Matchmaking Retention Through Emotional Variability - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] every time you play a match you just feel tired because you're fighting you're trying to get to the top there's no easy crushing enjoyable moment of victory where you feel super powerful [Music] hi friends welcome to the metacast round table by navik and today is going to be a really chill episode i feel so grab a little hot train put your cozy shoes on uh because we're joined by anil dasguptas cpo and co-founder of first light games and also the crypto cabal meetup in london which is happening later on and matt diane senior no oh wait recently promoted uh lead product manager at ea and also

navic contributor welcome do you have your cozy shoes on yes very cozy ready to go good how about you i know i'm too fashionable for cozy shoes mine hurt my feet but they look good on me that's how i roll i'm gonna look at your feelings wait that sounds weird okay scratch that scratch that actually today is the 50th episode of the round table wow 50 of these i joined about i don't know 12 ago or something so a big chunk of that was nico so congrats to nico on this 50 episodes not years um and okay before we kick off i saw the leaked list of the playstation state of play uh what are you looking forward to i'm looking forward to the game stray

i'm very excited about this game you control a stray cat roaming around a like post-apocalyptic robot cyberpunk city of some sort and uh you know i love cats i have a cat so i'm excited about this game that's all the analysis i have good good makes sense are your dogs going to be jealous no i don't think so they get plenty of attention oh yeah that's so cute uh and neil do you have anything you're looking for oh it's super obvious yeah it's super obvious for me but it's street fighter 6 it's already been announced but the last time they did it they didn't really show any gameplay they just showed some kind of conceptual stuff i've got a feeling it will knowing capcom still only be conceptual stuff they normally don't show the gameplay till fighting game season which is in august but one can dream one can hope um it's all about that gameplay i'd love to see it it's a it's a game i worked on in the past uh street fighter 4 which is quite a long

time ago when you consider this now a five and all that sort of dazzle in the middle but always a fan i'm curious what they are doing a bit i understand that this time round as well the game director is a lady and i think that's the first time for a street fighter franchise so yeah um i've heard behind closed doors that they're quite excited but let's see cool yeah do you think it's going to be an open world fighting game who knows i mean do you know what i have to say when they do the games like that i always hope that someone puts their stamp on it even if it's like maybe doesn't even work out i think with franchises personally i hate it when people play it safe i'd rather that each one was this kind of identifiable different thing you know for good or for worse so if it is i mean you know why not i mean yeah i think it's better to be marmite with games like that it's kind of interesting in the industry isn't it you know that's not normally the way they do normally it's better to be safe rather than sorry but um you know when there's been so many games you know i think it's celebrating its 35th anniversary this

year i personally would rather something that really makes me excited for it so open world street fighter 6 confirmed that's what we're saying here with cats with cats with cats yes i didn't see final fantasy on the list i actually think i saw two different lists because i think there were fake images circulating the internet and one of them had final fantasy but then the recent one didn't uh that is my grand desire please final fantasy 16. where are you i heard i thought i had heard some rumors about like final fantasy vii remake part two was gonna be announced uh soon yeah that was also yeah that was also in the one of the images i saw that now was no longer the image that i found that would make more sense that would be pretty exciting to see that it's been a long time coming isn't it i'm going to be devastated if stray is not actually on the slate though

what have i got to look forward to then final fantasy yeah no i am actually legitimately super stoked about final fantasy remake part two um the original was my favorite game ever and i loved the remake so i'm definitely excited about part two whenever that does come yeah i'm still on the final fantasy 10 team as the best final fantasy i understand good no one tried to convince me otherwise this is great okay moving on you're entitled you know this is such a nice group of friends gosh this is the chill podcast yeah it is a chill podcast i just don't have the hot drink to slip on um yeah so next big announcement i got really really excited about star wars jedi fallen order the sequel was announced with the cool name of star wars jedi survivor i have nothing else to share on that apart from that really cool tidbit of news

did you play the first one i did i did yeah did you what'd you think yeah i liked it it was kind of like um star wars meets dark souls almost not as difficult i think but um similar kind of design i thought it was really good yeah the combat was really good it kind of had a platforming platform feeling which was nice it was a controlled open environment which i appreciate i get to bog down in open worlds so i like having a bit of a exploration path but not too much within the different worlds yeah i'm looking forward to the next one i agree it was um dark souls light and if you played at a higher difficulty it definitely got very dark soulsy i ended up turning the difficulty down because i'm a wimp it was good it was good um oh and just the last news yeah hutch started the four day work week so i'll now be trialing this life of a four-day work week i'll i'll let you know in a month or so what this feels like oh wow

me yeah maybe i'll build a boat or something [Laughter] that's very cool for them to do that though it'd be interesting to see the results yeah it'll be good there's been data being shared of other companies and games doing this but you never quite know how i don't you know i don't want to throw the results into question how how true is it why you put through the to the media i suppose so going through it myself um yeah i'm keen to see if i can do as much in four days well we'll see and with that we'll kick off the first topic today which is from matt yeah so this will be a quick one i think but um wanted to talk about some trans media announcements from sony so they they have come out and said that there's going to be some adaptations of some of their first party ips god of war is going to be a tv show apparently on amazon prime horizon zero dawn is going to get a netflix show and

the sort of head scratcher to me was gran turismo is going to get a movie um and supposedly neil blomkamp from district 9 fames is penned for or directing that we'll see i don't think that's been confirmed um so you know before we dive into like what we think about those adaptations uh i just wanted to like kind of give a bit of background also because this seems to be like a uh strategy that sony is pursuing right so so they have also previously um announced uh adaptations for last of us for ghost of tsushima for twisted metal and jack and daxter i think the three of us maybe previously discussed uh around the bungee acquisition uh if that might be a strategy that they took destiny and i know maria's really stoked about that um so so it seems like this is a strategy that somebody's pursuing uh i wanted to just kind of throw it out to you all like do we think this is gonna work um what is the goal like are they trying to drive people back to the playstation

network with these tv shows and movies or is there are they franchise building is it all the above is something else like what do you all think and now uh yeah i think i would say all of the above to be a complete cop-out with the answer um it's something we have discussed quite a few times and we were kind of saying that how games now because it couldn't have got to being an adult in sort of their form right games have been around for so long now so 30 to 40 years that we're getting to the point where i piece of truly becomes forever franchises and i think if you were to look at ip management in general this sort of thing is the sort of thing you would expect to do and if you've got like a hit ip you know why would you not do this kind of thing um you know that's exactly what you would do you try to make it so that you know it's not just a game but there's other media that trump that spins off it um i think you know maybe a more interesting question that you asked matt was um you know will it work

and that i'm less confident of in my answer i would say um if i'm being honest because let's let's say gaming and transitioning away from gaming has largely been a failure i mean perhaps if you look at things like pokemon being a card game that's different so we have definitely seen games kind of been successful not just in their native form but i can't really think of a really successful gaming iep that sort of managed to be a successful movie it may be something the hedgehog has done quite well but still i think i think it does right like yeah um you know hollywood accounting is notoriously kind of strange but um i think if we're just talking numbers like financial success even some of the really poorly reviewed movies have been financial successes like i'm remembering back to the world of warcraft movie which was like a huge hit in china um uh one movie that i neglected to mention earlier was the uncharted one uh in january which which appears to have turned a profit based on what i found on

box office mojo um uh i don't know like i think i think we're all kind of old enough to remember when like the super mario movie was a big deal john leguizamo was like whoa this is crazy video games are coming to movies and now it's like you know one thing i wanted to ask you all is are we in a golden age for film and tv adaptations uh video games because i think we we might be i think we are looking at the market of how many people in the world are gamers and love everyone has a favorite video game or mobile game um like mine is final fantasy 10 and i'm constantly talking about it and i'm i'm more hopeful about film and siri adaptations of games rather than books because books have a story line by line on character development that is done for you by the author and in games there's that mixture between the narrative and then you have your own

especially in rpgs you're making your own story as you go so perhaps people won't be so bogged down on line by line of the story and will be more open to different storylines and on at least with my consumption habits i will watch anything that has an ip on it that i like even if it has disappointed me in the past because i like the ip and with games i play a lot of games you've got persistence to do that i admire your spirit for that i would say i think it's the golden age for trying it i would definitely agree with that for me a golden age would be that the results are good but listen i would say this i'm not against it because i feel that it's like a numbers game at some point someone will make a great gaming movie stroke tv series maybe you could argue the witcher is that although that was a book before it was a video game then it will take off and you know let's remember that comic book movies even though now they're everywhere and i personally detest them even though i'll be a massive comic book fan as a kid it

took years and years and years for someone really to crack it like the batman's were always pretty successful superman mediocre but it wasn't really to kind of spiderman one with um the sony release that everyone's like oh my god you can make a superhero movie and hollywood for years had shied away from it and then they were everywhere and marvel repeated their formula over and over and regardless of what you think about them they have definitively been some you know comic book movie adaptations have been absolutely amazing you know i'm a big fan of guardians of galaxy for example so i think it'll be the same thing i don't know when it will happen i kind of pray that someone does i think for me maybe it's the same for you guys but it's just sad that given the richness of the iep that is available with some of the video game adaptations that the movies have been so poor um you know my time in capcom resident evil that's actually considered a success in movies but the movies just got nothing to do with the games it's just sort of so disappointing when the lore of the games is like for me one of my best of my favorite things about it like they've got great characters so i just hope

someone someday does it justice but i think it will happen because at some point you're going to get a script writer who grew up with video games actually knows the source material about the back of their hand and is talented and the person financing it also understands video games and also knows said game and they'll make it happen and hopefully it'll be glorious and successful and then that will be the golden age uh but i commend i commend sony for doing it there the grand there is no one's weird as hell though that's just like it i was gonna ask if you thought that was gonna be the paragon of video game film could you imagine if that one was though because maybe it's such a blank canvas but it's just because obviously what does it even mean there's no characters there's no world here but um i mean they've got a great director on it who can say they made a movie out of battleship too so you know i can make a movie out of anything yeah and it worked for the witcher a number of players went back to the game after watching it on on netflix yeah and do you know what's going on

oh okay you know what game has great great lore and would be a great siri uh destiny is it is it okay i thought you're going to say final fantasy 10 even though that's been the theme okay so so you're kind of setting it up maria it's uh it's a great segue like which since we're talking about sony and transmedia which sony ip do you think makes the jump next oh gosh the the the choice is limited because they've already announced so many i'll give you one to think about i think you'll appreciate this neil what if they made a tekken well but is that sony or is that namco that that they are making oh yeah live series i think i i'm sure there's a yeah there's a tekken animated series already i'm pretty sure i've even seen an episode of it it looked quite good that that would be good that'd be all for i mean the mortal kombat movies are questionable shall we say but yeah i i personally really like the first one

they ever made with that i actually think that was quite oh yeah that station that's the classic yeah have they announced crash bandicoot yet that would seem more the sort of thing that um i think would work well because sometimes i think that like going for the more realistic style is harder because you're trying to appeal to two audiences the ones who already like the fact that the franchise and sort of new people who might not but might think it's a bit nerdy whereas i mean they're doing jack and daxter as well i think that's another good one i kind of feel that those ones are a bit easier to succeed in because you can have like cool looking characters that are over the top and it's maybe cheaper to do animation than it is to do live action movies and you might get more of a hit there so if they've not done that that's the one that i think they might do because it's still a strong ip and i think would work well in that world how about you guys what do you think matt well i gave i gave my prediction uh tekken but like i think anil makes a good point that's not really a sony ip

um i don't know um i think yeah crash bandicoot is an excellent call i'm excited for the twisted metal tv show oh just because i loved that game i don't know maybe my excitement is misplaced but uh i think michael b jordan is gonna be in that one uh if i'm not mistaken um i don't know i'm gonna have to do some quick googling here i already said mine which is uh destiny uh if i had another choice i would dive into a warframe series or a trilogy of movies or something it just has such good lore and it's pure sci-fi and i love a good sci-fi with high fast action combat and different characters that have different powers and synergies that'll be good i was mistaken about twisted metal it's anthony mackie not michael b jordan so i got my superheroes mixed up but um yeah he's gonna be uh he's the he was falcon and falcon winter soldier

um are you good man do you have any other questions can we i have so many questions about the gran turismo movie but i think we could i think we can move on we'll have to wait wait and see we can then do a round table on the movie once it's out oh i'm up for that yeah yeah uh yeah neil so on on to your topic yeah so my topic is on merge mania and i'm not talking about uh the merchant games on the mobile top charts which i think could also be a relevant discussion but the general consolidation is happening in the industry and i was sparked by another acquisition happening this week which was a trail mix um well actually supercell now got a majority stake in trail mix they're people that i know quite well uh cairo if she's listening congratulations to her i remember her speaking to her actually when she founded that company and um i really was thankful for her time because that was around the same time that i decided to do something so yeah so does it end and i think that there's

sort of that the bigger questions are sort of like is it good for the industry is it good for players themselves um how do we think it's going to be effective going forwards how about the web 3 sort of elephant in the room in the sense that like many companies are starting to pivot or thinking about pivoting and who's going to be the next big company to be acquired many things we can touch on so i'll throw all those kind of darts your way maria and see what you have to say wait what those are a lot of darts at the same time so let's start the top one and let's say you know what's your overall take on consolidation in the industry is it good for the industry and is it good for players i'm going to do a call out answer here as well okay um i believe business and financial markets it goes in circles everything is in a circle so there will be consolidation and then well sorry in english what's the antenna for consolidation expansion

was it is it okay um and so yeah i think it'll go it'll go in circles we're in in consolidation and then that will be the next step the consolidation makes sense um for these big companies especially that they've been around for years and now they're starting to plateau with a growth and strike struggling to find the next growth opportunities the acquisition is a good way to reward um your shareholders and then move on to the next thing to be honest i'm more thinking from a player perspectives what's running through my mind now if i'm trying to think as a player what do i feel about the consolidation and it makes me nervous because we see all of these games that are a little bit risky like the straight cat wandering through a city if i were in a big big company probably have more green

lighting processes and they want to be less they're going to be more risk averse to try to guarantee better returns will they allow for more creative risky games that have these concepts that aren't so based on other games that are out there like non-formulas is what i'm trying to say so we could be we could see a reduction of just interesting high high realism games that are out there that have high production values hopefully you know hopefully in their there's an indie market so we'll keep seeing those kind of new games and fresh ideas in the indie market but i always like to stay in front of my playstation and just have this high definition world to get lost in with very high quality and high production values and i'm a little bit afraid that that might decrease what do you make of the fact though that at the moment i think a big change is that the companies who previously used to do the acquiring like your ubisoft

eas and before they required activision blizzard are now the ones being acquired like that's a huge paradigm shift like ea acquiring a company that's literally happened for like the last 20 years ea being acquired hasn't happened yet that's a game changer same with activision blizzard and you know that definitely speaks to i think the world has finally worked out that video games is a thing like despite the fact that it's been bigger than the movies and music industry for literally 10 years straight i i personally always felt that video game companies were undervalued and that's why even when earlier in the year like the activision blizz one like eyebrows were raised at that number i sort of thought but is it i mean if you look at what you know how strong their pedigree is and the increasing value of the games industry but maybe more question for matt i mean you work more in these spaces as well like what do you think about like that happening because that's like never has really been seen before in the industry yeah it's an interesting question um

i've certainly never gone through that um i'll say as like as an employee of ea it's it's a very large company already and so to think about what it means to be absorbed into an even larger company um is kind of daunting um you know one of my one of the challenges that i um have to overcome on a sort of regular basis and that i talk to other employees about frequently is like needing to reach out to other studios and share learnings um across like the mobile organization or just the broader organization there's you know lots of pms across the company many of whom i have never met and so how do how can we share learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel every time we're doing a new system uh something like that so i can imagine that challenge would only increase uh going to a you know pick a tech company microsoft netflix apple what have you um so i mean that's that's kind of like the first thing that comes to mind as

someone who's on the on the ground day in and day out um i think uh to maria's point it's it's a maybe a little bit concerning as a player um i think that that you're spot on that there will be fewer bets made on you know interesting new riskier projects um that's that's the sense that i get as well um you know given we have these sort of um decaying macroeconomic conditions things are going to get a little bit tougher out there we probably are going to see more acquisitions and more consolidation of struggling studios that that need uh some support but also these big platform holders need content to fill the pipelines right like xbox game pass needs new games and sony needs new games for their network and so there's there's gonna be a need for these kind of games but whether those type of companies will continue to remain independent or they're going to be increasingly

um you know aggregated under embracer or ea or what have you like i guess that remains to be seen but those are kind of my initial reactions to me and also speaks to the evolution of tech and entertainment companies and how big and profitable they are um like to the point is is true i know but just thinking about you know the fang acronym the small number of companies that exist out there that can pay these huge sums to to buy these mature companies for like you're saying for guaranteed content pipelines for their for their products or you know if disney acquired ea to have more ips and be able to also build games with their ips so yeah to me it speaks to the power that some companies right now have you know apple amazon google microsoft yeah we all know who they are

[Music] yeah i i don't i don't have an opinion on it really i there there are some concerns about monopolization that i have um to buy a company as big as ea there has to be a company bigger than them is where i'm coming from and to me i find that a little bit scary as like a small human in this world yeah this sort of thing has been seen in other industries like in the movie industry there's very few sort of uh studios now where there used to be way more you know back in the 50s and 60s same thing happened just consolidated and the fewer marriages being like the winners and they monopolized all of the supply line and you know made this sort of situation it is now perhaps maybe like moving on a little bit how about like you know the rise of web 3 because web 3 potentially could be a game changer in the fact that you've got different types of organizational setups specifically dowels and you know you could end up having a game which is run

by its own dao which would mean that a company doesn't really need to look after it but the people who were looking after it would sort of be truly passionate about what they're doing and care for it um is that the sort of thing that could could stop mergers from happening in i don't think in the short term in the mid to long term that's just an open question i think it's an interesting new format that the industry will need to grapple with but i don't think it's going to stop consolidation i think i mean maybe i'm oversimplifying but i think any acquirer could come in and just scoop up a bunch of tokens instead of scooping up a bunch of shares um and i think on the topic of web 3 generally that is going to be an area where we do see acquisitions you know these big companies outside of maybe ubisoft and square enix like they don't have the capability to do web 3 right now and it really doesn't make sense for them to do that like it's sort of a classic kind of innovator's dilemma right where it's it's like it's not in their best interest to be

trying these new things that are risky and will pull away from their main kind of cash cows and so it's better to just like acquire someone uh like a first light games that is already doing this already um and you know showing potential um so uh that i think that's gonna happen like it's it's too risky for activision ea name a big you know publisher to start that stuff from scratch it's easier to just acquire those capabilities hmm i'm not i'm i'm honestly a bit skeptic about daos until i see it work fully independently and being able to manage a business like a game in a way that is profitable because my initial assumption is that the dao would manage the game to make it fun if it's a game then there's a whole play

play to earn play and earn that maybe would give a financial motivation to also try to maximize the the revenue potential for the game yeah i don't i don't know until i see it in action i'm just getting skeptical about it anil what do you think uh even though i brought up the topic i think i would largely agree with both of you um i think it will cause some sort of minor differences as people understand the sort of new world but uh cash is king at the end of the day as matt said even in the dao someone could just buy all of the tokens and then essentially run the dow how they wanted to anyway there may be some protection measures put in place to get around that but realistically the games industry works like a certain way and that's probably how it will be you know going forwards and i do think though that in terms you know the question asks is when does merge mania end and i think web 3 doesn't end it actually if anything is going to make it more likely and if

anything the types of companies that will be acquired might be not just traditional gaming studios but people who sort of sit between different verticals so yuga labs would be a good example of someone who you know they're making games but you know they're a kind of a cultural style studio too artistic branded more like that and but i think you know maybe not them but someone like them inevitably also gets acquired probably by the traditional people that have the channels and media i think maybe another question though is that you know how long can it go on for before these companies get so big that kind of anti-competition laws kick in and they're forced to kind of sell up entities amazon especially is one of those companies that to this day i don't really understand how they're allowed to exist in their current form because they have so many different like aws just by itself should 100 be his own company like i'm not really sure how someone can own that plus the logistics pipeline maybe someone from a legal angle can but i think it's just a matter of time before some of that happens even the same to

microsoft it's so huge and at what point does there have to be a microsoft games division is a separate company and it's just called xbox and then you know microsoft sits on top of that and and and that might have more of a an effect in when mergers stop oh this question might get a little bit political i don't think there's enough political motivation to break up such big companies due to how governments work elections work and so i i have doubts that that will ever happen the way that i see it is that as professionals and especially working in a creative industry i believe the expansion will come from potentially people wanting to explore more of these creative risky ideas and get frustrated within these big companies of you know

top-down decisions and processes and not having the freedom to just do something that's risky without jumping through a bunch of hoops and getting authorization to do it probably getting rejected and having to work on something that is more of a known formula and so yeah you might you might see companies that decide to start branching out and be more independent again i think there will always be that independent segment of the industry uh just sort of people who are passionate about a certain idea or project and want to go build it for sure that's not going anywhere um uh oh i lost my train of thought i was gonna comment on you oh yeah um so you were talking about antitrust um i remember when the uh microsoft activision you know uh acquisition was just being announced and i saw some charts about like percentage of market share across pc mobile and console gaming and

none of the combined entities were like more than 50 so like these are massive companies for sure and they span a lot of different industries beyond gaming but when it comes to gaming specifically i don't think any one company is really monopolistic as far as platform dominance you might argue like apple or google that's maybe a different conversation but if you were to also further break it down by like genre i think you would see the same thing there's no like major monopolistic players like probably the closest thing would be i don't know candy crush in match 3 or call of duty and shooters but even those have competitors that make uh you know decent businesses yeah so yeah i don't think there's there's a numbers case to be made for monopoly at least at this point yeah there is a clear difference between what feels like a monopoly as a consumer versus the actual definition of a monopoly to then right um have legal consequences on it

yeah the games are still 60 70 the micro transactions are still you know 99 cents to whatever high-end price like no one is extracting you know undo sums beyond what's industry norms well i'm curious to see how far it will go is the development of the platforms for example publishing platforms like epic and then the intersection with the metaverse and also the intersection of web 3 in terms of the chains so looking at immutable it feels like immutable is becoming this chain publishing platform that if you have a deal with them they'll uh help you set up your account flows and best practices and user funnels potentially we'll see perhaps on-chain game services who who knows that people can tap into and there's a lot of competitors out there so we might see a dominant company come out of the end of it and perhaps it could be acquired

by one of these other companies i don't know i'm curious to see that aspect of how far it can go and who will become known as the publishing platform in web3 that has services like epic online services or play fob out there interesting oh matt just did his lean in the chair no i don't have any slide comments right now um yeah are you happy to carry on you don't know neil do you have any other running lessons let's move on to the next one okay so good [Laughter] i should have prepared better i didn't know we were gonna get a questioning from the host um oh yeah and if you subscribe to the navic digest newsletter it's free you could get a roundup of all of these insights matt actually recently wrote a piece about the state of public and private markets that covers a lot of this if you want to go and check it out and

yeah that's then my topic for today which is about matchmaking so it's inspired by a washington post uh article called video game developers want fair online games some players don't and the summary uh this was written by ethan davidson the summary is that some popular war zone players on twitch and youtube um they seek out lobbies that are filled with less skillful players i think they call it bot lobbies or something like that um because skill based matchmaking which is a widely used formula right now in pvp games they try to match players i'm probably over explaining this you know what it is and then a number of players they just find it it's that constant skill matching every time you play a match you just feel tired because you're fighting you're trying to get to the top there's no easy

crushing enjoyable moment of victory where you feel super powerful you you win by a lot of effort and being good at what you're playing but sometimes players just want to chill yeah feel like they're crushing the world of course sometimes you will be crushed you'll just be completely taken over in a match and the match hopefully will end soon so that you can move on to the other one um and these players by the players were asking to have these lobbies where they could always face less skillful players one thing that i kept thinking about that someone has to be at the bottom so if you're always placed in these less skillful lobbies the same people potentially are just going to get crushed over and over and over again uh and i played a lot of destiny 2 and battlefield 5. so i i somewhat know the feeling in some of the game modes of just being constantly crushed and then that's why i churned

because i never got the opportunity to to be equally good um yeah so you know i know and neil matt you both are experts in matchmaking right i'm not an expert but i think you hit on the key point in my mind there at the end which is you churned because it wasn't a fun experience like you know there's matchmaking based on skill around like establishing the best competition best level of you know fairness but really i think a lot of these games should be matchmaking to optimize towards retention and keeping people in the game and engaged with the game um unless you're like a league of legends where you're doing like high level competitive gaming and you want it to be fair you know 50 win and lose rate um i think you should be optimizing your matchmaking towards engagement to keep people in the game and having fun so you get um you know a less of a choppy experience as a player you know

you don't want to be getting crushed every time but you also don't want to be winning every time you don't want to be too easy that's sort of like the classic um game design challenge of vacillating between like too challenging and boredom um so anyways i think that's the important bit is like optimizing towards engagement and keeping people retained in the game rather than optimizing towards perfect fair play and do you think that happens currently with the games that are out there that are heavily pvp well that's that's kind of the vibe i'm getting from this article and from your summary is that these sort of like esports pros are upset that they're having to play against other really talented players um you know personally i don't have a lot of sympathy for that argument um like if you're gonna be like a super high skilled player you should expect to play against super high skilled players but i understand why you don't like i'll give you a real world example like i

like to play basketball i don't like i like to play basketball because i can play with my friends and have fun and we're all like around the same skill level i don't like to go out and like play against a bunch of d1 college athletes because i'm gonna get destroyed um so you know i can understand the point of view but um yeah i i just think that the goals are different what are you thinking now yeah i've actually worked on quite a few matchmaking algorithms in my past and on games like this i've got quite a lot to say about this i think you are right to say that um they kind of on the surface don't appear to be doing that great a job at optimizing for attention but actually i think they kind of are because certainly in my experience what we kind of found quite quickly is that the most vocal players are the ones that complain the most but those people tend to be the ones that are the most skillful and they will play your game regardless so therefore if you're in charge of the product yes you want to optimize for attention

but who you're optimizing for attention for you probably want to optimize your attention for 80 of the player base rather than 20 of your player base and for 80 of the player base losing feels bad and the most tolerable limit they will get to in a pvp game is 50 at least that's what our findings were and i'm pretty sure i've heard that across the industry if you make a pvp game like you were to make let's say a a card battle a single player rpg then you can get away with uh 60 40. that actually means making the player win even more than 50 at the time but you don't want them winning so much that it's too easy because then they also churn which is another thing to put out on there as well that if it was like you're winning all the time there would be no interest in playing the game so i actually think that's kind of like how elo has ended up where it is and matchmaking because that has i'm not saying it's the best way but currently no one has come up with a way that is uh feels better than that without having the kind of negative consequences and i do remember a few times actually we had something that was kind of like a

modified elo ranking that tried to take certain things into a consideration like what your current win streak was on had you lost uh had you ever lost streak for a while to make kind of temporal adjustments and did they really have a big impact not really i have seen it happen in some other games like at the naked plates of clash royale you quite often get this feeling of if you lose a lot of games in a row it will hand you what's blatantly a bop so that you can smash it and then you'll you'll feel good again but you kind of know it's a bot and it's like if you were to really make it like a truly bespoke experience you would do something similar to that and right now the ai with bots isn't good enough you can always kind of tell right when you're really good at these games so um it is interesting i totally agree with you marie i have to say so i used to run fighting game tournaments i used to play in said tournaments myself too and one thing i found is that in the casuals before the tournament i used to have a great time because there was no pressure on you were having a challenging game but it didn't really matter if you won or you lost and then as soon as i get into the tournament proper itself oh this feels horrible like every move

every miscalculation you make and it actually wasn't that fun no matter how well you did and i strangely found myself much for preferring the casuals both before and after if that makes sense and a sort of main event was fun to watch but not necessarily to play through and a bit like your kind of basketball comparison that i play football every week and it's quite competitive but we're not really playing to win and i really like that so it's not like a league it doesn't really matter who wins or loses but everyone of course wants to win but that's like a more kind of fun feeling and so i can totally understand it's like the equivalence of netflix and chill is you just want to like call of duty and chill or battle royale and chill and just have a good time and you might have like with no stress on you you might play better and you do things that are more fun or if you watch people stream often they do that that it's more fun to watch it when they're not being so kind of competitive um totally feel that way but you know these games they're popular because it goes for that kind of killer player persona profile right you want to win you want to dominate you want to be the best well if you want to have a game that facilitates that what comes of that

is you're going to lose quite a lot of time and you're going to get beaten and so on and so forth and how do you balance it and then then you have games like um hearthstone was a really good example of this where they put like quite a big element of luck into the game so it meant that like even if you were the best player in the world you could never really get above kind of 70 win ratio which is interesting because you know i've worked on fighting games where the best player in the world can have like a 98 ratio there's not that much luck involved at the very top level and you know that has pros and cons pros because it means that like oh the best player always wins but cons because it's boring because the roger federer stroke rafa nadal novak djokovic of insert video game here always dominates whereas it's more fun to watch like that you know the underdog have it stay kind of thing so it is pretty interesting i mean i'd be curious and maybe throw it back on you that you know how would you even go about fixing it i mean my personal uh opinion is that like um there has been no good way to do it and hence why elo is just the de facto

default solution we keep to because it works not that it can't be improved but it's decent i don't i don't i think what matt was saying not always being perfectly skill based having some variation uh i believe that it applies ai to find these perfectly matched skilled players so perhaps there could be an ai that understands what kind of cadence of winds tight winds uh yeah i should distinguish tight winds from crushing winds from tight losses and crushing losses understanding what's the best pattern essentially segmenting and yeah adding in artificially that variation into the player's experience so that sometimes it's easy i suppose um in terms of the elo rating something that i've been thinking about is how how does elo maintain variability with who you

face if your game has a load yet you well the way the system works is that if you get matched with someone who's much more skillful than you if you win you'll got the ranks faster and conversely if you're really highly skilled you have a lot to lose by playing the lower ranked player so that tends to mean that you if you're forced into that you you may not want to accept the match that's allowed in the algorithm or more likely it just means that you know it's trying to just like average everything out so everyone's around the the same ranking and essentially it means that on average you will always be after a couple of hundred matches you'll be always having like a 50 win loss ratio because as you improve you're then quickly put to someone who's more skillful to you and as you get worse you get matched with people who are also equally bad so that's what it really does and it's just basically you hard crunch the numbers you do like monte carlo simulations that's all it really tends to just shows you that doesn't matter what number you start at you will always end up in the middle and that's sort of what's preferred and you maybe get less than one percent of players the same as in

chess right chess is feed a ranking it's just elo right so there are some people that have bonkers scores like magnus carlsen i think set the record for something like 2 600 and then you've got like a sort of if you would lose to anyone he would lose like you know 200 elo whereas if anyone could take a game of them they'd like an international grand master immediately sort of thing that's of how ridiculous the level he got to which is kind of unfair on him i i wouldn't be surprised if magnus carlsen is one of these guys but guys kindly just let me play some fun chess against people so i can just beat some scrubs and feel good about myself rather than punishing me um yeah yeah unfortunately there's no like easy answer to this um there are a lot of really really smart people working on matchmaking algorithms and you know crunching the numbers from a data science perspective and machine learning like there's a lot of smart people working on these problems and i don't think there's a great answer yet i mean there's definitely some some good attempts as the nls pointed out you know there are things you can do like um

well bots is one thing uh you know for better or worse like it's especially around the dau problem you kind of have to have bots um and you can probably spend a lot of time and energy um adjusting the ai to different skill levels to better match against differently ranked players you can have also ranked play versus casual play where you have different algorithms there may be different matchmaking algorithms at different ranks maybe it resets season over season there's all sorts of different ways you could approach this but no doubt it's a challenging problem uh last last question that's been on my mind i know if you're working with a fairly small game team you know a small studio maybe you're bootstrapping don't have a lot of funding and you have a team of 10 to 20 people how how far would you go to try to optimize the matchmaking it's a great question i i think that

what i've noticed is that you're better off trying to get people into a match rather than trying to get them into a fair match if that makes sense because it's still better to play against human competition than just bots so you want to optimize for that and that tends to be the bigger challenge for a startup as opposed to the other way around because if you're a startup when you release your game are you going to get it that your matchmaking time is less than a minute because you've got enough of a player base to do it unlikely you know that's where like you know if you're blizzard or your supercell you're a massive advantage because you can announce your brand new game you know called super test prototype fighter whatever you want to call it it's like really clear that it's a beta and immediately two million people download it even though it's only available on the canadian itunes store and they've already got that concurrency and they can check it um whereas if you're a startup and you wanted to make the set the same game even if your gameplay was really amazing they can't guarantee it and that's not to say it's not important you definitely want to kind of add that but it's like the secondary consideration to wanting to make sure that people get into the game first as matt says bots are a necessary

evil because you've got to that's going to help you facilitate getting players into the game um but then you definitely get these sort of i've seen this on a number of games i've worked with where you can basically compare the retention of people who are matched with real players against people who are matched with bots and like the retention of real players is like oh 70 day one and then retention with bots is like 20 day one and it's like oh great we just need to put more people into the game but that cost you more money and then you know you haven't got this way of monetizing of the people you're putting in so you need some fairly deep pockets to to kind of say that and that's why i think you definitely notice in the industry how some people are amazing at making pvp games and some people have tried it but no they're never going to go back into that because it's just not really possible uh you know look at how valerian has become like a really great game for raya but it definitely helped they can put so many people into it and use that to like really kind of tune it if you were trying to go against them i'm not saying it's not possible it's just a much bigger mountain to climb

sounds like wave 3 potentially is a good space to release pvp because you can create that awareness prior to releasing the game even if you're a small studio that is the conclusion we have come to at my company though okay i i i yeah to be totally honest with you on candid that's exactly it like if it was a um or could we do the same game we wanted to do about it being web 3 i think it'd be a lot more challenging uh because you know one thing that i like about the sort of web 3d development philosophy is like the pyramid's been turned on its head what will tend to happen is that you'll be working on a top secret game for two years no one's ever heard about it until the announcement trailer comes out and then you see if people like it or not whereas games in web 3 right now some people literally show one screenshot start their community start selling people on hopes and dreams and people come towards it and if people like the idea of what you're making more and more people will arrive and if you've got like a good uh product market fit eventually that game will become a real thing and then people will like it the danger there is of

course then you're buying into hopes and dreams not a real product and what if the real product doesn't match the hopes and dreams and then projects fail that way but it's interesting it's a for me having been through both cycles i far preferred this way of doing it because it feels more kind of like indie or sort of like you know a bunch of developers in a bedroom or sort of a university working together on their dream project which is fun and you get that kind of um payback with a feedback loop much faster like if your game is good then people are going to say it's good and if it's not it's not and then you can kind of move on whereas you know that's sometimes like it'd be interesting she's asked to ask you matt like you know when i was working for like a sort of juggernauts in the past and working on games that would take years you know you often got to sort of point a year in development where you're like oh you know it's still going to be another year before people even see this game and you know what if this game sucks okay okay so yeah i mean maybe maybe you've endured such such things in the past and then yeah it can be brutal whereas i'd have

loved it if like you know people could put it out there and you could try it and you know i've seen both things like i do have to say i remember one i won't see what game it was but um it was shown you know fairly advanced they were going to sort of announce it so two months after it was shown to us what do you think about it and i was trying really hard not to tell them the game absolutely sucked and then sure enough when it came out like it just bombed and yeah and like you know you could have saved yourself two years of life and like i said if you're unfortunate to be put onto that kind of project so um yeah that's a that's a very real thing that's maybe those of life behind the scenes is a game step is that those things happen i i happen to know someone who worked for the first 10 years of their career or not a single game that got released every single one got cancelled behind closed doors so they were like a really talented person and this person i won't say their name but they ended up becoming like the game leader of a super successful game that's like one of the best sort of performing games in the world right now and yet for the first 10 years of their life they didn't have a single ship product to speak of uh fair play to this person

they stuck with it and you know got there in the end but you've got to have tough skin to do that uh neil i'm curious to ask and i don't know how much you can you can say on the record here but like this matchmaking thing as it relates to web3 like is there anything um that the blockchain sort of uniquely enables there i was sort of thinking through this um like maybe um you know sort of your your elo scores or equivalent could be sort of immutably stored on the chain could you like have the um matchmaking algorithm be like a smart contract where people could fork it and like you know improve it over time kind of open source like have you guys thought about this stuff at all like what's what's happening uh in in this space from a web 3 perspective i've got to say those are way better ideas than anything we've had i might steal some of them for ourselves and please we are we i have to say there's someone on our team who's literally looking at that aspect right now but i think for for where we are we still i don't think the blockchain really adds anything at the moment because you're

still looking to get like fun and fair matchmaking is the most important that's very interesting though to show it like you know immutably on the blockchain i think that could definitely help with um finding people who are cheating or you know because there is this kind of concept of um people doing clash as well where people deliberately lose they can make a bigger run because they know that the elo is going to modify it so you can do it and you could maybe analytically resolve that but how big an issue that really is um but you know i think what you've kind of touched on there is the same of everything with web3 which is that it gives us potentially new solutions to many problems they've had in the past and it's up to people to figure it out perhaps you don't need web3 to solve some of these problems i mean that's sort of the point we're saying here like my wedding people are optimized for it and that's really good thought today i i it could be some cool stuff to be done there i'm curious that sometimes players say oh you know if you just did it like this it'd be way better um so if it's on the blockchain you have your yeah all of that information public and

someone can take it and then just say hey come and play in this game that i made that's meant to be way better yeah i don't know it sounds like it sounds i was gonna say that i don't know about you but it's been proven over and over again that just because you're good at a game doesn't mean you're good at designing games and i i always say that as someone who also thought that myself too there's like a different skill set involved and you often many companies have done it i've certainly seen it at companies where you'll bring top players in you'll listen to their ideas then you'll like implement your ideas and they're not very good or you'll hire someone from that background to do it and again it's like they know how to min max a specific system of rules but the ability to come up with the rules in the first place and give you that feeling that's like a different aspect and and but that is challenging i i genuinely think it's like like sort of left brain right brain thinking that they're too sort of diametrically opposed so to be fair we had that often um like working on fighting games that people who would design it were they were okay at the game but they they

would get completely destroyed by someone who is like the top tournament player but then the top tournament player if they gave us their ideas you're like well that will never work it just won't be very much fun um so yeah that's kind of back to your point there maria is like you know they could make their own sort of thing so look how much better it is but i'd put a lot of money to say it wouldn't be better maybe but just having that opportunity to if if you want to dedicate time to doing it that you can take that information and and go and spin off something of your own it just feels exciting um all right well i think we'll wrap up the episode because we're near the one hour one hour mark unless and nil matt anything additional you want to add i don't think so it's a good good chill podcast yeah as always a pleasure i hope my nubbik elo doesn't suffer too much in the making of it do we have an elo oh no this is this is why anil and i keep getting matched in the podcast very evenly matched

is this skill based matchmaking or retention based matching oh i'll let the listeners decide well thank you very much for joining today and also thank you to the listeners for listening in today if you want to join the discussion you can find us in the navic discord or we will see you next week thanks everyone [Music] you