Expansions and Partnerships

foreign [Music] gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a full sun current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novik's growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and advisory services for more information visit www.navic.com now let's jump into the episode hello everyone and welcome to another novik Roundtable I'm your host Evan Becker and today I am joined by Aaron Bush a co-founder of navicu you may have seen a million times here on the show Anil Das Gupta pardon me if I pronounce that incorrectly the co-ceo of FirstLight Studios and Dave Elton the president of Blue Line Studios and how you guys doing

not being at GDC here yeah we're the we're the lame group this week but I think our Squad here is also pretty cool and this is really the place to be and everyone at GDC should be jealous I feel like we'll see t-shirts or something bragging about that after that we do have some good uh good topics today obviously some stuff was announced at GDC as well uh you know a lot going on out there a lot of going on in games in general uh so we've got some cool news today we're going to be talking about uh Netflix has some game updates there's going to be some multiple new studio openings from existing game studios uh Amazon and twitch having some layoffs some not so fun news there uh we've got some deep Dives in strategic Partnerships between IMX and polygon should be pretty interesting and a new mobile app stores coming out and then the big Rays from CCP for 40 million dollars for a web 3 game so if you want to go ahead and kick things off here Aaron yeah so lots of good topics today but we can we can

start with Netflix which can be uh a bit of a smaller update so this past week Netflix unveiled some new roadmap details regarding its gaming Ambitions so I thought it'd be worthwhile to at least share where they are at with some of these numbers so to date Netflix has released 55 games all of which are on mobile naturally many of them revolve around Netflix IP at this point some of them are built on more traditional gaming IP just being licensed for Netflix and others are just the more simple mini game like games that you know they threw on initially just a pilot and Kickstart but with the gaming ambition on Netflix could look like um however this year Netflix plans to release another 40 games and it has 70 additional games on top of that in development with party with Partners plus it has a another 16 games in development at in-house Studios so you can you could do the math that's what 146 new games in the pipeline in some

shape or form which is quite a lot um and so you know I suppose a handful of these could already be established games that they'll just continue to license but in large part you know these games will be new and exclusive to Netflix and I don't think we need to to fully reopen the the Netflix can of worms here which added several times in the past about how you know games on on Netflix is still a pretty rough user experience that you know hopefully will change at some point with probably alongside regulatory changes with just how app stores operate right um and you know also just how there are still our questions about like the true impact of games on a big video first platform and whether they can license or create standout hits from taking this type of shotgun Approach at least at least so far um so anyways I just thought those numbers were interesting just because it it shows how big this pipeline is at least how many shots they're they're

taking um but but Dave I also did just want to hand the mic to you a bit because I know you have made a game for Netflix before and so I'm curious if you have any Reflections or reactions on what you see they're doing in this pipeline or even just how it's gone so far for them yeah absolutely um uh you know working with Netflix was a you know my opinion was it was a great experience um especially considering how fast they actually put everything together uh like they went from initial announcement of hey we're going to do games to actually launching games within you know just really just a few months um and really what they're doing is very similar to any other major platform uh you know when Xbox came around they were looking at how could we fill in all of the games to cover off all the genres to to meet the expectations from a broad audience and really where they are right now is in that second stage where

they've kind of filled in most of the genres and now they're looking at improving the quality for the offerings inside each of those genres um and you know in in today's you know today's Marketplace or today's situation for developers it becomes a little bit more of an interesting place for them you know the likelihood of being able to launch a new game in the free to play market becomes you know more and more challenging and working with a subscription-based um you know provider such as Netflix you know gives them an opportunity to make games with uh you know with guaranteed Revenue coming in um so I think you know from the from the developer's perspective um you know working with Partners like Netflix becomes you know more and more interesting as they're looking at how can they diversify their portfolio to make sure that they could you know survive as they as you know as we all figure out how do we best Market games in the in the current situation what do you guys think about the shotgun approach that Netflix is taking you know

I just said there's 146 games in the pipeline does that do you think that makes sense for them should they be more focused or does this make sense just to throw stuff out there and see what works and learn from it any any thoughts on that I I like it for that reason I think it's if you've got those kind of resources mobile games are not that expensive to develop compared to a console title you can go quickly if you need to make up the the space quickly I mean I think it's quite similar to what they did just when they made their own shows right they started with one or two then they cleaned it loads a lot of them you never heard them again but some were developed in some multi-hit IPS I mean if you can do it and you want to get there fast like learning as fast as possible is the way to do it um yeah you could say maybe they should go for um fewer ones of higher quality but we don't know they might all be high quality but we know they could be working with great Partners when you're on Netflix I'm sure there's a lot of people that are willing to work with you so um I I personally I quite like it I think if you want to get there and you

haven't been in games for a long time you're going to have to do something dramatic to try and get there quickly so their best strength they've always felt is the data approach of the company right using that's a tuner and get there fast so you're going to collect a lot of data if you can interpret that make smart decisions based on that and I think it's exciting I just wonder though if if they end up in another situation where Netflix is happy to Greenlight a million different shows but they're also happy to cancel them after one season so what happens to games right you're like oh hey sorry your game's underperforming you're canceled like that seems like that could be a risk for games Maybe it can't yeah it can be um I mean games are removed from subscription-based platforms for sure um but I think uh you know the the point about data is is really the big thing for for Netflix right now yeah and it was right it is a data-driven company and uh you know being able to have that many games in front of them

um they they really are able to learn really really quickly what is the the titles that work well for them I mean they they have a slightly different uh business model from a traditional free-to-play publisher you know they're not looking for Revenue directly from the titles they're looking at it as a retention play you know keep people inside the Netflix ecosystem um so you know they're going to be learning new things on their own you know they're not going to be necessarily looking for the exact same metrics that the you know traditional fee to play publisher is looking for they're looking for those things that help retain subscribers um and in some cases that's going to be you know just pure retention in other cases it's going to be you know is it a case of are they able to offer that new thing to keep people coming back um you know if if they're finding that people are only retaining inside games for you know a very short period of time

then you know they're they're the Netflix model is you um you know you you just consume a whole bunch of media all at once and one seating and then you go find something new and something new comes in every week and so they may be looking at that exact same model in terms of games well speaking of expanding out into more games and things like that we've got some new studio openings uh you want to dig into that Dave absolutely um so we've got three new Studios that were announced uh just over the last little bit and um in the most case it's really about doubling down and supporting uh the games that have um you know really made large marks inside the marketplace so the first one uh respawn is announced respond Wisconsin um and they're going to be part of the overall development team of the live Ops Team and in supporting uh Apex Legends development so they're gonna be working

directly with the existing Studios which are in LA and Vancouver and their main goal is to make sure that they are able to keep up with a new uh season uh every three months uh dream games um you know a company that uh has seen fantastic um growth through their one game of Royal match uh they've opened up a new studio in London uh as part of that they're looking at growing their head count from about 160 people to about 250 over the course of the coming year they've brought on a couple of uh ex-king Executives to fill the roles of Chief marketing officer Chief people officer um and so that that London office is as a main part of supporting the global expansion uh and mostly in support of oil match and then finally Big Fish uh is announced a new studio in New Orleans um so they're the home of uh ever merge and gummy drop um and for them I think what they're

looking for isn't necessarily support for a very specific title but they're looking at how can they bring in uh a new Talon pipeline um so going into a region inside the states where they don't I hadn't previously had any um any Studios so and they've been supported by the New Orleans Regional Economic Development Group so they're they're looking at you know how can they bring in new talents or sorry new uh technology Studios into the uh into the Louisiana area one of the main things is ah yeah I can get uh a lot of uh you know fresh out of college time right there um I think the you know the the main story is you know uh how are people able to continue to uh support the games that are that have been doing well really well and double down on those titles um and uh yeah do you know if uh dream games are they building a new game or

two is that part of what's fueling the growth they've just been so impressive I'm curious what they're they're up to if they're doing something new um I wouldn't be surprised uh you know the a lot of the founders came from uh the studio that obviously has put out a few few uh well to do games um but at the same time I mean Royal match is doing really really well uh I wouldn't be surprised if they had a few games that they're they're working on but I would assume that they're going to take their time on them and make sure that their their kpis are really solid yeah I almost wonder if it'll be like uh let's continue it in the Royal series the way there was like saga games stuff like that so we'll end up with a some kind of Royal whatever game next from them let's get to see more studios in the states uh like you know with a lot of people often times trying to go to maybe some cheaper places to see one in uh you know uh Louisiana one in Wisconsin I think that's I mean as an American I'm a little biased but I think that's pretty cool

um but unfortunately we also have the flip side of that which is uh some down scaling coming from Amazon and twitch if you want to dig into that Aaron uh yeah and I'll I'll keep this brief so the the so-called year of efficiency as Zuckerberg at Facebook has athlete put it it continues to make the rounds this week affecting Amazon which in turn led to 400 or so layoffs to Twitch um and you know at this point none of this is super surprising it's just a different economic and operating environment where large companies who you know projected a certain level of growth that you know they saw over the past couple years um and hired for it it didn't pan out that way and so that they have to make adjustments and with a a company like twitch in particular which reportedly you know is still struggling with profitability and you know still fighting for its market share and and all of that and also as likely to face some pretty heavy post coveted decelerations too

um and probably made some errors in how it was projecting its future it's not surprising to see it trim its cost structure so you know not great news um but um news nonetheless but the other thing I wanted to to pair it with was that at the same time this was announced or roughly the same time um twitch also swapped its CEOs so Emmett Shear who was co-founder of twitch and has been CEO for 16 years uh he just stepped aside and handed the reins to Dan Clancy who served previously as president of twitch now I don't I don't know enough about Dan to comment on how he'll manage the platform any similarly or differently from from Emmett sheer but what I will say is that even though twitch probably has had room to improve in terms of how its managed platform rules and dealt with um you know Creator Support over the past few years and it's found itself in a bunch of controversies over time um you know despite all of that it's

actually held up its market share has held up better than I thought that it would have if we look back over the past couple years on one hand Facebook gaming and what they they've done on the streaming front that's pretty much just fizzled out uh that's not what they're focused on and so that's one big potential competitor especially in emerging markets that uh that isn't super relevant anymore um and then YouTube I also thought would have gained even more market share by now essentially especially because of one how it's just a hub for all things video and two they also started striking more exclusive deals with big creators as well but for whatever reason you know maybe it's just in terms of how streaming is a priority or not for YouTube or even just leadership changes such as how um you know ever since really Ryan Wyatt who who was the head of YouTube gaming uh year or two ago when he left for polygon Studios he wasn't the first to leave and there's sort of been a train of exiting um after that maybe that's had some

impact there too but anyways I'm I'm just curious to see how um you know both kind of tightening the ship and having a new captain at the helm what that could mean for for twitch going forward whether they'll be able to you know maintain their share or even grow it and in surprising ways or um or if that won't turn out I think we'll just have to wait and see how this new CEO navigates but uh anyways just thought it was a pretty interesting moment and a kind of a reminder to keep an eye on what's going on at this company it definitely sounds like they don't really have a whole lot of competition like everyone that's tried pretty much to to take a piece out of twitch hasn't seemed to have lasted so like they seem to be in an okay position as long as streaming's popular and if they've just kind of you know tightened things up uh you know puts them in a good position I think to continue going forward yeah we'll see how the next year goes the network effect is held up a lot better than I thought it would I mean we

obviously saw with mixer who had you know mixer was just throwing money left and right back in the day at you know streamers like ninja and shroud um how that didn't work and you know twitch just kept on being switched but on the flip side like who has better Network effects than twitch YouTube you know like two affiliate people at the world use YouTube and so for twitch to still be fighting you know as well as they are against YouTube that's kind of the the more impressive side of the equation for for me at least but of course you know in the next two three years everything could change so we'll see how it goes with uh with Ryan Wyatt going over to polygon Studios and being uh the master of Partnerships uh he actually kind of brought that over to to polygon because I guess we've got uh them announcing that they are partnered up with their arch rival immutable which was a pretty exciting announcement at GDC yeah let me take this one so I think this is super interesting um I don't think anyone saw this coming I'm I'm quite deeply involved in web3 and no one I knew uh knew about this is really

taken aback so let's give some kind of context or some background here so um immutable X IMX they're based in Australia unicorn sort of dialing of the web3 space they're really sort of their mission statement is to make it seamless to get into web 3 they haven't had their own platform they handle all that stuff in the background you just go and make your own game and you plug in they've got a game called Gods Unchained which is kind of like a Hearthstone type clone which is one of their kind of Premier Products they use their technology polygon Studios the aforementioned they have their own kind of um you know side chain to ethereum they've been using that they've really push themselves as being like the chain for supporting Mass game adoption and these two were in you know quite big rivalries around sort of 18 months ago when many of them would be approaching Studios to try and get them to build on their chain I have to say personally I was speaking to both so it is quite interesting to see that there is actually now they're the same thing all Friday the same thing well not quite so before they announced at the first day of GDC is that there's a strategic strategic partnership between the two and essentially what IMX is going to do

is they're going to be using some of polygons technology to do their own zero knowledge uh evm rollout um don't get kind of too technical in terms of the terms of what this means but it allows you to kind of do blockchain transactions that are much faster speed and so it's a really kind of help for scalability at the moment using things on a blockchain sometimes it can be slow sometimes you have to pay expensive gas fees as we call them things like this and if you're talking about having mainstream adoption and having hundreds of millions of people using it there needs to be Solutions in place to handle this and IMX has decided to use polygons um you know new service essentially rolling out which I think is very interesting because IMX themselves were also pretty big on their kind of stock where roll up and their own Solutions doing this and that is a question I'd like to propose the panel because I actually thought that was supposed to be one of their strengths so that's kind of an interesting line on it and so there they're in a strategic partnership they're going to be using their technology to make their own zero knowledge evm I think some other interesting things to look at is as a result of this announcement the IMX

token dropped 15 that's quite substantial and the polygon token actually was largely unchanged so perhaps you might have thought that that might have increased in value but it kind of held firm um the two very strategic partnership they said they'd been in discussions for over nine months that to begin with it was a bit weird having the discussion but when they sort of both realized that they both kind of want to use the power of ethereum so you know these guys are not building their own chain they're still going to be using that but they're harnessing the power of it that they align pretty quickly so some kind of topics that I'd like to think about and why I think it's like a really interesting one to kind of talk about for me this is the first really big consolidation I've seen in the web 3 space um and you know is that a good thing or a bad thing you can kind of look at it either way um this was a crazy space not so long ago with so much money thrown about I think it was inevitable that some of these things were going to have to consolidate down in a few winners would emerge this is perhaps the first time we've seen something like that um or is it a bad thing that you know you only have a few power players that are going to kind of dominate this sort of nasian space where the dream was it

to be all decentralized and there wasn't going to be a Netflix or an apple or a Google that you had to be subservient to and if for those of you who are listening on Spotify there's a lot of smiles and laughters amongst the panel right now so they'll probably say perhaps what some of us feel um I got some more things let's start with that then and before I go into our topics so what do you think about this move um I'll hand it over to you Dave actually um I actually do think it was inevitable and I I do expect to see more um you know as you mentioned we saw a huge amount of cash piled into the web 3 ecosystem over the last little while and uh with the values dropping down to where they've where they have been I think you will see a lot more consolidation um do I think it's a good thing um in many ways I do I think you know as you look at uh you know the desire for interoperability as you look at desire for having that ability to transfer

uh you know uh nfts or funds or items between everything it becomes a lot easier if you have a set of rules that everyone plays by and if you've got you know 30 or 40 different uh chains and uh currencies and everything and trying to get everyone to play well together that becomes a really really big challenge when you've got so many different players with different perspectives and different ideas in terms of where they want to take the industry um so I do think that you know having some fewer number of players inside there will make things a little bit easier you know will we ever get to that point where it's fully decentralized I'm not sure if we will I think if you look even at the you know the ownership of the chains where a lot of the the tokens are are still within you know small groups of people that uh even right now that that isn't the way that

uh the industry is playing out but um but yeah I'm I'm still very interested to see how things go I'm also curious to hear Devin's take on this way before that I just have a couple like clarification questions that that maybe you guys know the answer to and so when I was reading this it seems very much that for immutables platform and Tech stack it's going to be leveraging polygons um Tech capabilities but on the polygon side I wasn't clear if uh just with its gaming Ambitions is it essentially like fully pointing everyone to immutable that it works with or a team's still going to be able to build separately on Saigon or it's it's separately it's a brand new chain basically yeah yeah right um and then second I was going to ask just Anil since you mentioned the kind of the token movements um whether like does anything really change like if you're using immutable like as a user and the tokens you have

to use if they're now using polygon or do you still just use IMX the same way or does it now throw the polygon Matic token in or like I mean that that's a great question I don't 100 know the answer to why I wanted to raise it though is that at the time I remember when we we were shopping around is that IMX part of the deal was you had to use their token as part of the ecosystem and that was kind of your payment so if some event like this happens and then completely out of your control you know now your treasury is dropped in a massive amount of value or your funding for your project that's extremely dangerous and I I think that this is like maybe for me a bit of a fear of it like I actually agree with Dave I think that it it's not a bad thing at all actually that this has happened in the sense that I think think some consolidation is good a few kind of people that have the right spirit I think will help the industry move further along in the long term but I do worry that like more people get burnt early with things like this in an unfair way and that is kind of your question like I suppose a sort of different

example many people use for example Unity engine what if Unity for example got bought by Electronic Arts would you still be able to use the engine like no one really knows and no one really thinks about it because it's too scary a proposition to really think through there's enough stuff that keeps you awake in the middle of the night without answering those questions but when things like this happen out of the blue that could be something that you know Kudos have an impact I I like you are very curious to see what Devin has to say about it but my understanding is is that no it does not point you anywhere there's two completely separate ecosystems and their remaining awareness just utilizing the technology and my assumption is is because I think that polygon did a really good job with Reddit in terms of using their kind of moons and nfts and given the scale that Reddit has I think that's like the ultimate proof point that does work on big skill and why it's like well look do you want to risk making your own one where it could go wrong would you want to just go with something that works yeah as the uh there isn't a web three guy this was like a a pretty big deal to me like I I found this I obviously I've written a lot about both companies and

dug into like a lot of what they did and I found that the token drop actually kind of interesting because one of the parts of the announcement that's like buried a bit is the idea that this new chain will actually use IMX tokens as the gas fee uh instead of Matic as the underlying thing so like that should have actually driven the value up I think because now there's more utility for the IMX token I mean maybe it's like hey let's drive it down so gas is cheaper I guess side I'm not sure what the uh what the reason was I got to imagine it was more of a response of like oh IMX is kind of like giving up on their own Tech on the startware stuff as you guys mentioned and maybe that's like a loss of of confidence there some extent but I would actually be if I was if I was shorting anyone's tokens I would go more towards polygons more so because it looks here's what it looks like to me is that polygon and immutable constantly fighting back and forth over games bribing each other perfect examples metal core it went from immutable to polygon and according to their keynote back to immutable again and it's like they're just constantly fighting over custody of their kids like every five seconds and I I think I I

feel like what happened is polygon looked at that one you know what this is distracting us from building all of our infrastructure stuff we're not just a game platform whereas immutable is a total gameplay they're not trying to do the Reddit onboarding I mean they have the GameStop thing which is I guess somewhat relevant especially the ties between GameStop and Reddit uh in some ways and so like I I could understand why polygon was just like you know what you guys take games like this we're we're we got so many bigger fish to fry you know we've got Starbucks to deal with we've got all these other things we need to be working on uh because you see very different takes too from um you had uh Ryan Wyatt talking in in their panel they did and then you had uh Sandeep talking on a podcast on Bank List's podcast and you could Sandeep almost looked happy about it because he's like oh we get to just focus on infrastructure like that's what I want to do I want to focus on the tech and it's kind of funny because this is actually a big launch for them in a way since uh their ZK evm was only on a test net before like it hadn't hit a main net

yet so this is like a first big selling point for their Tech to like get their Tech out there for ZK evm because we don't have a great mainstream ZK evm and uh and like immutable was pushing the ZK thing but not fully compatible like they weren't you weren't really doing like a lot of token stuff or anything on chain it was all just like trade nfts gasless that was like their only selling point so I think this is this is a pretty big deal for for gaming if people adopt it but I'm curious and yourself being a web 3 developer on polygon is this an attractive thing for you guys like are you like hey baby we should move over to this to be totally honest we're still trying to get our heads around it ourselves like that's that's the thing what does it mean I feel like the communication from both parties is pretty poor if I'm being honest I think that they should make it clear because these like I say can have sweeping changes and what should it mean and where does it stand and you know they say the announcement you know IMX have got their great kind of passports of web 3 sort of feature and does that mean polygon want us to

use that or use our own thing or or what are the solutions because really you know what both part was trying to say is you know you just concentrate on making your game and you can rely up on our Tech to to do the heavy lifting which is great but then it's like well we can't because we've got to keep changing our minds as to like which solution we're actually going to implement so um yeah I really want to take on this topic because I think it's really interesting already some great takes from the panel as to what it means um I think we'll have to see what kind of comes out in the washers they say as to where we go next with it um I always say to be fair though that we're built on polygon it does seem to be pretty stable for what we use them for which is certainly improvement over some blockchains we've seen so we've been quite impressive so far but I do think people need to get their message on you know maybe a question I would have just quickly is you know what does this really mean for IMX I mean is that now their their major kind of feature is more just like the onboarding part or um because I seem to remember that they that was one of the big things that they did at all ZK themselves in the past so that's um I and that's my misunderstanding that's like a curious

thing that like why that's no longer the player they're using someone else for it yeah and they just launched the the unity plugin as well so you have to wonder will that Unity plugin be updated for this new chain as well because like the current one I can't imagine would work with this unless there's like already the features baked in and you just have to like switch somewhere in the settings but it's pretty different right because like you are actually having to deal with your own potential smart contracts on the Chain as opposed to the the existing Unity plugin which was more of like let's talk to a unit the IMX API and let it handle stuff so like that's I mean more control for the developer but also more like that that plug-in has to handle now and they were all excited about how easy the onboarding was and it's like well now do we have to like have a whole different thing what's the launch date for this are they actually I mean they made it look like uh possibly metalcore might be a partner for this but they didn't really announce like these games are going to this chain and like I I do wonder if we'll have some some potential gamer confusion in the future about which chain they're playing on with

Shane like whatever but I also at the same time like I think it'll be uh obvious if you're if you're following developers like that move over from polygon that need the evm part well okay obviously they're going to be on if they're moving to immutable it's going to be the ZK evm one yeah that makes sense I mean I guess from bigger picture my standpoint I don't know exactly what it means for IMX or you know there's still questions and I think anytime there's a transition you can look back and and be like oh maybe this should have been communicated a bit more clearly at this time or this you know the order of operations or speed of how certain things get degraded or said happens but um I don't know just thinking big picture even though this Sparks a little bit of chaos and questions in the moment it actually seems like it actually creates maybe a bit more stability um you know down down the road and thinking longer terms so this is just sort of a hump but like once the Integrations are more set and the community views especially like immutable as like more like the stop to

go to it seems um it should should you know lead to much more clarity and ease of communication and less confusion down the road is sort of how I look at it and really like props to immutable for pulling this off and really solidifying you know their their own ecosystem as like a leading Contender here and I mean I sort of view that as you know they've already done a pretty good job through having raised quite a bit of money and being an early mover and like just building out multiple parts of their ecosystem and through BD Landing Partnerships but I mean at this point too there's I wouldn't say it's you know quite like in the free from competition or anything it's still so early so many other players but having you know this level of scale and Lead um and just ability to reinvest both in M A and R D like it can keep that keep advantages rolling for a while in a steadier state where companies don't

have to think about who's leading who's not what's it going to be in six months or a year um so so to me it seems like this is actually a pretty good step forward for the ecosystem as well just in terms of more clarity yeah maybe it becomes just a lot easier now like the to just decide which blockchain do I go with well it's like if I'm making an app I go over to polygon if I'm making a game I go over to IMX and stuff and now it's a lot easier you can just focus back on the game and more less about the which I'm sure I know you probably went through that for a while like which blockchain are we going to build on in that back and forth and debate about that it just I imagine it that that's a long headache just take it out especially since you have a choice of like do I need like the evm part if I do now I actually have an option for that so I don't have to like so you know sift through those and I I do imagine though that this is like Solana and avalanche now just over in a corner crying at this point after this because this is like this is a pretty big blow to whatever momentum they might

have had and at this point like now it's like Salon is a discount nft Marketplace and Avalanche is like I guess if you want to roll some of your own stuff like it's not there's not a lot of uh competition in a way now but like at the same time you know hopefully decentralization still wins out I know Robbie Ferguson certainly looked extremely happy and excited about all this so I gotta imagine like that's very bullish for them so it is it is funny to see the token drop uh after after all that but maybe that's a short-term thing we see it raise back up you're implying that crypto vegans actually do their own research and read this move print um they're just shorting their own stock yeah well uh speaking of uh expanding out and Contracting the same time we got some new app stores for mobile all right digging to Aaron yeah we'll see how this shakes up so there's you know some Rumblings out there of new mobile app stores and the works and this topic maybe is a bit more hypothetical than usual um but it's seeming less and less

far-fetched every day um that there will be new app stores launched that may or may not be competitive in in some ways you know launched from these these big tech companies um and you know for one reason why this is worth talking about and why these these Rumblings in the knees are happening is because you know it's widely known at this point the App Store practices are largely anti-competitive and even though early attempts from epic and elsewhere failed to generate outsized change there is a slowly growing criticism among Regulators that um you know bits and pieces need to change whether it's anti-steering rules preferential treatment of first party apps or even just the nature of app stores themselves and so for example the eu's digital markets Act is likely to play a notable role next year at least starting from the the EU and driving some notable change around creating more competition um for for app stores and largely

because of this some other big tech companies are starting to act like sharks they're smelling the potential blood in the ocean the opportunity for for prey and our you know preparing their their plan of attack um and so you know we know that epic games now according to Tim Sweeney already has its Mobile store ready and they've stated their intention to to build something that supports apps Beyond games we know very little but that's that's just what has been lightly thrown out there and then also Microsoft has also stated that it hopes to launch its new app store for games as early as next year especially if the Activision Blizzard deal goes through uh this year so anyways I've just found this this topic pretty interesting just to think about how it could play out um if other app stores are allowed to exist

um and so I'm curious just to throw it out to to all of you if regulatory actions did enable third-party app stores across IOS and Android starting with the ease uh dma do any of these new contenders actually pose a threat is there a path for them to succeed or is this largely just hand wavy like it sounds great but in reality people will still just use you know that main Apple App Store and Google Play what do you think first off uh there already are other app stores uh so if you think of it you know Amazon Samsung uh Huawei they all have their own app stores and none of them have been able to really move the needle in terms of being able to take any sort of large market share away from Google Play Store um now I think uh you know probably what epic and what Microsoft bring behind

them um can probably bring a little bit more to Bear than uh than what those other stores have to to this point and you know ideally bring some big name games to those stores to help attract people there um but I think they're still going to have you know challenges in terms of moving people away from uh a stores that are you know pre-loaded with the devices and B um you know breaking people out of the habits in terms of where they go to look for games um epic I think uh in terms of building out their own app store they'll probably go to a similar Playbook as they did with uh when they were building out the Epic store itself for uh for games um and probably look at you know what are things that they can do to really entice um developers to want to come in so from a rep share perspective and from the from the consumer side you know what kind of exclusives can they bring or you know what can they do in terms of making

excitement um exciting launches and and um and giveaways for players for users Microsoft you know hasn't necessarily seen the same success with their with their store um that's what uh what epic has been seeing more recently is they battle against uh Steam so it will be I think interesting to see uh what Microsoft does uh for store-wise and how successful they end up being in that regard I was going to say I mean I think a lot of it depends on execution but I think there is a huge opportunity here I think what it reminds me of a little bit is that I remember back in the 90s the PlayStation if you remember was originally going to be an add-on for the Super Nintendo it was going to be a CD drive and then the two companies fell away and Sonia said we'll do it ourselves and we'll be successful and Super Nintendo we're like you have no understanding of this Market there's no way you can succeed and Sony said hold my beer or sake because they're a Japanese company and he executed and the

way that they did that is because on Nintendo you had to pay the fee to develop the card trade and the kind of the cartridge Royal CP that Nintendo collected whereas Sony said we've got a CD drive so you don't have to pay more than one dollar to print the cd so you're going to get more as a developer or a publisher than you would and everyone flocked to them based on those kind of promises so I think if you look at the App Stores it's a kind of recurring theme on that book how they're pretty bad in the sense that they don't really offer Discovery they're not really serving any kind of platform to help people so you can actually argue they're a barrier rather than a helper at this current moment in Mobile so I think that there is an opportunity the execution is if a new app store comes on they have a smaller royalty rate so let's say it's 10 rev share rather than the 30 cut that they're getting right now and they're able to really push new titles and demonstrate that with some kind of lost leading marketing or things like that to get people over there I think it could work and I think another reason why I think it could work is that

how do people even discover these things in the first place it's actually not typically through these stores that it's more through you know Performance Marketing or outside channels and you click a link that then takes you through and there might be a few more steps involved but you could get it that way so all that pudding to contact I think if the execution is there it's definitely right for massive disruption and it could be something to take a piece of the pie I would be more excited I think for for my Microsoft one over epic epic store I think was really good on PC they tried hard you know give you free games and stuff like that but no one really made any sizable revenue from there not anyone I know at least so it didn't really get there I thought why Microsoft May succeed is they having bought all these heavy duty IPS and they're just about to get a whole ton more of them that's going to get attention like if you've got your Call of Duty if you've got your blizzard games and you've got to go to this store I mean how did steam pull it off on the PC to begin with right it was you have to have like one half-life too you gotta gotta install Steam right and people yeah people put

up with it and that's where we are right now do I think it will happen too early to say but I think that it seems to me like it's a that this has been planned for a long time I'd even go as far as saying that's probably the reason why they even went ahead with that the the Activision visit merge you know a lot of them were saying that the king and their you know stuff on mobile was a big reason why they wanted to say you're taking some pretty big players I think over to you to make people move over let's see but I I think that um they may be successful with it I think they'll start to make some inroads in it yes it seems like gaming is really the only main possible wedge where something could be could be pulled off yeah and it might not even stem from like mobile first games that are able to be that wedge and instead like you know the benefit with Microsoft is they they're they view their future as like being truly cross-platform across all of

their games across their Cloud capabilities across their subscription itself and you know I mean that's still tens of millions of subscribers some of which you know might be you know willing to to try this out and just kind of seed the platform I have a harder time seeing you know if the Activision Blizzard deal goes through like how does a Candy Crush like really like be like really practically shift over and to like a new plan platform and work like it will probably exist on both if that were the case but it's not going to be a reason to to Really shift over and and bring a massive audience with it I would think that could be I could be wrong if they want to they want to be really gutsy and the actions that they they take who knows um but but yeah I mean Microsoft probably is the most interesting to me from the standpoint of it has a ton of content it has a like a strategy and Mission and Tech stack that supports cross play in a way that's unique and interesting that you can't really get

elsewhere um they have also more of like a proven ad Tech stack within Microsoft 2 that could probably play some kind of role in being integrated in in the games or the App Store and you know facilitate Discovery or ads of some type um here that's interesting um and yeah I mean they also just have a competitive budget they have a lot of money that they could probably be willing to to burn for a while and play the play the long game I mean I'm sure epic would think so similarly but they don't have the balance sheet of a Microsoft to be able to to go really hard and all these different directions these different loss leading directions um at the same time and last over time so yeah I'm curious I have a really hard time seeing how like Beyond games how how other app stores would really shift you know you know get spun up or shift over or something like that but I don't know maybe there's a world where if if Microsoft is able to succeed and bring

over tens of millions of Gamers that it could start to you know also creep out it's you know circle of of what it offers um and to more productivity tools or who knows um but yeah it's interesting I I still don't know how optimistic I really am on any of this truly breaking through because Network effects are really tough to break we already kind of talked about this a bit with twitch earlier who is in you know you could say a weaker position but the network effects held up a lot stronger than people thought whereas in this case at Apple in particular but also Google play like they are the Giants with the the giant Network effects surge it's gonna be really hard to to break and it'll be hard for consumers to really want to make a switch unless they have a super obvious reason too which is not going to be most people probably but yeah interesting to think about what do you think Dave um so the one thing I think that uh is a bit of a challenge for Microsoft is the

regulatory environment right now so if you look at yes Microsoft's got you know a huge War chest but if Microsoft went in and said hey you know what if you come and play just in our backyard we'll give you you know huge discounts we'll do all sorts of things for you as a developer and as for a player I think there would be a lot of people then starting to uh make some noises about hey Microsoft is throwing around their weight too much whereas if epic you know did something similar I think most people would say well epic's just a small team so yeah they can go ahead and do that there's no no challenge with that um but yeah I do think epic is going to have some challenges in terms of you know you can do a nice discount on a PC game you could take 25 off you can't take 25 off a game that's for free um so you know that's that's could be obviously a huge challenge in in terms of moving people around um mobile game developer mobile game players are very very hard to move

uh so you know games that have tried to do sequels as an example move from one game to another I found it very very challenging to move people and if you think of all the people that I've spent all their time building up uh you know their Candy Crush levels inside uh you know the iOS version of the game they're not going to move over to Microsoft they're not going to move over to Epic no matter what they've built up way too much time and energy and potentially money into those games so you know wanting to move from one platform to another is uh you're just you're just not going to be able to move those players so it really is about all those new players that you can try and attract in um so I I don't know if it's necessarily Candy Crush it may be like the next games that King brings out that really is the thing that helps them move into uh into a new store well it's funny too because Candy Crush uh actually came with Windows 10 for a while I assume still does so it's like it's not like uh

there wasn't already I mean I gotta imagine Microsoft's got some stats on that on whether or not like they saw people actually playing that on desktop the way that you know their solitary collection is their other thing they try and push right uh and maybe they were seeing it as like this is like the alternative to Solitaire because it is the mobile alter I mean not truly an alternate because Solitaire does pretty well mobile still too but uh but I thought it was kind of interesting that and they'll brought up the um the the whole Sony uh the Nintendo thing because Microsoft uh kind of went through that like just dumping money into Xbox to make it happen but they've also had like Monumental failures on their own app stores previously uh their own devices you know you've got like the the Windows Phone the zoom all these other things that they tried to do to try and pick that up even I I can't even imagine the Windows store has like the level of adoption that they want and that's baked into the operating system and like pretty much the only competitor quote-unquote on the operating system so it's like this is it's an interesting position I think for Microsoft to be and given all those other factors plus the

idea that Aaron was kind of teasing that like uh you go from being like fighting these regulatory bodies considering you a monopoly with the the Call of Duty pick to suddenly being the savior of breaking up the Apple Google duopoly by being the alternative it's like which are they are they are they Friend or Foe to The Regulators at this point it's it's a very interesting position for Microsoft to be in but I'm sure whatever it is they'll spend tons of money on it uh and and succeed or fail money will be spent so hopefully people could get in on it it'll be like the the Netflix kind of thing like Dave was saying earlier where like you know just maybe hey it's a something we can get some guaranteed revenue on if they're willing to like like the Epic deal give us some sweetheart thing to get in on this like maybe it's just a good way for some initial Studios to build up like it's an opportunity here to ride that wave whether or not it crashes on the beach or keeps going it's a wave but uh we've got another pretty interesting web three here I don't want to turn trying to turn into the crypto corner but GDC actually had some good web 3 announcements and uh

we've got a big one from CCP the makers of Eve online uh with a big 40 million uh from from Mr Moneybags a16z for a web 3 game uh absolutely yes so um thank you for stealing my lead in uh but CCP did announce 40 million uh so along with a16z obviously there were a number of other contributors to that uh to that race so makers fun bitcraft uh Nexon interestingly especially since Nexon also announced that they are um bringing in the world of nft into uh into one of their products um so I mean we all know that Eve online uh the the flagship game for CCP has been around for uh almost 20 years I think it's their anniversaries in a couple of months um and it famously has been you know one

of those games that gets called out whenever you're talking about what is a successful game economy looks like now this is a a game that has seen incredible uh Wars inside the game uh it's an incredible Movement by the players um you know players playing a wide variety of roles um and you know you've seen uh you know huge amounts of money move inside the game get lost inside the game um but in terms of like an economy it's something that you know a lot of people have been able to point to and say this is something that they've done right and I think as you look at some of the challenges inside a lot of crypto games nft games right now is that how do you maintain how do you build and maintain a successful economy so that players do feel like if they're going in they're spending their money um that they're going to have that long-term uh you know good feeling good

experience and that uh you know if they're going in they're putting in you know the equivalent of uh I think there was an estimation to build up one of the capital ships is that the equivalent of like eight thousand or nine thousand dollars that that is something that's going to be maintained as a value Point through it um now what the money is being spent towards is not a directly inside Eve online it is for a game that is separate from Eve online uh or any of the other products that they have in development so it is operating uh entirely by itself at least for the moment so you're not really going to see it as uh an opportunity to see interoperability where you know you buy a ship in one Eve online Universe game and be able to transfer that into another Eve uh Eve title um but it definitely will be interesting to see how they are able to balance that economy when uh you know the Eve online

is much more of a closed economy value that comes into the game stays inside the game um for me one of the other interesting bits outside of you know being able to see if this is a successful Economy based around blockchain and nfts is this game uh according to the announcement from uh from CCP is that they're going to be allowing uh a truly open third-party development to create a relationship between worlds and players uh in their quote and for me this really is an interesting thing is that they're they're really kind of offering like two chances that uh disruption in terms of how they build up their economies in one uh you know have the ability to have money is flowing in and out of the economy but two you also now have other people coming in and building upon uh you know the the eve webstery Tech stack and experience and

what does that actually feel like so you know you we may actually see what um that uh that ability to have different people building different things expand much farther beyond what we've ever seen before you know second life has seen people that were able to spend you know their entire in-game career building furniture for other people well what does that actually look like you know you know is someone come in and say hey it would be really cool if um you know in the first person shooter everyone would be able to actually drive around in cars well I'm going to build those cars now I'm not CCP I'm going to build those cars bring them into the game and start you know I'll have my Dave's car shops dealerships you know throughout the game people can buy cars um for me it certainly is an interesting um I don't know if I'd say an experiment 40 million dollars is a lot of money to spend on an experiment um but it for me it's certainly going to be an interesting sandbox for for people

to play in and and I am interested to see how it actually all turns out yeah the one other interesting part of this deal that I I picked up on that I just wanted to come out before we talk more about the the web three elements of this is that um the investment is focused on the game project itself it's not actually an investment in CCP games or Pearl abyss and um you don't see that very often and and you know on one hand I can kind of understand why they're separating these two things I don't really know what this new game exactly is or how similar or different it will be from Eve online so it's kind of hard to say but on the other hand it just kind of it's just kind of weird like how do like what does an exit opportunity look like for a game in the same universe like inside the company that is in charge of that Universe um I I have I have no idea like what the end game is that that's a great question

that hints that some kind of token liquidity right it's something that you can exit faster or perhaps it's another one I've seen recently is that people take a share in revenues of any Marketplace or daily transactions that are made their own and you know if you see the amount of players a player transactions that are done on the existing Eve that could be extremely lucrative but that kind of leads into a question I kind of had around this because I'm sort of surprised that they had to raise the money um because whilst 40 million isn't like a trivial amount of money I mean my understanding is a pretty profitable company that they made like 80 million last year alone and sure they have a big team and it's going to cost them and etc etc but they don't really Market Eve much compared to other games I know they did a big push on it sort of maybe 10 years ago to sort of really see they could break it but they sort of found that Eve is a game that is like a niche audience but a niche spends and they retain for life so you don't really need to worry and it's like the definition of a cash cow that you can leave going so why they fail to do this

um especially with the people that you've mentioned in the format one thing I would say around the um the kind of separate entity and things like that is that does mean from a legal standpoint it can be a bit cleaner because otherwise if you have to do a sort of like you know offshore entity or things like this depending on the sort of assets there's still a lot of Regulation that isn't in place in a lot of the European Union and European countries so perhaps they're just protecting themselves those ways but um yeah I think it is to me that hints that there will be some kind of uh other liquidity especially the sort of companies that have backed it and they're not gonna back it if if they have to wait for a kind of exit or whatever but I do wonder why they they couldn't just do it themselves or is this them sort of saying look we know how to build the game and economy but the actual sort of web 3 side we need some advice from that'll be my speculation on it anyway I'm not sure if it actually is uh investment only inside the game the way that I read uh was that it was an investment in CCP okay but the funds were being directly earmarked for a particular game so I don't know

that it's been actually defined as a separate entity I think it's still inside the overall CCP maybe the investment is focused on the game project itself so this means that the new investors did not acquire a stake in CCP games or in its parent company Pearl Abyss so I don't know if they were off or who knows um but but I guess we we won't know probably for sure for quite a while but yeah I think an ill might be might be right that maybe this will get converted into like token ownership or something and like this game like the ownership of the game will be through tokens and more Community run in the same in a way that maybe like an alternative Eve online could be owned by the eve world of of players and contributors and stuff um I don't know we'll see but but yeah the other part of this that I thought was really interesting that you hit on a bit Dave was the composability part because I think Eve online it has it like you've had as an API that has enabled players to build some really

interesting things I'm not I'm not an Eve online player myself so I don't know in in detail but it seems really really interesting and compelling and so but to be able to do that in more of a blockchain setting where composability you know building on top of like whatever the game is set on the whatever blockchain it uses being able to unlock ugc and new ownership and economic driven ways that just feels so core to what Eve online has been and again I don't know what this game even is and how much like Eve online it'll be but just based on what they have built in the past it seems like an exceptionally good fit here compared to many other places where we've seen you know announcements like that been made in the past and I think from an audience fit it fits a lot better um you know I have a much easier time seeing nfts in side the eve universe that I do inside

a casual game as you know some of the the web 3 announcements have been these days around casual side of things um and so I I do think that it will be a an easier fit uh for a today audience down the road it certainly be able to go more mass Market but I think today it fits a lot cleaner inside the euf audience at least they've got a lot of economists on staff already right for from Eve that should hopefully be able to help figure this out whereas you know a lot of other companies have to kind of hire external people or figure it out themselves they've got the experience I'm not saying it all directly translates but they do have that experience but Eve is so as you mentioned they've not totally opened compared to this whereas like I I gotta imagine this might attract maybe a more predatory audience uh depending on the type of game and stuff that's like looking to make money out of it like because you can kind of make money in a way by playing Eve but not really right like that's not the main incentive uh like it's more the play money within the environment like you can you can make

money there but cashing it out is really difficult like you could get free play time you know through their Plex and stuff like that but I gotta imagine it's gonna be something that might even pull new players in to their to the world that are interested in maybe extracting value depending on how they set it up or maybe just like uh maybe you'll even have a different theme and maybe suddenly they'll actually expand Their audience but I do got to imagine regardless of like who's being invested in directly at the end of the day this is just expanding the GDP of Iceland probably by devil since we know that that cut that company's basically Iceland at this point uh employing probably half the country but you know this is a pretty big deal I mean if if it is inoperable and like you know it does expand to like having other things like for example you know would you would you be like hey let's let's have some some blast Royale characters integrated into this and that kind of thing like is this an opportunity that like may be exciting to web 3 developers to be part of this type of environment perhaps I mean I was we're all kind of

rushing to talk that was kind of funny about this topic I was going to say that I feel with if when I first found out about blockchain technology and its use in gaming my immediate thought was if there was one studio in the world that should definitely be making a web 3 game it was CCP because they've already proven it like that's maybe World of Warcraft is like the second one but I feel even more so Eve if you're aware of the nuances or the specifics of that game so I think it's kind of like a really obvious thing and I'm sure that anyone that could possibly invest in them would have done for for the same reason like you know if they can't get it to work then who can I think it's quite as straightforward as that but you could be confident on the tech the economy the audience wanting to do that and all that in terms of the interoperability it's kind of a niche you know space isn't it I could see perhaps other sci-fi games and things being interested but um I'd be pretty quiet I'd be excited myself to see what they can do with it I think this will be something that you just know is going to get some great use cases and you know when you hear and then if you heard this like crazy story

how you know you have you have different sort of alliances and guilds within Eve and how one guy actually got a job working for someone in real life but two years working for an enemy Clan and he was like a secret agent the whole time and he basically right at the end gave them all these details they did like 10 million US dollars worth of damage to their entire fleet and of course he got sacked but he was an absolute hero from the actual Alliance that he was working for like this is legitimate things that go on so I think for things like that it will be amazing all of that all on The Ledger all immutable kind of secure um whatever they make should be great and I I wouldn't be surprised about what they create most of more use cases that other people can tie into both force and I think having like a developer like that coming into web 3 is like a real kind of stamp of approval as well they're like okay this is like someone seriously who you know can execute and they're gonna make something good in it and that makes me excited to someone who's developing in it because it's still got you know bad rep for the right

reasons I would say you know you can't really condone some of the activity so maybe a bit of a sellout answer for you there yeah I've been reading um empires of Eve uh which is a book it's a two-part book series that like Chronicles the history of of Eve online but like the like inside the game of Eve online like like tracking like the different characters and factions and you know all the all the wars that went on and it's insane like to to just see like it really is like a real history that's been taking place inside of this game and like so you're to your point Devin about like you know if you make it real money will people exploit the system somehow try to you know profit from it like I think that works so perfectly into like the the hands of like what this Empire is trying to do which is yeah or what Eve generally has done which is like it's all these factions and Empires trying to exploit each other in any way possible to get advantages in the wars that they're happening Across the Universe

and obviously you know there probably are some some caveats that you would want to put on that in in real life if you're actually working with real money but you can let it play out I think to a pretty extreme degree and this this kind of ecosystem compared to to anywhere else and so you know I've said it like three times we don't even know what this game is or how similar it will be to Eve online but um but yeah thinking it through it is exciting to see I'm very excited to see where this goes and even just to get what like the r poo on a cave like this could be it'll be pretty astronomical if if they do a good job developing it well imagine a secondary something I mean that's going to be huge or you know those are all being on The Ledger there will be characters that are created in year one and by year 20 you can look through its history and you'll be like oh my God it was like you know look at all this cool stuff that they did and you know owning that particular thing is really going to mean something to someone and that you've got this like really open world flexible game system that has allowed these real things is it

it it is basically it's blockchain games before the blockchain was available that's how I think of eat so just plugging that in is like the most obvious move ever yeah and not even just the characters like me just think of the like the capital ships being able to go through this capital ship was in the Battle of 2023 and also in sector 911 won the battles or it's a final volley like the stories that you're able to have captured around all of the components inside there you know really becomes that much more open and being able to be built upon and and at the same time being able to say hey I own a piece of History you know here's the here's my ball that's uh Babe Ruth hit and here's my capital ship that won the battle inside Eve web3 I do got to wonder then to to something that Aaron mentioned like if we see a shifted policy because uh you

know Eve's kind of famous for you know whatever happens happens kind of thing if you're not hacking then whatever you do goes right it's wild west by policy which is something that you just generally don't see in any multiplayer game right it's like its own unique beast but the question is does involving real money or financialized assets deeper into a game suddenly change that do they have to go like well we have to make certain exceptions here or they go hey code is law on the blockchain too you know like it's its own Wild West as long as like the things weren't exploited in some way like the smart contracts weren't exploited then hey that's you know that's how it goes uh and like if this attracts more Bad actors then because they can potentially like that dude that embezzles all that money out of that company right that works for that and does that Big Heist actually gets to cash that out in real life in some way and dude just ends up like buying his own island off of like embezzling money from a giant virtual corporation like it seems like that

could get really messy in an interesting way from our point of view I think but uh as a company I got to imagine they've got to be pretty wary of like do we have to change our stance here like that wasn't originally even their stance like the whole like wild west thing they just kind of like decided to do that along the story of Eve and uh it's it seems like this is not like maybe even an inflection point for web3 in general if this is something that takes off because as you as we've all mentioned like Eve is like one of the games that's always mentioned uh alongside like Diablo and CS go as like games that are like bring something to web3 or bring ideas for these economies like we I think what regardless of whatever they do we're all going to be watching it right but it's I don't know how far off this even is like is this something that's like okay well they just got the investment money it's like cool well that was this like 10 years off from now like because it's gonna take forever to design and build it out and web3 games are not I mean maybe I'm wrong on this and no but I don't think web 3 games are faster to build than web 2 games like I think maybe a little bit

slower so I I don't think you'll see this for five years right that's that's a developer as well that they're not gonna rush it they're absolutely not gonna I don't know if you remember they actually did try to make a mobile version of Eve at one point as well I don't think it ever passed the stuff so they did actually have it out it's uh it's but it was done by Netties so they basically and it's actually pretty close to the main game okay okay is that still out now is it yeah I believe so but it's like again the outsourced kind of like they said like you have access to all our data and stuff but like you're able to build the client all that I was gonna say I remember they didn't rush it put it that way so I don't think I wouldn't expect to see this before 20 30 if I'm being honest but it'll probably be good when that does finally come yeah and I think that actually does point to the you know why did they need to raise 40 million dollars yeah it is I mean it's a big Tech stack and it's a lot of people um like it's not like Eve online is a Content light game there's a lot of stuff you need to build for that game

um so I you know that 40 million dollars may go sooner than they actually want it to go maybe they'll use some AI tools to help build it out right that'll be the part of that investment is an AI tool for a lot of that like for not in this other procedural generation but like you know some AI generation of a lot of content or something I mean again we don't know what the theme is but we gotta imagine they're not gonna stray too far from their their wheelhouse like you know it's the main audience of of Eve like absolutely loves that stuff and there's such a huge massive not massive like in in scale but in quality of like ability to keep these people for life why would you want to stray that far from me for like you'd want to be like well like let's monetize our core audience and maybe bring in some new people but like you you know your audience well but they've they've had missteps in the past where they like wanted to expand out on stuff like the world of Darkness stuff they were gonna do uh and they just kind of didn't and then like all those other sort of like tie-in spin-off things that they were gonna do to Eve that didn't really work out as Anil said they would they didn't even really like develop the the mobile

one themselves like they couldn't really I I kind of worry that they oh it's almost like they needed the 40 million to create a second like company within the company to build the stuff so they could still have their main focus on Eve because even like Eve Valkyrie the um the the VR game like has been Sunset because I just didn't want to support it anymore like they're not great at multitasking I guess put it that way but I think they do have two other games exactly the development still in addition it's like inside the Eve online so this is yeah so this would be at least you know the third new game actually that is a fair comment from Devon though that they are a student you've got to say that okay they've made this phenomenal hit but they have not done a second one second album syndrome right and you know that might be a bit unfair but I mean there are a lot of devs in that situation like I know look at for example you know Notch made Minecraft right then he made like some game called the Scrolls or something like that which I understand was even quite decent but it's like you know it's hard to get lightning in a bottle twice

right um and yeah so maybe you are right it's just another company within the company and then they can just concentrate on their baby but still explore this kind of new space um but I don't want to be down on them I I say it genuinely I think this is something I would really look forward to seeing like uh this is like someone who should be making a blockchain game so I I really can't wait just probably laugh wait a long time for it yeah stick me in the freezer for about five or ten years so I can just wake up and and play it right I don't want to have to wait with us not even knowing any details but uh speaking of those uh those kind of big three games that we talk about with uh with blockchain there was one of them I don't think it was blockchain related announcement but did have an announcement uh during the time that we were recording this so we look forward to I imagine talking about that next week uh but I want to thank everyone for for showing up today Dave and Aaron uh great Roundtable great discussion and uh very excited to to dig into some more and some more GDC meet next week

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