Josh: Hi Itay, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

Itay: Hey, my name is Itay and I’m VP of marketing at Mad Brain Games. I'm doing mainly performance marketing and user acquisition activities. I've been in the gaming industry for the past 9 years or so and I love games.

Josh: How did you start working in gaming?

Itay: Yes, my career into gaming started around 9 years ago. It obviously started much longer when I was a kid. I love playing games, computer games, shooting games, console games, and all around that and professionally 9 years ago I joined small marketing agency in Israel. We did gaming, but we also did e-commerce. So I did mobile and Web as well, and I loved it from the very first moment, and I thought that it would be great to take it to the next step. That's when I joined Yellowhead, it's a quite known and successful performance marketing agency also based here in Israel. And there I started working with many clients, many big clients from the gaming industry, globally and locally as well. I did mainly Google Ads was we all did back then. And my point was basically to bring the best results for my client. Then it was a bit easier. I think the competition was lower than today.

From there I moved to Huuuge games. I managed several user acquisition teams and a great time I spent there. And when I felt that I wanted to take it to the next level, I joined Mad Brain Games where I worked till today. I wanted to join a startup place where we developed games from scratch to a small team. And I'm enjoying every moment. I think that also, recently, we're experiencing great growth in our game.

Josh: What is your favourite game of all time?

Itay: It's an easy answer for me. It's a counter strike. I was like all in on Counter-Strike. I had a clan. I have friends that played with me, and I have played with them for years. I still now and then like going to my computer and playing. But for sure, Counter-Strike was my favourite game of all time.

Josh: Did you ever play like competitively? Or was it sort of more casual?

Itay: Oh, definitely competitive. Not at the highest levels, you know, but competitive games. It was on 1.5 and Counter Strike 1.6 back then. Now they have one Counter-Strike 2 which is extremely different compared to what we had but still fun.

Josh: Tell me a bit more about your role since joining Mad Brain Games. What have you been focusing on?

Itay: So I joined Mad Brain Games 3 years and a bit ago. I joined pretty much at the beginning of the journey of the of the company. And basically with our two founders, we developed casual mobile games. We focused on the award puzzle category.

From day one, we were working on our main game, which is Word From Adventure. It's a word puzzle game crosswords, basically challenging your brain to solve a word puzzle. The idea behind the game was to take a very successful genre of word games that has hundreds of millions of players around the world and combine it with the escape experiences and adventure which means to build locations, renovate them, and progress throughout the game. Unlike just solving crossword puzzles. So we added another layer of entertainment to our game and I think that’s what puts our game in a different spot than on the rest of the word games today. We've worked on this game for the past 3 years. We improved it. We tested so many things. We changed our game economy, our monetization model and now over the past I would say 6 months we’ve been growing significantly in user acquisition budget, in user base numbers and in business metrics and we have a long way to go. But we're working really hard on this game, and we have a few more games that are now in the open and that we're working on. That is my journey at Mad Brain Games so far.

Josh: So it is a case of building that story element into the actual sort of puzzle. Genre, right? Creating narrative to drive a more in-depth experience.

Itay: Yeah, exactly. Basically, we didn't want a game that you just solve puzzles one by one, even though, that this is fun enough. There are people that we have that are players that launch the game to play levels. And, you know, come back day after day and don't even touch the story part but what we wanted to do is really add another layer of fun, of entertainment, of content with the game, and the idea was to combine those two genres into one game. We did that successfully.

By the way, we hear amazing feedback from our players. That that's exactly what they have searched for in the world puzzle category, something combined both worlds. We do see more games like us today. But we were one of the first to do word puzzle with escape adventure at the same time.

Itay: Yeah, we really believe in the content part of the game. We're working really hard on that one.

Josh: Do you treat those two players differently? The players who play to do levels and those who play for narrative, do you differ your approach when advertising and in development?

Itay: I wouldn't say that we tailor the different experience by 100% for the two types of players. But we do try to challenge our players as much as possible, in a way that if we see players, where levels are sometimes too easy for them or too hard for them we try to balance the experience for players in a way that they will enjoy our game at the maximum level. But we don't really tailor the experience in escapes players versus levels players because we believe that the games should offer the same experience for each player, even if sometimes they want to play word puzzles or you know to collect daily bonuses or play a worldle game, because we have, like a wordle feature in the game. So we want to give everyone the option to do whatever they want in the game.

And obviously we try from our side to maximize the experience and the fun for our players, because we believe that maximizing fun, maximizes experience. That's what will help us also retain the player in the game for the longer term. I've mentioned that we are an ad based game. It means that we're showing ads to our games in our games. Obviously no one loves ads and it's annoying. But at the same time it's a monetization model which is quite popular in the gaming world today and in apps in general, I would say. Alongside the fact that we serve ads in our game, we want to keep the experience as fun as possible and enjoyable. So it is a balance.

Josh: You touched on user experience vs ads towards the end there, so I am curious to understand how you are protecting the game experience. How are you optimizing the ad experience?

Itay: That’s a great question. We always test at the frequency of the ads that we show in the game, the cool-down between the ads that we show in the game. Where we should add a new placement rewarded video where we shouldn't.

It goes one versus the other. You want to maximize revenue by showing ads. But at the same times you want to maximize user retention by not showing ads. So there's a sweet spot. It's not so easy to find and it's an ongoing test, of frequency, of cool-downs, of length of ads. When can you skip an ad and when can you not. There are many different type of tests that we run at the same time to get conclusions, and again try as much as possible, obviously not to hurt retention, because at the end of the day as a business we look at the payback curve and payback is a combination of retention, of RPDAU, of CPI of many factors. Retention is one of the most important factors that we look at.

So it's a great question and I don't have an easy answer for that. We're just testing things all the time and trying to hurt retention the least.

Josh: What are the core changes you've seen in your transition from social casino to the puzzle genre?

Itay: Most of my career I worked on social casino games, really heavy games with an IAP focus. And you know whale focused games. And I think back then, even when I worked at Yellow Head, and obviously, of course, at Huuuge games in the UA perspective what we tried to achieve the most was hitting our goals. Our goals were achieved by bringing players into the game that will make deposits and obviously as many pairs as we get. We improved our ROI, and we didn't quite look at CPIs, for example, too much.

I would say the most important metric for us, while the CPA of a paying user, the cost per action. I mean, how much it cost us to bring a paying user into the game and obviously the effort revenue per paying user that we bring from that pair. If I look at my UA strategy back then it was mainly hitting those goals and bringing those players who worked with I think, all of the networks that exist today at our industry. We spend massively and those were big and heavy campaigns.

When I compare it to us. Strategy in an ads game that what we're doing today here at Mad Brain Games obviously, is a startup as well, which is by nature a smaller company than the one I worked with, basically we  are much more sensitive to CPIs here at the company. Obviously I would starting payback is the most important thing. Okay, we look at Payback. We want to be positive ROI and everything is great. But in reality, to get this payback, we also need to make sure that we're paying as less as possible for players with the highest retention and possible. So our UA strategy is much more sensitive here, and we go to sources that bring us extremely high ROI on the short term, and with low CPIs.

We don't look at payers normally, like we used to do at social casino and IAP games. We take much more care about retention. We take much more care about ECPM. It's the work that includes working together at monetization and user acquisition, working together and by hand. Both have a significant influence on each other. So it is a different story, to be honest.

Josh: As we head into 2024, I wanted to ask your thoughts on the greatest challenges in 2023 and what 2024 will look like for mobile games UA.

Itay: I wouldn't divide it like to 2023, and 2024, because it's an ongoing challenge that we face these days. If we talk in practice for us, and I know that for many in the industry SKaN in iOS is still a challenge on the UA side, and although I have to say, we're doing now much better than what we did in the beginning. We have a better understanding of how to operate and then where to get good results from, but I think there is much more to reveal there, and much more to. Also SKaN keeps evolving it keeps changing even as we speak. So there's more to expect there.

And another challenge. If I go back to my previous answer, is that we still keep fighting to keep those CPIs down. I mean, it's difficult. And because competition is increasing and that said, we have some solutions in hand. We're working very hard on creatives. We collaborate with several AI companies that helps us on that and feel that we enter 2024 really strong on that sense, in terms of creatives.

Looking at UA I think that maybe the third one is driving growth from additional media sources. We always try here to step where others don't step and find opportunities in sources that maybe not all of the industry are working with and we had some great successes in the past year. In that sense we brought some very strong media sources that I think were very young when we started working with them, and we got great success from them. So I think that's another thing that we would like to keep on doing in 2024.

Josh: The final question, a song plays for you every time you walk into a room, what song plays for you and why?

Itay: Honestly that is the hardest question of all. I'm an optimistic person in my nature. I think that if I need to pick a song. It might be Three Little Birds by Bob Marley. That would be my choice.

Josh: Very strong selection to be fair! Thanks for joining us Itay!

You can check out more from Itay here!