Cutting Through the Game Recession Fluff - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] it was possible to see snoop dogg eminem madonna steve aoki and the chain smokers all in the space of three days and forget about business it was just all about the party [Music] hi friends welcome to the metacast roundtable by navik we're doing a little pre-recording um because i'm going on holiday and so it's actually monday today and if you think that we look tired well that's because it's monday um so today i'm joined by anil dasgupta co-founder and cpo at first light games recently arrived in london uh so we'll talk a little bit about that in a while matt dyan lead product manager at ea and contributes here at navic and also a new

joiner today brett novak founder and ceo of liquid and grit welcome brett thanks for having me so as we usually do uh do could you give us a 30 second intro about who you are and liquid and grit sure i started in the gaming industry a pretty long time ago amazingly it seems seems like a short period but i started in actually some console work with pete parsons the ceo of bungie studios for a long time working on halo and then i eventually went to business school and then joined zynga where that's where i really got my mobile gaming knowledge i guess and then was on zinga poker left there went to blue shell games for a couple years and then started liquid and grit which really provides all of the reports and tools and information not all of but a lot of the reports and tools that i wish i had while i was at zynga and blue shell games and i've been

doing this amazingly for seven years now and we cover currently the casual core and casino markets and soon the sports and arcade markets why why did you call your business liquid and grit is there a fun story there is actually so in an interview with steve jobs he was asked what he felt like great product development process was like and to answer the question he told a story about basically when he was a kid he was introduced to a rock grinder and the rocks being a metaphor for people in product like grinding rubbing up against each other arguing fighting discussing and in that process he poured in a little liquid and grit powder to basically create these polished stones so i named the company liquid and grit because i feel like we're the sort of the liquid and grit powder to help the product process for game teams that's awesome i love it

um thanks for the the quick intro and anil so you landed today at 7 00 a.m after a red eye flight from new york how are you feeling um tired as you can probably imagine but it was a pretty uh reinvigorated i would say so yeah i was out at nfc nyc um being in the web 3 world i thought it was important to go i felt to be honest with you a bit like some everything in web 3 it did feel like somewhat of a rug pull in the sense that i got to the event and it was not really anywhere near as good as i thought it would be but i think it was great to actually be in an amazing city but with so many people in the web 3 world all in one place at one time i'm pretty sure that your next question maria is going to be to ask me what was the best stroke most exciting thing that i i saw there and i would say that if you played your cards correctly it was possible to see snoop dogg eminem madonna steve aoki and the chain smokers all in the space of

three days and forget about business it was just all about the parties and you know someone once told me that we were in a bear market at the moment but i'm pretty sure that one party thrown by mythical games must have cost them at least three million dollars i've never seen anything like it huge venue uh this is the one that you had the chain smokers in um there's people who are blatantly being paid to turn up at the party shall we say bring the far all night um it was amazing i don't think i've been to a party as cool as that in probably the last 15 years um so fair play to them i'm guessing that they pre-accounted for it six months ago when we're in in a bull run um yeah it was a lot of fun and mainly to put sort of you know uh faces to names got to hang out with nico you know from the other side of the navic podcast that was great fun um but i think you'll be curious to see where we're going at the same time whilst all these parties were great i do think that people were more somber and realizing that it's time to build and thames make great stuff which

i think is really what gaming should all be about so yeah it was a little bit about what nfc nyc was like i saw your photo shoot with nico by the pool side i tell you what those bitcraft boys can afford some nice hotels that's what i would say i was not staying in one anywhere near as nice as his spots i also heard that there was a fake snoop dogg at the event that a lot of people believed was was the real snoop dogg is that the snoop dogg that you saw i know well i guess it depends if they managed to get into the ape fest or not you know that would be my answer to that question oh did you go to the 8th fest i couldn't possibly comment okay okay mysterious um so today we're going to be talking about um ux4 blockchain mobile devices is there a recession in games who knows we'll dig into it fortnite is also testing a way to find teammates

that better align with how you like to play and we'll briefly also dive into miniclip acquiring cybo is that how you pronounce it who's a developer of subway subway surfers just one like last question before we move on uh bret favorite game recent and favorite platform was it oh well i'm i i mean clash royale is it's not that recent but it's always been a love of mine i've played it for a long time so i think i ought to give that a shout out here and mobile would be the would be the platform nice if i'm kind of lame i'm kind of lame but it's just like i can't get away from it it's really fun i started getting into it i just didn't have time to continue yeah it's really the progression feels really satisfying what what league are you in what what league like what level yeah or i think they call it like i'm six yeah i'm my my score right now is six

thousand um okay yeah you're up there then yeah i know i keep on trying to uh to like i keep on debating whether i should really go hardcore and like try to get even higher but then i'm like okay you got other things to do like don't do it so i kind of like just hover at this 6 000 my highest like 6 300 or something 65 um i got once i think um but yeah you hear that supercell just target bret yeah i always i'm always embarrassed because i only imagine the stat of has deleted it and reinstalled x amount of times like i'm that i'm i'm on that line item it's like stop playing and then i start again yes kind of embarrassing well that's how it works about mobile and on that note we'll go to a nils topic

which is about mobile devices sure yeah so my topic is user experience for blockchain mobile products and what inspired me to bring up this topic is at nfc nyc there was a curious announcement pretty early on and that was that solana were going to be making a salon a phone and everyone's like what uh have you not heard about other sort of quite bigger manufacturers that have failed making their own phone microsoft tried to make their own phone twice and it failed amazon tried to make their own phone and it failed so why do the crypto bros think that they've got a better chance of doing and you know at first it kind of seems like suicidal and what are they thinking but when you sort of dig into it and speaking around the community i think what people realize and what could be quite clever about this is it's an effort to try and bring forward ux in general with blockchain products so anyone who's ever used it and i'm not even talking about gaming which is this whole you know even deeper darker rabbit hole to go down but if you want to buy crypto you've got to attach yourself to

a wallet you know what's the difference between a custodial and a non-custodial one where do you hold your crypto how do you make a purchase how do you do all the kind of kyc stuff there's about a million hoops that you have to jump through none of which are pleasant and it's all very painful and an ideal world you know if you go and pay for something in the shop you most likely pull out your debit card you tap it on a machine it takes the money away from you and you purchase that good so yeah i want to talk about this because i wondered what people thought about the idea of trying to make a device that was specifically looking to solve the problem of making crypto easier to use on your phone and and what it could do going forward so yeah i'll throw it out there so was it a phone is it a phone or just a device like i mean because i mean could it be like a card or a little device that you know like a like i'm always imagining a pager that you have on you that could be the evolution so what they announced i think it's a fair question to ask is they announced two things

firstly they announced that they're making something called the solana mobile stack sms see what they did there funny guys these crypto pros and that's the software that'll be running on it and essentially it's like a layer that can be built on top of android with its own decentralized app store that was kind of the big thing that you can't do on apple um but on top of it to showcase it they also had their own device which would be like the flagship device to show off the power of the sms and the decentralized app store so that's what they've announced and potentially i suppose it could be used for the device that's not a phone in the future but that was the offering that they had at the event so i was going to ask like if you actually need a phone to improve the ux on mobile can't you just do software but it sounds like you answer that question like they're doing the sms to address that and then the hardware piece is extra i don't know like maybe tell me a little bit more about that because it seems like a very expensive

undertaking um i the first that you mentioned windows phone first thing i thought of was espn phone um another another failed uh venture um but we've already seen kind of the difficulties with supply chain and getting chips and you know building phone handsets in the first place for the established players uh how how are they how are solana going to kind of break into that market and also tackle this additional challenge of you know improving ux and uh blockchain yes i think the interesting thing is that i i personally think that they're actually doing this as a lossley that i don't think they're actually looking to to make money for the hardware sales of the phone but rather they can see the positivity so their foundation also pledged like a 10 million funding spree for uh mobile apps using their technology and that would be the way to kind of push it forward and i think what they're kind of like i think what they realize is rather than developing it themselves is get people who are better suited and got better

experience to try and solve the ux issue for them so how should your keys be retained on your device how can you use it so it's as seamless as possible and they're probably hoping that some of that software that comes out of it can be used not only on their own ecosystem but maybe broadly across the whole spectrum because it's something that i think people in web 3 we talk about it quite a lot on on these meta cars you know every week how just how problematic it is right now and these basic building blocks have to kind of fall before people can kind of move forward and you know if you look at kind of history repeating itself you could say that like the iphone itself was not the first touchscreen device to have been made as a phone like samsung lg even microsoft i tried it many times before but it never really solved it and really what the iphone did that the others didn't is it had this amazing ux and a native touch sort of screen interface and that brought it to the masses so the feeling is is that could be the way that they're going here i have a a couple questions from

the gaming perspective so i i didn't fully understand what you can and can do but it seemed like it it the phone is the wallet in a way yeah that seems to be like their most unique thing so at the moment you know you can't do that if you were to buy uh crypto on your phone right now you can do it but you'll have to have like an app that sets up like a non-custodial wallet which is uh not so safe um or you would have to you know be in charge of transferring it there and then when you kind of purchase it whereas they're sort of saying by building it into the device natively how it works i don't quite know but you never know it could actually be like it's more of a cold storage wallet despite your phone being online and just the way that things are connected is very secure and very seamless at the same time so we don't have too many details from them at the moment but these are sort of things that could be possible if you've got a native device where everything is all-inclusive right i heard that solana blockchain is struggling to scale and even went down a few times so do you think that this

could also be a play to get from you know a wider breadth of creators interested to development like for example games for solana because it provides the best user experience you can on mobile for a blockchain game and so you want to develop for that technology and be installed on the app it's all possible i think it's quite interesting because you've touched upon something there which is that people are sort of jokingly calling the solana network the salon and not work because that's how often it's down um that joke isn't one of mine i wish i could claim it but at the same time there really are a lot of games that are being built on salon including some pretty nice ones on top of that you've got magic eden which is like an nft marketplace and that's actually right now in terms of transactional volume more popular than openc would you believe so they're definitely doing something right and this one again sort of feels similar to the sort of ecosystem again that they're they're trying to tackle maybe problems in another way and and people kind of keep the faith so i i couldn't really

comment too much on like the the stability of it's going to do it but i think that i would say compared to maybe other blockchains out there at least on paper they're doing things that are attractive for people in the space to want to develop on it by thinking a bit more outside the box and maybe not just so much tech bro because you know that sometimes the problem is that you can build some amazing technology but if it's not usable then no one uses it i think back again to how you know steve jobs recognized very early on like when he was at xerox park about the mouse and you know he was like oh do you guys realize what you've invented and and they hadn't and he realized that what they've invented is a way for people to interact with a computer in a way that felt intuitive and that was like the billion dollar idea and he moved on it so um yeah it's all just speculation but i think that they're trying to sort of position themselves to be like more than just a blockchain and more of a oval suite of things that can have a lot of usage yeah i think my feelings on it was that i saw in the announcement they mentioned

the app stores and you know how google play and the app store take a cut off the of the revenue and that they weren't going to do that on the other hand it seems that they're creating another closed ecosystem because they didn't mention other wallets they only talked about solana they talked about the solana wallet and as we can see currently in the landscape there are so many wallets and the wallets change depending on the blockchain that you're interacting with so isn't that a closed environment well we'll see if they provide more details i'm just going off the limited information license have they announced a go live date or a release date of some sort early next year i think cool well okay we'll see yeah sounds like uh let's see i mean it i don't i don't know a ton a ton about obviously i don't know i should say this but it seems almost like a uh story to raise a little bit more money i mean they've raised 300 million and we get to that level i

gotta imagine that your story's gotta be pretty impressive like it's gotta be pretty big for you to go raise more money right um so you have to go you have to go after massive opportunities you can't just be like oh we're just gonna change the ui of our existing technology or we're gonna add a button here or whatever right you have to be like we're gonna take on a giant market right i mean you've raised 300 million dollars like what do you need another 200 million dollars for well we're going to build phones right then we're going to build then we're going to build people to play those phones right and like it's like it's like i don't know it just seems like right like that we're going to we're going to use like i don't know i'm not trying to i'm always kind of i guess i'm the skeptic on this stuff but it's like you're gonna go build phones i don't know it seems pretty awesome it's fair to be skeptical i think yeah right um well on the on the investment and acquisitions now we'll have matt's topic

yeah miniclip oh sure um yeah so my topic this week um was that miniclip acquired this company sibo again we're not sure if we're pronouncing it correctly sibo sibo i don't know but they're the publishers behind subway surfers which is um massively successful if you have not played it it's like an endless runner but it's been around it just celebrated its 10-year anniversary subway surfers did so it's a long time ip in the mobile game space which is pretty impressive i have to say you got to give them credit for that but anyways the the studio that publishes subway surfers was acquired by miniclip for an undisclosed amount um and thought it was interesting for a couple of reasons one because this is such a long lasting ip in mobile and it's interesting to see it change hands especially in the context of point number two which

is that miniclip had recently announced we talked about on pod actually that they were going to be pivoting to mobile games rather than browser games and if there's a company that knows and appreciates older ips i think it would be miniclip right they themselves have a number of games that have been around for years and years so i think this is a big get for them and uh vicariously a big get for 10 cent which has a majority stake in miniclip um so a couple uh quick hitters here as i said 10 years old the game 30 million average dau i would love to have 30 million average tv for my game that's amazing um most downloaded mobile game ever according to pocketgamer and even as recently as may was the most downloaded game according to sensor tower um and final point um i don't know how much to read into this i've not gone through an acquisition but the terms

were undisclosed and i had read in another chat that sometimes that might be indicative of they didn't get the terms they maybe wanted to get i don't know speculation but um oh sorry last point here is that um it's a difficult ua environment right now right things are changing in user acquisition for a game that is downloaded as much as subway surfers is maybe it's less of an issue as an established ip but saibo has other games in the pipeline that they're also presumably going to want to scale and so you know i was just looking um uh pocket gamer does those like uh or i don't know if it's games in the street up is those lists of games in soft launch most anticipated games in soft launch and they have one on there called subway surfers match i don't know much about it how long it's been in soft launch but it's like a casual puzzle game and it's it's in soft launch in i think southeast asia right now so that's a game that they have in the pipe that they're going to want to scale and and do some ua against but it's a

challenging environment and you know perhaps time for sibo to partner up with someone that has deeper pockets that can support those upcoming projects as well as continue to maintain subway surfers so yeah that's kind of the summary um what do you all think like um surprised to see it change hands uh what do you think it means for miniclip any sort of takeaways for the mobile free to play space broadly do y'all think i've got to say i don't think it's a surprise until i think it fits perfectly into the mini clip strategy if nothing else the cross promo potential of such a title is incredible i've heard that subway surface has been downloaded over 2 billion times um now i'm sure that a lot of those downloads are like the same kid downloading it twice but still two billion is like you know more than a fifth of the world's population having played a game that's quite incredible it is a great game as well so i think from that perspective it makes perfect sense i think also if

we've been realistic i think from cyborg's perspective it's probably much needed they were sort of one of those sort of like um one hit wonders in a way i mean what a hit to make for sure to get that many downloads but that game came out a long time ago when the app store was a lot more naive and you know uh nascent in its sort of prospect and they never really sort of sold the way to monetize that game it's got an extremely low up down probably probably average to zero if we're being honest across it and it makes more of its money through adverts and so on and so forth and they could never really kind of take the next step up and take these highly predicted you know retentive games and make them into money makers they tried like a fantasy version of subway surfers i forget the name but it was got global featuring this is about five or six years ago and it had a kind of like gacha style system in it and they had like this main character again endless runner but with a sword and you could fight stuff and it just did nowhere near the numbers that subway surfers have done they tried many times

to sort of make something that could repeat the retention of subway surfers but the monetization of anything that's not a subway surface and they could never do it um and then maybe it's just impossible to make a game like that as well by the way so i think this makes like a really good sense but for them too maybe they get some sort of an exit i think as you just alluded to matt the ability to have that sort of know-how with someone who's been there done that and got the t-shirt be really useful for them and i think it just makes a lot of sense as you say mini clip really know how to spot an undervalued ip that will fit into their kind of network and i think it's perfect it's almost like subway surfers is a game that you could imagine mini clip having made themselves anyway so perfect fit for me i think well i think that was well said i i think and i think that acquiring companies for users at this point makes a lot of sense because it's much less competitive than the ua market itself right so you can theoretically get a much more discounted user uh per per user amount if you buy

a company with like like in nil said two billion downloads right just that alone regardless of the ip itself is extremely valuable and you're only competing against a few other suitors right so theoretically you have more information or you can derive more value from that acquisition with your existing games or your existing knowledge of game development through iap or whatever it may be so i mean i think we're already seeing this in mobile gaming a lot of consolidation but in particular these are interesting plays because you're you're theoretically buying the users and expecting to monetize on them now that said i think there's a fair amount of risk in that assumption right because obviously the the team at subway surfer has tried to do that it's not a secret that that's what they should have that that's what they should have done and i'm sure that that's what they were doing for the last 10 years right trying to figure out how to make money off of these users and they're obviously probably good developers in themselves

they created one of the greatest games mobile games ever so it's a little bit risky and i think that's something too we've seen in the past where companies say oh well we'll add this to it and the arp dial will obviously go up and that's not always the case so um it'll be interesting to see how it plays out but i think it's a good move overall i like the acquisition user play by larger companies yeah i agree it feels like a natural move for for a mini cup going for more while uh acquiring a company that knows how to do user acquisition successfully at least you know that's what i'm assuming because i believe i read that in the last 18 months they went from 2 million to oh sorry what's the what was it yeah 20 sorry 20 million to around 30 million of average deu and considering that was in the last year and a half with all the post idfa that's that's quite impressive

and so yeah i think mini clip bring in that experience they also get deeper pockets like matt said for ua potentially also get um more you know across miniclip the whole ecosystem of companies more experience and ideas and knowledge to learn how to better monetize their games yeah seems seems like a great fit i think you all wrapped it up very well i think it's a it's an interesting move and indicative of the times that we're living in with the mobile space and just sort of the competitive environment and on that note we have to go into a sadder topic that brett already alluded to the recession i don't think it's a sad topic actually for gaming i think we're in a good position so i think that's more of my sentiment around it but and i'm sort of here to say that okay so let's maybe maybe we'll put a different spin on it so this is in reference to a game industry biz article that yes was

titled the pandemic bubble isn't uh you know is coming or whatever you know something like that the pandemic bubble um and you know isn't oh is bursting is is the point of it but that then this was more of a console article and then there's one on play tico recently laying off 250 people on the mobile side but on the console side the point was that the consumer spending is down for the last seven months of course this was comparing it to pandemic numbers engagement has declined and then a quote from take two's uh zelnick where he says the entertainment industry is not counter cyclical despite what people say after 08 financial crisis we suffered our competitors suffered our numbers suffered and we don't wish it on anyone platika there was another article on platika laying off 250 people they did it in montreal la and london and according to the company this was

working to unify parts of its activities the news of the studio closures layoffs follow after a year in which plateka saw expansion of its business operations so that's sort of what is getting printed i'm going to talk a little bit more about my thoughts on it which is that i feel that gaming in general i believe will be protected from the recession i think that console may be hit harder will definitely be hit harder than mobile just because of the business model i think that's well known i think that what we're seeing in the space is more a reflection of other things like what we talked about with ua being more competitive space engagement post pandemic obviously being down two and less about the recession and i see some of this recession rhetoric more and layoffs from platika more of a representation of just a natural cleaning up and more operational focus

after an expansion year last year where obviously they were taking advantage of the growth and they're sort of using the recession as a little bit of a smoke screen which makes total sense i would do the same for just you know natural cleaning up i mean 250 people for platikas and is isn't likely to be a massive number they've acquired a lot of companies and they're likely trying to consolidate that in some of those regions the other thing though it may impact is raising money and this podcast obviously is a little bit more web3 focused i think in terms of capital my guess if i was a vc would be that investing in higher beta web 3 like ideas may be a little bit tougher right because it's much less it's a higher beta and they're probably looking more so towards more reliable markets that are going to be counter cyclical i do think mobile games is one of those markets so i would say that the raising of capital

for mobile games or potentially for console that i would say probably not it's probably much different much larger numbers is going to be positive so my conclusion is that yes there's a lot of rhetoric around the recession i think as a game developer as a business owner as a ceo of a big company you should always be preparing for potential declines in revenue for whatever reason so you should be prepared but i think ultimately it could be an opportunity as you see other markets really get hit ua prices might go down because we might not be competing with those dollars so i would actually be prepared to take advantage of these changes so that's my somewhat short that's my that's my like selling that this is maybe a good thing you did good i kind of believe it now uh ma you seem like you are you a believer um yeah i generally agree i mean there's

a lot of different ways to interpret it right like we could talk about consumer spend in some of these areas or we could talk about like investment from vcs which is something i wanted to kind of follow up on to point that that brett made about like well web3 crypto is a little bit more higher beta and i'm wondering if you think like you know surely mobile gaming is probably lower beta than crypto and web 3 but still potentially somewhat volatile in the sense that like we just talked about the ua environment a little bit being more difficult if you're trying to spin up a new ip in mobile start up a new studio is that something that might be difficult to raise money in regardless even though it is you know relatively safe compared to crypto web three i don't know what do you think do you think we're still going to see investment in that space yeah i mean i agree and i think my point is more that that decline in ability to raise capital in

mobile is not due to recession right it's due to ua is your point right and so it's you know the rhetoric that's out there is this recession is going to have all this impact on gaming and i don't think that's the case right like if i have to stack rank it which is what you're saying too we're both not stack ranking the recession as the thing that's going to cause decline in vc funding for mobile gaming we're both saying it's ua and likely potentially engagement post post pandemic right um and so yeah i do agree and i think if if i was a vc web 3 would be something that i would invest in as the higher beta option right because you know people are still going to want to play games during the recession people do turn to entertainment particularly cheap entertainment during times of recession because they want to escape their reality more so um i think in games may benefit from it if it does happen yeah i was going to say i think brett you cut through the fluff really nicely that was a really good

kind of opening statement on a situation and i think it's quite interesting because what happened is the last time we almost hit a recession at the start of covert is that gaming actually boom because it turned out when people couldn't leave their houses um gaming was the one thing they could do and then people were like oh wow gaming is recession proof and now it's all turning out that oh well maybe game isn't quite recession proof because spending kind of 70 bucks on your new playstation 5 game at a time where the cost of living is going through the roof exponentially and uh you know in the uk where maria and i live you know there's literally going to be a problem this winter of people choosing between heating and eating and those are your problems then a game certainly isn't high up on the agenda but i have to say i'm very bullish on it like yourself actually bro i think that ultimately it probably will be good for games because again if there is a recession what again tends to happen is people look for cheap entertainment and video games is exactly that i i remember

when i was trying to save up for money when i was in my early 20s video games were brilliant because you know the amount of entertainment value you could get out there you know go out for one night out um and cost you know tons of money or buy yourself a video game and you can have enter endless entertainment for six to eight months i'm not that much fun at parties by the way you can probably tell despite my talking about mythical games party earlier in the week so yeah i think it's a really good way and i i don't believe that yeah i mean either i don't believe that i would just like copy yes david i don't have to call vs on that statement so i think it probably will have a better effect i think we just might not see it right now i think you know the recession is heading everything at the moment all at once it's not just video games i think if anything video games is the least effective of anything i think though that as you mentioned i've definitely seen that vcs are just not cutting checks right now i think if you were being offered terms right now they're not going to be the best terms and you probably shouldn't be doing it

unless you've got like an absolute dream team or you absolutely need that capital or you go out of business i think people just are a bit understandably intrepid just want to wait it out a few moms see what's going to happen you know we want to see when we hit quote unquote you know the deeply that you know the dip of the dippiest dip you know when there's no more the bottom can do and that will probably be you know notified when we start seeing inflation rates hiked or stopping heights by you know the federal reserve then we might see more going but i think in general it's still a good time for games as you mentioned brett because now is the time to build if a game is going to take you know one to two years to develop at minimum well actually doing the investment or doubling down on the investment right now makes a lot of sense because by the time markets start to correct themselves the products will be ready so um yeah i think you're right to say that the place for example is a good one of maybe someone who expanding it a bit too fast a bit too quickly maybe maybe overly bullish last year due to growth now they're just having as you say a correction also when you take on

that many new teams a lot of the time you have redundancies anyway right like do you need three data science teams you probably only need one you know etc etc but you happen to pick them up as part of the acquisition so maybe it's just the sort of the natural law and order of things and i think gaming will come back stronger and better than it ever has been it always tends to and it may also introduce new opportunities i think actually the crypto gaming one is interesting at the moment many games get labeled as being sort of ponzi schemes rightly so in my opinion but again when tough times hit the kind of ability to earn through playing games will probably be even more sought after than it was before i wouldn't even be surprised for example if actually start seeing a bit of a resurgence later on in the year when some of the new stuff is ready so be interesting to follow um but i think of all of the industries gaming is maybe one of the best place to sort of um have the minimal impact of a recession on it i wonder if there's a delayed effect though because like you're saying and now

people may still have savings and will only start seeing the really tough choices about where you don't even have savings to spend on entertainment further further along and at least in the uk it's meant to get more difficult throughout the year we're going to see energy bills go up again when you know winter comes and with the current state of the world in terms of wars and other issues i won't go into there's no solutions in sight right now to alleviate the costs that are really hiking up and we might see also people struggling to pay their mortgages as the um as the rates go up so i i think you do cut through the fluff but i i remain a bit skeptic i'll see throughout the year how it goes on but i wonder if there will be that lagging effect and then in terms of the platforms i thought it was really curious that you mentioned console could be hit harder than than mobile do you think that is also the

case between premium games and free to play because the free-to-play model usually relies on a very small percentage of players with deep pockets whilst most people are don't pay anything compared to the premium games and whoever has the deep pockets to already be a big spender they might be less affected by a recession yeah yeah i mean i think obviously the model free to play is is more conducive to a recession because people can play for free i mean it's the greatest roi of entertainment that you can get um i pretty much uh but i think that and i think the deeper pockets is kind of a little bit of a misconception i think it's i think it's people who have deep pockets but also value spending on entertainment more than what we do like when we when we you know when us sort of like the game developers think about how we're spending things like that this is not a great way i think to to represent the gaming base right like they wait entertainment and things like

that much more heavily than we do right and you'll also see i mean if you're talking about like people who are really really going to struggle and and obviously i feel feel very badly for them but you're also going to have capital from governments getting injected into the system for those people and those people somewhat unfortunately will also still turn to games as their form of entertainment they're not going to have jobs they're going to be at home and they're going to get this free capital so they're going to use that money to kind of offset it right so if you're saying that group is going to cause the decline that group is going to receive government funding government stimulus likely and they're going to use that for their entertainment so so again i think it's it's going to be i think it can be a good opportunity i would just be ready to to see what happens generally change is good in gaming because games as we just talked about the game industry is very flexible very reactive very innovative very fast and when there's change that's generally a good thing if you are in that category when you say ready what do you mean by

being ready well i mean i can talk for hours about this but organizationally you you want to build an organization and a system that is optimized for what you currently think is going to happen and what you can't expect to happen okay and because life and business and everything else is made up of sort of like unexpected events that happen regularly and so you want to have a very flexible system so you want to have like additional capacity you may want to have contract workers you may want to have some additional capital on hand or a team that's ready to take advantage i mean you just basically want to have the ability to react to what is happening in the world and what has changed in the world and and be able to take advantage very quickly so it's a weird dichotomy where you want to have a system that's based on hey i think the world's going to go in recession but i also want to be ready

for if it is a recession that's positive for us that we can attack it as quickly as possible okay does anyone have more takes on this or should we talk about fortnite yeah fortnight oh on the conversion i did finally buy the startup bundle on diablo mortal i couldn't resist it i wanted to look cool it was a great offer wanting to look cool still recession resistant yes um yeah just before we move on one thing that i find a bit difficult when reading these news about the the layoffs you know we saw coinbase i believe they laid off quite a lot of people um i think sometimes news rightly talk about it factually but even if it's one person being laid off that's quite difficult i know people who know people that were laid off in the play dica from london and it's it's really difficult because you find out without much notice what's

going to happen so yeah a lot a lot of love to whoever went through that and hopefully you won't see that many many layoffs in the industry all right fortnite so i have a thing for pvp games where i have a very specific style that i like it to have in my squad when playing multiplayer i like it to be a little bit competitive so we're not just laying back but we're trying to lean into it and win but not being competitive enough where it becomes like a toxic relationship within that group where you know people get angry uh if you don't play perfectly i also don't like when my teammates use you know they're angry at the other opponents so they'll use attacks on their looks or sexuality or something because that happens a lot in in these multiplayer multiplayer games so i personally i love multiplayer games being in a squad um i've talked about my destiny too love but i just find it

really hard to find people who who i like to play with basically and spend a lot of time and work together with so i thought it was really interesting what fortnite is trying to do they're testing like social tags where you can tag one to three on your profile about your preferences about your favorite game mode but also your vibes so if you're chill if you're funny if you're intense and if you have the the feature turned on you can then send an invite to someone who's in your server region that matches one of those tags and so it's a way of limited words standardized communication to try to find people that you're more compatible with and we've seen through multiplayer games like no like i was explaining not everyone has a friends group to play these games with and if you have a regular squad you'll create friendships and that will make you harder to to leave and go to another to another game so yeah i'm really looking forward to seeing what the what the test results will will lead to um yeah this is in an

a b test right now and so we'll see if it gets rolled out or not yeah what do you think matt you also work on multiplayer game yeah i'm a little bit curious about the implementation of this and how they're doing it um but i have seen similar features done on mobile actually um like uh i know pubg mobile has done this before where you can you can fill out your profile or your player card such that you describe other games do this too like the play styles that you prefer and that you would look for in potential teammates i know i don't know if they still do it but they used to have a feature where they called it like brothers in arms or something for new players coming into the game to get paired with a veteran player to kind of show them the ropes and then ideally you that's an in-game friend that you've made and you can play together going forward um so i think mobile has been pretty innovative in some of these areas and

there are a lot of lessons to learn there but uh you know if there's if there's one game that's you know big on social connection playing together and hanging out in the same shared space uh it's fortnite and so uh you know i would expect them to be a leader in the space so i'm excited to see like i haven't seen what it's going to look like in action so i'm curious to see what it looks like and now is this part of your release feature set it should be i mean i think you've touched upon the fact that um you know these games they're sticky when you form that social group so getting people into that group is really important and it's not just fortnite we see this and we see it in so many games you know clash of clans 4x games um even games like heyday if you find a nice group of people you end up with these situations where people have never met each other in real life and yet they're besties and you just want to facilitate the ability for that to

happen as best as possible i kind of feel like the way that you've described it it sounds like an okay way to start but not really powerful enough but it's still something i assume no test i think something that we should give epic and fortnite a lot of credit for is they tend to do a lot of a b test right i remember how we were talking about before how they removed the base building aspect as part of a test they did in their game and i think that's really impressive that a game that's as successful as it is is not resting on its laurels that they're using kind of modern video game techniques i.e well i think you call it modern but the idea of an analyzing and product managing and a b testing and seeing what okay it works this well but maybe it could work even better if we if we made some you know logical changes and either it works or it doesn't work so i'm like matt i'm curious to see what the outcome would be i think on paper it sounds like a great idea i feel like the implementation may not go quite far enough because how different is it from just having sort of regular lobby groups or you've just got a bit of text underneath in an ideal

world what would somehow do is your algorithm would know that you're this type of player and it would just pit you into automatically without you thinking but i don't know how to design an algorithm like that maybe brett could do something like that you need somebody's big brain to do that i wouldn't be able to do it but i think spiritually i get the idea yeah put people into a vibe that they really like find people that are similar to them the game you already enjoyed becomes even more fun you make friends that last forever and you really like the game so clever idea as you said maria curious to see what comes out of it there's probably a lot to be learned from a data standpoint too for a game as big as fortnight right people are self-selecting their tags that describe how they play and then all of a sudden you've got all this data on your player base they're just volunteering up to you on how they like to play what time of day they like to play what modes are their favorite and then there's of course um some delta between stated preferences and actual observed preferences and you can measure that um with your you know two

or three data science teams that i'm sure epic epic games has so there's probably there's probably a lot to be learned there i would imagine it's very interesting that is so true i hadn't thought about that yeah yeah you could get a characterization of your player base through those three stacks well at least what they think that they are as personalities yeah brett i i mean i love the direction of it i i echo what matt said i mean this is something that's kind of been on mobile for a fair like a good amount of time i mean tagging i i i feel like i hope is v1 of this because it's there's a there's a lot more innovation that they could do like matt said as they could do back or i can't remember who said that it could be back-end logic to recommend other players too because you know everybody thinks nobody self-identifies at an abusive pvp player right it's like everybody assumes they're super nice

until you get them on youtube it's like yeah it's like well i mean it's like yeah i mean you go to these like little league games and these are all like normal dads during the day and then you get to like little league and they're like beating each other up right so nobody goes into it thinking so i i just wish i just hoped that there's a little bit more progression of it right like predictive models there could be ratings of players where you could rate players or you could kick players out of your group in some type of way or you have you know bet like sort of like uber or you have you rate the players and their preferences because this is a huge problem and we've done um a lot of research in the core market and this comes up a lot like it comes up all the time like like what you were talking about maria is like abusive abusive stuff that goes on in pvp is is like one of the biggest issues right so i hope there's more here to come and they figure it out because um it'll be great for just the gaming ecosystem in general

hats off to the product manager or product managers or team who came up with the idea because the more i'm listening to it the more perfect of an a b test this sounds because the the the the effort to create this ai model and optimize and yeah try to make it work in the best possible way start by having labels that people can pick and then see what happens and see if there's value in it um yeah wow blown away by product management i built a predictive model feature when i was at zynga and i don't think there's enough of them in mobile gaming the downs the upside is pretty high they're not they're not insanely difficult to build from a map from like a statistical standpoint and the the downside to them is the ability to try to uh monitor them because you know they're sort of like a like a living and breathing entity in your game that you you really don't you can't see sort of the impact as much on them um but i'm a little surprised that

there isn't more predictive models going on in mobile games at this point um i think that's kind of a big big opportunity for gaming in general with all the data that we have well those two teams of data science you can go and hire them and uh have someone trying to explore in this space and i you know i have a good friend who's a data scientist and he's he's amazing he's like this wizard that you you create a problem and he'll just find a way to create some kind of model to to resolve to resolve the problem um maybe it's an expense that most companies cannot have especially perhaps in mobile with the budgets to to build the games because data scientists are quite expensive roles difficult to hire high salaries and then you have someone that is more experimental without perhaps a specific goal for them to help achieve i don't know anil you've even met yeah i think you're right to say that because i think the companies i know

that have the most data scientists tend to be companies like king um playwrights like people that have got like a colossal you know cash cow game where they can afford to have this many people and at that point often not looking for huge wins but just kind of small amounts that give yourself a little you know plus 500 bips here plus one percent there and and it all mounts up and it keeps your your cash cow consolidated at the top of the pile whereas you know if you're a smaller developer it's not like it's something you wouldn't want to do but how much time effort and resource can you put towards it when you don't have this kind of stable of games that you would rather do and i'm curious actually maybe a question for brett is like you know when you make such a model did the benefits outweigh the cost that was involved because that's something that is always curious i think it's one of those things that often comes up as like product managers saying wouldn't it be cool if we did this but you choose something else that you just feel a bit more confident on but maybe that's only because we don't really know like the end results like you know is it

something that you've really seen like stratospheric results with or was it just something that was useful just a curious question really yeah it was very impactful and it was great because you weren't using the development team really to do it right so because you have your existing game right you know the ad tags and the ui for tags and all those different changes right it's mostly the data team working to create a predictive model and then the dev team just implementing that in the game and the game itself not really changing so in terms of the depth cost it can actually be cheaper in a way because you're using a different group to build it right and then the dev team just implements it i think one of the reasons that we don't see more of it is because there's just so many opportunities for just making broad stroke changes right it's like if they don't have tags at this point adding tags is going to help them they should do that first they should jump to predictive models right and but that said adding tags may in fact be

slowing them down to getting to a more optimal solution right as opposed to this sort of like v1 solution which is just tags where they look at tags maybe a year from now and go okay like people aren't tagging themselves as malicious pvp fighter so we're going to think of something else and so maybe it's slowing it down but i think that's kind of why we don't see as many predictive models in the market as as i would expect yeah i can chime in a little bit i've worked with data science uh data scientists on a couple of mobile games now and i think brett is is spot on um it's probably easier especially if you're a small studio to just go out and make a new feature or make big changes than it is to work with data science to implement some kind of model however if you're one game within a portfolio of games you know you mentioned earlier anneal a company like king or some other sort of company that has a portfolio of games of similar genre or similar style and then you've got like a data science team building

models that can be applied across the entire portfolio that's a different story um and you know maybe more worthwhile like you might have some games that are a little bit underperforming within the portfolio where you're going to test out those models first get them working correctly figure out the learnings of like what do we need to know when we're building this into our game what are the kind of constraints and bounds that we need to put into our model and the levers we need to expose to the data scientists work out those kinks on the underperforming games and then when you have it ready you can roll it out in candy crush or whatever uh you know the the top performers uh so that is probably why we wouldn't we don't see a larger scale um but uh it can be pretty powerful in my experience once you've gone through some of those steps yeah all very interesting takeaways okay well i think we'll wrap up the the episode here

unless one anyone has a burning burning comment feedback no i see a nil are you ready to go for a nap he says nothing no comment all right brett thank you so much for joining for your first episode yeah thanks for having me and matt insightful as usual cool well if you want to if you want to join the conversation or add to anything that we spoke about you can find us on the navic discord and you can also sign up to the free navic newsletter called mavic digest to keep on top to the industry news um thanks for listening and we'll see you next week bye everyone [Music] you