Going Beyond User Acquisition - the Curious Case of Dice Dreams
Figuring out how to successfully scale a game is a complex problem that can take a long time to solve. During the soft launch, initial KPIs are oftentimes underwhelming – they’re not bad enough to scrap the game but also not good enough to move forward into the global launch. At this point, it’s all hands on deck for the product team who analyze the game and audience to the point of exhaustion just to make sure that the metrics are headed in the right direction update after update.
Unfortunately, product improvements alone often are not enough to successfully scale a game. You also need your marketing team to be laser-focused on improving the marketability of the game which includes identifying the characteristics of your most valuable players and finding more players just like them.
Every successful mobile game story is different and offers something unique for the industry to learn from, and the story of SuperPlay and Dice Dreams is no different. In this episode, I had the privilege of sitting down with Noam Banon, the CMO of SuperPlay, to talk about how their game Dice Dreams was able to find success in the highly competitive mobile games market. I was also lucky enough to get Sumit Chandel from Google to join the conversation and provide insights on how he’s seen game developers like Superplay unlock growth with Firebase’s wide range of tools.
Please enjoy the shortened transcribed version of our conversation below. If you want to make sure you get all the details, I suggest listening to the full podcast.
Tell me more about SuperPlay’s Dice Dreams. How did this hit game come to be?
Noam: SuperPlay was founded in 2019 by an experienced founding team coming from Playtika, PlayStudios, and Rovio. After gathering together a core team, which I was a part of, it took us only six months to soft launch our first title, Dice Dreams. Since then, the team has grown to include over a hundred super-talented, dedicated, and driven individuals working out of four different studios.
Our first game, Dice Dreams, has become a global hit. But it was a grind to get it to where it is. The game didn’t come out of the gate with extraordinary KPIs, so we had to work very hard to get it into the right place for global launch. Over time we learned how to buy better traffic, monetize more effectively, and develop the right features in the right order. Our strategy was to improve the KPIs one by one until they looked good enough to launch the game globally. This process sounds simple, but it took a lot of work to get there.
I also want to say that in a startup, everyone has to be prepared to do everything. I, for example, was responsible for customer support. So even though I was officially the CMO, I was still replying to people via our customer support portal. This ended up being very useful because it gave me valuable insights into player behavior and pain points in the game.
How was Dice Dreams able to overcome its initial growth challenges?
Noam: Dice Dreams launched when the pandemic started and after nearly a year of being in soft launch, the game started to scale nicely, peaked in mid-2021, declined a bit, and then hit another growth spurt in 2022.
I think it's common for a game to grow up to a certain level. When your budgets are small, you’re able to be more precise with your marketing. However, when you scale up, you need more targeting options, more creatives, and more of everything. When you hit that level you kind of have to take a step back, slow down the growth, analyze what you’ve done thus far, and see how you can improve the ROI to reach the next stage. This includes adding more mixed media channels and growth strategies.
The dip was in many ways a marketing decision. But it was also influenced by the changes in the market in terms of privacy changes on iOS, new game launches, shifts in the macro economy as well as the work done by our development team on new and existing features.
I personally think that taking the foot off the gas pedal is important to assess the level of scale thus far, the models you’ve used, the progression of acquired players, and the accuracy of your original hypothesis. It’s what any responsible gaming company would do.
In terms of concrete actions that we took to improve our performance, well, it’s data. A lot of it. We are using what we call smart bidding in conjunction with Firebase. For us, it was important to switch to this bidding strategy because all of our competitors, not only our direct competitors but also big brand advertisers, are buying in the same places with the same methods. Then, when you combine smart bidding with more effective creatives, you really start to see improvements in ROAS.
It seems like Firebase has been instrumental in Dice Dream’s growth. What is Firebase? Is it available for both iOS and Android?
Sumit: Firebase is Google’s app development platform, helping mobile and web developers build and grow apps and games users love. We offer a suite of tools designed to help throughout your app and business’s journey. More specifically, when you’re building with Firebase, we can get your app up and running quickly through a streamlined experience that lets you focus on what matters most.
Firebase also gives you easy-to-use tools and the ability to iterate in real-time to optimize performance at launch and beyond. And when you’re ready for growth, we offer the control, automation, stability, and flexibility you need to scale.
Regarding platforms, Firebase is cross-platform and we actually just launched updates for both Android and iOS developers.
For example, we recently strengthened the integration between Crashlytics and Android, and Google Play. Crashlytics now provides insight into your crashes right in your local Android Studio project so you can discover, investigate, and reproduce issues within the context of your IDE, instead of having to constantly jump between the Crashlytics console and your codebase. On top of that, Crashlytics now integrates with Google Play so you can filter Crashlytics crash reports based on Play Tracks, making it easier to distinguish which crash events are from internal testing vs. open testing, vs. in production - and better prioritize what to tackle first.
On iOS, we just updated Firebase to fully embrace the modern Swift language, which should further improve the experience and allow developers to use the latest Swift features along with our platform.
How easy was it to get the Firebase SDK into the product team’s roadmap?
Noam: Every time you ask the developers to integrate a third-party SDK it's like something dies inside of them (chuckles). It's like you're asking them to do something that is simply too difficult. And I understand their perspective.
There’s always a certain risk involved with a third-party SDK that can result in additional work for the development team. If the development team has had a third-party SDK crash the game previously, they’ll be automatically worried about implementing another one into the game. Since Firebase is a Google product, it definitely lowered the resistance from the development team.
Look, in the end, if we want to grow, Google is one of the largest, if not the largest platform out there. And as a CMO, I need to make sure we’re leveraging these tools to grow. So, you know, that's my sales pitch to the product team. If we want to grow on Android, we need Firebase.
My understanding is that Dice Dreams also used Firebase’s Audience Triggers to accelerate growth. Can you describe what Audience Triggers are at a high level?
Sumit: Audience Triggers are a Google Analytics feature. Before explaining Audience Triggers and how they work, it’ll be good to understand Google Analytics events in general and Google Analytics audiences. Events are just events that you generate in your app that you send out to the game team to analyze. Simply put, it’s what actions your players are taking when they play your game. For example, making purchases, leveling up, and so forth.
Audiences can be created to represent users who have done things that you care about. For example, that could include “purchasers”, which as anyone who's made a purchase or an in-app purchase within the last month. That's the audience that you'll define and they become the “purchaser” audience.
Audience Triggers is somewhat of a newer feature where when a user qualifies for a Google Analytics audience, it generates an event that you can measure and analyze. If we go back to the same “purchaser” audience that I mentioned previously, when someone qualifies for that, you could send an event that says “became a purchaser” or something along those lines.
Now you have an event that you can either measure independently to determine the velocity at which your purchaser audience is growing, or optimize towards if you want to. This allows you to create another audience around that event, which means that you can create different funnels within your game if you know that players in your game qualify for different audiences. This results in measurable, highly qualified events, and you can create additional audiences or measure those specifically as a conversion event that you might care about.
What results did you see after using Audience Triggers? What metrics have improved?
Noam: By combining two pre-analyzed proxy events and optimizing our campaigns on that newly generated event, we were able to drive higher-value users to make an in-app purchase at D0. After increasing our testing spend, the campaigns quickly began performing at an optimal level, delivering improved results in comparison to similar campaigns.
In terms of metrics, we saw a 150% increase in D0 ROAS with no change in our CPA costs and volume. Additionally, our campaigns managed to scale significantly whilst maintaining stable cost-per-action levels, enabling us to reach our desired performance levels faster.
What are some other ways you’ve seen developers use Firebase?
Sumit: An important part of turning your game into a business is to optimize your user experience to drive the bottom line results you want. A popular way to do this is through manual experimentation, which involves setting up A/B tests for different components of your game and finding the top-performing variant. We see studios testing everything from sale bundles and difficulty levels down to years-long experiments around price elasticity.
We know how important A/B testing is for studios. Remote Config lets developers dynamically control and change the behavior and appearance of their game without releasing a new version or setting up any complex infrastructure. With Remote Config's latest personalization feature, developers can save time and effort when it comes to running experiments. Personalization harnesses the power of machine learning to automatically find the optimal experience for each user to produce improved outcomes, taking the load off the studio.
All you need to do is specify the objective you want to maximize, and personalization will continuously find and apply the right app configuration for each user, taking their behavior and preferences into account and tracking the impact on secondary metrics along the way. For example, you can personalize the difficulty of your game according to player skill levels to maximize engagement and session duration.
What’s in store for the future of SuperPlay? Do you think you’ll use any other Firebase products or features?
Noam: Our experience working with Firebase has been really positive, so when we can see something that we can utilize, especially in our new games, we’ll make sure that Firebase is there from Day 1. Which specific feature? That I don’t know, and I’ll need to do some additional research on that. I’ll also need to pitch it to our development team, but it’s much easier to implement these types of requests on new games versus existing ones.
Connect with your local Google team and visit the Firebase website to learn how Firebase can unlock growth for your games.
