AI Integration, Psychological Insights & Market Trends with Founders of Solsten

[Music] this podcast is brought to you by apps flyer in today's Digital World understanding your app's Journey from Discovery to download is more than just insightful it's essential enter apps flyer the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar work smarter with apps flyer that's your new reality dive deep into Data driven sites that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they interact with your app app sler where your app's potential meets performance welcome welcome welcome everybody to the deconstructor of fun podcast I'm the host and you're the guest I got two guests today which is rare first time two guests in the same room Joe sheepy CEO Solon Bastian Bergman COO of Solon welcome thank you Mishka than for having

so this is a surprise podcast I didn't know that I was doing a podcast but we were doing a podcast and uh we got three very interesting topics we're going to talk about where are we as a market today and I think that's an interesting topic to cover with the two of you because you work with the biggest Publishers in the world and some of the upand cominging Publishers on all the platforms whether it's mobile whether it's PC whether it's console you're working them or whether it's pelaton that's the uh that we can say that client so even like gamification platforms if if you will uh then I wanted to talk about new game development it's a huge thing um it's huge thing because it's a huge problem so everybody's talking about how they going to get their new games out with all the changes that we're going to discuss and it would be very interesting to hear how your clients have been able to do that because you have a very unique approach and more of a traditional approach which is like everything new is well forgotten and then then you're like the that that

stuff and then uh I wanted to end up with something highflying which is uh which is AI you're like what no Ai Ai and and that's uh that's that's again one of those topics that you're one of the first platforms that used AI before it was a buzzword to raise money yep so it would be very interesting how you've been using Ai and how some of your clients have been using Ai and where do you see AI being utilized in the future but let's go in where are with the uh the market cycle I'll just say three things that I I see affecting quite heavily one is interest rates which leads to higher level of well in interest rates due to the higher level of inflation and so when you have higher interest rates you have less money less Capital being available and that of course leads to things like investment freezes that we see a lot of startups having trouble raising more money and they're usually sometimes a mid-development they haven't gotten on

the green we see companies cutting down their costs because money has a price and the second thing is especially on the mobile market we see privacy changes affecting the increase of CPI and the well through the limitations of targeting and of course that increase of CPI leads to some of the genres being destroyed like hyper casual or the genres mainly or the studios being transformed because now we're talking about hybrid hybrid casual and we're talking about hybrid casual just because they can't make enough money from ads to justify the installs they so they're increasing their retention so that they can monetize more so they can put in in that purchases that's essentially it that's the whole business model change but where are we in the market cycle you know from your perspective as a as a partner for for the for the biggest and the up incoming Studios do you want to start this one oh let's you start okay I think you know um part of it is is something that i' I've

never heard game companies talk about before but you hear companies talk about it all the time outside of games uh and it's this word change management and I think that you know when we when we're successful and we have a boom and we get reinforced by certain behaviors so tracking and targeting is something that the gaming industry got better at than any other industry hands down um and they had a lot of success at that you know it got to the point where over 70% of apps in the App Store that were making money were games like that's how good we got at that as an industry um the other thing is the amount of games um you know there was this period of time where I always used the merge dragons joke because it's like merge games are popular dragons are popular let's make merge dragons and all of a sudden you're making 100 million dollar um that was a reality just a few years ago you could go and feel in gaps in the market and say like these things weren't there that's done now like our industry's been so good and successful at filling out the market with content that now you

know Netflix talks about like you know content problems and discoverability issues like and it's really not discoverability that's the problem it's resonance it's not that oh like uh I watched I don't know Frozen on Disney plus and now you should watch Frozen 2 um or now I want to find something similar to Frozen 2 it's at that time when you need to watch a movie and you're sitting down with the people around you what actually is going to resonate with you and I think there's there's that aspect so there's the market aspect and then there's also the thing that people forget that economics are psychological they're not you know it's the reason modern economics started in 1970s and if you look at at what we do today there's a reason why we can't predict what's going to happen because of human beings and how how we behave and we behave in in very interesting ways and I think a lot of game companies miss the fact that if we look preco um the boom that happen happened where

people were playing games all the time they're inside what that did was it just completely raised the bar on experiential expectations so the you know the example I give is like everybody's always you know they had McDonald's they love McDonald's and now it's like they've had Michelin star restaurants and then they have McDonald's again they're like didn't taste like it did when I was a kid you know and they're like it's so much it's like you put that Michelin star restaurant though like that's actually real food you know I'm a foodie now I know what food is well they're the same with games you know they're they're going into games and we measure this stuff across everything from hybrid you know casual to uh uh MMOs like you kind of name the gamut of companies that solsten works with it's all over the place and one thing we've seen is focused attention has actually gone down over the last two years so what's happening and you can actually see this trend outside of gaming too engagement rates are going down year-over-year so attention used to be the the currency of

Engagement you know social media Tik Tok that new thing that new event that new stuff and so liveops teams were able to rely on a lot of that now you you have to rely on more longterm things like friendships bonding interesting experiences people can have story narrative and these are things that the game industry wasn't even really like it depending on who you you know if you into a Japanese developer like oh yeah we do narrative but yeah you you have seven-year game development Cycles like not your average company can think in that that way so that's been I think one of the major changes and we haven't um the the industry still thinks that McDonald's Works they're still working off of the psychological expectations of preco but they're not realizing this is another data point that we see um the majority of Gamers now because they've they've played a bunch of games um levels of long-term orientation are going up so when they play a new game they're like they're trying it to say is this something I can sink my teeth into so your day one to day seven retention

metrics that you used to think were really important don't matter as much now because they're willing to play till day s to see if they can actually sink their teeth into that world because they've already been burned a couple times where they've played games and like we're seeing Gamers like research actual Studios now they're going out beyond the IP of the game like can we is this developer gonna you know in two years from now can I talk to the manager yeah so I yeah it seems like it's it's um I think what you're you're you're speaking to you combined the fact that you know all these barriers of actually getting something in front of a person and having it work and resonate with them is is much higher across the board with the fact that you know Mishka you spoke to Rising interest rates someone took the punch bowl away that's effectively what happened the last you know during covid um access to free money was great while it was free we all knew that that wasn't going to last so the part is over to an extent and to a degree I I mean it's a personal opinion

I actually think it's healthy because it forces people to be way more conscientious with the money that they have because it's harder to get the capital so you have to make sure it lasts longer and make really sound business decisions with it so we went from this world where anybody everyone and their mother wanted to make a video game like like I'm 18 I'm wherever I've have no experience I'm going to make a game here's 5 million go for it like take my money because you're making a game now we're in this different reality where money has a price again you have much higher barriers much higher expectations that you actually have to meet ideally you know exceed a little bit on the consumer side so that you know we we were in U this this quote really stuck with me um we were at an event one of our investors a couple couple weeks ago in uh in in Vegas at the summit and we're the there's a round table and the topic was launching launching games actually launching games in 2024 not building launching and uh I was at this table with 30 executives from you know Leslie was there the guy

that made Grand Theft Auto and Raph CER was there too he's one of the first people at Ultima Online and the the prompter for the round table was so what's changed and everyone's waiting and looking at each other and Raph raises his hand and everyone pauses because Raph has probably something important to say and he goes for me what's changed when I start a new game day one I think about the business model and this is a guy who self- admittedly at that Roundtable his whole life he's like I've always wanted to build games because I was was passionate about the project and my creativity took me there that was my my guide my whole career and he's like but I can't operate off of that anymore because the reality is yes I need to have that passion to put in my best work but I got to put food on the table too so we should use that quote for deconstructor of fun there you go the the whole thing the business model for games uh shout out to Rav cooster yeah Legend um you've heard of heroic Labs by now and we keep talking about them because in day's mature Market you need every

Edge to be successful rather than spending those precious company dollars on building game Tech focus on building your game and shipping it get into your players hands faster and grow your community heroic Labs is Battle tested partner and friend of the podcast their Tech enables you to be flexible creative and scale for Success heroic Labs has your Tech stack covered whether you're looking for a worldclass backend game server an amazing game development framework Fantastic live Ops to wiing all more reliable Mass scaleability heroic Labs has solutions for all of these challenges and it's not just us a deconstructor of fun praising heroic laabs the company works with some of the world's biggest Publishers on many of the Beloved games focus on your game save a big chunk of cheese and avoid Tech risks with heroic [Music] laps this podcast is brought to you by data AI now you're asking didn't they get acquired by sensor Tower they did

and that's awesome here's why whether you loved using data. a or sensor Tower the combined company will offer customers even stronger and more detailed insights on the full Digital customer Journey exciting times lie ahead as sensor Tower and data Jo enforces go to data. a or sensor to.com and get on board with undeniably the best data partner in the business now back to the episode okay I picked up three pretty big things so one is marketability so I think marketability was a big topic for the last three four years where it was almost the key metric like what is your IPM what is your CPI what is your Ro ass and basically that made or broke the game like everything involved the around marketability but with these changes especially the Privacy changes that metric is not the one metric to rule them all anymore so now we're going a step back to like hey actually the product has to be pretty good as well

like you can't just Market something and get people cheap monetize them early on sayara next one in and um McDonald's model uh but um and then the second part was the the economical changes so well not economical but more in the industry so I said the bar has been raised and that has been happening in the games industry all the time though with the changes the marketability I don't think it raised the bar on the product it raised the bar on your marketing ability your data abilities but it it we haven't had the focus on the product side as much as it's now back on Y and the one and this the third part that you mentioned was the attention the decrease in attention that's an interesting part is that like uh across the board with all consumers like people just can't read books anymore yep yeah there's literally a study showing like with even kids um they they gave them uh laptops uh and and um or iPads and they had them study for school and iPads versus

studying in the books and even the bad students who read the books perform better on the test than the good students who read from iPads so the thing about human beings we're incredibly adaptable So neurologically speaking when you spend time on a device like your glucose runs out if you look at focused attention your glucose runs out of your brain in about 20 minutes of focused attention so think about surgeons for example like that's focused attention gluc glucose the brain yeah hopefully glucose and the brain is expensive organ so your your body is always trying to save the energy from from the brain and so what our brains have learn to do as we've gotten more content more news feeds as social media has gotten better at trying to control and command Attention our brains have also adapted and got smarter to not take in what's there and reduce Focus attention when we're on digital platforms and digital devices and and how do do how do developers basically tackle this I mean

decreasing attention is is really dangerous like as as a species for us well and and that's and it's only applied to digital platforms okay so so our brains have learned that if we're going to be on a digital platform by the end of the day if we have the same focused attention that we had when we were playing Oregon Trail back in the day and kids or whatever like it's just it's the the brain has learned to to recognize this is you know a device and and my level of attention needs decrease to preserve glucose in my brain so that when I go to bed at night I'm I'm happier and things like that too like we're adapting to the world we're in you know a lot of people have this idea that like well cavemen did this it's like well they were cavemen like yes we're the same species we were 200,000 years ago but we're also really different in a lot of ways too like epigenetics like we change so given that um you know I think what's interesting is like there's this thing called the biophilia effect for example so a book it's called your brain on nature written by medical doctors a

lot of really cool studies on that but if you have like for example nature in your game and and real nature that's one way to get increased levels of focused attention because when you're in nature the brain feels safe especially water there's a reason why you can't walk anywhere in Disneyland without hearing or seeing water because we feel safe when we're around water so there's ways to to increase focused attention by reducing the cognitive load of these experiences another is by actually understanding the value and person ality and motivational framework of the person so think about you know when people say I'm like an extroverted introvert what do you mean well what they mean is that when they're around their friends they feel like they get energy when they're not around their friends or at like a new event and it's a bunch of strangers they're like that was exhausting for me well why why was the friend part not exhausting lower cognitive load brains using less glucose why because you have value alignment so when you go into a room and like the three of us have some vales I know that you know are aligned

on you know we discussed those yeah yeah and and what that does is it reduces your brains load to use glucose so if you design your game like so for example we were talking about like NFL Rivals that game if you look at that audience um one of the interesting things about people that like the NFL in general one of their top values is leadership you know and so is it because you know do people like Tom Brady and this do they you know did they help increase that value or do they you know people that have that value they're attracted to games like football because there's a quarterback and there's a clear sort of leader of the group it's a chicken and egg problem doesn't matter but if you think if that's a strong value for you and if if you know that about your gaming audience and you can design to those values because people spend money and time on what they value and from a cognitive perspective it's very easy for us to interact with what we value so when you understand the values of your audience you can reduce cognitive load increase Focus attention so what's

transitioning is and this happens to any industry that gets hyper competitive so think of like um uh tailor in New York you know if if back in the day when it was you know a lot of people go why are American shirts so you know Americans wear shirts and all like bulky it's like what's wrong with you guys it's like well Europeans didn't have as much money back in the day so you would make shirts tailored to begin with when America was wealthy you didn't you wouldn't got that thing tailored and then America kind of got off the rocker a little bit and everyone just thought you buy these boxy shirts and then you filled them up and then you fill them up and fill them in and and the the thing is though so when things get really competitive you were tailor back then you wanted to be the best tailor what were you going to do you were going to understand your customer and audience like better than the other tailor like if I know John and this is what John like he's a politician and this is what he does for work this is what he values this is who he is these are favorite colors I'm going to

crush all the other tailor and the thing is we've had such a blue ocean in this gaming industry to go in like create and be creative where like you could you could you even look at some fashion from like the 1800s you're like people wore that it's like yeah cuz some creative created something and there just wasn't that many other options and that made them look different than the peasants or something like that well now people have so many options in games just like if you look at any industry that booms so so really if you want to reduce cognitive load and increase Focus attention one of the best ways to do it is to build a world that is is in that person's reality so to speak to an extent um and so and that's what a lot of game companies don't do you know they're like we use ble types or we made up personas or we um uh the behavioral one's the funniest one like you know we use I'm not going to name the names of the companies but um you know these are completionists or these are adventurers it's like that's not who they are you

you looked at behavioral categories in your game like we're in this space right now it's not like we're podcasters like that's not who you are it's something you do and what you talk about and what you do in that is related to your personality your values your cognition all these other things that are uniquely you um and so by focusing on those things you can actually create an experience that's interesting can you go to like a concrete example I know you work with um Mainframe so that's like on um out of Iceland and Helsinki and and now Paris as well it's one of those like big upand cominging MMOs very rare for a startup to do an MMO but um but I think those are the type of games where understanding your audience is very important so I know you work with them I would like to have like a concrete example of how do you find that value alignment and how what features what work does it help to decrease that cognitive load to allow players to to get into such a big game yeah so I I can

speak to two specific things and I'll start on I'll start actually with a marketing and brand positioning example because that's where it all starts like how do we actually communicate to players out there to differentiate ourselves and and like create that promise or show that promise that's going to resonate with the right people that we want to bring in um if you I don't know if you've seen the the Gameplay trailer that they watch I saw it all the way from the first seed deck so when you when you watch that trailer and you get to the outro screen I forget the exact vering but wording but it's something along the lines of a place where you can build a home that didn't happen by accident when you actually they and we've been working with them for three years from literally the beginning through from the first seed deck from the first Seck the dragon fight and everything exactly so when you look at they they they dissected the market in two broader categories so to speak MMOs sandbox RPGs and trying to find where's the overlap between those

where Eve meets valheim and we're trying to carve out that unique space for us that was drastically oversimplifying but that was kind of whatas to understand he meets valheim that's a good pitch be like got it there you go so you're welcome and um when you when you when we started to focus in on what is the the two three most interesting most valuable personas in that entire space one of the things that was consistent across those three different groups was they were all very high in a from a percentile perspective compared to the rest of the gaming population in lacking purpose and seeking purpose in life and really valuing so they were really after they they needed that anchor in life they needed that meaning they were looking for that purpose so we were we were talking to the team about that and um the spe the marketing team which is that's the team that's based in Paris um Eric Eric's leading that group's phenomenal team and they took that and we started having these conversations you go well what's more fundamentally

human in terms of giving a human being purpose than the idea of a home your in group your your tribe just the word home exactly so that's where all of the they have four core brand pillars every single one directly aligns with a core psychological attribute of those of the core personas in that market that they are after that they designed to and it's no coincidence that their Early Access group has it's close to like 185,000 people registered for that game and over 70% of them we actually did short assessments called a typing tool it's effectively a subset of the big psychological assessment that we run that allows us to understand how do these people line up with the personas that you've been trying to build and design to this whole time it's it's like um a Harry Potter Sorting Hat for any audience so you can you know have your Market audience and then we can put our Sorting Hat in there and know hey yeah yeah are these and are these even a part

of exact the valheim meets Eve meets you know exactly and um I think it's just over just over 70% of the 185,000 people perfectly match to the one absolute ideal Persona that they're after so that's where they just did their I think they just did their open Alpha was trending I think number seven on Twitch or something like it's and the reviews are really really good and there's gravitational pull towards what they've created and that initial like very organic uptick in the reviews that are coming out from broader you know streamers and players that are playing it it's not a coincidence that people are liking it because it was that whole thought process was so anchored in this is exactly the person that we making it for to your point they designed to those very specific core values from pretty much day one yeah so from the first time user experience and it's really a blended experience from trailer to marketing to your fouille it it should a journey and you're taking that person

through a journey based on who they are and that's what we call resonance you know and that's that's what the you know outside you know people talk about relevance like relevance doesn't work you know you can you can go to Amazon you go on Instagram you can learn about relevance all day like oh you just did this do you want to buy this I just I literally just bought that or I just did that like I don't need you know I just had that experience that's relevance resonance is highly dependent on understanding the person like you can't have a dinner with your spouse or your best friend that's like wow like I would love to do that again without understanding who they are you can't you just fundamentally can't do it and so you know if we look at game designers today you know there was this world of like I'm a genius I'm a creative genius um I call them like Moses designers because they go to the burning bush and whatever they did at the burning bush it's their ritual they bring the design document here's the tablets yeah and let's do this and it's like you know I used to um ski uh a lot professionally

and um when you go off like a big Cliff it's kind of like the same thing it's like you know but you can you can probe the snow before you do it you can look at the depth you can do this well the last four years we've had people just jumping off cliffs you know we got this and then it's like it's almost like we looked at it as a consequence of the industry like oh games just fail MH and and the realiz the reality now is back to our first conversation on economics Capital games can't just fail anymore it's like I always would look at like these creative teams I'm like there's two massive casualties happen one is the loss of creativity like you guys are some of the most brilliant imaginative creative people in the world and you just spent three years to five years of your life and you just threw it down the toilet I'm sure everyone learned some stuff but from a societal perspective that sucks like we your art your creativity could actually been going into the world um and then from a business perspective I think what's interesting too is we lived in this world before where and and I think you

know you brought this up related to the the Mainframe earlier where you know you had a buddy who was like you know I played it and it just didn't it it wasn't enough for me to keep coming back it wasn't for me well good um that's part of why we use these like typing tools is we literally had an executive at a game company who did it and he was the Persona that only had a market size of a million people from so he was in the market for the game but he's like oh I play all these games and he was like this was a really good head check for me because I read through the traits of that Persona was like yeah this is me and he's like so when I'm giving my thoughts and opinions on the game I'm literally pushing our game into a smaller Market segment and it's like think about it you're the CEO of of a game company and you've been really successful how many people in the world are there like you and so when you look at you know for them knowing hey we're designing to our audience to the to the the group of people that this is going to resonate with and I think that's

happened a lot where um Executives who have been successful in some extent come in and say well you know I don't I don't like this um this mirror and I don't like this um you know driving wheel and I don't like this car seat and it's like yeah but it's a Honda it's like do you buy Hondas do you like Hondas they're like No And it's well well then your opinions don't matter you you know and so I think that part um is a really important aspect of this so when we look at that Journey from day one it's not about does it reson it maybe it's not for you um but does it resonate with the the people that are part of the the biggest part of the market that have the biggest opportunity that's there and the answer with you know what they're doing and what we're able to see from the data like when we do play testing with them we can see the different personas from the play test so we can see like hey um you know Persona 3 like usability was

like it was it was okay for them but Persona like one and two it was great for example uh and Persona one and two are the biggest part of your market with the highest engagement with that that's your so in the past like back when I was at Big Fish we do play testing and we go hey this feature worked really well for some people but not really well for others so it was okay when in reality it might have actually been a really good feature because it worked really well for our deal customer profile but not for our non and so yeah it's I think it's pretty interesting those yeah I can just before I forget my point so uh that's an interesting thing that you mentioned with the resonance and then you talk about audience size and probably audience value as well because a lot of the times when I talk to Executives now with all the changes in the privacy or privacy I get lost with which way to pronounce this anymore um but with all those changes is they're talking about that we need to make a game that is more

fitting for a broader audience yeah and what you're saying is like no this dumbest thing you can do you still need to make a game for a specific Audience Show me one company that's done the broader audience thing show me one game that has succeeded doing that yeah well they they do anecdotal examples of like well Candy Crush is played by millions and millions of people that's the dumbest ever like Candy Crush was made for Facebook mobile players in a really Niche space if you look at fortnite fortnite was so Niche when it started and if you know um a friend who is a game designer at Nintendo he used this example for me a while he's like made a ton of games in his career he said we we get this like instinct we see this big fire and all these people are standing around this big fire and we're like we want to go by that fire too cuz that's where we'll get heat and warmth only to realize when we get there that we're standing quite far away from the fire because there's a crowd there so what's the best thing to do well go figure out where to make your own little

fire and before you know it there's going to be a crowd and then people start coming around and all of a sudden like people are copying you and so you know and that's the whole the whole point is the change management like the psychology of what people were reinforced to do to win for the last 5 years is not correct anymore it's and if and there still might be one or two people that still like squeak through it's like you know Indiana Jones when like the doors closing they're like but it worked for them you know cuz you want to reinforce your own biases um and our brain is built off of survival so if you have like high dopamine experiences and you get a lot of money like you were a part of that Candy Crush team or you were a part of and then now you go and your brain is wired towards survival so you your brain is literally wired to think that you should keep doing that yeah and I think it's just an important point to raise because that's what I've been hearing like the two things that I've been hearing from Executives like well we just need to make games that that are appealing for broad audiences

no more Niche and then the second one because we can't Target Niche and the second one is um let's just bring an IP let's just slap it on top of it that that way we can get the audience and then we lower the bar and they're more accepting in the beginning of the game so we get get them into the game and we've I've heard Executives say that too and what they don't realize if they actually wrote out those two sentences they wouldn't they would realize they're directly contradicting each other and what's so what what's cool about IP is when you have good IP you've actually pre-established a value connection so let's take for example Monopoly like we we work with Monopoly Solitaire that was one of the early games where they came to us like hey we make solit were one of the biggest soliter games like we're trying to find IP fits um Monopoly was the second highest resonating IP um with people that play solitire and that was an IP they had access to well if few and and so when we say resonating like these are people that have said out of all the

IPS in the world Monopoly is one of my top three so these are like Monopoly people um if you play Monopoly and you've been playing Monopoly for a long time there's a value set that is in Monopoly that you resonate with so it goes back to our cognitive load and focused attention perspective like think of a brand that you really like if you see it you're going to look over at it you're going to be and why like um so like if I think of brands that I love like I love DPS skis I have a value connection that is both from a brand perspective and experiential and I'm not being paid by them or anything I I don't think many who listen to this know even what you're talking about they're great that's good they're great they're great skis but the the point is like and so that's that's a perfect example most people who would hear that they're going to feel nothing from it when I when I hear that I think of powder I think of all the great times I've had in the snow I think of what they feel like compared to other skis and then the values

associated with that freedom creativity athleticism all these things that are important to me and and my life and the vitality and the vivaciousness these are values so I feel that so Monopoly like we're talking Monopoly people so you you're that's what you're doing you're directly targeting a value set of people that is pre-existing so IP is not a hack it's not it's it's beautiful in terms of its ability to do that and I think you know the the oppos it model like The Clash of Clans sort of model of like we're going to create a theme and art style that when you see it it's branded you know this is probably supercell when you see that like that is an amazing effort and it works too like I'm sure if you did the same thing I'm talking about with supercell art and characters there's a brand there you would actually hear people say some similar stuff but that's a long journey it takes a lot of time to like brand something where people are going to start to feel stuff and maybe like a good example of that is um there's a study where they they had people do a bunch of creative tasks and

they counted like how you know diverg in thinking like how many creative ideas are you able to come up with um and they put different logos in the room and they didn't tell people the logos were in the room so they put like IBM other random logos Apple logo far outperformed any others in terms of the amount of ideas that people generated and no one were was told that the Apple logo was there MH and so Brands like in another good example I mean everyone knows you know the Coca-Cola and Pepsi test but most people don't know the actual study like so when they when they you know block them out and just put them next to each other and you look at the brain the brain under Pepsi actually is way more active than under Coca-Cola so Pepsi from a neurological perspective looks like it it's better to people and it is like under the you know the blind taste and Pepsi people go yeah and blind ta Place taste test Pepsi is better it's like cuz you don't understand the power of brand and so when you introduce the Coca-Cola brand something really

interesting happens in the brain um this so this is the huberman part right the the pre the predial part of your frontal cortex the the predial part of your frontal cortex in your brain that's the part of your brain that really processes Nostalgia which is a very powerful emotion and so like those Coca-Cola commercials around Christmas those weren't a mistake that wasn't like oh let's and this is this goes back to adver in in games and how little like you guys big brands have been really thinking through this and there's a reason why Coca-Cola when you know Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger rest in peace when they go and invest and and they go who do you like he's like Coca-Cola why well let's go full circle inflation when inflation goes up you can raise a can of a coke with the rate of inflation and nobody blinks an eye you do it with a SAS company like us people go what you just raise your prices by 133% what do you think you're Coca-Cola or something exactly so where I'm where I'm going with this is though when when

you have that Nostalgia moment that brand when people see Coca-Cola The Taste actually changes and The Taste is better than Pepsi and when you go when you go to Coke drinkers you know does Coke or or Pepsi tastes better they'll tell you in a second Coke and so the the brand the IP is a direct audience full stop it's it's a niche audience that then allows you like to expand when we um we we worked with uh I'd like to say it but we don't have a clearance for it it's a really big IP um it was a game and it was this is kind of funny story guns there's no guns interesting okay but um we had a a person from um another big company basically oh yeah we know all about those users like we study them and everything and I'm like tell me about them and he started and I said because we've we've psychologically assessed this whole audience and I'm like everything you're saying's wrong M I'm like let me guess cuz they had a

they had a competitor game from a mechanic perspective I'm like let me guess you sent out a bunch of surveys to people in your game and asking them if they played that game and you're like yeah that's exactly what we did I'm like what if I told you that 95% of their da are net new Gamers they've literally never played video games before so you maybe the 5% that have probably play your game too the competitor game but you're looking at 5% of that game and that's what that IP did it brought in net new people who had a lot of affinity with that IP and then if you ask those people hey are you a gamer even though they're playing like three hours a day on this game they're like no but if you say are you a fan of that IP absolutely so the niche audience and then from there you can you know this back to the fire they created a a new fire or they brought a pre-existing fire out here and brought it in I have Mariah carry in my head now holidays Coca-Cola can I can't tune it she's making she's

making bank right now every time this year she gets Christmas time um Step into the future of game monetization with exola exola empowers developers and Publishers to market sell connect and optimize their games globally from payment solution to a full suit of tools designed to grow your games Revenue while fostering a lawyer player base exola is your game's gateway to worldwide success with exola the world is is your playground visit exa.com today and find all the solutions that will help you to power your games into success everywhere another point that you I kind of wrote here is um I think you talking about failing failing fast that's sort of a Lean Startup mythology and um I I've been I've been reading about it I think that book came after the the do crash where it's just like let's let's go cheer let's go faster let's find out market fit with as early a product as

possible like the MVP and I think that time and if you push companies to do that is wrong because what you're essentially measuring is how good is this MVP yeah compared to what is in the market and you're were talking about like hey we you need to understand the the players every the bar has been raised the attention have been raised and I feel like the companies need to be much more deliberate rather than chasing whatever kpi every different VC will say yes or every different executive it's like well the D7 has to be this well the roas has to be that well the K factor is actually really important so that has to be there so rather having a very very deliberate approach and not chasing like how fast can I fail because that's that like you should not fail that that's not the goal of of your startup you should succeed in in a you know and this is like um you know um if you look at biological species K versus our selection you know bees versus elephants like how many do

you produce um elephants don't have a lot of chances to survive so they're going to have less Offspring they're going to teach their offspring they're going to be very diligent about it the fail fast model Works in blue big blue oceans so when the dot era was new that's a brilliant strategy when you take that strategy and try to fit it into a mature Market which hello the gaming Market people is maturing and so when you declining a little bit so that's the uh that's like above maturity yeah so it's maturing and and so you know look at how Swiss people do stuff that's so you know watches been around forever when when they go make a watch it's not fail fast it's it's who are who are our buyers how many of these people are out and how do we get you know it's account it's Direct Mail marketing it's direct marketing they know know that we probably have about 50,000 people in the world that are

going to buy this watch but we need to make it for those 50,000 people and we need to get all 50,000 people of them to buy that watch and there's a lot of money in that you know and so that's kind of what's happening in gaming right now is that that fail fast model that was like and back to people being psychologically reinforced based on success you know our brain is wired around that and it's the same reason like BF Skinner came up with behavioral psychology um till the till the day he died till he 95 years old he denied that cognitive psychology was efficacious in any way even though the amount of research was astounding but the amount of work he had to do to go from like Freudian dream world to convince people that you know behavioral psychology is real he had to do so much work that he just believed it so much and he had so much success from it that was a part of his identity so like we've seen people at companies we worked with you know they come in they like we got this new UA guy he was the top UA guy at insert name of company that spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on UA at

in the the height of targeting and tracking and then now it's two years later how's that person doing oh they're gone now why did it take you know what what happened why did it take so long like well they they weren't performing well because they're stuck in a success pattern from before and most people change management cognitive adaptability neurogenesis these are hard things like if you look at when neur Genesis happens in synapsis form you know like neuronal clusters um the older we get and the more success we have so these things become like super highways little kids it's like dirt roads so if you want to move a dirt road from here to here they their brains are amazing like you can go from a behavior that was bad you you guys both know you know um to a behavior that's good you can change that relatively easy but it's why they say you can't teach Old Dogs new tricks if you go from most like people who've had either older or had a lot of success at

one thing it's the same reason why um the more educated people like if you have like phds or two phds you're more likely to have more cognitive biases too there's research that you can look it up on on that and so now you have a super highway like BF Skinner did and to to move that highway from here there's a lot of Machinery that's involved to get this from here to here so it's like you can't just change that that success pattern overnight and that's what we're going through as a whole industry so there's going to be younger companies or more cognitively flexible people that are literally and are right now killing it like that's what mythical is the number one to number nine top grossing game NFL Rivals game and I was at this web 3 conference yesterday I was speaking at you know they're all talking about web 3 games web three games I get on stage I'm like no one's brought up the fact that there's a web three game on the App Store and everyone's talking about the future of gaming and I'm like there's a web 3 game on the app store that's a top grossing game right now in

sports and it's been so since October like why why are you guys not talking about that like it's the no one wanted no it's like I said it and no one heard it because in their brain you can't put web 3 games on the App Store but mythical did and so I think it's it's weird when those it's like um the I'll I'll stop after this but like the the natives you know um in in the United States um when the Nina the Pinta and Santa Maria came their stories how they didn't they couldn't even see them like they saw the water the Wake moving so like that's a really weird wave like it's this v-shaped wave and obviously none of us are there so we can't confirm but but these stories PR proliferated and the How The Story Goes is a kid went out there and started describing the ship and the shape of it and then they could start to see it our brains are wired to protect us so like if an alien ship was in the air we probably wouldn't even see it cuz there' be our brain probably couldn't wrap it a little kid might though cuz they're cognitively

flexible enough to go hey and then they might be able to describe it to us dumb adults and then we're like oh yeah I see it I see it now it took us how many minutes till we got to aliens 45 that we already crossed huberman there's um maybe maybe just just quickly there one of the um so to speak Pathways or roads that would need like repaving or needs to be moved when you when you bring it really down to to an organizational level in studios and different teams working together the sooner and the more marketing and product not to make this political but reach across the aisle and actually work on the same team Anchored In what is anchored in a unified understanding of this is the audience or this is what we're going after and they're both playing on the same team because you spoke to this earlier and I think it's a really really important point when you put a creative a brand promise what you're creating for your new game out there in front of people and you're

bringing people in back to launching all those early kpis marketability testing cpis are up all this stuff the game needs to be in a position to live up to the brand promise that's being created otherwise you bring players in they play for a couple days and go nah yeah that wasn't what I was being promised so to speak that was like the thing with Monopoly solitire exactly it that almost bombed because the the team like part of the team really had this set idea on what the game should be like they're like how much Monopoly how much solitire so um Zack Pon who's their VP at marketing this goes exactly to marketing and game teams playing together um because there's some people that think you shouldn't do that um but they need to play together to really get that that first-time user experience and that brand promise correctly he just said okay how about this we make one prototype off of the audience the the Monopoly Solitaire people and then we make one off of the Moses the tablets

you know and we we test them against the audience and we see the the one that was based off the audience crushed it compared to and that's the one it's their it's their second grossing game highest grossing game that that they have now um and that's that's a clear story of and actually was interesting one of the game designers on the team like he went from being like okay I I see that now and the next game that they made he's like I made like 17 games in my career I actually like when I had to make major decisions I could see their psychology I could go back at night I could do my my tablet thing but what I had with me then was who they are and who like you know as people and then I could come back and he's like we literally what we designed that game like how much faster nine months faster nine months faster than the average game cuz he's like and then then and with 9 months faster with early retention and engagement metrics that like really good right so yeah I think it's it's it's

just that like you have to you have to deliver on that brand promise um because otherwise it's what what you were speaking to the back to the fail fast analogy right if you if you don't do that marketing might be doing a really good job they're bringing in great people the game can't hold them retention is nah and then the game team goes hey marketing bring in better people and right now in that environment marketing says well not going to get a lot better than that we're we're trying and it's not it's brutal out there so they're going to bring that and then the game team says well the marketing team says can you fix the game and you end up with he said she said and everyone's just pointing fingers at each other so that's a Surefire way of setting yourself up for failure yeah that's that's that's uh quite typical with the uh with more siloed organizations um whether they're games or apps or or anything with with those type of things but um but I think with the with the deliberate part I I feel like a lot of startups have been pushed towards That Lean Startup method and I don't think it's just a

good method to have with like we haven't had it for a long time compared to other type of companies that we've had throughout any industry uh nobody starts a car company saying like just fail fast you know just like uh that's see what works and like what crashes and burns and then we'll just go and iterate across and pivot to different type of vehicles it's like what are you talking about it's like we make the first car and the first car is for the first segment and this is the most valuable segment and we're going to start with the sports car we're going to start with a pickup truck because we believe in we have to make that pickup truck work in order to do other ones there's not like we're going to fail with a pickup truck and then we're going to do the motorcycle it's like what are you talking about people just going to remember the horrible pickup truck that failed yep and I think it's why like you know companies like the Mainframe like everywhere um I just talked to this guy from Avalon you these are Big MMO games these are kind of like you know um attempts at you know the the true metaverse type stuff but the the market opportunity there it's you know it's something like if you ask uh City Bank I

think it's the metaverse is going to be like worth about 12 trillion dollar by whatever um McKenzie said five trillion you know uh Chad GPT said 12 so whoever you want to trust there uh how chat GPT split the difference between the data from those two um why did they give more weight to City Bank um but you know but what they mean by that they don't they don't mean like it's this like you know Oasis game that's going to make that much money what they mean is like the Chipotle example you were giving at at breakfast and I think that's worth bringing up because these are new oceans to make make money and grow and I think that a lot of people that are still stuck in the old way of thinking and and the you know whether it's you know foul fast or this sort of stuff it's like that's a blue ocean Market that's like we're in a red Ocean Market now but it's it will what what and this is everything's a caterpillar everything's life is traffic you know if you don't have a heartbeat

you're dead like if we look at games emotions and games you know people like oh we have all this positive sentiment I'm like do you have negative sentiment too they're like no I'm like that's a bad game like the most what we see is with sentiment when there's positive sentiment and negative sentiment that means the person cares if you are only in your relationship all positive all the time you don't really actually care and so you know I think like like what's happening is you know teams are going to have to reframe how they think about experience and how they think about quality and how they think about creating and crafting and really being and both from a marketing perspective because that's the other part that you know we were talking a little bit about before this there's just games game companies got better than any other industry at targeting and tracking and when that got taken away it's like you guys literally forgot how to actually make do advertising you know any other industry make creatives it's need-based you understand your Market you invest in that it's not let's make 50,000

creatives and ab test them if they're all junk like some of the best performing ads that you do see today from game companies they're ones that that investment went into yeah well that's the Lean Startup method just throw stuff on the wall that is as fast as possible and then find what works and then follow that which which works in a blue ocean I like out very very big blue ocean maybe it did it did for Silicon Valley you know it's like a lot of cuz if when you think about that that was the the first Doom bubble and this the second one like if you look at the first.com bubble um there's not an online calendar there's not an online calculator like if you talk to like these guy a lot of their those guys companies got bought by Apple and but that's even deliberate like the most non-deliberate is like let's try calculator and then at the moment when it's not showing traction because it's not finished and you're testing it just pivot to something else dog food it's like why cuz like B had a good idea let's just jump there chase that for

three months then pivot because we never finished that idea we didn't find the early traction and so we're going to jump to the next thing which which in a blue ocean no you're going to land on gold if you do that because there's so much gold out there it's like it's like if you're a minor and you were the first to Colorado and it's like go hammer at that rock go hammer at oh there's no gold go you're eventually gonna hit an or vean that's so shallow that you're going to find gold if you go to Colorado now and try to do that you're not going to find any gold no is there still gold in Colorado probably but it's like you got to buy that pot of land you got to really invest in like technology where to dig and and through that we we are seeing companies that have a more deliberate uh tenacious whatever you want to put it approach like scopely that is very focused on like we're going to make this game work and it doesn't matter how many times we have to Pivot inside that game inside this thesis we can change the the um the details of this thesis maybe the core game is not functioning correctly but we are going

to keep we are going to make this game with this IP with this element with that and and kind of like making it work rather than at the first sign of of um of weakness we're just going to abandon it and start from the beginning at something totally new so it's like a playing a musical a game of musical chairs and now just there's no music playing so it's like uh you just don't have time to switch between chairs yep exactly um Matt stri he used to be the director of research at scop playay like he's he's one of our directors of products now and um if you like if you ask him if you listen to him talk about you know all that methodology and and really focusing on audience the player I mean they've been doing that for a while um and there's a reason why Matt's at solsten and it's it's the next generation of how you actually are doing that and ensuring um that those outcomes take place uh and scop I think has earned the right to be able to do that too you know it's like you got to get good at it um so you're probably going to have you know and and that's the

thing like with failure it's it's only failure I mean truly true failure if you didn't learn anything and so that's why I see like when game companies keep doing the same thing over and over again it's like you're going to fail again with the other IP you're doing the same thing over and over again like figure out how to get good at this thing and it's like you know you think of um other traditional Industries like okay I'm going to stick with skiing maybe cuz skis have been made for a very long time because it's a very broad topic for many listeners yeah that's why we're doing it everybody understands skiing of course we talking cross country or downhill we're talking downhill right now let's going more Niche and so so you know you you ski and you make skis you're you're not like oh like let me make pencils which actually you know Bick the pencil company like they're also one of the biggest wind Surfer producers and razors and they're they're not did they make it in Wind surfing no they needed to stick the pencils but it's like you know I think there's this tendency to you know you you want to really nail a certain

industry or certain product like I've seen Game teams well even back when I was at Big Fish we made solitire games we made casino games we made um hidden object games we're really good at those things and then Clash of Clans came out you know um all these sort of I don't know game of war type games we're like oh they're making a lot of money let's make them it looks simple do you know any big fish games that no cuz they didn't work yeah like like it's like it's like hey guys what are we good at and and let's think about how we develop and hone that skill and really dial that in and I think that's very powerful when when you know who you are all right I want to cap this conversation so we talked basically about what the market is how do you approach new game development and I want to kind of cap it off with something that is tied to both and that's of course AI a Hot Topic and I think the from my perspective AI is essentially a way to make to be more

efficient as a company and as a team and efficiencies is especially needed because that's how economy grows you produce more with less that's that's what efficiency is so I'm I'm very curious is like how does solsten has been using AI pretty much since the beginning and how do you see the studios that you work with uh utilizing AI because you look you work not only with the big established ones but you work with the up andc ones as well yeah and you should talk about how we've been using and I there's a a lot of really good client examples there's some interesting things that some of these studios are doing cool I gu I can start with what we're doing and yeah um you know when back when we started we started this company six years ago and we'd have investors be like hey are you guys web 3 are you doing web 3 of course and um our answer was no but we do deep learning and machine learning and um and I I was really allergic to the term AI even back then because you now we talk like now colloquially AI means machine

learning and deep learning um so AI uh we you know back then you know what we actually meant by AI was a general AI a general intelligence um and by that by that measure um you know worms depending on the worm have anywhere from 300,000 neurons or whatever and they're generally broadly more intelligent than the AI we have today still you know general intelligence is hard um general intelligence is very hard um you know it's the same reason why like chat GPT fails actual medical exams and things like that so um you know I think to start backwards like I forget who it was at chat GPT but it's like yeah you know we scraped the internet and we're selling it back to you at $20 a you know month or something like that but the what we saw back then was a big problem in the medical industry and in The Clinical Psychology industry which was

fundamentally psychological assessment which to me I don't know why this is obvious but it's not obvious to everyone else I think one of the most fundamental important things as human beings is know thyself like we have to understand who we are so we can be a force on our reality and that's effectively when I was a um psychotherapist the consequence of mental health issues people are struggling with understanding their brains understanding their mental health States and because they're struggling with who they are there's cognitive distance they're stuck they're not doing well and then so they seek help and then we use diagnostic tools like the mmpi which is like 500 questions to you know 1980s style figure out try and figure out you know is this is this schizotypal personality disorder is it depression is it ad what ADHD what is it and the best tools that I had access to as a clinician these things are like the best stuff is like 85% you know accurate and

if you look if you think of the medical industry if someone's like hey there's a 15% chance that the surgery we're doing we actually don't need to do like that's a big deal and that's good that's good for like clinical psych like a lot of stuff is like 30% like there's a 30% chance and in medical terms that's to me just unacceptable if something is like you're giving somebody a medication for potentially the rest of their life and there's a 30% chance that that's due to air not okay so I said well what what can we do we need we need to allow product companies to better understand each other Etc and so there's the AI that that we we work in two levels of of ML and and um deep learning one is just straight up assessments which adaptive computerized adaptive testing is actually one of the oldest examples of machine learning um David Weiss uh professor at the University of Minnesota still alive he's like 86 he inv Ed computerized adaptive testing machine learning AKA Ai and I get like um I I've

met a lot of investor Bros explain AI to me which is really fun um you know and and when we take in like like University entri exams like ACT SAT in America that's what that is it's adaptive computerized testing that is quote unquote an example of AI it's learning about you as you're taking the question so solon's been focused on developing the world's largest and most robust adaptive psychological assessment um there's only one other example that we've seen or know of and it's at the M Clinic that's used um our assessment runs off of like 10 supercomputers it takes a lot of computing power so it's learning about you as your answering these questions and people think like oh isn't that just like chat GPT well the difference is the things that it's sending you are validated psychometric items uh and and a big thing is this thing called accuracy and validity and reliability so how how valid how reliable and so like a good example of

that is um you know when you ask the question like hey uh how happy are you with this player experience and like some researchers like yeah I'm a great survey designer um and I asked them like what's what's your construct validity and reliability scores for that question like what do you mean I'm like do you think that's a responsible question like what do you mean and I'm like okay here's what we know about that question when you ask that question so if you compare it to previous existing really valid assessments it doesn't match up to happiness at all it actually has more in common with Indulgence so when we look at that as a trait construct what you're actually measuring more is how indulging was this game for you okay is Indulgence helpful with retention does it correlate with retention no it actually doesn't it it correlates with early novelty and maybe some early gameplay so the question you're asking isn't actually useful to the game team in the beginning also it's terrible reliability meaning

if I ask you that question now and a week from now happiness goes up and down and it goes back to what we were saying earlier with engagement you like if a person's really engaged in your game they'll be pissed too that because because that's because they care so if there if a new feature came out like talk to like um EV on line they were talking yesterday at at the you know and he was saying like our players get like intense when we release some new feature stuff and um it's cuz they care it's cuz they like really care about the experience so if you ask that player in that moment how happy are you playing the game they're like zero but they might be one of the top Spenders who's played your game for 20 years who got married you know on EV on line or something like that and so so the the thing is what we developed is all these assessment questions that really validly and are what's nice is we've done this across 125 different countries it's the broadest example of that so that's one example of machine learning that we do the other is when we take in play data from the game we structure that data so what one of the things solon's doing is we're building out the cognitive layer

of the internet using AI M so you know you in this game for example your base got destroyed is that predictive of resilience or not we can cross reference that against our assessment we take a small sample and we say in this game that matches up with resilience for this type of person if the person has low levels of openness it actually doesn't uh and then we go to another game and it has nothing to do with resilience for example so we're able to use the entire world of play to train psychological prediction and that's the thing that the internet doesn't have today there's no cognitive layer or psychological layer to the internet there's only a behavioral layer so what people did and what we did is what we did it's not what we're going to do our psychology is a much better predict predictor of what we will do so if you think of like you know someone throws a a I don't know a snowball and hits a guy in a park and it hits the guy and it spreads out to like

five other people around them and they all get hit with snow and it's this kid that threw it well one person maybe gets angry one person gets excited and starts throwing snowballs back one person's laughing like all these people just had the same behavioral experience of getting hit by a snowball with a kid but all of them might have had really different emotions or reactions because their personality you know it's because of who they are so we're we're literally the AI of human understanding and so you can think of it as like and I think you know like if you've ever seen or read the book Ender Game where he's playing the game and it's understanding his psychology and where he should go into flight school or the Sorting Hat and Harry Potter like that's that's how our model is continuously learning how to predict enduring psychological attributes and so there's there's this AI of of you know these large language models like these learn these that's a whole different world than the world that that we're in and people think that

that is AI that that's what AI is all AI is it's it's a it's a unique data set that you might have and then you create a learning model whether it's supervise or it's a reinforcement learning model or whatever it is you create learning models around these things and to your point it's efficiency and U um one of the problems with efficiency is efficiency is boring though too so like I think I've said this before but like the most efficient version of Lord of the Rings is like you know they need to destroy a ring and so they go to this volcano and throw it in and it's done like token would have never been known if that was so like the the problem with um with AI so now what what are we GNA what is solson going to allow for we're going to allow for clinicians developers designers everyone in the world is going to be able to snap their fingers and know who they're creating stuff for which is so cool so we just we made a lot of efficiencies on that but it's still boring without the creators so so we're going to have more

content um you know whether it's you know these these image learning models that can produce you know new creatives um you know 95% of human cognition and what we do is synthesization we're synthesizing things but then the other 5% we're generating AI can't generate it's not generative yet so anyone that tells you that it's taking all the past stuff so where human beings where there's going to be a massive market for people is in the generation part so Divergent thinking skills back to our our Apple logo put the Apple logos in your room I don't know but like like the ability to synthesize information quickly and then generate from it so now I can use solsten to quickly synthesize who and why and then I can use all these other platforms like um we had a customer for example use mid journey to create multiple different um creatives for their game like they're thinking of like what theme should we use what art style and they did it off

of the psychological data that we had that you know like you just talked to um you know one of the biggest consulting firms out there I don't know if we can drop that yet we probably can okay so BCG you know and and they're like even if we wanted to try to hire all the experts to do what solsten did manually it's it's years and millions of dollars just for like one project you know and we can do that in the snap of our fingers at a level that we can show the validity the reliability all these things we can literally show you like how good it is um and so the ability to do that quickly there's a huge efficiency in in understanding who um and that's back to the resonance Factor you can't create resonance if you don't know who and then all the whats like like here's creatives here's generative levels here's um you know um narrative models that I can use with like chat GPT or things like that and now I'm matching solsten data so we're we're like the who

of AI and a lot of these things are the what of AI and what happens in between things like narrative models and mid-journey and us is resonance resonance is what gets created between the two of us but what actually is needed in between all these models that are synthesizing is a human to generate and so when a human can synthesize like like for example Vulcan did this with Harmony Gam games he looked at all these different creatives and he used to be the um head of data science at machine Zone you know so he's data guy andits sorry what's his name uh Vulcan Edis yeah yeah he's now CEO of a puzzle gaming company yeah so so this so this this is the case I'm talking about so they used us for this so they generate a bunch of stuff using mid Journey they do resonance testing with us because we have all the audience data and they actually can see you know the different personas and they know hey you know Persona one and two they really resonate with this creative they don't resonate with these creatives or these themes or these art styles or these features for

that matter and then they know like okay the but this is our main audience so we're going to go for these so it literally allows you to synthesize information much faster now where the generative part comes is the artist the designer taking that information and going what's new what's interesting what what could the AI not do um you know a like we can't for example we can look in our data we can say I think there might be a new trait here like that wasn't previous defi previously defined that's interesting but it takes a human being to also generate what that might be and then we can put it back into our model so that's the supervised learning aspect of all this um yeah so I don't know if you want to Harmony games is a great example and in similar vein um Cosmic Lounge MH puzzle Studio out ofsink exact so Tom me Tom me the the CEO and co-founder there he was speaking at robocon yesterday and this this big AI track and I think it was the room that was the fullest out of the different

tracks I was hug clearly people are interested um and he he talked about a lot of really really interesting things what they're doing and I think what's what's cool about this is this is a 20 person studio now he raised about like four four and a half million or something like that in funding so they're still very very early and fairly small but they've leveraged you know things like mid Journey it's very similar case where they have salston they use mid Journey they did the same you know creative art style generational part they have three artists they do the really Divergent thinking as you said so they follow that to the tea I think the numbers that he was he was mentioning is that his artists are saying they're about 40% more efficient overall which is great because it frees their time up to do the things that they are uniquely capable of doing that is going to give them an edge even more so it's not the AI That's giving them the edge necessarily it's the AI That's freeing them up to be more creative and more unique about how they're going to tap into the audience that they want to be

after and they took it to a whole another level which I I'd never never heard of to that extent they built what's called a um I think they called it the puzzle engine M where how how they are generating the levels the art style the flow of the all of it in a system that they've built where effectively without having to write any code the system does it all for them so it's almost like they're dragging and dropping s different patterns with defined rules and all of a sudden they're able to within a fraction of the time generate thousands of levels in different variations with different decision trees how they would want it so their point is we're able to test so many different variations of what we're thinking about in a fraction of the time to then see what works so that we're not waste quote unquote wasting our efforts on one Direction going down really really really really far and then having to backpedal and go well what is that

other direction that we may that we may want to pursue here so it's was really really interesting and I think yeah the the efficiency gains that he was talking 40% is a lot if you think of it you know big companies yes but for a 20 person team that early funding is a finite resource to an extent the I keep raising the efficiency as a point of an AI because ultimately I see that as being the competitive Advantage because a lot of times when the startups get funded and they look up to let's say blizzards of the world and they're like we want to be the next blizzard okay all right that's a great vision but then they start competing in the way the blizzard is competing they start hiring the people who would like to work at blizzard but they are not working so they're going to work for you but they were going to try to work like the people at blizzard so what is your competitive Advantage you are much smaller you have like I mean you can't even compare yeah like like you're worse in everything but that you're trying to do exactly what the other company is

doing and I think that is ludicrous from a business perspective and that's why this this sort of these type of increases it also talks about like what kind of a people you need to be hiring to your startup you need to be hiring artists that are very interested in AI to see that as a tool instead of seeing it as a as um as an opponent as something that is that is a risk for you and your whole craft and you're being and and who you and so um that's why these AI conversations are for me they feel very fundamental and they feel also something that established companies are going to have a lot of trouble with because they have hired certain people with a very certain fixed mindset where they will see AI as as something that breaks the status quo um is can cause layoffs which is like the at at every word of every every person right now and so there going to be against the AI which going to give the smaller companies that are being set up from this perspective who are smart who are

not who are trying to compete with their strengths and not with their weaknesses a Competitive Edge yeah it comes full circle change management MH cognitive load you know and that's what if really like if you create those efficiencies well what is the real thing that's happening like everyone's trying to do try to do a creative task in the evening and if you have kids if you have a family if you have a job it's like good luck you know your C load's tooo high at that point in the evening you're you got to go to bed like you got to have a drink you got whatever you know um you got to work out so if you look at those efficiencies and now instead of you know 5% it's maybe 15% of your day is generative um that's interesting because now that human being can go think of new ideas based on really good synthesization and so like what um you know Tommy's doing you know where solsten really fits in here is we're we're actually the AI of resonance so you generate a bunch of levels you generate a bunch of creatives you generate a bunch of things that doesn't

mean that the person's going to Care especially if they're generated off of models of what was we have to create what will be you know our job as Builders as entrepreneurs is to understand where markets and audiences are going and meet them there not to create what they already had yeah and in order to meet them there you need to synthesize really really well and then create off of that so I think that's the the role that AI will play like if I think of um adaptive levels uh adaptive sort of game environments um even some things as simple as player matching like with us like that's another example where we do machine learning is we're literally able to see these are the psychological traits that are causing matches not to work these are the psychological traits that are causing matches to work we we have an integration with Excel bite where we can literally see this this data and then you know like okay cool it's Conant stantly learning based on your game based on your environment that people who are like this match really well with

people who are like that which could be different in another game environment so imagine you're a game designer like oh yeah I know that people who are like super extroverted and really motivated by fearlessness they match really well with people that are like collaborative sure maybe in your environment they did but in a new environment that might not be true and so the AI of residence is important because those Team Dynamics can change when environments change so people places and things are what a lot of AIS are generating right now and what we're generating is how they fit back to the actual audience or the person and so that's where we believe like the future of AI and who's going to win there is who has the most unique data sets like anyone can go do another chat GPT because you can scrape the internet you can have a chat GPT competitor solson has the largest psychological data set in the entire world right now like three or four years ago I think the The Finnish government had it because every uh every person they sent to the military had to go through psychological

evaluation and they kept those um but so we're at a point where we have that it's a unique data set and think of like um cancer detection models for example so you go to John Hopkins male clinic how many you know different Imaging you know Studies have they done and what's what's logged there what data do they have there it's going to be really interesting AI models that can be trained off of that that chaty PT isn't set up to to do and so I think it's there's a really interesting future with asking yourself as a game developer if you're saying you know we do AI well what does that mean does that mean you're hooking into solsten you're hooking into mid Journey you're hooking into chat that's not no we are doing the AI like you're hooking into it um but if you are a game developer you can absolutely generate your own ml systems so ask yourself like hey in our game what's a unique data set that's in our game that doesn't exist in other games and you can build model around that that are really interesting um so I think that's like a lot of these games like everywhere and um uh you know the main

frame and and like I think there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff that happens because the worlds are so big where they'll have unique unique data um and we think of like um you economic data like look at Robin Hood uh you know how do they make their money well they sell a lot of that data back to financial institutions think about what you could do as a game developer where you have really interesting econom models you can go sell that back to a lot of a lot of uh different types of companies so I I do think there's going to be way more Revenue models in gaming Than People realize right now yeah yeah because of AI yeah it's when you it's interesting when you bring it back to the connection to IP and maybe bigger Brands and where all of this is going to go when you talk to the executives at um Adidas or Adidas as I should probably say true the form Adidas they've been they've been staying away from um video gaming per se a little bit

because they they said over the last years it hasn't been the quality hasn't been there for them to go full on with their brand and what they want out of it and they're saying now they're starting to see that experiences are becoming better and better so they could actually see a fit with their brand and what they're trying to do with their community and when you talk to leadership there and I said well what's your guys' vision for video games video games are wholesale and what they're thinking about to your point on Revenue models is well we want the video games we want to monetize what is Adidas in the video games too so I'm not even we can have the blockchain or web 3 conversation but you don't even have to go there it's just every time and this is a really good example take the uh FIFA franchise that EA had for the longest time now it's called what F fu fu or something something like that so when you are when Real Madrid is in those games and they have been four decades and Adidas is their that's the

kit that they're wearing so Adidas pays Real Madrid millions of dollars a year like hundreds of millions because they want them to wear those jerseys so Adas makes money every time you and I or people in Spain or whever in the world buy a physical Jersey yeah they make zero money right now when that's shown in the game when people buy equip a player in FIFA or in these other games with an Adidas kit but it's literally exactly the same IP it's exactly the same design it comes from the people made in Bavaria it's exactly the same thing it is just the digital version of what you can buy in a store yeah and they make zero money off of that so what how they're what they're thinking about and what they're looking to is game development partners and actually game developers and Studios who are really open to exploring Revenue models where they say like hey we we're going to go to the people that understand that we're

bringing extremely valuable IP that elevate the overall experience that you're making for players here and we absolutely should be monetizing our IP so the more players or or developers are are open to exploring those Pathways there's a lot of money to be made that and those monetization models currently don't exist in that form yeah like mythical starting to explore them they're starting to explore them but yeah and I think that's where and they've created a tech on the back end to do it too like people like in that that conference yesterday they're like wait those are nfts yeah how are they doing that and the whole conference the whole day on the future of gaming was literally about the future of gaming and it was excluding that the future they're talking about you can download right now yeah and I'm like you guys this is silly the future the future present yeah anyway yeah I think that's uh We've covered a lot of ground yeah I'm going to end up with one quote with your quote I I'm going to quote you actually and you and that is just to summarize what

Solon does quote um it answers to the question who are we creating for that's essentially how I would uh summarize the platform yeah and and I think that is also an important quote because that is the answer to how do you make new products yep is you have to start with who are you creating them for now instead of just throwing spaghetti on the wall and finding high ipms low cpis great rses and whatnot marketability is not enough you got to have everything we're back in the uh square one yep know that thank you gentlemen thank you that was awesome and thanks everybody for listening