DC Dark Legion - Lets Play

[Music] Dark Legion. Let's get into it. Okay, let's talk about it. This one came out, you know, I think two weeks ago. This was from Fun Plus. If you remember Fun Plus, Chinese founders, they're originally in Beijing. They've expanded globally. But the thing that I think is uniquely interesting about this company is that the overwhelming majority of revenue comes from the West. About 80 to 90% of their revenue comes to the West. I'm very confused about what the long run strategy of Fund Plus is. They haven't really been talked about as an acquisition target. They're a privately held company. I'm not quite sure what the long run strategy for them is, and they've had a rough go of it the last couple years. So, if you remember, they kind of peaked around the pandemic with State of Survival. That game came out, absolutely crushed it. Before then, they had two Forex games that have done I think they announced they had done over a billion in lifetime revenue. So, they had been in a good place, but in the last 2 to 3 years, they've had a lot of declines. And I really want to

ast web store adoption. And so, sometimes when you look at these declines, okay, are people just converting to web store? And not only that, they've been very good at making sure that they now have PC versions of all their games, including for the Dark Legion DC game, which is about the DC superheroes. And so, what is this game about? What are they trying to do here? So, it's a bizarre combination of having a Fallout shelter style base building element, which is kind of like your core homepage, but they're also going to merge this with squad RPG elements. So, you're going to collect DC characters, you're going to have your, you know, star system, you're going to have your gear, you're going to have your artifacts, you're going to have all the things that you would expect from a typical squad RPG. Then, we're going to add in 4X. And the 4X element is strange in my opinion. Now, I'm about 4 days into the game, so maybe the 4x element is going to evolve. But normally in a 4X game, you're fighting for the seed of power, which is something in the center of the server map or the shard map that gives you

influence over the server. Sometimes you're able to set a tax policy. Other times, you might be able to get more resources by just holding the seat of power. This one has a very strange world map in that it doesn't seem to be concurrently shared with other players. So right now, if you're watching the YouTube version, you can see a nice little picture of Batman here, which is their map. But it doesn't look like this map is shared with others. Instead, when you zoom into a particular section, that is when the 4X style map appears. And you see your normal ships with your marches towards the center resource. And the center resource is where you can gain additional material or currencies that help upgrade your base. And it's there where you can have PvP conflict. So, I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to get out of the Forex piece. Like, normally what drives a lot of Forex activity is control for territory. And this territory is only once you go into a particular space or a particular shard. So, I'm I'm really confused on what the situation is here with the 4x1. There doesn't seem to be things like

peace shields, which are really common. So the best I can come up with is that this is really starting to play on Star Trek Fleet Commands thesis which in really Breaking Bad, you know, going back to that game rest in peace where we started to add a lot more squad RPG elements to 4X. So we're adding the ideas that you had characters, you had stars, you put them in vehicles. It was a lot more depth in terms of sync than I think a lot of Forex games had previously. I still haven't seen a lot of game developers in the West go after something similar. So maybe we could position a thesis something closer to, hey, let's add a little bit more squad RPG to Forex in the vein of Star Trek Fleet Command, but tone things down. The unfortunate reality though is this is not where like the Forex meta is. The Forex meta is about acquisition, right? And how are you going to be able to acquire users with a squad RPG style front end or even a Fallout style front end is really confusing to me. And we look at the initial performance of the game. I'm benchmarking against two other titles. One of which is Sea of Conquest, which is another game that Fun Plus

launched earlier last year, and we haven't really had a chance to talk about it. It seems to have done okay, and the other one is Age of Empires. This is the Timmy game based on the RTS. This one seems to have just fallen off a cliff extremely rapidly. So, if we go to the next graph, you can see that precipitous decline in revenue from Age of Empires. I mean, the thing we don't know is how much the Chinese have just burst marketed this game, whether they dumped, you know, a truckload of UA and okay, the UA is starting to taper off. Okay, is the game going to decline into nothingness. Whereas with Dark Legion, it looks like they pumped UA into this to begin with, as we know, it's starting to decline pretty rapidly. And without a sustained UA strategy or without a clear thesis, I really struggle to see how this one's going to win in the long run. their creative is really emphasizing the Fallout Shelter style elements. They've been having your normal fake Forex ads, but like again, the Forex meta is about extending that experience into, you know, at least the day one through day three experience, if not further than that. I'm a little confused on what the

thesis of this game is or how this thesis fits into like the current Forex meta paradigms. I you know what I was shocked about? Like they're like down like 50% from 21, right? Like revenue run rate. And yes, maybe some of that will be offset by web stores and stuff, but it looks like the Chinese are eating their own. I mean, like the all the other companies like Lilith and, you know, all these other games coming up the pipe have just completely just annihilated them. Yeah. A little scary. And they haven't come out with any new releases. And I think that's kind of the big thing that like I think they've had a couple failed new releases, but this is like the first like big swing. So, you know, we'll see if they can actually pull it up. But this game doesn't look like it's something that's going to be able to be material relative to something like State of Survival. Yeah. My super early impression, Phil. I played probably 10 minutes of it. We spent a lot of time with some Warner Brothers folks at GDC, which was really fun. And I think you guys know, I'll mention it. I made a lot of DC and Batman toys in my career. My uncle is a

huge DC comic book collector. I've read those comic books. In my office is prototypes of all of these DC characters. I love it. I actually don't know [ __ ] about Marvel. So, the challenge, as much as I love DC, is it is a brand, it's almost like Star Trek until recently, that often doesn't have a lot of success in gaming, sadly, right? Like some of the biggest failures ever. Remember the EA Superman game that like completely failed like horribly. It's even more direct here, Jen. There already was a failed Squad RPG about DC characters that we talked about a while ago that went Yeah. No, there there's that. There's even when you collab and you know many of the MOBAs have put the DC characters inside although I think in Fortnite there's nothing better than seeing Batman and Captain America running around inside of Fortnite which is the coolest thing. So, in any event, from the gameplay standpoint, I felt like I was in a time machine to like 8 years ago where the gameplay just felt so incredibly dated to me, like you were

saying with the shelter thing and all of the dialogue, like they have not taken any of the notes from what is making Forex incredibly successful today, which is that super easy onboarding directly into the play. you know, having that kind of easy experience that you want to, you know, come in at, you know, almost like that hyper casual gameplay onboarding. So, for me, I just felt like I was like retro, like this feels like it's not going to work in what I've seen be successful in today's 4X kind of strategy market with what players are expecting with an IP and a brand that has no reason for being right now. The new Superman title is coming this summer, but you know, like it's not lined up with anything about the IP. So, I'm I'm worried for them would be my assessment. Did you tell that to WB when you were in the meeting? I did. I Yeah, actually. Make Batman relevant again. I'm not sure if you know this, but I often hold back on all of my opinions

when talking to people because I've never heard that. I've never heard that. Yeah. No, I would have appreciated being in that meeting. One way to wrap it up is it's kind of a [ __ ] sandwich in the sense that like the beginning isn't so great and the end isn't so great either. Like if we go back to like Ethan's Tower of Want, it's very clear in 4X what's at the top of the Tower of Want, which is the seed of power territory control. And I didn't see that here. And they don't have that on the Squad RPG style side either, right? There's only one version of battling, right? And I'm sure they're going to come out with more versions. But like we solved this in Breaking Bad, you know, one of the PMs, Chris McCabe, shout out, came up with Moments in Time. So rather than having just like one Walter, you know, we can have 18 different Walters. Okay, we give him Heisenberg. We have him in season one, we have him in season two. I was just surprised they didn't launch with like five versions of Batman. Like give me Batman from Superman versus Batman. Give me that version when he has the armor on. Give me all these iconic moments from DC. This is where I connect with this franchise is give me the moments in time from the Squatter Peach element. So, they don't have a high Tower of want

and the beginning doesn't sound good either. It just kind of seems like a [ __ ] sandwich here. I actually don't think the middle's that bad, but you got to get me in and you got to give me something to strive towards in the long run. This is a whole other podcast, but the only two characters people care about in DC is Batman and Superman. And Batman is the best character in the entire history of action figures cuz he can be anything. The answer is Spider-Man, but that's okay. I'll let you continue with your longness on this one. Yeah, I I may argue with you on that one. I'll go back and pull some toy industry data, but um Spider-Man will destroy you. Spider-Man is the most popular comic book character of all time and the best one. But sorry, continue. Uhhuh. Uh you're wrong, but that's fine. You know, I'll that that's for tomorrow's next week's podcast is I'll come and give you all the data. Defend the boogeoisi. I'll defend the proletariat. Peter Parker is a working-class man. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire. billionaires for the win. One last point, I just want to put numbers behind it because I'm looking at this real time is that Fund Plus was like 15% of the strategy market in their heyday, right,

in 2020, 2021, right? They are now like close to 7% last year and 5% this year. And who's eaten their lunch? Century Games. Century Games First Fun are basically that's it. Like it's like the two the other Chinese companies just as Jen said, the model has shifted in forex, right? We all said that 4X would not survive post the IDFA and it's thriving and it's mainly because of the Century Games model. Yeah. The casual gameplay deep monetization design notion. Yeah. Casual fun. But anybody that doesn't know this business like this has happened like three times now. Four times maybe, right? Like because initially it was all Kabam and then Kabam got destroyed by Machine Zone. Then Machine Zone got destroyed by everybody because they just like burnt the ships, right? But the that's when Fun Plus started doing their thing in Lilith, right? And now FunPlus and Lilith are getting destroyed by the other Chinese companies. So it's like this complete transition. And ironically, it's exactly the same

[ __ ] game, you know? It's exactly the goddamn same game under the hood with with a different rapper, right? And so to be honest, I like this though, right? Like these cycles of innovation create opportunity for new developers to go after, which so now it becomes not let's go after copying century games. It's what's the next model in Forex? because obviously innovation matters here. So let's go after it. I thought about it from an acquisition standpoint to Phil's point is you've got the core game that people want. You know the seat of power. You keep changing the rapper to make it accessible or interesting. You can add an IP whatever that is but it is an interesting play pattern. You have UA that can bring you in with that interesting play pattern. And then the other thing that we're seeing too, and I think Gamer I think we talked about this before, Gamerfinery did a study that for these fake ads, 50% of those fake ads are becoming inside of the games in the top 200 games in the top 200 revenue games. This is from maybe, you know, 6 months ago. But so the idea is to make

sure that the fake ads aren't completely fake, that you're actually putting them inside the game. It's a miniame, it's an event, or it's something so that it all ties together. [Music]