Join Clash remains in top 100 for 1 year and is most downloaded game of January 2021

Join Clash is the first hyper-casual game by Freeplay, a gaming company with offices in the US, Belarus, and Russia. After partnering with Supersonic, Join Clash skyrocketed to #2 on the iOS and Android app stores and stayed in the top 100 charts in the US since March 2020, with more than 219M installs worldwide. 

Hear from Evgeniy Sidorov, Lead Game Producer at Freeplay, on the steps he took with Supersonic to reach the top of the charts.

Getting into gaming

Before Freeplay, I worked on several casual gaming projects in a small Belarus IT company that focused mainly on non-game apps. Sometime after, I moved to Freeplay, and using their experience and support, I gathered a team of professionals - together, we started to experiment with hyper-casual game development. 

Enter: Supersonic Studios

We already worked with ironSource’s mediation platform for our game Join Clash and enjoyed some promising results. In particular, Join Clash’s $0.22 CPI, $0.30 LTV, and high IPM for a video ad we ran on Facebook, really stood out.  

When Supersonic contacted us, we felt that a partnership could be effective. Even though we had our own skilled UA and ad monetization teams, we still felt that we could move quicker with our global launch strategy and achieve bigger and better results in the long term by working together. And, of course, knowing that Supersonic had the backing of a big network like ironSource made the offer to collaborate even more appealing.

"Even though we had our own skilled UA and ad monetization teams, we still felt we could ... achieve bigger and better results in the long term by working together."

- Evgeniy Sidorov, Lead Game Producer at Freeplay

Doubling LTV and reaching #2 in the charts

When we kicked things off with Supersonic, the two main focuses were:

• Game improvements
• Optimizing the monetization and UA strategies

Supersonic helped us work on the game’s features from the get-go. These improvements included a new and improved UI, enhancing the upgrade system and adding new weapons and shields per upgrade, tweaking the difficulty, and adding additional meta. 

Then there were the monetization improvements, which included adding rewarded placements, A/B testing the interstitial frequency, optimizing our existing waterfall setup, and introducing automation with LevelPlay in-app bidding. With all that support, we had time to focus on other parts of the game and improve the overall performance and experience. 

It didn’t take long for us to more than double our LTV and to reach performance benchmarks that aren’t normally seen for hyper-casual games. Since then, we've continued to increase LTV to $1.29 in the US - over 4 times what we started with when we first began working with Supersonic.

Testing, testing, and more testing to achieve an IPM of 38

On top of working on the game itself, Supersonic was equally focused on the creative side. We already had a great video that generated a low CPI on Facebook, but Supersonic decided to optimize it even further. To do this, they created dozens of different videos, a few playable ads, and interactive end cards.

Ultimately, Supersonic’s playable ad generated many more, higher-quality installs. The results of their thorough creative production and testing were impressive. In fact, during the launch weekend, the playable ad generated an IPM of 38 and tens of thousands of installs each day for iOS in the US specifically.

Supersonic then continued to constantly update their playables in order to improve the IPM and scale the creatives they generated. We understood that Supersonic treats creatives the same way they treat their games - with carefully thought-out strategies, extensive testing, and a deep understanding and application of best practices. 

The amazing work that we did together with Supersonic to improve both the game’s LTV and the creatives resulted in rapid growth that took us all the way to the #2 spot in the U.S. charts while maintaining significant profit along the entire way.

Stability, revenue, and scale

Another big win from the partnership with Supersonic is the sustained success of Join Clash. While hyper-casual games have the reputation of quickly losing momentum, we’ve been able to hold a spot among the top 100 apps across both app stores since we launched in March 2020.

Knowledge-sharing is caring

Working with Supersonic gave us access to cash flow, experience, and resources. But, it wasn’t entirely a one-way street. Even with an internal UA and creative team on our side, Supersonic’s transparent and collaborative approach helped us through the entire process of our first game launch. In our first conversation with Supersonic, we had a back-and-forth of ideas, with our UA/monetization team providing valuable insight which resulted in Supersonic adding new sources to their ad network partners. Meanwhile, the Supersonic team proved to us the value of having a publishing partner with extensive finances and experience at their disposal.