaker 1 But yeah,

Speaker 1 more AI.

Speaker 1 Like the Milkmate? What is this? What is this?

Speaker 1 Oh, there we go.

Speaker 1 In Albert Einstein's

Speaker 1 stream of impulse.

Speaker 1 This is impulse.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. This is also kind of from there.

Speaker 1 Even triple.head.

Speaker 1 Yeah, triple.head.

Speaker 1 So there's, I didn't

Speaker 1 find any AI. It doesn't mean that they don't have it.
I'm still waiting for some AI

Speaker 1 Albert Einstein. I think if they have the Milkmaid, why not Albert Einstein?

Speaker 1 I know, yeah, right.

Speaker 1 But they have, yeah, they have quite a lot of these.

Speaker 1 Let's see, first scene, usually new

Speaker 1 stuff.

Speaker 1 Oh, Jesus Christ. Look.

Speaker 1 These fake fingers, look and just tapping whatever. Yeah, yeah.
Completely different game.

Speaker 1 There you have your AI stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hello, Tu.

Speaker 1 Random

Speaker 1 German. Yeah, it's German, but she's definitely not German speaking German.
Oh, this is.

Speaker 1 She's AI. She's AI.
Look at the hands. Look at the hands.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yes, she's AI.
She's a person AI.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but this is like retarded AI. This is like low-cost AI.
Man, this is

Speaker 1 very low-cost AI.

Speaker 1 But you know, it only has to fool a couple of people, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is terrible. This is terrible, man.
Oof.

Speaker 1 No physics.

Speaker 1 That is

Speaker 1 fine, I mean, but still, low-cost AI.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's

Speaker 1 German. It looks kinda AI.
No. That looks real.

Speaker 1 It's AI.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 everything go over the place. Yeah, it's AI.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 The wrinkles changed. Yeah, it's AI.
Yeah, it's AI, man. I talked about that.
Yeah, yeah. Wow.
That's actually quite a good one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Got your fool on first drive. That's enough.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Nice. Yeah, that's enough, man.
Like, and that's us.

Speaker 1 If it's aimed for, well, the thing is, not us as young people, but us as game

Speaker 1 from the gaming industry, we see this stuff. Other people, they don't.
Outside of games, if you don't work with AI,

Speaker 1 you're fooled immediately.

Speaker 1 You don't see it. You don't see it.

Speaker 1 But these are kind of, yeah, this is. Can you check some ads from Integral? I just want to see what they're running there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is.

Speaker 1 Doctor on the street. Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's a street city light. No, no, no.
I mean, like, I'm just looking in between as you're looking if I find some other AI, and there's like other things there.

Speaker 1 All right. Oh, this is AI.

Speaker 1 Oh, they also have the airport ad, the one that Hero Wars is doing. But if you're spending, you know, probably a hundred, hundred and ten a day, right? You need to have

Speaker 1 all the like mainstream, all, all total addressable market concepts, you know, the ones that target everything.

Speaker 1 Here you have it. It's

Speaker 1 that looks like a playrex ad

Speaker 1 yeah a little bit

Speaker 1 but you're only two percent

Speaker 1 and then we have these a lot a lot a lot yeah they have a lot of lot of different different ads and this is just

Speaker 1 oof this is wow what's what's happening yeah I mean it's exactly like blockbuster and we here we have also

Speaker 1 also the tile match stuff

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay, we need to watch this one.

Speaker 1 One second. This is also.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 But you give me the screen. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Go for it. Go for it.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 There's like literal hospital.

Speaker 1 There's the doctor recommending the husband of a wife to play the game as a medicine.

Speaker 1 Like this.

Speaker 1 No way. This is perfect.
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 You see that behind? He's literally, they're filming in a pharmacy. Yeah.
They put up some stuff like fully, full production of the whole.

Speaker 1 It's real short. Yeah.
It's literally like real short. Yeah, it's a real production.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Beautiful. These guys are definitely, you know, pushing the boundaries here.
Yeah, you have, yeah, you have 800 pages of all of this and of the here's our fake doctor again

Speaker 1 man this is exactly what i what i did when i was in in maldives i i shot like few of the secretives exactly like this

Speaker 1 oh yeah there go for the billboard yeah this this one no this one this one yeah yeah

Speaker 1 why does this work wall of text in

Speaker 1 random like uh high population uh what is it square yeah doesn't look like Times Square, but like, you know, something like that. It's a Times Square from Bish.
Falling down. Oh, that's a good idea.

Speaker 1 Oh, our doctor is alive. Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 1 But it sounds basically that they really know what they're doing on the UA front, right? Yeah, they definitely know what they're doing. Of course.

Speaker 1 You can't have this

Speaker 1 amount of revenue.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's the same guy. It's the same guy who's the station maintenance.
How much they had to pay for these people to do these things? I like that. This is literally like B-grade movie production.

Speaker 1 I saw, I started. Well, I saw first time

Speaker 1 an ad on Facebook, which is two guys that I saw in every fucking creative, and they are now selling a course like how to make funny ads.

Speaker 1 And they were literally, yeah, I think they were in almost every

Speaker 1 Forex.

Speaker 1 Oh, there you go.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is exactly. Is she real? Yeah, she's real.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so look, so many, so many different concepts. So

Speaker 1 many ads. So it sounds like you're gonna give them a nine then, huh? Probably, yes.
I mean, I wouldn't say

Speaker 1 I would say even ten. I mean, there is not there is nothing else that I mean that they can do.
They can do basically. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is uh this is interesting because they yeah, they do a lot of stuff that uh I'm talking about. All this wall of text and uh the UGCA videos, AI videos as well, different concepts.

Speaker 1 It's not not only

Speaker 1 one or two. He's fake.
He's fake. He's fake for sure.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's another

Speaker 1 percent AI.

Speaker 1 So you see, if you look at some details, when you're still, yeah, yeah. But that's like, you know,

Speaker 1 best to them. Like, use AI as much as possible because you know it gives you a lot of power.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 With this amount of money they spend,

Speaker 1 it could be very, very, very expensive to to build all of this in-house

Speaker 1 but not everybody is

Speaker 1 is ai right so

Speaker 1 yeah they know what they're doing the fan it looks great

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 i would still

Speaker 1 i can't there's the social features there has to be social no no no no but like honestly i don't think this game would could be any better even with that because it's supposed to be simplistic just like blockbuster not saying that they need social features that was you said.

Speaker 1 Okay, this is very bad.

Speaker 1 By the way, they should have like 9.5 for UA because their AI still can be improved a little bit.

Speaker 1 This one looks very scary.

Speaker 1 It was fine.

Speaker 1 It was okay. Yeah, this is AI as well.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 sure.

Speaker 1 Nice. I need to try a little bit more of this.

Speaker 1 The different text. Yeah, yeah.
So, product-wise,

Speaker 1 again,

Speaker 1 maybe a little bit more events, but again, I don't really, or I can't really comment on like if it's good or bad from the because, again, it's all about the difficulty curve.

Speaker 1 And if they have the basic difficulty curve, you know, drill down all like dynamic triggered when you lose, when you fail, when you, whatever, you know, your session count goes down, your engagement goes down, and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 It's like a lot of variables, and it's basically how strong is your DDA? And it seems it's very strong, like block block. So, very,

Speaker 1 very strong. We'll We'll see on Review Radar when we go back on this.
If they have six million daily active, then basically that's what they're doing. And wow, that's great.

Speaker 1 But you know, for me, like I can I can end up like easily at nine, basically, because again, it's a money printer and like why focus on stuff that you don't don't want to do or like you know wasting your potential or like turning it IP or whatever, where you can just throw all your effort into UA and ads and make it as bad as possible.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 I don't know. Is this one hundred forty

Speaker 1 the end game, or is it there is still potential to be 400, 500 per day?

Speaker 1 That's what we'll see, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what we'll see. But I mean, BlockBlast has just been a steady rise for the last couple of years, right? Yeah, but for this, you need

Speaker 1 a little bit more UA, yes.

Speaker 1 I think this is it. I don't think

Speaker 1 this can go more than what we are seeing at the moment.

Speaker 1 You look at the growth rate in the active user bases. Go to active users.
Sure, that's what that's like. That's what you look at for this.
Active users,

Speaker 1 downloads, man. Active users isn't really the best example.

Speaker 1 Go to retention as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, go to retention. That's probably better.

Speaker 1 Fuck.

Speaker 1 Whoa. What did you expect on these giant numbers? Yeah, I know.
Go for it, but the last quarter, not all of this. It's just

Speaker 1 won't change anything. That's 2001.
That's the only one. So go, go, go.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Same as you want to change anything.

Speaker 1 It's giant volume. Like, I know games with giant volume never have good numbers on day one.
What do you expect?

Speaker 1 I know, I know they don't. I thought I was expecting at least 40, if I'm really honest.
Yeah, if you go keep in mind,

Speaker 1 this is like kill numbers, you know?

Speaker 1 No, no, yes, they are this giant scale numbers. Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's kill numbers if it's on low scale, then it's kill numbers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but this is exactly what we had

Speaker 1 even with the gigs adventure. Like the day one was terrible and then they look at day 30 versus day 60.
It's 1% difference. Yeah, like straight up.

Speaker 1 Day 90 would be the same. And same with the rest.
So

Speaker 1 in the end, you know,

Speaker 1 you can pay bills with retention. So they know what you're saying.
Sure, but

Speaker 1 if you have an ads-driven game, then retention kind of counts.

Speaker 1 Of course, it counts, but it's still about like, you know, if they squeeze 90% of the revenue by day 30, so what? Yeah, yeah, of course. I i mean you are basically saying what i'm saying always

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 it's a double cross yeah

Speaker 1 from a different number yeah i guess we can wrap wrap up here yeah you're giving them you're giving them a nine pending a ten when we do review radar jakob yeah okay cool i can i can do nine i can pending 10 9.5 that that's what i'm pending

Speaker 1 yeah i can do nine for nine point five as well it's kind of nice ten all right and on that bombshell it's time to end.

Speaker 1 Thank you Raj for coming.

Speaker 1 Definitely go to our Slack channel as well. Also, 25gamers.com.
Buy all the hoodies,

Speaker 1 like your industry friends and colleagues. And see you next time.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Ciao.