Interactive Streaming & the Future of Gaming | PGC Digital #1

as introduced my name is chris cataldi um i am ceo co-founder of a company called genvid technologies um and i'll be talking today about interactive streaming and the future of gaming as we see it here at genvid um and uh for those of you who don't know genvin i'll be doing a brief introduction then jumping into what we think is the opportunity for game developers and others in the ecosystem and then jumping into some direct um examples of some partners using interactive streaming to engage their audiences and do some cool things and then i hopefully will have some some really cool q a at the end so what is genvid uh who is gender i think you always need to know who you're hearing from and uh we've been around for just uh over four years now uh we started with four people uh all of us from the games industry space mostly most recently from a company called square enix uh we're involved with the cloud gaming

subsidiary uh called shooter technologies and we've grown into a team of more than 50 people in six different locations in for in this case now just three countries oh well depends on how you look at it but in many countries uh spanning north america europe and asia uh we've in the last few weeks uh announced some additional financing from some very welcome and awesome partners uh viet hui in china samsung and korea uh into tokyo and japan and who are joining our existing venture capital investors uh via um galaxy interactive makers fund horizons ventures marsh capital and oca i always like showing uh a group of uh this slide that showcases the awesome group of people that i work with um in those offices if it wasn't for them i would just be a crazy person ranting and because of them i'm a crazy person ranting with some actual uh meat on on my rants so

thank you for all of them uh i think you'll see the the variety in terms of ethnicity uh diversity of background experience age gender you name it it's there we think it's extremely important uh enable to to let us uh you know tackle these these new experiences what we're trying to do the media has covered us if you haven't heard of us i think in terms of public uh streams we're uh we've been partnering with the top esports broadcasters as well as uh interactive streaming and stats uh experts like stats helix to create interactive experiences on twitch for the counter-strike majors uh london major the berlin major uh etc i can talk more about that later so the title of the this of the talk is um interactive streaming in the future of gaming and um i think it's important to explain

what we mean the future of gaming is uh and the the best slides i had for this actually date back to our first fundraising slides just over four years ago uh when we took kind of our our vision for where the game industry was going and and made it um made it a little bit more crystallized and so sorry i'll go back by the way uh we see the game industry on a progression from uh experience one point of what we call experience 3.0 although we don't use this vernacular anymore i think it's interesting to to visualize exactly what we mean experience 1.0 where games started where single-player experience is not really shared with anyone except people who are directly in the room uh and they were made on a purpose-built set of hardware that was local when went from experience 1.2.0 and 2.0 we defined as this multiplayer component

where people are still playing the same game um the game hardware runtime hardware is a little bit more modular but people are able to interact on that uh with each other with people from different kinds of backgrounds but they're still fundamentally playing the same kind of game on the same kind of hardware uh um and where we're on nutrition transition point now between 2.0 3.0 is this idea that we have people interacting via game experiences on different kinds of hardware and in fact the kinds of game interactions are having is also quite different so if you're playing fortnite on uh and right now we're in a tradition we're in transition between 2.0 3.0 so most of the facets of 3.0 we're still trying to facilitate your agenda uh and and with our partners uh we're still pretty much in the 2.0 but you're starting to hear these ideas of cross-play uh people uh what is the you know what will game uh interactive you know element for for example fortnight you know you have cross play between mobile pc on uh and console um

yeah what we're trying to understand here is what can we facilitate more here and uh for the most part the gaming um experience on mobile um shouldn't be the exact same as it should be on pc or console mostly because of different kinds of hardware and for games to be um specifically successful they need to cater to the individual hardware runtime that they're on and uh while some games land themselves more towards that other games you can't directly you know expect to have the same kind of seamless interactivity and we're trying to address that um where we see games going with uh trends in connectivity processing power and what we call evolving play style is new kinds of games that are ubiquitous access that have multiple levels of meaningful engagement and then are just massively social and massive participation uh and there's we see a gradient of interaction that isn't just play and this is an opportunity for

everyone in the ecosystem because play has defined the gaming industry up until now and will continue to define the gaming industry but it shouldn't limit the gaming industry and uh to talk a little bit more about that i think you need to see uh exactly what we do so in general we see gaming as a uh component of what we see as the uh you know the the conflation of uh two very big types of of interactivity or content games and media so traditionally games have been you know uniquely interactive and focused on a specific demographic whereas media has been not necessarily interactive but more more mass audience and interactive streaming as as you know whether you're thinking of banner snatch we're thinking of all of these um you can even talk about the zoom revolution as an example of streaming that's interactive right i'm talking here people are asking questions um long story short

we see um both sides moving towards each other games are trying to become more mass-market media's trying to make it more interactive and interactive streaming itself is a really cool interesting uh harmonious uh confluence of the two and it's not what you're there for um but in order for games to fully disrupt and we would generally think that the game developers are in the driving seat here we need to take some hints from what we uh see to be success in traditional media and traditional media has a again if you go back to the idea that social media is more massive and more and more participatory uh there's a service design that's inherent there that games currently don't have and that's in general a focus beyond just player uh and so one example i like to start with is what we see with uh with sports is one kind of media right everyone grew up playing sports no one thinks um you know we have uh a larger view of what it means to be an uh

a sports fan that isn't just someone who plays sports and because that's because there's an entire service design around that so they're people playing in the stadium in the physical world right um then they're people who pay money to go to the stadium and these are the people who have the most highest per capita uh revenue and also usually the most highest cost per per user and then there's the aggregate largest demographic which is people at home but there's a service design that goes from player participant and viewer and the player in any case is just a content creator for the rest of the funnel if you juxtapose that against digital uh for games in this case you have people playing the participant experience doesn't really exist then we jump directly to viewers and whereas the participant experience for for regular media in the sports case is the core uh axis on which the viewer experience is

made so for example a participant experience in a football city in american football stadium you have you know the people who are nearest to the field you have people with the best angles the most access to uh the play the live players and then the people at home are watching facsimiles of that different camera angles zooming in to the players the same way a participant does in the stadium physically uh and so there's a service designs based around the participant experience that the viewers at home are able to enjoy uh in the digital world we kind of jumped directly from player experience to viewer experience for the most part today right and so we're just literally watching the the player view for everything and uh that's not necessarily the best example uh and so therefore uh right now we have an underserved market which is the viewer uh the the audience is large and getting larger and there's always this this discussion about what it is to to watch video games uh long story short developers today are

just starting to get uh comfortable thinking about viewers as a part of their ecosystem uh which is why it's pretty cool that we're able to talk about this uh here so again if we were to make a real world sports analogy of it uh what we're watching today uh what we're interacting with today as non-players is pretty much the uh a worse experience of the viewer uh we're seeing the player sorry of the player we're seeing the player's perspective we're able to kind of jump around from those we're seeing we'll see replays but we're not necessarily able to see the whole dynamic um you know experience that the people in the stadium would see and i apologize for jumping from football to baseball but in america that's what we do um it's more than just camera angles it's more than just perspective it's there's an entire communication construct that we can think about so um you know and here are some examples of game genres we work with where you know we think fighting games think mobas think car ccgs think mmos it's not you know fighting games aren't just watching the the similar

thing to mma right if we're talking about games right uh it's we find when we're thinking about and working with publishers and game developers that uh because it's fast paced and tactics focused rather than being something that's just you know just take real world examples of mma or boxing and let's just put that for fighting games like street fighter it doesn't quite work the same way because it's just not the same kind of game um it's actually more akin to something like badminton uh where you have a big focus on replay big focus on on stats um and a big focus on the individuals is there and creating a narrative around that an interesting time i'll i'll fast forward through this but the same sort of thinking where we don't get fooled by the visuals we get fooled by the actual core concept of the of the experience that we're watching actually does come into big play and uh the golf thing at the end for mmo is if you think about it watching and i was kind of like golf we'll talk about that there's

anyway um so again we're focused here on that participant experience uh agenda and a lot of our partners in that by focusing on creating a value-driven participant experience that has multiple layers of engagement that affects what they're watching we can create a really cool funnel that benefits everyone in ecosystem players and be a viewer so again think of the physical world players aren't paying they're being paid for the most part participants are paying the most but having the most fun and because they're there because that stadium is there you have the digital or or the more remote experience that the viewers have at home that in this case are driving the most revenue from broadcast right sponsorships et cetera and if you again think that i think that same uh contract juxtaposed that into digital we have a lot of cool opportunities and this is just another way of saying players are the current uh you know core uh demography that game developers think about today they're the only real

monetized uh segment today uh interactive viewers again another way of saying participants are the opportunity to create uh value and revenue driving opportunities um that developers who are creating in general game developers what do we specialize in we specialize in creating interactive experiences that we can monetize right and so if you could if you think about interactive streaming as a is a some contract with that um we can then create experiences that spectators who may not necessarily have that interactive ability we can still create awesome experiences for them so what does that mean what is interactive streaming you might ask and if you haven't checked out any of the uh the streams you pi for for counter-strike or or follow us in the news uh uh let me explain what an interactive schumer can do uh so for example as a viewer when i log into any game today uh if it's not on a geneva enabled stream and i don't know much about the game or haven't played the game for a couple months the game has evolved right the game is

constantly evolving that's the biggest difference between again physical and digital but sports is that games are living breathing uh beings almost right and unless you have a high competency that you are gaining and then retaining through practice you're unable to unreally understand what you're watching so i i you know if you don't if you look at any other media in the same prism and you don't know much about sports you don't know much about movies uh you don't know much about music and that was the the core um you know hurdle that enabled you to decide whether you want to go to a stadium uh we'd have much fewer people going to stadiums more people much fewer people go to movies and music uh venues right in general all you need for any of those things is enjoyment and the idea that when you go there you don't feel incompetent and currently watching games doesn't have that so imagine going into counter-strike and being able to watch not only any angle you want but literally see the map see all the stats be able to follow the

player you want and be able to feel like you know what's going on right i you know i can't say how many times people when they talk about watching games they say it's great i love the idea but i don't know what's going on and we do that through live viewer guides and uh and and you know personalized data and cameras but also being able to showcase what's going on in the game and last but not least and this isn't uh it's becoming more and more actually um prevalent but the ability for viewers to actually be going on again when you think about why people go to stadiums it's the big difference there is feeling like you're part of the action and currently uh people when they're watching games don't get to really feel like part of the action and that's gonna be able to change imagine like horror games type scenarios where you're able to literally reach out and touch the game and affect the players and affect what everyone else is watching and you watching and being there makes that difference uh when thinking about types of

interactivity we like to structure our thinking a little bit um and the the easiest tier that most developers and publishers when they start thinking about interactivity go into first is that informational tier again going back to what does it mean to be a competent viewer uh and you know it's it's literally being able to go in and see what's going on in the game being able to toggle on and off uh what's going on the equivalent of turning up and down volume uh on your traditional broadcast we should be able to turn off a gun volume of of stats and and other data because that's all intrinsically there in the game but it's kind of uh currently trapped within the video next is customizable this is the idea that you have multiple types of demographics people supporting different players people support different teams people with different levels of literacy in the game they should all get their own kind of custom experiences and again if you think about the digital stadium example there are people who are there for the home team the away team they're people who are there in the corporate box and they're just people there who are in the bleachers

who are just dire fans uh they're season ticket holders etc so we should be able to give customized experiences for viewers at home the same way uh and in that case again the easiest way to think about is custom cameras or custom data feeds or or you know custom chat or custom cheer uh these are all what we call customizables here and last and this is where game developers immediately go it's where we you know we see the opportunity is influential and that's the ability for people to literally reach out and affect the game which in fact the player experience whether it's through cheering and so that the players can hear and feel that viewers are cheering for them again think of the digital stadium idea or it's actually going out reaching out and throwing a grenade into the middle of a match and seeing what that does or it could be a little bit more nuanced than that it could be buffing or cheering in a way that the npcs the boss characters get uh more powerful and the viewers are able to enjoy that and also maybe players who are watching that get better drops because viewers are cheering it's

quite nuanced but the cool world some examples here in terms of difficulty uh the reason we start with informational and go from that to influential is because information is much easier the more you get into having dependency on thinking about game design uh the more work you have to do right because you have to start thinking about balancing if you think about what does it mean to let viewers uh attack players what does it mean for players to be on the receiving end etc um you know each game is going to have to deal with it differently but there are some easy wins that we can definitely take from informational in some cases customizable before we go directly to influential um the question is okay why would you want to do it well they're different ways of monetizing whether we're talking about um not monetizing it directly at all and using as a way to funnel more players or whether it's through subscription or other brand partnerships or last but not least literally letting uh viewers be the engine for microtransactions where viewers are buying consumables or buying cosmetics

that both affect their own individual experience as well as those who are also taking part in that online game and by doing that you know viewers uh graduate from becoming just uh idle uh viewers to someone who's a participant in the system and because that participant is it has this example sorry this experience created for them uh viewers are able to actually contribute uh monet monetarily as well as experientially to to the content which is again what if you think of sports if you think of live theater if you think of you know these these these events that we think about uh as as as massive um you know they have those elements and with my remaining time i'm going to talk about uh some developers who've used genvid uh and then announced january interactivity uh and and specifically some of the features that

they've done and what that will lead into q a so i have five developers i'm going to be jumping through them really quickly in the next about three to four minutes i'm happy to get q a on this um but we'll go from there so first we have um in power studios they have an amazing uh space fighter game called in the black uh and they're based in the us uh they're the super experienced team that from the makers of crisis and x-wing and their core focus of the player was a game that was unlike using play uh plain physics to model space game uh interaction fighting they wanted to actually use the same kind of um physics models that space simulators use like kerbal et cetera and they made an amazing game that's very difficult for for people who are watching to play um all these games are still unreleased they're still in development um so one of the things they did is letting viewers actually go ahead and on twitch or on a shooting platform of

the the developer's choice they're able to go ahead and turn on stats be able to see how the ship is moving uh for whoever there is they're watching be able to see what the weapons are that's there things that usually you wouldn't be able to to to uh um you know play around with uh be able to see uh the the stats of the live match who you know who's killing who and all those things next is the you know we're talking about 3d space and we're talking about you know dog fights and all kinds of crazy things um the cameras are very uh you know hectic and frantic uh so if we just watch the player experience or try to do multiple camera angles you'll never come up with the perfect camera angle so for for them they created a expandable mini map that show and they spent a lot of time designing the ui for where the viewer would be in watching within 3d space and be able to show the totality of that experience uh and be able to literally you know toggle that on off play put out whatever in their view viewer ui that they want to

put there uh and last but not least when we're talking about what they thought about full influence they thought about the viewer be able to cheer for players and players hearing them cheer uh as well as being able to change or influence the broadcast cam and you know cool things here where viewers are able to put wagers and bounties on specific players and and viewers and players are able to reap the rewards of going ahead and uh if a player uh executes a a bounty and then takes out another player because a viewer has has used virtual cards to do that uh both the viewer who put the bounty as well as the player benefit via in-game assets really cool stuff there next is retro by a helsinki based developer called black block games uh it's based in the godot engine uh and originally you know the player experience is a mobile game and and the game here is think of and i you know i'm not a developer in this case but their vision was for an online 24 7

mmo for mobile games uh players where viewers uh where players are you know each if you think about a game like uh grand theft auto where people are running around in in in cars wreaking havoc around the city uh each of the people in the cars is a player and the viewer experience that they created there is something really cool where were viewers able to watch live on a virtual cct cctv feed and you know look at different camera angles uh see kind of what's going on in the city but also be able to uh go ahead jump in uh you know see the the helicopter view like we're where the us are used to seeing be able to jump in and throw in different kinds of impediments or charge ups one example is the cash truck reviewers are able to throw in a cash truck when players hit the cash truck they get in in-game currency um if there's a pinata which does similar things but also blows up and affects the player experience and then there's the soccer ball which is

again i think it's because it's european team they like that and so players are able to go ahead and you know in the cars play around with that and these are only unlockable by the by the viewers and these are some cool experiences out there next is a japanese developer uh called throw the warp cord out they created a switch game uh called demolition robots and here it's uh if you just think of like a kaiju experience whether these kaiju coming in and wrecking a city each viewer in this case uh lives in the building and they're setting traps to try to stop the kaiju these these robot kaiju come in to attack the city uh and first you know you want to know where you live you want to know where everyone else lives so being able to on the stream click around and see where everyone is that's one thing being able to go in and throw in traps and when if a monster gets caught by the trap the viewer benefits from it and obviously the monster gets impeded uh and be able to cheer um for for the the robots etc next is don sagi uh the english name is don swagger this is

another um switch game uh it's kind of a crazy japanese acorn tennis game uh it's really cool stuff uh viewers here are able to just make as many things happen in the game they're able to uh you know click on virtual uh points that only they see these blue flames again these are superimposed on the stream in a native way if they get that they're able to unlock other um interaction schemas including cheering including throwing in acorns that affect the viewer and player experience and they're even able to cheer and viewers watching can experience that cheer and spiked acorns are these kind of crazy things that affect um see things happen uh last but not least is dead house sonata um a canadian-based team working on lumber yard amazon and the whole idea here is for this narrative driven action rpg where the viewer and

the player are really interacting with each other and so viewers can drive what's called a dungeon master mode via voting a specific viewer is chosen to be the dungeon master and and literally as a dungeon master be able to upgrade what's going on in the in the game uh and they're able to control npc movements control traps do all kinds of crazy things um that affect the players and then the experience and it's only unlockable by these viewers a lot of examples here doors and literally think about everything a a dungeon master can do now someone on twitch could do that um and so we're still early most of these games are still in development most of the interactivity is currently focused on esports um but developers in the driving seat and and we and genevieve are really interested in seeing what we can do to drive this transition from just play to interactive viewing being a part of

that system and driving any kind of ecosystem with that i think i've got two minutes of q a which i'm happy to you you perfectly timed it you went right up to the edge you go you've got up at 5 30 you demand as much time as you damn well want chris um so um yeah we've got some questions i think it's brilliant i'm it's really exciting um how how you know there's a whole new say a whole new era a whole new part of the game's world where players can generally interact in in in kind of esports or live kind of competition i think it's it's fascinating and right now of course there's a lot more people looking for engagement than ever absolutely i hope so i mean i'll just briefly want to say one thing i think um at least in the u.s we've been watching lots of uh entertainers who are used to live audience interaction whether it's our late night shows or comedians or or what have you and they're you know having to really really quickly learn how to what it is to be a twitch streamer without having any uh kind of native interaction and

you're you saw they would have empty studios first and then they now they're gonna be found at home i saw that it's kind of exactly and it wasn't it's not it's not it needs a bit more help but it was the first couple of bit like okay you know with your kids well it's not the the best um kind of driver for i think what we're people are coming out of the world to see that oh we don't have the right uh tools to create these experiences that aren't there in a physical way and i you know it's going to be more and more going on and i look forward to to to be able to drive that and and the rest of the speakers today i'm i'm i will be even though it's 5 30 from going to be staying on you'll be watching them while you're changing changing nappies um no i i will i will fousey's waiting in the wings from dice but she'll be shortly so i'm not buying chris i don't give chris's time don't worry everybody'll get their time it's not a regular pgc we have a bit more time so we won't be actually off the stage after five minutes so i've got a question here saying i've been a starter user from day one and i'm really impressed with how

it works but this is a starting thing i'm less impressed with how expensive even old titles are in the store what can we do to prevent greedy platform holders from price gouging i know that's not really your service but i guess well i mean i i i worked on cloud gaming for a long time i think uh without casting dispersions or picking winners and losers or or anyone i think in the end of the day when we go from a physical based media to digital media um before we even went online um when we changed media types uh enough value has to be there so we can't just focus on catalog we need to make sure that people who are our payers are feeling that they're getting value for their money whether or not that means the subscription pay for all you can eat or not really um depends on the the kind of strategy for each company i do believe that um the promise of cdn and for all cloud gaming isn't just recycling old catalog or being another console but creating new kinds of um experiences that the people who that are unique to cloud

gaming uh and uh it's still early in that regard and i think everyone in the space agrees on that and i think that's the one way you're gonna to answer the price gouging concerns just to create new experiences because once a new experience is created there's new value created from that fair enough i want to get at least a couple more questions yeah here's a good question how do you contract cheating with a view like this what would stop someone from relaying extra tactical information to players playing the game as someone's taking this very seriously because obviously a pro esports player in here totally and the answer to that is how do we do that in the real world and the answer is we divide who gets access to what data uh and we create so for example we don't stream every baseball game in the world right we just don't do that we stream certain baseball games uh and the people who are watching at home uh unless there's usually some sort of mitigatable delay that would stop the people you know in the stadium from hearing what's going on uh and stealing signs etc uh long story

short there's an entire design around this so that the people um who are making the experience make it so that you can't cheat um and if you just take today's games and put all the data there and let everyone watch it there's gonna be this idea oh well then you know i could watch my friend's game and i can help them cheat well the easiest answer to that is you take the sports paradigm you only do it for professional games first where people are already in town for boots sequestered off into a stadium anyway and so they're not you can't worry about them cheating and then as developers get more and more comfortable with playing around with with dynamics here um you you eventually get to a place where if a player gets information from from a viewer it's not cheating it's part of the game design and the game it's like people build like pirating into distribution right it's free exactly okay so i've got i've got one final question welcome come on two into one um so um and then i'm gonna have to head you into the digital ether to be interacted with what other people it wasn't clear from the talk what

services generate office developers compet compared to developing spectaculars themselves and what your monetization model is so maybe they they say is a technology licensed are you taking account of the audience if your revenues just explain how you work with the developer there's also questions coming up about how we can get in touch with you so this you've already got a potential partner in here so it's good absolutely so you can email me at chrisgenvidtech.com or go to jennifer tech website or speak to one of my uh any of my amazing counterparts in any any of my offices um but also in terms of what jennifer offers we started as an sdk our focus is on creating the tools that game developers can use to create these experiences our monsters one station model is super simple we make it so that developers don't really have an excuse uh uh from that perspective not to use us where a simple uh two-tier system first tier is licensing so if you use our tech we don't pay a single dime until you start broadcasting uh commercially uh and then it's a a per unique viewer per month model so if no

one watches we get no money if a lot of people watch we get a very small amount of money uh and then from that if you start selling things through the stream um we do get a revenue share of what people buy through the stream so if you have consumables et cetera that viewers are unlocking and that's what viewers uh are paying and then that's new revenue for you and therefore you revenue for us we don't touch anything in the player at all if you get a lot more players because of it we don't just know some kind of weird system agenda takes credit for that kind of stuff so cool