How Does Voodoo.io Market Their Games?

- Unlike Ketchapp and some others, they don't do any cross promotions
- They don't have an enormous amount of social media followers (FB, Twitter, Insta)
- I don't think they do paid acquisition either (the LTV per user is probably too low for that)

Of course some of their games are quite innovative and might have spread through word of mouth (e.g. Snake VS Block). But others like Flappy Dunk and the recent Rolly Vortex are nothing I haven't seen before and the production value (quality of graphics, sounds, etc) is a notch below Ketchapp and Appsolute in my opinion.

So what is it? How do they manage to reach the top of the App Store charts that consistently?

I've seen some people post here with great industry knowledge, so maybe you can help me crack that puzzle

 

Two-words Instagram marketing

 

Brilliant! I think you've cracked my puzzle

I dug a little deeper and found this Tweet: https://twitter.com/Julien_Donguy/status/877956754860003329

Looks like they are doing a lot of paid advertising on Instagram. Must be much cheaper for user acquisition than traditional ad channels.

 

Along with Twitter, it looks like they are using Heyzap as an ad mediation that could also explain cross promotion between Voodoo apps. Have a look:
SDK: https://gyazo.com/8b17d03a5a08272b742348295179ec91

 

Hey @Frank_mobi28 , how did you find that out? what website is that to check what SDKs other apps have?
Thanks,

 

@Benfont its a paid service so not anyone can have access. Check them out Mobbo.com I really love them!

 

Thanks man, will check it out!

 

Lets talk farther and in more details, about this discussion
I also find many ads on instagram of ketchapp games and voodoo games but also others big companies and even Asian developers match3s and clones.
What i ask are few things:
1. how game with low LTV like 0.2-0.3 $ (and i am generous here) can make many posts on social media which are expensive
2.voodoo also make ads on applovin interstitial just for your infromation - also wired due that also expensive for that kind of games
3. If instagram such a goldmine and it very cheap why not all the other companies who put ads on instagram are scaling up and be like voodoo ?

 

i have something to add, today i saw voodoo stack jump game AD at my facebook mobile app
still a riddle for me how low LTV games worth to place ads at expensive social media

 

Hello guys,
Anyone here have experience ever work with Voodoo? ( send your game to them and let them help you publish the game )
Are they play fair? And how about the percent of the earnings that they will take?

 

Bro i think you are missing the point, whatever Voodoo is doing we also can
Maybe if we all share some knowledge each other we might crack it out, as it seems they are doing UA pretty look it simple instagram and FB, now we need to understand how low LTV game worth to himself place ads there
there game most of them pretty simple and not that unique so it not about the theirs game though

 

One word: retention. If you have a good game with high retention you can get better ad network deals with higher eCPM and therefore have a higher ROI. Then the only thing you have to do is advertise for a lower CPI than your ARPU and you can make money. Making games is difficult, making a successful marketing is even more difficult. Voodoo has 5 years of experience in both and have perfectionized what they are doing. I used the entire year to research the marketing part of the game industry and it’s still a difficult thing to understand for me. You need a ‘big’ team to make it happen because it’s the work of different people with different skills and knowledge. One person alone is not enough. That’s what Fortafy has done since two years with Color Switch, Ketchapp and Voodoo started this year to make it work. There are a lot of other publishers who make the same. It’s just that Voodoo is the best in what they are doing. Ah, and I almost forgot: you need a lot of money for this. If your budget is lower than 20k, it’s probably not worth it. In fact, if you want to hit the charts you’ll need much more than that. In the end it’s like every other business. You invest first and you only make profit when you can succeed on all levels of your business. That includes even the admin part. You fail in one piece of the puzzle and you will fail. The dream of making real money just because does not exist in the game industry.

 

Well according to one of Voodoo's PM, the marketing cost of having a game in the number 1 spot of the most downloaded games of the App Store is 100.000 USD per day.
You can hear the full interview here:
http://www.appmasters.co/voodoo-gabriel-rivaud/

 

About the article i didnt find where it written that voodoo spend or talking about spending 100K$ in a day on ads
However about what Christoph wrote here, yes retention is important but at the end of the day theirs games almost same as ketchapp
and in the end of the day we are speaking about 0.2-0.3 LTV on IOS and on Android it much lower
So even if they have many people who are doing marketing we are talking here about very low CPI amount for it to be worth it

A question for you guys, what is more or less the stickiness ratio that comes from ads, for games style Ketchapp and Voodoo

 

About Fortafy it really a riddle, tell me guys is anyone here saw an AD of them in any ad platform or social media
I never came across with theirs ads if exist at all

 

Actually, their games are everything that Ketchapp games are not. Ketchapp games are what Trey teaches. This kind of games are not working anymore. They are punitive. People don't want to play anymore with punitive games. At least not the casual users. They want games like Voodoo publishes. Fun and easy with immediate and repetitive challenges. I have to admit, Ketchapp as of late is trying to copy it though. So if you have high retention and a lot of impressions you can get very high eCPM from the ad networks which makes the UA possible.

 

it is not an article, it is a podcast. In the podcast they interview one of the PMs of Voodoo, and it is there where he says that it cost around 100K to have a game in the top spots of the App Store.

I totally agree with that observation.

 

Rolly Vortex, Stack Jump, Snake Vs Block, Flappy dunk those are not almost the same of ketchapp style ?
if not plz explain farther, i guess i missed something then

 

Play with them and you'll see.

 

I don't think @Christoph was talking about the style of the game. At the end of the day both Ketchapp and Voodoo's games are casual games. However the differences between both are there.
For example: Voodoo's game Flappy Dunk is clearly inspired on HopHopHop by Ketchapp. However, the difference in difficulty is huge.
In HopHopHop you have to go through the rings in an almost perfect way in order to make the doors open. Flappy Dunk on the other hand is very easy, you just have to go through rings to keep advancing in the game.