Drawing the Ethical Line for Misleading UA Ads - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] it's created this sort of like table stakes where everyone is starting to have to be misleading and using these kind of ridiculous ads that don't have much to do with the game just to try to keep up with the ones that are already doing that [Music] hi friends welcome to the methodcast roundtable by navik and i'm already being burned by our guests [Laughter] today we're joined by anthony pekarella co-founder of level up labs david amor ceo of playment it's good to have you back and jimenville cpo at hutch welcome everyone hi hello hi this is the first time i've been on with tim and anthony um tim i've worked with in the past or at least because we've

compared notes in the past when uh when i needed to pick your brains about uh mobile free to play analytics and that kind of thing tim right yeah exactly back in the day nice to be here with you crossing over in brighton typically yeah yeah we share a city right yeah oh you should have a tag team called brighton boys i'd buy this shirt that's an entirely different kind of team oh no okay i just said how are your weeks been good weeks yeah good um let me think my point of view as you know maria i was knocked off my bike about a month ago been slowly recuperating i am now fit for podcasts happy to be back good anyone else has something exciting to share a heart-to-top a bike accident i'm getting over coveted at the moment but feeling feeling better last week was rough but i'm good now so i've just been going through that i'm pretty much pretty much there now this

is the first week i'm like yeah man i'm 100 on it we're doing the four-day working week and i'm like yeah that's happening i'm doing it i'm on top of things and then today a lot of things came at once and i'm like whoa hang on oh this has got a bit crazy hey that's how it goes very cool yeah kind of waiting for someone to ask me back oh yeah how was your weekend wow so lost and forgotten my week's been great in dnd i joined the cult so that's pretty cool if i play my cards right i might get wings and a pretty cool radiant weapon so i couldn't ask for more really wait a second all right let me just understand a little bit more about what you're doing this is in real life dnd game on online one hybrid it's all about hybrid working now is it and what does it mean to get your wings i get actual wings because it's a valkyrie cults so you know they have wings and they fly it's

pretty cool it's actually sorry they just like grafted onto your back or how do you well i didn't get a chance to ask many details because they're a bit dangerous and they were just asking you know either give us your blood and make a pact or you might die so i chose to make a pact i'm not i'm not sure this is safe okay i've got concerns um have you seen legend of vox machina it's a it's an amazon prime show that uh critical role um is doing and it's all very d um critics seem to love it it's fun it's uh probably more gory than uh game of thrones so like it's up on that but uh it's it's cool to see like all the dnd classes and races and um like kind of accurately represented in a show i have to watch it i actually found it quite interesting from a game design perspective because as part of this pact and this is a home room campaign that's

going to go on for another year or so if my character ever reaches zero hit points um i will lose power over my character my character will become an npc because she'll become just a follower of this cult and i have to generate a new character and someone in the group said well d d and games is all about giving players the option to make interesting decisions rather than the correct decisions i thought that's yeah that that does actually translate into fun awesome that sounds fun yeah all right topics what topics we have today we're going to be talking about web forums as a social hub for games and misleading advertising so that should be spicy um polygon is announcing well they have announced a zk evm and if we have time we'll talk briefly about the uk government's loot box self-regulation decision

all right tim you're up yeah all right so what yeah this uh just tickled me i saw the article about it and i'm a bit old-fashioned so i i don't go to develop but it's talking about how web forums are interesting way to support the community in your game they kind of fallen out of favor and then there were a bunch of people kind of singing their praises uh i think that forums still have a place but i also think we can do better so just to elaborate on some of that the really interesting part for me is the thing we did on top drives by accident which is we launched the game and linked to our web forum directly from in the game so okay great really making it up front getting loads of people in there and then like a couple of months later we switched to an in-game forum using a third party called kt play and but what that meant is we've stopped feeding people into the web forum and we've got the whole golden cohort there right like the players you get in the first week or month they're really the players who are the best for the game they love it most

and then they they sort of isolated from other players coming in and actually that became the best place for really detailed discussion between devs and players uh by that self-selection i was like oh this worked out quite well that wasn't the plan but it was brilliant and the forum was actually you know really really suitable for that kind of discussion the threading uh the stickies the longer posts all of that kind of thing we did eventually have to shut it down uh because we couldn't justify the cost but we migrated those players to a specific channel in discord and actually this is how we're working on the other games as well right you have your special you can have a special channel for the most trusted expert players uh for those more detailed conversations with devs uh that are really really valuable so i could say okay we maybe didn't lose anything actually you could preserve that value in in the new environment uh the the only other thing i was going to say is like what what could be even better than what we have now i know discord is

very clever with some of the you know bots and scripts you can do but i do think i've seen some places handle this quite well there's a whole thing about the existing players discussing things with each other and the new players coming in and there's a little bit of a bounce to be had there like you're having these detailed discussions about the game and new players are like what's that what is that what does that mean hey how do you do this and it like ah that's just messing it up and so there are some places that you know have a nice pattern of okay that goes on segregated over here that's very sensible uh i think that there's always a repetition thing where this question always comes up players don't look at faqs i do think this could be handled quite elegantly and that functionally if you're writing something into the form for the first time that actually should serve as a kind of search that an intelligent uh bot or something could say oh it hey you know there's been 17 posts about this and this one had a really good answer maybe just read that i feel like they could be something like that could get better i've seen it in some ways and never been that impressed and then

finally integrating it really tightly with the game uh i saw a lovely thing in the game called food fantasy which is a roster rpg where you collect characters that are based on food has a really cool thing where they have synergies that actually make sense for the for the food so if you combine the tea and milk they have super combo together for example anyway but they had a really lovely thing where there was a discussion thread for each of the campaign levels that you get to directly from the game and so and you can see players going ah this guy is really annoying oh yeah i solved it by bringing this character you know and and so contextually it was was beautiful i feel like that could be done in many other ways so anyway that's that's me what do you guys think forums dead forever well first of all i think this was sparked by the fact that gearbox had turned off their forums right and decided that instead they were going to point people to a disco or their discord instead i mean i think short version i think it's i mean what the discord is

completely different things from forums like it's uh transient it's noisy it's really uh just suitable for a certain kind of player that really pays attention to gives it everything it's com you can't spider it on the internet um so it just sort of disappears there's nothing to link to so you know maybe maybe i shouldn't say it's that but it's certainly so they're not the same thing so i don't think it's in in any way a good idea to say hey we're going to close our forums but we have the discord well they're two separate things you should you should have both in some shape or form and for them or indeed anybody to just rely on something transient like a chat client seems like a bad idea to me there we go there's my spicy take there is a scaling problem right for sure i could like if you're going there's a certain size and you handle your that socially in certain way even the forum will break down if it's just

just way too many people talking it's not going to work and discord as well so you have to manage that for sure um yeah i uh so i was at um congregate.com for about a decade and um so we were web browser games portal and um originally flash games but then as other detects came out and one of the noteworthy things about congregate compared to all the other platforms is that we had a live chat running right next to the flash games [Music] and there were public chat rooms you could join but we also had game specific chat rooms so you could join a chat room just for that game but we also had full forms so we had both of those things going and um as david was saying like they are very different functions um chat rooms were great they were really good at um like onboarding new players there were always some helpful people to sort of answer some initial questions and give some advice um and it was that sort of real social connection the forums on the other hand

were you know as you guys have been saying like they were searchable you could put persistent facts you could put um you know people would ask a question and it would get answered and then other people could find that answer and can ask for clarifications and um and so that ended up being much more of a good like reference and long-term um record of things and uh you know we absolutely kept both of those going for the whole time i was there and they each have their own challenges uh we had i think 600 volunteer moderators to keep chat somewhat seen and i had a whole bunch of other ones that are focused on forums and uh so it is a lot of effort to do it well and do it right um but you know we consistently found that there were players who were in chat all the time and wouldn't touch the forums and there are people who are in the forums all the time and would never speak in chat and everyone had their own place they like to be their own purposes um i think you know we we didn't have any searching in chat so it was even more transient

than something like discord but discord still is not going to have nearly the search capabilities of google at this point um and uh you know as that can continue to develop maybe but right now it's it's a chat client like it's it's um it's just a different purpose and i i don't understand why i certainly don't understand why you would get rid of your forums like even if you want to go read only at least let them search for something um but um yeah i mean i i don't know that like are you know teens now not even searching like is that just a go to the web and search for something you're looking for is that not a behavior no like i i honestly don't know if that's just not how people interact at this point go all the discord enough that just seems like such a pain for everyone who's in the discord like constantly asking answering questions i think it depends on the persona i think there's communication personas just like player personas and even in the game when we close the forums and had everyone go to discord there was some negative feedback about

the style of communication being very different so for example if you're in a forum you write a full post and then you post it's not like on discord where you write a few words and then you send and then you write another few words and you send and then because you're doing that conversations just start intermixing between one another and you lose track so i i can understand the point of consolidation of community because if you don't want to scale your your community team you can't have them spread across platforms so maybe it's finding that middle term depending on your audience yeah and just understanding the audience of your of your game and making the right choices we don't we don't spend as much time for example on twitter that we do on discord so i have no no good answer i understand why game companies are consolidating and at the same time i understand that they're different communication styles yeah i think as tim says a large part of the game is

this social it depends on the game but a large part of the game is the social interaction outside the game there's games that i've played where i spent more time talking about the games and forums and i haven't played in the game and it's still part of the game you know i wouldn't be there talking about it being excited about it if the game didn't exist and so maybe it depends on the kind of game you're making but to cut that part away seems um seems like a bad idea to me not sure where you do it i think there's just a place for different types of communities that can co-exist so when i search things for new games i'm playing it always leads me to to reddit so could reddit not just be the new forum yeah reddit is pretty good it's it's different again obviously it has its own pros and cons but you've got yeah you've got that threading you've got searching uh the whole uploading thing it does some really great stuff as a system for producing good results and it is what generally that is yeah my go-to thing any games i'm interested i'll just subscribe to the reddit and

then and then it's just all there it's all there it's really handy in that way i do appreciate it i i would say downside of reddit i love reddit but the downside is that the community is start is owned by the person that started it and if that person [Music] is the right person to do that then that's great and it's motivated to continue doing it and maybe has some support along the way and does it a good job of it then great you've got a healthy community but that is a sort of point of weakness that it probably depends on the person the moderators of that subreddit being the right sort of people to grow it which isn't guaranteed so maybe i i think i've got a friend who's building something in this space his uh thesis for his company is that that people that are contributing to the content be it moderators or people creating the content should see some value from that should see some benefit from it and it's sort of a web what i would describe as a web free idea where if you're creating value for

the game if even if it's not inside the game itself then shouldn't you see some sort of benefit from that other than some sort of kudos ranking and i think that's you know when tim you talk about where could you how could this be evolved and to me that's an interesting direction you could take and even if it's not web 3 at least recognizing the value that content creators and moderators add uh even if it's not through token in some other way than just a star ranking next to them or something yeah i mean i think splinter lands oh sorry tim oh go go ahead uh splinter lens i believe has a rewarded community is it based on hive i'm not sure the technology but i remember reading something where people were saying that actually the content quality was worse because people were posting just the post right in order to get that reward i guess to what i was going to say so i actually tried something like this in i think 2008

uh very niche there was a website i haven't checked if it's still alive called anime papers they had a whole complicated ecosystem where you could earn currency by contributing to the forums or uploading scans high-res scans of anime stuff or anger whatever you've got and then people would photoshop that and make cool wallpapers out of it and it was trying to create this whole economy to create value and share value but the forum had exactly that problem but everybody was just writing stuff to get points and then they made a rule that you can't repeat stuff we've already spoken about because that's just spam and the net result was surreal it was so people going uh tennis we we haven't talked about tennis yet right yeah who's got some opinions about tennis so yeah you've got to design that quite carefully yeah yeah um i would say that you could design that quite carefully i don't think that's a busted flash there's there's more to be said about that sorry anthony definitely

oh that's okay um there's there's a little bit of a um uh kind of a bitter um i know skeptic side of things or um where like it used to be for the intrinsic value of it like you know people would contribute to a community because they enjoyed it like the the moderators wanted the community to be a better place they um they'd like to feel special like we gave them their own access to a forum and we'd talk to them a lot and like once a year we'd send them like a little present or something but you know they were doing it because they loved the community and they wanted to be involved in it and the content creators were doing it because you know they wanted to put stuff out there and they wanted people to play their games and um you know i do believe in people being rewarded for their work but there's also a question of um you know once you start uh you know paying people for something uh the motivations start to change um and i think we see that even in like work situations where like people you paying people you know extra bonuses or something

isn't necessarily going to lead to better work results or better work satisfaction um and so like it's it's that same sort of you know how do we reward behavior and how intrinsic versus extrinsic and as it's its own separate topic and maybe some other time but um yeah it's it's uh it's an interesting motivation question i guess and just before we go to the next topic um david is playment having forums it's um no we have a discord despite the fact i just trashed discord we do have a discord it's just not my happy place so i don't know i'd be happy to see those forums return you caught me out there didn't you maybe it's on the roadmap here's the fact that it was something that when you were talking maria reminded me of this headline i've seen this week that i'm going to get it slightly wrong only but um 40 of teens use tiktok instead of google to search for things now so they you know if you want to find out

about i don't know whatever topic you want pride weekend then you wouldn't go to google and type pride weekend you're going to uh dig talk and that wouldn't even occur to me to do that i love tik tok but it's still that isn't where i go for search for things and i suppose it's just a reminder to me that this is an evolving space isn't it and and what works for me isn't necessarily what works for other people and there's different ways of approaching the same problem yeah i think tick tock now is uh is a popular app to get news from sure it is the idea of searching for using that to search for something that you're interested in like uh would you go there for you know some people will be going there searching for top drives tips probably but uh it's probably not the way that you think about it maybe i should start recording some tick tock videos i just saw tim recoil visibly at that idea i think i could come up with some cool jingles and dances like doing a little break you have to go where the people

are don't watch the right like there you go yeah it's worth tracking and you know and sorry i know you we're about to move on i made the mistake a long time ago where i made a game and made a forums for that game and were really really frustrated that people went elsewhere to talk about my game and was trying to pull them no no can't we go we've made a place for you to talk about it but of course that's just completely wrong-headed and if there's a community going on anywhere you should be thrilled and and just if the party's going on over there then go over there probably that's uh nothing to complain about is it it might be an interesting topic for future episodes talk about whether releasing a guild or clan type feature in your game must have a chat or not because that's that's something i've i've never found a good answer right right right all right anthony misleading ads yeah um so i think we've all seen um the ads that uh have nothing to do with the mobile

games this is pretty much just on mobile um which is kind of its own right yes that's the ones um i remember even seeing the game release that was advertising itself as the game that you've been seeing advertised um but uh yeah i think and i mean i think play rick's gardenscapes was one of the first ones to really do it and um and it's it struck me i think because you know as a player it's frustrating to me um as a you know someone in the mobile space who is trying to do user acquisition to acquire users it's very frustrating um because the fact is they they work right like they are when you you show something what they want to see rather than what you have they will are more likely to come and get that and you know there are reasons that like the ftc has um the u.s federal trade commission has um laws against misleading advertising

um [Music] and uh but i've seen you know people actually cite play ricks as being innovative and you know really kind of just you know like changing the space in like almost a good way because it brought down costs to install and but uh you know for me i think it's doing a huge disservice to players and they're probably getting away with it because you're not paying for it right like you download a game for free and we're used to downloading games that aren't good and you delete it and if you like it then you keep it and people aren't you know if you were paying you know a couple of euros to download this thing from people and it was totally different than what you expected people would be really upset um but it's created this sort of like table stakes where everyone is starting to have to be misleading and using these kind of ridiculous ads that don't have much to do with the game just to try to keep up with the ones that are already doing that um and so it's it's created this culture where i've talked with advertisers who are like trying i've even found myself doing

it where you're trying to justify like we've got to do this even to be able to participate we've gotta like we try to stay as close as we can to the game but we still sort of take some liberties because you know it's just what are you gonna do um and so i'm curious you know as to the sort of like the ethical side of it the legal side of it i don't know you know why no one's really stepped in on this um i did i'm okay and i was one more i talked to a lawyer friend of mine who also asked the question you know how is it different from a cinematic trailer for a game that looks nothing like the game so anyway go ahead maria i can see tim almost jumping out of his chair tim come on what are you doing yeah it's interesting because i've gone on a bit of a journey on this like i started out the same as you like this is unfair and ridiculous like we made a legit good game we present an ad showing you what the game is like these guys made some other game presents something else and they're stealing users based on the thing they didn't even make and here we are trying to be honest promote our thing it's outrageous but no i have i

have softened on it like for one thing i think that as there's the platform as the system has matured i don't know maybe i'm i don't feel it has become the dominant thing that everybody's doing and you have to do it to get in i don't i don't think it has people wise up to it right like i don't know how much of this was just facebook changing their policy but the like clickbaity titles you know like 37 most dramatic ceo incidents in brian number seven will shock you like you don't you don't see that anymore there was a thing where it was well the effective and everybody was like wow what is number seven i want to know and then everybody was like wait number seven was nothing why did i click on that and then it you know it the feedback loop kicks in you can't fool all humans forever so i think it doesn't create the massive systematic effect i was worried about and you you don't see clickbait advertising anymore no i do i do but you you recognize it it's that one again it's that one again and then sometimes there's one you go oh

that's a bit weird is that the thing or not you know you you question it so yeah it's out there but i don't feel like it has become table six uh well we're not doing them and we're doing okay there's an example i guess but the other thing i was going to say is that there's also two ways that i think are kind of legitimate uh going all the way back to game of war how i think really first were the big guys doing this they they had like every kind of ad you could imagine it was like there's a first person shooter it's game of war his uh catapult attack game is game of war this is a tower defense game uh but the dominant one and that winning i think was tower defense and i could see how in a way the game is too complicated you can't convey what this game is in 30 seconds you just can't but you could convey the simple thing and say do you like this if you like this you'll like that it's a bit different but you know it's it's in the right direction so i could sort of see that i guess the cinematic trailer for you know

console games is similar it's like this is the gist it's not the actual thing but if you like this you'll probably like it so i can kind of see that and then the other one where we get into it is research purposes right where you go maybe this feature would be good in the game well it'll take us three months to implement it but we could make a video of it in a week and we could just put it out there a bit and see if people click on it now that is annoying for consumers but maybe it's better for them in the long run or even for a completely new game like imagine an ecosystem there's some people making games and in one version of it they make 100 ads for different games they put them out and they work out which ones people like and in another universe they make those games one at a time and try them in that other universe they're going to go out of business and not make games people like and then the other one they're going to find good games and people are going to be happy longer term that's extreme but you you get the point and the final part that really hinges on it for me is that what should happen here and i really

worry especially because of those two points i mentioned about legislation saying this is you can't do that because how do you even draw that line like you nobody can represent perfectly a game in 30 seconds anyway you can do errors of the mission so i do think it's just in the systems that they the platforms control that you have to do it right like you go from the ad to the store okay you see the screenshots well we can control that now we the the stores can say your screenshots are nothing like the game this is not allowed and so in a way that safety barrier maybe it could be improved but i feel like that is that is where it should sit and they have done that right on that yeah i mean i don't know how much is police but that became a thing didn't it sorry murray i don't know if it was the uk if it's only in the uk but at least the play risk games here in the uk they had to integrate their mini games showing shown in the ads into the game itself due to rules yeah you're asking like who's going to think

about it in terms of legislation it was yeah that's the only one i've heard of uk going no yeah advertising standards you're not allowed no that i think that was a platform thing i think that was apple and google wasn't it they insisted that the screenshots and the way it's presented was at least the screenshots i think that you think both um i'm going to be super cynical here i think misleading advertising just happens in other products you know i still go to the yogurt section at the shop and they're like zero percent fat but then you look at the ingredients and it's all sugar so it's actually not good for you to buy the zero percent fat um and i think it's a bit like this here i don't think there's a way legislating it feels a bit too heavy-handed to resolve a problem is it a severe problem for players again because they can see in the store it's free to play in this case so they didn't lose any money in that return i think something i'm finding really interesting though is

game developers thinking about ways to create almost tick-tock-like moments or advertising moments within their game so for example we look at royal match and they have the king levels and then they use those king levels to create really interesting ads or i don't fully agree with this one but kingdom maker has a make babies animation sequence where you see two people going behind this bed and you see the bed shaking and feet and arms um and that that's the video i've just been i i see being shared widely um yeah and i think this this this started also for example with other entertainment forms i remember childish gambino made a song called this this is america and the whole video was shot in a way to maximize how many gif opportunities could then be created on social media and i think that's something that game developers can start putting within

their designs those key moments that even though it's not the core gameplay they will still lend themselves really well to creating um ads for you eh yeah i suppose i've got to add to that it's interesting to me that the game that people click on is a game that they i mean there's a reason why they don't show the game footage because that's not engaging enough for them like to play garden skates or whatever it is if they just show footage obviously they've done a b test to suggest that a better ad to show is the one that doesn't represent gameplay but equally they don't that the one that would represent gameplay i if you actually implemented the version of the ad then that isn't as successful as gardenscapes so it's interesting that you need to use something that doesn't represent the game but when you get to the game you don't the fact that it's different is good and keeps people there for longer and in a way if you didn't oh you know maybe this is a stretch anthony i'll give you this but you know maybe if um

maybe if you didn't have ads that could draw people cost effectively to a different kind of game then the type of games you get have would be narrower and less varied because it turns out that to get people playing you need to offer them something i guess is your point him that they can understand in five seconds whereas actually the game that they'd prefer to play for a longer period of time can't be conveyed in that period of time therefore you need to find another method to get people to it and that's just uh if you want a breadth of game then and i'm not sure you would say play wicks are the champions of breadth of game styles and nonetheless to get people to a different kind of game you need to present a different um the the ad doesn't represent the gameplay necessarily um i think for me it crosses the line when it starts being for example sexist or misogynist or just you're you're appealing to a certain i don't know player target i suppose

for i think it was play ricks who used um it was a mother and a baby in a cold room and they were shivering and they couldn't take care of each other and then you have to rebuild the room i always got really bothered with those ads and this isn't even the worst like some games out there it's um you know a woman walking through a zombie apocalypse and then she's like oh i can't live and then she finds this person on the floor she's like oh can you save me um so i i'm clearly very triggered i want to hear anthony's feels like anthony needs a right to reply here so what do you what do you think of these comments anthony uh let's see so um you know i i will i will grant you that it is it is hard to represent um a complex game in 30 seconds or in some cases even five seconds before the skip button pops up um and i think there are ways i mean like garden escapes you could show like the choice between the things

that you want to put in your house and then like a quick match thing and like it's not the whole game but it's at least adjacent to the game um and so i think yes and and i've worked with some advertising where you know we tried to represent the kind of the ideas of the game um but it was at least like relevant to it and so when you get to the game it's like oh okay this is still based on you know the sort of sci-fi presence or whatever um but when it's something that's completely different then you know what you're doing is just like i mean to me that's getting back to clickbait um the uh i mean you had the what was it um caesary that had the play now my lord this was like a decade ago of the like sexy women in just a little um med wreck on the uh on a website and people just click on it having no idea what the game was but it would convert because people click on it uh and so it's sort of like i guess it's sort of a you know do the

ends justify the means kind of question like there's there's a little bit of an ethics question for me um that apply i mean it's a little bit different in terms of the like the sexist ones which i think are also awful but for a slightly different reason in some cases um that uh at least the i mean i think the main game industry this is a whole different thing as growing up like uh console games and um i've grown up a bit in terms of um uh like representation of women and everything but mobile is definitely a bit more of a wild rest right now with some in some cases um but uh uh yeah i i think you know it's just when you're having to do something that is completely silent i mean you can be advertising a new knife and then someone goes and downloads the game like is that okay like can you just i mean where is there a line or is it literally like you can do anything as long as you get the click and then it's okay um i think that's yeah yeah like i can see that there's two systems part that worry me right like one is

what if you like you're poisoning the well are you just like consumers go well this is ridiculous all the ads are irrelevant i will now ignore all ads because i can't believe anything i see that that'll be bad that would be bad for everyone and then the other one is backing up what um marie was saying i there's a weird uh sort of synchronicity i think it's because the systems that play are similar have you seen the horror that is kids youtube there's some articles about this like some system or some people converges to produce the absolute maddest and most horrendous content and it's optimized over time just like these creatives have to find what gets the views what gets the clicks and it is it's this similar stuff it's like frequently it's pregnant elsa from frozen being menaced by the joker like it's uncanny it's really similar where it ends up and i'm like is this the horror that if you create a system that optimizes its way into the cuban id this is what you end up with

like it's quite terrifying and i could say yeah i don't want a system that promotes that as the way so then what's the um what would you do anthony to reign it in if that's broadly what you'd like to do would you legislate or would you hope that the game is some sort of code of conduct for advertising in the mobile games industry that feels like a push not sure i'm not sure that people would adhere to it um yeah i think we'll talk about self-regulation and legislation a little later today too um so i mean there there is legislation at least in the u.s about false advertising like you can't say something does something and then it doesn't um so you know whether or not that should extend in this case i'm not sure but you know there there is some protection um uh against that and clearly in the uk too since they made uh guard escapes put in those little sliding puzzles um just to sort of

technically it's it's in there um you know i i would i would hope that consumers would wise up to it tim but i think we're seeing that they aren't like the this is still i i don't know most of the ads i see nowadays i think are still in that like we still see some that are doing well advertising their own games and those are great that's fantastic um but uh you know having talked to advertising experts they're often coming in and recommending misleading advertising as like the the ideal way to do it uh so yeah i'd love to see some some self-policing because i don't think the audience is doing it i think it's it's like the kids youtube where just you optimize for it and that's what had clicks and you know that's that's what the data says so we're gonna do it um and uh it just keeps working so uh yeah it's i mean some of it is just like oh it's not fair because i want to be more like honest about my my own games um and so maybe that's just me whining because i don't want to uh compromise on that but

um yeah i'm not sure what the right solution is but it to me it's there's there's one more line i'd like to draw to protect it as well which is in terms of the ability to control the ads that appear in your own game uh this is a problem we have we say oh we're not allowing these five events and these guys they find some shenanigans they get around it and they show some 18 plus ad in a game that's not supposed to have it like come on don't do that right like okay i appreciate advertising it's complicated there's a whole complicated system between the person showing the ad and which one gets shown that there's all these intermediaries right so i don't know where this happens it tries to happen it doesn't seem to succeed i would like to see that strength um well we'll continue a bit on the self-regulation and the unfairness of whether you choose to walk the ethical line or not in the in the last topic so before we get there david polygon and ck yeah i don't know if is too nerdy to me it's quite interesting but we'll see how we get on and also i've written myself some notes so that i can try and

explain it in a way that i think is digestible so apologies if i'm dumbing down but but equally maybe it's useful to set the scene so first of all layer one block chains like bitcoin or ethereum or cardana or um miscellaneous are a layer one box they're sort of big and slow and not really great to use with games and so both for people making games and people playing games the block the layer one blockchains that exist aren't particularly fit for purpose so they're interesting but not great and there's been a number of solutions and come onto in a second but none of that worked particularly well polygon who i think is probably the most famous gaming um blockchain have in or are talking about a new blockchain for dk evm that really hopes will fix some of the problems both in terms of the developers and in terms of uh the players to make something that's easier and faster to use and i think it probably is worth doing a

little bit of on taxonomy i had covered a bit of it there but uh you know a layer one blockchain i think of as like a completely separate country like if you've got something you can't really keep things on blockchain but blockchain doesn't talk with ethereum they're completely separate they can't join up in any way or at least it's very very hard for them to do so completely separate and very slow one of the reasons is and but very secure one of the reasons is bitcoin like will have 50 000 nodes so to try and corrupt it you'd have to you know be an enormous effort ethereum has 000 nodes so again has lots of computers all verifying those transactions great for keeping it secure but makes it slow and expensive to use so the solution to today has been side chains pretty much and the idea there is they're faster and cheaper but the way they do that is they have less nodes uh but it but that also makes them less secure so famously ronin which is a side chain uh had five nodes and then three of them

got taken over and 600 million dollars was extracted from it so and polygon proof of stake which is their blockchain to date um is also a side chain and i suppose and really they're just like mini blockchains but if the same amount of people use polygon proof of stake as use ethereum then it would suffer the same problems of ethereum so it's not it's like a band-aid solution and i think anybody using it knows any of these chains knows that it's a band-aid solution and and you can and it's easier to get your assets from one of these side chains to ethereum where you could sell them on something like open c but but nonetheless the side chain isn't i think everybody including polygon would agree that's not the right long-term solution so i think this what's been announced this week and they're not the only ones doing this is uh blockchains with based on a technology called zk roll ups and what they do is uh you you round blockchain code on these what's called a layer two

and the difference is that all the time they're bundling up those transactions and sending them to the main blockchain so in the case in this case they're sending it to ethereum and if you think that you're zipping up all those transactions every i don't know minute or whatever it is putting it to ethereum then it's cost effective because you're zipping things up and you're only paying for one transaction but um but it has that security of ethereum so it's sort of getting the best of both worlds and so i think that the reason why so i guess other people doing this is uh stark net is probably furthest ahead but that uses a different programming language i think the thing that people are excited about with this polygon ck evm is here's another type of zk uh roll up technology a layer two but this time you can write it in the same programming language as you can ethereum which is called solidity so i first of all i sort of stopped there and does that make sense am i missing anything out so far it does does for me

um i have one question so far so it's the stark net zk technology i think they're in partnership with immutable life well immutable x uses uh stock x okay so but you don't have to have an agreement with immutable x to access the technology stark net is still sort of open source similar to polygons yes um they are they're they're both zk roll ups and um immutable x it uses that technology but if you're a game maker then it only does that a set of things it only it's not programmable so you can't actually run code on it you can only ask immutable to do the dozen or so things that it does which i'm sure it does very well but if you're trying to write a blockchain code then the mutable doesn't allow you to do that ollie last time i spoke to oh so so bit like a game choosing to use unreal or unity as a game and an engine

instead of using their own game engine uh correct but you can only do a this set of it's not programmable so you can only use immutable or forte or you know whatever other systems to to use that set of things that they do like mint something or bridge something or if you want to try and do something new then you don't get to do that so that's the difference between those i suppose uh it's sort of i guess maybe kind of like using mario maker versus writing in c plus like mario maker lets you do a set of things and i mean a lot more than what uh immutable does but you know you can only do the things that are there and you can put them together in however way you want but if you want to write any sort of custom code a smart contract or something that's not possible on on um yeah that's that's right i understand and and so you can have so why is using solidity importance well solidity is a programming language that that's the

language of smart uh contracts so you can actually run code on ethereum that you can invent yourself and and that's a little bit like javascript and and it allows you to uh run code on chain and uh and i suppose the exciting new thing is that this is technology that actually looks like it might be fit for purpose to allow people to run run their own code on a blockchain rather than just relying on these services that just do a set of things i would say that starknet is further ahead as a technology and in indeed they invented a lot of the ideas that are being used in this ck roll-up technology but you had to learn a different programming language they would argue that it gets a better result and it might but but i but i suppose the difference here is the polygon who have a lot of momentum already behind their blockchain efforts to say hey you have all the benefits of zika roll-ups plus you don't even have to

rewrite in another language so i think that's why people oh another one is that that it's all open source and some of the other people doing this it's not all open source so i think that probably uh people like it for that fact as well but uh yeah it's quite a big uh it hasn't happened yet it's just been formally announced so it's not really news in a sense but uh right would you guess that's darknet sorry does darknet say anything about it they seem to be the only ones in the playground and now someone else might be well i mean they don't say publicly because they're too polite i spoke to them about it i think that what they would say i don't think they might be saying is that they are trying to build a car not a faster horse and by that they're saying hey we have to change programming languages if we're going to do this properly so yeah i know it's all painful and you don't like it and there's this new language cairo you've got to learn but that's the price of that you know you have to go some

pain in order to get the best possible results polygon are taking in a different approach which is to say um no you can just use the same programming language and of course for a lot of people that are looking to make get something up and run more running more quickly then that's a uh that's attractive is this does this change the the trade-offs then is that is the triangle uh decentralization versus security versus scalability right i don't remember looking into this a year ago when it was kicking off and i was like huh you know yeah i don't think the compromise is ever going to be good between those this is not going to work and then does this like oh this unlocks it oh you can actually have that scalability without compromising as much on yeah that's that's exactly the that's the reason why people are excited is that you still have that security while being on a system that um is a lot faster to use and and to give

you some numbers when we put our first game out then when we did a transaction on ethereum uh which is you do a transaction to play the game then it cost the player 20 in gas when we did the same on polygon proof of stake then that was like 10 cents to do the transaction so certainly there's a huge cost saving it's much quicker but the problem is as ronin found is that it's not particularly secure and isn't really nobody feels it's a particularly good long-term solution so i think people are excited that at some level it solves that triangle problem you described him one of the challenges with um an evm with the ethereum virtual machine is that it's not particularly fast like computationally um so like there are some games that are trying to do like fully hunching games and it's um you know there's only so much they can do because it's just not a fast system uh does this change like is this mostly about transactions or would it actually allow

like the smart contracts to run more efficiently and that that may be a distinction that i'm not really making that isn't just about right blockchains are slow you know someone described it to me you know ethereum's about the speed of an apple ii there's a way of thinking about it which is you know a big step back and this this is faster you know the um but but still i think you need to take a different approach uh both in terms of game design and how you do our technology we we're having that problem and we use a system called uh called zk proofs for doing a lot of the computation on in the client in the game and then proving that it's correct and sending to the blockchain to prove that what's been done locally is correct so i think that us and other games companies are saying okay blockchains are always going to be pretty slow even even if they're improved what can we do in the interim to solve that issue but i don't know one of the things that i i'm in my bubble you know this is my day-to-day dealing with this kind of thing to you guys is this just a

oh well we have google cloud and we have azure and we have aws i don't know they're all systems who cares uh is that or is it different i don't know i think it depends how into the technical side you're keen on and you're curious about this is bringing me back a little bit to node.js um coming around where it wasn't as good to do server dev as for example something like java but people still used it because someone who knew javascript could then be full stack so it it seems a little bit like that where zk evm for polygon might not be as good as using something like starknet but because you can ex you can utilize the same team to do more things then the trade-offs might make sense so i'm curious about it from that perspective tim you've got any strong feelings about this yeah well yeah because going to that that thing right looking back in that triangle and going hey this is kind of cool that because of those compromises i'm not sure you could really make anything that great with it

and then going back to the last time i was lars was talking about dark forest and like oh this is something legit that'd be cool you couldn't do another way but it can't scale and so now it's like okay like maybe the ingredients are coming together there is something interesting you you can't do another way now maybe you can scale ah maybe we're unlocking something new there well and you know also that's a great point because i think that you blockchain has a load of roadblocks in front of it and it's unclear whether or not their roadblocks you can never get around or will at some point get round and as you said there's long time people say you can't do anything new with blockchain and then some things happen and if some things happen then that that are new and interesting then there's probably more that were undiscovered and then you say you could say up a blockchain so slow it's never going to work and then somebody and vast amounts of resources money people are being thrown at these problems so i mean you know maybe that's why we're getting

there but then okay this looks like it might be a solution to the problem that it's uh this triangular problem where you have to sacrifice speed or security or something and now it feels like okay we're actually getting over some of the things that we thought might have been blockers and presumably we would be able to get over a few more so maybe in a sense that's what's exciting to me that things that seem to be hugely problematic is starting to be pushed away i was just going to say that i feel in the web 3 gaming tests of david i got a b minus and tim god i didn't you weren't being tested marie i saw your happiness in your eyes when jim said that he was excited about it i mean yeah tim's right that was a problem that seemed unfathomable this idea you've got to make a compromise and maybe not i would say there's a little footnote there so there's some argument over the internet if it's 100 compatible with evm and i think some people feel that it bent the truth a little bit there just full disclosure i should say

but but i mean from my point of view having currently building on polygon proof of stake i'm thrilled because it means that i can move my game server code to this few more future-proof technology without having to rewrite it i mean who knows we'll we'll do some performance tests we we also like starting it a lot so so i don't know which way it will go but it feels like we have some options now sorry we need to move on to the last topic so closing closing statements i i was just going to ask a a quick question which is like do you think that there's sort of an equivalent of moore's law that's going to apply here where it is going to just keep getting faster or are we going to hit a like a ceiling pretty quickly just good question there's nothing necessary i've ever seen in computers that hasn't adhered to moore's law isn't it so i i can't answer that intelligently other than saying i'd be surprised if it didn't all right what i was just going to say it's every future innovation like we're just

talking about with discord right the new thing comes in and people go well look it's not as good as this thing that we used to have in this way or this way and it'll never solve this problem lying to the fact that oh it's better at this other thing and maybe that isn't a problem and maybe this problem can be solved so yeah you've always got to remember anytime there's something new defaulting to oh the old way's better because it's actually because you know it more and you don't know what can't and can be solved yet yeah and sometimes the audience will choose for you because if everyone's on discord you have to be on discord i don't know how this applies to blockchain but we'll we'll see hopefully the audience will will grow over time okay last topic uh the uk government loot boxes self-regulation drop the little peppers of spiciness okay so a couple weeks ago the uk government they were doing um an investigation and they told the games industry that they have to take action on loot boxes

or they're going to risk future legislation but for now they're allowing self-regulation so in particular it says that children and young people should not be able to purchase loot boxes without parental consent and i believe that was sort of already um a rule based on the age-appropriate design code that the uk government is well has already implemented and they had some recommendations that the industry could follow for example letting players know that loot boxes uh do not guarantee success um trying to present the real you know the fiat value of the hard currency or soft currency that they're using so that people can not get lost in a distortion of how how expensive it is having an inclusion of messages when players have exceeded a certain number of purchases and then advises them to pause spending um i see this a little bit like how mmorpgs usually have a

message where if you're playing for a certain amount of hours they tell you you should take a break but doing this in terms of monetization so i'll open the floor is this mostly about kids and loot boxes or is it about loot boxes more generally in general they were investigating claims that loot boxes are gambling and gambling is proven to have a negative effect on humans and so they wanted to understand whether loot boxes having being similar to gambling also causes harmful effects on on human beings and i read i skimmed through the full document that they wrote and they did surveys they seemed quite in-depth surveys but it was limited the number of games that were being surveyed so it doesn't span a very wide breadth of the industry they seem to reach the conclusion of for now it's okay to self-regulate and i assume part of this is that as soon as

you decide to regulate something the government is also going to have costs in trying to enforce the regulation and so i can see also why there's a motivation from the governments to first try to incentivize self-regulation before going all in and having to do it for the industry well i'll start by if it's about uh i'll start then just if it's about kids a bit i never understand about mobile phone game misuse spending and kids is doesn't that fall under the parental controls of the phone not not sort of passing it on but my kids uh have phones and they play games but they can't buy things and that's how it's set up by default so a really easy way i would imagine for people to stop kids spending on anything in game is just to not allow that for the parents to tick that box i'm not trying to be offhand about it or saying that the

games industry shouldn't be think about that carefully but i don't i don't understand why that isn't the first port of uh i do think the platforms could do that a lot better right because i think if you look at surveys like how many parents use these systems to control their children hardly any how many even though they exist hardly any so i yeah i think the platforms it's not us we can't do it one game at a time it's not the answer but the platforms could improve the surfacing and functionality of these features that is reasonable yeah yeah they analyzed the parental controls and they did find that it wasn't how do you call it a healthy percentage of parents that were aware that they could control their children's spending um but again it's not only based on the children it's also based on adults so for example digital banks now have the ability for you to select to not allow transactions that are gambling related so even if you have if even if because

self-control isn't something that we can do every single moment of the day so having technology also protect you when you're going through a moment where your self-control is more limited i think that is indeed something like tim was saying that maybe platforms could do better um i do agree that some kind of self-regulation in the industry as as a consumer and someone who works in free-to-play just sounds like a healthy thing to do you know try to inform your players about the decisions that they're making what do you think anthony um yeah so uh i i do agree that the platform's like there is an education problem of parents and you know new tech is always going to have that to some extent i know i got away with a lot of stuff on computer as a kid because my parents didn't know how to stop things from happening so like you know the kids are going to know things that the parents don't and if the platforms aren't educating on that there is only so much that can be done and i i think

very few people are going to argue with the no we want eight-year-olds to be spending as much as they want like that's no one in the industry is going to defend that um and uh when i was at congregate we we had in-app purchases and uh anytime a parent called in and said hey my kids spent all this we would just refund everything um and usually banned the account just so that people don't you know use that as a way around things but um which was one of the things that they also the uk government recommended was having generous refund policies um so uh yeah there is that side of things um of uh the the kids and you know please let's think of the children um but the the other side of the gambling side um you know i i do think that there is enough even though you can't cash out which is one of the the defenses that people use um you know there is a lot of personal value that people get out of games like that's why they're willing to spend money in the first place is because this is their hobby this is what they enjoy doing and you know they get

this entertainment value out of buying things and so the the ability to spend money and not know what you're getting out of it uh you know it does have some parallels i think um and so the there's been some regulation by uh the google and apple like requiring um odds to be shown of the uh of loot boxes um i know it was a 15 20 years ago i think maybe 10 15 years ago that uh japan outlawed compu gacha which was a form of gotcha but it was so hard to like people just couldn't understand the odds it was it was such an obscure thing that there was no real way to a player understood how hard it was for it to happen and so um people weren't able to make educated decisions but you know in the same way david that you are shocked the player parents don't use the controls i don't understand why anyone would ever buy loot box without seeing the odds like why if you don't know what's going to get out like even your chances of getting out with it why would you buy it like to me like my math brain like that's just inconceivable because

what are you getting but you know that's been the standard and people have done that for years so we have in the uk we in our slot machines fruit machines what they call in america i forget anyway they have a payout rate which is mandated by law but in very small print and it's there i'd be surprised if that has any effect at all so i i guess before sort of jumping to conclusions about what we should put in our game in terms of payout rates it could just be futile which isn't to say we should just wash our hands of it but if we're gonna put something in like if that payout rate has no bearing on people's how much people spend then it's just not the best use of our time and we should probably find another approach um don't know warnings on cigarettes are kind of a good example of that like how many people really decide not to because there's a little warning on it like they've already decided well but someone who has not done it before for example smoking could be

really put off like i i've never smoked and i'll never smoke even more after seeing the horrible pictures on these on these packs it creates little moments i remember seeing somebody getting out the cigarette packet and there was a kid there and they looked at the packet they're like why are you doing that it says it kills just i like this little smile okay i think i think it's responsible if you're as a as a consumer i like to know what i'm purchasing and with some purchases i make i do a lot more investigation and i try to understand it further for example food versus if i'm i don't know buying a plushie who knows um and i think companies and products have the responsibility to inform their consumers of what they're buying and so things like showing the odds and loot boxes yeah we should definitely do that i don't understand why more games don't don't do it for me the ethical like what were you

discussing in the misleading ads for me the difficulty of game self-regulating is that there's a pressure on the company to decide how much of the ethical line are we going to walk because i don't think there's going to be many companies out there jumping the gun to say we're going to be the first to tell players to stop spending because they're spending too much there's also it's pretty old now i think but a case study on that uh i think it was king uh they tried out this putting a message in front of players who spent a certain threshold say hey you know are you sure are you okay maybe we can help you or maybe it's a bad idea and the response was massively negative these players are like what are you doing get out of my business this is my money i know what i'm doing i can't believe you'd even think you should put this in front of me and i can see it like because where is that threshold that's that is really hard right there are players for whom a hundred dollars is a really silly thing they should not be spending a hundred dollars and there are other players for whom that's nothing they'll

do it it's fine they should not be spending fifteen thousand dollars or something so it people are so different that's really hard and we can't we can't know about it either so i do i i i like the idea of it the idea that of the game saying hey you know this is a bit crazy maybe take a step back like spending too much time in an mmo but where you draw that line is really really hard yeah and so in an mmo it just appears as a little line in the chat so it's not very disruptive like a massive pop-up just yeah and it's more uniform right like 14 hours is a long time to be playing for everyone like definitely that's maybe just think about that whereas the money thing is a lot crazier yeah i mean i think you're absolutely right like a hundred dollars is very very different to different people um and you know maybe the message is not you know hey this is crazy um but you know i i can't think of a single game where i can look and see how much

money i've spent total like there's no sense i mean that's part of the reason that virtual currencies are used not the only reason but like it does sort of abstract out how much you're spending um and so you know whereas i can look at a store or something i can see i mean it's not really easy to find on amazon but you can get a sense of how much you've spent um so i think at least like just having that awareness because it's the to me the one of the risks is it's sort of just sneaking up on you like if you're spending ten dollars every couple days like that can become a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars in a couple months um and you're just not aware of it so you know i think some surfacing of how much you've spent and if you're fine spending that much something great um it's just you know awareness but um i think also like a few guys i really like the idea of that one because it could be it could even not be that detrimental to the game but maybe i'm wildly optimistic but you i can imagine a few positive effects like a players like i bought the 10 pack

10 times in the last two weeks probably i should have bought 100 pack because it's better or a player might say i pay 30 in this game every month i've been playing it for years wow i didn't realize i valued it that much and then like oh months gone past and i haven't spent 30 dollars maybe i should then because i usually do i don't know if that's good or bad but being more informed about it like that does sound fair i like that idea the platforms could do it all the games could do it as well right yeah it's less it's less about enforcing player behavior via the game itself through its its features and its design and more trying to like not preventing players from knowing the full breadth of information of their actions so if you want to you do have that information available to you and i think uh i think league of legends does this i remember a friend saying that him and his group of players well friends who played together they all went to see how much they've spent in league of legends and we're very surprised to find out

what that total was like yeah but we're broadening this out a bit i mean the piece was about loop uh loot boxes specifically rather than yeah worrying about people spending too much money i think um i i don't know how much attention people would pay to um payout rates for the reason you said you to you anthony like why wouldn't you look at that because that's almost about the gameplay figuring out how what the chance of you getting that is uh i guess it's it's not often straightforward to implement that when we look to that in the past uh loot boxes i mean i'm not doing this now but blue boxes were the payout rate was influenced by who you were where you are in the game so that wasn't just a fixed number that was something that part of segmentation and changed according to what you were doing at least that was the designer i don't know if we ever implemented that but uh and it's not just as straightforward as writing the number i wouldn't think

and that's where like regulations around like gambling would apply as well like and at least in the u.s like you're every individual um they have to be independent events so like if you're having a losing streak they can't give you a win because that smooth influences it um i do have a general question like we've talked a few times about self-regulating and the uk government said like you know you you guys as an industry need to do this or we're going to step in like how does that work like what you know is there an industry body that gets that we all agree has the ability to enforce things and i mean we're talking worldwide so i mean who does that how does that even possible well i mean not enforcement but we've got yuki and tiger or tiger do they say who could draw something up but you could say okay we think we should adhere to this and people say yes we're adhering to their thing yeah there's trade bodies in the uk and elsewhere right that uh igdo i suppose is the best known international one that ought

to be able to put a set of guidelines up him ahead and you know maybe the bigger players decide what seems fair and then hope that everybody adopts it i've got something similar in web 3 where there isn't a lot of legislation around web3 crypto in games this year and it will come i welcome it you know i think some bad things going on in the world of blockchain games that should be policed and and but of course you know when you speak to the government that the idea of blockchain is new the idea of blockchain and games is even newer so it's really up to the people making it to try and get ahead of the law so that they can suggest something sensible that you then hope gets adopted by as law or later that feels like a less precarious way of doing things rather than hoping that law the law chooses something that doesn't just destroy your business and this happened a lot when i was working in fisheries because if you allow a government to make the decisions for you it's probable that they don't understand the industry in and out as if

they're a business owner and so if you can self-regulate and understand what is the best best way to self-regulate and to achieve the goals at the in the long run that will probably be a better solution for your business rather than having to follow yeah legislation that set by people don't encounter these these problems every day and the full cascade yeah we'll have to wrap up the episode here unless someone has a another closing statement this is my thing today yeah i'm done all right well thank you so much for joining that was really good and if you have anything to add to all of these topics you can find us in the navic discord um if you're curious about loot boxes uh navic pro they did a deconstruction on the the infamous diablo immortal that would be a good one to read about probability and drop rates um yeah thank you so much for joining and i'll see you again next week thanks

mariah see you guys [Music] you