Bridge Race, the first game of The Garawell Games, a Turkish gaming company founded in January 2021, became the most downloaded mobile game worldwide in April with over 50 million downloads.
We often come across games that are download leaders for a day or an hour, we can say that we are quite used to reading such newsletters. Garawell’s success, however, is not just to peak in download numbers in a very short period of time, but to have achieved this lead in the total of the whole month. And that’s a real achievement for a studio that’s just been established.
We had a long and very enjoyable conversation with Nebih Başaran, founder and CEO of Garawell Games. We’ve heard bridge race’s story, and we’ve learned information that will be very useful to developers (and developer candidates) who want to have a say in this industry.
Nebih Başaran
Pleasant readings:
Tugbek Ölek: Let’s start with your Story of Garawell. Your story seems a little short, because the company’s foundation is still very new. But I’m sure he had a story before that.
Nebih Başaran: Our company as a company corresponds to the beginning of January 2021. Before that, I had a 1.5-year history related to game development, dating back to the summer of 2018, after graduating from galatasaray University computer engineering undergraduate program. That’s when I started developing myself into game development.
At that time, my friend, who is now in the gaming industry, and I started a tour company by turning to other projects. We brought in a box game called Codenames, and we translated it into Turkish. We became distributors and made it fall into the category of best-selling games in Turkey. I mean, I have a bit of entrepreneurial roots. I’m also familiar with these issues because I’m a computer engineer. Then, in the summer, with the people I found close to me in the time left over from these other initiatives, together with a close friend of mine who graduated from school and a friend who also had something to do with game development at Istanbul Technical University, we both enrolled our own company in the internship program and started to develop it.
Did you participate in the internship program?
We joined the program to get the internship out of the way, but we were also playing with our team of 3 at the time. The level of professionalism was a little low, because that period was spent just learning and sieve the parts of unity engine that would be useful to us. Then we made a deal with Voodoo to broadcast our games if they performed well. During this period, we both improved ourselves and developed around 50 – 60 new prototypes. None of these prototypes have passed tests such as CPI and Retention.
During this period, the most important point that I thought I could contribute to the sector in my own private was the subject of “idea”. I’m someone who sees it as impossible for games to succeed unless there’s an original idea. I’ve never been in the “our game holds it when copying the idea of a holding game.” We tried to gamify our ideas by prioritizing authenticity.
Therefore, we were not saddened that the games we tried could not come out of the tests, we came up with different ideas by saying “so this does not hold”. At the beginning of 2021, we were able to show this feature with the games we made. During this period, we started discussions with other publishers and decided to work with Supersonic Studios by being a little selective, preferring the most active broadcaster in 2020.
Meanwhile, Umur Özal, who is at Galata Business Angels, and Haluk Ünal, who I previously collaborated with in the tourism business, were involved in the project as investors. And in January 2021, we started this business.
And in January, you founded your company.
yes. Bridge Race, a sequel to a prototype we built before we founded the company, was also released in March. In fact, we had a very intensive process until March. We even had a second game called Doctor Portal, which went soft but didn’t make it to the global launch. So I’d say we were able to release Bridge Race in a very short time. The story of Bridge Race also began a month before our founding.
At this point, I want to pick something up. Now you actually have a story that’s been going on until Garawell’s board, right? In the second year of this, you actually produce about 40 or 50 prototypes.
yes, it’s a story about a year and a half old, and there’s 40 or 50 prototypes. I’d say it’s a company for these prototypes.
So aside from your coding and engineering training and experience from the past, we can see this one-and-a-half year part as your training process, your preparation process. Then you didn’t actually get into the business of incorporation or game publishing until you found a really good product, a prototype that you believed in. You waited for that product.
That’s right, that’s right.
And how did you see that light in Bridge Race? Were A/B tests, KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) very good? So when you look at Bridge Race, okay, that’s the prototype, we’re flying, let’s get the investor, the publisher, the company, blah, blah, blah?
In fact, the confidence we felt in attracting publishers and investors was not due to Bridge Race, it was our opinion at the end of the maturation process I was talking about. At that point we were saying “now we’re in, we’re at a level to get into the market, even our game’s out, it’s going to come out.” We even had a saying, “it’s not a matter of how, but when it matters.” I mean, it wasn’t just how, it was when.
Here’s how I can explain the situation at Bridge Race. We test each game ourselves after making it, we are not a company that gives big testers and receives feedback. What I saw when I tested Bridge Race was this: for the first time I played a game with pleasure while sitting down and testing 70 levels.
I mean, even when we finished the prototype, I found that I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t just playing by saying let me find the bugs of this, but by saying, “What if you try techniques like this in this game, it’s a different winning method.” I see myself as a player, I like video games with depth more.. It was a breaking point for me to see that this mobile game also gives me pleasure, that it has depth.
We’ve seen it tested in the office. We said, “This game is pleasurable, now it’s all about seeing KPIs, that is, the values that will come out when tested.” So the pleasure we got from Bridge Race has become a popular spot for the public.
So when did you launch the game softly?
It was the beginning of March this year.
You launched soft at the beginning of March, and then you went straight global, I think.
Yes, it went straight global, that process was very fast. Of course, this was actually a prototype that we started working on from December, but at that time we turned to our other game, Doctor Portal; and when our team was small, we just had to focus on that game. When the game came back from the soft launch, we continued with bridge race. I’m glad we moved on because it became a much more successful, much more popular game. We actually liked this game more than Doctor Portal, to be honest.
How many downloads did the game get in total after March, that is, when we came to April?
April totaled close to 30 million, but as of now it has close to 70 million downloads.
In April, when you were already number one in the Play Store, there was good news on Pocket Gamer that “one out of every 5 games downloaded in America comes from Turkey”. They specifically mentioned you there, and garawell was number one. So what do you attribute the game’s rise to so high after it went global? You know, there’s supposed to be a very serious user acquisition campaign, but how much of it came from organic, how much of it was UA? Has anything special been done for optimization?
We communicate with phenomena when it comes to marketing, different types of campaigns on social media, we are not interested in them. What really made our game work was the raw video we made. We had a very simple, 25-second video that told you about gameplay directly from within the game. This was the video we got in the first place, and it was even the video that made it go from soft launch to global launch in March. So this video was taken as a base in all campaigns, Supersonic made an audio plugin, visual effects plugin on it, but the video was always the same.
There are two players in the video. Since you know the game, I’m simply telling you. Red and blue player. You’re red, you collect bricks, but blue prevails over you. This is what happened in 5-10 seconds, and we made the gameplay clear because we presented it as raw video. In this way, we have reduced CPI (cost per install) considerably. This low CPI actually allowed us to reach a large audience very comfortably when reflected in UA.
But what we really did in April was that we were releasing updates every day and adding something new to the game. Everything we added here increased the gameplay time. Each new level map, each new character, every new thing that joined the game increased gameplay time, making us doubly playable after a while.’ So when a person downloads the game in mid-March, the gameplay time is around 500 seconds, but by now it has close to 1000 seconds of gameplay.
Bridge Race gameplay video
1,000 seconds per user or session?
Per user; We can now play our players for twice as long, and we owe it to the innovations we’ve made in a month and a half. Sometimes we slip down to very marginal ideas. For example, we asked if this game could be able to support multiplayer. We started every morning with ideas like that. In consultation between us, we have made updates that will work best and increased that gameplay time. These are both important things. One, the fact that the video we shot on CPI has been watched a lot, two of us are managing this process well with the updates we have made. Of course, supersonic has success in marketing, and no one can ignore it.
So let’s just say that your main thing was in the success of the game: you found a very good core mechanic, that’s why people liked the game anyway. At the same time, this core mechanic was at the heart of marketing.
definitely. You know how many of the users are organic, which actually shows it. 25% of the game was organic. This game was actually a game that brought innovation to the market. People downloaded it so organically because they thought they saw something new, they stuck to so many games. I think it was critical that it was authentic. As you said, core mechanics were critical. On top of that, we just set standards and added content.
Well, I’m guessing in-game monetaryization is probably ad-based.
of course. There are also in-app purchases, but more ad-based.
Can you give me a ratio of about the two?
Ads can be more than 95%, I think. In-app purchases are minimal. There’s only one “ad shutdown” that sells, and we have a bundle. We’ll be increasing the number of bundles soon, but at this stage it’s coming from around 95% advertising.
And did you do certain things there? So in terms of ad-based revenue, did you use anything special in the background when you originally planned the game? Or do you solve them on the publisher’s side?
It’s going both way, actually. As we take the game to the soft launch, you know, the prototype is being extra advertised. In this integration, we took their ideas and managed this process by adding advertisements where we deemed appropriate. The award-winning video topic is something that more gamers should address anyway. You ask where the player is given the award-winning video, the player is more likely to click on it.
First of all, there’s an award-winning video at the entrance to the bonus level. Then when starting the game there is another award-winning video, such as “Start with +5 blocks”, not just “click to start”. These are actually situations that both give the player small extras and create a win-win by clicking on the video. Apart from the award-winning video, we have also made an innovation by placing ads in the game that appear directly within the game. This innovation was not actually well perceived in the comments, but we found that the gameplay times were still high; I mean, people were still playing and watching commercials. We didn’t expect that when we put in-game commercials.
So how did you put these fixed ads? You’re watching it in episode-to-episode transitions?
Actually, it’s an auto-in every 25 seconds. Although the mid-game ad appears to be an intervention in the user experience, the level length in our game is very long compared to many hypercasual games. So the amount of time you spend on one level is only 4-5 in some other games, but it amounts to a time to spend. So we had to do it this way. We have games where one level lasts 1 1/2 minutes and 20 seconds. So we went to an average of 25 seconds. We have an obligation to show this because the gameplay times in hypercasual games do not exceed 1500 seconds no matter what you do. In a game that you play up to 1500 seconds, the average ad time is the more you earn. We decided to leave it that way because it increased our gameplay time.
So are there any KPIs you can share with us? I don’t know how much you can share, but for people at the beginning of the road, it’s important to put a target KPI in. If you can’t share bridge race’s real KPIs right now, can you share some of your own goals?
Of course, there’s data I can share about Bridge Race. We test it because CPI is important first in the release phase of the game. When I mentioned the raw video in CPI, we got a CPI of 20 cents from that video in the first place. When this CPI is sent to a lot of audiences, it is actually expected to grow, it was a CPI that could grow up to 50 – 60 cents. But we’ve seen that it’s not really that much. So our advantage when we went from soft launch to global was that we were able to maintain this 20-cent CPI. It’s up to 30, 40 cents, but it hasn’t gone any higher. If the game is consumed quickly by some audiences and goes to certain niche audiences, we have seen that our game appeals to all audiences while CPI rises.
Another data I’m going to tell you here is demographics. The GAME’s CPI is initially low for many games due to the Facebook algorithm. It captures a niche mass, but as soon as that niche comes out of the mass, the algorithm causes cpi to rise. Here, when you publish the game to niche audiences, such as the men-only game, the youth-only game, the CPI of the game can rise rapidly.
But in our game, it was the best demographic that could happen because of the proportion of 50 to 50 men and women and the fact that it appealed more to young people between the ages of 10 and 15. This is what demographics have become, thanks to the fact that it is distributed to an equal audience, a game that more children can play, and already has a new strategy because of its color. In Retention (a metric that shows how many% of users who start playing your game today continue to play in later days), 40 percent are 1. Day and 11% 7. It started with the day with the values that should have already happened. When you get ads in, it’s expected to drop, but we’re still 40% 1. 7 around 10-11% per day. We have day values. This data, which is critical to the continuity of the game, has been the biggest reason why we continue to be profitable and to be the most downloaded game of April.
So how did the distribution between Android and iOS work?
CPI is already expected to be lower on Android, but Retention is the same in both. Actually, that’s where the data I can’t tell begins. When we look at LTV, that is, life time value ( income earned from a user over its lifetime), our rates are slightly higher than other games that we can compare. What really plays a role here is gameplay time and retention, and the more they go, the more profits from one person. But the platform where the game is downloaded more is Android; I would say there were 6-7 million iOS and the rest was Android, up from that record in April.
25 percent to 75 percent. So what are the levels of LTVs?
I can’t give you the full details, but I’d say it’s good for a lot of games. What I’m talking about is the games in Supersonic, and since these are not very explained data, I don’t know the figures of the other companies.
Then how much should a good LTV be, not as a Bridge Race? I mean, we always talk about LTV being higher than UA, but at what level does LTV start, which we call “this game really profitable”?
The game changes to the game, actually, but in general ARPU (average revenue per user – average revenue per user) is good if it meets CPI on day 5. So from day five there will already be additional profits coming on top of the game. Of course, the comparison of this varies from game to game. You may have developed a game that costs $1.5, maybe it looks very depressing because of its CPI, but when you look at it, if the game earns $1.5 per person on its fifth day, if the playtime and retention are high, this game is also profitable. So it actually depends entirely on the balance of CPI and ARPU. If the CPI is low, but the ARPU of the game is also low, that game may not be able to output. This means that a game with a CPI of 20 cents but a 15 cent on day 5 may not be released.
But what the publishers always say is that cpi should be under 30 cents. That doesn’t mean there won’t be a game with a $1 CPI, but instead of spending time updating for the CPI of a $1 game to get the game to bring arpus for more than $1, maybe you can find those 20-cent, 30-cent games and update them the same way and make a much more profitable game. In our example, CPI was also low, so we had already started with a high level of profitability from the beginning. In short, we can say that “LTV/CPI should be a great equal 1”.
Well, I’m going to go back a little bit to the aftermath of this download success. After all, you’re still a small team. How many of you are there?
There’s seven of us now. We have 3 developers, one designer and two team leaders. One of them is me, I intervene in technical matters, SDK integration and game-related, where feasibility is reasonable. We have another team of leading friends, and my financial wife is supporting us in our company.
Now you were a company that tried a lot of prototypes with this team until March, but in about a month after March, you became the most downloaded company in the world. Was there anything in this transformation that caused you trouble, that surprised you, that left you in plywood? Or did it go smoothly because there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure and so on in hypercasual?
That’s a very good point. It’s been a lot of trouble, so let me start by saying that. I mean, luckily, it wasn’t a trouble-consuming process because the idea we had was good. From bug cleaning to the trial of the updates you will make, from the A/B tests to other innovations made in case the results of those tests are bad, there have been problems.
Although our team is small, I think we have done a great job in a month’s time. Because we worked until night, and it wasn’t just “we made plays, we quit.” We struggled with different problems every night. These were sometimes problems with the user experience, sometimes they were performance-related bugs, sometimes they were bugs related to SDK integration or opening up to a new country. For example, you see an error in Thailand, because it turns out that your game does not support the Thai language, and for this you have to solve something else related to the SDK. We’ve also spent a lot of time sorting out these kinds of problems.
For example, we discovered that the A*Star algorithm used in many AI games has a memory leak in a package. We discovered this because of phone heating or other performance errors, playing 70 – 80 levels without ever turning off the phone from start to finish. So you have to be a little crazy to do that, we did that.
Then you’ve been in constant crisis management since the game went global.
Absolutely, absolutely. Even now, for example, we’ve added roadmaps to the game, and there are some bugs that this has created for the masses, perhaps a thousandth of a thousand. The more we put into the game, the more crisis management branched out, which led us to work nights out of business time. But if you say this study has stressed you out and disturbed you? contrariwise. I’ve seen that we’re a team for it. We enjoyed solving crises every day and seeing the data increase the next day. We were satisfied with the increase in data tables such as retention rise, ARPU rise , LTV rise that we saw when we woke up in the morning. This actually put us in such an endless cycle, and the updates began to become permanent.
Well, let’s talk about the future. Of course, I don’t know if you can say this, but what’s the financial equivalent of being no.1 in the world for a month, downloading 30 million? For a studio. You want to give me a number?
I can’t say that either, and those numbers are still confidential.
Well, let me ask you this. So such a peak success, let’s say it’s 1 1/2 months, 2 months, 3 months. Does this bring garawell enough funding, revenue, resources, to suddenly take the studio out of here and turn it into a studio of 40 or 50 people, or do you think we’re going to be at peace until at least the end of the year?
I think the first thing you’re saying is, we can actually get the funding that can come to those points financially at this point. At this stage, both investors are getting a lot of communication and the game has a benefit. Of course we’re going to grow up, that’s for sure. This is a situation that has pros as well as cons, and we consider all these options on the table. But at this point, it’s too early to tell.
But I can tell you that if we talk about a company that will come to our level in the future, with this table in front of it, it has the power to evaluate all the options on the table. I hope we’ll have that financial comfort soon. But are the options here, for example, the right option to grow a team? I don’t think it’s always, because if you’re making hypercasual games, even two developers sometimes work very hard to prototyping a game.
I think the most critical point is to care about the idea. Ideas, ideas, ideas. Nothing else is as important as the others in the first place. If you have the competence to get your opinion right and handle the game, there’s nothing against that game, and it’s down to crisis management over that month and a half. Of course, the large team will provide a great deal of relief there, but if you say everyone should come up with ideas in a studio of 40 people during the idea development phase, you may lose originality. I’d say the little team is better for us at this point because it’s the most critiqued idea.
That’s all I have to ask, is there anything you’d like to add?
I’ve told you all about it, as far as I can think. Thanks to you, you’ve already asked for all the important points.
I think you gave me some pretty good information. You know, you gave me pretty clear information, starting at the beginning of the road and climbing to that success. Oh, that’s good.
I’ve talked about growing the team, but we’d rather work with the few and core people who can provide us with support. But at this stage, if anyone wants to, the applications are open. Our friends can also communicate with us on the website or directly with me, via LinkedIn, as they wish.
Then thank you very much.
Well, thank you.
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