LEGO Fortnite Pops / Google's Legal Loss / ESRB vs Web3 / The Game Awards

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foundational technology loved by millions of Gamers and integrated into the communities of the largest mobile PC and web 3 gaming products on the market to learn more about this Flagship product simply head to harbor. or check out the details in the show notes and with that let's dive into the episode hello everyone welcome to another novic Roundtable I am your host Devon Becker and with me of course I have the biggest brightest Minds in the industry continuing to join us here with Aaron enil and Jonathan how are you guys doing today great thank you good it's the second to last round table of the year so yeah we're getting close but I think it'll be good only one week off for good behavior just to just to celebrate so uh definitely um obviously take the time out there the audience to to take a let your ears cool off for a week but nice as possible in that seven to eight days you've got left so you don't get a lump of Co for Christmas oh

yeah definitely but yeah like uh a lot of good topics today in terms of uh updates to some stuff we've discussed previously and in concluding but also just some some cool stuff looking forward uh related to the game awards that we wanted to dig into um but the the first few topics we're gonna just briefly get into all coincidentally relate to Epic so it's going to be interesting and this sort of umbrella thing I don't think that obviously not intentional on epic's part but definitely some good news and bad news kind of situation uh so why don't we just right start right off with uh the good news about Lego fortnite that we touched on last time yeah so this is mentioned in last week's round table but I really wanted to touch upon it because it's been overwhelming success since the launch of the survival mode which is the collaboration between Lego and epic Lego group put big investment into epic to to get this mode out so since it's launched on December the 7th um it's had an a peak player count of 2.45 million players and an average concurrent player base exceeding 1 million so it is in fact the most popular game mode in the

game right now huge hit I know some people internally at Lego that are very happy with the initial results so far a big hit for them and look I think that they are owed a lot of credit because Lego I feel is a company who has somewhat missed the mark with their kind of digital strategy in the past they have had some successes specifically with The Travelers Tales games and such but you would think for such a beloved IP that's kind of Timeless The Lego Movie proving that they can move into sort of trans media that they haven't really had a kind of Smash Hit game myself I've always just been surprised why they never got on the Minecraft bandwagon a long time ago I know they made their own version but frankly they should have bought that company years ago in my opinion anyway they've gone this way they could have made their own separate game they decided to launch it within fortnite which is where the players are I think that's proved to be a fantastic decision look how many players are there and I think it's going to do great for their brand awareness will probably do good for their revenue and it looks like most importantly of all the players really like it I don't know if you've tried the mode yourself I

think it's very cool actually really does feel like um what you'd feel like a Lego game should be in the current ERA so yeah I think they have a lot of props and I think yeah it would be worth getting maybe some of the panel's opinion on why you think it's been so successful is it just lightning in a bottle or you know is it epic for Lego it's an awesome success for Lego and for epic um and obviously you know bigger picture it's starting to prove out a bit that uh fortnite can be more than fort night and that's that's a big deal but also you know for for Lego it's a pretty good I don't I don't know if comeback is the right word but like next step in gaming that's been a long time um in the making um there's there's a great book called Brick by Brick it's basically like the story of LEGO's business like kind of from inception through like modern history up to like a few years ago and it digs into you know

the company's like entrance into gaming and how hard of a time they they were having and just not being able to figure it out for themselves and then you know the business as a whole between like actual Lego and gaming Etc turned to to licensing like with Star Wars and all these other big IPS and that's kind of the Tailwind that they have been been writing um particularly in in gaming and so for them to take another step that feels more authentically Lego right sort of like a build your own adventure you know build your own kingdom kind of thing um it makes a lot of sense and so I'm I'm glad that the investment that they've made um in Epic has you know resulted in this brand equity and I think it's successful enough that they'll continue to invest in it and make it better and better over time so I I doubt this mode is going to stay the number one mode in fortnite like it'll you know that Battle Royale will will

make its return but uh my guess is that this game will have staying power to me like the questions are like how does this thing you know monetize into the future to really be kind of worth the engagement poll that that it has and that might take some time to figure out um and that'll also make it different from like a from like a Minecraft too which is a premium game um but also you know the bigger question for Epic from this is is how the success in the first party game trickles down to third party games and so first of all like we've seen that these first party games like Lego it has brought fortnite as a whole to new highs and it has brought in new new types of players and so it's a success from that standpoint but I don't think we've yet seen uh engagement from the first party first party games trickle down into to third party games and that's something that'll take time developers are probably going to be antsy for a while as you know they're

waiting for like better tooling to like get pushed over the finish line and for a little antsy about like you know why is all the engagement mainly in like these first party games but uh so it'll take some time to play out and we'll see exactly how that that works but to me like those are the big big questions from here but it's obviously a great success with the launch so far yeah agree completely and I think it hits on a couple of macro Trends we keep coming back to in this podcast which is like generating audience and scale is hard harder than it's probably ever been and building awareness of new IP is hard right so you've got scale built into fortnite and you've got IP with Lego and the idea of leveraging scale with IP is probably a much easier way to go than again if Lego was trying to build this game from the ground up despite the strength of their IP so it seems like a perfect partnership you know my only critique would be maybe you know the launch

product's a little thin you know it almost feels slightly Early Access e it's not super deep um you know as a person who doesn't have as much time to dive into gaming as I used to was plenty deep for me but uh you know for anybody who's super hardcore potentially they would have played through it's there by now but it's it's a it's a big hit I've already introduced it to my son who's already diving into it and you know it's as Aaron said it's a beloved IP it's very much a beloved IP in our in our house and again I sort of think it hits on this thing that works in gaming right which is like introducing other generations to the IP that you had and so you know it it presses a lot of uh a lot of macro buttons in all the right ways there's a couple funny things around kind of what you said which is you're talking about uh you know using the scale of fortnite and the IP of Lego but if you think about it in the Lego toys they've done the opposite where they've used other people's IP to help scale their blocks out to more Generations like you talk about the generational thing where there's a lot of kids who are would probably wouldn't have been that into Legos unless they

were like oh hey it's Star Wars or oh hey it's other things that I like in this form and now I'm more into Legos then of course they've capitalized on that with the different Telltale Games and then even The Lego Movie like Lego Batman movies stuff like that so it's it's kind of funny they're kind of getting it both ways right where they're they're trying to scale off of other people's IP as other people scale so I mean tot go both ways right well we'll see if we end up with a with a fortnite movie but fortnite Lego movie right off of it but but uh it'll be interesting to see if it also affects their relationship with Minecraft at all just because they also have Minecraft sets that they produce obviously you're not going to see like a Minecraft set in the Lego thing for fortnite because that would be kind of maybe a little too on the nose at that point especially with Microsoft owning it uh but it is interesting and and I could see some potential with uh it seems like they and I don't have numbers to back that up but it seems like they might have been fairly successful with their uh Mario kind of course creator sort of toys and then also like with Mario Maker having been a fairly success successful thing I could see some potential for that to be

sort of digitized whether that be through the fortnite experience or if they're able to leverage this into their own products stuff like that there could be some potential for additional IP Crossover with Mario being able to like say make levels essentially within a Lego program uh digitally that sort of recreating multiple IPS at the same time so lots of interesting potential there depending on the directions they go and Licensing and all that paperwork fun I'm sure yes but uh I'm going to have a lot of trouble managing screen time in my house for sure I can imagine well you know like Legos are definitely not the worst thing right it's one of those like wholesome activities you're like all right all right if you're if you're spending time doing that maybe you'll become an engineer or something that you know makes good money that's fine uh you just stem and or steam now I guess it is well that's going to be interesting right because Lego there's obviously no Lego limitation time in our house and there's screen time limitations in our house and if it's Lego screen time what do we do gray area they F they found a work around for you it I'm not playing fortnite I'm playing Lego

Dad it's the workaround now speaking of workarounds epic's other story here that is good news bad news good news for epic bad news for Google we finally have a Swift and interesting conclusion to that case yes so quickly background in 2020 epic sued Google claiming that it used its dominant position to capture excess profits from from its App Store and so now finally 3 years years later a jury has decided that Google is guilty and there still our next steps to come the next steps are a judge will decide what remedies must occur and Google will inevitably appeal the decision um so it's going to drag out for longer as always and so maybe we'll be talking about this for for a while too um but we should get some some recommended changes shortly um and one thing that's worth noting um is why Google lost this case around its

App Store and payments um systems when Apple won its case against epic a couple of years ago um and so just to break that down a little bit to try to make some sense of it um Apple won because it's a vertically integrated ecosystem meaning its customers purposfully know what they're buying into with apple control over the App Store experience in that case could be and was argued to be core to the value proposition of picking apple as your smartphone provider or tablet provider um there were still anti- steering charges Etc but but that is what the courts decided not really my opinion that I'm just saying like that's that's what the the the judge decided in that case the difference between Google and apple here is obviously then the fact that Google is largely not selling vertically into integrated products but

rather its software Android through contracts to oems to the phone makers and what this trial dug up and showed was evidence that one Google paid oems to keep them from Shipping with alternative app stores that two it made deals with top app makers regarding special rates and treatment around payments percentages to to keep them satisfied three Google acted to fend off multiple developers from launching alternative game stores and then fourth apparently uh it failed to convince the jury that its 30% fee is fully Justified and behind all of that of course is the fact that Google has pitched Android as open source But as time has gone on and Android has become far more dominant and you know it has dominant market share in smartphones from its operating system standpoint it's begun tightening control

so Google essentially tried to maintain its open source perception while actually acting against it which makes it harder according to the courts for consumers to see what's going on and make make good decisions um so the question from here is what happens and we'll see what the judge has to say soon but one key piece that may change that I want to flag is the firm tie right now that exists between Google Play and Google Play billing um and so yes other app stores may continue to be a thing you can still actually do that on on Android to some degree despite their their attempts to limit it as much as as possible um obviously those will still struggle because of Google plays Network effects but anyways more importantly it's now more likely that app makers can stay in Google Play but use alternative billing systems which would hack away from that 30% fee cut and that's potentially a big big deal and really what the win here is for epic epic can

still go on and try to make their alternative gaming store more successful but more importantly you know fortnite in or other games in uh Google Play Store don't have to use Google uh Play billing and can go through their own payment system or others that potentially is a major value unlock and is perhaps the the larger outcome for gaming of all of this but we shall see as the dust settles but um that that's my my perception of what happened here but I'm curious if you guys of other other takes or other other thoughts on that I think there's one more lever which is the Apple case was a judge decision and the Google case was a jury decision and right or wrong arguably or not I sort of find that judge Le cases often are found more to the letter of the the law and there's an emotional

component to jury Le cases that uh is a wild card Factor I'm not saying given all the levers that you laid out this wouldn't have been the same outcome with a judg Le case but I think I think you know that uh Google did a much worse case emotionally convincing the jury I would say I would say that's backed up too by the the idea that what they were doing kind of looks like bribery but might be perfectly legal in which case you know a judge might just be like well that's legal that's fine whereas you know a jury is like whoa whoa that looks like bribery you know with the cases with the with what they were doing to kind of pay off developers like Activision Blizzard things like that to sort of be like uh no don't don't do other stores this is fine here's some money uh those kind of actions obviously it depends on the the lawyer and the ability to present to the jury and the jury selection all that stuff right whether or not you push those emotional buttons but that sort of thing as you said probably would have been fine under a judge I mean depending on how

they yeah I think that um like the difference again like apple being vertically integrated it can kind of do whatever it wants on its own on its own Hardware on its own ecosystem as people know that that's what they're buying into but more in this case where you're just running an operating system if you're able to control your Monopoly through like contracts that you know like favor certain companies that maintain your dominance that maybe are not fair executed across um you know more more competitors or more players in the space that often is viewed as like leveraging contracts to like unfairly maintain monopolistic position and you actually do see that as a means of you know judges and juries cracking down on monopolies over over time um I don't know how much it's really happened in Tech so far if anything it probably should happen more and you can even look at companies like Amazon and kind of point to it's more like the contracts that they make between suppliers and

such that are more the the issues or contracts of bundling you know and like and like Microsoft or or something and so where these contracts take place is often where you can start making cases against monopolies but yeah obviously if it were a judge specifically could have been different but in this case too it's still the judge that decides you know what the remedies will be so so we'll we'll see how that really really uh pans out the judges are still in business yeah the one thing I believe that the judge kind of shot down in terms of Remedies was uh epic was proposing like something where it' be like we need to do something to prevent them from kind of skirting around this in some way uh I forget the exact legal wording but basically trying to make it so that like they couldn't find just another way to work around the ruling uh and the judge was like no uh if they do just come back basically which of course has been extremely expensive I imagine for epic so I'm sure they didn't want to hear hear that they would just wanted to be one and done with this sort of thing but

to be fair on on Epic side for those who like weren't following epics kind of like uh case in this they weren't really asking for like monetary Rewards or anything like that they were like hey we just want Google to play fair basically was the idea and that's it definitely makes epic epic look good in this case uh I I imagine that that could have even influenced the jury to be like whoa whoa they're not even asking for money uh they're just kind of wanting Google to do right that probably bought them A Little Bit of Sympathy from the jury I imagine yeah hopefully uh hopefully this cracks down on the building tiin I I I got to imagine apples looking a little nervous because this sort of if if it separates that building sort of thing chips away at that link and then you start looking at the anti-steering stuff which in itself is kind of goes towards the building stuff and that of course is where all the money comes from as they run these Services you got to be nervous if you're app at this point I mean if you think oh I've won this it's still chipping away at sort of the Precedence and and just the legal sort of ecosystem that seemed to be in their favor before

the anti- steering seemed to be the common you know agreement between these two cases right in both cases anti- steering was seen as you know illegal poor behavior and so the question comes down to you know once you've removed the anti- steering you know do we just see a slow drip towards you know a shift to developer you you know obviously it's more friction but if you take the most egregious friction out of it furthermore the active insertion of friction right just over time do you see a slow move towards you know direct to publisher direct to developer yeah I was going to say just from a kind of being in the industry standpoint and and you know working on mobile I think this is actually more impact for what happening on Google than on Apple because although players do spend more on on Apple they don't spend as much because there aren't as many like normally when you look at your game in the downloads you'll have significantly more on Android than you will have on your iOS devices so any

change in the bottom line is huge so going to other app stores I think as well is more palpable or palatable for users on these platforms so I expect there to be quite fast changes here and I can definitely see things picking up and I think it's good for people that are in the industry right now because uh yeah obviously there's a lot of people bleeding right now I think it will have a big impact I can imagine too not everyone's going to want to roll their own building kind of thing and things like that so you end up with a situation where people that are willing to provide the building stuff but at a competitive rate to Google then start to become interesting and that of course forces Google down and we may see a situation where Google still wins they're just forced to come down in their take because like oh yeah everyone still wants to use it but you know like there's competition now and that's the big thing right is competition is supposed to be the thing that keeps price is fair and that doesn't exist on App Stores and that's what all these cases are about so hopefully that brings it out I mean these kind of cases did force them to to sort of consider that 15% uh sort of tier and then forced Apple to do the same so everyone kind of started having to budge a little bit and now this wi forces them to budge maybe a

lot of bit we'll see depending on like the remedies potentially things like that so obviously with legal stuff though it's it's ongoing there's nuances and details that be better to ask of lawyers probably but overall this seems like a win for gamers and game developers potentially I mean it may not be a win for gamers I don't know we may get still get the shaft on just 30% markup uh for for us but not for the developer so hopefully the case is the uh the savings are passed on to us to some extent we'll see but uh speaking of Epic and stores in a different take their own store running into some interesting issues around regulation of sorts uh interesting case you where you know epic had been known and we we talked about this before for bringing a lot of uh web 3 or blockchain games onto the its desktop store which was you know a big deal because uh valve doesn't allow that on Steam and so this was kind of a safe harbor it seemed for these sorts of games and so they just been piling on I think they're they're well

over maybe even 200 at this point uh you know either coming soon or on so it's been a huge huge deal for that industry um but now they're starting to show a big crack potentially which is through uh the the ratings which happened to hit Gods Unchained one of the older games still doing stuff here and had managed to been on the epic game store for maybe a week or a month or something so a very short period of time uh before it suddenly had to get removed due to being rated as adults only which is of course like similar to nc7 uh with movies where it's pretty much just death at that point you can't be in theaters really or things like that it just it comes down to people won't carry your stuff not necessarily that you're banned for being in stores and epic is not going to carry adults only games so that leaves a situation where they're just basically removed and now the reasoning that they gave was not for the typical stuff of of graphic violence or nudity things like that or sexual content but instead was for the uh the rewards that could be earned through play having real world value

which is huge to the value proposition of web 3 games which now is basically almost like saying if you want to make your anything in your game actually mean something outside of the game and or like have value long term that's now an adults only game which is of course a huge huge problem not just for web 3 games but just for any game that might have stuff that's tradeable on an external Marketplace uh or have some potential for dollar value you know of course they're not going to lay out the ex act way that they ruled this out and and well not ruled they not a court but you know determined this exactly and what kinds of things might not qualify for this but this potentially opens every single one of those web 3 games to be marked adults only if they have any kind of Rewards or any kind of things that are produced or given to the player through the game or game play that then fall on that and this this is some overlap as well with uh Google's side of things you know on the topic of the Google store with their policy around gambling law and the way that the reasons they don't want to have loot

boxes that produce anything of real world value like you know tokens or nfts so some definitely overlap there and this is striking I think at the heart of web 3 in general and if it stands as is and continues to steamroll big big problem for that whole not just on Epic but across all the stores uh so I mean an Neil as a web 3 developer yourself I I got to wonder what you're thinking this obviously a different store that you're in but still same potential problem well this specifically I was going to add some more context that they have a sealed mode which is a bit like if you play tcgs when you go in with a blind deck and so that was considered gambling because you have like real world value associated with the card and you don't know what you're going to get going into that mode because you could get like an amazing deck where you could get like a crap deck such as the Beast of playing sealed and so for that reason that was considered gambling and that's what's changed in the age rating thing so that's a little bit of a a kind of slippery slope because those are the mode you'd want in it I mean I largely

think that like epic gam store who cares just to be totally honest with you name one person that's ever downloaded a game on that store and not on Steam uh you know I don't think that'll happen could this be a precedent that we see in other stores it's certainly possible I think it will be something that we start you know I think first what happen is people will build it then there'll be some backlash then it'll probably start becoming more accepted or there'll be ways around it and then it'll be allowed um but for sure that's something that people have to consider because in this case yeah what it's important to understand it's not that they suddenly got age rated because they put like you know adult content in terms of the artwork on the cards or anything like that it was literally a Game feature and I would say that like yeah having a sealed mode in a card game makes loads of sense in fact I would actually say as someone who loves card games themselves that's a cool mode that you'd like to do um you know it's definitely fun to play in tournaments like that sometimes because it's you know uh really quite random and fun in that sort of way so interesting to see um yeah as a web 3

developer not sure what to make of it like I said given that it's a I'd be more worried if it on the bigger platforms but interesting to see that they took that stance the question is is it the canary and the coal mine towards gaming kind of starting you know crypto winter 2.0 right you know again certainly going back to the macros it's not been the best regulatory SL legal environment for crypto once again right you know bitcoin's you know increase and then slight pullback aside and the the question is is this this just another example of You Know The Regulators are coming right so yes in and of itself it's a it's a teeny removal but you know in increasingly there seems to be uh unhappiness with uh with unregulated crypto marketplaces yeah I mean honestly this whole thing is a bit absurd um like I think you're right Jonathan that the

regulatory piece has just been slow to figure out certain regions have done it much better than others but in the US in particular it's been um annoyingly slow if not non-existent progress and in a bunch of ways but um to me this is just like the ESRB uh which is is not a government entity it's like it's a nonprofit entity that everyone just kind of looks up to and standardizes around um and it's a decision that they made to to start to either they always have viewed it this way or they started viewing it this way and either way like the solution here is just that either the ESRB just like has to come to grips with reality of like what's really going on here because it's not rocket science that a game like this like should not be rated adult only um um even if you could like tag it in other ways to say that there's like real money potential or

something you can do that without making it tagged a don't only to have this large of a ramification on it getting removed from stores and such um so as you know I think you know leaders in web through gaming should be like lobbying like kind of banning together to reach out to the ESRB to try to come to some type of um agreement on how to not let that happen not be judged in that kind of way and find Alternatives like you can instead like on these on these stores like get those ratings of like there are inapp purchases in this game like how that's been added there are you know potentially real money values in this game um but it still be rated T or whatever based on the actual gameplay like that makes a world of sense compared to what it is right now but that has to actually like go through

discussion and get hashed out the other side is just you know an epic game store who obviously cares about about this um just seeing it happen and also being part of the solution and what happened here was just an automatic policy type of thing where they just as a policy don't allow games of a certain certain rating if it happens it just gets automatically pulled and I think that's actually fair to have that type of policy on a store like this if that's what they choose to do um but if it's screwing over games on their own platform then they should you know also band with developers as epic often does to try to get it resolved um so there's that and then also like I was looking in like the ESRB like the difference between M which is 17 plus and adult only which is 18 plus is kind of ridiculous if you think about it like what does one year have to do with anything just like change M to 18 plus

if that's how you really feel um not even have adults only like I don't know maybe I'm being too simplistic minded about that but the more I look at the ESRB I'm just like what the hell like like why like why does everybody like worship this uh rating entity like we should be able to come to Solutions with them or around them that can solve anything and everything uh both with this specific circumstance and web 3 and honestly anything else and you're totally right on 17 versus 18 you know again I think they're trying to make a point about it right it's the difference between a hard R and an unrated right yeah you know whether we agree or disagree but but yes I mean you know the the industry struggles with ESRB go back decades but I think this is just the latest point of it coming to a head right we've got a new a new game mechanic you know isn't it is this in essence the new loot crates kind of issue that we're dealing with yeah and I guess like uh my guess is this gets

resolved in some shape or form um with epic um but it really does signal I know there are other attempts out there to create alternative web 3 laning distribution hubs that can just make their own rules and sidestep all of this and build their own features that are more web3 native and the more these types of shenanigans happens the more that makes a world of sense too um I don't know if that will get a whole lot of traction because of this right now just because of how early it still is in terms of user adoption but if this were to happen five years from now it would create so much more um you know attention and traffic towards Alternatives that it just kind of makes you wonder if that should happen earlier um I think it makes a lot of sense for just because of network effects for you know an epic games to figure out how to take this and web 3 and web two games or whatever you want to call them kind of live side by side because gamers are just Gamers at the end of the day day it don't need all these different platforms but uh yeah it does make you

wonder how this will play out yeah do a couple of your points there the the funny thing is it has all the tags that you're talking about already with the blockchain nft tags yeah that fully pretty much are the disclaimer you're talking about so it's like they're already doing that part which was like very proactive on epics part and making sure that there was those warnings so people know what they're getting into which of course is your point right like people should just know what they're getting into and be okay with it and they're already warning there I mean the the only way they could be more so is if it like when you went to install it one more time just double- checking you know this is blockchain nft right like other than that like it's it's pretty much doing that uh and but to be fair like epic is the one enforcing the policy uh and there there's no reason they can't just go hey adults only is allowed but only in this one exception and that's like that's that's fine they could do that because it's not like some automated smart contract that executes they can execute on that they could have Flags in the their system or whatever to handle that so I don't think that's like

it just matters whether or not they want to do that now of course they've like I think gotten a lot of good hopefully good PR from allowing a lot of games on there that were you know dealing with struggles on trying to get traction on other platforms but you know that's of course from the people that are pro web3 the people that are anti- web3 you know might have felt the other way uh and to your other point the the SRB is one of those things where it was like we had all those moral panics every time there's like new stuff introduced Like Comics or video games or whatever and it was like it was meant to be one of those like sort of community Solutions where it's like hey we'll regulate ourselves so you don't have to regulate us and it's like that seems like we're we're starting to creep towards you know or maybe we have been for a while just almost ending up like a sort of de facto government body where we almost need to reboot it again right and and bring it back more down to the community level or like maybe have you know committees things like that so it is kind of funny that like these things are technically already solved but it clearly didn't the solutions didn't work uh and so I mean obviously this is like a very recent thing and I don't think epic has really

had time to react obviously gods and chain is trying to figure out what they could do H because this is like a big game for them and this has been very successful lately they've put a lot of time and effort into revamping this game because it was kind of just idling for a while because this is one of the oldest uh web 3 games still operating and still doing well mostly because they put a lot of effort into that and to lose that status obviously sucks but they've been doing well without the Epic store prior to that so this is not going to like them obviously they're also immutable which runs their whole blockchain so this for for all the people to happen to this is actually not the worst like this isn't some small uh developer that's just like well we're screwed shut down the doors you know we can't get any traction now so like at least it's not a terrible situation but as Anil pointed out this might be something that people might want to be cautious of exactly how they Implement their their web 3 uh rewards in terms of what the entry point is and whether or not that leans too far away from skill or things like that obviously like physical trading card games have sealed

tournaments you pay to get in you get a deck exactly like this you get a monetary reward or some other physical reward that has real world value so it clearly happens in the real world without falling under gambling regulation and minors do it like minors participate so I don't think it's clearly like it's it's not an adult soling like sort of activity it's just a matter of how they enforce this policy but I do think this sort of thing combined with all the other loot box stuff is leading us towards ahead eventually of where video gaming meets traditional gaming uh as we see it in terms of the fact that like there's obviously something that works about you know traditional gaming that obviously works as well in video gaming and you know developers would like to have as much of that as possible without Crossing you know the moral ethical and legal lines and you know as I pointed out with the with the Google thing as well they're just like hey just don't touch that area and you're fine this is this seems like we're heading towards that territory where that becomes whether it be a legal battle or just a

territorial battle uh I don't think we hear the last of this sort of thing just madebe from different angles but it's uh it's the end of the news time and we're going to get right into the game awards but of a different type not our own giving Game Awards this time the game awards just happened recently if you didn't hear about it uh it's almost taken the place of E3 in a sense here which was a big surprise because E3 of course is now you know just kind of dunzo so everyone kind of Saved their uh their big trailers and reveals and things like that for the game awards which uh had a lot of announcements uh in a year where of course we had you know people struggling with former delays and layoffs and stuff like that now we got a lot of uh potentially cool games coming out hopefully but we just want to take a look at some of the interesting stuff that came out of that in terms of what it could mean for 2024 2025 uh game genres things like that uh so why don't we just go ahead and start with you uh anel oh loads of great stuff there let's start I guess the thing that made me most excited uh for me actually it was a no man Sky developers um hello

games of their new game I hope I haven't stolen that from anyone else if that's what they were going to say um why do I think this is I think there's kind of an industry Trend at the moment of maybe being a bit overly ambitious and not quite executing on that vision and I dare say that the original no man sky was like that I would say that Bethesda kind of experienced that themselves this year with the perhaps slightly underwhelming Starfield so why am I impressed by this because actually I feel like even though this game um which is going to be set us on one planet because their previous game was an entire universe that you could create it kind of felt like that all the lessons that they've learned from improving no man's sky over the last few years is going to be collated into this game which is like a actually an RPG which is quite unusual I didn't really see them making that type of game I have to say um Buton One World it looks graphically gorgeous procedural World though they're using that Tech so yeah I guess why I'm excited I think one I felt like the the concept looked good

art style looked great but I also felt that it almost shows some kind of humbleness of like maybe we should try and make something that we know we're good at and the lessons that we've learned we can use to make a great game so like maybe just in my mind I'm kind of overplaying it but I'm already just thinking wow I I I kind of don't see how this game is going to be bad in fact I'm kind of thinking this game is going to be really really good because they just kind of do everything that they're good at and make it good better uh so yeah I thought it was really really captivating um really excited to to see it h yeah and so the game's called light no kind of an interesting name too H curious to see more of it and one thing that I rate about them as well is that actually have to say I used to work with some of the people at their companies so maybe I'm a bit biased I know how talented that they are um but something I think is really cool about them is they often do things that aren't just you know copying the same engine over and over but they like to push themselves and try new challenges I think it's something they have like extremely strong technical competency so really excited to see that game and give it a

try for myself yeah I'll actually jump in um because one of my my points was um similar or tangential which is that I think we're starting to see more um small teams punch above their weight um and I think we'll continue to see more of that um the this team hello games with light no fire I think is one one example and they've proven themselves to some degree already but it's still a small team you know pursuing big Ambitions I talked about this maybe a couple weeks ago with Embark Studios and uh the finals and how that was a small team that basically made a AAA shooter game that's um you know that's captivated a lot of attention lately and you know in that case a lot of it was just like being very Progressive with you know AI tooling and software they're using to like enable their developers to be more efficient than perhaps what you see at the larger companies out there and um I

think we'll continue to see a lot more of that and it started you know showing its head a bit you know at the The Game Awards this year where it's not just those teams making Indie Games although they're still you know is that see what people would normally consider Indie Games U but also a lot of the similar size teams making games that that are more competitive with the bigger bigger players so uh maybe early early days of seeing that Trend kind of take on more legs just to add you know as for my previous point you know I feel that they have built up a lot of Goodwill with their improvements in no man's Sky I think they and cyber Punk were the two games that I felt like people really wanted to be good but ultimately were extremely disappointing at launch with with their titles and I think that both of those teams I believe cyber Punk actually did win an award for best ongoing game or something like that which is kind well it felt like a a bit of a madeup award which is another subject that we might kind of cover already in this cast but I do think that

it's fair to sort of acknowledge or you know I do like that for example that you can salvage something and repair that and and make it better like I do think look you could argue that especially for a team like CD project red they shouldn't be shipping something of that you know technical problems on day one no man's sky at that Team Hell games is much smaller so I feel that you know there was pressure with them with the first time around because you know this was the the opportunity of a lifetime to see sort of revenues they've never seen before they had to push the DAT look maybe it is copium from my side but I think that with this game I would be surprised if they rushed it I think they would take their time with the lessons that they've learned and even if it's not quite as good as people want to be on day one or do I expect it to be much better they'll maintain it over time so that's kind of my point there is I think that people in the industry are growing up a little bit in that sense realizing what's necessary to do that and it's much better to execute on a few ideas in a really strong way rather than to overpromise and none of those ideas work

which that's the kind of theme that I still see that even though we have all this possibility that you can do with like current engines and tooling and things like this it's actually extremely difficult to get a really overall uh product that works I'm gonna hack this a little bit which is you know my biggest excitement coming out of the BL what I'll call the blast radius around the game awards was G GTA 6 which was supposed to announce the day before the game awards to kind of you know get ahead of the 10,000 announces but ended up being two days before the game rewards because I think they worried about it leaking but I mean I think what hundred and something million views in like uh you know 36 hours it was it was very hard for me not to be excited about that and I think the trailer you know for a for a company that's always gotten trailers right I think the trailer was exceptionally good as far as you know they go so I couldn't not leave being most excited about GTA 6 there was a

there was another topic as well Jonathan that that I think you wanted to kind of bring up sort of related to the small teams sort of argument uh coming from anill and Aon around the awards that sort of was more of a halo around it yeah I mean it was interesting right because I think the there was a bit of a controversy going into the Video Game Awards and then a different sort of controversy came out of it right which is very clearly as you kind of set this up like the VGA have now become the new sort of key announce moment of the year and Publishers developers have leaned into it or especially Publishers have leaned into it and so the product has become increasingly commercial and the sort of commercial first focus of the product and I think Jeff's done an amazing job with that has had a couple of different sort of community blowbacks right the First Community blowback that happened in advance was about you know how all politicized or not politicized you know the show was going to be around

what's going on in the Middle East and the second one sort of coming out of the show was developers sort of feeling like second class citizens behind Publishers hits celebrities Etc and you know sort of the the people who are responsible for making the games day-to-day and you know work endless hours and the people that deliver the Magic in the end of the day I think sort of felt short shifted by you know 30 seconds to sort of say everything they need to say being shoot off with sort of like you know oscar style leave the Stage Music if they didn't get done you know how much stage time was you know Matthew mccane versus you know a developer and uh you know how much they get lost and or clearly commercial placements around these channels you know like Jeff's got a a very specific commercialization model right which is a lot of like what looks like content is in fact you know sort of paid marketing and so you know you sort of came out of the awards with a with a second group of gaming insiders you know and again the

overlay of you know all the layoffs that have happened in the business and you know no sort of recognition of that in the Run of show in sort of trying to put as as much of a positive Face Forward commercially friendly product out there you know I you know on one level I completely get that and the magic in this business is never done without the Magics on the second piece is if you sort of compare viewership of say the dice Awards you know if you go to YouTube or you know other streaming platforms with the VGA it's undeniable right so it's a classic argument about do you want your art in front of the most eyeballs as as possible interestingly so far with the exception of a little bit of press the VGA seems to have skirted being dragged in any kind of like major controversy over this and it all seems to just be sort of like passing through but there were certainly a couple of small community storms around this year's VGA there there have been in the past and there will be in the future and I think it's actually good that um they

haven't bent the knee to you know anyone controversy because it's a slippery slope of where do you draw the line for what you want an award show to stand for in the world or not for topics that are often bigger and bigger than gaming um and so I I think it's good to keep focused on video games and awards and and such um I I even remember last year the big controversy was around like um uh what was it like inequality around like representation in the industry and so they led the awards with um a note about we don't tolerate that and I think one of the controversies coming out of it was like the first trailer they showed right after that was like one of the studios that was accused of of you know letting whatever inequality happen I don't remember exactly so there's always go it's a massive industry with so many people globally all around the

world there's always going to be controversy but I think staying generally focused is is right um but of course I mean The Internet's been on fire so I don't think we need to pile on to hard was saying like yeah like of course like give developers a bit more time like to talk you know a bit of the celebrity stuff almost makes it seem like they don't think games industry people are cool enough for a game award show and need non-industry people too which is a little which is a little weird but I don't know in general like I think cramming it full of releases and stuff is actually what makes it interesting and celebrities pull attention and it becomes a more watch better show with that despite what all of the complaints about it um are so give and take and to your and to your point about last year I mean part of the irony is allegedly the 30 second limitation on speeches was based around an 8 minute speech last year given by Hollywood talent in essence right like a game voice over actor so you know it's

it's it's always this pushful give take to try to make it the best show but I agree with you if it doesn't remain a commercially viable product first that's not good for gaming that's not good for the developers that's you know not good for selling games and you know it's that classic thing about all art right are you here to get your art out in front of as many people as possible or are you here to celebrate your your art in a you know very narrow Echo chamber yeah I mean going on to Jonathan Point uh actually kind of leads into what I wanted to bring up about what I noticed about the whole set of games for the most part announced uh around that commercialization and it is kind of funny you think about uh like what you were saying Aon thinking about the idea of like what if the Oscars was the platform for announcing new movie projects it's kind of it is a little weird in the sense that we're you know not used I mean I'm used to like ComicCon almost being the platform for movie announcements at this point just due to like Marvel kind of running the show but it is it is a little weird to like here's the winners from before and

now you should be excited about these ones coming up that we're totally not going to be biased towards because they were launched here at our show yeah just to jump in there I've got to say that's my big pet peeve with it as so I understand about making it a product that people want to watch but that just feels so diametrically opposed to to what it should be about clearly this thing is aimed at being the Oscars for games right and it's just not it just feels like a complete Li to that and well that's my opinion and stance on it so it's even now we're getting more excited about the game launches rather than celebrating the winners and things like that and I feel that that's fundamentally wrong but that's that's fair so so here's the question is it the Oscar of gamings or is it the gramys of gamings and the grammies has had the same critique right that it's largely commercially driven that commercial success leads to who appears on stage I agree they're not necessarily like announcing future recording projects with the Grammys but the the Grammys versus the Oscars has been you know sort of commercially LED for a long time you

surprisingly a huge number of winners managed to perform in the show why do you think that is right and you know collabs Etc so so I I I hear you but I think part of it is like is this the Grammys of gaming or is this the Oscars of gaming well maybe if they were uh showing new movie trailers you know at at the end of the Oscars Will Smith wouldn't have to come up and slap someone like just to get relevance again I mean but like the the overall thing I would go towards was was looking at the the selection of games that were announced right you mentioned it being kind of a commercial entity obviously this isn't free air type anyone can jump on right it's not Public Access so what I noticed as a trend and like it's you know kind of broad game Trends anyways is like a lot of recognizable whether it be sequels brand IP or just like tagging on to the the the previous success of a developer like you you mentioned in with no man's sky right it's not a sequel to No Man's sky but they're tagging in on specifically to hey you remember no man's Sky here's a game but it's not

just like a game out of nowhere it's the game by the developers of No Man's sky like there's always either an association with a developer or an IP or a sequel and I mean it makes commercial sense right you don't want to announce the game no one knows anything about or cares about right some of them were just like hey this is the next hideio kajima game and that's all we're really gonna tell you stuff like that but it was always there was always some Association to something recognizable as a way to make this like at least have some imp for these things and I think that also like kind of Scopes the kind of things you're going to see because especially if there if it's pay to play like to have your stuff on there you're gonna have to have some marketing budget you're not gonna be some indie game so it's GNA skew a lot of what you see I think in there but it is interesting to see like them trying to farm a bit of nostalgia trying to farm a bit of like excitement around sequels and things like that I mean you have World of Goo too like going back or like a Sega announcing like crazy taxi games again uh so there's a bit of like people kind of trying to play off of that recognizability and I think that like impacts a lot of I mean we already see a lot of sequels in games right and in

movies and everything else because uh you know when you're trying to drisk obviously you're going to look for things that uh have some platform already and aren't just coming out of nowhere but I did notice like a lot of that uh in the the min mini announcements uh so it was interesting to see that just that kind of sort of diversity of different types of recognition sort of farming happening and a lot of there wasn't a lot shown in a lot of these it was what like those teasers where it's like hey remember this and that's really all we're really telling you and and there was definitely a lot of that happening which it does remind me a bit of e3 unfortunately E3 had a lot of not really showing you so much but just trying to get you excited uh which you know this is maybe early for a lot of these games so I can understand that but it does feel like we could get bait and switched with a lot of these where it's just showing cut scenes or showing some kind of maybe an intro video or a theoretical this is what we hope the game will look like uh down the road sort of thing so I would definitely take a lot of these trailers with a grain of salt because it seems like they're just trying to be like hey this is a moment we can leverage to kind of advertise our way into 2024 and 2025

when our balance sheets are looking terrible we're having to lay off people we need to get people excited maybe we need to start selling Early Access or pre-orders getting stuff going like these weren't like 2026 2027 titles they're going to try and get the ball rolling now and so it seems like a lot of people were taking advantage of that timing obviously they're not selling like Christmas kids but there were a few games you know announced and things like that that were immediately out right after so it did become little bit of a in stores now kind of moment so I just look at the commercial angle this is you know the maturity of gaming and this is the scale of gaming and this is gaming borrowing from movies who borrow from TV who borrow from Sports who borrow from music and back to gaming right you know when you're talking about the developer Rob I mean that's been a long-standing thing in movie trailers right Oscar winner blah blah blah Oscar winner blah blah blah the Oscar winning director of blah blah blah right so no surprise we're seeing gaming and then also to your point I mean you know available now like that's you know the new music Beyonce lemonade model right like you don't talk about it until you can buy it

because the awareness is wasted if you can't convert it right so like this is again going back to the macros it's like we we all trying to find these moments right like everything's like a moment where you're trying to capture you know can I get to awareness can I get to conversion Etc and you know again I think we should feel very fortunate in the industry that we have moment and let's see what we can do with it definitely there was to be fair there was also some things that were even just kind of minor announcements around like Hey we're adding DLC to this game or a new character to this or reporting this game over to PS5 or to PC like there was definitely a lot of people just looking for something to throw in there just to make sure like because we don't have the E3 Spotlight anymore and the spotlights are so rarely you're talking about some of the other award shows just not having the eyeballs so if this one has the eyeballs and they use the celebrities to get those eyeballs then it's more like hey now we're using influencers to leverage to you know give a platform for these games to better advertise

something to juice up sales uh and obviously with ones where it's DLC or whatever it's like the game is available now uh so it definitely seems like we will probably see more of this I guess kind is my point as well like if this is commercially successful in giving people sales or driving attention to things that they would struggle to push through like a steam ad or like you know a mobile ad or some some other uh maybe less visible platform that's kind of SC shot depending on what the viewership was like I don't know what the viewership numbers were like um but I'd be interested to see like any kind of conversions that happened as a result of actually seeing this obviously unless there's a coupon code or something involved you're not really going to see like direct attribution but uh if it's successful I imagine we'll see other award shows or other shows trying to do something like this to try and find some way to be relevant to get people to want to get their advertising out there through this whether it be even something just on Twitch yeah another sort of color piece I'll add to this is I feel where you you sort of felt the

layoffs and the sort of General tenor of the business coming in is I didn't feel the ecosystem of pre-event post-event activations and celebrations existed in downtown Los Angeles this year you know when I walked out of the awards I didn't feel like I had the same options of the number of places I could go as prior years you know to sort of carry the celebration on Into the Night and you know that's a qualitative view potentially if you added them all up they were as big as bigger but it felt smaller and maybe that's the reaction to like it didn't feel proper to throw a big party after laying off a bunch of people a and a major publisher that I'll leave unnamed chose to have their own holiday party on the day of the game awards you know and and the employees of that publisher were at their own event as opposed to even the awards and I know there were some grumbling that they you know they had Awards you know games that W Awards or up for awards but the the ecosystem didn't feel

I mean not that last year felt frothy to some of the other challenges that Aaron laid out but you know it did it felt a bit subdued walking out post Awards you know into the center of downtown Los Angeles versus a couple years ago well as we kind of wrap things up that to you know we getting a little short on time I I wanted to have you know other people I I know Anil already got a chance to but just kind of uh you know mention any of the games that were particular standouts uh not necessarily just like oh that looks cool but like things to be looking forward to you know probably to be discussing on this podcast down the road when they come out good or bad uh whether whether again that be good or bad like you think that's a huge misstep or a particularly exciting game in terms of the business and like likelihood to be successful um I'll let you go first Aaron yeah well I'll I'll actually kind of tie it into another Trend that I noticed which is just like the continued rise of the like quiet relevancy of China and all of this like nothing in the event screamed China right but there was

actually quite a lot of games that either were made directly by a Chinese developer that were pushed out more than we've seen in the past so you know like black myth Wukong which actually looks really good um uh or you know like the hoyo versus is inless Zone zero or like the new ark Knights game that's coming out but is also going to be crossplatform and therefore relevant to more people like that had a larger presence than I remember being in the past um but also kind of the second piece of that is the the AAA games are starting to come from the China funded Studios that are us-based or europe-based um that are you know either published by level infinite or um you know owned by 10 cent in some kind of way and so these were games like like last Sentinel um from the light speed La team or exob born which is going to be published by uh level infinite and

honestly like I mean those were were not gameplay trailers so we didn't like actually see much from them yet but those are like you could tell are like high budget like lots of effort like lots of talent going into those games that I thought were interesting and I thought were pretty good and I'm excited to see what's coming next but again nothing about that scream like you know like this is owned by China or like China's you know stealing a larger share of the the game awards you know trailers reveals but um that's what's happening um and as we've talked about before like a lot of these Investments are still ramping up like we've talked about how nettis has been um launching a bunch of studios and the US and um Canada and you know been buying in in Europe and a lot of those are new and I think they even just announced like a couple more over the past quarter or so and so not even of those are showing up yet but we're already starting to see the impact and that's just going to grow further so

some of what I was interested in games wise came from these Studios but as a trend that one that one really popped out to me real stealth Trend but uh hopefully it's something that doesn't you know that we don't have to care about uh as Gamers that is you know like hey cool games awesome everyone wins kind of thing but as from the business side it does seem like something worth keeping an eye on Jonathan your pick nothing really to add except it's clearly going to be a very busy early 2024 for Final Fantasy which is always fun you know and I'm interested to see the Apex Legends mash up again playing on that recognition and install right the cross and everything else yep but I mean obviously that's a cool thing right like we do want to be excited about things that we have high hopes for as opposed to just coming out of nowhere and being like hope that's good I don't know anything about it like I think a good example is like uh blade uh coming out from you know like oh we we haven't really had a blade game so we don't know what to expect from that but then the developer adds a lot of context to that you're like oh like yeah they make great games that would really suit this IP so

that's cool like we could be excited about it now so I mean given like obviously they they didn't show anything other than like this brief cut scene sort of thing right um but it did did seemed like there was a bit of uh some of them really like being like oh this is gonna be good and then some being like I don't know what to think like Aon pointed out with the just the ones that look really cool and are obviously going to be high production value but I guess I guess we'll really find out you know throughout 2024 I mean it was good to see though that there is a big slate for 2020 24 uh because you know we had such a big sort of Delay from covid and going into like some of the good ones coming out in 2023 it's good to know that like the layoffs haven't completely stopped the pipeline but I do wonder if some of these end up uh 2025 you know because of layoffs and other things happening uh that could slow them down so hopefully that's not the case and hopefully we get something maybe mid 2024 to to show the progress of these things and is just teasers but definitely I think an exciting time to be a gamer even with the layoffs and the things going on uh

you know as Neil said a lot of cool Tech out there to build a lot of cool things just not always not always doable but we're definitely I think growing in into eron's Point that's helping a lot of these small teams be able to do a lot of cool stuff so I think all the better for gamers right a situation where we don't have to go a I hope EA makes it or something where we're expecting a lot of money to be put into it but I guess that's where we could be happy about some tools for once but we'll see how it goes down last thing I'll say is like it's also just interesting to note like who wasn't at the event or who didn't have like a big showing at the event like obviously we mentioned GTA GTA is too big for for the game awards like it deser deserves its own special day and so we saw that but also you know Nintendo didn't show anything you know they have their Nintendo directs and they used to be a big Presence at E3 but it appears they've kind of gone another way they were there to accept Awards uh and give very short speeches that were doubly short because them had to get

translated uh but you know they didn't show any anything new um I guess like PlayStation there was there but I guess simly like Xbox didn't have like that big of a showing and so still a lot of these like big ecosystem players uh they might have thrown a bone out but they're kind of hoarding their own best um content for their own events and such which with E3 Dead game is here it takes its place a bit as a way to come together to some degree although it's not really a conference um uh but you know all these other companies are still going to go in their own own directions by the way that's I'm gonna tag onto that for a minute this is gonna sound like a crazy comp but bear with me for a minute so I think you're hitting on one of the big trends of marketing anything heading into this world uh you know and it's where you're going to call it a crazy comp so Automotive right everybody used to activate around the Detroit Auto Show the LA Auto Show in the same venue practically downtown Los Angeles a

couple weeks before I went to the LA otter show I'm as passionate about cars as I am about games no Mercedes no BMW no Porsche right because the people with the power they're creating their own activation moments they're no longer like I need to buy into this thing to activate and I'm going to create my own activations so I think you have identif at a huge point but I also don't think it's Unique to gaming I I think we're increasingly seeing these sort of Mega Powers feeling like they're going to create their own kind of fan focused announcement moments without having to rely on third parties and also the fear of sort of getting lost in the crowd right I mean again you you sort of opened your thing talking about you know GTA 6 we don't need to be there we don't need to be lost I mean they still sort of leveraged it right like they were supposed to be one day day before like in essence to steal the Thunder of it right but it's like those with the greatest power are going to create their

own unique marketing moments and I I I think you're going to see more of this in gaming as you laid out but I think you're seeing more of it in everything well then I guess that begs the question will we see a whole bunch of attempts around where E3 was before because that seemed that you know that became like a crater that everyone kind of dog piled into because of that being that sort of activation window as I guess you would put it is that going to be the case now are we going to see all of them or is everyone going to be like I'm going to be one month earlier than them and I'm going to be one month earlier than them and then we start to see January through July with just every big game company having their own moment and trying to spread it out or is it just like hey let's all concentrate on when people are paying attention and that's the middle of the year and the end of the year but but I also think it's gonna be about hacking other things you know you mentioned ComicCon the movie industry didn't care about Comic Con until not that long ago right and then the streaming industry started caring about Comic-Con so I actually think part of this trend is going to be see like you know are we going to see a publisher leaning into Grammy's activation or like

you already see some of it around dice or GDC or like you know CES is probably the wrong time because it's just after the big Q4 right but it's sort of like what other cultural events around the ecosystem and the target audience are you going to start to see sub ecosystems for gaming like gaming is going to pick some shots around these you know like is it going to be the NBA all weekend it might be right it's the same target audience well I'm going to look to the next auto show for for mechanic simulator 2025 to a plug see if they could pull that off or or Gran Turismo I guess or any of those kind of games could definitely I mean they might already be doing that to be honest I don't pay too much attention to Auto but there's definitely plenty of games that could tag it to other industry events uh and be a part of it Comic-Con was you know a perfect example that because it was like hey it's comic book movies but it also leaned into like hey you know Star Wars or SciFi it's like well it's not Comics but you know it's it's culturally relevant to that particular demographic and I think as you said they're looking for moments that are like demographically relevant

or Spotlight attention timing relevant and I'm sure we'll see more of that this is definitely like not the end of that as uh if E3 is dead and a lot of things are going to look to fill its shoes different ways but but a quick note on that as well um on something that eron mentioned for those who didn't see Nintendo's uh sort of show that they were going to run in Tokyo in uh January I guess got cancelled uh to like threats and stuff like that so those you were looking forward to that unfortunately won't happen so hopefully they kind of shift that over to a bunch of sort of Nintendo directs which uh are started their channel that they've built up over time which is kind of interesting so we'll see if they can actually leverage that the same way or if they kind of miss out on not having that sort of big event I think maybe that'll be like an early test of what you're talking about Jonathan we'll see uh as Aon mentioned in the uh the top of the show here we've got one more next week so definitely make sure to stick around for that of course thank you listeners for tuning all the way into the holidays here and of course into the next year as of course we're not going anywhere we're just taking a one-week break so that you

guys can hang out with Santa Claus or whoever you hang out with around this time of year and uh we will be back uh next week and then in January after that so make sure to uh to catch us next week thank you guys of course on the panel for great opinions and I also recommend everyone go check out all the game awards show stuff whether you feel it maybe too commercial crft or not there's a lot of great trailers a lot of exciting things being announced uh maybe your favorite things in there because God knows there's like a hundred announcements it seems like so chances are there's probably something you like in there if you didn't manage to catch it you can just Google it and find lists pretty easily in YouTube videos things like that so you didn't have to actually be at the show to catch them so make sure to check those out but in the meantime we will uh be hanging out for the weekend and catch you guys next week if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a fivestar review VI and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus

if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu and advisory Services again that is [Music] www.nic.edu will'll catch you in the next episode