In the Hot Seat: Mattel163 COO Devin Nambiar on Uno and life after the NetEase deal

Hello everyone and welcome to PGC in the hot seat where we talk to some of our fantastic speakers before they take to the stage at some of our global events. Now, I'm your host Maryam Mahmood, editorial director of events here at PGC Spire and joining me today in the hot seat is none other than Deborah Nambiar, chief operating officer at Mattel 163. Devon, so fantastic to talk to you today. I've been so excited for this talk. I just want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time.
Yeah, thanks so much Maryam. It's it's great to be here and I'm glad to be connected with PGC once again.
I have so many questions for you as you know, but for our audience, for those who don't know you, do you want to just give me a sort of quick intro as to who you are and what your role actually looks like as COO at Mattel 163?
Sure, yes. So, I'm Devon. I'm I'm from the US originally from California. I've spent over a third of my life in in Asia and right now I'm the chief operating officer for Mattel 163, which is a global mobile games publisher. We

recently became part of Mattel. We were born as a joint venture between Mattel and NetEase. Now we're officially part of Mattel as the internal game development and publishing division of Mattel. And as chief operating officer, I handle primarily all of our R&D and publishing efforts as well as future-facing portfolio strategy.
Fantastic stuff. Now, that leads me quite nicely into my first question for you Devon. So, Mattel 163 is itself an East meets West story, a joint venture between an iconic American toy company which we all know unless you're living and one of China's internet giants NetEase. Now, from the inside Devon, you're actually at a really interesting vantage point. What actually makes a partnership like this work when so many cross-border collaborations sort of stall? I feel like we've seen that over and over again, especially with the sort of China and West collaboration.
Yeah, yeah. It's a great It's a great question Maryam and you know, just for the context like you said, it's right. Mattel 163 is an East meets West story. We're born out of a small investment from Mattel and NetEase to to form and

fund the joint venture. And this was started about eight years ago. NetEase also provided at the time a seed team, a small team of developers. These developers were scrappy and hungry and eager to prove themselves, and it started from really humble beginnings. But from these humble beginnings, the JV kind of grew, and you know, recently over the years we've now hit a skate velocity to the tune of over a billion dollars in lifetime revenue, uh nearly a quarter billion in ARR, and 20 million MAUs across our four live games right now. This was an amazing return for both the JV and the shareholders, and it's one of the reasons why Mattel recently decided to acquire the remaining stake of the JV. So, bringing us in-house now as the internal game development and publishing division of of Mattel. And like you said, Maryam, it's it's true that many cross-border collabs have stalled. You know, I can think back to when I was at EA, and I spent, you know, almost 10 years there. Some of the Tencent collaborations that we did, right? Some of them worked, the ones that were managed out of out of APAC, some of them did work. Others, you know,

in the industry, ones that we did did not work so well. I mean, Apex Legends Mobile comes to mind as as something we had to eventually sunset that game, right? But in this partnership, you know, NetEase has had a cross-border mentality and success previously with Blizzard, so they kind of knew what they were doing. And, you know, honestly speaking, they took a rather hands-off approach with us. You know, we were a made-in-China but published globally in East-to-West effort. And likewise, you know, on the Mattel side, they were relatively hands-off in the beginning. Their involvement was minimal in the sense that the team was given trust to operate, flexibility, and autonomy to build. And I think that combined with the fact that the team itself, you know, under the leadership of Amy, our CEO, really refused to fail and built with intent, you know, that really helped make this partnership work. From the NetEase side, you know, they had they had their own business to it to tend to. From the Mattel side, they were a toy company, right? And you know, now in a post-deal world, we'll we are still given that sort of trust, flexibility, and autonomy to to make the right

decisions, and Mattel is really focused on, you know, leveraging its franchise power and the the brand power to to help us to grow.
That's awesome. So many people in the gaming industry are looking at you with true sort of envy, Devin. I can I can say that with with surety. So, my next question for you, you've had these sort of chart-topping free-to-play success in both Asia and the West. Is there And this I feel is a question that many people will know. Is there a real difference in what players in those markets want, or is that a distinction that's more of a myth than a reality when you're actually looking at the granular data?
Yeah. Yeah, well, I think there are varying perspectives on this from different people, but actually, like you said, after looking at the data, the behavioral data, and also after spending, you know, more of a third of my life now living in APAC, I can say definitively that that user preferences here and how it maps behaviorally in the data, it it they are different mar- in in a few different ways, right? East Asia in particular has historically been a place where uh players have had greatly diverging tastes from players in other parts of the world, particularly the West. I mean, entire games really PC

and mobile free-to-play MMOs, like the fantasy westward journeys of the world, which was a NetEase title, grandy subgenres of of SLGs, like Land for Land, which in Chinese is called Shuai Tou. A lot of people in the States probably not And I've heard of this game, but it's made billions of dollars in East Asia alone. But a lot of these games when launched These games have been launched in the US or Europe. Honor of Kings comes to mind as well and from Tencent. Those games basically face-planted. The same was true with Monster Strike in Japan, a title that epically failed uh globally, but made billions of dollars in Japan alone. Korean MMOs, like Lineage, same story. So, there have, you know, the player preferences and and tastes and when you look at this in the data, and we've seen this even, you know, back at EA when we were doing this, we saw this as well. There have been some titles that have been exceptions to those rule, you know, overseas products recently, the Whiteout Survival, Top War, Free Fire. Those have come out and broken out globally, even though they were made in Asia, but those were designed for an overseas market to begin

with. FC Mobile, a title that I spent several years on at EA, was a hybrid product. We first, you know, had a skew of it in the West passed it to our teams in APAC. We rebuilt the game. That game succeeded in Asia. We then took it back and launched it globally with a ton of success. But even then, our Asia skews of the game, we had three parallel skews, a skew for East Asia, a skew for Southeast Asia, a skew for, you know, the global market. And how we managed those skews and how we designed them was completely different. The game was built and operated totally differently, and we operated those skews in parallel. So, yeah, I would say that preferences are pretty different and it actually plays out that way in the data.
Something that just came to mind is we recently did an analysis of what China sells versus what they play. It's an honor of kings. It was something ridiculous like 80% of their revenue is made domestically, which when you're actually looking at that data, it's so interesting to see.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Yeah, so you've sort of described yourself as a knack for optimizing products early in their life cycle and then scaling them massively. You have a

knack for that, I should say. What's the signal you look for early on that tells me this one is worth pouring fuel on? The million-dollar question.
Yeah. Yeah, let me start off by saying that the landscape has changed profoundly over the last 10 to 15 years in how to do that, right? Back in the early and mid 2010s, I was at Kabam and we were launching, you know, The Hobbit and later Marvel Contest of Champions. It really was a golden age for mobile gaming in the sense that you had a near complete holistic data picture of users you were buying from UA, juxtaposed with the fact that the UA market wasn't really yet an efficient market. You were able to get early reads on also retention and monetization reliably through soft launch territories like, know, know, Canada for example or the Nordics. Fast forward to now, the business is as hard as it at its ever as it's ever been, right? And I think a lot of people will attest to that. IDFA, the privacy revolution that the platforms have capitalized on, increasing regulatory scrutiny, fragmented laws, geo-fragmented laws, means we're largely operating not maybe not blind, but severely vision impaired in terms of

making scaling decisions. Soft launch territories also in general now they know that they're soft launch territories, so sometimes the data is not as reliable. But despite all of that, I would say that, you know, everyone although we're operating a limited playing field, once you're in a territory where you have reliable data that you can trust, the the North Star metrics have not changed much. And I think these are, you know, we looked at these in Asia, we look at these globally, right? Long-term retention, stickiness, session time, healthy ROAS, reliable PLTVs that you have confidence in, those are still the North Star metrics for us. But really it's about taking a holistic picture of the data, combining that with several qualitative data points as well in your limited soft launch limited market tests, and really building confidence over time. And that's still how we approach things at Mattel, that's how we approach things at EA over a decade plus, and and I think that's still the case.
Love that. Devon, you've built high-performing teams from zero to one. When that team spans continents, in your case, I think it's Los Angeles and Hangzhou in China, cultures and time zones, what's the hardest part and the

thing that people underestimate? I mean, I feel like I can kind of guess part of the answer, which would be time difference, cuz what is it? 15 hours. But what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, yeah, I think one thing people underestimate and sometimes overlook is you said time difference, and that's for sure one of them. It it really is overall the communication cost, right? Not only that geographical time difference, but also cultural and making sure that teams, even though sometimes they're speaking the same language, they will just totally miss each other in terms of understanding. And that's hard with a globally distributed team, right? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. There was, you know, an instance where at EA we had been developing um a game FC Online, which was the largest PC online game in APAC, and its mobile companion app across with developers across three countries. And we had decided we were over invested in codev and decided to wind that down at the time. That was the right decision. But there were other instances, like with FC Mobile, where that became a globally distributed juggernaut team, right? We had core development in Shanghai, live content in Malaysia, PM community and other functions in

Vancouver. And at Mattel now, we're exploring, you know, codev opportunities. We have our China team, which is core R&D. We have our LA team, where, you know, it's a lot of the Mattel folks. And we're also exploring, you know, expanding codev to India now as well. What's the key difference with when this works and when it doesn't? I would say the main thing, Miriam, is time on the ground together building trust. With the right leadership and the right mindset facilitating that and proactively engaging in it. Building bridges is really so important, especially when you're building products that are aiming really high, right? I know a lot of companies will celebrate globally distributed or remote teams, fully remote building successful products. I think in some smaller cases that can work, but when you've got really big goals against something, I think that becomes more of a fantasy unless those teams have already spent time on the ground building trust together.
Interesting stuff. Now, Devin, Mattel 163 has turned beloved physical IPs into mobile hits played by hundreds of millions of people. What's the genuinely hard thing about translating a brand

that people grew up with, you know, generations-wise, monetize? So, what what how does that feel in terms of monetization, and how do you do that without losing what made the game actually special to start with? I mean, I can think about Uno myself. These are 40-plus year-old games. My great-grandma played it. I mean, it's a really special case, and I want to get your sort of thoughts on that.
Yeah, it's it's a great question. It's really hard. I think, you know, it takes truly deep immersion into not only the IP itself, but also the culture around that IP to really understand the essence of what makes it special and you know the team doing that has to be able to identify that. Identifying that is really hard and that's where a lot of mobile games fail, right? Some mobile game publishers sign IP deals with the sole purpose of lowering CPI, but I think that's a really surface level understanding of what an IP can bring and it's also a missed opportunity for both the game experience and the players. You know, I think Scopely, Javier talked about this with regards to Monopoly Go a couple of years ago on the

D.I.L.F. podcast. I would get, you know, encourage people to go check that out. It was a great one, but you know, it's it's really I tend to agree with that that premise that, you know, there is a deeper way to engage with an IP and now for UNO, right, as an example, the game was our first successful scale product Mattel 163. One of the things the team did and I think this really helped the game stick was to preserve the core UNO card game rules. Not just using UNO as an IP in a match three or another type of genre game, but to actually preserve that core classic UNO and approach design with the question of what would a classic UNO card game made for mobile feel like, right? And what is the essence of the UNO IP, right? With core rules intact, so that decision was made, the next thing was, you know, how does UNO feel in real life, right? The one of the things that makes it special is as a card game is that social experience. You're sitting around a coffee table on the couch with friends, slamming the right card at the right time and all the emotional highs and lows that come with that. And translating that into mobile

game play was one of the things that our team wanted to do at the at the, you know, inception of the game and continues to to strive for. That's why the game is synchronous PvP, that's why it has a real-time social element, right? But to be honest, the social experience also is something that we still don't feel we're 100% you know, we 100% gotten right and it's something we're constantly working on.
Right. Devin, you as I mentioned before, you operate between Hangzhou and Los Angeles. So, for a Western company looking East or an Asian company looking West, what's the piece of sort of cultural intuition you wish you had before or the the piece of cultural intuition you wish you could hand out to people before they could make their first move? Just as a piece of advice that you have the privilege of knowing now, you know, you operate between these two places.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, you mentioned cultural intuition. I think as, you know, in terms of the mindset that you have to come with, you have to come with a mindset of adaptability and rolling with the punches. I think this

is something that we've seen now that, you know, we're part of Mattel and we're engaging more with folks in in LA is that, you know, we have to be adaptable, they have to be adaptable, but we all have to come with an open mind knowing that, you know, our teams have different capabilities and being able to you know, trust the teams or putting trust is something that you you build over time, but something that you have to come with with giving everyone the benefit of the doubt that they're trying to do the best thing, right? This is one thing I would say is maybe cultural intuition or how you should approach things. I think in terms of product, one thing is that if you're building for a certain market and you want to take it into a different region, whether that's East to West or West to East, your chances of doing that with your existing product are pretty slim. So, invest in tailoring and really culturalizing that experience putting people on the ground that you trust, who you spent time with initially building trust in charge of driving that together. And then also, I think, you know, if you are, for example, trying to take advantage of APAC as a region to do, you know, scale development taking advantage of China's capabilities or

Malaysia or India's cost benefits, my advice is that you cannot do this managing fully remote from a global hub unless the people in charge have a nuanced understanding of how that type of dev works. And like I said, the openness and the the flexibility and the adaptability to to roll with the punches. You know, buying a studio in China, for example, throwing investment capital at it and trying to manage it from, you know, a global hub to with without any, you know, sort of nuance understanding is going to be really hard and and so that's something that I would advise against.
Interesting stuff. Now, Devin, to wrap up our conversation, we've got to ask you this. What are you most looking forward to at PGC Shanghai this year? You're obviously joining us and you'll be joining the Does the Best Game Win Anymore panel. So, can you just give us a little bit of a taste of what you want to share, what you're looking forward to because we're so excited to have you and I think that's What is it? Just 3 weeks away.
Yeah, it's coming up really quick. Really excited for that. And, you know, honestly, the thing I'm looking forward to and I look forward to to every year, and not only at PGC Shanghai, but at, you know, GDC and others is reconnecting with a lot of people in the industry. It's a small circle, friends and

colleagues from around the world. I'm incredibly lucky and grateful that we have this this network. China now, particularly Shanghai, has reopened its doors to to global travel over the last couple years, so I'm always excited to see old colleagues here, show them around the city, and just exchanging ideas through these forums like the panels and just these, you know, coffee conversations, exchanging ideas as we continue on, fighting the good fight in what has become a really mature industry um from different parts of the world, and uh PGC London has become a global gathering event. I'm looking forward to PGC Shanghai becoming the next event, the sort of, you know, APAC event on that scale with that type of reach and pull to bring people in. So, looking forward to seeing everyone in Shanghai and looking forward to to the event.
Amazing stuff. Now, Devin, before we let you go, is there any we always like to ask our guests. Is there any last things that you want to share with the audience, anything happening at Mattel 163, any parting final words?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot exciting happening right now. I think, you know, since the acquisition, now that we're

fully part of Mattel, our team feels very empowered now to, you know, not only continue trying to scale our games, which our portfolio is mostly the card games, Uno, Phase 10, Skip-Bo, Mattel's card brands, but now we're looking at other brands as well, right? Like what would a Barbie game look like? What would a Hot Wheels game look like? You know, other IPs, Mattel has such a treasure trove of IP and and franchise strength and we are really partnering with, you know, with the Mattel folks in LA to figure out how to really scale and and bring that into the digital realm. So, it's very exciting for us. You know, nothing specific to announce yet, but definitely a lot of ideas brewing.
Watch this space. Devin, thank you so much for taking the time. It was such a pleasure.
Definitely. Thanks, Maryam. It was It was great to chat and I'm looking forward to PGC soon.