Granny: The untapped goldmine of horror games on mobile! How Granny Broke YouTube & TikTok?

Speaker 1 Basically, this developer kept churning these horror games because it's obviously working for him pretty well. Because

Speaker 1 he started in 2014 with

Speaker 1 Slenderina, and then by 2018, he's pretty much doing like a million downloads a month with just Slenderina. And then comes Granny

Speaker 1 in 2017,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 then she like goes like supernova in June 2018 and does 60 million downwards in a month. But you know, this doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 1 We need to look at the active user base over the same time period, otherwise, it's like we'll go there. We'll go there.
Don't worry. We'll go there.

Speaker 1 Just want to see, like, show you how consistent these games were. Yeah, and like, they still are.
Yeah, yeah, but how can you create this?

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Speaker 1 Hello everyone and welcome to another amazing episode of Two and a Half Gamers.

Speaker 1 We are recording right now on Friday evening so that you can stay two and a half steps ahead of the mobile gaming industry. I'm Felix Brauberg.
I'm Matiel Ancherich. And I'm Erko Bremer.

Speaker 1 And we are

Speaker 1 your

Speaker 1 host.

Speaker 2 It's gonna be fine. Yeah, the life was a little bit better, but it's fine.

Speaker 1 It's okay.

Speaker 2 Okay, Mr.

Speaker 1 Now, Felix, Felix,

Speaker 1 switch to like horror Felix and to the

Speaker 1 end. So, we are here to talk about something extremely scary and upsetting today, and that is that everyone, as you know, has a grandmother, but not everyone has a granny that's trying to kill you.

Speaker 1 Because today we are talking about the mobile hit horror game that is granny

Speaker 2 in slovakia everybody loves granny because she wants you to eat all the food in the world and if you say no she doesn't get the food you need to eat more there's no there's no is no it's not an answer you always need to eat everything she prepares so It's not, I mean, it's kind of horror as well.

Speaker 1 I think horror games in mobile like even after like watching stalker and seeing how that did is like a very underserved genre in mobile this game is doing quite well on the organic side oh yeah there's no way

Speaker 1 when we decided to do a cover yeah to do a cover on this you were like oh you play it and I played it it was scary like it's not nice to play especially if you're playing with headphones it's like

Speaker 2 you played it yeah I played it it's also not nice to like watch the videos it's just like whoa what the fuck should we just just start with

Speaker 1 the game design? Like, you can show the game off straight away before we show the numbers? Because

Speaker 2 you mean showing the actual game in the second minute of the podcast?

Speaker 1 No way. We need to be 19 minutes in before we can do that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 At least.

Speaker 1 At least 19.

Speaker 1 Let's go.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 That reminds me of yesterday when I played the game and it it was scary.

Speaker 1 It's still scary.

Speaker 2 It's still scary.

Speaker 1 It's scary.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's start with this and I guess we'll.

Speaker 1 There she is. There she is.
I think this will be a very unique episode. Like we never had this episode.
Yeah, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 we need to use this music actually from... Yeah, is there any way you can share the music? I don't know.
Like,

Speaker 1 I mean, you can make the game scary. If you mute it, it's like, that's how I play it.

Speaker 1 How the experience is like music and sounds.

Speaker 2 Yeah, when you share the whole screen or the tab, you can actually share the sound as well. Oh, really? By the way.
Oh, yeah, sure. I mean,

Speaker 2 just click on the tab.

Speaker 2 There's also the tab.

Speaker 1 I'm sharing the whole screen. Also share system sound.
There you go.

Speaker 1 Mate,

Speaker 1 can you stop doing that when you do the UA covers and not share with sound? Because that would be amazing.

Speaker 2 I do that. Well, I just didn't do it on the

Speaker 1 okay. So, is that when I would sound it? Yeah, yeah, that's what sound.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, that is scary. There we go.
Okay,

Speaker 2 let's play a little bit. I won't cheat my pens now.

Speaker 1 Let's play a little bit. By the way, this is the main menu.
If I click more games, it goes literally to their Google Play Store account.

Speaker 2 That's yeah, but if you can put it a little bit

Speaker 1 lower on the volume, even lower.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Steven.

Speaker 1 Let's play it out louder when you play the game, but yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay, okay, let's go.

Speaker 1 So, first thing, there's difficulty options, and why there's difficulty options because there's a lot of replayability. You can see immediately.

Speaker 1 Turn on the music a bit when you're talking about it, and then we can turn off for the gameplay. Even

Speaker 1 more. I don't even

Speaker 1 hear it now. Yeah, it's too much.

Speaker 1 Turn off the gameplay.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, there's darker settings, extra logs, mute, what

Speaker 1 so loud just mute the fucking music. Seriously, I don't even hear it now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we can hear, we can hear it. Yeah, now I understand like why why you you always say like, oh my god, I need to

Speaker 1 throw your drive

Speaker 1 with creatives

Speaker 1 because of your UA creatives. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 We we use it once we're there. Anyway, so you can have quality settings.

Speaker 1 You see that it's like all prototype and everything because, as I understood from the research that JetGPT did for me, it's done by one person.

Speaker 1 A suite, actually.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I can tell you from the ad revenue, this motherfucker is rich.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we will talk about that.

Speaker 1 Talk about that in a second. So yeah, you can make the game basically harder.
I don't even want to imagine what would happen if I check the nightmare setting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and there's also like extreme difficulty and stuff like that so practice is where i played a little bit first because i was a bit scared gram granny's not home so you can just walk around the house really

Speaker 1 okay yeah so typical instructions like this is pretty much in in line with all the like uh amnesia horror games where you can't really fight the horror you can just go around it or hide behind it or like you know stay survive basically i mean you can get the crossbow and shoot granny but then she's only out of the house for 15 seconds and then she's back she gets tranquilized yeah tranquilizing shots turn on the music now let's just be quiet and show the the day one

Speaker 1 yeah don't overdo it please there's no music it's just like

Speaker 1 there's music only when she gets annoyed

Speaker 1 yeah there we go so what we can do is we can move by the way the settings for the emulator are great there's press right mouse button to lock the mouse and control and view angle movement.

Speaker 1 So it's pretty much set up for emulator already. Nice.
There's also a Steam game, by the way.

Speaker 1 So when we move, it makes sounds, especially on the creaking floor. Or oh, here we go.
I guess we're

Speaker 1 there. She is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we need to do stuff like this and hide under the bed and then

Speaker 1 try to survive. There she is.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you hear the music or no? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, great.

Speaker 1 Yeah, then what we can do, we can dag because there are pathways that you need to duck or like go around the table and stuff like that. Like here.
You can hear the piano. It's like.

Speaker 1 I don't hear anything because it's just so low. Like it's just like trying.

Speaker 1 So what we'll do is we crawl around and the thing is, and this is the main mechanic of the game, to open these containers, and there's nothing here, but they are actual items around the place.

Speaker 1 And what you need to do, like you see, the door, for instance, you need to escape, as was written there.

Speaker 1 And there are these, like, for instance, there's an item right there that I can probably touch for now.

Speaker 1 But I know that, for instance, here,

Speaker 1 if we go here,

Speaker 1 crawling

Speaker 1 against these boxes, I don't yeah, shit.

Speaker 1 there we go

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 if Granny catches us we get one life deducted basically so that's we have uh five lives right you have to get out of the house with five days right so you get you have to get out of the house by five days and the day changes when she catches you and then you wake up in the bed again with everything the same like the state of the game just being the same yeah uh yeah i think we lost matia already because of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's a bit scared, I think,

Speaker 1 anyway.

Speaker 1 So you go around the house and you are tasked with like getting these items together, and those are pretty much like adventure-style items, such as like locks, weapons, tools, and whatever.

Speaker 1 Pretty much, yeah. There we go,

Speaker 1 hide, hide! Yeah, I'm hiding.

Speaker 2 Yeah, she got me, so I'm back.

Speaker 1 But it's back.

Speaker 1 We thought you were a bit scared. I know you don't like that.
Yeah, I know. Of course.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 She got me. So

Speaker 1 I'm a little bit proficient in this because my sister is a horror fanatic, so she forced me to watch all the horrors there are. There's like horror franchises and stuff like that.
This is good.

Speaker 1 It's okay.

Speaker 1 You know what I think is quite interesting, though? Because this game, before we get to the ad part, makes a lot of money, right? And it's one guy.

Speaker 1 And there's a bunch of horror movies that have like a 200k budget and they make like a hundred million in the box office there's a whole franchise it's called the conjuring franchise yeah exactly but there's like

Speaker 1 so many horror movies that make a lot of money from a small budget like because it's just easy because you know the best horror movies are the ones where you just play on the person's fear without even showing anything

Speaker 1 you don't need like crazy effects or whatever like pretty much you don't show anything by the end of the movie there's like one shot of the monster or something and everything's created in your head.

Speaker 1 So, that's the beauty of it.

Speaker 2 Why don't you play the game?

Speaker 1 Actually, we already played. You got uh killed in day two, you missed it, okay.
Anyway,

Speaker 1 let's do it. So, she lays these bear traps.
Okay, hello,

Speaker 1 let's see.

Speaker 1 I think we already screwed it up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this doesn't really work like it's supposed to work.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 you were scared one Walter.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ. So that was the game.
Day three. So, and there we go.

Speaker 1 That's the beautiful township playable.

Speaker 1 So, I guess this is my part to say: like, the interstitial ad obviously has no banner ads because the guy was clever enough not to add banner ads because that would ruin the whole thing, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So, between the days, they have interstitial ads, right? And

Speaker 1 on, I guess, like it's every second day, every second day. Yeah, every second day.

Speaker 1 The interesting thing here is, right, like it's 18 minutes of gameplay over three sessions on average, right? So it's

Speaker 1 quite a lot of gameplay. Man, that's just an average.
I don't think so. It just does justice.
Because if we go

Speaker 1 a little bit, and let's actually leave it to a professional. So I check the walkthrough.
This is the walkthrough of just one of the endings. It's 14 minutes, actually.

Speaker 1 So if we go here, you see this guy's a pro because he immediately goes and finds the key and gets the tranquilizing shot, waits for the granny.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was just enjoying this so much. So he tranquilizes her and then goes whatever he needs to do.
Because the main point of this game, why it's so good.

Speaker 1 You turn off the interstitial, it's playing township in the background. Oh, really?

Speaker 1 That's why I shouldn't. It's like

Speaker 1 the sound stuff.

Speaker 1 So what he does is basically he tranquilizes Granny. There's like three or four tranquilizer shots.

Speaker 1 So he has like, I don't know how many seconds now until she wakes up 15 yeah or even more yeah but he goes pretty much his way because what you need to do in this game is that you need to search a lot of stuff because there are randomized spawns of items the items are the same all the time like there's a key there's car battery there's engine parts tools whatever like you see but see what he does he pretty much searches the whole place because those random items means that they're spawned in different places each time you start the game.

Speaker 1 That's what makes it replayable.

Speaker 1 So he goes and pretty much searches the stuff, yada, yada, yada. And he goes, and it takes a lot of time.
And think about it: like, how much time it actually takes you to even understand these things.

Speaker 1 Yeah. In between dying to Granny all the time.
And shaking our pants. Yeah, exactly.
It takes I'm not the target audience for this, but like

Speaker 1 stuff like this. Like, yeah.
There we go.

Speaker 2 He died.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Granny didn't even catch him. It's just crumbled through the floor.
So already lost a life there. So

Speaker 1 again, goes there into the attic and tranquilizes her again.

Speaker 1 As usual.

Speaker 1 But yeah, the thing is, as I learned, that he goes on and like finishes, for instance, the ending. Your objective is to get out of the house.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 But the thing is, there are multiple endings. That's the beauty of it.
Because for instance, his ending that he is going for is actually that you

Speaker 1 repair the car in the garage, and then once you repair the car,

Speaker 1 he did it by the way on his last life, because on your last life, on day five, you have this like big string, and there are three straps and bear traps that she lays there.

Speaker 1 And there he goes, he repairs the car, and then after he repairs the car, you actually need to ram the car garage door for something

Speaker 1 multiple times, yeah, multiple times, and

Speaker 1 one more,

Speaker 1 and there we go. And he went away, and that's the end.
And that's just one of it.

Speaker 1 Because keep in mind that in the beginning, there was the door that you could just go through the main door, you just need to open it. I don't know if you saw it somewhere, but maybe

Speaker 1 we'll watch it here after you get rid of the door. No, don't play the game.

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 2 No, don't play the game.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 I'm too scared already. Just wait for the third one.

Speaker 1 Watch it. This is the first time I'll ever say this in our entire friendship, but you're so cute.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so. Honestly,

Speaker 2 I hate horror movies.

Speaker 2 I can't do it.

Speaker 1 I can't do it. It's like you get used to it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I don't want to use it. I don't want to get used to it.
I don't get it.

Speaker 1 So there's the door, and you literally go there and insert the master key.

Speaker 1 There's like a lot of multiple locks, man. Yeah, yeah, like because it's another scenario.
So if you go here and uh, I guess we get killed anyway. Fuck a second.
Still afterwards.

Speaker 1 Maybe afterwards. So if you go here, for instance, here you see, I went to this guy's channel, and there's like

Speaker 1 let's zoom a little bit.

Speaker 2 So yes, please.

Speaker 1 Granny game, main door, escape guide. All it has to do is

Speaker 1 then how to get the bones then, granny, all painting pieces,

Speaker 1 completion guide. There's like secrets, like, even though it looks like so shitty and prototype-y, like scratch that, but the depth of it is just so good.

Speaker 1 So, imagine that you're not only completing it once, you're completing multiple times if you're like a horror fan.

Speaker 1 Because there's just there's just no alternative, especially there was no alternative in 2018 when this was come up.

Speaker 1 And you see, as we go, there's like granny all chapters, escape, granny one, and granny two full gameplay with all games, came it was like one hour videos.

Speaker 1 And it takes a lot of time even to complete one playthrough, not multiple playthroughs. So, I can imagine that, like, it takes a lot of ads, like all escape endings.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this guy doesn't have really a big viewership. There's so many other things.

Speaker 1 This is a new one. I was searching for a new one, so I would get the latest build of the game without showing it.
But if you go really granny,

Speaker 1 yeah, for instance, his trailer on his blog, which is seven years on his channel, the developer's channel, is 137 million. Yeah, that's just the trailer.

Speaker 2 This is the trailer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, If you go into these videos, it's like 96 million three years ago. That's exactly 94 million four years old.

Speaker 2 That's exactly the one that I was talking about.

Speaker 1 53 million, 53 million, 40 million.

Speaker 2 And if you go to shorts, there's like 300 million views, and it's like, it's insane.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 As I said, this game was the second most watched game on YouTube in 2018.

Speaker 1 when it when it went out.

Speaker 2 At least that's and it's still it's still going strong. It's still going still going strong.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 let me just finish the game. So the thing is that

Speaker 1 Granny caught us again.

Speaker 1 Let's leave Granny one and let's go actually to Granny two.

Speaker 1 I think Matia is excited.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we need to turn on the music, of course, again.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes. We need to turn on the music.
We need to turn it on.

Speaker 2 Tell me afterwards. I'm just going to answer.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 yeah, we also have now grandpa.

Speaker 1 Is the music playing or no?

Speaker 2 Yes, unfortunately it is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so now we also have grandpa and granny because grandpa has a different mechanic, he isn't that sensitive to sound, but he hits much harder and he patrols the area.

Speaker 1 So again, pretty much the same thing like you see there. It's it's like that's it pretty much.
So if we go here

Speaker 1 not much has been changed and this didn't really like took that much development, I guess.

Speaker 1 For like the

Speaker 1 I know there are a few more mechanics. There's like a lockpicking mechanic added and like some other things, but it's pretty much very simple.

Speaker 1 And the thing is, the good thing is that the guy is actually doing that horror thing franchise thing where all these games are connected by lore.

Speaker 1 I'll talk about the lore a little bit later, but you see, just by the way,

Speaker 1 it's kind of very much the same. And that's it.
And you'll see that when I show the numbers, actually.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's there.

Speaker 1 Let me show you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to read some of the mid-rolls we have instead of watching this.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, do you want to do the first one?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 By the way, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't see anything.

Speaker 1 Grandpa just bashing our head, but let's talk about...

Speaker 1 One of our main sponsors, PVX Partner. Exactly.

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Speaker 2 And you know, as we talked about, UA data can feel a little bit like a black box or a horror movie. But PVX Lambda is a game changer.

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Speaker 2 And you can avoid the horror movies.

Speaker 1 The horror UA, the horror. The horror UA.

Speaker 1 Shit scared Matt. It's pretty good.
It's priceless. He's so cute.
I just want to bounce him on my knee. Anyway, so there's also the third one.

Speaker 1 And the third one is the key one because

Speaker 1 the third one actually ties it all together. And this really

Speaker 1 explains where grandma comes from. Yes, and not only that,

Speaker 1 actually, there's another series of horror games this developer did before.

Speaker 1 And the series is called Slenderina.

Speaker 1 As the daughter. Snarl.
Slenderman. It's based on Slenderman.
Daughter of Slenderman.

Speaker 1 So if we go here, you see that you can actually enable Slenderina in the game itself.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she's somewhere. Oh, there we go.
You can also check like just Granny, just grandma, and both. But I don't know why don't we see Slenderina? She was supposed to be somewhere here.

Speaker 1 Just not showing her face.

Speaker 2 She's setting up a web shop for sure.

Speaker 1 You're so scared you need to do another app. There she is.
Here she is. Exactly.

Speaker 2 She's just, yeah, she just finished the Fast Spring webshop because as no horror D2C partner

Speaker 2 with real world experience at scale, Fast Spring is your partner you can trust without any horrors. Jesus.

Speaker 2 Go to fastspring.gg and quick launch a new web store and don't play horror games.

Speaker 1 We want to be fast

Speaker 2 exactly because they have delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years and they power top mobile publishers around the world. So go to fastspring.gg

Speaker 2 and avoid horrors.

Speaker 2 Oh my god.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so

Speaker 1 Granny is actually the gra she is the granny of Slenderina as I read in the stories.

Speaker 1 She

Speaker 1 gets poisoned by at that least. She gets poisoned by her mom and then Granny

Speaker 1 takes the mom into dungeon here somewhere. Whatever.

Speaker 1 Pretty much all the things that you would expect from some kind of horror franchise lore or whatever.

Speaker 1 So the game's kind of the same.

Speaker 1 Not really something.

Speaker 1 Just more mechanics and more stuff. And again, it's amazing it's done

Speaker 1 as I guessed by one person.

Speaker 1 So you see, a budget got a little bit bigger. So there's now an intro and everything.
So

Speaker 1 but the assets and everything, I guess they are

Speaker 2 reusing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 Why you should not reuse it?

Speaker 2 Of course, the howl, as usual.

Speaker 1 I don't hear anything.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so that's there. And in between, Mati gets shit shit scared again, because

Speaker 1 my guess there's some jump scare back into this. This is my favorite episode we've ever done.
This is so good.

Speaker 1 Yes, I see it. You're so as soon as Mati did this, torturing Mati.
Oh, he's just making a joke. And then I'm like, oh no, he's just...
No, I'm not making it.

Speaker 2 Man, I just hate this. I hate this so much.

Speaker 1 It's just so good.

Speaker 1 Like, this whole thing is like a work of passion. You can see that

Speaker 1 the guy really took his time. There we go.

Speaker 1 What was this? Shotgun? Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 There we go. You should get shot? Yeah, because you need to wake up in bed, of course.
So I guess that's the usual thing.

Speaker 1 but yeah even even this like whole life mechanic with days this is like very very clever and and done done super well so yeah same same thing as you know so we end up in uh where a dungeon

Speaker 1 how do we get out of the dungeon do we just open the door

Speaker 1 oh no you sure you need to find the key there's a key

Speaker 1 it's a hairpin it's a hairpin it works pick the lock pick the lock i'm trying

Speaker 2 you should try you try more

Speaker 1 harder

Speaker 2 there you go is there a sound of it yeah yeah there is yeah

Speaker 1 all right that's interesting can i tweak there we go that's nice

Speaker 1 okay

Speaker 1 but yeah vs d is not working just give me a second

Speaker 1 there we go for those who know how this works

Speaker 1 hello keyboard back again oh yeah and I guess this is the same thing as usual with the Slenderina added on top and all these other things and in yeah you're now trying to survive three

Speaker 2 people instead of one in Granny.

Speaker 1 Avoid I guess. Avoid avoiding this seems like another one of endings where you need to go with Subway.
Yeah, I read about that like subways.

Speaker 1 I don't know what Granny did for a living before, but she's rich, nice house.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Stationary.

Speaker 1 in the second one she has a hidden moat under the house and the ship

Speaker 1 nice yeah she's also very rich on that point

Speaker 1 there we go

Speaker 1 with the shotgun yeah there we go anyway

Speaker 1 let's get to the actual numbers because this is super interesting uh not here yeah because the the active user base is

Speaker 1 huge yeah so this is the thing i wanted to show you first this whole thing started with slenderina the Seller. And this was doing still okay numbers, like what 120, 200k downloads a month.

Speaker 1 It's it's yeah, for like one month.

Speaker 2 That's pretty good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this is Slandrina. Then you see House of Slenderina.

Speaker 1 Then you see

Speaker 1 what

Speaker 1 I guess. Can you turn off the music, Jakob? Because

Speaker 1 it's enough with the horror stuff. Sorry.

Speaker 1 Too much thematic.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so then we go slandrina the seller 2 and pretty much all the slandrinas get released

Speaker 1 what do we have have like three four slanders

Speaker 1 the school slender the forest so basically this developer kept churning these horror games because it's obviously working for him pretty well because

Speaker 1 he started in 2014 with with like Slandrina and then by 2018 he's pretty much doing like million downloads a month with just Landrina. And then comes Granny

Speaker 1 in 2017.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 then she goes like supernova in June 2018 and does 60 million downloads in a month. But you know, this doesn't mean anything.
You need to look at the active user base over the same time period.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, it's like

Speaker 1 we'll go there. We'll go there.
Don't worry. We'll go there.
Just want to

Speaker 1 show you like how consistent these games were.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And still are.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. But how can you create this virality? Because there's like one viral thing, and I was like, oh, the second one for sure would be like not that good.

Speaker 1 Like, bam, 10 million downloads on like lunch stuff. Then the third one, bam, again, 10 million downloads.
Everything.

Speaker 2 Yeah, what do you mean, like, how can you even create, like, it's the horror movie, and the next one, and the next one is still horror.

Speaker 1 I don't move it. I don't know.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 how can you recreate the virality? of the thing

Speaker 2 but it's the same it's the same principle it's just the whole game so like that's the thing like you're trying to but man like if you would try to do any other different game like what like you create 10 flappy birds and what like each of them has 10 million on the line yeah but it's like it's not the same flappy bird you need you would need to do a different uh

Speaker 2 plus one i guess you here you have the grandpa and also this is a different is

Speaker 1 you're telling me grandpa is solely responsible for another 10 million downloads peak i don't think it's solely responsible for the the dead download peak but i think this this is a new game no no no this is the hidden beauty of this because this is so marketable memble yeah

Speaker 1 immutable that pretty much at this point everybody discovers granny and once everybody like i'm gonna find one views again because there's another granny game i don't think youtuber jumps on this again it could be a dead as well yes sure but it's not like oh i'm gonna farm the views it's just uh

Speaker 1 why would you play

Speaker 1 like this is i think this is the exact effect of that like like we're gonna farm the views and twitch viewership because everybody jumping on the game that was the second most watched game on youtube well if yeah if it was second most yeah then then that was the snowball effect yeah for sure so that's that so anyway

Speaker 2 back to current reality which almost like uh someone talking about supercell all the time yeah

Speaker 1 so 40 million downloads last month this tells you everything like this is like just amazing for something that's like what seven years old and still like solo guy making all these things.

Speaker 1 Revenue-wise, again, no IPs really. Like, yeah, we don't even really need to talk about this.

Speaker 1 Just let's recap the numbers here. So, Granny is pretty much responsible for nearly half a billion downloads.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 out of this world.

Speaker 1 Then, Granny 2 is 200.

Speaker 1 Granny 3 is 136. Slandrina, the first one, is 60, then 30.

Speaker 1 It's just like hit after the hit after hit after hit.

Speaker 1 Amazing.

Speaker 1 So go to Granny and let's look at the active user base because then we can start talking about the ad revenue, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Looking at the AU graphs.

Speaker 1 Okay. Loading.

Speaker 1 and i think really it also has to do um need to double check when's the conjuring date or like amnesia when like these steam games really took off because i know a lot of horror games at some point kind of really really took off at least i know about them because my sister are playing all of them yeah

Speaker 1 and this is pretty much it like this is not really that different from amnesia actually like if you know like like one of the first really big pc games that started this genre was amnesia where you're going with like a candlelight around the house again you can just escape and survive.

Speaker 1 That's like pretty much the same.

Speaker 1 Uh, yeah, so two million 2.1 million, but mostly in T3, right? So, yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah, still, but 2.1 million after seven years, exactly. So,

Speaker 1 that's

Speaker 1 it's like you know, like nearly the like three million peak,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 So, India is one million out of that for sure, yeah, yeah, but still, US like 115K.

Speaker 1 It's not bad. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 magic number. Yeah.
So I took a look at so the only ad placements is the interstitials between the days, right? Every two days, there's an interstitial. So it's very simple, right?

Speaker 1 It's very generous, by the way. I would exactly say that.
Yeah, yeah. So

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 pegged it at four interstitials on ImpDAO

Speaker 1 on 75% of the user base in the last 30 days. Now here comes the biggest delta that I've ever said on the podcast.
Because

Speaker 1 if this is properly managed and set up, that means that this game is making anywhere between 45 to 52k a day in ads in the last 30 days.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I couldn't find an ad app.txt file at all. And I spent a lot of time looking for this.
So there is a strong possibility that there's only one ad provider. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that basically would handicap this down to probably 19 or 20K. 20K per day.
Yeah. At 20K per day.

Speaker 1 So what was happening in the market around when this game came out was that Unity was extremely aggressive on going on something called

Speaker 1 exclusivity deals, where basically if you made a game with Unity, you turned on ads with Unity. So you saw you having some, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 1 When you saw you had some downloads, they would reach out to you and be like, hey, sign a exclusivity agreement with us for X amount of times, and we'll drop our margin fee from 30% to 2%.

Speaker 1 But you only work with Unity, so you couldn't use a mediation. And there's been so many developers from 2018, 2017, that time that I spoke to them, like, oh, we have a really good deal with Unity.

Speaker 1 I'm like, no, you're getting bent over a table.

Speaker 1 And then they add a mediation and they double or triple revenue. So like, that's the delta.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you're telling me

Speaker 1 your Swedish friend Dennis took a

Speaker 1 deal with the devil here. Yeah, with the devil.
Maybe, I don't know. I'm just hypothesizing, right? But, like, if he's got a proper mediation setup, and honestly, the only ads I saw were Uni ads.

Speaker 1 So, maybe I just got unlucky, but that's why I'm hypothesizing it. But if he has a proper setup with a good mediation, if you want help with it, I can tell you how to set it up, right?

Speaker 1 Because honestly, this is too much money to leave on the table, even when adjusting for very low ECPMs. Like, this is huge if you're mediating this correctly, right? Because it's all organic, right?

Speaker 1 But the ECPMs I plugged in were extremely low and it still came out with this number.

Speaker 1 The one thing I would say that I would change in how all the games are done in terms of ad placements is if you go back to the game Granny 1, please,

Speaker 1 the actual game, yeah, the game, and go back to the menu on Granny 1. Oh, yeah, that's Granny 3.
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 Marty's favorite.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the only thing I would change here, because I think the interstitials make sense, you should definitely not use banners.

Speaker 1 I don't think you should use app open ads because it takes away so much from kind of the horror feel, right? Immersiveness.

Speaker 1 Immersiveness, right? But the only thing that really makes sense to me, because you have to figure this game out, right? Press play.

Speaker 1 What I would do here is I would put three hints on how to complete the levels that would help you out between three behind three rewarded ads.

Speaker 2 And that doesn't not take the whole.

Speaker 1 Press the next one. Press the next one.
Continue. Yeah, because basically, like

Speaker 1 here it tells you the hints, tips. It tells you the tips right there.
So take three of those and just hide behind

Speaker 1 instructions, man.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 This is how you play the game. It's not the hints or tips.

Speaker 1 It says tip magic

Speaker 2 no seriously you're out of order designing games seriously you can't you can't slap ad placement on everything yeah you can't you can't you can't no you can't i've been doing it for eight years it works amazing

Speaker 2 you are not in here and seriously like no it won't work here it wouldn't work because it's it's it really

Speaker 1 like I think what what he can do is be more aggressive. He can just be more aggressive and put ads between each day instead of every second day.

Speaker 1 Okay, turn off the granny music. It's uh

Speaker 1 too somber.

Speaker 2 You know, even even if even if you go like

Speaker 2 revive for an ad, that's also

Speaker 1 no, I would say that. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 it's also stupid. It breaks the game.

Speaker 2 It breaks the goal, the whole experience.

Speaker 1 But honestly, like with this amount of inventory, he should be on a mediation deal that pays him to be on a mediation platform.

Speaker 1 He should have probably 10 to 12 networks set up competing, and then he would be 50k a day. So, assuming that you didn't find any txt, it means that he isn't on any mediation deal.

Speaker 1 How the adopts txt file works is right if you go to well, I can show you right now, right?

Speaker 1 Closer to Mike Felix, because we're losing you. Yeah, so

Speaker 1 let me let me get the screen, right?

Speaker 1 Thinga, so here, right? So, how the adopts txt works, right, which is where you can see everything, is it goes to whatever your app store listing is.

Speaker 1 It scrolls your website, what you have listed, which is in this case, Granny, right? So, this is the website.

Speaker 1 Matthew thought he would be safe.

Speaker 2 No, no, Granny Plush is like, what the f man? Geez.

Speaker 1 Second most watched game on YouTube. What do you think you're doing? I know.

Speaker 1 Here, what the Adapts Txt does. It takes the website that's listed on the app stores and then it adds this line, right? And then it's not there.

Speaker 1 So that means that even if they have multiple networks, that means that they're not getting access to all the resellers, which is usually 50% of the inventory.

Speaker 1 So even if you had a mediation set up without having the adapts.txt file set up, you're still not getting access to probably 50% of the inventory that you could otherwise access, right?

Speaker 1 So no, if you're right. Yeah, so if I go here to like another client, right? So let's look at

Speaker 1 one of the biggest publishers in the world like like crazy labs right so

Speaker 1 this is crazy labs adapts txt and you can see how long it is

Speaker 1 and you know they have really big ad revenue right but like if you don't have this listed that means you don't get access to the demand sources from all these sources and only from the direct demand

Speaker 1 even if he has mediation he's still massive it's like it's like monetizing with your hands behind your back basically or hiding under the table So, assuming all these things, how much revenue did he lose?

Speaker 1 Over the whole time.

Speaker 1 He's lost half. He's lost half.
At least half of the revenue, yeah.

Speaker 1 Revenue. So basically,

Speaker 1 50k a day, I would say, if he has mediation with this properly set up, maybe it's just a glitch. I don't know.
But otherwise, it's like 19, maybe lower. It's like, that's how big of...

Speaker 1 a screw-up this would be or that's how much money you'd be losing so if you don't have the ad upside

Speaker 1 a day for seven years

Speaker 1 19. So, basically, it's between either like 19 a day if he doesn't have this setup, or 50k a day if he has this setup.

Speaker 1 Hmm, yeah. So, it's like

Speaker 1 he's still rich, but it's just like, yeah, you know, like it's all good, but yeah, should I just calculate 19k for seven years? Yes, yeah, please.

Speaker 1 Wait, it's not 19,

Speaker 1 that's like 50 million, it's 31, 31k, 31k a day.

Speaker 2 Isn't that like too much, honestly?

Speaker 1 It's pure money, man. I mean, I'm guessing there's no UA.
No, yeah.

Speaker 1 So the ECPMs I put on the interstitials is on, okay, so in the US in the last 30 days, right, it's 95,000 users across the whole portfolio in the US on iOS.

Speaker 1 Android, 65,000 users, iOS worldwide, 63,000. Android, 3.4 million across the three games, or all the games.
and i put the ecpm at 3.5

Speaker 1 on 75 of the user base so it's like super low right and also because it's like

Speaker 1 what do you mean 75 of users it's 100 users uh you never get 100 on interstitials because there's always issues like i've never seen a

Speaker 1 interstitial rate higher than 75 it's never going to be higher than that

Speaker 1 never seen it yeah for some reason but the game's very accessible because again looks like potato quality that's one of the main reasons why it works so well

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 I will turn on the the music no keep it the sound the sound

Speaker 1 because I mean honestly yeah is it any C T V ads here or

Speaker 2 I couldn't find any honestly but guys you should definitely talk to Vibe because if you have so many videos on YouTube by all all the all the youtubers, you can turn that into the T V or C T V ad easily and launch your CTV campaign on Hulu Roku2B and you name it in minutes because it's so simple and totally

Speaker 2 self-served.

Speaker 2 So you go check out the vibe.co and join the 5,000 brands that are already using it, vibe.co, and just set up the campaigns by yourself. Super easy.
And

Speaker 2 here we go.

Speaker 1 Granny's house. So there's a music video with nearly half a billion views.
Yes. Okay.
What's the language that he's singing?

Speaker 2 I don't know, but we can try. I mean, I can reshare with some.

Speaker 1 It's a family gaming channel of six people. Yes.

Speaker 1 What are we watching?

Speaker 1 I don't know, man.

Speaker 2 You've got a big new website idea.

Speaker 1 You don't have YouTube Premium? No, you don't have Adblog.

Speaker 2 I don't have Adblog. I don't care.

Speaker 1 Mom, it's okay.

Speaker 1 Okay, just at least it's English. I thought it would be some kind of a whatever.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 we can go from this. Yeah, yeah, I don't want to see this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I will stop sharing and resharing without.

Speaker 1 So that was the entire UA strategy, right? Viral.

Speaker 2 Pretty much, pretty much.

Speaker 1 Virality.

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't think there is a UA strategy. It's just there's no UA, basically.

Speaker 1 But keep in mind, like, keep in mind,

Speaker 1 guys, guys, very important thing: horror games were really the big shit back then.

Speaker 1 Think of it big shit. It still is.
No, no, back then, it was much more. Think of it.
PewDiePie, PewDiePie originally grew up from playing horror games as gameplays on his channel, doing stuff. Okay.

Speaker 1 Yes. I remember when he was very, very small, and he was just his whole channel where this.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, keep that in mind.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we tried to watch Granny's videos, and but we still have the Hero Wars ad.

Speaker 1 No problem.

Speaker 2 Look, yeah, it's 470 million views six years ago. Fine, then we have a short, which is 10 million views.
Again, Granny, 10 million views. Granny's house, 28 million views.
All this shit is

Speaker 1 look.

Speaker 1 Do you know what just had the biggest flashback to?

Speaker 1 Remember when you guys paid that like weird family in America for Diggy's Adventure in their basement, and this looks like a murder basement.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 I remember that. I remember that.
So, look, you have Granny 6 funny shorts, whatever.

Speaker 2 Modded versions, modded versions,

Speaker 2 everything in millions.

Speaker 2 And all of this, look, send it to friends to see who's got scared. I almost shit my pants.
Like 370 million views. All of this, 130 million views.
It's insane, even this.

Speaker 1 Hulk opened the door.

Speaker 2 Spidey escapes granny.

Speaker 1 Here you go.

Speaker 2 106 million views. Five months ago.
Five months ago.

Speaker 1 Five months ago. Oh my god.
Yes.

Speaker 2 This is life and kicking. All of this, like all these modes and whatever else.
This is the whole UA strategy. And we're talking about this in the Bending Spoons episode because this is fake.

Speaker 2 This is cool.

Speaker 1 And there's

Speaker 1 the Spider-Man. Where?

Speaker 1 On the left. Gasoline and Spider-Man use Granny Chapter.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 2 right, so you have all of these millions of views. You know how much or how many insights you can get from this? It's just insane.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
It's just spooky, scary, skeleton, dancing, Halloween.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 Why is horror not a bigger genre on mobile when there's hits like this? Do you think there's been a lot of people that tried?

Speaker 1 Clearly, you're wrong saying that.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 clearly.

Speaker 2 People care, but I don't think

Speaker 2 how can you build any type of spin depth in this type of game?

Speaker 1 It has to be ad monetized, right?

Speaker 1 The thing is that

Speaker 1 you can't really free to play it, I think. That's

Speaker 2 4.5. I mean, there's granny, but this looks like an AI granny.

Speaker 1 You know, in which sub-genre it's assigned in Sensor Tower?

Speaker 2 Tell me.

Speaker 1 Environmental.

Speaker 1 What does that extreme mean?

Speaker 1 Yeah. I don't know.
I want to see this category.

Speaker 2 So TikTok is not huge, but YouTube is absolutely huge.

Speaker 1 Do you know who's there? There's Robbery Bob on the third player.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 Okay, fine. Coolboy Runaway.

Speaker 1 Escape from Mental Hospital. Kamala Horror Exorcism.
Fantasy Room. Brain Rodora.

Speaker 2 All in millions of views.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Screw up Emily Story Pal so it basically means that there's no horror category

Speaker 1 on the store.

Speaker 2 No, no, of course not.

Speaker 1 That's that has to do something probably with the guidelines because i i know that as i showed you like green tree doesn't have an apple version because of some kind of guidelines thing so i guess this has to do with the things that these things are horrors and they are kind of rated not for the stores i guess

Speaker 1 yeah i agree

Speaker 1 yeah because just imagine like how how how this would like can you can you post-produce this please

Speaker 1 you will have great fun yeah i'll get great fun yeah kind of just imagine like what would happen if because you look at the the thing and it's like you know placeholder is done by one person kind of shitty okay whatever and like easy to do but it still still makes it and like you know don't want to lower the quality or anything but just imagine that like a full production company with like i don't know 30 people would start doing like very very high polish horror games and like how much stuff can you create there so i guess they would be going and breaking all the guidelines that they could basically so this means then we end up at Steam instead of mobile stores.

Speaker 1 It's quite an interesting category for Android, though. Like 3 million users across the platform.
But that's my guess. Because again, give me the screen, please.

Speaker 1 Maybe I should just turn on the music just because of it. Yeah, I want to see Marty's face one last time before we end the episode.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So in

Speaker 1 environmental category, whatever that means.

Speaker 1 So there's Granny, there's Granny 2, then there's Robbery bob and i don't know if there's even granny three so uh for those listeners who don't know uh me and yaka worked on robbery bob together and we managed to nearly double the revenue when we worked on it so that was

Speaker 1 acquired by decca it seems

Speaker 1 yeah so that's there revenue wise i guess there won't be anything here because most of these games are at yeah there's like

Speaker 1 Puzzle adventure mystery game by Pixel Federation. Here we go.
There you go.

Speaker 2 There There we go. That's a mystery.

Speaker 1 Five Nights at Freddy's. Yeah.
So you see that there's revenues like nothing here.

Speaker 1 Everything is there.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. Hey, shut up.
Go to active user base before you say that, because I'm not going to sit here and listen to you say that. Because if it's a lot of users, could we add revenue?

Speaker 1 I'm saying that IP revenue is nothing.

Speaker 2 It's not.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not. Yeah, so it's not again.
So Robbery Bob in the second place, King of Sneak. Shoe, shoe, spider monster.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Granny chapter two of

Speaker 1 Okay. So my guess is because these things are not here, it means that they are like on the you know gray area.

Speaker 2 Nobody actually cares about this subcategory or sub-genre at all.

Speaker 1 Because I don't believe that if like this including myself.

Speaker 1 If this is so successful that it wouldn't be followed already by some, you know,

Speaker 1 Chinese startups and stuff like that. For next week,

Speaker 1 I think that both me, like myself and Jakob, would gladly pay Mati 100 Euros each to self-record him playing with headphones. Granny won on max volume.
And that would be the last thing.

Speaker 1 Whatever's going to happen. I'm going to have to go to 150 Euros.
But the lights have to be on and it has to be in the middle of the night.

Speaker 2 You need to get it. I don't need to talk about that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. You don't need to talk,

Speaker 2 man. Like, this is not the motivation.

Speaker 1 Seriously.

Speaker 1 I mean, no fucking. Okay, let me go another route, please.

Speaker 1 No. Man, don't worry.

Speaker 1 I know exactly what to do. Okay.

Speaker 1 We need to do our Steam stuff soon.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we need to cover some horror games. Yeah, it's our time for lunch.
Perfect. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 This has been another super scary episode of the Two and a Half Gamers where we just uncovered the hidden horror genre that no one cares about except three million Indians.

Speaker 1 And it has been fantastic insights. And we hope, yeah, and we hope that one of you listeners will build a horror game to overtake Grandma.
Or that

Speaker 1 I guess the owner or like proprietor of Granny will add an Adapt TXT file and make more money because it's literally just leaving it on the table.

Speaker 2 Listeners, this is the start of the end of the podcast. If we start recording more

Speaker 2 horror games, I'm fucking out.

Speaker 2 Anyway, thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
Please leave a comment under the video. You can scare the shit out of me if you want.

Speaker 2 i don't i don't mind or just join the slack channel which is the link is in the show notes thank you very much until next time bye bye