two & a half gamers
00:12:28 路 Una, Jakub Remiar, Denise Farley, Felix Braberg
[00:12:28] S0: In the original. You mean like limiting the session length? [00:12:31] S1: Yeah. That like you ran out of energy. [00:12:33] S0: I don't think... Not at least during my time. [00:12:35] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think so. There was there was... Sorry for having these, like, those questions, like, thinking out loud how it works. But again, very nice design again because it's supporting lots of possibilities of this very deep economy, which is quite hard to pull off for a game that has pretty much a hyper casual core. [00:12:51] S0: Yeah. Yeah. That is true. Yeah. Actually, like, what you said about the the energy mechanics, that is something that we had in the Lego Hill Climb Adventures. So maybe that's [00:13:00] S1: Yeah. Yeah. But that's, a side note. [00:13:01] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:13:03] S1: Also also, like, I just really want to, like, point this out because this was super creative. Like, currently, the game is running a Halloween event where you're literally just smashing pumpkins, like, with a baseball bat and looking how far they fly away. [00:13:18] S0: Yeah. I love these public events where you have to, like, throw the ball or the pumpkin or whatever. Like, that's so fun. I I keep playing them for, like, like, I don't know, like an hour straight. It's so addictive. [00:13:30] S4: I think that that's what makes this game legendary. And like, why people continue to play it and invested in it, like, is the the social events and the public events. I love that. [00:13:44] S2: It's also great to drive impressions. Like, I'm sure you see a
00:13:44 路 Felix Braberg, Denise Farley, Jakub Remiar, Una
[00:13:44] S2: It's also great to drive impressions. Like, I'm sure you see a [00:13:47] S4: huge [00:13:47] S2: spike in impressions every time you do an event. Right? Because it's [00:13:50] S1: It's time limited. [00:13:51] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. [00:13:52] S1: But but it is great because from design perspective, it switches the core. You are doing something completely different. You need to first learn it. You know? Learning is fun. That's that's the first thing. [00:14:00] S0: Yeah. [00:14:00] S1: And the other thing is that it switches the pace. You're not racing completely all the time nonstop. You're just doing this very fun activity, and especially super nice because I think hillclimb racing was one of the things that... Like, one of the games that can invented ghosts, if you know. Ghost being other players' replays, which are much more tempting than just brute forcing it with bots. Therefore, your gameplay is very compatible with this asynchronous trick, I would say, which gives you the opportunity to have, like, giant matchmaking possibilities without these hiccups. So, yeah, that's there. And I'm... Again, I I was following the game quite closely and its evolution. I know work with it indirectly before in the past, but it's quite robust, I would say.
00:14:00 路 Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg
[00:14:00] S1: And the other thing is that it switches the pace. You're not racing completely all the time nonstop. You're just doing this very fun activity, and especially super nice because I think hillclimb racing was one of the things that... Like, one of the games that can invented ghosts, if you know. Ghost being other players' replays, which are much more tempting than just brute forcing it with bots. Therefore, your gameplay is very compatible with this asynchronous trick, I would say, which gives you the opportunity to have, like, giant matchmaking possibilities without these hiccups. So, yeah, that's there. And I'm... Again, I I was following the game quite closely and its evolution. I know work with it indirectly before in the past, but it's quite robust, I would say. [00:14:41] S2: Let's talk about the Admon. It's quite interesting, right? So obviously, rewarded video is probably the biggest revenue driver, right? But it's also quite a lot level based, right? So interstitials after levels. How do you guys balance the interstitials with retention? Because it's also absolutely can destroy retention at the same time.
00:14:41 路 Felix Braberg, Una, Jakub Remiar
[00:14:41] S2: Let's talk about the Admon. It's quite interesting, right? So obviously, rewarded video is probably the biggest revenue driver, right? But it's also quite a lot level based, right? So interstitials after levels. How do you guys balance the interstitials with retention? Because it's also absolutely can destroy retention at the same time. [00:15:00] S0: Yeah, we've tested interstitial frequencies, we've tested like delaying interstitials on certain markets, we've tested removing interstitials altogether for the players, and there's been... The results have been varying. And something that I've noticed throughout all of the experiments is that it's quite hard to get the retention up significantly by altering the interstitial experience. I don't know if it's because players just love the game so much that they're playing regardless We also delay interstitials every time you watch a rewarded video So maybe if some players watch rewarded video placements like frequently enough, then they won't be seeing any interesting shows either. [00:15:58] S1: That's why I haven't seen them.
00:15:58 路 Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg, Una
[00:15:58] S1: That's why I haven't seen them. [00:16:00] S2: Yeah. It's like this on several clients, right? And what you're kinda doing is suddenly nudging people to watch rewarded ads. So like if you have a cool down timer of one hundred and eighty seconds after each rewarded ad, you're doing two things that actually make you a lot more money, right? One of the things you're doing is you're encouraging people to watch a higher paying ad units, is the reward thing. But also what you're doing is you're able to space out the impressions between them. So ad networks like Google, you guys prefer early impressions because you assume people have more attention. So if the first impression is being paid $100 right, for a rewarded ad, The second impression might be paid 95, and as bigger drop offs, the higher the eCPM is. Yeah. If you space it out, it also recovers. So... Yeah. [00:16:43] S0: Yeah. That's true as well.
00:16:43 路 Una, Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg
[00:16:43] S0: Yeah. That's true as well. [00:16:45] S1: That's quite an interesting concept because, again, like, I deal with so much sword puzzlers, and it's a bread and butter there, like, a level around 15, 16. Interstitial just kicks in. Maybe a little bit of segmentation for lower tier traffic, which just makes them go sooner, a little bit more for higher tier. That's it. And and basically there. And the rewarded aren't really the trigger point here. In your case, if if they are a trigger point, especially with this robust economy, that seems like a very good thing to... As you said, because they're not exclusive to payers of... Like, payers paying and watching. And then they pretty much, again, if they keep watching they don't get hit with interstitials. [00:17:20] S0: Yeah, exactly. But to summarize, we haven't really seen interstitials as something that's dramatically decreasing retention in players. Like even, for example, for paid users, we've run experiments where we've delayed interest shows into twentieth or fiftieth session, but still there was no like significant impact on the retention numbers. [00:17:51] S2: Before moving on to UA, I just wanted to say the best ad placement I think I saw in Hillclimb Racing two is the meta rewarded ads placement. So for you basically get rewarded for the more ads you watch in total gets cumulative, like cumulated and added up together. And then essentially, if you watch 15 ads that has an impact on your gameplay. If you watch 50 ads that also does it. So you're rewarding users for all the ad watches they've done.