Deconstructing Pokemon Unite with Hadrian Semroud and Javier Barnes

welcome welcome welcome everybody and today we're going to talk about a game that i should have have been playing but didn't play it was it was the game that we should we three should have been playing but what ended up happening is the youtube kept on playing and wrote about it so introduction to my two amazing guests first javier barnes experience designer with over 10 years of experience working at some of the best of game developers and game publishers welcome javi i'm glad to be here and expecting to talk a lot about this game oh good good and then we have a hadrian semrude experience pm of eight years in the industry as well working on all kinds of top games at top companies from casual to social casino hadrian welcome thank you mishka very very happy to be here my first appearance on the podcast huge fan of the podcast by the way okay well well let's let's kick it off let's

kick it off so we are talking about pokemon unite and this was a quite of an interesting game because first of all arguably the best ip right uh not even arguably the best studio making this game it's cross-platform it is in the genre that is very hard to enter but those who succeed take all the you know all the loot the game accumulated quickly 30 million downloads in just seven days beating games like league of legends wild rift and brawl stars in the speed of scale and then on the revenue side we see 10 million of a run rate that is declining as installs are declining so essentially nuts not a growing product so what happened um you know what were your expectations as this game was about to launch uh hadrian let's start with you so like as you said pokemon ip i think i was like i was sure that the thing was gonna grow super quickly like we've seen with other pokemon product and

when i first played this game so i'm not like an expert moba player like javi i'm more of a like casual casual type so i played the thing and i had fun like yeah the product was nice and but i knew something was going on there's like on the first on the ux and on the the way every like the menus where where were being built and everything i knew this was something that was missing and i mean the revenue is showing so there's clearly something to be to be discussing here and but yeah the game is pretty fun that's the first thing that we can say about it that's for sure but yeah huge ip but lots of organic download as we could expect with such a such a huge brand for sure javier you've been you've been writing a lot about mobas and i think you um there was an article on master the meta newsletter where you wrote a whole like a deep dive and into mobas especially mobas in the west so what were your expectations this game was coming did you think this is like the next brawl stars or what were yours honestly i was i was expecting uh a brawl stars like a game that was more related to blasters and to

league of legends um and yeah as you said like this game had every card on the on on the hand to succeed so it's actually very interesting to ask the question like what what happened what went wrong because it's always easy to say sure this success this achieve success because of this this and this but when something fails and has all of the factors that should make a product uh successful it it really raises a lot of questions and um yeah i i honestly same as hadrian and probably the same as you i was expecting this to be a huge hit and it's been surprising i honestly was expecting it um the gameplay to be a bit more closer like uh rather than so close to the core mova experience um

but yeah worth asking what's wrong well let's talk about a little bit here because like before we just dive in into into pokemon unite i wanted to kind of ask you to talk a little bit about the moba market like what has it looked historically on mobile um what have been sort of the best practices uh can you can you kind of level us up on the on the on the knowledge of mobas on mobile yeah so just to do a crash course on this um this is probably one of the generals that is more geographically distributed uh there's two different worlds one it's um asia uh mova's are big in asia there's this game called owner of kings which in the west is known as ren of valor which that one in in china is makes so much money it's kind of its own category like it's absolutely out of scale from any other product in fact whenever i compare it with other games i

just consider it its own category just because of the size it has and um a lot of the gum like a lot of times when we say asia and moba we we kind of uh talk about china exclusively but the reality mova is popular in in all of asia and in fact there are several games that are pretty huge um like compass for example that it's it's great because they dominate a specific country in this case uh japan um so in asia it's it's a its own thing uh but then in the west it's a different size of course this only happens on mobile because of course league of legends is huge in the us right but um when it comes to mobile um what we find is in the west we find games that are kind of core followers they try to have this um gameplay that it's close to the to the

core and by that we understand close to league of legends um like games like mobile legends will drift and so on but they don't get even close to the same volume of revenue and downloads as horner of kings or what we would expect from something related to league of legends and then i would say that in the west what has been more successful is games that incorporate or take some inspiration from mobas but they are not actually mobas when it comes to the core gameplay games like um brow stars which is when it comes to gameplay it's a top-down shooter it's closer to zuba than to league of legends but it incorporates this idea of characters that have special abilities and uh teams that have to coordinate and and so on so there's a huge difference between these two territories yeah yeah i've been following mobas as well for a long time like like back when i think zynga had this game called solstice arena like like back back back in the days like i remember playing

fates forever which afterwards became discord i've been playing vainglory since since the beginning so i've been also following the genre quite closely not because i particularly like mobas i actually do not like mobas except heroes of the storm that's the only one i find them very confusing and not fun just just like you're executing like this this list that you read on wiki and you're trying to you know buy the right items at the right time and do the right thing and kind of lane and kind of like do your own part as not as as a part of a team instead of like doing whatever the hell you want to do but but this one is particularly interesting because you mentioned honor of kings and i think they cross like 10 billion in gross revenue over over the lifetime honor of king has been made by the same studio that made pokemon unite so the expectations are really high and and in the west as you mentioned it's like it's been just a graveyard of mobas we got marvel mobas like even kabam just released a sort of a brawl story kind of a like moba

with marvel characters not doing too well and apart from all stars just tried yeah game of thrones came off tried a couple of times with good quality yeah the rpg style very good temple stuff and and it seems like the only one that succeeded has been brawl stars and even they have done tremendous amount of marketing and and we've seen kind of them like pop and drop in multiple different markets as they've you know they've been just the most accessible version and not easy like not an easy launch we we followed that game go through like a two year soft launch uh on the instructor fund and and kind of doubted that it would even come out but still was able to come out so so this this is diff definitely the sort of a market that is very hard to enter uh usually in southeast asia and asia but but how we just as you mentioned it's like the expectations for this were so high because of the ip like maybe this would happen the same way as it happened with um with location based games like none of the location based games really make any sense except pokemon go so we're kind of

expecting like maybe this is going to be the ip that is going to make mobus accessible in the world apart from the from the core audience but it doesn't seem like that's uh yeah that's the you know classic uh west how do we get the western hardcore players to start playing you know something that they like and it's like it's the same for shooters it's the same for a lot of different genre and yeah i know you like shooters right now i do like shooters it it is the forever endless quest of making like a western player to play this type of game and yeah because they're already at hardcore players over attached to pc when it comes to the west well in the in the east it's a little bit different and mobile hardcore is about is more you know it's it's most likely to succeed so hadrian what what were the uh your first impressions when you after you downloaded the game and started playing because it's very different so me i'm i'm as i said i'm not a huge mobile fan i i don't like i don't even have like heroes of the storm i played the thing i think was quite the gameplay is quite fun i like it because it was very simple and

as you said the there was no need to say okay this is the deal that i need to follow those are the items that i need to buy this is how my character is supposed to be played this is the my lane doesn't like i need to last hit things oh this was the way this was nice for me it was like okay cool this is fair all of the projectile like homing you know javi what you mentioned uh before it was very very very very simple and i loved it but then after playing a while i was like okay cool so what is making me wants to keep playing this game like where's okay i'm hooked with the gameplay that's nice but like i need something i need progression i need something going on here and while bro style picked me up very early but like hey this is your first character this is your second character you guys you need to master this you need to progress in this event in this thing i was like okay cool there's many things to do in pokemon i felt like was like good good initial burst and then okay cool what i'm doing now and i i felt like there was a lack of more you know in-depth progression system

that would carry me through the to the mid game into the late game and i i missed that i missed that to be to be honest so that would be my first impression i think so kind of like not having that clear progression system of like what am i working towards right exactly exactly and also like i i kept playing the same characters i didn't want to try more and i think that's the core thing that we're probably going to discuss even more in the in this podcast but i got very attached to my my venosaur i tried something else but then i was like okay cool like what am i doing here and i think the initial sort of audience of casual ip lovers that came they got they got the initial hook but then they we lost them very quickly that would be that would be my two cents oh so javi can you talk about some of the um some of the major changes that were done into the core of the game because you know there's at least three big ones that you wrote in the in the blog yeah i mean to be honest they

kind of adapted a lot of the mechanics that come from the core gameplay in order to frame it in a simpler way maybe the one that is the most relevant the one that everybody will notice is the fact that the victory is achieved by achieving a higher score rather than by uh um destroying the base of the of the opponent uh that's that's actually the i would say is the major change it has a lot of implications it means that uh the game doesn't have minions so the player character is the one that is achieving the victory rather than in league of legends or uh well-raised mobile alliance and everybody else that the game is about supporting the minions and the minions are the ones that are doing the hard job right which is kind of counter-intuitive um but it's how it is uh so that's the biggest the biggest um

the biggest change um but then we also find other mechanics that are core in in league of legends and so on that have been reinterpreted to be kind of compressed and casualized uh one of them that really are very interesting is the side objectives uh in league of legends and all of the other games that are followers of it there's the the button there's the dragons there are side side neutral big bosses that the entire team has to collaborate in order to defeat and that provides an advantage that um that what helps the entire team to to achieve victory and here and i think that probably illustrates what has happened with with uh programming unite um there are three of those chart bosses but two of them are pretty much

irrelevant and the big one is sabdos and it's like whoever gets up does basically wins like it it completely um he has a huge power it completely um overwrites the rest of the game and um i think this again illustrates very well what's going on with with pokemon united is the fact that on this casualization they have made everything so simple that it's it's very easy to understand but also they have removed a lot of liars of mastery compared to league of legends where the team actually has to discuss and actually has to strategize if it's worth going for the site objective or not if it's uh if they should should uh forget about some uh side objectives in order to focus in in destroying turrets for example that sort of strategy is not here in in pokemon unite in pokemon united it's like no you need to go for this otherwise you'll lose the match and um

that that removes a lot of depth also the sub does sorry go to just to go for that a little bit the zapdos timing is a bit weird in my opinion i think it arrives late right javi uh and he's like i don't know i had the feeling that when he was here it was already like this was already decided it was already decided and then the sub just was like completing the the cycle of the team that was winning was already the one that's getting the zapdos in in in the games that i had so i don't know i think there was a little bit of a timing issue here yeah i mean side objectives in most movas one of the uh functions that they serve is that they are combat mechanics um so it completely makes sense that it appears at the end the problem is that it's it's uh essentially no matter how the match is going at the end it's gonna be a clash in the middle of the map and it's gonna be

okay you have been losing the entire time but if you get to kill zapdos and score it you may absolutely turn the the tables and if you were dominating and you get to keep zapdos from the other team you basically uh obtain the victory so again it's it really simplifies a lot the strategy and it removes a lot of of depth because the player the players do not need to take decisions based on that it's a straightforward strategy okay and how about how about the uh the champion builds like how are how would you compare the complexity of those compared to let's say you know from wild drift to brawl stars like adrian you want to talk about those so yeah the the we had one debate with her with harry when we when we were discussing this game it's about the skill selection thing uh you remember that hobby that's like so in the way the the way the the bl's evolves with the game is that when you level up your your pokemon you

get to select which skill you take in in like if i if i understand correct normally in lol you don't select things like you unlock the order is the thing you select but not the skills themselves in pokemon you can you have one core skill at the beginning and then you can select to switch it for two other skills and that would be your build so like there's clearly a builder i was playing the the ghost the ghost pokemon thing i forgot his name bringing french all the name and different um so this ghosting got clearly a bill that was about teleport new come escape and there was another there was like more support dart uh shooting but shooting poison training this was this those are work two clear builds and the problem i had with that and probably how you want we won't agree on this is that i had the feeling that there was no progression to my character because i kept changing okay cool i'm removing this skill so was i was playing this way at the beginning of the game and i'm playing another build which made it very confusing because what i would have liked is like okay cool the thing that was doing at the beginning is sort of

increased and emphasized at the end of the game instead of saying i was playing a and now i'm playing b and then the middle of the game is switching and i'm playing another type style and this was an issue for me i don't know if have you felt the same way at least this is an innovation i don't know if it works the way they intended to to to work i i mean i agree the the so when it comes to characters i would say it's two different things no one is the um evolution of the character during the match and um [Music] it's it's very interesting how how they do it because again the builds are kind of mobile in the sense that with a different set of skills and different choices there a tank character can become a completely different thing can become more damage dealer and that that's kind of cool i mean for me this is actually something that uh it's good because it makes that um

it gives more more depth the the problem is that there are other side other mechanics on the characters like the held items that are generate synergies with only one of the bills so actually during the match if you're an expert player and you are fighting against some other expert players you really have less choice than what it seems because your health items is are going to determine the scenario are going to synergize with some of the specific choices so really it seems that there's a lot of uh options but really if you want to be competitive you don't have as many um but i think it's a good replacement to the items mechanic in some other uh movas that misca mentioned that were one of the biggest barriers and it is true and league of legends is super difficult to learn the what the items do it's difficult to take those decisions because the items are complex there are a lot of them and you need to take those decisions in a match that is not that long so it it makes it it is really really

difficult it's one of the areas that require more mastery and in fact in most mobile movers that area is generally simplified or um characters have a recommended field which basically it's like okay buy this item and if you want to experiment you can do it but it's not the recommended thing um so that's one thing um and and then the other is the amount of uh time that you require in order to master a character and i think this is the key part it's related to the other but the biggest problem at least in my opinion one of the biggest problems of this game is that in order to master one character one pokemon you need way less time than in other games to master any character in wheel rift that's going to take you months of practice i have been playing for one year straight with master g in will rift

i don't even i mean i still suck when it comes to whenever i reach the ball people start um picking on me on the chat because i i don't know how to properly play because the role it has to employ it's it's harder the um way to use the abilities in order to extract the maximum value it's it's much more complicated it requires coordination with other characters it's really really complex in pokemon they have removed a lot of that so actually i was feeling it was pretty good with any of the characters after i was i was playing for like 15 days maybe uh so really it doesn't have a lot of um a lot of depth um and one interesting thing with brawl stores is the fact that the characters in broadstars are deceivingly easy to to master one could argue that they don't really each of the characters individually they don't need that much time to master but they compensate with quantity because in browsers you have so many

game modes there are so many uh opponents that you really need in so many maps that you really need to master okay i know how to use poco but then i need i have to learn how to use it in this specific map how to extract the maximum value in this specific game mode maybe in one game mode i'm using more the healing ability but maybe in some other game mode i use it more as a area damage dealer um and uh the fact that there are so many characters of uh opponent uh yeah that there are so many brawlers it also requires you to learn the uh ranges that the ranges that each of the enemy units have the dodge patterns that you have to do with against every each of the enemies and that that is a huge mastery so although uh because this was something that we were discussing before like okay browsers each of the characters they

they don't require that much to master i think that the big the biggest difference is that um in broadstars they compensate with a lot of quantity while in pokemon unite it's not only that the characters get dominated relatively fast but also the fact that uh the roles are not as clear because because these bills are so mobile like it's not clear like okay i'm fighting against a um a chatty thought and i don't know if it's a damage level or yeah it's more a support kind of thing it depends on what the other player has done with it uh so really it requires it removes a lot of mastery from uh the equation and just also on broad star that's a like physical skill necessary but there's also a power curve so there's a mastery when it comes you know your character it's like 40 what you mentioned right how it could be up to 40 percent the increase in in power and there's something there's also this that's like it's an earlier but the scale that you have it's also about the time you invested and your luck because it's cacha in the case of a

brawlstar yeah even even um in the case of broadstars they probably have realized that there is a problem with the mastery dev which is why they have added the gadgets like okay as soon as you have mastered the basic mechanics of the of the character well now it's a gadget so now you need to relearn this character and now it's a star power so you need to relearn and then the second star power so um it's a story that never ends and uh this is something that this game doesn't have at least not right now but as i mentioned at the very beginning and then my last thing is that there's a progression path i know that i want to unlock the star i want to unlock the stop or run the star brought to i want to get my my favorite character to get better and this is the thing i was mentioning at the very beginning and i was like and when i play broadstart i say i want this character i want is pretty good i'm gonna just try to grind it so that i can get all of those upgrades and things and this is clearly what i was a little bit lacking in uh in pokemon yeah i agree i agree it was it was um not as clear and also when

we talk about the changes in the core like you mentioned the score based victory condition the compressed side objectives the straightforward character builds one thing that i was kind of lacking as uh as an enthusiast mobile player is that i didn't get to dominate anybody like it the victories didn't feel as good because you i never even got to the last scoring point like it wasn't like you know we rolled over somebody it was just like we played a game of pickup basketball and we we won them 21-3 and it was like okay well fine let's play another one let's play another one and when you lack the progression feeling with with together with not feeling that that you are dominating even when you are dominating um i think i think those are those are kind of like the challenging elements there but i wanted to ask like adrian starting with you like we're talking about core first and we're talking about these core changes what do you think was the goal of these changes into the core gameplay and do you think

they achieved the goal that they've set by changing the core so much from atypical moba so for me so i think we mentioned that already a little bit the code was very simple and that's the perpetual quest of you know casualizing a a core genre and trying to get more more people to play it and to some extent and talking with some people that some friends of mine that play the game it worked because i've seen people play this game that would never have touched any wildlife or a game this way so to some extent it works the problem is like when you're trying to go casual casual more casual you're gonna lose the core people and the cool people or the one that are spending or pro this is where your money is so yes i think to some extent they managed to make more people play the game but they lost they left so much money on the table that the number you're seeing right now is the result of that in my opinion um javier what do you think kind of similar uh jackie macrenzis uh

talks about making a deep game for the masses and how many challenges are there and i think that in moba in particular the fact that it's a the fact the complexity is something good we can argue if the entry barrier is something that can be removed or not but the fact that the complexity the complexity that it has and the depth that it has is what makes people play the game over and over again like whenever you play uh a mova and um it's something that calls you uh you see that you can lose yourself in the game you can watch guides you can see youtubers uh you the the amount of effort and the amount of time that you can spend on this game becoming better and better is huge it's not unlike a real sport whenever you play soccer like if you want to really become

good at soccer you need to spend a lot of time and and that's fun and actually it's very rewarding uh that sensation where you you and your team of friends uh become better and better um so that complexity is something insanely important um i think pokemon unite tries to make the game accessible but by making the game accessible it removes the depth and it removes that magic ingredient so the feedback that i have obtained because i'm super biased because whenever i play a game like this i'm i'm not even enjoying it anymore i'm seeing like oh there i know i see what they are trying here oh i see what they are trying here but it's very difficult for me to assess the fun so in order to assess the fun i need to talk to a lot of people and the common comment that i get told about this game is oh yeah it was fun at the beginning i i think that kind of summarizes what i

think it's the problem here um that it's a game that sure it's accessible it's very you feel good very easy but then there's nothing else um by the time people realize that this is over and over the same thing they get bored got it so so your assessment essentially you know is that it was the idea was to make a game for players who don't really play mobas but like pokemon that's a wide audience and now you give them a game that is quite accessible but has more depth than brawl stars which we know is um is suffering from the lack of death and depth and and has to just increase the amount of content they produce the amount of characters they produce the amount of levels they produce to keep the game engaging and have been adding more depth to characters to the progression mechanics so they kind of tried to go to my understanding from the middle like they're not as deep as well not definitely not as deep as wild drift but definitely deeper than brawl stars and we're trying to

find that sweet spot and it feels like they failed like they're too shallow for core audience and too complex for for the casuals would that be correct way no lack of progression i would say for lack of explanation they need to be guided way more they tried to to do the empire puzzle thing you know they try to do this and an empire and puzzle has a good on boarding it feels like a puzzle but it starts to stop start to get to a more rpg start very quickly and this is what they try to do i think for casual they like they like the guides okay i'm doing i'm on i'm on a journey i'm gonna go do this and then i have my brawlers i'm gonna accumulate things and for code they're like i want something deep i want something that i can't i can watch uh a twix stream on it like how do i get good how do i get good guides on specific characters how do i get my reserve to be the best and i'm reproducing this guy that i saw on youtube that's doing great and doing multi-kill things you don't have this in

pokemon in my opinion another factor that i think it's very relevant and uh i know we're talking over and over about browsers but actually this game made me realize how good browser is um is that browsers may be simpler on each of its individual components but it has good systems in order to incentivize players to master them all uh in particular the fact that the trophies is the your the player trophies is the accumulation of the individual trophies of each of the characters made you have to play and master to some degree all of the characters yes um which is completely different to league of legends where the less characters that you master at least at the beginning the better because um they are really really difficult to master right um so in browsers what is really good is that the game systems make that organically the player plays

with a lot of the brawlers and have to master them all um and that kind of complains compensates the fact that the individual complexity of each of the elements is smaller but one of the problems of pokemon unite is that those systems are not here in fact all of the systems are incentivizing the player to specialize even more than in league of legends and even more than on other let's say more hardcore um more hardcore mobas because this game doesn't have a pick and ban mechanic um you can select characters in each team and the way they have um structured the the competition it makes that whenever you're you're high on the on the comp on the competition on a high league you're you don't want to play with a new pokemon you're going to lose and you're going to go down and this is a completely different experience to brawl stars in braille stars if you're really really good with

one character you want to play with the other because with the other you have more chances of increasing your trophies which is ultimately make you progress uh in pokemon unite everything is like about uh focusing in one maybe a second pokemon but that's really your choice but um it really forces you to stay linked to one character so if the characters do not have a huge depth and on top of that you don't diversify um that even shortens the amount of pliable time that that you can be playing while mastering something new that's that's a very good point race because the champions are the lifeblood of any moba and you have to create a systems where you want to play as many as possible like even the uh the original league of legends character rotation system is one of the best ones because that pushes you to play with others and pushes to monetize and i especially like what heroes of the storm did back in the days is that they had the character that

the champion rotation but with each champion you also the higher the higher level you got you unlocked more of the skills that you were able to choose like in this game you were able to choose how do you specialize as the match goes on and the more you've played with the character or with the champion that means the more master you have it and now instead of two choices you might have three or up to four different choices and that was pretty cool plus you unlock new skins as long as you play to level five and level ten and so forth so so any kinds of systems that pushes you to play with as many heroes or champions as possible is incredibly important in mobas and that doesn't happen in this game so i wanted to ask a question like just just for those who haven't been playing too much like myself how do you get new pokemons in this game because i saw them in the store but i didn't have i didn't find that sort of a progression path that i'm playing in order to unlock this next character like um how do you how does it look so it's because it's because there isn't

there's a couple of progression things that unlock pokemon especially like first-time user experience challenges you're in the past and you will get some for free but the core the core thing is the shop and it's at the direct purchase shop so you go there you spend you'll spend your cash and you get directly your pokemon license you can use soft currency you can use hard currency um so you will get a couple for free because you've been playing the game so you accumulate currently you'll be able to get some new but that's that's basically the way that that you get new pokemon so there's a couple of there's a couple of progression system small ones that are like you can get this one and something that i've been also criticizing about the game that i still would be great and actually did it for halloween which is that you can get it through some liveops events they just did it so this was something that i was craving for was like please do something do something with live of some of the new pokemons and they actually did it and this is a good path in my opinion but yeah it's mainly to the shop interesting to the show it's quite confusing since you have so many

characters i mean you're in the pokemon universe and plus you have timmy that can do unlimited amount of content like they're not afraid of content treadmill so javier how do you how does this way of unlocking new champions in pokemon unite how does that compare to the wild rifts the honor of kings the mobile legends and the brawl stars of the world like like how would you compare it so in in most other modes um and i'm excluding bro stars from this uh the player gets what the player wants so it's similar in the sense that uh there are um it's direct acquisition uh the biggest difference is that again uh whenever you acquire uh a character you need to invest a lot of time in order to to master it uh the main difference would be primarily browsers where the acquisition is randomized because you get rollers from the loot boxes

and and which kind of extents it makes that you cannot go directly to the to the character that you want um but what is interesting is that in most other movas um [Music] there is an intended path of for the player to go so there are some characters that are kind of introductory um like in well rift or league of legends garen or tryndamere like characters that are simple to master or simpler than others and then as the player masters them they then naturally moves to other uh perhaps more effective characters like and more complex roles like jungler type characters or katarina and characters that are way more difficult to control and that if you're unskilled you're going to get white

in pokemon this really doesn't happen it's more like choose the one that you want and uh they pretty much have more or less the same uh performance in fact i would say that probably the beginning ones are the ones that are more favored by the community right now um like venusaur is extremely powerful um especially and especially if equipped with it with the proper held items um and this is actually one of the systems that um kind of reinforce the specialization they held the items because they're uh the held items increase the abilities of the characters they are difficult to uh obtain they are difficult to master well not to master but to upgrade so it means that whenever you have upgraded a set of held items it's an extra investment in terms of money and and resources to get extra held items

which is again another factor that makes you stay married to the to the pokemon that that you first choose just to just to add a little bit on that mesh kit this thing but what we said before is like this there's nothing that just encourages the player to to try more pokemon so it's great like they are getting mastered quickly except for the held items but the held items are shared so it doesn't really matter like you don't have to specialize in in one so it's easy to master and then it's direct purchase so there's like there's there's nothing stopping you for from just keep playing the same the same thing over and over again you you see my point here yeah yeah it's almost discouraging same thing as with clash royale for example when you have your certain deck you don't want to make any changes because you leave trophies and and then you're and then you're screwed so it's it's very much the uh the similar approach except that in clash royale at least you have eight cards that you're optimizing against and

this one you essentially have one maybe two if you're feeling very adventurous so this is this is why this is putting and this this is basically what our conclusion that this is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on creating more of those because it gets easy to master like that people want more and more and more so it gets it it puts a lot of pressure on that and the other point and i think what can probably come back to that after a little bit is the the liveops is not really helping on that since it's very simple it doesn't really provide this type of engagement that you will get for free without adding content so the game ended up being a big content treadmill which could be which could be an issue let's be honest even if timmy has like the firepower of of anyone everyone in the in the in this industry yeah it's also a smart smart studio where they wouldn't invest too much in a game that is not growing but timmy has shown from before that they can they have they have a very sort of a long-haul view on games you know get keep monetized old-school

approach so they're not worried about quarter-recorder revenues per se and they kind of believe that they can get there and they have you know they have proven that they can get there so uh talking about getting there like how would you know we talked about the changes in the core game and the whole idea was to clearly to make it more accessible for audience that is not hardcore mobile audience uh but and and um and it seems like the biggest sort of a mistake if you will has been done in in the fact that it lacks clear progression mechanics and it lacks most importantly the incentive to try to play with different pokemons so how would you change that at this point like like what what kind of changes would you be implementing too to fix that issue so i can try something the for me i would put like a lot of a lot of power on the live ups itself so having the release of a new pokemon being i don't know if you've played afk arena i think

you probably have one of my favorite game of all time um when the new character released it's like a big thing there's a try especially them dimensional which are the most you know the the most important characters in the game probably there's a bit there's a big event there's like an event to be able to get it for free you can pay directly for it there's like there's a big thing and the whole it's like even if the whole season was around this new character the new content that that's coming and in my opinion this is something that would work very well for this this like core cache casualized core audience because they would be like okay go i need to engage i need to i need to do this event there's a lot of different things that i need to do in order to get the new content for free but also be able to play with it like a free trial afk arena again does it very well free trial on on characters to taste a little bit and so i would start with this for the acquisition and then i will try to like javi said encourage with the system different modes where different pokemons are better than others there may be a

peak and band system maybe a rank plus plus when you can when you can rank with one specific but then you you can also play with different with different programs i would basically live ups for acquisition really put everything around the idea looks like it's it's temporal it's now something's happening right now and i need to do you need to go to go for it and the second step for me is also the revamping with the systems to make it so that it's not i want to only play vanessa and that's it i can also play with something else and i can have the same amount of fun if not more so this would be my that would also that would also mean that you would have to uncouple uh your event progression from the uh the overall uh progression of the game meaning that when you are engaging with a pokemon that you haven't really played before that shouldn't hurt your overall progression it should only accumulate towards that event progression it's always parallel when this comes to this it's parallel and temporary so it's like you need to do it's the thing to do now and this is very important again i'm just i'm coding afk arena with the dimensional system uh

great system it's it's a good game to quote javi do you agree or would you add something more i do agree with what was said in the end what they need to do is diversify the amount of of pokemon that players play with they i mean pokemon is an ip the has a strong collection factor by the method of acquisition of pokemon that they have in the game right now they have removed that component and this is something that they could explore in order to generate engagement they could as hadron said at more events that made players play in specific ways maybe play in specific game modes in order to obtain them i think one pending decision that they have to take when it comes to the gameplay it's the if they are going to be a game with a main mode in a single map or they are going to go for multiple maps and

multiple modes in fact in the quick modes they they actually have more maps um which to be honest they're not as fun as at least in my opinion they kind of have the same problem that in league of legends have the ram map and so on it's just cool it makes more puts more focus and some other stuff but really it's not as fun as the main thing but i think they still although they i i feel it's unlikely and maybe it's not a wise decision to touch the core very much i think they still have room to iterate on the main map that they have they can do improvements they can do small variations that can progressively make the game more deep in terms of the decisions between on which lane the characters go and so on um because that would reinforce more the decisions of uh row of roles and the distribution of lanes right now nobody cares about the

lanes because you can switch the lane very easily but yeah at the end of the day when it comes to the gameplay they can do improvements on on that regard definitively uh adding more collection methods to the pokemon rather than direct purchase it's a great idea going for events for incentivizing players to play with stuff that they don't have and when it comes to systems that really i think they need to revamp um really i think they they need to revamp the uh the competition system that the leak system that they have where defeats are punishing and uh it it disincentivizes players to test new things and it this is a devices players to play with with a variety of roster and that's really harming the game uh in my opinion they they should go for an approach more similar to browsers maybe

not requiring players to play with every single pokemon that may be too much but maybe with some selection based on the type or based on the on the uh element or something like that they can figure out something uh in order to make players play not only with a single pokemon but with four eight and uh eventually mastered a lot of them and before before we kind of wrap this up i wanted to ask you guys about the monetization and and the uh and the team play like do you think like first of all on the monetization front do you you know would you fix anything from the from the current perspective like assuming that you were able to make new pokemons more desirable would you keep the same monetization system as it is uh hydrant i mean based on what the other games are doing if we managed to make them play with

more i would stick to the same thing i think if we managed to do the sort of afk arena style thing with free trials and events and new program new ways to obtain pokemons i will keep the the you pay now to skip that uh type of shop i think this this works this is not the problem is that the problem is that the brahman is like it's the player is not encouraged to play more exactly which is the issue so we'll stay i would stick to that for me this is not the biggest the biggest issue yeah i know yeah and um and okay so that that's what i thought like the systems per se is not really what is building this game for modernization it's not direct purchases versus shards versus gotchas and that kind of stuff it's more like just incentive to actually make those purchases and uh one thing that i want to ask regarding monetization like javier uh do you feel like there should be some a little bit more pay to win mechanics like even like remotely paid win like you know mobile legends uh upgrades yeah i would say this game actually is more paid to win

than other mobas because they have the held items and uh if we compare just for those in the audience that maybe don't play mobas or don't know mobile legends for example they have skins that increase the some stats like some add some passive uh buffs to the to the characters so it's slightly pay to win ish and in pokemon there's a similar thing each pokemon pokemon humane sorry it has every pokemon has three held items and they held items each of the held items uh grants up to three um abilities or buffs but they are very powerful if we compare the amount of um i mean the volume of of stats that they increase or the effects that they generate it's it's huge compared to two

other games i'm thinking now from i mean deciding for memory but in the article you can fight the screenshots um but there are there's one item that is like 20 damage life steal on damage like so it's it's huge when um fully upgraded so it's a game that it's more paid to win than than others i don't think that's necessarily the problem honestly judging what works on on moba mobile the ones that make the most money they integrate uh pay to win mechanics like in i mean it's not as heavy as a 4x but they all integrate some degree of of pay to win i would like it to be different but that's what it is browsers they have grades and it is true that the percentage of stats increment that the grades generating in blood stores is smaller than the percentage of stat increment that you get in cla royale significantly different

and significantly smaller but there is the it is there right um i actually think that in in this game probably probably they have went too fast when we're having this and they have went too over two overboard with it i think they should have been a bit subtle with that um i don't know what's going to happen with with that if they are going to eventually rebalance it down or not we will see uh probably not because they want to make money and and um it's it's it's um that would be difficult to change what what about the people that already paid for it um and now when it comes to the monetization as a broad topic um i think there's a range of decisions that you can take before a game is launched and a range of decisions that you can take when the once the game has launched and you have established a kind of non-written contract with the players and

there are several things that in my opinion they should have done different before launch the skin system should have been different they have this fragmented uh cosmetic type of system for the character i mean for the player which is barely not seen in the game yeah but then with the pokemon it's just like skins as a single piece and why not the other way around it would have made way more sense maybe they could have come they could have considered having some upgrade on the pokemon and but now it's too late like now they cannot introduce that without killing their the audience that they haven't started to build and actually the biggest probably one of the biggest issues that they have is that they are not accumulating a huge audience because the downloads are not staying for a long time in the game so now it's not the time to take decisions to foster monetization in my opinion now it's the time to foster a big audience and then we think about how we monetize them

later that makes sense all right just maybe okay before we wrap up for me this should be also a full ux sort of discussion the current ux i think if you have just to stick to the strategy of okay we're going we're going with the diversification we're doing with those pay2win elements but the the way the elements are placed on the ui and everything should be should be sort of be supporting that which it currently doesn't there's the event of buried the held items are buried somewhere um you you should be able you know borrow style does it again another again larsa but it does it very well that you see your progress on different characters you see your bills you'll see the next star you're gonna get all of that the tasks in the battle pass they're very clear all of that the current ux for me doesn't support anything it's neutral at best and i think it should they should have a discussion about that for sure yeah it's like based on the strategy it's like a careful one almost like hey we're making a game for a wide

audience western audience let's not intimidate them with a lot of a lot of buttons a lot of a lot of shabazz so just if the pokemon are so important why can't i access my pokemon collection just from the menu yeah and that's interesting it's a beautiful ui and a nice ux uh but it's not kind of hitting it it's not supporting the goal so i wanted to i want to wrap up by getting your predictions so next six year next six months so two quarters by the summer does this game grow its revenue does it get to a growth path or or is this is this it like is teami gonna you know because they're already already making the um honor of kings um gentian impact version of that and they have a bunch of cool games in the works they got call of duty mobile they got honor of kings so they got a lot of games they can be investing into what do you think end up next six months or is this game gonna turn around and start growing let's start with adrian

um i i think the current for me the path will be the thing is going to grow a little bit with some content drop and then it's going to stale and maintain just maintain but not too level that's that's timmy acceptable in my opinion hobby i mean not sure if it's going to be in the next six months but i think that this game is going to have a huge increment on the revenue uh but it will be linked to the release on china um and i wouldn't be surprised if we see something similar to what we have seen in what will rift where the game was just doing okay in the west i mean not probably in the lower range it was making less revenue than mobile legends in the us for example uh but then they released on china and they are making 10 times more money and i think um it could happen the same thing with with this game uh when they release on on china but if we so i think it's going to make more money no matter what not sure if it's the next

six months but eventually the thing is um what happens in the west and uh what's the potential win that they are going to obtain in in china i think again it will really depend on on if timmy really invests on it or not i don't think so i think it's going to kind of stagnate maybe they achieved like a small growth but i wouldn't i wouldn't expect an uh an explosion of growth just because they need to solve a lot of problems with i mean they would need to make a lot of changes in order to do that and um maybe if the game wasn't soft launch i would have a different opinion but i think that solving some of the issues that they that the game has are not trivial changing stuff related to core gameplay or tweaking that at this stage and with the limited range of changes that you can do once the game is live that's difficult um so although i think

there are some easy wins low hanging fruits that they could collect um i wouldn't expect these to become another braless stars in the next six months because there's just a lot of things that need to be changed in order for the game to achieve that so even even the change of events to favor different champions would not be enough i mean i thought we'll just do a small bump drop but it's not going to fix the cool thing that javi mentioned i think that would help the my thing my thoughts with that is that in order to turn a game around and we have niska talked a lot about this it's not about doing one change you really need to change a lot of things in in a lot of areas of the game and some of the changes are sometimes subtle and my concern is that in order for the game to reach like the next level when it comes to revenue and

growth it requires so many changes in so many different areas that i i see it very very challenging i'm not saying it cannot be done but it's really challenging well if there's one studio that can do anything i think it's probably to me absolutely at the end of the day all the good factors that the game had that we were anticipating or made us anticipate a huge win or a huge success before it was released are still there the ips is still powerful um the gameplay it's it's um like it has a base where they can build on top so all of the values are still there and although we can frame it as oh they got a lot of of installs and but they didn't make the money wasted opportunity it's never a wasted opportunity it's it's in a game that has such a huge market penetration at launch

uh that's never the last bullet because they can then release something one event or one do something in the game and then reawaken all those users that play the game maybe they thought like oh sure it didn't interest me for a long time then if everybody starts playing with it and there's a something new and really that calls people in again i think they they can bring back a lot of those installs and in fact a lot of games that have been able to turn around uh like legacy games that then start making a lot of money what the hell happened they have made it because of that they have made it because they released this kind of event of this kind of massive change that kind of brings everybody back well on that note big thanks to hadrian simrud javier barnes check out the uh the full deconstruction on the constructor fun blog post blog you guys did an amazing job just breaking down this game and and um i learned a lot i learned a lot by

talking to you and especially by by reading the uh the whole the whole set so uh can't wait to see what happens when the uh when the team guys and and uh and ladies read the uh the post and and go through their backlog and see if those are the type of things that they should be doing so thank you thank you fellas so much thank you thank you thank you everybody for listening and drop some comments uh javier and hadrian will be answering those on on either here or on the dof slack or on the blog or you know anywhere where you send the comments on their linkedin dm that's actually the best because then it doesn't have to go through me so so anyways thank you so much for listening and thank you so much guys for for opening up this game