Baldur's Gate 3 Launch / Playtika Earnings / Dota 2 Arcade Shutdown

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I hear uh Sebastian may have run into some funding perhaps yeah well thanks thanks for the great Segway Devin yeah so Infinite Canvas the user generated gaming meets gen AI Studio publisher I run raised six million dollars recently which has been a ton of fun and so we've been launching a new game called creaturecraft creaturecraft.gg if you want to check it out the Discord game powered by AI which is always a lot of fun to develop against yeah having tried it myself it was pretty easy to get going in pretty much any Discord server you have control over so recommend people check it out free to check out so might as well give that a go we have some great topics today yeah congrats uh we uh we have some cool stuff uh just good variety of games topics today uh we're gonna talk about Baldur's Gate uh with the third game having a pretty insane launch uh DOTA arcade actually shutting down there's referring to the uh the valve game uh Dota 2 I believe in that case uh and then some stuff about rec league uh which is a newly announced game that should be pretty interesting

to dig into play Tikka and play Studios with their earnings calls fun stuff in there and then some some interesting discussion over Ai and microeconomics around YouTube clip and thumbnail making but uh first why don't we dig into that amazing Baldur's Gate 3 launch yeah I mean hottest game uh at the moment I guess uh and and yeah I mean I just downloaded my copy yesterday I still haven't gotten to play it but uh I know Maria you've played it a little bit right uh how I have three different I have three different friends groups so I have three games going on okay and it is hands down one of the best games I've ever played I play DND 5e and so it's just imagine someone went into your brain in your RPG sessions and then put it into a beautifully crafted environment when they do their magic is like exactly how I had pictured it in my imagination

is just absolutely fantastic yeah loving loving it I don't I think it's spreading like like wildfire because even in d d groups we're like oh have you play this no install it and everyone is just buying it from from Word of Mouth in my circles yeah yeah that's cool I mean uh I'm full disclosure I've actually never played baldor's gate and also never you know really engaged with the DND um you know the tabletop game and that like that whole experience but this time like you know I just had to like download it and check it out so hopefully after the point I'll I'll get some time to like check out the game but I mean um but yeah I mean you know the launch has just been insanely great uh for this so you know maybe first going over like some of the performance metrics real quick um so this game has been in Early Access since October 2020 and it's we got to know that it was uh it sold about like 2.5 million copies um so I had like a 60

dollar price you know results in 150 million in Revenue already which really helped carrying you know that studio uh to the next Point uh for for launch um in terms of comps you know that's about uh 5x higher than you know the Early Access sales uh for Divinity original sin 2 which is larion Studios uh previous game there's an interesting story around that that I'll come to like you know how Larry and got the right to build Boulder Escape uh later um but yeah I think overall you know just in terms of those Early Access copy sold um and you know after launch they've probably like doubled that by now if if not more um it's probably gonna be like the biggest Baldur's Gate launch of uh of all time in terms of concurrence I mean this is this has been like that uh you know the sexy headline that's kind of been doing the rounds uh it hit 800k

concurrent players over the weekend which is just huge um and it's currently sitting at about between something you know 600 to 700k and also like above Apex uh pubg and GTA 5. so that's crazy and one interesting stat uh you know it's it's like a 1.3 GB download I literally had to like give just clean out my steam deck just to download the this game but that 122 GB or 123 GB download you know it also created like one of the biggest team bandwidth spikes in history uh hitting like one close to like 150 000 gbps whereas like the average is more like in the 25 to 30k in so generally like you know really really good um but yeah I mean overall you know just kind of knowing all those numbers um and it's also like sitting at teams number one top Crossing spot right now it I mean there was clearly like this massive unmet you know audience hunger

that uh that this game is now satisfying and it's just been a great Revival of uh the Baldur's Gate franchise um but more interestingly like I guess I wanted to just hit on like Lion Studios itself um I never knew about them until you know researching this topic so they started off in 1996 uh and it's founded by this person called Sven win K and it's a Belgian uh video game developer um and they interestingly started off in casino and educational games but then moved into RPGs uh after that um a lot of other people might probably know this but uh I only again just got to learn during my research they're best known for their Divinity series and now of course Baldur's Gate 3 but the way that um they got the rights is like a slightly interesting story so they've been wanting to work on the Baldur's Gate IP for quite some time and then they approached Wizards of the Coast

um you know uh some initial discussions happened in 2014 and visits of the coast kind of felt like the studio is too new too small to inexperienced to like take on uh this IP and kind of be trusted with it and then you know this is the coast turned them down uh but then uh at around that time you know Lionel is also working on uh Divinity original sin 2 and the pre-release materials of that like really impressed Wizards of the Coast and and then you know the course went back to learn and then they said you know are you guys still interested and of course they said yes and I mean the studio they basically they were at 140 employees you know 14150 employees at that point and given this IP and you know um what needs to be done uh to kind of do justice to the game you know getting

getting reviews like Maria is right here uh they basically have two options you know uh either they scale up their team and you know really deliver or they scale on the game itself but I mean scaling on the game is like really that's uh that would just not do it justice and and yeah they scaled up from 140 to 450 over you know uh this these six years of development assuming like about 300 employees may be working on this that feels like 100 to 200 million dollar development plus marketing budget for this and you know like I mentioned uh at the at the start the The Early Access already netted 150 million so they're doing pretty good with like you know the PC uh with the console launch uh still uh kind of pending and and yeah you know overnight they're kind of the kings of the RPG space uh now um although yeah I mean to be fair it's also less of an action RPG game or action RPG game and more of like I don't

know exactly how to call it but let's just call it like the DND RPD kind of game to be honest yeah it's just an RPG game yeah I guess yeah sorry within the ND there's you know technical players who know the rules ins and out and I think it just shows larion's quality to execute I would say it's the best um transformation from a tabletop RPG into a playable game because they really nailed um changes from Divinity 2 into Baldur's Gate to be able to translate that technicality of DnD and just make it easy for people who are really specific about how to play with the rules of DnD it just does it absolutely perfect and it's just such a joy to experience it yeah and that's the core audience to like keep happy right like if you just don't deliver on uh you know the way people imagine these things to play out

in the table of experience and it doesn't play out that way in like a 3D experience uh then yeah I mean I don't think it would have been the success that it is today um but yeah other some other interesting tidbits uh and that that should kind of close out the update but um yeah one interesting thing I noted was you know the Early Access saves were actually not compatible with the full launch version but I'm not really sure like how much of uh like how much of distress that might have caused to people uh it doesn't seem like too much of distress but still interesting but I guess the bigger and more interesting thing is that mods also will be available soon uh in this game so I'm like really really curious to see like what people end up kind of building out uh with that tool set um but yeah I guess the final question uh is and uh you know that that's what I was thinking about is is Staff feel going to be better than this um my guess is yes I guess in terms of units sold at least

what do you guys think I mean there was so much said I don't know if I have anything to add right like I do think like it's a fun game there's a lot of people playing it hell yeah right to me balder Skate 3 is no different than the type of launch we had with Oppenheimer and Barbie which is high AAA value large amount that went into it and just gotta take a deep breath and say this is awesome I'm really happy that we saw some success here and at this team hopefully got to make Baldur Escape 4 or more likely support Baldwin Gates 3 into Infinity um based on my Social Circle um not all of my friends want to play Baldur's Gate because of the type of game all of my friends want to play Star field and so I'm going to say Starfield is going to be a bigger success it's just more of a wide a wider genre if they hit the quality and it's amazing and not full of bugs when it releases

I'll just add that if yeah and also like Bethesda is just like this okay yeah exactly exactly so it's they just kind of know how to kind of create those more quote-unquote Mars Market RPG experiences I guess but I mean yeah then currently the best all those gate launch of all time but yeah that's uh that's about it with Baldur's Gate looking forward to kind of playing it uh tonight hopefully and yeah maybe in the next episode I can report back and tell you what my first you know DND World experience is like that's actually an interesting question like I wonder how the experience would be and curious what's going to look like when you play if you don't have people to play with right like I I would probably never play Baldur's Gate solo is my current feeling about this like it's very much a different groups of friends curious how people I'm curious what the play experience is like out there in part because in theory it's a it's a potentially single player game but in practice it may not be and I

think this is like one of the biggest reasons for me not getting into Baldur's Gate like when I was you know maybe still in school I kind of saw the game and it it just had like this complexity and tree barrier that I just wasn't willing to kind of invest in uh and and you know that kind of just kept me from playing the game versus you know playing a Hitman or an Oni at that point in time so um but yeah uh yeah but yeah I mean you know it's uh it's also a little bit embarrassing that I haven't played Baldur's Gate at all and I guess that's why I just want to kind of uh you know give it a chance and see uh see what happens yeah it's interesting like the the the relation to these tabletop games right so you've got like a for I think for a good contrast of a tabletop RPG coming over and not doing well like cyberpunk right that was basically a translation of a tabletop RPG that had been kind of around for a while and it had been a long time since anything but done with it they tried to like shoot

for the moon didn't work out right and and so obviously this is a situation where I think the d d audience might be a little bit bigger too like d d is doing very very well uh right now outside of the the whole issue they had with the open license that they they kind of pacified most of that I think at least put out most of the fires around that and that seemed to calm everyone down everyone's just excited about d d again like I still hear about it like the amount of people that even are asking me if I'm gonna play Baldur's Gate and I'm like do you even know what that is like you're asking me like the just the this has gotten really good word of mouth it seems like and that I think that's a pretty big deal which is funny because it does come across like a single player game and just like what you think of for these kind of games but it does have co-op so I think that was a smart choice for pushing that social sort of like hey are you gonna play it can we play it together kind of uh aspect that I think is like very helpful for these sort of things like whereas you can't do that with cyberpunk right I can't I can't co-op with anyone on that and it's it's you know it's a funny contrast due to something like Starfield uh because those are pretty different audiences in

a lot of ways but also by the time Starfield really comes out everyone will be done with Baldur's Gate anyways because you know how they are with their delays anyways it'll be timing wise probably be fine and and probably come out buggy enough that some people will wait and it's just Tabitha releases ours you have to expect a certain amount of bugs when they come up but it's kind of funny the lineage though going back to uh like their Fallout games which also helped them kind of popularize their their RPGs on console and things like that along with Skyrim uh goes back to like uh the original Fallout games we're also based off tabletop RPGs but then they didn't get the license they wanted had to modify it it was like originally the group's license but then they kind of had to like tweak things because that didn't work out and there was like potentially some legal issues but it's just funny the lineage lineage of these old school tabletop RPG uh like players bringing that into these games and now there's enough hardcore audience that are into that sort of thing that it's like very receptive because I feel like it you know you go back 10 20 years a game like this came out you wouldn't have been breaking Steve and so I think that's that's a pretty

big shift in audiences you know like we see in Mobile for example where it shifts towards more hardcore audiences over time so I think it's a good sign for for hardcore Gamers that there is this kind of huge audience for these kind of games but uh speaking of complicated games with long lineages and uh making changes uh the jota story here we've got from Sebastian this would be pretty interesting to hear this is a Bonker story highly recommend not listening to me and reading this amazing Reddit thread and I want to are you even watching video is crazy but super long uh Wanna Give a quick shout out to Reddit user trencha who wrote a great summary honestly you don't have to watch the video so here is the story in its entirety it ends with dodo arcade getting shut down so I want to flag that for everyone DOTA arcade for those of you don't know is effectively the Warcraft 3 map editor custom game UC Community for DotA really

robust tooling we got Auto chess so if you've ever played TFT or DAC that came out this ecosystem and to that extent a couple of a couple of players slash industry insiders inside the DOTA community and sunspan and Jenkins created a game called the build the arena like about like 18 months ago fun game like by all means a fun game effectively they went out they were monetizing it they you know put in a few hundred thousand dollars in development they're hoping to get back you know a few hundred thousand dollars out and maybe make some actual money off of it just like the folks over at TFT and DAC had made previously they run into this really amazing and amusing idea which is like hey for balance purposes they create a community of 250 Gamers uh who are the highest ranked players to come in and talk to them about game design a player is like hey I've gotten this here's my screenshot the screenshot was malformed it just wasn't a good way to

indicate it and the moderator was like hey you need to send a new screenshot and this player in the infinite wisdom that this person has start saying death threats and being like hey screw you far worse words far worse reset to the point which of obviously the guy was bad for life from the game he then submits a gdpr request saying hey we think you're storing my information screw you this is almost certainly a troll action it is totally fine that's a troll action it happens but it turns out actually the arcade's not gdpr compliant you can't actually delete player data very easily that's its own set of headaches but more importantly because of that the lawyers got involved valve lawyers take a look and they're like hey what do you mean you're monetizing rip that is massive trademark and copyright violations we need to enforce it can we work around that the answer is no well in that case let's kill DOTA arcade and that is the

story in like 30 seconds or less it's a crazy story highly recommend reading about it long story short they're killing it because a legal team said something needs to change we can't change it in time so let's kill the game and go from there what's the what's the moral of this story honestly that's a great question no I I think they actually if I had to pull one more of the story is you should you know people should vote in their elections clearly one person could have outsized effects on the outcome of large corporations and large Investments I think that's probably a fair a fair one to say the least so yeah it just feels weird to me like you know I think like when I watch the video it maybe they kind of made it sound like Steam had like no idea that that monetization was going on but I mean that can't really be the truth right like they've oh very much be the case I think it's actually almost

certainly the case that there are people like that was a large company almost certainly the legal team had no idea because you know we we as human beings if we don't look at like for example Mania until you mention the 100 million dollar budget for uh for Baldur's gay probably 100 million dollars I I'm playing it but I didn't think about the economics of it and I think there's a lot to be said about that kind of thing yeah I guess the thing I'm like um that sucks the most for me at least is just like how the creativity would just get killed you know like just going back to that auto chess example itself um you know yeah at the end of the day like a completely new genre was uh kind of created through that and just for the uh you know the creative betterment and uh future of the industry this is this like really really sucks but I mean who knows maybe maybe steam you know uh also

I mean she probably understands that too and maybe they kind of clean up their act and maybe relaunch it at some point maybe this is just oh man you've never worked without before [Laughter] like DOTA has been always encounter Striker both some of the most hands-off Esports ecosystems because they they want their they like making games and that's what they do and everything else is running around well if you look at steam charts right now it's literally Counter-Strike DOTA Baldur's Gate three that's literally the top three like at this moment so it's kind of funny topic wise that those kind of ended up right there because yeah if DOTA is not really going anywhere and they're like I don't think they're making most of their money off of the mods existing so I guess who can blame them in a way definitely tragic but uh I guess I guess the lesson I take away is uh dealing with mods and

monetization is always like a problematic thing right like since valve started having like Workshop stuff and everything it's always been this weird contentious thing when it comes to monetization and it is kind of funny because I remember like uh when when Auto chess was trying to spin off to its own thing and there was all that like controversy of oh can they launch their own kind of thing it reminds me of like what happened with like um Pub G and uh and Daisy and stuff with uh Arma and just mods in general and like not having good a setup for how people monetize and how you deal with the legal things around people modding it seems like something that's that needs to be like maybe not salt soft but at least like structure with some framework people could just copy and paste into future games because I I mean hope I want to say it's not going to go away but I I just I guess it's hopeful that modding never goes away but it's it's a pretty big deal especially now when we start getting into AI stuff and all the things where people can start to make things or like you know uh Sebastian's project for example where

there's like you know a certain amount of user creation AI stuff involved it seems like it's going to be a pretty big topic if people are monetizing and like valve's already like kind of gotten into that with with AI creations and whether or not they're like allowing stuff that the whole topic we've been into before with making them prove it and it seems like valve is being very cautious from a legal standpoint a lot of times lately when they when they smell something like with the crypto stuff where they like tried it but they're like legal stuff's not really worth it right now it just it seems like that's kind of their stance a lot of times is like Sebastian said they're printing money so why risk it uh when they could just be like it's just not worth it to us and it seems like the way they have their flat structure if some if it's not worth it to some random person at the company that's willing to like spend all their time on it it just doesn't happen because they have their kind of weird like jump between project structure which you know what to be fair when you're a company like that that makes that kind of money I guess you can't fault them for it and it's nice that we have epic games as like someone else that could just be like we'll do it kind of thing so you know maybe we'll see people start to

move to some kind of mod environment over there because I think epic's probably pretty Pro Mod I mean you look at what they just did with fortnite so maybe these kind of uh people will shift over that and they'll find some way to monetize that through you know some form or another that that epic is okay with yeah a couple things Supply that you mentioned Devin uh one completely agreed the flat hierarchy stuff is super interesting there should be an entire episode dedicated towards what valve was doing amusingly it became very much in Vogue in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s and then died off because there are a lot of inherent problems unless you have a cash printing machine in the background to run the system the second thing that I'll flag for for you guys and I think this is particularly amusing with regards to valve's lawyers is I do not fault the lawyers I think that's something that we often do in America in particular you have to protect your trademarks and you have to protect your copyrights now really if there's enough resourcing to then help people work around those issues to get Comfort to

the legal team I think that's completely reasonable to do but you're right there's not enough executive support for it people aren't going to Care the people move on the one one interesting point that um you know that um these what what are the names again Sons Sons fan and Jenkins they kind of brought out in their video is they said that uh the only reason that you know uh was might kind of decide to I don't know at some point reverse the decision is if the community wants it and um yeah curiously what do you guys think about that statement do you think do you think you know like will is is that is that in the realm of possibility and like how is Community Action actually been uh to this Etc I mean they have they certainly have respond to it it's unclear if this has enough traction for people to respond to people just don't seem to respond as strongly to stuff like this as they do

to stuff in their other ecosystems and so if I were a betting man I'd imagine that arcade is dead and uh they will never make back their money is sort of my like unfortunate bad here I guess just look at the concurrent players from this point forward and see if it still maintains that second place if it does then there's no reason for them to care if it doesn't then there's a reason for them to care like that that's kind of the yeah at the end of the day I'm sure they have the analytics like whether or not they're always paying attention to some of the legal stuff I'm sure they're paying attention to the numbers and at the same time like they've already milked Dota 2 for a long time now like I I doubt they're going to be like crying if they'll be like well we have to move on uh I mean obviously they spent money on it they built it up but I've gotten the impression from like even like just the way they run tournaments and stuff that they're just like International's cool we'll we'll do it as long as it's kind of working and then as as soon as it's not we'll move on speaking of moving on play teacup play Studios earnings talking about money

yeah um I guess yeah I mean I'll quickly run through the earnings of both these companies but um I guess the the bigger topic I just wanted to kind of hit on because we hardly talk about it is you know what's the state of social casino games and in Mobile for you to play um and this is referring to you know uh games like you know on the slots games and various card games and such like so um for play Studio specifically this is a us-based company um uh you know mostly having a lot of slot games um their uh their first half uh revenue of 2023 was upward like 14 uh at 158 million um they've mostly broken even over this time uh with kind of no change uh in due to no change in operating costs um but you know they continue to kind of bleed cash also over time and and as of as of you know the first half of this year uh

greater than 90 of that quarterly revenue is kind of uh coming in through all this all their various slots games but the interesting quest in the story is that greater than 80 of their downloads actually comes from a Tetris game the rights to which they acquired uh from network uh at the end of uh 2021. um to me that kind of feels like you know one of these um I'm not I I don't think it's kind of like a diversification strategy from like slots going into casual and you know kind of the story that uh platika has been telling uh my feeling is that this game was it's basically like a feeder the Au feeder game so that you know they can kind of continue to find people who would engage with their uh with their Swatch games which is basically the you know uh money printer of the company um but yeah I the one the one thing I want to call out and we'll kind of see this also in the

playtika story is that you know that play uh play Studios uh deu has just been kind of continuously dropping and um even though Tetris does exist and it's like getting a lot of um you know new people in at the end of the day the the eu's for their slot games um is the one that kind of Matters from from you know a revenue perspective and and that has just been dropping uh since the start of 2021 interestingly enough when you know during the time of idfa and the post covet slump and such um platika also you know a slightly similar story both of them uh yeah their political earnings kind of came out uh yesterday um thank you to uh Revenue uh which is at about 750 million so about like five six times uh bigger company than placed videos that was down uh two percent quarter over quarter and 2.5 year over year um it's still I mean practica still

continues to be a profitable company and the 10 to 12 net income margin and you know cash flow generation is strong they're currently sitting and sitting on about 1 billion in cash um but yeah like I've mentioned the word platika also in the past their portfolio continues to be a very very old one um and the casino theme titles uh are actually uh growing in terms of the portfolio Revenue mix uh share so this kind of flies in the face of the narrative also that they've been trying to like you know drum around about uh we are kind of diversifying into casual and we want to like kind of make that like you know uh the bigger Revenue uh portion of the company but yeah again with playthika similar to play Studios you know there um the eu's and uh daily paying users also continue to drop um and and this is if you if you check out platika's earnings this is probably also why you know they keep calling out um how they're direct to Consumer

platform uh is performing so much better you know quarter row quarter just just so that they can kind of signal I think at least that they can and signal to the market that they are kind of taking control of this idfa situation and that entire conversation but yeah you know so like just very quickly in summary before talking about like the state of Social Casino itself but basically both play Studios and play thika you know they're they're both you know heavily dependent on their slots and Social Casino games for uh for a good chunk of their revenues but I mean the eu's of both these games continue to drop and therefore you know revenues will also continue to drop because how much can one really milk you know an existing player base uh with the free-to-play monetization mechanics so but yeah and so kind of zooming out and

looking at you know the state of Social Casino it's if I had a question I had a question about playtika did you notice any change from them releasing their blockchain reels feature because they released it towards the beginning of this year I think was there anything in the earnings about it because I've not heard anything since the release went live and it's still active yeah anything web3 was just not mentioned at all uh interesting yeah but yeah um something that I've always kind of felt about like the entire social Casino you know category slash genre on mobile is that it's kind of always maybe from 2021 onwards it's always been at this Crossroads where um it can either kind of choose to slowly Fade Into the sunset or kind of evolve in some meaningful way uh the

interesting thing about um you know if you kind of look at the thrilling 12 month downloads for this genre the downloads are actually up uh 42 year on year um which at about 1.7 billion and the reason that's interesting is because I just wouldn't have expected you know like uh new players to be coming in uh to the restaurant at this point um but uh on like deeper investigation I think that's mostly driven by just new games launching and like the same people mostly the same people just like playing multiple games and therefore you know the download numbers uh kind of inflating on on adita.ai but I think the core point is that even though like downloads are up 42 uh year on year Revenue has basically stayed flat for this entire genre year and year therefore you know it's just um yeah it's just not like quality users

at the end of the day none of that download Volume or user volume is generating into uh any kind of money uh at the end um but yeah I guess I guess that's kind of like you know my overall point about social case you know I I feel um it's really at this like Crossroads where it kind of needs to choose to either or not twos uh but you know it if it doesn't do anything it'll just can't slowly Fade Into the sunset or you know they have to like continue to evolve in some meaningful ways uh either through like genre innovation of some sort or um you know figuring out new UA creative strategies and such um and and yeah I think casual Casino which is games like coin master was like one such Evolution but um those are also I don't think the player overlap with Social Casino is super high if there is something there but it's also not like super high so

so yeah something else kind of needs to happen um but yeah Social Casino continues to kind of surprise me uh every year that it's still kind of around and and still you know chugging to some extent but but yeah curious to hear uh what do you guys think to remember reading a report a couple months ago that Ashley said it was back to growth the genre is uh am I misremembering I don't know depends on the report and I guess the data provider itself um I mean we are we're with data that Ai and maybe the growth that they were talking about was the downloads growth um and maybe not Revenue um but their revenue doesn't really seem to be going anywhere I was wondering about its long-term legs as a genre because um obviously like The Real World Casino is right like which are are different business right they work economically pretty differently but uh they've been around for a very long time and they they're not really going anywhere but I

wonder about the the genre like whether it needs to like continue to evolve and tweak and stuff like that because when you look at uh certain genres on mobile some of them just never go away like uh city building kind of stuff right timer sort of thing that's been around since Facebook uh gaming Pro since really technically before that if you want to go way back it could be back to like very old dos games and VBS Store games and stuff it's and so like some stuff just kind of has that persistence where maybe for some businesses it's not economically viable where like they're not making the profits like as you said downloads going up Revenue not things like that so you know maybe do we end up in a situation where uh there's just less of the games because it's not like a growth industry but it's like a consistent one where people are like hey I'm not going to get into this business but the people who like dominated stay in it and I mean to your point about like the growth I actually have been seeing commercials for games I don't know if they're new games or not because I don't play most of these but I I will see them on streaming services like you know Hulu or whatever I'll see the commercials for them still so there's definitely still

advertising going on I like outside of just say Facebook ads and things like that so there's definitely interest at least in trying to pull new customers but I gotta imagine it's like it's different to acquire customers for a a you know a download of a mobile game versus like a physical casino right like it's a pretty pretty different thing so I mean look what's your thoughts on like the long term say like five ten year yeah like the I think the core issue with Social Casino is um it basically like mirrors a lot of mid core uh you know genres in terms of its user acquisition strategy so like targeted UA is very very important for Social Casino and also retargeting strategies so you know basically keeping your existing players uh activated at all times and also kind of retargeting all your children players and bringing them back so you know but in the current UA environment like that entire lever has completely um I mean at least for iOS it's been removed to a really good extent that

Android has like you know like it's limited amount of high quality players around the world so um I think and that that's why I like that's why I keep that's why I'm like continuously surprised with like how Social Casino is able to like sustain and chug over time but you know I mean even Google is eventually moving to uh you know gonna it's gonna like end up mirroring uh Apple's uh policies when it comes to you know this privacy first uh world and um and yeah then then I think fun something basically either fundamentally needs to change in their user acquisition strategies itself or the products and you know that's basically what's gonna I keep it alive uh or you know and maybe hopefully like return it to a path of growth uh at some point yeah I mean that's a pretty big contrast with the Privacy stuff versus like regular casinos for example which are very big on profiling people keeping track of them all that stuff right all

the stuff that is starting to go away in Mobile and so I wonder then like do we see Social Casino for example starting to do lots of incentivizing of like give us your email address things like that so they can pull as you said pull the customers back like for example and I keep using the casino real world one just because it's like one people probably know pretty well uh in general you know they'll do a lot of retargeting with like uh bringing people back with like free play right where it'll be like free play promotions are there things where they're like hey they they have your email address they have your physical address and they'll try and take advantage of that to try and get you to come in obviously like Social Casino is already sort of built around an element of free play but I imagine there's like that same kind of tactic or strategy of like hey here's a promotion to get you to come back get you re-addicted again stuff like that and and I mean maybe maybe that's the future that is just trying to like continue to pull back people but as you mentioned earlier it like in something I think I've heard a few times around Social Casino it's people bouncing between games a lot like they run out of their whatever expense for the day they just bounce to another one and so it's like

maybe there's even some room for a few players if they can kind of maintain that core of like oh everyone's just playing these three for example and then just well if everyone is then those three can retain but maybe not monetize super great like I mean is there situations like that where we could just see a few little you know kingdoms of those games yeah that that might that might actually maybe maybe that actually ends up happening and I think that's probably why I like Social Casino will probably never really go away and it will just kind of you know sustain at maybe lower levels uh over time um but on your point about you know um the retargeting uh stuff I I think that's that's why um you know just going back to this director consumer platform that ladyka is kind of pushing that's pretty much why I think that they are you know investing in that Tech um and essentially trying to like you know get to know who's playing their game and who could be playing their game outside of apples and Google's uh you know ecosystems and kind of behold into

um whatever tools that those two platforms provide so and that that's why I like you know play because kind of like take control of that conversation and just get back to you know fully knowing who is playing and who could be playing uh their game I'm not sure a place to doing anything similar they have like a play Awards program which is some kind of a loyalty program you know in collaboration with various Casino like real Casino Brands and stuff but I haven't looked into it deep enough to really know if it's scan of something in a similar vein or not do you think there's any indication that we could see um because now that play Tikka like they're not making new games but they they started acquiring some at least uh with with Yoda is there any possibility then if I'm talking about like consolidating the Social Casino space could we see an acquisition strategy where it's like if it's just going to be down to the few people that already know how to run Social Casino really well they see a potential in one

but you know another company that's just not interested in doing it anymore scooping that up it just kind of controlling the you know like a semi-monopoly around the industry like if it's just not going to go away yeah that's why I I think that could potentially happen and for me like the whole Governor of Poker acquisition you know platika was I mean it it what it came like a couple of weeks before the endings came out so it was clearly like a signal to the market that you know uh we want to like continue investing in first of all like you know we can continue to do M A after like the shadow of not being able to get review uh but um but also you know maybe it was a move in like the semi-monopolizing of the poker subgenre because with the acquisition of government so I mean has the biggest poker game right now uh in the focus of genre with the World Series of Poker game and I think governor poker is at position number three or four uh so kind of getting governor poker and then gives them takes their market share up from 20

to about like 30 35 in that uh and then you know once they have if they consolidate these different poker games then they can just cross promote and you know essentially generate more revenues like that and kind of keep their portfolios going so um it could happen but it's I feel it's still like it'll be like a slow strategy slow growth strategy um but but yeah that could potentially happen I mean the other interesting thing is platika is also kind of closing in on sitting on one billion dollars in cash right and that will need to be deployed uh at some point and that's definitely not a small amount of money so maybe something big coming from playthika yeah I would say one thing that I just want to flag as a interesting thing to think about stems from a couple of priors there's one cover the priors one like social casinos whether people like them or not casinos in particular are the best game Loops in the world and from a pure if

you define a game loop as input and output where I input some action and I output some of the motion there is no Loop that is more clean and purely like dopamine driven than Casino bass Loops then that way casinos are actually insanely good games there are a lot of other issues with it they might be too good of a game that is something that's come up and again and again but that's always concerning in that way the social element of casinos which is interesting the Social Casino part of it some people use this as backhand to me hey you're gambling without actually making any money but in reality there should be more social components in terms of trying to interlace your communities in order to drive a lot more traction the thing that played Tikka at least remember my well I've been looking at and been following along is struggling with actually has nothing to do with either of those things I think they're still quite good at the social part still quite good at the casino Park I think the core question revolves around money I think it specifically is

a question whether or not you want to burn the furniture or not there's this old school thing for those of you who don't follow game design as closely which is that at any moment in time you can burn the furniture in order to create a bigger fire but the cost of that is that you burned all your furniture and you destroyed your house and one interesting thing that Mania I think you're alluding to which is I think the question is like hey do you keep iterating on these dying formats or on this game that no longer has the social Pizzazz that are built on LTV cat curves our pre-at changes or do you burn the furniture make a ton of money call it a day let it die and then work on the next thing I think that is a fundamental question that is constantly on the minds of everyone involved you honestly do want to burn the furniture if the game is going to die eventually because a live live up costs of these games are so high I don't know the answer I do think to to similar day that Marie I've seen I've seen that Soldier casinos as a genre in

terms of money generated hasn't decreased at all in fact it's only increased adjusted to inflation might be flat but like it's it's only increased and really the question is where that's been aggregating is it aggregating the platika universe absolutely not there are a lot of ex-platique of gals guys and gals who are scattered throughout turkey and Israel right now who are killing it making new games are capturing and stealing away some of those whales that have different scale I don't know the solution but I think this is probably one of the most interesting executive decisions that are going to be made which is hey are they going to start burning the furniture or not a really good example a canonical example of bringing the furniture is an old Marvel game which I will not name the name of where playing Spider-Man which by the way for those of you don't know Spider-Man is by far the most popular and most famous and most sought after uh character in the Marvel Universe and so they didn't let you play Spider-Man it was a super end goal that you can only achieve by

spending thousands of dollars and thousands of hours they basically unlock Spider-Man it drives revenues through the freaking roof and then the game dies and that's what Bernie the furniture looks like because now they've gotten rid of the incentive you're good to go so yeah I think I mean I think I do agree with like your overall point that it will be like a pretty interesting executive decision um though I would um I would challenge the game design Point uh specifically a little bit so I think I would actually Challenge and say that I think hyper casual games are probably the best design Loops versus the casino ones because at the end of the day the casino Loops um money is money is uh kind of introduced as an ingredient and as soon as bunnies kind of introduced as an ingredient in the in the design Loop that basically overshadows anything else um if you can kind of make it if you if

you just make it easy uh or you kind of make the path to earning more money or have greater winnings as easy as possible pretty much any Loop would work but being able to get into you know the Primal dopamine uh motivations dopamine hitting motivations of human beings uh I think actually hyper casualness may be doing uh the best Molly I think you and I are saying the exact same thing by the way like hyper all the hyper casual lips with all the respect too to the people who make these hyper casual loops and and I have no disrespect there I actually think it's really interesting they are all the same Casino Loops there's actually no Delta I've seen in any hyper casual Loop that's any different from a pure press button get reward mechanism it's the only Delta being like you replace dollars or something else I actually think uh wuga which was an acquisition play Tikka made about five years ago on the say we're really good at exactly that obfuscation like

that basically people thought of luga as somehow a deeper game Loop in the Casual world but in reality their Hospital game was effectively just a casino style Social Casino Loop but just dressed up with some interesting lipstick right uh there was like a lipstick Pig metaphor I was trying to make but it's it's been lost so I'll leave at that but I completely agree like it is it is so interesting to see what these guys and guys are doing and I think a lot of them you should just kill them right if you build your game on a cacltv Model that's no longer sustainable because a CAC is wrong or the LTV is wrong that just sounds like you should cut your losses and move on the next question I have then is so like you know what you're saying is like okay well if it's if it's built around inquiring players and that's not affordable anymore combined with the live Ops stuff then it's just like all right well it's just not worth it anymore what if you were to take an approach and then maybe this is a averting the furniture of just squeezing players more so you just squeeze out the people that aren't

the whales keep the whales and be like that's fine like we could survive off the whales we can reduce the live Ops to just what the whales want we can focus on them obviously you maybe have a little bit lower than just whales but what I'm saying is like if you're just like hey we don't care about acquiring new people we don't care about necessarily like trying to overly run the live Ops we're just gonna like kind of almost Skeleton Crew this but with enough that the whales are happy and just roll with that and and say you know maybe some games don't survive that and some do like is that just like a viable path or just be like that's good enough so this is more mod use territory if I want to take a quick stop at it you really start messing with your PE ratios because effectively when you have a growth story and you're able to grow your users and your Revenue at the same time the markets may give you credit for a PE ratio of over 10x 20x even in some of these tech companies when we're trying to squeeze out marginal dollars on depreciating assets we've now entered the world of sustainable long-term businesses and I think that's exactly

what we should live in for a lot of these game companies but we're talking about Revenue multiples back down to like three to five x as opposed to 20x uh profit earnings right I will flag that this is what titique has been the head when they've been running into since the IPO right or do they IPO I actually remember if they drug listed or ipo'd or spacked I forget exactly how they went public but since then you know the Stock's been down something like 50 60 right like it's a pretty crazy amount in part because there was a belief pre-att that we can just keep putting in money and it prints money like I put in a dollar and gives me a dollar ten cents that seems great isn't that just Tech in general though that you're talking about like the belief around everything being 20x all the time and that story kind of starting to come maybe a little less true than people wanted oh you say that but meta is also up to 150 your year to date so like you know it's unclear right it's certainly it really it certainly is a story of casual gaming I would say and I think social casinos have taken the

largest brunt of the hint and we'll see if it recovers who knows yeah yeah I mean on the on the wheel like sustaining on whales that's basically like what both placed videos and play thika and probably the entirety of Social Casino is doing right now but it's I mean yeah it can it can continue for some time but at the end of the day the the reality is even whales have you know limited amount of money in their in their wallets and you just cannot keep squeezing that lemon uh it's just not an infinite pool basically and therefore you know unless you launch new games and you know um give them new reasons to spend um then then yeah you're basically on a on a downward path and you can extend that downward path for a longer period of time but but yeah from a public company perspective you know that growth story does matter and um and yeah you cannot do it on a fixed

portfolio with a fixed amount of veils that have a retention curve attached to them and which will also keep decreasing you know over time so I guess then uh I wonder if we'll see uh basically moving kind of offshore right where it's you know if it's just not the good thing for the tech industry anymore kind of thing like the especially the Western kind of tech Silicon Valley industry and they're just like man not interested anymore we moved on other things and maybe that's like a situation where uh you know we just it moves to Turkey and other places like that where they're maybe more willing to to do that because they're not necessarily needing a 20x potentially like I don't know I I think there's the future sounds pretty uncertain based off everything you guys have said where it's like maybe some of this work maybe it won't maybe some of it's worked better than we expected but maybe some of it hasn't so I think it'll be a a topic I imagine we will revisit no doubt yeah but uh I think I think most most uh most of the Social Casino focused companies are mostly gonna just be focused on diversifying outside of the genre

um and we're gonna see that already kind of happening with huge games for example you know uh they've kind of moved into setting up these supercell style pods and really experimenting with the kinds of games that you know they can build outside of Social Casino so so Social Casino continues to pay the bills and you know uh solely build up their cash balance but um but yeah I think yeah everyone is kind of seeing the writing on the wall a little bit and investing in diversifying outside of this genre no I guess we'll see uh speaking of a of wrecks that uh could be in slow motion here we've got uh rec league uh could be an interesting one uh in terms of uh web 3 potential still yeah well that was a great segue uh before we dive in just to wrap up that play teak I had one thought I feel like for I don't know about a year we've been talking about how Social Casino portfolios need to diversify and yet we haven't really seen that in

action at least in play Tikka so at the end of the day it makes me wonder like what's going on like why isn't it moving in that direction faster so rec league yeah NY was acquired by Anna mocha so NY is the developer of rec league and they also developed a mobile game called Power Rangers Legacy and essentially rec league is a gameplay reskin with very small tweaks it changes how you you know create your characters their mechs you have to collect Mech parts and then each part has an ability and basically how you build your Mech is what's going to give you the abilities um if you imagine the fighting game you're mostly moving and then selecting your ability so it's not super Twitchy as you'd expect for example with a Marvel contest of Champions and this is a game that will be a blockchain game and a non-blockchain game at the same time and The Innovation that they're

going for is that within the non-blockchain game in the store players can buy mechs that were built by blockchain players through iaps and so their proposal is that they're going to create a sustainable economy where it is going to have an element of play to earn but it will depend on the sync for web 2. so overall this is one of the key takeaways from my analysis that makes me very bearish on this game because looking at ny's ability to scale user acquisition and the performance of Power Rangers Legacy I just don't see that they're going to be able to create an on blockchain playerbase that is large and engaged enough to create this thing for blockchain players and so like looking at the differences of rec league and the current incumbents in the mobile genre so I'm looking at Marvel contest of Champions Dragon Ball Legends I look at Injustice Gods Among

Us and the performance isn't good so I'm not really comparing them here for for rec league and one thing that first strikes me is that rec league doesn't have an IP so Marvel Dragon Ball is all IP driven but Reckless not going to have one their solution is you know like fortnite or Greener where they're going to do brand crossovers every season and so that's going to create your IP driver but I really don't think that's going to be enough because you don't have the I the core IP for your user acquisition and then that's going to put more pressure in your user acquisition strategy and creating these different creatives every time you have a different IP I I just think that that's a really massive hit in terms of the abilities to succeed of this game and then their first IP is targeted to blockchain players which is board apes and so yeah if you're targeting the

blockchain the small blockchain community that makes a lot of sense it's a popular IP but then if you're making this game for non-blockchain players then you're going to have to scale them to create that sync board Apes is a minor IP and maybe it's even an IP that will create the wrong impression for non-blockchain players additionally their combat so I did play Power Rangers Legacy to try it I'm just quite confused who the target is for that game because it's not skill Twitchy it's not incredibly lean back it's sort of in the middle um and then they're adding this whole Mech RPG that has a bazillion combinations for you to create it so it's not really for the Casual player when you have all of these combos so the targeting isn't clear for me also they're not releasing rec league on iOS but looking at just Power Rangers Legacy that does not have good performance but just looking at their game the revenue

per download on iOS is just so much higher than Google Play and so I can only assume they're not going on iOS because of the blockchain restrictions potentially I'm really really not sure because Power Rangers Legacy is on iOS in any case case I looking at the performance I would say Power Rangers Legacy would be a game that would have been sunset by most mobile studios in terms of expected kpis and if you compare you know Marvel contest of Champions achieves a break revenue of uh like 23 million 18 million Dragon Ball as well and then you look at Power Rangers Legacy is like you know 200k a month it's just really low and so I'm thinking like why why is the play here from NY and Anna Mocha taking this game that has been in the market it has not scaled it has poor performance considering Benchmark for mobile

why are they going with this gameplay and so I just see them targeting blockchain like it's like it's an okay game it's a good game to to play and they're targeting blockchain players but it just makes me question like I don't see how they're going to scale this in non-blockchain to create that sync and then also let's I'm not even going to go into whether it competes with the other main incumbents like Tekken and whatnot it's just it's not even worth bringing into the conversation yeah what are your thoughts on my analysis I don't know I think the project is like honestly I think it's going to be DOA this project uh it's uh like for me like basically we're like fighting games come down to is you know the characters and the control and the controls and like they kind of um these two elements um um they kind of enable some of the you

know Hallmarks of fighting games like you know the speed and the themes and the narratives around the characters and uh you know and and most importantly Mastery of these characters you know when you're actually in the in the in when you're actually playing that fighting uh game but I feel like over here Envy has just made like some weird decisions one is it's Mech themed which we all know is really not like the most Mass market theming for mobile players um second all the mechs kind of look the same so you know if you if you look at like some of the biggest uh you know fighting games out there there are all these individual characters who have like very very strong narratives they're all balanced against each other in terms of you know the skills that they bring to the table and the fighting style and how players can kind of interact with them over here it like all the max kind of look the same and there are like you said you know these one point I think

they said like 1.7 quadrillion uh combinations because of all the parts which basically means that you know the characters are not really going to be that different from each other uh in in the in the fighting sequences um and and yeah like you know from a controls uh perspective or from a characters but I didn't talk about controls but like just looking at some of their uh gameplay videos it also felt like the control system for this game is kind of like how like turn-based RPGs maybe it look like where you just have like a fixed set of buttons with you know fixed set of skills that you're doing inside and you're still moving yeah and it um and if but if you kind of compare it to I do think like contest of Champions is the better comp and you know even Mortal Kombat 10. they have like really they while they have like simplified the control scheme to fit mobile uh it they have still been able to retain um the uniqueness of every character and

you know with different um with um with like different abilities and like what what they can actually do and things like that but I just didn't really get that feeling from uh you know directly right now so yeah I think I would say so I would say it's not a fighting game to be honest it's more of a deck it's like a deck building time your usage of your ability and be on the right place but it's not it's not um a skill based fighting game yeah exactly I think it's more like uh yeah it's more like a fighting RPG play rather than like an action fighting game and it I think just given like how that 1.7 quadrillion number it gives me the feeling that and basically it's a game that is that is still continued to be designed for you know speculators first and you know fighting players second but if it is a fighting RPG play maybe maybe you know uh then then I

could be yeah I'd say honestly my analysis I thought it was going to be deeper and then I quickly reached the conclusion that this is a game being pitched to blockchain players with an element of non-blockchain to create that economy of sync but this isn't really a game that's being tailored um to to scale in the non-blockchain market if you look at that's why you have all of these combinations it's like oh well so many nfts and then you can sync them and you can burn them you look at fighting games and they're not built through combinations on purpose because you have to really control the experience for the Mastery and the Combos and it yeah this is this is and then the max like the mechs allow you to have these 10 pieces that you built and I would say like maybe mix are more targeted to the blockchain community in terms of the interests

um I actually uh was it my games released today or they did a PR push for little big robots which is like a casual fide really vibrant um War robots experience I started playing today and I love it so I can see how much could be casual fight that's not what what wreck league is you know one of the things that I always want to fly to everyone especially people who are thinking about games in general is that we should account for base rates right like most games fail and by most games I mean like 99 of games at this point fail and so it's always interesting to see if a game will succeed more so than to necessarily opine if they'll fail I think talking about Ballers getting how awesome and successful it is is always far more interesting to me than trying to figure out hey why I think this new launch will fail because deep down at least for me I always hope that everyone succeeds like I think that's one of those things where I'm deeply hopeful I think the one part of Murray's analysis that really resonates with me and I think it's really applicable especially in this

fighting game genre is the lack of IP there is no distribution here and so it's hard to say that the game mechanics on their own can stand the test of try and succeed when there is no distribution one would hope that say the board apes are otherwise provide enough distribution such that these games succeed but still unclear and I think that is something that we will see come up over and over again one bad natured thing that I see a lot in blockchain I also see this in some other game formats as well is you can't excuse you can't use the ecosystem as an excuse to make a bad game a bad game is a bad game no matter where the bad game is like Manu and Maria's conversation delineates this where it's like hey if these game mechanics be it the quadrillion whatever or 10 different actions don't make for a fun initial 30 seconds initial two minutes initial five minutes then it's just not a game right and so I really

hope that they succeed from the perspective of I hope every game creator is able to make an interesting game but I do think that if you don't have an interesting distribution method be it Dragon Ball or Pokemon or something that makes someone want to play the game and at least stick for a little bit and you're a bad game where money is like looking at this and sees no difference in the actions that's a bad sign for this game it means that they're not doing any of the things they're necessarily sufficient requirements it's necessary that you're a good game but it's not sufficient you're a good game to succeed but if you're not doing the necessary part it's just not gonna do well the thing that confuses me the most about this uh about this case is I mean it's it's being developed by Envy right and they have been like making fighting games for what the past 10 15 years so like I wouldn't I would expect like they kind of know you know the important ingredients of of uh of a fighting game but um but yeah I mean well yeah it's kind of mostly in agreement with what Sebastian

is saying to John Ben as you know someone now building a game and and blockchain I would say it makes it hard because you have to really determine what's your key driver a really really fun game and then you create monetization for it or do you create a game that has a really good economy in terms of things that you can sell and sing and then you have a game to sustain that because everything you know in blockchain currently a lot of students are pursuing is using blockchain for monetization and if you're doing that it does change how you develop your gameplay and this is what what I see is that even if NY were excellent um I think you said that they are even if they're excellent at building a fantastic fighting game building a fantastic fighting game where

you have one character and they're going to fight that's not going to create the blockchain economy that you need and so this is why you see it's like rec league is a game that is built to have a good economy or like economy with many things that you can buy and sell and equip into your Mech and that's the prioritization here it'd be interesting to see how it does there's a as man you said NY actually develops a pretty good fighting games before that were IP based the Power Rangers game that not the mobile one you were mentioning but the previous one that was on Console it was also on cloud I remember actually playing it on stadia uh it was a pretty solid game and they were pretty good at developing the the net code and uh doing like an actual good fighting game but again that was IP based they also did a wrestling based one that I think was WWE that was I imagine did okay uh so they know what they're doing in that area as many so which is which is why this is odd but they but they've like speaking of odd choices I mean they just came off of uh after the Animo acquisition developing a Olympics themed game

specifically for the Olympics that that had happened and like that was just the weird like what where is this even being developed by them it's not in their wheelhouse at all and like whereas this game at least kind of is but developing it for mobile is kind of an interesting choice because it's like then they have to skew it towards that style of gameplay which was is really not their Forte and I think actually the closest comparison is Transformers forged to fight which is a very similar style of gameplay it's robots the difference is of course had IP even that didn't succeed it's to the point now where it basically got rescued uh by Netflix so like it was a Kabam game it just kind of like started going downhill towards the end of 2022 losing people just couldn't retain them and now Netflix basically scooped it up it hasn't really been able to rescue it either and now it's just going to kind of Coast off of being part of Netflix's catalog and so if if that one can't even work where it's a robot IP that has characters that people care about then yeah it's probably this is this is a a web 3 play and if the web 3 side of

it works where like say the Yuka lab part takes it off then yeah maybe it could succeed off the web 3 part but as far as the mobile game design part as far as the fighting games as I part that's probably not their strong suit here and it is after after being bought by Anna mocha they've just been making some strange choices uh and I don't know maybe maybe we'll see more as more comes out because you know they've released a decent amount of information but obviously the game's not out yet but it is it is a lot of a lot of our choices but I don't know I guess I guess we'll have to see yeah I just wanted to before we move on to the topic I wanted to talk about riots project l because I dove into uh rabbit hole about fighting games and then I appeared on the other side and honestly I'm now even more excited for Riot's building with project L like putting these two experiences side by side and seeing what is required to make uh Esports Grassroots Esports level fighting game

the number of features that are necessary for like practicing perfecting the depth of Mastery of each um character seeing what Riot has done with you know League of Legends and valorent they really have my betting chips now for being able to make a Next Generation fighting game and they're making like a tag team based fighting in multiplayer where it's like wrestling tag team where you're you know you're in together and then you wait for your partner to hopefully survive and then tag you in and have that whole mechanic the art style looks amazing and so I'm I'm actually really excited and I think out of everyone who could try to challenge the incumbents you know Tekken Mortal Kombat Street Fighter I believe that projectile has a good chance do you think I'm being too happy and excited about this should I be more bearish I've not looked into projectile like very very deeply but you know based on whatever gameplay videos I saw and

like some of their uh you know developer uh Vlogs and such um I think I would like share the excitement for sure uh and I think they even said in one of the developer Vlogs that if you know while they were making the decision to kind of enter the space one thing that they definitely wanted to get right with that game is they wanted to introduce something new to the genre with that game and and that's essentially this uh you know tag team feature and you know how that feature specifically is going to um change up fighting styles uh in a in a like you know the typical fighting style of mastering one character and then playing that character in a fighting game versus you know maybe either mastering multiple characters and being able to play with them and you know synergize with them in a round or being able to play with another with a friend of yours in such perfect coordination in the round so that you can be like two other people and yeah I

don't know it it's it's um it it could be big or it could just not work also um but but yeah I think that's that's I guess those are the kinds of bets that also kind of you know evolve genres and and don't so um you know yeah my understanding is uh previously there was a game I can't remember the exact name of it I was trying to look it up uh by a couple developers that was in a like I think in the alpha State uh that was like really good like they spent a long time making a really solid net code anyone plays fighting games knows like online knows the net code is like really really important these types of things especially if they're looking to be Esports competitive and uh and it was a really solid game I actually played it during like that that short Alpha they had and then they got scooped up by Riot and so my understanding is I believe those people unless they've moved on are on this project and so that it like that gives it some good potential at least from the the development side from the like having people that understand fighting games really well now of course like one subscribed by right who knows

after that point right uh but I do think that gives it a at least a good indicator that like there's some potential and in that side of things obviously Riot has been pretty successful so far in their spin-offs that they've done like you know their other projects I mean I guess technically without spin-offs but other projects they've done outside of maybe like Legends of room Terror where it's been like a little bit less uh successful I think than they probably wanted but Valentine seems to have done well so I think it's uh it's probably easy to just be bullish on this because it's it's right they've been doing well they've got good people they've spent a while on this I don't I don't think there's any reason to like doubt that it could at least have potential other than the fact that they're going into a pretty heavy fighting game season uh you know with Mortal Kombat one you said Street Fighter 6 with an amazing debut in a great Evo showing uh just Tekken coming out after that like there's there's a lot of competition but at the same time like you know maybe people will be just playing all of them and Raya is a known Powerhouse to be able to develop great

characters they have an amazing process to to do character creation that you care across all of their games and so I can just see that fitting in perfectly with a fighting genre I guess we'll see I think I think like I said probably an easy bet uh I think we're probably all foolish on it like unless someone says otherwise so we'll definitely be looking forward to it in the future of course everyone always keeping their eyes on right hopefully they don't become like another blizzard we'll we'll see but I want to thank everyone for tuning in I know it's been like a little bit of a long one we had I think a pretty meaty discussion on Social Casino that I imagine we'll continue as long as the genre lives you can better don't happen very often so I'm I'm uh I'm absolutely you guys listen listen to my analysis over there definitely a lot of people tune out very quickly on that but yeah but I mean hey if you guys enjoy that sort of conversation as well or more topics that you'd like to see on those sorts of things or ones you want us to like do some good extension session on make sure to to shoot us uh email to the mailbag that podcastnavic.com we always look

forward to getting like emails from you guys feedback topics comments questions we've definitely had some good questions where that were good follow-ups that we've had a chance to answer so make sure to shoot those our way but I want to thank everyone for listening this long as well as of course the panelists for sticking around for some good long conversation and we'll see you guys next week if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a five star review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast navic dot Co or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what novik has to offer make sure to check out our website www.navic.com there you can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter navic digest or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging Consulting and advisory Services again that is www.navic.com thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode