Nathan Ceulemans’ Post

I'm back to work after three weeks of paternity leave. ✨ Here's what having a baby boy taught me about B2B sales. I just had to reuse that meme. No B2B sales tips from me. 😂 Little less travel planned for me in the near future while this little guy needs maxing out on love and sustenance, but I'm keen to catch up with the gaming space again soon at #gamescom2024 (and the #mobilegamesawards - Kohort is nominated!) and #pgchelsinki! See you soon y'all. #mobilegames #mobilegaming #gaming

✍️ In a gaming world full of LTV curves and ROAS tables, I wish more were talking about payback periods. The more I want to write about this, there's more that I feel needs to be written about. ⏱️ In short: LTV and ROAS only make sense if you keep in mind the time window. Two games making $10 per player? Meaningless if the first makes it back by D30 and the latter makes it back by D720. The faster that LTV backs out on the spent CPIs, the more your cash flow accelerates, and the faster you can reinvest into more UA (after considering your price volume of course) or into further improving your retention and monetization (see my previous post!). Not to mention time value of money - money on hand faster, is just better. 🧠 For more depth on this topic, I'll start off with a page from Angus Lovitt (former VP Marketing at King and founder of Kohort)'s playbook from "How Not To Waste Money on UA". (Link here: https://lnkd.in/eKmrwisp) His Tip 2: "Set the right payback periods" "Everybody's cumulative CLV curve is different - and not all games are created equal. Using the attached graph to illustrate this, you could have two games which are working to the same payback period of one year. Given the shape of the curve, Game A is 66% more profitable after three years. Yet, somehow everybody defaults to "we're buying to one year". It's important to do your own modeling and choose the payback periods which are right for you." Thoughts added: if you look at each curve you'll be inclined to think of the CPIs you can spend at to get those cumulative LTVs to back out. Keep in mind that there are three additional nuances to this: 1. Price-volume relationships. For example: if you're putting in your initial spend, are you seeing outsized new installs in your golden cohorts? You'd be quick to pat yourself on the back if you're not keeping that in mind, only to be disappointed when # new installs slows down at a higher spend. 2. Different customer acquisition cost ranges resulting in very different values of players. Spending 10x more on new players might not give you 10x more new players (again, PV, see pt. 1) but it can mean you're "fishing in a new pool" for higher-value players. You better hope you monetize them properly. 3. This is a global view so about as superficial as it gets. The more you want to get a proper grip of what to spend, think about where. In which Geos are my LTVs stronger? Is my PV curve the same in all these geos? Similarly, am I able to get the same quality of new installs across all networks I can spend on? Read on for Angus's continued musings on missing your goals (continued in comments, as I ran out of space here)... #gaming #paybackperiod #ltv #roas #useracquisition #mobileua #gamingua #mobilegames #mobilegaming #marketing #gamedevelopment

🤔 At a recent conference I was presented with a dilemma by a mobile games studio founder: "How do I get my board to sign off on budget for a product feature our team badly wants to build?" Cool, a fun thought exercise, and who doesn't like those? 📊 What this question boils down to quantifiably, in my eyes: how much is a % uplift brought by a new/updated product feature worth to a game's bottom line and its player LTV? Facing declining DAU, many studios come to a similar situation but taken to a broader context: when does it make sense to increase my budget on an improved product (giving a game more polish, more and better features, an ongoing live ops calendar, etc.) vs. spending budget on growth in new users? 📈 I went about charting this in real-time on Kohort on an aggregate data dump for a game (not actuals, no worries). Let's say we can get a 10% retention improvement, a 5% monetization improvement or a 30% increased UA budget (spread to same channel mix). These are lofty goals for single feature updates, but it's a starting point. What I came out to quite quickly was that this was a matter of trade-offs between different values over different time spans. A 5% monetization improvement could be a quick win - leading after a year by $9M (12.6% cumulative revenue increase after a year); while a 10% retention improvement brings a more modest $6.9M revenue increase at the 1 year mark, but catching up to create more long term value 2 years later. (The best part? Took me minutes to set this up on game data, not just hypotheticals) 💸 So what's that feature launch worth to this studio and their board? The answer: it depends on their appetite for long-term growth vs. risk, but monetizing their users 5% better would theoretically create a revenue uplift of over 10% in the very short term. Reforecasting for potential long-term retention squeezing from higher monetization would be an interesting next step to dive into from there. 🔜 Next I want to dive into changing payback periods, a topic that's come up from speaking to numerous studio heads the past few months, and a crucially underestimated part of the equation as a seemingly small target adjustment can create exponentially larger or smaller returns. For instance - why do so many stick to "one circumnavigation of the sun" (or half that) as an ideal payback period? Thoughts? Any what-ifs you'd be interested in exploring? #gamedevelopment #gamebusiness #gamingbusiness #games #gaming #forecasting

Hello Dubrovnik and #RebootDevelopBlue! Excited to be here for my first time joining this annual conference, bumping into old friends and new, talking predictive LTV and getting the most ROAS for your buck. Who's in town? Let's meet up in the next few days. #Reboot #RebootConference #gaming #gamedevelopment #predictiveltv #roas #mobilegames #mobilegaming

🇹🇷 Pumped to head to one of the capital cities of the mobile gaming world - Istanbul - in a few weeks to join HIT Games Conference's panel "User Acquisition Reinvented" alongside APPS, AppSamurai, DreamLoft and BoomBit! My message will probably go against the flow: you're often better served spending less, not more on UA 🤔 ... and knowing when and why exactly is the real trick. The mobile games industry has counted enough painful experiences in overspending on new users with all-too-lengthy payback periods, suffering the pains that come with incremental CPI increases, and misunderstandings over how to wisely use a studio's single biggest line item - UA spend. If you want a masterclass on what to avoid repeating, be sure to check Angus Lovitt's recorded session on wasted UA spend given at GDC - I'll share the link coming soon. It's not all gloom and doom though - those that apply the learnings are those that get ahead. Be sure to join our panel on the afternoon of the 19th April - and see you in Istanbul. 🙌 #mobilegaming #mobilegames #turkishgames #turkishgaming #useracquisition #ua #onemorehashtag #andanother

🌁 Back from #GDC2024 and a week filled with valuable meetings, mediocre coffee, great speaker sessions, wonderful weather, and an optimistic atmosphere for gaming. Thanks SF, you were great. Some thoughts to share: 🗣️ Our two Kohort hosted sessions, led by Angus Lovitt and Jon Bellamy, drew large crowds (beyond capacity even) eager to learn about today's ROAS maximization, cohort forecasting and perfecting your payback periods. While GDC draws many indie devs and students alongside industry veterans, the learnings are invaluable to all today. 🤝 There's really no better conference than GDC for games. The audience is vast and from every continent, and are keen to meet (though you'll have to prepare for lots of walks between hotels), and the sheer number of times you have quick bump-in meetings on the street with old acquaintances is amazing. 🤔 From the various speakers and meetings, it's clear there's a major focus on underlying business fundamentals for games studios, amid stronger competition and tighter margins. That said, a majority of games remain unprofitable and growth is top-heavy with the largest studios getting their ROI right. 📈 While there's an underlying sense of pessimism among many in the space after far too many layoffs and a chilly fundraising landscape in the past year, it's now an ideal time to find great opportunities, and a strong optimism for future growth persists. In Bing Gordon 's words at the CleverTap-AWS for Games GDC event: "As we grew the gaming industry a hundred-fold, 75% of the time, investors could prove that the game biz would always suck." 🌞 SF, in sunny weather, is a great city for #GDC (though what's this I hear about GDC moving?). It's great to see the sights, to go for a run and a ball game, and few US cities have such a great vibe. City safety still needs to come a ways though - with several attendees telling me of run-ins on the streets of downtown SF this year. 🤯 And no, nobody saw the Sensor Tower-data.ai acquisition coming (at least not that direction) though consolidation in the mobile data space was talked about for years. Thanks all - and thanks to our brilliant team at Kohort - Dan Marcus Jan Pickard Greig Rapley #gamedevelopersconference #sf #sanfrancisco #gaming #games #mobilegaming #mobilegames

😍 Ah #GDC2024 - calendar's almost full and looking forward to meeting up with everyone again. Want to catch up - or join me for my 6AM pilgrimage to the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge for a sunrise pic (see attached 📸 ) - don't hesitate to HMU. This year's going to be interesting. At Kohort we're seeing a 2024 games industry that for many studios is in do-or-die mode. Some things don't change - still seeing inefficient spending on UA with little forethought, still seeing copycat games pop up left and right, still seeing countless pitches banking on a neat creative idea with little business model for growth - and some parts are in a maelstrom of change, of unexpected layoffs, and of wide-ranging uncertainty. I can tell you all about how our forecasting's there to prevent you from hopping on bad bets, but let's save that for when we're all there. And hey, crypto's up so bound to hear a lot about it this year! P.S. for the marketers - we've just gone into beta testing with a feature that automatically adjusts what your spend should be in order to hit your target payback. It's looking 🔥 Book time with me here: https://lnkd.in/eUwHpB48 #gdc #mobilegames #gaming

...and on the 5th day 'til #GDC, Jon Bellamy gave to me... "How not to f**k your studio: Forecasting done right" 😍 That's right, that's the title we submitted. Forecasting isn't just guessing and a numbers game; get it wrong and you're potentially costing your studio millions. JB - former Chief Commercial Officer at Huuuge Games - will walk you through lessons learnt in growing mobile games studios to billion-dollar giants, with candid takes aplenty on the reality of planning for success. What you can expect: 📝 The importance of business planning pre launch 📈 How to predict the future of your title(s) 📊 A framework for the forecasting process post launch 👎 Calling out some of the uglier business practices 😲 Stories of catastrophic failure and epic success from industry leaders 📅 Wednesday March 20, 2024, 2:00pm - 3:00pm in Room 2011 in the West Hall at GDC. Click the link here to add it to your calendar: https://lnkd.in/dwTFaYtd Dan Marcus 🔜 GDC Angus Lovitt Jan Pickard Roxane Vichot Chelsea Africa Stu Maclaren #mobilegames #mobilegaming #gdc2024 #gamedev #gamemarketing #useracquisition

💸 With #GDC2024 a week away, here's a session you won't want to miss and the topic's pretty blunt: "You're probably wasting money on user acquisition" 💸 Angus Lovitt, founder of Kohort and former VP Marketing at King - using real world data and the use cases you'll actually want to hear about - will explain why these days he is often advising F2P companies to spend less on UA as a matter of studio survival. 📅 Don't miss it - Tuesday March 19, 2024, 2:10pm - 2.40pm in Room 2006 in the West Hall at GDC. Click the link here to add it to your calendar: https://lnkd.in/dgxWrsDV And while you're there, meet with us to figure out just how much money you're wasting 😉 Dan Marcus 🔜 GDC Roxane Vichot Jon Bellamy Jan Pickard Greig Rapley #mobilegames #mobilegaming #gdc #gamedev #gamemarketing #useracquisition