🧩 Can Century Games Crack the Match-3 Puzzle Genre? In Match3 genre, only the bold survive!

They're not differentiating enough.

So, one thing I questioned when we first, you know, before we started recording, was I have questions around what the strategy is of these three games.

Like, what are they trying to achieve?

I mean, I think one of you mentioned, yeah, they're like this learning.

But if you go back to when Party Match came out,

they've been learning for three years.

And

if you're going to be learning in match three, you got to be learning much faster.

And they have a live game.

So the learning should be

moving exponentially.

It's 4 a.m.

and we're rolling

Two and a half gamers talking smack.

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Uh, recording already.

Ah, there you go.

Let me just hello.

What?

Are you in a rave?

Yeah, no, it's of course.

It's uh, It's a podcast rave as usual.

Hello, everybody.

Welcome.

Better nightlife than in Seattle.

I'm coming to your place.

Yeah, of course.

Come on.

It's a rave in my daughter's room.

Yeah, Bratislava.

Like, fucking dark literature and suicidal novelists.

All right, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.

Okay, welcome.

Yeah, okay.

Let's start here.

Let's start from here.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

We already started, man.

Let's go.

And today we're talking about not one game, not two games, but three games.

Then three games.

Woo-hoo.

I need to go for it.

My name is Matteela.

Yeah, Imomo Forex.

My name is Matteel Ancheric.

I'm Felix Brauber.

And I'm the guest.

I'm Laura Taranto.

Oh, yeah.

I've been on this podcast before.

I'm very excited to return.

Welcome.

We are your hosts.

So, perfect.

Thanks.

So it's not Forex, it's Century Games.

It's batch-free.

It's casual puzzle there, whatever activities they're trying to do.

And it's a lot.

It's a lot.

So let's

start with what.

Can you share, Yaku, what exactly all those games are looking like?

Or where do we start?

Yeah, yeah.

Let's

start as usual with some numbers and some kind of.

Thanks for bringing the energy.

Should we do like a high level of as well and what Century Games is?

Because I know they're typically known for Forex games.

Like I think they did Kingshot, they did White Up Survival, and now they have these three Match 3 games.

And it's kind of like, where do they go?

Yeah, but

I think when we started talking about them early, when Frozen City, Frozen City was and then White Out Survival, like they had all these farming simulation games, hit tons of them, and then suddenly Frozen City exploded, and then White Out Survival exploded as well.

Yep,

nevertheless, the portfolio, even before White Out Survival, was doing something like 16 to 15 million a month already in 2022.

Just saying those are those Family Farm Adventure doing 7 million.

Like it's dwarfed by whiteout survival on the graph.

But if I take this out, you can see that it was still doing huge chunks of revenue.

So the original,

like the portfolio is very diversified, let's say, for a Forex company.

Comparing something, this to River Game or Fun Plus.

Because it wasn't a Forex company before.

Yes, it was not.

So that's what I wanted to talk about.

So it was, it was Fun Plus sold DNDN Interactive Studio to Century Group.

And that's how this group, that's how Century Games started.

So, yeah, sorry, that's that's what I wanted to because it's a fascinating history of how they started.

Yes, they had the family farm adventure, which was one of their first games, the farming game, I believe, or it was an early game of theirs.

Early games, they had Dragon's Capes, which was a spin on this family, whatever.

And when we talked about it, they already had back in like 2022 or somewhere around it,

the gross

pupils were like pimples.

One of of your favorite creative tricks.

Yeah, one of my favorite creative tricks in the onboarding already.

Back then.

Now they're doing all this like slightly different

hypercasual stuff, but yeah, like they were already changing it all back then.

It was absolutely.

So far, farm adventure, just to get that in context, already behind 208 million just here.

So it's still pretty big.

But yeah.

Just just to tell you, I was working on the creatives on this game.

And

I was supposed to bring a new creatives to the table, new creative ideas and concepts.

And like, okay, so these are the creatives we actually tested.

And I opened that drives, like 500 different concepts.

Like, okay, so how do you, yeah, how do you find something that wasn't tested already before?

Oh, my God.

I tested everything.

So, and that was low-scale family farm adventure.

Like, now you can translate it into what I thought survival.

It's like on steroids, basically.

Yeah.

So here somewhere, you could see that, like, at the

beginning of 2023, there's the frozen city kind of a blimp here, but it gets dwarfed very fast by whiteout survival, and that's usually what people know.

It's everything for yes.

So, now it's the forex company, mostly, I guess, but there's still other avenues that they're following because Kingshot is doing very well.

We recovered that.

It's already passing one million a day in revenue.

So, yeah, that's getting very, very big.

is basically it can i yep just ask here laura how much do you think on top of this they do through web shops

how about

okay first question is i actually don't do they have web shops set up for at least for the match three games i think most of these have

i have not looked for i'd have to check

Or we can ask our new sponsor, Fast Frink.

You saw where I was going with it.

I I know where we were going with this because, you know, Fastpring delivered D2C at scale for over 20 years.

You know, they powered top mobile publishers around the world.

So maybe, just maybe, they also work with Century Games.

Well, we never know.

We should definitely ask because there's no drama D2C partner.

They can scale.

So just go to FastSprink.

And open your web shop as well.

That was very, very nice, Black Felix.

Very nice.

Thank you very much.

I thought you'd you'd pick up on that i thought you'd pick up on that yeah i had it on my in my sleeve for later yeah

i'm actually curious though laura like do do do a lot of web do a lot of match three games monetize with web shop or not like going back before the shill but yeah

but back before the show well i think the the hardest thing for me to know is what percent of the the ones that do have it set up what percent actually of their revenue comes from web shops because that information doesn't it's not in sensor tower it doesn't exist yet yes unless that yeah unless a company like Xola that does it will share it, which I imagine they wouldn't because this is, they're not going to, you know, reveal revenue data of their, of any of their clients.

But

that's the hardest part to estimate.

So shoot from the hip.

You have a lot of, how many years experience do you have?

Like, shoot from the hip.

Yeah.

So shoot from the hip.

Shoot from the hip here.

It depends.

Okay.

So what I've seen it done before, it depends on, honestly, I think it partially depends on the integration if it's available in the app itself.

So I know you can do one link in the game to push it to a web shop, but then you still owe, what, 27%

of the

platform fee comes from the post-sale that that sale.

I would not say

it depends

almost.

You think so?

After the Apple ruling, I guess it's going to increase much more to something like 30.

I would agree with that.

I think it's going to increase.

I don't think the visibility is high enough today.

And I don't think it's easy enough to target your players without setting off alarm bells elsewhere.

But you can do direct pop-up now in the US.

You've seen those screenshots of supercell games.

Literally, in your face, pop-up, here's the store.

True.

The only thing that is missing is it's so one thing that I've, you know, recently I've been getting a little bit more accustomed to is when you have to make your own.

Well, one, if you have your own payment processor, that's one thing.

If you have to build that whole tech end-to-end, it can be that's the part that can be incredibly annoying, multi-step, which may or may not affect the actual funnel completion rate of that purchase.

The one thing that makes it super easy is when you have Apple doing the whole thing, it's click-click done.

So, these are the things that actually have to sit down.

So, shooting from the hip would entirely depend on how it's how it's implemented.

We're gonna need an answer: 20%, yeah, yeah.

It's, I would say,

fine.

I'm gonna

open up to any of the listeners.

I have not I have not

myself worked with it, so let's go 20%.

Tell me, I want to hear

what everyone else sees.

I have worked with a Forex game that was quite large, and they had 50% payments coming through web shops.

50%, but we're not like mega scale, but it's

anything mid-core can hit this easily.

This mid-core.

Yeah, but then you ask about casual games in Matrix, so it's like the 20% is always like Laura.

If you say 20% on anything, it's always the like that's the safe bet.

It's a safe bet.

20% is always a safe bet.

So,

I would say 20%.

Back to century, why are we actually talking about centuries?

We're talking about centuries.

Yeah, you're right, yeah, sir.

So, Whiteout Survival and Kingshot Killing It, yada yada, that's the forex part which we're not going to talk about today.

But the other thing, which is really important, and I guess it's this kind of a sleeping dragon, is that they're going very heavily into casual, and they're going meaning they're attempting they don't have yet like a giant if you don't care

Family Farm Adventure doing 200 million a success, it's not the match tree, yeah.

So, basically, they're going after a lot of casual games.

If you look at pretty much how these games are being released, for instance, just last month, they already released Boltsoft and Block Color Match, which you can guess which are following.

Block Color Match is core color block jam, uh color block match, and Boltsov is screwed on, basically.

Yeah, I mean so Century is trying to heavily diversify into casual and

what we'll be talking actually are the three match tree games that we picked off of the portfolio because they are going heavily into match three.

Not not I'm not saying that not going to other directions, but let's say at least Trackstar has been a little more successful, definitely more successful than Chrome Valley Customs, so we're gonna talk about that.

That's the topic for today.

Hopefully, we can figure out some strategy because I'm a little bit puzzled still.

What the strategy is.

Oh, hello, hello there.

I didn't see you.

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so

truckstar family farm match and party match for some for a second i thought you are actually on level 239

no

which

I'm pretty sure you are not.

When you say party match, can you actually sound excited?

Like you're going to a party?

No.

Do a party.

Yeah, so let me get out of this and lose my string here so we are on the same page.

We are able.

Level 50, okay, nice.

That's my usual here, like level 50, I guess when the feature said unlocks.

Like, did you see anything else, Laura, that I missed there?

That was supposed to be unlocked after level 50.

No, I mean, I played to level 100, uh, 100 in Truckstar.

I got to high 80s in a party match, which used to be called Disco Match and a Family Farm Match.

They're very similar.

And at one point, I realized I could stop playing.

I didn't have to hit actually level 100 because the games, especially Family Farm Match and Party Match.

They're so similar, I'm convinced that they used almost the same engine with a couple of improvements for those two games.

I mean, we are talking about Chinese companies, so Chinese efficiency, yeah, yeah, I mean, you joke about that, but that's actually standard.

I mean, you have no, no, yeah,

if you have the if you have the engine,

you might as well take the engine you have, and add what you think is going to be the next wave of innovation that a player wants to see, and then chuck it in the next game.

Yeah, maybe we can look here into the slide you did there because before we actually start to talk about the games like their dates because I think this is quite important whereas the disco party match, I guess, went and didn't make it.

But it's dead basically now, right?

That's my question.

Like, do these games are considered to be just like guinea pigs to do experiments or they're just dead or why they're alive?

I don't know.

But yeah, this was done here.

Chrome Valley Customs comes around and then.

Yako, Byako, you know, like like you said, like, Laura, can you talk about this slide you made?

And then you start talking.

It's fine.

I'm happy for you to jump in.

So I remember when Disco Match came out, because I was playing it about a year ago.

It was on my radar.

Yeah.

And I didn't realize it.

I mean, I realized it was Century Games, but not to this.

I didn't, what I didn't realize was that it was going to be the kind of the foundation of what Family Farm Match was going to be.

But in 2024, I actually went through the updates.

They renamed it to Party Match.

And I could not, that I have, you know, a theory, some theories as to why they're not good theories, but

they did, they released this in 2022-ish.

Then it was pre-Chrome Valley Customs.

So Chrome Valley Customs came out.

And then I do not think at that point, I don't think Disco Match, they may have used the same engine, but there's more differentiation between Party Match and Truckstar than there is between Party Match and Family Farm Match.

So

Disco match was first, then Chrome Valley Customs came out, and that was supposed to target,

give, I think it was, increase the demographic of male players in the Match Street audience, give them something that they would particularly like in terms of theme.

Forza Customs came out shortly after Chrome Valley, and then Truckstar came out.

So there's this wave of like, how do we integrate more of potentially an audience with,

how do we engage more of a male audience into the match day world?

Because we know about 50% of the population of match three generally plays is male.

So maybe if we give them trucks and beer, they'll play, they'll enjoy it more.

Who knows?

Brilliant idea.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Outstanding move.

We're so simple.

And then what came afterwards, which was a very recent release, was Family Farm Match.

And if you play all those three games, the top row is the Century Games games for Match 3.

And then I've just put two for comparison that were not Century games.

The way I see it as Family Farm took from Party, and then Truckstar is a little bit on its own.

So it was a little bit different.

And I think that's why I pulled in the Chrome Valley and Forsa.

So there's two different distinct lines

as I would slice and dice.

Yeah.

Here's the chart how it actually went off where

Chrome Valley Customs said like 2023 hit this peak of something like 100k a day

and then slowly if I get this off, pretty much

declined.

Yeah.

And then you see why.

Yeah, pretty much Truckstar ate its lunch, and then, yeah, Truckstar kind of peaked and stayed somewhere there around 80k a day.

And here we are, basically.

Can I say a really funny note here?

If you put the cursor on November 1st,

the CEO of Space Ape actually told me that, no, no, back another year.

So, go back to when it was actually peaking for, yeah.

So, right here during this peak, the CEO of SpaceSape told me that Exhibit visited the Space Ape office and was very excited.

And I had no idea that Exhibit is actually called Melvin.

He was very excited, and it was a very funny visit to the office.

But, yeah, he was involved in this game, right?

So, hilarious.

Oh, yeah, we need to talk about the episode.

Yeah, yeah, we covered it.

Hey, with Dmitry,

from the Europe perspective, and then like how they

got in exhibit

via cameo.

Yeah, cameo.

Then and they're like, oh, you know what?

Yeah, let's just work together on this.

And they put it in the game.

If you look at downloads for the same group, the same group,

what you'll see is that at Chrome Valley Customs, around the same time, you can see the revenue kind of switch.

They also stopped, it looks like they stopped spending against this game.

So you know, because

CPL is really high

cpi is super high like dimitri said like look like it was so expensive at some point like we we just had to do a lot of different hyper casual type of videos because yeah as soon as you start showing match free it's like 50 plus

and i'm pretty sure like this

50 plus it's quite high for chrome valley customs to just

beat against by the way that's the only differentiator between the let's say the ua play that i've seen within these games.

That Chrome Valley Customs actually has the mini games.

Similarly to like Royal Match.

If you go here, you can even go and play them.

It's called Vehicle Simulator.

So you literally...

Yeah, I guess it needs to download it.

I think I had that normally put in.

Was it called?

Yeah.

What was it called?

I heard that too.

No, no, no, no.

What was it called?

The minigames?

Do you say

okay.

What's the name of the mini game?

So you actually go and

ride a truck

and you need to put that was not a success.

Yeah, it was not a success, but it still kind of went there.

You failed with reading the fucking echo simulator.

The second one's better because the second one's actually forklift.

Oh, I did that one too.

That's it.

Yeah, because that one was actually put put on level 30 into normal saga, so they force you to play it or skip it.

So it's the typical kind of royal match treatment, but it's not every 10 levels as you see.

The yeah, it's like level differences is giant, so they didn't really kind of put that much effort into it.

But uh, if you look into it, it's there.

If we're talking the UI question, like, yeah, it's this is like pretty advanced stuff that they have.

And you remember when we talked about this in one of the creative uh trends,

it was all like kind of like a driving simulator type of creatives, and it's still there.

It just, I,

when I was kind of looking into the family

match, farm match, also creatives, and we were going to look at that.

I don't think, and heads off to the team, and we love Heaven and the whole century games.

I don't think, yeah, they their UA knowledge for match games is there.

You mean like it's hindering their progress?

It's probably they're kind of getting there, but UA is

exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

On the on the forex,

yeah, no problem.

How I in here, how I view it, like the slide that Laura did here, is that like this is pretty much when they were kind of more starting with like match 3 formula and just learning, learning, learning.

Here they went in two separate ways, whereas like because they had different games in between also, not match 3, but click to match or whatever, different kind of sub-genres, just same schedule.

And they went Chrome Valley Customs and pretty much diverted there into the Chrome Valley Customs meta and like the mechanics.

But they still use the template from Disco Match because it's like the base baseline.

And Family Farm pretty much gets returned back to the original, like we're following the baseline standardized template and went like Royal Match style on it.

And Trackstar's kind of a deviation, which I guess kind of they okay with it, but can scale it still.

One thing you should, we should note is that the vehicle simulator that you that you showed to access it, it's actually not a button on the HUD.

It's in the settings screen.

Yep, it is here.

Yeah.

So I played up to the first four.

They're very similar.

They're all basically driving.

There's some sort of

maneuvering vehicle.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, so that's there.

Regarding the template itself is the usual kind of royal match setup, the events trigger meta, where you have the battle pass that unlocks somewhere there in like around level 30, the monetization events on the right side of the screen,

the

let's say trigger engagement events on the left side of the screen.

By the way, this one I didn't saw in the Royal Match lollout.

I don't know if this is because you actually have to pay soft currency to be matchmaked.

And you never pay.

No, no, no.

Normally, you would be like mitch made automatically with these other events that I've seen within different games.

Here you actually had to pay like a like a wager and then

skull.

Yeah, yeah, but it basically puts a timer there.

And

after it finds an opponent, you have like 15 minutes to kind of overcome.

Also this one, this is also interesting where you have the

track that you're pretty much restoring and you need to make it by the end of the timer in order to keep it in your collection.

Which is again, I guess, a little bit of like that's what I was saying: that they kind of deviated from the Royal Match template and just went completely kind of accustomed to their Truckstar needs, I guess.

I would agree with that.

There's definitely elements of differentiation between the meta in this and even less so I'd say the core, but mostly how they approached a lot of these kind of the live events versus the other two games.

The other thing I was messaging Jakob about was if you go to in Truckstar, if you go to the guilds, the social area, this is the first time I've seen this.

They actually have team challenge integrated into the team itself, so

it's almost like its own UI HUD for how the team's performing things to do

that is not in the other two games.

That is, again, another reason why

not even in Royal Match.

I haven't, I haven't seen it in Royal Match, unless I'm not in the A-B test for it, but I have not seen it in Royal Match.

So they have their own iterations, which is great, But other features are pretty much kind of bread and butter oil match.

Like you have the standard albums there.

This is kind of again very similar.

The leaderboard setup, again,

very similar.

The show

not show.

This is the progression setup, let's call it.

But again, progression here is the farm.

Here is the cars.

And here is the like these club areas.

Oh, they were pretty much unlocking there.

Yeah, here you see, for instance, the different thing with the cars is that you have these additional cars from events I guess that you can get or collect or whatever something.

I guess that that's going for their mechanic.

Yes, let's talk about the core because I want to hear your your kind of

let's say

what do you think about the core currently and what what they do, what they don't do or how would you compare this to Royal Match or why this can scale to Royal Match?

You know, in terms of, okay, the core mechanics, so in terms of how the engine's been developed and the kind of the logic of things like how boosters are placed or the smartness of the propellers, especially when propellers are combined with other boosters and what they target, I think it's actually done very, very well.

What for each of these games,

and again, I'm going to

kind of combine Party Match with Family Farm because they're so similar to even to the point where of the how they

introduce obstacles, the obstacles they pick.

That is all,

it's not a copy, but it's almost as you can tell.

It's very similar.

Almost like one team.

It does feel like one team.

It does feel like

one team that is working on the two games that are on the right.

Well, looking at this on the right-hand side, and then it's a separate team working on Trumpstar.

What I want to call out a little bit is

what was confusing to me was the level difficulty and overall level balancing was

it's too easy.

So for Truckstar, I think it's a little bit more difficult.

I think I put in my notes that the

if I was gonna, if I was gonna like finger in the air, you know, estimate, I would say the APS, the attempts per success, so that's general difficulty for you know how you determine the levels difficulty.

It's probably one to 1.25 on average between levels 100, 1 and 100.

A few levels were maybe two APS, but it didn't go up.

It didn't go higher than that.

And I would say, like, a hard level is like you're looking at anywhere between two and six,

two and six attempts per success to beat the level for that.

And then, and actually, Truckstar is more difficult.

So then you have these other two games where it's, I found it significantly easier.

I can't tell you how many times I used an EGP and then game purchase.

more moves for coins.

I don't think I did going through the first.

Let me see what actual specific level I got to.

Okay, so I got to 85 in Family Farm Match.

I don't think I used an,

I don't, I think I maybe failed one level, and I probably wasn't paying attention when I was playing, and I certainly didn't mean to use any of my coins.

Well, when you compare this to Royal Kingdom, it's just day and night.

Royal Kingdom was significantly more difficult.

And I think that's that's a determination.

So if we looked at that revenue of these three games, I was thinking, why, what is the strategy behind this?

Why haven't they experimented with one to make one more difficult, at least, you know, starting level 50 and up?

And

could they be making more revenue from this if they did?

Yeah, that's my this is my other kind of not question, maybe just points here that

Trackstar deviated not only with the template and some like additions, but also the difficulty curve.

Because these two have kind of very similar difficulty with, and to me, it feels like Royal Match, because Royal Match is kind of very easy in the beginning, at least, compared to Royal Kingdom, which is kind of more close to Truckstar.

I guess even the harder than Trackstar.

So if you go to

yeah, if you go to slide five that I made, I pulled just to like dig this point home.

If you look at this, this is

the obstacles are almost identical.

In party match, I unlocked the, what was it, the super lightning ball.

I can't remember what it's called in party match, but it's when you don't fill a level.

I think I had a 41-level shriek in one of these games.

And

you can see here that the beer in the the cat beer is literally the same in both games.

And then, what I thought was super interesting was it's pictured in Family Farm Match, but unfortunately, not in Party Match.

But I have a video of it.

In the Family Farm Match, um,

in the graphic, you see those two cards in the middle of the board.

That was a really interesting mechanic.

I mean, it's not completely novel, but I haven't seen anything super identical to it in another game.

Yeah, I took video.

So, it's

so this is the

just it's so similar, They play so similarly.

Just the

but I think the one the video after that, I show the

poker

here at the end.

Yeah, that's.

Yes.

It's this mechanic.

Again, simple, but it's exactly the same.

The art is even the same in both games.

I haven't seen it anywhere else.

I haven't seen it.

I haven't.

There's like in a farm here of Saga, they have like generators.

So you match next to it, you generate.

This looks like a combination of a generator obstacle with

it's almost like the super the splash color in Candy Crush Soda

for Felix and Mate, who didn't kind of catch it.

What do you do?

Like you break those cards, you need to match close to them, and then what they do, they kind of shuffle here in this animation and turn a lot of tokens on the board into the same color, which actually creates cascades.

That's basically what's there.

And usually, there's a

resource requirement in the level to, you know, collect sixty, a hundred, whatever of whatever it is, that color

board piece that you need that's generated by this poker deck.

Yeah, but looking at this screen, the the beer cat beer screen or whatever it is, like, yeah, it's definitely same as at everything pretty much.

So I guess they're just following the template.

And and yeah, again, back the question would be, would you consider this

omitting Truckstar now out of the equation and just focusing on party match and family farm that they're progressing with their core kind of let's say

not juiciness but let's say the quality of their core you would would you compare this that they're already reaching the like the quality of royal match

they're pretty close I think they're pretty close I think the biggest obstacle for them is going to be the levels the level balancing rather the levels are way too easy

and one thing that we we tend to forget maybe as developers or I don't know seeing these two games side by side, I feel like we tend to forget.

One of the biggest complaints from the casual puzzle audience is that the games feel very, very much the same.

And my guess with this is that the party, the party match theme didn't connect.

Either the UA was too expensive or it just didn't capture the audience.

People didn't like it enough.

So they went with Farm because Farm tends to perform.

So if you look at these two, these are two separate games.

It's like the level is almost identical.

I mean, look, like the level balancing and everything

you are you need to be in istanbul to know to know how it works

i mean like it's pretty pretty

yeah like so so so one thing as you said like is the ua problem that that probably is like hindering them down the other one is the

the hidden part

yeah exactly like the actual like background of all of this at the back end like

all the sec secret sauce.

Yeah, it's definitely a secret sauce.

Like, this is not something that you can take from the game just by looking at it and reverse engineering it.

What do you, or what Century Games should do, they should look at Vertex games and their matching story.

I mean, they're a Chinese company, they're making ten million a month.

I mean, it's not Royal Match, but it's still doing way better than all the others.

Right, but like, my guess is like what Century is going here after is something like

Royal Match scale, or like, yeah, yes, but if you if you go step by step, then you can get it.

Like, this is way, this is nowhere near royal match scale.

Yeah.

Nowhere near.

No, the trackstar is like, well, like two mil a month.

Yeah, but my guess is that trackstar pretty much they kind of for me,

how I see it is basically, I think, for them is a learning experience.

It's not something like like Chrome Valley Custom scenario that we make it or we kill the company or something like that, you know, like do or die kind of situation.

Whereas it's like they they learn upon it, probably,

you know, enrich their template setup and move on.

And then Family Farm is the next one in the attempts, let's say.

Could I make an argument for two minutes and you guys sharpen your knives?

Sharpen your knives, because after two minutes, I want to get really hammered on this.

Jakub, if you could go to Sensor Tower, please, for Truckstar.

Yeah.

Because honestly, this just takes Truckstar up and look at the active user base.

So just

only Truckstar, please.

Let's remove the other ones.

And show the countries.

And remove the other ones, so it's only Truckstar.

So it's remove Forster customs and Chrome Valley customs.

There you go.

So around 1 million.

800, let's say.

800K,

which is 150k is US.

Yeah, do the last 30 days.

it's gonna

make bullshit

and then yeah zoom in zoom in please just pick us only

we're getting there ios no how much unified how much felix they can make yeah like 30k

so basically wait no some of the no no listen here no no listen here right so some of their top performing geos right

with the largest user base is

like geos that generally would never make an iap purchase right You have India, Mexico, Brazil, UK, right?

Or UK, but Indonesia, Indonesia, right?

But like there's a huge

part of the user base here that just is being unmonetized, right?

And I'm just saying, like even if they had

three rewarded ads in these geos, non-US,

they could be earning another like 22% right now on ads, right?

From these geos that are not generating anything, right?

And we know that the second largest match 3 game uses ads century games spends a boatload wait a second wait a second second largest match 3 game uses ads when you needed to watch 50 videos from indonesia how to get to those ads after level 4 000 that's the baseline you're talking here

but still all i'm saying is right if in non-us geos they showed five rewarded ads on half of the user base that would add an extra 30 on this title.

Right?

Laura, you want to take this one?

Look, look, look, look.

Let me finish.

Let me finish.

Let me finish.

Right.

So, what you can do is if you have close relationships with DSPs, they can send you data on the users that they have in their database that have never made an IAP or that have made an IAP.

If you use that data for segmentation, you never even in those geos show the ads to people who have ever made an IAP ever before from these databases.

You're kind of isolating yourself from any of the risks on degrading IAPs.

And I'm just saying, 30% on this, that's, yeah, it's quite a nice uplift in non-USGOs.

Yeah, sharper than knives.

I think I'm right.

Well, look.

Yeah.

Let me

just use my usual bullshit filter.

If it was so great, why wouldn't we see it anywhere else?

Century Games doesn't have any experience with ads.

Get Century Games out of this way.

King does it.

King does it.

Take a step back.

Century Games and Frozen City is full of ads, man.

Like, what are you talking about?

So.

No argument against it?

Okay, okay, great.

What do you mean, though?

I need a reminder.

White Out Survival has ads.

Yes.

Yeah, but why wouldn't they have ads in Truckstar?

That's my point.

So I'm agreeing.

I actually kind of agree with you.

That's what I don't get either.

So they're not optimizing revenue here.

And

they're basically, they're not differentiating enough.

So one thing my question when we first, you know, before we started recording was, I have questions around what the strategy is of these three games.

Like, what are they trying to achieve?

I mean, I think one of you mentioned, yeah, they're like this learning.

But if you go back to when Party Match came out,

they've been learning for three years.

And

if you're going to be learning in match three, you got to be learning much faster.

And they have a live game.

So the learning should be

moving exponentially.

That's why I was like,

I wouldn't know what the purpose was of why they necessarily keep releasing unless it's because it's too expensive.

They were trying to scale it.

Maybe Farnley fan match was the one that they're like, yes, this is the game.

It has the right theme.

We know Party Match works in terms of smooth.

It's a smooth core.

We've nailed down the meta.

Let's go.

That's the only thing I can think of.

Also, the tracks are with ads with 30% uplift.

I mean, you go from 60 to 100k per day, maybe, which is okay, but it's still not real match.

Opportunity cost, probably.

So, what do we think of

the actual strategies here?

Learning or slow learning?

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out that as well.

I mean, I well, it's there, they want to conquer also Metry at some point.

It's just my guess is that they just want to get too casual as much as possible.

But this doesn't look like it's as much as possible.

That's the thing.

It's as slow as possible.

That's not the problem.

Yeah, this is not even close.

How would you do it differently?

You have

three games.

One is basically dead, no UA.

Then you have track style, which is going nowhere in terms of the scale.

So, like, why are you even just put any resources if just stable 60k?

Like, that's a fail.

Honestly, it's a fail.

I mean, that's a fail.

So, now you have Family Fire Match in, I guess, Soft Lounge.

So, now this needs to scale.

If it doesn't scale, kill, just do another one.

Another one, another one, or just do three consec three games at the same time and then just try different things.

Theme, I don't know, yeah, different

whatever.

I think looking at this, you already see that

the theme option is already there.

The difference between these two is mainly the theme.

But theme option for a company with 4,000 people, two games, when you want to conquer the fucking match-free genre?

You know, how priority

switch within the company that makes like 150 mil from one game.

But even

with this pace, you will never make 100 million from match.

Like, never.

It's not going to happen in make, maybe in third life.

So, what?

do five five match three games in a month?

Not in a month, but five in a year, maybe, yeah, that's definitely possible for them.

It is, yeah,

it's just insane because they have like different match free uh merge games and all of the different things.

So, if you want to really conquer the distance, just put or buy a lot of efforts,

they can do that, it's not a problem for them, of course, of course.

But it's like, yeah, yeah, like I'm still, yeah, I'm also like on Laura's side, like, what, what's the actual strength?

I am puzzled as well.

I'm not, you know, I'm playing devil's advocate here, nothing else.

So let's say you keep around Party Match.

It's because the cores are so similar and the metas are so similar, you could use party match as kind of an experimentation place for anything you want to put in what you think is going to be your bigger game, which I assume is they're betting this on.

Right.

So

they're not doing because like party match like zero UA.

So the only thing I couldn't see in Center Tower was

the audience of party matches too small for estimated active users.

That's

keep in mind that they could be running these things in China that we don't see also true.

True.

We can ask in a few months.

Yep.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Because yeah, like and I'm pretty well when when we talk when I talked with heaven and the team in Vegas,

they asked a lot of questions about Solitaire as well.

Well, Solitaire is a whole genre now.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, exactly.

I think the battle has been won over here already.

Yeah, just call Vuga.

So you asked Heaven basically, it's like, oh, what games are you guys looking to make?

And he's like, yes.

Kind of.

Yeah, I was like, hey, guys, well, there's so many solitaire questions.

Are you making solitaire?

Not yet.

Do you want to...

Mate, do you want to go briefly over your way?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I also want to.

We took yourself to pieces here.

No, I want to show you how what they are doing with this gorgeous game is called

Family Farm Match.

So it's in soft lunch because you have Facebook and upload it.

Nothing else.

But that's not

the only thing.

Just watch.

Right?

Ooh.

Yeah, but wait with the ooh until the very end.

Obviously, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, save, whatever.

But have you seen one important thing

in the left

corner?

Yeah, just behind.

That's just root.

So here we go.

That's the first creative.

There's a second creative, which is actually

very creative, but it's like it's

a food.

Cooking game.

Yeah, it's just a cooking game.

right?

It's a cooking game,

but actually with the right logo.

Then

there's a lot of these, which all the picks, I'm not even sure if this is their own creative, but maybe it is.

The tokens on the top are there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

This actually might be...

Okay, so it's family mark.

But then we have this, which is another creative.

And

obviously nothing to do with the family match.

Because it's not a family match, it's creative.

It's a pearl gem

something else same thing here same thing here blah blah blah here i think this might be actually i think this might be actually it but again it's a cooking cooking creative cooking creative this must be steak this can't be is it isn't that the part when they are figuring out the game that you they that they put in between the levels because of the creative

can you see this

really yeah

you can see this yeah yeah exactly so i mean, this is how

Chinese companies have launched the game.

You just take whatever and just run it and see what sticks.

But yeah, here, look, it's the same thing.

River game.

Shoot bubbles.

And then it's all the between things like this, actually, quite funny.

When God create a family merge, right?

So.

You have all these fun merge gameplay, whatever that means.

Now it's all gameplay.

So I guess now they're trying to actually get the core KPIs.

And then you have all of these different fun

other gaming creatives that are trying to figure out like what's what's actually gonna stick and maybe just what kind of mini-games they're gonna build.

I feel like they have no idea what they're doing on the UA side on match in here.

Really?

It's really random.

It's really random.

It's like if you can see, right?

Like, if it's not a mistake, it's a super.

You know what is what is this game?

It's Match Factory.

Again, it's Match Factory.

I see this, I've saw, I've seen this million times.

Yeah,

Match Factory.

They took a Match Factory at

the seventh game, seven different games.

It's a seven different game, and then you have this, which is

it's so random.

I don't think there's, I mean, they're trying to find like what works, and it's, I, it kind of like it's really resembling like the whole strategy for for the match because it's just

pray and pray basically everything

like we try this we try that like

if you look at match villains

you could clearly see

they really know what they are doing from day one UA

and the gameplay.

I mean, and it's a new game, and we were like, oh my god, they're going after Royal Match.

But it's doing already 2 million a month.

We talked about it two months ago.

They're still growing.

So, this is not a glitch in Sensitiva for sure.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

I don't think there is a glitch.

If it's a glitch, it's one creative, not seven.

Not eight.

Not eight.

Right.

Which, I mean, it's completely normal.

If people do this, we'll just set up on top so I can

double-check that.

May

family farm match

on Facebook only.

If we go actually to what's interesting, is the creative side does not seem like they know what they're doing, but when I look at the actual how the engine was made,

it it is a it is a polished match 3 engine.

Level balancing aside, it is a polished match 3 engine.

so it's just all over the place.

Like, that's that's okay.

I see it.

I don't want to say problem, it's just uh, it's weird.

Yeah, it's good.

Okay, I see it.

I see it all.

There's no glitch.

No, it's like the glitch is when it's like one, one, one.

Yeah, we've seen that.

Yeah, we've seen the glitch, but like, honestly,

this is fine.

It's it's uploading the playables.

I mean, it can work.

We have uh videos here, so it's fine.

All this, I think it's it's it's never going to be scalable because you have one playable on Applebin, which is fine because you are.

I think, again, like this is a soft launch, very, I wouldn't say very early, but somewhere in like a mid-soft launch where they're trying to get some KPIs and maybe work on the balancing.

But they still need some numbers.

But this needs to be either going the near-death experience or save whoever from the farm, or just you go into the township area with all the idols.

They have all the knowledge from the

White House rival.

They're already copying or

getting heavily inspired by township anyway.

So, like, this is the place where you do it.

This is exactly the place where you do it.

Like, where else?

Give me the screen.

Yeah.

I'll show you something.

Sure.

I have a theory now.

So, you remember you showed showed that King Creative with Yeti being

stuck with Bitcoins?

There you go.

So isn't this just the testing part to kind of filter out the working creatives and then see which one work and then make their own

like this?

Yes, of course.

Yes, of course.

So like it's that like it's the

way more efficient way.

Just

get it whatever else from whoever else, just put it, see what works, and then just then replace the assets.

Yay!

Yeah, literally replace the assets, yes.

Because here, like,

same assets, literally, like, just the Eti is replaced, nothing else.

Like, these are candy crash candies, like you can still see them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can see it, I can see it.

But again,

even this creative is just not good enough in terms of save me or save the king concept because,

yeah, also, yeah, it's misses basically the whole emotions.

It's also part of King's creative, which I still didn't get to.

That's why you don't really copy King, but you kind of go and copy Royal Miles magically.

Just going

Royal Kingdom because they know what they're doing.

Because, like, yeah, this is like

the same page.

Yeah.

So, so that's that's that was my point.

I thought, like, honestly, if I if I then go to Trackstar, even, yeah, and this is Match Factor again.

It's Match Factory again.

I can see it from from Miles.

Like, even like, this is

this is one thing, but then you go to Trackstar, which we kind of saw a million times before.

But then, why don't you just use

exactly what you're doing in Trackstar?

It's all like, you see, all the driving simulator, or as you might say, vehicle, Yakub, Mr.

Vehicle.

And this is what they're doing all the time.

And even such, like, this is pretty good that they have also gates with all these trucks and racing.

And

it's just, why don't you just do this?

You mean like the fake MP strategy?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, I know why, because if you're in a soft lounge, you can't do this, because then you're just your KPIs are just fucked.

It's just, it's it's it will disappear.

It's not gonna work.

In here, it can because it's already live, and you can you can use all of these tricks tricks now.

So I'm really curious to see like when

this Family March

game will come

live in like worldwide.

Because that's like where the scaling should happen.

Now you say I really like that creative.

I want to play that game really badly.

This one?

Yeah.

You could see it's a finished creative because their structs are you know screensaver

all over the place.

Yeah, screensaver, yeah

well you can you can play this one as well if you want

but no like but this is what you do on like

match three

it's just check king uh not king well just uh kings but in royal royal magic and royal kingdom

so this is this is it and this is what they need to figure out for the their all match three games because if they don't figure out like the u a part it's not gonna

it's just yeah it's like it's impossible.

Like, that's that's the part of that

equation.

So, this kind of works.

Was the verdict works on family match current state of UA?

It's absolutely random.

DBD.

It's not even the AI.

It's absolute random.

I mean, like, it looks like it's very early testing phase.

in terms of like the creative concepts, like where sh which direction they should go.

That's my verdict, kind of, because they have the gameplay, which they need for the KPIs.

But then, yeah, why don't you just do this

as well?

This is way more closer.

Yeah, but it's way, way closer to like the family match.

It's literally whiteout survival creative.

And that's all you need.

This is basically all you need.

Come on.

There you go.

That's Whiteout Survival right

Even the temperature is there.

That's the engine.

Yeah, that's your engine.

Like, it's exactly.

And it's like, what else do you need?

Nothing.

You have already built everything in there.

It's just risking.

Basically, so

still.

Yeah, it's like a lot of fun.

We need to talk about all of these new creatives in the next

creative trends.

Anyway, okay, so yeah, I think that's magic.

We can

we can wrap it up here, okay.

So, um,

you've always been down there.

Laura, you want to do a final verdict on the puzzle strategy?

So, I'm trying to think of if I was in, if I was the one leading the portfolio strategy for these games, what I would be, what my thinking would be.

I

if this were me, what I'd probably be doing is

getting slowly winding down party match, disco match in favor of what I think is going to have lower CPIs and a more broadly appealing theme by releasing a fan match, farmly, uh, family farm match, and then taking everything that worked and just wrapping it up a little bit nicer.

My hope then would be that what I want to see, what I want them to do next is start to figure out how to adjust their balancing so that they can actually make money off of this game.

And frankly, I'd be putting ads in it as well.

That I would be.

I would see, Marty and Jakob always hate on me, but I'm always right.

Wait a second, I didn't say any negative comments about not putting ads.

Like, I can get that.

I can get that.

I just said,

we wouldn't move the needle that

30% is nice.

I would still take it.

I would be,

if the goal is for them to learn and say, okay.

We know they're that they have, you know, I think they've done a great job.

I loved White Out Survival.

I thought it was a great great game.

And I'm not even a Forex player.

So I wanted to move into casual.

Maybe this is a slow ramp, but what I can't stress enough is that when it comes to these types of games, making a match your game is not easy, especially if they're building, they built this engine at some point from scratch or they took it, right?

So, and I just pulled up a tactile Simon's Cat Match as a quick comp.

It's doing pretty well.

But if I play the engine side by side, the the engine in Family Farm Match is, in my opinion, significantly stronger.

It is a more polished engine.

So you have this team that could actually build a very good Match 3 engine, but there's, in terms of how they're

handling some of the things around that, is

maybe they need to learn or maybe they just want to get players through.

They just want to measure.

That could be it as well.

Right now, there's nothing.

Go ahead.

Yeah, but you know why, like, this Simon Scat is doing well?

Because of the Lily's Garden.

I mean, they already done this it's lily's garden's a tapper sorry a clicker not a match three game

yes are we talking about the same game like it's doing well

well i just thought it was doing

terribly i just quickly looked at the hold on doing okay

it's doing okay

it's doing okay give me the screen it's doing it's doing okay

i mean it's it's doing okay it's doing okay

i mean let's yeah we can't

we can't compare this downloads this downloads They've lost an engine.

We can't compare everything to Royal Match, right?

I mean, not everything's going to be a billion-dollar plus game.

Sure.

I think it's not doing it.

It's a cute game.

It's doing better than the other game.

That's what I was looking at.

It's doing okay.

Let's see.

I mean, is it going to be a hit?

Probably not.

Definitely not.

But I would say that it has to do with the quality of the engine more than anything else.

And the theme is a little bit niche.

I mean, I know Simon's Cat.

I think it's a cute comic, but is it going to be the IP that everyone knows and loves and downloads because of it?

No.

But

I mean, this is just

a risking, just a risking of the party match game, basically.

That's also dead.

Come on.

Like, it's also that.

So.

Well,

I think I played about 70-something levels of Simon's Cat match.

Actually, it wasn't bad.

It wasn't bad.

I was proud of Tactile for making it, but if I'm going to compare apples to apples for core engines, I would say Family Farm is a stronger core engine.

They have the product, manpower, that that's definitely taken there.

Don't get me wrong.

What you said there, I guess, is the biggest problem where this like

pretty much secret source match three know-how that only few people or not few, but like very specific,

let's say, people that have lots of yeah, a lot of years behind driving match three games have.

And if you don't have someone that skilled on the team that can especially know like how to balance difficulties difficulties and drive conversions through that, then I guess it's really hard to figure out yourself.

So, again, that's the thing.

You can copy one-to-one the level design and everything.

But when we come back to your points in the match-free overview,

how all the boosters are behaving,

how everything is happening on the bar,

especially the stuff that you don't see that's happening on the back end.

The real difference if two of the boosters are activated at the same time, like it's a completely different player experience as well.

Yes.

If I'm going to get like really technical, it has to do with the timing, how long animations take, the order in which they play, how many particle effects.

If you're going to be like, though, there's a milk bottle in one of them, how much spray that gives off.

All of that has an effect in terms of how it makes the player feel.

But a lot of it has to do with the speed and I would say the order of operations of how things go.

How player-friendly is it?

So, one thing that I think it does a great job of that I haven't seen done well in other games in match 3 games is how they handle pre when they when the level first loads.

You have boosters.

You have your wind streak boosters, you have your

persistent timed boosters.

So, the pre-level selection boosters, sometimes you have a timer, you can use a little, you can use the line clear for 15 minutes.

There's a certain order in which you have to lay those on the board with that disrupting either a preset match in the seated level or, or, um,

there's not enough space.

You have to think about how the player is going to respond because then it feels like something they earned is something they can't use.

So in that regard, that's what I say, a polished engine.

These are the types of things that I mean.

The smartness of the propellers.

This does, Family Farm Match does it really well.

I'm actually quite, I think they did a great job.

I would commend them.

But that's only one aspect of it.

They need to get the other bits.

bits and bobs.

They need to get their APS curve making more sense because then I think they'll see a world of difference in revenue.

But again, it comes back.

They also got to figure out what ads they're going to use and maybe not the Wonder Blast ads.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Figuring all the ways.

Okay, that's great.

Yeah, I think we can end Brittie here.

Like, it's not going to take on the Mage 3 market immediately, but definitely, yeah, we'll keep it on the radar.

Arte, you want to take us out?

Me.

Yeah.

Me again.

Okay.

Thank you very much for coming.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

No, thanks.

No, like it's also thank you very much, Laura, for coming.

It's always great to have you here, especially these episodes.

Because

there's some things that I can't even assess here.

So thanks for the expertise.

Happy New Dinner.

Always great to have the puzzle queen with us on best three episodes.

There you go.

And listeners, thank you very much for coming as well.

Join the Slack channel.

Also, please comment on the video.

It's very important to hear your feedback.

And see you next time.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Ciao.