Manticore: The Next Big Game Creator Platform?

hey everybody welcome today we have myself joe kim and adam telfer and we are joined by frederick de camp and jordan maynard from manticore the makers of the new player creator platform called core welcome guys thank you thanks for having us good morning so today we will be talking oh sorry today we will be talking to frederick and jordan about core and more specifically number one the product vision to the target audience three business model four key challenges and issues and five the current status and future road map but before diving into all of that i thought i'd start with our understanding of what core is just based upon some of the the blogs and videos that we've watched and it'd be great to kind of clarify any misunderstandings that we have but from watching a lot of the videos and especially the

developer demo that came out last month and by the way i'll put a link in the show notes to all the the videos and the blog post in case anyone wants to go deeper but just to kind of describe you know my understanding of what it is i wanted to first start by kind of describing the that understanding so first high level the platform seems to be a high fidelity roblox i think frederick you described it as such in in one of your videos so both a creator platform to easily make games by people who have limited technical and coding capability and it's also a game portal where all the games made with the platform are made available to the core players so similar to roblox the creator platform has a wysiwyg drag and drop creation system where you are able to take pre-built game templates art assets and other types of functional blocks and modify them so it seems to be more of a template system but with the ability

to customize and for further customization it seems like you can code against the creator platform similar to roblox by using lua the scripting language so to some degree it's kind of like a a lego for games where but the game primitives here are much more functional and higher level but at the same time templated and currently you can build games using the core framework which currently runs on pc only for now uh it'd be great to uh talk to you about what that roadmap looks like in terms of other platforms and also core can currently publish out to pc only although i know you guys have talked about a future road map for mobile and console as well the platform also abstracts the infrastructure in terms of server and game operations from the user and runs all that for creators so also similar to roblox and so that at a high level is kind of our understanding and just based upon

that understanding wanted to talk about what we then would believe are the three key advantages and disadvantages and would be great to get your feedback on whether we've got these right or not so in terms of the advantages one would be that it allows non-devs and non-technical people to create very high quality games and and also very quickly two is that core manages all of the infrastructure for you the live ops and and all the servers and all that kind of stuff and three core includes lots of assets so you can literally build whatever game you'd like without having to create external assets so from a cost perspective and speed perspective that's very efficient now on the flip side the top three disadvantages uh we would interpret as following first it would be harder to differentiate your game from others from the templated functionality to the fact that all the shared assets will be used be available to anyone

in the using the platform and currently it also seems like you can't import assets into uh you know into the system as well secondly uh in terms of the monetization revenue models so developers jumping on are sort of betting on the future growth of the platform and for a revenue model to emerge but you know so roblox has been around for a long time so it's been able to build a huge user base but in this case it would seem like developers would be betting that this becomes the next big thing and the revenue model emerges and third uh you know in terms of like the app space or other spaces developers would have more control over marketing and distribution and so here you're not in control of the distribution and marketing for the game and so it's not like you know if you have a mobile app and you can like spend uh spend marketing dollars and try to promote your app here you'd be kind of at the control of the the ecosystem so with that

and that was pretty long-winded so apologies for that but let's stop here and frederick and jordan could you talk to us about whether our understanding of the platform is correct and whether you would agree or disagree with the advantages and disadvantages outlined right right thank you so that's uh i'm frederick the guy with the french accent the ceo of manticore games and the guy with the the regular californian accent american accent is jordan or chief creative officer and co-founder of medical games uh yeah so it's a fully loaded intro lots of lots of points to touch upon i think there are a couple of things i want to say uh maybe starting at a super high level and then going into all the details you mentioned uh i think you you know as you highlighted core is a fairly complex uh uh platform right it's it's it's it has two sides right at the side for the creators and aside for the players so it's a two-sided marketplace at a high level ambition is really to make uh creating games uh

much much easier than it is currently as you know currently making games is extremely hard the pipeline involves you know sometimes a dozen tools uh the mastery of all these tools plus the backend servers the multiplayer code the publishing the the business aspect so on and so forth so core is really a one-stop shop for all that instead of using multiple tools you use just just one it's not just a tool it's also a service platform as you highlight it so there are lots of analogies you use they are not all wrong i think they are all partly true uh regarding other platforms um you know i think the the key differentiators and some you highlight it very well are you know one you know the the graphics the high end graphics the high fidelity of the graphics the high fidelity of the gameplay all that comes back in right whether you want to make a single player game or real-time multiplayer game uh an mmo first person shooter or thought person shooter everything comes baked in uh in course so by default de facto

out of the box you get real-time multiplayer uh you get the servers as you mentioned you get like all that is transparent you don't have to worry about knowing about the client server architecture about scaling about understanding what to deploy how to deploy all that is fully baked in right um and so for us that was very very important because we see so many studios struggling financially 90 of studios constantly struggle financially and one of the reasons is because uh it's so hard to make games it's so costly it's so uh you need such a high technical expertise um the other thing you mentioned you know is is so the graphics and the fidelity of the the graphics and the gameplay that's super important to us the fact that when we play because we come from that world of mmos first-person shooters or person shooters as players and as game makers the code the multiplayer code has to be perfect everything has to be perfect um you know another key differentiator that that that you mentioned is is um

you know the fact that you have all that in one platform it's hard to understate uh the fact that the analogy you didn't use but that we use often and that we are um that are mentioned about koi is the similarity between almost youtube and twitch in terms of the creation in terms of the usage in terms of the fact that it's gonna unleash loss of creativity in gaming that is not present today gaming today is resource for a certain group of people who have access to the tech the funding etc we score it's much more open almost anybody in the world can make games and we already have examples of people in very far away places that typically are not represented in gaming making games in core so that's that's a a i think where i would start on the analogy of twitch on youtube again to be clear is is from a a player's perspective in terms of consumption you can go from one game to another in just a matter of seconds so it can be a game it can be a world it can be a scene it can be a story just like you would on youtube or twitch and for the creators

so the the analogy with this platform is because you know it's super easy to create to remix to publish to share to collaborate and of course in turn to find your audience right um so that's why i would start on i don't know if jordan has probably some stuff to add on the technical side yeah absolutely i'm jordan uh sorry sorry interrupt but do you uh in terms of the advantages and just disadvantages would you guys agree or disagree with that or was there anything wrong in terms of like our understanding yeah it's a good question and i i was going to talk about the um you know the perceived disadvantages actually i think in some ways become advantages uh so for instance the fact that uh you know you mentioned that right now you're not allowed to to bring external models into core you use all the models that we provide that actually turns out to be an advantage in a number of ways we we don't find that it limits the creators create it actually i think sort of um enhances the creators creativity of what they can make with those pieces we allow you to keep bash things together

such that you can make all styles of games we have examples of cartoony games and examples of sort of horror sci-fi games made with those same pieces uh it also on the technical side makes it so for the consumer for the player the game downloads very fast because all the heavyweight assets are already on the user's computer so they don't have to download all the models for each individual game all they download for each individual game is a very very small definition file that's like a couple hundred k so that's why in the trailer you see people jumping from game to game to the portals it actually is almost that fast you can jump from game to game with your friends that quickly so it's you know there's um and on the you know for the example for the marketing the perceived sort of downside of the the the players and control their marketing i would actually argue that you know discoverability on the app stores the various app stores is difficult right yep i think on core you have not only a level playing field but you actually have just a link that is if someone has core installed and you pass in that link and discord or you pass them that link on slack they click on it they actually jump into

a multiplayer instance instantaneously uh from that game so i think it's actually almost easier to market because all you have to do is put your link in discord and people can join your game one thing that's very important also is that this idea that you know in the traditional current in the current traditional uh game development world it takes like big teams lots of time lots of money sometimes to make almost any games even indie games with score you can be one person you can be two people three people and you can do amazing things right we've we've seen people who are just back-end engineers just ui you like artists you you you are ux artists make full games on their own which in the traditional game development world is almost impossible except if they have team time and money right so yeah let's move forward in terms of talking about the games that this platform can actually create so i took a look at the video and i was actually very impressed with um the technology and how um or what types of games you can actually build with this right like it especially going on that idea that the product vision is to kind of build a

more in-depth higher fidelity roadblocks i think you guys have executed on that very well um looking through the videos what i was probably most excited about was the shooter aspect was that a lot of the games that you guys were highlighting were um shooter style modes and i could see the next brendan green the next kind of like pub g being built within this engine right um but in terms of the breadth of different types of game experiences you kind of highlighted that you've seen a lot of different games get created um but in terms of the breadth like what types of games do you see players actually highly engaging in so far and which modes or which types of games do you think you're going to be leaning into to kind of drive your audience um there are a couple of things right so obviously you know you have all the materials we put out like uh months and months and a half ago and um you know and and the community the the content has evolved already quite a bit right we have like all sorts of games on the platform already um one of the reasons uh you know we

we uh leaned into uh real-time multiplayer early on is because this is the hardest types of games to make technically right i'm not talking creatively i'm not talking commercially those are different players but from a technical perspective um you know uh making real-time multiplayer games especially uh shooters is is is very very hard right because everything has to be perfect it has to be perfect just to be predictable you have to have like all sorts of you know causality baked in you know it has to be uh perfect under probably 60 milliseconds some people with under 200 milliseconds but as a as a a first person shooter fan i know it's you know under 80 minutes are going to get really stressed and you know even 60 minutes right um so we decided to have you know the the the very best multiplayer code layer we could build right for

real for first person shooter third person shooters mmos etc like uh uh because that's something we've done multiple times in the past right our team has worked on mmos phosphorus and shooters or person shooters and everything has to be you know absolutely perfect so we decided to lean into that but then as you know from a technical perspective from a game design perspective there is really almost no difference between a real-time multiplayer game and unless an end asynchronous multiplayer game so after that it's up to the the creators right to use the multiplayer code or not in their design but um you know i i talk to studios all the time right and we've all worked on multiple types of games and there are studios to this day that avoid real-time multiplayer not because they don't want to do it but it's just they know they cannot do it uh it's a technical hill that they don't want to climb they want to spend their their their uh points their their their money their efforts on other aspects of game development not necessarily the rate so it's all fully baked in um you know

on the platform so just out of the box you get like a real-time multiplayer whether you decide to use it for for shooting for fighting or or whatnot right um and just speaking to the types of games that are already on the platform um where are you guys seeing engagement concentrate because like when i look at something like roblox um engagement tends to concentrate a lot around a lot of those top popular games so welcome to bloxville and what's the other one the uh the adopt me types of games right like games versus youtube has a very different kind of engagement um pattern um so with manticore what are you guys seeing at least so far and i realize it's very early on the platform in terms of concentration of engagement yeah so uh like you said it is very early in the platform but we have seen some interesting um sort of developments from from our creators and so trends and so obviously there's a lot of games that are created on the platform that are that are made from our template system

like you said that are very easy to create and shooters and stuff but very quickly we also saw creators doing stuff that we never expected and it's gotten to the point where you know if somebody asks is x possible on core or is why possible encore i used to say oh no not yet or maybe you can do that in the future but now i say i don't know like a creator might be able to do that like uh we've had people make their own player pianos in core for instance that it plays a midi file by parsing the midi itself in lua so there's really interesting um sort of genres exploit that are coming out and what's really cool is because creators can share their stuff in the community content we can talk about what community content means later and how it's different from a store and a marketplace uh later in the conversation but because creators can share their stuff if one person decides to write a player piano and put it on community content every game from now on can have a player piano in it if that makes sense so you really sort of see this explosion of content that gets put in as an example i don't know if you remember the um a few months ago somebody duct taped a

banana to a wall as an art piece in southern california and then somebody ate the banana one of our um one of our community relations people made a duct tape banana in core and all of our creators were putting it and hiding it in their game as an easter egg like literally that same day that that news story happened um so i think it's really you've never seen that possible in games before because you know a traditional game takes you know a year to make by the time you try to do a meme it's sort of out of date um moving on in terms of the product strategy with with comparing it actually to roblox and you talked a lot about like all the different types of games you can create like of course like when you compare some of these feature sets to roblox um they do include things like massive multiplayer right um right out of box uh of course their visual fidelity is much lower but overall they do hit a lot of those feature sets so what building blocks are you guys um really leaning into to help differentiate the types of games that are created on this platform versus something like roblox

yeah i can address that for sure so it's a great question and um you know like frederick said at the beginning we really sort of we come from obviously triple a hardcore gaming multiplayer gaming and we really care about the fidel the gameplay fidelity obviously the graphics fidelity is very high in core um so you know the other thing i think is the ease of use and the ease of publishing and we've really sort of been able to build core from the ground up we've built our own complete game editor package from the ground up to allow people to make games the other cool thing is that the editor package and the client game package are the same piece of software so you don't need to launch another piece of software you don't need to learn anything else you can just like with the game the same client that plays the game as anyone who's a player has the opportunity to be also a creator on the platform which i think is slightly different from some of the other platforms um you know there's a lot of you know whether we talk about roblox or dreams or even unity uh or things like that i think there's a lot of sort of uniqueness in in core that i okay i've been making

games for 25 years i started off making games odds for the super nintendo right and i've used every commercial and every proprietary engine under the sun in that 25 years and using core feels like almost magic to me like i'm still sort of amazed every time i go and and use it the the ease of iteration the ease of publishing it can't be overstated the fact that and later if we do a demo for you uh we do a demo on video i can show you that within five minutes we can create a multiplayer game and have multiple people playing it and published uh from the get-go yeah so it's mainly around like ease of use especially for these creators um and like right now you're a pc centric editor um is there ideas to on i'm assuming on the play side you're assuming you're gonna be able to move to say console maybe mobile but on the editor side are you also thinking like dreams or like roblox where you have some mobile apps edit editor will likely be on the pc for a while we might add a console access at some point for sure

uh for for the creators right um and then for the players it's a pc uh it's gonna be mobile console etc uh also looking at you know the some of the streaming solutions uh we see all that is gonna be fairly easy you know we we also built on top of unreal so we benefit from uh lots of the great things that they've been working on especially after having fortnight that they've reintegrated into unreal um and one last question on on this uh in terms of the technical limits of the platform um do you guys have any sort of limits within each game in terms of ccu or number of players or squad account or this type of thing yeah i could talk about that a little bit um one of the cool things about uh yeah so core um you can have right now up to 16 players concurrent in an instance of a game uh we're gonna expand that to 32 and hopefully later uh more but if if you're the 17th person to join a particular game it'll spin up a new instance automatically so there'll always be bandwidth for you to join a game you'll never be capped uh and you have to wait

in a queue or anything like that the servers spin up in a matter of like five seconds for a new game um and just to kind of go further in terms of the technical limitations are there specific likes like for different kinds of multiplayer games because as frederick mentioned you guys are really focusing on multiplayer i would assume that the architecture required to support a you know like a shooter which has very low latency requirements and has synchronization issues relative to a game like a clash royale would be very different so how do you manage these different kinds of games is it with the same architecture it's very very it's a very good question um so so as i mentioned before like i think technically the hardest types of games to make are the real-time multiplayer games where you have like super fast-paced action it has to be deterministic it has to be not only the client on the server have to be always in accord and know what every everyone is thinking but also you know you have to have predictability

deterministic it has to be deterministic within within a few seconds so on and so forth you will understand that's really the hardest uh the hardest uh type of game so we've made that uh possible on core after that you can reuse that you can detune it right like for instance a battle royale uh a clash royale type game uh it is real time but it's not like you're playing valerant or cs or uh apex right it's slightly different the the but it's it's somewhat similar the architecture is very very similar uh in many ways i've said it's really how you use it i mean again there are some people who made like non-multiplayer games people have made stuff that are not even games they are more like scenes and worlds and we have people who made uh all sorts of multiplayer games shooters battlers but what you're saying frederick though is underneath the hood in terms of the architecture and the approach whether it's like for the network sync for example whether it's like lockstep or mmo style like uh you know state sync or a hybrid like overwatch

uses whatever that is it's generalized across whatever type of multiplayer game it is is that is that right that is correct we solved for the hardest problem first uh which is the real time you know synchronous multiplayer games obviously and everything else is sort of a subset of that you can make like fridges that you can make a single player game that's a subset of multiplayer it's just player count is one uh and it and um you can also do turn based you know everything like that uh is possible within core we wanted to solve for the hardest problem uh you know first and foremost we and then everything else became easy after that and for now for the ccu like we can have 16 players right soon we'll have 32 and likely more later if i say more my cto is going to call me like within five minutes and say don't don't ever promise but we have a super strong team right it's like a team that has worked on all sorts of super complicated games our cto has 25 years of experience in gaming the average number of years of experience in gaming on the team is still around like 15 16 even though we've had lots of more

junior people recently so um you know the other thing is for us it's all a lot about uh the the the creators and the players giving them the best experience and um you know there are so many many many games where you don't have 2 000 people on the server sometimes you don't even have 100 people on the on the server so uh even with with 16 or 32 players concurrently like the combination of the combinatorials of of games that you can make that are fun is is already pretty infinite right um okay so just kind of moving forward and uh talking about product vision so i thought it'd be instructive to have you guys clarify for us what you guys thought in terms of the product vision in terms of like what is the ultimate goal here is it building a roblox for an older audience both player and developer or is it some kind of more grandiose metaverse vision like maybe we could kind of understand

from your perspective what what is the the ultimate end goal from a product vision perspective yeah i think it's it's somewhat all of the above right um and um and more and more so but let me yeah let me actually just jump in yeah it's okay so um so it's a really great question i think the overall product vision is to really sort of radical accessibility and inclusivity in gaming right i want core to be the way almost the way like you can imagine in five years core could be the way that games are made and it seems almost archaic that you would have done it any other way in the past just like us today we don't program games in assembly language anymore and if you try to if you thought about programming a game in assembly language people would think you're crazy in five or ten years people might say oh wait people used to use multiple pipelines and they had to have build processes and all this stuff that seems archaic that seems crazy i can just publish a game like you can publish a video right now on youtube you don't have to go to a studio you don't have to you know have a contract with a network anymore to make videos

um so when i look at the space in terms of creative sandbox games um my dreams as you talked about just came out locked on the ps4 um and overall the performance was pretty poor they haven't really been able to get to a critical mass of players but that's initial numbers and you look at roblox and of course like is a amazing success um going shooting up into the right in terms of their graph um but when you look at the initial right like 2006 to 2014 almost they're really really struggling to get that critical massive audience so when you guys are looking at this creative sandbox space um what are you looking at in terms of that initial time frame and like is there anything as a part of your strategy to kind of speed up that critical mass phase yeah absolutely so you know you you're after you know listening to your podcast on watching your videos etc i'm going to use some terms that are

probably more strategic business technical but i think you can handle them right basically we're operating a two-sided marketplace right you have the the supply side the creators you have the demon side the players and uh and you have kind of the platform and the content in the middle um with collaboration with with publishing so on and so forth uh you know so we're obviously looking at creating a flywheel effect right the the the creators make content the content attract players and the players then uh give us uh all engagement and in in in in in time and money and then we repurpose that in the platform by getting more creators et cetera so uh you know and and and so you and you mentioned also earlier like hey you know the the the promise for creator is you join the pride the platform early before it's fully baked fully defined and and before it starts taking off and that's one of the big promises right uh so we are doing all that right we are not just focusing on one side or the

other for now we are focusing a lot on the creators because it's critical right we want to have uh creators uh uh uh joining us uh whether they are new creators people who use unity produce roblox uh so on and so forth people who do game jams um and then we want them to get familiar with the platform start creating start collaborating with other people uh very soon we'll have the the the monetization part for the creators in place uh i'm not gonna give you the exact timeline but it's not it's soon you know some people have seen what we've done and they say oh you've done your closed alpha uh and then you open alpha so you're launching in 21 22 i said no we're launching this year and so it's piece by piece right and then um you try to place some some efforts on all sides of the funnel for now again it's all the creators because you know we want them to get familiar with the platform collaborate meet other people start experimenting we have tons of

schools and students and game jams that are adopting a core as part of their curriculum we have indie developers we have all sorts of creators joining the platform then they're gonna collaborate make content and we've been pretty upfront if you've seen the the the the blog post and the ama we did a few weeks ago about the roadmap and the monetization about how it's going to play out and how the monetization is going to be structured at first and in a few weeks few months we're going to start reaching out more toward the players obviously it's a different messaging right it's a different messaging um and the target audience for the creators is pretty broad right it can be any creators like people like jordan with 25 years of experience in gaming as well as a 14 year old girl in in belgium or africa or south america who has a genius game idea right or 20 something in in the iranian island and then for the players you know we'll see right what is the target audience but it could be also pretty broad we're also investing in um you know

ecosystem right training the creators and building incentives we have uh tons of events and contests game jams etc coming up in the next weeks it's going to be a very very busy late spring on summer uh in the community of core in the car community for for creators and then at some point of course for players so we have all sorts of game jams and contests uh i don't think i can reveal most of them yet but it's gonna be pretty exciting uh we have also all sorts of uh externship programs at play where we're gonna invite people who you know are not able to do their internships because of corner virus and to come on and do stuff in corn be trained in game creation uh but you're right right you you it took a while it is it it's it's one thing where you need to have i think patience patience doesn't mean you don't do anything you try to you know place some bets all along this

flywheel and see what happens try to get the fly will start i guess for you would be that way uh and then i think you know we look back in a year and we see oh probably we were right on on on placing bets in certain areas and probably we didn't know right in some other cases some things are going to work some things are not going to work um and and we would always be surprised i think of of what will make the success of the platform just like roblox was just like youtube was just like twitch was right um so it's it's going to be a mixer for that uh i know it sounds like uh who do you think is your beachhead like is it sort of like the the kids that are developing on roblox that kind of age out and then go to your platform is it small indeed you know devs like who are the or is it artists that you know always wanted to make a game like who do you think are your initial initial creators well for now we have all of this right we even have

um i would say more like triple a ish game studios experimenting on core to do prototyping uh but we have literally like everything from like 14 year olds that are have no experience in gaming uh all the way to pretty advanced indies uh using the platform um you know it's we we've been seeing lots of lots of good results i would say with with schools with students with aspiring game creators because um again there is a um almost an i wouldn't say anti-establishment but there is like you know as you know the traditional path to get into gaming is really really hard i mean you know we all got breaks to get into gaming besides jordan being bored into gaming because his dad was one of the early employees at ea so he had it easy but you know for the average person wants to get into gaming it's almost impossible right you know that right he the the frederick the kid frederick who was in

this small town in france back in the 20s or years ago his chances of getting into gaming were close to zero well so we're seeing lots of lots of promises with with people being at school and saying hey i've been learning to use all these tools this plethora of tools to make a game and i've been asked to specialize arts game design production engineering and all of a sudden there is core and maybe i should drop out of school right so we've seen lots of lots of progress there and also lots of innovation like some of the games we've seen like are made by these people who have not been i would say trained or or tented or whatever you want to use uh formatted by traditional game development and therefore they just make stuff that sometimes early on don't make sense just like on youtube just like on twitch right i mean we're all watching videos that shouldn't really make any sense but here you are with a million followers right i think another great target beachhead for us is also mod makers um you know the mod scene is something

where a lot of of innovation and genres have sprung out of obviously famously you know the entire moba genre now the entire battle royale genre has sprung out of originally the mod scenes but getting those uh mods to commercial success in the past has been very hard right like it's taken 10 plus years in some cases to get a mod that was you know very fun and innovative to commercial success and so we think with core with the sort of speed of iteration and the speed of publishing uh that could be a much shorter timeline got it okay so just kind of shifting now to business model this is you know kind of the topic that a lot of our audience is the most interested in in terms of monetization i know you guys have touched upon it with one of your blog posts but just for our audience could you tell us what is the kind of thinking in terms of business model both for manticore for you guys and then for your developers is it going to be more like a roblox kind of fun or is it going to be something else how does it work it's actually very simple right so the money comes from the players it's a free to play experience for the

players just like any game just like apex fortnite etc they come they play they can play endlessly for free obviously and then they have access to different programs different cosmetics right we have a very deep beautiful avatar system uh every time we show the platform to people uh actually that's what jordan is showing like people are really super excited about the the quality the diversity uh the customization of the avatars right uh so in some ways it's like lots of the other top free to play uh games out there so cosmetics right you have access cosmetics by by playing through progression and by by obviously paying um we'll have avatars we'll have all sorts of looks themes that you can combine we combine any way you want backpacks pets mounts you know you name it right for the players you also have access to all sorts of programs right that give

you kind of vip uh select access to progression cosmetics events right so it's basically the the the kind of battle pass season pass model uh probably a little deeper than what you see out there without riveting everything but uh you know you have battle passes season passes they give you access certain progression right certain stats certain cosmetics but also events uh that's a very important concept for us on the platform i cannot talk too much about it yet but you look at where i come from you look at what's already happening in the community for creators look at the next tweaks we'll have tons of events for creators soon we'll extend that to players so as a player you can be part of different different groups different systems right and so um that is kind of the main uh point of entry for for for for the money for the the economic influx right uh cosmetics micro subscriptions subscriptions etc

you'll have ways to also give uh subscription money to the platform at the platform levels at the creator level so players can just like on twitch youtube patreon etc they can give money directly to the creators they can subscribe to the creators right and then of course in turn we share lots of that with the creators and the creators are going to be rewarded based on the popularity and the engagement of their games for the first for the first phase of the company we're not really going to allow creators to manage their own ieps we think they have already way too much on their plates in terms of managing their games that's one of the things actually by the way a little side side note that we've been seeing is that you have people on the platform who's you know start making stuff and then people contact them and say hey what about this what about that or hey i took your game on i i changed it that way do you wanna do you mind like do you like it what do you

think so we want the creators to spend much more time on creativity with engaging their audience uh pleasing their audience creating new content as opposed to spending time reading all the books about monetization iaps etc so that's kind of the high level model but or or all good is really to create a very strong economic platform for for for the creators um for them to make money make a living be incentivized to create the very best games and the very best expense for the players you know like like frederick said i think the the really cool part about this is that it's the incentives are aligned right between between mantacore between the creators and between the players if you think of a youtube model where if you put a video on youtube youtube shares a portion of their ad revenue with the highest engaging content that's similar to what we will do we'll share a portion of our revenue with the highest engaging content and that really sort of aligns all incentives okay um on the um

product vision i just want to ask one more question um the visual identity of this game this was something that i think joe you touched on in the podcast previously okay um like when we look at the ui and we look at the game um it's right like very high fidelity roblox but it's easy to make the comparison to fortnite right especially when you're looking at the the ui um um right like is this something that was kind of part of your product strategy to kind of like lean on stuff that players would know or you guys trying to figure out how to craft your own visual identity there you know when we started manticore games actually core was not even our first idea we actually started making aaa 3d uh multiplayer games and later that that sort of evolved into core we could talk about that too if it was interesting but um our first game was going to be a game called spell shock that was sort of a modern interpretation of high fantasy uh real time combat uh sort of a la wow uh battlegrounds if you you know if you had played some of the famous well battlegrounds we really wanted to sort

of do something like that as a standalone game would be cool and so the art style really started from there sort of imagining what maybe uh uh you know if wow was recreated into in today's world uh what it would look like it just so happens that it um it sort of made uh uh it dovetailed with the with the with the fortnite look when fortnite came out we we started working on core even before pubg came out so long before lava for fortnight in terms of key challenges um if you were to kind of summarize what your top like two to three big challenges that you guys are facing right now what would they be technically what we're doing is super freaking hard super super freaking hard this is something that is not to be underestimated i mean you're looking at a you know we are a team of close to 80 people you're looking at years of not not just decades of expense encapsulated in the tool but in the tech stack but uh this is super hard like we've invested very early on on the tech side uh we're built on top of unreal but you

know we had to build our own editor on real-time multiplayer code or own publishing layer so this is something with lots of surface area lots of complexity um so but that's also what's so exciting right i mean it's kind of uh there is really not one week where we don't come up with a new angle a new way to look at things any way to think about it whether it's a feature a way people are gonna use core and then you you think super hard as a team and all that and then you look at the community and you're like oh wow they just blew us away with one new thing we didn't think about or one question you know um i don't know if jordan you want to even that right even though it was you're looking at right now you're looking at jordan is in something called call plaza which is a social hub that we made as part uh using uh basically all the games that were made on the platform or some of the top games and even that skatepark you're looking at like that's something that was ugc

everything is ugc right so it's like sometimes it's made by our team sometimes it's made by our team on their free hours and sometimes it's made by the it's made by the community so uh what about that challenge in terms of you know i think you were describing it as a flywheel but you've got a it sounds like you've got a really great platform you guys have solved a lot of great technical challenges you know so i guess there's one part in terms of getting developers aware and getting them on and making sure there's a revenue model for them but then at that point to get the players are do you view that marketing as as a challenge or do you think that once you have enough good content players are going to jump on or how are you viewing that challenge yes so the mindset i would tell you is not build it they will come that that that that that that almost never happens uh and when it happens it's it's a fluke or uh you know if for what we're doing it doesn't happen yes marketing growth uh community management developers relation all that is super super important

uh we're investing very heavily in that area i mean we we hired a few months ago patrick bickner uh who is you know i think has three decades in gaming he was a part of maxis before it was acquired by ea so he worked on all sorts of franchises over the years all sorts of games so it's an area that's super super important i think from a from a candied business perspective um though we are investing a lot toward the creators it's very important we have a very solid developers relations team uh with the players it's almost in some ways harder right because you talk to creators existing or wannabe creators and you say here is a small bug of stuff like come to the buffet you can do this you can do that you can specialize or not you can make games you know and it's it's it is not easy but with the players you know you have to entice them right you're all competing for eyeballs engagement right it's like you have kids right so it's it's it's nine it's you know it's it's 10 p.m

and i've put the kids to bed and i i i've walked for another hour and a half from the company on mexico and i'm saying hey now it's my time what do i do do i grab my kindle do i go into apex do i go into a valorant do i go into core do i go into netflix do i do something on my own whether something am i with my wife do i play you see what i mean right so we all understand that so we have various programs to jump start the pump in terms of content we have our own content we have some creators we're helping uh we're gonna invest into a almost like a a manual version of revshare early on that creators can be incentivized and say like hey these guys are serious uh they're already sharing revenues that we don't have yet because we want to have the players but um so it's going to be a mix of all that but by by the time we launch to the players in a few months we'll have you know a huge amount of content of high quality of all

sorts and we can work on the messaging also of course yes and one thing i want to say about the content that we're creating uh is that it's all available to our creators to use and borrow and copy and paste the way chorus create is made this um what i'm showing on my screen now is a vfx sample level you can literally go in and control c control v you can copy paste any one of these vfx into your game and you have a high quality rocket trail or a high quality spell effect uh by literally just copy and pasting so all the content we create as manticore is going to be available to our creators to borrow remix uh you know uses examples all that kind of stuff okay and so last area last set of questions around the status and roadmap so could you guys tell us what's sort of in the pipeline for the platform and what are like the key priorities in terms of features capabilities and things like that coming up there are several areas in which we're investing one um we're investing of course always in core for creators so we have more features coming into the

service into the client into the editor into the multiplayer et cetera for sure more tools to collaborate uh of course the monetization for the creators that's a big part that we're building the monetization for the players so having a way for us to give money to creators and have them manage their own games manage their own publishing their own marketing but also for a way for us to distribute the money a way for us to take the money from the the players i mean get the money from the players get the engagement uh so we're investing also a lot in social for the players um you can imagine like all the features i mentioned like you know friends list and friends related features one click joins all sorts of grouping chat etc uh we're spending also lots of time creating specific content for the creators and for the the players content meaning like games right so uh that's what we're working on um obviously you know there is lots of

work going on in the in the back end not just the backend team but in general like the back office right to be able to put core out there on different in different stores different platforms on the product side uh we're doing a lot of uh cool features that our creators have been asking for including very easy ways to do mpcs very easy ways to do foliage and grass and beautiful looking scenes like you can literally now with the foliage system make a beautiful forest in under you know a minute uh that looks aaa quality um so we're just continuing to make the the editor side easier to use uh and and um more full featured do you think that full age system is going to be an issue when you go to mobile no okay great all right so i think that's it guys uh thank you for your time and do you have a message for our audience you know first off thank you very much this was an amazing forum

i really loved the questions um you know i feel like my brain has been super stimulated so that's awesome uh so that was really really really appreciated the time and the forum the the the the opportunity to explain a bit more uh super in-depth question uh yeah i mean i think my invitation is really to uh the the creators and soon the players that come experiment see for yourself car is in open alpha so it's still early but at the same time it's still it's already out there right you can use it you can you can come play the game like right now you're looking at jordan playing a he's flying a bi-plane uh by playing game a biplane plane sorry over some forests probably in france or somewhere so everything is possible with score come expense for yourself uh whether you're a creator or player uh that's really the uh and and we have tons of tons of events and announcements in the next weeks it's gonna be a very very very busy next months for for us

we're offering tons of things to the community we're gonna have game jams we're gonna have game design contests we're gonna have an externship program we're gonna have an art creation program and contests uh going to have even panels to help people get into gaming and learn more about not just core but in general game creation game developments so yeah thanks for the time yeah thanks and i'll certainly have all the links to where to download core and all the links to videos and stuff like that in the show notes but thank you very much guys thank you thank you that was awesome great so um when you first launch core this is what you see you see sort of featured games top games you can play highest rated all those things discovery tools each one of these is a full-fledged game that i can click on and if i click play it'll launch me into a multi-player instance of that game running encore as a service but for the

demo i think it's really cool to create a game from scratch that we can play multiplayer uh really fast so i'm going to go ahead and do that i'm going to create a new game and i'm going to start from just a blank empty project to show how easy and how fast it is to create a gaming core i'm going to call this uh deconstructor of fun demo uh this is actually a constructor of fun actually our tool is a constructor of fun so we will do that so if you just hit play without doing anything else you see you've got a third person sort of standard control setup avatar this is really about our philosophy of opt-in complexity we want to give the creator 80 of what they want for the you know sort of a standard type of game out of the box without having to write a single piece of code this is multiplayer ready if i hit publish in the corner here right now we could have multiple people running around this blue plane but of course that's not very fun so let's add some stuff to this scene i'm going to take a 10 000 foot view here and add a terrain so i'm just going to generate a new terrain with our touring creator i'm going to say i want some maybe background

mountains uh so now i get some nice randomly generated background mountains these are actually voxels so i can carve holes into them and stuff like if i wanted to um and then it's got our sort of default blue material on here so now i'm going to start searching in core content core content is all the assets that we provide as core for you to make your games with so that includes sounds materials models all those types of things so i'm going to type terrain here to find some cool terrain materials and i could have my game take place in the snow if i wanted to do by just dragging and dropping i can also have it take place in the desert so we'll do a desert here and then is this is the kind of assumption like a 3d mmo type of environment is that the general assumption of core or if i wanted to make like a 2d game yeah we give you actually templates i started from a blank project but we actually have template projects you can start from that do 2d side scroller 2d top down kind of rts style even first person and third person so i'm just going to i'm going to do a third person one here just uh because it's one of the uh the sort of default easiest one so there's a

couple ways to make things in core i can literally start grabbing 3d objects and dragging and dropping them in and scaling them and you can see they got really nice you know high quality materials on them with you know bump mapping and all those cool features uh or i can go to community content i don't know if you can see that tab behind here they hide my uh camera there so community content um community content is anything that somebody has made in core that uh any creators made that they've decided to upload and share with the community and it could be sort of a 3d model they've could bash together it could be gameplay logic or it could be all the above so i'm actually going to type sniper here and what i'm going to find is a construction kit to make a full game called sniper alley so i'm going to go ahead and download that construction kit i didn't have it on my computer before i just downloaded it from the cloud and you can see what it is is a series of templates that i can use to make this game every one of these templates is ugc is user-generated content that a user and core has made right so this is ugc based off of art primitives of some kind that you guys have that exactly okay exactly so if i drag and drop the arena in you can see i get a nice sort

of arena for my 3d game to take place each one of these i can select the individual object and you can see the individual pieces that were put together to make this even these palm trees are not a single model we don't have a palm tree yet in core we're going to add one soon but so this user got creative and made a palm tree out of ferns that we had uh got it okay cool so uh and i'm gonna go ahead and start dragging in some other templates again all ugc and uh while i do that i'm fredrik if you're still there i don't think he's there but oh okay and jordan just so i understand so right now the um the target platform is pc when is mobile uh planned or yeah it's a great question we plan to do uh we plan to do console and mobile um and because we're built on unreal four obviously it's not we don't get it for free but we uh you know unreal four does run on all those platforms and uh we will have video settings that you can adjust for those different platforms and in fact we have to do that for pc anyway because not all pcs are created equal so we already have you know if i go into

settings i can go to uh video and adjust all my quality presets and we'll allow creators to also flag their game of whether their game you know if they think their game is appropriate for mobile right but just to your point i i think i asked earlier in terms of foliage i mean foliage yeah there's a lot of bushes grass all that kind of stuff has been a problem on mobile so what what is the sort of like let's say i created a a jungle environment what's the min spec on mobile that that you have in mind uh yep it's a great question um and a few things our foliage system is built to take into account the the video settings and the distance so you can you know you can have foliage drop out if you have a lower end device um you know i think of it's funny but people people so often forget that the nintendo switch is effectively a mobile device in itself and if you look at if you look at breath of the wild uh you know their grass and their and their bushes and trees are very high-end and it's just about how you how smartly you do it i think there's also features in unreal that we use such as

uh object instancing that that our foliage system uses that makes it quicker to render um so we'll we'll allow basically the creator to say hey on a mobile device draw half as much grass or something like that or just eliminate the or just eliminate yeah the exactly exactly so i'm gonna go ahead and continue making this game real quick i'm going to put in a palace here uh let's put this large palace over here and again this large palace is something that was a user created you can see that these are just like cones that were put in and uh so i'm just i'm not going to build the full game but i'll just do enough so that you can see and we'll actually play it multiplayer with with some people back at the office i'll message them on slack and right now this is on pc but you know part of what i was thinking in terms of your target audience as far as the developer community or that a lot of artists are you know the the kinds of people that don't have a lot of technical skill are going to be potentially the ones that are most interested but a lot of those artists guys are on mac so is is there some thinking in terms of mac support or are you guys um just going to keep it on sort of like

you know windows pc yeah it's a great question right now the plan is is windows pc um and it's i i would agree with you and especially for mobile game development uh that mac is for artists is super popular but more and more pc development and 3d studio max and you know um uh maya and all those things are pc based uh so i i think it'll be i think uh i think it'll be a good audience let me see all right i'm just gonna have one more building here and then what's really cool is that i'm gonna add the gameplay logic too so the gameplay logic for this game is actually just drag and drop it in and i'm gonna drag and drop some atmospherics in oops let me close this all some nice atmospherics going on this and also the ui all right so real quick i'm gonna test it okay and uh there so the gameplay logic that i dragged and dropped works um let me see if i can actually even get the sound working for you real quick

settings i turned it down earlier uh when frederick was all right so now what i'm going to do is publish this game uh and so the publishing step is pretty easy i go to publish game and a dialog box will come up and i can say hey this is a action game it's death match and i'm going to take a screenshot of it real quick that will be displayed on the on the page now what about like so since clearly like one of the the target sort of genres that you guys are going after is shooter but when we talk about different types of guns and gun characteristics do you surface that so that you can you know like let's say i want these 12 different guns but then all the characteristics in terms of like the the animations the you know uh ads sorts of characteristics the you know all the all that stuff the physics in terms of the bullet drop all that kind of stuff like how much how much customization is there with respect to the weapons because

certainly for a lot of games it's very different yes absolutely it's a great question uh it's very detailed um it's fully customizable so all of our weapons are actually ugc that sniper rifle that i just showed and i can show it again here if i just hit um if i just hit play on this is completely ugc including the code that does the the aim down sights the code that does the zoom in that's all written in lua so it's fully uh modifiable by the creators and it's even modifiable if they have no coding experience all the important things that you mentioned the bullet drop whether the bullets bounce their velocity muzzle velocity whether it's a hit trace that is all just in drop down menus on the weapon system uh and so i pop while we were talking i published that game and actually uh i'm going to go ahead and bring up the web page here see and i'm going to close course you can see that you know here publicly i've got uh whoops let me close that even i'm gonna close all the way out of course so here's the public webpage coregames.com dof demo uh and i'm gonna go ahead and jump into it and there's already some people in

the office uh i think jumped into that game and playing it uh and i'm logged in with a different account oh no hold on i'm on the web page i'm on a different account log out let me just i'll do it this way just go back to here where i'm logged in with the right account so if i look at new games you can see it here play there so you can see i've already got uh six or seven players in here uh i'm if ifrit and they let's go find them somewhere now they are instructed to let me win during demos but it doesn't always work and i don't know if you can hear the game sounds or not but uh i can't through zoom okay great it's all right that's all good let's see where they are oh headshot

they're trying so hard to let me win they're so nice but so this is you know full full 3d shooter that we just created in a few minutes one of the big thing in shooters is like visibility of of the windows in terms of the transparency and stuff like that do you guys know it so that that's different based upon the games like some games you want to be able to see through the windows some you want okay yeah absolutely uh all the windows are you can put any material basically i didn't show it but you can drag and drop any material on any surface so uh and we have some one-sided materials so if you want to be able to see out the window but not in uh stuff like that so i'm gonna go in here uh because there's a portal in here and as you know if you've watched the trailer you've seen people jumping through the portals uh and you saw that i was able to join this game just by clicking a link on a web page well going through this portal is just like clicking a link on a web page and it will take me to a different game that's written by a different person potentially even running on a different server so here you can see i'm in sort of a high fantasy setting i'm going to grab a hammer

and get on my mount which in this case is a hoverboard and go capture the points this is a capture and a five point capture and hold a fantasy setting if you've ever played a wrathy basin it might be seen as homage to that uh and wow uh and there should be other players in here somewhere that i can kill i don't know where they went there there so we handled melee weapons and and all kinds of things like that too oh she where'd she go and this is again all ugc uh these angel statues you see over here were made by one of our interns last year uh just out of individual pieces and we'll go to one more game just because i want to show uh that it's not all third person over the shoulder we can do top down and stuff like that too so what we've gone to here now is going to be sort of an io style uh version of sea of thieves it's kind of a pirate game where you are top down and you're sort of trying

to capture as much gold as you can before uh the other pirates and so in terms of the link that you had mentioned so you could potentially market your game right like with that link so if you press on the link it'll take you to the game yep i could create a facebook ad that has that link to take people okay that's that's yeah exactly boom so you can see we you know we support sort of all styles of different games it's not just shooters uh and you know third and first person we've had like frederick mentioned people make chess we've had people make um connect four with physics right on the on the pieces all right squirtle's fired right and so you said this is built on top of uh unreal so is there access to like the i forgot it's called blueprints or whatever their visual scripting language is that's a great question so no so one of the interesting things about core is yes it's built on top of unreal 4 engine but it doesn't use a single line of unreal 4 editor code we

that editor you saw earlier we created from scratch in unreal for runtime so effectively we're just an unreal four game that happens to have a very good map editor uh toolset in it and but more than that obviously creation of code gameplay code using lua but all this editor you see here was written entirely by us in unreal for runtime it doesn't use a single line of unreal for editor and then were there any other sorts of you know tech stacks that you guys deployed for the core infrastructure whether it's not like on the network side or or or otherwise i'm sorry could you repeat that question i'm sorry so like you guys used unreal uh but were there any other sorts of tech stacks that you guys like let's say photon for network or you know any other third-party sorts of uh yeah i know yeah so all of our uh every all of our tech stack and i could show it even a stack diagram but uh we have unreal four at the bottom all the rest of our tech stack is custom written by us by ourselves and by our team it's also cloud agnostic so it's able to run on any of the major

cloud services out there so if there's a better matter in terms of being since you guys abstract that from the user is there a reason why user would say well i want to go aws instead of azure or whatever it's a great question uh and we we do abstract it we extract it such that they actually don't choose we the core system chooses for their players which is best for them so if we detect that they've got players in a certain region uh we spin up servers on at the correct cloud that's best and most cost effective for that region got it yep cool so that's that's mostly the demo i mean um yeah it's really really cool what you can create with community content though like if i wanted to set a wedding apparently in sniper rally here i could just download these wedding props and have a wedding in sniper alley uh uh you know one one thing i'll show real quick actually if you've got time uh one of our one of our earlier creators was a fan of the game portal and he made a portal gun uh you know sort of an homage to the portal gun in here and complete with the physics and everything that you would expect right

uh so if i just put this portal gun here and i click play i can go replace my sniper rifle with that put a portal put a portal literally any game on the platform now can have the portal mechanic and if it wanted to so i think you're going to start to see amazing things where people like what if i mixed you know mario kart style racing with portal type portal guns like what would happen like things that you've never even imagined before got it yep cool okay great well thank you very much jordan thank you so much okay talk to you later [Applause] [Music] bye [Music]