The Art of Scaling games: The Creative arms race

Speaker 2 So that's the that's the sad part about this that like you know you having greatly creative people isn't really gonna win this race It means you having people that know execution so well so they can produce so much stuff that's that's that's wins this race

Speaker 3 It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice.
Matei drops knowledge made of gold and ice. Felix with ads making those coins rise.
Jack up designs, worlds chasing the sky.

Speaker 3 We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew, talking UA adverts and game design too. Matei's feeling shaku, bringing the insight.
We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight.

Speaker 3 But K UA, master, eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyberspace skies.
Felix stacks colours like a wizard in disguise. Jackups crafting realms lift us to the highs.

Speaker 3 Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey sick, got your back.
Ads are beautiful, they like the way. Click it fast, don't delay.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 3 Uh-huh.

Speaker 3 Uh-huh.

Speaker 4 Hello, everybody. Welcome to another super special, rare episode

Speaker 4 for whatever we are calling it these days. We have a special guest, so it's definitely super special.
And my name is Matteel Ancherich.

Speaker 2 I'm Felix Broberg, and I'm Jakubremier.

Speaker 4 And we have...

Speaker 6 Ritsky. Hey, nice to meet you guys.

Speaker 4 Sorry, I just threw you under the bus.

Speaker 6 I thought it was a thing, and then I was.

Speaker 4 I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. No, welcome, Ritski.
Welcome back onto the show. Could you

Speaker 4 give our listeners just a brief intro, just to remind who you are and why you're great?

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 6 Hey, guys.

Speaker 6 Thanks for having me. And good to be back on the podcast.
My name is Ritzki Shabutra. I'm a co-founder at TBX.
We're a financing platform for gaming and consumer apps.

Speaker 6 We provide non-dilutive capital, growth capital for user acquisition, so you can scale your apps to their maximum profitable potential.

Speaker 1 There you go. Nice.

Speaker 4 And today we are going to talk about what else than creatives. Because

Speaker 4 as you all, dear listeners, might have noticed, we started talking about one interesting KPI or North Star metric or whatever. Felix, you mentioned it on some of the last podcasts.

Speaker 4 The new or the number of new creatives in the last 30 days, and we are kind of measuring this against different games that we review and Ritzkim is always kind of

Speaker 4 is also doing this on his own and the team as well and just interviewing different clients and and we thought you know let's just talk about this because it's super interesting so what have been you what have you been doing recently ritsky yeah well firstly Let me just clarify that I'm not an expert in this.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 I'm going at this problem as a journalist.

Speaker 1 But we are. So don't worry.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Exactly. But I've been doing a little bit bit of primary research and we're fortunate enough to work with a lot of gaming, mobile gaming clients.

Speaker 6 So I just asked them point blank, like, what's your biggest pain point right now in scaling your games? And all of them point to their UA manager.

Speaker 6 Basically, 14 out of 14 of them pointed to their UA manager and was like, okay, the thing that's blocking our scaling is keeping up with creative ideation, production, and testing.

Speaker 6 Essentially, that's it. And then they also mention

Speaker 6 that the companies that they are tracking, i.e., their competitors, seem to be increasing the pace of experimentation over time, creating even more pressure to keep up.

Speaker 6 So we decided to see if we can quantify this and dig a little bit deeper into the numbers.

Speaker 6 I'll share with you guys what we found shortly, but basically I showed this to Mate and he was like, I was like, what the fuck, bro? How can anyone possibly solve for these types of volumes?

Speaker 6 And voila, here we are. I'm hoping to find answers here on this podcast.

Speaker 4 That's why we are here. We were also quite surprised when we looked at, let's say, Kink Shot.
We looked at what else, Last War and other companies.

Speaker 1 Blogblast. Blog Blast as well.

Speaker 4 Lita Mayong and all of these. Like, oh, how many new creatives in the last year? 10,000.

Speaker 2 Jesus. We even now have two podcasts based on creatives, one for AI ones and one for non-AI ones.

Speaker 4 Here, here it is, yes. which is 16,000 new creatives in the last three days, which is nuts.
That's ridiculous. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 6 And sorry, just to clarify on this, because I think we're using different platforms. You're using Sensor Tower.

Speaker 1 I'm using App Magic, but

Speaker 6 there's

Speaker 6 in at least in App Magic, there's this concept of creative, which is like

Speaker 6 new. Like, no, there's new creatives and there's just total creatives, but each creative that they show on the platform is basically like a bundle.

Speaker 6 They don't repeat like similar creatives. It's like, because then it'll be really, really repetitive to show on the on the platform.

Speaker 6 So it's more akin to a concept, but I don't think it's a concept either. Anyways, we can get into that.

Speaker 1 We're in the concept.

Speaker 4 In the middle, yeah.

Speaker 2 For a concept, you would need

Speaker 2 very heavy filtering, most probably by humans, which you cannot really do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 7 But can we maybe just take a step back, Matthia, and can you explain for viewers who are just joining us why Vita Mayong has 3,000 new creatives in the last 30 days and the UA benefits of that?

Speaker 4 Because the creative velocity is the name of the game. Since we started talking about this, I think 2025 in January, and I said, look, this like companies with high

Speaker 4 or a big number of creatives and new creatives are going to win because every time you add new creatives, the new creatives kind of get a little bit of a boost of impressions on some channels.

Speaker 4 And the creative fatigue on certain level of scale is quite high. So you need to rotate and refresh campaigns very frequently.

Speaker 4 On Facebook, it started to be quite intense, and I'm kind of adding and adding new creatives almost like two or three times a week, even though the scale

Speaker 4 is not like hundreds of thousands of dollars, even if it's like 50k.

Speaker 4 It really requires a significant amount of creatives to be

Speaker 4 able to go for profits.

Speaker 2 8 million DAU and 400, pretty much half a million downloads a day.

Speaker 1 So just saying,

Speaker 1 so that's, I mean, wow,

Speaker 4 that's the 23,000 creatives right there.

Speaker 4 Because, you know, if you look at my kind of metric, when I see like when I when I know the game is scaling, is when I see their ads like five times a day on Facebook or different times.

Speaker 4 I mean, like, seriously, I'm just browsing like Instagram, Facebook, and I see the games, like, oh, wait a second, I didn't even see this game before. It's like, oh, okay, let me check.

Speaker 4 So, okay, it's scaling five creatives, but sometimes it's just five creatives, like the same creatives, which can happen.

Speaker 4 And then the game is kind of going to die quickly because there's not enough, let's say, the creative firepower.

Speaker 4 But when I look at Vitamayong and I see 10 creatives a day and 10 different creatives a day, like that's insane. That's really insane.
So that's like how you actually scale these days.

Speaker 4 And I don't think it's going to be very different in 2026, Actually, you know what? It's going to be even more problem, not problematic, but it's like even more like we're going to go deeper in this.

Speaker 4 It's going to be still about volumes, but the quality needs to go higher because

Speaker 4 the bar is going to, this is not going to be enough anymore. So, we are screwed.
2026, yeah.

Speaker 2 You haven't even started talking about playables on top of that.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Speaker 1 exactly.

Speaker 4 There's a whole new world which is called playables, and let's not go there because there's going to be

Speaker 4 10 podcasts which is fine.

Speaker 7 So wait, let's take a look at this right so this is the category that Vitamayong is in which we just looked up 23,000 creatives which they're dominating in terms of downloads right so this is ad monetized games so let's just look at the top three

Speaker 7 games in that category

Speaker 7 it's Vitamayong Tile Explorer and Tile Club

Speaker 7 So you can see that the ones that are the largest have the most creatives. So this is exactly what Matteo was talking about.
The more creatives you have, the larger your game will be.

Speaker 1 The scaling is to be.

Speaker 7 The scale. Yeah, the scale.

Speaker 7 This is kind of what they talked about at Amplify for Apple as well, right? That their algorithm kind of favors new creatives and a lot of new creatives.

Speaker 4 It's not a lot of new creatives. They also have the creative sets these days.
So it's slightly changed over the course of the last few months.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 4 as even Alexi mentioned... Alexis mentioned that new creatives have like 5%

Speaker 4 of the traffic and then based on the first five percent of the traffic bump, then the algorithm decides if it's if it's going to get more traffic or not.

Speaker 4 So literally, if you if you just mathematically just go with more, then you will win.

Speaker 2 Can we define what's new creative time-wise? Like, what after two days it's not new anymore? Three days, one day, or what would you say?

Speaker 4 New uploaded creative, that's like the new batch, but I mean, like

Speaker 1 how long

Speaker 7 overall traffic, yeah, but how long is it creative new?

Speaker 1 How long is new?

Speaker 4 Honestly, like that's that it can be one day, it can be two months. I don't like what's like, I don't really get the question.
You mean new in terms of the algorithm or new in terms of like

Speaker 4 until

Speaker 4 it reaches the five percent of the of the traffic, which is good.

Speaker 4 Like we can be depends on the budget, so it can be one week because your budget is low, or it can be one day because your budget is like 50k per day. In that case, it's like half of the day, maybe.

Speaker 2 Okay, so once again, so five percent of the overall volume spend or UA spend is

Speaker 4 going to be allocated to new creatives. When you upload them into the into the channel,

Speaker 4 you will get the five percent of that overall spend. It's going to be allocated to the new creatives.

Speaker 2 Okay, and if they

Speaker 2 consume more, then no new anymore.

Speaker 4 Exactly. That's just the

Speaker 4 after exit learning phase.

Speaker 1 Learning stuff today. This is good.
See?

Speaker 6 Sorry, just so I understand,

Speaker 6 is it based on an impression count or a spend? I guess spend and impression are related, right?

Speaker 6 But okay, spend an impression. And this is when we had a conversation separately outside of this.
And I was like, hey,

Speaker 6 I think you need to, back in my old school days, like four or five years ago, I was like, okay, we need to hit 50,000 impressions to properly test this creative concept or this creative variant.

Speaker 6 Like, what is that number nowadays?

Speaker 4 And it's also going to be very interesting on the different channels. I think what you mentioned might be connected to Facebook, for example.
And then

Speaker 4 I said, I think you just need 5,000 impressions. And I don't think anyone uses impressions anymore.

Speaker 4 Because if you're a UA manager that working on the game for some time, you add new creatives and you see immediately after maybe like even a couple of like hundreds of impressions, it picks up.

Speaker 4 the spend immediately the like the winner because what happens on facebook and everybody has this problem is you have one or two best performing creatives and it's really hard to kind of find the new winner.

Speaker 4 So you upload the new creatives, you test it out, and there's like seven different kinds of frameworks for testing.

Speaker 4 But let's say for simplification, you're adding new creative concepts into the business as usual campaigns. So you add your new creatives there.
After one day, zero traffic or very, very...

Speaker 4 slow traffic, which is close to zero. Then you add a new batch, very similar.

Speaker 4 And then you add the new batch, and then suddenly one creative starts to spend, like after even after our hour of uploading.

Speaker 4 If you're lucky, you will see if you're, I mean, still, but you will see these patterns after a while. So you don't really need like 5,000 impressions.
You can see it right out of the get-go.

Speaker 4 You upload the creative, it's

Speaker 4 really like strong concept. It takes over the spend immediately.
And you will see it in one day, basically. So that was like kind of

Speaker 6 it's kind of really sad that, like, you know, some guy who's not doing this in a, you know, machine, machine supported is like spending time like thinking about like the smallest little detail about this thing.

Speaker 6 And they have like

Speaker 6 one hour of limelight before they get shut down. It's like kind of sad.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you can't really force this because even if you, because even if you say, okay, you know what? I'm just going to pause the creative winner.

Speaker 4 that I have, so I will leave the room for the new creatives.

Speaker 4 You pause the winner and other creatives will take over the spend for sure, but those will have worse results than the creative winner, obviously.

Speaker 1 So it's like, okay, you will not help.

Speaker 4 Then people try to do a separate creative testing campaign. So let's say you're running purchase optimized campaigns.
Let's do it's cheap in a cheaper way.

Speaker 4 Let's just try mobile app install campaign, test creatives, and then put winners into the business as usual.

Speaker 1 It's gonna work.

Speaker 4 Only on paper because you will find the winner. You will put it into business usual campaign, zero spend.

Speaker 4 See, it's the same thing, but you just kind of wasted five days of testing in the mobile app insta campaign.

Speaker 7 So, I have a question. I did some quick maths, which is always fun, right? So, Vitamayong, 23,000 creatives in the last 30 days, which means every day 766 new creatives, which means every 24 hours.

Speaker 7 So, 31.9 creatives per hour. How the hell do they do that?

Speaker 4 I mean, do you think like they're doing this automatically?

Speaker 7 It's just obviously, but like, how do they do it automatically? Like, this is insane.

Speaker 7 They do Vitamayong, Tile Club by Game of Asian, they do their creative output that they do in a month, they do in a day.

Speaker 1 Well, look,

Speaker 2 you can do this into context. So you automate a lot of stuff in the first place.
That's like for sure.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but how? Man, just

Speaker 2 tools. So you have a concept and you put the concept into seven or eight different formats.
So you need to come up with a different concept for each format. No, you just check it out.

Speaker 7 But you change the color or whatever. No, change the color

Speaker 1 format.

Speaker 2 Format. Format, like just the format, like banner, whatever.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it takes counted as like 10 or 15 new creatives, which is just still one concept.

Speaker 2 So, you know, you saying they're doing 32 creatives per hour means that maybe they're doing like, I don't know, three per five hours or something, maybe. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Really

Speaker 4 normalized creatives Yeah, these types of things.

Speaker 2 We really need to boil down to the like how much concepts, like actual completely different concepts they are pushing out.

Speaker 2 Not just like, because you know, you have this one concept, and then you like slosh it on your pipeline, and then like the pipeline automatically converts it to all these other formats.

Speaker 4 That is my guess.

Speaker 2 Which, if you're not doing it efficiently, then you have this.

Speaker 4 With 23,000 creatives, you need to have the automated pipeline for also, which is is going to be not only just you know uploading the creatives manually would take you like all day ages it's impossible to do it like manually seriously then what is really impossible to do manually is also translating because vitamayong for example and kind of talk about this game all the time they have so many different like languages we saw English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, whatever else also has to be automated and then just uploaded in bulk.

Speaker 7 So how do you start with this let's say me and ritzki we want to start a game called pita mayong and we want to get to 23 000 creatives every month right so for pita mayong how do we start like what tools actually no bullshit i'm actually curious like what tools do you actually use for this

Speaker 7 yeah you're not called matia but like come on like i want to hear this

Speaker 4 pita mayong is is great no honestly so you have you have tools that help you bulk upload and you have 10 millions of them so you can you can use that but in in terms of the creative production, first, you start small and then you scale.

Speaker 4 I mean, obviously, you won't be able to scale from zero to 23 creatives overnight.

Speaker 4 It's just like you slowly build the process, and the process is you have a small team in-house, one UA manager, at least five video editors. That's that's my ratio, because that's very important.

Speaker 4 Some people have it the other way around, which is absolutely ridiculous.

Speaker 2 Five to one creatives to UA managers.

Speaker 4 That's my ratio that I kind of think I have 10 most.

Speaker 1 But that's Western.

Speaker 2 ratio is I think like Asian ratio is like one to ten.

Speaker 4 Western ratio is yeah, a little bit different a little bit different, but still, that's the ratio.

Speaker 4 You you build that and then you start kind of you build the the own pipeline, which is ideation, production testing, in my in my case testing is just uplo uploading them to the business as usual, just not s not to waste time anyway.

Speaker 4 Then

Speaker 4 from this, when you start producing creatives on the da on the weekly basis, then you start kind of working with external partners. So you don't really rely only on your internal team.

Speaker 4 And then after you have like one, two, three, four, five different external partners, you start automating stuff.

Speaker 4 And also in terms of the ideation and production, like every everywhere where you can, you just try to be as effective as possible.

Speaker 4 And Felix, like, if you go and do Peta Mayong, I will say, don't fucking do it.

Speaker 1 It's going to be pretty hard.

Speaker 4 Yeah. But no, like, this is how you kind of start and then just expand.

Speaker 7 Basically, you use AI for video editing and change editing the videos, or no, you change more for creation than editing, I would say.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 4 you can do a little bit of editing here and there, you have new tools that are going on to be on the market as well.

Speaker 4 But primarily, if you saw like my workflow just for creating random social media posts, like this is the same thing that you can do for UA.

Speaker 4 So, there's so many options, man. Like, I

Speaker 4 I don't know where you should. Well, I know where you should, sir.
I just told you.

Speaker 6 I think when I think about it, I think there's a few bottlenecks, right? One is the bottleneck in terms of just creative capacity. Like, how do you create?

Speaker 6 And then obviously edit as well. There's also a bottleneck in ideation.

Speaker 6 Like, I think some people are just like, how do I even think about, even as you were mentioning, like three concepts every whatever, however many days?

Speaker 6 Because if you do that for enough months, you're like, you definitely run out of freaking concepts.

Speaker 2 You go to competitors. No worries.

Speaker 4 there's always stuff to steal there's always stuff to steal yeah exactly it's actually like the ideation part for start is very easy go to competition take five or ten their best performing ads and then just use them

Speaker 4 in for pita my own i would i would try for for something else and my own clients i wouldn't really steal this just like take inspiration.

Speaker 7 So if we're doing Peter Mayong, I just go to Vita Mayong and then I'll look. Oh, this creative looks nice.
And it goes like this would work. Look, 14%.

Speaker 1 This one is going to work super well. And

Speaker 2 if you're an Asian studio, you don't even do that. You just take the creatives, cut off the end cards, and run it.

Speaker 1 Easy. Exactly.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, like that ideation

Speaker 4 becomes a problem at scale, but again,

Speaker 4 you have tools for that. And you have then, if you run into this problem, it's a good problem to have.

Speaker 6 But who is Vita Mayong copying? as in like

Speaker 2 other genres twenty three thousand other genres other genres like you need to go like that's why we see stuff like royal kingdom or royal match the big match 3 game copying kingshot literally they copying kingshot one to one they're also doing blog blasts creative so right exactly so once you kind of capture your whole genre you go outside of your genre because honestly there are just two or three genres that are the best which is Rex Forex and Forex and everybody goes to forex to steal their their creatives.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 4 And then you have

Speaker 4 all of these different things. And also, when you run out of games, you go to apps.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 And you are starting the same roller coaster again.

Speaker 2 That's the sad part about this: that, like, you know, you having greatly creative people isn't really going to win this race.

Speaker 2 It means you having people that know execution so well so they can produce so much stuff.

Speaker 1 That's, that's, that wins this race.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's not what creatives were in the 60s, you know, a bunch of weed and hanging out. No, it's just copying.

Speaker 4 But also, I found out, like, it's, I was always kind of saying and had the impression, you know, like, let's just test this and it's going to be fine. Like, we'll see what good data says.

Speaker 4 But now I'm not actually the same anymore because it really makes a difference if you know what you're doing and you're not just randomly testing shit. It just like comes up.
Like, this is great.

Speaker 4 Let's see. Now I'm kind kind of also asking myself, like,

Speaker 4 for a longer period of time, like, okay, this, like, what is this? I mean, do I care about?

Speaker 4 Like, does it really spark any types of emotions, or is it just fake enough that it actually grabs the attention?

Speaker 4 It should it and will it gonna is it is it gonna work and these questions even before I go and upload the new creatives because then you can it can change quite a lot actually I we just produced one one video for for a gaming studio and it's like look you know what like

Speaker 4 this is kind of nice but then let's just also cut first three seconds because it's absolutely boring and I don't want to see it there also same thing it's a it's a headline and we we should we need to grab attention I don't care about the headline just floating around in first three seconds no just straight to the altered gameplay and then let's use that headline and just put it on the top of the video and suddenly out of one video we have three

Speaker 2 that's called experience that's it i mean yeah that's true

Speaker 4 This is an interesting discussion.

Speaker 7 Yeah, like, so on the back of this, right, this is super interesting. I'm just wondering, right? We often joke on this podcast about the app police, right?

Speaker 7 Do ever a company sue each other for creative copying or it's just not a thing? I don't think Royal Match creatives, you know, like they're so good, right?

Speaker 7 Do they, would Dream Games ever sue anyone for copying them, like match villains?

Speaker 4 But match villains is just not copying them.

Speaker 4 I mean, if you copy, it's just one-to-one,

Speaker 4 really. And even if they do it, like, who cares?

Speaker 6 I mean, there's like, again, there's also like, it's really hard to kind of claim the IP of something that's moving so fast that's like, that has a shelf life of however long.

Speaker 6 But yeah, I think that that'll be pretty tough.

Speaker 4 Well, anyway, so Ritski, what does like the clients also mentioned after

Speaker 4 you reviewed all that the creative is a problem, basically? Like, what, how they can think about it? Like, what's what was the

Speaker 4 reasoning behind also the research and everything?

Speaker 6 yeah i mean the reasoning behind the research is that it's the extremely frustrating problem and it's just like yeah

Speaker 6 you can definitely feel it if you're not moving or you there's no momentum in your own company you definitely feel everyone else kind of whizzing by and so after hearing enough of it i was like okay i i really wanted to quantify the problem and so if you allow me to share share my screen i'll absolutely share with you kind of what what what we uncovered and i'd love to hear kind of what you guys think

Speaker 6 whether this this kind of aligns with what you're seeing but just just to start off with how we did the how we did the the the research so we basically took uh actually across mid uh mid-core hyper casual and casual but i just want to talk about mid-core here because i think the revenue brackets make most sense on on uh generally more iep generating games so we took the top 1000 grossing mid-core games in tier one and we looked from january 2023 to to to September 2025 and then we categorized them between their IEP brackets like under 500k to all the way up to 2 million and above.

Speaker 6 And then we looked at associated creatives, which is what AppMagic describes as like multiple visually thematically similar variants. And then we took a look at new creatives.
So this is what we see.

Speaker 6 So if you look at

Speaker 6 the first chart on the left, just shows that despite CPMs becoming more and more expensive, there's still demand for it and increasing demand for it.

Speaker 6 Like people are super hungry for more and more impressions despite the CPM inflation.

Speaker 6 But then if you look at the chart on the right, it shows that that also translates to the number of creatives that they're producing.

Speaker 6 And it becomes more and more exacerbated as you increase the revenue bracket. So, the $2 million IAP revenue and an above bracket is skyrocketing to like 400-plus creatives per month.
This is average.

Speaker 6 This is not Vita Mayone. Vita Mayone will be

Speaker 1 excuse.

Speaker 6 But like 400 million, 400 plus creatives per month on average for any, any, any, any studio that, or sorry, not studio, any game that's generating 2 million above on revenue.

Speaker 6 I think it's pretty staggering. And this, if you look at it from a longitudinal standpoint,

Speaker 6 you can sense how you'd be very frustrated if you started in 2023 and you had the same system going on, and you realize everyone else is kind of shooting up.

Speaker 6 So that was like

Speaker 4 the same system from 2023 until today,

Speaker 2 you're not there.

Speaker 6 You're non-existent.

Speaker 7 That's no good.

Speaker 2 It would be really interesting to see the ratio of chinese companies in that last segment on the red chart yes i think it's like 50 i'll get back to you on that one that is an interesting one

Speaker 1 all of them

Speaker 6 all of them look at this this echoes what you were saying jakob which is basically more revenue more creatives like if you have more revenue you're going to spend it on on more creatives yeah absolutely which brings us to the next slide which is how many new creatives here and so on average about 40 to 50 percent of the total creatives are new on a monthly basis.

Speaker 6 So this definition over here is categorized as a monthly basis. I don't think that's that surprising.

Speaker 6 For this 2 million plus IAP bracket, it's 253 new associated creatives per month, which I think is pretty significant. And we go back to the question of like

Speaker 6 how the hell do you.

Speaker 6 create a system that allows you to do this. Also noting some growth spikes.

Speaker 6 I don't know if that's correlated to new systems or tools that are available in the market where suddenly like especially the one million one million and above kind of brackets are are kind of spiking in certain times is that ai is that i don't know um

Speaker 6 new

Speaker 4 you have january right there usually which is the the best time of the year anyway and it drops a little bit in summer and then spikes back up for

Speaker 2 also

Speaker 2 the start of the year we've seen a lot more ai models coming out into like it was something like March, I remember. There was like a lot of stuff coming into the market.

Speaker 2 Literally, like every week you had another video model.

Speaker 4 It started, I think, last year when I was still here, I started doing like all of these like AI like experiments. It was October, November.
So that's that's right there. What was before 2023?

Speaker 4 I have no idea. But last year, definitely.

Speaker 2 AI is definitely going to increase volumes so much.

Speaker 4 100%.

Speaker 4 Like we said, 50% of the gaming companies are going to use AI next year in creatives. I mean, that's like, if they don't, then they are not going to be in this chart, unfortunately.

Speaker 6 One thing that I was wondering, and you were talking about Vitamayon, but I'm looking at this like top 2 million plus range as well.

Speaker 6 Outside of the total UA of the total UA budget, what percentage or how much do they need to reserve to just for testing whether or not these new creatives work?

Speaker 6 Like, how do you think about that budgeting?

Speaker 4 I usually try to have like 10-15% percent budget allocated for creative testing.

Speaker 4 And if you're spending a couple of millions a month, it's that's quite significant still.

Speaker 4 But I think not the main question is, like, how much money they sh or how much how many resources they should be allocating for the creative production.

Speaker 4 That's even like a bigger question because, like, it's like, you know, testing, you can test things and even if you skip testing and just start traveling everything into the business usual,'cause then that's fine.

Speaker 4 But if you're spending spending, oh, like these guys are earning two million, so I'm pretty sure like they're spending more than that, or around or people somewhere around to two million, it's going to be a significant portion of the cost from the marketing PL as well, or the UA PL.

Speaker 4 And it can be

Speaker 4 anything between

Speaker 4 a couple of thousands to even hundreds of thousands of dollars for per month just for creative production. And I'm not even going into the

Speaker 4 space about

Speaker 4 like the these high polished cinematic trailers that cost quite a lot of money. I mean now with AI it's going to be slightly less, but still it's just, I'm not even going there.

Speaker 4 And those are millions.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 4 that's the real question.

Speaker 6 In your experience, Mate, like

Speaker 6 do CEOs understand this?

Speaker 1 Like that.

Speaker 1 Absolutely no.

Speaker 5 They should be on every CEO's wall.

Speaker 7 That is what they should ask every morning. Like, how many creators did we come up with yesterday?

Speaker 4 Man, Felix, I have worked with one company, and the CEO had two UA managers,

Speaker 4 half-time video editor, spending 10K per day. And I was like, guys,

Speaker 4 this is a very bad distribution of the workforce. I mean, 10K per day can be done by half of a person, not two UA managers.
Where is your video editors?

Speaker 4 Like, we were like, where is like, oh, but you know, we are gonna start working with one company like when

Speaker 4 well maybe in two months like yeah but we want to scale now like yeah sure and we should do these like ua efficiency benchmarks man because like people don't don't even get the get the map this was ridiculous so

Speaker 4 no they don't understand

Speaker 7 You know what I'm just thinking about? Like looking at these charts, right? So it's still a lot of number of creatives, right?

Speaker 6 But in context of this, it's even more impressive, these games that we reviewed in the last month like the tower level devil these cinderella stories are even more magical now than they were four years ago insane so there's this one one other chart that we we were running which which i thought was quite interesting but basically if you flip this and you said how many creatives does it take for you to reach a million impressions you can kind of get a proxy to how your creative efficiency Because if you want to get to a million impressions, how many creative creatives does it take for you to iterate?

Speaker 6 And what we see here is, I think, other than this, this, the 69, the 69 one, there's like a clear, like almost efficiency happening over time and also over scale of revenue.

Speaker 6 So, over time, even this, this lower bracket is getting more and more efficient, getting to a million impressions.

Speaker 6 But also, even in 2025, year to date, there's a clear efficiency as you spend more money. So, or as you generate more money.

Speaker 4 You know what you are doing?

Speaker 6 There's maturity in the creative system or how you've set it up. And then if you survive for long enough, you learn from your mistakes and maybe, maybe, maybe you're able to kind of do this better.

Speaker 6 But I think

Speaker 6 it goes back to

Speaker 6 me thinking about these teams who

Speaker 6 they're basically led by these CEOs who are thinking, okay, I have a thing that works for me. That's generating me

Speaker 6 500K to a million. And they basically stay there for three years and trying to survive at that kind of that kind of using those systems.
And I come to them, I'm like, hey,

Speaker 6 your ROAS is positive. You should scale.
But the first thing that they're thinking in their mind is like, how the fuck? What do I have to do to do that? Nothing has worked in the last three years.

Speaker 6 Because you actually need a pretty drastic change in your creative system, I think, is probably the answer.

Speaker 4 You know what's also quite challenging sometimes?

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 4 the trust of the CEOs, because some of the, like sometimes this happens, like CEO is the only person that runs all the UA creatives whatever which they always should because they at least they kind of start to understand like how it works but then then there's the challenge of oh I hired two people and but they're not doing even the half of the jobs that I was doing it's not even close they're like how can I trust these guys

Speaker 4 when my creatives which are just random creatives that I created are just ten times better than whatever they they are doing. So then that becomes a problem afterwards.
So

Speaker 4 interesting, interesting dynamics in all the companies.

Speaker 7 I was speaking this year to a person who works in an ad network who's very clever, right? And he had a unique, interesting point on this, right?

Speaker 7 And he said that all these companies, because in since 2020, mobile gaming had grown, has grown compared to now in terms of revenues by 6x.

Speaker 1 That's what he said.

Speaker 7 So if your revenues from 2020 hasn't grown by 6x, that means you're behind. And basically you've actually shrunk in real terms, right?

Speaker 7 And I think a lot of studios that don't understand this concept of a lot of creatives are the ones that are falling behind.

Speaker 7 Like if you're roughly the same as you were in 2020 compared to now, you're behind. And that's not a good thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's pretty much a different way of saying what we're saying every single podcast.

Speaker 2 So rolling. steamrolling over everybody.

Speaker 1 Exactly, right?

Speaker 6 There's one more chart that I wanted to run by you guys.

Speaker 6 I thought there would be, basically, my hypothesis was that there was going to be like a Pareto law or like a Pareto kind of dynamic where like one creative would generate the majority of impressions.

Speaker 6 Obviously, if you're doing 400 creatives, it's probably not going to be one. But I ran this analysis where I was looking at the top three ads of all of these games across every single month.

Speaker 6 It's quite sizable. Like the top three ads could generate

Speaker 6 at max in 2023, there was a couple of outliers that were generating 24% or 49% of the total impressions of the game,

Speaker 6 which was a huge, I would consider that a Pareto.

Speaker 6 In more recent months, it's like 11 to 18% of total impressions in 2025, which is still quite a lot considering now they're doing 400-something

Speaker 6 creatives and the top three is generating 18%.

Speaker 6 And Mate, we were talking about like one company, I forgot what it was, but basically they, the case study was like, it took them one, like they had to make 1,800 creatives for them to find the one creative that generated like over a million dollars of UA spent.

Speaker 6 And sometimes I think like maybe you just haven't iterated enough or spent enough to find that one creative that could blow you up.

Speaker 4 That's the thing, but sometimes you just run out of money until you find that creative.

Speaker 4 No, but like Joe's aside, that's like, it's a hit, like not hit games but hit creatives it's just one creative it's gonna change the whole cpi ltv equation and that's it i mean

Speaker 1 exactly like that like this is exactly the game

Speaker 2 exactly yeah the whole game is built on that one creative that you taken from strongflow which is a steam game which is their like entry gate into the low cpi exactly yeah

Speaker 4 And then that makes three million a day plus. So it's like that's is, but then, of course, it's very challenging to find this one hit creative.
If it's not, then everybody would be.

Speaker 2 I can't even imagine how many tries they attempted there.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, exactly. Because that's, that's something we don't see.
Everybody's like, sees only the

Speaker 4 winning creative.

Speaker 1 But everybody can copy.

Speaker 4 No, it's like it's all over every Forex game, basically.

Speaker 4 So, yeah.

Speaker 4 It's about that one.

Speaker 6 If only you could find a partner that would kind of split the bill with you on the UA costs and take risks alongside you.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I was just going to say, I was just going to ask you, Risky, what does this mean if we look at this from the eyes of UA financing market? Like, what does this mean actually?

Speaker 6 So I'll tell you, like, I can tell you conceptually what it means, but basically in practice, what we've seen our clients do is they basically started to think about their UA budget, like 80% of their UA budget, as accessible from an external partner.

Speaker 6 Right. And so they're like, and that includes not just the media spend, that also includes the creative production spend and the media budget testing spend.

Speaker 6 And if you're able to test or allocate more budget to testing this, you're just going to be more aggressive in creative production, in testing new channels, and all of these things.

Speaker 6 And if it doesn't work, look, we share the risk with you. You have someone who shares the risk.
If it really doesn't work for a long period of time, we're probably not going to continue funding you.

Speaker 6 So, there's a balance there, but at least this gives you access to

Speaker 6 budget where you can test more and then if you find a winner then you know that that you can you can double triple quadruple the spend on that winner that's that's how it works in practice because that can take

Speaker 6 two three four months until you find that winner which is painful but that's unfortunate but it is it is what it is and when say you do let's say you do find the winner right let's say like you don't know when it's going to happen but let's say you do find that winner wouldn't it be such a shame that you don't have enough money to spend on that winner?

Speaker 6 And that you have to now think about, okay, now I have to go call these VCs and whatever, or I have to go and talk to these banks.

Speaker 6 You ideally want some way to access the capital as and when you see those winners. That's what

Speaker 6 I would suggest.

Speaker 4 Yeah, because if then you start raising, then until you raise and get the money, the winner is already dead.

Speaker 6 That's all I had to share, guys, but thanks for your inputs.

Speaker 1 All you had to share? This is amazing.

Speaker 7 Very good discussion.

Speaker 5 This is great.

Speaker 2 Yeah. A lot of work, actually, by the way.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Actually, we ought to generate this report for any one of your viewers who are interested. I don't know if we can put this on the link or you can contact me.
You can let me know, and

Speaker 6 we'll generate this report at least once a quarter just to give you a sense of where all of this changes.

Speaker 6 And then there's this other thing that we're kind of doing because a lot of the clients that we're speaking to, they find this like, yes, they have sensor tower AppMagic to go and like stock their competitors or different genres, but having to like watch all of these ads

Speaker 6 like and spend a lot of time understanding and breaking it down is kind of painful.

Speaker 6 So we developed kind of some, a few, a few properties to be able to break down all of these ads in the top categories. Like if you were looking at Forex, we can tell you what's in each of these ads.

Speaker 6 And then we basically publish a deep analysis on this. Mate has been helping us actually kind of validate these insights.
And then we've been giving it to our clients and they've loved it.

Speaker 6 So if anyone is also interested in that.

Speaker 4 Yes, people are already asking in the comments from our few of the last episodes because we mentioned it on the Creative Trends episode that we are doing this trend reports with PBX partners.

Speaker 4 So people are asking like where they can access these reports. So guys, this is it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 We'll share more information about that very soon.

Speaker 6 It'll be open to anyone and we'll also take requests for specific genres or categories that you want to kind of follow. And would love the feedback as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you should, Matthew, really think about those UA efficiency benchmarks because we talk about these things all the time in terms of KPI, product, even admon, and like how many impressions, but nobody talks about like how many creatives per person or like ratios or whatever.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of like efficiency that's efficiency stuff utilizing still, especially in the West.

Speaker 4 Yeah, if you're a team of five, you don't really have two UA managers, yes, half, half

Speaker 4 part-time video, sure, sure, yeah.

Speaker 7 So, I guess the TLDR for today is more money means more creatives, which means less problems.

Speaker 2 Yeah, okay, we can more money, more creatives, which Indian means less creatives because that it creates more money.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 come on.

Speaker 1 It's been a great episode.

Speaker 4 Ritsky, thank you very much for coming on and sharing the data and for the great discussion. And also, listeners, if you want to reach out,

Speaker 4 I'm going to put Ritsky's

Speaker 4 LinkedIn or email into the show notes with all the links that we mentioned. Join the Slack channel.

Speaker 4 Also, if you have any comments, questions, anything, please do that or just ask, add those into the comment section under the video on YouTube. And then see you next time, I guess.

Speaker 4 Thank you very much. Yep, cheers.
Bye-bye. Thanks so much.
Ciao.