AI Art: DALL-Eks or High-value Disruptive Innovation? - The Metacast by Naavik

remix culture exists in all sorts of artistic mediums games music people draw influences and recombine things in all sorts of ways without any sort of training data all the time [Music] hi everyone welcome to the metacast roundtable by navik i'm back from holiday and i'm joined by david amore ceo of playmond and matt dyan lead product manager at yay hello welcome back thank you and that's uh i'm glad to be back you know as much as i love my family i've got a job to do here we're pioneering new things i've got games to make and uh it's exciting particularly the stuff that we're doing i feel like if i'm away for a week then uh i'm missing a lot i'm still checking

twitter and thinking oh man we need to be uh plowing ahead now that said things have moved on arguably more with me being away from the office than being in the office but nonetheless it's nice to be back and out the other side how do you feel about that you went away and things were productive maybe i should go away more but uh no i'm fine with that that's how it should be if everyone was waiting on me then i'm not running the business in particularly good way am i wise words kicking it off strong i see david did anyone here get a gamescom no no no sad face okay where are the how do you we're not part of all of my whole linkedin page it was everyone like oh gamescom was amazing i'm going to gamescom it's a really interesting show because it's primarily a consumer show so just oh again i can't remember exactly how many people but i'm just overwhelmed by the quantity of people showing up to

play the games and how passionate they are which is always nice to see but then also nice it's absolutely crazy too that show floor so nice to retreat into the business section on the times that i've been there but i think people have fun there were there were a lot of announcements i think so there's some pretty cool announcements all right maybe we're coming on to that and it seemed like the navic deconstructor fun party was also fun oh yeah yeah i couldn't wait for that we'll have to get aaron and monu and thomas on here for the full debrief oh yeah manny's on next week i can i can debrief oh perfect debris from live oh and when i was in argentina for my holiday i met up with a listener delfino who reached out um she's a ua leader ether max and showed me buenos aires went out for dinner yeah it's amazing so listeners if you visit london let me return the favor um i'll show you a nice a nice place to have dinner that's there's probably more people

listening from london than argentina be careful with that that's fine i like to socialize it's great there are many restaurants to go to in london so i'll never run out and last question before i move on to the topics has anyone seen the tekken anime on netflix no i have not don't don't it's not good it is not good i'm happy to be challenged if anyone listening watched it um because right after that i watched the dota's anime yeah i heard that was very good that is very good it's excellent i'm totally hooked on it tekken sad sad times damning review yeah yeah well hopefully the next ones will be better all right so today we're going to be talking about ai art applied to games there's something that came out of a

rabbit hole that i don't think will ever go back to it so we're going to go into that sony acquired savage game studios from our friends uh well mishka the constructor of fun so we'll go into that a little bit and we're also going to be talking about triple a games uh well triple a studios making crypto games that that will probably be a bit spicy so we'll see that tell us about the rabbit the rabbit hole okay rabbit hole i started seeing the wars dolly and minute mid journey middle journey wait midtown measuring yes going around everywhere and i had no idea what it was about and it made me feel as when crypto games started to be talking about where i quickly just felt like this mammoth and so i had to go and explore what it is so text to image generation has existed for a long time i think the first time it was explored was about 50 years ago when

an artist made a rules-based um ai text image or like it was teaching it rules to create art um based on what he wanted but now this is dolly and my journey they're bringing this technology for free to the wider public to the mass consumer and so it's essentially democratizing the ability to place what you can see in your imagination um to something visual that that you can share and we'll go into that a bit more so there's just some little differences between dali and mid journey and then there are others in the market all focused on these two because they're the ones that are being mostly talked about and easily accessible so dolly is in a closed beta and is developed by open ai and my journey is in an open beta and you just need to join discord you get 25 free text prompts that you can use and then you can subscribe to i think it's a membership or something where you can then do do more and you can even create them privately so that

other people don't see what what you're creating and so one thing that we'll be discussing is that existing art is used to train these models and different art can be used to train different kinds of models so i know that mid journey is exploring um like models for different types like if you want to do a photo realism or if you want to be doing more of uh painting style or sci-fi style i don't know but they were exploring training different ai to be more specialized and so the first thought angle to keep my summary short is that if ai is used to create these images and it was trained on art that is existing so there are original creators why outputs is it considered an original so let's apply this to games can i use my journey or dolly to create art place it in my game and then commercially distribute it what do you think commercially or ethically

commercially well i haven't read the t's and c's of either of those but uh that if the question is is that uh given that it's based on somebody else's artwork that they created that is copyright then do you have are you legally allowed to distribute artwork that has been created based on that is that what you mean maria yes because the the model doesn't output a copy an exact copy of something that someone created it uses it uses existing art to be trained and then it creates something that could be considered as unique but is it unique if it's based on data from other people's creations have you ever seen i mean i've seen tons of these images and i have a dali you know account so i've been using it myself it's not clear to me

i've never seen hey this was the original image that it was used to be trained and therefore hey you asked for an elephant with a ball on his nose and we provided one albeit with a different background but this is the original image so i don't have a good sense of how similar the ai generated images are to the original piece of artwork have you seen any of those kind of comparisons so far i haven't i've seen claims from many artists saying that recombinations of existing artwork is not unique and cannot be an original and that artist should be paid so that is uh one of the challenges with using this kind of technology what do you think matt i tend to disagree with that point of view i'm not an artist so i should say that first but um uh you know i think remix culture exists in all sorts of artistic mediums games music uh literature like people

draw influences and recombine things in all sorts of ways without any sort of training data all the time um so i think the i guess the ethical burden is on the people making the ai models to source their training data uh properly and give credit where it's due but as an end user if i let's say i want to make a game with dolly or mid-journey uh generated art i don't have an issue with that uh i don't know what dolly's terms are i had a brief look at mid journey and you know please correct me if i'm wrong here but i think that you can you can use it commercially but you don't have exclusive um ip rights to it i think you share it with uh with mid journey um so you know personally i don't i don't have an issue with it because you know one it's i think it's difficult to attribute the output of these models to any one particular

piece of data or source image uh maybe i'm wrong there uh but also because remix culture happens all the time um you know if you think about like there's uh there's about a hundred games that are like 1942 like the plane game that you're flying and you're just sort of the vertical scroller there's about a million variations of that uh does all the all the royalties accrue back to the original one i don't think so um they're just sort of game design tweaks where did you get to on it maria my heart and my head have different opinions i'm very much aligned with my what matt is saying there i don't i i just can't help feeling with my heart that if you're using data to train a model that data should at least be authorized to be used in some kind of way sure we've and culturally we're sort of a situation where anything

that's on the internet becomes fair game to use in some way you you know copy right aside but it's out there and sort of in the public domain and therefore you get to use that in lots of different ways it feels like it's it feels like another case of where the people creating the content aren't really in control of what they put out there and so if there was a mechanism where people said hey i'm happy for my artwork to be used in training data for ai whatever that is whether it's art or you know brain scans for hospitals has also been the case then but you know every time you reference it i want to get a dollar or something and you think okay well i'm putting it out there but at least i'm being reimbursed for it i think a challenge is that you know if people are creating artwork based on yours that uh that wouldn't exist without your artwork and you're not seeing anything from that that doesn't that's a little doesn't rest easily how come i'm being

the voice of it's unusual i'm before i'm usually the capitalist i know i'm sensitive so really i was waiting for you to put a crypto spin on it hey i nearly did could you tell i nearly tokenized it yeah i felt it was coming it's the training data there's nfts you can track royalty payments yeah yeah see i don't have to so you finish you're finishing each other's sentences now i i honestly think that that might become true in in terms of ip ip rights maybe blockchain will play a bigger part of this i even remember when i was doing my postgrad and we had to write a thesis most people in the class were using google images images that they got from google like just because it's on google images you can't use it um without i had an issue well it wasn't it's not an issue but we we made a splash screen for our game and um it was the the images you know had a logo across it and it had a very evocative sort of concept arty image

that the art director gave me looks beautiful really good and then i was going to distribute it more widely and then i thought you know i don't actually know where this piece of artworks come from i don't know if art director did it or whether or not it's come from the internet or unsplash and then i think how you could just run this through dali or something and get something that's that's similar but then i stopped and thought well i don't know if that's cool because that would be a very quick solution for the problem where i don't really know if this is a copyright image or not i'll just create something brand new with an ai solution and that can be a splash green and i think that can be a splash screen forever without having to pay anybody or worry about um ip rights so it feels like it's already you know that was that happened to me this week in game production it's not uh this is happening now this is not theory um you know what's ethical it's it's upon us now i suppose yeah i imagine a way to work around it

is if the value is proven and the company is big enough let's say a ubisoft decision or a sony decides to build a model with in-house proprietary art they could potentially still have enough data to create a good model without infringing any kind of copyright with whatever it outputs yeah yeah maybe i've also seen um that uh some people are building sprite games using sprites that have been created in dali so rather than just concept art or reference but actually sprites to be used directly in a game and having some amount of success with that so to actually not need to use an artist at all or at least not a team of artists but instead lean on ai is definitely a brand new idea right and that's what i love about this technology entering games just by some very brief conversations i had because i started exploring it and then i was i was finding it very fun and

i asked if other people were exploring it the stream of messages and the amount of people who were already using it for their working games was incredible so an art director was using it to explore different um art directions like different different vibes i guess that they could give to to the game together different inspiration sources very quickly it was being used by um a founder of a company who's trying to create a pitch deck and solo he could just create these images and take what was in his imagination without any artistic skills and be able to put in a pitch deck product managers and game designers using it again to just exemplify the feeling that they like to achieve with a goal that they have to then go go to an artist to develop yeah i i'm very excited i think i think reducing the barriers for people to be creative is extremely important even more so in a

creative product like games i think the applications are fascinating um you know it could be something like helping to generate ua creatives really quickly um or like i saw on twitter a while back someone did a choose your own adventure uh kind of text game and the images that accompany that the text were all generated by dolly um but it's it's fascinating like we could probably talk about this for a long time and this is definitely my new favorite genre of twitter thread for sure um one point that i wanted to bring up was i i've noticed people saying the art the artistry is really in it's no longer in making the image it's in generating the prompt the prompt that you feed to dolly or to mid-journey and that seems to really ring true with me at least

you i think you get far more effective results when you include stuff like i don't know like extremely high detail 4k art station blender like all these terms that are not necessarily descriptive of like what you're representing but like more about the quality of the image i don't know it's really odd it kind of turns it on its head a little bit yeah maybe that becomes a new skill in the art department yeah i think so we are figuring how it gives to correct prompt what about i mean you're in the business of making bigger games matt and you know what we're talking about so far is 2d images that sort of set the scene concept art that kind of thing do you ever see that making its way into 3d assets animations um i don't see why not i don't think the you know these programs aren't built for 3d at the moment but uh i don't see why not like there's there's different different

parts of the pipeline so it could be used extensively in the concepting phase but if you've got a big ip that you're working on like i am for example i think you need to be a little bit more careful about like what the output is it needs to adhere to certain brand guidelines and you sort of have a art bible that you're kind of sticking to so there's there's some limitations but if it's a brand new ip and we're still kind of concepting i don't see why not um another potential application is like there are all these um needs for like meta art let's say you need like some sort of image as a backdrop for your ui like you're running some events or something and you need a meta art that just shows some soldiers on a battlefield you know like you could kind of quickly spin something up there probably save a lot of money from a production standpoint too yeah sometimes it's hard to encourage artists to use things other than the things they build themselves so for a long time i've loved the unity asset store it's got so many assets animations this kind of thing and it's great for getting something up and running quickly and often yes you know

very high quality but it but it's i think if you're an artist you generally soon build it yourself take some discipline to to say yes i could i could build it myself but instead i'm going to go to the easy route and pull something that maybe not is quite good as they feel they could have done themselves but you know so there's a bit of a cultural issue there in using others and generated in-house as well i think are you using in-house maria or not what can you say within hatch if we're using these programs no some people are using it to explore in the personal time and still it's still in uh just feeling feeling at stage and trying to understand its potential it's not officially being used for anything not that we're developing uh one thing that definitely excites me that matt um touched upon is for marketability testing and potentially for ua if you can very quickly create many

variants that are interesting to start give you some some direction as part of i don't know maybe market analysis competitive analysis before having an artist dedicated to exploring the direction that that costs yeah could be extremely interesting um i do think this might change like you're saying david might bring in a new type of role because usually you have data scientists who have nothing related to art and then you have artists and then you have tech artists who kind of go in between the engineering and the art um i think we might also see a kind of new role of a data scientist artist where as with that artist about 50 years ago who created his own model based on rules to to output art you could have an artist that knows how to do some machine learning um an ai rules base to aid this in in the process so like we are saying that if you have a design a design bible some guidelines that you

need to abide by i've seen some people claim that this is going to eliminate artists in their jobs maybe in 10 years i don't think so personally i think whatever you output at least i've never worked with any kind of ai that could function without humans at least uh i think it's called post oh no i lost i lost a phrase you were gonna sound amazing then i know um it's not it's like cleaning and cleaning up the data and the results but cleaning is not a pretty word it has a much fancier word escape what about you saying to me another time maria about the fact that the results presented aren't particularly ethically or culturally diverse is that an issue yes i've even noticed this in mid journey so it's just a known problem with any kind of machine learning if you use biased data to trainer it

will have a biased output and you can already see that in mid journey where someone had typed african american and latin or latinx and it had it was just outputting traditional stereotypes of what people with these backgrounds um look like and so this this is another reason why i think artists won't go away because i don't think we're ever going to reach a place where we can teach ai how to know the entire world and diversity and inclusion even within a company a single artist can't do that this is why you need people with different backgrounds and working together as a team and calling each other out to resolve problems and how we're doing representation so it sounds like you're suggesting that the artists in the future are going to be trying to correct their mistakes of the data set that have been looked at so draw ethically correct mexicans and african-americans et cetera in order to

correct the sample data or something well in in terms of uh diversity including also in terms of guidelines like matt was mentioning or taking something that's a baseline and bringing it up to standards to what the output is desired by the art director i i say i see yeah i've never seen any kind of ai or machine learning that didn't need a human intervention like maybe a listener can correct me maybe there is an example where a model out there is so advanced that it doesn't need any kind of human input but even when you're using the model for example with my journey when it outputs it gives you four options and then you choose one of the options and you can keep iterating it you can use different prompts i think maybe what will happen is that the original idea or the original concepts might come from a model and then it will go to the artist to take the exploration further it will

become part of ideation well here's a thought you watching that ilm show do you know this being shown industrial it's called light magic that disney show so it's it's chronic first of all you should see that second thing is it's a without putting too many spoilers about industrial like magic of course we made star wars and then you know went on to do many things in the effects department and there's a sort of again without trying to spoil it too much there was a point when it went from physical to digital and you know a lot of the people that really specialized in in a physical were now being replaced by digital like jurassic park area that kind of thing but you know has because those tools have become easier to build more art then has that decreased the quantity of artists no it's becoming you know debatably easier to make a greater quantity of art but it hasn't reduced the amount of artists it's probably increased the amount of artists because the amount of art that's been created that way is just so much larger so maybe we'll see something similar happen there

one thing i think we might see is um increasing specialization um i don't know you know how or where dolly and mid journey source their training data but presumably it's like the whole internet right yeah and so to your point earlier maria about you know needing human intervention you know perhaps we're going to see additional models that are more specialized um so let's say um this model is uh particularly good at generating props um that are i don't know fantasy style like fantasy art style or medieval or wild west or something like that maybe we even get to a point where you have um publishers that have their own like massive library of assets that they can pull from to kind of stay within uh brand guidelines or art viable it's like we don't have to go kind of concept a

bunch of new stuff we have a an entire set of training data from our you know 100 previous titles that we've released and we're just going to feed it into our own proprietary model so perhaps we'll see more specialized applications that are yes they do require human intervention but they're intentionally limited in scope so as not to you know pull in bias or to be very like hyper targeted at a specific use case or visual style that's okay that's a good idea yeah i agree yeah and since i i started doing little bold predictions and niko's style uh with the with the unity iron source uploading by the way you called it i call it yeah i know yes i'm wondering if i could tell you actually took your advice and listened to the podcast and thought you know i'm not going to go with um i would be very surprised in the next two three years unity either unity and or unreal have some kind of partnership

or acquire one of these texts checks to image and they do an integration in the game engine and whenever you're designing anything maybe it has a way like the sprite characters maybe there'll be a way to do um exploration of what it could look like and then it automatically rigs it up or if you're designing an environment and you need a banner you can just write something and it'll populate we see we've seen unity's strategy to do a lot of integration with workflows with artists so that they might be the first to at least do a partnership yeah i think i think again it's the rabbit that came out of the hole and the rabbit's not going to go back in it's being you're mixing your metaphors there everything yeah rabbits come out of the hats people go down rabbit holes but it doesn't matter you know i guess that's the merge difference we're the rabbits okay i actually i don't think that's a particularly bold prediction i have to say wow okay i think it's gonna happen like it just we're only talking about images right no i mean you're you're 100 right

that's what i'm trying to say yeah yeah um that we're only talking about ai generated images ai is going to change a lot of things yeah we'll go to the video guys we're gonna yeah video we're gonna have ai's writing their own code um in the not too distant future like i don't think it's crazy to say that there will be ai generated games entirely you know if you think about like how simple something like a hyper casual game is and you just feed a training data set of hyper casual games to a model and it starts putting out its own in unity unreal something like that i think that's totally within the realm of possibility i'm not comfortable with this future you describe matt everyone should start doing four day work weeks and start getting used to having more free time okay i'm comfortable i'm comfortable with that future cool all right well uh we'll carry on uh matt all right um so changing changing topics slightly uh so

very recently uh sony acquired a company called savage game studios um so you may know savage game studios as the studio that was founded by mishka kakov and a couple of others uh mishka of course being the founder of deconstructor of fun our friends over there so congratulations to them i just want to give a shout out to the other co-founders in advance if i'm butchering your names uh nad ajir he was ex of wargaming and gree and michael mcmanus ex of wargaming and kabam um so they were they required for um an undisclosed amount by sony just the other day and they are said to be working on uh i've lost my notes here a mobile i believe this is like mobile action game um and we'll come back to that in a minute but um you know they were they were started a couple years ago they had 4.4 million in seed funding from makers fund play

ventures a few others they're going to be a part of a newly formed playstation studios mobile division and i'm quoting here which will operate separately from the console business and focus on mobile titles using either new ip or existing playstation ip and just a quote from mishka so he said we made this deal because we believe that playstation studios leadership respects our vision for how we can best operate and succeed and because they too are not afraid to take chances all of that plus the ability to potentially tap into playstation's amazing catalog of ip and the fact that will benefit from the kind of support that only they can provide there are a number of um references in the articles i was reading about this uh story to tapping into playstation ip uh which i would love to get your thoughts on like what ip we think they might be working on before i turn that over to you both um i had previously heard that they were making a shooter game on mobile but all the articles i was reading just say

it's just a mobile action game so i don't know if that's changed um this is my this is my understanding i tend to follow this basically she was a shooter right yeah yeah yeah i tend to follow it closely working on a shooter myself so i'll be excited to see what they put together and if it remains a shooter or if it's just an action game but um yeah congrats to the team i think that's awesome um but this is brand new for sony and uh before well let's just talk about savage games for a moment like what do we think they're they're doing here do we have any guesses as to what the ip might be are they going to do a new ip are they going to sort of borrow a sony ip and put it on their action shooter mobile game i think sony would prioritize bringing their existing ips to mobile because one of their goals that they stated was that by 2025 they want half of their games to be on pc and mobile and they've started doing ports to pc

already so i would expect it's an existing ip and not something new i won't dare say what ip that could be what do you think matt i think you're thinking what are the options um i i don't have any strong leads but some of the options like if i'm thinking of a shooter last of us maybe is the best fit for that um could be horizon if it's like a bow and arrow shooter but the shooter could be a lot of things right like it could be a first person shooter it could be a top down brawl stars type shooter uh mishka did work at supercell i should say um you know it could be a lot of things we're just speculating here um it could be ratchet and clank so this is this is one of the first mobile games i would bet sony would bring to mobile here's something to consider is that let me just see when they got their funding because it feels like what a couple of years ago that they got their funding

yeah i think it was two three years ago yeah i'm looking at a um yeah okay so my point is that having raised 4.5 million dollars 4.4 million dollars and been around for two three years then presumably they have a game that exists you know and there's nothing soft launched right i haven't seen anything uh but the point is that uh they either will have had to have killed the game that they're working on in which case uh that seems like strange acquisition to anyway i don't know so they've either killed the game they're working on or they've adapted the game that they're working on or it's a brand new yp i can't you know if it was a brand new title i should say so it would be surprising to me if they've thrown away two three years of work to then just start working immediately on something else so maybe you know there's a i my guess would be a new ip that's right for mobile uh or an adapted one i suppose that's that's sort

of shoehorned in i don't know you make a good point about the timeline right so if they've been working for two to three years they probably have something built um but is it like in a stage where they can very easily tack on an ip i would think maybe not maybe it's already kind of fairly that would be a lot of rework right at least on the art side i would imagine and so maybe it's like they've got their first product uh which is a new ip and uh sony feels confident in the product what it's going to be and they're really investing in the next game which will be a sony ip so sony sunny mentioned that they were going to keep their console dev separate from mobile so it could also be that savage gaming studios is being onboarded to help build out that strategy because they might how who are you going to code dev with are you going to do any partnerships are going to do more acquisitions and they could bring the know-how on how developing on how to develop a

successful mobile game with free to play i was going to read this from this is when they got their funding announcement whenever that was a couple of years ago all the shoot this is mishka all of the shooter games since the start of battle royale boom in 2018 have focused on the competitive fast-paced gameplay we see there is an opening for games that offer an opportunity to play with others and have rewarding sessions without the high pressure of pvp environment what games are those i i just want to make a call to savage game studios and sony can you please bring destiny to mobile please can that be my wish great segue there there have been reports that there's a destiny mobile game no in the works yeah yeah no way it's uh yeah it's netease and bungie um now the i think the article i was reading

was like it was pulled from a linkedin post or something so take that you know with a grain of salt but um that is uh something i had thought about as well you know that's that's an obvious shooter right there bungie coming over to sony um yeah maybe it's maybe it's your time maria well all right and can i make another point overall though isn't the bigger news story that playstation are going jumping in with both feet well actually i think matt you have a better understanding than i do have sony made this size of play into mobile previously i haven't been keeping track i don't think so so this is really the first plate say okay we're dedicating a new vertical in our games business which is mobile and as you said marie it's not going to plug into shoehay or you know however that works and instead it's going to be its own thing over here and and that you know is moving sony uh computer entertainment into uh away from being exclusively about

playstation and i guess they do some pc but you know into mobile now and yeah i guess the last right but but you know very late play into mobile i suppose that if you're in the games business that you can only you know all of these companies ea activision and finally you can only ignore mobile for so long if it feels like a clear play in terms of the business strategy you need to increase growth console wars there's there's only so much you can do to improve hardware what are you going to do next open up new markets new markets or new new platforms mobile and pc that were widely untapped by by sony i remember having a conversation uh about hang on a second what was that microsoft activision with you guys on this podcast i think and and saying hey i wonder whether or not uh hang on a second activision is still going to be putting out their playstation titles now they're acquired by microsoft i remember you saying to me

matt well of course yeah you know it's all about just making money from men entertain games ip now and so maybe and to me that's like a bit more old school where i think there's a clear link between the hardware and the and the software and so the idea that they wouldn't be exclusive to those platforms is surprising but maybe it's just that's just the way things are now you just make the most of whatever uh gaming ip that you have regardless about what platform it's going to run on is that it possibly i mean i think it's interesting to compare this uh sony move to microsoft on one hand as the other console and nintendo as the other hardware maker and how they've both approached mobile microsoft i get the impression their mobile approach is like through the cloud streaming and they're not really doing like a dedicated mobile gaming free to play approach maybe i'm wrong um uh and nintendo have taken the opposite approach which is i think going to be a little bit more similar to what sony is doing

um although i don't think nintendo has dedicated mobile studios i think they work with others and they kind of like co-develop so yeah it's just an interesting comparison between the three um that's really what's your point about sorry go ahead marie no sorry i just want to say there's a really good point about xbox in the comparison sorry carry on oh that's okay i was gonna say um uh um lost my train of thought oh yeah david you were saying it was um their first kind of uh foray into mobile and you're right i think it is they have done some mobile games through their crunchyroll division and they have like a couple i was looking on one of the data providers yesterday as i was doing my research and um they have a couple of games but nothing you know chart topping noteworthy they have a couple team battlers and things like that but yeah this is definitely like a a big first step albeit a late one but it's the first step well and and mobile games largely rely on their live games they

rely on live content and that know-how and that i think that plays even more into the bungie because the acquisition of sony with bungie was to gain that knowledge that bungie has from you know having two very successful live games with destiny and destiny 2. so bringing that then into mobile that would be amazing one thing i thought was interesting and maybe this will be my my last point on this story is is that point about bungie um i see parallels working at ea to respawn um you know bungie is not a part of the mobile division as far as i understand it at sony this is a brand new thing that savage game studios is kind of leading up um ea acquired respawn and respawn is kind of its own thing but they also do apex mobile which is a mobile game but it's like separate from ea mobile kind of um so i'm sort of drawing parallels there maybe i'm completely off base and that's just my bias as an ea employee but um it'll be interesting it's not like good or bad it's just an observation do you exchange knowledge

absolutely certainly i do working on a shooter i have i have relatively frequent contact with the folks at respawn but that is always a challenge to be clear is like getting out of your silo and reaching out and sharing learnings with other studios not just at ea at all large organizations um you know when i was in business school i did a consulting project with sony not on games but on their animation department and that was some of the feedback i got was that they tend to be like now granted this was a few years back but they tend to be a very siloed organization in that animation only talks to animation so many pictures only talk to so many pictures playstation only talks to playstation and so on and so forth so bridging those gaps and sharing learnings is a challenge for any large organization yeah on on challenges for large organizations should we go to david's topic all right yeah okay so i i saw a couple of things announced at

uh at gamescom you know more traditional games event i suppose and there was you know i'm wondering if it was the first uh wave of aaa games that use blockchain and actually first of all i'm going to make a bit of a definition point of definition here you know as i as you know i'm working in this field myself and uh i've sort of kind of conclusion that there's going to be games that use blockchain like for instance they might store their digital assets that you buy on a blockchain instead of in the game and then there's also let's call them blockchain games that a new kind of games that you know people are figuring out now now there's a couple of games that were announced um at gamescom the first one was called off the grid a treble a console game by neil blomkamp he's the guy behind district nine and i think a lot of gamers are excited that he's sort of what that guy would create and uh from the trailers and all the sizzle it

looked like it was going to be something exciting it looks like it is going to be something exciting and i think somewhere i think somebody spotted a job ad for the company that said hey we're hiring for people to understand smart contracts and that sort of uh raise the alert i suppose see i'm doing it now anyway the other one is everywhere so everywhere is a game that leslie benzie's studio is building and this you know i know a little bit about that development i know it's enormous you know leslie is producing behind gta titles and split off from the houses a little while ago and has been building this enormous game and and again you know is in both cases i think that what they're saying is that the digital assets are being uh held as nfts i.e you own them as nfts rather than being held within the game itself and then you know you know they haven't said a lot more than that but i suppose uh first of all that's for me i think the first time that real

triple a and obviously ubisoft you know dabbled a little bit but here this is a aaa game that's brand new brand new yp hundreds of millions of dollars probably to create and um and using nfts in some way there and so that's notable and then the other thing that's notable but not noticeable i suppose is the way that the press really jumped on that as being the a reason to crucify the game overall so i think interesting that gamers and the gaming press seem really excited about those games until it became it seemed that nfts were going to be used in some way and um you know i suppose to me uh i suppose that's it that i've seen negative press reaction and at least within the vocal gamers have also added comments to say right i was i thought this game was going to be amazing but now i've heard it has nfts in it then i'm never going to touch it and uh it's

a reminder to me i suppose the uh what i i've always thought should be a good thing for gamers if done right like you own those things that you buy and are free to buy and um sell with whoever the second-hand market that's always seemed like a good thing not a bad thing but it's a reminder to me that even when it's been handled quite carefully it's still the kiss of death for triple a games and and i suppose the first question is to you guys is um you know when i read the i read a gi docs piece and a eurogamer piece on these games and both were really i had to read them twice to see hang on is this a opinion piece or is it is it i was going to to actually lean on that yeah because i mean they're really fanning the flames saying like here's reasons you should hate this game and uh and i don't know you know that's doesn't feel like news anymore starting to feel a bit like opinion well you know

lots of things there what do you think is going on guys you go matt well so i would start with like what is the definition of aaa and why does that make it any oh wow oh he went higher up okay yeah david oh why is it any different i suppose that uh okay so there's a a category of games that represents about what would be say about a third of the games industry by revenue and uh it seems like using nfts to attract digital ownership in those games is a great use case of the blockchain but um uh games to date you know those games today haven't used it and so this is uh i i guess why significant is that maybe a third of the gaming market by revenue has started to introduce nfts into you know that category

yeah i mean i think of aaa in terms of like production quality and and scale and um maybe maybe it's just like aaa is the closest thing to the traditional pc console era of games that this sort of uh backlash tends to come from like the same backlash that we got the free-to-play mobile games yeah which until the last maybe three-ish five-ish years mobile games also did not really have aaa quality um games now they do i would argue but um yeah to me it's it's just like a benchmark for quality and polish and maybe scope but it doesn't it doesn't touch on business model or technology so much and so to me it's like the triple the aaa aspect is more feeding into the backlash than it is to anything else like i think you can apply

blockchain technologies to single a games indie games like it doesn't really make a difference in in my opinion it's it's more about like how you use it um but i i think this triple a and and you know you could say like attaching big names like neil blomkamp leslie benzies to these games that lends it more credence as a quote aaa title um so you know i can see that but i think that's where the the backlash comes from if if i had to take a quick read on this is like um you know the pc console crowd they don't want nfts in their games and these are games that they would excuse me otherwise be excited about because of their polish and scope and whatnot and the big names attached to them that they're suddenly i guess disappointed i might disagree a tiny bit um please i i think triple a games are still seen as

the pinnacle the enshrined protection of what a game experience is you have this super polished experience you have to own a console you play it at home it's um it's a different setting from playing a mobile game and it's a premium experience where you pay a hefty price and then that experience is protected and we're still seeing a lot of backlash of premium games that then have free to play elements in them i think exactly because of these reasons because it's no longer a protected experience that you that you're having and because of the revenue that they generate and the different kind of experience i think seeing i think seeing blockchain being used in aaa games would solidify blockchain as a used technology with more how do you call it reputation

legitimacy legitimacy that's the word then being used for example in mobile because mobile still has a a lot of um i can't remember the word in english a judgment if you play mobile games or if you make mobile games it's still seen as inferior is still seen as um not as premium as as console and so i think i think that psychological factor of bringing legitimacy is still is still important with triple a i i would uh push back a little bit in the sense that like i i see that as like a very western point of view i don't disagree by the way yeah but like there's a whole part of the world that just like never had the console pc generation they went straight to mobile and so you and i might think that like consoles are kind of the pinnacle uh or pcs or the pinnacle of gaming experiences that's based on our history with games and having played them on pc and console as as as kids and we were sort of first experiencing games i developed mobile games so i don't

agree with whatever i just said um i i don't i don't agree that they're less but i can't like that i think that is a present mindset in the western games market and i was gonna say do you think that uh it seems to be a worse reaction than if either of those games said hey we're going to have iaps in this game yes yeah it's still at an even earlier stage because it's been a few years since gamers have started to see free-to-play elements in games and you have aaa console games that are free to play um like destiny and warframe fortnite so there is i think that the public has had time to become more accustomed to seeing that but blockchain is new new and so the backlash will be even harsher and and the i think man made this point that there was there was any detail the implementation so if and i don't know one way or the other

but if these games genuinely just use the blockchain for digital ownerships of things that people buy in a game then that's genuinely i can't think how it isn't that's a generally better model than an existing model where the items that you own are trapped on a server that you you know can do limited things with so that i would think is a a better implementation than the current one we have but i don't know what implementation they're planning why are you smiling maria because i was gonna say is it is it really i i think that is what you ask it has still too much friction and too many dangers because if it's locked in a server i have some guarantee that whatever i pay i'll get no friction i can use it immediately with like the blockchain i think yeah i think you're right maybe in five years time but right now there's so much friction and you have to create a wallet and then if you link your wallet to the wrong place you can lose something you can

lose something that you own so it's ownership but risky risky friction yeah so okay so in principle uh yes david but in practice no david because you know wallets and the ux surrounding them are horrific right now and then if you want to trade you have to currently i think generally you have to go to a marketplace and you can't even do it in game and yeah and then i i whenever i open openc i just see a lot of bad quality stuff sold there and then that immediately just tanks my experience yeah yeah i do want to touch upon the journalism aspect because i have seen on multiple occasions official sources of news stating an article as being news and not an opinion piece and then they show a lot of personal opinions about blockchain

i think news industry we have to protect it it's super important to be impartial and be have some kind of assurance that investigation has been done and it's factual contrary to a lot of social media where everyone can be an expert if you say something loud enough and i i i feel that this is affecting the legitimacy of the news even further you can report something about this and just put your personal opinion on it about how horrible it is yeah i mean it's a problem with media in general perhaps but it's not a bad commercial strategy to write content that chimes with the people audience that's your audience right so you're not sure those uh i don't like it i think it's a real shame i don't think it should be the case but you could say the same with fox news or you know oh yeah definitely this is a much wider conversation than here yeah and you know i i like gamer network you know i like those sites generally um

it's interesting to me that they who generally i think take a quite careful about their editorial policy uh just letting it all hang out when it comes to blockchain it's like hey you hate it we hate it let's talk about how much we hate it and you know i don't know if i don't know if that's cool or not it certainly doesn't help you know i i genuinely think that you know certain things we're doing and i see lots of my peers doing are doing generally new and interesting things in the games industry but a barrier that we're going to have to get over at some point if we're to reach wider market is say i know that this is your opinion on that and yes that has been true to some extent but this is something different there isn't environmental issue it's not scammy this is a new kind of game that happens to use blockchain but that feels like an uphill battle right now this is why i think it's important for aaa games to start integrating these blockchain elements i think it will also push the innovation to have the frictionless experience for for players

and if anyone can do it i believe in neil blackham because districts this wait what was it long camp right blancamp because both district nine and sharpie their movies are very different they go against the grain of what cinema is and they have respect of those gamers you're right so so it's a shame that and the other thing that stuck in my vote a little bit is when somebody saw that job ad and say hang on a minute wait a minute what's going on here then there was a very apologist uh response from that developer saying well hey hey wait a minute don't worry yeah we're not we're just doing some experiments and you know we're cool and it was and it was technically inaccurate as well oh yeah i think maybe they should have prepared their response a bit better yes i knew they could have prepared for that they i mean and they could have done right they could have predicted that response so what was inaccurate is

that they claimed they were developing the game on unreal and so that meant they weren't going to be using blockchain it was all on unreal unreal and blockchain can work together and reel is just a game engine i know someone in the pr department wrote that i think potentially yeah yeah yeah i don't know uh it's uh the battle is gonna go on for some time longer uh generally my opinion on this is like there's talking the talk and walking the walk right i can i can you know personally describe how i think we're making a different kind of game it's not scammy and but ultimately the only way to really prove it is to put a game out there and see what people think of it well matt is a great reporter of web3 games crypto games with an impersonal product view all right i need to uh reporter all right we'll wrap it up um

if you want to join the discussion you can find us on the navic discord thank you for listening and we'll be here next week bye everyone [Music] you