Felix Braberg

📈🚀 Wood Nuts by Abi Games Studio Hits $500K/Day in Overall Revenue! $450k/day is ad revenue!  🚀📈 3️⃣ Three things drive this success; Clever ad placements, challenging gameplay, and a massive userbase of 4.5 million DAU.💡 Key to Wood Nuts' revenue model is interstitial ads, appearing after every level. With an average session length of 20 minutes, users encounter about 6 interstitial ads per session. The key here is that inter-ads are shown also when a user fails a level. As this is a hard game users will see a lot of interstitial ads. 🔥 Wood Nuts challenging gameplay that requires users to stay focused at all times to pass levels. Users can unlock 3 different sets of boosters and one more position slot by watching RV ads. That means that users can watch up to 4 RV ads per […]

🚀Creatives trends in Mobile Gaming UA 🚀 One of the most critical aspects of mobile gaming User Acquisition (UA) is the creatives. In our latest episode, we dove deep into the top-grossing games to uncover what’s currently working as of June 2024.Here's what we found:Unconventional Elements: Supercell’s Brawl Stars is leading the charge with creative use of unconventional characters, like a poo character in a diaper. This unexpected twist grabs attention and differentiates the game in a crowded market. 💩👶Longer Video Creatives: Nexters' Hero Wars has shifted to longer creatives, with lengths ranging from 2-4 minutes. These are designed to engage viewers in the news feed rather than the typical Rewarded Video ad unit, suggesting a strategic move to capture and retain attention in a different format. 📺⏳Hypercasual Elements in Non-Hypercasual Games: We’ve noticed Playrix, Dreamgames and Supercent incorporating elements […]

📣 When should you implement banner ads in your game? 📣 💡 To have Banner ads account for a significant amount of your ad revenue you need the following:- Long session lengths 📏 - Uninterrupted gameplay ❗ - A refresh rate that is optimized for your game or App Long session lengths allow you to increase the amount of impressions or IMP/DAU you show to your users. Generally, a banner IMP/DAU of 80-120 is what you should aim for if you’d like to earn a meaningful contribution to your user LTV. ☀ A big factor that helps increase the banner IMP/DAU is showing the same banner placement for as much of the user session as possible. Every time a user moves between menus and the banner placement changes, the mediation needs to reload the banner creatives, reducing the total amount of […]

🤔Question: Do you need the same Android and iOS game ad experience? 🤔 📡 Let's take a look at Match Factory by Peak Games. It’s currently generating $13.7m/month in IAPs ($165m/year wow!). Unlike its largest competitor Triple Match 3D by Boombox Games Inc, Match Factory has no in-game ads. Is this a mistake? Let’s take a look…. 🔎 🤕 Ads hurt retention - this is something game developers have been told for years... But I’d argue that in the Casual Puzzle genera, it's not true. Looking at the retention data in Sensor Tower Triple Match 3D (with ads!) has better retention throughout the whole player life cycle (D7 retention is 23% vs 17%). Looks like having ads in Triple Match doesn’t prohibit amazing retention numbers. ⁉ ❓ All users need the same game experience - why? Match Factory’s DAU split is 57% […]

👨‍🚀 On May 5th Helldivers 2 announced that it had sold 12 million units 🚀 , making it the fastest-selling video game on PlayStation of all time, beating out mega titles like Fortnite and Call of Duty. It’s estimated that Helldivers 2 revenues are about $480 million since its release on the 8th of February. 🤔 Earlier this year I had an in-person discussion with Eric Kress who argued that one of the main issues with the current PC & Console market was the need for more supply of games that gamers want to play. The meteoric rise of Helldivers 2 seems to in part prove this hypothesis to be somewhat true. After reaching 450,000 concurrent players on Steam two & a half gamers decided to do a review of the gameplay and overall economy to figure out what made […]

🔩 Screw Jam 🔩 Hits $250K Daily revenue! 40% or about $2.5/month of that is ad revenue. Let’s take a look at how Quok Games and Rollic did it. 🔥 🔥 🕗 Banner and Interstitial ads have a nasty habit of reducing retention in any game. Screw Jam starts displaying these ad units after level 15, at each level at about 2 min that’s almost 30 min into the game time. Displaying Banner and Inters after such a long time helps explain why D1 retention is 52% and D2 is 41%.🤔 Rewarded videos take almost a back seat in ScrewJam - the only two rewarded ad placements that appear are 1 level for an RV ad when you’re out of life and two spins per day on the lucky wheel. RV make up about 40% of the overall ad revenue as […]

👋 Let’s look at the top 2 Merge Games Ad Monetization strategies. Right now the undisputed leaders in the Merge Category are Magmatic Games Ltd’s Travel Town ($620k/day IAP) and Mircofun’s Gossip Harbour ($350k/day IAP). 💰 Travel Town according to Sensor Tower boasts a DAU of 1.5m and is mediated on Google AdMob. The current Rewarded ad placements are Energey replenishments when you run out of energy capped at 4x per day and after level 10 pop to unlock bubbles on the merge board. About 40% of users should interact with these placements roughly bringing the IMP/DAU to 3.2 meaning a daily ad revenue of around $100k or 15% of overall revenue (Estimate!).💹 Gossip Harbour’s DAU is slightly lower at 500k users and is mediated on AppLovin and has a heavier focus on ad revenue. Currently, there are 4 Rewarded […]

❗ Breakdown of Supercent’s aggressive hybrid casual ad monetization strategy. Pizza Ready and Outlets Rush takes inspiration from SayGames’s My Perfect Hotel but adds an aggressive twist. Pizza Ready generates around 93% of its revenue from ads $4.8m IAA (my estimate) and $350k (sensor tower data) from IAPs per month. Outlets Rush makes $3m (my estimate) from ads with an additional $163k per month. Let’s take a look at the ad units and placements! 🔎 💹 ℹ ℹ Pizza Ready & Outlets Rush adds a new unique rewarded vector compared to My Perfect Hotel. This allows users to watch an ad to increase their carrying capacity, alongside character speed and dynamic placements for soft currency in the game. In theory, this vector increases the potential rewarded ads users can watch by 33%. Pizza Ready & Outlets Rush also incorporates the use […]

💫 We dive deep into AFK Journey, the innovative continuation of the acclaimed AFK Arena by Lilith Games. AFK Journey sets a new standard in the idle RPG genre, blending high-quality design, a captivating narrative, and significant gameplay innovations. All of which will be doubtlessly copied in upcoming RPG games. 💫 🗯 What sets AFK Journey apart is its gameplay and unique user acquisition strategy. Focusing on high-quality, story-driven creatives and leveraging YouTube streamers alongside hooks and cringe UGC-like content, Lilith Games ignores the fake ads trend for a more authentic representation of the game's immersive world. This approach, featuring long-form ads highlighting the game's narrative and gameplay, has contributed to its success.Just two weeks post-launch, AFK Journey has already hit insane revenue figures, crossing 💵 $800k 💵 daily on mobile alone. When factoring in its webshop and PC client, revenues […]

We Are Warriors by Lessmore is an Ad revenue juggernaut. In less than a few months, the game has scaled its ad revenue to just about $200k/day earning an additional $33k/day in IAP revenue. Here’s how:Progression is not linked to watching Rewarded Ads. We Are Warriors uses caps on most RV placements to ensure that users stick around for longer and are more motivated to make an IAP. One of the best-performing ad placements is the RV placement for free meat which is capped at 2/day. This cap means that users can’t quickly progress through the levels and have to remain in the game for longer.81% of users in We Are Warriors watch Rewarded ads. For reference a 45% ad viewer rate on rewarded ads is considered average, 81% is simply a master class in Rewarded Ads. As the progression […]

Pocket Champs has scaled to $100k/day in IAP revenue with a whopping $40k/day on top of that in Ad revenue. We were joined by Madbox’s Game Director Arthur Michel to help us dissect the game and make sure we’re not talking BS! Pocket Champs does some pretty clever things to maximize ad revenue without taking away from the user experience. The first is the clever use of rewarded ads that reduce cool-down timers for the training bags. Most networks assume that users who watch many RV videos in a row, pay less attention to the ad. Thus the networks are willing to pay less for those subsequent impressions. The drop-off in revenue is usually around 5 IMP/DAU per session. Training bag timers can be reduced by 30 min per RV video, which can be watched consecutively with a 5 RV […]