Game Developer Conference (GDC) 2024 Recap: Themes, GDC Talks, Takeaways, and Rumors

all right what's up everybody Welcome to the game makers GDC recap and Brett I'm looking for you for some [ __ ] talking I actually met with Solomon yesterday that's exclusive for you that's exclusive content great great yeah he mentioned you were busting his chops too so like I I definitely would love to have you share with the audience some of the jokes that you told but anyway so the objective of this episode brought some folks coming back from GDC last week but we want to focus on key learnings trends and maybe even some rumors I don't know how comfortable you guys are talking about some of the the secret rumors but I think it'd be cool if we can talk about some of them more generally or things like that but with us today to recap GDC we have First Matthew conman Director of Business Development at Super social we have Brett Novak CEO at Market intelligence

company liquid and grit and Kenneth Landon director of product at hitfactor so again in terms of the agenda for today we're going to first start with key themes and Trends from the conference second we'll talk about GDC talks I think Ken you were the only one of us who actually attended a lot of these talks and so would be great to to know if there was something value no one yeah that's a trend too that's a trend too like nobody goes to talks anymore that I that that I know but that's because you guys are just in the the VC world now it's actually the most the most passes ever sold they sold 30 attendees this year yeah oh nice nice and yeah I mean we definitely want the conference itself to be healthy and to be ongoing just so we can keep freeloading off of the conference itself for all of our meetings but third third topic we'll I just want to like focus in on specific key takeaways that you guys thought were from the conference and

finally to the extent that you guys are comfortable sharing some of the the secrets the rumors the word on the street if any I think we can kind of wrap it up with that but starting with themes and Trends I can go ahead and kick off some of the things that I heard but do any of you guys want to go ahead of me or should I just jump right in lead way all right I'll jump in so going to cover like probably five key key points or kind of themes or trends that I just saw the first was certainly not a secret VC investment seems to be down seems to be down a lot the investors whom I spoke with candidly stated that they have slowed down they are not really investing very much their LPS limited partners the guys that fund their firms have been cautioning to slow down and giving them some guidance in terms of making sure that they don't invest too heavily and the game teams that I spoke to that were seeking funding were saying saying that they

were actually having a very difficult time not much luck at all getting funding and even on the publisher side so Publishers can often invest or do publishing deals but even for them I'm hearing that they're writing much smaller checks one story in particular was of a Dev team that asked for almost three million in funding and they got countered by a publisher for like 400k so unfortunately it does seem like unfortunately for the industry fortunately for me because I I don't want to see more game studos funded Investments down and so that was one key Trend or theme that I saw the second is in terms of the development model where just speaking to other game developers there does seem to be a shift away from new game development to live Ops and a dramatic focus on efficiency so smaller budgets tighter deadlines more specific

deliverables and there doesn't seem to be a lot of leeway for long-term projects where investors just kind of trusting the team to deliver and things like that but also guys if you have any comments or if you want to jump in just kind of jump in anytime to just so I don't monologue for forever but yeah yeah no I wanted I wanted to jump in actually on VC real quick before we go far it's interesting because there's a lot of funds that raised a lot of money in 21 and 22 and they have to invested right so it that Capital isn't necessarily called yet but it's committed right and so at some point they're going to have to begin investing again now they also were writing very large investment checks in 21 and 22 with some of that money but what did Griffin raise for their their second their their latest fund that was 22 I think they raised over 600 million right like it wasn't too long ago that gaming funds were under $10 million and that was considered big and now we're talking about gaming specific funds that are several hundred million dollars that

have to find ways to invest this money and literally they need to find ways to invest it because they have to invest this money at some point otherwise they violate their contracts with their LPS and so it's I I I don't think it's dead forever it's just some have been burned Lately by by certain Investments by certain valuations lack of exits right all of this comes to hurt now I do think that there have been several successful wins for the VCS lately in terms of exits whether it's sales IPOs Etc and and and and I I do think as as that as that side of the equation starts to heat back up potentially then they'll start investing more and so I I don't think it's it's a time to necessarily be discouraged I just think if you look back at really what happened in 21 and 22 especially and how much Capital flowed into the space I know JK we used to talk a lot I used to show those charts that I got from Bloomberg around the IPO Capital the VC Capital the the m&a capital that was going into gaming we I think it was

the the 22 number was more than the prior decade before covid combined close to that like we're talking about insanes amount of capital that came in and so when you kind of take that step back and reassess it's I don't think it's dead forever we just have to kind of get back to a rational trajectory in that process to to the point on these first two trends that I'm talking about the lower VC investment as well as a more efficient development model moving towards greater discipline auditing smaller Milestones but the general focus here with the first two is just efficiency right which is I think I've been talking about for a few years it's been in the coming it I mean it's been something that's necessary and we're kind of going through that but leading to my third point which does seem like the third theme for me is that there does seem to be a lot more pain coming whether it's in the next few few months but something like I would assume that we've got three

to six more months of additional layoffs and things like that before we're we're able to work our ways through a larger scale rationalization of the industry to the point that you made Matthew in terms of the overinvestment that's happened and things of that nature at GDC there generally did see seem to be two camps of people when it comes to the Outlook of where we are and where we're headed in the future there were the optimists and the pessimists in terms of the two camps and a lot of the optimists were just like oh yeah things are going be great I I know it I feel it but then if you ask for reasons why there really wouldn't be a lot of reasons why besides just like intuition feeling well we've already seen a lot of pain I think it's over so but those feelings seem to be at least from the people I talk to based more on a feeling rather than on any real reasons the pessimists on the other hand did feel that there's going to be more pain at least for the next three to six months

and the reasons that were kind of brought up were first of all that there are more layoffs or Studio closures kind of coming on the startup side I would say that there has been a number of raises where in the past where they're starting to run out of cash now whether it's like seeds that aren't able to get their series a or series a which for many of the companies during the boom times didn't even align with any Milestones right and I can say that for for my studio as well I mean we couldn't have gotten funded in the current environment just just to be honest right and but at least on our side we kind of predicted what was going to happen right now in terms of move to efficiency and for a more difficult investment environment so even when when everyone was telling us don't raise too much don't don't raise uh more money now we I I basically said nope we're gonna raise as much as we can and we did and now we're

one of the reasons why we're still alive is because of that because of that choice but anyway I would go ahead I was just gonna say I think on the optimism versus pessimism point it really depends on on what type of Studio you are and what point in your journey you are I I brought this point up to a friend from a different podcast that like if you are at a big studio and your board is asking you to make more of the same game and you're just getting super bored and you're being outco competed by some of the biggest game developers it's a scary time because you are like operating against Tighter and Tighter margins so that's Doom and Gloom for you you're not working on games you necessarily want to work on because you're being constrained it's highly competitive Etc if you're any developer and you're also making those same games it's super difficult because you can't outspend scopely you can't outspend any of the big depths but yeah because those big companies are being constrained and being focused on what they can develop actually opens up an opportunity space for some of the

smaller developers who are willing to go really wacky with some of their game designs and so there is actually a significant amount of opportunity for them the batas of the world the hell divers 2 of the world people who have Innovative takes on game development can actually make some serious headwinds right now now I I was talking to some VCS at like the deconstructor fund party and they were very bullish on preed Indie developers because they see blood in the water they can get a higher percentage than they normally could and they're just out they're looking for really interesting gameplay designs so and there there I think there is two sides of the coin you just have to position yourself towards the positive side of the coin and not like I said it's not every Studio can do that you can't be a big fish and Big Fish Games or whatever and then go and do that because you are going to be constrained right and I I will say the one other change that I've seen is that I I think it's great that those investors are excited about some seed L

founding teams or opportunities but the other thing that I've noticed is that a lot of those investors are now asking for more like it's hard to just raise off of a PowerPoint anymore it's like okay we also need to see a prototype of some kind before we'll invest in in this in the seat so they're asking these game Studio teams these founding teams to do a lot more before they get their initial check which is you know probably a healthy thing but it's just the new reality of where we are yeah I would definitely agree with that is the mo more healthier thing we we probably should not be able to raise $2 million off of a PowerPoint presentation that's just kind of insane or a60 million series a like some companies were doing in 21 and 22 like good for them to be able to go get that money but you know it does that's part of the reason that we're seeing this right now you we had all this it's the overinvestment but it's also it's not just the overinvestment on a gross level it's the overinvestment of these individual idual Investments like traditional VC is not

about these big bold bets so early on it's about taking lots of very very small bets and one of them takes off and when you're throwing $60 million at a at a PowerPoint right that doesn't work yeah I would say that the current environment the other impact of this though is that it's going to discourage longtime Horizon opportunities or or projects and so I certainly could not have gotten our company fed based upon like I told our guys India is going to take a while you're going to be waiting years for us to improve that story today would not get I get thrown out of a room right today and when you look at some of these games monopoly go was in soft lch for six years Hearthstone was in development for many years there's some of these bigger games that just take a really really long time and to fund some of these games for the period of time that they they may need in order to be

successful is likely not going to happen in the current environment so I would say that those kinds of opportunities are going to be much much more difficult to fund even though they might make a lot of sense right like look how much look how super successful a game like valerant or Monopoly go or Hearthstone or any of these games that did take a super long time in development to kind of get right I just don't see those happening anymore in the current environment but yeah that that's just the the tradeoff of what's going to happen and I slightly disagree I I think that there will be more Investments like that they're just going to be much smaller scale like you're not going to see those big bold VC Investments at an early stage you're going to see lots of different shots on gold that are much smaller scale and I think there's going to be more investor protections built in more Milestones things like that that have to be hit to get some of the capital that's that's committed right you don't just get the check up front think so I think VCS are going to be

smarter about protecting themselves and putting those those those checks in place those milestones in place it's going to be harder for developers in that sense but I I I do think that for the right developers the right ideas the money can be there I think the VCS are going to have to start looking a lot more like Publishers like they're going to have to start adding a lot more Milestones into their deals the only thing that makes sense to me yeah and so I Matthew I don't disagree with anything that you said I but I do think for those longtime Horizon projects the the pedigree of you and your team is going to have the bar is just a lot higher so absolutely quality ma quality will matter too for sure like it's it's not that everyone's going to get funded like it pretty much was for a year and a half or two yeah other thing coming up is that there does seem to be a lot of fire sales happening with some studios that are struggling and even some of the bigger companies do seem to to be struggling right now because of at the

beginning of this so one thing I did kind of confirm with about four or five different folks is that UA seems to have been deteriorating fairly significantly since the beginning of this year for whatever reason and so that's also why I think more pain is coming because and I believe the EA the the latest round of EA Loff is now public right I think I'm pretty sure I saw something on my LinkedIn feed but yeah there's there's definitely in one of the reasons why I think some of the bigger companies with certain genres are having problems now and in particular I would say the EA issue is likely related to their their glue acquisition is that some of the old UA marketing tricks from you know whether it's like a Kim Kardashian type of game or other games that Target females I mean or a lot of that stuff is now learned by a lot of people in the industry so a lot of those tricks are no longer as viable or relevant anymore and so this situations that existed for

example when Kim Kardashian came out and no one was focusing on the female audience and you could get a $2 CPI versus a $10 CPI just because you're targeting females and have the right thing and you've got all these marketing UA tricks that not everyone was coping yet at that time so that that we're in a different environment now so I do think that that's the issue happening with the bigger companies that may be struggling why we may be seeing more pain is because of some of the those things that are happening to our industry currently yeah I guess I don't want to monologue too too long here but just just a couple of quick additional points first is AI and live Ops seem to be a really tremendous area of focus I kind of opted into that as well just doing like a AI Focus panel for the game makers J that that you guys attended but also shout out to the clever tap team in AWS we did a AI cross live Ops talk but a lot of people just inside discussions

at some of these private events have been thinking a lot more about Ai and what we're seeing is that it's not quite like I would say almost no one really agrees I I don't think anyone is suggesting that AI has have has a massive impact right now on the game development content pipeline or anything like that but that because of the rate of progress that we're seeing and because there are certain things that you can do in the game development process using AI that the promise of it's going to be in literally three months six months a year two years out is going to be pretty tremendous and yeah I think I think AI we did a whole podcast on AI a couple months ago right and and I think everything we said then is probably trash at this point because it's all evolved so rapidly but it is the kind of thing where even if it's not impacting your workflows today and and it's not doing things for you you need to be cognizant and thinking about how it can down the road what's coming and how you

can eventually build that in something that that that I look at a lot is like hey can we be more efficient down not today but maybe in three six months 12 months Whatever It Is by leveraging X Y and Z and and those are types of things that especially the the very manual labor tasks of of work that get done that that eat up so many hours what can we do to expedite that process and cut it down from hours to minutes that's going to be huge down the road for for companies like us yeah and maybe just the last oh go ahead again I was just going to say there's just so much art that goes into modern mobile games Modern PC games and to Echo again your both of your points is it's not here today but the progress we've made over the last 12 months has been significant I I'm sure you all on the call remember mid Journey appearing what feels like less than a year ago what feels like it wasn't there really really recently and now we're to the point where you can prompt something have it create an image for you have it then be sent to another service have it

3D modeled have it sent to another service have it cut out have it sent to another service and have it rigged like so and that's like almost half of the pipeline there's only half of the pipeline left and that'll be solved within six months 12 months yeah so it's can what you're talking about there's there's a company called Ready Player me I saw their demo of of this thing they're absolutely working towards exactly what you're what you're talking about and we'll see where they get to but they they seem to be doing promising stuff there another example I just met with a company today that's building generative music and it's all license-free music so it's all created based on models and so think about how much time it takes a sound engineer to put together background music program it for when you hit certain milestones in a world or a quest or whatever AI can potentially do that now like that's huge I think it was alen Anam might have been somebody else but I think it was alen Anam who said that the like the the jobs at in an art studio are going to change significantly you're not going to lose your job to AI but you're going to lose it to the person sitting next to you who

is using AI right and I do think that's going to happen like on on games that are like 700 people like World of Warcraft or even larger more than half of those developers are artists and that might shrink down to less than a 100 people versus the three or 400 people that it is now um because each of those people is producing three or four times the amount of art that they were producing beforehand using these tools so I mean it it will drastically change our industry but I don't think that means that we're going to have net less games being made we're just we're going to have the same amount of developers we're just going to be producing three or four times the amount of content we were beforehand but we will need is a way to filter out all the crap that is being produced by all these extra Studios that are popping up yeah so what one last one from me and then I'll hand it over to you guys is just the criticality of UA and marketing so we were at that at the game makers GDC dinner with Shong from Century but I won't talk about the specific details from there just because I I I don't I'm not sure if we have permission to talk

about that on his behalf but I'll just say the general theme is that Marketing in UA is definitely critical there are pretty huge points of emphasis teams resource being deployed around UA and marketing to make games successful and that and we're kind of back to like five to 10 years ago when it would it's not just about the product quality it's not just about live Ops there's the three pillars you have to have a great product you have to have a great live Ops and you have to have uh a great UA marketing and so we're we're back to that we we you need all three of those to be successful in the mobile market today and with that let me open it up to you guys what else do you guys see themes trends that we should be talking about I mean that that covers a huge swath of what was at GDC I mean ugc is a huge one I think we're going to go into that a little bit later AI was literally everywhere I heard from multiple VCS

that your studio is just not going to get funded if you don't have ai somewhere in your slide deck that's so like that's concerning cuz back to my previous Point like about the board members forcing you into specific design space that that makes my skin crawl a little bit as a a player focused designer like okay now I have to work in this space to to get funding um I think it's a shame that we can't talk about the Sentry games information because I think that would blow people's minds the specifics there but yes I want to Echo that point it is absolutely imperative that you put as much resources as you can into Marketing in UA because that is unfortunately 60% maybe more of our business right like it's it's all about getting people into your game so but yeah and I think the last one that was blew up you have it here as like the last topic which is the sensor Tower data AI merger that's going to be a interesting thing for us product managers over the next couple months to see how that rolls out has those those products kind of consolidate and merge

together yeah and Brett you know both of those companies very well what are your thoughts a little biased a little biased though okay I don't know if I can speak unbiasedly about both of them I'm a internal Optimist on all these things I'm an optimist about the industry about the changes about it maybe that's because I've been running my own company for eight years and you kind of have to be but I'm excited for the merger I feel the though the data providers are at an interesting intersection with what's going on with idfa and moving moving so much revenue off the platform that that's that's the difficult problem that that they are going to need to solve and I think now that they're one entity D and sensor Tower it's going to allow them to focus so much more on that and having had conversations with both groups I know sensor tow super product

focused and they're very good at listening to um to game developers and and they both are I'm sort of speaking as sensor towers and day eyes one now but I'm I'm kind of excited for it I mean I know there's it's a little scary for them developers but the fact that they're going to get back to just like focusing on product figuring out how how they're going to incorporate off platform revenue and how they're going to add some new cool stuff like that's exciting to me and exciting as a partner of of both of theirs so I'm kind of excited which which service do do you prefer don't make him answer that sensor Tower sensor Tower both you know both I mean they're entity they're one at this point full disclosure we have Partnerships with both of them so I will say it's it it can be worrisome like there there is a risk they just start jacking up prices I

don't think that's who they are but like and if they do that I think some of the large Publishers are going to just be forced to build their own analytic systems to at least have some negotiating leverage on price right I mean so it could go south quickly I don't think it will I think what we have seen is at least for sensor Tower it is a testament to their strategy that they Diversified a little bit I think it gave them a little bit more resilience against what's going on in Mobile gaming they bought pathmatics they've done some other things whereas dat AI na app Annie has kind of stayed true to who they are in kind of a single vertical or more a smaller set of verticals and so I I think that's something to to see kind of play out here but I was chatting with some of the sensor Tower people at GDC it sounds like they're excited I mean I know there was there was layoffs but they they they are excited to bring on a lot of the employees to really help them do more than what they've been able to do and have more resources to invest and so that could just be the marketing Spiel and they're good at it but I I do kind of believe it and that's exciting if they can build lots of cool new features and tools for for developers on

all platforms including an area that's really untapped is is ugc platforms is not really professionally covered and it'd be interesting to see if that's somewhere where they go next also yeah it did see most of the developers that were speaking about the merger were most worried about prices they're like I think they might jack up the prices so that seems to be the biggest concern and expectations from a lot of people in the industry I also do think however that this is a big opportunity for some of the the second tier guys out there because I think they the market will be looking for the next backup but those guys were so far away in terms of scale and services so but I think one of them is going to make a big step forward I would assume that of the players there's probably two that I would be looking at most closely which is app figures and then social paa now I've told the social paa guy first of all of all your name sucks big time like social P makes no

freaking sense as a name they haven't listened to me so I would say may hey not everyone like feedback like we do that's a lesson I've had to I've had to learn over 40 years not all of us were raised in households where that came like every five minutes just the FYI I actually funny story I was meeting with someone I love at GDC as a person and I've worked with very long time Talia at plarium I can give her a shout out because she's amazing but she was giving me a bunch of feedback and I was like oh this is so great this is so great and at the end she goes oh and last thing take a public speaking course oh I was like Talia you went too far you went too far I was like I gonna have to end this meeting five minutes early to go cry in the bathroom for five minutes before my next meeting and I told that to my wife she got a really good crack out of it and I don't know that was you asked me to say some jokes

I'm gonna make fun of myself yeah out toia I appreciate all of her very great feedback and not everyone appreciates it as much as we do yeah but I I fully expect one of those guys to maybe double triple more their business just because I do think that the Market's going to look for a viable number to at the very least it's hard it's hard that that business is hard and I don't think dayi was doing anything per se wrong I think what they ran into is that they just raised so much Capital that the the valuation that they were looking for just wasn't there because the market is is not necessar the Tam is not as big as as they potentially thought it was all those things you were talking about before Matthew about the market conditions but I really think they just ran into the fact they raised 170 something million 165 or whatever it was and they just couldn't get that yeah that you know 700 yeah maybe we could talk about more spe specifics of the deal in the rumor section

or if we're looking for a future sponsorship from censor Tower maybe we shouldn't say anything but no but yeah maybe we could talk about that a little bit yeah it's not that important developers okay so yeah let's go to the next section then unless you guys have any anything more but Ken I know you were at a lot of the GDC talks I haven't gone to any GDC talks for the last two to three years because every time I bought a pass it was just a huge waste of money I would average one and a half sessions per year which I just didn't think was worth it but it um glad to know that you went to those talks probably the one talk that I I did kind of feel like I wanted to go to but I and that might that what potentially would have been worth getting the pass for is the is the Frank squared the Frank plus Frank supercell talk and I know you went to that one so definitely excited to hear more about some of the key GDC talks and what you learned but do you want to take us away in that section again yeah I can do that I also I'm

curious to learn more about like if you brought PMS along with you would you advise them to go to these talks or like is the reason why you don't go to them because there's just so much more value in the hotel lobbies versus the talks um because I do find that many of the talks to be valuable it's just is a I I would say for me the the problem with the GDC talks is that some of them are great some of them are gold but they're very few you and and so and for me like because I've got so many meetings outside of GDC it makes it hard for me to go to some of those talks there's usually always conflicts and you know if you allow your schedule to go I mean you can fill up your entire day with 30 minute blocks of meetings so you this something I actively fight against but yeah I would say as a PM probably talks more important when when you're kind of more in the executive side then it's what's more important are these private dinners

these kind of private events and things like that to be able to really get to understand well want want to develop your relationships with partners and things like that but also some really key information and important insights usually come from the private stuff yeah I totally yeah I mean I didn't I didn't have a pass but I'm on the bizdev side of things right so it's it's not relevant for me and and so I think that's an important thing to remember is you can look at the schedule and you can kind of understand what's what's what's going on and you can you can assess if it's even going to make sense just from the topics that are there for someone like me it doesn't make sense because all my meetings are are one to one that I need to have and and and so most of it's in hotel lobbies right or in hotel rooms potentially and so for someone like in my role it doesn't make any sense but I I can totally see the value for some people who are definitely in the PM side are actually trying to learn and and take more best best practices back to their teams there's also the cost consideration right is it if you're company in this environment is it worth sending your people just to go listen to

people talk when you could eventually just watch that online too right because they do put this stuff online as well so I I think that's a consideration as well for for some companies who are trying to be efficient and save some money right now yeah I guess for me what a key question there is is it more valuable to send folks in person to these talks because the GDC Vault pass gets you all the content as well and what the trade-offs are for that that's an extra think Grand just to send them to the talk it's also dangerous I remember a startup telling me that they sent four four people to GDC and then after GDC they lost two of [Laughter] them y I mean it's not just the extra cost of the past it's Hotel it's flights it's everything right when you when you add it up like and if they're at GDC they're not doing something else right like at least for me being at GDC and doing doing those meetings is my day job right if if if a developer or a PM is sitting

in these lectures all day they're not developing pming a project right and so learning is work learning is work it's also it's also I mean there's probably at this point a 75% chance you're coming home with some kind of cold or something like that whatever yeah I mean I am shocked that I went to both GDC and then I went to New York this week for play fronts and I am I'm not sick yet at least I know right and I mean the amount of people I talked to that are sick this week it's just ton so it is a kind of an interesting question I don't think people think about it enough is like what is the true cost of going to a conference I struggle with that for sure because it's it's a whole day I'm not doing work and that's extremely costly so I go halfway where I'll meet but I'll have time in between to check email to do some work to respond and that makes it manageable but um it's

hard probably actually the first not just to give it some props the first report that we ever or I ever wrote I should say we but it was it was just me at the beginning it was a talk at GDC that I went to on crossy roads and the guys who started crossy roads did an unbelievable talk on crossy roads and put on all of their numbers because they were like an independent development studio and they crushed it and they made an amazing game and they were trying to give back to the community and they put up their kpis their revenue numbers their retention numbers everything that they did it was pretty incredible and I ended up writing our first report on that talk and crossy roads in general and so I'm just trying to give GDC talks a shout out here and tell probably not a very interesting story but those are the best talks I go into

that a little bit here in a second but like it reminds me of Emily Greer at congregate all of her talks were in the good where she shares like all of congregate kpis the world which is the idol the idol games talk from from G but again I think that one I've listened to is just a ton on the Vault and I completely agree in fact there's a bunch of videos that I want to check out on the vault already and I'm I was checking to see when they're going to go live for that so but again I'm I'm not saying that none of them are useful like there's clearly value in these things you know just it depends none yeah yeah with with that in mind I'll go over my my top three talks from the from the GC so my number one I'll start at the top is the Frank squared talk from supercell so this is Frank Yan and Frank kenberg the GM and the senior game designer working on brawl Stars so the the purpose of this talk was to review their removal of loot boxes from brawl Stars initially

when they pitched this talk to the GDC team it was supposed to be a gloomy affair because at the time brawl star's revenue and engagement has tanked significantly and they wanted to show sort of the the learnings from that talk or sorry the learnings from that event in that talk halfway through the year they made some significant liveops changes and added a pseudo loot box back into the game and they're every single one of their metrics basically did a 180 and now they are on a path to go straight to the moon so it was a a really really interesting talk they showed their Internal Revenue dashboards without the y- AIS so we know that between summer of last year and last month they've 8.8 xed their revenue which is insane like we can sort of guess what those numbers are using dat AI numbers which is now on track to be being one of supercell's most profitable games they did mention in the talk as

well that it's now past a couple billion dollars in Revenue so huge huge franchise for them the team there is is growing in size to be able to live operate it at this at this scale which I think is in on track with ilka's sort of commitment to Growing the teams to live op for the future and being able to compete against some of these huge teams for scopi and other large mobile developers um they had some really really good actionable learnings which is one of the key key things I look for in talks that kind of like push them ahead of other companies they're not really marketing pitches they're really focused on spreading those learnings out within the entire community and those learnings just to briefly kind of go over them here were to simplify when you're wrestling with a complex design to reduce noise when you're rolling out big changes because those big changes can make it difficult to do analysis that big changes by themselves are not a silver bullet that often times it's better to do lots of small changes than one large um change especially from a Dev cost perspective to find people that

challenge you um both in the design space it's very easy to get stuck into a specific design Paradigm and those challenges can come from any part of the team and one of the funniest ones was that random rewards are exciting and that was kind of like the the biggest one of the talk that players have these brains that react very positively to random rewards folks are there's a there's a really classic book in product management called it's by nearer all I'm sure BR is it called hooked something like that it's like the classic retention Loop and one of them is like one of the steps in the CRA classic retention Loop is random rewards and if you remove that from the retention Loop players tend to retain less so because they removed this random rewards portion of their hord Loop players returning and they've added it back in and now they're not and then their last learning was to just double down on retention based momentum so like as you've seen in some of the charts that they had in their talk um they also grew their Dow during this time period

by I think it's like almost four times maybe was like three and a half times something like that so pretty significant overall performance it was great to see the data minus y- axis we can guess what the y- axxis are from data AI but it was great to see that it was great to see that they were how humble they were they were it was not a marketing talk which many of these things can be um so yeah that was definitely my top one I I think everybody should watch it on the Vault watch it a few times if you can my number two talk was King's AI talk and that was one because everybody in your Social Circle is going to be talking about Ai and this is one of the few use cases for how it's actually being used at a billion dollar Studio to improve live Ops at that studio King's currently using it on Candy Crush Soda Saga to reduce a significant portion of a specific task in one of their game design pipelines so there's this step inside of the pipeline where after generating a new level that they have to

like iterate and tweak to get like a specific score from a spe from one of their like test spots and this AI one can generate the level for the start off and then two it can run tweaks create different tweaks using like machine learning so that they have to like press the button less times and they've basically reduced the the total time that game designers have to spend on new level creation by something like 65% so that was really kind of cool and they went into really really deep detail on their models they like showed the models on screen so like if you're there in the chat and you're quite a technical person not chat in the in the talk you're quite technical person you can use some of that information for your own studio if you're you know want to take this approach I think one of the interesting takeaways from people in the audience during the questioning section of it was that they were asked if this meant that they were going to increase their level Cadence and they said no which which translates to we are no longer going to need 65% of our game designers working

on new levels so it's a a arrow in the quiver of the people saying that this AI thing is going to reduce jobs it's interesting point of view to me so the third one I wanted to talk about just because it seemed to be everywhere and I don't I wasn't super happy with how the GDC folks rolled these out they were overlapping was epics ufn talks and these were some of the best talks as well I had a friend go to the one that I couldn't attend and we both really enjoyed them this is where epic sort of highlighted the current performance of ufn ufn they highlighted their ongoing road maps for ufn that's is where they like they debuted how much money they were making they debuted certain things like the the crater follow follower button things like that I think one of the reasons why I liked this talk specifically is because it's one of these talks that makes the developers in the room feel like there's WI in the sales sort to speak inside of the industry where if people are telling you

the next big thing on the horizon is ugc this is one of the biggest ugc creators telling you hey these are all the tools we're providing you so it's more like a hype talk if anything and also allows us as developers to kind of like come up with new ideas of how we're going to match our products around these new tools that they're rolling out I still think they have a long ways to go something like twitch's bounty board program is going to be needed for for ugc platforms like this just to kind of allow develop is a way to sell into the platform but yeah like those were those were my top three talks together there was just a lot of really good ones this year more so than what I've heard in the past to Joe's Point earlier there was a lot of really sold out or sorry there's a lot of sold out ones there's one I I really wanted to get into which was the Gen AI one that that had like a line wrapped around the entirety of the South mcone Hall so like literally the line looped around and the back of the line was at the front door it was crazy like

a thousand people waiting to get inside so a lot of people eager for that any thoughts I want I have a few more things to go on I I would jump in on ufn because they did announce a lot of cool things at GDC and this is kind of the second year that they've had ufn at GDC because they announced it last year a lot of good updates just before GDC they released progression saving which literally is table Stakes for building games right and so they getting there they're rolling out more features there's still a lot of question marks around the viability of building a game's business on it rather than it just being a professional modding platform because that's really what it is right now it's really just a professional fortnite modding platform at this point it's it's for example you can't do it's a ugc platform but you can't literally do ugc you can't do Avatar items because epic still controls that because that's how they make all their money in fortnite BR right is from Cosmetics right and so how does how does the platform evolve to become more

encompassing to all the features that are vibrant on other platforms like Roblox if they really do want to compete with Roblox one of the most engaged features is the Avatar economy and if you keep that gated behind epic at the parent level that's going to be very tough to build that Community around yeah agree yeah but one thing it does seem clear is that we I had mentioned that live Ops and AI were key themes of this GDC and certainly the talks that you mentioned seem to be oriented on live Ops or or AI in some way so I definitely think people should understand that this is this is kind of the current state of our industry right where new game projects many of them are getting cancelled resources are being shifted to live Ops which is why the industry is so focused on live Ops right now and because margins are tighter we're operating in a more difficult environment so live Ops becomes increasingly important and then on the

AI side that's kind of like the hope for the future and where there's all sorts of promise and so those two areas to me make a lot of sense in terms of where we should be focusing maybe I should talk about it more in the rumor section although I I think Matthew you're saying we talked about this before you're saying the data is already there but I did hear that in terms of ufn that kind of like the word on the street was that there's a lot of folks at who believe that that whatever the 340 million or 300 million plus payout is more of a subsidy right now that the ufn experiences aren't actually even though the current narrative by even epic or others is that hey this is driving a lot of additional engagement and blah blah blah to fortnite but what I'm hearing is that actually most of the gains that we saw in ufn or in fortnite were not because of ufn experiences but more because of fortnite classic and so yeah I mean you can look at the data

on on fortnite GG and I mean put this put that in the in the in the the video and the podcast notes right if you just look at literally right now while we're recording there are 2.9 Million people on fortnite the entire platform 1.8 million of them are inside of Epic experiences so epic is getting the majority of the engagement and yeah only monetization is engagement based payouts right now so epic is getting 2/3 3/4 of the engagement they're getting two3 or three4 of the engagement payouts and that's before you even consider that I have to go back and check I think they also get a cut of what they pay out to other creators right I think there's a commission they take on the payouts to the other creators I have to go back and double check that right so their share of the payouts might even be higher than their share of engagement at that point as well right okay Ken did you say you have a few other things or yeah this is just sort of like advice for people like me that are going to go to GDC that are not

Executives and some things to avoid sort of along the lines of some of the things we're talking about at the top of this section which is like do you need a GDC pass to go to GDC I would say that the first one is no you don't really need one a good uh a good thing to get is the Expo pass just so that you can get into the the Expo itself there's a lot of value in going to the different booths talking to people that does open up a lot of networking for the more Junior and level folks and also gets you into a lot of the the sort of like Freer the free talks I would say like the more sponsored talks but if you want to buy a pass and don't want to pay for the full value of the pass you can my advice would be to get the back half of the week instead of the front half of the week the front half of the week tends to be the more like I don't know how do I put this the front half of the week tends to be about like more of like the marketing marketing yeah and like no it is like I mean when epic does the state of unreal like that is a marketing event right where as opposed to you go to the

specific talks on specific Technologies or product road maps right that's going to be a different audience a different conversation I fully I fully hear what you're saying yeah and then the back half of the the week is more like pm learnings and like really good mey talks that are more our style so yeah that then the last sort of bit of viice I say is look for talks that are not about Shilling like a lot of these talks that you'll see ahead of time are going to be from Expo sponsor or like really really big sponsors like Google or AWS or whomever and if the entire talk is just like Google or a huge sponsor don't go to it 99% of the time they're terrible I went to one that was like talking about monetization best practices and it was literally just like people who've never worked on a game before and their their takeaway advice that I got from them was that you should do localized pricing and I was like I'm glad I wasted an hour and you'll see that kind of as a common theme I think that was one of Joe's points earlier is there's a lot of

really bad talks because people paid to sponsor these events and they deserve a talk apparently from that so avoid those and you can you can kind of figure out they're not all bad so I I mean I I've heard a lot of positive things about the clever tap AWS the the event that I moderated which I I thought was important right noal did just just I hear a lot of positive things about the event that I moderated that that event specifically please cont to make first off first off one really awesome event that I went to oh yeah the one that I presented at first off that event was not inside of GDC that was like an external event and you had a lot of you had a lot of game makers in that in that event right okay I will say kidding aside that was an awesome event and I have posted on LinkedIn it was epic like and I don't just mean that dis full disclosure I signed up to go my

flight got moved up so I couldn't make it so someone else in our community went instead of me so I technically was there he just my I mean it was it was pretty sweet and I posted about it bing Gordon leted off it was awesome it was really insightful stuff Allan went second founder of blizzard and it's just funny he said JK I'm messing I love you you did a great job that was a great that was awesome is that the same hoodie you wor even you're even though you give yourself props I'll give you props too it's the it's the year of efficiency or the second year of efficiency the only thing that was was almost as good was the talk that I gave earlier in the day uh it wasn't I'm kidding but I but to your point k i I think think like yeah so picking good talks and then I

one bit of advice I would say is try to find the private events right like yeah those are hard I but those are some of the most valuable some of them I and I know like the the Korean Gaming Community has like a secret dinner thing which I was not invited to this year thanks guys but like you know some of those talks with different communities and things like that are are the best so however you can get into the the private events and dinners and things like that I think is is for me the the biggest part of GDC most of the parties suck by the way because like nerds are awkward and we don't like to dance they're too loud to network in so they're just like awful go to the dinners instead yeah I've completely avoided those now but yeah I remember attending some of those in the past I went to a D and D dinner this time and it was phenomenal it was uh sponsored by Sandow and then they like professional DMS it was so much fun it was nice yeah that's definitely sounds

like a good idea I didn't go but I heard the the Sunday night Dungeons and Dragons event like the the D and D competition where I think Ben Brody won I saw posted on LinkedIn is like the best event at GC it wasn't dungeons dragons it was magic the Gathering oh it was magic it was magic sorry that's what I meant yeah yeah the magic the Gathering tournament yeah it was it was apparently pretty amazing so yeah that's kind of my my takeaway from those talks and some of the key learnings you can have from outside of it okay so so maybe third then in terms of key takeaways is what are the specific key takeaways and we've talked about some of the trends and themes but whether it's from that mix or or other things what was most valuable to you guys from GDC I just I I think that there's an Awakening in terms of people looking for what's going to come

next now that mobile is saturated and mature right and this kind of goes into the why did mobile take off so well I mean part of it was we connected five billion people to the internet that didn't have internet before whatever it was right with mobile devices and the mobile gaming wrote on the coattails of that so I don't think there's going to be necessarily another platform that takes off on a rocket ship like mobile did especially China but whether it's actually web 3 and I do think there's some cool things happening in web 3 that are still going to take a long time to be flushed out whether it's ugc which obviously where I work so I'm bullish on that but I try to keep myself grounded I think there are other platforms that are starting to kind of find themselves and really start to find a footing to help us potentially grow on top of a what's going to be effectively a stable mature industry like Mobile's not going to grow much console's not going to grow much PC is not going to grow much these are large Industries but you're not the the the double digit days of growth are gone and so for me it's

it's identifying where the where the puck is going next yeah is the growth gone because it seems like well I would agree with you on the console side it seems console's kind of flattish to losing a bit but if if you were to smooth out the co okay so mobile the GDP maybe a GDP plus growth business like yeah it's not growing 20% anymore right sure sure yeah yeah it's going to grow it's income growth effectively all right okay I'm going to counter that with with with what Bing Gordon rhymed on stage that I have pull up from clevert so Bing Gordon just I guess he's really into rhyming and so he he pulled out his phone and and did a poem and it I pulled it up here because it counters what you're saying Bing Gordon's big theme was that and I'll read it it was that basically okay I'm going to read the paragraph loving what you do how however is more controllable than making big bucks and remember as we grew the gaming

industry H hundredfold 75% of the time investors could prove that the gaming Biz would always suck and I I loved his rhetoric because his basically went through stories of the every single time that people said the gaming industry was dead it was mature it would never be this it would never be that told really cool stories about Madden and how just a bunch of really great great stories of 25 years he's been in the gaming industry and I was never going to do this never going to do that and that today we are here again where the gaming industry is dead and it sucks and never move on it's over and I I again a little bit more of an optimist I'm not saying that you said that Matthew I just he I'm just trying to make this interesting and say the other side is my takea away from GDC from that talk in particular was that JK gives the best uh round tables A and B

it's like it the gaming industry grows from unexpected stuff that most people can't see and so well I think fully agree and that's that's kind of what I was trying to allude to is that like trying to identify what's the next thing that's going to be the next Catalyst for growth because what we have today is kind of mature right and so it's I don't think mobile is going to double again right it's going to be something else I mean okay maybe you disagree I could see mobile doubling I could I could see mobile doubling in Revenue per user I could that seems very feasible to me in the next 10 years I I could see his looking back and going I can't believe people only spend $4 doll a month or whatever they spend on average yeah crazy I was at play fronts in in New York this week and there was a presentation from Activision Blizzard media which is like their their advertising arm and one of the comments that I heard that made me chuckle inside was we're not too far away from more money being made on advertising in games than than in game spending which made me chuckle but that that's just a little

anecdote so some people are thinking there's ways to monetize on top of I AP as well extremely so yeah Brett to your point on doubling I I think you're right because when we look at the Chinese market for example we're talking dramatically higher per player monetization and conver like a two like I've in in the past we've launched a game before where a conversion in us might be 2% but in China like 10% so yeah look look at ARP Dows in in Japan versus the United States as well that you can't you can't extract geographies like that you have to look at each of them individually because every Market is extremely understood but I I I think that we've got we do have to what I'm saying is like to Brett's point I do think we do have some extra capacity even without like the the Topline growth in install base and things like that on a per player monetization or change the the culture of pay I think it's

possible yeah I grow 7% I think a lot of the revenue that moved on to mobile recently that everybody's sort of saying is going away from from gaming is really just cable Revenue getting put on the mobile platform which is just more money which is another example of how much people are willing to spend on entertainment that is greater than what they're spending on mobile games y cable is is $2 $250 a month right and and and at this point Cable's dying and now people are getting Hulu and all that other stuff but even that could be dying right I mean so I don't know you know I mean I'm just saying I could see it yeah surpris five years from now we're all spending way more money on the phone I mean and certainly when my kids get older they will not be hesitating to spend a five times as much money on their mobile device than I that I am yeah is if arpt grows 7% a year for a decade it doubles so like that's kind of what has to

happen yeah or or spending Behavior can increase as well potentially but no no yeah so yeah so yeah if people spend 7% more a year for a decade we we spend more per person we double the spend per person over a decade yeah okay so for me the biggest takeaway and not not to beat a dead horse but I think we got to really like for me I'm I was kind of Allin on AI before GDC but after GDC it's like I feel even more strongly that AI is critical right and there's just so many companies I met with working on interesting new applications of AI and even if the vast majority of them are fail but in terms of the resources energy effort being put into AI as well as the the significant ramp and capabilities and the speed at which improvements are happening and I mentioned this during the panel but the AI panel with with clevert and AWS but like this is the thing that's so

hard for us as human beings to understand is when we see exponential growth and and so if we if you miss this you you might be dead or it's gonna like you really should be paying very close attention to what's happening in Ai and if people are right because I actually am more optimistic on AI than than I have been on many things my lifetime but I I do think that if this if people are right and I I actually am kind of in the camp that this might actually be as big or bigger than internet then huge fortunes are going to be made in the very in in the not too distant future and you definitely do not want to be on the losing side of getting screwed up by AI you you want to be the guy leveraging the the to Alan Adams Point the guy leveraging the the AI instead of the person being replaced by the AI and maybe one final point on just key

takeaways is I kind of was reminded the importance of just just random serendipitous meetings with people talking about random things and then finding new people who have really great insights and building relationships with those people for me was kind of great at GDC is is being able to have those kinds of just random meetings and getting to know people better hopefully that we [Music] [Music]

App Store platforms and then they become not just margin creative but they can also become full UA channels and then that becomes actually more interesting okay all right so let's wrap it up with any rumors there's there's a number there's most of the rumors I think I can't talk about publicly here but maybe a few things or just generalized rumors would be one is that crypto is actually not dead that a lot of people think think it is

and they've kind of given up on it but there are a number of Studios still making tons of money including a couple who have I guess sold on their token Sals have done extremely well I've never gotten into the whole crypto thing so I'm not as familiar with that market but I'd hope for the best for any Game Dev Studio out there and to the extent that that's back good for them and hopefully they can kind of it's great if they're able to figure that out I just I personally just don't know much about it I actually saw a post on LinkedIn today I gotta go back I'll go back and try to find it and share it it it was along the lines of the number of active transacting wallets in in web 3 games just eclips the prior Peak from when web 3 games were popular in1 it's still not it's still barely like three million active wallets so like we're talking the entire total user base of web 3 gaming is like three million active players when we have three billion mobile Gamers right so it's we're still talking about a tiny Market but yeah I mean I think there's excitement and enthusiasm but it's still

mostly crypto natives who are price sensitive right Bitcoin has doubled because of lots of things including the ETFs and institutionalization of it ethereum ETFs are probably coming I know people debate that and this is my dorky finance and ETF background speaking but it seems to be that ethereum ETFs will happen in this year at some point also the problem is that the US already ruled that everything besides Bitcoin and and ethereum is a security and so if you're transacting in it you're technically committing Securities fraud if you don't have a exchange license and that's including games yeah as the only person here that's working on web three games I can tell you that I'm personally pessimistic okay but also I probably should not go more into how pessimistic I am for like non-disparagement Clauses and stuff so yeah I'm not a I I think there's G to be more headwinds a lot of what you're seeing now is because of Bitcoin pumping

and yeah yeah I'm just I'm pessimistic I'll maybe talk about it more in the future but I don't think we're this is going to last okay but I mean let's all it ties back to the conversation we started with too around VC capital I mean there was so many studios in 21 and 22 you threw blockchain or web 3 in your pitch and you added a zero on your check right and so yes the crypto markets have round tripped but there's still not a return on all this Capital that went into the space and there probably maybe won't be for a lot of it right and so I I think from that perspective it's it's still going to be very difficult but I do think that there there are some interesting things happening and it's just I've evangelized the metaverse I I work in ugc gaming now and I think similar to those Concepts and those platforms this is just a very long-term play and if you're putting in eight figure checks right now you're probably way too early yeah I don't it feels like if people are making money it's they're making money from selling coins and then

there's no like long-term liveops plan here there's a lot of people like pumping up short-term cash and that's it there's not a single even actually Infinity there's not a single story that you can point to of like hey this game is successfully operating at a million dollars a plus a month for years on end and I don't think we'll see that for years if ever I'm very very confident that you will see people selling hundred million do worth of nfts you will see companies selling coins the the their coin offerings for $50 million and so on for all the reasons Mt is given but that to me are not those are not game businesses maybe the crypto industry as a whole you can kind of Define it as that but those are not game businesses those are no it's Finance masquerading as a game 100% yeah so right yeah I did I don't want to say specific names but I I did did hear about some of these some of these crypto games that raised a ton of money and I

I'll I'll tell you who who it is afterwards but some of these guys are reportedly and maybe one of you guys told me are are just like out partying and stuff all the time not really taking their game seriously so talk to your to your point Ken I I do think that you you might be like the point you're making about a game that's building longer term value yeah maybe you're right based upon just some of the anecdotal stuff that I'm hearing as well and hopefully those guys would take it more seriously or if the approach was hey we're just going to do we're just this is just kind of like a just like a money grab where we do our token sell we grab a bunch of money and then now we're flying on our private jets and going to these different islands and just chilling then I do think that's gonna potentially be longer term negative for the crypto gaming industry so hopefully some of those guys stop doing that I I keep on hearing this like this argument that there's a lot of players who want to own their asset that they have this

Counterstrike skin and they wish they could have it and trade it and so on like my experience in the industry thus far is that that's like one in 10,000 of the players the players like every single other person is trying to flip assets like they are literally thinking about it in a way that would get them in hot water with the government so like I I and we as developers cannot think like the the 99 or 999,000 people whatever we have to only think about that one person we are literally legally forced to think about that one player because we can't treat our products like Securities to Matt's point we can't um design for returns we have to design for gameplay because if once we start addressing that return aspect of it that's when you start like pushing us into a security space so we absolutely cannot get go down that route and that puts us at a huge sort of like conflict with that player base right and we it's just a really weird design space to be in

there's not a huge amount to players I me I think if there's three million active wallets what's going to happen is that they're going to be shifted between four or five Super Games there th each of those games is going to shark fin on a sale die shark fin on a sale die and just keep on going between the games and that's not a sustainable business yeah and like and and to your point about the nft business model as as a as a part of web 3 gaming Roblox has own equivalent of nfts they have limited ugc right no one makes money on limited ugc anymore like as soon as Roblox as a platform open that up to all creators effectively with like very low minimum price floors and very low minimum Capital constraints the the the price of limited ugc fell off a cliff most like most developers use it as a UA tool at this point not even and they give it away for free and and and so yes there's demand for these items but not demand to pay for them and not demand to trade them there's demand to just collect them because they're free and have the latest cool

thing right what one other rumor that was going around are some of these sales of actually not only just some studios that are struggling but I and I think you would be surprised at some of the names that that some of the bankers are throwing around in terms of who's for sale but even some studios that are at least on the surface doing very well and also rumor I think the EA thing now has been announced but like there are some other bigger companies that have not fully gone through the efficiency cycle yet where it does seem like whether it's whether it's coming very soon or later that there's going to be additional rationalization happening and some some of the names mentioned are kind of surprising but yeah they're out there and we we'll see what happens to the industry after some of these fire sales uh complete I would I would note for that for a lot of games companies March 31st is end of the fiscal year so it kind of makes sense like that's why embracer is trying to sell all these

assets before March 31st because they want to get it done before the end of the fiscal year right layoffs happen at the end of the fiscal year right maybe the start of the new year so timing wise it doesn't completely not make S or timing wise it makes sense right in the sense that a lot of these comp EA for example March 31st fiscal year we just saw take two buy gearbox from from bracer right that's they're both on a March fiscal year I believe right and so when you kind of start to line all this up it does make sense I do think that what's interesting about the the take two gearbox deal and we don't have to get into that too much but it was all stock it was take two played for it and all stock they couldn't yeah I don't think they could I mean I don't know I don't talk to Bankers but it doesn't look like they could get debt financing with their leverage where it is already and they didn't want to they don't have the cash on hand necessarily to to do that with their debt position right so it I think that says a lot about the state of financing as well for these deals and so when you're saying some are struggling even with the fire sale and they're trying to sell and they can't I think you have to also consider the financing environment and potentially the fact that creditors don't want to

lend more money to the space because they got burned by Glue by zingga by other big deals that have kind of gone belly up and they're stuck holding the bag on the debt side right and maybe that was the issue because I know that some of you also had mentioned that one of the rumors going around at GDC was a potential gearbox MBO management buyout but to your point Matthew if they're not able to access debt most likely they can't get that to work and so maybe that was why yeah an MBO is usually very heavily debt driven when you do it right and so exactly if they couldn't get the debt financing then that makes sense why that kind of didn't go through and that's why I still personally think take too overpaid but like whatever it's stock it's it's phony money for them that phony money for them right it's they can print that money shareholders take the hit and so I do think it's telling about the state of the industry though the fact that it was an all stock deal okay yeah and probably the the only other rumors for for whatever reason and I think it was

like and some people did bring up the whole Monopoly go thing which is kind of funny because I I still think not everyone fully understood the objective behind that but for whatever reason a lot of those folks that came and talked to me about that also would throw in their scopely story so scopely is mad at me already so I'm not gonna mention these kind of rumors and stories that I heard but I can talk to you guys about it offline but certainly a lot of that but besides that I don't know do you guys have anything else in terms of rumors or things that you heard before we wrap it up or maybe Brett you wanna you want to tell us about some of the jokes that you were I I don't know if you're comfortable sharing sharing those but I'm G comforable talking about it no I I mean I had a couple good jokes obviously the moment I had a great time with everybody the one joke I already told you but the other one which is my boy Solomon who did put together that whole Leever uh thing was amazing but it was just I got a good laugh out of the fact that a he wanted me to speak after Bing Gordon

who founded EA and Allen who founded Blizzard or anyone else to speak after him and B the fact that he ended up being the person speaking after those two people so I thought that' be kind of uh pretty funny because those two guys have just like epic past and or I've s said just amazing past and it was it was it was a kind of a privilege to just go to this this this event and hear them speak and I ended up actually waiting to talk to Allan afterwards and I can say that he was so kind modest and awesome and it was just it was one of the highlights of GDC for me for sure so Props to Solomon and JK for hosting that I give you guys and Brett was making fun fun of my outfit because I was just wearing this this hoodie and sweat but like we're game developers what do you want me to you want me to wear sweatpants new balanc shoes and a Nike sweatshirt and I and and that hat and I was like bro

thanks for getting dressed up for the Alan next to alen Adam and Bing Gordon who are in like thousand doll suits really fany outfits JK was trying to get his 10,000 steps in and he just like walked right into the the thing and just sat right down and just gave the pan off all right okay right cool well I think that's it then guys there's a wrap GDC 2024 we got the key trends and themes important takeaways as well as little few rumors here and there and hopefully if you guys go to one of the other private events later I'd be happy to relay some of the some of the other rumors that I can't speak publicly about but H happy tell tell you guys in in private but all right okay that's it for our GC 2024 WAP it's more of a recap not enough [ __ ] talking but maybe next time we'll get that in all right that's it catch you'all

later [Music] bye [Music]