DOTA Underlords, Anthem Still Alive, Blizzard Departures | Games ReCAP Episode 008

[Music] sup everybody welcome to another episode of recap good morning good morning thanks for joining us here for the best show ever made on Twitch ever in Twitch's to me nobody has more viewers than us right now guarantee don't look at the numbers verify just trust me just trust me for the best pure instincts of course I am branded fam so goes one shows Larry Charles over there and every day we bring you the top gaming news from a game developer perspective alright first off let's talk about what is valve up to holy crap yeah they did it they did it Beyonce I heard they dropped the album in the middle of the night yeah pretty much so a dota of course is basically their leader Pelagians it's like the Ranchos right and they

came out with the mobile version okay what is it was it called under Lawrence yeah DOTA under Lords okay and it's been released within the last 24 hours and it has been killing it a hundred and seventy four hundred thousand concurrent users not just downloads yeah usually not so there currently there downloads is probably way higher than that way to have that many people online playing at the same time that's the peak yet number so let's assume maybe four or five even six times that amount current downloads and within that 24 hour period is a guess yeah so it's a pretty insane to kind of see that steam has that ability still they're one of the few publishers where without any warning or whatsoever they can just release something and get instant coverage that's when you know they're making money they're like and we released a game I just throw it out it's just they're not really known for really releasing too much data on their part yeah and so from this article you can

see that you know instantly surpass other valve titles like Team Fortress 2 which is 123,000 peak concurrent users in our Dalton I got completely able to fortress two all-time peak concurrent users there's only 123 that's their highest peak even after like orange box came out oh man okay it's a different time no right so completely obliterated that and you got to cut artifacts numbers by half or like two-thirds even because most of that was porn from whatever but like there is a lesson comparison right here that you can see dota 2 is always on top right there in terms of a peak but right there it's slotting under ring rounder counter-strike is doing it under Lords well like the strength the steam it's still relevant yeah and these franchises just stick around forever so this is

mobile game on mobile platforms but it still counts as a going through Steam like it's this is concurrent users on Steam or just concurrent users on that title well I believe it's still somehow related to steam just related to valve I don't think it goes through a steam just wonder make sure yeah yeah so I haven't tried it myself have is this these games are not your type cup of tea either right well potentially I'll say dota is right down my wheelhouse cuz I'm a big fan of MOBA right now huge into heroes of the storm and so obviously there'd be no heroes of the storm without dota without valve making dota and like work taking dota and be like hey what's this you guys got oh we want that we own it now let's do our own version to get the Warcraft property out there and yeah you know create our own lore but yeah so without dota there wouldn't be here with a storm and I love here's on the storm so I would probably want to try this game just to see what it's about there is like a lot of similarity between a lot of the mobiles even with their own distinct kind of here's what makes ours different yeah not just champions but

rule set or player experience yeah so I'd be happy to give that a shot and dota has an eSports scene still so that's one advantage over my beloved heroes of the storm because obviously we lost ours rip but anyway 24 hours 170,000 concurrent users that's I can't imagine what their trajectory is like you know when you go to a big game studio and you see all the numbers like on the screen like if you go to Facebook and they show like their here's how many people are on Facebook right now and it's just like going up and down up and down up and down I'd actually really love to see what that looks like for a game like this that's gonna skyrocket and user accounts so they've got a ton of accounts to pull from I can tell you that much yeah I'm trying to look for like a valve official gameplay footage I'm not even seeing any of that I'm seeing it by the streamers Amell doesn't market games they are so comfortable they just it's like the Rockstar approach that's like hey whenever we want to release the

other you just release it they don't do press coverage they don't go through the media outlets they just release whatever they want to release on their YouTube account and it gets instant coverage it's the rules feel the dreams in New York like they just built the baseball stadium in the middle of field and people showed up yeah I mean that's a that power they do have even though we tease about them never really shipping games they did the experiment with a lot of stuff and once in a while they do kind of pepper it out there in the wilds and it's great to kind of see it being received really well it's one of the styles that I want it's I don't think I'm gonna ever download it because it's not my type sure game but I want to see what it's like let me see if I can find some footage for you guys to get worse yeah I think the cool thing here is I'm starting to just see companies with money taking risks again like I that dota under Lords isn't just like mobile dota I'm imagining that there's got to be some sort of gameplay hook or twist that actually is a unique property it's

just kind of streamlined for mobile as far as frame rate as far as asset detail and visual fidelity goes much like I think auto chess and then Auto chest turned into or has like a off spawn and somebody in comments correct me but I think like there's this new game out it's like team tactics Liga legend team tactics or something like that where you have like a small tactic style anybody familiar with tactic style games it's multiplayer tactics simultaneously I actually think that's a pretty cool concept where instead of me being one person owning like my squad of seven and playing chess against computer with you RPG rulesets it's actually five of us versus five of them other people but in a tactic style approach so I'm interested in seeing how that kind of gameplay works it looks like we got some video loaded up so let's see let's see what kind of experience we got here seems like like a football s fast forward to where they like play there okay so here we go so this is where your did this is where you were always

talking about what is your your first looks great oh snap so it's yeah sweet it does kind of remind me of the auto chests and then the team tactics I got a look into all the chests that's another one of those hey I'm starting to hear a lot about this but I haven't spent any time investigating so I have no idea but it seems like it's going it's selling like hotcakes mm-hmm wow that was quick there must be a tutorial level is there like a halfway point or like further in the video that we can just scroll to real quick get some real combat well I mean like yeah this is B for mobile so they're like ants obviously aware it definitely feel it definitely reminds me of the video I saw of team tactics yeah just dota style okay is this something you you see yourself getting into later ah yes and no I think that it's cool

because it looks like there's not a whole lot of frantic moving going on you kind of put a person in place and then you use one or two abilities that speed of the gameplay I think is great for mobile but what I enjoy actually about the mobile experience is just the rapid pace frantic you know strategy is evolving every half a second as you get new data or as you understand new things happening and this is kind of like they're bullet spongy enough where you can kind of like put them into a situation and start fighting and then you realize like oh four seconds from now I'm going to be losing so let me course-correct they're like get behind the guy who's the tank or get behind the person who's you know can do some sort of crowd control so like yeah they're setting up their initial frontline which is all frontline apparently you know no failing you know like clash with chess right or class Rory L was originally stemming off of chess and so like an how did this I think clash Royale to me feels like competitive tower defense and what I'm

seeing here is a simplified slower version of a scrum from MOBA like they're taking the one part of MOBA that's usually the most fun which is the 5v5 fight they're putting you in a very enclosed arena where you just have to have a 5v5 fight and so it seems like your tactics gonna be very limited but because of the way health and damage is kind of slowed down it looks like you have a longer gameplay experience but they're just giving you the steak they're just giving you that 5 to 5 teamfight experience and I think that what's cool about this game is like the battles will be decided probably within 1 or 2 deaths usually because there's nowhere to escape - there's no towers to help defend you there's no minions to like try to use to create some sort of setup or to have somebody dive too deep and then you go to a safe spot and then that person realizes their health was too low to actually make it through the wave of minions that are just behind them common things that you do in a MOBA but you don't really have those opportunities here so I imagine in this gameplay experience there's a whole lot of steamrolling there's like like you may as well quit

right I saw 4 red accounts the two green accounts you may as well quit you're gonna lose like there's no point there's nothing else to fall back on other than being the first team to get the first kill I bet you if you look at the data - if you are the part of the team that got the first kill and like significantly like your team still has a decent amount of health I bet you it's just full of steamroll experiences so there's probably a lot of toxicity in this a lot of quitters a lot of it's your fault fu well it seems like the rounds go by pretty fast right within like 2 minutes which is obviously something they intended to be for mobile games which I love I've always loved Donuts graphics / League of Legends like I feel like the artists over there at least the art style is what I am noticing is that great from all this switch mechanics seems pretty cool like okay they wiped us out with this kind of a combat or they had this and they had that so I'm gonna swap in this champion to try to mitigate some of that

oh look at that interesting yes I can see why aging no more and more as you see this wood you will willingly give you yourself a try with this I'm like completely on the other spectrum I'm all about first-person and fighting games but you you're more well is there the hard part that I have about this again just goes to the the way that the numbers usually work in these types of games regardless of the champions that you pick in the skill level that you start to have because you're spreading it across five peoples and five people's five champions and five players individually it's usually very hard to kind of come back this game definitely feels like and I've said it already but as soon as one team scores the kill it's very easy for the five to score the next kill the next hill the next kill the next kill and so I don't know how much strategy really comes into play once you start losing people yeah then it really seems like you just have to have the best guessed best opening and then you've won so this game is all about initial engagement I

would imagine I don't see like any sort of sustain I don't see any sort of and you know maybe I just haven't played it enough to really know because it looks like the red team has six players now and the green team has five and I don't know if that's like some sort of balancing mechanic like hey if you lose you get an extra champion or something like that to try to keep it even right so I'll probably need to get my hands on it and try pun intended because it's a mobile game but we'll see yeah it's obviously people are really loving it for them to can stick around and like over a hundred thousand people playing it at the same time under 24 hours that's their crazy impressive and that kind of lends to what the industry is kind of heading towards like fortnight if anything broke the barrier down where the mobile industry was kind of like separate from triple-a industries right and now we're starting to see the big player is kind of going to the mobile

world in a huge way 174 174 hundred thousand people is our numbers that any of these mobile companies would love to kill for and especially within a twenty one oh man you kidding me I would love to have because that's just who's playing online again right so like who knows how many come nonchalance yeah and then I would love to see what their their pay model is uh uh like are you buying champions yes are you buying upgrades power skins or are you are there where I guess where the cash falls I'm hoping it's not pay to win like hey your hero has been knocked out please pay 20 bucks to get these gems which is gonna allow your hero to be less susceptible system right all right we'll see ya well I mean we're I'm definitely looking forward to to what they have cooking next man all right let's move on to our next topic then which is done oh speaking of dead heroes this is it

so anthem I think I spelled that right without me there's an oh look at this Adam that's the that's the 10th might as well right who cares whatever that name is yeah seems like to be the only one that really cares about this IP not being dead because I thought because of it because of its rocky launch that it was dead in the waters dead upon an arrival I thought Bioware was already packing up their boxes and calling it quits because it was not just anthem but the mass effect spinoff that failed shortly before that so drama the screen yeah drama you know the Bioware company or a studio didn't work on that which is Edmund Edmondson Edmondson you know there's someone responsible because some of those guys went over there but by

where as a company can't take two massive fails and then survive right so uh you know ei going out there on damage control I guess after they did they're like half recurse Senate at the UK talking about how loot boxes are surprised mechanics on yesterday's episode speaking of surprises to kind of kind of calm everybody's worries saying that Bioware is still evolving expanding to test the elasticity up the brand keyword elasticity seam it breaks it sooner or later that's what you're seeing with the infant today yeah I think everything about ei right now in regards to covering up for failures is all about saving face and less about actual truth or plans or intent yeah just the feeling that I get is that it's it's it's not that they actually have a release plan it's not that they like actually care to keep Bioware or anthem going

I think they don't they just don't want to blemish on their record they don't want people who have invested money in the company to think that oh no to catastrophic failures in a row what's going on right this is to me it feels more like we are trying to calm the confidence of the people who are holding our shares in their hand thinking about throwing them in the fire and just getting what they can and pulling out right because we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars gone into these products and - if EA were to just cut and be like we're abandoning it anthem is no more even though that that's technically what it feels like to me as a consumer who's actually interested in games because I look at their release plan and they like remove it they've like hey there's no new content like announced on their release plan I saw a couple weeks back I think and then also to know that I mean come on anthem what's what's their community numbers that eleven thousand players it's just actives going in there something like ridiculous right now let's it's the devs just going in there like trying to fix it and they just play

testing you know one is playing Hansa yeah no one's playing anthem right now man let's not kid ourselves those rings are talking about it we could pull up twitch right and let's see if you're on twitch if you don't mind take a look over the anthem we just started we're we're above Anton right now let us know how many people are actually viewing or streaming for anthem right now because that's like a great indicator I think twitch is actually a great indicator for not necessarily success but for community you know community scale to see how big the community is how active are involved or excited people are about something like when world of warcraft classic was announced and they people could play the beta again world of warcraft is like high on the list of like twitch support right art of twitch I think they jumped up back to like the top 5 mm-hmm since classic was announced that but then also the people were started playing the beta some of the big streamers going to classic and having a great time with WoW again yeah so I'll say this I obviously

for the developers working on anthem I think that like you made a great looking product it seems like technology limitations or just things actually being working or not ended up cursing the project from being as fun as it should have been right like most people talked about bugs they talked about things not working properly and I didn't necessarily hear and you know I may be wrong but I didn't necessarily hear that like this is a [ __ ] game because it's not fun it's not exciting there's nothing to do there's XYZ I did hear that did okay there was repetition and there was just not a lot of deep deep no death yeah no death gameplay in there and so that's why you know the community feel gypped fair enough I I guess the main stuff I heard was like bugs loading screens taking forever and like things that was like yeah you know what that's us but nowhere in the design doc does it say like hey 2-minute loading screens 10-minute loading screens that's what going to be our feature right like the

stuff that they had planned for the game I just felt like a lot of people probably didn't get to see it I guess mmhmm yeah I'm very surprised that actually support oh we just got the numbers 12 12 streamers 103 viewers department did this is Bioware well this let's call it just EA alright this is EA just [ __ ] up and they re always they're always on the front lines or on the front page at like drama Jesus their reputation is just terrible yeah but yeah one on three viewers that's like 50 QA people trying to fix this shitty game yeah in 12 directors who are just holding on to their jobs there's no one's playing this game I'll say this I don't blame the artist in a sense like dude you never been in art it looks like a cool game like everything

about it looks cool artists delivers okay designer all right you know everything [ __ ] up on that slide look when it code when the programmers are like alright we need to pull up the stats and see where memory is over budget right there's no such budget for it design art budget animation budget sound but it's not the idea that makes the framerate slow it's not being able to find dirt on the technical standpoint sure if it doesn't run it's our fault but if it sucks when it runs your I'll take that blame if if everything else is executed and it still falls flat yeah yeah look at the design team yeah I I anticipate this game about two months from now the representative ei saying hey we're closing down all the series and it's like is it even worth going free to play for anthem right like that's the question that's the honest question nobody wants to play this [ __ ] for 60 bucks but what if it was free

would you try it no because the people who bought it are not upset because it's not free anymore right it's they're upset because there's nothing to do you know it was a half-baked game and they were sold on a lie and so the you know there's wandering around in this like forest and there's no one there but leaves game was released and there's no one there to play it does it exist yeah exactly it's a thud all right so they should just call it bed and do something with their Mass Effect franchise and go back to the basics and maybe maybe people give them the benefit of the doubt within another Mass Effect world but that's not to say that this world doesn't seem interesting I would buy into this but they were way over their heads now I mean it's just a classic crunch nature I think they we did a Bioware on game devlin chain

and Glassdoor confession right there just on this bad work cycle and mentality that great games can't be made unless it's being crunched or brilliance doesn't happen into the last second right and that's a dangerous gamble because they've done it twice in a row and ei isn't the type to let you try a third time right so in terms of like this high-caliber five-year development cycle five to eight years development cycle Bioware in my opinion is not the number one option they're never gonna greenlight any of these projects for them anymore which also means you know they're gonna go a lot safer as they should right be responsible and create smaller games so this is the route that most Triple A developers are going now I think the thing for me that I'm seeing from this is I think EA is gonna be forced to start changing their business

strategies but the sad part is I don't know if it's gonna be for better or for worse right I don't know if that change of business strategy is gonna result in better scenarios for developers you know safer projects but maybe a little more ambitious just less depth or if it's gonna be no double down on what's been working which is why they're in front of UK Parliament saying these aren't loot boxes yeah this isn't that gambling stuff yeah this is surprised mechanics this is a surprise see you spent three bucks surprised yeah worthless bet you didn't see that coming right like that's fun that's why they're doing the dog and pony show up there because I was watching another video I think they were saying that like EA gets about maybe sixteen sixteen percent of their annual revenue comes from just loot box mechanics like no new content added just people buying the same thing over and over and over hoping for that random chance that they get the purple lightsaber and that's generating about sixteen fifteen sixteen percent of their annual revenue so like imagine if someone was like hey

you're gonna get a fifteen percent reduction in your pay you'd probably be like [ __ ] that yeah wait for I want that I need that yeah and so I understand why but yeah you're like don't lie to them don't lie the UK Parliament don't have the Queen show up don't have a queen show up and you know let make us look bad in front of the whole the whole European wherever the UK Parliament scuse me where are off camera producer is demanding some pets I know I'm tired of looking at them uh so let's go ahead and talk about the next topic to be honest I was one of the few that were was excited about the IP it looks great it looks like a man it looks like destiny yeah good what sure right it looks more realistic with stylized it looked really fun but knowing the history I was kind of trepidation some trepidation trying to just hold back from actually buying it

outright because I knew the drama net thing was a lot of drama now be new friends that were on like on that project and they were complaining about it before it was released so it was I didn't have the trust and I knew like the reputation of Bioware was like a crunch culture so you only can do that so much before you actually break yeah there's only a few companies that have been successfully like really working their developers to death and be able to pump out like great IPS you know Naughty Dog's and the rock star in rock star right there's only a couple of those guys in that I think because of their superstar leadership they are able to somehow work that will make it happen and only guarantee success at the end of it I'll say this that's a great word was the guarantee right like using a crunch culture development cycle I mean not necessarily that they leaned on or that they created it that way who knows why

things weren't left-to-right I'm not talking about that but what I will say is I'd much rather if I had to pick between crunching on two things as the developer who lives in let's say California right where things are expensive you have a family you're probably looking more to crunch on the thing that has already proven successful then to crunch on the thing that is the we don't know right so like anthem perfect example you're gonna put in all that extra time new franchise fans haven't seen it before is going against destiny which already has an installed user base there's already another game that's like a destiny like competitor which is warframe what's offering free to play like that destiny space is hyper competitive versus like rockstars like hey remember Grand Theft Auto for how well that did remember Grand Theft Auto 5 how well that did do you want to come work on Grand Theft Auto 6 you're gonna work like crazy but bonus there's a lot of people who like oh yeah yeah like they already see it but if you told me that Grand Theft Auto 6 you mean have to tell me anything about it you know by working on it people just expect yeah it's gonna be good and it's gonna be

worth it as soon as like one of the Houser brother's dies then the guarantees suddenly drops right there's a reason why the few developers that you really put your bets on exists and there's only a few is because four they have that that overworking nature to guarantee to really sit there to make sure that anything that's being put out trailer wise and even gameplay wise meet the demand and expectation they're not everyone's that that good of a director did not everyone is able to see the full process in their head and put it on paper yeah and be able to carry out those instructions with their team and be able to output the quality that they pictured and originally right very special case scenario types of people that works in these companies and to think that because that's the what Noddy die is doing everybody can just copy paste that format and now I'm at very

few very few so to me the the route of these Triple A companies if they keep copy pasting that mentality they're slowly gonna fall Bioware's gonna be gone yeah like III anticipate Bioware going in making smaller indie titles very soon there's no way their anthem is their last output of a big huge game of that caliber period I think if I was EA and I had control over bio right now the thing that I do see value in what they've done with anthem is I know that they are capable of making a fantastic looking game like if you fix all the gameplay or tech problems with anthem it's like a triple threat right like you made a game that looks fantastic so if the other two things were better you could have had a chance so I would potentially say like all right obviously this team of developers can make a high quality looking product let's just make a product that's not this entire world universe worth of work that's gonna stream together all these

untested untried systems in a way maybe we should focus on something a little smaller maybe we should focus on something a little more like an overwatch style where it's like hey you know it's very simple rule sets right very simple experiences the breath comes in the replay right it comes in the variety of characters that you can choose and then play this experience over and over and over and over and over no NPC's in overwatch right not that I know of I don't know what people are doing in the workshop and sometimes they have those like special events but I'm dead yeah I digress you're dead you take it yeah I'm digesting - I had a good breakfast take your team and make something where your scope isn't so large that you're setting yourself up for failure like this again learn from what they haven't been able to do double down on what they can do and find a way to make something that like exists in that world so like I would love for Bioware to put together something it's like great art style but also the depth of the experience is not in this long adventure story RPG with growth and like trying to go after destiny and in going

competing with a game where Activision was like 10 years of support 500 million dollars and XY & z XY and Z yeah like get out of that market find another market for your team to make something that can be beautiful but not as complicated to deliver on and I think that that would be my Hail Mary for Bioware I would do that I wouldn't have them go back to their roots and do story RPG I wouldn't let that go for now because those games are big and expensive make something beautiful small and replayable and see how that goes that would be my my advice and I don't know at all but that's my advice mm-hmm well we we always hope for the best for everyone that is over there we of course don't want like another triploid developer to completely disappear I mean there's one in every okay or terrible fall from grace titles there's always like awesome developers within that mix from these studios that are already situated

in in the areas they are in where these studios are so we hope for the best we hope Bioware still sticks around I mean ei kind of coming out there I would have to assume they're talking from the standpoint of like the few hundred players that they have now oh my god don't don't leave or are they talking about like hey we hear you and we are gonna do our best to make sure that Bioware is gonna stand with us so real quick we might be having some technical issues it says we're getting half of the sound drop out five times a minute well that's pretty big yeah well we'll see what what's going on I believe I'm not streaming anything else but why don't you take the cam right now while I take a look but we can see up here on our side if it's dropping and we do see sometimes it does truck for some reason maybe bad internet time whoever's on

Netflix you come off well I'll say this I think that again I always hate to see studios closing especially if I know a studio is at risk and we knew kind of going into this that the projections and the I don't even want to say projections I want to say requirements that EA had for anthem were huge and it seemed like if anthem didn't work then we were probably going to lose Bioware all together and so I still even now hope that that's not the case it gives me hope to see that EA is trying to save face and say we haven't abandoned this game but the cynical side of me is more like whoa I think they want to tell shareholders that they haven't abandoned the game even if they quietly phase out any sort of development they just don't want people to like dump they don't want people to just forget it EA to bad ones in a row plus they're in front of the UK Parliament because of the microtransaction loot box scandals everything about this company is going to be bad they're losing money I'm getting this out of my 401k dump the stock because those exec bonuses a lot

of those bonuses are tied to performance a lot of their own portfolios are probably filled with EA stock that's about to go down half and their net worth potentially goes down by directly related amount it's not always about greed but I do know that that sometimes that has a lot to do with it so I think that they might be trying to save face more than they're actually trying to save jobs hate to laugh at it but that's just my opinion yeah I mean that's a pretty safe bet we can move on to our next topic and I sorry for everybody that's seeing us like a bit so uh it seems to kind of stop by this point our third topic for today are you ready for this Larry yeah let's talk about the fans all right so what's going on with history all right so I'm gonna switch over to our article for you yeah so articles a Gamasutra Gamasutra so Kim fan here's another portion of what's going

on with Blizzard so at the beginning of the year we saw to these types of departures to major heads at blizzards who were kind of taking care of the the eSport arena and anything turning any of their IPs into eSports because eSports obviously here to stay yeah this is a woman that's been there for 13 years and it's going away yeah right and this is has been happening the last month and a half because Activision has pretty much fired or let go part of the 800 layoffs a good portion of blizzards marketing team to kind of integrate their own Activision headquarters market team to take care of all blizzards licenses and one of those being the the guy they or uh ordered but they got they hired from ESPN no I hired a freezie spean kind of handled their their eSports arena and that has triggered a

lot of people that's been at Blizzard for a long time that knows games that knows that area really well that knows what gamers want that are simply disagreeing with his methods and I think that when you look to do a hotfix because I call something like that a hotfix right I don't know this person Gaming resume I don't know their background our interest in competitive video gaming and I don't know how much they even understand competitive video gaming but I do understand the value of this person understand sports sports participation sports broadcasting event setup and things like that I think that person does bring to the table valuable skills that will help with the growth of eSports but I think that to hotfix and remove somebody who knew the culture side who knew like it was actually attached to game game properties game communities to bring in an outsider who's probably completely unrelated I call that a donkey move and I think that at best you should have had some sort of hybrid synergy sure you have a decision

maker yeah but that person I would I would actually hire them to consult very high paid consultant right give them some power as well but you don't ever want to disrespect the culture because the culture is who's giving you the money yeah the fans are who are actually there the reason why there's a thing called eSports otherwise it's just a couple people playing a game otherwise Rihanna's on so we're twitchy right now obviously twitch has the corner in terms of streaming games but with their Amazon game studios they have a lack of IP to really put it on the front page and so Blizzard going about it as if they already have twitch which is that step backwards right and kind of figuring it like kind of getting rid of all the talent plate okay we're gonna do right you're gonna have like the arena and stadiums all ready to go but no IPS from Blizzard to actually demonstrate on stage what are you guys doing man yeah it's and I think that like that person coming from sports world is probably again this is all assumptions cuz I

don't have as much insight into this as you might have at the moment but what I will say is I can imagine that that person's like yeah we're gonna get on ESPN and ESPN plus and we're gonna get the slots that are competitive for the amount of money we want to spend 2 a.m. 3 a.m. 4 a.m. we're gonna run dota tournament so we're gonna run I shouldn't say do it we're gonna run overwatch and we're gonna show Starcraft 2 and it's gonna be those two games because no one is watching hots high-level competitive anymore because we killed that everything that I just heard in like that kind of approach would be a catastrophic failure because when I look at the community of gamers you asked him about ESPN if you do that like I love doing the Venn diagram of people who have ESPN people who play video games right like competitively or appreciate competitive gaming that slice is like a small slice I don't see those people giving a [ __ ] about dota or excuse me heroes of the storm overwatch or whatever being on ESPN because that means they have to be in a seat at a certain time watching television they're

on their computers they're playing games they're whatever they're doing like your fan demographic is on the computer their primary way of watching this thing is through twitch or through basically Blizzard's own channels worth it like through the launcher you can see like hey this is live click to watch this event so the hard part about eSports for Blizzard is one I think that their properties which are eSports valuable are not enough to fill a whole networks worth of scheduling - I think that there's an ebb and flow to it right like there it's season based they don't have games that basically are gonna run all year right so you have your overwatch season you have like alright here's the champion of the season but it doesn't take 12 months to run the season it's actually a lot shorter so the hard part I think that they're gonna be faced with is just is eSports even valuable to you as a company so much so that putting all this money and time and attention into it is going to drive revenue and profits and I don't know that the answer to that question is yes I think that they're they have a great community for their

games I think people are playing it left and right and I think there are the money that they spend on eSports like you could spend 1/5 of that and just put it into marketing put it into community-based events community-based prizes where the eSport is actually just the game like hey who was the best here you won a prize out of all the two three four five eight ten twenty thirty million players you're always gonna be in the competitive bracket so you're the athlete yourself yeah you know what I mean I think that right now is too early to see hold on before I hang myself in my words I think that it's too risky right now to see Blizzard trying to double triple down on eSports there's so many cheeky things happening at that company yeah they're not retaining the talent that they should be like to see like old-school like toothed iron like there since day one c-level people or creative director people willingly leaving the company because they'd rather do nothing than work at Blizzard yeah the company started its day I don't even want to be associated well we have all right I'll say yeah we have friends

that are are I've always made it their life goal wanting to go to Blizzard yeah that are telling me that like I'm not sure what's going on over there yeah talking to friends yeah I mean they're talking to friends over there and like yeah things are changing yeah thing things are changing fast there's a lot the active vision takeover is Israel yeah and it's happening and unfortunately it's though the the flagship for if you live in Orange County it's it's beautiful it's a beautiful campus everybody around here would love to work there but the opportunities are completely dropping right now and I don't see a way out of this if they're not retaining talent and they're not attracting talent that only leads to lack of talent which also means lack of new IPs which also means you know yeah its eventual downfall right so I'll say this I think that trying to solve the eSports problem right now is

not their biggest problem it's not the biggest problem yeah it might be the case it might be the case that they're kind of just sizing down that department maybe these guys got pulled in a room and say hey eSports not our focus right now keep it going but right now we're just focusing on analyzing all the IPS and I think that sounds like more like an Activision called I mean they understand because eSports right now though it was catching on a lot of traction the last two years like streaming is definitely more popular and more advantageous as a marketing standpoint because everything about streaming makes more sense when I think of the user give you the demographic when I'm ready to watch gaming content I go to twitch it's and I'm watching my favorite to watch one person whenever one introduction but maybe a team small team but to rent a stadium and inviting people there to actually watch and compete with each other so yeah like twitch throws these kind of like

celebrity switching events yeah playing the games but it's still in community right like I said within the community bettering those events right ninja is still at his house yeah Drake is still at his house and sometimes I do invite all the streamers in one location but like twitch does have control over that and it's advantageous to all those streamers to do so to kind of combine the communities to migrate the communities together yeah activision to start without a platform and you know to go on to twitch to eventually kind of just live streaming yeah unless they're gonna somehow roll that into battlenet which I don't think is a smart idea that's like you're gonna start a whole sector that you've never had a part in before I think they don't have enough games and the games they have don't have so much of a community that it's worth investing all that infrastructure into trying to do that to push those games plus the games we're starting to get long in the tooth great overwatch has been out for a while you know I mean is overwatch the only game that's being watched on Twitch front lizard yeah from Blizzard world

warcraft overwatch on twitter like on the top list world of warcraft is all on the five once classic came back out okay overwatch I think is still up there I haven't checked in a while Starcraft 2 front page yeah maybe top 100 yeah not sure and it's just a guess but what I'm saying is like I would not be investing in eSports infrastructure if I was that company that would avoid that at all cost I think that it's actually gonna be better for all of you Sports if there was a third-party company that took an olympic-style approach where did we stop looking at each other as competitors even on eSports right because I think that that's what's killing it is the fragmentation is they're like hey we have a community so we're trying to do our own event I would love it if it was like look g4 network is back yeah we know all the big games and we are handling like infrastructure and events and doing all this stuff just partner with us so that we can bring top-level people and have this content running all the time I think that is a better shot at trying to do eSports because I

wouldn't want to just be on a platform just to watch overwatch all the time I'm gonna burn out yeah like twitch why I love it is because it's a smorgasbord it's all a cart I can switch to heroes of the storm then I can go watch die by daylight I can go watch life is strange then I can go watch you know uno then I can go watch hey this person is just playing guitar and like taking requests that seems cool right like it's giving me these opportunities to vary the content I'm experienced yes so I think that that kind of approach will help eSports more than we want our own thing because we're our own company and we just want to show our yes they need to just play nice with twitch admit defeat admit twitches the platform and work with twitch and just create great IP so that they can put an event around it because twitch if anything should be the ones making the stadium's should make it should make the the noise invite other pros they have the connections with the pro streamer is to kind of make it advantageous for both sides get more fans exactly and Activision doesn't have that luxury

right now they're pissing off everybody that's working for them in every way it's like it we just laid all you had on people why don't you trust us come on man come on man so as far as what was the the lady's name miss fan yeah the most Vietnamese name ever obviously she left for a reason it sounds like she's going to a new opportunity so that means she wasn't easily recruited away but if she if she spent her entire 13-year career there helping your growing eSports and then I'm assuming she's going to a better opportunity well like her departure well let's kind of quote what she just said as I hang up my story she look forward to a bright future and wish all my Blizzard friends and family the very best as you race let's go good luck but she marks the second departure blizzard in the last month dude because overwatch League co-director and

commissioner the guy who was in charge of overwatch making a nice for left the company for fortnight as well so epic is just eating up all these tools which is a really big upgrade I really wish everyone would stop stealing my people man haha shoutout to cliffy B tweets from it's hard to argue for tonight because they have the biggest game they have the money they have the ability to churn out all the new items new seasons and the ability to kind of monetize it without getting in trouble with the loop boxes you can take risk there and they won't be risks yes like I hate to say like that but they have that kind of money yes like that 200 million idea didn't work yeah we just gave three hundred million dollars to the unreal fun to dress whatever right well the paints a picture of how something like 400 million was under million in a month yeah that's pretty much how much they make which paints a picture of how far

epic has gone from the eyepiece I mean they always was in the engine business and he would you know sell moderately well really well in the in console game business which is like six to ten million copies with Gears of War you know unruhe tournament and they took a little leave of absence right with Paragon even though Paragon was excited about that game yeah everyone forgot about the game it was a moderate success that can I think the numbers were they they saw like potential upswing because there was a lot of interest into it before and I just blew it out of the waters a hundred times right and that's why they switch gears and like we should focus on fortnight before tonight wasn't supposed to happen this way no it's like it's a story that still makes me laugh yeah to this day cause like I was letting to see the save the world numbers versus the battle royale numbers yeah it was the best idea they had just pop out nowhere to take take yeah best idea they had to take yes and they ran with it and they grew it and it became a phenomenon so

but that's if I were if you were to ask me two years ago who would be in that type of position Blizzard would be because they had all the IPS they had the worldwide influence they had players in every nation playing one of their games and they were on on tracked to be continuously dominant right the second in place would have been valve for me right there's like oh these guys have in constant revenue stream they don't worry about rushing things and you know they can treat an employee's right and retain the talent and keep building amazing IPs two years later epic out of everybody has the biggest game and everyone's leaving for epic for stability that's insane right like Blizzard has really fallen some crazy I feel like they are slowly gonna well it started with the

Diablo mobile announcement like don't you guys all off games right folks and then all the 800 people laid off right and then these high departures from Blizzard the restructure the restructure having people from smaller team Infinity Ward in Treyarch kind of taking the flag for bolt for all their ecology to franchise outputs to CEOs versus three Studios yeah the investors and the stockholders and and everybody Activision leadership can't be looking at this as like good call guys since since the 800 people layoffs right we just might be in the era of it's now too competitive and too expensive to make 200 plus million dollar games no like that just might be the reality we're starting to face that doesn't mean that you can't do it that doesn't mean that it's impossible I'm saying it might be too risky for very many companies

right Sony still doing it but God of War obviously already has a fan base that's been built and sustained the Last of Us great game people are expecting part two to be freaking awesome so that has a little bit of a leg to stand on as well so I can see that like there's opportunities still but I'm naming like literally individual games that I could see being profitable while knowing that like 500 600 700 games that try to come out at a triple-a level are not even gonna hit the mark whatsoever even though over the past five six years like oh we sold 4.6 million copies of Tomb Raider what a failure you know what I mean we can never do that again that was like a scandal that came out a couple years back and so we might just have to face the reality that because of how many different ways that players can find games spend money in games spend time in games and it just might be too expensive to expect that just because you spent four hundred million dollars on this new game property that that audience is gonna be there it just and that might

not be the way to go anymore it you know it's a new landscape market is shifting as a business you have to recognize that and you have to have a plan that hopefully you put in place two three years ago or if you're noticing the indicators now have a plan that is gonna allow you to be more agile at least spread your risk and try to do some smaller stuff and see you know what I mean you have people way smarter than Brandon and Larry Charles who see actual spreadsheets and data of like hey man this may not be the thing to do anymore no nonsense this is how we've always done it do it again if that's your attitude right now good luck Gigi nice knowing you yeah I mean they're definitely confident in their ability to analyze and take over watch I think that's their flagship right now because you know everybody recognizes that the streaming game you need to be really good at for your game to have long lasting impressions right overwatch is probably in the best position to do that it's competitive it's fast pace it's enjoyable its

replayable and it seems like they have the content seasonal drops in place to expand it so yeah it makes sense that overwatch is their focus and probably why all the talents being pushed out because yeah I agree with my method or not mentality and they're like [ __ ] you then I'll leave and I don't know how it's gonna play out I'm not gonna undermine someone from ESPN having the skill set to to to really take eSports to the next level right but games to me is still a different nature to work with that type of talent pool you have to respect them and I feel like anybody that comes from an outside industry coming into our industry instantly has that attitude of just looking down on us right and you feel that immediately yeah you like

youryour it's a plaything come on I was talking to athletes what's multi-million dollar people and the way that you're recruited right like hey you did all this for ESPN and did all that you probably already had some high and mighty like you saying the attitude there so they're pulling you in like save us mm-hmm they're giving you such power yes in how you're even being brought in yeah that of course you're gonna go in there swinging your sword around not caring that somebody is like no no like you got to care about the community yeah they brought me here for a reason I don't give a [ __ ] about what you're telling me yes he brings that whole per bottle and ego and saying like there's a reason why I'm here let me establish that reason to make sure that you know Bobby Kotick over there is uh I've already got the doubling down on me yeah you put Ken Griffey in he hits a home run you start selling his jersey they don't understand what's over exactly right so I mean these are the type of hires that like really completely destroy the culture right and the culture is so tight-knit at Blizzard

that anybody that comes down on him this way when you're dealing with creatives men we have Eagles ourselves yeah it's like we know the basis of every game comes from us yeah like the heart and soul the long-lasting longevity of a franchise stems from us and as soon as you mistreat us we'll take our talent elsewhere where you gonna be with so many numbers and stat sheets you're gonna be what are you going to be dealing with to me I think this is where the word passion applies right like we are very passionate about the games we play the games we invest our time in the games we enjoy the communities that we feel part of right that's something that both the developers and the consumers at some point regardless of how they mate bicker interact or like flame each other inside of the community they all do want that community to exist and be protected regardless of the like micro changes each individual may want I think on the whole developer is obviously and the consumers love that we have our bash in

our game community right we want to protect that at all costs well we don't want to see as neckties come in and completely ignore that and just think about it as a product sale you know consumer relationship like again like the drug dealer reference like we have a thing that you want so here's how you're gonna buy it from us like uh no not really yeah there's so many other people doing it better than you guys right now I'm gonna go watch twitch cuz I heard ninja was doing XYZ I heard doctor disrespect was doing this and that I'm gonna go check that out exactly and I can see that attitude being pulled apart right like honestly they probably are looking at that crowd right do they respect ninja they respect doctor disrespect all these streamers and treat them as athletes right as digital pro athletes whatever they want to call themself I think it's called eSport yeah I don't know we don't even have a name yet start to respect that like movies host competitor it's like there's no official

name that go to name that we actually called these streamers right now and so it when you approach these guys it's hard to kind of talk to them like you would talk to an NFL athlete or anybody within the ESPN repertoire right and so again you're treating both sides of the talent you know people that are creating the content people are marketing the content the streamers and then you know the audience you just see in them is like this this huge pool of people that should be watching it's just a constant looking at the survey in the area and [ __ ] on everybody if you don't know what's special about your product you will not be the best person and I think that's the class right there and I think that's the class for the directors over at Blizzard leaving is because like you know nothing about games it's like you have no idea it's like why am i listening to you you're coming in here swinging around but you can probably tell like a half-baked like from a mile

away like you're gonna come into my expertise and tell me yeah something related to your expertise which I don't doubt yeah yeah oh that sounds great and like yeah but you gotta work together but exactly you need there needs to be more cohesion yeah I'm assuming that that's probably the big problem yeah my way or the highway cuz I've done it before yeah in this other area yes related yeah and it's the wrong approach right because it's a it's a steady industry that's growing there's a lot of new things about it that people are learning about you can't just copy paste whatever you did in your industry and coming to our industry and then think it's gonna work well here's the thing we won't have to keep saying this kind of stuff very often because all the failures I keep seeing stacking up that the big publishers have to keep absorbing yeah it's gonna financially force them to change yeah yeah is gonna run out of pretty ways to save loot box yes it's going to happen yes right consumers are gonna dump the stock and yet continue to fail yeah so there's a point of inevitability where the two things cross and then EA has to course change blizzard is going to half the course

correct yeah so we can preach and March and you know wave the flag as much as we want I know but I also know that like there's gonna come a time where I'm not gonna have to say anything because literally they're gonna it's happen there exactly it's exactly happening and so uh let me pull these graphics apart and then go ahead and doing this so in touch yes so it's been about an hour thanking again for everybody's tuning in obviously if you're watching this on Twitch thank you for watching on youtube thank you even more from we a future or from the past we thank you fast we thank you today so again when join us daily on 10:00 a.m. next month next Friday we will be launching our new show backseat gamer okay and I'm gonna pick a game first for Larry to play so if you want to tune in and see what game I picked for him the trick is picking a game I know he's not good at and just [ __ ]

on him the whole time but Larry's method is probably gonna be more helpful and suggested but I'm just gonna be frantically frustrated the whole time it's cool it'll be fun it'll be so we go to do a test run next one I mean next week next Friday come join us then if you want to support us go to our patreon or you want to do a one-time donation and we love that too yeah either way it helps if it puts gas in my tank thank you very much I really appreciate it seriously and so that is the end of it sweet well you know what they say whenever you want to yell on the internet you use caps-lock and then you like apologize so you bring it back to regular font but then they mess up again so you use caps locks again consider yourselves recap I'm really mad I'm running out of ammo for that joke [Music]

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