From MMOs to Web3: James Hursthouse on What’s Next in Gaming

and actually applicable in gaming as well. We are entering an era where uh we can have what I describe as owner champions. So you have a fan, then you have a super fan,
but now why not offer that fan or that gamer or that player the opportunity to actually be a co-owner in
in either that business or that royalty stream or whatever it is, right? [Music] I'm just going to jump right in because I think you need to do the introduction of yourself as well because when we met at the Pocket Gamer Awards the other night at dinner and we started chatting, I'm like, "This is totally impromptu. This is not planned. Certainly wasn't on your schedule to say, "Okay, podcast impromptu at Gamescom because James, what don't you do?"
Yeah, what don't I do? Well, I don't know. I ask myself that all the time. So, terms of an introduction, my name is James Hurst House. Uh, I've been in the

games industry for 20 I I used to like to say 20 years, but now I have to say 25.
Um,
but you're an OG then.
Well, I suppose.
It's a badge of honor to say that.
Yeah. I mean, in gamers since I was seven years old, which was uh
Wow.
early 70s.
Okay.
And, you know, I think I got an Atari uh console for Christmas. I can't remember either 7 years old, 8 years old, something like that.
Okay.
And so since then, I've always just been fascinated by games and interactive and uh yeah, I kind of really got into the industry in 2000, I would say.
Um my degree in the late 80s was actually in philosophy.
Oh, I've got one of them. Have
you started and mine was specifically computational model of the mind, right? So at the time obviously
AI was theoretical to a certain extent.
Yeah. you know, cheering machines made out of wood and
will this piece of wood ever become self-aware or will it be able to start to think and all this kind of stuff?
Teaching gloves.
Yeah. No, exactly. You know, all of that

stuff, right? So,
where we are now in 2025 is really fascinating for for having that background. But that's definitely the reason why, you know, throughout my life, I I kind of got drawn, I guess, initially to MMOs and was always a gamer. M
so I moved to Japan from the UK in 1993 thinking I'd go for a year or two with the aim of learning Japanese to kind of carry on my studies but one thing led to another and that led to two kids and then 17 years in Japan. Um and then I was very lucky actually I got to sidestep into the games industry proper in around 2000. Mhm.
Um cuz originally I'd gone over to teach and then I ended up uh working for the English language teaching publishers like Oxford University Press and stuff like that.
But a buddy of mine said, "Hey, I've got a guy in Nihon Bashi that wants to learn English every morning.
Would you like to teach him?" And uh so I said, "Yeah, sure." And turned out it was at the time Nexon had a joint venture with a company in Japan. So it was the Japanese CEO of that company.

And then very quickly he says, well, he says, okay, after about three months, why don't you do the international bisdev?
Then I won't have to learn English.
And so that's kind of how it started. So he sent me over to GDC 2003.
Okay.
And uh a lot of the guys who a lot of the people who were in the in the bar at the San Jose Fairmont when the entire industry used to fit in the bar at the San Jose Fairmont. Uh still part of the network today.
Oh yeah.
And still doing work with a bunch of those guys and seeing some of them over the last few days. Right. So um as a result of that yeah it's been half of my career has been infrastructure in the early days.
That's why I connected with you because yes you know gaming from the very start but you've been bringing it to I wouldn't say another level don't want to go to a pun here but you know understanding what do we want in a game what's the level of ownership that we want in a game what is the level of engagement that we want with all the objects around the game. So games,
commerce, experience.
Yeah.
Um, metaverse before it was cool.

Well, sure.
Metaverse before it was cool.
Yeah. And I think what's is interesting actually is, um, you know, when I moved over to Vancouver in 2010 to start the studio, obviously sort of Vancouver as a location has a lot to thank Electronic Arts for, right? So a lot of the people in Vancouver have had that like I would say typical western
kind of you know in the early days of gaming in western markets it was obviously all you know physical device.
Yeah. Yeah.
In the early day tapes and then obviously CDs and then DVDs and stuff but you know having grown grown up in gaming in Asia um I feel pretty lucky because obviously you know freeto play really found its feet in Asia.
Um you know I remember cart rider being invented. I remember the vitriol from western developers around freeto play which now kind of reminds me of like web 3 and stuff like this. So I think
not having had that western lens in the early part of my career is quite lucky because
I can continue to sort of look for innovation. I think a lot of innovation still coming out of you know South

Korea, Japan, China now and other markets right so
but you're also viewing gaming as a form of entertainment which is which it is. We know that already. But it's like it's like gaming,
music, film,
icons are are not part of any one platform.
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing there because I thought that was fascinating of bringing you know the whole idea that there are objects there are I won't I won't preempt it because I want you to tell your story but you know
there are we collect it's in our it's in our DNA and that's what's proven through everything we collect in a game but you're bringing you're bringing other aspects of entertainment into that realm which I think is very smart very smart
yeah I mean I think you know if you take take a step back. So the online games guys, I mean, you know, we we always used to gather in Austin every year and there was sort of the early stage of MMOs for the Austin Game Conference and things like this, right? So I think online gaming in particular was

really good sort of
formative breeding ground for a lot of the stuff that's happening more broadly now. Um so back in 2007 I think it was uh a group of us got together and and we wrote a white paper called the metaverse roadmap
and I think Neil Stevenson had coined the term probably 199796 I can't remember so I think snow crash was the first utilization of the term metaverse right
so 10 years after that you know for us it was okay we we sort of understand metaverse second life had recently started
um and so in the metaverse road map we kind of identified six pillars of the future
one of which was absolutely convergence, right? So we we kind of knew that entertainment formats would converge.
Um I'm not quite sure that we knew that for example the power of the game engines like I think Unity and Unreal and obviously as Unreal's now moved into virtual production and you know you don't really make movies these days without Unreal. And so this whole idea of a shared pipeline of assets
and obviously until GPUs were of a power

that could manipulate those in game. Mhm.
But yeah, I think all along, you know, we sort of saw that as a as a necessary uh I wouldn't say endgame because obviously the story is not fully written yet, but uh you know, having done work, for example, blending music with gaming and then
uh games with films and books with films and now I just sort of think this the idea of having to restrict your access to an IP
through only one doorway or one window into that IP is is kind of restrictive, right? I think the best IPs that are out there now and you know they are definitely cross media.
Yeah.
And uh obviously
you're trying to and you're trying to uh bring some new perspective, new life, new attention to these. And even and even a couple where I was like, "Yeah, do it, James, because I'll buy into it." Um you know, how exciting.
Uh you know, photography, for example, that was that's
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so that's a project. You know, it's interesting because aside from games, I mean, obviously we've got

still got interest in games.
Um, and a lot of what we're doing like specifically in gaming at the moment is things like instant access play,
trying to make it more accessible for a regular person
to play gaming. Right. There was a friend of mine actually the other night uh last night
talking about,
you know, Madden on console. um you know it has 5 million
sells 5 million regularly but there's actually 400 million fans of the NFL
so what are the other 395 million right
so I think partly their access to gaming is is hampered by either the console purchase or maybe what for whatever reason right and so I think
um in our day-to-day life when it comes to helping the games industry we're talking about now instant play being able to click a link and get straight into a game
yeah cloud is
using cloud game streaming basically And obviously then there's things around user registration and ethical data and all this kind of stuff. But aside from that, yeah, we um we've got some projects more in the web 3 space sort of stemming back to the work that we did

with Iron Maiden on Legacy of the Beast.
Um
well, tell me a little bit about that. Tell
my audience doesn't know about it. We had a we had the pleasure of sitting next to each other so we could chat about it.
Yeah. Well, so Legacy of the Beast was a great thing. I mean, I've been a fan of fan of the band since I was well
12, I guess. maybe 11, something like that. I first saw Maiden I think when I was 13.
Yes.
Which is a long time ago now. Uh but then saw them recently in June
uh at the 50th anniversary show at West Ham in London which was an amazing experience, right? Because still as great as ever.
Um but to get to work with the band and sort of see how interactive and the stories and all these sorts of things would fit in and their willingness. So for example, Legacy of the Beast was the first time that a major artist tooured a video game, not an album, right? So, we're very proud of that and we knew that, you know, it was going to be
associated with the tour. So, we kind of had a two-year extension because of the pandemic, right? Things like this.
But, I think, you know, seeing how music fans would then start to come into gaming and all this kind of stuff was

very uh instructive.
So, what we're doing now, and I can't go into too much detail, but
you know, there are things like um music publishing rights or music royalties. Uh there are things like ownership of photography collections, right? And so,
that's a smart one. Well, so anytime that you've got something that generates royalties now with, you know, new web 3 frameworks and smart contracts, sometimes, you know, security tokens, stable coins, all of these kinds of things. Um, and actually applicable in gaming as well. We are entering an era where uh we can have what I describe as owner champions. So you have a fan, then you have a super fan, but now why not offer that fan or that gamer or that player the opportunity to actually be a co-owner in
in either that business or that royalty stream or whatever it is, right?
So obviously, you know, things like
fractional real estate tokconomic tokenization of real estate that's been happening for a while.
You know, Black Rockck will say that basically the entire world, every single asset in the entire world's going to be on on chain eventually because it's that

much more convenient to manage and all these kind of things. For me, you know, tokenizing a relatively faceless apartment building in
somewhere, it's not that exciting.
Exciting.
Exactly. But if you can own something
that you're passionate about,
um, you know, the sort of data shows that owner champions
twice as likely to engage, twice as likely to evangelize, you know, they spend that much more. Um, and so I think that there's a there's this new sort of synergistic relationship between fan and artist or between gamer and studio or between and some of that's coming out now obviously with the amount of user generated content that you see.
Absolutely.
I think it's a great new paradigm.
You saw you saw it coming. We were chatting about that because I was like yeah you know but fellow you said and you're like yes and I have it in my deck and I was absolutely blown away and I thought this is it. Yeah,
everything goes around full circle, but you're taking it one level further than that because I think we've gone through our web 3 and our metaverse,
you know, whining uh at the first time because we it was

blown. What can I say? You know, if you haven't Well, it was, but you know,
it was blown, but now it's back.
Yeah. No, 100%. And I mentioned free to play earlier, right? So, again,
yeah,
people of a certain age will remember Western game conferences where the vitriol vitriolic negative reaction to freeto play in its early days.
It's not a real game. It's
it's not a real game. It's just a Ponzi scheme, right? So,
yeah.
And obviously web 3 kind of, I guess, was blown up from that, I think, because obviously in the modern world, you know, the ability for something to go viral for good or for bad,
you know. So, obviously free to play, like the debate around freeto play, I think, was kind of restricted to game developers, whereas I think the debate around web 3 has been much more public, right?
Yeah. And obviously I think certain people probably more people have been burned by the first phase of web 3 than they were in freeto play. I don't know. But uh
but I think yeah you're right. I mean so I think uh it took it's taken a while for it to find its feet.
Um
and I think if you look at what's really going on now in sort of what I would say is the either the second phase or third

phase of web three. Some people are calling it web four,
you know, maybe web five, web six. When do we get there? I mean, I think there's a ton of stuff that came out from those early experiments
which will genuinely
kind of revolutionize everything. Well, inform everything actually in the same way that freeto play has informed a lot of non-gaming interactions.
True. So,
look at like something like a Duolingo. I mean, it's gamification.
Dualingo is gamified. Absolutely.
Almost everything is to a certain degree though. you know, you get Expedia points and
so, you know, how do you how do you sort of now address a generation that's grown up with the engagement and the retention and all these kinds of things from games and they sort of expect that
genuinely and so
as always though for me I look to South Korea or other parts of Asia and if you see the way that certain games companies have started to integrate web 3
it's not like you know in the west where it was like a big baseball bat going hey buy tokens hey have a wallet it's kind of
yeah please have our wallet or that wallet or which wallet all that

confusing stuff. So, what they did there though, they've introduced, you know, kind of,
you know, cuz if you think about it, back 2004, 2005, whatever,
you know, lots of lots of players were getting ripped off trying to sell characters on the gray market. You know, they were trying to trade tokens
or in-game currency, right? Yeah.
Incidentally, another one of
everyone had an NFC.
Well, 100%. Yeah. So, another, you know, one of the pillars of the future in 2007 was true digital ownership, right? So, we recognized that players wanted
to feel invested in a game, right? And uh
I think we went about it the wrong way. We knew they wanted to have NFT, you know, NFTTS or something like that,
right?
But as you said, it was a bit of a hard sell.
Well, but I mean, if you think about having to sell your character on eBay to make money, how many, you know, people got ripped off, companies didn't make any money from that, right? So if you look at the sort of a genuine utilization of web3 tech, it kind of allows that behavior to become legitimate.
Players feel like they've invested genuinely, right? So you know like a game like for example nitros from we

made.
Okay,
if you see the stats between the non-web tree version and the web three version,
the web three components don't come in until much later in the game. But once you have that hardcore player base, that genuine sense of ownership
does extend the game. It increases retention. Certainly when you look at like day 180, day 365, you know, the fact that people feel
bringing it in later in the journey that makes
in the journey, right? And so it's after the player is already engaged and now you can say, "Hey, wouldn't you like to genuinely own this character or hey, wouldn't you like to have sort of invested and and so things like staking and things like some of the more esoteric web 3 stuff is introduced in a way that feels natural within that game, right? rather than it being the game's kind of like a an excuse for a tokconomic scheme, right? So I think finding that balance
is really important and you know there's a lot of
you know developers globally now who have kind of I think realized that that's
at least in gaming that's the right way

to do it right
now in something like you know um fractionalizing ownership of a photography archive even more important that we don't talk about wallet and you know staking and gobbledegook and all of this kind of like all of these arbitrage all of the to all of the terms that I think web 3 did such a poor job in I mean even the word NFT right
you know also
yeah digital ownership certificate or I think there's a whole ton of other words that we can use that would make it a lot more um
accessible right so anyway so that's kind of like the universe that I'm existing in at the moment and as far as gaming in particular is concerned it is around this sort of new paradigm of you know influencers being able to directly promote their own games through instant links
how are we going to bill
you know obviously there's been strangle hold or whatever on the industry by the platforms and that's not to say that they haven't served a great purpose right I mean a lot of people are out there going oh you know what did Apple ever do for it 30% and I think the

answer actually is they did a lot right because they did the distribution piece they do the build so
good about alternative app stores are you excited that something that's going to be a driver here
oh for sure
or that they'll have web shops or you know web shops you're going to have to merge right
web shops yeah I mean you know yes and obviously In a way, this has been the last the last couple of years have been the years of the web shop, particularly since the Apple Epic
sort of court case found its, you know, at least a temporary conclusion. I don't know if that's the end of the story, but um yeah, for sure. So I think you know in my opinion the more choice the more access the more ease with which that 395 million user base of NFL fans can now access game or games
of some description the better it's going to be for the entire industry although it'll mean that these halls will get more and more packed on an ongoing basis right but so um yeah but anyway I mean so I think that it's a very exciting future and I still think that whole idea of does the game spawn the movie does the movie spawn the Yeah.

And obviously we're entering this amazing world now of of AI supercharged userenerated content.
Yeah. So I was talking to Goat Gaming, another great episode I did, and the community manager is AI, right? And the cool thing is
that when the manager, who is Amy, right? Uh when Amy does an activation or a contest or a tournament, it is engagement off the charts, right? It's like 2x of when a human does it. I don't know if that's good or bad news for us, but it is what it is.
Yeah.
Um, and you saw some of this in what you were writing about. I mean, how much of that when we talked about, okay, ownership and we are definitely on the same wavelength on, you know, like Bowie was right.
Yeah. Bowie bonds and all that stuff.
Bowie bonds ahead of their time. No one will know this out there, but but we do. And it was it was on the market. It was so wild at the time.
Should we just do a quick explanation of Bowie bonds?
Yes, let's do that because you're right. They won't know it. Okay.
So, David Bowie, obviously always a massive innovator, right? There's

interviews with Bowie about the internet in general, which will blow your mind if you go find him, right?
Yes.
Um, and I feel very fortunate obviously, you know, passed away a number of years ago, but you know, we have touch points into Bowie and some of those iconic innovators, right, with some of the work we're doing.
Um, which feels amazing. But anyway, so so Bowie was very precient in that he recognized, you know, whatever I can't remember. I think it was in sort of late 90s where he said, "Okay, I'm going to be making a certain amount of royalty over the next 20 years. I'm going to pre-ell that royalty." So he basically sold these things called Bowie bonds.
Yes.
Which you could buy and as a result of that, you would then have a an ownership stake in David Bowie's future royalties. Right.
Right.
Um now if that too the Bowie carding, right? So that whole idea of having an ownership stake in an artist that I love and respect and obviously it would have been much more easy if it was on chain smart contract would have been allowing to be more sophisticated but in a way you know the core premise of being able to have ownership in that artist with

really I think Bow's invention. There's a couple of other examples as well.
Um anyway sorry what were we talking about?
I was talking about what you were writing about.
Oh yeah because that's that's a while back that blog. Well, it was Yeah. Well,
I'm going to I'm going to read it.
Well, 2007, we did the metaverse road map.
Yeah.
And then last, was it this earlier this year, I decided to go back and look at each of the pillars of the future and see where we were at, right?
Okay.
So, obviously, true digital ownership morphed into blockchain, crypto.
Okay. So, we nailed that one. Where are we at?
So, we got that one. Well, userenerated content. I think we saw that because obviously at the time, Second Life was really pioneering in userenerated content. Pain in the ass it was to actually make anything. I remember in Second Life, I had my character and I managed to
put a billboard like intersecting my head and I for like months I was walking around with this half finished billboard in my head. So I mean I think now
obviously with AI and the sort of backslash I'd like a world based on whatever. I mean, it's going to be so much easier for

Yeah.
content creators, whether they're professional, whether they're sort of UGC level, you know, fans
to engage in that process, right? And I think the whole thing is how do you take,
you know, a million people and have them make a hundred bucks each rather than 100 people making a million bucks each. Maybe that's an extreme, but maybe 100,000 and 10,000 anyway, whatever. So I mean and I think that's where the very precient guys like who are now starting to put licensing deals that you can just pick and choose off the shelf say in Roblox right if you saw that number of Squid Game things in Roblox incredible right so that relationship again between IP creator
um vibecoded games
they add value to the creation totally and then I don't think you know back in 2007 I think we just started looking at things like auto difficulty adjustments I mean maybe not maybe I'm I'm being a little bit, you know, rose rosecolored spectacles with that. But there was definitely a phase where we started to introduce auto difficulty adjustment in gaming. So,
you know, obviously if the player kind of they haven't pushed a button for 15

seconds, we better give them some help or this guy's clearly an expert and
and he or she should therefore get a slightly harder version of the game. But now I think, you know, if you look at AI, you can be like, "Okay, let me build this game once." And the level of customization that we're going to be able to do
is unimaginable.
It's incredible really. Right.
Yeah.
And I think again, you know,
well, and then some of that stuff then once again feeds back into the technology that we're going to need to be able to distribute those games where
it's not actually been made in advance, right? I think we're going to see quite a lot of
sort of
on spec.
Well, sort of. and and not only necessarily were fans making stuff, but they will. But then also, I think that this,
you know, I'm working on a couple of projects now where it's kind of like there's a there's a game master and the game master is going to sort of basically create new chapters for these um stories over time.
Well, yeah, it's a lot like D and D. Yeah.
You know, like goes around.
Well, yeah, because because now it's not going to take you, you know, six months to build a new level for a game, right?

You know, you can be like, okay, as long as I've got a player base,
you have a narrative and a story, you have it. Well, then also polling the players, right? What do the players want, right? Yeah. And you know, I think that sort of more symbiotic relationship between the developer and the player base is really going to come into its own because the the means of production are now that much easier, right? So,
um yeah, so that's a really interesting piece. So, what we got? We got true digital ownership. We got you
UGC. We definitely sort of figured that one.
Yeah.
Ump compute, which we've already touched on with cloud game streaming, so we don't want to work now. Okay.
So, that one's there. Um what else did we have? can't even remember now. There's a couple of others, but anyway, so with the blog,
yeah,
it'll come back to me in a bit. So, blog earlier this year, I decided what rather than waiting 20 years till 2027,
right?
It just felt like the time was right to go in and look at some of these sort of
I'm glad you did.
Where were we at, right? You know, and that's really informing what we're doing particularly at Greenstone at the moment. We're kind of like sort of
Greenstone. It's like a connector.
Well, kind of. Yeah. I mean,

orch orchestrator is what I'm thinking.
I like it. I mean, I don't know. Sometimes I call it super connector.
Okay. So I saw that. I saw that. I thought it was pretty cool.
Well,
super connector. I go with that.
And I like business development as a service because if you say it quickly, it's badass, right?
So I like badass super connector. But
I love it.
Yeah. Anyway, so I mean that's
badass super connector.
But so what I'm finding is, you know, like
you need sort of, you know, whenever you look at some of the tools providers.
Yeah. And it's kind of interesting because obviously first half of my career was much more infrastructure server hosting you know like pre-cloud you know how do you how do you deliver big MMOs in in sort of you know 2004 five whatever it was right um and obviously that got easier with cloud although you know certain advantages and there's still a lot of bare metal guys around right but um
right
you know I think as we uh as you sort of look at this distribution piece it then creates other challenges right so obviously at the moment as you try and put together a player base. A lot of that is because you know um people can sniff the device, you get the device ID,

but if my game is now happening in a server, you know, 20 miles away, there are new challenges around creating that player database. How do you collect ethical data?
Yes.
You know, and so
this is going to be creative and it's going to create tools.
Well, for sure. I mean I think the tools have to kind of morph to match
morph to match
current environment and then to a certain degree I think sometimes the tools come along
and then they then help define what innovations the creative can make right and so I think you know it's always been a case that I would say that creative always has to come first
and anybody that builds tools and platforms just for the sake of it
without solving a genuine problem or having recognized a shift
from the content side
that's kind of like a fool's errand really and you'll end up making tech that's brilliant but nobody wants it. Right. Which we, you know, we've seen a hundred times.
Zero wealth of business model ideas. Is there one that you felt was a miss or you were super excited about something and it didn't turn out that way?

Well, it's an interesting question because I mean I think you know it's it's often said that it's worse to be too early than too late with something, right? And uh
you know I guess you know
there you go, James. You've been too early but it's catching up with you. But but what are you the most excited about right now?
Yeah, I mean for me there's a few things. I I do think that this convergence like we haven't really seen what convergence necessarily means yet with some really cool IPs. I do think that we're sort of at the if if it hasn't happened already. We're certainly at the dawn of an era where we could have, you know, a threeperson team make a billion dollar game. And I think that's pretty interesting, right?
That's good news for our indies out there.
Well, for sure it is. I mean and actually you know I think although you know again I think you know what's going to happen is that people will figure out AI tools to be able to kind of sort of take the risk out of that development.
Yeah.
You know like okay what type of genre for which audience and I've done enough data scraping to sort of
sort of know that this thing's going to

be a hit and
you know kind of like these sorts of things. But I always think there is room for for indie creativity, right? Because it's outside of that,
you know, kind of the framework of the norm
and it moves faster,
right?
Moves faster. And now I think that the means of production are that much more accessible to more people, right? So ultimately creativity is the thing that's going to win.
Yeah. Well, it's good that human creativity matters.
Human creativity. Well, yeah. And also
there's a place for the humans. Absolutely. I do think that there will be a sort of wave of games where bots are playing bots and I don't know. It's going to be
and we'll watch them. Well, we'll probably wager on them. We'll probably use the blockchain to wager on bots fighting bots or something like that. But
hopefully then when the when the alien force comes, we'll have trained up the bots to be able to fight them in like Enders Game or something like that. But
love it.
Yeah. So any I mean all that stuff's very exciting. Then for me personally, I don't I mean, I I keep liking this idea of taking what we know from the games industry in terms of engaging an audience and then retaining an audience and then actually monetizing an audience, but monetizing them in a fair

and ethical way. Right?
Some of the stuff we're doing at the moment is much more about how does a player or a fan feel valued in the relationship rather than harvested. Right? So, interesting stuff around ethical data. you know, how do you make it so that the player can revoke permission for the company to access data at any time? So, I think we live through this kind of slightly wild west era of data scraping. And
obviously, you know, to a certain degree, Facebook wouldn't be Facebook if they hadn't gone down that path, right?
Yeah.
But I think it's time now for everybody to kind of be part of a more egalitarian future, right? So, whether that happens or not, I'm not sure. But I do think a democratized sort of egalitarian future was the was the real promise of of what
it's almost like it
it's going it's inescapable like that genie is out of the bottle.
I hope so. Well then you know you mentioned personaliz ultim ultimate personalization and if we are going to like permit the world to use the term web for that's what it's about. It's the personalization layer that AI brings. So

it's your health program it's your game it's your music it's what you want to do. It's like, you know, the world kind of morphs around you.
You co-create your experiences that's going back away as well.
Well, I mean, and already there's always been that sense now, I think, with distribution sort of having been solved, right? I mean,
yeah.
And and again, for indie creators, the idea of if they have a great game and they've got enough viral, there's enough word of mouth, there's no reason why it can't go to millions and millions of people, right? Because and that's why I think to go back to that conversation about the strangle hold of the platforms.
Yeah. That's
the fact that that isn't there anymore.
That's ending.
Yeah. And I think they'll be in the mix. Of course, they're going to be in the mix, right? But
be there. I'm going to stay connected with you, James, because it very much enjoyed our discussion at dinner and here again for Pocket Gamer and in the future
because you have a look into that future, James. You do.
You do. you don't give yourself credit, but I was listening to you and it's like you can't have that many hits um and

that few misses in looking at the future from 2007 to now. So, I have to say you are an OG and I am happy.
Thank you very much. Well, it's been a real pleasure. I mean, both today and at the dinner as well. And I will say Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards is one of the events of the show. So,
yes. Yes.
Yeah. In future, everybody has to go down there and uh support the mobile games industry because what was it 51% of all games are now mobile.
Yes. So it's it's the dominant form that doesn't get the credit.
Yeah. And a lot of spend. So it is a business.
The business of games.
Great to chat with you, James.
This show is all about how to do your job better, how to make an amazing game, how to market it, and you have a say. So if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on, then we would love to hear from you.
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