Match3 Games Market Overview: Mechanics, Monetization, Trends, UA & Creative Strategies for Success

When you make a match three game, yes, you want the meta to be good, but you have to make a solid puzzle for puzzle players because the puzzle players are the ones that spend.

And I define a puzzle player as those that play these match three games because they like playing the levels.

So the level is the most important part of your core design of the entire match three game.

So simply copying the same board, same obstacle board same obstacle same whatever yes but no but no 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. Welcome to the Two and a Half Gamers, the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles.
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. I'm super excited.
Hello, everybody. Welcome.
This is Two and a Half Gamers. A new special episode.
Well, not new that much, but it's a special episode because you loved the merch market overview. So we brought Laura again back and she's going to help us review Match 3 category.
But before we do that, my name is Mati Lanceric. I'm Felix Broberg.
I'm Jakub Remer. We are your hosts and we have Laura.
I'm Laura Taranto. Welcome.
Yes. Welcome, Laura.
Super excited to have you again on the podcast. All right.
So, what should we do? Wait, wait, wait. Let me do a quick announcement before we get started because this is going to be a monster, epic, long podcast episode.
And I can see by the note it's going to be a really good one but i just wanted to say if you are uh let's say if you're vietnamese if you're chinese or south korean or japanese or russian listening to this and it's a bit difficult to keep up with english or turkish or turkish of course don't worry we have subtitles made for you so You just need to go down here, press captions, and then you will be able to get it in your native language. So everyone can take benefit of this great learning bonanza that we're about to share.
And for you, excited enough, stay tuned for, well, gonna be a big announcement early next year. Very tied to what just Felix mentioned.
So, yeah, we can get back to the episode. I mean, I'm just going to sit tight and enjoy the ride, I guess.
I mean, we are again like I can't do this, Felix. Like the last time.
I dressed up for this reason just to have a nice shirt on there will be a lot of ua i think so there will be a there has to be a lot of ua this i mean this if we were recording this like five years ago i'd say yeah you two can like just tell jokes and chime in but everything's changed so much that uh it Admon is super important now, as are just how you bring in users. UA has changed, and I think for Master, UA has changed entirely.
Yeah. The only problem with how UA changed is basically the history in SensorTaro, which goes back to 2022.
too, But I have some interesting points, which is a shameless plug, obviously, because I wrote an article about fake ads, OG, basically Nexters and Hero Wars, which was going back to 2018 and 19. And I have some interesting stuff there, which definitely helped with the UA for Playrix and the whole, their whole portfolio.
Should we start? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Do you want to start with, Jakob, do you want to do a show our little slide deck and I can start with just why match three is so important? Oh yeah. Sure.
Let me guess. would be again as usual this this won't be starting in money this will be starting with the history lesson oh yeah as per se because we we like to do those here and we also like to kind of make stuff more put into context so you don't need to then think too much on what's happening here.
Reminds me of our discussions in China. So if that's going to be tied to that history lesson, why we are better, or not better, but why we are more used to casual games rather than just them used to play really hardcore stuff.
So I think this is it. So shall we do first the history one? Oh, yeah.
Laura. Am I taking? Oh, you want me to take this? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sure. I can't take credit for the timeline, though, because Jakob made this.
I just used your template. No worries.
No worries. Matchly's been around forever.
I think it's one of the earliest games that I hope... I imagine most people have at least heard of Bejeweled, because that's kind of where it started.
And then you can't talk about Matchly without talking about King, because they're the ones that came in and decided, all right, we're going to make specials and power-ups, and we're going to change how that engine works, make it more interesting. We're going to make it something that can make money.
So King is, I would say, King's Candy Crush is one of the first games that I would say established match-through really into the market. They were smart.
They stuck with what they knew. Candy Crush Soda came out a couple of years later.
I remember when I worked at King, I remember playing some of the early builds of Soda and being like, this is amazing. Because unlike Candy Crush 1, that's when they started experimenting with things like gravity.
So pieces don't have to fall down. They can also go up.
And then we have kind of Playrix came in. Playrix started with Fishtum.
Fishtum, I don't really, I know it's important, but when I look back at Playrix's history, it's gardenscapes and homescapes that came out a couple of years later that I really think started to put Playrix on the board. And I know I'm going to get some hate for saying that, but I think it was really, well, seriously, I think gardenscapes was the one that they changed how they kind of changed how specials worked how you got specials on the board um and that for me i think that also pushed us to look as players like oh there's more ways to play match three you can look at you can play in landscape you can add different renovation elements to it it doesn't just need to be a saga map which was the popular way to show meta progression with games like Candy Crush and Candy Crush.
I remember that article back in the day that was like the death of a saga and everybody was talking about it, like no more saga maps and everything will be now visualized through these renovations and whatnot. But just like adding one tidbit there, Gardenscapes for the OG people was originally a hidden object game.

And later down the line, Playrix kind of changed it into Match 3, which I guess, if I understand

correctly, was by design as hidden object has a much demanding content treadmill and

Match 3 doesn't require that.

So it's also like a capacity decision.

But yeah, if you really Google Gardenscapes back, back, back the way down uh down there the memory line you'll see gardenscapes hidden object games gardenscapes was actually my like first match free game that i played like an idiot and also the same thing with with homescapes i i think i i mean like an idiot at that time because that was like 2015 16 oh yeah 16 17 i was with like, four years in the industry. I was like, oh my God, this is great.
And I played both games. So the usual stuff, you lose all the lives in one game and then just go play another one.
And I think I ended up like level 500 or something, which is for 2016, 17, I had very different motivations in life rather than just playing other games and off-scpes. Well, Mate, I have a question then.
If you played to level 4 or 500 with other motivations, what was the name of the butler? Austin. Hey, okay, you did it.
That was way too easy. Yeah, that was easy.
That was way too easy. All right.
So we have gardenscapes, homescapes, actually um they aren't i mean they are different and they do capture slightly different audience types one is you're renovating the garden then they moved into indoor but the one thing i want to also say about plerics and hidden objects is they have come full circle more of their recent games now they actually went back and they started to figure out how to tackle hidden object as a genre again. Yeah, the Man and Matters game is out, which is a Hidden Object with the Guardianscape's meta.
And then what they did with Hidden Object, because you have your Pearl's Peril, your Jude's Journey, what they actually did was, in my opinion, they took match three elements in terms of how you think about levels and boosters, and they actually applied that to object so yeah um and then we have candivore i mean you put this in there i have i have feelings on candivore i i actually don't consider this a match three game i mean let me just kind of explain why why the list looks like this and it's not because whatever somebody said so so why we uh choose this list was because if we look at the sensor tower kind of current ranking for the last month by revenue these are the top eight games on the list that's why we literally chose the list just to be clear regarding revenue size because everything else basically from that point just get very very miniature compared to games like Match, which makes 120 million a month currently. So that's the relevancy of the list.
Of course, there are many important games in this evolution, like Bejeweled that was mentioned and stuff like that. But again, this is not a five hour long episode.
This is it. Maybe it should be.
Maybe it should be. A few hours long episode.
So let's see how that goes. But yeah, why i chose it there because it's like for me it's kind of interesting that something that was uh launched in 2017 still kind of preserved very well and if you look at the chart and this is the most interesting part they're actually hitting record revenue based on their current scale.
And I think it's the only match tree game in this whole chart that is currently hitting record revenue this year. Or not this year, sorry, this month.
This month. Pretty much going still up.
So I think they deserve a spot here, even though they're completely exotic, niche-y, and it's something similar to Puzzle Quest. I had problems today starting it again.
Hopefully it can at least start a little bit. Yeah, but then there's also a question.
We are talking on Match 3. I mean, where is Toy Blast and Toon Blast? Those are too much.
Those are collapse games. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Get out of here, Matej. Get out of here.
I know, I know. But, you know, in general public and for people, non-puzzle people, it's just, it's almost the same.
Yeah, yeah. There's a different sub-genre, let's say, of puzzle.
That's what I wanted to hear. A little bit of a quick plug just to kind of get this out of the list.
So this is how matchmasters look. It's actually a PvP-based match tree, similar to Puzzle Quest.
Puzzle Quest is a very old, I mean, like 2005 or 2000-something PC game where you were literally having RPG-based abilities and you were destroying your opponent. But the important part that there is there is that you have one board for both kind of players

and they are kind of competing against each other.

So this is kind of the thing that can differentiate them out of the other people here.

So you see, for instance, here there's my turn.

And let's say I make a move here.

If I make a booster move somewhere, I don't think so.

We are able to do that now.

Thank you. here.
So you see, for instance, here, there's my turn. And let's say I make a move here.
If I make a booster move somewhere, I don't think so. We are able to do that now.
Four of a kind. I actually can get one more turn, for instance, here.
Yeah, there we go. And now opponent's turn, which also is very important because if I, let's say, set up something, he could use it to his advantage.
If I didn't finish my move or something or something and it gives him the kick there. I have some abilities.
I can use boosters actually during the gameplay itself, so on and so forth. So just saying this still exists and makes like 10 million a month still after seven years.
Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I remember correctly with the matchmasters, they do more of their monetization based on buying those boosters pre-level to help you in the level, right? Yeah, for sure.
Those are literally like you can buy cheat codes during PvP match, which is unheard of in PvP style games. So they approach monetization a little bit differently.
But Matchmasters itself, I think one game that we, that it's, it's not, it didn't quite pop. I think as much as King wanted it to was candy crush jelly that had that idea of you playing a level against in this case, it was the queen or the AI.
And I feel like this definitely took inspiration because at that time period, which was about 2015, 2016, there was a huge wave of studios looking to find ways to have, to make basically PvP or against an enemy type match three games. And this is the game that kind of stuck out and worked.
But again, it did not take like a Candy Crush style board. They didn't take that engine logic and just apply it and then have two players play.
They made fundamental changes to how that match-through works. Yeah, exactly.
Which, by the way, brings us to the current situation where Royal Kingdom was experimenting with similar mechanics, but I guess we'll get there. So yeah, let me switch back here and we can finish the timeline.
So there's a couple, yeah, so I feel like what we're trying to do is kind of show kind of the big players in this space.

We also, besides the ones we mentioned,

so we have King, we have Pleryx.

I mean, there was like a battle for

the top, the top match three game

basically after Soda

came out and after the Escapes games came out

and it was them fighting for who was number one

and then we had other games kind of come into the

mix, but I would say the fight for the top didn't really restart until Dream came out. That's when Royal Match was the one that really came and decided, all right, we know how to make a better match three game.
We can actually give King and Playrix a run for their money. Wait, I was going to stop you right there because I have a really funny story.
I had a friend who worked at Unity when Homesca uh homescapes came out or garden scapes i can't remember but basically told me that they'd come in and they were like yeah we want to buy all your traffic for two weeks so they bought all of unity's traffic for two weeks for the game launch and yeah that's pretty crazy to think that a company can do that i mean why not there are these um different rumors that glue not like not even rumors they glued kind of decreased the u.s pen because they didn't want to compete with the playrix because it was just like pushing the cpi it was the time when playrix was fighting matching convention and the original kind of setup of those fake ads started and they copied

their own kind of a setup.

Do any of you remember when they

bought all that ad revenue from Unity

what the CPIs were? Because I imagine

they were still a much better deal than what we're seeing

today. Oh yeah, of course.

Great deal, I'm sure.

Good old days.

You can just imagine some of our players walking is like all of it today the only two so we'll talk I think we can I think Dream is a little bit Royal Match and Royal King they're probably worth going a little bit more into detail with and when we kind of look at what's important to, like, what counts as a really good match-three engine. So we can come back to those.
The only other two are Apple Evans Project Makeover and Modern Community. I don't know, have any of you played Modern Community? Not really.
I don't think so. Is it a soft launch one? It's not.
I don't think it's in soft launch anymore. It's been out since at least a year.
But what they tried to do was they looked at... It's match three.
But they did heavy narrative landscape. And then they took its renovation.
And then also they took like an avatar decorator. And then kind of like saw this game it's everything yeah it's everything it actually has a strong core it has a very strong core puzzle so kind of core engine design but i don't think it my guess is that i if i had made that game i thought it would have been like skyrocketing to the top i don't think it ever really i imagine they would have hoped it had done better than it did.
So it's a continuation of the first game, the makeover one. It's different.
Project Makeover was... I feel like they were like, okay, what else can we do? We have kind of like renovation.
We know that works. People like fixing up stuff.
And then you come in with like, all right, can we do with it what shows were popular people the same that same audience probably likes uh project runway they probably like those shows where you give someone a makeover and they took that kind of that idea and then attached it to a match three engine but it was very much more on the what um basically the the style of aspect of it as opposed to the puzzle aspect of it but that was more like i think a ua play rather than just a product or game design play probably i think it would i think it would have been both you still the audience still needs to like it yeah i mean those ads are fucking terrible but what's interesting about uh when they launched modern community what they actually started to do and a lot of games don't necessarily do this because it can be very disruptive to the audience that's already playing, is they started taking things that worked in the fundamentals of the engine and moving it back into Project Makeover. If my memory serves me correct, then one of the things they did was like, I believe when it first came out, it did not have something like tap to activate or concurrent matching.

They went back and re-added those types of elements to project makeover so they're still investing in this game they're still trying to make changes keep it keep it alive um by modernizing it even kind of big swings that require going back and rebalancing a lot of the levels you're right this is definitely different than project make It doesn't seem like a continuation. It's high fidelity.
Well, that's a video. It's super high fidelity.
They've invested a lot in this game. You can tell it was...
This is a huge content pipeline. Huge content pipeline.
But the scale of it doesn't seem... Yeah, it doesn't look...
30k is nice for a small company, but not for Aplavin, definitely. Yeah, but Aplavin is really not a gaming company.
And, you know, like they're trying to get rid of all the gaming assets, right? So, yeah. It doesn't really matter that much.
Okay. If you pop to slide five, I took...
I wanted to do a breakdown. Yes.
So I looked at worldwide revenue, cross-platform, just match three, just to show kind of who has had market share. And you can see, I mean, I would argue in the example of Project Makeover and Modern Community, Modern Community, it is more polished, more modern.
I think the levels are better. The engine's better.
You can't fault them for anything they've done it is

not it's it didn't even make the list of kind of top games by market share which is a shame because i i think it's i i personally think it's a better game than project makeover but in terms of like lifetime revenue so far it just hasn't it hasn't really been able to make it space it doesn't really seem like they're spending that much either.

I don't think so.

I think how it currently performed, I imagine they're pulling out investment in it, would be my guess. But yeah, so when Yak was showing the top games, we specifically chose these games because these are the games that are dominating the market.
So we're looking at Candy Crush, Gardenscapes, Homescapes, Royal Match, Soda, Fishdom. Farm Hero Saga is also on here.
The one that is in Mandarin, I believe, is Onipop. Korean one? No, it's Chinese.
Chinese one, okay. What is the lifetime revenue of all these games combined to date? Just so the listeners can have an idea of how big Total lifetime revenue? No, it's like total lifetime revenue of all the games combined today I just wanted to see if you look it up I just wanted the listeners to get an idea of overall I think we should look it up for an exact number because I believe what Candy Crush has crossed is it's definitely what in 3 billion would be at least.
Royal Match is somewhere up there too. I mean, these are billion dollar games.
Click it. And then in the meantime, we can make a bet or guess.
I'll say 20 billion. Is that enough? That's a lot.
I would say 10, but that's not that much, I guess. 15.
15. Let's see.
15. 15 altogether.
I think that's low. I think that's low too.
Okay. Just these three is already...
Why don't you just put it in one tap, man? Come on. Okay.
Let's start. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Big listeners are trying to find...
Lifetime revenue completely. And if you're listening to this, you take a guess as well.
And whoever gets closest wins the hoodie. Yeah, exactly.
Don't forget to comment. I'm already lost because now it's 17 and you're not even in half.
Yeah, no cheating.

Wow.

Whoa.

So we're already at 17.

Yeah.

20.

Okay.

I think only the small ones remains.

Yeah, but okay.

So you're not that far, Felix.

Interesting.

Oh, wait a second.

We forget the fish one.

Fish, fish, though.

We'll stir the pot and then... Yeah, I think.

Well, that's nothing that's quite small well while you put this together since like 2023 match 3 just IAP roughly pulls in about like all the games across platforms um about 400 million a month wow so basically go back rimo to your beautiful thing together so for our listeners who are just listening we have 23 and a half billion in lifetime revenue of these what what is it, nine games? Or, yeah.

When I looked at this deep, when I was pulling some

of these, pulling in all this data,

since about the same

time, since about March 2023,

85% of the revenue

that we're talking about this, like

400 million a month, comes from the

top nine games.

It's... An elite club.
And you know what's insane? The dream games appearance out of, I mean, I don't want to say out of nowhere, but it's just like they came, as I said, like you mentioned, Laura, let's just dominate the market. In one year, well, not in one year, last year they became the top right game game so it's that's insane yeah we'll get to talk about them very in very big detail but one last thing I wanted to mention here keep in mind that King also runs its own kind of web store platform which hasn't been kind of shut down and it's been running since forever basically when it was born and I'm also

guessing that at some point

web shops start to kind of pop up in

these terms but I guess it's not that

prominent as in RPG

genre or somewhere else where there like

web shops are really really kind of killing it

you can hear these

anecdotes about

the regular casual

mom from US

whatever that means doesn't really go

to the web shop it's just

Thank you. anecdotes about the regular casual mom from US whatever that means doesn't really go to the web shop it's just placed on the mobile phone or website whereas if you go to and check Forex or RPGs people will get there just to get additional value but what was it like I think Playtica or something like Something like that was like 50% already web store.
Well, Playtica have a... I know this, but basically what they do is they have a VIP team, and if you spend over, I think it's 5 grand, they send you an iPad pre-installed with a web shop.
Yeah. I mean, that's a nice way.
Anyway, just saying that what you see here could be

probably bigger because these games are pretty

old and they have different platforms and like

Facebook stuff

and websites

of course

this is mobile only

so just saying

okay sorry tangents

but a good tangent I think

yeah where did we end it up? here

we were talking about this

Thank you. So just saying.
Okay. Sorry, tangents, but a good tangent, I think.
Yeah.

Where did we end it up?

Here.

We were talking about this.

So I think...

I love match three.

It is not...

I mean, I still think of all the core engines.

It is the best one that combines luck and perceived skill,

without a doubt.

And that's why if you look and

you're deciding if you i believe if we go back to i wanted to take a slide the slide before this

i wanted to look at you like which just generally puzzle sub-genres because i think one people

question ask when they start either a studio or a game is what should we make next um and it is just

I think it's, oh, this is a general genre.

But you look at this compared to any other puzzle segment. It is hands down the most dominant engine type.

And I think it's just down to the basically you play.

A lot of it's based on, well, you think you're actually becoming a master at what you do but there's actually so much behind the surface and that is dictating whether or not you're odd you're basically your odds of winning but it adds enough of like luck where it feels like it can just it can create the feeling almost like you're in a casino a little bit i think it it is the closest, in my opinion, to that. I think I made you squirm with that comment, Matej.
No, I was just thinking if you're under control of what's happening on the board, and not always you actually are. I think the term we're trying to say here is that it has the best illusion of control.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I have this example of Royal Kingdom.
It's all like, oh my God. After the episode we did, I was like, I mean, I have to do better.
So I started actually thinking because, yeah, I was just tapping because I was used to just tap and just don't think about what I'm doing because all the games now are definitely easier. I started thinking about what I'm doing and then it's like, oh my God, this is great.
I feel so powerful. I can do all of the stuff.
And then I realized, oh my God, there's almost only one move that I need to actually pass the level. And all of these great things that we usually discuss like the balancing was just top-notch honestly and I was like oh now I know what we always discuss like this is exactly that's why I purchased all the like the special offer and then I was like oh my god yes now I now I now I understand what's happening the graph I was thinking sorry sorry you're like yes this slide this slide this slide it's it was the first slide that's where we're looking at puzzles of genres and match three the only thing that has kind of eaten into the match three rev share or the market share is actually what we discussed last time which was um uh grid merge merge two yeah oh yeah it's actually bigger than than Blast.
Yeah, it seems so. There's only two games that really are top charts in Blast, and there's a Toy and Toon Blast.
Yeah. That also brings me, by the way, to a little bit of off-topic comment that Peak Games, like at its best of being the click-to-match company, is now having its next best game not being a not being Match Plus game, but being Match 3D.
Oh, Match Factory. Match Factory.
So this continuation also didn't happen. I guess we see the chart not really continuing here.
Also, they are literally printing money on Match Factory. It's just the KPIs are insane.
Insane. And when I say that, I mean it because I kind of know firsthand.
It's just, yeah. Well, I mean, what do you do? You have to make a decision.
What are you going to make? You're going to go into match three. This is where you're competing, where it's been almost impossible to break in.
So there's now this pivot towards what other types of puzzle games can we make? And this is why we have Tile Match. This is why we have the Match 3D and various spinoffs of that or the Hexasort.
All of those, they're coming out to try to find what is another engine that people will like that you're not competing with these behemoths that understand the Match 3 market, how it works, what we were saying before. all the the trying to your their job is match three the match three market, how it works what we were saying before all the their job as match three designers is to give the illusion that you are becoming very very good at something and that you understand how it all works while keeping a lot of it underneath the surface because they're pulling the strings behind you what was your role at king again? pulling the strings behind you pulling the was your role at King again? Pulling the strings behind you.
Pulling the strings, yeah. Stream master.
Pupper master. Pupper master, yeah.
I took a quick look at, I wanted to figure out, okay, what's going on? Are people still trying? And the answer is yes. Different studios are releasing new match three games.
So I think I went back. I like kind of the larger ones from bigger studios or something that's made a little bit of any type of ripple when it's launched and high level like none of them are close to this chart so rovio came out bloom city match it's actually it is rovio's strongest match three game it's their best engine they've made.
It's... I wish it was...
No, it's not enough.

Matching story has come out, but that's now looking at hybrids. Now we're taking match three and merge.
That's actually doing quite well, but it's not purely a match three game. Playrix has come out with at least three more games.
Aqua Match, scapes and room scapes tencent is trying to made happy match i believe um anapop is tencent if i remember correctly that game is at least 10 years old super it was it's the strongest performing match through game in in china and they haven't I don't think anything else has.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I misspoke.

It's not 10 cents.

It's happy elements.

It's happy elements.

And then you have Chrome Valley customs,

which is a space ape,

a super cell makeover match,

tactile monster hunter puzzles from Capcom and truck star by century

games.

Those are kind of the,

I know there's more.

I don't,

don't flood us with comments.

I know there's more. I was just trying to do.
Yeah. Please flood us with comments i know there's more i was just trying to do yeah please flood us we love that yeah please yeah throw everything at us yeah yeah please do please do but i was trying to pick out the ones like okay who's still trying um and it's it's it's tough when i looked at the uh of the new games of anything that has launched most of the games have launched prior, in the top 30 have launched prior to 2023.
It was Chrome Valley Customs that was the most recently launched that was the highest. And I think they're ranked at number 31.
And their lifetime revenue is estimated at about 40 million. And that's it.
And that's it. Yeah, that's it.
Because now they're kind kind of going down heavily because truckstar is just taking over oh oh i did pull this i what i mean i think they probably intentionally scaled back ua that's how i would read this and truckstar is like we had mitri from chrome valley customs uh on on the podcast talking about like how...

It's love for Century Games.

Yeah, very strong competition.

And now it's just very hard because you just can't compete, honestly.

I mean, if you are competing with Century Games,

you need to be River Game

and you need to be Last War just to be neck to neck.

If you are any other company from West,

it's just not going to happen.

Unfortunately, I'm sorry. And we know Heaven and the team, and they're amazing.
And there's also 4,000 people in the company. There's 480 in the UA team.
Yeah, so it's just very tough. So yeah, you can't really compete.
Same thing with when we discussed Merge 2, Microfon. They have some of the top games except for Moon Active's Travel Town.
Yeah, they have higher revenue combined than Travel Town itself. And they have also a few other games there.
So it's just basically they're the biggest Merge gaming company now now well I would say out of nowhere but that's definitely out of nowhere out of nowhere let's see I'm very bullish on the studios in China coming out with some of the strongest puzzle games like that's what we discussed with heaven and the guys in China. They really want to go to penetrate the puzzle market.
It's just about time that when, not if, but when. As soon as they do it, then it's going to be an interesting again, interesting, interesting UA competition as well.
Hello, Unity. I'd like to purchase all your impressions, please.
No, no, no. What can it be? Hello, Unity.
I would like to buy you and then just run into your inventory. That's what's going to happen.
I want to ask, or not ask, but kind of a comment on this. You see Match Factory and Tile Match and all the games, just kind of Turkish companies, and they have the match-free knowledge and experience, so they can do way better than all of the other gaming companies.
So the question is, if you don't have this and you just think you can copy any other match-free game, do you think you can succeed? I mean, I most probably know the answer, but it's just how can you think you can succeed to beat them? And then that's the first question. And then why would you ever do that so one you can't and this is okay when we looked at that market share graph the revenue you saw other that's to me that that is where everyone else is like oh my god it's so easy to make a match for a game he's got like to make a board make some pieces and it's totally fine um that's what happens i yeah it it is not what when i've worked with i've worked with very you know i've talked to different match three studios and one thing that that personally i'm i'm just flabbergasted by is they go in thinking ah i'm just gonna make if i just copy the exact same level design that i see in royal match the first 100 levels make it you know look almost as good i should just see the same revenue right it does not work that way or i see the other mistake the same retention won't be there explain explain why explain why so the listeners just understand because okay so what you see is the level.
We can go a little bit. Yeah, we can start the core deep dive, I guess.
So if you look at half these game loops, I actually, in most cases, with the exception of a couple games, I would say like Township would be one or anywhere where they have slightly different places to spend. The core loop of a match three game is pretty consistent.
You win a level, you progress in some fashion, and then you play another level. And you progress like it could be this is like the renovation or you're moving forward in a saga map.
And a majority of that, your spend either goes, the only things you can typically buy are some sort of boosters. You've battle passes now or extra moves.
And that's it. So people think it's like, oh, I can just do that.
It's no big problem. And they forget that when you make a match three game, yes, you want the meta to be good but you you have to make a solid puzzle for puzzle players because the puzzle players are the ones that spend and i define a puzzle player as those that play these match three games because they like playing the levels so the level is the most important part of your core design of the entire match three game so simply simply, if simply copying a board, like the same board, same obstacle, same, whatever.
Yes, but no, but no. Or, and I see, like, I mean, there there's businesses that have tried to start by being outsourced level design studios.
And I want to bang my head against the wall and be like, I don't, that is not, I do not think that's a wise choice to use and like, it's just, it's not the same there's, when you do you actually want me to go into here, kind of like what the core components of a match 3 game sure, where else yeah I'm going down a rabbit hole as deep as we can go until we hit rock bottom. Rock bottom, yeah.
So the way I break it down, I call it core engine design. Again, we are catering towards puzzle players, players that like these levels.
And I think to simplify it, I think there's two parts, core engine design and level design, and they are not the same thing. Core engine design, I would break down itself into core logic, speed, and visuals.
So core logic is things like what I mentioned before with Project Makeover, concurrent matching. They went back and re-added that.
So being able to match things at the same time. Technically, you actually have to be able to build that.
And it's not easy because you have to make sure that the order of operations happens correctly and the engine can basically handle that kind of input. Things like, does it have all seven shapes? You're making specials.
Specials are a core part of the experience. Do you have tap to activate? Do you have the right board size? what is your when you have those specials are the combinations the right combination so i've

seen games where they've um they've experimented and they've done they've created different bomb shape sizes so it's typical when you have like a oh like in this in um in the example in the middle you have the bomb with the tnt that is a five by five board clear so that clears out 25 25 spaces. Other games will do it.
So it's only three by three. That's very different in terms of how it sets up the level, um, how, and how fast you progress the level.
Um, and then the one that also is incredibly important that games do very differently. And this is why it's so hard to copy is, uh, Oh, perfect.
You have your call, the propellers, um, in candy crush soda, it's, It's the fish. It's the little, it's, it's so hard to copy is, oh, perfect.
You have here called the propellers. In Candy Crush Soda, it's the fish.
It's the little, it's basically you tap to activate it and it chooses a random place on the board to either progress an obstacle forward or get rid of a piece. What it chooses is so important.
If it's random, it will not work as well as if it's actually actively looking to help the player reach the goals. This becomes incredibly important if you're using it in your last couple moves, because what you want to do is set up players for an almost win.
And if that's your last piece, you hit that propeller, it goes somewhere on the board, you're on your last move, and you fail because it hits the wrong piece, let me tell you, there's going to be a lot of broken bones against the wall. But no, it is really important because this is like, you need to feel like the game's on your side.
And if it's actively not helping you, it can be hurting you. So that these things are things that I think sometimes are not considered when, when different studios or different companies want to start making a match-three game, which is why it's not just about the level.
It's literally about these very, very small nuances. Just by, like Laura said, having the difference between three times three bomb and five times five bomb.
Just think about it, how much it speeds up the level once you have access to it, because you're suddenly destroying and matching much more pieces per move.

So think about per move speed, how much stuff I can kind of dish out.

Suddenly it speeds up the whole game.

So I was in this situation because I was designing, not match three, but click to match game before.

And when we were deciding these things, like, yeah, let me tell you something.'s very hard yeah you gotta test it right it's very hard and i'm glad you bring up speed i don't know if you've ever played a slow match three game it's one of the worst experiences yes no but and it's not just it's it's a couple things one when you let's say you have a clear, you have this great five by five bomb board clear. How fast do those next pieces spawn in? Is it, is there momentum built in or not? Is it a consistent speed or not? It sounds dumb.
It sounds like I'm, you know, being nitpicking. It makes a really big difference on feel.
The other thing that I think what goes into speed is animations. I mean, animations can be absolutely beautiful, but if they are, they need to be fast enough and they need to be relative to the, to the piece or the value you're getting back.
So people sometimes over animate a line clear. That's not the, that's not the most powerful one.

That's something quick.

You spawn them more than you do color bombs.

It's not as powerful as,

as the color bomb,

which is the,

when you have like a match,

a five line.

And it's,

you need to have all of that kind of set up in such a way that you are

constantly emphasizing what the visual hierarchy is,

both in the speed of animations, how fast you're clearing the level and what is important for the player. And I've seen this, I've seen people go haywire on this and none of it makes sense.
And it just gets slow. And again, it goes back to if your main revenue is from getting those extra moves, the more times you surface those extra moves, the more opportunity to spend you're creating for the player.
So the slower everything is, now you, let's say a player is going to spend an average in 10 levels. If it takes, or rather, let me rephrase it, if you're going to spend 30 minutes of your day in a session, you want them to clear and go through as many levels as they can.
You don't want them, you don't want it slow. And then you're having less exposure to the level end.
So these are things that I think people forget. The other thing that I think is often overlooked is just the pieces are so important.
You're staring at this board for quite a long time. This is like the most thing you see.
You need to be able to clearly differentiate the pieces. They can't be too detailed.
This is small. Like I've, the other mistake I see a lot of developers make is they go, they add all of these little, like there, I mean, it's beautiful, but then you can't see half them and it makes the board look busy.
So the obstacles need to be very clear in terms of what they do.

They have to be simple.

And they have to be something that can be parsed quickly.

I can't tell you how important the parsing is.

I want to be able to look at a board.

And players should be able to look at a board.

And it needs to be very easy to see what to do next.

Basically, the ergonomy needs to be top-notch.

Because if you can't read it, you won't play it. That's why I don't play Candy Crush because I just I can't I couldn't really play Candy Crush because of the visual I don't like it I can't read it well the original the original and any other King games, it's just too sweet for me.

Yeah, I also feel like I'm going to have a sugar overload just by looking at it.

Hold my tooth.

Actually, Jakob, pull this up next to the Royal Match or Royal Kingdom,

and then we can look at side by side.

Now, I want to give King some grace because they did this first,

and a lot of these rules have come out in the last five years.

And Candy Crush is over 10 years old, right?

Thank you. then we can look at side by side now i i want to give kings and grace because they did this first and a lot of these rules have come out in the last five years and candy crushes over 10 years old right so and this goes back to how much you how much you're going to go back and really change everything that is a that is a lot of work can be quite disruptive um but you can see the visual parsing it is much easier to see in in Royal Match where the pieces are, where your next move is going to be, what the obstacles do.
Then Candy Crush is a little bit more difficult to suss out. That's why I like the Gardenscapes and Hobescapes way more because it's, again, way better visual kind of feedback, at least for me.
Yeah, keep in mind this is a product that's like 13, 14 years old. Sure.
I think Candy Crush deserves the utmost respect and again, these are rules that came out recently. This is over 10 years old, right? Just as an example.
Yeah, but it's dated like let's be honest like just saying yeah yeah but any other new game they they made it's just not gonna surpass the revenue of the original candy crash that's just that's how it is the way i like to think about this have any of you been at a party where it's too loud and you strain to hear anything and like all the time conferences yeah how tired do you get like constantly like what what it's the same thing that applies here that same principle of strain you don't want to create exhaustion for your players and the harder you have to strain the harder it is to play so you want to remove that element when you when you're making a match three board um let's see the The last thing I have is not part of core engine design, but part of level design. And I think this is where developers also make a lot of mistakes.
I've seen when I've talked to different level designers or even like product people, they'll be like, oh, you want to make it, we just balance it always with moves. If a level's too hard and we need to balance it, just change the number of moves to a degree that's true.
But there's also part of it that it just, it's 100% not true. There's sometimes moves is not the main way to change difficulty.
You actually have to understand all the elements of the board, the obstacles you're using, the obstacle mix, and changing a difficulty might be removing a specific obstacle, changing the board size. Everything, I think, gets slightly oversimplified, and aspects that should be incredibly important to how levels are created are sometimes overlooked.
I hope I didn't scare everyone off from making a match-to-game. It's great.
It's wonderful. I can add on top of it.
Last time I remember when we were doing this, it was something like 10% of the levels we made actually made it into the game regarding their quality and what you need to do and what you need to make in order to make good levels with your level designers i mean like team of level designers not like few people those are like 10 plus so just saying that most of these games have loads of people making levels on them and only a little bit of fraction of all those levels actually make into the live updates which you need to dish out by the way every two weeks for 40 levels. Otherwise, your payers are going to eat them out because they're going to eat them out.
They won anyway. And then they're going to churn and move to a different game.
Yep. 100% true.
So I'd say I mean, I love match 3. I still think I think it's fun.
It's just there is. I wish it was given.
We all understand that RPG games are complicated. What are they talking about? Yeah.
Well, there's a lot more. You're looking at more components.
You're getting shards of something to make something else. There's different values you're balancing.
To be honest, when I was working on a click-to-match game, and when I was working on Battle Legion, the RPG, that actually seems more simple to me. Because I can create Clash Royale-style gacha-based economy in a spreadsheet in two days.
That's not the problem. The combat and the mechanics and the mechanics of the gameplay that's the problem of course but the economy the balancing it's not that like for instance clashware everybody knows clashware balancing like the sheets are out there on the internet but do you know the dynamic difficulty of these levels do you know the churn indexes like how you know which which which churn percentage you're looking for like how many people should convert and like leave based on your churn ratios and all those specific secret levers that are being pulled in behind.
Maybe actually Laura knows, but any other person in the industry doesn't. Well, I will gladly welcome you on the RPG side of the developer community.
I think what Laura is trying to say is on the surface, it looks super easy. But if you look under the hood, it's just not easy at all.
Whereas the mid-core looks really difficult on the surface already. Yes, I don't think so.
It's that hard. That's why you can even do a lot of these RPGs in the market.

Think about it. How many RPGs are made during the year and how many of those scale up?

It's not hard. How many Match 3 games actually scale up?

Can we get back to Match 3?

Wait, wait, wait. This is Match 3.

Yeah, it's just a comparison with different genres.

No worries, you're doing candy great. Thanks.
Let me pull the knife from your back when I see you next time. Please.
Oh, Jesus. Anyway, anything else, Laura? Or should I move to meta? We can move to the meta.
The only thing I will summarize is like, it's the right finding, the right balance of difficulty. So understanding how the board elements work, how understanding the different combinations can create different levels of difficulty and knowing how to work that.
Your goal is to basically create, you want the player to end in a state where they want to, they basically want to buy those five extra moves. And what you kind of mentioned before is a good level designer needs to know how many times to put that in front of the player.
So how many wins do you give them versus not giving them and how many times do you surface it? This is something I think Township does quite well. And I mean, it speaks for itself.
Township speaks for itself in terms of revenue. The only other thing, oh, two other things.
The other is obstacle design. Again, this goes back to copying.
You can't just, Royal Match has ice, so I make ice. They have crates and boxes, I make crates and boxes.
Yeah, that works for the first hundred levels, but just as a reminder, these games go up of levels and you consist you always need to be making new obstacles and for every new obstacle you make then that's that they they also you are now combining them with the obstacles you have before so now you have to keep in mind with every new obstacle it has to work with all the previous ones and all those interactions the level designers need to have a very good understanding of what type of difficulty

and fun it creates for the player.

So last time

we discussed this, I think it was like

Gardenscapes and

Homescapes, they had like 14,000

levels or something like that?

CandyCard is 15,000.

And how often do

they introduce new

obstacles and features? Two weeks cycle 40 levels, I think is the cadence now, in the standard in the industry. But new features and new obstacles.
There's one more new mechanic. Yeah, okay.
Imagine these level designers are pretty well paid. I guess so.
I hope so. But this also goes back to the visuals

think of how many obstacles there are

your brain can't remember all of that

so again everything has to be super clear

what does it do

do not try to teach the player new things

if it has water in it

or we can use this one

the egg is probably

not the best example

in the royal magic example

but like

what's a better one

Thank you. can use this one.
The egg is probably not the best example in the Royal match example. But like, well, it's a better one.
Ice is a better one. Ice is a good one.
Anything that grows. So, you know, a flower is going to grow if it's going to be in stages.
You know that a plate is going to break. Just because for any match player, you know, boxes are going to be, are going to block a square and they're going to break like those types of the connections that people that players and people already know are the things you want to lean into so importance of the visuals matching the design and then also working with already exists in game you basically need to build them like that was the last time when i was building them was like they need to be within this property metrics so you create the property metrics basically that your engine or your game can handle and then you just change the parameters so let's say one of the parameters is it has gravity there's no gravity that's like a basic parameter then we have need to be matched near it let's say to kind of clear off then you just scale the parameter and like two matches near it and suddenly it's a completely new mechanic which one was a i don't know snowman the other one was ice but now we require two matches then you create another parameter which is matched by the same color of a piece again within the same exact property we just now created three different mechanics from the pretty much same property and this goes scales.
Yeah. But then you end up with like, I don't know how many,

literally like hundreds of them and they need to work together.

And by the way, you need to A B test them all the time to see if they actually work,

because it's not uncommon when you implement new mechanics and they're like a very,

very worst kind of churn rates, very bad churn rates on the levels. And you need to pretty much get rid of them.
And that goes on and on forever. There's one thing, well, this is where a good level designer is incredibly important.
So I've been in a situation where we did, basically we were looking at, we were trying to analyze churn by a specific obstacle. And there was one obstacle that generated, that just like had, if it was used in a level, those levels had higher churn than levels without it.
And what they ended up doing, instead of going back and having to, let's just say it was in 500 levels, you have to go back and remake 500 levels. So instead of doing that, what they tried to do was change the usage of it and change which obstacles it was paired with.
So they, this level designer was, was very, is very, very talented. And they were able to say, okay, players hate this because in this case, it was, I think it was, it was something that was timed related.
And they're like, in the case where it's, it's works against them, they hate it. They found a new way to use it where it actually, they were able to reduce churn when it was used just purely by how,

where they put it in and what type of levels it was in.

So that,

that's the type,

that's the type of people you need designing these levels.

Like you have the parameters,

but it means nothing if you don't know how,

how to find people that know how to make it fun.

Yeah.

Those are level designers,

not game designers,

different kinds of people.

Most probably from Turkey. Want to make it work? Hire a Turk.
Okay. So let's go down the meta rabbit hole.
I guess this will be a little bit more simpler. So let's start with Candy Crush.
Candy Crush, the original one, as we have it here. I don't know if I'm going to finish the level properly.
You can't speak and play. Yeah, I'm not going to do this thing again.
Anyway, so what these guys did was the original saga. You can see it here.
It was just a very, very easy 2D map with this kind of a candy-like manner. And there was literally a line connecting the dots.
That was it. Like, if you remember, like, the very, very OG Candy Crush had this thing where you were put after some levels on some kind of a 72 or 48-hour timer until you invite three of your friends or something.
I think it was spreading, like, white fire on Facebook because of that mechanic mechanic and then they had to turn it off for like you can you can pretty much go into youtube and then just do candy crush 2012 or something if you pass me the screen share briefly i can show the original versus a version from 2022 i think i have it somewhere come on like keep lower the screen you don't need to share all the time. I promise to give it back.
That's okay. That's what he wanted to hear.
Yeah, let's gang up on Jakub for a while. For the meta, you can see how many changes they've made.
Yeah. So that's actually like two more and there's like a third one that I'm going to show now.
But yeah, you see that how it can evolve and this is still within the saga kind of a thing where it's out of the like it's out of fashion these days but they're still running it. Of course, I guess they can't change it really but here you can see the evolution because the main thing that they were doing was they needed to communicate progression somewhere because you know just an increasing number doesn't really help you kind of communicate that you're moving from point a to point b so they literally took the the the direction here where you are moving from point a to point b and you can see literally that in the beginning it wasn't even point a to point b it was like they were even going backwards basically so in the first one it's kind of a like very very cartoonish and doesn't really kind of feel that that well i think the current one feel very well actually i think they borrowed the bestiends Parallax-style saga that they have now, because I don't think so.
I've seen it somewhere else before. Best Fiends was the most prominent example, if I'm correct.
I'll return the screen to you. Yeah, thanks.
Yeah, so we have this kind of very nice parallax, and that's pretty much it. I don't think so there's anything else here that's kind of very significant.
Candy Crush added leaks system into it with like bronze and silver and whatnot. So like you have also that visualization as for like communication of your progression.
But yeah, that's not something I got into it in those few days yet. one of the interesting thing is that they have these like golden levels that i i haven't seen this mechanic yet because most of these other games uh i guess except saga then the soda one they don't really emphasize kind of looking back on stuff they just like kind of cut stuff away and like you know you restore in this section let's move to new one like let's move like new one new one like even big games uh toyblast and tombblast there like tombblast especially the digital saga there was like the big change there and again you can't return back like that that was the whole point like you don't really backtrack and here you can see you have these golden crowns and these golden crowns they mean that you win the level on the first try.
And this is a very strong push that Candy Crush is doing. I think it's like the only one of all of these games that we covered where literally right at the end of the level, where you're just nearing your end moves, it pops up, this kind of pop-up that, oh, get the golden crown if you win the level on the first try so yeah and of course

what you want to do is you don't want to have these like misses within the chain where you don't have the gold crown because you didn't win the level on the first try so yeah that's i guess their progression which still works but again it's kind of out of fashion a little bit um but Yeah, it has been updated a number of times.

What was the name of the Candy Crush game where they had these, I wouldn't say pets, but the characters, which was a little bit more 3D. Candy Crush Friends? Yeah, Candy Crush Friends.
Dead Death is also a similar setup. Yeah, there was the Parallax kind of sagamop.
Yeah, that was the one where you actually had gacha system, if I remember

correctly, where you can collect those friends

shards and then unlock them, get abilities

from them, switch them. Yeah, it didn't work out.

Yeah, then we have the

saga,

which is again a

saga, but again it's from left to right

and I guess that's it.

The environments change, as you see here in the middle middle so before it was this kind of island and i had to unfreeze these bears and then suddenly we are in this winter wonderland whatnot and again this goes on and on and on so not not really that much to it and i guess other candy crush games they are i don think so, they're even going after Match 3 that much these days

because I've seen that they are running Candy Crush Solitaire in Soft Launch.

They're running Candy Crush Match 3D in Soft Launch.

And maybe a few more titles that I'm missing,

not under Candy Crush name.

But I guess that's it, if I understand,

if I remember their portfolio last time I saw it. Remember Crash Bandicoot? No.
That's, yeah. Yeah, so that's it.
That's, I think, the current end of the saga and then where the saga ends. I think the last big prominent game with the saga in puzzle genre, not match three,

was Toy Blast. And afterwards, that's pretty much it, if I remember from revenue standpoint.

Okay, moving on. So if we switch to the slide here, actually, before there even was a saga,

there was this other thing, which if I remember, where did I

put it? In my

sea of emulators.

And that's

fishdom, which

is not saga. It's not

restoration. It's actually aquarium.

So you're literally having...

Yeah, it's decoration, but

you have a fish tank.

So if I literally see, like I'm bumping here, it's a fish tank.

I can feed the fishes and I can play the levels.

And because this is a Playrix game, I can also play these other levels.

Yes, please.

And we'll get to this very fast.

So before we finish this nicely, completely not fake gameplay. It's called a minigame.
Yeah, of course. The icon, by the way, that you saw there, because there was not a level number, there was the puzzle icon.
It seems to be completely standardized now between the games. Everybody's okay.
Like, okay, now it's time to play the puzzle that I'm here for because the creative showed me oh yeah so uh this is the standard now but just to finish the progression uh team here the game runs on these fish tanks that are basically a decoration environment as laura said and if i understand correctly uh i guess this is the like the first predecessor of this restoration meta that that has done this setup because what you're doing is that you have different fish tanks that slowly unlock for instance we have this tropica fish tank and we need to populate it with different fishes different decorations different i don't even know what this this. Decoration? Yeah, I guess more different decorations.
And it will have different star rating and setups and whatever. But the important thing is that you have an idle progression into it, actually.
Because fishes make money if you... Come here, fish.
Leave Eric alone! If you... Come here, fish you if you feed them they give you they give you money uh if you go back uh here after some time again it's like an idle mechanic so you collect money from them and then you buy more fish in different fish tanks the currency scale so if i'm here somewhere i don't know where

in different whatever fish tank number 28 like the costs of the fishes goes to like thousands

and even millions so again this is some of those kind of first things that the decoration meta

started and even though it's here in the chart in 2015 mobile release this game is very very old

it's 2008 but it's still doing i guess great it's a money printer basically it's doing really well

Thank you. here in the chart in 2015 mobile release.
This game is very, very old. It's 2008.
But it's still doing,

I guess, great. It's a money printer,

basically. It's doing really well.

The last slide I dropped in their revenue chart.

I think I have it somewhere

here between the...

Very last slide.

Fishtom.

Yeah, Fishtom.

Basically, from Corona, it's just super stable, around 30 million a month and that's it this nice little old fish tank is still making so much money so much money yeah that's like i think this very signature for play leagues that all of their old games are just money printers and they know very well how to maintain their money printers and then don't scale down that's very important they actually scale up like township but yeah township like if you look at if you look at soda and we would put pool soda here is actually scaled down and it's like again cruising at 10 million a month but it's definitely not that it's high whereas playrix games usually go up as their life goes on. Yeah, the Fischdom Township is a great example of this.
They are just growing still. Insane.
So this is, I guess, the first kind of setup of this restoration meta that started it later. And then we have Gardenscapes and homescapes, which are, I guess, the OGs of the restoration meta, as you see here.
So we have Austin, both gardenscapes and homescapes. And we have this mansion that's been, like, here, I think it's not even scrollable that much.
What's happening here? OK. The homescapes one is more of a, like, I think that's not even scrollable that much what's happening here okay the homescapes one is more of a like I think there's his parents house or something because they're living there with him doesn't matter honestly I don't think that matters so this is not that rundown it's just old or something here is literally rundown in guardianscapes and it's I think again if you google, it's the same setup that they were having in the Hidden Object Guardianscapes game.
So again, same. What it does really well, that it's just much stronger visual feeling that you're moving and getting progression and improving than the basic line with points that's moving upward.
Very simple. What they did here compared to fishdom, they ditched the whole economy setup, whatever, buying fishes, maintenance, pretty much streamlined it.
And by the way, keep in mind, and this is very important for overall discussion, all of these metas, literally what they do, they do this giant streamlined milestones until we arrive at what we have with royal kingdom and i'll get to it so this already streamlined fishdom where there's no maintenance of the fishes no buying no nothing so what we get is just these stars and you get stars by playing levels and that's it by the way you don't even need to do this i've seen players that have like thousands of stars, run down mention, they just don't care they just play the levels and you're not prohibited, you're not forced to kind of do any interaction with Austin or whatever, you can just play and I've seen those people That's why I said it doesn't matter if it's his house or who's house. The other big thing, of course, is the story narrative.

There's a very big story narrative into it,

and there's a lot of these chit-chat conversations between each level.

Okay, so the question is,

do people really care about those stories in between levels

when you just said that they don't really care about the renovation?

No, no, no. I'm not saying they don't care.

Some don't care.

The key is that some do, some not,

which is you again increasing the total

receivable market.

I think it's important for players to have

an understanding of why they're doing

what they're doing.

And then how much story you want to put into it

depends, I feel like, how much money

you have in your budget to pay for all of it.

But I think you need some sort of North Star.

Okay, then let me rephrase the question.

If there would be a terrible story, would this make the same amount of money?

Would it break it, you mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm trying to think of match three games with terrible stories that are doing well.

I mean, I love Candy Crush. I don't think it has a very strong story yeah i don't think i don't think they give a lot of context into why you're there yeah or why mr like i just it's very light but again they that that they have the benefit of one of the first movers yeah Yeah.
Yeah. So they have the star system.
Again, it's very simplified. So you get starts at the end of the level.
You can use them or you don't. You have these tasks and so on, so whatnot.
That's it. And the visual improves, it gets better.
And that's basically it. Then we have project makeover, which took it a little bit higher especially in the UA environment it's I guess very kind of I don't really want to pay as much attention to their creatives because it's just yeah I know that's cool we'll get to it so what these guys did is that they already started streamlining this because rather than having a map, whereas Gardenscapes, you've seen this.
You have this giant mansion. You can scroll all around and do all these things.
And it has giant foreshadowing of like, I can go here and renovate this. All of this.
No. So now we have just episode by episode, which is room by room, where there's usually a rundown room and a person that we need to renovate, literally.
And we need to make over the person. Yeah, yeah.
And you need to, like, wash his face, read the letter. Yeah, there's some, like, more drama and story into this and, like stuff.
It's quite nicely done. I don't want to discount this.
But yeah, we don't really need to watch it. And yeah, so you're basically renovating the person and the flat.
So it's a little bit of like re-decor and a little bit of like, yeah, more like hair salon style game. Other than that, that's basically it.
Like if you look at the, I don't know if I have the episodes here. This is basically their like overall progression if you look at it.
So you have a lot of these like different episodes that are different people. Like for instance, I don't know if I can even go to the episode.
Yeah, I can. So I already did one room here where I completely decorated the room and yeah, see, this is how it was.
Then you kind of nicely decorate it. This looks like a great green.
Very nice. Yeah, yeah.
Why is she crying? Oh, you fixed it it because she wasn't redecorated yet

yeah and you can return to your

different rooms and check stuff

and even change your original choices

I guess

you can play a little bit

it reminds me a little bit of Sims actually

but yeah

that's what it is

they put a little bit more of the Sims

into the modern community

rather than just here

Thank you. of sims actually but uh yeah that that's what it is that they put a little bit more of the sims into the modern community rather than just here that's i would agree with that it's more it's more like a tv show actually yeah yeah so we have we have this as project makeover um continuing on the landscape or not landscape yeah.
Yeah. Candy War, we already covered.
They have literally like a trophy road system, similar to something like Clash Royale, where you just get more trophies as you beat more players because of a PvP game. Again, this is an outlier, an exotic match tree game, so we won't talk about it anymore.
So let's talk Dream now. So we go to dream and specifically royal match what royal match did with their meta and let me lose the level here oh no oh no yeah don't lose oh it'll be horrible so what these guys did is that they don't really redecorate stuff they actually build stuff and this is again one more simplification to the rule because already we ditched the whole kind of like giant mansion of redecoration as for makeover where they just have like one episode uh what i'm doing here may interject on one part of this yeah so when i look at when i look at dream and royal match i actually think their their progression comes from toy toy blast

tomb blast and then royal match because what they ended up doing was it's very similar um this kind

of just the level button same thing in their previous game that they made at peak before

starting dream which was a single button so it was just one iteration of adding a very, very, very light decorative element. Yep.
Again, the important part is that nothing is run down here. You don't see stuff that's like run down, abandoned, whatever we need to repair.
Like you're not repairing anything. You're just building on like completely clean slate.
That's it. Like you start levels with like nice floor and then you go from there.
So if I was like... It's also simpler.
Yeah, yeah. You don't have to make the assets then to the destroyed assets.
Exactly. That's what I'm saying.
That again, it decreases the content pipeline. Yeah.
The very big signature thing regarding their meta is that they have this event style trigger system that I guess has been copied now at Infinom by every single hybrid casual game pretty much and every other game on the market that's kind of trying to kind of squeeze as much revenue out of this because events as we know are not bringing retention they are bringing revenue spikes which is something that's very critical for games monetizations uh and the big differentiator again is that these events run on very short timers of course you see these kind of big ones like for instance this one which is three days or something, of course. But you have these other ones, like let's say Lightning Rush, you see there's eight hours for it.
And that's it. You hit even shorter events, like for an hour, so on and so forth.
So the whole purpose of these kind of side events, usually there's like monetization events on the right and engagement events on the left, is to reinforce playing the core so you don't really need to do anything you don't really need to i guess this whole magic cauldron thing is an exception where i actually needed to click something or whatever sometimes you need to like dig for treasure or whatever but most of the times you just kind of play as you as you would anyway and you get rewards or you compete with something on a ladder and push it through. Monopoly uses the same thing, exactly the same thing.
Regarding the visual, or let's say the other progression, a lot of games this year implemented, guess what? Collectible albums. Very trendy right now.

Very trendy.

Super trendy. So this was implemented in Royal Match this year in March, as I read that right on Game Refinery.
In Project Makeover, this was implemented in April or June. They also have this.
I just don't have it unlocked here. And one more game that has it that I didn't mention is Matchmasters.
Also has this kind of mechanic. So this is a very, very kind of simple and literally compatible with any core progression layer mechanic that I guess it's, it's originally, if I i understand developed by scopely in yahtzee with friends and then it was successfully adapted into monopoly go and i guess after everybody saw the success of monopoly go then then they kind of implemented it everywhere uh what it does is basically it creates gacha out of nothing into your casual game which is great because gachas.
So what's happening here is that we have literally a collectible album. Think about like your childhood collectible album.
Each of these different icons is a page of one album where you need to collect these stickers. And these stickers are gained through booster packs.
And booster packs are suddenly a new type of currency and resource that we get throughout the game because these economies are super scarce. So suddenly we have more stuff to throw around.
But what we did also is that we didn't increase really any currencies in the economy because what these albums give us are the original currencies of the game itself. So it's literally increasing joy, but not not increasing complexity so we're just collecting these stickers and then after you collect them you get more resources and if you collect everything you get again grand prize and i think this is the only thing that's like a new functionality because it's a badge and if i understand correctly it should be added somewhere into your player profile visual

or something and that's pretty much it regarding what what new it does these things goes on these very long cycles like one month two month cycle where you need to collect everything from the album if you collect duplicates you can convert them to pretty much other booster packs so that That's it, like literally.

And the big kicker, I don't think so, these guys have it implemented yet, is that you can trade these cards with other players. That's what Monopoly Go does very well.
I don't think so that all of these games has this last big piece of implementation of these progression mechanics. In Match 3, no, Travel Town does.
So this is actually, yeah, does. Grid Merge is popular as well.
Travel Town lets you gift. It's not quite trade, but you can give players your other cards.
I think you talked about it during the episode last time. Yeah.
We actually did. These guys don't have it, and I don't think so all other but it's pretty much becoming the like the go-to progression mechanic in casual like all the casual because any casual game can implement this it's just super easy like it can literally live within its own circle of economy doesn't touch anything else within your other economy and that's it and suddenly you have something to collect and collecting thing is great so that's the only The mistake with this implement with doing this implementation is if it's not done on a cycle ah yeah for sure this this cannot be permanent this this cannot be permanent because if it gets permanent you pretty much hit a ceiling of like this gets bloated and not really like super clunky you don't want to get there so this gets reset reset.
Think of it as some kind of a battle pass, basically, style timing. And once it gets reset, you lose all your stickers and everything, and a new thing kind of comes in.
You win a grand prize, and then it gets set to nil again. Exactly.
It resets completely. Yeah, but the grand prize stays with you.
Yeah, the grand prize stays with you that's that's the thing that the good implementations add visual slots into the game so you have some more visuals like player icon framing or whatever something monopolygo has the pieces on the board that you suddenly can move as i don't know wolverine or deadpool was the the latest one they did a very successful marvel collaboration with their whole progression mechanic here. So, yeah, that's, I guess, the only requirement.
It's spreading like wildfire in casual games as one of the main progressions. There's also the wind streak.
It's spreading like wildfire. Yeah, wind streak is not the progression mechanic, but yeah, that's the core driver mechanic.
Wind streak came out in 2018 in 2018, one of the first ones? That's like a

2017-2018.

That came out.

That's old news now.

It's like layered wind streaks

and what was it?

The lightning ball.

Those types of

I would consider lightning ball an iteration

of what started

as wind shriek and then it was like, how do we make wind streak it even better? Okay. That goes back quite some time in the history.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. That's why we're here.
Moving on. Thank you.
No worries. And then moving on to Royal Kingdom to kind of finish this iteration so now we I guess got a little bit more complex here wait before you go there 53 because I had to play all of these yeah but I mean I mean, I was level basically 20 when we recorded

the podcast, which was last week.

And now I'm 90

something. It's just

I wasn't really ready for

progression in the Royal Kingdom.

By the way, it's really hard than the Royal Match.

I think it's about 1.5

to 2 times the difficulty.

Yeah. 5.05.

Oof.

Whoa! Flex! I know! Wow! Whoa! I wanted to see what the ice worlds look like. Wow.
I wanted to say, I already, I mean, when I started playing Royal Match back when it was launched, I felt like this is just a game changer when i compare it to candy crush it just played way better now when i'm playing royal kingdom again i feel like even better even better again like one level above like the by the way that that's also like it's insane if the difficulty would be a little bit less difficult like royal kingdom is the best game for me as for like non-core match three player playing the game yeah but i can i can tell you the the secret you need to have the win streak and their win streak by the way their win streak is i think three times more granular than these guys these have three in the chain and you have five and six six no five five five five Five, sorry. Five, yeah, yeah.
And then you add the other boosters there, and it's just you're unstoppable, basically. If you then lose, then you just can't play this game.
So, back to the progression. These guys don't have a collectible album implemented yet.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Laura. I have not seen it.
Yeah yeah so it's definitely not there if you haven't seen it uh and laura hasn't seen it it's not there yeah so the the thing that they did here is that they did a little bit of again streamline a little bit of complexity so instead of this kind of tiktok style um one image thing, they actually did these nice islands

that you have in this world.

And they tried to build a little bit

of this kind of a narrative

of kingdoms competing against each other.

So it plays really well into their story.

So I guess they went a little bit step backwards

to something like Gardenscapes,

where instead of just like one single image

that we're doing now, we're actually having maps that you can zoom in and zoom out and redecorate because I guess my mouse... It's beautiful and one thing I will add when I unlocked you unlock Iceworld at 501 I believe, so you beat 500 then you get Iceworld.
They actually have a cutscene. They have cutscenes even during the world.
I remember there was a cutscene where Dark King created the golem that I had to beat. I lured him into his...
And it was like a cutscene. Like CGI cutscene on level 10.
That was not part of... So I played the soft launch version of this.
The cutscenes were not part of soft launch. But now they are definitely...
This is actually now they are one that is kind of adding this narrative to give context to why are they adding a change of visuals instead of why are you going from this to an ice world? Why is this golden here? Yeah. So you see here, I can then zoom in, zoom out around this very nice island in this kind of usual fog of war fashion, where it gets kind of unhidden slowly one by one.
If we go into these tasks, we are now getting elixirs. And we can just select and choose.
But again, we don't really select anything, just illusion of choice. But it's a little bit of streamlining of this kind of star system, I guess.
A little bit more granular. I guess they can pace it a little bit better because stars are not that granular as like whatever, hundreds of elixir.
Yeah, I don't know. It's just more, I guess, polished, bigger production quality and everything.
So that's there. But not really that big of a change.
Their meta, I mean... I disagree.
I think it's actually a really big change. For me, when I first saw Royal Kingdom's world map, I was blown.
I was just so taken aback. No, no, no.
Go back. The other one.
The island one. Because they...
Yes, they went from kind of this flat one. One screen was kind of all you could see in Royal Match.
I was like, this actually makes it feel immersive. I thought it was beautiful and I was surprised it had that kind of like display of progression hadn't come out sooner.
Yeah, that I definitely agree with. Like I said it wrong.
What I meant is it's nothing new as for like the Gardenscape setup where you have the scrollable maps so they as i said backtrack a little bit bit there into the formula which i guess to be honest is just much more immersive than a single image here in royal kingdom or tombblast pgames tombblast where again single image and that's it basically so this is the bone i have to pick with studios like everyone just is like oh that seems to work Let's just use this static image that changes over time. I wish I saw more studios experiment with how they showed this visual progression in the meta, so we would have had more versions like this.
I think that this is just generally what I read when I read a lot of player research on what puzzle players want is they're getting so many copies of the same thing that this is why I don't think the games

that come out are performing well, because they keep copying the same instead of trying to

experiment and figure out something a little bit different. How do we make this more immersive or

more fun? Or how do we change the engine? How do we experiment with, in the case of the specials, anything?

We just see so much of the same, and it's starting to feel a little stale.

And this is way more complex again.

And when and where did we talk about complexity in creatives as well?

It's just, no, come on, seriously.

And also the level of polish, like what we see now in Match Free or Royal Match and Royal Kingdom creatives, it's just, it's and also the level of polish like what we see now in match free or royal magic

royal kingdom creatives it's just it's a different level and also you have so many things it's also quite immersive when you watch last time we were talking about the royal kingdom felix lost basically he was just staring at the at the screen like wow this is really great it was my eye candy

yeah

and these staring at the screen like wow this is really great it's like it was my eye candy yeah and this is basically the same thing yeah it is it is yeah so i guess that's there um i think royal kingdom is for me if they have the collectible system which i guess they'll implement at some point will be the best kind of visual like meta uh like paired like it's pretty much like the best engine like literally like evolution of cars like this is the fastest most kind of well polished car uh to me uh regarding the systems here uh what i'm afraid that uh they forget one very important part from royal match which I guess we'll talk a little bit

more in the UA part.

Because it's not being utilized.

And it's being utilized on the other games.

But I guess let's pass it to Felix

for now and kind of wrap

up the ad section here and then we can talk

full-fledged on UA.

Yeah, it's not going to be as long

as your sections because

that was extremely comprehensive. I think

it was going for more than an hour already.

But I think the main takeaways from the introduction that was so well done by Laura, and then also the complexity highlighted in the metagame is that this genre earns a lot of money, which means that the users are some of the most coveted users in mobile gaming right and that means that these users are extremely valuable and exactly pretty sure what monty's going to say next in the ua segment is that the cpis in this genre are some of the highest probably the only other genre that's higher on average is social casino or is it roughly the same now no social casino is higher i think or forex or forex yes again it's it's nowadays it's really hard to say thanks to all the mini games and then ips for monopoly and ua fun stuff so it's really hard to say but kind of if you show the gameplay it's really expensive really expensive meaning 50, 80, 100

plus fun stuff so it's really hard to say but kind of if you show the gameplay it's really expensive

and really expensive meaning 50 80 100 plus for a payer oh wait it's a purchase campaign not even a payer yet yeah and so if cpis are that high that means that the trickle down effect of that means that the ECPM in these games will be some of the largest, right?

But that also means that these studios have a very big incentive to protect payers. Because if you spend a lot of money finding these payers, you don't want to let them go.
So it's Social Casino and Match 3 that have some of the most complicated segmentationsations ever where majority of the market even chooses not to show ads at all but that's not to say that there is a market so there's actually i've had quite some experience with this there's three main ways that i categorize how match three games basically do ad monetization the first one is kind the most common one, and that's basically just segmenting by IAPs. Games in this kind of category have in-app ads, usually after a certain time window.
So usually what's being tracked here is the first time purchase window, and that's being measured on a geo level. So what happens is that these games tend to monetize how late? Day 28, day 40.
Like what's usually the time? 180. Yeah, it can be that long as well, right? Are you talking about first time someone makes a purchase? First time purchase.
Oh, no, it could be as early as one week. I've seen it for seven yeah but then like the the curve still grows oh yes yeah it's a beautiful curve yeah she just grows it keeps growing keeps growing after three years so the first thing that's done that is it's being tracked uh geo, essentially.
Think some games that do this is some of the smaller ones that we haven't covered. So it's none of the ones we're actually covered.
But the kind of main one after that is taking this a step further and basically tracking the first time purchase window and also dividing it in by geography. So you filter in historic data on where IAPs have historically taken place and then you speed up the rollout of ads in geos where you assume that users will not make a purchase.
An example of this is Candy Crush, which we're going to talk mostly about today

because they have the biggest ads business. It's rumored that they're making about 750 mil a year in their ads business, which is quite sizable even for them.
Yeah. They have a big user base, so why not? Yeah.
And there's even tutorials on YouTube that I was able to find on how to get ads.

So in Candy Crush, I'll show you some of these because I went deep, right? Because, yeah. Anyway, I'll get into that more later.
But yeah, and the third category of segmentation is just no ads. So just no ads.
And actually using the no ads as a way to do user acquisition, because of course, Royal Match and Royal Kingdom, they don't have ads in it. And they always put it in their creative, which is, I don't like, but it's cool.
Match Factory does the same. Yeah, it does the same.
I spoke with someone inside of Playrix to find out what's actually going on because some people say they have ads, some people say they don't.

So I actually reached out to someone.

So the actual scoop here is that Playrix used to have ads in 2018 to 2019. And then the senior management, aka the two brothers, decided that they hate ads and they ripped it up but what they didn't want it well so reminds me the story of uh why doing um really blocks fake ads fake ads because we were in china and we were discussing like fake ads and if like and then like the guys from china said doing your you can't use fake ads what happened Well, the owner of Douyin and basically the Chinese TikTok said, he saw a fake ad, got so angry that he banned the fake ads on the whole platform.
It's like immediately. So no fake ads.
See how easy it is not to have fake ads? You just need to piss off the right person.

Well, I also heard a rumor while doing research for this

that King ripped out their whole ad program

and delayed it by six months

because they implemented ads.

And then I think one of the C-level was on holiday

and he saw an ad from Playrix

that he was just like called in.

It's like, take it out the ads.

And then they waited another six months.

I don't know if that's true. Anyway, so PlayerX in 2018, they ripped out the ads, but they didn't want to be, they didn't want to treat the longtime players that had the ads in a bad way.
Because when you take out ads from these games, I'm sore, Larrick, and Atestu, people get really angry because you're giving up a lot of economic value when you take out the ads. So right now, PlayerRix still earns about 15 to 30k a day from ads.

And it's essentially from legacy users that they haven't taken up the ads from because

they don't want to make them angry.

I mean, they don't want to watch the ads.

They want the free stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, basically.

Wait, wait, wait. Maybe they're like, yeah.
They're like the secrets here. watch the ads they want the free stuff yeah exactly yeah yeah so uh the main type of ads that actually generate revenue in pretty much the main game that does ads is candy crush and all the ads are essentially limited to oh let me do a high five here.
Yeah, there we go. Yeah, they're all essentially boiled down to four main ad types.
And it's all related to the core. And that's really where you can build up a lot of impressions.
It's the most popular one tends to be the pre-level start booster. Then after that the after level boost then after that is more lives and then last which the one you give away the most infrequently is more moves when you fail so what's after level boost by the way what do you mean so like doubling a reward okay yeah so these are not shown always and they're shown different to different geographies and the kind of way that they're distributed if we go back to the segmentation is that new users don't see any ads and the more you play the more likelihood you have of seeing rewarded ads.
So if you think of the distribution of rewarded ads per days active in a match three game, it tends to increase significantly the longer you've been in the game without making a purchase. And what they play around with with the segmentation is basically based on the historic IEP data, how high these daily rewarded impressions per DAU increase by how long you've been in the So in days zero to two, the average for a game might be 0.2 or 0.3 for the whole game of rewarded impressions per DAU.
And for players who've been playing for longer than 365 days on average, that might be six. So it goes really high.
So let me actually do a screen share here. What I'm going to start by showing now is so to find videos that showcase this for Candy Crush is not easy because what I needed to find, I'm just going to highlight this, right? Because it wasn't easy.
So I needed to find a player who was failing levels in a tier three geo so i spent a lot of time researching on youtube

for like indonesian candy crush fails which takes more than a smile but anyway we're going to start by showing the tier one English speaking geos.

So let me show here.

So after four hours and when this user reaches level 402 is the first time that they actually see a rewarded ad and I'll just show you so Rewarded placement, you mean? Yeah, rewarded placement. So the option to watch a rewarded ad.
And I'll just show you. Rewarded placement, you mean? Yeah, rewarded placement.
So the option to watch a rewarded ad. So they're playing here.
And then they finish. Let's skip ahead a bit.
Still a lot of moves. Yeah, still a lot of moves.
Arrow to the right. Here we go.
Five seconds. There you go.
What's happening? Where was it? Four hours something. Wait, four hours and three minutes I have written down here.

Ah!

Yeah, just press the right arrow.

Yeah, there you go.

Four hours and three minutes?

Well, you are already in four hours, four minutes.

Let's see where it was.

Yeah, this is the one.

Yeah, for sure.

It was really interesting.

It took like 400 levels.

Yeah, 400 levels.

But that's like 2% of the game. 4 hours of gameplay, right? So here we should see it.
15,000 levels. Who watches 4 hours? 3% of the game.
Okay, it was basically here on the booster afterwards, right? But it should be there. I guess it's just me that watched this much, but yeah.
so frustrating anyway so it's basically an after level boost that's shown i'm really frustrated now now that's we are of course oh there we go there we go yep here we go level 124 so this is the after level booster right so this is the first ad placement that you see in an English-speaking geo, right? So, yeah, four hours in. Yeah, you remember this is before level booster.
This is before level booster. Yeah, this is a pre-level booster, yeah.
Yeah, which is the most popular genre for, or the most one that tends to get the most impressions also, I'm told. Yeah.
So let's compare this to Indonesia. So it wasn't easy to find levels where they're failing to showcase the outer moves.
But essentially here is in Indonesia, you have the daily treat machine. It's just an ad placement.
But basically here, I'm going to go to 610 and you'll see the...

So here essentially the user is playing and they're failing.

They're out of moves.

Out of moves and then here you see basically you're watching out for more moves.

But wait a second, you get all of those boosters? Yeah. Like those eight moves and like a discobal? Yeah.
It's quite generous, right? So this is in Indonesia. Remember that? So this is level 4,000 or something in Indonesia.
Okay. Yeah.
And then there's an ad. And then you'll see something crazy here as well, is that the reward is collected.
So you can watch another ad to collect the next reward. So it's actually a step-ad.
Progressive ad. Yes.
Wow. So you can really stack it.
And that would never happen in the English-speaking geo, I suspect. So it's very much designed to increase the ad load in countries where the likelihood of an IAP purchase is

very low.

And that's why we've never seen

ads.

Because remember, if you want to download a game in

another geo, you essentially

have to have

on iOS, you need to have a credit card

from that geo. Otherwise, you can't switch stores

to get them. Usually VPN is not enough,

right? So that's why it's so hard to figure

out what the actual segmentation is.

So thank you.

Thank you. that geo.
Otherwise you can't switch stores to get them. Usually VPN is not enough, right? So that's why it's so hard to figure out what the actual segmentation is.
So thank you, random player in Indonesia, for helping me out. And then now I'm going to show you the pregame booster as well.
1633. As this is a cooking show I've prepared.
This really speaks volumes of how even hard is Pine Piece. Again, volume play.
Yeah, exactly. So volume play.
So here's the pregame booster to get whatever booster you want for the game. Actually, you watch it here.
And then again, you can see that the progression in these games, or the person has been for uh 15 minutes and they've already watched one two three four five six ads right and then here even at 233 uh the person or player fails again uh fails again and runs out of moves and they're already allowed to watch another rewarded ad to get even more moves. So the simplicity or like the amount of moves that you can get by failing means that it's kind of a nicer game.
And then a lot of this economic value that's otherwise locked behind is actually given away for free. So those are the four main slots, I guess, that earn majority of the impressions.
I don't know. Has that changed quite a lot since you were there, Laura, at King? Like how ads were viewed? So the game I worked on, I worked on Farm Heroes.
And I don't believe we had ads in the game when I was on it. Okay.
So I know they were looking at Farm Heroes Super Saga, which was the next-gen Farm Heroes did have ads, but Farm Heroes Original did not. And I don't believe...
I was on the Candy team, so I don't remember if they had already been working on ads when I was there on the candy team. Yeah, but you can see here October 2023,

someone is helping out in the forum asking,

like, how do I enable ads in Candy Crush?

And someone's saying, I'm not an official king person.

I did get ads suddenly in my game level, 2,300.

I believe this happened because I never spent any money up until that point.

Person's very sharp. Yeah.
So here also we have someone who's very frustrated to bring back the ads because they were getting free boosters. Then we have other users who are complaining why I don't see any ads.
Yeah. Yeah.
And the King community basically explaining that it's actually randomly assigned as a test. And that's in August, 2023.
So I should imagine from these posts that essentially the amount of ads in Candy Crush have increased significantly since then because they're growing that. Here's also the video on how to get ads in Candy Crush.
There's definitely like a big community of people who want ads or want the free stuff right so ads are beautiful ads are very beautiful right uh mediation that king does uh i've heard it explained to me that they do it through google ad manager and what they actually tried to do initially was to not go via programmatic and have a giant sales team themselves and build their own ad networks at one point they had so many users uh this will fail and it's never been done before so it failed because essentially despite all their users uh they won't be able to have enough scale to really get enough demand going. So how they have it set up now, I've heard, is that they have it set up through Google Ad Manager.
And what they have is they have their programmatic guaranteed, and then they have preferred deals that are set up with I.O., and then they also have private auctions. So they also have a media kit.
And usually how you do that at a large scale is that you look at your programmatic buys. You have your whole waterfall set up with bidders.
And then you add a premium on top of that for the first placement. And then you can build out a quite big business doing that.
So you don't rely only on programmatic advertising. But that's how it's done.
And yeah, that's all I have to say about ads. They're super interesting super interesting anyway so where do we where do you want to start uh with the actual ua because there's a shit ton of stuff i want to say okay i would like to know what are the ads that are working and um or or the what's the creative strategy for match three today match three Okay.
I just started because we can't really go back to 2012, unfortunately. But I mean...
Fortunately. Unfortunately.
But this is what I actually started kind of researching if I see some level of creatives. And then I found out a lot of TV ads for Candy Crush.
Guess what? I wasn't that surprised to be honest. This goes back it's out on mobile and Facebook.
So this is the original stuff. Yeah, I think this is the...
That looks like television quality. It was a TV ad.
And this is like me that looks like yeah yeah that's like television quality it's because it was a tv ad and this is 2012 this 2014 uh 10 years ago uh so we're kind of yeah this is tv in creatives you know i was always kind of screaming about how the Candy Crush UA looks exactly the same.

I mean, because it was only gameplay.

I mean, only gameplay.

It shouldn't be an insult, to be honest,

but it kind of is in this kind of genre, unfortunately.

Because you don't really do it like that anymore.

It's just it won't get you almost anywhere in the current market.

So this is a New York City, again, TV ad.

So we have all of these on their Candy Crush YouTube account.

This is back in the days.

And I want to say one thing.

What have you noticed here, basically, in this screen? It's fake. No, no, no, no.
The buttons. The buttons? Look at the buttons.
Yeah, the store icons. PC client.
Yeah, there's the Facebook, there's Microsoft, and then it's Amazon.

And I mean, Felix, you're the Amazon expert here, but all the casual.

Amazon, yeah, Amazon Kindle, fire basically.

But this is interesting stuff that worked on basically puzzle casual games. I think this was 2016,18 when I was doing the Dig's Adventure on Amazon.
There was Candy Crush, Garden Scapes, and Homescapes because Amazon was really big for casual, like for 35 plus women in the US. So all the casual games were there and it was

making a lot of money back then.

Now I'm not sure how big

it is anymore, but still.

This is just an interesting

thing.

Not big anymore in the specific demographic?

Not big anymore overall, I

think, for the casual.

I haven't heard about

it recently that much besides Felix mentioned for ad monetization purposes. But yeah, we have more TV commercials.
And then, I mean, I just want to go here and then we can go to like actual UA and I can show you almost all the games that we discussed. What do you think were the UA channels back then? I mean, it's quite simple.
Let's say 2012. Ad Colony and TV.
Definitely Facebook. Yeah, definitely Facebook.
I think Facebook was like the first thing. And I remember running a UA on Facebook when there was only right column, which is Facebook desktop, basically, which is like static image like this.
It's like super slow. You can't see anything.
But it was the only ad format where it was actually cost per click rather than just installs or anything else.

It was Facebook only.

Then there was the Google finally.

And then, yes, Felix actually ad colony was quite big back then. Nailed it!

I mean, that was one of the first networks, right?

Like, let's call the proper one.

Okay, so let's just go actually in the Candy Crush here January 2022. In 2022, there's always more networks.
You can see Facebook here, MopUp, Haplavin, YouTube, Google, and the lift of an iron source. From this kind of impression, majority went to Unity.

And I'm not surprised Royal Match was also super big in Unity,

even like a few years ago.

So let's just check this.

Not in-game footage.

Not in-game footage.

Just for that kind of hook.

And now for this,

this slightly different actual altered gameplay,

right?

But this is.

You're not sharing,

by the way,

if you,

I'm not sharing.

Oh,

no way.

By the way,

notice how we moved from not in-game footage to the current state of fake

ads.

That's how far we have moved.

Actually, that's a really good point.

That is a very good point.

Let me just

do this again.

As much before, we're taking

the quote-unquote fake ads,

the not-representative gameplay,

and then working it back into the game.

Exactly.

So now you see it, right?

So

here.

Not in-game footage.

And how is this?

I mean, it's not in-game footage,

of course.

How is this 2022?

It's

it was 2022,

2021, actually. 2021.
I thought it didn't feel like 2022. It felt like 2021.
Yeah, like, what's the difference, man? Seriously. Anyway, you see all of this kind of gameplay.
That's it. That's kind of where it was, and that was kind of the game.
But we skipped a little bit what happened in 2018. And I just want to go back here and share this tab instead.
So what they're looking at right now are kind of Hero Wars and how they started working with the old pin. And this was when they launched, what was it, like 2016? I think that was the launch.
And then they started doing these duct tape minigames, pull the pin. And then what happened? Here you can see the jump.
I mean, this is kind of COVID, but then there's this jump somewhere in 2018, 19.

And what happened was the players actually bought the stake in Nexters.

So they bought the stake and then they suddenly, it was in 2018.

So they started seeing all the numbers and everything that was done

with the pull-to-pin UA creatives, which is basic. They're still in the games.
They're still. And this is just like, this is like, this is like original.
This is the OG. So this was Nexter's that invented that? They didn't steal it from anyone? No, no, no, it was Nexter's.
And I'm actually, I'm actually having a call with the guy who invented this engineering. Oh, it's.
So this is basically like the original OG pull the pin level, which then started kind of before. This is so you can see a royal match.
Oh, wow. Yeah, exactly.
You see all of this, like, inspiration nowadays,

like, where it is actually coming from.

And it's just, and this is, I don't even know, like, what the game is this.

I think it's actually, this is like Austin from Wish on the left-hand side.

I'm trying to save, again, saving, it's not the king,

but it's saving the sheep and animals and chicken. And now what we have here, again, a poor fishy.
This is a little bit different than the pulled pin, but kind of the mechanic is almost the same. Wait, wait, a poor fish? Did you just assume that fish is socioeconomic status?

Wow.

This is actually a play on the game.

What was it like when you're saving the crocodile from water? Where's my water?

Was it a game or something?

Oh, that's a good job.

That's right.

I mean, you know, you have all these

inspiration from different

games. And then, look.

There we go. This is the OG pull the pin which literally just changed the whole landscape on the UI for match 3 I think because it came from that RPG Hero Wars and then they saw like what difference does it make for them because honestly it was just fake it was any game let's call it that way and then they started what difference does it make for them because honestly, it was just fake.
It was minigame, let's call it that way. And then they started using it and then saw really big growth.
So they started to implement it in the game as well. By the way, for the uninitiated, why they saw a big growth? What do you, why? Like the CPIs went down quite heavily.

There we go.

CPIs, okay.

Thank you very much.

Cost per install.

So cost per install went down quite a lot.

And then, like now,

there's the never-ending discussion.

But, you know, this is fake.

So it really doesn't matter

if the CPIs are low

because the retention is low. And then also, you then also the players don't really stick around that much.
But think of this as you have a 50... Well, I think I can actually mention the latest example from one of the games that we ran.
It was VO campaign, so value optimization, US, Facebook.

And we could see $130 CPI for value optimized campaigns.

What this campaign does is basically, let's simplify stuff, it's hunting for whales.

You have $120 CPI.

And then it suddenly, you have, I mean, back in 2018 2018 most probably it was like 30 whatever still quite a lot when when we're talking about cpis of like three or four or five so then suddenly you have these like mini games or like kind of out it's not even altered gameplay it's just it's completely fake and creating these different scenarios, we have played more modes in the game. Well, kind of.
Which then decreases the CPI. So instead of you have, let's say, one player for $50, you have 50 players for $1.
And suddenly the pool or the opportunity to actually retain or just convert these players to payers is way higher

than if you have only one player.

It's just, it's mathematics,

like nothing else. It's just more players,

bigger the chance, so you actually

convert these

into payers afterwards. If you showed gameplay,

users wouldn't want to play it because they don't want to

play match 3, so you trick them with

mini games. No, they would play

just as soon as you show the gameplay of match three they know what they're getting into and it's basically really expensive to actually acquire those players. Eventually they will pay, maybe maybe yes, maybe no.
What will happen Felix is that you get users that wouldn't go into the game in the first place now you get them into the game so you can have better chances of capturing that whale basically playing a gacha rather than getting expensive match tree users which already know what they're going to get and they're expensive to begin with maybe you will actually increase your time because of using this and you have a higher chance of getting more users. Actually, if they saw the match-free game, they wouldn't just download the game because it's just, nah, it's not there.
But then it's like, oh, let me try this. I just want to play this until I hit the level that I saw in the creative.
And we were reading those reviews

in some of the creative

trends before.

It's just some people are still in the game

waiting for the level to appear after

level 300.

Can you give me the screen? Just one second.

Of course.

Can you see?

This is it.

Just to show you on real terms.

Now it's super polished. You see here

there's this button where

Thank you. so just to show you on real terms now it's super polished you see here there's this like button where it's literally like puzzle stuff this is I think level 15 or something after level 15 I go here again it's the usual you can skip it if you want but you don't because it gives you extra soft currency this is now a little bit more complex because from the beginning they've done it in a way that you can't

lose. Pull all the pins, you can't

lose. Like in the first

set of these puzzles, you just can't lose.

Now, if I do wrong moves, for instance

here, I can lose.

So suddenly there's a little bit of difficulty

and poor Austin won't get the water.

But if

again, this gets more and more and it's starting with every second level, then it moves into every third level, then it moves every fourth level. I don't even know where it stops.
But this is now default for all the Praerics match-free games. Default.
And not even match-free, it's also in Township. And we discussed it before.
It's just as soon as they started using different creatives from idle games. So, you know, all the Golden Goblin stuff and stacking different eggs and different objects.
They put it into the tutorial. It's in the tutorial.
You play the game, you start, and it's just the first session, five minutes in,

and there is like,

oh,

wait a second.

There is something in like,

let's try.

You click play and you are in the UA creative immediately.

Yeah.

This is for instance,

project makeover.

This is a game.

Project makeover.

Project makeover.

Has it as well.

Tactiles makeover match included this in their soft launch.

Give me,

give me the screen back.

I will show you where is this coming from immediately because this person just showed me this and I was like, man, we discussed this. It's coming from apps business.
And we are now in the era of where you kind of borrow things from outside of gaming or kind of in from different genres like that's the like that's now mandatory like you borrow things from hyper casual or whatever else but now like the level above that is you borrow stuff from the apps business you borrow stuff from e-commerce d2c whatever else and you just implement that into the game. Why do you think AppLavin made a huge jump into e-commerce? It's just connected.
It's really connected and it's just a brilliant move from basically everybody. So that's what I want to show you.
So that was 2018 and now when we go back to actually

2022. By the way,

this was not there before.

When I originally played Guardianscapes in

2016, this

shenanigan thing wasn't there.

Of course, no, no, no, it wasn't there. It was just

added afterwards because

what happened was people started complaining.

Oh, wait a second. Where is this

creative? Where are these levels? Oh, wait a second. So we can actually implement it back into the game so they shut up it's like it's not a nice you increase their retention because they think like this is the game i'm playing and this match three whole thing like whatever there's this side mode or something yeah exactly because there's so many of these levels that it actually seems like this is the main part of the game.
Yeah, it's true. Yeah, that's true.
So it's not that they don't share. You increase the retention and the stickiness and then just kind of add what kind of additional content that they can play.
You know, it's great because who knew I would spend $300 in a Forex game? Exactly. Or in the match-free game, it's like, oh, wait a second.
It's actually cool. Oh, shit.
I almost won the level. Let me buy that special pack immediately.
So this is basically the evolution of Candy Crush. It's just the objects and then just the eyes there.
Just kind of putting a little bit of emotion there. I don't want to say nothing else, but this is basically it.
But if we move, let's say, I can actually do it in here. If we move to, you can go to last month, actually.
So you go here. This is a different creative.
Oh, wait a second. We have a hook now.
We have fake hands. It's moving in different directions.
You can see the level of polish is definitely a different level. But again, quite boring.

You see all of this.

There's different music.

Again, it's all about the gameplay.

But they are doing

some interesting stuff.

I mean, this is, you know,

you remember this from 2022?

Oh, wait a second. 2021.

So this is a creative that is actually

live for two years. But here we go.
Oh, wait a second. 2021.
So this is a creative that is actually live for two years. But here we go.
Oh, wait a second. Oh, finally.
What is this? Can you help me, Mr. Player or Mrs.
Player? You know, I'm freezing out here. So these are the same ones I see.
This type of you need to match on a time frame to save something that I feel like Dream is using as well. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. That's exactly what they started doing.
Because at some point, they're like, who are these guys from Turkey? We don't care. We can use all these boring creatives all the time.
It's going to be fine. And they're like, oh, wait a second.
We are not the top one game anymore. We need to do something on something on the creative side oh and then there the u18 is like hey we've been telling you for this for years anyway so we have this interesting hook right here which is you know what it's quite uh satisfying to watch so they are now moving in this direction we also kind kind of discussed how they're using the TikTok trends

and some different things

that they were not used to.

You know, all these movies-like,

high production value stuff

that they haven't been using before.

But now it's just, you need to.

It's not optional.

You have to go.

Sorry, so they're one step away from freezing families already. Kind of.
But I don't think that the freezing families will be there. I will show you who doesn't really care about the brand and who really cares about the brand.
These guys really care about what they're showing in the creatives. So I don't think like it's going to be freezing families.

It's going to be saving things.

They are also saving the...

Well,

they already had the girl,

which is like kind of similar

to the kink thing.

Yeah,

yeah,

yeah,

but they had also like

one other thing

where it was saving

a different person

or not person,

the character there.

Oh,

here we go.

No,

it's not saving them. But I was kind of watching the ad where it was kind of saving and I think like yeah this is also quite similar to saving the king exactly yeah yeah yeah it's like the saving kind of mechanic all near that experience yeah but everybody copied this save, and just paired it with gameplay.

It doesn't really work for everybody.

Well, what a surprise.

So we have all of this, I think.

This reminds me.

Oh, really?

Don't tell me that.

Oh, wow.

There we go.

So, you know, like, here we are.

Here we are. Here we are.
Like, you can't really fight this, unfortunately. You need to join this.
You need to join. Yeah, you need to join this.
But this is at least a nice way how to kind of follow the trends or try to replicate what the competition is doing. Because yes, we have

this is

basically it.

This is basically it.

This is a royal match with a different visual

style, basically.

One to one.

Exactly.

They need hexagons.

You need hexagons. Guys hexagons guys you need so and then the same thing oh yeah no snake yet no I didn't see snake snake is a different category by the way it's just it's really insane like how they were using it in 2022 so like this is yeah this is Candy Crush so this is Candy Crush.
So, you see, like, how it moved from the TV commercials 2014? There's your brand guidelines. There's your brand guidelines, yeah.
You know what's, like, the ultimate brand guidelines? Yeah, revenue. Revenue is the ultimate guideline for brand.
Like, nothing else. Like, this is it.
like that's like kind of candy crash but then

we just jump straight into oh no i don't want to actually i don't want you to vomit so let's just go straight to fishdom instead because this is this is exactly they still do this yeah still do the good old Hero Wars numbers game with the hook.

And there you go.

And this is, yeah. They still do the Hero Wars thing.
They still do this. Yeah, still do the good old Hero Wars numbers game

with the hook.

And there you go.

And this is, yeah, this is 30 seconds long.

And this creative is running for a long time.

A long, long time.

And people are...

They have it in the game.

Yeah, you showed us.

You showed us that.

So it needs to be in the game.

Look at this creative, whatever it is that.

And this is another one, but

it starts exactly the same.

It's exactly the same, but it's 45 seconds.

So it has multiple layers

because then you end

the

what is it? Yeah, the creative

and then you actually switch and

start showing the different type.

But still, the numbers game,

nothing else. So then,

I mean, and this is just happening

Thank you. and then you actually switch and start showing the different type.
But still, the numbers game, nothing else. So then, I mean, and this is just happening for a long time.
They had all the pins, all the fun stuff back in the days. Now they're playing this numbers game, nothing else, basically.
But then we are talking about different channels here. Again, like it's not Unity for Playrix, but it's Aplavin.
And for King, it's also, if I look at actually here again, and we select all the channels, because if you are top one, top two, top three game, you basically buy everything. Here, instead of Unity now, it's Aplavin and Mintegral and then YouTube and Facebook.
And this has been running on Facebook for three years. So, interesting.
The UA landscape changed. Now we see for a lot of casual and puzzle games, Mintegral on quite a high position in terms of the UA, then Uplavin, that's like a no-brainer.
With Uplavin, it's interesting because what I mentioned with the $120 CPI, that was on Facebook, but on Uplavin, it's around $100, $150, somewhere in that kind of range. What you need to think about is in order to make Upload work, you need to have 10 to 15 pairs, unique pairs per day.
When we were calculating this, I think cost per purchase was $600.800. You need to multiply that by 10 or 15.
That's your starting budget for uploving. Wait a second.

Can you put the $600 into context?

I'm a little bit lost here.

So you pay $600.

It's a cost per purchase.

So you pay $100 for a player. But actually,

you need to spend $600

to find a payer.

So six players of those $600. Kind of, yes.
Yeah, exactly. Yes.
And then you need 10 unique payers per day for AppAmin Algo to work properly. So 600.
6K. 6K, which is a starting point for the budget.
So it's just just putting things in context like how much money you actually need to spend on Upload just to get things moving on the kind of match free side of things yeah starting the train I didn't show any types of playables but honestly all of these of these SDK networks, it's heavy on playables. Playables really like very high production cost and takes a little bit longer to actually build.
So you need to think about that when thinking about the whole UA and creative kind of strategy. I'm not sure why it's not working, but anyway, It's kind of heavy on the levels.
You've seen any playables with fake gameplay? Or just real ones? Yes. Also on fake.
Also on fake. Okay.
So, look at this. And this is getting really ridiculous.
So, we are now in January 2022, which is basically Gardenscapes. So, it's kind of post-COVID.
And this is also like, look, the six plus rating on the very button says basically everything. So the hook, the divorce, and the freezing families and babies and whatever else, this is their play right now.
So we are freezing. We are doing all the the stuff how did the season change so fast? I mean you know it's hard you move in and then it starts to freeze immediately move in and it's winter yeah exactly this is just disgusting this is disgusting it does work so well because it creates drama people are getting pissed about it yeah you know it pissed like you want to actually help and again you know where is this like coming from it's again near death experience that we are talking about all the time so you know you want to save these, you know, you don't want them to freeze.
And just, oh,

Jesus Christ, I need to go and download

the game and help them.

But it's like... Six of them.

Yeah, all of them, exactly.

It's a different...

Yeah, it's a 3D version.

It's a 3D version with puppy.

That's Austin puppy, by the way.

And then just, it's all about the emotions here. And I mean, it works.
What can we do? It works. I didn't see any freezing families levels, but if you actually go...
Gardenscapes has those. Like the puzzles and everything.
They are people freezing. You need to light up the fireplace yeah but that's like

it's an evolution

of freezing because here

I mean

evolution of freezing

you have multiple levels of freezing families

and this is it

so it's like again like the whole

kind of plot from

the very beginning is just

divorce and whatever else and then you have all these and then you have these pins and this is the devil evolution that I'm talking about in here it's the pins before it was all only a matching now you have again you see there's no things here but still oh now they are again they are. Again, super complex, one-minute long video

where, like, shit ton of stuff is happening.

So you need to keep up, like, what's actually happening.

You started at the door.

You got kicked out.

Then you moved to a different place.

Then you had to do this, all the pins.

Then, again, you appear in this freezing room.

One minute long.

So many things happening. And complexity at this pace.
It's disgusting, yes. But yeah, this is the play for Playrix now on Gardenscapes and even, I think, in the Homescapes as well.
But then if we go... Matchmasters is basically using all of the just gameplay with uh with people or just um something like this which is also very important for i mean not exactly the concept but the very important for the royal match and this is this is the these are trends on tiktok yeah so.
So they're definitely taking from whatever trend is popular on TikTok and then integrating those into ads now too. I've seen that.
Yeah. Match Match is doing this quite well.
Jesus Christ. I mean, they're using almost the same, just like the combination of decoration and then just a little bit of the gameplay then they have one kind of okay who cares who cares there is one signature ad which they have a green one where they show a lot of different faces and then just the gameplay.
Nothing else. I really don't understand how this game is making so much money, to be honest.
But I guess in terms of the UA, it doesn't really say anything about the actual game in general. I need to have figured something because as I showed you, this is the most stable growing game on the mobile.
This is the signature UA creative and they're running this for a while. There's the old lady on the right corner and a lot of different people.
So it's kind of... Battle Royale stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly, exactly.

So, you know, matchmasters.

There you go.

Anyway, and then,

before we go into the real stuff,

I need to just go quite quickly

because this is just the rock bottom,

I think, of the creatives, to be honest,

because it's even worse than Polaric stuff. is Project Makeover it's just gross this actually reminds me of interactive fiction ads oh yeah it's taken from there absolutely all the episodes choices and all of the I don't want to say it there you go all of the the fun stuff, but this is definitely from there.
Because people are used to see those in baking the days when they were scaling. And it was all about body shaming and just ridiculous stuff, like divorce and drama.
It's the same thing. But it's I mean I don't even know what's happening here seriously yeah see like what's happening yeah and this is they have, like this is like this, they have this hat,

which is basically split into, I think, three different parts,

which was the hook from like the beginning with the X and everything.

Then they have this hospital.

And then now there's multiple things.

Like it's, again, it doesn't really show the match three that much. You see? It's like, what is this? It's not even match-free.
Yeah, it's not match-free at all. I'll do some hyper-casual crap that runs currently.
Exactly. And that's been the biggest...
It's not innovation. It's just the change that all the match-free games had to do.
It's just that they don't show the gameplay. That's what we discussed.
They don't show the gameplay. In here, the whole the makeover stuff is just the UA play.
It's absolutely UA play. It was so big on the hyper-casual stuff that they implemented in here.
Look, cheating on a pregnant woman, I mean, what does this even mean? Why is this in the creative? Like, why? I mean, I know why. It's just converts and scales.
By the way, this game makes consistently 12 million a month. That's a straight line.
Yeah, I know. And the number of iterations stay they've done on the ua and like different makeover stuff and like the creativity is endless i'm not sure like where is this coming from but it's like guys like kudos to whatever like whoever is this is creating these scripts and everything i mean it's it's terrible to watch but but still like interesting, interesting evolution, honestly.
So yeah, we have all of this different stuff. And then let's go to the actual fun part, which is, which is what? The Royal Match.
The Royal Match, exactly. That's the Royal Match.
No, no, no, no. I don't want to show you.
New Masters. No, no, no.
I want to show you different things. Where is it? No, maybe I'll find it.
Anyway. So they, we have December.
This is January 22nd. No, February.
Okay. So we have all of these different things.
They started. It's just save the king.
This was like the signature first creative. All the drilling and then just trying to escape.
This was the first stuff they've done. And it worked so well because then, where is it? It's in the game and it's in the king's nightmare.
Just offset the retention and then just kind of create another level. Everything level, basically.
Everton level. Everton level, basically, right? Constantly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then we have multiple iterations on this.
It's, again, this is easy. It's just saving the king from fire.
He's maybe drowning in some cases. It's here, like, this is basically the whole thing they started doing.
Then if we go share this tab instead again. It's slightly advanced again.
It reminds us the higher budget stuff and the Hero Wars stuff. It goes to Polish and the overall quality goes at that level.
It's, again, quite evolving. Then we have this, which is, again, no ads and free-to-play.
This is another spin of the UGC stuff that they started doing heavily back in the 2023 with different faces from cameo which we called b actors but i mean i will show you kind of i mean it's still celebrities but not j-lo level celebrities yeah it's basically half of the crew from Suits. I think there was a guy from How to Solve a Murder and different stuff.
So this is what we have. And this is what I wanted to show you.
Oh, wait a second. What is this? Oh, pull the pin.
They don't run this anymore. No, no, no.
It was just like, you know,

they tried. They tried.

Because, why not?

You really need to, you know,

admit that they're like, when something

works, they

pop on the trend first.

It doesn't matter if it works for them or not.

They tested it.

Exactly. Because,

remember, you make

three millions a day.

Which means

No, this makes... trust tested it.
Exactly. Because remember, you make three millions a day,

which means... No, this makes

four or five. Okay, so

you make four or five a day, which

is, I mean, even better in terms of the

actual numbers. You know,

you need to basically spend like five

million a day.

You know, like...

You have to make everything. Yeah, exactly.
So yeah, you are next on the line like, hey, can I buy all of your impressions, right? So it's like this is happening and you have always problem, like two problems in the UA. You have small budget, you don't know where to spend it.
You have a high budget, you don't know where to spend it. Like it's the same problem problem it's just different levels of the problem with this level of budget you need to have really a lot of the creative concepts and not just iterations different creative concepts and then obviously using all of this korean kind of guy talking about uh match uh world royal Again, one minute long, escaping, saving, drowning.
Ah! And? There we go. Hello, hello, Mr.
Snake. Hello, hello, Mr.
Snake. So, I found out they started running the Snake in December 22.
And it wasn't a very big focus. It was always about this freezing, drowning, and fire and whatever else.
And it kind of quietly entered the mix. And they experimented with all these near-death scenarios, whatever.
And then they didn't use it for a while. I mean, it was running in the UA Channelics, but then the return of the snake kind of

happened in August 2023

and they started like kind of

using a lot of different iterations

and I think from

March 2023

if we go, no, we are

here, March 2023, this was like

the actual

another version, they

started using it quite heavily and way more often but in August 2023 it's just kind of returning into the whole UA and then in January 2024 and we can check that right away I mean we can do just January but I can I can do January 2024 in here right the way they started just leveraging that trend a lot because the assumption is that they took it from Kingdom Guard they didn't I thought they took it from Kingdom Guard but actually Kingdom Guard it from them. They came up with this 2022 as the first kind of company and game.
You see the Snake is still early, kind of visual style. But early this year, it was mainly Snake.
It's just like that, but more polished now, right? Yeah, more polished now and then what is interesting now they again moved from the snake to my dear co-hosts what I'm always talking about the slingshot catapult the rocks rocks. Different things like this now.

No, this is now, it's rocks,

it's balls,

it's this maze, and

physics.

Yes, physics basically.

And this is everywhere

in different iterations.

The evolution is just incredible.

This is also, oh wow,

awesome.

Oh wow, haven't seen this yet? Yes, we actually because it's new wow it's new and you know what is yeah that's different and you know what is this ai ai yeah ai of course it's all ai how i know because i work like this Exactly. And it's 10 seconds.
So it's all AI. It's everything here.
It's AI. And they're jumping on this trend.
Why? Because they follow very closely. One genre and one genre only.
Do you know which one? Exactly. Because every time...
You know how this chain works? Evony. Oh, then it's kingdom.
Evony. Yeah, Evony trying everything.
And then it's royal match. It's just taking everything from Forex.
The slingshot, kind of. The trampoline and everything.
The sharks, basically in in the hooks it's all coming from Forex so they're smart because they're looking outside of because they're having the same strategy as Forex now to pretty much lower the CPI on the highest total adjusted market as possible we don't care now what you play just come in and this is again different variations of that physic based creative it's it's just it's great and this is exactly what royal kingdom is using as well uh to be honest we can maybe try to check the royal kingdom as well but it's going to be exactly i mean we just discussed that means that the whole ua market is going to turn to this yeah quite quickly every single genre we need to say they're not going to be able to do it easily because you see the level of again complexity, polish the whole setup they have it's just you... Yeah, product onboarding.
Yeah, you can't easily copy this. You can't easily copy this.
So, yeah, if we go to Royal Kingdom... But this is the setup only for the big guys.
This is only for the big guys. Small guys can't do this setup.
The main problem with this, it's like trying to copy Supercell. You can't copy Supercell if you're not Supercell.
Yeah, but you look, this is Royal Kingdom.

Here we go, Snake, all again.

But then all different things,

again, saving him from literally drowning.

Here, this is also kind of

what they took from Royal Match.

Royal Match went big on those celebrities and you know let me just show you that because it's fun sorry they never went for some kind of very high celebrity promotion did they? kind of yes with who? it's just what's the Simon Koval Po? The American Idol guy? The American Idol guy. The whole American Idol crew actually.
Let me check. I think it was November or October, 2023.
I feel like I wouldn't consider them JLo style A-listers. No, like look.
So this is like the Patrick Dathams from Suits. Like this was their strategy on Facebook mainly.
with all basically the whole crew from Suits and some of the rest of the different celebrities. You know these people.
Oh, here we go. We're still on the same tab if you're showing it.
Are we? Yeah, there we go. Okay.
So I was showing this basically which is Patrick Adams from from Suits they were really really big on on this on YouTube and this is this is the part of that that American Idol kind of creatives this is just the other version was just Simon playing in the in where whatever changing room and this is it so they were quite big on these uh celebrities and then just okay look i have no idea who is this but i guess this is the part of the american idol as well anyway so yeah are we uh almost because i need to wrap up really soon i I know, we are almost done. This is just, this is it, basically.
This is basically it from the whole UA perspective. So I can actually stop sharing and then just say it's near-death experience, basically, which is the better version of creativesives um saving whoever which already forced upon candy crush creative strategy yeah then we have freezing families which uh kind of now going into the like gossip harbor and the merch genre basically because they're using only freezing families nothing else and then we have the, not celebrities, but kind of user-generated content slash influencer stuff, which is coming from Cameo, by the way.
So we discussed that. And that's what's working.
And obviously Playboss. So all of the fun stuff.
Phew, Jesus Christ. I think we covered everything match three today.
I hope so.

Yeah.

Anyone gonna do a few sentences

at the end? Like, my

takeaway is that meta-wise

and, like, the whole market-wise, it's pretty

much gonna just

cement itself as much as possible

and either somebody comes up with, like,

something, I mean,

unique UA trick, basically, that is able to penetrate the market, they don't stand the chance basically, including Royal Kingdom. As for like, Royal Kingdom can get big, but it's going to be what Soda Saga is to Candy Crush, it seems.
Yeah. Yeah.
On that bombshell. Anything you want to add? I would take it from what I said before, if you want to play it.
I don't have anything else to wrap with. Yeah.
I think that's... We are good.
Good to go. Good to go.
Thank you very much for listening and watching this on YouTube please float us with all the comments you have all the different games that we should have covered but we didn't maybe we did it on purpose nobody will ever find out thank you very much for staying with us again this was a very long episode we're going to do it again anytime soon. Most probably next quarter with different genre.

Laura, again, thank you very much for coming.

Always.

It was beautiful.

Thank you.

And see you next time.

Also, join the Slack channel.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. bye there's even someone told me i didn't want to include it that King has interstitials in some geos, after levels.

I've seen those.

Yeah.

They do?

Someone told me that was closed with the King,

and I haven't seen it, so I didn't want to include it,

but he said that in some geos they have interstitials after levels.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Interesting.

No, hard to find a bad king playing indonesian that's uploaded a video of them being bad but do i do i get the drive that like pretty much putting ads now into like tier one match three game would kill it in a way that like somebody would just overspend over you no so basically they remove ads as soon as you don't as you make an IAP purchase you don't see the boosters anymore even for the Indonesians no yeah if you make a purchase that takes away the ads or the placements for the ads straight away but you still never see them if you're a D1 player you do after a while if you don't yeah like I showed you showed you on the first video. Okay, okay.
That's what I misunderstood. So you still get them even in tier one geos, but you just need to be like 3,000 something, whatever.
Or a non-spender. I'm sure they look at the average time to spend, and if you're a certain point beyond that, you haven't spent yet, even if you're in the U.S.
or tier one country, I don't see a reason why you wouldn't show them ads. And then if they do spend, let's say they watch ads, they're watching them, and then all of a sudden they buy a package and then they're a spender, then you just take the ads away.
Yeah, exactly. Pragmatist, Laura.
You'd be surprised how many people in these companies are not pragmatists. Well, this is what I was trying to get with when people approach making these games.
I feel like everyone wants to take shortcuts or find easy ways and be like, oh, this is fine. I'll rationalize this.
We're, you know, just these are the things you have to do. This is the most comprehensive match three thing anyone's ever done.
I think they're comprehensive things, but updated one to the current one, I guess. Or I know the dissertation work on Match 3 or puzzle games.
Dissertation? Yeah, the Genoa Chance one, I think. That's like giant, giant, like goes all the way to like 82.
i have not seen that one you need to see this i need to send this i'm i won't lie i'm a little disheartened by like the current i want to see more coming from match three i i feel like we no one's done a lot of experimentation on the engine the only one i've seen seen is Monster Hunter Puzzles. They started experimenting with diagonal matching.
And then they took something called, they froze the board for a certain period of time. And you had to make as many matches as possible.
That's core engine innovation. I have not seen many studios try.
And I just, what makes me so frustrated about it, about this is that I can't tell if

people are just scared and they just want guaranteed win or guaranteed income that they don't want to deviate too far, but that runs counter to what players are saying they want. So we keep seeing more or less very, very similar things coming out where the engine's the same, a lot of the specials are the same.

The, it's, it's also sort of like decorator or lightweight meta and it's i don't know i'm i'm i guess i'm bored i want to see more i want to see people trying new things but i'll send you this one but this is like for me when i was doing the match three thing or click to match, this goes all the way to Chainshot 85

and it does this giant

thing up until

Luxor or something.

There you go.

Can you send this to me? Sure, sure, sure.

It literally connects the dots all the way to

the first game because the

Chainshot game actually is the

first puzzle game and it's

this... I would just like to keep this in the recording.
I'm sure you can. We can at the end.
We can at the end. We are at the end thing.
Yeah, I can put it in the end. Yeah, that's true, actually.
This is super true. But I can get to it back.
They're talking about tile match and bubble shooters here, too. So this is looking more puzzle.
Yeah, this is a whole puzzle. This is not matching.
Oh, this is puzzle. It just goes all the way to the first game, and then there you go.
Let's look at some creatives from a big one pixel man. Okay.
Am I a big blob? You're definitely blurry.

I am a blob.

Okay, but it's fine.

Don't worry.

It's going to work.

It's going to work.

Because I changed the Wi-Fi, so that's why.

I hear you.

Okay, perfect.

Let's see.

Let's see how it goes.

Anyway, so creatives that work. Hello, everybody.

Welcome back.

Welcome back.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Yeah.

Watching this in the post-crazy scene.

Obviously, as usual.