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- [00:03]
Branch IO / Xsolla Sponsor
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Matei Lencaric
The problem is that the distinction needs to be drawn between the competence of the economists and the correctness of their analysis.
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Eric Soufert
Welcome to the Mobile Dev Memo podcast. I'm your host and Eric Soufert and I am joined today by Matei Lencaric for the seventh edition of the Mobile Dev Memo Mailbag, which is a Q and A show where I will ask my esteemed guest questions that were submitted from the audience. So, first of all, Mate, welcome, thank
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Matei Lencaric
you very much for having me on the show. It's nice to be on the other side of the barricade for once.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah, I bet. So you're the interviewee?
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah.
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Eric Soufert
So before we hopped on, I was trying to remember when we first met. I mean, it was years and years ago, I think it was when I came to Pixel Federation and did the consulting project there. Right.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, I think, I think so. Which was 20, 15, 16. I don't know, it's.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah, 15 or 16. Probably. Probably 16. But yeah, I mean. So 10 years ago, yeah, I came to Bratislava and I had never, I had never been there before, but I, I liked that city. It was like a mini Prague, I remember.
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Matei Lencaric
Very true. I mean, we're not getting any younger. Ten years ago, it's. Yeah, time flies.
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Eric Soufert
Time does fly. So most people who are listening to this probably know of you from two and a half gamers from your presence on LinkedIn. But for those who don't, can you just please introduce yourself before we dive into the questions?
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Matei Lencaric
Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks again. So, yes, my name is Matteo Anchorage. I've been in the industry for like 12 years. I'm mostly working as a UA consultant. I have my own creative team of TwinMotion designers. I also do playables because it's very important. I'm now building my own no code playable tool which is called Playable Maker. And I started doing also a little bit of apps and games here and there. So I'M I'm busy and I love it and I absolutely love it. But my main business is still UA consultancy, so that's that.
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Eric Soufert
We bumped into each other at Pocket Gamer Connects, what, three weeks ago.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, it was a nice, nice show. I love, I love pgc. It's kind of the opening of the year anyway. Right?
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Eric Soufert
Yeah. So that's actually, that's maybe the first question. So this one's for me. This was not from the audience, but so I know I just see from, from Facebook that you go to a lot of conferences. I think you were just coming back from one right? In Barcelona, was that right?
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Matei Lencaric
I. Yes, I was in Barcelona. So I mean there was time when I was doing way more conferences, but now I tried to pick my battles pretty much BGC London, then usually games for in Barcelona. I had a long pause for gdc, but I was there last year. But this year I said I will maybe just go on a vacation instead. So then I'll be at MAU afterwards. So those are I think the first big shows at the beginning of the year. And then I would just China drove maybe at the like in, in summer. And that's pretty much it.
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Eric Soufert
Well, so that, that was a question. So which conferences do you prioritize? What about gamescom? No Gamescom.
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Matei Lencaric
Oh. I mean I was there for eight times maybe and it's same people all over again. Everybody ends up in Mario hotel lobby which is always crowded. Now there's even a bounce. Either lets you in or don't. So not anymore for some reason. But maybe I will come back to gamescom next year. We'll see.
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Eric Soufert
So how do you view MAU from a relevancy standpoint? MAU used to be. From my perspective, it used to be the conference. And it's broader than gaming for sure. I mean it covers kind of the whole spectrum of the app space. But how do you view it now? I mean they got acquired a couple years ago. There's a lot more friction with putting on the side events and I think it's still very popular. But like I think basically the value or I think the priority of these conferences got totally reset. Post Covid, like so pre Covid, you can't use that as a guide for what's on the calendar now. But actually I think that that worked in PGC's favor because yes, that blew up. Post Covid. Pre Covid. I mean it was a good show, but post Covid it became the show.
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Matei Lencaric
Exactly. Yeah. Pre Covid was like, okay. I was like, ah, maybe I will Go now it's like that's the first one beginning of the year and now it's like 2,800 people, which is insane. So definitely yes. For MAU, it hasn't changed. I still think it's the conference to go and visit now it's not mobile apps unlocked, but mobile audiences unlocked, which is interesting. And that broader spectrum, I guess. I mean I'm now also doing a two and a half gamers gaming summit before the MAU. It's kind of still add like the MAU content. So just like one day before when there is the batch pickup. So I'm a friend of the conference for, for a long time. So I think it's still worth it. I still, I think it's still worth it in terms of the content. Most probably not exactly the same as it was pre Covid, but what's the same, right?
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Eric Soufert
Yeah, I mean MAU was I think distinguished by the content. The content was always really strong.
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Matei Lencaric
Yes.
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Eric Soufert
So. So actually I, I spoke to MIU about doing something similar like an mdm, you know, little mini conference beforehand. We never kind of converged around that, but that was. We had sort of spoken about that. Yeah. I mean, I think and I, I haven't been to MAU in a couple years, but that's just. I'm just a lot busier now with two kids. I bet.
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Matei Lencaric
I bet.
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Eric Soufert
But it's still like, it's one of the ones that I, I feel jealous when it's going on and I'm at home like, like gdc. I don't really feel jealous. I. I feel like it's a grind. GDC is a grind. And just being in San Francisco for a large conference is, is not necessarily pleasant.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, it's not pleasant experience. I mean, I haven't bought a ticket for a long time and I don't even go to the actual venue. So now it's again like meaning me meeting everybody at like W. Buriot or whatever else is around that. So I was like, you know, vacation. Gdc. Vacation, yeah, right, for sure.
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Eric Soufert
So it became a lot more popular in the last few years for you know, companies to build out their own, you know, little circuit of events, you know, where they'll do like three or four. I don't. I want to call them dinners because they're usually bigger than dinners. But it'd be like a company specific event where, you know, they'll run out of space and they'll do presentations for the day and then they'll have like a party after any of those that, that are on your radar that for being like very high quality or like high signal to noise.
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Matei Lencaric
Well now when, you know like when we do like as two and a half gamers do these things as well. So I would definitely call out mine for obvious reasons but that's pretty much it. I usually don't do these like too many of these side events because it's usually distraction and again presentation and then networking. I rather do a networking sessions because sometimes I feel people are kind of filled up with content already. So people are there just to talk to people instead of just sit there and listen. So I try to do also my side events. There's just no music, less of a drinks, just talking and people love it. So. And that's, that's what I also usually enjoy.
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Eric Soufert
Okay. And so now moving on to the questions that I didn't write, we got a number of questions about web. So web onboarding, Web ua, let's maybe start there. So I mean web ua, let's. Let's call it web onboarding. Does that work for games? Have you seen any games implement that in a way that. That scaled.
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Matei Lencaric
Well those are two separate things. So implementing that. Yes. Scale. Not yet I think because it's super, super popular. On the upside and I started talking about this a couple of months ago and I already see some, some companies from, from Turkey that are already implementing this say semi successfully. So it's not there yet. It's not there yet because it's a little bit more complicated than just putting few quiz questions into the web. And that's pretty much it. And then ended it with the subscription. So here I'm kind of experimenting with the web where you actually have full build playable. So you kind of play or like the. Yeah. To play the playable after let's say a minute or two minutes you get, you get an event like hey download the game afterwards. So again on paper works the technical complexity is a little bit different and more, more tough to crack. But I'm pretty sure I will see this way more often in 2026. Maybe even with like the subscription or purchase webshop component there as well.
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Eric Soufert
Oh, interesting. Okay, I want to talk to you about that but let's, let's table that for a second. Do you think it's. It's a certain type of genre that can make that work? I mean I don't think like a casual game could. Could make that work. Right. Or do you think it. Does it matter?
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Matei Lencaric
Well it's, that's a fair question. I think I think the genre doesn't matter that much. For example, I saw even Royal Match or Match Villains using let's say jig solitaire, which is 3x3 puzzle play end cards in different UA network ad networks. So if you use that on the web, again, it should potentially work. I don't think it represents the real gameplay that much, so it would be a little bit misleading. I mean, even if it's a little bit misleading, nobody cares anymore that much. Right. So I would still rather see like a little bit more real gameplay on that website than in the, in the playable rather than just a fake because then it most probably won't work. So not really the genre, but the actual playable and that's like the style of it.
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Eric Soufert
So Playtika had the whole web arcade concept where they could do kind of web onboarding because it was synchronized from the web to the app. Do you need that or can you just do web as a pure play onboarding mechanism and then drive people to the app where that's where you expect them to play the game?
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, that's two separate things. I think you can still do the web onboarding and then on top of that, if you have anything connected to the actual web shop and then the payment on the web, that definitely helps with more signals back to the UA channels and then you send afterwards the players to the app. That's where the complexity kicks in.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah, and then syncing everything up.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, exactly. I mean you can still do it with Facebook conversion API on the landing page and then with the MMP afterwards and then sync up in the, in the mmp. But again it's, it's easy to talk about and it'll be hard to sync up in the real life afterwards.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah, well, I mean, where do you think at the end of the year we'll see? Anybody that has 100%.
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Matei Lencaric
100%? I'm pretty sure if. Well, I'm not sure if the big companies, because they move slow. I mean it's still pretty big chunk of the revenues, but I think smaller teams which are eager to earn more money on top of whatever they're earning in their apps. So I think we will see definitely that and I'm still expecting it in 2026.
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Eric Soufert
Have you seen larger companies move slower with anything related to the web because they're worried that Apple will retaliate against them?
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Matei Lencaric
Oh, I had few conversations like this. So the companies just actually in Barcelona, one of the bigger companies from Israel, they said we don't really want to do this because we really like organics from Apple and we don't know if it's going to happen and it's an interesting boogeyman. Now I can understand that. Obviously if I have so many such a big portion of revenue coming from App Store then I might be scared. But then I would like high risk, high reward.
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Eric Soufert
Could you see any games at the end of this year monetizing almost entirely from the web and not using IAPs at all?
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Matei Lencaric
So actually one case study interestingly connected to the what we just discussed. It was an app. They removed payments from the app and then moved everything to web and then suddenly they saw a huge dip in organics. So basically if you're not getting revenues to the app stor, which are signals, then well suddenly you are losing the rankings. I mean it can be also the tactic from Apple, but also I mean logic, because if you don't see any purchases, then obviously why should you get organic installs? So I don't think it's like fully going to happen.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah, I mean that's one of those things that is pretty logical, right? I mean like you could view that as like some sort of, you know, evil policy like, oh, we're going to starve you of organic discovery if you don't have any IAPs. But then how do you tell if the game's any good if there's no iap?
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Matei Lencaric
Exactly. Yeah, that's, that's the point. How can you get the signal and then like, okay, well this is just an app without anything. Well, I guess doesn't work. Or is it so? Exactly.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah. And then I mean, you know, it's, it's. What Apple said to defend its policy is correct. I mean they do implement a lot of security and you have no idea what people are doing on the web and there's no way to audit that. Or it's very difficult and you could be just ripping people off. I mean there is truth to that. I mean it's not.
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Matei Lencaric
That's true. Yeah. But it's also true you can actually earn more money on the web shop anyway, which is true.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah. I mean my sense is they could have saved themselves a lot of pain here and I think it probably. There was a point I think in the last two years where it probably would have worked out in their favor monetarily if they would've just switched to 15% across the board.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, for sure. Because at 30% it's not really justifiable, to be honest.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah. At 15% you probably wouldn't have that many people pushing into the web at all.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, exactly. Because people wouldn't care that much, that's my opinion. Because it is a hustle, honestly. And it's like again there's the gray area, blah, blah, whatever else. So yeah, 50% people would just say, okay, that's fine.
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Branch IO / Xsolla Sponsor
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Eric Soufert
Okay, talk to me about web shops for sort of smaller, less household name brands. Right. So like we all know that like you know, Scopely had been doing web shops for years and years. Supercell have been doing web shops for years and years. Play Tico, we just talked about it. They had the cross compatibility thing. Can smaller games do that? Can they drive people to the web with link out and see the same. I mean how does the conversion rate change from big game to small game?
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Matei Lencaric
Even, even Pixel Federation does that. I was just talking about about it with them and some smaller companies. They, it's still, I mean you can do link out, you can link out from the app, you can do all sorts of other stuff. It's marketing and all the, all the different activities. Even social media, which if it's good enough then it can work. Zynga is doing this so it still can be like 20, 30% of the revenue on top of it. Of course if you're not big enough then it's not maybe as sexy. But even though for them it's the additional margin. So I still, I'm talking to our sponsors as well and they're saying even smaller companies making couple millions a month, it's still pretty big chunk of the revenue. So why not a couple million a month?
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Eric Soufert
I don't know if that's small.
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Matei Lencaric
Okay, medium sized to be small meaning. Okay, so I'm working with one game which is let's say 400,000 per month, which is smaller. Okay. So anything between 100k to 400k I would still do it less than 100k. Yeah, that might be just not really something. Which is interesting enough.
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Eric Soufert
Okay. Because that was going to be. My next question is where's the threshold? When do you start investing here? Because it is an investment and you have to build stuff.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, exactly.
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Eric Soufert
You work with Xola who's a sponsor. Thanks to Accsola for sponsoring the show. But I mean, you have the pipes and that's great and it's very helpful and it saves a lot of time. But you still have to build out the store, you still have to get the connectivity going and the fulfillment. So I mean, it's not work. I mean, exactly.
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Matei Lencaric
And someone needs to actually manage that. And also you need to find a proper partner. So if they solve someone else. And also not all these partners are equal because some of them, they know more, they have integrations with mmp, some they have not. So it's a. Yeah, it's. It's actually quite, quite a big chunk of work.
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Eric Soufert
So you brought up mmp. So that's actually a question we got. And I'm actually curious to hear your thoughts here because this just feels like such a dynamic space. I was talking to some people at PGC and there's a large diversity of viewpoints here and I'm curious to get your take. So let me just, let me. I'm kind of taking a couple questions we got about MLPs and combining them into one and adding my own lens on it. But let's say we reconvene here. What's today? We reconvene February 16, 2027. Are games still using mmps or how many games are not using mmps? Or is it just taken for granted that everyone has an mmp? Or what do you think the use case for the MMP is in a year's time?
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Matei Lencaric
I feel even if we do, like one year from now, people are still going to use mmps. And it's maybe connected to the question before some of the people that I talk to first. For some of them, they even don't know what MMP is, which is terrible if it's 2026, for God's sake. But I still think people are going to use it. Why not? Because still some of the smaller teams, they don't know, they don't have data teams, they still need to attribute players, they still need to use it for running at least some, some ua. I still think it's like it's still going to be here. Of course we have other, other companies, but still, I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon.
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Eric Soufert
You think there's. Will there be like, let's say, like, let's, let's define big as, like, I don't know, 10 million a month or something in revenue? You think there's any big games where the studios have moved off of MMPS completely? In a year's time or they'll still be using them, but they'll be. Because my sense is like I've changed my view on this too. I think the MMP is here to stay. I think it's here to stay. But you need a lot more tools than just the MMP now than you did. But I mean, yeah, like, I mean some companies use the MMP as their analytics back end. I mean that's just what it. And so not, not completely but like that's, that's a big chunk of it and so you know you're never going to get rid of it. It's, it's, yeah, it's too integrated. But, but could you see a big company just moving away completely, building some internal tools that just replace it altogether?
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Matei Lencaric
Well, big company. Not really. I mean if it's a big company then it's going to take five years and then a lot of money. And then eventually it was like, oh, we have this internal tool which is great, but it's so slow. If something moves quickly in mobile games industry or the games industry, which often happens, then I'm not sure if they're going to be able to react. So, and I've been y. I've been working with some big companies and they are always these teams like oh, we will build everything in house and it either takes again, I guess I said like million years or it never happens because it's too expensive. So I think yeah, it's not going to move anywhere. Just people build stuff on top of it. That's it. That's the kind of more efficient use of the mp. Yeah.
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Eric Soufert
Let's go back to subscriptions. So how do you see subscriptions playing a role in game growth today? So that was, that was a question and then I would just kind of add onto it, like is that, do you see that growing as a share of revenue? Do you see it shrinking? Is it not changing? Or like how do you, how do you see that changing over time?
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Matei Lencaric
It's like blast from the past, I think like games and subscriptions, like that was the thing a couple years ago and then it absolutely disappeared. So maybe with like the growth of apps and that subscription, it's going to maybe reignite some of the discussions, but I don't think like there's anything really meaningful in terms of the subscription. Maybe the battle passes should be a subscription recurring one. But, but would that help? I have no idea. I don't think it's going to go, I mean it's just going to be Very small portion of the revenue which is usually I go like 10%, maybe ish 15. That's it. I don't see the actual usage of that in games that much.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah, well, I mean the battle pass makes sense and just some sort of recurring gem pack or soft currency pack makes sense if you have a really strong live ops loop.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah.
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Eric Soufert
But a lot of companies are not good at building those and so you can't really, you can't layer a subscription on top of a week live obsolete because no one sees the value. Right.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah. And then, and then I can see the storm of people, oh, I forgot to unsubscribe and now you're charging me even more money. Evil games. So yeah, I would literally love to see that discussion. So I mean it's interesting tool but not for games that much.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah. And even in the app space I've seen the shape of subscriptions change a lot. So you see a lot of the subscriptions being different, sort of non standard, like not what you'd expect in terms of the regularity of the recurring payment and just experimenting with that. I've seen companies unlock a lot more revenue just playing around with different timeframes for the subscription. So it's not. And then having different tiers of the subscription. So I think, yeah, my sense is like actually this is a good, this is maybe a good follow up question but like my sense is like where you know, this is so use case specific and so context dependent that you just have to try a bunch of stuff. Yeah. And like gaming companies tend to be pretty bad at that I think just because, like, because gaming companies I, and you know, I get yelled at whenever I say this, but I think it's true. Gaming companies are not led by product managers or let's, let's say games are not led by product managers. Games are led by producers.
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Matei Lencaric
Yes, exactly.
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Eric Soufert
Producers where berets. And they see the game as their canvas to express their artistic vision. They're not like a pm. You know, go walk into an app company, talk to the PM and you say I want to change the onboarding flow. And you know, do this, this. And he's like, all right, we'll test it. You say that to a gaming producer and they'll yell at you, yeah, don't touch my baby. Don't touch my baby. This is art. I've made art. You don't understand it. It, you know, you brute, you buffoon. And so like it's just you don't have that and you know, look, I get yelled at all the time. Because people are like, well, we experiment with everything and, you know, we have no sacred cows. Okay, fine, you're the exception. Usually they're not. Yeah, let's say you are. But I mean, for the most part, in the main, dealing with producers tends to be kind of excruciating because they don't want to change anything. Everything has been summoned from, you know, some deep well of artistic insight that can never be questioned. And you know, if you as like the analytics guy, like I was for a long time, try to push like, ah, why don't we try this? Or just have something set up where it allows us to test different things. They just reject that out of hand. Yeah.
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Matei Lencaric
Well, I remember this discussion when I had with like the actual producer. It's guys, I see, let's say five placements for ads. You can easily implement that. And it's like, oh, oh, don't even tell me, like, the revenue is growing. I mean, call me when. When it's the other way around and when it's gonna be decreasing. It's like then after a couple of years, then he implemented the ads and then earned like four or five millions on top of the revenue that they were earning. I was like, I still kind of, you know, realize like, this could be already done. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So like, yeah, and this is. I know this is a very tough discussion to happen always when I see the different onboardings in the apps business on the app space, it's insane how many different variations they're testing just to kind of get better. And the higher conversions. I haven't seen these types of A B tests for, let's say special offer. I mean, kind of special offers. Yes. Maybe messaging. Yes. But then it's not exactly the same. And I can, yeah, people can argue like testing onboarding on apps is very. It's easier than testing onboarding and gaming and tutorial and stuff. But all the live ops things, they can be tested so much until forever. And I didn't see like that happening that often. Exactly. Because of what you just said, which is interesting and it should be. It should be tested basically everything. Even when I'm talking like to my team and then producing creatives and we are having maybe brainstorming and then like people from the actual product that they're just gonna then tell me their feedback for creatives and I. Guys, I don't want to know your feedback.
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Eric Soufert
Right.
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Matei Lencaric
Yeah, you. I don't want to know what you think about the creatives because this is going to be wild. And every time they see ads like oh my God, we can't this again. This is my baby. I. This can't look like this needs to way more polished as a guys. No. How about. No, let's test it out then we can, we can talk about it.
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Eric Soufert
Yeah, I mean don't get me started on that. I mean that is, you know, so the toughest conversations I've had about creative. I mean you end up having, you know, really challenging conversations just about call it brand integrity. Certainly, certainly like, like, like fidelity in terms of like representing the actual gameplay. And we can, we can talk about that because I got a question about that too. But someone submitted a question about fake game ads. You know, you've been pretty vocal about it it recently. But what I would respond with is like look, if you want to provide feedback on every ad, we're going to be here all week. I mean you understand that I'm going to deploy 200 ads this week. Like there's no time. I can't possibly collect your feedback on every single one. Like we're going to test stuff and see what works on the brand suitability side. Yes, I accept that and I'm happy to have that discussion. And you just give me a list of things that are red lines that I won't cross and that's fine. Like I'm totally willing to do that. Like that's the easiest way to do it it but I need to be able to test too many concepts, much less variants a week for you to be able to give feedback on any given thing. And if you just eliminate things, all you're doing is you're reducing that scope of performance. I mean, because ultimately that's what it is. Like we're going to find stuff that works and it's some set of coordinates on some multi dimensional plane that I don't even really think. It's interesting to try to dissect. If it works, it worked. All that tells me and I mean this is where I get a lot of pushback too. I am focused on the process, I'm not focused on the output. If the output worked, that means the process worked. It didn't mean that there's something to learn from the output. That's been my position for a long time, but it's even more so my position now because of the ramp up in volume that you have to produce. So if the creative worked and it was a winner, great. That means the process produced something that worked. Now what I care about is the consistency of the win rate. I don't care about what the creative looked like. And if you say, well, the creative worked because of of XYZ thing, it had a red tint or it had a tank in it or had a dog, I say that's. You can't know that. You can't possibly know that. What I know is that the process produced something that worked. And if the hit rate stayed the same, if the rate of change is increasing in favor of more winners, that's what I care about, not the actual output. And I'm not going to try to dissect the output and I'm not, certainly not going to try to psychoanalyze the person that clicked on it. What I'm going to say is like, there's too many variables here for me to ever be able to comprehend why someone clicked it. What I care about is the process. If the hit rate is steady or increasing, the process works. That is yes or no.
- [29:16]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah, 100%. Because then we can enter the never ending feedback loop and then suddenly it's like nothing is going to win because we are just stuck in the feedback loop forever. And then we're not testing enough. And also talking about you need to just test volumes of creatives now. It's like, I mean there's no other way unfortunately. And if the creative looks like it usually is even performing better than the high polished ones because it doesn't look like an ad. So I don't really care. And sometimes when I say, oh let's just. Because I really care about the people within the company and I say, okay, let's just review this afterwards. I know I made a very big mistake because then that's exactly the never ending feedback we want to avoid. And then I was like, okay, you know what, stop. Let's just get back to the testing and then we can talk after we get some data in because that's it. That's pretty much it.
- [30:18]
Branch IO / Xsolla Sponsor
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- [30:21]
Eric Soufert
The ones getting all the credit? Yeah.
- [30:23]
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- [30:51]
Eric Soufert
So we did get a question about fake ads. I'M going to adapt it to the conversation. But, but so, but there is a red line, right? I mean, there is a red line here. I mean, some of these ads have gotten perverse and disturbed and I don't, I wouldn't feel comfortable associating my company or my game with them. Certainly games that are designed for, you know, primarily to be played by, well, I mean, kids games are one thing. I mean kids games, you can, you can kind of put that to the side because I don't really think there are that many successful studios making like kids focused games. I mean a lot of, for the most part, I think you're targeting 40 plus parents anyway.
- [31:24]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah. Even if it's kids game, you're targeting parents. But of course I don't really like producing sexist ads like anything gross. It's just. Yeah. I mean, given like the ethical reasons, obviously I don't want to do it. Fake ads or misleading ads, I don't care that much. Also, it needs to have certain visuals and logic behind, let's say the runner gates mechanic in Forex. It needs to have different specific elements within those ads to make it work. But yes, anything which is like freezing families, freezing babies and like, oh my God, come on. I can see how it works and why it works, but oh my, I try to stay away from that.
- [32:07]
Eric Soufert
Right. I mean, there's a lot of things that could be commercially viable that we just disallow in our society. So I mean, some of these ads are truly perverse.
- [32:20]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible to watch. But then again, people are just screaming, oh, why don't just the platforms don't just ban this then it's like, guys, they're making money out of these. Why would they ever ban anything like this? It's never going to happen. And one amazing example was one of our friends, Paul West. He said some of their competitors, they were using even their ads with his face on, in, in the video. Personal face. Yeah. And he was like, guys, like, can you take this down? Like, oh, we need more evidence. Like, what more evidence do you need? It's. This is my face, which was in the creatives. It's our competitor Stall. Guys, come on. No, we need more evidence. So it's like, do they do that
- [33:09]
Eric Soufert
just to troll him?
- [33:10]
Matei Lencaric
I have not. I hope so. I really hope so. You're like, yeah, so, yeah, platforms, they don't really care that much, so why would they? This is just like the great example of it.
- [33:25]
Eric Soufert
So I'll tell a quick story. I mean this is recent. Like, someone messaged me on the mobile memo Slack, like, I don't know, two months ago. And I had published a course like years ago that was like, pretty expensive. And it was up for a couple years. And I looked at it like a year ago, and I was like, you know what? This isn't. I'm not proud of this anymore. It's just dated. Like, it just wasn't. It just didn't. It wasn't current. And so I took it down. Like, I, you know, deactivated it or whatever. And the reason this person reached out was because, like, they had an account and they tried to, like, log in and it was. It was down. And so I was like, okay. So I just sent them the videos and they said, by the way, there's a website selling your course for $99. And like, my, My course was like almost a thousand. I went to the website and it had the original price, you know, on it, and then it had just a big line through it and it's like, oh, you're in luck. This is on like 90 discount. And I was like, what is this? And so I looked up, like, how do you. How can I get this taken down? And so Google has a way to, you know, submit a petition so they'll at least exclude it from search. Right. And so I said, hey, this is my course. Like, it. It's got my name on it. Yeah. And they. You could see the screenshot of, you know, the video, and it's got my face in it. I'm like, that's me. Can you please. And I, I don't approve of this. Can you just take it down? And they're like, how do. And they, you know, someone responded like, how do we know it's you? And so I just took a picture of my face in front of the screen with the picture of my face on it. Right? Like, it's like, see, it's me. It's the same. And they just never responded.
- [35:04]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah. Well, there you go. It's because what people do these days, especially companies from China, they just pretty much steal the creatives that you are running and they just crop the end card or. Yeah, just remove the end card from the actual video and then just run. And just run it as their own video. It works. That's like the worst part of that whole exercise. It actually works. And some of the new wave of the social casinos, like the top tycoon and carnival tycoons, which have different onboarding, but then it's just pretty much slot Machine Afterwards they're using creatives from different games which are idle games and it works so well. So I was like okay, let's test this out. So my team made like 10 videos for my let's say plant identification app app for let's say $5 CPIs. I stole some. Or like let's say, yeah, I just downloaded some of the planned apps. Creatives tested against each other and those stolen creatives have like $1.2 CPI. I was like, oh, okay, interesting. So that's why people are stealing the creatives. Because actually if you find a good one that fits whatever you are running, they actually can work way, way better than the New York Creatives. Is it okay? I don't think so, but unfortunately people found out about this long time ago and now I can see it across the whole gaming industry. So that's like, that's, I would say like that's where we draw, draw the line. Even worse than fake ads like stealing each other's creatives, which is the worst case scenario I guess.
- [36:49]
Eric Soufert
Well, so that's actually leads to another question. Again I'm going to adapt it to the conversation but so how long do you get like let's say you get a creative out and you know, it just outperforms everything, it's a massive winner. Like how long do you get to keep that to yourself like before someone discovers it and rips it off and clones it?
- [37:05]
Matei Lencaric
And I think that's just a matter of like a week maybe. Well yeah, it depends on like who are your competitors? If your competitors are Century Games, then you have maybe a couple of days. Because I know, because I know some of my friends from, from Turkey, they said every creative we produce like it's, it's basically after a couple of days it's already on Sentry Games account and, and just adapted to their games. So it's that quick. Obviously if you have 400 people in the creative team, it's quite easy to uncover new teams and creative winners. But then I think even now with say with the Pixel Flow guys and their creatives, I think now we are starting to see, after their huge success, starting to see the conveyor belts and their kind of dilution, little bit of their mechanics in different games genres like Forex and strategy games. So if it's the same genre, I would say weeks. If it's either genre, maybe a couple of months. But yeah, it's not like 2014 or 15, unfortunately. Unfortunately I'm not sure. I can't decide.
- [38:15]
Eric Soufert
So do playables insulate you do they act as a defense a little bit because it's just harder to make a playable or. No, because I mean those are. You could basically make them in the same amount of time as a video now.
- [38:26]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah, I think it's. You can make them since. Well let's say you can make it in like two weeks. If you have big, big team, then it can be even less than that which all the big companies have. But even now like some tools, well, mine included have. We have like 150 templates. So you can just take a template and you have it playable out out there in like a day pretty much. And if I when I saw the jigsaw pretty much scaling which is again just like puzzle game and it's pretty much jigsaw puzzle 3 by 3 or 4 by 4 doesn't matter. I just took one of the best performing static images that I had for a hidden object game. I took that playable, put it like took the template, put it on applovin, suddenly best perform out of all of them in a couple of days and scale like 5x the budget and even the Ross exploded. So you don't really need even weeks anymore. That's the scary part. That's the scary part.
- [39:30]
Eric Soufert
Is it harder to clone a playable because I mean with a video ad you can just download the video like you said and swap.
- [39:35]
Matei Lencaric
It's a little bit, yeah. It's harder to clone the playable. You can copy that. You just need to swap the assets. So yeah, that's a little bit the hardest part.
- [39:46]
Eric Soufert
Is that why you think, you think playables are becoming a bigger portion of budgets for some studios?
- [39:52]
Matei Lencaric
I think because of uploading rather than just because of that. Because uploading is already 50%. Well ish. Depends on who you talk to. But pretty big portion of the spend and you need absolutely playables for uploading. And when I was amplify they said top companies produce 60 playables per month, which is insane. But I guess it's like the White House revivals matches and all the big guys.
- [40:19]
Branch IO / Xsolla Sponsor
But still that's a huge number.
- [40:21]
Matei Lencaric
It's a huge number. Yeah, right. It's a huge number. But it's like high number of creatives in general success and bigger success and same thing for uploading and the playables. So right now for me I'm just doing one like two free playables a month at least. Ideal scenario is like five and plus.
- [40:43]
Eric Soufert
So this is a question we got what tools are you using for creative production? What are the kind of like most current, most modern Tools for producing creative.
- [40:52]
Matei Lencaric
Oh, geez. I mean, where do I start? I actually just published an article about the tool and the actual step by step. So it's anything from all the AI stuff usually like the Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini to all the Adobe After Effects blender and regular stuff for, for the motion designers. But if I am producing a video, I'm just using all the clink and the VO3 pretty much AI stuff. And I'm now working pretty much with the layer AI which kind of combines all the tools out there.
- [41:28]
Eric Soufert
So how automated can that get? Can that get fully automated?
- [41:31]
Matei Lencaric
It can get fully automated. I'm now actually building one workflow which is pretty much connected to the tasty travel skewed animal AI videos which are basically everywhere. So now I built this pipeline and I want to automate like fully automated so I have my own game assets. I want to transform this asset with AI to the Q DMLs and then pretty much add like slide animation on top of it and then stitch together, add the end card and then export. It's like five steps workflow, easily done.
- [42:12]
Eric Soufert
Have you seen Sea Dance too?
- [42:14]
Matei Lencaric
Oh, it's on my Twitter pretty much everywhere. And I also saw the Disney lawsuit against the fight.
- [42:26]
Eric Soufert
Yeah, well, they also. Did you see the video? It was the Sea Dance produced fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
- [42:33]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah.
- [42:34]
Eric Soufert
And then that immediately prompted a lawsuit.
- [42:37]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw also the Wolverine versus Superman and, and even Darth Vader versus Thanos. I was like, oh my God, this is exactly what I needed. So funny. But it's so, so great. I mean like the production value. Oh my God, it's insane.
- [42:54]
Eric Soufert
There was one of. It was a Curb youb Enthusiasm, you know, clip that was produced with Sea Dance 2. And you, you wouldn't be able to tell if that was not. And it was the. The person and pasted the prompt. It was like a sentence and it produced a 30 second. And it was funny. It was like, it came out of the, like it came out of the. The show. I mean it's, it's kind of. It's this. We're. We're entering a kind of bizarre, strange new, new era here. But, but I think once you can get that hooked up for the purpose. I don't know where you can access Sea Dance to right now. I was, I was playing around, I was trying to play around with it last night and I couldn't find anywhere where you could actually get access to it.
- [43:29]
Matei Lencaric
No, it's still, it's still beta yeah, and it's like, yeah, invite only.
- [43:33]
Eric Soufert
But once you get that into a production workflow, I mean we're talking like real 3D render, like live footage essentially that you're being able to add to your creatives.
- [43:43]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah, 100%. Even like the Genie 3 that was launched recently, I don't think it's going to destroy games. I would rather use this for building worlds for the creative.
- [43:55]
Eric Soufert
Right.
- [43:55]
Matei Lencaric
I mean it's like it's way better usage of that, that product. The tools that I'm using now with all the article that I mentioned, it's pretty much talking about the one video would take me or the guys from my team a week now it's done, let's say a day because then you need to have a professional voiceover or whatever else lip syncing style and then post production, all the AI movements and it just speeds up pretty much everything if you know how to use it more efficiently. But then that's it. I mean that's a huge help.
- [44:34]
Eric Soufert
What about the platform tools? Like are you using any of Facebook's creative production tools for games? I feel like that's more for E Comm.
- [44:42]
Matei Lencaric
It's more for E Comm. I tried to use it for games or some experiments. It's not there yet. It's not there yet. But think about it. I was talking to Facebook about exactly this. Like if they can can build a proper tool for videos even while using their own data to kind of, let's say, showcase what is actually working on the platform for different genres. Because for small teams and small developers, they don't have big creative teams. They have no idea what to do. And if they can use their data to just help these guys to spend more and show them what works and they don't even really need to leave the platform. Sounds interesting.
- [45:29]
Eric Soufert
No, I mean they absolutely should. I'm a little surprised. They seem to be moving very slowly. I would expect them to have already launched these tools for game advertisers. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I think they're poised for a big year with gaming. Because I think they have a lot of stuff that they could launch very easily that would just kind of get them to a state where they're providing functionality that some of these studios just don't have have. And that's what's going to unlock net new UA spend. Not just incrementally, I mean incrementally new UA spend, but like big chunks of it from studios that just don't have those capabilities.
- [46:02]
Matei Lencaric
Exactly. Yeah, that was, that was exactly my pitch to them. Like guys, like if you want to grow again and there, I mean certain extent to grow again, like to have more small size developers and there's a lot of them. I mean this is exactly how. Because they don't need to leave the platform and they need, they need creatives. I mean they need lots of creatives and, and this is how you easily can build that.
- [46:26]
Eric Soufert
Analytics, what are you using for analytics? What's state of play? What's the best of the best of the analytics? Right now
- [46:34]
Matei Lencaric
usually I plug myself into whatever company is using. So there's usually MMP and then looker or anything for actual dashboards and then whatever like amplitude and what else? I mean obviously Firebase, but that's pretty much usually like internal stuff.
- [46:52]
Eric Soufert
So just kind of Firebase plus MMP plus maybe some internal.
- [46:57]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah, internal stuff. Yeah, internal dashboarding tools and then that's pretty much it.
- [47:03]
Eric Soufert
All right, what about competitive analysis? What are you using for competitive analysis?
- [47:07]
Matei Lencaric
Oh, I usually do. I mean if I have, if you have paid access to Sensor Tower, that's my go to usually if you don't, then I'm you know like ads, library, Google transparency and TikTok. And I use even TikTok for trends much. But since we are doing the competitor at least creative analysis for podcasts, I'm always in Sense or Tower.
- [47:29]
Eric Soufert
Got it. Let me talk about TikTok. How do you feel about TikTok for gaming?
- [47:33]
Matei Lencaric
Oh, it's my, let's say third best channel. Well, depends on the game but like second or third best channel for iOS.
- [47:41]
Eric Soufert
Really? Yeah. Wow.
- [47:43]
Matei Lencaric
It's working really well. Yeah. Behind Apple obviously.
- [47:46]
Eric Soufert
And then what's three Google then met better.
- [47:49]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah. Usually Facebook is on the second or third spot but well, TikTok is always up there with Smart plus and then the TikTok one creatives. I mean, amazing still works.
- [48:03]
Eric Soufert
Wow, that's surprising.
- [48:05]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah. And it doesn't matter really about kind of genre. It works for me for hidden object, for metric, for strategy as well.
- [48:13]
Eric Soufert
Yeah, their Smart plus has improved a lot.
- [48:15]
Matei Lencaric
Lot.
- [48:15]
Eric Soufert
You know, when they first launched it I was a little bit skeptical because it didn't, it didn't really seem to do much.
- [48:19]
Matei Lencaric
It was terrible. It's interesting to see how TikTok evolved over time and especially even like now in last four. Four months pretty much.
- [48:29]
Eric Soufert
Yeah. I mean I had a lot of conversations with people that, where you know, they kind of thought that TikTok had kind of pressed pause on doing anything like really innovative because they just didn't know what, what the status of the company was going to be. I don't know if I find that I didn't hear that from anybody in TikTok, but I heard that from people who apparently KNEW People in TikTok that were saying that. I found that a little hard to believe because I felt like, well, it's still going to exist, I mean, no matter what, but. And it felt like, I mean, Trump said, I mean, you know, before he even got elected that he was. He was going to find a way to not ban TikTok. So it didn't feel like there was a huge risk there. But yeah, TikTok's improved a lot for other categories. I don't have too much access to it on the gaming side, but okay, it sounds like it performs well.
- [49:17]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah.
- [49:18]
Eric Soufert
All right. And then this one, I'm just really curious to hear what you have to say. So what genre are you most excited about this year? What do you think is going to be a breakout? Or what do you think is going to be just capturing the most revenue? Or is it just nothing's going to change?
- [49:32]
Matei Lencaric
I don't think lots is going to change. I know there's at least 100 Forex games coming from China to the store this year for all my friends, so that's going to be an interesting battle there. But then, like this, the first genre that works really well, then the second one is Match three. Great. What else do we have? Honestly, I'm pretty skeptical about anything else.
- [49:56]
Eric Soufert
Where do you think hybrid casual sits?
- [49:58]
Matei Lencaric
It sits right before Match three because even all, like these new titles that are growing, IAP revenues are way more close to casual than the hybrid casual that was, let's say, two years ago. So it was a stepping stone towards casual games. And I'm pretty sure, like the Pixel Flow is the great example. It is still close to hyper casual, but way more casual than the rest. That's why they're earning so much money
- [50:26]
Eric Soufert
on IP side, right, mate, There were a couple of questions that we didn't get to just have to bring you back again, but appreciate this, this is great. We covered a lot of ground. Thanks so much and feel free to plug your stuff now. Where can people find you? Where can they consume your wisdom and your insight?
- [50:41]
Matei Lencaric
Yeah, just LinkedIn, Matthialand Church, or it's actually the brutally honest newsletter, which is landchurch.substack.com and yeah, just hit me up on LinkedIn or just go to two and a half gamers on YouTube and then subscribe there. Thanks, Eric. This is amazing. Thank you.
- [50:57]
Eric Soufert
Smash that subscribe button. Thank you so much. Good to see you.
- [51:00]
Matei Lencaric
Good to see you. Thanks.