Panel: Playing Together How To Boost Retention by Adding World-class Multiplayer Options

foreign [Music] [Applause] I took the time to make some slides for this panel because I think that it's just supportive and it's great so and also you can see the games and our panelists made and I have a bit more of an idea of what they're doing where they're coming from and um and um yeah so we're gonna dive into virus subject in this panel um uh hopefully you're gonna learn uh one thing or two so

um yeah hi guys how are you hello all right all right cool chair will hold yeah okay yeah it does oh my business now there you go all right so um um so yeah let's just take a minute first and introduce uh all of you so um I I let you go maybe from uh John to Miguel to TV and uh and then we can move on with the with the with the first question in the panel okay my name is John Middleton I'm the CEO and founder of nifty games we specialize in sports games for mobile mobile first sports uh partnered with the NBA NFL uh each player association and um make Clash style head-to-head sports games so that's been in the games business since uh mid 90s so I've done pretty much everything in and around games from Hardware to middleware to

you know in-game advertising merchandising and now uh free to play mode here we are and and NBA class was a game of the day recently on the Apple Store yeah it's pretty cool it was a glorious day and had to stroke of midnight that shot it off [Laughter] you know Ninja Turtles at midnight killing me very cool actually looking at the video looks very nice um I've been working in industry for about 13 years now time passes I work as director of development for First Flight games we make a battle royale game top down shooter working with Quantum for a couple of years now I'm quite excited using their Tech our game it's on running on the polygon chain so we jumped on the web tree wagon

we've seen very interesting results so you can also tell a bit about that for everyone who's interested or already how to wipe the iPad English and yeah I excited to answer questions before hi guys my name is Stevie I'm the developer of typical Financial Builder because I'm a solid developer but I'm helped by uh two very professional hello products not here present and are very lovely application security engineer here we have only one product so I'm pretty new to the industry I've been publishing mobile games for just over three years now with blood investors being our only product and I just wanted to uh switched things up a little bit um with this game it's physics based uh

it doesn't have any animations it's a very sandbox like but also once you bring some progression to it as well where you get a lot of uh items and um yeah I guess we'll have more time it's like 16 million installs how many install is that I wish uh so iOS from sandwich it's probably around 15 minutes yeah 15 million is still all organic uh uh rather baby at some point but uh nothing to say wrong about so as you might have understand is that we have three different completely different type of teams here right so yeah and people love to stab people that's right well you know that's Medieval Times uh cool all right so let's move on so um

um so let's start at the beginning so multiplayer if we go back in time 10 years five years or even like one year ago was not that much present in the mobile industry and now it's leading all the chart as I was saying earlier so how do you feel like to jump on the bang wagon let's say of building multiplayer games for mobile um and and how do you feel like your production is going and how um how do you feel in general regarding like uh creating multiplayer games today how it is for you I can go first on that I've been actually making multiplayer games throughout most of my career and the value in the beginning where mobile I've been working as a mobile and mobile you didn't quite require that multiplayer can see because content was asynchronous most of the times and you could kind of give a

content on update monthly basis now as games become more social more needed of meeting my friends even in some places getting new girlfriends and boyfriends it kind of makes it more appealing and with the the new tech is also evolving a lot servers are becoming more cheap Technologies like Quantum appearing it becomes almost fundamental needs scope of the development to make multiplayer which for techies like me super cool and I love that kind of games and and Ernie from Super skill said World of Warcraft was his favorite game so he's mine so makes oh okay so I want to make some like every guy after school I want to make a MMO ah thank God I moved that idea out of myself but if you want to make a game today almost you need to think about multiplayer in some scope and the need of synchronous and

competitive becomes almost fundamental yeah I agree I think you know from my standpoint it's a competition it's tried and tested and it's a as you alluded to it's been in games now for a long time you know uh for mobile it's been relatively new but completely uh I'd say it's prerequisite to some degree as far as uh the gameplay goes because you want to make sure that you can build enough community and have enough competition uh so that the fun you know kind of gets hyper accelerated and I think keeps people interested longer and it's uh helpful for not only uh gaining players by keeping them around retention retention retention and I think you have to have multiplayer and in some ways the more the more the merrier yeah definitely come back so first of all blood investors was completely an experiment from my side it was just single player making a crappy old engine

I can say that now and just people came to me the players in the past four multiplayer they can play with their friends who had research it and kind of the person didn't know how I could actually you know sing physics because that's always fun to have like synchronized physics across especially when it's peer-to-peer it wasn't fun but um I think what you said with uh definitely Health retention because I could see like all action games with Trails off very quickly after the first take seven particularly non-existent but ever since multiplayer has come to the mix with the items as well which are remarkable in the rice system and people that something to different aimed for but also uh just pure fun of that I guess that's uh it doubled their attention basically overnights yeah but with your game too I thought he said he said peer-to-peer but I thought he said I thought it was a spear to spear which would have been spear to spear is a great that'd be but

uh one thing that trademark that uh the players went through also in the past like three years while actually everyone is is we all went through Colvin where everyone was at home and multiplayer games were the exit form many people out there to share emotions and have fun and um so I obviously on our side at Photon we saw a huge increase in user base in all the multiplayer games that we have um so like it's very hard to convey emotions not in real time like um or in the single player game indeed but also can say from probably many people that are listening that I get I had actually had very interesting business cases into in two sites where we literally saw a single player and the multiplayer was very minimalistic to grow 15 to 20 percent retention revenue and LTV and it was already a very profitable game

and even for people that are thinking about every Studio that's starting now and looking at pitch decks and going to investors it's a very I want to say interesting selling point but almost fundamental if you think about in that scope you know that it's a long traveling LTV a long-term retention or potential for that and investors do love that because it has a lot of money and who doesn't so sell the money and just sell your pitch so that creative that there's all everything has a downside so it's more Tech heavy it's more Tech demanding just get a nice tacky that looks do develop helps you a lot let him nerd in the corner don't feed him he's directly does it but helps to achieve the results but the results are more upscaled and if you don't let's let's move to the next subject so um boosting retention right

so that that's why some of you are here um so look at their uh brings plans uh brings replays uh brings that you look at someone else play to learn how they play uh it brings multiple elements that you can only sometimes reach with a streamer so how do you feel like um what are you what do you be your go-to or your must-have in the multiplayer game to make sure that your organic downloads stays and convert and how multiplayer can help with that yeah I mean from a sports standpoint for us uh Nifty games you know uh bringing multiplayering as compared to you know if we use Bots or something like that that you know to compete against is it's like totally essential because you have to have the element of uh real human competition and and uh the

agency that a player brings into the into the fold uh when you're going head-to-head or even if it's a 2v2 or something like that uh it adds so much kind of eclectic uh spot gameplay that you have to have that you know it can't be predictable it can't be you know like you're playing a you know a platformer for you know 1997 or something it's got to be way more Dynamic and that's what that's what uh that's what multiplayer brings and I think it's just it's totally essential in any kind of a situation where there's uh competition or where there's a ongoing benefit to the player to have elements of surprise even if it's been a story based aspect I think it still works yeah yeah and also important to notice is what is your audience we don't think I found out is a more casual your audience audiences more Cooperative they'll be

interested entertained from and features whereas you're talking about guilds but is more how to support and connects two players more players creates more engagements and Rick and if you put monetization around that engagement is very very fulfilling if your game is more competitive users this can be even the fights with your male audience and female audience the multiples in central you cannot do it all the way around and following all the things on the Bots as a starting point force to reduce one thing we did and we single great value is cling and scale of players and how deep they go on your player base the place when they start they don't know your game and they're still very early starters and easy game and for them is hard as you have increasing what difficulty you create engagement and content for

them you can even increase Bots where they have more HP more damage over time I do create almost a league system or most operation system that can create the necessity of finding my next challenge on what I'm making and I find that the most interesting aspect on this competitive and actually Quantum has about SDK very interesting that allows this you can have different systems you can even go on a behavior tree or go oriented scope we use finite because it's very based on a loop system and so we're hierarchical State charts but coming back to the point creating that scope of what is the Journey of the player from first time playing to playing for one straight months you have enough content spending very little time again put the developer on the corner don't feed him until he makes it but until he

go until we will execute it till the in the end but focus on the journey that player can can can can achieve and multiplayer for this competitive course very good uh so on top of the protection I think there's something to be said about also having a strong single player that can manage to come correct but uh counterbalance the multiplayer respect as well so I think at least from my side a good strategy was having unlockable content that you can only unlock any single player and then once you get arrested by someone with a lot higher view which you can only unlock a single player give me a comeback and kept our overheads pretty well sharing my Trade Secrets here but it's definitely something that really helped us and then you can have a lot of content that is unlocked in quite a I guess predictable

way but in that it feels right for the players to have that Cadence of unlocking things but it's not behind some payroll or something but but it can be removed of course but then they can come back to multiplayer and enact their revenge on however one key aspect of it is to have multiple game mode right so especially in multiplayer games where it's 1v1 where you know if you have just one mode it's often the same Rhythm and you're like you can get exhausted so you can go to another mode which is more smooth and then the single player line is obviously a lot smoother most of the time but then if you um one thing that we can see in the mobile RPG game or mobile action game or in Mobile in general right so it's five versus five right so or if you look at Apex and others where it's three versus others then you need to be with

others right you cannot be alone right so most of the time you try to be with friends so it means you're gonna say hey at 6 PM let's meet up let's go together and try to improve and then it's all about communication and skills and this obviously turns out into adding more retention because you are helping your friends and teammates and that makes them better and they want to pay back so they will come back and play again it's really really interesting value to humans to share and something to exploit obviously yeah that's true and even within that there's layers I mean from a retention standpoint like right now we're introducing uh playoffs and tournament brackets so that even as you're competing you know head-to-head multiplayer against one other then we're also building in a larger form where it's you know two four two four eight thirty two sixty four teams going against each other within a certain amount of time and I

think that that just keeps just adds to the competition right it's it's how can you have as much activity during a certain amount of time as possible and that's when you're after for games and Gamers and I like that like for yours The Gamers coming and asking for it it's just it's pretty indicative of the kind of nature of it you need to be multiplayer it's a Gamers The Gamers expected investors obviously you guys expected as well it's just a prerequisite of the media at this point to have you know multiplayer and to be able to to build community Within the games and to be able to have confident whether it's uh whether it's sports or whether it's RPGs or RTS or MMO or you know pick your genre and go all the way down to uh choices and episodes and you know the more the merrier I think is the message and I think it's uh for us it's

always been about competition and competition obviously uh requires more players than one cool let's move let's move on so um so we touched it a little bit earlier regarding like a production of multiplayer games so obviously it's different regarding UTV you started single player then added multiplayer afterwards um we see Productions that are doing that a lot but failing meaning like they they come with the gameplay and they say hey I want to play with multiplayer now let's do it and they just can't because of the way the gameplay was built first the most you know they have to to trash 90 of their code and then restart again so obviously also your choice on the engine uh will dictate pretty much what is possible what is not um and then I guess I'm gonna you know ask the same question as earlier it's more about like finding people who has the know-how and and how do you

um put that all in place so that you can have like an extra good product and um and then iterate and move forward so how do you tackle that [Music] so the I can I have a theory and uh going in many different Studios I work in the past the engine decision and we go and then we're going to multiply an engine decision comes down to your talent pool and where you want to find your products uh itself what is the the product trying to build from personal experience and finding Talent on mobile and find talent in Europe is much easier if you go unity and in America it's much easier if you're trying to find it unreal um but on the context of multiple itself and agreeing with Mark you need to build

a multiplayer from the beginning because architecture developments and the system behind it is not the same of course you always can patch it multiple inside but you're going to have more problems than Solutions in there and you have to treat it more as a prototype multiplayer okay it's interesting it players like it it works now let's make the game from Roundup and in terms of production itself there's you are increasing the scope of your game you can now with actually specific Quantum and other tools that coming out um it's much easier using only client developers while in the past you need to have a back-end complete Ingenuity networking team that could do the entire multiplayer right now we start to have almost entire Solutions make made not only the net code Parts with tools you can use only client developers in the back end part you can use tools like playfab and Firebase where you have

also you can almost only client Developers consult with one one back-end engineer but it trim Downs this theme size before it was 20 now you can go probably 5 10. but it's not yet walk in the park there's some scope for example in Quantum which does a lot and helps a lot it's a different Tech you have a ramp up page a rapid stage which the team needs to adapt but the difference of hiring 10 developers into Iron 5 you see on the end of the month much the budget is taking um also but the speeds also you pay initial costs but then it gets mitigated over time because the the team developers are getting this and also from the previous topic I see more and more as developers are understanding and

getting into multiplayer the practices the fundamentals architecture needed to support it is become more embedded on the day-to-day work well I saw in 2017-18 when multi-purpee came more and more problem predominant in the industry where everything was new and Phil felt like I had senior developers acting and working at Journey developers and now it's becoming easier to work with so it's been a great Evolution and I think students are trying to contemplate on that team size to support it so um for from production standpoint I can only literally speak for myself because I I mentioned I tried the peer-to-peer Solutions so obviously my game is very low scope compared to but I don't think it's very heavy it's probably your analytics your everything bunched up to one big thing it was quite amazing but

uh in terms of actual synchronizing for the players do with focus on Unity networking too which is great that's what I'm currently using and I found it quite easy to extend to use for uh create many things not only just uh any game but uh remote all sorts of interactions that uh doctors can help with each other but uh yeah when it comes to just the production part alone I'm afraid I'm quite verse in my own stuff and I'm not sure what applicable things I could say on the topic so I have a question for you so obviously you are building the same game so it was single player and then you have to change your mind to go multiplayer so what was your learning path more or less like um because you have to think about Lobby room joining friends and all these things you know yes so I use playfab first when it was I should uh rewind to the beginning so at first I did it in construct the game

if you're familiar with the HTML5 game where you can take a simple HTML page not unoptimized mess if you do it this way but uh I had to basically remake the whole game so I remade it in unity and then I started using Photon for the multiple exclusively that's a long story short yeah I think you know we knew from the beginning that we were going to be obviously geared towards melting player and uh you know using Photon solution obviously once you get into building games and when you for us it was really not just singular game but a slate of a product um you know we knew that uh looking for uh best-in-class kind of solutions for any aspect that can help us either save time or save money or build better products or you know give better experience we're going to do it it's going to happen every time and I think

uh well we started with you guys pretty early and and it worked uh well right out of the gate and I think you know building for all multiplayers no-brainer I think it's uh but what about NFL Clash yeah yeah so so what is your transition or you're learning from let's in NFL Clash to NBA Clash now uh well NFL it's actually it's funny because that's more of a gameplay learning I think it wasn't it's less about uh you know how multiplayer worked and more you know from a technology standpoint uh very very similar but from a gameplay standpoint you know what we learned a lot about sports Gamers which is interesting that as compared to even other types of Gamers that are out there whether it's RTS uh because there's a there's a lot of that in there as well um having more General control over the situation more Agency for the gamer to to have some input into whether they've won or lost the match uh was crucial and

and it felt actually lacked that we like that uh initially a lot of taking it down and retooling now towards you know the beauty of sports is there's always another season so you know we'll see where that one goes and we you know additional uh player control within the game you know uh while maintaining head-to-head competition it's a delicate balance and the nature of football American football being kind of uh you know stop start a little bit more strategic than uh some other types of sports whereas the ebb and flow of basketball or soccer or ice hockey tend to be a bit more friendly to to multiplayer I think we were able to give players more control in basketball for instance to have individual NBA players that's you know special abilities that they could then enable and you could then kind of

unleash that on your opponent and then they would kind of return serve and vice versa use their players against you you'd have to try to figure out a way to defend and I think that's where we we cracked it out a little bit and you know now that we have those degrees much better GUI is great now we say UI ux yeah it had a degree and the user experience like um it's much easier to use than uh yeah it's also known as game number two yeah one thing I can add is that uh for those who are the pure stocks before I was talking about live operation like 10 years ago where there was basically like no stops like there was nowhere to go to find help to do live view operation while now there's you know hundreds of companies that offer that as a service multiplayer is sort of at this in the same right now meaning that uh there is about five or six shops that can help you to build proper multiplayer games

and they're always like super book but um you know like in three five years some you know from now there's probably going to be more service providers because it's going to help into making uh production easier um so yeah we're still in the early age but uh there's a lot to learn um there's an exercise exclusive Tech finding so we talk about Quantum the engines and all that but there's also other technical elements that helps either into your own production so for example like we see mini production using a mirror figma and then also in terms of rows the product ownership they use collaborative tools and how to pump the information from the players into in-game elements so obviously you know Tech helps both software and techniques to make things faster so let's go very quick in that but is there like one

thing that really helps you uh like move the needle in your pro in your overall production in terms of Technology or software suite should I say if there's nothing I can move to another subject as well it's fine it could be I can dig to my brain and probably find something but uh do you mean something specific or a particular piece of software but it can be either wow not a leader it's totally fine I think just the mindset of uh if you want to synchronize physics so this is very particular but if you want to synchronize physics the corresponds but I think it's best if you synchronizing forces rather than the objects oh yeah sure that's one yeah that's why we build Quantum then right it's a full physic engine right um uh yeah okay if you use Photon Unity Network ing yeah emulator so so that's one key aspect is that there's multiple ways to build and multiplayer games and you can just share information using a relay or

you can have the all engine react to inputs and then obviously the synchronization is much better and and more accurate um how someone take finding that I for us and been on previous projects is um I'd say analytics is measuring tools like there's always a problem you always have problems and you're gonna have some nice big problems and as if you set up good measuring tools not only in terms of networking and Quantum even provides some basic fundamental measurement tools but build your own tool in your pipeline in your live game um and this is not even this is on the tech side that suddenly the example suddenly in U.S players are having huge spikes and huge problems and what is that happening

we're seeing things happening and was just for a particular reason but you need to measure in many different contexts and measure tools really really help you to um tackle the problem squeaker and avoid the downfall of the customer service in the future and also having ways that you can let's say come down like one thing we found very good is come down to the game as you were a player but in the testing modes so you can also have a measuring tool that you can build on the Fly and deploy it so having ways that you can actively debug yeah it's it's life changer for when the game is live with tons of players don't underestimate that because when you have a problem it's going to be a nightmare together it's a rabbit hole that you can't tell that's what yeah I agree and just being able to test new features as they come online or new gameplays it comes online

and then also adding in uh traffic and you know the amount of pressure you put on onto your game and it's uh General Tech back bonus is a huge asset to have as well that I think you guys provide which is pretty cool um I know our team's always consistently making sure a lot of it is you know we want to uh test everything and we want to have everything be as you know as refined as possible before you unleash it in the wild so um cool awesome uh next one multiplayer games risk okay so obviously um in any production there's risk that comes inside so it does not appear make it like a more expensive for example and then second do you feel like your user base you need to group them more and if you don't have

the the proper onboarding techniques you might lose them so where do you see the risk when building a multiplayer game oh it's kind of a tough one to answer because I don't you know that risk is what we're after basically but I think from from my standpoint uh anytime that there's a situation where you can uh leave a competition you know for us you know players dropping or or uh jumping out of games kind of kills the experience sending any kind of uh any Tech difficulty obviously would kill it as well and certainly multiplayer generally and historically has brought larger risk of more troubles basically than than single player but I think that uh as Things become more commoditized and companies Focus you know specifically on on

multiplayer and synced gameplay it alleviates that a lot and I think uh so it really comes down to gameplay risks and risks around uh gamer you know Behavior so you know that's Community stuff and it's it's everything from you know language all the way down to just dropping out of a game and and you know another player having a bad experience because uh you know somebody somebody jumped out so there's one element I can add to risk in terms of smooth reproduction is that uh so when we were building stumble guys uh we're wondering if we should add the option that you can take one of the player and throw them out of the map right for front so uh so it was added to the game and it was a risk to say well you know we'll all the players exploit that and in the end they did and they find it fun so so we're like okay well let's leave it like that so um

so a gameplay elements sometimes can be surprising but uh yeah we should do that have LeBron James get thrown out yeah everyone understands it'd be good it's a good idea yeah I'll follow on that because the the turret first is the complexity of the game you increase so you need to increase also your costs so something where I discussed but the the biggest follow-on and he was saying is you increase the risk of removing control of yourself and giving to the players for the outcome of the game you've ever increased toxicity it's not something you control it's a players that bring the toxicity and you creating a fundamental platform for that to exist or for that to rise there's ways that you can try to meet again but you cannot control it fully so that's I believe it's the biggest risk is you removing some design control or some scope control of your game that the players have because it's you're

giving more game to them they they are the content but multiplayer games you make players the contents so they make the content for you and that's great so because there are players that players are playing against points and they can be sometimes can be fun sometimes can be really bad and there is examples I can tell this interesting story that was would put on a game we put the global shots and that's courageous yeah and we had to turn it down after one day because players starting Selling Houses then cars and we still sooner or later they're going to start sell drugs and something else so we had to turn it down before it became a problem so see this is kind of the risks you can increase because you don't control that content and there's ways to mitigate that but it was 24 hours the global shot was down because what can come out of that we have to stop it

no definite second that uh having especially in games when the hike player generated content that's definitely a risk but at the same time um I think it's quite funny we're going to be as Brave to give them a chat they want to chat but give them a moment instead they'll be enough communication for you guys but uh definitely they can do stuff with uh names or any other inputs that they have they can have little dance or stuff like that but coming back to risks I think it boils down to how comfortable you are with the reward um having the pleasure generated content be a vehicle for the sport of mouth in general like the exchange it could be of any type of platform or I guess a new way mechanic as having the UAV IRL between the peeps

I think that's uh that will be quite risky not having a it's more risky to not have it really to not to not allow for Community to not allow for competition is more risky than the risks that come along with it so I think that's kind of I guess my would be my two cents we used to have a Discord Channel but we don't anymore and that's all I'm gonna say about that we never went there but then we just heard the topic forward the he put these three games on the same Discord because it helps him so I guess it's different from one Community to another and uh one thing that we hear a lot and that same thing we're hearing like 10 years ago is that oh well 10 years ago was I don't want to implement live team operation because I have to pay for some apis and servers right and then now it's like oh you don't have we don't want to implement multiplayer because I'm gonna

have to pay for some servers and but nowadays everyone's doing live game Operation so uh so the risk of uh cost is actually not there at all and um uh where it you get it back safely because you make happy players okay um so uh community so we've touched that a little bit uh so you listen to your community which is fantastic uh so but sometimes as John was saying as you know there could be a data center somewhere that fails and then the community comes with the Pittsburgh and uh flame torch to you and saying hey can we try a game so um obviously multiplayer games are way more brutal than any other type of games regarding the community so um yeah what do you think but how do you manage it yeah well you just said it I mean you have to have Community Management and you have to be able to um for us there's there's uh two aspects of there's kind

of the um the game Community but then there's also the general like in the case of MBA Clash you know the NBA community so there's fandom that goes along with what's going on in the game before they even play the game so there's uh it's already some very strong attitudes about you know different players in the game or different who should be in the game Who shouldn't be in the game you know uh what what each Gamer's team is just you know what their deck is assembled as for instance um but generally speaking at you know I think uh as long as you monitor your community no don't allow for anything that is you know excessive I think you're you're okay monitoring but uh that can at least participate a lot of overhead and it because we're low on staff but it didn't make sense to focus so much resources on moderating sure or this is great about that so definitely it's not a

one-size-fits-all approach but uh just in terms of the general toxicity I think it can mitigate it by making it fun to lose as well for people then they don't feel as budgetful and a better word when uh when it comes just talks about their who's better the worst of a gamer then um yeah players for us communities because you are at Eno games before yeah yeah Community is gigantic inner games was it's they you know games was different you know games was a was a web-based game company so they pivots to Mobile in 2016 17 so people very late and Community when you go on web games communities like the old times was the PHP forums and all that is

fundamental because and I don't know if it's also part of the game type uh but the way we since then I've been thinking about it even the games I've been working the cameras I've been working and now first light being a a blockchain game based Community creates three fundamental points which are very valuable that I see Studios and companies undermine them one is the most effective organic growth so we talk about Word of Mouth communities is actually where Word of Mouth you bring the most valuable players at zero cost and it's really really Goods in that context if you're thinking about UA the other one where we see very interesting is I would not say Collective development but in more context when you hear other SAS companies in not in games is talk with your customers

talk with your customers understand your customers and try to learn their problems and figure out Solutions in our case it's find the talk with your players and talk and this card is very on another Discord all channels Reddit talk with your players you really really will see what their problems they have sometimes just some problems you see data to confirm that talking is completely different meeting people on the streets it's good it's first time but there's a lot of value talking with them and fundamentally you also can test hypothesis that's the third point is testing hypothesis with your players one thing we're starting to do a lot and now being in webpage is also different because it's very much it's still a niche so it's very Community Driven yet so it's very important for us so everything is new there's no but if you got more Buffy to play there's no one so he helps us a lot well so at Forum we we have like many customers and then we have multiple and web3 blockchain and whatnot and what I

hear often is uh uh well players slash actors that finds ways to farm uh tokens and farm and FTS and whatever and in the end they almost have to um you know play the FBI agent and and you know play as a as someone who's trying to yeah there's some resources and then so so uh do you have a story regarding that or yeah so interesting so my name is Miguel and there's a bot in America it's a farmer bot which is they someone in the community to make fun called it Miguel bot um because it's now always collecting so there's a way and we are seeing actually these farming Bots converting between different servers and picking developers names to pick on us we already saw that they come from most of them are in based in Russia Venezuela and Philippines so it's literally trying

to farm and they want to basically stay trying to get tokens to then sell them so they will make money but at the same time Community is smarter than even smarter than us as developers and they're creating now these core channels to tag the Bots and the names of users on the main bus rail channel to say this is a farming block let's not buy for him so this is a blacklisted from the community so if you want to buy from him you must not be part of the community most so this creates also toxicity but healthy ecosystem because players always listen to your players players know more than you and they will stop all these things which is interesting yeah I'm sure I mean I thought ours is much more benign but I think uh you know you get back to what we do with the NFL and you know we got a ton of feedback from from players on based on that game and and then

that was coming in mid-development of the NBA game you know we're able to modify it to to fit you know because it doesn't it doesn't developer it's not development through consensus or anything like that but when you're here a strong enough kind of opinion coming from a community in general and it becomes uh you know prevalent then all of a sudden you say okay wait a second let's make sure we're delivering what what Gamers want not just what we as a game developer you know to do yeah and uh that that that really worked well and frankly uh I don't even know how you would go forward you can gain development without it it's a it's a crucial part of the situation to hear from your Gamers as much as you can so you know you're trying to make them as happy as possible keep them around as long as possible I guess it's the player base that dictate if you want a global chat or not don't do it don't do it okay so uh very quickly like a future of multiplayer so um

uh yeah this one it's hard to tackle because like um we're doing in my seat but um so obviously like I've been recommending everyone to go multiplayer they find it's going to be more good player in the future but um uh where do you think all of this can evolve in terms of gameplay so there's still like multiple genre is not covered in multiplayer but um do you think that it that was very would be like the foundation of the future of gaming or it might go even further than that I don't know yeah I mean I I know speaking for us we've got different uh you know for Next Level multiplayer I think uh in competition you know for again getting back to fandom you know we're looking at things like geofencing where you know is based on Stadium if you're in the stadium you can play other people in the stadium or if you're you know it could be you know in a McDonald's it doesn't matter but but wherever you are you know

if you're a a Celtics fan and and I'm a Lakers fan I'm not the other way around I'm Celtics uh you know then you could you could face up and play each other that way so there's a lot of things you can do with multiplayer anything that allows for kind of interaction with real world uh location and real world activities that the the players could then bring into compete with one another uh yeah and what I see multiple as you said more fundamental I I have no doubts even now the trend is cross-platform um yeah and this is going to evolve even more with how the industry is going and the the some of the the actions that have been happening but I would say even more about multiplayer is we'll see and photon is doing that pretty well is

creating the engine of networking where multiplayer becomes not more about the questions what type of game you're making well you're making multiplayer game and there's an engine that already supports you don't care about if it's server alternative you don't care about if it's a Sim motion based on care about if it's cluster or uh room based what you care about is peer-to-peer you care is a multiplayer game and like you make Unity back in the times you make an engine for cars for sports for FPS for fighting now Unity makes everything and new makes everything and I believe very soon you have multiplayer that is just database or it's just uh synchronous based you don't care you just make a multiplayer game and then you have different modules and I'm not I believe it's not we're not very far from that even seeing the evolution in the last five years uh it's and the cross platform is just going to accelerate guys we're gonna have to wrap up

oh yes we can talk forever [Music] questions [Applause] [Music] thank you [Applause]