Game of Phones: Alex Merutka on the Battles Shaping Mobile Gaming’s Future

[music] Hello world. Welcome to the Pocket Gamer Podcast with your hosts me, Brian Baglo, and the Hand of the King herself, Peggy Anne Saltz. Hello, Sir Peggy. How are you? What are we talking about today?
Well, you you you nailed it, Brian. I brought it out. I had to look for it, actually. You know, it was part of that that that geeky time, Game of Thrones. Um, even Needle here, which has actually now turned into my letter opener. [laughter]
Wow.
I'm into this stuff deeply. [snorts] Uh, but that's not that's not the reason. The reason is because if you look out where we are in gaming, you know, it feels like this, Brian, right? You know, you have the battle for mobile monetization. It's between platforms, but also it's a battle for attention, control over the entire gaming

ecosystem. So, you bring this all together and I had a thought, let's do something completely different, right? Let's have the game of phones. All right, you're with me, you got it.
You know, you know I am a sucker for a pun and also a huge geek. So, so Game of Phones absolutely works for me. But no, you're you're absolutely correct. This is very timely. It's very relevant.
You know, our audience, they're asking themselves questions. It's like, okay, is it going to be Google? What about the performance dominance of app loving? You know, Tik Tok reshaping the funnel? What is going to happen to creative? So bring all these questions together and we have no better guest to speak to this than Alex Maritka, founder and CEO of Craftsman Plus, which is a top creative ad technology company that also works with the ecosystem, right? They partner with Meta, Google, Tik Tok, and not only just having the inside track because of those partnerships, he's an accomplished

marketer. And what I find very very relevant to our show is that before starting Crafts and Plus, Alex was also one of Apploven's earliest employees. Okay.
Yes. So if you want to have the inside track, we've got it. And that's why we have you, Alex. I mean, let's let's face it. You are you are edgy. You're insightful. And I will say your insights cut deeper than Valyrian steel. So, are you ready to join us in the game of phones today and unpack that war of platforms?
Peggy, Brian, thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, ready to jump in.
So, one of the things we hear on the podcast a lot, Alex, is this war of attention. And it is savage. You know, it's people have only so many hours in the day and it's not just a choice between platforms or genres or games versus social media. It it's going out for a walk in the fresh air. It's going to the pub. It's stroking a puppy. So, where is the front line of this

attention war?
Gaming specifically is kind of where this uh this attention is going. Uh mostly because it's very rare to have a a place where people are hyperengaged when you're playing a game. You're very focused. You're you're inside the game. So, there's a lot of depth to whatever you're doing um when you're playing games in general. So uh when you think about how much scale that has users in games, this is why it ties into adtech because you can make decisions really quickly. Most of the times when you test something, it takes, you know, potentially weeks, months to test something in gaming because you have the attention. You have a very fast feedback loop. You know, if there is any lag time or friction in a game, people move. They immediately close. They play a new game. There's tons of other options. So the technology has to be super sound there. And that's why adtech kind of pushes the industry forward. And that's why when people say, you know, gaming is always at the forefront of technologies because it has to be because of that user um friction, you know, users bounce and so technologies

companies have to adapt to it.
We know the importance of creative. We know how quickly that moves. I'm just curious here, Alex, you know, looking at um Apploven and all of these old plays, right? I mean, Apploven's interest in Tik Tok alone, that was that was something. That was one of those moments where you think, you know, they don't, you know, they can't write like this, basically. [laughter] Yeah. You can't make it up. Um, what was what was it about this moment that speaks more deeply to what's going on in the industry?
I think the play was a huge bold move. I didn't think they they'd go for uh Tik Tok to say at the start, but, you know, it it does make sense. I think you you map App Levven's feedback loop of what they've been able to do with their their Axon product and being able to drive for performance marketers. You couple that with their absolute dominance in the gaming space on the mediation side with Max ads and they have all this state of the collecting from the publishing side and mediation side. Um and when they

look at you know they're growing their business both on gaming and ecom. Uh you know if you actually ask a lot of like casual gaming companies sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Same with Meta. There was a little bit of a drop off on Meta. I think they kind of took their ball off gaming. I think Mark was really, you know, heads down in the metaverse for a while, realized the stock was getting crushed and then decided, hey, I got to go start building more uh ad tech for AI and jump on this wave. App going on the offensive here. Um, you know, I kind of thought they would pick up Snapchat because it was it's a lot cheaper. Um, and they could have just uh scooped Snapchat. Uh, Tik Tok was a bigger play. Obviously, that's where a lot of folks discover things. It's where the trends are happening and it's the kind of the first point of contact like tip of the spear. So you couple that with the tip of the spear that is gaming for technology companies to evolve. Um there's something really powerful that could happen there. I I don't think Meta really has doubled down on gaming the way Apploven was created from gaming. Meta had it for a little bit then they double down on e-commerce

and now you've seen that a little bit backfire with their shoppable commerce product that they're pulling along with Tik Tok. So I think both these platforms realize we went too far in ecom. Uh gaming on the other hand, Appleven's just been dominating it. Gaming is very contextual as well. So you have all this contextual data plus App Leven's algorithm that you could couple in pushing into Tik Tok. You could actually make a super uh like viral social strategy in gaming with App1 plus Tik Tok. So I think that's that's where the strategy lies. So, in terms of discoverability, where are we right now? Who are the leaders and how does the landscape look right now, Alex?
Back in the day, um, especially in mobile gaming, there were only maybe five or six ad networks that were really monetizing games. So, companies like Chart Boost, Adony, Vungle, App was one of them, and everyone was pretty even. Um, it accelerated really quickly. So, no one no one kind of thought, even Wall Street didn't think that this was a big sector, what would happen with with

gaming? But going back to what I first said about that feedback loop, when you test technology on games, because they're so engaged, you can test things really quickly in a few days, learn, and then move on. So, when you're a gaming company and [snorts] you're thinking, uh,
you know, hey, I if if your competitor, you you have a very similar match three game, let's say, but your competitor can monetize 5% better than you, um, because they've updated their tech stack, they're using a different technology than you, that 5% efficiency changes the whole game because then when they're going into growth mode, they take that 5%, they could bid 5% higher in the auction. It doesn't matter if you're 1%, 20%, or 50% higher. If you win the bid, you win the bid. Um, so that little bit of extra competitive advantage sets apart companies like Candy Crush that became like number one
early on, held that position for a while. Companies like Dream Games that have done a really good job securing the spot and basically everyone else in the market. So you it's it's it's really cutthroat out there for gaming. So you

want to use all the tools you can to get that slightly higher monetization. What company like appleven did was they really focused on performance from the beginning where you know companies like Google was more used for uh kind of like backfill remnant inventory saying hey you guys are focusing on impressions um we're focused on performance so you monetize let's say 80% of the impressions are yours Google I'll take the top 20% of the first couple ads that come into these games to get folks to download other games and do more performance focused advertising eventually that kind of took over and that's kind of the rise of app loving really focused on the monetization [clears throat] side of things helped developers make more money early on which then um created a flywheel for developers to be able to buy more users and that's this whole mobile growth uh you know ecosystem blew up
and I remember at the start it was like well apploven apploven has a studio so when I side with apploven I'm basically giving over my data to a company that

has a studio that will compete against me and it was sort of at that point in time marketers like nah I'm not going to go with them and then and then it all changed. What changed?
I think some people were probably a little bit worried and concerned. Um I had developers ask me and call me about it. Um ultimately though it did fuel App Leven's engine. They did get some data on it. They did get a little bit of a a head start in some ways by doing this. They also learned a ton about how game developers really are because they actually were a game developer themselves. But yeah, it was pretty controversial at the beginning. I think most people just said it goes back to this what I mentioned about the monetization. If you didn't use Apploven, let's say you used Unity instead or Chart Boost. You used one of those two. You were monetizing at 10 to 40% less per per ad impression on your dollar. And then your competitors like, "Well, we'll just go with Appven then and we'll just start out bidding you on inventory and you'll slowly die and we'll slowly win." Uh, and so they kind of had to say, "Well, if you're going to do it, then we have to do But ultimately

Apploven shuted that business anyways. Um, and mostly because I think that, you know, finance folks in Wall Street didn't understand the two business models. Apples said, "You know what? We're just going to dump this business. We're to go sell it to our friends at Triple Dot who we're close with. They're going to sign some big pub deal with us. We're cool with that. We don't need this business and we'll just show you we're pure software. You can't disrupt our multiples and this is our focus."
And that's where they are. It's the iron throne is what I'd like to call that.
Absolutely. It's if you can demonstrate the power and you generate the money, it's like there's something um really simple about that and and it's so strange because we hear from so many guests, Alex is there's still a suspicion about the business side of the game sector. You know, we still have this strange um dream that if you just build it good enough, people will come and we'll give you money. And it's no longer the case. Yeah, I think it's a lot more about the whole funnel. So, you definitely need a good product. The biggest challenge for

gaming right now is retention uh once you get them in, but there's the whole feedback loop of monetization that then turns into more this discovery, user acquisition. Um and with all that space becoming automated uh with the more and more AI enabled platforms the way Meta is doing and and pushing towards the future and everyone's kind of focus on AI and campaign management uh the big focus left is creative. So you have to tie the monetization into UA with all the automation happening there and then find the right creative to to drive folks in. And that's where we really double down um at Craftsman. That's what we see is hey how do we differentiate ad campaigns now because everything else is you you plug in your your goals into a campaign app 11 or matter or Google you uh you set your targets and then you upload your creative and let it rip
talking about creatives and that's what we hear all the time I mean I got money every time I heard it be a rich woman because it's the only lever that we have

it's the you know it's the heart and core and soul of UA you've even said that um for example in the case of playables you know uh creative is is a is the honest signal of intent.
I mean specifically on playable what we see is playables allow users to show you and the advertiser who they are what they're interested in tracking that data and then creating that tighter loop because right now most of the time when you run a static or a video you just know does creative A work or B work and that feeds back into your data pipeline. But if you're able to go in video A, someone clicked on Jamie Lannister, for example,
um, and you know they're a Jamie fan, then it's more data than just video A, video B. It's specifically what in that video, what in that ad experience drove the user convert and gives people optionality. So when you can't target users the way you used to um like pre uh pre-AT and Apple tracking changes and all the privacy changes that have

happened these last few years uh you could target really really concise and precisely um nowadays you can't target as much. So a lot of folks and media buyers are taking the well we'll let our creative decide where our campaigns run. We'll we'll target broad. will let our creatives decide where we're running um who we're reaching and how we're reaching those users. And interactive and playable is just another way. It's also, you know, another tie back to gaming in general that these playable ads started in gaming. They haven't stayed in gaming. They've expanded into ecom. We see them a lot all over apples network right now. They moved into entertainment, fintech. So, there's a bunch of different verticals outside of gaming that are now using these these playable ads. But it started in gaming because again gaming is the space where performance matters. The little extra CPM you can get from a playable versus a static ad. Um that performance that you can drive on an install really affected gaming. They're actually getting that little experience and getting a sense of

the gameplay loop within a playable. So it makes perfect sense to me. But I'm I'm so excited to hear that the fintech sector is finally picking up. um having done a a little bit of work outside the games world, the amount of respect that the financial services sector gets over and above games. So to hear that they're actually having to learn from us makes me very happy.
Yeah. Yeah. Same. Um I mean I think in general if you ask a 100 people on the street, do you like ads? They'll probably say no. Like most of them. Um but if you say, do you like games? You'll get a mixed backs. Most people, yeah, I like games. Um, so it seemed pretty sense like take something that everyone hates and take something that everyone loves, mesh it together and that's playables.
I like the way you describe that and and playables. I mean that comes up a lot and we've heard it many times Brian when people are talking formats that they are invested into um you know playables is at the top of the list. Can you maybe share because you're working with so

many companies, you know, how is that evolving as the new audience filter?
So, I'll I'll give an example of my my best friend from third grade, Brian. Um, we both like Fire Emblem. It's one of our favorite games. Fire Emblem is kickass. If you haven't played it, please go do it. You will thank me later. Is one of the best games ever created. When I started playing Fire Emblem, me and my friend Brian were both very into Fire Emblem. Um, but what I noticed over the years is we play differently. Um, he is a storyline. Um, and he'll go past level, you know, level six and like, "Oh, did you see that romance story that happened there?" And, "Oh, I I'm so happy we we we took out the the villain and I got to save this person." Like, who? What are you talking about? I'm on level eight. I'm just trying to play to win and all I care about is winning. And so, it's very different player types. We both like Fire Emblem, but we are actually very different types of people that will like different types of games. We happen to both like Fire Emblem. So, when you take

this to playables, you get a lot more versatility. If you just showed us an ad for a game, we might not know what that is and and how much we like it or not just based on like a video. But if you said, "Hey, try to solve this really quick. Can you beat this?" I'm going to get hooked on that. That's my hook. That's that's the capture for him. It's like, "Hey, did you know you could customize your characters this way? Check out the artwork and the storyline." So, even though we both play the same games, playables really help you unpack way more detail into a user behavior. And ultimately that funnels into algorithms to drive better performance.
We can't target like we used to. And so this becomes uh the new power, the new superpower uh you know the uh um the Valyrian steel for the marketers. Are they aware of that that they can let users qualify themselves more and maybe learn from that in the process?
Most gamers know that playables work and it's some of the best type of ad creative. If you're running on App Leven

and you're a gaming company, you need playables. It's just a fact. Um, more platforms, you're looking at Snapchat starting to get into playables right now. Um, Tik Tok's tried, haven't done well. Again, another reason for Apple lo to swoop in and and lay the groundwork for playables for them. Uh, so you're you're seeing that people know they work, but I don't think people are using them to the effect they can. Gaming is a hit driven economy. So you build five games, you know, one fails, one fails, one fails. Oh, you got a hit. Great. Now, you know, you don't need to go raise more money, you have a winner, and keep running the game. So, how much money did you spend on the first four games you built before they failed? Maybe each game cost you half a million. Some studios it's two to three million per game to build. Um, and so instead of wasting all that money on what you think users will like, why not just build a miniame of your game and it playable, launch the ad campaign in a real environment on Facebook on Apploven, see who signs up, who downloads, and again there's nothing to download. It's just a proxy, but then you get that market data. So a lot of companies are going,

you know, very much before it's, you know, business to consumer B to C. You're seeing it kind of flop now C to B. Let your consumers determine what type of business you build. Let consumers consumers to games let's call it C toG. Um so consumer to games is this new trend now. And if you start using mini games as a representation of what you could build
and how you build and what what do you want what world you build next when you're building to keep retention high. These are all things that we're seeing a little adoption but way less than you think. Becky,
this is the best way to test the water. This is the best way to reality check your ideas because, you know, many in our audience are saying, you know, I can't build on a hunch.
Yeah, Peggy, we hear this so often and I was just writing a story for the Scottish Games Network a couple of days ago about the UK Games Fund, which basically provides grants to go and build prototypes. Rather than build a prototype, do it as a playable ad. It's

the minimum viable product of minimum viable products. Alex, this is mind-blowing. Yes, I will be absolutely honest. I had never considered that, but it makes so much sense. You're building a core gameplay loop and putting it out there and seeing what works. If it's the player calling the shots in the sense that this is the intent, therefore, this is the game to iterate. That means that you are much more than than maybe the platform you were maybe a year ago.
We've seen our our company grow tremendously. everyone came into gaming, brands [clears throat] started getting into it.
Um, but this is kind of the next wave of of what folks will do because I mean it's amazing that you can just test this as a in a real environment to understand what actually works. Even console games are thinking of, you know, how do we do this? So, when we think of of playables, they don't [clears throat] even need to be just ads. You can actually just, you know, drive someone with a a playable or video ad, however, to a micro site that

you host yourself. you can capture all the first-party data on your site instead of running it as an ad. So, I think it opens up the door for other companies to understand just how do users react and you know if you had to save one box of cereal and you know they're both falling which one do you pick? The Cheerios, the Froot Loops, whatever it is, there's a lot of different behavioral tests you can do
with gaming. Again, kind of my first point of gaming is the fastest closed feedback loop. You get so much quick data. Did they click on it? Did they install it? Did they close the X button? What was their session time? You get so much data in gaming that takes other companies like you talk about fintech, Brian, like I mean how many times do you like click around in your Chase app? Um versus like how many times you play Angry Birds or there's way more data in what you're actually hugely
behavioral from a user tapping and interacting. So that's uh I think that's going to be the big wave of non-gaming companies getting into what what would

people choose? What do people like those types of scenarios
the whole time I'm thinking absolutely you know it used to be that we thought about you know who is the audience the details about you know where they live who they are age group whatever and now it's more like no I am what I do that speaks more about me than my demographics so doing rather than demographics richer data richer insights and a better a chance to succeed because you understand the audience. You've seen what they do.
Well, Peggy, like my third grade best friend, again, we're the same age. We grew up in the same area. We play the same game, but we are way different people by what we do in the game and what we do on ads and how we behave and interact. So, exactly to your point, that is the big key that everyone's kind of missing here. Um, and that's going to be the big shift we're to see. We are at that time in this industry

where we [music] need we need strategy. We need good ideas. Um we've had some great guests. I'm just thinking Brian about you know the great folks over at Solston. They get deeply deeply into this looking into the player psychology and what's exciting for brands.
You're doing so much and you're thinking so deeply about this which is for me exciting. Alex, how much of this are you going to actually be bringing to us
at Craftsman? We are doubling our dev team and tech team this year. And so we're going to put our like heads down into AI into all things creative into dynamic content. So like when you get served an ad, if it's a gaming ad and it's thundering outside of your your hotel room, the ad reflects that weather component. It affects the time of day. If you get an ad at nighttime versus the morning, that's different. What do you do in your morning ritual versus your night ritual? So shouldn't ads be served differently there? And not just based on the platforms that are handling this, but on living on the creative itself. Basically allowing creative to have like a mind and life of its own. Because you have the platform Facebook and all these

black boxes that are just saying, "Hey, we'll handle it all."
If you just let them handle it all, you're not going to be different than anyone else. And who's going to win in that? The biggest brands with the biggest money, which for most everyone listening on this is probably not you. You're no one has the biggest checkbook. No one has the biggest IP. So in order to compete there, you're going to need to uh to fight this with other living tech on the creative itself. So you have the platform tech and then you communicate that with the creative tech.
The context is going to be king. It it was it was in the non-gaming world, remember? Um exciting to see it come to gaming,
of course. And and we hear this again. This is something that comes through in so many different ways from so many different people. Know your player. Know where they are. be able to connect with them on a personal level. So again, it just it makes so much sense.
So let's swing back to where we started this big battle. Mobile gaming is ground zero. Why is that? And where do you see

it going? because there are going to be players spending a lot of time, a lot of money, and some realms that will rise and some realms that will fall.
Yeah. I mean, gaming just has so much scale. So, um it's where technology meets attention instantly with instant feedback loops and those like extra, you know, milliseconds. Um that little extra data, that little more efficiency changes your entire trajectory. It's like if you're swimming in the ocean for a marathon and your head's down and you're just slightly off the course by just a few degrees and you veer off, you know, you put your head back up and an hour later you're way off course. So when you think about the space, Apploven had a massively dominant position in the space. Um they were challenged by companies like uh Iron Source and Unity and Vungle back in the day. Um, and then when Apploving bought Mopub, it was

basically GG ladies. Um, I think I told one of the finance guys I spoke to about it and he was like, "Man, you literally said GG ladies when that happened." It's like, well, yeah, they just bought like the biggest native SSP supply source. They completely own the publisher and the monetization side now. And then you saw Unity quickly snap up Iron Source right after that to try to play defense and defend. Um, and then Appleven ultimately stayed the course. They had leadership execution on point where Unity and and Iron Source trying to squish those cultures together. It just wasn't executed properly. So Apploven pulled ahead. Again, when you think of that analogy of swimming in the water, uh Unity's head was down with Iron Source. They swam off course. Applo just put their head up, swam straight ahead, and got to the finish line first. When they got to that finish line, they created a data mo. If you're just 5% better, you're just infinitely better. So they created this data mode. They kept growing and now you have companies like Google and Google Ads Manager and ADM Mob coming back into the space

saying, "Hey, um, one apploving, you you might buy Tik Tok. Hey, that's a little scary. We are pushing YouTube shorts. I don't know if we like this." Um, okay. So they might go bid on on Tik Tok. Uh, uh, when Google thinks about Apploving, uh, you know, Apploven is so focused on ecom right now. They're not really defending the gaming walls because they're so far ahead everyone else. They haven't needed to. So those walls are pretty unprotected. They have like two guards up there. There's no white walkers coming. They're on the [laughter] north. There's nothing coming over there. They're fine, you know. [clears throat] Then that comes Google. Google's basically, in this case, I guess the white walkers. Um, but they're coming in and saying, "Hey, our search business is getting deteriorated right now with AI. We're losing search traffic that our core business is going that way. YouTube's a huge focus um which is competing which would compete with app 111 if that acquisition happens. So where can we hit app right now where they're not looking where potentially can hurt them a little bit and take away their competitive advantage which is the

pub side the monetization side. Why is this important is because it's the data it's like the heart of all the data um comes from those those pub connections and that monetization side. So Unity can't compete with Apploven. Why? They don't have enough money. Um their tech isn't good enough and they don't have enough money. So they can't just like outpay app Le1, but Google can. They can just say, "We'll just throw billions of dollars at this until we have that position and we'll just burn cash to get our data and to get our position and box you out essentially." And then the question is, would Google really burn that much money because they're that much, you know, they're not as efficient on an app living on the side? Yes or no? Facebook said no. They're not doing it. They kind of back down from that game. They're not. They're focused on other things. Would Google do it? You're seeing a little bit. You're seeing Google kind of test the waters. You're saying, should we start pushing more back into this network space, this mobile inapp inventory space?
Um, and we're we're seeing them, you know, I wouldn't say fully challenge app

right now, but in some cases, they're being pretty aggressive with certain publishers.
Then publishers need to make some choices. They need to pick their allies. I won't ask you who's going to win and who they need to go to because that probably isn't where you want to go, Alex, unless of course you do. But, you know, some guidelines, some ideas, some questions to be asking yourself as a gaming publisher out there right now because you have to choose your side.
So, whatever team can push the fastest and move the fastest with you, uh, that's where you want to be. Uh, you know, the focus Google's massive business. They have a lot of different business properties and their focus um has been, you know, on a lot of different directions. Um Apploven's been head down for a while on monetization, but now they're really focused on ecom. So, will they take their eye off more on the other side? Maybe. So, as a publisher, um I would say figure out what company's giving you the most support that's pushing the products the fastest. Um that gives you that leg up

to monetize slightly better. all these dollars, everyone's moving, you know, these dollars into performance dollars. So, we should hopefully see that, you know, with these other um channels starting to advertise in games more, CPMs will rise, you'll monetize better, and then the battlefield basically opens up again to say, you know, who's monetizing higher with this new influx of advertisers and demand coming into uh the gaming channels. So, I'm I'm going to throw in a bit of a wild card here, Alex. And is this sort of grind between App Love and Google and you know, sort of the the current incumbents going to continue or do we have a dragon out there somewhere? Is AI or is there a a new challenger that we don't yet know about lurking somewhere over the horizon?
There there definitely could be a lurker. I'd say right now it looks like it's still going to be uh an apploving versus a Google mostly in the space. Uh, and C it all depends how much money Google wants to spend and how aggressive

they want to get. What what's their focus of their company like strategic value? I mean, app 11 is only a little over hundred billion dollar company for them. So, it depends, you know, when do they want to try to go in there and take it out and how hard the fight's going to be. Essentially, App1 is very well fortified. It has a great castle and awesome walls, good guard towers up. It's going to be really hard to take the castle. So, you're going to lose a lot of men, a lot of troops if you want to go down that. Your arm is going to get depleted. You could probably take it if you want, but is it worth the squeeze? I don't know. Probably not. Mostly, but maybe. You know what what I do think, Brian, would happen, there'll probably be some specific uh mediation partners that focus on certain verticals that are more sensitive to data. Think like COPA compliance. So, you'll see maybe some like evolution of companies coming in for those specific um kind of like outliers, the 5% of the space, 3%. But in terms of the whole like the 70 80 85% of the inventory and the opportunity that's where app's going to be and we'll see if Google um aggressively goes after

the challenge. I was reading a fantastic article from Brian Ball for I'm a huge huge fan of him going way back to Reforge and recently he just said you know hey we do a lot of search through AI so open AI may be the platform that rules them all in the end if that becomes our behavior. So it could be a platform out there on the horizon. I would say maybe you know how um like Discord are launching like their own games you know in China there's like super apps where you play games in the app. If openai became a super app and then had an entire dev community in there and AI games being built and an entire system and world in there then yeah I I could see them competing against that. So if they launch micro games, mini games, any sort of instant games platform in Open AI where you can just instantly play because the thing is App 11 has this huge network of all these gaming companies. It'd be really hard to replicate that. So you have to

push all of the devs over, you know, you combine like a Roblox plus an open AI, like then then you're talking like there's something there. Um
maybe we shouldn't give them any ideas. Brian, [laughter]
as the father of an 8-year-old obsessed with Roblox, the idea of AI enabling it
terrifies me. U so let's never talk of it again. No, it's it's a really good point and I think just there are outliers out there. There are companies who who could pivot, who could um you know change their business model or look at games and say actually you know what this could be an area that we we need to double down on because of that engagement because of that data.
Maybe just a quick very quick one. It is a battlefield. So what is the one thing that you think mobile game studios must do to survive in this new monetization era that you're telling us about?
Yeah. close close the loop um between the platforms, the monetization,

your product and users and creative and make sure all those systems are talking instead of instead of just building and thinking of your business as different points, create a system, create a process between them
and systemize everything yourself internally between those channels. So I I'm I'm absolutely um mind blown by our conversation and we have to have you back. Um maybe 12 18 months when the whole battlefield has changed but we don't come back with Game of Thrones. We do succession. You know I think anything focused around a swary Scottish patriarch. Uh I I can get on board with that. [laughter]
Sounds good. brand.
Before we let you go, we have a couple of questions. You've already answered one of them, so this should be quite quick. Um, that brings it right back into the heart of things, which is games. So, the question we ask all of our guests is, what is it you're playing right now that is taking up way too much of your time when you should be going off and doing other things? And then

second one, and I think we know the answer to this, is your favorite game of all time?
Yeah. Um, so favorite game of all time, Fire Emblem and Star Ocean, PlayStation 2, uh, was incredible. super underrated. Star Ocean was fantastic. Um,
taking up too much of my time. I got hooked on Mr. Auto Fire, um, actually, which is there's a lot of ads in it. Um, I enjoy it. It's kind of like market research for me. I can tell my girlfriend, hey, I'm actually doing work right now. I'm understanding the the market and what's happening out there. I did just download the new Yuyu Haka Show game. Um, I'm a little bit of an anime fan, so it's downloaded on my phone and I will be playing that later today.
Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Well, um, some very strong choices there and some very underrated choices as well. So, I think I might have to go, um, and do a little bit of retro games hunting. So,
please do,
Alex. Thank you. This has been completely fascinating. And I think I speak for both Peggy and I when I say come back soon.

Yes.
Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate it.
Great to have you. And it's a deal and we'll find a date.
Sounds good. [music] 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. We want to hear from you. We want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness. So, if you have any suggestions for us, if you have any feedback for us, you can always get in touch. You can email us at podcastpocketgamer.biz. You can find us on Twitter, pgbiz. And you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website. [music] If you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts, you can find them at pocketgamer.biz/mpodcast. And we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows.
And we've got you covered on all the major platforms. So subscribe to the

audio podcast as Brian said, look for us on YouTube. But if you want to read it, hey, you can do that, too, because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website. Tune in again for the next edition of the pocket gamer.biz Biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future.