Magic Sort Review: The Next big thing in gaming. Or is it?

Speaker 1 Aplavin.

Speaker 1 I think they're mediating with Aplavin as well, right? Yeah, 100%. 100%.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I forgot to say that in the ads part because basically the rewarded ads are 120 seconds. So basically, they have it on the most aggressive settings.
So it's Aplavin ad.

Speaker 1 Okay, count that down even lower. It's all 22%.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like seriously, guys, when you start scaling this, you can't have the most aggressive end cards. Like, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 That's not possible to have, honestly. But.

Speaker 2 This is a no-bullshit gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail, powered by our ad monetization, game design, and user acquisition triple-threat expertise.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the two and a half gamers, the unfiltered truth, served with a side of giggles.

Speaker 2 Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry.

Speaker 1 Welcome. My name is Matteja Antanic.

Speaker 1 I'm Felix Proverb.

Speaker 1 And we are your hosts. And if you are watching this on YouTube, you don't see fake background.
It's not Christmas anymore. So the half-gamer is back.
It's Felix. It's not the Christmas tree anymore.

Speaker 1 There you go.

Speaker 1 And today we're going to talk about Magic Sword. The game

Speaker 1 we have on our radar for a long time. A long, long time.
But it wasn't really there in terms of the revenues, but now it is.

Speaker 1 I think it's still not quite there yet. It's more of like

Speaker 1 I mean, we like everyone in Turkey has been talking about this game since it came out in January last year as basically the next studio and the next game that's going to be making a lot of money, basically.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I've been saying this to both Mati and Rima, like this is the next peak. This is the next big thing in Turkey.
And what was it? Last this week, right? On Tuesday.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this week.

Speaker 1 They announced

Speaker 1 biggest ever Series A round in Turkey for 30 million. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
The time you're listening, it was last week. Wait a second.
Wait a second. Spike raised also like 60 mil.

Speaker 1 So this is A, Series A, Series A. Spike did either Series A or actually C.
Like it was quite big. This is not the biggest seed in.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can hear the clickers.

Speaker 1 Type, type, type, type, type, type, type.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 Spike raised 50 mil in May last year. Yes, which was

Speaker 1 not a series A, it's not a Series A. It is a series B, you know? No,

Speaker 1 it is series A. Come on.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, you're right.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 1 You should know. You should know.
You should know. Which means that it brought together with this Spike Race 100 together.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Anyway, do you guys know also like fun? You know, you know, Gherkin Turk, our friend of the podcast, who works at Leighton Ventures. You know, this is Leighton Inventures' first investment.
Oh, fuck.

Speaker 1 This is the first one. So, right out of the gate, Gherkin Turkey splits the goddamn arrow.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. That's a great start to the fund.
Yeah, yeah, that's a great

Speaker 1 start.

Speaker 1 Congrats, Gherkin Turkey. Congrats.

Speaker 1 Look.

Speaker 1 And I guess we should also congrats Applevin because I'm assuming a large portion of this 30 million is going to be spent with them. Exactly.
Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Which brings me to

Speaker 1 today's episode sponsors, which is PVX Partners. And you know, you don't need to raise 30 million to actually fund your UA because PVX partners, simplest, most effective credit line for marketing.

Speaker 1 There you go.

Speaker 1 Smooth as it gets. Smooth as it gets.
I mean, I was initially waiting for this. If you're scaling your game business, you don't need funding.
Here's the deal: PVX Partners, no equity dilution.

Speaker 1 There you go.

Speaker 1 so yeah

Speaker 1 how do you scale your games pvx partners pvx partners now no seriously so you you know you have the the control of of your ua budget without giving away your soul and piece of your company so pv visit pvxpartners.com now and uh also check the the show notes there is going to be the link yeah

Speaker 1 you want to do your subtitles shill now instead of the end of the

Speaker 1 guys if you're watching this in turkey we have turkish subtitles we also have korean chinese vietnamese and

Speaker 1 russian

Speaker 1 and we have a korean youtube channel

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 there you go

Speaker 1 this is this is basically everybody in Korea because that's where we were last week. So yeah, well, Felix, now I can do this.
I can do this I will use it.

Speaker 1 It's like, what's happening? This is they like, I can't believe Riverside took off the virtual backgrounds and then added media board instead. This is such a downgrade.

Speaker 1 And I actually

Speaker 1 played it right after our thank you notes to PvX partners, but it was only preview. So I was like, why are you not, why are you not cheering up? What do you mean, Felix?

Speaker 1 You don't like the soundboard, friends?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Guys, let's move on to magic sword. No one cares about this.
Like, guys, let's just move on.

Speaker 1 Oh my god, stop, stop, stop.

Speaker 1 We can move to the magic magic sword. You remember the time when I was playing with the camera and you both nearly killed me? No, it's the time.
No, no, no, kill Matty. It's no, no, it's it.

Speaker 1 You're not playing with the camera. Camera was playing with all of us.
It was just zooming. Hello, hi friend.

Speaker 1 You're still broad. Anyway, okay,

Speaker 1 you can actually

Speaker 1 sometime put the camera movement on and then we will see what's going to happen. Let's do it.
Anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, anyway, yeah. Next time when there's, you hear this,

Speaker 1 it's going to be.

Speaker 1 I'm going to fly to Slovakia and strangle you. Well, you're flying actually to Slovakia, so you can do it on Friday.
Anyway, okay, let's move to Magic Sword.

Speaker 1 Okay. So let's move to Magic Sword.

Speaker 1 So regarding the... Let's talk numbers this time, first time.

Speaker 1 No, yeah, you wanna see the game and then see the numbers. Okay, let's let's do the game then.
Please, just so the game itself. If you know

Speaker 1 the sword genre and you know, there are like twenty of water sword puzzles and stuff like that. We'll get to it and just like look look it up.
So, this is a play on the sword puzzle genre.

Speaker 1 It's a very specific genre. We had a few games already on the channel, specifically Collarwood from Bernie.
Yeah, it's pretty much a very, very similar game.

Speaker 1 What do you mean, fulfill?

Speaker 1 That's basically it. Yeah,

Speaker 1 for now. So, this is the second one.

Speaker 1 What's really interesting here is that most of these games, if we go,

Speaker 1 we can check right here before we

Speaker 1 do some numbers, actually.

Speaker 1 Let's just do

Speaker 1 the gameplay. Yes, let's do it.
Oh, yeah, let's go to the numbers. Gameplay, gameplay, gameplay.
People want this. Okay, okay.
Gameplay, gameplay. So it's basically

Speaker 1 the core isn't that new.

Speaker 1 The iterations are the new on the core. I think that's very important to say.

Speaker 1 So most of the sword puzzle genre games are just basically you having bottles and like pouring leak fit and trying to match the color and having the same color in the same bottle. So let's say

Speaker 1 few level level based mechanics.

Speaker 1 Not that robots is matched tree. So for instance, here we have a mechanic that there are some water

Speaker 1 segments that are hidden.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we need to like

Speaker 1 move the one on top of it to kind of unhide it. Here, you have a specific mechanic where you need to complete the specific color to uh reveal like and give you pretty much choices for two new bottles.

Speaker 1 So, let's start with here,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 there we go. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know if it was my superior blonde brain, but I didn't fail a single time until level 33, or is that by design? It's because

Speaker 1 it's not hard, like for the start.

Speaker 1 It's quite hard to create difficulty, even in this

Speaker 1 specific core.

Speaker 1 But yeah, let me show you a few other things here. So you slowly kind of fill in the bottles.
It's really important to match the colors in a way that it makes sense.

Speaker 1 So let's say now I'm unhiding this thing, this thing, this thing. By the way, it's super smooth that you can even move like really, yeah, two and two in the same thing.
Two at the the same time.

Speaker 1 I mistook that. But yeah, it's like very, very nicely done.
And this is one of the first iterations that this thing does. The production values.

Speaker 1 If you look at all the sword games on the water sword, whatever sword you had, the production values are not there. This is literally royal match style production values.

Speaker 1 All the VFX, particle effects, everything, animations, blah, blah, blah. So that's that's the number one thing.

Speaker 1 Anatoly was talking about this exact thing when we were talking about Color Woodsword as well. He said, like, it needs to be polished because this audience really is into Polish and high quality.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. And

Speaker 1 I will show you in a second when we look at the whole genre, most of these games aren't that polished.

Speaker 1 The ones that are driving the whole genre is basically a very kind of easily done, organically, ad revenue-only driven game.

Speaker 1 How do you know it's organically? Sorry, not organically, but like there's 20 of those. So there's UA, but there's a lot of organics.
It's hyper casual still. Yeah, it's kind of.

Speaker 1 They also don't have that many mechanics within the curve, which means that

Speaker 1 the level design of this game, I guess, is the new wave where there's much more mechanics that you see being like these hidden segments, whatever, stuff like that.

Speaker 1 I guess at level 300, I will get like much more of this just if I get into it. But it's quite boring and slow.
Which this? No, no, no. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, no, no, no. Let's let's do another one of those.
Who's the best game design, uh, game designer on the channel? Can you tell me the big difference between this game and Colorwood sort?

Speaker 1 There's no easy time.

Speaker 1 There's no time, there's no time

Speaker 1 or no moves. It's just

Speaker 1 there.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 And then what's the other big difference?

Speaker 1 Currency?

Speaker 1 Ad revenue-based? Like Colorwood is all ad revenue-based.

Speaker 1 Alright, tell us. So the genius, genius difference that these guys have is that

Speaker 1 I really want the hard level now.

Speaker 1 Don't know if I can even show you through this one because I'll probably need the hard level. But yeah, let me try.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 tell me.

Speaker 1 Do you need to show us? Yeah, I want to show you. The problem is I don't know if I can show you in these these easy levels because I literally need to break the level.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the thing. Like, I haven't failed yet.
Yeah, so the big difference here, I will get to it as we'll talk about it.

Speaker 1 I'll show it later, probably, is that when you break the level, the game tells you this never happens in the sort thing genre, whereas you're just staring at the screen and you're just like shifting around, you don't know what you're doing, and you run out of time.

Speaker 1 Best case scenario, but yeah, but there's no time, basically.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so there's no time so you know it's even worse because you're just like you break your level already you can do and you're just like being frustrated and like looking at it this thing tells you immediately and then offers you the plus one bottle

Speaker 1 which is i think very good monetization trigger which is something that brings them much more closer to the ip kind of setup of puzzle games whereas for instance even compared to colorwood you can break your level in collarwood and you just need to play for four more minutes whatever you run out of time because you don't know you break it.

Speaker 1 Same with Blossom Sword, right? Yeah, probably the same.

Speaker 1 So you need to have a pretty good algobot in the game that kind of, you know, constantly checks the board if you even have more moves or if it makes sense or whatever.

Speaker 1 And when you run out of it, then it pops up the monetization screen, actually. Like, this is their plus five moves thing, which works very well because we see IP revenue on the game.

Speaker 1 Do you think that the main monetization mechanic is that or the streak mechanic? Because the streak mechanic is simply amazing. Like, when I lose a streak, I'm like,

Speaker 1 Streak mechanic just dries into this. Streaks mechanic make it more powerful.
That's it.

Speaker 1 Because without streak, you wouldn't be that compelled to use that 900 gold to buy the booster. Because if I buy the booster within the level, it's different after the level.

Speaker 1 You can't use the booster, which is the same booster, by the way, after the level. After I lose the level, I can only use the gold.
I cannot use the booster if I have it here.

Speaker 1 So there's a big difference. And if I lose there, I lose my streak, so on, so on.
Blah blah blah.

Speaker 1 So that's there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, do we want to finish this one or no?

Speaker 1 I think it's pretty clear. Do you want to show the menu? Do you want to show the menu? Yeah, we can show the menu.

Speaker 1 By the way, this is one other thing that I still think why I said that it's still not really there yet.

Speaker 1 What do you mean there yet?

Speaker 1 When we were talking about investment and like the next big thing, uh,

Speaker 1 because I by level 50, when I were doing the match 3 episode, Royal Match was bombarding me with events, there were like four or five events already running on the side, stuff like that.

Speaker 1 These guys don't have that yet, they have like one, two events, that's it. So, we can

Speaker 1 we can now

Speaker 1 guess or hypothesize about like why is this happening? Because on the UA front, it's also

Speaker 1 you remember what we were talking about. Uh, triple match CD,

Speaker 1 they were ready. I don't think these guys are ready yet on the UA front.
They have

Speaker 1 quite mean still.

Speaker 1 I think they've been holding off waiting for this round to come in and then using that money to scale, right? That's what would make sense.

Speaker 1 Yes, but that's like

Speaker 1 in my world, you are ready, be it like having few channels with low spend, you tested things, and then you get the money, boom, you scale immediately. This will take them another month or two.

Speaker 1 Do you know what's going to happen in one month or two? Maybe that's going to be a quite different story on the UA side or whatever. I mean, they've already been cloned like eight.

Speaker 1 I counted eight clones that have the same name, nearly, even. So, yeah.
See, this is the screen I'm saying.

Speaker 1 There's a hard level, so I break it, and it immediately tells you this the moment you click it.

Speaker 1 So, you don't have to wait.

Speaker 1 And here's your streak. See? The plus bottle.
Even though I have the boosters, I still need to spend.

Speaker 1 If I don't have the gold, immediately monetization store initiation.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So that's very clever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's give up. Yeah, we'll lose our streak.
There we go.

Speaker 1 See how cool the animation is.

Speaker 1 It's so good. Yeah.
So this is this is the the kicker regarding the monetization. They've done the even even one more life.
So

Speaker 1 uh if I ask you to, where do you think the two co-founders, which company did they work in before founding Grand Games?

Speaker 1 What do you think? I mean, they're all in your gig.

Speaker 2 Good job, games.

Speaker 1 Good job, games. Okay.
Okay. No, it's basically the two co-founders called Bakir and Mustafa.
And basically, and Bakir was a marketing director, and then Mustafa was a game developer.

Speaker 1 So I guess the founding team really understands the UA part as well then. Because, yeah.

Speaker 1 if you're marketing, I guess you know how to know UA, right? Well,

Speaker 1 if you're a marketing director, it doesn't really mean almost anything. No offense, obviously.
I have a lot of people who are not. You could have five people working under you and you do shit.

Speaker 1 I had CMOs with zero knowledge about UA, honestly.

Speaker 1 Few of them

Speaker 1 were my bosses. So, I mean, I had very close contact with them and they didn't really know that much.
So, marketing, yes. Decision making, yes.
UA,

Speaker 1 a little bit less. Let's see.
Let's see. Let's see.
And

Speaker 1 I'm not saying this is the case. I'm just saying it doesn't really mean.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.
Let me let me finish the feature set and then we'll talk numbers. So

Speaker 1 as said, this is currently the magic streak thing, which is happening recurringly. So I had that one yesterday.

Speaker 1 There's one today, again, 11 hours, which treats you against pretty much this kind of a event-based leaderboard.

Speaker 1 Then there's this kind of weekly world encounter leaderboard, which is ongoing as like one of the main features here on the bottom.

Speaker 1 Then there's the daily challenge thing, which by the way, have a little bit of a different setup of levels. You have these crazy high levels, which my guess are in the creatives.

Speaker 1 Maybe. I would guess so.
Maybe.

Speaker 1 See, there are because the bottles are free.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we were using this kind of a blob, which is, by the way, very nicely animated.

Speaker 1 And we're slowly kind of eating our way to the thing. And this is, by the way, time-based, you see? There's a difference right there.
Time is ticking. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 yeah, they have it

Speaker 1 a little bit spiced here with like a different core, like altered core, let's say.

Speaker 1 And that's pretty much it. Like, nothing else to it.
No other progression layers, no additional things or whatever. Maybe they'll log somewhere there later, but I...

Speaker 1 Yeah, just check the the YouTube yeah I'll check if there's something but still by as I said by level 50 I would have multiple events from Royal Match or bold royal kingdom online also like the the dream gaze pipeline when was the the level you saw the first interstitial like 25 or something 23 22 22 22 2 23 yeah 22 23

Speaker 1 where where are the rewarded videos why interstitials oh so basically they have rewarded video it's for the life so you can see there if you press the plus four,

Speaker 1 and I've watched like 10 in a row. So basically, if you lose a life, you can just go there and watch a rewarded.
So yeah, if you keep losing life, but it's not that hard, right? So it's not

Speaker 1 for the 900 gold.

Speaker 1 But there is 900. Like, let's look, just click on that.

Speaker 1 Go back to the plus sign on the on the on yeah, there you go. Click, and you have refill for 900 and plus one for for the

Speaker 1 reboard video, which is basically

Speaker 1 only one life, refill is five lives. Okay, but okay, fair, fair.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 it would be too much value from one ad. I wouldn't do that.
Yeah, sure. Do you want to show the crazy good metrics before we start talking about ads? Yeah, um,

Speaker 1 yeah, so regarding the metrics themselves, um,

Speaker 1 so the good part is that it's 95% revenue is US and it hit 55k a day yesterday. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is great.
And you can see the big kind of scaling these late few weeks.

Speaker 1 Right after the announcement of the seed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so they're already shoveling the money into US. So yeah.

Speaker 1 The game was launched on April 2024 and yeah, like pretty good good kind of slow hockey stick

Speaker 1 as you would expect from a

Speaker 1 puzzle game.

Speaker 1 regarding downloads itself,

Speaker 1 it's because we know it's so expensive, so you know, it's what, nine, ten K downloads a day, most of those US, so this is very still big money being thrown into UA. If you count,

Speaker 1 you know, whatever

Speaker 1 value optimized campaigns for US users, I can even imagine how much that would be. And then active users data is not available, so we won't get that.
Yeah, it's quite dry

Speaker 1 for the downloads for the ad uh yeah ad revenue estimates but can i just ask a question what happened on january 7th

Speaker 1 january 7th

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 or january 8th sorry january 8th

Speaker 1 what should happen

Speaker 1 grand games released another game called car

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 yeah you have you heard there oh you have it there there you have have it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was there for a long time man.

Speaker 1 Oh really? Yeah. I was checking the game and yeah, I was looking at downloads.
I was looking at downloads and it says zero and then suddenly on the eighth of January

Speaker 1 July last year. Yeah, yeah, it it's their first game.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I would say on January 8th or the last few days, it's just they opened up way more countries on a plug-in campaign. The good part the good part when you can see the

Speaker 1 similarities with Spike, if you look at the Carmage game, what do you see here?

Speaker 1 Mini Cooper? Not Mini Cooper. Very similar art style.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And also the same thing, yeah, template. Yeah, it's a template.
Same as Stylebusters and Blitzbusters and whatnot, like Spike are doing. So they are basically going into puzzle genre.

Speaker 1 They have a template and they're slowly building it up. I guess that that's that's by the way the same thing that the Royal Match is doing.

Speaker 1 Like pretty much every Turkey studio that's going to puzzle games knows that like the rules here that you need to be efficient and you need to kind of recycle and do modular stuff with your game.

Speaker 1 So the first game probably already laid the foundations of the second game when we're looking here. That's what I wanted to say.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but there's

Speaker 1 actually I saw like one other game in this genre I guess we're going to cover soon, but this looks very familiar to Blockjam.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. This literally looks like Blockjam itself.
So, yeah, let's say. Just with cars.
Yeah, yeah. Which is a good call because cars lose CPI.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, but it's like a very nice pivot, by the way. By the way, this was second.
Not first, the Carmage was the second. This is July 24, and this is April.

Speaker 1 So I guess they killed off the other one, right? And focused on magic sword. No, they released magic sword, and then after three months, they released also car match.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but pushed car match and then scaled back, and now they're kind of

Speaker 1 scaling this since what, like September. Yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah, doesn't matter. Uh, as I said, like you need to have as many shots as possible as fast as possible, so this is still good.

Speaker 1 Um, yeah, so I guess if nine if they now have 30 mil to kind of spend uh and like run the UA on a game that has very good metrics, uh that's a definitely good thing.

Speaker 1 We'll definitely keep this on the radar episodes. Not next one, but the other one, probably.
Yeah, we need to

Speaker 1 let it grow. But yeah, what? Do you want to show the retention curves as well? And then we can

Speaker 1 show them. There are no retention curves.

Speaker 1 Would you say this is like a hybrid casual game?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't say this. This is really hybrid casual.
It's like

Speaker 1 I would guess that it's 85%

Speaker 1 IP revenue driven.

Speaker 1 You You're wrong. Or even more.
Really?

Speaker 1 Well, you know what? If this is a hybrid casual game, we have something for you. Because you have something exciting for the hybrid casual games out there.

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It's superhybrid.com. Superhybrid competition.
Thank you very much, Supersonic, for sponsoring the podcast.

Speaker 1 And now we can continue. Yeah.
So, yeah. Do you want the screen, Felix, or should I keep it? No, no, I'll just talk about it, right? So

Speaker 1 it's still pretty simple, right? Because there is only one rewarded ad placement, which is on the main menu, which is the life increase, which we talked about.

Speaker 1 And then, as we said, interstitials start on level 22, which is

Speaker 1 probably not right now, I would say, but basically they show interstitials. Then I got it on level 22, 28, 31, 34, 37.

Speaker 1 And I have a feeling probably what they'll start doing is every level

Speaker 1 after a certain, yeah, after a certain time if you don't convert to IEPs.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 estimating the ad revenue here is a bit tricky because I'm only going by downloads. So the error margin.
It's all US. Yeah.
Still. Yeah.
Also, yeah, it's also error margin here is really big, right?

Speaker 1 Because I'm going on downloads instead of active users.

Speaker 1 So I'm thinking that you probably have users see anywhere between six to eight interstitials per session,

Speaker 1 which means that right now the game, yeah, but like that's me paying one round run, right? So I saw five on my first-time user experience or my first run when I was playing it.

Speaker 1 So, if you actually have good retention, which I assume this game has since they raised 30 million, like yeah, you're gonna show that many justicial ads, I think.

Speaker 1 Uh, I put one rewarded ad because I don't think people have any need to watch a rewarded ad at all. So, maybe 50% of users watch one rewarded ad, but not more, right? I think it's too much.

Speaker 1 I think you're very generous. I think it's too much, yeah.
Should I take it out? I would say like

Speaker 1 0.5,

Speaker 1 yeah, 20-30%, not more, honestly. I haven't even watched it and i played these are pairs but they'll pay for it if they wanted

Speaker 1 yeah i mean that's also quite bold assumption but still

Speaker 1 yeah it's like so yeah let's do 30

Speaker 1 yeah so

Speaker 1 that means right now the game is making

Speaker 1 let me see here so that means the game is making about

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 11 to 15k a day in ads which would be 24 of the overall ad revenue.

Speaker 1 So which is pretty much what I said. Yeah.
Yeah, but I changed the rewarded, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I don't think so. This is going to turn into like, it would need to be like super

Speaker 1 super big volume and super hard segmentation there to kind of go there. And they would need much more.

Speaker 1 You can do these things, but they don't have even the basic feature set for the IP event pipeline. you know, the disco ball event, whatever event, that event, the fake leaderboard event, whatever.

Speaker 1 Like, we know these events, like, we see them all the time in like Royal Match, Hexasort, whatever, everywhere. They just don't have that.

Speaker 1 So, I don't think so. Do you think it's weird that they don't have banners? Like, do you think that's going to be added online?

Speaker 1 They don't want to have banners because they want to pose as a premium title, like Royal Match, right?

Speaker 1 Match Factory and stuff like that. So, no, no way.
And you can see the play uh in the game itself that

Speaker 1 uh if you look at it just by its visuals, it's just like very nicely polished. And this is the part that I wanted to show you.
So if we go into sort category by downloads,

Speaker 1 you can see there are like

Speaker 1 okay, this is traffic jam, traffic jam, traffic jam, color what's there. That's the biggest basically sorting game by download.
Then we have water sort.

Speaker 1 And if you look at water sort

Speaker 1 and and just compare the visuals, how Water Sword looks,

Speaker 1 I think they updated the screenshot recently, but still, like,

Speaker 1 it's nowhere close as the Polish

Speaker 1 game kind of, you know, here has here. And

Speaker 1 yeah, it's just not there. And if you look at all the other games that you have, these, like, I think there's even less water puzzles that I've seen last time, but there's a lot of those.

Speaker 1 If you go on the other hand to the

Speaker 1 yeah, just let me finish this one and then we can go.

Speaker 1 If you go to the revenue part, uh, there's hexasword because it's on the sword,

Speaker 1 uh, there's seedway, which is again different core, and then there's magic sword. So, by revenue side, they're already leading their kind of very specific kind of water sword genre, like sub-genre.

Speaker 1 The whole thing is, yeah, kind of dominated by hexasword, but this is not really the same core, so I wouldn't put it in the same thing.

Speaker 1 And there's pretty much nobody behind them in the same like water sword something puzzle.

Speaker 1 So, I think, yeah, nutsword is the closest one which is doing like nothing because there's an ad-driven game

Speaker 1 there. So, yeah, they have it open there if they can scale it.
Yeah, definitely. Now, moving on to the UA part.
Oh, hello, hello.

Speaker 1 Hello, hello.

Speaker 1 Well, in that case, let me just uh let me just find where the UA is. Oh, here.
So, as I suggested before,

Speaker 1 it's not a lot of stuff, to be honest. Let's just get rid of the sound.
So, as you as you mentioned, I mean,

Speaker 1 Aplavin,

Speaker 1 I think they're mediating with Aplavin as well, right? Yeah, 100%. 100%.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, I forgot to say that in the ads part because basically the rewarded ads are 120 seconds. So, basically, they have it on the most aggressive settings, so it's uploading ads.

Speaker 1 Okay, count cut that down even lower. It's all 25%.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like seriously, guys, before when you start scaling this, you can't have the most aggressive end cards. Like, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 No, that's not possible to have, honestly. But

Speaker 1 anyway,

Speaker 1 the good part is, when I say they're not ready, I mean

Speaker 1 they have very electric tons of different playables, which is good, but it's only on Applevin.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 oh, you can guess like what exactly it is.

Speaker 1 This is it.

Speaker 1 So basically, just sorting stuff, obviously. Level 2,000.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 2,000. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 What is your level? Mine is 2558. For sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay. So this is it.
This is the first one. Then we have a few others.
And now this gets a little bit more. This is a big bottle one.

Speaker 1 Exactly with that goo that i showed you in that uh daily challenge yes that's the daily challenge with some nice background music i feel almost like in in korea in the elevator on 36 36th floor there is uh a little bit of emoji emoji fine that's it second now we have third

Speaker 1 Again, same thing, different types of colors, but still the same. Plastic bottles.
Plastic bottles. Oh, yeah, true.
Plastic bottles.

Speaker 1 Good spot.

Speaker 1 It's like Lego faces, huh?

Speaker 1 Yeah, kind of. Like from wish, I guess.
So we have then another one.

Speaker 1 By the way, if this would be a real level, it would be so frustrating because so much manual work.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 You don't want to play this game. You don't.

Speaker 1 It's already. It's got a cute cat, so I want to download it.
Exactly. There is a cute cat.
So,

Speaker 1 how many playables we have already? Three. Only playables.
This is only playables.

Speaker 1 Two, three,

Speaker 1 four.

Speaker 1 Five.

Speaker 1 This is the fifth.

Speaker 1 Oh, there's the magic.

Speaker 1 Oh, there was the wand.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 Harry Potter. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 There's also like slightly spooky sound in the background. Oh, okay.
Sword and relax. Okay.

Speaker 1 Don't be scared, Machi.

Speaker 1 Sixth playable. Sixth playable, guys.
No creative, just playables. This is only uploading.

Speaker 1 But uploading is the biggest channel. That's the thing.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 in here, it's all playables. I mean, five playables? Well, this is sixth one, sorry.
Seventh. So,

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 this tells you,

Speaker 1 well, no videos because

Speaker 1 this is just a playable end card, right? Or interactive end card. And there are some videos, but there's not a lot of them.
But this is this is a good, good baseline or start for any types of UA.

Speaker 1 And there's seven, eight,

Speaker 1 these are basically the same.

Speaker 1 So if we have a lot of playables, have like, do you remember how many playables Blossom sort had? Very similar number. And they were scaling heavily.
So

Speaker 1 uploading

Speaker 1 prepared for scaling. But what if

Speaker 1 you want to scale, I mean, to let's say like Royal Match, and you have the 30 mil, you can't rely only on uplavin.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not. I mean, uploading only,

Speaker 1 yes, because that's like it's it's uplavin here and Facebook. So

Speaker 1 it's like two

Speaker 1 basically two channels. And you don't have really any playables on fae on Facebook, but we have videos at least.
So now we can we can actually watch all of these videos.

Speaker 1 I mean

Speaker 1 so this is one

Speaker 1 yeah it's quite interesting.

Speaker 1 Also the

Speaker 1 3D

Speaker 1 polished. Yeah I would say very polished.
This is pretty nice. It's yeah it's nice.

Speaker 1 It's nice. The first one is also quite hexa sort.

Speaker 1 Oh yeah kind of. Kind of.

Speaker 1 Yeah, nice, yeah. I haven't seen it until you said.
But again,

Speaker 1 pretty good I would say very high high polish quality is the same thing

Speaker 1 same thing again same thing again

Speaker 1 and we have where did we see it? Oh, yeah, of course

Speaker 1 exactly

Speaker 1 exactly that

Speaker 1 so they're borrowing few a few different things from different games but

Speaker 1 this is another video and we have only nine pages of these videos for

Speaker 1 uh for January. So So

Speaker 1 it's kind of the same thing, but it's all uncovered. So it's not that mechanic when you

Speaker 1 really sort these things and the colors and then just pop the other battles. And then we have this one.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you have the thing is, you have seven different playables on Applaven, and you have five videos on Facebook. I mean, that doesn't make any sense.
Seriously. Doesn't make any sense.
Why?

Speaker 1 Because it's, it should be more. It should be way more.
Because this is.

Speaker 1 I'm pretty sure, like, this, it's two months old, it's still live. So they're running.
And this is, yeah, this is the one that I should want to show you. It's not kind of the long

Speaker 1 bottle, but still slightly. This is the same, they just stacked it on top of each other.
Exactly. Yes, exactly.
So, like, why don't you just have four of these

Speaker 1 different variations, different backgrounds, the same

Speaker 1 elevator music, the same sound, like everything? It's like, it's quite, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't see. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I didn't want to say. Yes.

Speaker 1 And we have, yeah, there's a different color. Wow, it's like this is more pink.

Speaker 1 Okay. I mean,

Speaker 1 great.

Speaker 1 So I was curious. I was trying to actually,

Speaker 1 let's say, if

Speaker 1 it's ads library because I tried to

Speaker 1 find this on on Google Ads Transparency, but I did I couldn't find anything

Speaker 1 so I went to to here

Speaker 1 into Facebook just to see

Speaker 1 magic sort

Speaker 1 just to see like what's what's exactly they're running and if if I'm not missing anything and I think like look so I have this interesting tool which is called ad scan and

Speaker 1 this is not paid,

Speaker 1 by the way, but still,

Speaker 1 I use it for checking or kind of calculating the spend. And this is only Europe Union because of the laws and stuff.
So, this is the creative they are running the post kind of spend.

Speaker 1 And then I found was that one in Central Tower as well? I think so. It's somewhere hidden.
I can show you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it's nine. Yeah, it's nine

Speaker 1 pages, so it's not that

Speaker 1 yeah, but there is there are a few few few different things.

Speaker 1 Oh, end cards.

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 1 exactly. But look, the end card

Speaker 1 is just the same level, basically. So

Speaker 1 not good for your fake dying king. Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this is where it got a little bit interesting because I couldn't see this in

Speaker 1 Sensor Tower. Maybe I wasn't really looking that well, but I could see this immediately in the fields of Facebook ads library.
This is very using this. This is really nice.

Speaker 1 And also using this kind of passion. Scroogem, like, yeah.
Screw gem pass gem. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's nice. But yeah, it's like, look here, I mean,

Speaker 1 now you can you can actually

Speaker 1 add

Speaker 1 another

Speaker 1 ad and and run this. So

Speaker 1 yeah, they're running. This is, yeah, I think that's it.

Speaker 1 Nothing else, just a little bit brighter.

Speaker 1 But, yeah, I think that's the one. It looks like they have the hallmarks to see that they really know what they're doing, right?

Speaker 1 Kind of, yeah.

Speaker 1 We have there's a

Speaker 1 hook, there's a hook, there's a hook. She's screaming, help me.
So, you know, there was this guy,

Speaker 1 I think I had it in the Rolek versus Voodoo comparison on LinkedIn, where there was this little blob saying, hey move move it or something and it was quite popular in these games and then I think some lady said it was actually invented by popcor guys and it was the the person or the the character says hey move it

Speaker 1 it was actually voice the voiceover was someone who worked at popcorn and it was really popular so they used it in all the creatives so this is kind of a variation basically like hey help me and instead of hey move it so like hey you help me.

Speaker 1 And then that's it. Like, so it's a, it's a hook.
It's a.

Speaker 1 And yeah, we're here. It's not free, but it's kind of two bottle screw jam.

Speaker 1 It's a bus jam.

Speaker 1 And here we are.

Speaker 1 That's

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 end of these all the different videos. All right.
So well, we can probably end it there then, but like it's super interesting. It is.
Because we're probably going to come back to this, right?

Speaker 1 Because yeah,

Speaker 1 we're definitely going to come back to it to see if there's a new dream or another spike, basically.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because it's already kind of like 50k per day.

Speaker 1 50k per day.

Speaker 1 And I tried the Google ads transparency, but you need to f kind of search by game company name. So I couldn't find grand games there.
Whatever that means, maybe they're not really running Google.

Speaker 1 I think they should.

Speaker 1 And then you have all the other channels, like

Speaker 1 anything, basically, anything besides uploading and Facebook.

Speaker 1 I'm still kind of, I need to figure out where the short mechanic came from, obviously from hyper casual, but also like what kind of CPI does it get

Speaker 1 because it's kind of going into, like you said, like casual puzzle genre and it's not really cheap segment. So I'm really trying to find out what's the actual number.

Speaker 1 My prediction for this is that they need to finish their live ops feature set,

Speaker 1 like the events, and like you know how to do this. It's all mesh, basically.
So do that. And they're probably building it already.
Second thing is have one more progression layer. Either the

Speaker 1 chronic collectible album that's been everywhere or whatever, whatnot, like just add one more layer there for sure.

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 you need to start killing some kings guys in acid lava and everything like i don't think so this thing will scale if they don't find their own kill the king or jump on any of those band bags that are already there triple mesh city i would say is for closer to to this even look uh anatoly was showing us uh

Speaker 1 some of the diff like um different levels basically for for the UA like I think still that in the current market and we we we've seen this all the time, either you have the UA trick or you don't have a game.

Speaker 1 Period.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just, yeah, I just

Speaker 1 mentioned why I think

Speaker 1 China is really

Speaker 1 ahead because the UA is game design, basically.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 1 The UA game design is one basically there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Nice. Yeah.
And with that in mind, I think that's

Speaker 1 pretty much it.

Speaker 1 Thank you much for coming. And

Speaker 1 please join the Slack channel.

Speaker 1 So you can get notified when you return to the game.

Speaker 1 See you next time.

Speaker 1 We need to beat our old soundboard.

Speaker 1 Stop, stop. Okay, okay.
Next episode, no soundboard.

Speaker 1 Oh, we'll see you. We'll see about that.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Bye-bye.