InZOI vs. The Sims – Can Krafton’s Life Sim Take on EA’s Giant?

[Music] It's Carmen baby. Next week we're going to have wallto-wall enzoy coverage. You just buckle in. It is Jen. I think you looked at the Tik Tok numbers. I looked at the wish list numbers last week and it's only continued to grow. It's the number one wishlisted game on Steam. I think it's sitting at 1.2 million wish lists and the Tik Tok numbers look impressive. Jack. Yeah. So, LinkedIn, Adam, I actually do find interesting things on my feed. Maybe you should join my feed. You just send me the better people to follow. I just get a lot of people complaining. Well, I get Oh, believe me, I get that, too. Wait, by the way, no one likes a grouchy Canadian. Okay, just just clean it up, Adam. Jesus. What? You're supposed to be all positive, all like roses, and I don't know. [ __ ] You've been dragging me down every week I'm on this podcast. Crest drags me down. There we go. So, for my LinkedIn, I forgot who posted this. Sorry. I'll give you credit somewhere. So, they basically pulled

like a bunch of different video games on Tik Tok. Total views, total video views, and views per video. And some of these games are big like Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Cyberpunk. And so, those are kind of in the top total videos. Obviously, they've actually been out for a really long time. So, for Enzo, the views per video are like the highest of all of these different games, like 30,000 views per video. I actually, you know, went and started to watch some because I was like, "Oh, what am I doing? What am I missing?" You know, just do a a quick little Google search and influencers are they're not even paid from what I can tell. Some of the top ones are already in millions of these views. It's just people playing and just like in Sims, right? It's like, "What crazy [ __ ] can you do with your character?" I saw one guy was like, "Oh my god, I can drive a car." and this other woman was like, you know, running her characters around and bumping into people. It looks really good. A lot of the comments are about Sims. And so, if I'm on the Sims marketing team, I don't

know. I would be really thinking about how do you leverage that? How do you do a campaign to go against? This should be a [ __ ] call to action for the Sims team to get off their [ __ ] ass and actually build something that's [ __ ] contemporary, right? Hell with the existing game. Let's move the [ __ ] on, right? I hope this thing crushes them because they need to like get something like something in to get them moving, you know? So annoying. Completely agree with you. This is why I've like been banging the table on this one is that the Sims and Maxis have just been collecting fat checks for basically 15 years building DLC packs. Fat checks. And if you actually are at EA, you should look at those numbers because they are mindboggling. No one talks about them. and they have built a very I actually think we're undervaluing the relationship that EA has built with the consumer base because the Sims have a very direct relationship with EA. And I actually think this is one of the biggest problems Enzo is going to face is that it's very much a Steam distribution. It looks more unreal and

more realistic in terms of graphics versus The Sims which is I think a little bit more colorful, a little bit more poppy, a little bit more I think has an affinity with female players which The Sims overwhelmingly are. But I think marketing is going to be this game's biggest challenge if they can't speak to that audience and find how to connect with them. But I completely agree with you. Like, let's [ __ ] go. Let's see some competition, right? We talked about Paradox. They canceled their Sims competitor earlier last year, which was just on the verge of launching. This is why I'm so excited for this. And if you haven't seen the creator day, I believe it is with Craftton. They have the creative director of Enzo on stage. And this is where I became a true believer. He's insane about simulation. You can tell he spent his whole life thinking about simulation, the problems with this genre. And as soon as I saw that video, I was like, where do I write the check? I'm like a true believer. This creative director, I've got a lot of faith in him. It's almost too eastern. It felt a little eastern, but the look was fantastic. The customization of your characters, like I said, I was watching the guy drive the car and it looked like GTA. Like, it was very high quality,

very well done. By the way, just I I can't I can't just let this go. The name is so unfortunate, too. When you're competing against The Sims, like, which is the most obvious [ __ ] name ever known to man for a game like this, and you say Inzo. I mean, yeah, that's been the most difficult part about like spreading the word about this game is like, what is the game? What What is their name? And I think even the spelling Oh, right. Yeah, I can easily spell that. The one thing though, Jen, on your table, the video games on Tik Tok video Yeah. thing. One thing that I'm actually looking forward to with this launch is we've heard amazing wish list numbers. We're looking at like total video views. You're showing like multiple metrics there. I'm trying to get a sense of like what are the right pre-launch metrics for PC console games because everything feels like a vanity metric until you can show that it's pretty predictive. And like I think we looked at that when Rivals came out too and Rivals was very

strong on Tik Tok but actually weaker on Wishlists. Rivals obviously beat out Delta Force on that comparison. Right. So in this case you're looking at pretty low in terms of total views. Is views per video actually the right metric to center around or is it total videos? And like the fact that it's a tenth of the size of Monster Hunter Wilds versus wish lists where it's much closer. What's the signal that's going to say sales for this game? Oh my god. Yeah. This was our dinner conversation that one night, Adam, which is our side quest that we should do one day. But yes, so engagement, right? Just like in games, it's in marketing. When you have like a super engaged user base and maybe in the beginning it's smaller, it just shows you the potential of where it could go. So I spoke to this woman who work in Crest. Hold on with me for a second. It's a VR game. It's like the number one VR game right now. It's called Animal Company. And so, you know, young woman like was lovely. She's like, "How can I think about growing?" And she gave me

some of the numbers that they have. I don't want to give them out publicly, but they're probably bigger than some of the games that we're talking about on VR, which was insane. And then she said, "I don't pay anybody to do influencer marketing because the Gen Alpha people playing this game have been posting their own content. the influencers are coming to her to get like you know a little bit of like inside information because it's making them money because they have a highly engaged gen alpha audience. So Adam I think to answer your question is yes I think these deeper kind of conversion metrics about the engagement on these types of social posts within your core bullseye target is going to be the real way to understand the potential of the growth. Did that whole rant make sense? Kind of like to to me there's so many of these different KPIs and I think there's some stitching together of them that gives you the signal that you need. And I think right now unfortunately a lot of

marketing teams end up focusing too much on one the one that's doing well and then ignoring the others and then you end up in this situation of like we don't actually know whether we're on track or not to build up that fervor. There is no holy grail marketing KPI in my experience. You know, again, like one of the things I wish we could do is an algorithm that takes in a bunch of these signals across these different channels and kind of puts them together maybe into an overall score, but which is the the game discovery co thing, right? Like that's the hype score that he stitches things together, but then it ends up being much more for indie games, like more predictive there, less predictive for some of the others. So, yeah. No, for sure. [Music]