GameMakers 2021 Drunk Awards Show

okay everybody i think we are live hello and welcome you are all here today for the inaugural live game makers 2021 drunk game awards show today we are going to talk about the best and worst of free-to-play games in the game dev industry for 2021. we'll keep it loose informal casual but also hopefully we have a little bit of discussion and debate with you here you have myself j diggity dog aka the kiminator aka joseph kim ceo of lila games and we have a great industry panel for you today and maybe we can have all of our speakers introduce yourselves in alphabetical order just quickly say who you are and what you are drinking today starting with let's see here javier barnes who are you what are you drinking that's actually a good question uh

sometimes i don't even know myself i'm a game designer with 10 years of experience and what i'm drinking it's a cider so i'm going full hipster all right next we have josh burns josh who are you what are you drinking i'm josh burns i'm actually currently searching for a job it's a full-time job so after this if you want just hit me up very open day opportunities i'm also eric i'm wearing my kingdoms of camelot merlin is my homie t-shirt that i found when i was sitting on my closet just for you you are so cool i don't know in a poo poo brown specifically i've never picked that color uh and i'm drinking white cloth white claw there we go that's what i'm drinking too next we have shannon chang hey guys um i'm uh i've been in the games industry like a decade

investor partially retired but recently came out of retirement um as the head of um operations and marketing and product for trading tv and tonight i am drinking a bottle of cashasa from my recent trip to brazil i came back with like two cases this stuff's great shannon are you a bitcoin billionaire i not quite billionaire but hopefully one day nicholas nicholas harrigar who are you what are you drinking yeah hi guys i'm nicholas i'm certainly not a bitcoin billionaire i'm an executive coach for startup ceos and ctos and i am drinking point ksa kulch today uh locally brewed in san francisco and i'm trying to open this now without making it a gigantic mess all right and then we have matthew

cotterman matthew who are you what are you drinking hi i'm matthew i'm i'm a senior analyst with bloomberg intelligence i'm in hong kong so i'm repping asia here so even though it's 7 30 in the morning right now i'm drinking coffee with japanese whiskey in it so i'm i'm i'm participating fully and as you can see in my background i'm also a co-host of the into the metaverse podcast so you can check that out as well all right and we next have eric the eric cress eric who are you what are you drinking i'm eric kress i am on the deconstructor of fun podcast um and i also am an analyst for wall street hedge funds and and i work for warner brothers and the nft company forte so i do lots of things in the space and i unfortunately am uh 70 days sober so i am drinking coffee um and my goal to become 15 body fat by 50. i am uh gonna be

sober for the next six months unfortunately so all right and next uh ken landon yeah i'm not shooting for that 15 by 50 i'm more i'm drinking white trash uh jagermeister today there we go bring all the fat white dudes out there represent all right and finally we have brian pegging off who are you what are you drinking i'm brian i was most recently at glue in corporate development strategy and i spent 15 years at deutsche bank prior to that last nine months mainly focused on the investor space and founders base with crypto and video games um today i am drinking something local it's uh called gray whale gin it's made in sebastopol california not too far from here and it's fantastic all right and so just getting things started i do want to just have a quick you know note of caution just just a

reminder drinking and discussion in debate sometimes don't go that well together so let's keep it loose but it would be sad if somebody got canceled or fired as the start of 2022 so so just be a little bit careful but as always i think we should always speak our our minds to the best that we can and starting with our first category uh the first category is which games industry company was the biggest winner in 2021 and the way that we're gonna uh run this is that uh we have a number of our panelists here i will call on one of them to to submit their client their view on on who they think should be she should win this category they'll talk about it we'll have a little bit of discussion and debate and then we will take a vote so starting with you can who do you think should get this award for uh the biggest winner in 2021 in terms of

games industry company who and why yeah my my winner for this was me hoyo and that was primarily for one reason of gunshot impact kind of coming out of nowhere i would say for most of us in the west um i don't think a lot of people could have pointed to whom the yoyo was two years ago they have they they started developing in a really like unknown way for all of us westerners and within one year within development they grossed over two billion dollars in revenue which is absolutely mind-blowing it's unprecedented in our industry there obviously are game developers out there that have grossed more um in the past year but for a fairly new company with a huge amount of um pipeline in the works it's just absolutely mind-blowing to say uh to see is super inspiring um and if you take a look at the revenue trends they're not going away like they're

they're consistently pulling in money month after month uh a year out and it's just going to continue going into 2022 and 2023. how much have you spent in the game i think that's well no if my wife sees this dude divorce money you know like not good money enough how about that enough yeah too much probably all right any other thoughts on me hoyo anyone want to chime in here on ken's pick yeah i'll just note that you know they are also i mean the game itself is amazing but they were also really a big driver of the commission fee wars in china um they were one of the first companies to avoid the major android app stores and for those that don't know there's no google play store in china so every platform has its own and they usurped the big ones and went to smaller ones to get a lower commission rate and actually their success was a big driver of the commission wars in china so not only was the game so

impressive and well made but it actually had a big impact on the chinese mobile game industry overall okay i think another impressive thing was just that their development cost is also super economical right like when we think about a company grossing a billion dollars a year we're expecting them to spend like 1.2 in ua right and that these guys are reportedly spending uh they spent 100 million dollars to make the game and 200 million a year to operate it and they're grossing 200 or 2 billion on top of that which is mind-blowing it's just phenomenal business they also had an amazing go-to-market strategy with tons of influencers tons of like grassroots marketing like they spared no expense they would actually took i think teami's approach in terms of of blasting this thing out there and getting as much and on top of it they have the monetization design that is [ __ ] egregious like it is like so predatory in its definition right and people are so shy away from this gotcha

stuff but they didn't give they don't give a [ __ ] right and that's i think the big thing with them is that they you know like riot or or or you know blizzard could never do this i mean i think it's what they should do frankly but like you know they don't have any restrictions that the western publishers have with all this [ __ ] around gotcha you know so they take advantage of their situation in the marketplace right yeah one of my thoughts as a monetization designer is that even though it's egregious it could be way more egregious like they have a pity system built into their gotcha right like if you didn't want to do that you could break so much more money but yeah there there's plenty of places for them to keep on pushing the monetization the next two years so it's going to be a rocket ship all right and for our second nomination javier do you want to state your nomination here uh hopefully i don't look like a fanboy but my nomination is riot games this has been their year i think um

all of these spin-off products of of league of legends like uh will rift and tft which i was a bit skeptic from the sense that they were not working as league of legends of course but they were massively successful in china uh so that has set them up as one of the few western companies that is able to be very successful on asia as well and on top of that arcane and all the partnerships they've done uh that has brought their ip to a whole new level and i think they are set to win they're now in a completely different situation all right eric what's that look on your face i i'm gonna have to respectably disagree i would actually put them in the biggest loser category of anything because oh well wild rip was a train wreck right it didn't do anything in the west the whole goal was to build a game for the west that would do well like they stated goal right of course is going to do okay in china they have 10 cent backing them right and

tft doesn't monetize either right so and then i mean i look valorent is a big success for them and i'll give them credit for that but that wasn't this year but wild riff and tft just seemed like a huge disappointments from the performance in the west that's what i would say um but yeah moving on and then an app annie your next one i'm preempting this one i don't know what the hell you're talking about all right well comment on riot though i mean you got you got to say arcane was incredible right i mean just in terms of the the industry loved the the ratings like i've never seen a metacritic or not metacritic but like a rotten tomato rating as high as it got it was just incredible series so um and then i'm trying to look up the wild rift numbers right now but i don't remember it being terrible but uh i i would say i would i would say for arcane it's you know you gotta you gotta think i i don't know i i think that was a pretty massive accomplishment shout

out to thomas food great job anyway have they released any uh at least any organic uplifts from that yet like any apms let's slip how how well that show has helped their other parts of their business i haven't seen it but like you saw twitch numbers for like league of legends and valerian spike when arcane came out so clearly there was an engagement boost whether that translates into revenue or whatnot is you know we will find well maybe we won't find out because mario doesn't really say anything but there was clearly at least an engagement boost if you look at things like twitch downloads apps etc okay well wild so hey hey eric cress so i'm showing wild rift as doing 200 million uh it did today is that mainly china or is that it did 70 million in the west 70 million x china on 54 million downloads okay that is an epic failure for a game that big and the uh ip that big i mean there's this i mean nevertheless i'm going to add that

according to somebody that we love and we respect mobas do not work in the west yes that's my next one we will get to that we will get to that except for mobile legends to some degree all right and so okay so we have biggest winner mihoyo uh riot games i'm gonna say app annie what a surprise sponsored by app how did eric know because i i i kind of wrote about this before in a previous uh game makers newsletter post but you know they're kind of coming out of this sec ruling i think that the use of mnpi for a lot of the their competitors in my view this year is going to have an impact we may see a lot of their competitors disappear so or or be highly challenged so anyway

that's that's my that's my vote for biggest winner and brian what who do you got yeah i got a safety pick uh i'm gonna nominate microsoft i think it's been a banner year for them uh the the acquisition of bethesda bringing them into the fold and growing the game pass subscription business past 20 million and growing i think it's a good narrative for investors and i think that it's gonna underwrite bigger deals from microsoft in the future to aggregate more content i think uh similarly with sony i think those two companies are the ones that are still uh very much in tune with developing experiential games over two to three year time periods and not getting mixed mixed up in uh timelines and things like that so looking forward to seeing what they come up with right yeah you know i've been personally really impressed with game pass uh more than i thought i mean i know they're running a [ __ ] ton of promotion for it but uh definitely it seems like it could be pretty material uh in the future yeah and they added ea origin to the game pass they just added ubisoft

plus to the game pass you know they they even got sony to put mlb the show day and date release into game pass which i have played way too much of i love that game and i'm very happy it's on xbox because i got the the xbox series x so you know i think microsoft has been building this vision of of this subscription service for a while and i think you know that you know they've stuck to it over the long term and there's a lot more to go just as brian said to be clear mlb got baseball on to microsoft not not microsoft fair but you know still i mean i don't think anyone would have thought that a sony game would have ever shown up in game pass you know up until it happened what i am expecting is with the my playstation to be able to connect into the game pass cloud gaming that will be if i can play from my playstation to xbox games you're out of your mind what are we talking about i i i think i think phil spencer would

sign up for that you know if he if sony handed him a term sheet he would sign it i think i think what happens in the console is pretty shady because you go into their website and the website is somehow blocked so it's super shady how they are able to block me using my device to navigate to a website that is not opening by them i don't know i think the chances of that being okay are as big as the chances of an android uh you know operating system running on an iphone um yeah i'll take pets against that dude apple's like [ __ ] ruthless man they're just like out of control ruthless you're gonna that's why that's what i'm saying you're gonna throw shade at sony come on like get out of here all right who's next all right so josh you can only you can only nominate one company who do you got uh i'm going to go have to go with roblox i mean we got mataverse [Laughter]

how can you say roblox has something metaphor related they still have just roblox but i think they have they have first mover advantage they have a lot a lot of momentum they have 15 years behind them i think this stock was looking pretty tasty for a while but uh i like who they you know the team they brought on so i'm gonna go with roblox i'm sorry if eric's disappointed with that no no no i i thought you were gonna take app 11 so that i can take roadblocks i can do that too if you want but i was told to only pick one no yeah i mean you could make a case for app 11 that mo pub acquisition pretty i mean good for app lovin not not great for the industry yeah they may be the biggest winner this year app 11 but they're going to be the biggest loser quickly on roblox like so my perspective is like on the stock side of it right like if you look at the stocks it was a brutal brutal brutal year for stocks in

the publicly traded space everyone got destroyed okay except for roblox roblox was up 30 it was up 70 at one point it's now back down to like probably only up like 10 but um but clearly they're the ones that won the hearts and minds of the investor who's chasing you know rainbows and unicorns with all this metaverse and nft stuff so i think uh roblox was the big winner from that perspective um and then i agree with mio is definitely insanely successful and applovin navigated this these murky waters with with this you know this apple nonsense uh they did really well they're really smart though they yeah they are ruthless i don't care what any of us have to say man they just keep plugging away they're going to come into non non gaming area and just crush next year i don't know agreed all right guys let's take this to a vote so we've got mihoyo riot appani microsoft or roblox

so starting with me hoyo who votes for mihoyo as the games industry company that was the biggest winner in 2021 uh i don't i guess you guys could just raise your hands you got three okay right interesting hey who votes for riot games if you don't you don't have to vote for your your combination yeah you do yeah there you go conviction all right who votes for app annie [Laughter] brian convinced me to try and vote for microsoft but i guess i i should vote for my my own um and who votes for microsoft one nice all right and roblox for sure roblox man

i bought it at like 67 a share and sold before 140. nice i'm kind of torn like so for 3-3 i could like maybe switch to roblox but like for for the business case the stock case maybe yeah roblox is a clear winner but uh i mean i've said it i don't think it's going to get dethroned for a couple years i've said it on our podcast roblox will be a trillion dollar company now i don't know when but you know they they are they have as josh said first mover advantage in the metaverse um if you just look at kind of the services they're rolling out on top of the core gaming platform concerts live events are going to be massive uh so that's that that's why i'm there they also brought in all these brand partnerships you know they have nike they have vans all these you know athletic brands that are targeted towards a younger audience and you know those kids are going to grow up so you know matthew they're 18 plus and they can actually buy stuff online

it's it's a solid business they have to offer products that are worth buying though like loads of people are on myspace for a while until facebook came around and just they have a demographic problem and matthew i listen to all the stuff you do and i think you're really really good at what you do but i don't agree with you on the roblox thing i think roblox is is going to have a huge problem growing to where their expectation of growth is both from a geo and from a from from a demo perspective uh and then we have epic in the pipeline this year building out their tools and technology which should take a while to do but yeah i don't know i get well i get a little bit worried about roblox i think their their content is not good enough so we'll see all right let's run this off then let's uh vote between this the two who votes for me hoyo i i'm gonna stick with me one two three i'm changing okay and roblox waffling okay okay so roblox wins

do we have to we drink right yeah everybody's drinking right yeah what what wasn't that the no no after yeah okay yeah all right what's next uh let's see because i'm the biggest okay this should be fun which games industry company was the biggest loser in 2021 and we're gonna start with our first nomination from brian who do you got nice cd projekt red i think if i take a step back and look at all the things that microsoft's doing right i think that cdpr did the exact opposite uh anytime i see that much fanfare and and froth around a upcoming game launch you just it's just not the way things should be going i think it ultimately polluted a very good game uh based upon management decisions

and uh off we go that's that's my vote okay all right ken who do you have yeah i just want to make sure i'm like legally covered here because to me uh these are my opinions and not the opinions of my former employer so uh i have activision here um stock down was down i think at one point almost 50 in the year uh just crazy for a 60 billion dollar company um massive brain drain i mean i shared just recently today like the lead quest designer for wows out so many amazing designers and developers and creatives are just like fleeing the company this is a complete culture clash with uh yeah yeah okay okay all right my nomination is facebook we saw what a huge impact the whole

apple idfa deprecation issue had on facebook in my view it seemed like this was more of a personal beef of some kind because it did seem like apple was specifically targeting facebook allowing fingerprinting to continue because they know that that that continues that helps steal share from facebook we saw many publishers uh you know prior to id deprecation who had say like 25 to 30 percent of revenue on ios coming from fan drop to near zero or single digits at best and so my pick here is facebook and josh did you want to comment here on something i mean no i just i mean i think it was impactful but facebook just chugs along man they they have such scale that they'll figure out a solution and they have a million other things going on so right

i mean you talk to the people there they're it's like a speed i mean it's a big deal but sort of not really because they have so many people working on solutions and other things that i don't know yeah joe how come you're calling them still facebook oh meta yeah another fail from them yeah all right eric cress who do you got you know i i have to admit there are so many losers this year like if you're just talking about this year like it was a disaster it was an absolute train wreck across the board like uh there's no no no one was left standing everyone was down like every single publicly traded company take two ea activision ubisoft zynga whatever so it's only the degree of loser like this this year right so the biggest loser from a stock perspective was still front which i've been railing against the machine since the beginning even though i love them i love you guys if you're listening but they were down like 54 the stock was down and then followed that by ubisoft which was down 45 like they've just

gotten freaking annihilated right and they're still going down because they got nothing right um but i have to agree that overall in terms of the overall impact like in terms of dollars uh activision is probably the biggest where it was down 30 but that's like billions and billions of shareholder value just [ __ ] lost in in months right it's just nutty right but i have to admit look good i would say activision to me is quantitative and quality i mean the quality of stuff i think is the brain train is insane for them and that i think that's a pretty severe long term don't get me started on glue please don't get me started put people in the audience yeah um so zynga gets the honorable mention here because i was such a bull on zynga for so long but they just hit a freaking brick wall and they are so unprepared for idfa that they are just like shooting blanks out there and i don't know i i can't even see a a situation in which they can recover from this thing so

their stock is down like 30 and probably more now it's down to six dollars a share which is quite sad well eric what do you think about zynga's acquisitions this year uh well what do you mean which ones starlink no no no no no no no no boost is i sharp boost is just another problem right to solve right they don't have the like the core mechanics of ua ready much less do they have the ability to try to integrate stuff like that so it's just all a pipe they even talk about sharp boost in their last earnings i look i didn't see anything i don't think so they're generating the rolex acquisition was good they they basically shored up their advertising that's like been the only thing that's like been a positive but i mean sorry i don't want to go on a big zinger ramp but the fundamental problem here is that zynga has done all these acquisitions they've got the revenue from those acquisitions but they haven't they have no titles in the pipeline to contribute and the titles that came from

the acquisitions have done [ __ ] and and and farmville is not doing much so there's no way they can grow organically next year and that's their biggest problem and they have no products in the pipeline that are interesting so there we go um so my vote is still activision though activision is the biggest biggest loser this year for sure i think we can vote yeah well no no we got one more we've got um we got matthew but i'm actually before matthew you start i'm surprised eric you didn't mention skills because i think peak to traffic skills yeah dude it's a criminal organization right so like i don't even consider it a gaming company but you're right skills is by far the worst just so everyone's aware jk steve and i did super stonk bros on skills back in may and it was actually may the fourth and we literally top ticked the stock so yeah not to be like we're smart or anything we got lucky we're you know better to be lucky than good but you know definitely yeah that's that's i i

don't even want to talk about skills as a gaming company because it's not my clients made a lot of money on skills because that was a short on the short side oh yeah sure yeah they had a great year they picked up victor wang this year one of our homies so they're yeah he's good victor's good so they got a chance well okay so you gotta you gotta separate out stock and people because when we rant on stocks it doesn't mean we don't like the people necessarily but yeah so anyways my my pick although i might not actually vote for it but i just wanted to talk about ubisoft because yes the stock was down there's been you know issues in the background with people culture but the biggest thing for me is you get the sense from this company that they don't actually know what they want to be like i feel like senior management is kind of like a puppy chasing a butterfly sometimes you know we want to be an nft blockchain game company oh no no now we're a metaverse company oh no no now we're making free to play no now we're mobile like they don't they don't have a strategy they're they're chasing the latest thing and

if you're constantly shifting resources and constantly changing your focus you're never going to be good at one thing and for me that's that's almost the biggest problem it's from the top down is that they don't have a vision of what they want to be yeah i've been ranting about that for a long long time are there many companies that do have a good strong vision for themselves they all know exactly where they are you may not agree with it you may not like it but they know what they want to be okay so putting it to a vote we are voting for either cd project red activision facebook still front or ubisoft and you don't have to vote for your own we'll just we'll just put it that way so that we can get a it'll be easier for us to get a winner so who votes for cd projekt red as the games industry company that was the biggest loser in 2021 i'm actually not voting for mine okay

uh next activision okay facebook uh that's i'm not i already voted for activision and uh still friends and okay javier who are you voting for i'm not voting on this one uh okay he's got upstairs switzerland i think a lot of companies lost all across the board like eric said um and in fact i think that the biggest losers are probably the ones that are jumping into business models that they don't understand and they don't just because they need something to get the investors excited right so okay moving on to the best game either hd or mobile and starting with nicholas who do you

got who do you nominate for the best game of 2021 valheim straight up um it's it's it's a great game um i i think you know not not for anything specific but more just like how immersive it is and how much you know the experience and how you play it so that's that's one thing that i really like you know the the variety it provides it's great single player it has this co-op mode there's pvp possible but it doesn't just go like oh you're doing battle royale and you know yet another one of those um i particularly like the base building in the game and then you know venturing out that somehow is is different from you know other games in the genre and then i think the biggest reason for me to pick it is is just you know keeping in mind that you know it said out there like there are five guys that made this game i think who has whoever has ever worked on a game and obviously everybody here

has and you know probably the entire audience that is just an astounding accomplishment how you can you know make such a game you know so big so refined and all of these things and this yeah i'm not saying it's perfect but you know if you can pull this off with five guys um you know i'll shuffle i'll i'll pull my head to that and um yeah so that's the clear winner for me and brian i i know you also like bellheim right what are your thoughts yeah 100 that was my game of the year uh based upon time spent money spent i it was actually one of those things where like uh the co-op was so good that i learned how to set up a private server and then realize it was gonna cost me like 70 bucks a month to run it because my friends were building giant like space that's a commitment so you know it was just i'm very into co-op games i'm very into games that bring co-op forward uh and it makes me excited about games that are coming in the next few years because it inspired them and so it's not the biggest commercial success and it had you know 5-10 million downloads or whatever but for me that was the one that stuck all right cool uh ken let's let's hear your surprise

pick for already knows where this going with this one this mention impact it's one of the best master classes of art and bait and switch gameplay that you can imagine gets you super immersed into this zelda-like exploration phase just to smack you with like as eric said an egregious gotcha system that you have to grind on for the next two years um you know that's shown in its revenue this is i think this is genji or miyoyo is like second game and again two billion dollars you know it's just mind-blowing it's the most profitable game in this first year of development and is not showing any signs of letting down engagement numbers are super strong retention numbers super strong monetization still there so i don't see anybody beating it i think there's probably an argument for you know folks out there having different preferences of gameplay maybe it's not the most revolutionary gameplay in the world but it's a really great um

ensemble of a bunch of different elements just masterfully executed upon so yeah i'm gonna get you a good divorce attorney okay thank you playing your game thank you all right my nomination for best game 2021 i'm gonna have to say naraka bladepoint this was and i i know matthew you know shout out to bloomberg for writing uh writing a piece on naraka but this kind of speaks to this emerging trend that we're also seeing in terms of a lot of these china-based development studios actually producing really great games now you know mihoyo is an example we've got black myth we've got up-and-coming studios like 24 entertainment which is based in beijing published by netease so naraka for those who don't know it's a battle royale game up to 60 players that fight it's martial arts thing so you wouldn't think that it has great relevance outside of china but still it's picking up some steam

um last november bloomberg did report that naraka grossed at that time 240 million selling over 6 million copies and was one of the fastest selling chinese pc games ever and so clearly it's resonating they're gonna start pushing naraka like in the game i saw like a notification that it's already gone to mobile but i i was looking on i i was looking at the app store today and i couldn't see it but um clearly there's some additional upside the game actually is i mean for me because i don't play a lot a ton of pc games it's very complex and a little bit hard to play but definitely very innovative very fun and i just thought that they did an excellent excellent job on morocco yeah coming to mobile and console in 2022 so okay so it's not there yet okay uh i i think it i think it might have soft launched i don't think it's in full launch yet got it okay eric chris oh sorry yeah i'm only shaking my head because it's pretty it seems like a very niche

title but what i would say is that this just trend of chinese development on aaa console and pc is is a huge trend that they're just fleeing for their lives out of the chinese market as the regulation gets more and more egregious um so you're gonna see a lot more of this like people trying to compete or the asian companies chinese companies in particular trying to compete in the west and i think that's a really really interesting trend of which this is one of them so that's good well eric there was like what 14 000 chinese developers that shut down in 2021 yeah i saw that stack and i'm crazy you look at how chinese companies are structured there's lots of shells and different subsidiaries and the way the way that chinese corporate structure is done is really like wishy-washy and so each of these entities can roll up like several layers and so if you shut down one layer that doesn't mean the whole thing is shut but to shannon's point

they are cracking down on this stuff and they need to go elsewhere they can't acquire any american companies anymore because the regulators the biden administration is going after them so you know it's going to be interesting to see how many of these companies actually succeed in the west so far so good it seems for 10 for 10 cent you know timmy lightspeed and quantum have been hiring like a banshee in the la area right and yeah and and nettie's as well you know these these companies are coming especially for console console is like the last bastion on tap for them and yeah and they see it tencent acquired sumo digital uh to really give them the some of the back-end tools to really uh enhance their console publishing yeah we know you as well you know it's moving over as well so this year was not this year was not a great year for hd unfortunately game wise right i think this 2022 is gonna be a lot better i think there's gonna be some big titles um so i really don't have much to add i think the one that we have to actually say is halo infinite even though it was delayed a year the fact is they finally executed on a game the multiplayer was

really solid the engagement was off to the through the charts like off the charts uh which was a little bit of surprise for me frankly the single player was eh more kind of boring but like it was decent but the multiplayer has been good and and i think they they executed against one of their marquee titles versus sony which basically had [ __ ] all all year the second year of a console cycle they have no games they have no games like people playstation owners are just so forgiving on this stuff it is ridiculous for them not to have something you know um so anyway so i think microsoft executed with halo and i think you know it was a pretty good game so i'm going to say that one i'm going to throw guardians of the galaxy in the mix i thought this game was just a fantastic story it was fun to play the mechanics where you control the whole team like it was just the most fun i had in a game all year and but i'm also going to secondarily nominate marvel future

revolution that was the mmo that came out from netmarble you know this this was uh this was quite an impressive mmo it was like a con hd quality mmo made for mobile um you know so that's how you take a drink break really quick so if you haven't checked out marvel future revolution i think you should because i you know i think the quality of the mmo that they built for a mobile device was quite impressive i need a shameless plug because um you know trading has been like the most active engaging game for me um i think you know free-to-play games or like why would i spend my money to like get nothing out of it um i'd rather actually mean nothing and then nothing fun there's fantastic experiences endless amount of fun what do you mean nothing no but stock trading crypto trading nft trading you can actually make money on it and it becomes an entire like community experience

with the gamification you can even do like paper trading with your friends oh she's these are the metaverse awards i forgot nfp awards let's chill for nft boards i don't think that happened in 2021 except for axes so let's uh maybe in 2022 we'll see yeah if you if you bought bitcoin at the start of last year and held it through the year on a risk-adjusted basis you underperformed the nasdaq by 30 percentage points so we just watched but if you bought when shannon back in 2013 when it was 350 a pop and you huddled it until 2021 on a risk-adjusted basis microsoft that's performed just as well okay okay matthew just talking knowledge all right all right guys let's put this to a vote so who votes for valheim

come on sometimes it's okay for a game just to be around for a month you know it's like i have no plan for longer than a month but you know in our hearts it lasts way longer so yeah all right gentian impact although i gotta say gen shin did launch in 2020 but all right okay two votes two votes all right nuraka bladepoint i'm gonna vote for the rocket oh two all right it's awesome game are you keeping track of the votes are you just like writing it in the paper yeah i am yes and halo infinite two votes it halo is actually a good game i i would agree it's pretty good i don't know if it's best but uh it's pretty good uh let's see what guardians of the galaxy and marvel future revolution the dog

also had a vote so whoever dogged one all right so i think we're going to have to i didn't vote what's the tie the tie is between valheim gentian and raqqa well that's a lot of responsibility josh i mean i'm about to pick the [ __ ] i don't know i'll go to uh belheim just because something all right well let let's run this off although we lost we lost chris but now we've got i think he's choking the dog between three between three this is probably better so who votes for dalheim yeah yeah yeah two josh you just voted for valheim cress is also voting for val [ __ ] who votes for gibson message me about it three ah who votes for naraka

no one two all right so it's it's gonna it's gonna come down to third set yeah tie break valheim versus gentian all right okay behind me all right fine one two three four five all right well i mean that's that's already that's majority all right that's it let's see what it is that's nordic minecraft you guys are crazy after three rounds of voting and you're just in time for the worst game of 2020 yeah that's a great question [Music] but starting uh with the first nomination from brian who do you got i actually had a hard time with this because i don't really play a lot of games that i don't want to play um but i would say that you know diablo 2 remastered for me was a bit of a a tough one uh i do like that uh

playing games that have been out before i guess but just something about it it's like i need something a little bit newer um and at the same extent i think call of duty let me down a little bit this year too i've always been one of those guys that would pay for it all four times a year for the campaign and just getting one campaign and like going back to world war ii again and uh just need to spice it up a little bit and that was that would be mine very soft uh worst game more like disappointing for me okay uh javier who do you got i have uh cyberpunk 277 i think uh bad lounge is a four a game you cannot launch broken and they did also i think very bad damage control they were very silent about it for several months it wasn't clear from the fans if it was going to get fixed or not and although they're now doing a comeback i felt they they they completely missed

the opportunity okay it wasn't even a disappointment it was a bad game like not in a playable state yeah and also like they just cut it just considering all the hype around it and it's like right and then it was a yeah i think it was a complete train wreck it was not only not well executed like i think it just plainly didn't work so like who whoever authorized to like even try to put this out there i i cannot imagine that any delay or something would have been worse than what it did because like even if they fix it now you know ship has sailed it's just like which is really unfortunate for a lot of people involved yeah i think this is a warning for every well not just public company every company when you're talking with your investors cd project backed themselves into a wall they promised investors and if you look at their compensation plans they actually basically had to get the game out in calendar 2020 to get stock compensation for themselves so they put

themselves against a wall to release the game before the end of 2020 regardless of what shape it was in so when there's a lot of people that make games here and i'm just speaking from the investor community but don't don't promise that and you know it's it's been shown over time look at what halo right they delayed that game and it came out better in the end because they delayed it don't rush a game just to make money you know a delayed game is usually eventually good isn't that what shigeru miyamoto used to say yeah you know don't don't don't let don't let investors rush your game and rush your development yeah the fundamental problem is that this team was very very small and new and they were very unsophisticated on how to deal with wall street and they were propped up so much on the polish exchange right and so like they were like the darling of poland right and when you're a rock star you have to act like a rock star right you were the biggest biggest company by market cap in poland at the high yeah so

like they caught up got caught up in this fervor that was beyond their control and their capability bad no it is no but that but that's what i'm saying that's the reality but it's still a bad excuse for what happened you know because eventually like you have to pick up the pieces and you know i i quite frankly i don't really care you know if you're new to this and all of that you know if there's a there's a base level of in intelligence and also multiple people and they have both of those things then you know i mean honestly if you launch this what are you expecting like what's gonna happen right is is there even like oh maybe nobody's going to notice come on like what's going to happen it's a terrible product take the take the money and run yeah correct right that is even if they cut too long i think i mean i think that you know what one once the the you know the the [ __ ] has hit the fan you you you gotta deal with the consequences you know you gotta do damage control and probably gotta bite the bullet and delay it and all that i'm not saying it's pretty but out of all the options they had at that point and they must have known that

this was you know an insufficient product to say the least like why do you still push that button if that is the worst outcome of them all with you know very predictable second and third order consequences that's the part that i don't understand and you guys already know where my vote is going to be but yeah i mean this is my best short call in 2020 so i'm i was well well on top of this one from the get-go the the tech was never gonna work on current gen so they were they did put their back against the wall they had no choice but to release this thing frankly um this is my my least uh or most disappointing game of 2020 by far it took i took off three days of work to play this game and then took back two of those days afterwards because i was so pissed away my my vote on this one is pubg new state okay i cannot even imagine this thing doing worse right i was already going to say that this was going gonna be bad because there's no way you're gonna get people to move over from a game they've spent

years playing and move over to a new game first of all that's [ __ ] impossible right the second thing was that like tencent was not gonna sit down for this and just let them build a game and try to compete directly against them there's no effing way they would have done that right and so they came out with this game with a bunch of hype pre-registration around 40 million and this thing has died on the vine like they've done 9 million dollars of revenue if they were supposed to get to a billion a billion with a b if they get to like 50 million i'll be shocked right that the way this thing is going by far the biggest disappointment of the year and there are many other ones gta trilogy is up there in my opinion that was like yeah that was that was personal disappointment because i was really really really looking forward to this which ages me but i'll admit that right it's just like oh man awesome you know like back in the 90s and then it it just seemed like a i don't know like a cheap money grab right like like like a like a terrible

port where like like nobody put any love into this so so i i thought that was just like a letdown because i love gta and this just sucked i'll i'll stick with that one i mean there are other ones that i could go on and on about but i'll do one more dungeon jargon dragon's dark alliance like dude i actually talked to these guys sometimes so maybe they're not going to talk to me ever again [Laughter] dude hasbro has got to figure out a [ __ ] interactive strategy you know like seriously they have these brands they got to do something with them you know wait here didn't hasbro acquire backflip like six seven years ago yeah exactly you just shut it down right yeah so like yeah like like let's build a good game right let's let's try that you know with your license is that the voodoo game what is that the ludia game or a different one i think that's a different i think jk should talk about the loot um that's after my time

but on the mobile side i would actually put i'm sorry i hate to do this well we're going to do this later but like you got to put the riot game on there wild rip you got to put that on there how many games are you coming out with there you go there's no way that riot said we are doing 60 million dollars in the west in for this for our biggest [ __ ] franchise ever but it's not a bad game we're talking about worst game not the biggest financial disappointment right i don't know but that is something bad he doesn't care about gameplay and these you know non-tangible you know numbers don't lie things it's all about dollars enterprise value moving enterprise values here i'm with new state though and i'm actually in okay i am going to take it back to the to the dollars in the stock market i'm surprised that crafting stock is held up as well as it has you can't ipo

secretly drinking that coffee yeah the pubg sorry i'm sorry to interrupt those [ __ ] ruthless on this [ __ ] dude they [ __ ] totally bombed the store you searched for a new state uh pub g news state it goes the first two responses are are the regular pub g game they were like all over these guys dude they like mess with the wrong [ __ ] right those guys are ruthless dude i have to i would love to meet and talk to the person that did that in 10 cents like it was it was awesome i love it tencent even does that to their own teams internally their own studios do that to each other you didn't think they were going to do that to someone else like they don't really know each other yeah what is the expression for 10 cent the shark and the something bathtub

it's just sharks over there there's only sharks ken did you want to add your spicy take or should we should we call this to a vote we can call it to a vote nobody's going to agree with mine all right so we are voting for either call of duty vanguard um cd prod uh actually no cyberpunk 2077 or pubg new state or dungeons and dragons dark alliance i guess we've got those four did i miss anything gta and gta trilogy okay so five options starting with call of duty vanguard who votes for call of duty vanguard i'm staying with this just because i'm tired of world war ii and the same old okay uh cd project cyberpunk or sorry cyberpunk the white class game it's so bad i can't even tell apart the

game and the developer is just like i'm feeling the claw all right is the law all right okay new state two three chris are you adjusting something or are you voting are you doing multiple votes double dipping and now you're mute he's trading he's trying dungeons and dragons darker lights it's an airplane he's just like adjusting he's shorting shorting stocks all right i'm voting for d d dark alliance [Music] and anyone want to vote for gta trilogy all right so looks like the winner is pub g new state i think you're miss congratulations all right so cd projekt who voted for cd projekt

biggest surprise all right biggest surprise who do you got nicholas axey it's i mean like i think everybody has the same thing for this one and no but okay i i'll say a thing about it so so just truth be sorry you know it's it's a game that personally i i don't think would have appealed to me at any point in my gaming career not only now that i'm old um but uh yeah i mean who would have thought that this title that this has already been around for a while right all of a sudden would become the poster child for play to earn right and uh like like to a degree where you know the developers or the publishers valuation has gone you know in in in the billions where everybody's talking about it where you know a

friend of mine who's in banking and has very little to do with video games recently asked me about it and i think like how do you even know what that is um so that's why this is my vote for biggest surprise it looks like nobody wants to submit any other candidates i mean i would have expected somebody to maybe say like new world or halo but looks like it's it's all it's all axie all day axi right at one point i was surprised more like a tamagotchi pokemon mixer somehow they've convinced people that this is a game it's literally just a work sim you got people in indonesia it's a casino yeah 85 percent you pull the lever you get you get something potentially good and you sell it for money it's all a casino except now yeah the problem the difference between gotcha and in genshin versus axi is you can cash out for real money now so it's not even like a gray line between it being a slot machine and not like it it is a slot machine

if i put it in and there's a shortage of teachers and all of that in the philippines now because everybody is making three extra money on active which i mean [Applause] don't take my material okay because i said that in the podcast it's like look the entire filipino community is out of labor force because they're all playing axey right now correct yes it's like it's gonna be it's gonna be a dystopian nightmare when all these like all these trading things from shannon are coming online right the whole global economy is going to collapse right no but but in all seriousness it's the creator economy okay no but this is let's create our destruction right mark my words mark my words this is the forecast production are gonna be gone because they're all gonna be playing [ __ ] trading games on shannon's platform guys this is gonna be a forecast to if if and when and i'm more of a win than if guy play to earn really universally

takes off you will see this in other countries not only for teachers right there will be a lot of labor shortage because certain people think i can make i don't know 50 bucks an hour playing axi versus 12 bucks an hour doing something that's really hard on my back so um it will have a larger economic impact than i think we will offer c and when i say it i don't mean actually i mean earn like play turn in general i'm much being funneled from one holder to the pretty another holder and if the game is not fun it's not going to funnel this is not it's not extensive like if walter driver puts a random number generator into my event tuning sheet on an excel it doesn't make it a game this is not a game it is literally just a work simulator and you're so old-school dude like you're like you're hey boomer welcome to the new world all right look that's not what you're talking about have you ever have you ever played a free-to-play game do you think that's a good of course i have i use the

progression engine that's a [ __ ] progression engine like there's not that's not a game you know i used to sell uh whatever team i fun about understand like i can i can understand selling wow gold i sold wild gold i bought wow gold i understand that but like this is not the same thing well we're not talking about whether it's fun to play right that's not the question here right now is it i mean it is let's move on let's go let yeah let's let's move on axi was the the unanimous winner yeah i'll have to drink after that just just pound one for axi okay all right all right thanks thanks for everything actually oh oh all right i'm a lightweight guy i'm already feeling it i've only gone through three white claws but i'm feeling it all right has that bottle arrived yet it has not but uh if

yeah we'll keep going until it arrives and then i'll just have to drink from it all right so let's let's cut this back a little bit jk let's come back just like a one-liner for you aaron's got eric's gotta get to the gym so let's get this thing done yeah all right well i think it's great to lose man look at me all right biggest comeback i gotta say amazon new world everybody thought new world was dead uh it had a super successful launch 800k ccu according to steamdb and you know the word on the street was that people thought that the games division was basically headed for you know getting chopped but now with the success of new world obviously crucible got cancelled andy jassy jeff bezos have both publicly come out supporting the games division and basically kind of reiterated this message of c it takes investment in order to make something successful now i i'm not going to say that new world ultimately is a successful long-term game but in terms of like a

comeback from having you know so much i i don't know a distrust in skepticism around amazon's gaming division and having something that actually did launch pretty successfully i will say new world you're out of your mind but go ahead next one all right brian who do you got i was thinking about new world but honestly if i think if i had to take a a a little closer lens at it i think the odds of that game not being around in five years or greater than it being around okay and by not being honest i think like you know 10 to 20 000 or something like that yeah there was a lot of bluster when it came out about hey we [ __ ] made it or whatever but it's uh it takes a lot more than that to build a long-term game and i'm not sure if amazon has the dna to do that well also the scale expectation for an amazon is very different than 99.5 percent of companies so i don't have another nomination jk i'm sorry oh okay oh sorry uh javier who's

who's your nomination i have two nominations actually one is cdpr because i think that they are now doing a comeback with uh cyberpunk they are now positive on the steam reviews the christmas went well for them and they are now preparing the new edition of the game re kind of free launch of the game and i think that's that can be very positive and my second nomination is supercell because they stopped the revenue decline that they have been declining for a while and now they're up uh most of them crazy eddie man they they did stop declining that's true oh they did the world signing only in the world of the absolute love for your supercell can you say that they're the top winner or top no i didn't say that the biggest comeback because they didn't lose revenue for like the fifth year in a row right it's unbelievable right okay i am i am a supercell fanboy

but nevertheless i think that um stopping their fall is something pretty impressive especially because they that came from from clar royale that was on a huge decline for quite a while and being able to turn around a game that is so old um i i think it's that is pretty impressive now the question is if they can now start to grow again but counterpoint uh everdail you know just [ __ ] wish yeah that's the worst game ever go on i i need to have like job security in the future so i can't [ __ ] on them too much let's just get on okay all right ken who's your pick mine is apex so you know me i've been like a pc fanboy for a long time i've worked at blizzard i played literally every br you can think of apex was sort of a sleeper for me um it felt initially when it launched like a bit of a replication of other things that we've seen in the industry but over the years

they've differentiated quite significantly and you can see that now their their twitch viewership is spiking pretty hardcore they've basically cannibalized all of call of duty's uh vr viewership or a large majority of it um i think uh apex really is one of the the games we need to keep our eye on here in 2022. yeah i agree with ken on this one i think apex has shown remain amazing resilience and and amazing liveops for team that didn't have any experience at this at all when they launched it they just basically started from nothing um and if you look i look at like um uh engagement numbers and the only game that's maintained uh you know interest is is apex everything else is down 30 40 50 even even uh fortnight so yeah i think they've done a great job with apex i think they're confident too and i've seen a lot of pretty expensive marketing push behind it in the last month or so so and mobile is coming which should help

them in asia um you know i don't think it matters in the west at all but i think in korea and japan that's going to be a big a big you know those markets relatively aren't as big as china us but within those markets i think a mobile apex is going to be quite successful and if they can get it into china at some point ever with 10 cent and helping them you know that's a big opportunity as well yeah i agree you know the only thing i think they may be missing and that i might just be ignorant on this is the esports scene doesn't seem to be existing at all for this fps so i'd uh i'd question what they're doing in that regards if there's going to be any sport related to it dude esports is over come on man i think that wave is going blue valor is still sticking around you know so by the way valerian's got to be an honorable mention too they've done quite well this year so absolutely i'll give it out to ryan for that one shannon what what do you got who do you got i'm surprised eric i'm surprised you didn't say gamestop no come on think about the money play since you're off but how is that a comeback

it's like the the real underdog story didn't you guys all grow up they didn't do anything they don't they literally didn't literally just go to the store pick up like whatever games bring it back home completely like nonsense like zero like no one gave a [ __ ] about them and then with wall street bets and all the other you know retail investors pumping it up like crazy with the short game against so your comeback of the year is wall street it's not gamestop it's memes was just a proxy for rational exuberance it has nothing to do with gamestop yeah matthew too many analysts on this call getting triggered talks like a professor sometimes you know like gamestop is a six dollar stock basically so everything else is just a meme and and total like exuberance as mr as the professor i'm calling you for the professor sorry i read too much alan greenspan yeah yeah no no i mean gamestop is ridiculous and then they show this nft thing they're up 25 after

hours thank god people started to like get real and it's only up three percent but uh yeah game stops at zero sorry all right let's vote on this so who votes for you and by the way i'm not saying new world is going to be successful in 22 but for 21 like going from potentially getting shut down to having jassy and bezos say hey our games division is doing well i i would say that's a good comeback but anyway anyone for new world i i will vote for new world i'm going to come with you even though i thought the arguments on apex were amazing it's got 8 000 viewers right now on twitch 8 thousand yeah it's in 2022 it's down to number 28 most yeah so more like instead of being top 10 it's more like top 30 but i think it's really switched the narrative because the narrative before new world was amazon cannot make it and now it's amazon cannot keep it up and i think that's a big change of knowledge hold on a minute i'm not allowing this anymore look

amazon in video games is done we're already involving eric there's no more arguing right now go go go stop it amazon is done like they've lost all their teams they haven't been able to get games out this game is a disaster right it they did their four million units or whatever they did now no one is playing this game like amazon has done the only thing that amazon has left in the kitty is to do an acquisition and maybe they acquire [ __ ] you know i think they should actually go after zynga because zynga's toast they go after i can't really say anything more than that but like there's just there's no freaking way that amazon continues in the in this direction anymore like they just don't they forget it all right enough of that new world biggest missed opportunities this is just like blowing my mind that you guys think this okay all right so you're always voting right so we i think we got we had okay we got before next week we've got we've got cd projekt and um cyberpunk 27.77

who's who's voting for that wait what one i think aren't we still with the comebacks and i was waiting to vote for apex what happened someone had an argument for cdpr is coming out having a comeback but i'm not sure it's relevant now okay all right apex apex [Music] okay one two three four five picks wins drink apex wins drink grass drink more caffeine eric more caffeine all right i'm moving on i'm just getting warmed up man yeah let's let's talk mobas please all right let's let's get there biggest missed opportunity of 2021 javier go i'm going to say balf because all the competitors of valve have mobile strategies valve does not instead we got alex we got steam deck weird things that really are not not the the reality of the gaming

industry and i feel that dota underlords which was their launch on on the only game that i think so far they have launched on mobile they could have been the start of their mobile strategy like it was for riot but instead of that they abandoned it so for me valve big company but they are entirely missing out the mobile world which is the future of gaming so i feel that's the biggest missed opportunity what happens when you move to new zealand but wouldn't you say like maybe epic's game store would be a bigger missed opportunity than valve in 2021 like the way they executed the store seemed a little weak to me relative to what they could have done but all right so we got valve second i i'm gonna say pokemon unite now i think pokemon unite is a fantastic game been playing with my whole family

this this this weekend i've been playing a little bit off and on here and there but i just think that you got the pokemon license we saw pokemon go explode out the gate the gameplay is great i think the mistake that was made was really around and i won't go into this in too much detail i'll i can um i'll write about it or talk about it later in more depth but where they really screwed up in my opinion is that they got the gameplay right they got the systems wrong they got the monetization wrong and that was a big missed opportunity like if you look at the monetization for the game you know it's very weak but i think you got to be able to monetize similar to like you know kind of like like at least like a shooter game or some or more than they have and so for me i felt like you have the pokemon license you have really great gameplay um you you've got a strong early mid game i think the late

game in pokemon unite is a little bit weak but still serviceable but um i i definitely think they they could have done the monetizations in the system's design better you know what they could have done is not [ __ ] sake stop making this one right i mean like look how many bodies are on the ground on mobas right we have riots game which is [ __ ] horrendous right marvel super war which is a top top [ __ ] production value game from marble right that's a disaster catalyst black is a disaster already in beta and you know like super eagle megacorp keeps making the same [ __ ] game expecting different results they're like it's insanity right stop making mobas for the west period end of sentence okay like it's not gonna work if pokemon unite and riot's game don't work league of legends nothing is going to work just stop okay but i agree with you that is a good one pokemon

like this is the the game my kids are playing the most all the time and like i i like this is finally a game that like a dad can play with the whole family i think they got that part like absolutely right but you know the come on it's like how do i even monetize in this game they've hidden the money position so much because it's a [ __ ] moba exactly they don't monetize that's the thing no no no but you you could easily do it you you could you could easily make change you could easily make them like okay all right eric i'm gonna i'm gonna write something on how they could have done this appropriately nice yeah it did it did okay in china but yeah it quickly got overtaken i mean it

didn't make a dent in honor of kings and league of legends once that launched you know it you know pokemon unite kind of disappeared yeah great game poor systems poor monetization can be fixed no cannot no disagree it's dead move on all right ken who do you got i've got new world um yeah this for me was a huge missed opportunity you got amazon billions pouring into a studio but like no no big brains there to help develop it um there are some execution misses on their side that were just unforgivable from a development perspective i know that like there's a lot of game devs here on this call but making an mmo that's client authoritative [ __ ] blows my mind that's like the dumbest detect take of all time um and it could have been something really cool i mean the mmo space is really really hard to iterate in a world of warcraft's done everything you can think of so like their territory control system could have been like somewhat revolutionary but they've like

completely [ __ ] the bet on execution over and over and over these last few months like and if you look at their engagement numbers they're just like falling through the floor i keep on hearing like telfer in my ear say that all it takes is another expansion and this thing is going to like go through the roof but like there's gonna there's it's not there's there's no way this ticket's gonna do anything it's just gonna you know right off into the the graveyard at amazon and nobody's gonna even talk about it anymore meanwhile josh has turned into a ghost or something it's really interesting that he left behind when he left the streets there is one in the chat and i threw out the game before so you know i guess i guess uh i guess we can throw it out as well as a missed opportunity marvel future revolution like the game was really well built it was really fun but there was no content post launched to retain people and so like there was that that's a huge missed opportunity so that's a good that's a good shout because like i turned out of that so quickly i hit the level cap and i was done with it like i love that game i love that game that

game was amazing that was great but there was no content to keep you once you hit level cap and that was the problem yeah i forgot i've got another one real quick which is uh everdeal i know i didn't write in the news do you know the amount of game designers i know that wanted to play this game and just got burnt out after a week is astronomical it's like the like the perfect hooks for retention but no monetization shitty social systems and they haven't released content in five months which is crazy for supercell right like brawlstars also wasn't a big hit when it first launched and then they continued to iterate for months and months after that for whatever reason the cell that's working on everdail just [ __ ] sucks but they stopped they stopped they shot stopped hemorrhaging revenue so they're good right i mean supercell's in good shape now all right big biggest missed opportunities for 2021 valve pokemon unite marvel future fight new world everdale who votes for valve zero okay not even me

pokemon unite all right one two three four five yeah winner winner winner we're good oh yeah okay we're getting the majority all right next biggest oh go ahead first you have to drink grab some white cloth oh my goodness all right joseph next next thing that i'm sending you is like those little beer cozies oh yes there was no replacement for displacement that was a nice one going i have been muting myself for those i didn't know those were cool all right these are definitely these are definitely hitting me pretty hard you're like right all right

so next is biggest news of 2021 nicholas who do you got uh scrolling through the list what are we talking about oh yeah yeah so now i i just remember my answer to this one and and um uh yeah so apple uh epic lawsuit was was obviously big news i know it started in 2020 but the verdict came out in 2021 and although there is this argument to be made that apple prevailed um you know in the for the majority of of claims uh it still went down in my mind as you know finally somebody took on apple and and they succeeded because the tail managed to wag the dog because apple you know for the first time in one minute the app store launched 2008 can't you know dictate anymore that there is only one payment processor system and that is their own um so

i have to say that was a big surprise to me um a welcoming or a surprise i very much welcome because you know while i like a lot of apple products and services i also disagree with them on some things fundamentally and that's one of them and you know having been an indie developer before you know there there's a beauty about you know having all of this built in but it also sucks to you know always have to fork over 30 and not you know being able to um to circumvent our surround that so that's the biggest news for me because also that was a big surprise in 2021 and i think there will be uh trickle-down effects from this that we will see over the next decade you know be it that other people will there or other companies will dare to take on apple i think that's something that we will see you know to what extent this will be exploited i think it will have a significant impact on how marketplaces are going to be built and monetized um not only and you know both as far as you know the existing ones you know how how

do will they have to change as well as the new ones that we will certainly see that nobody has even you know conceived yet so um that is was pretty big news and uh big surprise yeah okay ken you had some thoughts on this too right apple versus epic yeah this is from insider baseball there's just so many companies right now building web marketplaces um this this verdict was just massive in the pm space with everybody drooling over 25 increased margins um i don't know if it's going to like fully pan out the view that way but like this this thing created waves that i've never seen before like my pm communities everywhere blowing up over it so apart from like five percent but five percent still a lot like solace yeah or any like third-party payments that that's what we were doing in southeast asia since like 2016. yeah yeah yeah you can get away with it from southeast asia but not in the united states or uk right

no matter what right uh yeah that's the weird thing so jk is like one of the few people that called this out this blows my mind the fact that they they think that they're going to get money from people like yes they're going to try uh and the good they'll pull you off absorb they don't they still have leverage yeah there's going to be the good the good folks that are going to do it and there's going to be loads of devs that also hide and obstacle their money so yeah anyway that's much of a longer discussion uh brian yeah brian what do you got i think you know it's a tough one to talk about but i think that the the headlines we've seen uh from a variety of companies but especially activision around uh harassment in the workplace and has reverberated throughout the industry in several different harmful ways and i think that the one thing that i'd like to get across is that the folks that felt like they had to leave because of stuff like this uh certainly hope they come back because the industry needs

diversity the industry needs a lot of different people involved to entertain fans build games everything but that was a tough one to to be exposed to and read while being someone that's you know involved and employed by the gaming industry and ken maybe not to get in trouble but no no no since i'm drunk okay all right let's let's move on all right so i will say netflix and uh basically netflix launched their mobile offering oh sorry last november and look i'm not i'm not saying that netflix is going to be successful but i'm saying that you know they have the potential for entertainment companies to come in and offer a service that is basically a different kind of model right one in which that's more tied to the the ability for them to offer something that helps to prevent turn or or lock in their service versus another entertainment service provider i think

is if this works like if it reduces term by a little bit is a big deal and reid hastings as we is has famously mentioned has suggested that you know their biggest competitor is not the other entertainment companies like hbo max disney uh disney plus and and services like that but more fortnite and so i would say that potentially and it's hard to see for for now but in 2021 that may wind up being the biggest impact if it plays out as it potentially could or not er i agree on the impact i just think versus the two things we talked about for biggest news it's not in the same category it's it's big but it's nowhere near either of the two other two i think yeah i think there's a huge debate on what netflix can do in this space but we'll we'll leave it forever but i i'm actually just going to basically say the same thing the activision well the culmination of all the activision pr

you know culminating with the wall street journal article was probably the biggest news in terms of this space ever right for a long long time so that was nutty the fact that bobby is still ceo of activision blows my freaking mind right and i think he i don't think he's gonna get kicked i i do have a theory though i think maybe in six months he gets kicked he goes becomes chairman but to a certain degree he can only kick himself right so yeah right he owns the board unless unless the power they say that esg is important but they don't actually do anything about it yeah things like this don't typically collapse until you see some kind of financial compression or maybe changing fundamentals and if they were coming out they went from 108 to 58 dollars right it's not like revenue growth it's not profitability when those things start revenue growth their biggest gains got kicked out indefinitely but it's like it's like it's a it's a longer i guarantee you in the next two years the stock is ninety dollars easy

easy we gotta no no all right i gotta stop we gotta step away from this yes all right the choices are apple versus epic activision news or netflix who votes for our apple website and for everybody as a reminder we'll talk about the biggest news right maybe the biggest news of 20. this is an audio thing remind people what the category is yeah sorry thanks nicholas i appreciate it so who's voting for apple versus epic news we got four all right it should be a tie make it a time activision one two three four joe you gotta vote for this jk you gotta break netflix i'm gonna break it with all right i will say i don't know god damn it how about we just we give a joint award and we'll just leave it there more half the way the only thing i would say is that even though the the

the activision news was freaking huge that apple versus epic is just massive industry news like it it's it surpasses one game developer this is every single person who pushes anything to the app store is affected by this and it reshapes the future there it is you guys convinced me apple versus epic let's do it all right let's go let's go i think you guys are really over your expectations are too high on what this means but i i think that's right that was the moment we were all supposed to be silent and drink and not you know reminisce about the vote that we didn't appreciate all right so you know all right we're gonna bring this thing to a close so with one last one one last uh one last uh award to give which is the biggest game or big game update you're looking forward to in 2022 i am gonna kick it off with my personal favorite in my opinion this is super

easy god of war ragna rock scheduled to release this year god of war was a masterpiece and the trailer for ragnarok looks amazing i even think like some of the controversy like with the um with the black female as loki's wife i think all the controversy actually even helps personal opinion but um and from the trailer you see the crackling hammer obviously thor is going to be one of the big uh adversaries in that game looks just amazing so i am voting for i am submitting god of war ragnarok as the biggest game big game update to look forward to in 2022. there's no [ __ ] way this comes out in 2022. [Laughter] they added 2023 to the the paper dock yes all right brian who do you got yeah my mine's kind of a dark horse uh kerbal space program two uh the first one i

just started playing maybe three years ago and it came out in 20 2011. a lot has changed and space travel a lot has changed in co-op the first one gameplay very cerebral you had to like understand physics to play it and you know i think when we're all searching for those gaming moments over the course of our lives we're really surprised we're really excited that we did something like whenever i orbited or hit the moon the mun uh that was always pretty cool for me so if they find a way to make this game interesting for uh new games 10 years later with the all the new implementations of space travel with reusable rockets and things like that i can go a long way in educating people about space so i think a cool one to keep an eye on all right and ken you've got who do you got i've got the diablo mortal um it's out in in soft launch or whatever text test launch or whatever so i can talk about it it's beautiful it's uh basically a pc game on mobile i don't know if i'd classify it being made as blizzard it's sort of like show i developed um

yeah it's it's got some interesting evolutions off of d3 i resonate super strong with core diablo fans um the only thing i would say is that i'm not sure this is gonna be a business success uh monetization design in the releases that they've pushed so far not without china if they don't uh add a few more aggressive pms to that that team i don't think the game is going to do super well for the business and uh yeah that's where i sit but the team that's working on it's phenomenal at blizzard and that uh the partner studio i i have a last minute submission i missed the question earlier but uh i would i would have chosen gta 6 and then i realized there's no way to come out in 2022 so i had to scrape that but what i'm genuinely looking forward to is gran turismo 7 and i think that has a good chance of actually being released in 2022

and you know fight me on it but i just think you know they have you know been awesome games for what like 20 something years now and uh a new one only comes out you know what twice a decade and i'm looking forward to this one because it's pretty much still the racing game on the planet so all right john yeah so i'm i'm pretty interested in what netflix is going to do i know some people are not as bullish but there's like five people at netflix dude what are you talking about they got nothing dude it's years from now and one of them worked at seven up or sprite before probably right they got a hundred that's like that they they feel like an audience they have a platform they're taking it they're not doing the amazon where they're trying to make one incredibly successful game so i think it's not a sexy strategy but i think they're being like plotting along and i don't know i'm really interested i could be wrong we can do this in a year and you can tell me i'm a fool but no no i i actually i'm totally with you i'm really

curious and and fascinated with what they're going to do i just don't think it's going to be anything in 2022 that's going to be i think anybody that's putting work money to work on a longer time period for two to three years with special branded ip and story based content and games just going to succeed over the next five years so netflix is i like it yeah but i think if they want to create if they want to create gunshin on for netflix they need 800 developers they're not going to be able to make this game with 800 netflix developers they do have an in they do have an internal studio though because what i have seen so far is that they have been licensing other games and buying stuff from gameloft all catalog like a game that several of us worked at like uh by the end of december they had five people like that's it they no game developers nothing they they're building from scratch and look he'll do it but i i whatever but also members look at the content on the platform right this isn't like all high brow super high end experience right so i think we're we're all in the industry we're expecting some like amazing

innovative experiences but i think there's a lot that can be done with you know something that's not super sexy if it's like back catalog games and stuff that people actually will play and engage with that for us is lame uh anyway all right i'm interested my vote is starfield because i actually do think this game is going to come out because he promised it would come out but starfield from bethesda uh exclusive on microsoft uh xbox as well as pc and not coming to sony playstation you fanboys um uh yeah i think this game is probably gonna be the biggest game next year and uh and i'm excited because i just love the thousands of games generally speaking so but that thing can roll to any direction i'm really scared about that one why they haven't shown a lot of gameplay if any uh i don't know they're they're doing the rockstar playbook dude they don't give a [ __ ] right that's why i feel good about them with the the microsoft banner like if you need time they're going to

give you time i mean pedestal releases one good game and then one bad game and now it's about them releasing a good game but uh we will see but i i will argue that sci-fi is always divisive right like fantasy is really easy like the the broadest market possible loves fantasy but the sci-fi either love it or hate it and so it limits the upside potential but if it's a great game people will play it regardless right so and i think they this is the only team that matters at bethesda and and and they they make great games so i am uh i wonder yeah is it does anybody know if it's next gen only by chance i didn't look closely i don't know anyway we'll see all right matthew connor man last submission take us home gonna take us back to cd project in cyberpunk 2077 because the the next update the next patch is coming in the next gen version of it and i'm not so much excited about it for this game because this game's already dead but you know if they can get this back to being steady kind of what javier

was alluding to before with you know in decent numbers adding the christmas season when we get them working on what you're for over the next few years you know they can go back to what they're good at with what's your and and all the hype around what's your franchise i think you'll start to see them potentially regain some steady footing and go back to what they really know and what they're really proving it doing and so that's why i'm kind of really interested in this and while it's in the chat someone threw in the riot mmo but that game is many years away we're going to get the fighter game before we're fighting we're going to be living in some facebook server some something that comes up it'll be a meta server i don't cyberpunk is that i think i think that can make a real comeback because the market penetration cyberpunk no no i think cyberpunk is dead i just want to see i want to see the company get back on steady footing and show us what the game could actually look like by fixing it and having it come out for the next gen versions so we can start to think about

what what your four could actually be and what the real potential there is for them in a few years okay so looks like our looks like our nominations are god of war ragnarok kerbal 2 diablo mortal gran turismo 6 netflix generally and a cyberpunk 2077 update how about star field just like seven white claws yeah dude there's a snuggle bus here did someone say kerbal 2 i don't remember that was me yeah all right god of war ragnarok one i'm gonna get one vote too jk it's fine man oh wait uh are you giving me a vote no i'm gonna give a vote to myself like you okay kerbal two diablo immortal yeah one all right gran turismo six

one reflex wins it i voted for star field nothing all right well guys i think that's that's it [Laughter] okay is there any other questions from the audience before mother up when are we gonna take a bathroom break

that's my question when are we gonna get it from the leela games yeah i gotta take a piss for you take a knee all right all right uh so i think if there are no other comments maybe uh let's see joe what's one rumor that you've heard for 2022 in the first four oh i i can't well i already put it in a slack i can't i can't speak about it publicly no it could be something else it could be something else okay that's my question jk do you want to do 202 predictions yeah was the acquisition of uh there's an acquisition that will be announced shortly okay uh well there's a bunch of those uh anyway so is it leela games what what stock are we buying next week the stock to buy always is tesla right yeah yeah always buy tesla 100 percent

how's that arc investment doing what i was about to say thank you oh i don't i don't invest in ark but i do invest in tesla so if you were you were such a fanboy of that woman and she's [ __ ] capping brutal no i i i i i was actually really [ __ ] smart so yeah performance is [ __ ] because you just need to pull out at the right time i feel like uh i feel like stock selection is like a new issue ipo etf is just not the best move like it's i don't know it's not really selection involved there it's more like feed me i i'm a non-diversified highly concentrated investor you know 50 tesla google and unfortunately alibaba unfortunately well you know i told you is marketing dollars let the stock selection speak for itself

and get my fees low thank you all right okay that's it no questions no god let's see two viewers so amen to tesla stock it's a good question all right i i i think people want a crest show eric yeah you'll get enough of me you won't even want more because i just throw a shade on everybody all right guys i would watch a reality show 24 hours following a like no you don't want that are you kidding me that's like the most boring thing ever dude i'm with the old man at the uh watching him peloton all right guys yeah i really have to use a restroom pretty badly so um with that thanks everyone for joining uh we had a few people join us and this will all go out to youtube and the

podcast and the whatever whatever it'll go out to you so thanks guys and that is it catch y'all later cheers