Cracking the 4X Code: Billion Dollar Strategy (2.5gamers x GameMakers crossover)

You wouldn't even notice if it's a top war or if it's a last war. They're literally using the same creatives.
And I mean, it makes sense. And now what everybody in terms of 4X are doing now, and even the White House Revival or the high-seas hero, is just borrowing the best parts from from different games and that's what i think dark war is also doing it's 4 am and we're rolling the dice but day drops knowledge made of gold and ice felix with ads making those coins rise jackup designs worlds chasing the sky with the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking ua adverts and Matej, Felix, Jakob, bringing the insight We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight Matej, UA, master eyes on the prize Tracking data through the cyberspace skies Felix acts colors like a wizard in disguise Jakob's crafting realms, lift us to the highs Two and a half gamers talking smack Slow hockey stick, got your back Ads are beautiful, they light the way Click it fast don't delay hello everybody thank you very much for tuning in to this special episode which is a crossover with game makers.
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I'm pretty sure the Forex episode that we are talking about now, they will definitely benefit from partners like pvxpartners.com. So now back to the episode thank you so first of all welcome everybody we have the latest crossover collaboration between game makers and two and a half gamers today yes we discuss a recent post written by justin yao discussing one of the most successful game studios of last year and continuing on to this year which is First Fun aka Funfly, the developer behind the hit top grossing game Last War Survival.
But in this discussion today we're going to be talking about not only First Fun but also River Game. What is that relationship? How are these two companies related and what is behind their billion dollar strategy? And so to discuss this very interesting and secretive topic, we have for you myself, Joseph Kim, CEO of Lila Games, building a shooter game.
But prior to this, I was in publishing at Segaga nbc universal but more appropriate to the discussion at hand i also worked at fun plus and led the development of the game king of avalon which became a top-grossing game and many of the reskins are very are 4x games and helped uh you know fun plus uh kind of like moving the direction of 4x we also We also have Justin Yao who wrote the post that will be associated with discussion. He has a background in investment banking and private equity.
But most recently he's also been writing for Novik and is now an NBA candidate at Wharton. No comment on getting an NBA for you, Justin.
I'm sorry to hear about that, but you know,

it's all good.

And from two and a half gamers,

we have both Mate Lanserich and Jakob Remyar.

Nice.

Two of the two and a half gamers,

you know,

the other guys they have.

Yeah,

we are two because,

well,

the half gamer,

when we talk about Forex,

it's never there because there's no,

there are basically no ads. Right.
So many of you guys already know Mate, long-time UA guy, runs a UA agency along with his No BS newsletter and founding and being a co-host on 2.5 Gamers. Also, we've got Jakob, also from 2.5 Gamers.
Extensive background in game design at Pixel Federation, also Superscale, now as a freelance consultant working with many of the world's best companies. And so that's your crew.
And, you know, ironically, as the guy who actually worked on a 4X game, I'm probably the least up to date on what the hell is going on with 4X games. Although, you know, we did do a podcast before that was very popular with Mate.
We had that collab before where we talked about the whole strategy of, you know, trying to take like hyper casual concepts, bringing them in and all that kind of stuff. If you missed that, we'll put some links in the show notes.
But this is our crew. We will be talking about this topic.
And so maybe I can hand it over to you, Justin, to set up the context of history, what the hell is going on, and to help us understand more about this stuff. Before Justin starts about the history, I kind of had the post where i was talking about first fun and river game as a one company and there were people in the comments like well you got it wrong this is a different company it's not the same only if you know like yeah there's a lot of.
Yeah, I think First Fun is the entity that is in Singapore, I guess. Funfly is the Hong Kong entity.
And then there's, I don't know. I'm just sure.
Yeah. Yeah.
Most of the companies. It's the same thing as we discussed Top Girl, which is deviled by, well, Top for Fun.
but it changed their company name on stores like five times already. So I was like, but we have some friends.
It's now Top for Fun, by the way. Nice.
Okay. But I'm sure it's all legit, right? Everything's legit.
Always. So, good.
Yeah. Nice.
Yeah, so there's like a million developer accounts and many different entities, but if you actually play the game, you'll realize it's the exact same gameplay, same design, same art, same stuff, recycled art assets as well. This goes, by the way, all the way back to Machines.
They're also doing this epic war, epic time or whatever, where the Mobile Strike or the other accounts, it was not game of war was just alone there sitting in the portfolio when you have the the forex uh core then like why rain when the wheel you just re-skin but yeah i will get there we'll get there it's not the risk inning anymore yeah all right uh so let me let me dive into it um but like before we start like let's turn back the clock a little bit um as we know like first fun river game we've discussed sort of the same entity um but this partnership actually goes back a very very long time uh so the founders actually met at this company called alex technology which was a very successful chinese game developer and they actually initially started by making making games for social platforms. Their first hit game was a game called Happy Farm, which actually looks a lot like Farmville if you take a look at it.
And that took off in, I think, Asia as well as some other regions. And that helped them get some money from Tencent in 2009.
That helped them expand beyond social platforms into other platforms as well, into mobile specifically. And I think over time, they became known for their expertise with 4X games, and especially their ability to ship those games globally as well.
And in 2013, they launched a game called Clash of Kings, which grossed over a billion dollars over its lifetime. And early on, it showed a lot of promise.
So they actually sold the business shortly thereafter to a Chinese strategic which was trying to build mobile games for 400 million dollars so it was an amazing exit for the founding team and obvious investors like Tencent obviously loves these guys and after exiting I think they had pretty long non-competes like I read somewhere that was like five years long so the founder of first Fun was the founding CTO of Alex Technology. He spun out and found his own venture capital firm called Challengers Capital, which has over a billion dollars asset under management.
And they backed Moonton, which was sold to ByteDance in 2021 for $4 billion. Also backed River Game, which is the other main character in our story, which was founded by an early LX Technology PM.
So around 2020, I think the founder started getting, like the founder of FirstFun started getting an itch again. He was like, oh, my non-compete is over.
Maybe I'll start something. So he started FirstFun and quickly got some money from his old friends at Tencent.
And I think he took some of that money and acquired a significant minority stake in Rivergame, like 40% stake or so. That really formalized their partnership, and you can sort of see it in their games.
And I don't think there's much information online about how they exactly work together today, but it's very clear if you played their game, it's all the same. They're working together very, very closely.
Their flagship title, Last War, was sort of built off of the river game ip of top war and then launched under like the first fun name and um sort of like it's really interesting how they're looking to redefine the forex genre and like now they have like three of the top 10 forex games using this like sort of same playbook of like combining ua and the product together and having it come together

and uh before we let uh matej dive into the ua magic i'll pass it off to jacob wait wait wait wait it's mcay

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Matej. Matej.
Ah, it's gonna, it's gonna, it's fine. Don't worry, don't worry.
I'll go. Yeah, I'll go.
I hope you forgive me for that. I'm supposed to make a lot of fun of it always.
Yeah, before. I'll pass it off to Jacob, whose name is easier to pronounce.
I've played a lot of these games. Just called him Matthew.
Just called him Matthew. Yeah, just called him Matt.
But before, yeah, before we go there, I think this is really, really interesting stuff that you can't really find anywhere, basically, on the internet. The only thing that we, like, how we know these teams are kind of connected that we talked to Heaven from Century Games, and he said, look, man, like, they know each other.
They know each other quite well from backing the days. So this is quite interesting how the whole kind of setup is done.
Yeah, like, he actually introduced us to River Games CMO because these two guys are basically arch rivals there, but they're actually very good friends. They were doing this silly photo op where one was smiling, the other was not like, oh, this will be us next year.
I was like, okay, this is you 2023, this is me 2025. Yeah, and you guys know the relationship also between Century and FunPlus, right? Yeah, so there's all these, they're very well connected.
It's a small role. It's very...
It's a small world.

Yeah, it's a small world.

It's basically the street

of 4X OG people

all doing their games

and all knowing each other.

Like a small village,

I would say.

Yeah, but the thing is now

what River Game

or First Fun is doing,

they have not only Last 4

but Dark War as well,

Top Heroes,

and Last War Z

or whatever that's something

which is in the soft launch

that will be briefly discussed

and then there is another

Top Heroes follow up

so it's like

it's really becoming

interesting even more

in 4X, they're cementing

themselves on the top spot

it's insane

just to

get that right, Top Heroes is the one game, and then Top Heroes Idol Battle AFK RPG is the other one. And I didn't even say Top War, so there you go.
It's like it's five games already. Anyway, yeah yeah it's that's just pretty pretty pretty

cool that's why i think uh century games is a little bit behind so the like high seas hero it's a new thing but it needs to really catch up quickly because even though you you may like said like white house survival made like eight million a day like a few a few days ago or weeks ago but It's not enough.

Yeah, doing Chinese New Year.

Yeah.

I think the interesting thing, though, is that from all I can tell, everyone is going full focus on Forex. There's no like, oh, wait a minute.
Maybe if fingerprinting goes away, maybe this, maybe that. They're like, no, no, no, no no no Nobody cares.
We're going all all in on Forex. We're investing.
We're doubling tripling down so it does seem like Like the guys that are in the space are basically very enthusiastic and very optimistic about the growth of the space or The rest of the market just sucks. Well, it that's true as well but the thing is we are discussing here forex and when when when you talk to other people in dina she's like oh my god forex they are not even there yet they think still like forex is from the yeah game of war days but we are so far ahead of that era and now when we talk about Forex and all of these different onboarding situations that they implement in the game or different themes, art styles, whatever else, I'm going to show you with Dark War especially and their UA, this is just UA-led product design.
It's just like this is it. This is where we are at the moment.
Yeah yeah but you need to do it right because there are examples like if you take for instance the new age of empires 4x game it's like that's not how you do it guys it's just like even though you're dancing no this is not how you do it and the game's basically dying as we speak yeah because that's like uh it's mandatory now to to build the game around the onboarding and like that's the key. So all the fingerprinting and all of the privacy changes, nobody cares.
Nobody cares. You build basically now games and events and onboarding and everything just around the UA and around the algorithms.
Think about it. You need to be able to send such a big amount of events from the game to Facebook, to Uplavim

especially, to Google, TikTok, wherever.

And you need to take that into consideration already when you're building the game.

And when, where and when can you do it?

Ideally, in onboarding.

So that's why you have the core, which is Forex, and that you can squeeze the money out of basically everybody. And then you borrow the onboarding from any other game that can have low CPIs, pretty much.
That's the key. So, Mate, you had mentioned that there are a number of innovations in 4X.
Clearly, like the UA sort of top of funnel to a gameplay integration trick is there. Jakub, Matej, are there any other like other tricks that or advances that you think we should call out specifically? Yeah, like having a very good 4X game is one of them, of course.
Because I think this is the issue here also, that people just focus on this UI tricks on the beginning and everybody's talking, we are also talking just about that, but again, it needs to be like 4X first, in a way. So that's important.
Just to want to bring up this article that we got from Ning, a friend that we met in Shanghai, where he talks about like a few metrics, just like a metrics to kind of look for in order to understand how Forex works. And it will, I guess, smoothly go into the marketing part.
So first is the part where he talks about that Forex is based on Forex servers. It's not one game for everybody.
It's Forex these kingdoms are kind of working with their own ecology And this is super important because you create a new server Literally like every three days and you try to stuff that server with new players and then because after those three days It doesn't matter Let's say it doesn't make sense to put in new players because everybody is so far ahead, you start a new server. Because a lot of these things are about having an equal starting point where at some point people in the kingdom get so far away from each other so you're basically nothing compared to the whales.
You can't play. You're just like, you know, trying like an ant beating an elephant, basically.
So you need to continuously create different servers in order to kind of keep this equalized position, which is again driving the UA. And then the other thing are the dynamics of the server itself, how to kind of keep it running and how to know if it's dying or not dying because a lot of it goes into the social interaction between the alliances and between the tensions or as they're expanding on the map, you know, they're bumping into each other, killing each other, so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah, all these, like, social dynamics.
We've seen this many times working very well even in games that are, what was it, the Empire Strike thing? Empire Takeover? I almost forgot the name. Empire Takeover, which literally has zero UA, makes half a million a month.
Between half a million to one million a month Yeah, exactly so that's like the strength of it like these social dynamics that works there, but again You can just kind of check the benchmarks there to know that basically after day 30 Usually the whole server is just paying players because everybody else just gets stomped to the ground. And then Nick pretty much goes into direct examples like how to count it up by just checking the alliances on the server and the leaderboards.
And by that kind of estimate, you can get a good round down of, okay, if this server is alive or not. And then just like all of metrics that he's pretty much going around where like how much can, you know, spend people and blah, blah, blah.
Don't want to go like in super details, but pretty much what it means that you end up with something like 30 to 80K installs for a day for one server, which is the demand that you're going for because it's just so high and the CPI is so high yeah so and that's that's like the just the starting default point you can enter the game and that's why we go into the second part of this whole thing which is why are we just you know going after UA and taking down the CPI as much as we want with different implementations of cores onboarding and hypercasual systems, basically? Yeah, and I think the point that you're making, Jakob, in terms of how important server and player management is, is something that, you know, I'd love to see this post. I've never seen anyone write about it.
But, you know, and the word on the street is that, like that the main reason that most people attribute to the failure of Game of Wars are like, oh, they inflated their economy. And they basically leave it at that.
But then you ask, well, why did they inflate their economy? Why were they giving such massive sales and discounts? Well, it's because to the point that you were talking about, you've got all these super killer whales and everybody else in the middle got nuked. And so then you're trying to take the lower level and get them high enough so that they can be the sheep for the wolves at the top.
Right. And so like, it's called feeding the whales.
That was literally the UA attack. Yeah.
So like, if somebody has written about this, I mean, that's just pure gold because I've never seen anyone write about it. So yeah, we should definitely, we'll add the links to whatever that post is in the show notes.
And if anyone is a PM or a systems designer, you absolutely have to be aware of these kinds of issues for sure. Yeah, again, it creates a very big tension.
That's what he talks about in the article on the company where like, again, literally citing this, the remaining users are mostly acquired by blah, blah, blah, campaign which may cost $50 to $300 per install. Yeah, exactly.
This is the thing we're talking about, $50 to $300 per one install. People are still super surprised when I talk about how really expensive it is in match free or merge.
Like $50 to $80 for purchase campaign. I was like, oh my god, no.
Yeah, well, this is not 2013 anymore. You were buying CPI campaigns for $5 and that was already super expensive.
Like, just wake up. It's maybe $25.
It's not going to get any better. Honestly, any better.
Like, this is the reality. Yeah, and then, you know, you just count the numbers.
If the players are so expensive and then you need 30 to 80k downloads a day in order to stuff that server up. Yeah, that's a lot of money on a daily basis.
But the thing is, with all these, we talk about this as a trick, like UA trick, you use the hypercasual, but it's not a trick anymore. It's really baked in the game.
You play, you have to play. You have to play those, let's call it hypercas casual levels and all these kids mechanic you need really need to play so it's not it's not a fake anymore it's just it's it's not called mini games as it was back in the days with gardens caves and homescapes it's just it's another core that's it it's just yeah it just drives down the cpi and broaden up the funnel because uh of how the actual gameplay on the core looks like which is brought brought from the hyper casual like that's that's the main thing and we know that from total battle which is also a forex game which is the only forex game top seven yeah which is not from china and it's it's from our friends from score warrior they they were kind of trying to nail this for a long time and trying to find like what kind of mini game is is going to work and this game is already eight years old and they started scaling like a couple of years ago back so yeah because they were trying to figure it out yeah yeah yeah exactly just like to to sink this in it's like a 2017 game release so which is like now eight years old and it after those eight years old it's hitting record revenue of half a million a day so just still this tells you how like strong the strategy is if executed properly yeah and then it takes like that's uh where it's it's actually growing.
That's when they figured out the actual combination of the mini-game, well, onboarding. Yeah.
So in revenue size for last 30 days, they are basically on seven places with something like 20, 20 and a half a million a month. But still, nothing compared to last war, which is 10 times bigger, literally 10 times bigger.
That's the scale we're talking about. Yeah, and I mean, I think it's important to underscore that, like, some of these, you know, we can kind of be a little bit glib and just, you know, kind of hand wave and call them tricks and dismiss them, but, like, it literally means the difference between success and failure.
And, like, you know, people may or may not know. We may have already talked about this, Mate, but Whiteout Survival was actually a failed game.
Right. So it was I think it was like a zombie game or a mafia game or something like that.
And then the theme Frozen City and yeah, the taking drawing from Frozen City because they're like, oh, look at all the you know look at the metrics for frozen city so that literally made the difference between success and failure and not only like a small success it's like a massive top grossing success right and so um i i think that kind of though begs a question so So we had, I would say in like the last, the wave before this was we saw a wave of themes, right? It was all about reskins and like, you know, whether it's like Game of War to Mobile Strike to Final Fantasy and FunPlus or had, you know, King of Babylon to State of Survival to. I think they also tried a pirate ship kind of boat thing, too.
They had a dinosaur thing. But it was all themes.
And then now we've got the UA game, hyper-casual game integration, integrating that initial onboarding part. So then what's next? you i i don't know how would you get do you think there's more room to run on this current current trend or are we going to have to shift to the next trend um i would i would pretty much like categorize like the forex era of like what you just said pretty much which which ended with something like rise of kingdoms The Gr Rise of Kingdoms, I would consider the...
Yeah, the last kind of... Yeah, the last of the...
The themed. Yeah.
Yeah, the old generation of Forexes where they implemented Heroes, Gacha, very sleek, super sell-ish UI, like very good experience. Again, at its height, it was doing like 3 million a day somewhere in start of 2021.
And that's, I guess, the era of Forex still going kind of straight without additional stuff. Because it was like the height of Corona, CPIs were completely different, stuff like that.
So yeah, all the external factors. Afterwards, as you can also see here on the chart, where pretty much from its height from April 2021 It just went down to something like a third of its scale or fourth, whatever It's the time where all of these other and a big Chinese Lilith is also Chinese of course, but I would say the second generation of Forexes comes in which are Designed with the premise that the Forex is like up to par with everything that was done before with all the knowledge everything is just like up to part it's like nothing's there but the important part is that uh where is where we are uh yeah last four so that's what launched june 2023 yes somewhere there where ua is the main focus and you is driving product.
You are missing one big point, Mr. Jakub, over here, because before last word, there is Evony.
And where the fuck you have Evony in these graphs and Sensor Tower, Mr. Jakub? Yeah, I have Evony somewhere here.
Here it is. Because what they did, and they saw what Playrix is doing, started doing pull the pins and start and implement in the game so that's very very important and that's exactly where they started scaling but check this yeah yeah 2021 where lilith's uh rise of kings was at its height it was one tenth of it yeah it was 300k a month but then again 2022 2023 it went, 2023, it went on its full scale, where it's kind of like one million a day.
Pull the pin. That's there.
But pull the pin is still like just, I would say, it's like Pikachu to Raichu, basically. Where it's just the first stage of trying to kind of do the onboardinging more like fake-ish yes but then both whiteout survival both last war both like all of these other chinese games are doing it now as an integral part of the game it's not anymore a gimmick it's an integral part of the game and it stretches through the whole game the white Whiteout Survival, I would argue it's not

exactly like Last War because the Whiteout Survival onboarding is just, isn't onboarding. It's frozen city and that's it and then you have 4x but in Last War you actually you have another core right? Kind of.
It's Last War unlocks the world much sooner. Yeah but you You have still the hypercasual or gates mechanic gameplay.

What do you have in White House Survival? You have only 4X. The idle.
No, no, you have the idle. He is idle, man.
He is idle, idle. Like, it is exactly the same as if we go to high C's.
We'll get there. We'll get there.
We'll get there. There's 4X, by the way way so this is high seas hero which is the latest iteration on the market of this because this is now three cores not two because if i click here even though it looks like fallout shelter this is basically frozen with a different skin yeah with different visual and 2d thing but if i go like stuff go stuff like here, or you see the reactor here that I can change engine and stuff, it's the same as Frozen City, basically.
It's the same. This is the 4X map with the world.
Again, the same. We all know this part.
But the main start as this start is Legend of Mushroom. So they basically layered it with Legend of Mushroom, then Frozen City, and Whiteout 4X part.
So it's basically Whiteout Survival plus Legend of Mushroom on top. So we actually go through three cores now.
This is the game that hasn't been scaled yet. It's doing 40k a day, which is, I guess, just the maintenance mode where Century Games is trying to complete.
So this is the next generation,k when you ask like where are we going if it

works if it works it's no no no no there is no if it works you look at the charts last four five

games century games one so this absolutely has to work this has to work there's no there's no way

about like yeah it's just a matter of time not if okay so the next yeah we literally

basically yeah we we literally got told by century game ceo who said that on my post

Thank you. not if.
Okay. So the next wave is multiple cores, basically.
Yeah, we literally got told by Century Games CEO who said that on my post, that, like, yeah, we're still figuring it out. Thanks for following that.
Because words on the street is, like, this was an RPG game before, but 4X, you can squeeze way more out of the players, and you already know 4X from the White House Survival, so. Yeah.
So this is one thing where I would say the evolution is going again to be more hidden, more kind of total addressable market where you're taking different players from different genres and trying to squeeze them into the Forex core, where in the end they meet with this like high profitable LTV engine which is Forex. And then there's the other one, and we go back to our image here, which is Top Girl girl by the way just to kind of validate this picture this is the chart that we're talking about this was released november last year and it's currently doing 200k yeah more than 200k a day there was a problem with like i don't know absolutely because yeah i don't know probably some kind of technical problems i would say like i don't know if it's also on download.
Yeah. Oh, or maybe it's the UA got turned off.
I still see those ads. I still see those ads.
But yeah. I don't know what's happening here, but it's very suspicious.
But anyway, it's scaled up. And the thing here is the other way to do Forex, which is completely hide the 4X and never even talk about it.
And even though it looks like a 4X, you just take completely different naming, team, everything.

So here, for instance, this game is based on the premise that you are running, as a manager, you are running a group of girls that you get from Gacha.

And they have different AI-generated visuals or whatever. It's like softcore porn, basically slapped on Forex.
Yeah, like dating stuff. They text you and so on.
I don't know. Where's the messenger? Yeah, where they send you AI pictures and stuff like like that.
These guys really went full on AI on this. There's even the part where like if you record with them it's the game starts to play like videos of K-pop stolen videos.
K-pop choreography. Yeah.
No kidding. Like this is how it, basically.
So you see the effort the guys put into this in order to masquerade the part of it. And instead of soldiers, you're creating fans.
Instead of monsters on the map, you're going against shopping malls and hotels. Instead of whatever players are defeating stadiums.
It's all within this pop group. So if you't really know like you are playing forex and you are just a regular type of player you wouldn't even notice that you will never say this is forex there's not even like one no hospitals you know mention of like damage or something like that yeah and and the whole whole mechanic by the way it's it's like very streamlined because usually you would expectX.
I can't skip that. Okay, I can't skip that because I'm CEO level 25 or VIP.
Sorry for that. But if we go here just to kind of show you, yeah, so media reviews on the song, blah, blah, blah.
Also, all of these, it doesn't make any sense. You just click.
You just click and... It's an idler.
In the beginning, it started as an idler. Again, the map...
Jakob, maybe you can help me understand, though, because, again, I'm an old-school 4X guy, so the beauty of 4X, when we were working on it, was basically around the economy, right? Because unlike a like a gotcha driven game you have the ability to have a consumable economy where you're building a lot of troops and you have like these build war cycles where you're building troops and then you're going to war which drains the economy of all the stuff that you built up and that's how you are able to monetize almost infinitely better than a game with limited progression, for example. Because there's destruction of property.
In this example, what do you do? Do you build up a bunch of girls and they battle each other and they die? How do you train the economy here? The fans die. Fans die.
Fans are the soldier. I see, I see.
Okay. So if we go...
So you go raid the shopping mall. Yeah, you go raid the shopping mall, but I want to go to show you how to actually build up soldiers here.
So you build them by idle sales or whatever. And again, this is building 800 soldiers for hours 800 fans so so so imagine like this whole screen is basically that the whole simplified final of a city where you upgrade every single building where you know you need to upgrade and tech like tech to read the soldiers from like level 1 level 4 level whatever this is just like super simplified it's super simplified but the mechanics are kind of the same.
Again, I have a lot of soldiers, and if I go somewhere here on the map, and there's whatever, a concert. So we go perform, and then I guess we can, we need to go to a shittier one, so we go perform, and then we select soldiers.
So we have 48,000 soldiers. We have like 5 girls.
It's pretty much similar to Rise of Kingdoms. Again, gacha-based heroes.
We go by car, and there we go. And that's it.
And we have two... Yeah, instead of...
Just simplified forex. You look at them like marching the army on the right-hand side, which is Dark War, I guess, and then the left-hand side is just driving a car to a shopping mall.
Yeah, but this is exactly the same thing as I'm doing here on the right side, where this is Darkware. Exact same thing.
Nothing else. So it sounds like you're still able to push on themes a bit.
You've got the multi-cores. Is there anything else in terms of how you guys see the progression of 4X going? Justin, do you have any thoughts on where you think 4X is going? So one thing is, again, more onto adding different cores, adding different kind of fake stuff to kind of widen the funnel.
The other one is this Top Girls thing where completely different team, non-battling, non-whatever, simplification. I guess the premise is creating new 4X players which are oblivious to the point that they are playing 4x of course like

again going around the market and then uh yeah i guess this is where we end up like i don't see anything else currently working on on the other end because you can't just start with 4x it's just like too complex too hard to get to and it's it's almost like we can match free you show the 4x or you show the match free and CPS are

yeah, CPS are

120, well, 200

C-VIL It's almost like we can match free. You show the Forex or you show the match free and CPIs are $120 or $200 immediately.
Yeah, yeah. So it's not possible.
Again, if it would be possible, games like this, like Rise of Kingdoms, they would be doing great. They're not doing great.
It's just like the game's great. I played it for multiple it for multiple months just like not possible uh so yeah we end up into the you know ua decides the the product now and because of that the product completely shifts on the onboarding but the end state of it is still you need like a proper forex destruction of property a map kingdom social guild mechanics and all these other now justin now now we talk because he's trying to catch a breath, so now it's your turn.
Because if you know, it's like... Yeah, no.
That's how it works. Yeah, so I think like for, like I played Last War for like 30 days, then Top Heroes for like 60 days.
And I think like the way that at least First Fun is tackling it, I can't speak to the broader as a whole. They're actually trying to integrate the game loops to be more deep and to keep that illusion for longer.
So I think for Last War, I think the gates mechanic went away by week one or two. We'll get there.
We'll get there. Week one, probably.
And I don't really play it. I don't really engage with it anymore.
You still need it, yeah. But at least for top heroes, there was more reason for me to re-engage with that core loop.
There was like bosses that I had to kill every single day for like loot drop. And I had to go back and expend my energy and go back to that gameplay loop every single day.
So there was more integration. I think the retention overall for top heroes is actually better than what I saw for Last War.
Yeah. And I'm now trying to just kind of jump into the UA and the part and the creatives because we are talking about this and the Top War that we didn't touch that much, they changed the whole tutorial and onboarding like four times throughout the years.
And now completely, completely, completely. Yeah.
You look like, you look at this and this like top war, this was their like creative, like the signature creative, they were merging and never using these merge kind of mechanics because merge was sexy before. And this is what worked for them.
But then merge got crowded and it wasn't that sexy anymore. I mean, it's really expensive as well.
It does create an interesting retention profile or riding up on that side. But this was it.
They were trying to push the merge a lot. But then they did all of these hyper-casual stuff as well obviously so they were like they went through a big big evolution and then now when you look at what they are doing in terms of the the creatives you wouldn't even notice if it's if it's a top war or if it's a last war they're literally using the same creatives and i mean it makes sense like i and now they're the the what what everybody in terms of the forex are doing now and even the the white house survival or the high seas hero is just borrowing the the best parts from the from different games and that's what i think dark war is also doing because dark war on the other hand and i'm jumping between the because Dark War, on the other hand, and I'm jumping between the games, Dark War, on the other hand, is just, it's whiteout survival, basically, with a different theme.
And they are now doing so well because of their creation. And, wait a second, July, it's not exactly the way, but they also went through a big, big shift.
So these were the creatives they were running before. And you don't see any kind of AI generated stuff.
But then, what I think we didn't talk about is that all these companies between each other like they steal shit f like you you basically come or they come to the work like what are we going to create this today for for the for the videos like oh let's see what the other guys were running yesterday so this is the brief and like literally we we thought the Dark War started this AI kind of revolution. But they actually, oh, I was digging a little bit deeper and they didn't.
They were using all of this. So let's stay with Dark War.
Again, kind of survival theme. Nothing.
Looks like Last of Us. Nothing really AI driven.
then I think they when they started running was kind of November or October and that definitely helped them scale like heavily and I've seen this

million

on stage,

on the other stuff.

And this is pure AI.

I was,

when we were talking about Dark War,

I was able to create

this type of video

during the recording

in five minutes.

In five minutes. And they scaled already to half a million a day from october and this like this goes well with the theme and uh and this again like very much touches the point with the the top girl where you use ai also in the creatives as well and i will use it everywhere again, the Darko, the integral part of their success, again, like here, they were not scaling that much before they started doing this AI stuff.
It was just like, it was okay. Maybe it was only in SoftLounge, but as soon as they hit this, it just scaled massively.
And now they're still continuing on scaling. And in terms of the UI, this is great because think about the efficiency here.
If I am able to create a video during the recording in 10 minutes and I'm a UI manager and I talk about this game and while I talk, I do the stuff. They have a shit ton of people in the creative team.
They're just pushing new stuff on a daily basis in hundreds of the videos. By the way, let me stop you right there a little bit.
I think people underestimate how many people are there on the creative teams of 4X Games in China.'re talking hundreds like literally hundreds hundreds like 200 150 it's a baseline i think for a game like whiteout survival it's just like no way around on the on the creative team also if you i mean i i think you don't really hear the sound but anyway like all of these like look they, I will show you, like, how many creatives they have. But this is also, like, if you check, like, how the White House Survival is doing, and I will get there, they have engine to build the creatives.

Like, you see the quality.

You see, like, the different.

Like, every month when we talk about the creative trends, White House Survival has, like like let's say 100 or 200 new creatives like it's insane every single month because like this is this is the game like this is exactly the game that you just like like the ua like when we talk about is like how ua is dead yes it is because this is this is different thing you you really need to push on the like volume of creatives and you need to add the new creatives into the campaigns on a weekly basis yeah in dozens in ideally hundreds of course like if you don't have the scale is fight out survival not that many games have but still it's still like it's it's about the volume it's about the volume this you have

they have 600 pages of creatives that's insane and this is this is dark war this is dark war

which is uh now if we look at the january like what they are doing like they started kind of

experimenting with different stuff as well not only not only AI but it's still yeah it's like this is just like the insanest thing in in the whole whole UA yeah you have you have now the combination of AI this UGC I don't know if this girl is is or no. Maybe no.
I can't even say that anymore. So this is how to scale the UA these days.
And if we go to Last War, it's basically their UA is now these, all of these different gates mechanics.

And, and oh my God, they're doing such a good job

because this is from last, last month.

This is January.

And you see like, it's, it's the concept,

like nothing new, but the iterations there,

it's, it's, it's all about the quality.

If we go back to, let's say 2000 2000 when they launched 2023 i think in december it wasn't all uh gates mechanic i mean kind of but they were using these type of things right it's like the slingshot and all of the all of the fun stuff, but I think did they launch 2023 or 2022? Soft launch June 2023, started scaling November 2023. Because I was looking into the creatives, it wasn't always as great as it's now.
And you look at this and you immediately see Age of Origins, which we also didn't talk about, but it was Age of Origins and then Last War, where they basically, Last War, copied almost everything that Age of Origins did before. So they, it's like, it's either Evony or Age of Origins origins then it came to last war and now like the how all of these kind of no idea ideation or but who is inspired by who is like evony uh then other forex and then it comes into royal match after all that also goes after After the Royal Match comes Playrix.
So basically 4X between each other is like within weeks, then a few months it comes to match. To casual.
Then it goes back to Playrix afterwards. And Matthe, what's your outlook in terms of UA for 4X in the future? I mean, do you think, you know, like one, you know, I think there was a question before somebody had been asking about the profitability based upon UA spend.
but also just the outlook in terms of do you think that this continues in terms of

whether it's the size of the ua teams or the amount of creatives is this sustainable

what's your just the outlook in terms of do you think that this continues in terms of whether it's the size of the ua teams or the amount of creatives is this sustainable what's your just general outlook for for ua uh i think the the the general outlook and like where they are going from from here is that's what i think like it's happening to high seas hero it's you need to have the onboarding suitable for the broader market and the marketability needs to work on that side of the equation. I think what's going to happen next with High Sea Heroes is they kind of find a better theme or something which is not really that core as Legend of Mushroom and the whole Navy kind of art style and theme because it's just, it's too core.
It drives high LTV players, yes, but if you look at basically this. Yeah, this is Top Girl.
So we have the Freezing Girls. So this is Top World.
So it's all AI and now there are freezing families trends coming from casual games. So this is going to be, unfortunately or fortunately, the next evolution of the whole of the UAE with the Dark War and all the AI stuff.
because if we actually go even further and go this game where oh wait a second i think it was last they went so ai that it's like you can't go boy yeah yeah exactly this This is just our AI. Where is this?

Where can I find all of this AI stuff? It was just insane. Like, it's all.
Go Facebook. Go Facebook.
Yeah, mail me Facebook. You're right.
It was mainly Facebook. It was all Facebook only, I guess.
It's just all AI. all AI maybe I need to go back to November as well and just go all yeah it's and then they do this into the music which is the Gangnam style obviously and they brought all of these different stuff which people really want to watch these things because it's new and it does look great and if you see how the AI video tools progressed in the last few months, you can do 10-second videos, so that's why there's always so many cuts.
But as soon as we get into the 30-second or 20-second videos length with AI, it's going to be unstoppable. You won't be able to see.

Matej, can you give me the screen? I have some of the best ones saved on my computer.

I'm not sure people are ready for this.

This is

what I think. It's going to

be the next

step in the UA. I use a lot

of AI on all the

games.

All the games I manage because that's where everything is heading yeah and and again the the current trend is basically that it's so bizarre and so new that you want to watch this even though it's like completely nonsensical but it's still because the generation is just getting so good lately you still want to watch this and there's like many iterations of this that these guys are pulling off and it's just amazing just to look at like what they're capable of doing i think i saw one the the morph one where was the morph there was a lot of different stuff we talked about this in the last the creative trends episode as well, where we saw Pikachu, Marvel, DC, all the IP infringements

in the last Creative Trends episode as well, where we saw Pikachu, Marvel, DC,

all the IP infringements in the AI world.

Yeah, this one, this one.

This one's my favorite.

And this is the thing, like,

nobody cares as much about this.

Yeah, for usual.

So.

Yeah. I didn't even see this.
Oh my God. Yeah, I told you I saved some very, very specific ones because you won't be able to see them anymore.
But this is the trend. This is the trend.
These are very easy to create, very easy to pump out, and pretty much you catch the trend and just hop on it. That's it.
We've seen this on multiple games pretty much going over it, and it's just there. It works.
The thing is, everything that Forex does now, and we see, it's a trendsetter, basically, because if it works in Forex, it means that you were able to actually buy against all of these 30k, 40K, 1,000 installs. So now it's kind of coming into the other genre.
So Forex is two steps ahead than everybody else. So everything we see in Forex is going to come to the other part of the industry.
Like, this is how it is. I know all three of you guys were kind of keying in on

4A So this is how it is. Right.
And I know all three of you guys were kind of keying in on 4X. Was it because of the revenue? Or like, Justin, why did you start keying in on 4X and following these games? Is it the top grossing nature of these games? Or for what reason? Yeah, it was the revenue number.
It's just how high these games were going and how high they were charting. But I think a good question is, like you said, the margin side of the equation, right? I'm sure this stuff, when you launch at this sort of scale, it isn't cheap.
And I think it goes to whether or not this business model is sustainable as well over the long term. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as probably some of these CPIs get more expensive.
What do you think the payback window is, Matej? Is it 24 months? Is it longer? That's what I think. It's 24 months.
But then I heard some rumor on the street as well that White House Survival is getting way, way quicker, the money back, which sounds unreal. but still like the

how they can sustain

the low CPIs and low meaning

anything between 30 to 50 instead of

like 300

that's the key and I can

see that work honestly

looking at the

revenue numbers

yeah but also if you look

at these games I mean the new generation all of them

are pretty much scaling up

all of them are like

Thank you. revenue numbers.
Yeah, but also if you look at these games, I mean, the new generation, all of them are pretty much scaling up. All of them are from left to right going up.
This is basically how the market works. The only ones are...
Rise of Kingdoms, the old one. Total Battle is the only exception to the rule that is breaking all the rules here.
People it where like how, because it's not only the UI trick that they're doing, they're actually, they even told us like, it's many things that they did in order to improve the game from like its initial version in 2018 to where it's now, where it's doing half a million a month. Yeah.
But, half a million a day, sorry. That game's been around for freaking forever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They somehow, they're like like a cockroach but a top grossing cockroach they started doing the pull the pin that's where it went up and then now they're doing the gates mechanic because they borrowed it from last war so so that's why like everything is connected and i think the next kind of the the generation that we are talking about is free course but it's actually more skewed towards the last one and the visual style, how that looks like.
But this is again the thing that it confirms the assumption that Forex engine just works the best. And the only thing you need to do is pull the lever on the CPI part of the equation.
That's it. Like you have it, you have money and that's that's where it goes honestly like why i started looking into forex i hate that gameplay i can't play it really jacob is the one explaining that i'm not but the innovation on the ua front like it's that's insane so it's like we can learn so much from forex it's like's like that's the new generation of the creatives, the UA approach, everything basically.
Yeah, I think there's like no single genre on the planet currently that's innovating so much on both the UA front and product front, which is just like even if you will never do Forex in your whole life, you should still study Forex. And you know why they need to innovate? Because they have to.
because if you if you will never do forex in your whole life you should still study forex and how they work because they have to because if you if you pay 300 for cpa it's not sustainable and you need to figure it out you end up like rise of kingdoms if you know you don't innovate you go down that's exactly and again the ip thing won't help you here like we've seen the we've seen the age of empires thing how of Empires thing. You might actually be at a disadvantage because of the royalties and the licensing fees.
So if you need every bit of margin, you can. So then it would seem like the way that you could compete would be to figure out how to gain additional margin.
I'm sure they're all doing web shops, I assume. Yes, of course.
And if you found a way of driving K-Factor, that would be another way of improving your margins as well. Yeah, but you see...
Yeah, but driving K-Factor is basically having the top level. Like, it was, by the way, the most watched video on our channel with like 40k views.
That video went absolutely insane like viral I haven't seen it literally because it's ranking on the top girl gameplay on the first place and we hit like 40k views which we obviously didn't have before anywhere and it's still getting shit ton of views that's why we actually that's why I actually made a made a song about it as well because yeah because by the way we released a two and a half gamers music album which is the most random thing ever and like people love it so yeah but yeah it's like this is like this exactly this is exactly the thing but again this is the same thing where if you remember the save the dog thing that was trending at some point on tiktok where you would like draw with your hand like this kind of obstacle to save the dog against the beast so there was what was the name panoramic uh guys who literally yeah so they literally duct taped the levels into their onboarding and shoot them up to like eight million a month from 30 or 40k uh a month to basically six million in within like a few months yeah nice yeah just because of that because again they changed the whole store screenshots all those creatives everything to this one trendy thing and then but it's like It's basic math. You pour more people into the game, there is higher chance of them becoming payers.
Them getting converted. Easy.
That's it. Yeah, okay.
We could be here for forever. I love it.
Yeah, I love it. I love it.
So do we have any last thoughts in terms of, I don't know if there's any other topics we could discuss or maybe just your general outlook. Or how about we can end with a non-consensus prediction.
So a prediction in terms of the Forex market that you think most people would disagree with you about interesting i think everybody disagrees with us anyway because we think forex is forex is like far ahead of everybody and like that's like my main problem with half of the industry is that they don't just pay attention to Forex and they should. And they should.
Like maybe one. Okay, let's do this one.
Maybe one bold thing is that what you saw there on Top Girl, the streamlined version of the Forex engine core. Why are you doing this? I know, I know.
It I know. I was helping my mind process.
Because, you know, it's smurfed into this very small, streamlined thing. Okay.
So you need to play your Asanga as you're talking. Anyway, so because it's so streamlined and it still works very good because just that map the interaction the unlimited spend them and like all these other dynamics just is the best LTV engine in the market what I think will happen that probably we'll see the other way around later down the line where games that were predominantly not or genres that then never have anything to do with 4X,

will implement this as an additional engine the other way around.

Where here we are at the point where we put a lot of fakeness and a lot of different shortcuts and stuff in the beginning,

but it all leads to 4X.

This would be the other way around,

where we have something and 4X will be an addition.

Endgame will be 4X.

Endgame will be something plus 4X.

But it won't be just 4x. Okay.
Yeah, I was going to concur with that view exactly. I think, like, Nick, I'm pronouncing his name wrong, but he writes for Novik as well, and I think he's a Supercell game designer now, and he sort of talks about sort of like pure 4X games, which we talked about earlier, like improved UX.
Then you now have genre mashing. And then later on, you have this idea that's like used as a meta game, like for like other genres.
And like, this is exactly what's happening, I think. I mean, I wouldn't consider 4X a meta, personally.
I feel like it is gameplay. but like I would say probably my probably non-consensus prediction would be that I think that the next big wave or like the next big 4X game will actually innovate on the gameplay side rather than through genre matching or things like that,

that it'll be a unique kind of gameplay.

Because I think if you look, if you think about like the idea of, you know, of time march battles and also of alliances, that I think that there's things you can do that

are different from how the gameplay orients today.

And I think that's where you're going have a big new win personally um you mean something like the avatar game that never went away out of soft launch which had clash royale style combat in the 4x map so so for example i mean if you think about like one of the things that that we found in 4X is that if you join an alliance very early, the LTV profile of the players that joined like on day one or very early were dramatically higher. So you can kind of imagine, is there a gameplay that is from the very beginning oriented more socially? in which you're...
Everdale tried. You didn't work that hard.
So, yeah. So, like, I mean, I won't say the specific idea, but, like, you know, today when you look at, like, the way the gameplay behavior of so many people, especially after COVID, is in groups and teams and people playing together.
So if you could orient the gameplay more towards a team based thing or like the entire like this idea, like and I know FunPlus was excited about high seas and having 4X on a boat for a very long time. Sea of Conquest.
They have the Sea of Conquest now. Yeah.
I mean, I think like almost for like every year after I left FunPlus, I think Andy had mentioned some form of like, you know, of pirate sea-based like 4X team. But like the notion of like of changing up the gameplay where um you know maybe something

like that where where you're actually not landlocked where there's some notion of being

in a real time now anyway i won't go over the specific ideas but you guys kind of get where

i'm going right yeah that you don't have to rely on this kind of like you know like a static map

Thank you. kind of get where i'm going right yeah that you don't have to rely on this kind of like you know like a static map where you're jumping around but but like the elements that are core to 4x the ability to you know um to build and get rid of troops or whatever units that you're talking about but if you can change that gameplay in a way that is different and refreshing but you're taking those same things it's it's the whole notion of um the strange attractor right you take something uh novel and then you take something that you're used to and you kind of combine those together i think that's coming um i already have a couple a few ideas personally um i just't done them, so I'm sure other people have plenty of ideas along those lines where you can kind of make it feel a little bit different, right? Rather than it's just being another theme, another skin, something like that.
Other people are already working on it. Don't forget the suspicious look, Jakob.
Let's end there. Let's end there.
Let's end there. I see him just catching a breath and that's going to be like another hour.
Another hour for sure. Let's save it for a follow-up podcast because I think this is not the last time we talk about Forex.
So, there you go. We should definitely do some kind of Forex recap of the year, like we used to do for Web3,

which we don't need to do anymore.

What we need to do is

a Forex

genre overview.

Like a complete one.

But we need...

That will be hard.

Call it the 4.5x

episode. Yes, okay.
Call it the 4.5x episode. Yeah.
Yes, definitely, yes. Great.
All right. Okay, well, I think that seems like that's it.
So for the audience, if you stuck it out this far, thanks for hanging out with us and hearing what we have to say. And for our audience, we will catch time thank you very much justin mate yakub this uh ridiculous collab between game makers two and a half gamers

and justin so all right thank you guys and we'll catch you all later thank you much cheers Thank you.