Garena Free Fire Deconstruction - The Metacast by Naavik

thomas what do you think are you as excited as i am about this um i don't know you seem extremely excited i'm i'm quite excited [Music] hi everyone uh welcome to the metacast roundtable uh by navik and today i'm joined by aaron bush a co-founder of navic you've heard him in the past episode and thomas baker uh thomas is a new joiner to the round table so um yeah could you do a very quick intro yeah sure um i'm tom baker i've been in the games industry for about um 15 years um

most noteworthily i was at ea for about 10 where i worked on ipu like mass effect and need for speed and the sims and i was also a lead designer on the real racing franchise for about seven years um and i've been senior consultant with narvik for a couple years now impressive cv thank you awesome i don't know i don't know what to say that's fine we can move on so i have this i have this idea i do this with people i meet in real life um so if you think it's weird i'm just weird in real life and i just ask a very random question to try to get to know people so i thought about a question when i was walking to the office this morning do you ever have a situation where you're walking on the street and then a stranger ends up walking side by side with you because you're walking at the same pace in the same direction

yes okay what do you do in that situation do you walk with a stranger like journey you just go together do you walk faster or do you just walk slow to avoid the awkwardness i no i i would not walk at the same pace i would um kind of make a calculated judgment on whether over time extrapolating based on our current travel speeds and our apparent destinations um whether it was going to get to the point where it was really awkward or whether it was going to be briefly awkward if it was going to be really awkward i would either yeah i would either accelerate if i'm already moving faster or slow down more if i'm moving currently slower so that's a massively nerdy game design response you probably learned more than you wanted to but that was great i love this is why i love these random questions yeah i got to know a lot awesome question um i just i just walk side by side with people

i feel i feel like i am in the game journey we just are together for that smell period of time and then we each go our separate ways after enjoying some time together uh okay how about yeah i i i don't want to impose so that's that's why i avoid the possibility anyway how about you i like your answer i like so i'm i'm it's currently 1pm for me for thomas it's 11 p.m for erin it's 7am and i'm asking this question to you aaron with your donut hat at 7 00 a.m uh most of the time i'd probably be the person to go faster um if it were right now though i think i'd go slower i don't have the the energy to find extra speed right now yep it makes makes sense all right so we have some pretty big news i know it's already been announced on the newsletter uh by navic now re-bend it as navic digest and we're

going to be talking about the first free to play premium content as our first topic today which is a deconstruction of garina's free fire game and followed on to that we're going to briefly discuss the mobile game earnings were down during q1 2022 just trying to figure out what could be going on and um i also i thought it was a really cute topic a bloody-born car it's a fan-made game about bloodborne yeah it's just so interesting i've never heard about this i think it'll be it'll be a good a good discussion um just before we move on to the to the topics i just want to do a shout out because it was pocket gamer mobile game mobile games awards 2022 um tuesday evening and so they announced some winners so huge congratulations to cookie run kingdom that one pocket gamer people's choice award and that's developed by dev sisters and beatstar that won game of the year and it's

developed by space bay space ape who also won the best developers award so congratulations i play yes i'm coughing i actually played both of these games so very happy that they won these awards awesome have you have you tried them uh i have not i'm ashamed to say but i certainly will okay well cookie run kingdom is adorable so i recommend everyone to try it out okay yeah so erin um just before you dive into the deconstruction what was going on with navic what's this new premium track of content yeah it's a better transition than you might think from what you just said too so uh but i'll explain why in a second so so navic pro um you know it used to just cover blockchain games you know we had ongoing game deconstructions we had weekly market updates we had weekly essays that dug into you know various trends

companies games you name it going on in the industry and we just launched our second vertical uh free to play mobile which we're super excited about and and thomas is one of the the pros that's helping us you know bring this um to life and help make the the free fryer deconstruction possible along with eva who unfortunately couldn't join us today but she she had a huge role to play in that as well um and in this free-to-play mobile vertical um you know subscribers will also get ongoing game deconstructions weekly market updates um and ongoing research essays that cover a wide variety of topics across um the mobile games industry and it's a better transition than you thought because our next deconstruction is of cookie run kingdom you know digging into like why this game that you wouldn't suspect is doing as well as it is doing um and so i actually downloaded it like two days ago and started playing it yesterday um and uh yeah i mean it's a it's a super

it's it's super deep and pleasant game that i'm excited to dig into and share share more about with all of our our subscribers the world of cookies um but you know the kind of the the best part about you know this subscription is that um you know this new vertical edition it's within the same subscription that existed before so for you know the same thousand dollars a month or ten thousand dollars a year if you want to pay annually for for a discount you know subscribers will get four monthly game deconstructions two weekly research essays and two weekly um market updates so we'll be adding even more um over the months to come really our goal is just to build the number one platform for games industry insights and research period all within one subscription so so if that sounds interesting to you or you want to learn more definitely go check it out at novik.compro and if you know by chance you want to inquire about getting multiple seats for

your team um or just learn what your options are there uh you can reach out to me at aaron novik dot co so yeah i'm super excited to to be ramping all of this up over the next month and making navic pro you know two times bigger and better than it was a month ago uh first so excited is cookie run kingdom my mind is fine okay i'm so happy we're sharing this world of fuzziness and cookies without our audience oh right i didn't realize yeah so it's all within a subscription that's really cool i like that pricing yeah so hopefully i mean we're trying to make it as valuable as possible um so yeah i'm excited by it and i yeah i'm glad you are too maria i hope other people are as well we work hard yeah i think i think it makes sense with how much the world is converging and the line between free-to-play and web 3 is starting to get a little fuzzy or over time even

within companies that currently develop free to play so i think having access to the two verticals is extra important um in this in these times we're in okay well we will then jump into the deconstruction in case you have not played garina free fire thomas will do a very quick overview of how the game plays it's about all um how do you call it a battle royale so i don't think there's anything kind of new that they do but maybe they do thomas tell us what is this free fire um well i mean i could explain what battle royale is um i'm pretty sure everyone would know by now drop into massive map blah blah blah survive when the chicken dinner etc um so the things that garina free fire does that are different um like the essence of battle royale has basically been the same since popular uh

since fortnite popularized it you know or pubg actually popularized that back in in 2016 um but there are some subtle but really quite important differences between the way that free fire does it and other games do that have allowed them to um really capture a larger audience um one one of the critical things is that the the player count is is half the regular 100 so there's just 50 people dropping in which has all sorts of benefits uh as a mobile title the map doesn't need to be so big which means it has a smaller memory footprint and it takes up less space on disk and doesn't take as long to download in the first place um it also means that they the matches are shorter um so yeah that it's kind of more compatible with that uh you know playing on the go um style that that tends to be prevalent on on mobile um

and then they've done a bunch of other things like uh loot is very plentiful um so there's there's basically no chance that you won't have a decent weapon when you encounter another player um that the gun play is really kind of mobile friendly they've got some heavy auto aim that the weapons are very low on recoil uh there's not much bullet drops or yeah encounters tend to be um players tend to be fairly evenly matched when they encounter one another it's it's not as like technical or it's not as kind of heavily dexterity based as um as some other shooters on the platform um yeah i mean i could go on there's more there's more in the decon they've kind of taken the the fortnite building mechanic and distilled it down into just simply placing walls um glue walls so that like serves the primary function of being able to control the flow of battle and get a defensive kind of barrier up

between you and some opponents very rapidly but without all the input complexity of something like fortnite where you have to like harvest resources and then switch modes and and all that stuff um so yeah they've they've made some really smart technical and game design choices that have enabled them to scale to that insane uh one billion downloads mark that they've managed to get such greener free fire is mobile only at the moment correct okay do you think the design choices we see that because it was designed as mobile first whilst um the majority of the other battle royales on mobile were originally designed for console and then ported yeah i think that's highly likely yeah um yeah it has a very mobile first um kind of vibe to it um and they have they've deviated from the tap

from the template uh in ways that pretty much no one else has and i think that you can see the benefits of that um you know playing out over those one billion downloads and its dominance um of of the sub genre i think it's definitely friendlier to my dexterity skills i get crushed yeah in other battle royales yeah i mean shooters on mobile are kind of a weird proposition that they're not simple games to play on any device but on a touch screen like really quite challenging so they've they've made some very smart concessions to that um yet to to make it friendly like you said um before we dive more into the game itself i was wondering aaron do you could you explain to us who garina is and what other games they have developed if any sure so um yeah the background here is pretty interesting um so garina so the parent company is c

limited um but you know garina is really the subsidiary company that's focused on games and it was the first element of what c limited became which c limited has a market cap of like 60 billion it was over 100 billion um earlier this year and so it's actually like a pretty insane company that's working on a bunch of things which i'll talk about in a second but um garina specifically which was the first part um it really started as like a publishing platform for a console or pc specifically uh in southeast asia and so uh they really began with a partnership with tencent to publish you know some of their games you know most notably uh like some riot games like league of legends and southeast asia and that's how they built up the you know the first parts of their platform and the other you know just social components on that platform as well as seated an audience um and you

know where it was able to you know build a business and make money and then build a team to enable them to no longer just be a platform to publish other people's games in the region but to start developing and publishing their own and free fire was was really like the the team's first and only like step into publishing developing and publishing their own game which is a pretty great first game to to to make and have succeed as much as it has and so um yeah garina you know then kind of shifted its focus to doing much of its own development and live ops around the world and part of what has made free fire so interesting and we can dig into this this more potentially is how it's been able to succeed in the regions that it has and so for example southeast asia is obviously a key region

for free fire but it's also done well in latin america it did well in india until you know the recent ban like really clamped down on the the base game there and it's doing you know surprisingly well on android um uh in the us too where it makes quite a bit of money but really the kind of the the pattern among all of that is that it's been able to succeed on lower end um android devices um and regions that were underserved by the other battle royale games so obviously you know underserved and compared to like more of the pc oriented games and and uh free fire came out in late 2017 i believe which is the same time that like battle royale in general was starting to take off and you started to see like the explosion of of pub g the explosion of fortnite uh free fire was in that explosion as well it just targeted other parts of the world and so you know most

of us um you know and in our you know more english-speaking countries um weren't didn't see free fire be part of we saw the other games but free fire was was very much there um and the kind of the last part i'll mention about why this is so interesting is obviously when a game blows up the way it does and ends up getting a billion downloads it generates pretty meaningful like business along the way um but why c limited um it's what's so interesting to me is that it's not just taking its profits and you know just sitting on them it's reinvesting pretty much 100 of its profits um into other other business avenues primarily shoppi which is the leading e-commerce player in in southeast asia which um didn't start that way but has since you know risen to it's a pretty i don't know i wouldn't say dominant market share but growing in majority

market share of e-commerce in southeast asia um which is an even bigger opportunity than video games potentially and that that you know has is what has driven the business to be worth you know 60 billion plus um the gaming is awesome it's provided that profitable foundation but um leadership has been able to reinvest to to make this rising conglomerate really more of a juggernaut to take over more um rising you know just important elements of what you know the internet enables uh primarily in southeast asia so e-commerce and they also do some stuff with c-money which is their more like fintech division still small but growing really fast and so yeah it's a fascinating fascinating company and fascinating to to really dig into and understand um not just free fire's role in garina but garina's role and the entire sea limited ecosystem

yeah that's that's really interesting and just to give an example of how well the game performs i was on a long-haul flight and there was someone using the airplane wifi which is terrible and they played this game throughout the flight that's how good it is in maintaining that multiplayer performance so when i before i joined the gaming industry i was working and selling food products and you had these products that had payment terms that were very much into the future and so the way that a lot of the companies are organizing that industry is that you have a part of the company that has products that you can just put into a supermarket and you get immediate immediate payment and then that acts as a cash flow for the rest of the business so it seems that this is a similar case where garina is providing that more media cash flow into the rest of the of the company do you think this will we'll see more of this in the

future in games where big companies that are in other industries by a games company to have that cash flow effect um i don't i don't think it would be as simple as that i think that um a company would have to be still be very focused on making sure that if it's acquiring a games business that it can win at gaming but i i do think that we will see more internet companies and just tech companies that have their own ecosystems um look to gaming one because um you know if you build a successful gaming business you build a large audience and then you can use that audience it's not just the the cash flow that you can use but you could also point the audience to other things potentially across your ecosystem and you see it with companies like like more in like traditional gaming as you know like xbox right like they they have they

serve a bunch of gamers but then they're able to like build a larger ecosystem around things like xcloud which is built on azure etc and so i think just more that mindset of like ecosystems in which gaming is a part um that will be a good mindset but i i doubt you know these internet companies conglomerates will will just look to buy gaming companies just because they're profitable and want to use the profits so there will be a deeper strategic layer there interesting so um oh sorry thomas i was just gonna say um even if they do acquire them uh i mean we've seen um google amazon netflix all attempt this and flounder to varying degrees um amazon has gotten a couple of hits under its belt in the last six months um but yeah it's certainly not a simple proposition

um so yeah i think that the way that garina did it is is interesting they started with you know they started in gaming and that that is their thing and they expanded elsewhere um yeah i wonder if that's uh that's more viable as a strategy um yeah i mean maybe i'm being a little bit proud as a game developer but i think game like game development is insanely complex like as an intersection of entertainment art technology um yeah and business it's like and software development it's like just ridiculously uh intricate the number of moving parts there um i don't really know whether it's more complex than other industries but um i like to think that it is yeah so yeah the game's first element is important there you can see it with other companies like epic that you know started making games and then

created this whole other enormous like tech ecosystem um out of it it's hard i mean these are the exceptions these are like the very rare companies that are able to pull something like that off but when you find them you normally have something pretty special and um we don't have the time to go as in depth as the deconstruction um however thomas if there was something about the monetization of the game did anything take you by surprise or you yourself as a consultant in this area you thought oh this is really smart and i can see this being applied to other games yeah yeah there are a number of things that free fire does monetization-wise that are quite unconventional um probably the most noteworthy i would say is selling both cosmetics and power um most battle royale or you know competitive online shooters tend to not

do this um kind of part of the deal i think um or the the kind of contract that players uh opt into when they start playing an online competitive game typically is that this um that it's going to be kind of level playing field uh and and in battle royale you know you drop into the map and everyone has the same chances um you know skill and luck notwithstanding everyone starts from the same kind of initial um kind of stakes or um yeah starting position um whereas free fire yeah that there are a bunch of ways that you can with spend um you know afford yourself an advantage um but but the really smart thing about it is that they have i would say kind of made landed the game uh pardon the pun in like the goldilocks zorran of selling power where

um it's it's just influential enough that i think players are um willing to invest and see the value but not so influential that it feels fundamentally corrupt or unfair um and that's a function of a number of different things it's got to do with the fact that like just because you've got a powerful gun variant doesn't mean that you'll find it when you're wandering through randomized you know loot locations um it's got to do with like the fairly hectic and randomized nature of encounters in battle royale where like you don't know when you're going to find someone or who they're going to be or how many they're going to be or is it going to be you versus a squad or several squads converging blah blah blah so there's there's all these randomized elements that kind of um like dilute the power that you purchase um so that's one really interesting thing and then and then the other thing that really struck me about its

monetization model is that a lot of the cosmetics and um power are temporary which um you know some other games do this uh you know temporary cosmetics have been popularized in korean games quite some time but um temporary power is quite unusual to my knowledge um so yeah not only are they managing to sell stuff uh that other people typically wouldn't but they're also selling it and reselling it so yeah i think i think that's how you're seeing the ltv um that you are so they've got this really healthy you know ridiculously high production values hyperactive cosmetics and battle pass and heavily themed seasons thing going on supported by insanely well produced you know animations and in some cases live action promotional material and then you've got the power and then a lot of it is temporary so yeah they're

they are doing a lot of things um that are unusual and very effective um and further to that and this is perhaps the detriment in terms of being able to expand into other um like tier one countries where other battle royales are more established yeah i i don't know how excited your average pub g player would be about the prospect of facing off against people who have weapons that are better than theirs or um or how excited they would be about spending and getting something temporary um so yeah it kind of works really well for them because they launched this way and they have captured an audience and um that is the precedent that has been set for that audience primarily in tier two and three regions um but i don't know how well it would translate although we are seeing you know very healthy revenue in the us

so maybe i'm wrong yeah that that does sound very interesting sounds like the game if another type of game would do that they would also have to find a way to balance it with that randomness that you were describing it's not it's not a lesson that games can plug and play with less a bit less complexity um and being able to fit with different core loops like the battle pass that's something that is fairly simple it's still complex but fairly simple to adapt to different genres and different different core loops um yeah interesting yeah i agree by the way what is the goldilocks zone i've never heard that expression oh sorry um you know just like not not too powerful um but just powerful enough like just right okay yeah i think maybe i made it up i'm pretty sure i did i know it sounds cool yeah yeah yeah i was wondering how much of how much of the acceptance of the

potential buying power in power creep is about the audience if some other game chart of battle royale tried to do that with it with a tier one audience if they if they would be accepting of it um so you said that the game is having good well is having great success in the united states why do you think that is uh i think i i think um it's it's it's really taking off on on android in the us um you can see um that the numbers uh of battle royale uptake in the us i think is is for pubg um is really dominated by ios from memory um whereas uh yeah free fire seems to have really kind of landed um

like very nicely on on lower and mid-tier devices on on android in the yeah in the american market um aaron this is perhaps your more your area especially yeah i mean i think it's just that um yeah it's doing well on the lower end android devices because that's what has been underserved um and so uh yeah they were just able to tap into a a niche that probably not many people thought really existed um and you know in terms of the like percentage of downloads like it's very low um in the us uh compared to you know the total of the world but uh the you know the percentage of revenue is is really high um because you know even though you know these are low-end devices you know it's still a a you know a wealthier spindier country than than other places you know whereas you know india for example it was getting like a pretty enormous percentage of downloads but it still

only represented like two percent of the game's total revenue and so it really was just the complete opposite of that in the us but you know interestingly now like the company it finds itself especially after losing a region like india that they're that like one of the countries that it wasn't really meaning to target that it was trying to you know serve more of these like other underserved like major regions but this this other region is now which represents a minor like a tiny minority of players is now like a really important revenue driver and so you know as they've seen some of these other regions fall off uh it's it's actually like really important that they don't screw up um the the us even though it never really was their intention which is just like an interesting you know side effect of what's going on see when you mention india it's because it was banned free fire yeah so there were

there were like a ton of bands that happened um i forget the dates like let's let's call it like last year sometime um that that ban just a ton of like chinese affiliated companies and so this is when like pubg mobile for example was originally banned and that's when free fire swooped in and became you know like the dominant battle royale game in the region but now it it it got banned um or at least its base game got banned uh you know there's free fire the base game and then free fire max which is it's more you know i guess it's targeting more premium devices um but so strangely that that's here the game isn't banned and none of us have any idea why it doesn't make sense why you would only ban the base game but not the not the max version um but but yeah either way i think it got banned because of its relationship to with like 10 and probably you know i mean it's all like a very like politicized

you know occasion when these things happen and so it really is more politically driven than probably anything like really substance driven on free fires part which i mean this is a singapore based company they just happened to work with tencent and so yeah they probably share like like user data and things like that which is actually like going to be like pretty normal to share like game data with big partners that you know are the backbone of you know a lot of your your platforms and and stuff so i i think it probably was blown a little out of proportion but um you know india was still able to kind of use it to um you know push some of these games aside which also probably helps their own like domestic market two of developers find help them gain more market share themselves but yeah very interesting so based based on that aaron um is revenue and dau for garina free fire on a growth path not anymore so it had

like a pretty explosive i don't know caught like three years um where you know not only did it do well but it was it was like really a phenomenon and in a bunch of these these regions because you know kind of similar to maybe how a game like fortnite was um around us where like it was just like a thing that you know you know like this particular summer like you know that kids are gonna be like you know spinning like every day and fortnight with their friends and it was just like the cool thing to do and everyone was rallying behind it free fire definitely had that moment in these regions and those moments are just impossible to sustain because people just naturally move on from whatever's at like peak height to new things um so you know like a bit of that has been playing out with free fire um you know but like probably paired with you know just like post coveted tailwinds and people just are spending less time into playing these games among among other

other trends that are probably more region specific but but yeah more recently um you know the number of downloads the revenue in these key regions has been has been trailing off and so you know we were kind of digging into you know to what degree it has been trailing off obviously india getting banned that takes it about down to zero um in that in that region um for you know new downloads and and stuff um but uh yeah it's not the same juggernaut in terms of growth that it once was yeah no now i understand why you're saying hopefully they can protect their market in the united states where they're getting so much of their revenue so thomas um i know we have apex legends the mobile version on its way um we know that free fire is doing this huge collaboration with bts where the band members are even creating their own character costumes something like that

and they're doing a music video in in the game but now we've also been discussing about the band in india and the the metrics that are on a downward path what what do you think we'll we'll see next from free fire um well i think i mean if if if i were them i would my first step it's kind of a boring one but it would be to really slow down and kind of address tech debts because um potentially part of the reason for that decline that aaron was just talking about is that the game is so uh perpetually reinventing itself in all these deep and amazingly like fancy ways that it seems like it's actually harming the technical stability um and performance of the game which is kind of an ironic problem for free fire to have because it rose through prominence on the basis of being technically accessible and and now it's

kind of buckling um kind of flying too close to the sun so yeah that's that's what i would do if i were them but like in in more exciting um you know possible news um like they so one thing that we haven't talked about is uh free fire max which is this kind of funky sister app that is basically just free fire but um with hd assets and a couple new features um it has completely shared economy shared accounts shared progression shared live ops like it is free fire it just looks better and it has a map editor so that's that's really interesting um and one of the reasons they might have done that other than kind of a marketing play is um maybe it's a step in the direction of going cross-platform because um

yeah because in uh september i don't know sometime in 2020 they acquired um the the studio that does dauntless which is a console on pc cross-platform free-to-play game um and it's not like an obvious acquisition so maybe there is subtle strategic um value to that maybe they are you know maybe that acquisition plus the hd release of um free fire with max is is a step towards a cross-platform hd version um which would be really interesting and kind of see them in a sense stepping into the shoes that that fortnight vacated um when it started its fight with with google and apple um so that's yeah that's one possibility and yeah maybe they go transmedia like um like league of legends uh

riot has done um you know maybe they turn it into a tv show they already have a lot of very slick promotional material um so maybe maybe they can spin it out into its own kind of pop culture universe and make the game much bigger than the game and become like a a cultural phenomenon on that scale yeah um yeah i also hope that they can um really improve their ugc element craftland um which would be just like a really unique differentiator for a battle royale game especially like a based one um we haven't talked about it too much but part of like what also made free fire so successful is like their skill in like region based live ops where they have like tons of events around like like maria you mentioned bts um and

that's like a really cool collab but it's not the first of that of that kind by far they've done a ton of collabs with other artists and athletes and you know other organizations and like you know when movies come out kind of like fortnight how like fortnite has like collaborated with anyone and everyone um free fire has kind of done its own edition of that but you know targeting its own specific regions and along the way like building its own like mini games like in the app and all sorts of crazy things which i think i agree with thomas they probably need to slow down a little bit on some of that and just reassess what really is gonna move the needle and not create even more tech debt um but the the craftland part the ugc element um is really interesting and i'm pretty bullish on the idea that of just like when you have these enormous player bases if you can enable them to create on their own that is a source of building like a really interesting competitive advantage especially if the

others that you compete with aren't doing that like a pub g mobile i don't think is doing anything like that or call of duty mobile isn't um so that would be really interesting kreflan isn't perfect i think um uh thomas you might want to correct me on this but i think like to like you can make your like experiences but then in order to like spin it into its own server then you can like share with people you have to like pay in order to share your experience which completely like breaks the logic of what would make ugc go viral so i think they would have to kind of fundamentally look at their business model there maybe give up some revenue in terms of the like uh creator sharing what it has created but ideally like if you've set your system up the right way you're going to create a lot more revenue by enabling so much more creation and so much more engagement um and plus two if they do go cross-platform that could even work really well on on

you know console pc too so yeah i i'm really really curious to see what they do with with craftland it's there for a reason but i think has been under under invested in and under thought through but if they can get it right could could have pretty pretty unique upside yeah within you ugc within a free-to-play game i'm interested to see how that will play out maybe like you're saying because it has such a high dau it it's successful but i've i've had a recent exploration within ugc and free-to-play and if it doesn't provide good rewards to players they might not want to spend time playing the ugc uh yeah because they won't get rewarded for it and they're doing it for community fun but they're actually progressing their game so i do maybe that's a topic for another time but i i am curious to see whether um how it will perform within within free fire and

when you mention don't list i just realized i might be wrong here i was trying to find that information i think dauntless was a bit of a poster child during the development of epic online services that they were using them i might be wrong i i just have this recollection about dauntless development where because they're integrated now with the account system of epic i believe so that that could that could be extra interesting if b bringing that relationship with a publishing platform that has all of these services account linking that has been proven and with dauntless and maybe they had a way to help shape what the services are now with eos and then that integration with with free fire and those connections cool ah well i have to confirm this okay so i i'm going to have to well we won't be able to talk about um bloodborne cart i really want to ask this question

i think we're going to have to create a topic uh topic that backlog i was thinking i was thinking is garina free fire for battle royale genre what royal match was to match three where you have all of these really big names within the genre that people already accustomed to and then there's this company that shows you actually you can still penetrate and be very successful in a market that can be considered a red ocean because you find that tiny bit of the market that's not addressed yet and you can find a huge opportunity yeah i would kind of more equate it it's an interesting analogy i think there's some truth to it i would more equate it to um supercell and um and clash royale kind of taking the taking them over experience and distilling it into something that's more mobile friendly as as a format um

obviously they haven't gone as far um [Music] like that you know it's the same perspective that there are there are many more similarities between free fire and other battle royales than there are between clash royale and i don't know league of legends but nonetheless i feel like it's they brought that mobile first maximum accessibility mentality to an established genre and um kind of proven that when you make a game accessible to you know an even broader audience um you can find new success whereas my understanding of royal matches story is like they took everything that everyone else had done before and just did it that much better that um that that they could scale super hard thank you um yeah it was very interesting deconstruction i i have read

as very intricate super deep and i recommend going into the details we've only brushed the tip of the iceberg really so if you want to read the full deconstruction check out navic get in touch about um signing up to their navic pro service um yeah thanks thanks thomas for sharing all of your knowledge he did a big chunk of that consultation all right uh in less great news um the mobile game earnings were down 7 during q1 this year so this was a report by sensor tower um the google play market revenue uh for this period declined 13.8 percent and the apple app store dropped by 2.3 um aaron i'm scared what does this mean oh no um well oh no

i mean i think i think it's important to put it in perspective it's not really that surprising so in q1 of 2021 so last year um the the number was a 25 increase in mobile gaming sales and that was that was unsustainable um so that was you know getting the benefit of still a lot of people in lockdown that was pre-idfa deprecation um and so you know you look at today's seven percent decline you know a lot of that is the the covid um you know post covet headwinds now companies are now you know facing the idfa deprecation which you know um a large percentage of mobile studios are facing some kind of revenue loss from and trying to redeploy ad spending and try to you know find higher roi elsewhere um

and yeah i mean the truth of the matter is that the market like should not be growing as fast as it was um last year and so this is just like a natural reset and if you look at like a two year trajectory um it's still like the trend line is still about even i think um and so i would expect this is one of those things you can't really overthink it's just more of like a sign of the times of where we are in the cycle and it'll it'll return back to growth it might not return back to growth in the next quarter or two there'll still be some more of that cycle to to work through but at the end of the day this is still uh still a fundamentally a growing market i think um they're like in the same way that like idfa changes kind of rock the industry i think there could be more things like that that happen in both good and bad ways um that could you know change those growth rates you know in the next year or two but um that's just sort of how i think about the kind of that current

seven percent decline okay i think i'm going back to when you know at the new year's there's usually a lot of blog posts and content being created about predictions for the future and one of the predictions i saw going around was that the mobile game market is going to start going on a decreasing trajectory and then i saw this i was thinking no this can't be true okay but it doesn't sound so doom and gloom um it's just part of the cycle like yeah it's just a reset i think okay and something that was cute and you can't you can't spike 25 year on year and then not expect a correction of some sort a year later it's like the hidden the hidden sting in the tail the numbers look bad but they're probably not right yeah that i think that makes a lot a lot of sense and yeah something that

i've been very curious about is what makes the difference between apple app store and google play audiences because we also saw this difference in the numbers within garena free fire and we saw the decline was larger in google play than the app store is it just purely based on the number of users of those platforms and so you see more of a decrease on google play i'm honestly not 100 positive sir go ahead thomas well i am also like one and a quarter percent positive but like i i have a random like pop psych or pop sociology theory um which is that unfortunately the people who happen to own android devices also happen to be the people who are more uh less able to do their jobs as a result of um as a result of covered lockdowns because

they tend to be people who need to physically go somewhere to do the thing that earns them the money so if they're locked inside with lots of spare time not working then perhaps they're online socializing spending and therefore the spike and this isn't backed by numbers um or anything in fact um but maybe you know maybe the spike a year ago was higher on google play for for those reasons and therefore the drop is higher uh the drop is high yeah comparatively now yeah that makes sense it's an interesting hypothesis okay and um i was looking at the highest grossing games on the app store and they were honor owner of kings uh which is from 10 cent pubg mobile uh also from tencent and gentian impact uh hoyoverse are you surprised by these top three

highest grossing no i i mean i'm pretty sure these have like been the highest grossing for for a little while so it's been uh maintaining the status quo for a little bit i think yeah it feels such powerhouses uh how can i yeah i'm very interested to see what does a company have to do to compete with them how can you get your foot into the door to make a top three gaming like a mobile game by revenue yeah yeah i don't think that's easy [Laughter] once you figure it out let me know yeah yeah um yeah sure um no problem uh well i mean i think it helps you know that those games are huge in china and china has a very you know it's the most populous nation in the

world in the world um so that probably helps their middle class you know is continuing to emerge um yeah i mean smart for an adoption continues to grow so uh yeah and and and actually i read recently that apple device adoption is growing um like quite quite notably um in china as well so um yeah the fact that they were topping the app store is yeah i mean yeah do do you don't you don't one does not simply dethrone um games games like these something has to be very disruptive to to knock the knock the hit off its perch so yeah i'm just waiting to see that day it just feels like such an exciting landmark when it happens i think the industry will be

different as a whole it will be massive yeah well it has happened like gentian impact for example is probably the most recent one there and that definitely was a a breakthrough game of its type before that uh you know like a pub g mobile that was also like a pretty incredible breakthrough of its type and and i i don't remember when honor of king started but the last two those are pubg mobile was made probably like four or five years ago four years ago um and uh yeah the um yeah again thank you for the word um you know it's only i mean that one's only like less than two years old so i mean it would not be surprising at all you know within the next year or two to see some other like newer games compete for that for the throne yeah yeah i'm really encouraged by the fact that they're all they're in genres you go to murder about aurora and uh action

yeah action rpg so yeah i think just like from a from a gamer perspective i i think that's really healthy yeah i i think from a game deaf perspective it scares me a little bit enter entering into the chinese market how do you do that there are so many regulations and then i think they have these rules where your game can only allow certain amount of hours for people under a certain age and verification of id it just seems that there's such a huge wall to climb in order to get your game in the that while circulating in the country that unless you're a big company or associated to a big company like i don't know 10 cent for example it's just so difficult to do that we i don't know how many consultants there are out there that do help companies just take that step and help them enter the market yeah well we do have one on staff at navic actually coincidentally um but um yeah i mean i've been part of teams that

were trying to get a game into china um and yeah it wasn't easy in fact it was impossible it didn't happen and it's um even harder now like i'm pretty sure approvals of mobile games have ground to a halt like right it's it's it's effectively not an option um as far as i know so okay well i'll just manage my expectations the game i work on won't pop the grossing chart of the app store oh i can live with that little from number four and i know we only have four minutes left i really want to talk about bloodborne cart let's do it can i let's do it yeah okay cool cool all right i'll try to do a really quick intro and try to explain what it is so um bloodburn is now on his seventh anniversary i believe and there's a creator called lilith

walther who created a bloodborne psxd make i didn't even know this was a thing but it's when you take a game maybe like a modern game and then you d make it into an older console generation um so the creator uh if you play the the d make it's like you're playing the initial part of bloodborne just copy by copy even the intro is the same but on a playstation one is a perfect render of it and now the creator is doing a a cart version where i think you can you can race and you can race against other characters from bloodborne like father god's going uh and have these i don't know fun cart races in also a playstation one type setting and it goes down into the detail where you can intentionally slow down the game's frame rate so that you can have those uh those

moments uh during the boss fights where you're just trying to fight them but the frame rate is down so it's a lot harder um they also increased the loading times so that you have that really painful slow chug that i used to have in playstation one um yeah it's just i didn't know this existed and i'm i'm also surprised that from software allowed lilith to do these fan projects considering how it's it's a like for like usage of the ip and the first d make it's it's essentially a copy from from the beginning of the game i believe so yeah yeah i don't know thomas what do you think are you as excited as i am about this um i don't know you seem extremely excited um i'm i'm quite excited i think it's amazing that it exists it's the most

hilarious incongruous like genre ip mishmash um i don't know it's kind of like a positive version of when ea resurrected syndicate as a third person shooter with the skrillex soundtrack like 10 years ago but this this is like something everyone wants even though it doesn't make any sense whereas that was something no one wanted um but yeah i guess um it's it's really uncommon for developers and publishers to be this kind of um permissive um you know you see so many take down requests from like rockstar or nintendo um so it is it is very odd um it's it like i i read an interview with with the guy who directed um relevant ring recently which is from software game obviously and and he talked about how um everything in the game needs to have a certain kind of poise and finesse um and grace to it

and um and how that's kind of present throughout the entire game and you can you can really feel that but anyway my point being maybe someone very influential who has a very artistic mentality near the top of you know from software which is um you know uh like um which published bloodborne and maybe someone is is looking at these creations and going no this this is treating the source material with the respect that it deserves um i don't know that i would look at it and be like yeah a karting cutting game featuring the bloodborne player character is um is necessarily um graceful or um full of finesse but uh it it exists so that's pretty glorious you have to watch the trailer

because it has this sort of bit retro wave entrance song and you see the main character outfit just walking towards the motorcycle in a really cool powerful way i know it's so it's just it seems it seems [Music] fun seems a fun application of vip and i know there's a lot of players out there that bloodborne is not on pc so i think it's also a little way to keep players who can't play the game because they don't have a playstation experiencing it um i hope yeah i hope we see we see more of this is so awesome when we see creative people spending their free time making these fan projects that the quality is so high it just impresses me uh there are such people out there in this world and it makes me happy yeah and i don't think i don't think this person is making any

money on it either um so yeah it's purely just like a passion driven project and also probably part of why um from software is okay with this being out there or probably just a piece of lie um but yeah i mean yeah it makes me happy i don't think i'm as excited as you maria but it makes me it still makes me happy um i guess like the kind of kind of the the spin that i would put on this is like it it's sort of like it just brings kind of like the concept of modding up like you know there was like a an era and it still is true where like modding on games just building crazy stuff based on the the ipa material in the game um that was like a thing and then it kind of shifted the market has shifted more towards like indie developers just kind of like building things separately you know inspired by stuff etc um but i i really think there still is an opportunity for modding to make like a comeback but in like a better way than

in the past and so i was just thinking back to um a conversation i had last year with um scott rice manus who's the founder and ceo of mod i o we have an interview um of of that conversation with him on our on our website but anyways he made some like really interesting comments uh but i guess in short like mod i o like for example they're they're basically building a platform that makes it easier for all of these different games to like enable modding on their platform uh or just based on their game and then like integrate it much more into the gaming experience where people can just build um more crazy things and to me like it just feels like a lost opportunity like i know bloodborne is its own like it's its own like very like specific experience and like a ton of games are like that too but even just like having the capability for these things to be made that are connected to your

um your core game experience that i i'm super bullish on that idea um and especially like if things can just be integrated really well where you can you know just download download uh you know something that looks interesting even though it has nothing to do with core bloodborne experience versus it having to be made 100 separate by fans that sits 100 separate from the game itself um it would just like this is cool but i think uh it would be really awesome if the ecosystem could evolve to support more of these kinds of people much more connected to the to the games themselves it might be an uphill battle to convince a from software to enable that kind of capability in its games but um i don't know uh projects like this to me just like prove that it's so worth it to enable that that kind of thing yeah i actually don't own a pc to game i

just game on my mobile phone or my console and i feel like i totally miss out because i see these videos of people doing just weird stuff in games and you could totally get me playing more hours in your ecosystem and in your game if you allowed me to just do i don't know strange things within it i saw this video of a player playing i think it was elven ring with homer simpson how's the character it looked absolutely hilarious i love that um oh sorry thomas yeah i was just gonna say bizarre and i mean the thing about modding is people are gonna do it whether you whether you or specif and monetize it and bring it into your ecosystem or not um there's all sorts of mods failed and ring like yeah the homer simpson one um and an elden ring odd for tekken 7 as well which yeah the director of that game spooked on twitter and was like

this is amazing but please stop but anyway that's another kind of related story um yeah but like people are gonna pour their love and creative energy into these bizarre um bizarre kind of spin-off experiences so like aaron said if you can harness that and bring it in-house um and smooth the passage then [Music] yeah it's it does seem like a really healthy opportunity for everyone involved we are a little bit over the hour so we have to wrap up this episode unfortunately i could keep going about this subject maybe in the future we can talk about it for a bit longer um yeah so elif walter keep rocking keep doing this thank you for spending your time doing this this remake well not remake but fan project for bloodborne it's really appreciated and thanks thomas for joining for the first time awesome thank you hopefully it was it

was good you'll come back one day hopefully yeah gladly if you'll have me okay good good uh and thanks aaron is all for for joining us always fun even though it's 7 a.m yeah maybe not 7am next time but um it was fun always happy to chat all these things with you maria oh all right well um i hope you have a good day and join us for the next episode next week bye everyone see you [Music] you