🎮 Habby finally SPEAKS: The template evolves! First-ever Habby Western interview

I can't speak for him, but I don't think that's what he wants to do.

And it's very clear because he still wants to focus on trying to, he wants us and our partner studios to continue to release games that can be completely genre-defining, especially for mobile.

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Hello.

Hey, welcome to Two and Half Gamers, where we stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry.

My name is Matiel Ancharic.

I'm Felix Brauberg.

My name is David Pern.

And

we

are

your

hosts.

It started so well, it went so well.

I know, I know, I know, I know.

It's fine, David.

Welcome, welcome to the podcast.

So, we have a special episode.

Can you introduce yourself, please, and tell our story?

Absolutely,

guys.

I'm so honored to be here today.

I am a former viewer and fan, turning now into a guest.

As you guys all know, my name is David Pan.

I'm currently spearheading business development, investments, and all types of fun things at Habby.

Hey,

legendary Habby at the podcast at last.

Thank you so much for coming.

Yeah, well, it took us what, like three, three and a half years?

Three and a half years.

By the way, Yaku,

before we join, please keep the mic close to your mouth because I suffer in the post-production quite a lot.

You are like five decibels lower than all of us, and it really

hurts my ears.

But today we're going to talk about Habby and all the fun around your games and how you do stuff.

It's important and everybody is interested to hear.

Absolutely.

And then I want to say before we kick this off, I'm curious too.

A lot of people have mentioned before, like, oh, it's so hard to reach out to Habby.

But I do know that like there's quite a

like there's quite another large population of people who have made contact.

For you guys previously, you guys have spoken with Stefan.

Have you you met uh managed to meet is like some other people from Habby in the past?

Oh, Stefan only.

And I don't think Stefan

I don't think Stefan remembers us from the days where we actually worked with Boombeat and we met Stefan in Kdansk, which was a long time ago.

Where he was showing us the initial build of Archero.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

So it was a long time ago.

All right, so this is probably twenty eighteen then, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Something like that.

Do I get it right?

But ba basically, this is like first time, like Western interview with someone from hobby?

No, so

have you guys ever heard of my predecessor, Shrikant?

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

Yeah, like, so basically, Shrikant, like, he was running this whole show, including things like, you know, PR and all that stuff for the longest time since 2018 as well.

And then he basically put all the frameworks together.

He's made it so, it's like this transition for me from being formerly product guy now to business development.

He's made it so smooth as well.

So, I just want to give a huge, you know, shout out to Shrikant if he's watching.

He might not be watching, but yeah, it'll be great if I can connect you guys with him too.

He's still doing business development right now at a company based in the UK, I think.

Yeah, over mobile games.

Nice.

There we go.

Light grenade.

Yes.

We got the boot.

Now, yeah, exactly.

Now is the real deal.

Yeah, anyway, can you introduce a little bit of what's your current position?

I mean, like work and stuff, David, at hubby currently, because director of publishing is one thing, but I guess every single company have their like in it.

Yeah, what does it even mean?

It basically means I just get to talk and they pay me.

In all seriousness, like, so for Habby, when Shirkant

decided that he wanted to move on to his new opportunity, the company basically was in

had a bit of what's the word kind of like a void for a long time because like for Habby unlike like not to throw shade or anything, but I think a lot of companies, when they hire for business development, it's more on the business side.

They're looking for someone with true experiences on how to lead contract negotiations for things from mergers, just investments as well.

So, then for Habby, they were really looking for someone who could evaluate a product, like mainly from a publishing perspective as well.

So, that's how it kind of worked out for me.

But,

like, to get to the crux of the question, is

the business, the business development director for Habby is expected to, of course, find leads, of course, to lead all the talks with potential studios that we might want to partner with, investments, et cetera, et cetera.

But most importantly, is we're expected to lead our teams into trying to find a product that is truly going to be the next, hopefully, our Chiro, Survivor, Cappy Go, et cetera, et cetera, Souls, all of them.

Yeah.

It's pretty good.

Regarding the company itself,

pretty good.

I'm still like, lots of people are, I think, think, finding Habby a little bit under the shroud of mystery of like who they are or what that does.

So if you can elaborate a little bit on that, as the company itself.

Yeah, so it's like you guys know too, you guys have met our fearless leader, Stefan.

He founded the company in 2018 inside Singapore.

And like the company started off, right?

Like there was a bit of like, what is Habby?

What are we going to do?

Are we going to develop?

Are we going to publish?

Etc., etc.

And of course, we're primarily a mobile games publisher.

Like that all all said, we do have

some pretty big goals to see if we can do our own games as well, as well.

And we're quite involved in the publishing process, too.

By that, I mean we're quite involved with our development partners inside tweaking the games.

But I think the best way to think about it is we are a mobile games publisher.

So all things from user acquisition to all the other publishing-related services, that's something we do, and we're quite good at it as well.

We can, we can see.

We can see that since Archer One, uh, Survivor, and even Archer two and Capybara go and all the others, so that's pretty good.

Yeah, those titles are bad,

yeah.

I mean, we did cover all of them, basically.

I think instead of Archer One, but all the others.

Oh, I got one for you guys.

Have you guys played Punball?

Have you guys played Penguin Isle?

Yes, Flaming Core,

Kingdom, yeah,

Flaming Core, all of them, all of them, of course.

Nice, nice, very good.

But yeah, you don't see the template if you don't play all of them.

Yeah, the famous hubby template.

And oh my gosh, yeah.

Yeah, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Sorry.

Oh, no, no, no, no, it's fine.

Go for it.

Go for it.

Well, regarding the, like, let's say, Western expansion, there's been recently an investment in Turkey by Hubby.

Can you talk a little about that?

Because that's, I think, was opening a lot of eyes here in the West.

Yeah, that's something that was really cool because that happened a little bit right after I joined.

And then, so, like, basically, the company, as we all know, they're called Mavis Games, and they're led by a great husband-wife team.

And the CEO's name, his name is Sagan, and he is probably one of the most intelligent and nicest guys you can get the chance to speak with.

He's not only been in the gaming industry before this, he's been in all types of things related to technologies technologies and et cetera, et cetera, industries.

So when he decided he wanted to start games, like that was back when it was literally just him and his wife.

And then they made the connection with Stefan, and then it just all happened so quickly.

Slidey Block Puzzle was Habby's first ever game.

So it's so funny when you think about how we've made our name now publishing these roguelike games when the first game we did was kind of like a

you guys have played slidey Block before, right?

It's kind of like that one, one specific,

kind of like the sub-genre of, you know, puzzle games where you move the block along and whatnot.

And like, that was a hit.

It was a hit.

It was quite profitable.

And from there, though, the relationship we had with them was, hey, we want to give them some space and some time to continue to explore to see what they want to do.

And not so long ago, we had a discussion with them and they really want to get back to it.

And not only get back to game development, they also want to put their foot down and see how big they can do this all by themselves.

So that's where the $2 million investment came from.

And it's something that was a long time coming, I'd say, as well.

We're just really excited to see this next team that they got.

The specific name, I'm sorry, because it's a prototype name, it's escaping me, but it was kind of like the something, something color, and it's still going to be like the casual puzzle thing.

Yeah, I know I'm not doing a great job.

I can't remember the name.

No, don't worry, like it's still quite early.

We discussed this with

Istanbul because he came he came to attend our our event in in Istanbul last week.

And he is really a really, really nice guy.

And he also said like him and Stefan goes way back when the hubby published their like first game, which was a long time ago when they still still kept it close.

And now it's like when the opportunity was there, it's like, look, let's do this.

Exactly.

Huge investment.

I like to take this moment to basically put our company on kind of like a pedestal too, as like kind of gross that might be.

A lot of people in my talks with like these studio heads who are like, hey, we're thinking about working with Habby.

They always ask like, oh, like when we do the business side of things, there's not that much that makes us seem so different from ABCD publisher.

I don't want to name specifically, but.

Like the one thing I go back to is the fact that Stefan, our leader, our boss, he is so keen on long-term relationships.

And then I always bring up that story right it's like hey they were our first ever you know game development partner and they made a game that now is technically not in our what's the word not in our it's not technically our forte yeah yeah genre yeah yeah it's not our strength but hey we're still willing to continue this relationship like because of all the sentimental the value that's been there whatever but uh yeah yeah yeah that's definitely it and i'm actually curious too when you were speaking with like the when you were speaking with kind of like the sagan it's like, did he bring his whole team along or was it just he was the only he was there because you know when you're attending the the events you can't work and someone needs to needs to work on the side as well

and he's so nice too it's like what you mentioned like i'm going there for like the mobed dictum but my plane lands at 3 a.m or 5 a.m or something and then And then he basically volunteered.

He's like, I'll pick you up at the airport.

I was like, no, Sagan, it's okay.

Call a taxi.

And then he's like, no, I will pick you up at 4 or 5 a.m.

at the airport.

So he's a super nice guy, super humble.

That's how it should be.

The relationships are very important.

Absolutely.

It is a people business, after all.

As much as those, as much as especially console players, will be like, all bubble game developers, publishers, marketers are evil.

It's like, we're people too, man.

Regarding the current mobile games, like, I would call them like pretty much like the second generation now.

After the first four or five, we talk about like Archero, Kinjaran, survivor io and pumball so we have now capy barrago archero 2 whittle defender released recently a lot of these games i mean like all of them when we look at them a little bit closer and in our reviews we see them skewing much more towards microtransactions and ad revenue than was done before in hubby's like let's say design style any comment on that or as like just confirming the move from hybrid schedule to like heavy ip games i think from the start and that's something that internally, I think I brought this up before in our previous talks where it's just like internally, we actually don't like that term,

you know, hybrid casual.

It's not saying even though we don't like that.

You're being credited with the invention of it.

I actually was speaking to someone.

Ah, geez, it's totally escaping me.

But I was talking to someone not so long ago.

I think it was at Gamescom.

And then like they were telling me how they invented that term.

And then I have talked with some people and then they're just like, no, it's because of you guys.

When you guys made our chiro, you guys, but the point is, internally, we do see ourselves still as mid-core, mid-core through and through.

And albeit mid-core with a very easy ramp into onboarding, right?

That all said, though, going back to the question,

we have, yes, like we do want to move more into the IAP space.

IAA has been something which is like, oh, it's great.

It's there and it's working.

But with each new game that we develop or ones that we develop in in tandem with our partners and we publish we always want there to be a specific focus on in-app purchases and long tail retention because one thing that we talked about during china joy too is as you guys know user acquisition for us right like we don't have that same manpower and those same tactics which a lot of our counterparts here might have so rising ua costs are something that we do we feel the pain from it as with a lot of publishers do.

And we do believe that as long as our games foster really high long-term retention, and if we try to get that IEP conversion rate as high as possible, it's something that we can live with.

If I can just tag on to a question here, which kind of is about ad revenue, right?

Because yeah, you used to have a lot more higher percentage of ad revenue, and now you kind of made this move, right?

What were kind of the discussions going on backstage to make that move happen, right?

Because it's still nice to monetize the user base that's not converting.

Right.

I think this might make, I think this might make, you know, Felix upset, but at Happy,

it's, it's like the guys in charge.

Like, there still is this feeling, which is like, the more ads we have, it's only going to, oh no, we lost Yaku.

No, don't worry.

Like, he'll be back.

He'll be back.

It's like the more, like, it could be rewarded.

It could be interstellars, whatever it is, it's going to impact the user experience.

And at its best, it might make your play session a little shorter.

At its worst, players will churn.

In our minds, too, we just want to make sure our retention is as high as possible.

That makes sense, but

I mean, I guess you have A-B tested all of this

just to get this retention as high as possible.

Yeah, yeah.

And then it really just goes back to,

it's all connected, really intertwined, where it's like, hey, if our retention is high and our UA costs are going up, then it's not that big of a deal.

If our our UA costs continue to be as high as we do see them, then a low retention rates, it's basically

probably the difference of a couple hundred million dollars, even.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So basically, if you look at it, like Survivor I/O compared to Whittled Defender, if I saw your retention numbers, it would be way higher on Whittle Defender compared to Survivor.io.

I do want to share something, which is like, in terms of long tail retention,

there is a game that

you know, I recently

talked about this.

Like

Survivor.io and the first archery, their long-term retention is not, it's like the chef's kiss.

And then I'll just leave it at that.

Yeah.

One thing, I mean, we saw the retention numbers for Archero when it was early on, and it was already like chef's kiss with on steroids.

So

yeah, Stefan was showing us, actually.

Yeah,

it was a long time ago.

So, but still, yeah.

And I mean, we can see the huge success of Survivor.io.

So, again, we can understand like where it lands.

You know, Survivor.io and Archero, they're really, they're really special, I think.

And then that's why Survivor.io is in a lot of ways the true successor to the first Archiro.

So, yeah.

One thing I want to add here regarding the context of this discussion, like we're currently looking at Wheatle Defender on screen, is that I think it was after Legend of Mushroom where I noticed that basically the like infamous template got upgraded with a lot of their perks and stuff that legend of mushroom was running so i put it out now it's something like version 2.0 or maybe 2.5 especially with stuff like

course it's two and a half yeah okay to two and a half then stuff like the lifetime privilege cards and like stuff like that because that's that's basically the push from the ads into like more

IP skew territory.

For us, as you said, if Abby itself was always looking at itself as a mid-core, for us in the West, it always was like hybrid schedule.

But now it's even for us, it's mid-core because it's

as core as it can get.

And and Whittle Defender, by the way, it's like the most scorage game you have, if I understood correctly, because just the meta, the spend depth, like it's a scope-based game which you don't really have.

On the other hand, like all all the other games have just inventory systems of a single character and so on and so forth.

Yeah, but look, uh before we you go a little bit deep on the template side, uh David, you mentioned the the rising CPIs and all of this.

And honestly, the ads part

can

help you with that because

it's gonna, if you add like the blended Rust campaigns or the ad Rust campaigns, that can drive the CPI down.

But you're gonna get a very different player profile.

So, I mean,

I can get at the moment towards more IIPs because it's way more quality users that

retain longer.

I remember having a conversation with our director of user acquisition actually about this not that long ago, like a month or two ago.

And like, let's just say it's all things we're still working in.

Like, we're still trying, experimenting.

We're really excited because we have a very special game that isn't soft launch.

It's not the one that you guys have seen or people talk about.

For that game, we're going to try to do a lot more with that.

We're going to try to break how people view what Habby has been doing with our last few launches from Cappy Barrago to Archio 2 to Willow Defenders.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That one's going to be interesting.

You're going for a Forex template?

Fake ads?

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

I don't want to basically generalize an entire population of CEOs out there, but there's a joke in China that if you're a mobile games founder CEO, in China, you will try to do a forex SLG at one point in your life.

And then that might be the last game decision you ever try to make, too, as well.

But I don't think that's, I don't think that's the case with Stefan.

I can't speak for him, but I don't think that's what he wants to do.

And it's very clear because he still wants to focus on trying to, he wants us and our partner studios to continue to release games that can be completely genre defining, especially for mobile.

And with that comes a lot of expectations.

Like, I've talked about this before as well.

Like, we see Archiro, like a lot of people say vampire, survivor, clone.

But then in our minds, it was like, we refine this genre to be literally perfect for mobile.

Just one-thumb gameplay, super responsive.

Yada, yada, yada.

Yeah.

Which is it you guys look up to the most?

Is it like the supercells of the world, or is there any studios that is just you guys go like, that's cool?

I like to say I'm going to give a really diplomatic answer here.

And it's that.

There are so many studios with end publishers that do something so good.

And maybe they do some things that aren't so good.

We just like to focus on all the good things that each one of them does and see which ones can we replicate, which ones can we do better.

And for those things that we're like, it's really clear, like we can never achieve this.

We just won't bother.

Like, for example, not speaking on behalf of the company, but let's just say if you're a company that's really good at huge budgets for user acquisition for Forex, that might not be something we're so keen on doing, at least not now or the near future.

Yeah, you know, like the idea answer is you look into the mirror and say, publisher of the month, hobby.

And that's actually pretty cool, too, because we, it's not that we specifically tune those press releases out.

I just think the only one who's really paying attention to that stuff is probably me because the rest of the team is so focused on like, what's our next game?

How do we make this better?

I'm the only one who's like, I'm on LinkedIn all day.

I'm on like stuff like this all day.

But you know, maybe that's why they hired me, right?

I'm basically LinkedIn boy.

Okay.

Moving on a little bit further then, we had an episode by Lemon recently on the channel where he covered again the mini-games market of which had been games in China and there's a special section dedicated just to hubby so just wanted to go over it very quickly where there's a capybarago reskim version as he named it which is again something that we talked about before basically capybara version in uh i guess there's the chinese theme there Then there's the Capybarago 2.0, which is with Hubby New Meta system as set.

This, if I'm understanding correctly, is the one that's coming from Wheatley Defender because it's with RPG, much more deeper meta, stuff like that.

Again, Drink Kingdom's theme, which is a China local team.

So, again, very, very localized.

And then the last one is again, I'm saying, like a little bit of surprise to me, there's a CollashQuest kind of follow-up, which is the Supercell game that was skilled some years ago with the new Meta 2.0 Wheel Defender system.

Taking all this into account, just wanted to get your comment on how do you see currently the beach admin games platform for you, and especially in your context of your soft launch strategy?

Yeah, so I will say two things.

One, for the WeChat minigames, right?

It's like, it's kind of like the implication there that your game is published on this platform.

It's going to have to go through some changes as opposed to if your game was specifically published for kind of like the traditional platforms.

You might have to tweak how the game performs to make it run well on WeChat minigames because of that reason that we can push the game's performance to like things as simple as feedback responsiveness to how the graphics play out.

So, that's one thing, if that makes sense on what I just rambled about.

No, no, no, okay.

Cool, cool, cool.

All these are things that we're very aware of and how we treat this platform.

We're not holding it on a pedestal.

I think that's something that's pretty interesting that now all these Western developers and publishers are like, oh, WeChat minigames.

We need to get on WeChat Minigames.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

But it's like, are you sure you want to be on there?

Is it even worth your time to be on there?

And

what I've noticed is a lot of old school publishers for mobile games, like these guys with huge IPs behind their games, they're so keen on breaking out of this space.

I think that might be like pretty good, or who knows what can happen.

But more than likely, what we think is if you just go on there, your thing's going to get copied.

Your IP might not be too relevant to the local Chinese who are playing, and you know, the rest is history.

but yeah,

okay, sounds like people only see the

revenue potential, yeah, the revenue potential, like, ah, people on the bottom, so you're gonna earn so much money, yeah, yeah.

Like, people are just like, oh my god, like the whole population is on WeChat, and then, like, oh my god, my DAU can be like this much.

I just have to, yeah, yeah, that's all true, but how are you gonna get people?

How are you gonna get the people continuously playing your game if you want to do IAP?

Who's gonna be your Chinese, you know, like what's it called?

The ISBN, like, license, whatever.

The middleman.

Also, like,

how much easier are you going to get it?

How are you going to do the UA?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, there's this one game in China called the Xian Yu Zhirwang, and I don't know what it's called in English, but it's an uh, it's like the fish game, it's like uh

uh

idle RPG, and then like they go hard on the ads too.

Like, I like my WeChat is flooded with their ads.

So, yeah, yeah, we had like a schedule discussion discussion at China Joy with Leimon.

I was like, oh, these guys, like, few, few people, like, they're spending 2 million a day on WeChat minigame on the UA.

Exactly.

I'd love to share a story from when I just started in the mobile games industry.

And then at my

first company,

they stopped trying to do China Market because, and then, like, you know, this is back in 2017, 2018.

They stopped doing China market because they felt the UA was too expensive.

I don't know how they feel now compared to what's been going on in the rest of the world, but yeah.

I think that that's consistent what we hear from other companies when we go to China always: that Chinese market is actually even harder for them than the overseas market and the Western market.

Yeah, also people don't realize as soon as we came to China for ChinaJoy, like there were already so many clones of games on WeChat

with so many new like plus ones and iterations.

So, you push your game into the chat into WeChat, and then next day they're going to be 10 copy clones.

Yeah.

Way better than your game.

Way better, way better.

And then, like,

it's like the top two will do well.

And then, like, there's like a hundred that like did it okay, but they're still commercially failed or like they're considered commercial failures.

Um,

it, you know, when kind of like the lucky defense, when that came out, it was literally that's exactly what i'm talking about yeah like two three days later it's like this one company they copied it on we chat games and did really well and then like the scary part that i think we want all our friends in the west to really get is like the scary part is a month to six months well beyond this companies are still trying to copy that in china for wechat minigames they're still trying to crack it and then yeah it's just that kind of hyper competition that's just insane ruthless yeah that's the thing that people don't understand, I guess.

That's why I wanted to bring it here because to you know, to hear it from a local Chinese studio, because

we should minigames and everything we say about is great and everything, but you know, you need to compete in much higher gear compared to the master market.

So that's there.

Anyway, moving on.

Thanks for that.

Yeah.

How did you guys feel about that one game, though?

I'm so sorry.

How did you feel about that one?

Like,

you know, the fruit game that you saw, the fruit and vegetables game.

Fruit Ninja?

The Clash Quest.

The Clash Quest.

Yeah, that Fruit Ninja.

Yeah.

The one taking on the Super Souls Legacy there.

Yeah, because you guys found it.

And then, yeah, like there are quite a few people that are talking about this a month ago, a month and a half ago.

How'd you guys feel about it?

It's like, did you guys play it?

No, no, I haven't played it yet.

But I know the game from

shared the link with us and then we can play.

Yeah, yeah, you know, us.

We can't go into the charts.

I don't...

I don't think it's up anymore.

And then, you know, this is one of the titles I was like, I'm not going to talk about this, but because you guys, boom, it's right here in front of my face.

It's like, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's going to be what you see now might not be what it is.

If I mean, like, heavy iteration in the meantime.

Yeah, I guess.

Yeah.

Like, I'm like, I'm keen on like

what's there because if I remember correctly, this whole thing was actually taken from one of the PC Heroes spin-off games where they had this mechanic, and then Torpo designed it in Supercell, which is their pristine guy who did like Boom Beach,

Brawl Stars, and like Hey Day, and like pretty much one of the best designers they ever had.

And then they killed it, actually.

So I don't know.

Like, we don't really see that much puzzle RPGs coming out recently.

Like, the days of Empires and Puzzles, all those things are kind of long gone.

So I'm a little bit skeptical, even though that somebody is still probably viewing something in this idea when you picked it off.

So let's see.

Yeah, we'll see.

Always great to see some innovation.

Yeah, we will see.

Before Q4 ends, you know,

uh before Q4 ends, you guys should be seeing something pretty freaking cool.

Pretty freaking cool.

Yeah.

Couldn't wait for the 4X.

How do you see the currently the biggest challenges for in the Western market as for hubby and its expansion scaling and you know pretty much getting the market share that you need?

I want to say it's something that a lot of publishers who have released titles that are pretty successful in the usual countries in East Asia, like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, or you know, China, that like we're all dealing with this thing, which is like, hey, the games do great in these regions, but we can't replicate the same level of success in the West, aka the US.

Is it something we view as a challenge?

Yeah, we definitely do.

We're actively trying to see what we can do to make sure our games are in this, like, we don't specifically mention them, but right now they're popping in my head.

Like, you know, Supercell, at least kind of like the classic Supercell.

By that, I mean, like, from Brawl Stars and Clash of Clans and etc.

Like all these games, they do so well worldwide, period.

And that's something that we wanted to see our new games achieve.

All in all, our newer games, they still did really well.

They still are doing quite well, especially in the US.

But are they at that same level that we see in specific regions that I mentioned earlier?

Maybe not as high.

And that's something we're going to try to fix.

And it all comes down to the monetization as well.

And like we at Habby, we truly believe that monetization is a big, scary word, especially from a user perspective.

But how we can tie that into not just live ops or not just little blah, blah, blah, but into the core loop.

You know, if I, when I look at the comparison between you and Supercell and the UA and the creatives and all of it, that's your biggest problem right there in terms of the US and the West.

You do really well with all the creatives in Asia because you know how to do it properly.

But when you use the same creatives in Vest, it's not going to work.

That's why the Survivor.io did really well because of the theme, because of the ads, and basically everybody copied your ads.

Just right now, for one, like for my games and when I work on different mid-core titles or not even mid-core, but anything else, I just have this concept which is called Survivor.io, which works everywhere.

It doesn't matter.

It works really everywhere.

That's why it works so well and you could scale.

And then then you you look at the capybara go and all these different creatives which are not really tied to the gameplay you have the capybara but it's just it's so eastern oriented if you don't change that you're not not gonna win in the west unfortunately because it's just the cpi is so high exactly because of that the monetization is great but the cpi is bigger and then the lack of playables in all the different channels that's where you need to push a little bit i definitely like,

you know, internally, we talked about this before, too.

And then, in fact, during our conversation inside ChinaJoy, that was one of the first things I made it a point to go back.

Right.

Like, we're just going to continue.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

That's a long cross.

Yep.

And then, like, we're at that point too, which is like, hey, if we can, if we can publish the next.

first Archero or the next survivor, that'd be great.

But right now, the mindset's like, hey, that was the past.

We need to do our best to see see what we can do to change some things, to achieve that same success, whether that's in UA or whether that's in a game design, even.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, Matic.

Or, you know, you could go the dark way and join the Forex group right over the block.

I mean, Jakub, I don't think this is going to work that well for Archer because

Arch or Archer or Hubby in general, like you already have the kind of the wider appeal a little bit and the kind of smooth onboarding into the games.

I don't like what would you do?

I'm not saying like do fake onboarding game on top of survivor.

I'm saying put 4x behind survivor.

Yeah, 4.4 advice.

Jesus.

I think you guys know the story.

At my first company, we primarily did slots games, and then our boss is like, I'm going to do a 4x now.

And then I was like, holy fucking shit.

And then, like, so it's just insane because I've heard the stories about how, you know, for example, Sentry, like, how they built it up to this point, and it was very methodical.

And it required a lot of moving pieces, including like, hey, I'm just going to have

that seem like that's that doesn't work like that.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yes, I'm glad you guys said that.

Yeah, it actually does not work for all genres.

You can't just do that.

But then we tried it and it was a spectacular failure.

And then, like, just rounding back that experience, you know, if a team, I'm not even speaking for Habby here, just like for a video game company.

Yeah, in general, if you want to do Forex, you're going to actually have to go and probably poach a producer and his entire team.

And that is not cheap.

Like, that's like, you're not even doing user acquisition yet.

You're already spending a hefty amount.

And then, yeah, I mean, but you know, who knows?

Who knows, though, right?

Like, you never say never.

Never say Forex.

You never say Forex.

Never, never.

You know, my first Forex game, like, not counting like, you know, traditional PC Forex games, like, my first mobile Forex game was actually a game by the name of Kingdom Guard, you know, the Tower of Defense, and then turned into

it pretty well.

Yeah, for fun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That game just like completely blew my mind.

I was like, what the f?

And then you get into it, though, you know.

You know, like, I was talking to River games too, not so long ago.

And then,

you know, it takes a special breed.

It takes a special breed to do this.

And then

what's funny is now, like, we're talking about this with China Droid.

There's a few Western developers out there too now.

They're like, hey, we can do this.

Gameloft did it.

We can do this.

So, yeah.

Yes, exactly.

The famous last words.

How hard can it be?

Yeah, I got it.

I can just get a little bit of market share and I will be fine.

Yeah, I heard that multiple times.

I do want to check myself really quickly.

I did not mean to say that

disparagingly, because at the end of the day, I do think it is pretty important that non-Chinese publishers and developers, you know, try to throw their hat in on this.

Because right now, like, yeah, like it could be a cultural thing, it could be whatever.

I just don't think they're fun.

But I love, you know, Forex as a genre, especially like my PC, like Forex games, grand strategy, whatever you want to call it.

So I do think there's a lot of room to make it better.

Like, kind of like, even though it's not a non-Chinese company, but when they made like Rise of Kingdoms, right?

Kind of like from Lilith, it changed everything about this genre.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, back in the days, if you go even further, there was the time of Machine Zone where there was Mobile Strike and Game of War.

Pretty much glued to the top one and top two in the charts, and that's it.

There was the charts all the time, every day.

So that's there.

This goes directly into my second questions.

How do you see the biggest challenges of Western developers?

compared to Chinese one in the Western market.

If you talk to,

if you talk to like just a random, what's called product manager, monetization manager in China, they'll always tell you the same thing.

They'll tell you, Western developers are so creative.

They're great with how they want their games to be artistically

blah, blah, blah, but they just don't know how to monetize.

And then, right?

That's what I wanted to hear.

Well,

I've...

spoken with a few of my like very good friends who are your developers in Canada and the US and then the conversation usually goes down to like, maybe they don't want to admit it, but I like to think that they don't want to do it because there's some kind of line in the sand that they don't want to do.

I mean like moral high ground?

That's moral high ground.

Yeah, moral high ground.

And whether or not we want to believe that is the fact,

I will believe that, like, because I think monetization is a very, it's a tricky thing to get, but if you really wanted to go out there and to learn and to unpack it, I think it's totally possible.

I really do think that there's a lot of developers in the West who just don't want their game to turn into that.

But I think you guys know much more about this than I do because not only have you guys worked on that site before, like, for example, the Yaku, but you guys have spoken with so many developers in the West.

Yeah, I've experienced

it.

Literally, like, we won't put gacha in our game.

That was the answer.

Like, really?

Yeah, we refuse to add more ads in this game because we feel like

that is, we feel that it's mean to the players or the players won't like it and you're like okay i think that's a great point from felix too right it's like we're talking about the admon and then i mentioned earlier too right it's like we don't want to go too heavy on admon like because there's perception that's like if i make someone if i raise our impedow to like more than 10 all of a sudden there might be a um there might be a Fucking Jesus Christ.

I can't use big words.

It's like the retention might go down.

And then like the impedown goes up, but the retention goes down.

An inverse relationship.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Inverse relationship.

Yeah.

So why did I get a master's degree?

If I can't even use those fancy words, but and then, but then we mentioned things like, oh, but then what about, you know, a battle pass?

Won't battle pass make retention go down?

You know, it's really interesting stuff.

And I'm not on the data team.

I'm sure if they delved into it, they might be able to see your thing or two about that.

But if we go back to the question, right?

It's like, what's.

what's the biggest challenge for like these Western devs?

I've spoken with quite a few and I've seen them come up with really great core loops.

Yeah, but the monetization.

and then even not just that.

It's like the core loop is really good.

But it's like, what is like, what's the deeper kind of like, what's the progression meta?

It's like they have something there, but it's like, is that really going to facilitate somebody coming back to the game in two, three months?

Spending tons of dollars.

Yes, very much.

See you later.

Forever.

Right.

Yeah, this is the point where I've been telling like for the last, I don't know, 10 years, basically.

Like the moment that I understood what free-to-play game design is about.

monetization is the game design.

If you don't have monetization in mind when designing the thing, you can't just duct tape it all later.

It just doesn't work like that.

I think that's the problem with

the romantic designer or developer part where I completely agree.

Like some people aren't here for the money.

They're for the art.

It's completely okay.

But you can afford your moral high ground when your game is profitable and it's like LTV or viral success or something.

And then you can have these things.

If your game is barely managing it or like struggling to get out of soft launch like goodbye like that's just just what's gonna happen talking about soft launch

you have an interesting approach to soft launching and we were kind of thinking like like why asia first and then global then like you're opening up different geos markets how is that it's changed it wasn't like that before it was like

what's the what's the kind of thinking behind if you can talk about it a little bit i think you're referencing it's like that one country we like to it's like that one country we like to go hard in.

And then we bring in like, you know, two, three other countries in East Asia.

And then from there, it's just, okay, we just go, right?

Yeah, because you mentioned if it doesn't work in Vietnam, then you kill it.

I don't remember.

I don't recall.

I don't remember saying that.

No, no, no.

I mean, no, no, you didn't say it like that.

But if it doesn't work, then you need to refine.

Right.

So like.

Like basically come down to proxy countries.

And that's something that I really love about Habby.

Cookie Cutter, you know, template, which is super important if you're a smaller team and you don't have those same, you know, pillars to help you support advanced testing or advanced hypotheses making, right?

But then for Habby, it's like they're quite clear.

Like, this is our target audience for this game.

We know what country is going to give us a good proxy.

And then blah, blah, blah, you do it there.

And then whatever happens in the rest of the world, we're pretty sure it's going to be replicated from these countries we've chosen.

Now, will this change in the future?

I think it will, especially when we start doing games outside of this specific genre or sub-genre.

So it's something we're aware of.

It's like what you guys mentioned.

What we're doing now is different from what we did a certain amount of years ago.

So yeah, it's just what we're it's just what we see is working for us now.

Because you have so many data points that you know, like if these are the benchmarks, these are the KPIs.

If they're better than what you saw before, then you move forward.

If they're not, then you need to refine them.

Right, definitely.

And that's something I will mention, too.

I don't know why it is.

Maybe I haven't talked to enough of them.

It seems like a lot of Western developers, they're not super strong on event mapping.

It's like they're aware of event mapping, but they're not doing as much as they could.

And then I don't know why that is.

Like, maybe you guys have some insights there.

But yeah, event mapping is like super, super key with all companies here in East Asia, right?

Like, we got that stuff all up in the data so we can see exactly what's going on and make all types of hypotheses.

Decisions.

Decisions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Usually,

when I work with different companies in SoftLarge, they ask me, like, oh, what are the events we should track?

I was like,

wasn't you supposed to have them already?

In my old days as a publishing manager, I literally had like the front-end guy and the back-end guy, the leads, like they'd be so mad at me because each week I'm giving them like a long list of things, like, I want to see these events.

And then they're just like, do you know how many fucking shit that's going to fucking clog up the fucking thing?

I'm just like, please try, try, right?

And then, like, yeah, sometimes I did ask for too much, and it did like screw up the servers to an extent.

And then, but then

at least you know, more or less,

exactly, exactly, yeah, yeah, it can kill you rather

if you, if you know, doing the decisions wrong from the point on, especially soft launch,

exactly, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Yeah, I think this kind of goes back to that thing, which is like maybe, maybe in the West, there's this, like, people are so focused on like the game itself as opposed to everything else right maybe it's not maybe that's just the reality there's the reality i mean yeah there's exceptions right but yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah like there's definitely huge exceptions like you know like i wanted to give them a shout out like like still fronts you know bit life like that game's just amazing and then i think they did it their own way and i don't know how they're how they did it what was their plan their methodology but like like you know from the rewarded ads all the way to your in-app purchase purchase design, right?

Like, I was telling you guys, I think I was telling you guys, I at least left a comment on your YouTube video talking about it.

Like, I was just like, it's like I'm playing a paradox game.

It's crazy.

Yeah, that's the live simulator game we have review on that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love Stillfront.

I love you, Johan.

The Swedes.

Okay, Felix Mate, any other questions on your plate?

I think I'm kind of running.

No, I asked pretty much.

Yeah, that's fine too.

because we, you know, we don't wait until it's our turn.

We just want this conversation going and flowing.

That's that's the key part of the discussion, Jakub.

I think what's next for Habi then?

What we can we can kind of expect.

I was about to say, like, now sounds like it's a good time for like kind of like the shameless plugs and all that stuff.

Uh,

so um, I have my own product line, and then I'm gonna send no, I'm just kidding, I don't, but

in all seriousness, I think what's next for Happy Right is probably the same for a lot of publishers.

The next game, and you know, like what's going to be the next game, and then like, like, like the next game after that, and that, and that, and that.

At least that's my focus and the focus I want for my team.

And then, how to achieve that really is: I just tell people: if you are a studio, big or small, regardless of what genre, if you guys have an idea, please feel free to share it.

Even for Forex, because I've spoken with a team actually that is doing a Forex, actually, two teams.

And then it's actually something that we'll always at least talk about internally and we'll weigh the pros and cons.

Because the Habby today is most likely a little different from the Habby one month ago, and et cetera, et cetera.

We will always take into account what resources we have on hand and what we can do to accommodate a certain type of game.

And if

the risks outweigh the gains, then yeah, we'll say no for now, But the door is never closed.

So again, we want to see if we can break out of being known as the roguelike guys.

Does that mean we'll be doing a match three game or something like that?

Like, I don't know if it'll be that big of a vivid, but we're open to a lot of things.

Yeah.

Just to confirm those two forex games you mentioned are Western or Asian?

I don't think a Chinese team would.

now, I don't know.

Like, you know, keep in mind, I'm not like a real Chinese person, right?

I'm like kind of like a fake Chinese person.

Come on.

No, no, no, no, no.

It's true.

Like, sometimes I get into a cab and the people are like, are you Mongolian?

And I'm like, what?

So I have never heard of a case where a producer for a Forex game in China.

will actively go out there and be like, I'm looking for investments or this or that.

Usually what I hear of is a publisher will identify

a special, you know, a special potential opportunity, sorry.

And then they'll actively go out to try to poach a producer like, like to work on the Forex game with their idea.

But in the West right now, we're seeing a lot of guys are like, hey, I have an idea.

I need investment.

Things like that.

So that's different.

That's different.

So, how people can reach out to you?

Yes.

I'm sure we can do our kind of like the magic video thing and then my happy

work email will pop up like boom yeah just like that and then you guys can reach out to

that

nice and then you go if you go on a LinkedIn there might be a million David pans but try to look for the fat bald one and that may narrow it down a little bit and you know what I can do put your LinkedIn

URL into the show notes and profile don't worry yeah we can we can that sounds like we can make it a little bit easier for people

that sounds like witchcraft witchcraft but yeah absolutely and then I'm not as responsive as I was a few months ago because, you know, like we're in Q4 now, a lot of stuff going on.

I wanted to also,

I'm saving this for last.

October 13th.

I want you guys to save the date.

I'm also going to reach out to you guys a little bit before that.

Like we got some really big news.

Really, really big news.

So I'm excited about it.

Yeah, it's next week.

That's good.

It's next week.

It's next week.

We're

really excited about it.

We're going to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm I'm sure the gaming industry is gonna really love that news.

Yeah, Abby's getting bought by Saudi Street Fun.

Let's not, let's not jump, let's not speculate, yeah, let's not speculate, let's speculate, we'll see, but which means it's gonna go live before yeah, gonna be fun.

And I do want to say, like, I'm already picturing this, like, kind of like from the viewer's perspective.

I feel kind of bad because I feel like there wasn't that much insight that maybe someone wanted to learn.

Abby, you surprised me.

There was a lot.

Yeah, we can, we can judge.

You know, sometimes I do want to, yeah, sometimes it's just better to hear it from the copyright source and confirm the stuff that we're saying because you never know.

And once at least you confirm it, it's like much better than nothing.

So don't worry.

It's still okay.

Well, cool.

Well, I feel really good about that.

But there's one thing I do want to like, if there's something that, like, what games are on your guys' radar right now at this moment?

I know you guys do the oh, games radar

video each month, but what's something that's on your your mind?

Sonar.

Soft-launch sonar.

Excuse me.

Sonar, radar, whatever.

What games are on our mind currently?

Or you mean like what's what's like

yeah, so there's lots of movement in social casino.

We are very keen on looking at.

For instance, there was this new Robio game that's pretty much iterating Social Casino and the whole Social Casino is going to be Forex in the next few months, it seems.

Meaning that they're taking on the like additional onboarding game into the creative strict.

So that's there.

Then there's a lot of movement in the

let's say non-conventional puzzle genre which means there's lucky adventure as well on the on the menu for us lucky adventure like lots of these like i would say trends that are popping up there's lots of steam stuff also that like we just covered the megabomb game which seems to is by the way it's already past 100k ccu in the meantimes it's still growing up like crazy and uh yeah that game is gonna be that game is gonna be copied to hell on both like both vchat both mobile everywhere like that system is done very, very well.

Like, that actually was

one of the games I wanted to talk with you guys about, too.

I don't know if we have enough time today, but yeah, for Mega Bonk, I'm really excited.

Like, it's so crazy how we find out about this, right?

Because all my friends were playing it in my friends' list, and then I see it, and then I buy it.

And then now, in the last week, I see all these websites they're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, but it's just you,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

It looks,

I don't know, yeah,

It's it's very clever iteration.

That's like the thing.

Like those two games that he put together, meaning the risk of rain 2 and survivors kind of loop.

Vampire survivor.

Yeah, yeah.

It's it's done very clever.

And you know, the numbers speaks themselves.

Vault on Twitch, vault on Steam, and everywhere.

So we'll see.

All right.

All right.

Perfect.

Like that's also something we're pretty big on.

Like, like, yes, Steam games.

You can just kind of take them, you know.

Do it yourself.

Put it as an onboarding.

That's been done before.

That's true.

Absolutely true.

But like, again, like, not to sound too much of kind of like a shill or anything, but like, like, we do believe in trying to be ethical in how we do things too at Happy.

Like, I think that's what makes us, again, pretty special, even though, like,

we want people to know we're still kind of like a boutique publisher.

And then, like, because Stefan comes from...

a producer background, he knows the pain of having his game, you know, copied.

And I don't know if we talked about that specific game like it really hurt him really bad like when that happened to him and then the game that copied his game now is like it's on its eighth or tenth you know version in the app store and then for his game it's still kind of like a hallmark game that like a lot of people have played and still play but yeah so like that's something he always talks about too he's just like we're never gonna do something like that where we just blatantly copy now how people feel about vampire survivors and archiro survivor i o i mean like there's there's a lot of things we can go back and forth about that.

Yeah, it's like a coming all from different games, like Korean Magic Lantern game.

We covered it.

So, yeah, it's not really that easy as it seems on the surface.

Yep.

If you know how it works, then you know it's not easy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Thank you very much, David, for coming.

This is amazing.

And I hope to see you soon.

I mean, guys, Jakub is going to see you in Istanbul for Mojictum.

I'm going to see you hopefully sometimes next year before China Joy.

If not, then China Joy.

It is.

Oh, yeah, absolutely

again thanks really appreciate

say say good words to to your team and we say hi yeah looking forward

yeah looking forward absolutely guys i still remember it was just like two years ago when i was just your fanboy on youtube and now like being able to come here to represent our company and just to like you know just to share words with friends it's really it it truly is an honor and then we're really looking forward to we're we're really looking forward to have 2.5 gamers play our new games as soon as it's ready.

I'll see what I can do to get that into your hands officially earlier.

Yes, then nice.

Let's do that.

Woo!

Let's go.

Amazing.

That's what we like to hear.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

All right.

Listeners, this is it.

Thank you very much for listening.

Join the Slack channel.

If you have any questions, reach out to David or just comment under the video and see you next time.

Bye.

Ciao.