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

Speaker 1 When you make a match 3 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.

Speaker 1 And I define a puzzle player as those that play these match 3 games because they like playing the levels. So the level is the most important part of your core design of the entire match 3 game.
So

Speaker 1 simply copying a board, like the same board, same obstacle, same whatever.

Speaker 1 Yes, but no.

Speaker 1 But no.

Speaker 3 This is a no bullshit gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail, powered by our ad monetization, game design, and user acquisition triple threat expertise.

Speaker 3 Welcome to the two and a half gamers, the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles.

Speaker 3 Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry.

Speaker 4 I'm super excited. Hello, everybody.
Welcome. This is Two and a Half Gamers and

Speaker 4 a new special episode. Well, not new that much, but it's a special episode because you loved the merge market overview.

Speaker 4 So, we brought Laura again back and she's gonna help us review match-free category.

Speaker 4 Uh, but before we do that, my name is Matil Ancharic.

Speaker 2 I'm Felix Broberg,

Speaker 4 we are your hosts, and we have Laura.

Speaker 4 Welcome, yes,

Speaker 2 welcome, Laura.

Speaker 4 Super excited to have you again on the podcast.

Speaker 4 All right, so what should we do?

Speaker 2 Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me do let me do a quick announcement before we get started because this is going to be a monster, epic, long podcast episode.

Speaker 2 And I can see by the notes it's going to be a really good one. But I just wanted to say, if you are, let's say, if you're Vietnamese, if you're Chinese or South Korean or Japanese

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You just need to go down here, press captions, and then you will be able to get it in your native language.

Speaker 2 So everyone can take benefits of this great learning bonanza that we're about to share.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 4 for you, I'm excited enough. Stay tuned for,

Speaker 4 well, gonna be a big announcement

Speaker 4 early next year, very tight to what just Felix mentioned. So, yeah, we can get back to the episode.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, I'm just gonna sit tight and enjoy the ride, I guess.

Speaker 4 I mean, we are again like eye candies, Felix, like the last time.

Speaker 2 I dressed up for this reason, just to have an astrodon. There will be a lot of UA, I think.

Speaker 1 There has to be a lot of UA.

Speaker 1 If we were recording this like five years ago, I'd say, yeah, you two can just tell jokes and chime in.

Speaker 2 But everything's changed so much that

Speaker 1 Admon is super important now, as are like just how you bring in users. UA has changed, I think, for matters.
UA has changed entirely.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 The only problem with

Speaker 4 how UA changed is basically the history in SensorTaro, which goes back to 2022.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I have some interesting points,

Speaker 4 which is a shameless plug, obviously, because I wrote an article about fake ads, OG, basically Nexters and Hero Wars, which was 2000, going back 2018 and 19. And I have some interesting stuff there,

Speaker 4 which definitely helped with the UA for PlayRigs and

Speaker 4 their

Speaker 2 whole portfolio.

Speaker 2 Should we start?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do we want to start with Jakob? Do you want to show our little slide deck? And I can start with just why match three is so important.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

Speaker 4 Let me guess.

Speaker 2 Money.

Speaker 2 No, no, no. This would be, again, as usual, This won't be starting in money.
This will be starting with the history lesson.

Speaker 2 Because we like to do those here and we also like to kind of make stuff more put into context.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you don't need to then think too much on like what's what's happening here.

Speaker 4 Reminds me our discussions in in China. So if that's gonna be tied to that history lesson, why why we are better or not better, but why we are more used to like casual games rather than just

Speaker 4 them used to play really hardcore stuff.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 4 I think this is it.

Speaker 2 So shall we do first the history one? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Laura. Am I taking? Oh, you want me to take this?

Speaker 2 Yeah, sure. So

Speaker 1 I can't take credit for the timeline, though, because Jakob made that.

Speaker 2 I just use your template. No worries.
No worries.

Speaker 2 Maxry's been around forever.

Speaker 1 I think it's

Speaker 1 one of the earliest games that

Speaker 1 I imagine most people have at least heard of Bejeweled because that's kind of where it started.

Speaker 1 And then you can't talk about Match 3 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.

Speaker 1 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 3 really into the market.

Speaker 1 They were smart. They stuck with what they knew.
Candy Crush Soda came out a couple years later.

Speaker 1 I remember when I worked at Kang, I remember playing some of the early builds of Soda and being like, this is amazing.

Speaker 1 Because unlike Candy Crush One, that's when they started experimenting with things like gravity. So pieces don't have to fall down.
They can also go up.

Speaker 1 And then we have kind of Playryx came in.

Speaker 1 Player X started with Fishdom.

Speaker 1 Fishtum, I don't really, I know it's important, but when i look back at playrix's history it's gardenscapes and home homescapes that came out a couple 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 it was well seriously i think gardenscapes was the one that they changed how they they kind of changed how specials worked how you got specials on the board um

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It doesn't just need to be a saga map, which was the popular way to show metaprogression

Speaker 1 with games like Candy Crush and Candy Crush.

Speaker 2 I remember that article back in the day that it was like the death of a saga, and everybody was talking about it.

Speaker 2 Like, no more saga maps, and everything will be now visualized through these renovations and whatnot.

Speaker 2 But just like adding one tidbit there, Gardenscapes for the OG people was originally a hidden object game.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But yeah, if you really Google Gardenscapes back, back, back the way down there, the memory line, you'll see Gardenscapes Hidden Object games.

Speaker 4 Garden Scapes was actually my first Match 3 game that I played, like an idiot, and also the same thing with Homescapes.

Speaker 4 I think I, I mean, like an idiot at that time, because that was like 2015 16 oh yeah 16 17 i was what like three 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 the all the lives in one game and they just go play the 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 on scapes and homescapes.

Speaker 2 Well, Mate, I have a question then. If you played to level four or five hundred with other motivations, what was the name of the butler?

Speaker 4 Austin.

Speaker 2 Hey, okay, you did it.

Speaker 2 That was way too easy. Yeah, that was too easy.
That was way too easy.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 1 So we have Gardenscaped, Homescaped, and actually, surprisingly enough, they actually,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But the one thing I want to also say about Player X and Hidden Object is they have come full circle.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the Man and Masters game is out, which is Hidden Object with the Guardian Scapes meta.

Speaker 1 And then what they did with Hidden Object, because you have your, you know, 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 Hidden Object.

Speaker 1 So, yeah.

Speaker 1 And then we have Candivore. I mean, you put this in there.

Speaker 1 I have feelings on Candivore. I actually don't consider this a match 3 game.
I mean, it's just...

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let me just kind of explain why the list looks like this. And it's not because, whatever, somebody said so.

Speaker 2 So why we chose 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.

Speaker 2 That's why we literally chose the list, just to be clear regarding revenue size, because everything else basically from that point just gets very, very miniature compared to games like Royal Match, which makes 120 million a month currently.

Speaker 2 So that's the relevancy of the list. Of course, there are many important games in this evolution, like Bejewel, that was mentioned and stuff like that.
But again, this is not a five-hour long episode.

Speaker 2 This is it.

Speaker 4 Maybe it should be.

Speaker 2 Maybe it should be.

Speaker 4 A few hours long episodes.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 that was

Speaker 2 launched in 2017

Speaker 2 still kind of preserved very well. And if you look at the chart, and this is the most

Speaker 2 interesting part, they're actually hitting record revenue based on their current scale. And I think it's the only

Speaker 2 match 3 game in this whole chart that is currently kind of... hitting record revenue this year.
Oh, not this year, sorry, this month, this month, like pretty much going still up.

Speaker 2 So, I think they deserve a spot here, even though they're yeah, they're completely exotic,

Speaker 2 niche, and like it's something similar to Puzzle Quest. I had problems today starting it again.
Hopefully, it can at least start a little bit.

Speaker 4 Uh, yeah, but then there is also a question: we are talking on match 3.

Speaker 4 I mean, where is Toy Blast and Toon Blast?

Speaker 2 Those are three too much.

Speaker 2 Those are upscapes, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're out of here, Matt.

Speaker 4 I know, I know, but you know, in general public and for people, non-puzzle people, it's just it's almost the same.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. There's a different sub-genre, let's say,

Speaker 2 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, out of the list. So this is how Matchmasters look.
It's actually a PvP-based match tree.

Speaker 2 Similar to Puzzle Quest. Puzzle Quest is a very old, I mean, like

Speaker 2 2005 or 2000 something PC game where you were literally having like RPG based abilities and you were destroying your opponent.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So this is this is kind of the thing that kind of differentiates them out of the other other people here. So you see for instance here there's my turn and let's say I make a move here.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 For instance, here. Yep, there we go.

Speaker 2 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 and it gives him the kick there.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 seven years.

Speaker 1 Yep. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I remember correctly, with Matchmasters, they do more of their monetization based on buying those boosters pre-level to help you in the level, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like, those are literally like you can buy like cheat codes during PvP match, which is like unheard of in PvP style games.

Speaker 1 So they approach monetization a little bit differently.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 against an enemy Type Match 3 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.

Speaker 1 They didn't take that engine logic and just play apply it and then have two players play. They made fundamental changes to how that match through works.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Which, by the way, brings us to the current situation where Royal Kingdom was experimenting with similar mechanic, but I guess we'll get there.

Speaker 2 So yeah, let me switch back here and we can finish the timeline.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We also, besides the ones we mentioned, so we have we have King, we have Playricks.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's when Royal Match was the one that really came and decided, all right,

Speaker 1 we know how to make a better match three game. We can actually give King and

Speaker 1 Playricks a run for their money.

Speaker 2 Wait, I was going to stop you right there because I have a really funny story.

Speaker 2 I had a friend who worked at Unity when 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 why not? There were these

Speaker 4 different rumors that Glue, no, not even rumors, the Glue kind of decreased the UI spend because they didn't want to compete with the Polarix because it was just like pushing the CPIs.

Speaker 2 It was the time when Plerigs were fighting matching mention

Speaker 2 when the original kind of setup of those fake ads started and they copied their own kind of setup.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 Great deal, I'm sure.

Speaker 4 Good old days.

Speaker 2 Can you just imagine someone from Player Swalking is like, all of it today.

Speaker 1 The only two, so we'll talk. I think we can, I think Dream is a little bit

Speaker 1 Royal Match and Royal King.

Speaker 1 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's like what what counts as a really good match 3 engine.

Speaker 1 So we can come back to those. The only other two are Apple Even's Project Makeover and Modern Community.

Speaker 1 I don't know, have any of you played Modern Community?

Speaker 4 Not really. I don't think so.

Speaker 2 Is that a Soft Launch one?

Speaker 1 It's not, I don't think it's in Soft Launch anymore. It's been out since at least a year.

Speaker 1 But what they tried to do was they looked at,

Speaker 1 it's match three.

Speaker 1 but they did heavy narrative landscape and then they took its renovation and then also they took like a avatar decorator and then kind of like

Speaker 4 i saw this game it's everything

Speaker 1 yeah it's everything it actually has a strong core it has a very strong core puzzle so kind of core engine design but it 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

Speaker 1 I imagine they would have hoped it had done better than it did.

Speaker 1 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 we have kind of like renovation we know we know that works people like you know fixing up stuff yeah and then you come in with like all right what else can we do with it what shows were popular people the same that same audience probably likes uh project runway they probably like um 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 was very much more on the

Speaker 1 what um

Speaker 1 basically the the style up 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 terrible

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 keep it alive by modernizing it, even kind of big swings that require going back and rebalancing a lot of the levels.

Speaker 2 You're right. This is definitely different than Project Makeover.
Doesn't seem like a content pipeline.

Speaker 1 It's high fidelity. It's,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 1 that's a video. It's super high fidelity.
They've invested a lot in this game. You can tell it was.

Speaker 1 This is a huge content pipeline.

Speaker 2 Huge content pipeline. Okay.
But the scale of it doesn't seem

Speaker 2 like 30k

Speaker 2 is nice for a small company, but not for IPLAVIN, definitely.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but Applevin is really not the gaming company.

Speaker 4 And, you know like they're trying to to get rid of all the gaming assets right so yeah yeah it doesn't really matter that much okay if you pop if you pop to slide five

Speaker 1 um I took I wanted to do a breakdown yes so I looked at worldwide revenue cross-platform just 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, has a, I think the levels are better, the engines better.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 you can't fault them for anything they've done.

Speaker 1 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 think it's, 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

Speaker 1 make it space.

Speaker 2 It doesn't really

Speaker 4 seem like they're spending that much either.

Speaker 1 I don't think so. I think where the how it currently performed, I imagine they're pulling out investment in it, would be my guess.

Speaker 1 Um, but yeah, so when uh yak was showing the top games, these are the these we specifically chose these games because these are the games that are dominating the market.

Speaker 1 So we're looking at like Candy Crush, Gardenscapes, Homescapes, Royal Match, Soda, Fish Dumb, uh, Farm Hero Saga is also on here. The one that is in uh Mandarin, I believe, is Anipop.

Speaker 1 That's that's it's

Speaker 1 no, it's um Chinese, Chinese one, okay.

Speaker 2 What is the lifetime revenue of all these games combined to date? Just so the listeners can have an idea of how big

Speaker 2 notice, like total lifetime revenue of all the games combined to date.

Speaker 2 I just want to see if you look it up. Yeah, I just want the listeners to get an idea of like overall.

Speaker 1 Okay, I think we should look it up for an exact number because I believe what Candy Crush has cost is it's definitely what and three billion would be at least.

Speaker 2 I could royal matches somewhere up there too.

Speaker 1 I mean these are billion dollar games

Speaker 4 Click it and then

Speaker 4 in the meantime we can we can we can make a bet or guess I'll say 20 billion is that enough

Speaker 4 that's a lot I would say 10 but that's that's not that much I guess yeah 15 15. Let's see five fifteen

Speaker 2 fifteen all together. I think that's low.

Speaker 4 Hey, really? I think that's low too.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 Just these three is already why don't you just put it in one in one tap?

Speaker 2 And come on,

Speaker 2 okay. Let's start.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Speaker 4 big listeners are trying to find

Speaker 2 a lifetime revenue completely.

Speaker 2 And if you're listening to this, you take a guess as well. And whoever gets closest wins the hoodie.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 I already lost because now it's 17. You're not even in the half.

Speaker 2 Wow. Whoa.
Okay. So we're already at at 17.
Yeah. 20.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 2 I think only the small ones remains.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we'll look at it so you know, not that far, Felix.

Speaker 2 Interesting. Oh, wait a second.
We forget the fish one.

Speaker 2 That will steer the pot. And then

Speaker 4 I think

Speaker 4 that's nothing.

Speaker 2 That's quite small. King Royal Kingdom as well.

Speaker 1 Well, while you put this this together, since like 2023,

Speaker 1 Match 3, just IAP, roughly pulls in about like all of the games across platforms,

Speaker 1 about 400 million a month.

Speaker 2 Wow. So basically, go back, Remo, to your beautiful thing together.
So for our listeners who are just listening, we have 23.5 billion in lifetime revenue of these, what is it, nine games? Or yeah.

Speaker 4 Much masters.

Speaker 1 When I looked at this deep, like when I was pulling some of these,

Speaker 1 pulling in all this data,

Speaker 1 since about the same time, since about March 2023, 85% of the revenue that

Speaker 1 we're talking about, this like 400 million a month comes from the top nine games.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 insane. Kind of elite clubs.

Speaker 1 And you know what's insane?

Speaker 4 Like 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, like, yeah, let's just dominate the market

Speaker 4 in one year. Well, not in one year, in like

Speaker 4 last year, they became like the top right game. So it's that's insane.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we'll get to talk about them very

Speaker 2 in very big detail. But one last thing I wanted to mention here:

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 prominent as in RPG genre or somewhere else where they're like web shops are really, really kind of killing people.

Speaker 4 You can hear these anecdotes about

Speaker 4 the regular casual mom from US, whatever that means, doesn't really go to the web shop. It just plays on the mobile phone or website.
Whereas if you go to and check Forex or RPGs,

Speaker 4 people will get there just to get get additional value.

Speaker 2 But what was it? What was it? I think Playtika or something, something like that was like 50% already web store. Oh, 50%.

Speaker 2 Playtika 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 five grand, they send you an iPad with it installed with a web shop.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 4 that's a nice way.

Speaker 2 Anyway, just saying that what you see here could be probably bigger because these days are pretty old and they have different platforms and like facebook stuff also facebook facebook canvas and all that fun stuff and and yeah and websites and yeah yeah of course like this is mobile only yeah

Speaker 2 so so just saying okay all right sorry tangents but a good tangent i think

Speaker 1 yeah where did we end it up here yep here we were talking about this so i think um

Speaker 1 i love match three

Speaker 1 it is not i i mean i think it i still think of all the of the core engines it is the best one that combines luck and perceived skill without a doubt.

Speaker 1 And that's why, if you look and you're deciding, if you, I believe, if we go back to,

Speaker 1 I wanted to take a

Speaker 1 slide before this,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Um, and it is just, I think it's, oh, this is a general genres, but you look at this compared to any other puzzle segment, Match 3 just,

Speaker 1 it is hands down the most dominant engine type. And I think it's just down to the basically you play.

Speaker 1 A lot of it's based on, well,

Speaker 1 you think you're actually becoming a master at what you do, but there's actually so much behind the surface 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 is the closest to in my opinion to that yeah

Speaker 1 yeah i think i made you squirm with that comment mate

Speaker 4 no i'm just i was just thinking um

Speaker 2 like if you're on like under control of what's happening on the board and not always you actually are i think the the the term we're trying to say here is that it has the best illusion of control yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 4 because i i i have this example of Royal Kingdom. It's all like, oh my God, after the episode

Speaker 4 we did, I was like, it has it, 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.

Speaker 4 Because all the games now are definitely easier. I started thinking about

Speaker 4 what I'm doing. And then it's like, oh my God, this is great.

Speaker 4 I feel so powerful.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Now I understand what's happening.

Speaker 1 The graph, I was thinking, sorry, sorry, Higaby, you're like, yes, this slide, this slide, this slide, it's, it was the first slide. That's where we're looking at puzzle sub-genres.

Speaker 1 And match three, the only thing that has kind of eaten into the match three web share or the market share is actually what we discussed last time, which was

Speaker 2 grid merge or merge two. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. It could actually begin than Blast.
Yeah, it seems so.

Speaker 1 There's only two games that really are top charts in Blast, and those are Toy and Tomb Blast.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that also brings me, by the way, to a little bit of off-topic comment that

Speaker 2 Peak games, like at its best of being the click-to-match company, is now having its next best game, not being a Match Plus game, but being Match 3D. Oh,

Speaker 2 Match Factory.

Speaker 2 So this continuation also didn't happen. That's, I guess, we see the chart not really continuing here.

Speaker 4 Also, they are literally printing money on Match Factory. It's just the KPIs are insane.

Speaker 4 Insane. And when I say that, I mean it because I kind of know firsthand it's just.

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, what do you do?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So there's now this pivot towards what other types of puzzle games can we make. And this is why we have Tile Match.

Speaker 1 This is why we have the Match 3D and various spin-offs of that or the like Hexasort, all of those.

Speaker 1 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 three,

Speaker 1 basically the match three market, how it works, and what we were saying before.

Speaker 1 All the

Speaker 1 trying to your 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

Speaker 2 because they're pulling the strings behind you.

Speaker 2 What was your role a king again?

Speaker 2 Pulling the strings behind you, pulling the strings, yeah, string master, like puppet master,

Speaker 1 I took a quick look at,

Speaker 1 I wanted to figure out, okay, well, what's going on?

Speaker 1 Are people still trying? And the answer is yes. People are like, different studios are releasing new match 3 games.
So I think I went back.

Speaker 1 I tried to pull 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's, I wish it was, no, it's not enough.

Speaker 1 Matching Story has come out, but that's now looking at hybrids. Now we're taking match three and merge.

Speaker 1 That's actually doing quite well, but it's not pure, that's not purely a match three game. Playricks has come out with at least three more games: Aquamatch, Family Scapes, and Roomscapes.

Speaker 1 Tencent is trying to make happy match. I believe

Speaker 1 Anna Pop is Tencent, if I remember correctly. That game is at least 10 years old.
Super, it was, it's the strongest performing match 3 game in China. And they haven't, I don't think anything else has.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm sorry. I misspoke.
It's not Tencent. It's Happy Elements.
It's Happy Elements.

Speaker 1 And then you have Chrome Valley Customs, which is Space Ape Supercell. Makeover Match Tactile.
Monster Hunter Puzzles from Capcom and Truckstar by Century Games.

Speaker 1 Those are kind of the, I know there's more.

Speaker 1 Don't flood us with comments. I know there's more.
I was just trying to.

Speaker 2 Yeah, please flood us with comments. We love that.
We love that. Yeah, please.

Speaker 4 Yeah, throw everything at us. Yeah, yeah, please do.
Please do.

Speaker 1 But I was trying to pick out the ones like, okay, who's still trying?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's tough. When I looked at the, of the new games, of anything that has launched, most of the games have launched prior that in the top 30 have launched prior to 2023.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 And that's it.

Speaker 4 And that's it. Yeah, that's it, because now they're kind of going down heavily because Truckstar is just taking over.

Speaker 1 Oh, I did pull this.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think they probably intentionally scaled back UA. That's how I would read this.

Speaker 2 And Truckstar.

Speaker 4 We had Mitri from Chrome Valley Customs on the podcast talking about

Speaker 4 like how

Speaker 4 very strong competition and now it's just very hard because you just can't compete honestly.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 There's 480 in the UA team.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so it's just

Speaker 4 very tough.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, you can't really compete.

Speaker 1 Same thing with when we discussed Merge 2, Microfon, they have

Speaker 1 some of the top games except for Moon Active's Travel Town.

Speaker 4 Yeah, they're now they have higher revenue combined than

Speaker 2 Traveltown itself, yeah.

Speaker 4 And they have also like a few other games there, so it's just basically they're the biggest merch gaming company now.

Speaker 4 Well, I would say out of nowhere, but that's not definitely out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 Not out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 Let's see, I'm

Speaker 1 very bullish on the studios in China coming out with some of the strongest puzzle games.

Speaker 4 That's what we discussed with Evan and the guys in China. Like, they really want to go

Speaker 4 to penetrate the puzzle market, and it's just about

Speaker 4 it's I mean, about time that, like, the when, not if, but when,

Speaker 4 and as soon as they do it, then

Speaker 4 yeah, it's gonna be again interesting, uh, interesting uh, UA competition as well.

Speaker 2 Hello, Unity. I'd like to purchase all your impressions, please.

Speaker 4 Okay, no, no, no, you know what's gonna be hello, Unity. I would like to buy you and then just run into your inventory the same decision.

Speaker 2 That's That's what's going to happen.

Speaker 4 Well, I want to ask, or not ask, but kind of a comment on this. You see

Speaker 4 Match Factory and Tile Match and all the games, which is 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.

Speaker 4 So the question is: if you don't have this and you just think you can copy any other match-free game, like, do you think you can succeed? I mean, I most probably know the answer, but

Speaker 2 it's just

Speaker 4 how can you, how can you, 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?

Speaker 1 So, one, you can't.

Speaker 2 And this is,

Speaker 2 okay,

Speaker 1 when we looked at that market share graph, the revenue, you saw other.

Speaker 1 That's to me, that is where everyone else is like, oh my God, it's so easy to make a match 3 game. You just gotta make a board, make some pieces, and it's totally fine.

Speaker 1 That's what happens.

Speaker 1 It is not

Speaker 1 when I've worked with, I've worked with very, you know, I've talked to different Master 3 studios.

Speaker 1 And one thing that personally

Speaker 1 I'm just flabbergasted by is they go on thinking, oh, I'm just going to make...

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It does not work that way. Or I see the other mystery.

Speaker 2 The same retention won't be there.

Speaker 1 The same mistake.

Speaker 2 Explain why. Explain why.
So the lesson is understand.

Speaker 1 Because, okay, so what you see is the level.

Speaker 1 We can go a little bit

Speaker 2 to the core deep dive, I guess.

Speaker 2 So that

Speaker 1 if you look at half of these game loops, I actually,

Speaker 1 when you made in most cases,

Speaker 1 with the exception of a couple games, I would say like

Speaker 1 Township would be one, or anywhere where they have slightly different places to spend, the core loop of a match 3 game is pretty consistent.

Speaker 1 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 on a saga map.

Speaker 1 And a majority of that, your spend either goes, the only things you can typically buy are some sort of boosters. You have have battle passes now, or extra moves.

Speaker 1 And that's it. So people think it's like, oh, I can just do that.
It's no big problem.

Speaker 1 But what they, what, or, or, and they forget that, like, it's

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I define a puzzle player as those that play these match three games because they like playing the levels.

Speaker 1 So the level is the most important part of your core design of the entire match three game. So simply, if simply copying a board, like the same board, same obstacle, same whatever,

Speaker 1 yes, but no,

Speaker 1 but no.

Speaker 1 Or, and I see, like, I mean, there's businesses that have tried to start by being outsourced level design studios.

Speaker 1 And what 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.

Speaker 1 There's when you, when you, well, do you actually want me to go into here, kind of like what the core components of a match three game?

Speaker 2 Sure, where else? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Where else?

Speaker 2 Going down a rabbit hole. That's what I'm thinking.

Speaker 2 As deep as we can go until we hit like rock bottom.

Speaker 1 So the way I break it down, I call it core engine design. Again, we're just, we are, we are catering towards puzzle players, players that like these levels.
And I think

Speaker 1 to simplify it, I think

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, core logic is things like

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Technically, you actually have to be able to build that. And it's not easy because

Speaker 1 you have to make sure that the order of operations happens correctly, and you're not, the engine can basically handle that kind of input.

Speaker 1 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? Or do you have the right board size?

Speaker 1 What is your when you have those specials? Are the combinations the right combinations? So, I've seen games where they've

Speaker 1 experimented and they've done, they've created different bomb shape sizes. So, the typical when you have like a, oh, like in this, in

Speaker 1 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 spaces. Other games will do it.
So it's only three by three.

Speaker 1 That's very different in terms of how it sets up the level

Speaker 1 and how fast you progress the level.

Speaker 1 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, oh, perfect. You have here called the propellers.

Speaker 1 In Candy Crushed Soda, it's the fish.

Speaker 1 It's the little, it's, 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.

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because what you want to do is set up players for an almost win.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Let me tell you, there's going to be a lot of broken phones throwing them against a wall.

Speaker 1 But no, it is really important because this is like you need to feel like the game's on your side.

Speaker 1 And if it's actively not helping you, it can be hurting you.

Speaker 1 So, these things are things that I think sometimes are not considered when different studios or different companies want to start making a Match 3 game, which is why it's not just about the level.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's literally about these like very, very small nuances.

Speaker 2 Just by like Laura said, like 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.

Speaker 2 So think about like per move speed, like how much stuff I can kind of dish out. Suddenly it speeds up the whole game.

Speaker 2 So I was in this situation because I was designing not match three, but click to match game before. And like when we were deciding these things, like, yeah, let me tell you something.
It's very hard.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You have to test it, right?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 it's a couple things. One, when you, let's say you have a board clear, you have this great 5x5 bomb board clear.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 the other thing that i think what goes into speed is animations i've i mean animations can be absolutely beautiful but if they are

Speaker 1 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 overanimate a line clear.

Speaker 1 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 the color bomb, which is the when you have like a

Speaker 1 match a live line.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now you, let's say a player is going to spend an average in 10 levels.

Speaker 1 If it takes, or rather, 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.

Speaker 1 You don't want them, you don't want it slow, and then you're having less exposure to the level end.

Speaker 1 So these are things that I think people forget.

Speaker 1 The other thing that I think is often overlooked is just

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They can't be too detailed. This is small.

Speaker 1 Like, I, the other mistake I say 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Basically, the ergonomy needs to be top-notch because if you can't read it, you won't play it.

Speaker 4 That's why I don't play Candy Crush because I just

Speaker 4 can't.

Speaker 4 I couldn't really play Candy Crush because of the visual or everything. It's just, it's, I don't like it.
I can't read it well.

Speaker 2 Original, the original. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, all the original and any other king games, it's just

Speaker 4 too sweet for me.

Speaker 2 It's too

Speaker 2 I also feel like I'm gonna have a sugar overload just by looking at it.

Speaker 1 So actually,

Speaker 1 pull this up next to the Royal Match of Royal Kingdom, and then we can look at side by side. Now, I want to give King some grace because they did this first.

Speaker 1 And a lot of these rules have come out in the last five years. And Candy Crush is over 10 years old, right? So, and this goes back to

Speaker 1 how much you're going to go back and really change everything.

Speaker 1 That is a lot of work and can be quite disruptive.

Speaker 1 But you can see the visual parsing. It is much easier to see in

Speaker 1 Royal Match

Speaker 1 where the pieces are,

Speaker 1 where your next move is going to be, what the obstacles do, then Candy Crush is a little bit more difficult to suss out.

Speaker 4 That's why I like the Gardenscapes and Hope Scapes way more, because it's, again,

Speaker 4 way, way better visual kind of feedback, at least for me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, to keep in mind, this this is a product that's like 13, 14 years old.

Speaker 1 That's why I want to, I don't, like, I think we should, I think Candy Crush deserves the utmost respect. And again, these are rules that came out recently.
This is over 10 years old, right?

Speaker 2 So just as an example. Yeah, but it's dated, like, let's be honest.
Like, just saying, yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but

Speaker 4 any other new game

Speaker 4 they made, it's just not going to surpass the revenue of the original Candy Crush. That's just, that's how it is.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 And like all the time at conferences, yeah.

Speaker 1 How tired do you get? Like constantly, like, what?

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So you want to remove that element when you're making a match three board.

Speaker 1 Let's see. 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.

Speaker 1 I've seen that 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.

Speaker 1 If a level is too hard and we need to rebalance, it's just change the number of moves. To a degree, that's true.
But there's also part of that that it just, it's 100% not true.

Speaker 1 There's sometimes moves is not the main way to change difficulty. You actually have to understand all the elements of the board,

Speaker 1 the obstacles you're using, the obstacle mix. And changing a difficulty might be removing a specific obstacle, changing the board size.

Speaker 1 Everything, I think, gets slightly oversimplified.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 aspects that should be incredibly important to how levels are created are sometimes overlooked.

Speaker 1 I hope I didn't scare everyone off from making a match speaker.

Speaker 2 It's actually

Speaker 2 great.

Speaker 1 It's wonderful

Speaker 2 i can i can add on top of it uh last time i remember when we were doing this uh it was something like 10 of the levels we made actually made it into the game regarding their quality and like 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 don't like few people those are like 10 plus

Speaker 2 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 pair is gonna eat them out because they're gonna eat them out day one anyway anyway and then they're gonna turn and move to a different game

Speaker 2 yep

Speaker 1 100 true so it'd say

Speaker 1 i mean i

Speaker 1 i love match three i still think i think it's fun it's just there is it is i wish it was given we all all understand

Speaker 1 that RPG games are complicated.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The only thing is what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, there's a lot more, like, you're looking at more components. Like, you're getting shards of something to make something else.
There's different values you're balancing.

Speaker 2 To be honest, like, when I was working on a matched

Speaker 2 click-to-match game, and when I was working on Battle Legion, the RPG, that actually seems more simple to me because I can like I can create like Clash Royale style gacha-based economy like in spreadsheet in like two days.

Speaker 2 That's not the problem. The combat and the mechanics of the gameplay, that's the problem, of course.

Speaker 2 But the economy, the balancing, it's not that like, for instance, clash rail, everybody knows clash rail balancing, like the sheets are out there on the internet.

Speaker 2 But do you know the dynamic difficulty of these levels? Do you know the churn indexes? Like how, you know, which

Speaker 2 churn percentage you're looking for, like how many people should convert and like leave based on your churn ratios and all those like specific, you know, secret levers that are being pulled in behind like

Speaker 4 maybe actually laura knows but any any other person in the industry doesn't

Speaker 4 like well i will gladly welcome you on the rpg side of the of the corporate computer i think what uh what laura is trying to say it's on the 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.

Speaker 2 It's that that that

Speaker 2 hard.

Speaker 2 That's why you can even do like a lot of these RPGs in the market. Like, think about it, like, how many RPGs are made during the year and how many of those scale up.

Speaker 2 It's it's not hard, like how many match 3 games actually scale up.

Speaker 2 Can we go back to the match 3?

Speaker 4 This is mature, yeah. It's just comparison with the different genres.

Speaker 2 No worries, you're doing R CND great.

Speaker 4 Let me pull out the knife from your back

Speaker 4 when I see you next time.

Speaker 2 Anyway, anything else, Laura? Or should I move to Meta?

Speaker 1 We can move to the meta. The only thing I will summarize is like

Speaker 1 it's the right finding the right balance of difficulty.

Speaker 1 So understanding how the board elements work, how understanding the different combinations can create different levels of difficulty and knowing how to work that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Royal Match has ice, so I make ice. They have crates and boxes, I make crates and boxes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that works for the first hundred levels, but just as a reminder, these games go up into thousands of levels, and

Speaker 1 you always need to be making new obstacles. And for every new obstacle you make, then that's that they also, you are now combining them with the obstacles you have before.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The level designers need to have a very good understanding of what type of difficulty and fun it creates for the player.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so last time we discussed this, I think it was like

Speaker 4 Gardens Caves and Host Caves, they had what like 14,000 levels or something like that?

Speaker 4 Candy Curse is 15,000. Yeah, and how often do they introduce new obstacles and features every two weeks, two weeks cycle, 40 levels?

Speaker 2 I think it's the K next now.

Speaker 4 In the standard in the industry, but new features and new obstacles.

Speaker 2 One more new mechanic.

Speaker 2 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 I imagine these level designers are pretty well paid.

Speaker 2 I guess so.

Speaker 2 I hope so.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Do not try to teach the player new things. If it has water in it, it should, like, say, like, um, or we can use this one.
Oh, the egg is probably not the best, best example in the royal match example.

Speaker 1 Um, 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.

Speaker 1 You know, that a plate is going to break. Um, just because for any matchly player, you know, boxes are going to be, are going to block a square and you, they're going to break.
Like, those types of

Speaker 1 connections that people, that players and people already know are the things you want to lean into.

Speaker 1 So, importance of the visuals, matching the design, and then also working with already exists in game.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 So, you create a property metrics basically that your engine or your game can handle, and then you just change the parameters.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Then you just scale the parameter and like two matches near it. And suddenly it's a completely new mechanic, which one was, I don't know, snowman, the other one was ice.

Speaker 2 But now you require two matches. Then you create another parameter which is matched by the same color of a piece.

Speaker 2 Again, within the same exact property, we just now create three different mechanics from the pretty much the same property. And this kind of goes on and scales and scales.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but then you end up with like, I don't know how many,

Speaker 2 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 have very very worse kind of churn rates very bad churn rates on the levels and you need to pretty much get rid of them and that that goes on and on forever

Speaker 1 There's one thing, well, this is where a good level designer is incredibly important.

Speaker 1 So I've been in a situation where we did basically, we were looking at, we were trying to analyze churn by specific obstacle.

Speaker 1 And there was one obstacle that generated that just like consistently had, if it was used in a level, those levels had higher churn than levels without it.

Speaker 1 And what they ended up doing, instead of going back and having to, let's just say it was in 500 levels, that means you have to go back and remake 500 levels.

Speaker 1 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 very, it's very, very talented.

Speaker 1 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 times related.

Speaker 1 And they're like, in the case where it works against them, they hate it.

Speaker 1 They found a new way to use it where it actually, they were able to reduce churn when it was used just purely by where they put it in and what type of levels it was in. So

Speaker 1 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 to find people that know how to make it fun.

Speaker 2 Yeah, those are level designers, not game designers. Different kind of people.

Speaker 4 Most probably from Turkey.

Speaker 2 Want to make it work? Hire a Turk.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 so let's go down the meta rabbit hole.

Speaker 2 I guess this will be a little bit more simpler.

Speaker 2 So let's start with Candy Crush.

Speaker 2 Candy Crush, the original one, as we have it here. I don't know if I'm going to finish the level, probably not.

Speaker 4 You can't speak speak and play. Yeah,

Speaker 2 not so much going to do this thing again. Anyway,

Speaker 2 so what these guys did

Speaker 2 was the original saga. You can see it here.
It was just 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I think it was spreading like wildfire on Facebook because of that mechanic, and then they had to turn it off for like farm.

Speaker 4 You can pretty much go into YouTube and then just do Candy Crush 2012

Speaker 4 or something.

Speaker 1 If you pass me the screen share briefly, I can show the original versus a version from 2022.

Speaker 2 I think I have it somewhere.

Speaker 4 Come on, like keep lower the screen.

Speaker 2 You don't need to share all the time.

Speaker 1 I'll share. I don't, I promise to give it back.

Speaker 2 That's okay. That's assured.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 That's what he wanted to hear. That's what he wanted to hear.

Speaker 2 Yeah, let's gang up on Yaku for a while.

Speaker 1 For the meta, you can see how many changes they've made.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, so

Speaker 2 that's actually like two more, and there's like a third one that I'm gonna show now. But yeah,

Speaker 2 you see that, like how it can evolve.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 they needed to communicate progression somewhere because you know just an increasing number doesn't really help you kind of

Speaker 2 communicate that you're moving from point A to point B so they literally took the 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

Speaker 2 they were even going backwards, basically.

Speaker 2 So, in the first one, it's kind of a very, very cartoon-ish and doesn't really kind of feel that well. I think the current one feels very well.
Actually, I think they borrowed the Best Fiends

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I'll return the screen to you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, thanks.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 yeah so we have this kind of a very nice parallax and and that's pretty much it i don't think so there's anything else here that's kind of very significant candy crash 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 i got into it in those few days yet uh one of the interesting things is that they have these like golden levels that i i haven't seen this mechanic yet because most of these other games, I guess except Saga then,

Speaker 2 the Soda one, they don't really emphasize kind of looking back on stuff.

Speaker 2 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, Toy Blast and Tomblas, like Tomblas especially, they ditched the Saga, that was like the big change there.

Speaker 2 And again, you can't return back. Like that was the whole point.
Like you don't really backtrack. And here you can see you have these golden crowns.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I think it's the only one of all of these games that we covered where literally

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So yeah, that's I guess their progression which still works, but again, it's kind of out of fashion a little bit.

Speaker 2 But yeah, it has been updated numerous times.

Speaker 4 Like, what was the name of the candy crash game where they had this,

Speaker 4 I wouldn't say pets, but the characters, which was a little bit more free than that.

Speaker 2 Candy Crush French.

Speaker 2 That's also similar setup.

Speaker 4 There was, yeah, there was the parallax kind of saga map.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was the one where you actually had gacha system in it, if I remember correctly, where you can collect those friends' shards and then unlock them, get the abilities from them, switch them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it didn't work out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, then we have the also the saga,

Speaker 2 which is again a saga, but again, it's from left to right, and I guess that's it. The environment changed, as you see here in the middle.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, not really that much to it.

Speaker 2 And I guess other Candy Crash games, they are, I don't think so, they're even like going after Match 3 that much these days because I've seen that they are running Candy Crush Solitaire in Soft Lunch, they're running Candy Crash Match 3D in Soft Launch, and maybe a few more titles that I'm missing, not under Candy Crush name.

Speaker 2 Uh, but I guess that's it. If I understand if I remember the portfolio last time I saw it.

Speaker 2 So ever crash bandicoot?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 That that's yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Uh yeah, so that's it.
That's, I think, the current end of the saga and then where the saga ends.

Speaker 2 Um, I think the last big prominent game with the saga in puzzle genre, not match three, was Toy Blast.

Speaker 2 And afterwards, that's that's pretty much it if i remember from revenue standpoint okay uh moving on so if we switch to the slide here uh actually

Speaker 2 before there even was a saga uh there was this other thing which if i remember where did i put it in my sea of emulators uh

Speaker 2 and that's uh fishdom

Speaker 2 which is not saga it's not a restoration it's actually aquarium so you're literally having, yeah, it's decoration, but you have a fish tank.

Speaker 2 So, if I you literally see, like, I'm bumping here, it's a fish tank. I can feed the fishes

Speaker 2 and I can play the levels. And because this is a PlayRigs game, I can also play these other levels.
Yes, please. And we'll get to this very fast.

Speaker 2 So, before we finish this nicely

Speaker 2 completely not fake gameplay,

Speaker 4 it's called mini-game.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course, it's called like the icon, by the way, that you saw there, because there was not a level number, there was like the puzzle icon

Speaker 2 seems to be completely standardized now between the games. Like everybody's okay, like, okay, now it's time to play the puzzle that I'm here for because the creative showed me.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 this is the standard now, but just to finish the progression theme here, the game runs on these fish tanks that are basically a decoration environment, as Laura said. And if I understand correctly,

Speaker 2 I guess this is the like the first predecessor of this restoration meta that has done this setup. Because what you're doing is that you have different fish tanks that slowly unlock.

Speaker 2 For instance, we have this Tropica fish tank, and we need to populate it with different fishes, different decorations, different,

Speaker 2 I don't even know what this is.

Speaker 2 Decoration? Yeah, I guess more different decorations. And it will have uh

Speaker 2 like different star rating and setups and whatever but the important thing is that you have an idle progression into it actually

Speaker 2 because fishes make money if you come here fish

Speaker 2 if you

Speaker 2 if you feed them they give you they give you money uh if you go back here after some time again it's like an idle mechanic so you collect money from them and then you buy 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 fish just goes to like thousands and even millions so again this is some of those kind of the 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 doing really well Yeah, I think the last slide I dropped in their revenue chart.

Speaker 2 I think I have it somewhere here between the very last slide.

Speaker 2 Fish them. Yeah, fish them.
Yeah, so basically from Corona, it's just like super stable, around 30 million a month. And that's it.

Speaker 2 This nice little old fish tag is still making so much money. So much.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's like, I think that's very signature for play leaks 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.

Speaker 2 That's very important. They actually scale up like Township.

Speaker 4 But yeah, well, Township was. But

Speaker 2 if you look at Soda, and we would put Pulsoda here, it's actually scaled down and it's like, again, cruising at 10 million a month, but it's definitely not at its height.

Speaker 2 Whereas Player League's games usually go up as their life goes on.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the Firdom is North Firdam Township is a great example of this. They are just growing still.
Yeah,

Speaker 4 insane.

Speaker 2 So this is, I guess, the first kind of a setup of this restoration meta that started it later.

Speaker 2 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 on gardenscapes and homescapes.

Speaker 2 And we have this mansion that's been like here i think it's not even scrollable that much

Speaker 2 what's happening here

Speaker 2 okay uh 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 yeah honestly i don't think i don't think that matters so so this is not that rundown it's just old or something here is literally rundown in garden escapes and it's

Speaker 4 i think

Speaker 2 Again, if you Google it, it's the same setup that they were having in the Hidden Object Garden Escapes game. So again, same.

Speaker 2 What it does really well is that it's just much stronger visual feeling that you're moving and getting progression and like improving than a basic line with points that's moving upward.

Speaker 2 Very simple.

Speaker 2 What they did here compared to fish them, they ditched the whole like economy setup, what they were buying, fishes, maintenance, pretty much streamlined it.

Speaker 2 And by the way, keep in mind, and this is very important for like overall discussion, all of these metas, literally what they do, they like do this giant streamlined milestones until we arrive at what we have with Royal Kingdom.

Speaker 2 And I'll get to it. So this already streamlined fishdom where there's no maintenance of the fishes, no buying, no nothing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I've seen players that have like thousands of stars run down mention.

Speaker 4 They just don't care.

Speaker 2 They don't care. They just play the levels.
And you're not prohibited.

Speaker 2 You're not forced to kind of do any interaction with Austin or whatever. You can just play.
And I've seen those people.

Speaker 4 That's why I said, like, it's not, it doesn't matter if it's his house or who was up.

Speaker 2 The other big thing, of course, is the story narrative. There's a very big story narrative with into it.
And there's a lot of these like chit-chat conversations between each level.

Speaker 4 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 the renovation

Speaker 2 levels? 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 recipient market.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 I think it's important for players to have an understanding of why they're doing what they're doing.

Speaker 2 Okay. Yes.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 4 Okay, then

Speaker 4 let me rephrase the question. If there would be a terrible story, would this make the same amount of money?

Speaker 2 Would it break it? You mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Try to think of match three games with terrible stories that are doing well.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I love Candy Crush. I don't think it has a very strong story.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't think they give a lot of context into

Speaker 1 why TV is there or why Mr.

Speaker 1 Like I just, it's very light, but again, they that that they have the benefit of one of the first movers,

Speaker 1 yeah, yeah,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's it, and the visual improves, it gets better, and that's basically it.

Speaker 2 Uh, then we have project makeover, which took it a little bit uh higher, especially in the

Speaker 2 UA environment.

Speaker 4 It's uh, I guess, very kind of a I don't really want to put like pay as much attention to their creatives because it's just yeah I know it's cool

Speaker 2 we'll get to it so what these guys did is that

Speaker 2 they already started streamlining this because rather than having a map Whereas Gardenscapes, you've seen this, like you have this giant mansion, you can scroll all around it and like do all these things.

Speaker 2 And it has like, you know, giant foreshadowing of like, I can go here and renovate this, all of this, like, 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 is

Speaker 2 that we need to renovate, literally. Uh,

Speaker 2 and we may cover the person, yeah, yeah, and you need to like wash his face, uh, read a letter,

Speaker 2 or yeah, some there's some like more drama and story into this and like animations and stuff. Like, it's you know, quite, quite nicely done.
Like no, don't want to discount this.

Speaker 2 But yeah, we don't really need to watch it.

Speaker 2 And yeah, so you're basically renovating the person and the flight. So it's a little bit of like greedy core and a little bit of

Speaker 2 more like hair salon style game.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So you have a lot of these like different episodes that are different people. For instance, I don't know if I can even go to the episode.
Yeah, I can.

Speaker 2 So I already did one room here where I completely decorated the room. And yeah, see, this is how it was.

Speaker 2 Then you kind of nicely decorated.

Speaker 4 This looks like a great green. Very nice.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Why was she crying? Oh, you fixed it. Because she wasn't redecorated yet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, And you can return to your like different rooms and like check stuff and even change your original choices, I guess. So, yeah, you can do and play a little bit.

Speaker 2 Like, it reminds me a little bit of Sims, actually, but uh,

Speaker 2 yeah, that's what it is.

Speaker 4 I think that they put a little bit more of the Sims into the modern community rather than just here.

Speaker 2 That's I would agree with that.

Speaker 2 It's more like a TV show, actually.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 yeah, so we have we have this as project makeover.

Speaker 2 Continuing on the landscape, or not landscape, yeah. Candy War we already covered.
They have literally like a

Speaker 2 trophy road system similar to something like Clash Royale, where you just get more trophies as you beat more players because of PvP game.

Speaker 2 Again, this is an outlier, an exotic match 3 game, so we won't talk about it anymore.

Speaker 2 So let's talk Dream now. So if we go to Dream and specifically Royal Match,

Speaker 2 what Royal Match did with their meta, and let me lose the level here. Oh no.

Speaker 2 Oh no. Yeah.
Don't lose. It would be horrible.
So what these guys did is that they don't really redecorate stuff. They actually build stuff.

Speaker 2 And this is, again, one more simplification to the rule. Because already we ditched the whole kind of like giant mansion of redecoration as their makeover where they just have like one episode uh

Speaker 1 what i'm doing here may i 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.

Speaker 1 So it was just one iteration of adding a very, very, very light decorative element.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the 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 it.

Speaker 2 Like, you're not repairing anything, you're just building on like completely clean slate. That's it.
Like, you start levels with like a nice floor and then you go from there.

Speaker 1 So, if I was simpler, yeah, you don't have to make the assets then to the destroyed assets.

Speaker 2 That's what I'm saying. That again, it decreases the content pipeline.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 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 Infinim 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.

Speaker 2 And the big differentiator again is that these events run on very short timers.

Speaker 2 Of course, you see these kind of big ones, like for instance, this one, Team Treasure, which is three days or something, of course.

Speaker 2 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 had even shorter events, like for an hour, so on and so forth. So

Speaker 2 whole purpose of these kind of side events, usually there's like monetization events on the right and like engagement events on the left, is to reinforce playing the core.

Speaker 2 So, you don't really need to do anything. You don't really need to, I guess, this whole magic calderon thing is an exception where I actually needed to click something or whatever.

Speaker 2 Sometimes you need to like dig for treasure or whatever.

Speaker 2 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 pushes it through.

Speaker 2 Monopoly go uses the same thing, exactly the same thing.

Speaker 2 Regarding the visual, or let's say the other progression, a lot of games this year implemented, guess what?

Speaker 2 Collectible albums.

Speaker 2 Very trendy right now. Very trendy.

Speaker 2 Super trendy. So this was implemented in Royal Match this year in

Speaker 2 March.

Speaker 2 As I read that right on Game Refinery.

Speaker 2 In Project Makeover, this was implemented in April or june they also have this i just don't have it unlocked here and uh one more game that has it that i didn't mention is uh 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 understand developed by scoply in yahtzi with friends and then it was successfully adapted into Monopolygo, and I guess after everybody saw the success of Monopoly Go, then they kind of implemented it everywhere.

Speaker 2 What it does is basically it creates gacha out of nothing into your casual game, which is great because people love gachas. So what's happening here is that we have literally a collectible album.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And these stickers stickers are gained through booster packs.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But what we did also is that we didn't increase really the any currencies in the economy because what these albums give us are the original currencies of the game itself.

Speaker 2 So it's literally increasing joy but not increasing complexity. So we're just collecting these stickers and and then after you collect them, you get more resources.

Speaker 2 And if you collect everything, you get a grand prize. And I think this is the only thing that's like a new functionality because it's a badge.

Speaker 2 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 new it does.

Speaker 2 These things go on these very long cycles, like one month, two month cycle, where you need to collect everything from the album.

Speaker 2 If you collect duplicates, you can convert them to pretty much other booster packs so that that's it like yeah literally

Speaker 2 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 match 3.

Speaker 1 No Travel Town does so this is actually yeah grid merges is popular as well Travel Town lets you gift It's not quite trade, but you can give players your other cards.

Speaker 4 I think you talked about it on the like during the episode last time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can, we did, we actually did, yeah.

Speaker 2 These guys don't have it, and I don't think so, all the other, but it's pretty much becoming the, like, the go-to progression mechanic in casual.

Speaker 2 Like all the casual, because any casual game can implement this. It's just super easy.

Speaker 2 Like, it can literally live within its own circle of economy, doesn't touch anything else within your other economy, and that's it.

Speaker 2 And suddenly you have something to collect, and collecting thing is great.

Speaker 2 So that's.

Speaker 1 The only mistake I've seen with this implement, with doing this implementation, is if it's not done on a cycle.

Speaker 2 Ah, yeah, yeah. So

Speaker 2 this cannot be permanent.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So this gets resetted once, like it's think of it as some kind of a battle pass, basically, style timing.

Speaker 2 and once it gets reset you lose all your stickers and everything and new new thing kind of comes in like monopoly

Speaker 2 you win a grand prize and then it gets set to nil again exactly like it resets completely the grand prize stays with you yeah the grand prize stays with you that's that's the thing that the 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 latest one.

Speaker 2 They did a very successful Marvel collaboration with their whole progression mechanic here. So, yeah, that's, I guess, the only requirement.

Speaker 2 But it's spreading like wildfire in casual games as like one of the main progressions.

Speaker 4 And also, the wind streak.

Speaker 2 It's spreading like wildfire, wildfire. Yeah, win streaks on the progression mechanic, but yeah, that's that's like the core core driver mechanic.

Speaker 1 Wind streak came out in like 2018, though, like one of the first ones. That's like a 2017, 2018 there you go that came out.

Speaker 1 That's old news now. Now it's like, yeah, yeah, it's like layered wind streaks, and what was it, like the lightning ball,

Speaker 1 like uh, those types of I would consider lightning ball an iteration of what what would have been what started as wind streak, and then it was like, How do we make wind streak it even better?

Speaker 4 Okay, uh, that goes back quite some time in the history, okay?

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 yeah, that's why we're here. Uh, moving on, Thank you, Yakup.

Speaker 2 No worries.

Speaker 2 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, why are you level 53?

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 2 because I had to play all of these.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but I mean, I was level basically 20 when we recorded the podcast, which was last week, and now I'm 90 something.

Speaker 1 it's it's just i i wasn't really ready for progression in the royal kingdom but by the way it's really harder than royal match oh i think it's about 1.5 to two times the difficulty yeah 505.

Speaker 2 whoa i had

Speaker 2 flex die now

Speaker 2 wow whoa

Speaker 2 i wanted to see what the ice world looked like

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 4 I wanted to say I already, I mean, when I started playing a Royal Match back when it was launched I I felt like this is just a game changer when I compared it to Candy Crush it just played way better now when I'm playing Royal Kingdom again I feel like

Speaker 4 even better again like one level above like the the Royal

Speaker 2 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 3 player playing the game yeah but I can I can tell you the the secret you need to to have the Winstreak.

Speaker 2 Their Winstreak, by the way, their Winstreak is, I think, three times more granular than these guys. These have three initials.

Speaker 4 Six? No,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, back to the progression.

Speaker 2 These guys don't have a collectible album implemented yet. Correct me if I'm wrong, Laura.

Speaker 1 I have not seen it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's definitely not there. If you haven't seen it.

Speaker 2 Laura hasn't seen it. It's not there.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 just one image thing, they actually did these nice islands that you have in this world.

Speaker 2 And they try to build a little bit of this kind of a narrative of like kingdoms competing against each other, so it plays really well into their story.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 I guess my

Speaker 2 beautiful.

Speaker 1 And one thing I will add when I unlocked,

Speaker 1 you unlock Ice Worlds at 50501, 501, I believe. So 500, you beat 500, then you get Ice World.
They actually have a cutscene.

Speaker 2 They have cutscenes even during the worlds. Like, I remember there was a cutscene where Dark King created the golem that I had to beat.
Like, oh, I'll lure him into his.

Speaker 2 And it was like a cutscene, like CGI cutscene on level 10.

Speaker 1 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 there.

Speaker 1 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 that why are you going from this to an ice world?

Speaker 1 Why is this golem here? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So you see, here I can then zoom in, zoom out around this very nice island in this like kind of usual folk of war fashion where it's get kind of unhidden slowly one by one.

Speaker 2 If we go into these tasks, we are now getting elixirs and we can just select like and choose. But again, we don't really select anything, just illusion of choice.

Speaker 2 But it's a little bit of streamlining of this kind of star system, I guess. A little bit more granular.

Speaker 2 I guess they can pace it a little bit better because stars are not that granular as like whatever hundreds of elixir.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I think it's actually a really really big change. For me, when I first saw Royal Kingdoms Royal map, I was blown.
I was just so taken aback. No, no, no.
Go back. The other one.

Speaker 2 The one

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I thought it was beautiful and I was surprised it had that kind of like display of progression hadn't come out sooner.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that I definitely agree with. Like I said, said the wrong.
What I meant is it's nothing new as for the Guardianscape setup where you have the scrollable maps.

Speaker 2 So they, as I said, backtrack a little bit there into the formula, which I guess,

Speaker 2 to be honest, is just much more immersive than a single image here in Royal Kingdom or Tomb Blast, P Games Tomb Blast, where again, single image, and that's it, basically.

Speaker 1 This is the bone I have to pick with studios.

Speaker 1 Everyone just is like, oh, that seems to work. Let's just use this static image that changes over time.

Speaker 1 I wish I have seen, I'd saw more studios kind of experiment with how they showed this visual progression in the meta. So we would have had more

Speaker 1 versions like this.

Speaker 1 And this is just generally what my 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.

Speaker 1 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 like the specials, anything?

Speaker 1 We just see so much of the same, and it's starting to feel a little stale.

Speaker 4 And this is way more complex again. And when did, when and where did we talk about complexity in creatives as well? It's just, no, come on, seriously.

Speaker 4 It's and also the level of polish, like what we see now in Match Free or Royal Match and Roller Kingdom creatives, it's just

Speaker 4 a different level. And also, you have so many things, it's also quite immersive.

Speaker 4 When you watch last time, we were talking about Royal Kingdom, Felix lost basically, he was just staring at the screen, like, wow, this is really great. It's like

Speaker 2 it was my eye candy,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 4 and this is this is basically the same thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it is, it is, yeah. So, I guess that's there.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 they forget one very important part from royal match which i guess we'll talk a little bit more in the ui part because it's not being utilized and it's being utilized on the other games.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's not going to be as long as your sections

Speaker 2 because that was extremely comprehensive. I think it was going for more than an hour already.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And that means that these users are extremely valuable. And exactly, pretty sure what Monty is going to say next in the UA segment is that the CPIs in this genre are some of the highest.

Speaker 2 Probably the only other genre that's higher on average is Social Casino, or is it roughly the same now?

Speaker 4 Social Casino is higher, I think.

Speaker 2 Or Forex.

Speaker 4 Or Or Forex.

Speaker 4 Again,

Speaker 4 nowadays it's really hard to say, thanks to all the mini-games and IPs for monopoly

Speaker 4 and UA 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, wait.

Speaker 4 It's a purchase campaign, not even a payer yet.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So it's Social Casino and Match 3. that have some of the most complicated segmentations ever, where majority of the market even chooses not to show ads at all.

Speaker 2 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 3 games basically do ad monetization.

Speaker 2 The first one is kind of 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Day 28, day 40, like what's usually the time of game monetary?

Speaker 2 180. Yeah, it can be that long as well, right?

Speaker 1 But you're talking about the first time someone makes a first time.

Speaker 2 First time purchase.

Speaker 1 It could be as early as a week. I've seen it for

Speaker 2 within seven days.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but then like the curve still grows.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes, it's a beautiful curve.

Speaker 2 That nobody ever saw.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it just grows. It keeps growing, keeps growing.

Speaker 2 I have to say that we might have to grow.

Speaker 2 So the first thing that's done then is it's being tracked by geo, essentially.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 An example of this is Candy Crush, which we're going to talk mostly about today because they have the biggest ads business.

Speaker 2 It's rumored that they're making about 750 mil a year in their ads business, which is quite sizable even for them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they have a big user base, so why not?

Speaker 2 Yeah, and there's even tutorials on YouTube that I was able to find on how to get ads.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 in Candy Crush, I'll show you some of these because I went deep, right? Because yeah.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I'll get into that more later. But yeah, and the third category of segmentation is just no ads.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they always put it in their creative, which is, I don't like, but it's cool.

Speaker 1 Match Factory does the same.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it does the same.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So the actual scoop here is that playricks used to have ads in 2018 to 2019

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 then the senior management aka the two brothers decided that they hate ads

Speaker 2 and they ripped it up but what they didn't want to

Speaker 4 well

Speaker 4 reminds me the story of uh why doin um really blocks fake ads fake ads because we were in china and we were discussing like fake ads and everything like and and then like the guys from China said Doing you're you can't use fake ads

Speaker 2 What happened?

Speaker 4 Well the owner of of Doin and then basically the Chinese TikTok said he he saw a fake ad got so angry that he banned the fake ads on the whole platform It's like immediately.

Speaker 2 So no fake ads see it like see how easy it's not to have fake ads

Speaker 4 You just need to piece up the right person

Speaker 2 well i also heard a rumor while doing research for this that kings

Speaker 2 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-levels was on holiday and he saw an ad from PlayRix.

Speaker 2 And then he was just like called in. It's like, taking out the ads.
And then they waited another six months. I don't know if that's true.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so PlayRix in 2018, they ripped out the ads, but they didn't want to be

Speaker 2 they didn't want to treat the longtime players that had the ads in a bad way.

Speaker 2 Because when you take out ads from these games, I'm sorry Larik and a test do, people get really angry because you're giving up a lot of economic value when you take out the ads.

Speaker 2 So, right now, Player Rick still earns about 15 to 30k a day from ads, and it's essentially from legacy users that they haven't seen the cold board that was taken out the ads from because they don't want to make them angry.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 1 they don't want to watch the ads, they want the free stuff. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, basically,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 like the secrets in here,

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there we go. In focus now.
Yeah. They're all essentially boil 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.

Speaker 2 It's the most popular one tends to be the pre-level start booster. Then after that is the after-level boost.
Then after that is more lives.

Speaker 2 And then last, which is the one you give away the most infrequently, is more moves when you fail.

Speaker 2 So.

Speaker 2 What's after-level boost, by the way?

Speaker 2 What do you mean? So like doubling a reward.

Speaker 2 So these are not shown always, and they're shown different to different geographies.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, if you think of the distribution of rewarded ads per days active in a match 3 game, it tends to increase significantly the longer you've been in the game without making a purchase.

Speaker 2 And what they play around with with the segmentation is basically based on the historic IAP data, how high these daily rewarded impressions per DAU increase by how long you've been in the game.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And for players who've been playing for longer than 365 days on average, that might be 6. So it goes really high.

Speaker 2 So let me actually do a screen share here. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 What I'm going to start by showing now is

Speaker 2 so to find videos that showcase this for Candy Crush is not easy because

Speaker 2 what I needed to find, I was 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.

Speaker 2 So I spent a lot of time researching on YouTube for like Indonesian candy crush fails,

Speaker 2 which takes more than a smile. But anyway, we're going to start by showing the

Speaker 2 tier one English

Speaker 2 speaking geos.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 show here. So

Speaker 2 after four hours,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So the option to watch a rewarded ad.

Speaker 2 So they're playing here

Speaker 2 and then they finish.

Speaker 2 Let's skip ahead a bit.

Speaker 2 Still lots of moves. Yeah, still a lot of moves.
Arrow to the right.

Speaker 2 Here we go. Five seconds.

Speaker 4 There you go. So, yes.

Speaker 4 What's happening?

Speaker 2 Where Where was it?

Speaker 2 Four hours.

Speaker 2 Four hours and three minutes I have written down here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just press the right arrow. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 4 Four hours, three minutes. Well, you are already on four hours, four minutes.
So yeah. Let's see.

Speaker 2 Well, this is the one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 It's really interesting. So it took like 400 levels, yeah? Yeah, 400 levels.

Speaker 1 But that's like 2% of the game.

Speaker 2 Four hours of gameplay, right? so here we should see it

Speaker 4 fifteen thousand levels yes

Speaker 2 okay it it was basically here on the booster afterwards right but it should be there but

Speaker 2 i guess it's just me that watched this much but yeah

Speaker 2 it's so frustrating

Speaker 2 anyway so it's basically an after level boost that's shown

Speaker 2 i'm really frustrated now

Speaker 4 No, that's we are, of course.

Speaker 2 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 GR, right?

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 yeah, four hours in.

Speaker 2 You remember before-level booster. This is like this is a pre-level.
Yeah, this is a pre-level booster.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which is the most popular genre for, or the most one that tends to get the most impressions, also, I'm told. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, let's compare this to Indonesia. So, it wasn't easy to find

Speaker 2 levels where they're failing to showcase the outer moves. But essentially, here is in Indonesia, you have the daily treat machine, which is an ad placement.

Speaker 2 But basically, here I'm going to go to 610,

Speaker 2 and you'll see the

Speaker 2 so here essentially the user is playing and they're failing, they're out of moves

Speaker 2 out of moves,

Speaker 2 and out of moves, and then here you see basically watch an ad for more moves, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but wait a second, you get all of those boosters, yeah, like plus eight moves and uh like a disco ball, yeah, it's quite generous, right?

Speaker 2 So, this is in Indonesia, remember that

Speaker 2 this is level 4,000 or something in Indonesia.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 4 okay,

Speaker 2 yeah, and then there's an ad, and then you'll see something crazy here as well. Is that the rewards collected, so you can watch another ad to collect the next reward.
So it's actually

Speaker 2 progressive ads. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 So you can really stack it. And that would never happen in the English-speaking geo, I suspect.

Speaker 2 So it's very much designed to increase the ad load in countries where the likelihood of an IEP purchase is very low.

Speaker 2 And that's why we never seen it

Speaker 2 anyway. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because remember that if you want to download a game in like another geo, you essentially have to have the 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then now I'm going to show you the pregame booster as well

Speaker 2 1633

Speaker 2 as this is a cooking show I prepared.

Speaker 2 This really speaks volumes of like how even higher

Speaker 2 volume play. Yeah, exactly.
So volume play. So, here's the pregame booster.
Uh, to yeah, get whatever booster you want for the game. Actually, you watch it here, and then again, you can see that

Speaker 2 the progression in these games, she's been, or the person has been playing for

Speaker 2 15 minutes, and they've already watched one, two, three, four, five, six ads, right? And then

Speaker 2 here, even at 2:33,

Speaker 2 the person or player fails again,

Speaker 2 fails again and runs out of moves, and they're already allowed to watch another rewarded ad to get even more moves.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, those are the four main

Speaker 2 slots, I guess, that earn the majority of the

Speaker 2 impressions. I don't know.
Has that changed quite a lot since you were there, Laura, at King? Like how

Speaker 2 ads were viewed?

Speaker 1 So when I, the game where I worked on, I worked on Farm Heroes, and we, I don't believe we had ads in the game when I was on it.

Speaker 1 Okay. So

Speaker 1 I know there was, they were looking at

Speaker 1 Farm Heroes Super Saga, which was the next gen Farm Heroes did have ads, but Farm Heroes Original did not.

Speaker 1 And I don't believe, I don't, I don't, I wasn't on the candy team, so I don't remember if they had already been working on ads when I when I was there on the candy team.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Uh, I did get ads suddenly in my game level 2300.

Speaker 2 I believe this happened because I never spent any money up until that point.

Speaker 2 Maybe

Speaker 2 person's very sharp. Yeah,

Speaker 2 So here also we have someone who

Speaker 2 is very frustrated to bring back the ads because they were getting free boosters.

Speaker 2 Then we have other users who are complaining, why I don't see any ads.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the King community basically explaining that it's actually randomly assigned as a test. And that's in August 2023.

Speaker 2 So I should imagine from these posts that essentially the amount of ads in Candy Crush have increased significantly since then because they're they're growing that.

Speaker 2 Here's also the video on how to get ads in Candy Crush.

Speaker 2 So there's definitely like a big community of people who want ads or want the free stuff, right?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 ads are beautiful.

Speaker 2 Ads are very beautiful, right?

Speaker 2 Mediation that King does.

Speaker 2 I've heard it explained to me that they do it through Google Ad Manager.

Speaker 2 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 network. Because at one point they had so many users,

Speaker 2 this will fail and it's never been done before. So it failed because essentially, despite all their users,

Speaker 2 they won't be able to have enough scale to really get enough demand going. So how they have it

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then they have preferred deals that are set up with IO. And then they also have private auctions.
So they also have a media kit.

Speaker 2 And usually, how you do that at a large scale is that you look at your programmatic buys, you have your whole waterfalls set up with bidders, and then you add a premium on top of that for the first placement.

Speaker 2 And then you can build out a quite a big business doing that. So you don't rely only on programmatic advertising.

Speaker 2 But that's how it's done. And yeah, that's all I have to say about ads.
They're beautiful.

Speaker 2 Super interesting.

Speaker 4 Super interesting. Anyway, so

Speaker 4 where do do you want to start with the actual UA? Because there's a shit ton of stuff.

Speaker 1 I would like to know what are the ads that are working? And

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 what's the creative strategy for Match 3 today?

Speaker 4 Match 3 today. Okay.
I just started because we can't really go back to 2012,

Speaker 4 unfortunately.

Speaker 2 But I mean,

Speaker 4 or fortunately.

Speaker 4 But this is what I

Speaker 4 actually

Speaker 4 started kind of researching if I see some level of creatives and then I found out a lot of TV ads for Candy Crash. Well

Speaker 4 guess what I'm and I wasn't that surprised to be honest. This goes back, you know, it's out on mobile and Facebook.
So this is the kind of the original first one?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think this is the like the original

Speaker 1 television quality.

Speaker 2 It's because it's TV show.

Speaker 4 It wasn't TV ad.

Speaker 2 And this is 2012? 2012 this 2014 uh this

Speaker 4 10 years ago

Speaker 4 uh so we're kind of yeah this is this tv in creatives you know i was always kind of

Speaker 4 screaming about like how the candy crush you a looks exactly the same i mean because it was only gameplay i mean only gameplay

Speaker 4 it's it shouldn't be an insult to be honest but kinda is in this kind of uh

Speaker 4 genre unfortunately Because you don't really

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So we have all of this on their Candy Crush YouTube account.

Speaker 4 So this is back in the days. And

Speaker 4 I want to say one thing. What have you noticed here, basically, in this screen?

Speaker 2 It's fake.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 4 The buttons.

Speaker 2 The buttons.

Speaker 4 Look at the buttons.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the store icons.

Speaker 2 PC.

Speaker 4 Yeah, there is the Facebook, there's Microsoft, and then it's Amazon.

Speaker 4 And I mean, Felix, you're the Amazon expert here, but

Speaker 2 all the casual

Speaker 4 Kindle fire, basically. But it's this is interesting stuff that worked on

Speaker 4 basically puzzle casual games. I think this was 2016-18 when I was doing the Diggs Adventure on Amazon.
There was Candy Crush,

Speaker 4 Gardenscapes, and Home Scapes because Amazon was really big

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I mean, now I'm not sure how big it is anymore but still this is just like an interesting

Speaker 4 interesting thing not big anymore in the specific demographic yeah not big anymore overall i think for the casual

Speaker 4 i i i haven't heard about it recently that much besides felix mentioned for uh ad monetization purposes

Speaker 4 but yeah we have more tv commercials and then i mean i just want to call here and and then then we can go to like actual ua uh and i can show you all of the almost all the games that we we discussed

Speaker 4 what do you think were the the UA channels back then I mean it's quite which year 20

Speaker 4 let's say 2012

Speaker 2 Facebook ad colony and TV

Speaker 4 definitely Facebook yeah definitely Facebook I think Facebook was like the first thing and I I

Speaker 4 I remember running a UA on Facebook when there was only right column, which is Facebook desktop, basically, which is like

Speaker 4 static image like this. It's like super slow, you can't see anything.
But that was the only ad format where it was actually cost per click rather than just installs or anything else.

Speaker 4 It was Facebook only. Then

Speaker 4 there was the Google finally. And then, yes, Felix actually ad colon.

Speaker 2 It was quite big back then.

Speaker 4 I mean, that was one of the first ad networks, right? Like, let's call the proper one.

Speaker 4 Okay, so

Speaker 4 let's just go actually in the candy crush here, January 2022.

Speaker 4 I mean, in 2022, there's always like more networks.

Speaker 4 You can see Facebook, uh, here, mop up, hapla, in you, um, youtubal, um, Google, and then Lyft of an iron source. From this kind of uh impression count, like majority went to Unity.

Speaker 4 And I'm not surprised Royal Match was also super big in Unity, even like a few years ago.

Speaker 4 So, let's just check this: you know, not in-game footage, not in-game footage, just for that kind of hook, and now for this

Speaker 4 slightly different actual altered gameplay, right?

Speaker 2 But this is

Speaker 2 you're not sharing, by the way.

Speaker 4 I'm not sharing, well, why?

Speaker 2 By the way, notice that

Speaker 2 how we moved from not in-game footage to the current state of fake ads.

Speaker 4 That's how far we have moved.

Speaker 1 Actually, that's a really good point. That is a very good point.

Speaker 4 Let me just

Speaker 4 do this again instead of.

Speaker 1 Before, we're taking that the quote-unquote fake ads, the fake, then the not representative gameplay, and then working it back into the game.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 4 So now you see it, right? So

Speaker 4 here,

Speaker 4 not in-game footage.

Speaker 4 And like, how is this? I mean, it's not in-game footage, of course.

Speaker 2 2022.

Speaker 4 It's

Speaker 4 2022, 2021.

Speaker 4 2021.

Speaker 2 I thought it didn't feel like 2022. It felt like 2021.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like, what's the difference, man?

Speaker 4 Anyway, like, you see all of this

Speaker 4 kind of gameplay. That's it.
That's kind of where it was, and that was the kind of the game. But we skipped a little bit what happened in

Speaker 4 2018. And I just want to go back here

Speaker 4 and share this tab instead. So, what are we looking at right now, like kind of Hero Wars and like how they started working with the pulled pin?

Speaker 4 And this was when they launched, what was it, like 2016, I think that was the launch, and and then they started doing this

Speaker 4 duct tape uh um mini games, 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 twenty eighteen, nineteen.

Speaker 4 And what happened was the the players actually bought stake in Exters.

Speaker 4 So they bought the stake and then they suddenly it it was in twenty eighteen, so they they started seeing all the numbers and and everything that was done with the pull-the-pin UA creatives, which is basic.

Speaker 2 They're still in the games.

Speaker 4 They're still. And this is just like, this is like this, like original pull-the-pinner.

Speaker 2 This is the OG.

Speaker 2 This was Nexters that invented that? They didn't steal it from anyone?

Speaker 4 No, no, no, it was Nexters. And

Speaker 4 I'm actually having a call with the guy who invented this in January.

Speaker 4 It's like, it's just

Speaker 2 insane.

Speaker 4 So this is basically like the original OG pulled up in level, which then

Speaker 4 started

Speaker 2 kind of

Speaker 4 yeah, exactly. You see all of this like inspiration nowadays, like where it is actually coming from.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it's just, and this is,

Speaker 4 I don't even know like what the game is. This, I think it's actually, this is like Austin from Vish

Speaker 4 on the left hand side.

Speaker 4 Again, saving, it's not king, but it's saving the

Speaker 4 sheep and animals and chicken. And now, what we have here

Speaker 4 again, a poor

Speaker 4 fishy. This is a little bit different than the pulled pin, but kind of the mechanic is almost the same.

Speaker 2 Wait, wait, a poor fish? Did you just assume that fish is socioeconomic status?

Speaker 2 But this is actually a play on the game. What was it like when you're saving the crocodile from water? Where's my water? What's the game? Or something? Oh, where's my water? Oh, that's a good idea.

Speaker 4 That's right. I mean, you know, you have all these inspiration from different

Speaker 4 games. And then, look.

Speaker 1 There we go.

Speaker 4 So, this is the OG pull the pin, which literally just changed the whole landscape on the UA for match 3, I think, because it came from that RPG

Speaker 4 Hero Wars, and then they saw

Speaker 4 what difference does it make for them? Because honestly, it was just fake. It was a mini-game, let's call it that way.
And then they started using it and then saw

Speaker 4 really big growth. So they started implementing it in the game as well.

Speaker 2 By the way, for the

Speaker 2 uninitiated, why they saw a big growth?

Speaker 4 What do you mean, why? Like, the CPIs went down quite heavily.

Speaker 2 There we go.

Speaker 4 CPIs. Okay.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much.

Speaker 4 So Cost Principle went down quite a lot. And then, like, now there is

Speaker 4 the never-ending discussion, but you know, this is fake. So it really

Speaker 4 doesn't matter if the CPIs are low because the retention is low. And then also

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It was VO campaign, so value optimization US Facebook.

Speaker 4 And we could see $130

Speaker 4 CPI for value optimized campaigns. What this campaign does is basically, let's call it simple, let's simplify stuff.
It's hunting for wells.

Speaker 4 You have $120 CPI. And then it suddenly...
You have, I mean, back in 2018, most probably, it was like 30, whatever, still, quite a lot when we're talking about CPIs of like three or four or five.

Speaker 4 So then suddenly you have these like mini games or like kind of alt, it's not even altered gameplay, it's just it's completely fake.

Speaker 4 And creating these different scenarios where play more modes in the game, well, kind of,

Speaker 4 which then decreases the CPI. So instead of you you have, let's say, one player for fifty dollars, you have fifty players for one dollar.

Speaker 4 And suddenly the pull 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 the mathematics, like nothing else.

Speaker 4 It's just more players, bigger the chance. So you actually convert these into payers afterwards.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 They would play

Speaker 4 as soon as you show the gameplay of match 3, they know what they are getting into, and it's basically really expensive to actually acquire those players.

Speaker 4 Eventually, they will pay, maybe, maybe, maybe yes, maybe no.

Speaker 2 What will happen, Felix, is that you get users that wouldn't go into the game in the first place.

Speaker 2 Now you get them into the game. Now you get them, yeah.

Speaker 2 So you have better chances of capturing the whale, basically playing a gacha, rather than getting expensive match 3 users, which already know what they're going to get, and they're expensive to become.

Speaker 4 And maybe you will actually increase your time

Speaker 4 because of using this, and you have a higher chance of getting more users. Wouldn't actually, yeah, if they saw the match 3 game, they wouldn't just download the game because just it's not there.

Speaker 4 But then it's like, oh, you know, 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

Speaker 4 in some of the creative

Speaker 4 trends before. It's just some people are still in the game waiting for the level to appear after level 300.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 can you give me the screen? Just one second. Of course.

Speaker 2 So do you see?

Speaker 2 This is it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 After level 15, I go here again. It's the usual.

Speaker 2 You can skip it if you want, but you don't because it it gives you extra soft currency this is now a little bit more complex because from the beginning they done it in a way that you can't lose pull austin you can't lose like in the first 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 austen won't get the water but if uh 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.

Speaker 2 I don't even know where it stops. But this is now default for all the player experiences.
All the players.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 creatives from idle games, so you know all the golden goblin stuff, and stacking different eggs and

Speaker 4 different objects, they put it into the tutorial. It's in the tutorial.

Speaker 4 You play the game, you start, and it's just the first session, five minutes in, and there's like, oh, wait a second, there's something in, like, let's try.

Speaker 4 And you click play, and you are in the UA creative immediately.

Speaker 2 Yeah, immediately. This is, for instance, project makeover.

Speaker 2 This is again

Speaker 2 project makeover. Projectover.
Makeover match has it as well.

Speaker 1 Tactiles Makeover Match included this in their soft launch.

Speaker 4 Give me the screen back. I will show you where this is coming from immediately because this person just

Speaker 4 showed me this, and I was like, Man,

Speaker 2 we discussed this.

Speaker 4 We discussed this.

Speaker 2 It's coming from apps business.

Speaker 4 And we are now in

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like you borrow things from hypercasual, whatever else.

Speaker 4 But now, like, the level above that is you borrow stuff from apps business, you borrow stuff from e-commerce, D2C, whatever else, and you just implement that into the game.

Speaker 4 Why do you think App Labin made a huge jump into e-commerce? It's just connected, it's really connected, and it's just

Speaker 4 a brilliant move from like basically everybody. So, now, yeah, that's that's what I want to show you.
So, that was 2018. And now, when we go back to actually 2000,

Speaker 2 by the way, it was not there before when you originally played gardenscapes in 2000 it wasn't no no no no the situation and again thing wasn't there of course it no no no it wasn't there it was just added afterwards because what happened was people started complaining oh wait wait a second where is this creative like 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 the guy you increase their retention because they think like this is the game I'm playing and this match 3 whole thing like whatever there's this side mode or something, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Because there's so many of these levels that it actually seems like this is the main part of the game, yeah, yeah, this might, yeah, it's it's true, yeah, that's true.

Speaker 4 So, it's not that, yeah, they don't shut they shut, you increase the retention and they like the stickiness, and they just kind of add what kind of additional content that they can play.

Speaker 2 You know, it's great because who knew I would spend $300 in Forex game, exactly,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 4 or in the in the in the in the in uh in a a match-free game, it's like, oh, wait a second, that's actually cool. Oh, oh, shit, I almost almost won the level.

Speaker 4 Like, let me buy that uh special pack immediately. So, so this is this is like basically the evolution of Candy Crush.

Speaker 4 It's just the objects and then just the eyes there, just kind of putting a little bit of uh emotions there. And and not, you know, I don't wanna say nothing else, but this is basically it.

Speaker 2 Uh,

Speaker 4 but

Speaker 4 if we move, let's say,

Speaker 4 I can actually do it in here.

Speaker 4 If we move to,

Speaker 4 we can go to

Speaker 4 last month actually. So you go here.

Speaker 4 This is a different creative. Oh, wait a second.
Wait a second.

Speaker 2 We have a hook now.

Speaker 4 We have a fake hands.

Speaker 4 It's moving in the in different direction. You see, like the level of polish is definitely a different level.

Speaker 4 But again,

Speaker 2 quite boring.

Speaker 4 You see all of this.

Speaker 4 I mean, there's different music. There's it's again, it's all about the gameplay, but they are doing some interesting stuff.

Speaker 4 I mean, this is you know, you remember this from 2022? Oh, wait, 2021. So, this is a creative that is actually live

Speaker 4 for two years, but here we go.

Speaker 4 Oh, wait a second.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 what is this?

Speaker 4 What is this? Can you help me, Mr. Player or Mrs.
Player? You know, I'm freezing out here.

Speaker 1 So, these are the same ones I see. This type of you need to match on a time frame to save something that are that I feel like dream is using as well.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's exactly what they started doing because at some point they're like, ah, who are these guys from Turkey? Like, we don't care.

Speaker 4 We can use all these like boring creatives all the time and

Speaker 4 yeah. And it's like, oh, wait a second, we are not the top one game anymore.
We need to do something on the creative side. Oh, and then the UAT is like, hey, we've been telling you for this for years.

Speaker 4 Anyway, so we have this interesting hook right here, which is, you know, what it's quite satisfying to watch. So they are now moving in this direction.

Speaker 4 We also kind of discussed how they're using the TikTok trends and some different things that they were not used to. You know, all this like

Speaker 4 movie-like high production value stuff that they haven't been using before. But now it's just you need to.
It's like not no, it's not optional. You have to go.

Speaker 2 So sorry, so they're one step away from freezing families already.

Speaker 2 Kind of.

Speaker 4 But they won't be. I don't think that the freezing families will be there.
I will show you like who is actually

Speaker 4 who doesn't really care about the brand and who really cares about the brand. Like these guys really care about what they're showing in the creatives.

Speaker 4 So I don't think it's going to be freezing families. It's going to be saving

Speaker 4 things. They are also saving the

Speaker 2 well, they already had the girl, which is like kind of similar to the kink thing, yeah, yeah,

Speaker 4 but they had also like one other thing where it was uh saving a different person, or not person, the character there.

Speaker 2 Oh, here we go. Uh,

Speaker 4 no, it's not saving the, but I was kind of watching the ad where it was kind of saving, and I think, like, yeah,

Speaker 2 this is also quite

Speaker 2 similar to saving.

Speaker 2 Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 It's like the saving kind of mechanic, all everything

Speaker 4 near that experience, yeah, yeah, but everybody copied, copied this save whoever, and just paired with gameplay. It doesn't really work for everybody.
Well,

Speaker 4 what a surprise. So we have all of this.
I think this reminds me.

Speaker 2 Oh, really? Don't tell me that. Oh, wow.
There we go.

Speaker 4 So it's even, you know, like, here we are.

Speaker 2 Here we are.

Speaker 4 Here we are. Like, you can't really fight this,

Speaker 4 unfortunately.

Speaker 2 You need to join this.

Speaker 4 You need to join. Yeah, you need to join this.
There is like 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.

Speaker 4 Because, yes, we have

Speaker 4 so we this is quite this is from basically it. This is oct, yeah, this is basically it.
So this is royal match with a different visual style, basically.

Speaker 4 Exactly. also this and they need

Speaker 2 hexagons

Speaker 4 yeah guys you need to get oh yeah so and then the same thing

Speaker 4 oh yeah yeah yeah yeah no snake no snake yet no i didn't i didn't see snake uh yeah snake is a different category by the way it's just uh it's it's really insane like how they were using it in 2022.

Speaker 4 So like this is, yeah, this is Candy Crush. So you see like how it moved from the TV commercials 2014?

Speaker 2 There's your brand guidelines. There's your brand guidelines.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like you know the you know what's the like the ultimate brand guidelines?

Speaker 2 Yeah, revenue.

Speaker 4 Revenue. Revenue is the ultimate guideline for brand.

Speaker 4 Nothing else. Like this shit.

Speaker 4 But like that's like kind of crandy crash.

Speaker 4 But then we just jump straight into, oh no, I don't wanna actually don't want you to vomit, so let's just go straight to fish dom instead because this is this is exactly

Speaker 4 the hero, the good old Hero Wars numbers game with the hook, and there you go. And this is, yeah, this is 30 seconds long, and man, this creative is running for a long time,

Speaker 4 a long, long time, and like people are

Speaker 4 in the game, and then, yeah, you showed us, you showed us that, like, so it's, it needs to be in the game. Look, this great,

Speaker 4 whatever is that,

Speaker 4 and this is another one, but it starts exactly the same, it's starts exactly the same, but it's 45 seconds, so it has multiple layers because then you end

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 uh, what is it, yeah, the creative, and then you actually switch and start showing the different type, but it's still the numbers game, nothing else.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But then we are talking about different

Speaker 4 different channels here again like it's not unity for for uh

Speaker 4 playricks but it's uplavin and for king it's also if i look at actually here again

Speaker 4 and we select all the channels because if if you are top one top two top three game you basically buy everything

Speaker 4 Here, instead of Unity now, it's uploading and Mintegral and then YouTube and Facebook. And this has been running from Facebook for three years.
Well, so interesting.

Speaker 4 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 Applavin.
That's like a no-brainer.

Speaker 4 With Applavin, it's interesting because what I mentioned with the $120 CPI,

Speaker 4 there was on Facebook, but on Aplavin, it's around 100, 150, somewhere in that kind of range.

Speaker 4 What you need to think about is in order to make uploading work, you need to have 10 to 15 pairs, unique pairs per day.

Speaker 4 When we were calculating this, I think cost per purchase was $600 or $800.

Speaker 4 You need to multiply that by 10 or 15. That's your starting budget for uploading.

Speaker 2 Wait a second. Can you put the $600 into context? I'm a little bit lost here.

Speaker 4 So you you pay six hundred you it's a cost per purchase. So you pay a hundred dollars for a pay player player,

Speaker 4 but actually actually you need to spend six hundred dollars to find a payer.

Speaker 2 So six players of those six hundred kind of, yes, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 4 And then you need ten unique payers per day for Appamin Algo to work properly.

Speaker 2 So six 600K, hundred

Speaker 4 which is a starting point for the budget. So it's just putting things in context, like how much money you actually need to spend on Applaim, just to get things moving on

Speaker 4 the kind of match-free.

Speaker 2 Even starting trend.

Speaker 4 Yeah, starting trend, basically. I didn't

Speaker 4 show any types of playables, but honestly, all of these SDK networks, it's heavy on playables. Playables really like

Speaker 4 very higher production cost and it takes a little bit longer to actually build. So we need to think about that when thinking about the whole UA and and the creative kind of uh strategy.

Speaker 4 I'm not sure why it's not working, but anyway, it's it's kind of heavy on the uh on the

Speaker 2 playables with like fake fake gameplay or just just real one. Yes, also on fake.
Lots of fake, okay.

Speaker 4 Lots of fake. Uh so look look at this.
And this is getting really like ridiculous. So we are now in January 2022, which is basically Gardenscapes.
So it's kind of post-COVID.

Speaker 4 And this, it is also like, look, the six-plus rating

Speaker 4 on the very bottom says basically everything.

Speaker 4 So the hook, the divorce, and the freezing families and babies and whatever else is this is their play right now.

Speaker 4 So we are freezing. We are doing all the stuff.

Speaker 2 The season changes so fast.

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, you know, like it's it's hard.

Speaker 4 You move in and then it starts to freeze media to move in and it's winter, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 And it's like this is just disgusting.

Speaker 4 This is disgusting. And it's just, it's, it's work, it does work so well because it creates drama.
People are

Speaker 4 pissed about,

Speaker 4 yeah, annoyed, 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 all the time.

Speaker 4 So, you know, you want to save these

Speaker 4 families, just you know, you don't want them to freeze. And just, oh, Jesus Christ, I need, I need to go and download the game and help them.

Speaker 4 But it's like six of them. Oh, yeah, yeah, all of them, exactly.
It's uh, it's a different, yeah, it's how it's 3D version.

Speaker 4 It's 3D version between the 300. That's all

Speaker 4 it's and then just it's it's all all about the emotions here. And I mean, it works.

Speaker 4 what can we do it works i didn't see any like freezing families levels but uh if you actually go gardenscapes has those like the pin puzzles and everything like they are

Speaker 2 you need to light up the fireplace

Speaker 4 yeah but that's like it's a it's an and like evolution of freezing because here i mean maybe

Speaker 4 level of freezing yeah evolution of freezing you have multiple levels of freezing families man and this is yeah yeah this is it this is it so it's like again like the whole kind of um plot from the very beginning is just divorce and whatever else, and then you have all these, and then you have these pins.

Speaker 4 And this is the

Speaker 4 evolution that I'm talking about in here, it's the pins before it was all only matching.

Speaker 4 Now you have, again, you see, there's no pins here, but still, oh, now they are again, super complex, one-minute long video where like a shit ton of stuff is happening.

Speaker 4 So you need to keep up like what what's actually happening.

Speaker 4 You start we started at at the door, you you got kicked out, then you move to a different place, then you had to this all the pin, pull the pins, then you again you appear in this freezing room, one minute long, so many things happening again complexity at this best it it's disgusting, yes.

Speaker 4 But yeah, this is the like this is the play for for play ricks now on on Gardenscapes and then even I think in the home escapes as well. But then if we go,

Speaker 4 yeah, Matchmasters is basically using

Speaker 4 all of the just gameplay with

Speaker 4 people or just

Speaker 4 something like this, which is also very important for,

Speaker 4 I mean, not exactly the concept, but very important for the Royal Match and Royal Match.

Speaker 1 These are trends on TikTok. Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 they're definitely taking from

Speaker 1 whatever trend is popular on TikTok and then integrating those into ads now too.

Speaker 2 I've seen that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that Matchmatch is doing this quite well. They

Speaker 4 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4 I mean, they are using almost the same just like the combination of decoration and then just a little bit of the gameplay. Then they have one.

Speaker 4 Kind of. Okay.

Speaker 4 Who cares?

Speaker 2 Who cares?

Speaker 4 Who cares? There is one signature ad

Speaker 4 which

Speaker 4 they have

Speaker 4 basically the green one where they show a lot of different faces and then just the gameplay.

Speaker 4 Nothing else.

Speaker 4 I really don't understand how is this game making so much money to be honest. But I guess

Speaker 4 in terms of the UA doesn't really say anything about

Speaker 4 the actual

Speaker 2 game in general.

Speaker 2 We need to have figured something because as I showed you, this is the mold staple growth yeah of course

Speaker 4 this is the like signature ua creative and they're running this for a while like there's the old lady on the right hand right corner and and a lot of different people so it's kind of royal style yeah

Speaker 4 exactly exactly so you know matchmasters there you go

Speaker 4 anyway uh and then

Speaker 4 before we go into the real stuff

Speaker 4 I need to just go quite quickly because this is just the rock bottom bottom, I think, of the creatives, to be honest, because it's even worse than Polaric stuff. This is Project Makeover.

Speaker 4 It's just gross.

Speaker 1 This actually reminds me of interactive fiction.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. It's taken from there.
Absolutely. So all the episodes, choices, and all of the...
I don't want to say, there you go.

Speaker 4 All of the items, the fun stuff, but this is definitely from there.

Speaker 4 Because people were used to see those in, like back in the days when they were scaling and really, and it was all about just body shaming and just ridiculous stuff with like divorce and drama. And

Speaker 2 anyway,

Speaker 4 it's the same thing.

Speaker 4 But yeah, it's

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 I don't even know like what's happening here. Seriously.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 See?

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 there are so many of them. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And this is one. Yeah, like this is like this.

Speaker 4 They have this ad which is basically split into, I think, three different parts, which was the the hook from like the beginning with the eggs and everything. Then they have this

Speaker 4 hospital and then now there's multiple things. Like it's again, it's it doesn't really s show the match free that much.
You see?

Speaker 2 It's like, what is this? It's not even match three. Yeah, it's not it's not match 3 at all.

Speaker 2 You have to do some hyper casual crap that trends currently. Exactly.

Speaker 4 And that's like, that's been the like the biggest. I don't, it's not the innovation, it's just the change that all the match 3 games had to do.
It's just that, like, they don't show the gameplay.

Speaker 4 That's what we discussed. They don't show the gameplay.
In here, like, the whole makeover stuff is just the UA play. It's, it's absolutely UA play.
It was so

Speaker 4 big on the hypercasual stuff that they implemented in here. And look, cheating on a pregnant woman, like, I mean, what does this even mean? Like,

Speaker 4 why is this

Speaker 4 creative?

Speaker 2 Like, why?

Speaker 4 It's just, but, I mean, I know why.

Speaker 2 It's just converts and by the way, this game makes consistently 12 million a month. Just literally.
Straight line.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 4 And like the number of iterations

Speaker 4 they've done on the UA and like different makeover stuff, and like

Speaker 4 the creativity is endless. I'm not sure, like, where is this coming from, but us, like, guys, like kudos to whatever, like, whoever is this crew is creating these scripts and everything.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's terrible to watch, but still, like, interesting, interesting evolution, honestly.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, we have all of this different stuff. And then

Speaker 4 let's go to the actual fun part, which is

Speaker 4 which is what?

Speaker 2 The Royal Royal Match. Royal match.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 Royal match. No, no, no, no, no.
I don't want to show you.

Speaker 4 No, no, no. I want to show you different things.
Where is it? Maybe I'll find anyway. So, they

Speaker 4 we have December. This is January 22nd.
No, February. Okay.
So we have all of these different things that they've they started. It's just save the king.

Speaker 4 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 the

Speaker 4 it's in the game and it's in the king's nightmare just to offset the retention and then just kind of create another like levels

Speaker 4 everything level basically, right?

Speaker 2 Constantly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 So then we have multiple iterations on this. It's again, this is

Speaker 4 easy, it's uh just saving the king from fire, it's maybe drowning in some cases.

Speaker 4 It's here, like it's this is basically the whole thing they started doing.

Speaker 4 Then, if we go

Speaker 4 share this tab instead, again,

Speaker 4 it's slightly advanced. Again, it further reminds us the

Speaker 4 lyrics stuff and the Hero Wars stuff. Yeah, it's it goes to polish and the overall quality goes another level.
It's again again quite evolving.

Speaker 4 Then we have this, which

Speaker 4 is again no ads and free to play.

Speaker 4 This is another spin of the UGC stuff that they started doing heavily back in 2023 with different faces from Cameo, which we called B actors. But I mean, I will show you.

Speaker 2 Influencers.

Speaker 4 Kind of, I mean, it's still celebrities, but not J-Low-level celebrities.

Speaker 4 It's basically half of the crew from Suits. I think there was a guy from

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 2 Ooh,

Speaker 2 pull the pin.

Speaker 2 And they don't run this anymore.

Speaker 4 No, no, no. It was just like, you know, they tried.
They tried.

Speaker 2 Because this is, you really need to you know you know admit that they're like when something works they yeah on the trend the first doesn't matter if it works for them or not they just tested it exactly because remember

Speaker 4 you make three millions a day

Speaker 4 which means no this means four or five okay so you you make four or five a day which is i mean even better in terms of the the actual numbers you know you need to basically spend like five million a day.

Speaker 4 You know, like

Speaker 2 everything.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. So yeah, you are next on the line, like, hey, can I buy all of your impressions? Right.

Speaker 4 So it's like this is 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.

Speaker 4 You have high budget, you don't know where to spend it. Like it's the same problem, it's just different levels of the problem.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 this Korean kind of guy talking about

Speaker 4 match, about Royal Match. And again,

Speaker 4 one minute long, escaping, saving, drowning.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there we go. Hello, hello, Mr.
Snake.

Speaker 4 Hello, hello, Mr. Snake.

Speaker 2 So I found out

Speaker 4 they started started running the snake in December 22,

Speaker 4 and it wasn't a very big focus. It was always about this freezing, drowning, and fire, and whatever else.

Speaker 4 And it kind of quietly entered the mix, and they experimented with all these like near-death scenarios, whatever. And then they didn't use it for a while.
I mean, it was running in the UHL mix.

Speaker 4 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. I think from March 2023,

Speaker 2 if we go, yeah, we are here, March 2023.

Speaker 4 This was like the

Speaker 4 actual another version. They started using it quite heavily and way more often.

Speaker 4 And but in August 2023, she's just kind of returning into the whole UA and then in January 2024, and we can we can check that right away. I mean, we can do just January, but I can

Speaker 4 I can do January 2024

Speaker 4 in here right away.

Speaker 4 They started just leveraging that trend a lot.

Speaker 2 The assumption is that they took it from Kingdom Guard?

Speaker 4 They didn't I thought they took it from Kindergarten, but actually Kindergart took it from them.

Speaker 4 They came up with this 2022 as the first kind of company and game.

Speaker 4 You see, like the

Speaker 4 snake is still like early kind of visual style, but

Speaker 4 it's in like early this year, it was mainly snake, it's just like that, but more polished now, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, more polished now. And then,

Speaker 4 what is interesting, now they again moved from the snake to

Speaker 4 my dear co-hosts, what I'm always talking about:

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 slingshot catapult, the rocks,

Speaker 4 different things like this. Now, no, like this is now, it's the it's rocks, it's uh, it's balls, it's this maze, and this is just and the

Speaker 4 physics, basically, yes, physics, basically.

Speaker 4 And this is everywhere in different iterations. So, like, the evolution is just incredible.
I mean, this is also also, oh, wow, also.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow, haven't seen this yet?

Speaker 4 Yes, we haven't actually

Speaker 4 because it's new. Wow, it's new, and you know what this, yeah, that's different.

Speaker 4 And you know what is this? AI,

Speaker 4 AI,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 4 AI,

Speaker 2 of course, all AI.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 Because they follow very closely one genre and one genre only.

Speaker 2 We know which one exactly.

Speaker 4 Because every time, you know how this chain works: Evoni,

Speaker 4 oh, then it's kingdom,

Speaker 2 Evoni, and then it's

Speaker 4 trying everything, and then it's royal match. It's just taking everything from Forex.
The slingshot, kind of

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 trampoline, and everything, the sharks basically in the hooks, it's all coming from Forex. So they're smart because they're looking outside of Forex.

Speaker 2 Because they're having the same strategy as Forex now. To pretty much lower the CPL on the highest auto-rested markets possible.
We don't care now what you play, just come in. Exactly.
Yeah, look.

Speaker 4 And this is again different variations of that physics-based creative.

Speaker 4 It's just, it's great. And this is exactly what Royal Kingdom is using as well,

Speaker 2 to be honest.

Speaker 4 We can maybe try to check the Royal Kingdom as well, but it's going to be exactly. I mean, we just this is the one.

Speaker 2 So that means that the whole UA market is going to turn to this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, quite quickly.

Speaker 2 Every single genre.

Speaker 4 But you know what's what's we need to we need to say

Speaker 4 they're not they're not going to be able to do it easily because you see like the level of again complexity polish the like the whole setup they have it's just yeah product

Speaker 4 yeah you you can't yeah you can't easily copy this you can't easily copy this

Speaker 4 so yeah if we go to to Royal Kingdom, this is the setup only for the big guys.

Speaker 4 This is only for the big guys.

Speaker 2 Small guys can do the setup for the main problem with this. It's like, you know, trying to copy Supercell.
You can't copy Supercell if you're not Supercell. Yeah, but you look.

Speaker 4 You look, this is Royal Kingdom. Here we go.
Snake, all again.

Speaker 4 But then

Speaker 4 all different things.

Speaker 4 Again, saving him from

Speaker 4 literally drowning. Here, this is also kind of

Speaker 4 what they took from Royal Match. Royal Match went big on those celebrities.
And you know what? Let me just show you that.

Speaker 2 Because it's

Speaker 2 never went for some kind of very high celebrity promotion, did they?

Speaker 4 Kind of, yes.

Speaker 2 With who?

Speaker 4 It's just

Speaker 4 what's the Simon Kowal, Powell,

Speaker 2 American Idol Guy?

Speaker 4 American Idol Guy, the whole American Idol crew, actually. Let me check.
I think it was November or October 2023.

Speaker 2 I feel like I wouldn't consider them JLO-style mailers.

Speaker 4 No, like, look, so this is like the Patrick Daydoms from Suits.

Speaker 4 Like, this is like this was their strategy on Facebook mainly with all, like, basically the whole crew from Suits, and then some of the rest of the different celebrities.

Speaker 4 Which is like, you know, these people. Oh, here, here we go.

Speaker 2 We're still on the same type if you're showing it.

Speaker 2 Are we?

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 So I was showing this basically, which is Patrick Adams from

Speaker 4 Suits. They were really really big on this on YouTube.
And this is this is the part of that that Emeric and Idol

Speaker 4 kind of creatives. This is just the other version was just Simon playing in the in where, wherever.
Changing room.

Speaker 4 And this is it. So they were quite big on this

Speaker 4 celebrities. And then just okay, look.

Speaker 4 I have no idea who this is, but I guess this is the part of the American Idol as well.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so yeah. Are we almost because I need to wrap up really soon?

Speaker 4 I know we are almost almost done. This is this is just this is it basically.

Speaker 4 This is basically it from the like the whole UA perspective. So

Speaker 4 I can actually stop sharing and then just say

Speaker 4 it's near-death experience basically, which is the better version of creatives,

Speaker 2 saving whoever, which already forced upon Candy Crush creative strategy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, then we have freezing families, which are kind of now going into the like gossip harbor and merch genre, basically, because they're using only freezing families, nothing else.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So, and that's like that's what what's what's working, and obviously, playables.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 4 all of the fun stuff.

Speaker 4 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 I think we covered everything match three today. I hope so.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Any anyone gonna do a few sentences at the end? Like, my my takeaway is that meta-wise and like the whole market-wise, it's pretty much gonna just

Speaker 2 cement itself as much as possible, And either somebody comes up with like something,

Speaker 2 I mean, a unique

Speaker 2 UA trick, basically, that is able to penetrate the market, they don't stand a chance, basically.

Speaker 2 Including Royal Kingdom.

Speaker 2 As for like Royal Kingdom, can get big, but it's gonna be what Soda Saga is to Candy Crush, it seems. Yeah,

Speaker 2 anything you want to add?

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 1 I would take it from what I said before. If you want to pull it, I don't have anything else to wrap with.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I think that's

Speaker 2 good.

Speaker 4 Good to go. Good to go.
Thank you very much for listening and watching this on YouTube.

Speaker 4 Please flood 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.

Speaker 4 Nobody will ever find out.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much for staying with us. Again, this was a very long episode, but we're going to do it again anytime soon.
Most probably next quarter with different genre.

Speaker 4 Laura, again, thank you very much for coming.

Speaker 2 Always.

Speaker 2 It was beautiful.

Speaker 4 Thank you. And see you next time.

Speaker 2 Also, join the Slack channel.

Speaker 2 Bye-bye.

Speaker 2 Bye-bye.

Speaker 2 There's even someone told me, I didn't want to include it, that king has interstitials in some geos after levels.

Speaker 2 Man, I couldn't find it.

Speaker 2 I couldn't, 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.

Speaker 2 That's interesting.

Speaker 2 You know how hard it is find a bad king playing Indonesian?

Speaker 2 That's a little video of them being bad.

Speaker 2 But do I get the dried 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Even for the Indonesians. No, yeah, if you make a purchase, that takes away the odds or the placements for the odds straight away.
Yeah, but

Speaker 2 you still never see them if you're a tier one player. You do.
After a while, if you don't. Yeah, like I showed you on the first video.
Ah, okay, okay. Okay, okay.
That's what I

Speaker 2 misunderstood. So you still get them even in tier one geos, but you just need to be like 3,000 something, whatever.

Speaker 1 Or a non-spender.

Speaker 1 I'm sure they look at

Speaker 1 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 US or some or tier one country,

Speaker 1 I don't see a reason why you wouldn't show them ads.

Speaker 1 And then once 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 spender, then you just take the ads away.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You'd be surprised how many people in these companies are not pragmatists.

Speaker 1 Well, this is, this is what I was trying to get with when people approach making these games.

Speaker 1 I feel like everyone wants to take shortcuts or find easy ways and be like, oh, this is fine, I'll rationalize this, where,

Speaker 1 no, just you get these are things you have to do.

Speaker 2 This is the most comprehensive match three thing anyone's ever done.

Speaker 2 I think they're comprehensive things, but updated one to the current one, I guess, no.

Speaker 2 Laura, you know the the dissertation work on match three or or or puzzle games.

Speaker 1 Dissertation?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the Genova Chance one, I think.

Speaker 2 That's like a giant, giant goes all the way to like 82.

Speaker 1 I have not seen that one.

Speaker 2 You need to see this. I need to send this.

Speaker 1 And I won't lie, I'm a little disheartened by like the current state. I want to see more coming from match three.

Speaker 1 I feel like we...

Speaker 1 No one's done a lot of experimentation on the engine. The only one I've seen is Monster Hunter Puzzles, where they started experimenting with diagonal matching.

Speaker 1 And then they took something called, they froze the board for a certain period of time, and you have to kind of make as many matches as possible. That's core engine innovation.

Speaker 1 I have not seen many studios try.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's also sort of like decorator or lightweight meta.

Speaker 1 And it's, I don't know,

Speaker 1 I guess I'm bored. I want to see more.
I want to see people try new things.

Speaker 2 But I'll send you this one, but this is like for me when I was doing the match 3 thing or click to match, like this goes all the way to chain shot 85.

Speaker 2 And it does this giant thing up until like Luxor or something.

Speaker 2 There you go. So it's literally

Speaker 2 sure, sure, sure. Like it's literally connect the dots all the way to like the first game because the change, the chain shot game actually is the first puzzle game.
And it's this

Speaker 4 I would just like to keep this in the in the recording.

Speaker 2 I'm sure you can.

Speaker 2 We can

Speaker 2 thing. Yeah,

Speaker 2 I can put it in the end.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 This is like super true. But I'll get to it back.

Speaker 1 They're talking about tile match and bubble feeders here, too. So this is looking more at a puzzle.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is a whole puzzle. This is not much.
Oh, this is a puzzle. Oh, yeah.
It just goes all the way to the first game. And then

Speaker 2 there you go. But these crazy things.
This is look at some creative from big one pixel man.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 No,

Speaker 4 I am a big blob.

Speaker 2 You're never a blob to me, you're kidding. I am a blob.

Speaker 4 Okay, but that's fine. Don't worry.
It's going to work. It's going to work.
Because

Speaker 4 I changed the Wi-Fi, so that's why.

Speaker 4 Okay, perfect. Let's see.
Let's see how it goes. Anyway, so creative that works.

Speaker 2 Hello, everybody. Welcome back.

Speaker 4 Welcome back. Yeah, thank you very much.
Yeah, watching this in the post-creative scene.

Speaker 4 Obviously, as usual.