Voodoo Sauce Lab — The new team innovating to monetize games
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Tech
·
Jan 1, 2020
·
Written by
Kevin Waser
·
3
min read
Two years ago, Voodoo began more creatively experimenting with its revered Voodoo Sauce, the innovative solution it had created to help monetize games more effectively. The goal is simple: increase game revenue by testing different features, such as ads directly integrated into games.
After starting out as a game developer at Voodoo, I had the opportunity to move to the Tech team a few years ago as a Tech Engineer, and I officially integrated the Voodoo Sauce Lab team a year ago.
We are a squad of five people who have come together quite organically. We have Safouane (Team Leader), Maxence (Monetization Manager), Romain and myself (Developers). Before Safouane proposed that the team focus entirely on Voodoo Sauce, I used to work on it as a side project.
Voodoo Sauce is the package that is found in all our games, containing various SDKs that enable monetization, in-app purchases, GDPR compliance, and analytics. It is a package that we offer to game development studios, who integrate it into their games to monetize them. The Voodoo Sauce Lab is the innovative part of Voodoo Sauce, which allows us to go even further in what we are already doing today.
Audio Ads is the project that the Lab has been focusing on for the past seven months. We have been working on the integration of these audio ads into Voodoo Sauce, so that they will soon be available for all games without the need to create a special package.
The team is working on several features that increase game revenue, such as ads directly integrated into games, in-game advertisements, including audio ads. Audio ads constitute an innovative solution that prevents players from wasting precious seconds watching ads that block the entire screen. Instead, players can listen to audio ads while they play, without interrupting their gaming experience.
The team uses a mediation solution called Max Ads, which offers several different advertising networks. The networks retrieve ad opportunities and display their ads based on their financial investment. And we are currently exploring new ad network options to further improve our revenues through ads.
Voodoo Sauce is mainly aimed at hyper-casual games that are naturally disappearing from the market because they are less profitable. The goal, and the challenge, is to find innovative solutions to increase the revenue of these games and maintain their presence in the market, alongside more casual titles.
What I love about our team is the mindset. We are all very motivated by innovation and the creation of new features. Our project-based approach gives us a great amount of freedom and allows us to have a greater impact on the business. The processes in the VS Lab are less cumbersome than those of the core Voodoo Sauce project because they are more focused on innovation. The atmosphere is also different because we feel differently committed and stimulated depending on the projects we develop.
Although we are part of Voodoo’s Engineering & Data Business Unit, we have our routines such as dailies at 2 pm to take stock of our progress, our sprints every 2 weeks, and we are starting to plan our team building events. We are also very flexible on remote work as some of us live outside Paris, and we try to meet at least once a week for those who are here.
I hope the team will continue to grow in the next few months. Having initially created Voodoo Sauce five years ago, I have been lucky enough here at Voodoo to benefit from several internal moves and constantly push my ideas and abilities. I hope to continue for a long time with this new Lab, creating and innovating a little more each and every day.
If you would like to join the Voodoo E&D team, we are looking for a Android Mobile SDK Developer/ Apprentice, or reach out to me on LinkedIn!