GOAT: Jakub Remiar on Mobile Gaming, Gacha Mechanics, and Trends | Full Interview

hello hello we have a very special guest on Goat Gan on air today and it's our first episode with E and yakob of course e is our host I think he is mobile gaming Legend from my side like everywhere on LinkedIn on events he's kind of famous I would say a celebrity so today we would like to know more about Jakob and from not on the business perspective of course the fun side to enough gamer side of course his favorite games his life so welcome yeah welcome thanks for the intro like uh definitely not Legend yet especially by the year count because there's not that many years like 10 is okay but not that much but yeah thank you for having me yeah yeah uh of course we are having uh happy for having you and how about how much you are happy for having the second baby yeah that's uh

I'm super happy especially about the logistical exercise that that we like follow so yeah we're preparing everything for that and super happy that uh it's going to be a girl so my wife's super happy because now we have a boy and a girl because she wouldn't even admit anything else just just the usual but yeah everything's kind of I guess a little bit wind down so you won't see me at PGC or games from Barcelona unfortunately and stuff like that so we'll get a little bit of a pause here and like what is the first event that you will make this year we already did the event in Korea we always love to go to visit our friends in Asia we have a lot of good friends there and especially the the knowledge and the trends are like completely different to ours so it's great to see different perspectives on site so that was one and like early January and my next one if everything goes according to the plan which is very I'll be probably in duik I think that that's the closest one in mid April okay okay that sounds good actually my second question is kind of related to traveling

like you know we always end up chatting about Japan and Pokemon stuff like I'm actually curious personally curious about like why and how why this love for Japan and more yeah so I started collecting Pokémons when I was like six I think something like that so and I never stop basically it's mostly like these things snowball I would say like if you like you know collect the cards watch the anime then you watch some more anime then you watch pretty much nearly half of the anime at some point and uh yeah for me it's like very nice Hobby in a way that like I just you know basic principle that you I can just tell you when when you're watching like any Random TV series on Netflix or whatever compared to anime it's just that people in Japan because you need to watch anime in Japanese like English voiceovers isn't really the way to watch it people really put their soul into it like you could see that like the difference in

this voice over dubbing is just like on another level and the other thing is that the story is just much more Dynamic and unpredictable because you can kill off anime characters at any point like you know no kind of contracts with actors are broken so imagine like the thing where people were all over Game of Thrones where they were like killing all the characters in like super unpredictable way like in anime it's default it's like anybody can die any time and get back anytime so the stories and everything that they can do is just like much more Dynamic I think and Anime is not really even something like you would say like a typical series or some kind of a genre it's more of like art form so anime can be literally about everything you can go from like 3 years old doron you know the the blue cat thing for kids all the way to like that note or stuff like even Netflix is now big on anime like they're doing Witcher series basically in anime and like know Castlevania and stuff like that so it's more of like art form there's even Lord of Rings movie now in cinemas which is

done in anime so that says for itself I would say yeah that's that's actually pretty much solid and I also personally watch anime more and more these days because it's not like just old days it's not just for fun there are like so much high quality stuff as well so my second question is another personal curiosity I think like whoever had a call with you before knows that you are very famous with your winter background I think it's been there for the last 48 years what do you think when when will um this chain be broken and the next will come yeah the the winter background that I use on my calls to hide the mess uh that's left by my son usually behind me so yeah that's there I I think at some point when we were having these like Zoom calls during Corona I people were kind of started having these and I was like why not I should also pick one uh I guess the time I would change one will be probably when I actually made my own

one that's because I just like need more creativity and and this is just not worth it kind of changing it now because it's like you know what what could be better than like Mountain Cottage in Winter that's fair well you kind of answered our next question which was one random hobby or interest outside of gaming and you said collecting Pokemon cards but let's let's just say outside of collecting Pokemon cards and gaming yeah uh I would say my most kind of weird hobby would be he which is historical European martial arts basically fighting with swords and stuff so I used to do that for 10 years pretty hardcore with like three trainings per week and yeah that was like one of the best experiences I had in my I would say I just don't have time to kind of train anymore and my sparing partner which was my trainer basically and very good friend again got two kids and life happens so yeah I'm just going to the gym normally and don't don't like spare that much but the thing and like

this whole kind of sport basically is still alive and like kicking very well especially now in Europe it's super good because it's it's not really something that you see in the movies and this also by the way destroys a lot of movies for you because you suddenly know how these things work it's basically just you know it's in the end basic math and geometry and stuff like people turning around each other with showing their backs with their swords and doing these like Pats and stuff like it's complete even even like Star Wars for like some of the scene stars like you know people trying to drag each other with their swords clashed it's like you're dead you're just like instantly dead and like you now watching some choreography of a movie like Star Wars for instance like yeah he was dead here he's dead here again he's dead like this is completely dead he would be dead five times and like stuff like that so yeah but it's it's really really like I would say sportswise is very very good and refreshing because you need to move your whole body most of the stuff is surprisingly in legs not hands because

you need to move pretty much unconsciously with your legs independently of your hands that's the most kind of hardest part and the other one is that you need to feel the blade of your partner or like enemy or whatever because it's super super dependent on the style of the your opponent like if if he's strong you cannot be strong against him because he'll overpower you therefore you need to go around him if the other way is through you need to be strong because you can overpower him but yeah my my my kind of thing was always the German School of the long sword which is very kind of simple it's always like if the best defense is attack let's just say if you could teleport to any country for a week can't get away where Japan of course okay never getting enough of Japan yeah like I was there at Tokyo game show last year and we were there literally for a week and I would say like out of that like three days were business four days were just like me going around Akihabara the anime neighborhood because it's just so good you don't see this stuff here in the west at all and it's like only Japan works like Japan yeah that's true yeah

and actually he even told me I think last month like they in super marks they have like products with Pokemon for eles Pokemon's like super strong there like pretty much everything can be branded by Pokemon like you can see Pikachu's face pretty much every 20 M there if you're walking the supermarket and yeah the brand just lives super strong and if people think like Pokémon was whatever 90s thing it's not it's just like I was there at the sunshine city which like the biggest shopping mall in Tokyo and there's literally like three floors on the shopping mall dedicated just to Pokémon there's the biggest Pokémon Center in Tokyo there's like Pokemon Pikachu Cafe that was like sold out all the time there's Pokémon go special merchandise store Point there's pretty much they have a plushy of like every single Pokemon there nearly and stuff like that that you don't see around yeah so yeah it's live and kicking and very well crazy actually actually another question

that I'm really curious about like how did you start your first carrier like about the educationwise first job because like in our industry almost everyone is kind of like out and then they and then they find themselves in the game industry suddenly how how was it for you yeah yeah nobody wants to like oh I'm going to work in EA when I'm 5 years old yeah uh yeah this is this is like one way one way nice another way like it's kind of a curse of our industry unfortunately that it's not really easy to get into it for me it was I would say the same thing pretty much I love video games from my childhood like from pretty much like five six years old and I never stopped so that's there but it never downed on me that I would be working in the industry so I would say I could I was pretty much following like kind I guess conventional career goals like get the high school get a University degree fight some job stuff like that I was

really drawn and I'm still drawn to psychology which is my PhD background there so I was there at the school and and like psychology is great in a way that you can pretty much connect it with anything you like because there's psychology in it like it it's just like everywhere and uh yeah I did my bachelor thesis literally in World of Warcraft it was uh like about social interaction in MMO communities literally a survey I was like get on one big server and go to game Masters approval that I could go could do the survey life in in game pretty much crazy then I built uh my own demo and my own lab in Oculus Rift in 2014 it was called the metaverse back then cuz I was following the research of Stanford University and uh yeah like it was always kind of I I would be doing these things I I wouldn't be you know the couch guy when you go and like tell your problems and stuff I was always kind of working in the lab and trying to do experiments and at some point one of my uh um um people that I surveyed pretty much

and that went to the experiment told me like oh we really need this help with the VR game that we working at pixel and and he keeps keeps coming to my office and what some point he said like I keep coming here all the time like why don't you work with us directly and suddenly I find myself in the gaming industry doing a VR game that we did for year and was pretty good I would say but yeah fortunately the VR Market ended where it was and then I I pretty much discovered that like all all the things that these people are doing here regarding the free topl is pretty much like behavioral psychology like we're building Skinner boxes pretty much operational conditioning gacha boxes and stuff like that it's very very close to psychology so I hope into it and pretty much never left because it was very engaging and it was pretty much in a way the same thing we did in the lab where we run experiments now we just call them AB tests and do them on a very giant scale but it's was pretty much the same thing for me yeah I think that's really cool that you have a background like this

because I I don't I don't see I don't see any other person that has a background like this in the gaming industry do you I I I know a few like for instance if you know Celia Celia Holden she she's the Epic girl that did the uxui for fortnite and stuff like that they're few but I would say very few because usually for game designers um I think it's a good good background but I would still say that stuff like uh programming and math is better especially on PC IND the scene which is just you can go your own stuff but for free to play and like for our kind of type of Industry where I don't need to code and like I I couldn't even so it's a little bit better in some ways but yeah you know you need to like do the hard part and play the games learn and like do stuff that's kind of unconventional nobody will tell you that at coool that that won't help you at all well we want to know what's been the most rewarding and totally unexpected part of your career we're talking about like I didn't see that coming type

moment didn't see that coming um have a lot of rewarding things I guess I remember when we were showing stuff on Gamescom when I was literally 5 days talking to reporters and journalists from 9 till 5 which was like never thought I would end up in a spot like this and that was the that was when when we were having the VR game so it was I guess a little bit different environment than our usual kind of free to playay you know PGC kind of WIP like those were those were literally like just normal people I remember at some point like even New York Times picked up the game and put it into article about like what they saw with like new VR stuff so yeah that was like very very interesting and especially like when we were going around the what was it yeah just going around Gamescom hallways back then and like seeing for the first time people like Palmer Lui or like all of these people that you hear in the news and like suddenly like you're there like good that I didn't really went to kind of tell them anything because just like too too too scared to and not that big

of a fanboy won over me yet but yeah it it was really nice and like you wouldn't really think that you would get there at some point but yeah now now it's different of course this and and and uh and and and yeah and the last thing I never thought I would be doing ads like at some point at TRL which was really great experience when I was working in Tamp in Finland to some degree during Corona uh I picked up let's say pH people taught me our marketing guy there how to do ads waterfalls pretty much the stuff that Felix does like ad monetization and all these things what am I doing and became it became super obvious to me and like I learned a lot of stuff but of course I didn't pick it up now for like 5 to four years so can can really you know I would be basically a total Noob now because stuff's change so much and you need to kind of keep up on the edge to be to be useful in that and pointed the industry but that that was super interesting like how just to see how this kind of funnel external funnel works and even on the podcast I

think it's super interesting to know how these other areas of game industry works even though you're in a game design but it's super important to know how marketing Works how ads work how this whole funnel Works how all these things like inside out work you don't need to like be able to do them just know how they work so you can then like keep them somewhere in the back of your head if you're designing stuff because you know that it's there waiting for you sounds very good but I think you're you're famous too like everyone in the gaming industry knows you not that much but yeah thank you we'll do all we can actually it's it's funny like whenever I'm talking about jaob with my Turkish friends the name is also kind of Turkish like there is yakob name they are saying which yakob I'm saying the yakob like celebrity so yeah you're you're famous in at least I can confirm Turkish industry that that's always happened to me in stul like when I when I go from the airport to the city with a taxi it's like always ah yakob and they started Turkish oh all the time yeah actually

you like mentioned about some like game design stuff already I'm personally super curious about gacha mechanism and like literally almost every week you write about it over like um turn off gamer side also like chatting about it but I think not everyone knows what exactly we mean when people say gcha so like actually we just want to know about it a bit from your perspective yeah so as always everything goes back to Japan you should go there and see it full scale because I think only there you will truly understand how powerful and important gachas are and how they took their population basically by storm there they have even laws by the way that prohibited specific types of gachas that we in the west don't care about that's why they are allowed here so yeah there's much more suitable stuff online if you want to read on this I really recommend cam Toto's block that's I I would say the biggest expert that I always learned guy okay yeah on on gacha where he

pretty much explained a lot of these things that I throughout the years like pretty much read all of it so that that would be my number one recommendation the other thing is with gatas people think that like it's just loot boxes and stuff like that but it's not really in a way that game designers and like game industry took it as a progression and monetization mechanic and it's very hard to build there are certain rules that are not really obvious to the surface that people usually skip all the time because people just think that GES are about like you know pull of tokens like we have I don't know 50 characters and then some like epic Mythic common drop rates and that's it and now we have now you don't so this is just like one piece of the puzzle the other piece of the puzzle is the width and like pretty much the mathematical function of gacha like how much it can you know consume duplicates how much can you roll it how how deep it is and stuff like that also the like the third and most important part which is completely hidden like why do you even roll it why do I needed and is there you know like the typical ABC

problem like if I have this character can it solve all of my problems or is it just like I need to have you know like a water Pokemon now because there's electric Pokemon so now I need the rock Pokemon and so on so forth so there are a lot of these mechanisms and parts of the gacha like think of it as some kind of like car engine and people just talk about the surface of it like how nice it is and produces a lot of money but there's like so much sophistication under it literally for me like there's like 30 % of time that I do with my client Studios I'm just like fixing gacha on mechanics and progressions because they're either not well understood or people don't just kind of get the point of why they did this or that or again it's just by years you see what works what not works and like how these designs evolve for instance in my opinion like one of the biggest breakthrough in gacha is like supercell kind of design which they started with Clash Royale it's pretty much just that in Asia gachas are 0 to one binary situations where it either drops for you

or it doesn't drop it's kind of very unforgiving but it plays still well in Asia that's how it works uh in the west we have this kind of like say like more forgiving version where you have these shards so you still get like legendary shards very fast like very frequently but you need to you know cumulate them still to upgrade the unit but the feeling is there it's like your legendary doesn't drop like once a month which is like normal for Asian G any Lucky by the way cuz I remember when I was playing for instance Empires and puzzles for year I never got the five star hero ever oh that that's how Asian gacha works okay so patience yeah yeah yeah yeah and and you know not not really the patience that's like the frustration tolerance when you now spend because you really want it that's how it's supposed to do but yeah compared to supercells design where you have The Shard GAA which is again very forgiving it's just different so it's really important to understand these mechanics when you're doing that and when when you pretty much decide that okay we're going to go for gacha progression in in our

game because gacha is then the main thing that your game will monetize on that will you know engage people on and that will die on if it's not done properly a good ending how important it is well everyone I think wants to know what's your goto mobile game right now and if you had to explain why in three words go to mobile game right now so currently I'm really playing hard Pokemon TCG pocket M of course yeah so three words is Nostalgia because that's like Nostalgia well monetize the other word is giant Revenue because they have giant Revenue even though they're declining a little bit now but the third word is expectation and that's that that's my main thing why I'm still playing it at least because there's so many unanswered questions they're going to say they said they're going to answer this this month where they're going to implement the trading system which I'm super curious how because it could literally destroy the game in in like 2 days then they're going to implement

their first new big set they already did one in January which spiked their revenue to alltime high like 7 million a day so I'm expecting something like that soon and yeah we'll see because it will be like it was never I think done properly in in the mobile games industry to have like a trading system that works in a gacha game because trading systems and gacha games don't really go kind of together whereas skipping the randomness of the gacha is like number one rule not to do stuff in G CH so we'll see like the the rumor is that they're going to only allow like low Rarity cars to trade and higher Rarity cars won't be tradeable which then we'll make the trading kind of you know weak to begin with but let's see but I'm super curious I think that's a good game to follow these days and it's not really that demanding you can just you know sometimes it's more about collecting than battling itself so we'll see how that they're going to resolve that yeah that's that's actually cool and of course gcha is there as well so G is it's a very strong GAA uh so we actually now enter the fun zone

so we prepared some uh little games for you uh yeah I didn't didn't didn't didn't read them purposely so good oh it's basically quick fire and uh let's start with a good summer vacation or a winter break winter break of course superheroes or super villains nothing think superheroes still Outdoor Adventures or Coy indor oh the adventures are also good like don't get me wrong I don't see the home all day digital art or traditional drawing digital armies nft then traditional drawing single player or multiplayer oh single player definitely board games card games monetization iip iip for sure mobile games console games I never owned a console for mobile games PC master I here then mobile games pc pc pc for sure

we'll end up crossplatform anyway yes merch or sword puzzle merge for sure mat three or blast blast because I did the blast game before Runner or Idol idol runner's dead sorry no way survival or hidden objects survival survival survival for sure that's much more engaging in my opinion solitire or tile I think it's solitire now because like the new wave of solitire stuff that's coming it's it's kind of tylish to begin with but yeah it's in my opinion much more interesting hushi or Kebab oh hushi oh yeah for those who don't know this is like U traditional food fight hushi is the traditional food here in Slovakia the national food uh which is this kind of very strange type of cheese like unfinished cheese I would say that that would be a good name which we have a patent in EU by the way with with bacon and these uh potato dumplings so that's hushi and Kebab is Kebab like the whole world knows because it's

everywhere so yeah Alki for sure all right for the next game it's going to be you picking your winner game so I'll give you like two names of the games and you'll pick one and then we'll continue with the game okay okay so capy go or Clash Royale CYO okay Capo or brawl star brawl star brawl star or Pokémon go Pokémon go for sure Pokemon go or Pokemon TCG pocket uh oh yeah let's go Pokemon TCG pocket okay Pokemon TCG pocket or Royal match Pokemon TCG pocket okay Pokemon or Royal Kingdom Pokemon Pokemon or match Factory a match Factory is super strong but still Pokemon is Pokemon match Factory or Monopoly go a monopoly Go's very good monopo go or archero 2 archero 2 is going to be even capy Baro so archero 2 okay archero or dark war survival archero archero or white out survival white out survival that's that's that's white out survival or garden Scapes a white out survival no

white out survival or Candy Crush still white out survival Queen Master white out survival okay white out survival or Clash of Clans white out survival for foral wins for for your for the best game you chose I wouldn't say the best game is the best money game yeah I was like in the beginning so scared because like we put Pokémon go to like third one and okay he will pick Pokemon and like no no no like don't get get me wrong Pokémon go is great and like Pokemon TCG also but white out survival that's like another level of like pretty much what they're doing and how Forex behaves in the current environment and then the innovations that did even on the UA side what they doing so completely different game Pokemon is Pokemon because it has the strong IP without it it wouldn't be nothing so I'm sorry that's just like not comparable expertise yeah I'm still waiting for my building for like two days to like complete it's just it does it well yeah we actually have a new game on the blog that we're going to do a podcast today from Century games which

is the high seas hero which is actually three cores really so yeah so not two but three really looking forward to that one it's like uh yeah this stuff is evolving just too fast yeah it is I think that has been a cool one I really enjoyed and uh like it was our first experience and Jakob already has been podcasting for the last uh 58 years so thank you for joining us being our first one and please feel free to do the ending Jakob take over yeah um thanks for having me wishing good luck with with this and like to like a lot of other episodes because I think there's a very interesting format where we don't really talk business but we talk about people from the business which is still kind of important and brings a little bit of like human to to our you know linked post full of success and everything and money which is kind of all we see there so that's great and yeah thanks everyone for listening and

if you want find me feel free to reach out either on Lincoln on on our slack Channel which is open to everyone feel free to join that one