Finding your way within a black ocean | Mihai Pohontu from Amber

[Music] we now joined by Mii ponu from Amber how are you doing today I'm doing great it's always fantastic to be back at Pocket Gamer connects in London a conference that have been attended for many years and really uh yes not just me then that's good that's good to hear fantastic well we always ask everyone up front just to describe what their company is if people aren't familiar we haven't spoken to you before I think so what is it Amber is all about Amber is a game development agency uh we provide a wide array of services like full game development C development porting quality assurance art localization and customer support we over a th people in 10 different locations around the world so pretty large uh agency and uh We've also had U you know fantastic track record working with some of the biggest Partners in the industry uh supporting them and their portfolio of games gotcha good toe well we have to focus on some

of the more negative things first it's been a tough year for gaming in 2023 and it looks like it might be something similar this year certainly things like VC spend is looking to be considerably down we had a lot of good games released last year but this year maybe not so many being made as a person involved in that end of it yourself how's that going to affect your business going forward do you think the year uh 20123 has been the most difficult year in the history of Amber you know we've had successive rounds of like team op optimizations and focus on operational efficiency um definitely a tough year but the good news is that at the start of 2024 we see increased investment in external development our pipeline certainly looks healthier than it has been in Q4 of last year and you know historically for us q1 of any year has been kind of the slowest period of the year so it's a really good sign that we're seeing increased fraction um look uh

the UN we have been very blessed in the games industry to not having like a CLI recessionary periods so I think last year was the first time where we kind of seen this you know 13,000 layoffs were announced formally in the industry my personal opinion is that the the number of layoffs are much larger maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg because most companies don't announce their layoffs and in my estimation the hardest hit sector have been Indie Games smaller Studios so it could be that the number the total number of layoffs in games has been like 10 times as bigger as those that are formally announced not a good year for for games in general but in a sense that creates also opportunities you know new business models will be emerging new Studios will be formed during these very lean times and uh hopefully this is the start of a really nice period of growth you know we emerged from a golden era before 2023 and hopefully a new golden era will start from 2024 or onwards we're going

to be doing a talk at the show tomorrow I think that's right isn't it what's that going to be about what's the topic interesting that you ask it's precisely this the state of external development in the games industry you know what are some of the risks and some of the opportunities what trends we're we're seeing uh in the global market well speaking of Trends we talked about AI last year at our shows cuz at back then the generative AI thing was just becoming popularized now it's enchanged itself and I think people are starting to tie it to things like the layoffs to the been happening the more negative side effects maybe they are actually coming to pass um for the machine learning that exists already there's been you know most marketing companies use ml in some form or another uh in your business are you already using a lot of ml anyway and this is just a progression of that or do you see that there are benefits to generative AI that maybe don't necessarily cost people their livel do you think there's a balance yeah I I truly don't believe that uh gen AI has been respons ible for

these last round of layoffs I think it's a combination of large firms optimizing for profit and like smaller outfits finding it hard to find publishing deals and to find Services deals um in the wake of this uh dir of investment in the space and the first time in the history where the industry um registered a dip post pandemic so I think those are the main culprits um I personally I'm I'm very bullish on on AI I think it will be part of our lives in very meaningful and pervasive ways I think what's important for us as game developers is to use AI in an ethical fashion to make sure for example that in art the original authors are accredited and we are using data sets that are you know free of any sort of legal complications and conundrums so I think there's a way to do that um and and it will simplify development first of all programming will become something that will be highly aided by AI with in

in generative AI the fact that we can create almost any images I think in the next couple of years we'll see 3D models and 3D scenes being created in the same way from a prompt um we're already using AI heavily in localization and testing you know it's part of our Bots that are you know testing for um map um uh correctness um you know it's um testing bound map boundaries that's that's the word that I was looking for and uh finding bugs finding crashes um we have used uh generative AI systems uh like uh mid Journey um and Del to help the kind of creative conceptual process you know generating images that help illustrate the world and and it's much faster to do this than like drawing it manually but once we get to a point where where we have a vision an artistic vision I feel like the human

creativity and the human contribution in the process continues to be extremely relevant um I don't see AI as something that will take from games industry jobs but something that will enhance our work as game developers got sure now you use the term uh work within within the industry is like finding your way within a black ocean what do you mean by that what's the Black Ocean um well so there's this concept of a red ocean versus a blue ocean right so blue ocean is considered an area of innovation Market defining um novel Technologies or ideas and then the red ocean is a highly competitive market where firms are battling for dominance and usually using any advantage like cost or size in order to uh establish themselves as a top mover in the market The Black Ocean is a market that has been red for so long that the carcasses have uh colored the water black uh and the mobile sector is

um you know informally considered to be that like you know such insane levels of competition uh is one way to to see the uh the industry as a whole the other way to see it is that it's a area that is apt for truly transformative change so from this like Black Ocean a highly competitive space like incredibly new ideas can be born and uh I'm really looking forward to 2024 as a an year that we revolutionize is the way we do things in the mobile industry I think um using things like AI we can make the live operations process a lot more efficient and uh and also I think that smaller Studios leveraging AI systems can achieve results that normally we would ascribe to AAA developers so this is truly the thing that makes me most excited is that like relatively small teams intelligently leveraging AI Frameworks can create a lot more content

can write a lot more code and can really deliver much deeper and broader experiences than ever before in the history of the game of game development well we've seen a lot of Crackdown on the way that data is used and hanged certainly Apple in their Marketplace they crack down with their TTP stuff you've got uh Android doing it a little bit with Google but also recently China started dropping uh what can and cannot be bought and paid for within inap purchases so no more daily user rewards things like that something that's going to potentially change the way that games have to be designed which means you have to be very reactive very quick and uh nimal to be able to turn on that stuff as you know developers Publishers and things like that how do you find like how quick can you turn on a dime in the current landscape how fast in agel do you need to be to keep up well um as an independent developer you need to move very fast and like follow the latest trends and explor any Niche that has the potential for commercial success um I would say that's much more difficult to

do in the context of a larger team with an established product um and that therefore that creates an opportunity for new entrance in the space um and uh also like it's we're a very interesting inflection point in the industry because on one hand we've seen in the the Google uh legal decision recently that you know there is potentially uh a way to like open up the Android market not make it all control by Google like allowing other app stores on the platform which is an interesting proposition it could really open up um the traditional thief of the uh App Stores um it could have reverberations on Apple even though Apple like won a legal decision uh uh right before in the in the fortnite case and um so that's an interesting development that is worth following because it really could change the parameters of how the industry operates if we are dealing with open plat forms then some of the limitations that were

imposed by Google and apple on their platforms would obviously go away um at the same time what I'm seeing that uh that I find quite exciting is that um a lot of developers are are starting to build crossplatform experiences that monetize outside of the mobile space so like you know a big theme at at this year's conference is web shops you know where you know you're able to sign up users they can transact on the web they can you know kind of customize their experience on the web and then they can come to the Mobile screen as it were to you know enjoy the the game experience itself so I think we'll see a lot more than that that's another way to circumscribe the traditional dominance of the first parties in the mobile space I personally feel that in the Long Haul an open platform will do a lot more for creativity and innovation in the space than the current system that is like tightly controlled by the first parties see and apart from the the talk that

you've got going on tomorrow what are you doing at the show from your perspective what's the reason you come to these kind of events well the first and foremost the reason is to find my friends and say Hello uh people come to Pocket Gamer connects from all over the world and uh it's really wonderful to like reconnect uh as the name of the conference implies uh but outside of that it's really just getting the word out you know what amber does you know that we are codevelopment partner to you we can help you you know build your games faster and more beautifully as well um so finding Partners uh saying uh hello to people that may be interested in finding employment in the industry we're still hiring so we're looking for you know smart people to join the team and uh and of course to have fun in London the best city in the world that's what we'd like to hear well thank you so much for talking to us we look forward to the talk tomorrow cheers [Music] he