Niantic Layoffs / Square Enix’s Future / FTC Lawsuit Revelations

foreign [Music] gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a full sun current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novik's growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and advisory services for more information visit www.navic.com now let's jump into the episode hello everyone welcome to another novik Roundtable I'm your host Devin Becker and with me I have some great panelists as always especially the ever Lively Aaron Bush co-founder of novik we got Matt D on here Nava contributor and founder of OE scheming and we've got a new face here Mario stefandis and let me know if I uh pronounce that correctly stephanidis I you know it's it's got a

lot of vowels in it uh why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself though yeah it's closer than 90 of people so you're good um yeah I saw Mario stefanidis um formerly uh used to work at Roundtable Investments uh in gaming research pretty much for three years and then before that I was at BlackRock for three years in fixed income research so I've kind of spent the last six years researching various things and I made the decision uh late last year to pursue an MBA from Columbia business school so kind of just floating around uh prepping to do that but the main thing I've done to uh you know occupy myself and be useful in the world is right for navic for the last few months I've been proud to write for uh navic Pro and now that that's shuttered I've been writing for navig digest and it's been awesome to be a part of the community that uh you guys have created so thank you yeah and if you watch or list or read

what am I even saying if you read navic digest you'll see every week Mario is the is the guy who writes the the like the weekly deals section and just like all of all the happenings of what's going on in the Venture world the public markets world plus you know writes a couple times a month about all sorts of various companies and topics too so so yeah Mario's done great great work for for novik so far and excited to have him on the the podcast today too yeah always going family here and hopefully uh those of you in the US also had a great Fourth of July as we have just finished that here in the US and of course we got Mario I think uh out of town at the moment but hopefully celebrated as best he could but uh definitely a good one uh we've got some great topics as well today of course as usual lots of lots of stuff going on in the games World we've got some stuff about PlayStation opening up potentially to Roblox Unity launching some AI platforms Niantic with some unfortunate layoff news uh big Square Enix update lots of stuff in there and some revelation Nations around everyone's favorite FTC trial that we'll

get into that you know to make sure to continue that Saga uh but first Aaron you want to talk a little bit about what we got going on over at novik as well yeah so we are super excited to announce the launch of navix open gaming research initiative and for those of you who have followed navic for a while you already know that we work really hard every week to provide you with great content about the business of gaming primarily through our podcast here and the novik digest newsletter but this initiative is going to take our free content and research efforts to the next level and so our mission here is to create the number one destination for games industry research and do so in a way that's incredibly open and enormously collaborative but bring it all together in one easy to consume spot so this effort will Encompass what we already do with digest in the podcast but what's exciting is that we're on the cusp of adding much much more so for one you may have already seen US expand digest that Cadence to four times a week but we're

also adding monthly game deconstructions by monthly genre reports monthly deep dives into important Trends in companies ongoing Market Research into public markets deal making web 3 ugc and more and soon we're going to be adding a new tactics driven segment to this podcast that will explore exactly how various games teams executed and succeeded and there's even more that we want to to get to like events and Community efforts that that will build up so really all in all we're adding a bunch more high quality research that we're really excited about and the last thing I'll say is just that um we're only able to do this because of two main reasons one is because we have an incredible community of creators who are not only experts at what they do and that we're grateful to have around but who are also passionate about learning in public and if that is something that you're interested in being a part of just reach out and let us know we always

love building our team of people to work with and learn from um and and just collaborate with um and then second we're bringing on a dozen launch Partners who are helping fund all of this expanded content creation um but not only are they funding it but they're also super excited about the open gaming research initiatives Mission and have a bunch of insights to share themselves so um you'll you'll learn more about those partners and you know the the weeks and months to come but if you want to learn any more right now about this Mission our amazing creators or or our new launch Partners uh or honestly just want to check out our new website which we're as we're recording is about coming out but it's pretty cool and I'm excited about that just go to navic dot Co slash ogri and make sure you're signed up to receive all of the updates so very excited to get rolling on this new bigger and better initiative and I hope everyone listening um is excited too yeah a lot of good stuff to look forward

to and obviously all of us as well uh right for the the newsletter and lots of good stuff I think at this point like people are gonna have to switch to a four day work week uh just have enough time to be able to read all of this but get that three-day weekend in there uh which you know that's great like it it's honestly even like almost sometimes too much content for I think all of us to keep up with which is uh it's a fantastic problem to have so definitely make sure to also check out you know all the all the sponsors all the people helping support that you know make sure to even just bounce to their website for a minute check out what they got going on just so that they see you know some some definite interest uh from everyone so we keep doing that sort of thing and obviously you know as Aaron mentioned you know there'll be more news coming out as we get rolling with that but uh definitely keep an eye out for it make sure if you're not already for some weird reason especially if you stumbled on this through YouTube or something make sure you're subscribed to novix newsletter because uh yeah it's gonna be bursting through your inbox as Aaron said uh you're probably gonna have too much to read but it's worth it but out of the actual discussion topics here where we're going to talk instead of reading right now uh Playstation

potentially opening up to Roblox what do you think about that man yeah I'll kick this off with a quick update here so this will be um you know no surprise to anyone who listens to this podcast that we have news coming from the Microsoft Activision trial um so this was this was a revelation that came out of those hearings um that uh PlayStation Sony and Playstation are potentially opening up to Roblox so if you follow Roblox you know that they're available on basically every other platform you can get it on your PC Mobile phone even on Xbox but Roblox has intentionally been held back from PlayStation 4 and Playstation 5. um what they say is mostly due to the the consoles young user base and wanting to protect those those users but the revelations coming out of this um trial is that um there are now talks happening that that might be relaxed it sounds like Sony um is uh I should say Sony quote has

reviewed those policies and relaxed a little on this this is coming from Jim Ryan of Sony uh he said they've been conservative for too long and now we are currently engaging with people at ROBLOX um so I thought that was interesting um in conjunction with um a piece that I mentioned I think a one or two podcasts ago whenever I was last on was that uh Roblox was opening up to um older experiences for 17 plus uh players so I think this you know the previous concern was about protecting their users now they're opening up a little bit to more mature audiences um and this is just another move in that direction um and then you know one interesting parallel I thought was when Sony was kind of the last holdout on Cross play too um and sort of like the just the business opportunity and the huge like Market of players forced their hand to to participate and like not leave that money on the table essentially

um so yeah I mean that that's that's basically the update I think it's interesting uh obviously Roblox a company to continue to watch but um you know on the other the other end of this deal Sony kind of slowly opening up to more um ecosystems platforms on its own platform uh Playstation already have fortnite which is kind of like you were talking about cross-platform and stuff like that I remember that was a big deal with that um I mean wouldn't that have already kind of opened up a more mature in theory uh platform like more more so than Roblox uh yeah certainly um it's I guess the analogy was more about like Sony being the last person to kind of join whatever like movement or initiative that's happening um sort of having their hand forced from just like the tremendous amount of money they're leaving on the table yeah obviously Roblox is coming to Oculus too or the quest I should say

right like that's coming up pretty soon as well that'll be that'll be pretty exciting so yeah nice little little Tailwinds here um for Roblox and yeah and as you're saying that especially if they can start to build more content for the Aged up audience I think those are probably perform better on all these other console experiences and sort of just um primarily mobile too yeah I was gonna say uh Roblox um fortnite skus young but Roblox SKU is really young like the majority of Roblox users are under the age of 12. and they've been trying to build their older demographic for a while now um parley to sell ads it's really hard to sell ads to people that aren't even teenagers yet for like legal reasons and obvious reasons uh and tapping into PlayStation which is arguably the oldest demographic of the three major consoles um is a huge win I think for both parties well I guess we'll have to see how that launch goes uh if it does I mean I imagine they might

announce it at some point as you said Matt this was kind of a revelation right from the trial and not like an announcement from Sony yeah just to be clear like it's just uh the news is that discussions are ongoing and Playstation has kind of relaxed their approach to this but nothing official has been announced cool well I guess we'll have to see where that goes I'm sure you know Roblox Community out there excited about the possibility uh if they're PlayStation fans as well maybe having to play it on their phone for the moment or they're on their computer but uh yeah lots lots of cool stuff uh speaking of of platforms doing interesting things Unity watching some AI platforms yeah so Unity has been bit by both the AI and the AR VR bug over the past month and so despite you know absolutely no Financial updates over that time and and of course the last one you know a couple months ago was quite poor um Unity stock you know even so is still up about 50 over the past month as a result of a couple um announcements the first was when

Apple announced the Vision Pro and that Unity would be a partner unity's stock shut up um even though it'll be many years before this device actually uh truly scales and quite honestly it's just kind of funny to me because Unity would have been there anyways especially given Apple's poor relationship with epic so that was kind of a dumb stock move at the time in my opinion but um this past week wave number two hit which is AI and unity has been writing the AI Buzz for a while now ever since it kind of vaguely announced that it was working on something but this week we we learned officially at least what the first steps are of what what that is and so for one it launched a couple products uh it announced cintis which is a crop cross-platform runtime interface solution basically enabling creators to embed AI with less latency issues into what they create it also announced Muse which is a set of tools that helps creators make real-time 3D content more

efficiently and these are you know good they're fine and there will be more tools added in time but honestly the more interesting piece of the announcements this week was the launch of the AI Marketplace which allows third parties to build and sell new tools on top of unity and given how much uh AI Innovation is exploding and moving at such a rapid Pace right now there's naturally going to be more interesting activity on the marketplace for the foreseeable future than anything probably that Unity will just create internally and house and so I think that you know that is exciting it's good logical next steps for the company it obviously helps make sure the company is going to stay relevant as technology evolves none of this should be a surprise like it's just kind of a matter of like when not if they're gonna you know lean into like all the next waves whether it's do Hardware platforms or do software capabilities um but uh I do suspect that the hype

will probably die back down like moving 50 over the past month on things that should have been pretty apparent anyways and again it's just a matter of like when not if it feels a little much to me um and so especially at a time when like I don't know if you remember the last like uh like earnings call it's just like wow okay so Unity is actually shrinking and it's number of large customers and like oh it still has a lot more work to do and it's streamlining efforts so there are other like more business specific factors at Play that you know once people remember some of that some of the hype here could could die down a little bit but all in all um great to see unity and the industry at large kind of takes steps towards enabling these Technologies and new devices that are going to be really exciting in the future definitely definitely something to look out for because uh as you said like you know the hype may die down but people will still experiment with this stuff so I think it's great actually because these tools aren't necessarily just for games you

people make all kinds of experiences in unity and unreal so having these sort of things more accessible to everyone I think just you know expands what people might experiment with in the future especially if we get a down period from the hype cycle and people are just kind of in that build phase like we've seen you know with web3 or VR in the past you know couple years so very excited to see where that goes but uh speaking of VR and AR uh Niantic unfortunately having some layoffs on their side yeah it's uh being kind of a problem that's troubled the gaming industry and more specifically um mobile games uh I would say for the better part of the last year uh the Indiana Tech news was particularly shocking because this was supposed to be a company uh growing on all cylinders inking all sorts of different licensing deals and third-party Partnerships to develop uh you know the latest greatest app on your phone and now we have the news that they're getting rid of 230 uh employees of their like roughly thousand

member Workforce so about 25 layoffs uh that's mainly going to take the form of shuttering their uh office in Los Angeles um this wasn't the office responsible for uh Marvel World of Heroes which was an AR game uh in development uh obviously with the lucrative Marvel license so they really must have been losing a lot of money to close such a such a deal with Disney um and then NBA all world uh which is another uh title that's currently out there not the most well received if you look at the reviews across the two app stores but that will be sun setting uh you know I think this points to the huge investment that is going in right now to create the next like Blockbuster games like I'm going to talk about that a little bit later on with Activision but the costs to develop new games has absolutely ballooned and in this period of high interest rates you can't really blame these companies for wanting to

shore a profitability even if it means um not being Super Hyper growth anymore uh I thought it was pretty interesting that CEO John hankin is a letter to uh all the employees there said that Pokemon go is going to remain a forever game this game has already been out for seven years and you know it had its Second Wind during covid when you know if you just walk to Central Park you could see like tens of thousands of people trying to find the you know shiny Gyarados or whatever uh but that game kind of feels like it's also becoming less and less relevant and for that to be labeled as the forever game is a bit concerning like talk about concentration risk uh that's not to say they don't have other games uh Hank said they're going to focus on uh Peridot Peridot Peridot I don't know it ends with the T and uh Pikmin Bloom uh which is the partnership with Nintendo obviously and various other titles but they've lagged

a lot compared to Pokemon go um it's just unclear that even with 750 remaining employees if you really need that many to support one title uh so I wouldn't be surprised to see other big moves hit uh that studio unfortunately yeah I guess it's uh not a huge surprise yeah let's let's really talk about this a little bit because I think it's I think there are a couple things that are interesting here um one is just the to me it maybe feels like a more sudden reversal of sorts because I feel like it wasn't actually that long ago that we were on the podcast talking about wow Niantic literally just announced all of these new um all of these new projects and you know at the time we were like well Pokemon go like is great um and you know I think most of us would probably view it as a forever game I think it still is performing well but basically everything else hasn't really the needle so why should we expect all these other games too but okay we'll see

how it goes um and so it is a pretty sudden reversal from you know a month or two ago having all these announcements to you know being like you know just taking more austerity measures so there definitely was some hard conversation within Niantic maybe around you know fundraising efforts or just calculating their burn rates or recognizing that you know with the launch of the Vision Pro and the timeline there that maybe the the timeline to like the the rest of their business really clicking and becoming Revenue positive that's going to be longer than they thought I don't know what it is but they're clearly being more conservative um in terms of how they're going to have to manage their their burn rates and their their focus and so I understand it from from that perspective too um but yeah it's just it's just interesting to see the sun reversal but also just kind of recognize that yeah like maybe like Niantic is not in the future it is more of a games business than not today but I don't think that's its goal its

goal is to you know be something more like the Google Maps like or a map based API for like the 3D physical world and then all then be able to support all the cool things people are going to create with that and games are just sort of a kind of a stepping stone to getting to that future but if they think that's further out um then yeah making some of these hard hard decisions and having big cuts that that sadly does make a lot of sense but curious what what you think Matt and Devin I I would agree I mean I think I was on that same podcast episode with you when we were talking about it last and you know my recollection is Pokemon go was making you know like five to eight million dollars a day something like that like it's it's still pretty lucrative uh for a game that's that old um but to your point Aaron about it about Niantic being a company that's like more interested in AR and like Google Maps type software I I think

that's right I think Pokemon go is like despite most players probably not using the AR features it was like a really successful kind of proof of concept for their software and um all of these kind of follow-on games have been much less successful um and we can speculate as to why that is maybe it's the IP maybe it's just not like that compelling of a you know game design um I don't know um but um I agree with you Aaron that like they want to do more in the AR like Physical World um realm I just don't know that they've really figured out how to do that um and now yeah with this with this news like taking austerity measures um you know cutting some games that were not performing or in the case of the Marvel game probably they just saw the writing on the wall like user acquisition is really expensive and maybe these soft launch kpis are not what we would like them to be and they just made the you know Financial

calculation like you know we need to just stop this expense right now before we go deeper in the hole I'm speculating of course but this is my read on it yeah having having watched kind of the history of like location-based gaming for for quite a long time like in even participating in helping make some uh in the past I have to say in general location-based gaming is not a compelling experience for most people uh it's it's a novelty it's a gimmick and uh and if you look at the history of what niantics built the AR was never a big part of the experience it was always the location-based gaming and that like that found a perfect Niche with Pokemon go where it was like this makes absolute sense for the IP like just perfect like this is what Pokemon generally is walking around doing exactly this and so it was it was a perfect fit right but then after that it was like just shoehorned these things in like NBA was just like the perfect example of like just not a good fit at all like I'm sure the other reasons for doing it but then

you look at more recent releases like Peridot where they actually tried to go the other direction and lean away from the location-based gaming and more on the AR side and having played around with that you could kind of see some of the glitchiness of it and like they have a good AR platform but I think this is the problem they're stuck in location-based gaming is not a great experience until AR is like fully there and portable AR is not even close to fully there and portable so like you know as you guys mentioned about Apple and their AR stuff and these AR experiences in general until they get there like there's there's honestly not a compelling use case for light ship even their their whole AR SDK so they're in a tough spot with what they're trying to do business-wise like trying to find some other IPS to fit with like other Nintendo ones even like Pikmin but if you've played that game it honestly is kind of a boring game in the sense of just like you're planting stuff and maybe the IP fits a little bit but the actual gameplay experience just isn't there yeah I think I think part of the problem was when reality Pros price tag was

revealed at thirty five hundred dollars you know it kind of shot down uh a lot of people's hopes that AR was going to be consumer grade um sooner rather than later uh I wouldn't be surprised if the talks began shortly after that because it's hard to imagine someone sporting a 3 500 device if they can even afford it and walking around cities um you know and trying to stay safe while doing that yeah the funny thing is we're not even really that far away from this stuff working with the unreal xreel stuff if you added a camera to that Tech like to those glasses like then we actually can be there because it's just your phone screen with a camera added and like that would actually make their experiences you know what they're trying to build basically work because they'd basically be portable you'd have just sunglasses on like we're not actually that far away from potentially like shoehorning it in but no one's really trying to drive towards that like everyone's thinking about what Apple's doing yeah I was just gonna say that's

probably an astute observation Mario that they probably were kind of waiting out to see what the the Apple release was really going to be and what reception to that uh was going to be before they make a bigger decision I think that's probably right the very last thing I'll say about this topic is just thank God Niantic has Pokemon go because think about it right like this is a company that got founded in 2010 and just think about how off their timing has been in terms of making a bet on AR becoming a more of a mainstream thing they were very very very very very wrong um in their their timing and it still looks like it's a few years away and honestly you have to ask the question like if they did if they do not have Pokemon go what would this company even be at this stage like what would the layoffs and kind of look like from here um so thank goodness they have it and that Pokemon go is able to you know subsidize the development and enable them to to

ride this timeline out longer even though they're they're timing their bet on timing was off in the first place it really is so lucky that they that they stumbled across what a sensational hit Pokemon go was my goodness I like how you say that as if as if like Pokemon was was ever really a big risk right in terms of the IP it's such a strong IP like it makes a lot of sense but on the opposite side of layoffs we've got a acquisition uh scopely picking up a company yeah I'll keep this one um pretty short so it was recently announced that scopely is acquiring tag games which is a mobile development partner they've worked with a ton of big Publishers and and Studios over the years um I think the entire team is like 60 employees and they're all getting Acquired and coming over to scopely and this deal uh they've worked on games like csr2 Angry Birds action Prison Architect mobile it's just many many

um other games for for various Partners over time um and so this is not a big acquisition by scoplay it's definitely not even in their top five in terms of you know being noteworthy they're not really acquiring a game here or a product it's acquiring um Talent that's gonna help build and run all sorts of internal um games I I imagine as a kind of Staffing up more for you know live Ops expansion across their entire portfolio I'd guess um the only reason I mention it is because I think it's just worth keeping an eye on scopely and more broadly Savvy games group when I was on I think it was last week we were discussing like what to keep an eye on for for the rest of the year or just going forward and uh my answer was just you just gotta watch who has the money like who has Capital to deploy and Savvy games group has about as much as anyone in the industry that they're looking to put into work and I don't know if scopely is officially part of Savvy yet it's still the deal still might be

closing but either way part of this umbrella it's just worth keeping an eye on these companies that are having access to tremendous capital and if you kind of look at all the little pieces you can probably start to stitch together what this broader what the broader story a narrative is going to be and with scopely I think it's pretty clear that um when when the deal officially closes and they fall under Savvy there's going to be some new phase for the company that they're going to be able to to reinvest deploy more Capital to expand in all these different directions and maybe maybe maybe the this deal has a small piece to do with you know like preparing to you know staff up to get ready to expand in in New Directions um or just tackle new Ambitions in the future so not again not a huge deal when you just look at this one this one specific acquisition but maybe in the broader puzzle of what scopely and savvier are working on what they're cooking up um it's it's just worth

noting yeah I think you make a good point Aaron um you know I think scopely has been pretty open about pursuing PC console as a next um Avenue of expansion for them I don't think I don't know that tag games is gonna contribute towards that just looking at the article it seems like their expertise is mostly mobile um but in terms of strategy it seems like they're going towards PC console that said um there's always it's always good to have talent in-house right and we're increasingly seeing these bigger Publishers snatch up like third-party Studios or Studios that they've worked with in the past that's definitely been scopely's approach where they'll uh collaborate on a game they'll maybe make a small investment in the company and then if that goes well they acquire the company outright and bring them into the fold um so you know from my perspective it's like scopely is continuing to grab talent and build up their organization and as you say Aaron they have all this Capital that they're going to start looking to deploy and um I think they're gonna they're looking to be a major

player um to compete with that sort of next tier up of EA Square Enix who we'll talk about in a little bit take two and so on these like multi-platform form International Publishers with a massive Global footprint well hopefully if anything without you know given all the layoffs you know as we were just talking about uh this is something that guarantees maybe a little bit of job security for that Talent uh for a little while so maybe they're safe like maybe it's a situation as well that maybe tag wasn't in a great position to be able to keep things going and this was a a way to make sure that its employees has I mean just just speculating on possibilities as well but uh overall hopefully a good thing for those employees and and you never know even like with them being mobile Talent uh there's a lot of mobile games even coming over to PC and uh there's always free to play stuff on there and you know maybe eventually moving on to console as well so so they're expertise with things like liveops and stuff like that is still definitely I imagine applicable uh but I mean we'll see hopefully we don't see layoff announcements after and it's not just like one of those things where they just kind of strip behind it and

instead it's about building up talent but uh yeah uh the Square Enix thing you just mentioned a lot to I think to chew on in this one yeah definitely um and I'll try not to talk for like 10 minutes here and maybe we can break this up into a few segments but um the the sort of intro here is that uh we've got a I've got a piece coming out in navic digest uh in the next day or so um sort of taking a look back at at Square Enix and a number of recent happenings that I think are worth keeping an eye on so um the the one that probably most of you have heard about is the launch of Final Fantasy XV um this is their Mainline title um and it seems like it's done fairly well in the early days mostly positive reviews I saw like high 80s on Metacritic um there was also some some review bombing which I'll touch on in a little bit and why that's happening but mostly positive reviews for their Mainline release uh so we'll talk about Final Fantasy A little bit but also um at the end of May they announced their fiscal year 23

earnings and they're kind of disappointing um this this would have run from April uh I believe April of 22 to March of 23 and just to kind of like preview that total revenue was down six percent digital Revenue down twelve percent profit down three percent uh all year over year figures so not great results and then this comes uh this is the con completion of the second year in a three-year medium-term business plan is what they call it um which is it's sort of like a a larger strategy for the company to uh improve its uh Financial prospects and streamline the organization so we'll talk about that in a little bit as well and then the final piece um sort of bringing this all together is that the Square Enix just unveiled its new CEO to the world or he just took the helm rather uh and he um he had an appearance at a pre-launch party for

Final Fantasy 16 pre-launch event where he kind of took the stage and really endeared himself to the fans talking about how he grew up playing Final Fantasy and he's really a gamer at heart he's younger um than the previous CEO he's it is a mid 40s late 40s I think um and trying to bring that sort of Gamers perspective fans perspective uh to the corner office so these are all the things that are happening and that caused me to like want to reflect on what's going on with Square Enix so let's talk about um Final Fantasy first so look the game is it seems to be doing well it's clearly a different direction they've been going in a different direction for a little while with the Final Fantasy 7 remake Final Fantasy XV these are all more like action RPG as opposed to turn based I believe they brought in like a really senior design person from Devil May Cry to do the uh combat for this game um but you know I had to look at their IP generally and finalizing is

definitely the biggest one they've got Dragon quests they've got Kingdom Hearts a couple others um but where this connects to the issues around publishing is that all of their major Final Fantasy releases have taken 5 to 10 years or more to release and so you know one of their one of the things the Square Enix has talked about wanting to do is focus on fewer titles but at a um higher Cadence that have a global appeal um so you know let's just start there um because I realize I'm rambling a little bit like you know we had the news last uh last year I guess it was earlier this year about embracer taking Crystal Dynamics away from Square Enix they want to streamline their publishing they want to focus more on Final Fantasy um what do you all think about this strategy do you think that it's reasonable for them to try and get their production timelines down to five years or less for these major

titles let's say um there's a lot there so take it wherever you like to take it and we can come back to some of the other topics I can start um so I suspect that Final Fantasy still is probably the main growth engine of this business going forward and maybe they can shrink production timelines a bit I don't know I think if anything you know they can probably just reinvest in expanding the Final Fantasy ecosystem and to ensure that even if the the turnaround between the main games is long that they still can get their remake engine um you know flowing at a rate that's you know better than in the past and that create upside that you know their MMORPG you know maintains a good healthy Cadence and um you know is able to to maintain if not grow over time and I don't even know too much about Final Fantasy on mobile

other than that there just have been a ton of random games um published over time but to me the it strikes me as an opportunity to focus in some kind of way to make more just like one bigger better long-standing mobile game so I don't know if the opportunity with Final Fantasy is just reducing production timelines maybe I I can't really say but it still strikes me like there is opportunity elsewhere in the ecosystem to kind of grow it out make it make the the engine there more robust um but beyond Final Fantasy even like I think the challenge with Square Enix is like all right if you want to take focused bets and you want to um you know like focus on bigger more focused IPS it's just sort of a question of like well if it's going to be something Beyond Final Fantasy what's it going to be and I don't think there is a super clear answer to that question like

it's probably not Kingdom Hearts it's not octopath it's not you know life is strange unfortunately it's not going to be forespoken um you know definitely not foam Stars uh and so where does that leave you probably Dragon Quest Dragon Quest is probably like the next best bet that they would try to build out in some kind of way maybe they can make it more reinvent it to some degree to make it more Western friendly and make it just like a bigger Global hit I that that's probably like the best I can come up with but none of this happens with the flick of a switch right these are all things that you have to build up to over a span of years and so um maybe whatever the next medium term plan is going to be and maybe in this next next letter to shareholders at the new CEO publishes maybe he'll he'll lay out some of this stuff but that's my that's my best guess my best shot at what this could look like Aaron I get the impression that you weren't Blown Away by the SpongeBob DLC announcement

for power wash simulator [Applause] I wonder why yeah yeah I mean uh you know I completely agree with you Aaron that Final Fantasy is going to be the breadwinner for Square Enix going forward you know as it had been with square uh when when the first point came out um you know I wouldn't say that the company is in like a crisis like it was uh when Final Fantasy one came out that led to that game being renamed what it was uh but certainly they have to um think about what the timeline is going to look like for future releases in that franchise as well as in their other franchises as well you know Final Fantasy uh 16 uh seven years is I think don't call me on this but the longest gap between Mainline installments uh and uh you know Final Fantasy 14 like is an MMORPG like they need to also think

about the naming convention for their games because it's getting to be a little confusing you know I I think the X CEO commented on this but uh you know having the single player story driven games I think titled one thing and then having the games that are going to incorporate some form of live live officer MMORPG elements be another thing I think it's super important to delineate those because you're right it's not very Western friendly I mean it's not friendly at all to any gamer uh to have the game's title like that um also when it comes to Dragon Quest you know Dragon Quest 12 uh it looks like it's gonna come out this uh next year probably um maybe later this year still but probably next year that's a seven year gap between installments again one of the longest between main ones there and yeah there's there's not a ton of other IP to draw from that is going to sell tens of millions of units per installment I'm just waiting for the inevitable move to announce the next

Final Fantasy as just Final Fantasy or Final Fantasy one like Mortal Kombat did and then just reset the counter start over again um um so you made some good points Mario I just want to add a little bit of context here so so you people understand um the the other IPS they have to work with and sort of the structure of the business so they have this Digital entertainment um business unit which is where all of their gaming content uh exists and then that's further subdivided into what they call HD games which is usually PC console uh that's where Final Fantasy single player experiences live even some of the smaller titles like octopath traveler or power wash simulator those go into HD experiences um then they have MMOs which as far as I can tell is just Final Fantasy 14 and Dragon Quest 10. um and then they have uh they call it like um experiences for smart devices and web browsers something like that so let's just call it mobile for for um the sake of discussion and of the

like top 10 games in Mobile according to data AI within their last fiscal year three of those 10 were Final Fantasy titles um and Final Fantasy 14 easily the biggest contributor to MMO segment HD segment it's obviously a final fantasy Mainline titles so I don't know if if we feel there's like a lot of risk there like putting all their eggs kind of in that basket but in terms of developing new IP um you know they've not said much in that regard obviously forespoken didn't really turn out like they wanted it to we've got Kingdom Hearts coming down the the pipe at some point they've got a couple other titles that don't seem to be moving the needle um and you know I I guess where I'm taking this is the medium-term outlook for the company is a little bit murky so this is the last fiscal year of their medium-term business plan they're not going to hit the targets that they had set out for themselves a couple of years ago uh there's just no way their own forecasts are coming in well below those and in

terms of you know strategic moves that they announced in this you know earnings report um you know nothing that would really blow anyone away they're talking about acquiring more Talent you know revamping their their publishing organization to kind of streamline it a little bit more but they haven't really announced any major Moves In One Direction or another other than like their longer term future which they're really all in on blockchain right now we can talk about that in a little bit they've made a bunch of investments in blockchain startups across the world talking about establishing a corporate Venture Capital arm in their business they focused on being a Pioneer in that space But we're not there yet and and there's this this gap of like what do they do in the medium term what is their next medium term plan look like and there have been you know so there was some news again coming from Microsoft Activision that um you know Square Enix was a potential acquisition Target for Microsoft as early as 2019 to bolster Game Pass and give them a presence in Asia

um you know I don't know that that Microsoft would be the company to do it but acquisition is something that's been rumored for a while Sony has obviously been a part of that conversation being a fellow Japanese company as well so you know maybe there's something there in the medium term where they become a an attractive acquisition Target for Sony or tencent or Nexon or whoever um well before they get to this whole blockchain thing I think that's still quite a ways away so like what do they do in in the medium term uh and and do we see them maybe getting involved in in some of these acquisition talks like and also they have a brand new CEO like you know what does he think I think the medium term is doubling down on Final Fantasy which isn't necessarily a bad idea like I don't think putting all your eggs in one basket is actually as big of a risk when you have such a dominant killer IP like we saw you know similar concerns with a company like Activision with Call of Duty where it's like oh man

Activision for years it's not really creating anything new but you know they just kept building up the Call of Duty ecosystem and it was a tremendous growth driver for that business across devices across business models and I think the biggest and best IPS in the world they can't copy exactly what Activision did but there is more more you know opportunity opportunity to unlock with these with these Mega IPS and so I think Final Fantasy is going to be the centerpiece of a medium term plan I think it has to be um and yeah I mean I think probably identifying if they want to make more focused bets like all right well what is that going to be like what are the next couple focused bets around either creating a new IP or just taking an IP you have and making it more globally friendly or more Multi-Device friendly or something um I would imagine that would kind of be the center I have a feeling some of this blockchain stuff I think it's going to come back to bite them is my guess and it's not because like I'm against it I

think that experimenting with the technology is great but if you know I think that the company just dedicated itself in a big way too early so where even if it creates a great web 3 game in some kind of way external forces like platform rules or Securities regulations or just like onboarding and tooling frictions it's just going to be too much to overcome in a big way and it's just going to make the ROI on those projects less than it would be if they just reinvested elsewhere um and so my guess is they're probably going to lighten their tone at some point regarding web 3 more because it's going to be forced on them by the investor Community who just like isn't happy with the the progress that's my guess but um you know as they as they do that they can just kind of refocus more on the biggest IPS and kind of building those ecosystems and that's my guess as for a three-year plan but David I'm curious even what you think on the blockchain so

do you do you think that's going to remain Central to to Square Enix are you going to diversify or one that down one sort of piece of context that I think is uh important to know is uh Japan has been really like at the government level really bullish on blockchain and that I think you know you're talking about regulations and stuff like that yeah in the US like there's already a lot of companies just pulling out from the US in general not wanting to risk the Gensler wrath uh so they're just not even bothering and I think you know Japan's already fine with localized games right they do a lot of localized games that are just like this is Japan game and they don't bring it elsewhere and I think they're fine with that so I think looking at it from that perspective where they're just like you know maybe we just do web 3 in a place where we know is super friendly towards it uh you know like the Prime Minister came out being like nfts are going to be great you know like Japan's gonna be you know on top of this and so if you're a company that's a huge company in Japan and Japan's going like we're gonna dominate web three it does make some sense to be like well we want to be at

the Forefront of that now like as you said though like they are very early I mean their their first blockchain game symbiogenesis is is what I call glorified where's Waldo with tons of lore involved it's not necessarily like a bad thing for what they're trying to do with you know they're all about their fiction and their lore and things like that and they've they've made some money selling Collectibles around Final Fantasy and things like that so they definitely they understand that there's some angle with community and lore and things that they can do that tap into web 3's Community aspects uh however that Community is a bit small in the the grand scale of things now that being said if Asia blows up like we think it might over the next year or two between South Korea and uh and Japan and maybe elsewhere as well like I think that could still be you know important for Square Enix now of course if that doesn't happen over the next year or two then yeah maybe we see them be like you know what we're gonna put that on ice for a while like and then just focus on our other stuff and and you guys mentioned like even like Dragon quests

and stuff like that uh you know there's opportunity for them to involve that potentially in some of this stuff even if it's just collect digital Collectibles right they they already did quite a bit of that with Final Fantasy and I think it was mostly successful so I don't see any reason why they wouldn't continue to leverage their IPs into blockchain stuff even if it's just at the collectible level because there is there's an appetite for digital Collectibles even if you strip out all the other web 3 stuff uh at that point and and you know there's an angle there for them they have a whole physical Collectibles business too so it's not that you know much of a stretch yeah to to their like quote-unquote credit when it comes to blockchain now like I don't agree with the strategy I think they should be doubling down on their core franchises for something I'll talk about after this but um you know the Final Fantasy games don't follow any sort of continuity the Dragon Quest games don't follow any sort of Pumped annuity and I think that's made them great because someone who is a new gamer can just jump in and not have to watch five hours of lore videos like I'm with Diablo right

now um but uh you know on the other hand uh it's hard to have like a unbroken continuity like with the nfts it's not like you could have a character from one game that's going to transfer into another game each game has their own set of characters their own environments Etc uh so that kind of gives creative to them starting something fresh and maybe pursuing that strategy for the first time um you know in terms of the mainline installments uh I just don't see any reason why it took took seven years to come out with a new Final Fantasy um from software is pumping out soulsborne games every two to three years Alden ring is probably going to be the greatest game of the decade and one of the largest open world titles you know ever released um for that genre that is uh and that took them three years to come out and that was after sekiro so I I like I understand there's differences when it comes to the graphical Fidelity of the Final Fantasy games they're obviously a

lot sharper and you know quote unquote more polished but they all follow the same RPG elements in roughly the same formula so I just don't see why those games can't come out on a more frequent Cadence for such a large studio I mean is probably where mobile makes the most sense right like RPG is a huge huge sector of mobile right now and seems to be continuing to grow obviously a lot of competition in that space But you see more and more anime based mobile games or RPGs taking over like consistently uh and a lot of them coming from you know China or South Korea or Japan like coming over from those you know Asian demographics and there's a perfect opportunity there obviously they've experimented with it I still see like you know Chrono Trigger remastered on sale and like all these other ones that they've they've put on there like to test the waters on mobile I don't think they're going to be like Nintendo where they like only or are doing these weird sort of experiments they clearly have potential to bring stuff onto that that platform and then we're talking about

like more frequent Cadence that's a good platform to be doing that on yeah and they they um their previous approach from what I can tell has been to take different IPS whether their own or external IPS and bring them to mobile um you know Final Fantasy 15 for example had I was looking at something like six seven eight spin-off experiences some of which were mobile some of which were not but they just like they have this established IP and then they build off of it in different ways to your point earlier Mario about like these characters not necessarily being interchangeable they actually have mobile games that have all of their final fantasy characters as like a character collector gotcha thing so I think it can be done and they've certainly tried to do that I'm sure that they'll well I shouldn't say I'm sure but my guess is that they'll probably continue something similar with Final Fantasy 16 do a mobile release I don't know if they'll do another like Forex game or whatever but um they have plenty of opportunities on mobile and expertise to do it definitely all opportunities for there and of

course something we didn't even touch on they do you know some stuff with arcades as well you know there's like you mentioned Matt lots of stuff with Collectibles they have a lot of businesses going on a lot of opportunities different things they could be doing so definitely a lot of things to watch for with square eating so and I hope the web 3 thing works out for them of course because you know being a big web3 kind of guy like I'd like to see that work but we have uh and we've already kind of I think touched on this multiple times uh throughout the podcast uh the revelations coming out of the the FTC trial against uh Microsoft Activision which will hopefully be the ending chapter of this Everlasting Saga maybe maybe not maybe it'll be like the ending of Lord of the Rings uh where we get about five different endings to this thing but uh yeah uh We've definitely got some cool stuff to talk about hey I hope yeah I think Microsoft wishes that the FTC is the wondering and they're gonna cast them into Mountain once and for all and you know Vanquish them from being a menace for the Mega cap Tech uh us you

know companies uh but you know we yeah we belabored this topic so many times but it is just super important you know there's a 70 billion dollar acquisition is not only large when it comes to gaming or technology even it's large like in the grand scheme of things this is one of the largest Acquisitions of all time especially for all cash maybe the largest all-cash acquisition of all time um and the five-day trial um that recently wrapped up uh revealed just a whole host of things partially due to shoddy um disclosures from all parties you know I I think someone tried covering up part of the disclosure without like non-permanent marker so we saw how much the cost of a triple A game uh is uh which is something I'll touch on but there was just a whole host of things um you know I guess to sum it up if a

problem this is for preliminary injunction uh what that essentially means is if it's granted the FTC will stop Microsoft from what it's trying to set out to do until a later trial date so this is basically saying okay if this is granted you can't do what you're trying to do which is acquire Activision Blizzard until later this year and Microsoft's Council has called that a potentially three-year bureaucratic nightmare um so needless to say if this injunction is not granted the deal won't be going through um Bobby kodek has made that clear on the Activision side um Phil Spencer has made that clear on the Microsoft side um so yeah it's a Paramount importance uh you know if the injunction is granted uh it vindicates Lisa Khan and the FTC um in their ongoing Crusade against Mega cap Tech uh they have tried to block deals like both large and small uh if you remember last year they even tried

to block um the acquisition of VR fitness app within uh by meta and that was a deal undisclosed but reported to be between 300 and 400 million dollars so a really small deal and you know luckily they failed in that but again that took almost a year to resolve uh you know I think my big question is how does Microsoft evaluate gaming if the deal falls through you know one of the shocking admissions I think from day two was that they admitted they lost the console Wars uh in the last two decades um which would be since the beginning of the Seventh Generation so the Xbox 360 uh the Wii and the PS3 uh having a 16 market share in 2021 so that means they have like about one-sixth of the gaming Market which is pretty small um you know does Microsoft even continue with Xbox long term if this deal doesn't go through uh I think if you ask a lot of people they would say sure like they can't get rid of Xbox that's such a

important part of the company it's the fourth biggest segment but if you look at the numbers it's only about one tenth of the revenue and I think in even smaller share of the operating income which is something they don't break out but you know that has the potential of making Sony and Nintendo uh into a duopoly uh you know we've come from the late 80s early 90s where we had all these different console makers to now potentially two like let's say in three to four years so I guess my question to you guys to kick things off is um do you think such a Draconian outcome could take place if the deal doesn't go through like what do you think Microsoft's going to do if without Activision Blizzard yeah I think it's possible um I think that it's I think Microsoft's or sorry I think Xbox's future hinges on Acquisitions to some extent if they really want to maintain the Game Pass strategy they can't just build all of these new games internally they have to acquire franchises and such and

obviously the Activision deal is like way oversized or just outsized and so it gets more scrutiny but even if it were to acquire something more in like the Bethesda range again that would just get a ton of scrutiny all over again and I feel like they just would not want to deal with that over and over and over every time they try to do anything and so um at minimum it could change their strategy and what they try to do with Game Pass and at a maximum yeah it could cause Microsoft to just rethink what the heck are we doing with with Xbox I don't know what that ultimately leads to a spin-off a sale probably not shutting it down I would guess uh maybe just de-prioritizing it I think the range of outcomes is really wide um if the the deal doesn't go through but yeah it's typically a more bad more bad than good for them if it doesn't happen I was just gonna ask like if it doesn't go through why would they not just look to another Target um and try and acquire a different

smaller publisher um it seems like that that would be the the path of I mean I know there's going to be resistance regardless of whatever they do but like that's what they they strategically they need to acquire these IPS right if Sony's going to keep doing the exclusive thing which doesn't seem like it's going to change anytime soon um that was the I meant to mention that with Final Fantasy as well it was a PlayStation exclusive but if they're going to keep doing that um doesn't Microsoft need to continue to bring different IPS and Publishers in-house to bolster their content catalog and also their development talent I mean I I think so but the question is do they want to provoke the ftc's ire because again they've gone after Acquisitions less than a billion dollars you know it's such a big administrative headache and the disclosures are so have such negative repercussions for for the companies like some of the disclosures that we saw were from

Microsoft's Cloud business and their security business you know that has nothing to do with their gaming business but it's an unfortunate revelation of the trial that during the discovery period you have all of these different um you know documents coming out and yeah I mean those segments are growing a lot faster and have a lot better margin profiles than the gaming division uh that could be why they don't want to acquire something else because they would have to make like five to ten bolt-on Acquisitions to match the breadth of content that Activision would give them and it just would take so long I can't imagine them pursuing that but I could be wrong the the last thing I was going to say is that the time it's like the timeline here that's like the the problem on top of just like regulatory approvals like if they try to you know make another decent size acquisition they'd have to go through like the same thing all over again and you know the approvals for Activision it's taken a year and a half like do they really have that much time to spare again and

building up their game pass catalog in order to compete or if they wanted to do several smaller Acquisitions um I mean one they couldn't be that small they need like IP that can move the needle and so you know any one of those deals especially if there's several of them those will just take time to to happen and still have to go through regulatory approvals have to go through long timelines and so my guess is that you could just start to see some impatience and the longer that they like don't have these hits in Game Pass just like the more angsty Xbox as a whole is going to be like from the bottom all all of the gamers all the way up to the top with Satya Nadella uh you know and kind of thinking about the role of Game Pass or Xbox in general so yeah they might try to have a plan B after this I just think it's kind of it's not gonna be great it's just gonna drag out um and maybe in the long run it's still fine but lots of headaches in order to pull in

maybe this is like a naive point of view but like from my perspective Microsoft is like a trillion plus market cap company and they're gonna Outlast Lena Khan or anyone like they're they're not going anywhere and I think that they uh they have they can sit they can deal with headaches they can you know wait and be patient if they need to I don't I don't see that as like again maybe this is an IU point of view but like I don't see that as the major stumbling block yeah there's like a shortage of uh potential assets that could like match up to what Activision is or would have been but if they're really intent on acquiring content I think they probably have more resources to bring to bear legally than the government does um so I don't know maybe maybe I'm wrong here but it seems like they could wait it out if they wanted to yeah no I mean I think that's again like where it could go either way like you know do they continue their gaming business do they not do they pursue more Acquisitions do they not it just had so much variability

to the process but not volatility because it is such a small company Microsoft that you know for Activision it definitely has an element of volatility and I'll touch on that right now but for Microsoft themselves I don't think you see the stock plummeting or surging if the deal doesn't go through and again like I think depending on who you ask the deal could be a good thing or a bad thing for Microsoft it is a huge cash outlay um for potentially not a ton of benefit for the broader business but you know when it comes to Activision uh and prepping for this podcast I put together a list of pros and cons um because again I I think it's a lot more impactful for Activision stock than for Microsoft stock um and I could only think of two Pros uh uh and those are that Activision financials look pretty good in q1 2023 uh operating income Rose by 70 percent um all the segments are growing pretty nicely again after a kind of doldrum period

um Diablo 4 the pre-sales were amazing the game has come out selling tons of units the game is critically acclaimed you know they couldn't ask for a better launch I think after those um three uh test periods that they had um in Call of Duty is still a key driver of growth and then the other Pro is that the three billion dollar breakup fee it actually does Boost Activision's Enterprise Value by a bit It produced it by five percent um at the current stock price it would go from 56.4 to 59.4 billion um that's a three billion dollar breakup fee that has to be paid out by mid-july um if there's no new terms we negotiated for the deal uh but now with that being said there's a ton of cons and I personally think acquisition stock shakes out much much lower than where it is now if this deal falls through uh you know one of the biggest cons is that we've only had a limited Financial disclosure since um Q4 2021 um their fiscal year that is uh they don't have to have granular reporting

while being in the middle of an acquisition process uh and you know they've had no slide presentations no earnings calls so all of the data that us as investors would get um immediately after would be kind of torrential and who knows if it would be good or bad we only have kind of the top line to work with um Buffett also trimmed his stake from 5.6 billion um to 4 billion recently and that didn't put a ton of pressure uh on the stock um because it is again in this merger Arbitrage period but you know he did buy the stock for merger art purposes and the way merger arborics is either the deal happens or it doesn't so either the stock goes to 95 or Birch is going to dispose a huge chunk of their shares um definitely the shares that they bought between their initial one billion dollar stake before the announcement and this latest tranche which is you know 75 of the Holdings um and that's going to weigh on shares that's going to be a huge block trade if

it happens uh also valuations are down significantly since the deal announcement uh you know the multiple is like over 20x when looking at operating income for a such a mature gaming gaming publisher and developer I find it just hard for it to stay there um especially because there's no other natural buyer for Activision who's going to spend tens of billions of dollars and deal with the nightmare that is the FTC well hopefully at the end of the day if the deal doesn't end up going through then they can still find a way to like get back to normal and pop out those Call of Duty games and and all the other billions of sequels they'll undoubtedly be pumping out of all their franchises but uh a lot of question marks still as as of course things aren't done with that whole long journey and so I'm sure we'll be back at it again probably next week but uh we do actually have a a mailback question we wanted to quickly get to uh and this is in reference to an episode we had a little while ago uh and where we talked a little bit about the company keywords which was kind of a lesser

known company so I'll just read out the question uh and the the comment real quick and then we'll get to answering it so the the um they said super cool that you guys covered keywords could you go deeper into the company health or financials do they have any major competitors and how is their strategy unique in the market where do they get their Competitive Edge from so Aaron or Mario if you want to take this Mario go ahead yeah I can I can kick things off um so for those of you who don't know keywords is one of the largest like gaming companies by employees like they have 12 000 employees but they're deliberately under the radar and part of that is due to their CEO's Vision to be the picks and shovels servicer to the games industry uh rather than to and I quote bite the hand that feeds them uh so they have three segments um those are uh foreign globalize and engage create is about 40 of the business and that covers external

game development and co-development it also covers art Services uh globalize is 44 that's kind of what they're known for their bread and butter uh localization services like translation um for audio and test text also quality assurance and testing and then engage which is multilingual player support you know back-end support uh a full service marketing strategy uh from a financial perspective they're super healthy they have over 700 million dollars Revenue annually 20 ebitda margins and they're only trading at like a 12x uh EV to ebitda multiple which is really low for a company that just grew 22 organically last year which again was their highest growth rate since 2016. uh but they've been punished by the market um and it's hard to say why um my theory is that people are fearing incursion of AI you know AI what one of the easiest things they might be able to

do is like localized content and convert text and audio to a native language but I don't think it can deal with the nuances that come with localization um in markets like Germany and China that all have bespoke um content screeners that need um boots on the ground and a lot of different offices dealing with all this stuff so I think the concerns are overblown for context the stock is down like 40 year-to-date down even more from its peak in 2021 uh one of the worst performing um gaming stocks uh of like large gaming stocks of the year yeah I'll add um two more final final thoughts here um one is just that it's important to to know that keywords is very acquisitive and so its performance usually is just as much a bet on the pilot as it is on the plane so to speak um and I don't have a great sense of how good they really are or more specifically how good the relatively new CEO Bertrand bodson is a capital allocation and as Mario's saying the

stocks down a lot it's basically where it was like five years ago at this point and I I have a feeling kind of the growth by acquisition debt to this company is a big big reason why the the stock is down kind of in the same way we've seen growth by Acquisitions elsewhere in the industry um kind of fizzle out as just bad deals have been made and just companies have to reset um the last thing just to answer the question about competitive Advantage if you look at any individual piece or segment of this business whether it's external game development or art services or localization Etc there's a ton of competition individually around each of those pieces but but what makes keywords so unique is that it likely creates outsized value from having all of those offerings take place Under One Roof and so if it can work with a big company and simplify their lives by not needing to go to a dozen or more different companies and instead they can just use keywords that that is a value unlocked for a lot of people just in Simplicity of of operating and you know

if that's and you know as keywords expands its capacity and adds more capabilities that becomes even more the case and I'm not really sure to think about the AI stuff yet but um I don't think that competitive Advantage is Ironclad but that's kind of where it comes from I think cool well hopefully that answers your question uh listener obviously we we look forward to more questions and more feedback and all kinds of stuff from you guys uh to shoot that out just podcast navic dot Co make sure to let us know what you think any things you'd you'd like to just cover more on like you know this was something from a while ago we were happy to dig into more with more details and uh and be a great source for business of games information for everyone out there and of course look forward to all the upcoming stuff that Aaron mentioned at the beginning about the updates to the newsletter digest stuff and uh lots and lots of content coming your way and of course as always thanks to our panelists here uh Matt Aaron and our new panelists Mario look forward to him again and in a

few weeks or so but uh thanks you guys for being here and of course thanks to the listeners and we'll catch you guys next week but in the meantime have a great weekend if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a five star review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast navic dot Co or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what novik has to offer make sure to check out our website www.navic.com there you can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter navic digest or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging Consulting and advisory Services again that is www.navic.com thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode