Are Video Game Cons Still Worth It? | Design Club

Okay, so now in theory, we are live upon the tubes of you. Uh which I do see is accurate. So, that's that's a good start. Um Right, excellent. And my connection's excellent, and that's wonderful. Hi. Hello, Janet. Hi. You may be wondering why there is no countdown. We decided it wasn't working for YouTube. And so, we're changing it. We have changed it. So, if you're as you're coming in, um you will uh we'll be getting everyone in, and much like breakfast, we're going to tell you a little bit about the show, and then do a show, and then tell you what we did during the show, and that'll be it. Um Uh that's Yes, that's correct, Artemis. I abs- That's that's exactly it. Uh let me let me get that up here. Uh that's right. We love Janet Moore because they don't have to wait for the countdown. That's correct. That's it. They get us immediately. Uh that's that's clearly on here we go. Yeah. Boom. Uh For For

those of you wondering, actually, since we just told Brad this, apparently, when you do a countdown on YouTube and you want to edit that out on the VOD, you have to wait about 24 hours for that, and then it does really weird things to your first couple minutes of So, clipping off the end of a YouTube clip seems to be fine, like shortening a thing down. YouTube's a little wonky with the beginning. Therefore, we're just not doing a countdown on the beginning. We're just going to in. We're We're We're just pre-show. Yeah. We're just not going to do it. Yep. Or we're not going to do the countdown. We will do the pre-show. Yes, that's correct. Yeah, um and there has been an awful lot of feedback, Jeff, actually, on Breakfast about keeping the pre-show versus the post-show versus Cuz yeah, we thought we might clip out the pre-show, but everybody was like, "Keep the pre-show!" Well, I think Okay, so this is kind of an interesting thing, and I think it's really taken hearing from the YouTube audience to realize this. This is part of the show.

Right? speaking of that, I want to see their chat. Wait, turn me on to the How do I turn their chat thing that's right. Yeah, okay. see the YouTube chat. Okay, so in in social stream Yep. Uh you're going to click over in the So I select live source? Um yep, you're going to select live sources and then you're going to pick the one that we have right now, which is it should automatically highlight the thumbnail. Yep. And then you click activate selected, and then it will show up in the in the thing. Uh Okay. Yeah. Hey, I saw Yay, I okay. I have We have the technology. We are here. So Raybian says, I think this is interesting. I do think it would be helpful to have YouTube put up the going live in X hours preview so the people know when to join. Maybe. That does necessitate us doing more pre-setup work further ahead, which isn't out of the question, but is a

thing to keep in mind that like Actually, I have a good We could just record 2 hours of going live in 2 hours that we post and then immediately delete it when it's done. Will I say you're twitching? No, I have to keep OBS up during that, and which means I can't do anything else. No, I vote I vote no, because there's no way that I'm aware of to render like to have a video play as if it was live except for a premiere, and premieres are different. And that no. Okay, we'll do the research. Yeah, I'm going to I'm Well, there's got to be an easy way to do that. we just cut out a 5-minute countdown because it played with our retention rates poorly. Well, it played with the retention rates because it was part of the same video that we had to click. If that was a separate video that said going live in 2 hours, Here's the other problem. Here's the other problem. We don't get the link to this video that

you're watching right now until we go live. So, we can't point people at the new live stream using the old live stream, which also creates a problem. Interesting. Yeah. There's all kinds of stuff. Uh I need to actually, in the spirit of failing faster, I'm going to change a thing real quick. So, uh chat, just, you know, hang tight. Do do your thing. Um I need to change this cuz I think this is not correct. Haha, it's not. Ooh, what was not correct? Um the Expiring minds want to know. the uh um this, if I if I showed Jazzym's dancing crabs before, it would stay forever. And now it will stay for It should stay for 7 seconds as opposed to having infinite crabs. So, that we can't forget to hide the message when we're done. Mhm. Um

YouTube does let you schedule live streams. That is a different thing than we will go live in 2 hours. That's the thing that we're looking at. Um Yes. Part of the problem uh for breakfast is that I don't know what the topics are going to be until Sunday night at about 8:00. Um so, I could do that and give you like an idea. We're also still experimenting. So, if if it makes sense on YouTube to have there is a schedule, then yes, we can look into that. Um For breakfast, it's a little harder. You're going to need a placeholder thumbnail. For design club, we might be able to do it after our Tuesday meeting and give you a thumbnail and like a topic plan. That's a possibility, and we'll take it under advisement. pretty fast at these thumbnails. It's true. Yeah. Uh yes, all all of chat eventually does indeed become crabs. That is that is known. It is correct. Um So, By the way, Will, did you know crab's favorite food is bread? Or just the edges of it.

Yeah, cuz they're crustaceans. All right. Ex- Ooh, good one. Great. Excellent. even have to say it. For those of you on YouTube just joining us, that long-suffering sigh from Will is the fact that he's had to put up with these for over 5 years of our morning talk show. Yeah, that's correct. That is that is where he can now do the punchline with that with very little prompting. That's correct. Um Oh. love that Twitch chat is currently We need to get some crab emotes over to YouTube. So, that's a great point, Jeff, and I'm so glad you brought it up. Uh I don't know if YouTube has animated emotes yet, and YouTube emotes are gated by the number of members we have on the channel. So, if people on YouTube are interested, you can join at the $5 channel membership level, get access to the Discord, and help us get more emotes. That's the thing you can do. Um Can we get Actually, how do I post one I want to show the dancing crabs. Oh,

I just click it. Cool. Yeah, you just Yeah, you literally just or four times because I clicked Yeah. Uh Learning a thing. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. We are actively uh met Jeff was at GDC getting ready for this getting for ready for this stream while Matt and I were doing all of the pre-setup last week, which is in part why we did the pre-setup last week, because if you'll notice, the test stream, please ignore, was exactly a week ago right now. Um so, we We would normally would be doing Design Club. Yeah, correct. Um Uh yeah, that that is and freshly shorn. Got a good haircut yesterday. Yeah, that's right. Uh Uh, the bull the bull is correct. We are in fact doing it live. That is correct. That is sort of RMO. It's not always the MO, but for a lot of things, yeah, we just try it. Honestly, for this, like the next couple will get more and more produced as we do them, but this is our very first Design Club co-stream on both YouTube and Twitch. We've been doing it on Twitch

for over 5 years, and YouTube has finally gotten their tools good enough that we feel like we can kind of do the simulstreams. Yep. And it's an additional advantage to us because um Twitch just decided that they no longer want to participate in the business of hosting VODs, videos on demand, um and so this way there will be a place where people can watch the VOD of Design Club. And if you don't want to watch it with ads, you can watch it on Nebula. Will, did you know YouTube is really good at hosting videos? I did know that. Jeff, do you want to of their thing. It's true. Do you want to know what's really funny, Jeff? Clowns. Actually, they're not They're not particularly funny. No, yesterday I went to I was at um I was watching um Twitch's monthly data dump, essentially, where Dan Clancy, the head of Twitch, the CEO of Twitch, and um various heads of different departments answer questions from the community and tell us about upcoming features.

And it was lots of information, and I shared what was relevant with the team, and there's other information about other stuff, but the funniest thing to me at the end, the funniest thing, was the official Twitch account at the end of the stream said in Twitch chat, "If you missed part of the stream, catch it tomorrow on YouTube." So, th- they're just abandoning it. They're basically saying they don't want to Twitch account said that tomorrow the only place to see the official Twitch broadcast about Twitch, a site which does video streaming, would be YouTube. And I was like, They have officially thrown in the towel, Will. You what? said we do not care about VODs any longer. That's correct. So, uh yeah, so YouTube, you are now the official repository of VODs. Behold. Uh if it's good enough for Twitch, it's good enough for us. Wow. Sorry, I was still LIKE THAT YEAH, RIGHT? LIKE just That's like Pepsi saying

go to the Coca-Cola to buy a Pepsi tomorrow. Yes, that is exactly what it is. Please go to our competition tomorrow to receive our product. Damn. It's just What? Yeah, right? Okay. Um Man, I need Matt's airhorn noise for this. Right? It's just That's officially a Twitch has thrown in the towel on part of the To be fair, nobody watched VODs on Twitch and Twitch was paying a substantive amount of money to store hundreds of millions of hours of video that nobody was watching because people go to Twitch to watch live and historically came to YouTube to watch VODs. Now it's live and VODs. Although, um and if although Uh I think the people in YouTube chat can corroborate this. Um my experience with YouTube live streaming, and I've looked around a bit as we've been getting into this space,

is that it's not about discovering new things by game or by subject matter. You get some amount of algorithmic discovery on your homepage and you get Excuse me, live streams of the channels you're already subscribed to. But you it's not the same as Twitch where there's like a directory where I can see all of the people who are playing Grand Theft Auto or Apex or Fortnite or Minecraft or whatever, right? There those do exist, but those seem to be less about less the way that people discover new content. So, there's this very be fair, on Twitch, their discovery for that is pretty awful anyway, because they just stack rank it. Right. That's correct. In Twitch's mind, an algorithm is a former vice president trying to dance and doing it poorly. So, um you know, uh Wow, that's like a 2000's cut. Man, that's over 20 years old. Huh?

That's older than some of our viewing audience, Jeff. Yeah. Speaking of which, I just put in the tech specs for a a new emote called extra old, which is game with a long gray beard shaking his cane. I'm very looking forward to this. Um Dude, actually, you Having said that, did you see the It came out like a year ago at this point. I just watched it again while I was traveling to GDC and back. Mhm. The um animated Scott Pilgrim on Netflix. No. So, they put it out about a year ago. So, Scott You know remember the live-action movie, Scott Pilgrim versus the World? Yeah. Imagine a world where a decade or whatever later, all the guys and girls got back together again to do it in animated in like an eight-episode series. They got all of the original cast back to do it. That's really cool. Except at the end of episode one, the story you think you're seeing takes a right turn and it they completely change it based on how the

movie went and and it's just it's uh it's amazing and we get to meet an older Scott Pilgrim looking something like Akuma. Um That's amazing. back with like the beard and the abs Yeah. from Street Fighter. Yeah. Um by the way, It's really good. It actually makes me like the movie even better Right, cuz of the context. this decade-later follow-up anime. Yeah. So, we got a really great comment from Janet that I wanted to read. Uh The post says, "I've talked to YouTube almost exclusively for many years now. YouTube keeps you in contact with the content that you already watch and is great at putting you in uh onto other channels that are similar." I think that's a really good point. I think that that is something like Twitch depends on us to circulate viewers to other similar content, right? We are the algorithm. Streamers are the algorithm. But, YouTube's algorithm is all about "Hey, you like Extra Credits. You might also like, you know, OSP or

um um uh who was I thinking of? Game Maker's Toolkit, right? There are plenty of other places that like do similar content to us or that we've collabed with or like we've got major overlap with Tier Zoo or, you know, all kinds of stuff." Yeah. Uh A whole bunch of them. Actually, it's funny. Do you know I actually chatted with the guy who writes the YouTube algorithm and it works in a slightly different way than most people think it actually does. Mhm. So, most people think like imagine you're writing an algorithm to recommend games. Sure. What most people would think is, "Hey, let's go look at like the features or something of, you know, these five games and based on that if you liked those, we'll find another game with those same features or genre or stuff like that." YouTube doesn't do that. What YouTube does is it looks for viewers like you. And it says, "Hm, I have 100 viewers like you. 90 of them have watched this one video and you haven't. I will therefore

recommend you that video because other viewers like you have liked that video." So, it doesn't care what the video is. Yeah. It's that viewers like you have watched this video a lot and therefore thinks you will like it, too. It is using slime mold to find shortest paths for circuits. I don't know if any of you are familiar with that. They've done this before. Slime mold is incredibly efficient at finding the shortest path towards an towards a food source. And so they've used it to do optimization problems rather than crunching it. They'll just put slime mold in something that's vaguely close to it and it's usually right. So in the same way, rather than brute forcing it with like a bunch of math, you just go well you're in this group and this group likes that so do that, right? Which is cool. Um I mean I I'm sure it gets a lot more complicated under the hood, but they base a lot of it on what people actually watch as opposed to characteristics of the video. And I think that's because it's really hard to define characteristics of a video, especially before a year or two ago.

Before you had AI that could scrape and analyze. Like it was just it was easier to build a viewer profile. User profile and base it on that. Yeah, Dogbert Dogbert says it exactly. Detecting content is hard. Detecting similarity is easy. Yeah. Um cool. Well, I think we've given everybody time to show up. We're We're nice and warmed up. That's our pre-show. So we are going to do the same thing that we did on Monday. If you're not familiar, this is how this works. We're recording a part of this stream for Nebula. That's our sort of cut down produced segment of the show. So we're going to go to a black screen for a couple of seconds. Then we're going to play an intro stinger. We're going to reintroduce ourselves for the crowd over at Nebula. We're going to do a a talk on our topic. Um we'll still be taking questions from chat during that and then we'll wrap up. Uh we'll take care of some business here. We'll say bye to YouTube and we'll roll into our next Twitch stream. That's the general way that that this works. So questions, comments, concerns on that before I hit the button. Did I miss anything, Jeff? The button. The button. We'll We'll we'll be hitting the button

in a moment and it will all go black. Right, yeah. I have way too much fun just saying all that. I I know. I know. All right, so we're going to back and black and then we're going to start the recording. Um okay, chat you are allowed a small panic. Not a big one. You can have a little panic as a treat. Okay, cool, great. Oh, good times on internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that right now at this moment is for the first time co-streaming to both YouTube and Twitch. I am your humble live stream producer host Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff. Hi to the people, Jeff. Hey everybody, I am Jeffrey Yorkin, the studio director of Extra Credits and long-time video game designer over 20-something years at this

point. And if you are joining us for the first time or one of the first times, Will and I do a weekly talk show where we pick a design element from games or around games or game culture and deep dive into it. And sometimes it's an actual video game and sometimes it's something adjacent like today's topic, Yeah. video game conventions. Yeah, and in fact as as someone in chat quite eloquently put it, um oh, where is it? I'm going to I'm going Pop it out. Uh it's not showing up. Okay. It's um This Design Club is talking about the pros and cons of cons. Yes. Correct. I was about to say yes to it. Yeah. Damn it, Will. You are faster than I am today. Yeah, so the The reason that we're doing this is that Jeff, you weren't here last week. I was not here last week. So, you were off in the mystical land of GDC. Well Ah, wrong button. Keep going. Uh so so you were at GDC, which is the Game Developers Conference.

Conference. I was. It was my Hold on. More than 25 now. That's a lot of G Yeah, that's a lot of GDCs. That's a lot of GDCs. That's a lot of like experience and badges, right? And and it's important to note that GDC is not like PAX or Comic-Con or E3 E3, rest in peace. Yeah. Rest in peace is at this point. It's broken up. Yeah, correct. So, for brief overview, what is GDC and what were you what were you doing there this time? And it's been actually, it's funny, it's been different on different times. But, GDC is the Game Developers Conference. It is every year in usually March. It takes place in San Francisco at the um big convention center right in the middle of downtown. There are three large, large sections of the convention

center. It takes over all of them because one does, and it's you and your maybe 20 or 30,000 closest people who work making games in the game industry show up for that. And it is well, there's lots of things at different conferences. This one, the thing that you really show up for isn't necessarily the showroom floor or anything else. It's that they have maybe 20 or 30 talks every hour for a week. You show up to go to lectures. At least, that's theoretically what you do, and I'll get to that in a minute. But, the Game Developers Conference is for game developers to go learn about game development. Okay. And to meet other game developers who are also there to learn about game development. Or at least, that's what they say. Right, yeah. By the way, I saw Arthur there for his first GDC. Arthur, for those of you who've been here a while, was our old community manager and left a couple

years ago to go to law school. Yeah. And now And he's now working with video games and law, and got to show up for his first GDC as like a lawyer or almost lawyer. He's not quite there yet, but almost lawyer in the industry. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and um a lot of the talks at GDC show up elsewhere, right? So, if you're if you're interested, there are many articles and other things that reference talks at GDC. We We talked about two on breakfast, actually. One about um people don't actually explore as much of an open world as they say they do. And the other one, which was very interesting, which was um Helldivers 2 gave a talk on propaganda, which is a very unique niche that they are extremely qualified to speak on. Uh And if you like things like that, GDC will post some of those to YouTube, but also has something called the GDC Vault, where if you buy access for a year, I believe you get the entirety of every recorded talk that's ever happened at GDC, stretching back 25 years or so. That's so many hundreds

of thousands of hours of talks. Yeah. And so, part of the Some passes at GDC also include the Vault access along with them when you buy them. That's really cool. Because GDC's main focus is educating game developers. Okay. And this is a pro and a con because Actually, Will, can I talk about what I've done Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, cuz it sounds like you've been to not all of them, but almost all of them. A goodly number. So, my very first game was a game called EverQuest, and I joined the team in '97 as one of the very early members, a very long time ago. So, this is And before that, like I I didn't go to a video game school because there were no game schools when I graduated in '95. Um I was a self-taught game designer. I Wait, I played D&D and BattleTech and card wars. Like, I read all the the and

paper games. I would buy books to read. I DM'd. I played mud um semi BBS games. I learned how to program muds in college. We actually used to play a lot of Marathon in college. That was Bungie's game before Halo. And I learned how to use their level editor. And so about a year out of college I got my first job because I'd already been modding and making mud games and modding Marathon levels. And saw an ad basically saying looking for people who can program LPCC plus plus, which was the mud programming language, and design levels. And so I showed them the levels I built and the code I built and I got hired in like a week later to go be one of the early EverQuest members. And so like back then learning that you got to go to GDC. Well, so like I joined in '97, my first GDC was in '98. This was like wow. It's a conference full of people giving lectures and there are no game schools. Right.

This is where you show up and you get to hear a young Will Wright talk about designing SimCity. Right. Or a young Warren Spector. Or like I got to meet Raph Koster who was lead designer for Ultima Online, who was our one of our main rivals. Like you get to go up and show up and go see lectures and meet people. And so my first almost decade of GDC was showing up to hear talks and actually get I think I got to give a talk in it was either '99 or 2000. EverQuest came out in '99, so maybe it was 2000. Like I got to give a talk on with a whole bunch of other EverQuest designers on the design of and production of EverQuest because it was one of the first break it was the first 3D breakout MMO. Yeah. And there were a lot of people suddenly very interested in can we make one of these? And it's very worth noting that this is um serving a unique function at the time,

right? The time period that Jeff's talking about, there's no YouTube, there's no LinkedIn, there's no like you are learning things that are inaccessible anywhere else. This is a truly unique opportunity. There's no schools, there's no any of that, right? So like that's a big part of what Yeah. what made it cool. And it was interesting, too, that you could see somewhat almost culturally where different groups were on game development. Like I remember in showing up in I think it was 02 to see it might have been the Lineage team talking about quests and the Korean experience. And I was like, "Oh, this is going to be interesting." And I showed up and everything they talked about was stuff we'd been doing 5 years ago. And like it changed very quickly after that, but it was so weird that we were like, "Wow, this is a talk I'd expected to hear back like a while like just looking at different parts of development at

different points before the world got more and more connected and game dev got more and more connected and we all accelerated off of each other." Right. So, that was the initial GDC, but it was also the meetings and the parties and all of the events around it where you got to meet other game developers Mhm. and try and get into a cool party because at that point we were all young and up-and-coming game developers. Right. But one of the things GDC caters to is the young and mid-level game developers, but not so much to senior or let's say creative director level people because if you make a talk for, you know, super senior MMO designer, there might only be 40 or 50 of those Also at that point in the world. Right. Also, what is the topic going to be on? Right? The people who are giving the talks are not the target of the talks. Right? Like, so what what what could you

possibly even give a talk on, right? If if someone is at the the forefront of uh new ideas and developing new things, they're not the people who need to be taught things in that way. And and so we get this weird thing that slowly over time a lot of people who go to GDC go, "Wow, there's less and less talks for me." Like, there are still interesting talks. You show up and hear things and there's round tables and you might go to a sponsored talk by, you know, Nvidia at the time or whatever to hear about what they're talking about with their new graphics cards. So, you know, as a designer usually it's like the engineer on your team shows up to that, learns some stuff, and then comes back and tells the team. But it becomes more and more about the networking. And in '06, I started a research company called EEDAR with a friend Greg Short. Uh we electronic entertainment designer research. And we became the biggest video game market research firm. Um actually in the world. And we sold a decade later. So, my my next decade at GDC was I still showed up, but I was the

one doing data talks. Like, we were doing some of the first Here, let's tell you about some of the actual data trends happening at you know, in the game industry. And I used to call it actually I Well, I named the talk Awesome Video Game Data Mhm. because I learned GDC always alphabetized their talks. So, always put me at the top of the time slot for the hour I was doing it. I'd be the first talk listed. Yeah. Unless somebody put like AAA, like, AAA game development, but with an A, I was always like Would they get upset at you if you'd used a tilde? The little um the little uh the key to the left of your one key, the little I was cheating at that point as opposed to just being a game designer and hacking their system. Right, yeah. But also, I'm from California. I'm allowed to say awesome. That's true. You are. Yeah, that that is But it's like written into our state constitution. You can say You can say awesome if you were from Cali. Okay, great. Excellent. And so yeah, I would go do a talk on data because I wanted people to buy insights from our company. So I'd go talk about the coolest things I'd seen over the past year.

And people would be like, "Wow, if they're giving to that much data for free, what more do they have?" Right. And so everybody won. Like everybody got here's an hour's worth of free data trends, you know, look at what this genre is doing. Look at how DLC is actually becoming more accepted by, you know, whatever it was. And we got pretty known for that. And it got a good amount of business. And so yeah, like we'd go to GDC, I'd give talks, and we would go hunt clients. Because every game studio had people there. Right. And so rather than flying out to like 80 different or, you know, 30 different major game publishers and 50 major game studios, we'd show up at GDC because all of the people were there. Yeah. And what you learn about these kind of conferences very quickly is there's always two or three hotels that the lobby of those hotels is where the business of the game industry gets done. Yeah. Like there are certain hotels that if you sit

in and just listen for a couple days, you'll hear a couple billion dollars worth of deals get signed. And if you've never been to GDC, but you have been to PAX East uh a great example of this is um if you are looking at the front of the Boston Convention Center there's And you look left. look left. There's a hotel right there that's attached to the convention center, and it's got that really nice bar. Yep, and the super high ceiling and the huge amount of seats. Right. Yep. That's where that happens at PAX. Because this isn't that's of the hotels that like go sit in that lobby. Yeah. Business gets done. Deals get signed. Devs sign with publishers. Publishers talk to IP brands. Like all of the stuff. That is just like yes, you can absolutely commit a lobby. Hold on, let me Hold on. I got it. I got it. Yeah. Don't think that there aren't people just sitting there listening. Oh yeah, absolutely. Any yes, absolutely.

But that's So that's that's a unique thing that you got to do at GDC, right? This was a unique networking opportunity because at the time you were doing it, even in '06, the the standard of doing business was we meet in person, we go for a meal, we hash things out over drinks. Pre-Zoom. Right, yeah. Yeah. And so like doing that for a decade, but like when we were getting ready to sell the company, I was already like starting up a new startup with a buddy to do VR. And my buddy Dimitri Ditsiaridis. And so like somewhere around 2016, 2017, when we showed up to GDC, we had our pitch decks. Like we had the games we wanted to make. We were looking for investment. And because it was so expensive to go rent a booth on the GDC floor, and it was so loud there, we actually used um

a company called Breather. Think of Airbnb for conference rooms. And so we rented like a really nice conference room two blocks from the convention center. And for like 1/8 the cost. And so like for a couple years, my GDC was pitching. Like we'd talk to all of again, everybody's there. All of the investors and publishers. We were like, "Hey, come on over. We've got a lobby set up. We have VR machines set up so you can sit down in a quiet room. We've got coffee and alcohol and drinks. You can put on a headset." And that's where we got all the money to find our fund our company. And we went to other mixer parties and things. So, we did business. So, I went from like learning about games to lecturing about games and getting clients to pitching my next game and like getting the funding and showing off what we were doing there. And you know, after we had a couple of hits and then realized VR was not big enough yet and gracefully shut the

company down. Like I was actually I was going to go start up another company where I came over to Extra Credits because I knew Dan and James were like, "Hey, need some help running, you know, getting this up and running for a bit." And suddenly the whole thing retired within a year and I had an ownership stake and was running a studio for this. Like now I go to GDC to bump into writers, to hear topics, to network with people, and like learn about industry things, and just again connect with people to bring on as guest speakers or other things. Because again, it's still where everybody gathers. Yeah. I haven't actually bought a ticket to GDC and gone to see a talk in over a decade. Yeah. But I still go to GDC because everybody else is there and too much else happens. You might you might sometimes hear this phenomena referred to in other parts as lobby conning, which is if you're going to a place just for exposure, just to meet up with people, just to be part of those hotel

you know, hotel lobby bar conversations. You don't actually need to go into the convention and there's a whole group of people for whom the convention is sort of ancillary to the fact that there are a bunch of people all in one place who all have a common interest. Right? And the events of the convention are the reason that some of those people are there, but the critical density of people is the reason that a lot of people are there. Yeah. Right? And for a con, it's a little bit of a back and forth. Like they want people to buy the tickets. Mhm. But they also just want people to show up. Like if enough people show up that makes the critical mass that people do still go get the tickets and other things. And some people might come out to go see talks, but they also want to go do the business. Or they might show up to do a talk. And but it's not like you get paid to like if you do a talk you get a free ticket to the show. Yeah. Like it might be that the reason they get people out to do some of the talks is not just the ticket, but the fact

that all the other business and networking goes on during it. Right. So part of their job is to remain relevant and be the big social hub that everything revolves around. Which leads us naturally into a question. Okay. Right? Which is in an era of increasing online-ness, right? Both post-pandemic lockdown, right? And uh the advancements in video streaming and everything else, and more and more reliance on social media and digital platforms to disseminate information, and I have a note about that in a moment. Uh why do we still have conventions? Are they accomplishing that goal? So I went to a couple of the virtual cons during the pandemic, and it's just not the same. Sure. Like there is something magical about wandering from hall to hall to hall and talk to talk to talk and getting bored with a talk and going to the next one or the people you meet there or just hearing the audience around you. It's just it is more

engaging if you can do it. Sure. Virtual is a nice secondary, but you don't get a lot of the accidental discovery. You don't get to walk into a talk and say, "Oh, what am I going to do this time slot? I've got an hour to kill before the next one I want to see." And you sit in on something and you're like, "Oh, that was interesting." Or the showroom floor or you chat you say hi to the person next to you and you're like, "Oh, you're the lead designer for God of War. That's cool." Like it's It's less organic. Things are rounded. Yeah, the the the the virtual experience is less organic. Um by the way, a a side note on the whole idea of digital platforms to disseminate information, uh Jeff, did you know uh you you were busy I believe working on some other stuff for the channel this morning, uh but I got an opportunity to watch the Nintendo Direct from today that they sprung on us because it's not enough that they're announcing the Switch 2 next uh week, April 2nd. Um they had to have one today to tell us that there's now going to be an app that

is exclusively Nintendo news daily that they will be updating about the Switch 2 release on every day following the announcement. They have their own news app for Nintendo for smartphones now. I was actually thinking more of So, yes, but the amount you have to plan your press Yeah. to have a worthwhile thing to say every day every day from launch announced to launch Yes. is a lot. Well, there's also a lot of rumors going around that that'll be a small window or as small a window as they can physically feasibly make it. But anyway, that's either here nor there. So, you've been talking a lot about GGC, right? Specifically, because that's sort of hyper relevant, right? Just happened, you were just there. But that's far from the only kind of convention that's super relevant to the video games industry, right? It's um certainly one that has a special place

in the games industry because it's existed for so long and has such unique purpose, right? But Dice also exists, right? As the other E3, PAX, Comic There's a lot of um MI6. Right, there's a lot of adjacency, right? And there there are some that have expanded started in the games that grew out of it, right? PAX started as just PAX and now is um also PAX Unplugged, right? Um E3 has their offering of what they service. Correct. Uh full like half of the hall No, it's not half. It's probably a quarter of the hall in Boston in the very back is just tables for like Magic and board games. Um and like the vendor hall is about half Magic and board games. Yeah, which is great. There's There's nothing wrong with that, but it is interesting that it's expanded beyond the realm of just video games, right? And then E3 has come into existence, been super relevant, faded out of relevance, shut down for several years, tried to come back, failed, came back sort of and then

shut down finally for good. E3's had a troubled a troubled history. Uh and then there's the the ones that I think a lot of people, when we talk about gaming conventions, I actually think most people think of the consumer-facing ones, because those are the ones that are the fanciest, I would say, for the average consumer, especially now that E3's gone, right? Well, they were the accessible ones. Like your normal person isn't going to show up at GDC. Because they're interested in playing the games, but they're not interested in going to hear a 1-hour talk on how to lay out poly maps for better path you know, better pathfinding in RTS games. It is It is kind of interesting to me that the only convention I know of that attempts to combine that consumer-facing side and the industry-facing side into one convention is TwitchCon, which means it's a very strange convention.

VidCon does a bit of this Yeah, like And again, there's so many different cons. And at every con, one of the questions you always hear is people say, "Was it worth it?" Yeah. Like even at GDC, like I was chatting with a couple people, which was, "Was the show worth it?" And we can get to why in a minute. But like if we're talking GDC is the one the biggest one which is developer facing. Yes. to teach about games and gamecraft. There are other smaller cons that do the same. Yeah. But that's the big one. There is media facing conventions. E3 was a media facing convention. Tokyo Game Show uh Gamescom Though both Tokyo Game Show and Gamescom also are a little bit of what we call a consumer facing convention. Which is it's also one that a normal person might go to to see interesting things. And other ones like that are PAX, uh Comic-Con, Gen Con.

But there's different conventions kind of aimed at different purposes and different target audiences. A- And And to be clear by the way Yeah. When we say media facing, right? Uh I do want to be clear that while the attendance at them is media facing, it often yielded high interest from consumers. So for instance, um Matt and I last year co-streamed the Gamescom awards some part of Gamescom. I think it might have been opening night. Mhm. Um because that was a thing that was presented to us as a media opportunity to do a thing and it generated interest among consumers, right? So when we say media facing, you may get coverage from it in a sort of trickle down fashion, but you will probably not absorb all that information as an end consumer unless you're highly invested in the industry um for whatever reason. Going to throw this one on screen. Is The Game Awards a media facing con? The

Game Awards is an award show. An award shows are an adjacent thing. Some cons have award shows at them. The Game Awards is a stand-alone thing. It used to be tied more loosely to E3 ish. Yeah. But it was but um we'll keep Game Awards as its own separate category I agree. because those don't necessarily require a convention. Right. But there are still ways to get information out. Correct. And I think the the as we as we talk a little bit about the the cost-benefit analysis of this, I think you'll see why we want to put Game Awards in its own sort of separate category. Um So So lots of different Yeah. convention types, which is good, and lots of different reasons to go. And I've been to everything I listed I've been Actually, no, I haven't been to Tokyo Game Show. Tokyo Game Show is fun from everything I've heard.

Tokyo in general is fun, so you know, squares. Um Uh So what what if you made it sound really important and relevant and sparkly kind of, right? You've got You've got all of these good memories. Let's Let's get down to like the the brass tacks of it. of good memories. Yeah, right, exactly. is its own whole thing, which we should touch on as we go. Yeah. So what What's the downside of all of this, right? Like why So let's be let's be a little honest about this. When we're talking about conventions and going to a convention and making the choice to invest time, money, and usually you're investing those twice, and we'll talk about that in a second. Um to go to a convention, what What's the cost? What's the downside of this picture look like? So let's start with cost cost. So like for me to go to GDC plane ticket hotel nights if I bought it a conference pass

um ride shares to and from the airport um, meals in hotels and other places that are pricier than you know, at home. So, it can easily easily easily be a four-fig four-figure spend. Or actually, almost unavoidable. Like, if you're going to San Francisco and you're getting a hotel for three or four nights and a plane ticket and any ride-shares and any food. So, straight up, first one, there is the actual cost cost. Yep. And depending who you're going for, like, back when I used to work for Sony they would send me up to E3. They would pay for my hotel and my ride or my airplane, you know, all of all of that. Because they thought it was worthwhile enough to send a certain amount of their developers up that that was them investing in like developer training and experience. Mhm. And it was a perk. Yeah. Yeah, work for Sony, they send you to the con. Cool.

That's like one of the extra things. And that is a perk for some things. But if you own the company or if you're kind of independent and going like, if you own the company, the company's paying, but you also know where that money is coming out of. Right. That's all money you could have been doing other things with. Right. And and and in the same way, that time that you're spending Yes. at the convention, preparing for the convention, is time that you could have been spending doing other stuff. from the sickness you inevitably get because you're sharing my sniffles after convention. Right. Yeah, absolutely. But but also, let's talk as well, when we're talking about cost, opportunity cost is very real as well, right? So, you've got um, last week, great example, right? It was absolutely worth it for Jeff to go to GDC and have all of the those conversations and to come back with a perspective on that to do this to do this stream and to to make this video. But at the same time we didn't have our planning meeting last week. We didn't have uh, our stream last week,

right? I missed three days of work I would have otherwise been doing. Right. Uh and God, yeah, it so it's And you didn't have to make a demo. You didn't have to take anything with you, so you didn't have to prepare ahead of time. Yeah. Like what was it in 2017, I think? When we were showing off some of our we were showing off our game for Oculus. We actually we'd done the official Catan port. So we were doing Settlers of Catan in VR license. We actually got to invite Klaus Teuber's sons out. Um Klaus Teuber's the guy who wrote it to like come help us demo the game. We were in the middle of the GDC floor, in the middle of the Oculus booth. Like we were in the shiniest spot at that time you can possibly imagine. Yeah. But we had to have our game playable and bulletproof for that. Prep all the demos, fly out the crew out. Like it all had to be ready to go. So it was weeks worth of extra effort to

get ready to be shown off in the middle of the GDC floor. Oh, and I did a talk that same year. Right, which means also prepping the talk, so it was it was a lot of extra prep work around that. And to be clear, if you've never I I think Jeff's level of prep for convention talks is immaculate, and it all is also extensive. I have literally never seen a more complicated slide deck for a talk ever than one of Jeff's. If you're going to do it, you got to like I mean, we're very stylistically different on that count, but um I I have I game must respect game. But that's still that's we're talking hundreds of person-hours to prepare for this. Or more. And it's you know, but you're you're weighing your trade-off. Right. For us, being in the best show-off position for our game in the middle of the Oculus booth while

doing that was a thing we wanted. Yeah. Doing a talk about, you know, VR when people were like, "Will VR make it or not?" was a thing we wanted to be. Yeah. Uh it's kind of funny actually. That was um it it's reminding me uh the PlayStation VR 2 or the the PSVR 2 came out, right? And I have one and it's great and I love it. But when I found out that there used to be at the in the area you're talking about, VR was such like a it's going to be everywhere that they port dedicated VR headset ports in graphics cards and they don't need more. I didn't realize that. It was For a while, people like it's funny. We actually figured out at that GDC we're going to be shutting our company down. Yeah. Because we're in the middle of the floor, the game launched, we were the number one selling game for that entire week and we looked at the sales and we said, "Oh, this means that Oculus has sold this much hardware where they promised they

were going to sell this much hardware." Right. So, if you're the number one selling game, that theoretically means you cannot be making any more money. But this there's something called hardware install base, you know, if you sell 100 iPhones and have Angry Birds, you could sell 100 copies. If you sold a million iPhones, you could sell a million copies. VR was having closer to that 100 than the million problem. And therefore, with the best even with the best game, we looked at the money and we're like, "Oh, that is not sustainable. Right. We're going to shut the studio down over the next 6 months gracefully find everybody new jobs because we don't think VR will get to the point it needs to be to sustain a studio." Right. Which is So, it was it was really interesting experience. Yeah. By the way, that's so the best way to do that to like gracefully make an intentional choice to end doing a project. And that's hard to do by the way. We'll we'll probably do a talk about like saying goodbye to your to the thing you worked on at some point cuz that is a difficult skill to learn. Um but it's also like I think everybody who worked for me would come back to any new

studio I started because we could treat them that way. Yeah, right. Absolutely. part of being honestly running a studio well. Yeah, you're right. That is a whole other topic. But like Yeah, okay. So conventions to me like I have this weird like floating thing of they're really useful but there is the cost. Physical. There's the opportunity cost. There's physical risk. Like I just having gotten back one of my buddies who I had dinner with like hey, it was great seeing everybody at GDC. Looks like I picked up COVID. Like Right. Adam got COVID at GDC because it's a gathering and It's a ga COVID is like the flu now. It's just going to be around forever. You get your shots so you don't die from it. And um Yeah, like that that is what that is. Yeah, that is a huge uh a huge thing, right? That like there's um Also, it's just like it's even even if you don't get sick it still sucks because

say that you're go say Jeff gets to go to Tokyo Game Show, right? Ooh. He still has to deal with the jet lag in both directions, right? It's still um some amount of like physically taxing to travel a huge distance. Mhm. In I think 2001 I went to the Korean version of the Tokyo Game Show. Maybe it was two. One or two. Where basically they flew me out. Sony flew me out. I got to be there for two days and then they flew me back and while there I also went to a EverQuest fan meetup and helped pitch NCsoft because we wanted them to publish one of our games and we were going to publish one of their games. I got to meet Richard Garriott actually during that. That's cool. Um like cuz he was on the he was at NCsoft at the time. So but it was yeah

like my jetlag was extreme. Yes. Like that's just But again like first world problem but not at the same time. Like you know you get to fly to Korea. Yes, I do. I still have to fly to Korea. Yeah. Um so cost opportunity cost personal risk oh studio risk. Um so hey cool. You're sending 20 people to GDC or PAX or anything else. So yes, you have the cost for them. You have the opportunity cost. They're not doing all the work they would have otherwise been doing. The personal risk, hey five of them caught flus and two caught COVID. Studio risk and then they all came back. And suddenly the rest of your studio is getting exposed to all of that. Right. Um and there's also a little bit of the protective moat. Like you have 20 people who are happily working at your studio.

And then you send them off to GDC and they get to talk to all these other people and they find out about these new opportunities. There's a lot of studios and publishers that are really worried about sending staff because this is where everybody does networking. And that working often involves finding new jobs. Right. So so like the And like that's not a bad personal one but from like a studio perspective, you're always a little worried. How many people am I paying to send there that may be using this to advance their career and go find a job and leave me? Right. So the the people who are most likely to get opportunities that you would want to send them for G to GDC for. Let's say your lead designer gets offered the opportunity to do a talk at GDC. That puts them and you in a good spotlight. They get to talk about the cool work that you're doing and everyone gets excited for the thing that you're making. But it also makes them personally a very attractive uh employee, right? A very attractive person to be in like, "Oh, yeah, take my

card. Let's do lunch. Let's do whatever." And now you're risking being short a lead designer. It It's funny you say that. I'd completely forgotten Adam, the same one Uh-huh. who got COVID, was reminding me at dinner that like 20 years before that ish he'd pitched me cuz he was working at Monolith to come be a lead designer on an MMO project they were putting together. And had pitched me and mildly interviewed me for to be come become his boss. Mhm. Um at GDC and then my current boss walks by at the time while we were having that conversation and that he thought it was hilarious. That's hilarious. Like I'd forgotten about that. Yeah. Like it's not an abstract. Like Right. It's a very concrete thing that like it is a risk to your studio to send all of the cool people that are doing all of the good work to a place where there are people with money looking for employees and are empowered to make your employees better offers that you can't match.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Or maybe you can, but you hadn't you'd hope that you weren't going to have to. Right. Yep. Cuz like not only does it stink to lose that person, but now you're probably behind your deadline significantly. Um Okay, and then And um so yeah, like there's lots of stuff that goes around the convention of is it worth it? And for the employee, it almost always is. Right. Like you may crunch for a couple of weeks to get your demo ready, but part of that is you're getting the cool thing to show off to hopefully make your game sell a lot and get you that sweet royalty check or profit sharing or you know, kudos to go make that next cool game you want to make. Yeah. So, uh but that while that is cool and great, is that the best way to do it? Uh I mean I have some of the Kit Kats I brought

back from Japan. Okay, great. realized they're sitting here. Okay, great. Excellent. So, like but is that is that the most effective way to do that thing, right? They like we we've sort of we're in the mode, I think, as an industry where we do it that way cuz we've always done it that way. So, we're going to keep doing it that way because these are institutions, right? GDC and like E3, the number of people who have never been to E3 or thought about going to E3 who were sad when E3 declared that there weren't going to be any more E3s was pretty high, right? Because it was an institution that was part of the that was a uh significant part of the industry, right? Um So, that that's one of the questions. And then the other one is with all of those costs and all of that risk, how do you actually determine from like a cold calculus perspective whether going to that convention as a studio was a positive ROI or not? Right? Cuz it's very difficult to like how do you say like, yes, this was

actually a success and not just emotionally a success because there's a lot of emotions that go around in being room with filled people who are like recognizing what you're going for. Yeah. So, like as a young to mid-level developer, you might or a studio head, you might be cool. Did my young and mid-level developers go see 20 or 30 talks and come back with a whole bunch more knowledge and inspiration? Yeah. As somebody like as somebody who is giving talk to raise my profile in the the industry, it might be did my talk go well? Were people talking about it? Did I have a full room? As somebody selling video game data research, it might be how many millions of dollars of contracts did we lock while we were there. Right. Like that's a pretty easy one. As somebody pitching investors and venture capital to fund my next studio to go do VR when VR was a hop and coming thing, it might be how much money did we get, you know, into the studio to go make the game.

Right. So like some of these are very concrete metrics. Some of the hardest ones are the ones for the actual part of the con. You know, for GDC, did my people who went to go see talks get that done? But for different conventions like E3, you might say, you know, are there more Are there better ways to accomplish the same goals? And I think that's one of the reasons GDC is still here, Yeah. but E3 isn't. Yes. Because for a long time, E3, or the Electronic Entertainment Expo, was the media-facing show. Yeah. So as a reminder, games have been around for a long time. My first E3 was in '98, and we went up to show EverQuest. It EverQuest came out in '99, so we were showing like the precursor to what it could be. Mhm. But the reason Remember I was talking about

all the networking that goes on? The reason E3 existed was in the proto-internet phase, people got a lot of their news from magazines. And some magazines were starting to move to digital format, but it was still the prestige was print. The prestige was game covers. Could you get on the cover of PC Gamer or Game Informer? I actually still have right It's a fastener to the wall those I take it off. Brad McQuaid, our producer for EverQuest, said he would personally buy and frame the first game cover we ever got for EverQuest. So, PC Gamer, what month is that? September of '88? Or '98? Cuz it's '98. PC Gamer EverQuest is a little older than me. has EverQuest on it. And I still have that framed cover sitting on my wall right Okay, yeah. because of how important it was. And you it was cheaper for companies to go

pay the outrageous E3 fees to be on the ground floor and show off their games than it was to fly hundreds and hundreds of journalists out to come see the thing. So, the goal was you would have your most badass demo or version of the game you'd just released, but usually the precursor to the game, the demo ready, and everybody would show up, and all the media would be there. And your press person, if they were good, that you'd have your big showroom floor where you're showing off the game, but the real magic was the um back room, which was you'd have the lead designers, so I did this for a whole bunch of E3s, would sit there, and every half an hour for 3 days, you would get PC Gamer coming in, Playboy, CNET, CNN, just this list of people who covered like big name TV, I list Playboy, you may laugh at the time, but getting printed in Playboy

back in the late '90s, early 2000s was huge for your game. And Playboy had a section that covered games. Yeah. Like it it was Well, especially when video games were rising as a medium, right? Like it it became uh They weren't as ubiquitous as today. They were considered a more niche product. Correct. But everyone wanted to be in on it kind of in the same way that now everyone wants to be on you probably just inserted a buzzword. It's probably a valid one, right? Like that it was that same thing except it was for video games. All right, so like I remember literally doing day upon day upon day of the same demo every half hour and every single group that got in what in was important cuz they were the ones who were going to write about it and get your game the press that then waited to go sell all of the copies. Right. And now And Yes, as times have changed it has gotten easier and easier to disseminate

information. Yeah. To send people trailers, to send people betas that they can play online even for an offline game. And to get things out in a way that it didn't used to be. And over time people also wanted to start controlling their message a little more. And influencers became a thing. Mhm. It used to be that there were dedicated game journalists. Those were the people that covered games. Nowadays there are there's less of them but there are thousands of other large to small people who can tell you about games. And it doesn't always have to be at the same one time in June. Right. Yeah. I think that's that's very true. It used to be in June by the way because that would let you get your press coverage lined up for when you launched your game in the fall to be ready by Christmas. Yeah. Absolutely. Different release cycles and so something like that just over time more and more companies started pulling out of E3 realizing they could do their own media.

Hey, I'm Nintendo. I can now make my own app that will feed you daily news on this. Exactly. That didn't used to be an option. Right. And so and I think at the same time there's this sort of um not rise but like steady state Um, Office over in YouTube chat brought this up. Um, blended conferences, right? Mhm. Uh, that that accomplish some media facing, some consumer facing, some uh, industry facing, right? Um, like Gen Con. And actually E3 was trying to pivot to that at the end because they realized the media itself was no longer enough. So, they'd have a media day and then a media plus influencer day and then a day that like the general public could buy a ticket and come see the games. Yeah. And I think it's just it couldn't shift and stay relevant in such a way as say Gen Con or PAX. Like the rise of PAX. I mean like here's a big consumer facing show that it's about people who love

games. You want to come show off your game? Cool. And especially for a lot of indie to small to mid-tier people who couldn't afford the E3 prices, they could afford the PAX prices. Yep. And they could go up and get in front of a whole bunch of people who love games. Some of them would be journalists cuz the journalists were interested in going out there cuz PAX is fun. Some of whom would be influencers cuz influencers want to go out there cuz they can make content at PAX cuz it's fun. And so you've got this kind of shift on the dynamics of the kinds of conferences that were useful to people because they could mix and blend what the conference was about. I I also do want to um, uh, just interject into that uh, conversation. Specifically when we're talking about the Gen Con versus um, PAX divide or like specifically the Gen Con physical versus PAX digital divide, right? If we're using those as placeholders for those two sides. There is a pretty significant difference I think both in the scope of the industry

for Gen Con, right? Like um, you're almost board games and card games. Gen Gen Con is physical tabletop. Correct. And adjacent. Right. You're almost never I I'm going to I'm going to go out on a limb, Jeff. Tell me if you think I'm right or wrong. It's going to be extremely difficult to move as many units of a physical board game as it would be to move that same number of units or greater number of units of a digital game, right? While the design cost is is less, right? Um there are Design cost is less for a physical game. For a physical game, yes. production cost is significantly higher for the Right. the tangible assets. Right. And so there's a bunch of different dynamics about um number of copies that get sold, how they get sold, how they get demoed, all of those things feel slightly different between the two. So it's not it's not a one-to-one is all I'm saying is that there are concerns in the Tabletop also has the ambassador thing that um they want to get the people who show up

at Gen Con or PAX or PAX Unplugged or and play the game and be like, "Oh, this was great." And then go back and tell all their friends about it and those people buy it, too. Right. They're like, "It operates in a different way than throwing up a sexy trailer and people are going like, 'Oh, you know, God of War looks fun. I'll go buy that.'" Right. But yeah, is you need to convince one person in the group to buy Gloomhaven. And then they'll convince everyone else in the group that they should pitch in to help buy Gloomhaven, right? Um As one does. As one does, right? I'm actively considering buying a copy of Twilight Imperium because I have problems, apparently. Um I don't have a play group for Twilight Imperium, but I want one. So I want a copy of Twilight Imperium. Um Okay, so that's that's sort of like the the E3 media-facing part. We've talked a little bit about influencers, talked a little bit about companies. So And actually it should be worth

mentioning cons are different vibes. Like you go to Gen Con for tabletop. You go to PAX for tabletop and small to mid-size games and the occasional large one and maybe to see some actual plays. Um, you go to San Diego Comic-Con somewhat for the comics, but also to go see all of the movie and TV TV show stuff, which now inundates it. Like San Diego Comic-Con is more like pop culture con Yes. in a lot of ways. Not as many comics anymore, though they still have the name. And to see artists and talk like So, each one kind of has its own niche. And they're different. Like San Diego Comic-Con's different than Emerald City Comic-Con up in Seattle or New York Comic-Con out in New York. Right. But each show kind of has its vibe and its audience that it serves. Right. And I think the ones that have been able to adapt and sort of Mhm. um mold themselves to the changing landscape, right? That

um there are cons that have a better social social media presence than others, right? There are cons that encourage that kind of um to be the physical space to do the digital networking, right? That there are those that have adapted and made it easier to see that you can accomplish your goals, whatever they may be, whether you're media influencer, fan, developer, studio head, whatever, at that convention, right? Than others, right? And I do think I agree that that's part of why E3 E3 sort of just floundered and failed is that E3's probably the prime example of I can get it somewhere else now. Yeah. Right? And like San Diego Comic-Con's been really nimble. Like there's an alternate version where they stuck harder to their we're comics vibe and stayed it, you know, never grew into the behemoth that they are. Yeah. By embracing, oh, San Diego's 2 hours from LA.

We can get all the movie people coming down to do that. And all the TV people and all of the, you know, LEGO to come do their thing and Lucasfilm to set up their huge, you know, Star Wars stage that they do or like all of this pop culture refund stuff. That's just part of, you know, why people still show up and it sells out 30 year, 40 years, whatever down the line. Right. But it's interesting, too, that as we've talked about this, we've drifted further and further away from major video game conventions. I do want to point that out, right? That like and I don't think it's on accident, right? Because I think the value proposition for a physical gathering for a digital product is harder and harder and harder to pitch. Right? So, for instance, um uh I when when last time I went to PAX East was oh god, pre-pandemic. Um And cuz it was the one right before the

pandemic started. Right. Yeah, we were all like we we were already like uh elbow touching instead of shaking hands and like we knew something was up and then like we got back and like 2 weeks later we were in lockdown. Um Uh I remember that there were I was thinking that it was really weird. There was a Magic game. So, you you may not remember, Magic wanted to make an ARPG, like a Diablo-style ARPG uh for Magic the Gathering. It didn't work, by the way. Um but one of the things that I remember was why would I stand in line? Why haven't they like released the demo? Why isn't there a a beta online for this multiplayer game? Why am I going to wait in line at the con for an hour to play the demo for a digital game here when I could, you know, do other things like play um the Enter the Gungeon uh arcade cabinet with Matt, right? Matt and I are both huge devotees of Enter the Gungeon and we went and waited in

line to play on the only physical copy of the Enter the Gungeon light gun arcade cabinet, right? Like that's a physical experience. I can't get that at home, but it's harder to convince me, even as someone who's very interested in the idea of a magic ARPG, that I should spend physical time waiting in a line to play a demo or waiting in the line because there was the line for the um uh Animal Crossing demo for Nintendo. And that line was like an hour and a half long to play like a 20-minute demo of Animal Crossing. And so some people stood in it, but a lot of people just looked at the booth, which may have increased their sales, but it's harder and harder to pitch that idea to people. what they wanted though. Oh yeah. They showed up. Yeah. They got tons of media pictures. And even if you didn't do it, you're like, "Wow, that game's going to be popular. I should check it out." Like they did their job with that. Nintendo actually Nintendo and Animal Crossing had a much better execution than many other games. There were

definite We got pitched games to cover that like did never made it to production. Um Yep. Some made it to production and then fizzled out. Uh all kinds of stuff. And so It It is a tricky tricky thing on that, but I think a lot of it comes back to Hold on. That there's been a shift in how we pick up media, video game media. And that Sorry, still getting over the GDC stuff. Right, yeah. For a long time you went to the store to buy your game. You just You went to the store to buy your game. In '06 was the first time consoles put hard drives. That was the Xbox 360, the PS3, and the Wii. Before that, there were no hard drives that came with your console. Right. That means the only way to get a game was to have gotten and bought it.

And physical digital sales did not come to parity with digital Those digital sales did not come to parity with physical sales somewhere until like the mid-teens Sure. of the 20s. So, it has been less than it has been maybe a decade or less that more people got started getting their games digitally than physically. And I think that, you know, that has snowballed recently. They are much more digital, but so this is conferences adapting to something that just used to be standard. Like, you went to a conference because you couldn't download a digital version of this game and see it. Yeah. You wanted to go see the thing. Like, you got to see the sneak peek because they weren't putting it online. And nowadays companies are like, "Wait, it's so easy to do digital distribution, the internet speeds are faster, everybody has hard drives, people are used to getting it this way.

There isn't the magic that you could go play this game exclusively at a con because the publishers realize they don't need to gate it that way. Yeah. Absolutely. And And I think that that like and that's, you know, exactly what we're saying about news, too, right? Why would Nintendo spend time, money, and energy going to a media-facing convention now? They might do it for something like Animal Crossing, right? Big physical demo presence is a sales opportunity, but it's a marketing opportunity. But they can deliver information in a very controlled, clean Nintendo's presenta- Nintendo directs are clean. They are edited, they are produced, they have voice-overs, they have translation, right? Everyone looks great, they have like hair and makeup and everything, and like they don't have to worry about getting everyone to whatever convention it is and having translators on site for Nintendo executives and like all of that. Right? So And I think that's part of kind of the upping the game around what they're doing is that

as cameras have gotten better and lighting's gotten better and you know conferencing and editing and all virtual conferencing and editing you can put all of this together now and do a really slick presentation in a way that you just couldn't before. Yeah. So I think some of these cons it's actual tech things. Like E3 went away from the tech changes some of the demo, you know, physical demos and other things went away again, tech changes. And that's part of adapting to an ever-changing industry and staying relevant is being able to look realize which way the wind is blowing and try and make sure you are sailing ahead of the group and don't get caught behind and kind of sink. Right. Two layer metaphor on metaphor there. Right, yeah, so many layers of metaphor. So uh Jeff, I'm going to put you on the spot. I'm actually going to I'm going to I'm going to put you on the spot. I'm going to put you on the spot. As someone who is a person who has spent a career looking ahead at the industry and seeing the way things are going from statistics to you know, being a developer to running your own studio to all of that. Do you think that

we're heading in a direction where conventions are going to continue to be a worthwhile experience for the industry? Yes. Okay, please defend. Um so there's a couple reasons people go. So my favorite cons are you still like so I like GDC. Sure. There will always be value for me in showing up talking to other people finding out what's going on, renewing relationships and like being around for that. The reason cons like PAX or Gen Con um will keep going is they're fun. Like, people aren't showing up there just to see the new Animal Crossing demo. That might be a thing they do there. They're showing up because they want to look around with their friends or their family or even just by themselves. Go shopping. time. They're going to show up because they're buying a ticket to a good time. Yeah.

It's like going to a concert. You're buying a ticket to a good time. Their good time is, you know, hanging out with their friends and playing a live D&D game in a pickup. Or seeing that Animal Crossing thing. Or going to go see an actual play or just wander around and buy some fun merch. Like, I come back every year with some fun merch. I have a young kid. I buy them Every PAX I go to, I bring him back a couple sets of dice. You know how he has more dice than any other child of his age should. I bought him a little treasure chest for Christmas that he can put them in. It's his treasure chest full of dice. They've been great counting aids. Like, I could do that off of Amazon. It's more fun to walk around in person and be like, "Oh, here's some cool dice for my kid." Yeah. So, some cons are ticket to fun. Those cons, I think, are San Diego Comic-Con is like that. People are going there cuz they're going to have a good time. So, consumer-facing ones that can continue to stock

themselves with things people want to see, I think are going to do better than ever. I think industry-facing ones, as long as they can stay relevant. You know, for game developers, there will always be new crops of game developers. There's whole schools dedicated to cranking them out. Companies still need a place to all meet up and talk about things and to send these new and low-level and mid-level people to hear lots of talks, learn lots of things, and hopefully make better games for them. Yeah. And And in the same way, the um the industry benefits from things like this year, the union debuted. There was a there's a nationwide video game workers union that debuted at GDC. That's a thing that's much easier to do in person that kind of organization and getting people to sign up and doing all that. That's much easier in person than online. Yeah. And it's a good chance to like sit in and hear It's funny. If you're at home, there's always or at your office,

there's always 30 other things you could be doing Yeah. instead of listening to it. Part of the magic of a con is when you're there, you're like, "Cool. I'm here to hear this union talk. I'm here to hear this person, you know, talk about Slay the Spire development." Right. And you know, the things that they talked out about along the way and how they made their like those are things that are honestly sometimes easier to consume and understand in person than they are with all the distractions in other places. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Cool. Well, I think that is a good place for us to leave our discussion on cons. Let us know in the comments. Ha. I'm a YouTuber now. Let us know in the comments below what if you if you think that cons are worth it. Are they not? Are they How do you feel about them? What was the last one you did? me ramble on for a little bit. Yeah. But again, these are specific things like as a developer talking about it. Yeah. And for those of you who happen to be

watching the vlogs now that we're throwing them up if you want to come join us, we are we go live at 11:00 a.m. every Thursday. That's Pacific time. and on Twitch. Pacific time, thank you. For Brad and Janet, for Rocky, which is Nebula, we throw it up about a day later. Yep. And VODs now have a new home that you can also see on YouTube as well as the ad-free version up on Nebula. Yep. Absolutely. We'll be back next week, probably. There's Unless I get jury duty. Yeah, unless Jeff gets jury duty, but we got our fingers crossed that that's not going to happen. Um Uh know. I I think I'd make your Well, anyway, jury duty you would, but it's just like going to a con, it's going to disrupt the workflow, right? I'm sure I'm sure it's a great It's a It's a civic duty and a worthwhile experience, but I'm hoping that my workflow doesn't get disrupted. Anyway, um we'll be back uh either next week or the week after. We're probably going to talk about the Switch 2 debut. Um I'm super excited for that, actually. Mostly because I want It'll be the first time that we'll have gotten to like sit down in this format and talk about

there's a new console, what does this mean? Um so, I'm super excited for that. Uh thank you all so much for being here, and we will see you all next time. Say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people, Jeff. Okay, we back. We back. We are. Hey, I kept my energy up the whole time, and I hopefully didn't get too many sniffles on um Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um Uh I saw I saw uh both question about web games. So, when we're doing design club, uh I love that question. I absolutely love this question um that What was it? Will it turn up on screen so I can see it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I'm getting there. Um Uh any thoughts if web games might make a comeback similar to the flash games of the past? I think that's a great topic. We're going to try and keep these a little more focused. Um I think that's a fantastic topic that I

would love to talk about, mostly because I have an unending sort of very rose-colored view of the idea of Kongregate. Oh man, yeah. Kongregate was a thing um back in ye olden days, and I have many games that I loved on Kongregate that I have never found for placements for off of Kongregate. of the old What was it? Armor Games? Uh Armor Games was one of the devs that used to make They made like three or four of my favorites. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And before that they were games of Gondor before the um before the Tolkien estate looked at them and went And they went Excuse me. Our bad. Our bad. We're Armor Games now. That's our bad. Sorry. Sorry. Don't sue us to do oblivion. And it was great, right? So um uh Yeah, WebGL and WebAssembly have really come along since Newgrounds and Kongregate, for sure. For sure. The problem is kind of the same problem that we have with phones though, which is that um um

that like why Why, right? Why would I do that when I could instead just get something off Steam? Right? So like is it for a work computer? Then I have my phone. So like in my opinion, mobile games and the rise of Steam specifically and the lightweight like free-to-play end of Steam have made it hard for web games to find a purchase in that sort of I would I think it's the phones even like Yeah. Web games were good because you used to be able to play them basically without installing things. Now that everybody has a uber-powerful computer Right. sitting in their pocket it's hard to play a web game on a phone. And if you've made a game in the right engine porting it to be an app is just as easy as putting it up on a web on a browser, in some cases easier. Yep. Um So I think it's really it's just that phones are so easy to dev for Yeah. that

it makes it less desirable just to do a web game. Yeah. I I agree. I agree. I I think that there are there are some like there's some nuance there, but in general in general I agree. Um Cool. Cool. Yeah, like we said um in the in the wrap-up there, uh I am if Jeff doesn't get jury duty, the plan next week is that we are going to do a sort of breakdown like a not the We're not going to We're probably not going to do a breakdown of what the switch two is doing, I don't think. What I think we're going to break down is the announcement itself. If like that's what I wanted to take a shot at is like but there are plenty of people who are going to be talking about oh the hardware specs mean this and that and the other, but I want to like look into the way that Nintendo announces the switch two because I think that that is a fascinating thing that not a lot of people are going to talk about if that makes sense. Right? Like how And I've covered a lot of hardware in my

time. yeah, yeah, yeah, um Uh I think that that's and by the way they're already setting up the the venue space. Uh there's already a sign that someone spotted in New York that has like a one of those big standing placards that says like it's confirmed that it's just going to be called the switch two. Um which Good luck with that. Wii U all over again, eh? Um No, Wii Wii U was ambiguous, this is not, yeah. Actually, let me tell you here's my advanced one. The Wii U was confusing to the people who bought the Wii which were the parents. That's true. Because I think I would guess 75% of Wii consoles or Wiis were bought by a parental figure. It may be for them and their kids. Right. Maybe I'm overestimating. But Switches I would say have a lot of the

same. Telling parents the switch two is out as opposed to the switch prime Uh-huh. like Wait, which is is which is different? A switch or a switch prime? Right. Two tells you it's the next iteration. Right. It's not the Xbox thing. They've learned from Xbox, right? Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One S X Q R what like stop. Xbox, you need some help with the names. Um Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So, um this is what's going to happen. Uh we are going to wrap up the YouTube stream. Uh we we are going to throw to some Twitch stuff. We need to do some uh finagling that uh YouTube doesn't need to see. Um so, we will be back Monday on YouTube for breakfast. Please join me and Matt. We're going to have a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. Uh we're already gathering stories. Uh For those of you who haven't been to on Mondays for breakfast, Will and Matt will do a very high-energy recap of the gaming news of the week. Yep, that's

correct. And it's great. Uh I I it is it is one of the It and Design Club are two of the things that I'm most proud of after all of this time on Twitch. So, uh please join us for that. It'll be here on YouTube. Uh and uh yeah, so uh Twitch chat say bye to YouTube. YouTube chat say bye to Twitch chat and we'll we'll see you all next time. Uh bye YouTube.