Alien Invasion case study: How to scale a game with a small UA team
Let’s start with introducing the company that originally developed the game – Multicast Games.
Multicast Games is a small team of mobile game creators from Cyprus. They sell casual and mid-core games worldwide, like Alien Invasion.
Alien Invasion
A mobile game created by Multicast Games, later sold to CrazyLabs
Genre: Hypercasual
Monetization: 50% in-app, 50% on advertising
OS: iOS and Android
TOP Countries: USA, Germany, Japan, and Korea
In Alien Invasion: RPG Idle Space (Alien), players take on the role of an alien hero using its tentacles as grabbing hooks to capture humans and resources in its surroundings. The core gameplay loop encourages players to collect resources for upgrading their character, minions, and buildings while tackling mini-missions and engaging in boss fights.
Oh yeah, wait a second! We actually talked about this game on our podcast some time ago – Ha!
This ‘basic’ grabbing action features all of the elements that a successful and catchy hyper mechanic should have including:
- Intuitive mechanic: When a human is in the proximity of the alien, it automatically grabs the human (without an onboarding or tutorial).
- One-finger joystick control: Alongside portrait screen orientation.
- Satisfying: The visuals, sound, and haptics associated with the grabbing-like action are incredibly satisfying.
- Skill: Dealing with different humans\enemies requires varied tactics for faster ‘grabbing.’ Some need chasing, others require running from (while grabbing), and some simply stand there, enticing you to grab efficiently. All these tactics can be mastered but are still intuitive and easy to grasp.
- Marketability: The alien’s action is entertaining to watch and entices the viewer to try, play, and grab themselves. By doing so, it adheres to the first rule of hyper-casual — marketability.
- Art Style & Color Palette: The art style of Alien is distinctly hyper, characterized by vibrant colors and simple, iconic art lines.
- The Theme: An interesting exception lies in the theme. Typically, alien/space themes are not as popular in hyper-casual games. While there are certainly some highly successful hyper-casual games with this theme, it remains a rarity when compared to other themes.
Casual & Mid-core Elements of Alien Invasion
The main areas where casual and mid-core elements take center stage are in the progress and retention features, which we’ll further explore and showcase in the following sections.
The ‘casual’ element of Alien integrates the following progress flow:
- Casual RPG Meta Layer (e.g. ‘explore and expand’) with map staged revealing as seen below:
- Upgrade system that features characters (and minions) as seen below:
- A second upgrade system that features building, non-playable characters (NPC) and additional currencies as seen below:
The ‘casual and mid-core’ elements of Alien integrates the following progress flow:
- Live events (e.g., collect drones, pegasus, etc.) and ‘Boss fights’ as seen below:
- Content updates and live ops (e.g., ‘coming up in the next update’, etc.) as seen below:
- Managing expectations (e.g., zones, levels, upgrades) as seen below:
- Quests for progression that require new mechanics to fulfill them as seen below:
Thanks, CrazyLabs for the writeup!
USER ACQUISITION & NUMBERS
It looks like the game peaked already after a bigger push last December 2023, peaking at $100k/day IAP revenues when adding the ad revenue and sadness multiplier, which is easily $250k/day. It is now doing something around $100k/day.
How did I come up with that? Listening to Felix and all his Excel sheet Admon mambo jumbo. External tools say 40k in IAP revenue, multiplied by a sadness multiplier of 1.5 = $60k in IAP revenues. Given the hybrid monetization and split 50/50, we are at least on $100k/day, if not $120k/day revenues!
I would expect to see way better numbers outside of the United States. It’s interesting to see Japan and South Korea in the Top 5!
UA Channel mix
Applovin is NOT the biggest channel in terms of spending. What a surprise! Right? No MAX, no UA fun? On the other hand, Applovin looks like the top spender in August.
- It looks like Google is the biggest channel for all of Q2 2024.
Mintegral
- Mintegral also being up there in the top going strong”!
TikTok
- No official TikTok channel, but hashtag #alieninvasion is live and kicking!
Facebook, Unity, DSPs, and the rest
- it depends on the tool I use; some other channels are still relevant.
Diversifying the UA portfolio efficiently is not an easy job. Here, we can see a good baseline of plenty of channels.
When I was digging into the UA strategy, I found one interesting case study:
It takes a lot of work for one person to manage multiple channels. This is why most companies start hiring more UAs.”
Vyacheslav Krivsunov,
CEO of Multicast Games
Multicast Games decided to take a different path. The team wanted to work more cost-efficiently without hiring more people. The goal was to give UA managers real-time data on the go. This would prevent the company from spending too much money.
At Multicast Games, the UA team works 24/7 (OUCH!), which allows them to notice every minor change in the performance of their campaigns.
To optimize their work time, the team wanted a mobile measurement tool with its own mobile app to help them see changes anywhere, anytime.
They already had a mobile measurement partner (MMP), which they used to track attribution and installs from the desktop. So, they only needed to link their MMP to AppMetrica. AppMetrica’s no-code integration allowed the team to do this quickly and effortlessly.
By integrating their existing solution with AppMetrica, Multicast Games can now easily see where their money goes in real time and optimize their budget spending as soon as possible.
“No matter where we are, we can check our spending in real time on our phones. Our team tracks channels like Unity, Reddit, and Twitter. Now, we can do this while hanging out with friends or lying in bed before sleep.”
Vyacheslav Krivsunov,
CEO of Multicast Games
User Acquisition report shows your app installations in real-time.
These real-time reports from AppMetrica did a better job of this than other MMPs. That was the primary reason why Multicast chose them! Check this out:
Multicast Games also used AppMetrica’s product analytics reports. The funnel reports help them separate their income by game level and see bugs before users report them.
This is the funnel Multicast used to segment the audience by game levels.
Connecting to Google Play
Multicast Games used AppMetrica to attribute organic traffic from Google Play. If they noticed a spike in traffic, it was obvious that the app had been featured in rankings. This helped them get more traffic and gain more organic downloads.
“With AppMetrica, we can separate organic traffic from Google Play or Google Ads. We can quickly find out if our app was featured and the country where it happened. We use AppMetrica’s User Acquisition report for this.
Then we would boost traffic to these countries. This helps us improve our ranking and get more organic downloads.”
Vyacheslav Krivsunov,
CEO of Multicast Games
Results
They have spent over $1 million annually on their Alien Invasion game, which has a ROAS of 200%. The company then sold the game and received an additional revenue boost from the deal.
Connecting the UA dots, tracking everything in one dashboard, and most importantly, spending $1 MIL per year with 200% ROAS. I would take that!
CREATIVE STRATEGY
Looking into the Mobile action ads gallery for creative research. These are the types of creatives they run:
- gameplay
- playables
- TikTok AI voiceover
- gameplay with subtitles
Thats it! Yeah, I would be focusing on creating a concise creative strategy for Alien Invasion.
So to sum it up. This all above is a big bullshit! Have you paid attention? You have a hybrid casual game that combines the best of both worlds! LOW CPI from hypercasual and spend depth from mid-core games. You don’t need fake ads or UGC. I will leave you with what My Perfect Hotel is doing to get the picture:
Alien Invasion Creatives
Takeaways & last comments
- For a successful global launch, you need both a killer UA and a monetization strategy. It’s not easy to do it without one or the other. Small team can do great things when using proper tools!
- I am surprised by how many unique creative concepts are running. The game UA lacks the creative depth that is essential for further scaling the game.
- Playables, playables, playables. After seeing the recent scale of Applovin on different games, you need to start adding more playables to the mix to keep the campaign healthy. The same goes for new videos—every week, 2-3 new videos!
- Great diversification of UA channels! Kudos.
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