⚠️ The Industry’s Dirty Little Secrets: Confessions from the UA Underground

Thumbs up if they spend $50 million on a, on a, on a, you know, on a large like friend campaign, and everybody's like, why don't we do the same?

Or why don't we do a Super Bowl ad?

And it's because it's fucking stupid.

And, you know, like, it's, it's maybe,

it's maybe smart if you have a lot of money and you're like going after the marketeer, you want everybody to talk about you.

But from like a pew and profitability, like the actual number on valoads perspective, it's not necessarily profitable.

It's 4 a.m.

and we're rolling the dice.

But

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Two and a half gamers talking smack.

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And thank you very much for joining us for this special episode.

Now let's get back to it.

Thank you.

Keeping the glasses on the whole time?

Let's roll.

Let's roll.

Welcome, everybody.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

My name is Matthiel Ancharic.

And I am Joseph Kim.

We are your hosts for today.

We have a very special episode because we have a third guest, but you don't know her or his identity.

We'll keep it anonymous.

Let's call it Dr.

Doom.

Let's go Dr.

Doom.

Awesome.

Because we're going to ask some very direct questions.

Maybe we'll piss off a few people, maybe a lot of people.

We'll see.

We'll see what happens, but it's going to be a lot of fun.

I definitely want to do it more often.

So, anyone out there, if you like this and you want to come on the podcast to talk the real stuff,

come on.

So, let me know afterwards.

Okay.

So,

where should we start?

Where should we start?

Maybe just to set the stage for the audience.

Yeah.

Dr.

Doom, can you tell us a little bit about maybe like don't identify yourself, but maybe talk about your background from an expertise perspective in terms of like, you know, the kind of work you've done or the kind of expertise that you have?

No.

No, perfect.

Very good.

Very good.

Okay.

Well,

let me just say we've got one of the brightest minds in the gaming industry.

Growth.

Gaming.

And we'll just set it.

We'll just leave it there because we do not want him to be identified.

Yes.

I did spend all the money.

Her Her or her, yes.

Okay, good.

Well, I did spend a lot of money as well.

That's why I have the protection, the glasses on, so we can keep ourselves safe, anyway.

So, should we start with like the who is the most overrated studio in the mobile gaming right now, and uh, and why everybody can or why they can get away with this?

But what does it even mean overrated,

right?

Yeah, what, what, where, where do you want to go with this?

Since we've got a UA angle, do you mean?

So there's a couple of ways we could go with this, right?

Overrated could mean that there's a lot of hype and the performance isn't there.

The other thing could be that you've got some of these game studios that are charting really high in terms of top grossing, but the actual financial metrics in terms of like free cash flow or profitability.

does not match their top grossing ranks.

That's another way.

And then the third that's kind of coming up more is just there there are a lot of like these overhyped early stage studios that got a ton of funding but are basically fraudulent or things like that so there's a lot of different ways we can go i assume from the ua angle are we going to talk more about top grossing relative to profitability i would say yeah i would say that because uh there are a lot of well not a lot but few companies out there we talked about one game already and i think we don't really need to go there uh anymore but yeah like growth a lot of spend but then there's the question if the spend is like what's the context for the the level of spend they are doing and uh and if they are kind of reaching the the profitability or the hype around the right all the all the UA spending basically yeah I think it's good to talk about it but but in in the in terms of the payback windows like does this money ever pay back or not

we can talk about dream kings I'm okay like because it's it's very relevant uh I wouldn't say it's the most overrated but it's definitely overrated like their strategy in reaching the 25.

Okay.

Yeah,

that's a

pretty good topic.

Even with the recent

kind of celebrity campaign.

Could you characterize it?

So,

just for the audience, if they're not aware of some of the financial disclosures behind Dream,

as well as like, and obviously they're doing great from a top grossing perspective.

They've been ranking in the top three to five globally for the last few years.

They've been dominating from a RPD perspective as well.

They're showing extremely high RPD,

but

they were not profitable.

And so maybe Dr.

Doom, do you want to, I'll just, I'll just,

that'll be my tee up over to you.

Yeah, I think.

I think they're really going enough there to market you.

And it's really questionable whether this money ever pays back.

And

one of the biggest challenges of being a UA professional nowadays is that every, you know, two years, someone like Dream Games

comes up, that they spend $50 million on a, on a, on a, you know, a large like friend campaign.

And everybody's like, why don't we do the same?

Or why don't we do a Super Bowl ad?

And it's because it's fucking stupid.

And, you know, like, it's, it's maybe, it's maybe smart if you have a lot of money and you're like going after the marketeer, you want everybody to talk about you.

But from like compute and profitability, like the actual number of downloads perspective, it's it's not necessarily profitable and you can look at the role of kingdom uh downloads and revenue growth it's not as as exponential as look people would expect um after such a large campaign um and again

it's like it's it's not even two weeks after the the celebrity campaign started 50 million dollars 50 million

where's that where's that 50 million dollars coming from come on

every no every single celebrity is probably like you know three four million dollars Uh, these guys are like super expensive.

Let's say it's 20.

Let's say it's 20.

And it's it's it's basically all over their UA channels.

It's everywhere on Facebook, on Google.

So it's not only like a celebrity campaign, meaning like they're doing the TV only, but it's like actually in the creatives, in the campaign.

So they're spending against it.

But would you expect more downloads as a result of that?

I mean, they are grabbing more downloads for sure, but would you expect to kill me more downloads as a result of a $20 gillion, $20 million more budget?

I mean, I think what people are not actually comparing these two, which I think they started doing this, which was CoinMaster back in the days with J-Lo, Terry Cruz, and all the Kardashians and everything.

Back then, I think it was like 2017, 18, I guess.

I need to check and do the comparison, a fair comparison.

Like, it

increased revenue by a lot.

But there was a lot.

So, I'm, yes, in this case, it might be just not really matching the

i guess expectations

but whose expectations the market or the the ua experts expectations i mean this is a this is a match-free game which is going to pay back in two years or maybe never well we'll see i mean it's two weeks only i mean like i play royal kingdom i'm level i don't know like 200 something and i haven't well i paid maybe like twice or three times only and i paid played this game since we reviewed it on the on the podcast

so right now i'm getting to the point where i really need to pay more and it's like three months since i started so now it's not really a good time to actually

kind of measure this against the the revenue increase then the installs

maybe yeah but

sorry sorry dr dean but can't we say that this like to some degree you could say dreams overrated but at the same time, isn't this the strategy that's existed over the last 10 years from every startup?

Is to, and, like, there's all these people in the industry where they see the top grossing charts and they're like, oh, those guys are doing so well.

It's like, are you like,

how many times do you need to be fooled, motherfucker?

You know, it's just like, Jesus Christ, dude.

Like, all these companies try to chart up and then sell, right?

Yeah.

And, and so, I don't know, it's, it seems so naive when so many people in

friends of ours are basically like, this company is doing so great.

And then you see like glue post-acquisition.

And so many startups post-investment or acquisition, they just fall.

And it's just like, guys, something was fundamentally broken with the UA model.

And why do we not learn these lessons?

I don't know.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry for that, Dr.

Good.

Yeah, it comes down to RPD, which is what you mentioned earlier.

We had a really good game.

It basically every fuzzy on its own.

So it's fairly easy to advertise around match.

Just like spend more money.

That's how it works.

But, you know, we're having them, it's a little too early for that.

And I think they're also doing themselves

nothing, you know, they're not really helping themselves with two games that are named very similarly and look very similar.

And now they have a brand campaign for both games.

It's going to be really hard for the consumer to distinguish.

But again,

this is, in my personal opinion, not necessarily a data treatment

fact.

So it is to be seen what's going to happen.

Yeah, look, they're increasing the revenue in the last couple of weeks and months.

It's going up.

And I'm not sure if we are in the position to actually say this is a flop or

this is a great thing.

Obviously, it's everybody says, oh, this is insane.

And I mean, yes, the

installs per day only only 5x from 100,000 to to 500,000 per day so I guess it's doing something

so I wouldn't say isn't it isn't it I think the the I guess the tailwinds or like the the the positive aspect of of dream being able to acquire more aggressively than other companies though is because of the genre of game and when you think about the retention of that kind of a like a match three game is generally very very long right

so i i think the danger comes when other games try to acquire in the same way with longer payback windows when you don't have the stickiness of the players.

So, Dr.

Doom, what do you think?

Is that

could you am I right in making that kind of an assumption that because it's match three and for certain genres?

Sure, like you know, and we saw that with, for example,

uh, you know, um, slots and casino games that they were the first ones to go dramatically longer payback windows.

And it kind of made sense for them.

But

from your perspective in terms of, you know, when you look at the profitability of Candy Crush,

does Dream eventually get there?

Is that basically okay for them?

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

I think, especially a viral match, I mean, Master Games had a ridiculous long-term retention.

Like when we're talking about two, three-year retention, it's really, really high.

It's higher than what's the case with, you know, like most of the myth gore games, like the United retention.

Um, and that's why you have these big mesh tree publishers who stand against uh, you know, three, four, five, six-year payback windows, and that's what no one talks about.

Uh, one of the biggest topics that you just see was like, oh, we hope we paid the money back in six months.

No, you're, you do not.

It just doesn't exist.

Yeah, no, it's not more like that.

Yeah, it's not realistic anymore.

Like, if you paid money back in six months, your game will be growing like, you know, mushrooms or whatever is the saying.

Yeah, uh, so and since that's not the case, something you know, you're not tracking it the right way.

So, when you look at these games, like let's say Royal Match, and let's say they spend 30 to 50 million dollars a month on your way, you know, they're generating significantly more, and they're essentially in the game of like, you know, growing at market share further, not necessarily in the game of, let's say, the money back came the most efficient data.

So, yeah, and they can do that because of their really great long-term retention.

I mean, look at it as like day 60 or 12%.

Yeah, day 90, Royal Match, 10%.

Day 90, 10%.

I mean, and this is basically a straight line afterwards.

Like, it's insane.

Yeah, it's insane.

Yeah.

And that's basically if you follow Andrew Cham, he says that successful businesses are those where that have like where the retention curve flattens after a while.

And you see that here.

So basically after day 30, the player, there's almost no churn.

And that's why Royal Match is printing money.

And Royal Kingdom, I don't know.

I mean, but at the same time, they have to grow they raised a ton of money i don't say they are overrated they're definitely not overrated but they're also not coming you easy as most people think uh you know they have to make some compromises in order to to support this crook

right and just so for our audience so so again we're not taking out of context and shit like that right

uh we're not saying that uh dream games and royal match are failures or this or that.

It's just that relative to their grossing rank, it would be better if they had a higher free cash flow profile or something along those lines but since they're a private company they don't really care about that that much yeah yeah exactly so that that's i guess that's the right angle to talk about it but you know a great company a great success a success like thing that's remedied for the longest time

um so so you know

all the best about the drinks you said yeah and maybe like one thing i would like to ask you about dr doom is that i think the other thing that happens a lot when it comes to

the stories that we tell either internally and externally and how this comes is through a couple of things.

One is like

the UA models that are built internally and the fact that UA folks are,

they have to show that they're successful.

So the incentive of a UA manager is to tell everyone in management that they're doing great.

And so internally, what I have often seen is a lot of window dressing, right?

Where, and Dr.

Goom, you can tell us about your own experiences along those lines as well.

But then it's like, hey, this game is doing great.

Look at this cohort.

Look at iOS US only.

200 people.

And then like these small stories are then kind of wrapped and then told to management.

And I think the truth of the matter is most management

in gaming are not not the highest IQ people, if I'm just being honest.

Until they'll hear something that a UA manager says, and then they'll brag about it.

Oh, yeah, this game is doing so great.

We, you know, our Rohaz is freaking fantastic.

You know, our UA spend is only 25% of this or that.

You know what I'm saying?

100%.

You know, they come to me and say, like, you know, day 70 is 35%, but your day 90 is 40%.

So

gives the fuck.

You need to look at it from a more holistic angle.

And you need to understand the curves.

And the most important thing is you need to understand the measurement.

Well like how things are measured internally.

And I think most companies don't really notice.

You know, like, is this user, an existing user, a new user?

Like, is this user little beta does this user little beta come from EPSLIR or internal data?

And then how do you essentially

dedupe and properly track and generate LTV curves of those players?

It's super easy to make LTV curves or like ROS curves look really good if you take into account existing players because most of these players who are in the game after they knew they're payers.

And essentially, you know, they generate a lot of revenue every week.

And if you treat them as new players, then you know your cohorts are going to look great.

So I think there is a lot of, there's, there's an overall lack of understanding of how measurement works on the UI side.

And this can make things even worse.

Then because of that, you know, some people are like, our UI team is great.

And our rep you know our reputation is not growing we don't know why our data is declining this probably why there's this there's this like math city nerd chef from the path that that you know we we don't really know how to fight but auto ua is doing well well it's not you know the role of yeah the role of

yeah surprise surprise you know the role of a you team is to grow games not to you know maintain their decline um yeah so it kind of seems like there's there's kind of two aspects of like the internal overrated ua growth team or ua performance right one is a ua model that and everyone's incentivized to spend and so that ua model is going to be very aggressive at often and so then a lot of executives take that ua model as truth even though it's a forecast or an estimation of what could happen under certain you know excel spreadsheet scenarios with anyone who can just adjust adjust numbers really quickly and make things look good So that's one.

And the second are the stories that are told internally because a

UA manager wants to get their bonus.

And so they're going to window dress some stuff to let people in management know: hey, we're doing great.

Look at this.

Yeah.

So look at this, don't look at there.

Don't look there.

Look at this.

It's like the classic.

The danger, I think, is in

internal,

like internally, management teams who don't understand and they get bullshitted

is

my take on this.

Yeah, that definitely happens.

And I also think with private companies, they really want to paint the super positive, thoughtful picture and say, we're doing great.

And they're looking for angles to say that, right?

Because they're trying to raise money.

And, you know, their numbers, look, their, you know, earnings and like your numbers are not really public and it's harder to argue how well or not well they're doing.

So that's really where it comes from.

I think you know it's another controversial topic we can cover.

The best example are all these come exotic PPE channels that look really, really good early on, but then they just like look like shit three weeks later.

You know, not all of these, you know, Montepez is an expert here.

Not all of the networks operate this way, but a good chunk of them does.

And again, they make your early numbers look good.

They make your shitty,

you know, shitty LTV projections

even better

or worse, depends on the angle.

But yeah, Monty, I think you want to say something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So based on, yeah, all these rewarded UA channels are

great,

but you can't evaluate them with the same lenses as the other UA channels because yes, you're using LTV projections and then suddenly the first seven days look amazing.

Of course, because you have the rewards tied to the day seven, or even if you do like day 30, and then you tie the rewards to day 30, but then afterwards, people churn immediately, and then your LTV prediction is fucked like immediately because like you're counting with amazing numbers, let's say on year one or year two, but then there is no one playing the game anymore because they churned, they claim the reward.

Bye, thank you very much.

So, yes, that happens so often these days.

But I mean, they're not doing anything wrong.

It's just like how that channel worked, basically.

It's just that the UA managers don't really see beyond the point of day seven, day 30, because, oh, look, the prediction is amazing.

Yeah.

Thank you very much.

See you next time.

And it's essentially how it said to us traffic always worked.

Yeah.

It's just these guys are, as you know, like three years old and they don't really understand how different trafficking types mature and based on that.

Their LGBT cards are not adjusted.

The way they measure things is not adjusted.

So, you know, that's why.

essentially, this

also comes back to the relationship between the UA managers and

the management or the founders.

Because I have the, I have few different, or I had a few different engagements where I was brought into the team and

the CEO asked me, like, look, so I have no idea how to evaluate my UA team because I don't understand how it works.

I was like, what the fuck are you?

Like, how can you even manage the company?

And there are like three people managing 10,000,

like, spend of 10,000 per day.

I was like, why do we have free people in the UA?

Like, this can be done by like half of the person.

Seriously.

Oh, but I didn't know.

What do you mean you didn't know?

I mean, do you don't talk to people or you just, you know, don't listen to people talking around you?

Or you just don't go to conference?

Like, three people managing 10,000 daily?

Like, that's.

That's

insane.

So, yeah, like, there's something fundamentally wrong with like the whole flow of how the UA works.

And then, if founder doesn't really know, like, that's a problem.

But it it's common, man.

I don't think a lot of gaming founders understand why UA is so important.

And, you know, obviously we're UA guys and, you know, we're always gonna up to our own horn.

But, you know, we're like talking about industry that has like 90% days of insurance.

Like, or, you know, 80%.

So if you don't drive users, you're not growing.

So essentially, you're super dependent on user position.

I don't eat this reason.

It's not really like this.

If you look at software, the service or subscription, it's a little different.

But when you talk about gaming specifically, you depend on user acquisition a lot, unless you are candy crushed and

since I'm representing, since I'm not the UA expert, but I represent the sort of gaming executive and founder.

I do agree with Mate.

Like, if you are in mobile, like mobile gaming, it's product, live ops, and growth.

you have to understand all three if you don't there's a problem you you need somebody on your team to understand it to oversee things and to try to get that organizational um optimization so that you're not getting bullshitted and you're running things efficiently as per what mate just just suggested in my opinion you're

not

you

yeah no but because then then it's your it's if it's your own company and

it's i mean if you're using you don't understand how it works, like it's not going to last long until you run out of money if it's not, if it's not managed well.

And it's honestly,

it's your problem.

It's your, it's your problem because you don't understand.

And you should.

I always say every founder, at least one or two campaigns, you just go to that fucking Facebook dashboard, you click five times, you have a campaign.

At least you know how it's done.

And then you kind of manage it for a week.

And that's enough.

But at least you know how it works and then that opens

your mind so much so so much

sounds like a business idea all right did we just finish our first question yeah

only 20 minutes only 20 minutes yeah it's fine it's gonna be a lot of fun it's gonna be a lot of fun no but I think uh then the the question I think you you touched a little bit is there's the scan and then there's uh the the UA managers they're kind of

trying to get the bonuses because of the seven targets or whatever else but then I really it's really funny to see some of the the young guns out there that started doing UA and running them and they seem like they they know everything

and they were not there before which again

opens

your mind so much that you know what what worked 2013 14 so you were there basically so all of the new stuff like web to app and all of this.

I mean, I was there.

I mean, I can remember.

It wasn't called Web2App.

I was there when there was this like

different creatives, which wasn't really called misleading or fake fake ads back in the days, but they were there.

They were there.

I mean, third time, yeah.

If you grew up in the Travion era and Eagle European, you know this, and eRepublic, all these web browser games, they had misleading ads back in 2005.

So it's not new at all.

I mean, you know, Machine Zone playables were me squeezy gads.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, no one talked about it.

And Machine Zone was getting punished for that.

So they had to have the playable in the game.

So all these things had them in the past.

It's just you guys are young and you know nothing.

So shots fired.

I'm sorry.

So who are these young guys?

The only UA guys I know are like Yumate and like Warren and you know we are not John Chanley's coming up coming up.

we are not young anymore.

It's like you're open linked and there's a lot of these people.

It's okay.

It's okay.

That's how we're getting old and all.

It's not a tate to share when they are saying it's a tated test.

I'm kidding.

I think the biggest change is really

we can dive

deeper in this topic, but the biggest change is that

your EID became way simpler since

2021.

And essentially, everybody's in your ROS campaigns, and all you need to do is change bits and creatives.

And that's why every single new age UA manager keeps talking about creatives all the fucking time, like creatives are the only thing you can do.

They're not.

And then they're like, okay, how do we test creatives?

And they don't really understand how disk creators because they don't really understand how algorithms work.

Yeah.

So, and that's really why it pays to be old and wise like us.

No, it's like

I'm at the at the point where I read something on LinkedIn or in Slack channels or somewhere, and

I'm getting so annoyed and pissed at the same time because I see it's wrong, but I don't know if I should interfere or if I should let it go.

Because if

people are just getting this information, which are

ultimately wrong, like it's it's gonna spread like wildfire everywhere.

And then people are are just gonna be stupid afterwards because they're oh but he said that she said that and it's like but this is not how it works it's not how it works I was

I don't know how to go how to how to get out of this situation basically I'd say that you're pretty active at telling them they're they're not doing the right thing

maybe

yeah to put it to put it nicely um yeah but overall i mean that's that's fine you know you don't like it the industry also i feel further apart than it was five years ago.

Yeah.

I mean, outside of events, people don't really talk to each other that much.

Like, back in 2010, we were a closed community wherever they talked to each other.

There was a bunch of events at a time.

I don't, or maybe I'm stole, but I don't really see a lot of those events anymore.

You know,

that's quite different.

And then...

Everybody has their own opinions about things, the Mascan being one of them.

And these are like pretty technical things that that you need to figure out as a, as a, as a community, not necessarily as an individual person, because of the lack of information and because all the bullshit that was, you know, spread around scan and everything, scanner related.

So, uh, and I think we were missing out on that fun because we are not operating as one or trying together to figure out this, the hardest problem in the industry, which is that

yeah, measurement.

Yeah, it's you're right that people don't really share that much

anymore or not don't share that much anymore, but it's like sharing with just one purpose and one purpose only, just to benefit on their own, not like to benefit as like you said, like the community.

Honestly, the scan, that's a big problem that, like, no nobody was able to understand properly how it's how it works, the technical side of things, it's really hard, and then people are like, ah, like, it's gonna change, doom, UA is dead.

Like, it isn't I'm not sure like how

that evolved.

It's not that at all.

It's just it's hard to understand properly and it's okay.

It's okay if you don't.

It's just people are really afraid to admit like, oh, well, I don't understand this because then

I can't do my job properly.

All right, let's get to some spicy questions.

What's the spiciest?

I don't think we're going to get through every question.

So

what's the spiciest thing we can ask?

Dr.

Doom.

This is the origin story.

The adventures are coming.

You know, we need like six more episodes.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't worry.

Don't worry.

This is just like

the teaser for the next episodes.

But

I think the one we have with the large creative teams coming from China is pretty interesting and

important as well.

Because then we have all the Chinese companies coming to get and conquer all the top grossing charts.

Yeah.

Same teams.

So just to set the stage for the audience, it's been rumored or

on good on good confidence that some of these games.

It's not rumored, Jacob.

It's not rumored.

We know it's.

We know, we know.

Yeah.

But basically, some of these top grossing games out of China have huge creative teams.

Some reported as much as 300 plus people.

Doctor Doom.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

And what are these people doing?

And

if these Chinese studios can have 300 creative folks per game, what makes sense for a Western game studio to do?

Yeah, just for Confix,

an old man talking, Playerts had 150 people on the creative thing for the longest time.

Like, Playerts was known at the time for having a really, really big creative team.

So the question is, why did they have 300 people?

First,

it's not super expensive to have a large creative team in China.

It's my understanding.

I don't have a lot of data to support this.

So that's one reason.

Second reason is that these are mostly Forex games or hardcore games that

depend heavily on creative diversification.

So in order to promote a Forex game today, it's incredibly competitive.

You're going to pay $100, $200 CPIs.

The only way for you to survive and grow is to find hierarchy creatives that have somewhat reasonable retention.

And essentially, they only do is just like they semorize campaigns and they keep trying to find crazy winners in order to lower their CPI and scale again.

And really, I have to give a lot of credit to PlayRix because PlayRigs really highlighted or like invented this, where, you know, they start as a Master game, then they move to like decorations, they move to hold the pin.

I mean, Matte knows all these different creative concepts, but they only did massive UA bursts when whenever they would unlock a new creative concept that does really well on the IPM front.

And Chinese developers, you know, they're extremely more aggressive.

They have deeper pockets.

These games are printing money.

I mean, like White Out Survival and

the Last War are making like a billion plus dollars a year globally.

So they, you know, for them three hardly creative people, but you know, they don't cost as much as developers.

They work for, you know, six days a week and they turn on like a ton of creatives.

It makes total sense because they are spending a ton of money and their number one job is to lower the cost.

And how you do that is to create.

Now, whether 300 people is like too much or not, that's a separate discussion.

But we've seen this before and it makes sense for them, like

it's logical.

I'm not certain whether it's probably whether, you know,

it's the best way to invest money, but definitely makes sense to invest money to a certain extent.

Maybe 120 people.

Well, the thing is, like, it's not possible to do it in the US, like full stop.

100%.

Yes.

and to be unlike we can talk shit about the us too uh

i

think you know chinese developers are eating our lunch or western developers lunch because they're just bugworking us yeah they keep trying they you know they build games faster they operate games you know more efficiently and they build more ads and test more things of the uit for better so So if you look at like Wast War and White Out Survival, if you have feed three years ago, it's impossible to scale a 4H game.

I would tell you fucking...

Yeah, Yeah, I would say no, it's fucking stupid.

Just like launch a casual game.

Like, only casual games are growing.

You know, do like a merge through a game, whatever.

But look at them.

A billion plus, you know, dollar businesses out of nowhere.

So a method.

Oh, it's not out of nowhere, man.

Like, they're like, these, all these guys are good old friends, as we discussed with JK in our Forex episode.

Like, this is the next generation of Forex.

I've been talking to the guys from China, and even Heaven from Century Games, he mentioned there are going to be hundreds of Forex games coming from Chinese studios in the next couple of months.

And I'm talking to other people from the West.

Everybody's now just, oh, there's a Forex.

They're spending, they're, you know, printing money.

Let's do a Forex game.

Well, good luck.

Good luck with that.

So, and it's, yeah, it's definitely not out of nowhere.

And honestly, with the 300 people in the creative teams, yes, I'm not sure like what are they doing?

But anyway, you just, you, you said it correctly.

Like they need to drive down the CPIs and decrease the CPIs.

How you do it?

Creative volume.

Absolutely.

But the thing is, like how they do creative research, you just

hundreds of them just come to the to the office and they just browse the internet and then find trends, what works, like what other people are doing.

They copy the concepts immediately, like from like one day to another, and then bam,

that's how you do it.

But Dr.

Doom, would you say that this level of,

I guess, investment and resource around creatives, is that specific to Forex or only specific genres?

And would you also say that if you are a Western CEO trying to do Forex, given that you can't hire 300 people from a cost structure perspective, should you just avoid Forex?

That's a really really good question.

I mean, I think it really depends on how deep your pockets are.

Because the thing with Forex is, you know, your conversion rates are going to be lower, like payer conversion rates, your CPIs are going to be higher.

So to make something like Iplobin work, where you need whatever, like, you know, 10 conversions to pay, you really need really deep pockets.

And in order to test creatives at scale, you need even deeper pockets.

So it's really a question of, you know, if it's FunPlus and they have like a ton of money, sure, you can give it a try.

If you're a smaller developer, unless you can raise a ton of money and you really have a ton of experience, let's say machine zone guys, it's going to be really, really hard to make it successful because you can't do it without super beat pockets, unless you casualize it or make it slightly more accessible than what's the case with the even if you do that,

even if you do that, you still need either the Forex expertise or UA expertise to make it happen.

And

like now, the

overlap of people just very much decreased that they have either one of these or both.

It's like very few of the people.

I think there's also an information advantage that the Chinese studios have because

just speaking from my own experience when I was at FunPlus back in the day, we had a lot of information.

Oh, yeah.

We were in the United States.

I don't think the Western studios have the information.

We were in Shanghai, China, Joy, and we were talking to the developers.

And they said, look,

the TikTok guys or the reps, like, they share the data from like your company to all the competition like they don't care like so everybody knows everything immediately even before before the the actual uh team members so all about execution yeah yeah

one thing that's different though compared to again 2015 is that it's so much easier for chinese developers to scale their games in the western markets like you know if you think about you know 10 years ago they had to figure out how to like work with facebook and google Not only do you go to Appleby and just like, here's all my money to spring you.

But you just said Appleby is very tough.

It's tough, but they have deep pockets.

That's what I meant by deep pockets.

And again, they've been elsewhere, but I think FWAD made it significantly easier for non-Western developers to scale their games in the Western world.

Yeah, I mean, recently, definitely, yes.

When I look at the actual

UA channel portfolio of the Last War and Forex, Last War and and Whiteout Survival.

It's very balanced, especially on Whiteout Survival.

They're spending like 20-30% on all of the big channels.

The Last War is skewed always more towards the Google.

So, yeah, and all the Chinese games basically

Forex or anything more hardcore-ish, it's mainly, and from the experience I had with working with some of the Chinese studios, they were always big on Facebook and Google and tried up Lavin and other channels and never succeeded that well because they don't have that experience and expertise running the uploading.

Now, yes, it's it's a little bit little bit better.

It's the unlocks unlocks scale immediately, within a few buttons.

And then just change creative over and over again.

Yeah, you need use your three hundred person team to no, but honestly, like all the all the big Forex games, they have engines where they build uh where they build the creatives.

So in that case, that should significantly make your creative process way more efficient, basically.

Then, you have a lot of AI stuff coming on the creative side, and especially from the Chinese studios on the Forex front.

So, yeah, like the 300 people, it's quite a lot.

I would say 100 is already a lot, but still, I think, manageable.

And I would say

Whiteout has 100 people in the creative team.

Oh,

we'll see.

Hey, Matei, so you've been actively doing stuff with AI.

Yeah.

When do you think that AI overcomes that 300-person creative team advantage?

Next year.

Next year.

Absolutely.

We're just talking about this with Jakub, and we already see some kind of spillovers from the AI hooks into the actual creative work.

So we talked about it on the Creative Trends podcast where Dream Games were, they were testing a few different ai hooks and then there was one especially that i i guess that worked then they transferred into the game kind of um art style and everything and just improved it

but

until we we have ai just replace the whole creative team

yeah there's a lot of work on the on the on the way until we get there and

what about on your side are you seeing in the industry a lot of folks using ai for creatives or for growth applications of any kind besides creatives?

Yeah, for everything.

I'm currently interested in just like the content side of AI and the amount of content that's generated with AI, YouTube content,

it's insane.

And for creatives, at least for live-action stuff.

I mean, Cling got so much better in the past like six months.

It's insane.

Like the stuff you can create.

So making videos, 3D videos, two videos with Cling, it's it's a no-brainer i mean you kind of have to do it um i think for playables for um any kind of in-game gameplay uh stuff we need to build build workflows to make ai work for us but it's inevitable it's inevitable it's incredibly fast and incredibly cheap uh so i i don't see a reason why anyone would not play around with ai I guess the main reason is

the legal side of things and regulations.

Like not everyone wants to do that, but it's a no-brainer.

It just makes sense to to do it.

Yeah.

Okay.

And with that in mind, I think we should pause here, keep the rest of the questions for the next Dr.

Doom episode,

if you agree.

I've got one last question.

One last question for Dr.

Doom, because like

back in the day,

I'm over five years out of touch, but there used to be ways in which you can bot downloads and things like that.

And I think one of the questions you were going to ask, Mate, was like, you know, the

kind of like the download performance of some hyper casual and casual games.

And it used to be that you could pay for with very little amounts of money.

Like way back in the day, it used to be like, I think, $8,000 to get top three downloads in the U.S.

And I put a chart in the notes for you guys.

That was an old pricing sheet that I got.

Yeah.

So that's, you know, that's not.

That just to be clear, that's not something that anyone should do.

But it used to be the case that you could pay to rank for downloads or anything like that.

And I'm sure many studios back in the day used that to get investment and things like that.

Is that still possible today?

And if so, what are the prices like in today's market?

Yeah, it's possible.

It makes no sense, though.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, we'll talk about it in the next few episodes.

I think platforms fail to to help developers with organic growth.

And it's just getting worse.

Organics start tanking across the board for everyone.

And essentially, the reason why it makes no sense is that the incremental downloads you're going to get from like a top-free position are not worth the investment.

So you can still drive bot downloads.

You can still get cheap installs.

But it's really questionable what's the quality of those installs going to be and what is the actual incremental value you're going to get in the U.S.

and gear one markets from that particular placement?

So that's why it's not as common,

but it's possible.

The impact of featuring has come down a lot too, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Try to find the top-free jar in the F-store.

It's

near impossible.

And Google swapped all the free placements with page placements.

So, you know, it's really, really hard to do driver gang downloads nowadays.

So it kind of doesn't make sense to do it at scale.

Okay.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Now, nobody does it.

It's still kind of possible, and there are still some review buying and all of this, like dark head SEO, ASO stuff.

So it's still happening.

It's still happening.

I hear that side is still like I heard just recently some people are still doing that kind of stuff.

Like

Astro reviews and stuff like that.

Yeah.

I mean, obviously.

I mean, people are doing some crazy, crazy shit out there that nobody talks about.

But thank God we are here here to talk about it and unpack all of this.

Anyway, okay, good.

Thank you very much for coming.

Thank you, Dr.

Doom, for coming.

I'm pretty sure that we see each other again in the near future.

And yeah, until next time, thank you very much.

Cheers.