Transcript
[Music] welcome to the navic gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novic growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and advice ADV services for more information visit [Music] www.nic.edu management and more than 500 Investments across the US Europe and Asia with its dedicated gaming practice light speed gaming the firm is investing from over $7 billion in early and growth stage
Capital making it by far the largest fund focused on gaming and interactive technology Light speed's Team combines deep expertise in gaming with a global multi-stage investment platform and a culture that truly puts Founders first selected Investments include epic games snap and stability AI as well as game designers and producers who led the creation of titles like fortnite Call of Duty League of Legends valerant Starcraft 2 and many more for more information simply go to gaming. lsvp Doc or check out the details in the show notes and with that let's jump into the episode hello everyone welcome to another novic round table I'm your host Devin Becker and with me I have great panelists as always we got Dave Maria and Felipe here today for a nice Full House how you guys doing doing well thanks playing Warcraft Rumble okay we gotta got a stay up to date on all the games here we got a we actually got a lot of variety of topics today too on a bunch of different games which should be pretty fun uh but we do
have to start with unfortunately the you know the the dower topic of course of uh continued layoffs which we'll get into and then you know some Acquisitions which is maybe a good thing some some uh maybe movie news here for video games which continues for whatever reason I guess they like money uh fortnite some interesting news around that but then also epic back in court again uh wanting to make sure that fortnite you know money goes to somewhere useful and then ea uh doing pretty well actually with their their soccer football whatever you want call it depending on where you're at game but let's just uh jump right into the Bungie bad news get that out of the way well now I feel like the bearer of these bad news I want to stay on the I guess they like money that that was that was a good topic okay so according to an anonymous source the decision to lay off the staff was bungees not Sony's uh the initial assumption when the layoffs were communicated was immediately that I came from Sony because there's been layoffs of naughty dog visual arts media
molecule and then there was a recent acquisition from Sony where Bungie was like no don't worry we're not going to lay people off based on this and then people were laid off so the reasoning is Destiny 2's underperformance there was an internal source that estimated that they missed their projections by about 45% and lightf Falls DLC sales were strong but since lightfall there's just been this massive drop uh in terms of playing engagement in terms of player spending the CEO and some other Executives they forfeited their bonuses uh of course the the staff of Bungie was asking if the executives look at other levers to pull before laying off the staff um yeah no pay cuts were announced but they announced that they had forfeited their bonuses in the past that hasn't gone down very well as you can imagine um and so in terms of the impacts I think this made the news more there's been so many layoffs um but
Bungie stood out to me because it came at a massive shock to the community because some beloved player facing staff members that have been there for a very long tenure were let off and one of them was actually Destiny 2's composer Michael salvator and this is something I just don't really understand like maybe they you know maybe Michael salvator wasn't really fully leading the the osts I I don't know but like Destiny 2 for me 50% of the immersion comes from the music and you know rip deepstone lby that was my pandemic dreamy music yeah I I I'm not sure what's going on and I saw that there was a there was a mention and passing from someone at budy at Bungie that said the right people are now here to continue taking the projects further I don't know if that's alluding is not for me to speculate I just know what is in the news news
so as part of these layoffs there's going to be a delay to the next DLC of Destiny 2 I think it's now being delayed to June generally it comes out January is being delayed to June and also their new extraction um their extraction ah I can't even say this extraction shooter called a marathon that's also expected to be delayed to 2025 now do you have any thoughts to add oh and you know this comes in line Ubisoft also laid off I think 120 some people in the last couple days so yeah unfortunately I expect that it'll still continue a little bit longer um we're unfortunately in that time of year when Studios often do let uh team members go as they finish up their Christmas releases um yeah still unfortunate news for everyone in the industry still continuing with the the bad news of layoffs I guess if you think about it
Bungie like probably has a lot of employees for only having one live game at the moment that's six years old and kind of dependent on DLC and live service stuff that any like you know unexpected like downturn in that Revenue coming from that is going to hit them pretty hard in terms of like I mean I don't know like what the deal is with Sony in terms of whether or not uh you know they might have had any kind of safety nets there or anything to help like sort of fund them going forward as they're doing probably with Marathon but but I guess that you know that's kind of a warning of like when you only have one real game out there at the moment you can kind of suffer for probably a bit of shock from that like if it just doesn't do well or just doesn't hit the right target but at the same time like I don't know I guess that's they kind of work with that so I I don't know maybe they just have too many employees but it is surprising that they cut some of like the older ones I mean maybe it was just a senority like needed to go for pay reasons or something but if they're not doing pay cuts too seems a little strange but yeah they actually said I
think some employees again this is all I guess leaked internal information that uh the studio itself would have been in Jeopardy if they hadn't been acquired by Sony if they were still independent they may may have had to close doors that's pretty scary seeing the developer of Destiny 2 such a massive game um in that in that risk and Destiny 2 is an old like you said it's an old game it's a game that requires a very expensive content treadmill and players devour content like even the seasons after two three weeks when I was playing it was just being drip-fed content to try to make it through this season and still have a reason for players to come back every month it's also on older Tech uh Destiny 3 doesn't seem to be coming anytime soon I remember when I was playing there were rumors that they were creating a team to build Destiny 3 on a new tech stack that
would make it easier um to expand the game and they decided to stick to Destiny to and try to make it work but it yeah like you grow your your Tech your Tech debt and then if you're trying to do anything massive it takes longer so I I I assume but I'm confident in my assumption that the the speed of development for Destiny is playing a role in not being able to ship content as fast as they would like scary to think that the developers of Destiny 2 would be in Jeopardy I guess it's just funny timing too on top of the BlizzCon announcement of World of Warcraft getting another expansion and that's been out for almost 20 years now so it just shows like I guess you know depending on how iconic it is and how entrenched you are to be able to survive because I'm sure they've had expansions that didn't do as well as they wanted either but they're also now in Microsoft's hands and so it's like all these companies kind of getting acquired up you know maybe he's helping provide some buffer but speaking of Acquisitions
uh we got one from Azure games is that you pronounce it Azure or azer I don't know indeed I was going to ask the same because I always pronounce them in a bit of Spanish so I don't know well there's an Azure for sure with an e at the end so I'm thinking maybe this is azer but just wanted to check give us a Spanish fipe Aur Aur Aur games but yeah Aur games uh this is a Cypress based mobile games developer and Publishers publisher sorry H have announced that they have purchased the entire portfolio of hyper casual games from good job games uh so for for those of you that are not familiar with this company they started as a hyper casual developer and they had already like around 30 something titles uh hyper casual games they were also the ones that develop uh oh sorry I forgot the name um them mat sorry and that we could label it as
hybrid casual and they introduced quite an interesting twist uh to the uh myON soliter with a tray at the bottom that had been copied with many many other titles now and become kind of a trend in the market of mobile games that they also sold it h in this case to moonactive uh so it seems that they are like getting rid of like the more hyper uh castled port folio in order to get found and and money to to bet big on the Casual games so they had a casual game in in soft launch for quite a while uh that is a blast game or match to game and uh I think like this is kind of a move uh to to focus solidly on that or that maybe other casual games but like trying to like move on uh and maybe as some uh famous Publishers said like hyper casual is dead so trying to move
on to and focus just on on casual so what do you think is do you think it's a good move uh I definitely think it's a good move on the part of uh good job games I mean they're able to extract some value from uh you know a portfolio that certainly is challenging times for hyper casual um and you know certainly don't see an improvement for hyper casual going forward um there a lot of things that uh are certainly against that overall genre including Unity adding in new charges for there for their engine usage is one of the potential ways that going see higher costs for hyper casual um yeah I think it's a good move for uh for a good job as I said they extract some value allow them to take some money from that portfolio and put it towards uh games that they think they'll have more longer term uh Revenue um perspective um as for
aser games I think you know if they start looking at if they have a very large portfolio that they're able to move customers in around inside then potentially they have the ability to lower their General CPI um making it a little bit more uh profitable for them um especially if they've already got games that they can see what all the kpis for them uh you know they've been in the market they see how they monetize they see how well uh they're able to um do on the on the ad side um you know they're they're bringing new games to their portfolio that they can share customers with with an understanding of what the revenue potential is uh Felipe I was wondering um your thoughts on the trends of games now being acquired more and more rather than teams and Studios so we saw the acquisition of stumble guys Zen match that you referenced is that could that be because the mobile gaming industry is reaching that maturity where Studios have um how do
you call it like an overflowing portfolio that can be best optimized by selling and then investing in new games rather than sunsetting or trying to continue operating with a skeleton team well in in this case I think like these two cases like one is like the the games from good J games and the other is stul guys are different so stul guys to my knowledge was like developed by kind of an indie team so it was a small team like the they they develop this game and I think they they like get a bit of scar with the scale that the game took and they were a bit afraid that maybe they got toed because of the similarities with the with Fall Guys and they maybe try to to to sell it in order to like not not be persecuted for it uh and like I don't know if uh for a big company like sco made sense to really like buy not just the game but also the team
because like I think like they had resources to to make that happen and like the team wasn't large enough to really like by buying the team as well like avoiding like any problems in the transition to to scopy so I think that that case is different from from good job games uh where I feel like they've probably decided to just sell the portfolio because they want to keep the the talent and they have already maybe transitioned the to startop focusing more on casual games and maybe these games were just like being like maintained by a few people and like building new no new content and other stuff right so in that case it's more like uh selling this inventory to to allow to to really focus but also to have the funds to like I don't know like do UA at a bigger scale when the they find that the pro market fit for the game that they have instead of having to go elsewhere and raise money as for instance another Turkish company Dre had to do at
that moment so probably it's kind of a strategy to be more autonomous on that I kind of Wonder then too if there's like a different strategy depending on whether or not uh you want to take people on or you're just trying to acquire users like I imagine if you were trying to acquire users acquiring the game makes more sense if you're trying to acquire Talent acquiring the people makes more sense but like acquiring both when you only want one seems like that would incur a lot of cost like inquiring people when you just want the users is going to be like a huge payroll ad and all that stuff especally when that's only going up right now and all the problems with that so I got to imagine like that's probably contributes to some of the decision but I do wonder what some of these companies like like this this one for example when these companies are transitioning from hyper casual to casual or hybrid casual whatever like the big difference right is retention uh and that's what they're like trying to switch is to have something with more retention maybe less focus on just quick ad pump stuff like that but I I wonder with some of these companies like do they have the expertise to be able to actually handle that ret attention design uh I mean you
say the kpi stuff definitely right they're they're good at working on kind of that sort of liveops mentality around the kpis but like retention like requires I think a little bit of a different skill set so I wonder if some of these companies like end up hiring people on or in this case if azer has that Talent already and it's like oh we you guys are good at developing the games and innovating a bit and then we have some Talent around retention and can help you make that transition then I can imagine a situation like that where it actually made total sense to Quire them so I I could imagine the is like going to be like kind of an ongoing thing for a lot of these companies going through that transition I think it part will also depend on the types of games um you know it a hyper casual game is a lot easier to transition from one team to another generally because the code bases are fairly simplistic the pipelines are fairly simplistic um you know you only need one or you know one or two or three Engineers to be able to go in and try and understand how the game was constructed uh it becomes a lot more
difficult when it's a large scale game when you start getting into the Casual you know midcore and and up games when they're a lot more complex in the code their I pipelines they're a lot more complex there's a lot more moving parts to it um so for the hyper casual I think in my mind it makes a little bit more sense in terms of you still have a bit of an ease of transitioning the game from one team to another it's most likely isn't too hard to get in the code and have an understanding of how you know you could work inside there so probably speaks a little bit towards the you know not needing the team to come across with the game itself yeah and also I will add that when you uh like get the team as well then you need to decide right because they are based in a different uh country so what that is is like they are going to operate as a as a company so I'm buying like the company but they operate as a sister company within the uh the bigger company or are I am I integrating them into uh my company and
being part of that like that could also have some risk and like even could happen that you buy the team and like they lost lose the the feeling of belonging and they eventually uh find another job because they they don't want to stay right so then you pay for something that you that's not going to last yeah I got to imagine even with the relocating stuff right where some people just don't want to relocate you might lose team members on that front as well and I mean like luckily we have a little bit like more remote culture thanks to co to some extent which I know you know some people are very against some people are a bit more Pro I think in the game industry it's been kind of one of those things where I think there's like a lot of culture stuff that's maybe lost in the remote work but I'm sure some companies manage it but yeah as you said like especially with this being a global business stuff now right where all these companies are like especially mobile games tend to be I think a little bit more Global in that sense uh although obviously like console has plenty of big studios and stuff so but uh speaking of one team transitioning to another in terms of Ip uh we have some news around another
Nintendo property transitioning to film absolutely uh some amazing news for all of us Zelda fans uh came out of Nintendo this week um this is great I got two breaking news pieces to talk about today uh so Nintendo announced that uh Legend of Zelda is coming to the big screen as a live action film um now this is a situation where uh they are um really being a key part of bringing the game uh bringing the game to the film uh they're providing uh 50% or just over 50% of the financing for the film uh meaning that they have control over the film which I think is a really big part of ensuring that uh it will be of the high level quality that Nintendo want wants uh especially out of one of their key franchises uh
Zelda um and obviously you know this is coming hot off the hills of the success of Super Mario Brothers movie which I think as of uh the beginning of November had done over 1.36 billion dollar in box office uh and I'm sure will continue to uh make it up the charts in terms of uh you know as it gets to um uh to digital downloads and and so forth uh so the two people that were attached to it uh there was um Arie Avid is the uh the producer working alongside um Nintendo and he is uh someone who's not you know certainly very familiar with uh bringing big properties to the to the film um he is someone who was behind uh some of the original Spider-Man's Venom uh and certainly is very familiar with
um you know bringing uh comic book or other media to the film industry so very much looking forward to that um and uh the director uh Belle is uh someone who uh worked on um a number of films or most recently uh or is the film that he's got uh coming out uh very shortly is a kingdom of the Planet of the Apes um and previous to that did the Divergent uh Trilogy of films uh so certainly uh some uh some uh people that are bringing a lot of interesting perspective and and I'm really really looking forward to it I think with Nintendo's level involvement that uh it will at the very least hoping it doesn't suck but I do think that they've got a really solid chance of it uh being successful film didn't the director do Maze Runner yes yeah huh
hopefully no ma Runner style all right yes we'll see I'm well I'm loving is now all of the guess who's going to be the cast uh for the movie and my favorite pick so far was in the guardian for Zelda it's Zenia from June I think she'd be such a great fit um yeah please please bring really cool actors I'm so hyped for this I loved Mario it was like feeling Mario in this in the cinema and I'm looking forward to the Zelda one this one's Meant To Be Live Action right not CG yes live action yeah definitely seems like a bigger risk uh given that like you know some of these successes have been more so on the CG or like cartoon or anime side than the live action just because like it's it's a little harder I think to translate video game stuff to live action but in this case Zelda was always just kind of like relative fantasy stuff not not anything like really the super video gamish like Mario kind of was so
like maybe there's some some leeway there for make it kind of work like with a live action you have to find trying to make it look exactly like it is in the game or the anime whatever it is to cringe I think that happens a lot with the anime liveaction movies they just get a bit cringe but like with a one piece live action I thought it was really good and so I I do have hopes it will work out yeah and I do think that is one of the key bits for having Ary in there as well is that he is familiar of producing you know taking Pro you know properties that are um very uh over the toop like I mean Venom is certainly not a uh boring classical historical film character it is very much overthe toop it is taking a Fantastical world and grounding it inside the reality of the real world so I I do think that there is some uh potential for uh um for making
it there uh and yes I do want to correct myself it's the Maze Runner series thank you for that Mar not the diversion series uh that the director West ball has had in the past um but he does have upcoming the the kingdom of the Planet of the Apes cool and you have some other breaking news for us uh yes uh GTA 6 so uh word has come out that we are going to see a trailer for GTA 6 in early December and uh people are really getting excited about this the stock uh this morning when I last looked was up 7% based on the news um now take to in the past it suggested that uh GTA 6 would launch in 2024 um and so the timing for the trailer coming out uh early next month uh certainly is in line with that uh take to said that they uh are seeing
themselves reaching their next phase of growth in fiscal 2025 which is uh starts in April 2024 um so do expect that we'll probably see uh or hopefully see GTA 6 uh launching in Spring early summer uh of next year but uh yeah it was fantastic to see that the the trailer will be dropping soon it's given the sped of delays in games that e that either haven't have been delayed significantly or have come out very half-baked I got to imagine it's probably more realistic if they're targeting like around summer then maybe fall unless they rush it out uh because this is a big big BET right like so they I I definitely hope they're not going to try and rush it out um and take their time on it and I imagine given the complexity of GTA 5 you know you always have to go bigger right so GTA 6 always a chance that this could be like a real mess if it comes out too early so so I mean I hope they're not providing too much early guidance where
like it ends up hurting the stock or something if the game does get delayed but I would imagine like as long as it gets out by Christmas right like that's the idea like if you target summer you could get it out by Fall still not a bad situation to be in but I gotta imagine like I mean I guess we'll see what the scope looks like right when we see the trailer if we do see one yeah and they they gave their guidance in terms of uh the next fisal year being their next phase of growth back in May of this year so I think it's a situation where um you know even back then that they were fairly confident that it was going to hit early enough in the fiscal year that it would be uh a significant contributor to uh to fiscal year 2025 um and for me that does speak probably uh summer time frame but yeah no later than than the fall Ure to ensure they get their their Christmas rush in place I guess the other question too is whether or not it's looking to be like a live service thing or like I I mean you have to kind of imagine it probably is but yeah given that uh from
you know GTA online to all of the updates they do not inside not only just in Grand Theft Auto but across a number of their properties uh the compan certainly built more and more for you know continually updating their properties I expect that uh yeah GTA6 will be uh continually updated and um ever expanding GTA Universe for them I'm I'm actually quite nervous for the launch of this game because GTA plays such a massive role in culture I find like in the gaming culture it sets a tone and there's a lot to be corrected from GTA 5 and I really really hope that GTA 6 is more modern in terms of you know how you treat women and how they portray different cultures um be you know more realistic and Le GTA 5 so take two
Rockstar Deliver us a upto-date culture game please um you play a very influential role that's my petition I guess well I guess if if we do get that trailer you know soon hopefully it'll be like enough content to get an idea what's coming and not just like a teaser I mean obviously like that they're not saying exactly what's going to be in or anything like that so uh I got to imagine they're going to try and ramp up to it it is kind of funny to like release a trailer for a game for next year just before Christmas this year it's like get get people excited for something they can't buy yet I mean unless they're going to start pre-sales for for Christmas that would be pretty nuts but I suppose in theory they could right where if it's that hyped um and and I gotta Wonder like what effect this may or may not have on GTA 5 uh you know monetization because it's still like an ongoing game right where uh will they get some kind of slowdown say going into spring or summer where people just like I'll save my money for GTA 6 or it's just like we're just going to ride this till you know the wheels fall off and six comes out uh and I imagine there might be at least some weakness towards
the end right uh but we see playing live service games that just kind of wait to less like and I'm sure you know like Modern Warfare 2 is still probably monetizing okay right before three comes out here for example because they they tried to make sure that like people knew it was okay to keep spending money on it for example so they uh they're announcing it now so that people are able to save their money to be able to afford the $200 and $300 special versions of the game when it comes out they might also be uh keeping it for December for their earnings in December might yeah might help pull through the rest of the quarter with the excitement and I think obviously like we like the Assumption was this was GTA because like when it was announced a while back right because of the the take two just doesn't have anything else this large uh to really impact I mean unless they've got a project you know no one knows about right so uh that does also mean that that like you know this is a pretty important project for Take 2 so I
would imagine they're going to try and make sure that this launch goes well and I got to imagine the marketing power once it actually goes Full Tilt next year uh and they actually have like the game kind of he like moving towards that release date it's probably going to be nuts like I mean obviously we're moving away a little bit from like traditional like TV commercials but I imagine like there there'll be those plus streaming well well I imagine we we're to the point where you might see commercials in movie theaters uh for something like this I imagine oh definitely at least here in England you already have uh ads for games in the theaters yeah and in terms of uh GTA 5 um I mean they've done a fantastic job of being able to keep their retail price up pretty high for that game uh you know drop it down to $20 and it could see still a decent tail for quite some time I have I have a rule I generally only buy PlayStation games since they reach the $30 Mark or lower and I've been waiting since GTA 5
launched for the price to come down and I it it never has maybe now maybe now I'll play GTA 5 they used to have the the classic uh or the greatest hits kind of series or whatever it was for like the PlayStation that was like the $20 ones where they all hit that price point for retail but uh yeah like now like I guess if they could just charge a premium for it they can but to be fair like we're also in a period now where you could play it over game pass at least for a period of time like who knows when they'll turn that off but for the moment like people that do that did miss out can always play that way assuming they have you know game pass at a high enough tier for it but I don't know how that game would run with that uh but you know I given that uh it could be bit of a a processor intensive it's actually kind of nice to be able to run in the cloud but speaking of games uh running on for a while after uh they're they're getting a little old and and trying to get that throwback in there fortnite trying to bring back some Nostalgia successfully yes um I was not aware of this until it took over my Twitter time timeline and I decided I want to dig into it further so they
released an OG celebration season that's going to last for 4 weeks instead of the usual 3 months and the game is going to be updated regularly throughout the season where they're going to be releasing bringing back uh content that existed in the OG seasons of fortnite and they brought back the original map and some classic locations I think one is the the to like Twisted Tower or something like that anyway and we're speaking about it because the concurrent player count this year was averaging around 1.8 to2 million and we saw a spike in August when they released their new season and it peaked to 2.8 million but with the release of the OG season the alltime peak has reached 6 million and a total of around 45 million players joined during the weekend to play the season and so really like hats off to to Epic this is a major win for them and I was looking at some benchmarks and there was a game called the finals
um that was in open Beta during the weekend I believe it was trending on Steam it was trending on Twitch it's like this chaotic destruction mechanic and that had 7.5 million players and so you know with the peak almost reaching with a new game that's pretty amazing and I love the context that the Guardians newsletter put is like 10 times the number of people who watched the pre premiere of Last of Us and last of us is pretty popular anyway I like that stat and so I was looking into like why is the OG season bringing such amount of players and so fortnite changed a lot since his release I think it was like in 2017 and so the maps used to be more Bare Bones you didn't have like all these NPCs and all this Mobility like swimming and mounts um it used to have the build mode and now the no build mode is as popular as the build mode and the game also used to be more hardcore
especially with the build uh it used to have like a lot of what what's called like sweaty players um and fortnite evolved to attract a broader um a broader audience it became less hardcore and just over time by Nature they start adding more to the maps um yeah becoming I don't know more more fun more accessible to jump in and so what really captured my attention here is that I think this is one of the first examples where we see that Nostalgia works for Gen Z2 it's a gift that keeps on giving and so if you're growing up with fortnite and you're an OG player now you're a bit older maybe you moved on to Cod and now you have the OG season and we see like these new I guess more modern uh fortnite players joining in with the influx of the of the OG players and then in terms of why this is a major
win for fortnite they've been seeing their player count in Decline uh we know with the layoffs and changing into their creator economy that they need to refill their coffers plus all of the costs that going into these legal battles that they're fighting in the name of the industry and especially looking at the Creator economy where you have the this ugc content being created you need eyeballs in order to scale and so what better than to bring in your old audience like re reactivate them join them with your current audience and create that Peak and so I'm really interested I don't know if they're going to share these kpis but I love to know the kvis in terms of what percentage of returning players are now engaging with the ugc maps and ugc content so looking forward to to hearing that I have a little bit more in terms of whether I think the player account will sustain but before jumping into that do
you have any thoughts I guess looking at uh World of Warcraft data from the similar kind of thing where they tried where they did the vanilla and brought back like they managed to bring back a lot of laps players for a period of time but I think over like over time that kind of diminishes a little bit those especially if that's a that's an example where the players are maybe a bit older than fortnite players in terms of the Gap um but it does mean like oftentimes they might be in another phase of their life or something like that where they've transition on it's like not necessarily just that they maybe sick at the game but that they're just also like doing other stuff playing other things and so like bringing people back like I I remember when wow vanilla came out like it brought a lot of people back people were really excited people haven't played in a long time and like and blizzard kind of you know tried to take advantage of that as long as they could but at some point like those people kind of go back to their real life uh and so I I got imagine like there's going to be like some window but at the same time like uh there is like the possibility to continue this even pasted when epic does it thanks to the the unreal edited for fortnite stuff
where people could make the islands and stuff that recreate the OG content and kind of keep it going as long as there's interest in it at least and I gota imagine people will do that just hoping that their Island will be popular and stuff like that I think from a Content perspective also it's like another big reason why people are are in there and interested as I think of the people that joined you know fortnite couple of seasons in uh and there was uh you know store content that they just didn't have access to you know as as um epic brings out new characters new maps and so forth um you know those are the things that people are able to purchase able to interact with but um you know offering the ability to go back in time and seeing some of those characters and be able to acquire some of those characters that they uh that they missed out on uh gives people you know a reason to to really be interested in um you know seeing if they can you know add them to their to their roster of characters uh
in addition to the people you know wanting to come back and experience what they first experienced when playing fortnite yeah looking at the numbers I'd say it's still too early to tell whether they will stick around and sustain uh the best I could do was dig into the Reddit communities and see what people were saying overall I don't believe fortnite will keep this direction as permanent because players do enjoy en the more lively Maps the NPCs um what the game is now and so there's a lot of uh comments about the old map being like slow it's B it's empty it doesn't feel like the world's alive and so but then at the same time I've also seen players say finally my device can play fortnite because the the there's less you know less performance requirements for the game to work and that made me think whether you know maybe maybe maybe fortnite will learn from this and have a game mode that is more Bare Bones so that it it does what
garina freefire did for um countries that are mainly lower performing devices by having a game that runs more smoothly and so we'll see we'll see I I I truly believe that for them to stick around it could very likely come down to that percentage of how many of those players start engaging in the broader ecosystem of fortnite and if they can fall in love with the more modern content yeah nothing nothing I can say from the numbers now and then my last thought on this topic maybe I'm a bit late to arrive at this conclusion but it was a conclusion nonetheless that it just puts into so much context fortnite's move and epic's move to the unreal editor for fortnite because we can see how a game becomes so popular that you just cannot satisfy why so so many different um opposing player personas that want
different things from the game and fortnite is already a major content treadmill and we talked about this in terms of Destiny as well and the content is expensive to make and now if you have to make that content for uh very different player personas that's a major cost for the studio and so moving towards this ugc system where players are building for players it allows fortnite to satisfy more and more personalized player personas within their within their ecosystem so again I might be a bit late to this conclusion but yeah how do you do you agree with this take I'm curious about your thoughts uh I do because it's not only just the content it's the style of content so again going with the what you're talking about player personas like if you look at ROBLOX one of the great things about that is that there are so many different types of games ins side there built by the players because that's the type of thing that they want
to do uh there are a number of experiences that I really wouldn't have expected to be you know so high up on terms of the charts in terms of Engagement but it was players building something that they wanted to uh wanted to play and so by epic giving them you know their their players a place to play play you know a playground to to make the things that they want to do inside that Universe yeah I think it's a a great move for them and yeah it certainly does um you know address all of those different player personas and everything from a simpler version of fortnite you know it's easier to run all the way through to you know I really love playing with the style of characters and be able to you know play um inside the fortnite universe but having in a completely different experience where fortnite becomes a pizza delivery game instead of uh trying to you know have a a a battle royale I'd play that pizza delivery game instead of the Battle Royale well gu
this is also just like a good learning experience for epic either way because first off they could see uh like the contrast between the old and the new stuff to see whether or not they made the right decisions on the way they moved Direction wise like obviously they'll be the people whining vocally and like you can take a little bit of that uh and kind of read between the lines but you also can look at what people do and what people are excited about if they're just playing like the old vanilla stuff for like a hot second but then really itching to go back to the other stuff then clearly like okay those things were the right direction but if people are like I don't really want to play the new stuff anymore I want to play this old stuff then you have to look at like what you changed that you know obviously the resource hog thing it's one thing but the Unreal Engine just keeps getting beefier and beefier so that's kind of like inevitable at that point but the the other thing is like uh you know when they look at what people are building the ugc platform and it's like oh yeah if it's for Niche audience cool you can kind of leave it alone let the people people build stuff for each other but if you see like something really successful
maybe you don't have to necessarily like steal the idea but you can certainly learn from it and see what to incorporate into main fortnite I mean obviously we have a lot of platform companies that do that like apple and and Amazon they're Infamous for just kind of like taking a successful idea that someone else built on their platform and then making it themselves and kind of edging the other people out uh epic doesn't seem like that kind of company but again it's it's it's great learning for them because obviously it's not just uh metrics in terms of player bases and stuff but there's like money involved with the Creator shares and stuff like that so they could definitely see what's successful whereas like Roblox doesn't have like a proper game itself to necessarily compete with the the games within it obviously fortnite is like a game within that ecosystem so they built it off that instead I don't imagine they're going to be like oh let's steal the pizza delivery idea let's steal every other like game mod and and shove it in here but same time like if they see like the trend of what fortnite's doing is waning in favor of these other mods and stuff like that they could definitely take advantage of that like why not right like you're building that platform obviously you
just have to make sure not screw over your creators when you do that um but I mean but speaking of platforms uh screwing over people epic's still in the battle here against uh this now Google uh instead of Apple but maybe a continuation maybe not this is OG uh map for epic at this point the battle continues um so as a bit of a recap so epic did face off against Apple uh inside the courts they're uh trying to battle what against what they saw as a monopolistic uh fee uh in terms of their 30% uh and uh unfortunately for epic that battle did not go their way um pretty much uh it was a summary judgment against epic I think there was only one count that did go their way everything else went Apple's way now this is still all in uh the court system um I think it's uh making its way
up to the Supreme Court at this point um but uh it's now uh the Epic versus Google turn now there are some definitely some differences between what happened with apple uh versus what's going to be coming about with Google right now um the the same it's the same core concept uh from epics perspective you have an entity that's uh controlling uh you know very large component if not in the case of Apple um all of it um but the difference is here are Google as compared to apple doesn't own isn't the only Android store uh it does allow for things such as uh side loading um but if you dive down into the metrics 90% of all downloads are through the Google Store versus uh through Samsung or any of the other Android stores that are out there uh and Google
still does require payment happening through them the other big change or big difference I think is this time around versus with Apple the Apple court case was it was a judge it was a judge who was um you know ideally took the time to have a good understanding of the technical landscape they have an understanding of what the marketplace looks like in this particular case this is a jury trial so you're now dealing with situations of uh you know the potential for Consumer emotions in play um and especially now given a time where people you know are are are struggling a little bit in terms of finances and and you know will they have a different perspective in terms of yes big Tech can uh take the 30% and that's what they deserve or is it more of a case of well you know it really shouldn't be that uh that much of a of a take um they've already introduced some of the current
arguments that they or some of the arguments they had with apple especially when it comes around the PC store landscape um how epic you know really forced uh a number of uh stores to change their revenue share uh where they're at 88 uh 12% in terms of their uh share uh Microsoft ending up going to that that particular model uh they made the argument that steam chose 30% only because that's what the marketplace was charging at that point not because there was any real um you know any uh any real reason for that percentage um other than that's what everybody else is doing um so I do expect we'll be seeing a lot of the same arguments as they they brought forward during the Apple um trial I think unfortunately for epic some of them are not quite as uh strong just because
Google is able to point out that um you know you can sideload apps you can go to different stores you don't have to get the the games through the apple or through the Google Play Store um but I think epic will probably counter that with well anytime you do try to sideload something you have to go through a wide variety of setting changes uh you have to accept the really dire you know warnings from Google saying hey by the way if you Sid load this particular piece you may compromise your entire phone and and you'll lose uh all of your money and and your children and everything so really don't sideload this game you should really do it through the through the Google store so yeah so I I think it'll be interesting uh expect it uh Tim Sweeney and uh the CEO for Google will be um you know presenting their sides of the cases is uh inside the coming weeks um but yeah I'm I'm really interested in seeing what the difference
between having uh a judge who uh you know has taken the time to be uh to become very well versed in what uh the marketplace is actually like versus having a jury and see if there's uh any difference in the rulings there um thoughts you covered I have nothing to add yeah for me I I don't I don't quite understand the strategy right like I would say like okay get win the case against apple and then like fight against Google because as you said like it it seems like Google is better position to to defend themselves in in this in this case right like so if if you haven't managed to win the case against Apple what makes you think like you could win against Google and like otherwise seems like a waste of money I do think that they are looking at some of the things that have uh
transpired where um a number of the attorney generals in in the states uh brought forth a similar type of lawsuit against Google um but in the end they ended up settling uh that wasn't a case where they actually won um I believe match.com or the match group also ended up uh having a settlement with them um where the they were able to implement a user Choice billing so offering different uh payment options um but you know same as uh other stores um you know the games the game side of the stores tend to be held in a slightly different set of circumstances as other um as other parts of other or other apps that are downloaded through the stores if you look at the differences between uh what the revenue share is uh uh for games versus other apps there are certainly uh differences inside the stores so um yeah
on the game side I agree I mean they're epic's going in with a uh certainly not as much of a a winning hand against Google um I'm just wondering if it's maybe timing if they think that the potential for sediment against uh big Tech is there and that they they you know want to take advantage of that right now um or or what the situation is but yeah I I agree believe they had they had a stronger case with apple and if um uh but you know that's not going to get resolved anytime soon that's G to go through the courts for quite a while still so I remembered at the time when epic was in the courts with apple that they were they had already started their their um suit is that how you my I need to watch more um judicial dramas that epic had yeah EP epic sued Google in 2020 after a fight over inapp purchase
fees and so it just had a really long road to get to court and in the meantime the Apple suit has uh reached its conclusion and only now so they haven't filed recently this this has been filed a long time ago and now they also have um allegations that Google paid Activision Blizzard and Riot games I think we discussed this on one episode that they said oh we're going to do our own mobile store and Google was like take some money yeah that was the the uh the hug the golden hug or something like that I'm trying remember weird but basically it was it was very much uh they will look at who the top developers were um and would pay money towards them and in uh in Hope of enticing them to stay within the inside the ecosystem uh and that will be brought up again if it hasn't already I'm sure that will be brought up again um but you're right yeah that was brought up during the Apple trial I gotta say though like the payment or the the fight over payments I
think is a part of this that make maybe makes some sense like if everyone's if Google forces everyone to use their payment system uh regardless of how they're going through it and like at the end of the day like it's it's you know obviously because they make Android right and they're kind of giving Android out and like this is their way of like kind of like making sure that they get some Kickback from that uh but at the same time like that if people are building all these other side things and doing all this work to do that then they probably I think it's fair that they you know be able to have their own payment options for that um whereas especially from Google who's very like web friendly everything should work through the web and all that stuff so the fact that they're not like being like hey exola we can work with you or something you know one of those ones that's like very web friendly to say like let's make a deal with these companies if they're gonna give a golden hug to anyone like give a golden hug to these other payment rails and then settle on that part because the part that like where they're defending on the the side side the store actually is pretty fair because like it generally you shouldn't be loading random apks
because they are infecting people pretty frequently and that happens a lot it's not like a random thing where like occasionally there's M whereare there's m whereare in the store regularly like Google's not doing the greatest job of always protecting that but like I think I think uh for like epic's argument there is pretty weak I mean obviously not on the jury but if I was I'd be like come on like they're not being apple right now like that's the big difference is Apple's very like you do what we say we're going to do like that's it and Google's like yeah you could do some stuff I if you look at the recent stuff on web 3 I think it shows like their ability to be pretty flexible in areas where you're not really like taking too much advantage of them even on the payment stuff they weren't being like apple where they're like nope all the payment stuff has to go through us when it came to like nfts so I think I don't know that sounds like the area where that maybe they need to find something that works yeah and developers are you know looking at what are those payment things that they can do in order to get around around at and so you know you look at scopely and the games that they had originally as mobile games they're
now offering crossplatform and hey look when you you know purchase stuff on the PC it could be either you know for the game developer it's either they're getting a better percentage because uh you know their payout to exola is a lot smaller um or they're able to offered at at a different uh different number well I think my my perspective here is I appreciate epic doing this for the smaller developers that don't have the money for these legal costs so thank you thank you epic because when you I hear a lot that the recommendation to Mobile gaming Studios is just do a web shop and then you'll take less of a cup but actually you say you do save but you don't save as much as you think you might because you can't do your own Financial back office and so you have to use a payment provider that's Merchant a record and they're going to take a much larger percentage fee than is you know
one may assume um if it were to use a payment a payment system where they do not provide The Merchant of record when you look at the cost of building a very sorry building maintaining and creating a scalable experience for a web shop that comes with costs you need to expand your team to have you know the team member side that you need to to perform that work um then you have the community and the marketing cost to try to educate your audience to trust and go to the web shop but then you have um like false links they are false web shops and then you have to spend time trying to protect your players from going go to the right web shop so like there's all these complications not as simple as create a web shop and the the problem will go away and that's why I think it should be something where they try and work with the these companies to facilitate a safe way of doing that where like games are L allowed to link out to these web shops from the app so you know it's a trusted thing because it's from within I mean if
the game's compromised the game's compromised how much you can do at that point but like I think there's if if it's safety is the issue right there's like a a way to make that work and that obviously like the thing with the apks is an example of like they've actually compromised pretty well like the the workflow to like install apks because I install ones like that all the time especially in web 3 uh it's not that bad like compared to apple stuff especially like what they do on desktop now with all this code sighning and stuff it's actually pretty reasonable when it comes to like a compromise with cyber security but like as you mentioned like web shop stuff can be a little tricky right L that was one of epic's arguments was that you know people were going to Shady places to download fortnite uh and stuff like that and that is kind of a problem where just like what can you do about user error and I think if Google like allows a certain amount of that which is interesting because like that was the one thing that epic one versus Apple was the steering like the steering to online stuff was the thing that they actually had some success on so there's the possibility here that Google sees that and like let's just compromise there and
call it a day like I I don't know if they will but they at that point then it's a waste of money to I think to continue to pursue it uh if you could just find a good compromise with with h Google and get the golden hug you know in court and I think everyone will be happy but uh but speaking of companies moving on from uh companies trying to leech off of them EA managed to to move away from uh FIFA and it sounds like maybe successfully yeah it did did at this this is what the they are claiming so well for those of you that are not very familiar with with this so EA have like this football franchise named FIFA and like for for for many years but uh they were going to renew the the licensing like FIFA ask for a billion dollars and they' say okay no that's too much H we are going to to break the deal and like we will Rebrand ourselves and uh that something that work uh well according to the first early results has worked very well for for EA so EA Sports FC the
rerun the game ER from EA has registed like 14.5 million active accounts in the first four weeks so this is a significant increase compared to FIFA 23 that was the last game uh with the with the name in in the franchise which reached 10 million players in the first week um so this is like very successful metrics uh and has lead to increased revenue and earnings from for EA so it seems like overall like that the money that they had to spend in marketing to like make aware of the people that this is still like the same game but with different name has been the like lower than the uh amount of money that they needed to pay FIFA and like they they used to pay FIFA like because that should have given FIFA this time like a larger amount um so this is like great news for them also like the mobile
version uh set records with 2 million installs on the first day uh and 11 million in its first 10 days um EA Sports FC has was the third bestselling title in September and that they expect like L single digit growth for the franchise in in the full year which uh well quite good results inde did like for me it was a bit surprising because I like uh I've been a player of these games for for a long time and we had like uh proevolution soccer was the competitor of FIFA back in the days that right now is renamed as e football but still there and it's free to play and it's surprising for me that like well Sports FC has managed this large amount of uh Us surve in such short amount of time like uh this spite of the rebranding given that the the main computer is free to play and you can get
there so I guess that probably is like this network effect so if you want to play with your friends they are there and then you like eventually move there because you want to play with them uh so quite quite interesting result so uh I don't know what do you think like maybe this like creates like a thought in EA ea uh leadership like saying okay maybe we need to reconsider the deals that we have with other brands and like maybe think twice whether to continue with them I think the FIFA Arrangement is probably a little bit different than like an NFL or an um uh or any of the major franchises in part because while the FIFA brand is gone uh they still have all their other licensing deals with the players and with the clubs and I think that is at least for me when I was when I played a lot of FIFA at the time that's what I was most excited about was that I was
playing with a particular club or I was playing with a particular set of players um whereas I think if you lost like the NFL license then you wouldn't have uh the Dallas Cowboys the Miami Dolphins the you know the the Patriots so you lose all that that club branding which is still very much a big part of uh of the NFL experience you know people being a fan of particular uh Club um so I think the the things that you know most important for players is still very much part of the the football club experience uh at least from my perspective and they chose howand and the you know from Man City who won Champions League and he's one of the most recognizable players nowadays with this with this strike record you don't even need to have FIFA there it's like you see Howland you see it's a football game you know probably if you're into these football games that
e football doesn't have a great reputation unfortunately when they transitioned to e football P really lost like quality and it was a very buggy experience and so I think fantastic transition I completely agree with you Dave that it's a particular case because they do still have the licensing they really only lost the FIFA name and that's not that's no longer I believe like what drives players to want to play FIFA game it's the quality of the experience the physics the the the licensing with the teams and even marketing wise like I don't even see any marketing when with 44 eotb I just see um what's it called now it doesn't even matter it's not e football what was it called EA EA Sports yeah a very recognizable name yeah for me it's even hard to pronounce I don't know why they like I don't know choose different name something more catchy I
would say but like maybe they wanted to just keep it like minimum thing is they have a brand now that they that they successfully transitioned and now they can do whatever they want with it like we talked a little bit about this before too like now they can do spin-offs now they could do whatever and they don't have to deal with cutting FIFA into that right uh because like the idea is like if if they were doing it under FIFA at the time right and they went to do like a spit off they'd want the recognition of the other game towards say a mobile game or whatever it was right and they'd need that now if they built up the brand recognition around this they could do whatever they want with it it's their brand at that point they picked kind of a name doesn't really mean much it could stand for a football club it could stand for whatever it's just FC uh and so that was I mean pretty smart in terms of like if if all that FIFA was bringing was a brand name and they could cut that out this this seems like a great opportunity especially since they get to keep the more important part of the brand name which is the Ultimate Team Team part right that's still a trademark they own and they still get to use this part of this and like everyone knows that part and I think like the audience I think as
you guys mentioned like the audience for this kind of game is not gonna be like oh where FIFA go I guess they'll stop buying these games like they're just like oh it's FC now Okay and like because the at the end of the day like the underlying game was still built by the same people like it's still if it was transitioning to a different company making it that would be like a much bigger risk but the fact that EA is still continue to make it whether you you know whether you like the way EA does that or not if obviously you've been buying them every year then you want to keep going with that this is like a no-brainer for that audience like you're not gonna be like ah I like FIFA too much to you know to to buy this anymore it's like I mean it was it was a name that was pretty ubiquitous with this sort of thing and it's going to take time I think for EA to like replace that in kind of like just the way people talk about oh I'm playing some FC like the way people talk about playing FIFA is like I've see in movies see it TV shows like it's you know thing but now that's going be awkward transition but at the same time FIFA is not exactly a well-respected organization at this point so I don't think anyone's shedding any tears over
that loss so this is just a good opportunity for EA and it like it does it does prove though to potentially other companies and EA like there's opportunity for making these can transitions if you're in the right position like this licensing deal was the right setup for that it's also situation where they've built up that fan base and have the position to be able to make that transition so I mean we'll see how it goes with fc20 obviously there could be some big downturn or change but I I think this succeeding was kind of like almost a given unless they flubbed the game itself and I'm curious to see how many of the people came on they were wondering about you know how much of a new change it was for the game like how many people would come in and go okay well this is actually the same thing as FIFA 23 just with a different name on the cover and the couple of players have transitioned to different teams or if they felt like it was part of like an overall rebranding not just from a title and a little bit of splashy Graphics but if there were any changes to the
gameplay or the feel of the game so uh I think you're right it'll be interesting to see what uh the the feedback is on on uh fc25 yeah and I was curious of that right because like I I didn't have the chance to to Really compare both but like I remember back in the days when I was Jer and didn't have like much money to spend on games so I was deciding to like Skip One version because it's like okay well the changes are not so big and well don't matter if I look the the players are not updated like still the game is feel the same and I'm playing with my colleagues it's it's still fun uh so I don't know if they have like added like big novelty or additions this time like really make players to to want to to migrate to the newest version not just because of the the rebranding but because of they they feel that there is something new that is worth it yeah they released at female players I believe for the first time and I'm really looking forward to seeing how much if we can see
a correlation between the growth of the audience of female football especially like I know women who started to watch football because they're watching women and that's more fun it's more relatable and you know with the World Cup and the Euro that's growing in a lot of popularity I'm curious to see if there's going to be a correlation of seeing um an audience growth for the game and also more female percentage I think it's very male skewed currently the player base so like they're tapping in this whole new market potentially over the next two three years that because I know in terms of other sports as a sport grows in popularity your games audience has that correlation and I'm fairly certain we're going to see that with EA EA Sports FC yeah I don't know also how this could correlate with the unit Sol of PS5 so maybe like people have bought the PS5 after like maybe or like well it wasn't
worth to to buy fifah 23 so they'd say okay I will wait for the next one right and like this correlates a little bit with the thing that we were saying like maybe you Skip One version because there's not much novelty so it was just good timing for them to do this transitioning when people are migrating to PS5 I'm sure with all that stuff if the metrics back up any of that in a way that makes EA look good they'll talk about it otherwise won't hear about it right like that's that's how it comes with with these sorts of metrics where like we don't have that data so if they're like yeah like all these people are playing it now because there's female players or or all these people are playing now because they ps5s and our PS5 attach rate to huge like sure they'll tout it uh and we'll you know hear about it later on but if not then or if the numbers aren't big enough then they probably just won't say um and that's you know that's all we can I guess get from these companies but at the end of the day like I actually kind of like I'm not always a big champion of like big companies like EA but I think this was kind of a success for everyone except FIFA which I think worked out like probably not a good move to
Strongarm that and uh and hopefully like it leads to like other good transitions for companies and not any ones where they're just like hey let's cut this Big Brand out that actually is a good brand uh so I mean we'll see right this is definitely going to be something other games are going to look at like you know Madden franchise even or like just any of these right I mean you obviously had ones that were like just NBA 2K or you know those kinds of things where there're sort of other attempts at sort of making those generic brands that we've seen before so you know you lessons to be learned but uh at the same time like it's good that their investment money went far because I'm sure it wasn't just investment money in the marketing but they also had to transition a lot of assets that they don't normally have to right because they kind of re purpose them between years so I'm sure this was like a pretty big investment for EA in a number of areas uh and I and I imagine there's the chance that maybe it actually didn't turn out profitable but they're not going to say that uh and they'll just take that into fc25 so we'll see how that does come uh Christmas as well we obviously haven't seen the holiday season to see how this carries into that or not because this is again the kind of
game that can potentially be like a holiday gift sort of thing because it's an annual thing so I already heard a a Christmas song on the radio today it's is Christmas season yeah Halloween's over unfortunately Black Friday before right so yeah that's true I wonder if we'll see many digital deals uh come Black Friday I guess we'll have to get into that uh in the post black Friday episode um and if you Cyber Monday oh Cyber Monday yeah before we wrap up I just want to compliment Felipe's t-shirt I feel you're like the superhero of freeto play because you have like in the center of your chest a gem whenever I saw I was like buy some gems cool well I wanted to thank everyone for for listening and of course our panelists as well for bringing some good topics today lots of uh lots of good stuff to talk about and hopefully we get uh you know some good news continuing into the the following weeks as I know it' been a little bit of a slow period before but as we go into the holiday season people are going to be looking for a lot of sales attention so I imagine we'll get quite a bit more as
well as earning seasons has been kicking off so I imagine there'll be some good stuff there to chew on especially when aon's around of course he's always good one for that one but uh thanks everyone for for tuning in as well of course for another week and uh make sure to you know enjoy the rest of your weekend and if you're not already subscribe to the digest and uh get lots of good good content but anyways we'll see you guys next week [Music] if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a fstar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what novic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu contact us to learn about our wide- ranging Consulting and advisory Services again that is www.nic.edu
[Music]
Auto-generated captions from YouTube — names and numbers may be misheard.
Comments