Subway Surfers · B2C · endless runner mobile game
Ask players' age, show kids only child-safe ads, and block gambling and gun ads
Very few complaints across a billion ad impressions a month
Workedcustomer-supportpricing
What they did
Players state their age at install. Anyone under the legal age in their country (13 or 16) goes into a COPPA segment served only by ad networks with COPPA-compliant inventory. For adults, blocklist gambling, guns, pornography and anything R-rated. When a player reports a bad ad, flag it to the network to remove. In-game SDKs record which ads were shown and engaged with. COPPA and GDPR compliance handled by a small team.
What happened
Guest says the system is efficient with very few complaints, run by few people.
- Stage
- scale
“And if you are younger than the legal age in your country, then you get placed in what we call the COPPA segment. Depending on the country it's 16 or 13.”
“we've blacklisted a lot of categories that should not be shown”
“It's a very efficient system and we have very few complaints, so we actually are not a lot of people doing it”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Subway Surfers: Move the game to a new city every three weeksGuest credits it with keeping the game fresh for 13 years; no numbers
- Subway Surfers: Keep the core game free and unlimited, and never lock content behind paymentTop-5 downloaded game every year since 2012; 1M installs a day
- Subway Surfers: Have a small in-house team post 5-10 videos a day riding pop culture trendsViral hits of 75M-100M views on salaries only; guest says it lifts app store featuring
- Subway Surfers: Let anyone use the game in their videos, and repost the cool onesCreators, including a K-pop star, make unpaid content; the game became a meme format
- Subway Surfers: Put a few hundred dollars behind posts already going viralTens of thousands of dollars total; helps hits spread to other platforms
- Subway Surfers: Let players watch an ad for a reward instead of payingAds bring in 80-85% of revenue; still the top game in tier-2 and tier-3 countries
- Subway Surfers: Swap characters with other hit games, with no money changing handsBrings back lapsed players and boosts both games; Crossy Road got the bigger bump
- Slopes: Sell day and season passes next to the subscription for occasional usersHost cites it as working; no numbers