Case Study: Marvel Puzzle Quest grows even mightier with Lab Cave ASO

HoundofShadow

I stumbled across this article about MPQ which was posted last month. 

Link:

https://www.pocketgamer.biz/feature/74819/case-study-marvel-puzzle-quest-grows-even-mightier-with-lab-cave-aso/

To summarise, Lab Cave were approached by D3 GO! In 2019 and they wrote about their ASO (App Store Optimation) results for MPQ across various regions, how they determine popular characters and keywords to focus on.

Lab Cave specialises in 360 mobile growth, focusing on ASO, publishing and monetisation.

One thing that jumped out to me are the popular region or language that they focused on:

Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, English (United Kingdom), Spanish (US), Indonesian, Arabic, Turkish, French (France), Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian.

Their results:

On iOS we achieved 161.7 per cent growth worldwide, 155.9 per cent growth in the US alone, while on Google Play, Marvel Puzzle Quest grew by 298.8 per cent worldwide(!), and by 61.3 per cent in the US. Meanwhile, the Organic Conversion Rate increased from 5.9 per cent to 10.9 per cent following the first optimisation

I think the above should be good news?

DrDevilDinosaur

It's just Search optimisation.
They had a ~300% increase in turning up in search results, which in turn drove a 5% increase in Conversion Rate - that is, user installs following a search. Almost 11 out of every 100 searches became a new user. (But we don't know how many that actually is).

So those installs definitely represent an opportunity for increased ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user). Ultimately it's good news if they start paying and you're a shareholder. However I wouldn't expect it to have any impact at all on us (for one thing, this is just the search optimisation - there's no data on retaining these new users, after all, that's up to D3).

HoundofShadow

The typical % of players paying for f2p games is between 2% to 4%. Average retention rate seems to be about 2% to 6% at Day 28. About 5% of spenders are whales. In other words, there is one whale for every 20 spenders.

100, 000 searches give about 11,000 installs. At Day 28, about 220 players continue to play the game. Out of 220 players, about 4 players will purchase something.  So, they need about 500, 000 searches to get a whale. I think something's wrong with my calculations?

I noticed the Chinese market is not in their optimisation. I suppose it's banned there?

The new keywords and CRO were so successful at attracting new users that after nine months we had almost exhausted the available users in the chosen Tier 3 territories.

Any idea what Tier 3 territories mean?

Bad

That was interesting.
About china, its a country with own political interest and own industry that certainly will not match with american superheroes. Here is some data:

• Mobile and PC games revenue in China was in $33.1 billion in 2019, projected to pass $46.7 billion by 2024
• China had 685 million gamers in 2019, expected to rise to 772 million in 2024. 637 million are mobile gamers, and most PC gamers also play mobile games.
• Mobile games generated $18.5 billion in 2019, up 18.2% from the previous year, and forecast to reach $32.0 billion by 2024. This excludes revenue from mobile game exports, which was $6.4 billion, up 21% yoy.
• Female gamers are rising, making up 42% of total gamers in 2018, 46% in 2019 and forecast to be 50% in 2020, primarily on the mobile platform.
• Chinese gamers continue to be motivated by esports, and revenue of games played in esports reached $13.9 billion, rising to $23.2 billion in 2024. Total esports games revenue for 2019 was $13.9 billion, 42% of all revenue, projected to grow to $23.2 billion in 2024.

Top 20 games on china: https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-20-android-games-in-china-by-mau/
About Mpq, marvel games are searched around the world. Right now having this brand franchise is guaranteed a succes on publicity. As it says is searched for men in majority but matching gems is played mostly for women. So it fits an unique frame.
And that "converting" that means installing, its an opportunity that many games (not being the most well known) would crave for.
In fact if in your alliance there is a free spot and if you daily boot inactive players, all days of the week there will be a newcomer to the game.

PiMacleod

Bad said:

In fact if in your alliance there is a free spot and if you daily boot inactive players, all days of the week there will be a newcomer to the game.

Can vouch for this.  We have a revolving door in our last position, it seems.  Of course, we don't boot unless they become inactive for like a week, but it's hard to find a person that's a long-term player... a lot of them seem to look at the top 5~8 in my alliance and use it as a measuring stick that they'll never be able to meet.

Vhailorx

HoundofShadow said:

I stumbled across this article about MPQ which was posted last month. 

Link:

https://www.pocketgamer.biz/feature/74819/case-study-marvel-puzzle-quest-grows-even-mightier-with-lab-cave-aso/

To summarise, Lab Cave were approached by D3 GO! In 2019 and they wrote about their ASO (App Store Optimation) results for MPQ across various regions, how they determine popular characters and keywords to focus on.

Lab Cave specialises in 360 mobile growth, focusing on ASO, publishing and monetisation.

One thing that jumped out to me are the popular region or language that they focused on:

Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, English (United Kingdom), Spanish (US), Indonesian, Arabic, Turkish, French (France), Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian.

Their results:

On iOS we achieved 161.7 per cent growth worldwide, 155.9 per cent growth in the US alone, while on Google Play, Marvel Puzzle Quest grew by 298.8 per cent worldwide(!), and by 61.3 per cent in the US. Meanwhile, the Organic Conversion Rate increased from 5.9 per cent to 10.9 per cent following the first optimisation

I think the above should be good news?

So this is a vendor reporting on how awesome their own results were?  Forgive me if I am a bit skeptical.  Also, the quote you offered was a little devoid of content (e.g., growth as measured in what units?!). 

HoundofShadow

I doubt they will write this article if they are not doing well. 

The full content is in the link. It's a pretty long article, so I picked something interesting to me. This result measures growth in terms of visibility and conversion rate in the app store.

Vhailorx

HoundofShadow said:

I doubt they will write this article if they are not doing well. 

The full content is in the link. It's a pretty long article, so I picked something interesting to me. This result measures growth in terms of visibility and conversion rate in the app store.

Do you have a lot of experience with business consulting?  As far as I can tell, writing glowing self-reports when the actual deliverables are **** is basically the the default condition for the whole industry. . .

HoundofShadow

I think you are confusing the different metrics being used in the industry. I understand you hate the direction the devs are going, but this article doesn't have anything to do with how the devs should stop releasing characters every two week, make feeders available asap for all 5*, reduce price of items to less than $10, etc. It's simply about visibility and conversion rate.  If they can help improve visibility and conversion rate, it's good for everyone.

PiMacleod

Before people write anything else more flammable, I'd just like to remind everyone that EVERYONE (business or personal) is capable of writing glowing self-promoting material(s) when it is not warranted.  This is found in business, on people's personal social media posts, and our politics.  I'm sure you can think of more than one time when someone boasted about themselves when the results didn't match the boast, or even before the results were delivered.

Its unfortunate, but I've come to accept it as the norm.  There's a saying that has been gaining more and more popularity, and it unfortunately speaks to our collective integrity as a human race:  "Trust, but Verify".

I'm not saying these people said anything wrong or right -- I'm merely commenting on the topic of self-boasting, whether warranted or not.

Bad

Im not on this business, but I think the article is like a curriculum vitae. It can be boasted to a certain level, but supposedly the customer will verify before contracting.
For not spending money on people not capable. And for people in the business I suppose these are data easy to verify.
Anyway it makes sense to me that games based on marvel do increase their popularity with each film released.

HoundofShadow

It's normal to write some good reviews for yourself. It's common. However, if they don't have the experience or proof to back their words up, I doubt D3 will approach them.

This is the background:

We have launched over 700 apps and games to the mobile marketplace, we manage a portfolio of over 200 apps and have reached over 300 million organic app downloads

That's about 1 million downloads per app on average. While it's not churning out 100 million downloads per app, but I think it's the right fit for D3.

Moving on, I think to trash the entire F2P gaming industry and to call their deliverables **** is unnecessary. If one really dislikes this industry so much, I wonder why they still continue to play **** games like MPQ.