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

52m

Today, we break down Granny: the solo-developed mobile horror hit that racked up a billion downloads and $50,000 daily ad revenue with no UA, no team, and nothing but YouTube virality.


You’ll learn:


The secrets behind Granny’s viral growth and billion-plus downloads


Why four simple interstitials are better than banners, IAP, or rewarded video


How meme culture, Let’s Plays, and YouTube Shorts keep the DAU high


How a lack of mediation and adops left $50 million on the table


What makes Granny so replayable—and why nobody’s cloned the formula


The untapped goldmine of horror games on mobile


Key Takeaway:

You do not need a team, UA, or even high production values to win. Build for memes, embrace virality, and never underestimate the power of a good scare on mobile.


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This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.

Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠

Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-2um8eguhf-c~H9idcxM271mnPzdWbipg


Chapters


00:00 Introduction to Granny: The Horror Game

04:26 Game Mechanics and Design Exploration

07:27 Gameplay Experience and Strategies

10:26 Monetization and Revenue Insights

13:26 Multiple Endings and Replayability

16:23 Personal Reflections on Horror Games

19:22 The Evolution of Granny: From One to Two

21:50 Connecting the Dots: Granny and Slendrina Lore

23:57 The Passion Behind Game Development

26:42 Analyzing Download Trends and User Engagement

31:08 Revenue Insights: The Financials of Granny Games

35:17 Optimizing Ad Placements for Better User Experience

36:18 Game Design and Monetization Strategies

37:29 Understanding Ad Mediation and Revenue Loss

39:52 Calculating Potential Revenue Losses

42:00 Leveraging YouTube for Marketing

44:09 The Impact of Horror Games on YouTube

46:05 Challenges in the Horror Game Genre

50:01 Future of Horror Games and Closing Thoughts


Matej Lancaric

User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant

⁠https://lancaric.me

Felix Braberg

Ad monetization consultant

⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com

Jakub Remiar

Game design consultant

⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar


Please share the podcast with your industry friends, dogs & cats. Especially cats! They love it!

Hit the Subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple!

Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

Listen and follow along

Transcript

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

Because

he started in 2014 with like Slenderina, and then by 2018, he's pretty much doing like a million downloads a month with just Slenderina.

And then comes Granny

in 2017,

and

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.

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.

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?

It's 4 a.m.

and we're rolling the dice.

Mate drops knowledge made of gold and ice.

Felix with ads making those coins rise.

Jackup designs world chasing the sky.

We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew.

Talking UA adverts and game design too.

Matej, Felix, Shaka, bringing the insight.

We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight.

Love KUA, master eyes on the prize.

Tracking data through the cyberspace skies.

Felix stats colours like a wizard in disguise.

Jackups crafted realms, lift us to the highs.

Two and a half gamers talking smack.

Slow hockey sick, got your back.

Ads are beautiful, they like the way.

Click it fast, don't delay.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

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

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 Bremier.

And we are

your

host.

It's gonna be fine.

Yeah, the life was a little bit better, but it's fine.

It's okay.

Okay, Mr.

Now, Felix, Felix,

switch to like horror Felix and to the

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.

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

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

i think 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

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

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

the game design?

Like, you can show the game off straight away before we show the numbers?

Because

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

No way.

We need to be 19 minutes in before we can do that.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

At least.

At least 19,

let's go.

Wow.

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

It's still scary.

It's still scary.

It's scary.

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

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.

I think

we need to use this music, actually, from...

Yeah, is there any way you can share the music?

I don't know.

Like,

I mean, you can make the game scary.

If you mute it, it's like, that's how I play it.

how the experience is like music and sound yeah when you share the the whole screen or the tab you can actually share the sound as well really by the way oh yeah sure I mean

just click on the tab

there's also the tab I'm sharing the whole screen also share system sound there you go

Mate can you stop doing that when you do the UA covers and not share with sound because that would be amazing I do that well I just didn't do it on the

because that would sound.

Yeah, that's what sound.

Yeah, yeah, that is scary.

There we go.

Okay,

let's play a little bit.

I won't cheat my pens now.

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.

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

lower on top of the volume, even lower.

Yeah, Steven.

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

Yeah, okay, okay, let's go.

So, first thing, there's difficulty options, and why there's difficulty options because there's a lot of replayability.

You can see immediately turned on the music a bit when you're talking about it, and then we can turn off for the gameplay.

Even

more.

I don't even

hear it now.

Yeah, it's too much.

Turn off the gameplay.

Okay,

um, yeah,

so there's darker settings, extra logs, mute, what

so loud just mute the fucking music.

Seriously, I don't even hear it now.

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

throw your drive

with creatives

because of your UA creatives.

Yeah,

okay.

We we use it once we're there.

Anyway, so you can have quality settings.

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.

A suite, actually.

So, okay, I can tell you from the ad revenue, this motherfucker is rich.

Yeah, we will talk about that.

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.

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

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 she gets tranquilized yeah tranquilizing shots turn on the music now let's just be quiet and show the the day one

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

there's music only when she gets annoyed

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.

So it's pretty much set up for emulator already.

Nice.

There's also a Steam game, by the way.

So when we move, it makes sounds, especially on the creaking floor.

Or oh, here we go.

I guess we're

there.

She is.

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

try to survive.

There she is.

Yeah.

Do you hear the music or no?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, great.

Yeah, then what we can do, we can dag because there are pathways that you need to dag or like go around the table and stuff like that.

Like here.

You can hear the piano.

It's like.

I don't hear anything because it's just so low.

Like it's just like trying.

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

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

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

But I know that, for instance, here,

if we go here,

crawling

against these boxes, I don't yeah, shit, there we go

so

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 in 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.

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

anyway.

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, pretty much.

Yeah, there we go,

hide, hide!

Yeah, I'm hiding,

yeah.

She got me, so I'm back.

But it's back.

We thought you were a bit scared.

I know you don't like that.

Yeah, I know, of course.

Yeah, yeah.

She got me, so.

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.

It's okay.

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.

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

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

you don't need like crazy effect 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.

So, that's the beauty of it.

Why don't you play the game?

Actually, we already played, you got uh killed in day two.

You missed it, okay.

Anyway,

let's do it.

So, she lays these bear traps.

Okay, hello,

let's see.

I think we already screwed it up.

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

Yeah,

you were scared.

Walter.

Jesus Christ.

So that was the game.

Day three.

So, and there we go.

That's the beautiful township playable.

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?

Yeah, yeah.

So, between the days, they have interstitial ads, right?

And

on I guess

every second day.

Every second day.

Yeah, every second day.

The interesting thing here is, right?

Like, it's 18 minutes of gameplay over three sessions on average, right?

So it's

quite a lot of gameplay.

Man, that's just an average.

I don't think so.

It just does justice because if we go

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.

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.

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.

You turn off the interstitial, it's playing township in the background.

Oh, really?

That's why I shouldn't.

It's like

the sound stuff.

So what he does is basically he tranquilizes Granny.

There's like three or four tranquilizer shots.

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.

That's what makes it replayable.

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.

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

stuff like this.

Like, yeah.

There we go.

He died.

Yeah, Granny didn't even catch him.

It just crumbled through the floor.

So already lost a life there.

So

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

As usual.

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,

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

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

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.

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

multiple times, yeah, multiple times, and

one more,

and there we go.

And he went away, and that's the end, and that's just one of it.

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

we'll watch it here after you get rid of the door.

No, don't play the game.

What?

No, don't play the game.

Why?

I'm too scared already.

Just wait for the third one.

Watch it.

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

Yeah, so honestly,

I hate horror movies.

I can't do it.

I can't do it.

It's like you get used to it.

Yeah, but I don't want to use it.

I don't want to get used to it.

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

There's like a lot.

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.

Maybe afterwards.

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

let's zoom a little bit.

So yes, please.

Granny game, main door escape guide.

All it has to do is

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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,

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.

This is the trailer.

Yeah, If you go into these videos, it's like 96 million three years ago.

That's exactly 94 million four years old.

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

53 million, 53 million, 40 million.

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

Yeah.

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

when it when it went out.

At least that's and it's still it's still going strong.

It's still going still going strong.

So

let me just finish the game.

So the thing is that

Granny caught us again.

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

I think Matia is excited.

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

Oh, yes.

We need to turn on the music.

We need to turn it on.

Tell me afterwards.

I'm just going to answer.

Yeah,

so

yeah, we also have now grandpa.

Is the music playing or no?

Yes, unfortunately it is.

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.

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

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

For like the

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.

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.

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

it's kind of very much the same.

And that's it.

And you'll see that when I show the numbers, actually.

Yeah, so it's there.

Let me show you.

Yeah, maybe.

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

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

Yeah.

By the way, yeah,

I don't see anything.

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

one of our main sponsors, PVX Partner.

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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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And you can avoid the horror movies.

The horror UA, the horror,

the price.

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.

And the third one is the key one because

the third one actually ties it all together.

And this really

explains where grandma comes from.

Yes, and not only that,

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

And the series is called Slenderina.

As the daughter.

Slenderman is based on Slenderman.

Daughter of Slenderman.

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

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.

Just not showing her face.

She's setting up a web shop for sure.

You're so scared you need to do another app.

There she is.

Here she is.

Exactly.

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

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

Jesus.

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

We want to be fast than Fladrida.

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

and avoid horrors.

Oh my god.

Yeah, so

Granny is actually the gra she is the granny of Slandrina as I read in the stories.

She

gets poisoned by at that least.

She gets poisoned by her mom and then Granny

takes the mom into dungeon here somewhere.

Whatever.

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

So the game's kinda the same.

Not really something.

Just more mechanics and more stuff.

And again, it's amazing it's done

as I guessed by one person.

So you see, a budget got a little bit bigger.

So there's now an intro and everything.

So

but the assets and everything, I guess they are

reusing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Why you should not reuse it?

Of course, the howl as usual.

I don't hear anything.

Yeah, so that's there.

And in between, Matte gets shit shit scared again, because

my guess there's some jump scare back into this.

This is my favorite episode we've ever done.

This is so good.

Yes, I see it.

You are 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.

Man, I just hate this.

I hate this so much.

It's just so good.

Like, this whole thing is like a work of passion.

You can see that

the guy really took his time.

There we go.

What was this?

Shotgun?

Oh, okay.

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.

But, yeah, even this like whole life mechanic with days, this is like very, very clever and done super well.

So, yeah, same thing as the middle.

So, we end up in a

dungeon.

How do we get out of the dungeon?

Do we just open the door?

Oh, no.

You sure you need to find a key?

There's a key.

Oh, it's a hairpin.

It's a hairpin.

Pick the lock.

Pick the lock.

I'm trying.

You should try you try more

harder

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

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

okay

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

there we go for those who know how this works

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

people instead of one in Granny.

Avoid I guess.

Avoid, avoid.

This seems like another one of endings where you need to go with Subway.

Yeah, I read about that.

Like Subways.

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

Yeah.

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

nice yeah she's also very rich on that point

there we go

with the shotgun yeah there we go anyway

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

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.

It's it's yeah for like one.

That's pretty good.

Yeah, so this is Slandrina.

Then you see House of Slandrina.

Then you see

what

I guess.

Can you turn off the music, Jakob?

Because

it's enough with the horror stuff.

Sorry.

Too much thematic.

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

what do we have have like three four slander slender the school slender the forest so basically this developer kept churning these horror games because it's obviously working for him pretty well because

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

in 2017.

And

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.

Otherwise, it's like

we'll go there.

Just want to

show you like how consistent these games were.

Yeah, and still are.

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.

Like, bam, 10 million downloads on like lunch stuff.

Then the third one, bam, again, 10 million downloads.

Everything.

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 it's still horror.

I don't move

horror game.

But

how can you recreate the virality?

of the thing

but it's the same it's the same principle it's just the whole game.

So that's the thing.

But man, 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 not the same flappy bird.

You would need to do a different

plus one, I guess.

Here you have the grandpa, and also this is a different is

you're telling me grandpa is solely responsible for another 10 million downloads peak?

I don't think it's solely responsible for 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 members yeah

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

could be a dead as well yes sure but it's not like oh i'm gonna farm the views it's just uh

why would you play

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

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

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.

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

Just let's recap the numbers here.

So, Granny is pretty much responsible for nearly half a billion downloads.

It's like

out of this world,

then Granny 2 is 200

and Granny 3 is 136.

Slandrina, the first one, is 60, then 30.

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

Amazing.

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.

Looking at the AU graphs.

Okay.

Loading.

And I think really it also has to do,

need to double check when's the conjuring date or like amnesia when like these theme 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 were playing all of them.

Yeah.

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.

That's like pretty much the same.

Uh, yeah, so two million two point one million, but mostly in T3, right?

So, yeah,

yeah, still, but 2.1 million after seven years, exactly.

So,

that's

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

yeah.

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

It's not bad.

Yeah.

So

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?

It's very generous, by the way.

I would exactly say that.

Yeah, yeah.

So

I

pegged it at four interstitials on ImpDAO

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

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

But

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.

And that basically would handicap this down to probably 19 or 20K.

20K per day, yeah.

At 20K per day.

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

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.

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%.

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.

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

And then they add a mediation and they double or triple revenue.

So like, that's the delta.

Okay, so you're telling me

your Swedish friend Dennis took a

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.

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?

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?

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

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,

the actual game, yeah, the game, and go back to the menu on Granny 1.

Oh, yeah, that's Granny 3.

Yeah, I know.

Marty's favorite.

Yeah.

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

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

Immersiveness.

Exactly.

Immersiveness, right?

But the only thing that really makes sense to me, because you have to figure this game out, right?

Press play.

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 and that's doesn't it not take the the whole breaks the game exactly

press the next one press the next one continue yeah because basically like

here it tells you the hints tips it tells you the tips right there so take three of those and just hide behind rewarded instructions man

exactly this is how you play the game it's not the hints or tips this is like this is how you play it

right it says tip magic

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

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

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.

Okay, turn off the granny music.

It's

too somber.

You know, even even if even if you go like

revive for an ad, that's also

breaks the game.

It's also stupid.

It breaks the game.

It breaks the goal, the whole experience.

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

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.

How the Adapts TXT file works is, right?

If you go to, well, I can show you right now, right?

Closer to Mike Felix, because we're losing you.

Yeah, so

let me let me get the screen, right?

Thinga, so here, right?

So, how the Adapts TXT works, right, which is where you can see everything, is it goes to whatever your app store listing is.

It scrolls your website, what you have listed, which is in this case, Granny, right?

So, this is the website.

Matthew thought he would be safe.

No, no, Granny Plush is like, what the f man?

Geez.

Second most watched game on YouTube.

What do you think you do?

I know, yeah, yeah.

So, 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.

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.

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?

So no, if you're right.

Yeah, so if I go here to like another client, right?

So let's look at

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

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

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

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?

Over the whole time.

He's lost half.

He's lost half.

At least half of the revenue, yeah.

Revenue.

So basically,

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...

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

a day for seven years

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.

Yeah, so it's like

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.

Wait, it's not 19,

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

Isn't that like too much, honestly?

It's pure money, man.

I mean, I'm guessing there's no UA.

No, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

yeah

i will turn on the the music no keep it the sound the sound

because i mean honestly yeah is it any ctv ads here or

i couldn't find any honestly but guys uh 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

self-served.

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

here we go.

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?

I don't know, but we can try.

I mean, I can reshare with some.

It's a family gaming channel of six people.

Yes.

What are we watching?

I don't know, man.

You've got a big new website idea.

You don't have YouTube Premium?

No, you don't have Adblog.

I don't have Adblog, I don't care.

Mom, it's okay.

Okay, just at least it's English.

I thought it would be some kind of a whatever.

Okay,

we can go from this.

Yeah, yeah, I don't want to see this.

Yeah, I will stop sharing and resharing without.

So that was the entire UA strategy, right?

Viral.

Pretty much, pretty much.

Virality.

I mean, I don't think there is a UA strategy.

It's just there's no UA, basically.

But keep in mind, like, keep in mind,

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

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.

Yes.

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

So, yeah, keep that in mind.

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

No problem, but 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

look.

Do you know what just had the biggest flashback to?

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.

Yeah,

I remember that.

I remember that.

So, look, you have Granny 6 funny shorts, whatever.

Modded versions, modded versions,

everything in millions.

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.

Hulk opened the door.

Spidey escapes granny.

Here you go:

106 million views five months ago.

Five months ago, five months ago.

Oh my god, yes, 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, this is cool.

The spider mom

on the left, gasoline and spider-mom use granny chip to make okay.

So,

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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just spooky, scary, skeleton, dancing, Halloween.

Why?

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?

Clearly, you're wrong saying that.

Yeah,

clearly.

People care, but I don't think

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

It has to be ad monetized, right?

The thing is that

you can't really free to play it, I think.

That's

4.5.

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

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

Tell me.

Environmental.

What does that extreme mean?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I want to see this category.

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

Do you know who's there?

There's Robbery Bob on the third player.

Sure.

Okay, fine.

Coolboy Runaway.

Escape from Mental Hospital.

Kamala Horror Exorcism.

Fantasy Room.

Brain Rodora.

All in millions of views.

Yeah.

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

on the store.

No, no, of course not.

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

yeah i agree yeah because just imagine like how how how this would like can you can you post-produce this please

You will have great fun.

Yeah, I'll get great fun.

Yeah, can't.

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.

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.

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.

Okay.

So in

environmental category, whatever that means.

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

acquired by decca it seems

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

Puzzle Adventure Mystery Game by Pixel Federation.

Here we go.

There you go.

There There we go.

That's a mystery.

Five Nights at Freddy's.

Yeah, so you see that there's revenues like nothing here.

Everything is there.

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?

I'm saying that IP revenue is nothing.

It's not.

Yeah, it's not.

Yeah, so it's not again.

So Robbery Bob in the second place, king of sneak.

Shoe, shoe, spider monster.

Yeah.

Granny chapter two of Google.

Okay.

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

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

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

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

Chinese startups and stuff like that.

For next week,

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.

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.

You need to.

I don't need to talk about that.

Yeah, exactly.

You don't need to talk,

man.

Like, this is not the motivation.

Seriously.

I mean, no fucking shit.

Okay, let me go another route, please.

No.

Man, don't worry.

I know exactly what to do.

Okay.

We need to do our Steam stuff soon.

Yeah, we need to cover some horror games.

Yeah, it's our time for lunch.

Perfect.

Thank you very much.

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.

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

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.

Listeners, this is the start of the end of the podcast.

If we start recording more

horror games, I'm fucking out.

But

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.

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