Is Transmedia the Next Mainstream Game Dev Strategy? - The Metacast by Naavik

there's only one bit of bad news which is i have actually shown maria my game and um there's there was one screen on the game and i gave it to her and she was like anil the ux in this screen is awful and you know who who actually programmed that screen it was me [Music] hi friends welcome to the metacast round table by namic and today i'm joined by anil dasgupta you've seen him here before cpo and co-founder at first light games also joined by abby manu kumar co-founder of navik and tom hammond ceo and co-founder of userwise this is the co-founder podcasts everyone's a co-founder except me that

we know of well i thought we know it's it's coming it's coming right well what secret businesses i have on the side um today we have a diverse uh topics that we're going to be discussing we're going to talk about transmedia like is transmedia the evolution from cross platform i have a very extensive list of how many games i'm now going into other forms of entertainment microsoft is considering in-game ads for free-to-play titles i'm personally extremely excited about that as a mobile product manager in free-to-play and we're also discussing coda payments they raised 619 million and we're going to be finding out who they are and why do they get such a huge amount of of money and if we have some time we'll discuss fortnite's zero build mode that's bringing people back into the game that's really only if we have time because we're going to just talk about some

stuff that's not the topics um tom i don't know if you know tom he's also the podcast host of mastering retention which is an amazing podcast so tom tell us who you are yeah well it's fun i don't actually get to be on too many other podcasts that often so thank you so much for having me um yeah i guess i'm a little bit of a serial entrepreneur i kind of got into the gaming space first kind of on like the ad and then survey monetization side um eventually that led me into a lot of live ops and stuff and more recently started a company called user wise kind of building the the unity of the game operation space so a lot of folks are building basically the same stuff over and over again to try to run their games as a service and we're looking to kind of standardize that so yeah that's kind of what we've been doing yeah fun fact uh this is just seems very surreal because when i was trying to get into games i listened to pretty much

every single episode of mastering retention to learn and be able to pass interviews and get more knowledgeable so yeah it just feels like this full circle now from the podcast i have to get my head around it a little bit sounds to me like you owe tom maybe some dinner or something based on that he's basically got you employed so yeah i'll take a portion of the salary and yeah dinner's great too it's already going away so there won't be anything left soon no not otherwise not a wise investment um yeah i wasn't user-wise in my crypto sorry i i live in england i live in england i need to do some puns and and anil some exciting things are happening at first light games yeah last week we were super lucky we've just closed a private seed sale for tokens

for 5 million us dollars which is amazing and can i just say that you know thank you very much yeah master retention and navic are two of my favorite podcasts for the fact that maria has given me the opportunity to shield my own project on this podcast clearly puts it to number one for me so um for me for me i've been involved in console games i was involved in free to play really early on as well and i think that web 3 is going to be the future of gaming i think the main reason for that is because as a gamer myself fun fact about me i used to skip school to play street fighter 3 in the arcades in the trocadero here in central london and back then you had to pay money to play video games yeah rare concerts i know i'd spend 50p and then if you were good you could stay on for a few hours which was kind of reason why i really liked that game so for me the fact that if you're you could play your favorite game and earn money potentially on it or own your own assets to me is absolutely mind-blowing i think that's incredible it's a very easy user proposition to kind of give someone so if i could play my favorite ever game the street fighter and i could earn money playing it well i wouldn't be involved in this podcast i'd

still be at home right now in my pants xbox controller arcade stick and i'd be playing that game because why not so i think it's going to revolutionize the industry who's going to get there first i don't know i'm sure it'll be like a gradual change it might not necessarily be overnight but you know our ethos is a studios you want to make really really great games that people really enjoy playing and um make them really fun and put that kind of web 3 element in there and um yeah the reason we decided to make a battle royale game is because at the moment a lot of people who play play to end games are based in developing regions so kind of southeast asia india especially i have to say i'm half indian myself so i have you know quite big fondness i think web 3 is going to be huge for that region latin america too and all of these regions if you do your market research they love battle royale so make them a really fun battle royale game make it web 3 let them earn crypto and we think that's going to be success and that's what we're making for there's only one bit of bad news which is i have actually shown maria my game and um there's there was one screen on the game and i gave it to her and she was like anil the ux in this screen is awful and

you know who who actually programmed that screen it was me um now luckily with the funding we have other developers to do of it but do you know like when you're at a party and there's like that girl you fancy and then she walks off with someone else at the end of the evening and you're like oh man i kind of had that really low feeling in my place that like below the velvet thing because the first guy i just had like bad boys yeah yeah yeah see i love it you've got to hear these things up front but i'm not going to lie when she just looked at me she gave me some look and you know maria is really nice on this podcast but she can be pretty brutal hasn't been she kind of looking like ux on the screen it's not very good isn't it no and she was right but i mean i same thing happened same same thing happened with me when uh i also asked maria for feedback from like some navic logo refreshes and yep ux was pretty bad [Laughter] so you guys just got a plan for that high school reunion moment when you come back and you know you're like the all-star yeah that's what you got to go for i feel i was tricked though because anil

didn't say that he had done the work before giving it to me for feedback so i didn't know to keep your emotions and feelings can i say maria because my mother is sort of half polish half ukraine she's got those eastern genetics you know she actually when i told her that we'd raise the money she didn't say congratulations you just said is it real money or is it crypto question mark and that's the sort of thing that i'm used to so honestly i actually really appreciate the feedback and i actually think that's you should if you want to make a great game it's just the fact that you know there's no points of you know blowing smoke up each other's you know what's it you need to know if it's good or not um i've worked on some really good games in the past and at some points those games were quite terrible actually and the way that they got made good is because people had those frank discussions so i think as long as you don't um you're not personally critic you know critical of someone but it's constructive criticism as to the project you're working on i think that's all fair and game and i actually appreciate it so um yeah that screen is getting redesigned as you can imagine

i'll check i'll check on friday um i don't know how to go to the next topic from this um but actually one question though anna like uh i also saw that you uh you have uh your beta testing program going on right now uh so i i used to like accepting new people into the program we are but i think how do we get in a very good question oh my god this is the best podcast ever it's incredible so you have to join our discord last real.com discord if you want to get part of it but i mean no so this is a this is actually quite a new um experience i think for everyone who's making the transition from free to play into web3 right so free to play is all about your cpi's on your social media adverts and getting better ltv than that cpi that is the model web 3 what we're learning really quickly is that the pyramid has been turned on its head so now you actually have to build up your community from grassroots and sort of more sort of like brand marketing get people invested into your

game and get them to sort of create a virality engine and self-propelled it so to answer your question you can get into the beta but in order to do that you have to like take part in various contests that you set and these contests will be things that like you know make some artwork make some posts retweet about this advertise it on your podcast you'd definitely get entry if you did that for example so someone in this this group is definitely getting access to but the point is is that then you're incentivized to you know to keep building the community and so you know what you're trying to do is you're trying to grow your user base from you know the five people when we first started off our discord server to 5 000 to 30 000 to 100 000. so yeah anyone who's thinking about going into web3 this is something you really need to understand and um you know for us you've come from the traditional sort of performance marketing angle and how you kind of do it it's quite refreshing because you have to completely change your way of thinking and figure out yourself and i actually quite like this because i think that free to play i think right now it's maybe a bit of a proven formula people sort of understand how to make a successful game now making a civil game

isn't that easy otherwise wouldn't everyone just be making royal match like dream studios and having a billion dollar company inside 14 months or whatever ridiculous thing they managed to do um it is well that's an amazing job they're people who are world class of what they do um but here because you have to kind of work it out for yourself and that what we're trying to do may not work i think that's part of the fun so um yeah how would you get access join the discord play part of the games give me better ideas to grow our audience and community i'll definitely be receptive to that but that's how it kind of goes but i don't want to like turn this into this but basically the the final takeaway is that the three of us at least have gotten access already just because yeah we just promoted you on the podcast nice yeah my friends are sick of hearing the story uh but you're all my friends now so i'll just share it even more so i it was interesting because i bought crypto for the first time and then suddenly i was getting ads for star atlas so something's going on there and i

decided to click on the star atlas to see the flow and so i clicked on the ad it took me to the star atlas website the website said to connect my wallet so i could start playing it was just on a website that was scrolling just a random one and i clicked to connect my wallet but then the wallets that they were offering me is not not none of them were my my wallet so then i turned and i thought that was really interesting how there's that there's that um how do you call it friction with getting the user into your game because there are just so many wallets out there if you don't have the right one that the game integrated with you can just turn at that point so it's an interesting development in the funnel to get players into your game anyway hopefully that uh hopefully that goes away in the funnel soon yeah hopefully yeah yeah i totally get it like every new crypto game that i've tried to play it's been the same issue you know some new

wallet somewhere where i i'll have to like create a new account then buy some crypto you know convert it over some other third bridge and then finally i have it in my actual crypto wallet but uh and yeah just like starting the game itself is you know a two-hour experience uh just trying to get all that in place you know what if you want to improve your attention there's this brilliant podcast called mastering retention and someone in this channel has got it and i reckon if you listen to that they may give you some tips on how to improve that funnel i couldn't possibly comment tom looking looking sheepishly we try we try but i also hear it's good for uh if you're going through the interview process i will we'll carry on into the first topic today because i can just hear nico he's listening to this episode and he's thinking we should be talking about this in crypto corner so maybe we need to talk about user funnels in a crypto episode in the future i

think that would be quite interesting i agreed so transmedia i got a little clickbait title transmedia the evolution from cross-platform and the reason why i started thinking about this is just a number of studios that are being founded to do transmedia products including games and the number of games that are now being shown on as a film as the series for example this week streets of rage announced the movie jason mamoa being considered to star in minecraft and he's a huge star in the acting world we know the witcher although that was book game and now siri eldon ring they announced that they wanted their ip to be more than games sonic the hedgehog was in roblox kenny crush saga new movie coming out we saw the unseen studio based in tokyo that's been founded to build experiences that go go further than than games god of war

going to have a prime show and i can just keep going on through this list and so it's just making me think we have more and more games that are embracing transmedia and nowadays we're so difficult to acquire users you want to increase the number of touch points that you can have with them and keep reminding them of the story getting you engaged in the lore and the experience and then you go to play a game and it's all vice versa you could also have a movie and then bring people sorry have a game to bring people to to the movie so i'm just wondering is this is this the next big step is this becoming normalized and expected from popular games you can't just stay a game you want to leverage the profitable opportunities of being in transmedia um what do you think actually maybe even to kind of take a step back um i actually feel like some of the examples you know you listed out there

is one distinction that we should probably make between transmedia and cross platform um because i actually think those are two different things um for me like transmedia is more about um more about like taking that ip and kind of expanding or telling stories of that ip across different platforms versus cross-platform is more about recycling that ip you know across different platforms or recycling that story and not kind of like adding on to it so probably like the witcher example is maybe more of the cross is more in the cross-platform bucket versus maybe league of legends and you know what they did with arcane is maybe more in the trans media bucket and actually don't think i feel like actually both these strategies um they're both like two important parts uh

for making like really highly profitable entertainment ecosystems and they can actually be additive to each other so i would even like not it even though transmedia is becoming more popular i wouldn't even think about it as like an evolution to cross-platform it's just it's a different um it's a different uh thing entirely and cross-platform can kind of co-exist with it and basically ips can pursue both strategies at the same time but at least that's how i think about it but uh but yeah curious to hear what you guys uh feel do you do you know what you said about your mother anil and that she's just ruthless this is what i feel now manu is a very heavy critique of of the daughter for the ux ux feedback that's really really interesting so um

just before we move on i think the takeaway of what you're saying is that transmedia is when you use the same ip but you're telling different stories across different mediums yeah or expanding on a story um for example like these animes and mangas you know they would like start the story um in a book continue it in the game you know continue it in the next book maybe it's in the movie after that and basically you have this you have the core audience you're kind of like taking the school audience from medium to medium so that they can continue to explore the story and kind of like leaving those breadcrumbs so that they can continue to explore the story but but yeah cross-platform feels more about like just recycling the same thing and you know more targeted towards audience expansion and maybe even a little bit of engagement and re-engagement versus in transmedia it's a little bit flipped so it's more about like engagement and

re-engagement and audience expansion also does happen but maybe come second so with them that makes sense tom what do you think you know i think the most valuable thing that a game studio can ultimately create is an ip um you you look at the top publishers that are out there like your activisions your ubisofts what do they really have they have really great ip like you know blizzard has diablo and warcraft and you know call of duty from activision you know these are kind of evergreen ips that continually generate pretty much all of their revenue um and so i i think that ip's kind of core there and i was thinking about transmedia a little bit and i was kind of reflecting back to my childhood pokemon came out right um and yeah that was probably a great example of transmedia done well um

you know they had a show which probably was you know my first experience to it when i was over at my friend's house and i got to watch it because i didn't really get to watch a lot of tv at my house um and so oh this pokemon thing is kind of cool um and then you could get trading cards and you could do a bunch of trading with other people on the bus um and then you know i finally got like a game boy color and like now i actually get to experience that myself um and it's just kind of this whole ecosystem that like draws you into this ip um i think more people are probably leaning into it because well frankly user acquisition costs were already going up before idfa and all that kind of stuff but you know people have more options that are you know so entertaining demanding their attention all over the place than ever before and you're trying to come up with creative ways to find and reach new people in new ways and i also think it's good ways to re-engage your audience like league of legends doing their arcane series

you know it's possible they started to hit the point where their monthly active users were going down a little bit and they wanted to re-engage some people that like heavily played in college like me but hadn't really since because it was too demanding of a game but then you know watching that again kind of draws back the desire and now you can actually engage deeper with those champions and you can engage in a different way with the game so i think it's all about you know recognizing that the most valuable thing you can create is that ip and then how do you expand and build upon that ip so like that netflix series of arcane it adds a lot of depth to the ip of league of legends i think and that makes it more valuable yeah i know someone who's quite a big player of league of legends and he was saying it was difficult to create a connection with the characters because lol doesn't really dig deep into their backstory and who they are like that important element of the rpg of do i identify with the background of this person and do i want to i don't know play as them act act like them and

arcane gave that because you got to know and got to know them you got to create an emotional connection and then you kind of bring that into the game even though the game doesn't give you that directly i thought that was very interesting i neil well what are your thoughts on translation i think tom has stolen all the good stuff to say but i want to touch on it because i think he had it what he said was brilliant i think one he touched on idfa and i think idfa is a lot about privacy which is a big thing that sort of become like a bit of a buzzword over the last two years that people feel very conscious about having their data self-harvested you know you mentioned maria how you bought some crypto and you immediately got advertised the crypto game for example right that's that in action so with more and more people becoming privacy conscious it means that performance marketing is going to kind of drop which means what well that means that we have to go back to marketing how it was done in the console days which was brand marketing and traditional marketing activities and tom mentioned again how was brand marketing done ip ip was the way to do it because an ip kind of security for generations how many call

of duty games have there been i mean what are they up to now call of duty 22 it must be or something like that you must lose count a bit but by making a great ip that is universally loved it's something you can sell over and over again is very popular it's funny to kind of use the term transmedia because again with thomas example he mentioned pokemon well how about things like transformers how about things like star wars you know this thing's been going on for for a million times and you could argue that disney's just a marketing company that uses its films to market its toys which sell gangbusters right so it's a very smart strategy to use and then again like well why are they doing it now well another thing that's kind of quite frequent in ip cycles is other than like maybe two of which star wars and pokemon are the only two i can think of most other ips are cyclical which they have a kind of boom and bust cycle so what tends to happen is a generation will grow up with something and they'll find it really popular then they'll grow old and you know as you get like you go from kids to teenager you're not really interested in your transformers anymore well maybe i was because i was a bit lame like that but you know you get to sort of 18 19 and it's more about you know being an

adult then rather than playing with your toys but then you start getting to 30 years old or something like that and you might have children and now oh a new transformers movie is coming out it's about 12 years since the last one oh i see because that's when that generation is old enough to have kids now and so i have fond memories memories of transformers so i take my kid to the movies and i'm really enjoying the movie because i love optimus prime and now my kid he's seeing optimus prime and he really likes it too and so and that's why you see quite often that you get this kind of cycle with ips and they do that because that's like a very common thing to know so you can bet for example ghostbusters have done it recently right you can almost see the timing like to like or masters of the universe is another one that's coming up anything that you like it will come back in x amount of years so you know think about something that you like during the 90s that sort of thing is almost bound to be coming back like you know where is the buffy the vampire slayer reboot it's got to be going around hollywood right now in my opinion because it's just sort of so primed for it right um retro is i think all the 80s

have been done so the next thing will be the look how look how excited maria just got when i mentioned that i know i did just feel it felt uncanny because i love it so am i i am you know who wouldn't be what a great show so yeah i think it's really about i think trans media is a really key play for any company it's like the dream really when you have an ip you know games as well you're changing platforms who knows what they'll be on you know we mentioned a few podcasts back you know what if you've got like the netflix for games you don't even have your own hardware the best thing you can do is protect yourself and have beloved ips that people like that you can sell in many different ways many different touch points it reduces your advertising costs it's just all one big positive loop feedback cycle so that that's why people do it and yeah touching people in different ways or as an audience gets older they still have fondness for something through nostalgia but they want to interact with it in a different way so i might not play league of legends anymore but i might love to watch the tv show and that engages the news generation as well so i think it's um it is i wouldn't necessarily say it's

the future i think in some ways i'm kind of surprised that people didn't do it more often maybe it's because in the past you had really poor movie adaptations like um you know the tomb raider one was a bit dodgy the street fight movie is awful etc etc and you know maybe people are getting better at it now i think to be fair i'm not a fan of league of legends but when i saw arcane i was like wow did pixar just make a league of legends animated series that's how high quality it is and i think if people it to that level then it's bound to do well um so i think more and more companies will do it especially as we see huge consolidation amongst the top players like why would you not do it if you've got a massive ip it just makes sense to do it that feels like a long game though if you're a small studio do you think the difference nowadays is that before you had to play this game throughout like you were saying 12 15 years before you could succeed with transmedia but nowadays considering the number of pla platforms and the ease to develop for

them the lower costs of entry that it's becoming a strategy that can be more widely used or perhaps within i think perhaps it's just because video games has grown up basically right so you know people who are maybe seven or eight when they were playing video games they are probably well into their 30s by now so they are having children so maybe it's the first cycle for them to really start pushing it and getting a new audience into it i i think that's more of it why it makes sense for it to happen now but i think it is something you'll see more and more often in the future i think just frankly before that there you know video games are still a pretty new industry right like you know when did the nez come out maybe 83 or something like that i i don't really know um so before my time but you know uh not much though um so at some point you know there it does become cyclical as i say so i appreciate what you're saying it's like you know if you're gonna do this thing you know why would you do it there's not that much shorts of involvement but these days i think attention spans are a lot shorter and it you know look at for example how retro consoles sell really

well right you know there's just like a super nintendo with a usb port you plug it into your tv and it works and they fly off the shelves so there's definitely something to it there and okay look how massive video games is right i mean look microsoft bought activision blizzard for 67 billion right if that doesn't show you just how massive it is and if these techniques are being used in the movie industry which is only worth 10 billion or something you know or much more than that you know what i mean compare compared to video games it's much smaller then why would you not employ the same proven techniques in video games and just make them work better so um i i think for the really big guns it's worth doing yeah for someone who's just starting up definitely not you definitely aspire to get there i have a bit of a philosophical question um i'll ask you manu because you seem to not not enjoy my philosophical clickbaity questions so something that i feel right now in the

world is that people want more significance to what they're doing i think people in general are getting tired of just doing the same things over and over again that don't have a benefit for the world don't um tap into your creative nature you're just in this box doing something that's not very meaningful and sometimes i wonder is this for example we saw with the unseen studio they want to embrace creativity and create this in working environment where creativity comes first and you're exploring more than a game is just an iep product do you think that part of this is just people and people in general are looking to work at a company and and build a product that allows them to explore more of their creativity and be more free in the way that they create um so do you mean like is that kind of a

catalyst for more trans media occurring yes not with the bigger ips and the big companies but seeing smaller companies mid-sized companies trying to achieve this you can say no yeah i mean i think it's probably definitely a part of it um but yeah i mean at the end of the day it does come down to games being a business and yeah winning strategies uh that can result in highest profitability in that business will basically you know uh uh or yeah gunner like the most attention uh attraction and i guess you had to appear earlier point about um you know what like or to another's earlier point but you know how ips i mean yeah the games industry is about like 50 60 years old and some ips have you know uh now matured enough for them

to explore trans media in like a pretty meaningful way and and i guess that's one of the key reasons uh that it will only increase uh going forward um because yeah we just have like more and more ips now maturing and you know survival of the fitness with ips that's going to happen and you know there will be like more transmedia ips but probably another more macro trend uh when it comes to consumers is yeah i mean i think all of us just want access to those ips you know at the right place at the right time on every device in every shape and form in every like you know interactive sense and we're just like um yeah we're hungry for more content and if it's an ip that we love we'll engage with it you know uh so that that so and and that's why i say like the line between transmedia and cross platform is actually really thin because

to achieve that you do need to go across a platform but when once you do go across platform if you want to drive engagement for like your absolute core golden cohort audience you're like you're super fans then it has to be about like being able to expand on that story tell that story across like different platforms and really like drive that engagement and therefore you know customer ltvs and such so yeah i mean but yeah none of that can happen uh without you know uh the people behind it and to your point probably what you said would be one one key motivator for the people actually building these transmedia experiences so okay well we'll see what happens over the next the next few years maybe buffy the vampire slayer will come about another animated series

i do have one question for everybody uh but if there's like one iv that you kind of hope uh to see going transmedia what would it be i think tom knows the answer already i don't know i'm trying to think of like what's my oh man i like so many games and stuff that's this is a hard question i i could go first like like while you guys were talking the one ip that i really uh would have hope uh for is maybe um gears of war uh because that's okay yeah that's like one that one that storyline uh is probably the only game that actually like you know uh yeah brought a tear to my eye while i was playing it and uh that's definitely one that i would have loved uh or yeah maybe it can still happen um and i think max payne tried it a little bit but uh maybe not enough uh but who knows

that would probably might be my second uh option uh nero tomato for me for sure hands down definitely please make this come true for me boringly it would be street fighter i know they already tried it street fighter has truly iconic characters you got chun li the strongest woman in the world that was thought of all the way back in 1992 the russian wrestler indian guy who's amazing who can kick your ass like why there isn't an amazing live-action movie like mortal kombat i think did a really good job of it street fighter they also made a really great animated movie but it didn't do it wasn't as popular because manga wasn't and anime wasn't popular sort of back in the 90s so i think they should try it again because i've always thought i don't work for them anymore but they have made characters that are like on a part with superheroes in terms of their popularity and their coolness and they just couldn't maximize their usage because they're not that good at marketing whereas i feel if someone like electronic cards are in charge of street fighter whilst the game quality might

not be as high the marketing and sales potential would go through the route because the hardest thing to do is to make truly amazing characters like you know i'm a guy but i wear a chun-li t-shirt sometimes you know i mean that's how cool the character is and i don't think she's like over-sexualized either she just looks cool because she's got the chinese dress and kicks your ass so yeah i would love to see more of that in that universe okay first light games you know what you need to do to avoid those productivity from decreasing never get street fighter for your office [Laughter] tom so i i'm leaning towards some of like wizards of the coast games like dungeons and dragons and magic the gathering like yeah they've got a lot of characters but they have so much lore and depth and opportunity for different stories to occur within that universe i could see some really awesome books and movies and stuff kind of coming out there yeah definitely oh can i give a second answer destiny

please as well a destiny movie anyway we need to get we need to get moving um or else we're going to talk about ips that we love for the rest of the episode now microsoft's in-game ads for free to play games i thought this was extremely interesting because i personally i play a lot of mobile games and i love ads the ads where i choose to watch them to get rewards not the ads where i'm forced to see them because i don't really monetize that much and i just like having the option and why don't we have this in console for free to play games it just makes a lot of sense and sorry are you guys familiar with player one dave madden's company um they're doing this actually um i mean at a smaller scale than maybe what microsoft could come in and do but i know that they've been doing this it's like they work with brands to get like brand quality tv and then they show them in pc and console games just like you

know a free to play ad placement that you'd place you know in a mobile game they do it on pc and console okay what do you think about having this feature in console games i think it's great i also told dave that i think this is a great company idea so yeah i think it makes total sense and i think more and more games especially pc and console other than maybe like the elden rings and you know maybe some of the playstation games that are like 40 hours of single player content and stuff i think more of them are going to go to free to play type modes as well and so i think having ads in there is just a natural way to offset having to do forced purchases and stuff yeah i thought it was interesting because they only they communicated doing in-game billboards for example so static ads that you see throughout environments they did not mention having video ads so you couldn't actually do the types of

monetization through ad revenue that you have in mobile games right now surely that that has to be the next stage well i okay i'm jaded but in-game billboard ads seem so stupid to me like okay maybe you can get some brands to do that but if you want to track roi of like perfect like you can never do it like it's just not gonna work like i think they're raising a bunch of money and they're doing some cool things and there's all these companies trying to do it but like at the end of the day it's like some billboard i don't recognize billboards in like the normal world and i'm sure not going to recognize them in the like the game world and they're only going to fit in like a certain subset of games so i think rewarded video ads like what player one is doing definitely has a future in free-to-play you know pc console games and stuff like that um the billboard ads i don't know maybe in the metaverse it'll you know take off and you could do some sort of like tracking that it's actually going to work or whatnot but

you know to me the only billboard that's maybe trackable would be like the culver's putting up the billboard you know ahead of the uh the stop and you realize that you're hungry as you're driving and so then they can see well our revenue went up fifty thousand dollars last month after we put the billboard up so that must have been there you know the cause of it or something like that i don't know i think i think it'll probably be uh triangulation like that i mean here's like an alternate idea so uh what if you got to see like a like a gucci clothing billboard in fortnight and but then and then you went to the store to actually like buy a skin that was you know also gucci branded and in the background there's like a revenue share etc happening on on those assets but um that could be like or oh yeah what do you think about like that flow i think that some people have tried that before and i think it's always been a bit indifferent i think to be fair now

that everyone's going into the metaverse all these sort of ideas are coming back up again and you know kind of what's old is new again and it's like these ideas were tried in second life and um playstation home back in 2005 but now that we've got like a maybe a truly interoperable multi-cross-platform multiverse that it could work again and it might do i'll be honest i right now i don't really see it as pothom's thing i always agree with what you say if it's just billboards that's been tried so many times and it it barely works in the real world you know it's only really used by brands like coca-cola and coca-cola's philosophy is they want to be more ubiquitous than water they've basically conquered the world so much that they're literally trying to make it that people drink more coca-cola than water because that's the only enemy left for them to defeat right so sure maybe they will put some in-game brands so you know you don't go more than eight seconds without seeing the coca-cola brand but i don't think that anyone else it would be too roi positive but i think the wider subject and you know why you're getting excited mirror is that yeah free-to-play games on on

high-end platforms why not have adverts i think for me i would draw the line as long as it's not on premium games that's something that i don't want to sort of ruin experience i sort of think i remember once having just in our country sky tv right which is like premium channels and then you pay 60 pounds a month and then you still get adverts on your premium tv and i was like what hang on a minute so i'm paying i'm paying 60 pounds like a month to watch game of thrones and i still get ad breaks or i could just uh maybe watch this on some other sources couldn't mention what they are and and not have to see that like it was a bit of a no-brainer and that made it feel a little bit worse it seemed like netflix right now you don't you don't have adverts other than it recommends the next thing to watch and that's really good whereas if netflix all of a sudden had an advert it was sort of cheap in the experience so i think if it's free that's fine yeah i know we're going to kind of go our eyesight i think as long as um you know they sort of keep it out of that that's okay and maybe the one other thing to add to this is maybe where the billboard is coming is trying to be non-intrusive in terms of ads which is always sort of like the holy grail there's actually a london-based company called audio mob and they do

audio adverts so the idea being player now i'm not too convinced on that but apparently they have the numbers they've certainly raised a lot of money maybe that's the way to go i mean if you've ever played the gta games right sometimes i don't know about you but i would just pull over and listen to the the gta radio because it was like as good as the game like it was hilarious some of the things that they would come up with like you know what was it called life invader which was their sort of facebook uh sarcastic take on the things like that so maybe something like that could work um i guess as it becomes more and more competitive people have to find additional revenue sources i think we're all fine with that i mean i can see why people to do it but i think as long as it is unintrusive and it you know it adds rather than takes away and i think you know your example maria about how in free to play is like an opt-in and you know that watching adverts allowing you to play a bit more and then sometimes you might even see a game that looks cool when you download it i think that's like a very nice cycle but then those other games there's hyper casual games where you get no chance but to watch the advert and it forces eight of them down your you know your throat before you can do that and obviously we know how their

model works you know if you can watch you gotta play in airplane mode yeah there you go guys someone knows someone knows how to get around it but i mean um you know that i feel leaves like a bad taste in your mouth so i think as long as it's done tastefully in the right way they've got no problem with it um but let's see how greedy people get with it because that's always the issue isn't it yeah you saw my eyes light up when you talked about netflix yeah because it seemed i i don't know how much of it is speculation to be honest but it feels like the next step for them and they're increasing their subscription like quite a lot it's it's personally it's just becoming so expensive where i'm starting to question whether i want to be subscribed and i thought i'd be forever subscribed to to netflix and so they're considering or there's speculation that they're considering having a lower price subscription but you'll see ads even netflix are considering it that's interesting gotta make sense that there are actually two other companies also that are kind of doing

these um you know non-intrusive ads like when on the billboards or on game objects so there's one another london-based company also i think called admix and another one called uh anzu or anzu um and yeah both of them have actually like yeah gone i think both of them have gotten their series b's uh pretty recently and to be honest like when uh when maria also like brought up this topic uh that you know we'll talk about this topic i was like pretty split on on the effectiveness of billboards because i mean i was i was looking at the market back in 2010 when you know facebook games were or farmville was doing like mcdonald's billboards on its you know isometric uh isometric view games and i mean they were just not effective but looking at these two companies it kind of did make me ask the question like okay you know what change like is this

just to entertain the possibility of it coming back like why would it come back and i guess the one reason that or the one thing that changed for me is well the number of gamers in the world has basically tripled or more than tripled since 2010 and as we saw with kovid like games are definitely becoming you know community watering holes in a way people gather in games and like and brands have to stay relevant and you know brands like coca-cola where you know the only enemy is water like they have to like you know stay relevant uh in all these different mediums and to me like that felt and and that kind of like that thinking just justified like okay why xbox is first of all you know only limiting it to these non-intrusive in-game object ads and also why they're kind of limit limiting it to brands

to start with and and that's why then and then i kind of went okay yeah i could probably see like you know a gucci billboard coming up in fortnite and me going and purchasing uh the gucci uh you know jacket or whatever cosmetic in the store me thinking continue to think about gucci later maybe going to i mean i'll never buy a gucci jacket ever but just you don't have to lie money you can no you can tell the truth but uh but yeah i mean i could like i could imagine that kind of flow it's just you know um basically brands being in the in the right places where all the people are and and and games are definitely one of those places and and from xbox's perspective i mean generally we're seeing even in game pass etc you know they they generally have a pretty flexible mindset when it comes to like offering business models to developers and how they want to like monetize their um

their content and and yeah so you know why not like provide an advertising option to uh to the free to play uh uh gamers but yeah because it's also um they kind of have to like tread uh lightly because i mean it is a control first audience and i mean we we all know how that audience maybe feels again uh feels about ads so i don't know this kind of felt like a good balance but yeah remains to be seen if it if it'll actually be effective you know um yeah yeah i think it'll come down to the roy of having such a feature in your game like how easy is it to do the integration do you need an engineer to spend four weeks doing it is it one day how long does it take you to have those billboards with ads within your game and then second how much are people willing to pay for their ad to

show on such a billboard so i personally until i know i have data on those two aspects it's quite hard to think to to have an opinion about whether i'd go for it or not i'm i'm hoping as more companies do this and we start seeing it in games we can start having some notion about the way of of doing such a thing cool yeah oh yeah government uh yeah i was just going to say that um one other thought that came to mind which is kind of also a question mark to me is like well i'm assuming also this uh i mean this is not existing in xbox you know any of the games that are part of xbox game pass but would add i mean would like a microsoft ad platform you know permeate to even the xbox game pass games at some point as like you know a fifth potential um

monetization option for developers over there um that's like an open open question for me but i guess if they see success over here maybe it also gets into the xbox game pass experience um and it's just like a you know it's like a turn on turn off switch if people if developers want to use it um but yeah we'll have to see as more more details come come through i'm definitely keen to to understand how far they're going to push this and just before we move on to the code of payments discussion um anil are you thinking about having rewarded as within blast royale at the moment not because we want to keep the game i guess our kind of whole ethos is to try and be the good guys of web3 so in doing that we want to be like sort of as gamer focused as possible and whilst you know adverts have their place if we're trying to go for more of a premium experience if it's not right but i have already seen games that are trying to do it i mean today is just another revenue

source i don't think people have a problem with it per se um but it's not on our immediate roadmap though so coda payments they raised 690 million a valuation of 2.5 billion and in case you don't know coda payments i'm going to try to tldr this very quickly so they're a fintech company based in singapore they work with some huge publisher names such as tencent garina and montoon that publishes mobile legends bang bang and they also work with non-gaming products such as tinder that was surprising to learn and they have a bunch of products so they have kodashop which is an app and a browser shop the app being on android only from what i've been able to find codepay which is an integration with payments you don't have to be on kodashop but then you have this integration with a number of current

currencies and payment providers because not everyone has paypal or visa for example and then they have the extra which is i think if you are integrated into kodashop it integrates you into other e-commerce platforms one of them being shopping which i think is quite popular and so i i know that there's another company doing something similar i believe it's called exola um i i think what i don't fully understand and i'm keen to keen to clarify with this discussion is that i know with the epic versus apple the outcome is that potentially apple is going to have to allow other payment methods um but there's no real date on that on when it can happen so i'm just a bit unclear about the business model for companies such as coda payments and xola and how did they get such a huge valuation

tom what do you think so i have okay i'm going to tell you guys something that i haven't told really too many people about but when that south korea thing happened where they forced google and apple to say hey you have to accept third party payments um kind of had a little bit of a light bulb so you know with user-wise we give you this really sophisticated ui to be able to control you know everything in your game like building out your shop and segmenting it and time-based stuff and all the offers and exactly what segment gets and a b testing all that stuff really we give all the data to the point where the player actually clicks that buy button and then you know you send it into google or apple you know iap or whatever so it's kind of like could we actually just add a fintech payments portion of that um to like our you know free version of the tool um and the answer was

yes in theory we could do we want to build that all ourselves no maybe we should partner with like stripe or xola i won't say who i've talked to and potentially do it but i you know i will say yeah it's there and probably the revenue of a company is maybe like one percent after the fees that there's so many fees that live uh you know with visa taking a cut and the bank taking a cut and everyone else that's in there so you know suffice to say there's maybe like one percentage profit you know on the end um but then you know all this stuff's been going on google and apple ultimately i kind of had to like lay this thing down to the ground and say i have no idea when this would even be possible like right now apple's like okay you're going to have to pay 27 surcharge on whatever your third party payments and it's like well what's the point then you're not saving it so it's not making any sense i think that it's going to be a long drawn-out battle because there is so much money at stake for google and

apple now if they want to take the high road they could just say hey we're just gonna charge the five percent and make the cut and i i think all the cases would go away but i don't think they're going to do that because that's like tens of billions of dollars of revenue they'd be leaving on the table and so i think it's going to be a long drawn out battle and i think some countries may never get to that point but certain ones like there's the free app store thing going on in the us right now that's going on there's some uh lawsuits and penalties and stuff going on in a couple like european countries but you know they're charging like five million dollars a day or something like that which sounds like a lot but to the amount that apple is making versus what they're losing it's it's pennies um and so i think until those fees significantly go up and the country's government as a whole really forces and comes down it's gonna stay this way and they're gonna have to fight for you know every you know percent of uh rev share that they have

in there um i do think that it's going to be an opportunity eventually i think the dominoes are starting to fall but how many dominoes and how long it's going to take i think it's going to be a you know years before it really kind of comes to play um it seems like you know i hadn't really heard of coda before um but it seems like they do look and they're trying to have like a third-party app store kind of a play for some of these external things that could be where they're at it looks like they're maybe at like about 150 million in revenue last year so i'm i'm assuming that that's a large part of where their evaluation came from on you what do you think yeah i mean yeah i mean also to kind of like second everything that tom said but yeah i feel like one reason is definitely that just this regulatory climate is you know moving in the favor of companies like coda and xola etc

um we it's just a matter of you know when those dominoes will actually fall and that value will unlock for these companies but probably another um another reason i could think of is is just that there are there are many gamers that are or there's a potential gaming audience in various emerging countries that are still not online and they are now coming online for example um i think one of the big big reasons that um gaming in china also exploded uh was also because of you know just localized payment infrastructure the same thing is also happening in india at the moment with you know um with companies like ptm etc google pay you know coming up coming up with an india solution and and africa is a market that a lot of people are now looking at um you know and that's definitely going to be a continent where localized uh payment

solutions from companies like you know coda or xola etc will be quite valuable for unlocking value in that market or yeah basically allowing these people to you know engage with in-app purchases uh through whatever means they have and and yeah so i feel like that would probably be like a second reason for why the valuation might be so high because that opportunity does still exist in in these emerging markets that do have like a significant population of people who are interested in games but um are either just not online or don't have the means to you know monetize even when they want to so um yeah those are like the two thoughts i had about this but yes and uh i believe that eu is exploring a digital markets act that would force apple to allow users to

install apps from outside the app store allow devs to use the app store without having to use apple's payment system being able to sideload other third-party stores so that's the another regulation that could prov could prove to be quite good for companies like this i think what i was seeing in my search that left me with some doubts as okay as a product manager of a game is it worth the investment in integrating with another third party to save on the commission that the apple and google play store would would charge me and i was looking at code payments and i believe code shop takes a 15 commission instead of 30 percent exola has a 5 commission um i think that is higher in xola for certain payment types though like some places like half descending cash and and there's somewhere where they list out

the actual percent that you take for like each thing that they do but i think it they try to do five percent overall i was going to say i think with code to pay i think what their proposition is though is that it's specifically like manually kind of touched on this but there's a lot of people in the world who don't have a credit card right therefore they love mobile games it's not even a case of being online or not actually now people ask us and get online but they can't pay so how do you pay so indonesia is a great example of this and garina i think are one of the biggest users of coda pay and yeah so they've scaled up garina free fire so people there can use vouchers and they go to their local shop or their convenience store off license and buy the vouchers there and then they monetize in the game and these things sort of seem a bit anticipated to us like they don't really work even though you see these sort of things for sale in in shops and grocery stores here in the west but over there it's massive because people just don't have credit cards and they never will they're completely off the grid right they don't have a proper formal contract it's all going to be cash in hand so how do you monetize that user base so if you wanted to scale up your game and make it popular in

southeast asia or regions like that india is another great example you would go with one of these kind of solutions and they've got real revenue and i think someone like this the reason why they're valued so highly is it's working in southeast asia well look at india a lot of people in india right how about nigeria right where lagos is going to become the biggest city in the world but i think 2030 is predicted to have a population of 41 million or something insane like that latin america again so although maybe one day all of these things will be like fully first order countries as well how long is that going to be and in the meantime being able to actually monetize these because at the moment they just don't even register we don't even realize it but all these people have the demand they want to pay and the games just have to be set up so i think coder payments by comparison to someone like exola um they're not really i think they of course part of their offering is also to be like a different app store but it's more actually facilitating people to be able to even pay in the first place which i think is different which also is arguably the sort of thing what crypto is trying to do as well again that's why crypto has

been really big in philippines for example because it's like when people found out oh you just wait you know you don't have a credit card but anyone can set up a metamask wallet if you've got online yada yada then you can get someone for you to exit your crypto interfere and they can give it back to you all of a sudden that unlock this earning potential so yeah don't forget about the rest of the world i guess would be my tldr there i think you know indonesia i think it's the fourth most populous country on the planet which surprised me i think it's like 800 million population india's over a billion latin america brazil you know as a region tons of people there as well and don't sleep on these territories they are worth a massive amount of money and coming back to garina again that game was massively profitable just by being the first to monetize in those territories moon ton again where did mobile legends bang bang first started making his money in southeast asia it's only when it came over because it was so popular over there that it did that so um yeah i maybe doesn't surprise me that is worth so much because i think something like this is sort of one of those sort of under the radar sort of things that you just don't realize how big it is until if you went around in

vietnam and you were like why are all these kids playing mobile legends bang bang and how are they doing it you're like ah is this is how it works yeah yeah that's very interesting um i do feel the question of like you know whether um yeah like all these overhead costs related to you know integrating these kinds of sdks maintaining them i don't even know what kind of an account it's a try this might cause for developers but um yeah that there it's a pretty valid question you know that you asked maria like will it kind of be worth it to have all of these options also in the uh in the game um but yeah i guess that remains to be seen just depending on you know how these how the implementations uh actually uh play out in all these markets and you know to

what anil said like how much of that uh how much of that monetization potential is actually unlocked yeah i would do research i think it's going to depend on your daily active users and where they're at and your total revenue and total size and all those things and you weren't that you know garina free fire if they can even make an additional five percent per month that's maybe you know non-trivial revenue but for someone that's maybe making like i don't know a million per year total for the game it's like is it worth all the hassle and stuff probably not but then again you want to go through and i would probably like survey my users and maybe those areas that i can't reach like are they unable to pay or you know you just gotta do a little digging and research i think as you would with any sort of product manager type yeah i'm i was trying to think i don't know off the back of my mind whether i apple's terms and conditions would allow

for a mobile game to integrate with something like coder payments they'll if it's directly in there they will shut it down um xola has a web shop so you can give them like a link that will open a website where you can like pre-populate the items and then they can pay with a credit card and xolo will take a you know five percent cut of that so you can do that i know they've done that with like scopely and they you know push a few others but like you know scopely there really only pushes that to their heavy whale spenders because they want to recoup the costs of those whales um and so they give them like better deals to go to the the web flow and so because they know they're going to spend the money they can save some money they'll go through those additional steps but i think the average user you know it's hard enough to get them to just do the one-click payment with you know apple iap but going through additional hoops you're gonna drastically you know reduce your conversion there yeah

it's probably like a pretty big risk actually you know uh because at the end of the day access to these games is still going to be happening through apple and android devices um and therefore and for a company like apple you know they're going to be controlling that experience and regardless of you know how favorable the regulatory environment is apple can still come up with all the smokes and mirrors required to you know incentivize paying through their own uh systems like maria like the ux would be pretty bad you know i'm going going to a quota and and kind of paying so well that's why maria could only get the android app right you've answered the question because because you are allowed to do this stuff in those regions so um yeah that's the reason yeah yeah and there was actually no i i entered their uk shop there wasn't much there it was just a handful of games maybe two two handfuls of games but maybe that is the case where

if you don't have an in-game reference that you have this other shop and players find it somehow through other means that's not through the game maybe a website your social post something you can email them email them about it if you collect email but you know that's a whole nother thing that we don't want to get into right now [Music] actually well i i wish them the best i think it is the it is going to be part of the future we have to see when the dominoes are going to fall very exciting to see them raise um such a valuation and funds so yeah keen to see what what comes next i don't think we're going to have time to talk about fortnite's zero build mode and unless you want to give a quick comment [Laughter] i don't know how quick how quick it will be um i i think yeah the summary

maybe next time the summary is that fortnight when they released the new season they removed building from their battle royale people initially it was received with mixed feelings but then streamers actually saw uh people coming back to the game because that the building has such a huge skill bar that you have to be very good at it and then you just feel crushed when you play the game because you're not that good and so it just made it a bit easier for newcomers or people returning to the game so actually ended up being really positive and i believe recently they brought building back into the battle royale and now they have a zero build mode to try to retain those players they haven't said whether they're going to keep it or not so i imagine they're just doing a lot of experimentation to analyze the impact on the game of having less of a skill gap um for new players yeah i was going to ask anil because a blast royale being being um [Music] are you is this something that

you're considering during your game design yeah i mean not specifically building but i think it's quite an interesting topic because it's like how much relevance does skill have in gaming because when fortnite first came out being able to watch streams and see these amazing people do this like incredible like super fast buildings like wow okay this game isn't just the pub g clone it's got something unique to it but then as you've you correctly pointed out when you try and play and do it for yourself you're like unless you have the reflexes of a cat and the manual dexterity of like a gymnast it's impossible to do it and you cannot do it on the mobile just no way right you just don't have the capacity to do it now what we found in ours is that we actually started our game with like a death match mode which is like much more brutal you die a lot very skill based now some people in a team when i'm one of them we actually prefer that mode but we notice when testing it that it's a real feel this bad kind of game mode and so the general audience didn't like it as much whereas battle royale because in battle royale is quite strategic and you in fact cannot shoot anyone get all the way to the final two or three people and only start shooting people then and

legitimately win is more popular so i think what obviously the product managers for fortnite have obviously realized is someone came up with the a b test and it was hypothesis i think that getting rid of build mode will increase retention okay let's try it and the fact that they've now made a zero build mode probably shows that the results are quite promising so now they're going to keep it again and then they'll probably they might even remove build mode altogether right if it turns out that that's the game that people want to play but i think it's you know i could talk all day about game design i really like talking about it but i think finding the sweet spot between sort of skill and luck is quite important and i think it's not surprising that games that are kind of infinite but have some sort of element of rng to it tend to be the most popular so for example um you know if you play like mario kart while getting the power-ups and at what point in the races is kind of the rng element that means it's not just the best person wins every time there's always a chance that someone else could win and card games are the best example right the fact that the deck is shuffled means that every time you play even if you're the best player in the world sometimes you get the worst hand and the

best players can make the best out of the worst hands but they won't always win it's also a reason why in my opinion something like hearthstone is not as complex as magic the gathering and in my opinion isn't as good a game to play but it's actually more popular because it's more friendly to people to play and it seems like it depends what you're going for but the sweet spot is there so to answer your question i think we're trying to go for a game that makes it so that people can enjoy it no matter what your skill level is it does allow for mastery but it isn't so brutal that you'll never win and you know it's kind of funny because my favorite game as we mentioned many times the street fighter but street fighter is brutal like street fighter is kind of like a 95 to 5 type game so like i have a friend he plays akuma i play dudley i beat him maybe one in 10 games and i don't think even the thousands of matches that i've played him that he's ever got lucky like every time he's beaten me i've always been like wow he's just better right and um i i kind of like that brutality and i'm just like even though he's beating me 10 times in a row in my head i'm just thinking yeah i'm going to win the next 11 and i've never won the next 11. i don't think i've even won more than like three in a

row so some people like that but i think that's a very old school feeling i think these days i always think it's one of the reasons for example why mobas overtook rts games because in mobas you can kind of get carried by other people on your team so even if i'm not the most skillful person on the navic team here because you've got tom and maria that are just carrying us and destroying people in the lanes i can still win a couple of games and you can teach me and i can get better so i think this is an important part of game design going forward is that this kind of old-school brutality isn't as popular and look even at olden ring which has broken sales records for like a a souls type series that game is way easier than previous games in the series even though it's considered quite hard like the amount of bonfires or they call it um was it divine grace is called in this game isn't it like which is the bonfire mechanic now there's so many more around there's in previous ones that you might have to go back half an hour or something so you can still have a skillful game you just have to balance it that way i think that's what fortnight's realized and i think so far that's proven to be the quote unquote winning formula but that could always change in the future it will be interesting actually if we see

sort of cyclical trends because when the soul series started becoming popular it sort of showed oh actually people like a real challenge maybe that's coming back again but then it turns out they don't like too much of a challenge so you gotta get it like goldilocks porridge you gotta get it just right you know goldilocks makes an appearance you definitely don't want me on your team i got kicked out of our group of apex legends that's how terrible i am i got booted i got substituted i thought you're going to stay because you were winning too much that's why you got booted but yes yes that's that's why indeed well we have to wrap up today's episode thank you so much for for joining i'm leaving the episode with no definite answers but i'm going i have a lot of food for thought and to see what what comes next and thanks tom for joining as a special guest thanks for having me this has been a blast lolita oh because it's blast royale yeah oh tom making these the christmas i got it i gotta secure that beta invite you

know [Laughter] uh join our navic discord if you want to continue the conversation and we'll see you in next week's episode [Music] you