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

Speaker 1 You wouldn't even notice if

Speaker 1 it's a top war

Speaker 1 or if it's the last war. They're literally using the same creatives.
And I mean, it makes sense. Like, I and now they're they what

Speaker 1 everybody in terms of the forex are doing now, and even the

Speaker 1 White House survival or the high seas hero is just borrowing the best parts from

Speaker 1 different games. And that's what I think Dark War is also doing.

Speaker 2 Mate, you aim as your eyes on the prize, tracking data through the cyberspace skies. Felix stacks colors like a wizard in disguise.
Jackups crafting realms lift us to the highs.

Speaker 2 Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick, got your back.
Ads are beautiful, they like the way. Click it fast, don't delay.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Hello, everybody.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much for tuning in to this special episode, which is a crossover episode with Game Makers.

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Speaker 3 Thank you. So first of all, welcome everybody.

Speaker 3 We have have the latest crossover collaboration between game makers and two and a half gamers. Today,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 Prior to this, I was in publishing at Sega 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 Evalon, which became a top-grossing game and many of the reskins are very Forex games and helped

Speaker 3 Fun Plus kind of like move in the direction of Forex. 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.

Speaker 3 But most recently, he's also been writing for Novik and is now an MBA candidate at Wharton.

Speaker 3 No comment on getting an MBA for you, Justin. I'm sorry to hear about that, but, you know, it's all good.

Speaker 3 And from Two and a Half Gamers, we have both Mate Lancerich and Jakob Bremiar. Nice.
Two of the two and a half gamers.

Speaker 3 You know, the other guys they have.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we are

Speaker 1 because, well, the half gamer, when we talk about Forex, it's never there because there are basically no ads.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 So many of you guys already know Mate, longtime UA guy, runs a UA agency along with his No BS newsletter and founding and being a co-host on Two and a Half Gamers.

Speaker 3 Also, we've got Jakob, also from Two and a Half Gamers,

Speaker 3 extensive background in game design at Pixel Federation, also Super Scale, now as a freelance consultant, working with many of the world's best companies.

Speaker 3 And so that's your crew. And, you know, ironically, as the guy who actually worked on a Forex game, I'm probably the least up to date on what the hell is going on with Forex games.

Speaker 3 Although, you know, we did do a podcast before that was very popular with Monte.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 If you missed that, we'll put some links in the show notes.

Speaker 2 But this is our crew.

Speaker 3 We will be talking about this this topic, and so maybe I can hand it over to you, Justin, to like set up the context of history, what the hell's going on, and to help us understand more about this stuff.

Speaker 3 Monte, did you have to do that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so just to start about the history, I kind of had the post where I was talking about First Fun and River Game as one company. And there were people in the comments, like, well, you got it wrong.

Speaker 1 This is a different company. It's not the same.
It's like,

Speaker 2 only if you know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a lot of different.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think first First Fun is the entity that is in

Speaker 3 Singapore, I guess. Funfly is the Hong Kong entity.

Speaker 2 And then I mean, there's

Speaker 1 most fun companies. It's the same thing as we discussed Top Girl, which is developed by Tap for Fun, but it changed their company name on stores like five times already.

Speaker 2 So it's like,

Speaker 2 but we have different

Speaker 2 up for fun by the way.

Speaker 1 Nice. Okay.

Speaker 3 But I'm sure it's all legit, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 everything is legit.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Nice.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So like there's like a million developer accounts and like many different entities.

Speaker 4 But like if you actually play the game, you'll realize it's the exact same gameplay, same design, same art, like same stuff, recycled art assets as well.

Speaker 2 But this goes, by the way, all the way back to Machine Zone.

Speaker 2 they also were doing this like epic war epic time or whatever where the like mobile strike or the other accounts like it was not game of war was just alone they're sitting in the portfolio wait when you have the the forex uh core then like why reinvent the wheel you just reskin

Speaker 1 but yeah we'll get there we'll get there it's not reskinning anymore

Speaker 4 Yeah, all right. So let me let me dive into it.

Speaker 4 But like before we start, let's turn back the clock a little bit. As we know, like First Fun, River Game, we've discussed sort of the same entity.

Speaker 4 But this partnership actually goes back a very, very long time. So the founders actually met at this company called Alex Technology, which was a very successful Chinese game developer.

Speaker 4 And they actually initially started by 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.

Speaker 4 And that took off in, I think, Asia as well as some other regions.

Speaker 4 And that helped them get some money from Tencent in 2009. That helped them expand beyond social platforms into other platforms as well, like into mobile specifically.

Speaker 4 And I think over time, they became known for their expertise with Forex games and especially their ability to ship those games globally as well.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So they actually sold the business shortly thereafter to Chinese Strategic, which was trying to build mobile games, for $400 million.

Speaker 4 So it was an amazing exit for the founding team and obviously his investors like Tencent obviously loves these guys. And after exiting, I think they had pretty long non-competes.

Speaker 2 Like I read somewhere that it was like five years long.

Speaker 4 So the founder of First Fun was the founding CTO of Alex Technology.

Speaker 4 He spun out and found his own venture capital firm called Challengers Capital, which has over a billion dollars asset under management.

Speaker 4 And they backed Boonton, which was sold to ByteDance in 2021 for $4 billion.

Speaker 4 Also backed Rivergame, which is the other main character in our story, which was founded by an early Alex Technology PM.

Speaker 4 So around 2020, I think the founder started getting, like the founder of First Fund started getting the itch again. He was like, oh, my non-compete is over.
Maybe I'll start something.

Speaker 4 So he started First Fund and quickly got some money from his old friends at Tencent.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And you can sort of see it in their games.

Speaker 4 And I don't think like there's much information online about how they exactly work together today, but it's very clear if you played their game, like it's all the same.

Speaker 4 They're working together very, very closely. Like their flagship title, Last War, was sort of built off of the River Game IP of Top War and then launched under the first fun name.

Speaker 4 And sort of like, it's really interesting how they're looking to redefine the forex genre.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And before we let Matej dive into the UA magic,

Speaker 2 I'll pass it off to Jacob.

Speaker 2 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It's Mate.

Speaker 2 Wait, Matt. Matej.

Speaker 2 You just right goes right there.

Speaker 2 Matej.

Speaker 1 Ah, this is gonna, it's gonna, it's fine, don't worry, don't worry. I'll go.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm gonna. Hope you forgive me for that.

Speaker 1 but um, make a lot of fun of it always.

Speaker 2 Yeah, before

Speaker 4 I'll pass it off to Jacob, whose name is easier to pronounce.

Speaker 2 I've played a lot of these games, it's called

Speaker 2 someone else. It's combat,

Speaker 1 yeah, before we go there, I think this is really, really interesting stuff that you can't really find

Speaker 1 anywhere basically on the internet.

Speaker 1 Only thing that we like, how we know these teams are kind of connected, that we talked to to Heaven from Century Games, and he said, Look, man, like they know, they know each other.

Speaker 1 They know each other quite well from back in the days. So, this is quite interesting, like how the whole kind of setup is

Speaker 1 done.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They were doing this silly photo where one was smiling, the other was not, like, oh, this will be us next year. I was like, okay,

Speaker 2 this is you 2023, this is me 2025.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and you guys know the relationship also between Sentry and Fun Plus, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so there's all these, they're very well connected. It's

Speaker 2 a small world.

Speaker 2 It's a small world.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a small world. It's basically the street of Forex OG people all doing their games and all knowing each other.
Like a small world.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but the thing is now,

Speaker 1 what Reaver Game or First Fun is doing, they have not only Last Four, but Dark War as well, Top Heroes, and Last War Z or whatever. That's that's something which is in the soft launch.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the shooter one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what we briefly discussed. And then there is another top heroes follow-up.

Speaker 2 So it's like

Speaker 1 it's really becoming interesting even more in Forex. They're cementing themselves on the top spot.

Speaker 1 It's insane.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 just to get that right: Top Heroes is the one game, and then Top Heroes, Idol Battle, AFK RPG, is the other one.

Speaker 1 If I understand that, and I didn't even say Top War, so there you go. It's like it's five games already.

Speaker 2 Or it's not

Speaker 2 anyway.

Speaker 1 Anyway, you're trying.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's just

Speaker 1 pretty cool. That's why I think Century Games is a little bit behind.
So

Speaker 1 high seas hero, it's a new thing, but it needs to really catch up quickly. Because even though

Speaker 1 White House Survival made like 8 million a day, like few a few days ago or weeks ago but it's not enough

Speaker 2 yeah doing trade

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 3 the i think the interesting thing though is that from all i can tell uh

Speaker 3 everyone is going a full focus on forex there's there's no like oh wait a minute maybe

Speaker 3 maybe with you know if fingerprinting goes away maybe this maybe not and they're like no no no no no no

Speaker 3 we're going all all in on forex we're investing we're doubling, tripling down. So it does seem like

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 2 that's true as well.

Speaker 1 But the thing is, we are discussing here Forex, and

Speaker 1 when you talk to other people in the industry, like, oh my god, Forex, but

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 Or especially and their UA.

Speaker 1 This is just

Speaker 1 UA led product design. It's just like this is it.

Speaker 2 This is where we are at the moment. Yeah, but you need to do it right.

Speaker 2 Because there are examples, like if you take, for instance, the new Age of Empires forex game It's like that's not how you do it guys.

Speaker 2 That's just like even though you're instant, no, this is not how you do it and the game's basically dying as we speak.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like nobody cares.

Speaker 1 You build basically now games and events and onboarding and everything just to around the UA and around the algorithms.

Speaker 2 Let's think about it.

Speaker 1 You need to be able to send such a big amount of events from the game to Facebook, to upload, especially, to Google, TikTok, wherever.

Speaker 1 And you need to take that into consideration when you are like already when you're building the game. And when, where, and when can you do it? Ideally, in onboarding.

Speaker 1 So that's why you have the core which is Forex and that you can squeeze the money out of basically everybody.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 you borrow the

Speaker 1 onboarding from any other game that can have low CPIs, pretty much.

Speaker 2 That's the key.

Speaker 3 So Mate, you had mentioned that there are a number of innovations in Forex. Clearly, like the UA sort of top of funnel gameplay integration trick is there.

Speaker 3 Jakob, Mate, are there any other

Speaker 3 tricks or advances that you think we should call out specifically?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like having a very good Forex game is a good one,

Speaker 2 of course.

Speaker 2 Because I think this is the issue here also that people just focus on this UA tricks on the beginning and everybody's talking.

Speaker 2 We are also talking just about that, but again, it needs to be forex first in a way. So that's important.

Speaker 2 I want to bring up this article that we got from Ying, a friend that we met in Shanghai, where he talks about 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 the part where he talks about that forex is based on forex servers it's not one game for everybody it's forex servers and 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 the new server.

Speaker 2 Because a lot of these things are about having an equal starting point where

Speaker 2 at some point people in the kingdom get so far away from each other, so you're basically

Speaker 2 nothing compared to the website. You can't play.
Yeah, you can't play, you're just like, you know, trying like an end beating an elephant, basically.

Speaker 2 So you need to continuously create different servers in order to kind of keep this equalized position, which is again driven driving the UA.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Because a lot of it goes into the social interaction between the alliances and between the tensions of as they're expanding on the map, you know, they're bumping into each other, killing each other, so on, so forth, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2 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 forgot the name.

Speaker 2 yeah empire takeover which literally has zero ua makes half a million a month between half a million fighting each other

Speaker 2 yeah yeah exactly so that that's like the strength of it like these social dynamics that works there but again

Speaker 2 you can just kind of check the benchmarks there to know that basically after day 30

Speaker 2 usually the whole server is just paying players because everybody else is just like gets tomed to the ground and then uh nick pretty much goes into like direct examples like how to count it up by just checking the alliances on the server and the leaderboards.

Speaker 2 And by that kind of estimate, you can get a good kind of round down of okay if this server is alive or not.

Speaker 2 And then just like all these metrics that he's pretty much going around where like how much kind of you know spend people and blah blah blah.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 installs per day for one server,

Speaker 2 which is the demand that you're going for, because it's just so high and the CPI inforx is so high.

Speaker 2 So, and that's like just the starting default point to enter the game.

Speaker 2 And that's why we go into the second part of this whole thing, which is why are we just going after UA and taking down the CPI as much as we want with different implementations of course onboarding and hyper-casual systems, basically.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I think the point that you're making, Jakob, in terms of like the how important server and player management is is something that,

Speaker 3 you know, I'd love to see this post. I've never seen anyone write about it.

Speaker 3 But, you know, and the word on the street is that like the main reason that most people attribute to the failure of Game of Wars are like, oh, they inflated their economy.

Speaker 3 And they basically leave it at that. But then you ask, well, why did they inflate their economy?

Speaker 3 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 yeah it was like it's called feeding the whales that was literally the ua tactic 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.

Speaker 3 So yeah, we should definitely 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like it's again, it creates a very big tension.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 campaign, which may cost $50 to $300 per instance. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 This is the thing we're talking about: $50 to $300 per one install.

Speaker 1 And I guess people are still super surprised when I talk about how really expensive it is in match 3 or merge, like $50 to $80 for a purchase campaign.

Speaker 2 Oh my God, no.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, well, this is not 2013 anymore, but it's like

Speaker 1 you were buying CPI campaigns for $5 and that was already super expensive. Like, just wake up.
It's 2025. It's not going to get any better.
Honestly, any better. Like, this is the reality.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then, you know, you just count the numbers. If the players are so

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 But the thing is,

Speaker 1 with all these, like, we talk about this as a trick. like UA trick, you use the hyper casual, but it's not a trick anymore.
It's like it's really baked in the game.

Speaker 2 Like you play, you have to play.

Speaker 1 You have to play those

Speaker 1 higher, let's call it hypercasual levels and all these case mechanics. You need really need to play.
So it's not fake anymore.

Speaker 1 It's just it's not called mini games as it was back in the days with gardenscapes and home scapes. It's just it's another core.
That's it.

Speaker 1 It's just it just drives down the CPI and broaden up the funnel because of how the actual gameplay on the core looks like, which is borrowed from the hypercasual.

Speaker 1 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 uh it's from our friends from score warrior they they were kind of trying to nail this

Speaker 1 for a long time and trying to find like what kind of mini game is is gonna work and this game is already eight years old and they started scaling like a couple of years ago back

Speaker 1 so because they were trying to figure it out, yeah, yeah, yeah, just exactly.

Speaker 2 Just like to sync this in, it's like a 2017 game release, so which is like

Speaker 2 and after those eight years old, it's hitting record revenue of half a million a day.

Speaker 2 So, just still, this tells you how like strong the strategy is if executed.

Speaker 1 And it takes like that's uh, where it's it's actually growing, like that's when they figured out the actual combination of the minigame well onboarding

Speaker 2 yeah yeah yeah so in in revenue size for last 30 days they are basically yes

Speaker 3 with something like 20 20 and a half a million a month but still like nothing compared to last war which is 10 times bigger literally 10 times bigger that's that's the scale we're talking about yeah and i'm i mean i i think it's important to underscore that like some of these you know we we we can kind of be a little bit glib and just call you know kind of hand wave and call in tricks and dismiss them but like,

Speaker 3 it literally means the difference between success and failure.

Speaker 3 And like, you know, people may or may not know, we may have already talked about this, Mate, but White Out Survival was actually a failed game, right?

Speaker 3 So it was, I think it was like a zombie game or a mafia game or something like that. And then

Speaker 3 the theme

Speaker 3 and yeah, the taking, drawing from Frozen City because they're like, oh, look, look, look at all the, you know, look at the metrics for Frozen City.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 I think that kind of though begs a question. So we had,

Speaker 3 I would say in like the last

Speaker 3 the wave before this was we saw a wave of themes, right?

Speaker 3 It was all about reskins and like, you know, whether it's like Game of War to Mobile Strike to Final Fantasy and Fun Plus had, you know, King of Avalon to State of Survival.

Speaker 3 I think they also tried

Speaker 3 a pirate ship kind of oat thing, too. They had a dinosaur thing.

Speaker 3 But it was all themes. And then now we've got like the, you know, UA game, hyper-casual game integration,

Speaker 3 integrating like that, that initial onboarding part.

Speaker 3 So then

Speaker 3 what's next?

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 3 Do you think there's more room to run on this

Speaker 3 current trend? Or are we going to have to shift to the next trend?

Speaker 2 I would pretty much categorize the Forex era of what you just said, pretty much, which ended with something like Rise of Kingdoms. Rise of Kingdoms, I would consider the

Speaker 2 last of the... The themed.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the... the old generation of forexes where they implemented heroes, gacha, very sleek, super sellish UI, like very good experience.

Speaker 2 And again, it was at its height, it was doing like 3 million a day somewhere in

Speaker 2 the start of 2021. And that's, I guess, the era of Forex still going kind of straight without additional

Speaker 2 stuff to kind of. Because it was like the height of Corona, CPIs were completely different, stuff like that.
So, yeah, all the external factors.

Speaker 2 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 third of its scale of four, whatever.

Speaker 2 It's the time where all of these other and 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 par.

Speaker 2 That's like nothing's there. But the important part is that

Speaker 2 where we are. Yeah, last four.
So that's what

Speaker 2 launched June 2023. Yeah, so somewhere there, where UA is the main focus, and UA is the first time.
And you are missing one big point, Mr.

Speaker 1 Jakub, over here. Because before last war, there is Evoni, and where the fuck do you have Evoni in these graphs and sensor tower, Mr.
Jakub?

Speaker 2 That's that's

Speaker 2 very, very,

Speaker 1 very, because what they did and they saw what PlayRix is doing, they started doing pull the pins and started and implemented

Speaker 1 in the game. So that's very, very important.
And that's exactly where they started scaling.

Speaker 2 But check this. Yeah, 2021, where Lilith's Rise of Kingdoms was at its height, it was one tenth of it.
It was 300K a month. But then,

Speaker 2 again, 2022, 2023, it went on its full scale, where it's kind of like one million a day or something. Pull the pin.

Speaker 2 But pull the pin, pull the pin is still like just,

Speaker 2 I would say, it's like Pikachu to Raichu, basically, where it's just the first stage of like

Speaker 2 trying to kind of, you know, do the onboarding more like fakish.

Speaker 2 Yes, but then both White Out Survival, both Last War, both like all of these other Chinese games are doing it now as an integral part of the game.

Speaker 2 It's not anymore a gimmick, it's an integral part of the game, and it stretches through the whole game.

Speaker 1 Whiteout survival,

Speaker 1 I would argue, it's not exactly like Last War because the White Out Survival onboarding is just just is an onboarding. It's Frozen City and that's it.
And then you have Forex.

Speaker 1 But in Last War, you actually you have another core, right?

Speaker 2 This is kind of.

Speaker 2 It's it's uh last war unlocks the world much sooner.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you have still the the hyper casual or gates mechanic gameplay. What what do you have in in white uh whiteout survival? You have only forex.

Speaker 2 It's idle.

Speaker 2 It's idle, idle. Like it is exactly the same as if if if we we go to high seas.

Speaker 2 Let's look at it. Look at it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Forex.

Speaker 2 By the way.

Speaker 2 So, this is High Seas Hero, which is the latest iteration on the market of this, because this has now three cores, not two. Because if I click here,

Speaker 2 even though it looks like Fallout Shelter, this is basically Frozen City.

Speaker 1 It's a different skin, yeah.

Speaker 2 With different visual and 2D thing, but if I go like stuff like here, or you

Speaker 2 see like 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 Forex map with the world.
Again, the same. We all know this part.

Speaker 2 But the main start as this starts is Legend of Mushroom. So they basically layered it with Legend of Mushroom City, then Frozen City, and whiteout

Speaker 2 4X part. So it's basically whiteout survival plus Legend of Mushroom on top.
So you actually go through three cores now. So this is the game that hasn't been scaled yet.

Speaker 2 It's doing 40k a day, which is, I guess, just the maintenance mode where Century Games is trying to complete some of the games.

Speaker 1 So, this is the next generation, JK. When you ask, like, where are we going?

Speaker 2 If it works, if it works.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no. There is no if it works.
You look at the charts, last were five games, Century Games one. So, this

Speaker 1 absolutely has to work. This has to work.

Speaker 1 There's no way about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just a matter of time, not if.

Speaker 3 Okay, so the next

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Because words on the street is like this was an RPG game before, but Forex, you can squeeze way more out of the players. And you already know Forex from the Vital Survival.
So

Speaker 2 yeah. So this is one thing where I would say the evolution is going again to be more hidden, more

Speaker 2 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 high profitable LTV engine, which is Forex.

Speaker 2 And then there's the other one. Let me go back to our image here, which is Top Girl.
By the way, just to kind of validate this picture, this is the chart that we're talking about.

Speaker 2 This was released in November last year, and it's currently

Speaker 2 200k. Yeah, more than 200k.

Speaker 2 Big drop. There was a problem with

Speaker 1 absolutely because, yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 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 TUA got turned off.

Speaker 1 I still see, I still see those ads, I still see those ads, but yeah,

Speaker 2 yeah, I don't know what's happening here, but it's very suspicious.

Speaker 2 But anyway, it's scaled up, and the thing here is the other way to do forex, which is completely hide the forex and never even talk about it.

Speaker 2 And even though it looks like a forex, you just take completely different naming, team, everything. So, here, for instance, this game is based on the premise that you are running

Speaker 2 as a manager, you are running a top group of girls that you get from gacha and they have different

Speaker 2 AI generated visuals or whatever.

Speaker 1 It's like soft corporate basically slapped on Forex.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like dating stuff, they like text you and and so on. I don't know

Speaker 2 where's the messenger, yeah, where they like send you AI pictures and stuff like that. These guys really went full on AI on this.

Speaker 2 There's even the the part where, like, if you record with them, it's the game starts to play

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 videos of

Speaker 1 stolen videos.

Speaker 2 K-pop choreography. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm not kidding. Like,

Speaker 2 this is how it is, basically. So, you see the effort the guys put into this in order to masquerade the part of it.
And instead of soldiers, you are creating fans.

Speaker 2 Instead of monsters on the map, you're going against shopping malls and hotels. Instead of whatever players you're like defeating stadiums, or like it's all within this like pop group.

Speaker 1 So, if you don't really know, like you're playing Forex and you are just a regular type of player, you wouldn't even notice that

Speaker 2 you will never say this is forex, there's not even like one

Speaker 2 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 expect forex.

Speaker 2 Like, I can't skip that, okay. I can't skip that because I'm on CEO level 25 or VFP.
Sorry for that.

Speaker 2 But if we go here, just to kind of show you, yeah, so media reviews on the song, blah, blah, blah. Also, like all of these,

Speaker 1 it doesn't make any sense. You just click.
You just click and

Speaker 2 it's an idler. In the beginning, it starts as an idler.
Again,

Speaker 2 the map.

Speaker 3 Yako, maybe you can help me understand though, because

Speaker 3 again, I'm an old school Forex guy. So

Speaker 3 the real, the beauty of Forex, when we were working on it, was basically around the economy, right?

Speaker 3 Because unlike 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.

Speaker 3 And that's how you are able to monetize almost infinitely better than a game with limited progression, for example.

Speaker 2 Because there's destruction of property.

Speaker 3 In this example, what do you do? Do you build up a bunch of girls and they battle each other and they die? Or like,

Speaker 2 how do you frame the economy?

Speaker 1 The fans die. The fans die.

Speaker 2 The fans die. The fans are the soldiers.

Speaker 3 I see, I see.

Speaker 2 Okay. So if we go into the game.

Speaker 1 You go raid the shopping mall.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you go raid the shopping mall, but I want to go to show you how to actually build up soldiers here.

Speaker 2 So you build them by idle sales or whatever, and again, this is building 800 soldiers per hour.

Speaker 1 800 fans.

Speaker 2 So, imagine like this whole screen is basically that whole simplified funnel of a city where you upgrade every single building, where you know, you need to upgrade and tech, like tech tree the soldiers from like level one, level four, level whatever.

Speaker 2 This is just like super simplified, it's super simplified, but the mechanics are kind of the same.

Speaker 2 Okay, where again, I have a lot of soldiers, and if I go somewhere here on the map, and there's whatever a concert, yeah, so we go perform,

Speaker 2 and then uh, I guess we can we need to go to like a sheet here one, so we go perform, and then we select uh the girls, yeah, soldiers.

Speaker 2 So, we have 48,000 soldiers, we have like five girls, it's like the pretty much similar to Rise of Kingdoms, again, gacha-based heroes. We go by car, and uh, there we go, and that's it.

Speaker 1 And we have two, two, like yeah, instead of just simply focusing on like marching the army in the on the right-hand side, which is dark or I guess, and then the left-hand side is just driving a car to shopping mall.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but this is exactly the same thing as I'm doing here on the right side, where this is dark war. Exact same thing.

Speaker 3 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 Forex going?

Speaker 3 Justin, do you have any thoughts on where you think Forex is going?

Speaker 2 So one thing is again more onto like adding different cores, adding different kind of fake stuff to kind of widen the funnel the other one is this top-girl thing where like completely different team like non-battling non-whatever simplification to like i guess the premise is creating new forex players which are which are oblivious to the point that they are playing forex of course like again going around the market and then uh

Speaker 2 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 forex it's just like too complex too hard to get to and it's it's almost like with match three you show the forex or you show the match three and cpis are yeah cpis are paying 100 20 what 200 like dollars immediately

Speaker 2 yeah yeah so it's not possible like again if if it would be possible games like like this like uh 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 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 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 um that's how it works

Speaker 4 yeah so i think like for like i played last war for like 30 days then top heroes for like 60 days and And I think, like, the way that at least First Fun is tackling it, I can't speak to the broader market as a whole.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 2 week one, probably.

Speaker 4 And I don't really play it, I don't really engage with it anymore.

Speaker 4 But at least for top heroes, there was more reason for me to re-engage with that core loop.

Speaker 4 There was like bosses that I had to kill 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.

Speaker 4 So there was more integration. I think the retention overall for Top Heroes is actually better than what I saw for Last War.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and and I'm now I'm trying to just kind of jump into

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And now

Speaker 2 completely

Speaker 1 like you look like you looked at this

Speaker 1 and this like top war, this was their

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 1 creative like the signature creative they were merging and they were using this 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 mean, it's really expensive as well.

Speaker 1 It does create an interesting retention profile or lighting up on that side. But this was it.

Speaker 1 Like, they were trying to push the merge a lot, but then they, yeah, they did all of these hyper-casual stuff as well, obviously. So they were like, they went through

Speaker 1 a big, big evolution. And now, when you look at what they are doing in terms of the creatives, you wouldn't even notice if

Speaker 1 it's a top war

Speaker 1 or if it's the last war. They're literally using the same creatives.
And I mean, it makes sense.

Speaker 1 And now

Speaker 1 what everybody in terms of the Forex are doing now, and even

Speaker 1 the White House survival or the High Seas Hero is just borrowing the best parts

Speaker 1 from different games. And that's what I think Dark War is also doing, because Dark War,

Speaker 1 on the other hand, and I'm jumping between the games, Dark War, on the other hand, is just, it's wiped out survival basically, with a different theme.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they're now doing

Speaker 1 so well because

Speaker 1 and wait, second July,

Speaker 1 it's not exactly the way, but they also went through a big, big shift.

Speaker 1 So these were like the the creatives they were running before.

Speaker 1 And do you you don't see any any kind of AI

Speaker 1 stuff,

Speaker 1 but then what I think we didn't talk about is that all these companies between each other, like they steal shit, like you, you basically come or they come to the work, like, what are we doing going to create this today

Speaker 1 for the videos? Like, oh, let's see what the other guys were running yesterday.

Speaker 2 So, this is the brief.

Speaker 1 And, like, literally, we thought the Dark War started this AI

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Again,

Speaker 1 kind of survival theme, nothing.

Speaker 1 Nothing really AI driven.

Speaker 1 But then,

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 when they started running, it was kind of

Speaker 1 November or October. And that definitely helped them scale heavily

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 2 I've seen this

Speaker 1 million

Speaker 1 on stage

Speaker 1 on the other stuff. And this is pure AI.

Speaker 1 When we were talking about dark core,

Speaker 1 I was able to create this type of video

Speaker 1 during the recording

Speaker 2 in five minutes.

Speaker 1 In five minutes.

Speaker 2 And they scaled already to half a million a day

Speaker 2 from October last year.

Speaker 1 And this goes well with the theme. And this, again, very much touches the point with the top girl where you use AI also in the creatives as well.

Speaker 2 You use AI everywhere.

Speaker 1 But again, the dark or the integral part of

Speaker 1 their success, again, like here,

Speaker 1 they were not scaling that much before they started doing this AI stuff.

Speaker 1 It was just like, it was okay, maybe it was all only in soft lounge, but as soon as they hit this, it just scaled massively. And now they're still continuing on scaling.

Speaker 1 And in terms of the UA, like this is

Speaker 1 great because think about the efficiency here. You have,

Speaker 1 if I am able to create a video during the recording in 10 minutes, and I'm a UA manager and I talk

Speaker 1 about this game, and while I talk, I do the stuff, they have chit ton of people in the creative team.

Speaker 1 They're just pushing new stuff on a daily basis in hundreds of the videos.

Speaker 2 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 Forex Game in China.

Speaker 2 We're talking hundreds, like literally hundreds, hundreds,

Speaker 2 like 200, 150. It's a baseline, I think, for a game like White Outside.

Speaker 2 It's just like no way around

Speaker 1 the creative team. Also, if you, I mean, I think you don't really hear the sound, but anyway, like all of these, like, look, I will show you like how

Speaker 1 many, how many creatives they have, but this is also like with, if you, if you check like how the White House Survival is doing, and I will get there, they have engine to build the creatives.

Speaker 1 Like, you see, you see the quality, you see

Speaker 1 like the different, like every month when we talk about the creative trends, White House Survival has like, let's say, 100 or 200 new creatives. Like, it's insane.

Speaker 2 Every single month.

Speaker 1 Because, like, this is this is the game. Like, this is exactly the game.

Speaker 1 The UA, like, when we talk about this, like, how UA is dead, yes, it is. Because this is a different thing.

Speaker 1 You really need to push on the volume of creatives and you need to add the new creatives into the campaigns on a weekly basis.

Speaker 1 Yeah, in dozens, in ideally hundreds, of course, like if you don't have the scale, it's fightout survival. Not that many games have, but still, it's still like it's about the volume.

Speaker 1 It's about the volume.

Speaker 1 They have 600 pages of creatives.

Speaker 1 That's insane. And this is dark war.
This is dark war, which is now, if we look at the January, like what they are doing, like they started kind of experimenting with different stuff as well,

Speaker 1 not only AI,

Speaker 1 but it's still,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 1 it's like this is this is just like the insanest thing in in the whole whole UA.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you have you have now the combination of of AI, this UGC, I don't know if this girl is is real or or no, maybe no, I I can't, I can't I can't even even say that anymore. So

Speaker 1 so this is how you scale the how to scale the UA like these days. And if we if we go to Last War,

Speaker 1 it's basically

Speaker 1 their their ua is is now like iteration of all of these

Speaker 1 all of these different gates mechanic 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 uh

Speaker 1 it's it's all about the quality if we go back to let's say 2000 when they launched 2023 i think in december it wasn't all

Speaker 1 gates mechanic.

Speaker 1 I mean, kind of, but they were using these type of things,

Speaker 2 right?

Speaker 1 It's like the slingshot and all of the fun stuff. But I think, did they launch 2023 or 2022?

Speaker 2 Soft launch June 2023 started scaling November.

Speaker 1 November, because I was looking

Speaker 1 into the creatives, it wasn't always

Speaker 1 as great as it's now.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So they

Speaker 1 it's like it's it's either Ebony or Age of Origins, then it came to Last War, and now like the

Speaker 1 how all of this kind of no idea

Speaker 1 ideation, or but who is inspired by who is like Evoni, uh, then other forex, and then it comes into royal match afterwards.

Speaker 2 Yeah, royal match also goes after forex creatives after royal match comes play rigs.

Speaker 1 So, basically, forex between each other is like within weeks, then a few months it comes to match,

Speaker 1 then then it goes back to uh to play rigs afterwards.

Speaker 3 And Mate, what's your outlook in terms of UA for Forex in the future?

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 do you think,

Speaker 3 you know, like one,

Speaker 3 you know, I think there was a question before somebody had been asking about the profitability based upon UA spend,

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 1 What's your just general outlook for for UA uh I think the the the the general outlook and like where they are going from from here is

Speaker 1 and that's what I think like it's happening to a 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 if I think what's what's gonna happen next with high sea heroes is they they kind of find better theme or something which is not really that that core as Legend of Mushroom and the whole Navy kind of art style and theme because it's just that's too core.

Speaker 1 It drives high LTV players, yes, but if you look at basically this

Speaker 2 is top girl.

Speaker 1 So this is top girl. So it's all AI and now they're freezing families trends coming from

Speaker 1 casual games.

Speaker 1 So this is going to be like the unfortunately or fortunately the evolution, the next evolution of the whole the UAS with the dark war and all the AI stuff. Because

Speaker 1 if we actually go even

Speaker 2 further

Speaker 1 and go

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 wait a second, I think it was last

Speaker 2 and they went so AI that it's like you can't go more. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 this was just our

Speaker 1 AI

Speaker 1 AI. Where is this? Where can I find all of this AI stuff? It was just insane.
Like it's all

Speaker 1 go Facebook. Yeah, mainly Facebook.

Speaker 1 It was mainly Facebook.

Speaker 1 It was

Speaker 1 Facebook only, I guess. It's just all AI.
Maybe if I need to go back to to November as well

Speaker 2 and just go all

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 it's

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 they they do this into the music which is the gangnam style

Speaker 1 obviously

Speaker 1 and like they borrowed all of these different stuff which you know like people

Speaker 1 really really want to watch these things because it's new and it's

Speaker 1 does look great. And if you see like how the

Speaker 1 AI video tools progressed in the last few months,

Speaker 1 it's like 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,

Speaker 1 it's going to be unstoppable. You won't be able to...

Speaker 1 to see yeah mate can you give me the screen i have some of the best ones save on my content oh jesus card i'm not not sure people are ready for this.

Speaker 1 Because like and this is this is what I think it's uh it's it's gonna be

Speaker 1 the the next step in in the UA and I use a lot of AI on on on all the games that yeah

Speaker 1 all the games I I manage because it's uh that's where everything is heading.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and and and again

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I think I saw one, the morph one, where was the morph one?

Speaker 1 There was a lot of different stuff. We talked about this in the last Creative Trends episode as well, where we saw Pikachu, Marvel, DC, all the IP infringements in the AI world.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this one, this one. This one's my favorite.

Speaker 1 And this is the thing, like,

Speaker 2 nobody cares much about this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, fusion.

Speaker 1 So.

Speaker 1 You didn't even see this. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I told you I have 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.

Speaker 2 These are very easy to create, very easy to pump out, and pretty much you catch the trend and you just hop on it. That's it.

Speaker 2 Like we've seen this on multiple games, pretty much going over it, and it's just there.

Speaker 1 It works. And that's like the thing is, everything that Forex does now,

Speaker 2 and we see

Speaker 1 it's a forest, basically, because if it works in Forex,

Speaker 1 it means that you are able to actually buy against all of these 30k, 40k

Speaker 1 thousand 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.

Speaker 1 Like, this is how it is.

Speaker 2 Right. And

Speaker 3 I know all three of you guys were kind of keying in on Forex.

Speaker 3 Was it because of the revenue, or like Justin, why did you start keying in on Forex and like following these games? Is it the top-grossing nature of these games, or for what reason?

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 I'm sure this stuff, when you launch at this sort of scale, it isn't cheap. And I think it goes to sort of like whether or not this business model is sustainable as well over the long term.

Speaker 4 And love to hear your thoughts on it as probably some of these CPIs get more expensive.

Speaker 2 Okay, what do you think payback decades?

Speaker 3 Matej, is it 24 months?

Speaker 1 That's what I think is 24 months. But then I heard some rumor on the street as well that Whitehouse survival is getting way, way quicker the money back, which sounds unreal,

Speaker 1 but still,

Speaker 1 how they can sustain the low CPIs and low, meaning anything between 30 to 50 instead of 300.

Speaker 1 That's the key. And I can see that work, honestly,

Speaker 1 looking at the revenue numbers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but also also if you look at these games, I mean the new generation, all of them are pretty much going up.

Speaker 2 Like all of them are like from left to right going up. Like this is basically how the mar market works.
Like the only ones are the old guards. Yeah, as I said, Rise of Kingdoms, the old one.

Speaker 2 Like Total Battle is the only, I guess, exception to the rule that kind of is breaking all the rules here. And people should really study it.

Speaker 2 Where 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 uh

Speaker 2 that game's been around for freaking forever

Speaker 2 they somehow exactly they're they're like a like a cockroach

Speaker 1 like but a top-grossing cockroach they 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 that's why like everything is connected And I think the next kind of the generation that we are talking about is free course, but it's actually more skewed towards the last war and the visual style, how that looks like.

Speaker 2 But this is again the thing that it confirms the assumption that Forex engine just works the best.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 And that's where it goes. Honestly, like why I started looking into Forex, I hate that gameplay.
I can't play it, really. Jakob is the one that's playing that.
I'm not.

Speaker 1 But the innovation on the UA front,

Speaker 1 that's insane. So like we can learn so much from Forex.
It's like

Speaker 1 that's the new generation of the creatives, the UA approach, everything basically.

Speaker 2 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 how they work in cores.

Speaker 1 You should need to innovate because they have to. Because if you pay $300 for CPAC, it's not sustainable.

Speaker 2 And you need to figure out. You end up like Rise of Kingdoms.
If you don't innovate, you go down. That's it.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 And again, the IP thing won't help you here.

Speaker 2 We've seen the

Speaker 2 Age of Empires thing, how they ended up for the first time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because you might actually be at a disadvantage because of

Speaker 3 royalties and the licensing fees. So like if you need every bit of margin, you can.

Speaker 3 So then it would seem like the way that you could

Speaker 3 compete would be to figure out how to gain additional margin. I'm sure they're all doing web shops, I assume.

Speaker 2 Of course.

Speaker 3 And if you found a way of like driving K factor, that would be another way of improving your margins as well. Yeah, but you think

Speaker 2 driving K factor is basically having the top building.

Speaker 2 Like, it it was, by the way, the most watched video on our channel with like 40k views.

Speaker 1 That video went absolutely insane, like viral.

Speaker 1 I haven't seen it literally because it's it's it's ranking on the top girl gameplay on the first place,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, but yeah, it's like this is like this exactly. This is exactly the thing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, there was, what was the name, Padoramic, the RPG guys, who literally, yeah, so they literally duct taped the levels into their onboarding and issued them up to like 80 million a month.

Speaker 2 From 30 or 40k

Speaker 1 a month to basically six million in within like few months.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Nice.
Yeah, ju just because of that, because again, they changed the whole store screenshots, all those creatives, everything to this one trendy thing.

Speaker 2 But it's like it's basic math.

Speaker 1 Po you pour more people into the game, there is high higher chance of them becoming payers.

Speaker 2 Them getting converted. Easy.

Speaker 2 That's it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 We could be here for forever.

Speaker 2 I love it. Yeah, I love it.
I love it.

Speaker 3 So, do we have any last thoughts in terms of

Speaker 3 I don't know if there's any other topics we could discuss, or maybe just your general outlook, or

Speaker 3 how about we can end with a

Speaker 3 non-consensus prediction? So, a prediction in terms of the forex market that

Speaker 3 you think most people would disagree with you about.

Speaker 1 Interesting. I think everybody disagrees with us anyway because we think Forex is Forex is Forex is like far ahead of everybody.

Speaker 1 And that's my main problem with half of the industry is that they don't just pay attention to Forex and they should.

Speaker 2 And they should.

Speaker 2 maybe one, okay, let's do this one. Maybe one bold thing is that what you saw there on Top Girl,

Speaker 2 the streamlined version of the Forex Engine Core. We just

Speaker 2 helping my process. Because

Speaker 2 it's smurfed into this very small streamlined thing.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you need to play your asegan

Speaker 1 as you're talking.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so because it's so streamlined and it still works very good because just that map, the interaction, the unlimited spending and like all these other dynamics just is the best LTV engine in the market.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 never have anything to do with forex will implement this as an additional engine the other way around.

Speaker 2 Where

Speaker 2 here we are at the point where we put a lot of fakeness and a lot of like different shortcuts and stuff in the beginning, but it all leads to Forex.

Speaker 2 This would be the other way around where we have something and Forex will be an additional engine.

Speaker 1 Endgame will be Forex.

Speaker 2 Endgame will be something of plus Forex, but it won't be just Forex.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I was going to concur with that view exactly. I think like Nick,

Speaker 4 I'm pronouncing his name wrong, but he writes for Navic as well, well. And I think he's a supercell game designer now.

Speaker 4 And he sort of talks about sort of like pure Forex games, which we talked about earlier, like improved UX. Then you now have genre mashing.

Speaker 4 And then later on, you have this idea that's used as a meta game, like for like other genres. And like, this is exactly what's happening, I think, in the long term.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 I wouldn't consider Forex a

Speaker 2 meta, personally.

Speaker 3 I feel like it is gameplay, but like,

Speaker 3 I would say probably my

Speaker 3 probably non-consensus prediction would be that I think that the next

Speaker 3 big wave or like the next big 4x game will actually

Speaker 3 innovate on 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 of you know of time march battles and

Speaker 3 also of alliances that I think think that there's things you can do that are different from how the gameplay orients today.

Speaker 3 And I think that's where you're going to have a big new win, personally.

Speaker 2 You mean something like the Avatar game that never went away?

Speaker 2 Soft Launcher Witch had clash Royale style combat in the Forex map.

Speaker 3 No, like, so for example, I mean, if you think about like, one of the things that we found in Forex 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.

Speaker 3 So you can kind of imagine, is there a gameplay that is

Speaker 3 from the very beginning oriented more socially

Speaker 1 in which

Speaker 2 Everdale tried.

Speaker 2 So yeah, so like, I mean,

Speaker 3 I won't say the specific idea, but like, you know,

Speaker 3 today, when you look at like the

Speaker 3 way the gameplay behavior of so many people, especially after COVID, is in groups and teams and people playing together.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 high seas and having Forex on a boat for a very long time.

Speaker 1 Sea of conquest. They have the Sea of Conquest now.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I mean, I think like almost for like every year after I have FunPlus, I think Andy had mentioned some form of like, you know, of pirate C-based like Forex team. But like,

Speaker 3 the notion of like, um,

Speaker 3 of, of, uh, of, 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 map.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I won't go over the specific ideas, but you guys guys kind of get where I'm going, right?

Speaker 3 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 like the elements that are core to Forex, the ability to, you know,

Speaker 3 to build and get rid of troops or whatever units that you're talking about.

Speaker 3 But if you can change that gameplay in a way that is different and refreshing, but you're taking those same things. It's the whole notion of the strange attractor, right?

Speaker 3 You take something novel and then you take something that you're used to and you kind of combine those together. I think that's coming.

Speaker 3 I already have a few ideas personally. I just haven'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?

Speaker 3 Rather than it's just being another theme, another skin, something like that.

Speaker 1 Other people already working on it.

Speaker 1 Don't get the the suspicious look Jakov

Speaker 1 let's let's let's end there let's end there let's end there

Speaker 1 okay I see him just catching a breath and that's gonna be like another hour another hour for sure

Speaker 1 let's save it for for a follow-up podcast because this is I think this is not the last time we talk about forex so there you go

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, we should definitely do some kind of forex recap of the year like we used to do for web 3, which we don't need to need to do anymore we need to what what we need to do is uh a forex uh genre overview

Speaker 1 like a complete one but we need

Speaker 2 yeah that will be hard yeah anyway okay call it the the the 4.5x episode

Speaker 2 yes definitely yes

Speaker 3 great all right well 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.

Speaker 3 And for our audience, we will catch you next time. Thank you very much, Justin, Monte, Jakob,

Speaker 3 this ridiculous collab between game makers, two and a half gamers, and Justin. So, all right.

Speaker 2 Thank you guys, and we'll catch you all later. Thank you much.

Speaker 1 Cheers. Bye-bye.